• YAILE-VMIWIEiaSinnr- • miBiK^israr •

1911

***¦¦ <^»*j^il

DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE

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DIVINE
TRANSCENDENCE
AND ITS REFLECTION IN RELIGIOUS
AUTHORITY AN ESSAY BY
J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A., D.D.

(¦art t( 5 otf Kivovfievov Kivei, atdtov Kal ouaia ko.1
ive'pyeia otiffa . . . dpeydfieda de 5i6tl So/cel /j,8X\ov ?)
doKei ditm dpeydfieda. Aristotle, Meta.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
i 9 1 1

PREFACE
It is now more than twelve years since I
published an essay on divine immanence, con
sidered as one aspect of a dual truth which was
stated in the following words : — " Christianity,
with its correlative doctrines of the Trinity and
the Incarnation, laid equal stress both on the
transcendence and the immanence of God, or in
less technical terms upon His supremacy, and
His omnipresence."1 But in the interval the
latter phrase has been frequently employed as
though it were an exclusive alternative to the
former ; with the result that such has come to
be its natural meaning and implication for many
minds. In other words, it has been diverted from
a Christian to a pantheistic use. I have en
deavoured, therefore, in the ensuing pages to
recall attention to the complementary conception
1 Divine Immanence. V

vi DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
of divine transcendence ; as being, from the
Christian point of view, presupposed, and not
precluded by that of immanence ; and further
to point out its intimate connection with the
note of spiritual, and, in that sense, supernatural
authority, which distinguishes the organization,
faith, and worship of the Church, and leads to a
correlative element of obedience in the character
of its members.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I
EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS PAGE
/There is no single and uniform tendency in " modern thought," but
various diverse tendencies . . .1-3
One of our most modem sciences, if yet entitled to the name, is
psychology .... 3
Which describes the processes but not the object or the end of
thought ... . . . . 4
This has a tendency illegitimately to take the place of philosophy . 5
And causes undue emphasis of the subjective element in religion . 6
As against its objective and authoritative element, which is none
the less real for the difficulty of its definition . .7-8
For Christ claimed authority . ... 8
And transmitted it to the Church, which has since exercised it . 9-10
While from the nature of the case there must always be an authorita
tive element in the teaching of religion . . .11
/Which in the last analysis is a reflection of the divine transcendence 12
For God is the absolute and transcendent ground of relative and
finite existence .... .13
The term ' ' absolute " being here used to signify independence of
all necessary or compulsory relations to anything outside Him
self . 14-15
The divine transcendence is constantly recognized in the Psalms . 16
And is the necessary correlative of the divine immanence, which
would otherwise degenerate into pantheism . 17-18
This transcendence is symbolized and reflected by the authority of
the Christian religion . . .... 19
vii

viii DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
But the older forms of that authority, e.g. in reason, the Bible, the
Church, may appear to have been shaken by modern criticism,
under the influence of the above-mentioned psychological
bias
Hence there is need for the reassertion of their essential importance
and reality

CHAPTER II
RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE BEING
Plato calls the absolute Being "the good" or "the idea of
good " . . .22
Which is the transcendent cause of all existence and knowledge,
otherwise called " God "  23
Who can only be known by an effort of our whole being, when
morally and spiritually purified . . 24-27
The existence of this absolute Being is presupposed, as the standard
by which we judge relative things ... 27
And our object should be to live in communion with it, and so
become " the friend of God " . ... 28
Aristotle is in substantial agreement with Plato . 29
He maintains that there must be a transcendent Being, on whom
all else depends, and this he continually speaks of as God,
whose highest life is self-contemplation ... .30
And who moves the world — (1) as the object of universal desire;
(2) as a general organizes an army . .31
Hence all nature aspires Godward ; and the aspiration culminates
in man. Dante and Milton express this . . . 31-32
Plato and Aristotle agree, according to Augustine, in ' ' one method
of most true philosophy,'' and its most influential interpretation
has been the Christian . . . . . 33
They both agree on the need of moral purification for the know
ledge of God . .  34-35
Also that the existence of absolute Being is presupposed in all our
knowledge of relative things  36-37
An argument repeated by Augustine .... 37
That is, we have not merely a conception, but what may practically
be called a perception of God . ... 38

CONTENTS ix

PAGE

Science justifiably assumes the rationality of the world ; which
implies mind ; which implies personality .... 38-39
This is a judgment of our whole being ; and is repeated by
Descartes . . . . . . 40-41
And this judgment culminates in the experience of the saint, e.g.
Augustine . . 42-44

CHAPTER III
THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS
Personality is not necessarily finite because it involves distinction of
the self from the not-self . . ... 45
For analogy suggests that a. perfect person would be one for whom
there was no essential not-self ; though this would not preclude
such distinctions as the doctrine of the Trinity involves . 46-47
Nor can an absolute Being be gradually realized by an evolutionary
process . .  48-49
This is, in fact, substantially the same notion against which Plato
and Aristotle contended, in their argument for absolute Being ;
and their doctrine has been reaffirmed by all subsequent
« idealists ...... . . 5°
While it is confirmed, if indeed it was not originally suggested by
our religious experience . . . 5I_52
As well expressed in the Psalms  53
Such experience, being that of our whole personality, is more real
and concrete than any merely intellectual judgment . . 54
But it may be confirmed by intellectual arguments . . -55
Which, confessedly however, have more value as corroborations
than as demonstrations of Theism .... .56
E.g. we can argue from the action of human will to a first
cause . . ¦ 57-5^
And from human reason to a final cause 59
Which predisposes us to recognize design in nature, despite of the
modern attempts to invalidate its evidence ... 60
Such design is further confirmed by our sense of divine guidance in
our personal life  62
Which, in turn, throws further light upon the traces of God's provi
dence in history . . ¦ • -63

DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE

PAGE

And also upon the moral arguments for Theism . . . 64
But behind all these intellectual arguments there is the instinctive
verdict of our whole personality . . . 65

CHAPTER IV
TRANSCENDENCE AND AUTHORITY
It is sometimes said that the conception of immanence should super
sede that of transcendence . 66
But this is unphilosophical . 66-67
And unchristian . . 68
For it lands us in pantheism, with all its speculative and moral
difficulties . . .69
Eastern philosophers endeavour to escape these difficulties by
teaching the unreality of matter . . .70
But this is obviously unscientific and also unphilosophical, since
matter is intimately linked with spirit, and partakes of its
reality . . . . ... 71
Thus transcendence and immanence are not alternative but correlative
conceptions in Christian theology . 72
Both of which are involved in the Incarnation . . . 73-74
And this divine transcendence is reflected in the authoritative tone
of Christianity ....... .74
For all authority, to the Theist, is of divine origin . . 75
Being the claim of the whole, to which by our social constitution we
belong, over its parts . . 76-77
And appealing in the last resort to conscience for the recognition of
its claim .... . . 78-79
While the absoluteness with which conscience speaks is a reflection
of the absolute sovereignty of God . . 80-8 1
Whose authority is based, in the last analysis, upon the fact that He
is the supreme good of man . . 82-83
And acts on him primarily by attraction, and only when rejected by
coercion ... . . 84-85
Secular authority, as such, is delegated from the divine, as SS. Paul
and Peter teach . .... 85-86
Hence religious authority is more fundamental than secular 87
And culminates in that of the Christian religion . 88

CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER V
THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH
PAGE
'The first note in the teaching of Christ which impressed His hearers
was its authoritativeness . . . 89
This He vindicated by appeal to His works, teaching, character,
and claim of mission from the Father . 90-91
'Behind all which was the influence of His personality . . 92
, And so He founded His Church to act by personal influence upon
the world < . . 93 1
And the Church claims to exercise an authority delegated from Him 94
But the sinfulness of fallible human beings has destroyed the visible
unity of the Church . . ¦ • 95
And raised controversies, therefore, as to where the true Church is
to be found . 96 "
We appeal to antiquity .... 97
And there find the episcopate considered essential 98
As is stated, among others, by Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, and
Ignatius of Antioch . 99
It is maintained in some quarters that the episcopate was not of
apostolic origin .... . . .100
But this objection underestimates the gravity of the Church's
tradition . .... 101
' Only episcopally-governed Churches, therefore, are, in point of or
ganization, identical with the primitive Church, and, in that
sense, legitimate branches of the Catholic Church . . 102
Thus, in the institutional region, the episcopate is the symbol and
instrument of Christ's authoritative hold upon the world . . 103
This position, can be maintained against adverse criticism . . 104
Which cannot shake the broad historic fact of the episcopate's con
tinuous existence and claim . . . 105
But the study of comparative religion suggests that the Christian is
only one of many priesthoods, due to the operation of a natural
human instinct . • ¦ 106
This is true in a sense ; but the Christian is the explanation of all
the rest, and illustrates them by suggesting that the human
instinct was from the first divinely impressed . . . 107- no
Thus, for those who accept it, there still exists a living authority,
claiming to perpetuate that of Christ . in
And its existence is a fact of great evidential value . 112

xii DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
CHAPTER VI
THE AUTHORITY OF THE CREED PAGE
The authority of the Church's teaching necessitates its dogmatic
form, to which exception is often taken . . . 1 13
True, the Church consists of living men, whose object is to per
petuate a life . . . . • rI4
' But this life consists in union with Christ, and therefore involves
the knowledge of who and what Christ is . . . IT5
This involves teaching the facts of His earthly life, together with
the Church's traditional interpretation of them contained in
the three creeds . . . . . n6
This interpretation was due partly to Christ's teaching, and partly
to the subsequent illumination of the Holy Spirit . . 117
The creeds state ( I ) the historic facts . . . . 118- 119
(2) The interpretation of them, involving the doctrines of the Trinity
and the Incarnation . . . . . .120
The object of the creeds was simply to guard the apostolic tradition 121
And they must be read in the light of the New Testament . 122
To alter them would further endanger the unity of the Church 123
While their fixity reminds us that a certain element in our Christian
thought is fixed, because revealed 124
They are essentially historical . 125
For the theological element which they contain is, in intention,
no more than a statement and restatement of the particular
interpretation historically put upon the facts 126-128
They are therefore inevitably dogmatic 129
But regulative rather than speculative . . . 130
While it is precisely their dogmatic definition which enables a
definite life to be founded upon them ... 131
And therefore gives them especial value in a critical age . 132-133

CHAPTER VII
THE AUTHORITY OF SACRAMENTS
I, The Church confronts the world with authoritative sacraments . 134
The student of comparative religion suggests that these are only
sublimated survivals of savage custom . . 135

CONTENTS xiii
r PAGE
•'But this does not prevent their having been invested with new
authority by Christ . . . . . 136-137
In virtue of which they have the same element of fixity and
permanence as the ministry and the creed ... 138
And are corrective of undue subjectivity in religion 139
By their objective character, as being gifts from God . 140-142
For there is a tendency, nowadays, to emphasize the human side of
religion more than the divine . ..... 143
And this is accentuated by the comparative study of the ethnic
religions of the world  144
But there is a divine initiative in all religion, which may be traced
in the appeal of nature to man . . 145
In the inspiration of all great religious leaders . . 146
(Which is apt to be forgotten by the merely archaeological student
of the past) ... . . 147
And again in the creation of the religious instinct itself . . . 148
Hence in all religions the primary fact is God's operation upon man 149
And the sacramental system brings this fact both symbolically and
actually home to us ... 1 50
It does not materialize spirit, but spiritualizes matter 1 5 1
As against modern Manichaeanism . 152
For the Incarnation made a new epoch in our philosophy of matter 153
And gave a sacramental character to the whole of our earthly life . 1 54

CHAPTER VIII
THE AUTHORITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
The authoritative value of the Old Testament has not been impaired
by recent criticism ... .... 155
Which has indeed called closer attention to the human element in
the Bible ... . ... 156
But cannot affect its self-evident spirituality . 157
The prophets speak with a uniform conviction of inspiration . 158
The quality of which is quite unique in the history of the world 159
And their consentient message, viewed in connection with their
influence, creates a strong presumption that their conviction
was true .... .... 160
That message taught (1) the unity, (2) the omnipotence of God 161
(3) His wisdom seen in the order of creation . . . 162

xiv DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
PAGE
(4) His righteousness in the judgment of individuals and
nations . . ... . . 163-164
(5) The harmony of His moral with His natural legislation . 164-165
And this teaching was unique in its contemporary world . . 166
Further, they interpret their nation's history and destiny . 167
As being a people peculiarly chosen to bear witness to God 168-169
Both for themselves and for all nations . . . 170-171
And this service is, at last, expected to find its highest expression
in an individual Messiah ....... 172
The degree in which this prophetic expectation can be regarded as
fulfilled depends upon our presuppositions ... 173
For the believer in the Incarnation it has been decisively fulfilled 174-175
And is thus seen to have been divinely inspired . . 175
As Pascal forcibly points out . 176

CHAPTER IX
THE AUTHORITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
¦^The authority of the New Testament depends on that of the Church,
in whose service it was written ..... 177 1
"Its meaning, therefore, is that which from the first it possessed for
the Church . .... 178^
Whose object is to make mankind members of Christ . 179
Hence the New Testament possesses for the Church an essential
unity ....  180
As dealing with one subject — the fact and consequences of the
Incarnation ... . jgj
And this unity includes the Old Testament also . . 182
As taken up and continued in the Law . . . 183-184
But would fall to pieces, without the belief in the Incarnation 185
Hence the authority of the New Testament, like that of the Old,
depends upon our presuppositions . . . 186
For Christians it is the authorized record of the origin of a life 187
Which exists, as a fact of experience, in the world to-day . 188
And is essentially founded on belief in the Incarnation and
Atonement . ... jo-
Which belief, therefore, must have been held by the synoptists,
when they wrote, though they describe a time prior to its
realization  190-192

CONTENTS xv
PAGE
For their function is to establish the humanity, as the epistles and
Johannine writings establish the divinity, of Christ . . 193-194
The former, therefore, describe Christ as partially understood before
Pentecost, the latter as fully understood after Pentecost . 195-196
Hence, for those who are living the Christian life, in the strength of
the Christian creed, the New Testament possesses all its old
authority ... . . . 197-198

CHAPTER X
CHRISTIAN LIFE UNDER AUTHORITY
The authority of the Church over its sincere members is as real as
ever in the present day . .199
And is a reflection of God's authority . ...
Hence the emphasis upon sin in Christian ethics, as being dis
obedience to God's authority .
And consequent importance of the Atonement
This leads to humility  203
Which is the condition of Christian strength . . 204
Further, the sense of living under divine authority renders life a
vocation  . 205-206
And our ethical standard absolute . . . 207
It also leads to obedient self-surrender . 208
Which is the counter-agent of the anarchic temper . 209-210
And the secret of true freedom  211
Again it differentiates the Christian from other kinds of courage 212
And this courage culminates in patient endurance . . . 213
Finally, the conviction that the divine authority is based on love
induces thankfulness . . . . . . .214
For the beauty of the world, and the love in human hearts, as being
divine gifts . . ... 215-216
But above all for the Incarnation . . . . .217
And in this sense of gratitude the Christian character cul
minates . . . . 218-219

200

201202

CHAPTER XI
Recapitulation . . . • 220-244

xvi DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES
Note A. Absolute Being . . . . 245
Note B. Episcopacy . . . 249
Note C. The Synoptists . .... 252
Note D. Religious Authority ... . . 254

CHAPTER I
EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS
»" Modern thought " is a phrase with which we
are nowadays very familiar, but it is a some
what misleading phrase ; for it seems to give a
kind of fictitious unity to a number of what are
in fact heterogeneous opinions. It thus tends
to stereotype a fallacy — the fallacy that there is
any one type or tendency of thought which
can be called distinctively and characteristically
modern. Whereas a really complete survey of
contemporary opinion would disclose in it variety
rather than unity — a multitude of incoherent
and often incompatible points of view, all of
which may in a sense be called modern, though
many have ancient analogues ; but none of which
can claim to be typically representative of the
age. While, further, such unity as there seems
sometimes to be is often more apparent than real.

2 EFFECT OF ch.
For many of the current expressions which we
all use— -words, for example, like " evolution " or
" experience " or " reality " — mean such different
things to different minds that their common
employment does but darken counsel by imply
ing an amount of agreement which does not in
fact exist. There were never so many writers,
and therefore, presumably, thinkers of a kind,
as in the present day, and quot hominum tot
sententiae is a proverb that is never obsolete.
In other words there is no one modern view
of the world to be accepted or rejected in the
block. But there are many views which approxi
mate and interlace and then diverge — currents,
and cross-currents, and rapids, and backwaters
of thought — which must be discriminated and
judged on their individual merits.
Moreover, modern thought, being of this
complex and many-sided character, is neither
altogether so good nor so bad as it is sometimes
represented to be. We can easily recognize the
admixture of truth with error in bygone ages,
and may reasonably, therefore, suspect a similar
condition in our own. Some of our present
opinions will doubtless persist and thereby prove
their truth ; others will disappear and thereby

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 3
expose their falsehood. While even the best
opinions may, like men, have " the defects of
their qualities," elements of congenial error com
mingled with their truth. For in a world that
is tainted throughout by moral evil, the mere
increase of knowledge does not necessarily insure
its correct use. #
Now one of the most essentially modern of
our sciences is psychology ; if it is yet entitled
to be called a science, which some of its students
deny ; the science or, at least, the description
of our various mental processes. This, like all
other special sciences, is abstract in the sense
that it makes abstraction of its particular subject-
matter, and then studies it in artificial isolation
from the context wherein alone it actually and
always lives. Thus psychology deals with the
growth and nature and faculties and methods of
the mind in its widest sense — how we feel, and
think, and will ; and can never legitimately treat
the further question, as to what we think, and
why we think — the ultimate nature of the objects
of thought, and the final cause of our existence
as thinking beings, at all. The nature of this
distinction may be easily illustrated from the case
of any other science. An oculist, for example,

4 EFFECT OF ch.
will give us an elaborate and fascinating explana
tion of the marvellous mechanism with which
we see, and all the complex process of its
operation. But he cannot, as such, as far, that
is, as he is simply an oculist, tell us what the
particular objects in a distant landscape are, or
what the effects of a sunset or moonrise will be
upon our inmost soul. Or an aurist again may
teach us the delicate structure and intricate
convolutions of the ear, and the method in which
its function is performed. But he cannot, as
such, tell us the meaning of a symphony of
Beethoven, or how the hearing of it may influence
our life. While the significance of such sayings
as " Turn away mine eyes lest they behold
vanity," or " Take heed what ye hear," will be
still more remote from the scientific cognizance
of either. So distant is the how from the what
and why of our feeling and thought. Thus
psychology can trace the process by which our
knowledge is acquired, but not the value or
meaning of that knowledge* which is a question
for metaphysic or philosophy.
But specialists generally tend to overestimate
the relative importance of their own speciality;
particularly at a time when they have achieved

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 5
rapid and striking results, as has been the case
with the study in question, of recent years.
Hence there has lately arisen a disposition,
explicit and articulate in some cases, inarticulate
and unconscious in many more, to substitute
psychology for philosophy ; either by adopting a
frankly agnostic attitude towards all metaphysic,
as dealing with things beyond our ken, or by
so shifting the emphasis and interests from the
philosophic to the psychological aspect of know
ledge as to leave the former out of account.
This psychological tendency, then, so to call it,
is in the air, widely diffused beyond the ranks
of those who are fully conscious of its operation.
And, however the metaphysicians may smile or
sigh, it colours our modern treatment of many
problems to an undue degree.
And nowhere is this more marked than in its
influence on man's attitude towards religion and
theology. We are told, for instance, in certain quarters,
that the older conception of God as transcendent
— sitting above the water-floods and remaining
a king for ever — is being superseded by the
conception of His immanence or indwelling
presence in nature and the human soul.

6 EFFECT OF ch.
Akin to this there is a widespread disposition
to base religion exclusively on inner experience
or spiritual insight or feeling :
I have no name to give it,
Feeling is all in all.
With this, again, agrees the increased interest
taken in the mental process by which our
religious ideas are acquired, and the influence
upon them of the emotions and the will to
believe ; leading to the common use of phrases
like the " evolution of religion " or " evolution
of the idea of God."
The same thing reappears in much of our
Biblical criticism. In the New Testament, for
instance, attempts are made to trace the rise
and growth of Our Lord's consciousness of His
person and office. While stress is laid upon the
psychology of the various writers — their personal
idiosyncrasy as affecting their treatment of
history and doctrine.
And with all this there is an increase of
religious individualism. Personal experience and
private judgment are emphasized as against all
that is external or institutional in the life, or
traditional and dogmatic in the teaching of the

I PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 7
Christian society. This, of course, in itself is no
new thing ; but it has received a new impetus of
recent years.
Now all these views contain elements, and
often important elements of truth ; but taken
together they show a tendency, if not of the modern
mind, as such, at least of many modern minds, to
be one-sided in their appreciation of religion ; to
exalt what in the common phrase is called its sub
jective over its objective and authoritative element.
It may be granted at once that we cannot now
attempt either to locate or define authority as
precisely as was done in bygone days. The
authority of reason, the authority of conscience,
the authority of the Bible, the authority of the
Church are all phrases which at once raise
complex difficulties of thought. They have lost
something of the clear-cut character and definite
outline which they once possessed. But this need
not mean that they have lost their reality. On
the contrary it is mainly due to the fact, or to
our increased appreciation of the fact, that all
such authority is a living thing. For we cannot
classify or define living things as completely as
abstract conceptions ; since living things, from
the very fact of being alive, are always in a state

g EFFECT OF ch.
of change, and cannot be arrested in a static
condition. While we are painting them, they
imperceptibly assume a new expression, and we
find that our picture must be begun over again.
But this difficulty does not alter the fact that there
is and ever must be an element of authority in all
true religion, and in none more explicitly so than
in Christianity. To begin with, the Incarnation is emphatically
presented to us in the New Testament as an
advent ; no mere event in the ordinary line of
human evolution, but the coming of One from
a transcendent sphere. " God so loved the world,
that He gave His only-begotten Son." " I came
forth from the Father, and am come into the
world." " The Word was made flesh." " Who
being in the form of God, counted it not a prize
to be on an equality with God, but emptied him
self, taking the form of a servant."
And with this accords the contrast between
the teaching of Christ and other men. " He
spake as one having authority and not as the
scribes." " Ye have heard that it hath been said
by them of old time . . . but I say." " A new
commandment I give unto you." " Come unto
me." " Take my yoke upon you and learn of

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 9
me." " For my yoke is easy and my burden is
light." " Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name,
that will I do." " Him that cometh to me I will
in no wise cast out." The language is human,
but the implied attitude is that of One who
confronts mankind with an authority which is
other than that of men, and which He wills to be
accepted as such.
Moreover, what He once did, Christ has
continued and still continues to do, according to
the Christian belief, through His Church. " Go
ye and teach all nations " are the words of its
commission, and again, "He that receiveth you
receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth
Him that sent me." And so the Church, as an
institution, has stood and stands in a sense over
against the world, confronting it with an authority
that is difficult to define, but easy to recognize, as
transcendent, coming from above, before it can
grow immanent, realized within. The Church
meets each fresh individual with a message, a
ministry, a literature, and sacraments. And this
is as true of the baptized child as of the
unconverted heathen. He may early have been
taken into Christian arms and received into the
Christian society. But as he grows up he finds

10 EFFECT OF ch.
that society, in a very real sense, outside him,
and around him ; teaching, insisting, appealing to
him through a number of external agencies, to
enter upon his inheritance, and make the Christian
life his own. And if he listens to this appeal and
gives his mind to the subject he will naturally ask
questions that need to be answered. Whereupon
he is again confronted by a number of evidences
from without ; such as the practical universality of
religion in the race, the various arguments in its
favour, the strangely prophetic history of the
Jewish people, culminating in the appearance ¦
and character of Jesus Christ, the foundation
and history of the Christian Church, the New
Testament, the sacraments, the lives of the saints.
These various facts, with their Christian interpre
tation, are presented to him, by the society, which
claims an authoritative mission so to present them.
Concomitantly with this process, his own inner
and personal religious experience may be growing.
But it will, usually, grow out of and be conditioned
by all this suggestion from without. And, how
ever independent of external influence, or critical
of its details he may become in the end, he could
never have attained that end without its
operation.

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS n
Moreover, we must remember that from the
very nature of the case, this process must of
necessity, if the Christian life is to continue, be
repeated in every successive generation ; since we
all enter the world as children, asking questions,
and dependent upon others for their answer.
While, further, the majority of mankind have
neither the time, the capacity, nor the opportunity,
to study religious questions at first hand for
themselves, and must therefore remain as
dependent upon authority as the child. This
-need not prevent them from gaining real religious
experience ; but it will supervene, as with the
child, upon suggestion from without. Of course
no personal religion that is real will long continue
to rest solely on external authority. An element
of experience will soon begin to blend with the
acceptance of authority, and that element will
gradually increase. While the attainment of a
maximum of inner personal experience is the
natural goal of all religious endeavour,— such
experience as will enable us to say " I know
whom I have believed, " — the experience which
true mysticism seeks. But it would probably be
fair to say that the majority of those who, in any
generation, might be called sincerely religious

12

EFFECT OF ch.

people, fall far short of this possible maximum,
and live largely in reliance on authority. And
we have seen that from the nature of human life
it must be so. The element of authority in
religion must always be strong.
But there is a great deal more to be said upon
the question than this. ' For authority is not
merely a compendious means for conveying
knowledge to those who have no time or power
to gain it in other ways. It stands for a
substantive fact ; it symbolizes a great reality ;
it is the witness to an important truth ; — the truth
of what in technical language we call the divine
transcendence. »
There is a natural objection in many minds to
the employment of abstract, metaphysical expres
sions when speaking about religion. But their
use enables us to isolate particular points for
consideration, and so to clear our thoughts, which
the infinite complexity of real existence would
otherwise but hopelessly confuse. Even the
physical sciences which deal with the most
concrete forms of experience would be powerless
without the use of abstraction, and the consequent
generalizations which abstraction enables us to
make.

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 13
When, then, we contrast the transcendence, or
surpassing nature, with the immanence or in
dwelling presence of God we are only describing,
in our very inadequate human language, two
aspects of one and the self-same Being. But they
are very different aspects, and it is of the utmost
importance that in our thoughts about religion
both should be kept in view.
Metaphysically speaking, then, God is the
absolute, transcendent Being, who makes finite
and relative existence possible ; and all those
mental categories, or forms of thought, like
"cause" and "substance" by which we give
comparative stability to what would otherwise be
merely the fleeting phenomena of sense, do but
symbolize the fact that all the chance and change
of things which is for ever going on around us,
has its root in a permanent Being, or as the
Germans would say world - ground, that abides
and is the source of all reality. We do not
postulate this idea because our feelings need it.
On the contrary its necessity is involved, as all
idealists from the days of Plato and Aristotle have
constantly maintained, in all our thoughts.
We shall return to enlarge upon this point in
a subsequent chapter ; but to prevent confusion

14 EFFECT OF ch.
it may be well here to state in what sense we
use the phrase "Absolute Being," particularly as
some of our modern pragmatists scoff at its use
altogether, while other thinkers criticize adversely
this particular use.
" Absolute " means unrelated to anything out
side itself. It may include internal relations,
but precludes all external ones. Some thinkers
construe this to mean, independent of all relations
of any kind whatsoever, to anything outside itself.
Therefore, say they, the Absolute is a term that
can only be applied to the totality of all existence,
that is to the world - ground together with the
world, or in theological language God together
with creation. But if the Absolute is to be
understood in this sense, it becomes a practi
cally meaningless thing. For we can attach no
common predicate, beyond that of bare existence,
to such an absolute. We can make no profitable
statement about God and the universe viewed
together as one whole. And accordingly this
conception of the Absolute has led men into
extraordinary intellectual difficulties.
But the term " Absolute " may also be used,
and is used by Christian theologians, to imply
" independent of all necessary or compulsory re-

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 15
lations," " independent," that is, of all compulsion
or determination by another, or in other words
completely self-dependent and self-determined.
It is in this sense that we apply the word to
God. And His absoluteness, so conceived, is
not affected by His relation to creation since
that is not a necessary relation, but one con
tingent on His own self-determination — His own
will to create. A free man may voluntarily
limit his practical freedom, by adopting a pro
fession or a rule of life, but such voluntary self-
restraint does not diminish, but rather emphasizes
his essential freedom. And so we conceive
God's absoluteness to be perfectly compatible
with His relation to His creatures, precisely
because they are His creatures, or in other words*
the result of His own free will. In fact our chief
need of the term "Absolute" is to protect the
doctrine of the divine freedom. " Of His own
will begat He us." It is in this sense then that
we speak of God as the absolute Being.
Now the theological bearing of this absolute
ness is that God is the perfect Being, the
Almighty, the Omniscient, the Good, who
sustains all finite beings in existence, or in
other words imparts to them all the reality that

16 EFFECT OF ch.
they possess, while transcending them as im
measurably as the Creator ever must transcend
the creature. He is our infinite and absolute
Other. He is all that we are not. And for this
very reason He is the Object of all our hope and
desire. " All men yearn for the gods, as young
birds open their mouths for food," says the
Greek poet. " My soul is athirst for God," says
the Hebrew Psalmist. " We are restless, O
God, till we rest in Thee," adds the Roman
philosopher. The Psalter is a prayer book that
has not yet grown obsolete ; and the psalter is
full of this thought, of the dependence of the
creature on his Creator.
" Thy hands have made me and fashioned me ;
. . . O give me understanding that I may live."
" Be thou my stronghold, whereunto I may
alway resort ... for thou art my house of
defence, and my castle." " The Lord is my
shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing." " The
Lord is my light, and my salvation." "The
Lord is the strength of my life." " Whoso
dwelleth under the defence of the most High,
shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty."
Such language may not express the whole of
religion, as a Christian conceives it ; but it does

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 17
express its essentially fundamental and permanent
basis ; except upon which no further super
structure could be raised. It does not express
an earlier conception of God, to be superseded
in time by a later ; but the very first and fore
most feature of what we mean by God at all.
For when we pass on, as Christians, to the
further thought of God's indwelling presence or
immanence within us, and of Christ's being
formed within us, and of our bodies becoming
temples of the Holy Ghost, the whole signifi
cance of this depends upon the fact that God is
our eternal Other, and not our self. " It is one
thing to be God," says St. Augustine, " and
another to be partaker of God," and the essential
character of this antithesis cannot be better or
more emphatically expressed than in the well-
known words of St. Thomas — " We come as
sick to the physician of Life, unclean to the
fountain of mercy, blind to the light of eternal
brightness, poor and needy to the Lord of all
things . . . that we may receive the bread of
angels, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords,
with a humble, lowly, and contrite heart." In
other words, the Christian conception of the
divine immanence in man is the extreme c

18 EFFECT OF ch.
opposite of the Vedantic identification of the
inmost self with God. Man at the centre of his
being is not God, but is capable of receiving
God (capax deitatis), while, as the result of that
reception, his own individuality, his own "peculiar
difference " is not pantheistically obliterated, but
divinely intensified. Thus the divine immanence
in man, as conceived by Christians, depends, for
its very character and value, upon the divine
transcendence ; upon the thought that the same
God who "hath respect unto the lowly," is still
" the High and Holy One that inhabiteth
eternity; whose name is Holy."
This, then, is the great truth which lies behind
the authoritative element in the Christian religion.
That authority is a permanent reminder of the
absolute sovereignty of God, in its twofold
aspect, as involving the unqualified right to com
mand us, and the unlimited power to protect us.
" Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest
against God ? Shall the thing formed say to
Him that formed it, Why didst Thou make me
thus?" and again, "neither death nor life, nor
angels nor principalities, nor things present nor
things to come, nor powers, nor height nor
depth nor any other creature, shall be able to

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 19
separate us from the love of God." And this
twofold thought is at once the source of our
religious awe and our religious peace. Our
Creator and Ruler and Judge is God Almighty ;
but our Father, Saviour, Sanctifier, is the same
Almighty God.
The truth, then, that authority symbolizes
being of this permanently important character,
its symbol must needs be important too. And
here arises our modern difficulty. For all the
old forms of authority seem at least to have been
shaken by criticism ; because in all we have come
to recognize, with increasing clearness, the
element of human fallibility and consequent error.
And we have to sift this criticism, with a view to
discover the extent to which our old forms of
thought are inadequate ; and, in that case, how
their inner reality may best be preserved. For
example, the demonstration of the Being and
Attributes of God was convincing enough to
men who were perfectly satisfied with syllogistic
deduction from self-evident premises. But both
the self-evidence of these premises, and the
sufficiency of the syllogism have ceased to be
obvious to us ; and the authority of reason in
religion has, in consequence, lost its old simplicity

20 EFFECT OF ch.
of application. Again a Church whose general
councils were held to be infallible, and whose
dogmas were viewed as adequate expressions of
divinely revealed truth, represented authority
in a definite and tangible shape. But our
modern recognition of the necessarily human
and limited characters of the men, who sat in
councils, as well as of the language that they
used, has rendered our appreciation of their
authority more critical and complex than of old.
While once again an infallible Bible, verbally
inspired, was a positive source of authority to
those who so received it. But with our fuller
realization of the human element in the Bible,
the precise form of its authority has changed ;
we can no longer settle our difficulties by the
mere quotation of a text. Other instances might
be cited with the same effect, but these will be
sufficient to illustrate our point.
Now in all these cases the authority symbolized
a reality. It represented God's sovereignty over
man. But the form of its expression was tem
porary, and in some cases, as we now think,
mistaken. Yet the reality remains, as great
for us as for the men of old. God has the
samej sovereign relation to us as to them. And

i PSYCHOLOGICAL BIAS 21
reason, and the Bible, and the Church still
witness to the fact. Only the precise mode of
their witness has for us somewhat changed its
character ; and in so doing become harder to
define. But we cannot, because this is the case,
accept the suggestion which is now often made,
that we should fall back upon mere feeling or
personal inner experience as the sole basis for
our religion. Reason and the Bible and the
Church are as important to us as ever, as
authoritative as ever ; and are not essentially
affected by the fact that the precise nature and
conditions of their authority present to us more
complex problems than they did to a previous
generation.

