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NEW (?) THEOLOGY

NEW (?) THEOLOGY

THOUGHTS ON THE UNIVERSALITY AND
CONTINUITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD

BV THE

VEN. BASIL WILBERFORCE, D.D.
• > >
Archdeacon of Westminster
Chaplain of the House of Commons
Select Preacher before the University of Oxford

LONDON
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1907

PREFACE
THE sermons in the present volume profess
to be nothing more than answers, delivered
in theo rdinary course of parochial ministry,
to questions put from time to time to the preacher
by members of his congregation desirous for in
formation as to the so-called " New Theology,"
and at whose request these answers are here re
produced in more permanent form. Certain pro
positions will be found to be frequently reiterated.
on the principle of Sydney Smith's saying : " He
is not the discoverer who once utters a truth, but
he who repeats it again and again until he compels
men to hear."
What is " New Theology " ? There is a sug
gestive saying in Eccies. i. io, R.V., which seems
to me to supply the answer : " Is there a thing
whereof men say this is new ? It hath been in
the ages that were before us." This utterance
of the great pessimist assuredly includes that
aggregate of conceptions of the Divine nature, and

VI

Preface

operation, and relation to humanity, which finds
historical expression under the name of Theology.
Speaking accurately, there is no Theology of
which men can say: " See, this is new." There
are revivals of obsolete conceptions, fresh illumina
tions of ancient truths *' which have been in the
ages which were before us," but there is no " New
Theology." The Gospel itself is not New Theology, but the
interpretation, the fulfilment of all Theology since
the world was. St. Paul virtually acknowledges
this when, in his Epistle to the Colossians, he
wrote : " The Gospel which ye have heard was
preached to every creature under heaven "; and
when, on Mar's Hill, St. Paul quoted Aratus, and
proclaimed the Immanence of God, in the words
" In Him we live and move and have our being,"
he was not, as the Athenians said, " the setter
forth of strange gods," or the author of a " New
Theology," but the exponent of a truth as old
as the world.
This was clearly in the mind of Augustine when
he wrote (" Opera," vol. i., p. 12) : " The thing
itself which is now called the Christian religion
was really known to the ancients, nor was wanting
at any time from the beginning of the human race
until the time that Christ came in the flesh, from
whence the true religion, which had previously
existed, began to be called Christian ; arid this,

Preface

vn

in our day, is the Christian religion, not as having
been wanting in former times, but as having in
later times received this name."
This, too, was the conviction of Justin Martyr,
who, in his first Apology (chaps, xxii. and xlvi.),
writes : " Those who lived according to the Logos "
— that is, who obeyed their highest intuitions —
" were really Christians, though they have been
thought to be Atheists, as were Socrates and
Heraclitus among the Greeks, and such as re
sembled them."
It was the mission of the Christ to restore, to
illuminate, and to manifest in His own Person,
the ancient Theology of the Immanence of God ;
to convince man that humanity is an expression
of the Universal Father-Soul ; to appeal to man
" above himself to lift himself " because he
belongs to God ; to assure man that he is immortal
because God is immortal, and that he has within
him a life which is Divine ; that of that Divine
life, which is the attribute of humanity as a whole,
He, the Lord Jesus, was the absolutely perfect
embodiment for purposes of observation ; that as
this Immanence of God in man is recognized,
acknowledged, obeyed, it will regenerate man's
nature, control his lower conditions, emancipate
him from the tyranny of the senses, and finally
conform him to the image of the Perfect Son.
Thus did the Christ amplify, interpret, illuminate.

viii Preface
and restore to its right place in the thoughts of
men the Theology discoverable in the ancient
Eastern writings 2,000 years before the Incarna
tion, namely, the illimitable Fatherhood of the
Infinite Originator, the Immanence of the Divine
in man, and consequently the essential solidarity
of humanity, truths which, when emphasized in
the present day, are designated, sometimes
seriously, sometimes contemptuously,
New Theology.

CONTENTS

NEW (?) THEOLOGY
SOUL-HUNGERTHE PRE-NATAL PROMISE
WHERE TO FIND THE LORD
THE STORM -
PRAYING FOR THE DEPARTED
THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY UNITY
HADES
TRUTHSHALLOWNESS
ASSURANCE -
DEMONOLOGY -
OUR MOTHER IN HEAVEN
THE VISIBLE CHURCH
THE LIMITS OF FORGIVENESS
ST. SIMON AND ST. JUDE -
THE ATONEMENT
AUTO-SUGGESTION -
O.H.M.S.
PHARISEEISM ADVENT: S.P.G.™
ADVENT: INCARNATION
ADVENT: THE BIBLE
ADVENT: THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

PAGE I
13
25
38
49 60 72
85

123136 150
160172183193
203215
226 236
251263 274

NEW(?) THEOLOGY
" The servants which drew the water knew."
John ii. 9.
I AM convinced that it is the purpose of the
whole of the Epiphany teaching to provide
for us strong consolation, to lead us into the
depths of the Fatherly love of God, and this is
done, not by direct declarations, but by stimu
lating the thought-capacity, by awakening the
hereditary hunger for knowledge of God, by sug
gesting the nearness of the Spirit of God, by lead
ing us to realize that the universe glows with His
diffused life, and therefore that all things, how
ever puzzling and cross-working they appear,
are and must be under the Divine over-rule of a
responsible Creative Spirit of limitless resources,
adequate to every possible emergency.
The Gospels for the Epiphany season are
apparently selected with this object in view, and
they all seem to me to radiate from that tran
scendent sign recorded in the Gospel for to-day — •
the miracle at Cana in Galilee.
The miracle is inexhaustible in its teaching, 1

New(?) Theology

but I will confine myself to three considera
tions :
i. It encourages a tranquil rest in the omnipo
tence of the Infinite Parent Spirit by intimating
His universal Immanence.
2. It suggests the reward of humble obedience
to the promptings and guidance of the inner voice
of this Immanent Spirit.
3. It implies the responsibility attaching to the
recognition of the inseverability of the human and
the Divine.
First, it encourages tranquil rest. It seems to
say, " Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my
soul ? Put thy trust in God." And this it does
by intimating to us, with infinite delicacy, by
hint rather than by demonstration, after the
manner of all God's self-revelations, that the
Creator of the Universe is the Spirit of Evolution,
that the ceaselessly reproducing power in Nature
is a manifestation of His Immanence and active
life ; it teaches us to — " See, in part,
That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil co-operant to an end."
It teaches us to believe that all that is is God's
thought in process of transmutation into matter,
and therefore that what we call moral evil is (in
this life's education) a necessary condition of
moral growth ; that goodness is the fruit of
energetic struggle against that which contradicts

New(?) Theology-

it ; that the true life of the human soul emerges
from the deepest contrasts, and that, therefore,
when the life has emerged for the individual,
.the community, the race, the contrast will be
taken away, and the phenomenon called evil will
be destroyed.
For, first, the miracle of Cana exhibits God in
His true position in the material world, and adds
a dignity to the most familiar processes of Nature,
by disclosing the " Word of the Father " as the
evolving hfe of all things. Thus, it corrects
partial, inadequate, and false views of God. For
example, it corrects Pantheism, the most fasci
nating of all the half-truths, which identifies the
universe with God, and it corrects it by showing
Him as a Person manipulating Nature from out
side while embodied in a part of the very Nature
He was manipulating. Again, it corrects Deism,
the coldest of all religions, which practically
banishes God from all free, personal action in the
world that He has made, and it corrects it by
showing Him Incarnate in the Lord Jesus actually
at work upon the laws of its growth. It establishes
the Christian conception of God as the great
comprehensive solution of all the difficulties of
all religions, by showing us the Man Christ Jesus
as the Incarnation, or human enclosure, of the
Logos, or logic, or Eternal Reason, of the all-filling
God, manifesting His glory.
The word rendered " glory " is the untrans
latable Greek word doxa, which here signifies,
i — 2

New(?) Theology

amongst other things, His oneness with the in
finite life immanent in Nature ; and this oneness,
or glory, Christ, the Logos, manifests by con
densing into a moment of time months of natural
growth and progress, during which moisture is
absorbed into the vine-plant, into the blossom,
into the grape, and whereby the grape swells and
ripens and becomes wine. See then how, in the
miracle of Cana, Godward thought is stimulated.
We are shown that behind the life in the vine there
is a greater life, and behind that an infinite life,
a universal Parent life, and that this Parent life
is God, and that God is conditioned in flesh in
Jesus, and that the name of the universal respon
sible Parent life (as far as we are concerned) is
" Jesus," the faultless, the self-sacrificing, the
tender, the true. And if God be such an one as
Jesus, we have no excuse for pessimism ; we need
not shrink from trusting Him with the unsolved
problems of Nature — the earthquake, the tiger's
claw, the serpent's poison, and the ceaseless
tragedy of blood and pain, for He is the omni
potent centre of things created, and He is not only
responsible for our being, but loves us with an
everlasting love, and doeth all things well.
This is the faith of the Christian ; this is the
tranquil trust in the Love of the Over-Soul,
which' some speak of as a New Theology ; this
will shine on when all words that profess to de
scribe it are antiquated curiosities, and all theo
logies that have formulated its propositions have

New (?) Theology

been buried in oblivion. It must prevail, absorb
ing into itself all other religions, until here or
hereafter it has slaked the thirst of the ages,
and the darkest, lowest life shall know that the
Father loves the world, and that the true life of
every man is God within him.
Secondly, I think an incident in the history
of the miracle indicates the reward of humbly
and readily obeying the softest whisper, the
gentlest impulse of that indwelling life of God
which is the interior, eternal Kingdom of Heaven,
and that reward is knowledge, assurance, the
life and light of God becoming more and more a
fact of personal experience.
" The servants which drew the water knew."
This apparently unimportant parenthesis has,
first, a doctrinal, and, secondly, a practical
application ; and first, doctrinal : the master of
the ceremonies, occupied with the importance of
his position, " knew not whence the water which
was made wine was " ; it startled him, annoyed
him ; he was accustomed to certain social con
ventionalities and a regular order of procedure,
and the benumbing influence of established usage v
prevented him from recognizing that the inmost
creative element of the universe was being un
folded from within the majestic Person of one of
the guests. He didn't know.
One can almost picture his impatience with the
bridegroom and the servants : " Where did you
get this ? This is something new that you are

New (?) Theology

springing upon us. This is off the lines of custom.
I don't know where you got it." But " the ser
vants which drew the water knew."
Now, I ask, is this glorious, stimulating truth
of the inseverability of God and man, the im
manence of God in man, the impregnable founda
tion of universal restitution — this certainty
of an irresistible agency advancing mankind to
a condition of perfection purposed before the
world was, which many of us have been pro
claiming for twenty years — is this a new theo
logy ?
Some conventional, unillumined critic, some
master of denominational ceremonies, stiffened
in the conventional, asks : Whence comes this new
teaching — these perilous, half-fermented inepti
tudes of unorthodox minds, impatient with the
traditional conceptions of the Churches ? It is
new, it is off the lines of custom, it is dangerous !
In a sense, it is new. I suppose there is a sense
in which rediscovery makes old things new. I
suppose reversion to primitive type would seem
new to minds of a particular cast. This idea of a
new theology was suggested first by the Rev. T. T.
Lynch, an able Congregationalist minister of
fifty years ago, in a poem which I have often
quoted :
" There is a new commandment which
New hearts alone can keep ;
Its fruits, a new earth and new heaven
Will with a new song reap.

New (?) Theology

And when this new command is kept,
With new eyes shall we see
New things of every kind except
A new theology ?
"Ecclesiastics, spider-like,
On Jesus Christ the door
Have spun their cobwebs fine until
They've darkly closed Him o'er.
They catch the souls that come to Him,
They seize them for a prey.
O blessed hour ! O happy man
That sweeps their webs away !
" And webs that any man may break
May many men repel,
And why should Heaven's door look as dark
As if it led to hell ?
Perhaps this new theology
Has come to do no more
Than sweep the cobwebs all away
From Jesus Christ the door."
The masters of ceremonies know not whence
it is. They are unaware of that clear stream
which has flowed down the ages through the
Upanishads, and Plato, and Philo, and St. John,
and Clement of- Alexandria. " The servants
which draw the water know." The sensitives,
the idealists, the seers, the mystics, they who
watch the growing light of God's glorious dawn,
who patiently follow the gleam, who listen for
the inner voice, they know whence this God-made
wine of truth has come ; they know it is no new
concoction put into the old wine-skins ; they know
that it is the old wine of God's self-revelation

8 New(?) Theology
being rediscovered ; that God does not need to be
found and appeased ; that the supreme struggle
of man should be, not to pacify an omnipotent
despot, but to become conscious of a loving,
responsible Father's operation within him ; they
know that the power of the old illusions is passing
away. It is utterly untrue to say that there is
a decadence of religion in the present day ;
there may be, there is, a decadence in the practice
of certain external observances, but there has
never been a period in human history when there
has been a keener hunger for God. Superstitions
are decadent, I allow ; limitations are losing their
hold ; but the evolution of the Christ in humanity
was never more marked. Moral, social, humane
characteristics are more prominent to-day than
they ever were before, and many silent, thinking
men, who are not churchgoers, are more really
religious in the deep and esoteric sense than — well,
what shall we say ? — than Torquemada and his
auto-da-fe, or than Calvin who burnt Servetus ?
No, let the masters of the ceremonies, whether
mitred abbots, or episcopal legislators, or govern
ing bodies of trust chapels, be patient with the seers,
the servants who draw the water, for they know.
They have silently, secretly, patiently obeyed the
command, " Whatsoever He saith unto you, do
it " ; and He, the indwelling Christ, that measure
of God's life, which is the glory and attribute of
humanity as a whole, has whispered to them where
and how the good wine of truth is to be found.

New(?) Theology

There is a practical application of this thought
which I need hardly emphasize — " the servants
which drew the water knew": the obedient,
simple-minded ministers to the needs of others.
The line of service is the line of knowledge ; they
who " do the will know of the doctrine." A life
of selfish vanity, a life of idle indulgence, a life
of mean self-concentration may have much re
ligion in it, but it will not know the inwardness
of this truth.
The miracle of Cana is the picture of the cease
less activity of God transfiguring the human
plant as there He did the vine-plant. The
immanent power of God is effecting, slowly but
surely, the moral restoration of mankind, and
this work He is doing through the servants who
draw the water, the loving hearts who rally
round the weak, the tempted, the erring, the
fallen. God bless the " servants who draw the
water !" Never be discouraged ; remember it
is not the servants who turn the water into
wine. It is the Wonder-worker of Cana, who,
dwelling in you, works the miracle through your
hands. Every worker for the good of the
brethren, however simple may be the work under
taken, is a servant drawing the water in our
Father's unceasing, progressive miracle of chang
ing discord into harmony, lower into higher,
water into wine.
One final thought. A great responsibility
attaches to the knowledge of this old theology

i o New (?) Theology
that some call new. Some of the " masters of
the ceremonies " who " know not whence the
water that was turned into wine was " are dis
tressed at the prominence given to the divinity
of humanity. Well, there is God's word for it —
" Let us make man," or, rather, according to
the correct translation of the Hebrew word,
" let us generate man, in our image." Ah, they
say, you have here forgotten the Fall. Now,
whatever may be the full ethical bearing of the
allegorical epitome of origins, in the account
of what is called the Fall, it is clear that whatever
that image of God was it was not destroyed by
the Fall, for it was after the Fall that God
appended the penalty of death to murder,
because murder was an affront to the image of
God in man. The likeness of man to God is the
awful fact, while it is the central fact of human
history. Man, as we see him, is an eternal
thought of God. Translate literally Ps. viii. 4 :
" What is man that Thou art mindful of him ?
Thou hast made him for a little while lower than
Divine, that thou mayest crown him with glory
and honour." This, you say, refers to the inner,
invisible part of man, for his outward part is
formed from the dust of the earth. Yes, this is
true ; the chemical elements which exist in the
human body — oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, car
bon, sulphur, phosphorus, lime, potash, sodium —
are all found in the dust of the earth, and these
are the sole constituents of the human body.

New(?) Theology u
But then, God is the soul of the universe too !
No, you cannot say where, in what part, the image
of God is. Jesus was " the express image of
God's person," and there would have been little
difference in His appearance from that of others.
But Christ appeals to this divinity in man
that He may lift our lives. I don't suppose we
ever were nothing and nowhere, but now, as
His sons and daughters, we are here. " God is
Spirit," and they that worship Him must worship
Him in Spirit and in truth. But Spirit only can
worship Spirit. So man is Spirit, and however
we may have blurred, overlaid, disfigured the
image of God, if the Christ lays His hand on any
one of us this day, and asks whose we are, there
can be but one answer :
" I am thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me ;
But I long to rise on the wings of faith,
And be closer drawn to Thee."
The conclusion is obvious. Know it, believe it,
trust it, act upon it, live it. All lesser con
ditions vanish in the sight of this tremendous
reality. Of course we often forget it. The
constant demands and almost insolent usurpa
tions of our lower nature often hide it from us ;
but to live consciously in the recollection of it,
if it be but for an hour, stimulates life, strengthens
character, refreshes vitality. How powerful a
motive it affords for the struggle against sensual

12 New(?) Theology
appetite, anger, despondency, and the rest of
the darker conditions of our flesh education.
How it scatters the paltry worries that vex and
harass. While the mind is fixed on it, how
horrible does it make impurity, selfishness,
rebellion. What it demands is the habit of self-
surrender to the Divine overrule of the indwelling
Christ Spirit, exposure of the inner being to the
sunshine of the all-pervading, all-surrounding
Divine Presence ; the rallying cry in despondency,
" I am the Lord's," " Christ is in me the hope of
glory," " Able to keep me from falling, by the
power that worketh in me." To say " I can't,"
to accept and leave yourself as you find yourself,
is the deepest denial of God. Carlyle was right
when he said, " Nonsense, the impediment is in
thyself ; here or nowhere is thy kingdom." To
accept and leave the world as you find it is a
similar denial of God. Vital, practical, remedial,
world-salting Christianity is the direct, automatic
fruit of the knowledge that you are a Christopher,
a Christ-bearer, that the image and likeness
indelibly branded into your inmost self is that
of God. Help the Christ to win the world ;
help to fulfil the transcendent utterance of the
Christ in John xvii. : " The glory which Thou
gavest 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 made perfect in
one."

SOUL-HUNGER
" Blessed are they that hunger." — Matt. v. 6.
I HAVE severed this Beatitude in twain because
I desire to take it out of the particular into
the universal, and because the sign recorded
in the fifth chapter of St. Matthew of the miracu
lous feeding of four thousand hungry pilgrims in
the prairie beyond the Sea of Galilee affords an
acted drama of the esoteric meaning of the Beati
tude. I do not propose to elaborate the actual narra
tive of this miraculous feeding, as I wish to use
it only as an analogy of a spiritual truth. It is
the record of a miracle. What is a miracle ?
They who know that one life is immanent in the
universe, and that all that is, is an expression
of the Divine Intelligence in that one life, will
reply with Walt Whitman : " To me there is
nothing but miracle." That is true ; but in the
accepted sense a miracle is a variation of the
accustomed order of this self-expression of the
immanent Divine Intelligence. It is, therefore, an
evidence of the ceaseless activity of the Universal
13

14 Soul-Hunger

Soul to which attention is specially called, because
this activity is manifested in an unaccustomed
manner. We talk about the " laws of Nature ";
there are no laws of Nature. By the laws of
Nature we can onlymean the aggregate of observed
phenomena, all of which phenomena are equally
miraculous, though, being familiar, they excite no
surprise. We are accustomed to the vibrations
of the creative thought of God acting continuously
in one direction, and we call it a law. If this
vibration of the creative thought of God acts in
an unusual manner, and brings about something
we have never seen before, we call it miracle. If,
for example, I were striving to illustrate the law,
as we call it, of gravitation, and buried in the
ground some small oval pebbles, they would never
come up. If amongst them there were one acorn,
it would defy the law of gravitation which kept
down the pebbles, and it would rise from the
ground. But it would not be a violation of the
law of gravitation ; it would be the vibration of
the thought of God that regulated the vital force
of the acorn, superseding the vibration of the
thought of God that regulated the gravitation that
kept down the pebbles. If, however, it had
happened once only in human history, and had
been recorded in the New Testament, it would be
called a miracle, and probably ridiculed and
denied. Now, assume that in the fullness of time
the Universal Soul would specially manifest the
nature and character of His Immanence in one

Soul-Hunger 15

perfect specimen of the human race, that perfect
specimen of the human race could in no better
way prove His Identity with the Universal Soul,
to the dim-eyed and the unspiritual, than by
exhibiting His perfect knowledge of, and control
over, these various natural forces and activities
that we call the laws of Nature. For this purpose,
that He might prove that all the power of the
-Infinite Spirit was embodied in Him, the Lord
Jesus wrought a few of these signs or miracles.
He seems to have wrought them unwillingly, as
a last resort, when men could not or would not
recognize from His character and His words His
fulness of the Divine Spirit. " If ye will not
believe My words," He said, " believe Me for My
works' sake "; and they did. Their wonder was
excited. " Who is this," they said, " that the
winds and the1 sea obey Him ?" Thus, miracle
is knowledge. The phonograph, the telephone^
wireless telegraphy, would have been witchcraft
in the days of the Stuarts, and miracles to our
grandfathers. Professor Huxley once, in the
Agnostic Annual, warned the youthful opponents
of revealed religion to be cautious in their at
tacks upon miracle. Predicate, he said (I am not
quoting his words, but this was the substance of
them) — predicate a human being with absolute
knowledge of every secret interior process and
molecular arrangement of Nature, of every move
ment and counter-movement, and he would be
able to control, subordinate, transfigure, retard,

1 6 Soul-Hunger

accelerate these processes, and, in short, do all
that Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have done.
But be it noted that no man could have such
perfect knowledge were He not an exceptional
and peculiar incarnation of the Eternal Logos,
or Reason of the Infinite Spirit called God.
Therefore, the miracles of Jesus were credentials
of His Godhead.
There is much to be learnt from this miracle.
For example, it is a powerful appeal for human
confidence. " Follow Me, trust Me," says the
Omnipotent Friend of man ; " take risks for Me
fearlessly, accompany Me into foodless places ;
I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." Then
the motive of the miracle is so noble, so God-like,
" I have compassion," He said. It is a revelation
of the permanent attitude of the mind of God,
and God's compassion is not a sentiment but an
activity. It is compassion, intense compassion,
not anger, that the Mother-Soul feels for us when
we are blind, foolish, insubordinate. And it is for
us also to cultivate compassion ; it will make our
souls noble and God-like. The small measure of
compassion we possess is a mirror of God's heart ;
it is " that we have the likest God within our
souls." And let it be not a sentiment, but an
activity. Let us strive to make the world a little
happier for man, woman, child, animal, and we
shall not have hved in vain.
Again, how suggestive is the material of the
miracle ! He did not send legions oi angels to

Soul-Hunger 17

the bakers' shops at Capernaum to fetch bread !
He asked for their own supply, however inade
quate, to be placed into His hands, that it might
be empowered, vivified, multiplied by the magic
of His touch. We need nothing added to us from
without ; we have enough of the Divine gift of
the Christ nature in us to perfect ourselves and
to feed others if we will only truly place it into
His hands. When He bids us take our place in
the brotherhood of the race, and feed others
spiritually and intellectually, it is of no avail to
plead the poverty of our natural endowments, the
meagreness of our possessions, the limited sphere
of our influence. He says : " Place that small
store into My hands." In other words, call upon
the Christ within you, blend your Christ nature
with the Christ around you, above you, beside
you, and reason, affection, imagination, influence
will be new-born, as when St. Paul said : " I can
do all things through Christ that strengtheneth
me." But the point that I desire specially to empha
size as a solace to the restlessness of some earnest
souls, disappointed at the continuance of an un
satisfied desire for God, is this : The feeding of the
four thousand in the wilderness is an illustration
of the blessedness of being hungry, apparently
hopelessly hungry, in His company. And you are
always in His company. " Blessed are they that
hunger," He says. He does not say, Blessed are
they who think they have attained, blessed are the
2

1 8 Soul-Hunger
theologically replete, the complacently satisfied,
but " Blessed are they that hunger." Obviously
I am referring to the. inwardness of the saying, to
soul-hunger, to the intense longing to know more
of the Absolute, the Everlasting Being, and of His
relation to us ; and this is a hunger that is in
tolerant of delay, that often causes fret and worry,
that savours almost of doubt, that cries im
patiently : " My soul is athirst for God ; yea, even
for the living God." Some of these hungry ones
are, I know, often listening to me in St. John's
Church, and I know also that their attitude is
one almost of resentment against the Eternal for
so hiding Himself, and of dissatisfaction with
themselves for harbouring this resentment. I
want to assure them that this unconquerable God
ward restlessness is the purest and deepest desire
that they can know ; that this hunger is health,
not disease ; and that the Lord Jesus was definitely
including them when He said : " Blessed are they
that hunger." There are, I know, many church
goers who hunger not. They have scant appetite
for thought - excursions into the Infinite, and
exploring suggestions. They dislike metaphysics
and philosophy, and rather resentfully expect a
preacher to confine himself to Church dogma and
personal morality. I doubt not that there is
a useful place for such teaching : " Dearly beloved,
believe the Creeds ; be moral, and go to church ";
but the truly hungry starve under this diet.
He was a shrewd student of human psychology

Soul-Hunger 19

who once said that the school of thought to which
a preacher belonged was betrayed by his selection
for use of one of three words—" She," "It,"
or " Him." If he spoke of " She," he indicated
the Anglican branch of Holy Catholic Church,
with all its noble traditions, dogmas, and formu
laries, to be accepted on authority, without
question, reasoning, or mental reservation. If
he spoke of " It," he referred to an infallible,
Divinely dictated Book called the Bible, which was
to be accepted without criticism, without inquiry,
without rational consideration as to alteration of
time, circumstance, and environment, and be con
sidered as the sole means of communication
between God and man. If he spoke of " Him,"
the preacher was referring to the all-filling, all-
creating, universally diffused Individuality, ex
pressed and manifested in all that is, and whose
most transcendent revelation is in the Person of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is clear that these three bases of exhortation,
blended and rationally interpreted, embrace the
whole philosophy of religion, and quite recently
I warned the winged ones against the mistake of
rashly flying away from the protection of the first.
And as to the two attitudes indicated by the
words " She " and " It," are they not valuable
soul hospitals on the rudimentary plane ? Have
they not produced, and are they not producing,
saintly lives ? It is only when they lead to
intellectual stagnation, and produce an attitude
2 — 2

20 Soul-Hunger

of moral repletion, and condemnation of other
people, that it may be well to disturb those abiding
in them, for when souls are pre-eminently self-
satisfied, and cease to be hungry, they are out
side the Beatitude : " Blessed are they that
hunger." Suppose, as an illustration, that some of the
multitude who followed the Lord Jesus into this
prairie possessed privately a store of food of some
kind, and were replete with that sustenance, while
the others were famished, they would not have
been candidates for the compassion and the miracle
of Jesus ; they would have looked on with the
indifference of repletion and the fastidiousness of
abundance upon that huge mass of barley loaves.
No blame, that I can see, would attach to them,
but they wouldn't happen to fit into the category :
" Blessed are they that hunger."
Now let us for a moment analyze that hunger
which distresses some of you. It is a sharp pang,
that blessed restlessness, that inarticulate yearning
of the home-sickness of a human soul beginning
to reahze that it was not created when it was born,
but somehow came forth from the Absolute and
longs to discover the way back. What is it ? It
is the well of water within you (of which Jesus
spoke) , springing up into everlasting life. I thank
the Lord for this analogy ; it is most suggestive.
The Divine Nature in man is curiously like the
little clear stream bubbling forth from the chalk
hills, and commencing its pilgrimage to the ocean.

Soul-Hunger 2 1
Whence came that stream ? That bubbling forth
from the chalk hills was not its origin ; that was
its birth into natural conditions. It came from
the universally diffused, invisibly suspended mois
ture. Thence it was precipitated as rain, and
soaked into the earth, and then appeared differ
entiated as that spring, bound within the limita
tions of banks, destined to work its way through
the obstructions of earth till it reaches the sea,
when it will once more be evaporated by the sun
and return whence it came. It does a useful,
cleansing, beautifying, refreshing work between
the birth of its precipitation on to the earth and
the grave of its pouring into the sea. Read
Tennyson's " Brook." See how it nourishes
" here and there a speckled trout, and here and
there a grayling "; how here it nourishes into
surpassing beauty a million turquoise-tinted for
get-me-nots, and there masses of golden king-cups;
how here it moves a mill-wheel, and there extin
guishes a fire. And then it joins the " brimming
river," which is made up of a thousand such
streams. Its isolation is gone ; it now moves on
in increased volume in the solidarity of the water,
and at last it reaches the sea, and under the
drawing power of the sun it ascends, its work
done, to the centre whence it came forth.
No analogy is complete, and this analogy fails
in the fact that the particular river, as that
particular river, ceases to be itself when it returns
whence it came, and we, when consciously identi-

22 Soul-Hunger
fied with universal life will not lose the sense of
our separate individuahty ; but it is a lovely
picture of the ceaseless hunger and progress of
the awakened Divine Nature, steadily increasing,
cutting its way through obstacles, fertilizing the
earth-life through which it passes, joining the
" brimming river " the unity of the race, and then
disappearing into the ocean which men think of
as death, to be received again into the bosom of
the Absolute —
" When that'which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home."
But observe : restlessness, hunger, constant
hunger, first to " join the brimming river," then
to be poured into the sea, then to be lifted to the
clouds, is the stimulus of its progress. Duty
between its banks is the law of its being. Feeble,
as at times it seems, swerving far out the direct
line to the sea when the soil is too hard for it to
cut its channel, behind it always is the driving
power of the irresistible law of gravitation that
" keeps the earth a sphere " ; nothing can frus
trate its ultimate destiny. It came out from sus
pended moisture into the Umitations of its banks.
It must leave the limitations of its banks and
return to suspended moisture. We are not in
animate like the stream, but, similarly, behind
us is the driving power of the mighty, evolving
purpose of the Omnipotent. It is within us. We
are generally as unconscious of possessing and being

Soul-Hunger 23

possessed by this irresistible power as the stream
is unconscious of the law of gravitation. But
the hunger we feel is an evidence of its presence.
Let us " reckon ourselves " alive to this power ;
acknowledge it, claim it, say, " It is mine "; then
let us act as if we felt it, and we shall advance in
power, and the indweUing Christ will increase in
volume day by day.
So, may I say, give up worrying and thinking
you are in danger of becoming an Agnostic be
cause you are hungering. Mentally enthrone the
Universal Soul alone behind and above and
within all worlds. Consolidate all speculations,
theories, problems into the perfect optimism of
the poet's words, and believe that —
" All nature is but art unknown to thee ;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see ;
All discord, harmony not understood ;
All partial evil, universal good ;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear — whatever is is right."
Know what the Absolute must be by the testi
mony of the deepest and truest within yourself.
And if the fact that even in the best of men there
is so much of the admixture of the lower nature
that the Divine Image is blurred, then fall back on
the answer given by the one Perfect Man to Philip
when, like you, Philip hungered for a vision of
the Absolute : " He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father." In other words, given a specimen
of the human race, in whom identity with the

24 Soul-Hunger

Absolute in thought, will, feeling, and action is
perfect, and you have as fuU a revelation of the
essential nature of the Absolute as is possible
in these finite earth conditions. And to that
" Jesus-aspect " of the Universal Father we can
lift up our hearts in prayer and say to Him, many
times in a day :
" Lead us in Thy truth and teach us, for Thou art
the God of our salvation ; upon Thee we desire to wait
all the days of our life."

THE PRE-NATAL PROMISE
The Eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ
Jesus our Lord." — Eph. i. ii.
" Promised before times Eternal, but in His own season
manifested." — Titus i. 2.
THESE two passages of Scripture provide a
characteristic Epiphany motto, for Epi
phany is essentially the festival of the
abolition of limitations of time, space, creed.
nationality from the everlasting Christ — the pro
test of the Spirit of God against all narrowness,
and aU cramped, unworthy conceptions of Divine
Love. And it is a New Year's motto, inasmuch as
it is one of those inspired, enlarging epigrams
which, when thankfully apprehended, affect with
surpassing power the practice of human life.
Epiphany is manifestation, and manifestation
is bringing into the sphere of visibility and recog
nition something previously existing, but hitherto
unknown — something promised, perhaps, " before
times Eternal."
It is not possible to exhaust the self-revelation
of God implied by the Epiphany. But two
illimitable Eternal truths are specially Epiphanized
25

26 The Pre-Natal Promise
by the Christ, and are discoverable from His
characteristic actions and words which are selected
for record in the appointed Scriptures of this
season. The first is the Immanence of God in
man, the inseverability of the human and the
Divine, the assurance that the spirit in man is
the direct offspring of the supreme Spirit, that
in God " we live and move and have our being,"
that beyond and beneath the clouds and vexa
tions and second causes of this age of elementary
education there is ever working, silently but
surely, a Supreme Will, and power, and purpose,
promise that makes for perfection, transforming
water into wine, lower into higher, weaker into
stronger, rudimentary into complete. And the
second is the pre-eminently practical truth that
this revealed relationship to God imphes corre
sponding obligations and responsibilities : that
if the poor human shadow of nobihty, the nobihty
of ancestry, is understood to impose an obliga
tion on the heir not to disgrace his forefathers,
or shame the name he bears — if we even adapt a
French saying, noblesse oblige, the force of the
obhgation on those who become conscious of
Divine sonship and of their hereditary right to
the throne of the universe is immeasurably greater,
and that the faintest dawning on the soul of this
transcendent truth wiU force from the Ups the
utterance, " Wist ye not that I must be about
My Father's business ?" Both these Eternal
truths are implied in the passages I have quoted,

The Pre-Natal Promise 27
and provide a thought of assurance for a New
Year. The beginning of a year is one of God's
mflestones in the onward struggle of human life ;
every pilgrim who is not utterly sunk in indiffer
ence, frivolity, unbelief, thirsts for a word of
cheer — an uplifting thought— a rally back upon
an eternal veracity — a measure of the Divine oil
that feeds the flame in the silver lamp of opti
mism. The future is all uncertain ; its probable
perils are beyond our ken ; its problems are in
tricate ; the riddle of this painful earth is as
insoluble as ever ; " the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth together in pain." Careworn
travellers on life's journey on all sides cry, " Give
us of your oil, for our patience is failing, our lamps
are going out." We are weak, sinful, dim-eyed,
the passage of a year emphasizes the dread regu
larity with which silent Time steals on his ever
lasting journey ; we look in distress from our im
perfect lives to the perfect standard, from human
attainment to Divine requirements, and we are
Ml of anxious forebodings.
First, praise the Lord for Divinely implanted
dissatisfaction with the imperfect, for that in-
stinctivs longing for the perfect which constitutes
the healthy growing pains of the Godward life.
But sursum corda, lift up your hearts ; base the
life at the beginning of this New Year upon the
sure word of Him who cannot lie ; rise out of the
dream of the unreal, the iUusion of the pheno
menal, the deception of second causes, and for

28 The Pre-Natal Promise
once let God be true and every man who contra
dicts Him a liar ; you are part of the Eternal pur
pose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord
" before times Eternal." To bid a congregation
be honest, sober-minded, self-controlled, would
be both a platitude and an impertinence. To
adjure each other as items in the Eternal purpose
of the Creative Mother-Soul ; to live bravely and
confidently in that faith ; to shape our lives as
our Father's sons ; to trust, to hope, to endure,
to claim 'in all times of crisis and temptation
the supernatural life of the God whose we are,
and whose we can never cease to be, as an
aid to our sinning enfeebled humanity — this is
to appeal to each other upon God's plan for our
development, and to point out the road to pro
gress. Our success in the days which are before
us, if we live this year out, will certainly be in the
exact measure of the reality and constancy of
our communion with the highest. I know I
speak the truth here ; we may have irksome
duties to perform, troublesome habits to conquer ;
we may start with new resolutions ; we may wear
ourselves into exhaustion by our merely human
efforts at self-improvement, and we shall fail
apart from the Divine Power which worketh in us.
But this — this is the victory that overcometh,
even our faith ; and faith is the appeal to the
Divine Power -within, possessed always, every
where, by all.
Now follows a question I desire to ask you ;

The Pre-Natal Promise 29
What do you understand by the expression
" before times Eternal " ? To whom could God
give a promise "before times Eternal"? Put
the question thus : Epiphany's time-honoured
story of the star leading the Zoroastrians across
the wilderness to Bethlehem is an analogy of the
Father-Soul influencing human hearts, inspiring
human aspirations. There is always a star leading
to the goal of life. Now, in this secret process of
influencing human volition, to what does the
Parent-Soul mainly appeal ? Of course, every
human faculty is appealed to, but to what
special faculty in man is the main and ultimate
appeal made ?
Consider the sentence. I have quoted from St.
Paul ; it is one of his later writings when " such
an one as Paul the aged," " promised before times
Eternal." The Greek is irpo XP°VWV alwlwv ; the
expression is limitless in its suggestiveness.
First, note the use of the celebrated word Aionios,
around which has raged the controversy as to
the duration of after-death chastening, and which
has been wrongly translated " everlasting," thus
perverting the whole meaning of the last verse of
Matt. xxv. *: - «
Chronos aionios — " age time," or " times Eter
nal " — is, according to this passage, certainly not
God's extended, never-ending existence, but a
period projected from God in which certain
things were to happen. If there can be
a before-ceonian time, it is perfectly obvious

30 The Pre-Natal Promise
that there can be an after-ceonian time, and to
predicate of the word " ceonian " — never-ending
— is therefore both unscriptural and irrational.
But St. Paul tells us that a promise was given —
a promise of the knowledge of the truth — before
these " Eternal times." To whom was the pro
mise given ? A promise to be supporting and to
afford a basis of appeal must be made, not to a
race or to human nature in the abstract, but to
individuals. AU God's dealings are personal ;
each several human being is dealt with by Him
as though the only one living, and therefore, in
a sense, the full understanding of which has been
hidden from us, this promise must have been
made " before time Eternal " to each one of us.
Obviously we are thinking out of our depth*
for no man can define his own individuahty. He
knows himself to be a complex bundle of contra
dictions, an example of the words of Young, in his
" Night Thoughts " :
" How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man —
Helpless immortal, insect infinite, a worm, a God !"
But he is also profoundly conscious that, as
Browning says :
" There is an immortal centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness."
His highest thought of himself is that he is a
spirit, for awhile incarnated that he mav be
educated for a higher life in a purer world :" that

The Pre-Natal Promise 31
is the utmost that he can know, and fortunately
we are not concerned to place into definitions
what our Father has seen fit to leave unexplained.
But Holy Scripture speaks with no uncertain
sound. In Eph. i. 4 we read : " God chose us
in Christ before the foundation of the world " ;
in 2 Tim. i. 9 we read : " God saved us and called
us according to grace given to us in Christ Jesus
before times Eternal"; and here, in Titus i. 2, we
read, " promised before times Eternal." Though
we cannot explain, we are perfectly justified in
drawing legitimate inferences according to the
laws of thought, and we may ask : Why are men
haunted, possessed, with the instinct of some dim,
far-back, forgotten experience ? Whence came
the deeply rooted belief amongst a certain section
of the Jews of a past condition of being which
led them to question the Saviour as to whether
a man was born blind because he had sinned in a
previous life — a question which He refused to
answer ? Whence the inspiration of Word-
worth's well-known thought —
" Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home " ?
Whence the sweet legend of the Talmud, that
the dimple on the upper lip of every human being
was made by God's finger when, after putting
His immortal child into the training school of the
world, He whispered into the ear of each, " It is
well; thou art Mine," and then pressed His

32 The Pre-Natal Promise
finger on the lip to prevent his speaking of it ?
Whence that thought of Addison —
" 'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us ;
'Tis Heaven itself that intimates eternity to man " ?
We know that this instinct of a forgotten past
has been weighed, taken to pieces, analyzed.
One of the leading scientists of our age has tried
to trace it to the duality of the brain, to an
impression striking one lobe of the brain a
thousandth of a second before the other, and
so giving us an impression of a previousness.
Another able investigator has attributed it to
hereditary memory ; he affirms that these tran
sient flashes that seem to imply a forgotten past
are merely the inherited brain impressions of
experiences of our ancestors ; but when the Infinite
Originator says, "promised before times Eternal,"
how do I know that the appeal of the Spirit of
God to my soul, His dealing with my conscience,
His awakening of my fears, may not be an appeal
to this very promise, my recoUection of which has
been put to sleep by the " drowsy syrups of the
world " in which it is my duty to exist ?
AU who have had a long experience of the
ministry have witnessed many awakenings, hardly
two the same : some apparently sudden ; some
a slow development into new principles," new
motives, new thoughts, new actions. In every
case — I speak from my own experience — they
have suggested the awakening to the conscious-

The Pre-Natal Promise 33
ness of something always possessed, but never
before recognized. It has seemed more as if it
were God's finger touching some hidden chord,
and awakening some long-forgotten memory,
appealing to some far-back promise, some melody,
perhaps, learnt in the condition of mystery
whence we came " trailing clouds of glory " and
which that which Owen Meredith calls " Matter's
dense opaqueness " prevents our recollecting
clearly. So " promised before times Eternal " seems like
an appeal to a memory — that treasure-house
of the mind of which the key is not held by
us. Memory, mysterious memory, sometimes
awakened with an overwhelming rush by the
perfume of a flower, or the bar of some long-for
gotten tune with, as Longfellow says, " a tear in
every line." Let a man define to me physical
memory before he ventures to define or hmit or
deny what I am suggesting as the possibflity of
a spiritual memory. We have all heard how, in
one of the Indian wars of the last century, a child
was stolen and brought up amidst the Indians,
far from home and friends. She had forgotten
her name, her language, her parents. When the
American Government made peace with the
Indians, the captives were brought back and
restored to civihzation, but no one was able to
recognize this girl ; she knew no one, and no one
knew her ; her memory was a blank. An anxious
mother, instinctively feeling relationship with
3

34 The Pre-Natal Promise
her, sought in vain for some token by which she
might identify her child, but all attempts failed.
At last the mother began softly to sing to the
girl a hymn she had taught her child in early
infancy. She sang it again and again ; as the
cadence rose and fell, there came a wistful look
into the child's eyes ; it slowly changed into
recognition. The memory of the childhood's song
had broken the spell ; she was " born from above "
to love and home and hope and happiness, and
rushed into her mother's arms.
May it not possibly be thus that the Holy
Spirit of the Mother-heart of God sings the song
of home into the spirit of the wandering, alienated
and earth-bound children of men, striking a secret
chord within the heart, and calling it to the con
verted life ? Who shall say ? Who is there who
does not know something of that mystic thrill
when God is feeling for the heart-strings ? That
whisper of the Eternal singing a song of the spirit's
childhood, in the dark hour of the night, in some
sorrow ? We have perhaps recoiled from it,
resisted it ; we have thought, " How sharp the
point of this remembrance is !" But, " See that
ye refuse not Him that speaketh." Perhaps our
Spirit-Father is whispering to the affections and
the emotions, seeking to interweave our Ufe with
His, and that is heaven.
" Promised before times Eternal." The pro
mise obliterated by the Lethe of human birth
and life, the slumbering memory of the promise

.The Pre-Natal Promise 35
qui'ckened and appealed to by the Spirit of God !
Do you ask what possible bearing upon practical
ethics there can be in a speculation so remote,
so esoteric, so profound ? Practical ethics !
They are the ethics of the magistrate's bench.
The morals of " thou shalt not " are the morals
of the police-court, not the morals of the Kingdom
of Heaven. The morals of character arise only
from considerations that touch the springs of
action. Whatever regenerates nature, ipso facto,
transfigures conduct. Pascal, in his " Pensees,"
says : " Beyond doubt, the recognition of immor
tality makes the entire difference in morals ; it
is dangerous to prove to a man how nearly he is
on a level with the brutes without also showing
him his greatness." Yes, his greatness; and I
contend that whatever tends to intensify the con
viction of the elemental inseverability of God
and man ; whatever suggests to the soul its hidden
capacities, its truly intense powers ; whatever
convinces man that within him abides an heredi
tary germ of a Divine humanity, that can never
die and never be disintegrated, affects, and must
affect with surpassing power, the practice of his
life. It teaches him to live for eternity; it
crushes pessimism out of his heart ; it leads him
to see in every trial, in every disappointment,
the working out of the Father's promise of a nobler
manhood ; it says to him : " Rise to the conscious
ness and the dignity of "your noble origin and
lofty destiny. You belong to God ; you are heir
3—2

36 The Pre-Natal Promise
to a throne. You came forth from the Father
and came into the world. Look unto the rock
whence you are hewn, forget not your lineage,
your responsibility, in a self -sought degradation,
yield yourself unto God." Moreover, it tends to
the dissemination of practical ethics, for it calls
a man irresistibly to work with unwearied com
passion amongst brother-souls who, like himself,
have come forth from God, and whose true citizen
ship also is above, " whence they came." The
man who thinks profoundly along these lines
that unlock the secret of the universe — the lines
that reveal God as the Responsible Originator
calmly working out a purpose — will be keen and
eager in the work of striving to rescue his fellow-
men — to remove the causes of their degradation.
He will recognize himself as projected for awhile
into the atmosphere of this planet for purposes
of education, and, believing in his origin and des
tiny, he feels himself to be like the native pearl-
diver on the coast of Borneo : down into the
choking waters does the pearl-fisher plunge, with
his net-basket round his waist, holding his breath,
hastily gathering as many pearl-bearing shells
as he can reach, and after three, or at the outside
four, minutes, he is drawn up again, and presents
the pearl-bearing shells that he has gathered to his
master. He would die if he stayed there, and if
he did not work while he was there, his plunge into
the deep waters would be wasted.
" Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's

The Pre-Natal Promise 37
business ?" said the God-inhabited Child of Mary
when He realized His union with the Father.
Practical ethics as the immediate result of recog
nition of Divine Parentage is the lesson of that
utterance — an instantaneous liberation from the
material plane, following upon a clear vision of
spiritual truth. "As He is so are we in this
world," said St. John, comparing the Christian
worker with the great Saviour of Souls, who
" came out from the Father and came into the
world " to find for Himself the pearl of great
price — the uplifting of humanity — and again
" left the world and went unto the Father."
We, too, have come from the Infinite. We
cannot stay long under the waters of this world ;
threescore years and ten — less, far less, in com
parison with Eternity, than the four minutes of
the pearl-fisher. Is our net-basket filling with
pearls ? In the day when " He shall make up
His jewels " will there be in His crown some that
we have found for Him under this life's stormy
sea ? The motto of one who believes in the
possibility of this interpretation of St. Paul's
words wiU be : "I must work the works of Him
that sent Me while it is day, for the night cometh
when no man can work."

