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DEPOSITED BY THE

LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

GOD'S EDUCATION
OF MAN
BY
WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE
PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE

BOSTON AND NEW VORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
@bz Sltoergibe pregg, Camori&ue
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

HIS book attempts to indicate in a
very general way, and also within
a single small section to point out
in considerable detail, the radical and far-
reaching change which is taking place in
theological conceptions. The general re
marks on the theological situation as a
whole, and the outline of the larger circle
of religious truth, I have placed by itself in
the Introduction. This is for clergymen
and such laymen as are not afraid of hard
reading on fundamental themes. All others
are earnestly urged to skip it altogether ; or
at least not to assume in advance that the
main portion of the book is as dry and bar
ren of practical results as the opening pages
of this Introduction will appear to them
to be.
By way of a Conclusion, I have added a

iv Preface
discussion of two contrasted philosophical
conceptions ; in which it is shown, by
examples from philosophy, literature, art,
politics, and missions, that in these kindred
spheres there has ever been manifest that
inevitable tendency to pass from abstract
and transcendent to concrete and imma
nent conceptions, of which the position
taken in the body of this book with refer
ence to Christian truth and life is simply
one more example. This also, though by
no means so hard reading as the Introduc
tion, the reader who is economical of effort
and intent on edification alone is "consider
ately counseled to omit.
The three central chapters take up in
detail, and restate in modern terms, the
essential truths which the ancient doctrines
Jof sin, redemption, and sanctification sought
to express. So long as God and man were
regarded as alien and mutually exclusive
entities, the courts of justice afforded the
most obvious analogy in which to formulate
the relations between them. The new

Preface v
view, which regards God and man as kin
dred, — related to each other as vine to
branch, father to child, — finds its most
appropriate analogy in that drawing out of
the small into the great, of the imperfect
into the perfect, of the dependent into the
independent, of the growing organ into
the complete life, which we call educa
tion. Hence the title — God's Education
of Man.
This divine drawing-out of man has three
stages : First : Man, the imperfect frag
ment, the dependent member, impelled by
appetite and passion, sets himself up as a
complete and self-sufficient end in himself,
in defiant disregard of the bonds that bind
him to his fellows and to God. This false
attitude of self-assertion is sin ; and has
to be restrained by law, which is the asser
tion of the relation of the part to the whole,
and of the claims of all on each.
Second : The good, healthy organism re
claims the rebellious and unruly member ;
God comes after runaway man; in spite

vi Preface
of his ill-deserts, offers him a share in
his own large, generous life, and willingly
takes upon himself the pain and sacrifice
essential to fit an imperfect and unde
veloped member into place. This winning
back of an unworthy and offending member
to humble acceptance of his forfeited place
in the spiritual world is the province and
prerogative of grace.
Third : The member restored to position
in the structure must be trained to specific
function in the world's spiritual life. This
training to specific function, whereby the
member becomes partaker in the whole life
and joy of the God whom he gladly and
freely serves in his specific service of his
fellow-men, finds its consummation in the
crown of Christian character.
Instead of representing God primarily as
judge or ruler, with a majesty to uphold
and an authority to vindicate ; and man
as a culprit or "probationer," concerned
mainly with being punished or pardoned ;
I have sought to present God as a wise and

Preface vii
patient teacher, eager to impart to man
lessons which it is good for him to learn ;
and man as a dull and stupid, often wayward
and wilful, sometimes even fractious and
rebellious pupil, whom the great teacher
is patiently trying to train for usefulness
and honor and blessedness and immortal
ity. In many respects , any; attempt to revive
an interest in doctrinal theology is a thank
less task. Men have grown so weary of
the unrevised systems of the past that
they have come to doubt whether a new
construction, adjusted to modern scientific
and philosophical conceptions, is possible
or desirable. Hence whoever makes even
so slight an attempt at1 reconstruction as is
presented here must expect to be charged
with putting new wine into old bottles ; if
indeed his product is conceded to be wine
at all. Fortunately, fermentation is not
the only process in nature from which analo
gies can be drawn. The thrifty householder
brings forth out of his treasure things new

viii Preface
and old. Old trunks have been known to
put forth new and vigorous shoots ; and
grafting is sometimes advantageous.
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE. ¦
Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Me., August i, 1899.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH
I. The Universal Will of God the Metaphy
sical and Ethical Basis of Christianity i
II. Christ the Historic Revelation of the Uni
versal Will of God ... 26
III. The Holy Spirit, God in Humanity. The
Doctrine of the Trinity the Unessential
Formulation of Essential Truths . . _j/
IV. Sin and Atonement . ... 16
V. The Organisation of the Spiritual Life.
The Outlook for the Future . . . 4/
VI. The Present Need of Theological Construc
tion. The Function of Dogma . . 46
CHAPTER I
CONTROL BY LAW
I. Man's Primitive Innocence and Early Fall 59
II. The Universality of Law. The Unique
Character of Hebrew Legislation . 65
III. Ceremonial Elements in the Law. The
Ritualism that is Idolatry ... 72

x Contents
IV. The Law concerned chiefly with Right Re
lations between Persons ... 7^
V. Gratification of Appetite in itself a Good.
Specious Excuses for Sin . . . 76
VI. Answer to the Excuse that Certain Sins
are " Natural." The Meanness of
Sin  80
VII. Tlie Responsibility of Wealth . . . 85
VIII. The Test of Pleasure ... 90
IX. The Moral Law in Politics . . . 96
X. The Pride of the Pharisee and the Conceit
of the Perfectionist. The Inadequacy
of Law  '02
CHAPTER II
CONVERSION BY GRACE
I. The Priority of Grace. Its Various Man
ifestations  113
II. Vicarious Sacrifice. The Sacrifice and the
Forgiveness of Christ. How to bring
Sinners to Repentance . . . .119
III. Justification by Faith. Its Justice and
Reasonableness ..... 1)6
IV. Conversion. Time and Manner. The
Pastor's Class  142
V. Regeneration a Gradual Process. Its Uni
versality and Necessity . . . 146
VI. The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ . 150

Contents xi
VII. Prayer not Reflex Action but Vital Com
munion. Its Answer Inevitable . . 153
VIII. The Need of Christian Fellowship. The
Dawning Sense of Freedom . . . 757
CHAPTER III
CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE
I. Character the Completion, Service the Ex
pression, of the Work begun by Law
and Grace  /05
II. Christian Character consists in doing one's
Specific Work well for the Glory of God
and the Good of Man . . . . 174
III. The Sense of Proportion and the Art of
Subordination Essential to the Highest
Character and the Best Service . .184
IV. The Church and its Services a Means, not
an End. The Bane of Clericalism and
Sentimentalism ..... 190
V. The Educational Analogy. The Minis
ter's Threefold Task . . . • '97

CONCLUSION

TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS

I.
Plato and Aristotle .
• 2I3
II.
Kant and Hegel .
. 218
III.
Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning
. 224
IV.
Garrison and Lincoln
. 229
xii Contents
V. Burne-Jones and Watts . . . .231
VI. Foreign Missions. President Nott and Sec
retary Anderson. Cyrus Hamlin and
David Livingstone .... 2jj
VII. The Practical Difference between the Two
Types of Idealists. The Greater Difficulty
the Greater Glory .... 24$

INTRODUCTION

Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson : Ulysses.
Not once or twice in our fair island-story
The path of duty was the way to glory.
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevail'd,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.
Tennyson : Ode on the Death of Wellington.

GOD'S EDUCATION OF MAN

INTRODUCTION
THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH

The Universal Will of God the Metaphysical
and Ethical Basis of Christianity

HE current creed of Christendom is
a chaos of contradictions. Truths
and lies, facts and fancies, intui
tions and superstitions, essentials and ex
crescences are bound in one bundle of
tradition which the honest believer finds
hard to swallow whole, and which the ear
nest doubter is equally reluctant in toto to
reject. It is high time to attack this chaos,^
to resolve it into its elements, and to re
organize our faith into a form which shall
at the same time command the assent of

2 God's Education of Man
honest and the devotion of earnest men.
This work cannot be done roughly with
the broad-axe. The problem is not me
chanical, but vital. One cannot chop the
creed in two, and say, "This half is true
and that is false." We must discover the
germ of life in the old and somewhat
decrepit body of current tradition, and
from that vital germ we must breed the
fair and vigorous body of the faith that
is to be. The new faith will not be a
mechanical fraction of the old, whether
large or small. It will be a reproduction
of the essential features of the old in fresh,
vigorous, functional relationship.
What then is this living germ ? What
is the pearl of great price, the one thing
needful, the better part which shall not be
taken from us, the hidden leaven, the grain
of mustard seed, the rock foundation, the
oil in the lamp, the sap in the vine, the
blood in the veins which makes one mother,
sister, brother of the Christ ? The answer
to that question lies far back in psycho-

The Ethical Basis of Christianity $
logy, deep, down in metaphysics, high up in
ethics. Hints only can be given within
the compass of the first few pages of a
single chapter.
Whatever is, is incomplete. As Words
worth says : —
" Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed."
Man is no exception. He too is made
what he is by virtue of his relations to
what he is not. There is no such being as
a self-sufficient individual. Unus homo,
nullus homo. Men independent of social
relations are as inconceivable as mountains
without valleys. Things in relations, men
determined by their social environment;
the finite in the infinite, the individual
responsible to universal claims, represent
ultimate units, within which thought in
deed can by abstraction draw distinctions,
but into which it can insert no dissecting
knife. To cut a man off from his material
environment and social relations would be

4 God's Education of Man
to sever him from himself. The residuum
would be zero.
So much, at least, the hardest-headed
doubter would not venture to deny. He
will admit that a man must have some
ground to stand on, some room to turn
round in, some environment to react against,
some claims to respect, some standards to
acknowledge, in order to be a man at all.
He dares not cut so near the quick as to
exclude all physical environment, all social
obligation from what he calls himself. Yet
even this concession is fatal to the atheist ;
for, though at first he may not see its im
plications, it will give him no permanent
resting-place for the sole of his foot until
he finds rest and peace in God. For let
him put in his knife as far from his individ
ual heart as he pleases ; let him make his
physical environment and social relation
ships as big as he likes ; he is no better off.
Let him make it as large as America:
America cannot be cut off from Europe,
either historically or geographically. Let

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 5
him make it as large as the earth : the
earth's motions and structure and chemical
constitution are inexplicable apart from the
solar system. And if he undertakes to
define in terms of either time or space the
solar system, he must borrow his defini
tions from innumerable systems of which
ours is but one. Whatever object he thinks
about at all must be thought in definite
relations to all other objects of his thought,
must inhere in a single system of rational
relations. The same experience awaits him
if he asks himself the moral question, " Who
is my neighbor?" Duty does not stop
with the claims of the man next door, or
across the street, or in the same town, or
in the same state or nation, or across the
ocean, or in the same century. /Beings we
never heard of and whom we shall never see
will be the happier or the more wretched in
consequence of what the humblest of us
does or fails to do. Wherever there are
conscious beings capable of knowing what
we do and what we are, there are persons

6 God's Education of Man
under whose possible praise and blame our
conduct fallsA Here again the thoughts of
these other jSersons, their praise or blame,
are not mutually exclusive, unrelated judg
ments. They all inhere in and partake of
a single system of spiritual obligation and
moral judgment, the existence and univer
sality of which is attested by the tendency
of all minds, in proportion as they are intel
lectually and morally developed, to come
to an ever closer agreement concerning
what is good and what is evil, what is right
and what is wrong. This Thought which
holds the universe in a single system of
rational relations ; this Will which includes
the acts and attitudes of all persons toward
each other, which is present in all our indi
vidual thoughts, implied in all our confi
dence in our own memories, involved in
all our communication with one another,
assumed in all argument, asserted in all
doubt, affirmed in all denial, — this Abso
lute Thought and Universal Will is the
unescapable reality which the world agrees

The Ethical Basis of Christianity J
to call God. Our behef in him rests on
the fact that no knife has ever been found
sharp enough, and no surgeon skillful
enough, to find the precise point, whether
near or far, where the finite stops short, or
duty comes to an end, or some things cease
to belong to the same system of relations
as other things; or we can excuse our
selves from membership in whatever phases
of the moral and spiritual order we continue
to think of and talk about.
All this, doubtless, seems vague and re
mote from the point at issue. Fortunately,
when we turn from the metaphysical basis
to the moral structure of religion, we get a
clearer outlook. For there are two sharply
contrasted kinds of conduct. One kind of
conduct makes the practical assumption
that the interests of the individual or of
some definite group of individuals, large or
small, are the only interests to be consid
ered ; and that the interests of other people
are to be subordinated, sacrificed, utilized as
mere means to the interests of the individual

8 God's Education of Man
or of the tribe to which he happens to be
long. Such conduct may or may not con
form to the moral standards of the commu
nity ; it may or may not be beneficial in its
direct practical results. All conduct which
proceeds from this false individualistic stand
point, whether it happens to be beneficent
or injurious, moral or immoral, is funda
mentally false and essentially irreligious.
The other kind of conduct recognizes
the thoughts and feelings and wills and
claims of other beings as of equal reality
and worth with those of the individual ; it
recognizes that the interests of others and
of self are fundamentally one, by virtue of
their common inherence in a single moral
and social system from which it is impossi
ble that any one of us should be divorced.
It respects that system of relations, and
the laws and customs through which it
finds expression, and seeks primarily to do
what is for the interest of all, considered
as members of the single system of moral
relations, rather than of self conceived as

The Ethical Basis of Christianity g
apart from others and from all. Such con
duct, whether its details be well or ill ad
vised, whether it wins the praise or blame
of the immediate spectators, whether it
actually works immediate good or harm, is
fundamentally right and essentially reli
gious. Historically this consciousness of a uni
versal natural and moral order has emerged
in very grotesque, inadequate, and often
mischievous and immoral forms. Gods
have been conceived as capricious, and to
be cajoled; sensitive to slights, and to be
appeased; overwhelming in majesty and
might, and calling for man's abasement;
jealous, and demanding his humiliation;
unnatural, and gratified by the suppres
sion of his natural desires ; malevolent, and
to be approached with dread; vindictive,
and laying up a store of wrath to be vented
in the world to come. Different races
have emphasized different aspects of these
attributes supposed to be divine. The early
Hebrews were not without their share of

io God's Education of Man
these superstitions. Yet among them —
thanks to the prophets — there slowly
emerged the consciousness that justice and
mercy are the right adjustments of the in
dividual to his social environment ; the true
expressions of man's spiritual nature, the
supreme demands of the divine will. That
insight of the Hebrew prophets tallied
with the analysis of the Greek philosophers,
and was taken up and made the central
principle of Christianity. Jesus saw and
felt and knew that this comprehensive spir
itual Source and Environment of nature
and of man, inasmuch as it includes all at
tributes and operations of all persons, can
not itself be less than personal ; he gave to
it the personal name of Father, and revealed
to mankind that the doing of the Father's
will to all our fellow-men, his children, is
the open secret of the blessed life. This,
then, is the answer to the question as to
the vital essence of Christianity with which
we started out.
Devout acceptance of this will of the

The Ethical Basis of Christianity i /
Father and the universal good which it
includes, as the principle and substance of
one's own thought and action, is the essen
tial element in our Christian faith. / The
man who makes that will of God the basis
of his character and the motive of his con
duct carries with him the living germ of
Christianity ; for this principle, rightly ap
prehended, covers the whole of life. The
man who has it will be kind and considerate
in his home, upright and honest in his work,
public spirited in civic and political relations,
socially courteous and sincere, sympathetic
with the suffering, generous to the poor,
helpful to the weak. On the other hand,
he will resist oppression, expose hypocrisy,
denounce injustice, rebuke fraud, fight for
timely and rational reform. He will do
these things whether they are profitable or
costly, popular or unpopular ; whether they
bring thanks or curses, praise or blame;
whether men strew his path with palms and
hail him with hosannas, or crown him with
thorns and nail him to the cross./

12 God's Education of Man
The man who has this disposition has
God in his life, Christ in his heart, the Holy
Spirit in his soul. It matters not whether
he got it at the first hour or at the eleventh ;
whether through Jewish law or Greek phi
losophy ; whether in a Catholic cathedral or
in a Methodist chapel ; whether the articles
of his creed are thirty-nine or none ; whether
he succeeds in living up to his aim or per
petually fails; whether he can thank God
that he is not like other men, or can simply
cry, " Lord, be merciful to me a sinner ! "
This disposition to make God's will of love
to all mankind his own, in spite of repeated
defeats, successive failures, seventy-times-
seven wrongdoings repented in a day, if
clung to, never despaired of, never at heart
abandoned, makes the soul that has it,
though it were the soul of a harlot or a pub
lican, the sister and the brother of the Lord.
No man or woman to-day holds so crude a
creed, or accepts so false a philosophy, or
knows so little or so much of science and
criticism, or has so bad a record, or so weak

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 13
a will, or so irritable a temper, or so sen
suous a temperament, that he or she need
remain for one instant outside the Kingdom
of God in consequence. If any such remain
outside, it is because their pleasure or their
pride, their prejudice or their distrust, keeps
them from trying their best, with just the
views and record and nature and capacity
they have, to do the blessed will of God,
and make the situation where he has placed
them as holy and happy as they can. For
the one thing needful, the germinal prin
ciple, the rock foundation, the oil that lights
the lamp of life, the sap that makes the
branch a member of the vine, the blood-
relationship which constitutes one a brother
or sister of the Christ, is the sincere dis
position to do the will of God.
The raw material of the religious life is
the distinction between right and wrong.
He that hath that has the stuff to make
a religion out of. He that hath not this
distinction, sharp and clear and bright and
sensitive, hath not the elements of the reli-

14 God's Education of Man
gious life. /Be true to that distinction;
follow its leadings, accept its conclusions,
and the inevitable logic of life draws one
¦m into the presence of the living God/ Lose
it, let it grow dim and dull and blunt, and
not all the evidences of all the apologists
can make even the existence of a God a
credible hypothesis. For to him that hath
the moral insight, religious faith shall be
given; from him that hath not the moral
purpose, the religious assurance that he
seemeth to have shall be taken away.
Let us try to follow this logic of the
moral life, and see how the purpose to do
right widens into the presence and deepens
into the peace of God ; how the absence of
that purpose narrows the soul and hardens
the heart, until the barren negations of a
cold and cheerless atheism are all the poor
shriveled soul and hollow heart can hold.
Right and wrong are relations. When
I do right, I acknowledge that there is a
system of relations in which other beings
as well as myself are included ; and I take

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 1 5
my place as a member of that system of
relations. This system of relations is not
of my own making ; it is often not exactly
to my individual liking. There it is, how
ever; and every right act of mine is a
recognition of its presence, a fitting of my
self into it. In every right act I become
a part of an order of beings, a member of
a system of relations, greater than myself.
Thus every right act is an enlargement of
myself ; a saying to something higher and
worthier than myself, "Not my will, but
thine be done." What we shall call this
larger sphere, what name we shall give to
this something which we address in every
act of righteousness, need not concern us
at present. That there is something greater
and higher than ourselves, which we re
cognize, and address, and obey in every act
of conscious and deliberate rectitude, is
sure. Every wrong act, on the contrary, is an
attempt to deny that there is any system
of relations larger and worthier than my-

1 6 God's Education of Man
self. Wrong is not altogether successful
in this denial, especially at first. For in
the form of remorse, shame, condemnation,
the violated order is still present with us to
avenge its disregarded claims. Yet per
sistence in wrong-doing succeeds in stifling
and deadening the remonstrances of this
larger sphere of relations which we have
violated ; until at last the hardened heart
scarce hears the condemning voice, and is
left almost alone in waywardness. In so
far, then, as wrong is successful and com
plete, it shuts a man into his own selfish
will as the only spiritual reahty which he
recognizes. All things and all persons and
all claims outside himself are treated, not as
real and valid and equal or superior to the
self, but as mere means to be disregarded
and denied and trampled on at the dictates
of selfish interest or wanton inclination.
To such a person, faith in a spiritual God
is absolutely impossible. He has n't the
material to construct such a belief out of.
Such a man may have a sneaking dread of

The Ethical Basis of Christianity ij
a great avenger; a cringing fear of what
this avenger may do to him in the hereafter.
But that is mythology and superstition ; not
rational religion or spiritual faith. This
man has refused to recognize and respect
the elements out of which a spiritual faith
must be developed; and consequently he
finds himself without a God ; or rather, what
is worse, with a magnified image of his own
hardness and cruelty and malignity, set up
on the throne of his conscience, which was
meant for the true God of goodness and
love to occupy.
Let us now return to the man who does
right. We left this man conscious of a
system of relations of which he is a part ; a
member of a spiritual order, larger, higher,
worthier than himself. Is such recognition
of a system of relations, such participation
in a spiritual order, equivalent to faith in
God? It is the chief element in such a
faith. For what is selfhood, or personality,
as we know it in ourselves ? Is it not the
power to reduce a manifold of impressions

1 8 God's Education of Man
to the unity of a single order, and to sub
ordinate a multitude of clashing impulses to
the unity of a cherished purpose ? Hence
the unified system of relations and the com
prehensive moral purpose, which all experi
ence of right conduct brings home to us,
is the manifestation in the world without
Of those very principles of self-conscious
ness and self-determination which consti
tute the personality of the self within.
Hence, doing right is knowing God. For
it is recognizing a thought and will like
our own, but vaster, higher, and holier.
The man of the pure heart sees God ; for
he sees and serves an order and a will like
the order and will which organizes his own
little world of appetites and desires into a
system; but as much more glorious and
grand than the order and will within himself
as the movements of stars and planets, the
rise and fall of nations, the development
and overthrow of institutions, are more
grand and glorious than the petty passions
that agitate his individual frame.

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 10
So much is sure and incontrovertible.
If by belief in God we mean that we are
enveloped by a universal system of reason,
and upheld by an absolute order of right
eousness, then the existence of God is evi
denced in every true thought we think and
every right act we perform. And every
true and righteous man may be as sure of
God's existence as he is of his own.
Furthermore, this kernel of faith, hard
and cold as it seems when taken by itself,
if cast into the warm, rich soil of an earnest
moral life, begins to swell and sprout, and
take on more vital and attractive forms.
Right is formal ; good is substantial. Every
growing soul comes to do things less and
less from a conscientious regard for what
is right, and more and more from a loving
devotion to what is good. The best work
in the world is not done on the first and
lowest plane of conscientious fidelity to the
right. Mothers do not nurse and rear their
children at the dictates of conscientious
scruples. Patriots as a rule do not enlist

20 God's Education of Man
in the service of their country or die in her
behalf at the dictates of their consciences.
The mother's love draws her toward the
child's good ; the patriot's love impels him
toward his country's welfare. Right is the
root ; good is the blossom of the spiritual
life. When you have worked up through
conscientious fidelity to the right, to warm
appreciation of the good, then you begin
to reap the rewards and benefits, the com
forts and consolations, of the spiritual life.
He who does the right comes to see the
good ; and he who sees the good finds God
and blessedness.
*fTo do right out of a tender and loving
regard for the persons who are affected by
our action ; so to live that no man may be
the poorer, no woman may be the sadder,
no child may be more wretched for aught
that we have done or left undone; so to
live that through our words and deeds, men
may see the truth, and enjoy the beautiful,
and reverence the pure, and honor the
noble, and possess the means of material

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 21
and social satisfaction — that is to share the
life and love and blessedness of God.?j For
whoever lives this life, not from mere con
straint of duty, but from love of those his
life affects, soon discovers that in that life
of love he is not alone. The satisfaction
and the joy of it attest the fact that this is
the life he was meant to live by the Father
in whose image he is made ; and he knows
that every word and deed of such a life is
well-pleasing in his Heavenly Father's sight)
Thus the person who has grown up
through faithful doing of the right into
loving devotion to the good, finds every
place a holy place, every bush upon the
roadside ablaze with God, every circum
stance where duty can be done and good
can be accomplished, a gateway to heaven,
an approach to the throne of the Most
High. He sees God because his heart is
pure; he has abundant communion with
him because he has some measure of that
participation in his holy purposes wherein
alone true spiritual communion is found.