CHAPTER II
RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE BEING
We have spoken of the conception of absolute
Being as dating in Western philosophy from
Plato. For though he had his predecessors they
are only known to us in fragments, and chiefly
through theirjnfluence upon himself. It may be
well, therefore, to refer briefly to what Plato
taught. For to us he is practically the father of
philosophy, the great idealist of all time ; whose
thoughts, however variously interpreted along
the ages, have never lost their magic charm, and
are still a power in the world to-day.
Plato then speaks of the absolute Being as
" the good " or " the idea of good " ; ideas in his
language meaning not intellectual abstractions,
but transcendent realities which are the heavenly
"patterns" of all earthly things. And the
neuter form of his expression must not be taken
to imply impersonality, any more than when we

ch. n ABSOLUTE BEING 23
say " the deity." For he elsewhere speaks of
" God " and of " the very and eternal mind."
" As the sun," he says, " is not only the author
of visibility in all visible things, but of genera
tion and nourishment and growth ... in like
manner the Good may be said to be not only
the author of knowledge in all things known,
but of their being and essence, and yet the Good
is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity
and power." And again, " That which imparts
truth to the object and knowledge to the subject
is what I would have you term the Idea of good,
and that you will regard as the cause of science,
and of truth as known by us ; beautiful, too, as
are both truth and knowledge, you will be right
in regarding this other nature as more beautiful
than either." 1
" Can we ever be made to believe that motion
and life and soul and mind are not present with
absolute being? Can we imagine being to be
devoid of life and mind, and to remain in awful
unmeaningness, an everlasting fixture? That
would be a terrible admission."2 And again,
" The creator of the world was good . . . and
being free from jealousy he desired that all things
1 Repub. 508, 509. 2 Sophist, 249..

24 RELATIVE AND ch.
should be as like himself as possible . . . God
desired that all things should be good, and
nothing bad as far as this could be accomplished.
. . . Such was the scheme of the eternal God." 1
But the knowledge of the good is not easy of
acquisition. "My opinion is that in the world of knowledge,
the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen
only with an effort ; and when seen is also
inferred to be the universal author of all things
beautiful, and right, parent of light and the Lord
of light in this world, and the source of truth
and reason in the other . . . the first great
cause which he who would act rationally must
behold."2 Our capacity for this knowledge arises from
our own kinship with the divine, and its condition
is moral purification. Thus :
" Concerning the highest part of the human
soul, we should consider that God gave this as a
spirit (Sal/iova) which was to dwell at the summit
of the body, and to raise us as plants not of an
earthly but a heavenly growth, from earth to our
kindred which is in heaven. And this is most
true ; for the divine power suspended the head
1 Timaeus, 30, 34. 2 Rep. 517.

ii ABSOLUTE BEING 25
and root of us from that place where the
generation of the soul first began. . . . He
therefore who is always occupied with the
cravings of desire and ambition . . . must have
all his opinions mortal, and as far as man can
he must be all of him mortal ; — But he who
has been earnest in the love of knowledge
and true wisdom . . . must of necessity, as far
as human nature is capable of attaining immor
tality, be all immortal, as he is ever serving the
divine power. . . . And the notions which are
akin to the divine principle within us are the
thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These
every man should follow . . . and by learning
the harmonies and revolutions of the whole,
should assimilate the perceiver to the thing
perceived, according to his original nature, and
by thus assimilating them, attain that final
perfection of life, which the gods set before
mankind as best, both for the present and the
future." 2
And again, " The most divine part of the soul
is that which deals with knowledge and wisdom.
. . . This then resembles the divine principle.
And the man who contemplates this and so learns
1 Timaeus, 90.

26 RELATIVE AND ch.
to know the whole divine principle, would thus
also come best to know himself."1 " By acting
justly and temperately you will act as is pleasing
to God . . . and you will so act by contemplating
the divine light." 2 " We ought to fly heaven
ward, and to fly thither is to become like God as
far as possible ; holy and just and wise." For
"In God is no unrighteousness at all — he is
altogether righteous ; and there is nothing more
like him than he of us who is the most
righteous." 3
But this involves a process of entire con
version from all ignoble aims and interests.
" As the eye cannot turn from darkness to
light without the whole body, so too when the
eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul
must be turned from the world of generation to
that of being, and become able to endure the
sight of being, and of the brightest and best of
being — that is to say, of the good. . . . And this
is conversion . . . not implanting eyes for they
exist already, but giving them a right direction,
which they have not." 4
It is thus not merely with our intellect, but
1 Alcibiades, i. 133. 2 lb. 134.
3 Theaetetus, 176.: 4 Repub. 518.

n ABSOLUTE BEING 27
with our whole being, when spiritually purified,
that we may recognize the good or God. And
of the process by which we do so he says :
" When I, or any one, look at an object and
perceive that the object aims at being another
thing, but falls short of it and cannot attain to it
— he who makes this observation must have had
a previous knowledge of that to which, as he
says, the other though similar, was inferior."1
" Therefore before we began to see or hear or
perceive in any way, we must have had a know
ledge of absolute equality, or we could not have
referred to that the equals which are derived
from the senses — for to that they all aspire and
of that they fall short." . . . And so with " all
other ideas ; for we are not speaking only of
equality absolute — but of beauty, good, justice,
holiness, and all which we stamp with the name
of absolute being." 2
Thus we imply our consciousness of perfect
Being, in our judgment that earthly things fall
short of it. And our soul must rise from the
one to the other by using the objects of sense
and the hypotheses of science as " steps and
points of departure into a region which is far
1 Phaedo, 74. 2 /*¦ 75,

28 RELATIVE AND ch.
above hypothesis, in order that she may soar
beyond them into the first principle of the
whole."1 Thus the true way of love "is to use
the beauties of earth as steps along which one
mounts upwards, for the sake of that other
beauty, going from one to two and from two to
all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions,
and from fair actions to fair notions, until from
fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absolute
beauty, and at last knows what the essence of
true beauty is." 2
" This is that life above all others which man
should live, in the contemplation of beauty
absolute ... in that communion only ... he
will be enabled ... to become the friend of
God, and be immortal if mortal man may." 3
It is, of course, impossible to do justice to
an artist like Plato by any bare quotation of
extracts ; but these passages may suffice to show
his general view of the question before us : —
First : that God is the absolute Being on
whom all else depends.
Secondly : that we know Him through an
element within us that is akin to Himself.
Thirdly : that this element of our soul needs
1 Repub. 511. 2 Sympos. 211. 3 lb. 212.

ii ABSOLUTE BEING 29
moral purification ; since only the godly can
know God.
Fourthly : that we thus find the perfect
implied in the knowledge of the imperfect. This
he sometimes calls " reminiscence " such as
Wordsworth has described :
The soul that riseth with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar ;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
But it is doubtful how much Plato intended, or
how far he retained this particular view.
Fifthly : that the objects of sense and science
have a real value " as stepping-stones and points
of departure," from which we may ascend to the
truth and beauty and goodness which they
imperfectly manifest.
Before going further it may be well to com
pare the teaching of Aristotle with this.
Aristotle criticizes Plato, but in fundamental
questions is substantially at one with him ; and
often only translates his master's poetic eloquence
into dry and highly technical prose.
" The highest philosophy or theology," he

30 RELATIVE AND ch.
says, " deals with the being that is eternal,
immutable, transcendent."1 For "it is plain
that there must be some one and eternal being
which is the originator of all movement."2
" Something which while itself changeless is the
source of all change, an eternal and essential
energy." " On such a first principle heaven and
all nature depend." " Therefore we describe
God as an eternal, perfect, living being ; so that
continuous and eternal life pertains to him, or
rather he is that life."3 " The energy of God is
immortality, and this is eternal life."4 "And
since God contains all good, and is independent
he will be occupied in contemplation ; for this is
the highest mode of life ; and since there can be
nothing better than himself he will contemplate
himself." 5 Thus " He thinks himself (as his
own object) and his thought is thought of
thought."6 "So that the energy of God, while
excelling in blessedness will be contemplative." 7
On the relation of God, thus conceived, to the
world, he gives two somewhat different, but not
necessarily irreconcilable views.
The first principle " moves all things by its
1 Met. v. i. 2 Rhys. viii. 6. 3 Met. xii. 7.
* De Caelo, ii. 3. 6 Mag. Mor. ii. 15.
6 Met. xii. 9. ~ Nic. Eth. x. 8.

n ABSOLUTE BEING 31
attraction . . . like the objects of desire or
thought, which are ultimately the same, namely
the real good ; that which does not merely seem
good because we desire it, but is desired because
seen to be good." 1
But again, " If we ask how does the nature of
the universe contain the good, whether as some
thing existing independently apart, or as its own
orderly arrangement, we answer in both ways ;
like an army whose excellence consists both in
its organization and in its general, but more
especially in the latter ; for the general does not
result from the organization, but the organization
from the general."2
From this conception of God follows the
rationality of the world. " God and nature do
nothing aimlessly."3 "Nature always does the
best thing that is practically possible." 4 Andnature
rises through successive stages towards God — a
thought which both Dante and Milton have em
bodied in passages that are purely Aristotelian :
All things, whate'er they be,
Have order among themselves, and this is form,
That makes the universe resemble God,

1 Met. xii. 7. 2 lb. lo.
3 De Caelo, i. 4. i lb. ii. 5.

32 RELATIVE AND ch.
In the order that I speak of are' inclined
All natures by their destiny diverse
More or less near unto their origin.1
And again Milton : One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to Him return,
Endued with various form, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life ;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes ; flowers and their fruits,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual ; give both life and sense
Fancy and understanding ; whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being.2
At the crown of this ascent stands man. " Man
is the only animal that stands upright . . .
because his nature and essence is divine ; and
the function of what is divine is wisdom and un
derstanding."3 He has a passive mind, which
receives the impressions of sense, but also
an active reason which is "separable"4 and
1 Dante, Par. i. 102 el seq. 2 Par. Lost, v. 469.
3 Part. Animal, iv. 10. 4 De An. Hi. 5.

n ABSOLUTE BEING 33
comes into him from without and is alone
divine.1 And the highest life for man is " not to confine
himself to mortal things, but as far as possible to
immortalize himself," by imitating the divine life
of contemplation, " in virtue of that divine element
that is within him." 2
Aristotle, it will be noticed, is more coldly
intellectual than Plato ; but they are funda
mentally at one. And Augustine, in speaking of
them, says: "The ablest critics teach us that,
despite of the differences which strike careless
readers, Aristotle and Plato agree in their
reasoning ; so that as the result of much time
and discussion, one method of most true philosophy
has, in my judgment, been evolved."3 Like alii
great philosophers they have been variously inter- I
preted or developed, the Neoplatonic mysticism \
and the Arabic pantheism, for instance, being !
among their historical results. But the form in '
which they have, as a fact, been most widely '
influential has been the Christian development
which they received from the Fathers and School
men. Plato weighed most with the Fathers, and
especially Augustine, during the period when
1 Gen. An. ii. 3. 2 Eth. x. 7. 3 Contr. Acad. iii. u. 19, 42.
D

34 RELATIVE AND ch.
Christian theology was being formed ; and Aris
totle with the Schoolmen when it was being
systematized and arranged. ,
To return then to Plato: we find him teaching
that God or the absolute Good is not to be
apprehended by the mere intellect, but by the:
whole man, the converted soul that has been
brought out of the dark cave into the true light.
Nor is it possible to convey by a single quotation
the emphasis with which he insists upon this point.j
For it is the burden of long dialogue after
dialogue. It is the reason of the importance
that he attaches to education and to law ; they
are to purify and train the soul. For the
philosopher is a lover ; philosophy is the practice
of dying, or the preparation for death (fiekeri)
davdrov). The senses are to be suspected, not so
much for their intellectual inadequacy as for their
moral seductiveness ; because they drag down
the soul. While the chief value of science is
declared to be not intellectual satisfaction but
advancement towards the knowledge of God.
Now when religious teachers maintain, as all
religious teachers consistently do, that knowledge
of God, as distinct from speculation about Him,
can only be reached through the gateway of

n ABSOLUTE BEING 35
moral purification, they are apt to be charged
with obscurantism. It is noteworthy, therefore,
that Plato, a Greek of the Greeks, a philosopher,
freely critical of his country's religion, and biased
by no trammels of priestly tradition, makes, with
all possible emphasis, the same assertion.
And though Aristotle is less explicit upon the
point — Aristotle, who, as Shakespeare reminds us,
thought young men, on account of their "hot
passion of distemper'd blood,"
Unfit to hear moral philosophy — 1
yet the whole drift of his ethical teaching is to the
like effect.
Here, then, we have the verdict of what is wont
to be called the natural or unassisted human
reason, if indeed that phrase has any meaning —
the verdict of Augustine's "one method of most
true philosophy " ; and it fully supports the
Christian belief that he and he only that " willeth
to do shall know of the doctrine."
Before enlarging upon this point it may be
well to revert to Plato's view of the way in which
we obtain our first conception of absolute Being ;
which is preliminary to that further knowledge of
which we have been speaking. We find the con-
1 Troilus and Cressida, Act ii. Scene 2.

36 RELATIVE AND ch.
ception involved, he says, as we saw above, in
our judgment of relative and finite things as such.
In judging things to be relative and finite, we
are judging them by tacit reference to an absolute
standard ; in calling them imperfectly beautiful, or
good, we presuppose that there is a perfect beauty
and goodness, which they only partially reveal.
And Aristotle argues in colder language to the
same effect ; that a world of rationally ordered
change, or as we should say development, implies
as its condition an absolute reason which itsel:"
transcends and is beyond all change. A universe! ]<
he saw, could not develop itself in the air, a:;
some modern writers appear to think. It must be
sustained in the process by a Being who is, in his
language, "wholly actual"; that is, above anc
beyond all development — Himself " unmoved, al
motion's source."
Augustine, a thorough Platonist, reproduces
Plato's form of the argument :
" Examining whence it was that I admired the
beauty of bodies celestial or terrestrial ; and what
aided me in judging- soundly on things mutable,
and pronouncing 'This ought to be thus, this
not ' ; examining I say whence it was that I so
judged, seeing I did so judge, I had found the

n ABSOLUTE BEING 37
unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my
changeable mind. . . . My reason . . . without
any doubting proclaimed ' that the unchangeable
was to be preferred to the changeable ' ; whence
also it knew that unchangeable, which unless it
had in some way known, it had no sure ground to
prefer it to the changeable. And thus with the
flash of one trembling glance it arrived at That
which Is."1
And at a later date, Aquinas revived the
Aristotelian reasoning.
Now the first point of this argument is that we
do not derive our notion of absolute or infinite
Being, as a mere conception, from the indefinite
amplification of what is relative and finite, and
then attempt to prove that a reality corresponding
to this conception exists. This is the usual
empirical account of the matter, and it is against
this view only that Kant's pleasantry holds good,
that the thought of a hundred dollars does not
prove their existence in our pocket. On the
contrary our argument maintains that in thinking
of relative and final things we presuppose, not
merely the conception but the actual existence of
an absolute and infinite Being, as necessary to
1 Aug. Conf. vii. 23.

38 RELATIVE AND ch.
account for, and therefore partially revealed in, all
lesser existence.
In other words we do not start with a mere
conception of God, but with what may practically
be called a perception of Him ; as being involved
in all our experience, and in the very possibility
of that experience.
Take ordinary scientific experience, for in
stance. It has a metaphysical implication, of
which its students are, for the most part, unaware,
for the simple reason that it is no concern of
theirs to be metaphysical any more than it is
to be musical ; they must specialize themselves
for scientific success. But science, incidentally,
proves the truth and validity of reason ; for it
learns to understand the world, and proves the
correctness of its understanding by making pre
dictions that are subsequently verified and in
ventions that actually work. And this further
proves that the world is intelligible and so
capable of being understood ; that it is orderly
and not chaotic ; a house and not a heap of bricks,
a book and not a pile of letters. The scientific
man does not pause to assert this. He assumes
it, takes it for granted, at his every step ; and the
assumption is invariably justified. But the same

n ABSOLUTE BEING 39
reason which leads us so far leads us inevitably
further, to the conclusion that an intelligible or
rationally ordered universe must be the work of
mind ; and that in the process of understanding
it we come in contact with this mind ; as we do
with that of an artist in studying his picture or
an author in reading his book. There is then77
as a fact of our experience, mind or reason in '"
the world-ground.
But this conviction necessitates a further step.
For mind or reason in the only form in which we
know it is an attribute of persons, self-conscious
beings who can also love and will. To speak ot
impersonal reason, or unconscious purpose like
Hartmann, or unconscious will like Schopenhauer,
is to use sonorous language that means literally
nothing. For such terms are merely abstractions
from personality with its most essential elements
omitted. We must therefore either decline to
discuss the subject, or follow the only analogy
that we possess, and conclude that the mind or
reason in question is personal. He must, of
course, infinitely transcend personality as we know
it, but He must include it in His greater being ;
analogously, perhaps, to the way in which animal
life transcends yet includes chemical activity ; while

40 RELATIVE AND ch.
human personality again transcends and includes
animal life. And though it may be said that this
divine personality, however probable, is only an
inference, we must remember that it is an in-
Terence from a fact of actual experience, namely
the presence of reason in the world.
This would be a modern way of stating the
case ; but it is in the last analysis identical with
the argument of Plato and Aristotle, and of all
the great idealists from them to the present day.
Various proofs, as they have often been miscalled
— for they are not proofs in the sense of demon
strations — various proofs of Theism have been
classified and catalogued and named ; but they
all have their root in this fundamental position
that a world of relative and finite things exists as
a fact, and yet, being relative and finite, cannot
account for or explain itself; and therefore
implies by its very existence the further existence
of a Being that is neither relative nor finite ; an I
absolute and infinite Being. Moreover, though I
thus capable of intellectual expression, this argu
ment is not merely a judgment of our intellect
but of our whole personality — reason, feeling,
conscience, will; and therein lies its strength.
As persons we can recognize other persons ; and

n ABSOLUTE BEING 41
we recognize, beyond the relative, an absolute
Person. Descartes, who handed the argument on, with
intense conviction of its validity, from mediaeval
to modern philosophy, expressed its purely intel
lectual aspect in a way that is open to criticism
— leading to the gibe of Kant that we have
quoted above. But it should be remembered
that he also puts this more concrete and personal
aspect of the case with force, as follows :
" From the very fact that God created me, it
is highly likely that I am in some way created
in His image and likeness ; and that that likeness,
wherein the idea of God is contained, is perceived
by me, through the same faculty, wherewith I
perceive myself. That is to say, when I turn
my mind's eye upon myself, I not only know
that I am an incomplete, dependent being, which
aspires unceasingly towards something greater
or better than itself; but I know also at the
same time, that the being whereon I depend
possesses in itself all the perfections to which I
aspire, and that not indefinitely only or poten
tially, but actually and infinitely ; and therefore
that this being is God." 1
1 Midit. i.

42 RELATIVE AND ch.
But this personal consciousness of God only
reaches its highest degree of certitude in the
experience of the saint. For the saint alone has
undergone in its completeness that conversion
of which Plato speaks. He alone, therefore, is
qualified to enter into that personal communion
with God, before which all other ways, and
degrees and kinds of knowledge pale. The
saints, then, are our strongest evidence that the
verdict of reason has pointed true. And the
saints, it should be remembered, far outnumber
the philosophers. Known and unknown through
the ages, they have been, without hyperbole,
" a great multitude whom no man can number " ;
godly people of whom alone the proverb is in
its highest degree true, that their consentient
voice — and on the point before us they all speak
with one accord — their consentient voice is the
voice of God — vox populi vox Dei.
Let us hear in conclusion one of these, as
great a philosopher as saint, who had been led,
as he tells us, by the teaching of Plato to the
teaching of St. Paul, and whose whole language
remains instinct with transfigured Platonism.
"I entered," says Augustine, "even into my
inmost self. ... I entered and beheld with the

ii ABSOLUTE BEING 43
eye of my soul . . . above that eye of my soul,
and above my mind, the Light unchangeable
. . . not the common light, which all may look
upon, nor any greater of the like kind . . . not
such, but other, far other than this. Nor was It
above my soul, as oil floats above water, or sky
over-arches earth : but above my soul because It
made me ; and I beneath It, because I was made
by It. He that knows the Truth, knows what
that Light is ; and he that knows It knows
eternity. Love knoweth It. O Truth who art
eternity ! and Love who art Truth ! and eternity
who art Love ! Thou art my God, to Thee do
I sigh night and day. . . . And Thou criedst to
me from afar ' Yea verily I am that I am.' And
I heard as the heart heareth, and could sooner
doubt my own existence than that Truth ' which
is clearly seen being understood by those things
which are made.' "1
But this assurance only came after that long
agony of conversion which the Confessions of
Augustine describe — conversion whose result
was to purify the heart, and by doing so to clarify
the mind. For :
" Reason is the sight of the soul . . . and
1 Aug. Conf. vii. x. 16.

44 RELATIVE BEING ch. ii
right or perfect reason is of the nature of a virtue ;
but even this will not enable us to see the light,
unless three qualities are present within us —
faith to believe that the Object of our look will
when seen bring blessedness ; hope to assure us
that if we look aright we shall see that Object ;
love to desire both Its sight and Its enjoyment.
Then follows that very vision of God which is
the end and object of our look. . . . And this
is the crown of virtue, the attainment of reason's
goal ; whereon the life of blessedness ensues." 1
1 Aug. Soliloq. i. vi. 13.

CHAPTER III
THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS
Before continuing our subject it may be con
venient to notice one or two current objections
to the conception of absolute personality. It is
urged in some quarters that personality involves
the distinction of a self from a not-self, or ego
from non-ego, and is therefore essentially finite
and relative — relative to the not-self, without
which it could not exist ; and consequently that
an absolute Person is an impossible conception.
But this criticism has been answered again and
again to the effect that self and not-self are in
no sense correlative or co-ordinate terms. My
consciousness of myself is a perfectly positive
thing; whereas the not-self, considered simply
as such, is a mere negation. I am conscious of
myself as a self-conscious being, one, that is, who
can reflect upon myself, and my own internal
state, my thoughts, feelings, purposes, or, in
45

46 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
other words, as a subject who can make myself
my own object. And the essence of my person
ality consists, not in my distinction from the rest
of the world, but in my self-consciousness and
all that it involves. It is obvious that as a
relative and finite being I am dependent upon
other persons and things. But why and in what
way dependent? Not simply because they are
not myself — a mere negation — but because they
are potential parts of myself; capable, that is, of
being assimilated and incorporated in myself, like
the food by which my body grows. And it is
precisely in this process that the development of
personality consists. A person learns languages,
science, music ; wins the love of friends ; gains
money, property, power, influence ; and in each
case makes what was once an alien not-self into
a part of himself, with the result that the whole
content of his personality is enlarged. He has
become a richer, greater, fuller, more complex
person. And in proportion as this is the case he
is less constantly dependent on the not-self, for
he can be occupied with his own inner experience ;
like Milton in his blindness composing Paradise
Lost. Of course under human conditions we can

in THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 47
only trace this process to a very limited extent.
But it is sufficient to suggest, by analogy, that a
complete and perfect Person would be one for
whom there was no essential not-self, because all
essential experience was His own ; an infinite
fulness or Pleroma, in the language of St. Paul.
This analogy obviously would not preclude such
internal relationships within the Godhead as the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity involves ; but
rather points, indeed, when thought out, in their
direction. Nor, again, would it be affected, as
we have seen above, by the existence of finite
creatures created by God's own freewill. It
merely suggests that personality need not
necessarily imply contrast with an alien not-
self and therefore be to that extent always finite ;
but that it may be, on the contrary, wholly self-
contained and therefore absolute. In which case
one might say in the words of Lotze that have
of late years been so often quoted, " Perfect
personality is in God only ; . . . the finiteness
of the finite is not a producing condition of . . .
personality, but a limit and hindrance of its
development." But another objection has been raised of late
years against the doctrine of God's absolute-

48 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
ness, on the ground that He realizes His will,
and therefore Himself, through an evolutionary
process, and here on earth through the ministry
of men, men who co-operate with Him to raise
their fellows. Consequently, it is urged, He
must be in process of realization, and as yet not
fully realized ; partly still potential and not wholly
actual. But, of course, this objection begs the question
against God's free relation to the universe. It
assumes that the universe is in some sense
essential to His being. Whereas the familiar
experience of our own free relation to our works
may at least suggest another analogy. For a
man remains, in all essentials, the same human
being, whether he chooses to employ himself in
external works or no. If he writes poems,
paints pictures, invents machines, he will by so
doing manifest, and in that sense realize, his
innate capacities ; but he will not add a cubit to
his stature, or otherwise alter his essential
personality. If he had chosen to remain a
" mute inglorious Milton " and do nothing, he
would have been a less useful, and a less moral
man, but still equally a man, with all the
constituents of human personality. And so if

m THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 49
God's relation to the universe is free, if He
creates and sustains its development of His own
freewill, He does, of course, in so doing manifest
Himself, and realize Himself in a new region;
but not in a way to affect His divine personality,
or absolute Being, as such. In other words we
might say that His purpose is increasingly
realized, but not His person. This is only a
human analogy, and cannot be pressed too far, but
it is an analogy based on something that we know,
whereas the pantheistic alternative, which it is
designed to meet, has no such basis in known fact ;
it is an imaginary hypothesis that cannot really be
thought out.
These objections, therefore, fail to maintain
themselves when analysed. At the same time, as
we said above, the conception of absolute person
ality cannot be developed without leading in the
direction of some such doctrine as that of the
Christian Trinity in Unity. As we have
frequently enlarged on this point elsewhere, we
need not now do more than state the fact.
Sociality is certainly of the very essence of
personality as we know it, though limitation is
not. Absolute personality would therefore
involve absolute sociality ; which is precisely what

50 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
the doctrine of the Trinity implies. And it is
because Christians hold this doctrine, as the
result of human thought playing upon what they
believe to be a basis of revelation, that they can
the more securely think and speak of God as
possessing absolute personality.
To return : we saw in our last chapter how
Plato and Aristotle taught that the reality of an
absolute Being is involved in all our knowledge
of relative and finite Being. And this doctrine
has been maintained by all the great idealists, too
numerous to name, that have handed on the torch
of philosophy from Plato to the present day. It
has been differently expressed in different ages,
but these differences of expression, relative as
they naturally were to the varying categories of
their day, do not alter the fundamental identity of
the thoughts that underlie them. And though
the position is attacked in the present day from
the agnostic or empirical point of view, there is no
essential novelty in this attack, whatever new
name it may assume. It is the same criticism
which idealists in every age have had to meet,
and in meeting which they have only intensified
their central conviction.1
1 See Note A.

in THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 51
Moreover, we saw that this doctrine runs up
into and is confirmed by the highest religious
experience. We might put this otherwise, and
perhaps more accurately, by saying that it is an
abstraction from, or an abstract portion of that
religious experience. For religion is of course
older, far older and more universal than philo
sophy, and the religious conception of God is
proportionately older and commoner than the
philosophic. Indeed, it is interesting to note that
many modern psychologists are disposed to trace
the historic origin of our religious consciousness
back into the region of instinctive feeling or
emotion ; and this not with the effect of reducing
it to a thing of merely subjective value, but
rather as emphasizing its fundamental place in
our original constitution and make. There are
analogies for this. The mutual attraction of
the sexes, and the maternal instinct, for example,
are among the most elementary and funda
mental attributes of our race. And they are
both, in their obvious aspect, purely emotional —
irrational instincts as they are sometimes called.
Yet they work teleologically for the production
and protection of offspring, and thus for the
maintenance of mankind. In other words, they

52 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
accomplish the most far-reaching results of reason
and compel us to believe that they were implanted
for that end. And so, if we trace religion to
an instinctive origin, we do not thereby diminish
but increase its authority ; as springing from a
region that lies deeper than ghostly fears, or
mythic fancies, or selfish interests of priestcraft —
the region of which we can only say, " It is He
that hath made us and not we ourselves." "Thou
hast made us for Thyself, and we are restless till
we find rest in Thee." But, whatever the history
of its development, religion once developed rests
ultimately on the experience of really religious
people. Others may accept it on their authority ;
but its whole vitality and power in the world is
due to those for whom it has become a matter
of real experience. And what is this experience ?
It is that of personal communion with a tran
scendent Person, who appeals to our conscience,
our affections, our intellect, our will — to all the
faculties of our complex being. It is summed up
for all time in the language of the Psalmist :
O Lord, Thou hast searched me out, and known me : Thou
knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising ; Thou understandest
my thoughts long before.
Thou art about my path, and about my bed : and spiest out all
my ways.

in THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 53
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue : but Thou, O Lord,
knowest it altogether.
Thou hast fashioned me behind and before : and laid Thine
hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me : I can
not attain unto it.
Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit : or whither shall I
go then from Thy Presence ?
If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there : if I go down to
hell, Thou art there also.
If I take the wings of the morning : and remain in the utter
most parts of the sea ;
Even there, also, shall Thy Hand lead me : and Thy Right
Hand shall hold me.
If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me : then shall
my night be turned to day.
Yea, the darkness is no darkness with Thee, but the light is
as clear as the day : the darkness and light to Thee are both
alike. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect : and in
Thy book were all my members written ;
Which day by day were fashioned : when as yet there was
none of them.
How dear are Thy counsels unto me, O God : O how great is
the sum of them !
If I tell them, they are more in number than the sand : when
I wake up I am present with Thee.
The stages by which the possibility of this
experience is reached, whether in the history of
the individual or the race — Plato's steps and
points of departure, — no longer concern us when
their work is done. They are the ushers that