WHERE TO FIND THE LORD
" How is it that ye sought Me ? Wist ye not that I
must be about My Father's business ?" — Luke ii. 49.
EPIPHANY is the revelation of the limitless
immanence of the Spirit of God in the
whole universe, but specially in man, a
transcendent example of which immanence in
man is provided for our contemplation in the Lord
Jesus, who, through His acts and words which are
grouped together in the Epiphany Gospels, mani-
iested to His disciples the effulgence and the glory
of His Divine attributes.
Each Epiphany Gospel relates one of the signs
which He gave as credentials of His divinity, and
the Gospel for the first Sunday after Epiphany
directs our attention to the God - inhabited
Hebrew boy in the midst of the Rabbis in the
Temple, " both hearing them and asking them
questions." And the thought-excursion sug
gested by the special sign of this Sunday appears
to me to be included in the question He addressed
to Joseph and His Mother, " How is it that ye
sought Me ?" 38

Where to Find the Lord 39
This question, and the circumstances that led
to it, seem to me to suggest to the imaginative
faculty three considerations, the first on the
surface plane of thought, the others striking a
deeper note :
1. Where Jesus ought to be found, conveying
a lesson on the simple plane of the ethics of dauy
life ;
2. Where Jesus always may be found, which
takes us into a profounder sphere of thought ;
and —
3. What is the logical result of seeking Him in
the right place whether you consciously find Him
or not.
1. Where Jesus ought to be found. Here we
are on simple, homely grounds. It is recorded
in an earlier verse, " They sought Him amongst
their kinsfolk and acquaintances, and found Him
not." Remembering that there is always a
spiritual meaning under the letter of Scripture
narrative, it is no fanciful application of this
pathetic incident to say that under the inwardness
of this sentence lies hid the secret of much domes
tic sorrow, the explanation of much hard, isolated,
unsympathetic family life, the sickening experi
ence of many an awakened soul, who, after enter
ing into the knowledge of the Lord, has had to
seek spiritual communion and friendship outside
the family circle. It is because so many who
profess and call themselves Christians keep the
Christ, the Christ Spirit, the Christ attitude, the

40 Where to Find the Lord
Christ Presence, out of its proper place in the
home, and when you seek for Him " amongst
their kinsfolk and acquaintances " you find Him
not. The application of the thought is too obvious
to need emphasizing. " Return," said Jesus to
the exorcized Gadarene, " to thine own house,
and show what God hath done for thee." It is
as though He had said the first duty of a regene
rate soul is at home, amongst kinsfolk and ac
quaintance ; you wiU want more grace to witness
amongst your own kindred than to strangers.
The intuitive apprehension of the revelation of
the Absolute in Jesus is not a dogma, nor a theory,
nor a hypothesis, nor a dream : it is a spiritual
power, a personal Presence, a controlling genius
of life, a principle of action, an hourly consola
tion ; and home-life is the very first test of its
reality. If you would read the index of a life,
if you would detect the ruhng passion of a human
soul, if you would know the true character, you
must see it at home ; you never really know the
great men who have left the impress of their
footmarks upon the sands, of time until their
biography has told you what they were at home.
Why is this ? Because in the home the re
straints of external criticism are relaxed. A
tired man who has returned to his home under
some rebuff or disappointment takes off the mask
he has worn before his feUows. He does not
mean to be unkind, but in the freedom of his

Where to Find the Lord 41
home he is uncurbed ; he can blurt out what he
wiU with impunity. It is not want of affection ;
it is want of realizing that the Presence of the
Christ of God, the humanity of the Absolute,
" with us always to the end of the age," is a
solemn mystery that chaUenges us every hour of
life ; that Jesus, in all the love of His self-sacri
ficing heart, and all the purity of His transparent
soul, is a visible witness of our domestic life ; and
to know it, and to strive to live in the knowledge,
would be to possess a controlling influence against
that corroding mildew of home-life called temper,
and the result would be domestic happiness.
When the civilized world was ringing with Gor
don's praises shortly after his death at Khartoum,
his sister said to me, " No one knew what he
reaUy was until they knew him at home : the most
considerate, the most affectionate, the most un
selfish of men." Surely the first simple surface
lesson from this incident is that it should be our
effort to recognize, and that we are entitled to
claim, a Presence which will blend with and
sanctify and enhance a thousandfold the love of
family life, and that without Him, without the
breath of His inspiration, the spirit of His life,
the restraint of His Presence, we can do nothing ;
and the first simple thought from this Gospel
should be the aspiration that of none of us may
it be said, " They sought Him amongst their kins
folk and acquaintance, and found Him not."
The second consideration from that question,

42 Where to Find the Lord
" How is it that ye sought Me ?" takes us into
deeper waters. " Wist ye not that I must be,"
the Greek is, en tois tou Patros mou, which is
translated in the Revised Version " in My
Father's house," and in the Authorized Version
" about My Father's business." Both transla
tions are full of profound meaning. " In My
Father's house." What is the inwardness of this
expression ? What is " My Father's house " ?
What is the supreme dwelling-place of God ?
The enlightened mind replies at once, the entire
universe ; " there is one body," the sum-total of
all that is, and " one Spirit," the all-creating soul,
life, love of the universe. Everywhere is " My
Father's house." True, in a sense the whole
wondrous universe is His house, and the cease
less reproducing generative power which throbs
in every blade of grass and uplifts every seed is
the expression of His immanence and His activ
ity. It is a deep mystery how God and matter
blend, how the pulsation of His life through aU
things constitutes the pulse of life in all that is ;
the universe is God's hiding-place, as it is also
God's manifestation. But the depth and fullness
of this revelation and its influence upon human
progress will be in proportion to our capacity
to grasp the thought that this one life, in aU and
through all and above all, expresses itself in
different degrees, and that its highest expression
is man. " My Father's house " in its highest
meaning is man ; as Chrysostom says, " the true

Where to Find the Lord 43
Shechinah is man." " The Temple of the Lord
is holy, which Temple ye are." The Absolute is
immanent in man as the Logos, the self-utterance
of God, hidden from all men, and yet in its measure
the experience of all men. The Lord Jesus is
the perfect example of this immanence, and " as
He is so are we in this world." In every human
being there is a share, a germ of this Divine
nature, the same in kind, though not the same
in degree. In the Lord Jesus it was in fullness,
such transcendent fuUness that He was able to
speak of it as " the Father in Me." " Wist ye
not that I must be in My Father's house ?" is
as though He had said, " How is it that ye seek
Me only as an objective human enclosure of the
Divine, as something apart from you, outside
you ? Look within ; search your inmost, pro
foundest self ; find, cherish, train within yourself
the ray of the Divine light which is your Eternal
Ideal humanity, for God's life in man is the secret
of the Lord and the source of man's eternal
assurance." What an amazing, subduing con
sideration it is — the Father's house myself ! My
body a temple of the Lord ! How can I climb to
that high plane of thought ? How can I keep
there ? As I am but a humble seeker myself, I
have no direct answer to the question, but I can
perceive that there are two ways of knowing
truth : the one is through the senses and the
intellect ; the other is through awakened spiritual
intuition. The Lord recognized these two

44 Where to Find the Lord
methods, and contrasted them when He said, " A
little while and ye shall behold Me no more,"
using the word theorite, referring to physical
sight through the bodily organs, " and again a
little while and ye shall Me see," using the word
opsesthe, which implies the mental vision of the
awakened intuitions. Intellect starts from its
own self-consciousness, and uses logic as its
instrument of investigation. Spiritual intuition
starts from the dawning of a perception of a
higher self which stimulates an indefinable up
ward yearning. Intellect argues up to God ; it
seeks Him everywhere, outside itself, and it finds
Him. Spiritual intuition, on the other hand,
starts with the perception that God does not need
to be sought, that He has never been absent from
us, and the function of the human will is to co
operate with this perception and strive to become
conscious of the Divine operation within.
I suppose the road is the old one of auto-sugges
tion, St. Paul's " Reckon yourself," identify
yourself with the essential truth, and not the
sense illusion of your being. Intellect will con
vince you by strict logic, if you follow the laws
of thought, that the creative universal life must
be immanent in you, and spiritual intuition will
encourage you mentally to claim the Divine
inheritance, not as something which you will
one day become, but as something which you now
are. Yes, every believer ought to be " God manifest

Where to Find the Lord 45
in the flesh." When you see purity, honour,
goodness, chastity, sweetness of spirit, and
strength of principle in a human face, you are
looking upon God ; the glow of the Divine In-
dweller is shining through the windows of His
house, His temple. Might not Jesus, who is the
visible embodiment in perfection of that Divine
potency immanent in germ in each one of us —
might He not say, when we are worrying over the
insoluble problems involved in the different pre
sentations of religious truth, when we cry out,
" We have sought Thee sorrowing through sys
tems of thought and schools of theology ; we have
consulted experts in doctrinal casuistry, and we
have found Thee not " — might He not say, " How
is it that ye sought Me ? Wist ye not that I must
be in My Father's house ?" Thou wilt find Me
striving within thy inmost, the deeply hidden
germ in every man, the heart's Son first, the
heart's Lord afterwards. If you will but face life
with the knowledge that God's nature in you is
your unfailing assurance and strong consolation,
" the mystery hid from the foundation of
the world " revealed in Jesus, " Christ in you
the hope of glory," your life would be reconsti
tuted. But let the translation stand as it is in the
Authorized Version, " Wist ye not that I must be
about My Father's business ?" and it teaches
virtuaUy the same lesson, and affords consolation
to those who cannot climb to the higher con-

46 Where to Find the Lord
ception. It teaches that Jesus, the Jesus Spirit,
the Christ nature, the activity of the Logos, is
to be found wherever human beings are asso
ciating themselves with the Father's business,
and the Father's business is the evolution of the
race ; dealing with sympathy and helpfulness with
cases of misery and ignorance. How is it that
ye seek Him in speculative researches into what
theologians call the hypostatic union ; in casu
istic, hair-splitting definitions of mysteries beyond
your ken ; in adherence to traditional shibbo
leths ? How is it that ye seek Him in bitter con
troversies as to the precise method of His entering
by Incarnation into the world which He made,
and in which He has always been immanent ?
The Kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.
Ye shall find Me wherever My Father's business
is enterprised ; I shall be there whether ye find Me
or not.
This is the meditation of my heart to-day, and
it is not unpractical, for where the immanence
of the Christ in the race has become an influential
conviction as well as an intellectual hypothesis,
it will be found to lie very deep amongst the
springs of action. If you are once truly liberated
from the Calvinistic mildew that infests many
theologies and impoverishes many religions, and
have become convinced that humanity is the
Son of God, that humanity was in the beginning
with God ; that Jesus, who is God manifested and
man interpreted, is the example and prophecy

Where to Find the Lord 47
of a universal fulfilment ; that the one perfected
Son of God is the Archetype and forerunner of
every son of God, you will realize, as perhaps you
never realized before, that Christ has not effected
some great thing instead of you, but in the truest
sense for you, that you, in conjunction with Him,
may effect it also ; that whosoever hath this hope
in Jesus purifieth himself even as Jesus is pure ;
that, though the fact that one member of the race
has gained the victory over every form of unsub
dued nature is the promise of Our Father that
the triumph is virtually assured to all, this
triumph can only be effected through individual
courage, conflict, and resistance, and that the
whole duty of man is reaUy expressed in Tenny
son's lines :
" Arise and fly the reeling faun, the sensual feast,
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
Let us go forth, then, as heaven-born children,
as immortal mortals into the unknown of this
New Year, convinced that we have a citizenship
in heaven, and a mission from the Father. Let
us bear in mind that the obligation of sonship is
that Divine constraint, " I must be about My
Father's business." Let us go forth into the work
of reUeving misery, righting wrong, uprooting
corruption, stemming the tide of depravity, help
ing on the evolution of the Divine sonship of the
race. And then, though sorrow and pain and

48 Where to Find the Lord
disappointment may await us, as everywhere
they awaited the Perfect Elder Brother, what
matter if we know that our life be " hid with
Christ in God," and that the indwelling Christ
has promised, " Ye shall be perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect " ?

THE STORM
" Then He arose and rebuked the winds and thesea,
and there was a great calm." — Matt. viii. 26.
THEN He arose. Who is the " He," who
commands the wind and the sea, and they
obey Him ? Who occupies this unrivalled
position in human history ? Why does He thus
control Nature and govern the ideas, the aspira
tions, the actions of miUions of mankind ? There
is no secret connected with Him for those who are
liberated from limitations. The philosophy of
the Christian revelation has long, since answered
the question He put to the Pharisees : " What
think ye of the Christ ?" We recognize that He
is the highest expression of the Unconditioned
InteUigence that we call God. As a proposition,
the Infinite Originator whom we caU God is un
thinkable, because our finite minds cannot grasp
boundlessness. God only becomes thinkable as
He expresses Himself. The Eternal Reason, or
Word, or Logos of the unthinkable God has ex
pressed itself, uttered itself, in that which is
visible, in the phenomena of the universe, in all
creaturely life, in human beings, and, lastly, in
49 4

50 The Storm

the fuUness of time, this same Eternal Reason, or
Word, or Logos, that down the ages had expressed
itself in Nature, in conscience, in history, " be
came flesh and dwelt among us," embodied itself
specifically in one human form, born of a woman.
Therefore the " He " who arose and quelled the
storm is the He who is the King, Son, and Lord of
every heart, the unit of the universe, the objec
tive manifestation of that subjective Reason or
Logos of God, which is the immanent life in aU
things. " He arose and rebuked the wind and
the sea, and there was a great calm."
Did He work what is conventionally called a
miracle ? Well, do I work a miracle if, after
placing some irritant on an ailing body for medical
purposes, when the pain and distress has done
its work, I arise and soothe the irritated surface
with some emollient, and there is a great calm ?
I am the agent in both cases. I have been both
the cause of the irritation for a recognized purpose,
and the producer of the calm when the purpose
was fulfilled. But I have not worked a miracle.
Does it sound like a paradox to say that the
" He " who arose was both the storm and the
queUer of the storm ? An Oriental mind would
take the thought in a moment. He, the Logos, the
self-utterance of the Absolute, is the immanent
energy of the universe. He is that all-inclusive
Spirit whose consciousness is everywhere. " With
out Him was not anything made that was made;
and that which was made was life in Him." The

The Storm 5 1

universe, with its unerring, unalterable, regular
ized working, is one aspect of the consciousness
of the immanent Word or Logos. Not an atom
of matter, not a wave of the sea, not a force in
Nature, not an electron in the cosmos, ever has
been or ever could be unfilled, unpossessed by the
Word or self-utterance of the Absolute. In the
fullness of time this Eternal Reason sought
separate human enclosure in one spotless, perfect
Being. The Logos did not cease to be every
where because it was Incarnate in Jesus. He
Epiphanized, manifested, His identity with the
universal life by His power to modify or mani
pulate at will the phenomena of the universe
inhabited by His all- vital spirit. It was like the
consciousness of a man modifying, manipulating
some part of his own body. ' ' There is one body , "
the universe, "and one spirit," the immanent
Logos, who for purposes of recognition was
embodied in Jesus.
That ship in the storm, that arising at the right
moment of the controlling power of the Incarnate
God — what a splendid philosophical explanation
it is of the puzzles that surround our education
in this infant school of human life !
How conspicuously it frees you from the
miserable materialism which down the ages has
referred good and evil to different elemental
creative sources. He and He alone is the imma
nent centre of aU things. " I form the light, I
create darkness, I make peace, I create evil, I the
4—2

52 The Storm

Lord do all these things." In the midst of the
apparent contradictions, antagonisms, and con
trasts, there is only one principle at work, only
one love pulsing, only one purpose evolving, only
one end possible. Of course, I know this does
not answer all the questions. Why the necessity
for the agony, the soul-darkness of the storm ?
We do not and cannot know why, but reasoning
by inference convinces us that without the storm
the moral element in humanity would be lacking,
that without a contrast goodness would have no
significance in the conscious life of man. The
Christ, the Christ-nature, the God-germ is within,
in the ship, slumbering, waiting to be awakened.
The storm, the suffering, the distress, the fear,
causes the Divine within to be recognized, volun
tarily chosen, obeyed. When the storm has done
its work, He, who has always been there, arises,
and there is a great calm.
It is easy to apply the teaching of that scene on
the Lake of GaUlee to God's way and will with the
human race. It is His way and wiU in race de
velopment, in church activity, in individual
growth. In race development it is the immanence
of the Logos and the spirit of evolution that
makes the storms. That massacre of unarmed
men with women and children in St. Petersburg :
it was the storm, the cyclone ; it claimed many
lives ; for the immediate victims, one is assured
that the Divine love travaUs in pain within them,
and that their future wiU redeem their present, that

The Storm 53

now they are in a better world than this endorsing
the utterance of St. Paul — " I reckon that the
sufferings of this present time are not worthy to
be compared to the glory that shall be revealed."
But what are the rulers doing ? They are
resisting and temporarily hindering the evolving
force which is working out the purpose of God.
You can no more reverse the progress of the race
than you can crush back the soaring eagle into
the egg. Humanity is not a machine, but an
organism in which is implanted the germ of free
dom, self-respect, self-government, equal rights,
universal brotherhood. This germ is an aspect
of the activity of the immanent Logos. Where,
as in a wisely ruled, constitutionally governed
country like England, this instinct is regulated,
guided into useful channels, generalled by men of
light and leading, it quietly, healthily advances,
bearing fruit in new civil institutions and better
social arrangements. The storm is not needed.
Where it is sullenly and cruelly resisted, crushed
by the tyranny of self-seeking despots, it accumu
lates force, and one day it bursts its barriers, and
the whole social fabric totters with the shock.
" There is a wound, a grievous wound, that rankles
in the heart
Of those who from homes and all by tyrant hands
must part ;
It never heals, but rankles on, like wind, now calm,
now storm,
Till gathering strength, tornado-like, it bursts : then
comes Reform.

54 The Storm

In other words, when the evolutionary forces
working out the slow-moving purposes of God
have done their work, then He arises, and there
is a calm. But the whole process has been the
activity of His indwelling life, as certainly and as
positively as is implied in the majestic declaration
in Isa. xiv. : " I make peace, I create evil, saith
the Lord, I the Lord do aU these things." Pre
cisely the same principle is at work in the develop
ment of Church activity. That ship in the storm
is a close analogy of the Church of God, militant
here on earth against every form of sin, and de
pending for her success upon the recognition and
unfolding of a Divine life within her. The storms
of the irreconcilable forces of evil beat against
the Church, which is the national instinct of
rectitude organized, exactly in proportion as she
courts unpopularity by rebuking with unflinching
severity the social sins of any age. The perpetual
peril of the organization caUed the Church is to
leave the Christ slumbering, and to strive to calm
the storm by opportunism rather than principle,
by pouring oil on the waves rather than by
boldly battling through them ; to endeavour to
mitigate the danger of losing her cargo by siding
with the forces which produce the atmospheric
disturbance of national immorality and degrada
tion. The only true safety of the Church, both
as regards her cargo, which is represented by her
temporalities, and her crew, which is represented
by the position in national life of her official

The Storm 55

leaders, is to awaken within her the indwelling
Christ, and manifest in power against the gigantic
curses of the so-called civilization of the age,
regardless of consequences. Then He arises, and
there is a calm.
But the closest analogy of the ship in the storm
on the Sea of Galilee is the individual man.
(You wnl generally find that this mode of inter
pretation provides the key that unlocks the
inmost of revelation.) Man, working his way
across the sea of life from the mysterious shore of
the eternity whence he came, to the equally mys
terious further shore of the eternity into which
he is going, propelled by the rowers of his natural
faculties, his influential and automatic senses, his
appetites, desires, and ambitions, steered by an
instinctive Godward tendency caUed natural
religion, which no race of men has ever been
without, because natural religion is the imma
nence of the Logos ; the force that moves the
needle of the compass by which he steers being
a kind of home-sickness that keeps him the only
really restless animal that God has made, but
possessing also somewhere a mysterious in
dwelling power, a Divine life, a " secret hid from
the foundation of the world," a germ life of
Divine Sonship, a guarantee of immortality, a
hereditary relationship with God, a potentiality
that St. Paul calls " the Christ in you, the hope
of glory," very constantly left slumbering, un
born, unawakened, smothered by the desires and

56 The Storm

ambitions of the lower nature, by lust; self-wiU,
temper. And what possible remedy has man in the
cyclone of temptation when he is relying upon
his own natural strength ? " In me," says St.
Paul, " that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good
thing " — that is, nothing good enough to resist
the tempest of passion. Is not sin a storm, a
hurricane, a disfigurement of God's image, a
producer of degraded bodies and wounded affec
tions, of broken hearts and ruined souls ? The
whole phenomena of that bitter secret of the world
tallies with the incidents of a tempest ; the anta
gonism of currents of thought, the sense of op
pression and distress, the consciousness of peril,
as every safeguard of good resolution is torn down
by the storm ; it is only fools who make a mock at
sin. The sensitive, the highly strung, the easily
tempted, the men of good intentions, weak will,
and strong passions, they know its agony, its
thraldom, its reality. Praise the Lord ! He is
never so far off as even to be near. He is within,
in the ship of life ; our spirit is that which He holds
most dear. Then goes up the eager cry, " Lord,
save us, we perish." It is an appeal both within
and without. It was Augustine who, in an illu
minated moment, cried out, " O Felix culpa !"
for the remedy is ever close at hand : where sin,
there grace ; where storm, there peace. It is the
resolute concentration of mind upon the eternal
realities which not only wakes up, quickens into

The Storm 57

activity and conscious life the germ of the Christ
within, but appeals to the saving power of the
Christ without ; it not only appeals to the highest
within, but it pleads with the Friend of sinners —
" By Thy cross and passion, by Thy precious
death and burial, by Thy glorious resurrection
and ascension, good Lord, deliver me." And then
shall He arise, the Sympathizer, the Healer, the
Wonder-worker, the Indweller, the Mediator, the
God who, as man for man, was tempted in all
points like as we are ; and He says : " Place the
ship of thy life in My hands, but for the future
live in the spirit of recollectedness that I am in
the ship of thy life, that I dwell in thee, that thou
art My temple ; strive to remember that I am
ever working to penetrate and sanctify thy inmost
soul ; and now I will strengthen thee to resist
sin for the future, and help thee to bear meekly
the pain which the memory of sin brings." And
thus does He rebuke the wind and the sea, and
there is a great calm.
Carry the thought on for a moment to the other
side. Se»Him in this morning's Gospel* throwing
open the door into the world of spirits, and as
suming without limitation the control of all
forces and all beings, whether on this side of death
or the other. I have spoken so often on the latter
part of this Gospel that I need only allude to it.
The Greek word daimon — here mistranslated
devU — always, as you know, means disembodied
* The fourth Sunday after Epiphany.

58 The Storm

human personalities ; and that which is caUed
possession or obsession, when the daemon seems
to influence the living, could not be without the
permission of the Father of Spirits, and would
appear to be an operation of the omnipotent com
passion of Him who has said, " All souls are mine,"
intended in some way for the improvement of the
daemon by an abnormal kind of temporary
identification with a purer human being. I am
by no means a convinced believer in what is
called obsession, but 1 have seen several cases
that were called obsession, and they were always
cases of pure, gentle souls.
The strange incident of the departure of the
daemons, with the permission of the Christ, into
the bodies of the swine can only be judged from
the standpoint of the responsibility and Father
hood of God ; and as God is the Father of the
spirits of dead sinners, as truly as He is the Father
of the spirits of living Christians, and as every
action of His is remedial, and every permission of
suffering intended to redeem and sanctify, this
permission could only have been, because in the
deliberate judgment of the Lord Jesus it was
better for these debased human spirits so to taste
the depths of degradation by being saturated with
the swinish element that they could sink no lower,
and in the very horror of the experience awaken
to the agonies of a repentance which should be to
them the beginning of the ascending life. No
other interpretation is consistent with the all-

The Storm 59

Fatherhood of God, and the loving, saving,
remedial mission of the Christ. If this be so, then,
the highest, the most consummate expression of
the love of God in the Christian creed is contained
in the article " He descended into Hades," or,
in mystic language, " He crossed over to the other
side," and the lesson is of unutterable consolation.
Human nature can never descend so low as to be
beyond the reach of the missionary activity and
remedial resources of the Christ of God. If we
sink to the lowest Hades, even there shall His love
follow us, and His right hand hold us. He will
come over to the other side to seek us amongst
the lost. And even in the awful storm of the
remedial discipline of the world beyond the grave,
there shaU come the moment when He will arise
and rebuke the tempest, and there shall be a great
calm.

PRAYING FOR THE DEPARTED
" God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,
for all live unto Him." — Luke xx. 38.
AS the years roll on, as human life wears away,
Easter with its message becomes more to
us than Christmas or any other festival
of the Church. Why ? Because the power of
Easter is that it has converted hopes, speculations,
aspirations into certainties. It has brought life
and immortality to light. The universal instinct
of survival in the human race has always lifted
the minds of men beyond the silent barrier of the
grave into an expectation of a continuity of
existence after death, but the shadow of uncer
tainty has ever rested on the permanency of
man's distinct individuality. This uncertainty
our Father has taken away. It was the deter
minate counsel and foreknowledge of the Father
to send forth, in the fuUness of time, one perfect
Son, the Elder Brother of humanity, the Type
and prophecy of every member of the human
family, who, after being trained by temptation
and suffering, passed through the grave and gate
60

Praying for the Departed 61
of death, and showed Himself alive by many
infaUible proofs, being seen, as St. Paul teUs us,
by above 500 brethren at once, the greater
number of whom were alive at the time that he
wrote. Easter Day was the occasion of His first showing
forth of His individual survival. It is a justifiable
figure of speech to call Easter Day the day of
His resurrection, but it is only a figure of speech,
for He rose out of the limitations of His atomic
body at the moment when He breathed out His
life on the cross. But Easter Day was the day
of His first visible appearance, and therefore
upon that day we praise God that a future Ufe
is certain, that personality is deathless, that
sundered hearts will be reunited. " I am He,"
Jesus said, " that liveth and was dead, and,
behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the
keys "; and " because I live, ye shall live also."
He lifted the doors of death and Hades, as it
were, off their hinges, as Samson carried the gates
of Gaza on his shoulders, and bid us look right
through the dark vaUey into the life everlasting,
and see our home, our fatherland, our mother-
country, our beloved, waiting for us beyond and
above the time experiences of this mortal life.
No grander, more comprehensive utterance of
the Christ has been recorded than that authorita
tive anticipation of the revelation of Easter which
I have quoted — " God is not the God of the dead,
but of the living, for aU live unto Him." The

62 Praying for the Departed
utterance is prefaced with these words : " but
that the dead are raised." It is the resurrection
of which He is speaking, and He clearly, unmis
takably identifies resurrection with continuity of
individuality, and not with some future recon
struction of the atomic envelope in which the
school-time of human experience has been passed.
The whole thought of Easter, then, is Sursum
corda — Lift up your hearts — rise out of Materi
alism ; cease to identify yourself with your
human body ; affirm your ideal humanity ;
believe that God's life in you is your immor
tality, that life in the body is but a brief stage in
an endless career, that there is a consciousness
within you wholly independent of the body.
Professor Tyndall once said that consciousness
without brain action was certainly conceivable,
that atomic flux was its proof. He said the
" chasm between brain action and consciousness
is impassable. Here," he says, " is a rock upon
which Materialism must spht whenever it professes
to be a complete philosophy of the human mind."
Of course, it is utterly impassable so long as
physiology seeks for the immaterial spirit in the
convolutions of the brain. Let Materialism split
upon its rock, and sink fathoms deep into oblivion ;
it has done good service by witnessing to the im
portance of the body ; we can now do without it,
as we can do without the swaddling clothes of
our infancy. The material part of us has been
in flux, like the water of a stream, or melting wax,

Praying for the Departed 63
since we were born, and the whole time we have
been conscious of continuous personal identity,
and he who finds himself thinking, feeling, re
solving, perceiving, after sixty years of atomic
flux, knows that Materialism is an illogical
dream, perceives that mental and moral activity
cannot be arrested by the perishing of his outward
mechanism, and recognizes the appropriateness
of the teaching of the great Evolutionist, Jesus
Christ, when He proclaims continuous progres
sion, limitless development, unending conscious
individuality for man in the words, " God is not
the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live
unto Him."
Now, obviously, the applications of the great
revelation of Easter which appeal to the power
of the imagination are innumerable, but to-day
I desire to emphasize one thought specially. In
its universal aspect the revelation of Easter is
an authoritative demonstration of the common
spiritual bond uniting all men, whether in the
body or out of the body, with each other and with
the universal Father Spirit who thought us into
being. And thus it encourages us in a sublime
spirit of confidence to look with thought-eyes
through the open door and realize our close union
with the departed whom we have " loved long
since and lost awhile."
" Do we know that they are alive ?" asks one.
How do we know that they are alive ? We know
it because we are alive ourselves, and we are alive

64 Praying for the Departed
because the immortality of God is embodied in
our nature, and that Infinite, Creating, Upholding
Life throbs through us and through them. There
fore we know that they are alive. God is love,
and the motto of love is " for ever," and the logic
of love is " there is no death." " God is not the
God of the dead." All live unto Him ; so long as
God lives man lives, for the immanence of God
is the life of man.
I think we should sometimes try to force our
selves to realize this, for the law of spiritual
growth is a profound conviction of a noble destiny
and an unswerving certainty that the eternal will
outlive the things of time. The exercise of this
law is to force the imagination to behold the face
of our Father which is in the heaven of the
inmost — in ourselves and in all. It is to recognize
in every aspiration, in every throb of dissatisfac
tion with what we are, our Father's promise of
the nobler manhood He is evolving. The angels
are what we are told they are because they
" always behold the face of our Father which is in
heaven." And the Kingdom of Heaven is within
you ; to behold the face of our Father is to see
in His inner promptings the Divine ideal which
it is our function to recognize, obey, and develop
until our lives become a normal expression of His
immanence. Thus the teaching of Easter — that
God's life is the common possession of man —
uplifts and illuminates the race, and constant
disregard of it, or hard materialistic disbelief in

Praying for the Departed 65
it, is the doom of hope, the extinction of develop
ment, the sepulchre of motive.
Try sometimes and think this thought ; think
that time is not running out for us into annihila
tion, but into development. Say to yourself, in
some moment of silent meditation : " I live be
cause God Uves," " His Eternal Spirit is my true
life," " His irrevocable purpose is my ultimate
perfection." With one strong act of the will,
withdraw from outward things into the secret
of His presence, and then you shall see sins of
thought and desire, and appetite, and temper, and
pessimism fade as the baciUi of disease wither
and perish in strong sunlight.
But now for the thought which I desire to em
phasize. You ask me : Can we pray for the dead ?
Ought we to pray for the dead ? I answer :
This pulsing through man of a common Divine
life is true of you, of me, of aU men, while still
in the flesh. -Must it not be equaUy true, if not
more tme, of those who are no longer in the flesh,
but Uving in the other sphere of being ? It was
of men long dead that Jesus spoke these words,
" God is not the God of the dead, but of the
living." Centuries had passed since the bodies
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had become re
solved into their constituent elements, and min
gled with the matter of the planet to be used by
others. Yet the Lord speaks of them as alive,
as risen. " Now that the dead are raised," He
says : " God is the God of the living, for aU live
5

66 Praying for the Departed
unto Him " — some here, others in higher condi
tions, but aU sharing the same life.
Those human spirits whose bodily covering was
so dear to us are alive in personal identity, stiU
united to us by the communion, the common life
of the family of God. No suspension, even for a
single moment, of the vital functions of the spirit
is possible or conceivable, for " all live unto Him."
What matter that they have passed temporarily
from our sight ? The urgent demands of human
life often necessitate that kind of separation here.
To watch the features of a loved one fading into
invisibility as a great ocean steamer slowly in
creases her distance from the wharf is very like
watching a death. One has beautifuUy said :
" In the loss of friends and children we see the
vine grow up by the side of the fence and pass
over the top ; the flower is on the other side."
All of us have loved ones flowering on the other
side — the little child whose frail life you saw
breathed so sufferingly away, whose beloved form
you laid in the grave, loath to part with it —
" Before decay's effacing fingers
Had marred the lines where beauty lingers."
The heart strains and yearns in the track of the
loved spirit that has passed into another dimen
sion of space as the heart strains and yearns,
after the ocean steamer passing to another hemi
sphere ; but you know that extinction has no
more place in the one departure than in the other

Praying for the Departed 67
— the child is flowering on the other side, in the
sunshine, in the unclouded presence of the Uni
versal Mother-Soul who is our life also. No —
" They do not die
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us."
And I confess that I cannot see in what our
Christian religion is better than Materialism if
we aUow ourselves to change to them.
Do not yield for a single moment to that blind
ing superstition which would dare to silence
your prayers for your loved ones so soon as the
silver cord of physical life is loosed, and the
golden bowl of visible embodiment is broken.
Popish, is it ? So much the better for Popery !
Archbishop Magee, who was, above all things,
a Protestant, wisely said : " Prayers for the pro
gress of the departed abound in the early liturgies
of the Church, and especially in connexion with
the celebration of Holy Communion. To say
that such prayers imply Popery is not only unjust
and uncharitable, but in regard to our contro
versy with Rome extremely rash and unwise." I
would add that it is more than rash and unwise :
it is stupid Materialism. It is idle to question
how they can be benefited. If the Infinite Mind
can set free influences of good in response to our
prayers here, though the whole process is a com
plete mystery to us, He is surely equally able to
do so there ; and if it is irrational to pray for our
5—2

68 Praying for the Departed
feUow-men there, it is equally irrational to pray
for them here ; the common pulsation of God's
life through them and through us constitutes the
link between us there and here.
I want to encourage you to pray for the de
parted. To pray for them links you to them. I believe
that they are very near to us — in a sense nearer
than when in the restrictions of the flesh — and
that they are affected by our conduct and con
dition. What else do those tender words reveal
ing the motherliness of God signify ? Why does
he wipe away their tears ? Are there tears in
Paradise ? There is joy, we are told, when sinners
repent. Must there not, therefore, be some regret
when we are hardened ? There must be a thriU
of sympathy between us and them. The ascer
tained facts of physical science are tending ever
more and more in the direction of breaking down
the supposed antagonism between mind and
matter, between natural and supernatural, and
indicating that the communion of saints is not so
much a theological expression as a natural law ; for
it is rapidly being demonstrated that mind can act
on mind independently of the recognized channels
of sensation. CaU it mind-transference, or tele
pathy, or dynamic thought, or what you w iU, it is a
fact that in some circumstances mind can influence
mind without contact, without even proximity.
" Star to star vibrates light. So may soul to soul
Strike through a finer element of her own."

Praying for the Departed 69
Let the believer in the revelation of Easter
reverently concentrate determined thought upon
one now in the spirit-world whose judgment on
earth he greatly valued, not seeking that species
of intercourse which encourages messages spelt
by raps and knocks, but by projection of the
mind into space external to itself, seeking at the
same time communion with the Divine Spirit,
and who shaU deny the probability that the loved
one we . seek, whose affections are expanding in
the fuller, freer life beyond the grave, can pour
into our minds a stream of guiding, stimulating
influence ? We are surrounded, says St. Paul,
by an innumerable cloud of witnesses. Amongst
them are some of our closest and dearest — the
mother who bore us, the father who taught us by
his forbearing love what the love of God must be.
Would they not cheer, encourage, console us if
they could ? Must they not grieve when we are
hard, worldly, prayerless, impure, un-Christlike ?
And then, perhaps, their Father and our Father
wipes away (metaphorically) their tears — I know
not how — possibly by the assurance that, as
they have fought and conquered, so shaU we ;
that if they " wait but a little while longer in un
complaining love, His own most gracious smile
shall welcome us also above."
Thus is the possession of the common Divine
life that death cannot sunder a truth that should
awaken us to the dignity and blessedness of life,
lift us into the sphere of eternal realities, help us

70 Praying for the Departed
to live unto God earnestly, consciously, willingly,
repentantly ; for our real home is with God and
our true citizenship is in heaven, and " our God
is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for
aU hve unto Him."
FinaUy, however intensely we believe in the
inseverability of God and man, however irref rag-
ably convinced we are that our beloved are alive,
it is, as Byron says, " a fearful thing to see the
human soul take wing." The agony of a recent
bereavement is keen and passionate, and cannot
reason cooUy ; but it is our privilege and our duty
not to " sorrow as those without hope." The
nearer we get to the God within us, the nearer we
are to our beloved departed. It will be but a
little while and we shaU be reunited. The revela
tion of the survival of the Christ encourages us to
alter the agonizing " good-bye " of bereavement
into the " good-night " of expectation, to say
when they depart :,
" Only good-night, beloved, not farewell,
A little while and all His saints shall dwell
In hallowed union indivisible,
Good-night.
" Until we meet before His throne,
Clothed in the spotless robes He gives His own.
Until we know as we are known,
Good-night."
Inasmuch as God is not the God of the dead but
of the living, we are sure — absolutely sure — that —
" With the morn the angel face will smile
That we have loved long since and lost awhile."