22 God's Education of Man
Belief in God is something no logician
can argue into us, no apologist can prove ;
any more than by arguing the logician can
satisfy our hunger if we have no food, or
the apologist can assuage our thirst if we
refuse to drink the water that he offers.
The bread and the water of the spiritual
life are the doing of one's duty and the
service of our fellows ; and without these
elements one can never have the hfe of
fellowship with God, of which they are the
indispensable constituents.
Faith in a living God, in other words,
must be wrought out of our own moral and
spiritual experience. The man who gains
it in that way, by doing his work as a mem
ber of a great spiritual order, and serving
his fellow-men as members of the same
great kingdom of which he is himself a
part, comes to know God with the same
certainty that the fish knows the water,
the bird the air, or any living being the en
vironment in which it lives and moves and
has its being. ^Live and move in the con-

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 23
scious and practical recognition of the holy
Will that includes every right act of yours,
and rebukes every wrong act ; and you can
not long remain unaware of the divine
presence. \ Serve a good that is as real in
your neighbor as in yourself, and infinitely
transcends you both, and out of your ser
vice will be developed the glad and glorious
assurance that the universe is a place
where good can be and ought to be the
aim of every will that inhabits it, and is the
final purpose of its beneficent Creator.
Doubt in our day has had many a de-
famer, and many a eulogist. The eulogies
and the defamations are often equally wide
of the mark. We must discriminate two
kinds of doubt : the passive and the active.
Passive doubt is weak and contemptible.
It folds its listless hands, sits idly down,
and waits for some evidence or other to
come along and prove to it the existence of
a God and the probability of a hereafter.
It is high time to tell such passive doubt
ers in plain terms : " There is no God who

24 God's Education of Man
will ever deign to disclose himself to lazy
souls like you. No heaven-bound chariot
will ever stop by the wayside to pick up
such worthless tramps." To the man who
has no moral earnestness within him, there
is no possible means of ever discovering
a God without ; to the man who has no
spiritual life in his own soul there is no
place where eternal life is gratuitously dis
pensed. This lazy doubt which boasts its
own emptiness, and expects to be fed like
a tramp on the crumbs of other people's
faith, has had much more respectable treat
ment in these days than it deserves. The
sooner we drive these spiritual tramps from
our doorsteps, and starve them into honest
seekers after moral and spiritual work,
the better it will be for them. To those
who have nothing, nothing shall be given.
Those who lack the moral purpose are in
capable of spiritual faith.
The other and nobler sort of doubt is
worthy of all encouragement. To those
who are working hard to do the right and

The Ethical Basis of Christianity 25
make the world the better for their pre
sence, let us be quick to say : " You are
already in the kingdom of heaven, though
perhaps you know it not. You are a child
of God ; for you could not live and work
as you do unless there were within you a
latent consciousness that the spiritual world
is one, that good is its aim, and that the
source of its oneness and its goodness is
akin to the reason and righteousness that
struggles for expression in your own moral
and spiritual life. You have in your own
souls the stuff that faith in God is made
of. Hold it fast, cling to it, however small
and faint and feeble it may be. For unto
every one that hath the moral purpose shall
be given the spiritual life, and he shall have
abundance of the peace and blessedness of
God."

26 God's Education of Man
II
Christ the Historic Revelation of the Universal
Will of God
If this is the main thing, is it not the
only thing ? No. The one thing needful
is not the only thing. Foundation is not
structure. The oil requires the confining
lamp, the conducting wick. The sap must
have supporting fibre. Blood must be sus
tained by bone and tissue. The nucleus
must have the enveloping protoplasm to
make the cell complete. The error of con
servative orthodoxy has been to confound
nucleus and protoplasm, blood and bone, oil
and lamp, foundation and structure, in one
mechanical aggregate; and then to say,
"Take all or nothing." The error of liber
alism is its mechanical separation between
the principle and its embodiment, and the
tendency to dispense with important fea
tures of the latter altogether. Between the
mechanical aggregate of essentials and non
essentials offered by the orthodox, and the

Christ the Historic Revelation of God 2y
mechanical dissection of essentials from
nonessentials offered by the liberals, Chris
tian faith is purchasing either the semblance
of vitality at the expense of rationality, or
a barren rationality at the expense of vital
ity. It requires reorganization, a restate
ment in which the vital principle shall at the
same time be distinguished from and united
with its historic and social embodiments.
This vital principle is, as we have seen,
the disposition to do the will of God. A
will, however, must have an organ. A soul
must have a body. This will to do the will
of God must have the historic, social, and
material equipment wherewith to make it
self effective in the actual world of men
and things. Such a body for its soul, such
an organ for its will, liberal Christianity
lacks to-day; just as traditional orthodoxy
comes perilously near to lacking a soul for
the body of doctrine it preserves.
An effective spiritual and social move
ment must have a human head, a personal
Lord, a real Master. Such a Lord and

28 God's Education of Man
Master the Christian finds in Christ. In
his life and teaching, in his character and
career, the will of God, conceived as love
to every man according to his capacity and
needs, first came to adequate personal self-
expression in human history. We can
distinguish, but we cannot separate the
movement from the man, the art from the
master, the life from the soul that lives it
The man or the church that presumes to
separate the doing of the will of God from
loyalty to the person of Jesus Christ is sure
to become as barren and amateurish as the
novice in any art or science who ventures
to disregard the best that has been done
before him, and to set up on his own ac
count. For man or church, the measure
of devotion and love and worship to Jesus
Christ is the accurate and infallible measure
of practical power, not perhaps in enter
taining the aesthetic sensibilities of the cul
tivated few, but certainly in moulding and
transforming the character and conduct of
the plain masses of mankind. For it is in

Christ the Historic Revelation of God 29
the form of the concrete and the personal
that the moral and spiritual makes its only
effective appeal to human hearts and lives.
When Jesus Christ is thus accepted as
the historic human embodiment and revela
tion of the will of God, it is the most natural
thing in the world to identify him with the
will which he embodies, and to worship him
as divine. Contact with a perfect conductor
is contact with the battery itself. Lines
paraUel to the same straight line are parallel
to each other. The printed book and the
mind of its author are not merely like each
other, but of' the same nature. Likewise if
God be to us, not the problematic product of
some far-fetched speculation concerning the
ultimate origin of the cosmic process, but
the manifest presence of a holy will work
ing for the righteousness and blessedness
of man ; and if Christ is to us the historic
bearer, and supreme personal expression,
and ultimate spiritual interpreter, of that
blessed will of God, — then to call this man
Jesus less than divine, or quarrel with his

SO God's Education of Man
title Son of God, is to empty the very name
of God of all the historic associations and
concrete content that give it worth and
make it worshipful. To deny divinity to
Christ is to relegate all divinity whatsoever
to the far-off shadowy realms of metaphysi
cal inquiry. If the flesh and blood of the
man whose meat and drink it was to do the
will of God be not divine, then the days of
faith in a living God are numbered, and the
feet of the agnostic are at the door to carry
out the corpse.
The modern argument for the divinity of
Christ is very simple : Love is God. Christ
is our highest and completest historic ex
pression of love. Therefore Christ is the
Son of God, our Interpreter of the Divine,
our vision of the Father. As Rev. Theo
dore C. Williams has happily expressed it :
" God gave the world his Son ; and he was known
For God's own Son, because he took the throne
Of perfect Love, that seeketh not her own ;
And freely giving, as to him was given,
Made Love on earth commune with Love in heaven."

The Holy Spirit, God in Humanity 31
III
The Holy Spirit, God in humanity. The doctrine
of the Trinity the unessential formulation of
essential truths
If now the living will of God applied to
human life is the aspect of the divine with
which we men are chiefly concerned, and if
Jesus Christ is divine by virtue of the origi
nality and power with which he made that
will of God present and effective in human
history, one more kindred insight is inevi
table. In so far as ordinary men and women
do this same will of God to-day, they too
become thereby partakers of the divine na
ture and the Spirit of God dwelleth in them.
And here again, the Spirit of God, the Holy
Spirit, dwelling in devout and humble,
though frail and imperfect human hearts,
is not merely like God, similar to the divine,
but is God, is of the same nature with the
divine. Approached from this point of view,
the divinity of the Holy Spirit is as self-
evident and obvious as the divinity of Christ

32 God's Education of Man
himself. Both insights are essential to any
apprehension whatsoever of God in the
only terms intelligible and helpful to us ; in
terms, that is, of our humanity.
I would not attempt to force these doc
trines of the divinity of the Son and the Holy
Spirit on any man. To the natural man
they are unintelligible mysteries. When
set up as independent propositions, they are
meaningless or self-contradictory. On the
other hand, they develop themselves out of
experience in doing the will of God. For
no man can strive earnestly and deeply to
do the loving will of God, without gaining
thereby an ever-increasing reverence for
the divine character of the Christ who
revealed the fullness of that loving will as
a world-transforming spiritual power, and
the divine quality of the Spirit in the hearts
of all our fellows who have caught from
Christ the enthusiasm for the life of right
eousness and love.
Whether we put these insights together
and label the product the doctrine of the

The Doctrine of the Trinity 3}
Trinity is a minor matter. The writers of
the New Testament did not find it neces
sary, though in the early development of
the church, the fathers found it expedient
so to do. The divinity of the Son and of
the Spirit, however, are so vitally involved
in the belief in an immanent divine will,
that it is impossible logically to think out
or to live out belief in the will of a divine
Father without including in it, as its inev
itable corollaries, belief in a divine Son and
Spirit. Hence, as the first step in the re
organization of our faith, was the recognition
of the presence of a divine will in human
affairs as the primal and central fact, so
the second and third steps must be the
recognition of the divinity of the Christ who
revealed that will in its fullness to the
world, and of the Spirit in the hearts of his
followers, making that will a growing and
deepening power in the world to-day. And
these are steps which the orthodox no less
than the liberal churches need to take. For
neither orthodox nor liberal has to any extent

$4 God's Education of Man
grasped this insight. The orthodox has the
name of it; but in traditional, unreasoned,
and practically unintelligible form. The
liberal, on the other hand, often gets an
approximation of these truths in the form
of a vague semi-pantheistic deification of
humanity : but he has no definite crystalli
zation of affection around a divine historic
person ; no adequate expression for the in
finite and eternal difference between the
life that is impelled by nature and the life
that is inspired by the Spirit. It will be
an immense gain to both parties, and a pos
sible bond of union between them, when
the presence of the will of God in human
life is accepted as the primal spiritual prin
ciple; and when the divinity of Christ
who introduced, and the Spirit who propa
gates the divine will in human life are
accepted as the obvious corollaries of that
primal principle.
The moment these truths are lost sight
of, the possibility of a theological interpre
tation of life is gone. To try to construct

The Doctrine of the Trinity 35
a theology without them is to impose upon
one's self the ancient task of making bricks
without straw. As a matter of fact, in con
sequence of our lost grip on these truths,
we have no theology to-day. What passes
for such in orthodox circles is a mixture of
scholasticism and mysticism ; and so-called
liberal theology is a medley of metaphysics
and sociology. The one is the ghost of a
theology that has long been dead ; the other
is the embryo of a theology that is waiting
to be born. \Start, on the contrary, with a
clear faith in a living God, historically re
vealed in Christ, and socially present in the
Spirit of Christian life to-day, and all other
doctrines of religion follow as logically and
inevitably as a geometrical demonstration.
Only the merest outline of such a deduction
can be presented here.

$6 God's Education of Man
IV
Sin and Atonement
If there is a holy will embracing all
human life, if the principle of that will has
been revealed in the life and character of
Christ, if the practice of that will is going
on to-day in the hearts and lives of all
who have Christ's Spirit, then all that
falls short of that will, all that is incon
sistent with that character of Christ, all
that is unresponsive to that Spirit, is sin.
And since no man by nature rises spontane
ously to the high and holy level of that
divine will, that Christlike character, that
spiritual life, it follows that all have sinned
and come short of the glory of God. Sin
is original; that is to say, it is not due
to any special and peculiar perversity of
the individual, but results from his partici
pation in a human nature which, by virtue
of its animal inheritance and natural con
stitution, as a matter of course seeks pri
marily its own good, regardless of how that

Sin and Atonement 37
mdividual good of his may clash with the
good of others, and obstruct that progres
sive good of all men, which is the will of
God. This original sin into which all the
children of Adam, or, in other words, all
members of the human race have fallen,
and of which by virtue of their physical and
psychological constitution they all partake,
deepens into guilt and individual responsi
bility just as soon as it comes to stand in
conscious contrast to the larger good which
the will of God, the character of Christ, the
life of the Spirit, represent. The moment
the hght of this larger life shines upon a
selfish soul, the darkness of the merely
natural life of selfishness is thereby con
demned; and persistence in it thereafter
gives rise to guilt and condemnation.
Conversion from sin takes place when
first the larger life of love, rooted in God,
revealed in Christ, and diffused through the
Spirit in the lives of those about us, appeals
to us as preferable to the continued life of
selfishness and sin. As soon as one has

)8 God's Education of Man
experienced this great change from doing
his own selfish will to doing the will of God,
he hates sin, both in himself and in others,
as he never hated it before. For he now
sees it as an offense against the loving will
of God, which he is trying to do, a wrong
against his fellow-men, whom he is trying
to serve.
The man who hates sin is sure to get
himself hated by sinners ; by the men, that
is, who persist in doing the mean and cruel
and loathsome things which his new life
opposes and condemns. In pride and self-
defense these evil-doers will do him all the
harm they can. At the same time the
man who has thus been born into a new life
of righteousness and love will feel more
keenly than he could have felt before the
pain and shame and wretchedness which
wrongdoing brings on its innocent and help
less victims. Thus the man who makes
the will of God his own finds heaped upon
himself the double burden of the odium of
sin and the mass of misery to the innocent

Sin and Atonement 39
as well as to the guilty, which sin carries in
its train. Then he begins to understand
why the Son of God had to be a man of
sorrow ; why he had to suffer on the cross.
He begins to see that the life of every man
who does God's good will in a wicked world,
and loves the poor sufferers whom the evil
maltreat and hate, must be a life of sacrifice,
and its profoundest symbol must ever be a
cross. Not until one knows what it is to
fight corruption and cruelty and brutality
and hypocrisy, to pity the poor victims of
these wrongs, and to be criticised and ma
ligned and impoverished and persecuted for
it, can he begin to appreciate the heroic
sacrifice of Christ, who carried the fight
for righteousness and purity and sincerity
and love into the very camp of the scribes,
Pharisees, chief priests, hypocrites, adul
terers, and extortioners ; and at the cost of
his life then and there won for the world
the eternal triumph of truth over lies, of
right over wrong, of kindness over hardness,
of purity over lust, of meekness over pride,

40 God's Education of Man
of love over hate, of good over evil. No
thing short of this experience of earnest
service and unflinching sacrifice for the tri
umph of God's will and the good of man
can interpret to us to-day the meaning of
the sacrifice of Christ. Every man who has
tried to do these things in any degree knows
full well that there can be no salvation
either from sin, or from the misery sin
entails on guilty and innocent alike, save
by the vicarious sacrifice of some brave,
generous servant of righteousness and bene
factor of his fellows. The doctrine of
atonement is self-evident to every man who
ever fought intrenched and powerful evil,
or sought to rescue the wicked from their
wickedness and the wronged from their
wretchedness. To those who have never
touched that fearful burden of human sin
and misery with so much as the tips of
their dainty and critical fingers, the doctrine
of vicarious suffering, like all the deeper
truths of the spiritual life, must remain
forever an unintelligible and impenetrable
mystery.

The Organisation of the Spiritual Life 41
V
The Organization of the Spiritual Life. The
Outlook for the Future
This new life of service and sacrifice
brought to the world by Christ, and begot
ten in us by the Spirit, at once demands a
socially effective organization and expres
sion, that those who share this life may be
bound closer together ; that the enthusiasm
of it may be kept alive ; that the numbers
who share it may be increased; and that
those who are losing it may be brought to
share its privileges and blessings. This
organization must have officers and teach
ers ; times and places of meeting ; articles
of agreement as to the principles of this
better life; edifying literature to keep it
ever before their minds ; dignified ceremo
nies to impress it periodically upon their
hearts; established modes of communion
with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,
whence the new life comes. Such an organi
zation is the church. Such a place is the

42 God's Education of Man
sanctuary. Such a time is the Sabbath.
Such articles of agreement are the creeds.
Such officers are ministers, priests, deacons.
Such a literature is the Bible and the Book
of Common Prayer and the collection of
sacred hymns. Such ceremonies are the
order of worship. Such modes of com
munion are the sacraments, and public and
private prayer. The form of none of these
things is sacred or essential in itself. It
matters little whether the day be the first
or the seventh of the week; whether the
Lord's Supper be observed with bread and
wine, or with bread and water, or with bread
alone ; whether baptism be with little water
or with much; whether prayer be stereo
typed or extemporaneous ; whether the pas
tor be dressed as a layman or robed as a
priest ; whether the creed be old or mod
ern ; whether the Bible be regarded as one
book inspired alike throughout, or many
books of varying degrees of inspiration;
whether the church is called by one or
another of a hundred different names. If

The Outlook for the Future 43
church and priest, and creed and rite, and
book and voice, and house and hour, bind
men together to do the will of God, and
walk in the way of Christ, and live the Me
of the Spirit, then they are all holy, sacred,
God-ordained, — not by any mysterious spell
inherent in themselves or handed down by
apostolical succession, but simply because
they are useful and efficient agencies through
which the will of God, the grace of Christ,
the peace and power of the Spirit, gain en
trance to the hearts and lives of regenerated
men, and go forth to conquer and redeem
the world.
Faith in the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit makes the problem of the future
clear. If the love of God be no other than
that which suffered in the Son rather than
that the world should be left in darkness
and sin, no other than that love which
yearns to-day in the hearts of countless
fathers and mothers for their children, of
pastors and teachers for their people and
pupils, of lovers and friends for those dear

'44 God's Education of Man
to them, of reformers and philanthropists
for those who have gone far astray, then we
may be sure that no soul can share God's
blessed eternity on any lower terms than
glad and generous participation in God's
life of love, in the sacrificial service of Christ,
in the devoted life of the Spirit. We have
also the best possible grounds of assurance
that every soul that does enter here and
now into the divine life of love, into the
service of Christ, into the fellowship of the
Spirit, will not be suffered to drop into
nothingness, but will be raised with Christ,
in the power of the Spirit, to a blessed
immortality. The reorganized faith of the future will
not be such a very different faith from the
faith of the fathers. Some excrescences
will have to be lopped off, or allowed to
drop by their own dead weight under the
gentle influence of time. Taken one by
one, its articles will correspond pretty closely
to the articles of the traditional orthodox
creed. Yet they will be rooted in a central

The Outlook for the Future 45
spiritual insight ; bound together by logical
relations in a rational order of subordina
tion, instead of being tied mechanically
together in a promiscuous bundle by the
tight cords of blind tradition and unverified
authority. Current orthodoxy in its present unor
ganized form cannot hold its own under the
searching light which the twentieth century
is sure to flash upon it. Current liberalism,
with its inorganic protest against ortho
doxy, has a still briefer lease of life. Our
faith, whether it be of the orthodox or of
the liberal type, must be reorganized. In
that reorganization the simple doing of the
will of God, as that will has been historically
revealed in Christ and is socially embodied
in the Spirit in which Christian people live
to-day, must be the centre of which all other
doctrines are the circumference; the oil
that gives the light of life, to which all
Scriptures and churches and sacraments
are but the wick and lamp ; the life-blood
of religion, to which all creeds and rites and

46 God's Education of Man
professions are but the bony framework
that sustains the beating heart of love and
loyalty within. VI
The Present Need of Theological Construction.
The Function of Dogma
It is doubtless occasion for congratulation
that all the systems of theology constructed
previous to the general acceptance of the
doctrine of evolution, and the universal dif
fusion of the results of historical and Bibli
cal criticism, have " had their day and ceased
to be." Evolution and criticism have given
us a larger world, and the system of thought
that is to express this enlarged world must
be vastly more complex and capacious than
any of the systems that went before. Sys
tem of some sort, however, we must have,
if practical life is to be wisely directed and
pure emotion is to be permanently sustained.
If there is a God ; if there has been a reve
lation of his will in history and of his nature
in humanity ; if there is a person worthy to

Present Need of Theological Construction 47
be called his Son, and a Spirit adequate to
represent him in the world to-day ; if man,
by nature the heir of the animal, is in spirit
capable of becoming the child of God; if
there are processes by which man can rise
from the natural to the spiritual state, and
gain assurance of divine favor — then it must
be possible to render some intelligible ac
count of these facts and processes, and to
set forth these truths in rational relation
and systematic form.
This doctrinal duty our churches are fail
ing to fulfill to-day. There is no accepted
body of doctrine, clear-cut, well reasoned,
consistently and comprehensively thought
out, which you can count upon hearing
when you enter a Christian church. In an
informal discussion at a club, where men
of widely different views were expressing
themselves with great freedom, a mill agent,
a man of unusual keenness and intelligence,
a member of a Congregational church, de
scribed what is actually given out in many
of our churches as " debris floating in dish
water."

48 God's Education of Man
The fault is not exclusively or chiefly
with the ministers. Our mode of selecting
ministers, while it tests a man's rhetoric
and elocution, and whether he has a
taking way with the young people, gives
little or no means of ascertaining whether
he has a reasoned and organic body of truth
to communicate or not. Furthermore, we
have no recognized centres or agencies
through which such a positive body of doc
trine is being effectively disseminated.
There are a few individual writers here and
there who give some evidence that they
have thought things through to a conclu
sion ; but they are too much engrossed with
practical cares to give more than glimpses
of their doctrine to the public. There are
colleges and seminaries which teach philoso
phy and theology ; but a theological profes
sor of large experience remarked recently
that he knew of only two colleges which
give their students a point of view which
has any significance for theology ; and the
professors of theology are too new in their

Present Need of Theological Construction 49
places, or have too few pupils under them,
to have made upon the churches as a whole
the impression of a " school," with charac
teristic and positive convictions. There are
excellent publications which contain excel
lent articles ; but, since the unfortunate
discontinuance of the "Andover Review,"
we have not had a publication devoted
to fundamental theological problems which
can be counted on to give a definite, con
sistent, consecutive presentation of a posi
tive point of view. Whether the doctrines
advocated in that review were sound or
unsound, helpful or harmful, is a matter on
which there is honest difference of opinion,
and which it is not necessary to discuss.
It did give an able presentation of certain
views, and it did provoke able criticism of
those views, and both the statement and
the criticism were of great service to the
development of thoughtfulness on these
great themes.
The fashion nowadays to decry and depre
ciate dogma is the most silly and foolish of

50 God's Education of Man
the many fads of the hour. If we give way
to it we shall soon or late be compelled to
substitute second-hand ecclesiastical hear
say, in fantastic garb and unctuous intona
tion, for personal insight into the laws and
personal possession of the motives of wise
and noble living.
Dogma is to religion what astronomy is
to the stars, what botany is to flowers. We
do not consider it sufficient to simply gaze
at the stars and smell the sweet odor of the
flowers. The astronomer breaks up the
starlight with his lenses and gives us a doc
trine of their motions and their chemical
constitution, which is a very different thing
from what the plain man gets by simple
star-gazing. It is the science of astronomy.
The botanist cruelly pulls the lovely flower
to pieces and gives you in place of the beau
tiful and fragrant whole a name and a place
in a system of classification. It is the sci
ence of botany. And yet there are men
who have no quarrel with either astronomer
or botanist, who nevertheless raise a great

The Function of Dogma 5/
hue and cry the moment you begin to ana
lyze God's attributes and attitude toward
man, and to break up man into his elemental
passions and pull apart the springs of
motive in his soul. They complain that in
place of the living God and breathing man
you are giving them mere dead dogmas and
inanimate abstractions. To be sure, you
are. You are doing for God and man pre
cisely what the astronomer does for the
stars, precisely what the botanist does for
the flower. You are aiming to be scientific ;
you are applying the tool of science, which
is analysis, to the revelation of God and to
the soul of man. It may be a cold, cruel
thing to do. It may be that the product is
not so beautiful as is the living whole with
which we start. But it is just as necessary
and just as useful in the one case as in the
other. If any man in this late day wishes
to go up and down the earth decrying sci
ence, he is welcome to the task, though he
will get scant hearing for his pains. Let him
not, however, pose as the friend and advo-

52 God's Education of Man
cate of science in every other department of
knowledge, and then when it comes to the
subject of man in his relation to God decry
the scientific method of logical analysis, and
dogma, which is its inevitable product.
You can get star-gazing without spectrum
analysis. You can get the bloom and fra
grance of the rose without a compound
microscope. You can get sweet, sentimen
tal experiences of piety without logic and
dogma. In all other departments, however,
the world has agreed that the shallow, sen
timental first impression is not enough. If
we are to save religion from the intellectual
contempt into which it is fast falling under
the influence of this superficial sentimental-
ism, we must subject man in his relation to
God to a rigorous analysis ; we must throw
out one by one upon the screen of logic the
component elements of the divine nature ;
we must lay side by side upon the table the
sepals and petals and stamens and pistils of
man's dissected soul.
" Ah ! " my unscientific, sentimental friend

The Function of Dogma 53
objects, "you forget what wretched, false,
grotesque work men have made of it when
they have tried to subject the idea of God
to logical analysis and draw up man's nature
and destiny in terms of dogma." No, I do
not forget. There has been a great deal of
false and pernicious dogma in the world, I
must admit. But theology is no exception.
The Ptolemaic astronomy taught many
erroneous notions. Shall we therefore decry
astronomy as a whole and revert to simple
star-gazing ? The Linnaean system of botan
ical classification was arbitrary, fantastic,
and misleading. Shall we therefore assume
in advance that Gray and Goodale have
nothing to tell us which it is worth our
while to hear ? Augustine and Calvin and
Edwards doubtless made mistakes. But
does it follow that there is nothing for us
to do to-day but settle down in self-compla
cent ignorance and trust that man is on the
whole a very good being, or if he is n't, a
good God will bring him out all right in the
sweet by and by? The man that takes

54 God's Education of Man
this indolent attitude becomes thereby intel
lectually side-tracked, and erelong will find
that the train of earnest thinking has moved
on and left him standing generations behind
the times.
If one is ever tempted to indulge in this
superficial depreciation of dogma, let him
remember that therein he is parting with
his intellectual birthright, which is a def
inite, scientific grasp of the principles of
the spiritual life ; let him remember that for
every such idle word of blasphemy against
the holy name of science he shall give
account at the bar of outraged reason for
what comes perilously near to being the
one unpardonable intellectual sin.
It does not follow that dogma is to be
preached, any more than it does that it
would be wise for an astronomer to offer
his diagrams and formulas to a visitor to
his observatory as a substitute for the stars
the visitor comes to see ; or that a botanist
should give his guest a bouquet of technical
names in place of flowers to look upon and

The Function of Dogma 55
smell. The preacher should know dogma
as the scientist knows his formulas and
nomenclature. He should be able to state
in dogmatic terms what precise changes
from lower to higher states of thought and
feeling and volition his sermon is calculated
to produce.
The work of intellectual destruction has
gone far enough. The immediate work
before us now is not destructive, but con
structive. We no longer need the inspector
to condemn, but the architect to plan. In
view of the havoc which evolutionary and
critical conceptions have wrought in the
traditional beliefs, it is time to weld to
gether the truths we have saved from the
wreck of the ancient systems and the truths
that have been brought to us on the flood
of these scientific and historical studies,
into a definite, coherent, reasoned and rea
sonable body of doctrine, which will give
the intelligible plan of life and authoritative
guide to conduct, that, in the complexity of
modern life, is more imperatively demanded
to-day than it ever was before.

