f*."

;-^^»-

-It. '^'ti^M

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the Library of
FRANKLIN BOWDITCH DEXTER, YALE '61
The gift of his daughter
MRS. HENRY LAURENS

THE APOSTLES' CREED

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

RELIGION IN BUSINESS : Practical Suggestious to M^n of
Affairs. 149 pp. r-imo. 75 cents.
QUESTIONS OF MODERN INQUIRY: A Series of l^scussions.
-70 pp. l'2iuo. ><l.'2:').
"He lias handled a snie.s of (JifScult and, in .some instances, very
delicate questions in a way which everybinly inii^t admit to he en
tirely fair and candid. He does not hiunch epitliets ut njen because
they doubt, nor hoUt it to be a crime in theuj, or even a fault. If tliey
desire to in\<-stik';it<- tlie chiinis ( 'hristianity makes njiou the soul.
One has only to turn to the cliapters on '-What am I to think ahout
God ¦'" ''AVhat am I to think about the BibleV" ''"Why not give
upmiraclesV" and "How far Is the Bible inspired'.'" to come upon
illustrations of this. Tlie fairu'-ss and catholicity of his treatment
of the topics lie takes in hand ivill Jiave to be trranted hy all. AVith
marked ability he discusse.-; the hottest of our burning questions
with interest and profit,"—" The Advance."

HENRY A, STIMSON.

THE APOSTLES' CREED

IN THE LIGHT OF

MODERN DISCUSSION

BT
HENRY A. STIMSON
D.D., Eipow; M.A. ANB S.T.D., Tale

'And this is the victory that hath overcome the world,
eveu our faith." I John 6: 4.

BOSTON
Zbc pilgrim press
CHICAGO

Copyright, 1898
By Congbeqational Sn.sDAY-ScHOOL ASD PunLiSHiso Society

K

/I

\\r\

k42

5t5fc

LINOTYPED AIJD PRINTED BY J. J, ARAKELYA^
293 CONGRESS STREET, TtOSTON

TO THE MEMBERS
OF THE
MANHATTAN CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH •
MY DEAR PEOPLE, WHOSE KIND AND LOVING AP
PRECIATION HAS INSPIRED THIS WORK, AND
WHOSE TRUE AFFECTION AND STEAD
FAST DEVOTION ARE MY DAILY
JOY AND STRENGTH.

"Conviction is not to be labored by the coercion of
civil or ecclesiastical punishment, but "by the gentle
force of persuasion and truth, not by an appeal to the
tenets of parties and great men ; not by an appeal to
the positions of Arminius or Calvin ; but by an appeal
to the inspired writings. The only way is to examine
our sentiments by Scripture ; then candidly and benev
olently inquire how far we are agreed in reality ; to
walk together by the same amiable rule, so far as we
have attained to think alike ; and to forbear real differ
ences in love, where there appears a sincere love of
truth, candor and piety ; remembering we all have the
inalienable right of private judgment in religion ; and
that liberty of thinking and choosing our religion, lib
erty of conscience, was the great errand of our pious
forefathers in America."
Rev. Ezra Stiles. (afterwards President of
Yale College): Sermon before the Conven
tion of Rhode Island, Afril, 1760.

CHAPTER I
THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
I am aware that the final and only irrefutable argu
ment for the Christian faith is the Christian life. I am
aware that the scientific world in its thought is turning
back to-day to Aristotle's complete and splendid defi
nition of a perfect life : that it is the sum and satisfac
tion of all the powers of our nature. I recall Savon
arola's saying^ that what a man does is determined by
what he knows ; and I do not forget that as a man
"thinketh in his heart, so is he." Yet it is necessary
that the Church should have logical and well-founded-
arguments for the support of its faith, and that it
should gather up, from time to time, the definite state
ments of its faith, in an enduring Creed. The whole
history of the Church has shown that the confession of
faith is vital to the working out of the Christian life ;
so that from the beginning the confession has been
held to be as essential to worship as are praise and
prayer and the sacraments.''
With that in view, we come without apology to the
1 Tanto se ciasenno quanto opera.
2 See Note 1.

4 THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
line of thought before us. When we study our faith,
we are doing more than making philosophical inquiry.
Such study is for the building up of character, for the
attaining and sustaining of a mature and established
Christian life. The suggestion that we are engaged
in a mere strife about words may be answered with
Carlyle's wise aphorism, "At all times a man who
would do faithfully must believe firmly."
We begin, then, with the -first affirmation, "I be
lieve." In order to understand just the relation in which
faith stands to life, we must conduct a few preliminary
inquiries : —
In common life there are certain conditions in which
not to believe works the same result that positive de
nial would effect. We have in the night a suspicion
of smoke. We refuse to form any opinion about it,
and turn to sleep. That postponement is just as fatal,
in case the house is on fire, as would be the conviction
that it is not. So there are certain great truths that
have a strange cogency upon the soul ; they are vital,
pressing, momentous, and concerning them hesitation
or doubt or postponement may be as fatal in its conse
quences as disbelief. Whether we will or not, we find
that we are not easily done with the questions, Is there
a God? Is the soul immortal? What is the nature of
sin? What is the eternity that awaits us? Is Jesus

THE AFFIRMATION OP MAN 5
Christ indeed the Saviour from sin ? Is there a judg
ment in the world to come?
It was in the hour of his own supreme exaltation
on the Mount of Transfiguration, which was also the
hour of the humiliation of his disciples by their failure
to cast out an evil spirit, and also the hour when the
whole want of our common humanity, in its utter
helplessness before the consciousness and the conse
quences of sin, was expressed in the beseeching prayer
of the father of the man possessed with the evil spirit,
that Jesus uttered the words, "All things are possible
to him that believeth."
What, then, is this all-important belief, which has
brought such a promise, in such an hour, from Christ
to his Church? What is the meaning of that phrase
in which we join with all Christians when each Sab
bath we say, "I believe"?
In its simplest terms, it is the affirmation of Self.^
Day by day I have noticed, in the course of an
excavation going on near my house, that the men
have been erecting a great crane with which to lift the
loads of earth and rocks. They have taken pains to
fasten the crane and stay it in all directions, until it
should be firm and trustworthy. Only then was it
ready to have its lifting power tested. So in our life
we need not only standing-ground for ourselves, but
I See Note 2.

O THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
bracing — that we may be able both to stand and to
lift. We must get a sure foundation.
Inquiry may well begin with the simplest questions.
Are we sure as to the reality of our existence? Can
we affirm "I am"? Can we know that we, individu
ally, are existent, with powers and possibilities and a
history, apart from all else that is about us? Can we
assert, "I am" or "I believe," with that assurance of
anchorage which will enable us, as duty or oppor
tunity calls, to reach out with lifting power upon
others? We all face what Tennyson calls
"This main miracle that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world,"
and we must know the significance of the fact and the
measure of the power.
A starting-point in philosophy has been found in
the affirmation, "I think, therefore I am." It will
serve our purpose. We know that we do think, and
that, being what we are, we can project our thought
into the future, or turn it backward upon the past, and
thus create for ourselves a history ; and that this indi
vidual history, which constitutes our life, is not only
a mirror of things that have been and a prophecy of
what is to be, but is the sum of what makes up our
souls; our history has entered into ourselves. We
are to-day what we are because of the past, because

THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN *]
of the possibilities of the future, because of the sum
of the character which makes us each know ourselves
as ourself, and not another.'
In the course of philosophic thinking in these late
days there has come about a notable change in regard
to the starting-point in the realm of morals. There
was a time when everything was made to center in the
command of God. When that was held insufficient,
ethical obligation was sought in a man's relation to
the community — the old Greek doctrine. And very
important and wide-reaching philosophies have been
built on this altruistic basis, that is, on the duty of men
to other men or to the state. But that notion has
proved inadequate. ' The question arises, "Why
should I deny myself for others?" "Where is the ob
ligation to turn aside from one's own pleasure to pro
mote that of other men?" And it is difficult to an
swer to those who do not believe in God. ' To-day
philosophy is turning to simpler terms, and books of
ethics are seeking to establish moral relations pri
marily upon what a man is in himself, rather than
upon what he owes to others. "
It will be asked. How can that teaching be adopted
without exalting selfishness, and so proving destruc
tive of all human progress? We get our answer in
the affirmation of the Creed, "I believe ;" therefore I
J See Note s. s Note 4. s Note B. « Note 6,

8 THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
am. It is I who believes. I am a self-conscious being.
Very well, then. He who made me, made me for a pur
pose, for all existing things have some object. The
God who created me, created me with a plan, as he
did when he made a flower. When he made the
first rose, he had a conception of what it should be in
its final perfection, and he gave the germ to the earth
to keep alive. Through the centuries the working to
gether of man's skill with nature has produced, let us
say, the "American Beauty;" not the final, perfect
rose, but a very advanced form of that perfection, pre
paratory to and prophetic of that thought which God
has in his mind of what a rose may be. The gardener
has been successful in cultivating roses, just so far as
he has hit upon and followed God's plan for the rose.
So God has made man according to an idea that
exists in the divine mind. What, then, for man, is the
supreme good? The realizing of the final perfection
for which God made him. What, for man, is right?
All that helps him to work out that ideal, until he shall
attain it. What is wrong? Anything that shall in
terfere with his attaining that perfection. Whence,
then, arises duty to other men? We discover that
God has so placed us as men that we cannot work out
that supreme conception unless we work with other
men. God has set the solitary in families. He has
given children to parents and parents to children, hus-

THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN 9
bands to wives and wives to husbands, he has bound
race to race and nation to nation, that the world shall
join to help each individual to attain to that final affir
mation — until he shall say in the presence of his
Maker, "I am. Thou didst make me at the begin
ning ; thou didst summon me to be a worker together
with thee in the attainment of the ideal in the divine
mind for me. Here is the finished work, thy thought
attained." '
So the conception of Aristotle is realized in this
broader. Christian truth, when we recognize that God
has given us powers, every one of which has its possi
bility, and which, in their working together, shall pro
duce a satisfaction, a serenity and peace, which shall
be the final reward, the final joy of every soul. To
quote St. Augustine : "Thou hast made me for Thy
self, and my heart cannot rest until it findeth itself in
Thee." Here, then, is the significance of the Chris
tian affirmation, "I believe," in which I individually as
a Christian may be permitted to affirm that I am ; — a
creature of God, made according to his thought, hav
ing duties in relation to his will, working out the pos
sibilities which he has established in my nature, capa
ble of infinite joys and infinite sorrows, because I am
of the divine.
But as we move on in this line of inquiry,
> See Note T.

IO THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
we find our chief faculty for working out God's
plan for us is the will. The famous maxim of Loyola,
the Jesuit, was, "In all things be as a dead man."
And the discipline he established was to so subject and
master the individual will that it should be crushed, as
the soldier in the army is trained to have no will but
that of his superior. Of the three vows of the Order,
poverty, chastity and obedience, that of obedience was
made supreme. Of course this surrender of the indi
vidual will to the organization, to the will of a leader,
has supreme potency in the creation of a machine, in
politics or in religion. It creates the mightiest engine
ry known to man. Its sweep of power is merciless.
The man is nothing, the organization is everything.
But as a conception of service, it has always been felt
to be unsatisfactory, and has been fought against con
tinually by many a strong heart. I remember reading
a letter of that beautiful young English professor.
Clerk Maxwell, in which, earnest Christian as he was,
he protested against the teaching that the religion of
Christ demands the subduing or enfeebling of the will.
"On the contrary," he says, in effect, "the will is my
self ; it is a gift to me of power. So far from surren
dering my will, or subduing it, I believe I am called of
God to train my will, to secure to it supreme domin
ion, but to hold that dominion in the way of right. I
am to bring myself at my best to Christ."

THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN II
When the Christian, in bis historic Creed, declares,
"I believe," what is this but saying, I can bring my life
into the line of God; I have received the power and
privilege from him who created me not a beast of the
field, but a man. I can make my life what I will.
My will is free. God has made me so far like him
self ; I am his son ; and as the Father has the power of
choice, so has he given to his son to have this trait
of his Father. The affirmation of the Creed is the af
firmation of that freedom of the will which makes
every man responsible for his own life, and for the
final account of himself to his Maker.'
Faith, then, is simply the answer of the individual
will to the truth. I am; I have the power to
choose. And now, I believe. That is, I have that
understanding of truth to which my will assents, and
in relation to which my will finds service. When I
say "I believe," I simply summon the whole man that
is within me to a certain particular kind of life.
It is easy to illustrate this in daily life. Take the
case of a little child. The child stands tottering before
a chair by his mother's knee. The thought in his
mind is, "I would like to walk," and the question
arises, "Can I, or can I not?" He is persuaded to be
lieve that he can. With tottering step, obedient to his
will, he makes the attempt. So long as he thinks he
1 See Note 8,

12 THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
can walk, he walks. The moment he allows himself to
doubt, he falls. Or look at the boy swimming in the
stream. Believing he can reach the other shore, he
bravely plunges in. So long as he believes he can
cross, he swims safely. In the middle of the stream he
hesitates, his will falters, some one calls to him from
the shore that he is over his depth ; he attempts to turn
back, and promptly goes under. John Muir, the ex
plorer of the Alaskan glaciers, tells a touching
story of the way by which he saved his dog
through bringing him at last to believe that he
could cross unaided a perilous ice bridge over a cre
vasse ; which at last he did with a rush. That call
upon all the powers of our being not only enables us
to act, but creates in us new powers. It becomes con
structive. We find that what we believe we can do,
we are pretty sure to be able to do; what we are in
doubt about, is uncertain ; and what we think we can
not do, we surely shall fail in. So, in the Christian
life faith becomes the important factor. All things are
possible to him that believeth; and without faith we
can do nothing.'
When, then, we say, "I believe in God," we mean
that we have such knowledge of God, and such experi
ence of God, that our will shall be governed by God ;
we command ourself in his service ; we give ourself to
1 See Notes 9 and W,

THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN 1 3
be his. The Christian, then, is one who has come to
that. He has such views of God and duty, of himself
and his privilege, that his will is obedient to his view
of the truth ; he has brought all his powers into alle
giance to God.
The confession of the Church means that as a whole
it is working together with God to achieve in every
man that purpose and plan which God has formed for
him. We have recognized that God's purpose for us
is our supreme good. Whatever helps us toward that
end is for us right; whatever interferes with our at
taining that reality is wrong. Every Christian, then,
has a plain path of duty before him. Every Christian
knows what it is to believe. It is to have that definite
understanding which he gains from his own heart, and
God's Word, and the experiences of Christians about
him, as to what the desire of God for him is ; namely,
that he be pure in heart, kind and true and tender;
that he keep himself continually under discipline, as
one in service ; that he believe in God's Word, and
that God has ever more and larger truth in store for
him. In proportion as he is obedient to this faith,
his whole life shall be a progress, a bloom, a beauty,
until it shall come to its final fruitage. And that
fruitage shall be the attainment of God's fulfilled pur
pose for him.
Now the question arises, How about error? The

1 4 THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN
old-time maxims were, "Know the truth," and "Avoid
error." Are they identical? Far from it. Know the
truth means something very different from Avoid
error. Avoid error, we easily can do — by doing noth
ing. Avoid error, we can easily achieve intellectually,
by knowing nothing, having no opinions, no concep
tions, no purposes. Knowing the truth, on the con
trary, is bringing ourselves into allegiance to the
Truth. It is surrendering ourselves to the authority
of what we know, be it more or less. But is there no
error mixed up in truth? Doubtless. Still, we are
so constituted, and the truth stands so related to us
that we always have the power of seeing the good
there is in the truth, and of throwing off evil. Ac
cept, therefore, the authority of the truth you see, and
be loyal to it.
Imagine the injunction to a soldier, "Be very
careful not to incur any wounds." Who would fight?
The command is, "Advance ! Charge !" Give yourself
in the line in which what you do will count for
the cause you represent.
The effort to obey the truth is the first step to
attaining larger truth. The purpose to use so much
truth as one sees, is the surest guaranty of escaping
error. Anselm's great saying becomes true, "I be
lieve in order that I may know," and so does Abelard's
reply, "I know in order that I may believe." The

THE AFFIRMATION OF MAN 1 5
Christian Church has always believed with John Rob
inson, the Pilgrims' pastor, that there is "much truth
yet to break forth out of God's Word." It has also
abundantly proved that in proportion to the use of
such truth as is revealed to each man have been the
growth and blessedness and power of Christian truth
in us, and the reality of our service in bringing in the
kingdom of Christ in the world. '
There is a story of a craven who broke his
sword in the battle, and flung it away, and fled.
The prince came along, wounded, bleeding, weapon
less, hard pressed. .Seeing the broken sword, he
grasped it, and, turning, led his men back to victory. '
What is that but a picture of the Christian; the
weapon of truth in his hand broken and imperfect, but
ever recognizing that it is still a weapon given of God,
and that with true faith and strong heart and unwaver
ing allegiance to his Master behind him, it is compe
tent by the grace of God to bring in the day of
triumph for his Lord?
Therefore, "I believe" is the paean of victory of the
servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, for it is the affirma
tion of a manhood which unwaveringly responds to
his life-giving call.
1 See Note 11. 2 Note 12.

II
THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD

II Believe in (5o&"

"/« the beginning God'" .... Genesis 1:1.

CHAPTER II
THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
I have tried to show how, in the opening affirmation
of its Confession of Faith, the Church recognizes the
dignity of man ; and how the appeal which Christian
ity makes is the appeal for manliness. It is a return
to, and enlargement of, the old conception of char
acter, that the highest ideal is the devotion of all one's
powers to a definite duty — Aristotle's splendid concep
tion of the noble life as one in which man's whole be
ing is drawn into the service of what is best.
Now we come to the definite statement of the Chris
tian faith : "I believe in God ;" that is, I summon all
my powers to a supreme consecration, and I devote
them to God.
A letter recently received from a missionary in
Japan incidentally mentions a conversation which he
had just had with a Japanese inquirer. The Japanese
at first questioned the propriety of discussing the char
acter of Almighty God, holding that that is too great,
too absolute, to be made fundamental in any form of
religion. Perhaps also the awakening consciousness
of his own sin led him to draw back before the thought

20 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
of the unknown, holy God. The result of the conver
sation was that he changed his position, and admitted
that his first impression was mistaken, and that, in
deed, if he was to find a faith that would satisfy and
save his soul, he must find it through some glowing
perception of that Being who seemed too sacred and
too remote for his earthly comprehension.^
Those of us who have passed middle life have lived
to see a great change take place in the attitude of un
believers in our civilized communities toward the idea
of God. Up to the close of the first half of this cen
tury we were still under the influence of the sharp
antagonism between faith and unbelief which was
rampant in the preceding century. The doctrine of
God as our Creator, Preserver and Ruler was strenu
ously held and strenuously opposed. Those who did
not believe were violent in unbelief. But by the mid
dle of this century the new science arose, a new epoch
opened in human thought, and with it came a new
view of God. Men were startled with the thought
that, after all, creation did not need a Creator; it is
only a process, an evolution, perpetually unfolding
from within itself. A new geology, a new chemistry,
a new astronomy, and, more than all, a new biology,
have not only come to possess the thoughts of men in
all material knowledge, but have come so to influence

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 21
the view of God that the old antagonism has disap
peared ; and we now find ourselves surrounded by
people who are willing to be entirely indifferent as to
any conception of God. You may affirm your faith in
God if you will, but it is not necessary to a
man's conception of nature or of life ; it is not
necessary even for solving the problem of the fu
ture. This feeling is strengthened by the fact that
the Bible has come to be regarded as the product
of forces working through long periods, human
in method if not in origin, fallible and erroneous.
And this remarkable change, perhaps the most re
markable in human thought that the world has
known, has unfolded so quietly and yet so rapidly,
that men still living and not past middle life have seen
the transformation and been hardly conscious of it.
It has proved itself not only revolutionary in science,
literature and civilization — not only a change in all the
processes by which men are seeking to settle social
and ethical questions — but it has extended into the re
lations between the Church and the world. It has
done much to break down the old walls of separation ;
it has dissipated the old antagonisms. And to-day
you would find it difficult to discover a single instance
of a man or book which expresses its thought in the
old, sharp, bitter hostility to Christianity. An occa
sional voice may be heard reiterating the old sneers, or

22 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
Striving to arouse the old hatred, but it meets no re
sponse, and seems only to emphasize the extent of the
change. There are on all sides of us, in our congre
gations, in our business, in our homes, multitudes of
excellent people who are perfectly contented to go on
agnostically. They are good neighbors and friends,
upright, lovable people, but without God and without
compunctions. They are not enemies of God; far
from it ; they have no care one way or the other. As a
consequence, we Christians have ceased to make the
strenuous appeal of our fathers, which expressed itself
so often in warning of the danger of judgment, which
exalted God in his holiness and justice, and saw in
him that One before whom every man must appear to
give account of the deeds done in the body. So that
when we take up the historic creed through which the
Church has expressed itself in all time, we find that,
while retaining the ancient form of expression, it is
sounding to-day in new ears, and in its interpretation
has greatly changed.^
We need, therefore, to come back to the old truths,
and ask ourselves. Do they retain not only their truth
fulness but their insistence? Are they as strenuous in
their requirements, as full of potency in their inspira
tion and in their warning, as in generations gone by?
Is it enough to believe that God is immanent, that is,
1 See Note 2.

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 23
found in all existence; and that we should content
ourselves, and others about us content themselves,
with the pantheism of the past; which, finding God
everywhere, as a matter of fact found him nowhere,
or, at least, not much of him anywhere? Shall we
return to the faith of the deists, who believed indeed
that God created the world, but then left it, as a ma
chinist makes an elaborate piece of mechanism, and
passes on to something else? Or shall we hold that
the universe is so complete, and so governed by law,
that there is no need of God in it at all ; that its very
completeness has expelled God? Shall we agree
with those scientific men who, Ruskin says, "do not
believe there is a God, because they have not found
him anywhere in a bottle"?
From all this we come back to the Apostles' Creed.
The Church still says, as from the first, "I believe in
God." And it is asked again, as it has been asked
from the beginning, to give evidence of the ground of
its belief — to define to the world what it means by this
affirmation of its faith.
Now the religion of Jesus Christ has always been
and always will be a practical thing — little concerned
with speculation, but always concerned with life.
Therefore, whether we are dealing with the Ten Com
mandments or with the Apostles' Creed, we are
brought back to the same point of view, the bearing

24 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
of our faith upon our life. Christianity enforces a
definite moral code.^ It molds men to a certain defi
nite method of life, and in connection with that definite
life, it aims to create and maintain certain definite feel
ings. There must be not only a steady pulsation of
the life that is to be lifted and regulated, i.e., an obedi
ent life, there must be the outgoing of the heart in
abiding affection for that life. And the affection is as
essential as the life. Therefore there must always be
also the ideal of the Christian life, which shall give
character to the service, and lead to the perception of
the supreme Source from which that ideal rises. That
Source is God.
It would be easy to show that this process is analo
gous to the requirements and processes of our daily
life. An architect, for example, is a man whose busi
ness is to produce in material form, as houses and
stores, the creations of his mind. His profession is
practical. But he is not in the best sense an architect
unless there is awakened in his heart an affection for
his work. And not only that, in order that he may
work successfully he must have ideals which are
cogent because they spring from the laws of beauty
and of use. He must know what the possibilities and
Hmits of his profession are, as determined for him by
conditions fixed in the nature of things ; so that his
1 See Note 3,

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 25
ideals, his affection and his practical work always go
together. After the same fashion the Christian life is bound up
with the Christian's conception of God. We are com
pelled to go back to the source of both life and feeling,
the character of God, who not only has given us, in
his word, ideals of life for us to realize, but has real
ized them himself. We can worship only a God who
is himself, in his supremest glory, that which he has
set before us as the ideal for the fulfilment and
adorning and blessing of our own personal life.^
So we come to the questions : Who is God? What
is he? How do we know that he exists? Philoso
phy has dealt with these questions from the beginning.
It has argued along many different lines, and the
work of one generation of thinkers has been often set
aside by that of the generation that followed. But is
it true that the conception of God is uncertain because
arguments change? Because these advance and
widen, is the foundation less established? Men are
still arguing, for example, over the meaning of the
statue of the Venus de Milo. The statue is un
changed. Through all the changes of argument
some things remain fixed. The conception of man as
a thinking being subjecting all things to the test of
whether they be true or false, that do?s not alter.
1 g?e ITot« 4,

26 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
When, seeking to live right lives, conscious of the
desire of our hearts for right affections and for realiz
ing the presence of God who made us, and made us
for himself, we ask what is true and what is false,
what is right and what is wrong, we are prepared to
receive the answer that inevitably comes : "There can
be no thought without a thinker :" Descartes' "Cogito,
ergo Slim." And the very conception of reality is
simply a conception of existence as submitted to the
test of a supreme judgment. The judgment of man
may be mistaken ; he may take the false for the true ;
but we are conscious in all our thinking that the
thinking, as v/ell as the facts themselves, are submit
ted at last to the arbitrament of the eternal Truth.
"Dark, dark, yes, irrecoverably dark
Is the soul's eye, yet how it strives and battles
Through the impenetrable gloom to fix
That master light, the secret truth of things
Which is the body of the Infinite God."^
That idea of the absolute Truth, to whom all exist
ence, the thinker himself and all his thoughts, are
submitted, is the one enduring conception. It is the
thought of the absolute God. Because there is
thought, there is a Thinker. Because there is exist
ence, there is a test of reality. And that test of reality
is the test of the infinite ]\Iind, who is over all and in
all, and to whom at last all is to be brought.
1 Ai-tluir Hallam.