Praying for the Departed 71
The following prayer for the departed can be procured
from Messrs. Vacher and Sons, Great Smith Street,
Westminster :
" Our Heavenly Father, the Father of the spirits of
all flesh, in whom all creatures live and move and have
their being, in whatsoever world or condition they be ;
I beseech Thee for him whose name and abiding-place
and every need Thou knowest. Lord, vouchsafe him
light and rest, peace and refreshment, joy and consola
tion in Paradise, in the companionship of saints, in the
presence of Christ, in the ample folds of Thy great love.
Grant that his life [so troubled here] may unfold itself
in Thy sight, and find a sweet employment in the spacious
fields of eternity.
" If Ae hath ever been hurt or maimed by any unhappy
word or deed of mine, I pray Thee of Thy great pity to
heal and restore him, that he may serve Thee without
hindrance. " Suffer him to know, O gracious Lord, if it may be,
how much I love him and miss him, and long to see him
again ; and if there be ways in which his influence may
be felt by me, vouchsafe him to me as a guide and guard,
and grant me a sense of his nearness in such degree as
Thy laws permit.
"If in aught I can minister to his peace, be pleased
of Thy love to let this be ; and mercifully keep me from
every act which may hinder me from union with him as
soon as this earth-life is over, or mar the fullness of our
joy when the end of the days hath come.
" Pardon, O gracious Lord and Father, whatsoever is
amiss in this my prayer, and let Thy will be done, for
my will is blind and erring, but Thine is able to do ex
ceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think ;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

THE HOLY UNITY
" That they may be one, even as We are."
" That they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art
in Me, and I in Thee, . . . that the world may believe
that Thou didst send Me." — John xvii. n, 21.
EVER since I acquired the habit of thinking,
it has been my impression that " the
doctrine of the Holy Unity " would have
been a more appropriate title for the foundation
dogma of the Christian Revelation than " the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity."
First, because it is the perfect unity of the
Supreme Being that ever requires defending and
emphasizing. And, secondly, because the absolute unity of
the Divine nature, under diversity of manifesta
tion, is authoritatively declared by our Lord, in
the passages I have quoted, to be the pattern of
the unity He requires amongst His followers.
First, let me speak of that which is caUed the
" Mystery of the Holy Trinity."
To imagine that the human mind can detach
itself by effort from extemalism, and blend in
worship with the Universal Mind merely by having
72

The Holy Unity 73
presented to it a dogmatic proposition akin to a
mathematical puzzle, to be believed on pain of
damnation, is simply a violation of common
sense ; and yet the fact that the whole of Catholic
Christendom insists upon our accepting a certain
form of words and a certain definite analysis of the
. Universal Spirit called the Holy Trinity naturally
concentrates our solemn attention upon that par
ticular order of thought in which it has pleased
God to unfold Himself to human intelligence.
It is not my desire to entangle any in meta
physical subtleties when I ask you to fix your
mental gaze for a few moments on that which is
called the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, before I
ask you to consider the ethical considerations that
flow from it.
The word " Trinity " is not in the Bible ;
neither does it occur in the standard of faith re
quired of the laity — namely, the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. Calvin
said that he was willing that the word " Trinity "
should be abolished, if only it could be the ac
cepted faith of all that Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, each distinguished by a peculiar property,
are one God. Nevertheless, as the word conveys
an effective impression of the truth underlying it,
and is sanctioned by hallowed custom, no believer
need hesitate to adopt it so long as it is not used
to embitter controversy or condemn others.
The essential characteristic idea underlying the
word " Trinity," in which the Church expresses

74 The Holy Unity
the sublime doctrine of to-day, is that the Infinite
Being, the Creator Spirit, is one and indivisible ;
that in His unbroken Oneness there is contained
a tri-unity, a threeness, not of separate indi
vidualities, but of essentially separate manifesta
tions of the same individuality, by which absolute
power, perfect love, and complete holiness enwrap
the human being in an eternal purpose in every
department of his life. This is the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity.
It is not new. Traceable everywhere in the
religious history of the human race is a conception
of the threeness of the Supreme InteUigence, tiU
it culminates in the revelation of the Christian
faith. It underlies Zoroastrianism, it is enshrined
in Brahmanism, it is discoverable in the oldest
Eastern Scriptures 1,300 years before Christ,
where the everlasting is described as " Sat," or
Absolute Being ; " Kit," Absolute Being thinking
itself into duality ; " Ananda," Absolute Being in
loving operation upon the hearts of men.
Sat, Kit, Ananda : God in essence, God in
manifestation, God in outflowing life. How won
derful a foregleam is this of the glorious creed
which has come to us through Bethlehem and
Calvary ! The God of Christianity, communion
with whom we seek to-day, has revealed Himself
to us as, first, the Parent-Source, from whom are
all things, for " of Him and through Him and to
Him are aU things"; this is God the Father.
Secondly, inasmuch as this truth in its entirety is

The Holy Unity 75
too wonderful and excellent for us finite beings
to attain to, so much of this Parent-Source as can
be usefuUy understood by man— all, that is, of
His affectional and moral nature, has been re
vealed in a human personality so completely that
Jesus can say, " He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father," and yet there is so much more in God
that we cannot now receive that Jesus can also
say, " the Father is greater than I " ; this is God
in self-utterance, or God the Son. And thirdly,
the perpetual influence, or Spirit, or Atmosphere,
or breath of God, the essence of the character of
God as revealed in Jesus, is poured forth into our
inmost spirit, thinking the thought within us,
praying the prayer within us, mingling God's life
with our Ufe, mind with mind, heart with heart,
spirit with spirit, empowering, guiding, sanctify
ing ; and this is God the Holy Ghost, and these
Three are One.
In vain does materialistic scepticism deride the
doctrine of the Trinity ; in vain does it invoke
mechanics and science to prove to us the absurdity
of our unbelief in threeness in unity. Nature is
the time-gesture of God, and threeness in unity is
a recognized fact amongst the phenomena of
Nature. Professor Tyndall proved to us by ex
periments with the spectrum that any intensely-
heated body emits at the same time three rays,
differing in their results, but forming such a unity
as to be inseparable.
There is first the " heat-ray," which is felt but

76 The Holy Unity
not seen ; there is secondly the " light-ray,"
which is seen but not felt ; there is thirdly the
" actinic ray," which is neither felt nor seen, but
which is only known by its chemical action upon
certain sensitive substances, such as in the opera
tion of photography ; and these three are one, and
yet not one is the other, and not one can exist
except in conjunction with the other.
Is not this an echo in Nature of the revelation
of the God of Nature, the Thrice Holy of believing
miUions ? The Father, felt, as the Soul of the
Universe, but not seen. The Son, the light-ray,
" I am the Light of the world," seen but not felt,
not touched except by the touch of faith, " though
the multitude thronged Him." The Holy Ghost,
neither felt nor seen, but known by His effects in
conversion, renewal, sanctification, sensitizing the
heart of man to receive the likeness of God when
the " Light of the world " is poured into it.*
The very analogies of the natural world forbid
the thinker to aUow that threeness in unity is
either unphilosophical or absurd. " The meanest
flower that blows " is as veritable a trinity in
unity *as God Himself, possessing essential life
which no man hath seen at any time ; visible form
which manifests essential life ; perfume proceeding
from essential life and visible form ; and these
three are one. Hold in your hand a common
* Cf. sermon on " Holy Trinity " in " Following on
to Know " (Masters and Co., 78, New Bond Street), in
which this analogy is used.

The Holy Unity jj

magnet, and you have a model of the order of
thought in which God has revealed Himself.
First you have the Nature-power that holds atoms
together. What is itj? Name it. You cannot !
It is just a fact that precedes demonstration, that
is beyond criticism, that defies denial. Secondly,
you have the tangible weight that you hold in
your hand, visible, external, embodied. Thirdly,
you have the outflowing magnetism which draws
atoms of steel to itself. What is it ? How does
it act ? It is imponderable, invisible, unanalys
able, but it is the outflowing power of the two
other entities, and these three are one ; and the
whole is in your possession when you grasp the
outward form, just as every incommunicable
attribute of the Trinity is ours when we grasp
vigorously Jesus the Revealer. Truly the un-
raveUer of the secrets of Nature is the unconscious
commentator upon the creeds of Catholic Christen
dom. Consider now what is the ethical teaching of
this transcendant doctrine of God. That God
should appeal to man to unite himself in all his
weakness to .this magnificent Triple Alliance of
power, helpfulness, and influence ; this Trinity of
" love in diffusion," " love in activity," " love in
indweUing," is a declaration of the dignity and
responsibility of man, and an assertion of his
capacity to respond to the highest, or misuse his
privUeges and turn away from his peace.
Man is the offspring of the Infinite: "In the

78 The Holy Unity
image of God made He man." Man has an heredi
tary similarity of nature with God ; he is himself
a trinity of spirit, soul, and body, so marveUously
infolded that these three are one. Spirit is the
root and centre of his being. Spirit is that which
underlies his face and form and speech and action ;
Spirit is that by which he can look above and
beyond this world of sense, and enter into com
munion with his God ; Spirit is the kingdom of
heaven that is within us ; Spirit is the affinity
which enables us to mingle our lives with God's
life ; for no gift can be received without affinity
to the gift. " Dwelt no power Divine within us,
How could God's divineness win us ?"
The rarest beauties of sea and sky and form and
colour are nothing to a man without the corre
sponding idea of beauty within him ; he admires
and rejoices because the kingdom of beauty is
within him ; the most exquisite harmonies of
music are nothing to the man without the master-
sense of music within him ; he is ravished by
melody because the kingdom of melody is within
him. Similarly the deep things of God, His
nature and character, lofty ideals, boundless
possibilities of development, are offered to us and
attained by us because " the kingdom of heaven
is within us," and the calling into activity of this
" kingdom of heaven within us," this hereditary
God-consciousness, is confided to our own voli-

The Holy Unity 79
tion ; it is the voice of the moral law within us
which says, " I ought," and obedience to it is
man's salvation ; it is the self-assertion within
man of the Divine humanity which reaches God
ward and gains strength tiU it assumes the control
of the lower man, lifting him into a nobler exist
ence, a loftier aspiration, a life " hid with Christ
in God," and sustained by the outflowing Influence
of Father and Son, which is the Holy Ghost.
Surely this is the inwardness of the saying, " Who
soever will be saved must thus think of the
Trinity " — to which I would add, " Whosoever
will be saved must thus think of himself."
The second thought from the doctrine of the
Trinity is this : In John xvii. the Lord refers to
the perfect unity in essence, with plurality in
manifestation, in the Godhead, as the analogy of
the unity He desires amongst Christians, and He
suggests that if this unity were effected, the world
would believe that He came out from the Father.
To my own mind, this suggestion is proof posi
tive that the schemes and conceptions as to the
visible corporate reunion of Christendom with
which we are familiar in the present day are
founded on a mistaken basis, and that true unity
upon the pattern of the unity of the Godhead, is
not a successful scheme for theological, doctrinal,
and ecclesiastical identity, but an essential, pro
found, spiritual unity coexistent with wide diver
gence of external manifestation.
" That they may be one, as we are one " are our.

80 The Holy Unity
Lord's words ; and what was the characteristic of
that plural unity ? Can any divergence in visible
manifestation be imagined more complete than.
that which obtains in the threefold self-utterance
of the Absolute named the Trinity ? First, the
Infinite Immanence, the inmost uplifting life of
aU that is. Secondly, the visible manifestation in
one human embodiment of the moral nature of
the Infinite Immanence, dying as the sinless
Sufferer on the cross of Calvary. Thirdly, the
tongues of fire visibly descending at Pentecost
and guiding the early Christian Church under
the name of " the Spirit of Jesus." And these
are three separate and distinct manifestations of
one Immeasurable, Omnipotent Unity called God.
Then again, the Lord said, " That the world
may believe that Thou hast sent Me." It would
in no way surprise or interest the world, the out
siders, to see professors of a faith aU holding pre
cisely the same opinions and adopting precisely
the same definitions and externals, living amicably
together. They would have no excuse for discord.
That which would arrest the attention of outsiders
would be the spectacle of professors of the same
fundamental belief, widely differing as to detaUs,
definitions, dogmas, and external methods, so
bound together by the magnitude and reality of
their common fundamental belief that they were
content to suffer each other to worship precisely
according to the preference of each, because they
recognized beneath all externals a " unity of the

The Holy Unity 81
spirit " so profound, so real, so intense, that it
transcended all human sects, methods, and de
nominations. This would be an exhibition that
would interest and astonish the outsiders, and
their conclusion would be that the fundamental
truth which could thus weld together those widely
separated by distinctions of creed, method, and
sect, must be a reality. It is to this kind of unity,
surely, that St. Paul referred when he bid us
" keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
The fact is that " the Church," in its essence, is
a spiritual and invisible body, existing wholly
independent of its external manifestations and
methods, which may be national, geographical,
almost even climatic, and with regard to which
there may be, and ought to be, room for almost
unlimited divergence of opinion without any
rupture of true spiritual unity. If the Lord
Christ were to-morrow visibly to return, after the
manner in which some Christians expect Him to
return, and caU to Himself His Church, His Body,
is there anyone in his right senses who believes
that it is only the particular denomination to
which he belongs that the Lord would call ?
Would it not be that " great multitude which no
man can number, of all nations and kindreds, and
peoples, and tongues," and sects and eras, who are
united by faith in the Incarnate Lord ? And if
that would be true in the event expected by some,
it is true to-day. This conviction incapacitates
me from cordial acquiescence in the language of
6

82 The Holy Unity
the appeal for unity, widely circulated, signed by
the two Archbishops and the responsible heads
of the principal Christian sects in England. I am
unable to accept the first proposition — namely,
" that our Lord meant us to be one in visible
fellowship." I believe, on the contrary, that He
meant us to differ as widely as we please in visible
organization and external manifestation, but to be
one in spirit ; and I do not believe that Christian
unity is attainable by a reconsideration of fron
tiers or a system of mutual concessions, but by a
deepening of spiritual life. The atoms of a drop
of water are held in solidity by a mysterious
combining agent, invisible, indefinable, caUed
electricity. In like manner, the mysterious,
ever-present, all-pervading Spirit of the Lord is
the combining agent of the Church.
You could as readily induce the constituent
gases to mingle and form a drop of water without
electricity, as to imagine that you can make a
Church unity, by obliterating rubrical landmarks
and abolishing credal limitations, without a
general deepening of the spiritual life. The mis
take is that each man believes his own denomina
tion to be " the Church." Doubtless the marine
inhabitant of each little rock-pool at dead low
water at the sea-side complacently dogmatizes
that his diminutive environment is the ocean.
Nothing will dispel the illusion but the rising of the
tide, and as the irresistible flood advances, over
flowing all barriers, the little creatures are united,

The Holy Unity 83
not by mutual concessions, but by a common
enlargement of horizon. Once acknowledge that
the unity demanded by the Christ is analogous
to the unity of essence in Trinity — namely, not
unicity but harmony ; once acknowledge that,
like the instruments in an orchestra, apparent
antagonism of sound is not inconsistent with
harmonious expression of the mind of the com
poser, and we shall not hanker after visible unity
so long only as we can secure " unity of the
spirit." I would, therefore, plead with my fellow-
Churchmen to believe that rigidity is never a sign
of life, bigotry never effective spiritual force. I
am convinced that the indweUing Spirit of the
Lord is striving in our day against exclusiveness
and in the direction of the freest spiritual com
munion between those who differ widely as to
methods, creeds, and definitions of faith ; and no
English Churchman does credit to himself or
honour to his Church by sneering at the " Noncon
formist conscience," and speaking contemptuously
of " undogmatic Christianity " and " simple Bible
teaching." I am quite prepared to pray earnestly
" From all heresy and schism, good Lord, deliver
us," and to accede to the suggestion that we
should pray the prayer for unity, and " seriously
lay to heart the danger we are in through our un
happy divisions," but I am more inclined to apply
the intention of the prayer to the " unhappy
divisions " in our own Church, to the religious
6—2

84 The Holy Unity
partisanship so common amongst ourselves, than
to Nonconformists. And believing as I do that
the Holy Catholic Church, which is the Body of
Christ, transcends all human sects, systems, and
denominations, I can throw my whole heart into
the perfect, Divine demand of our blessed Lord
recorded in John xvii. : " That they may all
be one, even as Thou Father art in Me, and I in
Thee, . . . that the world may believe that Thou
didst send Me."

HADES
" There is one God and Father of all, who is above all,
and through all, and in all." — Eph. iv. 6.
THE picture in to-day's Gospel, *of Dives
in Hades, drawn by our Lord's own hand,
is that of a certain man undergoing, in
another condition of being, remedial treatment in
our Father's operation hospital, called Hades.
And the words that cause inquiry and mental
distress, and which seem to contradict the imma
nence of God, are the words, mistranslated from
the Greek in the Authorized Version : " In hell
he Ufted up his eyes, being in torments." I con
tend — I have always contended — that the words,
though of dread import, if rightly understood,
are luminous with eternal hope, and fuUy con
sistent with the blessed definition in to-day's
Epistle,* " God is love."
It should be laid down as an immutable axiom
that aU expressions in Holy Scripture calculated
to terrify and distress should be interpreted ac
cording to the revealed nature of the Responsible
* Epistle and Gospel for the first Sunday after Trinity.
8S

86 Hades
Father, whose name is Love, and who, according
to St. Paul's all-inclusive definition, is " above
aU, through all, and in aU." Think over that
statement of the overrule and immanence of God ;
what a grand dogmatic declaration it is of the
nature of the Creative Spirit of evolution, at once
the Originator and Master of the universe i
There are considerations productive of a sense
of rest and security involved in this iUimitable
definition of the immanence of God.
I. It predicates the boundlessness of the all-con
taining soul, life, love ; it leaves no room for any
mental conception outside the One Infinite Life.
2. It shows that the common Deistic concep
tion of God as far away beyond the stars — outside
of humanity and the universe, a conception
which finds its chief sanction and support in the
Latin theological ideas, blended with the Hebrew
tribal Deism, is an iUusion — an iUusion which
has its uses so long as the human mind is on the
rudimentary plane of perception, but out of which
the human mind wiU gradually grow as the in
tuitive plane of perception is opened to it.
3. As God is "in aU," it shows -that Incarna
tion is a universal principle, and not an isolated
incident. We talk of the Incarnation as if our
Blessed Lord alone were the Incarnate Son ;
whereas humanity is the Incarnation, and our
Blessed Lord the Perfect Archetypal Specimen of
humanity, filled with aU the fullness of the God
head bodily ; therefore adorable as God, but also

Hades 87
the consummate and unique manifestation of a
sonship, which is the attribute and glory of the
race as a whole, for God is " in aU."
4. It encourages us to " rest in the Lord "; in
our times of darkness and difficulty to claim the
indwelling Life, Love, Power ; to recognize that
we have been made " subject to vanity," not of
our own wiU, but by His will, that, after having
experienced the bondage of corruption, we may
fuUy know the liberty of the glory of sonship.
5. It implies the irrevocable law of true philo
sophic thought — namely, that whatever is real,
not merely transitory, is eternal and universal, and
must have always been, as a principle, in the
measureless mind of the Infinite Originator caUed
God ; and before this law of philosophic thought
the blasphemous doctrine of everlasting torment,
for so long based on this story, vanishes as dark
ness before light ; for that doctrine assumes the
beginning of an unending condition which is a
flat contradiction in terms.
A cultivated Brahmin once said to me in India,
" Whatever had a beginning will have an ending ;
only those things that have no beginning have
no ending ; evil had a beginning, therefore evil
will have an ending." Now, one inevitable
corollary must f oUow from these axioms — namely,
the ultimate salvation (in other words, the bring
ing to fuUy realized consciousness of man's true
Divine nature), of every human being.
As I am requested to reiterate the exegesis I

88 Hades
have so frequently given of the story of Dives in
torment,* I would say first, emphatically, that
this picture, drawn by our Lord's hand, of a human
soul undergoing remedial after-death purgation is
one of the strongest possible proofs of the recogni
tion on the part of Almighty God of His responsi
bility for curing, healing, every diseased soul.
It is impossible to draw from it a single conclusion
to justify the God-dishonouring belief which still
clings to Christendom, of the remediless and un
ending torment of the unsaved.
Secondly, the slenderest scholarship is capable
of discerning that the Word " hell " is a mistrans
lation. Dives is not in hell (whatever that word
may mean) : he is in Hades ; Hades is the in
visible world. The word is derived from two
Greek words meaning " not to see." I confess I
am at a loss to discover where that word " hell,"
in its common acceptation, came from. The
English word is from the Old Saxon helan, " to
cover over." The man who thatches a house in
CornwaU is still called a heller, and the word
" helmet " is from the same root. But whence
came the idea ? It is not Pagan ; even Pro
metheus, chained to the rock, said of his torments
that they would have an end.
It is certainly not Jewish, for the Jews, though
they brought back from their first Persian cap-
* Cf. " Sermons in Westminster Abbey," Elliot Stock,
62, Paternoster Row ; " Speaking Good of His Name,"
Masters and Co., 78, New Bond Street.

Hades 89
tivity a distorted view of the Zoroastrian Ahri
man, and from it conceived their Satan, knew
nothing of it, and it is absent both from the
Mishna and the Talmud. Buddha taught, and
the millions who follow his teaching believe, that
hell is not a place, but a condition, the natural
sequence of obedience to the lower ego, here and
hereafter, whUe it lasts — that is, until the lower
ego is transfigured. The Mussulman certainly
finds Gehenna, Jahannum, in the Koran, but only
for non-Mussulmans ; and, in spite of the Koran,
the Persian Suffis rose to a clearer insight of what
reason, right-mindedness, and conscience demand,
as, for example, in Omar Khayyam, the Persian
epic translated by Fitzgerald, we read :
" Can ahen Pharisees Thy goodness tell ?
No — only those who with Thee dwell.
Thou sayest all sinners will I burn in hell.
Tell that to strangers — we know Thee far too well."
And again :
" I sent my soul through the invisible
Some letters of that after-world to spell ;
By-and-by my soul returned to me and said :
' I myself am heaven and am hell.' "
Moreover, where this incredible conception has
obtained, history bears witness that it has proved
a bar to progress, a menace to religion, a promoter
of superstition, and a potent influence for the de
gradation of humanity. So far from its exercising
a restraining influence upon the most vicious

90 Hades
members of society, its direct result has been to
provide hardened ruffians with a suitable, vocabu
lary for scurrilous and profane abuse, so that it
is theology that has taught the world to swear.
Is that Persian Suffi right ? He is ; but how ?
The answer is in the text — God is " in all." The
real self, the true ego, is the Divine nature.
Lately, speaking on the Immanence of God, I drew
an analogy from the physical body. I pointed
out that there are physical forces within us —
such, for instance, as the powerful hydrochloric
acid that promotes assimilation of food, which
now works for our health. When the body is dead
that same acid eats into the waUs of the gastrum
for the brief period that it is secreted. What
before was life-giving becomes in other conditions
destructive. That life of God, that Immanence
of the Divine, that true ego, that spirit blood of
our Everlasting Father, that is pulsing in us now,
will, in the age of chastening, if not co-operated
with here, be our chastener, our consuming fire,
burning out of us what is bad, making God's
people " wflling in the day of His power "; and
the lurid picture in to-day's Gospel is that of a
human being, who in life's education resisted his
regeneration, grieved and thwarted the indweUing
evolving spirit, rejected persistently the moral
demand ceaselessly made — not by an external law
giver, but by an indwelling educator ; so man
himself — his real self, his Divine saving self, the
God in him, which would have been his heaven,

Hades ^ 9 1
is now his hell ; but his purging, cleansing, re
storing, hell, saving, as the Apostle says, " yet
so as by fire."
Now, when our knowledge of Greek, and the
best instincts of our moral nature, have obliter
ated the mistranslation, we are in a position to
consider the place, the power, and the purpose
of what our Lord caUs Hades, and which He
elaborated in His story of Dives and Lazarus.
It is caUed a parable, but our Lord speaks of it
as an incident. It is a biography of some one
with whom He had come in contact. He says,
" There was a certain rich man." It is clear that
this is a powerful lesson as" to the continuity of
character — an assurance that death does not
necessarily put an abrupt end to an hitherto un
interrupted development ; that a man who dies,
fiUed only with sensual impulses and instincts,
which have controlled and overmastered his loftier
aspirations, finds no change in himself when the
material body in which he has been imprisoned is
dropped. A man takes his character with him.
Dives dies ; he goes to the disciplinary department
of Hades, because heaven is heavenly minded-
ness, and heavenly mindedness is character,
and character is continuous, and continuity
of character can only be remedied by the fire of
eternal love remelting and remoulding it. He
went, as we shaU aU go, " to his own place." A
man can no more live a Dives here, and find him
self a Lazarus hereafter, than he can go to sleep

92 Hades
an animal and awake a mineral. Suppose for a
moment that the conventional conception of a
death-bed repentance and pardon were realized
in actual fact, that at the moment of death a light
of knowledge burst into the soul, and with the
whole heart the dying man turned to Omnipotent
Love in true repentance. What then ? You say :
" He is forgiven." Of course he is forgiven ; but
in the heart of God he was never unforgiven !
And forgiveness does not alter character. The
point is that the whole level of his thought, and
ideal, and aspiration, and action is lowered ; he
would be as wholly without capacity for the
enjoyment of the higher spiritual state as a new
born babe is unfit for the pursuits of manhood.
And into the hospital of Omnipotent Love he must
go ; so that, as was the case with this Dives, the
opposite graces to the sin which has wrecked his life
maybe developed in what Browning calls that "sad
sequestered state where God unmakes but that He
may remake the soul He else had made in vain."
Now, in the consideration of this subject one
article in the Creed is constantly overlooked —
" He descended into Hell." It is worthy of the
utmost emphasis that this Hades, in which this
wrongly formed character in our Lord's narrative
was being remelted, is the very same after-death
shadow world into which the Christ descended
after leaving His human body on the cross.
And this Dives, whom our Lord knew, and of
whom He spoke, would have been one of those

Hades

93

very " spirits in prison " to whom St. Peter tells us
He preached. Dives is not mentioned by name ;
only they who died in the Deluge are mentioned
by St. Peter as typical of the worst and most
obstinate sinners. But it is one of the strangest
problems in human psychology that theologians
have been so timid in recognizing that the Hades
of Dives, and the prison of the spirits into which
the Christ descended, are obviously identical. I
suppose it is because the inference is too en
nobling, too grand, too all-embracing ; the con
tradiction that it administers to cruel dogmas,
traditional conceptions, heartless creeds, insolent
sacerdotalisms, too crushing ; possibly because
Western Christianity has feared to cast off the
shackles of Latin theology, and breathe the freer,
deeper, more esoteric atmosphere of the Greek
Fathers. There was no hesitation as to the accep
tance in the fuUest sense of all the logical con
clusions of this descent into Hades in that splendid
nursery of Christian theology — the Catechetical
School of Alexandria. The celebrated Clement
of Alexandria quotes the release of the spirits in
prison in iUustration of his statement that the
" most royal work of God " — namely, the salva
tion of men — is continued not only in this world,
but in the world beyond the grave." Origen,
Theophilus of Antioch, Gregory of Nazianzus,
Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, theologians of deep
thought and great logical ability, aU declare that
the descent into Hades was the emancipation of all.

94 Hades
without exception, who had died in sin, and
St. Jerome actually mentions this Dives, whom
our Lord had described as suffering in Hades,
and declares that he was liberated at the descent
of the Christ, who passed over " the great gulf
fixed," which was impassable by Abraham and
Lazarus. I am convinced that it is worth while
to give some serious thought to this connexion
between the heU of Dives and the heU into which
Christ descended ; for first it affords an authorita
tive proof of the unbroken continuity of individu
ality after death. It concretes the instincts and
aspirations of the thinkers of the world, such as
Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, iEschylus. It proves that
immortality is not that vague, shadowy conception
of the continuance of the race, but the persistence
of the individual ; that no suspension, even for a
moment, of the real vital functions of the ego
takes place at the dissolution of the bodily frame ;
that spirits passing into the other dimension of
space are the same ; they are, in other conditions,
at present inconceivable to us, but with an en
during consciousness of individuality.
The link of the common pulsation of the life
of God through them and through us, is un
broken by death, whether they are in Paradise
or in Hades, and the early Christians held that
the spirits of the departed were in one common
abode, though with separate regions or conditions
for the just and the unjust, according to the re
quirements of their education. Wherever they

Hades 95
are they are the same ; we shall know them, we
shall find them. " Soul to soul will strike through
a finer element of her own." As for the gulf, we
shaU not heed it ; we shall be as calm as were
Abraham and Lazarus, for we shaU know that
Eternal Love is working the change.
Now, I would only press home one lesson from
this oft-repeated exegesis ; it is this : The test-
point of character, upon which our condition here
after would appear to depend, as illustrated by
the story of Dives and Lazarus, turns not upon
orthodoxy of belief, nor upon certain breaches
of the moral law, but upon man's duty to his
fellow-man arising from the oft-forgotten truth
of the solidarity of humanity implied in the
words, " God is in all." Lazarus at the gate of
Dives is the analogy of the constant claim that
our fellow-humans and our fellow-animals have
upon our time, money, energy, compassion, and
influence. Neglect of Lazarus is, in the deepest,
truest sense, neglect of God in man. " There is
one God and Father of all, who is above all, and
through all, and in all." Thus, the divinity and
the humanity are so interwoven that it is impos
sible for man to aid his fellow-man without at the
same time definitely administering to the Eternal.
To refuse to minister to others, as Dives appar
ently refused to minister to Lazarus, to fear to
take up arms against public sources of temptation
and rain, to refuse to give liberally to recognized
institutions for the betterment of others, is to

96 Hades
incur the condemnation — " I was in prison, and ye
visited me not ; I was an hungered, and ye gave
me no meat." Lazarus lies at the gate ; the dregs
of our civilization lie at our doors. I wiU not
enumerate the various forms in which the Lazarus
of to-day lies at the gate of every soul whose eyes
are open to the truth of the Immanence of God.
Some of you will think at once of the drink-
degraded Lazarus ; others wUl caU to mind the
sweated Lazarus, the long-shop-hours' Lazarus.
But it seems to me that the same responsibnity
lies at the gate of all the white races in connexion
with the atrocities in the Congo, concerning which
Englishmen, descendants of the generation who
emancipated the negroes, ought to be neither
ignorant nor indifferent. I have recommended a
certain book,* written in Mark Twain's sarcastic,
cutting style, based on irrefutable evidence, and
endorsed by photographs which cannot lie. Read
that book in the light of St. Paul's declaration,
" God is the Father of aU, and in aU." Is He not
immanent in the coloured races, the races who
make up the majority of the population of the
world ? ¦ Are the dark races reaUy inferior to
the white races when they receive the same
culture ? Science tells us that the five races-
white, black, brown, yeUow, red — differ only in
the colour of their skin, but are the same in body
and mind, liable to the same crimes, amenable to
* " King Leopold's Soliloquy," by Mark Twain, with
sixteen illustrations. Fisher Unwin, London.

Hades 97
the same reasonings, capable of the same heroisms,
and, as St. Paul says, indwelt by the same God.
" God is the Father of all, and in all." When you
have read that book you will probably ask, What
can we do ? I reply, I do not know. I am fully
conscious of the extreme delicacy of international
relationships, and the supreme caution that diplo
matists must exercise to avoid the dread ultima
tum of European conflict, but I think we can help
to swell public opinion. We can utter our protest
with sufficient conviction and intensity to
strengthen the hands of our diplomatists in the
negotiations which are assuredly going on between
the British Government and the sovereign of the
Congo Free State. We can keep the question
stirring. Moreover, with our knowledge of the
power of intercession we can keep it on our hearts
before the God of justice and truth. And for
ourselves, the consideration of Dives in Hades,
and the hideous picture of the cruelties in the
Congo, where it is said that every pound of rubber
has cost a life, should remind us that we possess,
each one of us, a carnal nature and a Divine
nature, and that the friction of these opposing
natures is the training-ground of our spiritual
lives, and that he who knows the things that
belong to his peace will cultivate his higher nature
at the expense of his lower nature, believing that
the potency which can build him up is nothing
less than " the one God and Father of all, who is
above all, and through all, and in all." 7

TRUTH
" Buy the truth." — Prov. xxiii. 23.
THIS somewhat quaint injunction from the
Book of Proverbs is the answer I always
give when questions are put to me in con
nexion with the exposition of heU which formed
the subject of the previous sermon.
I am asked : " What, after all, is truth ? Where
can we find truth ? You say one thing about
heU fire — another preacher says something dif
ferent." WeU, in the pursuit of truth, there are
only two alternatives ; the one is authority, the
other is private judgment. If you adopt the first
you may clip the wings of thought ; if the
second, you must buy the truth, and at some
cost, like as a tree buys its fruit at the cost of
struggle against rain, and wind, and frost, and
insect, and environment. Every attainment on
every plane, whether knowledge, culture, accom
plishment, grace, virtue, is bought — and dearly
bought — at the price of assiduity, self-control,
patience, and courage. You cannot even be
truthful without buying the virtue. We humans
98

Truth 99
are not truthful by nature ; we are reared in such
an atmosphere of iUusion and make-believe from
childhood that we do not become truthful without
training. A really truthful character — a charac
ter that will hold no parley with corruption, make
no compromise with wrong, take no price for
right, scorn to screen itself from inconvenience by
complying with some conventional white lie of
the social world — is bought at a high price. It is
the result of the severe struggle of the higher life
against the lower in all departments of moral
existence. It is the fruit of the victory of the
indwelling life of Him who revealed Himself as
the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Consider
that point first. Truthfulness, veracity in daily
life, is scarcely susceptible of accurate definition
from the pulpit ; the clearest exposition ever
given was that of the deaf and dumb pupil in the
school at Boston, who, when asked " What is
truth ?" drew a perfectly straight line with his
chalk on the blackboard, and when asked
" What is falsehood ?" drew a crooked, zigzag
line. Truth is the straight line— untruth is the
crooked way.
The common instincts of honour repudiate the
crooked line as a sin against social order and a
breach of the unwritten law upon which all
dealings between man and man are based.
No man willingly seeks relations of any kind
with another man who bears the reputation of not
acting squarely. It is a witness to the dignity of
7—2

ioo Truth
humanity that no man will knowingly trust any
but a true man. Truthfulness, as I understand
it, does not necessarily imply precise accuracy of
detail in utterance or description, but it does
imply the clear intention always to convey a
right impression, and the intention to convey
always a right impression arises from the activity
of the truth principle within. Addison says the
man of integrity is " he who hears without any
intention to betray, and speaks without any
intention to deceive."
It is scarcely profitable to enter into the
casuistical hair-splittings of the schoolmen, but
as I have been definitely asked, I will say that
the question as to whether the law of truth-
speaking is absolute has been a subject of heated
controversy between moralists of equal authority
and weight. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of
Konigsberg, for example, says, " The rule of
truthfulness possesses the a priori quality of a
mathematical axiom. You must speak the truth
whatever the cost to yourself or others." Augus
tine says, " There can be no just cause for an
untruth," and Tennyson, in " Queen Mary," says,
" Better die than lie." On the other hand,
Jeremy Taylor, says, " Who would not save his
father's life from tyrants at the charge of a
harmless lie ?" Paley, the celebrated author of
the " Evidences," says, " There are falsehoods
that are not lies," and Dr. Johnson says, " If a
murderer should ask you which way a man had

Truth i o i
gone you should lie," and Athanasius, when his
life was in danger, saved himself by a prevarica
tion. WeU, " Better die than lie " is doubtless a.
noble maxim, a grand counsel of perfection, but
a different principle comes in when the lives of
others are at stake, for love is higher than veracity.
Love, St. Paul tells us, is higher than faith and
higher than hope, and though it would revolt at
the slightest stain on veracity it will give itself
and all it is worth for the object that is loved.
St. Paul, in the exaggeration of enthusiasm, once
said he was wiUing to be accursed for his brethren.
The converse of the proposition is self-evident.
Veracity is sometimes the weapon of hate. There
is no godly sincerity, no fruit of Divine sonship, in
those who wield truth like a bludgeon, who speak
the truth with a brutal frankness for the acknow
ledged purpose of causing pain. Of that detest
able attitude— " Oh, I'll tell him the truth,"
" He shaU hear the truth from me " — it is impos
sible to speak with too strong condemnation, for —
" A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent."
This branch of the subject may well be left to
the awakened conscience. If examination indi
cates a tendency to untruthfulness, buy truthful
ness at the cost of self-control, eradicate the
tendency by a ceaseless recognition of, and appeal
to, God's life in man, and be sure that the real
growth of character will be found in the exact

102 Truth
measure of the fervour and constancy ol your
realization that you are a tabernacle of the Divine
Word Incarnate in Jesus Christ, and as your
members are the members of Christ your tongue
is the tongue of Christ.
But I am convinced that the inspired injunction,
" Buy the truth," is intended to lead us into
deeper water than the ethics of conduct. What
is the truth that we are to buy ? What is the
price we are to pay for it ? What is truth ?
Lord Bacon says that Pilate was jesting when he
asked that question. I doubt it. He was too
intelligent for that. He grudged the price he
would have to pay for it. " If thou let this Man
go, thou art not Csesar's friend" — that was the
price. The truth — it is a phrase, an expression, a mode
of indicating an indefinable and unattainable
abstraction. " The truth " is the secret inward
reality, the cause, the meaning, the relation of
everything. " The truth " is that spiritual realiza
tion of conscious life in God towards which the
human soul evolves through all eternity. As
Arthur Hallam says :
" Dark is the Soul's eye ; yet how it strives and battles
Through the impenetrable gloom to fix
That master light, the secret truth of things
Which is the body of the Infinite God."
" The truth " is not an attainment, but an ever-
increasing illumination. It is a promise — " Ye

Truth 103
shall know the truth," said Jesus, and " the truth
shall make you free."
Truth, as a final discovery, exists nowhere, in
no department of knowledge — for truth is limit
less. The ascertained truth of one generation
is absorbed, transcended by the truth of the
next. Facts of physiology, of mathematics, of
astronomy, of science, bought at the price of
patient investigation, are true so far as they go.
Another generation will buy at a still higher price
higher truths, which will transcend without
contradicting the old truths. It is the same with
truths concerning the nature and relation to
creation of the Infinite Originator whom we call
God, truths which are bought at the price of eager
thinking into first principles, into the logical con
clusions of philosophic induction, each truth
carrying you heavenwards, expanding your con
ceptions, increasing your assurance till you almost
smile to remember what once you thought of God
and of yourself —
" For the Soul in its unfolding,
Ever more its thoughts remoulding,
Learns more truly in its progress
How to love and to adore."
And each stage of the truth which you have
honestly purchased with the sweat of your own
brow sets you free, and helps to set others free.
The Hindoo mystic describes the end to be
attained as Mukti, liberation (setting free). In-

1 04 Truth
creased scientific knowledge sets you free from a
thousand superstitions, and the physical investi
gators seem, by their larger mastery over the
material things about us, to be on the point of
liberating us from the material plane entirely ;
whereas deeper, nobler conceptions of the Infinite
Spirit are luminous with eternal hope, and,
setting you free from mediaeval phantoms and
lurid Calvinisms, place you upon the true stand
point of aU healthful obedience, which is the
recognition that your life, however apparently
tempted, sorrow-stricken, derelict, is in reality
" hid with Christ in God." And when you are in
that attitude, mental conceptions, and dogmas
that place God under limitations, simply sheU off
and wither.
Consider with what can we thus buy the truth ?
What do we possess that is precious enough
wherewith to purchase this priceless emancipating
boon ? Browning answers the question with his
usual inspired insight ; he suggests without
defining. He says :
" Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
There is an immortal centre in us all
Where truth abides in fullness.
All around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in."
An " immortal centre " — that is the gold-mine.
On the physical plane it is the hereditary endow
ment of the rational faculty common to aU except
the congenital idiot. And the physical investi-

Truth 105
gator opens his gold-mine outwardly through his
senses to the matter of the universe, and buys,
at the cost of infinite toil and much denial of the
claims of the " gross flesh," the truths which
ease the path of life for all. The " immortal
centre " on the spiritual plane also uses the
rational faculty, but the spiritual investigator
opens his gold-mine inwardly to the breath of
the Infinite Spirit, for he believes that the
" immortal centre " is not the voice of authority
outside him, but the immortality of God embodied
in his nature ; that it is his share of the Logos —
the Eternal Reason of God ; that is his gold
mine waiting to be worked. And he too must
" buy " truth at the cost of the " gross flesh "
that hems in the " immortal centre," for this
" purchasing power," this capacity for appre
hending truth, is cultivated by exercise, by
contemplation, by prayer, by upward thinking,
by Holy Communion, by self-suppression, and is
clouded and stifled by sensual indulgence and
by whatever tends to materiaUze the life. He
who would develop the power of spiritual discern
ment, who desires that his " immortal centre "
shall haUow, guide, bless, and lead him into all
truth, must with strong force of will, on aU planes
of life, think the thought that is highest, and
earnestly strive to live the thought he thinks.
There are two planes of life on which this is
difficult — the one is the social, the other the
theological. Most of the hindering irritations of

106 Truth
life come from one or the other. The brotherhood
of man is a social principle, it contemplates each
man as having interdependences with his brother-
man. " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy
self " is half the whole law of being. But your
brother-man is frequently very unlikeable ; he is
often unintellectual, irritating, and sometimes
immoral ; you are tempted to dislike him, and
show pretty plainly your dislike ; and that
dislike of yours is a distinct hindrance to the
" immortal centre " ; it will cost you something
to buy mentally the truth concerning your
unlovable brother-man — namely, that he too is a
child of God, and " God inhabited " ; that the
universal Mother-Soul loves him as much as you,
and bears with his cantankerous peculiarities as
with yours ; that your consciousness of superiority
is probably an indication that you have some
mission to him, and perhaps, in the other dimen
sion of space, the voice will ask you — " Where is
thy brother ?" and you will find that, inasmuch as
thought is creative and forms an atmosphere,
your thought about him has hindered him, and
your dislike has made his downward way easier
and swifter ; your coldness discouraged him, your
unconcealed contempt confused him and drew
him back.
I merely say this because I know that the hard
and bitter thoughts of some people create a hard
and bitter atmosphere, and that many seekers
after truth are hindered and blinded by the

Truth 1 07
miserable misunderstandings and irrational dis
likes which disfigure so-called Christian society,
and sometimes mar the happiness of Christian
families. Again, I am certain that nothing more hinders
the unfolding of the " immortal centre " within,
than what I can only call malicious theological
partisanship on the one hand, or contempt for
your brother's rudimentary religious conceptions
on the other. If you are buying the truth,
remember there is no single undivided standard
of theological expression of the truth. The
creeds of Catholic Christendom are most valuable,
but there is always transcendently more in the
truth than creeds can define, or verbal limitations
contain. The majestic self-disclosure of the
Truth, which is God, is progressive, like sunrise ;
it is never final. The creeds are the sum total of
the thoughts of men concerning the nature and
character of God up to certain periods in Christian
history, and such collections of statements are
historically invaluable, especially for the multi
tude who will not buy the truth, but who expect
that it shall be bought for them by the thoughts
of others and presented to them. But remember
that even the creeds have come to us from two
separate and widely divergent fountains of
Christian thought. We talk about " the faith
once delivered to the saints," but that is not the
same as the expression of the faith. The expres
sion of the faith of Clement of Alexandria differs

108 Truth
from the expression of the faith of Augustine of
Hippo as widely as Arminianism differs from
Calvinism, or as Mr. Spurgeon differed from the
Pope of Rome, and the non-recognition of this
wide liberty of expression has again and again
in the past shrivelled up the Godward growth
of the " immortal centre " into a cruel dogmatism,
degraded by a wicked intolerance. Love and
mutual respect are the formative virtues of true
Christian theology. " Truth," said Lord Bacon,
" is the daughter of time, not of authority." There
is a fundamental verity under every form of
religion, however rudimentary :
" Assuredly know, when half-gods go, God appears."
But the half-gods are profitable, and cannot be
hurried away.
Every true seeker makes some contribution to
the general stock of the acquired knowledge of
God. Even the blatant atheism of some thirty
years ago made its contribution, as a protest
against imperfect Deism. It broke up faUow
ground, and made men consider what they reaUy
did believe.
There is a story, as old as the days of Plato,
of an island in which it was reported much gold
was buried. Many came and dug and delved and
turned over the soil. They found no gold, but
they prepared a barren soil for the seeds brought
by the birds and the winds ; and the hidden
treasure appeared in olive-boughs and rich clusters

Truth 109
of grapes. No " thought-labour " is ever lost.
Truth is of the future ; others enter in and partake
of the fruits ; you need not reset your theology
or rewrite your creeds, but you can always
review the old faiths in the new light, which never
comes to destroy but always to fulfil, and adds
distinction and vividness and expansiveness to
the old expressions, and you can avoid as a sin
against the indwelling Logos, or Reason of God,
all harsh condemnation of the religious stand
point of others. In proportion to the clearness of
your own vision should be your patience with
"what you consider the irrational doctrines and
absurd limitations of another man's religious
belief. Thus, while you may believe, if you are suffi
ciently illuminated, the interpretation I gave of
Dives in Hades, you will be silently patient with
those who " believe that they believe " that he
was in the torments of an unending hell.
Finally, cease not to " buy the truth " by
thinking strongly, patiently, and withal humbly
and teachably, into God. Not into some stereo
typed idol of the mind, whi®h is the product of
the last theological work you read, or the tradition
of the Church to which you belong. Thought
is higher than language, but it uses language — and
its language and its whisper is something like this :
" Infinite Universal Spirit, Thou hast no name
but Love. Thy life pulses through me and through
aU, and Thou art in me. Thou hast said, ' I will

1 1 o Truth
never leave thee nor forsake thee.' Therefore
Thou art in everything that happens to me. Thou
art working in me both to will and to do that
which is good. Thou art too vast for me to know
Thee as my trembling spirit would. But as Thou
hast revealed Thyself in Jesus I begin to under
stand Thee and what Thy purpose is for me and
for all men. Thy will challenges me from the
depths of my inmost being. I recognize it, I
acknowledge it, I desire to be more at one with it.
I would ' buy ' Thee — more of Thee — by the
conquest of my lower life with my higher, by the
strong denial of my illusory self and the strong
affirmation of my true self. Therefore, I pray
Thee, stir the sources of my being, regenerate my
nature, take me, make me, if needful break me."
This is, I suppose, to possess such measure of the
truth as is purchaseable here, for it is to know
that the life is " hid with Christ in God " and to
say : " I am Thine, O Lord ; I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me ;
But I long to rise on the wings of faith
And be closer drawn to Thee."