CHAPTER I
CONTROL BY LAW

" Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true
as the sky ;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the
Wolf that shall break it must die.
"As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law
runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is the Pack.
" Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your
cubs as they need, and ye can ;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never
kill Man.
" Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and
mighty are they ;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch
and the hump is — Obey ! "
Kipling: The Second Jungle Book.

CHAPTER I
CONTROL BY LAW
I
Man's Primitive Innocence and Early Fall
j|AN is the offspring of the animal.
Animal anatomy is wrought into
his structure, animal blood flows
in his veins, animal appetites and passions
burn in his heart. The mere presence of
these appetites and their normal indulgence,
however, is not bad, but good. That is the
element of ethical truth in the story of the
Garden of Eden. Adam as God made him,
man as he evolved from the animal, was
innocent as the sheep upon the hillside,
guileless as the baby in his mother's arms.
This goodness of primitive man was
maintained by natural selection and per
petuated through instinct For at this
stage of development good conduct is con-

60 God's Education of Man
duct which promotes, bad conduct is conduct
which hinders, nutrition and reproduction.
Hence primitive man could not go far astray.
For natural selection with its stern law,
"The soul that sinneth shall die," was
always close at his heels to smite the too
wayward individual and wipe out the too
offensive tribe. He was good because the
few points of conduct with which he was
consciously concerned were so fundamental
that if he were bad at these points he would
die and leave no offspring.
This hereditary and instinctive innocence,
however, could not last long. For when
man's wants multiply, and his life becomes
more complex, when simultaneous alterna
tives compete in his consciousness, or, in
the pictorial language of Oriental antiquity,
when he begins to " eat of the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil,"
then comes a "fall." As long as the im-
mediate instincts of nutrition and reproduc
tion were his main concerns, man could
scarcely fail to observe the two great laws

Man's Innocence and Fall 61
of life, which bade him, " Eat freely of the
fruit of every tree in the garden, and of the
meat of fish and fowl and cattle ; " and,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish
the earth." When, however, he comes to
have many points of contact with nature,
and with other men, then he may be well
adjusted to his environment on some sides,
ill adjusted on other sides ; and still escape
the clutches of natural selection. By vir
tue of his points of good adjustment he
can continue to live and reproduce in spite
of his points of bad adjustment. Through
this loophole the toleration of moral evil
came into the world. Through this entan
glement with the many-sided complexity of
man's nature, moral evil is able to maintain
its standing in the world in defiance of the
law of natural selection. An indignant pub
lic sentiment would exterminate to-day a
wholly bad man as unceremoniously as nat
ural selection did in days gone by. When
man had but few vital points of contact
with his environment, he was either almost

62 God's Education of Man
wholly good or almost wholly bad accord
ing to the prevailing standards of conduct
and conditions of survival, and consequently
the good survived and the bad perished.
Now all men are partly good and partly
bad; the good and the bad struggle for
supremacy within man himself; "both
wheat and tares grow together until the
harvest." The best man among us is aware
of many a point where his adjustment falls
far short of perfection; and the worst re
probate in our slums, or among our idle
aristocracy, has many a point which binds
him to the necessities or affections of his
comrades and helps him to maintain his
hold on life. This has been so admirably
set forth by John Fiske in his recent book,
" Through Nature to God," that I give his
words at length.
"If an individual antelope falls below
the average of the herd in speed, he is sure
to become food for lions, and thus the high
average of speed in the herd is maintained
by natural selection. But if an individual

Man's Innocence and Fall d_j
man becomes a drunkard, though his capa
bilities be ever so much curtailed by this
vice, yet the variety of human faculty fur
nishes so many hooks with which to keep
one's hold upon life that he may sin long
and flagrantly without perishing. There
is thus a wide interval between the highest
and lowest degrees of completeness in living
that are compatible with maintenance of
life. Mankind has so many other qualities
beside the bad ones, which enable it to
subsist and achieve progress in spite of
them, that natural selection — which always
works through death — cannot come into
play. Now it is because of this interval
between the highest and lowest degrees of
completeness of living that are compatible
with the mere maintenance of life, that
men can be distinguished as morally bad or
morally good. In inferior animals, where
there is no such interval, there is no devel
oped morality or conscience, though in a
few of the higher ones there are the germs
of these things. Morality comes upon the

64 God's Education of Man
scene when there is an alternative offered
of leading better lives or worse lives. Moral
evil is simply the characteristic of the lower
state of living as looked at from the higher
state. Its existence is purely relative, yet
it is profoundly real, and in a process of
perpetual spiritual evolution its presence in
some hideous form throughout a long series
of upward stages is indispensable. Its
absence would mean stagnation, quiescence,
unprogressiveness. ' '
This doctrine of the primitive goodness
of our first ancestor, "who was and was not
man," and of the inevitable shortcoming of
every son of this evolutionary Adam, is our
modern way of stating what Paul and Au
gustine and Calvin and Kant call the " fall,"
and the consequent total depravity, and ori
ginal sin, and radical badness of the race.
Stated in their terms it perchance provokes
our scorn and wrath. Yet, stated in these
words of our foremost American exponent
of the doctrine of evolution, it is so trans
parently reasonable, and logically inevitable,

The Universality of Law 65
that we may safely accept it as the starting-
point of our account of the moral nature of
man and God's education of him.
II
The Universality of Law. The Unique Char
acter of Hebrew Legislation
Although natural selection soon ceases
to be man's only moral spur, it gives rise to
its successor. For by weeding out exam
ples of bad conduct, and leaving the better
to survive, it tends to make examples of
the better conduct more numerous. Imita
tion seizes on these better examples, which
natural selection crowns with survival, and
hardens them into custom. Every tribe
as it advances toward civilization develops
customs ; and customs are the parents of
laws. . Law is custom clothed with authority
and sanctioned by popular acceptance.
Though it is the long, slow work of the
people to grind the winnowed grain of
custom into the fine flour of law, its final

66 God's Education of Man
codification is generally the achievement of
some individual genius like Solon or Draco,
Confucius or Moses. Law is universal and
unescapable. Just as underneath the ver
dure and foliage of the mountain you find
rock, and if you go far enough back of the
rock in time, or deep enough underneath
it in space, you find fire ; so underneath all
experience lies the great ledge of law, and
if you search deep or look far beneath and
behind law, you find flaming and remorseless
penalty. All laws which truly set forth the con
ditions of individual, tribal, and national
well-being are ipso facto laws of the one
God who rules the world in righteousness.
Not every lawgiver or community, how
ever, recognized with equal explicitness this
universal character of legislation. Unique
among the ancient nations for the explicit
ness with which they attributed the laws
of their nation to the one God of all the
world, stand the Jews. Their God, more
over, was a living God ; not merely one

Hebrew Legislation Unique 67
who had met Abraham by the oaks of
Mamre, Jacob at Bethel, and Moses on
Mount Sinai; but one who continued to
speak by the mouth of living prophets and
to declare his will in progressive legislation.
To be sure, by a harmless legal fiction, akin
to that by which the changes demanded by
the will of the English people are ascribed
to the gracious condescension of the Crown,
this progressive legislation was ascribed to
the single historic lawgiver, Moses, who
was represented as having received it com
pletely formulated once for all from the
hand of the Lord. Nevertheless they had
the two essential things : a developed sys
tem of legislation and the ascription of this
legislation with substantial truth, though in
fictitious and literary, rather than in scien
tific and historically accurate form, to the
God who presided over their national des
tiny. There is an infinite difference between
simply having customs, laws, and social
standards, as Greeks and Romans and

68 God's Education of Man
every civilized people must have, and re
cognizing that these laws are the command
ments of the one God, who rules the world
in righteousness. Without such a recogni
tion violation of the law may be regarded
as vice or crime, folly or wickedness ; but
it is not felt and known as sin. It is the
great contribution of the Hebrew race,
through their matchless prophets, psalm
ists, and lawgivers, to have identified the
progressively unfolding social standard with
the eternal will of God; and to have
branded all wrong-doing, not merely with
the social stigma of vice or the public pen
alty of crime, but with the deep-dyed stain
of sin. " Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
And done that which is evil in thy sight,"
is not Buddhistic nor Confucian, not Greek
nor Roman, but a characteristic Hebrew ut
terance. From this point of view, murder
and licentiousness are not merely violations
of hallowed ancestral customs, or illusions
of sense and passion, as Asia taught ; nor

Hebrew Legislation Unique 69
offenses against the harmony of nature and
the stability of society, as early Europe
declared; nor simply relics of a lower so
cial order carried over into a more developed
condition to which they do not apply, as
modern evolutionary ethics proclaims; nor
miscalculations of happiness, as utilitarian
ism affirms. All these points of view have
their measure of truth; but deeper than
all, and when rightly conceived, including
them all, is the great lesson which God
taught the world through the Hebrew race,
and which he has since reviewed in the
form of Puritanism, that there is one holy
will including all reality, and therefore ap
proving or condemning every thought, word
and deed of each individual soul. It was
that insight which, in spite of all their
faults, made Israel a peculiar people, chosen
of God to be the bearers of his special
revelation. Because this point of view is
inculcated with a clearness and concrete-
ness to be found nowhere else, the writ
ings of Hebrew psalmists and prophets and

70 God's Education of Man
legislators have a unique and imperishable
worth, are rightly regarded as Holy Scrip
tures and are made the basis of religious
worship in the church to-day. For they
contain God's first great lesson, that each
man, at each moment of his life, either is
the obedient servant of the holy will of
God that seeks impartial good, and is there
fore the object of divine approval ; or else
he is a disobedient, selfish, and obstreperous
rebel against that holy will, and therefore
is under divine condemnation.
The Jews became the religious leaders
of the race because they identified the
moral standard of their race and day with
the will of the living God, and measured
their acceptance with God by their fidelity
in fulfilling its requirements. We are their
worthy successors, we learn aright the first
great lesson that was taught through them
just in so far as we do the same. Only
let us be clear what the same thing in our
case is. The Jews took the standard of
their day and their race as the will of God.

Hebrew Legislation Unique 71
We must take, not the standard of their
day and race, but of our day and race, or,
since we are practically cosmopolitan, we
must take the highest standard of conduct
that the world has come to recognize, and
say to ourselves : " This moral standard is
for us the will of God. Just in so far as
we are faithful to that we are acceptable to
God. In whatsoever respect we fall short
of that, we fall under the condemnation of
God." For God wills the impartial and
universal good. The moral standard of a
race or age consists of the precepts and
practices by which men have actually found
that the public good is most effectively pro
moted. The standard is never perfect ; and
when we have done all that it requires, we
must count ourselves in many respects as
unprofitable servants. For as the circle is
greater than any of its constituent arcs, the
universal will of God infinitely transcends
the precepts and practices of any particular
race or age.

72 God's Education of Man
in
Ceremonial Elements in the Law. The Ritu
alism that is Idolatry
The law, like the Ten Commandments,
which is the great type of all legislation,
includes both ceremonial and moral ele
ments. A school, in addition to the les
sons which are to be learned, has certain
rules and requirements which are not them
selves lessons, but ways and means for the
harmonious and successful conduct of the
school while the lessons are being learned.
So in God's school, there are times, like
the Sabbath and holy week ; forms of wor
ship, like reading the Scriptures, prayer,
and singing; rites, like the Lord's Supper
and baptism, which, while not directly in
creasing the social welfare, are essential
conditions of that habitual and systematic
communion of man with God on which the
life of social righteousness and service de
pends. The nature of these religious ceremonies

Ceremonial Elements in the Law 73
changes with the development of culture
and reflection. Symbols appealing to the
coarser senses of taste and smell tend to be
superseded by the finer symbols which ap
peal to eye and ear. The sensuous ele
ment tends to fall away, leaving striking
color and sound and the motions of the
body and processions of men more and
more in the background, and bringing more
and more into prominence the written and
spoken word. Still, this process cannot
be hurried without loss. There are races,
and classes in all races, and individuals in
all classes, who still need more sensuous
and striking symbolism than the spoken
word of Quaker or Congregationalist af
fords. It is only when the symbol and the
ceremonial becomes an end in itself, when
the ordering of worship loses the sense of
its proportion and relation to the practical
life of righteousness, that we have the ritu
alism that is idolatry, and the clericalism
that is hypocrisy or superstition. These
evils, when they arise, however, are among

74 God's Education of Man
the worst curses that afflict the world. For
under the pretense, or it may be with hon
est but deluded purpose of manifesting God
to men, they hide from them that holy
will, which is the only God the heirs of
Hebrew tradition and the disciples of Christ
can consistently worship and serve.
IV
The Law concerned chiefly with Right Rela
tions between Persons
The great bulk of the law and a con
stantly increasing proportion of it must be
directed toward the establishment of right
relations between the individual and his
fellows. Even in ancient Israel, to do
justly and to love mercy were inseparable
from the injunction to walk humbly with
God. The "law of commandments con
tained in ordinances " was subordinate to the
law of right relations between man and man.
The Mosaic legislation included regard for
the fatherless and the widow, the training
of children, consideration for the poor,

Right Personal Relations 75
loyalty to the national government, pride
in the national history, devotion to the
national capital, responsibility of rulers and
judges, land tenure and family life, just
balances, leniency toward debtors, dutiful-
ness to parents, kindliness to neighbors,
the mitigation of the conditions of slavery,
and the evils of polygamy and divorce ; as
well as specific prohibitions of murder,
false witness, theft, adultery, and covetous-
ness. In the words of Canon Fremantle,
"The law through which the nature of
God was made known to Israel was the
series of moral and political principles
which established and maintained true rela
tions among the people."
Such is the first great lesson taught in
God's school. Man naturally judges his
appetites and passions by the standard of
his petty individual aims. Law brirfgs in a
universal standard. Law judges aets good
according as they promote, bad in so far
as they hinder, that universal good, which,
viewed in detail, is the harmonious relation

76 God's Education of Man
of man to his environment; viewed com
prehensively, is the will of God.
V
Gratification of Appetite in itself a Good.
Specious Excuses for Sin
The life of appetite in itself, uncontrasted
with custom and law, viewed apart from
its conflict with the rights and interests of
others, unjudged by the social standard,
expressed in the immediate, unreflecting
way in which it is expressed by the normal,
unsophisticated animal, is good. Other con
siderations being left out of account, appe
tite in process of gratification is better than
appetite thwarted or repressed.
If the drunkard were merely a throat
and stomach, and nothing more ; if the act
of drinking stood apart by itself ; if all con
sequences could be cut off ; if work, family,
friends and society could be disregarded
and left out of the account, then we should
all have to admit that the moistened throat
and stimulated stomach, diffusing a thrill

Gratification of Appetite 77
of vitality, cheer, comfort and .well-being
through the whole sympathetic system of
the nerves, and welling up into the con
sciousness of supreme self-satisfaction, is
vastly more to be desired and more to be
approved than the parched dryness of the
throat, the aching void in the stomach and
the depressed nervous tone and generally
dissatisfied state of mind of the man who
wants to drink whiskey and refrains. If
man were merely sexual and nothing more,
then on that side gratification under all
conditions would be a good to be sought
and repression an evil to be shunned. If
man were merely a cunningly devised ma
chine for acquiring property, and nothing
more; if he had no consciousness of the
rights of his fellows and was incapable of
representing to himself the wrong which
fraud and spoliation inflict on others, then
every dollar that by hook or crook he could
get into his wallet would be a blessing, and
every dollar that was taken out in justice
or in charity would be a loss. If man were

78 God's Education of Man
conscious of himself alone as personal and
of others as mere things, then every stir
ring of pride and vanity, every deed of mal
ice and cruelty, since they would heighten
his estimation of his own importance and
power, would be a glory to him, and every
touch of modesty or pity would be a weak
ness and a shame.
Now most of the specious excuses that
weak and wicked men offer for their vices
and crimes are based on this half truth.
They apply to themselves, living as they do
in a social system, under a social standard
and in full consciousness of their social
responsibilities, what would be true if they
were mere bundles of isolated appetites and
passions, out of relations to their fellows,
and to the social order of which, for better
or for worse, they form an inseparable part.
The drunkard and the libertine proclaim, if
not in so many words, yet by the tone of
conversation into which they fall in the
"freemasonry of the smoking-room," that
these favorite modes of self-indulgence and

Specious Excuses for Sin 79
self-assertion are perfectly "natural." So
they are. Blind natural impulse undoubt
edly prompts them. Man, however, is more
than "natural." To say of a man that his
conduct in this sense is "perfectly natural"
is only another way of saying that it is sim
ply brutal.
There is no vice so contemptible, no
crime so cruel, no sin so heinous, as not
to be susceptible of defense on the ground
that the raw impulse, the "natural" appe
tite, the isolated desire which led to it was
honestly inherited from our animal ancestry
or legitimately acquired in the process of
human evolution, and directed toward what
in itself is a real good. All evil is misplaced
good. But that does not prevent the mis
placement from being positively and inex
cusably bad. Sin puts the particular appe
tite before the total man; the individual
man before the social whole. It is this
sacrifice of the great to the petty that con
stitutes the meanness and exceeding sinful
ness of sin. Perhaps the most subtle and

80 God's Education of Man
dangerous poison that floats in our moral
atmosphere to-day is the tendency of a
widely read and much praised class of
novels to offer this "natural" defense for
sexual indulgence. VI
Answer to the Excuse that Certain Sins are
" Natural." The Meanness of Sin
When men offer this "natural" excuse
for unsocial conduct, as they have been
prone to do ever since first the contrast
between $wis and v6p.o% came to clear con
trast in Greece at the time of the Sophists,
the answer is that which underlies Kant's
famous maxims, " So act as if the maxim of
thy action were by thy will to be made a uni
versal law; " and "treat humanity, whether
in thyself or in another, ever as an end,
never as mere means to thy own selfish
ends." Ask the thief how he would like to
live in a world in which everybody should
steal. Ask the miser how he would like to
live in a world in which every man was as

Answer to Excuse that Sin is " Natural " 81
mean and penurious as he. Ask the liber
tine how he would like to be the son of a
mother, the husband of a wife, the father
of a daughter, who should have the charac
ter and status his conduct tends to give the
victims of his lust. Ask the corrupt poli
tician how he would like to live in a state
in which everybody was trying to get a
hving at the expense of everybody else.
What such a state would be is easy to ima
gine. Thomas Hobbes has given us a picture
of it in chapter xiii. of the " Leviathan : "
" Whatsoever, therefore, is consequent to a
time of war, where every man is enemy to
every man, the same is consequent to the
time wherein men live without other secu
rity than what their own strength and their
own invention shall furnish them withal.
In such condition there is no place for indus
try, because the fruit thereof is uncertain,
and consequently no culture of the earth ;
no navigation, nor use of the commodities
that may be imported by the sea ; no com
modious building ; no instruments of moving

82 God's Education of Man
and removing such things as require much
force; no knowledge of the face of the
earth ; no account of time ; no arts ; no
letters ; no society ; and, which is worst of
all, continual fear and danger of violent
death ; and the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short. The desires and
other passions of man are in themselves no
sin. No more are the actions that proceed
from those passions, till they know a law
that forbids them."
All this sounds wonderfully like passages
from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, wherein
he declares, "They have all turned aside,
they are together become unprofitable;
There is none that doeth good, no, not so
much as one. Their feet are swift to shed
blood ; destruction and misery are in their
ways ; and the way of peace they have not
known. For through the law cometh the
knowledge of sin. But sin is not imputed
when there is no law."
Now no man wishes to live in such a state
as either Hobbes or Paul describes. Yet

The Meanness of Sin 83
that is precisely the state of things which
indulgence of natural appetite and selfish
desire, unrestrained and unregulated by law,
tend to produce. The natural man, were
he in a state of nature, would be excusable.
Sin is not imputed where there is no law.
Or as we have said, appetite is not morally
evil until it conflicts with some recognized
superior good. No man in a civilized com
munity to-day, however, can be in a state of
nature; can avoid the recognition of the
superior good ; can escape the social stand
ard ; can evade the law of God. Every man
is reaping the benefits of that law of God, in
the purity and perpetuity of the home into
which he was born and in which he was
reared. He is enjoying the fruits of it in
the peace and order of society ; in the trust
worthiness of the tradesman with whom he
deals and the workmen whom he employs ;
in the kindliness and consideration and
courtesy which are habitually shown him
by his fellows.
Hence the meanness of vice, the ingrati-

84 God's Education of Man
tude of sin, the baseness of lawless indul
gence of appetite. The immoral man is a
hypocrite, a coward, an ingrate, a traitor to
man, an enemy to God. For he is taking
with one hand from his fellows the blessings
of their integrity, and purity, and kindness ;
and with the other hand he is giving back,
in some sneaking, underhanded way, the
curses of dishonesty, uncleanness, and cru
elty. If he could go off by himself and be
a brute among brutes, indulge his beastli
ness among the beasts, then his degradation
would be his own affair ; society would let
him alone ; and, as nothing better would be
given to him or expected of him, conscience
would let him off without a twinge. But
to act like a brute, and still to move among
men ; to wallow with the beasts, and still
to claim a home made sweet and pure by
woman ; to conduct his business and his
politics hke a savage, and still to walk the
streets and patronize the institutions which
Christian people have made secure and
sound : this receiving good and rendering

The Responsibility of Wealth 85
evil in return ; this living like a parasite on
a social system out of which one is sucking
the life-blood, — this in plain terms is what
the immoral man amounts to ; this is pre
cisely what it means to be a sinner.
The validity of moral law, the firm foun
dation of social responsibility for the good
of others on which it rests, and the mean
ness of disregarding it become the more
apparent the more concrete we make its
application. Let us therefore take three of
the more important aspects of every-day
life, wealth, pleasure, and politics, and see
what the moral law has to say with reference
to them. In other words, let us measure
conduct at these points by the searching
standard of its remoter consequences for
the total human happiness and welfare that
is affected by it. VII
The Responsibility of Wealth
First, wealth. Do we realize how much
of human life there is stored up in what we

86 God's Education of Man
eat and wear and spend and use ? Food
and raiment, fire and light, shelter and rest,
are bought for us by the exposure of the
lone shepherd on the mountain-side, the
weary weaver at her loom, the weather-
beaten sailor before the mast, the engineer
driving his train against the storm, the
miner in the bowels of the earth, the woods
man in the depths of the forest, the fisher
man off the foggy banks, the ploughman in
the monotonous furrow, the cook drudging
in the kitchen, the washerwoman bending
over the tub, and the countless host of
artisans and teamsters and common laborers
who form the broad, firm base on which our
civilization rests.
Because of this high human cost of ma
terial goods, all waste is wickedness, all
ostentation is disgrace, all luxury that is not
redeemed by uses to be explained later is
criminal. The food or raiment that we
waste is simply so much human toil and
sacrifice which by our wastefulness we ren
der null and void. The wealth and state

TJje Responsibility of Wealth 87
we ostentatiously display simply show the
world how much of the vitality of other
men and women we burn up in order to
keep our poor selves going. To boast of
riches, to take pride in luxury, is as though
an engine should boast of the quantity of
coal it could consume, regardless of work
accomplished ; as though a farm should be
proud of the fertilizer spread upon it, re
gardless of the crop raised in return. What
is the real nature of the idle rich ? Precisely
what do they amount to in the world ? To
eat the bread that other men have toiled
to plant and reap and transport and cook
and serve ; to wear the silk and woolen
that other women have spun and woven
and cut and sewed ; to lie in a couch that
other hands have spread, and under a roof
that other arms have reared ; not that alone,
— for we all do as much, — but to consume
these things upon themselves with no sense
of gratitude and fellowship toward the toil
ing men and women who bring these gifts ;
with no strenuous effort to give back to