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 2*]
Arriving at this, our hearts answer to the thought.
We find comfort in believing that, however we may
misjudge in life, however we may mistake false for
true, all is subjected at last to the absolute Truth, to
the pure and enduring Thought, which will set things
right. The heart responds to the conception that the
real involves blessing, that the true involves the final
dissipation of the untrue, that the weariness and dis
appointment of life involve the eventual setting of all
aright in the pure light of God himself.' So we come
to a definite conception of God. Because he has
taught us that our life must have in it a purpose, that
it must be controlled by love, that it must arrive at a
conception of justice and of right; because he has
given us the sense of personality in ourselves, so that
we think and feel and will ; he has precluded our con
ception of a God whO' is not himself a person, who is
not loving and just, who is not himself present in all
the world that he has made.' Because the highest life
known to us is the progressive realization of the eter
nal life by an infinite Spirit, we come to believe that
all beauty and all knowledge and all usefulness are in
God, the infinite Being who has made us in his own
image, has breathed into us his own spirit, and will
bring us at last to render an account to himself of what
he has given us.
1 See Note 5. 2 Notes 6 and 7.

28 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
This is the philosophic conception upon which the
Confession of Faith rests, the Christian affirmation,
"I believe in God." It enables us to say, "This
Thinker from whom we know thought, this holy One
from whom we know righteousness and good, this
infinite Affection from whom we know love, this eter
nal Personality, unseen, unreachable by man in his
searching after God, surely will manifest himself in
his own time and in his own way, to his creatures,
and indeed has so manifested himself.^
With this conception, which finds its answer in
every human heart — for there has never been a civili
zation so degraded but there has been this longing
after God and this indestructible belief that God was
revealing himself in thunder, in lightning, in the
strange life of the forest, the sea, the mountain, the
waterfall — the Christian turns to the Bible, seeking
the facts and details of revelation.
At once a remarkable thing confronts us. Every
where, whether in barbarism or in civilization, in
the wilds of Africa, or in the refined and pol
ished communities of the Greeks, man has always
been a seeker after God, if haply he might come
to him and find him. But when we open the Bible
we are struck with the fact that there is no evidence
that these men of the Old Testament v/ere seekers
I See Note 8.

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 2g
after God. On the contrary, they were men under
compulsion. They speak 3s they are moved. They
have not sought God that they might have some
thing to say of him, but God has sought them
and compelled them to give utterance to the truth
which he has revealed. Moses protests against
being sent as God's messenger to Pharaoh, or to
his own people. He says, "I am slow of speech,
and of a slow tongue." Jeremiah pleads that he
is but a youth from an unknown village : "Ah, Lord
God ! behold, I cannot speak : for I am a child."
David says, "Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my
house, that thou hast brought me thus far?" So always
from Noah to Malachi. What is the meaning? Every
where else gropings after God ; and here, all of a sud
den, men hastening to tell what they have received
from God and what they know about him ! They do
not always obey; indeed we find them in continual
revolt against the revelation they have received ; but
the revelation is there, the record is true to the facts.
The majestic righteousness of the Holy One of Israel
stands over against the oppressive sense of man's
nothingness. "What is man, that thou art mindful of
him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" "O
Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me." "Thou
understandest my thought afar off." "Thou hast be
set me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon

30 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is
high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go
from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy
presence?" This is the cry.^
Shall we not come, then, with something of confi
dence to this old book, with its unique voice, with its
solemn, distinctive place in the world's history, if we
would know something of the unseen God, and what
he is, if he is ever to reveal himself?
We open it. "In the beginning God"  Then
follows the story, not simply of what God did, but
of what God has shown himself to be. God created.
And the very word by which God is described,
"Elohim," what does it mean? "The awe-inspiring
One." The God before whom all men tremble has
manifested himself. God, our Creator ! Then fol
lows the long record of the names by which these
early men who received the revelation sought to make
known to others the God who had spoken to them.
He spoke to Moses at the burning bush, and Moses
said, "What is thy name?" Fix the revelation in
some form such that men may lay hold of it, and that
I may carry it as the eternal truth to the people. And
God said, "I AM THAT I AM." "Thus shalt thou say
unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto
you." "Jehovah," the living One. And now the He-
1 See Note 9.

THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD 3 1
brew scholars tell us that that is not the whole of the
meaning of that strange word. It is not the living, but
rather "the becoming One" — the One ever advancing,
showing ever more and more of himself. God, the
awe-inspiring One, he created. He manifested him.-
self progressively to his people, a personal pres
ence, revealing more and more of himself as they
were able to receive it.' As we go on with the story,
we find other names : Adonai, the Almighty ; Jehovah
Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts ; Jehovah Tzidkenu, the
Lord our righteousness ; the Holy One of Israel ; and
so on, until we come to the revelation in which the
Alpha and Omega, the Creator of the heavens and
the earth, manifests himself as Jesus Christ, our
Redeemer, Saviour, Friend.
Now, the answer the Christian gives to those who
ask his confession, is, I believe in God ; about whom
so little can be said, before whom the heart instinc
tively shrinks in its helplessness, but who through all
the ages past has been seeking to manifest himself to
his children, and whom the holy men of old, the
chosen ones of Israel, were permitted to know as the
Creator, Preserver and bountiful Benefactor of all ;
the personal God of the believer, the Ruler of his
chosen people, infinitely tender in his compassions,
and the final Judge before whom all shall appear. We
1 See Notes 10, 11 and 12.

32 THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD
can stand with that poor outcast woman of the Old
Testament story, by the spring in the desert, as she
called the name of the place Beer-lahai-roi, "The well
of the living one who seeth me." That is the Chris
tian's testimony. "I believe in God." Not the
Church, not the well, not the flame of fire, not the
quaking mount, and not the divided sea, but every
place in life is the place of "the God who sees me."
That is my confession. That is the source of the
ideal and the impulse by which all my nature shall
be brought to work out a manly life. That is the
confession to which the deepest springs of my heart
shall be open in enduring emotion. In him I know
my soul shall be satisfied when I shall see him as he
is, and shall awake in his likeness. And, for our
testimony to the world in its easy indifference, its self-
sufficient knowledge of nature, we seem again to be
standing on Mount Carmel, at the time of the evening
sacrifice, with all the priests of Baal in their pomp and
triumph, and the king on their side ; and over against
them, alone, the prophet of the Lord, with the simple
prayer, "Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people
miay know that thou. Lord, art God, and that thou hast
turned their heart back again." And out of the shiv
ering mount, God answered Elijah in the whirlwind
and the fire.

Ill
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER

**^be fatber aimigbt^?"

" Our Father -which art in heaven " . . . .
Matthew 6: 9.

CHAPTER III
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
In following the Creed to this point we have con
sidered what might be called the philosophic founda
tions of the Christian faith. Now we come to a
simpler and more familiar line of thought.
We have seen that faith is thought kindled by emo
tion, and concentrated by the will ; that it contains a
principle of knowledge, a principle of power, and a
principle of action. For the Christian faith is some
thing more than an affirmation of the intellect. It
is an affirmation of the intellect addressed to our entire
nature, summoning us to give all our powers to a
definite service. We have advanced from that funda
mental conception, to consider the direction in which
our service is to be rendered, and the impulse out of
which the strength of our life is to come. We have
said, "I believe in God." We know something more
of God than that he is "a mighty darkness filling the
seat of power." We have seen that the thought of
God is the final test of reality and the final arbitrament
as to the right. We have attained the eternal Pres
ence, the personal, vital source of all life, by whose

36 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
judgment all other judgments are to be tried, and
before whom, as the supreme consciousness, all pur
poses and thoughts and desires of men must finally
be brought.
Now we pass to that phrase in the ancient creed
which brings us to a definite revelation. We turn
from the uncertain ground of man's philosophic think
ing to the clear, authoritative and enduring state
ment of the revealed Word of God.
If man had not sinned, God's revelation of himself
to men, we can believe, would have been, in ever-
enlarging measure, progressive according as man ad
vanced in his capacity of knowing God — a doubly pro
gressive movement, in the coming down of God to
man, and in the ascent of man toward God. But with
man's fall, that uniform and steadily advancing revela
tion must necessarily be interfered with. We shall
find, as we open the story, that the revelation has been
a slow and troubled process, in which at every point
man is seen little prepared to receive the knowledge
which God is waiting to bestow.
We shall expect to find simplicity in the revelation
of the one God making himself known to man ; but
it will be the simplicity not of a single unfolding, but
the simplicity of harmony. Man will be gradually
prepared, and the divine nature will appear, now in
one manifestation and now in another, according to

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 37
the vicissitudes of his condition or the requirements
of his training. As the child in the home needs now
guidance and now withholding, as his growing spirit
reveals itself under the influences amid which he lives,
so this revelation will be various. It will often seem
to be devious, and even inconsistent with itself. But
at any one time it will be possible to look back upon its
course, and see that it is a revelation proceeding to
one end, and lifting man little by little to a larger, truer
knowledge of his God — a knowledge which will be
made complete when at last we shall see him as he is.
We discover that the names of God have been al
ways more than a name ; each has marked a forward
step in the revelation. "Tell me thy name !" was the
beseeching prayer of Jacob struggling with the angel ;
for in that revelation of the name he was aware he
would have full knowledge of who his midnight an
tagonist was. There was a time in the history of
Israel when it was said, "By my name Jehovah I was
not known to them." The great stages in the de
velopment of Israel are marked by three distinct names
by which God has thus been revealed in the Old
Testament. The old Hebrew name El Shaddai, the
Omnipotent, the Almighty, was the name by which
God was known to the patriarchs — a name suggestive
of the richness of God's power in blessing whom he
chose, of the solemnity of his worship, of the scope

38 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
and certainty of his judgments — a name made known
to people committing themselves to him, knowing
little more of God than his relations to the individual ;
the God with whom Enoch walked, "and was not, for
God took him;" who gave Noah his ark, and with
whom Abraham conversed alone on the hilltops of
Judsea. '
With Moses came a new name, Jehovah, the Living
One, preeminently the covenant-keeping God, who
was leading his people as a flock ; the Shepherd, car
ing for the little ones, bringing them on to spiritual
relationships with himself, revealing to their hearts a
spiritual indwelling, awakening a keener sense of
spiritual power ; so that underlying the sacrifices and
altars of Israel, lying back of their sacred days, and
recognized in their offerings, was this apprehension of
a spiritual God. When they erred and fell, they were
sharply reminded that this was the meaning of their
ceremonies and offerings ; God had no pleasure in
their sacrifices ; he delights not in the blood of bul
locks or of lambs ; "Wash you, make you clean ;"
"Cease to do evil : learn to do well ;" "Behold, to obey
is better than sacrifice." A broken and contrite
spirit, the surrender of the heart to him, the living
fact of present and intimate communion with him, a
spiritual God, these are the essential things.'
1 See Notes 1, 2 and 3. s Notes 4, 5, 6 and 7.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 39
Later came the name "the Lord God of Sabaoth,"
"the Lord of Hosts," — a widening of thought to un
derstand that he who was the God of their fathers was
also Lord of all. It had been foreshadowed in the
past. They had a distant, dim, but wide horizon of
the blessing to come to them as promised to Abra
ham, but only in the prophets does this thought take
possession of Israel and become characteristic of the
new day toward which, after the Exile, they were
moving. The Messiah of Israel, the God of Israel,
was to be God of all nations. So these three names,
God Almighty, Jehovah, and the Lord God of Hosts,
were characteristic of these three great stages in the
development of revelation and the development of
God's people — steps not sharply divided in time, but
marking the lines of growth. '
The name Our Father, as applied to God, does not
appear in the Old Testament except in a poetic sense —
"A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows"
— until it appears in the prophets. With them it is
understood as applying to days yet unrevealed, as
when Isaiah speaks of the "Mighty God, Ever
lasting Father, Prince of Peace;" or says, "Thou
art our father, though Abraham knoweth us not."
"He shall cry unto me. Thou art my father," sings the
Psalmist, "my God, and the rock of my salvation."
1 See Notes 8, 9 and 10,.

40 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
These few incidental passages show how strange was
the name on the lips of Israel. It never occurs as a
personal term. God might be in a large sense, some
sense yet to be revealed, the Father of the
nation, but not "Our Father," as he is in the New
Testament. '
The life of the Israelites, instead of being a life of
steady development in knowledge of God, seems to
have been a long course of fallings away from the
truth they knew. The patriarchs heard God's voice,
and went up, not knowing whither they went, because
God was leading them. We find individuals called to
definite service, to which they promptly surrendered
themselves, as Samson and Gideon and Deborah, or
men consecrated to God in their youth, as Samuel.
But as the patriarchs and judges gave place to the
kings, and the Israelites, through their intercourse,
particularly with their neighbors the Phoenicians, ac
quired wealth and luxury, the service of God lost its
hold upon them, and their life assimilated to that of
the heathen. Their sacrifices and public worship
continued, but expired so far as appropriation of the
personal God is concerned ; they had lost their mean
ing. This went on until the Captivity, when their separa
tion from God was so complete that God plunged them
1 See Note 11.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 4I
into the deep waters of the Exile, and the oppression
of the heathen, to restore them to himself. In time
they came back to spend their strength in learning
the lesson of the past. They organized schools, tak
ing to themselves the literature of Greece and the
other nations, so widening their intellectual horizon.
They became traders and travelers in all lands, as well
as voluminous authors, putting forth new powers, like
new blades upon an old stalk, and preparing the way
for the moving of the Jewish mind upon the world at
large, in the era of the New Testament and the advent
of the Lord Jesus Christ with the announcement of the
new name which he was to commit to his people for all
time to come — the revelation of the Father.
When we open the New Testament, we find at once,
and abundantly, the affirmation of "Our Father." It
is an affirmation on Jesus' part of personal service ;
that he came not to do his own will but the will of the
Father that sent him. It is his announcement to the
despairing woman at the well that God is a spirit, to
be worshiped iri spirit and in truth' — one who has re
vealed himself to the outcast, and who will dwell in
the heart of the woman. He says, "I am come in my
Father's name." "I ascend unto my Father and your
Father." He is the revelation of the Father. The
Sermon on the Mount — his most characteristic teach
ing — turns upon the thought of the Father. We arc

42 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
to glorify our Father by our good works, by the
spirit we are of, by our prayers and our gifts. As we
do the will of our Father, we are accepted ; we are to
aim at being the children of the Father ; we are to re
ceive our reward at his hands, and "blessed is that
servant whom his lord when he cometh shall find
so doing," that is, doing the will of his Father. His
prayer was, "Father, glorify thy name." And there
came a voice out of heaven saying, "I have both
glorified it, and will glorify it again." When at the
close he looks back upon his work, he prays, "Father
.... I glorified thee on the earth, having accom
plished the work which thou hast given me to do."
And when the disciples say, "Lord, show us the
Father, and it sufficeth us," as if they then gathered
up all the questioning they had had in their minds
from the beginning, — "We have heard the word from
thy lips again and again ; it is so familiar that we ask a
fuller explanation. 'Your Father, our Father !' We are
more and more convinced that we do not understand
that word as you use it. Show us the Father from
whom you come, whose name you are calling, to
whom you are going, to whom you say we also shall
go — show us this Father, and it sufficeth us;" then
came the solemn answer, "Have I been so long time
with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that
hath seen me hath seen the Father." '
1 Sl'C .Note 12.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 43
The revelation, then, of the Father is to be sought
in the Son. In the times of the Old Testament men
could not have understood it. That men should be
children of the Father was unintelligible even to the
chosen people, till they looked in the face of the Son
of God. In that new revelation of divine love, of
divine holiness, of the beauty of the divine person
in Jesus Christ, they knew what sonship was, and the
mists fell away. That they might know the Father!
In the subsequent centuries, only as men have come
to know the Son have they known the Father. Not
through the doctrinal affirmations of the Trinity in
the creeds, but through the personal surrender of the
life to Jesus Christ, men have been led, each for him
self, step by step, into that fellowship with God, that
conviction of his sufficiency for the needs of the sin
ner, his ability to bless as a father blesses the life of
his children, in which the Church has learned to say,
as it could not have said before, "I believe in the
Father." Fatherhood, in short, can only be known
through this divine Sonship and the consequent
Brotherhood. '
Scientists may teach us that in biology the life of
the race, the genus, the species, is continually shad
owed forth in the individual specimen. As they study
the form and history of the animal in its successive
1 See Note 13.

44 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
Stages, they can unfold the history of the stock to
which the animal belongs. The same is true of man,
in perhaps a larger and truer sense, in the life of the
spirit. In our infancy we believe in God. We hear
his voice, we feel his presence. As a child looks at
the stars, as thoughts come to him upon his bed, God
is not far off. He asks of God, and God hears and
answers. He makes covenants with God and they
are kept. It is easy to believe that all that is about
him and within him is of God. The years quickly
come when the child passes into youth, and the train
ing of the mind supplements the feelings of the heart.
And still the life of the growing child is readily yielded
to the service and love of his God and Father.
Obedience to law, and recognition of daily duty,
help him to something of stalwart allegiance. Soon
manhood arrives, with its rushing temptations, with
its battle with foes without and passions within, its
falling away from the simple faith of childhood, the
quiet, receptive confidence in all it has been taught,
which has been the stay and strength of the early
years. Then comes the conflicting sense of loneliness,
of separation from everything that once was held and
believed, and, worst of all, separation from God. And
the man feels, as Israel did, carried far away from his
own past, away from all his fathers believed and he
himself has known. Then often comes a period of

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 45
bitterness, if not of despair; the past outgrown; a
faith like that of the heathen, a cry after an unknown
God, uttered in the darkness. Then silence; or the
abnegation of thought and the abandoning of man
hood in seeking an infallible church and committing
all to the care of a priest. Well if after this there is
the dawn of a new day, the revelation of the Father,
made to us personally, in the Lord Jesus Christ, the
Elder Brother, the Saviour, the Friend.
It comes to each one in his own way ; sometimes in
church, from a message of the Scripture, some fa
miliar text gaining a new force as God's arrow ; some
times through sickness or some experience in business
or daily life ; sometimes in the very emptiness of one's
own heart. God chooses a thousand ways. But out
of all he chooses that revelation of himself which shall
pierce the darkness that envelops his child. As to
Israel, when her sacrifices were meaningless, when
her inner life was torn in fruitless struggles between
her proper leaders, and when men said with scorn
that the Messiah had come already and sat as a beggar
at the gates of Jerusalem, and no man knew him ;
suddenly the morning stars sing together, the voices
of angels are heard proclaiming the new birth — the
strange, sweet voice of the Father speaking to his
child. In that announcement comes not only knowl
edge of the Father, but back of it and as a medium

46 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER
for it, the knowledge of the Son. Then the day is
near when the prodigal comes to himself and thinks
of his Father's house ; the sinner learns of Him who
gave his life for the world ; the hard heart begins to
melt before the story of Jesus, and the man who was
without God and without hope in the world (all the
more because he had once had a Christian home or
a Christian faith) turns back murmuring that he is
not worthy to be called a son, and pleading that he
may be as one of the hired servants. With that new
knowledge of the Saviour dawns the new and true
knowledge of his Father and our Father. '
Like that experience in the new birth was the ex
perience of Israel. We understand the pitifulness of
the Saviour's cry, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which
killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent
unto her! how often would I have gathered thy chil
dren . . . and ye would not !" He wept over the city,
and then gave himself for it. And out of that giving
of Himself has the Israel not after the flesh found her
redemption and knowledge of her God. So many
another wanderer will yet find his redemption, and be
brought, as many have been, to his Father's house,
by the revelation of the Elder Brother, in whom we
are heirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ,
his Son, our Lord.
1 See Note 14,

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER 47
"Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our feverish ways I
Reclothe us in our rightful mind ;
In purer lives thy service find.
In deeper reverence, praise.
Drop thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease ;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace."

IV
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR

**fin>alier of Heaven anb jeartb

" O Lord, ho-w manifold are thy -works!
In -wisdo?n hast thou made them all:
The earth is full of thy riches." Psalm 104: 24.

CHAPTER IV
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
It would be possible for us to engage in a philo
sophical discussion of the Primal Cause of all things,
and to show, on the common ground of metaphysics
and philosophy, that creation requires a Creator. It
would be possible to open the Word of God, and learn
there in how many forms this truth of God as the
Creator is confirmed. What we need most of all is
a constant impression, wherever we are, by night or
by day, and whatever we are doing, in which all na
ture shall speak to us of God, and the voice of the
morning stars, that sang together at the beginning,
and has been heard as the harmony of creation ever
since, shall sound in our souls, and be to us a con
stant summons to know him who made us for himself.'
Therefore let us take our stand on the seashore
of a summer night. We are looking out upon the
darkening expanse of the ocean, when suddenly the
darkness is broken by the rising of the summer moon,
and we hear its challenge — the old challenge of the
sailing moon, summoning men to gaze into the starry
1 See Notes 1, 2 and 3.

52 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
heaven above our heads, to fathom its mystery, to in
terpret its message, if we can.
As our gaze follows the moon, we know that we
see but one side of her; as if to show us at once, like
a dancing coquette, how easily she will baffle our at
tempt to grasp her secret. We see the dark shadows
upon her face, and the astronomer tells us of vast
abysses and lofty mountains, as marking an old and
worn-out world — a mystery, a secret of God, assail
ing us incessantly.
We turn from the moon to the stars. One's eye
is caught by the ruddy glow of Mars, with its fasci
nating tale. We know how near it is to the sun, and
we think of the burning heat, that would render all
life, as life is known to us, an impossibility, and the
planet a glowing cinder. And again the astronomer
announces that Mars has an atmosphere and changing
seasons, and ground covered with snow which forms
in winter and melts away in the summer's sun, and
great, perennial bodies of water, seas and lakes and
streams that rise and fall, and what seems nothing
less than a system of artificial canals. Man is so far
unable to solve the riddle that there has been a stand
ing prize, left as a legacy in France, to any one who
should fathom its secret and establish communication
with the planet. How completely we are baffied!
It is a paradox in the heavens.'
1 See Note 4.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR 53
We look away to Saturn, with its belts, an unfin
ished world, carrying us back to creation in the early
stages. We have a sample. We think we shall see
the process. We begin to get a conceptPon of the
vastness and the majesty of the work of God in pre
paring the earth for man. And there we are stopped.
We listen to the tale of Uranus and Neptune. We
read of the professor in England, Adams, and the one
in France, Leverrier, studying the irregularity in the
orbit of Uranus, and reaching the conclusion that to
account for the aberration there must be the attrac
tion of another planet not yet discovered. Almost
simultaneously they reach their conclusion. They
ask the royal astronomer in Russia, Struve, to turn
his great Pulkova telescope upon an indicated spot
in the heavens at the designated time; and there, sure
enough, is the planet Neptune. But they triumph
only to learn later that that is not the planet they are
seeking. In its place they have found another un
dreamed-of planet, accomplishing the same results,
but far more eloquent of the cornucopia of God, that
vast, unknown creative productiveness, out of which
the earth, the moon, the planets, our sun, and all that
are beyond have come, to tell us nothing except again
our own ignorance ; drawing anew for us, far in the
heaven, the line that marks the bounds of man's
knowledge, and declaring how incompetent man is

54 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
to solve the problem of existence, or to account for
the beginning of things. All the time we are con
scious that we have been standing under the starry
sky, the fl(?or of heaven, "thick inlaid with patines of
bright gold," its myriad constellations of fixed stars,
which also have their message for us. And what do
we know of them? '
But here comes the physicist, with the message
brought to him by the light, as newly read in our own
times. Light travels 186,000 miles a second. It has
been hurrying to us, he says, from some of these stars
since the dawn of creation, and has not yet reached
our earth. Across these vast spaces it is speeding
through what seems to be an empty void, and we
have no conception as to how nothingness can be
traversed. He goes on to tell us that light is pul
sating vibrations. He divides a beam into prismatic
rays with four hundred million million of vibrations
a second at the red end of the spectrum, and seven
hundred million million at the violet end. The very
air we breathe is pulsating eight billion times a sec
ond. We catch our breath and blink our eyes and
wonder how we live. Color is simply differing wave
lengths; and the realm of light embraces heat, elec
tricity, magnetism, and we know not what.
Then the astronomer proceeds to tell us of what
1 Soe Note E.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR 55
these distant stars are composed. He weighs and
measures stars that are not seen and never can be
seen, whose orbits he determines to be revolutions
around another star; whose motions he records as
well when they are coming toward us as when going
from us. Then he analyzes their light, and proves
that the constituents out of which this earth is made
are the constituents that compose the stars.
And this universe, the more it opens before us, the
more wonderful is its unity — the same eternal gravita
tion, the same mighty revolutions, everywhere the
same unchanging forces; and all, without exception,
composed of identical molecules. We speak of the
development of the earth; we look at the changing
species in the world about us ; we read the record of
the rocks ; and we think that the force of nature has
perhaps produced these developments, leading to
things yet to be produced by nature; and suddenly
the scientific man tells us that back of the changes we
call evolution is the ever-present molecule, the basis
of all material existence. And that never changes.
In nature, weight and measure no molecule has al
tered. What each is, it always has been. A molecule
of hydrogen on earth is the same as a molecule of
hydrogen in the farthest star — bearing everywhere
the stamp of being, as Sir John Herschel said, a
manufactured product, made and placed subject to

56 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
forces that come from without, giving it its tremen
dous potency, the initial energy of all existence. '
As we stand with upturned gaze, how conscious yve
become of our littleness ! Our eye, in one-tenth of a
second, can see all it is capable of seeing in the sky.
The photographer's plate takes the place of the eye,
and where we see a hundred stars the photographer
makes us see five thousand. What a universe it is !
What a revelation this of creation! How little we
know ; how less than little we are !
And then, in our weariness and weakness, we turn
from the sky to the earth at our feet. We look upon
the swelling vastness of the ocean by whose shores
we stand, and Isaac Newton's words come to mind:
"I have been as a little child, playing with the shells
on the seashore, while the ocean of truth lies unex
plored before me." It is the ocean with depths that
plummet has not sounded — areas in which Mont
Blanc would not lift its towering head above the sur
face. Dark, below a thousand fathoms, dark and cold
and vast. It was supposed to be uninhabited, but
now we are told of its abounding life, of living crea
tures enduring on every square inch of their surface a
pressure of a ton for every thousand fathoms of water
under which they swim, a pressure equal to the impact
of a locomotive with a train of cars behind it — eighty
1 See Notes 6, 7 and 8.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR 57
or ninety tons upon each square foot! — beings that
are killed by simply being removed to a higher level.
The deep-sea dredge has brought up no trace of man,
no least relic, no hint that man has ever sailed the sea,
no single suggestion that men ever lived, but every
where star-dust, the silently gathering waste of the
heavens ; the ocean, out of its vastness, joining in the
voice of the starry world to tell us that He who leads
forth Mazzaroth, the signs of the zodiac, in their sea
son, who binds the cluster of the Pleiades in their
dancing circle, and guides the Bear with its train, has
assigned to the sea its bounds, and given to it its
unfathomed mystery and its mighty eloquence as it
speaks of God as Maker of all.
We turn to look at the sleeping earth. Night is
in the heavens ; night is on the waters ; and behold,
night is on the land. The wild roses have closed
their petals. Pea and gentian and oxalis and many
another flower have done the same. They have
ended their labor with the setting sun, and have sunk
into the arms of sleep. The leaves of many trees
change their position. They turn edgewise, or fold
together, or draw up around their stems. If you try
to move them, they resist ; if you succeed in the en
deavor, you destroy their life. The vegetable world
surrenders to the night. It witnesses to law. It
is a part of the one universe. As you come to in^

58 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
vestigate its sleep more carefully, you find that animal
life has living relations to it. The night moth has
come out to find the flowers awaiting its fruitful visit ;
and you are led into all that world of which the flower
is the wonderful revealer. Mystery beyond mystery!
Prehistoric botanists, bound up with the life of the
flower, giving their life for it, as it g'ives its life for
them! For we learn from the geologists that plants
at first were all independent of any help from living
creatures. There were no moths or butterflies in the
early world. But there came a time when the air was
filled with bloom. With the pollen-bearing plants
came the moths and butterflies that fertilize them.
And so true has been the service of the moths, that
the botanist is guided in his discoveries of the rela
tion of plants to one another by the moths that feed
upon them. For each species of moth feeds upon but
one genus of plant. And plants as remote from one
another as mustard from cabbage, or clover from
bean, or nettle from elm, are proved identical in ge
nus, by the habits of the moth that feeds upon them,
and upon no other. So all vegetable life is linked to
gether and sustained by the life of the living world
that floats above it. And we are led on into the ani
mal world of which we are a part, where again appears
a fulness of life and a wealth of thoughtful provision
that carries us back to the Infinite.'
I See Note 9. .