SHALLOWNESS
" Launch out into the deep." — Luke v. 4.
" Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord." — 1 Pet.
iii. 15 (R.V.).
^T^HESE two injunctions, the one from the
^ Gospel, the other from the Epistle for the
fifth Sunday after Trinity, spirituaUy dis
cerned, amplify and illuminate the subject upon
which I last spoke, and in connexion with which
I have received queries and comments. We
considered the two questions, What is truth ? and
Where is truth ? In answer to the first question,
1 suggested that truth is not an attainment, but
an ever-increasing illumination. It does not
exist as a final discovery anywhere in any sphere.
The truth is that ever-increasing spiritual realiza
tion of conscious life in God towards which the
human soul evolves through aU eternity. There
fore, the truth has little if anything to do with
those doctrinal differences over which men fight
their virulent theological battles. Truth resides
not in accuracy of theological belief, but in deep
and noble thoughts of God, accompanied by an

1 1 2 Shallowness

earnest effort to live the thought you think.
The purity of heart which alone sees God is not
an external rectitude of conduct, though what
ever sensualizes the life darkens truth, but it
consists in a mental attitude of love, peace, un
selfishness, and integrity of purpose, lt is sig
nificant that the condemnation implied in our
Lord's sternest denunciation was pronounced not
upon the publican, the harlot, the sinner, but upon
dogma without love, upon orthodoxy without
charity. Therefore truth has, as I said, to be
" bought " at the price of eager, earnest thinking
into first principles, into the logical conclusions of
philosophic induction, and every fresh light
carries you heavenwards, increasing your assur
ance, expanding your conceptions, brightening
your life.
When we considered the answer to the question,
Where is .truth ? I suggested that it was not
discoverable in the voice of authority outside of
us, though that has its great value on the rudi
mentary plane, but in the whisper of the Im
manent Divine embodied in our nature, in our
individual share of the Logos, or distributed life
of the Absolute. Browning says :
" Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe ;
There is an immortal centre in us all
Where truth abides in fullness."
Browning did but echo Cicero, who wrote
" Truth is sunk in the deep," and Cicero did but

Shallowness 1 1 3

echo Confucius, who said " Truth dwelleth deep
underground." The concurrent testimony of the
thinkers of all ages gave birth to the adage that
" truth is at the bottom of a well." It is ; but
that well is the fathomless depth of our own true
being, which the Lord Jesus told us should be
within us as a weU of water springing up into
eternal life.
These two propositions are strikingly illustrated
by the two passages of Scripture, which I have
quoted from to-day's altar Scriptures, spiritually
discerned. I say " spiritually " discerned ; there are several
planes of discernment. It was Swedenborg who
taught us to interpret Scripture on three separate
planes : the literal plane, which is the plane of
perception ; the intellectual plane, which is the
plane of analogy ; and the spiritual plane, which
is the plane of the intuitions. If we were com
plete experts in these laws of interpretation
doubtless the Bible would become to us a new
and far more precious inspired literature.
In considering the incomparable word-picture
in this morning's Gospel we can ignore the plane
of perception. We are not likely to interpret the
command, " Launch out into the deep," as
referring in our case to a literal boat — a literal
shore — a literal net. But when we consider it
on the intellectual plane — the plane of analogy,
it is luminous with warning, and we see at once
that the great Teacher is here putting his finger

1 1 4 Shallowness

upon a moral failing which incapacitates nations,
churches-, individuals, and that moral failing is
shallowness, superficiality. I do not desire to
elaborate this thought ; but no careful observer
will deny that this plague of shaUowness is the
bane of public life in an age when the increase
of what is called education has universalized a thin
veneer of shallow information upon every subject
under the sun — information acquired from a hasty
perusal of the selected morning newspaper — so that
every one has an opinion on all subjects, and few
men have a conviction on any. It is sometimes
justifiable to wonder how many loud-tongued
public advocates have honestly, as before God,
made a conscientious study for themselves of
measures and schemes calculated to produce
rectitude, peace, order, and national prosperity ?
how many have thought into those profound
principles whereby public morality is raised and
public wrongs are righted ? how many have made
a careful study of those fundamental axioms
which underlie the steady upward growth of a
nation's moral standard ? When the self-appointed
leaders of others sweep the shaUows with their
nets they may toil aU the long night of life, and
though they embitter the world with their con
troversies, they take nothing because opportunism
and not principle, popularity and not conscience,
the watchwords of traditional policy and not
conviction, represent their highest enthusiasm.
On this plane — this plane of analogy — the voice

Shallowness 1 1 5

by the Sea of Galilee, commands " Launch out
into the deep " — the deep where principles shape
actions. Cease that impotent skimming of the
mere surface of life, that dabbling in the shallow
water of fleeting opinions, that parrot-like repeti
tion of other men's aphorisms ; let down your
nets of thought and inquiry into those depths
where first principles, elemental laws, changeless
distinctions between true and false lie hid.
Great national reforms lie in the deep waters ;
they are never effected by shallow time-servers,
whose policy is not rooted in the profound
principles which alone can purify the common
wealth. From time to time there come forth men to
whom the spirit of Him who stood by the Galilaean
lake has whispered, " Leave the shallows,"
" Drop the party watchwords," " Launch out
into the deep." And in America a Lloyd
Garrison, after being whipped through the streets
of Boston, makes his country ring again, while he
demands that every man who holds a slave shall
show his bill of sale from God Almighty, or be
condemned as a man-stealer. In England our
own abolitionists eschewed aU political party,
refused all office, dignity, or emolument ; they left
the shallows, launched out into the deep, and
so broadened the moral foundation of the
national life.
It was this voice that sounded by the Sea of
Galilee that inspired Lord Shaftesbury to fight
8—2

1 1 6 Shallowness

the battle of the oppressed — the little slaves of
the chimneys and the mines. No political party
in the country could claim him as its own. It is
only thus that great reforms are effected.
On the same plane — the inteUectual plane —
who can doubt that this moral failing has infected
to a certain extent the national Church of which
we are members, this tendency to shaUowness,
superficiality, exaggeration of the importance of
perfectly immaterial minutiae. Instead of casting
the solid weight of the immense influence of the
Church against organized monopolies, vice-pro
ducing trades, unfair wages, life-destroying labour,
and general irreligion, Church dignitaries and
Church courts have been preoccupied with such
trivialities as to whether candles on the altar
should be lit or unlit, whether the wine for the
Eucharist should be diluted with water in the
vestry or the church, and deep cleavages and
bitter hostilities have arisen upon questions
which matter not the weight of a thistledown-.
" Launch out into the deep," says the voice from
the Sea of Galilee ; solemnly, seriously, purpose
fully claim the God capacity within the Church,
and in the midst of a world lying in wickedness,
a daily press teeming with the records of terrible
offences against God and humanity, the demon
of intemperance pauperizing and degrading the
race, take your place as heaven's antidote to a
world's depravity, instead of letting society step
back into Paganism while you are picking

Shallowness 117

theological and ceremonial motes out of each
other's eyes; the thoughtful letter in which
the Archbishop has recommended to the con
sideration of Convocation the finding of the
commission which has been sitting for two years
upon the so-caUed irregularities in the Church
endorses the Eternal verity underlying the
command — " Launch out into the deep." He
suggests — I am not quoting his words — that
rubrics, directions, articles of subscription, credal
definitions, adapted to the standard of past ages,
are manifestly out of harmony with modern
thought. What will be the ultimate outcome of
the finding of this commission I know not, but
I am certain that the command, " Launch out
into the deep," is the Divine protest against the
error of establishing finalities as to knowledge
of God and methods of worship, when liberty of
thought, freedom of action, and general progress
is the universal law of all that is.
" We must not," says Bishop Lightfoot, " cling
obstinately to the decayed anachronisms of the
past, we must not narrow our intellectual horizon,
but must absorb new truths, gather new ideas,
adapt, enlarge, and foUow the teaching of the
Spirit." It remains to consider the injunction, " Launch
out into the deep," on the spiritual plane — the
plane of the intuitions. The Lord Jesus — the
Perfect Specimen of the universally diffused
Divine humanity — the visible embodiment of the

1 1 8 Shallowness

heart of the Absolute, with the whole world in His
thoughts, with you and me in His thoughts, says,
" Launch out into the deep." It is a soul-lifting
injunction. Let down your net of thought-
concentration into the fathomless depths of the
Infinite Originator ; think deeply into the Soul
of Souls ; and though you will discover, more
and more as you progress, that beyond your
. deepest conception the unexplored still remains,
you will find an exquisite rest to your soul.
You will have thought yourself clean past the
hurly-burly of environment into the very bosom
of the Mother-Soul — and that is peace. And in
what direction shall I thus think ? As the
Divine love-spirit pulses through all that is, you
can think in every direction — you can commune
with God everywhere. But St. Paul tells you in
what direction each one should think ; he says :
" Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord." What
does he mean ? He means that this profound
thought of God as Absolute Substance, universally
diffused and universally self-conscious, necessi
tates the conviction that humanity is the out-
birth of God. He implies that, as God expresses
Himself in aU visible things, the highest expres
sion of God's thought on this planet is Man, and
therefore that there is in the very centre of our
humanity a germ of God's eternal love and God's
eternal life. And as man continues to " launch
out into the deep " of himself, he receives internal
evidence that the mystic " somewhat " within

Shallowness 119

him is nothing less than the Logos, the Word, the
self-evolving Divine nature ; that he is himself
part of that Mystery of the " Word made Flesh " ;
that this Mystery has been revealed to him, in
perfection, in one objective manifestation called
Jesus Christ, and therefore that the name of the
potentiality in him is Christ — as St. Paul calls
it, " Christ in him the hope of glory " ; and he
who accepts this truth sees that it contains and
implies the promise of his bright, high, endless
future ; and he also recognizes that this germ
of immortal sonship demands watchful, prayerful
culture, and he acknowledges the appropriate
ness of St. Peter's injunction in this morning's
Epistle, " Sanctify in your hearts Christ as
Lord " ; for he recognizes that this immanent
radiance of God has necessarily and logicaUy its
aspect of terror ; that it is a force to be reckoned
with ; that in pure mercy, if it is not by man's
co-operation suffered to absorb and atone, it
wiU destroy aU that is base and low, and carnal
and self-sufficient and stubborn — all, in short,
that unsanctifies.
And he who has thus launched out into the
deep of his own nature, and found there the
Christ, if he would not postpone his perfection
and multiply his discipline, will search and see
that he is not hindering and hampering the Royal
germ — the Divine sonship, which is unfolding
within him. Do you ask me : " How can we
sanctify in our hearts Christ as Lord ?— are there

1 20 Shallowness

any recognized rules of conduct ?" I reply : I am
only a humble pupil in God's school, but I would
say begin with the affirmation of the axiom
that the Unfolding of the Christ principle, which
is Infolded in the nature of man, is the pre
destined purpose of Almighty God for each one
of us. Teach thyself to believe that thy dearest
friend dwells deep within thine own soul ; then,
when by mental effort you have located the God-
consciousness as being within yourself as well
as everywhere outside you, do not strive for
heroic issues, but in patient, quiet obedience to
duty — home duty and public duty — assure your
self that nothing is trivial, nothing is small.
Emerson says :
" There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all."
Then, never allow yourself to be discouraged
at the poverty of the God-likeness you recog
nize in yourself. Evolution is a very slow
principle : hold a seed in your hand ; there is
little likeness to the parent plant or tree in
shape, size, appearance ; but you know that in
the soul of that seed is contained potentiaUy the
the perfect image and likeness of the parent
plant. When troubled by evil in the world around you
be careful not to ascribe reality to a shadow.
When Jesus said, " Resist not evil," He did not
mean His words to be taken on the surface-plane

Shallowness 1 2 1

of perception, and that we were to condone
wrong-doing by silent, unresisting acquiescence ;
but I imagine He did mean : do not give evil a
reality it does not possess by mentally magnifying
its existence and power ; your world wiU be very
much what you mentally make it ; overcome evil by
the ceaseless recognition and constant affirmation
of the reality and omnipresence of good ; recognize
that one life, one love, one purpose — and that
an irresistible purpose — pulses through all that is.
When troubled by evil in yourself, say " I
am a thought of God, a word of God — the Word
of God abideth for ever." The Word — the Logos
— the Christ — is the reality in you ; it will absorb,
assimilate, purify, illuminate at-one the whole
being. The saying " The caterpillar dies that
the butterfly may live " is not accurate. The
caterpiUar does not die ; if it did there would be
no butterfly ; the butterfly form is always in the
caterpillar, and the caterpiUar form is transformed,
transfigured at-one-d by the butterfly form evolv
ing within it as its " hope of glory."
And one thing more. To live this life which is
the " life hid with Christ in God," does not imply
physical, actual, isolation from the world. What
is needed is mental separation, not physical
separation. You can continue to progress in
the development of your highest spiritual faculties
while there is nothing noticeable in your mode of
life to distinguish you from others.
So to " sanctify in your heart Christ as Lord "

122 Shallowness

is not to fight over definitions of His nature, or
to talk controversiaUy about Him with your lips,
but to let His spirit work hi you and rule you,
slowly at-one-ing within you the human and the
Divine, and lifting you out of the iUusions and
infirmities of your finite nature ; it is to acknow
ledge and co-operate with this mystic hidden
Divine vitality, which is predestined to confer
upon us — " in this world knowledge of God's truth,
and in the world to come life everlasting."

THE COLLECT OF ASSURANCE
" O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all
things both in heaven and earth."
I PROPOSE to depart from convention, and,
instead of selecting a text, encourage a
thought-excursion into the general teaching
of the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the eighth
Sunday after Trinity, based upon the language of
the incomparable collect which I have just used.
It is sometimes a profitable mental exercise to
emphasize certain familiar words, and repeat
them with special intention, endeavouring to
estimate honestly how far they have become
incorporated into the verities of our life. Oliver
Wendell Holmes once described the process to me
as " Mental depolarization of familiar passages
of Scripture." The Church of which we are
members puts into our mouths to-day these words :
" O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth
all things both in heaven and earth." The
question is, do we believe that ? Is that an
axiom on which our lives are based ? Do we
repeat these words with conviction, or do we use
123

124 The Collect of Assurance
them either with indifference, or in a non-natural
sense, obliterating their meaning with a crowd of
mental reservations ?
" 0 God, whose never-failing providence
ordereth all things both in heaven and on earth."
Thousands of voices throughout the length and
breadth of the Christian Church have reiterated
that statement to-day, and, I venture to say,
without really believing it. The Latin schoolmen,
such as Augustine and Anselm, who have built
up our theological systems, did not believe it ;
the Church as a whole does not beheve it ;
the inveterate instinct of the ecclesiastical mind
balances it with reservations, or fences it in with
conditions and limitations until it is lost in a haze
and has no direct meaning. The wonder is how
it ever found a place in the Liturgy ; it comes
from the Sacramentary of Gelasius, and was
composed by one of the Gregorys, and I imagine
that it was the automatic outcome of the com
poser's subliminal consciousness, that which
Browning calls the " immortal centre in us all where
truth abides in fullness," and from whence, under
inspiration, truth sometimes speaks out indepen
dently of the outer consciousness of the speaker.
Why is it that this clear and definite statement
of the ceaseless operation of the Universal Being
in His creation is thus disbelieved ? Is it because,
in the words of* that vile epigram, it " is too good
to be true " ? When we speak of God, the
epigram should be " too good not to be true,"

The Collect of Assurance 125
Why is it disbelieved ? Simply because it grinds
to powder a whole category of adopted shibboleths
which have aimed at reducing to a precise and
working form the relation of humanity to the
One, all-containing Soul, Life, Love, which has
expressed itself in humanity.
What, for example, becomes of the dogma of
original sin if men are' the spirit children of God,
heirs of His eternity, and if He " ordereth all
things both in heaven and on earth " ? Augustine
practically invented -the doctrine of original sin,
and (as Mr. Tennant has shown in his able work
on the so-called fall of man) without one shadow
of authority. Inherited tendency to unregulated
desires is a recognized experience ; inherited guilti
ness is a grotesque travesty of elementary justice.
What, again, becomes of the favourite doctrine
of human free will, in the sense of self-determinism,
if God " ordereth all things both in heaven and
on earth," and if God is Love, and the Will of
God is man's sanctification ?
The full absurdity of the paradox that man's
will can ultimately and permanently defeat the
predestined purpose of God, which is the salvation
of the race, requires only to be faced to be re
pudiated. Postulate an Omnipotent, Respon
sible, Creative Parent-Spirit, expressing Himself
in a human race, that He might have millions to
love, and miUions, after education, to love Him,
and by some miscalculation so overdoing His work
as to produce a being with a superior will to

126 The Collect of Assurance
Himself, capable of resisting Him through the
endless ages, and putting His benign purpose to
complete and ridiculous confusion, and you will
have arrived at a reductio ad absurdum. The
will of man, though it has its clearly defined sphere
of activity, can no more escape the benevolent
action of the wiU of God than a material sub
stance on this planet can escape the law of gravi
tation, though, within that law, it may have
abundant freedom of action. Obviously we have
a large measure of volition within the irresistible
current of the will of God, or we could not become
moral beings. The antagonistic energies of that
divinely provided resisting agency that we call
moral evil, keep us constantly on the alert, and,
as we make, within our limited sphere, correct
choice between the alternatives presented, we
are built up Godward or the reverse. But in
asmuch as God and man are elementally insever
able, and God " ordereth all things," though
wrong choice and the selection of lower standards
will occasion pain and unrest, and seriously delay
the evolution of the Eternal purpose, and even
possibly entail disorder and discipline here and
hereafter, God is omnipotent ; to defeat Him is
impossible. Look down upon some great river from a com
manding height ; look down, sa}', upon the silver
Rhine from the chain of hills which encircle the
Grand Duchy of Baden. That river is inexorably
predestined to join the ocean ; to prevent it you

The Collect of Assurance 127
would have to violate the law that keeps the
earth a sphere. But note the tortuousness of its
course ; see how it makes vast loops and bends,
sometimes doubling back upon itself as some
obstacle — some exceptional hardness of sofl —
opposes its progress. The purpose of its existence
appears temporarily frustrated ; important con
sequences, even the demarcation of territories,
may result from its apparent liberty to follow its
own sweet wiU, but no power on earth can prevent
it from ultimately fulfilling its destiny under the
majestic law of gravitation which predestines it
to unite with the ocean.
To those who believe the words of the collect
of to-day, it is equaUy certain that no power
can stay the current of the water of life, the
stream of the evolution of the Divine nature,
which is part of the equipment of man, from ulti
mately reaching — it may be " far off, at last, far
off "• — the ocean of uncreated life whence it came,
and whither from all eternity it is predestined to
return ; for the Will of God is man's sanctification.
Again, the hideous libel against the Fatherhood
of God implied by the doctrine of endless, remedi
less, useless, unending torment in the world to
come is obliterated by to-day's collect. I enumer
ated recently the arguments for its refutation,
which I will not now repeat, but if it be true
that God " ordereth all things," and if amongst
the " all things " that He ordereth there really
were endless heU fire, truly noble-minded men

128 The Collect of Assurance
would rather go there than pass an eternity with
a being whose moral standard is so far below the
highest human standard that it could include such
an " ordering " as that. When, in the year 730,
the EngUsh missionary Willibrod was about to
baptize the Pagan Duke of Friesland, the Duke
asked the missionary where were the souls of his
heathen ancestors. " In hell," was the reply.
He at once drew back from the baptismal waters
with the remark, " If that is so, I would rather
remain with my own people." And there spoke
a noble, righteous soul. The same noble spirit
is discoverable in the history recorded in the
Upanishads many years before the Christian era,
of Yhodistera, the stainless king, who was trans
lated to heaven without death. On his arrival
in heaven, he was observed to be restless, and
one of the Devas asked him, " Yhodistera, what
seekest thou ?" He replied, " I seek my well-
beloved, and I see them not." " Yhodistera,"
replied the Deva, " your well-beloved are in
hell " — upon which Yhodistera is reported to
have turned his back on heaven, saying, " I go
to hell to seek my well-beloved, if perchance some
pain of mine may gain them ease." Thus do the
deepest, truest instincts of human nature rebuke
man-made caricatures of the Father-Soul of the
universe. I repeat : What becomes of all these shibboleths,
these rudimentary conceptions, if we believe —
really believe — that God, the Omnipotent Creative

The Collect of Assurance 129
Love-Force, the universally diffused Individu
ality, the Absolute Substance out of whom all
that is emerges, " ordereth all things both in
heaven and on earth," and that His name is
Love ?
Do you say that this complete acceptance of
the words of the Collect lands us in fatalism ?
I deny it ; it is not fatalism, it is filialism. The
attitude of a child, not troubling itself about grave
matters of family arrangement, is not fatalism,
but simple filial trust. Read to-day's Epistle,
and you will see that this " ordering all things "
is not fatalism, it is not the blind out-working of
an impersonal irrational force, but the Divine over
rule of a responsible Fatherly Providence. " The
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are the chUdren of God : and if children, then
heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ."
Here the definition of God is enlarged : " God is
Spirit." The definition of man is suggested :
Man is Spirit, because Man is God's Son. It is
necessary to reiterate that an entire scheme of
erroneous theology has emerged from the unfor
tunate selection of the word "Adoption" as a
translation of the Greek word vioBeo-La. This
compound word (never used except in the Greek
Testament) signifies the placing of one who was
unconsciously a son into the knowledge of the full
ness of his privUeges, and it cannot be tortured
into the meaning of our English word " adoption,"
which implies the receiving into a family of one

130 The Collect of Assurance
who was not a son before, and training and edu
cating him as though he were a son. Man is God's
son, not because God has adopted him, but
because man, in his inmost, is spirit. Pursue him
through the chemical combinations of his bodUy
organism, track him through his automatic and
influential systems, and there is ever a residuum,
a somewhat which eludes the investigator, which
the knife of no anatomist can detect, which the
exhaustive analysis of no psychologist can define,
which refuses to be ignored, which knows with a
certitude beyond all logic that it is, which simply
smiles when it is told by materialists that it is
the ripest product of chance or the result of a
fortuitous concourse of atoms set in motion no one
knows how, which cognizes the universe and calls
itself " I," which finds itself thinking, feeling,
resolving, perceiving in spite of lifelong atomic
flux. And what is this residuum but Divine
Spirit differentiated into separate human entities ?
What is this but the transmutation of God's
thought into Beings who think ?
God and man must then come together because
of the affinity between them, because the distinc
tive element of humanity is an emanation from
the fullness of Divine life. Spirit is not a word
that lends itself readily to definition, but it
is the outbreathing of the inmost in God and the
inworking of the inmost in man ; it is that part
of man which is capable of living intercourse with
God, and he is the most Godlike in whom it is

The Collect of Assurance 1 3 1
most developed ; and where it is manifested in
perfection, there is divinity.
For this reason the divinity of the Lord Jesus is
not a theological dogma, but a logical necessity ;
for in Him the Divine Logos was embodied in such
measure that He was the absolutely perfect mani
festation of the Divine Sonship, which is the glory
and attribute of humanity as a whole.
The late Sir Syed Ahmed, the distinguished
head of the great educational establishment at
Aligarh, in India, spoke of Jesus as Ruach Allah,
the out-breath of God, the embodiment of the
Spirit of God. And that which Sir Syed Ahmed,
though a Mussulman, had the illumination to per
ceive was positively true of Him in whom was
manifested " the fullness of the Godhead," is
relatively true of all men in their inmost nature.
Men are the differentiations of the breath of God,
and the spirit of man abides in the Spirit of God,
and the Spirit of God in the spirit of man, as the
bird abides in the air and the air in the bird ;
and vloOeaia, mistranslated " adoption," is the
awakening of the inmost nature of man in response
to the perpetual pleading and impact of the
Universal Spirit.
At this point another question suggests itself.
If God be Love, the one only Substance in the
universe, resistless, resourceful, perfect, and if He
" ordereth all things both in heaven and on earth,"
why, why, this via crucis? why this discord of
sundered wiUs ? why this distress, soul-darkness,
9—2

132 The Collect of Assurance
misunderstanding ? Apart from the fact that
the legitimate method of reasoning by inference
silences the question, because an aU-good, all-
creating Spirit could never be taken by surprise,
never make a mistake, and never have to mend a
broken plan, the Gospel for to-day reveals the
method of our education, and teaches us under an
aUegory that the true life of Divine Sonship can
only emerge from deep contrasts ; that in a sin
less, painless world the moral element would be
lacking ; that in such a world goodness, for want
of a contrast, would have no significance in the
conscious Ufe of man.
What is the spiritual meaning of that metaphor
in to-day's Epistle from the vegetable world about
gathering " grapes from thorns and figs from
thistles " ? Obviously, the thorn and the thistle,
the grape and the fig, cannot signify separate
types of men, or the whole force of the metaphor
would fail, and rank Calvinism would be estab
lished. The thorn and the thistle are obeying
God's own law of heredity and affinity by pro
ducing only thorns and thistles. They would
violate the law of their being if they produced
grapes and figs. No, it is just the old unvarying
experience of the nature and constitution of man
which perplexed and grieved St. Paul. It is
an allegory of our separate selves, of that strange
complex nature of which we are so conscious,
and which differentiates us from the lower animal.
Each man is the soU in which the hereditary flesh-

The Collect of Assurance 133
seed produces thom and thistle, and the hereditary
spirit-seed produces grape and fig. The two
growths in the same individual strive for the
mastery, and from the deep contrast between them
emerges the perfected life of the child of God.
There is no other way, for thus hath the Father
appointed ; salvation is character, not a scheme
successfully to elude well-merited chastisement.
There is no royal road to character ; " to him that
overcometh " is the promise ; the volition of the
individual, stimulated by the breath of the Spirit
of the Father, bearing witness to Sonship, decides
between the thorn nature and the vine nature
almost every hour of the day.
Heaven is our goal ; and heaven is heavenly-
mindedness, and heavenly-mindedness is char
acter, and character is the result of moral
decisions, and moral decisions are, made by
the will, and the will is the executive of the
conscience, and the conscience is the voice of
the higher nature — the " Kingdom of Heaven
within us."
As God's sons, we have the capacity, and we
are given the responsibility, of living by a definite
effort and purpose the higher life, the fruit-
bearing life ; and, as we live it, we weaken and
starve the thom-bearing life. " We are debtors,"
says the Apostle, we, who know the secret of
Abba, Father, we are debtors, not to the thorn
and thistle to live after the thorn and thistle, for
if we live after the thorn and thistle, we must die ;

134 The Collect of Assurance
but if we, through the spirit — that is, through the
development of the higher fruit-bearing nature —
do mortify the deeds of the thorn and the thistle,
we shaU live.
Surely this is the teaching of to-day's CoUect,
Epistle, and Gospel. Every purposeful en
couragement of Godward aspiration, every cling
ing to principle in time of temptation, every
masterful conquest over sensual passion by ejacu-
latory prayer, every self-suppressing quenching of
anger by the kind and gentle word, every coura
geous witness against public wrong when self-
interest would have kept us silent, ministers to
the growth of the Divine fruit-bearing nature,
and withers the thorn ; and, on the contrary, every
conscious stifling of a good desire, every deliberate
yielding to animalism, every refusal to recognize
responsibility for the temptation of the weaker
brother, every wilful violation of the everlasting
distinction between right and wrong, blights and
mUdews the fruit-bearing nature, till the thorn
and the thistle spring up and, for the time,
choke it.
Thank God, the Collect assures us that the
resources of His tireless love for every " plant
that the Heavenly Father hath planted " are not
exhausted if the thorn and the thistle do thus
choke the life, for there is the promise (which is
a doom and a promise in one) that the thorn and
the thistle shall be hewn down and cast into the
fire. But this is the disciplinary remedial treat-

The Collect of Assurance 135
ment of the world to come, and it will be a part of
ourselves that will be thus burnt. And this fire
of remedial destruction, though it is the fire of the
love of God, is painted in the parable of Dives and
Lazarus as of awfulness unspeakable. But we
" have not received the spirit of bondage unto
fear," but the Spirit of Sonship whereby we cry
" Abba, Father." So let our resolution be to
believe the CoUect for to-day. Let us believe it
intensely, practically, restfully. " God whose
never-failing providence ordereth all things both
in heaven and on earth." Then failing health,
darkening prospects, the multitudinous sorrows
of life, the puzzles of human education, will all be
illuminated for us with the unshakable conviction
that we are in God's infant school for the forma
tion of character, and that " the sufferings of this
present time are not worthy to be compared with
the glory that shaU be revealed "; for, as one has
said : " I think that human lives
Must bear God's chisel keen,
If the spirit yearns and strives
For the better life unseen.
For men are only blocks at best,
Till the chisel of God brings out the rest."

DEMONOLOGY
" That they may recover themselves out of the snare
of the devil, having been taken captive by the Lord's
servant [margin, by the devil] unto the will of God." —
2 Tim. ii. 26 (R.V.).
OBVIOUSLY it is not easy at once to break
the fetters of mental limitations, and rest
in the glorious doctrine of the Immanence
of God upon which I have recently been speaking.
Truly to rest in the measureless Love of the
Infinite, Creative Mind is to be convinced that
one Life, one Love, one InteUigence is expressing
itself in aU that is. It is to realize, with Jacob
Boehme, that God is All, and All is God. Not
in the Pantheistic sense, which identifies God with
the universe and so loses Him, but in the sense
that God is the universally diffused individu
ality, conscious in aU that is, and yet thinkably
antecedent to and therefore independent of phe
nomena. It is to believe in God as not only
immanent, but also transcendent ; thus it is to
believe in an Infinite Originator who can never be
taken by surprise, never make a mistake, and
never have to mend a broken plan. And from
136

Demonology 137

this there follows one logical corollary — namely
this : either the problem of sin, evil, temptation, and
the rest, is, or it is not, part of the universal order.
If it is part of the universal order, then all
things, however apparently paradoxical, are
working together for good. If it is not part of
the universal order then we are confronted with
another eternal antagonistic intelligence in the
universe in open hostility to the benevolent
purpose, and this is a dualism fatal to any
intelligent belief in God. Which is it ? Are we
universalists, working out by human volition a
predestined purpose, or are we dualists under
two Kings — one good and one bad ?
This is the problem which faces us all, and
which some of you have placed before me.
I ask you to look at this recorded utterance of
St. Paul in his letter to his young Bishop Timothy.
" Taken captive by. the devil unto the will of
God." The Revised Version of the New Testa
ment is far from perfect, but for this courageous
and faithful rendering of the original Greek we
owe the revisers a sincere debt of gratitude. It
contains a new and striking conception, presenting
a moral paradox calculated to startle stiff and
old-fashioned religionists. I can imagine that
this translation was not ultimately passed by the
revisers without considerable discussion.
But there it stands, full ot authority, as a
mental corrective to the words of St. Peter in
this morning's Epistle, the Epistle for the Third

138 Demonology

Sunday after Trinity, which if they were to be
apprehended literaUy without correction on the
higher plane — the plane of the intuitions— would
be sufficient to dishearten the most optimistic,
and make this world of education indeed a fearful
place in which to live. If it were literally true
that " our adversary the devil, as a roaring lion,
was going about seeking whom he might devour "
— in other words, that an invisible, all-powerful
antigod, of infinitely greater intelligence and
greater intensity of purpose than any human
being, was ceaselessly labouring to destroy the
moral order of the universe — it is but little that
any of us sons of men could contribute to* the
issue of such a conflict.
The whole scheme of artificial and false demon
ology, which originated from the tendency of the
human mind to objectify and almost deify evil,
and which has peopled the imagination of
Christendom with devils, is utterly swept away
by this one inspired sentence : " Led captive by
the devil unto the will of God." For what is the
wiU of God ? The wiU of God is man's sanctifica
tion. In other words, the will of God is the
procedure and operation of the infinite law of
God's being, and the law of His being is the slow
training and evolution of a human race in which
He has expressed Himself, enshrined Himself,
which " lives, moves, and has its being in Him,"
and which His irresistible, omnipotent will
declares shaU be sanctified.

