YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE
RICHARD S. FELLOWES FUND

I BELIEVE

I BELIEVE
SERMONS ON THE
APOSTLES' CREED
BY THE UEV.
G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY
AUTHOR OF " LIES ! " " ROUGH RHYMES
OF A PADRE," ETC. ETC.

NEW >iEJr YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE
TITLE OF " FOOD FOR THE FED-UP "

Made and Printed in Great Britain.
T. and A. CoNSTABLB Ltd., Printers, Edinburgh.

TO
J. K. MOZLEY, B.D.
IN GRATITUDE FOR MANY YEARS
OF FIRM FRIENDSHIP, AND MANY
LESSONS LEARNED

Authof's Foreword

This odd book rests upon an assumption.
It is not odd because of that. Most books
do. They have to, because all thought rests
upon assumptions. If in this life you refuse
to assume anything you had better blow out
your brains or take some prussic acid. Com
mitting suicide is like docking small dogs'
tails — it is better to do it all at once than by
inches. I have assumed that the hall-mark
of the modern mind which separates it from
the mind of yesterday is the idea of progress,
the conception of man and man's world as
being unfinished things which are in process
of creation. What has happened in modern
times is that the idea of progress has become
so dominant and powerful and so widely
spread that we must eitha: think out and
express our rehgion in terms of that idea,
or go without one altogether. Dean Inge
says that the idea of progress is not a modern
one, but so ancient as to be almost played
vii

Food for the Fed-up

out. I hate differing from the Dean— he
knows so much that ordinary people cannot
differ from him without having an uneasy
sensation that they are probably fools. But
one has to put up with that — and anyhow I
am used to it, I have had it all my life. And
besides, it cannot really be helped ; however
much he may hate to differ from the Dean,
the ordinary man cannot possibly agree with
him without going melancholy mad, and on
the whole it is better to live in a Fool's
Paradise than to die in the county lunatic
asylum. And so, in spite of the Dean, I still make
my assumption : the idea of progress; —
although individuals among the ancients may
have had it in their minds and expressed it —
is essentially a modern idea, and the essential
modern idea. It has filtered through from
the study to the street, and has taken hold,
not merely of the intellectual, but of the
ordinary man who works with his hands to
keep his children. And in that form — the
popular form — it is entirely modern. The
point is : is it true ? The Dean in his Romanes
lecture seems to think that on the whole it
is not. I am bound to confess that I find the
Romanes lecture dreadfully confusing ; I
viii

Authors Foreword

dare not say that it is confused. Half my
time I am wondering whether the Dean is
cursing the idea of mechanical and inevitable
progress in the macrocosmos, or the ordinary
common or garden idea of possible progress
in the cosmos. I am a bit vagu& as to what
the macrocosmos is, and quite clear that
whatever it is I do not know anything about
it. The Dean says that the idea of progress
in the macrocosmos is untenable and in
compatible with Christianity, and I am quite
willing to take his word for it, but I am
grateful to him for the statement that ' there
may be an infinite number of finite purposes,
some much greater and others much smaller
than the span of an individual life, and within
each of these some divine thought may be
working itself out, bringing some life or series
of lives, some nation or race or species, to
that perfection which is natural to it — what
the Greeks called its " nature." ... It may
be that there is an imminent teleology which
is shaping the life of the human race towards
some completed development which has not
yet been reached.'
That really gives me all I need. What the
Dean calls an ' imminent teleology ' I would
be content to call God, or, in the language of
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Food for the Fed-up

St. John's Gospel, ' the Word of God by Whom
all things were made.' Incidentally, I cannot
help feeling that God is not merely a simpler,
but a more accurate, term to use, because
teleology implies a person to teleologise,
unless we are to believe in a mechanical
teleology which the Dean says (and I agree —
Hurrah ! I am not a fool any longer now) is
anathema. The fact of the matter is that
the popular idea of progress has nothing to
do with the macrocosmos, or any such remote
questions as those which concern its ultimate
nature. It has only to do with the human
race and the possibility of its progress towards
perfection ; and this the Dean allows is an
essentially modern idea, for he admits that
' on the whole the ancients did tend to regard
Time as the enemy. . . . They would have
thought the modern notion of human per
fectibility at once absurd and impious.' The
idea that has taken hold of us all is that there
is a meaning and a purpose that runs through
human history as a whole, and that the great
call of God to human beings is to discover
what that purpose is, and co-operate with
Him in working it out. The great value of
the Dean's lecture seems to me to lie in its
vigorous protest against the idea that you

Author s Foreword

can progress without knowing where you are
going to ; that you can co-operate in the
working out of God's purpose without in any
way understanding what the purpose is ;
that the new doctrine is always the true
doctrine — ^just because it is new. This idea is
not so much a form of modern thought as a
form of modern lunacy. You cannot go
home by walking very quickly in the opposite
direction, and you are not of necessity nearing
Land's End because you have just arrived at
John o' Groat's. It is true that ' what we
need is a fixed and absolute standard of
values, that we may know what we want to
get and where we want to go.' Without that,
there can be no real progress. And yet it
does seem to me that although that is evi
dently true, there is a certain amount of
evidence to justify the belief that there is a
Power greater than ourselves which goes on
working its purpose out, to a certain extent,
over our heads as individuals and without our
full knowledge and co-operation. And the
evidence for that I find mainly in that extra
ordinary historical crisis which is called the
Industrial Revolution — the gift to man of
mechanical power. What impresses me
mainly about the Industrial Revolution is
xi

Food for the Fed-up

that it was the result of a gift from God, a
pure and absolute ' bolt from the blue ' so
to speak. There seems to be no doubt that
the enormous increase in productive power
which has come to man in the last century
and a half is the result in the main neither of
capitalistic enterprise nor of manual labour,
but of inventive genius, and inventive genius
is a pure gift like poetry — you either have it
or you haven't it, and if you haven't it you
cannot get it ; inventors are born, not made.
And although it is not true that people who
travel sixty miles an hour must be five times
as civilised as people who travel only twelve,
it is evident that the power of travelling
sixty miles an hour or more, combined with
the power of such rapid communication as
is supplied by the telegraph, the telephone,
and wireless, opens out entirely new possi
bilities for the world and the human race —
possibilities of union and of co-operation
which have never existed in the world before.
And these new -possibilities do seem to have
been worked out over our heads, and without
our knowing whither we were being led. It
is perfectly true that they do not in them
selves constitute a progress in humanity,
but they do provide for us a new and astound-
sii

Author's Foreword

ing opportunity for progress — true progress,
with a perfectly definite and splendid objective
which is the unity of the Human Race, the
creation of Man, the great Human Brother
hood. That we are actually making any
progress towards that objective is extremely
difi&cult to prove. Nothing is more futile
than attempted comparisons of this age
with others that have preceded it. Anything
can be proved by that method. People
generally select out of one age what suits
them and compare it with a selection from
their own age made for the same reason, and
then use the comparison to prove a pet theory
which is reaUy based much more upon their
peculiar prejudice than upon any reaUy
rational grounds. That is very largely what
the Dean does in his comparison between
modern days and antiquity.
But as one surveys the whole drama of
history it does seem to be enormously prob
able that Christ was right, and that the
other name for that great Power which moves
behind all things is Love, and that God is
working out down the ages the purpose of
Brotherhood. From our point of view He
is working it out appallingly slowly and pain
fully — it seems still to be miles and miles
xiii

Food for the Fed-up

away. Those who have seen it, loved it, and
longed for it, have received a dreadful set
back in the last five years, in which the Human
Brotherhood has been crucified and tortured.
But even in the face of those hideous years a
Christian can stiU believe, because the centre
of his Faith is a Crucifix, behind which stands
a tomb that is empty. He need not cut
down his hopes for humanity at large to
very modest and humble aspirations, as the
Dean tells us we must do. He can believe
that we have a millennium to look forward
to, and that the Kingdom of God is at hand.
The idea of progress in and through Christ
is, I believe, the most powerful and man-
moving reality in the world to-day, and I
believe that we have in Christ a rational
right to look upwards and onwards and to
see the New Jerusalem coming down from
Heaven adorned as a bride for her husband.
That is our objective. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.
St. Paul's Vicarage,
Worcester,
Jan. 6, 1 92 1.

XIV

Contents

I PAGE
BREAD AND BUTTER  , . I

II
I BELIEVE IN GOD THE FATHER . , , , 24
III
ALMIGHTY ?......<•• 49
IV
AND IN JESUS  ; t 72
V
CHRIST  • • 94
VI
HIS ONLY SON?  ^^^
VII
WHO WAS CONCEIVED OF THE HOLY GHOST, BORN OF
THE VIRGIN MARY  13^
XV

Food for the Fed-up

VIII PAGB
SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE ' . . . .171
IX
DEAD AND BURIED ....... 2O5
X
HE DESCENDED INTO HELL . , . . , 228
XI
THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN FROM THE DEAD . 252
XII
HE ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN  27O
XIII
AND SHALL COME AGAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD
TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD , . 29O

XVI

/. Bread and Butter
The language that men spoke in France and
Flanders was not always elegant, but it was
always expressive. It was the speech of
men who were up against realities, and it
got there, and got there straight, wasting no
time in plucking flowers of beauty by the
way. Some of its expressions will live and
some will die, perhaps some are better dead.
One of its commonest phrases, whether it
lives or dies, is a masterpiece of expressive
diction, ' I 'm fed up.' There is no Enghsh
Dictionary equivalent for it. It expresses
all the consciousness of waste and futility,
all the bitterness of barren agony that men
who lived in the vaUey of the shadow of death
laughed at, because they could not afford to
cry over it.
A I

Food for the Fed-up

• 'Tain't the sufferin' as I grouse at,
I can stick my bit o' pain.
But I keeps on alius askin'.
What 's the good and who 's to gain ?
When you 've got a plain objective
You can fight your fight and grin,
But there ain't no damned objective.
And there ain't no prize to win.
We 're just like a lot o' bullocks
In a blarsted china shop,
Bustin' all the world to blazes.
'Cause we dunno 'ow to stop,
Trampling years of work and wonder
Into dust beneath our feet,
And the one as does most damage
Swears that victory is sweet.'
The uselessness of life, the fatuous futility
of our sufferings and pains, the boredom of
energy expended to no purpose, and with no
clear end in view, the pure silliness of modern
warfare, is all summed up in those two words
' Fed up.' They express a state of mind
which all good leaders knew to be the soldier's
greatest enemy in war. An army of men
who are fed up can have no hope of Victory,
because they have no will to win. It is the
soldier's greatest enemy in war, this state of
mind, and the citizen's greatest enemy in
2

Bread and Butter

time of peace. Men and women who are
fed up can neither fight nor live. The
dangers of the disease, and of the disasters
that follow in its train, are greater in peace
than they are in war, because the task
of men in time of peace, the work they
have to do, is so much more difi&cult and
complicated than the simple work of war.
The immediate purpose of war, at any rate,
is clear : there is your enemy who will kill
you if you do not kill him, and the conscious
ness of this simple purpose, this plain objec
tive, with the tremendous motive-power of
self-protection behind it, is enough to sustain
energy and keep alive the will to work at
most times. It was only in the intervals
of what the Army, with a conscious or uncon
scious sense of humour, called ' Rest,' which
meant endless marchings to and fro, and the
forming of fours some thousands of times
a day, it was only in those times that black
doubts about the purpose and meaning of
it aU came down upon men like darkness,
and weariness set in, and they groused, and
were ' fed up.' Men who did not know the
3

Food for the Fed-up

reason often said that the better off the
soldier was, the farther he went back from
the fighting hne, the more he found to grouse
at. Of course he did, because he had not
then the saving sense of immediate purpose ;
if he was to keep going he had to find a
larger purpose, and a more comprehensive
rneaning in it all, and that was hard to find
— ^and often he did not find it, and was ' fed
up.' But in time of peace there is no such
clear immediate purpose, no ' plain objective '
to sustain a man, beyond the purpose of living
and the pleasures of life — and they are
terribly apt to paU and grow monotonous.
Doubts about the meaning and purpose of
it all come knocking at the door. What 's
the use ? Who 's to gain ? Why should
one work, and work one's hardest, why should
one do one's very best and put one's heart
into life's work — what is it aU for ? Why
should one give up anything or sacrifice
anything, isn't it folly ? Men work to live,
and what is life but pleasure, enjoyment,
and having a good time ? Why should a man
be unselfish ? What is the good of self-
4

Bread and Butter

sacrifice ? Each man for himself, that is
the common-sense policy, and the real gospel.
It gets down to facts, and doesn't spout
beautiful theories. And yet we know that,
sensible as it sounds, that pohcy spells
disaster pure and simple. Universal selfish
ness is another name for Hell on earth. Men
can only live in peace together, building
stable states and happy homes, at the cost
of continual self-sacrifice. We know it deep
down, but it is intensely hard to keep it
always before us, this necessity of self-sacri
fice. It is hard in any case, and impossible
unless we have a clear vision of life's purpose,
some plain and comprehensive objective.
Where there is no open vision the people
perish, they are bound to perish. There is
no commanding motive for unselfishness
wherewith to combat and overcome the
immediate and pressing motives to self-
seeking. Without some vision of life's pur
pose men fall back upon sensationalism and
selfishness. They cannot help themselves.
Like all other living things, men only move
when they are tickled, so to speak, or, as the
5

Food for the Fed-up

dignified psychologist would put it, all life
is perpetual response to external stimuli,
which sounds better in a book, but is really
a comic way of saying the same thing. We
only shift when we are tickled, and when
there is nothing to tickle us into self-sacrifice
we faU back on the selfish sensations that are
always tickling us. That is what we have
done. We are living for the sensation of
the moment, and it is profoundly unsatisfy
ing. It is like trying to hve on fancy
cakes — little bits of God knows what with
cherries on top — pure sensations without
satisfaction. You cannot live on them. You
must have bread and butter, solid food ; if
you try a diet of fancy cakes you get fed
up, which means you are still hungry, but
can't eat. We have been trying it on. We
have in these post-war days a sensational
Press, a sensational stage, sensational dress,
sensational literature, and sensational every
thing else, except sensational souls, and the
consequence is that our daily lives are as dull
as the daily press. They are full of murders,
6

Bread and Butter

divorces, bloody massacres, and monotony.
We are fed up. There is excuse for us.
We have been tried as silver is tried, we
have passed through fire and water and
had a surfeit of self-sacrifice, we have given
our best and bravest, and shed our blood
in rivers, and we trusted that God would
bring us out into a wealthy place, into a new
world. But it is no new world that we find
ourselves in, but an old world grown older,
a world of selfishness grown more selfish, of
greed that has grown more greedy, and of
folly that knows no limit to its foolishness.
There has come upon us a great disillusion
ment. We thought that the great Peace
Conference was travailing to the birth of
Peace, and it has brought forth an abortive
pandemonium. Millions who gave up their
all in a frenzy of self-sacrifice during the
war are asking themselves bitterly what
they gave it for. What 's the good ? and
Who 's to gain ? We are fed up. It is
dangerous, deadly dangerous, and must be
cured — and there is only one cure for it.
7

Food for the Fed-up

We must feed our souls on sohd food, and
not on the slops of sensationalism. We
must regain our vision of life's purpose and
set up a plain objective. We must, in fact,
be able to repeat our Creed, and mean it —
it is our first necessity.
We shall never know where we are politi
cally, economically, or industrially until we
know where we are religiously and morally.
You cannot understand the part except
upon some theory of the whole. You cannot
be fixed about an5rthuig unless you have a
faith about everjrthing. We must have a
creed. And yet we are ' fed up ' with creeds and
formulas. We suspect them. What differ
ence do they make? What does it matter
what a man believes so long as he does
what is right ? Tell me something you know
and I don't, and I '11 listen to you, but as
to what you believe, weU, there is a shortage
of paper and a surplus of hot air in the world
already, don't add to it by writing a book
about your creed. It is not your creed but
8

Bread and Butter

your conduct I am concerned with. You
can believe what you like — you can be a
Roman Catholic or a Plymouth Brother,
and in fact you can be a Calvinistic Confucian
with leanings towards Buddhism if you like,
so long as you pay your debts. Creeds don't
count. It is doing right that matters. That
is the common point of view. It sounds well,
and is nonsense. It is all full of inaccuracies.
It does not express thought, only feeling. It
is doing right that matters. But what is
Right ? What ought we to do ? What is
our duty as men ? A man does right when
he fulfils the purpose of his life. But what
is its purpose ? An axe is a good axe when
it cuts down trees — that is what it 's for.
A man is a good man when he does what ?
What is he for ? Many things are right for
one purpose that are aU wrong for another.
Many acts are right for a lower that are
not right for higher purposes. Patriotism
is right. It is right to love one's country.
But ' Patriotism is not enough,' Nurse CaveU
said before her death ; ' we need to love our
9

Food for the Fed-up

enemies.' Why do we need that ? You
cannot answer that question unless you have
a creed. You cannot really answer any
question involving right and wrong unless
you have a creed, a belief about life's final
purpose and the meaning of the world. A
great many of the men directly responsible
for this last Hell were acting rightly accord
ing to their conscience ; they were acting
patriotically, and that was enough accord
ing to their creed. They believed in God
the Fatherland, Almighty Ruler of Heaven
and Earth, and according to that creed
their actions were right. Follow your
conscience and you can't go wrong, is popular
cant and claptrap. Many of the most dam
nable deeds in history were done by con
scientious people. Their conscience was aU
right but their creed was all wrong. Your
conscience is only an eye which must have
light to see with, and your creed is the light
by which your conscience sees. Without a
creed it will trip you up and break your
neck. On a pitch-black night all men are
10

Bread and Butter

blind, and the man with keen eyes wlU often
be the first to fall because he thinks he sees.
A man can do a deadly wrong supposing it
is right. The drunkard who treats his pal
to drink and makes him like himself is doing
unto others as he would they should do unto
him, loving his neighbour as himself. He is
acting out the golden rule apparently. But
the golden rule is only gilt without a creed to
guide it. Right conscience with a wrong
creed will turn the human race into a herd of
swine helping one another to wallow on a
muck-heap. When you talk about doing
right without a creed you may sound sensible,
but you are really talking straight through
the middle of your Sunday hat.
All men act upon their real creed. It
may not be the creed that they profess,
because they may be Uars or hypocrites —
most men are both more or less — it may not
be the creed that they profess, but it must
inevitably be the creed that they beheve,
from which men's normal actions spring.
When you stop talking and start thinking,
IT

Food for the Fed-up

you are bound to come to it. The only thing
that really does matter is what god a man
worships and believes in.
You must have a god or gods. Your
god is what you live for, and you must hve
for something, if it is only your dinner. If
you hve for your dinner, then your god is
your belly, and a very common god too.
A real atheist would not need to commit
suicide, he would be dead already. He
would be like old soldiers, he would not die,
but simply fade away. If you live, you must
hve for something, and what you hve for is
your god, and your actions are based upon
your belief that it is what you ought to live
for — your real creed. The drunkard's real
creed is, ' I believe in Alcohol Almighty,
Lord of all good living, bestower of True
Peace. I believe in the fiery Spirit that can
give the coward courage and make the dumb
man speak, that soothes all sorrows, dries all
tears, and gives the weary rest.' That is his
real creed, and his actions are based upon it,
in fact his nose is coloured by it.
The most popular creed is stiU the one
12

Bread and Butter

with which the human race began — the belief
in many gods. Men are naturally poly-
theists. They tend to believe in and worship
anything that touches them, grips them,
possesses them, and lifts them out of them
selves. Men have destroyed the temples of
Bacchus, but they worship the Wine God
stiU ; they have thrown down the shrines of
Venus, but millions believe in Lust ; they
have broken the images of Mars, but still
his hoarse voice calls the nations out to slay,
and his fever — War Fever' — turns men into
beasts. Christ has won the churches, but
the old gods hold the streets. Many a man
who professes the fashionable belief in one
God does not believe in that God at aU,
but in half a dozen different idols that seem
to give him what he needs.
The average man is still a polytheist, and
as long as you remain a worshipper of many
gods you will remain an average man, you
will run with the ruck, doing what other
people do, saying what other people say, and
thinking what other people think, bitten
with every passing craze, from diabolo to
13

Food for the Fed-up

barbaric dances, priding yourself on your
sanity because you are as mad as all the other
lunies. You wiU be a sort of person, but no
sort of a personality. You will not be able
to say with any truth, ' I believe,' not merely
because you have no belief, but because you
have no ' I ' to believe with. You won't
have a real ' Ego,' you will be a split personal
ity, a house divided against itself, with Dr.
JekyU in the dining-room, Mr. Hyde in the
kitchen, and God knows who stowed away
in the basement. You will not be able to
rely upon yourself, because you won't have
a self to rely on, only a mob of selves clamour
ing for satisfaction.
The fundamental dif&culty of making peace
on earth is that we cannot find enough men
of goodwill — in fact, we cannot find enough
men of any will at all, good or bad. We
strive to make a united world out of divided
people, divided not merely from one another,
but divided within themselves. St. James
was in the right when he said, ' Why are
there wars and battles among you ? Isn't it
because there is a conflict of passions within
14

Bread and Butter

you ? You are eaten up with desires and find
no satisfaction. You butcher your brothers
and get up agitations, and they land you
nowhere. You plunge the world into battles
and great wars, but don't get what you want
because you won't pray, or if you do, your
prayers are rotten ones, because you only
want food to squander on your lusts.' That
is the root of the matter. We talk in splendid
bombast about the ' Will of the People,' but
God alone knows where to find it, or what it
is. The job is to find a man with a ' Will,'
let alone a people. Most men don't know
what they want, and won't be happy till they
get it. And there can be no peace for men
in that condition. The first step toward
peace is to kill polytheism and convert the
world to the worship of one God. Yoq can
not unite men with one another who are
divided within themselves. The first neces
sity is the concentration of your Faith —
which is another name for your life-force —
upon one God, one goal, one governing
purpose. If you can accomphsh that con
centration or surrender, you will become, or
15

Food for the Fed-up

be on the road to becoming, a personality, a
character. You may, of course, become a
bad character — ^that will depend upon what
god you choose. If you take a low god
you will be a character, but a low character.
If you take money, for instance, and make it
your one god, if you hve for it, work for it,
give up everything else and follow it, you wiU
become a distinct person — in fact, you may
become a profiteer, and a member of Parha-
ment or a peer. Almost any god will give
you for a while the power and joy of mono
theism, and that is the very essence of all
real power and joy. The joy of the mono
theist is what all the world, consciously or
unconsciously, is seeking. No man knows
the meaning of pure joy until he can say with
complete conviction, ' I have found it, I
believe in one god.' The joy of the lover for
whom all the world grows golden because
his mistress smUes, the joy of the artist
absorbed in his dream of beauty, form and
colour, the joy of the musician drunk with his
million melodies, all these are the joys of the
monotheist — they are the ecstasies of the
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Bread and Butter

man who has found the one thing which is
for him supremely well worth while, and has
surrendered himself utterly into its service.
That is the essence of bliss, and for a while
almost any old god will do it for you ; men
have got it out of whole-hearted devotion to
anything — from bottling bugs to badminton,
and from serving Christ to playing poker.
For a while any one god will do. But only
for a while. It won't last. You have a
many-sided nature, and you can fool part
of your nature aU the time, and the whole
of your nature part of the time, but you
cannot fool all your nature all the time.
Sooner or later, if your one god is not big
enough, and true enough, part of your nature
will rebel, and turn rotten on you — and you
will be ' fed up ' again. If you would have
the joy of the monotheist as a lasting thing,
you must not only find your one god, but
that god must be big enough and true enough
to satisfy the whole of your nature, or to
give such clear promise of final satisfaction
as wiU keep you seeking. The worship of
idols is like the taking of drugs, it ends in
B 17

Food for the Fed-up

desperation. That is why so many great
souls have been supremely unhappy in love.
They sought, as all men seek, the one God,
and for a moment thought they saw him
shining in some poor woman's eyes, and, of
course, fell down and worshipped, and asked
their goddess to ascend God's throne and be
the ruler of the stars. Then when she proved
unfitted for that job, and took to bearing
babies as a human substitute, they turned
in disgust and left her. All the love poetry
of the world, which the materialist in his
fatuous wisdom ascribes to the ' sex instinct,'
is written just as really in praise of God as
the hymn of any saint. The golden joy that
thrills through it and reveals a wonder world
is just a faint and distant shadow of the joy
and beauty that wiU transform the earth
when men have really done with idols and
can say their Creed in truth.
The instinct of the world is right in reject
ing purely formal creeds and dogmas as of
no importance. Of course they are of no
importance. Purely formal anythings are
of no importance. Purely formal five-pound
i8

Bread and Butter

notes would be of no importance. But real
five-pound notes are of great importance.
They may mean health, and strength, and
music, and art, and poetry, and love, and
children, and laughter, and mountains, and
sea, and sunshine, and heaven or hell — they
mean life or death. To throw out the reality
because the form is in itself of no import
ance, is pouring out the baby with the bath
water. Of course the form is in itself of no
importance, and while creeds are only forms
they are purely silly. But creeds must have
a form — like everything else in this odd world.
They must find expression somehow. Like
every other spiritual thing, they must have
a material symbol of some sort. That is
the best name ever given to creeds, and it is
a pity we did not stick to it. They are
' symbols ' of Truth. Symbols, mind you,
not exhaustive statements. There isn't such
a thing existing as an exhaustive statement
of final Truth. We don't know it yet, and
therefore cannot state it. The creeds are no
more complete statements of truth than a
soldier's love-letter from the front was a
19

Food for the Fed-up

complete statement of his love. You know
the kind of letter. ' My dear Ehza, — I hope
this finds you in the pink, as it leaves me at
present. I hope to come on leave soon. RoU
on Peace. Mind you don't forget me. With
love and kisses, your affectionate Bill.' And
then as many crosses as the paper would
permit. This is not an expression of reality
— it is ridiculous as an expression, but it was
to Eliza enormously satisfying as a symbol.
She slept on it, lived with it — it was life,
and love, and laughter, and sun, moon, and
stars, and that is what creeds and dogmas
are — ^ridiculous as expressions, but wonderful
as symbols. AU dogmas are poetry, and can
only be understood and criticised as poetry —
as an endeavour to symbolise what cannot
be stated. To treat creeds as you would
treat scientific statements of observed fact
is like reading Keats as you would an order
for Keating's Powder. The brevity of the
form is deceptive. It is taken as the brevity
of careful prose, when it really is the brevity
of l5n:ic poetry. You know what I mean.
Poetry does not say what it means, it hints
20

Bread and Butter

at it. So do creeds. They are absurd as
statements, but superb as symbols. You
must have them — you must have dogmas.
Undogmatic teaching is the driest, duUest,
dreariest thing in the world. It is teaching
minus conviction — ^brief, bright, and breezy
talks to the people on popular subjects that
pass the time away and get nowhere. O my
holy Aunt, how fed up one gets with that
business! It only consists in dressing up
platitudes and putting powder on their noses
to make them presentable. Undogmatic
teaching is so broad-minded that it is not
deep enough to wet the uppers of your boots.
It gets nowhere. It has no god. It tells
men to worship aU the gods in moderation,
and not to go too far with any of them,
because of God, the great policeman, who
has a big stick to beat any one who goes the
whole hog about anything. Undogmatic
teaching can't be Christian, because it has
to be careful — it must not hurt any one's
feelings, so anything is as true as any
thing else ; it is aU a matter of opinion —
nobody reaUy knows — ^you just believe what
21

Food for the Fed-up

you like; it is just disguised agnosticism,
and that is the duUest and most cowardly of
all creeds. You must have dogmas, because
you can't have convictions without symbols
to express them, and you must have con
victions because you must have a God ; it
aU comes back to that. What we need is
not less dogma, but more of it — tons of it.
Only it must be dogma properly understood.
Dogma is the potted poetry of faith. It is
the radium of reality. Don't let 's talk any
more nonsense about abolishing creeds ; you
might as well try to abolish bread and butter.
Let us find out what our creed is, and whether
it reveals to us a God to whom we can sur
render ourselves, body, soul, and spirit.
If our creed is only a form, that may be
our fault, not the creed's. You can bet on
this — You don't really believe your creed until
you want to say it standing at spiritual
attention with the roll of drums in your ears,
the light of love dazzling your eyes, and all
the music of a splendid world crashing out
a prelude to its truth. If your creed is duU,
it is dead, or you are dead, and either one or
33

Bread and Butter

the other of you must be made alive again.
Either you must change your creed, or your
creed must change you. That is the problem
that faces us — are we to change the Christian
creed, or is the Christian creed to" change us?
I 'm betting on the creed every time, and I
want to tell you why.

«3

//. / believe i7i God the Father
We must have a creed, a symbol of our faith
in this world's final meaning and purpose,
or we shall become ' fed up ' with life. 1
don't believe that there exists, or could exist,
a much better creed than that which we caU
the Apostles' Creed. If a man can lay hold
on its inner meaning — if he can see the truth
it hints at, however dimly — I believe he is on
his way to find the great Reality to which
he can dedicate every power he possesses,
and in which he can find satisfaction for
every fine desire of his soul. It is a wonder
ful little document. It blazes with colour,
radiates romance, and stirs the blood like a
battle cry. It only needs that we should
wipe the dust of ages from our eyes, and see
behind its short sharp sentences the Light
which gave it birth, and it becomes a living
24

/ believe in God the Father

creed for hving men. It fhrigs out its chal
lenge abruptly. It does not argue, it chal
lenges an argument. It does not do your
thinking for you, it caUs you out to think,
and act, and love, and pray.
To me it is always preceded by a flourish
of trumpets. It shouts out its great guess
at final reality, and calls upon brave men to
stake their lives upon its truth. It recog
nises that life is a great gamble. There are
no final certainties, only tremendous proba-
bihties. If you will not gamble in this life,
then you cannot live, you can only linger.
That is why the gambling instinct in human
nature is almost as strong as life itself. That
is why the effort to kiU it is bound to be a
faUure. Some of the finest flowers of human
history sprang from that instinct as their
seed. It is the spirit of enterprise, adventure,
courage — the very pith and core of manhood.
Of course you only play with and degrade it
when you merely put money on a contest of
horses. Life calls you to bet your heart-strings
on a conflict of gigantic forces. Saying your
creed is booking your bet, your bet of body,
35

Food for the Fed-up

mind, and spirit, on a great chance. You
are right if you seek to understand the chance
and count the odds up carefuUy, but you are
wrong if you refuse to bet because you can't
be sure. Taking risks is the only way to
safety. The man who wiU not bet is the
genuine agnostic, and a reaUy genuine agnos
tic can never know what life is. He could
not marry because his wife might play him
false, and would not dare to have a child
because it might be born cross-eyed. What
ever power there is behind this world, it must
have a sporting element in it, because it has
no use for men who wiU not take risks. The
great creed recognises that, and caUs on men
to bet on a great tip.
Is the world good or bad ? That is the
question. Is it good or evU ? That life at
present is a contest between the two is not
a question but a certainty. Here they are,
good and evil, at it hammer and tongs under
our very noses. Life calls out to us, ' RoU
up, roU up, to the great fight. What 's the
betting. Black or White ? pay your money
and take your choice.' To that chaUenge the
26

/ believe in God the Father

creed rephes, ' I back White— back it aU out
— my last shirt, and my only pair of breeches.'
' I beheve in God the Father Almighty, Maker
of Heaven and Earth.' Good is finaUy Al
mighty, Evil hasn't a dog's chance. That is
the Christian bet, which a man books when
he stands to say the Apostles' Creed.
That is the root meaning of the first clause.
The Christian is an Optimist, and believes
that at its heart the world is good. It is well
to get that fixed for a start, because there are
those who reject Christianity to-day as being
a pessimistic faith, and they have some
reason on their side. In a book of his caUed
The New Optimism, Mr. H. de Vere Stac-
poole says, * Nothing satisfies me but the faith
I have struck out for myself, and the phUo
sophy that a child can understand. And that
faith is simply in the essential goodness of the
world. . . . Christianity believes in the
essential badness of the world. . . . AU men
are sinners. . . . Christianity believes that
the world is bad to the core, and yet beheves
that a God who is all goodness made man aU
at once, and thoroughly bad ; left him in
Z7

Food for the Fed-up

that condition for an indefinite time, and then
sent His Son down to redeem him.'
Now I am sure he is wrong ; I am sure that
the plain Christian Creed has never been
pessimistic. These brave words : ' I believe
in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven
and Earth,' shout out defiance of pessimism.
Yet it cannot be denied that theologians have
so misinterpreted and twisted the meaning
of the great chaUenge that it has appeared
as if men were reaUy caUed upon to beheve
in just that blasphemous absurdity from
which he turns^ — the pessimistic he that this
world is bone bad, and that the most we can
expect is that God wiU save a remnant of its
teeming mUlions from a lost and ruined
universe, and that all the rest must be cast
for ever into the eternal furnace where their
worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.
It cannot be denied that any amount of
Christian theology and philosophy is based
upon that idea. The whole cycle of doctrines
that surround the ' FaU of Man,' ' Original
Sin,' ' Eternal Punishment,' ' Propitiation,'
and the * Sacrifice of the Cross,' have been,
28

/ believe in God the Father

and stiU are, so stated as to give the impres
sion, not indeed that God made the world bone
bad — Mr. Stacpoole goes too far there — ^but
that at some point in time the world that
God made good met with an awful disaster
and feU under a curse which turned it from a
garden of glorious flowers into a wilderness of
weeds, from which man was doomed to wring
subsistence by the toil of his hands and the
sweat of his brow, and in that awful state it
remained untU Christ came with His offer of
salvation for those who would accept. And,
moreover, even this offer has been made to
mean not that He came to retrieve the ruin of
the world, but to save the elect from that hope
less ruin and preserve them for life in the world
to come. Salvation was put off until after
death. This world of sunshine, sea, and flowers
remained a splendid ruin — the monument of
a past without a future.
That has been the idea behind a tremendous
amount of Christian teaching ; it is pessimistic,
and I feel, with Mr. Stacpoole, that it is blas
phemous and absurd.
Christian theology has been, and is stiU
29

Food for the Fed-up

often ghastly wrong, but what I maintain is
that the Christian religion, the intuitive faith
which is the fire behind its creeds, has always
been supremely right. It has never believed
that matter or the material world were essenti-
aUy bad. It has bidden men learn of the
lilies, and find their God through bread and
wine. It has bidden us give thanks for this
world's goods, and blessed the labour of our
hands. It has always been a sacramental
religion, caUing us to find God in the world,
and through it, and has stuck hke glue to the
faith that the ' Maker of Heaven and Earth '
was Almighty Good. It has always been
optimistic. But what about aU this pessimistic busi
ness? Well, you know optimism isn't easy.
Easy optimism is tomfoolery. Any optimism
which does not face the fact of evil is just a
blind fool's paradise built upon shifting sands.
It is no good trying to explain evil away ; it
is a flaming fact. Easy optimism turns you
sick. We have too much of it. That is the
root error of much of the sociahstic teaching.
Evil — lust, spite, envy, pride, hatred — is not
30

/ believe in God the Father

really faced, and their splendid theories of
the perfect social system are just wild dreams,
because they are based upon the easy opti
mistic lie that there is no evil to be faced ; it
can aU be organised, legislated, and educated
away. Men are only the angel victims of a
corrupt oligarchy and a pernicious social
system. But that is pure tomfoolery ; any
man who honestly reads his own heart knows
that. Evil is a stubborn fact of human
nature, and no scheme is any real good which
does not provide a remedy for it, and no
optimism is sound at aU which does not take
it into count. Trying to persuade sane men
that aU the blackguards live in Park Lane,
and aU the saints in Whitechapel, is just as
much pure foolery with facts as the endeavour
to turn it the other way round. And, more
over, the natural world is not an altogether
beautiful or perfect thing; it is fuU of
cruelties and crudities, and is apparently
utterly indifferent to matters of right and
wrong. There is no need to lard it on, is
there ? It is a queer business. It looks as
if the only thing to do was to leave it — give
31