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR 59
The workman sinks his dynamite into the rock and
blasts the ledge. Soon the broken rock is overrun
with new species of plants. The railroad engineers
come along and cut through a bank, and on the ex
posed slope the botanist quickly finds his profitable
field of exploration. The upturned earth proves itself
full of rare seeds, awaiting their opportunity. Every
farmer knows how valuable clover is as a fertilizer,
and we see him plowing in his unharvested crop. But
the scientific man has just come to tell him that it is
fertile because every rootlet of the clover is covered
with minute living organisms that create the nitrog
enous product which when plowed back into the soil
furnishes material for the oats or corn that are to
grow there. We are startled to learn that there is
more hfe hidden beneath the surface of the soil than
appears above it. Air and earth are found to teem
with living germs, noxious often to higher life when
improperly adjusted, but more often found essential
when understood, — a witness that God is every
where. "Earth 's crammed with heaven.
And every common bush afire with God I
But only he who sees takes ofif his shoes."
So we come to man himself, — an animal, but so
much more than an animal ; living on the earth and

6o THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
coming from it, but only an ephemera, a creature of a
day, in his existence, — with his poetry and his history,
his records and his promises. The story of the un
folding of the race has its counterpart in the story of
the unfolding of each individual; the growth of his
passions, the development of his thoughts, the in
terpretation of his longings, the creation and
establishing of his character.
What, then, is the ground for a Christian's faith in
the Maker of all? The story that everything has to tell
of itself. Every least seed is eloquent with thought to
him that can interpret it. Every distant star twinkles
with its divine message to the soul that is open to re
ceive it. Every human history has been a record of
man's doings in relation to the plan of God for him,
and, to him that can read the divine plan, is prophetic
of what God would have man do in the generations
yet to come. '
Look at the sun setting over the city. Above the
weariness and pain, the confusion and the sin, have
you not there the golden flower of another world?
Was the apostle's vision on the ^Egean isle only the
vivid play of a kindled imagination? Is this life all of
life? Did nature call herself into being? Are we clods
of the dust? and are those soul-stirring thoughts, and
the expectations they awaken, given only to deceive?
How can we believe it?
1 See Notes 10, 11 and 12.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR 6l
"When I remember that the starry sky
Was once but dusky darkness ; that the air
Can take such glory and such majesty
From smoky fragments and the sun's fierce glare.
And vapors cold drawn from the far salt seas; —
If out of shapeless matter, void and bare.
And rude, oblivious atoms. Time can raise
The splendid planet; if the formless air.
Earth's barren clods, decay and wrecks of death.
Can wear the bloom of summer, can put on
Man's strength and beauty, surely this strange world
hath
Some certainty ; some meaning will be won
Out of the stubborn silence, and our blind
And baffled thoughts sorae sure repose will find."
Sun and cloud and twinkling star, sea and rock and
humblest weed, are there to speak a word of God. We
feel the truth of the saying, "The truth of nature is a
part of the truth of God. To him who does not
search it out, darkness ; to him who does, infinity."
Everywhere is . . . "a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air.
And the blue sky, and the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.
And rolls through all things."
Everywhere is the sense sublime of God. And in our
aspiration to that Something beyond, dwelling in
the light of the setting sun, we are conscious that we

62 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CREATOR
are lifted above the matter beneath our feet. We, be
cause we have the living soul, and are not animal, hear
that voice. As the discovery of his third law broke in
upon Kepler's mind on March 8th, i6i8,he exclaimed,
"God has passed before me in the grandeur of his
ways! Glorify him, ye stars, in your ineffable lan
guage, and thou, my soul, praise him!" And Isaac
Newton exclaimed at his own discovery, "Glory to
God, who has permitted me to catch a glimpse of the
skirts of his garments. My calculations have encoun
tered the march of the stars."
We believe that He who made the universe made
us for himself; and any man who does not hear his
voice and do his will and answer to his love, is but a
perverted existence. He is cast out by the very force
of his life, into that awful solitude which must needs be
outside of the obedient universe whose nature is to
sing his praises, and which in all the extent of exist
ence knows no possibility of disregarding his call.'
1 See Note 13.

V
THE
AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD

*' Hnb in 3e9U0 Cbrist, His onli? Son,
our Xorb."

^'- JVo-w -when Jesus catne into the ^arts of
CcBsarea Philipifi, he asked his disciples, saying.
Who do men say that the Son of man is ? And
they said. Some say John the Baptist; some,
Elijah: and others, Jeremiah, or one of the
prophets. He saith unto them. But -who say ye
that I am P And Simon Peter ans-wered and
said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God." Matthew 16: 13-16.

CHAPTER V
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
We are in a very different scene from that in which
we were in the last chapter. There, following the
lead of the Church's Confession, we found ourselves
standing on the seashore, looking up at the sky, and
about us God's wonderful works in creation. We
sought to listen to the psalm of the created universe,
recognizing in nature's wonders and mysteries the
ever-present testimony to its Maker. We expressed
our belief in God, the Maker of heaven and earth.
Here it is not the voice of nature, but the voice
of the Lord Jesus Christ himself that calls us to know,
not his works, or his teaching, or his sacrifice, but him
self; to ask our hearts the question which the Saviour
put to his disciples, "Who say ye that I am ?" Matthew
says it was at Csesarea Philippi that this searching
question was asked. It was just before Jesus' trans
figuration, and after the turning away of his disciples,
following upon the miracle of the loaves and fishes,
because he would not consent to receive their plaudits
of royalty. In a scene of rare beauty, on the southern
slope of the noble Mount Hermon, about an ancient

66 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
grotto, a place once sacred to the heathen god Pan,
an early pagan settlement had gathered. Herod had
adorned the spot with a temple of white marble, and
called it after the emperor. Later, Philip had en
larged the temple and given it his own name, Caesarea
Philippi. It was one of those mixed Gentile-Judaean
communities, of which there were many on the skirts
of northern Galilee. On this beautiful spot, with, on
the one hand, the great world of heathenism pressing
up against him, with all its unanswered cry after an
interpretation of the riddle of life, and its yearning for
a knowledge of the living God ; and on the other side,
Israel, alone in her possession of the oracles of God,
alone in the extent of her humiliation, which others
could not understand, because her exaltation had been
so peculiarly her own ; alone in her possession of
prophecies yet unfulfilled and uninterpreted; alone in
the promise of a Messiah, whom she did not receive ;
— standing between the two, mocked in his poverty,
despised and rejected alike by both, bearing in his
heart the world's sin and the world's need, Jesus
asked : "Who do men say that I am?" Sweeping aside
their historic testimony, we hear him pressing upon
his disciples the personal question, "But who am I to
you?" Whatever force the question had then, it has now
much more. The disciples knew comparatively little

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 67
of the Lord. The resurrection had not occurred;
they had not yet had the revelation of the Holy Ghost
in their own hearts, or seen the witness to the living
Christ on the day of Pentecost, or had the testimony
of martyrs, as we have. That is all behind us ; it all
lay before them; and it conspires to make it a very
personal question to every man and woman to-day,
when the world is asking, "Who do you say that he
is?'" A Christianity without Christ is no Christianity;
and a Christ not divine is no Christ, or, at most, is a
Christ far different from the one in whom the Church
has wrought out her salvation and to whom she has
witnessed her good confession.
So the essential matter is, not what may be said of
Jesus Christ as a historic person, but what answer we
can give to these questions : Is he to me a living
Christ, a Saviour from sin and weakness, a daily
power in my life? Can I approach him, love him,
continue with him always? Has he opened the king
dom of heaven to me? Is my faith in him, as the
Messiah, one on which I am willing to stake not only
the future but the present? For the basis of our
answer we must turn to the Word of God itself.
The earliest written testimony that we have concern
ing Jesus is that of Paul. Each New Testament author
1 See Note 1.

68 THE AFFIRMATION OP THE SoN OF GOD
speaks from the standpoint of his own characteristics
and circumstances. Their testimony agrees, but it
has the advantage of individual utterance, and of the
unity that lies in diversity. Paul's testimony is pe
culiarly his own, and it is abundant. In Romans he
speaks of "Jesus Christ our Lord," who was "born of
the seed of David according to the flesh, who was de
clared to be the Son of God with power, according to
the spirit of hohness, by the resurrection of the dead."
In the letter to the Ephesians he says, "The God of
our Lord Jesus Christ, . . . when he raised him from
the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in
the heavenly places, far above all rule, and authority,
and power, and dominion, and every name that is
named, not only in this world, but also in that which
is to come : and he put all things in subjection under
his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to
the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that
filleth all in all." He heaps up words to show how
complete is the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ
our Lord. In Philippians he says, "That in the name
of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven
and things on earth and things under the earth, and
that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord, to the glory of God the Father." And once
more, in Colossians, "Giving thanks unto the Father
. . . who delivered us out of the power of darkness.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 69
and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his
love ; in whom we have our redemption, the forgive
ness of our sins : who is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation ; for in him were all things
created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things
visible and things invisible, whether thrones or
dominions or principalities or powers ; all things have
been created through him, and unto him; and he
is before all things, and in him all things consist.
And he is the head of the body, the church ; who is
the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in
all things he might have the preeminence. For it
was the good pleasure of the Father that in him
should all the fulness dwell." There is much more
to the same effect in all the epistles of the great
apostle. '
But while we find the essential truth concerning
Jesus, and something of his message as well, set forth
in Paul's epistles, we have also the story of the life
of Jesus as given in the gospels, and the Church is
accustomed to look to that for details. We will turn
only to the testimony of John. John was the disciple
whom Jesus loved. After Paul had given his testi
mony, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke had written
their narratives, at the close of the century it was per
mitted to John (probably the last survivor of the little
> See Note 2.

70 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
company that followed Jesus) to write his personal
testimony to the life and nature of the Lord whom he
so dearly loved.
How singularly John's gospel begins, with that
mysterious and seemingly dogmatic theological
preface : "In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God," — a
preface quite distinct from the simple narrative in
which John goes on to tell how the faith of Jesus was
revealed to himself and to the other disciples until
they became established in it. At the time when
John writes, this preface had evidently come to sum
up the settled faith of the Church concerning Jesus
Christ. John uses the characteristic term as evi
dently well understood, and requiring no explanation.
If the Gospel is held to be written by the "Presbyter
John," as is far from proved, the argument still stands.
Therefore we ask, where does the phrase come from ?
In the Old Testament we have the term used as in
Psalm xxxiii, "By the word of the Lord were the
heavens made," and in Psalm cxlvii, "He sendeth
out his commandment upon earth ; his word
runneth very swiftly ;" and in the prophets, where the
Word is personified, "The word that Isaiah the son
of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem." As
we study the Jewish literature of the time of Christ,
we know that the term Word had come into common

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 7 1
use as indicating the divine activity, — just as Wisdom
was used to personify the divine attributes. The
Jews came into close contact with the later Greek
philosophy, particularly in Alexandria, and the same
word appears in the Alexandrine philosophy as the
metaphysical term for the thought and power of the
absolute God — the God back of the gods — a con
ception never altogether absent from the Greek
mind. And now John, with his message for the
world, in order to convey the thought of Jesus' divin
ity and preexistence to the minds of the Greek-speak
ing people in whose tongue he is writing, takes ihe
word familiar tO' the lips of their teachers, and says,
"You are not unacquainted with speculations about
the means by which the unseen God reveals himself,
and the intermediate agents he employs. The God
whom you do not know, and whom in weakness you
are feeling after, I would declare to you. The Word,
the conception of God himself, back of all your myth
ology, and back of all your worship, back even of
the revelation to Israel, is Jesus Christ. He is the
Word who was 'in the beginning.' 'The Word was
with God, and the Word was God.' The language
has its own suggestiveness. It is as if he would say,
"He of whom I would speak was in the unfolding of
God through all creation, and was God." John ordi
narily uses the word for God with the article-^the

72 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
God. Here he omits it. The Word was not the God,
the Father, he was God. The essential nature of God
was his. It may be intended that here, as it were
on the threshold of the New Testament's revelation
of Christ, we should find the underlying conception
of God in the plurality of the divine nature, as it is
suggested in the opening sentence of the Old Testa
ment : "In the beginning God," — Elohim, a plural
term, God in the plenitude of his being, — "created the
heaven and the earth." In the beginning the Word
was with the Father, and was God. And by him and
through him all things consist. John affirms the per
sistence of the Word, the oneness of his essential na
ture with the Father, and his incarnation as a temporal
dwelling in humanity as in a tenement.'
But John quickly discharges from his mind this
term ; as if he said, "I cannot even give through your
thought and your speculations the message I have for
you. I see it as a prophecy. Now follow me while I
unfold to you the story of who Jesus was, and what
he told us of himself. For we have his own testi
mony; and because we have experience of the life
from God, we believe." He goes on, "As many as re
ceived him, to them gave he the right to become chil
dren of God." "And the Word became flesh, and
dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, glory as of
I See Notes 3 and 4.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 73
the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and
truth." Then he proceeds to tell how he first met
Jesus, and what the beginning of his miracles was,
and the details of his conversation with Nicodemus,
with the woman at the well, and with the man at the
pool of Bethesda ; how Jesus opened the mysteries of
his divine nature, of his having been before Abraham
was, how he is and always has been one with the
Father, into whose divine life he is to bring those
who shall walk with him.
From beginning to end, the gospel of John unfolds
out of the personal revelation that had come to him
from the Lord himself. It is the story of his own
knowledge of Jesus Christ. He closes his record
with these significant words : "These are written, that
ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God ; and" — to emphasize the fulness of the meaning
of the term, — "that believing ye may have life" — to
give which is the attribute of God alone — "that be
lieving ye may have life in his name."
He refers to the dealings of God with the world,
to show that they are revelations of God's nature.
"If God so loved the world," John hastens to say, "it
is because God is love. If God enlightened the
world, it is because God is light. What God is, he
has shown us in his Son Jesus Christ." It is not the
miracles of Christ, nor the example of Christ, nor the

74 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
works of Christ, that have brought salvation to a
dying world and revealed God ; but it is Jesus Christ
himself. It is in the adoration of his person, in the
surrender of the heart to his love, in the giving up of
the life to his life, that we are to find our life. '
So much, then, for the testimony of the New Testa
ment as to the person of Christ as distinct from his
sacrifice. Now as to the historic question : What has
the Church believed concerning Jesus Christ?
At the first the Church was made up largely of men
who had been with Jesus, or were taught by those
who had known him. They were content with telling
the story of Christ, and the Church they established
was largely content with the personal possession of
the living and ever-present Christ. Their doctrine of
the resurrection was the chief public grievance, and
brought some of the believers at once to the test of
martyrdom. As persecution developed, the martyrs
everywhere gave testimony to their faith in Christ
their Lord, whose presence with them they declared,
as Stephen did when he saw the heavens opened, and
the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.
But with the opening of the next century, and for
many years after, controversy waged about the per
son of Christ. At first the crucial question was as to
his humanity. There were those who recognized that
1 See Notes S and 6.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 75
Christ was a living force in the world, but they de
nied the substantiality of his bodily presence. They
said, "There have been other forces that have mur
mured in the voices enshrined in the temple. God
has often spoken to men." So the Church found it
self obhged to deal with the historical details of the
life of Jesus. They delighted to tell how he was born
of Mary, and was brought up by a village carpenter,
— with the full story of his manhood, of his hungering
and thirsting, his walking with the disciples by the
way, his doing and living as any man might do.
Whether the world accepted it or not, the Church
stood firm upon his humanity.
Then came the question whether he was really a
man in the possession of a human soul, or was he
merely a divine spirit taking possession of a human
body and using it — as a body might be possessed by a
supernatural spirit. The Church replied by devoting
all its strength to establishing the true manhood of
Christ in the possession of a complete humanity. He
was tempted as we are tempted. He wept with those
that wept. He was moved with compassion beside
the bier that carried the son of the widow of Nain.
He sobbed in the sorrow of the little household of
Bethany that he greatly loved. The testimony of the
Church was that that Jesus who walked in human
form had a heart and spirit and soul as every man
has. He was truly man.

76 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
Then, in a last attack, the philosophers admitted
that he had a human body and a human soul, but
urged that he had a divine will. The Church insisted
that no limitation could be made ; Jesus had a human
will as well; and his sacrifice, in yielding himself to
the will of his Father, was a sacrifice human in the en
tire extent. It was in the fact that, being made in the
likeness of man, in human form, with a human soul,
and working out a human character, as every man
does, by resistance of the will to temptation, tempted
in all points like as we are yet without sin, he gave
himself a deliberate and voluntary offering, that he
became a sacrifice for us and for the race.'
Then the controversy shifted to the question of his
true divinity. It was admitted that Jesus had a true
humanity. He was Son of man. But is it true that
he was the Son of God? The Church had success
fully maintained the doctrine of the divine unity and
the reality of the divine Incarnation. It had not
advanced to the successful harmonizing of these pri
mal truths. The attack of the Arians was at this
point. They said, God alone is eternal; all other ex
istence, including the Son, must have been created by
an act of the divine will. The Son may be unique ; he
is the Image, the Word, Wisdom, but he is not God.
Then the Church stood for its life. The Arian
1 See Note 7,

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 77
heresy popularized unbelief. It had won the leading
men of the world. It had its adherents in great
bishoprics, in which this intellectual aspect of the
nature of Christ was presented as sufficient to meet
the world's need. Until at last came the Council of
Nicaea, in the year 325. The issue at stake was not
of any particular form of philosophy, but of Christian
ity itself. The discussion turned on single words, and
on single letters in a word, but men contended for
their Lord. The majority had been swept into the
current of what would be called the liberal teaching,
but the Church reaffirmed the historic faith, in the
formal utterances of the Nicene Creed, "We believe in
one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of
the Father; Light of light; very God of very God;
begotten, not made ; being of one substance with
the Father; who for us men, and for our salvation,
came down, and was incarnate, and was made man." '
Yet for many years the Arian faith continued in a
large part of Christendom. For several centuries its
hold upon the Goths and the Vandals kept the Church
in the throes of the controversy. But for fourteen
hundred years the Church's unvarying testimony to
the divinity of its Lord has remained unchanged.
The awakening mind of the thirteenth century ques
tioned many things, but did not impeach it. The
1 See Notes 8 and 9.

78 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
scientific revolution which, as Mr. Gladstone has said,
opened to us the antipodes and the solar system, did
not shake it. The Renaissance, which, in bringing to
light the literature of the past, laid new foundations
for all literature, did not touch it. It seemed as if
the confession of its faith in Jesus Christ was fixed
as far above the perils that threatened the Church,
as the sky is above the mists which cover the earth.
Even the reformers, who in all ages are reshaping
the Church and reestablishing the foundations
upon which salvation shall rest, added nothing and
altered nothing in the testimony the Church has
given to its belief in Jesus Christ the Son of God, its
Lord, its Redeemer, its King. It stands, as he does,
the same yesterday and to-day and forever.'
We come now to the closing question. It is as if
again we heard Jesus sweeping aside the testimony
of the disciples, of the Church, and of the world, and
saying: "But, beloved, who do you say that I am?" It
is a searching question. That beautiful spirit, that
far-famed, tender-hearted man. Dr. William E. Chan
ning, said : "To know Jesus Christ is to approach his
soul, to comprehend his spirit, to see how he thought
and felt and purposed and loved." And the word is
eternally true — but it is not the whole truth. It is
not the testimony of the Church. To know Jesus
1 See Note 10.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 79
Christ is to approach his soul, to comprehend his
spirit, to see how he felt and thought and purposed
and loved — but far more is it to know him who pur
poses and loves and grieves ; to hear his voice who
says, "Come untO' me and live;" to know him, not
simply as the Jesus who on the hills of Galilee and in
the streets of Jerusalem testified to a loving God and
Maker of all — but to see him in the awful sacrifice on
Calvary, to know that he gave himself for us. It is to
behold him now as the risen and living Christ, our
Saviour and our Friend, comforting, pardoning, sus
taining ; as he hears our prayers, as he leads his chil
dren by the hand in their daily service, as he presses
home upon them his assurance of the divine grace and
a present pardon, and as he opens to us the vision of a
heavenly home where he stands tO' welcome us to
himself. In confirmation of the faith of the Church comes
the testimony of her saints through the centuries, cer
tifying to the loving and abiding presence with them
of that Jesus in whom they believed. "Eighty and
six years have I served him," said the aged Polycarp,
in the arena. "How can I blaspheme the name of my
King and my Lord?" So bishops and presbyters,
philosophers and soldiers, young men of beauty, and
scholars of high cultivation, widows and maidens,
slaves and shepherd boys, in the amphitheater and on

8o THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD
the rack, cried to the present Christ, and laid down
their lives for him.
"Whom dost thou worship?" said the consul to
Pionius writhing on the rack. "I worship Him who
made the earth and stars, and gave me life, and is my
God." "Dost thou mean him who was crucified?"
"Certainly I do. Him whom the Father sent for the
salvation of the world."
And the testimony of the martyrs is the testimony
of consecrated Christians to-day. We read it in
Livingstone's last record in his journal, in his lonely
hut in the Bangwuolo wilderness, as, bowed in prayer,
he summoned his failing strength to write, and was
found kneeling and dead at daylight : "March 19th,
1872. Birthday. My Jesus, my King, my life, my
all ! Again I dedicate myself to thee."
We hear it in the life of that young missionary in
India who passed away saying, "India is Christ's ;"
in the last words of the brilliant young McCall of the
Livingstone-Congo mission, dying in mid-work :
"Lord, I gave myself, body, mind and soul, to thee ;
I consecrated my whole life and being to thy service,
and now if it please thee to take myself instead of the
work which I would do for thee, what is that to me?
Thy will be done." Harrington in Massai land, and
Keith Falconer among his Arabs in Aden, and Cole
ridge Patterson sacrificed to the savages in Melane-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SON OF GOD 8 1
sia, and Pinkerton dead on the borders of Umzila's
country, and Bagster at Bihe, and the host of other
beautiful lives freely given for Christ and his gospel,
what are they but so many parts of the undying song
of the ages, in testimony to Christ our Lord?
It is the testimony from martyrs and missionaries,
from humble homes and from scenes of heroic sacri
fice, from men of every nation and clime, who first
have found Jesus Christ the Saviour who laid down his
life in atoning sacrifice for their sins, and then, con
fessing his name, and giving themselves to his ser
vice, have had revealed to them the face of the living
Christ, who came to be with them through their pil
grimage, to sustain them in their service, to comfort
them in their trials, to pardon them in their follies, to
welcome them home at last, when they shall see his
face and be like him. '
> See Note 11.

VI
THE
AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION

** Conceived \)^ tbe Hol^ Gbost
Born of tbe IDirgin riDari^"

"Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared unto
him in a dream, saying, foseph, thou son of
David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy -wife:
for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy
Ghost." Matthew 1: 20.

CHAPTER VI
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
After nineteen hundred years, the local circum
stances in which the birth of our Lord occurred, and
the little communities connected with it, retain the
central place in human thought. No one can speak
their names, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Judaea,
without feeling how the world has changed since they
were first heard in connection with Jesus Christ, and
how truly that great and almost indescribable change
in the world and in the life of men is because of
him. Whatever tradition may have attached to the origi
nal story (and you know how tradition seeks to ex
aggerate great events in human life), and however
speculation has been concerned with the person and
work of the Lord Jesus, the fact of his birth stands
unaffected. We read, as all the world reads on
Christmas day, the story of the first announcement
of the birth of a real person — the greatest of men.
Wrapped, as the quaint narrative says, in swaddling
clothes and lying in a manger, there was a child who
was to prove in later life what the angels announced.