Demonology 139

Therefore the soul of man can no more ulti
mately elude or escape the " shall " of God than
the planet can escape the law of gravitation.
And the irrefragable logical corollary of this
" shaU " of God is an absolute universalism, and
the strenuous denial of the essentiality of evil,
which, if essential, must be the antithesis of God
and so the promoter of atheism. " Led captive
by the devil unto the will of God " is, then, a
suggestive orientalized paraphrase for the chasten
ing and remedial aspect of the Divine activity.
God is love, and love is not only the driving power
behind evolution, but also the provider of the
resisting agency which stimulates and guides
evolution into right channels. It is a recognized
law of biology that resistance is a condition of
evolution. Without resistance upon the physical
plane there can be no healthy vegetable or animal
growth. Without resistance upon the moral
plane there can be no moral life. Moral life is
not tranquil conformity to environment, but
energetic struggle against any environment that
contradicts moral growth, and by contradicting
it makes it what it is. Where human volition is
not exercised in healthily meeting the resistance
of temptation, when what St. Paul calls " the
other law in our members warring agamst the
law of our minds " brings us into captivity to the
law of sin that is in our members, then in the
strong embrace and grip of another power, the
self-made devil of our animal nature that has over-

1 40 Demonology

mastered us arid holds us down, we experience,
sooner or later, a conscious humiliation and shame,
the bitterness of which leads us to recover our
selves out of the snare of this self -devil by which
we have been taken captive unto the wiU of God.
So that the wUl of God, which is our sanctification
is a power not to be trifled with.
It is a sublime, a transcendent conception, that
the whole mystery of human education, with all
its paradox and confusion, on its dark side as
well as its bright side, is completely under the
Divine overrule, and that God's perfected
humanity will ultimately emerge even out of the
lawlessness of self-will, that even the " snare of
the devil" in which men are led captive is " unto
the will of God."
Now, this is the thought upon which I suggest
that minds should be concentrated. To myself
it is most iUuminating, whilst fuU of warning.
For (1) it solves the problem of the mystery of
that which we call evil ; (2) it provides a sure
basis for tranquil self-abandonment to the purpose
of the Omnipotent ; (3) it indicates the sphere of
man's co-operation with that purpose.
1. It solves the problem of evil, so far, that
is to say, as the problem can be solved. How
does it do this ? By its complete abolition of
dualism, by its bold reference of the painful,
contradicting, disciplinary side of life to the
loving activity of the One All-containing Soul, in
whose infinite mind whatever now exists, however

Demonology 141

puzzling, must have pre-existed as an elemental
thought. " Led captive by the devil unto the will of
God." .Do we know what we mean when we say
God ? " Can a man by searching find out the
Almighty?" asks Job. Yes, he can, under that
promise of the Lord that His Spirit down the ages
should gradually, progressively teach men what
in His day they were not ready to receive. We,
in our day, are the inheritors of aU the earnest,
upward thinking of past ages, plus the direct
revelation of the Christ that the nature of God
is spirit, the name of God is love, the relation of
God to humanity is paternal. The fullness of
time has come for a reverent but fearless recon
sideration of our conception of God, and of our
relationship to Him. A right understanding of
the Christian conception of God brings Him very,
very near, so that it is only His nearness that
hides Him, for it does not banish Him to a throne
beyond the stars, or sublimate Him away into
the idealized abstraction of Pantheism, but
presents Him as an object of love, reverence,
adoration, and trust. The limited Deistic con
ception of the external Creator who has made
worlds out of nothing by the fiat of His will, and
who does not now innovate upon the resistless
play of the forces He has set in motion is gone.
Paley's argument for design is out of date. Im
manence and evolution are higher than design.
The Pantheistic conception which identified God

142 Demonology

with the universe and affirmed that God could
have no existence apart from the universe which
manifests Him is not gone, but has received form
and outline and life and reality, and is purged from
its dreary impersonal aspect by the coming of
the personal and perfect manifestation in the
Incarnation. It is now Pantheism plus transcendence — God
immanent and transcendent. The accommo
dations which were applicable to the mind of man
in a rudimentary stage have passed away.
• To us God is not " a person " in the sense in
which we use the word. God is the all-diffused
individuality, self-conscious in all that is, self-
conscious in the minutest electron that defies the
most powerful microscope, expressing Himself in
all forces and in all things from the gold-dust on
the wing of a butterfly to the immeasurable per
fection of the mind of the Christ. We ought to
be able to address our Father-God, both as indi
vidual and as universal. We ought to be able
to say to Him : " Infinite, universal Spirit, we
recognize Thee everywhere, the pulsation of Thy
life through all things causes all to live and move
and have their being, and Thou art our Father."
And if at any time we are bewildered by the
boundlessness of this conception, and the mental
demand for personality in the Absolute becomes
imperious and irresistible, has He not given us
Jesus, the supreme manifestation for purposes of
mental conception of so much of the nature of

Demonology 143

the Universal Soul as man can appreciate ? When
I cry to Him, " Lord Jesus, show us the Father,"
He wiU reply, " Have I been two thousand years
given to you, and hast thou not known Me ? I
am the sacrament of the Absolute, the outward
and visible sign of that inward and spiritual
omnipresence which you say you cannot find. I
am the personality of the Universal Soul ; whoso
receiveth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me." And
at once the human spirit, temporarily bewildered
in its pursuit of the all-filling individuality, can
rest itself upon the beating heart of one like
ourselves, and yet one in whom was all the fullness
of the Godhead bodily. " Come unto Me," saith
One, "and coming be at rest."
This is the God unto whose will we are some
times led captive by the power of evil. Do you
not see how this elevates, illuminates, mitigates
the whole mystery of that black puzzle in the
world ? This God says, " I am the Lord, there
is none else. I form the light and create darkness,
I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all
these things." And if, with that inquiring mind
which is the Godward appetite of the human
soul, you ask why, the answer is twofold. First,
common sense assures you that there cannot be
good without an opposite whereby to recognize
it ; that in a protected, shielded, temptationless
school of education the moral element would be
absent ; that, for want of contrast, goodness in
suchja school ."would have no significance in the

144 Demonology

conscious life of man. And, secondly, the method
of reasoning by inference silences the question.
Acknowledge that one life, one soul, one intelli
gence, one love pulses through all that is ; that
the purpose of this all-good, aU-creating spirit
is glorious and resplendent beyond human
thought, and that He is omnipotent and omnis
cient, the fact that He has chosen this method
of carrying out His purpose is the absolute
guarantee and assurance that it is the best
method. I know that at this point we arrive at
an inevitable question. If this devU by whom
we are led captive is the self-devU, if the disorder,
pain, sin, in the world are not to be attributed
to some person, principle, or power in eternal
contradiction to the author and source of good
ness, what is to become of the popular theory of
Satan, the spiritual antigod, the infernaUy Divine
phantom who has fiUed so prominent a place in
the religious history of the world ? St. Peter in
to-day's Epistle, speaks of Him as " your adver
sary the devU." I reply : If you think strenuously
enough into the iUimitable Soul, if you think
yourself through second causes into the infinite
originator of aU causes, you wiU have to lose
Satan as the mighty fallen archangel existing in
defiance of the will of God. You will have to
lose the traditional objectification of Milton's
" Paradise Lost," who is the hero of that poem,
the being with the dignity of a prince, the beauty
of a seraph, and the power of a god. There is

Demonology 145

simply no room for that phase of him on the
mental horizon of those who are resting in the
Infinite Universal Spirit whose life pulses through
all things, and whose love, endless, changeless,
and invincible, is working out a preordained
perfection through processes which our appre
hension is as yet too limited to grasp. I spoke
much on this during one of the Wednesdays in
Lent. If you want to keep Satan in Milton's
shape you wiU have to limit, to lower, indeed to
lose your conception of God ; but you can keep
him and ought to keep him, as a verbal accom
modation calculated to express that educative
conflict through which aU who live to the perfect
development of manhood must pass. You will
then recognize him as something more profound
and penetrating than the old fable of nursery
tradition. You will discover that the devil
against whom you are to be sober and vigilant is
within you, and is carried in the human heart,
that he is the power in ourselves that makes for
unrighteousness, that, in that sense, he is the
agency through whose training alone the human
soul can emerge with a true moral life.
God is making moral beings, not innocent non-
moral automata. Remember the axiom : Even
God can only make anything through the process
by which it becomes what it is. Even God could
not make a moral being except through the process
by which a moral being becomes what he is. And
that process is through contest with evil and
10

146 Demonology

overcoming evil. The potentiality of perfection
is in every man, because God is in every man.
Not to know relationship to God is to be non-
moral, like the anthropoid ape. To know it and
not to be loyal to it is to be immoral, like a
sinful man. To strive to be true to it is to become
moral. But man can only come to the conscious
ness of this deeply hidden Divine potentiality of
perfection through the instrumentality of imper
fection — in other words, of evil ; and if you prefer
to call that side of human education the devil you
are following precedent by doing so ; but as you
value your clear conception of the immanence
and power and rectitude of the Absolute, do not
fall into the error of making your objectification
caUed the devU independent of the determinate
counsel and foreknowledge of the one ultimate
authority, the one supreme power whose name is
Love ; for whatever is wrought by this demoniacal
agency is " unto the wUl of God."
There is one attitude of mind prescribed in this
morning's Epistle which I think is an essential
prerequisite to this conception of the " allness "
of God, and it is humUity — " He giveth grace
unto the humble." What is this humUity ? I
think it is an overwhelming consciousness of the
profound and reaUy insoluble mystery of our
being, a wiUing acknowledgment that there are
depths which we cannot mentaUy fathom, a
recognition that the spiritual man is the real man,
and the mortal "I" only a passing shadow, an

Demonology 1 47

illusion to which the Father has made us subject ;
compared with the spiritual ego, a mere vacuity,
a negation ; but at the same, time an acknow
ledgment that this spiritual ego, this inner self,
cannot be analysed or defined. I think it is
quiet, secret, watchful co-operation with the
Divine potency which indwells and moulds, and
deliberate recognition of, and self -adjustment to,
the educative discipline which the love of God is,
often painfully, applying to our animal nature. I
think it is the ever teachable attitude, the attitude
which is the prerequisite for entrance into all
kingdoms- of knowledge, whether scientific or
spiritual. Blessed are the consciously ignorant,
for theirs is the kingdom of knowledge. I consider
that there is far more true humility, more
contribution to spiritual knowledge, in the atti
tude of a great thinker like Professor Huxley,
who acknowledges, to use his own words, the
" passionless impersonality which science every
where discovers behind the thin veil of
phenomena," but which he will not venture to
name or define, than in the clean-cut dogmas
and ex cathedra definitions of an infallible
Pontiff. There is more humility in reverently thinking
into the throbbing, quivering, universal life of
which you are a part and saying, " Great Father-
Soul, I realize my limitations, I know I cannot
understand Thee, but Thou understandest me,
and with Thee and in Thee is the secret of my
10 — 2

148 Demonology

life," than in bitter controversial warfare over
the definitions of the various councils of the
Church. That is what I understand by humUity.
" That low, sweet root
From which all heavenly virtues shoot."
What is the practical outcome of this line of
thought ? I think it is threefold. (1) 1 think
that if we maintain this attitude of humble
dependence upon an indefinable Divine Imman
ence we shall find it increasingly difficult to lead
a merely selfish, mundane, materialistic life.
(2) I think we shaU gradually escape from the
isolating imprisonment of personahty ; being
members of one body — namely, humanity— of
which the Lord is the one spirit, we shall recognize
that we have no true life except as a part of an
organic whole, and, recognizing this, we shall be
more ready to become succourers, evangelists,
helpers amongst those dwelling in the slums of
great cities in whom the Divine Immanence is
hidden by the circumstances of their life and
environment. (3) I think we shall be more driven
to the protection, power, and love of our Lord
Jesus, the Sacrament of the Absolute, the outward
and visible sign of the inward and spiritual
Divine Immanence, the revealer of God to
man, the interpreter of man to himself, the
ever-loving mighty friend and elder brother
of the race who is always everywhere closer

Demonology 149

to us than breathing, and whose guaranteed
trysting-place is the Blessed Sacrament, where
especiaUy He. invites us to realize the blessed
injunction in this morning's Epistle : " Cast
ing all your care upon Him, for He careth for
you."

OUR MOTHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN
" Of His own will He brought us forth with the Word."
— Jas. i. 1 8 (R.V.).
THIS profound utterance of the Apostle St.
James is calculated positively to fascinate
the imagination if you let yourself really
think into its depths, and from the apostle of
practical Christianity, whose one theme is works
and not faith, action and not speculation, a
declaration so metaphysical, so esoteric, so
thought-stimulating, is almost a surprise.
In the original Greek it is more suggestive than
in either of the English versions. !3ov\7]8el<;
aire/cvno-Ev fjiia^ \6ya — " He willed us forth from
Himself by the Logos" : direKvrjaev is the word
used for the birth of a child from its mother ;
it has no other meaning. Is it not a thought
of wondrous comfort that there is motherhood in
God ? Ought it not to introduce a closer, a
tenderer, a more appealing relationship between
God and man ? The Divine motherly love
" brought us forth," and plead swith us for
confidence and reciprocal affection, using by the
150

Our Mother which art in Heaven 151
mouth of Isaiah words that are unequalled in
their motherly tenderness : " Can a woman
forget her sucking child, that she should not have
compassion upon the son of her womb ?"
Yes, the Mother Soul, d-n-eKVTja-ev, " brought us
forth," " bore us," that by separation we might
come to know our Infinite Parent as we could
never have known if we had remained in the
womb of His mind, just as between human child
and mother there can be no conscious, cognizing
intercourse till they are separated.
Now, it is obvious that this inspired declaration
of St. James reaches very far into the deep things
of God. It proves that the irrevocability of the
Divine Immanence in man is not a product of
human speculation, or " new theology," or a
plagiarism from Alexandrian Platonists, but an
authoritative statement in the New Testament.
As the child in the womb receives the nature of
the mother and is born into the world bearing
that nature — part of the mother — a repetition of
the mother, so have we come into this world with
a God nature, a Christ nature, within us, which
is our eternal humanity. It is true for us, if
it be not yet true to us, that we are the children
and the representatives of the Infinite Parent
Spirit by a process infinitely more intimate than
anything implied by the word creation. Consider
the glorious confidence that should be inspired
by this assurance, that humanity has thus come
forth from God — how it alters our outlook upon

152 Our Mother which art in Heaven
the world. The nature and perfections of God,
as omnipotent love and wisdom, by the process
and law of evolution, are graduaUy advancing
mankind by an agency ultimately irresistible to
a more perfect condition. Based on this pro
position of St. James, the belief in the logical
necessity of final restitution stands upon an
impregnable foundation ; the terrifying problem
of the existence of evil, while it remains as an
urgent motive for action, loses its power to
torment. As God, the mother, is the sole generat
ing agent of all that is, and as all that is must
have been in the thought-womb of the Infinite
Originator before coming into existence, the whole
mystery of evil and aU its terrifying cross- working
purposes must be within the purpose of the
eternal order and completely under the Divine
overrule. As God is the Spirit Immanent in man
and in aU that is, there can be no independent
rival to the Author of the Universe, and the
infinite confusion that at present perplexes us can
be nothing more than the necessary resisting
agency which is the constant challenge to do good,
and the ceaseless stimulus to progress.
Again, this amazing revelation of the creative
motherliness proves the reality and the univer
sality of human sonship and human brotherhood.
It is the justifying and the explaining principle
at the bottom of all generous strivings for a better
social order and more brotherly relations between
man and man ; it is the condemnation of the

Our Mother which art in Heaven 153

miserable divisions, the heart-burnings, the sus
picions that, both in politics and in religion, divide
Christian from Christian in England. It ought to
be the obliteration of the widening chasms
between class and class. It ought to make
impossible the international jealousies which
provoke taunts and defiances between the rival
newspapers of European nations which ultimately
issue in the misery and wickedness of war. But
it seems to me that this revelation of the close
relationship between the soul and God should
above aU impress upon us individually the
dignity, the priceless dignity, of human life, and
the vast responsibility of being thus temples of
God's Spirit, shrines of God's nature, differentiated
embodiments of God's life.
This is the lesson that St. James would ob
viously draw from it himself and have us lay to
heart, for he says, " Of His own WUl He brought
us forth with the Word. . . . Wherefore receive
with meekness the inborn Word which is able to
save your souls."
Look at this injunction with the utmost sim
plicity : the proposition is quite easy — it is this.
Take yourself — ask what am I ? I am a human
life, come forth from God as a personal spirit into
terrestrial birth, equipped with an hereditary
God nature, implanted in an hereditary flesh
nature ; and the momentous question is, Will
the Divine nature which has come forth heredi
tarily from .the Mother God assert its dominion

154 Our Mother which art in Heaven
over the flesh in which it is embodied, or will the
flesh exercise the supremacy and smother and
degrade the spirit, and so waste the period of this
life's education and force omnipotent love to
alternatives which are figuratively described as
" Saving yet so as by fire," a fire which will
destroy nothing but that bar-sinister in our
nature which excludes us from Heavenly Society ?
Upon what does it depend ? It depends upon
our use of our measure of volition in caUing into
activity the Logos emphutos, the inborn Logos,
which is " able to save our souls " ; in other
words, able to form character by a gradual con
tinuous conquest of the lower hfe by the higher.
Salvation, then, is the radiation of the Christ
nature which is inborn in our souls. Note the
emphasis this Apostle of practical Christianity
lays upon our part of the arrangement. God has
" brought you forth by the Logos," wherefore
" receive with meekness the Logos emphutos,
the inborn Word, which is able to save your
souls." With meekness ; that is, with watchful
ness, with yielding ; it is to expect and recognize
and acknowledge the sacredness of an inner
prompting ; to tend it with prayerful culture ; to
beware lest human perversity check its growth ;
resolutely to put away, as St. James says, " All
superfluity of naughtiness," an expression which
each must interpret for himself ; to strengthen it
by mental detachment, by secret communion, by
prayer, by the blessed Sacrament. As it grows

Our Mother which art in Heaven 155
it will build up character ; moreover, it will out
grow the boundaries and limitations of indi
vidualism ; it will make you kind to others ; it
will teach you to honour all men ; as it awakens
within you the nature of the Mother Soul it will
teach you that God's full Christ, God's true son,
is not one man, though one man alone realized
the ideal, but the whole multitudinous race of
men, of which race God is the Father, the Mother,
the Soul, the Glory, and the Eternity.
Now, here it is justifiable to point out the
illumination that is poured upon this revelation
of our origin and responsibility by the words of
the Gospel of to-day.* You may take it for
granted that there is always a subtle connexion
between the altar scriptures put into juxta
position on any given Sunday. This meta
physical talk of St. James about the Logos, " He
willed us forth by the Logos," " receive with
meekness the inborn Logos " ; these terms are
somewhat unfamiliar to the average man, some
what remote, inaccessible. Who, for example,
will venture to define the Logos ? All true
thinkers know what they mean by the expression
" the Logos " ; it has been a familiar thought
through all the course of the human generations,
but it suffers by definition. " In the beginning,"
' says St. John, " was the Logos " — and " God
was the Logos." What existence is to being,
what the spoken word is to. thought, what the
* Epistle and Gospel for Fourth Sunday after Easter.

156 Our Mother which art in Heaven
lightning flash is to electricity, that the Logos is
to the creative Mother Soul : its expression, its
activity, its self-utterance. The Logos is the
part of God that makes, upholds, sustains all that
is. " Without the Logos was not anything made
that was made " ; "in Him all things consist."
" By the Logos," says St. Paul, " the heavens
were made." The Logos is the one life in aU,
the intelligence in all — in the mineral, the crystal,
the lower order of animal life — and it is the
dominating power in the soul of man and in the
angels and archangels of the higher spheres of
light and life. And this Logos, in addition to
being thus universaUy diffused, has it ever been
manifested in a more definite, personal, inteUi-
gible form ? This question suggests the differ
entiation of the Christian revelation from all
previous Godward thoughts. Philo Judaeus, the
great pre-Christian Apostle of the Logos, never
knew how to describe the Logos, because he
never became a Christian. The Christian revela
tion is the unique, special, peculiar embodiment
of the Logos in one representative. " The
Logos," says St. John, " was made flesh and dwelt
among us, and we beheld His glory full of grace
and truth." That is, the diffused sonship, which
is the attribute of humanity as a whole, the out-
birth of the Mother God, became Incarnate in
Jesus of Nazareth in such perfection, and com
pleteness that the entire moral life of the Parent
God was manifested in Him ; and the fuU result

Our Mother which art in Heaven 157
upon human character of this Divine Immanence,
the conception of which had before been vague
and without outline, was shown forth in Him
that men might know what the power of the
indweUing spirit of God was making of them.
This embodiment of the Logos in Jesus was the
Divine answer to the cry of the human heart
seeking to know the nature of the Originating
Being which was hidden in the abstractions of
speculation, and hungering to be assured of its
own place in the universe of God. This embodi
ment of the Logos called Jesus did not stay long
in the limitations of the flesh, but long enough
to win the love of millions and to manifest God
to man, and interpret man to Himself. How
noble an aspect He presented of what a man
can be in whom the Logos rules ! How lofty a
standard of human conduct He raised ! He knew
that men would resent the contrast. Plato long
ago had prophesied that if a perfect man appeared
the world would crucify Him, and Plato was right.
And to-day's Gospel records His farewell. He
says, " It is expedient for you that I go away."
That " expedient for you " is a Divine law which
is irrevocably interwoven into our human lives.
If that " expedient for you " could only assume
its rightful position in our estimation of circum
stances, half the bitterness of life would be gone.
In the prayer of St. Chrysostom we ask Him to
" Fulfil our desires and petitions as may be most
expedient for us," though we rarely mean it.

158 Our Mother which art in Heaven
But what, in this instance, did He mean ? How
could it be expedient that their life, their light,
should go from them ? Well, apart from the
axiom that real reflection rarely begins until
observation ceases, it was expedient for this
reason : in order that the full meaning and
extent of the truth implied by the expression
" the inborn Logos " should become the mental
possession of humanity as a whole, and of the
individuals composing humanity, it was essential
that the visible objective manifestation of the
Logos should be removed from the sphere of
sight and touch. This " inborn Logos " embodied
in Jesus is not, and never has been, personal in
our ordinary sense of the word. It became per
sonal in Jesus for purposes of observation ; but it
transcends all personality — it is universal, it is the
Mother God repeating itself in aU souls ; obviously,
therefore, if this truth were to be learnt, realized,
appreciated, it was expedient that the visible per
sonality which manifested it under the limitations
of a human body should be removed ; that men
should know that this spirit of sonship, this Divine
nature, this ray of the Creative Being, is the hope of
their existence, the ideal of their life, the leaven of
their humanity, the assurance of their perfection.
Again, He said that if He did not go the Com
forter could not come. It is as if He had said that
unless the objective limitation were removed from
sight hearts could not receive the inestimable
comfort in believing in His all-diffused, indweUing,

Our Mother which art in Heaven 1 59
evolving aspect, for that is the Comforter. He
identified Himself completely with the coming of
the Holy Ghost ; He speaks of Pentecost as His
second coming ; He says, " I wiU not leave you
comfortless," " I will come unto you " ; and
St. Paul, in 2 Cor. iii. 17, in emphatic terms,
declares, " Now the Lord," meaning the Lord
Jesus Christ, " is that Spirit." And what did He
mean when He said, " When He is come He will
convict the world of sin " ? Just this, that when
Divine Sonship, the inborn Word, the Logos
within, begins to stir, to make itself felt, there
is a new principle of life which cannot tolerate
the lower nature, but fights against it. Without
Divine Sonship awakened there is no real con
sciousness of sin. Philo taught that where the
Logos had not stirred in a man there was no
moral responsibUity ; but when He has come, when
you know that you came out from the Mother
Soul, that as Jesus was so are you in this world,
then when you sin, when you are selfish, irritable,
unkind, impure, the punishment comes quickly
in the painful sense of disturbed harmony, and
you are miserable tiU restored. This is the Spirit
of Jesus convicting you of sin.
Think of it. He has willed us into being out
of Himself by the Logos. He demands of us that
we should " receive with meekness the inborn
Logos which is able to save our souls." Do we
believe the first ? Are we doing the second ?
O THAT WHILE WE CAN WE MAY !

THE VISIBLE CHURCH
" To make all men see what is the fellowship of the
mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been
hid in God ... to the intent that now . . . might be
known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God."
— Eph. iii. 9, 10.
SPEAKING recently from that profound ut
terance of the Apostle James, " Of His own
will He brought us forth by the Word," or
more literally translated, " He willed us forth
from Himself by the Logos," I pointed out that
this inspired declaration of the motherhood of the
Infinite Originator proved that the irrevocability
of the Divine Immanence in man was not a product
of human speculation or a new theology, or a
plagiarism from Alexandrian Platonists — but an
authoritative statement in God's immortal litera
ture which we accept as inspired. It is not a
matter of surprise, it is indeed a matter of
satisfaction that questions should have reached
me as to how the belief in the universal Imma
nence of God can be held consistently with the
popular view of the visible Church on earth.
" Does not," I am asked, " this universal, all-
160

The Visible Church 161
inclusive attribution of Divinity to humanity
obliterate the idea of the Church as a select cor
poration distinct from the world at large ?"
It will be my endeavour to point out to those
who care to lend me their thoughts, that these
two conceptions, the universal immanence of God
and the visible Church, so far from being mutually
destructive are intimately associated.
I think it is well, sometimes, to submit to the
reflections of the thoughtful, the strictly logical
sequence of reasoning from which the conception
of a visible Church emerges. It may be said to
begin with the first experience of that personal
search for the solution of the problem of universal
existence which comes to all of us when we are
mentally passing from the plane of authority to
the plane of intuition ; in other words, when we
cease to take things for granted, and begin to
wonder whether they are as we have been told,
and if so, why ? When we are first liberated
from the plane of authority, when we first use the
key of reverent inquiry in opening a way to the
central light, we find ourselves not at once on
the plane of the intuitions but on the intellectual
plane ; and on that plane, philosophic induction,
based on the results of scientific research, as
represented by those clear thinkers who know
they cannot free the universe from an originating
mind, lead us on step by step to that thought-
point where the affirmation of God as the Infinite
Originator becomes intellectuaUy a logical neces-
n

1 62 The Visible Church
sity. Time forbids that I should trace out at
length the thought-path of those mental giants
who have thus followed the gleam ; but one who
trod that thought-path as accurately as any man
of his generation, though he did not carry it to
its logical conclusion, Professor Huxley, thus
forcibly expresses the point to which he did
arrive. He says : " When the materialists stray
beyond the borders of their path, and begin to
talk about there being nothing else in the uni
verse but ' matter ' and ' force ' and ' necessary
laws,' I decline to follow them. ' Matter ' and
' force ' are mere names for certain forms of
consciousness." Thus, it is an indisputable truth
that what we call the material world is only
known to us under the forms of the ideal world ;
and, as Descartes tells us, our knowledge of the
soul is more intimate and certain than our know
ledge of the body. So, without Bible, priest,
or inspired prophet, we have got as far as this,
by intellect alone, that the realm of Reality has
been scientifically declared to abide in the realm
of Thought, and we are more sure of the world
of Mind than of the world of Matter.
John Stuart Mill saw this so clearly that he
says, in his essays, that " the relation of thought
to a material brain is not a metaphysical neces
sity, but simply a constant coexistence within
the limits of observation, and the uniform co
existence of one fact with another does not make
the one fact a part of the other."

The Visible Church 163
These are the conclusions arrived at by keen
logical thinkers, from physical investigation ;
and if we interpret these logical conclusions in
terms of human experience, the contemplation
fiUs us with a sense of rest and thankfulness,
for they spell God and immortality. If it be a
matter of science and logic, that thought is greater
than matter, the unseen greater than the seen ;
if the relation of thought to the material brain
is so little a metaphysical necessity that thought
can continue after brain is dead ; if throughout
the material forces of Nature I am to recognize
one majestic elemental principle of life — then,
unless I am to do violence to my thinking capacity
and reduce myself to an unspeakable dilemma,
I cannot free the universe from an originating
mind, and by an orderly sequence of ascent I
naturally proceed to an all-creating, all-originating
individuality ; and though I may hesitate to define,
and may be incapable of predicating what we
mean by personality in the human sense to what
I have found, I have none the less found God.
" A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a shell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave-men dwell ;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod —
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God."
God found and God affirmed by the inteUect.
11 — 2

164 The Visible Church
At this point, we have arrived at a contem
plation calculated to fiU us with a fearless rest,
for it not only interests the reason but fascinates
the imagination. And now, if we are true to
what we know, the intuitive instinct begins to
awaken, and suggests that as this one Infinite
creative life is everywhere present, as it throbs
in every blade and uplifts every seed, so also is it
expressing itself in every man. Therefore, for
purposes of self -manifestation, humanity is as
necessary to God as God is to humanity. " The
heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma
ment showeth His handiwork," but only man
can manifest the moral nature and character of
the Absolute. From this follows the indestruc
tible Divinity in man and also the vast responsi
bility of man : each one of us is a chosen vehicle
of the self-unfolding of the Absolute, and without
each one of us, His self-manifestation would be
lacking in some one point. God wants you and
He wants me ; He desires to express Himself in
you in some way different from His desire to
express Himself in me ; and here comes in our
individual responsibility, with which no one else
on earth can interfere.
Suppose these thoughts do more than skim
the surface of the rmind ; suppose they reach
the centre of your being, what then ? It is no
use to deny it — you are out of your depth, the
expanding of your God-consciousness bewilders
you, you are lost in boundlessness : though you

The Visible Church 165
have an opened spiritual eye, you cannot mentally
connect personality with an all-diffused Soul of
Souls, an inmost vital element. You can recog
nize that this Parent Source is manifesting Him
self in man, and that when you see purity, honour,
goodness, chastity, strength of principle shining
from a human countenance you are ipso facto
looking upon God, but God so diffused that you
cannot really form any kind of mental conception .
A universaUy conditioned Intelligence certainly
is the immanent energy of the universe ; but
direct adoration of it is as difficult to the human
mind as it would be in a lower sphere to endeavour
to personify steam, electricity, or gravitation.
You may say, " O Soul of Souls, Thou art every
where, in Thee we live and move and have our
being," and the prayer is a good one ; but this
yearning of the mind for an embodiment craves
satisfaction. And then it is that the Soul of Souls,
the drawing power of the Immanent Divinity
leads us to the soul-satisfying fact' of the Incarna
tion. " No man cometh unto Me," said the Lord
Jesus, " except the Father draw him " ; and the
Father draws us to recognize that, in the fullness
of time, the Immanent Creative Soul came, in
an exceptional manner, " out of the everywhere
into here " ; that He sought separate and unique
human enclosure in one spotless human life, one
Hebrew form of flesh and blood, born of the
Vigrin Mary, and we are drawn to see that the
Lord Jesus is the highest possible manifestation

1 66 The Visible Church
of the moral life of the universally diffused
Intelligence — that He is God made accessible,
tangible, visible, personal — that we are justified
in estimating the character and nature of God
by Him, that whoever saw Him, with opened
spiritual eyes, saw the Father, for that He was
the symbol, the sacrament, the outward and
visible sign of the moral nature and permanent
attitude towards mankind of the Universal Soul ;
and His appeal was, " Ye believe in God, believe
also in Me"; in other words, ye believe in a
universally conditioned Creative Intelligence,
believe in the peculiar self -manifestation of the
universally conditioned Creative Intelligence in
Me. It is as though this Immanent Mother-Soul
said to each one of us : " My human child, when
mentally overstrained by feeling after Me, when
bewildered by My Infinity and Universality,
you need not lose Me, for I have clothed Myself
in a vesture of flesh and blood that you may be
able to think Me objectively ; so think Me as
Jesus, love Me as Jesus, worship Me as Jesus ;
this is not all that I am, but it is enough for you."
I have often iUustrated this mental sequence by
describing Charles Kingsley's experience, which
he told me himself, of how, having found God
as Universal Substance, he foUowed mental
sequences loyaUy till he found God in Jesus, and
his soul was at rest.
But how, you ask, how are you going to make

The Visible Church 167
the conception of a visible Church emerge from
this sequence of thought ? In this way : What
was the supreme revelation that Jesus came to
unfold ? You say He came to make the Absolute
knowable and accessible. True, that is why He
saves to the uttermost all that come unto God
through Him ; but was that all ? No ; the core,
the inmost of His revelation was not only the
accessibility of the Absolute, but the Divinity of
man. He taught clearly, to those who have eyes
to see, that He was not a being wholly apart from
the brethren of the race ; that though He was the
only individual of the race in whom the Divine
Immanence was in such perfection that He could
say, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Absolute," He did not limit this Immanence to
His single Personality. He taught that He
represented humanity at its climax, that what
He was actually, humanity was potentially.
He taught that Incarnation was a universal
principle culminating in Him, that Divine Imma
nence was primarily of the race, and only second
arily of the individual, " I in them, and Thou in
Me, that they may be perfect in One " ; in other
words, He taught the Immanence of God in man
as the Divine basis of human society.
It is clear that if this knowledge prevailed,
in commerce, in legislation, in international
relation, in theology, in social life, in home life,
in individual experience — God's ideal for the race
would be fulfiUed. It will prevail, in the fullness

1 68 The Visible Church
of time, because God's ideals cannot fail. Now,
this ideal being universal — boundless, required
a symbol, a sacrament, a manifestation, an out
ward and visible sign ; and the visible Church
was founded to be this sign — this symbol. Just
as the Absolute, being universal, required Jesus
as a symbol, a sacrament, so the Divine basis of
human society, being universal, requires the.
Church as a symbol, a sacrament. Jesus said,
" As My Father sent Me, even so send I you."
As I was a sample of God's character and attitude,
so you are to be a sample of the Divine basis of
human society — the world seeing you should
recognize in you its own potentiality and God's
ideal for the race. For a little whUe the visible
Church was truly this, when they had all things
in common, and were in deed as weU as in word
salt of the earth and light of the world. That
the Churches have deflected from this standard
requires no elaboration, but this is their justifica
tion, their meanmg, their raison d'etre, their
purpose. No man hath seen God at any time,
but the Only Begotten hath declared Him. No
man hath seen the Divine Immanence in the race
at any time, but the visible Church is appointed
to declare it.
I ask you to see how this not only accounts for
the existence of a visible Church, but accentuates
the responsibility of membership with a visible
Church ; we are not members of the Church
for our own isolated comfort and safety, but as

The Visible Church 169
a witness to the world. A Church should be,
not a community of exclusives thanking God
that they are not as other men are, but a luminous
sample, and a prophetical pattern of God's Im
manence in the race as a whole. A true member
of a visible Church should realize that he or she
is meant to be an individual pattern of a God-
souled humanity. Do we, members of that branch
of the Universal Church that bears the name of the
Church of England, believe this and live it ? The
Church of England is a remarkable corporation.
If required to define it, I should say — repudiat
ing the ridiculous caricature that it is a mere
negation between the two extremes of Puritanism
on the one hand and Popery on the other, emanat
ing from some schemer's brain in the days of
Henry VIII. — that the Church of England is an
institution embodying a Divine principle, founded
upon the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ
Himself being the chief corner-stone, encased in a
framework of ordinance and ritual with which
it has clothed itself during the evolution of
twenty centuries, and with an absolutely un
broken continuity of ordained ministry .from the
days of the Apostles.
At present, the Anglican Church is a recognized
department of the' State, and this position,
entailing privilege, power, and influence, vastly
intensifies the responsibility of its members. •
Obviously its danger, as a nationally privileged
corporation, is to ^become unconsciously the

170 The Visible Church
repeater of the watchwords of the propertied
classes in the country, and the unintelligent
inheritor of traditional dogmas, phrases, and
poUcies. I forbear to criticize past action ; it is
not a whoUy pleasant historical retrospect ; but
to-day there is a powerful leaven spreading in
the Church, a spirit and a principle which aim at
identifying the National Church ever more closely
with the strivings and aspirations of the people.
And with regard to the past history of the
Church we may honestly say as much as this —
in spite of many unworthy compromises in her
corporate capacity, and in spite of a marked
timidity in striking authoritatively at great
popular vices, no man in his senses can deny
the noble work that throughout the length and
breadth of the nation has been accomplished
through the agency of the Established Church.
While with one hand she may have clutched too
tenaciously her temporalities, with the other she
has lovingly lifted out of the mire thousands
amongst the masses of the people.
But the fact remains that the object of the
Church — the first duty of the Church, is to be
before the world the sacrament, the symbol, the
outward and visible sign of the Immanence of
God in humanity. As St. Paul says : " The
feUowship of the mystery which from the begin
ning of the world hath been hid in God, to the
intent that now might be known through the Church
the manifold wisdom of God."

The Visible Church 171
One last word. If individually conscious of
not having lived up to the lofty standard implied
by membership with a visible Church, that
injunction of St. Peter which I am never weary,
of quoting, contains a consolation and an injunc
tion : " Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord."
Members of a God-souled a Christ-inhabited
humanity we are. I am as an individual, you
are as an individual, God-souled, Christ-inhabited.
This is the mystery that binds us to God and to
our fellow-men, by a tie which cannot be broken.
It is our safeguard while it is also our responsi
bility, for this is the truth we are pledged to mani
fest. " Sanctify it," says the Apostle, " sanctify
it in your hearts." To sanctify it is to acknow
ledge it, to be empowered by it, to yield to it,
to suffer it to evolve, to let the God within lead
us more truly to the God everywhere, Who broods
over us to receive, to bless, to forgive, and Who,
as we realize and manifest His Immanence, will
make us in very deed what members of a Church
are meant to be : Salt of the earth, lights in the
world, and witnesses to others of the " Mystery
which from the beginning of the world hath been
hid in God."

THE LIMITS OF FORGIVENESS
" And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the
tormentors, till he should pay all that was due." —
Matt, xviii. 34.
THERE are two methods of interpreting the
inspired parables and aUegories recorded
from the lips of our Blessed Lord ; these
two methods come under the saying of St. Paul :
" First, that which is natural ; afterwards that
which is spiritual." Strictly speaking, it is the
distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric,
the rudimentary and the advanced, the phUoso-
phic and the experimental. The former — the
esoteric, the advanced, the philosophic — inter
prets a parable in connexion with the profound,
aU-prevaUing, universal laws behind phenomena.
The latter — the exoteric, the rudimentary —
interprets it in connexion with these laws as they
become experimental in the superficial atmos
phere of our material world. The two methods
do not contradict each other any more than
next year's butterfly contradicts this year's
caterpiUar. The rudimentary only ceases to be
true, relatively to the higher truth when the
172

The Limits of Forgiveness 173
higher truth is apprehended. It is never abso
lutely essential for the peace of a rudimentary
mind to pursue the philosophic, the esoteric, the
advanced, though the pursuit is luminous with
spiritual joy ; and inasmuch as we belong to two
worlds and possess two very distinct natures,
St. Paul tells us that the best method is : first, that
which is natural, rudimentary, exoteric ; then,
that which is spiritual, advanced, philosophic.
For example, we desire, let us say, to apply
the powerful, realistic, parable of this morning's
Gospel* to the guidance of our daily life, and we
examine it first upon the natural plane. No
utterance can be imagined more helpful, more
encouraging. From the standpoint of our tra
ditional Deistic conception of God, with our
conventional view of the malignity of moral evil,
with our somewhat clumsy theological idea of
the unutterable corruption of man, born (the
Augustinian theologians tell us) into the world
sinful, and therefore an object of repulsion to
God, conscious that we live in an atmosphere
charged with temptation, while we are hereditarily
on fire with sinful desires — it is simply fascinating
to be met then, on the highest authority, with the
revelation of a love that knows no bounds — that
wUl forgive us not seven times, but seventy
times seven, that simply sweeps away all limita
tions and maxims, that transcends unspeakably
all human conceptions of forgiveness. As
* Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity.

174 The Limits of Forgiveness
Adelaide Proctor puts it with pardonable poetic
exaggeration :
" Kind hearts are here, but yet the tenderest one
Has limits to its mercy. God has none.
And man's forgiveness may be true and sweet,
But yet he stoops to give it. More complete
Is love that lays forgiveness at thy feet
And pleads with thee to take it. Only Heaven
Means ' crowned,' not vanquished, when it says
' forgiven.' "
True, there is a condition, or rather there must
be a consequence, there must be a similarity of
attitude. The forgiving man must live in the
attitude and spirit of forgiveness, simply because
the affectionate and forgiving spirit can alone
realize the blessing of forgiveness. " A man
who cannot forgive others, breaks down the
bridge over which he must pass himself ; for
every one has need to be forgiven. As when the
sea-worm makes a hole in the sheU of the mussel,
the hole is filled up with a pearl ; so, when the
heart is pierced by an injury, forgiveness is like
a pearl, healing and filling the wound." There
fore, our Lord added the words to the Paternoster
(variously rendered in the different records),
" for we forgive them that trespass against us."
He knew that a man bearing a bitter grudge was
standing in the lower self and not in the higher,
and that he could not assimUate God's forgiveness
tiU he had paid the debt of love he owed to God
and man.

The Limits of Forgiveness 175
At this point, I say, a rudimentary mind is
justified in pausing in the consideration of the
Gospel of to-day. It is competent for such an
one to say this is enough for my soul ; there may
be what you describe as a higher plane of inter
pretation, one that takes the thoughts into the
realm of universal law, but I do not require it.
Measureless forgiveness, as the antidote to cease
less shortcomings, takes the sting out of life, and
I want no more. Very well ; in that case, a
preacher can only say : " Act up to the teaching
on the natural plane, and the world will be better
that you have lived ; the misunderstandings, and
jealousies, and discords, and slanders, and sulki-
nesses that divide families and split up Churches,
and poison Christian work amongst those who
profess and call themselves Christians will pass
away, and the Millennium will shortly appear."
But there is such a thing as " following on to
know the Lord." There is an interpretation of
this parable on the philosophic, the esoteric
plane which seems — only seems, observe — to be
in flat contradiction to the sweet, soothing,
surface-teaching of the wholesale tenderness and
leniency of God. The seeming contradiction is,
however, only relative. The conclusion to be
drawn from it is in fact far more full of assurance
as to our ultimate destiny, and far more luminous
with life-controlling power than the conclusion of
facile forgiveness.
Carefully to consider this word-picture, drawn

176 The Limits of Forgiveness
by the Master's hand, is to recognize practicaUy
that its main teaching is this — namely, that
wholesale forgiveness, under the emotion of
compassion is not only a practical failure, but
may be even a fatal obstacle to the formation of
character by the removal of the legitimate con
sequences of actions, which consequences are the
educators of man. Such a forgiveness almost
always has to be revoked, and often, as in this
case related in the parable, at heavy cost to
the offender. Underlying the incidents of the
parable is the refutation, by anticipation, of the
rudimentary and artificial theology, which is
built upon the erroneous conception that sin
provokes the displeasure of, and affronts, the
Father-Spirit of the universe, and that, when
pleaded with, He lays aside this displeasure,
ceases to be affronted, and forgives in the sense
of removing consequences and penalties. Now,
considered esoterically, it must be a law, universal
and eternal, that there can be no such action as
what we human beings understand between our
selves as " forgiveness " from God to man. Why
not ? For two reasons : First, because such an
attitude as unforgiveness on the part of God is
inconceivable in the light of the higher under
standing of the relations between Divine and
human ; and, secondly, because the great heart-
sores of humanity are not to be cured .by being
forgiven. You cannot cure a broken limb by
forgiving it. Sin is the result of unregulated

The Limits of Forgiveness 177
desire ; desire is that quality in man which wars
against his higher nature. And to suffer man to
sin, and by forgiveness to shield him from the
consequences of sin, would be to interpose a fatal
obstacle to his education.
Let us examine these two assertions. First,
" the thoughts of men, widening with the process
of the suns," have entered upon a reaction from,
even a protest against, the historic Rational
istic Deism, which interposed an immeasurable
chasm between the Creator and the creature,
banishing Him practically from all contact with
humanity. " God is Spirit," says St. John —
Infinite, Universal, Eternal Spirit. His life, His
love, pulses through all that is. He is in all,
through aU, and yet above all. All visible things
are expressions of His immanence and self-
evolving life. " Are not these, 0 soul, the vision
of Him who reigns ? Is not the vision He, though
He be not that which He seems ?" Of these
expressions, the highest, on this planet, is man :
" The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," " In
Him we live and move and have our being,"
" Of Him and to Him and through Him are all
things," " And in Him all things consist." Thus
saith the Scripture. This is the new theology,
the new testament. And that He may be to us,
though universal, an object of religious homage
and religious trast ; that our phraseology in
speaking of Him may be accommodated to
creaturely conditions ; that we may be saved from
12

178 The Limits of Forgiveness
sublimating God away into an abstraction, He
has specifically incarnated His moral attributes
in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ assures us that
the same Divine Spirit which was fully manifested
in Him is also immanent in us, and that we may
form of it the tenderest, most filial conception,
and speak of it as Our Father. " The Father in
Me" is how He spoke of it Himself. Now, to
imagine this indwelling, ever-evolving, Love-spirit
to be capable of being affronted is as irrational
as to speak of your breath being angry with you
or your blood taking offence. To speak of it in
the terms of Dr. Watts's famous hymn about
sprinkling the frowning face of God is certainly
unphUosophical, and borders even on the profane.
Eastern Christianity is the most free from these
conceptions, which are mainly a survival of
paganism and Judaism built into the Christian
system by Augustine, the father of Latin theology.
Forgiveness, from the esoteric, philosophic point
of view is not the good-natured oblivion of an
omnipotent creditor to the infinite indebtedness of
a poor, helpless, human debtor. Forgiveness is
the recognition on the part of the tireless, loving,
inteUigent, indwelling and all-fiUing Spirit of an
awakened and self-accusing conscience ; and the
impartation of a healthier, purer impulse which,
by the steady, continuous conquest of the lower
life by the higher, will build up character and
form the Christ life within.
Secondly, as to forgiveness from the super-

The Limits of Forgiveness 179
ficial human point of view proving to be
practically a failure. It is as though our Lord
had said : " I desire that you should be tender,
unselfish, ready to restore an offender until
seventy times seven — not self-assertive and not
vindictive ; that you will learn from the obvious
surface-teaching of My parable. But, if you
penetrate deep enough, and are able to receive it,
you wiU also learn that an easy-going, wholesale
wiping-out of a legitimate obligation, under the
impulse of compassion, may be injurious, and
calculated to intensify your own or your brother's
fault." He draws a picture : The Kingdom of Heaven,
the paramount power, is like a man who would
take account of his servants. One cannot pay ;
it is assumed that there has been extravagance,
dishonesty — at any rate, wrong-doing. The delin
quent is confronted with the overwhelming force
of the paramount power ; he pleads for mercy,
he offers terms of peace, he is fully, frankly for
given, his position restored to him. But con
sider, does it do him good ? Does it touch his
character ? No, it is a failure, a gross, con
spicuous, lamentable faUure ; he is hardened in
his evil courses. The covetousness and selfish
ness, to have borne the consequences of which
would have educated him, are stereotyped and
intensified. He is a worse man than he was
before. The result is that it becomes necessary
that there should be a deliberate reversal of the
12 — 2

180 The Limits of Forgiveness
harmful leniency. Now, he must pass through
the crucial fiery ordeal, through which alone the
old nature can be made to die to sin and rise
again to righteousness.
" He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."
There are solemn lessons in this esoteric interpre
tation of the parable. Let no man resist the
tender pleading of the indwelling spirit of God
and cleave to some secret soul-pollution under
the delusion that a merciful paramount power
will make easy terms concerning it at the Day of
Judgment. Let no man continue sinning, under
the immoral mockery of repeated absolutions,
which, without touching character, only persuade
the lower nature that God is no longer affronted.
" Whatsoever a man soweth that he must reap,"
here or hereafter. He sows a habit, he reaps a
character. The Parent Spirit who caused us to
be has an eternal purpose concerning each one
of us, which is our ultimate, absolute perfection,
effected by the conquest of the lower life by the
higher. That we are thus situated is His arrange
ment, not ours. All are familiar with Browning's
story of the ring and the book. The goldsmith
would make a ring of gold ; the pure metal is too
hard to be fashioned into the required from.
The workman makes an amalgam of gold and
mercury, forms the ring, dissipates the mercury
by heat, and the jewel is perfect. Such an
amalgam are we, pure gold in essence, with the
lower metal incorporated ; with, however, the

The Limits of Forgiveness 1 8 1
power to be a co-worker with the Mighty Artificer
in effecting the perfection He has purposed. If
we wUl not — if we oppose a continual personal
resistance to His inward suggestions, what has
forgiveness to do with it ? The jewel has to be
made, and this parable teaches that no alternative
remains but the last great act of grace, called
in the Gospel Gehenna, where by God's chemistry
the aUoy is melted out and corruption is made to
inherit incorruption ; and that is " being de
livered to the tormentors till we pay all that is
due from us."
What is the moral of it aU ? The appeal is
direct, personal ; it is, " Awake, thou that sleepest,
and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine
upon thee." Many, I know, now listening to
me are living in the light — some in trustful,
speechless waiting on His will ; some in calm
devotion to a life-work that is often full of
disappointment, and brings no earthly praise.
Some, on the other hand, are conscious that they
are wilfully living far below their ideal, indulgent
to the lotoer self, infirm of purpose, irresolute in
action. To them the message of to-day's Gospel
is : Do not look forward to an easy forgiveness at
the moment of your death or at the Day of
Judgment. " Awake and arise from the dead
past of thy self -life." Shake off the moral
deterioration of the conscious choice of a lower
standard. Believe that the Kingdom of Heaven
is within you, that salvation is within you. Work

1 82 The Limits of Forgiveness
out that salvation ; the instant you throw your
will into it and begin the Christ will shine upon
you, and all the power of the Kingdom of Heaven
is yours. The Christ cannot help shining on you ;
He is shining on you now, but you know it not.
It is of the Christ, the ever-present, unwearied
Friend of humanity, nearer to each one of us
than He ever was to friend or disciple on earth,
that the truly inspired lines refer, the truth of
which many listening to me now can endorse :
" I looked to Jesus, and I found
In Him my Star, my Sun ;
And in that Hght of life I'll walk
Till travelling days are done."