Food for the Fed-up

it up as hopeless. But that sooner or later
spells pessimism, disguise it how you may.
You have to get down to it. Well, the
Christian teachers did get down to it ; that is to
their credit. They had to justify their reh
gious optimism, their belief that at its heart
the world was good — philosophicaUy and
theologically facing the fact of evU. Their
efforts to do it produced queer results — results
which often looked like blank pessimism, but
never were in the inner meaning pessimistic —
only honest. Their faith was always right ;
their theology was inevitably often wrong.
Their scheme of things is to us now
blankly incredible. The scheme of Salvation,
which starts in the Garden of Eden and ends
before the great White Throne, seems like a
fairy tale to us, and not a very moral one at
that. It does not satisfy us a scrap, and there
is no use pretending that it does. We simply
can't believe in this utter disaster that came
upon the world — in the FaU, the Flood, the
Ransom paid to the Powers of EvU, and
the propitiation of God's just wrath. It
lies right outside reahty for most of us, and
32

/ believe in God the Father

there is no good tinkering with it. It is aU
an effort to face facts with such knowledge
as its authors had at their command, and it
is impossible for us to bring ourselves back
into the atmosphere of their minds. We
can't do it. Why ? What change has come
over us ? WeU, the fact of the matter is,
that there has been born to us an idea, not a
really new idea, but an idea which has been
coming to birth all down the ages, and with
which the mind of man has been travaUing
for centuries. It is the idea of Progress.
Whether or not the world is now progressing
is a very debateable question, and it certainly
is impossible to prove to demonstration that
it is. But that is not the real point. The real
point is that it has become impossible for us to
think of the world except in terms of motion,
just as impossible as it is to think of it except
in terms of cause and effect. The idea of
motion — movement — has taken hold of us,
gripped us, and we cannot get away from it,
and we have an intuitive conviction that it is
vitally important. It may in time prove to
be an inadequate idea, but we are convinced
c 33

Food for the Fed-up

that it will never be proved to be a false idea.
It has got into our very blood and bones, and,
of course, it has got into our religion. In
spite of tremendous efforts to keep it out, it
has become perfectly plain that either we
must admit it, and interpret God — the
Christian God — in terms of progress and
movement, or else force people to find a new
god. So powerful is the idea that it can, and
has, become an idol, and men have faUen down
and worshipped progress, and surrendered
themselves to it with aU the fervour of the
true monotheist. For the space of many
years there has been a great crowd shouting,
' Great is Evolution of the Scientists.' It has
given men for a whUe greater comfort and
stronger courage than the Saviour Christ ;
it has restored their confidence in the future,
filled them with hope, and been the Father
of some burning charity. It has been the
battle-cry of a wonderful army of devoted
workers for social justice and scientific truth.
It has for many taken the place of God Him
self, and bowed Him calmly out of His Own
Universe. It is of no avail for men to write
34

/ believe in God the Father
books to show that the idea is largely an
assumption — a pure hypothesis. It may be,
but it has proved such an inspiring and fruit
ful hypothesis, that men simply cannot afford
to give it up except for something nobler and
better, and that is not forthcoming. The
alternative that Christian theology offers
hasn't a dog's chance. Christian theology
of the orthodox sort — that is the sort that
clings not merely to the spirit, but to the letter
of the Church's formularies — is all couched in
terms of Providence — Static and Stable Provi
dence. God is conceived of in terms of
absolute Monarchy. He is the Great King
Who administers justice, and maintains order
in a static finished world, distributes His
favours to whom He pleases, ordaining the
lives of men according to His Will. He is
the God of battles, Who declares War and
maintains Peace. Whatever happens is the
result of His command. He has endless
forces at His call to coerce men to obedience.
Plague, pestilence, famine, disease, and
sudden death in a thousand forms are the
weapons that He wields. He made this
35

Food for the Fed-up

earth as a training ground for a future life,
and at His pleasure He wiU destroy it, fiU up
the number of His elect, hold the great
Assize, damn aU rebels to HeU, and reign
supreme in Heaven. It is aU worked out in
metaphors belonging to another age and an
other political system. Men thought in those
days in terms of Providence and Security;
we think in terms of Progress and Adventure.
They thought in terms of Despotism, and we
think in terms of Democracy and Self-Govern-
ment. It is not so much that this presenta
tion is untrue to us, it is worse ; it is unreal,
it is chimerical, it is the stuff that dreams are
made of, and romances of a bygone day. It
is like a love story of the time of Alfred the
Great, vaguely interesting, but not convincing.
We cannot get there. It is all static. This
world is finished, complete, and the only
change we have to contemplate is the change
from this world to another. To us this world
is moving, growing ; it is not finished, it is
on a journey ; it is part of something much
larger than itself, which is all changing, all
growing, with a growth in which we all share.
36

/ believe in God the Father

We cannot get away from this idea of growth ;
it is in the very air we breathe, and it was not
in the air our fathers breathed ; they never
reaUy grasped it at aU.
That is the change. The point we have to
think on is this. Does this idea mean that
we must abandon the old Creed, abandon
Christ as the Saviour of the World, or can
we interpret the Creed in terms of the great
idea ? I believe we can and must. I believe
that the new idea comes from God, that it is
new light which brings out the essential
meaning of Christ's teaching much more fairly
and fuUy than the old could ever do. It
lights up this whole question of evil and of
good. The world is moving ; every soul is moving,
growing — where to ? that is the essential
point to decide. It is the essential point
about every movement — ^where is it going to
end ? What is its tendency ? If the world
is a movement, the question as between
optimism or pessimism is different. We do
not ask, is the world good or bad ? but is it
growing better or growing worse ? What is
37

Food for the Fed-up

its tendency ? The scientists lead us wrong
in one way whUe they poured light upon us
in others. They lead us wrong because they
fixed our attention upon where the world had
come from ; they turned our minds backwards,
and kept them gazing into the past. That is
not good, nor is it a true way of looking at a
movement. The only point in looking back
at all is that you may learn to look forward.
That is what we can do. If we take a good
look backwards, and get the picture there
displayed well into our minds, then we can
look forward in the right direction. Now
when you do look back in the light of the new
knowledge, it is a strange picture that you see.
There was a time when there was no life on
this planet at all. There was a time when it
could not have supported life, when it was
probably nothing but incandescent vapour
slowly coohng. I am not sure that the
preparation for what we caU life, is not more
wonderful, more utterly bewUdering, than the
growth of life itself. When one contemplates
the complicated network of conditions that
must have been provided and made continual
38

/ believe in God the Father

before anything could live, the idea that these
conditions were brought about by chance or
accident seems ridiculous. To watch with
the eyes of imagination, backed with know
ledge, this strange amorphous thing chang
ing and forming itself into a fit home for life,
beats all the wonder of the Creation story of
Genesis into a cocked hat, and, moreover, it is
a wonder that grips us now ; it is based on fact
and not on fable ; it has left its story written
in the material of which the world is made,
and it puts all pride of man, and all imperti
nent pretensions on our part, out of court.
If a great scientist succeeded in discovering
the origin of life and making a living thing,
what would it mean ? Why merely that this
tremendous process had produced a being
of such perfect intelligence that he could
actuaUy reproduce, with all the previous
conditions provided, the first and smallest
miracle that was originaUy performed by the
process itself without any visible agent to
perform it at aU. It would not abate the
wonder of the Creation one whit. I repeat
that the preparation of the world for life is
39

Food for the Fed-up

more staggering than the coming of life itself.
Once get the wonder of that preparation
through your head, and you will be ready for
anjrthing, and will be incapable of regarding
the world as a thing devoid of meaning. It
must have been meant for life.
Then through the movement life breaks.
Its origin is a mystery, and must remain
one no matter what is discovered. It was
the result of the process. Another drama
starts on the previously constructed stage —
the drama of life itself. It is a strange
and tragic story. It is full of cruelty and
apparently purposeless waste. Life takes the
weirdest forms. Weird growths of every sort
without any apparent use or meaning. Awful
reptiles and savage beasts, aU teeth and
belly and claws, wallowing in fetid swamps,
and gorging themselves on other living things.
Sitting up and blinking with bleered eyes at a
blazing sun, as they lick blood from their
slimy jaws. This kind of ghastly shambles,
without a gleam of intelligence, or a trace of
gentleness, goes on for thousands of years.
If you could have lived then, you would have
40

/ believe in God the Father

said that the world was a ghastly joke made
by some gigantic Being with the mind of a
Chinese torturer. But they that live longest
see most, and through the peepholes supphed
by fossUs and rocks we can watch the drama
proceed. Gradually there comes into its
action a new element, the element of inteUi
gence, and we soon perceive that this is a
power that is going to challenge physical
strength. The smaller and more intelligent
animals survive the gigantic monsters. They
adapt themselves more readily, secure food
more easily, move more quickly. They look
much weaker, but are much stronger. It is
the beginning of the great paradox of life
whereby weakness proves stronger than
strength. Already the Power behind life is
beginning to put down the mighty from their
seats and exalt the humble and meek. Al
ready mind is overcoming matter. Then out
of the twUight peers the face of the first man.
He is one of the smaller animals, and not
much different from them except for a light
in his eyes that seems to promise greater
inteUigence. Had you been living then, I
41

Food for the Fed-up

imagine it might have struck you for a moment
that there was an intelligent look in that
ape's face, and then you would have forgotten
it. He was only a freak perhaps, and not so
much different from the others after aU. But
that is where you would have been wrong.
That gleam is to grow into a blazing sun ; it is
to change the whole appearance of the world ;
it is to buUd cities, paint pictures, make music,
tame lightning ; it is to make the whole earth
servant to its wiU. These little differences in
living things want watching ; you can't tell
what they mean. The whole history of man
sprang from that gleam in his eye as the ape
swung up into his tree to rest. Look back
along that history. Watch the development
of the peculiarly human powers, and see if
you can guess at what they mean. Speech
the animals had, but man developed it almost
beyond recognition. Then he added to it
writing. They both aided him in his struggle
to survive. He has added music, painting,
then later printing, telegraphy, telephony,
wireless communication, etc. What do they all
mean ? The simplest of them is enormously
42

/ believe in God the Father

complicated. The gift of speech — the dis
turbance of the atmosphere by wagging the
bit of meat inside your jaws and flopping it
against your teeth, thus setting up vibration
which beats on your companion's ear-drum,
sets the nerves quivering and travels to his
brain, and then by the sudden and dramatic
leap which no living being understands (ex
cept that they might tell you that it was due
to the working of 'invariably concomitant
psycho-physical paraUelism' — and if that helps
you, you are welcome to it), he gets ideas in
his mind similar to the ideas that are passing
through yours — it 's a bewUdering business ;
and when you add to it the gift I am now
exercising, sitting in a chair with a copying-
ink pencil — a bit of a tree with some odd
material in it that makes marks on some
wood-pulp or rags — and making thousands of
strange signs and symbols which wiU be
taken up by a man who will translate their
meaning and put up similar signs made of
lead in a vast machine, and then stamp the
signs some thousands of times on to more
wood-pulp and rags, and produce that mystery
43

Food for the Fed-up

of mysteries, a Book, and proceed to seU it
to some man I never saw in my life ; some
one perhaps sitting up in San Francisco, who
will take it up and drink in through his eyes
the ideas that are coming from God knows
where into my mind, as I sit here in a silent
study thousands of miles away. Good Lord,
but a book is a queer thing when you come
to think of it, isn't it ? So is a piece of
music. Beethoven sits up deaf as a door
post, and the music of the Moonlight Sonata
sings itself into his head. He takes wood-
pulp and some black liquid and a bit of steel,
and makes blobs and lines, and scratches on
it. He dies, gets buried, and my friend comes
into the drawing-room and sits down at a big
lump of wood with some wires and hammers
inside ; he pulls out a music book, looks at
it, beats the notes that work the hammers,
and there floats out upon the air the same
stream of delicious sounds that sang them
selves in the brain of Beethoven, and I sit
here and see again, through the old musician's
eyes, the moonlight on still water shining,
and hear the rippling of a little stream, and
44

/ believe in God the Father

feel the touch of summer air, soft velvet hke
a woman's cheek — and Beethoven is dead —
and, O my holy aunt ! it is a queer business,
isn't it ? What does it mean ? It is aU the
result of the weird process that began with
incandescent vapour and monstrous ptero-
dactyles licking bloody chops beside a slimy
swamp. And it 's a thoroughly nasty pro
cess, it 's a bloody and a cruel process, it 's a
wasteful and non-moral process, and it is an
every other sort of adjective you can imagine
in the dictionary and out of it process ; and yet
it issues in the music of Beethoven and the
Life of Jesus Christ, and in these strange gifts
that baffle and bewilder one to think about.
What is one to make of it ? Well, there is
one thing stands out : aU these peculiarly
human gifts have one result ; they enable
men to unite, to co-operate, to share a common
fund of knowledge, of Truth and Beauty.
They break down our isolation from one
another and draw us into a closer unity.
They tend to make men, miUions of men,
into Man— the Race, the Human Unity.
They are means of increasing Love. There is

45

Food for the Fed-up

not a single peculiarly human gift that has
not got that tendency ; they aU tend to make
unity possible; they aU tend towards Love.
I look backward, and though my eyes are
often blurred with tears, and I grow hot with
anger, still I seem to see a meaning struggling
through it all, and it is best expressed in the
word Love. That is what the process seems
to be groping towards — the Brotherhood of
Man in Love. That is what it does seem to
be moving to, but under whose guidance?
By what power ? By accident ? Go on. By
necessity ? I don't know what that means.
There must be something behind it as big as
that which has come and is coming out of it — ^as
big as Man, with a capital M. There must be
some one behind it who has in him the Brother
hood of Man. God the Father ? Yes, that
does it. I come back to it when I have viewed
the process. I am driven to discover behind
it God the Father — a power that means the
Brotherhood of Man, and has it in His Heart.
Mind you, I hate the process. I think it 's
loathsome. But I can't do Mr. H. G. Wells's
touch, and beat my breast, and say the only
46

/ believe in God the Father

God I have is the Undying Fire within my
soul. I know that I came out of the process —
Undying Fire and aU ; I am the product of
it, the child of it ; and though I may not like
my parents' looks, I can't disown it, since it
issued in me. I must have been in it, I and
aU the noblest of my kind must have been
in it — Jesus Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, the
most blazing furnaces of Undying Fires —
they must all have been in it, or rather in
the Power behind it. I cannot separate
myself from it, and set myself over against it
as an enemy. A man can't fight his own
father ; that is just it. We are coming to it
— my own Father, our own Father. He
must be behind it. There is in me — there was
in the best of my race — a longing for this
Brotherhood of Man, and it must be in the
Process or Power behind it. He must be
— Our Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth —
the Author of the Process. Do I believe in
Him ? WeU, He has done a lot. He has
produced the longing for Brotherhood and
the means of making it. Do I believe
in Him ? WiU I bet on His success ? It
47

Food for the Fed-up

seems sensible, and besides, there is something
calling, something deep down inside. It 's
a bloody process, as bloody and unbeautiful
as a Cross, but it has done a lot. I do feel
like betting on the Future. Yes, I believe
in God the Father. Almighty ? I don't
know. What does that mean ?

48

///. Almighty ?
We have reached this point. The process
by which this world has come to be what it
is must have some one behind it. He may
be more than a person, and He can't be less.
He appears to be a Being Who has within
Himself not merely persons but a unity
of persons, a sort of Brotherhood. That is
what appears to be working its way out
through the process, so I suppose it must be
in the final cause of it. I am driven to that
conclusion. You see, we must look at the
movement in the light of its latest results;
that is the only way in which we can rightly
judge any movement. We must look at
nature in the light of human nature, and the
best human nature. We cannot look at it
apart from ourselves. Trying to understand
nature apart from man is like trying to under-
D 49

Food for the Fed-up

stand a body without a head, which is a hope
less job. We have suffered from that sort
of nonsense. When writers talk of nature
they very often don't make it clear what they
mean, but if it is to have any real meaning,
it must mean the whole universe, the whole
show complete. You cannot divide it up.
It is a universe. Cabbages are no more
natural than kings, and Julius Caesar was just
as natural as a jelly-fish. It is a unity, and
a single movement, and we must judge it in
the light of its latest results ; and when we
consider its latest result, viz. ' Men,' and ask
ourselves the meaning of their peculiarly
human powers — speech, writing, art, music,
printing, mechanical invention, telegraphy,
telephony, wireless communication, etc. — they
aU seem to have one tendency, they seem to
make for unity, they are all means to unity,
to the Creation of Man — the united human
race. That purpose is not accomplished, it
is not nearly accomplished, but it looks as
if it was being accomplished. And the queer
part of it is that it seems as if it was being
accomplished without our individually fully
50

Almighty ?

comprehending what the purpose is. It is
as though, to spite our stupidity and selfish
ness, some great Power were working a pur
pose out, moulding our blind and selfish
efforts to His WiU. Under the guidance of
this Power we appear to be blundering on
towards brotherhood. The almost dramatic
discovery of mechanical power in the last
century gives one that impression very
strongly. No one, I suppose, has contributed
more to the Creation of Man than the builders
of railways and inventors of more rapid
means of communication, yet one doubts if
they knew what they were doing in the least.
Their powers of invention were gifts. If
any one can be said to be inspired it is an
inventor. Inventive power is as much a gift
as music or poetry or pink eyes; you don't
earn it and you can't force it, it just comes
from God knows where — only He must know.
The gift comes and makes things for their own
sake, or for the sake of money or a woman's
love, or just for fun, because it can't help
itself. And it is only after ages that the pur
pose of aU the gifts becomes apparent at aU —
51

Food for the Fed-up

the final purpose. So one gets the sense of
a superior Power or Intelligence graduaUy
working out a colossal idea — the idea of Human
Brotherhood and Unity — the Creation of
Man. What infinite purpose that is part of
we cannot comprehend, but it probably is
part of a larger scheme, because this earth is
only a speck in an infinite universe. A sur
vey of the process forces in upon the mind
that sense of some one turning much more
out of our actions than we can understand
or foresee. We co-operate half blindfold, and
almost without any conscious desire to do so.
The Creation of Man seems a thousand times
more possible to-day than it did two centuries
ago, and we can hardly say that we have
consciously tried to make it so. As then,
this purpose of human brotherhood seems to
have been working itself out through the
process aU the time, and as it seems vastly
improbable that it can be doing so by an
infinite series of accidents, we come to the
conclusion that there must be some one
behind it, who must at least be a person, and
is probably more, and if we are to give Him a
53

Almighty ?

name, it is difiicult to see what better name'
we could give Him than ' Father,' not merely i
because He produced us, but also because it
is apparently His purpose and plan to make
a famUy of us. He has done a great deal ,
towards it, and it looks as if He was going to
do more, and I am drawn very strongly to
back Him, to believe in Him, to bet my hfe
upon Him and His plan. So I come to say
in a very real sense, ' I believe in God the
Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth,' Author
of the Process. But this Creed of ours goes
further and adds the word ' Almighty.' Now
at that word I am inclined to bogle and hesi
tate. What does it mean ? And my hesita
tion grows greater when I am told that
absolute sovereign power is an essential attri
bute of God, that He can know no let or
hindrance to the working of His WiU, that He
is absolute Master in His own universe, and
aU things move in obedience to His command.
It seems, then, that I am required to beheve
that every detail of this process is the direct
result of His WiU, and is good. Now that is
what I cannot do. The process seems to me
53

Food for the Fed-up

to be a cruel and a bloody business. I cannot
say that war, disease, pestUence, famine, and
aU the other characteristics of the process are
good. If this word ' Almighty ' means that
the Father could have made this world, and
obtained the results He desires, in a thousand
other ways, but that He deliberately chose
this, that makes my gorge rise. Why in
thunder choose this one ? It is disreputable
if He could have done it otherwise, without
this cruelty and wrong. It is not commoiUy
respectable. He must be an evil-minded
blackguard, with a nasty disposition like a
boy that likes pulling the wings off fhes. I
cannot get up any reverence for such a being.
Why, bless my life. He tortures children,
voluntarily tortures them to death, and has
done so for thousands of years. I can't stand
that at aU — it 's dirty ; and when I am told
that I must believe it, and that every detail
of the process was planned and carried out
precisely as He wished, I begin to turn sick.
Snakes, sharks, and blood-sucking vermin —
what sort of a God is this ? He chose this
way because He gloried in it! That beats
54

Almighty ?

the band. It turns me clean against the
process. I cannot see its beauty for its
brutality. I cannot hear the lark sing for the
squealing of a rabbit tortured by a stoat, I
cannot see the flowers for the face of a con
sumptive child with rotten teeth, the song
of the saints is drowned by the groans of
murdered men. Nothing can justify this
method of Creation but absolute Necessity. This
way is only tolerable if it is the only way.
There must be a great necessity binding upon
the Creator. He must have taken this way
because there was no other way to take. He
must hate the process if He is good just as
much as I do, and more, and I do hate it with
aU my heart. And yet I cannot adopt the
dignified defiance attitude, and set myself up
in judgment of it, refusing to recognise any
God but the stUl small voice within my soul.
I can't do that because it is not honest. I
couldn't have a soul or a still smaU voice or
a mind or anything else apart from the pro
cess ; I am the product of it, I am part of it,
one with it. I am one with aU life, one with
earth and sky and sea, one with birds and
55

Food for the Fed-up

beasts and fishes. I kiU them, eat them,
prey on them, but love them stiU. I cannot
separate myself from nature, or nature from
myself. I cannot simply defy the process,
stiU less can I wholly assent or submit to it.
I must somehow come to terms with it, find a
Friend through it, but He must be better than
the process is. He must be beyond as weU
as in it — morally beyond it — or He can be no
Friend of mine. He must be as good as I am ;
my inmost being demands that, and my
intelligence demands it because He produced
me, and I am better than the process. If that
sounds arrogant I can't help it ; I 've got to
cling fast to the best that is in me, or suffer
shipwreck. That is the very disaster that
has befallen many souls ; they degraded
themselves by submitting to a WiU of God
which in their best moments they knew to be
immoral, and by bowing their heads when
they should have fought. I must not do it,
nor must you. In a world like this you
cannot respect yourself unless you are a
rebel ; every decent man must be a rebel.
What I want to be is a rebel in the name of
56

Almighty ?

God. But if God is ' Almighty God, King of
aU Kings, and Governor of aU things, whose
Power no creature is able to resist ' — as the
Prayer Book puts it — ^how can I help making
Him absolutely responsible for every detail
of the process, and assuming that every
happening in it is the result of His WiU action
on it ? The conclusion seems inevitable. Yet
what grounds have we for believing that
there exists, or can exist; this ' Sovereign
power of Good that knows no let or hindrance
to the working of His Will ? ' What grounds
have we for believing that God is a Being
whose Power no creature is able to resist ?
As far as I can see, there is no evidence for it
whatever, and an enormous weight of evidence
against it. I cannot find in heaven or earth
a trace of the existence of such a Power. But
men say you degrade God if you make His
Power less than absolute. If His Power is not
absolute, if He is not complete Master in His
own universe, then He is not perfect. But
who says so ? Whose idea of perfection is
that ? Why must perfection of necessity
include the possession of what we caU absolute
57

Food for the Fed-up

power ? What right have we to assert that
there is or can be such a thing in existence at
aU ? What does ' Being Master in His own
universe ' mean ? It seems to be an essen-
tiaUy human metaphor, drawn from our own
experience by a negative process, and arising
from our chronic disposition to confuse Power
with Force. This feeling that God's per
fection demands that He should be possessed
of power as complete as that of a potter over
a piece of clay seems to be the result of
thinking that God's ways are our ways, and
of making God in man's image in the wrong
sense. We try to protect God's dignity as
though, hke the dignity of our earthly kings,
it depended ultimately on the possession of
force wherewith to drive men to His WUl,
as if God were a despot. That brings us to
the very root of all our trouble. Our ideas
of perfection are wrong. They are not the
ideas that God has revealed to us, but our
own. We do not reverence or worship the
Right things or the Right people. We exalt
the mighty to their seats, and put down the
humble and meek. We still believe in and
58

Almighty ?

worship Force, and despise Love. We are
wiUing to respect Love provided it has
Force behind it, but without that it seems
to us stiU to be contemptible. Pure Love
is stUl despised and rejected of men. It
saves others and cannot save itself, and that
to us is pure weakness. We are stiU ashamed
of the Cross, and cannot stand the reckless
humUity of God. We are still cowards and
snobs and sycophants at heart, and our real
reverence and respect is still for physical
force, wealth, luxury, and outward show.
Even when we profess to despise these things
we are not sincere. It is a case of the Fox
and the Grapes, we pretend to despise what
we cannot get. There is all the bitterness of
thwarted desire in the contempt which the
' have nots ' display for the ' haves.' Give
them the chance, and they would change
places to-morrow and be as blatantly vulgar
and as stupidly tyrannical as those who in
possession are to-day. The champions of
the ' Bottom Dog ' are only out to make him
'Top Dog,' not to make him a New Man.
Those in possession taunt the dispossessed
59

Food for the Fed-up

with envy, and their taunt is true, but they
are too stupid and too blind to perceive that
two wrongs can never make one right ; and
so we go round in the putrid circle of our own
moral perversity, plunging the world into
sorrow, and piercing our souls with pain,
because we crucify the Son of God afresh,
despising Love and not believing in its power.
This problem of power is the very heart of
our trouble. We have not grasped God's
Truth revealed in Christ, because our idea of
power is essentiaUy wrong.
Our idea of power is not God's idea of power
revealed in Christ, and it is not God's idea,
because our purpose is not God's purpose,
our will is not God's WiU. Our idea of power
depends upon our idea of purpose. It must.
Whether a thing is powerful or not depends
upon the purpose that you use it for. A buU
is a powerful animal for the purpose of
ploughing a field, but for the purpose of pre
serving delicate antiques in a china shop it is
not powerful at aU. The gentle hands of
some fraU woman would be power for that
purpose. A locomotive engine is powerful
60

Almighty ?

for purpose of transport, but not for the
purpose of teaching a child its alphabet. Our
idea of God's Power depends upon our idea
of God's purpose, and we cannot have a clear
conception of His Power until we perceive
with heart and mind that the purpose of God
is Brotherhood, the Creation of ' Man,' the
making of a united family of human beings.
When we have reaUy got that perception
clear and clean in our hearts and minds, then
we begin to see that for God's purpose, which
is the Creation of Man, the human family or
unity, there is, and can be, only one Power,
and that is Love. For that purpose force is
not power, it is weakness. A unity of human
beings is an imperfect unity just so far as it
is based upon force and fear. That is the
lesson that the history of these last strange
years should have blasted into our minds.
How much we hoped from the unity of the
classes and nations in time of war, and how
bitterly our hopes have been disappointed!
It was a weak and superficial unity, because
it was not based upon Love.
Again and again during the year after the
6i

Food for the Fed-up

war I listened to impassioned appeals to men
to unite in the cause of Righteousness, appeals
based upon the unity that we had attained
and preserved during the war. ' Look what
you have done,' cried the orators, ' look what
you have done. Look how cliques and classes
ceased to be, and a nation came to birth, fired
with one spirit, buoyed with one hope, press
ing onward like one man, on through the
Valley of Death and the sorrows of HeU,
on through seas of blood to find triumphant
Peace and final Victory. Look what you
have done, why can you not do it again ?
Why need there be dissensions now and
bitterness, why need we lose the splendid
unity that was born mid the groans of our
dead comrades on a thousand stricken fields ? '
Well, why need we ? Simply because it was
not a splendid, but an entirely superficial,
unity, because it was not a unity of persons,
it was a unity of bodies. A soldier in time of
war is not a person but a puppet, who moves
when you puU strings. The Army says to a
man, ' Go — Go — or I 'U shoot you,' and
naturally a man goes under those circum-
62

Almighty ?

stances. He is deprived of the freedom — the
separate and spontaneous life — which is the
essence of personality. That is why soldiers
are often impatient with politicians. ' Why
aU this talk ? ' says the soldier, the simple,
strong, and silent soldier. ' Why aU this
talk ? Why don't you get the thing done ? '
Because, O silent, strong, and extremely
simple (not to say fat-headed) soldier, my
purpose is not your purpose, and my power
is not your power. Your purpose is destruc
tion, and mine is creation. Your power is
compulsion, and mine is persuasion. Your
very existence is the result of my weakness.
You only come in where I fail. For creative
purposes force is not strength, but the result
of weakness, and it never creates anything.
That is the very essence of the Christian
Truth, and it is because we have failed to
grasp it that we crave for a God with what we
caU ' absolute power,' Who is Master in His
own universe, and are too blind to see that
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and
the weakness of God is stronger than men,
and why God hath chosen the foolish things
63

Food for the Fed-up

of the world to confound the wise, and the
weak things of the world to confound the
things that are mighty. In the eyes of men
there is no fool like God, because in the eyes
of God there are no fools like men.
That does not mean that we should abolish
aU armaments and force to-morrow. It
merely means that we should start out on
the right basis and recognise that our arma
ments are symbols, not of our power, but of
our weakness, that the great powers are
the great weaknesses of our world. It means
that we should recognise that we cannot
attain to greatness by painting the map of the
world red, but only by washing the soul of the
world white. Our military power is an exact
index of our spiritual and moral impotence.
Until we do recognise that, there can be no
peace and no true progress. And so it is
that when our minds are cleared of all con
fusion about the meaning of power, we begin
to appreciate the truth of this first clause of
our great Creed. There is a Spirit of Unity
who works out His purpose throughout the
process, and for that purpose — the Creation
64

Almighty ?

of Man, the Human Unity — there is no other
Power but His, which is the Power of Love.
God is Love, and aU power belongs to Love.
There is more real power in that simple
truth than there is in the massed armies and
navies of aU the nations of the world. There
is more wealth in it than earth's mUlion banks
contain. There is more beauty in it than aU
the mUlionaires could buy. There is sufift-
cient dynamite in it to blow our rotten civil
isation sky high, and bring down the New
Jerusalem out of Heaven, adorned as a bride
for her husband. It is the only thing which
can make our politics truly progressive and
redeem our House of Commons from its
exceeding commonness, which can heal the
hurts of the suffering peoples and lift the
everlasting burden from their souls. O God
for a statesman who would stop quoting the
Bible in the spirit of cheap and vulgar parody,
or to deck the insincere peroration of a frothy
clever speech, and would speak to the peoples
with clear insight and vision begotten of this
its crowning Truth !
Our supremest need is real faith in the omni-
E 65

Food for the Fed-up

potence of Love. Thousands talk of God
Almighty, and have no faith in Love at aU ;
to them the real powers are force, wealth,
competition, and self-interest. These are the
powers that sway the world. They only be
lieve that God made Heaven and Earth because
if He didn't, then they don't know who the
devil did. God to them is just the conven
tional name for The Great Unknown, about
whom nothing is or can be certain. Ortho
dox infidels, they say their Creed and never
base an action upon it, because they don't
believe in Love. If you told them that God
was not Almighty in the strict despotic sense,
but that He had to strive and travail to bring
His purpose to its birth, they would tell you
that they could not accept such a degraded
God as that. But this orthodox infidelity has
no power to save the world. God is Love,
the Spirit of Unity, Brotherhood, Co-opera
tion, Peace, and when we say our Creed we
pledge ourselves to live, to think, act, and
speak upon our faith in that spirit and in its
power. It is impossible to prove that Love
is almighty now ; it does not reveal itself as
66

Almighty?

supreme, but as struggling, striving, and
conquering, caUing us to fling ourselves in
faith upon it, and prove it almighty in our
lives. That is the sense of the Creed. It
does not pledge you to the incredible belief
that aU this weird and awful process is the
Will of an Almighty Despot ; it pledges you
to consecrate your whole life to the service
of Love, that you may prove your faith in
its final omnipotence in the only way it can
be proved, by experience. When you realise
this, the Creed rings out a question and a
chaUenge : Do you believe in the power of
Love ? It is not a thing you can accept and
let it make no difference to your life. It is
no mere declaration that you accept the
universe as it is, and believe vaguely that aU
is for the best. You do not hide behind a
picturesque and pious agnosticism disguised
as Reverence, and talk with bated breath
about the awful mystery of omnipotence, and
the f oUy of supposing that poor finite man can
do anything but just submit to His inscrutable
Providence. You do not take refuge in that
pride which apes humility, and insist upon
67

Food for the Fed-up

caUing God by splendid names that have no
meaning. You do not plead that God is
Eternal and you are temporal, and cannot do
anything but accept the mystery. You de
clare your faith in the foohshness of the
Gospel truth that the Eternal reveals itself
through the temporal as Love, and that you
propose to consecrate your every thought
and word and deed to the service of that
Love. Said in that true sense, the Creed can save
the World.
' Upward and onward I lead, lead on.
But my children are stupid and blind ;
They start at shadows and turn them back.
Back to the mist and the mire behind.
To mists of falsehood and mire of lust.
Where cruelty lurks with gleaming eyes,
To spring at the soul of the world I win.
And glut on its blood till beauty dies.
Ever and ever I heal their woimds,
Pouring in life with my Blood Divine,
Soothing their sorrows and trembling fears,
Staying their hunger with Bread and Wine.
Every wound in the world I feel.
Every pang is a pang to me.
Deeper and deeper the nails strike through.
Count ye the cost of my Calvary.
68

Almighty ?

Why should I sufier ? — ye ask me — why ?
Why not shatter the world into bits
And build it again a perfect whole
Where every part in the great plan fits ?
' Have I no power to work my wUl ?
Am I so weak that a mortal man
Can spit in my face, defy my word,
Can wrack and ruin my perfect plan ?
What know ye about weakness and power ?
Ye reckon of nought but force — brute force —
Ye think of the world as a vast machine
And measure strength by strength of a horse.
Ye think it is power to blast and break
Masses of matter to powdered sand.
Ye think of destruction, murder, war.
Ye think of a bull or a giant's hand.
And then ye think of your God and ask,
Why is He suffering, helpless, weak ?
Why does He plead when He ought to drive ?
Why is His majesty all so meek ?
Have I the power ? All power is mine,
Yet am I weaker than yon small child.
I am the King of a million worlds,
I who am lowly in heart and mild.
Yet shall I conquer and win my way.
Casting the mighty men from their seat.
Lifting the humble to heights of power,
Trampling the haughty beneath my feet.
I am so weak that I bear a cross,
I am so strong that I need no crown,
I am the first and the last — Pure Love,
I lift the weight of the worlds alone.
69

Food for the Fed-up

' Your power is nought but an ancient fear.
Gripping your soul froi.i the jungle home
Where your first parents with haunted eyes
At sunset left their lairs to roam
And seek for their prey by stealth, in fear
Lest a stronger beast than they should leap,
Swift death, to tear them with curved claws
And leave their babes to a hungry sleep.
Your power is weakness of fear hke theirG,
Ye pile up terrors with trembUng hands ;
Behind your bulwarks of boasted power
The phantom of fear and darkness stands.
Because it is dark and my great light
Is but a ghmmer to your bUnd eyes,
Ye put your trust in an idol God,
And crouch in his temple of lust and lies.
If all the might of the nations leagued
Were massed in a host prepared to fight,
They would be as weak as a broken reed.
Compared with a single shaft of hght.
Your swords of steel and your iron ships
Are shams that keep you in darkness still,
But Light and Love and Truth are powers
That work and weave the eternal Will.
' Your kings and thrones and gUttering crowns.
Your shining sceptres and chains of gold,
Proclaim you children that play with toys,
Poor damaged toys that are growing old.
Cutting your fingers with your toy knives.
Breaking your hearts in your childish play,
Weeping hot tears for your broken dreams,
Bhnd to the dawn of the coming day.
70

Almighty ?