88 God's Education of Man
them something as valuable and precious
as that which they have given to us : that
is the meanness and selfishness and sin and
shame of wealth that is idle and irrespon
sible. Against riches as such no sane man
has a word to say. Against rich men who
are idle and irresponsible, against rich women
who are ungrateful and unserviceable, the
moral insight cries out in righteous indigna
tion, and brands them as parasites, receiving
all and giving nothing in return; gulping
down the life-blood of their fellows, without
so much as a " thank you " in return.
That brings us to the old question, Can
a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven ?
Assuredly, yes. All things are possible
with God, and to right-minded men. It is
indeed harder for a rich man than for a
poor man, for obvious reasons. Being a
Christian, or entering the kingdom of God,
simply means that, instead of setting up
ourselves and our possessions as ends in
themselves, we shall make ourselves, and
all we have, organic, functional, instrumen-

The Responsibility of Wealth 89
tal, serviceable to the great and glorious
purposes of God for the welfare and bless
edness of men. The more we are and the
more we have, the harder it is to bring
ourselves and our possessions into this or
ganic and functional subordination to the
will that makes for human happiness and
social virtue. But just because it is so hard,
therefore it is all the more glorious. The
rich Christian is God's finest masterpiece
in the world to-day.
The man whose office is a pivot around
which revolve in integrity and beneficence
the wheels of industry and commerce, afford
ing employment and subsistence to thou
sands of his fellows; the woman whose
home is a centre of generous hospitality,
whence ceaseless streams of refinement and
charity flow forth to bless the world ; the
person whose leisure and culture and wealth
and influence are devoted to the direction
of forces, the solution of problems, the or
ganization of movements which require large
expenditure of time and money — these men

90 God's Education of Man
and women who are at the same time rich
and Christian, these are the salt of our
modern society ; by such comes the redemp
tion of the world ; of such, no less than of
the Christian poor, is the kingdom of heaven.
No honest man grudges these Christian rich
their wealth. It matters not whether their
income is five hundred or fifty thousand a
year. The question is whether the little
or the much is made organic to the glory
of God and the good of humanity. The
greater the amount of wealth thus organ
ized and utilized, the greater the glory and
the larger the good. VIII
The Test of Pleasure
Second, pleasure. Pleasure is Nature's
premium on healthy exercise of function.
The more of it the better. There is no
asceticism about the gospel of Jesus Christ,
though his followers have often tried to
tack it on. We all like pleasure, and are
not ashamed to own it. Not suppression,

The Test of Pleasure 91
-jk'-^but fruition, is the ideal of our nature. The
modern world agrees with Beecher when
he says, "My conception of religion is to
let every faculty effulge, touched with celes
tial fire." The Son of man came eating
and drinking and rejoicing, and shedding
joy and gladness wherever he went. And
the man who catches his spirit will find his
own life more and more full of happiness.
And I mean by that, real, live, human hap
piness ; not the pale, sickly counterfeit that
lights up the countenances of emaciated
hermits and psalm-singing pietists. What
ever ministers to the exaltation of body or
of mind, whatever stirs the blood, quickens
the pulses and thrills the nerves, is so far
forth a good to be desired. There is not
a bad appetite or passion in our nature,
unless perversion makes it so. Our bodies
are good, and every physiological function
is good, and the pleasure that comes of it
a thing to be rejoiced in as the seal of vigor
and vitality. Our minds are good, and all
the joys of mental exercise are glorious wit-

92 God's Education of Man
nesses to the divine image in which we are
made. Our heart's loves are good, and the
tender ties that bind us together in families
and friendships and mutual affections are
the best gifts of God to men.
There is, however, one condition of all
noble pleasure. We may not buy it with
the life-blood of our fellows ; we may not
purchase it at the cost of human degrada
tion. The attempt to regulate pleasure
and amusement by special rules is mischiev
ous and futile. The attitude of many good
people toward cards and billiards, the theatre
and the dance, is a concession to the devil
of things that are altogether too good for
him to monopolize. AU these and kindred
things are good, provided we do not pay too
high a price for them. When billiards or
cards are used to undermine the foundations
of honest industry in a fellow-man; when
they are used to make one man's gain con
ditioned on another's loss ; when they divert
the wages of the breadwinner from the sup
port of his family to the till of the gambler

The Test of Pleasure 93
or the saloon-keeper, then these things,
innocent and beneficent in themselves, be
come heavy with the weight of human misery,
black with the odium of human degradation.
The beauty of the human form, and the
charm of graceful movement, when wedded
to expressive speech or entrancing song,
are sources of the noblest and keenest of
our delights. Against opera or drama no
lover of his fellows has a word to say.
When, however, for the spectacular em
bellishment of the performance, woman is
asked to put off that modesty which is her
robe and crown, when the accessories of
the exhibition are such that we would be
unwilling to have one dear to us take part
in it, then we are buying our pleasure with
the red blood of a human heart and the
stained whiteness of a sister's soul, — a price
no true man will let another pay to procure
for him a passing pleasure.
The real reason why a true-hearted, noble
man cannot walk in the ways of licentious
ness is not the selfish fear of physical

94 God's Education of Man
contamination or social reprobation. It is
because he cannot take , pleasure in the
banishment of a daughter from the house
hold of her father; in the infamy of one
who might have been a pure sister in a
happy home ; in the degradation of one who
ought to be a wife, proud of the love of
a good man and happy in the sweet joys
of motherhood. On this point our social
standards are still barbarous and our moral
insight undeveloped. The man who has
eyes to see these things as they are ; the
man who can realize the cost of shame and
degradation to others which they involve ;
the man who can see this and still seek
pleasure there, is a man whose moral affini
ties are with the bygone brutality of the
Roman populace that found delight in see
ing gladiators die ; with the slave-drivers
who forced human beings to labor with the
lash. I care not how high such a man may
stand in social circles. He is a man with
a cold, hard, cruel, callous heart ; a creature
capable of finding a beastly satisfaction in
drinking human blood.

The Test of Pleasure 95
Can pleasure, then, like riches, be re
deemed, and made an acceptable offering
to the Lord ? Is there a heaven for the
pleasure-seeker and the pleasure-giver, as
well as for the rich ? Most certainly. Nor
mal pleasure is the counterpart of healthy
function, and blesses the giver no less than
the recipient. The practice of any worthy
art is ennobling, and gives more pleasure
to the artist than to the looker-on. The
actor, the singer, the painter, the poet, is
not degraded, but uplifted, by the joy he
gives. When we sail the seas or explore
the wilderness, we make the skipper or the
guide the sharer of our joys. And so with
all the pure domestic and social pleasures
that enrich the life of man. The test is so
simple and clear that a fool cannot miss it ;
though a knave may. Is the act that gives
you pleasure, all things considered and in
the long run, counting all the costs and con
sequences, at the same time a source of
permanent pleasure and well-being to the
other persons who are affected by it ? The

96 God's Education of Man
pleasure that fulfills this test is an acceptable
offering to the Lord. All other pleasure is
an abomination in his eyes. Searching and
severe as this test is, there is not a particle
of asceticism about it. It simply bids us
do to others as we would that they should
do to us, or to those whom we love best
IX
The Moral Law in Politics
Third, politics. Of all the freely flowing
waters of our modern civilization, there is
no portion which has been brought to us
at such risk of life and cost of blood as
our political liberties and civic institutions.
From Marathon and Salamis, from the
Netherlands under William the Silent, from
the British sailors who fired the Spanish
Armada, from Cromwell's Ironsides at Mar-
ston Moor, from the Plains of Abraham,
from Bunker Hill and Bennington, from
Quebec and Saratoga, from Trenton and
Yorktown, from Shiloh and Antietam, from
Gettysburg and the Wilderness, from all

The Moral Law in Politics 97
the brave souls who have risked their lives
for liberty and law, for justice and humanity,
we receive to-day the blessings they bought
us with their blood.
The moral law, applied to politics, forbids
us to receive our liberties and institutions
as a mere matter of course, with no sense
of gratitude to God and the brave men who
gave them to us. It means that we use
the greatness of our country as a means
to our petty, private ends. It means that
we seek for ourselves, or help secure for
others, offices and emoluments for which
we or they are unfit. It means that by
our indifference or preoccupation with our
private affairs we permit others to do what
we would be ashamed to do ourselves. It
means that we find it, on the whole, cheaper
and more economical to endure a worse
government and pay a heavier tax rather
than bestir ourselves to do our part toward
securing efficient administration and honest
government. It means that we acquiesce
in corruption in elections and favoritism in

oS God's Education of Man
appointments, and legislation by private
purchase and irresponsible influence.
Now we all tolerate a great deal of this
wrong-doing ; because in times of peace and
plenty the evil consequences of it are ob
scured. The taxes levied by public author
ity are a little heavier; the assessments
imposed by party bosses are a little higher ;
the streets are a httle filthier; life and
property are a little less secure ; the own
ers of franchises pay a little bigger divi
dends and the laborer pays a httle more
for his water and light and transportation ;
disease is a little more contagious, and the
death-rate a little higher. But these evils
are distributed over such wide areas and
such long periods, and fall on such vast
multitudes of people, that the individual
scarcely feels or notices his added share.
Even a war department in time of peace
and plenty may be administered on prin
ciples of personal patronage and private
profit and political pull, and no great harm
is manifest. It is, however, one of the

The Moral Law in Politics 99
few advantages of war that it puts men and
principles to the test, and with its keen-
edged sword cuts out their unrighteousness
and rottenness so cleanly that all men may
see and understand. Then we see what
privilege and pull and spoils and incompe
tence mean, not in vague, general terms,
but in terms of starvation and inefficiency
and disease and death. It is a wholesome
thing that, now our brief war with Spain
is over, we have not a particle of animosity
or resentment against the poor Spaniards
who stood up at their posts and fired their
bullets bravely at our breasts ; but that the
men whom we find it hardest to forgive are
those who failed to furnish our own brave
soldiers at the front, or even in then camps,
the reasonable requirements of health and
healing, of vigor and efficiency. The men
the nation blames most bitterly to-day are
those who, when the lives and hopes of
thousands of men and families, as well as
the nation's fortune and honor, were in
trusted to them, had the audacity to hold

roo God's Education of Man
these tremendous responsibilities in their
hands, and then, to use the mildest term
the whole vocabulary of whitewash affords,
"failed to grasp the situation " in which the
lives of these men and the fortunes of the
nation by their authority were placed.
If any great, lasting good shall come out
of this late war, it will not be the speedy
humiliation of Spain which every one fore
saw ; not the sudden acquisition of remote
possessions which no one had anticipated :
it will be the recognition of the truth that
the man who puts himself, or helps to put
others, into positions of public responsi
bility for which he or they are unfit, is
guilty of the only form of treason a great
republic has to fear.
What, then, does the moral law require
of us in politics ? It requires us to fit our
selves, and to hold ourselves in perpetual
readiness, for the highest service to our
country which we are capable of rendering ;
and not to allow unfit men to crowd out
their betters from the responsibilities of

The Moral Law in Politics 101
public service. Let each man, to the full
extent of his ability and influence, do these
two things, and he will do his part to solve
the still unsolved problem of republics ; he
will fulfill the requirements of the moral
law in this important sphere.
To be in a complex social system involves
being in the relations which constitute that
system. No man wishes to be out of the
system. Hence no man can logically escape
its obligations. They are binding upon
him. Law is simply the formal and explicit
declaration of that obligation of the indi
vidual to fulfill the relations which consti
tute the social system in which he is, and
desires to be. It tells man that it is not
decent to partake of benefits toward which
he is not willing to make his individual
contribution ; that it is outrageous to take
those benefits openly and publicly, and then
in secret and sneaking ways, to destroy the
very principles on which those public and
social benefits depend.
To judge all indulgence of appetite and

102 God's Education of Man
passion, all business and political and social
life, all cherished purposes and all unspoken
thoughts not by the relative standards of
the individual's physical or pecuniary or
social interest, but by the standard of that
universal good which is the will of God,
has therefore as its first effect the con
demnation of sin, and the revelation to the
sinner of his sinfulness and shame.
X
The Pride of the Pharisee and the Conceit of the
Perfectionist. The Inadequacy of Law
There are, however, people who fancy
that they keep this law of God, and con
sider themselves "unco guid," because for
sooth they have " not violated any known
law." The Pharisees in the time of Jesus,
the perfectionists of our time, are famil
iar, examples of this delusion. Puritanism
tended to the manufacture of this type, as
one of its by-products. Wherever law is
regarded as ultimate, and the human good
at which law aims is lost sight of, this cold,

The Pride of the Pharisee 103
conceited caricature of righteousness is sure
to set itself up and pose as the genuine
reality. Of all the monstrosities that mis
directed and short-sighted spiritual effort
has produced, this self-righteousness of a
loveless legalism is the most repellant. Peo
ple of this type commit, perhaps, few overt
acts of flagrant indiscretion ; but they rise
to no lofty heights of heroic righteousness.
They manage to keep their precious souls
just out of the hell of social reprobation
they are afraid of ; but they never come in
sight of the shining battlements of the
heaven. They may not cheat you ; but you
must not expect them to make a costly
sacrifice on your behalf. They may not
get drunk; but their homes are not so
happy that their children and neighbors
find it preferable to the saloon. They may
not commit adultery, or risk the scandal
of a divorce ; but marriage is not to them
a sacrament of self-devotion. They may
not tell many lies ; but they seldom speak
the truth with gentleness, or refrain from

104 God's Education of Man
peddling scandal out of thoughtfulness and
kindly consideration. They may not break
the Sabbath ; but no one who has to spend
it with them likes to see the dreadful day
come around. They may not swear them
selves ; but they are so prim and punctilious
in their propriety that they make the people
who see them want to. They are just as
good as trying not to be bad can make
them. But there is no freshness or spon
taneity in their cut-and-dried conformities.
For these and kindred reasons no strong,
brave, generous, original spirit was ever
content to remain long in this primary
school condition. Socrates drank the hem
lock rather than endure it. Jesus chose
the cross in preference. Paul, who had
large experience of it, cast it behind him as
a childish thing ; and was willing to endure
no end of stripes and imprisonments, perils
and persecutions, that he might save Jew
and Gentile from its intolerable bondage.
Luther went to the very verge of moral
heresy with his " Pecca fortiter " to escape

The Inadequacy of Law 1 05
it. Browning takes the ground that the
overt act is less disastrous to strength and
worth of character than the cowardly respec
tability of a soul that sets its heart on a sin
it lacks the energy to execute : —
" The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in view were a vice, I say."
George Meredith protests : —
"lam not one of those miserable males
Who sniff at vice, and daring not to snap,
Do therefore hope for Heaven."
Kipling, most virile and unconventional of
moderns, shows the same supreme con
tempt for those second-hand, imitative neu
trals, neither saints nor sinners, whose
character is a mere veneer, imposed upon
them from without : —
" And Tomlinson took up his tale and told of his good
in life.
'This I have read in a book,' he said, and 'that was
told to me,
And this I have thought that another man thought of a
Prince in Muscovy.'

106 God's Education of Man
The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade
them clear the path,
And Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness and
wrath.
• Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,' he said,
' and the tale is yet to run :
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer
what ha' ye done ?
Oh none may reach by hired speech of neighbor, priest,
or kin,
Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so
fair within.
Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom
has yet to run,
And ... the faith ye share with Berkeley Square up
hold you, Tomlinson.' "
But his sin turns out to be of the same
borrowed, imitative, school-boy character,
and the Devil scorns to admit him to Hell :
" And he said, ' Go husk this whimpering thief that
comes in the guise of a man :
Winnow him out 'twixt star and star and sieve his
proper worth.' "
Whereupon his servants report, —
" ' The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean
away.

The Inadequacy of Law 107
We have threshed a stook of print and book, and win
nowed a chattering wind,
And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot
find:
We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have
seared him to the bone,
And sure, if tooth and nail show truth, he has no soul
of his own.' "
The merely imitative man, the pupil
trained exclusively under the law, the copy
ist of the social standard, who is that and
nothing more, has no soul of his own, no
original righteousness, no forceful character,
no filial reproduction of the divine nature.
At the worst he is an incorrigible slave ; at
the best he is a conceited and unprofitable
servant. He is the self-centred, unchari
table elder brother of the parable.
Man is born with a simple, natural,
instinctive goodness, which, in contrast and
competition with the higher forms of good
which the increasing complexity of develop
ing society forces upon his attention in the
form of law, becomes bad. Even the keep
ing of the law for the sake of keeping it,

108 God's Education of Man
even if it were possible, would fail to make
him good. For goodness is the identifica
tion of the individual with all the personal
and social interests that are represented in
his consciousness, and are affected by his
action. It is the reproduction of the life of
the organic whole in the mind and heart
of the individual member. Goodness in
this deep, organic, vital sense, law cannot
produce. The best it can do is to restrain
the more flagrant outbursts of evil.
Every son of Adam, or in modern termi
nology, every member of the human race,
who shares its animal heredity, has within
him elements of evil which, by the very con
stitution of his nature, inevitably ripen into
selfishness and sin. For when his will first
emerges it finds itself the servant, not of the
universal social order for which it cares
nothing, but of its own animal appetites
and individual passions which are clamoring
for satisfaction. Psychology, sociology, and
experience alike attest the fact that in us
all animal wants and egoistic desires get

The Inadequacy of Law 109
the inside track and the first send-off in
the long race for supremacy, which is the
moral and spiritual history of man. God's
first lesson then is that man is a sinner.
Not that appetite is bad. In the animal,
thanks to the simplicity of its consciousness
and to the results of natural selection, appe
tite is good. In man it becomes bad when
it clashes with a greater known good of
self, or others, or of society. Law brings
home that knowledge of a greater good,
and the violation of the law is sin. All
men sin ; and all men are under condem
nation. The man who fancies he has kept
the whole law of God, and prides himself
upon it, merely shows how incapable he is
of appreciating the infinite breadth of ser
vice and depth of sympathy the real keep
ing of the divine law would involve. Man
naturally wants to have his own way and
gratify his own desires regardless of what it
costs in misery to others, injury to society,
insult to God. Law says to him, " Thou
shalt not do the mean and selfish thing thy

no God's Education of Man
animal nature prompts. If thou sinnest
thou shalt suffer the remorse of conscience,
the contempt of thy fellows, the condemna
tion of God."
Reluctantly, and through constraint, man
compromises on a perfunctory and half
hearted obedience. To escape the penalty
he obeys the law; to silence conscience
he keeps the commandments ; to maintain
his respectability he conforms to the social
standard. Conformity without character,
prudence without principle, respectability
without integrity, is all mere law can
do for man. It is the negative aspect of
righteousness ; the primary school stage of
Christian character. It is a powerful deter
rent from the grosser forms of evil ; but
for the positive promotion of the freer and
nobler forms of goodness we must look to
a more gracious dispensation ; we must be
born again.

CHAPTER II
CONVERSION BY GRACE

" That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true ;
Such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows.
If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you :
Make the low nature better by your throes !
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above ! "
Robert Browning : James Lee's Wife.

CHAPTER II

CONVERSION BY GRACE
I
The Priority of Grace. Its Various Manifesta
tions
f|AW tells us what we shall and shall
not do to others. Grace tells us
what others have done for us ; and
in turn suggests how we should feel toward
them. Law enforces conduct in the interest
of others on the reluctant will of the indi
vidual. It can compel outward conformity ;
it can shut up the guilty soul in a sense of
condemnation ; it sometimes puffs up with
pride the Pharisee or perfectionist who
fancies he has kept it. It cannot change
the heart, or renew the mind, or emanci
pate the will, or save the soul. Conversion
is the work of grace.
Grace is prior to law. In figurative

/ 14 God's Education of Man
language, "the Lamb was slain from the
foundation of the world." Yet inasmuch as
responsibility for our own action is the first
thing impressed upon us we become aware
of law long before we become aware of the
influences of grace. Or, to state the same
thing in terms of the definitions given above,
we know what we must do and must not
do, long before we reflect on what has been
done for us and the response we ought to
make. The child thinks of his father as
an authority restraining and punishing his
naughtiness, long before with appropriate
gratitude he recognizes him as the provider
of the necessities and comforts of his life.
The scholar thinks of the school as the
restricter of his liberty long before he comes
to appreciate it as the liberator of his intel
ligence. Both in the individual and the
race the thought of what we owe to others
in return for what others have done for us,
is a comparatively late and mature reflec
tion ; and when it comes marks the dawn
of a new disposition in the individual, a.
new dispensation for the race.

Various Manifestations of Grace 115
When Socrates refused to break the laws
of Athens, on the ground that he owed his
existence and training and protection and
liberty to them, he became the prophet of
a new dispensation of grace to the Greeks,
although he did not call the new principle
he represented by that name. Whenever
in nation or individual there dawns the sense
that the natural and moral order of which
we are members is good and beneficent,
the source of countless blessings which we
have individually done nothing to deserve ;
and in response we are touched with grati
tude and reverence and loyalty, then we
pass from the exclusive domain of law into
the higher, freer, nobler realm of grace.
The dawning of this recognition of the
goodness without us is, at the same time,
the beginning of an altogether new prin
ciple of righteousness within us. When I
do or refrain from doing something, not
because the law outside me says I must,
but because gratitude and loyalty within me
say I ought, then I have passed from bond-

u 6 God's Education of Man
age to liberty, from law to grace, from dead
works to a living faith.
Grace, like law, is no abstraction, speak
ing to us in ghostly whispers from the
clouds. It is concrete and personal. Just
as law speaks through the customs and
institutions of society, the stoutly asserted
claims of our fellows, and the sharp sting of
remorse and penalty which we feel when we
violate an obligation or wrong a fellow-man :
so grace speaks to us through the devoted
toil of the father and the gentle patience of
the mother in our days of helpless child
hood. Grace speaks to us in all the benefi
cent protection which society, with its offi
cers and institutions, affords to us, before
we have thought of rendering any service to
it in return. Grace speaks to us in the ser
vices and sacrifices of all good and great
men who, in days gone by, have labored to
build up the institutions and preserve the
liberties and hand down the privileges which
we enjoy. Grace speaks to us in the labor
of all teachers who have revealed the truth

Various Manifestations of Grace 117
so that we could see it ; in the loyalty of all
soldiers who have fought that a free and
united country might be ours : in all mar
tyrs and missionaries who have lived and
died that the knowledge of the larger and
better life of love might not be withheld
from the remotest corners of the earth.
The supreme historical representative of
grace, the one who brought it to the world
and established it as the authentic revela
tion of the heart of God, is Jesus Christ.
There are three degrees of the manifesta
tion of grace, and in them all Jesus, both
in precept and practice, stands preeminent.
All service freely rendered to others with
out hope of reward is a manifestation of
grace. He who feeds the hungry, gives a
cup of cold water to the thirsty, visits the
prisoner, heals the sick, teaches the igno
rant, entertains the stranger, nurses the
wounded, comforts the mourner, reproves
the erring, or does the least act of kindness
to the little child, becomes thereby and to
that extent an incarnation of the grace of

/ 1 8 God's Education of Man
God. The fact that Jesus centred his
own life in this principle, and taught the
world to find in it the source and centre of
its life, is his first claim to be accepted as
the Messiah, and welcomed as an authentic
revelation and incarnation of the essential
life of God.
The next higher form of grace is kindness
and forgiveness to those who have wronged
us. For then grace bears a double burden ;
the service freely given to another, and the
evil that other one has done to us. Here
again Jesus stands out supreme in history
as the one who made practically effective
in a considerable body of men the precept,
"Love your enemies, and pray for them
that persecute you," and in the hour of his
own supreme agony was able to intercede
in behalf of his executioners, " Father, for
give them, for they know not what they
do."