ST. SIMON AND ST. JUDE
" Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
death they were not divided." — 2 Sam. i. 23.
SURELY an appropriate motto for the Saints'
Day observed to-day — the Festival of St.
Simon and St. Jude. We know little about
these two. Simon, caUed the Zealot, was one of
the iconoclastic enthusiasts of the first band of
Christians, and early Greek writers tell us that
he earned the victor's crown — of thorns, for he
was crucified in Britain. St. Jude, who also
went by the name of Thaddeus, is credited with
the authorship of the letter bearing his name,
which will be read as the Epistle for to-day, a
letter which probably he did not write, as the
Epistle is mainly built up from quotations from
the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Tradition says
that he was martyred in Persia by the Zoroastrian
Magi. I propose to utUize the linking together
of these two saints in the Liturgy of the Church to
illustrate a thought which is in my mind in answer
to the questions which have freely reached me
in connexion with my words recently spoken upon
183

184 St. Simon and St. Jude
the forgiveness of sins. It is a consolation and a
help to me to know that many of us are thinking
together into the mysteries of God and man.
" Why," ask some of you — " why am I unable
to realize and attain to that attitude of mind
described last Sunday, and know that I am for
given, because the only relation that the Father
can assume towards my sins is to take them away
by curing me of sinfulness ?"
Well, perhaps it is because you are mentally
confusing sin with the consequences of sin. We
have been so grooved into the notion that for
giveness of sin means reprieve from punishment
that this solution is not improbable. Sin is
taken away when the cluster of tendencies within
you which have led you to infringe the moral
law are brought under the dominion of the Divine
nature which is also within you ; and the conse
quences of sin, though the love of the Father
will often mitigate them, are simply a matter of
cause and effect, and if they remain, and you
reap what you have sown, these consequences
will prove your best education. Again, perhaps,
for a reason into which I will not enter now —
namely, that the nearer you get to the vision of
God the more detestable do certain past actions
appear to you — your sensation arises from your
increasing inability to forgive yourself.
But the answer which I desire to give, which
will make a demand upon your thinking capacity,
implies an entire shifting of the whole mental

St. Simon and St. Jude 185
point of view, and when realized, transforms the
entire aspect of life. It is based on the principle
that man's only real being is spiritual and Divine,
and when this principle is awakened into con
sciousness it has power to control all lower con
ditions, graduaUy transforming them ; and the
one essential evidence of this Divine element
being truly awakened is that it immediately
recognizes a oneness with humanity, it transcends
and overflows the isolation of personality, it
reaches forth to blend with and to bless other
lives, it sees others as God sees you, and it implies
that as God is holding you free from all accusa
tions of guilt, you must also hold others thus free,
realizing that your only true attitude towards an
offending brother-man is not to desire to be
revenged, but honestly to endeavour to better
his condition, to cure him by striving to impart
to him from yourself, by the telepathy of sanctified
will and kindly thought, accompanied by helpful
action, the higher, healthier, purer life which you
have begun to realize in yourself. Is not this the
reason why our Lord appended to the petition
in the Paternoster " Forgive us our trespasses, as
we forgive them that trespass against us," the
commentary, " for if ye forgive not men their
trespasses, neither wiU your heavenly Father
forgive your trespasses " ? It is under the cease
less illumination of the teaching of the Holy Spirit
that we are able to perceive the inwardness of
that saying. It can only mean that acceptance

1 86 St. Simon and St. Jude
of the revealed standing of the race as indwelt by
God, as consisting of differentiated atoms of the
Infinite Originator, implies such an identity, a
oneness, between human beings, and such an
obligation of loving service between man and
man, that no personal affront could release man
from the duty of seeking an offender's welfare
from his heart.
Is it not more than probable that we do not
realize all that is meant by the forgiveness of
sin, simply because we are hugging this sense of
forgiveness to ourselves, shutting it up into the
isolation of personality, gloating over the feeling,
" / am forgiven, / am saved," and not extending
it and causing it to overflow to others ?
You are forgiven because you were never
unforgiven, personal affront being impossible
between God and you. So long as you accept this
position as between God and you, and do not
acknowledge it as between you and your fellow-
man, you are standing in the old unawakened
self, and not in the bright light of the full revela
tion of the indweUing of God in man. How
transcendently did the Perfect Elder Brother
evidence on the cross this characteristic of the
recognition of the indwelling Divine when,
after hanging for three long silent hours in agony,
He opened His lips, not to condemn or to reproach,
but to intercede and to bless, to impart His life
by the beauty of His example — " Father, forgive
them, they know not what they do " ! The Divine

St. Simon and St. Jude 187
gift in them is unawakened. It is not their true
Divine ego that is perpetrating this outrage —
" they know not what they do." In many of
those who heard must the Divine nature have been
afterwards awakened when they thought over
that utterance of Everlasting Love.
Once before when speaking on forgiveness I
touched upon this profound aspect of the subject
by drawing attention to the etymology of the
old Saxon word "forgive": it is "forthgive" — ¦
give forth — with an extended sense of going
forth to give, to communicate, a power or a know
ledge possessed by ourselves which, when received
by a brother in humanity, takes away his tres
passes by revealing to him his true relation to
God. Surely it is part of the magnetic law of the
diffused Divine life which is the attribute of
humanity as a whole, and which knits the human
race into an organic spiritual unity, that if you
forbear to communicate your gift you, as it were,
break the electric circuit, insulate yourself, and
for the time lose your own power.
I wUl imagine that you put certain ques
tions to me. You say, do be more explicit
in defining what you mean by this revealed
standing of the human race in God which we are
under the obligation of forthgiving to others
under the penalty of losing consciousness of it.
I reply, it is the indissoluble union in essential
nature of man with God. It is the knowledge
that God, the Universal Mind, is in man seeking

1 88 St. Simon and St. Jude
to express Himself ; that for this mode of self-
expression man is as necessary to God as God
is to man ; that, as God is universal, the true life
of each one of us is not in the imprisonment of
isolation, but in the organic whole, and to see
this is to look with a larger knowledge on
humanity ; that when this indwelling life and love
would bless and help, He does it through the wills
and thoughts of those most yielding to His
influence ; and, therefore, when I forthgive, as
the Lord Jesus did forthgive on the cross, it is
God blessing others through me, or, as our blessed
Lord expressed it, " The Father in Me doeth the
works." I will imagine that you ask me another ques
tion : How and when does the area of normal
consciousness awaken and expand so that the
individual is able to claim this inheritance and
say, " In me God lives and moves and has His
being " ? Does it come gradually or suddenly ?
I answer : Both. Generally this spiritual insight
which overflows isolated individuality and forth-
gives is the result of assiduous mental practice,
and comes slowly, thrusting its way through a
mass of traditional and conventional limitations.
I imagine that in no one does it become the
normal and habitual attitude of life — -that would
imply that education was complete. It was
absolutely perfect in the Lord Jesus, but even He
for a moment lapsed into the Hebrew Deism
when, in the agony of dereliction, He cried,

St. Simon and St. Jude [89
" Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ?" But the minutest
realization of it, even a glimpse of it, alters the
whole aspect of life.
Once I saw it come suddenly at an evangelistic
service in a tent, and it was in the person of one
who had been a professed secularist and an active
propagandist of infidel theories. I saw that
strange light come into his eye which Plato
thought was the sign of a memory of some bygone
existence ; I saw him fall on his knees ; I heard
the cry from his lips ; and when, on the following
day, he was confronted by his old companions
with the customary so-called "mistakes of Moses "
and moral difficulties of the Old Testament
which form the stock-in-trade of the professional
religion-destroyer, he replied, " I cannot answer
the difficulties, but neither now do I desire to do
so. One thing I know : whereas I was blind, now
I see." The spirit, in its hidden, thought-tran
scending operation, was witnessing with his spirit
that he was a son of God. That man was under
my observation for ten years afterwards, and I
never knew him waver. That supreme moment
appeared to have reconstituted his whole being,
and his influence as a forth giver was most power
ful. He then went to the colonies, and I know
not whether lie is now on this earth .
One other question I will imagine you put to
me : Have I ever seen this forthgiving of this
diffused, immanent God-life in operation ? I
have. I have seen it in operation in St. John's

190 St. Simon and St. Jude
Church. When it is in operation, it is God think
ing and willing through us in a particular direction.
It is then dynamic, and it causes things to happen
that would not happen without it. More than once
when devout hearts in this Church have been in the
right attitude you have been then " forthgivers."
Another question you ask me : What has
this line of thought to do with St. Simon and
St. Jude ? Just this. Why are these two put
together ? Why, though widely separated in their
ministry and martyred in lands far apart, are they
here blended ? Do you say they were brothers,
sons of Cleophas, nephews of Joseph the hus
band of Mary ? — well, that does not satisfy me.
The Western Church, to which we owe not a
little pagan leaven, sometimes builded better
than it knew. I think it is because they were
known to be illustrations of that overlapping,
forthgiving, spiritual affinity of which I have
been speaking. I think their juxtaposition arises
from a perhaps unconscious apprehension, on the
part of the compilers of the Liturgy, of the pro
found truth of that mystic knowledge of a one
ness which dees sometimes exist between com
municating minds. Is this fanciful ? Why
should it be ? There are three spheres of appre
hension of Holy Scripture— the authoritative, the
rational, and the intuitive. The believer in
direct Divine dictation is in the first sphere, the
higher critics are in the second sphere, the open-
eyed are in the third sphere ; and the open-

St. Simon and St. Jude 191
eyed are the truest appreciators of Holy Writ,
though they are indifferent to historic narrative,
and care nothing for literal accuracy. In all
ages, under all dispensations, there have been the
open-eyed. Spinoza, Philo, the composers of the
Kabbala, Jacob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg,
aU saw by inward light glorious meanings in
much that seemed unedifying in the letter.
I believe these two are thus commemorated
in union to illustrate that one human brother
can overflow isolation and stimulate brain waves
and spirit motions in another though one is in
Persia and the other in Britain, for though we are
separate entities, " there is one body and one
spirit." And now for your last question to me : " Why,"
I imagine you asking me — " why do you weary
us with this abstract esoteric line of thought ?
What possible practical good can it be to us ?"
I answer, I do it because I long to realize more
myself, and that you should realize more, the
responsibility attaching to the knowledge of
higher truth, of believing that one life pulses
through aU things ; because I desire that we shall
escape from that dream of isolated individuality
which is the illusion — what the Oriental calls
maya, what St. Paul calls the " vanity "—of earth-
life ; because I desire that we shall assiduously
practise this form of " forthgiving," of breathing
forth spiritual power till it becomes more the
normal attitude of the soul ; because, inasmuch

192 St. Simon and St. Jude
as this kind of " forthgiving " is the thought of
God starting from your own soul and acting as a
dynamic force upon the object of your solicitation,
it affords an additional motive for watchfulness,
purity, self-control, meditation, communion, un
selfishness ; also because this wireless current of
God's dynamics, this forthgiving of spiritual
affinity, reaches into the other world, abolishes
death, flashes from mind to mind across the gulf
between dimensions, unites us with the beloved
who are gone, opens a channel from their minds
to ours. " Star to star vibrates light,
So may soul to soul pierce through a finer
Element of her own."
Finally, the road to a clearer realization of
this truth is the daily practice of -mental self-
surrender to the indwelling Oversoul ; daily
reaffirmation of the transcendent truth that the
Supreme Intelligence is the one sole power in aU
things and all men ; that, as the offspring of the
Infinite Spirit, you, and all men, are as indes
tructible as God, and that when your soul is full
of heaviness and disquieted within you for the
wickedness of the world, for the alienation and
stubbornness of some loved one whose eyes are
holden, you may not despair, but echo those
words of assurance :
" Father of all, he urges his strong plea,
Thou lovest of all — Thy erring child may be
Lost to himself — but never lost to Thee."

THE ATONEMENT
" The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
— Rev. xiii. 8. *
QUESTIONS reach me which seem to indicate
the exact thought-point at which the con
ception of the Immanence of God puts a
strain upon rudimentary theology ; for whenever
I emphasize unusuaUy strongly the essential
inseverability of God and man, which is the bed
rock of my faith, I am met with the same anxious
questioning. Recently I spoke of the oneness
of the human race as consisting of separate
differentiated entities of the One Universal Divine
Consciousness which is God. I said that I could
see, as the ideal, that the whole process of our
education in the flesh ought to consist of a gradual
expanding and enlarging of our self-consciousness,
and the awakening from the dream of isolated
individuality, which is the illusion of our earth
condition, until it attains that perfection in
which it loses the consciousness of itself as some
thing apart from God, and finds its true being
in most absolute union with the universal origin-
i93 13

194 The Atonement
ating life, and that one symptom of the growing
of this Christ-Spirit within would be its suggestion
that we should avert our minds from, deny,
ignore, the outer self, cease to regard as real
outer conditions, outer joys and griefs, and live
more in the universal life which is not only in us,
but in all humanity, and that this mental attitude
would greatly condition our thoughts of and
conduct towards our fellow-men ; and I used the
juxtaposition of Simon and Jude as an illustration
of this conscious unity of spirit overflowing from
one man into another man which had probably
been recognized by the Church. Now some, to
whose winged thought I am indebted, and who
are probably expressing the minds of others,
say to me : " In this noble belief that universal
humanity is indwelt by God there is no room for
the doctrine of the Atonement, which has been
represented as the fundamental dogma of
Christianity." The question is, What do you
mean by the Atonement ? If you mean that
there is no room for the conventional conception
of a substitutionary propitiation whereby black
may be caUed white, while it knows itself to be
black, I agree. It is just possible that my own
endurance of suffering after deadly sin might
give me back my self-respect ; the endurance of
my deserts by another could only make me
despise myself the more. There is no hint of
this curious and artificial theology, which may
be described as Christianized Judaism, or purified

The Atonement 195
paganism, in any of our Lord's recorded words,
and the conception is whoUy absent from His
typical parable, His greatest teaching — the parable
of the Prodigal Son.
If, however, you mean the real doctrine of the
Atonement, as it is revealed in the tenth chapter
of the Epistle to the Hebrews- — namely, that the
Elder Brother, in the name of the race of which
He was the representative, offered to the Father-
Spirit a perfect and absolute submission of will,
and that in this offering through the organic
spiritual unity of the Body of humanity the whole
race is virtually at-one-d to God, through the
attained perfection of one Member of the race,
and that He — the Elder Brother — is now, as the
indwelling sonship of each individual, slowly
working out that same at-one-ment between the
human and the Divine in every separate son and
daughter of the Lord Almighty— if you mean
that, then I contend that the doctrine of the
Atonement is an absolute necessity to esoteric
thought as the explanation of the purpose of the
Incarnation, the interpretation of .the mystery
of our own dual nature, the indication of the
direction of human effort for improvement, and
the conspicuous guarantee and pledge that
somehow, and somewhen, and somewhere, the
Divine and the human within us shall be at-one-d
as they were in Him, for " As He is, so are we in
this world." But to see this it is necessary to be
emancipated from some conventional planes of
13—2

196 The Atonement
thought. For example, it is necessary to realize
that what is called redemption is not an after
thought, a generous Divine expedient for the
renovation of a marred purpose, but the pre
determined operation of the Father-Spirit whence
we came, before the world was. This is very
clearly expressed in the words, " The Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world." The clear
sight of this eternal reality lifts the mind above
some of the most serious differences which have
divided Christian thought. Rudimentary and
imperfect conceptions of the work of Christ in
redemption have originated obviously from in
adequate conceptions of the Divine Nature as
related to the conditioned or human nature.
They have arisen from the belief in the existence
of an immeasurable chasm between the Creator
and the creature, and from an instinct of infinite
indebtedness on man's part — an indebtedness that
no human effort could avail to remove. This
idea of indebtedness has insinuated itself into
Christian definitions, gradually expanding and
becoming less material under the increasing
realization of the Nature of God. In the earliest
Christian times the impression was widespread
that man's transgression had made the human
race debtor to the devil, who, like the brigands
of the mountains of Sicily, required a ransom.
Augustine virtuaUy accepted the theory, and
taught that Jesus, as incomparably the most
precious specimen of the race, was accepted in

The Atonement 197
payment of the debt as the substitute for
humanity. Athanasius, however, before the days
of Augustine, contended that whatever concep
tion of ransom attached to the death of Christ was
paid to God. Anselm, the Italian Archbishop of
Canterbury in the eleventh century, first defi
nitely formulated the two theologies into the
dogma which, in varying forms, has prevailed
and which has been spoken of as the scheme or
plan of salvation. According to this scheme,
infinite indebtedness has been incurred by man
to an infinitely Holy God, an indebtedness
impossible to be discharged by sinful creatures,
and the death of the sinless Son of God was the
expiation exacted by an omnipotent abstraction
called justice. In spite of the strange theological
confusion between two Persons in the Trinity
implied by this idea, in spite of its utter inadequacy
as a means of redemption for the race (for, whether
considered as Calvinism, which taught that only
those predestined to salvation could profit by it,
or as Arminianism, which taught that only those
who should hear of it and accept it could be
saved by it — it could only avail for a very limited
number of the race), it has not been without its
converting power upon the souls of men ; it has
delivered many from the paralysing phantom
of the old terror of judgment ; it has brought
an antidote to many for the soul-wounds of
humanity ; where it has come home to the heart
and the conscience, it has promoted an intense

198 The Atonement
personal love for the Lord Jesus as the wiUing
victim substituted for the sinner.
A faulty conception wiU often provide an
adequate working hypothesis, as the geocentric
conception of astronomy, since proved to be
false, enabled astronomers to foretell eclipses.
The faulty conception of the Character of God —
such, for example, as that conveyed in a hymn
by Dr. Watts, when he speaks of God's frowning
face being calmed by drops of Jesu's blood —
has led many, under the agonizing conviction of
sin, to cling with indescribable yearning and grati
tude to God's Pacifier, the Saviour of the world.
Every one knows of the Englishman who, moved
with compassion, bought a negro girl at a slave
auction and gave her her freedom, and how,
from that moment, she devoted her life to her
rescuer, serving him with the utmost fideUty, and,
when questioned as to her fanatical devotion,
would repeat again and again, " He redeemed me,
he redeemed me." With a similar intensity has
the Lord Jesus been loved by those who say,
" He took the cup in both His Hands, and with
one tremendous draught He drank damnation
dry." But such devotion has not been always
free from the mental confusion expressed with
simple frankness by the little child who said,
" Yes, I love Jesus, but I hate God." It is,
moreover, responsible for many a strong delusion
under which men have satisfied themselves that
they were what they caUed " saved," while their

The Atonement 199
lives were unlovely and unprogressive. From
such partial truths the mind of man is lifted by
the teaching of the Holy Spirit in that sublime
utterance, " The Lamb slain from the foundation
of the world."
Whatever may be the explanation our Father
wUl one day give us, when we know even as we
are known, of the mystery of what we now call
moral evil, the self-sacrifice of the Divine life in
the redemption of the world from moral evU
was a fact in the eternal counsel before the world
was, before moral evil existed, before man sinned.
So far as we can speak of time and succession in
connexion with the deep things of God, redemp
tion was not a scheme to amend Creation, but
Creation was an incident to fit into redemption.
In the order of thought God was Redeemer before
he was Creator. The pagans taught a God
above all Gods, caUed Necessity ; for the word
"necessity " read "love," and the teaching is true,
for the Uving and true God, self-revealed in the
Gospel, is under the law of necessity — the necessity
of His own being, which is love. Love, and self-
utterance in sacrifice, are synonymous terms.
Creation is love uttering itself, clothing itself,
conditioning itself in a body, of which body the
human race is the crown and climax. The real
self-sacrifice of God is not His embodiment in
one man, but His conditioning Himself in all men.
The embodiment in one man is the climax of his
operation in all men ; the Divine Nature, the

200 The Atonement
Lamb of God Nature, the redeeming Nature,
burying itself, as it were, as a Divine redeeming
Seed in man, is God at-one-ing the race, and every
human life on earth is an act of God in self-
sacrifice. The inmost life in every one, the true
being in every one, is the Divine Nature, and its
work is to redeem the whole man to God, to un
loose the human soul from the bonds of sinful
tendencies, and in the slow, gradual overcoming
in each one the self-will, the stubbornness, the
anger, the lust, is the suffering of the Divine
Nature. Thus, atonement is not an isolated act,
but a maintained attitude of spiritual evolution,
the working out of inmost Divine spirit, overcom
ing graduaUy aU the resistance and antagonism
of the outward sinful nature, and bringing it into
conformity with the universal Divine life, and
when that is accomplished we shall be in heaven,
for heaven is not locality, but character. And
this is " through our Lord Jesus Christ," for our
Lord Jesus Christ is that manifestation or aspect
of the Divine Nature, that self -utterance in sonship
of the Divine Being, who is the inmost in every
man- — " the mystery hid from the foundation of the
world, Christ in you," says St. Paul. He is the
evolving spirit who is slowly transfiguring the
race from within, and that He may be witness,
pledge, promise, guarantee, helper to aU, He
comes " out of the everywhere into here," con
ditions Himself in a separate human personality,
" the Word is made flesh and dwells among us " ;

The Atonement 201
the redeemer aspect of the Creator, in the fullness
of time, manifests Himself visibly, and in that
form lives outside us and for us, as our Repre
sentative, the life He is striving to evolve within
us as our inspiration. But you ask, " Did not
Jesus pay a price for our redemption ?" He did.
The price that Jesus paid to win our love and
gratitude was the life laid down in surrender of
the lower human will, in denial of the purely
natural self, in mortification of all human
ambition, in crucifixion of every selfish impulse,
and, in that " He was tempted in all points like
as we are," He is " able to succour them that are
tempted, and save to the uttermost . them that
come unto God in Him." If an able surgeon
saves your life in a crisis, he has, in a sense,
bought you with a price, and the price he has
paid for that act of redemption is the price of
years of study and application combined with
love of humanity and an intense devotion to
duty. And the price Jesus has paid to be able
to succour and save us is His lifelong acceptance,
as the representative of the race, in the completest
manner, of the will of Heaven expressed in self-
denial, suffering, and death, and inasmuch as in
Him is the type, promise, and potency of the
salvation of the race, and as He, as the Eternal
Word, is immanent in all men as the deepest
ground of their personal self-conscious life,
atoning — at-one-ing — the human, and Divine, I
contend that this true doctrine of the Atone-

202 The Atonement

ment becomes an absolute necessity to esoteric
thought. It accounts for everything, it interprets every
thing, it fits into everything, it unites all religions,
satisfies aU instincts, obliterates aU false con
ceptions, and, while it universalizes salvation
and exalts the objective personality of the Divine
Saviour, it individualizes human effort, and
teaches man the obligation of " working out his
own salvation because it is God that worketh in
Him." The conclusion is obvious ; it is expressed
in the words " Christ in you the hope of glory."
There is the highest declaration of Christian
phUosophy. You have a dual nature. The
highest part of that dual nature is the Christ-
nature, which is striving to unfold itself in you,
that it may in time " make of the twain " —
the human nature and the Divine nature — " one
new man." That is the atonement, the at-one-
ment in you. Resist that Christ-nature, and it
wiU bring you to the prison of spirits, out of
which you wiU not come tiU you have paid the
uttermost farthing. Give to that Christ-nature
careful, watchful, co-operation, and it wiU lead
you to a bright and endless future, not suddenly,
but by daily betterment, by slow degrees, by
the gradual conquest of the lower life by the
higher ; for, with Tennyson —
" I hold it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."

AUTO-SUGGESTIGN
" Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto
sin." — Rom. vL ii.
*" I " HESE words occurred in the Epistle for the
_|_ Sixth Sunday after Trinity, and inquiring
minds put questions to me as to their
meaning, and as to the meaning of the words of
the Gospel for the same Sunday. I am asked :
What did St. Paul mean when he tells us to
"reckon ourselves dead to sin" ? and what did
Our Lord mean when He said that if we called
our brother a fool we were in danger of the
Gehenna of fire ? WeU, what did St. Paul mean ?
Does he desire to encourage us in hypocrisy, in
pretending to a sanctity that we well know we
do not possess ? Whatever we are, we do not
desire to qualify as hypocrites. Our Lord says
that, " except our righteousness exceed the right
eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, we shall in
no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." And
He tells us that the righteousness of the Scribes
and Pharisees was hypocrisy. He says, " Woe
unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites."
203

204 Auto-Suggestion
Does not St. Paul mean this : That by the
power of thought, in the realization of the truth
of our being in God, we may conquer the demands
of the flesh nature, and control all lower conditions
in this complex mechanism that we speak of as
ourselves ? Is it not another aspect of that
glorious truth, the Immanence of God ? Does
he not mean auto-suggestion ?
The Greek word translated " reckon your
selves " is Xoji^eo-6e — tell yourselves, assure
yourselves. Does he not mean a strong mental
denial of one set of experiences and impulses, and
an equally strong affirmation of others, and the
anticipation that the series thus denied wiU wither
as a plant will wither when deprived of water ?
Philosophically, this principle advocated by
St. Paul is worthy of consideration, for it is a
thoroughgoing optimistic idealism, brought into
practical application on the plane of ordinary
experience. We are to believe and to affirm —
to tell ourselves — that the Spiritual and Divine
element in us constitutes our only real being, and
that, when awakened into consciousness and kept
prominent and active by thought-concentration,
it will rule the whole man.
There is little doubt that this principle of
auto-suggestion is rapidly being recognized on
the physical plane in the sphere of the influence
of mind over body. On this plane the principle
works both ways— both for disease and for
health ; the mind, dwelling constantly on par-

Auto-Suggestion 201;
ticular symptoms of disease, renders the body
liable to be affected by that disease.
In an obituary notice in the Lancet of a great
nerve doctor, who died from paralysis, this is
practically acknowledged, for we read : " It is
remarkable that he wrote much about diseases
of the nervous system, thus giving another
example of the curious coincidence that not
infrequently medical men die of the diseases to
which they have given special attention."
It certainly teUs for health. In spite of many
failures, and premisses that, in my opinion, are
erroneous, and an exaggeration of the matter-
denying philosophy of Berkeley, the so-called
Christian Scientists may fairly claim to have
established the principle that the sphere of causes
is the mind. Their counsel to their disciples is :
" Ally yourself in thought with the resistless
Divine life within you as the one true fact of
your being. Obliterate the obstructions of doubt
and fear, that the Divine force within may have
scope to work ; ' reckon yourself dead ' to all
the illusions of the false self ; ' reckon yourself
alive ' to all the elements of health and power,
and strength, and perfection, and this mental
process wiU result in change throughout the
whole physical frame." And it certainly does,
and in numerous instances, to some of which
I am able to testify from personal observation,
the result is the cure of disease.
It is almost a matter of surprise, considering

206 Auto-Suggestion
the training of the man in the strictest sect of
the Pharisees, to note the strong grasp of spiritual
intuition with which this truth — known to the
Easterns 2,000 years B.C. — is adopted by St. Paul,
and applied to the Divinely ordered method of
spiritual growth.
" Reckon yourself dead to sin — reckon yourself
alive to God." The road to a true and noble
life, he would say, is the intense, purposeful
focussing of your mental faculties upon all that
is high, noble, pure, Divine, and the deliberate,
persistent, ignoring, denying all that contradicts it.
The seed of action is impulse. Meet the impulses
within you on their own ground — where you find
them. They are aU in the mental region — think
yourself into God — reckon yourself alive to
God. Now, with regard to that strange saying of
our Lord about the Gehenna of fire, which is
a puzzle to some. Is not precisely this concep
tion of watching and conquering the impulses
the meaning of the whole passage ? It is so
veiled under the hyperbole of Oriental metaphor
that this teaching is liable to be overlooked.
The whole of this part of the Sermon on the
Mount might be summarized into the axiom ;
" Take care of the impulses, and the actions will
take care of themselves." When concerned as
to wrong action, search out the springs of that
action, and deal with them. The impulse contains
the potentiality of the action, and impulse resides

Auto-Suggestion 207
in the mental region. " As a man thinketh in his
heart," says Solomon, " so is he." And, as
Shakespeare says in " Hamlet," " There's nothing,
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Thus, as the mind is the womb of the impulse,
and the impulse is the mainspring of the action,
fill the mind with God — " reckon yourself alive to
God " — and your action wiU be right.
Is not that the Lord's meaning ? Your
righteousness, He says, must exceed the righteous
ness of the Scribes and Pharisees. The principle
of Phariseeism was that God was to be pacified
by certain external religious observances and
sundry outward pious actions. The ethics of
Christianity, on the other hand, the Lord implies,
would emerge from a close study of the seeds
of actions within. Right-thinking would produce
right-doing, and a mind consciously and pur
posely God-inhabited would transfigure conduct
and regenerate nature, for all love and faith
and tenderness, all purity and nobility and self-
sacrifice — all these, in their utmost intensity,
exist in the universal mind which is their source.
And this aU-inclusive, aU-transcending, all-diffused
universal mind is the God within us — the Christ
in man the hope of glory. Our Lord illustrates
this truth by enumerating the fatal results of
certain offences against the sacred law of brother
hood, which could have been easily avoided by
crashing in its inception the impulse which, un
checked, bore fruit in the action. " Whosoever is

208 Auto-Suggestion
angry with his brother is in danger of the judg
ment " ; in other words, a man of unrestrained
irritability, easily angry, impulsive, passionate, is
qualifying himself to be a prisoner before the court
— fhe local court mentioned in Deut. xvi. 18 — for
some unbridled action following his anger. " Who
soever shall say unto his brother, Raca (Worthless),
shall be in danger of the Council " ; in other words,
a habit of cold, sneering, contemptuous vitupera
tion is the high road to the violation of the Jewish
blasphemy laws — an offence tried before the
Council of the Sanhedrin and punishable by
death. " And whosoever shall say. Thou fool,
shaU be in danger of the Gehenna of fire " ; in
other words, he who has so accustomed himself
to abusive language towards his brother-man as to
call him " Moreh," here translated " Thou fool,"
— reaUy an untranslatable word of dread import
among the Jews, as implying a denial of the
parentage of God ; the word for the use of
which Moses was excluded from Canaan, and
there translated "ye rebels" — would certainly pro
voke a blow. The blow would produce retalia
tion, and might result in homicide, and the
subsequent casting of the body of the murderer,
after execution, into the Valley of Hinnom, there
to be consumed, with the refuse of Jerusalem,
by the beneficent transmuting worm that died
not, or in the sanitary fire that was not quenched,
but kept for ever burning to destroy the offal
of the city. Therefore, our Lord would suggest,

Auto-Suggestion 209
examine thyself, look well if there be any leaven
of these impulses within thee. If thou findest
in thy heart poison-seeds that thy better nature
condemns, wait not till they have developed
into action. If you are conscious of the impulse
to irritability, hate, envy, jealousy, revenge,
overwhelm them by mentally claiming your
inheritance of your true being in God. Ask your
self : Is this how God thinks me ? Is this God's
ideal for me ? Is this how the indwelling Spirit
wishes to think and to wiU through me ? In other
words, reckon yourself dead to these ungodly
impulses of the lower self — reckon yourself alive
to the loving purpose of God. Open the soul in
wardly by a powerful mental effort to the vital
energy of the interior indwelling Kingdom of
Heaven, the God within you ; and impulses,
affections, imagination will be new-born within
you. Our Lord conveys, under the veil of metaphor,
a profound warning. If I wiU not thus, by the
power that worketh in me, overcome the self-life,
the nature-life ; if I allow the lower impulse to
beget actions, and actions to form habits, and
habits to harden into necessity, and in that
condition pass out of this brief stage in our endless
human career, what then ? Beneath the Oriental
allegory we may learn " what then." God is
love and God is fire ; therefore, fire is love.
And, in what Browning calls that " Sad seques
tered state, where God unmakes but that He may
14

210 Auto-Suggestion
remake the soul He else had made in vain,"
I must abide until I have paid the uttermost
farthing of the debt I have incurred to the
humanity of which I am part. How I know not.
I know that love is eternal, and will preside over
the process. I know that somehow the Divine
over-soul will engender within the heart the dis
position which wiU bring the means of payment.
The last farthing will be paid by the genuine
desire to pay, by the impulses being rectified,
and the soul will be delivered ; but the fact remains,
and it is the lesson of that passage. Had the
impulses of the natural self-life been reckoned
dead, and the germ of the ideal humanity been
reckoned alive, and had this mental attitude been
persisted in until it became a habit, the necessity
and ordeal of this debtors' prison would have
been obviated.
From this consideration certain coroUaries
follow : (i) What possible guarantee have I that
this power is within me — this power of drowning
a wrong impulse in the flood of Immanent Divinity,
before it develops into wrong action ? How do
I know that this suggestion is not little more
than a kind of mental trick, a self-delusion ? How
is it possible for me to " reckon myself," " assure
myself that lam" dead to sin, alive to God ?
Well, Channing, who was a profound thinker,
once said, " I pity the man who recognizes
nothing God-like in his own soul." I fear very
many are candidates for Channing's pity, but

Auto-Suggestion 2 1 1
St. Paul gives the answer. He ends his sentence
with the words " through Jesus Christ our Lord."
Yes ; but what do these words mean ? They are
perilously familiar, as they form the end of
every prayer in the Liturgy. They mean that
Jesus Christ is the full guarantee of the indis
soluble union in essential nature of man with
God ; they mean that God, the Universal Mind,
is in man seeking to express Himself. This revela
tion has been given to us " in Jesus Christ our
Lord," and this signifies identification, not
substitution. It means that the perfect Elder
Brother, who came to be the visible embodiment
of the moral nature of the Absolute and the
perfect specimen of God's ideal of the race, did
not do anything instead of us, but literaUy, for
us, that He might assure us that the Divinity
which was in Him so transcendently is also in us
potentiaUy ; that "as He is, so are we in this
world," that we are " joint-heirs," with Him ;
that we are predestined to be conformed by the
same power to His image and His perfection ; that
as He was raised up, as we read in this same
Epistle, by the glory, the doxa of the indwelling
Father, so we, by the same glory, the same doxa,
are to walk in newness of life. God in Him, " the
Father in Me," was the power of His life— God
in us is to be the secret of our regeneration.
It means the true doctrine of the Atonement as
it is revealed in Hebrews x. ; namely, that the
perfect specimen of the race of which He was
14-^2

212 Auto-Suggestion
the representative, offered to the universal creative
Father Soul a perfect and entire submission of
the human wiU, and, that in this offering, through
the organic spiritual unity of the body of
humanity, the whole race is at-one-d to God
through the attained perfection of one member
of the race. And that He, the Elder Brother, is
now, as the indweUing spirit of sonship in each
individual, slowly working out that same at-one-
ment between the human and Divine in every
separate son and daughter of the Lord Almighty.
So He, His Spirit, His power, His nature, as
the visible embodiment of the Immanence of God
in humanity, the perfect specimen of the Logos or
self-utterance of God, which is the glory and
attribute of the race as a whole, is within us as
a glorious conquering vitality, ready to be called
into activity. (2) Then, for me to say, I cannot
reckon myself dead to sin, and alive to God — to
accept myself, and leave myself as I find myself —
is a profound denial of God, and a rejection of the
Christian revelation. Carlyle was right when he
said : " Nonsense, the impediment is in thyself —
here or nowhere is thy kingdom." (3) Then,
inasmuch as humanity is a God-souled soUdarity,
for me to accept and leave the world as I find it
is a similar denial of God. If I believe the
teaching of to-day, I shaU become conscious of a
deeper sense of the call for mutual sympathy and
helpfulness in the human brotherhood. I shaU
understand the purpose of that Congress being now

Auto-Suggestion 2 1 3
held in London, I shall recognize a oneness with
humanity, which transcends and overflows the
isolation of personality ; I shall know that if I am
content to look on while my brethren needlessly
suffer, I am sinning against the brotherhood. I
may be externaUy religious, but when I " bring my
gift to the altar " I had better remember that my
brother hath something against me. I have been
indifferent to the causes of crime and misery ; I
have given a guilty and cowardly acquiescence to
a condition of things which is a shame and a curse
on our civilization. And the Sermon on the
Mount points out the inevitable result of that.
I must pay my debt to the uttermost farthing.
What is the conclusion of the whole matter ?
If I believe St. Paul's injunction, I shall do this :
I shall take myself in hand, and watch my im
pulses, and if I detect the stirring of such as
I know are of the lower nature, I shall not even
pay them the respect of recognition, but at once
extinguish them by negation, by " reckoning
them " iUusory, non-existent, dead. And I shall
fill their place by affirmation, by " reckoning
myself," my true self, my ego, " alive to God."
In what words ? Any form of words will
do, so long as we affirm positively our oneness
with God's omnipotent indweUing power. Suppose
we are in sudden strong temptation, and with
true thought-concentration say secretly : "I am
a manifestation, an expression, of God ; His life,
love, wisdom, power, pulses through me at this

2 1 4 Auto-Suggestion
moment ; I am in God, and God in me." What
then ? You have not changed God's attitude
towards you in the slightest degree by this affirma
tion, but you have changed your attitude towards
Him, and, by thus affirming, you have put yourself
into harmony with the Divine purpose, and set
free influences of strength and goodness and power
which are always working for your perfection.
So, if I would grow in grace, in strength, in
purity, and in the knowledge of God ; if I would
help the Christ to win the world ; if I would help
to fulfil the transcendent utterance of the Christ
in John xvii. — " That they may be one, even as
We are one ; I in them, and Thou in Me, that
they may be made perfect in one " — I must believe
that humanity is God-souled, that God's greatness
is the infinity of attributes which I myself possess ;
and I must strive habitually, mentally to claim
that indwelling power, and to " reckon myself
dead to sin, and alive unto God, through Jesus
Christ our Lord."

