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CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORE ' BOSTON • CHICAGO ¦ DALLAS
ATLANTA ¦ SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON ¦ BOMBAY ¦ CALCUTTA
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

CREATIVE
CHRISTIANITY A STUDY OF THE GENIUS
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

BY
GEORGE CROSS

Jfant fork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
192a
All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1922
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and printed. Published February, 1922.

FERRIS
PRINTING COMPANY
NEW YORK CITY

TO MY CHILDREN

FOREWORD
DURING Easter Week of this year it was my
privilege to deliver the Nathaniel W. Taylor
Lectures at the Convocation of the Divinity
School of Yale University. I wish hereby to express
my thanks to the authorities of the University for the
opportunity of setting forth some of my personal
views before audiences of an extraordinary character
and to my hearers for the patient and sympathetic
manner in which they listened to my words. The
lectures are here offered to the reading public in
the form in which they were originally delivered,
except for a slight expansion at a few points. The
temptation to extend considerably the discussion of
some of the subjects mentioned was very great, but
such a course would have necessitated the recasting
of the entire work and the substitution of an
elaborate exposition of the theme for the merely
suggestive treatment that is more natural in the
case of lectures. Perchance I may be able at some
future time to offer a more exhaustive discussion
of important topics only touched upon at this time.
It is proper, perhaps, that this foreword should
mention some reasons for the designation of my
theme : "Creative Christianity." While it is hoped
that the lectures themselves make these plain, it may
7

8 Foreword
be added here that the title was chosen because of
the fitness of the descriptive term creative to set
forth a distinguishing quality of the faith which
Jesus Christ has given to the world. From its
beginnings this faith has had its home in the hearts
of the common people, its power in any land or
age in which it has made a place for itself has al
ways been in direct proportion to the strength of
its hold on the people whose hands are hard with
toil and whose minds are full of care, and the
most effective means of its dissemination have always
been found in the natural associations of the people
with one another. That it should be the faith of
the most intelligent, independent and enterprising
nations of the world in our day is what one might
expect when he discerns its genius. For it tends
invariably to freedom and spontaneity of action and
expression wherever it is found. Its progress among
any people is marked by the lessening of external
direction and control and the growth of inner confi
dence and self-affirmation. Not fixity of form but
continuity of development mark its presence and tell
its secret. Like a tree of life it has the self-perpetuat
ing power of an inner vital principle and from time
to time it sheds its temporary forms, as a tree sheds
its leaves, to provide for its own larger self-unfold
ing. Christianity is a historical faith. This is much
more than to say that it is united both in its origin
and its continuance to definite concrete fact rather

Foreword 9
than mere speculation, much more than to say that
it persists through successive periods of time by
means of the actual tangible forces that come into
action in the life of humanity. It is also to say
that its course is not truly separable from the action
of the complex of forces that make up the career
of any people who receive it, but it lives in their life.
The story of Christianity is just the life-story of the
people who are Christians. It is not a something in
itself that may be attached to the personal life from
without and, at will, detached again. It is in course
of change constantly just as the life of humanity
is always changing. The Christianity of today in
any land is more than the Christianity of yesterday,
just as the civil and social life of any people is
more than it was yesterday.
The organizing genius of the Christian faith mani
fests itself in the reshaping of the forms of conduct
or morality, the political affairs or civil constitution,
the traditional theories of life or popular philosophy,
and the manifestation of the spirit of reverence or
worship current among any people. The faith be
comes institutionalized in this way. It also becomes
institutionalized in the churches which seek to be a
direct embodiment of the Christian faith. These
have their own forms of government, doctrine and
worship, which commonly come to be viewed as
essential to the faith itself. But there comes a time
when these regulative provisions operate in the direc
tion of restraining the freedom and initiative of the

10 Foreword
believers whose spiritual good was intended origin
ally to be served by them. As a progressive people
outgrows these "essential" forms their continued
imposition becomes a tyranny or oppression that
must be resisted and thrown off, if faith is still to
continue. That . which seemed at one time indis
pensable to the religious life of the people has to be
set aside in the interest of that very life, and other
forms more truly representative of their higher faith
and more adequate to the fulfillment of its aims must
take their place. This is, in substance, what occurred
in the Protestant Reformation when national
churches took the place of the imperial Roman
Church, and again when the free churches arose in
response to the larger life that came to many of
those who had had their spiritual home in the na
tional churches. In the creativity of the Christian
faith lies its power to avert the danger of stagnation
and death.
It is not to be successfully disputed that we are
at the present day in the midst of a powerful move
ment, nurtured by a variety of spiritual tendencies
current among intelligent people, looking to the re
making of the forms in which our Protestantism has
traditionally expressed its inner life. Ecclesiastical
and doctrinal reconstruction are particularly impera
tive if the multitudes of educated young people issu
ing from our schools and colleges are to find a
congenial home in our Christian churches. Owing
to the character of the training to which they have

Foreword 1 1
been subject all the way from the kindergarten to
the university graduate school, the native cast of
mind in which their religious life is to receive its
moulding is so vastly different from that in which
we and our fathers approached religious questions
that, cost what it may to our feelings, we must
make up our mind that their interpretation of the
Christian faith, as of life in general, will be very
different from that which was given to us by the
fathers. The possibility of winning and holding
these young people for the Christian faith depends
very much on the frankness and courage with which
those of us who are familiar and sympathetic with
their training and perceive clearly the character of
the questions they must face shortly, make up our
minds to tell the whole truth, as we see it, plainly and
kindly, leaving the outcome to the God of truth.
For, be it remembered, these young people are to
be the guides of the great masses of humanity in
many lands in the days that are now coming so
swiftly upon us, when all the peoples of the earth
will mingle and seek a common leadership.
Two of the principal impediments to this higher
and purer faith I must mention. One of these is
the ancient Catholic inheritance of sacramentalism
and the other is the early Protestant inheritance of
legalism. These are often associated. Both tend
to obscure the inwardness, directness and freedom
of the soul's communion with its God and both pro
duce the fruit of a morally sterile formalism and a

12 Foreword
bitter intolerance. Both must be firmly repudiated
in the interest of a pure and puissant faith that is
to be the faith of mankind.
Happy are those teachers of youth who see in
the enquiring minds of the boys and girls who
throng our places of learning the promise of a
Christian faith higher than that which our fathers
gave to us and destined to succeed in winning the
allegiance of multitudes whom our faith failed to
win! Tennyson's words in "Locksley Hall" here
come to mind :
"Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, for
ward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the
younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Mother- Age (for mine I knew not) help me as
when life begun;
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the light
nings, weigh the sun —
O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not
set,
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy
yet."
George Cross.
Rochester, New York,
June 21, 1921.

CONTENTS Chapter I. PAGE
The Method of the Study  17
Chapter II.
The Discovery of the Perfect Personality. ... 54
Chapter III.
The Making of the Better World  94
Chapter IV.
The Power of Cosmic Interpretation  130

CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY

CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY;
A Study of the Genius of the Christian Faith.
CHAPTER I.
LECTURE I. THE METHOD OF THE STUDY.
Brethren of the Christian Ministry and Friends:
IN the series of addresses which it is to be my
privilege to bring to you this Easter Week I
am to ask you to embark with me on a study
of the genius of the Christian faith. To everyone
who seeks to hold this faith intelligently and to
communicate it to the minds and consciences of
others this task of ours must present itself as per
manently imperative, and the present juncture in
human affairs makes the time particularly opportune.
For the work of reconstituting the essential order
of human life, now pressing so hard on the human
power of initiative on a vast scale among many
peoples, is bound to produce a profound effect on
the religious life of men everywhere and particularly
where their religion has such ecumenical relations
as ours. Some of the most noteworthy influences
at work in this direction may be indicated at the
outset. 17

18 Creative Christianity
The great war which broke in upon the peace
of mankind less than seven years ago seems to
have precipitated upon the world a cataclysm of
unparalleled magnitude. It was not alone the deso
lation of the lands where the war was waged or
the destruction of the accumulated wealth of the
peoples, not alone the hugeness of the forces en
gaged in battle or even the wastage of human life —
appalling though it was — that made the cataclysm
so terrible to think upon. Nor was it that thrones
crumbled, governments and empires were crushed
or rent in sunder; that economic systems were
thrown into confusion and social bonds were dis
rupted; that customs and maxims that had long
stood sentinel to guard humanity against the power
of unrestrained passion lost their authority — though
the extent to which this occurred has filled our
minds at times with bewilderment and our hearts
with foreboding.
More trying than all this can be to the souls
of men is the disillusionment of the hopes of the
millions of people who have borne the Christian
name. Prior to the war the old pessimistic spirit
that formerly prevailed among Christians when
they looked worldward had mostly passed away
and the spirit of optimism had came at last to
prevail. The rapid spread of the Christian Gospel
during the last hundred years, the forming of
Christian communities in every land, the constituent
relation which the Christian religion had come to

The Method of Study 19
hold toward all the great forces of modern civiliza-,
tion, the penetration of literature and education,
science and art with its avowed principles, the insti
tution by Christians of enterprises for the ameliora
tion of human conditions everywhere — all these
were allied in inspiring men with the vision of the
rapid coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Our eyes were mostly closed to the signs of ap
proaching strife and our ears to the subterranean
rumblings that told of preparations for war and
we could not believe that, even if the spirit of the
beast and the bandit should arouse itself again, it
would prove mighty enough to bring our noble
structure down in ruins, until the breakdown sud
denly came.
One of the sights that were peculiarly distressing
to true-hearted ,and simple-minded believers was
the spectacle of nations professedly Christian rang
ing themselves on opposite sides in the conflict.
Christian and non-Christian were thrown confusedly
together, so that the struggle had not the appearance
of a war of religions. Moreover, the outbreak of
savagery in many quarters and the ill-success in
coping with it seemed to indicate that the motives
which we commonly associate with the Christian
name had a far lighter hold on the hearts of men
than the prevalence of Christian forms and organiza
tions seemed to indicate. Consequently, many intelli
gent people have been found in all seriousness ask
ing the question, Has Christianity failed?

20 Creative Christianity
It will not do to take this question lightly or
minimize the difficulty of answering it. We may not
regard it as a mere reaction consequent upon an
unusual strain. Nor will it do to seek to evade
the issue by replying, "Christianity has not been
tried," and seek to back up the evasion by quoting
some single utterance of scripture that sets forth a
principle of the Christian life which no man abso
lutely fulfills. If Christianity has a history — as
it assuredly has — then it is certain that Christianity
has been tried these nearly nineteen hundred years.
It must be frankly confessed that the Christianity
of the most recent past did fail at the very point
at which multitudes of us had hoped its power
would prevail, that is, it failed to prevent the most
hideous war in history. We do not forget the
magnificent display of heroism and self-sacrifice
by which the life — and death — of multitudes of those
on whose shoulders the responsibility of rescuing
humanity from an unspeakable calamity was glori
fied. And yet, notwithstanding it all, it is pretty
evident that people generally do not feel as sure as
once they felt that the Christian religion has brought
human control over material forces sufficiently under
the power of moral force to assure us that material
ism is not now threatening to crush the power of
the higher life.
It may be that other people will seek relief from
the pressure of the question by reviving a conception
of Christianity that, we supposed, Protestantism

The Method of Study 21
had outlived. It will be claimed, perchance, that
the association or alliance of Christianity with com
munity action, especially of a secular kind, is un
natural and unnecessary, that it was never intended
to become integral to civilization because its home
and its aims are found in another world, the world
above. "It has not failed," they will say, "because
it has brought to all who receive it an assurance of
attaining to that home. Its original intent is being
constantly fulfilled." Undoubtedly much scripture
can be quoted as looking in that direction. We shall
take further cognizance of this contention at a later
stage of our study.
Others, again, somewhat likeminded with these,
will seek to turn aside any implication of Christian
failure by narrowing the issue to a single point.
Such a saying as "Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God," may be quoted to remind
us that no man who has met the condition here laid
down for happiness will say that Christianity has
failed to bring him the joy and strength he sought.
Such words as these are doubtless of great signifi
cance and we thankfully acknowledge the comfort
ing asurance that the Christian Gospel, as expressed
in these words, has not failed to bring consolation
and strength to multitudes whose minds have been
profoundly exercised over international questions
or other ecumenical problems. But, at the same time,
it must be plain that to one who has taken the world
of humanity into his heart and who views the strug-

22 Creative Christianity
gles of great communities of men with one another
and the upheavals that disrupt the ancient bonds
of society as significant of the effort of the spirit
that is at work in our race to bring the world to
a better state, the question keeps coming home, "Why
has not Christianity made this purity of heart a more
common possession and a greater force in the
world?" It seems to me pretty plain that all such
must feel that the prevailing conditions at the present
time call for a reconsideration of the whole aim and
effective power of the Christian faith.
In addition to the facts I have mentioned there are
many concurrent influences now bidding us recon
sider the meaning of our Christian traditions. Some
of these influences are not very familiar to the mul
titudes whose hands are too busy with toil or whose
minds are too much occupied with the simple issues
of everyday affairs to make it possible for them to
become acquainted with the ways of the schools or
the interests that affect most deeply the mind of the
professional student. And yet the problems of the
trained thinker have a way of percolating through
to the thoughts of the more serious-minded among
the toiling masses of men. These discover that the
problems of the thinker are truly their problems too.
So that, for their sake also, even apart from the is
sues raised by the war, a revision of the whole
inherited exposition of the Christian faith is becom
ing daily a more pressing necessity. And this, I am
sure, we shall see, is not to be regretted as if it were

The Method of Study 23
a mark of declining faith. It is rather, I trust, an
indication that our faith is coming to have for us a
more vital relation to the whole of life than it had for
our fathers, It is not necessary in this place to do
more than make a bare mention of the principal con
current influences I have in mind.
Firstly, then, there are the accepted methods and
results of modern scientific research. The persistent
interrogation of nature, the collating and organizing
of her answers, the inductions and inferences drawn
therefrom, with a seemingly pitiless disregard of the
personal longings of the investigator or of any one
else, have annulled the ancient Christian representa
tions of this world, the worlds above and the worlds
below, so that they have ceased to appear as a state
ment of discovered or revealed facts, and have be
come to us a series of merely symbolic representations
of the movements of the inner spirit. This has
forced an abandonment of the cosmography which
is so closely interwoven with the biblical and long
current Christian view of the relation which the
world in which we now live bears to another world
to which men go when they die that, to many persons,
it seems difficult, if not impossible, to replace the
ancient view with the modern except at the cost of
undermining popular confidence in the truth of the
faith that found at one time this ancient cosmography
so congenial. Let us remember that the common
school children are being trained in the new
mode of conceiving the world and that they will

24 Creative Christianity
carry it with them through every phase of their
lives. Secondly, there is the fundamental scientific and
philosophic contention that that there can be no
genuine knowledge of this universe in which we
must live our life, except on the presupposition of
the immanency, permanency and integrated unity of
the forces and laws of the universe. This is now
becoming a common maxim of the schools. In con
sequence, every one so trained must place a note of
interrogation after all the biblical accounts of mir
acles. Now, when it is remembered that one of the
great churches of Christendom relies on these ac
counts of miracles and the continuation of such mir
acles as the basis of its claims and almost the whole
of the rest of Christendom from ancient times down
almost, if not entirely, to our own time have believed
that the great traditional doctrines of the faith
repose on the reality of these miraculous events, the
spiritual situation created thereby must seem fairly
revolutionary. To many people the miracles have
become a source of distress and not of consolation.
In this way it has been brought about that the whole
question of the reality and meaning of the super
natural must be faced anew.
Thirdly, we have to reckon with the rise and the
growing influence of the modern science of history.
Its conscience for facts is associated with a pitiless
throwing into the discard of all the most beautiful,
as well as the most repulsive, representations of

The Method of Study 25
events whose origin lies in the mere fancy or the na
tive love of the dramatic. It is governed by the de
termination to discover, if possible, the meaning
of human life by discerning the forces that operate
immanently within it rather than trace its changes to
interference from without. Naturally enough, it has
brought into question the trustworthiness of many
of those accounts which have seemed to multitudes
of Christians indispensable to the assurance of the
faith. In this way the origin of our faith and the
relation particularly of Jesus Christ and the events
of his life to it are brought once more under critical
review. These difficulties must be met squarely.
Fourthly, since the days of John Locke scientific
interest has been directed increasingly to the field
of the inner life of men. In due time it has led
to an examination of the nature and meaning of
religion as a form of psychic action or experience.
From an interest in the manner in which a religion
was given to men our minds have been turned to
the manner in which it rises in the human heart.
Consequently, there has been a transfer of emphasis
from its outer forms, its doctrines and its means of
propagation to its inner character and its inherent
worth to the natural life of men. In this way the in
ner affinity of Christianity with other faiths, as well
as its distinction from them, has been set before our
minds as of more significance than the manner
in which it was ushered into the world. The modern
Christian missionary movement, instead of opposing

26 Creative Christianity
this tendency, has confirmed it. Evidently, then, to
day the interpreter of the Christian faith will concern
himself more deeply with the manner in which the
faith lives in his own soul and the souls of other men
than with the forms in which it has been professedly
set forth. He will view it in its inner relation to
the whole of the processes of the mind in which it
dwells rather than as something superadded to the
life of men from without.
It is quite an inadequate estimate of the seriousness
of the spiritual situation now confronting us to say
that there must be a restatement of the Christian
faith in terms of the thought of the present day.
That indeed must be done, but much more. We must
rediscover it, so to say, by living through its history
afresh. It must not be assumed that there are avail
able for our use any fixed standard tests for the final
determination of what is truly Christian as distinct
from that which claims to be Christian. When we
turn to the liturgies, the creeds, the organizations and
the personal and social customs which have been
commonly taken as representative of the Christian
faith we can find no fixed external standard by
which we may decide how far they are Christian.
They are important as showing some of the ways
in which our religion came to expression in the past.
These are not necessarily the most significant. Per
chance we shall discover that the standard is to be
found in the future rather than in the past. Per
chance we shall see that that which is most truly

The Method of Study 27
Christian is yet to be. It may be that its judgment
day, like that which awaits each of us, is still to
come. I have spoken of crises in Christian history.
These are always significant because they bring to
light the character of the forces which have long
been at work but whose presence was somewhat
hidden. There are three that stand out pre-em
inently : — The first of these occurred when the Chris
tian Gospel passed out from the limitations to which
it was subjected in the Jewish community into the
great Graeco-Oriental world and came under the ne
cessity of adaptation to the spiritual conditions pre
valent in it. The second occurred when it passed
the boundaries of that world westward and was com
pelled to seek adjustment to the needs of the half-
civilized but energetic peoples of western Europe.
And the third great crisis occurred when it was con
fronted with the perplexing complex of influences
that made the Protestant Revolution. In the first
of these instances the danger lest the youthful faith
be dissipated in the medley of traditions, customs,
superstitions, myths, allegories and cosmic spec
ulations that flooded the lands of the eastern Medi
terranean, was met by the transformation of the
original Gospel into a body of mysteries, or sac
raments, as the indispensable media of the impar-
tation of the divine life, on the one hand; and, on
the other hand, the theoretical basis of these mys
teries was laid in the creation of the Nicene Creed

28 Creative Christianity
with its doctrine of three persons in one divine
essence and of two natures in the one divine person,
Jesus Christ. The second crisis was met by the
elaboration of a perfected system of sacraments in
tended to minister to all the various spiritual needs
of men, the perfection of a priestly order to whose
hands the sacraments were committed, and the prep
aration of a system of rules for the regulation of
the conduct of the individual and of a body of doc
trines to satisfy his mind. In other words, the peni
tential system and the scholastic theology grew out
of the second crisis. And the third crisis
issued in the institution of national churches
to serve the interests of both state and church,
in the simplification of the traditional ceremonial
to meet the desire of the common man to exper
ience immediate personal communion with God,
in the intellectual interpretation of the Christian re
ligion in "Confessions of Faith," and in the erection
of a final and sufficient standard of faith and prac
tice in the Bible.
Our present interest in these three achievements
lies in certain assumptions common to them all.
They may be reduced to the three following : First :
that with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world
an original supernatural deposit was committed to
men through a divine intervention in the natural
and normal course of things in this world. To
the Catholic, this supernatural deposit consists of
a positive heavenly grace communicated through

The Method of Study 29
certain tangible or visible facts and forms, known
as "mysteries" to the Greeks and "sacraments" to
the Romans. To the Protestant the supernatural
deposit is of "truth" or doctrines communicated to
the spirit of man directly by God himself (but, to
the Catholic, doctrines have a sacramental charac
ter — they are "mysteries," not necessarily to be
understood but obediently accepted). Second: the
bestowment of this deposit is inseparably connected
with a series of facts, similarly of a supernatural
order, the knowledge of which facts is preserved in
the Christian tradition. With the Catholic, these
supernatural facts continue to occur as an abiding
testimony to the presence of sacramental power
among men, but, with the Protestant these superna
tural occurrences are no longer necessary, since the
truth they attest is given once and forever. Third :
these authoritative traditions are given in the canon
ical Scriptures (say the Protestants) or in the pro
nouncements of an official priestly order or in both
(say the Catholics). The detailed development of
these capital assumptions as they appear in the var
iant Catholic and Protestant theories need not de
tain us further. It is sufficient to have pointed out
that the two chief divisions of Christendom hold
these fundamental tenets in common.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that all three
of these assumptions stand or fall together. The
first in order is the first in importance according to
the traditional interpretation. If it be not granted, the

30 Creative Christianity
special interest in the other two falls away. All three
have come increasingly under the criticism of Chris
tian men of late. It is doubted whether any absolute
external authority in matters of faith has been pro
vided or is needed. Similarly, it is doubted whether
the series of events recorded as occurring at the be
ginning of the Christian faith or at any stage of its
progress are to be considered as supernatural in the
sense commonly intended hitherto by that term. Sim
ilarly also, the question whether there was an original
supernatural (i. e., in the sense just spoken of)
deposit and, if so, what it was, is now open to per
fectly free discussion without prejudice to the Chris
tian character of him who raises the question. With
the gradual disappearance of sacramentalism this
assumption is coming to be seen as unnecessary and
even as an obstacle to the progress of the Christian
faith and to the permanency of its hold on the hearts
of intelligent men. The history of Christian doctrine
and practice has made it clear that both the form
ulations of Christian dogmas and confessions of
faith and the establishment of sacraments were called
forth by special circumstances and were meant to
serve special purposes that no longer obtain among
multitudes of Christian people. So much so is
this the case that it is no longer necessary in such
an assembly as this to argue the question in general.
I may add that I do not think that the situation, as
I have tried to describe it, is regrettable. So far
from being significant of a spiritual decline or a

The Method of Study 31
loss of confidence in the divine worth and perman
ency of the Christian faith, it seems to be indicative
of a growing clearness of the consciousness of our
relation to God and an immediacy of the assurance of
his favor that have led inevitably to the discarding of
those artificial supports, as a sound man throws away
the crutches which he found at one time necessary.
There is, however, a certain phase of the view
that a final and sufficient authority for faith can be
found in an objective deposit in the past that must
engage our attention for a few moments because of
the prominence given to it in some quarters at
the present time. I refer to the tendency to test all
that is professedly Christian by falling back upon
the certified teachings of Jesus.
Accompanying the growing dissatisfaction with
the creeds of the churches as standards of Christian
faith and with the view that the Bible in its entirety
constitutes the final authority, there has come a
regressive search for the Christian originals. One
of the results of this historical investigation is the
certainty that the authors of the New Testament
writings were not consciously presenting themselves
before the world as having been specially commis
sioned to prescribe for their fellowmen for all time
to come the doctrines to be believed as the condition
of salvation. It has also become plain that if they
had made in any instance a claim of this sort it
must now be subjected to those tests which are ordin
arily applied to all professions of special privilege

32 Creative Christianity
or power. That has been pretty generally granted
in our day. But with the disappearance of "apos
tolic authority" in the current sense there has come
a custom of falling back upon what is designated
"the teachings of Jesus" as the ground- work of
Christianity, all other teachings professedly Chris
tian, whether in the Bible or out of it, being subject
ed to the test of agreement with his. This view
represents, I say, the final remnant of the assumption
that there was an original deposit definitely given to
men in the creation of the Christian faith and that
this must be preserved in its purity and integrity if
the faith itself is to be preserved. We need not stay
even a moment at this point to develop the argument
that this is, after all, a legalistic interpretation of
Christianity or to show its defects on that account.
But we do wish to point out that this attitude toward
our problem raises two important questions. First
ly : do the traditional teachings of Jesus furnish an
adequate basis for the Christian faith as it has been
seen in actual operation in history? Secondly: can
it be affirmed with confidence that we really possess
the teachings of Jesus in any such form that they can
be called specifically his, as distinguished or distin
guishable from the views held by his followers con
cerning him and his teachings? An adequate reply
to the first of these questions must await a fuller
treatment of the entire theme of these lectures but
a preliminary statement may be made at the present
moment.