Vicarious Sacrifice 119
II
Vicarious Sacrifice. The Sacrifice and the
Forgiveness of Christ. How to bring Sin
ners to Repetitance
The profoundest manifestation of grace,
however, is not in gratuitous service to
others, nor yet in forgiveness of wrong
done directly to ourselves ; but in that vi
carious sacrifice which makes the sins of
others our own personal sorrow, and wrong
done to others our own personal grievance.
For the one thing that keeps earth from
being a heaven is sin. To root out sin from
the hearts and cut off so far as possible
its consequences in the lives of men, is the
one great deliverance for which the groan
ing and travailing world has been waiting
through all its centuries of agony and an
guish, brutality and wrong.
In the last chapter, we saw the essence
cMfcn to be the gratification of some appe
tite, passion, or interest of the individual,
good and innocent in itself, at the expense

120 God's Education of Man
of some greater good to self, others, or
society as a whole. We saw that this loss
and injury to others is what makes sin the
mean and shameful thing it is. Now this
loss and injury which sin inevitably inflicts
must fall on somebody. If it fell on no
body it would not be sin. The greater this
injury inflicted on others, the greater be
comes the sin. When the sin of greed
robs the widow and the orphan ; when the
sin of lust tramples defenseless woman in
the mire; when the sins of the rich and
powerful grind down the laborer and make
him bear on his overburdened shoulders,
in addition to the weight of his own heavy
necessities, the load of lazy people's luxu
ries ; when the sin of the parasitic spoilsman
fastens itself upon the state, and sucks the
life-blood of a country, — then such sins
ought to make every man who is guilty of
them ashamed of his meanness and brutal
ity, his injustice and mgratitude. Yet "so
hard is the heart of man that the mere
spectacle of the direct and inevitable con-

Vicarious Sacrifice 121
sequences of sin on its weak and helpless
victims has never been sufficient to restrain
the cruelty and lust and corruption that are
making such awful havoc in human hearts
and homes and states.
It is not until some one who has the keen
eye to see these evils as their poor down
trodden victims cannot see them ; some one
who has the heart to feel them as too often
the duU hearts of the sufferers cannot feel ;
some one who has the courage to say to
the prosperous and respectable sinners,
" Inasmuch as you wrong one of the least
of these poor victims, you wrong me, you
wrong the Father, and grieve all men who
have my spirit and the spirit of the Father
in their hearts ; " some one who has the
power to show all the world how loathsome
and hideous and odious these sins of theirs
are in the eyes of God and of all right-
minded men ; not until some one with the
most sensitive heart and most piercing
moral insight, and most fearless courage,
and most resolute readiness to be hated

1 22 God 's Education of Man
and sacrificed, steps in and makes the
cause of the poor victims his own, and
takes upon himself the enmity of those
who are wronging them ; — not until then
is sin likely to be seen and felt in its true
enormity, not until then can its power
over the hard hearts of men be conquered
and cast out.
A person who sees with perfect clearness
the meanness and cruelty of sin, and makes
the world see it and draw back from it in
horror and shame ; a person who fights it
with all his might, and does not shrink from
the hardest blows that may fall upon himself
in the battle against it, becomes thereby a
messenger of God to men, a saviour of the
world from sin, a reconciler of sinful man
to the righteous Father. The world has
seen many souls who have thus exposed,
attacked, and temporarily routed the abuses
and corruptions, the vices and sins, of their
people and their age. Preeminent among
such souls, supreme above them all for the
clearness of his insight, the effectiveness

The Sacrifice of Christ 123
of his exposure, the bitterness of his fate,
and the world-wide universality of the vic
tory he won, stands Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus found his people under an intoler
able yoke of ecclesiastical oppression. The
chief priests formed a pontifical clique, an
ecclesiastical ring. They controlled the
temple, bestowed the patronage, elaborated
the ritual, took their commissions out of
its costly observances, and ran things in
their own way for their own profit and ad
vantage. They were doing in the church
precisely what the corrupt and unscrupulous
political boss undertakes to do in the state
to-day. Against the authority of these
pontifical bosses, in opposition to the emol
uments of this sacerdotal ring, Jesus took
the side of the misguided, oppressed masses
of the plain and humble people. He
cleared the temple of its dove-sellers and
money-changers, substituted simple prayer
for expensive merchandise as the condition
of acceptance with the temple's God, and
even foretold a time when the worship of

1 24 God's Education of Man
the Father in spirit and in truth should
supersede the temple service altogether.
He taught plain, honest-hearted men and
poor humble women that God was their
Father and their Friend, and that he lis
tened more willingly to their heartfelt stam
merings of penitence than to the pompous
rites of priests, or the boastful ceremonies
of Pharisees. In the name of his Heavenly
Father he freely bestowed forgiveness, re
cognition, blessing on repentant publicans
and outcast sinners who would consent to
sin no more.
Of course, in claiming that his human
forgiveness and grace and love was at the
same time the forgiveness and grace and
love of the Father, he was entirely discred
iting the tradition of a jealous and cruel
tyrant ruling the world from beyond the
clouds, who could be appeased by nothing
short of the punctilious performance of
these costly rites which the mercenary
priests were manipulating to their own ad
vantage.

The Sacrifice of Christ 125
Therefore the chief priests envied him,
and as the Gospel tells us, " For envy they
delivered him up." Christ was the willing
victim of the greed and hate of a corrupt
priesthood, in order that he might be the
deliverer of the plain people from oppression
and extortion, from superstition and slavish
fear. Had there been no corruption or
oppression, no greed or pride, no supersti
tion or servility in the world, Christ's life
would have been a glad and joyous one.
He would have come to his own, to those
who shared with him the blessings of the
beatitudes ; and his own would have received
him, and hailed him as the Lord and Mas
ter of the life they were striving to lead.
Because he found avarice and pride and
hypocrisy and lust and cruelty enthroned
in the high places of the world, and dared
to attack these abuses and corruptions in
their stronghold in the temple at the na
tion's capital, therefore he brought upon
himself all the wrath and malice and vindic-
tiveness of exposed hypocrisy and thwarted

126 God's Education of Man
avarice and resisted tyranny. Because, like
the true shepherd, he cared for the sheep,
therefore he concentrated on himself the
hatred of the hirelings and hypocrites who
had been fleecing them.
While Jesus resisted sin to the uttermost,
exposing all its loathsomeness and cruelty
and hypocrisy, and bravely bearing the
worst its hate and malice could inflict, yet
he ever showed the kindliest appreciation
and readiest forgiveness to those who had
been betrayed into it by appetite and pas
sion ; and who, when once they saw its
meanness and cruelty, were willing to turn
from it and repent. Deep insight into the
nature of sin always makes one lenient
toward those who have fallen into it una
wares. We all sympathize with the little
boy who, when asked by his mother, " How
could you do such a naughty thing ? " re
plied, " Easy, mamma, easy." For sin, as
we have seen, is always the seeking of a
good : the measure of its sinfulness consist
ing in the size of the larger good which the

The Forgiveness of Christ 127
little good immediately sought displaces.
Under the influence of appetite and passion,
that larger good, which makes the gaining
of the little good by comparison a loss, and
therefore bad, ordinarily is seen but dimly ;
often is not seen at all. Sexual sin, despite
the fearful wretchedness and woe it visits
on its victims, is nevertheless the misdi
rected activity of the profoundest, holiest,
and most beneficent impulse of our nature.
Hence, toward the sinner of this type,
especially toward the woman whose too
trusting nature had proved the occasion of
her fall, Jesus could find no word of con
demnation ; though, in view of the fearful
evils the sin itself entails, he sternly added,
" Go and sin no more." With the publican,
the type of the meanest of all our social
parasites, the men who contrive, through
public office and patronage and pull, to get
a living which represents no equivalent
service rendered in return, of whom the
unscrupulous boss and spoilsman are the
most conspicuous examples in our day,

128 God's Education of Man
Jesus was likewise on terms of friendly
intimacy. Such men seldom realize that
they are thieves and parasites, living at the
expense of their more industrious and hon
est fellows. As a rule they are kind-hearted,
good-natured fellows. Indeed, without these
qualities they could not succeed at their
polite variety of stealing. To be sure it is
the business of all good citizens to make
them realize what public nuisances and ne
farious rascals they are. But as long as
they do not realize it, while we must uncom
promisingly condemn their actions, we must
appreciate and welcome the many good
qualities they have. By kindness and cour
tesy we shall win them to the better way
sooner than by contumely and vituperation.
The saloon-keeper is another example of a
class of men with whom, were he with us
to-day, Jesus would be on friendly terms;
though he would unsparingly denounce the
abuses connected with his business. The
saloon-keeper, as a rule, is a good-natured,
lazy fellow, who proposes to live, at slight

The Forgiveness of Christ 129
cost of either capital or labor, on the fruits
of other people's toil; but who does this
in the most gracious and affable manner
imaginable, and incidentally contributes not
a little to the good cheer and comfort of
the patrons who earn his living for him.
If the saloon-keeper strictly and conscien
tiously limited his sales to what is con
sistent with the health and efficiency of
his patron, and the proper support of his
family, then his business would rank with
other respectable forms of business, and he
would be regarded by sane people as a
public benefactor. The sin comes in when
the saloon-keeper, as from the peculiar
nature of the goods he deals in he is almost
sure to do, stimulates consumption beyond
that point, and thus becomes the injurer of
the man, and the robber of his family. Yet
as a matter of fact, in spite of all the talk
of temperance people, few liquor dealers
actually look at their business in that light.
They see their business, not under the black
shadow which disinterested philanthropic

130 God's Education of Man
insight casts over it, but rather in the warm
light which the merry good fellowship of
their patrons reflects upon it ; and honestly
deceive themselves into the belief that their
business is legitimate, if not positively bene
ficent. These rather conspicuous and noto
rious examples from the publicans and
sinners of our day may suffice to illustrate
the central spiritual insight that all sin
is committed under the guise of good ;
and therefore that so long as the sinner is
blinded by the light of that little good so
that he cannot see the frightful shadow of
the greater evils it involves, his sin is par
donable, and the sinner is to be forgiven
and loved : even while we do our utmost to
bring the sin itself out into the searching
light of its remoter consequences, so that it
shall stand condemned.
Law considers acts, and their conse
quences for others. Grace considers the
reaction of the act upon the heart of the
man who does it. Law takes note of inten
tion. Grace considers motive. Now inten-

The Forgiveness of Christ r^i
tion is often bad, while the motive is com
paratively good. To take a simple instance,
when a small boy on Fourth of July morning
puts a lighted cannon cracker into his neigh
bor's letter-box and blows it up, his inten
tion is to destroy the box and to inconven
ience his neighbor to that extent. Yet his
motive is not malice ; but simply the com
paratively innocent desire to have some
fun. With the mischief and naughtiness
of young children we are all inclined to be
lenient. We accept their proffered apology
that they did not mean to bring about the
precise unpleasant consequences of the
pleasant deed they nevertheless fully in
tended to do. This same distinction be
tween motive and intention comes in to
temper with mercy all judicious school and
college discipline; though a pagan public
often protests .because a recompense of
reward is not dealt out in full proportion to
the largest intention and remotest conse
quences of the offense. Christ treated
adults as children in spiritual discernment ;

i^2 God's Education of Man
and taught the world that the Father of us
all draws the distinction between motive
and intention in our acts ; and that as long
as we do not deliberately cherish a bad
motive in our heart, all the falls and lapses
into which appetite and passion, habit and
temptation may have led us, are fully and
freely forgiven as often as we sincerely re
pent and seek to make amends.
This uncompromising antagonism to sin,
exposing it in all the blackness of its self
ishness and meanness, together with the
most generous appreciation of all the good,
and the freest forgiveness for all the re
pented evil, in the sinner himself, which
Jesus introduced in its complete and final
form to the world, is the only principle
which can overcome sin in human hearts,
and redeem the world from its blighting
curse. Thus understood, it is obvious that
"there is no other name given among men
whereby we may be saved." For there
is no other way whereby a person who,
in seeking to gratify himself has wronged

How to win Sinners 133
others, can be brought to see how mean
a thing he has done, and to be heartily
ashamed of it ; and at the same time won
over to a genuine admiration for the higher
life, and an enthusiastic devotion to that
larger good of others and of all which
hitherto he has blindly disregarded and
wantonly betrayed.
This change which grace works in the
sinner's heart is repentance. Take the
saloon-keeper, for example. Law may force
him out of the business by its penalties :
but it cannot make him abandon it of his
own accord. What can ? Suppose that a
good man, by simple kindness and natural
friendliness, wins the admiration and affec
tion of the saloon-keeper. Then, when he
has won his confidence and devotion, let
this good friend, in a quiet, confidential con
versation, show him how noble and beautiful
it is to help make one's fellows happier and
better ; what a fearful thing it is to be the
occasion of their misery and degradation.
Let him frankly refer to individual cases, if

1)4 God's Education of Man
there be such, among the patrons of this
particular saloon, where the breadwinner is
incapacitated, the wife is heart-broken, the
children are impoverished, and the home is
made wretched through the influence of
drink. The man will see that continued
friendship with this valued friend, and con
tinued prosecution of this business which
he abominates, are incompatible. He must
reject the friend, and turn his back on all
the goodness the friend has brought into his
life, — he must sin against the Holy Spirit,
in other words ; or else he must get out of
the business which in the light of this
friend's character stands condemned. In
such simple, direct, personal, friendly ways
did Jesus deal with the sinners of his day :
and not until Christian people rely more on
grace and less on law; more on friendli
ness and less on force, will they make much
impression upon the sinners of our time.
So formal, forensic, hortatory, and institu
tional has our Christianity become, that we
have almost forgotten the straightforward,

How to win Sinners 135
direct, personal method of Jesus. We talk
about grace in the abstract, and attribute
mysterious potency to its miraculous work
ing. But do we place our main reliance for
changing the character of our fellows who
have fallen into sensual and dishonest and
cruel practices, and for relieving the world
from the misery and woe these evil practices
entail, on the simple power of a good, kind
man over the heart of the wrongdoer whom
the good man loves, and whose admiration
and loyalty and confidence he wins and
holds ? Not less personal than this was
the grace of Christ. Nothing less personal
than this same spirit of lovingkindness in
the hearts of Christian men and women will
do the work of grace to-day in redeeming
the world from sin, and saving sinners from
the evil of their wicked ways.

136 God's Education of Man
III
Justification by Faith. Its Justice and Reason
ableness
This response of the sinner to the gra
cious influence of the friend who at the
same time loves him for what he is, and
shows him how bad he is in order to help
him to be better; this yielding to the
friend's good influence, this acceptance of
the friend's ideal for him, this determination
to renounce all that is inconsistent with it
is what the New Testament calls faith.
Nothing could be less like it than mere in
tellectual assent to a series of abstract
propositions. When Jesus walked in Pales
tine, it was the personal response to his
gracious personality. To-day it is the per
sonal response to the father or mother,
pastor or teacher, friend or companion in
whom the Spirit of Christ dweUs. It may
be awakened in the crowded meeting or
through quiet conversation ; it may be ac
companied by true views of religious truth,

fustification by Faith 137
or by views in large measure false ; or by
no conscious recognition of intellectual truth
at all ; it may be aroused by direct appeal,
or induced by the silent example of one who
knows not that virtue has gone out of his
unostentatious life. In countless inexplica
ble ways the gracious Spirit of Christ in
all pure, kind, generous hearts in which
he takes up his abode goes forth to con
quer sin, and to convert the sinner from
the error of his ways.
If a man could at once become all that
he desires to be; if the moment he ac
cepted a good man's friendship he could
become all that the new relation demands,
then this simple act of faith would be final ;
he would have to pass through no interme
diate stage. This he cannot do. For he
is soon brought up short against the expe
rience so forcibly set forth by Paul, — the
impossibility of making the outward life an
adequate expression of what, in the light
of this new personal relation, he sincerely
desires to be. Then comes despair, dis-

138 God's Education of Man
couragement, self-distrust. For the spirit
ual transformation required is something far
deeper than going out of one avocation into
another, or giving up this or that obviously
bad habit. It is the radical reconstruction
of character on a new principle ; the accept
ance of an altogether new personal standard
of conduct and ideal of character ; and the
bringing of words and deeds into conformity
therewith. But the momentum of habit,
the flowing tides of old associations, the
prompting of ineradicable appetites and the
clamor of long indulged imperious passions
will continue to give vent in many a
cross word and selfish act ; many an unhal
lowed thought and unholy motive ; many
a bitter feeling and unprincipled ambition ;
many a weak neglect of duty and timid
shrinking from responsibility, utterly incon
sistent with the new life the gracious per
sonal influence has inspired.
It is to persons in the midst of this bitter
experience that the doctrine of "justifica
tion by faith " comes as a glad message of

fustification by Faith Reasonable 139
deliverance. To all such it says, "There
is therefore now no condemnation to them
that are in Christ Jesus."
How righteous and reasonable such "jus
tification by faith " really is, a single glance
will show. Here is a man who on the one
hand is full of mean and mercenary aims,
base and sensual passions, envious and hate
ful feelings ; who is constantly getting angry
and saying unkind words and doing cruel
things ; and who, in spite of all he can do,
is unable to root out the bad appetites,
choke down the envious feelings, rise above
the base ambitions, keep under control his
wrath. Yet on the other hand this man
has felt the attraction of the life of perfect
purity, and constant kindliness, and disin
terested service, and universal love, as,
coming from God through Jesus Christ, it
has been reproduced and reflected upon
him by some Christian soul. In his inmost
heart he desires to be the Christlike cha
racter which in another he admires and
reverences and loves. Is there one of us

140 God's Education of Man
who would have the heart to cast off or
condemn a man of whom we knew the above
description to be true ? Why, every one of
us would welcome and honor such a man,
in spite of all the witness of his evil deeds
against him. The difficulty is that we can
never know the heart of another ; can never
see his hidden faith. But if we could see,
if we could be assured that his affections
were centred on the Christ the Christian
friend had revealed to him, we should justify
and acquit him of all his past misdeeds.
Now God knows ; God sees ; and God is
not less quick to forgive, nor less merciful
and gracious than we are. Every man, no
matter how bad his previous record, nor
how prone to err his present tendencies,
who really accepts in gratitude and admira
tion and devotion the Christlike character
as it comes home to him in the person of
some soul who worthily represents him,
hath therein the assurance of the Father's
favor, and the forgiveness of his sins.
To doubt it is to make God less merciful

fustification by Faith Reasonable 141
than man; it is to deny God altogether.
The doctrine of justification by faith is
merely the theological way of stating the
truth which all deep literature affirms, and
all sound ethics establishes, that, as Brown
ing says,
" Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice :
" But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account ;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's
amount :
" Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped ;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher
shaped."

142 God's Education of Man
Justification is the condition in which
man stands before God, and would stand
in the eyes of all right-minded men, were
they able to see him as he is, when he has
gratefully and earnestly accepted in his
heart the offer of Christian love and the
ideal of Christian life, even though he has
not been able to make his lips and hands
adequately express the gratitude he feels
and the purpose that he holds.
IV
Conversion. Time and Manner. The Pastor's
Class
This transition from selfish indulgence
of natural appetite to grateful acceptance of
the Christlike character and motive as the
principle of choice, is conversion. Recent
studies of this process, undertaken at Clark
University, show that this change, so far
from being an unnatural and miraculous
experience, is a normal transition from a
life centred in the little physical environ
ment into which the individual is born to

Time and Manner of Conversion 143
a life that is responsive to the larger envi
ronment of social obligations. This change
occurs most frequently in girls at the age of
from twelve to thirteen ; and with the next
degree of frequency at sixteen. In boys it
occurs with most frequency at fifteen ; and
again with the next degree of frequency be
tween eighteen and nineteen. The change
tends to correspond physically with the
period of greatest bodily growth ; physio
logically with the advent of puberty ; psy
chologically with the ramification of nervous
tissue and the ability to grasp general ideas ;
socially with the emancipation from depen
dence upon parental authority and the en
trance into wider personal relations.
A study of the motives leading to con
version shows that in early conversions
self-regarding considerations and conviction
of sin play the most important part, but
steadily diminish in importance as the age
increases. The moral ideal, on the other
hand, is a small factor in the conversion of
children at the age of. from ten to thirteen,

144 God's Education of Man
but rises rapidly in frequency and import
ance between the ages of thirteen and nine
teen. The persons who are converted under
these self-regarding motives, if that may
properly be called conversion, are specially
liable to "back-sliding." Dr. Starbuck
declares, as the result of his investigation,
that " the relapses are generally among the
younger persons."
These and similar results of the psycho
logical investigator, dealing as he does with
only a limited range of specially selected ex
perience, are doubtless less reliable than the
mathematical exactness of his tables and
the plotting of his lines and curves would
indicate. Nevertheless they call attention
to the normal character of the change ; and
indicate in a general way the time at which
it may be expected and encouraged. They
show the fatal error of pressing upon chil
dren of tender years the fears of the future,
the terrors of conscience, and the conviction
of sin. They show the equally fatal error
of allowing the precious years of ripeness

The Pastor's Class 145
for this great spiritual change to pass un
improved. They indicate as the proper
attitude of the church something midway
between the high emotional pressure of the
revival meeting and the form of confirma
tion administered as a matter of course. It
is an excellent plan for the pastor to keep
a list of all the children and young people
of the congregation ; and each Lenten sea
son personally to invite each one who has
reached a certain point in the graded Sun
day school to join a pastor's class for the
study of the fundamental principles of the
Christian life. This class is preparatory to
entrance into the communion and fellow
ship of the church : yet only those who feel
attracted to the Christian life as thus pre
sented, and express a personal desire to
live the Christian life, are candidates for
graduation from the class and promotion
into the full fellowship of the Christian
church. This plan utilizes the principle of
concentration and expectancy and gentle
pressure, which were features of the old

146 God's Education of Man
revival method; yet avoids the indiscrimi
nate urgency and emotional excitement
which too often did more harm than the
other features of the movement were able
to do good. V
Regeneration a Gradual Process. Its Univer
sality and Necessity
Viewed from the point of its origin this
change from the natural to the spiritual Me
is called regeneration. The fact that the
new birth originates, not in the man himself,
but in the Spirit appealing to him from with
out through the personal example and in
fluence of Christian friends, and begetting
within him a life better than his own, like
most of the good old-fashioned doctrines
which the world had first misunderstood,
then doubted, and finally denied, is receiv
ing striking confirmation from contemporary
analysis and research. Tarde, Baldwin, and
Royce are enunciating, in a little different
terminology but in as sweeping and uncom
promising form as the author of the Fourth

Regeneration a Gradual Process 147
Gospel himself, the doctrine that man is an
imitation, a reproduction of the social en
vironment to which he responds. If a man
becomes good it is because he sees good
ness in some person, or in some institu
tion hke family, or state, or church, which
is composed of persons, and tries to repro
duce it in himself. According to these
writers all the acts of childhood are either
imitations of their superiors or else the prac
ticing, upon their inferiors, of what they
have learned from their superiors. The doc
trine of regeneration is simply the appli
cation to religion of the psychological axiom
that nothing can be in a man which has not
first been suggested to him from without.
Let any one ask himself whether he ever
attained a height of character or a quality
of spirit the suggestion and inspiration to
which did not come to him from without,
through the example of parent, the counsel
of teacher, the stimulus of friend, or the
portrayal of art ; and he will have brought
home to him his absolute dependence for

148 God's Education of Man
spiritual elevation and transformation upon
that Spirit of whom our parents and teach
ers and friends, in so far as they are holy
and pure and true, all poetry in so far as it
is noble, all pictures in so far as they are
beautiful, all history in so far as it is true
to what is best in humanity, are the living
witnesses and embodiments.
Denial of the necessity of regeneration
is virtual denial of the presence of the
Spirit of God in the life of humanity. What,
in speaking of the attributes of God, we call
grace, is in fact God himself ; and God,
as he is manifested in human lives and
human institutions and human history, is
what we mean by the Spirit of God. Hence,
as the Spirit is the more personal expres
sion of that side of the Divine Nature,
which, when we speak more abstractly, we
call the attribute of grace ; so regeneration
is a more intimate and personal expression
for that response on the part of man, which,
when viewed more formally and forensi-
cally, we describe as justification by faith.