54 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
have introduced us to the presence-chamber ;
and once there, the Presence speaks for itself.
We are conscious of relation to a Person, in His
unity and wholeness, on whom we depend, and
towards whom we aspire ; and are aware, in the
same indivisible act, of our finitude and His
infinity, of our own relativity and His absolute
transcendence. And it is upon this experience,
attested by its countless experts through the
ages, that our conviction of God's reality ultimately
rests. And this personal experience of our whole
being, it must be remembered, is more real and
concrete than any merely intellectual judgment.
We might compare it to existence in three
dimensions, as contrasted with existence only in
one ; a solid, that is, as contrasted with a line.
For besides intellectual apprehension it involves
love, of the kind which is no mere passive emotion,
but the active love that issues in self-sacrifice
and moral purification, with the intuitive insight
that purity brings — the love that issues in the
life of prayer. And further, it involves a corre
spondence of the will with God's will, an active
endeavour to carry out His will, rather than our
own, in all practical relations with the world ;

m THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 55
a life spent, that is, in the service of God. And
it is in proportion as a person thus realizes or
puts reality into all his relations with God,
that he grows increasingly aware of the divine
reality, which meets his love, answers his prayer,
strengthens his will, and assures his intellect.
But credo ut intelligam is the law of our
intellect ; as thinking beings we must reflect
upon the nature of our experience. And so,
as we break up the white light with a prism
into its component rays, we decompose our
primary perception of God into various partial
conceptions, to express, however inadequately,
different attributes and aspects of His Being.
And thus we reach the different abstractions
with which philosophy deals, and out of which
the various arguments in favour of Theism are
constructed. Kant's criticism of these arguments
is still often quoted against them. It should
be remembered, therefore, that this criticism
largely turns upon his own peculiar ' distinction
between phenomena and noumena, or appear
ances and things-in-themselves ; which distinction
we now regard as utterly untenable. Still, it
is urged, such abstract arguments do not prove
the God of our religious consciousness ; and

56 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
this is perfectly true, for the simple reason
that they are abstract ; they deal only with
isolated aspects of a complex living Being.
Moreover, they have a different value for the
convinced Theist — the man of such experience
as we have above described — and for the man
who has no such personal conviction. For the
former sees in them the partial analyses of a
creed which he already holds in its synthetic
unity and completeness ; and which he knows
to be incapable, under our present limitations,
of adequate intellectual expression. He can use
them, therefore, without offence at their logical
incompleteness, to illuminate and corroborate his
faith. Whereas the latter, the man without any
Theistic conviction, taking the arguments in
question at their bare logical value, and, as a
rule, ignoring the cumulative effect of their
convergence, is so preoccupied with their in
adequacy as proofs, and with their distance, in
any case, from the religious conception of God,
that he usually underestimates the probability
which they suggest.
The Theistic arguments have thus two different
aspects, which may recall Plato's description of
the double procedure, by which we rise from

iii THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 57
hypotheses or probabilities till we reach that
first principle which is no longer hypothetical ;
and when once secure in the possession of this,
can deduce our old probabilities from it as new
certainties. Thus the Theist is already in posses
sion of the first principle which is no longer merely
hypothetical. He has reached the divine person
ality in its wholeness, with his own personality in
its wholeness ; and can then analyse its aspects
intellectually, in virtue of his own correspondence
with it ; by picturing his own powers with all
their limitations removed. This is the scholastic
via eminentiae, or modern method of infinitation,
and gives us not merely negative, but positive
and definite conceptions of the Divine. Thus we
possess in our own will a positive instance, and
the only positive instance that we know, of causa
tion, not in Hume's sense of a mere antecedent
or secondary cause, but as a definite power that
can originate. We are, in our measure, creators ;
we can initiate action, form characters, frame
policies, paint pictures, carve statues, write poems,
invent machines. But we are limited in all this
by our material, our capacity, our opportunity, and
all the incidents of our finite nature. These,
however, are only hindrances to the free opera-

58 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
tion of our will and have nothing to do with its
essence. We can consequently think them away,
and so reach a perfectly positive conception of an
absolute will, which, as such, is the first cause.
For the first cause is not, of course, as is some
times absurdly supposed, the earliest of an infinite
series of antecedents, like the tortoise whereon
the world -bearing elephant rests, but a power
which differs in kind from all its effects, and is
not only, to speak in temporal language, the past
creator, but also the present sustainer of that
continuous process of events which constitutes
the life of the world. And when, for intellectual
convenience, we separate any antecedent and
consequent parts of this process into causes and
effects, we are only using the term " cause " in a
secondary sense, which must not be confused with
the fact of primary causation. The former only
transmits, while the latter originates energy.
Again, when we consider the human will as a
cause, it is not a power that initiates blindly. It
is rational and acts for a purpose or end, which is
the final cause, the sufficient reason of its action.
And the presence of a sufficient reason satisfies our
intellect. It constitutes an adequate explanation
behind which we have no further need to go. If

iii THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 59
I wish to understand a man's character, no mere
survey of his successive actions is sufficient ; I
must discover the motives which actuated him,
the purpose which he had in view. And so in
reading history we are not content with the bare
record of past events, but endeavour to discern
the motives of its various agents. And where
we cannot discover this ultimate purpose, or final
cause, as in the case of natural phenomena, we
recognize that our knowledge, however scientific,
is incomplete. For the ultimate demand of reason
remains unsatisfied ; the demand to know not only
how, but why things happen as they do.
The Absolute First Cause then, whom Theists
apprehend as personal, is also the Absolute Final
Cause, as Aristotle saw must be the case ; not
only the cause but the reason of all things. This,
again, is a perfectly positive conception, founded
on what we know of ourselves ; though, of course,
wholly beyond our limited knowledge to com
prehend. But though the final cause of the
universe lies beyond our comprehension, we can
study the small fragment of it that lies within our
ken. And a rational cause must be rational
throughout. We should expect, therefore, to find
traces of purpose in ourselves and the world

60 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
around us, as we can see purpose in the parts of a
machine of whose total function we are ignorant.
And this is precisely what the Theist finds both
in himself, in history, and in the natural world.
To consider first the natural world : there is
no question that, on the surface, it suggests order,
adaptation, purpose, design in a myriad forms,
from the stars in their courses to the bee in its
cell. And the positive weight of this suggestion
is not logically affected by the fact that there are
negative, or more strictly neutral, cases in which
we, with our human standards of judgment, can
see no purpose at all. The positive evidence of
design in a seed, for instance, is not in any degree
negatived by the fact that a thousand are what
we should call wasted in nature, for every one
that is matured. And this evidence of design in
the world has, as we know, been amongst the
most powerful of popular arguments for Theism
in every age. But nowadays we are met by an
alternative hypothesis which would explain away
this superficial appearance of design ; as due to
the survival of those things that were accidentally
fitted to their environment, amid the destruction
of the innumerable unfit. This hypothesis, when
extended from organic to inorganic nature, as it

iii THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 61
must be, if it is to prove its point, labours under
very serious difficulties ; and may be fearlessly
met, as it has been met again and again, on its
intellectual merits. But we are not now con
cerned with these ; for our present point is that
the Theist, whose faith is founded on personal
experience, finds amply sufficient evidence around
him of that purpose in the world, which he
already believes to exist. If there were no
such evidence its absence would perplex him.
But granting the evidence to be, as it confessedly
is, on the obvious view abundant, the fact that it
might possibly admit of another very hypothetical
explanation is for him totally beside the mark.
The facts are admitted and he holds their
explanation. And this brings us to the purpose or providen
tial guidance of man, and his history ; and first of
the individual man. The religious man, who is
not merely a speculative Theist, but in earnest
with his religion, is conscious of two elements in
his inner life ; his own will, and God's guidance.
His own will, weakened and perverted by various
causes and in various degrees, has led him to sin,
and so to complicate the whole course of his life.
He never is what he can see that ideally he might

62 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
have been, had there been no need of repentance,
no past to undo, no energy impaired, no oppor
tunity wasted, no frequent relapses, no failures of
faith. And to this extent the divine guidance
has been resisted and hindered and obscured.
His life does not present to his inner conscious
ness the picture of one that has been led steadily
straightforward by God. Yet, like Augustine,
he can trace God's presence in the very midst of
his resistance, leading him slowly but still surely
out of the devious paths of his own choosing, and
despite of his reluctance to be led. And he learns,
among other things, that prayer is heard and
answered ; — answered not by any mere modifica
tion of our own subjective condition ; but also
and often by the control of events which actually
happen to us from without. Few probably, if any,
of those who have come to lean on prayer as their
source of life have any doubt whatever of this fact.
It is a certainty for them which gradually grows
to be the centre of all their other certainty. And
this certainty is not a thing of yesterday. It is
as confident in the Hebrew Psalmist as in the
Christian saint. " I called unto the Lord . . .
and He heard me out of His holy hill." Thus the
religious man has a conviction that his life is

iii THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 63
divinely superintended, and, as he cannot suppose
himself an exception, that this is universally
the case.
And in the light of our personal experience,
we are more prepared to trace providence in
history. Because, to begin with, that experience
teaches us not to expect top much. The sin of
the individual is multiplied and complicated in
the race, hampering, hindering, counter-working,
quenching the operation of the Divine Spirit ;
and rendering His perpetual presence pro
portionately difficult to trace. Our inability to
distinguish what is primitive in human nature
from what is due to degradation is an instance of
this difficulty, from which much false generaliza
tion has arisen in recent years. Or again, the
impossibility of clearly sifting the elements in
historical characters, like that of Mahomet, or
Luther, or Cromwell, for example, or in crises
like the Reformation or the Revolution, would be
another instance in point. " The trail of the
serpent is over it all." But one fact stands out
above all these uncertainties ; that is the advent
of Jesus Christ, with its long preparation in
Jewish history and prophecy, its apposite
occurrence " in the fulness of time " that has

64 THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS ch.
so often been enlarged upon, and the subsequent
work of the Christian Church in the world.
Here we trace God in history, in a way that
throws reflex light not only upon all the earlier
religious aspirations of mankind, but also upon
the evidence of design in the natural world.
And in that light we can believe in a " divine
event to which the whole creation moves."
And what is true of the arguments from
design is true of the moral arguments for
Theism. They must be viewed from within to
be read aright. If we confine our attention to
the external aspect of things, the struggle for
existence in nature, — "nature red in tooth and
claw," and the moral disorder and physical and
mental sufferings of humanity, they seem difficult
to reconcile with the governance of an Almighty
God of love. It is only when we are convinced
by personal experience of our own relation to
such a God, who speaks to us in the categorical
imperative of conscience, and guides us by
severity as well as by reward, that we feel sure
there must be another interpretation of these
superficial appearances than seems at first to
meet the eye. This is a point which has often,
of course, been discussed at length ; and we

iii THE THEISTIC ARGUMENTS 65
only mention it here, as being in harmony with
what we have been saying above.
To resume then : we are nowadays prepared
to admit that the authority of reasdn is more
circumscribed than men have sometimes thought
to be the case. We do not expect to force
Theism by intellectual arguments into unwilling
ears ; we cannot, by such means, do more than
suggest its probability. But what we may seem
to lose here, we more than gain elsewhere. For
we have come to see that our Theism rests upon
a wider basis ; upon an instinctive consciousness
of our whole personality in which feeling, will,
and action all play their part.
This does not involve any contradiction of the
verdict of our reason, that the universe must be
ultimately rational, and goodness and beauty
coincide with truth. It merely means that our
present conviction is in advance of our complete
understanding — that "we know in part and
prophesy in part " ; looking to reason not to
demonstrate, but progressively to illuminate the
Object of our faith.

CHAPTER IV
TRANSCENDENCE AND AUTHORITY
We have alluded above to the notion that the
conception of God's immanence or indwelling
presence in the universe represents a truer and
more mature point of view ; before which that
of His transcendence must ultimately give way,
and become obsolete. But as this opinion, with
all the confusion of thought that it involves, is
somewhat prevalent in the present day, it may
be well to pause upon it for a while in passing.
In the first place, it should be obvious from
what has been said before that the notion in
question is unphilosophical ; since the meta
physical contention of Plato and Aristotle has
been approved by subsequent thinkers in every
age — the contention that we cannot account for
relative and finite existence at all, except as
grounded in an absolute and infinite Being — in
a Being, that is to say, which is transcendent.
66

ch. iv AUTHORITY 67
And this is not a mere postulate, or hypothesis,
which we assume for our convenience ; but a
positive affirmation of our reason. When, for
instance, we contemplate the endless stream of
secondary causation, we conclude that it must
have a source which transcends, and is not itself
a part of the stream. And it is the same with
all other relative phenomena. By the very fact
of being obviously relative and dependent, they
point beyond themselves, to something which
in the language of Aristotle must "not be
immersed in them if it is to control them "
(a/tty^? 'iva KpaTjj). But as most men prefer to
have such thoughts as these expressed in less
abstract and more concrete form ; we will put the
point in its directly theological shape. " God
dwells in the universe, we say, and sustains it
by His indwelling presence. Deus est in toto
mundo, says St. Thomas, ut anima in toto homine.
" God is in the whole world, as a man's soul is
in his whole body." And if we wish to describe
this truth by a philosophical term we call it
the divine immanence. But when Christians
make this statement, as in one shape or another
they have always done, they mean by God and
the world two different things ; no less different

68 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
than the Creator and the creature. And it is
only as long as this distinction is preserved that
the statement in question retains its meaning.
God, whose very name implies that He is not
the world, yet indwells and sustains the world by
His indwelling. " Though the Lord be high,
yet hath He respect unto the lowly" . . . "the
Lord our God who dwelleth on high, who
humbleth Himself to behold the things that are
in heaven and in the earth." The paradox of it
is its very point. And it may not uncharitably
be doubted whether many of those who say
that the conception of transcendence has been
banished by that of immanence, do not vaguely
and illegitimately retain an element of the former
in mind ; which enables them to credit their
statement with a more satisfactory meaning than
it actually possesses. For as a mere question of
the use of language, to speak of immanence or
indwelling, inevitably implies some kind of dis
tinction between the indweller and the indwelt.
And the phrase can only retain its ordinary
meaning so long as this distinction is present to
the mind. But if the whole notion of transcend
ence is rigorously excluded, we can no longer
distinguish between God and the universe

iv AND AUTHORITY 69
except as different aspects of one and the same
thing. We can speak by abstraction of God as
the soul of the universe, and conversely of the
universe as the body or expression or manifesta
tion of God. But we are not allowed by our
hypothesis to regard the two as in any mode or
degree separable ; since they are only different
ways of describing the same reality, which may
equally well be called nature or God. In a word
we are landed in pantheism, and committed to
the position that pantheism is superior to
Theism. But this is old ground in the history
of thought, and argues no new insight on the
part of modern thinkers. Pantheism is full of
speculative difficulties which have again and
again been critically exposed. But we have
agreed to confine the subject to its more concrete
aspect ; and will therefore merely notice the
bearing of pantheism upon morality. If God is
regarded as simply and solely the sustaining
principle of universal life, which includes, of
course, the life of mart, He must be conceived
to be as directly the source of evil as of good
actions. In other words, the distinction between
good and evil becomes meaningless ; since both
alike are the results of the same divine or natural

70 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
activity ; a sinister inference which in the popular
practice of pantheistic races has only too fre
quently been drawn,
The Eastern philosopher endeavours to evade
this difficulty by proclaiming the unreality of
matter, and therefore of all material life. It
is maya, he says, an illusion, which no more
affects the divine Being, than do evil dreams an
awakened man.
Such a theory, which even if it seems to save
their notion of God, obviously cannot protect
their morals, needs no serious refutation for the
Western mind ; though it has at times crept from
the East into the borders of the West, and is
not wholly unknown there in the present day.
But of course it is both unscientific and unphilo
sophical. That it is unscientific goes without
saying ; for it reduces the whole realm of science
to a dream. But it is equally repugnant to all
sane philosophy. For " matter," as we call it, is
indeed relative, unstable, impermanent ; changing
its forms from day to day. " The mountain falling
cometh to nought." And in this sense it might
be called, in the abstract, unreal. But it does
not exist in the abstract but in concrete union
with spiritual life ; the life of God, who sustains

iv AND AUTHORITY 71
it in Being as, in a measure, the manifestation of
Himself; and the life of man, whose instrument
of action it provides. Each moment of matter,
therefore, as it passes, is the expression of a
spiritual fact, and instinct with the reality of
spirit. The heavens that declare the glory of
God change their aspect, but renew their
message, in fresh form, from day to day. The
words and deeds of yesterday have fled away
past all recall, but their consequences are perma
nent, for evil or for good. " No power," says
the Roman poet, "can ever make undone what
the fleeting hour has once borne away."
neque
Diffinget infectumque reddet
Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.
So far, then, from any unreality of matter involv
ing the indifference of moral conduct, the awful
seriousness of moral obligation carries with it the
reality of the material world, which is at once the
instrument and stage of its realization.
In a word, then, pantheism is incompatible with
moral freedom and, therefore, with personality or
character either in God or man ; and represents,
accordingly, a far lower and less mature stage of
theological thought than Theism. It is necessary,

72 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
therefore, to emphasize the fact that directly
we speak of divine immanence as if it were a
superior alternative to divine transcendence, we
are logically and inevitably committed to this
irrational position. For to allow the faintest
distinction in the divine attitude towards good
and evil, is instantly to reintroduce the concep
tion of transcendence. Since if God in the least
degree prefers, or is even capable of preferring,
good to evil, He is, ipso facto, morally tran
scendent — " the power not ourselves that makes
for righteousness."
Thus transcendence and immanence are not
alternative but correlative conceptions in theo
logy. The one guards us from the pantheistic
confusion of God with the universe ; the other
from the Neoplatonic separation of the two.
Together they express what was first the Jewish
and then the Christian belief; that God is at
once eternally other than His creation, and yet
intimately present in its every part. And the
Incarnation has always been regarded by the
Church as the fullest manifestation of this dual
truth. Jesus Christ, as very man, "of a reason
able soul and human flesh subsisting," tempted
in the wilderness, weary at the well, praying in

iv AND AUTHORITY 73
Gethsemane, dying on the cross, is the extreme
exhibition of God's presence within the things of
His creation. But it is not the exhibition of a
God who is merely immanent ; for it is instinct
throughout with reference to such a union with
the Father as implies transcendence of created
things; and in His miracles, His sinlessness, His
awful authority of tone, flashes of this transcend
ence appear. Of course in saying this we
touch controversial ground, every inch of which
has been critically contested ; and to say it,
therefore, is to imply our conviction that all such
criticism has been or can be reasonably met.
But this is not our present point, which is simply
to state what the Church has historically taught
and still teaches about the Incarnation. It has
not attempted to explain what, if true, must be
to us inexplicable. It simply affirms that Jesus
Christ is God as well as man, and as such
essentially distinct from all mere men ; the Son
in His own house, while they are sons by
adoption. "I live," says St. Paul, "yet not I,
Christ liveth in me." But it would be beyond
expression inconceivable that he ever should
have claimed the faintest personal equality with
Christ. On the contrary, the very phrase implies

74 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
the essentially qualitative distinction which ren
dered such union possible.
Thus the creed of the Church is utterly and
wholly incompatible with any approach to the
notion that Jesus Christ revealed the latent
divinity of man ; in the sense that He exhibited
in Himself what men potentially are, and may
therefore in actuality become. On the contrary,
the Incarnation revealed God's transcendence, as
well as His immanence ; and enabled the unique
atonement through which men might ultimately
be upraised to a union with God, which they could
never in their sinfulness have otherwise attained.
The divine transcendence, then, is no mere
matter of abstract speculation. It is the vital
truth on which our whole Christian religion
depends, and the justification of the tone of
authority with which it confronts the world.
It is probable that the word " authority" gains
its first and most obvious meaning in the popular
mind, from the secular authority of the state, with
its universality of control, its positive laws, its
physical power of coercion. When therefore we
speak of religious authority, or the authority of
religion, a thing whose sanctions are invisible,
and whose sway is confined to those who willingly

iv AND AUTHORITY 75
accept its voke, we almost seem to be using a
metaphor ; or at least employing the term in a
derivative and secondary sense. But such a
supposition really inverts the facts. For all
authority, in the eyes of a Theist, must in the
last analysis be of divine origin, and can be
adequately based upon no other ground. Take,
for instance, what we call secular authority ; the
power which enacts and administers the laws of a
land. This may express itself, at different stages
of national development, as the authority of the
king, or of a ruling class, or of the people. And it
may degenerate, in any of these hands, into mere
tyranny, or brutal coercion. But wherever and
whenever it is by common consent accepted, as
a thing properly exercised, and therefore to be
obeyed : what is its justification ? What does it
represent ? It represents the claim of a whole
over its parts ; of a nation or society over its
individual members ; its right to control each for
the good of all ; and that for no arbitrary reason,
but because man is essentially a social being,
who, as such, can only attain his true development,
through the development of society at large ; the
whole and its parts being mutually interdependent.
Thus an individual man can only fulfil his destiny

76 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
by recognizing that he is a part of a whole, and
acting accordingly, both in what he does and in
what he leaves undone. He must do his own
work, perform his own function, make his own
contribution to the welfare of the whole ; while he
must not hinder or interfere with the correlative
duty of all others to do the like. And, corre
spondingly, it is the business of the whole, or
of those who exercise authority over the whole
society, or state, or nation, so to legislate, so to
use their authority that all its individual members
may be encouraged to perform their proper
functions, and discouraged from interference
with the corresponding functions of others.
Such is the ideal of government, however
imperfect its realization in a sinful world. But
what is its justification ? Upon what is it
ultimately based ? Why is the majority entitled
to control the individual ? Hobbes, writing in an
unhistorical age, pictured the natural state of
man as one of unlimited self-assertion, resulting
in a war of each against all (bellum omnium in
omnes) ; whence government was a practical
necessity, to make peace and progress possible.
And Rousseau's theory of a social contract or
agreement, to limit the individual by the general

iv AND AUTHORITY 77
will, was founded on a somewhat similar view of
human nature. But history, with its concrete
teaching, has brought vividly home to our age the
truth which Aristotle clearly stated in the abstract
long ago ; that man is naturally a social being
(d)v<rei iroXiTitcos), destined by his very make and
constitution for society ; and consequently that
what is now called altruism is as essential an
element of his nature as self-regard. " There
are as real and the same kind of indications in
human nature, that we are made for society and
to do good to our fellow-creatures ; as that we
were intended to take care of our own life, and
health, and private good." Such was Butler's
answer to Hobbes. And history bears it out.
The unit of human development has not,
historically, been the isolated individual, but the
family, and the clan. Society and its members
have grown up together, and need no artificial
expedient to unite them, nor artificial theory to
justify their union. We have that within us
which instinctively impels us to community with
others ; and at every step of our development
have been parts of some social whole, which in
one degree or another has controlled our life.
But meanwhile we live in a sinful world. Society

78 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
and its members are alike imperfect, selfish,
sinful. Friction and collision in consequence
continually occurs between them. Coercion be
comes a necessity ; and yet coercion may be
wrongly applied. And the question inevitably
arises " Why should we obey the laws ? " Actually
and immediately because we must, or we shall
suffer in consequence. It is ill arguing with the
master of legions. But a society, whose members
were merely actuated by the fear of punishment,
would obviously be no more than a collection of
slaves, and their government a tyranny. Some
thing very different from this is needed if society
is to be the organ of our development, the
instrument of our education, the condition of our
freedom. This can only be when its members
recognize that its laws are rational and
right, and that, in the words of an old English
moralist, " Tightness implies oughtness " ; we obey
them because we ought ; not because they are
mighty, but because they are right. Here, then,
we are driven back, behind all political or social
enactments, to conscience, the sense of duty, the
felt obligation of the moral law, as the only force
that can insure rational obedience to secular
authority. But conscience and the sense of

iv AND AUTHORITY 79
obligation are of no secular origin. It is true
that empirical thinkers have attempted to derive
them from the fear of punishment ; and when
this attempt broke down in its crude form, have
suggested, in its stead, the inherited fear of
ancient punishments, which had gradually been
forgotten, and left only their instinctive dread
behind them. But the fallacy of these theories
has again and again been exposed ; to the effect
that they can always be shown on analysis to beg
the question, by presupposing the moral judgment
which they profess to explain. No alchemy can
distil one drop of right from any quantity of
might; or the awfulness of " I ought" from the
commonplace of " I must." Every martyr who
has faced death for conscience is a standing
refutation of such theories.
We have to look deeper, then, for the origin of
our sense of duty and its obligation. Bishop
Butler, in accordance with the language of his
day, speaks too much as if conscience were a sepa
rate faculty ; but his description of its operation
is not impaired thereby. " There is," he says, " a
superior principle of reflection or Conscience in
every man, which distinguishes between the
internal principles of his heart, as well as his

80 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
external actions ; pronounces determinately some
actions to be just, right, good ; others to be in
themselves evil, wrong, unjust ; which without
being consulted, without being advised with,
magisterially exerts itself, and approves or
condemns him, the doer of them accordingly : and
which if not forcibly stopped, naturally and always
of course goes on to anticipate a higher and more
effectual sentence, which shall hereafter second
and affirm its own. ... It is by this faculty,
natural to man, that he is a moral agent, that he
is a law to himself: ... a faculty in kind and in
nature supreme over all others, and which bears
its own authority of being so. . . . To preside and
govern, from the very economy and constitution of
man belongs to it. Had it strength, as it had right ;
had it power, as it had manifest authority it would
absolutely govern the world."1 We tend now
to speak of conscience as our practical reason, or
reason acting on conduct, rather than as a separate
faculty. But this does not affect our point, which
is its " supremacy. " It " magisterially exerts
itself." It has "manifest authority" to "abso
lutely govern the world. " And this was what
Kant called the " categorical imperative" of the
1 Butler's Sermons, ii.

iv AND AUTHORITY 81
moral law — the unconditional, unqualified, absolute
nature of its commands.
It may be granted that this "categorical
imperative," or " supremacy of conscience," as we
commonly call it, took time to gain clear recogni
tion ; and also that the content of morality, the
particular things that were considered right or
wrong have varied in different ages and among
different races. But when once recognized the
moral judgment "I ought" is distinguished from
everything else in the world, by its absolute char
acter ; its intrinsic incapability of qualification
or modification by anything outside itself. And
it may reasonably be urged that the religious
explanation of this fits more closely to the facts
than any other ; — the explanation that here, in the
moral root of our being, we are in touch with
the absolute, the transcendent ; in other words
with the will of God ; which commands our
unconditional allegiance, not essentially or
primarily because it is absolutely powerful, but
because it is absolutely good.
Against this it may be, and is often said that
religion and morality are separable things, and
often exist apart ; as in the case where a low
or degraded religion has little or no effect upon

82 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
conduct, or in the case where a high morality co
exists with individual agnosticism or unbelief.
This may be true enough ; yet such separation
represents neither the normal, nor the ideal state
of things. For normally morality has been
developed and elevated by religious sanctions of
one kind or another ; and as a direct result of this
development has grown so strong, that in excep
tional cases it can stand alone. But such isolated
morality does not represent the ideal, or in the
deepest sense the natural state of man. For man
is naturally religious, in the same sense that he
is naturally social, however slow he may be to
recognize the fact. The same need for com
munion with others which impels him outward to
society impels him upward above all relative and
finite things to God. Union with God is his
supreme end, and therefore his supreme good, the
condition of his complete realization, of his final
satisfaction. And this satisfaction is not merely
moral, though morality is its first condition ; it is
also intellectual, emotional, aesthetic ; the fulfil
ment of all his desires for truth, beauty, and
love. And the man who is moral without being
religious, though he may be doing all that
in his present state of mind it is possible for

iv AND AUTHORITY 83
him to do, is still blind to the vision of his true
end, the destined goal of his development, and
misses some virtues from the fact ; while he is
further involved in serious difficulty as to how
moral goodness is to be determined and moral
obligation to be explained. For the only ade
quate account of the absoluteness of moral obliga
tion is, as we have said, that it is of divine origin.
God is the supreme good of man ; and we naturally
and inevitably seek our own good when once we
know it. When we have been convinced that a
thing is true we immediately accept it as such.
And goodness has been called the truth of action or
conduct. To recognize it is at once to desire it.
Hence God's authority over us is not merely
founded on His power or His will, if we may make
such abstractions, but on His nature. He is the
good of each man and of all men ; and in seeking
Him we are seeking that realization of ourselves,
in union with all others, which is the inmost
necessity of our being.
The whole of which we are members is
ultimately God's universe, and the conditions of
its harmonious working are the expressions of
His will. And as Butler says, " Your obligation to
obey this law is its being the law of your nature."

84 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
We do not, of course, think of all this when we
predicate "good," in ordinary life, of a man's
character or conduct ; still less when we apply
the term to things like health, or wealth, or
intellect ; or even call our possessions our goods.
But in the last analysis these things are good
because, and only in so far as they lead us
Godward and so conduce to our true end,
our final and complete good. If we divert them
from this end, and so waste our goods, we
immediately convert them into evils ; as when
we say of misused health, or wealth, or talents,
that they are no good to their possessor, or
have done him no good.
But by the misuse of his free-will man can
resist the divine attraction, and so go counter to
the true law of his own nature. He can " set up
an idol in his heart " and say " evil be thou my
good." And if so, the divine authority of neces
sity assumes a new complexion. And the obli
gation of love gives way to the obligation of
coercion. "If they break my statutes, and keep
not my commandments, then will I visit their
transgression with the rod, and their iniquity
with stripes." " Behold a whirlwind of the Lord
is gone forth in fury, even a grievous whirlwind ;

iv AND AUTHORITY 85
it shall fall grievously upon the head of the
wicked." " For it is the day of the Lord's
vengeance," " the great and terrible day of the
Lord," "for the hour of His judgment is come."
But these appeals to fear do not, in the last
analysis, create the sense of obligation which
makes a man a law to himself ; they are only the
inevitable consequences of its transgression.
And thus it is with the lesser authorities of
the world. So far as they represent the rightful
claim of the whole over its parts, they represent
a portion of the divine authority delegated
to man ; and we are under a corresponding
obligation to observe them ; while, in the case of
disobedience, they on their side have the right
to employ coercive sanctions. Such is the em
phatic teaching of the apostles. " There is no
power but of God," says St. Paul. " The
powers that be are ordained of God. Who
soever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God. . . . For he is the minister
of God to thee for good. But if thou do that
which is evil, be afraid ; for he beareth not
the sword in vain : for he is the minister
of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him
that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be

86 TRANSCENDENCE ch.
subject, not only for wrath, but for conscience'
sake." And St. Peter to the same effect :
" Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man
for the Lord's sake : whether it be to the king
as supreme ; or unto governors as unto them
that are sent by him for the punishment of evil
doers, and for the praise of them that do well.
... As free and not using your liberty for
a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants
of God." Such is the teaching of the New Testament
on the august authority of secular law. Yet
inasmuch as it is administered by human in
struments, it is always liable to human error ;
with the result that laws may be enacted, which
it is our duty to the greater whole, our duty
to God, to disobey ; as when the apostles them
selves, St. Peter among them, were brought
"before kings and governors" for Christ's sake,
and answered " whether it be right in the sight
of God, to hearken unto you, more than unto
God, judge ye." This right of conscience is,
of course, the very opposite of anarchical in
subordination, since it is based on the obligation
of a higher law ; nor, even so, is it a thing to be
recklessly or frivolously used, without self-evident

iv AND AUTHORITY 87
necessity. But the fact of its existence, the fact
that conscience does claim, in the last resort, to
judge the human law by the divine, and to
dispense from the former in obedience to the
latter, is sufficient evidence of the relative posi
tion of the two ; sufficient evidence that our
obligation to obey human law is based upon, and
conditioned by, our obligation to obey that which
is divine. It follows from this that religious authority or
the authority of religion is far more fundamental
than that of secular society ; for it reflects God's
essential and immediate claim upon us, as distinct
from the derivative and delegated claim of our
fellow men. And religious authority culminates
in that of the Christian religion. For therein
we have the clearest expression of what it is
in the nature of God that constitutes Him the
supreme good of our being, and goal of our life ;
in the revelation that " God is Love," and that
"we love Him, because He first loved us." For
the crown of all authority is the irresistible
authority of love.
We will pass on, therefore, to consider some
of the principal ways in which the authority
of the Christian Church is exercised over its

88 TRANSCENDENCE ch. iv
members in the present day ; with a view to
pointing out that this is, in essence, as real as it
has always been. It may be, as we have already
said, less definite in outline, less patient of rigid
formulation, than in ages of simpler thought than
our own. It is much less easily recognizable
by the outer world than when it was capable
of being enforced — though unspiritually and
disastrously enforced by secular sanctions. But
it has the same power as of old to regulate
the lives of all those who consciously accept it ;
and through their influence upon others, to
elevate the world.