The Method of Study 33
In the first place, then, it is quite debatable wheth
er an orderly collection and arrangement of the
Master's teachings, supposing it could be made with
certainty, would truly represent to us what he taught.
It is possible that such a presentation of his teachings
might disclose logical contradictions or, at least,
disharmonies. For there is no convincing evidence
that the Master possessed or even sought to frame a
connected and ordered body of thought or doctrines
after the manner of the philosopher or professed
theologian. It is extremely unlikely, indeed, that
this was the case. The narratives and sayings found
in the first three of our canonical Gospels unite in
conveying the impression that Jesus' teachings were
of the occasionalist type. To a considerable degree
the Gospel of John conveys the same impression.
His discourse was not in the ordered form charac
teristic .of the professional preacher. The very at
tempts made by the evangelists to present here or
there an ordered discourse disclose the work on their
part of piecing together detached utterances. His
utterances consisted mostly of stories, similes, ejac
ulations, moral injunctions and warnings, words
of consolation, pity and encouragement to the dis
tressed, religious exhortations, prayers, meditations
and personal conversations often directed in their
course by the queries or responses of his hearers.
He was an itinerant oriental teacher. Both his pub
lic utterances and his private conversations sprang
commonly out of peculiar circumstances and in not

34 Creative Christianity
a few instances the time, place and reason for his
speaking as he did have been lost to view. So that
it is quite likely to turn out that the orderly and
systematic arrangement of the so-called teachings of
Jesus might issue in giving to them a meaning
which they did not have and could not have when
they were first uttered. It is even possible — and we
can say it with the very deepest reverence for him
in our hearts — that if all the teachings of Jesus
were brought together in the exact form in which
he gave them there might be found among them
some that would not commend themselves as fixed
and final to the faith of the most intelligent and
devout Christians of the present day. Men cannot
be called upon to believe things simply because of
the name that is attached to them but they only
believe truly when that which comes to them from
without is at the same time the fruitage of their most
prolonged and profoundest experiences. In this way
there always arises a subjective evaluation of all
that is offered to our faith and in this way also it
becomes impossible to place the whole of what is
offered upon a common level or to regard every
part as equally vital. In the end it will be found
that what is to be placed at the centre and what
at the periphery of the teaching of Jesus is deter
mined for each of us by the relative depths of their
inwardness to our own hearts' life.
In the second place — to recall a point made a
moment ago — the true significance and value of what

The Method of Study 35
Jesus said are never to be discovered simply by put
ting his teachings by themselves. Not only do identi
cal words spoken under different circumstances take
on a different meaning but they take on a different
meaning on the lips of different speakers especially
when the subject is one in which the deepest emo
tional, intellectual and moral interests are at stake.
The words of no man are to be understood apart.
from an insight into his character. We must see
the speaker either actually or through the enlightened
imagination if we are to know truly what he means.
This is particularly true of one whose whole person
ality, and not merely his words, impressed itself
mightily on men and constituted the decisive factor
in the crisis of their lives. Consequently, when we
study the words of Jesus we must fuse them with
his deeds and experiences as these are reflected upon
us from the minds of the men to whom we owe the
earliest portrait of him. This brings us to our
second question.
Do we really possess the teachings of Jesus in
such definite form and with such correctness of
representation that they can be called specifically
his? For a satisfactory answer to this question we
are dependent on the work of the higher criticism.
The time at our disposal forbids anything beyond
a summary of the outcome of the immense labors of
this branch of historical science in its relation to
our problem, the positions of different critics and the
details of their findings being necessarily passed by.

36 Creative Christianity
We turn first to the Gospel of John. This work
is the product of long sustained and profound reflec
tion on the meaning and worth of the career of
Jesus. The writer has reached a highly developed
interpretation of it and plainly desires to set this
forth in his evangel. In comparison with the other
Gospels, it is emphatically a presentation of the
discourses of Jesus. But narrative and discourse are
brought together in such a way, for the most part,
that the events selected furnish a suitable occasion
for the pronouncement of the messages. Just how
far the character and the content of the narratives
were determined in accordance with the author's pur
pose in the discourses it may not be possible for any
one to decide but it was very probably so to a large
extent. It is quite in keeping with the opening words
of this Gospel and the tone that pervades it through
out to say that it is the discourses that supply the
motive for the delineation of the happenings and
not the happenings that supply the best clue to the
character of the discourses. The latter also reflect
mostly a type of thinking very different in many of
their features from that which prevails in the other
Gospels. Then, too, the author writes with the dis
tinctly asserted aim of establishing in the minds of
his readers a thesis which he states, and the opening
words of his Gospel indicate that a philosophical
interpretation of Jesus' career has taken possession
of his mind. Naturally, therefore, the discourses
are to be taken as setting forth a certain construction

The Method of Study 37
of the meaning of Jesus' words and deeds expressed
in the author's manner of thought and speech.
Whether or no there is at any place in this Gospel
an exact reproduction of Jesus' sayings it is im
possible to say, but the discourses certainly express
the author's view of what Jesus meant in the whole
sweep of his life's purpose. The fourth Gospel is
an interpretation of Jesus by an author who lived
two generations later and the interpretation reflects
the deep and broad experiences through which he and
other Christians had passed in the interval. Such
an experience as theirs must have brought an en
richment of meaning to all that they had learned of
Jesus. The verdict we have reached respecting the Gospel
of John leads- to a similar verdict respecting the
other Gospels, though many critics are loth to part
with the inherited belief that the sayings of Jesus
reported in them are his own peculiarly and that
the acts described really occurred in the time and
manner presented to us. We cannot go into the
question of certain hypothetical documents which
are supposed to underlie these Gospels. The hy
pothesis of an original Markan document under
lying our present Mark and source of the narratives
in Matthew and Luke paralleling our Mark, the
hypothesis of an unknown document or documents
which are the common source of the parallel dis
courses in these Gospels, as well as several hypotheses
respecting the origin of portions peculiar to a single

38 Creative Christianity
work, may very well be true. The questions hereby
raised are all of much interest, but for our present
purposes it seems to matter little how many of them
are verifiable so long as we remember that the ulti
mate originals are not documents at all but stories
and teachings circulated by oral transmission from
one person to another, one community to another
and one generation to another, supported and vivified
by the florid imagination and native dramatic power
of the oriental mind undisciplined and untamed by
the severe rules of an unemotional logic. It is
well to remember too that the Gospels are the deposit
of the experiences of more than one generation of
Christians of this type, whose struggles to maintain
and propagate their faith amid poverty, persecution
and conflict must inevitably have been reflected in
the recitals that finally took the form in which we
have them now preserved.
It also matters little, perhaps, if we do not know
whose hands put our Gospels into their present form,
but their reasons for doing so are of great account.
For one thing, the reader is impressed with their
evident sincerity. When they affirm that Jesus did
or said thus and so, they believe that they are
speaking truth, though they think of truth, not in
our modern matter-of-external-fact, logical or mathe
matical way of viewing it, but according to the
worthfulness of the effects the things that were done
had upon themselves and would have, so they hoped,
on others. Not as we might feel obliged to do,

The Method of Study 39
have they detached themselves from the narratives
nor are they quoting in cold scientific spirit the
stories and sayings that had been handed down, but
everywhere they are giving us their own hearts'
convictions of what Jesus was to them and would
be to the world. Any one who is familiar with the
freedom which the oriental uses in his weaving to
gether of the strands of a story that has been given
to him or in his composition of a message which
he is to transmit will appreciate this consideration.
It need not surprise us, therefore, if we discover that
their reports of the sayings of Jesus represent not
so certainly the words he actually used as they do
their belief as to what he must have said. To a
degree we all have been feeling that it is so with
these writings and because of the tenderness and
the grandeur of the faith that is expressed in them
we have had a feeling of shrinking, with reason,
from a treatment of them that would tend to sacri
fice their religious worth to the strict historicity or
non-historicity of their accounts from the de facto
point of view.
When the question of the historicity of the Gospels
is now raised among us it is meant to ask whether
certain purported events of those days, which are
quite unparalleled in our times and would certainly
not be accepted as plain accounts of real occurrences
by many intelligent people if the events were repre
sented as contemporary with our own times, can be
accepted as accounts of matters of fact of that time

40 Creative Christianity
or of any time. Here is the plain question : Can we
believe, as these writings seem to affirm, that the
natural order and connection of events which are
universally accepted among educated people of our
day were non-existent in those days or that this
system, if it did exist in those days, was broken
into from without for a special purpose, even if
that purpose was the highest conceivable? The
traditional apologetical answer to this latter question
has been in the affirmative, but the answer by the
scientifically trained college man of today is as dis
tinctly in the negative. It will be said also by him
that in the examination of the question it is essential
that the characteristic habits of thought and speech
of those days be kept in mind and that, through dis
robing the narratives of the drapery thrown around
them by the popular imagination, we may hope to
find the substratum of plain fact underlying. Can
this be done with certainty?
Permit me to illustrate this point by introducing
an account recently given me by a lady medical mis
sionary in India of an event in her ministry of heal
ing. The story is here given in her own words
as far as I can recall them : — "In the course of my
professional work I was called to attend to a little
sick boy in one of the jungle villages. The mo
ment I saw him I knew that I had a serious brain
case on my hands. For his body had become rigid
and as he lay on his back it described a curve, so
that he rested on his heels and the back of his head.

The Method of Study 41
However, I went to work to do the best I could
under the circumstances, and had success. Before
very long the little laddie was fairly well again. A
short time afterwards I heard his mother telling the
story of his recovery to a group of women sitting
round her, and this is the way the story ran : 'My
boy was dead for three days. The healing woman
came and laid her hands upon him and, behold!
he lived.' " Here we have the characteristic story
telling of the oriental mind, innocent of our methods
of training. We observe its native dramatic power
here at work unhindered. It delights in the mar
vellous, the mysterious, the miraculous. Its narra
tives are a series of pictures colored with the rich
imagery so conveniently at hand. The popular
oriental mind revels in this, but it knows little and
cares less for the close concatenation of causes and
effects which seems so important to us.
Let us suppose that, instead of a production of
the free imagination of the Indian woman's un
trained mind, we had before us the physician's own
expert report of the case given to an assembly of
medical men. Then we should find the story pre
sented from the standpoint of the profession. It
would be an exact and accurate account in technical
terms of what actually occurred, as the physician saw
it. The attention of the hearer would be attracted
to those features of the case which seemed the most
significant from the point of view of medical science.
To medical men this account would be entirely

42 Creative Christianity
natural and the physician's language would interest
them only in so far as it enabled them to visualize
the processes that marked the achievement of the
healing art. Yet how few of us who are untrained
in the technique of medical science could gather
from the narrative an intelligent view of what really
occurred! Or suppose, again, that, instead of the
Indian woman's semi-poetical representation of the
occurrence or the physician's professional statement,
we had before us the narrative of an eye-witness of
the physician's work who had never come under
professional instruction in this field but was pos
sessed of the intelligence of the ordinary modern
man amongst us. Then we should have still another
type of narrative. It would be such as the historian
could make use of as a correct statement of matter-
of-fact, though it might furnish only a very partial
explanation of what occurred, so that the use to be
made of it would be very limited.
It is plain that the manner in which the historian
could make use of these narratives would depend a
good deal on the particular aim of his investigation.
If it were to write an account of the progress of
medical science and practice in its treatment of affec
tions of the brain tissue, he would employ the
materials of the physician's recital exclusively. If
his aim were to set before his readers the quality of
the service the missionaries are rendering to suffer
ing humanity in those regions where disease and
pain are very prevalent and medical care difficult to

The Method of Study 43
obtain, he would depend mainly on the matter-of-
fact statement of our non-professional man of aver
age intelligence, a man who has as little of the love
of the mysterious and supernatural as he has of
technical medical knowledge. But if, instead of
either of these, his purpose were to acquaint himself
and others with the character and power of the
spiritual impact of the Christian spirit upon the
minds of India's jungle dwellers, the woman's dra
matic story would be material to his purpose. She had
access to no other means of representing the marvel.
Her statement is valuable material for the historian
because it discloses in a way in which neither of the
others can, the working of the Christian spirit upon
the minds of people of that kind. It may be that
her story is the most important of the three because
it brings us face to face with the facts which are
the most significant of all to us. Her story is to
us the dramatization of a spiritual process and it
touches our sympathies in a manner in which, per
haps, the others could not.
Where, then, do the stories of Jesus' words and
doings belong? In what particular lies their chief
interest for us? Unhesitatingly we decide, not to
the first of the three mentioned. Precise scientific
knowledge is utterly lacking. Do they belong, then,
to the second class? In a minor degree only. The
connectedness which we look for between the parts
of a modern story is found only in certain places
in the narratives. While the writers undoubtedly do

44 Creative Christianity
attempt to give information concerning the origin
of their faith, it is not usually traced to the normal
working of forces operative in human life generally,
as we perceive them, but to forces of a different
order. While we, with our training in historical
perspective and method would fain make out of the
stories an account of the life of Jesus it is quite
certain that this is not the aim of these narratives.
The Gospels and narrative elements found elsewhere
in the New Testament belong distinctly to the third
class. Everywhere the characteristic oriental mind,
untouched by the methods of our schools, is at work
dramatizing everything, setting forth with all the
power of religious emotion the coming in upon the
lives of men of a miraculous intervention of unseen
powers of the world above and the world below.
What the Gospels and other New Testament writings
disclose to us is the impression which the career
of Jesus made upon the minds of men at the time
of the writing and shortly before.
If, now, the question is asked, "What was it that
really happened as the result of which these writings
appeared?" we must say that if it is meant hereby to
ask, "How many of the deeds and words ascribed
to Jesus occurred just as they are represented as
having occurred?" we must say that while the ques
tion is legitimate and even inevitable, the prospect
of getting a satisfactory answer to it by the methods
of historical investigation is very poor. If one
attempts to give a definite answer it is more likely

The Method of Study 45
to disclose his presuppositions than it is to release the
external facts reported by eye-witnesses. Not only
so, but even if we could settle upon a reliable record
of the observable external facts of which New Tes
tament records are a representation, it is by no means
certain that much would be gained thereby for our
religious purposes. For the ultimate interest we,
as religious people, have in these accounts, lies in the
narrator's representative state of mind which is dis
closed in the accounts. The truly important event,
that which gives the New Testament its tremendous
hold upon us, is the production of the state of mind
which appears in the narratives and the other writ
ings and which has been communicated with growing
power to succeeding generations of people. The
external events happened a long time ago and will
never happen again. They are forever past. But
Christianity is surely more than a memory. The
state of mind into which these early Christians
came is not a thing of the past. The spiritual im
pact of it has persisted with ever expanding power
down to our times and seems destined to continue
while the world shall last. The creative force of the
faith that utters itself in the New Testament is
what we are thinking of at this point and our aim
is to understand the meaning and permanent char
acter of the spiritual forces that came into action
in the life of believers at the time.
When this point in our reflection on the genius
of the Christian faith is reached, it becomes evident

46 Creative Christianity
that we are confronted at the outset with the demand
that we undertake a critical estimate of the worth of
of what is found in the New Testament. It also
becomes evident that this estimate cannot be intel
ligently and adequately arrived at until the utterances
of religious faith found in the New Testament have
been placed in an unbroken chain of continuity with
the manifold expressions of religious faith found
throughout the entire Christian era to the present
time. As students we can avail ourselves of no
"short cut" to the discovery of the worth of Christian
faith at any period in the long story of its progress.
If we would really come to know broadly and deeply
what it was that came to make its home in human
hearts when Jesus came to the world we must live
in our own souls through the successive stages of
the life of the Christian faith and let each stamp
its character on our sympathetic mind.
We come here, at last, to our question : What is
it that comes to the spirits of men in the Christian
religion ? What is it the Christian religion brings to
pass in the life of humanity as its own achievement?
Of what is Christianity creative in the world ? What
is its genius?
A reply may be made to this question, of course,
by pointing to the creeds and confessions of faith
or the systems of doctrine or belief that have been
formulated as the result of the impact of the Chris
tian faith on the minds of men. Or we may be
directed to the liturgies of the churches or its organ-

The Method of Study 47
ized activity as exhibiting its productivity in the
realm of emotion or will. But, even so, it is neces
sary in respect to all these to determine in how far
they are genuine products of the faith and the out
come of such a critical estimate is likely to be the
fixing of an irreducible minimum of each of these
as constituting the essence of Christianity. Our
reply will take a different direction. We know
nothing of an irreducible minimum in this area. We
know of nothing that has remained or can remain
unchanged from the inception of the Christian faith
down to the present. To conceive the Christian's
task as that of conserving something given once for
all is to deprive it of its momentum and blot out its
vision. In accordance with what was said at an earlier
point in this lecture we shall also hope to avoid any
arbitrary determination of the issue, like that of
selecting any one of the multitude of heart-searching
and will-subduing utterances of the New Testament
and making that cardinal to the whole discussion.
Nor shall we depend on any differentiation of the
teachings of Jesus from the teachings of his first
followers, even if the two should not be identical,
inasmuch as this distinction always turns out in
the end more or less arbitrary and unsatisfactory.
Nor, again, shall we make the integrated and organ
ized content of the New Testament teachings — price
less spiritual heritage though it is— our final and
perfect test of all that is professedly Christian. For

48 Creative Christianity
it may very well be that in the depth of spirituality
experienced by the authors and in the period of time
and range of human history covered by these writ
ings there was insufficient opportunity for the ulti
mate purpose and highest motive power of the
Christian faith to become clear. Nor, once again,
can we be content to base our interpretation directly
upon the creeds and confessions of faith that have
appeared at times of spiritual crisis in the Christian
movement. While these are indicative of the man
ner in which the genius of Christianity was unfold
ing itself they all bear the stamp of the peculiar situa
tion the framers of those statements had to face
and the intellectual, emotional and moral character
istics of the men who composed them, with all the
limitations incident to their condition. Besides, it
is quite uncertain that these formulations are the
most significant thing Christians have done to ex
hibit their true faith. It may very well be that the
life of the private Christian family, the social cus
toms they have followed, the forms of government
they have set up and the liturgies or other forms
of worship in their churches are as significant as
their doctrines.
In other words, the genius of the Christian faith
is to be discovered through a study of the whole
career of the Christian people in its great general
characters. For, be it remembered that, while we
speak abstractly of Christianity as if it were a some
thing in itself, it is found nowhere but in Chris-

The Method of Study 49
tians — not in a book or a ritual or an organization,
but just in human persons. The story of the Chris
tian religion is not at bottom a story of those things
which more or less correctly, whether abstractly or
concretely, are taken to represent it, but it is the
story of the people who came long ago under the
power of a great personality and continue in their
loyalty to him. When we seek to designate the dis
tinctive character of these people it is not necessary
that we point to any positive addition that may be
said to have been made to the native resources or
capital of men. It may be that what we call the
Christian religion is just the native inner power of
the human spirit coming into action in a distinctive
way. It may be that the coming of Jesus among
men released hidden energies of their spirits and
that their action is so constantly creative that, so to
say, the Christianity of today will be less than true
Christianity tomorrow.
There remains but one word more to say in this
introductory lecture. I refer to the subjective (per
sonal) factor which is indispensable in the interpreta
tion of the Christian faith. All interpretation is at
bottom a species of evaluation. The interpreter
makes his approach, selects his material and places
his emphasis according to his hitherto estimate of
what is worthful. That estimate is no merely ex
ternal, scientific appraisement but springs from the
inmost experiences of personal good. This is not
an arbitrary element in the solution of the problem,

50 Creative Christianity
though it is subjective. If the experiences referred
to were the individual's alone, then the danger of
arbitrariness might be serious but this danger dis
appears progressively with the discovery of a com
munity life of which they are the source or the
product. At this point we are reminded of the Roman
Catholic contention that the power to make a true
interpretation of the Christian faith lies solely and
wholly within the Church. Over against the Protest
ant affirmation that every man has the power and
the right to interpret the revealed will of God for
himself stands the Catholic insistence that we are
to be protected from the caprice and arbitrariness
of the individual by the authoritative tradition pre
served in its purity and integrity within the Church.
Underneath this view of the matter is to be found
a profound truth perverted, as we have so often
found, in the interest of an ecclesiastical order. It
must be acknowledged that the individual who has
within himself, independently of others, the power
to interpret the Christian religion is a hypothetical
personality. In what minute degree, I wonder, has
an illiterate Hottentot, who has never lived within
the atmosphere of a Christian community the power
to apprehend the meaning of the Christian faith?
The great spiritual forces that have come into action
in human life where this faith has had its home are
nearly altogether alien to him. They have not
entered into the texture of his life. He has not

The Method of Study 51
had a communion with others in these things. The
whence of his spiritual life is vastly other than the
Christian. The New Testament with all its uni-
versalism of appeal would remain mostly a sealed
book to him who had no contact with Christian per
sonalities. I have chosen this extreme example in
order to bring out the principle. How differently
equipped is he who from his infancy inward has
breathed the air of the Christian family, or the
church, the community and the nation in which
Christian grace, mercy and peace have been the
chief forces moulding the lives of the people! In
thousands of ways of which at the best he is only
dimly conscious these have wrought his spiritual con
stitution and made him the kind of man he is. The
people to whom he owes this endowment were in
their turn made what they are by the quality of
Christian life to which they fell heirs. In other
words, we owe the type of spirituality which we
have to a spiritual inheritance from the past. Apart
from this we could never have come to be what we
are. Thus the power to interpret the faith, so far
from being an endowment obtained ab extra, is just
itself a gift imparted to us by the faith as it has
lived in other persons and through them been trans
mitted to ourselves. Wherefore, the very interpreta
tion I would now offer you has been constituted for
me by the inward condition of the community of
Christians, large or small, to whom I owe my very
self.