But power is mine, and is mine to give.
Ever I give it with my heart's blood,
Nothing can stay it — the power of Love :
Lift up your eyes, and behold your God.
The night is passing, the hiUs grow grey,
Awake ! and hark to the watchman's cry.
Love comes — I come ; and the eastern way
. SpHts into splendour as God draws nigh.'

n

IV. And in fesus
Now where are we ? Well, we have tried to
look this rum world in the face, and in the
light of what we know to discern what lies
behind it. It is a weird face. It is a face
as ugly as sin and as beautiful as an angel, as
cruel as the sea and as tender as a woman.
It is a world of stars and snakes, of violets
and vermin, of laughter and tears, of peace
and pain, of joy and sorrow, a world of con
tradiction. We determined that the great
secret was to grasp the fact that it was a
changing world, as changing as a face, with a
change so slow as to be invisible, and so sure
that no one could fail to see its results in time.
It is not a finished creation, but an uncom
pleted growth. As such it must be judged in
the light of its latest results like any other
growth or movement. Nature must be judged
72

And in Jesus

in the light of human nature, and the best
human nature — the mart5n:s, poets, saints,
and saviours of the human race. Looked at
like that, we cannot regard it as the result of
an accident or an infinite series of accidents.
It is like a difi&cult manuscript written in a
language which we only understand in part ;
much of it looks like nonsense, but here and
there a splendid sentence flashes out a glorious
truth that goes straight to the inmost core of our
understanding. It may be the life of a saint,
or the works of a poet, but because of it we
cannot regard the manuscript as the scribbling
of an idiot, or as the trail of dirt left behind
it by some mindless living thing ; because of
these great luminous sentences we must believe
that the writing has an inteUigence behind it.
There must be something behind as great and
greater than that which has come out of it.
Life has come out of it, and therefore life must
be behind it. Intelligence has come out of it,
and therefore inteUigence must be behind it.
Personahty has come out of it, and therefore
> there must be personality behind it. A
unity of persons, a brotherhood, a family of
73

Food for ihe Fed-up

persons seems to be coming out of it, therefore
there must be a unity of persons behind it.
I do not see how we are to get away from
those conclusions even if we wanted to. Of
course we can discuss them to no end, and
chase a miUion red herrings dragged across
the scent, but when we have indulged in
mental gymnastics until the very tissue of
our brains is bored, we come back to this.
We must either refuse to take any stand at
aU, and decide to ' Wait and see,' — an attitude
which is as ruinous in all living issues as it is
in politics — either we must treat the universe
as Mr. Asquith treated Ireland, with the same
disastrous results, or we must believe in God
the Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
And if we are to live in the fuUest sense, we
must take the one step further, and add
' Almighty,' thus throwing ourselves body,
mind, and spirit into the great task, believing
that the Power which began wiU make an
end, that the poem of life at last shaU be
complete, expressing perfect beauty. That
must be our final faith — 'I believe in God
the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and
74

And in Jesus

Earth.' And it is strengthened because of
the next step — ^because of Jesus. The Creed
selects one flaming sentence out of Life's queer
manuscript — the Life of Jesus. What are
you going to make of this ? it says. I know
there are some queer and cruel sentences in
the Book of Life. I know that many of its
pages stink of blood and reek with corruption,
but look at this sentence ; did you ever read
such perfect poetry, or listen to such splendid
music, as this sentence that begins in the
Manger and ends on the Cross contrives to
express ? Can we believe that a poem which
contains lines like these is anything but the
work of a consummate genius ? Yes, I know
it is very fragmentary, very sketchy. It is
not a biography in our modern senses. There
is no one consistent story in the Gospels. Mr.
Arthur Drews and the German critics are
right there. The Gospels are indeed a coUec
tion of fragmentary incidents. There is no
one consistent story. But there is One
consistent Character which grows out of these
pages until the student sees a Face and hears
a Voice. It is so consistent that a thousand
75

Food for the Fed-up

men can meet together and talk of Him,
knowing that they have a common Friend,
discovering again and again with a thriU that
down widely different paths, and in aU sorts
of peculiar ways, the same Person has come
to each of them out of the Gospel page. The
critic may come in with his spectacles,
scissors, and paste ; he may take the Gospels
to pieces and put them together again, but
when he has finished the Voice still speaks,
and the Eyes of Jesus stiU ask questions of
the soul. The Character still stands, and
calmly makes its chaUenge : Which of you
convinceth Me of sin ? In every age the
challenge has been taken up, and men have
railed on Jesus ever since He died. They
have declared again and again that He was
out of date, that He was dead and ought to
be buried. Some have attacked Him scorn
fully, with bitter anger in their eyes; some
have forsaken Him sadly, with lingering
regrets. But somehow He always appears to
be the final Judge of His judges. Nietzsche
spurns His humUity and dubs Him a slave,
and then dies in a madhouse, and becomes a
76

And in Jesus

byword in Europe as the author of a gospel
that leads the world to HeU. The pioneers
of progress proclaim Him a reactionary, and
then find themselves at a dead end with their
reforms, because they need a ' New Spirit '
among the peoples ; and it grows more evident
every day that the New Spirit which they seek
is as old as Jesus and as new. The critics
contradict themselves, and cut one another
out. Some say He is too joyful, some say
He is too sad. Some say He is too gentle,
and some that He is too hard. To some He
pipes and they wiU not dance, to others He
mourns and they will not weep. But it aU
ends in this. With sUent insistence the
Character criticises the critics. If a man or
woman or an age of men and women reject
the Character, they do it at their perU, and
tune makes the perU plain. An age of luxury
may reject His discipline, but time makes it
clear that they are wrong. An age of material
ism may reject His idealism, but their children
wiU come seeking it again. An age of puritan-
ism may condemn His gaiety and gentleness,
but the pendulum will swing back again.
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Food for the Fed-up

An age of scientific knowledge may spurn
His simplicity, but men come back with out
stretched arms and empty hearts to ask the
real questions that learning leaves unanswered
for the soul. If a man or a woman rejects
the Character, I find myself wondering what
is the matter with them, where is the yeUow
streak ? They may rej ect organised Christian
ity and be white men; they may reject it
because it is not like Jesus. They may reject
orthodox theology because it puts their mind
into a muddle, and does not seem worthy of
Jesus. They may reject the 'Divinity of
Christ ' because the words have come to mean
something incredible and absurd to them.
They may reject Jesus as God, but if they
turn from Him as Man, Man with a capital
M, Man as He ought to be, then I wonder
about them — what 's wrong ? With a merci
fully merciless finger Jesus points to the weak
spot in every character and in every age. A
learned critic explains Him away, lays bare
the inconsistencies and improbabUities of the
Gospel stories ; and just as one rises convinced,
one sees the Finger pointing to pride — pride of
78

And in Jesus

inteUect, the old idolatry of the mind — and
one sees that the whole argument is based
upon assumptions, and depends for its force
upon an atmosphere. It belongs to the study,
and not to the street ; culture cannot take the
place of Christ, the Character still stands.
An ardent Socialist curses Jesus as an enemy
of progress, a mUk-and- water Saviour, and
one is impressed ; and then the Finger points
to envy, hatred, malice, and the bitterness of
disappointed ambition, and the pages of
rhetoric lose their force, because one sees the
man. A man of the world mocks at Him,
and in the atmosphere of the smoke-room He
seems absurd ; and then the Finger points at
the man's mouth, the scales faU from one's
eyes, and one sees in the faces of these culti
vated gentlemen naked animalism, and the
sordid dreariness of the brothel comes into it
aU — one feels as if there were a bad smeU. I
sit after dinner with a man who argues
cleverly on grounds of humanity that His
ideas of purity were ridiculously severe. He
seems so broad-minded and so kind that one
is nearly convinced ; and then it all comes out :
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Food for the Fed-up

the poor devil is in a moral mess, wandering
round and round in the eternal triangle where
there is no argument but one. Again and
again it happens, and most of aU in one's self.
I want to reject Him, get rid of Him, and be
free. I invent a thousand reasonable excuses
and objections — circumstances alter cases;
He belonged to another age — but the Finger
goes on pointing to the spot, and in my heart
I know it is true. In a world of wUd uncer
tainties, new discoveries, and new theories
the Character stUl stands and judges them
right or wrong.
The wonder of the Gospel is not the one
consistent story, but the One consistent
Character that shines out through aU the
stories. And so, when a learned critic dis
misses Jesus as the literary invention of Mark,
• a figure swimming obscurely in the midst of
tradition,' one cannot help feeling that it is
the conclusion of a man whose mind is almost
as mixed as his own metaphors, a man whose
life has been lived second-hand, lived among
books and not among people. There is no
good entering into an argument with a mind
80

And in Jesus

like that upon this question ; it would end no
where, because it would be all on the wrong
plane. It would be like arguing with a
botanist on the beauty of Browning, or dis
cussing Rakmananoff's Prelude with a pro
fessional piano-tuner. Scientific method has
its limitations, and it simply is not applicable
to questions involving this kind of moral issue.
If John Mark invented Jesus, then there
existed at that time a literary genius before
whom Shakespeare pales into utter insignific-
ance. That this Character should be pure
invention involves to my mind a greater
miracle than the Resurrection. I cannot
believe it. Purely on His own Authority — the
Authority of His moral Beauty — Jesus stands
across the ages as Man — Perfect Man. But
was He more than Man? He was human; was
He Divine ? When you ask that you open the
floodgates to an interminable river of talk,
if you get down on to the intellectual plain.
To the making of books in attack and defence
of the Divinity of Jesus Christ there is no end,
and the study of them is not merely a weari
ness to the flesh, it is a positive poison to the
F 8i

Food for the Fed-up

spirit; they obscure the real issue. Thousands
of good men who would admit that He was
Perfect Man, that His was the Perfect Life,
resent the doctrine of His Divinity, simply
because it seems to make Him inhuman, to
remove Him from the practical into the
visionary, out of the natural into the super
natural. They want a man, and not a miracle.
They want a natural human Jesus, not a
supernatural Christ. Mr. Edward Carpenter,
in his book on Pagan and Christian Creeds,
comes out with this judgment : ' PersonaUy
I must say I think the " legendary " solution
quite likely, and in some ways more satis
factory than the opposite one, for the simple
reason that it seems more encouraging to
suppose that the story of Jesus (gracious and
beautiful as it is) [Good old feUow, out comes
the Character claiming its own — that 's me,
not Mr. Carpenter ; he would start to qualify
it, because it is beneath his inteUectual dignity
to be a Christian] is a myth which graduaUy
formed itself in the conscience of mankind,
and thus points the way of humanity's future
evolution, than to suppose it to be the mere
8a

And in Jesus

record of a unique and miraculous interposi
tion of Providence which depends entirely
upon the Powers above, and could hardly be
expected to occur again.'
If I have to choose between these two
notions, I would agree with Mr. Carpenter ;
but I don't see why I should choose. I don't
think either of them is true. I don't think
the Life of Jesus is a myth. That theory is
far-fetched — fetched out of brains that feed
on books, not out of experience that feeds on
life. I don't think the Life of Jesus was ' a
unique and miraculous interposition of Provi
dence which depends entirely upon the Powers
above.' I don't understand what that means.
It seems to separate the Life of Jesus from
the rest of life, it seems to separate the rest
of life from the Powers above. It divides
the natural and the supernatural into two
water-tight compartments. That is what I
think is all wrong. Humanity and Divinity —
God and man — are not two mutually exclusive
ideas, they are not like oU and water that won't
mix. Dear Lord, how much muddle there
has been over that notion. Jesus was sup-
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Food for the Fed-up

posed to be God and man — two separate
things combined into a supernatural unity,
but never mingled. At one time He acted
and spoke as God, and at another as man ; and
the result was, you never knew where you
had Him, and He appeared aloof and impos
sible. ' Of course he was God, and we cannot
be like Him.' That was the idea, and it
destroys the whole essence of Christianity. I
cannot separate Jesus from the process. He
was and is its Crown. He was one with all
life as I am. He was one with earth and sky
and sea, with birds and beasts and fishes, aye,
and one with pterodactyls and dinosauri, and
protoplasmic unicellular amoebae, and aU the
rest of the queer creatures with barbarous
scientific names that play a part in the ascent
of man. He was one with aU life. He
summed up the meaning of it all, and so
revealed the Creator of it all. He issued out
of the process because He had been in it
from the beginning, or rather it had been in
Him ; through Him aU things were made, and
without Him was not anything made which
was made. He is the Head of the human race,
84

And in Jesus

and the human race is the Head of nature.
You must judge nature in the light of human
nature, and you must judge human nature
in the light of Jesus, and so you must judge
the whole process in the .light of Jesus. It
meant Jesus from the beginning. All that
we can know about the Author of the Process
is to be found in Him. He is to us God,
because He is Perfect Man. He is God speak
ing to us in the only language we can under
stand, which is the human language, God
revealed to us in the only form that we have
eyes to see, which is the human form. He was
as natural as a jeUy-fish and as supernatural
as the New Jerusalem coming down from
heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband.
If there was a unique and miraculous
interposition of Providence, it was as unique
and as miraculous as the interposition which
took place when organic issued out of inorganic
matter, or when mind issued out of matter.
His Life marked a stage in the drama of
development. He was as natural and as super
natural as a cabbage, and His Life ' depended
as entirely upon the Powers above ' as the hfe
85

Food for the Fed-up

of a cauliflower does. You think it is irrever
ent to say that Jesus was as natural as a
cabbage or cauliflower. That is because you
have never seen a cabbage. You have never
stopped and stared at one as though it were
the first cabbage in the world. You have
faUen into the ridiculous error of supposing
that, whereas the first vegetable was a
wondrous mystery that no mind can ever
fathom, the billion-billionth vegetable is a
perfectly simple thing that a fool can under
stand, which is an idea almost idiotic in its
simplicity. Every cabbage is more wonderful
than the last, and adds more mystery to the
first, because the mystery of preservation is
added to the mystery of creation. It is not
I that am irreverent, it is you. It is not that
I do not see God in Jesus, it is you that do not
see Him in cabbages. You would in lUies,
of course, because Jesus happened to mention
lilies as revelations of God, and besides, they
are nicer looking. ' Behold the lUies of the
field ' sounds quite reverent and dignified, but
' Behold the cabbage in the aUotment patch ' —
weU, that is making fun. But what tomfoolery
86

And in Jesus

that is. Cabbages are just as divine as lilies ;
both mean Jesus, Who is the Crown of Life,
the Image of the Father. That is the truth of
the Incarnation. It explains all life in terms
of Jesus Christ. Jesus was as unique and
miraculous as the first man. There never
could be another first man, and there never
could be another Jesus. Both were unique
and miraculous revelations of God, but, of
course, Jesus was the higher revelation. The
first Adam was made a living soul, the second
Adam was a quickening, a life-giving Spirit.
Every fresh Christian — every soul that is born
again and finds in Him the New Man, the New
Life, and the Peace of God, adds to the
wonder of Jesus, and makes Him more unique ;
and we shaU never know all that Jesus was
untU we aU come to the measure of the stature
of the fuUness of Christ. It is not necessary
to suppose that Jesus was a myth that gradu
ally formed itself in the conscience of mankind,
in order that He may point the way of
humanity's future evolution. He does that
because He was a reality, and can only do it
with any certainty if He was a reality.
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Food for the Fed-up

In Jesus Man with a capital M, Man the
Human Unity or Brotherhood, was born. He
was the Incarnate Brotherhood of Man reveal
ing the Eternal Fatherhood of God. He was
Humanity Incarnate. How true that is to
practical life ! Was He not the Incarnation of
aU that we mean by ' Humanity ' ? That was
the Truth behind the title that above all
others Jesus loved to claim — Son of Man. It
was, of course, a title that He took from the
common parlance of the day in order to give
it a new meaning, to interpret it in His own
way — a way which profoundly shocked and
scandalised the religious people of His day.
They thought of the Son of Man as a despot ;
Jesus said He was a servant. They thought
He was a conqueror ; Jesus said He was a
sufferer. They thought He had come to reign ;
Jesus said He had come to die. It was as
Son of Man that He forgave sins, it was as
Son of Man that He came to seek and to save
that which was lost, it was as Son of Man that
He was betrayed into the hands of wicked
men, was mocked and spit on, crucified
and rose again. It is as Son of Man He

And in Jesus

claims to judge the world. He was the very
spirit of perfect humanity, and that was His
title to Divinity. Because, of course, man's
God must be Perfect Man. What other God
could we know or love ? He never acted as
God and not man. He never acted as man
and not God. AU His actions, aU His thoughts,
words, and deeds were human thoughts,
words, and deeds revealing God. He was aU
that we can ever know of God, because He
was all that we can ever know of man.
It is because we have not grasped this
truth, because we have clung to the letter of
the metaphors in which He strove to express
His Being and His Mission, because we have
insisted on a supernatural Christ in a way that
raised up in men's minds the picture of an
unnatural Jesus, that you get men — good men
and white — teUing you that while they love
Jesus as the best man that ever lived, they
cannot believe in His Divinity or in God at
aU. Humanity is their god, they will teU you.
Humanity is what they believe in and live for ;
it is the tragic drama of the martyrdom of
man that has gripped hold of them and caUed
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Food for the Fed-up

them ; humanity that Christians teU them
was left for ages in a fallen state, and then
given a chance of salvation — a chance that
only seems to have been taken by a tiny
fraction of all the countless miUions that have
sinned and suffered, laughed, loved, lived, and
died beneath the sun. It is the race they love
and live for. This is the inspiration of the
Socialist, so far as he is a real Socialist,
and not a common or garden thief. This
is the inspiration of the doctor, the scientist,
the educationalist, and of all that mighty host
of men and women who have gone out to
conquer, refusing the Sign of the Cross be
cause it stood to them not for the martyrdom
of God in man, but merely for the martyrdom
of man by God, or Fate, or the Great Unknown.
This is the inspiration of a million men whom
Jesus would have looked upon and loved,
saying wistfully, ' Thou art not far from the
Kingdom of God.' ' Not every one that saith
unto Me, Lord, Lord,' not every one that
accepts the dogma of My Divinity, ' shall enter
into the Kingdom of Heaven, but He that
doeth the Will of My Father which is in
90

And in Jesus

Heaven.' It is this great host that Jesus
longs to claim — not that He is jealous that
they should bear His name, but because He
has a power to give them that they have not
got, a peace to bestow upon them which they
do not know. These are the men and women
that must be brought within the fold of the
Catholic Church, if that Church is to save the
world. What keeps them out ? Often just
the noblest that is within them ; their sense of
justice, mercy, pity bids them side with man
the martjTT against the God who martyrs man.
A false conception of God. What they need
is just what they could find in God revealed
in Jesus, God in Man ; it would add to their
Love, Faith and Hope. Love they have,
but it is often faithless and hopeless, based
upon despair. They cannot believe in human
ity as it is now, they cannot worship this chaos
of conflicting passions and sordid self-interests,
this weltering mass of discordant individuals
that make the world of men ; they need
humanity as it is in Jesus, humanity caught
up into God, to transform and uplift their
Loving Service and fUl it with the fire of
9^

Food for the Fed-up

Faith. They must worship the Spirit of
humanity, which is crucified and tortured in
the world of men, and it is that very Spirit
which reveals its perfection in Jesus, and in
Him can draw near, nearer than breathing,
nearer than hands and feet. They have the
Christian ethic, they need the Christian re
ligion. It is only as religion that humani-
tarianism can become a vital force transforming
character and making men anew. And that
is the great need of all humanitarians to-day.
They have already a passion to give what they
have : they give time, money, intelligence,
labour, but the one thing they have not is
spiritual force, redemptive power. That is
why all their schemes are futile and barren.
Human nature bars the way, bars the way to
lasting peace between the nations, to real
co-operation between the classes, real unison
between the sexes, bars the way to the
Creation of Man. The honest Socialist breaks
his heart because men are not social, the noble
reformer frets and fumes because men wiU
not be reformed, the keen politician despairs
of politics because they are so sordid and so
92

And in Jesus

mean, the earnest Christian sorrows because
men will not come to Christ. Part of that
burden they all must bear because human
nature is imperfect and sinful, but part of it
can be removed if the barricade of false con
ceptions and old outworn ideas could be broken
down, and men be called to the Great Adven
ture, called to make their great bet on God
revealed in Jesus, God suffering in Man. If all
the honest but limited lovers of man could be
united with aU the honest but limited lovers
of God, an army might be formed which,
under the Sign of the Cross, might go forth to
save the world, because it would have in it,
not only Love, but Faith and Hope as weU,
and in these three the power it needs, not
merely to save men from their sorrow but to
save them from their sin.

93

V. Christ
The chaUenge of the Christian Creed thus far
amounts to this. Life is a gaUant gamble,
and you must either bet or cease to live, and
be content to linger. Will you bet your heart
strings on the Author of the weird and won
drous process by which the world and men
have come to be, believing that He has a
purpose, which is the Creation of Man, the
Human Unity, Brotherhood, Family, believing
in Him as God the Father, Maker of Heaven
and Earth, Who has within Him power to
carry His purpose out to its appointed end ?
Will you go further and bet that His character
is displayed to us in Jesus of Nazareth, Who
was the Perfect Man, and is therefore the
Revelation of man's God ? Then it goes on
and adds to that name which it puts above
aU other names a title. It adds to the name
94

Christ
of Jesus the title ' Christ.' WeU, what does
that mean ? Does it extend the chaUenge
further, or is it an empty title of honour ?
What does the Creed mean by asking us to
beheve in Jesus as the Christ ? It is a title
with a long and romantic history. Round it,
for those who know its story, there gathers a
surging multitude of human hopes, aspirations,
and desires, which have found utterance in
a mass of legends, myths, religious rites, and
ceremonies in every age and in every corner
of the world. * Christos ' is the Greek transla
tion of the Hebrew ' Messiah,' which means
the ' Anointed One,' and was the title of the
great Deliverer, Saviour, or Redeemer whom
the Jews believed would come to save the
world from sorrow and from sin. But this
expectation, this passionate longing for a
Saviour, was not confined to the Jewish race,
it was literaUy world wide. To quote Mr.
Edward Carpenter's book on Pagan and
Christian Creeds, their Origin and Meaning :
' The number of Pagan Deities (mostly virgin
born and done to death in some way or other
in their efforts to save mankind) is so great
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Food for the Fed-up

as to be difi&cult to keep account of. The God
Krishna in India, the God Indra in Nepaul
and Thibet, spUt their blood for the salva
tion of mankind. Buddha said, according
to Max MiiUer, " Let all the sins that were in
the world fall on me, that the world may be
delivered." The Chinese Tien, the Holy One,
" one with God, and existing with Him from
all eternity," died to save the world. The
Egyptian Osiris was called Saviour ; so was
Horus ; so was the Persian Mithras ; so was the
Greek Hercules, who overcame death, though
his body was consumed in the burning gar
ment of mortality, out of .which he rose to
Heaven. So also was the Phrygian Attis
caUed Saviour, and the Syrian Tammuz or
Adonis likewise, both of whom were naUed
or tied to a tree, and afterwards rose again
from their biers or coffins. Prometheus, the
greatest and earliest benefactor of the human
race, was nailed by the hands and feet with
arms extended to the rocks of Mount Caucasus.
Bacchus or Dionysius, born of the Virgin
Semele to be the liberator of mankind (Diony
sius Eleutherios as he was called), was torn to
96

Christ
pieces, not unlike Osiris. Even in far-off
Mexico, Quetzalcoatl, the Saviour, was born
of a Virgin, was tempted, and fasted forty
days, and was done to death.'
Now, when you come to think of it, that is
a queer business, isn't it ? Here you have
peoples so utterly severed and disconnected
that there is no possibUity of communication
between them, and yet there grows up among
them spontaneously, as it were, a passionate
longing for a Saviour — a Deliverer — a Christ.
'The long tradition of the Saviour comes
down from the remotest times, and perhaps
from every country in the world.' Funnily
enough, this has often been used as an argu
ment against the reality of the ' Christ.' The
fact that the Messianic passion was not con
fined, as most of us were taught in the days
of our youth, to the Jews, but was almost
as universal among men of every race as
hunger or thirst, is supposed to make it
harder to beheve that a ' Christ or Saviour '
has ever come, or ever wiU. When it is dis
covered that aU the world over men were
holding up helpless hands to Heaven in suppli-
G 97

Food for the Fed-up

cation for a Saviour, and that the Old Testa
ment only records one part of the age-long
preparation for His coming, we are told that
this conclusively proves that He never came.
Learned men trace the history of this passion
back through aU the maze of legends, myths,
rites and ceremonies that make up the history
of man's search for God ; they discover that
it had immoral or non-moral beginnings, that
it was connected with Nature Worship and
the Sex Instinct, and then teU us that, having
explained its origin, they have not only ex
plained the passion, but have actuaUy ex
plained it away, and proved it to be a delusion.
But that is a queer way of doing things. It
is the topsy-turvy method of argument that
the idolatry of the scientific method has im
posed upon the world of men for years. The
analysis of a thing is supposed to be a complete
account of it. Find out where a thing came
from, and you know what it is. Prove that
a man is grown from an egg, and you have
explained the man. Of course it is aU non
sense. It is not the beginning of a thing that
explains its end, it is the end that explains the
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beginning. You cannot explain a passion or
a plant by discovering where it comes from,
you can only explain by discovering what it
is coming to. If aU the world over, a passion
ate desire for a saviour and deliverer sprang
up, if black and white, red and yeUow men
have felt the passion burning in their hearts,
so that they have burst into poetry, invented
legends, and instituted rites and ceremonies
to express it, the only thing that would reaUy
explain such a mysterious fact is not the dis
covery of the long process of its growth from
strange beginnings — ^that only deepens the
mystery — but the discovery of some great
reahty towards which it was leading men.
Of course, if you believe that aU the worlds
were made by chance, or accident, there is no
use asking for an explanation of that, or of
anything else ; it is aU muddle, and there is no
good thinking at aU. But if you refuse to
take up that attitude, the logical result of
which is mental and moral suicide, if you take
up the challenge of the Creed thus far, believ
ing that a purpose runs through the ages of
creative movement, then this circle of saviours
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Food for the Fed-up

that rings the whole world round would seem
to point onwards to some one, or something,
some great reahty that would explain it.
The real object of studying the history of this
Messianic passion is not so much to discover
where it came from, as to find out from its
history what it is tending to.
If you study it in that way, some big broad
facts grow clear. The passion, like most
other human passions, as it develops seems to
undergo a process of refinement. It seems to
grow from the passionate longing for a magical
and material salvation into the longing for a
moral and spiritual one. Men seem at first
to long for a Saviour who wiU do something
for them, and later for a Saviour who wiU do
something in them. First, they desire a
Deliverer who will change their circumstances
and surroundings, and then a Deliverer who
will change them. Of course, it seems absurd
to summarise so shortly a process which
took ages, but, broadly speaking, that seems
true. First, men seem to find the root of all
their sorrows in the world without them,
and later become conscious that the trouble
lOO

Christ
reaUy rises from the world within. These
two strains in the passion do not, of course,
succeed one another in an orderly sequence,
nothing ever develops that way. Wherever
the passion is found these two strains are found
in it, but in some races the one is the stronger,
and in other races the other. And as men
grow in inteUigence and insight the moral
and spiritual passion grows stronger, and the
magical and material more weak. The reason
why the history of the preparation for the
coming of the Christ among the Jews has
gripped the Western world and survived to be
read and loved by common men, while the
history of that preparation among other
peoples has barely survived to be hunted up
out of the dust of ages by scholars, is that the
great Jewish teachers and prophets had a
clearer vision of the truth that what men
needed was a moral and spiritual redemption
— a Saviour who would change the world
within. I do not mean to say that the Jews were the
only ones to see that truth, or that there is
not a great deal of the lower strain in their
lOI

Food for the Fed-up

passion for a Saviour. Neither of these
statements would be true. The popular idea
of Salvation among the Jews was as material
and as magical as most popular conceptions;
and the best of their teachers were not free
from its influence. On the other hand, some
of the legends and sayings current among
so-caUed ' Pagan ' peoples show great moral
beauty and an intense longing for spiritual
Salvation. We have no right that I can see
to say that aU the other sacred books were
purely human and the Old Testament alone
Divine, that they were merely Folklore, while
the Old Testament is Revelation. That
creates a division between the human and the
Divine which cannot reaUy exist. But we
have a right to say that in the Old Testament
story of the preparation we do see the higher
truth, the loftier idea of Salvation, strugghng
more successfuUy to expression. We have
a right to say that in the battle of the sacred
books for survival the Bible won a foremost
place, mainly on its merits, because of its
deeper moral and spiritual appeal, because
it touched men's consciences and made them
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Christ
long to be better men in a way that other
sacred writings failed to do.
I do not think there is any doubt that we
have grossly underrated the moral and
spiritual worth of other religions, and have
aUowed prejudice to blind our eyes to their
beauty, and to the foreshadowing of Christ
which they contain. It is a tragedy that we
should have aUowed a spirit of almost savage
exclusiveness to have blotted out for us the
revelation of God contained in earth's miUion
myths and legends, so that Christians have
regarded them almost as though they were the
inventions of the evil one. It is a disaster
that we should have lumped all other faiths
together and called them ' Pagan ' — dismissing
them as worthless. It is disastrous because it
has distorted our missionary methods and
delayed the development of the world religion.
It has made us seek to convert the East not
merely to Christ, but to our peculiarly Western
Christ, and to force upon other peoples not
merely our experience of Him, but our ways
of expressing the experience. It is disastrous,
too, because it has bred in us the spirit of
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Food for the Fed-up

intolerance and contempt for others which is
one of the chiefest obstacles to the union of
the world. Perhaps, like other evU things,
intolerance was an inevitable accompaniment
of development, but it is none the less evil.
It has led us to stress and emphasise com
paratively unimportant issues in our state
ment of belief, and to elevate our own peculi
arities into the position of principles. It has
led us to trust in hatred rather than in love.
It has caused us to put prejudice before truth,
and to make a virtue of our own stupidity
and ignorance. It has often made us ortho
dox liars for the glory of God. It has thrown
us back upon futUe and unchristian methods
of defending our faith and spreading it
abroad, and turned us from the one method
which has in it the secret of success, the
method of living by it, of basing our every
thought, word, and deed upon its truth. It
has made us fearful and distrustful of the
power of Christ to win, and bred in us a
blasphemous anxiety to do God's work for
Him, and to build up defences for His Church,
with human hands and human minds, when
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MMWkMAi^M^

Christ
it needs no defences but its own eternal
truth. It has thus delayed the coming of the
day, which must inevitably come, when
the faith which has in it most of truth and
perfect moral beauty will win the world to
the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of lasting
peace. I do not think there can be any doubt that
we have paid, and are paying, for this mistake,
a heavy price both at home and abroad, and
that one of our chiefest lessons to be learned
is that bigotry is no adequate substitute for
faith. But when we have admitted aU that,
the fact stiU remains that in the Old Testa
ment story of the Messianic passion, and the
preparation for the coming of the Christ, the
real meaning of the passion comes out more
clearly than in any other, and it is true that
we can search the Scriptures for witness to
the Christ.
But aU this is ancient history you say —
very ancient, and in fact a bit mouldy. What
has it got to do with the issues of to-day ? It
may have been important for a Jew at the time
of Jesus to see that He fulfUled the prophecies
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Food for the Fed-up

upon which his fathers lived, but what has it
got to do with me in the year of grace 1920 ?
What do I care whether the Jews were God's
sole chosen people, or whether there was a
great light breaking through all over the world?
I am willing to admit that the latter seems a
more rational and likely notion, but how does
it affect my belief one way or other ?
WeU, you see, this Messianic passion and
its growth are part of the history of the world ;
they are a section of the wonderful process
by which man's mental and emotional world
has been built up, and the study of that
process is at least as important for purposes
of truth as the study of the process by which
the material world was built. And it has to
be looked at and judged in the same way.
The way to learn from the past is to remember
always that the whole universe is a movement,
and must be examined with a view to dis
covering what it is moving to — what its pur
pose is. We have seen that this Messianic
passion is a developing, growing passion,
which, as it grows, tends to change its content.
It grows from being a desire for a magical and
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Christ
material Saviour to being a desire for a moral
and spiritual one. It is a passion almost as
universal as hunger and thirst ; and urUess the
world is a joke, or a chance, it must have a
meaning and a purpose. We can best judge
of its purpose in the light of its latest develop
ment. In its latest development it is seen as
a passion for inward and spiritual Salvation,
the longing for a Saviour who wiU not merely
change man's lot but wUl change his heart,
redeem his character. If it points onward,
as we are driven to believe, to some great
reality which will be food for its hunger and
drink for its thirst, we should expect that it
would be a great moral and spiritual reality.
We should expect that the great passion
for redemption of the inner man would find
satisfaction at last in the appearance upon
the earth of a Perfect Character, possessing
the power of drawing men upwards into its
own hkeness. We have seen that the wonder
of the Gospel stories is that out of them, with
aU their inconsistencies, there grows a
supremely consistent Character which does
possess this power of drawing men upwards
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Food for the Fed-up

into its own likeness. This has been the
universal Christian experience. ' We aU, with
unveiled face reflecting as in a mirror the glory
of the Lord, are transformed into the same
image, from glory unto glory, as from the
Lord — the Spirit.' This has been the experi
ence not merely of the great saints who have
left their record behind them, and made their
mark upon the shifting sands of time, but it
has been the experience, the fundamental
experience, of miUions of unknown saints who,
by gaUant hves of self-sacrifice and love, of
purity and passionate charity, have bravely
borne the burden of the worlds, and done their
part unseen in our development as a race.
The history of the Christian Church, like the
hfe of its Lord, is a tragedy, and often a sordid
and revolting tragedy, but through it aU
there runs a vein of golden goodness that
redeems its squalor and its ugliness. A man
who can write : ' With the exception of a few
episodes like the formation during the Middle
Ages of the noble brotherhoods and sisterhoods
of friars and nuns, dedicated to the help and
healing of suffering humanity, and the appear-
io8

Christ
ance of a few real lovers of mankind (and the
animals) like St. Francis (and these manifesta
tions can hardly be claimed by the Church
which pretty consistently opposed them), it
may be said that after the fourth century the
real spirit and hfe of early Christian enthusiasm
died away,' as Mr. Edward Carpenter does,
is looking at history as a journalist looks at
life — from the sensationalist point of view.
No saint is worth bothering about who does
not make a name for himself, and the Church
is to be judged by the faults and faUings, the
sordid sins and squabbles that mar the history
of its highest ofi&cials. But the history of the
Papacy is no more the history of the Church
than the history of the British Cabinet is the
history of the British People. That judgment
is a vulgar judgment, vulgar with the per
nicious vulgarity of intellectual pride which
lives in the world of books, and lives in that
world without the imagination that comes of
touch with real human sorrow, and with real
human sin. The fire of Christian enthusiasm
has at times burned low, but it has never
died ; it remains the soul of Western civilisa-
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Food for the Fed-up

tion and the hope of aU the world. And it is
because this Character of Jesus meets the
Messianic passion of mankind at its purest
and best, and can prove itself bread for its
hunger and wine for its thirst, that we claim
for Jesus the title of the Christ.
And this adds to the challenge of the Creed
for to-day. The Messianic passion is not
dead. It is very much alive. There is in
the world of to-day a very intense conviction,
which after the last five years ought to be
more intense, that there is still something
wrong — ^radically wrong. And there is, too,
a longing which is intense and ought to be
intenser for some one or something to put it
right. The Messianic passion is stiU there,
and the two strains in it are stUl evident.
There are those who long for a magical and
material redemption, for a saviour or a system
which wUl change man's lot, and make the
world an entirely pleasant and comfortable
place to live in, and there are a smaUer number
who have seen deeper and know that man's
great need is moral and spiritual redemption,
a Saviour who will not merely change man's
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Christ
lot but transform man's soul, and who per
ceive that only so can man's lot be changed —
by the changing of his heart.
To take up the chaUenge of the Creed and
bet your life upon Jesus as ' Christ ' means
that you throw in your lot with this smaller
number. To believe in Jesus as the Christ
means that you stand irrevocably opposed to
the mUlion and one Godless and materialistic
schemes of redemption in which the world
abounds. It confronts you with the same
choice exactly as that which faced Jesus of
Nazareth. He came to a race in which the
Messianic passion was intense, and found the
people longing for a Saviour, but mostly
longing for the lower kind of Saviour — a
mUitary Messiah Who would lead a great
revolt and set God's people free ; a National
Dehverer Who would conquer the Roman
conquerors and drive them from the land, and
then take His power and reign in justice, re
storing the Kingdom of Peace and Prosperity
to suffering Israel. Expectation was keen,
thousands were ready to rise, oiUy waiting
for a leader and a signal. The Kingdom of
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Food for the Fed-up

God which John the Baptist proclaimed
meant to many of his hearers an earthly
kingdom of Peace and Plenty and National
Freedom. They sought a Saviour Who would
change the world without. There were a
smaUer number — very smaU — who looked for
a higher kind of Saviour, a Deliverer Who
would come to save not merely Israel from
its sorrow, but the whole world from its sin.
Very few indeed, if any, had this idea of the
Messiah, pure and uncontaminated by any
lower elements ; probably even the best had
an idea of an earthly kingdom, in which
righteousness should rule, and which would
be founded by a great supernatural Leader
Who would compel His enemies to submit.
None saw the Truth as Jesus saw it. None
fuUy grasped the fact that those who take
the sword must perish by it, and that the
everlasting Kingdom must be built on Faith
and not Force. Jesus had to choose between
the higher interpretation of His Mission and
the lower, between the material Salvation
which the people craved and the spiritual
Salvation which they really needed. He chose
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liMUhAdriUalihadUaMatfaBWi

Christ

the higher path, and in that choice lies at
once the triumph and the tragedy of His Life.
Once that choice was made. Calvary, or some
thing like it, was inevitable, and on that
choice, and on the way in which He carried
it into action, depends His claim to be The
Christ, The Saviour of the world.
That choice still pierces to the heart of our
most modern problems. Still bright within
the soul of man the Messianic passion burns,
and still the two strains in it persist. The
world is full of movements, plans, and schemes
to better the world without bettering the souls
of men, to obtain material without moral and
spiritual Salvation. There is still the bitter
ness caused by tyranny and oppression, the
t3n:anny of force, vested interests, financial
scheming and wire-pulling — the whole of the
sordid forces of reaction which remain in the
hands of those who find this world satis
factory and suf&cient for their small souls as it
is, and would not have it changed. This secret
shmy selfishness that saps the hf e-blood of the
nations and feeds on the sorrows of the poor
and friendless is still there, piercing us through
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Food for the Fed-up

with many sorrows, plunging the world into
wars, worming its way into our politics, breed
ing rot and corruption in high places. It is
stiU there, doing the dirty work it has done
for centuries. And it still causes the passion
for deliverance to burn in men's souls. The
ruling classes still stand over against the ruled,
the governors against the governed. And,
as in Christ's day, so in ours, many beheve
that Salvation can be won by violence and
threats of violence, by meeting force with
force, and tyranny with counter tyranny.
The vision of the great proletarian repubhc,
when the workers shaU rule the world, is
held before us as the ideal end. Salvation
must come through class war and the victory
of the down-trodden and oppressed. The
modern zealots — Socialists, Syndicahsts, Class-
conscious Proletarians — stiU proclaim war on
the hated bourgeoisie, bidding us beheve that
you have only to destroy the competitive
system of industry, and the rule of the classes
over the masses, and earth wiU be a paradise.
Everywhere we are forming ourselves into
great fighting unions to secure our own
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Christ
interests, and we are told that when the
Union of the Unions comes, and the people
rise as one man, then the day of salvation
wUl dawn for men. That on the one side,
and all the cynical forces of reaction on the
other, and the common man of aU classes
blind and bewildered between the two, that
is the world of to-day. And the only light
in it is sttU Jesus, the Christ. The Char
acter stands firm and judges these movements
right or wrong, or disentangles the mixture
of right and wrong which makes them so
bewildering to the honest man of the day
who has to earn his bread and keep his chUdren.
Jesus stands and teUs us that force is folly
and hatred waste of time, that ' a man's life
consisteth not in the multitude of things that
he possesseth,' that there is more in life than
pleasure, that giving is better than gain, that
the secret of life is service and self-sacrifice.
He is, of course, despised and rejected by
both sides. The reactionaries patronise Him
and render Him lip-service, but in their hearts
believe that He is quite unpractical and does
not count. The revolutionaries hate Him,
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Food for the Fed-up

and declare that His Gospel of Love is opium
to the people, who need to be fed fat with
hatred, that they may be strong to revolt.
Business is business, and Christ has nothing
to do with it, says the commercialist. ' Con
scious labour or planned organisation of social
labour is the name of the expected Messiah
of the New Age. Our hope of Salvation is
not a religious ideal, but rests on the massive
foundation stone of materialism,' says Mr.
Belfort Bax, the Socialist. Christ tells the
business man that he is an immoral scoundrel,
and the Socialist that he is a siUy fool, and
points another way. That is the glory of the
Creed. You know where you are, your
principles are fixed. Men can't come plucking
you by the arm and saying, ' Lo here ' and
' Lo there ' — this theory, that theory ; they
cannot turn you after a New Messiah every
week ; you know that what is wanted is the
transformation of the human heart into His
hkeness, and that aU schemes are futUe which
are not aimed at that, and aU plans wrong
which are not based upon it. You know that
the stone which the builders rejected is be-
ii6

Christ
come the headstone of the corner, and that
whatever scheme runs up against that stone
must in time be broken to pieces. You know
that these two parties make a lot of noise,
beating their tom-toms and blowing their
own trumpets, but that the real revolution is a
silent steady change which takes place in the
world as men, women, and chUdren see the
great light, and turn to the Character of Christ
as their lodestar, and are inspired with His
Spirit as their motive-power — as they realise
that Jesus is Christ.