86 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
the long-looked-for Messiah and King, Jesus, who
should save his people from their sins. * The angels
proclaimed his birth, and the very earth itself seemed
to join with the heavens above in the joy which men
as yet so little understood, but which was to be
henceforth the fountain of all joy.
From that hour, all human history needed to be
rewritten — that rewriting of history which, in these
days, is frequently upon our lips, especially in con
nection with man's life and with the structure of so
ciety of which Christ is the hope. We have often to
remind ourselves of the greatness of the change that
has taken place, even in our own day ; a change that
would be marvelously emphasized for us if we could
stand with the men of the past and look out upon the
world of modern science as it is to-day. Suppose Sir
Isaac Newton were permitted to come back, and
some reverent teacher should open to him the attain
ments of natural science now, what significance would
be given to his saying when he described himself as
"a child playing with the pebbles on the seashore,
while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered be
fore him" ! Or suppose that thoughtful philosopher
Kepler, discovering the laws of the heavens as he
interpreted the law by which the physical universe
is bound into oneness, were now to come back and
see how that law has been amplified in its realiza-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 87
tion, how from it have sprung countless other laws,
until, like blossoms upon a tree in its new fruitage, the
science of things on the earth has opened out into a
science of the universe, in which the distinction be
tween the natural and the supernatural has disap
peared, and only the natural and the unnatural, the
normal and the abnormal, remain. Or suppose,
after a half century, Humboldt were permitted to re
turn, and were moved to write again the story of
man's present scientific knowledge, would he for a
moment desire to bring out, or remind people of what
he wrote in the past? He would be the first to say,
"That may all be thrown aside. The work must be
begun anew. There is nothing in the story of that
day that can compare with the story of this : there is
little, indeed, worth remembering. Geology, chemis
try, biology, astronomy, all are new." All their de
ductions, their speculations, were as a child's know
ledge. Not that man's thought is deeper or pro-
founder, or his intellectual force greater to-day than
in the past, but because of the vast addition that has
been made to human knowledge, and in the furnishing
of so much new material to-day, the records of the
physical world are practically begun anew.
Still more completely did human history need to be
rewritten, as the story of man's moral development
and of his relations to God, as these were affected bv

88 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
the first Christmas. The real interpretation of exist
ence only then became possible. How little the
world was conscious of it! It had its own interpreta
tion of the prophecies, which were sufficiently start
ling; but to-day we know that, whatever old prophe
cies remain unfulfilled, this is sure, that nineteen hun
dred years ago a child was born, of the tribe of
Judah, in the city of David, who was called Christ;
and that in him as a fresh point all the devious lines
of the revelation of God to man in the past converged ;
and from him again all the unfolding of the future has
diverged, as his life and power and work embrace
to-day all that man is and hopes to be. Kingdoms
have risen and fallen because of him. Dynasties
have appeared, done their work, been changed by
his truth, and passed away. Many a noble head has
been laid down, many a lofty spirit has suffered in
his name. For the first time men have grasp upon the
knowledge of God, and know what the loving Father
has planned for them. Not only have countless in
dividual lives been changed, but all the world has been
made new. Europe has become the center of the
world's history, because Christ has found his home in
European institutions, and by the impulse of his love
in their hearts, missionaries from Europe have gone
over the world, until the story of Jesus Christ is
preached in every land.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 89
This, then, is the outlook of Jesus as given to us
to-day. Jesus Christ stands the one great fact. In
fidels have denied that there was such a person. Ra
tionalists have subordinated him to an ideal. Pan
theists have sunk him in an eternal incarnation of
God in his world. Mystics have dissipated him in the
shadowy realm of spirits. Open foes and false friends
have perverted his teaching and obscured the glory of
his person. And yet he has emerged from all alike
unaltered. No dimness has come to the luster of his
name, no spot has been found, in the scrutiny of the
centuries, upon the perfection of his matchless char
acter. He stands to-day as he has always stood, the
Redeemer of men, the one hope of the world.
We turn our thoughts, in common with other
Christians, to the circumstances which surround the
birth of our Lord. They are what we should expect.
The story is everywhere charged with divinity.
Coming to it from whatever standpoint, no one can
read this story without .feeling that everywhere it
bears the stamp of the other world. It is filled with
the spirit of the supernatural. Open it where you
will. Take the circumstances of his birth ; take
Mary's song ; take the scene of the shepherds ; take
the coming of the wise men ; you recognize that here
is a story differing from all other stories. It is not its
simplicity, its sweetness, its dignity ; it is riot any one

90

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION

thing, either in its substance or its form, that consti-
utes its abiding distinction, or supplies the reason for
its impressiveness upon all classes. You may read it
to little children, to the poor, the suffering, in the
asylum, in the prison ; every eye is intent, every heart
shows the same surrender to the mysterious power of
this story. It seems a little patch plucked out of
heaven. Read in any land, the effect is the same. Our
civilization is not above its level, nor is the rudest sav
age tribe so remote from it but that the missionary
can sit down and tell the story to the most degraded.
The one explanation of this is in the divinity that
hedges it about, and the divineness that is in it. It
is the story of the birth of the Son of God. The
Christian has the true interpretation. There was
nothing sudden about it, nothing unlooked-for from
the Christian standpoint. The virgin birth shall not
disturb us. As an incident in the narrative in every
way appropriate, we accept it. We have no wisdom
to go beyond what is written. '
If there is a Father in heaven, a loving God, the
Maker of us all ; if the story of man's fall is true, and
God's relation to it, and God's promises, even in man's
despair, then the yearning after God of the men of the
Old Testament, and of the better spirits among the
heathen, and the testimony of our own souls, even

1 See Notel.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 9I
in our darkest hours — all this converges upon the fact,
and shows that just so he would reveal himself. God
would so come down into human life, he would so
take up human life to himself, he would so establish
this bond between his creatures and himself, because
God so loved the world. '
The mystery which hangs over the beginnings of
every human life is only gathered up in a new form
over this life. A little child is put into our arms.
How mysterious its presence ! A new life has come
out of eternity, to live forever, to think God's
thoughts, to feel, responsive to the divine love, to be
an active agent forever in working out the plans of a
holy and a loving God, in all the universe. This is
the interpretation of the strange awe and tenderness
that come into every home with the birth of a little
child. How all this is gathered up in marvelous in
tensity, how it all gains a new depth and fulness of
meaning as we go back to the birth of that babe in
Bethlehem! As God is present in all life, so God
himself, in the fulness of the divine, was in that birth,
not only for that hour, and for Mary who hid these
things in her heart, and for the awed witnesses as they
stood impressed as never before, but for all men and
all time.
But not only is it the story of the coming of the
1 See Notes 2 and 3,

92 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATIOli
divine into humanity, it is also the story of the birth of
humanity itself. This is an equally important truth
for us. We read the story of man's life in Eden. It
is strange; it belongs, in our thought, to a very re
mote past. The world has so changed since then.
Man has changed in his thought, in his surroundings,
in his own person. We have small power of inter
preting that old story. We content ourselves with
the great central fact that in the beginning God cre
ated the earth and prepared it to be the abode of
man ; that when man came to consciousness he
found himself possessed of a sense of right and
wrong; that with transgression came the burden of
guilt upon all mankind, and the wrath of the
divine righteousness upon man's iniquity. Then fol
lows the enduring promise of the divine revelation of
pardon and of life. Beyond that we cannot look.
But when we turn to the story of Jesus, how dif
ferent! At once all our inquiry begins to be an
swered. Every man reads the story for himself, and
seeks to find how Jesus Christ comes into his own
life. He realizes the personal message. And so
humanity — not the large humanity of the world but
our own personal estate, with our temptations and our
needs — finds itself stirred and thrilled by the possi
bility of what Jesus Christ has brought to us. We
have received a revelation.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 93
There is a distinct difference between inspiration
and revelation. Inspiration is God's breathing into
men thoughts and utterances the meaning of which
they little understand — as God gave to the prophets
visions and conceptions the significance of which they
most imperfectly grasped, and which have been gain
ing an ever new and wider interpretation as man's
life has enlarged. There is a perennial freshness in
the way in which every new experience in one's own
life that lays hold upon the heart rolls back the mist
from the psalms and the prophets.
But when we come to revelation, we find that back
of the coming down of God to man, there is the ex
altation of man to receive the message from God.
In revelation the plane of the inferior is in a measure
lifted to the plane of the superior, that the higher life
may impart itself to the lower. It is the bridge across
which God comes to man. We feel as we read the
story of Jesus that God is with us. All humanity is
exalted in its tenderness, in its depth of possible em.o-
tion, in its sweet thoughts now enlarged, in the peace
of forgiveness to men who have destroyed themselves
by their own sin. We gain a new meaning of human
Hfe. What is this but that revelation of God to man,
for which the time had come?
We understand now, as men did not understand
then, how all the measures of man's life, his methods

94 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
of government, his forms of religion, his civilization,
were full and falling to pieces when Christ was born.
No existing literature, or ritual, or legislation, or
social order, was large enough for the world's needs.
The world had come to a condition that was without
fruitfulness and without hope. The best that men
could say was, "Endure ! Meet the inevitable with
philosophy. We come, we know not whence, and go,
we know not whither." Into such a world, with its
consciousness of degradation and despair, Jesus
Christ came. And at once we find that human life is
uplifted in order that God may speak to it; there
rises before us the bridge by which God may come
again to man, his creature.
So we turn again to the story of Jesus Christ, and
find that God has come down to man in the person of
his Son, and that Christ has come to work out the
will of God upon earth. If that is true, all men are
to have their part also in working out the will of God.
We are on earth under limited conditions, burdened
with our cares, depressed with our sorrows, every
where hedged about by our ignorance and helpless
ness. But because Jesus Christ has entered into our
life, he has shown that human life itself is not far from
God, and God is very near to every one of us. And
just as the old rituals of worship all had proved too
small for the revelation of God to man, and for men's

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 95
work as children of God, so a new life to the indi
vidual has proved itself likewise a new life to the
world. We have new legislation, new literature, a
new human society, as humanity itself is exalted in
the birth of Jesus Christ.
Heaven has come to earth in the person of Jesus
Christ, not in spite of our mortality, but by way of
it. Jesus came to do the will of the Father, being
made in the likeness of man, in the restricted condi
tions of any other human life. He knew the narrow
ness of a little Jewish village, knew what it was to be
confronted with the limitations of his race, his tribe ;
to strive in vain to break them ; to be finally rejected
and crucified. In the place assigned him, by the very
help of conditions he could not change, he was to do
the work of God. We are to do the same, not in spite
of our conditions, but by the very force of them. So
suffering becomes an instrument in God's service. It
becomes something from which we do not expect to
be delivered. But suffering, trial, disappointment,
failure, all the mingled cup of the common, average,
human life, interpreted by the story of Jesus Christ,
becomes at once the instrument which God has put
in the hands of every son of man, by which we are
to work out the plan of God — nay, the love of God ;
by which we are to prepare ourselves for final accept
ance by God, that we may grow in his likeness, and

9^ THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
at last be at one with him. "In all these things," said
the apostle, "we are more than conquerors through
him that loved us."
Here, then, is the lesson for us. The birth of our
Lord was the coming down of God into human life.
It was the revelation of the divine. And not on
Christmas only, but each Lord's day, Christians
gather for worship, using songs of praise and the mu
tual helpfulness of prayer, rejoicing in the peace of
God, and the fuller, sharper sense of the presence of
the unseen God, who is with us every day, in the be
lief that as he spoke nineteen hundred years ago, that
revelation is renewed in the conditions of every living
soul. He is filling all the world, and seeking to
speak everywhere and always to us all.
So, again, we have in Jesus our pattern. For this
Jesus accepted our human life. He did not consider
oneness with the Father to be a thing to be cluno-
to and coveted, but he gave himself of his own will to
this life with all its limitations, its deprivations, its
suffering, and at last its death, that he might be to us
the pattern of a divine life. His lot was the lot of an
accepted dependence. There is nothing so helpless
as a little child, and we can hardly conceive of a life
more humble than Jesus' life in Bethlehem and in the
exile. He never emerged from this condition. He
seems to have lived in his father's house until the be-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 97
ginning of his ministry. Then he became a wanderer,
homeless and dependent upon others for daily bread,
touchingly grateful for sympathy, love or care.
Nothing is bitterer to a proud spirit than this sense of
dependence. Yet it is the constant appointment of
the Lord's dear children, as loss or illness or age
comes upon us, to emphasize the daily dependence
upon others, under which, more or less, we all live,
under the conditions in which no man's happiness or
welfare can long stand in himself alone. That our
Lord accepted this as the fixed condition of his
earthly life makes this principle of cheerfully accepted
personal dependence a foundation stone in the struc
ture of society, and one of the chief of the divinely
appointed agencies of man's ennobling.
Then our Lord accepted humiliation. With the
accepted dependence in the home of Nazareth came
all that humiliation of his later life when he was de
spised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief. And that humiliation of life is also to be .
the Christian's constant experience. How often we
find ourselves weak when we think ourselves strong!
How often the strong man loses his strength, the
rich man his money, the man of lofty position his
name and his influence! How often honor goes to
the less worthy! How often we are called to bear
the humiliation of detraction and slander and untruth

98 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
and the perversion of all our good ! What is this but
that God wishes that we his children should accept
the bonds of suffering and disappointment in life?
Here is likeness to Him who was ordained to this
from the beginning. All this our Lord accepted as
part of the necessary condition of human life, and
therefore as essential to his redemptive work. It
opened his own heart to the divine love, and it opened
human hearts to his love. Because he went about his
Father's business, and lived his Father's life in the
presence of his countrymen, their hearts went out to
him. For no life was too low for him ; the woman at
the well, Zacchaeus the publican, the poor Syrophoeni-
cian woman, the outcast, the heathen — in their affiic-
tion he was afflicted, in his love and in his pity he re
deemed them. Through his accepting a service of
humiliation, all that could be revealed of love entered
into our life.
This, then, seems to me the supreme message of
Christmas, the revelation of God in everyday life ; the
exalting of humanity through Jesus Christ out of the
despairing darkness of the old world of heathenism;
and the ennobling of our life with all its weakness and
its suffering, making it the very instrument by which
as of old the Son of God comes into the world to save
the world. So to-day the divine Son himself does the
Father's will in us, and through us, his children, as in

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION 99
the Strength that he gives, and the love that he in
spires, and the desire and the loyalty of the heart that
longs to be like him, we accept the divine appoint
ments for us, and whether in weakness or in strength,
in folly or in wisdom, in failure or in success, in bur
den or in trial, we give ourselves day by day to walk
ing in his steps and doing his will. And as we so
walk, and as we so live, the joy of the Lord is re
vealed, and the measures of our life are full and
overflowing. We try to make other lives glad, if but for an hour,
on Christmas day. We wish we could carry the
gladness beneath the surface of these other lives, and
extend the blessing of Christmas through the year.
Our transient joy seems pitiful in the face of the awful
evils of the times. But the true remedy for those
evils exists, and this day declares it. It is nothing
more nor less than to do again what Jesus did — give
one's whole self to such as are fallen below the power
of helping themselves. To open one's heart, to love
them, no matter how unworthy, to forgive even when
forgiveness is not asked, to comfort and console before
you speak of duties, to pity and not to upbraid, not
to be afraid of the touch of evil, but to grasp it firmly
with strong hands and, with a love that never despairs
and cannot be destroyed, to carry Christ to men by
being Christ to them — this is the whole secret. The

lOO THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION
world will believe that the Son of God indeed
was born into our life, when it sees him living in it.
Each Christian life, however humble — and the
more because it is humble — is a new incarnation of
Christ.

VII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING
SACRIFICE

Suffereb unber pontius pilate
was Crucifieb Deat) anb Burieb"

'¦^ For while we were yet weak, in due season
Christ died for the ungodly.'^

Romans 5: 6.

CHAPTER VII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
Concerning the fact of the death of Jesus, there is
no question. His foes as well as his friends from the
beginning have affirmed it, or taken it for granted.
In the year 30 A. D., Pontius Pilate being governor,
Jesus of Nazareth, after a hasty condemnation, was
led outside the walls of Jerusalem and put to death
according to the Roman mode, on the cross. His
enemies have used it as a witness and argument
against the faith of Jesus ; and, taught of the Lord, his
friends from the first have made the instrument of his
death the symbol of his triumph.
It has been said that had it not been for the ex
altation of the watchword of the cross, the post-apos
tolic Church of the second century would probably
not have been able to maintain its conviction of the
sacrificial significance of the death of Christ as it did.
But this was fixed securely as an article of faith by the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper, which Jesus' own act
had established liturgically in Christian worship.
Not his teachings, not the wonder of his beautiful life,
but his giving himself in death, is the great fact in the

I04 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
redemption of the world by Jesus Christ. And be
cause of the fixing of the truth in that way, and the
place which the sacrament of the Lord's Supper has
occupied in every age, this remains to-day the great
central truth of the Christian faith. Atonement was
constituted for a sinning world by the sacrificial death
of Jesus Christ.'
So much, then, for the affirmation, the simple form
of which we find in the Apostles' Creed. But we can
not be content with the mere affirmation, we must
understand its true significance. For the Church has
harbored widely different views as to the meaning of
the sacrifice. It has been made to mean a price paid
to the devil for the redemption of souls that belong to
him. It has been regarded as a compensation to ap
pease the vengeance of an angry God. It has been
interpreted as a justification of the moral law — a sort
of ransom required by the divine government under
which, to protect the community, or to vindicate the
outward constitution, some equivalent offering must
be provided. At the other extreme it has been
looked upon as a dramatic appeal to the emotions of
men, that by the sight of that tragic spectacle men
should be led to God. But the Church has never
been content with its interpretations, though it has
been often tempted to make of them a test or cru.v.
I See Notes 1 and 2.

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE I05
Human thought has not yet grasped the meaning of
the atonement, and the plummet of man's experience
ha.s not yet gone to the depth of that divine act which
has become the pivotal point of all the movement of
God in bringing the world back to himself.
Notwithstanding the variety of views, a few things
are very clear. The New Testament, over and over,
teaches that Jesus died for the ungodly. Our word
for is not sufficiently expressive of the Greek of the
New Testament, which declares Christ died both
instead of, and in behalf of, sinners — as when in lov
ing sympathy one puts himself in the place of another,
to do for him what he could not do for himself; as a
physician puts his heart into the work of saving his
patient, or as when one is an actual substitute for an
other. It speaks of Jesus Christ as becoming a curse
for us, taking on himself all the moral sickness, all the
transgression that brings entail of death, that, in so
doing, he might give to us life ; so that, he having died
for us, we live, in virtue of what he has done. As
when one takes up a burden, he carries our sins on
the tree. It speaks of his death being that sufficient
act, by virtue of which a man's sins may be blotted
out and known no more.'
Whatever be the logical interpretation, it is plain
that our Lord regarded his own death as sacrificial,
X See Note 3,

I06 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
At the announcement of his ministry it was fore
shadowed : "Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh
away the sin of the world !" The meaning was un
mistakable in the thought of every hearer who stood
around John the Baptist when he spoke the words.
Our Lord never lost sight of the malignity of sin, or
of the bitter and permanent warfare between himself,
in his teaching, his acts, his spirit, from beginning
to end, and the world before him. He lived a life se
rene, unspotted from the world, over against the sin
which surrounded him. He was sent by his Father
to secure the doing of God's will in the world that
had become separated from the Father; and to do it
to such an extent and in such a fashion that when his
work should be finished, God would be so glorified in
the face of, and in spite of, the sin rooted in every
heart, that never again would there be need of a new
revelation in proof of the pardoning power, or of the
forgiving love, of God to any individual soul. \\'hen
his work should be accomplished, he would be able to
say, "I . . . accomplished the work which thou hast
given me to do."
How then shall we explain the sacrifice of Christ
as related to man's nature? For we never can rest in
any explanation of truth until it becomes related to
what we regard as fundamental, to the ethics of our
own morality, to the enduring relations of man to

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE IO7
man, and of man to God. How are we to interpret
to our own hearts and to one another this divine
sacrifice? Perhaps one reason why the Church has stumbled
over it is that only in these latter days men have
come, in their widening knowledge, to understand
how long and deep are the roots of man's thought and
man's experience. We know the meaning of a thing
only as we go back to its origin. We get the inter
pretation of words common on our lips by discov
ering the root meaning, and tracing its use until we
come to the stamp and mintage of the word which
passes current. Still more true is this in the interpre
tation of Scriptural doctrine. Every word is a meta
phor. It suggests a thought. And, worn as it may
be, like a pebble, by the attrition of the centuries, until
we understand its origin we cannot interpret its full
significance. Little children who never saw a sheep,
for instance, are amazed when you show them the
figure of a woolly lamb, and they are told its con
nection with the idea of Jesus as the good Shepherd.
Atonement, what does it mean? At-one-ment ; it is
in the Hebrew an expiation or a reconciliation by
covering the offense. From the same verb comes
the name for the lid of the ark in which were the law
and the testimony covered by the cherubim with
overshadowing wings — God shutting up the broken

I08 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
law, that the erring people might draw near to him.
The atoning, vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ — be
fore we can understand it, we must know the origin
and use of the phrase in the language of the people to
whom it was spoken.
We have in recent years for the first time a careful
and elaborate study of the religion of the Shemites.
It is now possible for us therefore to trace the origin
of their religious rites, and get at their original
conceptions. There was a time, very long ago, when men be
lieved that they shared a common life with their god
and their dom.estic animals. The bond was a physi
cal one; and the proof of the unbroken relationship
between the tribe and their god was simply their
prosperity — food was plenty, or they were at peace
with their neighbors. When trouble appeared, they
thought their god was displeased, and sought some
way to renew the interrupted community of life. As
they looked upon the animals as sharing this life,
what more natural than that they should seek the of
fering that should bring about reconciliation and
renewal in the blood of a chosen animal? To obtain
the blood, they slew the animal, offering a part to the
god, and drinking the remainder, or when this proved
repugnant, eating the flesh instead.
It was not a long step to the time when doubt

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE IO9
should arise as to whether the life of an animal could
suffice for the sacrificial reunion of god and man ; and
a human victim was sought, perhaps for the first
time in some hour of their distress, in the presence
of pestilence, or famine, or overwhelming defeat, and
offered always with the thought of reestablishing and
reuniting the life that had been broken. — though
there might be no higher conception of the value of
that reunited life than the material good it secured.
When in a later day Carthage, besieged by Agatho-
cles, offered as burnt sacrifices two hundred boys of
the highest aristocracy, and when, being successful,
she sacrificed the most beautiful of her captives, it
was but the perpetuation of the old ritual, in the form
in which it lingered among the heathen for ages ;
finally coming back, in the days of her degeneracy, to
corrupt Israel herself.
The day came for the final discovery, declared by
Jehovah to Abraham, that a ram caught in the thicket
by his horns might be acceptably offered instead of
the son.
This now is shown to have been the real succession
of events, and this the original conception of
sacrifice. The essential thought was taken up into the Old
Testament ritual, when the blood of the sacrifice was
sprinkled on the altar, as the part assigned to God,

no AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
and upon the people, to mark their participation. A
relation of covenant was established. God had come
to be a holy God. In his gracious condescension a
new life was made available for his people, establish
ing them in perpetual communion with him. The
thought is very clear in the ritual for the consecration
of a priest. The offering was of the caul, the fat,
and the liver, as the organs closely related to the
life. Then the blood was put upon the ear, hand and
foot of the priest, that the new life might be mani
fest, in his thought, his work, his ways, as the servant
of God.
Israel's peculiar possession was her new, deep sense
of sin. The break between man and God is a moral
one. God is estranged because of man's transgres
sion, and that transgression becomes exceeding sinful
because of the character of the righteous God. Re
union with him could not be found through the
physical life, whether of animal or of man. Sacrifice
continued. It was still the offering of blood, for "the
life of the flesh is in the blood," and "apart from shed
ding of blood there is no remission." But gradually
the conception became clearer, as human life became
loftier and purer; and while the underlying thought
remained that "it is the blood that maketh atonement
by reason of the life," the reunion with God that was
sought and that ensued was of the thought and spirit.