CHAPTER V
THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH
The first note in the teaching of Jesus Christ,
which we are told struck His hearers with surprise,
was its authority ; "He taught them as one that
had authority, and not as the scribes." We
trace this authority in all His words and works,
as well as in His contrast of Himself with other
teachers, and it is equally conspicuous in all the
four gospels. He Himself based this authority
upon His mission from the Father. " I am come
in my Father's name." " I seek not mine own
will, but the will of the Father which hath sent
me." " I must be about my Father's business."
" I do nothing of myself, but as my Father hath
taught me I speak these things. And He that
sent me, is with me ... for I do always those
things that please Him." At the same time it is
no partial authority, like that of a prophet " speak
ing in the name of the Lord." It is that of a
89

90 THE AUTHORITY ch.
plenipotentiary, full, complete, and personal ; the
divine authority not merely speaking through
Him, but committed to Him. " For as the Father
hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son
to have life in Himself; and hath given Him
authority to execute judgment also." It is His own,
His personal authority, and issues in a correspond
ing claim to personal allegiance — " Follow me,"
" Come unto me," " Learn of me," " Take my
yoke upon you," "Whoso cometh unto me I will
in no wise cast out." And it is significant in this
connection that He wrote no book — nothing that
in after ages might have come to be mechanically
treated as a thing impersonal. He confined
Himself to the personal influence of words, and
deeds, that were quick with His own immediate
vitality. While, in sharp contrast to His absten
tion from anything mechanical, He founded a
society of living persons, who under the guidance
of His Spirit, should, in each generation, live the
Christian life, and so exercise in their measure
personal influence upon the world.
But the right to claim personal authority must
be recognized, before it can be accepted, and in
vindication of this right Christ appeals to His
works, His teaching, and His character, taken in

v OF THE CHURCH 9r
connection with his proclamation of mission from
the Father. His works are not merely works of
power, but of power uniformly governed by love,
and are thus " the works of God." " The blind
receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers
are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised
up, and the poor have good tidings preached to
them." Such is His answer to the despondency
of John. And again to the Jews : " The works
which the Father hath given me to accomplish,
the very works that I do bear witness of me, that
the Father hath sent me." " The works that I do
in my Father's name, these bear witness of me."
" If I do not the works of my Father believe me
not. But if I do them, though ye believe not me,
believe the works." They are " the works which
none other man did."
Then there is a similar appeal to His teaching.
" The words that I have spoken to you are spirit
and are life." " For I spake not from myself, but
the Father which sent me, He hath given me a
commandment, what I should say, and what I
should speak . . . the things therefore which I
speak, even as the Father hath said unto me, so
I speak." They are " the words of God." " My
teaching is not mine, but His that sent me."

92 THE AUTHORITY ch.
And in immediate connection with His teach
ing, He appeals to His character. " Which of you
convicteth me of sin ? "
* But character and words and works were but
so many manifestations of the personality behind
them, and it must have been the total effect of
that personality, " full of grace and truth," that
constituted its own self-evident claim to allegiance.
We catch glimpses of this effect in the ready
obedience of disciples to His call, in the confes
sion of Peter " Thou art the Christ," and " Lord
to whom shall we go ; Thou hast the words of
eternal life " ; in the admission of the hostile
officers, " Never man spake as this man," and
their abashed amazement, when " they went back
ward and fell to the ground," and again in the
enthusiastic homage of the multitude, who would
have made Him their king.
Yet, in the end, He was only accepted by those
who had the spiritual insight to recognize the
self-evidence of sanctity ; by " the men of good
will." " No man cometh to me, except the
Father which hath sent me draw him." " Ye
believe me not, because ye are not of God."
And as our Lord worked through the immediate
force of His personality, so he chose to continue

v OF THE CHURCH 93
His work through the agency of human persons.
He left behind Him disciples whose characters
He had formed to found the Christian Church, a
society of living persons united to Himself, and
to one another by the indwelling presence of His
Holy Spirit.* " I have many things to say unto
you," runs the record, " but ye cannot bear them
now. Howbeit when He the Spirit of Truth is
come, He shall guide you into all truth. He
shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you " ;
and " Lo I am with you always, even unto the
end of the world." And it may be remarked in
passing that to the Christian there is no real
significance in the question raised by recent
critics — the unanswerable question, as to how far
the Church was founded by our Lord Himself
while upon earth, and how far by His disciples after
He had passed away : since, in the Christian view,
those disciples were guided by His Spirit, and to
that extent working His will. No subtlety of
criticism will disturb the conviction of the Church
that our Lord Himself, before His bodily presence
was withdrawn within the veil, bade His disciples
go and preach the gospel, that He bade them
baptize, and that at the last supper He bade them
" do this in remembrance of me." And this was

94 THE AUTHORITY ch.
the sufficient germ of all subsequent development.
But doubtless as He wrote nothing, so He
organized nothing, but left all organization as all
writing to those who had to meet and provide
for new necessities as they arose.
The mission of the Church, then, as conceived
by its first members, was to witness to Christ ;
to proclaim His authority over the whole of human
life, and to win men to obey that authority with all
that it involved. " Repent and be baptized every
one of you," says St. Peter, " in the name of
Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall
receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." " Giving
thanks unto the Father," says St. Paul, ". . .
who hath delivered us from the power of dark
ness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of
His dear Son." ThustheChurch possesses, accord
ing to its own tradition, a delegated authority from
Christ, to administer His word and sacraments,
and a continuous inspiration by the Holy Spirit to
enable it so to do. It stands before the world,
therefore, as a society created and sustained from
above, having its origin and authority from heaven
and not of men, a perpetual witness to God's claim
upon the world. But it works through human
persons, and human persons, however much in-

v OF THE CHURCH 95
spired, are liable to err. H ence it can never escape
an element of human fallibility and error. And
the first and most obvious effect of this error is
the disruption of its unity. Unity was the desire
of its Founder, and is still the aspiration of its best
members, but actually that unity has been marred
by schism, and that from very early date. Some
men take refuge from the sight of these sad
divisions in the thought of an invisible Church ;
and doubtless true Christians everywhere are in
visibly united through union with their spiritual
Head. But it was not an invisible, but a visible
Church that Christ and His apostles founded.
It consisted of living men, and had visible and
tangible sacraments. The very thing that it
represented was the visibility of the divine, the
capacity of the Spirit to act through matter. For
it not only witnessed to the Incarnation, but
carried the principle of the Incarnation out into
the world. It baptized men and taught them
that their bodies were to become temples of the
Holy Ghost. It bade them assemble themselves
together, lifting up holy hands in prayer. It
prescribed them a day for special worship, and
fed them with a holy food. In a word it made
them members of Christ, not, that is, of God

96 THE AUTHORITY ch.
invisible, but God incarnate. " That which . . .
we have heard, which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands
have handled, of the Word of life — for the life
was manifested, and we have seen it and bear
witness, and shew unto you that eternal life which
was with the Father, and was manifested unto us
— that which we have seen and heard declare we
unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with
us." Visibility is the keynote of it all.
» But the visible, the corporate unity of the
Christian Church is gone, and with its loss we are
at once landed in the controversies that have
never subsequently ceased, as to where the true
Church is to be found. Rome cuts the knot simply
by proclaiming itself the one true Church, and
ruling all others out of account. But we English
who deny this, regard the Church as divided into
branches. » And this again raises the question,
What constitutes a branch? It is a question
which may obviously receive, as it historically has
received, different answers. And we naturally turn
for light upon it to the days of the Church's unity,
the days of the primitive Church. For though in
matters of ordinary knowledge it is true, as Bacon
reminds us, that we and not the ancients have the

v OF THE CHURCH 97
wisdom of the ages, — the wisdom gathered from
the ever enlarging experience of the world,— the
case is otherwise with the Christian Church. For
the Church as we have seen bears witness to a fact
of history ; and the earliest Christian ages were
nearest to that fact. The Christian tradition was
started by those who could say "we have seen,"
and carried on by those who could say " we have
talked with those who saw," and is therefore of
necessity most vivid as it nears its fountain-head.
Moreover, it was not merely the fact of history
but its interpretation that the Church proclaimed;
and that interpretation was given once for all by
the inspired writers of the New Testament.
Subsequent generations may have enlarged its
application, but they have not changed its
essence. It comes to us as it was first taught by
the men who sealed their witness with their lives.
And when we pass beyond all this to the age
of councils and of creeds we find the Christian
consciousness, the mind of the Church, as
expressed by all its leading men, ever anxious
to preserve the apostolic tradition — to do and
teach, as the apostles were held to have taught
and done. And why ? — but because they
believed their function to be the transmission H

98 THE AUTHORITY ch.
of a witness — witness to a fact of infinite and
age - long significance, that never could grow
obsolete or old.
There is nothing, therefore, reactionary, no
academic antiquarianism, in our Christian appeal
to antiquity ; for the antiquity in question is not
a past from which we are sundered by long ages,
but the advent of the power by which we live
to-day — " Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and
to-day and for ever."
Now the first essential of a visible society
is organization, and when we turn to the
organization of the early, undivided Church, we
find that it centres in the episcopate, which is, of
course, generically a priesthood, but a priesthood
of a specific kind. " A bishop," in the words of
Hooker, "is a minister of God, unto whom with
permanent continuance there is given not only
power of administering the Word and Sacra
ments, which power other presbyters have ; but
also a further power to ordain ecclesiastical
persons, and a power of chiefty in government
over presbyters as well as laymen, a power to be
by way of jurisdiction a Pastor even to Pastors
themselves." Now there can be no question
that as a fact of history the general opinion of

v OF THE CHURCH 99
the early Church ascribed the institution of this
office to the apostles themselves ; bishops were
regarded as the authorized successors of the
apostles. As early as the end of the first cen
tury Clement of Rome writes to the Corinth
ians, " The apostles have preached to us from
our Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ from God.
Christ, therefore, was sent by God, the apostles
by Christ. . . . And thus, preaching through
countries and cities, they appointed the first-
fruits of their conversions to be bishops and
ministers over such as should afterwards believe."
And Irenaeus in the second century says, "We
can enumerate those who were instituted by the
apostles as bishops in the different Churches."
While the importance of the office, as early as
the opening years of the second century, is
attested in the famous epistles of Ignatius,
which chiefly for this reason have been subjected
to criticism as later forgeries, but criticism which
may now be said to have finally collapsed. " Be
subject to your bishop," he says, " your bishop
presiding in the place of God, submitting to him,
or rather not to him, but to the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the bishop of us all." "See
that ye all follow your bishop ; as Jesus Christ

100 THE AUTHORITY ch.
the Father." " Let no man do anything of what
belongs to the Church separately from the bishop
. . . but whatsoever he shall approve of; that is
also pleasing to God."
Various critical questions have been raised
since the Reformation, and more especially of
recent years, as to the origin of the episcopate,
with a view to suggesting that it was evolved, so
to speak, from below rather than imposed from
above ; that it gradually and sporadically arose,
that is to say, out of vaguer and less definite
forms of ministry, instead of being commissioned
by the apostles to continue and transmit their
own authority. We need not for our present
purpose discuss these criticisms in detail ; for
that purpose is to consider the significance of the
episcopate rather than its origin.1
But a general remark upon the subject may be
allowed in passing. There are confessedly some
literary allusions to the episcopate which seem to
conflict with the usual view of the Church. And
they have been supposed, in some quarters, to be
reinforced of late years by possible inferences from
the recently discovered " Teaching of the Twelve
Apostles." Yet if the difficulties thus created
1 See Note B.

v OF THE CHURCH 101
were put at their strongest, — which would in
itself be a great concession, — even then, the
smallness of their proportion to the mass of
counter-evidence must be borne in mind. More
over, any attempt to draw general conclusions
from the passages in question depends largely
for its possibility upon our ignorance of the later
apostolic and sub-apostolic history. It is of the
nature of the argument from silence (argumentum
e silentio) and has all the weakness of that argu
ment. We do not know what happened, and
may therefore, it is assumed, make a conjectural
hypothesis, out of some half-lights in the literature
that has come down to us. But this assumption
presupposes that the Christians of the second
century were as ignorant as we are of what their
own fathers and grandfathers had been doing,
and that despite of the intense emphasis which
they lay upon fidelity to the apostolic tradition.
For there can be no question that by that" time the
episcopate was an established fact, and generally
believed to be of apostolic institution ; on which
Hooker makes the appropriate comment, " No
doubt but being established by them on whom
the Holy Ghost was poured in so abundant
a measure for the ordering of Christ's Church,

102 THE AUTHORITY ch.
it had either divine appointment beforehand or
divine approbation afterwards, and is in that
respect to be acknowledged the ordinance of
God."1 * It is reasonable to maintain, therefore, as the
Church of England does by implication, that those
and those Churches only which have retained the
historic episcopate are in point of organization
identical with the primitive, the undivided Church,
and are consequently, despite their disunion,
legitimate branches of the Catholic Church. If
But our present purpose is not to argue this
point as against those Christians who hold other
views, but merely to enucleate the fact that the
episcopate has descended from the earliest ages,
and rules the immense majority of Christians
to-day, in order to raise the question, What
does this episcopate represent ? What does it
symbolize to the world ?
For it is, beyond question, a great fact ; it
looms large in human history — this order of
spiritual rulers that has outlived successive
dynasties, itself instinct, the while, with a vitality
that does not age. It is older in England than
the Norman, older than the Saxon conquest, yet
1 Hooker, E. P., vii. 5, 1.

v OF THE CHURCH 103
as quick with energy as ever in the world to-day.
It is independent of all forms of political organiza
tion ; independent of all outward conditions of
life ; whether called to crown a monarch with the
pomp and circumstance of ancient state, or to
live in exile and die in martyrdom among the
savage islands of the sea. It has passed, in its
long history, through many a vicissitude, and
seen its days of power and days of persecution ;
days of reverence and days of ridicule ; dark days,
too, at times, of degradation from within. But
still, through evil report and good report it has
persisted ; and is as strenuous as ever in its
missionary enterprise to-day. It is no ordinary
thing, then, this Christian episcopate, to be
explained by ordinary causes ; for no other
institution has retained its youth after well-nigh
twenty centuries of troubled existence. Its
changeless identity, which challenges our wonder,
is a part of its spiritual witness to a world of
chance and change. For the episcopate is at
once the symbol and the instrument of God's
authoritative hold upon the world through Christ ;
since, though a bishop may be designated by
king or minister or people, he can only be made
a bishop by the imposition of a bishop's hand,

104 THE AUTHORITY ch.
the hand of one who in his turn has received in
like way the like authority. And that authority
points back, as we have seen, to the first com
mission of the apostles by Him who proclaimed
His own commission from the Father, and
promised to be with them "always even unto
the end of the world."
In saying this we must of course allow that
the lineal continuity of the episcopate is not a thing
that admits of proof; and may always therefore
be liable to objections like those forcibly urged
by Macaulay. Macaulay, in a well-known passage
of his essays, following Chillingworth, argues
that, as a matter of ordinary probability, there
must have been many irregular ordinations, and
consequent breaches of the succession during the
obscurity of the Middle Ages when, as he says,
"the facts that are discernible through that
obscurity prove that the Church was exceedingly
ill- regulated." This again, we may remark, is mainly an
argumentum e silentio ; and ignores both the
tenacity of the Christian tradition and the
Christian belief in the guidance of the Holy
Spirit. But after all it is only a hypothetical
objection, and does not therefore require more

v OF THE CHURCH 105
than a hypothetical answer. If, therefore, we
may answer, through the element of error in all
things human, irregular ordinations did at times
occur, we may well believe that the Holy Spirit
would exceptionally remedy the exceptional
defect, and so reconstitute the normal order.
For the principle that the Sabbath was made
for man and not man for the Sabbath is one that
must govern all sacramental ordinances. They
may be normal instruments, but can never be
limiting conditions of the Spirit's action. We
recognize that action among Christians who are
without the episcopal organization ; and need not,
therefore, hesitate to admit the like on occasion
among those that are within.
The objections in question, therefore, do not
invalidate the broad historic fact that the epis
copate exists and has existed through the ages
with a continuous claim to be at once an instru
ment and a symbol of God's authority over man.
Nor is the significance of this claim affected by
the fact that it is only admitted by Christians.
The authority of Christ Himself was only
accepted in His earthly lifetime by the few.
And our present point is not the success of the
claim, but its existence. From the foundation of

106 THE AUTHORITY ch.
the Church it has always been present in the
world. The witness has always been borne ;
the protest always made ; God's authority always
asserted. But it may be urged against all this by the
comparative student of religion that the Christian
priesthood is after all only a special instance of a
world-wide and world-old phenomenon, and cannot
be explained by itself. All nations and peoples
have had their priests, appointed in various ways ;
and oftentimes of very conspicuously human
origin. The Christian priesthood must not, there
fore, be isolated from its context in human history
and treated as a thing apart, since it is only the
latest expression of what would appear to be a
general instinct in mankind.
This demurrer may be made from very
different points of view, ranging from that of the
agnostic who regards all priesthoods as equally
fraudulent to that of the Theist who merely
wishes to undermine the foundations of what he
considers objectionable sacerdotalism.
Now the premises of this argument are
perfectly true ; but not necessarily the conclusion.
For the conclusion is only another instance of
that misuse of evolutionary theory which we

v OF THE CHURCH 107
have often had occasion to criticize ; the misuse
which consists in assuming that a thing cannot
rise higher in value than its point of historic
origin. Whereas in a rational and, therefore,
teleological world, such as we have scientific
grounds for holding ours to be, it is the later
that illuminate the earlier stages of development
by showing what they were destined in the course
of time to become. And this is precisely what
the Christian episcopate does. It has confessedly
its roots in the past ; reaching back into the dim
distance of prehistoric ages. It is akin to the
Jewish priesthood before it, and thence to all the
earlier priesthoods of the world. But it is the
culmination — the definite, articulate, rational
culmination of all this priesthood. It is priest
hood grown self-conscious, clearly aware, that is,
of its own meaning ; and therefore aware of what
in earlier ages it only stammered to express.
For the religious instinct, which we now recognize
to be so elementary a part of human nature, early
issued in the institution of priesthood. And,
however degraded that priesthood might be,
when its gods were conceived of as "partial,
vengeful, passionate, unjust," it still symbolized
the authority of the divine in human life. And

108 THE AUTHORITY ch.
when religious conceptions were gradually refined
and purified, as most notably among the Jews,
this witness of the priesthood rose correspondingly
in character. But with the advent of Christ
"not to destroy but to fulfil" came a clearer
revelation of the Fatherhood of God and of its
essential foundation in love. The Shepherd of
Israel was thenceforth revealed as the Good
Shepherd of the world. And priesthood there
after became a pastorate, a shepherd's office,
whose function was to " tend the flock of God . . .
exercising the oversight (firmKotrriv, bishoprick)
not of constraint but willingly, according unto
God ; nor yet for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind ;
neither as lording it over the charge allotted to
you, but making yourselves examples to the
flock."1 Thus the significance of the Christian priest
hood, so far from being in any way diminished, is
immensely enhanced by its organic connection
with all that went before : since that connection
unifies and illuminates the spiritual history of the
world. For the old notion of a primitive revela
tion to man had come to seem, at least to many
minds, untenable, in the light of new opinions on
1 I Peter v. 2, 3.

v OF THE CHURCH 109
the lowly origin of our race. But psychological
inquiry now gives back to us, in the name of
instinct, much if not all of the important truth
which that notion enshrined. For we find a
religious tendency, with rare exceptions, that may
well be due to degradation, like the atrophy of
unused organs — a religious tendency that would
seem to be a very part of the make and constitu
tion of man. While from the. dimmest dawn of
history we see this instinct issuing in the
differentiation of an order" of men, who should
represent, however obscurely, the divine claim
upon the world ; and impress, however crudely,
a spiritual sanction upon human affairs. Further,
in one race, this claim rises, by degrees that we
can but partly trace, to that of One, authoritative,
almighty, holy, loving God, who "at divers times
and in divers manners spake in time past unto
the fathers." " It is He that hath made us, and
not we ourselves ; we are His people and the
sheep of His pasture." And finally from this
race issues, in the fulness of time, One whom we
Christians believe to be no less than God
Incarnate ; renewing and reinforcing by the august
appeal of His own redeeming love, God's claim
over the hearts and minds and consciences of

no THE AUTHORITY ch.
men ; and sending messengers to win Him the
allegiance of all subsequent ages.
These messengers are still amongst us, and
still transmit their office in words of spiritual
authority — authority to preach the Word — the
Word made flesh ; and authority to administer
the sacraments which unite us through His
body, the Church to Himself its Head.
Thus the comparison with earlier religions
does but emphasize the value of the Christian
priesthood, by showing its roots to be as old as
history ; rising at first, it may possibly be, from
an almost instinctive human tendency, which is
thus seen to be a prophetic signature impressed
upon our race, to claim us from our origin
for God.
It will be noticed that we have been speaking
only of one aspect of the Christian Church,
namely, its organization. Our object has been
to emphasize the fact that Jesus Christ not only
claimed spiritual authority over man, in virtue
of His mission from the Father, the source of all
authority; but also left behind Him a society, to
perpetuate the claim. And the corollaries of this
fact that we would emphasize are two — first,
that there still exists a religious authority in the

v OF THE CHURCH in
Christian episcopate and its attendant priesthood,
which is identical with that of old, and wholly
unaffected, as authority, by any advances of
criticism or fluctuations of popular prejudice. It
is a common, a traditional authority which its
temporary possessors can only exercise, as such,
within the strict limits of their original commis
sion, and not for any further or individual end.
But within those limits it enables them to act
and speak with secure certainty as living organs in
their generation, of the divine invitation to men,
" Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest."
Secondly, we would notice that though this
authority only exists, as such, for those who are
willing to accept it, yet the fact that it exists at
all has a striking evidential value. It arrests
attention, and must be reckoned with, in any
account of human history. Despite the many
difficulties which beset our thoughts upon the
matter, we can hardly help believing that the
earth's long evolution has a purpose, and that the
crown of that purpose is the existence of man.
all tended to mankind
And, man produced, all has its end thus far :
But in completed man begins anew
A tendency to God.

ii2 CHURCH AUTHORITY ch. v
We find that when man appears in history,
his nature has already prompted him to recognize
a spiritual environment and in its service to
differentiate priesthoods. These priesthoods
culminate in the Christian ministry, which with
clear consciousness claims to be the human
instrument through which God Incarnate nor
mally appeals to man ; and, in fact, as a result
of that claim, has continued to create through the
ages that Christian character which exhibits the
noblest type of life that the world has seen. It
is difficult to many minds not to recognize in all
this the operation of God in history claiming the
allegiance of mankind.

CHAPTER VI
THE AUTHORITY OF THE CREED
It is of course only by a somewhat artificial
process of abstraction that we can consider the
organization of the Church, apart from its
doctrines ; and we will now pass from the
authority of the teachers to the authority of
their teaching. That teaching has in the past
been dogmatic in its method ; and in the present
day there is a widespread objection to dogmatic
teaching about things divine ; especially when
couched in the language of a bygone age. We
have therefore to consider, in the face of this
objection, what is the rationale of Christian
dogma. In the first place, we have seen that the Church
was founded by a living Person, and committed
to living persons to hand on. And what is it
that they were to hand on ? Primarily a life, a
new life. " I am come that they might have
»3 I

n4 THE AUTHORITY ch.
life, and that they might have it more abund
antly." Men are to be enrolled in the new
society and thereby united to its living Head ;
their wills enfranchised, their affections uplifted,
their energies intensified, their whole existence
quickened by " the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus."
And the distinguishing characteristic of this life
was love. " We know that we have passed from
death unto life because we love the brethren."
While the very mechanism by which this new life
was symbolised and conveyed was itself alive and
personal ; oral teaching, baptism, the laying on of
hands, the breaking of bread, all involve personal
action and contact with persons. The whole
atmosphere throbs and palpitates with life. It is
easy, therefore, to contrast with all this what is
sometimes called the deadness of dogmatic
formulae ; and to maintain that in such a living
society as this, these formulae have no funda
mentally essential place, no indispensably
necessary function. Such old documents, it is
urged, must of necessity grow obsolete ; and the
life of to-day cannot be fettered by the dead hand
of the past. But will this bear examination ? Is
the contrast true ?
To begin with, all human life involves

vi OF THE CREED 115
consciousness. To live to any purpose we must
know what we mean and what we are about.
And all religious life involves a religious con
sciousness, a conception of God and our relation
to Him. " He that cometh to God must believe
that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them
that diligently seek Him." Naturally, therefore,
the Christian life involves the Christian conscious
ness, the Christian belief about God and His
relation to man. It is a living union with a living
Person ; but a necessary part of that union must
consist in thought. The function of the Church
is to win the world to Christ ; but this necessarily
involves teaching who and what Christ is; and this
has always, as a matter pf history, meant teaching
the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
These doctrines differentiate the Christian from
all other religions. And the authority to transmit
the Church implies the authority to transmit the
doctrines, not as intellectual conceptions apart
from the life that they enable, but as the
intellectual conditions of that actual life which
from age to age is being handed on.
There are of course various bodies who claim
the Christian name while denying both the
doctrines in question ; but they would admit that

116 THE AUTHORITY ch.
in so doing they use the name in a different sense
from the Catholic Church as above defined, which
has always taught these doctrines as the essence
of its message. Now the doctrine or teaching
about the Trinity and the Incarnation consists
partly in a statement of facts, namely, the facts of
the historic life and death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ ; and partly in a particular inter
pretation of those facts. Of course many modern.
critics would put the resurrection in the class of
interpretations ; but that is never how the Church
has historically viewed it. In the view of the
Church it is an event which happened and was
described by those who had seen and spoken with
the risen Lord. The Church then teaches that
these facts took place ; and that the true inter
pretation of them is that which sees in them the
Incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity.
And this teaching is compendiously summed up
in the three creeds which are accepted with one
subtle difference between the East and West, by
all the branches of the catholic or episcopally
governed Church. And these creeds are dog
matic ; they do not teach hypothetically but
categorically or with authority. " This is," they
say in effect, " what Christians believe, and it is

vi OF THE CREED 117
this belief which enables them to live the
Christian life." " Whosoever therefore would
live the Christian life, and die in the Christian
hope of the future must thus think of the Trinity
and the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ."
We do not now propose to discuss these
doctrines ; but merely the authoritative mode of
their presentation. In the first place, then, it
should be noticed that if these doctrines are true,
they can only be known to us by revelation, that
is to say on authority. That revelation we believe
to have consisted partly in Christ's own life and
teaching ; partly in the subsequent illumination
of the apostles by the Holy Spirit, enabling them
to understand the significance of that life and
teaching, as He had promised. " When He the
Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all
truth. . . . He shall glorify me, for He shall
receive of mine, and shall show it unto you."
Hence arose the Christology, as it is now called,
of the early Church ; from the inspired interpreta
tion of the facts concerning Jesus Christ. We
may argue as to the probability or improbability
of this revelation, and examine the various
evidences that may be given of its truth ; but if
we are once convinced that it is true, that it is

118 . THE AUTHORITY ch.
a revelation from God, we must accept it as
authoritative, or on its own authority. The very
notion of a revelation implies something beyond
our natural power of discovery, or of criticism ;
we may subsequently recognize its reasonable
ness, but cannot demonstrate it by reason ; while,
on the other hand, however much we might dis
believe it, we could never disprove it by reason.
If, therefore, the Church exists to transmit the
good news of a revelation to the world, and to
perpetuate a type of character founded on that
revelation, it must of necessity present its
message in authoritative form. " These are the
facts, and this is the catholic interpretation of
those facts."
First it witnesses to the facts ; it states
authoritatively that they happened ; and facts can
be attested in no other way. But it includes in
these facts the supernatural birth and the resur
rection of Christ ; neither of which, we are told by
many critics, can be called facts, in any ordinary
sense of the term. Of course neither the one nor
the other has a place in secular records ; they are
not in the plane of ordinary history. But the
Church, as the extension of the Incarnation, moves
in the spiritual as well as in the secular world.

vi OF THE CREED n9
And there may be facts in the history of the
Church, in the literal sense of events which
actually happened ; but which were only known
and believed within the Christian circle, by those
who were spiritually prepared to receive them.
And such, in the belief of the Church, were the
two facts in question. They occurred in the
world, but they were not known in the world's
history ; they were only known to those who were
" not of the world," and " of whom the world was
not worthy," those whose personal devotion to
Christ had morally merited further knowledge of
Him, and intellectually prepared them for its
acceptance. This does not of course mean that
these events were spiritual, in the often misused
sense of the word, as having no contact with the
external, the material order. On the contrary,
their whole significance for us lies in the fact that
they had such contact. It simply means that,
like some State secret known only to an initiate
few, they were only known to those to whom
Christ Himself had given "power to become
sons of God."
Then we come to the interpretation of the
facts. It will hardly now be denied that the
doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were

120 THE AUTHORITY ch.
held in the apostolic age with sufficient clearness
to lead naturally to the further definition which
they subsequently received. Even those who
consider them erroneous have to admit their
early origin. And the Church of the second
century, which proclaims them so decidedly,
attributes them emphatically to the apostolic
tradition. They are the intellectual presupposi
tions of the Church's message that " God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself," and
were developed, as we believe, by the Holy Spirit
in the minds of the men who were so conscious
of His guidance that they could definitely say,
"It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us."
Naturally, therefore, the Church teaches these
doctrines with authority, for it could teach them
in no other way. Its business is to make men
Christians ; and the Christian life and character
cannot be founded on an hypothesis or an open
question — " a great perhaps," but only on the
rock of a definite belief about God and His
relation to mankind ; namely, that " God so
loved the world that He gave His only-begotten
Son to the end that all who believe in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life."
But obviously the doctrines in question were not

vi OF THE CREED 121
as formulated in the apostolic age as they sub
sequently came to be. And it is the degree
of authority attaching to their subsequent formu
lation that raises difficulties in many minds at
the present day.
In the first place, we must remember the
avowed object of the creeds, which was simply to
guard the apostolic tradition. New questions in
volved new answers, expressed in the phraseology
of the day. But the intention of those answers,
in the minds of the men who made them, was to
reassert the Church's original belief. And it is in
this sense that we receive them, and no other.
In other words they are compendious summaries,
though sometimes in new terms, of what is con
tained in the New Testament as traditionally
interpreted by the undivided Church, or of the
apostolic tradition as reflected in the pages of the
New Testament, and are not to be taken as
meaning more than this. To take a single
illustration from the Athanasian creed, the dis
tinction there emphasized between the Son as
begotten and the Spirit as proceeding may
easily look like a piece of undue dogmatism on
the mystery of the divine nature, which we can
so little comprehend. But in reality it is the very

122 THE AUTHORITY ch.
reverse of this, being simply an assertion that,
just because we know so little, we must abide by
the language of Scripture, which in the one case
says " begotten," and in the other " proceeding " ;
a mere re-affirmation of the Scriptural terms.
Further, we must bear in mind that some of the
Scriptural terms themselves are obviously sym
bolical — terms like " descended into hell,"
"ascended into heaven," or again "eternal fire"
— symbolic adumbrations of realities that we
cannot adequately apprehend. And different
ages must inevitably differ in their interpretation
of symbols, since they will interpret them accord
ing to their own modes of thought. The use of
these phrases in the creeds, therefore, does not
commit us to any bygone interpretation of them,
any obsolete astronomy or mediaeval view of hell.
It simply, as before, refers us back to Scripture,
which we naturally interpret with the best light
that we possess. But why should we not remodel
the language of the creeds, it is sometimes asked,
in places where it seems archaic and possibly
suggestive of conceptions that we have outgrown ?
The complete and final objection to this lies in
the divided condition of the Church. In the first
place, the return from this state of division to one

vi OF THE CREED 123
of communion is, as we have seen, the necessary
aspiration of all sincere Christians. And as long
as the three creeds which have come down from
the undivided days of the Church are still common
to its now estranged and separated branches, we
have a formulated agreement in essential doctrine,
on which at least to found a hope of better days
some time to come. Whereas if we in any way
diminish the exactitude of this agreement we en
danger the essential basis of future reunion, and
to that extent defer its likelihood. And again
the very fact of our division carries with it a
corresponding inability to modify any formula
which we share with others, who could have no
concurrent voice in its modification. The promise
of guidance into all truth was made to the apostolic,
the united Church. And, as long as that union
remained, a common Christian consciousness, a
mind of the Church, is plainly discernible behind
all the differences of individual opinion and
fluctuations of popular feeling ; and in this mind
of the Church as expressed in the creeds, that is
in its most authoritative and deliberate utterance,
we are bound to recognize the promised guidance
of the Spirit. But the different portions of the
divided Church are partial in their views. They