O.H.M.S.
" There stood by me this night the angel of God,
whose I am, and whom I serve, saying, Fear not, Paul,
thou must be brought before Csesar ; and, lo, God hath
given thee all them that sail with thee." — Acts xxvii. 23.
RARELY, in the written record, is so much
consolation and stimulation concentrated
in a single sentence as in this utterance of
St. Paul which we have just heard read in the
second lesson. It is an inspired tabloid of thought-
suggestion. " There stood by me the angel of God " ; I
gather that he saw the angel. This opening of
the soul's vision to see into the higher, purer
world around us is not common, and I am not
prepared to say that it is wholly desirable, but it
is of unutterable value that some should possess
the gift, for that which is true for one of the
children of Abba Father is true for all, whether
they know it or not. And it is here revealed to
us that in the incidents of the busiest Ufe, in the
midst of perils and anxieties, celestial beings
beyond our powers of perception, have clear and
definite relationships with us, ministering to us,
215

216 O.H.M.S.

sympathizing with us, mourning over our failures,
rejoicing over our repentances, suggesting noble
aspirations, putting into our minds good desires,
true and lovely thoughts. We know not what the
angels are. The conventional conception of beauti
ful women with impossible wings is pure imagina
tion ; we only know that there is a briUiant host
of ethereal inteUigences, always beholding the
face of Abba Father, yet somewhere in our atmos
phere, grouping round our very heads, blending
with our worship and mingling with our lives. I
am myself a believer in that possible fourth
dimension of space, as different from length and
breadth and height as each of these is different
from the other. I believe there is another world,
as it were, within this world, transcending it,
pervading it, surrounding it, as the atmosphere
and space of a room surround a goldfish in a
globe — the same world and yet another world.
Let those who imagine this conception to be
fantastic read and study the article on " measure
ment " in the last edition of the " Encyclopaedia
Britannica " by Sir Robert Ball, the greatest
geometrician in the Empire, and they wiU recog
nize that the probability of the fourth dimension
is not absurd or unscientific.
How many times has it been true of us in
moments of peril or of dereliction, " there stood
by me this night the angel of God," and we knew
it not ! Think of it in some long night of sleep
lessness or anxiety. What is the first word that

O.H.M.S. 217

Paul is privileged to hear from the lips of this
angel, either by direct audition, or by projection
to the inner intelUgence of the intuitive self ?
" Fear not." If only we could be cured of fear !
There is Uttle doubt that the so-called Christian
Scientists are right in this — that they trace
physical iU to its source in some wrong thought
or mental habit ; they contend that to free the
mind from fear would cut at the root of many an
outward disorder. It is manifestly true on the
spiritual plane of thought. In Wisdom x. 12 we
read : " Fear is nothing else but a betraying of
the succour which reason offereth " ; " the
succour which reason offereth " is the strong
mental affirmation of the ceaseless love of the
responsible Mother Soul, the infinite Creative
InteUigence in whom we live and move and have
our being, and who says to us, " Live your life in
a sublime spirit of confidence and determination ;
rest in the Lord, for the immortality of God is
embodied in your nature." The first message of
the angel of God is " Fear not."
Then he says, " The angel of God, whose I
am and whom I serve." The whole philosophy
of life is in those words — " whose I am." Paul
knew that secret of the Lord — God's absolute
proprietorship of every human life. He knew
whence he came, whence we all came. " I came
out from the Father," said the Archetypal Man,
and in saying that He spoke the life-history of
everv individual. " And whom I serve." Paul

2i 8 O.H.M.S.

had also recognized the logical corollary of the
inseverability of God and Man. As a member
of a God-souled humanity, service — service for
others — under God, was the normal attitude of
his life. Do we all know this ? Is this in any
sense the normal habit of our angel-guarded
lives ? " Whose I am " is true not only of Paul,
but of the race. Humanity, therefore, is a cor
porate unity in which each is solemnly bound to
work for others as earnestly, or more earnestly,
than he would for himself. This is the irresistible
argument of every appeal to the vigorous and
healthy members of human society to take up
arms against the public sources of temptation
and wrong-doing which blight and ruin the lives
of thousands. " Whose I am and whom I
serve " is a motto that would clear the churches
of the many who profess and call themselves
Christians, and who just lounge and loiter through
life, too timid or too selfish to stretch out a hand
to soothe the restless sobbing of a world which is
wet with tears.
" Whose I am and whom I serve " is, moreover,
a motto that elevates service and obliterates
despondency. So closely interwoven are the
Divinity and humanity in the human race that
it is impossible for man to aid his fellow-man
without at the same time ministering to the
Eternal. " I was in prison, and ye visited Me,"
said the Manifestation of the Logos. " Whom I
serve." God's servant wiU never despair of any

O.H.M.S. 219
one. Workers in the slums of every great city,
whose sensibiUties are often revolted by the
enormities and foulnesses with which they are
brought into contact, are on God's service. There
is no despair on God's service, and there is no
failure on God's service. Once base yourself on
the motto, " Whose I am and whom I serve," and
it will lift you above physical weariness and
mental exhaustion. What are the suggestive
initials which give precedence and free passage to
certain letters through the post ? " O.H.M.S."—
On His Majesty's Service. Adopt those letters ;
place the Life into that mental attitude. Whether
it is visiting the poor in a non-receptive district,
or whether it is dealing with a fractious child, or
nursing a difficult patient, or bearing with the
tiresome disposition of another ; whether it is a
sudden summons after a hard day's work to do
some service for another, perhaps to go to some
distance on an errand of mercy when you are
physically wearied out, and the ordinary normal
standard of benevolence breaks down, say to
yourself with affirmation, with thought concen
tration, " O.H.M.S. — On His Majesty's Service.
This that I am called upon to do is the service of
the Infinite Majesty, which is the Immanent Life
of the universe." " O.H.M.S. — I am on His
Majesty's Service. I am doing the business of
Him whose I am and whom I serve." Then power
comes in doing, and you are carried through.
Then give due weight to that saying of the

220 O.H.M.S.

angel, " Thou must " be brought before Caesar.
Where does free will come in there? Yes, I
know we imagine we have free wiU, and a most
valuable illusion it is, for by it we are built into
moral beings, and obviously we have a large
measure of volition within the irresistible current
of the Eternal " Thou must," the unalterable
predestination to conformity with the Perfect
Son. Doubtless the rational and self-conscious
ego is intended to work out, by the formation of
moral decisions, God's " Thou must." But, as
I have often said, the will of man can no more
escape the benevolent action of the will of Abba
Father than the planet can escape the law of
gravitation. Spinoza said we thought — usefully
thought — that we had free wiU because we could
not trace the chain of sequences that made it
certain that we should act in a given manner.
That appeal to Caesar, for example : what appar
ently chance combination of sequences had
brought it about ? Probably, at last, a sense of
irritation at the stupidity of his accusers. It was
a mistake from the point of view of ordinary
human judgment ; it was not popular for a Hebrew
to appeal to Csesar. He apologized for it after
wards, and said, " Not that I had anything to
accuse my nation of." But all the while Paul's
volition was within the majestic sweep of the
grand unalterable " Thou must." AU was un
folding as it had been enfolded in the womb of the
Infinite Mind before the world was. It may be

O.H.M.S. 221

beyond our limited apprehension to state in a
proposition the equipoise between man's volition
and God's predestination, but what a glorious
truth it is to fall back upon — " predestined to be
conformed to the image of God's Son."
Then note the grandeur, the comprehensive
ness, of that declaration, " God hath given thee
all them that sail with thee." Let your mind
extend and enlarge that saying indefinitely.
Think of the protecting, radiating power of one
true, trusting, God-like soul. I wonder how
often, even on the material plane of physical
happening, thousands may have owed, in second
causes, personal safety in peril by sea or by land
to some Paul who was " On His Majesty's
Service" in their midst. Think of the light it
throws on those enigmatical words of St. Paul
about a beheving wife saving an unbelieving
husband, and vice versa. Think of the illumina
tion which it pours upon the power of influence,
how it anticipates the discovery of thought-
transference, psychometry, and all the rest of
those evidences of the oneness of the race which
are beginning to be recognized ; how it illustrates
the closeness of the links which in the purpose
of God bind human beings to each other. Leam
to judge others by God's standard : " the Lord
looketh not upon the outward appearance."
Keep contact with the spiritually awakened. If
we had judged Paul by outward appearance we
should probably have considered him common-

222 O.H.M.S.

place, a somewhat irritable Pharisee, of small
stature — so much so that his name Paulos (" the
little one") was a nickname— afflicted with
ophthalmia, even saying of himself that his bodily
presence was contemptible. And what was he ?
A God-inhabited King's messenger, convoyed and
protected by the Holy Angels of the Most High,
so full of grace and power that the overspiU, the
aureole, of his Divine nature rendered aU who
sailed with him exempt from peril.
Finally, go back for a moment to that expres
sion, " Whose 1 am," and see how it links on with
the teaching of this morning's Gospel,* and
emphasizes the true responsibility of human life.
The spiritual application of that aUegory caUed
the Parable of the Unjust Steward in this morn
ing's Gospel opens the secret that binds us to
the invisible and reaches to the sources of actions,
suggesting changed conduct by the transformation
of motives for conduct. The lesson it conveys to
the awakened is all in those words " Whose I am."
It is hardly necessary for me to explain again the
framework of the allegory, which is extraordinarily
simple though often misunderstood. A picture is
drawn of the delinquencies of the land-agent of an
absentee proprietor. The arrangement which
obtained in those cases was that the land-agent
should pay to the proprietor a fixed annual
income, reserving for himself whatever extra pro
duce the estate could honestly yield. In carrying
* The ninth Sunday after Trinity.

O.H.M.S. 223

out this arrangement, the steward in question
impoverishes the soil and distresses the tenantry
by exacting too heavy a personal profit in addition
to the fixed annual sum payable to the absentee
proprietor. He is accused to his master of
wasting his goods, and receives his dismissal.
Either under the sting of an awakened conscience,
or from motives of worldly wisdom, this land-
agent, instead of wringing to the last his extortion
from the tenantry and disappearing, begins at
once to make restitution to the tenants he had
wronged. It is not from his employer's fixed
income, but from his own undue profits that the
reductions are made, and when his employer comes
to hear of it he commends that rapacious land-
agent because his repentance was real enough to
induce him to set about the work of reparation
to the utmost of his ability so soon as his fault
was brought home to him. The Lord draws one
lesson from it on the plane of daily life : Make to
yourselves friends by your use of earthly things,
that when the earthly things fail the friends which
you have made, who may have preceded you into
the other world, shall receive you into the eternal
tabernacles. But the inwardness of the allegory
is obviously the truth of the Lord's absolute pro
prietorship of every human life, that man is not
wanderingly independent, " lord of himself, that
heritage of woe," but a steward of that which he
caUs himself for the Eternal, who has entrusted
him with the solemn charge. " Whose I am " —

224 O.H.M.S.

caretaker of myself for the Absolute, the Pro
prietor, the IndweUer who has expressed Himself
in me — that should be the dominant thought:
The self of which we are stewards is, of course,
that ultimate inmost in man which is Divine ;
it is that Christ nature, that share of the Logos,
which is our eternal humanity ; that germ is in
us, and under our careful, watchful, prayerful
culture it wiU grow, and a bright, high, endless
future will be before us. It is possible to waste
it, to stunt its growth, to smother it under the
accretions of the flesh nature ; this is to be a
faithless steward. I suppose that what we caU
death wiU be just that utterance — " Give an
account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be
no longer steward." How pitiful, how irrational
is that shaUow levity that ignores the solemnity
of the stewardship of human existence, that takes
the members of Christ and misuses them, that
lives a double life, making the powers of reason,
appetite, affection, imagination, pay, as it were,
a double rent — one to God in external religion,
and one to self in animal indulgence, thus im
poverishing that which is God's.
Yes, this " Whose I am " is a solemn thought ;
it summons into the service of God every power,
every energy, every affection, every hour of Ufe,
and most of us are conscious of self-wiU, pride,
caprice, stubbornness, appetite, anger. It is true
that it adds a sense of awfulness to life, but the
angel of God says : " Fear not," for the alarmed

O.H.M.S. 225

and awakened soul can hide itself in the splendid
counterbalancing conviction of the irresistible
overrule of the Divine Proprietor. Are we
" the Lord's " ? Then His Nature is enfolded in
every one of us, our lives are enwrapped by His
love. Our physical man enshrines a potentiality
which is the secret of the Lord. Even a fall —
when, hke the steward in the parable, we are
unfaithful to the treasure committed to our care
— by the agony it entails, the repentance it en
forces, the restitution it suggests, causes us to
emerge the humbler from the deep contrast
between good and evil which we have experienced.
" Whose I am." " The immortality of God is
embodied in my nature " — is a truth to be appro
priated as we appropriate the sunshine. It is
ours, our own ; it wiU not alter towards us because
we are timid, hesitating, backsliding. In the
mighty laws of Nature nothing is too small,
nothing too great, to be controlled to perfection —
the wondrous wheeling of the mighty planet, or
the floating of the gossamer in the still morning
air, are the outcome of the same law, and the
eternal destiny of our separate selves, equally with
the smallest worry of our daily lives, are shared by
Him who travails in pain within us. We are His,
and His Divine Presence and overrule are "closer
than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."
" God's greatness rolls around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness His rest,
And every cloud that floats above
And veileth Jove, itself is love." 15

PHARISEEISM
" God be merciful to me a sinner."* — Luke xviii. 13.
THERE is a tenderness, a Divine recogni
tion of human weakness, a revelation of the
compassion of God for the sin convicted,
in our Lord's parable of the Pharisee and the
tax-gatherer that has established it as an accepted
classic the whole world over.
It is truly blessed to be thus assured, upon the
highest possible authority, that the irrepressible
confession of unworthiness which sometimes
bursts unbidden from our hearts, is more precious
in the sight of God than a life which is a mere
dead shape of outward decency or a mere intel
lectual contemplation of esoteric truth. The
remarkable reversal of human judgment in our
Lord's verdict upon these two types of character
conveys a thought of comfort when the heart
sinks at the enormities and abuses and crimes
which disgrace our civilization. We are not
judges of the comparative heinousness of crime.
We estimate wrong-doing by the magnitude of
the shock which it administers to the moral sense
* Gospel for the eleventh Sunday after Trinity.
226

Phariseeism 227

of a community ; our Lord estimates it from the
standpoint of heredity, environment, disposi
tion, temptation, motive, opportunity. Many
whom society, for itsjawn self-preservation, is
compeUed to outcast, to condemn, to punish, are
less culpable in His sight than some moral and
religious favourites whose orthodoxy is unerring
and whose lives are blameless, but whose indiffer
ence to the disadvantages of their less-favoured
brethren has permitted to exist the social condi
tions of which they are the victims.
The parable, then, in its plain and surface
interpretation is cosmopolitan — it is a message
to the world. It speaks a language common to
the race, and, especiaUy where, as in India, the
wide gulf of caste separates man from man, it
teaches the heart with power ; and again and again
has a Hindoo listened to the story in the Urdoo
language, and, after mourning at his lack of the
virtues of the Pharisee, has rejoiced over the
verdict of justification passed on the publican,
and has cried out with a new light and a new
hope, " God be merciful to me a sinner." There
is a sense, however, in which the warning con
veyed in the parable comes home with a peculiar
emphasis to a community like ourselves, and
especially perhaps to men of my profession.
The actors in this story are enduring types, and
whatever culpability may have attached to the
attitude of Phariseeism in the comparatively
dim light of the dispensation of the law, is in-
15—2

228 Phariseeism

tensified a thousandfold in the pure light of the
Divine altruism of the Gospel. We have been
thinking deeply into the Immanence of God,
we recognize the ineradicable relationship between
God and man, our Credo is based upon the logical
necessity for the ultimate victory of the purpose
of Divine Fatherhood, we have dared to make
upon the Eternal a claim unknown to the
Pharisees of old, for recognizing the Lord Jesus
as the specimen Elder Brother of the race, we have
claimed our sonship and challenged our Father
with the sole responsibility for our existence and
our environment. It is a noble, a glorious Creed,
and he who holds it should be, in the words of
Browning, " One who never turned his back, but marched breast
forward,
Never doubted clouds would break ;
Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong
would triumph.
Held, we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to
wake."
Yes, it is a glorious Creed, but is it not obvious
that any creed is only worth what it produces,
and that such a creed predicates a life animated
by a new principle ? it implies that when we go
astray, in act or word or wish or thought, we are
far more culpable than the Pharisee, for it is
not merely ourselves, or other men, or public
opinion, or social convention that we wrong, but
a peculiar wound of gross filial disloyalty is

Phariseeism 229

inflicted upon the infinite and loving indwelling
Spirit whose Fatherhood and Immanence we
have so boldly claimed. Is it not obvious that
God has a claim upon us, the remembrance of
which should often fiU our hearts with a burning
sense of shame, and bring us to our Father in
penitence with the cry, " God be merciful to me
a sinner"? You say: "We are not Pharisees,
surely." Consider for a moment how the
malignant spirit of Phariseeism may coexist —
nay, does coexist — with the knowledge of the
Immanence of God. It is an Eternal law of God
that no height of personal sanctity can exonerate
an individual from his responsibilities towards
his feUow-men. The violation of this law was
the peculiar sin of the Pharisees ; for this violation
the Christ denounced them in language of unex
ampled bitterness. It was the sin of the Pharisee
in this parable, " he despised others." I may
be very reUgious, but if I despise others I am a
Pharisee. The same sin besets us in twentieth-
century life in three forms — Social, National,
Religious. Socially it enwraps itself in a pecu
liarly subtle form of pride, it creeps into family
life and dislocates the peace of home-communion ;
it freezes upon the lips the word of reconciliation,
the kindly look into the eyes, the friendly pressure
of the hand between husband and wife, brother
and sister, friend and friend, and misunderstand
ings are not removed, and discords are deepened
under the form of want of moral courage. It puts

230 Phariseeism

the dumb spirit into the mouths of believers and
withholds them from confessing their faith.
They come " up to the temple to pray," the Spirit
of God perhaps touches their hearts, they resolve,
while they are there, that they will confess
Christ by their life and language in the shop,
the office, the home, in society. The resolution
fails, they persuade themselves that it is modesty,
reserve ; it is really pride putting them into a
wrong relation to others, and pride is Phariseeism,
and Phariseeism is God's religion turned upside-
down, and, in a believer in the Immanence of
God, it is an anachronism, a contradiction, a
disloyalty, a sin. Nationally we are guilty of
Phariseeism when we refuse to recognize that we
are our brother's keeper while loudly denouncing
our brother's sin, and while we take no part in
the efforts of reformers to meet new emergencies
and new developments of evil with new remedies.
This, I imagine, is where the attitude of the
Pharisee in the parable was wrong towards his
fellow-man : he loathed and despised the tax-
gathering sweater— the semi-legal robber of the
poor, who fattened upon the misery of his
fellow-men, but his very exclusiveness and aloof
ness made the oppression of the poor more easy.
I do not say that the Pharisees could have
readily or wholly removed the difficulty, but as
the ruling-class — and the most influential class —
they could have done something. The tax-
gathering sweater of Galilee and Judaea repre-

Phariseeism 231
sented a vested interest and a powerful monopoly ;
they were always rich, and money is power.
There was at one time a popular rising, headed
by Judas of Galilee, against this special grievance,
and the Pharisees sided against the people. Again,
Nero, who, with aU his faults, had a genius for
government, once proposed the abolition of the
whole system, and if the ruling classes in Galilee
had wisely and firmly supported him, he would
have been able to overpower the obstructive
conservatism of the Senate and disestablish the
tax-gatherer. But the Pharisee refused to make
the welfare of his fellow-men his business — " this
multitude that know not the law are accursed,"
that was his opinion of the masses ; " Thank God,
I am not as this publican," that was his opinion
of the sweater ; and for this reason the Divine
Reformer unsparingly denounced the ruling
classes of His day, and selected a Galilean sweater,
Matthew the publican, to be His disciple.
History repeats itself. The respectable and
leisured classes of the community rarely, very
rarely, side with the oppressed, and tempted
populace against those who legally oppress them.
When they hear of scenes of brutality and
degradation that are a disgrace to civilization,
they thank God that it is not so with them, but
if the powers that be tentatively suggest any
measure by which the evil might be minimized
and the temptation removed, they are either
indifferent to it or they oppose it violently in the

232 Phariseeism

houses of legislation. It would be a useful self-
scrutiny if aU possessing votes, influence and
voices would, when they came up to the temple
to pray, ask themselves what is their attitude
and conduct towards the soul-destroying vices
around them, for they are not reaUy at peace
with God if they are not at peace with men,
and they are not at peace with men, as God would
have them be, if they are leaving their brothers'
burdens and temptations untouched with one of
their fingers. Then how common and how wholly
disgusting is religious Phariseeism : it is perhaps
the most un-Christlike of aU. EcclesiasticaUy it
would make one traditional type the sole measure
of the Church of God, and ruthlessly excom
municate all who conscientiously differ from that
type ; the irreligious Protestantism that greedily
believes any amount of lies about the Church
of Rome, the bigoted Anglican who wellnigh
denies a soul to the Dissenter, the Nonconformity
that from mere jealousy would despoil the
Established Church, equally merit the verdict :
take heed that they whom you despise do not
go down to their long home justified rather
than yourselves. There is also Theological
Phariseeism. Thank God, the degrading spirit of
Theological Phariseeism, which carried its creed
over the gulf into the things of Eternity, is dying
of itself.
Thomas Aquinas said : " In order that the saved
saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly

Phariseeism 233

a perfect sight of the punishment of the wicked
is granted to them."* That is Phariseeism in
excelsis, or, 1 should rather say, in infernis.
Christianity would richly deserve the contempt
of thinking men if buttressed by so foul a creed
as this, where miserable Pharisees, in their heaven
of unutterable selfishness, repeat for ever in glory
the cry condemned in to-day's Gospel, " God, I
thank Thee that I am not as other men, or even
as these souls in torment," while the poor souls
cried, uselessly and eternally, " God be merciful
to us sinners."
There is a remedy for Phariseeism. First it
must be discovered, then it can be destroyed.
There is a power that can revolutionize and
obliterate this mildew in the heart of man.
What is it ? It is the true vision of God as Imma
nent in the race, and manifested in the Incarna
tion, shining into the inmost.
The life and letters of the Apostle St. Paul
contain the humble confession of a Pharisee
converted by the vision of the Immanence of
the Christ in man : " By the grace of God I am
what I am," " I am the least of the Apostles,
not worthy to be caUed an Apostle." The
finished article is the proof of the artificer's
skiU. Given Saul of Tarsus, the proud, exclusive,
* " Ut beatitudo sanctorum eis magis complaceat, et
de ea~uberiores gratias Deo agant, datur eis ut pcenam
impiorum perfecte videant " (Suppl. to part iii.,
quest, xciv., art. I, summa).

234 Phariseeism

contemptuous, morally blameless, persecuting
Pharisee ; problem, how to turn him into the
humble, self-effacing, trusting, suffering Paul the
Apostle, going through the world " on His
Majesty's service." What can do it ? What
changed Paul ? The revelation of the Christ in
man ; the living God manifested as the Divine
humanity, Immanent in aU men ; the Eternal
Word, the Logos diffused in the race, proclaiming
" I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." " Be
ware," said the vision, "it is God, Immanent in
humanity, whom you are persecuting ; it is God
who is striving in the hearts of these men and
women whom ye despise ; when you misuse your
feUow-man you insult the Christ in man." In
Saul's case, being a typical case, a test case, a
manifestation in time relations of an eternal
truth, the revelation came like a blinding light
ning flash out of the iUimitable eternity of God.
But it is always coming, always pleading. There
is an influence, sUent as the faUing dew, mighty
as the rising tide, accessible as a mother's love,
ever seeking to pulverize and transfigure the
Phariseeism of the heart of man. In one form or
another it says, " I am Jesus whom thou perse
cutest," in thyself, or in others. Where it comes
home — right home to the heart — it shatters
self-delusion, it makes the best man say, " Good
God, what a sinner I am !" The instant a man
sees the tenderness, accessibihty, immanence,
ubiquity, self-sacrifice, determination of the

Phariseeism 235

Infinite Soul expressed in the human race and
manifested in Christ, his life starts from another
point, and be he Pope, or Bishop, or Cardinal,
or Quaker, be he Roman Catholic, Anglican, or
Dissenter, whatever faults of character, lingering
mischiefs of long disowned habits may cling to
him, one thing he will not be — he will not be a
Pharisee, he will never again despise others,
whether in his own family or out of it, and say,
" Thank God, I am not like So-and-so." He will
say, " I am not meet to be called an Apostle, but
by the grace of God I am what I am."
And the appropriate supplication for us all
to-day is, " From all blindness of heart ; from
pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy ; from envy,
hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness.
Good Lord, deliver us."

ADVENT
S. P. G.
" Behold. He cometh with clouds ; and every eye shall
see Him." — Rev. i. 7.
BENEATH this inspired prophecy, which
embodies the message of Advent, I trace,
first, a thought of profound consolation,
and, secondly, a suggestion of urgent duty. First,
consolation — " Every eye shaU see Him." It
is a glorious promise of ultimate universal perfect
sanctification, for, whether in this Ufe or in the
Ufe to come, the law is eternal, that only the
sanctified can see the Holy One, only " the pure
in heart shaU see God," yet " every eye shall
see Him." Yes, it wiU be a blessed sight even
for those who pierced Him, and for all kindreds
of the earth when they " wail because of Him."
A blessed time when the fountain of repentance
is opened, and a baptism of tears tempers the
baptism of fire. " Every eye shaU see Him."
It is the infinite thirst of every awakened soul,
the supreme consummation awaiting the noblest
spirits who have passed through earth's education.
Every inarticulate upward straining of the spirit
236

Advent 237
which we have been unable to interpret has been
the inner eye feehng for Him. Some can interpret
it. Faraday, when asked by Acland his concep
tion of after-death consciousness, cried out, " I
shaU see Him, and that will be enough for me."
Augustine cried out, " O let me see Thee ; and if
to see Thee is to die, let me die that I may see
Thee." And yet the anticipation is not always
a joy ; to those without spiritual inteUigence it
is meaningless, to those who are constantly re
sisting their regeneration, it is a trouble and a
perplexity. Why should the thought of seeing
Him be a trouble and perplexity to any ? Is it
not that many are mistaken, not in the faith and
hope of the Second Advent, but in the nature
of it ? Is it not because of narrow, limited,
materialistic interpretations of the visions and
utterances of these Eastern prophets and seers ?
If our method of interpretation be on the literal,
materialistic plane, our inferences will be hteral
also. The whole teaching of Advent has been
narrowed by a pernicious literalism of interpre
tation, a literalism which is perceptible in the
Advent CoUect. We have been taught that in
these very conditions of flesh and blood existence
we shaU see Him ; we shall witness (or those who
wiU be ahve wiU witness) a personal, corporeal
return of the Lord Jesus upon this earth. The
literalists exhort us to remember that we hve
on a planet that is doomed to an awful and sudden
destruction which shaU burst unawares upon a

238 Advent
careless world ; we are reminded that stars have
blazed up and blazed out ; that we live on a furnace
of internal fire ; that on a certain day, kept a
profound secret by the Ruler of the Universe, a
hideous and horrible cosmic cataclysm will occur,
and that in the midst of fervent heat, and sheeted
flame, and the crash and din and chaos of a
dissolving world, shall appear the Son of Man
in resplendent glory, who shall conduct a vast
Court of Assize, judging and condemning sinners
preparatory to the commencement of a reign on
earth of a thousand years. It is an unhealthy,
unspiritual, unphilosophic conception ; never
theless, at recurring intervals, it has proved a
powerful and most alarming expectation. In the
earliest Christian days the return of the crucified
Jesus in awful majesty was beheved to be immi
nent ; they had amongst themselves a kind of
password, " Maranatha," the Lord is at hand.
Down the Christian ages the behef has alternately
waxed and waned, becoming very intense during
periods of much social disturbance or of unusual
prevalence of earthquakes ; twice in compara
tively modern times the public mind has been
wrought into a sort of frenzy, and men have
parted with their possessions, and even, as in
America, collected in open spaces or on mountains
to await the trumpet of the archangel. Though
the prominent advocates of this view of the
Advent message constantly wander out of faith
into mathematics, and cover themselves with

Advent 239
ridicule by the wholesale failure of their dogmatic
prophecies, the fact remains that many deeply
spiritually minded men have been profoundly
influenced by this expectation. Its foundation
undoubtedly is the Messianic imagery of the Book
of Daniel, borrowed and amplified by the writer
of the Apocalypse ; and also some utterances of
our Lord, which, however, clearly refer to the
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70,
inasmuch as he expressly declares, " this genera
tion shall not pass till all these things be accom
phshed." It is also clear that St. Paul abandoned
the conception later in his hfe, for in his Second
Epistle to the Thessalonians he warns them not
to be disturbed on account of what he had
written, as though the Lord should immediately
appear. My own repudiation of this materialistic
interpretation of the Oriental imagery of the
Book of Daniel, and of the Apocalypse, is mainly
based upon the unquestioned fact that a personal
rule on this planet is precisely what the Lord
refused when the temptation came to Him to
make a miraculous descent into Jerusalem from
the pinnacle of the Temple. His Kingdom, He
declared, was to be " not of this world," and the
Messianic imagery of the Book of Daniel would
have been sufficiently fulfilled, if fulfilment in
time is looked for, when the Roman Empire
became Christian under Constantine in the fourth
century, and the long reign of which there shall
be no end commenced, in the course of which

240 Advent
the Christian faith becomes ever more and more
the dominant rehgion of civihzation. The cosmic
cataclysm, and the " great white throne," and
" the smaU and great standing before Him,"
and " every eye seeing Him," and the whole of
the rest of the imagery, will be amply fulfilled
for each one of us at the moment of our passing
out of these flesh and blood conditions. If the
idea of multitude still possesses us, it is satisfied
by the fact that more than a million human beings
on this planet die every day. If the nature of
the judgment baffles us, we may know that it
wiU be the intensified self-consciousness of the
disembodied state sweeping away the mists that
have blinded the soul, and presenting us with
a clear vision of the perfect standard we have
failed to reach. If the identity of the Judge is a
terror to us, we may know that " the Father
judgeth no man." " He. hath committed all
judgment to the Son," the humanity of the
Parent Source, who is of the same nature with us,
who has suffered and been tried in aU points
like as we are, and who wUl judge us from within,
the " Christ in us the hope of glory," so that
man, if condemned, wiU not be God-condemned,
but self-condemned, in the highest, truest, most
remedial sense.
And if we would lay aside any terror of that
after-death judgment, let us anticipate it, let us
stand before Him now, consciously, daily ; the
whole cleansing power of the Kingdom of Heaven

Advent 241
within is at the disposal of him who honestly,
truly, with fixed purpose, prays daily, " Purge me
with hyssop, and I shall be clean ; wash me, and I
shall be whiter than snow."
Why do I say that this conception of the
Advent as a future corporeal return of the Lord
Jesus is unhealthy, unspiritual, unphilosophic ?
It is because to my mind any conception of the
Incarnation that strains into the vista of the
future ages, speculating upon a personal return
of Jesus to end the dispensation, is defective at
the core, in so far as it induces forgetfulness of
tKe glorious soul-saving truth that He has come
into this planet ; that as the Word immanent
there has never been a time when He was not in
it, and that He has never left it, and that He is
here now. This yearning for an absent Lord is
as though you should gaze through a telescope
into the Milky Way to search for a friend who
was aU the while standing by your side. Human
life is a narrow isthmus between two boundless
eternities, one caUed " whence " and the other
caUed " whither " ; a living race of many millions
is being educated on that narrow isthmus, and
the deepest necessity of man is not so much the
promise or the threat of an Almighty returning
Judge in the distant future as the assurance of a
Divine, regenerating, helpful, powerful Friend in
the immediate present. It is the purpose of
Advent to remind us that such a Friend is ours
now the cradle at Bethlehem (to which the
16

242 Advent
Advent Sundays lead us) is a manifestation in
time-relations that God is the Friend of man,
ever in our midst, but veiled, hidden, " coming
with clouds." When God's heart came out of the
universal into conditions that we men might
learn to know and love and trust Him, He came
not as a theory, a prevalent idea, a literature, or
a bundle of maxims, but as a man — a sympa
thizing, loving, helpful man ; and though the
visible form of this embodied character of God
disappeared from human sight, put off its flesh
limitations and " ascended to the Father " — in
other words, was withdrawn into the centre of
all life — the Divine individuality under that
character has never left us. The Greek word
always used for " coming," parousia, has not
a future significance : it means " alongside of."
The coming of Jesus is the perpetual presence
of the Jesus embodiment of the Absolute, holding
us by the hand, while we stumble across the
narrow isthmus called life " until the day break
and the shadows flee away.' The non-recognition
of the invariable condition of the " coming,"
or parousia, makes it sadly possible for man
to stumble through life and never know the
nearness of the Divine Friend. " He cometh with
clouds," always with clouds; suppose the ex
pression to refer to the coming at the moment of
death, the clouds will be not clouds of vapour
drawn from the earth by the heat of the sun,
but clouds of glorified spirits drawn up by the

Advent

243

Sun of Righteousness from the earthly state. I
believe that we are instantly met by the spirits
of the dear departed. If the expression be applied
to the " Presence," the parousia, the clouds
are the dust-made clouds of earth's sorrows,
discipline, anxieties, all of which thinly veil His
loving presence. Scientists tell us there could
be no clouds without dust or pulverized matter.
Thousands of years ago- the Bible anticipated
this discovery, for the prophet Nahum says, " The
clouds are the dust under His feet." The analogy
is luminous with consolation. We often talk of
being under a cloud : He comes in that cloud.
There is not a cloud of pain, or sorrow, or sickness,
or shame, or repentance, or disappointment,
accumulated from Earth's much-stirred dust, in
which He does not come, and which is not pregnant
with the refreshing rain of His presence. " Behold,
He cometh with clouds." Every one knows the
history of Raphael's " Madonna di San Sisto,"
at Dresden. Its background is composed of
clouds. For many years the picture, begrimed
with dirt, remained uncleaned, and the back
ground of clouds looked dark and threatening ;
when the picture was cleaned and carefuUy
examined, it was discovered that the supposed
clouds were not dark atmospheric clouds, but
multitudes of angel faces luminously massed
together. It is ever thus. His clouds are minis
tering spirits, angel faces ; the heavy masses of
Earth's dust, which look so dark and unangelic,
16 — 2

244 Advent
are His veil ; in them He comes, seeking the heart,
striving to eradicate selfishness, to humble pride,
to quench passion, to melt obstinacy, to wean
from earthly things. Thus the spiritual teaching
of Advent is not the expectation of a corporeal
descent of the Lord from some definite locality
in the universe into this planet, but the emphatic
assurance that, through the revelation of the
Incarnation, the whole being of man is now and
here enveloped in a tenderness indescribable ;
that our little life, which sometimes seems so
stricken, or so abandoned, is floating in an ocean
of unfathomable love ; that when the smart and
burden of affliction is upon us the Divine
Humanity is " hard by," " never so far off as
even to be near " — and to believe it is the triumph
of faith and the secret of peace.
But I said that under this imagery of the
clouds there was not only a thought of profound
consolation, but also a suggestion of urgent duty.
The one test of true apprehension of the glorious
fact that all clouds conceal His presence wiU be
to seek Him and to find Him, and to make
Him known under the very darkest clouds, and
especiaUy under the cloud of ignorance of His
Nature, His Love, His Power, His Accessibihty.
And from the cloud of what is caUed Heathenism
His voice is calling to us to reveal Him to hearts
who do not yet know the inseverabiUty of God
and man, and the Immanence of God in man,
which was authoritatively manifested in the

Advent

245

Incarnation. " Go and make disciples of those
who know me not," is His command. " Go and
teU them that they are children of the Universal
Soul ; that they are immortal because God is
immortal; that they have within them a germ
which is divine ; that of the germ Christ Jesus was
the absolutely perfect Archetypal embodiment ;
that to beheve in Jesus Christ is to believe that
His nature, His spirit, dweUs in the centre of man's
being ; that as it is recognized, acknowledged,
obeyed, it will regenerate man's nature, ennoble
his life, emancipate him from the tyranny of his
lower self, and finaUy conform him to the image of
the Perfect Son."
That, surely, is the Gospel, and that alone is
the true basis of missionary enterprise. How
dare any missionary assume that there is no Christ
under the dark cloud of the rudimentary and
inadequate conceptions of the heathen races
they attempt to evangelize ! How dare any man
go, especially amongst Oriental races, and imply
that their religious aspirations and conceptions
are false, idolatrous, accursed ; that they them
selves are. outside the family of God; that their
sacred writings are absurd and contemptible, and
their prophets and teachers impostors and
fanatics! No, under the cloud of misappre
hension, ignorance, idolatrous limitations, and
degraded worship, is He, waiting for some Paul
on Mars HiU, or some. Livingstone in Africa,
to declare unto these people the true nature,

246 Advent
and relation to themselves, of Him whom they
ignorantly worship. The most irrational limita
tion of the Divine nature of which man is capable
is treating non-Christians, of whatever race, as
though they were, ipso facto, under the wrath and
condemnation of God. The Divine Logos or
self-utterance of the Eternal Reason, which was
incarnate in Jesus, has always been immanent
in humanity, inspiring upward thought, assimi
lating all that was best and noblest and truest
in each age, and carrying it higher, and preparing
it for the fuller revelation which it is the joy and
duty of the enlightened Christian missionary
to give. Who, I ask, was the driving power
behind the amalgam of Egyptian, Chaldean, and
Hebrew conceptions which represented the rehgion
of Moses ? Who inspired him to prefer the Ufe
of toil and danger to the luxury of Pharaoh's
Court ? The Apostle says " the Christ," one
thousand years before Jesus was born. What
indwelling spirit of love was grieved by the
hardness of heart of the Israehtes in the wilder
ness ? Again the Apostle says " the Christ."
Who was hidden under the cloud of the imperfect
conceptions of Buddha, Confucius, the author of
the Bhagavad Gita, and earlier still under the
Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Brahmanical
systems of thought, the purer and better parts of
which will live on for ever ?
Surely Justin Martyr, in his first " Apology,"
answers the question when he says, " Those

Advent 247
who lived according to the Logos (that is, those
who obeyed their highest impulses) were really
Christians, though they are thought to be
Atheists." The motto of the true missionary
should be, " Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him
declare I unto you." The true missionary says :
" Your aspirations, your writings, your worships,
aU bear witness of the Christ who came not to
destroy, but to fulfil. He has been hidden from
the foundation of the world. He is now mani
fested." The true missionary studies the con
ceptions, the behefs, the aspirations, the philo
sophies of the race he goes to evangelize, and
gives back to them elevated, illuminated, ampli-
fied, fulfiUed, interpreted, the upward traditions
they have inherited from their fathers, and leads
them to the living Lord Jesus, whom to know
is Eternal Life.
The great and venerable Missionary Society
which makes its appeal to you to-day deals, as
a rule, with non-Christian races upon the lines
I have indicated. Its very name is its credential
— " The Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel." Propagation is calling into fruit-bear
ing activity a dormant, vital principle by im
pregnating it with another vital principle. To
" propagate " the Gospel is to convey to the
receptive nidus of the universal sonship of the
race the impregnating pollen of the " Jesus revela
tion " of the Infinite Originator called God, in
whom aU " live and move and have their being."

248 Advent
To-day you are asked to strengthen the hands
of the " propagators," these missionaries who
have abandoned the- comforts of home to labour
in the cause of freedom, education, civilization,
and evangelization. As Englishmen we have to
condone for the past ; twenty centuries ago the
Master commanded, "Go ye into all the world,
and make disciples of every nation." How have
we, as a nation, obeyed the command ? The
earliest missionaries to India were forbidden to
leave the shores of England. When, constrained
by the love of Christ, they found their way by
Holland and America to Calcutta, they were not
allowed to remain under the British flag. Carey
and his fellow-missionaries were hunted off
British territory as outlaws, and were compeUed
to take refuge in a Danish settlement. Moreover,
we have gone into aU the world and made many
drunkards and opium sots. We grow opium in
India, under Government supervision, and send
enough to China to destroy in one year more
natives than have been converted by the mission
aries since missions were established. We have
destroyed the Aborigines of Australia and New
Zealand with drink ; we gain revenue in India from
Government liquor-shops ; and at this moment,
from various parts of Christendom, thousands of
hogsheads of fiery spirit find their way into Africa
to debauch and destroy the multitudes who, for
the first time, are being brought within the reach
of civilization. Is it not incumbent upon us to

Advent 249
provide the antidote ? The holy, humble-
hearted, self-denying missionary, filled with
Divine enthusiasm, is the one antidote to this
propagandism of devilry which caricatures the
Lord's commission. They propagate that higher
knowledge of God, as revealed in the Christ,
which includes every human good. The pessi
mists and the cynics taunt us with the tardiness
of evangehstic work, and openly proclaim the
utter failure of missions. The tardiness is
the fault of the Church at home. Failure is
impossible. The kingdoms of the world shall,
says God, become the kingdoms of the Lord.
This is as certain as that the sun shall rise, and
sunrise is the standing analogy. On Christmas
Day, 1890, I saw from the plateau of Darjeeling
the most majestic sight perhaps that the eye of
man can perceive on this planet, sunrise in the
highest Himalayas. I saw the lofty snow-peak
of Kinchinjunga, 29,000 feet above the sea,
crowned first with golden light, and slowly the
whole grand amphitheatre of mountains caught
the glow, till at last the shadows of night were
chased even from the deepest valleys. It was
an acted prophecy of the Divine promise, " every
eye shall see Him " — the promise which holds the
future of this sin-darkened world in its embrace.
It is we who cause this glorious sunrise to tarry ;
the least that we can do is to hasten His kingdom
by supporting with our poor dross the noble
light-be#rers in heathen lands. To-day once

250 Advent
more the Father-Soul of the universe reminds
us of the sohdarity of the race and the brother
hood of man, and says to us, His sons, " Where
is thy brother ?"
" Where is thy brother ? From his grave
Near thy own gates, or 'neath a foreign sky,
From the thronged depth of ocean's mourning wave
His answering blood reproachfully doth cry.
Blood of the soul ! Can all earth's fountains make
Thy dark stain disappear ?
Stewards of God, awake !"