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE III
A deep sense of personal guilt lay at the bottom of the
separation. That was removed in the acceptance of
the sacrifice and the renewal of the life.
The fall from this high spiritual conception came
about, just as it does to-day when men content them
selves with performing a ritual, and are oblivious to
its true meaning. Prosperity brought wealth and
luxury. The example and habits of their heathen
neighbors began to undermine both the morals and
the conceptions of the Israelites. Samuel rebukes
Saul : "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and
to hearken than the fat of rams." We hear the
Psalmist sing, "Sacrifice and offering thou hast no de
light in." "Lo, I am come." "I delight to do thy will,
O my God." With the prophets the protest grows
indignant : "To what purpose is the multitude of
your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord; I am full of
the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed
beasts ; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or
of lambs, or of he-goats.'' "Wash you, make you clean ;
put away the evil of your doings from before mine
eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well."
Oneness of life with God cannot be had as of old,
but it is to be found through a sacrifice, the real virtue
of which lies in the moral self-surrender of the wor
shiper. Sacrifice is still the offering of a common
¦ life, but it is of a life which God can share, not that of

112 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
an animal or a slain prisoner. The highest expres
sion of it in the Old Testament is in the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, in the vision of Him who, wounded
for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities,
is to be led as a lamb to the slaughter, and who shall
see the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied, for he
shall justify many.
How different is this whole conception from what
has been read into the Old Testament by the later cen
turies ! The original thought is the desire for re
newed life, the longing for assured fellowship with
the source of all life. And all the forms of sacrifice,
with its perversion and darkness and bloody offerings,
have been man's struggle after that life of God, which
sin in some form has destroyed.
Questions arise. Did our Lord from the begin
ning of his ministry foresee the inevitable death that
awaited him? It matters not. He saw clearly the
relation in which the surrender of self has always
stood and will always stand to the development of the
kingdom of God. This it was of which he was to give
proof. In all the past, men had only done God's will
as they gave up their will to his. They brought
themselves into a masterful self-discipline, as pictured
in the great prophets of Israel, who despised the lux
ury and political pride and ambition for which men
around them contended. They swept these aside, as

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE II3
they swept aside the ritual which had become per
verted by contact with heathenism, that the people
might see that the true life is found only when a man
puts self under his feet that he may do the will of
God. Jesus, called in the prime of his young manhood to
stand as an interpreter of all that the prophets had
said, beginning at Moses, preached the things con
cerning himself. We see him grasping this tremen
dous truth of the past and advancing to a new inter
pretation of it, as he proceeded to do the will of his
Father, offering himself as the bread that is consumed
in eating, and the wine that is poured out to be drunk,
as he gave his life in sacrifice for others.
His public ministry opens with the great tempta
tion, which was aimed directly at this his purpose of
self-renunciation. The Messianic conceptions and
ideals of Israel naturally had possessed his thoughts.
They are used by Satan as temptations to lead him to
take into his own hand the ordering of his new work.
Plausible as are the suggestions, he perceives their
true significance, and sweeps one after another aside,
that he may go forward in the pathway of loyal obedi
ence to the will of God. So he begins the self-re
nunciatory ministry in which day by day it becomes
clearer to him that a completer sacrifice will be re
quired. The shadow of the cross reaches down to

114 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
meet him. He begins, months before the end, to
speak of his death which he shall accomplish. He
interprets its meaning, as he turns back to the old
prophets : he is to be despised and rejected ; bruised
for others' transgressions ; and by his stripes they are
to be healed. He foresees the final triumph : "I,
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto
myself." And in the last hour, when the com
pleted act of surrender of his life to God has com.e,
he says, "It is finished." "Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit."
The sacrifice of Jesus is far other than pa3'ing a
penalty, or offering a substitute. It is the reestablish
ing of a life. The divine grace has made this possible.
God condescends to enter into a new covenant, in
which the death of Jesus is a sacrificial seal, as the
offering made by Moses in Exodus xxiv was the
seal of the covenant with Israel. The life now made
possible is appropriated by faith, and becomes a per
manent* possession, witnessing to itself. God con
sents to impute to the beginnings of this new life the
evidential value of its final attainments, and to accept
the forgiven sinner as completely his son, at the mo
ment of his giving himself to Christ. Oneness of life
with God has then begun. God's covenant becomes
the guaranty of its continuance, as Jesus' death is
guaranty of faithful service on the part of the be-

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE II5
liever. Jesus' sacrifice was in his will, rather than
in his bodily sufferings. For the real essence of the
atonement is in Jesus' absolute surrender of his will
to his Father in behalf of sinful men. His bodily
sufferings are as it were a ritual of the inward sacri
fice. The aim of the atonement is perfect obedience ;
therefore we are "saved by his life;" the sacrifice has
opened the way to a life in which the believer be
comes one with the living Christ, and through him at
one with God.'
God does not need the sacrifice in order that his
grace may have existence. But because of the ac
tual value it has in God's eyes, it becomes, to use
Wendt's phrase, an "actually operative motive" for
God to satisfy his gracious will. In this sense it is
the seal of the new covenant, and by it Jesus is made
the High Priest, not after the law of a ceremonial
commandment, but after the power of an endless life.
He offered his life through the eternal Spirit, through
the free, loving choice of a will whose determination
has eternal value, because it is of a divine-human
person, and has the seal of a redeeming death.''
We can apply to it the accustomed terms. It is a
ransom, for by it sinners are delivered from death. It
is a propitiation, for with it God has reconciled the
world unto himself, and has accomplished the purpose
1 See Notes 4, 5 and 6. 2 Notes 7 and 8.

Il6 AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE
dear to the heart of the holy God. It is vicarious,
because Jesus has voluntarily given himself to a suf
fering without which man could not be saved. It is
sacrificial, for it establishes a new covenant of life. It
is an atonement, for by it sin is covered, and man is
rendered growingly at one with God. It restores the
life of God in man to such extent that it compels the
sinner to look at sin with God's eyes, to judge it with
God's judgment, and hate it as God hates it, to the
end that he not only repents but turns from it
forever.' "What is the atonement?" asked David Living
stone of his solitary soul in the last months of his
African wanderings. "It is Himself. It is the inhe
rent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent to
human eyes and ears ; the everlasting love disclosed
by our Lord's life and death. It showed that God
forgives because he loves to forgive."
"Is not the love of Christ for us sinners very won
derful?" said a church officer to a poor old colored
woman, as they paused in the vestibule after a moving
sermon upon the sufferings of Christ. "Oh, no," was
the answer, "it is not wonderful at all. It is just like
him." He knows what the life with God is. He sees it
broken in us. To restore us to God, he gladly faces
1 See Notes 9, 10 and 11.

AFFIRMATION OF THE ATONING SACRIFICE II7
any sacrifice. Counting not even being on an equal
ity with God a thing to be held on to, he takes upon
him the form of a servant, and becomes obedient even
unto death, yea, the death of the cross, for our sake.
And now, to complete that sacrificial act, he pre
sents himself as our Saviour, coming with the life that
is in him to dwell in us, planting the new life and
nourishing it until it shall grow and ripen and bear
fruit, and even sinners, such as we, shall discover that
we too are sons of God.'
1 See Note 12.

VIII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE
RESURRECTION

*^be ^birb 2)ai? He rose from tbe 2)eab"

"\_We^ believe on him that raised Jesus our
Lordfro-m the dead, who was delivered for our
trespasses, and was raised for our justification ."
Romans 4: 24, 25.

CHAPTER VIII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
Let us put ourselves, in thought, back at the hour
when the bewildered company of the disciples, after
the crucifixion, found themselves alone. We can best
understand something of their feelings when in God's
providence we are called to stand at the open grave of
one we love, and the mystery of death rises before us.
We know that the voice we loved we shall no longer
hear; the face, so precious to us, we shall no longer
see. The living atmosphere which the loved one has
created for us is suddenly swept away ; we awake to a
world that appears strange, unsympathetic, having lit
tle understanding of us and our feelings and needs,
and yet one in which we are compelled to go on as if
life had not changed. Then all the mystery of what
lies beyond presses upon us.
But when we recall such hours, and strive to pic
ture to ourselves the state of mind of the disciples
when the Lord had died, we are still quite unfitted to
understand what that event meant to them. The
unseen world of heathenism had long pressed up
against tb§ro; a world peopled with innumerably

122 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
spirits of gods and men, vast in its extent, mysterious
in its details and character. But no voice had ever
come out of that world to disclose its true nature, and
the heart of humanity was everywhere burdened and
overpowered with the insoluble mystery.
These men were Jews, and behind them was the
Old Testament story. They knew here and there of
a man who had "walked with God : and was not ; for
God took him." But how little there is in the Old
Testament of immortality or of detail or suggestion
as to what life beyond the grave may be. Immortal
ity may be assumed, but it is not unfolded. With
that glimmering lamp of the Old Testament, these
Jews had turned in faith to Jesus. He was one come
out of the other life with an authoritative message
as to its reality — coming to bear witness in himself to
all its possibilities. And suddenly this revealer of the
unseen is himself mastered and crushed and trampled
upon by the old enemy — Death ! The open grave
with all its hideousness, with all its darkness, with all
its power of despair, yawns again before them.
Before we advance to consider the affirmation of
the resurrection and see the fulfilment of the prophecy
of the centuries, we find a phrase interjected in the
Creed : "He descended into hell." It appears in the
Apostles' Creed for the first time in the eighth cen
tury, and in any creed only as early as about 400 A.D.,

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION 1 23
when we find it in the Creed of Aquileia; although
it is affirmed in the writings of some of the early
Fathers. We ask what it means, and what was its
purpose. It is given as an amplification of the
phrase "was crucified, dead, and buried," for which
it was substituted as an equivalent affirmation. It
was introduced in the exigencies of controversy. ' It
was the reply of the Church to those who affirmed
that Christ had a human body and not a human soul.
The Church said "He was crucified, dead, and buried"
as a man, and if that does not content you, we will
say "He descended into the place of the dead," which
he could do only in a complete humanity. The
phrase was addressed to a definite heresy. It met
no general need, and it does not appear in the Scrip
ture. Paul has nothing of it in his formal utterance,
"I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according
to the scriptures ; and that he was buried ; and that he
hath been raised on the third day according to the
scriptures." And the statement in i Peter 3 : 19,
about preaching to the spirits in prison, "which afore
time were disobedient, when the longsuffering of
God waited in the days of Noah," is altogether too re
stricted and too uncertain of interpretation to serve
for the foundation of a distinct affirmation of the
1 See Note 1.

124 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
faith in some new and important relation. ' There
was much confusion among the early Fathers as to the
place and condition of the dead. The Bible knows
only two conditions, and not three, whether before
or after the judgment. But mythology has Hades as
the preliminary place of all departed spirits, and this
term in time crept into the Christian conception. But
it took seven centuries and the development of the
doctrine of purgatory to secure for it formal recogni
tion in connection with our Lord's descent into it.
The phrase as now used is without substantial war
rant, and is misleading. It was left out of the Book
of Common Prayer as adopted for use in the Ameri
can Episcopal Church, by the convention in Philadel
phia in 1785, and was only restored at the particular
request of the English ecclesiastical authorities. We
may pass it by as not properly a part of the
Confession.* The resurrection of our Lord on the third day was
made at the outset the corner-stone of the faith of the
new Church. "If Christ be not risen," it was said,
"your faith is vain and our preaching is vain, the dead
in Christ have perished, and we are still in the
common condemnation of the heathen."
Before we can proceed to examine either the use
which the early Church made of the belief, or the
1 See Note 2, s Notes 3, 4, 6 and 6.

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION 1 25
proof of its truthfulness, we are confronted with
Hume's argument as to the inherent impossibility of
ever proving a miracle. The ineradicable scepticism
of the human mind toward all possible evidence of
such an event was a point well taken with the con
ception of nature that maintained in his day. But
that conception has radically changed. Nature to
day embraces far more than the material world.
Mind to-day is held as truly natural as is, for example,
flesh, radical as is the distinction between them. Na
ture embraces man in his entirety. If mind is natu
ral, then spirit and soul are natural. The realm of
nature expands until it includes all that man has ex
perienced or can experience, though it is not by any
means confined to this. It reaches up to and includes
what has been regarded a distinct world, that of the
spirit. There is no good reason why it may not,
as the concept of orderly existence, include God.
About the time of our Lord there lived a great
Latin poet, Lucretius. Those who know his story
know that he was a devout and earnest man who
warred against the superstitions of his day, and strove
to show men the wonders of nature and the unseen
possibilities of existence ; how all things are related as
part of one universe, the seen and the unseen, and
how man is the apparent center of all. He was mis
understood; his name passes as that of a great un-

126 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
believer, but in fact— as is so often the case— he was
simply a man far beyond his times; he grasped a
truth which the modern centuries have slowly
wrought out. A hundred and fifty years ago Bishop
Butler said, "There is no absurdity in supposing that
there may be many beings in the universe whose ca
pacities and knowledge and views may be so exten
sive as that the whole Christian dispensation may
appear to them natural, i.e., analogous, or conforma
ble to God's dealings with other parts of his creation,
as natural as the visible, known course of things ap
pears to us." Bishop Butler also proved in this a
prophet, and his tentative position has already come
to be accepted as philosophically sound.
We have discovered that the supernatural is not the
logical antithesis to the natural. Stated accurately it
is nature and the unnatural, or that which militates
against nature, or antagonizes the uniform method of
nature. We get the right term from the realm of
ethics. We find no suggestion of antithesis to nature
until we come to this. Only in moral relations do we
find the conception. We speak, for example, of an
unnatural son, when we mean a son whose conduct
violates the normal relation of parent and child; as
we speak of unnatural crime when we mean some
thing not to be accounted for by the impulses or pas
sions of common humanity. Sin, therefore, is the

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION 1 27
real and only antithesis to the natural. Professor
Huxley was mistaken in saying that immorality is as
natural as morality. The immoral is not natural. It
is just the one thing in all the world that is unnatural.
Everywhere in nature there is wisdom, will, purpose
and progress, for God is in all. That only is unnatu
ral which is contrary to nature, which would resist the
unfolding of the divine thought, the realization of the
divine purpose. All else is natural.
This at once disposes of the argument against the
possibility of miracles and of the resurrection. Are
not such events witness to the progressive purpose of
the creative God, revealing himself in new manifes
tations of his ways as man's spirit widens to receive
the truth? Is it not the answer to the great yearn
ing of the old Latin poet as he sat up night after
night, as he tells us, striving to find words that
would express his thought and awaken his friend to
his own belief in the reality of the unseen? The
incarnation, the divine human life, and the resurrec
tion of the living Christ, are croyiming events in the
unfolding of the divine plan of which nature is our
best known daily expression.
Teachers of social science are showing that prog
ress is the test of a stable civilization. That is wise
which promotes the permanent welfare of the com
munity, which is in the line of progress judged

128 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
with reference to man's entire nature. So the Church
comes with an advancing revelation both of God
himself and of his purpose toward the world, as the
plan in which is to be set every new truth concerning
God and his Son, and his eternal Spirit.
Upon this setting, this mighty conception of na
ture as the universe, the entire creative work of God,
in which man is not only a part, but of which he is
the supreme product, we have the revelation of Jesus
Christ. The Church affirms concerning him, "I be
lieve in Jesus Christ, who suffered under Pontius
Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried ; the third day
he rose from the dead." And when the old reply is
heard, "That is impossible," her assured answer is,
"Not so. It is just the most natural and probable
fact in all history. In any case it is of a kind to be
established by proper proofs." Then we are free to
proceed to the examination of the evidence.
There is, first, the character of the witnesses.
Everywhere this truth was spoken against. The Sad-
ducees among the Jews, the leaders among the
heathen, the philosophers everywhere, when the res
urrection of the dead was mentioned, mocked. To
one and all the Christians answered, "This Jesus
did God raise up, whereof we all are witnesses." It
was the steady, triumphant, undeviating testimony of
the men who started the swinging march of the Chris-

Affirmation of The Resurrection 129
tian centuries. "We speak that we do know, and bear
witness of that we have seen." And the men who
bore the testimony proceeded at once to stake their
lives and what was dearer than life, their Christian
faith, upon the affirmation of that to them indisputa
ble fact. They had seen the risen Christ, or they
had talked with those who had, and he had shown
himself by many infallible proofs. Moreover, he
lived to them now, and their lives were witness to his
living in them. They were most convincing in
their unconscious testimony. They were strikingly
changed themselves. From having been upbraided
because of their hardness of heart, they displayed now
a robust and stalwart faith. They "saw, and be
lieved." A new light had broken forth for them, and
in the power of it they were new men.
Then there is the testimony of the Church itself and
of its various institutions. These must be accounted
for. The resurrection is wrought into them all. The
Lord's day, what is it but a perpetual witness to the
resurrection of Christ? The Supper is the memorial
of a sacrificial death, and also a festal meal ; why,
except as the seal of a new covenant, and witness to
the resurrection life, to the living and present Christ,
and to sitting with him at last at the wedding supper
of the Lamb? Baptism, what is that but testimony
of a new life already realized by the risen Christ, in

130 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
oneness with whom the forgiven sinner also lives?
So on through all the institutional history of the
Church. "To read the history of the Christian
Church," said the late R. H. Hutton, "without the
belief that Christ has been in organic and vital rela
tion with it, seems to me to read it under the im
pression that a profound illusion can for centuries
exercise more power for good than the truth. "^
There is no surer evidence of an historic event than
its constructive results. If you desire to be certified
of such an event as, for example, the expulsion of the
Pisistratides from Athens, or of the assassination of
Julius Ccesar, or of the beheading of Charles the First,
you find the record in the rise of the Athenian de
mocracy, or of the Roman empire, or of the English
commonwealth. With equal certainty the resurrec
tion of Jesus Christ is to be read in the Christian
Church. The Church is the greatest event in the mod
ern world, whether judged by its history, or by its
present power. It began in the resurrection of Jesus,
and has lived in his life.
In the same line is the spiritual experience of in
dividual believers. It is not to be read in visible in
stitutions, but it is none the less a substantial and
indisputable fact. In all ages the Church has been
able to show a multitude of men and women whose
1" Theological Essays," p. 285.

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION I31
changed lives witness to the substantial character of
their testimony, when we find them, from Paul on
ward, unanimous in attributing the change in them
selves to the power of the living Christ. It does not
do to meet this with a reference to the power of a
persistent superstition. Man's spiritual history fur
nishes well attested facts which are as genuine mate
rial for scientific induction as any other class of facts.
This testimony has from the beginning been success
fully advanced in witness to the truth.
Cyprian, the defender of the African Christians, ap
peals to the facts of his personal experience, which he
holds as indisputable as they are evident. Athana
sius and Gregory of Nyssa dwell on the startling
changes which Christ has wrought in human society,
his power to subdue the hearts of men, and to deliver
them from the fear of death and the dominion of sin.
This is the constant appeal on the lips of the early
apologists. "To those," says Gregory, "who do not
wilfully resist the truth no slight demonstration of the
divine Incarnation is afforded by the testimony of the
facts themselves." "They took knowledge of them,"
says the early record, "that they had been with Jesus."
While over against this ever-renewed evidence of the
Christian life, the deserted and decaying shrines of
heathenism and the hopeless character of heathen
ethics stand as witness to the Redeemer's triumph.

132 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
There remains to be added the testimony of the
contemporary writers as found in the New Testament.
Three of the gospels, however written, were in ex
istence certainly by the year A.D. 80, and they con
tain detailed accounts of the resurrection. At least
four of the epistles of Paul have never been ques
tioned as to their authenticity by any critic worthy of
note, and they all are shaped, in warp and woof, by
the apostle's unalterable conviction of the same truth.
These must be accounted for if the resurrection did
not occur. It is impossible to believe in a retrospec
tive attempt to create for theological purposes a false
tradition concerning a period and events that were
then so recent. The circumstances were altogether
too adverse, and hostility was too bitter and too alert
for such an attempt to succeed. It is far easier to
accept the truth of events which, much as they were
antagonized, proved indisputable, than to try to ex
plain how an unfounded claim of such a startling
character should have won wide and influential
acceptance. If we were seeking evidence of a historic event
merely, we might gather also the testimony of un
believers. But when the question is of the beginning
of a new life in the world, and new powers of human
action, and new attainment of spiritual being, then
there could be no testimony without the life itself.

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION 1 33
We turn instinctively to that, the testimony of the
millions of believers who to-day know Jesus Christ.
As believers we unite, not as affirming our faith in a
historic Christ, not as drawn together by force of a
tradition of what happened on the hills of Judaea eigh
teen hundred years ago. We are in the line of that
great company, the noble army of martyrs, and those
others following them who, in all lands and all condi
tions, have known Jesus Christ themselves. There are
in heathen lands missionaries who have given up all
that life presents as dear to any man — home and com
fort and friends and prospects — to do what? To go to
the far islands of the South Pacific, among savages, to
bury themselves as Livingstone did in Central Africa,
to stand single-handed at posts of peril in Armenia, to
work on through all the turmoil of nations battling in
China ; unfaltering in their faith, ardent in their testi
mony, to what? To the presence with them of the
living Christ. Prisoners in jail, sufferers on the
hospital cot, toilers in all departments of God's great
vineyard to-day, witnessing a good confession, bear
ing trial and loneliness and disappointment and loss
of the favor of men, enduring bodily pain and the
weight of advancing years, and greeting oncoming
death with a kiss, because they know Jesus Christ as
a present help in every time of need, their Comforter
and Guide, their Saviour and Lord ; whose final word

134 AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION
of "Well done, good and faithful servant : enter thou
into the joy of thy Lord" shall be the crown above
crowns in their triumph, and the peace deeper than
peace in their hearts.
Now it is this that forms the united testimony upon
the strength of which the Church repeats that glori
ous affirmation of triumph, "The third day he rose
from the dead."
But any infidel is competent to gather for us historic
testimony concerning the resurrection of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Any historian can tell us how incon
ceivable it is that the Christian Church should have
lived all these centuries with the glorious story of
Christ and of struggle in his name — should have
lived such a story, to have it then prove idle and un
true. The question is, What does the affirmation
m.ean to the Church? The Church knows that Jesus
Christ, being rich, for our sakes became poor, that we
through his poverty might be made rich. Therefore
in the consciousness of the riches given to us of God
in the new life brought down from God out of heaven
to us sinners by Jesus Christ our Lord — a life planted
in the death of our sinful hearts by divine grace, cul
tured and kept alive in our feebly-growing Christian
experience, and constituting, despite our sins and our
unbelief, our one hope, both for this world and the
world to come — in the consciousness of this im-

AFFIRMATION OF THE RESURRECTION I35
planted and sustained life of Jesus Christ in our
hearts, we say, "The third day he rose from the dead ;"
and we live because he lives.
"What makes you think that you are a Christian?"
said a member of the session to a young girl who had
asked for reception into a Scotch church. The candi
date looked up astonished, and simply answered,
"Why, he saved my soul !" That was all ; and that
was enough. "He has saved my soul." If a man can
say that of Jesus Christ, he can affirm all that the
Church has said concerning his birth, his life, his
death and his resurrection. It was all that he might
save my soul. He has done it. Therefore I believe. '
1 See Note 7.

IX
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT
CHRIST

**He ascenbeb into Heaven anb sittetb at
tbe IRiQbt Hanb of (Bob tbe fatber

aimiabti^"

"For Christ entered . . . into heaven itself,
now to appear before the face of God for us.
Hbbbbvts 9: 24.

CHAPTER IX
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
When we have satisfied ourselves as to the fact of
the resurrection, the affirmation of the ascension of
our Lord needs no proof. We pass on at once to try
to understand its significance. And here we come
again to what has been so often affirmed and illus
trated — that the creed of the Church is by no means
a mere dry and philosophic assertion of theoretical
truth ; it is the affirmation on the part of the Christian
Church of its life — the life that is, and the life that is
to come — one life — God working himself out in the
children he has made.
As we read the story of Jesus, a very significant
fact occurs in the account of the resurrection ; that is,
the striking change that took place in the attitude of
his disciples toward him. Before the resurrection
they lived with him as an intimate companion, follow
ing his counsels and occasionally feeling his rebuke.
But the moment he appears in the resurrection form,
all is changed. Without needing his words, "Touch
me not ; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father,"
they stand withdrawn from him. They are awed;

140 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
they are conscious of the benediction of his presence,
but there is no hint of intimacy or even familiarity.
There is no reaching out the hand to touch him,
even when the invitation is given. They have awak
ened to a new world. The life in which the mortal
puts on immortality, and the earthly body gives place
to the heavenly, is suddenly realized. Even though
they are reminded of Jesus' words that he should
rise from the grave, and they had assembled in an
ticipation of it, the reality startles them. It sud
denly changes everything. It was like nothing so
much as awakening out of a dream. A new world
opens, beside which the past suddenly becomes un
real and shadowy. It gathers up every interest into
itself. It comes to them from without and from
above. They are awed ; they are not yet of it ; but its
coming to them, in the power of the risen Lord,
makes them different men.
Then as we go on with the story we find that they
promptly and cheerfully surrender any claim to
superiority over other believers because of their hav
ing been received in the past into greater personal
intimacy with Jesus. "Though we have known
Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no
more." They have suddenly become aware of the
significance of this new life into which Jesus had
entered, of its meaning for them as well as for him.

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST I41
They hasten to present themselves as witnesses, not
of the miraculous healings nor of the sacrificial death
of Jesus, but of his presence as one come into our
life to save sinners, among whom they themselves
are possessed only of this advantage, that they had
known him first. This is remarkable. The only
men who have a right to bear testimony stand before
the Church to-day with the teaching that with a dead
Christ the Christian method of salvation is useless,
that the real Christ is as truly the companion of the
penitent, believing soul to-day as he was ever the
companion of Peter and John, and that it is as truly
the privilege of the Church to-day to know him, to
receive the life that is in him, and to get needed
hourly help from him, as it ever was possible for that
little company of his disciples to walk with him on the
hills of Galilee, or to be protected by him from the
storm on the Galilaean sea.
There is one of the epistles more than any other
devoted to this theme, the Epistle to the Hebrews.
It was apparently written just before the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Romans, which occurred in the
year A.D. 70. We can easily picture the situation.
The Jewish converts were looking for the restoration
of the kingdom to Israel; but the Lord delayed his
coming. Meanwhile, so far from seeing the kings of
the earth bringing their riches and their glory into

142 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
Zion, they saw gathering about them the threatening
forces of the heathen. Persecution had arisen. The
restlessness and turbulence of the Jews only made
their destruction the more certain and immediate.
In this time of distress, a message is given to one of
these perplexed and despondent Hebrew Christians
for his own people — a revelation as to the risen and
ascended Christ, pointing out his real though unseen
presence, and his power to comfort and strengthen
in their present need.
The message is also for us. At the close of a cen
tury the greatest in history, when the world seems
everywhere leaping forward to a millennium glory, so
rapid has been the development of civilization in all
its forms, we find ourselves paralyzed by the slug
gishness of the Christian heart. Nations that should
stand as witnesses of Jesus Christ are locked in deadly
struggle or standing at guard against one another in
eager greed to divide the plunder of the world among
themselves. The cry of the oppressed is not heard ;
the strong do not hesitate to crush the weak; great
accumulations of wealth have brought great power
and great alienations ; men everywhere distrust one
another; passion has become prudent, but none the
less selfish and cruel ; and with all our boasted prog
ress, the forces of evil were never more prevalent or
more intense.

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST I43
We are as men in a great battle which we hope
we shall win, which we believe we shall win, but of
which, from hour to hour, we can make out only the
confusion of the fray. Personal loss and discipline
have to be met. Trials grow thick at home as abroad,
in business, in thought, in Christian work. New con
troversies continually arise. The wisest plans fail.
Fruitage is often small. Old things pass quickly
away. We ask, as the Church has asked so often in
the years gone by, "What are the signs of His com
ing?" And again we hear the word of the Lord him
self, "Of that day and hour knoweth no one." There
fore we must seek the source of strength, if we are
to find it, not in eccentric interpretations of prophecy,
not in setting times and seasons, or anticipating a sud
den coming of our Lord in the skies, but rather in the
summons to look up and fix our thoughts upon the
abiding relationship of the ascended Christ to his peo
ple. We hear him say, "In your patience ye shall win
your souls," and we ask ourselves, "How shall I do it
unless He be with me, in my home, at my business, in
the Church?" When I know what it means as tes
timony to the abiding presence of the living Christ in
all my daily life that I say, "He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God," then I may well
be at peace, come what will of personal trial or of
delay in the method by which in his divine wisdom
God brings in his kingdom.