Regeneration a Gradual Process 149
Thus repentance and conversion, regen
eration and justification, are all slightly dif
ferent aspects of the response man makes
when he comes to recognize that God, as
Christ revealed him and as Christian hearts
continue to reveal him, is a gracious and
friendly Spirit seeking man's own good,
and forgiving his iniquities whenever he
repents. One cannot apprehend the nature of this
spiritual change without perceiving that it
must be very gradual and to a great degree
subconscious. Even the apparent ex
ceptions prove this rule. For Paul and
Augustine had been familiar with the ex
ample and teaching of Christians long be
fore they yielded ; and the intensity with
which they kicked against the pricks shows
that the pricking process had long been
deeply at work within their consciences.
No person can step at once from a life
of natural appetite, restrained only by law
and fear of penalty, to a life of grateful
recognition and responsiveness to the good-

150 God's Education of Man
ness and grace of God incarnate in Christ,
and reproduced in the spirit of Christlike
human souls. The momentum of associa
tion and habit is too strong ; the hold on
the new principles too vague and weak.
If the change is to be permanent and
fruitful, there must be systematic pro
vision for the renewing of the appeals of
grace at stated times and places ; for the
reinforcing of the influences of the spirit
through habitual exercises and associations.
There are three such spiritual agencies.
VI
The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ
First ; we have the Me and letters of the
Master and those who shared his spirit.
It often happens that through a good bio
graphy and ample correspondence we may
understand a man and a movement better
than many of his intimate associates were
able to. Many of us know Washington far
better than the laborers who were employed
on his estate : many of us can form a far

The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ 151
truer picture of the real Lincoln than the
customers who bought goods of him over
the counter, or the men who employed him
to split rails, or even the lawyers who met
him on the circuit, and the legislators who
sat with him in Congress. Even more is
this the case with Jesus. We can under
stand him far better than could Nicodemus
or Philip. We should be incapable of pre
sumption and errors into which Peter and
the sons of Zebedee were perpetually fall
ing. There is no magic in the Bible ; and
theories of interpretation have been put
upon it which are calculated to deprive it
of the virtue that it has. But when ration
ally and spiritually used, it has power to do
the very thing we need. It enables us to
reproduce to our own thought and feeling
the personal Christ, and the spirit he in
fused into his followers. An intelligent
and thoughtful student of the New Testa
ment ought to be able in any circumstance
of life to know with substantial accuracy
what Jesus would say and do were he

152 God's Education of Man
placed in that situation. I do not, of
course, refer to scientific and critical and
historical questions, concerning which pre
sumably Jesus knew as little as we to-day
know of the problems which will occupy
the world in the year of our Lord 4000 ;
but to problems of life and duty, and the
spirit in which we should meet the needs
and claims, the loves and hates of our fel
low-men. So many-sided was his teaching
and his life, that out of the record we can
reconstruct his personality more clearly
and comprehensively than that of any other
great character in history. We know that
he was rooted and grounded in love to God
and love to man ; and we know how he in
terpreted and applied the principle of love
toward pretentious hypocrites on the one
hand and condemned outcasts on the other ;
and how he dealt with typical cases all the
way between these two extremes. Out of
the Old Testament, on which he was nur
tured, and the New Testament, which he
created and inspired, we can gather the ele-

Prayer : Vital Communion 1 53
ments which made up his personality ; and
study by ourselves the lessons which he
came to teach the world ; and continue the
work his spirit began in us when first we
turned from our selfishness and sin, and
welcomed his forgiving grace as the princi
ple of a new and better life.
VII
Prayer not Reflex Action but Vital Communion.
Its Answer Inevitable
A second indispensable aid to faith is
prayer. Prayer gathers into personal unity
the scattered fragments of God's will re
vealed in Scripture, and in the lives of
good men who share the Christian . spirit.
To this personal God, interpreted through
Christ and the spirit, the prayerful man
devoutly says " Not my will, but thine be
done." Prayer is petition ; but it is petition
tempered by glad surrender to a will higher
and better than one's own. It is the pre
sentation of the human will for inspection
and orders to the divine Commander. It

/ 54 God's Education of Man
is the systematic continuance of the work
which conversion begins. It is the process
by which we keep the car of life in constant
connection with the spiritual trolley; the
essential condition of keeping up the mo
mentum which the Spirit in regeneration
imparts. The answer to prayer is as certain and
inevitable as any other case of cause and
effect. The will of God, the grace of
Christ, the influence of the Spirit cannot be
brought into contact with the submissive
and receptive heart of man without pro
ducing therein their appropriate effects in
changed desires, strengthened resolutions,
truer words and better deeds. And the
man cannot be changed in his thoughts
and purposes, his words and deeds, without
effecting corresponding changes in the
world without. Nor is this change in the
first instance mere reflex action, as it is
sometimes erroneously called. A mere
desire thrown out into the air, or acknow
ledged to one's self, would produce an effect

Answer to Prayer Inevitable 155
on the soul of the man who avowed the
desire. And such a reaction of his own
act upon himself might, though even then
rather inappropriately, be called " reflex ac
tion." But that is not prayer. Prayer is
the communion of two wills, both of which
are more or less explicitly realized and
present in consciousness. Hence the sub
sequent state of the soul that prays is not
merely the reaction of one will upon itself
as the result of its own exertions ; but the
resultant of the union and communion of
the two wills ; the amplification of the di
vine will through recognition of a new
human factor in the total situation; the
transformation of the human will conse
quent upon its having been brought humbly
and reverently into the presence of the
divine Will. Such prayer when offered by
a Christian is in the name of Christ. That
is, the content of his representation of the
will of God is made up chiefly of elements
which he has come to know through appro
priation of the mind of Christ. For the

1 56 God' s Education of Man
ethical and spiritual purpose of God is
known to us chiefly through the life of
righteousness of which Christ is the his
toric incarnation, and Christian people are
the living witnesses and reproductions. As
Jesus said, " The Father and I are one."
" No man cometh to the Father but by me."
No psychology of prayer that omits the
representation of the spirit and will of
God from the mind of the petitioner has
grasped the reality of prayer at all The
fact that a good deal of indolent desire and
indefinite longing and vain repetition is
labeled prayer, should not blind us to the
fact that true prayer is the most intense
and vital exercise of which man is capable ;
and that in that exercise a representation
of what God is and wills, as his nature and
will have been made known to us in Christ
and the Christian spirit, is quite as essen
tial a feature as our own desires and needs.
This systematic habit of bringing the
high ideal, the personal presence, the holy
will of God into close contact with the

Need of Christian Fellowship 157
heart, and compelling sway over the will
by surrendering the will, uplifting the heart,
opening the mind to God, at regular and
stated intervals, in private and in public, at
every solicitation of temptation, in every
moment of uncertainty, is the most potent
weapon of faith. It has indeed often been
sheathed in unintelligible ritual, dulled by
unworthy use, and imitated in baser metal.
But wherever it is the plain and direct
communion of the mind and heart of man
with the spirit and will of God, there its
supreme potency is forever proved anew ;
there its inevitable effects are perpetually
manifest. VIII
The Need of Christian Fellowship. The
Dawning Sense of Freedom
The third great aid of faith is fellowship.
The soldier who should shoulder his indi
vidual musket and march across the fields
to meet the foe alone, would find his patri
otic ardor fast oozing out ; and even if he
should actually attack the enemy, his indi-

1 58 God's Education of Man
vidual efforts would be of no avail. So
Christian faith needs fellowship ; both for
its own support in the individual, and for
efficiency in the conflict with organized and
aggressive wrong. One finds so many of
the old evil habits cropping out that he
doubts whether he has been really born
again. Then the external sacrament of
baptism is a welcome assurance against the
conflicting witness of the rebellious ele
ments within. The reproduction of the
Christlike example and spirit within him is
so slow and partial that he doubts whether
he belongs to Christ after all. Then the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper brings
direct from the instituting will of the Mas
ter the assurance that to all who in ear
nestness and sincerity will do a simple act
expressive of the desire to receive him, to
them, and so often as they do it, Christ
gives himself anew, with pardon for their
sins and fresh strength for the renewal of
the struggle.
So when the individual life seems to be

Need of Christian Fellowship 159
profitless and unfruitful, it is a confirmation
of faith to join with the great congregation
in worship and praise to God, beneficence
and service to man ; and to feel that through
our presence and support, our gifts and
prayers, we have our part in the great work
of Christ and his kingdom, at home and in
foreign lands. To join with others who
are engaged in the same great conflict ; to
compare experience with them, and unite
with them in aspiration and endeavor, helps
to keep warm and lively the faith within us
which otherwise would soon grow cold and
dead, like the coal taken from the grate
and dropped on the chill hearth alone.
In these experiences of the grace of God
and through these spiritual aids man ad
vances to a new stage of freedom. Under
law man was constrained ; accepting con
formity to its requirements as only a lesser
evil than suffering its penalties. Of two
possible alternatives he chose the one he
least disliked. He was not strong enough
or wise enough always to choose even that.

160 God' s Education of Man
Hence under the form of free choice, his
action was substantially forced upon him,
either by his appetites within, or social
standards and authorities without.
Under grace, on the contrary, man
chooses what appeals to him as good, and
the highest good. Indeed it is too good ;
so high that he cannot at once attain unto
it. Under law he tries to do what in
his inmost heart he does n't really want to
do. Hence, whether he succeeds or fails,
he has only the form of freedom. Under
grace, in glad response to the manifest
goodness and kindness of God, man is try
ing to do what in his softened and repent
ant heart he feels and knows to be the su
preme good. Hence, even though he fails,
as to some extent he must fail, he is at least
striving to express his inmost self ; and
therein has the dawning sense of what it is
to be really free.
Yet even the freedom that comes of
grace through faith is incomplete. For
though the spirit, when once touched to

Dawning Sense of Freedom i6t
grateful responsiveness through grace, is
willing, the flesh continues to be weak.
Under law man said, "I want to gratify
my appetites and passions regardless of the
harm to others, and law won't let me."
Under grace he says, "I want to respond
worthily to the appeal of grace, but my
appetites and habits won't let me." In
Paul's language, "To will is present with
me, but to do that which is good is not.
For I delight in the law of God after the
inward man : but I see a different law in
my members, warring against the law of
my mind, and bringing me into captivity
under the law of sin which is in my mem
bers. O wretched man that I am ! Who
shall deliver me out of the body of this
death?" For that complete deliverance from the
power, as well as from the love of sin, we
must look to a principle deeper even than
grace, and a bond stronger even than faith.
Conversion from sin, regeneration through
the Spirit, justification by faith, responsive-

/ 62 God's Education of Man
ness to grace, are different aspects of the
process which marks the turning-point in
the great race which starts with law : but
the turning-point is not the goal. Whoever
rests content in the mere repetition and
revival of these elementary spiritual experi
ences, as some of our Methodist, Salvation
Army, Christian Association and Christian
Endeavor brethren are prone to do, will
remain to the end a mere babe in Christ :
if indeed he does not grow weary of the
monotony of being born over and over again
and give up the new life altogether.

CHAPTER III
CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE

An' I spoke to God of our Contract, an' He says to my
prayer :
" I never put on My ministers no more than they can
bear.
So back you go to the cattle-boats an' preach My Gos
pel there.
"They must quit drinkin' an' swearin', they mustn't
knife on a blow,
They must quit gamblin' their wages, and you must
preach it so ;
For now those boats are more like Hell than anything
else I know."
I did n't want to do it, for I knew what I should get,
An' I wanted to preach Religion, handsome an' out of
the wet,
But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, an' I done
what I was set.
An' I sign for four pound ten a month and save the
money clear,
An' I am in charge of the lower deck, an' I never lose a
steer ;
An' I believe in Almighty God an' preach His Gospel
here. Kipling : Mulholland,s Contract

CHAPTER III

CHARACTER THROUGH SERVICE

Character the completion, Service the expression
of the work begun by Law and Grace
AW controls the outward act.
Grace draws out the inmost feel
ings. Yet neither obedience to
law nor faith in grace can make character
complete. To make the inner and the outer
man at one, according to the prayer of
Socrates, to make our work the expression
of our faith, is what the Bible means by
love; what theologians mean by sanctifi
cation ; what philosophers mean by freedom ;
what the plain man means by character.
The associations of the word love have
become too sentimental ; those of freedom
too metaphysical ; those of sanctification too
technical to express the third and highest

1 66 God' s Education of Man
stage of man's spiritual education. A holy
heart and a forceful hand must go together
to make the ideal Christian man. The legal
ist is hard. The pietist is weak. The man
of highest Christian character is he in whom
the grace of God inspires the love of man ;
and love of man makes the keeping of the
law spontaneous and free. When Henry
George called on Cardinal Manning, the
conversation taking a religious turn, the
Cardinal remarked, " I love men because
Jesus loved them ; " to which Mr. George
replied, " And I love Jesus because he loved
men." It matters little which order one
follows. It is absolutely essential that in
some way heart and hand, the ideal and the
actual, love to God and service to man
shall be united. Not until our brothers
are the better and happier for our presence
in the world, have we fulfilled the law, or
given expression to our faith, or reached the
goal of Christian character.
At this point the question at once arises,
" If this is what it all comes to ; if Christian

Character and Service 167
character is the one thing essential ; and if
practical service is the way in which Chris
tian character must find expression, what
is the use of all this prehminary discipline
of law ? What is the use of this elaborate
experience of grace ? "
One might as well ask, " Since it is the
water of the river that turns the machinery
of the mill, what is the use of a dam and
a canal ? " The undisciplined and uncon
trolled appetites and passions of our nature
no more tend of themselves to serve the
interests of others, than the water flowing
down the natural bed of the river tends to
turn the machinery in the mill upon its
banks. Law is the dam thrown across the
stream of these natural desires, to prevent
their going to waste in simple natural indul
gence. Faith is the canal which confines
the accumulated force of desire and concen
trates it upon an obj ect other than self. Not
until desire has been first resisted and then
concentrated and directed aright, is it pre
pared to love and serve others most pro-

1 68 God' s Education of Man
f oundly and effectively. More than that, the
example and inspiration of Christ give us a
conception of the possible length and breadth
and height and depth of service to our fel
lows which infinitely transcends any ideal
the individual is likely to set up for himself.
And finally, it is not until we have felt within
our own souls the experience of the love of
another for us, in advance of our deserving
it, and even in spite of our many ill-deserts,
that we are able ourselves to overlook the
failings and forgive the offenses of our fel
lows. Love is something which we cannot
work up within ourselves at will. It must
be first begotten in us by the love of others
to ourselves, in the form of grace, before
we can give it forth to others in the same
generous and self-forgetful form. We can
work out only what has been wrought into
us. That is why experience of law and
grace precede and prepare the way for the
life of loving service wherein they are ful
filled. That is what St. John means by say
ing that " Love is of God ; and every one

Character and Service 169
that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth
God." Love is like an atmosphere. A man
must be all in it, or all out of it. He can
not live half hate toward man, half love
toward God. He cannot expect to receive
forgiveness and grace from God except in
so far as he manifests the same grace and
forgiveness toward his fellows.
Thus the man who comes to the love of
his fellow-men through love of the Father
finds, not that the love of the one is an in
ference or conclusion from the love of the
other ; but that the true love of God is the
love of what he loves, or his fellow-men ; and
at the same time that the true love of his
fellow-men is so far forth a love of the God
whose love includes them. Hence his love
for his fellow-men does not depend on the
accidents of individuality and time and cir
cumstance, as does the love of the natural
man who has never learned to see his fel
low-men in the light of their common rela
tion to his Father and their Father, his

/ 70 God's Education of Man
God and their God. His love acquires a
constancy and impartiality, a power to bear
all things, believe all things, hope all things,
and endure all things in their behalf ; be
cause it is steadied and reinforced by the
universal love of the Father, in which all
human love inheres. He is not provoked
by men's resentment ; nor does he fail to
love them still, in spite of their lack of
appreciation. The love that is bom of
God, the love that cares for others as they
are, and makes their ends its own, is as
superior to that counterfeit love which is
born of nature, and makes others means
to one's own sensuous, mercenary, or am
bitious ends, as heaven is higher than the
earth. In Emerson's phrase, the one is
celestial, the other demoniacal.
" Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond,
Bound for the just, but not beyond ;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in others still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,

Character and Service lyi
Without a false humility ;
For this is Love's nobility, —
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold ;
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand and body and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
He that feeds men serveth few ;
He serves all who dares be true."

As Jesus tells us repeatedly, the highest
spiritual life is the unconscious service that
scarce knows itself as service at all; the
self-forgetful love that is so immersed in
the stream of life that it scarcely appears
above the surface as a distinct thing at all.
It is of the utmost importance that we
recognize the superiority of this uncon
scious, unpretentious service in our day.
Under the dominance of the law, a legal
Christianity sets up the ascetic type of
piety as supreme. Then your model
Christian is the person who does n't dance,
does n't play cards, does n't go to the
theatre; in extreme cases, doesn't even

/72 God's Education of Man
hold property or marry. Our modern
Protestant world is happily outgrowing all
that. Under the dominance of faith, the
model Christian becomes the person who
attends the prayer-meeting and the sewing-
circle, contributes to foreign missions and
numerous charities, teaches in the Sunday
school, lives in a settlement, and, in gen
eral, goes about doing good in conscious
and conspicuous imitation of the example
of the Master. This is much better ; but
it is not by any means the best. To per
mit this type to regard itself as best, or to
become tacitly accepted as the typical
saintly attitude, is to stunt our spiritual
development, and linger forever in the
second of the three great stages of the
spiritual life. All this is good, and in its
place essential : but its place is a subordi
nate one ; the second, not the third ; the
outer court of the temple, not the inmost
shrine. In comparison with the mere in
dulgence of the sensualist, or the barren
restrictions of the ascetic, it is great ; but

Character and Service 173
it is not the " greater things " which Jesus
expected of his followers ; not " the great
est thing in the world." It is one of the
besetting sins of clergymen to place the
greatest value on these things; because
they are the most conspicuous ; because
they come closest to their special sphere of
work. It is judging laymen by clerical
standards. It is placing the son who says
" I go, Sir," and went not, above the one
who made a less satisfactory reply in the
immediate presence of his father, but went
out into the vineyard actually to do his will.
It is a danger from which religious societies
and associations made up exclusively of
young people are never free. Whether
the ultimate effect of these societies is bad
or good depends on whether they regard
the emotional expression of their faith in
public gatherings as the main end of their
endeavor; or as a means toward a life of
more fruitful service in which the element
of subjective emotional experience shall
gradually merge itself in less conscious but

174 God's Education of Man
more practical forms of concrete social ser
vice. II
Christian Character consists in doing one's
Specific Work well for the Glory of God and
the Good of Man
What then is this third and highest form
of Christian character? It is the doing
of one's specific work well for the glory of
God and the good of one's fellow-men. On
the outside it looks very much like a rever
sion to the first stage of merely keeping
the law. But it is positive where that is
negative ; and it is enriched, as that is not,
by the enlargement of heart and motive
which has come through personal experi
ence of the love of God and of good men
toward us prompting and inspiring us to
love God and our fellows in return. On the
inside it appears as identical in form with
faith ; but it differs from that in having the
form of devotion filled out with concrete
and practical contents instead of resting in
abstract and ideal form.

Character : Doing One's Work Well 175
Character is at once more inward than con
formity to enacted law, more outward than
aspiration toward a cherished ideal. It is
the taking up of the outward law and filling
it with the fervor and enthusiasm of a
spontaneous inner life. It is the carrying
out of the inner life into those forms of
practical expression which the law enjoins.
Yet it is more than this. For law is ab
stract and general. It does not fit particu
lar cases, nor point out his precise duty to
the particular individual. Christian charac
ter, however, has the insight to discover
and the tact to promote the good of others
and of all in the most intimate of personal
relations and in the most delicate of prac
tical situations. Hence any account of
the structure and working of Christian
character must of necessity be very inade
quate and incomplete. Character must be
incarnate in a person and wrought into a
life, as it has been once for all in Christ,
and is continually repeated in the lives of all
his true followers. Only the dead anatomy

176 God's Education of Man
and dissected organs of this Christian char
acter and life can be written out in a book.
Still, even anatomy and physiology are
useful in their way ; and there is one great
underlying principle of the Christian char
acter and life which requires especial em
phasis. Each person has first of all some specific
place to fill ; some specific function to per
form. No one else can fill that place if he
deserts it ; no one else can do his work for
him if he shirks it, or does it ill. To fill
this specific place well should be the chief
concern of every Christian. No promiscu
ous activity in other lines, whether ecclesi
astical, social, literary, philanthropic, scien
tific, or artistic, can atone for neglect of
the specific thing God has committed to
our care, and for which our fellow-men have
a right to depend upon us.
To the wife and mother, this specific
sphere is obviously home ; and the domestic
rather than the social and public aspects of
the home. If husband and father are not

Character : Doing One's Work Well 177
made healthful and happy there, no con
spicuous performances at club or reception
can atone for this fundamental unfaithful
ness. If the boys and girls are not reared
from day to day and year to year in close
and loving contact with a wisdom and
gentleness and tenderness which tends to
make virtue instinctive and vice repellent,
then no activities in church and Sunday
school, no official position on Boards and
Committees can wash away the stain of
a fundamental responsibility wantonly be
trayed. The husband and father, in turn, has the
honest support of the family as his prime
concern. Idleness in others is a fault ; in
him it is a crime. Speculative investments
by others are foolish ; when indulged in by
him they are wicked. Life insurance for
others is a luxury; for him it is a duty.
Economy, for others a counsel of perfection,
is for him an unescapable decree. No free
handed treating at the bar or elaborate
hospitalities of the club, no lavish expendi-

178 God' s Education of Man
ture either in charities or sports can render
spiritually respectable the husband and
father who does not make the proper pro
vision for his family's support his prime
concern. Home is not the whole of life,
and persons may be faithful and loyal here
and at the same time very false and treach
erous elsewhere. The part does not include
the whole ; but the whole does include the
parts, and especially demands integrity in
the most fundamental parts. No person's
love to God or man is worth the breath
in which it is professed unless it includes
first and foremost a comfortable and happy
home for all members of his family.
To rear a large and vigorous family in
health and happiness, though not the whole
duty of man and woman, is yet the foremost
duty; and nothing short of the most im
perative claims of public service on the one
hand, or positive physical or economic dis
ability on the other, can excuse failure at
this point. The sacredness of sex as the
fountain of the humanity of the future, and

Character : Doing One's Work Well 179
responsibility for the physical, mental, and
moral character of posterity, is the gospel
which more than all others needs to be
vigorously preached to Protestant Ameri
can families. As compared with bringing
human souls into the world and training
them for useful service and enjoyable life,
all the pressing claims of business, all the
fastidious aims of art, all the restless quest
for culture, all the persistent urgency of
society, all the gilded glamour of the clubs
for men, and all the ponderous programmes
of the clubs for women, shrivel into insig
nificance. Work as a means to livelihood of self and
family, however, though the prime requi
site of the spiritual life, is only its begin
ning. This income-producing aspect of it
is only the subjective side of work. All
work, according as it is done well or
ill, is a benefit or injury to all whom it
affects. The carpenter, the mason, the
plumber, the painter, the machinist, in so
far as the work he does is honest and thor-

180 God's Education of Man
ough and durable, is a public benefactor;
in so far as his work is slipshod and
superficial and slovenly, he is a thief and
robber. In the one case he is a genuine
and vital member of that good order of so
ciety which is the will of God. In the other
case he is a parasite drawing his living
from that social order by eating the heart
out of it.
The farmer and the manufacturer are in
God's kingdom or out of it chiefly according
as the goods they produce are sound and
genuine, or defective and adulterated. The
merchant's standing with God depends
chiefly on whether he has a just and con
siderate regard for the rights of his cred
itors and the reasonable claims of his
patrons ; or whether he is simply bent on
getting as much out of them as possible,
and giving as little as possible in return.
The director and manager of large financial
interests is a sharer in God's spiritual life
or not, according as his dealings repre
sent real values and utilities and services,

Character : Doing One's Work Well 181
or as they represent privileges corruptly
procured through bribes ; competitors killed
off through unjust discrimination; capital
which is either fictitious or secured under
false pretenses ; schemes which tempo
rarily benefit their promoters at the ulti
mate expense of the public.
Whether a professional man is a Chris
tian or not depends mainly on whether he
brings to client, patient, or parishioner
the latest and best resources his profession
affords, or puts them off with what was
good enough for his fathers ; letting men
lose their lives, their property, or their
rational religious faith because he is too
indolent to keep abreast of the times. The
teacher and writer is saint or sinner pri
marily according as the presentation of
truth in attractive and winsome form to
pupil or reader is the object of unwearying
training and research, correction and self-
criticism ; or as he is content to palm off
traditional views in conventional form with
little concern as to truth of substance, or

1 82 God's Education of Man
grace of style and manner. The person of
wealth and leisure is ripening for heaven
or hell just in proportion as that leisure
and wealth are accepted as an opportunity
to engage in vital and urgent forms of
social and public service which cannot
be effectively and gracefully performed by
those whose main energies must be en
grossed in the support of themselves and
their families ; or the same leisure and
wealth are made the excuse for indolent
indulgence in luxury, insolent contempt for
labor, arrogant indifference to human wrong
and suffering, and effeminate irresponsi
bility for social progress and reform.
As a citizen, one's spiritual life is meas
ured by the degree to which he devotes
thought, time, strength, money, influence,
to the study of public policy, the nomina
tion and election of trustworthy and effi
cient officers, to service on committees and
in offices which affect the public weal, to
the advocacy of measures which make for
public prosperity. His lack of spiritual

Character : Doing One's Work Well 183
life in turn is accurately measured by the
extent to which he is willing to shirk these
responsibilities himself, and turn them over
to men who will betray them ; by his ac
quiescence in policies he believes to be
wrong, for fear of personal unpopularity
or impoverishment if he dares to oppose
them; by his idle confidence that if he
neglects his individual duty in these mat
ters, other people will do theirs, and some
how or other things will come out all right
in the end.
In social life one is admitted to or ex
cluded from the kingdom of heaven accord
ing as the happiness of genuinely congenial
persons is made his aim, and his entertain
ments are provided, and his invitations
accepted, with that end consistently in view ;
or personal ostentation and advancement
are his objects in the elaborately calculated
relations of host and guest.
Even in what is often called the religious
life, but what is strictly speaking the eccle
siastical life; in attendance upon public

184 God's Education of Man
worship, and the support of church activi
ties, the real Christian is marked off from
the pious hypocrite according as these ser
vices and activities are regarded as instru
mental to that deeper service of God which
consists of a life of practical righteousness
and loving service to one's fellows ; or as
they are viewed as devices for currying
favor with God, and making a comfortable
provision for the individual's own happiness
in the hereafter. Ill
The Sense of Proportion and the Art of Subor
dination Essential to the Highest Character
and the Best Service
All this is sufficiently clear and simple ;
so that a wayfaring man though a fool
need not err therein. The difficulty comes
in preserving a right proportion between
these several claims. For each normal in
dividual is identified with his fellows on all
these sides at the same time. He is mem
ber of a family; earner of a livelihood;

Sense of Proportion Essential 185
producer of commodities or renderer of
services ; man of leisure and some degree
of wealth ; citizen, churchman, and member
of a social circle.
While these spheres do not necessarily
conflict they do compete. Any one of
them might absorb almost the whole of
one's energy and resources. Such exclusive
absorption in any one line of activity is
justifiable only in the most extreme cases.
For in such exclusive devotion, the particu
lar relation is apt to become an ultimate
end in itself, rather than an element in a
life of universal service, of which this is but
one particular expression. The wife and
mother who is that and nothing more tends
to become narrow and selfish even in that.
The business or professional man who is
that and nothing more becomes hard and
inhuman, even in the doing of that which
in itself is an inestimable service to human
ity. Balance, health, sanity, spirituality
require the distribution of devotion through
all these different channels. On the other

186 God's Education of Man
hand an equal distribution would be fatal ;
for in that case one would be fairly respect
able in many lines, but forceful, efficient,
and highly serviceable in none. Each per
son must pick out some one central relation
which shall absorb most of his time and
energy ; and group the others around it in
due subordination. The principle of selec
tion and subordination is the service of
God in and through the service of our fel
lows. Hence the order of subordination will
not be precisely the same for any two per
sons. It can be indicated only for types of
persons; and then only in a very general
way. For wife and mother, as has been already
said, home is central ; social duties are pre
sumably second ; philanthropic and church
activities third ; economic and political con
siderations last. If, however, she have artis
tic gifts, and an impulse for expression, then
these may well come second ; and society
and church and philanthropy may be post
poned.