124 THE AUTHORITY ch.
emphasize different aspects of their common
inheritance ; and would inevitably import this
partiality into any modification which they might
attempt of a creed.
And this suggests a further thought. The
creeds were drawn up at a period which, for all
its metaphysical acumen, was simpler in thought
than our own ; and they reflect this comparative
simplicity in their severe and definite outlines.
They are the classic expression, so to say, of the
bare essence of Christian belief; and stand to us,
with our complexity of thought and multiplicity
of views, much as a Greek statue does to a modern
symphony. They keep us ever in mind of the
fact that a certain element in our Christian thought
is fixed, and does not change with our other
intellectual changes ; and that because, in the last
analysis, it rests on revelation. We have had the
distinction between revelation and theology much
emphasized of late, to the effect that the former
implies an experience, while the latter arises from
intellectual reflection upon that experience. And
accordingly the creeds might, on a superficial
view, be classed as theological, But they are really
historic ; the epitomized history of a revelation.
For they are the records of an experience handed

vi OF THE CREED 125
down from the witness of those to whom it
occurred ; together with the interpretation which
these its original experts put upon it. The latter
is theological, in a way ; but it is with the theology
of St. Paul and St. John. It represents, that is
to say, the meaning which the experience in
question possessed for those who underwent it ;
which for them therefore was an integral part of
the total experience. For it was not merely the
life and death and teaching or even the resurrec
tion of Jesus Christ which constituted the gospel
or good news of the apostolic Church, but the
significance of His personality as realized, under
the guidance of the Spirit, after His resurrection.
And this significance involved the doctrines of
the Trinity and the Incarnation, not of course as
formulated in a later age, but as we find them in
St. Paul and in St. John. For the course of recent
criticism has sufficiently established the fact that
what St. Paul calls his gospel, which certainly
included these two doctrines, was common to him
with the other leading apostles, and admitted by
them as such. It was the current " gospel " of the
Church, therefore, long before our present synoptic
gospels were written, and is reflected at a later
date in the writings of St. John. And it was this

126 THE AUTHORITY ch.
gospel which the creeds were subsequently com
posed, as we have seen, to protect, and not in
any degree to alter. This then is the positive
content of the creeds — the statement of the ex
perience of the apostles as interpreted by them
selves. For what the apostles preached to the
world was the history of Jesus Christ, together
with the meaning which it had for themselves
and the new life which it consequently enabled.
And this made up one total experience, " I live
yet not I. Christ liveth in me." " Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which
according to His abundant mercy hath begotten
us again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead." " Hereby know
we that we dwell in Him and He in us, because
He hath given us of His Spirit." All this is the
language of personal experience, but of experience
with which an element of theological inter
pretation is inseparably blent. And this may
suggest that at their point of origin revelation
and theology are not so easily separable as they
subsequently become. When the men who claim
to have received a revelation are dead and gone,
we may speculate on the content of their message,
and deduce theological conclusions from it ; as,

vi OF THE CREED 127
for example, the various theories of the atonement,
none of which were ever incorporated in a creed.
But the original witnesses to the Christian
revelation do not present us with two separate
things, a historic life, and its subsequent interpre
tation ; but one thing, a particularly interpreted
life. The interpretation, the significance of the
life of Christ, is the subject-matter of their
preaching. And the apprehension of this signifi
cance they attributed to the promised guidance
of His Spirit, who should lead them into all truth.
Doubtless this apprehension grew deeper and
fuller as their life went on, and may have been
greater in some than in others. But not till they
had attained it in a marked degree did they preach
at all ; for it was the essence of their preaching.
Their personal intercourse with Jesus Christ,
together with the change of thought and character
to which it led, formed one total, indivisible
experience ; and this they proclaimed.
" Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God
among you, by miracles and wonders and signs,
which God did by Him, in the midst of you, as ye
yourselves know . . . This Jesus hath God
raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. There
fore being by the right hand of God exalted, and

128 THE AUTHORITY ch.
having received of the Father the promise of the
Holy Ghost, He hath shed forth this, which ye
now see and hear."
Such is the first recorded Christian sermon ;
and St. Peter is here speaking under the personal
experience of the Spirit's indwelling presence.
Now the object of the Church's existence is to
perpetuate the possibility of this experience ; to
enable men in every successive generation to
attain what the earliest Christians possessed, the
gift of the Holy Ghost. But the experience of
this gift was part of a whole ; it was inseparably
connected with their belief in Christ as the only-
begotten Son of the Father, their obedience to
His commandment — His new commandment of
love, and their faith in His promise to be with
them to the end of the world. If, therefore, the
experience of the first Christians is to be
reproduced in us to-day — the experience that led
St. Paul to say " I live yet not I. Christ liveth
in me " — it must be reproduced in the same
context and connection. We must possess and
act upon the belief that made their experience
possible. Hence the necessity of the creeds.
They are historical. They summarize the life of
Christ, and what as a fact of history the early

vi OF THE CREED 129
Church believed about Him. Two of them, indeed,
employ language which was the result of later
controversies. But they do this, as we have seen
above, in the belief that it was the fittest language
that they could employ, and under a sense of guid
ance by the Holy Spirit. Some of this language we
might like to change into a more modern form.
But from this we are precluded, as we have said,
by our divisions. It is a disability incidental to
the various errors and mistakes which brought
those divisions about ; the inevitable penalty
of their existence. We must use the ancient
language therefore, even if with a sense of its
being at times archaic, as being the utterance of
the undivided Church. For it enshrines the two
central doctrines of our belief — the Trinity and
the Incarnation. It keeps us in remembrance of
the fact that these two doctrines are primitive and
fixed, however much speculation may play round
them. And to do this it must be, and could not
possibly be other than dogmatic. And this is no
defect, but a necessity of the case. For the
Christian life and character is a definite and
positive and concrete thing ; and as such can
only be sustained on a definite and positive and
concrete creed. It is no merely sentimental K

130 THE AUTHORITY ch.
condition, or mere imitation of Christ's morality,
but a personal allegiance to His Person. He
claimed the obedience of man's mind, as well as
of his heart and will, and claimed it as having
authority from the Father. And the Church,
which has an authoritative ministry to reiterate the
claim along the ages, must also, of necessity,
have an authoritative form in which to make it.
And the possibility of this fixed form is due to the
fact that, in its essential character, our Christian
conception of God does not alter. Different ages
and races have indeed laid a different emphasis
upon the various divine attributes. But the
belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation has
always remained constant. It came to us, as we
believe, from above ; from the immediate action
of the Spirit on the disciples who had personally
seen and heard and conversed with the Lord, and
on St. Paul after the experience of his conversion ;
and we can neither augment nor diminish it by
human speculation. We are no nearer to an
understanding of either doctrine than were the
Fathers ; the most speculative of whom are
continually anxious to profess their own incapacity.
Our knowledge of them is, in the well-known
phrase, regulative rather than speculative. It

vi OF THE CREED 131
rules our conduct, that is to say, rather than
informs our intellect. And our language on the
whole subject is of necessity largely symbolical.
But still these doctrines afford a fixed and
authoritative basis for our practical life ; which
rescues it from the intellectual vagueness, the
unreal sentimentalism, the moral hesitation which
we continually see arising from indefinite and
hypothetical conceptions of God. For in all our
worldly affairs we know that success is impossible
without a definite aim and object, a precise
purpose which determines, among life's many
possibilities, what we are to select, and what to
leave alone. And the same law obtains in the
spiritual life. As long as the great realities with
which that life is concerned are treated as open
questions for speculative discussion, or agnostic
avoidance, the life itself is correspondingly in
determinate and vague. It may indeed aspire,
but it cannot attain. Whereas the Christian
life is founded on allegiance to a Person and
consequent obedience to His personal authority ;
and this at once gives it precision of purpose.
" For I know whom I have believed, and am
persuaded that He is able to keep that which I
have committed unto Him against that day." " I

132 THE AUTHORITY ch.
therefore so run not as uncertainly ; so fight I,
not as one that beateth the air." " With good will
doing service as to the Lord and not to men."
Such was the spirit that enabled the vast practical
achievements of St. Paul.
Now obedience is never a quality that is
naturally easy to man. But it is probably no
exaggeration to say that in the present day
its practice is exceptionally difficult. For we
live in a critical age, and are accounted " nothing
if not critical " ; critical of everything, and
amongst other things, of authority in all its forms.
And criticism is the polar opposite of obedience.
For it is the very essence of the one temper
to raise questions before committing itself, and
of the other to commit itself without question.
The old notion, that obedience, as such, was a
virtue for its own sake, would revolt the average
modern mind, which views discontent as the
necessary road to progress. Yet there is truth,
profound truth as well as beauty in the saying
that " the glory of all created beings, from the
poising of the planets to the gravitation of a grain
of dust consists in their obedience and not in
their freedom." '
1 Ruskin.

vi OF THE CREED 133
The objection, then, to dogma, as such, with
its necessary implication of a claim to mental
obedience, is naturally strong in the present day ;
for the intellectual temper of the age is against
it. But this fact, in Christian eyes, so far from
justifying its abolition, rather necessitates its
re-assertion. Since it stands for the fact that
there are certain central verities, which, though
they profoundly influence our thought, were not
attained by any process of mere thinking ; but
rest, in the last resort, upon authority — the
august authority of Christ Himself, and of the
Holy Spirit His interpreter. The words in
which they have been transmitted by the Church
are of necessity symbolical ; but symbolical of a
perfectly positive and definite belief — the belief
that "God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto Himself."
This is the belief on which is based our love
of God, and of each other ; and hence it is
that when we meet for our great act of Christian
worship we still say, in the old words that all
the saints have used before us, the creed, the
solemn symbol of our faith.

CHAPTER VII
THE AUTHORITY OF SACRAMENTS
The Church confronts the world, not only with a
ministry and a creed which, if they are accepted
at all, must in the last resort be accepted on
authority, but also with sacraments which are
in similar case. They may be rejected ; but if
they are accepted, they must be accepted on the
authority of Christ and the Church, and represent
the unqualified claim of that authority to human
obedience. And this claim is unaffected by the
different views that may be held about sacramental
doctrine. It is the same to-day that it ever was ;
" This do."
In saying this we are at once met in the
present day, as we have already been met in
other regions, by the student of comparative
religion. The things which we now call sacra
ments have their root in the remote past, and are
as common among uncultured races, as among
134

ch.vii AUTHORITY OF SACRAMENTS 135
the great religions of the earlier world. This is
now so well known a fact that we need not
pause to illustrate it ; but may pass on to our
immediate point, which is its frequent misuse in
anti-Christian argument. Usages, ceremonies,
customs, of the nature that we now call sacra
ments, notablybaptisms and communion feasts, are
plainly, we are told, in the light of history, seen
to be human institutions, human inventions, with
no supernatural authority about them. Indeed,
the extreme view is sometimes maintained that
these religious customs were actually prior to
religious beliefs ; and that the latter gradually
arose from the desire to explain or justify habits
that had more or less instinctively grown up
among men better accustomed to act than to
think. It is easy, therefore, to argue that the Christian
sacraments, however elevated and refined, are
yet the lineal descendants of these earlier
customs, some of whose ritual accompaniments
they undoubtedly did in time assimilate ; and
that consequently they are of purely human origin
and can claim no unique authority. But this
argument begs the question, in logical language,
against the Incarnation. It assumes, that is to

136 THE AUTHORITY ch.
say, that no such thing as the Incarnation ever
took place. Whereas the Christian, who believes
in the Incarnation, is able to give a totally
different interpretation to the same facts. For
the very meaning of the Incarnation is that God
" took our nature upon Him " in order to act
upon mankind through human means. But in
so doing He raised those human means to a new
level, and invested them with His own unique
authority. Thus He took the fishermen of
Galilee with all their faults, Peter with his
cowardice, James and John with their ambition,
as afterwards the Pharisaic persecutor Paul, and
recreated them with "power from on high" to
bear His witness to the world. He took the
common sights and sounds of earth— the beauty
of the lilies, the ripening of the corn, the
branching of the vine, the wailing of the wind ;
and the daily offices of men — the sower, the
shepherd, the fisherman, the labourer, the mer
chant of pearls, the woman sweeping the house, —
He took all these ordinary things and stamped
them with new spiritual significance, thenceforth
to be His parables for ever. Now and again,
as Christians believe, He impressed a new
nature upon earthly elements, when He multi-

vii OF SACRAMENTS 137
plied the loaves and fishes, and made the water
wine. The fact, therefore, that the Christian sacra
ments were fashioned out of common human
customs does not preclude their being invested
with a wholly new authority by Christ. In the
words of Peter's vision, " What God hath cleansed,
call not thou common or unclean."
There are, of course, extreme critics in the
present day who deny that either baptism, or the
Eucharist, the solemn " breaking of the bread,"
was instituted immediately by Christ Himself.
But this is one of those extravagancies of
criticism that can only be maintained by a reck
less treatment of the New Testament and a
total rejection of the tradition of the early Church.
It is not, therefore, a contention that need be
seriously discussed, as in any way disturbing the
universal Christian belief.
• There have, undoubtedly, been developments,
both in the doctrine and the ritual of the sacra
ments, and divergencies of opinion about them ;
but none of these affect their authoritative
character, as it has always been presented by the
Church. Take, for example, the Eucharist, the
great central act of Christian worship. Other

138 THE AUTHORITY ch.
forms of divine service, litanies and prayers and
praises, have been freely composed and adopted
by the piety of men. But this alone comes down
to us, through the tradition of the Church, as
founded on the Lord's express command, " Do
this in remembrance of me." Thus its institution
emanates from Him who claimed to have
authority from the Father, and in all His words
and works to be carrying out the Father's will ;
and its acceptance, on the part of Christians, is
primarily, and, all other considerations apart, an
acknowledgment of that authority and an act of
obedience to that will. *
We have here, then, the same element of fixity
and permanence that we have seen in the
episcopate and the creed. The former reflects
the divine changelessness in the constitution of
the Church, and the latter in its belief. And the
Eucharist has the like relation to its worship.
It comes to us from Him who is "the same
yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." And it
calls us to communion with Him who changeth
not, and with whom "is no shadow of turning."
And this is the very heart of its significance.
For there are many minds in the present day
that may be described as tinged with religion, in

vii OF SACRAMENTS 139
a way that is hardly more than sentimental ; who
speak, in fact, of religion as cosmic emotion, a
thing of elusive outline and indefinite content.
And their existence creates an atmosphere by
which Christians themselves are often influenced.
And then there is always the subjective side of
religion, which is liable, even in the best of men,
to fluctuate with the natural alterations of feeling.
These fluctuations between elation and depres
sion, rapture and despondency, light and darkness,
confidence and care, have, in all probability, never
been so acutely experienced, nor so adequately
expressed as by many of those whom the world
has recognized as among its greatest saints. But
what is only a temporary trial, and consciously
recognized as such, by characters of the heroic
mould, is apt to be a very serious temptation to
more ordinary Christians. For in their case
failure of feeling may easily induce a relative
degree of religious apathy, which often leads,
while it lasts, to relaxation of moral effort, and, in
consequence, more or less reaction of life.
Now in contrast to all this, the sacramental
system of the Church keeps the objective element
of our religion permanently before us. In thus
using the term " objective " which has now

140 THE AUTHORITY ch.
become so common in this connection, we ought
perhaps to guard ourselves from possible mis
conception by saying that we simply mean by the
term that element of our religious experience
which comes to us, so to say, from without, from
the region that is not ourself ; that is, ultimately,
from God. God is the sole Object of our religious
consciousness, and all that radiates from God to
us and is in any way God-given may therefore be
called, in this sense, objective ; as distinguished
from the similarly termed subjective faith or
feeling or obedience, which receives and appro
priates it.
Of this objective element in our religion, then,
the Eucharist is at once the central symbol and
the cardinal instance. Take it first upon the plane
of its simplest symbolism. It is a sacred meal,
and reminds us at once of our dependence, for
very life, upon food, that wondrously variegated
gift of God to us from without, from nature, the
external world, the region that is not ourself. It
symbolizes the fact that our daily life is directly
due to this gift of God. And then it is a sacred
meal shared in common with our fellows, and
recalling again our entire dependence upon what
is not ourself; the great brotherhood around us,

vii OF SACRAMENTS 141
through whose social order, and work and service,
and sympathy and love, with the help that it gives
and the demand that it makes, we rise from
merely animal to truly human life. Here again
we are in the presence of a gift of God. " Male
and female created He them," and therefore by
essential constitution social. And when we pass
from this outward symbolism to the inner
significance of the Eucharist, it is again profoundly
objective. To begin with, it is a commemora
tion of the historic origin of our religion, of the
life and death, in time, of Jesus Christ, the Word
made flesh ; it carries us back to the last supper,
and reminds us, in the breaking of the bread, that
the essence of that life was not its teaching but
its action ; " that He might be a merciful and
faithful high-priest in things pertaining to God, to
make reconciliation for the sins of the people."
It recalls to us how " God so loved the world that
He gave His only-begotten Son to the end that
all who believe in Him should not perish but
have everlasting life" — a gift, a free gift from Him
who is not ourself.
But further, "the cup of blessing which we
bless is it not the communion of the blood of
Christ ? The bread which we break is it not the

142 THE AUTHORITY ch.
communion of the body of Christ?" It is a
communion with Christ dying for us and risen
again, and ever living to make intercession for
us, and through Him with our fellow-members
of His body. Christians have differed on the
insoluble question of the mode of this communion,
but not on the fundamental fact of its spiritual
reality. And the whole symbolism of our
eucharistic liturgy reminds us that this reality is
a gift of Him who is not ourself. There is the
outward consecration of the natural gifts of bread
and wine, before our eyes ; by the minister
clothed, as we believe, with God-given authority ;
their solemn delivery into our hands ; their signifi
cant reception upon our knees ; all impressive of
the selfsame lesson. It all points to the reception
of a gift, from without, from above, from God.
Here then, again, in our Christian worship,
as in our ministry and creed, we find an element
of fixity, stability, solid -ground on which to rest.
We are in touch with the Eternal not ourselves ;
who is independent of all our human fluctuations
of feeling, all our human variations of opinion ;
who is the same for young and old, rich and poor,
bond and free ; " the same yesterday, and to-day,
and for ever."

vii OF SACRAMENTS 143
And what is true of the Eucharist is true
mutatis mutandis of baptism, and of the sacra
mental system of the Church in general. It is
the same always, and the same for all, high and
low, rich and poor, the simple as well as the
sage. It obliterates all human distinctions,
because it represents the divine gift, the divine
initiative which is the central truth of our re
ligion. "We love Him because He first loved
us." So far, then, from being a survival from less
educated ages, and as such a thing with which
spiritual religion can dispense, the sacramental
system needs especial emphasis and is of special
importance in the present day.
For there has grown up, under the influence
of our evolutionary modes of thought, and in
connection with the comparative study of re
ligions, a tendency to put the human initiative in
place of the divine, the search for God in place
of His revelation. It is true, of course, that
among savage races, and in the various great
ethnic religions of Babylon, Egypt, India, Greece,
and Rome, it is the human element that first
meets the eye ; while there is little evidence
of anything that we can call by so definite
a name as revelation. Those, therefore, who

144 THE AUTHORITY ch.
regard religion as merely a human invention may
easily press these appearances into their service.
But there are several considerations which will
lead the Christian to a different conclusion.
In the first place, we are now familiar with the
thought that " the end is the test of a progressive
revelation."
From the grand result
A supplementary reflux of light,
Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains
Each back step in the circle.
When we find in the highest and most perfect
type of religion the divine initiative so clearly
marked as it is in Christianity, we shall expect
that it must really have been present in those
earlier and less perfect forms of religion, which,
for all their inadequacy, still are steps in the
same road to God. And when we look for it,
with this preconception to guide us, its traces
are to be found.
To begin with, there is the appeal of nature
to man. "The heavens declare the glory of
God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork."
Doubtless the Jew felt the direct religious signi
ficance of nature the more keenly. But St. Paul
affirms its existence for the Greco - Roman
world as well. " That which may be known of

vii OF SACRAMENTS 145
God is manifest to them ; for God hath shewed
it unto them. For the invisible things of Him
from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made,
even His eternal power and Godhead." " He
left not Himself without witness, in that He did
good, and sent us rain from heaven and fruitful
seasons, filling our hearts with food and glad
ness." Here we have an entirely divine initia
tive. " God which made heaven and earth and
the sea and all things that are therein " speaking
to man from without, through material things.
And we have seen above how strong the effect
of this appeal was upon Plato and Aristotle, and
through them and their Neoplatonic and Stoic
successors upon the Greco-Roman world.
Then, again, the mention of these names
should remind us that it is always individuals,
great individuals, that found, and reform, and
revive, and transmit religions and never average
masses of men. Whereas what the comparative
student of religion is most apt to see, is the
average belief and practice of the mass. Here
and there vague forms of great men are dimly
descried in the dawning light of history, but they
are little more than names to us, like Pythagoras,

146 THE AUTHORITY ch.
or Zoroaster. But we may be sure, from uni
versal analogy, that wherever there was any
living religion, there must have been individual
leaders behind it. And again we may argue
from the analogy of what we know in historic
times, that such leaders could never have arisen,
without some sense of inspiration and of mission,
like that of Socrates ; some divine initiative
operant upon them.
Again the facile theorists, who picture a pro
gressive evolution of our race, immensely under
estimate its tendency to degeneration ; and no
where does this act more profoundly than in
religion. " They did not like to retain God in
their knowledge," says St. Paul, in describing
the moral corruption of ancient civilization.
And, short of the extreme degradation that he
denounces, there can be no doubt that the
average mass of a people always reflects its
religion in a more or less degenerate form.
" The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests
bear rule by their means, and my people love
to have it so." This could be said even of the
Jews ; and we may compare with it Plato's
constant invective against the sophistic spirit of
his age, briefly summarized as usual by Aristotle.

vii OF SACRAMENTS 147
" The sophist," says the latter, " differs from the
philosopher in the motive of his life." " For
he gains his living by professing the semblance
of philosophy, without its reality " ; a character
which has been compared with that of the
Pharisee as depicted in the New Testament.
Such degradation, then, is always at work, and
the result in which it invariably issues is hollow-
ness. The letter is retained, but the spirit lost.
Rites, customs, ceremonies, consecrated language
remain, long after their spiritual meaning has
lost its animating power ; till at last, perhaps,
they dwindle into mere instruments and vehicles
of superstition. In a word, the human institu
tions survive, and become survivals, while the
divine fire that once inspired them has fled.
But it is just these external things, these human
institutions, that most readily catch the eye, when
we come to compare and classify the religions
of the past. We know that they must once have
been instinct with life ; but we cannot see where
the life came from, or how it acted on the heart.
For us they can be but specimens in our
museums of religion ; fossils of what formerly
were living things. We are not, therefore,
justified in concluding that, because to us they

148 THE AUTHORITY ch.
look so human, they were not, at their origin,
quickened from above. On the contrary, analogy
would lead us to suppose that whenever, and
as long as, any bygone religion was real, the
same divine initiative in which Christians believe
must in some degree have made itself felt.
Spiritual things are spiritually and not scientific
ally discerned ; we may have a science of re
ligious phenomena, but not of religious faith.
But this does not affect the reality of the faith,
or of the Being who inspires it.
Then, again, what is the religious instinct
itself that is so essential a part of human nature ?
What, in the eyes of a theist, but a divine
signature impressed upon man by his Creator ?
The desire to "feel after God if haply we may
find Him," that desire which lies at the root
of all our religion, irresistibly suggests to us
the conclusion of Augustine, " Thou hast made
us for Thyself, and we are restless till we rest
in Thee." Here, then, we have three different kinds of
consideration : the spiritual influence of the sights
and sounds of material nature upon man ; the
presumptive sense of inspiration in all great
religious teachers, coupled with the likelihood of

vii OF SACRAMENTS 149
its being lost to our sight amid the degradation
of their followers ; and finally, the nature and
character of the religious instinct itself. In the
first and third case we can plainly see the divine
initiative in human religion ; and in the second
we have sufficient reason to presume its operation,
however imperfectly apprehended or obscurely
expressed. We are under no necessity, whatever,
therefore, to grant that the primitive religions of
the world were of merely human origin, and by
so doing pave the way for the further contention
that Christianity is in similar case. But, on
the contrary, when we view them in the light of
our Christian experience, we have ample reason
for maintaining that throughout the religions of
the world the primary fact is God's attraction of
man, and not man's discovery of God. The
extreme case even of Buddhism would be no
real exception to this view. For though meta
physically atheistic, or possibly pantheistic, at its
origin, it was essentially founded on the moral
attractiveness of virtue. And this means, however
otherwise Gotama Buddha might have thought,
that " the power which is not ourself that makes
for righteousness " had hold upon his heart.
The sacramental system of the Church, then,

ISO THE AUTHORITY ch.
brings this divine initiative both symbolically
and actually home to us. And pre-eminently the
Eucharist sums up the fact that from first to last
we are in the hands of God. He made man and
gave him the earth for his use ; the scents and
savours of its fruit for his food ; its latent energies
to serve his will ; its sights and sounds of beauty
to lift his soul to higher things. He became man,
that He might show us the love, than which no
man hath a greater, by laying down His life for
our sake. He founded His Church to bring
home that love to the successive generations of
men ; and through the ministrations of that
Church " to as many as receive Him " He still
gives "power to become sons of God." From
first to last He is the authoritative agent, the
absolute, unconditioned giver. " What hast thou,"
asks St. Paul, "that thou hast not received?"
We did not create, we received our natural life
and its conditions ; and so we do not create
but receive our religion, with all that it in
volves. In saying all this, we are not denying that
religion has existed and may exist independently
of sacraments ; we merely affirm that the system
of the Christian Church is normally sacramental,

vii OF SACRAMENTS 151
and that sacraments, when rightly used, so far
from materializing things spiritual, spiritualize
material things. And herein is their special value.
For the material things with which we deal in
our daily life, including our " garments of the
flesh," are all relative, unstable, fleeting, ever in
a state of change. And we are tempted, while
we view them, to say sadly, as a Greek philosopher
said of old — "All things pass away and nothing
remains." But the sacraments throw a new light
upon this picture of perpetual flux. For they
too are material things, passing like the rest ;
yet through them the Eternal, the Transcendent,
the Unchanging One addresses us, lays hold
of us, unites us to Himself. And in this light
the whole world of matter is transfigured ; as we
realize with what high possibilities material things
are fraught. Food, health, wealth, work, pleasure,
time as it flies, are no longer for us merely
passing phenomena or "appearances," unsub
stantial shadows, that flee away and are forgotten ;
but events in the development of a spiritual being,
moments that can be arrested, and made to
minister, in passing, to the interests of our real,
our eternal life. And that because they are God's
gifts to us, intended for this very end — " talents "

152 THE AUTHORITY ch.
to be used in His service, "opportunities to be
bought up" for Him.
There was a time, early in the Church's history,
when the Manichaean view of matter, as intrinsic
ally evil, led to the docetic heresy, which regarded
the Incarnation as phantasmal, or apparent, and
not real, in order to preserve the divine dignity
from supposed contamination. And we meet
with similar modes of thought in the present day.
" Spiritual " is not unfrequently assumed to be
synonymous with" immaterial," and various fallacies
arise from this mistake. Spiritual religion, it is
supposed, must be, as far as possible, independent
of material conditions. Or again the resurrection
is regarded as a spiritual fact, the question of
whose material counterpart is unimportant. In
the same way a severance is made between the
historical Jesus of Nazareth and the divine idea.
Or by a still more fundamental error the In
carnation is totally rejected, on the ground that
the Infinite could not manifest itself, at a point
of time, in a historical person and historical
events. But all these opinions, like their kindred
heresy of old, ignore the fact that the Incarnation
inaugurated a new epoch in our whole philosophy

vii OF SACRAMENTS 153
of matter. For it not only revealed God to man,
but also man to Himself. It taught us what
perfect manhood could be ; it showed us the truth
of man. And, in so doing, it incidentally revealed
the true meaning of matter, as being no mere
blind and stubborn antithesis to spirit ; but the
agent — the wondrously adaptable and versatile
agent — through which, at least under our present
conditions of existence, spirit habitually works.
Matter, artificially and unnaturally divorced from
spirit, becomes a hideous " Frankenstein " and
inevitable source of materialism both in life and
thought. But matter viewed in its spiritual con
text is seen to be of infinite significance as the
natural and normal instrument of God's dealing
with men. And the Incarnation is the palmary
instance of this. The whole subsequent history
of the Church is, ipso facto, a standing proof of the
illimitable potency with which this single event
in history was charged. To say that God acts
and speaks through matter, or through history, is,
of course, to say that He acts and speaks through
a changing medium, each of whose successive
moments supersedes the last. But the moments,
so regarded, are no mere transitory phases ; for
each will have given expression to a meaning

154 AUTHORITY OF SACRAMENTS ch. vii
that endures. The voice dies away, but there
remains the word, which but for the voice would
never have been uttered. And the essence of
the Incarnation, if one may so speak, is that it
was no mere allegory, no mere " truth embodied
in a tale " ; but truth acted out in history ; under
the strain of the wilderness, the pressure of
Gethsemane and Calvary ; and by that action
realized for ever.
Accordingly the sacraments have been called
extensions of the Incarnation. And they may
well be so termed. For they continue its
principle. They bring the Incarnation home to
us. They convey, to those who use them faith
fully, God's grace or free gift ; with the authority
that comes from above and bespeaks our reverence
and awe, and the assurance and actuality that
material enactment affords. And by so doing,
they give a sacramental character to the whole of
life ; for they teach us to look for and therefore
to find, among the temporal things that are seen,
steps that lead onward and upward to the unseen
things that are eternal.

CHAPTER VIII
THE AUTHORITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
We have endeavoured to show in the three
preceding chapters that the authority of bishops
to perpetuate the Church, the authority of the
creeds as summaries of the Church's belief, and
the authority of the sacraments as organs of the
Church's spiritual life, are for all who accept them
the same that they have always been. They may
be criticized, ridiculed, rejected ; but within the
sphere of their acceptance, they persist unchanged
and " operate unspent." And this leads us on to
the authority of the Bible, which is often vaguely
supposed to have been impaired by the results
of modern criticism. WTiereas, in fact, criticism,
while it has thrown much new light upon what
may be called the human side of the Bible, has
not really shaken its spiritual authority at all.
To take first the case of the Old Testament,
we may consider in brief outline what criticism of
i5S

156 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
the kind that is generally accepted by sober
thinkers has done. Of course it disposes at once
of the notion of literal and verbal inspiration ; but
that had always been an utterly irrational and
indefensible opinion. And we now frankly re
cognize that there is a human element throughout
the Old Testament, which, as such, is liable to the
ordinary limitations of humanity. The biblical
writers did not rise above the scientific concep
tions of their age ; and in matters of history were,
at times, inaccurate. Further, it is now generally
accepted as a fact that, however old some of the
materials which it enshrines may be, the Old
Testament, as we possess it, is the result of much
editing and re-editing ; and that a great deal of
it, in consequence, is of a more recent date than
was formerly supposed. Critics still differ widely
on the extent and details and dates of this editing
process ; but practically all are agreed that, in one
degree or another, it took place. But we need
not pause upon their differences ; as our object
is merely to indicate the nature of the change
which modern criticism has effected. It has re
arranged the order, and consequently altered the
dates, of various portions of the Old Testament.
But the net result of this rearrangement is to

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT .157
emphasize the progressive character of the
religion and morality of Israel, in a way that
brings it into closer harmony with all other
national development. While incidentally it has
removed many difficulties, to which the imperfect
morality of the earlier ages, when viewed out of
its proper perspective, had often given rise. It
will be obvious, therefore, that there is nothing in
criticism of this kind which can essentially affect
a spiritual authority that does not depend on the
date or the name of a writer, but is, in the last
resort, its own self- evidence. Spiritually, for
instance, we neither gain nor lose anything for
being told that Moses did not write the first
chapter of Genesis, or Isaiah the fifty-third
chapter of the book that bears his name, or David
the Fifty-first Psalm.
On the other hand, criticism has, if anything,
enhanced our appreciation of the prophetic
element in the Old Testament by showing how
all its contents, law, history, myth, psalmody, are
penetrated by the prophetic spirit, quickened by
the prophetic atmosphere that unites them into a
whole. And what are the characteristics of this
prophetic spirit ? In the first place, all the prophets
agree in their assured sense of personal inspiration.