117

VI. His only Son ?
The next note of the Christian chaUenge adds
much to its meaning and more to its emphasis,
and that is an important addition, for often
Truth is distorted by over or under emphasis
of its many sides. The Creed proceeds to
underline in red ink the claim of Jesus to be
the Perfect Revelation of the Character of
God in terms of human personahty and the
Saviour of the world from sin. It pUes it on,
so to speak, and, not content with claiming
for Him the title of the Christ, it adds, ' His
only Son our Lord. ' There is to be no mistake
about it, because He is the power-centre of
the whole chaUenge. The Nicene Creed
bursts into poetry over it, and caUs Jesus
' God of God, Light of Light, Very God of
Very God, Begotten not made, being of one
substance with the Father, by Whom all
Ji8

His only Son ?

things were made.' It is impossible to attach
literal and exact meanings to each of those
glowing symbols. The whole thing is like a
fanfare of trumpets or the roU of a thousand
drums, emphasising the conviction that in
Jesus God reveals Himself to man, lays bare
His heart, and shows what He is like. There
is, of course, a note of defiance in the emphasis,
it is the chaUenge that replies to an attack.
Jesus was a very good man, or a very beauti
ful myth, says the world, but, of course, it is
childish to say that He was the image of God.
No man could be that, the infinite cannot be
completely revealed in the finite. You de
grade the whole idea of God when you con
tend that He became man, and revealed
Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus may have
been a great prophet and seer who proclaimed
High Truths about God, but to say that He
was His Image, ' His only Son,' as you put it,
that He is to be worshipped and recognised as
absolute Lord of men's lives — weU, we do
not want to be nasty, because we respect
your opinions, but it is nonsense, you know.
Be a bit reasonable, and draw it mild, and we
"9

F«od for the Fed-up

are wiUing to go with you. We are quite
wiUing to give Jesus a high place — perhaps
the highest — in the gaUery of the world's
good men. We are wiUing to admit that He
was the greatest religious genius that has
ever appeared on earth. We are willing to
give great weight to His teaching when it is
practical and reasonable, but, of course, you
know a great deal of it is too good for this
world, and He was rather a dreamer, wasn't
He ? It wouldn't work in business, would it ?
What ? Consider the lilies, and the ravens —
very nice idea — ^but, weU — business is business,
and men are not angels. Besides, this idea
of the FaU, and then the ages of preparation,
and then God sending down His Son to die —
after a miraculous birth — it is beautiful and
romantic, but it cannot be literal truth, can
it ? It involves so many queer antiquated
ideas. Now, if you would admit that the
Divinity of Jesus Christ is — weU, let us say,
an exaggeration, we wiU grant you that He
is the best guide to a decent hfe, and that if
you follow His teaching you won't go far
wrong. What more could you want than
Z20

His only Son ?

that ? Into that kindly and amiable con
versation the roU of the Christian drums
breaks harshly — solemnly, the four big beats
on the great drum first : " God of God, Light
of Light ' ; then it sweUs into a roar : ' Very
God of Very God, Begotten not made, being of
one substance with the Father, by Whom all
things were made.' O my sacred aunt ! says
the world, this is ridiculous, it is not fair
argument, it is not an argument at aU, it is
just very loud assertion. You cannot prove
it, and so you take to shouting. That is how
you win, because the man with a big voice
always draws a crowd. But you cannot
expect reasonable people to foUow you, what
ever the mob may do, and you 'U lose the mob
in the end ; they 'U start to think, you know,
and then you wiU be in the soup. It 's reaUy
no good shouting out a truth you cannot
prove. You cannot prove that Jesus was
' His only Son,' and has a right to be ' our
Lord,' the Lord of aU the race. Now can you ?
No, I can't. I certainly can't, if by proof you
mean a kind of coercive inteUectual proof.
There is no course of reasoning, however close
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Food for the Fed-up

and accurate, which can convince a man
beyond all possibility of dispute that Jesus
was not merely a good man among good men,
a great teacher among great teachers, but
God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very
God. I am convinced of that. If any one
doubts the impossibility of that task, I would
bid him get a good hst of the books that have
up to now been written on the subject of
' Christology,' and start in on them, and if
he knows after the first hundred and fifty
whether he 's on his topsy or his turvy, then
I 'U be very much surprised. And they go
on accumulating. Professor Jones rephes to
Professor Smith, and quotes the great author
ity Mr. Brown, then Bishop Jenkins butts in
and bowls over the lot. What it aU means,
and where it aU lands us, the God of mists
and muddles alone knows, or can know. One
has a ghastly sensation as one reads them
that these books are mainly made up of a
kind of glorified conjuring with great words.
The kind of certainty the Creeds express is
not the kind of certainty that can be got by
argument and reasoning. It can only be
1^%

His only Son ?

got by experience. Men can only come at it
by accepting the chaUenge and betting their
lives on it, living every day on the assump
tion that it is true, applying it carefuUy to
problems as they arise, and seeing how the
assumption works them out. But you must
apply the assumption with your whole heart
and soul, you must not wobble or waver on
it, or it is no use. That is why the Creed
accepts no compromise. What the man of
the world reaUy wants is to follow the teach
ing of Jesus when he hkes and reject it as he
chooses. He wants to accept the parts of it
that seem reasonable and immediately practi
cal, and reject what seems visionary and
ridiculous, or even difi&cult. He wants to
take Jesus as a human teacher whose teachings
are expressions of his opinions, but nothing
more. That sort of attitude is no use, says
the Creed. You must either accept or reject
the chaUenge, you cannot wobble ; and if you
are to do any good you must bet, you cannot
wait and see whether it 's a perfectly safe bet
first. I cannot prove to you that it is bound
to win. You must back the horse and ride

Food for the Fed-up

it, ride it aU out ; and I say that as you feel its
power beneath you, as you become conscious
of its strength gathering with every stride, you
wUl shout out your certainty as I shout mine,
and will perceive the uselessness of arguments
as a means to attaining certainty of this sort.
We come back to that — the necessity of the
great gamble. It is the same with aU the
big things of life ; you have to bet, and you
cannot bet on certainties. You have to take
a risk. AU that reason can do is to show that there
is not anything really irrational or absurd in
the risk — that it is not pure lunacy. There is
no peculiar virtue in being balmy. Life does
demand that you should be brave, but it
doesn't demand that you should make a siUy
fool of yourself. It does ask for faith, but it
does not ask for folly.
But, you say, that is exactly what I feel this
bet is — it is pure madness. It has got no sort
of reason behind it at aU. I simply cannot
see why I should look at Jesus as God. In
fact, I do not know what it means. But listen :
the point is, Do you think you should think
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His only Son ?

of Him as Perfect Man, do you think that His
Character stands out as the Ideal, the height
of perfection to which we as a race are bound
to attain in the end, and bound to strive after
now ? I 'm not going to ask you, ' Do you love
Jesus ? ' — it sounds the wrong sort of question,
it has a sentimental touch about it ; it ought
not to have that, but it has. The point is.
Are you ready to take Him as your Leader
and your Guide — for better for worse, for
richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,
tUl death brings you closer to Him still?
Are you wiUing to burn your boats behind
you and declare for Jesus Christ as the Master
and Captain of your fate ? Never mind now
whether He is God or man, human or Divine ;
that wiU come later, it is not the first step.
The first step is to get fixed as to whether He
is the Ideal after which in private and in
public life, in matters of home, factory, or
ofi&ce, politics and international relations, you
believe aU men should strive. That is the
first step, that always has been the first step —
the surrender to Him as the great Ideal, the
Perfect Man. 125

Food for the Fed-up

If you are not willing to surrender to Jesus
as your Guide, you will never reaUy know Him
as your God, not even if you read arguments
to prove it from now till you snuff out. If
you are not willing to surrender to Him, then,
as common sense man, you ought to ask,
' Why not ? ' You may say you don't need
an ideal, and the world doesn't need an ideal,
that you can muddle along without. And so
you can, you can muddle along quite cheer
fully perhaps, but you won't reaUy live — you 'U
only play at it. You may say you know a
better ideal, then for God's sake fork it out.
I don't. I never came across any one in
history who could pretend to stand in the
same street with Him. I 've said that before.
It is no good talking about Jesus as God
untU, and unless, you take Him as Perfect
Man. That is the kick-off to the Christian
life. That is where we have been weak. We
have been very strong on the fact that a man
must accept the dogma of the Divinity of
Jesus in order to become a Christian, but we
have not been half strong enough on the fact
that he must first accept Him as Perfect Man,
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His or.ly Son ?

must adopt as his ideal His Character, with
its hatred of lust, impurity even in thought.
His detestation of revenge, hatred, pride, and
selfishness. We must whole-heartedly accept
the whole Jesus as our ideal. That is the
real test of belief at the start. If you take it,
you will find yourself up against the world
at every turn, you will find yourself on the
opposition bench to a very strong government.
Your ideas of purity won't be the world's idea
of purity. Your idea of marriage vows won't
be the world's idea of marriage vows ; when
you make an oath you wiU reaUy keep it,
or count yourself as perjured. Your honesty
won't be the world's honesty, and your idea of
duty won't be the common idea of duty ; you
wiU find yourself ' up agin' it ' in a thousand
ways. And then your outlook upon yourself
and your own character wiU not be the same ;
you wiU realise that you are a pretty average
scoundrel, and that goodness is a big business.
It wiU mean more to you when you say that
Jesus was a ' good man.' You wiU begin to
wonder whether a man who was just human in
the same sense that you apply that adjective
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Food for the Fed-up

to yourself or your best pal could be ' good
as Jesus was good,' whether a man who was
sinless could be properly described as purely
' human ' and nothing more. You never
realise the dif&culty of being ' good ' until
you start in and try to be good — not merely
passable, but passionately good as Jesus
was. Perhaps that does not sound attractive
to you ; you can't stand ' unco guid ' people.
Well, nor can I, nor can any one else ; but
that is because ' unco guid ' people are not
really good, but often repulsively bad. They
are not charitable, they have not got the
courage ; they are not pitiful, they have not
got the love ; they are not saints, they are
only Pharisees, and Pharisees were to Jesus
like a bad smell. You cannot wriggle out of
it that way. ' Goodness ' in Jesus' sense
has nothing to do with ' unco guidness ' ; it
is as perfectly beautiful as it was in Him.
When you set out to get it, to find the Holy
GraU of spotless manhood or womanhood
according to the pattern that Jesus wrought,
you wiU very rapidly change your idea of
what perfect humanity means, and it wiU
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His only Son ?

dawn upon you that perfect humanity must
be Divine, and Divine in a very real sense — a
sense that stings, and hurts, and caUs. The
Divinity of Jesus to one who has set himself
the task of attaining to goodness of His
pattern ceases to be a dead dogma, and
becomes a hving, burning fact. I say you
cannot get at its meaning by any other road
than this road which He Himself caUed the
way of the Cross : ' If any man would be
My disciple, let him deny himself and take up
his cross and follow after Me.' And there is
more to it than that, because if you take
Jesus as your Pattern Man, you must take
Him as the Pattern Man for aU men, you must
endeavour to lead and persuade other men to
set out on the same quest ; you cannot be
content to be good yourself and let aU the
world go hang. Goodness of the Jesus pattern
is aU mixed up with love, with giving what
you have away. And when you start on that
job of leading other men to foUow the Perfect
Man, you will become more and more im
pressed with the fact that you cannot do it —
you cannot do it yourself. If it is to be done,
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Food for the Fed-up

He must do it — through you. You wUl
come to it more and more — that you have
nothing whatever to give away except the
bit of His Spirit that you have caught ; that
unless you get out of the road and let Him
come through, you have not a dog's chance
of helping, comforting, or inspiring any one.
This — these two results — inevitably follows
the whole-hearted acceptance of Jesus as the
Perfect Man. You come to realise first that
you are utterly dependent on Him for your
own goodness, and then that the world is
utterly dependent on Him for its goodness —
that is, goodness of His pattern. There is
a lot of goodness among men that has nothing
consciously to do with Him at aU. Men are
all the products of that queer process which
is penetrated through with a Spirit whose
purpose is the creation of the Human FamUy,
and there is in them aU a vein of nobihty,
generosity, tenderness, and honesty. You
will recognise that — you cannot escape it — and
if you are a Christian you wUl love it. Man
as he is now is in many ways extraordinarily
lovable. You would have to be a dull sort
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His only Son ?

of feUow if you could fight with a British
battalion and not get fond of the men. But
if you had taken the first step, and taken
Jesus as Perfect Man, you would be stiU more
impressed with the fact that this goodness is
not good enough, not nearly good enough, for
the purpose of real brotherhood and real
peace. It is utterly unreliable, it is subject
to the most bewUdering plunges into degrada
tion, its purity is smutty, its honesty is
wobbly, its selfishness is weakly, it has fine
impulses but few big principles, it is purely
human. You may say you love it, but you
don't really ; you don't love dirt, and smut,
and lies, and meanness — you can't, they are
so beastly ugly. The truth is that, good as
men are, they are not good enough. They
need — we need — another order of goodness
altogether if the purpose of the world is to
be realised and Man is to be created out of
men. The Jesus pattern of goodness alone
is good enough. His Life alone shows what
has been working itself out through the
process aU the time, and shows it in human
terms. The goodness of Jesus is the goodness
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Food for the Fed-up

of God, and is of another order from what can
be caUed human goodness pure and simple.
That is fundamentally what you mean when
you caU Jesus Christ ' His only Son our Lord.'
That is the living dogma of the Divinity
of Christ, and it is a faith that a man lives
himself into after he has taken the first step
of taking Jesus as Perfect Man. It is a truth
that can only be grasped by the whole man,
not by his intellect alone.
You have rejected the Divinity of Jesus up
to now perhaps, because you felt it could not
be inteUectuaUy proved, by reason, and that
it was a truth which reason ought to be able
to prove, and you were not going to be dis
honest and say you believed when you were
not convinced. I say that is aU the wrong
order. You cannot force or kiU your inteUect.
Of course you can't, and you must not.
Don't bother a tap about His Divinity as a
dogma. The point you want to start with is
His perfect humanity, the question you want
to ask yourself is whether you ought to be
like Him. Once you have fairly and squarely
decided that, you have taken the first real
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His only Son ?

step to prove that Jesus was Divine, that His
goodness is the goodness of God, which aU
the travail of creation was undertaken to
produce, the goodness that is good enough for
real Brotherhood, real Socialism, real Peace
on earth and Good WiU amongst men.
Of course, your temptation will be to say
that the goodness of Jesus is an impossible
goodness — that it never can be yours or any
one else's. Once you start trying it, you will
not be likely to say that it is merely human ;
that is the kind of thing a scholar says who
talks about it in the abstract, but is content
with his own cleverness in the concrete. You
wiU know it is Divine aU right, but your
temptation will be to say that it is impossible.
If you reject it on these grounds — well, you
know where you are, don't you? you know
you are a coward who won't climb ; you can't
disguise yourself as an honest man who won't
lie. But if you think fair and square on any
big human problem, you will come to it that
this impossible goodness is necessary, inevit
able, if human dreams — the dreams of the
Socialist, the Educationalist, the white man
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Food for the Fed-up

who loves his fellows — are to come true. This
impossible goodness is necessary, is the very
first necessity, if we are to make the better
world, for the better world can only be made
out of better men. The man who wants to
make the world a better, happier place wiU
come at last to see — if he is in earnest — that
his heart's desire can only come true as this
higher order of goodness is spread abroad in
men's lives. If a man is going to be in dead
earnest when he says —
' I will not rest from mental strife,
Nor sheathe the good sword in my hand,
TiU we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land,'
he will come at last to see that it can only be
built on the foundation of that sort of good
ness which is in Christ. He wiU come to see
that the weak spot in aU our schemes for
betterment is human nature in its ordinary,
wobbly, unreliable, good-and-evil state, and
that on that rock our dreams are bound to
suffer shipwreck soon or late. When you
stand there with necessity behind you and
impossibUity in front, when the choice is
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His only Son ?

stripped of aU disguise and you see that it
must be ' Christ or the present chaos,' then
you are down on rock bottom, and wiU cry to
the Perfect Man, ' Lord, I believe, help Thou
mine unbehef — I do believe — I want to be
heve in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.'

135

VII. Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary
We come to this. You cannot prove the truth
of the Christian Creed by reading arguments
in books, you must start out by doing actions
in streets and factories and homes. The
Christian Truth is not a matter of Truth and
Falsehood only, it is a matter of Life and
Death. Huxley was, of course, right when
he said that the only question an honest man
would ask was whether a doctrine was true
or not, but he was wrong if he supposed that
in all matters Truth could be attained by
reasoning. The challenge of the highest
Truth is not to the reason only, but to the
whole man ; at its heart the question of the
Christian Faith is a moral one, a question of
right and wrong. What Jesus did for the men
of His time, what He does for the men of aU
time, is to hold up before them a new order
136

Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
of goodness, a fresh motive of life. He bids
them seek and find ' Eternal Life,' a phrase
which never meant to Him a kind of golden-
harps-and-snow-white-wings-and-ever lasting-
hymns - before - the - great - white - throne exist
ence, which was to come as a reward after
death, but a new kind of life which was to
begin here and now — at once. It was indeed
never to find its completion and perfection
in this world, but it was to begin here — begin
in the honest and earnest search after that
new order of goodness which Jesus showed to
men as the goodness of God the Father.
If a man or woman honestly accepts that
chaUenge, and sets out upon the quest of the
Holy Grail of Jesus' goodness, he wiU begin
to understand why Christians are so definite
and determined about Jesus Christ as being
'His only begotten Son our Lord,' 'God of
God, Light of Light, Very God of Very GodL'
et cetera. He wUl become convinced that to
talk of a Person Who was the Author and
actual example of this sort of goodness as
being just a ' good man ' is to use language
without any real meaning. There never was
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Food for the Fed-up

a ' man,' however ' good,' who was like this.
When you honestly start to live on this level,
and stop arguing about it, you may come to
the conclusion that Jesus' goodness is impos
sible, unpractical, visionary, mad, but you
wiU not talk nonsense about its being ' merely
human.' You may rail at it and Him as
being inhuman and insane, and then His
splendid wholesome sanity and His humanity
in the best sense will stand up and ask you
questions. He was a mad fanatic Who
played with children. He was a morbid
puritan Who declared war on natural instincts,
and was called a glutton and wine-bibber and
the friend of the harlots. Who forgave the
woman taken in adultery. He was a ridiculous
visionary with His eyes fixed on Heaven Who
was always teUing men that their first duty
was to love one another and do good in this
world. He was a megalomaniac madman
Who was always talking about Himself as
King of Heaven, and always thinking about
other people, and living the simplest and
humblest life of kindly service. He made
Himself equal with God, and forgave the men
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost

that spit on His face. He was a weak and
womanish pacifist Who could not strike an
honest blow. Who faced a cross with the
dignity of a hero, and died unbroken at the
end. He was impossible, and infinitely
appeahng. If you set out to follow Him in
earnest, you may say in your heart that He is
' the God of unbearable beauty Who breaks
the hearts of men,' but you wiU cease to use
the cant of the critic who caUs Him a very
good man.
' Yet take thou heed of Him, for, as thou pass
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become
A thrall to His enchantments, for the King
WiU bind thee by such vows as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep, but, so thou dread to swear.
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field.'
This is the vivid and bewUdering spiritual
experience that Christians have crystaUised
and summed up in the words ' His only Son
our Lord,' the dogma of the Incarnation.
They found His goodness perfectly beautiful,
which means that they found it human in the
best sense, caUing on and pleading with aU
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Food for the Fed-up

that was best and noblest in them, and at
the same time they found it impossible and
unattainable. They could not abandon it,
it was too good ; they could not attain to it,
it was too high. He was at once inevitable
and impossible. He was at once human and
superhuman. He was God and man. That
experience, which is at the root, and always
has been at the root, of aU vivid Christian
Faith, would have been pure torture, had
there not come with it the thrUling discovery
that, impossible as He was, this Person was
alive, alive and infectious ; that though His
goodness could not be taught or learned, it
could be caught, and could catch you ; and
though it still remained beyond you, it could
draw you towards it, and very slowly, and
often painfuUy, transform you into its own
image. The Jesus order of goodness is not
only impossible and inevitable, it is also,
thank God, infectious. This final experience
completes the circle of enchantment by which
Christ binds the souls of men and keeps them
striving after the impossible, and still striviag,
though they fail a million times. This en-
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
chantment it is which is expressed in the dogma
of Jesus Christ, the Saviour Who was God and
Man, and which has made Christians ever
smce Christ died the laughing-stock and butt
of aU sensible and practical people, and has
exposed them to charges of hypocrisy, folly,
unreality, insincerity, morbidness, and aU the
hundred and one other curses that have been
cast at them aU through the many years that
have been heaped upon the days of the Son
of Man.
' Who that one moment hath the least described Him,
Dimly and faintly hidden and afar,
Doth not despise aU exceUence beside Him,
Pleasures and powers that are not and that are.
' Yea, amid aU men bear himself thereafter,
Smit with a solemn and a sweet surprise.
Dumb to their scorn, and turning on their laughter
Only the dominance of earnest eyes.'
The dogma of the Incarnation is not a merely
inteUectual chaUenge, but a moral and spiritual
one. It asks, ' Do you intend to abandon and
give up the Christian standard of goodness
because it is beyond you ? ' and the Christian
answer is given in the roUing of its unreason
able and idiotic but splendid drums, * God of
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Food for the Fed-up

God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,
Begotten not made, being of one substance
with the Father, by Whom aU things were
made.' No — No— No — I — won't — I will pass
through the gateway ; I wiU not abide with
out, among the cattle of the field.
This dilemma is not an artificial or merely
intellectual dilemma, it is a terribly real and
human one. The more one faces up to the
facts of life, the more sternly one refuses to
live in a blind fool's paradise, and determines
to see life as it is, the clearer and more cogent
grows the conviction that mankind must
literally choose between Christ and the cattle
of the field, between the higher order of good
ness revealed in Jesus and pure animalism.
Nothing makes this issue clearer than the
teaching of those who are opposed to Christ,
deliberately and consciously opposed to His
teaching. There are a large number of men
and women who are deliberately opposed to
Him, a larger number in Europe to-day than
there has been for many generations. I have
just been reading a book written by one of
these teachers. It is difi&cult for me to say
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
what I think of it and keep within the bounds
of the English Dictionary, or outside the
range of the laws of libel. But it does possess
one great merit, it is honest and consistent.
The author refuses to mince matters, and is
determined to face facts. He gathers up
all the scum and fUth of modern civilisation
and serves it hot as stinking soup. He hides
nothing, and draws his picture with a heavy
hand, and in very black ink. One reads it
and grows sick. It is difficult indeed to
believe it true and stiU retain one's faith in
God. But then, of course, it is not true, it is
one side of the truth. It is not a picture,
because it is all shadow and no light. It is
like a great deal of modern realism, which
mistakes mere brutality for noble sincerity.
Reading it, one would suppose that every
man, woman, and child in the British Isles
lives in a state of daUy and hourly misery
and degradation ; that there is no laughter
except the dirty sniggering of low-class music-
haU audiences at obscene jokes ; no honesty
except when it is the best policy ; no purity
because all men are vicious and all women
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Food for the Fed-up

harlots at heart ; no happiness because all
men and women live in terror of starvation.
You would suppose that a weU-clad, well-
nourished, h&ppy-looking child is so rare as
to be remarkable. It is a world of undiluted
gloom — and yet this is a very poor and
squalid quarter, where housing conditions
are disgraceful, where the streets are mean
and dirty, and the homes not fit for beasts,
but the children of my schools who have just
come out to play are shrieking with laughter,
most of them are warmly clad, and their
teachers love them (there is no class of public
servants more honourable and less honoured
than our elementary school teachers), and I
love them, and they are not all unhappy or
degraded; and this modern unrealist has a
bee in his bonnet and a kink in his inside.
He paints one side, the seamy side — but he
does that faithfully. We cannot burke his
truth, while we see his falsehood. There is
a cesspool of undUuted cruelty and fUth, on
the edge of which our civilisation stands and
staggers unsteadily. He says we dre over
the edge and into it, up to the neck, just
144

Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
sinking for the third time, and nothing can
save us but the drastic and desperate course
of drinking it — drinking it, stink, slime, and
aU. His way out is simple — simple, consistent,
and logical, but, good Lord, it would choke an
elephant. There are too many of us, he says,
that is the root of the matter — there are too
many of us, and we must get some of them
killed off. In order to do this we must
legalise and recognise as moral not merely
prevention, but abortion and infanticide as
weU. Every mother and father must be
left free to decide which of their new-born
babes they shall kill and which they shaU
keep alive, the final decision resting with the
mother. There is nothing, according to this
teacher, but mawkish sentimentality and
Christian hypocrisy to prevent this coming
about quite soon. Women can be got to do
anjrthing that other women do, and they would
take to murdering their babies as gaily as
they have taken to short frocks, jazz dancing,
and low-necked blouses. Men and women
have no morals, only manners or conventions
which depend mainly on their caprices and
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Food for the Fed-up

the climate. Once you set the ball rolhng
by the abolition of our present sentimental
laws, they would keep it rolling, and the
custom would be established in no time.
They would soon realise, too, that half a
husband is better than no husband at aU,
and free love without any vows other than a
contract which could be terminated by mutual
consent would solve the problems of the white
slave traffic and the unwanted woman at one
stroke, and would also, which is of paramount
importance, set men and women free to
exercise their sex functions without artificial
restraint or control. This would be the
crowning blessing, because sexual control is
at once impossible to attain and injurious to
attempt. More than half our modern sick
ness, neurasthenia, fnadness, more than half
our melancholies, jealousies, and perverted
cruelties, are due to the unnatural suppression
of the sex instinct. If you could somehow
kiU off, smother, and choke the pestUential
Christian priest with his pink-passioned, pale-
faced Christ, in whom he does not believe
himself — for the Christian Religion is one
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
part folly and three parts humbug — you would
then be free to live according to the true creed,
which is that man is an animal which has
happened, by circumstances over which it
has no control, to have its brain speciaUy
developed as it might have had its forelimbs
turned into wings, claws, suckers, or some
other of the thousand forms which nature
bestows. Once we start to live natural
animal lives, aU the troubles of our artificial
civUisation wUl pass away. Our one great
need is the honesty and courage to face the
fact that we are what we are — beasts that
perish. There is the solution : get rid of the
King and His enchantments, and be content
to abide without, among the cattle of the
field. There you have the dilemma, stark-naked
and stripped of all disguise ; and the only
difference between this particular book and
countless others of the same sort is that
stark-nakedness and freedom from disguise.
The same teaching in a milder form is being
poured out upon the children of this genera
tion, and is more dangerous, like aU other lies,
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Food for the Fed-up

when it wears a Sunday suit borrowed from
the angels of beauty and of truth. The
teachers of it are largely followers of Freud,
the psychologist, who have never read his
books, and dabblers in psycho-analysis with
the most elementary sort of knowledge of
what it all means. It is a ghastly thing for
one who has studied and come to understand
the powers of suggestion to contemplate the
unnatural alliance which has been formed
between the specialist in his study and the
fool in every street to debauch the minds of
the people with a flood of new sex teaching.
The scientific specialist who spends his life
in the investigation and treatment of obscure
nervous disorders sets out his tentative and
very imperfect discoveries, which are hailed
immediately as universaUy established facts,
and exploited by a host of eagerly ignorant
people who have neither the ability nor the
patience to test their truth or falsehood.
Freud doubtless performed a great service to
humanity when he disclosed the enormous
part which the sub-conscious mind plays in
determining our daily actions. He was un-
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
doubtedly right when he resolved that no
prejudice and ignorant opposition should
prevent him from revealing the power of the
sex instinct in man's sub-conscious life. He
was and is right in maintaining that sex desire
is the most powerful factor in ordinary
human nature, and that the unnatural and
forcible suppression of sex desire by the will
in obedience to convention or fear of conse
quences is the cause of frequent mental and
moral disasters. In all this he was right,
but his followers have been damnably and
disastrously wrong in supposing that the
only outlet for this powerful desire, and the
only way of preventing its unnatural sup
pression, is to increase our freedom of sexual
intercourse. The sex instinct has only one
outlet in animals, but it has a thousand
and one in men. Every creative, artistic,
and religious faculty man possesses is a
development of what Freud calls sex instinct,
and aU man's social, poetic, and religious
activity is an outlet — and the proper human
outlet — for it. We have here one of the
usual ' scientific ' errors arising out of the
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Food for the Fed-up

ridiculous habit of looking for the ex
planation of things in their origins. These
teachers will teU you that because the rehgious
instinct is connected with the sex instinct, and
is undoubtedly a development of it, there
fore the religious instinct is only the sex
instinct disguised, with a veneer over it, and
the love of a noble Christian woman for
Christ is only a perversion of the love which
should have found its natural satisfaction
in intercourse. They will tell you with con
tempt that a woman only worships God when
she cannot get a husband. It is only one
branch, and a very important branch, of the
deep-seated error into which the so-caUed
scientific method has led thinkers for more
than a century. It is the old business which
declares that because I am descended from a
monkey, therefore I am only a monkey, and
tries to get the world to progress looking
backwards. All this teaching which makes
man the inevitable slave of a tyrannous sex
craving for which no outlet is possible but
the ' natural ' one, which says that purity is
impossible and therefore we must have poly-
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
gamy, that restraint is impossible and there
fore we must have infanticide, abortion, and
prevention as cures for over -population, is
inteUectually based upon the fundamental
error of finding the meaning of the end in the
beginning. But that is not the root of it ;
the root of it is a moral refusal to accept the
struggle for existence which every higher
form of life must make if it is to survive. It
proceeds from that desire for lower peace and
contentment, that harmony of the lower
level, which is the temptation of aU living
things, and which ends in extinction and
death. Every new form of life has to struggle
for its existence or die, and that struggle is the
eternal method of progress. Life-force, which
is another name for God, seeks ever for new
outlets ; it broke through matter and issued
in mind, and it must break through mind
into something higher stUl. In this matter
of sex the tremendous force behind instinct
has broken through and found for itself many
new outlets in man ; it has broken into art,
music, poetry, literature, invention, and scores
of other channels, but most of aU, it breaks
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through into religion, and finds an outlet into
the infinite and eternal.
The connection between rehgion and sex is
undoubted and undisputable, but the mean
ing of the beginning is found in the end, not
vice versa. The meaning of sexual connec
tion is to be found in spiritual union, in love —
true love. It is love that explains lust, not
lust that explains love. Love is the new and
higher life that has to struggle for its existence.
These teachers deny its existence, and give
its name to lust, denying that there is anything
else. The struggle is irksome, socially and
individually irksome, and they will not take
it up. This teaching is the teaching of death.
LiteraUy, and in so many words, it is the ever
lasting call of the waters of Lethe — ^to sleep
and forget, and be content ; it is the caU of
decadence — to take the way down as the way
out ; and the call is loudest in this question of
sex. Here is the very heart of the struggle.
Abandon the battle at this point, and you
must retreat all along the line. Here it is
that in the life of each man and woman, and
in the life of every community, the struggle
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
is hardest and most painful. Frequently it
amounts to torture, and ends in madness or
in suicide, frequently, too, in obscure nervous
complaints, obsessions, melancholies, down
right madness. There is no doubt about those
facts. There is no doubt, too, that many
teachers, preachers, and social workers, who
have the highest aims, and are altogether on
the right road in other ways, make hideous
mistakes because they do not understand the
struggle and its sorrows fully, and do not show
the right way out. They are content to say
that lust is sin, and leave the wretched man or
woman to fight it by the power of their already
broken wUl — a hopeless task indeed. There is
no doubt that the teaching of the Church on
the matter of sex has been, and often is stiU,
marred by ignorance, stupidity, and cowardice.
But it is into this very centre of the struggle
for the higher goodness that the Creed comes
marching with its drums. It adds to the
words 'Jesus Christ His only begotten Son
our Lord,' the words, ' Who was conceived
of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.'
It asserts violently that the higher order of
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Food for the Fed-up

goodness which came with Jesus came in a
unique way, and a way which delivered it
from any contamination by lust. It was an
order of goodness which set love free from lust
and so made it perfect. This doctrine is the
point on which the ' natural ' school of sex
teaching concentrate aU their powers of abuse,
ridicule, and contempt. It has been laughed
at, mocked at, and covered with decent and
indecent contempt for centuries, and most
of aU during the great scientific century. It
is offensive to the natural school, not only
because it is miraculous, but because it has
led to the behef in love as distinct from
natural lust, a distinction which they abhor.
It is true that in their desperate loyalty to
love Christians went too far, and looked upon
virginity and celibacy as the higher life, and
tended to regard aU sex connection as, if not
sinful, at any rate a lower kind of good. This
was the result of its passionate rejection of
the lower goodness, and its determination to
seek love unstained by lust. Even an oppon
ent, and a contemptuous opponent, of Christi
anity like Mr. Edward Carpenter admits
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
that Christianity represented the most power
ful reaction against the long, intolerable
tyranny of the senses over the soul. And it
stiU remains the most powerful rebel against
that tyranny, and it is this fierce rebeUion
that has its power-centre in the doctrine of
the Virgin Birth. All the Christian belief
in the purity of womanhood, the sacredness of
motherhood, the beauty of home life, centres
round the Holy Family, and especiaUy round
the infinitely gracious and appealing figure
of Our Lady. All the Christian belief in
romance as opposed to mere sex adventure, in
love which means self-sacrifice, in child-bearing
as a sacred vocation, gathers itself around the
manger and the stable.
' Come sail with me o'er the golden sea
To the land where the rainbow ends.
Where the rainbow ends,
And the great earth bends
To the weight of the starry sky.
Where tempests die with a last fierce cry.
And never a wind is wUd.
There 's a Mother mUd, with a Httle Child
Like a star set on her knee.
Then bow you down, give Him the crown,
'Tis the Lord of the world you see.'
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Food for the Fed-up