144 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
I. We learn from the unfolding of the truth in the
Epistle to the Hebrews that the ascension of Christ
has given to the Church a more real sense of his
presence. He now appears "before the face of God
for us." The crucified Christ is in the very presence
of God to-day for you and me ; our present needs are
his immediate concern; he could not be more really
with us than he is.
Death brings to us a strange new sense of pos
session among those we love. They are taken from us
and buried out of our sight. We are overwhelmed.
The loss is irreparable. It is hard to understand how
joy can find place again in our life. The blessed
companionship in which our whole life seemed to be
wrapped up is gone, and we surrender ourselves to
the dull routine of daily duty with no expectation.
Slowly we come to be aware that the loved one is not
dead but living. We awake to a new, strange sense
of possession. Time may change others, distance
may divide, other interests may arise to lessen the
strength of their affection, but this loved one will
never change. He is beyond the realm of time, be
yond the separations of space ; there can be no divi
sion of interests or waning of love in him. He is
where they see eye to eye, he is ours forever. And
when the last day comes to the believer, his eager an
ticipation of his Lord is intermingled with that of glad
reunion with those he has loved and lost.

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST I45
Now, what is this but the earnest of a greater
truth, a suggestion, an illustration, a consequence, a
proof, as you will, of the reality of the presence of the
unseen Christ? It is what the Saviour promised.
"It is expedient for you that I go away." Why?
"For if I go not away, the Comforter will not come
unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you."
This new, inspiring, life-giving presence of God him
self is to be the blessed possession of all believers
for all time to come. "Lo, I am with you all the
days, even unto the end of the world."
The disciples at once entered into the sense of the
Saviour's presence. He opened their understanding,
he gave power to their words ; in his name they said,
"Rise up and walk;" he unlocked the prison doors
and led them forth ; at their death, as to Stephen, he
personally appeared. From the day he appeared to
him on the way to Damascus he was never distant
from the Apostle Paul. In special hours, as in
Corinth, he spoke to him, "Hold not thy peace : for
I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to harm
thee." With the care of all the churches, keenly con
scious of his bodily infirmities, holding himself as one
born out of due time, it was this conviction of Christ
as with him more fully and satisfyingly than he ever
could have been had he remained in the flesh, that
enabled the apostle to push on with his triumphant

146 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
but sacrificial load. The place the phrase "In Christ"
takes in Paul's letters, reveals the intimacy of the
fellowship he enjoyed.
This is what kept alive the hope of the Lord's
speedy coming. He never is distant. He may at
any time draw the veil that shuts out his visible
presence. The martyr always expected to see his
face before the onrush of the lions or the final effort
of the torturer. Jesus is spiritualized by the resur
rection, but not dehumanized. He has come into
more intimate touch with his followers ; he is closer
to their hearts, a more real and personal possession.'
II. The ascension of our Lord gives to us also a
more effective application of his sacrifice. The life
from God that Jesus brought into the world would
never have been fully revealed by his example and
teaching; it required the addition of his sacrificial
death. "God commendeth his own love toward us, in
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
Had we had only the example, we might have con
ceived of redemption for the righteous, but of no pos
sible salvation for the ignorant, the hopeless, the
despised. It was only after he had offered the one
possible and sufficient sacrifice for sin, that he sat
down at the right hand of God. Only then was the
extent of the divine love revealed.

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST 1 47
But for this our pride also would stand in the way
of our salvation. You go with aid to the strong
swimmer in trouble in the surf. You help him safely
to the shore. How natural for him to say that he was
not really in distress, that he could have got out by
himself ! The giving of Christ himself for us in a sac
rifice, costly, complete and accepted, declares our help
lessness. No example could have saved us. We all
were sinners and had come short of the glory of God.
Jesus, the crucified but risen and living Christ, alone
can save us.
The emphasis of the New Testament is always upon
this — the sacrifice of Christ made effective by his life.
See how much the writer of this Epistle to the He
brews makes of the life of Christ. "He is able to save
to the uttermost them that draw near unto God
through him" (7: 25). How? Because of his sacrificial
death? The very lowest sinner, the most degraded,
the most helpless, he is able to save. Because his
righteousness is 'imputed? That is not his thought.
He is able to save to the uttermost, "seeing he ever
liveth to make intercession for them." It is the cru
cified Christ who is the risen and ascended Christ,
standing in the very presence of God, with our names
written on his heart, who saves us as sinners.
Again, in the very opening of the epistle, God, who
of old tried in a thousand ways to bring men to him-

148 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
self, and failed, "hath at the end of these days spoken
unto us in his Son." Who "when he had made puri
fication of sins" — shed his blood as a sacrifice to
bring us to God — when he had done that, he "sat
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high ; hav
ing become by so much better than the angels"
(1 : 3, 4) — so much better able to help us sinners.
And again, he is a priest forever, "not after the law of
a carnal commandment, but after the power of an
endless life" (7: 16). Thus the life of the Christian
to-day is found in the living Christ who has ascended
from the grave, and stands before God pleading for
sinners, because his life he has planted in our hearts,
and by his indwelling Spirit is nourishing it, until by
divine grace we sinners shall be changed into the
likeness of his own glory. It is this power of Christ,
putting himself in the place of the sinner, and work
ing out in himself the life which the sinner cannot
live, which gives to his sacrifice a power perpetual and
vital to touch men's hearts and change their lives.
Adelaide Procter tells the story of a young nun
who was induced to run off with a soldier whom she
had nursed in the hospital. When he soon betrayed
and forsook her, she returned to the neighborhood of
the convent, hoping to die in her shame. In the early
darkness an older nun found her in the shadow of the
convent wall, and told her that she might return and

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST I49
take up the old life, no one being the wiser, for she
herself, discovering her flight, had, in the strength of
her faith in the love of Christ to bring her back, so
carefully performed all her duties in her absence that
she had not yet been missed. The completeness of
her substituting her life for her friend's had covered
her sin. What is this but a picture of Jesus Christ,
not as dead, but as the living Christ, putting himself
in the place of his servant, supplying his need, leading
on his life, until at last he brings him, repenting and
renewed, as an offering to the Father?'
III. In the ascension we discern also a more
gracious condescension of the divine love. As the
writer to the Hebrews says, "We have not a high
priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our
infirmities ; but one that hath been in all points
tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (4: 15). We
love to read the story of our Saviour's life; how he
was born in a humble home, worked in a carpenter's
shop, endured hardship from his surroundings in all
those penitential years, living the life of the plainest of
men. But not of that Judaean Christ, not of Jesus
of Nazareth, do we think to-day. Our thoughts rise
to that ascended Lord, made higher than the angels,
sitting in the glories of heaven, the ineffable glory,
where pure eyes do not behold iniquity, waiting for
t See Note 2.

150 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
the day of his triumph, when all the universe shall
unite to sing psans to his honor, yet turning aside
from all to be your Saviour and mine.
You remember the old classical story, how after
a great battle Alexander the Great drew up his victo
rious captains in long array, that he might distribute
the prizes and spoils. Walking along the line, as
signing the treasures to one and another, he came
to Cleomenes his friend. Stepping up to him and
putting his hands upon his shoulders, he simply
kissed him. Now stippose instead of Cleomenes his
friend, it had been Cleomenes the traitor. Suppose
it were Peter, or any one of the little company that
forsook Jesus and fled ; suppose it were any one of the
innumerable Christians saved in spite of themselves;
suppose it were the profligate Augustine, or the
drunken John Newton, or John Bunyan, the low,
vile tinker, or Jerry McAuley, the river-thief — and
Jesus Christ the Lord, in the day of his glory, has
come, with that great multitude whom no man can
number, bringing gifts to his own — what is to be his
prize? The kiss of pardon; the smile of forgiveness;
the outstretched hands of the Father of the prodigal
in divine benediction ; the joy among the angels of
God over the sinner who repents.
All that Jesus has done, all that Jesus is as the
Saviour of the world, is gathered up and made ef-

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST 151
fective for us in the tender sympathy, the immediately
available helpfulness of the present Christ. That is
what touches hearts. "Jesus Christ loves me."
When men and women say that, the new life has
come. A lady who had tried for several days in vain to
make some provision for a fallen girl who desired to
live a better life, stood before the girl, distressed at
her failure, and distressed still more at the girl's stony
hopelessness. "I told you it is no use," the girl said,
and went out. Some hours after, she came back. "I
could n't stand your crying," she said. The burden of
the gospel is just here, to make men believe that so
God loves. Patripassianism may have been a heresy,
but that God is so near to us, and his love to
us so real as to make his sorrow over our sins a
suffering to himself, is a most persuasive truth.
IV. The ascension of the Lord opens to us also a
more efficient and helpful teaching. Through the
years of his earthly ministry Jesus was busy teaching
his disciples. For what? For the days when he
should no longer be with them. It was the teaching
of the schoolmaster preparing his pupils for antici
pated needs. With his resurrection and ascension all
that passed away. At once they were no longer dis
ciples at school, but sons entrusted with their
Father's business' — taken as it were into active part-

152 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
nership. "Ye are my witnesses." Why? Because
the world is the field. It is the sphere in which my
kingdom is to be established. I have chosen you and
ordained you for service. Ye, beloved, are workers
together with God.
Therefore the teaching that we as Christians are
receiving daily from the Lord is not to be regarded
as preparatory teaching to fit us for the life that
heaven shall develop. It is rather partnership teach
ing, in which the senior partner works by the side
of the junior, giving him the benefit of his larger
knowledge and experience, because their interests are
one; and everything the junior does is for the older,
and all the wisdom and love and tenderness and
strength of the older is for the junior.
The wonder of the divine salvation bursts upon us
here. We have come to Jesus Christ with our
hearts full of skepticism and hardness and unbelief.
We have wondered how all these things could be
true. We have questioned all the revelation of the
past and all the teaching of the New Testament, and
we have stood afar off, and have had unrest in our
souls. At last the gracious love of our God has
brought us one by one near to himself, until we are
willing to say, "Lord, what wouldst thou have me to
do?" And the answer is, "Come unto me, and thou
shalt live." We venture. We have come to be will-

AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST 15;^
ing to be Christians. Very imperfect ones, often
falling back, but never forsaken of the Lord Jesus
Christ, doers of his will, bearers of his name. And
now our eyes are lifted up, and we discover, as Paul
did, that Christ is with us ; that he is going to abide
with us always. So we go about our business, we
travel, we go to our homes, our offices ; we have trial,
and perplexity, and bodily pain, and the heart is
rent, and the will has to be summoned, and we won
der what all God's strange providences mean; and
here comes back the assurance that Jesus Christ, the
living Christ, is with us every day ; that we are doing
his business, that we are working together with him,
that he is by our side and in our hearts, and we can
almost feel the touch of his hand; and we take
courage, and go on.
We now understand the wonderful exhortations
with which the epistle closes. Looking unto Jesus,
the author and perfecter of our faith, himself the
new and living way and the great high priest over the
house of God, we are to run our race and do our
work. We are not alone, nor have we found a God
of the thunder and tempest and darkness. We are
come "unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the liv
ing God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable
hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church of
the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, arid to

r54 AFFIRMATION OF THE EFFICIENT CHRIST
God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men
made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of a new
covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speak-
eth better than that of Abel." Therefore we cast away
our feebleness, as the apostle says ; we cast away our
fears and uncertainties. We receive Jesus Christ as
a very present help in every time of need, and putting
our band in his, proceed to live with him, as the
disciples lived with him when they first forsook all
that they might follow him and be with him forever.

X
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING
JUDGE

** from tbence He sball come to jubge
tbe <Si\\\c\\ anb tbe Deab "

" Looking for the blessed hope and appearing
ofthe glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus
Christ." Titus 2 : 13.
" For we must all be made manifest before the
judgment-seat of Christ; that each one -may re
ceive the things done in the body, according to
what he hath done, whether it be good or bad."
2 Cob. 5: 10.

CHAPTER X
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
The characteristic of the Christian Church as dis
tinct from the world about it is tliat it stands with
expectant and upturned face, looking for that event
which is to be the crown and triumph of the Christian
life; whereas the world about us faces the unknown.
Carlyle has stated the common thought : "We are
marching forward into the mists of the future tense."
There ought to be a future life ; but all the world's
experience and philosophy, its history and its specu
lation, give it only guesses as to what lies beyond the
grave. Over against this stands the Church with its
positive teaching and sure hope, waiting for the
coming and triumph of its Lord.
There is that in us which makes it hard for us to
believe that death ends all. We find a necessity for
much posthumous readjustment. Without a future
life, this world would be the greatest enigma, the
most inconsequential existence, that the mind of man
can conceive. Sin is a fact that cannot be annihilated
by oblivion. Forgiveness does not undo it. Its
consequences remain in our life, its memory abides in

158 AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
our hearts, and unconfessed sin has a way of gripping
the soul. We cannot shake it off. For this reason,
however stout our denials, we cannot easily get rid of
the conviction that somewhere, by and by, there is to
be a judgment. Conscience never entirely sleeps,
and her voice is the premonition of another Voice
that will surely speak in due time. Consequently,
men do startling things in spite of themselves ; the
obduracy of a lifetime vanishes in a moment, and
the most reckless or defiant spirit stands paralyzed
before its fears. Some years ago the watchman was
shot at the Kaskaskia railroad bridge, in Illinois.
Some one had fired, in the darkness, through the
window of his little guard-house, and killed him in
his chair. Several months after, a man gave himself
up to the authorities, confessing the crime. He
begged for trial and punishment, as a relief from the
remorse he suffered. The face of his victim haunted
him, he said, until he could bear it no longer. "I
knew it was wrong all the time," has said more than
one strong business man in my presence, in an hour
of distress, concerning business methods which he had
long practised or stoutly justified.
"In the corrupted currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice;
And oft 't is seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But 't is not so above.
There is no shuffling; there the action lies

AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE 159
In his true nature ; and we ourselves compelled.
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults.
To give in evidence."'
Therefore if the salvation which God has provided
as a redemption for sin is to be real, there must,
sooner or later, be such a judgment as shall declare
the truth and completely overcome evil. This is the
explanation of the testimony of man's heart ; it is the
foretaste in him of what is in reserve, either of
condemnation or acquittal.
As we open the Old Testament, we find that the
Hebrews, although they believed in immediate retri
bution, personal and national, looked upon the other
world, as all men had, as a world of anxiety and fear.
The Old Testament everywhere presupposes another
life. Death, to the Israelite, in every stage of his
history, meant more than the end of earthly exist
ence. It opened a new condition. There was to him
a real though a shadowy world beyond. The fathers
were there. Enoch "walked with God : and he was
not ; for God took him." That only indicated some
thing remarkable in the manner of Enoch's death or
in the type of his piety, not that he was unique in sur
viving the grave. Sheol was a place of conscious
existence, out of which at times a spirit might come ;
hence necromancy was forbidden. As revelation ad-
1 Hamlet, Act. 3, Scene 3.

l6o THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
vanced, they came to know the certainty both of
future punishment and of future joy. The Psalmist
says (i6:io, ii), "Thou wilt not leave my soul to
Sheol ; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see
corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life : in
thy presence is fulness of joy; in thy right hand there
are pleasures for evermore." This widened into
the resurrection view of Isaiah (26 : 19) : "Thy dead
shall live ; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and
sing, ye that dwell in the dust : for thy dew is as the
dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead ;"
and of Daniel (12:2), "And many of them that sleep
in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever
lasting life, and some to shame and everlasting
contempt." The Jews had come to believe that
at least for the chosen people a way was to be found
through the darkness of the grave into the pleasant
pastures of the life of God himself.
The New Testament brought life and immortality
to light. Jesus came out of the other world, and, re
turning into it, left no doubt as to its reality or as to
its essential character. Life becomes the presence
and favor of God ; death is separation from God.
"And this is life eternal," says Jesus in his farewell
prayer, "that they should know thee the only true
God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus
Christ" (John 17:3). "Depart from me," is the

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE l6l
final sentence of doom (Matt. 25 : 41). Thus the
other life takes on the essential features of this
life, and both become one. The dead are carry
ing forward the life they once shared with the living,
shut out from them now only by the change of exter
nal conditions. They are not annihilated, and they
are not unconscious. It has been left for our times
to offer us feeble suggestions of an easy solu
tion of serious ecclesiastical difficulties. But God is
no more now than he ever has been a God of the
dead. The Saviour's promise to the dying thief can
not be lightly swept aside; nor Paul's desire "to de
part and be with Christ," and his readiness to be ab
sent from the body that he might be "at home with
the Lord." And the vision given to the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews of the city of the living God,
as the abode of "the spirits of just men made perfect,"
is as far from being accordant with a post-mortem
state of unconsciousness. Annihilation, as Principal
Fairbairn has said, would be a confession of failure on
God's part. It is as unphilosophical as it is unscrip
tural. Hades, which is the Greek synonym for the Sheol
of the Old Testament, is never used in the New
Testament as the name of the abode of the righteous.'
"Paradise" is the term for their home. It indicates
1 See Note 1.

l62 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
life with God. Jesus is represented as already there,
and his saints are gathered and gathering around him.
"For our citizenship is in heaven," says Paul ; "from
whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ" (Phil. 3 : 20). Those who have reached that
blessed abode know already as they are known, and
having Christ, have all. Heaven, to the Christian, is,
above all, home. It brings immediate reunion with
those we have loved, and opens constant and satis-
tVing occupation. It is the place where the heavenly
Father spreads his table, and the Saviour fulfils his
promise that if we will open to him the door, he
will come in and sup with us and we with him.
But it is also the home to which the absent sons
have come, being the men they are ; therefore the
place where they shall find the full employment of all
their capacities and powers. The glories of the New
Jerusalem which filled the apostle's mind in the vision
of the Apocalypse, culminate in the revelation that
there "his servants shall do him service." Heaven is
a place of exemption from all that molests or makes
afraid ; it is a place of rest and joy unbounded. But
that is not enough. The believer has entered his
Father's house; he has become freed from earthly
cares and illusions ; and as a child who has finished
his school life and goes home to enter his father's
business and share his life, so the Christian passing

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE 1 63
out of this life in the full possession of his powers,
intellectual, moral and physical, shall find for them
nobler uses than ever before.'
Heaven is, in the thought of the believer, a place
of eager expectancy. Archbishop Leighton, at the
end of his long and beautiful life, commiserated
by friends because of his infirmities, replied that
"from the shaking of the prison doors he was led to
hope that some of those brisk blows would throw
them open and give him the release he coveted."
He "seemed to stand tiptoe on the margin of eternity,
in a delightful amazement of spirit, eagerly awaiting
the summons to depart, and feeding his soul with the
prospect of immortal hope and glory." "Ah, but you
have great assurance," said a friend. "No, truly," he
replied, "only a good hope and a great desire to see
what they are doing on the other side."
The late Professor Lewis Stearns, the brilliant
promise of whose opening career was so sadly cut
short by his early death, writes in the closing chapter
of his "Present Day Theology," upon the delights of
heaven as furnishing opportunity for those who have
been taken from this world in the fulness of their
powers and capacity for service in God's kingdom.
He pictures Eliot and Brainerd finding there the
souls of their red Indians; and Moffatt and Living-
1 See Note 2,

164 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
Stone the souls of their dearly loved Africans. He
little thought how soon he would join them, and
together with David and Isaiah and John and Paul,
plunge into the deep things of God, and find worthy
employment for his own eager mind in opening to
those gathered about him who have not had his train
ing or are not possessed of his intellectual grasp, the
truths he long wanted to know, now revealed in their
fulness and beauty. Is not this the true opportunity,
the fitting crown of any life dedicated to God and lov
ing the service of the kingdom, that it should spend
itself at last in labors which, shared with those we
love, shall make demands on every faculty, and feel
ing the perpetual joy of gaining knowledge, shall also
forever have the delight of communicating it to
others? Concerning the future state of those who die im
penitent, we know little. Revelation lifts the veil but
imperfectly upon their after condition. They are out
cf Christ and under the dominion of death, and the
implication of Scripture is of fi.xed conditions. Pro
bation, as we know it, involves conditions so different
from any in which they can possibly be, conditions of
mingled good and evil, that it is difficult to imagine
how it can be found in the life beyond. We knovi'
that God is loving toward all, and not willing that any
should perish, and we can be sure that at last no ac-

THE Affirmation of the coming judge 165
cusation can lie against him for not having done all
that is possible to bring every soul back to himself;
but we know also that now is the accepted time, and
that there is a tremendous urgency upon every man
that for his soul's sake, as for Christ's sake, he should
repent and be converted now.'
Out of that other life where to-day are all the dead,
Christ shall come. The time of his coming we do not
know. It has been much in the mind of the Church,
but it would have been well if Christians had not
wasted their time on idle speculations and vain read
ings of prophecy. Some things are clear. The king
dom of God is a growth. It has a history and a
development. It requires time. The earth is to be
filled with the glory of God, and the whole creation
waits. God has infinite leisure and patience. We
wonder at the long-suffering of God, as we wonder at
the patience of Jesus, giving himself in loneliness and
without visible success to a ministry which should
find its fruitage on the cross. We realize that there
must be some deep-lying necessity. The Church
requires leading, and enlightening experience.
There must be time for the slow accumulations of
knowledge, and the building up of Christian charac
ter, as we know all character has to be built up,
increment by increment. Growth in grace can only
1 See Notes 3, 4, 5 and 6.

i66 the affirmation of the coming judge
come by discipline in watchfulness and self-control.
What is true of the individual must be true of the
Church. The history has been what we should ex
pect. The Church has had not only to learn by her
shortcomings her dependence upon her Lord and the
meaning of faith, but has had to learn the value of the
pearl of great price by the labor of winning it.
One epoch ended with the destruction of Jerusalem.
This was an event in itself so startling, and in our
Lord's prophetic utterance was so intermingled with
the end of all things, that the early Christians might
naturally be confused by it into looking for the Lord's
immediate return. But while they had been taught
that this was a possibility, they had been warned
against attempting to fix the time. By degrees the
Church has learned to wait. In patience and in quiet
growth, in a love like the Lord's for sinful men, the
gospel is to be everywhere preached, not as a procla
mation, but as the seed corn of the kingdom, which
at last, with its ripened harvest of noble lives and
perfected civilization, shall be the witness to what the
Lord has wrought, and the fitting reward of his
sacrifice.' One difficult passage in Revelation (20:1-10) has
led some excellent people to believe that Christ is
coming to reign for a thousand years upon the earth,
1 See Note 7.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE 1 67
after which the powers of evil are to be again let loose
preparatory to a second resurrection. If the passage
is to be interpreted literally, it is in harmony with
nothing else in the Bible ; and experience teaches that
such literal interpretation has given rise to fanaticism
and excess. Augustine long ago suggested that the
passage applies to the age in which we are living, in
which Christ does dwell with his people, giving them
power to do his work. But be that as it may, the
method of the growth of the kingdom seems to be
established. In time the heathen world is to be taken
for Christ; the kings of the earth are to bring their
tribute and their glory into it; the Church is to be
tempted and tried continually, and doubtless never to
pass beyond the necessity of that discipline of trial
and sorrow and failure which plays so large a part in
our individual growth into the likeness of Christ.
Finally, as the thief comes in the night, and as the
fl-ood came in the days of Noah, when men were buy
ing and selling, and the business of life was going on,
the Lord shall come. Every eye shall see him. The
dead shall be there ; all witnessing to his triumph, as
senting to his judgment. The righteous God will be
seen to have done righteously. The loving God will
be seen to have done all that divine love could do for
the saving of the world. And the Father will be
recognized as gathering every child that will come, to

1 68 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE
himself. It will be the day of declaration. The days
of probation are past. The Lord gathers his own.
There shall be fulness of joy. Then shall be known
what is the life and immortality which have been
brought to light through the gospel ; and Jesus and
his redemption will be seen to be the center and
crown of all God's work in the universe.'
So this vision of the coming Christ becomes the
test of daily service. That the Christian shall be will
ing to work wherever God puts him; that he shall
not measure his service by visible gain; that he
shall leave results to his Master, being content to do
his work ; that he shall be characterized by a restful
spirit, serene, confident, as one who knows his service
and his reward ; that he shall not be content to build
up his own life, but give his strength to bringing
in the kindgom in the hearts and lives of others — is
properly required of one who knows that his Lord is
coming, and who has always before him the thought
of that glad day. The test of the Church is that it has
its face ever turned outward and upward, not finding
its joy in the oneness with which its members draw
near to each other, but the eagerness with which they
turn to daily life with its opportunities for helpful ser
vice, and to the future for the coming triumph of their
Lord. "The Lord make you to increase and abound
1 See Note 8.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE COMING JUDGE 1 69
in love one toward another, and toward all men . . .
to the end he may stablish your hearts unblameable in
holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of
our Lord Jesus with all his saints" (i Thess. 3 : 12,13),
is the first recorded prayer of the early Church. As
that prayer is answered and the individual heart is
established in the truth of Jesus, we are permitted to
see Christian after Christian, as the summons comes
to go home, and the bodily powers fail, and the
eyes close their earthly vision, have given to them
the vision granted the beloved disciple ; and again the
glories of the evening sunlight melt into the glories
of the new day, the purple, the amaranth and the gold
of the horizon becoming anew the radiance from the
towers of the celestial city ; and as the voices of earth
fade from the dull ears, the voices of loved ones be
yond are heard again; and the Lord himself walks
with his child through the portals of his Father's
house. Adoringly we sing, "We believe that Thou
shalt come to be our Judge;" and unitedly we pray,
"Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly."