52 Creative Christianity
And yet, the whole truth of the matter does not
thereby come to light. For the interpretation which
you or I may place upon the Christian faith reflects
the faith only as it has been transfused by the fire
of our personal selfhood. No man's personality is
purely a product of the community's life. No more
is it merely a duplicate of any other life that was
ever lived. In that transfusion of the traditional
Christianity that takes place in any one of us it is
become somewhat other than it was before it became
the centre of our soul's life. For there are within
each of us endowments that are peculiarly our own.
There is truly an "isolation" of personality from
personality that grows increasingly "defined" as
Tennyson puts it, with the years. This makes prog
ress possible. Thus the Christian faith is construed
within each of us somewhat differently from the way
in which it ever was construed before we came. The
faith of others, as it impinged upon our inward life
awoke into action the energies of our souls and, by
the action of these energies of ours in response, the
faith itself became in each of us what it never would
or could have been without us. In this way the
Christian tradition is now in process of evolution.
The Christianity of yesterday was creative of the
Christianity of today but at the same time the Chris
tianity of today is more and somewhat other than
the Christianity of yesterday. For it recreates that
which came from the past and makes it new.
Thus, then, we may say that the interpreter of

The Method of Study 53
Christianity remakes it by his very act of interpreta
tion and the Christianity which he passes on to others
by his interpretation possesses a character different
in degree from that which he received. The inter
preter is always a prophet. He puts forth, as it
were, a faith that is yet to be. Christianity is cease
lessly creative. It is ceaselessly in process of being
created. Accordingly, our task in these lectures is to point
out the manner in which the inner life of the Chris
tian people has fulfilled itself by constantly recon
structing the forces operative in it, as the evangel
wins new converts and as the context of their lives
calls forth spiritual activities of a new kind. We
shall specify three most significant directions in
which this creative action has moved. Firstly, we
shall study Christianity as the progressive discovery
of the perfect personality. Secondly, we shall ob
serve it in action bringing into being the better world.
Thirdly, we shall find in it the power to disclose the
meaning of the cosmos, moulding the universe as
an intellectual, aesthetic and volitional unity into the
likeness of the spirit that dominates the lives of the
Christian people.

CHAPTER II.
LECTURE II. THE DISCOVERY OF THE PERFECT
PERSONALITY
THE use of the term personality in the designa
tion of the subject of this lecture constitutes
an invitation for each of us to participate in
the stimulating discussions which a philosophical
treatment of this idea has called forth in our
times. That so much attention should now be
given to the study of personality in circles of
learning and in the literature of reflection is
suggestive of the centre of interest in the minds
of Protestant religious people. The limitations
of our present task forbid an excursion into
that attractive field, and the natural presumption on
my part that you are all in possession of, at least,
a working apprehension of the psychological and
philosophical implications of the conception of per
sonality renders an undertaking of the kind men
tioned unnecessary here. However, I think that I
may fitly make a few brief statements preliminary
to our discussion.
In the life of every human being there arises
sooner or later the power of being aware of one's
54

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 55
self as distinguishable from all things else and of
affirming one's selfhood in the face of the whole
assembly of facts which constitute our field of knowl
edge and action. At what point of time in the inner
and outer life of a child the beginning of this action
can be discovered neither memory nor the most care
ful psychical research enables us to determine, but
when once the experience of self-awareness occurs
it is never lost in the spiritual life of any normal
human being. As this mysterious power progres
sively unfolds itself in life it seeks to appropriate
the whole body of existence and relate it to itself
as material for its self-action and to maintain its
own dignity and worth in the face of all the forces
that impinge upon it and threaten it with destruction.
It is not only this power of self-distinction from
all things else that calls forth our wonder. We are
equally impressed with its power to recognize other
selves of its own order — in whatsoever manner it
may be done. It discovers itself in discovering them
and by living in and with them arrives at its own
selfhood. Thus there appears the triangle of self-
consciousness — the "I," the "thou" and the "he," —
each of them indispensable to the others. Person
ality is inseparable from this fellowship and in the
perfection of this fellowship finds its own perfection.
The interest in personality is the highest interest
of life, whether it be in the realm of theory or the
realm of practice. The story of its self-fulfillment
is the most thrilling that can be written, for all

56 Creative Christianity
others are tributary to it. The story of the progress
of science and art, of industry and commerce, of the
social and economic life becomes in its climax the
story of the manner in which men come to them
selves in this world, of the manner in which they
stamp the qualities of their spirit upon everything
they meet and of their successful assertion of
supremacy over the whole world of objective fact.
We feel that the theme of our discussion at this
time introduces us to the very heart of human life.
It is fitting that an attempt to exhibit the genius
of Christianity should begin at this point. Our
exposition begins naturally with the books of the
New Testament, since these are the earliest records
we possess of our faith and since these writings
concern themselves pre-eminently with the career and
significance of that personality that has dominated
the course of Christianity — Jesus Christ. In at
tempting to say anything at all about this theme I
am assuming that the education which the young
people are now receiving in the schools is of the
most serious import and am proceeding on the as
sumption that the spiritual needs which this educa
tion has created in their hearts must be met squarely
if they are to be the future apostles of our faith.
It is these destined leaders of the people I have in
mind in the present discussions.
Let us suppose that we had in our midst today
a young man who, having passed through the intel
lectual training given in one of our colleges, was in

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 57
possession of the range of knowledge and highly
disciplined habits of mind imparted by the prevailing
methods of education in our higher institutions of
learning, and who, while well acquainted with the
mythology and legendary lore of oriental peoples
generally, had never read the New Testament or
known till this day that the narratives it contains
existed. Let us picture to ourselves, I say, such a
youth discovering accidentally a copy of the New
Testament and proceding to read it through without
assistance from any one who professed to be an
interpreter of it. He would soon perceive that these .
writings, as I have just said, concern themselves
principally with two tasks, namely, the story of the
career of Jesus of Nazareth and an explanation of
the meaning of his presence and place in the world.
He would first proceed, I think, to evaluate these
accounts in terms of his appreciation of truly his
torical facts and their place in the making of our
present lives. We can surmise without much diffi
culty some of the thoughts this intellectually keen,
heathen young man would be likely to have.
It is pretty certain that his attention would first be
attracted to the extraordinary occurrences recorded
and that he would detect resemblances between them
and the extraordinary events associated in the minds
of people with the beginnings of other faiths. Also,
there can be little doubt that a reader with his mental
tendencies would regard such accounts as the virgin
birth of Jesus, the visions and dreams associated

58 Creative Christianity
with it, his feeding of thousands of people at a single
time from a few barley cakes, his walking on the
water of the lake to go aboard a boat and rejoin
his disciples, his producing a calm in the midst of
the storm by commanding the waves and winds to
be quiet, his raising of the dead back to life by the
utterance of a word — there can be little doubt, I say,
in the minds of those who are familiar with the
effect of thoroughly scientific training upon the
minds of men in our day, that this hypothetical youth
would class these portions of the narratives with
the folklore, legends or mythology he had already
found in the traditions of other religious faiths or
had read in their scriptures. If he also finds that
similar things are recorded of the followers of Jesus
for a time and are referred to his action through
them, will he not suppose that the one body of narra
tives is as likely to prove legendary as the other?
And if this young scholar finds that those books
of the New Testament in which there is little narra
tive or none at all nevertheless assume on the part
of Jesus and his followers the possession of similar
or greater powers than those mentioned in the narra
tives and that the names and powers which other
religions attached to the objects of their worship
correspond to those which are here connected with
the name of Jesus as descriptions of his dignity, will
he not conclude that this attitude of mind is charac
teristic of the New Testament as a whole ? It does
not follow that he would entertain any disrespect

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 59
toward these works on this account, for if he were
religiously disposed as well as scientifically trained
he might feel that human faith is so mighty a thing
that it is unable to express itself adequately without
resort to some such modes of utterance as these and
in consequence he might view their representations
as symbols of faith rather than records of external
fact. There is another series of impressions this young
man would receive from the reading of these little
books. He would find that in all these writings of
the New Testament — whether narrative, epistolary
or discursive — mingled with the features mentioned
as so foreign to our customary modes of thinking,
there are utterances of the sincerest and profoundest,
most stimulating and most comforting devotion. He
would find that with the sternest moral judgments
upon human action there is united the tenderest in
terest in the happiness of men and evidence of the
most unselfish effort to come to the hearts of the
poor, the homeless, the friendless, the ignorant and
the erring with the help they need. He would find
in the writers a serene confidence that they who share
these things are the destined leaders of mankind and
the heirs of a perfect blessedness in a world to come.
He would find also in them the spirit of the noblest
self-sacrifice and a courage that shrank not from
pain or death for the sake of their faith. I am
sure that our young man would find his heart touched
by these things and yearning at times for an inner

60 Creative Christianity
acquaintance with some of the experiences set forth
in these writings at the same time that he regarded
some of the things related there as legendary and
their hold on the minds of men as temporary.
There is a further step. This reader would per
ceive that those fine and high qualities of soul
that stir him so deeply are as closely associated with
the name of Jesus in the minds of the writers as
are the narratives some of whose features seem in
credible as matters of fact. The question, "How
came it to be so?" would force itself on his mind and
demand an answer. The hope of discovering the
answer would compel him to examine with the ut
most thoroughness open to him the whole situation
out of which these writings came, in order to find
out how it was they ever came into existence at all.
I believe that if he were a young man of sincere
purpose and balanced judgment he would rise from
his study with the firm and overwhelming convic
tion that, if there is to be any explanation at all of
the narratives, it must point to a real human per
sonality who lived among those people and impressed
himself so powerfully on their minds that they could
find no better way of telling what he had done for
them and what they expected in consequence than
by setting forth the force of his action and presence
among them in terms of those deeds and powers
that were customarily ascribed to beings of a divine
order. The thing they did would be quite unnatural
for men with our training but was perfectly natural

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 61
to men of their habits of thought and speech.
We may be pretty sure that such a student as I
have spoken of would not be content to allow his
interest in the accounts he found in the New Testa
ment to drop away at this point. He would find
in the situation an invitation to undertake the task
at the very outset of acquiring a clear knowledge of
the matters of fact that may be conceived as basic
to everything else. He would become one of the
large number of critical scholars who have sought
by the most effective application of established meth
ods of historical research to distinguish the "objec
tive facts" of Jesus' career from those elements of
the narratives which are due to the religious faith
and fervor, the personal hopes and expectations,
the inventive and constructive imagination of his
followers. The outcome of the efforts that have been
made in this direction are now fairly familiar to us
all. The attempt to exhibit before us the actual
Jesus as he was in himself, by eliminating those
features which a native, popular pictorial art threw
about him, by removing the oriental drapery from
his figure has been, on the whole, disappointing. Of
this the prolific crop of modern "lives" of Jesus is
very convincing evidence.
In the case of the investigations that proceeded on
the assumption that the contents of the narratives
could be taken at their face value as eye-witnesses'
accounts of facts and that the four main narratives
could be construed by a process of harmonization

62 Creative Christianity
into a single consistent narrative it has become
plain that apparent inconsistencies cannot be removed
without violence. Where, without insisting on the
harmony, it has been tried to write a broadly reliable
"life" of Jesus it has become evident that the original
narrators did not have this distinctly in mind and
that the materials necessary are inadequately sup
plied. Where the presence of interpretative elements
in the narratives has been clearly recognized and it
has been sought to remove these in order to retain
only the plainly certified facts, the resultant story
is destitute of the inspiring faith that makes the
biblical narratives such a mighty power in the world
and becomes as well suited to weaken faith as to
arouse it. The resultant figure of Jesus, when a
purely scientific criticism has offered its product to
us, is so clearly modernized that one is led to wonder
how the commonplace figure that is left in place of
the Jesus pictured in the Gospels could ever be
expected to arouse in anybody the warm-hearted
and conquering faith which those early Christians
undoubtedly possessed. We have seen already that
no relief can be found by seeking to retain his teach
ings rather than his personality because, in the first
place, it cannot be done with assurance and, in the
second place, because they obtain their meaning
mostly from the character of him who gave them.
With him left out, they tend to sink to the level of
commonplaces. Summarily, then, as to this point: We must

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 63
say that we have not in the New Testament a simple
matter-of-fact statement of what Jesus said and did,
and the more we try to make it appear so, the more
evident is our failure. We have no clear right to
claim possession of a verbatim report of his teach
ings or anything like it. True, there is in many
places a marked originality in appearance, betokening
the influence of a powerful personality. His stamp
in a general way is on them. It is quite possible
that there are instances, few or many, of exact
quotations from his lips and in many passages there
is a verisimilitude that inclines us to say, "This is
Jesus' own utterance and no one else's." But we
can never be quite sure that the verisimilitude is not
owing to the fitness of such sayings to the state of
mind those people had come to or to our own state of
mind. What we are sure of is, their attitude toward
him. We are sure that what they ascribed to him
by way of word or deed was what they believed he
had said or done or must have said or done under
the circumstances described. Or there were circum
stances of their own that demanded a word from
him to sustain their hearts or a picture of his doings
that would fire them with faith and courage. The
undertaking to separate his real words and deeds
from what they ascribed to him is a very precarious
one and often clearly impossible of execution. It can
never supply a sure basis for faith. It is my firm
conviction that what we do possess is of vastly
greater account. Instead of an irreducible residuum

64 Creative Christianity
of facts and sayings standing by themselves as the
foundation of a superstructure of a modern faith
we have an impressive picture of Jesus as he wrote
himself down in the hearts of men around him.
And it was done in such a way that the image of
his person could never be deleted but went on re
peating itself with ever growing force from genera
tion to generation. His inward life and career and
theirs became for ever inseparable.
Hence the New Testament representations of the
character and career of Jesus are at the same time
a genuine transcript of their own. In the midst of
the varied and often trying experiences through
which they were passing as they sought to sustain
their strength against the attacks to which they were
constantly subjected or to advance it among the
people with whom they mingled their inspiration and
their comfort came from the memory of the days
of his presence with them. All — words and deeds
and sufferings of his — were transfigured in their
meaning because these men were sharers of his ex
periences and bearers of his cross. This is what we
find in the Gospels as well as in the other writings.
The evangelists' renderings of his teachings reflect
their own as well. Their pictures of his career reflect
the character of theirs. The sayings they attributed
to him were the things they also said to one another
as they communed together of their faith; the mes
sages they attributed to him when he spoke to the
people were the messages they were constantly giving

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 65
to other men; his sermons were their sermons, his
parables their parables, his diatribes against the
Pharisees and other perverters of the truth were
the polemic they were accustomed to deliver against
their Jewish opponents; and the promises they
ascribed to him as he spoke to the sorrowing, the
tempted and the sinning, were the promises they were
accustomed to offer to people in those circumstances.
Everywhere the two are so closely melted together
that the attempt to separate them becomes more or
less arbitrary. What these men did in this regard
seemed perfectly natural at the time and it was quite
in keeping with the literary customs of the age.
Are we, then, the worse off because the separa
tion cannot be made ? Far from it ! The impossi
bility of making a clear distinction between the
things that Jesus said and did, on the one hand, and
the things his disciples conceived he must have said
and done, on the other hand, so far from being a
disadvantage to the Christian faith, turns out to be,
on the contrary, a gain. For, in the first place, a
knowledge of what he was in himself, apart from
his place in the hearts of his followers and the glow
ing utterances in their spontaneous confessions of
his worth to them, would yield us little more than
an unfeeling and dumb skeleton of One whose des
tiny was to be alive forevermore. We can have
little interest in him or in any one else apart from
the impression he made on men at the time and after
wards. And yet this knowledge of what Jesus was

66 Creative Christianity
in himself is just what the authoritative creeds and
confessions of faith have professed to furnish. Nat
urally enough, these professions lead to doubt and
unfaith toward that which is offered as the object
of faith. What, indeed, is any person or individual
detached from those relations of fellowship with
other persons in whose midst he lives? A doctrine
of the person of Christ which aims at setting him
by himself as a self-contained individual apart from
the life he created in others by his fellowship with
them yields us only a phantasm that bewilders and
confounds us. And, in the next place, the safest
index we can find to the true worth of any one lies
not in the manner in which he stands distinct and soli
tary, complete in himself independently of that which
he finds for himself in others, but it lies in the very
attitude toward himself which he creates in others'
minds, so that their character and his have become
inseparable through the manner in which he has
written himself down in them. The greatest trib
ute to be offered to the worth of any personality is
to be discovered in the transformation he has
wrought in others. This transformation in them
is always reflected back upon the image they retain
of him as its source. Paradoxical though it may
seem, it is of more consequence for us to discover
what Jesus' followers believed he said and did than
to know exactly what he said and did apart from
their belief.
We may say, therefore, that many of the marvels

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 67
which these men accredited to Jesus as his achieve
ments may turn out to be of much less significance
and importance to us than something else of which
they give little more than hints or to which — if we
except in part the fourth Gospel — they refer rarely.
Greater than his healings of the sick by a touch or
by a word, his feeding of hungry multitudes by a
miraculous multiplication of loaves, his restoration
of dead men to life; greater than his sayings and
discourses — nay, greater than his very example of
"the creed of creeds in loveliness of perfect deeds,"
is the faith in him which he created in the hearts
of his disciples. The others passed a long time
ago. If such as these were our chief inheritance
from him, the more remote they become in time, the
less effective must they become as directive of our
lives or standards of our conduct. We might go
further and say that under these conditions the fur
ther back from him we stand in time, the less en
couragement his career would give to us. For he
would be left standing out as a solitary form on a
distant horizon, or a sudden and brief interpolation
of a higher existence into the lower plane of ours,
and the long and fruitless waiting for his return
would issue in a loss of the hope he temporarily
aroused in our hearts and, perchance, a growing bit
terness would come in its stead. It is surely of
great significance that, instead of this, the confidence
of men in his worth has grown from generation to
generation and never did the reverence for him or

68 Creative Christianity
the sense of his indispensability appear greater than
today. Undoubtedly the distinctive thing about the New
Testament is the effort of the writers to delineate
the personality of Jesus. Dismissing from our
thought the prospect of showing that the picture is
scientifically verifiable or even absolutely trust
worthy as a record of observable fact, we see that
these writings were produced in the interest of faith
and that the features of their dominating figure are
a transcript of faith. The measure of their success
here is their great achievement. For they have suc
ceeded in constructing the portrait of a human figure
that has seemed to countless multitudes and scores
of generations of men the answer of God to their
longings for the vision of a personal state that will
satisfy their deepest and purest aspirations. How
did those people become possessed of this unparal
leled power? For it seems at the first glance, at
least, that it is one thing for such a personality to
appear in the world and quite another thing for
men to apprehend and appreciate him. Which of the
prophets did not the fathers kill? Which of them
do not the fathers still persist in killing? On the
other hand, however, how can we say that the man
is perfect who does not succeed in arousing in the
minds of those who have the best means of knowing
him the awareness of his perfection? Our first
answer to the question as to the source of the por
trait of Jesus in the New Testament must be, of