Perversions, degradations, and inconsis
tencies have marred its appeal and corrupted
its teaching, but that picture stiU remains as
the power-centre of Christian purity. And it
is as such, as the power-centre of the Christian
protest against lust, that it stands, and always
has stood, in the Christian Creed. It was
because they accepted the Jesus standard
of goodness, which demanded purity, not
merely hi deed but in thought, and separated
love utterly from lust, that it seemed almost
natural and inevitable to them that He should
be Virgin born. It is because I accept the
Jesus standard of goodness — accept it, God
help me ! even in this matter of purity — that
I cannot be certain that the miracle did not
happen. When I say in the Creed ' conceived
of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,'
it means primarUy that I believe in and accept
with all my heart the Jesus standard of purity
as the ideal to which I must attain. I believe
in the Holy FamUy and aU it stands for. I
believe in the redemption of lust, and its
transformation into faithful loyal love to God
and man. I take the road up, the struggle
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
and the Cross, and I reject the road down, as
the way out of my present sorrows, and the
sorrows of the world about me. And because
I have tried to reach that standard, tried and
failed, and keep on failing, because there is
in me ' That underworld where lust and Ues
Like vermin crawl and creep
Across my visions and my prayers
Whence sordid passions leap
' To slay the very thing I love.
To crucify my Lord,
And force me spit my sins upon
The face my soul adored,'
because I know the intense and appaUing dif&-
culty of that road up, and yet have known with
a thriU that there is redemption in Jesus' good
ness, and that He has power with this lie of
lust, that He can break its grip and lift me up,
it is because of that experience that I cannot
suppose that Jesus' goodness is purely human
goodness, or that Jesus was just a good man.
I never knew a man, however good, who had
not fought and faUed at times, and so I am
driven to suppose either that He was a myth
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Food for the Fed-up

or a unique and superhuman personality. I
cannot accept the mythical Jesus — its inven
tion would be a greater miracle than His
reality — and I am driven to accept His reality
as a unique and superhuman personality ; and
then, with that background, I have to face
the question, Did the miracle happen or not ?
With that background, mind you, with that
background I am still doubtful whether it did
occur, without it I would be perfectly certain
it did not. I believe in the miracle, so far as
I do believe in it, because of Jesus. I do not
believe in Jesus because of the miracle. I am
bound to be sceptical about miracles. Scepti
cism in its proper place is just as necessary,
and just as much a duty, as faith. I must not,
and cannot, accept any story that I would
like to be true, nor must you. Intellectual
honesty in matters where the intellect applies
is just as necessary a virtue as the honesty
which forbids you to steal your neighbour's
Sunday boots. And to a certain extent the
intellect does apply to this matter. Either
this thing happened or it did not, and we have
to weigh up the evidence for and against.
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
It is a dreary business. It has been done
again and again by different men, who arrived
at different conclusions because their bias
of mind gave them a different background.
It seems to me that this must always be. The
historical evidence is not conclusive either
way. It leads, and must lead, to a verdict
of not proven. The evidence is as good as it
could possibly be for such an event, which,
when it occurred, could not possibly have
been known to more than two persons — St.
Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary herself—
both of whom have apparently left records,
the one in St. Matthew and the other in St.
Luke. The records are different in detail,
but agree in the main fact. There is no con
clusive evidence that either St. John or St. Paul
knew about it, but then neither is there any
compelling proof that they didn't. It is a
bewUdering problem, and I feel sure that the
study of the historical evidence, unless some
more is discovered, cannot lead to any posi
tive certainty either way. I do not think
it was put into the Christian Creed because
of the historical evidence for it. Nor do I
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Food for the Fed-up

beheve it was put in because it was a fulfil
ment of Jewish prophecy, or regarded as such.
I do not think it was just a desire to pUe up
miracles. Christians do not display a tendency
to record any sort of miracle for the sake of
inspiring wonder, and the evangelists have
left on record our Lord's reluctance to prove
His authority by performing signs and wonders.
I think it found its place in the Creed and has
kept it because the purity of Jesus seemed to
His followers to demand such a miracle —
a unique personality demanded a unique birth.
And the religious significance, the actual
call of this clause in the chaUenge, is to accept
that standard of purity which was in Jesus as
the Divine Ideal for men and women ; and to
that caU I respond, and believe that men and
women must respond, if we are to find a way
out of our many sorrows, and found the better
world. But because I do accept, and cannot help
accepting, the uniqueness of the Character of
Jesus, it does make my outlook different, and
I cannot be sure that the miracle did not
happen. To begin with, of course, I take it
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
that it is tolerably clear nowadays that a
man who denies the possibility of any miracle
having ever happened, or of any miracle ever
happening in the future, is rather a ridiculous
person, thirty years behind the times, who is
reaUy claiming omniscience, and pretending
that he is intimately acquainted with aU the
hidden and mysterious resources of the uni
verse. It is possible to show that the dog
matic materiahst has made a fool of himself
in this matter before now, and denied the
possibility of things which have actuaUy
occurred. A study of the evidence for the
cure of disease by spiritual healing, hypnotic
suggestion, auto-suggestion, and other kin
dred methods would make it clear that it is
far too early to make dogmatic assertions
of possibUity or impossibUity where the rela
tion of mind to matter and of body to soul
is concerned.
You may, of course, grant that it is difi&cult
to imagine the Creative Power breaking or
suspending the action of His own laws, and
then point out that it is perfectly possible
for a human intelligence who knows the
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Food for the Fed-up

laws of nature, by combining and observing,
without breaking, them, to produce results
which to a person without his knowledge
would appear to be stark- naked miracles.
Thus I suppose telegraphy, telephony, and
wireless communication would appear to a
savage to be miraculous ; and the idea of
lighting his bathroom and heating his bath
water with lightning would have appeared
wildly improbable to my great-grandfather.
And if it is possible for a human inteUigence
to thus combine and submit to nature's laws,
and produce ' miracles ' for the savage, it is
much more possible for the Intelligence Who
made the human inteUigence to combine
without breaking His own laws in such a way
as to produce miracles that would baffle the
best of us for all time.
But when you have granted aU this, the
fact remains that the uniformity of nature's
working, i.e. of God's working in nature, has
been proved to be such a true assumption
that any apparent break in it has to be viewed
with suspicion. We cannot admit the prob
ability of a break occurring without very
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost

special reasons to account for it, and then
we do not think of it as a real break, but as a
new combination of forces. We cannot admit
the probability of God's continual interference
with laws of nature ; or else we lose our sense
of the reliability of the universe as a whole,
which is the foundation upon which our ordi
nary lives are buUt, and which is to the religious
man very precious as the Faithfulness of God.
But for a very special reason we may
rationaUy admit the probabihty of an appar
ent break. There have certainly been in the
past two such apparent breaks, two events
which are stiU, as far as we know, stark-naked
miracles: one was the emergence of organic
out of inorganic matter, and the other the
emergence of mind out of matter. At these
two crises in history there were breaks. Now,
if the Birth of Jesus was another such crisis
in history, and if the Birth of Jesus meant not
merely the birth of another man, but the
birth of a new race — the birth of Man, the
Human Unity, Brotherhood; if Jesus was
unique, as I believe Him to be, then there
is a very special reason for the apparent
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Food for the Fed-up

break, and the Virgin Birth becomes credible —
against that background. The objection that
this puts Christ further away and makes Him
inhuman does not hold. It draws Him nearer,
as near as in experience Christians have found
Him to be. If Jesus was merely a freak man
— a genius — then I have no more hope of
being good as He was good than I have of
writing plays as Shakespeare wrote plays.
No one is so utterly aloof from ordinary
humanity as the genius. But if in Jesus a
new break was made by God and life-force
shot up higher, as it did when Life and when
Mind appeared, and if I can become partaker
of that Life, as experience teUs me I can to a
very limited extent, then there is infinite
hope, and I can say, ' Brethren, now are we
the sons of God, and it does not yet appear
what we shall be, but we know that when He
shall appear we shaU be like Him, for we shall
see Him as He is.'
The attempts of Christians to be Christian
now are almost as ridiculous as the attempts of
the first men to be human, but it is not for us
who have had such strange beginnings to
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
despise the day of smaU things. Contempt
generaUy means stupidity and lack of imagina
tion, and it certainly does in this case. Eternal
Life on earth is stUl in its infant stage — only
two thousand years old, and what is that in
time's eternity of time? As individuals and
as a race we are only children, and there is
much ahead. Against this background the
Virgin Burth seems possible or even probable,
and Our Lady dons her robes again. But I do
not really think that her robes of sweet purity
and love depend upon the actual occurrence
of the physical miracle. By whatever means
that glorious Character was born into the
world, she is stUl the Mother of Christian
mothers, and one among ten thousand. She
stiU sits by her Manger or stands by her Cross
and calls out to the world of men and women
her chaUenge to the flesh in the name of the
Spirit, caUing us to pass beneath the gateway
of Christ's purity and leave the life of the
cattle in the field. And if a man wiU take up
the chaUenge honestly and sincerely, and set
out to seek the Holy GraU, I believe he can say
his Creed in the spirit, even if for honesty's
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Food for the Fed-up

sake he has to remain uncertain that the
miracle occurred.
This much, at any rate, is certain, that the
miracle wiU remain ludicrous and incredible
to those who refuse the chaUenge and make
no effort to subdue the flesh to the Spirit, and
no amount of evidence could ever convince
them of its truth. The real question at issue
is not an inteUectual but a moral one, and I
firmly believe that the Creed of the Virgin
Birth is practicaUy the only one in which
there is any hope of salvation from our present
miseries. We cannot go back to the beasts
even if we would. Christ has been too long
in the world, and has accomplished too much.
He may have to be crucified afresh, but He
will rise again. There is no way out of the
tyranny of lust save the way that leads up
wards unto love.
I do not believe that what is caUed the ' new
sex ' teaching, which in its essence is as old
as savagery, has any future. The race that
adopts it will commit suicide. I know that
the struggle for purity is agony very often. I
know that it causes misery, and has the
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost

appearance of hypocrisy, forcing men to pro
fess what they do not practise, but so does
the higher life aU round, and I do not believe
that there is any real escape backwards ; we
must go forward and upward, by the agelong
way of the Cross. And it has its compensa
tions and consolations. It humiliates you,
wounds you, makes you feel a hypocrite and
a fraud, but it leads to clean manhood, clean
womanhood, and Christian self-respect. The
sex instinct is only really tyrannous when you
stunt its growth upward and outward, and
prevent its flowering into poetry, art, music,
and into communion with the Eternal God.
This ancient and modern doctrine that it is
better not to marry in order that you may
continue to burn, because burning with lust
is the only real joy in life, may have its hot
house pleasures and its thrUls, but it leads
at last to would-be-young old men and women,
with no hope in front and no pride behind,
trying to keep alive the thriUs of youth,
undignified and indecent remains. It is
founded on a lie, and it makes life a mean
scramble for passing pleasures, with no real
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Food for the Fed-up

romance, no heroism, no self-sacrifice in it.
Thousands are living the life to-day, as thou
sands have lived it for centuries, with no
shame and no attempt at restraint, and they
are not good advertisements for it. I know
I shaU be told that the corruption and de
gradation which follow on that kind of life
to-day, the bestial excess, the disease, the
caUousness, are all the result of the wicked
Christian conspiracy, and that if you set men
and women perfectly free, they would be as
innocent and unconscious of wrong in pro
miscuous intercourse as dogs are, that they
would kill their babes with tender hearts, and
change their mates innocently as often as
they felt inclined, that they would no longer
be prurient and absorbed in sex once you
kiUed all the men with black coats and pre
posterous coUars, but that talk is pure bosh.
The idea that if you set men free from all
restraint, and from the fetters of convention,
they will become naturaUy moderate and
decent people who wiU treat their women
kindly and sacrifice their passions to their
highest welfare, has about as little real
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Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost
evidence to rest upon as any lie I know.
Everything we know of human nature is
against it. This idea of freedom is a carica
ture. I am a ' free ' man when I sit down to
a piano ; I am bound by no law, and subject
to no conventions, and I produce the most
horrible and brain-splitting results. The
real musician is a slave, bound by iron laws
and fettered by complex conventions, but he
produces music that the angels stoop to hear.
If man is to produce the music of eternal life
he must be bound by the laws of the master
musician, and be subj ect to the conventions
of Christ ; he must be a slave in that service
which is perfect freedom.
The real reason why the sex life of our
people runs into vice and consequent mental
and physical disease is not the pressure upon
their lives of Christian conventions and laws
of purity, but the fact that for most of them
the proper human outlets for the great desire
are dammed up. They have no real art, only
moving pictures; they do no creative work,
they only mind machines — they produce
much but create nothing ; they have no music
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Food for the Fed-up

but jazz dances; and, to our shame, my
shame, they have no rehgion, and cannot
find their way out into the eternal — they are
spirits in prison. The proper outlets upward
are dammed, and they seek the outlet down
wards, and that is not an outlet at all, but
a rotten road that is not a thoroughfare.
And these spirits in prison are exploited for
money wholesale by novelists, playwrights,
pressmen, picture-postcard venders; the ex
ploitation of pruriency is one of the most
paying businesses in the world. Lust pays
enormous dividends. It is a sure thing, a
dead cert, and a damnable disgrace. So
Mammon and Venus join hands and persecute
the Christ ; but, in spite of all their apparent
power, I believe the future lies with Him,
with Him and the Virgin of Bethlehem. I
believe that the race wiU turn at last to the
Mother Maid and to the ChUd upon her knee,
finding in Him the way upwards and the
way out.

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VIII. Suffered under Pontius Pilate
If you get down to the bottom of it, you will
often find that the difference between two men
who argue quite rationaUy about something
is not reaUy a rational difference at aU, but
an instinctive one. Both men will argue
quite reasonably, and will appeal to evidence
in support of their particular attitude, and
both wUl firmly believe that they are per
fectly reasonable people who approach the
subject without prejudice, and with com
pletely open minds, but underneath aU the
reasons there are instinctive forces at work
which reaUy influence their judgment, and
force them almost to select the kind of evi
dence that appeals to them. At bottom it is
a matter of taste.
That sounds rather a hopeless outlook,
because it is popularly supposed that tha"e is
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Food for the Fed-up

no good arguing on matters of taste, it is waste
of time. If a man does not like rice pudding
or Watts' pictures, there is no good proving
to him that he reaUy does. He does not,
and there is an end of it. But the case is
not reaUy so desperate as that, for, although
you cannot argue your friend Williams into
a taste for Watts, you may argue him into
studying Watts for himself, and so acquiring
a taste for him. You may not be able to
prove to your son Philip that he loves rice
pudding, but you may persuade him to try it,
and acquire a taste for it. Any number of
tastes are not natural but acquired, and often
acquired with some dif&culty. You may be
able to persuade a man to give something a
trial — to take the plunge, make the venture,
give the thing a fair chance, and so acquire
a taste for it. But it is important to realise
the nature of the dif&culty you are up against
in an argument, to uncover the instinctive
prejudice that sways your opponent's mind,
and allow for prejudices that may be swaying
yours. It is important to realise that an un
biased mind, if it is a possibility, is the rarest
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate
thing on earth. We are not nearly as rational
as we seem. We act and judge on impulse,
and then find reasons for the action and
judgment afterwards.
There is no doubt that to most men and
women Christ is an acquired taste, hardly ever
a natural one. The natural man has an
instinctive repulsion from Him, and it is very
often this instinctive repulsion, and not any
rational difficulty, that keeps him from being
a Christian, although he himself would tell you
that it is purely inteUectual doubt that stands
in the way. But you wiU find that until
the instinctive repulsion is met with and over
come the strongest arguments will faU flat,
and aU the flatter because the man thinks
that he is perfectly rational, when underneath
him aU the time the hidden forces of instinct
are at work.
Sometimes it is good instinct, and sometimes
it is a rotten bad one. You reason with a
man for hours, and he replies with apparent
sincerity of doubt and difi&culty of a reason
able sort, and then you discover that he is a
secret sensualist and means to stick to it,
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Food for the Fed-up

or is suffering from acute inteUectualitis and
worships his own brain, and you know that
you might as well argue with a donkey about
its unreasonably long ears — ^unless you get
down to tin-tacks and tackle the real issue.
One of the strongest and most deeply-seated
instincts that sway normal men is repulsion
from pain and suffering. It is a natural
repulsion with a very obvious purpose, and
intensely strong, and strongest in the healthi
est people. If a man likes inflicting pain, or
desires to endure it, and there are heaps of
men and women who do, healthy-minded
people agree that he is either mad or bad, or
both. Yet one of the strongest impressions
that Christ made upon the men of His own
time, and one of the strongest impressions He
makes upon the men of to-day, is the impres
sion of His sufferings. He was, and is, seen
to be ' a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief.' And His Gospel has often been stated,
and is still often stated, in such a way as to
glorify suffering as a good thing, sent by God,
and give the impression that Christ taught,
and would have us believe, that pain and suffer-
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate
ing were good things, and that a man who
suffered was to be admired and reverenced for
it whether He suffered for any good purpose
or not. Christians themselves have often
been morbid people, and beheved that suffer
ing of any sort was the WiU of God, and
always tended to purge the soul and make for
purity of heart. We aU know the kind of
Christian who manufactures his own crosses
by the dozen, and then pathetically claims
your admiration for the way he bears them ;
the morbid hysterical woman who walks the
way of sorrows paved by her own distorted
and self-centred imagination with the air
of a saintly martyr done to death for truth.
We aU know these people, and they are the
despair of our lives, for there is no more soul-
destroying evil than self-pity that mistakes
itself for sacrifice.
If we are to have healthy minds and live
healthy lives, we must assume quite definitely
and clearly that pain and suffering are evil
things, and that to endure them without
necessity is folly, and the most futile of aU
folhes, and to inflict them without necessity
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Food for the Fed-up

is sin, and the most sinful of aU sins. There
is no sin so vile and so degrading as deliberate
cruelty, and the essence of cruelty is the
infliction of unnecessary pain. We cannot
be too definite about the sinfulness of cruelty
of any sort whatever. But we must also
recognise that, evil as pain and suffering are,
they are by no means the worst of evUs, and
that to endure them for a good and sufficient
reason is the highest wisdom, and to inflict
them with a good and sufficient purpose is the
most perfect kindness. Only the purpose
must be good and suf&cient. We must have
a perfectly good object, and we must make
absolutely certain, as far as we humanly can,
that we cannot possibly attain that object
without infhcting suffering and pain. That
sounds like rather ponderous and platitudin
ous (those words have an imposing appearance,
haven't they? — ^just like fat men with loud
voices) common sense ; but the most ghastly
sorrows have been endured by men and women,
and especiaUy children, because the truth was
not recognised and good religious people
looked upon pain and suffering as good things
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate

which it was always beneficial to infhct and
endure, and which always tended to purge
and purify the heart. They have been con
vinced that men could only be saved from
sin by suffering, and that God sent suffering
into the world for that good purpose. This
idea has led Christians to tolerate and regard
as inevitable a great deal of totaUy unneces
sary and avoidable suffering. It has led them
to condone and even regard as beneficial
ghastly social conditions, involving the daily
torture of men and women. It has enabled
them to contemplate a dirty, unorganised,
wasteful, and stupid world as God's appointed
place of preparation for the next. The
Church has given its blessing to a stupid and
cruel chaos on the ground that it was God's
appointed preparation for a wondrous order
after death. Only the other day a good
Christian was teUing me of some outdoor
services in a poor quarter, and described with
great satisfaction the crowd of dirty, unkempt,
and degraded- looking people that thronged
around the preacher. He was delighted with
the service. Here was the real thing, the
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Food for the Fed-up

preaching of the Gospel to God's poor. So
picturesque and romantic. It did not strike
him that the existence of such people and their
miserable pig-sty houses was a reproach to
the Gospel and a wound in the heart of Christ.
Of course, when he was chaUenged with it, he
saw it, but he had to be challenged. He had to
be shaken out of his piety into practical
humanity. It was necessary to make him, a
good Christian man, see that this stupid and
avoidable suffering was a sin. He was stiU
under the spell of that perversion of Christ's
Gospel which leads to the sinful and morbid
glorification and sentimentahsing of stupid
cruelty. The same attitude has been com
monly taken by Christians towards disease.
It was God's chastening, to be meekly accepted
and submitted to. It was the cup of suffering
given by the Father, and must be drunk to
the dregs. It was a special privilege to be
aUowed to share Christ's sufferings, and the
sufferer must look upon it as such. These
things are sent by a watchful Providence to
test and try us. So in a vicious circle the
morbid lie worked round, fastening the chains
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate

of sorrow tighter round man's hands and feet.
Cruelty walked proudly round the streets
arrayed in the shining robes of Christ. The
error is fatal because it disguises cruelty and
gives it a religious sanction, and that is the
very thing sin always seeks — a good disguise.
Again and again men have tortured their
feUows in the name of God, pretending that
it was for their own good, and deceiving
themselves, when reaUy it was the morbid
and savage love of inflicting pain that was
urging them on. ' See thou to what damned
deeds religion draweth men ' is as true of
the Christian religion as any other. Men
have found doctrines to disguise and cover
the bestial cruelty and vindlctiveness of their
own natures. There is no doubt that much
of the powerful appeal which the teach
ing of the Divine frightfulness and eternal
punishment had for the elect was due to the
freedom it gave them to revel in thought
over the vengeance which they could not
infhct themselves, but which God would
inflict for them upon their enemies. It
was due to the making of God in man's
179

Food for the Fed-up

image, and the picturing of God's justice
as being like our degraded and makeshift
justice. Few words have been so misused as 'Justice.'
Justice has been supposed to demand that a
sinner should suffer whether any good pur
pose was served by the suffering or not. He
' deserves ' to suffer, and that is enough.
Nine men out of ten do not know what the
word ' deserve ' means. It is a word that
covers a multitude of sins — like charity. It
covers up any Lord's quantity of vindlctive
ness, and cruelty, and caUousness. The truth
is, that no one deserves a pang of pain unless
it is necessary for his own good, or the good
of other men, unless it serves a purpose which
cannot be otherwise accomphshed. This idea
of ' Justice ' as something distinct from Love
has been a curse to the world. Even now our
prisons are full of men and women who ' de
served ' to suffer, and who wUl be aU the worse
for it, and all the greater danger to society
because of it, and several steps nearer Hell
than they were before they suffered. Suffer
ing was inflicted on them in the name of
i8o

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
' Justice ' because we were too lazy, too ignor
ant, and too stupid to get to the root of their
sin and save them from it. The history of
this world's courts of ' Justice ' would turn a
strong man sick. AU through time man, with
his genius for self-deception and hypocrisy,
has dressed up his sin in the robes of this
attribute of God, and then fallen down and
worshipped it. The really just man is the
man who inflicts and permits only absolutely
necessary pain, and who suffers himself in
doing so. The more perfectly just a man is,
the more he wUl strive to avoid infhcting
pain, and the more keenly he will suffer
himself when he has to inflict it — of necessity.
God's Justice must mean an infinity of effort
to avoid inflicting or permitting pain and
suffering, and an infinity of sorrow to Himself
when He has to permit or inflict it — of neces
sity. God's Justice is God's Love.
If justice means the rationing out of pain
and pleasure to people as they ' deserve ' it,
this world is not just at all. Pain is not dis
tributed according to desert in this world.
Looking for that sort of justice in life is like
j8i

Food for the Fed-up

looking for a needle in a haystack when it is
not there. The best people suffer most again
and again. Life is not fair, and cannot be
made fair, except on the surface, and that
with great difficulty. It is true that we can
remedy, and must remedy, the glaring surface
' injustices ' of life, the disgusting extremes
of riches and poverty, the ridiculous differ
ences of opportunity for education and de
velopment, but these are only surface in
justices, and when we have remedied them
aU, life wUl not be fair. And in our effort
to remedy them we shall discover, and do,
that our greatest enemy is this idea of desert.
People who have been given by God greater
brain-power and higher ability look upon
themselves as deserving all they can get, and
as being in some mysterious way better than
the common ruck of men. They have a right
to affluence while others starve. They de
serve to live in fine houses with large gardens
and a tradesman's entrance while others pig
it two famUies in one room. They deserve
these blessings. Under that blessed notion
they disguise theh selfishness. And it is all
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate
a pack of stupid nonsense. They don't
deserve anything, and are not a ha'porth
better than any decent man who earns £3 per
week, and often not as good. They were
given these gifts of brain and ability to serve
and help with, they were given them as trusts
for a noble purpose, and unless they fulfU
the trust, they are just common thieves.
There is no desert about it.
And when you have kiUed that lie and
remedied the surface injustices, you wiU not
have made the world fair. StiU the natural
gifts which make for pain or pleasure are
unequally distributed without any attention
to desert. Brains, beauty, charm, genius are
not distributed according to desert, and they
are treasures beyond the power of money to
buy. Of course, in the orthodox religious
scheme of things beauty and charm do not
count, they are only skin deep, but as a
matter of fact they are the most coveted
gifts in the world, and productive of intense
pleasure, and are tremendous powers for good
or evil. There is no greater devU than a
beautiful and charming devU, and no saint

Food for the Fed-up

so powerful as a charming saint. They are
distributed unequally, and with no attention
to desert. Stupidity, awkwardness, shyness
are not distributed equaUy, or as they are
deserved, and they are the cause of agonies.
Misfortunes, accidents, disease, and death are
not sent to those that deserve them. What
is the use of pretending that they are ? You
may be a saint, but that wUl not prevent you
from falling down the ceUar steps and break
ing your leg. Life does not always punish
the guilty and reward the innocent. The Jews
tried hard to believe that it did, but it only
broke their hearts, and it will break the heart
of any one who tries to believe it, unless he is
the kind of person who can see a hundred
children burned to death and thank God
they were not his, or hear that a battalion of
fine men has been cut to pieces and thank
God he was not there. That kind of gratitude
to the Almighty is fairly common, and I often
wonder what He thinks of it. An exception
ally fortunate person might persuade himself
of the idea that the world was just, provided
he never felt the truth —
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate
' That loss is common does not make
My loss the less but rather more.
Never morning wore
To evening but some heart did break.'
It is not true that if you are good you wiU
escape pain, or that if you are sinful you will
incur it. The better you are the more pain
you may be called upon to endure, and the
worse you are the more pleasure you may
manage to obtain. I know of no task more
hopeless than the endeavour to maintain that
God's government of this world is just in the
sense of awarding reward and punishment
according to desert. When you get down
beneath the surface into the underworld of
private hopes and fears and horrors, where
the real tragedies of life are played out, and
have laid bare before you the tortures which
good men and women suffer, and when you
know with what brutality the law of heredity
works out, this copy-book lie about the way
to happiness being goodness, and the way to
sorrow sin, turns you sick. It is just soothing
syrup and untruth. God is not just in that
sense of the word. This world is not a com-
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Food for the Fed-up

plete, finished, and justly ordered place where
aU things happen as they should, where all
the good little boys get halfpennies and all
the bad httle boys get smacks. If belief in
God depended upon maintaining the truth of
that lie, then belief in God were impossible.
But belief in God does not depend upon it.
The Christian religion starts off by aiming a
blow at that lie. That is its chiefest glory.
It begins with the best Man that ever lived
hanging in agony on a Cross, and so faces up
to facts right away. There is its splendour.
It is rooted in the most stark-naked act of
injustice that the mind could well conceive.
There stands Perfect Man, with the spittle of
a drunken soldier streaming down His face,
a crowTi of thorns set sideways on His head,
with blood from the great wounds in His back
sousing red through the dirty purple cloth
that mockery has thrown across His naked
ness — there stands Christ. Behold the Man 1
AU history is summed up in that scene. There
is no truer picture of what history reveals
than a Crucifix. As it stood in a broken
Flanders vUlage, looked up to by broken bleed-
l86

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
ing men, as it stands in some rotten slum to
day while the squahd crowd pass seething
by, it is the Truth — the Martyrdom of God
in Man. Life is as brutal as it is brutal, as
repulsive as it is repulsive, as unjust as it is
unjust, and, thank God, as perfectly beautiful
as He is perfectly beautiful. That is the
secret. The Cross is not God's Will, but God's
Woe. The Christ is God's WiU — He is perfect
Beauty. But His beauty is not for aU to see.
To many there is no beauty that they should
desire Him. They cannot see Christ for the
Cross. It stands in the way. It blots Him
out. They have been taught, perhaps, that
the Cross was God's plan, that God willed it ;
it was part of His scheme, and they are repeUed.
What a God 1 What a plan !
They would be prepared to admire Christ
for His sufferings if they could see any good
and sufi&cient reason for them. 'This have
I done for thee ; what wilt thou do for Me ? '
pleads the preacher. ' What hast Thou done
for me? ' answers the man in the street.
' What purpose did this suffering serve ? '
' It saved the world from sin,' says the preacher.
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Food for the Fed-up

' But it didn't,' says the man in the street,
* you know it didn't. You are talking cant —
pious cant. It didn't save the world from sin.
Sin and sorrow stiU continue, misery and
v^retchedness are with us yet, and fall like the
rain upon the just and the unjust too. Men
stUl torture men and women, chUdren stiU go
hungry, there is still rape and murder, lust
and war. Our streets are fuU of it, our papers
ring with it, the world remains unsaved, and
the heaviest burdens stUl fall upon the best
of men. Calvary made no difference. It is a
summary of life's problem, but not a solution.'
' But Salvation is possible now,' says the
preacher ; ' it was impossible before. Man
can now be saved from sin. God's justice has
been satisfied. You see, God's justice required
that man must suffer for his sin, his rebeUion
against God, before he could be forgiven. AU
the world would, by the law of justice, have
been doomed to eternal torment in an ever
lasting Hell if Jesus had not suffered and
saved us from that awful fate. God could not
forgive, even if man repented, unless the law
of justice were satisfied and the punishment
188

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
which sin deserved was borne by man in Christ.
You do not understand the awful Holiness of
God.' But the man in the street gets frantic
here. ' No, I don't,' he says, ' and I don't
want to. I don't want to understand a
justice that demands eternal agony for three
score years and ten of ignorance, sorrow, and
sin. Who is this just God ? I do not believe
there is such a Being. If there is. He must be
the Devil. If I could meet Him, I would tell
Him what I thought of His justice even if I
went to Hell for it afterwards. Justice which
demands eternal punishment for anything is
not justice, but vengeance, cruelty, and hate.
I teU you straight, this just God of yours is
nothing but the reflection of your own dirty
mind, which is stiU back in the days when they
hanged a woman for stealing ribbon. You
may twist yourself into phUosophic knots
as much as you like, and pile up explanations
that don't explain to your heart's content,
but you cannot get over the fact that a
" justice " which demanded everlasting
punishment for anything would be just
another name for inhuman brutality. That
189

Food for the Fed-up

is aU this divine " justice " is, it is a survival,
a superstition in the worst sense.
' What I want to know is. Why did Jesus
suffer ? What good did His sufferings do ?
What difference do they make to-day ? What
good purpose was served by them which could
not have been served without ? If you cannot
give me inteUigible answers of some sort, I
am prepared to pity Jesus, as I am prepared
to pity any other noble visionary who has
been put to death, because he was before his
time, but I do not see why I should worship
Him because of His sufferings, which are just
one more gruesome act in this world's sordid
tragedy of errors. I admire the men who
suffered for me in the war, because I see what
good their sufferings did, I see what they have
saved me from, and I don't see how I could
have been saved without them. But I cannot
see what good the sufferings of Jesus did, or
what they have saved me from, or why, if
there be an Almighty God of Love, I could not
have been saved without them. I cannot
see why men should not have been forgiven,
if they repented, without this brutal murder
190

UMU^AtfiBift^&MUBMitU

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
as a sacrifice. Jesus forgave men freely when
He was on earth, and never Himself mentioned
any other condition of forgiveness but repent
ance. He told us to forgive seventy times
seven if a man repents, and went further, and
told us* to forgive our enemies, bless those
who cursed us, and do good to those who
iU-treated us, and that we were to do this
because we have to be perfect as our Father
in Heaven is perfect. Yet you say that a
caUous legal murder had to be committed
before it was possible for God to forgive a
repentant man. To be quite frank, this
doctrine strikes me as being not merely
incredible, but immoral as weU.
" Blest through endless ages
Be the precious stream
Which from endless torments
Did the world redeem "
is bad morality put into poor poetry, and
sung to a sorry tune.'
These questions, half formulated, and alto
gether unexpressed, crowd into the mind of
the man and woman in the street when he or
she is persuaded to come and be saved, and
191

Food for the Fed-up

the preacher pleads patheticaUy for gratitude
to Christ for His bitter sufferings. Visions
of similar brutalities which he has seen and
is anxious to forget flit before the soldier's
mind — men with their bowels in their hands,
men with bodies ripped and torn, murdered
children, ravished women ; and the great God
who needed a propitiation to save the world
from sin, and then did not save it, sits up and
looks down on it aU. The preacher cannot
explain. The theologian explains himself into
a knot which no one could untie. Dr. Dale
explained the Atonement to me as a youth, and
was harder to grasp than the Cross itself.
Dr. Moberly was worse. I have never read
a book on the Atonement that did not puzzle
me more than the puzzle. As for getting
a plain message for plain men out of them,
it would take God Himself to do it, no man
could. The miracle was that God sometimes
did. He can get through any cloud of lies
to find a soul in desperate need.
Plain men do not understand justice that
demands eternal punishment, and cannot
picture a Father who requires propitiation
192

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
before He forgives a repentant child. The
fact is that our preachers spend, or did spend
(they have largely given it up as a bad job
now and taken to brief, bright, and brotherly
talks to the people on popular subjects, with
sacred solos by Miss Jinks), their time explain
ing, not the Gospel, but the symbols and
metaphors which its first evangelists used in
the struggle to give its message to the men of
their day, men whose minds moved in a
different world from ours, men whose religion
was steeped in bloody sacrifice, whose states
were ruled by despots, and whose work was
done by slaves, men whose idea of justice
was full of cruelty and destitute of love. We
sacrifice reason and imperil morahty in order
to keep these pseudo-sacred symbols and
metaphors intact. It aU leaves the decent
man in the street cold. He finds it duU, dreary,
and repulsive. Better go out into God's green
fields and listen to the choir of birds, better
to see God's Love in a cloudless sky, than sit
in a stuffy church and hear a perspking parson
wrestling to explain how ' Justice ' and the
awful Holiness of God demanded a pecuharly
N 193