XI
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST

** 1 believe in tbe Holi? (Bbosf

"Nevertheless T tell you the truth; It is ex
pedient for you that I go away : for if I go not
away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but
if T ZO, I will send him unto you." ., ,„ „
-^ * ' ^ John 16: 7.
" Now I beseech you, brethren, . . . by the
love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me
in -your -prayers to God for me."
• EoMANSl5:30.

CHAPTER XI
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
It is significant that this simple affirmation of the
Creed has contented the Church concerning the doc
trine of the Holy Spirit. Here there is no complica
tion. "He shall not speak from himself," said Jesus ;
"but what things soever he shall hear, these shall he
speak. . . . He shall glorify me : for he shall take of
mine, and shall declare it unto you." In the divine
economy, the Holy Spirit has come as the indwelling
God ; to abide in the Church by living in the heart and
life of the believer. How real this abiding presence
was to be, and how he was to supplement, and, we
might almost say, supersede, the presence of the
Lord himself, is shown by the manner in which our
Lord introduced him. In that solemn hour, the
climax of his ministry, when all that is in our Lord's
heart gathers itself up and finds expression in his
farewell words, he turns to his distressed disciples and
says. There is no harm in this. It falls in with the
eternal purpose by which not only the world is to be
redeemed from sin, but in which the infinite love of
the Father himself is manifest. "I tell you the

1 74 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
truth" — as if to reaffirm the statement which they
should never thereafter forget — "for if I go not away,
the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go,
I will send him unto you." He says little of the
world of spirit into which he is going, except to affirm
its reality ; but he makes what he means to be a sub
stantial promise to his disciples in this hour of their
great need. The relation in which he has stood to
them is testimony to the comprehensiveness of the
promise. They had become conscious that he was
sustained by another presence than that of men.
Matthew speaks of him as "led up of the Spirit into
the wilderness to be tempted of the devil" (4:1).
Luke describes him as returning "in the power of the
Spirit into Galilee." The disciples, even at that time,
though they knew nothing of the meaning of the
promise of the Spirit, were conscious that Jesus was
overshadowed by that direct, divine revelation of him,
and that his whole ministry was in obedience to it;
so that the Lord, speaking of himself, asserts that he
casts out devils by the power of the Holy Spirit (Matt.
12 : 28). And when, years after, the New Testament
books came to be written, we find all that our Saviour
did and suffered attributed to the guidance of this
same Spirit of God in him. In Acts we read that
"through the Holy Ghost" he gave commandment
(1:2); and that God anointed him with "the Holy

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST 175
Ghost and with power" (lo: 38) ; in Hebrews, that he
offered himself as a sacrifice "through the eternal
Spirit" (9 : 14) ; in Romans, that it was the Spirit of
God that raised him up from the dead (8:11); and
in I Timothy that he was justified "in the spirit"
(3 : 16). Again in Romans he was "declared to be
the Son of God with power, according to the spirit
of holiness" (1:4). His whole life was a realized
possession of the Holy Spirit.
In the consciousness of this presence that had been
with him from the beginning, Jesus makes this prom
ise to the disciples. It is not conceivable that he
would make a promise to their ear and break it to
their heart, or that in this supreme hour, so soon
after he had been weeping by the grave of one he
loved, and knowing that they would soon be weeping
at his grave, he should deceive them. That abid
ing presence of God, which the Church was to know
as the Holy Spirit, was to be the more than sufficient
substitute for the visible Christ.
When we turn to the life of the apostles, we find
that the Holy Spirit takes very much the same posi
tion towards them and their work that the Lord had
taken. "I will send you the Comforter," he said.
The word is often given untranslated. Paraclete, but
that is not so easily understood. The Latin
word from which our word advocate comes, is used

176 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
sometimes as a substitute. It is the equivalent of the
Greek, and means one called to our side. We have
then the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Comforter.
That same Holy Ghost who was promised by our
Lord when he departed is promised to any sinner who
follows Christ. Even such a one, taken in the evil
hour of transgression, if he turns towards God, will
find that he has there One who stands for another,
but one who is called to us, one who comes sum
moned by our need, and makes all our circumstances
his own, who brings his knowledge and skill and care
to it, and does in us and for us all that our need may
require. So he "comforts" us. The Greek poet
.Eschylus says that the night before a certain battle,
when the little Greek fleet found itself shut in a har
bor by the great Persian fleet outside, the Greek cap
tains went from ship to ship, "paracleting" their men
— that is, putting new courage into them ; heartening
them, we might almost say. Their captains were
men who did not wait to be called, but came with
comfort of the kind that gives strength. And the
result was that in the morning the fleet was full of
courage, and went out to victory. The Persian fleet
was destroyed.'
Jesus meant much more when he used that word.
He says nothing of the temple, or the priesthood, or
1 See Note 1.

THE Affirmation of the holy ghost 177
the sacrifice, or the Sabbath, but everything of the
indwelling Spirit, as the source of enduring strength
for his disciples. Conviction of sin and of righteous
ness and of judgment is to be wrought in their hearts
and in the world about them ; the work of Christ is to
be made finally effective for the bringing in of the
kingdom of God into the world ; his life and sacrifice
are to be vindicated and made the central and radiant
truth in all the revelation of God to men ; and it is to
be done by the Spirit. "He shall declare unto you the
things that are to come." The future is all his.
There is to be no further revelation of God until Jesus
shall come in his glory. The stage in the unfolding
of the kingdom of God which embraces the rise, prog
ress, and final triumph of the Church of God on the
earth, is to be the era of the Holy Spirit.'
Jesus' own confidence in the promise he was
making is shown in that he took no pains to leave
any records of his own work or words. We rarely
feel safe without a writing; we want written record
of every important word. The wonder is that when
Jesus turned to these poor Galilaean fishermen who
were forsaking all for him, and committed his cause
to them, he showed no concern. They, in turn, seem
quickly to have caught his spirit, and to have been con
vinced of the sufficiency of his provision. When
I See Note 2.

178 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
dragged before officers and courts to give account of
themselves, we never find them producing documents
or summoning witnesses. Their testimony is always
concerning things they know — things witnessed to
their spirits by the Spirit of God.
Peter speaks because he is "filled with the Holy
Ghost," and men wonder at his calm courage, for they
perceive that he is an "unlearned and ignorant" man
(Acts 4:8,13). Paul declares that God has given
him "the earnest of the Spirit" in his heart (2 Cor.
I : 22). It is that kind of a pledge which is a part of
the thing itself. He uses a commercial term mean
ing a first instalment. He is not a man possessed
with an idea, or caught up in an ecstasy. He appeals
directly to the visible facts. He says we Christians
show fruits ; and he does not hesitate to catalogue the
fruits of the Spirit, that every man may judge for
himself as to the claim of the disciples to have a new
life from God.
In an age when all documents were verified by a
seal, confirming the fixed and permanent will of the
maker of the document, even after death, the apostles
did not hesitate to use so bold a figure as that,
and to say, "Ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit"
(Eph. I : 13). Our Lord Jesus Christ whom you see
no more and we see no more, stamped his eternal
truth, as with his signet, on our hearts. His Spirit

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST 1 79
dwells in us, forever revealing his will. He goes
further — life itself is the gift of the Spirit. "He that
raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken
also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that
dwell eth in you" (Rom. 8: ii). Even now this poor
body, with the mortality still upon it, yielding daily to
the pressure of advancing years, and the burden of
life, is the "temple of God" (i Cor. 3 : 16). To grasp
the meaning of this we must put ourselves back in
Paul's time. Imagine yourself standing amid the
splendid edifices of an ancient city, proud, as Athens
was of the Parthenon, or Ephesus of the temple of
Diana, and hear the apostle say, "We Christians care
nothing for temples. Our bodies are tbe temple of
God, for the Spirit of God dwells in us."
The apostle John at a later day gives a similar testi
mony. "We know," he says, "that the Son of God is
come." "We know that he abideth in us." "We
know that we are of God." How? "By the Spirit
which he gave us" (i John 3 : 24). A half century
or more before, Jesus had bidden his disciples fare
well, saying, "Lo, I am with you alway." Now John,
an old man, looking back over the vicissitudes of
those eventful years, finds his mind filled with this sin
gle thought. He has told his story of Jesus, he has
borne his testimony to those transcendent events of
long ago. But what is that? He adds.

l8o THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
"To me that story, aye, that Life and Death
Of which I wrote 'It was,' — to me it is;
Is here and now ; I apprehend nought else.
Love, wrong and pain, what see I else around?"
The indwelling Christ was to him everything.
Here is the summons to us. "I believe in the Holy
Ghost" is the quiet affirmation of the Church ; not
in the Holy Ghost as the exceptional possession of the
sanctified few. The Church has strenuously set it
self against the claims of individuals or groups who
claim to have a larger revelation of God than is given
to others. This claim always savors of fanaticism and
breeds hypocrisy and confusion. The Spirit brings
no new revelation. He takes the things of Christ,
the common possession of all, and gives life and
meaning to them. Thereupon the Church applies
this test to the man who claims to have more of the
Spirit of God than his fellows : Does he know more
of Christ? Is he more like Christ, with more of the
spirit of Christ, and the humbleness of Christ? If so,
then we accept the revelation of the Spirit in him;
otherwise not.
The Church will never accept, for instance. Gib
bon's accounting for the spread of Christianity by the
conjunction of favorable conditions, such as the
crumbling of the Roman empire, the decay of
heathenism, the corruption of public morals, the wide

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST l8l
diffusion of the Greek language. It will not consent
to seek the signs of its own progress to-day in its
numbers, or wealth, or social position, or complex
organization, or great intelligence, or eloquence.
Not by might of man or wisdom of man is its con
fession; but in the demonstration of the Spirit, and,
only so, of power. All else is as the chaff of the
threshing floor, the small dust of the balance. The
one source of life for itself, and of power in the world
over which the victory is to be won, is in the posses
sion of the Holy Ghost as an actual presence in the
heart of every believer.
This presence is certified not by the discovery of
new and startling truth, nor by power to do unex
pected things, but by the awakening of a tenderer
love, a more vivid apprehension of the Lord Jesus
Christ, and a more eager devotion to him. Where
there is most gentleness and most self-forgetfulness,
where most of willingness to take up one's cross daily
and walk in the steps of Jesus, there, from the be
ginning, the Church has been taught, is the most of
possession of the Spirit. And where that is, God is;
and where God is, there is triumph.
This, then, is the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. God
has not given his Spirit by measure. The gift is not
because a man has great intellect, or great popularity,
or great talents. Sometimes among the rarely gifted.

l82 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
but far oftener among the lowly, who, in patient con
tinuance in well doing, in circumstances of toil and
trial and pain and unselfish devotion to others, meet
daily duty in the humblest conditions of life, are
produced, with uncomplaining, steadfast faith, the
fruits of the Spirit which mark the fulness of the life
from God.
The work of the Spirit is before all to convince the
believer of the truth of God. It is that conviction of
sin and of righteousness and of judgment, of which
the Saviour spoke, which lies at the foundation of the
assurance of one's own salvation. Christianity is a
life, the life of Jesus realized by a man who is a sin
ner. Christianity is also a temple built of such lives
wrought into one another as parts of one whole. It
is not a doctrine, or any system of teaching or philos
ophy. To be a Christian is to yield oneself to
Christ, i.e., not setting up one's own aims, or seeking
one's own pleasures, but finding the joy and crown of
one's life in knowing that we are accepted of Jesus
Christ, and are being used of him to spread his name
in the world.'
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people," is the Lord's
voice through the prophet Isaiali. "Speak ye to the
heart of Jerusalem," he adds. The voices of
men speak to the ear. How often they fail to reach
1 See Note 3.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST 183
the heart! And when they do, how often the heart
is betrayed by the voice that comes to the ear ! In
the day of Israel's desolation, when her privileges
were taken away, and the darkness of despair had
settled upon her spirit, the cry of the prophet was for
a voice from God to her heart.
The answer to that prayer is the gift of the Holy
Spirit speaking in your heart and mine in the hour
of temptation and sorrow, when the world wearies
our ear with its confusion of voices, its warring of
philosophies and creeds and guesses, until one knows
not what to believe. It is the Spirit who comes in
such hours to witness with our spirits that we are
children of God. Jesus himself draws near, and the
humble, penitent soul finds himself safe in the Father's
love. He first moves us to say, "I will arise and go
to my Father ;" then he gives to us the assurance that
we are received.'
The Spirit also convinces the world that the faith of
the believer is genuine. This is the great, completing
work of the Spirit. He brings the sinner intO' ac
ceptance with God, and then uses his testimony for
the winning of the world. What more amazing, what
more irrational than that a few Galilaean peasants
should be set to the task of propagating a faith that
was to turn the world upside down! Yet the world
> See Note i.

184 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
flocked to baptism. Why? Because the Holy
Spirit wrought in those humble men to speak the
things that they knew of Christ, and to live lives like
Christ's. "We do not speak great things, but we live
them," was the noble boast of the early bishop. This
was the testimony that could not be gainsaid. What
is it that draws men to Christ to-day? Not our noble
buildings, nor our beautiful music, nor the splendor of
our ritual, nor the greatness of the Christian Church
in its organized life, its charities or its missions.
These are not what turn men from sin to righteous
ness. Rather it is the conviction that the men and
women with whom they come in contact have a dif
ferent spirit and are living a different life from them
selves. "It is not your preaching nor anything you
have said to me," answered a distinguished judge
who, in a little New England town, offered himself as
a candidate for admission to the church, "that has
brought me to this, sweeping away my lifelong in
fidelity. It was simply the life of my neighbor.
Deacon  ."
"If only such a saintly man as that can go to
heaven, there is no hope for me," cried a business
man, convicted of the Spirit, after having spent an
evening by chance in an inn with the saintly Arch
bishop Leighton.
"Mamma, I know the teacher I have now in Sun-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST 1 85
day-school is a Christian," said a little girl to her
mother. "Why, my dear?" "Because I see it in her
face." "He shall not speak from himself," was the declara
tion. The Holy Spirit takes the witness of the true
believer and stamps it upon the heart of the infidel,
of the man of the world, of the child.
We believers have covenanted with God that we
will witness to Christ. We will be the open channels
through which the Holy Spirit may take the things of
Jesus to those about us who do not know him — ^the
husband, the wife, the child, the friend. That means
that we will be very watchful of our temper, very
watchful of our faultfinding, of our captiousness, of
our selfishness, of our doings in business, of our social
habits, of our pride, lest all unconsciously we depart
from Jesus Christ, and grieve and quench the Holy
Spirit, lest all unconsciously but effectively we resist
his holy impulses to bend us to his will. We have
covenanted to live so that the Holy Ghost can witness
to the world of the truth of the incarnation of the
Son of God, of his atoning sacrifice, and of his blessed
ministry to the sick and the suffering, the profligate,
the outcast and the leper ; that men may know that
he is able to save unto the uttermost. Through us
men are to know the meaning of his sacrificial death,
of his opening for them the kingdom of heaven in his

1 86 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HOLY GHOST
resurrection, of the certainty of his coming again
with the blessed dead, and of his final triumph. All
this is the work of the Holy Spirit, first in the heart
of the believer, and then through him in the world.
"I believe in the Holy Ghost." Apart from him
there is no Christianity, for there is no Christ. Well
may we say with the apostle : "For as many as are led
by the spirit of God, these [and these only] are sons
of God." '
1 See Note B.

XII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE
CHURCH

*(

^be Holi? Catbolic Cburcb "

" Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the
wife of the Lamb."

Eev. 21: 9.

CHAPTER XII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
We have here a theme of surpassing interest. We
are to consider how the most splendid conception
ever given to the mind of men, the conception which
taxed and mastered the thought of Paul, which for
John changed the glories of the setting sun into the
glories of the New Jerusalem — how this conception ot
the Church as "the bride, the wife of the Lamb," as
"his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all," the
actualized kingdom of heaven on earth, has become
the Church of to-day, broken into fragments, the dis
jected members of the Church of Jesus Christ, exalt
ing half truths, and, in its divisions and strifes, dis
honored and ashamed. Or rather, through the
broken parts of the Church of to-day we are to look
back upon the original conception, to convince
ourselves that it still exists.
"The Holy Catholic Church" cannot mean any one
body of believers, however large; because, as Princi
pal Fairbairn has said, it is not "holy," for it contains
many unworthy members ; it is not "catholic," for at
most it is Roman; and it is not "apostolic," for the

190 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
apostles left no successors; and any claim to suc
cession that excludes other believers lacks the first
essential of genuineness. Moreover, it has "ex
changed the ministry of service for the functions of
empire.'' When we say "I believe in the Holy Cath
olic Church," we seek to lift ourselves at once to
consider something nowhere to be seen, for faith has
to do with the unseen. Corrupted, torn, defiled, put
to base uses, the Church has nevertheless been the
living power of Christ in the hearts of men, molding
and shaping the world as it has come under the do
minion of Jesus Christ, as the soul molds and shapes
the natural elements which go to make up the human
body. What, then, do we mean when we speak, as
the Church has always spoken in the past, of "the
Holy Catholic Church"?
Our word Church is from the Greek, Kiirios, Lord.
It is suggestive of an earlier origin of our English
Christianity than that coming from Rome, or, at least,
of a strong stream of Christian influence early coming
from the East, perhaps through central Europe,
reaching the distant and savage English shores, and
giving to us the name that, while forever defining the
Church as a body of people belonging to the Lord,
is also a memorial of Oriental missionary zeal.
The New Testament term is eeelesia. In Greek
usage it was the name for the assembly of the en-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH I9I
franchised or qualified citizens met to transact the
business of the city. In the Greek translations of the
Old Testament, it was chosen to render the Hebrew
term for the congregation of Israel. It was ready,
therefore, for Matthew's rendering of our Lord's
words, when, in the conversation with his disciples at
Caesarea Philippi, he says, "Upon this rock I will
build my church." Jesus applies it to a local body of
believers. In the few words he utters he says two
or three very definite things concerning them. Fie
says nothing of the sacraments, nothing of anything
which shall divide them from any other believers of
any age ; but he speaks of the Church as a body of
Christian people, his disciples and witnesses, in whom
God's righteousness is to be revealed in pure and
upright lives, and who represent on the earth his com
ing kingdom, which their labors and testimony shall
bring in. To them he gave the keys of the kingdom.'
Here, then, we have what may be called the charter
of the Church. Back of it, as a little group gathered
about the person of the Lord, lay the larger concep
tion of the kingdom of God for the world. In fact,
that term is used in the Gospels one hundred and
twelve times, while the term church is used only twice.
The new idea that Jesus announced was of God as no
longer tribal, but for the world— caring for all, and

192 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCtt
accessible to all, apart from their becoming Jews.
This conception of God Jesus embodied in a new
religion, and established it in a new society which
realized the brotherhood of man no less than the
fatherhood of God. This is the true meaning of the
term "Catholic" as applied to the Church. It denotes
a Church, in the fullest sense, for all men.'
As we follow the New Testament, we find that
the ecclesia, or Church, unfolds along the lines that
Jesus laid down. He defined it and its methods in
the parables of the kingdom. It is as seed sown in all
soils. It begins small ; it grows intermingled with
tares ; it is to be sought as hid treasure ; it is of
heaven, not of earth — having standards of its own ;
it is present, and may be entered now ; it is essentially
moral and spiritual ; it begins iri doing the will of God
on earth ; it is open to men of all conditions ; it en
counters persecution, and fails often of appreciation;
but God is in it, and it will bring great reward.
There is no emphasis upon official functions.
There is diversity of gifts, and variety of opportunity.
The pounds were one to each, but one gains ten, an
other five ; and the talents are variously distributed at
the beginning. There is emphasis only upon the
fact of personal responsibility, and upon the ob
ligation to bear much fruit. The kingdom has life

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH 1 93
from God. The rule of its growth is to work out
the life of Christ among men ; and he came not to be
ministered unto, but to minister. It is the faith of
Jesus, it is true, but not so much a doctrinal as a liv
ing faith, a faith revealing itself in the life. It is
noticeable that John in his gospel never uses the
noun faith, but always some form of the verb to be
lieve. He knows nothing of faith as a completed or
stereotyped affair that could be branded and passed
on from hand to hand. It is to him always a life, al
ways the thought of a man having Christ in his heart,
and doing his best to realize Christ and reveal Christ
in all that he is and does.'
We look in vain in the New Testament for any
suggestion of a priest, or a priesthood, as an officer,
or a function of the Church. We find neither the
term nor the thought. Christ alone bears that name ;
men may variously serve his cause but none are priests.
There is no earthly treasury of grace, and no author
ized or exclusive means for distributing it. God is
the source of all grace, and through the mediatory
work of Christ, every one who will has access to him.
The Church is a herald, summoning all men every
where to come to him and live.^
The Church is a kingdom, but as it is without a
priesthood, so it is without rulers. It has no political
1 See Notes 3 and 4. 2 Note 5.

194 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
or official framework. There is no suggestion of a
possession, whether by tradition or ceremonies or his
toric position, which shall separate one body of be
lievers from another ; still less any priority which shall
give to one superiority over another, however they
differ in age or condition. They are as children in a
father's house. They are called to serve according to
their several gifts and the common need; but always
as brethren, and not as rulers over the Lord's heri
tage. He who would be greatest of all is to be ser
vant of all. That remains the abiding test of the
Church of Jesus Christ on earth. Is it bending all its
energies to find opportunities to minister to men ; or
is it seeking principally to be ministered unto?
In its diversity there is unity; unity in origin, in
spirit, in oneness of life ; unity in variety of occupation
as of gifts ; oneness of final reward and acceptance.
Nothing is more notable than the way in which the
Church has been free to adapt itself to existing con
ditions, and the boldness with which it has laid hold
of and applied to its own uses whatever it has found
ready to its hand in the society about it. Whether
in the Jewish synagogue or the Greek town council,
in the Roman jurisprudence or the modern business
world, wherever it has discovered an office or a
method that promised usefulness, it has not hesitated
to adopt it. From the first diaconate to the last mis-

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH 1 95
sionary board, it has aimed at the highest and most
businesslike efficiency. Its function is to promote
piety, but also to see that piety shall be practical.
It is to be known by its fruits. And what are they?
Not numbers, not wealth, not dominion, not a place
among the powers of the earth, but the fruits of the
Spirit : love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance — all
that which the Lord Jesus Christ works in and
through the man who gives himself humbly and truly
to him. "The kingdom of God," says the Scripture,
"is not eating and drinking ;" not the things that per
tain to the body and can be paid for in the market;
not costly edifices, nor gorgeous ceremonials ; not
splendid music, nor highly developed organization,
things which appeal to the passions and pride of men ;
"not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace
and joy in the Holy Ghost.'' This is the conception
of the Church of God on earth. It is visible, but not
by sight ; always a vision given by God.
This is the conception as it unfolds in the great
epistles of Paul. The Church, at first a definite, local
bcxly, standing alone and administering its own af
fairs, has taken on a larger form. It has advanced,
as has been said, from a unity like that of the Church
at Jerusalem to a unity like that of the Church in the
Epistle to the Ephesians. It has become the whole

196 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
company of believers, with one Lord, one faith, one
baptism, and an infinite variety of gifts and service.
Paul faces the great continent of Europe, already
come to be the center of the old struggle for dominion
among the endless diversities of national and individ
ual life. The bride of Christ, whom He loves and
cherishes as part of himself, is there to find her home ;
under many forms and conditions, each member con
tributing its part, she is to do her work and make
known her Lord, until there shall be a glorious com
munion, a fulfilment of the Saviour's prayers and
promise, that they shall be one with him; and the
mystery hidden from the ages shall through her be
made known to other worlds than ours. Principali
ties and powers in the heavenly places shall through
her have revealed to them the manifold wisdom of
God. This is the real Church of God.'
The Church, in this large sense catholic, knows no
special polity, holds to no special forms and cere
monies, is distinguished by no special orders, and is
in no sense, from beginning to end, sacerdotal. It
ignores and rejects forever the term priest, except as
it belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ as the one Me
diator between God and man, who, having offered
himself once for all, has provided access for whoso
ever will to the throne of grace.
1 See Note 6.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH I97
"Where Christ is," said the old Father, "there is the
Church." Ubi Christus ibi ecclesia." It is as if he
had said, "Where two or three are gathered together
in my name, there am I in the midst of them." The
Christian ministry springs from the Christian Church,
and not the Christian Church from the Christian min
istry. The claim of a divine right for the clergy is
no better than the claim of a divine right for kings.
The center of administration, the source of power and
life, is to be sought in the company of believers, who
determine the service, and elect or appoint, under the
guidance of the Spirit, their own leaders; and recog
nize that they can never delegate to any man their
personal responsibility to the living Christ, whose
they are and whom they serve.
How did the Church ever lose such a priceless pos
session — the single teaching of the Saviour, the all-
compelling thought in the mind of the great apostle,
the one shaping and comforting and sustaining factor
in the life of. the early Christians, as they gave thera
selves for the name and sake of Jesus to the lions or
to the executioner's sword? As civilization fell to
pieces in the changing of the old world into the new,
when Rome went down before the barbarians, her
heart eaten out by her own vices, her force destroyed
by her selfish rivalries, a change came upon the
Church. All things human were seen tumbling, into

198 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
hopeless ruin. One organization stood untouched —
an organization which had laid its hand upon the
emperor on his throne, and spread itself among all
classes in all the world. What more natural, as Dr.
Hatch says, than that it became in the eyes of
men the only hope of the world? Its organization, its
ecclesiastical forces and dominance, in their despair
ing thought, were given of God to take the place of
the crumbling civil society. It became to them the
visible realization of that kingdom of God which
Jesus had preached. In the metaphors of the re
ligious writers, the confederation of Christian churches
was "the city of God," the "body of Christ," the
"Holy Catholic Church." They saw in it the ful
filment of the ancient types. It was the paradise in
which men walked with God, the ark of Noah in
which the redeemed were rescued, the temple of Solo
mon where God dwelt, the New Jerusalem, the
widow's unfailing cruse. Men said, The tabernacle of
God has come down to abide with men. The State
had given validity to the decrees of the Church, and
now the Church as a vast, organized confederation,
survived the State. It assumed universal authority,
and it interpreted the unity taught in the Scriptures to
mean unity of organization. The unity of a common
ideal and a common type gave place to the enforced
unity of belief, and then, of order. The simple creed

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH 1 99
of primitive days was lost in the maze of theological
speculation, and in its place the Church created new
standards of authoritative dogma. Acceptance of
these and membership in the organization became
the condition of salvation. A man, as Augustine
said, might possess all the virtues, but if he was what
the Church pronounced heretical, he was outside the
kingdom of God. The Church became a world or
ganization, with Byzantium and Rome in turn its
center. What was the result? Men assented to
Christian ideas without having in their heart Chris
tian enthusiasm. The Spirit of Christ was super
seded by the machinery of the Church. And with
that exchange of the Spirit for machinery, the life of
the Church expired.
Then came long centuries of darkness. But be
cause the Lord had lost silver, he did not suffer the
candle to be put out. At last came the upheaval of
the great Reformation. The world had lost the vision
of the true Christ in the domination of the embodied
Church — the Church that brought the emperor a sup
pliant to the feet of the pope, and issued its mandates
of life and death to the world.' Men turned for light
and peace to the open Word. Through this, trans
lated into the language of the common people, the old
vision began to reappear. Men said, "We belong to
1 See Note 7.