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 69
course, that it is to be found in the actual presence
among men of the all-subduing, all-inspiring per
sonality of Jesus who awakened them to the con
sciousness of an ideal that was so intimately united
with his actual life that it must, perforce, forever
after bear his name. But one would like to know
how much of the picture was derived from their
spiritual inheritance prior to his coming, how much
was due to their own endeavors apart from their
actual contact with him, and how much they owed
distinctively to his own active impression upon them.
To questions such as these there can be, in the
very nature of the case, no decisive answer. The
unity of the inner life of these people can be as little
divided into separate sections as can the inner life
of any one of us today. It may be true that no man's
inner life is a perfect unity. It may be that analysis
can disclose various factors constitutive of any man's
character, but in any case the analysis proceeds tenta
tively and the outcome is of uncertain value. No
man's spiritual nature is a composite. The spiritual
inheritance of these people, the contribution which
Jesus made to their inner life by his personal con
tact with them and the natural fruitage of their
own spontaneous spiritual activities were all fused in
one and made forever inseparable. So that, para
doxical again as it may seem, while we must say
that Jesus imparted to them the power to work their
great achievement of giving to the world the image
of their divine Lord, that he summoned forth in

70 Creative Christianity
them the latent energies that carried their faith and
their longing upward to God (and these energies,
but for him, so far as we can tell, would else have
lain forever dormant and dead), and that he
gave himself to them in the plenitude of his soul-
penetrating power; at the same time we must
say that it was they who made it possible for
him to come to the rest of mankind in the
way he has been doing. Whether or no there
be in all men the same inherent ability which
they showed, it is plain that it was these people
who brought into action the deep spiritual discern
ment that fitted them to make the discovery of his
worth to mankind. It was they who gave him to
the world. And they did it, not by a sort of photo
graphic process which leaves the personal originality
and creative power of the artist out of the picture;
nor by a sort of short-hand preservation of his words
which would exclude the interpretative genius of
the reporter and leave us only a fixed law that "kills,"
and cannot "make alive"; but they did it -by filling
the portrait with the whole wealth of their spiritual
nature. In the figure of Jesus which has been trans
mitted to the later Christian generations he and they
are for ever joined in one. They succeeded in con
ceiving the image of a personality that they believed
would conquer the world, and the course of history
has been a progressive confirmation of their faith.
He succeeded in imparting to them the inspira
tion to this achievement with such impressive force

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 71
that the Perfect One that floated into their mind and
out again into the great sea of human life was, so
far as they could tell, just Jesus as he was in himself.
And were they not right ? In any instance to which
We can point, the real man, the true man, is not
some hypothetical figure standing by himself apart
but the man whose inmost soul is reflected in the
souls of others.
It seems, then, that when we talk of these spiritual
possessions or achievements of men we are exposing
ourselves to the charge of the purely formal logician
that we are arguing in a circle. So it may be. Per
chance we cannot escape the charge. Perchance
there is no need that we should. If the laws of
formal logic are fixed, the standard of personal
character is not. The personal character that is
fixed loses in us its personality. The discovery of
the perfect personality is gradual.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the early
Christians as a body regarded Jesus as morally per
fect or sinless, that is, when the question arose in
their minds with such force as to demand an answer.
To be sure, the distinct affirmation of it is very rare.
At best there are only three or four places, found in
certain of the more reflective portions of the New
Testament, where the assertion is made, and there
it is only partially explicit. It is not possible for us
in the present connection to undertake a discussion
of the separate passages where such statements are
made. It is enough to point out that they indicate

72 Creative Christianity
that, as the theoretical interpretation of the faith
progressed, the question was sure to arise. The man
ner of its treatment would depend much on the con
ception of sin which obtained among the people to
whom the writings referred. Far more signifi
cant than any number of direct assertions of his im-
maculateness of character is the implication conveyed
by the entire attitude of Christians toward his name.
It showed implicit confidence, absolute trust, unques
tioning loyalty to the meaning of all he said and did
as they understood it. They had found in him what
they had longed for and what, as they believed, the
whole world needed.
I feel, however, that the very raising of the
theoretical question of Jesus' sinlessness tends to
divert attention from the governing interest of these
writings — and for that matter, from the governing
interest of true religious faith anywhere. The su
preme interests of life are the practical. The
theoretical are quite subsidiary and must not be al
lowed to dominate the life of a believer. Our New
Testament books were not, to any appreciable degree,
produced by philosophical idealists who were trying
to present in reasoned form a character that would
satisfy permanently the longings of men for a con
crete ideal — even though one might say they accom
plished it. They and their readers belonged to the
class that were and still are immersed in cares and
anxieties, sins and sorrows of many kinds and most
of them of a very concrete sort. The only kind of

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 73
perfection they cared about, after all, in any one
fot whom their allegiance might be claimed was his
perfect ability to save them. Their regard for Jesus
was not the wondering admiration of some abstractly
perfect character, such as recluses of old or senti
mentalists of our time might dream of. Nor was
it a sublime approval of the sentiments he was said
to be continually expressing. This would mean
little more than to say that he pleased them because
he was so much like themselves as they pictured them
selves at their best.
The important thing about these books is not the
belief or theory of the writers that one had appeared
among them as the solitary instance of pure goodness
in the world. This would be, as we have seen, no
sufficient basis of a gospel for all mankind but might
turn out to be almost the very opposite. Such an
one might be the despair of men rather than their
hope. In fact the very treatment of such a question
even now tends to become a matter of purely aca
demic interest and to divert attention from the real
issues when men are seeking the better life. The
discussion of it must turn out to be indecisive and
fruitless. For the judgment one may reach on this
question discloses most of all one's own subjective
standard or, at best, the conventional standard of
his time and place. In the end, the only one who is
fully competent to reach a decision on such a case
is he who is himself both sinless and omniscient.
We, poor mortals, in our ignorance and sin must

74 Creative Christianity
proceed on a different basis. The early Christians,
I repeat, were not thinking of such an individual
as we in academic fashion are pleased to call the
ideal of humanity but they were people to whose
minds the sense of need was ever present and the
one test they thought of applying to Jesus or any
one who might offer to help them was his competence
to cope with the ills they dreaded or were suffering
from at the time. The Gospels everywhere reflect
these conditions. Subjection to the authority of
the foreigner and the terror of his power ; the despot
ism of a home-grown ecclesiastical hierarchy; the
anarchical reaction against both; the prevalence of
poverty, hunger, disease and helplessness ; the long
ing and expectancy for the advent of an Inbringer
of deliverance — these are everywhere. The recital
of his words and deeds correspond to these needs.
How marvellously rich they are in inspiration and
comfort I need not stay to try to tell. The Gospels
and the other writings teem with assurance that he
brought to them a supremacy over all evil forces,
even over death itself. Had not he himself gone
down to death at the hands of their foes and his!
But his resurrection turned its horror into glory.
They too would conquer. Thus no collection and
organization of his teachings, however valuable it
might prove as material for a biblical theology, and
no presentation of the particular things he did, as
supposedly an example for us, can ever reflect ade
quately the power of the Christian faith. The force

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 75
of the appeal that any or all of these can make today
lies in their universalistic character. It is only as
they disclose to us the answer to our needs at this
our own time and place that we can see in the face
of him from whom they were affirmed to have come
the lineaments of a perfect personality. And this,
I must add, requires much more than a reproduction
of their quality of piety in our hearts. It requires
a piety as much deeper and broader than theirs as
the sweep of human life in our age and the strenuous-
ness of its demands exceed theirs.
Naturally, therefore, the representations which the
New Testament writers make of the personality of
Jesus must be used with discrimination. The ac
counts of such scenes as his exorcism of demons,
his transfiguration on a mountain top, his stilling of
storms, his summoning of deceased persons back to
life, his physical ascension into the sky before the
eyes of men, picture him as exercising a kind of
magical power and as having access to influences of
a kind extraneous to our lives. To men of that time
these might seem evidences of his high calling but
they make him in a corresponding degree a stranger
and an alien to us. In all this our minds are drawn
to the region of the mysterious, the unaccountable,
the unknowable. With a personality whose native
abode is there we can never be at home. Not only
are we unable to do such things as these but we do
not desire to do them. The supplementation of one's
native powers in this externalistic fashion suggests

76 Creative Christianity
to us the imperfect recognition of the worth of per
sonality. These representations of the relation of
man to the universe pertain to the stage of human
progress in which the benumbing fear of cosmic and
extra-cosmic forces, of impersonal or half-personal
spirit, of demonic powers, bad or good, was still
exercising a powerful control over the thought and
actions of men. In all this we see lingering in the
minds of these early Christians the old oriental dread
of, and subjection to the power of the non-personal
cosmos. We feel now that if such representations
as these were inseparable from his real character he
would be separated from us in the deepest meaning
of his nature and we should find the prospect of a
perfect affiliation with him far removed from us. In
this case, too, human salvation is conceived in rela
tion to existences strange to us and must always have
a character somewhat alien to the growing self-
consciousness of men. We know of no means by
which we can be carried into that unknown realm
nor do our longings reach out in that direction.
Therefore we are unable to see in the representa
tions we have just spoken of the perfection of
personality, but rather its disparagement.
But how different from these are the impressions
made on our minds by the recital of the Master's
inner attitude toward the poor, the sick and the
repentant! How contrasted with the emotions we
experience when we read the story of his soul's
life in the journey to the cross on which he was to

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 77
die! The reality of the inward strain experienced
in Gethsemane, his magnanimity toward those who
came to arrest him, his calm dignity before his
judges, his pity and his prayer for those who were
killing him, his self -commitment to God at the end —
how natural it all seems in one who had lived as He !
Efforts to make of these things a part of a pre
arranged plan of salvation are only offensive now.
For these deeds of his bring him near to us in our
hours of struggle to do and endure to the end and
they appeal to our desire to raise our manhood to
a higher level of worth. Jesus' endurance of death,
the grandeur of his self-affirmation in its presence,
his power over men's hearts afterwards produce in
our hearts the certainty of conquest over death in
the entire depth of its meaning. That is the heart
of the Christian faith always.
As the growing knowledge and religious experi
ence of the Christian people during these eighteen
centuries and more of their history have issued in
a state of mind that calls for a discriminating use
of the narrative materials of the New Testament,
it also calls for a similar discrimination in the treat
ment of the epistolary, discursive and predictive por
tions. Paul, for example, finds the experience "when
it pleased God," as he says, "to reveal his Son in
me," the focal point of interest in the outcome of
Jesus' career. He finds his own life's purpose deter
mined for him in the great act of Jesus' self-giving
on the cross: "I have been crucified with Christ;

78 Creative Christianity
and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in
me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live
in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself up for me." We find him
revolutionizing the popular view of the gift of the
Spirit by setting the extranaturalistic reference at
the periphery of the Christian faith and practically
nullifying these miraculous gifts or, at least, placing
the idea of the charismata at the periphery of the
Christian life. Instead, he internalized and ethicised
the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit by which the
Christian man lives and walks is the principle of
the higher life as against the "flesh," the principle
of the lower life. That is, the impartation of the
spirit is a bestowment of moral power and the fruits
are moral — love, joy, peace, long suffering, goodness
and the like. Our personality is enhanced thereby,
for the very mind of Christ is in us. Christ himself
becomes identical with the indwelling Spirit which
is reproducing in the Christian the action of the
principle of vicariousness that was the mind of
Christ, "who for our sakes humbled himself unto
death." "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and
death." "We have died with Christ and have been
made alive again in him." What is the value of
those external bestowments of an absent Christ re
ferred to in such phenomena as the gift of tongues
compared with the tremendous moral power of the
faith in his inward presence? Jesus is not made any

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 79
longer a figure of the past standing isolated in his
peculiar individuality and destined to be a fading
figure as the ages grow, but his personality has
entered into ours transfusing it and ever fulfilling
itself more perfectly in ours. The subjective ex
perience of the transforming power of a personality
who gives himself unreservedly for others has trans
fused the historic figure and made it everlastingly
present as the very self of our self.
But when, in contrast, Paul turns his passionate
portrayal of the Christain's inner striving for the
better life into terms of a cosmic movement the
impression it makes on our minds today is of a
very different kind from the foregoing. The inter
cession of the Spirit on our behalf, the groanings
for betterment which we experience within ourselves
seem to be represented as moments in the movement
of a universe that "groans and travails in pain to
gether until now." If our personal strivings are
to be explained as significant of the universal strife
of cosmic forces, then personality seems to fall into
a plane of existence lower than the cosmos, to be of
subordinate worth, and to be destined to dissolution.
When, again, in the epistle to the Colossians he
places Jesus at the head of those semi-personal or
impersonal energies which the Gnostics commonly
represented as the causes of cosmic changes — thrones,
dominions, principalities, powers — Jesus is once
more removed far from us. He has passed into
the realm where the personal and the non-personal

80 Creative Christianity
are fused and our hope of rising to personal perfec
tion by normal and native processes of our spirits
lies prostrate.
The higher Pauline view of the relation of the
personality of the Christ to the Spirit is hinted at
in the Synoptic Gospels but dominates the Johannine
image of Jesus. His work is represented as not
possibly completed in the earthly career of an in
dividual but as perpetuated and progressively per
fected in the growing inner life of his disciples.
There can be little doubt that the aim of the writer
was to substitute this for the apocalypses that the
Synoptists use when they set forth the future work
of Jesus in terms of vast and appalling cosmic changes.
"I will not leave you orphans; I come to you. . . .
Because I live ye shall live also. ... If a man
love me he will keep my words ; and my father will
love him ; and we will come unto him and make our
abode with him. ... I will love him and will
manifest myself to him. ... I have many things
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he
will guide you into all the truth. . . . He shall
take of mine and shall declare it unto you." At
this point the climax of the new self -consciousness
of those early followers of Jesus is reached. Their
deeper sense of personal worth was lifting them out
of the evil world around them. They had found the
perfect personality and in the discovery of him they
had found their own personality as welL Life had

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 81
now a new meaning to them. It could no longer
be described in terms of what they had been — for
their sins were forgiven, forthgiven, detached from
them as not exhibiting their true selfhood — but its
true worth could be described only in terms of what
they were yet to be. "The revealing of the sons of
God," which Paul had spoken of, should take place
when they should "be like him and see him as he is."
How natural it was that to such a writer the per
fection of the personality of Christ could not be
disclosed until he had reached his self-fulfillment
through the achievement of giving himself in su
preme self-sacrifice to their very souls. And at the
same time it is seen that the discovery of the higher
personality and one's self-attainment to it are not
successive events but one event. Each is implicated
in the other.
But while in these later Johannine writings there
are still traces of those features of the earlier pic
tures of the Apocalypse which describe Jesus' per
sonality in terms which subject its activity to the
intervention of supernatural cosmic forces, yet
the prevailing meaning is plain. There is to be
no violence offered to our personality in the redemp
tive process. I am never so consciously self-govern
ing and self-determining in my action as when I find
myself attracted and subdued by the higher person
ality. Then alone can I be my true self, the man I
was meant to be. In the end that personality alone
can attract my affections, retain my confidence and

82 Creative Christianity
control my will, who enables me to be aware of my
true self, my better self, the man I am to be. He
enables me to construe the purpose of my life in
terms of that which I see in him. He has become
my Lord, not in the sense that he can dictate for
me the direction in which I must go, for that would
deprive me of that inner force without which I can
not be truly personal, but in the sense that he projects
his selfhood into mine and effectuates in my spirit
the activities of his own. Every person does this
in some degree and without it our lives could never
have the unity of purpose that they do have with
one another. And when I find one in whom I see
that which can only fulfill and not destroy my true
selfhood, my attachment to him becomes the indis
pensable condition of my perfection. It is this
interpretation of the significance of the career of
Jesus which is to us the most impressive of all the
aspects of him presented to us. It is the heart of
that which we are accustomed to call "the atone
ment." We have seen that already before our New Test
ament was completed the Christian Gospel was pass
ing rapidly out from the moral and religious at
mosphere of Judaism into the broad spaces of the
Graeco-Roman world. There it made its appeal
to the most deeply religious spirits among the mixed
populations thrown together by the Roman conquests
under one supreme authority. The Christian teachers
found themselves confronted with the serious prob-

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 83
lem of interpreting their message to that mystical
and speculative spirit which the western Aryans had
brought with them from their ancestral abodes in
the East. It is true that these western Aryans had
not gone as far in the direction of depersonalizing
and denaturing existance as did the Brahmanic phil
osophy that ruled the East. Yet, under the guiding
hand of Plato, a hierarchy of ideas had displaced the
family of concrete deities that reigned over the world
and men, according to the ancient Grecian mythol
ogy, and the supreme deity had been turned into
the Supreme Idea, the all-inclusive metaphysical
good. The New Platonic philosophy which arose
about the beginning of the Christian era and had
its chief centre of influence in Alexandria, sought
to mediate salvation to the broken and oppressed
peoples of the Graeco-Roman world by imparting
to them a divinely bestowed enlightenment. Receiv
ing this enlightenment the human spirit would rise
from materiality, grossness, error, corruption and
death to the region of light and life from which it
had supposedly fallen. It was a philosophy of
redemption and seemed to accord with the Christian
message of redemption by a Christ who had de
scended from heaven to earth in order to raise men
up to heaven with him. Such a message appealed
powerfully to the conquered peoples whose religions
were now compulsorily practiced in secret. For in
their "mysteries" they had sought to come into
union of nature with their deities.

84 Creative Christianity
When "Jesus and the ressurrection" was preached
to the votaries of these faiths and to the advocates
of the philosophy that was akin to them, he displaced
in their minds their ancient deities, but it was at the
cost of being conceived in their likeness and his
salvation in terms of the kind of redemption which
their worshippers craved. His death and resurrection
were made the death and resurrection of a God and
by him they were to be redeemed from the bondage
of darkness, error and metaphysical corruption and
to enter into the incorruptible, immortal life of
deity. This is at bottom the theory that underlies the
Nicene Creed and the later Catholic creeds. The
crucial point in them is the matter of his being of
the divine nature or essence, on the one hand, so
as to be able to redeem — and of human nature, on
the other hand, so that it might be redeemed. Thus
in the minds of those converts from the ethnic
faiths his distinctive personality was left obscured
and was subordinated in importance to the divine
nature. Correspondingly, the distinct, individual per
sonality of those who became subjects of his divine
power was submerged in the human nature which was
to be redeemed. In this way the whole work of re
demption was represented as the incarnation of the
divine nature, in order that human nature in us might
be the recipient of it and become immortal. It is no
wonder if we find that the men who were to be made
the subjects of this transformation were in large

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 85
measure denuded of the rights of personality, their
power of initiative and self-affirmation denied, and
themselves reduced to the necessity of becoming the
passive subjects of an inscrutable change of nature
and an inexplicable enlightenment through the admin
istration of mysteries (sacraments) in priestly hands.
Not perfect personality but perfect nature is the ideal
held before the eyes of men by this theory.
But, even so, the vision of the Perfect Personality
persisted and in course of time reaffirmed its domin
ion over the human heart. Not even a complicated
heirarchical system and its organized sacramentalism
could conceal from view the mighty One that had won
his way into human hearts and was really compelling
a reconstruction of their whole view of the world.
The creeds that substituted a nature or essence for
a personality could not obliterate the loving memory
which the still continued tradition of Jesus and his
estimate of men preserved in action. And, accord
ingly, the theologians were greater than their creed
and the members of the Catholic Church were
greater than their church.
This is the more manifest when we pass from the
Graeco-Roman world and the Greek Catholic Church
to the mediaeval Roman Empire and the mediaeval
Roman Church. The Clugniac Revival, the Cru
sades, and the meditations of the mediaeval mystics
testify to the manner in which he was reasserting
his right over men's hearts. The individual human
personality came in for the recognition of his pre-

86 Creative Christianity
rogative. The elaborate penitential system that
was developed in the hope of keeping him in subjec
tion testified to the manner in which the Christian
faith was elevating his sense of selfhood above the
whole church system. Salvation was becoming
consciously not a matter of "nature" but an ideal
for the man. The system that arose out of a meta
physical conception of salvation began to break in
pieces. Men who were reading the New Testament
— and their number grew mightily — followed Jesus
in his ministry to the needy, walked with him the
way to the cross, sought in their Gethsemane to find
fellowship with him, the Tempted One, conceived a
personal nearness to him and a personal likeness to
him to be dearer than all else. Monks and nuns
found in him a brother and bridegroom to their
souls. He was to them the Chief Celibate, in whom
the grace of renunciation was supremely exhibited.
Their aim was to reproduce in their souls and bodies
the experiences through which he had passed and in
going the way of the cross with him they were, they
believed, in real fellowship with him. Of more im
portance to us is the fact that multitudes of the
Bible-reading laity, as they caught the image of
Jesus set forth in the Gospels, drew away from the
hierarchical and sacramental system in which they
had been in bondage and conceived in likeness to him
a consciousness of independence that shocked and
startled the church authorities and drove them to
make the vain attempt to extinguish the new light

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 87
that had come with the sight of him into the souls
of men. The whole issue resolved itself into a
struggle between the power of an organization of sup
posed supernatural forces, on the one hand, and the
power of the new estimate of personal worth that
had come to men's hearts, on the other hand. The
fires of the Roman Inquisition proved impotent to
destroy finally the latter. It became the soul of the
Protestant religious Reformation.
The Reformation signalized the advent of this
new type of self-consciousness in western Europe.
The sense of immediate relationship with God rose
to dominance in the Protestant heart. God's abso
lute sovereignty in the inner and outer life of the
individual and the eternal significance of the individ
ual came to expression in the doctrines of election
and predestination of each to his final destiny. The
absolute sufficiency of the atonement wrought by
Christ and its appropriation by the individual through
immediate faith in him guaranteed the man's safety
with or without sacraments. The absolute perfection
of the regenerating work of the Spirit of God who
attested himself by the "secret testimony" given
immediately to the soul of the believer identified the
final word of God with the highest action of the
human spirit. All this, and much more of the same
quality, seemed at the time to show that personality
had come to true self -recognition at last. But such
was really far from being the case. The accepted
conception of the personality of Jesus furnishes the

88 Creative Christianity
clue to our judgment. In the orthodox representa
tions of him at the time we see the grandeur of one
who possessed in himself in a real life on earth the
infinite power and glory of God and who gave him
self, nevertheless, to the endurance of an infinite
penalty for sin for the sake of men who were worth
less apart from the worth he thereby gave to them.
But the interest in him personally is mostly limited
to this one point. He is a being far superior to the
world-fleeing Jesus of the mediaeval ascetic, but he
is presented as an eternal divine personality whose
native abode is in a different realm from ours and
whose higher nature is an inscrutable mystery to
us. His appropriation to himself of an impersonal
human nature was in order that in it this divine per
son, whose nature is "impassible," might suffer re-
demptively for men. His whole career is interpreted
as furnishing evidence that it was so and his death
was an event of an order that pertained exclusively
to himself. The gulf between the essentially human
and the essentially divine still remains fixed and never
to be crossed by us. How artificial this entire con
struction seems to us now ! How we miss the human-
ness of Jesus as he sought to fulfill the imperative
of his own self-legislative potencies ("I must") and
felt his way to perfection as we must do ! We are
excluded from a true fellowship with him in it all,
for his life was metamorphosed into a pre-arranged
program known in advance (through his divine om
niscience) to himself, which ours can never be.