Food for the Fed-up

brutal murder as propitiation in order to
avoid damning a world of men to HeU.
They have my sympathy. But there is a
sublimely simple truth that saves. Get aU
that out of your head. Burn all the books
of explanation. Fisherise the whole boUing
and sack the lot. (' This is dreadful,' exclaims
the nice good man who thinks such things too
sacred to talk naturally about. 'What be
comes of Catholic theology ? ' I don't know —
and — Oh, I don't want to be contemptuous
or anything, but I don't care. As a matter
of fact, I have never been able to discover
what Catholic theology is. It changes with
every generation of Catholics. It cometh up,
and is cut down like a flower, and never con-
tinueth in one stay. It is the mortal body of
an immortal truth. Which is the CathoUc
rehgion.) We have suffered many things
for these dead symbols, it is time that some
one read their funeral service, and they were
decently interred in a museum. Let us get
out. Swing back to the universe as it is. Here
we stand beneath the stars, with the chaUenge
of the world before us. What does it mean ?
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate

Remember what we know. Remember first
that it is a movement — an unfinished move
ment. It is on ' a pUgrimage — ^a journey.
Where to? That is the question. And it
is in order to answer that question, and
only to answer that question, ' Where to ? '
that we have turned back and asked our
selves the question, ' Where from ? ' We
have sought to pierce the darkness of the
past in the hope of discerning the direction
in which the world is moving, and so guessing
the final goal to which it strives. We have
seen the agelong preparation of the world for
life, and then the strange beginnings of life
itself. We have traced its struggle upwards
stage by stage, we have seen vegetable,
animal, human life emerge, and we have
marked how each higher type of life has had
to struggle for its existence, only surviving
if it proved strong enough to overcome the
lower life. That has been true in the story
of man as in the story of animals and things.
We have watched the growth of man, and
have gained the impression that behind and
within it there seems to be a Power which
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Food for the Fed-up

makes for unity of man with man, which
strives to make the Human Unity or Brother
hood, to create Man. We have marked the
growth of unity against the obstacles of
human stupidity, imperfection, and sin, and
in that growth there came a crisis, a break
through, parallel partly with those great
crises when life itself began, or when mind
emerged out of matter, there came the crisis
of Christmas Day — the Incarnation. In the
fullness of time God broke through once more,
and a higher life than the merely human, a
new order of goodness, appeared upon earth,
and appeared as a solitary Personality amid
millions of a lower order of life. What would
you expect, what would the whole story of
the process lead you to expect? Are not
Gethsemane and Calvary, or something like
them, natural, inevitable ? Was it not
written in the rocks and stones, written in the
strange book of Life's history, that the Son
of Man must suffer many things, and be
rejected of the elders and chief priests and
scribes — the whole of the lower and older
order of life ; and was it not waritten, too, that
196

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
He must be raised up — ^that the higher order
must survive ? Can you not almost see that
naked Figure, with His wonder and His wounds,
growing out of the pages of your scientific text
book? Has not the whole process been the
crucifixion of the higher by the lower life, is it
not aU summed up in the Cross ? The process is
bloody, so is the Cross ; the process is repulsive,
so is the Cross ; the process is unjust, so is the
Cross ; the process is glorious, so is the Christ.
Behold the Man — Perfect Man — the Character.
Never does His glory shine so brightly as it
shines now. No man has ever seen the sun
who has not seen it break its way through
inky clouds and bathe the world in sudden
silver beauty from on high, so no man ever
sees the Face of God until it breaks upon his
vision through the clouds of Calvary. Never
was God so human, never was man so Divine.
' 'Tis that weakness in strength that I cry for — my flesh
that I seek
In the Godhead. I seek it and find it. O man, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee, a Man Uke to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever ; a hand like
this hand
ShaU open the gates of New Life to thee — See the
Christ stand.' 197

Food for the Fed-up

This is the truth : the martyrdom of God in
Man, not the punishment of Man by God.
This is the truth that lies behind all these
old - world symbols and metaphors, behind
the Propitiation and the Sacrifice. The In
carnation is the Atonement — and the Atone
ment the Incarnation. Good Friday is Christ
mas Day, and Christmas Day Good Friday,
and Easter Day, and Ascension Day, and
Whitsunday, because they are all Christ. It
is Christ that saves, not the Cross ; it is Christ
that redeems, not His sufferings. The Cross
does not save, any more than the process
creates. The Cross never saved any man, and
never could. You are not to be saved by
anything that happened in the past, you can
only be saved by God acting now in the
present. You cannot be saved by any Church,
Sacrament, Priest, or Creed of God — you can
only be saved by God Himself. Calvary
is not past, it is present. The Cross is still
set up, the crowd stUl stands and mocks, the
soldiers still play dice, the faithful stiU draw
near to worship God in Man. That Christ
Who hung there hangs there still, and calls to
198

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
you and me, chaUenging us to take up the
struggle of the higher life, bear its burden,
endure its shame, and win its inward Peace.
The Cross was the most natural thing in the
world — the most natural and inevitable, as
natural and as inevitable as all the rest of the
hideous process by which life has been, and
is being, evolved, and of which it is the fitrst
scene in the final act. There is no Almighty
potentate who made the world perfect, and
then permitted it to come to a disaster, put
it under a curse for thousands of years, and
then intervened and sent His Son to undo the
curse by offering a propitiatory sacrifice. It
is aU a tissue of ancient metaphors in which
men strive to express in terms of their day
the overwhelming experience of finding God
in Christ. He had to be expressed in terms
of their religion and their philosophy, but we
are not bound by them, or saved by believing
in them. We are only bound by the Spirit
of Christ, saved by our faith in Him, not in
what He was, nor in what He did, but in
what He is, and has been from the begin
ning, from the time that this mysterious
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Food for the Fed-up

business first began and the world of worlds
was born. The Gospel does not ask men to
believe in suffering as being good, or as being
the WiU of God. The Cross was no more the
WiU of God than any other murder or atrocity
that stains the story of man's life on earth.
The Cross is common, it is Christ that is unique.
It was no more the WiU of God that Christ
should suffer than it is the Will of God that a
good and patient wife should have her brains
battered out by a drunken husband with the
leg of a table, or that a young mother should
be ripped open and left disemboweUed on
her own doorstep by a drunken soldier. It
was the Will of God that the travaU of the
process should bring in the fullness of time
the perfect Life to birth, and that it should be
lived out in its perfection to the end. It was
God's WiU, because God was and is that Life,
and He was travailing in the process, and is
travailing stUl.
The necessity of Calvary was the necessity
that has been binding on God since the begin
ning of time, it was the necessity inherent
in the task of creation. We can never fully
200

Suffered under Pontius Pilate
understand it, any more than we can fully
understand anjrthing else. It is not sufficient
to account for the facts to say that God chose
to give man a free wiU, and that man chose
evU rather than good. There is a truth in
that, but it is not, cannot be, the whole truth.
All the misery and evil in the world, all the
cruelty and crime, is not due now, and never
has been due, to man's dehberate choice of
evU. It was not merely sin — in the full sense
of wilful sin — that has caused God's agelong
Calvary, or that hung Christ on the Cross.
AU through the ages men have crucified God,
not knowing what they did, crucified Him
through their ignorance, stupidity, and im
perfection as well as through deliberate choice
of wrong against right. There has always been
a voice crying in the heart of God, and appeal
ing to His Fatherhood, ' Forgive them, for
they know not what they do.' It is not
possible to account for aU the hideous misery
that has marked the growth of Man as being
the consequence of sin — ^unless you interpret
sin in a wider sense than the word can reaUy
bear. It must be taken to include ignorance,
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Food for the Fed-up

duUness of imagination, feebleness of mind,
and a host of other factors for which man
cannot be held wholly responsible either as
an individual or as a race. Religion in the
past has suffered because it concentrated aU
its attention on sin as deliberate rebeUion
against God, and passed over the part that
ignorance and feebleness have played in
making His agelong Calvary. This has been
due to the fact that we have separated the
Creation of the world from its Redemption,
basing our thought upon the doctrine of the
Fall and man's free will. But there is a
sense in which Creation and Redemption go
on side by side, and have always gone on side
by side, because the Creator and Redeemer
are One God. Redemption is not an after
thought of the Creator — it is an eternal aspect
of His work. The Lamb was slain from the
foundation of the world. There has always
been a Calvary in God's heart.
The first and last enemy of God the Creator,
is Death — nothingness, non-existence. That is
what evU is in its essence — nothingness. Evil
is self-destructive and tends to death ; it is
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Suffered under Pontius Pilate
based on a lie and ends nowhere. God's fiurst
creative act brought Him up against the
enemy, and He has been up against it ever
since, and must be up against it until
creation is complete, and the world is made
at last.
Calvary is the revelation in human terms of
what Creation — Creation in that larger, truer
sense which includes Redemption — means to
God. It is the struggle of Life with Death.
Christ is Life and the Cross is Death. Man is
saved by Life and not by Death, by Christ
and not by the Cross. When we say that man
has free will, we mean that he has become con
scious of the struggle of Life with Death in the
world and in himself, and can resolve or refuse
to co-operate with Life. Sin, deliberate sin,
is conscious refusal to accept the struggle for
existence which Life must make — conscious
refusal to bear the Cross. The only cure for
sin is Life — more Life. The selfish man is a
dying man. His world is small and must
grow smaUer. The loving man is a living
man. His world is large, and must grow
larger. What the world needs, what it always
ao3

Food for the Fed-up

has needed, is more Life. That is what Christ
can and does give, not by what He did, nor
by what He was, but by what He does, and by
what He is now — the same yesterday, to-day,
and for ever. God does not punish the sinner ;
sin is its own punishment ; it means inevitable
decay, and decay is painful, and it ends in
death — extinction. The pain may not be
terrible, may not be anything like as keen as
the pain of growth, but it is useless and ends
nowhere. Now we have cleared some clouds away, and
the Christ stands out from His Cross, and in
Him is Life Eternal. When you accept the
challenge to follow Him, you do not promise
to model your thoughts, words, and actions
upon the pattern of One Who was alive and is
dead, but to surrender in utter loyalty to
One Who was dead and is alive again and for
ever. It is not by the sufferings of Christ
that you are saved, but by His Life-force ; it
is not the Cross you are called upon to worship,
but the Christ, Who is the Life of the World.

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IX. Dead and Buried
You cannot expect a Christian — and by a
Christian I mean a person who has set out
honestly and with determined purpose to
seek for himself and for his fellow-men the
Jesus order of goodness, that new and Eternal
Life which came to earth in Christ — I say you
cannot expect a Christian to talk or vyrite
about the Death of Jesus Christ upon the
Cross without very deep feeling. I doubt if it
ought to be possible for anybody, any fuUy
human being, to contemplate that Death
without some feeling. No tragedy that
dramatic genius has ever staged is half so
poignant and so piercing in its pathos as
the simple Passion story of St. Matthew or
St. Luke.
If, as some of the scholars seem to think,
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Food for the Fed-up

the Passion of Jesus is a legend based upon
some ancient mystery play, then the author
of that mystery play was a genius who
knocked Shakespeare into a cocked hat. The
greatest artists and the greatest musicians
have felt their highest powers fail to do the
slightest justice to the Gospel Story. Bach
halts and Handel falters as they draw near
the end. AU the sorrows and all the glories
of human history surround and are summed
up in Calvary. Stand alone on that little hiU,
and you can hear the weeping and the songs
of triumph of countless worlds of men and
women who have journeyed out of the dark
ness into the light and out into the darkness
again. The heart of humanity turns thither
in its bitterest hours, and feels a friend draw
near. Explanations seem futile, criticism
becomes impertinent and absurd. Let it
stand alone, that Central Cross, and tell
its own heart - piercing tale. Words can
only serve to veil its glory and dim the
radiance of its beauty for the suffering soul
of man.
This is no place for asking questions or
206

Dead and Buried

weaving theological theories. Go down upon
your knees. This is the central mystery of
the Christian Faith —
' There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin ;
He only could unlock the gate
Of Heaven, and let us in.'
That is aU you need. Let the pathos of the
Cross have its way and break the hearts of
men with its tremendous appeal, ' This have I
done for thee ; what wilt thou do for Me ? '
That is the instinct of the Christian. It is
natural, and in some ways it is supremely
right, but in other ways it is wrong and
extremely dangerous ; it leads to a religion
of feeling divorced from thought, a religion
that is pathetic but not powerful, and that is
no good. A religion which is without feeling
is a poor thing, but a religion which is aU
feeling is not religious at aU, it is only senti
mental. The last thing in the world that
Christ was or wanted to be was pathetic.
He was no writer of tragedies. He was a
Saviour of men. He was the most practical
person that ever lived. The last thing He
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Food for the Fed-up

wanted to do was to set souls sailing on a sea
of tears to nowhere in particular. Emotions
are like shadows passing over cornfields;
they come and go, and come again, and leave
no trace behind. Christ wants more than
our tears. He wants our very selves, the very
fibre of our beings yielded up to Him. He
either wants you to go the whole hog or not
to go at aU: you cannot put Him off with
the easy tribute that you pay to Sidney
Carton on the stage. This is not drama, it is
reality, and we have got to ask questions, and
we have got to demand answers ; we cannot
be put off by false reverence or talk of mystery.
God's mysteries were meant to lead us on to
their solution, not to bar us out from hope of
truth. The Cross is a chaUenge. What does
it mean ? What did He do for men ? What
did He save them from ? How did He save
them ? Why did His death save them ?
What do you mean by being washed in the
blood of the Lamb ?
We have got to ask these questions, we have
got to seek an answer. Men have always
asked them and always sought for answers,
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Dead and Buried

and there has never been a satisfying one yet.
It is no good trying to pretend that there has
been one consistent Christian answer, because
there never has been. If you doubt that, get
hold of any review ^ you like of the writings
of the Christian Fathers about the meaning
of the Cross, from St. Paul to Dr. Dale, and if
your head does not whirl with the multitude
of theories, I am prepared to eat my Sunday
hat. There you see the spectacle of men — good
and holy men, and very brainy men too —
wrestling to express what the Life and Death
of Jesus meant to them, in terms of their
knowledge and their thought, and you get
up with a sigh, muttering to yourself, ' Good
Lord, what a business this Christianity is ! '
And yet, it is perfectly evident that behind
all these weird and wonderful theories there is
a tremendous and shattering experience which
these men are out to express, an experience of
Salvation which is aU bound up with Calvary.
It is perfectly evident that behind the chaos
* Dr. Rashdall's Idea of the Atonement in Christian
Theology would be as good a Review as any.
o 209

Food for the Fed-up

of Christian theology there burns the un
quenchable fire of the Christian religion. It
is impossible to make a seamless robe out of
the patchwork quilt of Christian theology,
impossible to make a consistent whole out of
this multitude of conflicting theories. Yet
they all have some common features : they
aU start and are based upon the doctrine of
the FaU of Man.
AU alike start from that great day when
God the Supreme Creator King looked down
upon His world. His finished and completed
world, and saw that it was good. Every
stone was in its place, every star stood to its
course, no discord broke the harmony that
God had wrought, as day by day the sun went
down and the moon rose up to bathe God's
garden in the silver of its peace. There in that
garden, innocent, sinless, naked, and un
ashamed, man walked with his own mate
and talked with God his friend as the evening
shadows fell. Then on a sudden, from some
where, from somewhere outside the picture,
there comes a jarring note, a discord. Evil
comes into the world, and Paradise is lost.
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Dead and Buried

There is no hint of where it comes from, save
that it is said to be an echo of a discord that
arose in Heaven itself among the angels that
surrounded the Throne of God. Man inno
cent, but perfectly free to choose between
right and wrong, chooses wrong ; then a cloud
Comes over the earth and hides the Face of
God, the world faUs under a curse, man be
comes a rebel, and the justice of the great
offended God demands that he should be
punished for his rebeUion.
Years pass by, and then there comes a
sudden and tremendous intervention on the
part of the angry and offended God, and aU
the world is drowned except a few choice
souls that are left floating on the waters in the
Ark of the Lord. But even that drastic
punishment does not stay the disease. The
curse of sin continues and eats its way into
the soul of man. The whole of the race is
doomed, for the justice of God demands that
the soul that sins should die. But God con
ceives a wonderful scheme to repair the disaster
and save mankind from the awful doom of
death and eternal pain that, apart from the
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Food for the Fed-up

scheme, inevitably awaits them. , Of aU the
nations in the world He chooses one, and by
a long course of education and of chastise
ment He prepares them for the coming of His
Son, the Saviour of mankind. He gives them
a divinely inspired code of laws, and orders,
religious rites, and ceremonies to be performed,
all of which in various ways look forward to
and foreshadow the coming of the Christ.
From time to time He sends them prophets
who plead with and recall them to the service
of the one true God against Whom they con
sciously and knowingly rebelled. And then
at last the great day dawns, and the Saviour
comes, and every detail of His Life and Death
is worked out in accordance with the Divine
foreshadowing and the Divine plan. In
accordance with that plan Christ moves on His
appointed way from Bethlehem to Calvary,
and on the Cross reveals the meaning of the
Temple Altars running red with the blood of
sacrifice, and of all the rites and ceremonies
that God had fore-ordained.
He is the Great Sacrifice and Propitiation,
and by His Death upon the Cross He takes
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Dead and Buried

away the curse, satisfies the justice of God,
saves us from His wrath, and opens out the
way of Salvation. His Death upon the Cross
was the climax of God's plan, it was the great
necessity. By that death He removed the
curse, by becoming ' a curse ' for us. So the
Death of Christ becomes the centre of the
Christian Gospel, and faith in the power of
that Death to save us becomes the only means
of Salvation. Christ's Death upon the Cross
was the only propitiation that was, or could be,
offered to turn away the just wrath of God
from sinful man. To whom the Sacrifice and
Propitiation was offered has always been
vague. Some said it was to the Devil, some
said it was made to the Father, some said it
was made by the love of the Father to the
Father's justice, but the Church has never
been certain to whom it was made.
That is a fairly just, though superficial,
sketch of the ' common element ' in the many
answers that have been given to the great
questions of how, and why, and from what
Christ saves us. But the worst of it is that
we cannot take this common element and make
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Food for the Fed-up

it our own, because it is just this very scheme
of Salvation, just this very Divine plan, which
has become utterly incredible to us. It is not
that it has been proved untrue, it is that it
has become unreal. It has not been murdered,
it has died a natural death, it has ceased to
grip. It has around it always the atmosphere
of a fairy tale ; inwardly we feel that it is
impossible, it lies right outside the circle of
our thought. You see, it starts off by con
tradicting at the very beginning our whole
idea of the universe. We cannot believe in
that great day when God looked down upon
His completed world and saw that it was good,
because the world never was completed, and is
not completed yet. The universe to us is an
uncompleted growth, with God as its Life-
force. We find it impossible to believe that
man has ever been as God meant him to be
and then faUen from that, because aU our
knowledge of the history of man leads us to
believe that he has grown up stage by stage
from the animal, and never has been as God
meant him to be, and is not yet. We cannot
believe in this perfectly peaceful garden
214

Dead and Buried

world, in which there was no struggle, no
bitterness or strife, when everything tends
to teU us that nature has always been as she
is now, red in tooth and claw, ruthless and
cruel, and that man, like every other creature,
has had to struggle for his existence. We
find no place in this picture for that tremend
ous struggle which man, like the beasts, has
had to face with bleeding hands and a breaking
heart aU down the years.
The background of the world's beginning,
our new Book of Genesis, is the story of a
fierce and terrible struggle between beast and
beast and man and man, which it is impossible
for us to regard as having been due to the
anger of God for sin, because it seems to be
the very tissue of nature itself, and began
before there was any sin to be angry about.
The new Adam that science draws for us is not
a being whom we could regard as in any sense
complete or satisfactory to God. Even in
his earhest days he must have been fighting,
fierce and ruthless in his cunning, or he would
never have survived. He must have been a
very different creature from that peaceful
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Food for the Fed-up

Adam of the garden to whom the beasts were
friends. Nevertheless, the fact that the legend
of the golden age of happiness in the dim past
of man is a world-wide legend, found in the
folklore of almost every people on the earth,
shows that it must have some truth behind it,
and we can believe that there was a time
when man was very little above the animal,
and was hardly self-conscious at all ; when he
fitted his environment as the animals fit theirs,
and was not yet troubled with the dreams,
the aspirations, and the everlasting discontent
which are the hall-mark of humanity as we
know it. We can believe in a time which was
in truth the childhood of the race, and which
has become, as our own childhood always does
become, a thing of beauty which grows more
beautiful and more rainbow-coloured as it
fades into the past.
What we cannot believe is that it was
really as pure and bright and peaceful as it
has been depicted from the distance of after
years, or that aU the sorrow and cruelty of
history — its wars, oppressions, tyrannies, and
tortures — have been due to the fact that the
216

Dead and Buried

first man wilfuUy and deliberately rejected
God. We cannot believe that but for that
first sin the progress of man would have
been an orderly and paiiUess advance to
perfection. History — the history of man —
is too painfuUy paraUel with the struggle
among the beasts for us to believe that aU its
chaos was due to wUful rebeUion. Partly it
must always have been due, as it is now, to
man's imperfection, his ignorance of truth,
for which he is only partly responsible. The
chaos of human history, like the chaos of
a human nursery, is partly due to sin, and
partly to childish ignorance for which neither
the chUdren nor their parents are wholly to
blame. Looked at in this light, the whole vision of
God is different. We no longer sit in a law
court and listen to a great Judge proclaiming
a sentence of just doom upon a sinful man ; we
see rather a great Poet wrestling to express
Himself in His poem, with aU the mingled
joy and sorrow, the success through constant
faUure, of the creative mind at work ; we see
rather a great Father striving to create perfect
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Food for the Fed-up

sons, and suffering always for their ignorance
and sin ; we see a great Life-force breaking
through into a new form of life, and suffering
agonies to give that new form of life perman
ence and strength. Nor does this vision of
God, as is commonly supposed, lessen or do
away with the sinfulness of sin. We cannot
believe that man was ever perfectly free or
perfectly responsible for the wrongs he did.
The sorrow and suffering cannot indeed be
whoUy due to wUful sin ; partly they are, and
always must have been, the result, not of
man's wilful rebeUion, but of man's ignorance
and imperfection — his childishness. Never
theless, we can and must believe that from the
very beginning, ever since man was man in
any real sense, he has had a certain measure
of freedom and a certain measure of responsi-
bihty, and that he has misused that, and has
laid upon the great creative Spirit the double
agony of Creation and Redemption, the double
task of enlightening his ignorance and turning
him from his sin, and these two tasks have
been going on side by side, this double
burden has been borne by God, ever since
2J8

Dead and Buried

man was man, and so the Lamb was slain
from the foundation of the world. There
has always been a Crucifix in Heaven's heart
of hearts.
With this new vision of man's genesis there
comes a new vision of the Cross. The vision
of the Judge and His awful justice, and of that
impending and appaUing doom, vanishes from
Calvary as it does from the Garden of Eden.
We no longer feel bound to the metaphors
and symbols that are based upon the old
Book of Genesis. If we cling to the great
words. Sacrifice and Propitiation, we give to
them an entirely new meaning ; we think
of them in terms of life and not of death. We
find ourselves, as we ought to fuid ourselves,
utterly unable to think of or contemplate
the Cross apart from the Empty Tomb, and
Christ's Death apart from His Resurrection.
It is not that He died, but that He rose again ;
it is not the Death, but the Life, the unconquer
able and insuperable Life, that becomes to us
the important point.
In the light of the doctrme of development
the meaning of the Cross shines out more
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Food for the Fed-up

brightly, with fiercer and more burning power
than it could ever do against the background
of the FaU, the Judge, and the awful doom.^
The old words take on new meanings. He
is the New Life, the supreme and perfect
manifestation of God, the great Life-force, the
Eternal Life doing battle with death and over
coming it. He is /our Sacrifice and Propitia
tion in the Spirit, because the idea of a Sacri
fice was the giving of something up to God
with which you identified yourself, and which
was the offering of yourself to Him. Christ,
the Living Christ, is our sacrifice, because it
is the Christ living in us, the Christ Spirit
born in our hearts, that we offer up to God as
the only ground, and the only possible ground,
of our communion with Him. It is Christ
crucified in us, the new form of Life struggling
for its existence in us, that is our only hope of
1 We find ourselves able to go back behind the letter of
St. Paul, behind his Rabbinic arguments, to the Spirit, to
that consciousness of new Ufe in Christ which is the real
source of his inspiration. As a matter of fact, we go back
to the atmosphere of the best Greek theology, and throw
away the coarsening and degrading influence which Latin
interpreters of St. Paul's Jewish Uterarism introduced into
the world. 220

Dead and Buried

perfection. Only as we become partakers of
that Life can we hope for perfection.
That is just bed-rock truth. Looked at in
the highest light, looked at as God must look
at me, there is nothing in the ordinary me,
nothing in myself, that is worth an5rthing, it is
only this Spirit of self-sacrificing love, this
Spirit of purity and supreme nobility, that
makes me worth anything at aU, or makes
any man worth anything at all. He is our
propitiation, because, once more, a propitiation
is something that you offer up to God instead
of yourself, and it is the ever-dying yet death
less Christ in my heart that I offer up to God
instead of myself. It is not any act of His
that I offer up, it is not anything that He did
in the past, it is Him Himself, alive in me,
Christ in me, the Hope of Glory. He is my
propitiation. The great thing that Jesus did for us was
not to die but to live, and His Death is only
valued as a witness to his Deathlessness ; the
Atonement is the climax of the Incarnation ;
they are not two, but one truth.
The great glory of the new idea, the idea of
221

Food for the Fed-up

movement, progress, and development, the
great light that it sheds upon the Cross, is that
it fixes our eyes and our hopes, not upon the
Death, but upon the Life of Christ, and upon
His Death only as the vindication of His
Deathlessness. Thus the Birth, Death, and Resurrection
of Christ are seen to be one truth, one revela
tion of what God is like. We get rid at one
stroke of the fairy-tale atmosphere. We no
longer have the Judge proclaiming the awful
doom upon the whole race, cursing the earth
and sending disease, pestilence, and famine
as punishment for man's sin, and holding over
them the threat of still more awful punish
ment to come, a vision of God which is torture
to our highest moral instincts. We no longer
have the vision of a supremely Almighty
Being Who creates a perfect world, and then
permits it to go wrong and fails to put it right
by the most drastic punishment, and fails
hkewise to put it right by His wonderful
scheme of Salvation. We are no longer
walking in the pious twUight of outworn
traditions, we come out into the sunlight of
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Dead and Buried

fact and of things we know. We do know
that there has been a Life-force from the very
beginning continuously expressing itself in
higher and higher forms of life. We do know
that each higher form of life has had to struggle
for its existence ; we do see in the Life of
Jesus and His Character the highest form of
hfe that ever appeared upon this planet. We
would naturally expect that that higher form
of life would have to struggle and strive for
its existence. Everything that we know of the
world would lead us to expect Calvary. It
was prophesied not merely by the Hebrew pro
phets, but by all the mUlion voices of prophecy
which have been since the world began. And
everything we know of the world would lead
us to expect Easter Day, lead us to expect
that the great Life -force which, through
failure, has so often triumphed would, through
failure, triumph once again.
And now to me the whole thing becomes
simple ; I know where I am. To begin with,
I know what God is like. He is revealed to me
in the Life of Jesus. God, Who commanded
the light to shine out of the darkness, has
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Food for the Fed-up

shined into my heart to give the light of the
knowledge of the Glory of God in the Face of
fesus Christ, ' and that is my greatest need
satisfied ; I know Him in Whom I have be
heved. There is no Great Unknown, no VeUed
Being, to Whose inscrutable judgments I must
perforce submit, even when they violate my
sense of right and wrong.
God is like Jesus. I know what I mean
when I ask God to forgive me ' for Jesus
Christ's sake.' I have got no sort of idea in
my mind about the awful, far-off, dreadfuUy
Holy Judge who spares me eternal punish
ment because of a ghastly sacrifice over two
thousand years ago. I have the vision of the
great creative Father with Whom I seek to be
at one, and I know that the only possible
reason I have for expecting that I can be at
one with Him is that there is in me something
of the Spirit of Jesus, something of His
Divinely perfect humanity. It is not mine,
and it is not me, it is a gift from God, a gift
which comes to me through His Cross, and
through His Saints, through His martyrs, and
His Church. The New Life is in me, the Life
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Dead and Buried

of Jesus Christ, and because of Him, alive
though crucified, in me, I can seek and find
forgiveness with God. I know what I mean
when I say that I am ' washed in the Blood of
the Lamb,' for blood is Life, Life given and
outpoured, and it is by the outpouring of the
New Life into me that I am saved. It is
not merely because He was crucified once
and rose again two thousand years ago, but
because by that act He is revealed as crucified,
yet always rising again in me, that I am being
saved, and that I hope at last to be completely
saved. I know also what I am saved from ;
not from any curse of God (an impossible
conception), not from any eternal punishment
for sin in the world to come, but from sin
itseh, from selfishness, from meanness, from
greed, from the sin which is its own heU. Thus
I find the very heart of the Christian Faith
and cast away its husk. God is revealed to
me in Christ, and I can know Him as He is, and
in that growing knowledge find Eternal Life.
The only trouble that I have left is that the
shadow of those old behefs, those ancient
fears, the shadow of the awful Judge and of
p 225

Food for the Fed-up

His dreadful justice, lies over the liturgies
and forms of service that I am obliged to
use ; the atmosphere of the fairy tale still is
within the Church, and I have to spend so
much of my time explaining that the words
of the Prayer Book do not mean what they
say, but something different, and it all seems
to be such waste of time. And yet I know
that the new meaning does beat through the
old words, that the new truth does find ex
pression in the old symbols. I beheve that
it always has found expression through them,
and that so far as Christ has saved men. He
has always saved them by the power of the
revelation of Himself and of God's love in the
Cross. The religion has always been right,
and men have never been able to make it of
no effect through their traditions. But the
time has now come when we should hft from
our people the load of misunderstanding that
arises from our tangle of outworn metaphors.
The whole of this bewildering cycle of
theories of the Atonement arises from the
attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable visions
of God, the attempt to keep the God of the
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Dead and Buried

Old Testament and worship the God of the
New. From the time of St. Paul onwards
this attempt has broken the brains and the
hearts of men. The time has now come when
we can be set free from that burden altogether,
and throw ourselves completely upon the God
revealed in Christ.
' Bread of Thy Body give me for my fighting,
Give me to drink of Thy sacred Blood for wine,
WhUe there are wrongs that need me for the righting,
WhUe there is warfare, splendid and Divine.
' Give me for hght the sunshine of Thy sorrow,
Give me for shelter the shadow of Thy Cross,
Bid me to share the Glory of to-morrow.
And gone from my heart is the bitterness of loss.'