158 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
" The Lord called Moses up to the top of the
mount ; and Moses went up. And the Lord said
unto Moses, Go down, charge the people."
" The Lord revealed Himself to Samuel in
Shiloh by the word of the Lord."
" The Lord sent Nathan unto David."
" Behold, the word of the Lord came to him,
and he said unto him, What doest thou here,
Elijah? . . . And he said, Go forth."
" The word of the Lord that came unto
Hosea." " Then answered Amos . . . The Lord took
me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said
unto me, Go prophesy unto my people Israel."
" The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
And he said, Go and tell this people. . . ."
" The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah,
to whom the word of the Lord came. . . . Then
the word of the Lord came unto me saying,
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee
. . . and I ordained thee a prophet unto the
nations." "The word of the Lord came expressly unto
Ezekiel the priest ... in the land of the
Chaldeans by the river Chebar."
" In the second year of Darius the king . . .

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 159
came the word of the Lord by Haggai the
prophet." " In the second year of Darius came the word
of the Lord to Zechariah, the son of Barachiah."
" The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel
by Malachi."
Such are a few typical instances of what may
all be summed up in the single phrase, " The Lord
said unto me, Behold I have put my words in thy
mouth." And whatever date be assigned to the
earlier documents that we have quoted, there can
be no reasonable doubt that the phenomenon
which they describe reaches back to Moses, and
was therefore intermittently present in Israel,
through a period of a thousand years — this
absolute assurance of an inspired mission from
God. This long line of prophets, then, with their
profound sense of inspiration, is a unique thing in
the history of the world. For though we meet
with claims to inspiration in other early religious
books, like the Vedic hymns and the Avesta, its
actual results, when compared with the Jewish
Scriptures, do but emphasize their intense, their
immeasurable distinction. While the oracular
inspiration of the Greeks was altogether of a lower

160 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
kind. Its cryptic mutterings and murmurs cannot
be brought into any comparison with the clear
self-consciousness of the Hebrew prophets.
Now a sense of inspiration, taken by itself, is
of course peculiar to its possessor, and in that
sense subjective ; it does not prove its divine
origin to others. But when the characteristic
spokesmen of a particular people agree through
many centuries, in the same assurance of the self
same mission, the fact begins to rise above mere
subjectivity, and at least raises a strong presump
tion of its own objective reality. That so many
men, through so many ages, of one race and one
race only, should believe themselves divinely
inspired and always to the same effect, suggests,
to say the least, that their belief must have been
true. And when we turn to the result of their
work, the effect of their message upon the world,
this presumption is amply confirmed.
And here again criticism has rather helped
than hindered our appreciation, by showing that
the prophets did not transcend their human
limitations. They did not miraculously predict
persons or events in the far future, as they were
supposed to do ; while many of their political
forecasts failed of realization. But insight,

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 161
spiritual insight was their primary endowment,
and only secondarily the foresight which true in
sight gives. And to realize the greatness of that
insight we must remember when they lived, and
compare them with the rest of their contemporary
world. Otherwise we are apt to forget their
unique originality in the history of thought. We
may frankly concede to criticism that there is
great uncertainty as to how much of the prophetic
teaching is to be attributed to Moses and the
earlier prophets. For the historic line of the
canonical prophets, and the prophetically edited
books are amply sufficient for our present
purpose ; though it would be absurd to deny that
these have, in any case, an immense tradition
behind them. What, then, are the salient features
of the prophetic teaching ?
First and foremost, the unity of God " The
Lord our God is one Lord." "Thus saith the
Lord, I am the Lord and there is none else,
there is no God beside me."
Then His omnipotence. "lam the Almighty
God." "I am the Lord, and there is none else.
I form the light and create darkness, I make
peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these
things." M

162 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
And as a natural consequence of this His
freedom in creation. " In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth." " He spake
the word, and they were made. He commanded
and they were created."
While further creation reflects His wisdom
in its law and order ; — that order which after
wards the Greeks called cosmos.
" God made the beast of the earth after his
kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything
that creepeth on the earth after his kind."
"Who shut up the sea with doors when it
brake forth . . . and said, Hitherto shalt thou
come, but no further : and here shall thy proud
waves be stayed ? " " Knowest thou the ordin
ances of heaven ? " " Canst thou bring forth
Mazzaroth in his season, or canst thou guide
Arcturus with his sons ? " " It is He who hath
made the round world so sure that it cannot
be moved." "He hath made them fast for
ever and ever, He hath given them a law which
shall not be broken." " They continue this day
according to thine ordinances : for all are thy
servants." And this order has a purpose, a final cause.
" Thus saith the Lord that created the heavens :

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 163
God Himself that formed the earth and made
it : He hath established it, He created it not in
vain, He formed it to be inhabited." "The
earth hath He given to the children of men."
Here we have no natural science, but we
have the outlines of a philosophy of nature,
which passes on into a still more definite
philosophy of history. For the crowning attri
bute of God is righteousness or holiness, " I
the Lord your God am holy." " The holy one
of Israel." " The Lord is holy in all His works."
" Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts." " The
righteous Lord loveth righteousness." " The
righteousness of thy testimonies is everlasting."
" All thy commandments are righteous." " Thy
right hand is full of righteousness."
It follows that "He shall judge the people
righteously." " With righteousness shall He
judge the world."
And this, in the prophetic view, is the key
to all individual and national history. The
ungodly may "prosper in the world," and "have
riches in possession " for a while ; but suddenly
they find themselves " in slippery places," " they
perish and come to a fearful end." While the
various sinful nations, one after another, are

1 64 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
visited with a "day of the Lord," "a destruction
from the Almighty." " I will send a fire on the
wall of Tyrus, which shall devour the palaces
thereof." " Babylon the glory of kingdoms . . .
shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and
Gomorrah," " because they have transgressed the
laws, changed the ordinances, broken the ever
lasting covenant." Whereas " the righteous cry,
and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of
all their troubles." " The work of righteousness
shall be peace ; and the effect of righteousness,
quietness and assurance for ever."
Thus the same " faithfulness " that guides the
laws of the natural world, governs also the issues
of human history. " For as the rain cometh
down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth
not thither but watereth the earth, and maketh
it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed
to the sower, and bread to the eater : so shall
my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth :
it shall not return unto me void, but it shall
accomplish that which I please, and it shall
prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." " Thus
saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light
by day, and the ordinances of the moon and
stars for a light by night, which divideth the

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 165
sea when the waves thereof roar ; the Lord of
hosts is His name ; if those ordinances depart
from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed
of Israel also shall cease from being a nation
before me for ever." " And the word of the
Lord came unto Jeremiah saying, Thus saith
the Lord, If ye can break my covenant of the
day, and my covenant of the night, and that there
should not be day and night in their season ;
Then may also my covenant be broken with
David my servant." "Thus saith the Lord,
If my covenant be not with day and night,
and if I have not appointed the ordinances
of heaven and earth ; then will I cast away the
seed of Jacob."
Before passing on to the fresh point of the
covenant here introduced, we may pause to
emphasize this general teaching of the prophets
that the unity of God involves the unity of His
world and of its history, and the harmony of His
moral with His natural legislation. We have
illustrated this at length, by quotation, because
nothing but quotation makes an adequate com
parison possible between the prophets of Israel
and the other teachers of their age. To say
simply that they taught ethical monotheism con-

1 66 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
veys no sufficient notion of the explicitness and
certitude, the fervour and force with which they
taught ; nor yet of the profound sense of inspira
tion under which they laboured. We to whom
their teaching has come down through Christian
channels, and mingled with intellectual streams
from other sources, are liable to forget how wholly
unique was its first appearance in the world.
Nothing of contemporary age can be seriously
put beside it. And when Greek philosophy in
after days approached the problem of God and
the world from the side of reason, Plato and
Aristotle approximated closely, in the broad
outline of their thought, as we have seen above,
to what the prophets of Israel had already reached
by religious intuition long before ; so closely
that Plato could be spoken of as " Moses talking
Greek," and even Augustine leaned towards
the view that he was acquainted with the
Hebrew writings ; so closely that in later ages
these two streams of diverse source were able
to meet and mingle within the bounds of one
theology. We have then, in the prophets, a long line of
men whose continuity of utterance had no parallel
in their contemporary world ; these men have an

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 167
equally unparalleled conviction of their own
inspiration ; they claim, that is, to speak with
divine authority ; and as the result they proclaim
a doctrine of God, and His relation to the world
which was unique in moral grandeur, at the time
of its appearing, as well as in the fruit which it
afterwards bore. This is a fact of history which
no criticism has adversely affected. The moral
weight of the prophetic message is as great as
ever in the world to-day ; the self-evidence of
its appeal to the heart and conscience is as
strong. But the prophets were, of course, more than
preachers of righteousness, and scourges of sin,
for all time. They were also the spiritual
interpreters of their nation's history and destiny,
with its infinite significance for the world. " The
Lord hath chosen Jacob unto Himself, and Israel
for His peculiar treasure." " The Lord hath
chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto Himself,
above all the nations that are upon the earth."
These may be late utterances, but they embody
a conviction which had been shaping itself from
the age of Moses, if not before. For though the
general tendency of modern criticism is to attribute
much of the literature that was once thought to

1 68 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
be Mosaic to various later dates, there can be no
reasonable doubt that the national self-conscious
ness dates from Moses. " The prophets who came
after," says so advanced a critic as Wellhausen,
"gave, it is true, greater distinctness to the
peculiar character of the nation, but they did not
make it ; on the contrary, it made them." And
this national self-consciousness was intimately
connected with the national religion. We need
not court controversy by illustrating this from any
source of dubious date. For it is quite sufficient
for us that the great prophets of the eighth century
B.C., Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, who are all confessedly
historic, regard the religious election of their nation
as an ancient thing. " When Israel was a child,"
says Hosea, " then I loved him, and called my son
out of Egypt." " You only have I known of all
the families of the earth," says Amos, " therefore
I will punish you for all your iniquities." And
Isaiah, " The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the
house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant
plant." And though Jeremiah writes later, he
looks back to the same far past. " Since the day
that your fathers came forth out of the land of
Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you
all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 169
and sending them." This relation is further
symbolized, at least from the date of Deuteronomy,
as a covenant: "my covenant between me and
Abraham " ; " my covenant with Isaac " ; " an ever
lasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies
of David " ; "His covenant which he sware unto
thy fathers." " My covenant will I not break,
nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not
lie unto David. His seed shall endure for ever,
and his throne as the sun before me. It shall
be established for ever as the moon, and as a
faithful witness in heaven."
This covenant is founded on the national
knowledge of the true, the righteous God, the
Holy One of Israel ; and carries with it the
obligation to serve Him. " Thou art my servant ;
I have formed thee ; thou art my servant, O
Israel." " This people have I formed for myself;
they shall shew forth my praise." " Ye are my
witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom
I have chosen." " Thou art my servant, O Israel,
in whom I will be glorified." " It is a light thing
that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the
tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of
Israel : I will also give thee for a light to the

170 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto
the end of the earth."
Here it would seem that no longer Israel as a
whole, the sinful nation, whose transgressions the
prophets so scathingly denounce, but the elect of
Israel or the ideal Israel is regarded as God's
servant. At times, again, this service is spoken of
as centred in a single individual. " There shall
come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a
branch shall grow out of his roots. . . . And
righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and
faithfulness the girdle of his reins." " Behold a
king shall reign in righteousness." "Behold I will
bring forth my servant the Branch . . . the man
whose name is the Branch . . . He shall build the
temple of the Lord ; and He shall bear the glory,
and shall sit and rule upon His throne." Finally,
suffering takes the place of glory, and the Man of
Sorrows appears, but still the old confidence is
unabated. " He shall see of the travail of his soul
and be satisfied." " By his knowledge shall my
righteous servant justify many." For on this one
point all the prophets are agreed : that the service
of Israel, its witness to God, must succeed in the
end, and God's righteousness be openly and finally
triumphant. Their insight into the nature of

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 171
righteousness enables them to predict its inevitable
victory. It is God's will, and therefore cannot fail
to be fulfilled. Their views of the time and manner
of this victory obviously change with the changing
situations of the national history ; for they spring
from fallible human foresight. But of its ultimate
certainty they are sure with the sureness of their
divine inspiration.
And when it comes it must affect all nations.
" It shall come to pass in the last days, that the
mountain of the Lord's house shall be established
in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted
above the hills. And many people shall go and
say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of
the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob ; and
He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in
His paths ; for out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
" And it shall come to pass that from one new
moon to another, and from one sabbath to another,
shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the
Lord." " All nations whom thou hast made shall
come and worship before thee, O Lord ; and shall
glorify thy name." " All the ends of the world
shall remember, and turn unto the Lord, and all
the kindreds of the nations shall worship before

172 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
thee." " And men shall worship Him, every one
from his place, even all the isles of the heathen."
" For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of
the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."
Finally the same thought recurs, though re
garded from a somewhat different point of view,
in the famous apocalyptic passage in the book of
Daniel. " Behold one like the son of man came
with the clouds of heaven, and came to the
Ancient of days, and they brought him near before
him. And there was given him dominion and
glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and
languages should serve him : his dominion is an
everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom that which shall not be de
stroyed. . . . And the kingdom and dominion and
the greatness of the kingdom under the whole
heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints
of the Most High, whose kingdom is an ever
lasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve
and obey him."
Opinions differ as to whether any definite con
ception of an individual Messiah is to be found in
the book of Daniel ; but in the later literature
that conception emerges with increasing clear
ness ; and however variously and vaguely it may

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 173
have been interpreted, there can be little doubt
that it was widely popular in the century before
the Christian era.
Here, then, we have theprophetic interpretation
of Israel's history. It is not full of supernatural
predictions, in the sense that was formerly
supposed ; but it holds high what may well be
called a supernatural hope. Israel has a provi
dential destiny ; a providential mission to the
world ; which because it is providential must
inevitably be fulfilled. Again and again its
realization, when seeming imminent, is disastrously
deferred ; but the prophet only answers, " Though
it tarry wait for it ; because it will surely come,
it will not tarry." Wave after wave of sorrow
sweeps over the nation ; but the only effect of
them is to spiritualize, never to destroy the hope.
While many minds are led at last to look for its
ultimate fulfilment, through the coming of some
one Person who shall be Messiah, the anointed of
the Lord.
Now we have often had occasion to notice
the influence of presuppositions upon biblical
exegesis ; and we must remember and examine
them when dealing with this prophecy. For
a critic who starts with the purely humanitarian

174 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
conception of Jesus Christ, — the belief that He
was merely a good man, — and therefore also with
the denial of His actual resurrection, will find
relatively little in the prophets to apply to His
appearance. Especially will this be the case
if he has the further not uncommon tendency
to treat Eastern poetry as if it were to be
construed by the literal laws of Western prose.
All criticism, therefore, that would minimize the
applicability of prophecy to Christ, must itself
be criticized as to its antecedent point of view.
For if that point of view prove to be unchristian,
we cannot expect from it Christian results.
But the Christian approaches prophecy with
the belief already in his mind that Jesus Christ
is God Incarnate. And this belief is the result
of many diverse and converging arguments,
which would retain their intrinsic value, even
if prophecy did not exist. But, holding this
belief, what does the Christian find ? That the
long expectation of the prophets has been in a
definite and decisive and stupendous degree
fulfilled, and the era of its complete and final
realization thereby brought into sight.
For the word of the Lord has, in very
deed, gone forth from Jerusalem. The Sun of

viii THE OLD TESTAMENT 175
righteousness has arisen with healing in His
wings. A king does reign in righteousness.
There has a man appeared who is " a hiding-
place from the wind, and a covert from the
tempest ; as rivers of water in a dry place, as
the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
He " hath borne our griefs and carried our
sorrows" and "justified many." Men do at this
moment " worship Him, every one from his place,
even all the isles of the heathen." There has
been given Him "dominion and glory and a
kingdom " — " a kingdom that shall not be de
stroyed." The Lord God of Israel " hath visited
and redeemed His people, and raised up a mighty
salvation for us, in the house of His servant David ;
as He spake by the mouth of His holy prophets,
which have been since the world began."
We cannot but feel, as we thus look back
over the long line of the prophets, from the
height of the Incarnation, that they were indeed
guided by the Spirit to foretell more than they
could possibly foresee, to utter words of deeper
meaning than they ever understood. And in
this light their sure sense of inspiration is abund
antly justified ; for the obvious fact of their
human limitations does but serve to bring closer

176 THE OLD TESTAMENT ch. viii
home to us the conviction that their essential
message was divine.
Pascal has forcibly summarized the authority
of prophecy ; and there is nothing in our changed
point of view, as above described, to diminish
the weight of his words.
" The prophecies," he says, " are the greatest
of the proofs of Jesus Christ. And it is in this
matter that God has exercised the greatest
foresight, for the object which has filled them
is a miracle, lasting from the birth of the Church
to its end. Thus for six hundred years God
has raised up the prophets, and during four
hundred years after He has scattered all these
prophecies with all the Jews, who carried them
to all parts of the world. Behold what prepara
tion there has been for the birth of Jesus Christ,
whose gospel was to be believed throughout
all the world. ... It is a succession of men . . .
who constantly and without variation come one
after another to predict the same event. It is
a whole people which announces him . . . and
which lasts ... to give a mass of evidence of the
assurance, which it has, and from which it cannot
be turned aside by any threats or persecutions." 1
1 Pascal, Pensles, transl. C. S. Jerram.

CHAPTER IX
THE AUTHORITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
•We should hardly need to remind ourselves,
at the present day, that the Christian Church
was not founded on the New Testament, but the
New Testament, years after its foundation, written
by the Church. • Yet we meet with confusions in
current thought about Christian things which
sometimes seem to make the reminder needful.
*We cannot overestimate the significance of the
fact, to which we have alluded above, that our
Lord Himself wrote no book ; not so much for
its negative implication, that He did not intend
His religion to be founded upon a book, as for
its positive proof of His directly opposite inten
tion. He intended to trust Himself to men,
and to work through human agency. He taught
and trained His first disciples, by the impress
of His living personality, and sent them, or
in Greek "made them apostles," to win the world
177 N

178 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
to Himself. In so doing they soon had occasion
to write letters and compile memoirs, and so
the New Testament gradually arose. And its
authority is therefore, so to speak, secondary
and derivative. • It did not, that is to say, come
directly from Christ, but from those who held
Christ's commission ; which commission, as we
have seen, was the primary source of all
authority in the Church.
The meaning of the New Testament is
therefore the meaning that it possessed for the
Church, within which it was written, and by which
its canon was gradually settled, and that was
subsequently embodied in the creeds. And that
meaning, though of course it includes, as an
essential ingredient, the ethical teaching of Christ,
does not centre in His ethical teaching, but in
His person and work — who He was, and how
He lived and worked and died and rose again,
and sent His spirit into the hearts of His disciples.
" God who at sundry times and in divers manners
spake in times past unto the fathers by the
prophets, hath, in these last days, spoken unto
us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of
all things, by whom also He made the worlds;
who being the brightness of His glory and the

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 179
express image of His person, and upholding all
things by the word of His power, when He had
by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right
hand of the Majesty on high." Such is naturally
the central thought of the New Testament,
because it was already the central thought of
the Church ; whose object was not merely to
make men moral, but, in order that they might
in the fullest degree become so, to make them
members of Christ. " I live ; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me," says St. Paul of himself, and ac
cordingly of his converts ; " I travail in birth again
until Christ be formed in you." " Ye are the
body of Christ, and members in particular."
" Your bodies are the members of Christ." " Your
bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost." " We
are made partakers of Christ"; "partakers of
the Holy Ghost"; "partakers of the divine
nature." " He that hath the Son hath life, and he
that hath not the Son of God hath not life."
" Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He
in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit."
" God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth
in God, and God in him."
The object of the Church's existence is to
promote this personal union of mankind, one by

180 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
one, with a Person ; and the New Testament
contains the history of that Person's life on earth,
and subsequent recognition as God Incarnate.
We have already, in dealing with the creeds, had
occasion to speak of the impossibility of separating
the fact of that life from its apostolic interpreta
tion. The two things had coalesced and become
one, before ever the apostles began their preach
ing ; and that under the influence, as we believe,
of the Holy Spirit of whom Christ had said :
" He shall lead you into all truth " — " He shall
take of mine, and shall shew it unto you." There
is consequently, for the Church, an essential unity
about the New Testament. It is not a mere
collection of independent writings, as sometimes
seems to be supposed ; it is one book, because it
is occupied with the various aspects of one
subject, which would be incomplete in isolation,
but combine to form a perfect whole. Thus the
synoptic gospels describe the earthly life of Jesus
Christ ; but in such a way that we feel the
emphasis to be on His personality rather than
His ethical teaching. This is perhaps most con
spicuous in the earliest and first of them, St.
Mark. But the subsequent enlargement of the
picture, in St. Matthew and St. Luke, though it

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 181
includes more of the teaching, does not in the
least degree alter the incidence of the emphasis ;
and indeed rather increases it, by the inclusion
of the Virgin-birth. While, further, much that is
commonly called ethical teaching really turns upon
the special relation between Christ Himself and
mankind ; it is not an ethic vaguely in the air,
but the particular ethic of His kingdom. Then
St. Paul, and St. John, and the writer to the
Hebrews tell us whom and what, after the
inspiration of Pentecost, the Church realized
Christ to be — " the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of every creature," " who being in
the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an
equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking
the form of a servant, being made in the likeness
of men " ; — the " Word made flesh " who " dwelt
among us " — " made like unto His brethren, that
He might be a merciful and faithful high-priest in
things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation
for the sins of the people." " Wherefore also
God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the
name which is above every name ; that in the
name of Jesus every knee should bow, . . . and
that every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

182 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
Lastly, the Acts of the Apostles describe the
earthly beginning of His kingdom from the day
of Pentecost ; and the seer of the Apocalypse its
triumphant issue in the glory of the New Jeru
salem, wherein at length the long hope of prophecy
is finally fulfilled. There is here a profound unity,
— and when the casual and incidental nature of
its component parts is borne in mind, as well as
the gradual process of selection by which they
were combined — a unity wherein the Church
cannot but recognize the guidance of the Holy
Ghost. Moreover, if the belief of the Church be
true, this unity is not limited to the New, but
includes also the Old Testament within its scope.
For if Christ be indeed the Messiah, then not
merely a few isolated predictions here and there,
but the whole prophetic movement, and the whole
national history behind it point towards Him ;
and that the more forcibly, the more we recognize
the progressive character of its evolution. And
this is the view, of course, which we find in the
New Testament itself. Christ comes not to
destroy, but to fulfil, and fashions His human
life upon the Scriptures ; meeting temptation with
them, claiming their witness, quoting them in
death ; while after His resurrection we read that

ix THE NEW TESTAMENTS 183
" beginning at Moses and all the prophets He
expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things
concerning Himself." And in accordance with
this the whole New Testament is saturated with
the Old, to an extent that only a careful analysis
reveals, and that admits of no compendious
illustration ; so continually are the old thoughts
and phrases woven into the texture of the new.
The person and character and works and rejec
tion and resurrection and glorification of Christ
are all pourtrayed as fulfilling the words of
prophets and of psalmists. " He is the mediator
of a better covenant which was established on
better promises," the new covenant of which
Jeremiah spoke. And so of the whole Christian
dispensation. It is the fulfilment of the old.
" These all having obtained a good report through
faith, received not the promise : God having
provided some better thing for us, that they
without us should not be made perfect." " If ye
be Christ's then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs
according to the promise." " This is that which
was spoken by the prophet Joel ... I will pour
out of my spirit upon all flesh : and your sons and-
your daughters shall prophesy, and your young
men shall see visions, and your old men shall

184 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
dream dreams." The final triumph of righteous
ness is taken up from the visions of the older
prophets and solemnly re-affirmed, re-illustrated,
re-emphasized in the Apocalypse. While the
various incidents of the national history are
viewed, in the new light, as typical of what was
to come ; the guidance, for example, by the
cloud in the wilderness, the passage of the Red
Sea, the gift of the manna, the water from the
rock, the sacrifices of the temple, and above all
the Passover and paschal lamb.
Thus the New Testament is not merely a
unity in itself; it is also essentially one with
the Old. And together they reflect a living
history, in virtue of which the Church which
witnesses to Christ and administers His sacra
ments to-day is lineally linked with the Israel
that came out of Egypt, and behind that with
the far-off patriarchal age. In history as well
as nature " He left not Himself without witness."
But the unity of an experience can only exist
for the consciousness whose experience it is.
And so the unity of this great spiritual ex
perience, reaching from Moses to the present
day, only exists for the consciousness of the
Church ; the society which holds itself com-

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 185
missioned to proclaim and extend the atoning
work of the Incarnation. For it is only the
Christ in whom the Church believes, the Christ
who is God Incarnate, that really sums up in
His own person, the law and the prophets, and
has consequent authority to guarantee the further
and final fulfilment of all their hopes. A merely
human Christ, on the contrary, whether His
mission be conceived as mainly ethical, or mainly
eschatological, — mainly concerned, that is, with
our conduct in this world, or mainly with our
preparation for another, — in either case a mere
teacher, would be no realization of the hope
of Israel, no earnest of the New Jerusalem.
To ignore His atoning sacrifice, His triumph
over death, His mission of the Spirit, is to
ignore all that constitutes Christ the Door
through which the old covenant passed into the
new. The awkward fact would still remain to
be explained, that, as a matter of history, some
such change did actually date from the day
of His appearance ; but no adequate explanation
of its reason could be given. For He would
only be one of the many who inherited and
transmitted the age-long hope ; instead of the
transcendent Being who " came forth from the

186 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
Father " to answer it. And the organic unity
of the two Testaments therewith must fall to
pieces ; for the Old becomes a failure, that has
reached no goal, and the New, in its most essen
tial features, a mistake. But, for those who
believe with the Church, this unity is a fact of
incalculable weight, as a corroboration of their
faith, and proof of God's providence in history.
When we are asked, then, whether modern
criticism has not invalidated the old authority
of the New Testament, we must answer that
here too there is a parting of the ways, and the
result which criticism reaches must depend largely
on the prepossessions of the critic. If he begins
by ruling out of court what the Church believes,
he will not find that belief justified by the
New Testament ; or rather by what he accepts
of the New Testament. But from the Christian
point of view this is an impossible process.
For consider what the Christian position, meaning
thereby the position of the Christian Church,
really is. It is, as we have already seen, that
the Church did not originate in a book, but in
a Person, and consists, and has always consisted
of living persons, bound together by an organized
ministry, a sacramental system and a creed.