Sense of Proportion Essential 187
If, however, she have a gift for organiza
tion and the management of people, philan
thropic and religious work may well come
second, and society and art may be thrust
into the background, with business and
politics. If she has a shiftless and improvi
dent husband and is shrewd and thrifty
herself, business must claim the second
place ; and even if it creeps up into the
first, while we may pity, we can scarcely
blame. Husband and father, again, as has already
been said, cannot allow any extraneous in
terest to excuse him from making the sup
port of the family his prime concern. Yet
here there are degrees. To permit a family
to suffer, or to drive the wife and young
children out into the industrial world to
earn their daily bread, is always an unpar
donable sin in an able-bodied man. This
must stand first. Yet when the point of
comfortable subsistence with reasonable as
surance for the future is secured, although
for most men the provision for the family

1 88 God's Education of Man
will continue to be the dominant considera
tion, it need not and ought not to be so in
all cases. The scholar then may place
scholarship first, and thrust into the back
ground the various ways of making money
which represent no substantial scholarly
achievement. He may neglect society to
a degree which in less gifted men would
imply a lack of human interest. The states
man, likewise, may neglect his private affairs
in the service of the public to a degree
which in men having no talent for public
affairs would be a grievous fault.
The man of leisure may give to social
reforms a degree of attention which would
be out of proportion in the man who has a
business to manage, or a statesman with
responsibilities of grave import upon him.
The man or woman of sensitive spiritual
feeling and insight may rightly give a degree
of devotion to the church, to the cultivation
of the subjective Christian graces and the
development of the inner life of faith, which
can hardly be expected of the man who is

Sense of Proportion Essential 189
administering large practical and public
affairs of so intricate and delicate a nature
that any considerable withdrawal of over
sight and control would result in fatal ineffi
ciency and widespread disaster. A relative
subordination of home and society, church
and philanthropy, is not only permissible
but obligatory for this man ; provided what
holds him to his task be not the mere ex
citement of the contest and selfish absorp
tion in the game, but a serious and reverent
acceptance of the fulfillment of these respon
sibilities as his specific contribution to that
welfare of his fellows which he knows to
be the will of God. Whatever order of sub
ordination the principle of largest service
will justify for any individual, — that order,
though it be wrong for every other man, is
right and good for him.

190 God's Education of Man
IV
The Church and its Services a Means, not an
End. The Bane of Clericalism and Senti-
mentalism In thus placing the church on a level
with other social agencies, and even recog
nizing its rightful subordination to home in
all cases, and to business, society, and politics
in special cases, one is not reducing God to
a level with finite objects, nor admitting
that true religion can be secondary to any
other interest. Because God is larger than
any particular institution he can be served
through whatever subordination of one in
stitution or interest to others best serves
that good of all which is his will. Because
religion is devotion to that will, it is not
confined to any one channel for its expres
sion. As a matter of fact, common sense does
recognize and approve such a relative sub
ordination of ecclesiastical to secular inter
ests, as often consistent with the truest

The Church a Means 191
spirituality. The church, however, is often
very reluctant to make this concession.
Especially in Catholic and extreme evangel
ical circles the clergy are apt to set up the
ecclesiastical life as practically synonymous
with the religious life, and to identify
devotion to the church with devotion to
God. Then all subordination of ecclesias
tical to secular interests is looked upon as
a weakness of the flesh, a compromise with
the world, a concession to the Devil. The
result is in every way disastrous. It sets
up a religious instrumentality as an end in
itself. It narrows and dwarfs the concep
tion of the religious life. It blinds the
minds of men to the deeper spirituality
which is found in the sanctification of the
secular by the spirit of service. It turns
over the great practical realities of life to
the dominion of Satan. It permits a few
feeble folk who have a gift for subjective,
sentimental, introspective piety, to usurp
the name of religion, and to pass as the
saints of God, the elect of heaven ; while

1 92 God's Education of Man
the great mass of the forceful men who are
fighting the battles of real righteousness,
and doing the works of practical beneficence,
are relegated to a secondary and inferior
spiritual rank. In Catholic countries this
ecclesiasticism drives the men of practical
power out of the church altogether ; leavmg
women, children, and priests in exclusive
possession. In Protestant communities it
retains these stronger elements in nominal
connection with the congregation, but too
often practically excludes them from the
more intimate fellowship of the church it
self. The result is an eMeebled church,
dominated by clerical ideals and sentimen
tal standards, on the one side ; and an un-
regenerated world, given over to men of
whom the highest spirituality is not ex
pected, on the other.
What we need is the increasing recog
nition that the domestic, economic, com
mercial, social, political, and ecclesiastical
spheres are all partial and coordinate
phases of the Me of service to the one

Clericalism a Bane 193
God who is immanent in them all, and is
acceptably served through whatever corre
lation and subordination of these spheres
enables the individual to render most effec
tive service to God and his fellow-men.
Such a frank and honest denial of the
absolute supremacy of the church is the
surest way to recover for it its relative and
rightful importance. The church is not the
righteous life itself ; but it is the training
school for the life of righteousness. As
such it is practically indispensable. The
educational analogy here is perfect. One
may become an educated man without going
to school or college ; for learning is not con
fined exclusively to academic walls. Home
study, the stress of public life, the respon
sibilities of business, the pursuit of art and
letters, may. give a man an education en
tirely apart from the schools. Yet the peo
ple who get a thorough education in these
extra-academic ways are few. The educa
tion thus gained is apt to be one-sided, out
of relation to current modes of thought,

194 God's Education of Man
and hence in a measure socially inapplica
ble and ineffective. In the same way,
through home training and experience of
life one may absorb the Christian spirit
of loving service entirely apart from the
direct services and institutions and rites
of the church. Yet here, as in educa
tion, the result is too often eccentric,
individualistic, incommunicable, and unor-
ganizable. Just as the great mass of men
must come to the intellectual life through
the educational channels of the school ; so
the great majority of men must come to the
spiritual life through the ministrations of
the church. The church is to the life of
the Spirit what the school system is to the
training of the mind, — the regular agency
which society has established, and men have
come to accept as the ordinary means of
spiritual education.
The recognition of this educational func
tion of the church, as the training-school
for the spiritual life, gives it a prestige and
permanent importance which is almost as

Clericalism a Bane 195
exalted as the claim it has sometimes made
for itself of being the spiritual life itself.
And it has the immense advantage, that
whereas the claim to be the spiritual life is
false, and its results are pernicious, this
claim to be the training-school for that life
is true and practically justified. For, just
as every man who loves learning, though he
may criticise their educational methods, yet
cannot fail to love and cherish and revere
the schools and colleges of his country ; so
the man who lives the spiritual life of loving
service in home and business, politics and
society, art and letters, cannot fail to rever
ence and love the church when once he
recognizes it as the great training-school for
just such service of God and man as that in
which he is engaged. So long as the church
exalts herself by arrogant pretensions to be
the bearer of a spiritual life distinct from
the life of practical social service, it will be
deserted by the strong, brainy, forceful men
of affairs, and left to languish in effeminate
sentimentalism and die of clerical conceit.

196 God's Education of Man
The moment it humbles itself to accept its
specific mission of training men for a ser
vice as much harder, and broader, and
stronger, and higher than her own as the
heavens are higher than the earth, as living
is harder than preaching, as humanity is
broader than priestcraft ; then it will be
exalted, if not to the exclusive preeminence
it sought at first, yet to an indispensable
membership in the social order which shall
never be taken from it. As long as the
church tries to save the life of ecclesiasti-
cism, and clericalism, and traditionalism,
and exclusiveness, it will die the death that
is in store for everything that is pretentious,
and unreal, and formal, and empty, and un
serviceable. As soon as it loses this life of
pious self-sufficiency and earnestly devotes
itself to making holier and better all other
departments of human life, it will find the
life of power and honor that always awaits
the man or the institution that is intent on
self-forgetful usefulness and service.

The Educational Analogy 197
v
The Educational Analogy. The Minister's
Threefold Task
This third stage of the spiritual life cor
responds to the university stage of educa
tion. Law deals with men as the school
deals with children ; compelling them to do
what is good for them though they do not
like it at the time. Grace appeals to men
as the college appeals to youth; winning
them to the spiritual life by the inherent
interest and attraction of the Ideal person
ally presented as the object of their affec
tion. Character treats men as the univer
sity treats its graduate students ; absolving
them from definite rules and specified re
sponsibilities, and leaving them free to do for
themselves something which is not exactly
like anything that was ever done before.
As the university is not content that its
graduate student should simply learn and
repeat what the university has to teach, but
insists that he shall bring to it some contri-

/ 98 God's Education of Man
bution of his own ; so God admits us to the
highest character, not in reward for keeping
the moral law, or in recognition of our punc
tiliousness in the performance of church
duties and services, but only on condition
that we shall go out into the actual world
and make it a healthier, richer, fairer, purer,
juster, happier world in consequence of
the original contribution that we make to
its domestic or social, its industrial or civic,
its ecclesiastical or artistic life. Note, please,
that the churchman is not excluded from
the eligible list ; provided he make his ec
clesiastical contribution in the same meek
and modest way that the artist offers his
art, the business man his merchandise, the
mother her family, the society woman her
reception ; not as a thing apart from life or
of self-sufficient excellence ; but as the spe
cific way in which he is best able to give his
best to his fellows and his God.
Such are the three stages of education
through which man passes on his way from
a life impelled by nature to the life that is

The Minister's Threefold Task 199
led by the Spirit. Every Christian congre
gation contains persons who are in each of
these three stages. The Christian preacher
who will fulfill his whole duty needs to pro
vide the warning and rebuke, the comfort
and assurance, the inspiration and enthu
siasm which each stage of development
requires. Unless he drives the selfish, sensual sin
ner to the corner of his pew in shame and
contrition for his meanness and cruelty, his
ministry will be a weak, sentimental affair ;
the mere singing of a pleasing song, which
has no effect to check and repress the awful
ravages which greed and lust and pride and
hate are making in the hearts and homes
of every city and town and village and ham
let in our land. In his dealing with these
hard problems he is as complete a failure as
would be the teacher in the public school
who should give to primary-school scholars
the laxity of discipline and the freedom
of method which is appropriate only to a
university. Lawlessness and license, vice

200 God's Education of Man
and crime, are sure to flourish under the
ministry of one who suffers one jot or tittle
of the law to pass unheeded, or through
neglect of teaching permits one of the least
of its commandments to be broken.
Unless he has an eager readiness to wel
come the first signs of introspection in the
growing boy and girl ; unless by appropri
ate hints and suggestions he is skillful to
deepen and intensify the self-questioning
mood until it reaches the crisis of convic
tion of sin and ill-desert ; and then knows
how gently to lead the soul distrustful of
itself out into the green pastures of a perfect
trust in God, and by the still waters of a
complete confidence in Christ ; unless he is
patient with the aberrations of morbidness
and tolerant of the extravagances of enthusi
asm; unless he has the imagination and
sympathy to live over again the doubts and
conflicts, the alternating hopes and fears,
the swiftly shifting phases of exaltation and
depression which marked his own entrance
into the higher atmosphere of faith ; his

The Minister's Threefold Task 201
ministry will be cold, formal, hard, unfruit
ful. His error will be akin to that of
college professors who either treat their
students like schoolboys and are in a
perpetual quarrel with them, or else treat
them like mature men and fire all their
instruction over their heads. The college
professor must recognize that his students
are neither boys nor men, but on the way
from the one condition to the other. He
must overlook many an animal outburst
which the mere schoolmaster would sternly
repress. He must put up with much cru
dity of thought and expression which the
university professor would scorn to recog
nize. He must be able to live in an atmos
phere of perpetual turbulence and enthu
siasm, crudeness and waywardness ; he
must appreciate and enjoy it ; and under
neath all its excesses and perturbations
never lose sight of the genuine worth and
power that is latent in it all. Precisely so
the minister must live over again each year
with a certain proportion of his congrega-

202 God's Education of Man
tion these first struggles after a firm foot
ing in the spiritual world; welcome for
the hundredth time the fresh discovery by
some newly evolving soul of what to himself
has been a commonplace of spiritual expe
rience for years ; never mind if faith does
take on at first exaggerated, irrational, im
practicable forms, set itself impossible and
useless tasks of asceticism, and run riot
in all the extravagances of " other-world-
liness." The colt that gives no trouble in
the breaking makes but a sorry beast to
drive in after years. The minister who
lacks this power of sympathetic apprecia-
ation of the struggles of early faith may lay
down the law so that sinners will tremble
on the one hand, or he may nurture the
serene, sweet piety of mature and ripened
saints on the other hand ; but he will not
build up his church: the deaths and re
movals will exceed the accessions "on
confession of faith ; " and the church will
steadily decline upon his hands.
Finally, unless the minister respects as

The Minister's Threefold Task 203
the genuine and essential substance of the
spiritual life the quiet, steady life of useful
ness and service of plain, practical, common-
sense people, who have had their emotional
upheavals and intellectual struggles once
for all, and have settled down to doing all
the good they can in the station in which
they are placed ; unless he can appreciate
this at its true worth and give such souls
his hearty encouragement and unqualified
approval ; then he will have no power per
manently to " edify " the stronger and bet
ter element of his congregation; in spite
of statistics in his favor and visible re
sults to show he will not be wanted long
in any pastorate. His error is akin to that
of a university professor who should insist
on punctuality of attendance at required
exercises and ability to recite volubly the
elementary lessons in his subject ; and place
little or no stress on freedom, original inves
tigation, independent results. He would
be applying school and college methods to
university students ; and as a result uni-

204 God's Education of Man
versity students would seek the direction
of their work elsewhere. The ministers
are very numerous who commit precisely
this blunder. They insist on estimating
the spiritual worth of their people by the
number of meetings they attend, and the
extent to which they take part ; forgetting
that this is but one of many lines in which
the mature spiritual life may find appropri
ate expression ; and that while it is to be
welcomed from those for whom it is a
natural and proportional expression of their
love to God and man, it is not the only
nor the chief sign by which the spiritual
power of a church or an individual attests
itself. The task of the minister is thus one of
peculiar difficulty. In secular education,
thanks to the graded system and the dif
ferentiation of institutions, the teacher has,
as a rule, only one grade to deal with. The
schoolmaster has what corresponds to law ;
the college professor what corresponds to
grace; the university faculty what corre-

The Minister's Threefold Task 20$
sponds to character. The minister, on the
contrary, has all these three grades to deal
with all the time. No minister can be
equally adept in all three types of spiritual
education. One man will be strong in
laying down the law; another in present
ing the appeals of grace; and another in
pointing out the practical applications of
the principle of service. His strength at
the point of greatest facility will be com
pensated for by comparative weakness in
the other aspects of his work. The church
which has a pastor who is strong in any
one of these three lines should be thankful
for that, and patient with defects in the
others. And when a change is made, the
church should aim to find a man who will
be strong in the department of spiritual
education which the outgoing pastor has
most neglected. For spiritual education
has these three well-marked stages ; and the
permanent well-being of a community re
quires that all these stages shall be repre
sented in its ministry. The fact that faith

206 God's Education of Man
is better than mere obedience to an exter
nal law, does not warrant us in abrogating
the law or neglecting to thunder its warn
ings and penalties in the dull ears to which
the still small voice of grace is as yet inau
dible. Likewise the fact that character is
greater than faith, and the helping of our
fellow-men is more acceptable to God than
ceremonial observances addressed directly
to himself alone, should not blind us to the
indispensable value of these ceremonial
observances, or make us indifferent to the
subjective exercises of souls struggling
through the new birth into the unfamiliar
atmosphere of faith. Each man and each
church needs to carry along, though in
different order and degree of subordination,
according to circumstances and stage of
development, all three types of spiritual
discipline at once, and retain them to the
very end. Otherwise faith will degenerate
into antinomianism, and there will be " sin
that grace may abound ; " love will vaunt
itself in faithless presumption; distracting

The Minister's Threefold Task 207
and dissipating multiplicity of labors will
rob the soul that forgets to worship of the
unity and peace and strength which are
found in God alone.
Discrimination is not separation. No
greater calamity can befall man or church
than to attempt to divide in practice what
has here been discriminated. All reforms
in the church have been attempts to restore
one of these elements to its rightful promi
nence. Puritanism was the restoration of
law, when faith and love had lapsed into
laxity and license. Methodism was the
restoration of grace, when law had lost
its grip, and love was dragging her anchor.
Unitarianism was the emphasis on charac
ter, when law had hardened into a form, and
faith had shrunk to a formula. The Refor
mation was a recovery of faith from under
neath an overgrowth of loveless law and
lawless love. Christianity itself was the
introduction of faith and love into a sys
tem which had contracted into law alone.
Our thought of God's dealing with man

208 God's Education of Man
must follow some familiar analogy. The
analogy of legal procedure in a court of
justice is worn out. It separates law and
grace, setting them over against each
other, much as the state gives the power of
sentence to the judge, and the power of
pardon to the governor. It leaves no room
at all for love, which is greater than both.
The educational analogy is not perfect.
No analogy can be. But it does help us
to see that these three attitudes, law,
grace, and character, are not inconsistent
or mutually exclusive, but successive stages
of God's discipline of man ; just as school,
college, and university are consistent and
complementary features of a single educa
tional system. In our modern life, edu
cation is much more familiar to us than
judicial procedure; the schools are more
intimate factors in our lives than are the
courts of law. Hence it may be a help
toward a truer apprehension of God's atti
tude toward us to think of him, not as the
stern Judge, tempering his justice with

The Minister's Threefold Task 209
mercy, but rather as the patient and faith
ful, firm and friendly Teacher, who first
constrains our wills to learn unwelcome
lessons of obedience to law ; then wins our
hearts to voluntary allegiance by the man
ifestations of his grace ; and finally leaves
us to work out largely for ourselves, in
original and independent ways, that char
acter which comes through loving service
and which is perfect freedom.

CONCLUSION
TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS

" The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Is — not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be, — but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means : a very different thing I "
Robert Browning ; Bishop Blougram's Apology.

CONCLUSION
TWO TYPES OF IDEALISTS
I
Plato and Aristotle
gp^glHE reader of the foregoing pages
must have noticed that while the
'' phrases of traditional orthodox
theology have been largely used, yet they
have often been employed in a different
sense from that with which they are asso
ciated in many minds. Religious truth has
been presented from what to many persons
will seem a novel point of view. To state
in technical terms the precise difference
between the traditional point of view and
that which has been presented here, would
lead us into metaphysical inquiries which are
foreign to the popular purpose of this little
book. To defend the positions taken here
against the positions which they are calcu-

214 God's Education of Man
lated to supplant would raise the whole
fundamental question as to whether the
transcendence or the immanence of God is
the profounder principle on which to base
the practical religious life of man.
What cannot be done in the form of
Begrijf, may often be hinted in a series of
Vorstellungen. By seeing what the differ
ence between these two points of view means
for Greek and German philosophy, for litera
ture and art, for politics and missions, one
may come by inference to understand that
the same fundamental tendency in theology,
though beset with peculiar dangers, is not
fatal to the religious life ; and to accept as
logically inevitable here what has come to
pass in other spheres of human interest and
activity. The fundamental issue is between
abstract and concrete idealism.
Plato and Aristotle are the great repre
sentatives of these two tendencies among
the Greeks. Raphael in his School of
Athens has happily indicated the difference
between these two men in the attitudes in

Plato and Aristotle 213
which he places them. Plato stands with
upturned finger pointing to the one perfect
Good beyond the clouds ; Aristotle with
down-turned hand outstretched toward the
complex details of earth. Plato sees what
might be, and condemns all that is because
it falls short of this. Aristotle sees what
is, and strives to bring the best that may
be out of that.
Plato draws a picture of the ideal republic,
and tells us, " Until philosophers are kings,
or the kings and princes of this world have
the spirit and power of philosophy, and
political greatness and wisdom meet in one,
and those commoner natures who follow
either to the exclusion of the other are
compelled to stand aside, cities will never
cease from ill, — no, nor the human race, as
I believe, — and then only will this our state
have a possibility of life and see the light
of day." Aristotle tells us how existing
states are actually governed ; and by criti
cism of their defects, points, not indeed to
the finished ideal, but to the direction the

2i 6 God' s Education of Man
actual state must take in order to approach
it. Plato will permit to his picked citizen,
who is to guide and guard the rest, no per
sonal property ; no private domestic life,
no wife and children whom he can call his
own. "The guardians are not to have
houses or lands or any other property ; their
pay is to be their food. They will not tear
the city in pieces by differing about ' meum '
and ' tuum ' ; the one dragging any acquisi
tion he has made into a private house which
is his, and which has a separate wife and
separate children, and private pleasures and
pains. And as they have nothing but then-
persons which they can call their own, suits
and complaints will have no existence among
them ; they will be free from all those quar
rels of which money or children or relations
are the occasion."
Note, by the way, that phrase free from.
That is always the abstract idealist's con
ception of liberty. The concrete idealist,
on the other hand, will always say free in.

Plato and Aristotle 217
Aristotle, on the contrary, places virtue
and happiness in the exercise of all one's
faculties ; in living well and doing well.
And he regards it as highly desirable that
one shall have the personal friends and
material objects toward which his affections
and interests may find appropriate exercise
and expression. He says, " We do not re
gard man as an individual leading a solitary
life ; but we also take account of parents,
children, wife, and in short friends and fel
low-citizens generally, since man is naturally
a social being. Happiness requires exter
nal goods too ; for it is impossible, or at
least not easy, to act nobly without some
furniture of fortune. There are many
things that can be done only through in
struments, so to speak, such as friends and
wealth and political influence." Virtue, ac
cording to him, is concerned with the details
. of the concrete situation in which we are
placed quite as much as with an abstract
principle. " Thus any one can give money
away or spend it ; but to do these things

218 God' s Education of Man
to the right person, to the right extent, at
the right time, with the right object, and
in the right manner, is not what everybody
can do, and is by no means easy ; and that
is the reason why right doing is rare and
praiseworthy and noble." II
Kant and Hegel
Germany presents these two contrasted
types of idealists in the persons of Kant
and Hegel. According to Kant " Duty for
duty's sake" is the one moral principle.
Morality has nothing directly to do with
the natural impulses, desires, and affections.
They are all morally indifferent ; one no
better than another ; all capable of becom
ing bad when opposed to duty ; but none fit
to enter into the end of conduct. Only the
act which proceeds from pure reverence
for law, regardless of consequences, interests,
and affections, is moral. Consequently, ac
cording to his system, a moral man or even
a perfectly moral act is as impossible as

Kant and Hegel 219
according to Plato the Ideal State is im
practicable and impossible. All this is high
and mighty ; but it is n't sweet, lovely, or
eminently practical. Kant's attempt to
convert this abstract theory into practice
was often ludicrous. He never traveled as
far from home as from Boston to Worcester
in his life ; and only once or twice in his
fourscore years did he get as far as from
Boston to Concord or Salem. Once a noble
man' took him to drive and did n't get him
home until nearly ten o'clock ; whereupon
he provided against any possibility of such
dissipation in the future by making a rule
never again to get into a carriage which he
had not hired himself, the motions of which
he could not control. His most intimate
friend was an Englishman who was so
punctilious that when Kant was two minutes
late in an appointment for a drive he drove
off without waiting for him. He himself
never overslept his seven hours from ten
to five in thirty years ; and he was so regular
in his daily walk that the neighbors could

220 God's Education of Man
set their watches by him. If the student
in the front seat whom he was accustomed
to watch during his lecture had lost a but
ton off his coat, Kant would lose the thread
of his discourse. His walks were always
solitary, because he would not run the risk
of breathing through the mouth which talk
ing would involve. Perhaps, however, the
most extreme instance of this fussy attempt
to subject all Me to strict rule was his
management of his stockings. The ordinary
devices for holding them in place, with their
inevitable interference with the circulation,
were of course out of the question in his
well-regulated wardrobe. Yet how to get
adequate support without unevenness of
strain in walking was the great problem.
So he attached a cord to each stocking,
passed it up through a hole in his trousers
pocket, and there connected it with a spring
inside a little box which he carried in his
pocket, so that the tension of the cord
could be adjusted to the exigencies of
walking by the spring. To such ridiculous

Kant and Hegel 221
pettiness was this prim and precise old
bachelor reduced in his attempt to impose
his own subjective rules and abstract ideals
upon the world in which he lived.
Hegel, on the contrary, says the first
duty of man is to get some property : " A
person must give to his freedom an exter
nal sphere, in order that he may reach the
completeness implied in the idea. It is in
possession first of all that the person be
comes rational. The possession of property
is the first embodiment of freedom. Pro
perty makes objective my personal individual
will." It is the same idea that we found
in Aristotle, that the virtuous will must
have some furniture of fortune as instru
ments of self-expression.
Hegel's second advice to every one who
has secured some property is to get married.
He says, " The family is the direct substan
tive reality of spirit. In the family we are
not independent persons, but members.
Marriage is essentially an ethical relation.
The objective point of departure is the free

222 God's Education of Man
consent of two to become one person. They
give up their natural and private personality
to enter a unity, which may be regarded as
a limitation, but, since in it they attain to
a substantive self-consciousness, is really
their liberation. Marriage thus rests upon
love, confidence, and the socializing of the
whole individual existence. The union of
personalities, whereby the family becomes
one person, is the ethical spirit." Or to
translate these rather technical phrases into
plain English, to be good and great, you
must have something and somebody to live
in and care for larger than your own petty,
empty, infinitesimal individuality. Property
begins this expansion of the self ; business
and profession carry it still farther; the
family life, however, is needed to deepen
and intensify it. Life that does not find
its outlet through some of these concrete
channels, whether in man or woman, is
pretty sure to shrink and shrivel into a
miserable fussiness about such trifles as the
punctiliousness of personal routine, and the

Kant and Hegel 223
student's buttons, and the strain on the
stocking supporters, which came to occupy
so large a place even in the capacious mind
of Kant.
Hegel's third counsel is, be a good citi
zen. He says, "The particular person is
essentially connected with others. Hence
each satisfies himself and establishes him
self by means of others, and so must call
in the assistance of the form of universal
ity. This universality is the principle of
the civic community. The state is the
objective spirit, and the individual has his
truth, real existence, and ethical status
only in being a member of it. The state
is the embodiment of concrete freedom.
In this concrete freedom, personal individ
uality and its particular interests have their
complete development." To translate this
again into plain English, it is only as we
enter into and share and serve the common
life, that our individual lives amount to
anything. By losing our Me in the larger
life of the community we find that this

224 God's Education of Man
larger life of the community is really our
own true life, for which we were made and
in and through which alone can we come
to our true selves.