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 89
Moreover, we are left in ourselves without the crown
of personality when we are made solely beneficiaries
of his atonement and remain for ever excluded from
the fellowship of his sufferings,- since atonement is
solely for us and never by us. And when we reach
the doctrine of a double predestination and its con
sequences in an eternally dual destiny for mankind
our personality suffers a violent diremption. For
the supposition that we could be consenting parties
to this predetermination of human personalities to
an end so absolutely contrary to all the hopes that
make our personality what it is, is to forget that our
individual personality can never come to its perfec
tion except by a communion of inner life as wide as
the race.
But while it is evident that the doctrines and prac
tices of the early Protestants beclouded the character
of perfect personality, it is also evident that the
genius of the Reformation was to create in men's
minds a powerful impulse in the direction of affirm
ing and vindicating the supremacy of personality
over all systems and orders, whether political or
ecclesiastical, intellectual or ethical, material or spirit
ual. Luther's doctrine that each man is justified
through inward faith and that this faith contains in
itself the whole truth of the Christian religion and
Calvin's doctrine that each one is separately elected
and foreordained to eternal life drew attention to
the inner wealth and the independent worth of every
man, though neither of these great leaders saw

90 Creative Christianity
this very clearly. The fruits were seen in the manner
in which the individual Protestant began to assert his
personal rights as against the system, no matter what
it might be, in the midst of which he was born and
whose sovereignty over him seemed inalienable.
In the consciousness of his immediate relation with
God the man became aware of his right and power to
subjugate the system and make it tributary to the
worth of the personality for whose sake it had been
created — the very antithesis of the spirit that had
come to reign in Catholicism. The story of the work
ing out of the premises of the principle would carry
us far into many fields of human endeavor. The
whole of the great fight for personal liberty, so
thrilling to the student of modern history, is the story
of the manner in which the self-affirmation in Jesus
of Nazareth fructified the souls of men when they
caught the new vision of him and enabled them to
reiterate his self-affirmation in themselves. The
rise and growth of religious Dissent in England and
the demand for liberty of conscience portended, as
some of its enemies saw, the coming of a storm in
many realms of human life. When men felt that the
perfection of their personality could come only in
a communion of free persons like themselves and
created the "free churches" in which they might hope
for the realization of their hope, they paved the
way for the remoulding of the forms of the political
world in which they lived. The civil war in England,
the American revolution and even the French rev-

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 91
olution signalize the manner in which the sense of
personal right and worth works its way to dominance
when men fail to see that the only permanently toler
able form of government is that in which personal
initiative has free play so that every personality may
come to its true self under it.
The great religious revivals of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries worked in the same direction,
even when the subjects of those revivals failed to
discern it. They were in inner sympathy with the
great movement in psychology inaugurated by John
Locke, where the whole body of human knowledge,
so far from being given authoritatively from with
out, tends to be viewed as springing out of the native,
inner activity of the human soul. The great mis
sionary enterprise inaugurated by William Carey,
the free-church man, was kindred in spirit for it
showed that the reality of personal relation with God
and the capacity of every human soul to share it
were becoming the dominant conviction of a world-
conquering Christianity. The tendency is to exalt
personality above all church-systems and to regard
them all as temporary and transitory inasmuch as
they are purely tributary to personal worth.
The same story is to be read in the transformation
that is taking place in the jurisprudence and courts
of justice of modern Christian countries, where
justice is ceasing to be the infliction of a mere quid
pro quo for injuries done (in the case of criminal
law) and is coming to be dominated by the purpose

92 Creative Christianity
to realize the worth of every man, the criminal in
cluded. The tremendous sweep of the scientific
movement has tended, on the whole, in the same di
rection. The scientific impulse of modern times
springs mainly out of the confidence of our spirit
that it is capable of compassing a true knowledge of
the universe by its own inherent powers and of mak
ing the forces of the universe tributary to the pur
poses of a personal career. Thus the progress of
science has worked powerfully toward the affirmation
of the supreme worth of personality. In other
words, the human personality finds that the mastery
of the universe is involved in the realization of true
selfhood. Our contention on this point is being con
firmed by the growing concentration of philosophic
reflection on the meaning of personality.
Reviewing our lengthy journey let us try to state
in a few sentences the outcome of our study up to the
present :
The coming of Jesus Christ into the world is an
historical movement ever progressively creative of
a new experience and a correspondingly new estimate
of the meaning and worth of a human life. By the
insight men obtained into the significance of his
career there grew up in the hearts of his followers a
conviction of their superiority in the world and of
the tributary relation of all things to the aim that
had come to birth in their souls to be like him.
It brought into existence a new and higher com
munion of men with men and created in them a mu-

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 93
tual appreciation, so that each saw his own inner
worth revealed in the others. In this new unity of
life with one another they felt that they were the
community destined to bring mankind to its final
destiny in a perfect unity of life like their own.
It introduced a new and higher appreciation of men
universally. It discerned in the lowest the potential
ities of the perfect life and proceeded to refashion
the life of mankind in all its ranges in accordance
with the prophetic anticipation they had obtained of
the future of the race.
Men have been enabled to do this by virtue of the
impact of the personality of Jesus Christ upon their
minds as his personality has progressively disclosed
itself in the creative activity of those who saw in
him from the outset the embodiment of the highest
and best hopes of the race. That is to say, in the
sublime tragedy of his cross men have seen the
power of a self-giving for all men which is the same
as the affirmation of a right and power to rule them
without limitation. In the subjection to such a rule
as this men find their highest realization of liberty
and power. In such a personality, ever fulfilling
itself in us, we see the warrant for faith in the ex
istence of God, for this self-giving is surely the very
godness of God. To believe in this Jesus Christ is
to believe in God.

CHAPTER III.
LECTURE III. THE MAKING OF THE BETTER WORLD
IF we may discover the motive power of the Chris
tian faith by a study of the writings that consti
tute our New Testament we may say that it
lies in the union of two outstanding visions, namely,
the vision of the Christ and the vision of the King
dom of God. In the former there appears the image
of the Perfect Man and in the latter, the image of
the Perfect World. The manner in which the Chris
tian faith has come increasingly to control the course
of mankind is seen in the way in which the former
of these has come to govern the character of the lat
ter. The Perfect World becomes the world in which
all the inhabitants possess in themselves the image
of the Perfect Man. All the other features which
human imagination has attached to the Perfect
World reflect the external conditions prevailing
among Christians at various times. But their in
fluence is only temporary while his is constant.
The historical course of the Christian religion
shows that the advent of such a figure into the natural
sphere of our life is not to be regarded as merely a
single isolated act. It is no mere solitary occurrence
94

The Making of the Better World 95
that may never happen again, no mere past event
that lies in our hearts as a sweet memory as long as
it can be vividly preserved there but is bound to be
come a fading image as the time between him and
us widens. If it were so, then its gradual disap
pearance beyond the range of our vision would tend,
as soon as we turned our eyes to present conditions,
to make the present and future of our restless life
seem all the darker by contrast. That it has not
done so but on the contrary, has filled human life
with increasingly higher meaning and richer hope
is the significant fact.
The features of the personality of Jesus depicted
in the Gospels which have been the most powerfully
effective in human betterment are not those which
represent him as in the possession of powers ex
traneous to the normally conditioned human life
but those in which he appears as naturally belonging
both inwardly and outwardly to our race. It is not
because he could cast out demons and heal diseases
with a word that he is most attractive to us. There
is something uncanny in one whose claims rest on
such a ground as that. If we could do such things
the ultimate gain for men as compared with what
we can do in the exercise of our normal powers of
healing would be very doubtful. Disease would be
a less serious fact than it is, it would not call forth
our sympathies and sacrifices as it does and life would
be less deeply moral than it is now. Neither is it
because he was able, if he so willed, to feed the hun-

96 Creative Christianity
gry multitudes with a few cakes that he attracts the
hopes of mankind toward himself. We cannot do
that, and it would be unfortunate both for us and
for the hungry if we could. Both we and they are
still dependent and are ever to be dependent on care
ful forethought and laborious effort, if there is to
be safety against hunger and starvation. And it is
well that it is so. Neither, again, is it because when
the elements of nature were battling against him
and his disciples and threatening them with death
he could still the tempest by his voice and bring them
to safety that we have come to put our trust in him
and seek his fellowship. Such a display of power
leaves us strangers to his secret. For we must have
recourse to the laborious task of learning the art
of navigation before we can face the storm with con
fidence. If tempests could be so easily mastered how
little we could know of the worth of our inborn
capacity to conquer nature by diligence! No! the
Jesus of the Gospels attracts us to his company, not
because he could free himself and others at will from
the limitations incident to life in this world of ours
or set aside the common obligations that bind us
down under the bonds of labor and pain, but be
cause we have discovered in him a sympathetic i
entering into the needs of our common humanity,
his assumption of the obligation to help men and I
a summons unto his disciples to a sense of responsi
bility for their welfare in every respect. If his
cross awakens us to love and trust, it is not be-

The Making of the Better World 97
cause we see that he was armed with an infinite
knowledge and power that made him secure, if he so
willed, against the fear or the power of death. That
would be to put him far from us at the moment of
our greatest need of fellowship, since we, poor,
ignorant mortals, cannot help but succumb when
our bodies are impaled on a gibbet- and have no such
knowledge in advance of what is to happen. But it
is because his yoke and ours are the same and be
cause with him we walk in triumphant fearlessness
in the presence of death and seemingly awful defeat.
Not in the freedom from physical and mental limita
tions, not in dazzling, impenetrable deeds, not in the
exercise of incomprehensible powers, not in the
ability to transcend at will our native human condi
tions and call legions of irresistible angels to his
side do we discover the secret of his power to redeem
our common life and transfigure it with a heavenly
glory. Not there — but in the discovery to our spirits
that he is the true man of us all in his familiarity
from within with human experience of the deepest
kind, in his interpretation of its meaning and worth,
in his exaltation of the features of life that are
common to us all to dignity and grandeur — in a
word, in his universal sociableness has he become an
abiding asset to the life of humanity and discovered
to us the way to the better world.
At this point we have reached the matter of
central interest in our present study. His disciples
from the first believed they had his secret. He had

98 Creative Christianity
taken them into his heart. They had found a new
fellowship. It was to him personally they were
drawn from the first. With him they had entered
into a new order of life. Their sense of his great
ness became a sense of their own. His destiny and
theirs became inseparable. A cleavage between him
and them and, in consequence, a cleavage among
themselves became intolerable to their minds. This
simple and commonplace statement becomes of the
highest significance. I said in the last lecture that
the great achievement of Jesus was his creation of
faith in himself on the part of his disciples. We may
now say, in expansion of this statement, that his
great creative deed was to bring into being a com
munion of human spirit with human spirit which
was of the same order as his own personal com
munion with God. The members of this communion
had begotten in them an estimate of one another's
worth as infinite, so that all else in the universe is
conceived as tributary to it. Jesus' achievement is
the creation of a Christian communion. This com
munion is of such a quality that as it has perpetuated
itself through the successive generations of men it
has been able to make the natural relations of men
with one another organic to its propagation and de
velopment. Through it the present world of men
has become a better world in the making. This is
the thesis to which for a few moments I must bespeak
your patient attention. In order that this may be
done I must first take a little time to refer to the

The Making of the Better World 99
views which men in various lands and different ages
have entertained respecting the relation between the
world in which we now live and another world to
which men go when they die or may have come
from at birth.
Students of primitive types of human communi
ties tell us that in the remotest ages and among the
crudest peoples known to us there was a common
feeling or intuition of being in contact at times or
even all the time with other existences somewhat like
themselves but different in that, among other things,
they were most of the time invisible and could be
come visible at will. These tribes, so remote from
us in time and manner of life were very like us in
that they were probably as much interested as we in
the world of "nature" so called and as much affected
by what happened in it. Unlike us, however, they
had not yet learned to discover in "nature" a causal
or philosophical unity, but events in the world seemed
very often detached happenings with no more order
about them than the irregular doings of these people
themselves. Unlike us, again, they had not learned
to unpeople that world of nature but saw in occur
rences around them, especially the unexpected occur
rences, the activities of living beings whose impulses
and thoughts were like their own. Not only fear
some facts, like the earthquake, the eclipse, the
tempest, the lightning and the thunder but the daily
breach of continuity in the common course of things
or even the common things themselves, like the

100 Creative Christianity
whispering of the dry leaves or the murmuring of
the bushes in the wind, the prattling of the running
brook or the strange sounds that awake the sleeper
at night, were the immediate doings of living beings.
By them "nature" was inhabited or, at least they
roamed about in it and thereby brought men under
their influence. To the ancient Hebrew the evening
breeze might be the rustling of the garments of
Jehovah as he walked in his garden at the cool of
the day. The sound of a going in the tops of the
mulberry trees might be to the waiting and impatient
warrior a signal that the Jehovah of armies was
rushing forth to the battle. Or the roaring of the
waves of the sea and the answering roar of the
heavens might be the voice of the animate Deep be
low calling unto the Deep above. Indeed it was
possible, so some ancients thought, that everything
had an anima, a soul, and men felt a kinship, marked
by mingled hope and fear, with the animals, the
trees, the flowers and even with things like the winds
and waters, that we call inanimate.
The interest they felt in these things was deeper
than that of the purely objective observer or that
of the impersonal and disinterested pursuit of science
to which we flatter ourselves as having attained.
They felt too deeply affected by outer things for
that. Th* pleasant sunshine, the cooling breeze and
the falling rain were the beneficences of kindly dis-
posea visitants. But tne smiting and killing blows
of the torrid sun or the lightning, the crushing power

The Making of the Better World 101
of the falling rock or tree or the mysterious snatch-
away of the breath from the body were the deeds
of malevolent or hateful beings, like angry or hate
ful men. The sense of dependence upon these other
beings for good or evil was ever upon the minds
of these early peoples and the thing they desired
above all was some way of controlling them for
their own personal interest. Here is where science,
the daughter of magic, began its wonderful career,
and here, perhaps, religion also began. Both hold
that within or behind or beyond the visible there is
an invisible. In both there is a reaching out to a
world or sphere of being akin to our own and yet
far other than ours. How to escape from the ill
that comes to us from that world or to avail one's
self of its good, is the problem common to both.
The interest in the other region was sustained and
heightened by the constant occurrence of death.
Increasing population and growing knowledge added
to the impressiveness of that event. It was always
painful to think upon, always bore the appearance
of tragedy. For the tenderness of affection was
wounded by it, the forward look was contradicted
by it and it seemed to speak of malignancy. Men
had seen the cruel blow of anger take away the
breath. Might it not be that every death was due
to a similar cause? Death, not life, was the mystery.
Whither went the spirit when it left the body?
Sleep and death were much alike. In a dream or
trance or vision a departed one might be seen for a

102 Creative Christianity
time, only to disappear again and at last never again
to reappear. At such times strange figures also
appeared, some of them beautiful and kindly and
some of them hateful and fearful to look upon. Per
chance at such times it was our breath or spirit that
wandered away to that other realm, to return again
at the moment of awaking ?
If the dead all went to that world, were they worse
off than the living? It must often have seemed so.
Else why this shrinking from death on the part of
all? Might not their taking away be the deed of
some such being as we see in our dreams when the
spirit goes a-wandering out into that other world?
Whatever be the answer, at any rate, the power of
the other world over the present must be very great.
Safety and peace must lie in the cultivation of the
favor of those who dwell there and in the discovery
of their purposes, if that may be. Many were the
artifices to gain the needed knowledge. Something
seemed to be learned from the irruptions of those
beings of another world into ours. The practices of
necromancers and soothsayers who contrived to get
into touch with the invisible, the speculations of
thinkers who strove to build a theory of that world
by means of the symbols of it which they thought
they found in this world, and the ancient mythol
ogies, which reflect the picturesqueness of the inter
pretations of existence made of old, are all registers
of the irrepressible craving in the bosoms of men
for a better world, a world in which all the good

The Making of the Better World 103
things of the present world could be retained or
recovered and the evil things escaped. For, whether
that other world were a better or a worse world
than this, men always desired the better, be it here
or there.
The uncertainty they felt about the other world
was deep. All seemed to go to it at death but
whether there was real life awaiting them there or
only a shadowy existence was doubtful. The general
feeling favored the latter. We remember the Hebrew
Sheol and the Greek Hades, so like it. For the
ordinary man it was
"A land of darkness and of the shadow of death;
A land of thick darkness, as darkness itself ;
A land of the shadow of death without any order,
And where the light is as darkness."
And yet, in comparison with a life of pain and
wretchedness here it might appear to the weary soul
as in some ways better:
"There the wicked cease from troubling
And there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there;
And the servant is free from his master."
There was a common belief that those who had

104 Creative Christianity
lived the more worthily here and the mighty leaders
of the people would enjoy an immortality like the
gods that came to men from time to time, while
others would fade gradually out of existence just
as the memory of them faded gradually from the
minds of their friends. Even the gods are depicted
sometimes as longing for a bit of the real life of
flesh and blood that men enjoy here. So that we
must conclude that the world awaiting men after
death was for the generality of mankind an uninvit
ing prospect. The hope of a better world was very
dim indeed. Brahmanic philosophy predicated an
almost infinite series of rebirths awaiting the great
masses of men before they could enter upon the
higher life that lay beyond and reach the goal of
final absorption into the Infinite and Final Principle
of all being. The impersonal principle, Karma,
which brought men into a lower or a higher human,
or a sub-human or super-human existence after
the present would operate perfectly, but who could
tell what it might have in store for himself? So
forbidding was the prospect that the reforming
Buddhist philosophy took a wholly pessimistic view
of personal existence in any realm and permitted, as
the sole hope, the attainment of the goal of final
extinction — Nirvana. The Graeco-Romans and )
other peoples over whom they ruled were more hope
ful in that they conceived the possibility of mortal
men participating in the incorruptness of deity, with
out the loss of personality, and sharing at last the

The Making of the Better World 105
immortality of the gods. But this was rather for
the elect few, especially those who had been initiated
by secret ceremonies into the hidden life. For the
multitudes the future was dark, and one might almost
say that, with here and there an exception, the an
cient world of men raised one sustained cry of pro
test against death. The language of the Hebrew
Psalmist is native to humanity at large :
"My soul is full of troubles,
And my life draweth nigh unto Sheol.
I am reckoned with those who go down into the
pit,
I am as a dead man that hath no help.
Cast off among the dead,
Like the slain that lie in the grave,
Whom thou rememberest no more,
And they are cut off from thy hand."
On the part of the Christian, compared with the
non-Christian, as we learn from the utterance of
Christian piety preserved in our great stores of
Christian literature, the interest in the other world
is more vivid. Without going at length into the
causes which have brought this about, we can say
in a word that it is owing to the manner in which
the whole of one's life is brought under the sway
of the moral principle— that is, life is viewed as
constituted by the mutual relations of persons — and
is filled with the power of moral passion. To

106 Creative Christianity
the Christian the evil world is the world that is made
up of the morally bad persons and the better world
is the world of the morally better people. That is,
the world in which those passions and deeds which
blast personal relations and destroy the sense of
blessedness gives way to a world in which the pas
sions and deeds of mutual love and kindness and
purity fit men to live together without strife. The
issue between the bad and the good is more vividly
conceived by the Christian than by others and the
division between the two worlds in respect to char
acter is more insisted upon. Consequently, death
ceases to be the dividing line. The cleavage is
continued clearly beyond death, and both the evil and
the good of the future world are portrayed in colors
brilliant and startling. One has but to read the
meditations, prayers and exhortations of the Chris
tian centuries to see that the heaven and the hell of
the Christian faith have a deeper significance for the
Christian than the contrasted conditions in a world
after death had for the non-Christian. Christian
Creeds and Confessions of Faith, Christian sermons '
and hymnody furnish abundant evidence that the
longing for the better world and the fear and shrink
ing from the worse are permanent and fundamental
characteristics of the Christian outlook on life.
In all the efforts of the human imagination to de
pict conditions in a world that comes after this one
may discern a reflection of an inherent dissatisfac
tion with things as they now are and a restlessness