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 187
The New Testament contains the record of its
origin ; but the record is not the origin, any
more than the Commentaries of Caesar are the
battles of Caesar. In each case the record
presupposes the life. But in the case of the
Church that life is continuous. The Church
of to-day, here and now, is quick with the self
same vitality as the Church of the first century ;
and this is due, as we believe, to the indwelling
presence of the selfsame Spirit, by which the
first generation of Christians was inspired ; " the
Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life." Thus
the New Testament is for us the record of how
there originated a life, which is at this moment,
as a fact of experience, energetic in the world.
By saying that this life is a fact of experience
we mean, first, that all Christians who are
sincerely in earnest, however imperfect their
degree of attainment, are personally aware that
their life is quite other than it would have been,
without the influence and power of their faith.
While secondly, those who rise to the degree
of spiritual eminence that enabled St. Paul to
say, "I live; yet not I, Christ liveth in me,"
arrest the common attention and are recognized
as saints, not only by their fellow- Christians,

188 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
but often also by the unwilling world which they
rebuke. That is to say, their Christian character
is a fact not only of interior and personal, but
also of external and public experience' as well.
This life then is a fact, a vera causa, a thing that
actually works, and whose reality cannot be
denied. And the New Testament records how
it came into the world ; namely, through the
" power from on high " of the living and life-
giving Spirit of Christ. The Pauline epistles
contain our earliest picture of the Christian life ;
and the stage of criticism is now gone by, which
doubted St. Paul's agreement in all essentials
with the rest of the Church. The belief which
he assumes to exist, among the Christians whom
he had never seen, would alone be sufficient
proof of it, even if we had not his own explicit
statement of the fact. What, then, is this life
as described by St. Paul ?
"Ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if
so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you . . .
and if Christ is in you, the body is dead because
of sin ; but the spirit is life because of righteous
ness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up
Jesus dwelleth in you, He that raised up Christ
Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 189
mortal bodies, through His Spirit that dwelleth
in you." " For as many as are led by the Spirit
of God, these are sons of God ... ye received
the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba,
Father. The Spirit Himself beareth witness with
our spirit, that we are children of God." And
other apostles use similar language. " Ye have
purified your souls," says St. Peter, " in obeying
the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love
of the brethren." And again the Epistle of Jude,
" Building up yourselves on your most holy faith,
praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the
love of God." And again St. John — " Hereby
know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us ;
because He hath given us of His Spirit."
And this life is the outcome of the selfsame
belief in the Incarnation and the Atonement which
reproduces the selfsame life at the present day.
The earliest form, therefore, in which the gospel
meets us is theological. The gospel of the
Church, on which the Christian life is founded, is
a theological gospel.
It follows that the synoptic gospels, the three
which record the human history of Jesus Christ,
without any definite theological framework, were
yet written by men who believed and lived in the

i9o THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
power of this theological gospel, as completely as
do Christians in the Church to-day. This is a
fact with which all serious students are of course
perfectly familiar ; but it is very far from being
equally familiar to that much larger class who,
without being in any degree students, have yet a
vague notion that the authority of the New
Testament has been seriously affected by modern
criticism. There is still the old notion abroad, that
a simpler and more purely human and -natural
history of the life of Christ can, by a sufficiently
eclectic treatment, be reconstructed from the
synoptic writers. And of course to a superficial
view, but a very superficial view, the synoptists
may seem to favour this misconception, by what is
one of their characteristic excellences — the severe
accuracy, that is, with which they reproduce the
past. While themselves living, as we have said,
on the theology of the Church, they travel back in
imagination to the time when it was not. They
recall the circumstances of a bygone situation, as
it appeared to contemporary eyes. They picture
the period when the resurrection had not yet
happened, and the day of Pentecost had not yet
come, and the disciples still moved wondering in
a Presence that they loved yet could but dimly

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 191
understand. And the fidelity with which the
synoptists reproduce this picture is strong
evidence of their historic truth. But it is only, as
we have said, a superficial reader that can be
misled by this fact. In the first place, it is plainly
stated to be the record of a beginning. " The
beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son
of God," says St. Mark. " The former treatise
have I made," says St. Luke, — for we may now
confidently affirm that it is he — "the former
treatise have I made concerning all that Jesus
began both to do and to teach, until the day in
which He was received up, after that He had given
commandment through the Holy Ghost unto the
apostles whom He had chosen." Now such
emphasis on a beginning necessarily implies that
it is not the whole, and that there is more to come.
And we feel the presence of that " more " as we
read these gospels ; for there is a tone about
them all which we cannot mistake. They all lead
up to and emphasize the Passion ; yet clearly
with no sense of its indicating failure. On the
contrary they are serene, calm, confident through
out, and clearly reflect the light which only
dawned upon the day with which they close.
Moreover they all centre, as we have seen, upon

192 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
the personality of Jesus Christ ; and that with an
evident implication that it was more than human.
And to get rid of this implication we must treat
them in a way which would leave these writings
that have impressed for ever their vivid picture
upon the world, with literally no picture to present.
In a word, we feel that the atmosphere in which the
gospels were written was the atmosphere of the
living Church ; the same atmosphere as that in
which living Christians read them to-day.1
And this consideration brings us back from
the book to the life. The book is not the origin
of the life, but the record of its origin. And the
life is being lived in the midst of us to-day. How,
then, is it originated and sustained ? Essentially,
as we have seen, by the indwelling presence of
the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit uses human
agency as His medium of communication, — the
living voice of the preacher, the living ministry
of the sacraments, the living sympathy of fellow-
Christians, the support and stimulus of common
worship, the solemn recitation of the common
creed. All these things react upon the spirit
within us, and bring it into concrete touch with
the life that has come down to us from apostolic
1 See note C

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 193
days. For omne vivum ex vivo. Life can only
originate in life ; and Christian life in Christian
life. The synoptic gospels are an important factor
in the transmission of this life ; but the gospels
as utilized, as vivified, and a fortiori as interpreted
by the Church. A musical score only passes
into music realized, when the magic hand of the
master is in living touch with the strings or the
keys. And however much the gospels may be
read by themselves, for their intrinsic spiritual
worth, they cannot be the same when so treated,
as when interpreted in accordance with the im
memorial creed of the Church.
Now the Church appeals to the gospels for the
spiritual teaching, but partly also for the personal
history, the life and character and sufferings of
Jesus Christ ; for the reality, that is to say, of
His human nature, and of His death upon the
cross. And though of course the teaching and
the life are not really separable, it is the latter
that is the more fundamentally significant. For
this is an essential element in the Church's theo
logical creed. " Jesus Christ . . . was incarnate
by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was
made man, and was crucified also for us under
Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and
o

194 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
the third day He rose again according to the
Scriptures." These are the facts recorded in the
gospels ; and the pre-eminent function of the
gospels, in the Church, is their witness that these
facts took place. But the further article of our
creed that " Jesus Christ . . . was the only
begotten Son of God . . . who for us men and
for our salvation came down from heaven," we do
not learn from the synoptic gospels, but from the
living apostolic tradition ; preached before the
gospels were written, reflected in the epistles
and the writings of St. John, and handed on con
tinuously by the living Church to the present
day, not merely as a doctrine to be intellectually
apprehended, but as a power to be personally felt.
Now, in considering the question whether
recent criticism has in any degree impaired the
authority of the gospels, we mean, of course, their
authority for Christians. Since for those who
read them otherwise than as Christians they may
possess interest and value of the highest kind,
but not authority. It is only, therefore, Christians
who would be seriously affected by any impairment
of the authority of the gospels. But it follows
from what we have been saying that Christians
are precisely those for whom no such impairment

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 195
can take place. For the authority in question is
only a portion of the larger authority of the living
Church. It is ringed round, as it were, by the
live wall of the saints and martyrs in all ages,
and that wall must be destroyed before it can be
effectively reached. In other words the spiritual
life of the Church to-day, and its continuity with
that of all bygone ages, is, as we have seen, a fact
of experience, whose reality nothing can discredit
or disprove — a plain and palpable fact. And
this life is sustained to-day, as it has always been
sustained, by the belief in the Incarnation and the
Atonement. This belief may of course be rejected,
as it often is, on philosophical or other grounds ;
and those who so reject it may support their
rejection by the way in which they read the
synoptic gospels. But this cannot affect those
who are living in the power of the belief, and
who read the gospels in a different way. For
the form which such negative criticism takes is
to maintain that the Christ depicted in the gospels
is not the Christ whom Paul preached and the
Church worships. But this is only an antagon
istic way of stating a fact which the Church readily
and fully admits. For the Christ whom Paul
preached was the Christ as understood by the

196 THE AUTHORITY OF ch.
Church after Pentecost ; whereas the Christ
depicted in the gospels is the Christ imperfectly
understood by His disciples before Pentecost,
the Christ who could say to them at the end,
" Have I been so long time with you, and yet
hast thou not known me ? " And again, " I have
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear
them now." While it is certain, as we saw
above, that the men who drew this picture, as
most notably and obviously Luke, the intimate
companion of St. Paul, did, at the time of drawing
it, hold the Church's theological creed ; and can
not therefore have had any intention incompatible
therewith. To summarize what we have been saying,
Christianity may be attacked along its whole line,
as it has been attacked in every age ; but the
attack gains no new potency from the critical
study of the New Testament. Nor is it the case,
as is sometimes ignorantly supposed, that all such
criticism moves, on the whole, in a negative
direction. On the contrary, it is quite as capable
of positive and constructive use. Many of the
extreme opinions about dates and authenticity
which were in vogue half a century ago have
been found critically untenable, and therefore

ix THE NEW TESTAMENT 197
abandoned. And the earlier the books of the
New Testament are admitted to have been written
the greater becomes the difficulty of denying their
substantial authenticity. The controversy on
these points, therefore, is less acute than once it
was. On the other hand, modern study has in
creased our appreciation of the human element in
the New Testament — the different idiosyncrasies
of its different writers, the gradual development
of their belief, the minute discrepancies which are
so natural, the inevitable corruption of texts in
their passage through the hands of copyists, and
such like things. Of all this we have a keener
sense ; but it only makes the whole more life
like, and need not in any degree diminish our
sense of its total inspiration. For we have long
recognized that inspiration, while it quickens the
spiritual insight, does not supersede the normal
action of the mind ; but, so far from diminishing,
intensifies the individuality of men.
We may confidently assert, therefore, that for
those who hold the Church's creed the New
Testament to-day retains all its old authority —
the authority, that is to say, of its own spiritual
supremacy, when compared with even the best of
other Christian books ; and the authority derived

198 THE NEW TESTAMENT ch. ix
from the Church, whose inspired instinct selected
and enthroned it, as the crown and culmination of
the law and the prophets ; the manual of that
message which the living ministry, in each fresh
generation, labours anew to quicken into life.

CHAPTER X
CHRISTIAN LIFE UNDER AUTHORITY
We have endeavoured to show that the Christian
Church claims and exercises an authority over
its sincere members which is no less real in the
present day than of old ; though we do not now
attempt to define it with the same rigorous
precision as in former ages. For we realize
that it is a reflection of God's authority, the
authority of a personal Being, transmitted and
administered by human persons ; and concrete
personality — personality, that is to say, as it
actually lives and works — can be felt but not
formulated. We may be intensely swayed by
it, but quite unable to say what is its exact
nature, or extent, or limit. The authority of
a saintly character, for example, is very impres
sive to appreciative souls, but it cannot be
logically analysed or defined. And the various
kinds of authority that we have been considering
199

200 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
are in somewhat similar case. They are none
the less real for being indefinable, incapable
of being circumscribed by a clear-cut outline.
This authority of the Church then, operating
in the various ways that we have named, brings
those who accept it into clear relation, as they
believe, with God as revealed in and by Christ.
And this fact differentiates the Christian from
all other codes of ethics. It renders the
Christian life primarily and essentially spiritual,
as distinct from merely moral. " Ye are not
in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the
Spirit of God dwelleth in you." The Christian
does not become a Christian by practising the
sermon on the mount, but by living in contact
with the Author of the sermon on the mount ; and
all his moral conduct springs from this spiritual
root. It is this fact which causes sin and re
pentance to have so much greater prominence
in the Christian than in other moral systems.
Other systems are apt to regard misconduct
as either vicious or criminal ; vicious when it
spoils a man's own character, and criminal when
it spoils his relation to society. But in the
Christian view vices and crimes only are what
they are, because they are primarily sins ; trans-

x UNDER AUTHORITY 201
gressions of God's law, disobedience to God's
authority, disturbing the very root of all our
spiritual life. Sin is thus the rupture of a
personal relationship which must be personally
restored. If we have misbehaved to a friend
we are not content merely to behave better for
the future ; we require a reconciliation that may,
as far as possible, undo the past and restore our
friendship to its previous footing ; and in order
to that we must express definite regret for our
fault, and receive assurance that it is forgiven.
So the Christian can never be content with
merely ethical repentance, as it is sometimes
called ; merely, that is, to forget the past and
do better for the future. More is needed on
both sides than this if his personal relation to
God is to be restored. He must go back upon
the past ; he must confess it : " Against thee
only have I sinned and done this evil in thy
sight." And he must receive the assurance
of God's forgiveness, before he can go forward
in his Christian life ; because the whole of that
life depends upon the integrity of his union with
God. Hence the importance of the Atonement
in Christian theology. It is the indispensable

202 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
condition of the renewal of human life. 1 1 removes
the initial incapacity by which we are beset. Many
attempts, of course, have been made in the course
of history to explain the nature of the Atonement ;
none of which, perhaps, can be called wholly
adequate, and none of which have been dogmati
cally authorized by the Church. But we need not
pause on any of these explanations ; as our
present object is merely to point out that the
Christian life is not founded on a moral disposi
tion, but on a spiritual event. " You being dead
through your trespasses . . . did He quicken to
gether with him, having forgiven us all our tres
passes ; having blotted out the bond written in
ordinances that was against us, which was contrary
to us : and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing
it to the cross." It is an intervention from on
high ; from the transcendent sphere ; and however
much we need to appropriate it by our own acts
of will, its primal initiative is not ours. We are
recreated by our first Creator ; and upon that
recreation all our Christian morality depends.
" If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature :
the old things are passed away : behold, they are
become new. But all things are of God who
reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave

x UNDER AUTHORITY 203
unto us the ministry of reconciliation ; to wit, that
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses,
and having committed unto us the word of
reconciliation. ..." Accordingly the first function
of the Church is to exercise this ministry of
reconciliation " to declare and pronounce to God's
people being penitent, the absolution and re
mission of their sins." And it is in the consequent
sense of sin forgiven that our freedom takes its rise.
" If the Son shall make you free ye shall be free
indeed." " Free from the law of sin and death."
Hence the fundamental place of humility in
Christian ethics. Nothing is more fiercely scorned
by the modern apostles of self-assertion than the
attribution of moral value to humility. And no
grace, perhaps, in practice is harder to attain. Yet
it lies at the very basis of Christian life ; for it
means the habitual recognition of our true relation
to God; of our sinfulness in His sight; of our
inability to help ourselves ; and consequent de
pendence upon Him for help. It is truthfulness
towards God, and is the necessary condition there
fore of all real prayer to Him, and consequently
of all spiritual life. " Behold I was shapen in
wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived

204 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
me. But lo thou requirest truth in the inward parts,
and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly."
" I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor
myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Humility
is thus essentially an attitude towards God and
not towards man ; and its effect on our relation
to the latter only secondary and incidental. It
follows that humility is no weakness, no cringing
abjection, as its critics suppose it to be ; but is
the very condition of that stability and strength
which characterize the Christian life. For when
once a man is conscious of being in his true
relation to God, the relation of penitent and, there
fore, pardoned dependence, he is able to say, " If
God be for us who can be against us." "The
Lord is on my side ; I will not fear what man can
do unto me." " The rain descended, and the
floods came, and the wind blew, and beat upon
that house ; and it fell not : for it was founded
upon a rock." And as St. Paul says in another
context, " that rock was Christ." This stability of
character stands out in sharp contrast not only to
its most obvious opposite, the life that is given up
to the pursuit of ephemeral objects, like pleasure,
or power, or wealth, or fame ; but also to all life

x UNDER AUTHORITY 205
that is passed without direct and conscious
reference to God. For "the double-minded
man," says St. James, " is unstable in all his ways,"
and all such life is apt to be double-minded ;
hesitating between alternatives ; characterized by
uncertainty. It lacks singleness of aim ; sureness
of moral judgment ; and is in consequence con
fused by the complexity of things. Whereas the
Christian living in conscious obedience to a
personal God, has a simplicity of motive, a sureness
of purpose, a fixity of goal, a straightforwardness
of conduct, which invest him not only with
personal efficiency, but with a stability on which
his fellows can rely.
Thou hast as a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude.
Further, the consciousness of living under a divine
authority and providence leads us to regard our
life as a vocation, a call from God. We can
no longer regard our abilities, our opportunities,
our circumstances, as fortuitously concurrent,
accidental things. Taken in their combination
they indicate God's will for us ; they point out
the particular work that God would have us to do ;
as Paul was " called to be an apostle through the
will of God." This is the purport of our Lord's

206 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
parable of the talents ; that our faculties and
opportunities are gifts from God, to be used in
His service, and for whose right use we are
responsible, and must one day give account ; with
its noteworthy emphasis of the fact that no relative
insignificance of the gift will be accepted as an
excuse for its misuse. We are as accountable for
one talent as for ten ; for the use of the eleventh
hour, as much as for the burden and heat of the
day. Such a view of life is, again, in sharpest
contrast not only to the careless temper that
moves aimlessly through life with no sense of
responsibility at all, but also to that other very
common condition of those who, while vaguely
uneasy at their own ineffectiveness, lay the blame
of it on their circumstances, and not on themselves.
With their present capacities, they could have
been useful under other circumstances, they plead ;
or in their present circumstances, had they only
possessed other capacities. They could have
utilized ten talents, but not one ; a whole day, but
not a solitary hour. Whereas a sense of divine
vocation precludes all such fatalistic self-deception,
and invests the smallest sphere of service with a
dignity which makes it great. In the light of it,
to do our duty is not merely to obey the moral

x UNDER AUTHORITY 207
law, but to do the will of God ; to co-operate
with His purpose; to "be about our Father's
business." Hence our motive will not be " to
appear to men " but " to our Father which seeth
in secret "; not to " receive honour one of another,
but the honour which cometh from God only " ;
working " not with eye-service as men-pleasers,
but diligently as unto the Lord." It naturally
follows that the standard of conduct set before us
is not relative but absolute ; not " the precepts
and doctrines of men " but " God's holy will
and commandments." And in like manner the
imperative by which it is enjoined is not hypo
thetical, "If thou wouldst be perfect," but
categorical "Be ye perfect even as your Father
which is in heaven is perfect " ; with the con
sequence that when we have " done all the things
that are commanded " us we must still confess
that "we are unprofitable servants; we have
done that which it was our duty to do."
Thus the sense of living in God's sight,
and under God's authority, imparts truthfulness
to the whole character, sincerity, simplicity,
transparency ; the singleness of eye that renders
the whole body full of light. Whereas " if we say
that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and

208 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
the truth is not in us." Men do this in various
ways. They attribute their faults to heredity, or
ignorance, or circumstances, or fatality ; to any
thing, in short, that will remove the onus from
themselves. Or, while ready to admit, in a
general way, that they are sinners like the rest of
the world, they are blind, for want of self-
examination, to their own particular sins. Or
again, under cover of doing their official or social
duty well, they too easily condone their more
personal defects. And all this makes for what
Plato calls that " lie in the soul " which is the
polar opposite of the Christian " truth in the
inward parts."
Again there is another class of virtues, another
aspect of the Christian life, which results from its
being lived under a sense of God's authority. It
is a life of obedience, of self-surrender, of self-
sacrifice. " If any man will come after me let
him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow
me." It is the following of a master. One of the
common objections to the monastic idea is that it
exaggerated the value of obedience as such. But
it may be seriously questioned whether there is
not a very real advantage, in the special emphasis,
under special circumstances, of a quality that will

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always remain unpopular. , Such isolation of
particular virtues calls the world's attention to
them, and invests them with more concrete
character. It trumpets their importance aloud.
Notably was this the case when the standard of
chastity was raised, and raised successfully, by
exceptional emphasis, in the early Church, against
the ruinous impurity of the Greco-Roman world.
So here, too, Christians have been helped to give
obedience its normal place in their life, by seeing
it thus set upon a pedestal of abnormal expression.
We have already alluded, in a previous chapter,
to the value of the obedient temper, in a critical
age. But it has a much deeper importance, as
being the counter agent of all insubordination.
And insubordination is very prominent among
our modern evils. There is, of course, a noble
discontent with things as they are ; which is the
necessary condition of our Christian desire to
right social wrong ; discontent, that is to say, with
all the evil that is in the world. But this is totally
different from the discontented temper which
issues in insubordination ; the temper that resents
restraint, as such. This may show itself in various
forms of social or political impatience, which are
comparatively unimportant. But it at once

210 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
becomes malignant when the restraint which is
resented is fundamental ; such as that of the moral
law, or civilized society, or the constitution of the
world and the restrictions that by God's ordinance
it involves. An anarchic attitude towards all these
things is widely prevalent in the present day ;
hopelessly ruining the individual, and contagious
of ruin to the race. For
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows ! . . .
Force should be right ; or, rather right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so shall justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And, last, eat up himself.1
Against this the obedient temper is our safeguard ;
the temper which recognizes the laws of nature,
as expressing the will of God, and therefore accepts
their operation with the aquiescence which that will
demands, even when the acceptance makes great
calls upon our faith ; the temper which still more
immediately hears and obeys God's voice in the
1 Shakespeare, Troihis and Cressida, Act i. Sc. 3.

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" magisterial " command of conscience ; the temper
which bears in mind that, however rightly we may
labour to improve the constitution of civil society,
" the powers that be are ordained of God " ; and
is therefore " subject to every ordinance of man
for the Lord's sake." Obedience, in fact, though
it may look at first sight like a mere abandonment
of our will, is for that very reason capable of
becoming the very highest act of will. For
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.
To submit our will to God's will, and so to
make His will our own, is the highest form of
self-determination, and therefore the greatest step
towards the formation of a character that is truly
free ; free, that is, not from the law but by the
law, — the law which no longer appears as an alien
restraint, because it is incorporated with the self.
Hence the ethical and spiritual value of obedience ;
it is the road, and the necessary and only road to
freedom. Whence it follows that the various
restrictions which nature and society impose
upon the individual, so far from being impotently
resented as limitations of freedom, should be
welcomed as the conditions of becoming truly
free. And on such freedom depends not only

212 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
our personal integrity, but all our capacity for
self-sacrifice in the service of our fellow-men.
Those therefore of old who so exalted obedience
had, after all, a truer insight than many of their
critics into the secrets of the spiritual life.
Yet again there is another important group of
virtues dependent upon a sense of relation -to
God ; those, namely, which are founded upon
courage, whether physical or moral. Courage or
fortitude was, of course, prominent among the
cardinal virtues of the Greco-Roman world. It
has an important place assigned to it by Plato
and Aristotle, and it lay at the foundation of the
Stoic life. But noble as it was, the Stoic life
was apt to be self-centred ; nor wholly uncon
nected with pride. There is a note of defiance
in it all. " Philosophy," says Seneca, " will enable
us to act for our own satisfaction, rather than
that of other people ; ... to live without fear of
gods or men, to conquer ills or end them." And
so the end of the Stoic's independence, or apathy,
was suicide. This was indeed courage of a kind,
but not Christian courage. For Christian courage
is founded on the sense of co-operation with the
will of God, and consequent assurance of His
providential protection. Hence when confronted

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with troubles that cannot be avoided it becomes
patient endurance ; which, as St. Thomas says,
is a higher form of courage than action, since " it
is harder to stand unmoved among dangers than
to attack them." Hence suicide which the Stoic
justified both in precept and in practice, is to the
Christian the extremity of sin, as involving final
and irreparable distrust of God. And it is in this
higher form of patience, endurance, resignation,
that Christian courage is chiefly shown ; from the
passion of the martyrs to the silent service of
the many who are only called to "stand and
wait." It may be contended that many of the above-
mentioned virtues could be practised on grounds
of mere morality, and apart from conscious
reference to God. And this is true in a degree.
We only maintain that such reference invests
them with a distinctive quality of depth and
perfection which they would not otherwise attain.
But there are further attributes of character that
depend not merely on the recognition of God's
authority and providence, but on the specifically
Christian revelation of His love. And prominent
among these is gratitude or thankfulness, with all
the joy and brightness that the grateful temper

2i4 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
brings. Many men can pray to God in times of
trouble, with a hope that is very far from con
fidence, if haply they may find help. But to be
grateful, to give thanks to Him, in times of glad
ness, is a far higher act of faith in His personal,
providential care. It argues a fuller assurance
that He, in very deed, is love ; and that " every
good gift and every perfect gift cometh down
from above from the Father of lights." And it
reacts in consequence upon our whole character
and intensifies the faith from which it springs.
St. Paul lays great stress upon this thankfulness
to God for His gifts. The heathen world in his
view came to its ruin " because that knowing God
(from His creation) they glorified Him not as
God, neither gave thanks." Whereas, in contrast,
he bids Christians to " give thanks always for all
things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to
God even the Father." " For every creature of
God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it
be received with thanksgiving." And of grace,
he exclaims " Thanks be to God for His
unspeakable gift."
And it is obvious that this attitude of mind
must profoundly affect our whole view of life and
of the world. The pantheist may experience —

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Some vague emotion of delight
In gazing up an Alpine height
Some yearning toward the lamps of night.
But the Christian who sees in the beauty of
the world, by whatever mechanism brought
about, a direct and intentional gift of the Creator
to the child of His creation, is thereby brought
into a far more definite and personal relation
to God. Every sunset on a mountain, every
moonrise on a lake, every nightly revelation
of the stars ; the grace of rose or lily, the song
of nightingale or lark ; the green of spring, the
gold of autumn, the silver crystals of the snow ;
the sight, the sound, the scent of rill or waterfall
or sea, may serve, in this way, to intensify his
spiritual life, and fill with fuller meaning his
eucharistic hymn, " We give thanks to Thee for
Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King,
God the Father Almighty."
And what is true of the aspect of nature, is
equally true of the love made manifest through
human hearts. All the tender self-sacrifice of
parents ; all the joy of those who take sweet
counsel together and walk in the house of God as
friends ; all the loyalty of lovers, lost in each
other's life ; all the sympathy of strangers who

216 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
pour oil and wine into our wounds, owe their
possibility to God's creative will. They are His
gifts to us, and if we use them according to His
purpose, they may become means whereby " we
love Him, because He first loved us."
In other words, the Christian sees in all these
things the highest phase of God's authority, the
moral authority of His love. For though love
cannot compel like law, it makes an appeal of its
own, which is in the fullest degree authoritative.
In the presence of one who loved us, and at the
cost of personal self-sacrifice had conferred on us,
in consequence, great benefits and blessings, we
should feel spiritually bound to show our gratitude
and love in return. We should be filled with
shame, to behave otherwise. And if we believe
that God has so loved us, and endowed us with
all our gladness, the same obligation must lie on
us to reciprocate His love with our own. And
this will naturally affect our entire attitude
towards our fellow-men. For " this command
ment have we from Him, that he who loveth God
love his brother also." But the Christian can
only maintain this attitude, because he is a
Christian. There is positive evidence of God's
love in the beauty and wonder of the world, and

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the abundant kindness of our fellow-men. But
it is crossed and chequered by the seeming
severity of nature's laws, and the wickedness
that ever mars the goodness of mankind. There
is darkness all around us ; and it is only our
belief in God's supreme gift that can, in any
degree, illuminate that darkness. " God so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,
to the end that all who believe in Him should
not perish but have everlasting life." The
darkness is due to sin, which not only corrupts
our conduct, but in so doing, confuses our mind ;
till we can neither see nor judge aright. But the
love of God is at war with that sin, and promises
His servants eventual triumph over it ; when the
covenant with Abraham, the oath unto David,
the hope of Israel shall be fulfilled, in the new
Jerusalem " which is above," " which is the
mother of us all." Jesus Christ does not answer
our speculative questions ; but He reassures our
heart. And this right to reassure us is witnessed
by the history of His own sinless life and victory
over death ; and by the subsequent experience
of His Spirit's action within the minds and lives
of Christians. Thus God's authority over us
culminates in the authoritative appeal of His love.

218 CHRISTIAN LIFE ch.
" The love of Christ constraineth us." " Ye are
not your own. For ye are bought with a price,
therefore glorify God in your body and in your
spirit, which are God's."
This, then, is the purport of what we have been
saying. The Christian lives under the authority
of God as revealed in Christ, and witnessed by
the Spirit through the Church. And this fact
differentiates his life from any that can be based
upon a merely agnostic or hypothetical foundation.
He believes himself to have a definite conscious
personal relation to God, and God to him. His
first necessity, therefore, is to maintain the
integrity of this relation, by sincerity ; which at
once involves repentance for, and contention
against sin — whose sinister effect upon the mind,
as well as upon the conscience and the heart, is,
in his view, immensely underestimated in con
temporary thought. This naturally leads to
humility, but through humility to " confidence
towards God " and recognition of the obligation
to serve Him. From this follows the obedience
which is the necessary condition both of insight and
of freedom ; and the patient perseverance which
is the truest courage. While, finally, the whole
atmosphere of the life is one of gratitude, arising

x UNDER AUTHORITY 219
from the conviction that God personally loves us,
and has shown that love in a way that may best
be expressed in the well-known words — "our
creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this
life ; but above all . . . in the redemption of the
world by our Lord Jesus Christ ; the means of
grace, and the hope of glory." The reality of
this gratitude must depend upon the reality of
the faith which is its foundation ; and is therefore
most conspicuous in the most saintly lives, like
those of St. Paul or St. John. And it is, perhaps,
the chief note of the Christian character, as
involving the intensest recognition of God's
personal and individualizing love. It emphasizes
the fact, as against all forms of pantheism, that
He is our Other, not our self; for only so can
love exist ; and our transcendent Other, in whose
light all thought of human merit or self-assertion
fades away, since our whole existence is His
unconditioned gift.

CHAPTER XI
RECAPITULATION
As we have made some digressions, it may be
useful to conclude with a brief recapitulation of
our main contention. We began by pointing out
how Plato and Aristotle, to meet a doctrine
current in their day, to the effect that all things
were ever drifting in a perpetual flux, contended
that, so far from this being the case, the very
existence of these fleeting things which we call
relative and finite, compels us to assume an
absolute Being as their source ; — a Being, that is
to say, which does not depend upon anything
outside itself. Many epithets may be employed
to describe such a Being ; and when we speak of
it as transcendent, we mean that in virtue of its
quality of absoluteness, it essentially surpasses in
kind, and towers over all relative and dependent
things ; — all things, that is, which depend for
their existence upon their relation to yet other

ch. xi RECAPITULATION 221
things beyond their own control. Much contro
versy has gathered round this subject during the
history of thought. But the position of Plato
and Aristotle has, as we said, been maintained
by leading thinkers in every philosophic age ;
and may be found stated in practically the same
terms at the present day. For example : "In
every line of thought the knowledge rises self-
evident that there must be an absolute and
unconditioned Being. We properly recognize it
as a primitive and universal truth, known in
rational intuition. The idea of absolute Being,
and the belief in its existence, are in the back
ground of human consciousness, and at the
foundation of all knowledge through human
thought. The existence of absolute Being under
lies the possibility of all finite being, power,
reasoning and rational knowledge. . . . We find
ourselves so constituted that the normal unfolding
of our own reason reveals to us the absolute
Being." 1 And again : " Let us suppose the
denial of the transcendent in experience and
then consider what follows. In the first place it
would be impossible to find any adequate basis
for the consciousness of the transcendent that
1 Harris, Self- Revelation of God, p. 155.

222 RECAPITULATION ch.
asserts itself concretely in religious experience,
and more abstractly in those notions of the
perfect, the infinite and the absolute which are as
inexpugnable as any of the concepts of relativity
and also impossible of reduction to them. Why
should we have the transcendent in consciousness,
if there is no transcendence in experience ? The
logic of the situation is coercive. There is no
deduction possible of the concepts of transcend
ence from the relative. The notion of relativity
itself is possible only in view of the concepts of
the transcendent."1
The identity of this absolute Being with the
God of our religious consciousness may be argued
on rational grounds ; but the value of the argu
ment, it must be admitted, is very differently
estimated by different minds. Plato's method,
however, as we pointed out, was not merely
intellectual, but also moral, aesthetic, and re
ligious. He appealed to the insight of our whole
personality when morally purified. And this we
saw was the sounder basis for the identification
in question. The absolute Being which reason
demands is recognized by religious intuition as
God. And the metaphysician has no need to
1 Ormond, Foundations of Knowledge, p. 357.

xi RECAPITULATION 223
object to this. " The attitude of scientific in
vestigation," says a recent writer on metaphysics,
" is clearly not the only one which we can take up
towards the ultimately real. We may, for instance,
seek to gain emotional harmony and peace of
mind by yielding up the conduct of our practical
life to the unquestioned guidance of what we
feel to be the deepest and most abiding elements
in the structure of the universe. This is the
well-known attitude of practical religion . . .
at present it is enough for our purpose to re
cognize them as divergent but prima facie
equally justified attitudes towards what must in
the end be thought of as the same ultimate
reality." :
But religion, as we pointed out, is older than
articulate philosophy, and the religious con
ception of God, therefore, earlier than the
philosophic. Only afterwards, with the growth
of reflection, it comes to be seen that this
conception must be construed as including
certain attributes which reason demands. And
this is actually what occurred in the history
of Christian theology. We are often now-a-
days reminded that our theology was de-
1 Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, p. 54.