INCARNATION
" Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in
Me." — Matt. xi. 6.
THE peculiar prominence accorded to John
the Baptist in the appointed Gospels for
the two last Sundays in Advent cannot be
without a purpose, and I imagine that purpose
is to emphasize the necessity for mental prepara
tion. The Baptist's mission was to prepare the
way of the Lord, to stimulate a national expecta
tion ; the mission of the Church's Advent season
is likewise to prepare the way of the Lord, to
awaken in the hearts of Christians a due spirit of
recollectedness, that their Christmas festival may
be a spiritual refreshment, and not merely a
recrudescence of the Roman Saturnalia. The
words which Jesus spoke were " Spirit and life " ;
therefore in the answer which He sent to the
Baptist's question He was laying down a universal
axiom, the force of which is as fresh and cogent
to-day as when, twenty centuries ago, it fell
from His lips : " Blessed is he who shall not find
in Me a hindrance, an occasion of stumbling."
251

252 Incarnation

It is only tentatively, by way of suggestion,
that I would endeavour to indicate how these
words seem to me to hold the key of the evolution
of Christian doctrine, and suggest the root-
thought for the observance of the Christmas
festival. Our Lord had just appealed to the testimony
of His works and to His teaching ; He had said,
" Go and teU John the things which ye do see
and hear " ; but from the words which imme
diately foUow it is evident that the circum
ference of the God-consciousness within Him was
widening to the extent of realizing His unique
identification with the Father, and with that
widening came the recognition by prevision of
the misconceptions, and confusions, and over
definitions, and metaphysical contradictions, and
persecutions, and cruelties which would cluster
round His name to the infinite distress of count
less hearts, and that Christendom would be rent
asunder by whoUy immaterial controversies as to
the mode of His conception and birth, and the
exact nature of the mysterious elements of His
Personahty, and so He adds, almost as a soliloquy,
but also as a proclamation, " Blessed is he who
shaU not be offended in Me." It is noteworthy
that He at the same time unhesitatingly assumes
a position of unique self -exaltation. He draws
away the eyes of man from His psychical triumphs
over the action of Nature, which He never spoke
of as miracles but as signs, and fixes them on

Incarnation 253

Himself. Blessed is he who shall not find in Me
a stumbling-block— not in My ethics or doctrine.
It is eminently appropriate that before the
festival of the Incarnation we should ask our
selves the question, What think ye of Christ ?
Who is He who sends such a message to John
the Baptist, and through John the Baptist to
the world ? The greatest prophets have never
spoken thus. The founders of the great religions
of the world— Zoroaster, Buddha, Kang-fu-tzee,
Mahomet — never uttered words like these. What
is the justification for this position of self -exalta
tion assumed by Jesus of Nazareth ? It has
" offended " many ; one sect has arisen to contra
dict it.
Some time ago there appeared an able treatise,
the object of which was expressed as being " to
bring down Jesus from the clouds, and restore Him
by criticism to the domain of history." To
restore Him to the domain of history is surely a
work of supererogation. He is sufficiently and
helpfully grafted into the domain of history by
the brilliant and scholarly pen of Renan in the
" Vie de Jesus," and by the frank admission of
Strauss that He lived and died in the reign of
Tiberius. And as to " bringing Him down from
the clouds," the whole tendency of the deepest
spiritual thought of the age is exactly the other
way. So far from old foundations being shaken,
the developing action of the spirit of truth is
evolving the fundamental idea of Christianity

254 Incarnation

more clearly than ever before, and illuminating
the old foundations with greater brilliancy.
What, then, is this testimony of God concerning
Himself which is offered for our moral admiration
on the festival of the Incarnation ? What is
the master-truth revealing the relation between
earth and heaven which was manifested in the
cradle at Bethlehem ? Clear the mind from the
cobwebs which the human lust for overdefinition
has spun around men's thoughts of God. The
essential being of the self-existent, primal cause
of all things is spirit : God is Spirit — not a Spirit,
but Spirit. We cannot define spirit, we cannot
know spirit : we can only mentally cognize the
primal cause as it conditions itself in action. The
•universe is God in action, God conditioning Him
self in phenomena — " the heavens declare the
glory of God " — that is, the universe is the proof
of God — God is the necessary inference from the
universe. " The impossibility of conceiving that
this great and wondrous universe," writes Charles
Darwin in 1873, " arose through chance seems
to me to be the chief argument for the existence
of God." Precisely ; it is not therefore in
essential being that God can be known, but only
as He expresses His Eternal Reason or thought
in visible and knowable things ; for things are
"thinks," things are because God thought them,
nothing, or no "think," is just God didn't think
it, and so it is not. A man, for example, who
has never seen Tennyson at any time knows

Incarnation 255
him as he breathes forth his reason in poetry.
God is known as He breathes forth His Reason
or Word in the transcendent poetry of the visible
creation. If I hold in my hand a violet, I am
holding an epitome of the whole of universal
existence, which is an aspect of God, an out-
birth into visibility of some characteristic which
is always in God, as an element of His being.
This process of Divine thought transmuting it
self into matter — is called the Word. " In the
beginning," says St. John, " was the Word " ;
in other language, God has always been the
Speaker, the Self-utterer, the Revealer, and every
creative act is the self-clothing of His Word in
matter. Similarly, when He made man in His
own image, the gift that issues only from God,
and is a part of Himself, His Word, became the
central hfe in every man born into the world,
and the birth of a man is an incarnation of the
Word. Our poor, warped, impoverished faculties
may seem to contradict it, but deep in the centre
of the being of every man there slumbers a God
nature to be awakened, a germ of God in self-
utterance. Thus far deeply- thinking men everywhere, and
speciaUy in the Eastern world, have attained ;
but however intensely they have believed uni
versal life to be the Divine Immanence, they have
ever yearned intensely to be able to think this
universal life into a personal, objective embodi
ment. In times of storm and stress and heart

256 Incarnation

anguish the solitary supremacy of an Omnipotent
boundlessness has not satisfied men, and they
have mentaUy conditioned the universal life into
some product of the imagination, and have
worshipped idols, and natural phenomena, and
attributes, and virtues, and plants, and animals,
and men, until at last, in the fuUness of time, the
Father of men satisfies the instinct He had Him
self implanted, and comes forth from Infinity to
respond to the universal demand of the race.
He gathers up these world-wide, agelong instincts.
of anthropomorphism, and satisfies them wholly
in the person of One who was, as no being ever had
been before Him, " God manifest in the flesh."
The Eternal Word or Reason of the Father sought
separate human enclosure in one spotless human
form born of a woman, and in Him the Word,
immanent in all creation, and in all humanity,
" became flesh and dwelt among us." This is
the great and solemn fact that makes this par
ticular birthday, commemorated on Christmas
Day, like none other in the world ; this is why
heart preparation is necessary that we may
spirituaUy perceive the rays of shrouded glory
which gild the commonplace exterior of the
manger at Bethlehem ; this is why, during the
Christmas Octave, we solemnly kneel when in
the Nicene Creed we repeat the words, " And was
made man " : it is because Jesus is the unique
individuahzation of the infinite self-consciousness
of God ; because He is the universahty of the

Incarnation 257

Immanence of God made accessible, tangible ;
because He is the symbol, the Sacrament, the
outward and visible sign of the permanent atti
tude of God towards the race ; and in that aspect
His appeal is : " Ye sorrow-stricken, bewildered
seekers after God, unable to find heahng for your
heart-wounds in the immensity and vagueness of
Omnipotent Absolute Substance, come unto Me,
and I will give you rest "; " the Father is greater
than I " in the sense that the Absolute is greater
than the conditioned, in the sense that diffused
electricity is greater than the lightning flash that
manifests it ; but in your human, finite, rudimen
tary condition you cannot know the Absolute fully,
influentiaUy, except through His self-revelation in
Me. Come, therefore, unto Me, and I will give
you rest.
In this connexion let me relate an experience
personal to myself which made an ineffaceable
impression on my mind. Some years ago it came
in the line of my ministerial duty to be in close
relationship with a very able and advanced
thinker, who had been in his youth bewildered
by credal definitions and rudimentary concep
tions of the Eternal forced upon him by authority,
and who had become a pronounced sceptic,
and a dangerous one also, as he was a powerful
pamphleteer. To him Jesus was a stumbling-
block. Together we foUowed out, during the
space of two months, this Une of thought, till he
saw that this unique Personality who has moulded
17

258 Incarnation

the destinies of men was a peculiar and exceptional
self-utterance of the universal Father Spirit — the
specific embodiment of the vital element through
which all that is has its being, the Incarnation of
the common spiritual energy that has striven for
expression in all the great historic religions of the
world, and of the love-force immanent in matter
and in men. It was like watching the growth
of a flower to see this widening and blossom
ing in his mind, and at last he wrote down for
me his testimony. I repeat it in his own words :
" An entire change has taken place in my opinions
with regard to everything ; for the first time in
my life I really believe in God and see a Christi
anity the existence of which in all my previous
thinking 1 had never so much as imagined. I
will teU you of what you have persuaded me. I
now believe (1) that there is but one Substance,
and that Substance is God ; (2) that all phenomena
are manifestations of God, and that of these
manifestations humanity is the highest ; (3) that
Christ is the perfect manifestation of God, and
therefore is God. I see that, in fact, Christ was
a visible display of God ; it was God Himself on .
earth, but, although thus fully manifested, God
was at the same time in all things. You have
led me into what I can only call a new Ufe."
Praise the Lord for that heart come home !
Blessed is he, for he is no longer " offended " in
the Christ. The God-man, the Divine Humanity,
is no longer a stumbling-block to him. Why

Incarnation 259

will not more witness to the ennobling influence of
this glorious faith ? You who have tried it and
found it true, you who no longer hunt an infinite
abstraction through boundless space, why do
ye " keep back His loving-kindness and truth
from the great congregation " ? Inasmuch as
doubt is the growing pain of faith there must
have been a time when your heart was like
melting wax ; when the silent abstraction behind
phenomena, the universal, unembodied omnipo
tence was —
" Too vast for you to know it
As your trembling spirit would."
And when under some intuitional awakening that
you cannot analyse it was true of you :
" I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary, and worn, and sad ;
I found in Him a resting-place,
And He has made me glad."
Was there any confusion in your mind as to
persons in the Godhead ? Did you involve your
self in Dualism or Tritheism, or in some meta
physical contradiction of the unity of the Most
High ? No, you know you did not ; you came to
the supreme revelation of the Eternal Reason
self-conditioned in a man. You came to the
Jesus-nature of the undivided Deity, arid the
fact of seeing that Jesus represented God gave
you reconciliation, pardon, uplifting ; enwrapped
you in love, pity, consolation, assurance, and
17 — 2

260 Incarnation

though perfection and conquest seemed stiU far
off it " made you glad."
Christmas, then, is the agreed-upon anniversary
of the precise moment in history when this self-
revelation of God's character was made. It was
nothing new, it was no afterthought, no ex
pedient to mend a broken plan ; it was a revelation
in time relations of what was always everlastingly
true. Just as there was a precise moment in
geological history, when the rays of the sun first
pierced the nebulous mist enveloping the planet
on which we live, though the vibrations and
undulations of the luminiferous ether that we
caU light had ever been ; so on Christmas Day
the intensity of the universal love of the Father
of aU worlds,, which had never varied, pierced the
mist of uncertainty which clouded human hearts,
and spoke to them from their own level with a
human voice. Christianity is no new religion ;
it is the culmination, the concentration, the ful
filment of aU reUgions since the world was.
Obviously this finding God in Jesus, while it
elevates our whole conception of the moral
relation between God and man, immeasurably
increases our responsibility. Deep, reverent
thinking gradually convinces us that the Word
embodied in Jesus is not only the friend outside
us, but the power in us. " I believe," said
Emerson, " in the stiU, smaU voice, and that
voice is the Christ within us." Yes, it is the
spirit of Divine sonship restlessly striving to

Incarnation 261

assert itself. As a grain of wheat is predestined
to become an ear of corn because the whole
potentiality of increase is involved in itself, so
is man predestined to be conformed to the
image of the Lord Jesus, the one perfect Son,
because the potentiality of the whole Divine life
is involved in his being. The Divine nature
inhabits, surrounds, enwraps, penetrates, stirs
within us. When we resist it, when we insult it
by being selfish, censorious, insincere, impure, it
must become our enemy, because it is so inexor
ably our friend. No life can Ue so close to the
life of God as do our God-inhabitedlives, without
finding Him our perpetual strength or our per
petual stumbhng-block. " Blessed is he," says
the indwelling Lord, " who shall not find in Me,
in my nearness, and protest, and correction, and
stimulation, a perpetual rebuke and offence." It
is not for the preacher to judge anyone but
himself. I am but a voice, reiterating the
assertion that God must -win, must overcome all
creaturely defect and obstinacy, must reign till
He hath put all enemies under His feet. God,
as He has shown Himself in Jesus, is the spirit of
evolution effecting the moral restitution of man.
To resist Him is Uke resisting the lightning-flash ;
it is to force Him to save you, " yet so as by fire ";
to wring from you the confession of Julian the
Apostate as he threw his blood-stained hands
into the air with the cry, " Thou hast conquered,
O Galilaean !" Yes, the Galilaean will conquer,

262 Incarnation

ultimately conquer the stubbomest wiU, the
darkest hfe ; to yield to Him, to cling in faith and
love to the transcendent beauty of His character,
recognizing Him as Emmanuel God with us,
God for us, God in us is the secret and soul of
genuine progress. To pass through the puzzles
and paradoxes of life's education calmly certain
that in aU circumstances an omnipotent, tender,
all-wise Friend holds you in His grasp, this it is
to be vitalized, empowered, elevated, saved ; for
" who is he that overcometh the world but he
that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God"?

THE BIBLE
"Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in
them ye have eternal life ; and these are they which bear
witness of Me ; and ye will not come to Me, that ye may
have Ufe." — John v. 39, 40 (R.V.).
I ASK you to recognize with what precision
this recorded utterance of the Christ defines
the place and power of the immortal literature
that we call the Bible.
First, it implies that the converting, hallowing
power of the written word lies not in any idolatry
of the letter as an end in itself. Secondly, it
suggests that the secret and soul of Holy Scripture
consists in its power to concentrate the will,
thought, and affection of the reader upon one
adorable Person, who is the life and light of the
world. " Ye search the Scriptures." What is included
in the term " Scriptures " ? " The Scriptures "
represent one form of the activity of the Eternal
Reason of the Divine Being, of that outbreathing,
that self -uttering of God which is called " the
Word." In the broadest, truest sense we dare
not limit the expression " Scriptures " to sacred
263

264 The Bible

literature. We are encouraged to conclude from
the appeal of the prophet Jeremiah, addressed
to the earth, that the movements of the natural
world are not dumb strivings of unconscious
machinery, like the writhings of the mythical
Enceladus under Etna, but the orderly obedience
of atoms of matter to the evolving power of that
Eternal Reason of God which is called " the
Word." And in this sense the universe, with
all its orderly processes, " hearing the voice of the
Lord," is God's first great Bible, the Word
clothed in matter. The Eternal has written
His history with the pen of patient time upon
the strata of the globe. Sometimes inscribing
it in mezzotint engraving in the indescribable
beauty of fossil impressions of fern and leaf one
thousand years before the Deluge ; sometimes
painting it in silver upon our window-panes in
fairy frost-flowers of symmetry and grace ;
sometimes suggesting it in the chemical labora
tories of the vegetable world, mingling it with
the subtle perfume of the flowers, impressing it
upon the many beautiful forms of creaturely
life. Thousands search these Scriptures, and
delight and instruct their fellow-men with the
result of their researches ; many investigators
have been content to drift, locked in the eternal
ice, that they may read what God has written
in His great frozen Bible of the Polar Seas. But
it is not all who find that Eternal Life, which is
the Soul of the Universe ; an unscientific denial

The Bible 265

of the necessary mind behind Nature, a narrow
criticism which substitutes the word " law " for
the word " Father," and the word " force " for
the word " God," blinds their eyes to the fact
that the Book of Nature which they are searching
bears witness to a Person. They search these
Scriptures because in them they think they find
the only hfe they know, and these are they that
bear witness of the life ; and idolizing the letter,
poring over their fossils, tabulating their speci
mens, they miss the spirit, and they will not come
to Him to whom the universe testifies, that they
might have life, and believe in " God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."
Again, without doubt, another " Scripture " or
" expression " of God is humanity. Many minds
have recently been disturbed by a lecture, widely
reported in the press, delivered by a well-known
dramatist, who lampoons, amuses, and instructs
his fellow-creatures by his clever plays at the
Court Theatre. In his " lecture on religion " he
is accused of conspicuous blasphemy. Now, as
I have been asked to express my opinion, I would
say that, in my opinion, the so-called blasphemy
in this lecture is not comparable with the blas
phemy sometimes spoken, written, and preached
by strict religionists. The play- writer accuses
God of powerlessness ; the accusation is illogical,
self-contradictory, ridiculous, but it is less dis
honouring to the Divine Being than the accusa
tion of gross cruelty added to powerlessness !

266 The Bible

Most of us were brought up in the doctrine that
God; having made man with the purpose of per
fecting him, was powerless to overcome a human
wiU stiffened into impenitency and rebeUion, and
being unable either to cure or annihilate His
failure, would keep him alive and sensitive for
ever and ever in torture indescribable. Surely,
to attribute such injustice and cruelty to the
Responsible, Infinite Originator, whose, name is
Love, is a profounder blasphemy than anything
uttered in this lecture and far more provocative
of unbelief. For no argument for the Divine
existence will convince an unbeliever so long as
prevailing conceptions of God are incongruous
to the intellect and repugnant to the moral sense
of mankind. But — and this is my point — the
lecturer is reported to have said that God could do
nothing without us, that we were His brain,
hands, and so on. There, perhaps unknowingly,
he uttered a grand truth ; for purposes of self-
manifestation man is as necessary to God as God
is to man ; the heavens declare the glory of God,
but man must declare the moral nature of God.
That was the meaning of the Incarnation, and the
Incarnate One said that, as the Father sent Him,
so He sent us. You and I are Scriptures of God ;
" Living epistles, known and read of all men,"
the Apostle says. We human beings are living
psalms, prophets, gospels ; thousands will read
us who never read the Bible. Let us remember
that responsibility. As one has said —

The Bible 267

" Our dear Lord's best interpreters
Are faithful human souls ;
The Gospel of a life like theirs
Is more than creeds or scrolls."
But it is about " creeds and scrolls " that we
have to speak on -the Second Sunday in Advent,
and on Bible Sunday the term " Scriptures " is
somewhat narrowed down to the various written
records claiming to reveal to men in different
ages such measure of the thought-transcending
plans of God as they were able and ready to
receive. " Ye search the Scriptures," said our
Lord to these men of Judea. What, then,
were these Scriptures which were searched in
the time of. our Lord ? It is not easy to declare
positively, inasmuch as there never has been
any authorized catalogue of the Jewish sacred
books. It is an historical mistake to imagine
that the Canon of the Old Testament was fixed
long before the time of Christ. It was not fixed,
even in Palestine, till sixty years after our
Lord's death, and several of the books were
in dispute during the whole Apostolic period.*
Briefly, the beginning of our present collection,
called the Bible, was made by Ezra, who, in the
fifth century before Christ, republished the five
books of the Pentateuch, and designated them
" The Holy Book of the Jewish People." After
him Nehemiah added the books of Joshua,
* Cf. " Who wrote the Bible ?" by Washington Glad
den, published by Clarke, 14, Fleet Street, London.

268 The Bible

Judges, Samuel, and Kings ; and, at the same
time, the third group of Old Testament Scrip
tures, called the Hagiographa or Sacred Writings,
were gathered by an unknown hand. Professor
Westcott, afterwards Bishop of Durham, tells us
that the Canon of Old Testament Scriptures was
formed gradually during a lengthened interval
beginning with Ezra from 458 to 332 B.C.
At the time of our Lord there were two distinct
collections of Old Testament writings, one in
Hebrew, the other a translation into the Greek
made by the Jews in Alexandria called the
Septuagint, which contained the Apocrypha ; the
Septuagint was the Scripture used by our Lord and
the Apostles, and it is from the Septuagint that
the quotations from the Old Testament found
in the New Testament are taken, and it is this
Scripture in all probability that our Lord referred
to when He said, " Ye search the Scriptures."
The actual shape of our Old Testament as we
now possess it, was practically settled at the
Synod of Jamnia, a.d. 90, and was reconsidered
and resettled at the Council of Carthage in A.D.
397, presided over by Augustine. Our New
Testament has a similar, though briefer history.
The earliest list, made in the year a.d. 170,
mentions all the books we now possess except
the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles of Peter,
and the Epistle of James. For over two hundred
years various lists of books were compiled by
such men as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian,

The Bible 269

Origen, and Eusebius; some rejecting books we
now receive as canonical, others admitting books
that are now rejected ; until at the Council of
Carthage in a.d. 397, our New Testament was
finally fixed in its present form. Thus did men,
exercising the critical faculty in the councils of
the Church, give us our Bible in its present shape,
and he who denies that the Holy Spirit guided the
deliberations of the critics in the Council of
Carthage has no guarantee of the authenticity
of his Bible beyond his own private judgment.
But sacred, soul-saving, God-inspired as these
Scriptures are, they are not the only Scriptures
which have moulded the thought and swayed
the destinies of the human race. St. Paul says
all Scriptures that are inspired by God are profit
able. The collect for to-day teaches us to say,
with a breadth that would be disowned by many
if it were realized, " Blessed Lord, who hast
caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our
learning." Consider the magnificent literature
of Asia and India. Weigh the glorious thoughts
and expressions of Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha,
the Hindu sages, and Mahomet. Study some of
the noble sayings in the Bhagavad Gita, ask
yourself what was the inteUectual and spiritual
condition of the Kelts, the Teutons, the Britons,
and the Gauls, at the period when these wonderful
men spoke these words of eternal wisdom.
Most of these writings are now accessible even
to the unlearned. The twenty years' unceasing

270 The Bible

labour of Professor Max Muller have brought
within our power of searching the Bibles of seven
great religions of the world, besides the Jewish
and the Christian, all, in their measure, denying
materialism, suggesting the spiritual, and wit
nessing to some great, though dim, ideal. They
all come from the East, and the four most pro
minent are the Veda of the Brahmins, the Lalita
Vistara of the Buddhists, the Zendavesta of
the Parsees, and the Koran of the Mussulmans.
In these, among much that we should rightly call
confused and inadequate, there are thoughts of
the Eternal so beautiful and true that they can
only be outbreathings of the Divine mind. In
the Rig Veda, probably the oldest book in the
world, are foreshadowings of the Trinity, sug
gestions of the Incarnation, and words such as
these addressed to God, though not by that name :
" If I wander like a cloud driven by the wind,
if I break Thy law through thoughtlessness, have
mercy, Almighty, have mercy." In the Zenda
vesta, the book of the Zoroastrians, the Magi who
foUowed the star to worship the infant Jesus,
you find : " O Ormuzd, Spirit of Good, give me the
Holy Spirit, for I believe Thee to be the Light of
aU the world."
In the Koran, the sacred book of the Mussul
mans, it is written : " There is no God but He, the
living, the self-subsistent ; He is aU that is, in
the heavens and in the earth." Beneath the
literal narrative of historical events in these

The Bible

271

books, which is often childish, there is ever a
mystical foreshadowing of the truth that the
destiny of man was to unite himself at last to
the great Spirit of the Universe without loss of
his individuality, and that the great Spirit of the
Universe would, somehow, somewhen, image
Himself as a transcendental man, and that thus
to Him humanity would come. The Sanskrit word
" Purusha," occurring both in Brahmin and Bud
dhist Scriptures, means the "Heavenly Man," a
term the meaning of which none could explain.
But what, you may ask, are these Eastern
Scriptures to us ? Let me tell you. Two hundred
years before Christ there arose a remarkable
movement amongst the Jews ; it came from
Alexandria ; it rooted itself in Palestine ; it poured
illumination into the formalism of the Jewish
religion ; it filtered through the thoughtful Jewish
minds into the Talmud and the Kabbala ; it
taught the doctrine of the Immanence of God
in all things, and the coming mystic heavenly
man ; it spiritualized the Jewish belief in the
Messiah ; it gave birth to the Logos of Philo ;
it initiated the philosophy of the first chapter
of St. John's Gospel. And whence did it come ?
Dean Mansel, one of the hardest-headed students
and logicians of the nineteenth century, tells us
it came from the missionaries from India, learned
in the teaching of the Vedas, who visited Egypt
within two generations of the time of Alexander
the Great, and this view is corroborated by the

272 The Bible

inscribed stones of King Asoka, to be seen to
this day in various parts of India. What is the
conclusion of it all ? Surely it is the iUimitable
Fatherhood of God, the essential solidarity of
humanity, the mutual interdependence of race
with race, the slow-moving, irresistible evolution
of the purpose of God in all ages, nations, peoples,
and religions. Surely one result of the considera
tion should be to teach us that, when we send
missionaries to the Brahmins of India, it should
not be to revile them as idolaters, to despise
them as outcasts, but to bring back to them
elevated, iUuminated, amplified, fulfiUed, realized,
the philosophy God gave them to give to us one
thousand seven hundred years before the Christ
came. To preach to them the Gospel, the good
news, that the " Purusha " of the Veda, the
" Messiah " of the prophets, the " Heavenly
Man " of the Kabbala, the " Logos " of Philo,
the " Word that was" God " of St. John, are one
and the same glorious Being, " promised before
times eternal, and now manifested "; that as
all streams and rivers, small and great, clear
and turbid, flow into the sea, so aU religions,
however distinct their forms, and phrases, and
usages, and conceptions, lead to the illimitable
ocean of the love of God, and culminate in the
revelation of Jesus, the universal Father-Spirit
manifesting His moral character in human
limitations, the one beautiful, enduring person
ality, " Whom to know is Life Eternal."

The Bible '273

Ye possessors of the open Bible, members of
the race that gives the Bible broadcast to the
world, do you " search it " ? Why ? Is it that
you may extract pointed epigrams to confound
a theological adversary ? That you may build
up dogmas and " plans of salvation "and Shib
boleths, and superstitiously idolize the letter,
worshipping it as the Ephesians worshipped the
image of Diana ? You do well to search it ; it
has been the cradle of liberty, the fountain of
free institutions, the destroyer of despotisms, the
friend of the people. Its inspired precepts have
asauaged the fire of passion, and taught the
secret of the spiritual life all down the ages. But
remember the words of the Christ, these are only
" they that bear witness " of Him ; do not let
Him say " they will not come to Me." It is not
possible to put that " coming " into a proposi
tion ; it is too secret, too personal ; it is the
whole soul moving forth, with awakened faith
and kindled imagination, to welcome the " Jesus-
aspect " of God as a living Person, close beside you,
longing to be taken into confederacy with the
sorrows and the joys of your changeful, anxious
human life . Love your Bibles if you will— I would
you loved them more— but remember the call is
not to a book, but to a Person ; not to a creed,
but to a Friend.
An Omnipotent Friend, who has pledged
Himself to us in the words : " Him that cometh
unto Me I wiU in no wise cast out." 18

THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN
" And there appeared a great wonder in heaven ; a
woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her
feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars : and
she being with child cried, travailing in birth. . . And
there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold
a great red dragon . . . stood before the woman . . . for
to devour her child." — Rev. xii. 1-4.
A WELL-KNOWN advocate of the verbal
dictation theory of ' Holy Scripture once
likened the Bible, in point of literal accuracy,
to a railway guide, in which the arrival and
departure of every historical event was accurately
delineated. It was the attempt thus to treat the Apocalypse
that was the foundation of Luther's openly ex
pressed dislike of the Book. Surely the exact
converse of this analogy is the truth. The
witness of God's immortal literature is " deep
caUing unto deep," the Infinite Spirit differen
tiated in the minds of the several writers, appeal
ing to the measure of the same spirit in the
inmost being of the reader. Only the awakened
faculty of receptivity can perceive the spiritual
274

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 275
appeal and read it in the message from the heart
of God. There are three planes of thought on
which the Bible is received — the authoritative,
the intellectual, and the intuitional ; they belong
severally to the literahst, the higher critic, and
the mystic, and it is the third of these who can
alone " inwardly digest " the Apocalypse ; for
there is no part of the Bible of which it is more
true that " the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth
life," than of these passages of Scripture selected
to prepare the mind for the observance of the
Christmas revelation. The literalists, for example,
as I have pointed out in a previous sermon, bid
us believe that the planet on which we live is
doomed to a sudden and awful destruction ; that
the earth, with its high civilization and its vast
mercantile and national interests, shall, upon a
certain day, be hideously and horribly destroyed ;
and that, in the midst of fervent heat, and sheeted
flame, and the crash and din and chaos of a dis
solving world, the Lord Jesus shall reappear in
personal corporeal presence, and shall conduct a
vast court of assize.
I have ventured to affirm that this conception,
influential as it has been, unfits the mind for the
great spiritual discovery of Advent, which is
the glorious truth that He has come into this
planet, that as the Word Immanent He has
never been otherwise than in it, that He has
never left it, that He is here now, and that the
" coming " of Jesus is the recognition of the
18—2

276 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
Creative Presence of the humanity of God holding
us by the hand as an ever-present Friend, while
we stumble across that narrow isthmus between
the two boundless eternities of whence and
whither which is caUed human life.
AU the Advent Scriptures appear to me to be
recorded from the higher spiritual state of per
ception, and to be addressed to an inward vision.
I am not prepared to define this inward vision,
to assign a place to it in any metaphysical system ;
but if the things of the spirit are only spiritually
discerned there must be in man, somewhere, a
more Uluminated sphere of perception than exists
in his natural faculties ; a spiritual consciousness
capable of receiving and comprehending the more
intense, the more vital realities of being. True,
this perceptive faculty is not given to us men
perfect and mature as it was possessed by the
Christ, the Ideal Specimen of our race, though in
Him too it had to grow and increase, but the organ
is there, the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, the
Divine Logos which was so transcendently em
bodied in Him is, in germ, in us. " He that
sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of
one "; and though our vision is dim, admitting
only broken hghts of revelation, we can penetrate
beneath the allegorical sufficiently to perceive
that His promised Advent, upon which at this
season our thoughts are concentrated, cannot be
limited to the signification of a materialized
physical arrival on this planet as from some

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 277
distant localized spot in infinite space which it
would be necessary for Him to leave ; not an
approach ab extra, from without, but a recognition
on the part of man of a Presence which has never
been otherwise than there. The word parousia,
translated "coming," literally means "presence,"
being alongside of, and its happening will be an
awakening of the inner consciousness of the
immortal perceptions whereby men are able to
discern that which has been ever ensphering
them, though on the material plane of appre
hension they knew it not. The inward nature
of man is composed of organs similar in character
to the outward. Natural phenomena are the
shadows of spiritual reahties, and it is a scientific
fact that the sensations with which we are most
familiar in our physical life have no real objective
existence apart from the receptive faculty of
consciousness within ourselves. It is possible
that we have never thought of it ; but sound,
luminousness, perfume, have no real existence
apart from the sensations produced in us. They
are objectively, all of them, only modes of motion,
vibrations of the air of different velocities ; the
mechanism that converts these vibrations into
sound, luminousness, perfume, are in us. As
these vibrations impinge on certain nerves within
us they become to us a consciousness of certain
sensations. You hear the booming of a huge bell
and you imagine that the bell is making the
sound ; it is not, it is only causing vibrations ;

278 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
it is you who manufacture the vibrations into
sound. A keen thinker of our day has said :
" Vibrations of air and ether existed millions of
years before there was eye or ear on this globe,
and they were external factors in developing
these important organs, but only as the auditory
nerve was evolved was there sound ; only as the
optical apparatus was evolved was there luminous
ness ; only as the sense of smell was evolved
was there fragrance. Without consciousness, and
the organs through which consciousness is differen
tiated into sensations, there would be no sound
and no hearing, no luminousness and no seeing,
no fragrance and no smelling." Thus it would
be scientifically correct to say the kingdom of
sound is within you, the kingdom of light is
within you, the kingdom of perfume is within
you. And the Lord Jesus, carrying the natural
analogy into the spiritual, tells us that " the King
dom of Heaven is within us "; and so long as
night reigns in the centre of that kingdom and all
its mystic Divine powers are sunk in stupor and
insensibUity, the intense nearness of the ceaseless
pulsations of the universal Divine life in the very
midst of which we " hve and move and have our
being " are not recognized ; the spiritual organs
through which the nearness of God would be
differentiated in feeling and cognition are numbed
and paralysed ; and the Advent prayer of every
heart conscious of darkness should be to the
Uving Christ of God, " Thou who in the days of

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 279
Thy flesh didst give speech to the dumb and
sight to the blind, touch, restore, vitalize the
benumbed organs of my soul, that I may see Thee
and know that Thou art ever ' closer than breath
ing, nearer than hands or feet,' now in the time of
this mortal life, in which Thou didst come to visit
us in great humility." And the special Advent
effort of all should be to cast off the works of
darkness (whatever they may be) which sen-
suaUze or materialize the life and quench spiritual
vision, now in the time of this mortal hfe, the
time of human education and human self-develop
ment, because the day of the Lord, the day of
open vision must come to each one ; the promise
is " every eye shall see Him, and they also which
pierced Him." The resources of omnipotent love
are inexhaustible, and if these spiritual faculties
and organs, the eyes of the soul, are, through our
own fault, not opened, " now in the time of this
mortal life," they will be opened yet "so as by
fire," as the eyes of Dives were opened in Hades ;
for God is love, and our God is a consuming
fire. Therefore, love is fire, and fire is love.
Now, it seems to me that this law of interpreta
tion applies to that apparently incomprehensible
chapter of the Apocalypse which has been read
to-day as the second lesson, which sounds like a
dream, and a vision, and a prophecy, and a
fairy-tale all rolled into one. I do not pretend
to the insight of Jacob Boehme, still less will I
assume the thankless office of a dogmatic inter-

280 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
prefer of the Apocalypse. That mystic compila
tion has been for generations the happy hunting-
ground of the literalists and pseudo-prophets who,
wandering out of facts into mathematics, have
manipulated the Apocalypse to support their own
favourite political or theological nostrums, and
covered themselves with ridicule by the wholesale
failure of their dogmatic prophecies. But there
is one golden key which seems to fit the wards of
the most complicated lock guarding the spiritual
secrets of the immortal literature called the Bible,
and that golden key is the key of microcosm ; in
other words, that a man is the epitome of all men,
and that parables and symbols and allegories in
the sacred writings, representing numerous
different actors in certain scenes, refer, in their
inwardness, to the experiences of a single soul,
and can almost invariably be applied to your
self. Apply this golden key of interpretation to
the mystical incidents of this chapter in the
Apocalypse, and see if it does not confront the
soul of man with the secret of its own dignity.
When we avoid the fatal mistake of literalism, and
recognize that these are not prophecies of meteoro
logical phenomena but of moral experiences, this
sacred allegory stands forth as the history of
the individual soul, veiled in inspired Oriental
imagery, luminous with suggestion, ethical teach
ing, and Divine assurance. " There appeared a
great wonder in heaven." What heaven ? All
the inspired symbols relating to the Kingdom. of

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 281
Heaven are to be interpreted in the light of that
truth, " The Kingdom of Heaven is within you."
A great wonder within man ; either within
humanity as a totality, in which case the whole
allegory would apply vividly to the wonder of
the gradual dawning of Divine consciousness in
the transition period of evolution between the
highest anthropoid ape and the lowest man ; but,
as evolution, though inferentially inevitable, is
non-proven, and therefore still speculative, we will
not pursue that thought, but apply it to the
individual. Then " the woman " represents the
moral and affectional nature of man, which he
shares with the higher animals other than man.
And she is " clothed with the sun." The sun, as
the most important object in nature, is the obvious
symbol of the " greatest thing in the world,"
love — the love of God. " The Lord our God is a
sun," and God is love. Every soul is thus clothed,
ensphered, permeated, by the universal Love
Spirit. Every soul lives through the diffused life
of God, who is love, and it is only His intense
nearness that renders Him remote from
observation. The " moon under her feet " is faith working
by love. In the night of our experience, when
the Divine presence is very dimly recognized,
there always remains, with the simple and the
pious, faith working by the reflection of the
ensphering love, as the moon sheds the reflected
light of the sun, and this has ever been the
driving power behind aU kindly enterprises which

282 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
have brightened the world. The " crown of
stars " represents the lesser and more broken
lights that illuminate the understanding ; all,
equally with the moon, gaining their light from
the centra] sun. All the lesser lights — art, and
science, and music ; logic, metaphysics, and
philosophy — all are originated, subordinated,
transfigured, by the one central spirit. " There
is one body," the universe, " and one spirit,"
the unanalysable hfe thereof. " And she being
with child cried, travailing in birth " — a powerful
analogy of the restless, unaccountable striving of
a hidden somewhat in the natural man, ever
energizing to come to the birth. There is no man
living who has not felt those travail pains. It
is the God-capacity beginning to cry out for the
living God ; it is the germ of the Christ-nature,
the Divine sonship latent in every man ; it is that
measure of the Logos or Word, or Eternal Reason,
which lighteth every man coming into the world ;
it is the man-child, the Divine humanity —
that which St. Paul caUs the " Christ in you " —
still in the womb of the soul, eager to be born,
to live in man, to grow in man, to ascend
the throne of man's being. It is the antitype
in every man of that of which the birth of the
Christ of the Virgin Mary was the prototype.
' ' Though Christ in Bethlehem a thousand times be born,
If He be not born in thee, thy heart is all forlorn."
And there is a definite moment with all, whether
conscious or unconscious, when the living Christ

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 283
is thus born within us. And it is then that the
true struggle of the evolution of character begins.
It is then that the " great red dragon " of the
purely physical nature, the lower region of appe
tite and passion — that which Tennyson calls the
" ape and tiger " within us — stands ready to
devour the man-child, to crush and destroy the
higher nobler self just born within. But, praise
God, whatever may be the vicissitudes of infirm,
temptable, suffering humanity, the man-child,
the Divine nature, the inseverable link between
man and his Maker, is indestructible. " Her
child was caught up unto God "; that is, the
Divine nature in us dwells ever in God. " That
which is born of God sinneth not." This is God's
life in man ; this is the impregnable foundation
of eternal hope. And though " the woman "
may have " to flee unto the desert," that is, man —
in the region of his perception, imagination,
affections — may have sorrow, trial, dereliction ;
though there is war in his profound interior
Kingdom of Heaven, Michael and his angels
fighting against the dragon — that is, in other
words, war within man, the higher impulses.
fighting the lower — the end is sure. " They
prevailed not," we read, " neither was their place
found any more in heaven." That is the glorious
prophecy of the end for every one of us, when
struggle is over, school time passed, the guerilla
bands of the old appetites finally subdued, peace
restored, character formed. " And I heard a
loud voice saying in heaven " — that is, in your

284 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
inmost, deepest self — " Now is come salvation and
strength, and the Kingdom of our God, and the
power ot His Christ." Thus is the " woman " of
the Apocalypse the allegorized representative of
every perfected member of the great organic
unity called humanity. Clothed, with love, based
on faith, crowned with knowledge of spiritual
truth, the inmost, the Divine humanity ever
" hid with Christ in God."
Thus has our Father provided under his inspired
allegory a strong consolation for us all in the
sore travail of human education. Let us then
recognize the power latent within man ; let us
acknowledge the Kingdom of God within man's
soul ; let us realize that man is the temple of the
living God.
All that we are, all that we can ever hope to
be, is derived from this everlasting fountain of
life springing up within the soul of man. How
immeasurable, how wonderful the revelation, that
in the fathomless depths of our being there dwells
a power, a spirit of evolution, that is able to trans
mute our whole being into a temple fit for the
habitation of the Eternal ! ' What emphasis does
this conception add to St. Paul's words, " The
temple of the Lord is holy, which temple ye are "!
What significance does it place upon that action
of our Lord with which the Advent lessons com
mence—namely, the cleansing of the temple.
The temple of the living God, to the cleansing of
which the Christ comes in loving indignation,
when even legitimate occupations Uke those of

The Woman Clothed with the Sun 285

the money-changers and the sellers of doves are
allowed to monopolize an undue share of His
sanctuary, is man. Man, as Chrysostom says,
is the true Shechinah, and to this glorious truth
Christmas Day is the witness. The Logos, the
hidden Divinity, the Christ-nature is in the womb
of every human soul, and must be born in the
lowly manger of our complex being as He was
born at Bethlehem.
" O would thy heart but be a manger for His birth !
God would once more become a child on earth."
God becomes a " child on earth," in one sense,
whenever a child is naturally born. In a deeper,
truer, more transcendent sense, when the Divine
God-consciousness is awakened within, and begins
to rule, and purify, and form the life.
We are all fellow-pupils in the training-school
of human life. The infinite and solemn mystery
aUegorized in this chapter of the Apocalypse was
manifested on Christmas Day, and it challenges
us against despondency. It opens to us that
" secret place of the Most High " in which fear
and anxiety and mourning are swallowed up like
bubbles on some calm, deep stream. There are
always stricken and sorrowful hearts on Christmas
Day. Some will be mourning for the beloved
departed, others will be yearning over loved ones
far away in some distant part of the earth. The
message of Bethlehem's cradle is, " Glad tidings
of great joy," for it declares that God and man
are inseverable, and therefore that man and man

286 The Woman Clothed with the Sun
are inseverable also. The love spirit, embodied
for purposes of observation in the Babe of Beth
lehem, is master of the universe, and the sole
power behind the complexity of human affairs,
and the bond of union between souls that are
sundered here. All must be ultimately well,
for He has sworn that He will subdue all things
to Himself, that He will raise and perfect the race,
that He will abundantly compensate for every
sorrow, eternally right all existing wrongs, and
most assuredly bring sundered hearts again
together in the many mansions of the Eternal
home. So if any soul is disquieted on Christmas
Day by the absence or death of loved ones —
" Cast on God thy care for these,
Trust Him if thy sight be dim,
Doubt for them is doubt of Him."
And as for those personal anxieties which are part
of our education here, " Arm thy breast with
stubborn patience as with triple steel." " The
trial of your faith worketh patience," and
patience makes every trial a ladder of ascent to
spiritual perfection. As Whittier says in his
poem on the Angel of Patience :
" He walks with thee, that angel kind,
And gently whispers, ' Be resigned ;
Bear up — bear on- — the end shall tell ;
The dear Lord ordereth all things well.' "

Elliot Stock, b?, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.

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