21,7

X. He descended into Hell
I HAVE met a good few honest men and women
who are out for reality in religion, who have
said to me that if the two statements, ' Born
of the Vhgin Mary ' and ' He descended into
HeU ' could be omitted, the short Creed of
Christendom would be to them a complete and
inspiring symbol of the great unseen reality
for which their spirits crave ; but these two
statements bother them, and on the whole
they would rather have left them out. Not so
much because they felt they were untrue as
because they felt they were unreal and un-
needed, they did not add anything to them.
I can understand that, but I do not think it
will do. We have seen how great and clear
a chaUenge to the world is involved in the
doctrine of the Virgin Bkth ; we have seen
that that picture of the Holy Family — the
228

He descended into Hell

spotless Mother, the strong, protective Father,
and the Holy Child — is, as it were, the big
drum of Christendom, beating out its summons
to the life of purity and its challenge to the
battle with the flesh ; and behind this other
clause, the descent into Hell, there lies a
chaUenge too. In this again Christ's trumpet
caUs us to the parting of the ways. Here for
the first time the Creed swings out into an
other world ; death is not the end, it says, there
is more to come. Life is more than a matter
of life and death, it is a matter of life and
death — and the Beyond. Good and evil, truth
and falsehood are not mere matters of welfare
and happiness in this world, their effects and
consequences reach out into another sphere.
The Creed calls us to bet our lives upon the
fact that five minutes after death we shall be
conscious, thinking, feeling, knowing, sorrow
ing, and joying. It caUs us to believe that
there is another sphere of life which lies so
close to this that within three minutes from
now I could be there if I would. It only needs
a revolver or some prussic acid, and I could
be there in three minutes from now. It is
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Food for the Fed-up

now three o'clock ; at three minutes past three
I could, if I would, be standing in that other
land. It is nearer to me than London is, in
fact it is nearer than Mrs. Hunt's tobacco shop
just round the corner.
Perhaps it is partly because of the words
in which it is expressed that the challenge is
not so much realised. Hell is a word which
has gathered around it a strange and avirful
association of ideas : it stands for a doctrine
which thousands of thinking, loving people
hate with all their hearts, the doctrine of
eternal punishment ; and even though we know
quite well that it is not in this sense that the
word is used here, the association of ideas
clings around it still, and plays a very large
part in turning men away from thought about
the real truth this statement of the Creed is
put there to express. If we could say instead
of ' He descended into HeU,' ' and so passed
on to Paradise,' if we could say, ' I believe in
Jesus Christ His Only Son our Lord, Who
was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried, and so passed
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He descended into Hell

on to Paradise,' I think the meaning of the
chaUenge would grow clearer ; it would also
link the clause on wdth Christ's own words
upon the Cross, ' To-day thou shalt be with
Me in Paradise.' The Creed caUs us to
believe that what He Himself said would
happen did actually happen, and that His
Spirit went forth to meet that of the friendly
and repentant thief in another world, and
that as His Spirit passed, so, when death knocks
at our doors, shaU we pass too. It does not
caU us as yet to the belief in immortality, only
to behef in survival, only to the belief that
death is not final. Immortality and survival
are two entirely different things. It does not
prove that because my personality survives
death it is therefore immortal. It is well to
remember that, because great numbers of us
are prone to mistake what is merely evidence
for survival as being evidence of immortality.
Even if the fact of the possibihty of communi
cation between ourselves and departed spirits
were proved up to the hilt, beyond aU possi
bihty of dispute, it would not prove that the
soul was immortal, but merely that it survived
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Food for the Fed-up

the ordeal of death. And the Christian Creed
does not ask us to believe in the least that
survival has in itself anything to do with the
Life or Death of Christ. Quite apart from
Christ, the human soul survives death and
lives in another world, a world in which its
fate depends upon its use of its life here.
It is a strange, and to many sore hearts
rather a baffling and bewildering thing, that
Christ tells us so little about the world beyond,
almost nothing definite or explicit. Many
books have been written trying to gather up
into a clear and consistent picture all the
hints He leaves us, but most of them are pious
guess-work, and they are not convincing. A
great deal has been made of the parable of
Dives and Lazarus, but it does not really bear
the weight that has been placed upon it. The
purpose of the story seems to be not so much
to give us information about the nature of the
life beyond, which is described altogether in the
terms of the Jewish thought of Christ's day,
as to drive home those lessons about the after
life which went through the whole of Christ's
teaching about it. The lessons are few and
232

He descended into Hell

simple. There is another life. Our fate there
depends upon our conduct here. The great
misuse of this life, which reaps inevitable
sorrow in that, is selfishness, the use of hfe
for the service of self. The rich man in the
parable is the typical selfish man, who works
out in the after world the inevitable conse
quence of his selfishness, which is separation
from God, the Sphit of Love. Beyond that, I
do not think there is much that we can learn
from the parable without forcing it. The
whole purpose of it is moral and ethical.
Christ does not seem to be supplying in
formation to clairvoyants so much as giving
a solemn warning to profiteers.
Exactly the same can be said of the Great
Judgment picture in St. Matthew, where the
sheep are parted from the goats. The main
purpose of the picture is a moral purpose, it
sets out to teach in vivid and compelling
terms the truth that good and evil, love and
selfishness have consequences that reach out
beyond this world and continue after death.
No man or nation here can come to the
Father, no man or nation here can fulfU their
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Food for the Fed-up

destiny and caUing, except by Him, that is,
unless they seriously set out to win for them
selves the Jesus order of goodness. The
acceptance or rejection of Love as it is revealed
in Christ is a choice the final results of which
lie away and beyond our joy and sorrow in
this life. The great purpose of the picture
does not seem to be the rending of the veil
that hides the future from us and the disclos
ing in detail of what is yet to come ; the sur
roundings of that Second Advent, the Throne,
the Angels, and the Glory, are once more the
conventional surroundings of Christ's time,
taken from the apocalyptic writings of the day.
The whole point seems to be that the Judg
ment is going to be a moral judgment ; it is
going to be a question of character, a matter of
whether we accept or reject Love as revealed in
Christ, and that the acceptance of Love means
a new and wonderful bliss which is not of this
world, whUe its rejection leads inevitably to a
new and avrful sorrow which is not of this
world either.
If we confine ourselves to what Christ actu
ally taught, that seems to be the sum total
234

He descended into Hell

of it. Nowhere does He satisfy our natural
curiosity, nowhere does He reveal to us detaUs
of what we may expect ; it is always the same
great lesson of tremendous hope and awful
warning. There, as here. He is to be the Judge,
because there, as here. He is the everlasting
Lover of mankind ; there, as here, the Character
is to stand and point with a loving but relent
less finger to the sins that stain our souls.
To those who have lost their best beloved,
and have watched the passing of the spirit
out through the gate of death, or who have
not had even that comfort, and do not even
know where the bodies of their dead are
lying, the New Testament is, in the first flush
of their sorrow, a disappointing book. A
thousand and one things that they would
love to know are not revealed ; a thousand
and one • questions that they would ask of
Christ He leaves unanswered. He has very
little more to say in answer to the great
question, What next ? than what could be
summed up in four words, ' More Life with
Me,' and that is aU, uiUess we add to it the
avrful possibility, ' More life without Me,' and
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Food for the Fed-up

so put before ourselves, as He for ever put
before men and women, the great choice.
That is all Christ has to say, and although
it is disappointing to those whose torn hearts
crave for details, it is in itself enough to
challenge the whole thought of the world that
strives to live without God. It is a chaUenge
to the ordinary worldly morality. There are
thousands of men in the world to-day who care
nothing for Christ and nothing for God, who
are quite prepared to patronise and support
the Church because they believe it is good for
society. It tends to make people respectable
and law-abiding, it makes them more con
tented and submissive to things as they are.
These people are quite prepared to invest large
sums of money in religion as an insurance
against rebeUion and unrest, while they never
give a thought to the life beyond, have not
a shadow of belief that the consequences of
what they do or leave undone can have any
effect upon a world beyond this one. Some
of them accept as a matter of course the
ordinary belief in a vague kind of Heaven,
but it does not affect their lives. They give
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He descended into Hell

their money to feed the poor, but have not
love, and so they are worth nothing in Christ's
eyes, they are stiU in the dark. However
respectable and respected they may be, how
ever much they preside at public meetings
for good objects, and however much their
subscriptions may be to hospitals and institu
tions for the prevention of vice, their eyes are
still blind to the great light, their minds stiU
move within the narrow confines of a life that
ends with death, they have not seen the truth,
they have not perceived the real nature of
good and evil, they do not know the difference
between righteousness and expediency ; life
is stUl to them a matter of profit and loss in
this world.
There are thousands more men who would
not support the Church or any form of Chris
tianity, who believe that the questions of
right and wrong are to be judged solely from
the point of view of this world, on the principle
of the greatest happiness for the greatest
number. Frankly, they worship comfort in
stead of Christ. Their idea of man is not the
striving, struggling, aspuring soul with the
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Food for the Fed-up

everlasting ideal stiU shining before him, but
a sleek, fat, well-fed, well-housed, and com
pletely satisfied individual, who sleeps and
eats and loves and laughs in perfect and com
plete content. This idea lies at the bottom
of the baser sort of Socialism, which seeks a
way out of our social cares by a road downhiU
toward the beast.
Against both of these, against the Lord
Mayor with the white whiskers who invests
money in Christianity as an insurance policy
against labour troubles, and against the social
reformer who strives for a comfortable and
Godless world, the teaching of Christ pro
claims war and cries, 'Thou fool, this night
shaU thy soul be required of thee.' There is
another world, and more and more as the
clouds clear away from the arena of battle,
and we see where we are, it wUl be found that
the struggle of the future lies between those
who believe that the soul passes on to Paradise
and those who do not believe that there is a
soul to pass or a Paradise to pass to.
This is true, and this challenge is contained
in the clause, 'He descended into HeU.' Do
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He descended into Hell

you believe that five minutes after death you
wiU stiU be alive and looking back with joy
or sorrow upon the chances you have taken
or have missed? That is the question. But I
think it is natural for people to ask, shice it is
the question, and since the issue is so im
portant, why on earth we do not find more
definite and detailed information about that
other world within the pages of Holy Writ.
Christ must have known, but why did He not
teU us ? It would have made us so much
more certain, so much more sure of our ground,
it would have been such an enormous comfort
to people in sorrow, to know not merely that
m His Father's House there were many
mansions, but what the mansions were like,
what people did there, and what they wore,
and the kind of life they lived. He might
have told us, but He passed on, only uttering
the words of hope and warning, ' More life
with Me or without.' It is this natural
longing that in these last days since the
war, when the many mansions of that other
world have suddenly become fUled with a
multitude of young and ardent spirits who
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Food for the Fed-up

leapt into it from the battle-field, has given
rise to a revival of curiosity and longing to
know more, and hence a great revival of
interest in the possibility and means of com
munication between this world and the next.
All down history, from the very earhest
times, there has been found among men, some
times waxing and sometimes waning, the
belief that communication with the departed
was possible and actually took place. There
is no older belief in the world than behef
in ghosts. The literature and folklore of
every people are full of ghost stories, but in
modern days it has become for the first time
possible, owing to the increased rapidity of
communication, the invention of printing, and
mutual understanding of different tongues, to
gather all this evidence together ; hitherto
it has been scattered and impossible to
collect. Now an enormous volume of such
evidence has been gathered, and for years
men have been at work upon it, endeavour
ing to estimate its value on scientific lines,
and come to some definite conclusion as to
what it aU means. Are all these stories
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He descended into Hell

the results of disordered imagination and of
queer tricks that our sub-conscious selves can
play ? Are they all due to fraud and decep
tion, or is it true that off and on we do hear a
knocking at the door ? I cannot claim to be
an expert, and perhaps it is only the opinion
of experts in this matter which is worth any
thing, but for my part I rise from my studies
with the feeling that it is impossible to dis
miss all the evidence as either imaginary or
fraudulent, and very difiicult to believe it to
be aU due to the queer tricks of the sub
conscious mind. All those factors enter in
and make the judgment more difficult. There
is madness, there is fraud and deception, and
there are queer tricks of the sub-conscious
self ; but when we have allowed for aU that, it
seems to me as if there was something more.
But the whole body of evidence with regard
to the nature of the other world contains
almost nothing satisfying or satisfactory that
one can rely upon. Every supposed com
munication has to be examined and tested, and
probably a great part of it has to be rejected
for one cause or another, and it seems to be
0 241

Food for the Fed-up

practically impossible for an ordinary person
to arrive at any certain element of truth,
although he may have a very strong impres
sion that there is an element of truth there.
All our research does not seem to have hfted
the veil that Christ let down between that
world and this.
The best summary of the conclusions at
which one arrives is that given to me by a
friend who has been investigating psychic
phenomena for many years. ' I believe that
the evidence for survival and the possibility
of communication as against the negative
evidence just balances over on the positive
side, and I believe in both. But as to the
worth of the communications with regard to
the nature of the other world, they are about
equal to the following : They are as if an
Eskimo who had just landed in India were
endeavouring to tell an Eskimo who had never
been to India over a telephone service forty
times as bad as the National Telephone
Service is, what India was hke, provided the
one in India had delirium tremens.'
The veU is not lifted, and we do not know.
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He descended into Hell

If a person reaUy understands the tremendous
difficulties that lie in the way of proving any
given message valid, I think the knowledge
ought to be sufficient to convince him that
this is a matter for trained people to in
vestigate in a highly sceptical and scientific
spirit, and not a point at which ordinary fools
can break in where angels fear to tread. This
is an unsatisfying and non-committal sort of
conclusion, but I believe it is the truth. I
do not believe that there is any solid or real
gain to be gotten out of amateur experiments
in Spiritualism. I do not believe that Christ's
sUence has been really broken yet, nor do I
believe that any good can come to the ordi
nary run of His children by their trying to
break it. It may be that more light wUl
come, it may be that Christ intends to break
the sUence, but it is quite clear that the
dangers which attend any but trained and
careful people in trying to pass beyond the
veU are tremendous, and that for the ordinary
man or woman it is far better to rest back upon
the fundamental fact which Christ taught (and
which is strengthened and confirmed by the
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Food for the Fed-up

truth that there is in this conflicting mass of
evidence), that there is the other world, and
that our fate there depends upon our life here.
The result of the ordinary person taking
up wdth enthusiasm the investigation of this
evidence and the practice of communication
through automatic wnriting, stances, etc., is
either that they simply disregard all the intense
and complicated difficulties that beset the com
munication and lay themselves open to whole
sale deception, and live in a fool's paradise.
which real knowledge might at any moment
cause to come tumbling about their ears, or
else that they produce in their minds, not a
tremendous certainty, but a maddening doubt.
There are, of course, exceptions. There is
a tremendous certainty in Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's words : —
' It was granted me to stand
By my dead,
I have felt the vanished hand
On my head.
On my brow the vanished Ups,
And I know that death's ecUpse
Is a floating veU that sUps
Or is shed. 244

He descended into Hell

' When I heard thy weU-knoAvn voice.
Son of mine,
Should I sUently rejoice
Or incline
To strike harder as a fighter
That the heavy might be Ughter,
That the gloomy might be brighter
At the sign ? '
But in thousands of cases the result is not
that, but rather a dreadful doubt.
' Is this so weU-known voice
That speaks
Just as he used to do of yore.
With just that turning of the words.
Is it some trick of my sub-conscious self
And nothing more.
Or is it truth.
That from some other world
My love is knocking at the door ?
' I could have sworn it was his voice
That spoke, it woke
So many sweet responsive echoes
In my soul
And stole across my senses
As his voice was wont to do
In thriUs of golden joy.
' And yet, and yet
It may be that I can't forget
Because he Uves in me,
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Food for the Fed-up

And through and through
My soul is drenched with his,
And memory
Plays some wUd jest.
' Dear God, wouldst Thou permit
So vUe a lie
To trick a poor forsaken heart.
And break the rest.
The troubled rest.
That time aUows me from my grief ?
But why should this be vUer
Than the miUion lies
That lure men to destruction every day ?
So many stars are ht
Up in the sky
That lead men nowhere
But to some grey
Dawn of sorrow and a barren shore.
Where nought remains of their dead dream
But an exceeding bitter cry.
And that cry's echo " Nevermore." '
That is often and often the result, and that
way madness lies. It does seem to be per
fectly certain that it is at their perU that
ordinary men and women substitute this ever
lasting probing into the future for a brave,
unswerving faith that neither in life nor death
can ought of real evU happen to those who put
246

He descended into Hell

their trust in God, and seek for love as it is
in Jesus.
But there is more still behind this clause,
there surrounds it a Christian tradition that
the Spirit of Jesus, when it passed on to
Paradise, was not idle there and did not sleep,
but spread abroad in Paradise, as He spread
abroad on earth, the great good news of God's
Eternal Love and of Salvation yet to come.
Whether it was that our Lord told St. Peter
this after He was risen from the Tomb, or
whether it was just that the Christians who
knew Christ felt that this was a necessity that
followed from the Love of God as they had
found it revealed in Him, because otherwise aU
the countless millions of men and women who
had hved and died before He walked upon
the earth, and lived His Life, and died His
Death to bring new Life into the world, would
have been ignorant and in the dark, and would
have remained without hope of salvation,
eternaUy lost — whether, I say, the tradition
sprang from Christ Himself or sprang from
the meditations of Christians upon the Love
of God revealed in Christ, it stands there as
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Food for the Fed-up

part of the great Gospel, and it does seem to
be legitimate for us to draw conclusions from
it. I conclude that Christ passed into Paradise
to meet not only the repentant thief, but
the unrepentant thief as weU. He went to
preach to those that were sometime disobedient
because, for reasons beyond their power to
control, they had never seen Christ. The
reason in their case was that they were not
born in time, but there are a miUion other
reasons that operate in the world to prevent
men ever seeing Christ, reasons which are
beyond their power to control. Thousands of
men and women have lived since Jesus died,
and never known His Name. The hne sweeps
out to the ends of the world. East and West,
and North and South, and gathers the stagger
ing multitude in, black and white, red and
yellow, old and young, and the message of the
Cross comes for them ; neither length nor
breadth, nor depth nor height, nor death
itself, can separate them from the love of
Christ which passes knowledge. Even be
yond the grave there is hope. The God of
Life goes on striving in the after world ; death
248

He descended into Hell

is a crisis, but not an ending. In our own towns
and cities and viUages are there not thousands
bom in rotten slums, their bodies tainted with
disease, their minds debauched by the cor
ruption of great cities, feeble-minded, vicious,
half-insane ? What is to become of them ?
It is no good trying to believe that they can
grasp the Gospel, or that they have eyes to
see. It is comfortable to believe it, but it
does not tally with facts. If any slum worker
tries to work, believing that death ends the
opportunity of life, and that either a man
must be brought now or never to the knowledge
of God, it wiU break his heart.
There are those who simply cannot respond,
and for them the message comes that He
passed into Paradise, and that just as the
Crucifixion is an act in time, revealing a process
in Eternity, so is the descent into HeU. Just
as it is true not merely that He suffered once,
but that He suffers still to save mankind,
Just as it is true that
' Red with His Blood, the better day is dawning ;
Pierced by His pain, the storm-clouds roU apart ;
Rings o'er the earth the message of the morning,
StiU on the Cross the Saviour bears His Heart.
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Food for the Fed-up

' Passionate and low, the voice of God is pleading.
Pleading with men to arm them for the fight.
See how those Hands, majesticaUy bleeding,
CaU us to rout the armies of the night.'
So it is true not merely that He descended
once into HeU, but that He for ever descends
to the depths to seek and to save that which
is lost, and that
' His Love is an unchanging Love,
Higher than the heights above.
Deeper than the depths beneath,
Free and faithful, strong as death,'
and stronger.
Once more this clause rings out the chaUenge
to the belief in the everlasting Love, and caUs
us out upon the journey, upwards and on
wards through life and through death, to the
Jesus order of goodness, foUowing the Star
of Bethlehem that set on Calvary's hiU only
to rise and shine again more brightly as the
lodestar of the human race.
There is no positive proof, there is nothing
that can compel certainty, about the existence
of that other world. There are a multitude of
arj;uments from the nature of consciousness
250

He descended into Hell

itself, and from the relation of the mind to the
body, which tend to make its existence prob
able, and which tend to make it reasonable for
us to bet upon it as a truth, but it remains a
venture of faith. And so once more the gaUant
Creed caUs us to stake our lives upon the great
chance, and to hve on the assumption that God
wUl not leave us in the grave, nor suffer His
children to see cormption, but that we shaU
pass on to Paradise.

351

XI. The third Day He rose again from the
dead

To the convinced Christian — the man who has
really burned his boats behind him and set
out to seek for Life as it is in Jesus — the most
thrUling day in the whole year is Easter Day.
It brings to him a joy that is hke no other
joy that life affords, aU other experiences
fade before it. If the chorus of earth's bUhon
voices, with the roU of ten thousand drums,
could crash out together in a song of praise, it
would not be worthy unless it were joined with
the voices of angels and archangels and the
whole company of Heaven.
Of course, that is not an argument, not a
formal or logical argument, but I doubt if it
is not the argument — the argument of vivid
experience against which oceans of logic and
seas of pure cold reason might break and break
352

The third Day He rose again
in vain. Fresh like the Spring it comes again
each year with its abounding gladness.
I have not had a sad life ; the world has
been good to me, most of the joys of the
common day I have tasted and found good.
I have loved the sunshine, felt the call of
Mother Earth, thriUed to the beauty of sun
set skies, and known the quiet peace of home.
I have been young, and known the joys of
youth, and have answered with aU my heart
to the poet's call —
' How good is man's Ufe, the mere Uving, how fit to
employ
AU the heart and the soul and the senses for ever
enjoy,'
and yet I am prepared honestly and soberly
to state that I know no joy like that of Easter
Day.
' Have I not Uved and known the joys of hving.
Bathed in its sunshine, wandered in its rain,
Have I not known the glories of self-giving.
The pleasures that plead and pierce the soul hke
pain ?
Have I not loved and drunk the wine of passion,
ThriUed to a smUe and swooned beneath a kiss ?
Yet were they feeble and powerless to fashion
Splendours that bum, realities hke this.'
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Food for the Fed-up

Here, in this year of grace 1920, I still find
in the Resurrection of my Lord the quin
tessence of aU that makes life supremely weU
worth living. It is very difficult to probe
and analyse this experience either in oneself
or as it appears in the Christians of aU time,
but it certainly means more than just the
conviction that the soul survives death could
possibly bring. Easter Day means more to
me, and always has meant to Christians
more, than just the certainty that death is
not the end of life. It does not merely bring
to me the message of a longer life, it brings
the message of a new kind of life altogether ;
it is not merely that it opens the gates of
death and lets me into a new world after this ;
it is that it abolishes death altogether and
opens out a new world which includes this —
a world in which the sunshine is more golden
and the fields more vivid green, and in which
the flowers of God's beauty never reaUy fade
away. That is how it is with me, and in that
I seem to stand in with aU other Christians.
The Risen Christ has always brought to us
not merely release from the death of the body
254

The third Day He rose again
as a thing to fear and dread, but release from
the death of the soul, a conviction of at
any rate potential freedom from slavery
to sin.
It is very difiicult, if you sit dovm to study
St. Paul's letters, to make out, when he is
talking about death, whether he means the
death of the body or the death of the soul.
This was perhaps because in his case the two
things were one, and he may have believed
that for every one who did not find Christ
death was the end of aU things ; but it was
certainly also because he always thought about
death, not as anything which happened to
the body, but as the climax of sin and separa
tion from God, and so the Resurrection to
him meant not merely that he would be
conscious after death, and that his person
ahty would survive, but that he was set free
from slavery to sin here and now. If Christ
be not risen, the dreadful consequence is not
that death ends life, but that we are stUl
in our sins, stiU the slaves of lust and hatred
and envy, jealousy, and greed. To the first
Christians the great meaning of the Resurrec-
255

Food for the Fed-up

tion was that in the Risen Christ they found
not merely an assurance of survival in another
world, but a Saviour Who set them free from
the slavery in this, and that is what the
Resurrection stiU means to Christian men and
women. It is the same joy that links us down
the ages, and yet perhaps not quite the same.
You see, to these first Christians it was a
perfect and completed thing. In the first
flush of their enthusiasm, while they stiU
believed that in a very short time the Lord
would come again and gather up His own,
they were convinced that this new freedom
from the power of evil was meant to be a
constant and lasting experience. They found
it difficult to believe that sin committed after
entry on the new life could be forgiven ; they
were convinced that they had passed from
death unto life because they loved the brethren,
and that in this perfect, sinless Fellowship of
His Church they would be able to live untU
He came in clouds and glory, and took His
power to reign.
We cannot understand the Resurrection
Gospel of the first Christians unless we remem-
256

The third Day He rose again
ber constantly that it was largely based upon
and hnked up with a firm conviction that
within a very few years the tmmpets of the
angels would announce the Second Coming.
To them the Cross was finished, final, and
complete. It was as empty as the Empty
Tomb. Redemption was an accomphshed
fact, they were dead unto sin, freed altogether
from its power, transformed and made aU
over again, new creatures. The winter of
sin and sorrow was past, the rain of tears
had become the sunshine of perpetual joy,
and flowers of perfect goodness appeared at
last upon the earth ; the time of the
singing-birds was come, and the voice of
the turtle-dove of perfect peace was heard in
the land.
It was that experience of completed redemp
tion and release which sent the first preachers
of the Christ to tell the great good news to
the peoples of the world, with hearts of love
and tongues of flame. But since those days
floods and floods of water have flowed beneath
the bridges of the world — floods of evU-
smeUing, dirty water, foul with corruption
R 257

Food for the Fed-up

and sin. Christ stiU delays His coming, and
His children have not been faithful to their
trust. The powers of evU have not been
vanquished, and the worm of sin has eaten
its way into the heart of the Brotherhood
itself. The history of the two thousand years that
have passed since Jesus rose again is a dark
and terrible business. There are no words
that could do justice to that awrful picture,
to the horrors of its everlasting wars, its
oppressions, persecutions, cruelties, hes ;
down the pathway of the years man comes
fighting fierce with bloody hands, and stands
at last in these last days, looking out through
blinding tears across the barren desert that
was once the smiling valley of the Somme.
The history of the Brotherhood itself is fuU
of sin and shame. Christ's Name has been
made a war-cry, and under the banner of His
Cross men have marched to pUlage and to
burn, to murder women and torture children,
and to trample tenderness and beauty under
foot. It is impossible that, looking back at
the Cross and the Empty Tomb through the
258

The third Day He rose again
darkness of these hideous years, we should
see them as the first Christians saw them.
It is not any use to teU us that one thousand
years in God's sight are but as yesterday when
it has passed, and as a watch in the night.
Time may be nothmg to God, but surely sin
and sorrow are much. It is not the time, but
the sin of the years that makes us see the trath
in a different light. To us the Cross cannot
be empty, we dare not think of it thus, it
has been too often repeated, and it is repeated
stiU ; its shadow stUl faUs darkly across the
fairest scenes in aU the world. To us redemp
tion cannot be a completed and a finished
thing. We cannot blind our eyes to the fact
that every day and every hour of every day
Christ is crucified afresh. But if the Cross
is still there, and if its shadow does faU across
the world, what we can and do assert is that
the sunshine of the Resurrection is there too,
and it is that which makes the shadow so
black and so distinct. The first fine flush of
Christian enthusiasm may fade, but it has not
faded away, and it has not left darkness
behind ; there is still the Light of the world.
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We cannot see the Cross and the Resurrection
as two distinct and finished acts ; we see them
as one — one great act in time revealing a
process of Eternity, revealing the Love of the
suffering but triumphant God. We see re
demption, not as a finished and completed
thing, but as a purpose that is being worked
out, and is to be completed in the fullness of
God's time. So we see it in ourselves, and
so we see it in the world. We cannot say of
ourselves that we are dead to sin and alive
only to goodness ; we cannot say that it
is no longer we that live, but Christ that
liveth in us, that we are new creatures ; we
cannot say that the Cross in our own hearts is
empty, that we are risen with Him ; but what
we can and do say is that we are dying to
sin, that Christ is cracified every day, but that
He rises again, that in our lives He is suffer
ing, but we are fUled with the conviction that
He is to be triumphant, that He has gotten a
hold on us, and wiU not let us go, that although
He is but feeble, is as it were just a baby in
a manger, hidden away in the poorest room
in the crowded inn of our lives. He makes us
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The third Day He rose again
feel that He is to be one day the Lord of
Glory, the King of Kings. That is how we
see Christ crucified and risen again in our
selves, and that is how we see Him in the
world and in the Church — crucified — crucified
in every street of our great cities, cracified
in every hovel of our slums, crucified on our
markets, crucified on our battle-fields, but
for ever rising again. Again and again men
cry that He is dead and buried, antiquated,
impossible, mythical; again and again He
comes back, takes hold on human hearts, and
sends them out to preach His truth, aflame
with the old new Love. Once more we see
how the great idea of the moving universe —
the idea of progress and development — comes
in to throw new light and make a wonderful
harmony of the apparent contradictions of
Christian experience. Looked at in the light
of that idea, the old old story takes once more
the powers of youth and goes out to win the
young. If our Gospel were only a Gospel of
the Crucified, it would be untrue to facts and
a Gospel of despair. But the Gospel of the
Cross and the Empty Tomb, of the Crucified,
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Food for the Fed-up

Risen Christ, always cracified and always
rising again, is the Gospel that faces all facts
and gives to life a meaning.
There is in the heart of God, and always
has been, a Cross and an Empty Tomb.
It is to the search for this experience that
the great clause, 'And on the third day He
rose again from the dead,' chaUenges man
kind. But there is a question which wiU be
in the hearts of all of us men to ask, ' How
far was this experience bound up, and how
far must it always be bound up, with behef
in the miracle — the stark-naked miracle —
of the Empty Tomb ? ' And when we come
to this it is as though we stood once more
before the Manger in Bethlehem and asked,
' Is it true that He was born of the
Virgin Mary ? ' These are the two great
miracles. Standing before the Empty Tomb is like
standing before the Manger of Bethlehem.
Just the same doubts and just the same diffi
culties beset us in these modern days as we
contemplate these two bewdldering mysteries
of Christ's Birth and Resurrection. There is
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The third Day He rose again
just the same confhct of duties — the duty of
faith strives in the honest man's mind with
the duty of doubt. There is much that bids
him beheve, and much that bids him hesitate
before he permits himself to believe. It is not,
and it ought not to be, easy for us to accept
a miracle. We have learnt to our great gain
to seek for God in the ordinary rather than in
the extraordinary, in the common rather than
in the rare things of life. We have passed from
the stage when men declared that miracles
were impossible. We would not say any
thing was impossible, because we know that
our knowledge of the resources of the universe
is infinitely small ; we do not feel inclined to
go blundering, hke fools, with dogmatic asser
tions into places where men of decent inteUi
gence — never mind the angels — are afraid to
tread. We cannot reject all miracles, but
neither can we accept aU. We cannot see
any virtue in a faith which defies and sets at
nought the claims of truth. The first ques
tion that any honest man must ask about a
doctrine is whether it is true or not, and as to
the actual occurrence of this miracle — for
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Food for the Fed-up

miracle it is — we have to go upon evidence.
But the evidence for the Resurrection is very
much stronger than the evidence for the Virgin
Birth. There is absolutely no doubt whatever
that it was accepted and believed by every
Christian from the very beginning, and was
the foundation of their whole faith ; it is
otherwise with the Virgin Birth. It is not
certain whether St. Paul or St. John beheved
in the Virgin Burth, it is plumb certain that
they believed in the Resurrection, practically
certain that they believed in the Empty Tomb
and the disappearance of the Body.
It is difficult indeed to make a consistent
whole of the Gospel story of the Resurrection,
and there seems to be little doubt that legends
grew up around it — earthquakes and glisten
ing angels; but, aUowing for that element,
there is very strong evidence that the earhest
Christians firmly believed on the testimony
of eye-witnesses that the Tomb was empty
and the Body not to be seen, and there is no
doubt that the full Resurrection experience
of the early Christians was bound up with
that belief. It is not certain that their ex-
264

The third Day He rose again
perience was equaUy bound up with belief
in the Vhgin Bkth.
It seems to foUow, then, that the Resurrec
tion experience, the enthusiasm and the fire
that burned in the early Church, the sudden
transformation of the scattered and be-
wUdered little band whose hopes had been
blasted by the Cross into a united and serenely
confident company of missionaries, prepared to
face death for theur living Lord, can be taken
as some evidence for the truth of what they
believed. It seems to me to be conclusive
evidence that something astounding happened,
and that they did see Christ, and did actually
talk with Him, and did actually touch Him,
and never forgot it. Unless I believe that,
the story of the early Church, and indeed the
whole subsequent history of Europe, seems
intolerably dif&cult to explain. Something
astounding happened. Men talked with Jesus,
touched Him, after death, and that experi
ence changed their whole lives. Was it reaUy
a miracle — a unique and solitary intervention
of God — or was it something which, in the
fuUness of the years, we shall learn to under-
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Food for the Fed-up

stand ? Is it in any way parallel with other
appearances and other communications with
the departed which are recorded in history
and vouched for by eye-witnesses? That I
simply do not know. But I do say this, that if
it was proved to be so, it would not make a
whit of difference to my faith. The Resurrec
tion experience is not bound up for me with
the technically miraculous nature of the
Resurrection itself. The Christian Faith for
me is aU bound up in the fact that the Cross
was not the end, that Christ appeared upon
the earth again, that He was seen and spoken
to by men, but it is not bound up with the
behef that in the fuUness of time no man
would ever do that again. Resurrections
might become commonplace, and Christ's
Resurrection still remain unique.
I cannot say as yet, nor does it seem to me
that any one can say with certainty, how far
the Resurrection of our Lord was a real stark-
naked miracle, and how far it runs actuaUy
parallel to other recorded experiences of com
munications with the dead. It is quite clear
that there was something odd about the Resur-
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The third Day He rose again
rection Body of our Lord, about its appearances
and disappearances. It is quite clear that His
Life with His disciples after the Resurrection
was not the same completely normal and
natural communion as was His Life before
His Death, and when He appeared to the
five hundred brethren at once, there were some
that doubted it. But whatever it was that
actuaUy occurred, it seems to me sufficiently
certain that a real objective Christ came back
and talked with men, and on that fact the
Resurrection experience of the first Christians
was based. The evidence for that fact seems
to me to grow stronger every day as the
effects of that conviction grow greater, as
the Carpenter of Nazareth strengthens His
hold on the hearts of men, and the Gospel of
His Life and Death and Resurrection seems
to light up with a clearer and clearer meaning
the history of the world. The fact of the
Living Christ grows larger and larger, and
demands more insistently that it should have
a sufficient cause. Each Easter Day adds
to the wonder of the first, and makes it seem
less and less probable that this tremendous
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Food for the Fed-up

human experience can be based upon pure
delusion. The Christian Faith is, as it were, the monu
ment of the Resurrection ; it stands as a
deathless witness to the Deathlessness of
Christ. The world abounds with stories of
risen saviours and conquerors of death, and
in every people of the world almost there is a
story of one who went through the VaUey
of the Shadow and came back with news
that all was well ; and to me that points to
the fact that, unless the world was made by a
mocking devil, there was One who really did
fulfil the prophecy that arose spontaneously
in the hearts of men wherever the sun made
night and day. And so it comes to this. I
believe that it happened, I believe that * on the
third day He rose again from the dead.' As
to how it happened, as to whether it was an
absolute miracle or something that in the days
to come, as we know more of Him, we shaU
grow to understand, I do not know. I wish I
did, perhaps some day I shall — who knows?
Life is long, very long, there is no death — it
is Eternal — I shall know Him as He is.
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The third Day He rose again
Meanwhile, I find in the Risen Christ the
assurance of Eternal Life, the knowledge that
I am now the son of God, and have in
Him the present power of Salvation from
my sin.

269

XII. He ascended into Heaven
Did He ? Where is Heaven ? What is it ?
Is it a place ? Is it a spiritual condition ? Can
we know what it is, or where it is ? God is
Spirit, without body, parts, or passions. What
do you mean by ' Sitteth at the right hand
of God the Father ' ? You cannot mean it
literaUy because He has not got a hand. You
cannot mean that He literally sat down. Do
you mean that He literally went up ? Is this
history or aUegory ? Did He reaUy ascend ?
Was there ever a day or night when that small
band stood with upturned faces gazing into
the clouds and straining their eyes to catch
a glimpse of the slowly disappearing Figure
with hands outstretched to bless them in His
last farewell ? And suppose He did go up into
the Heavens, suppose it was an actual case of
self-levitation, what difference does it make to
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He ascended into Heaven

you or me ? It is an extraordinary story, and
if it is a fact it is a very interesting fact, and
caUs for careful scientific investigation and a
search to see if any similar cases are recorded
in history, and if there are, to study their
common features with a view to finding out
what general law governs such occurrences.
There is, of course, Elijah going up in a
whirlwind into Heaven, but that is not very
certain history, is it ? It does not reaUy
help us very much. And, altogether apart
from the question of fact, why should it be
considered necessary for my soul's health in
this year 1920, to believe that Jesus Christ
disappeared from this earth almost two
thousand years ago by an act of self-levitation,
and went upwards into space until He was out
of sight ? Granted for the moment that He
did do it, what odds does it make to me now,
or to anybody else ? Does it matter whether
I believe it as a fact or treat it as a beautiful
legend ? Of course, I don't deny its beauty ;
I think the pictures of the Ascension are
amongst the most inspiring and exalting that
great art has ever given us — but does it matter
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Food for the Fed-up

to me and to the world whether this actuaUy
happened or not ?
Here are two distinct questions. Did it
happen ? and what difference does it make if
it did ?
Let us get down to the first. Did it happen ?
did He ascend ? The only evidence that we
have for the picture which is so familiar and
so gloriously beautiful — the picture of that
dear and weU-beloved Figure rising slowly from
the earth, with pierced hands held out in
everh sting benediction — the only evidence
we have for it is the testimony of St. Luke.
St. John does not give it, nor does St. Matthew;
the end of St. Mark was not written by St.
Mark, and it does not give the picture, only
just the fact, ' He was taken up into Heaven
and sat down at the right hand of God,' the
second part of which is evidently symbohc,
so why not the first ? It is St. Luke in the
Acts of the Apostles who has given us the
picture. Is it true ?
How can I tell for certain ? How can any
one tell ? If one is to approach the question
coldly, and in a sceptical sphit, remembering
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He ascended into Heaven

the honest man's duty of doubt, it seems to
me that the only conclusion we can come to
upon the evidence is that it cannot be proved.
The evidence is not sufficiently strong to con
vince a reasonable and impartial person
approaching the matter in a purely scientific
spirit. WeU, does not that give the whole show
away ? That is what I have always felt, you
say, ever since I was a child. The Christian
Creed won't wash or wear. When you plunge
it into the cold water of reason it shrinks untU
there is nothing left of it, nothing save this
splendid but shadowy Figure Who fades away
into the mists of time, and leaves us alone
with wars and workhouses, factory chimneys
and squalid streets — alone in a modern
mechanical, vulgar world of sordid realities.
0 my God, these tales of unbearable beauty
that break the hearts of men because they are
not true ! I came out of Birmingham Cathe
dral, from the Burne-Jones window of the
Ascension, into the twilight streets, and an
amateur prostitute giggled. The oldest pro
fession in the world — dreams and reality.
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Food for the Fed-up