The Making of the Better World 107
of spirit until that which is better is found. The
strivings and conflicts which men depict as occurring
in the material world and which fill so large a place
in their imagination of a coming world proceed from
the dividedness and conflict within their own nature.
So deep and distressing is the turbulency of our
spirits that we carry it out into the things that sur
round us and forward into a world which, so far
as we are concerned, is yet to be. This diremption
within so profoundly impressed the thoughtful in the
past that they sought its explanation in the advent
into the sphere of our human life of a being utterly
bad who succeeded in permeating our nature with
the alien spirit of his own. With the Christian life
becomes a battle. The agonies of a Paul or an
Augustine, as they struggled with this inner divided
ness, and the terrible denunciations of a Calvin or
an Edwards, as they sought to rescue men from the
slavery of sin, disclose more fully than any words
of mine could do the awfulness of the issue before
him who would make the better world his own.
For this inner cleavage runs throughout the history
of the human family. It has begotten a separation
between man and man till the whole race has ap
peared to men like Augustine as divided into two
great warring communities, the community of the
evil and the community of the good, the kingdom of
Satan and the Kingdom of God. The problem for
the individual has been, how to make the transition
from the one to the other, and the problem for

108 Creative Christianity
the community has been, how to overcome the one
and make the other supreme. Here, it seems to me,
lies the source not only of the inward strivings and
conflicts of the man but also of the great wars be
tween communities.
We are no longer content to be told that this strug
gle has been brought upon us by a sudden fall of our
humanity from a blessed state in the golden age of
the past and that the virus has been communicated
from father to son and from age to age down to
the present. Even supposing we had, as we have
not, a history of the struggle from the beginning, we
should still be in need of an explanation how there
ever came to be a struggle after the fall. It is not
sufficient, either, to say that the evil in conflict with
the good is a survival of the animality to which
man is heir. There is neither moral good nor moral
evil in mere animality. In the animal you find only
appetite, a dumb craving for physical satisfaction,
whereas you find in the man a restlessness arising
from an awareness of personal defect and often of
demerit. Whether this be felt by reason ef inward
condition or by reason of outer circumstances, the
sense of strife is there. In the Christian it takes
the form clearly of a sense of disharmony between
that which he now finds himself to be and that which
he would be and it issues in an effort to rid himself
of the one and gain the other. Without going into
the matter at length, we can say that the human
characteristic that stands out clearly here is the

The Making of the Better World 109
power of idealising one's self, of discovering, so to
say, one's destiny. The human spirit is possessed
of "prophetic power, the power to bring the future
forward into the present, the power to "reach a
hand through time and catch the far-off interest of
tears." Therein is found an imperative that cannot
be silenced. That better man which we are to be
commands us to master the worse man in us. And
in this, the Christian's longing for the better, there
is revealed the heart of the world.
It can scarcely escape the attention of any one who
is acquainted with the doctrine of human nature
that is traditional in the circles of Protestant and
Catholic orthodoxy that the foregoing statement
runs counter to it. According to the traditionally
orthodox view, the whole of mankind is turned into
a "massa perditionis" through the propagation by
natural generation of the evil nature — Original Sin —
which supervened in man upon the first transgres
sion. There is no need to discuss that doctrine here,
but it is well to point out that, while it points rightly
to the community character of human sin, it sadly
perverts the truth in that it fails to perceive that
the unity of the human race is constituted, not by
the fact of a common physical descent, but rather by
the participation, though in ever so various degrees,
in a common ideal. The only way we have of know
ing that there is such a thing as sin is by the human j
consciousness of an ideal the failure to attain to
which constitutes the sin. He who awakens in men

110 Creative Christianity
the consciousness of the ideal awakens in them the
consciousness of their sin. But this communion in
sin would be meaningless and unreal were it not that
it stands in contrast to the higher communion in the
ideal. For the ideal is one and not many. So that
the longing for personal betterment carries with it
the longing for the universal betterment. Personal
betterment is discoverable only in the better world.
Consequently the sense of sin is persistent in the
Christian heart because the hope of the better world
is dominant in the Christian. For the Christian the
world to come, whether it be here or elsewhere, is
the better world.
The Christian vision of the future has had tradi
tionally a two-fold character corresponding to the
two sources from which its forms of representation
have been historically derived. On the one hand
are the representations that have been derived from
the apocalypticism of the Jews and, on the other
hand, are the representations derived from the meta
physical speculations of the Greeks. Christian hope
and expectation have oscillated between these two
poles. From the Jew came the image of a new
world of men in a better earth. It would be ushered
in by a cataclysm, a physical resurrection of the dead,
a judgment of all mankind before the divine tribunal,
the sentence of the wicked to the lower world of
demons and the exaltation of the righteous to the
happiness of a renovated earth. Here the better
world is the reward of righteousness and it is be-

The Making of the Better World 111
stowed on men from without by the fiat and irre
sistible power of God. It is not necessary that I
should dwell upon the manner in which the Jewish
concepts and pictures have persisted among Chris
tians or that I should specify the variations that have
appeared. The Catholic catastrophic view of death,
the temporary purgatorial regions, the final judgment
day, when the irreversible sentence is pronounced,
and the eternal heaven and hell portray the better
world as absolutely distinct and for ever separated
from the evil world. In Protestantism death is even
more catastrophically viewed, since purgatory is re
pudiated and the eternal destiny of all is irrevocably
fixed at that moment. But while the picture of a
final Judgment Day is retained, it loses its signifi
cance, inasmuch as the justification of the righteous
and the condemnation of the wicked are both abso
lute and complete in the present life.
You will please notice that in all this the better
world is not only a future world for men, but it is
also a yonder world. Moreover, it is not only a
world in which men will find themselves some day,
if they are fitted for it, but it is really existent now
in all its perfect goodness and perfect blessedness.
Apart from that world the present world of men
and their habitation are evil. Deliverance ultimately
consists in making a safe transition to it from the
present world. The Christian institutions are viewed
as constituted for this end. So far as the present
world is good, its goodness is reflected back upon it

112 Creative Christianity
from that other world. For that reason the Chris
tian, as Christian, is not at home in the present
world. "I'm but a stranger here, Heaven is my
home." The virtues and graces he cultivates here
set him in contrast to the natural ways of men. He
must renounce the present world. Unworldliness is
his constant and outstanding characteristic. He can
endure the trials and disappointments and sorrows
of the present world, since they fit him for the better
world to come. For that world he longs unceas
ingly. There can be no denying the claim that vast bene- ^
fits have accrued to human life through this view
of the future. The very vision of a world to come
where perfect goodness and perfect blessedness co
exist and endure for ever has served to support the
effort to maintain the conviction of the rightful
supremacy of goodness in the present world and to
vindicate those who have labored and suffered for it.
It has come as a cheering inspiration to those who
seek to raise men to such a state here that after death
they may fitly enter there. Their labor is not vain
in the Lord. It has filled the hearts of the dis
appointed, bereaved, defeated and dying with solace
and patient courage. And, by contrast, the horrid
nightmare of the pit of hell has restrained the hand
of the reckless, sobered the morally indifferent to
deep concern and helped men to realize the loath
someness of the sin that culminates in such a fate.
But, on the other hand, all this seems to come by

The Making of the Better World 113
way of inference rather than from an immediate
interest in the present world or a direct estimate of
good and evil here. The cultivation of the virtues
that are pronounced worthy of reward tends to
become infected with the spirit of the hireling.
The door is always open to a disparagement, by con
trast, of the common things and tasks of the present
life and the negative merits of renunciation tend to
displace the value of a positive consecration of all
one's powers to the natural callings of life. Other-
worldliness may become as serious a menace to true
goodness as "worldliness."
The Christian inheritance from the Greek, in this
field, stands in contrast to the inheritance from the
Jew, but as respects our theme the outcome of the
two is strikingly similar. The Greek thinkers who
placed the stamp of their thought upon the ancient
Catholic church were philosophers and metaphysi
cians. They conceived the meaning of the present
life of man from the point of view of his cosmic
relations and cosmic destiny. For them the contrast
between good and evil was founded on the contrast
between matter, or flesh, and spirit. The mingling
of these in our world, the pressure of materiality on
our spirits was the source of all our ills. When the
seeming is confused with the real, the false with
the true, darkness, error, corruption and death ensue.
The hope of the Greek was turned to the higher
world of spirit. To him that was the better world.
It was the divine world, for Deity was spirit and

114 Creative Christianity
they who sought him must seek him in the spirit
and the truth. The way of escape from this present
world of darkness and error was by withdrawal of
our minds from the material. Then shall we find
the true light of the world and enter into it. That
would be immortality.
The Graeco-Oriental understood the Christian Gos
pel in terms of this philosophy. Out of the failure \
to attain to that higher world he came through the ->
Gospel to be able to grasp the assurance that it was
now available for him. For him Jesus was a being
whose true abode was in that higher world. In his
life of humiliation on earth divinity had united itself
to humanity and thereby imparted to it the higher
potency of the life divine. In him, therefore, human
nature had become really deified and now by union
of their nature with his it was possible for men to
rise out of this lower realm of the material, with
its darkness, corruption and death, to the higher
abode of perfect spirit, with its light and incorruption
and immortality and to dwell there in blessedness
for ever. To them the Incarnation of God in Christ
became the central dogma of the Christian faith and
the hope of the deification of our personal nature its )
governing motive. The kingdom of God was no
longer the dream only of national or moral idealists
or the dimly visualized image in the eye of specula
tive philosophy. It had become very real. Then
it became legitimate to take the visions and dreams
of seers to be actual perceptions of supernatural

The Making of the Better World 115
fact. The popular belief in the coming of minister
ing angels from that world to ours became estab
lished as true to fact. The kingdom of heaven now
became the kingdom in heaven. There and there alone
was the better world. That home of the spirits of just
men made perfect was the "dear, dear country" for
which the longing spirits of the saints aspired.
When once the soul had gained a glimpse of that
world of light and life the present world became
unreal, dark, false, evil and truly irredeemable. The
pathway of holiness was to be found in flight from
its contaminating power. Renunciation of the world
became the supreme demand, asceticism the true
ideal. Contempt for the body, condemnation of the
natural appetites, extinction of physical passion, self-
abnegation were required of all who would begin
even here to attain to the better life and live it for
ever in that better world.
But in all this we have only the negative condi-
of the attainment of the better life. What do all
these avail if there come down to this world no
positive heavenly endowments that make available
to men already a participation in that better world?
The response to this cry of need was found in the
(Greek) mysteries, (Latin) sacraments, which are
the special vehicles, indispensable media of the com
munication of the heavenly life to men. Christ was
gone to the world above and with him was borne
his deified, glorified human nature but from him
had come to men by special provision the fruits of

116 Creative Christianity
his incarnation. That is, certain selected portions
of common earthly matter were endowed with the
higher, divine energy or grace, in order that man
might participate in the invisible and eternal reali
ties in visible and tangible form. Thus, while pro
fane things remained profane and common things
common, portions of the common and profane were
transfused by special divine operation into a higher
nature and thereby the way was opened for men to
a transformation, through this same sacramental
grace, into the nature of the heavenly. The present
world still remained evil, I say, but by means of this
exceptional action of the heavenly upon the earthly
certain portions are made organic or instrumental to
the transfusion of our human nature by the heavenly
and divine. But this is to say that the present
world in itself is doomed to remain evil and the
only hope of humanity is to escape from it by
translation to the better world above.
But to say that this represents the entire Roman
Catholic estimate of the relation of the two worlds
would be very misleading. In her actual practice
a very different view comes to light. The Roman
Church, in order to secure her own self-preservation, I
was compelled by force of circumstances to take al
positive part in governing the present world. The l
remarkable feature about it was that the monasticis-
ing of the clergy, that is, the enforcement upon them
of the ideal of world-flight, and the assumption
of governing power in the world by the clergy went

The Making of the Better World 117
on hand in hand. Each was necessitated by the
other. It is true that the appearance of exercising
the power of secular government and of participat
ing in the common affairs of this world was seem
ingly avoided by compelling the secular authorities
to do the work directly. But the sword of the church
was ever suspended over the sword of the state
threatening destruction to the disobedient. It is evi
dent that, in this round-about manner, secular or
present-worldly things obtained a holy or heavenly
character by a kind of reflection from the higher
character of that to which they were subordinated.
All this was supposed to be in the interest of the
church's aim to bring men to the better world above.
Heaven-sent blessings or heaven-sent curses were
the consequences of obedience and disobedience.
There was no acknowledgment of the purpose to
make this present word better for its own sake or
that it had any value apart from its use as placing
in the hands of the church the means of drawing
the hearts of men away to the other world. The
same is true of the moral requirements which were
made a pre-requisite to participation in the sacra
ments. The sacraments were the heavenly saving
gifts, they alone were actually effective and the
moral demands, in so far as they were laid down,
were the conditions of their efficacious ministration.
At the same time, we perceive in all this the actual
working of the Christian faith as a redemptive power
resident in the common life of humanity and trans-

118 Creative Christianity
forming its character inasmuch as the whole complex
of human activities, from the common personal rela
tions of man with man up to the working of great
economic and political organizations, were then
brought under the influence of the moral quality
of the Christian spirit, notwithstanding its perver
sion to priestly interests. The theory of the church
men stood in contradiction to the facts of supreme
importance. It was not the sacramental order but
the moral transformation of common things that j
exhibited the character of the Christian faith. This /
was more powerfully displayed in the course of the
Protestant Reformation. It is quite true, of course,
that orthodox Protestantism often exhibited a kin
ship to Catholicism in its derogatory view of the
present world. To Protestant pietists it was com
monly viewed as "a waste, howling wilderness."
The longing for deliverance from the materiality
of the present existence, for escape from its natural
ills to the blissful ease of a heaven of rest, the
accentuation of the necessity of supernatural bestow-
ments in order to overcome the natural evil into
which by natural generation we were born — all these
recur in Protestantism. So also was the dependence
on the threat of eternal torments in a future world
as a preventive of sin in the present world. Both
the Catholics and the Protestants interpreted the
meaning of the present life in terms of the destiny
awaiting men in the life to come. After all, the
holy life was there, not here.

The Making of the Better World 1 19
Yet, by comparison with Catholicism, Protestant
ism was distinctly secular. Its repudiation of priest-
ism and its gradual rejection of sacraments; its
regard for natural institutions like marriage, the
family, and the civil state ; its tendency to repose I
all the right and power of law on the will of the
common people; its exaltation of the native intelli
gence of men and confidence in the validity of its
processes ; its interest in the achievements of natural
science; its nurture of economic interests — all these
things indicate that Protestantism is, on the whole,
a layman's faith. If Protestantism is more truly
Christian than Catholicism, then the Christian way
of attaining to the better world must be different
from the representation of it in either orthodox
Catholicism or orthodox Protestantism. It is sug
gested that the traditional division between the nat
ural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven,
between the realm where God lives and works and
the realm in which we common men are placed can
be no longer accepted. The interest in "the other
world" and the interest in this present world become
one and the same. Consequently, the betterment of
the present world, if it is to take place, must be for
its own sake and not merely for the sake of another
world to which we are destined to go but which
is governed by different laws from ours. Moreover,
the means to be used for its betterment are not to
be brought into action by a violent irruption into the
normal course of nature but in the very manner in

120 Creative Christianity
which the good of the natural life itself is promoted.
Quite in keeping with this is the conception of divine
revelation which is now becoming prevalent among
the more enlightened. Revelation is ceasing to be
conceived of as the communication of facts which
could not be known through the native processes of
our spirits but only through purely miraculous chan
nels, and the Bible is ceasing to be received as an
authoritative collection of information concerning
supernatural and superrational facts.
Consequently, the attempts to bring the lives of
men in this world under control by appealing to the
definitely known results in the after-life have lost
their force in a large measure and in the more in
telligent circles this kind of appeal is seldom resorted"!
to. The effort to make men better in the present
world by reference to their selfish interest in escaping^
from pain and gaining pleasure in another world
is out of keeping with the unselfish Christian spirit
and we may well doubt that, notwithstanding the
common use made of it in the past, the power of
betterment resident in the Christian faith is to be
found in quite a different source and works in a
different way. I trust that we are now at length
ready to discuss it.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the immense
sweep of the early Christian Gospel was owing to(
the rebirth of hope in a higher destiny and to thej
creation of a sense of higher worth in the breasts of
multitudes of the lower classes. Jesus was a car-

The Making of the Better World 121
penter and the son of a carpenter. The heavenly
proclamation came first to such people as shaggy, for
gotten shepherds. The first followers of the teacher
were of the class of fisherman. The common peo
ple are said to have heard him gladly. Religious and
moral outcasts, according to established standards,
drew near to him. The explanation is offered, that
he sought after them as a shepherd seeks his lost
sheep and that he ate and drank with them. That
is, the narratives represent him as finding the com
mon people, both bad and good among them, attrac
tive. Their common wants and woes, their loves
and longings won his heart. He found them inter
esting. He believed in them and sought to be near
them. To be sure, to us this reflects at first sight
his worth rather than theirs. But it would not be
a mark of worthfulness in him unless his estimate
were true. He evidently saw in them in possibility
the same worth of which he was conscious in himself.
He was able to transmit to his followers the same
estimate of mankind. The vision of Christ to their
souls has become a vision of the future destiny of
mankind. For he appears as man at man's best.
Christianity is itself an attempt to take men at their
best and not at their worst or even at their second
best. Perhaps we might bring out our meaning by
saying that Christianity takes men not as they are
but as they are to be. It idealizes humanity. Every
human being becomes thereby wonderfully attractive.
The secret of this attractiveness lies in the latent

122 Creative Christianity
consciousness that each of them is essential to our
true selfhood. We cannot do without these sons of
men. The thought of an eternal separation from
them becomes overwhelmingly abhorrent. He who
does not feel this is false to himself. For the long
ing to partake of the best another can bring to
me is only the reverse side of the desire to com
municate my best self to him. He cannot find him
self until I give myself to him and I cannot find
myself until he gives himself to me. We are
mutually indispensable. This is the discovery we
make in the love of Christ.
In this manner there arises in the Christian heart
a longing for fellowship with each and every man
in all the world and a vision of the day when man
kind will be a unit in that fellowship. In other
words, the world of men is by anticipation viewed
as such a world that the Christian communion can
become universal, all embracing. There is nothing
in the lives of men which necessarily makes the vis
ion spoken of impossible of realization, all appear
ances to the contrary notwithstanding. So says the
spirit of Christian faith. This seems at superficial
sight, of course, untrue to the facts. But, again, the
Christian faith persists in seeing men not as they su-,
perficially are but as they are to be. Consequently it >
sees in the weakest and worst those hidden potential
ities for the better which a higher fellowship, created
by the self-giving of the members of the Christian
community to those who are not yet members of

The Making of the Better World 123
that community, will bring to fruition, so that men
may come to their true selves. That is to say, the
meaning of the present world of men comes to
light in the Christian communion.
It is plain, then, that the better world which is
in the making by the Christian faith is to be viewed
as consisting not merely of a part of the human
family. It does not permit a permanent diremption
in our universal human consciousness but views it
as an antithesis to be overcome. The "saved" can
not do without the "unsaved." Not by a fear of
contamination through contact with the world of
men and a cowardly flight from the foe but by a
fearless and loving association with men everywhere,
as they pursue their secular tasks, are the disciples
of Jesus Christ to find their haven of safety and their
heaven of rest.
Consider for a moment the character of the Chris
tian communion as it appears in a local community
that we call a church. The significant thing about
such a local union is that it is made possible by the
hearty recognition, on the part of each, of a partici
pation in the divine love by the others. The power
that has brought them individually into the fellow
ship of the love of God as it is seen in Christ binds
them together in mutual regard and goodwill. Each
is elevated in the esteem of the others by recognizing
his own worth in the worth of the others. The many
contingencies of life through which all must pass
make test of the strength of this bond of union and

124 Creative Christianity
in this manner there arise in them all the virtues and
graces of kindness, sympathy, forbearance, forgive
ness and such like, without which the aim to estab
lish and sustain the communion must remain unful
filled. Mark you, it is not by seeking seclusion that
these graces and virtues arise in all but, on the con
trary, it is only in the common secular things of
life they are summoned forth. Here is the better
world already in the making.
Moreover, the high Christian estimate of all men
leads on to the practical purpose of extending this
communion throughout the world until it become
universal. Here arises the imperative to wage war
with those forces that would impede the execution
of this purpose and that threaten the communion
with destruction. The purpose to make this com
munion absolutely supreme becomes a basis of com
mon action. In this manner there arises a definite
community based upon that mutual recognition
of the fellowship that constitutes the communion.
Contact with other institutions that are not based
on the clear recognition of the worth of the principle
constitutive of this communion begets the conflicts
and struggles which form so large an element in
the history of human progress. It is in connection
with these conditions that there are developed the
virtues of foresight, courage, consecration, endeavor,
self-sacrifice, watchfulness, self-mastery, determina
tion, preseverance. Only in the exercise of these
qualities can there be any solid confidence in the

The Making of the Better World 125
ability to conquer the world. Observe, at the same
time, that these virtues and graces which arise within
the Christian community as the outcome of its pur
pose to extend itself over all the world are just the
qualities which are in daily requisition in the per
formance of the most commonplace tasks of common
life. Observe, in the next place, that the Christian esti
mate of the worth of every man carries with it the
judgment that the world of mankind is such a world
that the Christian communion is capable of becoming
ecumenical, all-embracing. This is but another way
of saying that the natural relations of men to one
another, according to the very constitution of men,
are to be viewed as preparing them to become recipi
ents of the grace that makes them members of this
communion. The meaning of the common life of the
present world of men comes to light in the Christian
communion. The secular life ceases to be profane
and unholy. Separation from it, flight from it, so
far from aiding in the pursuit of the better life,
separates one from the conditions under which the
better life can be normally developed. To put the
same thought in terms more distinctly theological —
the attitude of God toward the Christian communion
of love exhibits his attitude toward the entire human
race. The progress of this communion in the world
and of the communities that spring out of it, in so
far as they express its character or embody its spirit,