224 RECAPITULATION ch.
veloped under the influence of Greek specula
tion. But this was only possible because the
later Hebrew conception of God, from which
the Christian was lineally descended, already
involved, in a concrete and practical form, the
attributes which Greek philosophy subsequently
analysed. The prophets use no abstract
language ; they are everywhere vivid, symboli
cal, pictorial. But their description of God is
always that of an absolute and transcendent
Being. " I am that I am." " I am the first, I
am the last, and besides me there is no God."
" I am the almighty God," " the eternal God."
" The high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity,
whose name is holy." " My thoughts are not
your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,
saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than
your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
" The Lord most high is terrible." " The Lord
is the true God ; He is the living God, and an
everlasting King." Words could go no further
to express transcendence ; and when the Hebrew
thought of God was expanded into the Christian
Trinity, and Greek terms subsequently employed
in its formulation, this transcendence still re-

xi RECAPITULATION 225
mained at its root. The Incarnation and the
mission of the Holy Spirit to the Church made,
as we believe, a new revelation of God's capacity
for communion with His creatures ; but they
both emanate from and terminate in " Our
Father which art in heaven" ; the absolute,
transcendent Being, who as such is completely
free — capable, that is to say, of self-determina
tion, and therefore of such voluntary self-limita
tion as this involves, but patient of no other
limitation at all.
We did not pause to deal with the question
which arises at this point, as to the possibility
of the permission by such a Being of moral evil ;
because we have already endeavoured to do so
elsewhere.1 But we may remark in passing that
it is on this belief in self- limitation that the
Christian solution of that question rests ; the
divine self- limitation involved in the creation
»
of finite freewill. And this is the direction in
which our Lord points, in His parable of the
wheat and the tares ; " an enemy hath done this,"
but " let both grow together till the harvest."
" The long-suffering of God waited."
This conception of God, then, we maintain
1 Reason and Revelation, chap. xii. Q

226 RECAPITULATION ch.
to be more reasonable, more intelligible — that
is, in itself, as well as more in accordance
with what our reason actually demands — than the
pantheistic alternative which regards God as
exclusively immanent in the universe, or the
semi-pantheistic notion that He is being gradu
ally realized in the process of its evolution ;
both of which, though they may be stated in
words, are vague, impalpable, elusive, incapable
of ever being clearly construed into thought.
Further, God thus conceived as absolute, in
the sense of being wholly self-dependent, is in
Christian belief the final end and goal of man's
life ; the Being in union with whom alone man
can completely realize all the potentialities of
his nature, including the aspiration for true
and permanent communion with his fellow-men.
And this being the case it is the law of man's
nature, when unperverted, to desire union with
God ; such, therefore, is his duty, or the thing
which he ought, or is morally obliged to do.
In consequence of his freewill he can resist this
law, and sin, as he can resist the laws of health
and die. But in both cases alike he is going
counter to his own good, to the thing which
in his sane senses he cannot but desire. Hence

xi RECAPITULATION 227
it follows that, in the last analysis, God's
authority over man is founded not merely or
primarily, if we may make the distinction, upon
His power or will, but upon His nature, upon
the fact of His being what He is. Man must
seek his own good, and that good is God ; while if
he refuses to seek it, He who would have elicited
his love is constrained, in man's own interest,
to appeal to his fear ; and authority thus shows
its sterner side, though all the time it is the
authority of love. " When he slew them, they
sought him : and turned them early and enquired
after God. And they remembered that God
was their strength ; and that the high God was
their Redeemer."
We then proceeded to show how the authority
of the Christian Church claims delegation from
God through Christ, to symbolize and administer a
portion of His own divine authority. And though
we are now more critically conscious of the
element of error that is inseparable from the
actions of even the best of limited, finite, sinful
men, this does not alter the fact that God wills to
act, through men upon their fellows, and that
Christ so willed to act, when instead of be
queathing us a book, He founded a living

228 RECAPITULATION ch.
society. The authority of the Christian Church
may often have been mingled with and marred
by human mistakes in its mode of exercise ; but
it still reflects, however imperfectly, the divine
authority, the absolute, eternal, unconditioned
claim upon us of God who is our good.1
» In the first place, this authority is exhibited in
the organization of the Christian Church ; in the
episcopate which ordains its official ministry, and
so transmits its institutional existence, and the
priesthood which proclaims its message and
administers its sacraments. We briefly contended
that the kind of criticism which magnifies com
paratively small difficulties, of confessedly dubious
interpretation, is wholly inadequate to overthrow
the immemorial tradition that the bishops of the
earliest age were commissioned by the apostles,
as they themselves had been sent by Christ ; in
the same way that in all subsequent ages the
office was, as a well-known matter of history,
transmitted. And if this be so, it follows that the
essential actions of the Christian episcopate and
priesthood, the actions, that is to say, which they
are specially ordained to perform, come down to
us with the authority which Christ claimed as from
1 See Note D.

xi RECAPITULATION 229
the Father. Thus the Christian ministry, with
its changeless identity of function, through the
ages, is a standing witness to God's presence in
history, and claim upon the world. And the
authoritative language that it uses in administering
the sacraments, in ordaining, confirming, blessing,
declaring the forgiveness of sins, is an echo from
" the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity "
in transcendence of all human chance and change.
And if we are reminded that the Christian is but
one among many priesthoods, naturally evolved,
we answer that the fact does not lower it, but
raises them. For it exhibits man, throughout
his history, as instinctively tending towards an
institution, which was to rise to so spiritual a
climax in the end ; and therefore, we may
presume, as divinely destined by his make and
constitution to find his final satisfaction in God.
Again, the authority of the Church appears in
the authoritative character of its rnessage ; that
is to say, in the dogmatic form of its creed. It is
the Church of Jesus Christ, and exists to win men
to His allegiance, and so to endow them more
abundantly with spiritual life. And to do this it
must be able to teach them, categorically and
definitely, who and what is Jesus Christ. This

230 RECAPITULATION ch.
necessitates the record of His human life on earth,
as a fact ; and also the interpretation of that fact
which was given by His apostles, under the
guidance, as they believed, of the Holy Spirit,
and has been reiterated throughout all subsequent
ages by the Church. This interpretation involves
the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation;
which accordingly constitute the main content of
the creeds. The creeds state that certain events
actually occurred in history ; and that the Church's
traditional interpretation of them is, as against all
other views, correct and therefore to be believed.
Such statements must be dogmatic, from the
very nature of the case, for their whole point is
that both the history and its interpretation were
facts. Moreover, unless they were dogmatic they
would be practically useless ; for they would afford
no solid and stable foundation for the spiritual
life, which it is their express purpose to create
and sustain. They represent the fact that the
Church has a certain fixed and permanent belief
about God, which does not alter with the changing
speculations of the ages ; because it was not in
origin derived from the ordinary course of human
thought, but from above, from the transcendent
region ; from the revelation of Jesus Christ, as

xi RECAPITULATION 231
subsequently interpreted to the apostles by the
illuminating action of the Holy Spirit upon their
minds. And it is the possession of this definite-
ness of belief that makes a corresponding
definiteness of conduct possible. To the objection
that the language of the creeds seems, in some
places, to go beyond the doctrine of the New
Testament and the primitive Church, the answer
is that it was demonstrably never intended so to
do. The compilers of the creeds believed them
selves to be using the best terms that were avail
able to guard the traditional doctrine of the Church
from innovation ; while as acutely conscious as
ourselves of the utter inadequacy of human
language, when applied to things divine. And it
is in this sense that we retain and use them ; as
enshrining, in however imperfect words, the real
substance of " the faith once delivered to the
saints " ; and reminding us, by their dogmatic
form, that we believe that faith to rest on the
authoritative claim of Jesus Christ to reveal the
Father. Further, the Church, as a visjb_le._s,Q£i£ty, has a
common public worship. The threshold of that
worship is baptism, and its central service the
Eucharist ; the two sacraments which we believe

232 RECAPITULATION ch.
to have been " ordained by Christ Himself" and
to involve, therefore, direct obedience to His
personal authority, and all that we have seen that
authority to imply. Nor is it only in this way
that our sacraments connect us with the divine
authority. For they are both symbols and, as
Christians believe, means of grace, of God's free
gifts, that is to say, to the soul. And first they
are symbols, or outward and visible signs. • The
eucharist, for example, is a sacred meal, and as
such symbolic, at its lowest level, of our depend
ence upon the material world, which is God's gift
to us, for the maintenance and development of
our bodily life ; and, consequently, of all the
higher functions whereof the body is the organ.
Again it is shared with our fellows, and carries to
the climax of solemnity the immemorial sociality
of meals ; and in so doing reminds us that our
social nature and relationships, with the love in
which they culminate, are equally the gift of God.
And then, on a higher plane, its more particular
symbolism of the broken bread and outpoured
wine reminds us that our whole religion is founded
on God's greatest gift. " God so loved the
world that He gave His only-begotten Son."
" Christ loved the Church and gave Himself

xi RECAPITULATION 233
for it." "Who loved me, and gave Himself for
me. And what is true of the Eucharist is true of
baptism, and of the whole sacramental system.
On its symbolic, its pictorial side, it always
expresses the reception of a gift ; a gift that we
can claim by no right, that we can earn by no
merit ; a gift that is " freely given."
But the sacraments are not merely symbols ;
they are also, in our Christian belief, means of
grace ; channels of an inward and spiritual reality.
As such they have well been called extensions
of the Incarnation ; as continuing its principle,
and carrying spiritual life home to us through the
instrumentality of material things. And the
reasonableness of this is obvious. For our body
is an integral part of ourself, intimately reacting
and reacted upon by the soul. It is the sphere of
our realization, our spiritual life being unrealized,
till with an effort it has clothed itself in utterance
and action. It is the source again and instrument
of our fiercest and commonest temptations, and
as such the great battlefield of our warfare with
sin. Naturally, therefore, it must be included in
the consecration of our entire personality to God.
And it is congruous with all this that our spirit

234 RECAPITULATION ch.
should be assisted by grace that comes to us
through bodily means.
Moreover, as in the case of the priesthood, the
sacramental system of the Church illuminates the
kindred usages of cruder and earlier religions ;
and again beyond these throws a suggestive light
upon the spiritual significance of the material
world. For by the help of it we see that the
passing phases of material things may, each in its
moment of presence, have an eternal message to
deliver ; an aspiration to kindle by its beauty, or
an effort to evoke by its resistance, that will have
permanent effect upon the soul, when it is gone.
And while the Christian sacraments illustrate this
wider context, it in turn throws contributory
light upon them, by showing that they are no
exceptional or arbitrary things, but the natural
culmination of a process that is everywhere at
work. " For the invisible things of Him from
the creation of the world are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made, even
His eternal power and Godhead."
But the point we desire to emphasize is that
the grace of sacraments, the spiritual gift, that is
to say, which they confer freely or gratis, comes
to us with divine authority ; immediately through

xi RECAPITULATION 235
the authoritative ministry of the Church, ulti
mately from the absolute authority of God. It
comes in the way that all its symbolism was seen
to imply ; from without, from above, from the
eternal, the giver of all good gifts. And it has
the notes of its origin. It is the same for all,
overriding the distinctions of race, or class, or
state, or age ; the same always, unaffected by our
changes of mood or opinion ; and, in the legitimate
sense of the word, supernatural, as giving us
"power to become sons of god," "power from
on high." Thus the use of the sacraments
essentially implies a life of obedience to authority ;
authority which reflects the transcendence of
God. Again the Church has its inspired, its authori
tative book. But there is a vague notion in
many minds that the authority of the Bible has,
of late years, been critically shaken. But this
ought not to be and need not be so for Christians.
If, indeed, Christianity were founded upon a book,
it would be seriously affected by a critical de
preciation of that book. But Christians are, of
course, well aware that their religion is not founded
upon a book but upon a Person. The Christian
life was being led in its fulness, and the whole

236 RECAPITULATION ch.
essence of the Christian creed was being preached,
before any of the New Testament was written.
And though the New Testament has an intrinsic
authority of its own, in virtue of what it contains,
it comes down to us, as a canonical whole, on
the authority of the living Church, by whose
members, and for the use of whose members it
was originally composed. No amount therefore
of negative criticism, on the part of men who start
by rejecting the creed which is the presupposition
of the whole book, can be of serious importance
to Christians. Moreover, there are critics and
critics ; and the critical movement as a whole is
by no means necessarily of the negative description.
Much of it is positive and constructive ; the
thorough vindication of the Acts of the Apostles,
to take an obvious example, being the direct
result of modern criticism. And the general
effect of all such work has been to illuminate the
history, rather than to impair the value of the
Bible in the eyes of Christians.
Of course the Bible can never lose the in
trinsic value which it possesses for all serious
readers, in virtue of its moral and spiritual
grandeur. The prophets, the psalms, the gospels,
the epistles of St. Paul, can never be dethroned

xi RECAPITULATION 237
from the place they occupy in the literature
of the world. But beside and apart from this
intrinsic value, the Bible possesses an authority
for Christians which it has not, and cannot have,
for those who reject the Christian creed. For
while to the latter it is a more or less fortuitous
collection of independent writings, to the former
it comes with the unity of a single book. It
is the Bible ; it is one whole. And that because
it is focussed from beginning to end upon the
Incarnation ; upon " Jesus Christ whom," in the
words of Pascal, "the two testaments regard
the Old as its hope, the New as its model, both
as their centre." For if we believe in the
Incarnation, the whole history of Israel assumes
at once the character of a providential prepara
tion for it ; and the prophets are seen to have
been guided to foretell more than they foresaw.
Deny the truth of the Incarnation, and the
history fails of the high purpose, which its
prophetic guides and interpreters confidently
claimed for it ; while their own hope fades
into a delusion that never was fulfilled. But
Christians, in the present day, believe in the
Incarnation as positively as ever ; partly on the
authority of the Church, commended to them

238 RECAPITULATION ch.
by the wonder of its history, the work that
it has done, and the saints that it has schooled ;
this authority, of course, including the traditional
interpretation of the gospels ; and partly on
their own inner experience of the life which it
has enabled them to lead. And, thus believing,
they find a further corroboration of their faith
in the long preparation of the Jewish nation
for the coming of Christ ; and the assurance
of the prophets, with all their sense of inspira
tion, that the result of that age-long history
would be a blessing, not only to themselves,
but to the Gentile world ; — a blessing which,
whatever men may think about it, did as a fact
actually come to pass ; for few serious thinkers
would deny the world's debt to Christianity.
And, thus regarded, the Old Testament loses
none of its august authority from any critical
rearrangement of its details and dates. For
its essence is unchanged ; it is still profoundly
prophetic ; — prophetic of the blessing by which
Christians live. They cannot therefore cease
to view it as an inspired revelation of God's
providence in history and purpose for mankind.
" Whatsoever things were written aforetime
were written for our learning, that we through

xi RECAPITULATION 239
patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might
have hope." For "God who at sundry times
and in divers manners spake in time past
unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these
last days spoken unto us by His Son."
And what is true of the Old Testament
is true mutatis mutandis of the New. Its
interpretation turns entirely upon our belief
in the Incarnation. The New Testament was
written by members of the Church, and for the
use of the Church, nor did the earliest fragment
of it come into existence till after the Christian
life had been preached, and lived for some years
in the world. That life, as we gather from
St. Paul, who on this point was in undoubted
accord with the other apostles, was based upon
belief in the Incarnation. Consequently this
belief must already have been held by the
writers of the synoptic gospels. When there
fore we read those gospels, prepossessed by the
conviction that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate,
we read them in the same spirit in which they
were written, and have from the beginning been
read by the Church. They were written, that
is to say, in the same sense, and for the same
purpose as that for which the Church has always

240 RECAPITULATION ch.
authoritatively used them ; and that sense and
purpose they retain. It is possible, of course,
by a drastically eclectic treatment of them, to
construct out of their fragments the imaginary
portrait of a merely human Christ. But this
is not what their authors believed in, or intended
to pourtray. It follows that no wedge can be
driven between St. Paul and the synoptists,
or the synoptists and St. John, with a view to
the critical disruption of the New Testament.
It retains its unity, the unity that arises from
the singleness of its subject — the Incarnation of
Jesus Christ, — and with its unity its authoritative
value for all who desire to live in the power
of the Christian creed. This is not to deny
that many critical uncertainties attach to the
text of the New Testament. It is merely to
assert that if we retain the belief which is our
chief, if not only, reason for valuing it at all,
such uncertainties are utterly inadequate to
impair its substantial validity as a whole.
While we must further remember that it still
retains all the weight derived from that fulfil
ment of the Old Testament, which it every
where claims ; and which makes of the two
in Christian eyes, one book, upon one subject.

xr RECAPITULATION 241
" Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and
for ever."
It follows from all we have been saying that
the Christian life is lived in conscious obedience
to the personal authority of God ; which authority
is reflected internally in conscience, as enlightened
by the Holy Spirit, and externally in Christ and
His Church, with its ministry, its sacraments, its
scriptures ; all of which are critically depreciated
in the world to-day, but no more so 'than in
many other days, as for instance when Butler
wrote ; while despite all such depreciation, they
retain for those who believe and use them, the
same authority and power that they have ever
possessed. For it has always been an essentially
practical power, to be realized in and through
experience, rather than to be defined in any
adequate form of words. Hence the Christian
life is primarily spiritual, or, as it is sometimes
called, supernatural, in the sense that it consists
in communion with the Eternal Being who
transcends what we commonly call the order of
nature, and can regulate it, as, for example, in
answer to prayer, at His will. Consequently
Christian morality is reached through spirituality,
and is differentiated from other ethics by the fact.

R

242 RECAPITULATION ch.
This explains the prominence given, in limine, to
sin. Vice and crime are merged in the more
ultimate conception of sin, and the Christian life
is based upon repentance and the remission of
sin, as the indispensably preliminary condition of
restored union with God. It follows that with
such restoration comes humility, which is simply
the recognition of our true relation to God ; as
being one of entire dependence. But it is
dependence upon the Almighty, and thence
derives stability, consistency, courage, patience,
perseverance ; " as having nothing yet possessing
all things." Further life, thus regarded, is seen
to be a vocation, a call from God to be a " fellow-
worker " with Himself; and to do our duty, there
fore, is to do God's will, " to be about our Father's
business." And this involves working " as unto
the Lord," and therefore with singleness of purpose
and sincerity of motive, which issue in simplicity
and transparency of character.
Moreover, a life which is consciously lived
under divine authority is one of obedience, with
the self-sacrifice that obedience involves. But
obedience, whose object is the subordination of
self-will to the will of God, is the highest kind
of self-determination, and therefore issues in true

xi RECAPITULATION 243
freedom, which is the unhampered power to do
right, and so realize our good. Finally the
Christian believes that God's authority is not
arbitrary, but natural ; because He is the supreme
good, to which, when recognized, man must in
evitably gravitate, drawn by the irresistible attrac
tion of love. Hence the Christian life is one of
thankfulness, believing love to be at the heart
of the universe, and love which issues in personal,
providential care. And this gratitude, which
is at once the strongest affirmation of our belief
both in the personality and the love of God, reacts
upon the whole character and irradiates it with
an atmosphere of joy.
Such in outline is the Christian life as described
by St. Paul and St. John. It may be called
unworldly or other-worldly ; "for they who do
such things declare plainly that they seek a
country " ; and it stands in striking contrast to
much that passes for ethical practice in the present
day. But it is eminently practical, definite,
decisive, concrete, " fervent in spirit, serving the
Lord " ; and its definiteness obviously depends
upon the definite character of the theological
belief on which it rests. Thus divine tran
scendence is no academically abstract phrase,

244 RECAPITULATION ch. xi
sacramental grace, and biblical inspiration, no
superstitious or reactionary ideas ; for they meet
the pragmatic test ; they are alive ; they work in
the world ; they produce the one and only thing
which at once justifies the existence of humanity,
and vindicates its highest hope ; — the character
of the Christian saint.

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES

Note A
ABSOLUTE BEING
For numerous illustrations of this argument see the authorities
quoted by Gratry in his La Contiaissance de Dieu, to which
I am indebted for several of the references in Chapter II.
From recent philosophical writers I venture to extract the
following passages : —
" The longing and the misery of finitude that in my present
form of human consciousness now so frequently bound the
horizon of my darkened instants of fragmentary experience —
this longing and misery, when they beset me, I say, involve
that very search for Another, that very dissatisfaction with the
abstractness and dreary generality of my present ideas, which
I express in my own way, whenever, out of the depths, I cry
after Reality. . . . The world is and can be real only as the
object expressing in final, in individual form, the whole mean
ing which our finite will, imperfectly embodied in fleeting
instants, seeks and attempts to define as its own Other, and
also as precisely its own ultimate expression."
" The whole world of truth and being must exist only as
present, in all its variety, its wealth, its relationships, its entire
constitution, to the unity of a single consciousness, which
245

246 DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
includes both our own and all finite conscious meanings in
one final eternally present insight. . . . And . . . the knower
of the universe in its wholeness can possess ... no Being
that is unknown to himself. For whatever is, is consciously
known. . . . But if whatever exists, exists only as known, the
existence of knowledge itself must be a known existence, and
can finally be known only to the final knower himself, who,
like Aristotle's God, is so far defined in terms of absolute self-
knowledge." (Royce, The World and the Individual, Lect. ix.)
And again : " Conceiving the world from the point of view
of substance, or matter, or force, or any of the terms which
science uses to designate the ultimate in its operations, it
presents an aspect of coerciveness and inevitability that not
only evinces the relativity of our conceptions, but also the
necessity of presupposing something that is absolved from the
limitations which they impose. In other words, our concepts
of the ultimate constitution of our world all involve a point of
transcendence and the presupposition of some non-relative
ground of relativity. We reach then, as the last terms of our
relative experience, the notions of conditioned activity and
dependent being, and the question here is whether the trans
cendent implications of these will lead to the postulate of an
absolute that transcends experience, or rather, to the affirma
tion of absolute experience. Kant takes the former alternative.
But we have only to analyze the situation as it presents itself
in order to be convinced that the latter presents the more
tenable position. Conditioned activity, as we saw, is activity
that is modified by its other. It has in it, however, the
moment of self-initiative, which, could it get full and unimpeded
expression, would express truly the freedom of unconditioned
activity, and we have only to conceive this moment as freed
from its limitations in order to reach the notion of a self-
initiating, self-determining activity. And it is clear that such
an activity, arrived at in the way indicated, would be the

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 247
function of an absolute experience. A similar result follows
from the examination of the second notion : that of dependent
being. That being is dependent means in the last resort that
there is some other being in relation to which it is compelled
to be passive and receptive. This other being will then
possess the active originative function, the lack of which
renders itself relative. When we consider dependent being,
however, we do not find its dependence pure and unqualified.
The truth is that the notion of dependence is essentially a
qualified conception. The dependent can be conceived as
dependent only in proportion as the initiative that must be in
it is forced to lapse into passivity in presence of the agency of
another. In this case the other is a transcendent other, but
we will not need to argue at length here that the concept of
the agency of this other is to be reached by conceiving the
initiative that is in the dependent to be freed from its modifica
tion and given full unimpeded scope. The transcendent thus
realizes itself in a free activity whose potential germ is contained
in the relative experience.
" The conclusion that we draw from this is that the categories
of the dynamic consciousness do truly involve transcendence,
but not a transcendence of the concept of experience. The
points of transcendence are terms within experience which
are made relative by the modifications of other agencies, and
we have only to conceive the removal of the conditions of
these modifications in order to reach the notion of an absolute
experience in which these transcendent functions shall be
normal. The bearing of the conclusion arrived at here on
the problems of freedom and necessary being, cosmologically
considered, is clear enough. The doctrine of cosmological
freedom is, stated broadly, the proposition that somewhere
either in the world or out of it there is unconditioned activity
or absolutely free self-initiative. Kant admitted the possibility
of this in some hypothetical sphere outside of the world, but

248 DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
denied it a place in the world of experience. We, however,
demand a reconstruction of the notion of experience such as
will render it large enough to include both the relative and
the absolute, and we affirm that in this broader, concept of
experience and of the experience-world, must be included the
absolutely free self-initiative which we call freedom. We
contend, moreover, that this cosmological freedom is an
absolutely indispensable term in our world, being necessary in
order to ground the relative processes and to render them
either conceivable or possible. The doctrine of cosmological
necessity, stated in equally broad terms, is that either in the
world or out of it there is an absolutely necessary being ; that
is a being whose activities are all self-moved and free from
passivity and dependence on other, a being, therefore, whose
activities are all strictly self-determined by the inner necessity
of its own nature. Kant was willing to concede the possibility
of such a being outside of the world, but denied it a place in
any scheme of actual or possible experience. We contend,
however, that the concept of experience must be made all-
inclusive and that it must contain necessary as well as
contingent being. For we have seen that the notion of
contingence or dependence on other is impossible without
clothing the dependent individual with a potentiality of inner
self-origination that has been reduced to passivity by the
conditions of its relative existence. And in this connection
also we maintain that the cosmological postulate of a necessary
being is indispensable to the world of relativity as the only
principle that is able to reduce it to the stability required
in an object of knowledge." (Ormond, The Foundations of
Knowledge, pp. 387-389.)
There is also an excellent chapter on " Absolute Being " in
Harris's The Self-Revelation of God, which concludes with the
following summary (p. 165): —
"The true philosophy of human knowledge teaches that

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 249
knowledge is ontological in its beginning, that is, it begins as
the knowledge of being ; and it is always the knowledge of
being. "When we know, in the universe, being, we necessarily know
absolute Being, the ground of it and revealed in it.
" When we know, in the universe, power or causal energy,
we necessarily know the absolute Being as Power, the original
and continuous source of all finite power.
" When we know, in the universe, cause, we necessarily
know the absolute Being as first and all-originating Cause.
" When we know, in the constitution and course of the
universe, physical and spiritual, the manifestation of reason,
we know the absolute Being as absolute Reason, the Light
that lighteth every man.
"At last, when we find in the universe Christ and His
kingdom, we know the absolute Being as universal Love, the
Redeemer of men from sin."

Note B
episcopacy
On the subject of episcopacy, see Hooker's Ecclesiastical
Polity, Bk. vii., and for its modern treatment, Bishop Gore's
The Church and the Ministry ; Dr. Moberly's Ministerial
Priesthood, and Dr. Darwell Stone's Episcopacy and Valid
Orders in the Primitive Church. The following is Dr.
Moberly's summary statement of the situation (pp. 215-219) : —
" It is quite plain that from the earliest apostolic times
there were in every Church regularly constituted presbyters. It
is plain that, with these, deacons are habitually associated,
as inferior ministers. It is, I think, sufficiently plain that
prophets, as such, were not at any time a regularly constituted

250 DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
order of ministers ; and that, even as a class of ' gifted ' men,
they passed rapidly into insignificance and even suspicion.
It is, however, when we assume the continuity of presbyters
and deacons that the question begins. The real question is,
What is there behind, or beyond, presbyterate? Within the
New Testament, it is certain that presbyterate never was
complete or ultimate. Behind and above it, there was always
the background of apostolate. It may be taken as equally
certain that from the middle of the second century onwards
there is invariably found, behind and above presbyterate, the
background of episcopate.
"The question is then whether, between the close of the
New Testament and the middle of the second century, there
was an interval in which presbyterate had no background at
all; and whether, by consequence, the background of epis
copacy which we may certainly assume as universal and un
questioned before a.d. 150, was really, without continuous
apostolic devolution of authority, invented and evolved from
below. Was one background abolished, and, when there was
none, was another devised in its stead? Or was the later
background, with whatever modifications of condition or title,
itself the direct outcome, by lineal descent, from the earlier?
This question, and the answer, to it, are cardinal. Upon the
answer that is given it is not too much to say that absolutely
everything, in the rationale of Church ministry, depends. If
episcopacy is really in its origin evolved, not transmitted,
then the orders which it confers, and which depend upon it,
are ultimately also not transmitted, but humanly devised.
Then the entire belief of Christendom upon the essential
character of Church ministry — which was true, in fact, in the
New Testament, and during the lifetime of Apostles — died to
truth when they died, and has been a fundamental falsehood
ever since. . . .
" It is not irrelevant to emphasize the wider effects of

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 251
such a theory, and the extent to which all Church conviction,
and every historical principle of ordination, and perhaps form
of Ordinal, would be shattered by it. But it is more in accord
ance with the scope of the present chapter to insist that this later
Church theory must be understood to be already established
in the mind of the Church before a.d. 150 ; and so estab
lished, that there is no glimmer of consciousness that the
belief ever had been, or could have been, otherwise. But
such a belief follows upon an immemorial tradition of facts.
When, then, were the facts really otherwise ? Certainly they
could not nave been otherwise so long as apostolate lasted.
Certainly, in Asia Minor at least, episcopacy was most expressly
articulate, name and all, before the death of St. John. No
loophole appears to be left except the suggestion, itself upon
the broad facts not very probable, that in the non-Asiatic
Churches at the end of the first and the opening of the second
century presbyterate had a final and self-dependent authority.
Now this is certainly not at all like the Didache. The back
ground which it portrays may be in some ways misty or
mystifying, but the presence of a background is unmistakable.
Nor is it easy to reconcile with Ignatius's apparent belief as to
the universality and indispensableness of bishops. Neither, I
must submit, is it really sustained either by the letter of
Clement to the Corinthians, or of Polycarp to the Philippians,
or by the Shepherd of Hermas. These have sometimes been
thought to sustain it ; but I must submit that every one of
these, when weighed broadly and fairly, may be said — to say
the very least — to lend itself more conveniently to the opposite
view. " I have urged more than once that the evolution of an
episcopate upon which the presbyteral office depended for its
very being would shatter to pieces the uncompromising theory
of apostolical succession in the letter of Clement, if it were
not already somehow implied and contained within the system

252 DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
of the Church as Clement understood and intended it. And
I must say, finally, that whilst, on the one hand, I do not
believe that the European Churches could have become
silently episcopal, if episcopacy had involved any real altera
tion of their constitution at all ; on the other, ' the actual
phenomena of the writings of Clement and Hermas seem to
point to a real de facto existence of quasi-apostolic oversight
over Churches and presbyters, which is none the less practi
cally real because it is still perhaps imperfectly defined in
title and outline.
"As apostolate gradually disappeared, so episcopate gradually
stood out into clearness of view. There is a long period of
transition, in which episcopacy, eo nomine, may be said perhaps
gradually to ' emerge ' — for that is consistent with the previous
existence of what, though there, yet lacked explicitness and
recognition; but never to be 'evolved' — for that would imply
that it did not, in essential completeness, exist before. That
which was to come (between, say, the Rome of St. Clement
and the Rome which Hegesippus visited) was the stereotyping,
by titular contrast, of a difference inherently familiar, not the
revolutionary creation of a novel distinction. Meanwhile the
indefiniteness of nomenclature (such as it is) is no very un
natural result of what is historically a gradual, and at first
semi-conscious, process of transition, from the full and unfet
tered apostolate, to something which, though (in many respects)
far inferior, did yet really represent and perpetuate, as it was
essentially derived from, apostolic authority."

Note C
THE SYNOPTISTS
On this point see the preface to W. Richmond's The Creed in
the Epistles ; from which the following passages are quoted : —

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 253
" The Evangelists could not have been unconscious of the
contrast between the teaching of Christ which they recorded,
and the Christianity, the religion, in which they lived. They
must have been giving us in the teaching of Christ a pre
paratory stage of the Gospel teaching with the consciousness
that it was preparatory . . . they cannot have been un
conscious of the absence from the teaching recorded in the
Gospels of the most marked feature of the current Christian
religion, the life of the Spirit and the Divine Indwelling.
They cannot have regarded it as either an insignificant or an
illegitimate addition. Why were they not disturbed at this
contrast ? The only possible answer is that they view the
teaching of Christ as leading up to and preparing for the
Gospel as they knew it. They are telling us the Gospel story
as the story of the final preparation for the Gospel. The
Gospels are the last word of the Old Testament. . . . Like the
whole of the Old Testament they teach a temper of expec
tancy. They inspire in longing, a desire which is only met
when the Spirit is given, when the promise of the New
Covenant is fulfilled. . . . The Gospels not only give us the
last word of the Old Testament. They give us the first word
of the New Testament . . . they define a character, a temper,
which could only be realized or understood when the Spirit,
the gift of the Divine Indwelling was bestowed. . . . The
Gospels do not give us the simple Gospel, they give us the
incomplete Gospel. Nothing could have been more foreign
to the minds of Christian writers of the age of the Epistles
than that they should be supposed, in writing the Gospels, to
be giving us the whole Gospel of Christ."
" The historical inquirer cannot help asking, it is his business
to ask, at any given stage of a history, what did actually
happen. He is bound to ask — What did actually happen at
the beginning of the Gospel ? But he must do so with the
recollection which his materials themselves suggest. He can

254 DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE
only get at what did happen at the beginning through
documents which were written as deliberate reminiscences of
an initial stage of the Gospel, reminiscences of a beginning
recalled as a beginning. The actual fact is the complete
fact. He wishes to arrive at a life of Christ as it was lived,
to reproduce the portrait which He left impressed upon the
minds of those who knew Him in the flesh. Those who give
him the material for arriving at the results tell him that this
life was so lived in order, that He who lived it might be the
Spiritual life of those who record it, and of those who read
the record, that the impression He made on those who
companied with Him was made as a step to a living spiritual
knowledge of Him by those who know Him no longer after
the flesh."

Note D
RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY
On the relation of the authoritative element to the
intellectual and mystical elements in religion see Baron von
Hiigel's The Mystical Element of Religion. Of authority he
says : —
" Religion is ever, qua religion, authoritative and absolute.
What constitutes religion is not simply to hold a view and to
try and live a life, with respect to the Unseen and the Deity,
as possibly or even certainly beautiful or true or good ; but
precisely that which is over and above this, — the holding this
view and this life to proceed somehow from God Himself, so
as to bind my innermost mind and conscience to unhesitating
assent. Not simply that I think it, but that, in addition, I
feel bound to think it, transforms a thought about God into a
religious act " (p. 46).
" Christ is offered to us as the unique Saviour, as the

ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 255
unique revelation of God Himself. You are thus to take
Him or leave Him. To distinguish and interpret, analyze
or theorize Him, to accept Him provisionally or on condi
tions, — nothing of all this is distinctively religious. For, here
as everywhere else, the distinctive religious act is, as such, an
unconditional surrender" (p. 71).
" Only full trust, only unconditional surrender suffice for
religion. But then religion excites and commands this in a
person towards a Person ; a surrender to be achieved, not in
some thing, but in some one, — a some one who is at all, only
in as much as he is living, loving, growing; and to be per
formed, not towards some thing, but towards Some One,
Whose right, indeed, Whose very power to claim me, consists
precisely in that He is Himself absolutely, infinitely, and
actually, what I am but derivatively, finitely and potentially.
Thus the very same act and reasons which completely bind
me, do so only to true growth and to indefinite expansion "
(PP- 72-73)-

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