Ill
Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning
In the England of our own day, we see
the same difference between the poetry
of Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning.
Matthew Arnold is the abstract idealist of
modern poetry. We all know how superior
he is to all that is actual ; how inadequate
are all finite things to satisfy the craving
of his infinite heart. We have all had our
moods of worshiping this abstract ideal, and
our dear selves under the guise of it. We
have all sat in the calm moonlight and
gazed with passionate desire on the mighty
charm of the waters; and prayed to be
delivered " From the world's temptations,
From tribulations,

Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning 225
From that fierce anguish
Wherein we languish,
From that torpor deep,
Wherein we lie asleep.
From grief that is but passion,
From mirth that is but feigning,
From tears that bring no healing,
From wild and weak complaining,
Where sorrow treads on joy,
Where sweet things soonest cloy,
Where faiths are built on dust,
Where love is half mistrust."
Then we have gone off into a cozy cor
ner by ourselves, and taken our ideal by the
hand and said to it : —
" Ah, love, let us be true
To one another, for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
Of course, though the world has none of
these things, and can be made to have
none of them, we, we and our ideal, have
an inexhaustible store, if only there were
fit occasion to draw these treasures out.

226 God's Education of Man
But if we ever are so foolish as to venture
forth to show our riches, or expect to find
worthy souls on whom to bestow them, we
very soon recover from the illusion, bid it
"Farewell," and turning to our precious
selves once more we say : —
" And thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and sphered course
To haunt the place where passions reign —
Back to thy solitude again ! "
Thus turning away from all the sordid-
ness of a world that is not worthy of us, we
" Yearn to the greatness of Nature,
Rally the good in the depths of ourselves."
Matthew Arnold, to be sure, is a great
man, as Kant and Plato were before him ;
and as we have doubtless all thought our
selves to be when we have been captivated
by his mood. This estrangement from
the petty and sordid details of the actual is
one type of idealism ; and it is well for us
that we all have to go through it. To

Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning 227
remain in it, however ; to suppose that this
is the only idealism ; to think that this
mystical moonshine and downright mate
rialism are the only alternatives; that, in
deed, would be fatal. When the unreality
and absurdity of this abstract idealism
begins to dawn upon us ; when we find it
impossible to take it quite seriously any
longer, then it is good for us to remember
that this is only one type, the earliest and
simplest, to be sure, yet the shallowest and
silliest type of the great idealistic faith.
When such returning sanity, or dawning
sense of humor, impels us to close for the
time our Matthew Arnold, it is good for us
to open our Browning. On the threshold
we hear a very different note :
" I find earth not grey, but rosy,
Heaven not grim, but fair of hue.
Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy,
Do I stand and stare ? All's blue."
" How good is man's life, the mere living, how fit to
employ
All the mind and the heart and the senses forever in
joy."

228 God's Education of Man
He lives in a world where "Law, life,
joy, impulse are one thing." In the face of
all the evil in the world, which he sees even
more clearly than the mystic who turns
away from it, Browning still confidently
asks, " Is not God now i' the world his power first made ?
Is not his love at issue still with sin,
Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?"
He sees not a fancied good apart from
evil and beyond the clouds, but a good
in fighting evil and a joy in overcoming
it. No soul in all the world need be shut
out from the glory of the contest.
" Partake my confidence ! No creature 's made so mean
But that some way it boasts, could we investigate,
Its supreme worth : fulfills, by ordinance of fate,
Its momentary task, gets glory all its own,
Tastes triumph in the world, preeminent, alone."
This deeper idealism is patient of details,
shrinks not from drudgery, can flourish if
need be in poverty and obscurity and in
the face of hatred and malice. Even Pom-
pilia's awful fate could not cheat her of it ;

Garrison and Lincoln 229
nor in " The Death in the Desert " does it
forsake the aged John. There can never be
a situation that has not its ideal ; and he who
has eyes to look outward instead of inward
alone, can see beauty, glory, God every
where. Hence the concrete idealist has
his battles even more than other men ; for
all men's joys and sorrows are his own, and
all men's causes dear to him ; but it is in
conflict and through suffering bravely borne
that victory and glory come.
IV
Garrison and Lincoln
In American political life we get a good
example of the two types of idealists in
men like Garrison and Phillips on the one
hand, and Lincoln and Seward on the
other. Garrison and Phillips saw "what were
fair in life," proclaimed it in season and out
of season, and were ready to divide the
nation and break in pieces the Constitution
that the negro might be freed. They did

230 God's Education of Man
an important service in this way. But we
owe it more to Lincoln and Seward than to
them that this great united Nation stands
to-day the mighty and magnificent embodi
ment of the concrete condition which in
its abstract form the earlier prophets so
vigorously proclaimed. Lincoln and Sew
ard hated slavery and believed in its re
striction and ultimate abohtion. But they
were concrete rather than abstract idealists.
In Aristotle's phrase, they knew how "to
do these things to the right person, to the
right extent, at the right time, with the
right object, and in the right manner."
Consequently they resisted the pressure of
radicals who would have brought the mat
ter to an issue before the country was
sufficiently united to stand the strain ; and
shocked the reluctance of conservatives who
would have waited till every one was agreed.
At the moment when the exigencies of
war gave the opportunity, and public opin
ion was prepared to sustain it, they actually
set free the slaves, and guaranteed the per-

Bur ne-f ones and Watts 231
petuity of the freedom which they gave
by all the force of a victorious and united
nation. V
Burne-jfones and Watts
Bume-Jones and Watts illustrate these
opposite tendencies in painting. Burne-
Jones, when asked to paint a portrait of a
certain lady, replied : " Certainly I shall be
pleased to paint your portrait, but you
mustn't expect that it will look like you." In
other words, he was willing to take the gen
eral cast of countenance of the lady in ques
tion as an outline; but even in a portrait
it was his own pet doll which he purposed
to represent. Watts, on the other hand,
reads the writings of his subject, talks
with him on his favorite themes, and as
a result gives you, not Ms preconceived
ideal of a philosopher, but the sad lucidity
which a repressive education had cut into
the face of John Stuart Mill, or the deep
reflectiveness which a life of introspective

232 God's Education of Man
analysis had engraved on the features of
James Martineau. Even when these two
painters treat the same ideal theme, how
different the result! Burne-Jones's Hope
is the same elongated, elaborated piece of
woeful femininity which meets us in all his
pictures, save that in this particular pose of
" Hope," her left hand is aimlessly uplifted
into the clouds which are but a few inches
above her lofty head, and gropes helplessly
about in that misty medium.
Watts's Hope, on the contrary, robed in
the most beautiful of blues, sits firmly on
the round earth from which all else has
fled, clinging to the lyre which alone is left
her. Only one string of this remains un
broken. Blindfolded as she is she leans
her ear close to the one unbroken string
and draws from it the music that still is
latent there. So intent is she on the music
that is left that all losses are forgotten, and
the whole round world is music to her ear,
because her whole attention is centred on
the one spot whence music can be drawn.

Foreign Missions 233
That is the brave, true, deep form of hope,
which seizes the little good there is still
left in a desolate and discordant life, lives
so close to it and makes so much of it that
the one point stands for all ; and because
that one point is good and we are absorbed
in that, therefore the whole world becomes
for us good and glorious. VI
Foreign Missions. President Nott and Secre
tary Anderson. Cyrus Hamlin and David
Livingstone Foreign missions is the grandest example
of high and holy idealism the world has
seen. Like all idealistic movements this
may be approached in either of two ways.
Here, as elsewhere, the abstract idealism
came first to prepare the way for the
concrete. Whoever has read the literature of the
missionary movement at the beginning of
this century must have been impressed by
the extremely abstract character of the con-

234 God's Education of Man
siderations and motives which formed the
basis of appeal. The soul and its destiny,
not life and its problems ; the individual
and his nature, not peoples and their envi
ronment; the glories of heaven and the
horrors of hell, not the happiness of homes
and the welfare of communities, were the
chosen themes of missionary discourse.
For illustration of the abstract character
of these appeals I will not resort to the
extravagant utterances of students carried
away by youthful enthusiasm, nor to the
morbid psychology which permeated like
a poison the volumes of the widely circu
lated "Evangelical Library." I will take
the statements of the most mature and
enlightened leaders, delivered on represen
tative occasions. Here is a page from a
sermon preached by President Nott before
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church by appointment of the Standing
Committee on Missions in 1806 : —
"Brethren, have you sufficiently con
sidered the duration of eternity ? Have you

Nott and Anderson 233
duly appreciated the value of the soul ?
The narrow isthmus which intervenes be
tween you and the world of spirits is al
ready sinking; presently death will have
swallowed it up forever ! Let your thoughts
carry you beyond it ; lose yourself in the
immensity of those ages that have no end ;
— ages which the soul inherits, and during
which its powers increase, its capacity of
happiness and misery expands, and ex
pands, and expands, till (overwhelming
thought) it is capable of enjoying the joys
or of suffering the miseries of a world.
" Such souls those probationers possess,
in whose behalf I now address you. To
that eternity with which your minds are
filled they are hastening. Before they
launch into it look up to heaven and see
the preparations which grace is making and
the glory to which grace is waiting to re
ceive them.
"Before they launch into it look down
to hell and see the punishment with which
justice threatens them; take one deep

236 God's Education of Man
and solemn view of that fire which is never
quenched, and of that worm in the midst of
it which never dies ! Ah me, what a spec
tacle of woe ! venting unavailing cries to a
devouring flame and pouring out vain com
plaints to an unpitying dungeon; which,
when the sufferer asks, How long ? echoes
back, Eternity. Ages heaped on ages
intervene ; again the sufferer asks, How
long ? and again is echoed back, Eternity."
Could anything be more abstract, far
fetched, unreal, false, than that way of
looking at the matter ? Instead of human
hearts throbbing with passions and affec
tions good and bad, you have probationers
possessing souls. In place of the eager
hopes of youth, the burdens and responsi
bilities of manhood, the reverence due to
old age, and all the joys and sorrows that
cluster about the cradle, the wedding, and
the funeral, you have heaven, hell, the glory
and flame, cries and complaints echoed back
from the intervening ages and the unpity
ing eternities. And in keeping with it all, in

Nott and Anderson 237
place of the righteous rule of the Heavenly
Father and the winning influence of Jesus
of Nazareth, you have justice with its brutal
threats and grace with its formal prepa
rations, and all this sweet, rich, glorious
human life of ours reduced to the mere
preliminaries of a spectacular launching!
Yet, hollow and empty and unreal and abs
tract as these considerations strike us
to-day, it behooves us to remember that
with such barren abstractions as these our
fathers, at the beginning of the century, did
move the world and make their mark on
human history. Abstract idealism is doubt
less absurd and unreal when once you see
through it ; but it will be no slight task for
us to accomplish with our more concrete
and vital concepts as much practical good as
they did with these discarded and outworn
abstractions. These views continued to be dominant in
missionary circles until about the middle of
the century. As late as 1845 Secretary
Rufus Anderson, of the American Board,

238 God's Education of Man
in a sermon at the ordination of Edward
Webb, as a missionary to the heathen, said :
" The foreign missionary considers not so
much the relations of man to man as of
man to God ; not so much the relations and
interests of time as those of eternity ; not
so much the intellectual and social degra
dation and debasement, the result of bar
barism or of iron-handed oppression, as the
alienation and estrangement of man from
his Maker ; having as little to do with the
relations of this life and the things of the
world and of sense, and as few relations to
the kingdoms of this world as is consistent
with the successful prosecution of his one
grand object — the restoring in the immortal
soul of man of that blessed attraction to the
centre of the Spiritual Universe which was
lost at the fall. It is not fine conceptions
of the beautiful and orderly in human so
ciety that will fire the zeal of the mission
ary ; it is not rich and glowing conceptions
of the life and duties of a pastor; it is
not broad and elevated views of theological

Hamlin and Livingston 239
truth, nor precise and comprehensive views
of the relation of that truth to moral sub
jects. It is something more than all this,
often the result of a different cast of mind
and combination of ideas. The true mis
sionary character is based upon a single
sublime conception — that of reconciling im
mortal souls to God. To gain this the mis
sionary needs to have had deep experience
of his own enmity to God and hell-desert."
The transition from this abstract atti
tude, with enmity to God and hell-desert as
its starting point, as little as possible to do
with the relations of this life as its method,
and the restoration of the soul to the estate
it had before the fall as its goal, to a more
concrete and practical conception is well
illustrated in the life of Cyrus Hamlin.
Trained as he was in the theological con
ceptions of his time, he shared in large
measure these abstract conceptions of doc
trinal theology. He was, however, pre
eminently a man of common sense. He
had served an apprenticeship to a jeweler

240 God's Education of Man
before he went to college and the seminary.
He had made farm implements with his
own hands when a boy. While a student
at Bowdoin College he had made a loco
motive which gave the people of Maine
the first illustration of the practical work
ing of a steam engine, which he sold to the
college for $175, and which remains in its
museum to this day. He very soon dis
covered that even an immortal soul, re
stored to that attraction to the centre of
the spiritual universe which it had lost
at the fall, cannot thrive in idleness; and
so he set these redeemed souls to work
making rat traps and ash pans and stove
pipes ; baking bread and washing vermin-
infested uniforms and blankets. He fought
the cholera with wise sanitation and strong
medicine. He founded a college ; after
seven years of persistent pushing secured
the best available site for it ; got it placed
under the protection of the American flag ;
and there trained the men who were to
write the constitutions of states and hold

Hamlin and Livingston 241
positions of influence in the empire. With
Yankee shrewdness he saw what most
needed to be done, found out how to do it,
and did it. Thus, by making the spot of
earth and the group of people to whom
he was sent a little holier and better, he
commended his gospel of a good and holy
God who is everywhere working for the
best. Mackay, of Uganda, is another ex
ample of the missionary of the concrete.
He describes himself as " engineer, builder,
printer, physician, surgeon, and general arti
ficer to Mtesa," and says, "Among the sav
ages we have got to be savage, or at least
semi-savage. Their little loves and hates
we have to take an interest in. It is neces
sary that we make ourselves at home among
the people and learn to like them and their
country." The comprehensive purpose of the mod
ern missionary is well set forth in the let
ter in which David Livingstone made his
application for appointment to the Lon
don Missionary Society. " The missionary's

242 God's Education of Man
object is to endeavor, by every means in
his power, to make known the gospel by
preaching, exhortation, conversation, in
struction of the young; improving, so far
as in his power, the temporal condition of
those among whom he labors, by intro
ducing the arts and sciences of civilization
and doing everything to commend Chris
tianity to their hearts and consciences." It
was his constant effort among them to
resemble Christ. By his kindliness, sym
pathy, generous appreciation, and sincere
friendliness ; by his practice of the healing
art, and his fidelity to promises, he won the
natives to God by first winning them to
himself. He could not take as serious a
view of man's lost estate as he and others
thought he ought to, and writes, " I wish
my mind were more deeply affected by the
condition of those who are perishing in this
heathen land. I am sorry to say I don't
feel half as concerned for them as I
ought." Nevertheless, if he couldn't feel
concerned about the condition of humanity,

Two Types of Idealists 243
he did what was better, he loved men.
At the very time that he was reproaching
himself for lack of concern for their ab
stract theological condition he could write
in all sincerity, " I am only determined
to go on and do all I can while able for
the poor degraded people of the north."
VII
The Practical Difference between the Two Types
of Idealists. The Greater Difficulty the
Greater Glory
Such are the two permanent types of
idealists, whether among Greeks or Ger
mans or Anglo-Saxons ; whether among
philosophers, poets, politicians, painters, or
missionaries. Both types are great. The
abstract type is at first sight the more strik
ing and alluring. It is easily understood,
and to live according to it is not so very
hard. We all find idealism first in its abstract
form, and sometimes are tempted to rest
content with that. Hence it is important

244 God's Education of Man
to realize the fearful limitations of this
form of faith. For just so far as we are
bound up in this way of thinking our per
sonal relations become morbid, critical, cyn
ical, unsatisfying. Either we have failed
to find any actual human being who quite
comes up to this abstract ideal we cherish ;
and are beginning to look on common men
and women with something of the feeling,
" Stand by thyself, come not near to me,
for I am holier than thou ;" or else, hke
Burne-Jones in his portrait, we have dressed
up one after another of our fellows in the
finery of our own ideal only to realize too late
that it was borrowed finery after all ; and
then we have had to administer to our poor
disillusioned soul some such form of conceit-
consoling medicine as the " Farewell " we
had a few moments ago from Matthew
Arnold. The plain fact is that if we start
out with a ready-made ideal of our own,
and like the character in the ancient drama
go to and fro in the earth, and walk up
and down in it, seeking to find the exact

Two Types of Idealists 243
embodiment of this ideal of ours, we shall
wander lonely, bitter, cynical and sour to
the end of our days and remain to the last
" unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest."
On the other hand, if we look out on life
with an eye alert to catch the indications
of the ideals that are partially embodied in
the souls of other men, and with a heart
ready to worship at altars not altogether of
our own construction, then we shall find
the world full, not indeed of idols our own
hands have fashioned, but of ideals, incom
plete and unperf ected to be sure, yet slowly
and surely forming themselves under the
very hand of God. Then we shall exclaim
with Ruskin, "There is a perfect ideal to
be wrought out of every face around us."
Every person whom we meet will be a
potential temple of the Holy Spirit ; and
every bush upon the highway will be ablaze
with God.
It makes the same mighty difference
with the outcome of our work. So long as
our idealism is of the abstract, Platonic,

246 God's Education of Man
John the Baptist, Kantian type, we shall
bemoan in solitary, helpless uselessness the
corruption of politics, the dishonesty of
business, the cruelty of competition, the
artificiality of society, the inefficiency of
education. We shall wait resignedly for
philosophers to become kings, and the cate
gorical imperative to be subscribed to by all
manufacturers and merchants, and existing
constitutions to be abolished, and systems of
education to reform themselves, and ineffi
cient innocence to be enthroned by miracle
or magic. Either we shall do that, or else
we shall beat our heads against these es
tablished injustices for a time; and finding
that of no avail, we shall sink down into
a despair deeper than that of the mere
dreamer, because it can add to the forebod
ing of the dreamer the clinching "I told
you so " of the man who has tried to reform
the world and miserably failed.
How different from that the work of the
true idealist. He knows as well as your
bitterest pessimist how unjust, imperfect,

Two Types of Idealists 247
corrupt and inefficient most of our human
arrangements are. Yet he sees that every
one of them has at its centre a principle of
good. He seizes that element of good;
with firm grasp on that, he gradually but
persistently tears away one after another
of the useless integuments that wrap it up ;
pulls off the foreign matter that has fastened
upon it, cuts out the rot. Though his
work is never done, and the outcome of it
is never perfect and complete, yet, give
this man time, money, and opportunity for
speech and work, and in the course of years
he will make the most defective system not
only endurable but useful ; the most decrepit
institution not only tolerable but credit
able ; the most clumsy constitution not only
harmless but beneficent ; the most degraded
tribe not merely respectable, but, in some
simple way adapted to their condition and
development, positively and nobly Christian.
Let us not, however, part with the ab
stract idealist in a tone of censure and
severity. He, too, has his place, and it is

248 God's Education of Man
a great one. Plato prepares the way for
Aristotle, Kant for Hegel, Garrison for
Lincoln, as John the Baptist did for Jesus ;
and this is no mean service. There are
stages in the development of the individual
when the abstract idealist can render a ser
vice which if attempted by the concrete
idealist would prove premature. In a class
of beginners in philosophy one finds it pro
fitable to spend weeks in reading Plato's
dialogues, leaving only a few days for the
severer study of Aristotle. One can make
a class shrink with horror from lying or
licentiousness by Kant's searching maxim
"Thou shalt not treat humanity, whether
in thyself or others, as a means," as one
could never do with the more positive
and profound formulas of Hegelian Sitt-
lichkeit. Garrison and Phillips roused the
conscience of the nation as even Lincoln
and Seward would have failed to do. One
is not altogether sorry when he sees col
lege boys devouring Matthew Arnold, or
finds the rooms of college girls adorned

Two Types of Idealists 249
with the fancies of Burne-Jones. One is
not altogether sorry to see missions main
tained on worn-out conceptions. For we
ought to recognize all these things as a
stage through which most earnest people
in some form or other have to go; and
we know that if the men and women who
are attracted by them have much depth of
nature, or any redeeming spark of humor,
they will in due time see their inadequacy,
and pass on to take their places humbly
and joyfully in the ranks of the concrete
idealists. Few people come to this deeper
idealism directly. To those who have never
known the bitterness and isolation of the
preparatory stage, the eating and drinking
of the truer ideahst appears like the eating
and drinking of a gluttonous man and a
winebibber. Concrete idealism does not
show off the obvious ascetic stamp upon it
that abstract idealism always wears; and
hence it is often coMounded with sheer
materialism, which eats and drinks simply
to be merry, because to-morrow we die.

230 God's Education of Man
Let us then, prize each of these types at
its true worth. Let us be ready to give to
him that needeth it free range in the wide
domains of the abstract. Let us not count
as altogether wasted the half dozen years
or more that we ourselves may have wan
dered in that wilderness ; or hesitate to
fall back upon its mystic consolations in
hours of crisis and discouragement. But
let us neither for ourselves or others dare
to be content with that stage as though it
were ultimate. While we give full credit
to whatever preparatory work the John the
Baptist type of men may do, let us never
forget that though " of them that are born
of women there is none greater " than the
abstract, subjective idealist, yet he that is
but little in the concrete kingdom of ob
jective idealism is very much greater than
he. If we see the religious thought of the
church gradually shifting from the abstract
conception of a merely transcendent to the
concrete conception of an immanent God,
let us not be alarmed. For though church

Greater Difficulty, Greater Glory 231
history warns us that in time past Aristo
telian and Hegelian conceptions have not
been as fruitful in piety and fervor as their
more superficial and ascetic, and therefore
more readily intelligible and easily applicable
opposites, the time has come when religious
truth must be restated in these terms, and
lived out on these principles, if it is to retain
the assent and support of those among us
who have accepted the results of the doc
trine of evolution in science, and the con
clusions of criticism in history and literature.
The duty that confronts the church to
day is far more difficult than any that has
confronted it before. It is nothing less
than intelligently to apprehend this modern
life of ours in all its infinite complexity,
and then to reduce it to the unity and re
store it to the peace which comes alone
from seeing all the details of daily life and
social intercourse and public service in the
hght of their common relation to that
blessed will of God which Christ has re
vealed to us as helpful and redeeming love

232 God's Education of Man
toward all our fellow-men. This work re
quires a broader and deeper training in our
schools and colleges and theological semi
naries, a more direct and practical preach
ing in our pulpits, and above all a more
simple and earnest friendliness toward all
men, even the lowliest and worst, on the
part of those who represent Christ's king
dom in the world. To this harder task the
awakened church will not prove unfaithful.
The greater the difficulty, the greater the
glory "to him that overcometh."

BLECTROTVPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CD.
(gEfte iftitoffibe fete&
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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