126 Creative Christianity
is to be regarded as exhibiting the purpose and
method of the divine government of the human fam
ily. Hence the clue to the meaning of the history
of humanity, from its earliest beginnings down to
the present, is to be found in the purpose that is
being wrought out in the history of the Christian
communion. This inspiring conception of human his
tory was first set forth broadly, as far as my
knowledge goes, by the great Augustine in his City
of God. The thesis of that great work is to be
re-affirmed today again, though without those lim
itations and that warp of thought that arose from
his self-forced subjection to the Catholic Church.
That is to say : The execution of the divine judg
ments throughout the ages, as they progressively
sever the evil from the good, is to be viewed as
manifesting the divine mode of preserving the
Christian community from the power of destruction
from without and from within and as vindicative
of the will to make the Christian communion univer
sal. This manifestation of divine righteousness is
the actual progressive realization, in the course of
history, of the perfect good God has purposed for
all mankind. His government of the world becomes
a fulfillment of his holy love as it is seen in the
Christian communion.
Let me observe, in the third place, that this
enables us to draw a helpful inference as respects j
the relation of the natural institutions of men, such
as the family, the school, the civil state and the

The Making of the Better World 127
economic order to the making of the better world.
If what I have said about the character of the Chris
tian communion as throwing light upon the character
of the forces that are in actual operation toward
the making of the better world be true, then these
institutions are to be viewed as operative in the
same direction. It is, of course, impossible for us
to show this in detail at the present time and it may
very well be that it can never be strictly proven,
but we have, at any rate, a point of view from which
these may be discovered to have a significance com
mon to them all. All those modes of contemplating
humanity which make human history atomistic and
chaotic or even disruptive of an original unity of
the race; or those which discover its secret in a
control by miraculous interference from without;
or those again, which postulate a dual purpose and
a dual method within the life of the race; or, once
more, those which seek to determine the meaning
of human history by means of a knowledge of the
cosmos apart from man, are hereby set aside. The
diremption of humanity from humanity or of human
ity from the universe is cancelled and the whole
institutional life of men rises up as a progressive
revelation of the manner in which the individual
man comes to himself in a perfect communion of
all with all.
This, I beg you to notice, is a very different
thing from saying that the whole life of the Christian
communion and the whole sum of its saving energy

128 Creative Christianity
among men are to be held within the limits of a
single organization or order. Nor is it even to say
that it is necessary that there be any permanent
organization whatsoever of the forces of the Chris
tian communion as a separate institution. Far from
it ! On the contrary, it takes the natural institutions
of men of which we have spoken and sees, the rather,
in them the moulds in which this higher spiritual
force is to find its most effective mode of action.
These are to become the organs of the higher life
and they are to have the higher character which the
church has been in the habit of claiming for itself.
We do not leave them or seek some foreign kind
of order with a view to the realization of the hope
of the better world of which we are speaking. On
the contrary, these are to become the organs of the
higher life and they are to possess the higher char
acter which the church as an institution has been in
the habit of claiming for itself exclusively. The
native sphere of the operation of the Christian
spirit is in the forms of the community-life native
to humanity. There we find our better world in
the making and if we find it not there we find it
nowhere. For the most truly human — that is the j
most truly Christian, and the higher natural is theV
true supernatural.
To resume in brief : — The supremacy of Jesus
Christ among men, the perfection of personality in
him, lies not in a self-containedness, a self-sufficiency
on his part apart from the character and worth of

The Making of the Better World 129
any or all the individuals constituting the race of man,
but in his realization of the indispensability of him
self to the race and the indispensability of the whole
race to himself. Men have seen in him, as he fulfils
himself progressively in the lives of those who have
caught the significance of his personality, a quality
and range of life in which they may all be at last
at home with one another. In this way the natural
forms of the community-life of men take on prog
ressively a Christian character because apart from
them the spirit of Jesus Christ would be destitute
of the organs essential to its self-expression and self-
fulfillment. We can no longer be content to say
that the better life is or may be here because it is
yonder but rather that the better life must be yonder
in the life to come because it is already here.

CHAPTER IV.
LECTURE IV. THE POWER OF COSMIC
INTERPRETATION
IN the outline of an interpretation of the Christian
faith which we have been attempting to present
in these lectures we have reached the point of
saying that its genius is exhibited in its creation of
a moral world governed by the personality discovered
in Jesus Christ and therefore becoming unceasingly
better. A careful study of the history of mankind
since he came and especially of those regions in which
the Christian Gospel has found a home is confirma
tory of our conviction. But some of our most
serious questionings begin at this point. "Granted,"
it will be said, "that what you have said is true, it
may not carry us very far. Tell us if you please,
what is to become of this better world in the end..
For a world in the abstract, such as you have been
speaking of, does not concern us very deeply, except
in the matter of abstract thinking. Our world
is a concrete world, made up of people whose lives
are very strictly conditioned by the limitations of a
physical world in which each one of them lives and
has his being. Their interest in this physical world
130

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 131
is very direct because they are dependent on it for
every good they seek, including even the spiritual.
Each one of them has to pass out of this world ere
long, so far as we, with our limited vision, can see.
What is his destiny? What becomes of him then?
His participation in this better world of which you
have been speaking does not lessen but rather deepens
his concern with what becomes of people after death.
Has your Christian faith anything more than guesses
to offer in reply?"
The question, we all know, is age-long and thou
sands of times an answer has been attempted. The
interest is not always maintained at the same level
but rises and falls with the kind and degree of pres
sure on our spirits in age after age and in different
peoples. But it will never down. A Christian
teacher may be rightfully expected to have something
to say on the subject for the special reason that the
Christian religion has so often been represented as
fixing the hearts of men on a world into which they
pass at death. Christians have been supposed to
have in their possession a revelation from another
world giving to men a positive knowledge of that
life beyond and of the way to reach it blissfully.
This indeed has often been supposed to consti
tute its principal message. It has been held to
be a religion of the other world. And there are
times when men feel very keenly that it must be
such if it is to continue to be the comforter of the
heavy-laden multitudes of this world. At the present

132 Creative Christianity
day, as our hearts turn to those graves in Flanders'
Field, an agonizing cry goes up for some assurance
that, if a man die, he shall live again. Is there a
place in the universe whither our dear ones go when
they die? It is a cosmic question and its answer
involves an interpretation of the cosmos. Has our
Christianity something of a satisfying nature to say
to those hosts of intelligent people who are quite
aware today of the magnitude of the task lying before
him who would offer a religious interpretation of
the cosmos?
I am fairly familiar with the doctrines that Chris
tian people in the past held concerning the future life
and have elsewhere offered a study of it. I feel
that we are far from being able to content ourselves
with simply repeating the statements our fathers
made on this subject. A change in our mode of
approach to the problem has been forced upon us
of late and that for two reasons. In the first place,
we have been forced to a change in our views as to
what is meant by a revelation and of the manner in
which it is received. Increasing numbers of intelli
gent people, particularly those who have lived
through a college curriculum, have come to feel that
no man is competent to say that we have positively
authenticated information about the future life or
the world beyond. In the second place, the progress
of modern science, with its seemingly sure tread,
has tended to produce an unshakeable conviction that
there is a universe either made or in the making —

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 133
and for our purposes today it makes little difference,
so far as I can see, which you say — and that the
traditional division of existence into two worlds can
be only temporary. We must assume all the worlds
to be a cosmos, an ordered unity if we would inter
pret anything. Consequently, any interpretation of
life that makes the universe finally dual is bound to
pass away. It would seem also that the way of access
to. be »6@6ia»©6f an «o«de«ed^jimty-y-*f<" we**w©,ald-int£j>
oioassese to a true knowledge of the world to come, if
we may for a moment make reference to this tem
porary division, must be one and the same. The
two reasons assigned for the change become one.
It may seem, therefore, at first glance, as if the
methods and assumptions of modern scientific investi
gation, with their wide acceptance in the schools
where our young people are being trained to think,
had rendered a disservice to religion. That it has
rendered a service to our intellect is pretty certain.
Our emotional experiences have probably profited
also. Even our morals have been preserved from
a distressing dualism. But when it comes to reli
gion, many anxiously ask whether its hopes have not
been dissipated like a beautiful but illusive mirage.
It is, of course, quite out of the question for us
to deal adequately with this great issue in a single
lecture. A hint or two which, I trust, may be fruit
ful in the effort to answer the questions propounded
is the best that can be offered here.
We are to remember that this is assuredly a ques-

134 Creative Christianity
tion concerning the cosmos. Certain able and famous
thinkers of our times have sought to separate reli
gious questions entirely from metaphysical or cos
mical questions, in the supposed interest of religion.
They have sought to establish a way of arriving at
religious certainty in the midst of metaphysical 1
uncertainty. It seems to me that such certainty must 1
be of a very temporary and timid kind. It may easily
revert into the most chaotic uncertainty if it reposes,
as it seems to do, on a diremption in man's nature,
like the diremption men used to make in the uni
verse. It is very noteworthy also that the history
of human religions shows that, from the rudest
beginnings of them known to us up to the most highly
cultured of them, the religions of men have been
associated with an interpretation of the cosmosi
To me it seems inevitable that they should always be.
Therefore this easy way which the Ritshlian school
would fain hold open is not for us to take.
I should like to put the question not in the form :
Can the Christian hope of a better world for all
eternity be still held, notwithstanding the modern
view of the cosmos? but in the form, whether the
modern view of the cosmos does not offer an extra
ordinary opportunity to Christian teachers to exhibit
the supreme worth of the Christian hope? Can
Christian faith put upon the cosmos an interpreta
tion that must be the true basis of any real interpre
tation whatsoever? Is the Christian faith creative
of a power of cosmic interpretation?

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 135
To answer these questions let us turn for a mo
ment, if we may, to consider how any interpretation
whatsoever of the world arises. To do this we
may make a distinction between the conscious and
purposed interpretation of the universe which a
philosopher seeks as his peculiar task and the, al
most, unconscious interpretation of it which the
ordinary man makes constantly. The latter's in
terpretation is only implied in what he says and
does generally, and it does not come distinctly before
his mind until some one raises the question. It may
very well be, then, that the man is doing and saying
constantly certain things which he could never do
were there not a latent view of the physical world
in his mind which only comes to light when he
tries to give some reason for what he has done.
Now, the question before us is this : Does the Chris
tian man, just because he is a Christian, become pos
sessed of a power to find a meaning in the universe
which it could not have but for the Christian faith ?
May we expect, therefore, that the Christian cosmic
philosophy will ultimately surpass and subordinate
all others?
To make my point clear permit me to refer to a
homely event that happened some years ago. I was
digging one day in a mound that stood in front of
my summer cottage and presently there fell out of
a heap of mould that my shovel turned over three
very crude stone implements or weapons. An exam
ination of them carried me in imagination back to

136 Creative Christianity
ancient and simple times when the modern mechani
cal achievements of man were not dreamed of. But
here was a beginning. Some savage had taken a
piece of flat hard stone and, by rubbing it against
another piece or some other hard thing, had smoothed
the end of one or the side of another so as to form
a kind of edge that might enable him to cut some
thing with it. What had that man really accom
plished when he did this? Well, in the first place,
he had turned himself into an artisan or an artist
or both. In fact a true artisan is always something
of an artist and a true artist is always something
of an artisan. The ancient artisan turned a piece
of material to a use it could never have served but
for him. He had found a new use in dead inanimate
stone. Millions of ages might pass but, unless one
such as he had intervened, the stone would remain
as it was and the end which it was made capable of
serving would never be disclosed. As it is now,
he also finds himself possessed of a power he never
had before. With that crude weapon he can now
skin a beast or hollow out a piece of wood that will
serve a purpose that has been hitherto beyond it.
The whole story of economic and industrial advance
begins here. This is the starting-point of what we
call civilization. As it progresses, the earth comes
to produce for human wants a supply it could never
have offered but for him. And the extent to which
this may go on is unlimited.
What, then, has our crude artisan found? For

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 137
one thing, he has found that he is able to use a part
of what we call nature which was not previously
available for his own ease or comfort. To a part
of nature, at least, he is for the time superior. He
is no longer on a level with that which has now
become his instrument. It is a far cry from this
modest achievement and discovery to the mastery
of nature as a whole, but the important point is
that he has made a beginning of an undertaking
which will continually advance but has no end in
sight. He begins to be a kind of magician wresting
from nature favors which she would never have
granted of herself but which she seems bound to
yield on his demand. So far for the new relation
to the world of nature. But he also stands now on
a higher plane of life than those other men who
have never got his secret. They, like the animals
, must still wait on nature's convenience. They have
no power to make her give forth more than is her
wont. If there be a shortage they, like the beasts
that bask and batten in the woods, must struggle
against the beasts with tooth and claw for their due
share. He is the superman. He can dispense favors
to other men. They are now in a relation of de
pendence on him.
The main point I wish to make here is that our
artisan has inadvertently put a new interpretation
upon nature. We cannot claim that he has as yet
thought it out in any degree but in course of time he
finds out the meaning of his deed. He will hence-

138 Creative Christianity
forth think of himself and of the world about him
differently. He has the power to think in this waj
because he has the power to do the deed referred to.
He finds that it is through him nature gets its new
meaning. • He has stamped the character of his mind
upon it. He has made it what it was not and could
not have been without him. His action is inter
pretative because it is creative. More and more he
finds that he cannot place himself in the same cate
gory with the things he is using. He has risen to
a new pre-eminence in relation to the cosmos and
therewith has gained the power of a new cosmic
interpretation. One thing, therefore, we have discovered in this
little excursion into the life of the savage, namely,
that a human interpretation of the cosmos is some
thing more than a product of mere intellectuality.
Men do not succeed in wresting its secret from the
universe by examining it from without and, by the
application of self-sufficient rationality, setting free
its hidden meaning. We must first put into the world
that which we afterwards extract from it. We get!
from it again our own self transfused through having
been immersed in its depths. The new world-inter-'
pretation is a new self -interpretation. Or putting
it conversely — the world becomes a different world
to us in its meaning, because we have put into it a
hidden quality of our selfhood which was not there
for us before we put it there.
Of course, it may be said that the world is what

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 139
it is, no matter what we may be or may think it to
be, and that the interpretations of it that come
from transferring to it the qualities of our selfhood
are artificial and arbitrary. But let us not be too sure
that this is so. For, not only do we find it possible
for us to carry the qualities of our inner self out
in action within the world as if it were meant to be
the organ of our personality but we, in our very
selfhood, grow up in the world and find the frame
work of our being coming to us from it. If, then,
we place upon the world the meaning we find in our
selves, are we doing violence to it ? On the contrary,
we may be only showing that it comes to its true
self in us and by us.
Let us linger a little longer with our primitive man
who has made a tool for his own use out of a dead,
unshapen piece of rock. For the suggestion his
achievement gives us is of crucial importance to
our argument. The savage has hereby altered the
direction of his life's activities and discovered a
new realm of human knowledge. He has begun tc
be an artisan. That is, he has begun to manipulate
the mechanical forces of nature in his own interest.
He has entered on the experience of exercising a
personal control of nature's forces. Hence he begins
thinking of nature as never before. The intellectual
process of discovering and organizing her mechanical
forces has begun. He is a mechanic and he sees the
world with the eyes of the mechanic. The way has
been opened to interpret the universe as one vast

140 Creative Christianity
mechanism and to trace its origin to the purposes
of a great Master Mechanic. The new power of
which the man has discovered himself to be possessed
carries with it the exercise of a new cosmic inter
pretation. Our enterprising savage has also begun, or soon
will begin, to be an artist as well as artisan. He ad
mires his work. He finds himself inclined to preserve
it not merely as an instrument for getting what he
wants to satisfy his physical needs but simply as
something that he has made for his pleasure. In
course of time he does many such things. These
acts become pleasurable as well as useful, and
pleasurable even when they do not appear useful.
The articles he has made fit his feelings. A sentiment
of beauty arises within him and its force and range
of application gradually extend. From feeling a
beauty in what he has made he comes to feel a beauty
in things which he has not made but which stand
there before him already made. That is to say, the
world is, for him, capable of being physically made
beautiful and then mentally construed as beautiful.
Thence the way is open to see in the cosmos a work
of art. The artist has reached an interpretation of
the universe not open to any one who is no artist.
By bringing into exercise a hidden power in his own
nature he has disclosed a new meaning in the cosmos.
That is, the world has become in possibility for him
a true cosmos, an all-embracing Beautiful. The
world maker may well have been an Infinite Archi-

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 141
tect of Beauty, the perfect Artist. Nobody but the
true artist understands His work.
Our savage who has become both artist and artisan
has also introduced a new sense of relation to other
men. He is not only able to appropriate to himself
more of nature than hitherto, but he has also dis
covered to other men what they may do. In this way
he has founded civilization. For he has discovered
to men a way of communicating with each other not
open to anything less than man. Unassisted nature
could never have done what she is doing now but,
by the intervention of his genius, connections of a
new and powerful kind are established among men.
Men cease to be flocks and herds and droves and
they become a society. Inner bonds of a kind found
nowhere else are cemented between them. Social
customs and maxims arise. Morality is born. The
material instruments by which the members of a
human society are bound together are turned
into instruments for the realization of moral pur
poses. Thence the way lies open to the task of
seeing in the whole universe a medium for the
fulfilment of the moral life. The universe has a
moral significance. The man has summoned the
moral in himself into conscious action and has found
it possible to transfer to the cosmos the moral quality
he has discovered in himself. The ethical inter
pretation of the cosmos is an achievement of the>
human will and not of the intellect solely.
I hope that these illustrations of my thesis enable

142 Creative Christianity
us now to make a step in the direction the title of
this lecture suggests. That is, I hope to be able to
show that in the practice of the religious life men
enter upon the task of interpreting the universe in
a way that would not be open to them but for the
exercise of that kind of activity we call religion. I
mean that the religious man as such can not be con
tented with an interpretation of the universe that
comes to him independently of his personal religious
life. He cannot simply take over an interpretation
that has come from another source and adjust his
religion to it. It is quite misleading to say that the
world is whatever it is, no matter what one's religion
may be. For, just as a crude mechanical invention
sets a man on the track of turning the whole world
into a mechanism; as the making of a thing that
pleases apart from any other use it may have sets
a man on the track of turning the whole world into
a revelation of beauty; and as also the entrance upon
a moral relation with other men sets a man on the
track of making the whole world into a moral sys
tem; similarly, the entrance upon a religious exper
ience sets him upon the task of giving a religious
meaning to the universe.
No man has as yet succeeded in perfecting any
such achievement as is here suggested. The mechan
ical progress of men is very admirable and every
fresh advance in this direction makes the vista be
fore them more inviting, but whether or no the world ,
is really a vast mechanism it is too soon for any one l

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 143
to declare as a known fact. We can only say that the
prospect of making it out to be so is increasingly
encouraging. Whether or no the universe is truly
beautiful as a whole we do not yet know assuredly,
but the constantly increasing productivity of the
beauty-making power of humanity is a very strong
encouragement to him who fain would believe that
the universe is so constituted that in its wholeness
it awakens the sentiment of beauty in the human
soul that conceives it as a whole. Men have hoped
that the world is morally constituted and they have
sought to construe its changes as sanctions of the
moral law. But very often their constructions
have been very faulty and in all instances the por
tion of events that has admitted definitely such a
construction is very small indeed in comparison with
that vast portion that seems to ignore moral con
siderations and to defy the attempts of the moralist
to regard the whole as constituting a moral system
or as supporting such a system. All we can say is,
that every fresh moral advance drives us on more
determinedly to essay the attempt and heightens our
courage as we face the hard wall of forces in the
world that are seemingly neutral morally. So too, we
may find that religion only sets us at the task of turn
ing the world into a sanctuary of worship and leads
us daily onward to survey the whole in this light; but,
to answer the question whether the whole is fitted
to awaken and permanently sustain the religious
capacities of our nature remains as yet an uncom-

144 Creative Christianity
pleted task. The question is, what does religion do
for the interpretation of the cosmos and what par
ticularly does Christianity do in this regard? To
answer this question we must turn our attention
once more for a moment to the beginnings of human
spiritual activity or, at least, to what seems its be
ginnings, and thence indicate the direction it has
principally taken in later periods.
It has already been pointed out that the knowledge
that has been gained of primitive times makes it
pretty clear that science and religion had originallyl
a common root. Both sprang, on the one hand, from'
the sense of benefit or harm that came to men fromj
happenings in the world about them and, on the other
hand, from the desire to control the working of the
forces hidden there so as to secure good things and
avoid the evil. To men of these remote ages the
world was in a large degree a sort of disintegrated
and haphazard juxtaposition of things, a reflex of
their own irregular thinking and unordered lives.
In the later times, when the higher reaches of the
human spirit brought a whole of things, as it
seemed, within the survey of men and they grasped
it as a unity of some sort, two divergent judgments
were passed upon it. Men either saw in the dark
materiality of existence a threatened inhibition of
their desires to reach out to better things or else
they perceived in it a power or powers working for
their good. The world has always had for men some
kind of religious significance. They have either

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 145
feared or loved it, or they have both feared and
loved it, but in no case have they been able to feel
indifferent toward it. In the religions of men their
estimate of the world is especially manifest.
In all religions there is implicit, at least, a cosmic
philosophy. In Buddhism, for example, or in cer
tain types of mediaeval Catholic mysticism our
human connection with material existence consti
tuted an obstacle to the fulfilment to the hopes of the
pious. But this, so far from diverting their attention
from the cosmos, as a thing of no account or as to be
shunned because of its repugnance to their aims,
really drew their attention to it. The world threw it
self persistently on their attention as that which by
its very oppositional character stimulated their desire
to explain it. "Otherworldliness" always requires
for its vindication a theory of the present world. On
the other hand, in Judaism and Protestant Chris
tianity, where the world is conceived as having some
positive relation to one's good, the imperative to
interpret it is felt even more strongly because the bet
ter life would seem to be reached along its highways.
The Protestant spirit shrinks not from the attempt
to discover the ultimate secret of the universe but
plunges boldly into its most forbidding regions, con
fident that the knowledge of the truth of the world is
open to all and must minister in the end to the good
of all. Religion, we see, has always a cosmic interest,
not as a matter of supererogation, but as inherent in
its very life.