Bother your beastly questions. If it is a
dream, why need you come in with your
vulgarity and spit on your fingers to turn it
over and examine it ? I am sick of your book
and your honesty. Do we not need our
dreams ? I have never asked myself these
questions before, and why need I ask them at
all ? Better men than you have believed it
without question, and who are you to doubt
them ? Go and say your prayers, and ask
God to strengthen your faith.
That 's one me. But there is another that
answers, ' Please, I don't want to be vulgar,
and I don't want to be blatant. I don't want
to ask questions, but the beastly things ask
themselves. They kept on asking themselves
while I was saying my prayers. Is it true?
How do you know it is ? Isn't it only a
fool's paradise this faith of yours ? You
have only St. Luke for it, and it is a strange
and unique occurrence. You must be honest
first and religious afterwards — you know you
must. You know the horrors that come if
you twist those things the wrong way round —
orthodox lies for the glory of God. It 's no
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He ascended into Heaven

use, you must be honest first.' Of course,
there are more things in Heaven or earth than
are dreamed of in your philosophy or any one
else's, if it comes to that, but then the fact
that anything may be true is no proof that
any one thing is. The fact that Christ may
have ascended does not prove that He did ;
you have no evidence that will convince an
impartial inteUect, and that ends it.
But does it ? I doubt if inteUect ever ends
it. It is not big enough. You cannot take
this story and cut it off from all the rest,
isolate it and put it under the microscope of
historical criticism, and then decide that there
is nothing in it. You cannot get at the real
truth of it that way, you would only get the
same result as a chemist would who analysed
the Sistine Madonna and expressed it in
chemical formula ; it would be truth of a sort,
but not the truth ; it would be an abstract
truth, which, like lawyers' truth, is often
another name for lies. You see, it is palpable,
blunder-headed nonsense to say that a picture
is only canvas and paint ; it is plainly and
obviously a great deal more than that. The
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Food for the Fed-up

reality in a picture is the power that draws
and moulds men's minds, that haunts and
grips their thoughts ; the reality of the picture
is the personality of the painter. That is
what it reaUy is. A great song is not a series
of atmospheric vibrations causing molecular
changes in the matter of the brain, it is
laughter and tears, it is joy and sorrow, it is
life itself, it is a person caUing to a person,
a heart that seeks a heart. It is hard to put
these things into words, but you understand
what I mean, don't you ? This Ascension
picture is not merely itself — bald, isolated,
historical fact ; the reality of the Ascension
picture is the Personality of the Ascending
Christ. Before we can properly weigh and
estimate the value of the evidence for its
reality we must have some understanding of
that Personality.
You must take up the Christian challenge
in its due order, you cannot swallow it whole,
it wiU give you indigestion, mental, moral, and
spiritual stomach-ache ; before you decide
about the Ascension of Christ you must decide
about Christ Himself. Who and what was He—
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He ascended into Heaven

a myth? a magician? a man? the Perfect
Man ? a God ? You must start where those
who lived and died for their Ascended Lord
started, face to face with Jesus. You must
have seen Jesus before you can see the Ascend
ing and Ascended Christ. You must have set
out to follow Him, and you must have found
Him at once inevitable, impossible, and in
fectious — in a word. Divine. You must have
found Him in your own soul, crucified, con
tinuaUy cracified, and yet rising again, before
you can grasp the meaning of His Ascension.
You can only pass through Good Friday and
Easter Day to your Ascension-tide. It is no
mere put-off that. You must know what a
man was, what his power and his character
was, before you can rightly judge about the
truth or falsehood of an event recorded in his
life. What might quite well happen to one
person might be utterly impossible for another.
There is always the factor of personality
to be reckoned with in estimating historical
reality. If I did not believe that Jesus Christ
was like no other person that ever lived, if I
did not believe that He was unique, the one
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Food for the Fed-up

and only, this story would have no reality for
me ; it would be as the fairy tales, shadow
without substance, which is a sickening diet
for working men. But if you have entered
into the chaUenge thus far, if you have taken
up the life and the struggle it demands, if
you have set out on the great adventure, it
makes a whole lot of difference. The reality
of the story wUl then become more and more
an absolute necessity for you. I know that
that is an argument with a double edge. That
is just it, you say, that is how it aU came about.
These early Christians had taken up the life,
they had faUen under the spell of the great
Ulusion, ' The King had bound them by such
vows as were a shame a man should not be
bound by, yet the which no man can keep,'
and being under that Ulusion, and bound by
such vows, the story became a necessity to
them, and they invented it. That is a natural
reply, and if you can stUl believe that the
Christian life is a great Ulusion, and that there
is no reality behind it, if you can stiU believe
that Christianity is one of the great world
lies, and that Christian hopes and longings are
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He ascended into Heaven

aU destined to end in disappointment, then I
do not think there is any chance that you wiU
be able to find any reality in this story. In
that case we must go back before we can go
on. We must go back and stand before the
Character and ask ourselves again. What
about it? What about Him? I be
heve in the Ascension because of Christ.
I do not believe in Christ because of the
Ascension. The thing is this. Across the ages, when I
take up the New Testament, I find myself
talking with men who knew Some One that
I know, who loved Some One that I love, and
who worshipped Some One that I worship.
This Person, as far as this world was concerned,
was a dead failure. His earthly career fizzled
out upon the Cross. He was like a V6ry light
shot up into the sky, dazzling the eye with its
briUiance, and then dying away to leave a
deeper darkness behind. They all knew that,
these men. They aU knew that from a worldly
point of view His Life was one succession of
failures, that His career was as unlike that of
the Messiah the people expected as it weU
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Food for the Fed-up

could be — He could not even get twelve
entirely faithful foUowers. Yet I find these
men calmly confident that He was and is
the One Supreme success, that in Him, and in
Him alone, there is no failure but complete
and perfect triumph. How did .He succeed
in producing this impression upon them?
St. Luke may be the only one who records
the picture, but he is not by any means the
only one who records the impression. That
is universal among Christians. How did it
become so ? He went away and left them —
left them to fight it out apparently by them
selves, and they did not have such a blazing
good time either. The whole world did not
fall upon their necks and embrace them as
saviours, they had a job to get on at aU.
The Church they built was not such a howling
success, it was a poor straggling thing. Yet
these men and women remained un
shaken in their confidence that it had the
root of the matter in it, because He was
in it and with it always untU the end of
the world.
How did they come by this conviction ?
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He ascended into Heaven

Why were they not cast down and broken
hearted when He left them ? Why were they
not plunged into the depths of despair as they
were after the Crucifixion ? The answer that
they gave was that although He went away,
the manner of His going was such that it
convinced them that aU was weU, that He
would come again, and that meanwhile they
would not be left alone and leaderless, but
that m some new way He would be with them
stUl. The manner of His going was not hke
a retreat, but like an advance ; it spoke of
victory, and not defeat. It was not a de
parture, it was an ascension, it was the reve
lation of what He was — equal with God.
They were not down-hearted, because Jesus
was with God, and God was with them, and
could never leave them.
That is their account of how it was they
were not down-hearted, but bubbling over
with excitement and expectation. Christ had
fought, and Christ had won; in Him was
victory. That was the universal Christian
impression. Whether St. Luke gives an exact
and accurate account of the way in which
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Food for the Fed-up

that impression was produced, or whether he
gives the traditional picture in which Christ's
foUowers were wont to express the impression
made upon them by His departure, cannot, I
believe, be decided with certainty on the
evidence we have. I think it is the simplest
and easiest supposition to go upon, that the
picture is substantiaUy accurate, but whether
it is or not, it is certain that it describes in
the most vivid and compeUing fashion the
convictions that His departure created in
the minds of those who witnessed it. He
went away triumphant and to come again.
It was an ascension, not a failure and fareweU.
That is certain, and that is the main thing.
The manner in which the conviction was
created is not so important, the conviction
that this is the victory that overcometh the
world, even our faith, that is all-important,
and it is, and always has been, the essence of
Christianity. But you may say. Yes, I know
the impression of victory is the main thing,
but was it not a false impression, were not
these early Christians confident that He
would come again quite soon, were they not
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He ascended into Heaven

expecting that the Second Coming was only a
matter of months, or at most of a few years ?
You mention that in your chapter on the
Resurrection — the expectation of a Second
Coming quite soon ; and has not that expecta
tion proved to be a fizzle too ? You see He
has not come, and there are no real signs of
His Coming. They thought He would come
again within a year or two, come in clouds
of glory, and take His power to reign, and
we look around the world and see only this
after the Passion of two thousand years. The
promise of His Second Coming has not been
fulfilled. They were mistaken, those early
Christians, they were mistaken about this.
How can we be sure that they were not mis
taken about His Ascension too ? How can
we be sure that it was not just a legend which
grew up to express their early enthusiasm and
buoy them up in their false hopes ? To them
the Ascension evidently meant the completed,
final triumph of Christ. His work was done.
His sorrow ended. His redemption of the
world an accomplished fact. Can it mean that
to us ? To them His return to Heaven was
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Food for the Fed-up

hke the return of an Eastern conqueror, with
sin and death as captives in His train.
' To meet Him aU His saints, who sUent stood
Eye-witnesses of His Almighty acts.
With jubUee advanced, and as they went.
Shaded with branching palm, each order bright
Sung triumph and Him, sung Victorious King,
Son, heir, and Lord, to Him dominion give,
Worthiest to reign. He celebrated rode
Triumphant through mid-heaven into the courts
And temple of His Mighty Father, throned
On high. Who unto glory Him received,
Where now He sits at the right hand of BUss.'
That is what it meant to them. Can it
mean that to us ? Can we regard His task
as accomplished and His triumph as complete
when ' Here on the earth as years pass by.
Centuries pUed upon Calvary,
The story of man is but one long Une
Of insults heaped on the plan Divine.
Murder and misery, rape and war.
Sin hke an open, festering sore,
Oozing its filth through the souls of men.
Dragging them down to the dust again.
Worming its way through their noblest deeds,
Burying God in their Godless creeds.
Priests that spit in the face of Christ,
Cardinals decked for the traitorous tryst
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He ascended into Heaven

They keep with a God their souls despise.
For the poUcy's sake of the worldly wise.
ChUdren conceived and bom in sin.
Rotten with syphiUs, soaked in gin.
Housed Uke pigs in their filthy stys.
Cursed from the day they opened their eyes.'
Is not this triumph of Christ a mockery ?
Is not this victory which was assured to the
first Christians by the manner of His depar
ture a lie ? Does it not look as if the whole
conception was an illusion and the New Testa
ment merely the story of a great human hope
that history has kiUed as it has killed a million
other splendid hopes, and will probably kiU
a miUion more ?
' How can it' be that Christ can reign in glory.
Calmly content with what His love has done,
Reading unmoved the piteous, shameful story
Of the vUe deeds men do beneath the sun ? '
If Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and
for ever, then His soul must be wrung now as
it was wrung in the days of His flesh, as He
looks down upon the world as it is to-day.
Once more these two thousand years must
make a difference. We cannot disregard
them. Once more, I say, time may be nothing
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Food for the Fed-up

to God, but if He is a reality at aU, sin must
be much, and these two thousand years have
been two thousand years of sin — of sin and
suffering beyond the power of any words to
compass or express. If they change for us
the Resurrection experience, they must change
for us the Ascension experience too. It can
not be for us a perfect and completed thing ;
we are bound to see it against a different
background — against the background of the
two thousand years. History has done its
worst, done its very damnedest, to kill the
hope, to destroy the faith, and rob us of our
certainty, but once again the gaUant Creed
rings out its note of defiance. It has not kiUed
the hope, it cries ; the hope, nay, more, the
calm and confident certainty, stiU burns and
blazes in the hearts of those who have found
God in Christ. To them the final reality of
life is perfectly expressed in Christ Cracified,
Risen, and Ascending, with hands outstretched
to bless them. That is what they see every
where. They do not see Him regnant on a
great white throne, with all His work behind
Him, and all His sorrow done — they know He
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He ascended into Heaven

sorrows now, as He did then — but they do
see Him as the equal of the Highest, the
expression, the very image, of what the Power
behind life is. If they look into their own
souls they find Him there — crucified, but
deathless and ascending — Christ in them the
Hope of Glory, bound to triumph in the end.
If they look at the history of the world with
its struggle and its strife and its sin, they find
Him, once more cracified, but deathless and
ascending, slowly but surely coming to His
own, irresistibly moving to the accomphsh-
ment of His purpose. We do not presume to
pierce beyond the veil to regions that we do
not know, to truths beyond those which the
Incarnation has revealed. We do not any
longer draw imaginary pictures of splendid
courts and glistening thrones, of perfect songs
of triumph unbroken by a discord or a flaw.
We do not venture to give Christ in Heaven
what He never would have on earth, the
symbols of material power. We are content
with the picture that has been given us, the
picture of the dear and weU-beloved Figure
with the pierced hands, slowly rising upwards
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into regions out of sight, and that picture
makes all history luminous. History is not
the story of the descent of man from the apes,
but the ascent of God in Man to the Angels.
We believe in the Risen and Ascending Christ,
and we find evidence of it everywhere.
Had we clung fast to the Trath revealed
in the Ascension, the Revelation of the mean
ing of Life and History that it contains, the
new knowledge of God's method of creation
by evolution might have been for us a pure
and unmixed blessing. We would never have
aUowed ourselves to look down to the beasts
for the meaning of life as we did, we would
have remained steadfastly gazing up into
Heaven. We would never have been deceived
into thinking that because we were descended
from the jungle, therefore the laws of the
jungle must govern our lives for ever. We
would never have allowed the blasphemy to
be spread abroad that strife, struggle, war,
and remorseless competition were the laws of
God. The blight of pseudo-scientific cant
would never have ruined our social hves. We
would have known that evolution was not a
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He ascended into Heaven

descent but an ascension, not a mechanical
and determined ascension, but a moral and
spiritual progress which can only take place
as men are in Christ, living their life in His
Spirit, and basing their thought on His law —
the law of Love. Had we clung fast to the
Ascending Christ, and refused to surrender
His trath to Godless economists, there might
have been no Manchester school, and no
slums, no Treitschke, no Nietzsche, and no
battle of the Somme. We might before now
have succeeded in buUding the New Jerusalem
in this island home of ours.
We have forsaken the Truth and paid the
inevitable penalty, but let us return to it now.
There is in it power to heal the gaping
wounds of war.
We can turn away from that picture, and
with its trath as our great treasure firm and
fast we can honestly face the facts of life,
and stare them in the face, and defy their
power to hurt or harm, in the power of the
Ascending Christ.

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XIII. And shall come again at the end of the
world to fudge the quick and the dead
When will He come ? Will He ever come ?
Isn't it aU moonshine ? WiU there ever be a
Day of Judgment — a day when aU the nations
of the world shall stand in their teeming
millions before the Great White Throne, and
hear their final sentence read, and know their
fate is fixed for all eternity ?
There is no doubt that the early Christians
based their lives upon the certainty of that
Second Coming and of the great Judgment,
and believed that it would come within the
lifetime of their generation. ' We shall not
all sleep,' writes St. Paul, and writes in haste
with trembling hands because the time is
short, 'we shaU not all sleep, but we shaU
all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling
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And shall come again

of an eye, at the last trump : for the trumpet
shaU sound, and the dead shaU be raised in-
corraptible, and we (who are alive) shaU be
changed.' ' For this we say unto you by the
word of the Lord, that we who are alive, that
are left unto the coming of the Lord, shaU in no
wise precede them that are faUen asleep. For
the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven
with a shout, with the voice of the archangel,
and with the tramp of God : and the dead in
Christ shaU rise first : and then we that are
alive, that are left, shaU together with them
be caught up into the clouds, to meet the Lord
in the air : and so shall we ever be with the
Lord' To him that picture was a reality, a cer
tainty, perhaps the greatest of all certainties,
to him and to the Christians of his day, and
so they lived — lived as men for whom the
time was short ; earth was not their home,
its sunlit la-nes and flowery fields held for
them no sure abiding-place. They were as
men who haste to gather in the harvest, with
many an anxious look towards the sky,
before the storm-cloud bursts and the
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Food for the Fed-up

thunders of God's judgment roU out across the
world. They lived, urging men in season
and out of season to escape the awful fate
awaiting them if they were unprepared for
that great day — the day of the Wrath of the
Lord. Ever in their ears were the sounds of
His coming — the beating of His Feet was in
the air ; every morning there was the chance
that before the evening shadows fell the great
last post, which was to be for the elect the
great ReveiUe, would sound across the world
and summon its miUions to the valley of
decision. Life was to them indeed the great adventure
— a tremendous and thriUing romance. Time
pressed, the choice was urgent and compeUing.
Good and evil were not merely matters of life
and death, they held an issue of more awful
moment stiU. Men must choose, and choose
now, or — words could not say, nor pictures
represent, the horrors of that dread alternative.
It was as though those avrful days of 1914,
when, like a cruel and relentless sea, the
German host was sweeping across Belgium
on to Paris, were the normal and not the
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And shall come again

abnormal atmosphere of life. There was a
continual sense of a present crisis, the air was
electric with expectation, and the Christian
teachers cried with passionate and peremptory
insistence, ' Now is the accepted time, now is
the day of Salvation.'
Time passed on, and days stretched into
months and years, and still the Heavens
showed no sign. Suns rose and set, and stars
shone steady in the sky ; seed-time and harvest
did not fail ; the great world's life went roUing
on. Feasting and fasting, loving and hating,
sinning and repenting, laughing and weeping
bitter tears — there was no change. Men
began to mock the urgency of the Christian
hope, and their yet more urgent dread.
' Where is the promise of His coming ? ' they
cried, ' for from the days when the Fathers fell
asleep aU things continue as they were from
the beginning of Creation.' But the Christian
teachers replied, ' Forget not this one thing,
Beloved, that one day with the Lord is as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one
day.' The Lord is not slack concerning His
promise as men count slackness, He is long-
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Food for the Fed-up

suffering, not wUlmg that any should perish,
but that aU should come to repentance.
Men grew impatient then. I wonder what
they would have felt could they have seen into
the future, could they have seen full twenty
centuries roll out before them, and watched
the little handful of men and women that was
then: world double itself and double itself
again and again until the great earth groaned
with its modern multi-miUions. If the veU
could have been lifted from their eyes, and
they, standing upon some pinnacle of eternity,
could have seen the fields of time stretch out
before them — fields stained with blood, torn
with war, foul with the fUth of sin, and made
hideous by corruption, and yet shot through
with gleams of glory, and with the splendour
of unselfishness and heroic sacrifice — would
even the Christians have still felt as they did,
would it still have been sufficient for them to
reply that with God a thousand years were as
one day, and one day as a thousand years?
Would they have been able to maintain in
themselves and in their foUowers that sense
of expectation and of urgency, that feeling
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And shall come again

that they lived in a time of perpetual crisis
which called upon them and the nations of
the world for an immediate and conclusive
choice ?
This much is certain, that we have not been
able to maintain it, at any rate on those
grounds. With the vast majority of Christian
people it has been lost altogether ; you will
not find one man in a thousand who believes
in any real sense that the end of the world
might come to-morrow. Christian preachers
have from time to time wrestled to revive
that sense of urgency, and to convince people
that aU life is a crisis, and that they must
choose, and choose without delay, or face some
dread alternative. But as a rale, their efforts
to revive the sense of crisis have taken a
somewhat different form ; instead of appealing
to the Second Coming and the Judgment as
a certainty, instead of crying out to men that
the sounds of His coming were in the air,
and that they could hear akeady the beating
of the angels' wings, they have appealed to
the more definite and human certainty, that
in the midst of life we are in death, that at
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any moment death might come to any one
of us and summon him to meet his God.
The urgency of death took the place of the
Second Coming, and by its terrors preachers
have striven to force upon men the fact that
they stood at the parting of the ways, and that
if they failed to choose, and choose aright,
now, they must make up their minds that
when death knocked at the door it would lead
them out to the certainty of ghastly and
eternal torture. Preachers gave rein to their
imaginations in their desire to make this
terror felt ; they depicted with every detail of
awful imagery the scene of the Great Assize,
and the relentless voice of the Great Judge
pronouncing His just sentence of eternal
punishment. The Protestant preachers, in
their reaction against the abuse of it, neglected
almost entirely the merciful and reasonable
doctrine of an Intermediate State or Purga
tory, and in their earnest desire to make men
feel that they must choose now, taught men
to believe that the soul must pass straight
from the dying body into the presence of
God. But even for the Catholics the mercies
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And shall come again

of Purgatory were only for those who had
made some choice, some definite surrender
and confession of belief, before the moment
of death. Both Protestants and Catholics
attached tremendous importance to the mak
ing of one's peace before the end. Men and
women whose minds were reeling and shaken
with disease or distraught with pain were
feverishly urged by priests to repent them
of their former sins, and to trust in Jesus
Christ, and were taught that if they failed to
make surrender in time, they must face the
certainty of bitter and absolutely endless
torment. There still lingers among many people a
horror of aUowing their loved ones to pass
out into the Great Unknown without some
definite confession of faith. It stiU lingers, but
only lingers, and appears to be dying away.
Ought we to revive it ? Ought we to urge
upon people the tremendous and paramount
importance of making their peace with God
before they die, and the certainty of awful
consequences if they fail to do it ?
There has been in these last days a wide-
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spread and almost universal revolt among
Christian men and women against the doctrine
of eternal punishment. Thousands of good
Christian people feel that it is impossible to
reconcile with the Love of God those visions
of endless torment with which the teaching
of the past is fUled. The fear of Hell has lost
its hold upon our people, and lost its reality
for our preachers. They no longer appeal to
it, and if they did, it is fairly certain that only
a small number would respond.
One sermon upon Hell-fire I have heard
preached within the last five years — a sermon
terrible in its earnestness, preached to men
just about to go up the line — and what struck
me as horrible about the result of it was that
the men who came up to the penitent-form
afterwards were mostly nervous and un
healthy-looking boys, who looked like neuras
thenics, and who, manifestly carried away by
the atmosphere, were clammy and sweat
ing with fear, and I am afraid not half so
much fear of the eternal as fear of battle and
aU it meant. Even in those dreadful times I
could not bring myself to do it. I could not
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And shall come again

have preached that sermoii, because I simply
could not believe in that awful dilemma which
lay at its root ; and if I could have preached it,
I believe the result would have been the same,
to frighten a lot of weakly and neurotic people,
and leave the bronze-faced, healthy, gallant
crowd of men whose souls I desired to save
untouched and somewhat disgusted. I have
watched many of these men die in hospital
and on the field, and I cannot remember a
single case in which a man was afraid of the
Hereafter. Wounds they feared, and pain, and
always they were loath to loose their hold on
life, but never have I met a man who feared
the Great White Throne and the voice of the
relentless Judge.
Am I to take this as part of the Church's
failure to convince men of the great realities,
as part of the widespread heathenism among
the men of to-day which is the reproach of the
Gospel ? Ought I to go down upon my knees
and repent, not merely of their failure to grasp
that awful alternative, but of my own failure
to grasp it, and to reahse the hold it ought to
have on my own life ? For that, of course,
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Food for the Fed-up

is where the failure lies. One cannot preach
as reality to others what is not reality to one
self, and the fear of pain and torture Here
after is not reality to me, and does not play
any part in my daily life. I do not turn from
evil because it may land me in Hell — the Hell
of endless pain — and I am not, and never have
been, afraid of death, though I am as afraid
of pain and wounds and blood as most men.
Of course, what I feel and believe is abso
lutely of no importance except so far as I am
an ordinary typical man of my own time, but
that is just what I believe I am, and so if this
fact, that men are not afraid of the Hereafter
and of endless torture, is a sign of heathenism,
then. Dear Lord, I am a heathen too, because
I do not fear it. And yet I am perfectly
certain that if you try to tear out of the New
Testament, and out of the teaching of the
Christ, the element of solemn warning and
the sense of life as a time of real crisis, a
time when a choice must be made, fraught
with appalling consequences; if you try to
take the Judgment out of the teaching of
Christ, then you must invent a new Christ
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And shall come again

and a new New Testament. This sense of
Crisis in Life is an essential part of the Chris
tian consciousness. It is here that the belief
in movement and progress as the essence of
God's universe comes to my help. I cannot
beheve that there is any limit to God's Love,
or that ever, either in this world or in the next,
could He cease to seek and to save that which
is lost. I cannot believe that it could ever
be His WiU that a single soul should remain
in eternal torment, but I do perceive that men
are, to a certain extent, free, and that they can
wilfuUy reject God's Love and spurn it, and
I do perceive that there is a possibility that
they may go on wilfuUy rejecting it, not only
in this life, but in the life to come. I perceive,
too, that every time you reject it, it becomes
harder to accept it — harder even to see it
and reahse it at aU. I do perceive that men
are not so much ' beings ' as ' becomings,' that
life is motion up or down, up towards good
or down towards evU, and that every choice
is a step one way or other.
And it is along these lines that the sense
of the urgency of life comes back to me. It is
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Food for the Fed-up

in the hght of modern knowledge that the
meaning of those awrful record books becomes
quite plain and clear. Psychological research
has revealed the fact that every impression,
however slight, is recorded with infaUible
accuracy in the depths of the sub-conscious
mind. Every thought, every word, every
deed makes its impression there, an impression
which is recorded with an accuracy ahnost
beyond belief. And so in the motion of the
mind, which is its life, every thought, word,
and deed plays its part in deciding the direc
tion of the movement, whether it be towards
life or death. This fact it is which restores
to me the sense of perpetual crisis. It is not
so much for me that I may waken to-morrow
to find the Great White Throne set up in the
mists of the morning, and hear the sound of
the angels' trampets and the caU to the Judg
ment Seat, it is not so much that the Judgment
may come to-morrow as that it is coming
to-day. The Day of Judgment is to me not
so much an act in time as a process in eternity.
That tremendous picture of the Great Assize,
of the Judgment Throne, with aU the nations
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And shall come again

of the world gathered before it, is to me not
so much a picture of to-morrow as a picture
of to-day and to-morrow and the Beyond.
When Christ, in a lightning flash of vision,
saw Himself coming on the clouds of glory to
judge the world. He summed up the history
of the ages and expressed it in one act, just
as He did when the seventy returned with
their tales of evU subdued, and in the light of
that feeble beginning He discerned infinite
possibUities, and said that He saw ' Satan
as hghtning faU from Heaven,' thus summing
up in one tremendous picture the agelong
battle of the Church Militant here on earth
against sin, disease, and war.
That is precisely what I believe these visions
of the Judgment Day really mean ; they are
the summing up in vivid and compeUing
pictures of the essential meaning of the history
of the world. This is the profoundest trath
that hes behind the doctrine of the Day of
Judgment ; every day is Judgment Day, and
Jesus Christ is always Judge, because He is
Perfect Man—the Son of Man. He is what
we are made to be, and so must be our Judge.
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It is not that another Christ, different in
form, clothed with a different glory, wiU come
some day, it is that the same Christ, clothed
with the same glory — the glory of His dread
ful humility, of His love, and of His sacrifice —
is coming to-day and every day to judge the
world, is coming to judge the quick and the
dead, the souls in this life and in the life beyond.
Every day you and I write our records out
upon the tablets of our mind ; every day the
Perfect Man stands in very deed to judge
them, good or bad, not by any arbitrary act,
but because He is the Perfect Man towards
Whom the mind must move if it is to find life,
and from Whom, as it moves, it must draw
nearer death. He is the Judge of the move
ment of our lives, as the harbour mouth is
the judge of the direction of a ship that saUs,
and every sin is a swerving from the point —
a swerving which must be retraced, or hfe
can never find its haven and its rest. If the
soul continues to move away from Him,
away from Life, if we wilfuUy keep it on a
wrong course, it can only steer to its destruc
tion. What the destruction of the soul
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actually means, it is impossible to say, but I
feel very intensely that it is a possible and ap
paUing fate fraught with awful consequences,
and so I feel as one who holds the rudder of a
ship tearing through the water at a blinding
pace, with the storm-winds of passion in its
saUs, knowing that every turn, however shght,
of the rudder may mean either disaster or the
intensely difficult task of retracing the distance
lost. There stands the inevitable Jesus, the inevit
able Goodness to which I must come if I am
to find life. To Him my life must move or be
dashed upon the rocks, and every choice is of
intense importance, every thought or word or
deed of evil is a turning from the course to
which the whole being responds as quickly and
inevitably as a perfect yacht responds to its
rudder, and the result of which is registered
with the same awful, but perfectly natural,
accuracy as a turning is marked for the ship
upon the sea. So it is that without any
exaggeration the sense of crisis is restored,
restored to me from the pages of scientific
text-books on the study of the mind.
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Food for the Fed-up

And in the light of this knowledge, the world,
as it lives to-day, appears to me in my moments
of vision to be as mad, as recklessly and crimin-
aUy mad, as it must have seemed to the early
Christians. The way men will fly at once to
a doctor when the slightest sign of disorder
appears in their bodies, but will allow their
minds to go tearing through life, tossed and
torn by every passing passion, swept out of
their course by every crazy doctrine, and wUl
never make an attempt to change their direc
tion or set them right by any noble standard,
seems hke the recklessness of lunatics. The
strenuous efforts we make to stamp out diseases
of the body, the money we spend, and the
trouble we will take to stay the course of a
physical epidemic, while we aUow diseased
and morbid teaching to be spread broadcast
among our people, debauching and degrading
their minds by continual suggestions of evil,
which are allowed to play upon their imagina
tions without check — aU this, to one who knows
the power of suggestion and the inevitable
laws of its working, seems like the careless
ness of criminals. Only a mad world would
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And shall come again

spend thousands on curing venereal disease,
and aUow scoundrels to make thousands out
of breeding it by ingenious suggestion.
I feel come upon me all the urgency of the
old prophet crying to men that they are fools —
mad fools and blind — sailing gaily to their
destruction. It is not any eternal torment of
the body that I fear for them and for my
self, it is not any punishment for sin that I
dread.; it is sin itself, the disease. It is the
festering sores of lust and pride and selfish
ness, the foul mattering of sin upon the soul,
that I hate. It is simply the corruption of
the mind which results from sin that to me
is HeU. I do not think there can be any Judgment
sense for a man, any realisation of the awful
crisis, until he has seen Christ. You cannot
make a man fear Hell really until you have
made him love God. Once again you must
take the challenge in its order, and the Judg
ment comes at its end, and not at its begin
ning. You cannot drive men to the vision
of God by the fear of HeU, but you can reveal
to men the meaning of Hell by the love of God.
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It is the vision of the Jesus order of good
ness, and its inevitabihty, that makes men
see the horror of the gates of HeU ; and it
is the knowledge that every thought, word,
and deed is a step either upwards towards
that shining vision or downwards towards
that damnable abyss of sordid, mean futility,
it is that that makes every day a judgment
day indeed.
But there is more than that, because as I
look upon the story of my own mind and the
story of the mind of the world, I see that the
movement of both is like the movement of a
great river, flowing on for the most part in
the dark, but which now and then comes to
a time of storm, when vivid flashes of lightning
reveal which way it flows.
For long periods the mind of the ordinary
careless man and the mind of the ordinary
careless woman moves on its course without
any revelation of where it is going to, and
then there comes a crisis, a day of special
judgment. A man lives a life of quite ordinary immoral
ity, not any more nor not any less animal than
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And shall come again

that of the set in which he moves ; he lives
as his companions live ; and then one day he
gathers up into his arms a little baby born
blind, and knows that he struck out its eyes,
and he stands revealed to himself for what he
is — 2, dhty, foul-minded blackguard. Out of
the sightless eyes of his own child Christ stares
and cries, ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto
the least of these My little ones, ye have done
it unto Me.' It is his judgment day. Every
thought and every word and every deed of
his past life has played its part in bringing
him there to stand before the baby's throne
and hear his sentence read, and Jesus, the Man
Divine, is the Judge.
And so to different men in different ways,
sometimes in the form of a great responsibihty
which they cannot bear, sometimes in the
form of a great opportunity which they cannot
take, sometimes in the form of a crowning
temptation which they cannot resist, comes the
day of crisis — they are caUed to theh judg
ment. And as it is with individual men and
women, so it is with nations. For years their
history roUs on in the dark, and they cannot,
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and will not, see whither it is going, because
they reject the only Light by which they can
see, reject Him Who is the Light of the world ;
and then there comes a day of crisis, and they
are made to see. Just such a Day of Judgment
has this Western world been through in these
last years. For a century the life of Europe
rolled on, with its vulgar commercialism, its
sordid money-grabbing, its cruelty to children,
its exploitation of the weak, its tyrannies
and oppressions, blinded by its surface pros
perity and its idiotic trast in force, building
its battle-ships and torturing its women,
bloated with pride and self-sufficiency, count
ing its wealth, and pointing at its wonderful
enterprise, its growth in knowledge, and its
supreme command of the forces of nature;
and then came the Day of Judgment. In the
flashlight of a million guns, in the groans of
dying men and the wailing of countless widows,
in the agony and bloody sweat of a continent
racked with pain, we were made to see whither
we had been going, and what it meant.
Christ came to judge. Not that He willed
it, not that He sent it, but that we willed it,
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And shall come again

and we made it, and He came to judge, not
changed in form, not clothed in any other rai
ment, but just Jesus, thesame yester day,to-day,
and for ever. „ He, Humanity Incarnate, stood
in the midst of its battle-fields and judged.
I am not indulging in fancy, but am merely
trae to fact, when I say that I have seen Him
standing there time and time again, pointing
His loving but relentless Finger to the dead
man at my feet, and saying, ' That is what it
means. That is what "business is business,"
that is what "free and unfettered competi
tion," that is what refined materialism and
Godless prosperity reaUy mean — that boy
with the swoUen, shapeless face, with the great
hole in his head and the brain tumbling out,
that is what they reaUy mean. This is the
Day of Judgment.' That is the vision that
we ought to have seen, but have we ? Has
one in a miUion seen it ? Would one in a
miUion believe it if they could see it now?
And yet it is trae, as trae as Truth. My God,
cannot we see that it is mad to let our lives
and the lives of our people go tearing across
the sea of history without a light to guide
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them, without a standard by which to judge
the course they steer ? Can we not see that
Godless diplomacy. Godless commerce, and
Godless pleasure are worse than crimes ; they
are stupid, sinful blunders. We must have
light. There is no other light, there is no other
standard, than that which shines in His Face.
We must see it, and we must guide our ships
towards it, or we must perish on the rocks ;
and as I write the rocks are near, and I can
hear the breakers beating on a cruel shore, and
I cry with the sense of crisis on me, as the first
Christians cried, ' Now is the accepted time,
and now is the day of Salvation.' Mr.
Thomas spoke more truly than he knew when
he said, ' We shall either be on the rocks or
off them in six months.'
But there is more stUl, because as each day
of judgment reveals the meaning of aU other
days that have preceded it, and sums up in a
flash the history of a man or the history of a
continent, so it seems to me that some day
there must come a great Judgment Day, a
great crisis, which will sum up the meaning
of aU history, from its strange beginning to
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And shall come again

its far-off and inconceivable end — a great day
when the meaning of every evil thing shall be
finally revealed, and in that flash of revelation
perish and come to an end. And in that day,
if there is a soul or a community of souls that
have wUfuUy rejected the love of the Father,
and wUfuUy refused to see the Light, then it
seems inevitable that they must perish and
lose for ever the chance of attaining life.
From that day a new and wonderful move
ment must begin, the movement of pure good
ness, untainted by evil, towards the beatific
Vision and the splendour of His Face. And
so, because of the facts of history, and because
of the faithfulness of God, and the working
of His eternal laws which govern the mind, I
beheve very intensely that ' He shall come
again at the end of the world to judge both
the quick and the dead.'
I cannot, and I dare not, picture that Great
Assize ; I cannot, and I dare not, try to realise
the form that it will take ; but I feel in my
bones that it must come, and that every
thought, word, and deed of every man that
hves or ever has lived makes certain of its
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Food for the Fed-up

coming. I have my vision of Judgment, and
it has its own fear ; it is not the fear of
a flaming HeU, it is the fear of the Eyes
of Christ, and by the splendour of those
Eyes I plead with myself and with you that
we live our lives in the fear and the love
of God.
' I saw no thronged angeUc court, I saw no great white
throne,
I saw no open Judgment books, I seemed to stand alone.
I seemed to stand alone beside a solemn sounding sea,
While at my feet upon the shore broke waves of memory.
Their murmuring music sobbed and sought a way into
my soul,
The perfect past was present there, and I could see it
whole.
Its beauty and its ugUness, its sorrow and its sin.
Its splendour and its sordidness, as wave on wave
roUed in.
And ever deeper pierced the pain of aU that I had lost,
My dear dead dreams of perfect things, I saw them
tempest-tossed.
They feU hke wreckage at my feet, and, as I turned
them o'er.
The solemn waves, in Memory's caves, kept booming
" Nevermore 1 "
There came one dream, more dear than aU, a corpse
without a head.
The flying spray hissed " Cowardice," and it was dead.
cold dead. 314

And shall come again

Then suddenly a shadow feU, and I was not alone,
He stood with me beside the sea, and Ustened to its
moan.
I did not dare to raise my eyes, I feared what I might
see,
A cold sweat broke and bathed my brow, I longed to
turn and flee.
But could not ; rooted there I stood, in shiv'ring
shame and fear ;
The subtle shadow substance took, and nearer came,
and near.
0 was it days or was it years we stood beside that
sea,
Or was it aeons, timeless times ? It seemed eternity.
At last, compeUed, I raised my eyes. Two eyes looked
into mine.
And shattered aU my soul with shame, so sad and so
divine.
It palsied aU my pride with pain, the terror of those
tears.
And wrought into my soul the woe of aU my wasted
years.
" Depart from me," I cried, " Depart, I cannot stand with
Thee
And face the sorrow of those eyes beside this cruel sea.
Depart from me, I dare not tread the sands those feet
have trod.
Nor look into those eyes that teU the agony of God.
For there is written aU the tale of my soul's trait'rous
tryst.
The sordidness of sin that seared the splendid eyes of
Christ." 315

Food for the Fed-up

" Depart," I cried, and He was gone. I stood there aU
alone,
In sUence save that Memory's sea stiU made perpetual
moan.
Night shadowed aU, and wandering winds came waihng
from afar.
But out across the darkening sea shone forth one single
star.'
I fear the day that may come for me and
for my people, when there would not even
be the star.

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