146 Creative Christianity
Now, it is commonly admitted that religion is full
of passion, whether it be the deep and quiet contem-
plativeness that by its steady flow and pressure sub
dues all vagrant feeling and thrusts a man forward
into severe spiritual conflicts which he must fight out
all alone ; or whether it be at the other extreme where
the fierceness of its fire breaks out in fanaticism and |
intolerance ; or whether, again, it be in the more !
common ground between these extremes. But, in
any case, all those passions that play so powerful a
part in our common human relations, such as court
ship, marriage, family life, economic endeavor and
politics, are taken up into the religious experiences
of the people. In fact, the manner in which a man's
religion is related to these things gives the best clue
to its character. But in science we seem, at first
glance, to see something quite the opposite. Is it
not granted that the methods of science and its induc
tions can be trusted only when all the play of personal
interest is rigidly excluded from influencing the
course of investigation and its outcome? It would
seem that the motives and methods of science, on the
one hand, and the motives and methods of religion,
on the other, are so disparate that conflicts between
them become inevitable. And may not that conflict
issue in the destruction of the one or the other of
them? Such a conclusion does not seem to me jus
tifiable. It rises from a habit of overlooking the
self-imposed limitations under which science is work
ing-

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 147
Science has become to us the sciences. Each
science concerns itself with a detached portion of
existence and not with the whole of existence as a t
unity. The interpretation of this ultimate unity has
become the task of philosophy. Every special science
detaches a certain portion or field of the whole area
or complex of facts, the others being regarded as
temporarily negligible, and by a collation and order
ing of the materials found within this field, reaches,
presumably, certain inductions and inferences. This
temporary detachment of portions of the area of
knowledge is necessary, if any progress is to be
made. But every man of science knows quite well
that the results reached in this manner must be
checked up in relation to the results obtained by a
similar detachment of other portions and that the
whole must ultimately constitute a unity. If con
tradiction arises, there is error somewhere. And
just as he detaches a portion of the material and
places the remainder for the time, in abstraction, so
also he brings to play upon this material, not the
whole of the capacities of his nature — not all its im
pulses, passions, intuitions and longings — but only
those capacities which by detachment from the others
enable him to take up and execute this special
task of making a definite induction within a limited
area. The whole man, so to say, is not engaged in
that scientific pursuit but only those powers of his
nature which seem particularly fitted to it. If the
others were all allowed free play at the time and in

148 Creative Christianity
that particular field, confusion and uncertainty
would result. But the broad-minded man — who is
always more than man of science — is quite aware
that all those qualities and powers of his nature
which were, for a time, set in abstraction must be
called back again and their united action given full
play if life is to be lived in its fulness. Ultimate
truth cannot be attained by the disruption of our
humanity but only by its unity. Those very passions
and impulses, those very hopes and longings which
any particular science seeks temporarily to ignore,
remain unextinguished and must reassert themselves
in due time. Indeed, we may very rightly contend
that in a sort of half -conscious way they were oper
ative in the pursuit of the purely scientific knowledge
and that, but for them, the task would never have
been undertaken or, having been undertaken, would
never have come to completion.
If for a long time this was not clear to the mind
of the student of science the situation is now rapidly
changing- For new scientific discoveries are quickly
put to some practical use and the pressure of prac
tical needs is constantly inciting the scientific in
vestigator on to new achievements. Even apart from
this we can affirm that the man of science is constant
ly beckoned onward by the vision of communities of
men sharing the joy of his coming discovery or, even
at its lowest, the vision of his own more perfect
state when he will have enlarged the sphere of his
action so as to have become the denizen of a larger

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 149
and, from some point of view, better universe. The
image of the more perfect personality is ever before
his mind and but for this his zeal would fade and per
ish in indifference and sloth. He may have never
analyzed his motives or taken the pains speculatively
to construe their meaning, but if he will do so, he
will find no stopping place short of that supreme
regard for personality which is the soul of the re
ligious life-
That is to say, the scientific man is also religious
and his scientific purposes repose on religious mo
tives. If what I have been saying is true, we have, in
the final reckoning, no barely theoretical interest in
the world in which we live. It is only by the tem
porary abstraction of the higher interest that the
purely theoretical interest can ever be given a place.
It is not open to us to regard any man's final inter
pretation of the cosmos as wholly an outcome of a
careful discovery and collation of purely objective
facts and a calm, dispassionate and disinterested
construction of their interrelations. On the contrary,
his cosmical interpretations will be found to flow
from and to express the same deep personal longings
and purposes as he manifests in the vocation he prac
tices, the pleasures he pursues and the personal friend
ships and hatreds he cherishes. In every instance
there will stand disclosed his appreciation of the
universe as the great complex of facts and forces
in the midst of which he is to seek those achieve-

150 Creative Christianity
ments or attain those ends that constitute his life as
a man. The universe becomes his universe. Be
tween its character and his character there is always
a certain correspondence. His personal attainments
impart to the universe a character it could never
have had but for him. Even if one were to say
that he does not know whether or no there be a
universe, yet the very attempt he is constantly mak
ing to answer the question of its existence discloses
the motive of his endeavor, namely, the aim of
achieving an inner unity. For this inner unity is
impossible of realization apart from the unity of all
existence, that is, a universe.
We have now reached the crux of our problem
in the present lecture : Does Christianity as a re
ligious faith bring to its votaries a power of cosmic
interpretation not to be found otherwise or elsewhere
and, if so, what is this distinctively Christian insight
into the meaning of this world which we call a cos
mos? I feel that the inevitable brevity of our discus
sion makes it possible for us to give only a hint of
answer to this question and that the answer must
bear a somewhat dogmatical stamp. The outstanding
characteristics of the Christian religion as adum
brated in our preceding lectures shall be the basis
of the treatment of the present subject.
In the discussion of the creative activity of the
Christian spirit as it is seen at work in the discovery
of the perfect personality we have seen that this
perfect personality is visualized progressively as one,

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 151
by the enlistment and unified direction of his powers,
comes to the realization of his own selfhood. The
discovery of that Perfect One is an achievement.
But at the same time, to speak in the language of
religion, it is a revelation. In the devotion of our
energies to the higher end we are aware that we are
the subjects of the power of that higher personality.
He makes us what we are. We have also seen in our
study of the making of the better world that the crea
tive activity of the Christian spirit is manifested in
the way of an impartation of one's self to other men
and that, as we proceed on our way to the fulfillment
of this task of recreating other men in our likeness,
there is no limit that can be set for us short of filling .
the whole world with our own higher worth. Yet,
throughout this whole process of self-giving, the
Christian is aware that the others are as indispens
able to him as he to them. He must have them all
in communion with himself, he must ever receive
of them into his inmost self, for without them he
can never become the man he wills to be. It is this
illimitable community of men that is to make of him
the man he is to be.
At the same time it is to be noted that the commu
nity life of men does not arise in independence of
the forces of the material universe or by the purely
immediate relation of human persons with one
another after the mystical order. On the contrary,
we know of no fellowship of men with one another
which is not mediated by physical forms. The

152 Creative Christianity
character of that fellowship has always a correspond
ence with the action of the material environment.
Thus the communication of the higher life from
one man to another is to be construed as effectuated
through the cooperation of the human spirit with
the action of the material order in which it has its /
habitat. Men are the subjects of the working of
that order at the same time that they use it as their
instrument. In the Christian faith this cooperative
action is comprehended in its unity as an act of God
himself acting upon our spirits.
That is to say, in the attempt to set forth
the creativity of the Christian faith the active and
the receptive sides of our nature are brought to
gether. In the Christian religion they are seen in
equipoise. On the one side, we have seen that the
Christian faith summons the active forces of our,
nature to their highest possible development. It/
contains the great "I WILL" of the human spirit.
Its watchwords are consecration, self-devotion. It
begets in men unparalleled ambition, determination
to fulfill one's self to the utmost, intolerance of self-
effacement. It produces a self-affirmation unquench
able. No sooner is one goal attained than there
appears another goal that needs for its attainment
a mightier force than ever. Wherever this faith
may go its productivity is evident in all the spheres
of life — social, economic, intellectual, moral. The
Christian is continually discovering in himself pow
ers undreamt of before. He seeks no Elysium of

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 153
ease but a heaven of conquest. He can never be
content to be only himself but must ever become
more than himself.
But in and with this assertiveness of soul — not
prior or subsequent to it, but coactive with it — there
is an attitude of perfect receptivity. That ultimate
to which he aspires arises, it is true, out of the
creativity of his own spirit but at the same time it
is that which makes him what he is. That better
world which is to come into being through his ef
fort is by its very forthcoming producing in him that
betterment which he seeks to impart to mankind.
And thus, at the very moment when we Christians
are bringing the whole body of our concentrated
energies into an action that exhausts their strength
— at that very moment, I say, we are the most fully
receptive. The classical expression of it is the
Pauline: "I labored more abundantly than they
all, yet not I but the grace of God that was with
me." "Work out your own salvation with fear
and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you."
Thus self-assertion does not become arrogance, nor
submission become indifference. Initiative does not
become recklessness nor trust, quiescence. Free ac
tion does not become lawlessness nor obedience, self-
contempt. The contrast with Judaism and Buddhism, for
example, with their separation between that which
man does and that which is done for him,
is evident. In Judaism, the "I will" of God

154 Creative Christianity
and the "I will" of man are successive in the
order of time and contingent on one another, so
that the tendency is to make of God a commanding
and irresistible Will to which man must submit in
utter helplessness. In Buddhism, on the contrary,
there is an exclusion of any redeeming or uplifting
power and reliance is placed on the concentrated will
of the man unsustained by a higher Will. But in
Christianity the two sides of our nature are perfected
in their unity. In the fullest affirmation of the
meaning and worth of our own personality there are
the blessedness and peace that come from being sub
ject to the projection of the higher personality into
ours. In all this a certain attitude toward the cosmos,
an implicit interpretation of it, comes to light. We
must now attempt to indicate by way of suggestion
what this may be.
We have seen that, to us Christians, Jesus appears
as the Perfect Personality. His title to this high
honor rests not on his freedom, or exemption, from
the physical and spiritual conditions under which
our common lives must be lived but on the quality
of spirit he manifested and set in circulation among
men. Outwardly viewed, the circumstances of his
life were far from ideal. The child of a disap
pointed, defeated and subject people; nurtured in
the midst of social conditions that were dominated
by the influence of a selfish oligarchy, on the one
hand, and an intolerant hierarchy, on the other;
with the sight of the suffering that filth and disease,

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 155
poverty and hunger always bring to mortal men con
tinually before his eyes; himself impeded in his
work, persecuted, arrested and 'gibbeted through
official jealousy and obsequiency and through popular
madness. The forces of malignity and the powers
of the cosmos seemed allied against him. In strik
ing contrast to all this is the kindly way in which
he had formerly looked upon that which we call
"nature." To him the natural had not been synony
mous with the hard and evil and unfeeling but was
instinct with the beauty and goodness that filled his
own soul. Perchance some one may feel inclined
to say that these qualities could not be found in
nature itself but that he reflected them upon it from
his own soul and thus put into nature a meaning that
was quite contrary to its real character- Be that as
it may, the contradiction between his love of life and
the way in which the forces of material nature were
used against him to crush out his life is evident
enough on the surface. It is no wonder that the
evangelist in relating the story of his death said
that a darkness came over all the earth when he died.
Yet in the face of all this we can confidently
affirm that the chief source of Jesus' attractiveness
lies in his crucifixion and the way he went to it. Ii
is the spectacle of the Crucified upon his cross and
his cry of mingled desolation, forgiveness, confi
dence and triumph that has broken the hearts of
men and subdued them to the power of his grace —
not the spectacle of his reigning in glory with his

156 Creative Christianity
foes beneath his feet. It has seemed to men the
tragedy of tragedies to witness the reduction of all
the graces and virtues, the hopes and longings of all
mankind to shame and spitting and death. Why
should tragedy possess that mighty attractiveness
which it undoubtedly has for us all unless it be that
through nothing less can the true nobility of perfect
manhood come to light? Jesus' true selfhood came
to light thereby, and that not to our sight alone
but to his own most truly. When his disciples, in
consequence of it, declared that they saw him seated
afterwards on the right hand of the Majesty on
High, what was it but their way of affirming that
the supremacy of his personality came to realization
by the cross ? The forces that combined to accomp
lish his seeming overthrow became the ladder set
up on earth by which men ascend to heaven.
Therewith is assigned to the believer in Jesus
the task of reinterpreting the whole cosmos in accord
ance with the significance of this achievement of
the Master. Science, in forcing us to the recog
nition of the unity of all worlds compels us to see that
if any portion of the universe or any event in its
normal course has a moral or religious meaning it
is because the whole has such a meaning. It has
compelled us, so to say, to dismiss isolated miracles
to make room for one single, all-embracing miracle.
Christianity says that this miracle must be a miracle
of good and not of evil.
The prospect of wresting from the universe a

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 157
message of goodwill and of the uplifting power of
goodness seems, it is true, a forbidding one. In the
words of John Stuart Mill : "Nature impales men,
breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be
devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death,
crushes them with stones like the first Christian
martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with
cold, poisons them with the quick or slow venom of
her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous
deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of
a Nabi or a Domitian never surpassed. All this
Nature does with the most supercilious disregard
both of mercy and of justice."
This terrible indictment sets forth all too plainly
the fearsome and shrinking attitude toward nature
assumed by multitudes in other ages and even in our
own. The human response to nature's challenge has
taken many forms, from the dogged stubbornness
of the Stoic and the assumed contempt for the world
on the part of the mediaeval mystic to the utter hope
lessness of the Buddhist, except that the latter holds
that, by the extinction of desire, annihilation of
existence may be attained. Even the Protestant
Kant felt that the realm of nature and the moral
realm were not inwardly connected- To him they
seemed subject to different laws and their mani
festations were of a divergent character. He found
himself obliged to postulate — for he felt he could not
prove — the existence of God in order to reconcile
these two worlds. But this still left the natural

158 Creative Christianity
world an alien, if not a foe, to our moral nature.
If now, in contrast to all this, the Christian can
possess his soul in peace and live his life in fulness
of joyful strength, since he sees in Nature a friend
to his higher purposes, it must be because, together
with his ampler knowledge of the world's forces and
operations, he unites a quality of inner life of his
own that enables him to bring to the world-problem
a power of interpretation unknown to others.
His interpretation of the cosmos comes to him as
the only satisfactory explanation of his own achieve
ment- He has faced the terrible foes lurking in
Nature, "red in tooth and claw," and found them in
the end to be his friends. The seemingly pitiless
powers that have afflicted him with pains and sick
ness, penalties and losses, bereavements and sorrows,
and even the certainty of the arrival of swift-ap
proaching death to himself and to all that he holds
dear have disclosed their kindlier side to him. Even
when his whole career in life seems to have marked
him out to be an innocent sufferer for others' mis
doings or to be suffering, it would seem, meaning-
lessly at the hands of a Universe that pays not the
slightest regard to his longing for relief, he finds
in the1 end that his very misfortunes have turned out
to be the indispensable means to the better life that
has come to him. He has been able to turn the
miseries and terrors with which Nature has
visited men into smiling friends. He glories
in tribulation, for tribulation works patience, and

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 159
patience probation, and probation hope, and hope
makes not ashamed because in the midst of these
things the love of God has been shed abroad in his
heart through Christ Jesus. He knows no other way
by which this love could come to his heart, than by
the road of trial. To be sure, lie has not gone very
far in his exploration of Nature's secrets. He has
surveyed only a very little of the illimitable regions
of life that lie before men. But, having begun, he
can find no stopping place. And the discoveries he
has made in this spiritual enterprise must be the
basis — just as it is in all science — of all further
explorations. The world that has been evil to other
men he is making over into a good world. If the
cosmos is an ultimate unity he may Well believe that
his task can be accomplished.
Just as he who creates a mechanical instrument
out of an unordered mass of dead matter finds him
self warranted thereby in turning the whole world
into a mechanism subservient to a personal pur
pose ; and as he who creates a thing of beauty out of
a mass that is without form or comeliness, until he
transforms it, finds himself warranted to discover
the sentiment of beauty in the whole of things; so
also the man who has discovered that that which
seemingly had no interest in goodness but hvas
possibly malignant and sought his ruin, can be
turned by him into a ministrant of blessedness, finds
himself warranted to go forward to the infinite
task of turning a religionless universe into a mes-

160 Creative Christianity
senger of love. He finds the meaning of the cosmos
disclosed in the conquests he has made. He has
taken the seeming "dare" of nature and found that
he can turn it into his true friend. He has made her
speak the language of the tenderest service to per
sonality. To him, the universe exists for the purpose
of bringing into being just such personalities as he
finds himself coming to be. He verily makes over
the universe progressively in his own soul. His
cosmos is the product of his own creative spirit.
If at this point we recall how it was pointed out
in an earlier stage of our study that it is only in the
communion of personalities any human person comes
to his true self, our contention will be the more
abundantly vindicated. For the growing community
of spirit which is developing on a broad scale among
the many races of mankind has been rendered pos
sible by means of the prodigious advance recently
made in those scientific discoveries which have placed
the forces of material existence at the disposal of
mankind for their well-being.
Hereby also is brought to light the ultimate motive
of all science. The great generalizations of science
turn out to be a method of transferring to objective
nature the predicates descriptive of our personal na
ture. Science is an instrument for the affirmation of
the supremacy of personality in the universe, for in
the transfer of the terms which are descriptive of
the inner movements of our subjectivity to the objec
tive world there is nothing artificial, but in the act

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 161
of clothing nature, seemingly external to our per
sonality, in the very garb of personality the truth
of nature itself is discovered and set forth. Nature
thus becomes instrumental to the achievements of
the higher spiritual life. This is the faith upon
which science reposes. Without it the motive pow
er that carries the man of science through his prod
igious labors would be lacking.
If there seems at first glance an arbitrariness at
taching to this method of cosmic interpretation it
disappears when full weight is given to a consid
eration mentioned earlier. It was pointed out that
in the midst of our intensest and most spontaneous
activity we are the most fully conscious of being
receptive of the action of another. In human life
action and passion are reciprocal and equal. In the
cosmos there is that which impresses itself upon us,
awakens in us the powers that we should otherwise
never know to be ours and enacts its achievements
anew in our souls. In making over the cosmos into
our human likeness we are ourselves made over into
the higher likeness which we discover there.
Here, therefore, lies the way to the answer to be
given to the question of destiny. The world is
ours and ever shall be increasingly. "We are more
than conquerors through him that loved us." "All
things work together for good to them that love
God." To the Christian the universe cannot be an insol
uble mystery. Mystery indeed it is, but not an

162 Creative Christianity
insoluble mystery. For mystery stands no longer !
for that which is ultimately unknowable but only/
for that which is not yet known. The attraction
of the mysterious — and who has not felt its power? —
lies not in its inhibition of all further search by
the erection of an impenetrable barrier to all spir
itual progress but in the intimation to the pioneer
of thought that away "behind the ranges" there lies
an unexplored region that must yet be traversed
by him ere his life's task be completed. But, apart
from the Christian faith, I do not see how the uni
verse can ever have a meaning that will satisfy our
deepest longing. For, though we should succeed,/
independently of this faith, in answering the question
of the how or even the whence of this complex of
things we call the world, the question of the where-
u-nto must remain unanswered unless one can find
the way to turn its tragedies into triumphs and all
its evil into good.
This is the great bestowment of the Crucified.
He has discovered to us personality finding its per
fection ministered unto by the agonies as well as by
the experiences of bliss that corne to our spirits
through the inseparability of our destiny from the
natural constitution of the cosmos. We are making
our cosmos after our inner likeness while we are
being made through it. Without the sufferings it
ministers to us we should lose the better part of its
meaning, for we should never find our true self in
it. We should never know what it is for one to rise

The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 163
to the highest plane of life by learning how to give his
life a ransom for many. The Christian is able to
turn the universe into a cosmos ordered and beauti
fied to be the external abode of the personalities
perfected in vicariousness. He is able to find the
everlasting in the present and life in the midst of
death. Some months ago when I was a guest of Professor
Thorp of the United Theological College, Bangalore,
Mysore, India, I picked up a little volume of med
itations by an author whose name I have, unfortun
ately, forgotten and from it copied a short poem en
titled, 'And the Life Everlasting.' With it our
series of meditations, is brought to a close.
"AND THE LIFE EVERLASTING"
It will not meet us where the shadows fall
Beside the sea that bounds the Evening Land;
It will not greet us with its first clear call
When death has borne us to the farther strand.
It is not something yet to be revealed — ¦
The Everlasting Life; 'tis here and now,
Passing unseen because our eyes are sealed
With blindness for the pride upon our brow.
It calls us 'mid the traffic of the street,
And calls in vain because our ears are lent
To those poor babblements of praise that cheat
The soul of heaven's truth with earth's content.

164 Creative Christianity
It dwells not in innumerable years;
It is the breath of God in timeless things —
The strong, divine persistence that inheres
In love's red pulses and in faith's white wings.
It is the power whereby low lives aspire
Unto the doing of a selfless deed,
Unto the slaying of a soft desire
In service of the high, unworldly creed.
It is the treasure that is ours to hold
While all things else are turned to dust ;
That priceless and imperishable gold
Beyond the scathe of robber or of rust.
It is the clarion when the sun is high —
The touch of greatness in the toil for bread —
The nameless comfort of the winter's sky —
The healing silence where we lay our dead.
And if we feel it not among our strife,
In all our toiling and in all our pain —
This rhythmic pulsing of immortal life —
Then do we work and suffer here in vain.

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