200 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. Rome may
excommunicate us, it may sever us from itself, but it
cannot sever us from God, nor from those who with
us gather about his open Word." Then began to
spring up various groups of believers, as in the past
three hundred years, striving together with such light
as they have, often with sharp antagonisms and much
yielding to the world and the flesh, yet striving to
gether to get back to that conception of the kingdom
of God, the Church invisible, holy, universal, ever
known to the Father, ever doing his will, at last to be
recognized by the King in his glory, which the Lord
had given the world at the beginning.
We ask to-day. How is this vision — a vision, but
the truth — to be realized? How are we ever to re
establish the original conception? Not by adjust
ments of machinery, and not by compromises. It has
been pointed out that there are certain metals so
refractory that they cannot be altered or dealt with
except when they are subjected to the intensest heat ;
then they flow and fuse. So, not the heat of contro
versy, but the heat of hearts that are aflame with the
love of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the fire by which
the hardness and perversities of the visible Church are
to be melted, and the divided life of the Christian
community is to be reunited into the oneness which

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH 20I
shall witness to the world of that body with many
members of which Jesus Christ is the head.'
The need to-day is great, but it contains in itself
the prophecy of the future. Christianity is a life,
and life is its own vindication. It will perpetuate and
renew itself. The divisions and distractions of Chris
tendom foretell the reunion. Because men are
driven to cry for more of Christ, Christ will come.
As God made the world at the beginning for man,
so by his Spirit he has made the Church. It was a
work great enough for God. It is not enough, there
fore, for a man to be joined in heart to Christ ; he will
be joined to other believers in the Church. They
are covenanted together for a definite service, a ser
vice that shall be a daily and costly burden of toil and
sacrifice. If the Christian has not the marks of
Christ as stigmata on his hands, he will, like Simon,
have the cross of Christ on his back. He gives him
self up as a helper to Him who still carries the sins of
the world. In so doing he is in union with the saints
of every age, he realizes the Church universal, not by
his confession but by his service. In what he does
for his brother whom he sees, he proves his love for
his .Lord whom he does not see."
The question for every man, then, is not, "Am I an
Episcopal, or a Roman Catholic, or a Presbyterian, or
1 See Note 8, « Note 9,

202 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH
a Congregational Christian?" but, "Am I a member
of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ? Am I
joined indeed to the Church universal, which knows
its Lord and is known of him?" Think of the loneli
ness of the man who, in the day of the Lord's coming,
when this glorious conception of the meaning of
human life, of the meaning of God himself, of the
meaning of the kingdom and reign of the Lord Jesus
Christ, shall cease to be a dream and shall become a
visible reality — think of the loneliness of the man who
in that day shall find himself outside ; having no place
in its life because there has been no place in him for its
Head ; having no right to a name in the Lamb's book
of life, because he has never been willing to accept the
forgiveness purchased by the Lamb's blood or to
give his name to Jesus Christ for his service ! So long
as there is power in any group of believers to win
souls from darkness to light, so long the kingdom of
God is to be seen among men ; so long the old miracle
of redemption is witnessing to itself. Men are
changed from death into life because the Holy Spirit
dwells in the Church and among the children of God.
He uses their words to carry God's message ; he uses
their efforts to do God's work ; he uses their example
to lead men to desire Jesus Christ; he uses their
prayers to bring down a renewing life from God upon
stony hearts and worldly lives. Then men arise and

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE CHURCH 2O3
say, "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" And, behold!
the tabernacle of God is with men; the kingdom of
heaven is here ! To us is given the privilege of has
tening and shaping its unfolding until it shall consti
tute a communion as wide as human life, and as deep
as human need, with a brotherhood that shall spring
from fellowship with one Spirit, and faith in one
Lord.' <¦ See Note 10.

XIII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY
HOME

'^be Communion of Saints"

" Ye are co7ne unto mount Zion, and unto the
city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to innumerable hosts of angels, to the general
assembly and church of the firstborn who are
enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to
Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the
blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than
that of Abel." Hebrews 12: 22-24.

CHAPTER XIII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
Somewhere in Eastern Europe a young Slavic
orator delivered recently an address on a theme so
notable as to lead the wisest and most experienced
American in the Orient, President Washburn, of
Robert College, to make it the text of an important
article. His theme was this : The failure of the Latin
and Teutonic races to fulfil their trust in the civiliza
tion of the world. They have done great things in
the way of literature, art and science, and very much
for the individual man; but they have failed in that
they have not upheld the great truths committed to
them ; they have exalted the material above the spirit
ual, and have made a god of Mammon. We are not
concerned with his inference that the day of the
Slavonic race has come, but we accept the testimony
to the importance of the business we have in hand.
We are dealing with just these great truths which
have been committed to us by God, and which are
essential to human progress. Lose them, and what
avails all the pomp of natural resources ; what bul
wark is there in the bigness of your business, or the

2o8 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
amount of bullion in your banks, against the inevita
ble shame and the loss irreparable? The spirit in
man must live, and great truths alone can feed the
soul. If as a nation or as individuals we betray this
trust, or grow indifferent to the truth given us from
God, our end is near, and we deserve to be swept
aside. Men lightly read the Apostles' Creed, and deem
this affirmation of the communion of saints so much
verbiage, a mere synonym of belief in the Church.
But what is its history, and what does it mean?
It was not universal in the creeds of the Western
Church until the eighth century, though it is found
in one obscure Confession as early as the sixth. It
belongs to a time of transition. The eastern empire
had gone down before the advancing power of the
Mohammedan, and the anticipations of the new em
pire that was to arise under Charlemagne, follow
ing the turning back of the Saracens at Tours, stirred
men to believe in the continued life of the divine
society. It was a new nativity. A new world was
opening, with its center not in the East but in the
West. The gospel of Christ had found its way
among the Germans, and God was using the warlike
Franks to save his Church. After all, what did it
matter who sowed or who reaped? Are not the
saints of God one? Are they not heirs of all the past?

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 209
Is not the future all theirs, whether they be in earth or
in heaven? The pagan Huns believed that their an
cestors fought their battle in the sky, as they waged
their bloody contest on the earth below; and shall
not Christians affirm their faith in the oneness of their
Christian life? The glorious company of the apos
tles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble
army of martyrs, are to the believer not things of the
past, but the blessed reality of the present. He is
compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses, not
as remote and unconcerned spectators, but as sharers
of their honors with him, and eager participants in his
struggles and victories.'
This was the Christian revelation.
In the hour of Jesus' weakness, angels came and
ministered unto him. When the shadow of the cross
rested darkly upon him, he ascended the mount of
Transfiguration, not simply to draw more closely to
himself and to pledge to a more devoted service the
chosen disciples, nor only to hear the divine word,
"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,"
but also to have witness of the communion of saints,
as he held converse with Moses and Elijah. The
promise of his own perpetual presence and active co
operation in their coming service was his parting
consolation to the sorrowing disciples.

2IO AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
Christians at once entered into this truth. Stephen
under the storm of blows looked up steadfastly into
heaven and saw the heavens opened, and the Son of
man standing on the right hand of God, pledge of the
home that was awaiting him with the saints of God.
Paul writes his earliest epistle to assure the mourning
brethren in Thessalonica that their beloved dead have
not vanished into Hades, the hopeless realm of disem
bodied spirits, but are in blessed possession of their
eternal inheritance, and will be no whit behind their
surviving friends at the coming of the Lord. For
himself he is always as a combatant in the amphi
theater, so conscious is he of the onlooking saints, to
whom he and the Church he loves are doing distin
guished service in making known so much of the
mystery of Christ as is being revealed through their
sufferings and triumphs. The anonymous writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews gives us the same vision,
as to his illumined eyes, and later to those of the
apostle John, the general assembly of the Church of
the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven was seen as
the heavenly Jerusalem already established, the pres
ent home of just men made perfect, in the city of the
living God.
Not by chance do they speak of a city. At the
word we think of a place where humanity is packed
under distressing conditions, where great buildings

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 211
shut out the sunlight, where palaces back up against
tenements, and beautiful avenues lead down to filthy
alleys, where the struggle of life is at its fiercest,
where power tramples upon helplessness, and luxury
and riches jostle starvation and despair. But the
Greek polis and the Latin civitas meant, not a place,
but a community, an aggregation of people of one
stock and one speech, possessing common traditions,
animated by common aims, uniting in a common
worship, sharing a common life ; just as politics,
"politike," to the Greek meant not a scheme for the
adroit manipulation of the machinery of the State in
the interest of a party, or to maintain the corrupt con
trol of a "boss," but the art of so ordering the affairs
of a community as to promote the highest welfare of
all. Not carelessly did the apostle John write, "I
saw the holy city." '
Whether we read Ephesians 3: 15, "Of whom the
whole family in heaven and earth is named" ; or, as it
is in the Revision, "every family," the truth is the
same. Christians, living and dead, are joined in one
fatherhood, they belong to the one household of faith.
Here is the first great truth of the Creed. We are one
with the saints, joint heirs with Christ in the inheri
tance of the Father. Our life reaches up to theirs.
The blessed dead who have passed out of our homes
' See Note 2.

2X2 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
are now with them. We are separated as the mem
bers of a family separate for the duties of the day ; one
at the office, others at school, still others busy in the
labors of the home, all to reassemble at the close of the
day, bringing something of achievement, something
of larger life, for all to share. Which shall contribute
the most at the last home-coming, those who are now
beyond, or those who tarry here, who shall say? We
know that "we that are alive, that are left unto the
coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them
that are fallen asleep;" we may well believe also that
they have suffered no lack in the new opportunities
and privileged service of the other world. If Moses
and Elijah had much to see and hear on the mount of
Transfiguration of the wonders of the sacrificial re
demption that Jesus was accomplishing on earth,
beyond question they had much also to narrate of the
sweep of its eft'ect among the angels of God, and not a
little of what it meant to them in personal blessing.
If "these things" "angels desire to look into," as St.
Peter tells us, it is surely from more than idle curios
ity. And as for the saints, we know from Hebrews
1 1 : 39, 40 that "these all, having had witness borne to
them through their faith, received not the promise,
God having provided some better thing concerning
us, that apart from us they should not be made
perfect.'" 1 See Note 3.

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 213
True friendship stands, as Goethe said, on some
thing firmer than oneness of occupation and circum
stance, or even similarity of tastes. Sitting on the
same bench at school, sharing the same sports, pur
suing the same studies, greeting each other daily as
neighbors, membership in the same club, these are
all external and trivial. Friendship becomes worthy
of the name where there is some oneness of inner
life. It reaches its highest and noblest intensity
where men are joined in the grasp of their religious
convictions. Religious faith, in proportion as it is
deep and genuine, takes possession of a man's entire
being, therefore there is nothing left to stand in the
way of perfect sympathy of his heart with the heart of
his friend who is possessed of the same true faith.
The one Lord and the one faith, the one hope of the
world to come, and the one blessed experience of sins
forgiven, make the "one heart and soul" of those
who love the Saviour. For them death has lost its
sting, and the grave its victory. Though all else per
ish, love shall endure. Now and forever, hearts
united in Christ are one with him and with each
other.' So the truth before us reaches out horizontally as
well. It extends into the heavens, it also embraces
the whole earth. Our fellow men are of the same
1 See Note 4.

214 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
brotherhood as ourselves. This was the truth Jesus
came to proclaim, "God so loved the world, that he
gave his only begotten Son." Not for the Jews, not
for saints, but for the world, Christ was to die. The
gospel was to be preached to all, for all have the same
need, and are to be saved, if at all, by the same method.
It was a thought new among men. According to
Professor Max Miiller no hint of it exists in antiquity,
not in Egypt or Babylon or Assyria, until the third
century B. C, when at a Buddhist council under king
Asoka, the idea of conquering other nations, not by
force of arms but by the power of truth, was promul
gated. A resolution was adopted to send missiona
ries to all neighboring nations to spread the new gos
pel of Buddha. It presupposed a new conception of
the world. It announced for the first time the belief
that the different nations of the world, however sepa
rated by language, religion, color and custom, form
nevertheless one family ; that each of the members
is responsible for the rest, that humanity, in fact,
is not an empty word.
This is the truth Christianity proclaimed and saved.
"Go ye into all the world," is its message, because it
knows that of all men disciples can be made. "Ye
all are one man in Christ Jesus," is the startling mes
sage ; and it proceeds at once to exhibit the proof, as
it points to men of every kindred and nation and

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 215
clime sitting together in heavenly places. On the
day of Pentecost every man heard the message
spoken in his own tongue, and very soon the
Ethiopian ambassador and the Roman centurion were
seen taking their places in the same brotherhood that
received Stephen and Paul.
The affirmation, "I believe in the communion of
saints," comes therefore as a sort of climax in the
Apostles' Creed. It emphasizes the present reality.
In the exact sense of the Saviour's words we can say,
our faith is "not of the dead, but of the living." We
believe in, we know, the certainty of our possession
in the blessed dead whom Christ will bring at his
coming. All that he has revealed to us of life and
immortality in our continuing earthly service, that
and much more he is revealing to them in glory. It
centers in the revelation of himself, the disclosing of
his personal love, which fuses all into one in him.
At the marriage supper of the Lamb not one of his
children will be missing, and the cup of each shall
be full. As Zwingli the Swiss reformer said in his
dying confession, "Not one good man, one holy
spirit, one faithful soul whom you will not there
behold with God."
We have only to ask, then. How is this article of
our faith to be kept prominent?
By cherishing the memorials of the dead. We

2l6 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
are a new country, and have few monuments. We
are so busied with the passing cares of the life that
now is, and the duty of providing for those about us,
that we have little thought for the life beyond, and,
except in the mourner's breast, scant place for the
memory of those who have passed beyond. But let
us not think of this other than as a loss. Saints' days
are in our minds associated with a corrupt age that is
well outgrown; but what the Church loses in failing
to surround herself with the memorials of her noble
dead, every traveler sees when he stands uncovered
in what is to the nation that possesses it the most
precious building in the world, Westminster Abbey.
From the day when the humble stone-cutters and
wood-carvers and iron-workers of an obscure Eng
lish parish joined to erect a church that should be in
some degree a monument worthy of their faith, to
this, when the greatest honor that England can pay
any of her sons is a resting-place and a name within
its walls, Westminster Abbey has spoken to the heart
of the people. Many a weary spirit has found there
new courage, as did the little bookseller's lad, a hun
dred years ago, who, turning in to rest with a heavy
load of books, burst into involuntary tears at his
bondage and hopelessness, and looking about him
caught the spirit of the place, and said, "These men
have fought bravely the battle of life, and won ; and so

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 2l7
will I," and went out to become in time Joshua
Marshman the colleague of Carey, the father-in-law
of Havelock, the author of the Sanskrit Dictionary,
the translator of Confucius, and one of the great pio
neers of modern missions. Many a poet has sung, as
one did the other day : —
. . "to royal Westminster
Betimes I come, and gladly find
Those stately churches towering there.
Whose walls, that Milton saw, we see.
Ah, were, I cried, like these my mind
Great praise might be.
Were strength like theirs that hold the night
With solemn watch, though London sleep,
To arm my soul with steadfast right.
Then fear might end and hope be sure,
Could I like thera my vigil keep.
Like them endure."
Ewald, the historian of Israel, says the times are
full of promise when a nation is seen turning back,
as the Hebrews did to Canaan, to the source from
which it drew its life in its youth, to renew its strength
by keeping alive its earliest inspirations. So the
Church will always find nourishment for its faith, and
quicken and sustain its hopes, in keeping before its
eyes, in memorial days and enduring monument, the
nature of the great truth that we are even now mem
bers of the Church of the firstborn who are enrolled
in heaven, and are to have a home in the city of the
Living God,

2l8 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
But Still more important is it that we should prac
tice fellowship with the living. Let us make more
of the unity of believers, and less of our differences.
The great problem of to-day is the reconstruction of
human society on the basis of brotherhood. It is the
final step in the mission of Jesus. Saved men are to
organize in Jesus' name for the saving of the world.
It can be done, not by the perfection of machinery, or
the force of organization, however complete and com
prehensive. The Church will fail utterly if it is
turned aside to be the great social purveyor. Man's
material wants are great and crying, heaven knows.
But the Church will be shorn of its strength in fixing
its attention upon the need of clubs and schools and
baths and libraries and sanitation and model tene
ments. Its function is to open the springs of the
soul, to save society by the strength of the inner life.
He who raised up Christ from the dead will quicken
the mortal members and change the exterior condi
tions of all life just so fast as hearts are opened to
his incoming. When a social structure that is based
on clashing interests gives place to one that rests on
the sense of spiritual union begun now and to endure
forever, the special and perplexing problems of civi
lization will quickly disappear. When we talk of the
communion of saints, we are not dreaming dreams of
a past that never will return, nor seeing visions of a

AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME 219
future too distant to concern us. We are interpret
ing the present as gathering into itself all that was
good in the past, and containing all the possibilities
of the future. We would fill our souls with great
truths. We would open deep fountains of love and
faith and hope, that death and time cannot affect.
We dream dreams of glad reunions soon to come, and
we see visions of the life that is waiting to be revealed.
We keep alive the memory of the beloved dead, that
in the sense of their presence we may, as our Lord
did, receive strength for the sorrows and the cares
of the life that we have still to accomplish.
If there is inspiration in bearing an honored name,
or belonging to a great family, or continuing a his
tory that has long been distinguished, what is to be
said when the name is that of Christ, and the family is
of the saints in heaven, and the history is of redemp
tion? I believe in the communion of saints, because I be
lieve that the life we have received from the Lord
Jesus Christ is the life that has come down through
the men of the past who have lived for Christ, and
shall pass on through unnumbered lives yet to be
influenced by our example, blessed by our prayers,
helped by our faithfulness, saved perhaps to God and
heaven by our fidelity, as the Church, in the con
sciousness of its priceless possession, exalts its undy-

220 AFFIRMATION OF THE HEAVENLY HOME
ing truth, fights persistently against the ever-present
demand for dominion on the part of the material and
the worldly that press upon us, tries to be true to its
faith in the unseen and the eternal, and proves its
right to a place in the love of God by the strength of
the love of its members one for another.'
1 See Note e.

XIV
THE AFFIRMATON OF PARDON

*^be forgiveness of Sins"

" But that ye may know that the Son of man
hath power on earth to forgive sins (then saith
he to the sick of the palsy). Arise, and take up thy
bed, and go unto thy house."
Matthew 9: 6.

CHAPTER XIV
THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
We should expect that so concise and so vital a
confession as the Apostles' Creed would do some
thing else than gather up odds and ends as it ap
proaches its close. We look to see it come to a head,
as an arrow.
A young theological student said to me, "The
Apostles' Creed is not ethical." I replied, "I fear
that you think so because you have not studied the
Apostles' Creed." Christian faith always rests upon
a foundation of practical life. Every affirmation of
the Church's faith is the outcome of its experience, is
the summarizing of the doctrine it has received as
that doctrine has been put through the crucible of its
daily life. The theses that Luther nailed on the
church door in Wittemberg were not intended as
abstract themes for dry theological discussion, or
even as a bold attack upon the doctrine of indul
gences. They were a summons to a view of life in its
relations to God.
Whatever opinion men may have of the theological
place of the testimony of the Christian consciousness.

224 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
no theological thinking will live that has not the
whole man behind it; that is not the product of his
heart no less than of his head.
Ritschl begins his great book on the History of
the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconcili
ation with the recognition of the fact that notwith
standing the existence of sin, the Church has freedom
of religious intercourse with God, and at the same
time, in the exercise of that freedom, orders its own
life in conformity with God's expressed design. This
implies a complete moral restoration of the whole
man, and is the direct result of the historical revela
tion of God's purpose of grace in Jesus Christ. Noth
ing less than this, then, can be the contents of any
confession that purports to give expression to the
faith of the Church. Men are delivered from sin by
Jesus Christ. From this all Christian doctrine starts,
and to it as a constant ethical test must it all return.
The incident in our Lord's life that gave rise to the
assertion of his power to forgive sins, occurred in the
first year of his Galilaean ministry. The disciples had
been called, and were settling to their task. Jesus
had visited his home at Nazareth and made announce
ment of his mission to preach the gospel to the poor.
He had drawn attention to himself by some notable
miracles, like the healing of the nobleman's son and
Peter's mother-in-law. As interest in him became

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 225
more intense he advanced to the healing of the leper,
that the people might see that he was concerned with
something more than the externals of life. Leprosy
had always been the type of sin and guilt; his cure
of it was to show that his mission was not simply to
make men comfortable and prosperous. The time
seemed to have come for the opening out of the
thought of his heart. So we have the man sick of the
palsy carried to the roof and let down through the
tiling ; and then the wonderful cure, with the prepara
tory statement, "But that ye may know that the Son
of man hath power on earth to forgive sins." Bodily
healing that leaves the soul unreached and the life un
changed is nothing. His power is, before all, to
forgive. The healing is only external witness to an
internal cure which brings both access to God arid a
renewed life.
John the Baptist had preached a searching gospel
of repentance, and men were widely troubled. It was
clear enough that those who stole should steal no
more, and that in the thing in which a man had
broken the commandments he should repent. But
John felt the need of something deeper and more
thoroughgoing. We cannot conceive of the great
prophet of the wilderness as being satisfied with men's
amending their lives in externals, or being indifferent
to the burden which the men whose hearts his words

226 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
had searched carried because of the things done in
the past. The past has made the man, and no good
resolutions can unmake him. We can catch some
thing of the gladness, therefore, as well as the awe,
with which John, when taught of God, saluted Jesus :
"Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin
of the world !" It was that for which the world was
waiting. He was only the herald. His baptism was
of water. The coming One should baptize with the
Holy Ghost.
We find Jesus at once assuming this function.
Only life can create life. He must awaken in the
hearts of men such expectation that they will begin
to move toward him. When he says, "Follow me,"
tliey must leave their money-changing or their fishing-
nets ; or when he says, "Come unto me," there must
be a growing conviction that if they should come, the
weary would find rest and the burdened have their
burden rolled away. Quickly he finds his opportu
nity with Nicodemus, and the woman at the well, and
the chosen spirits that gather closest about him. He
opens the mystery of the new birth and the water of
life. He tells how the world through him is to be
saved. Incidentally he shows his power over nature,
as opportunity offers, that men may be expectant of
something more, and when the multitude throngs
about the helpless invalid with his four eager and

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 227
devoted friends, he looks around, and saying, "That
ye may know that the Son of man hath power on
earth to forgive sins," adds, "Arise, and take up thy
bed and go unto thy house." Men felt the charm of
this new teacher. They knew their own unworthi-
ness ; they were awakened to the conviction of sin ;
the gracious message of his life opened the way for
the manifestation of the power of God. They be
lieved, and according to their faith it was done unto
them. Thus Jesus prepared the way for his Church to take
up his work. In proportion as the Church lives out
its doctrine, do men come to receive and believe its
message. Carlyle's saying is true, "To teach religion,
the first thing and the only thing is to find a man who
has religion." The disciples took up the theme be
cause they had the proof of its truth in their own
hearts. The Holy Spirit witnessed with their spirits
that they were sons of God. They were forgiven.
They knew it. They had access to God and power to
live new lives. So they preached Jesus the crucified
Christ, and men were pricked in their hearts and re
pented ; themselves in turn to take up the word, and
repeat it to others. This became the form of the
perfected message : "Repent . . . that your sins may
be blotted out." From the beginning, those who pro
claimed it believed that men may be safely led to

228 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
know their own guilt. There is no pardon and
peace without it. The conviction of sin, of righteous
ness, and of judgment, is but another name for the
process of conversion. From the days of John and
of Jesus, the preaching that has brought salvation
has created great searchings of heart, and has hum
bled men under a new knowledge that they are
sinners.' Much modern teaching is just the opposite of this.
Men are exhorted to love one another, to do kind
acts, to grow in culture and the amenities of life, but
in all to keep their thoughts turned away from them
selves. There seems to be a new fear that we are too
feeble to bear much self-knowledge. All other
knowledge is good for us. We seek at least a taste
of every science, and we drink more than a little of
the dregs of the world's wickedness, to the end that
we may know. But when it comes to ourselves and
our own hearts, we are urged to think well of our
selves, and are carefully shielded against searching
inquiry. There is a wide-spread conviction that the Church
itself is loth to hear much said about sin. Not only
are the severities of the Gospel message toned down
or put away, but the loss of the sense of sin as an
ever-present and universal experience, bringing upon
1 See Note 1.

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 229
the individual soul the burden of guilt and alienation
from God, has affected the entire series of Christian
doctrines, doing away with the necessity of an atoning
sacrifice, reducing the regenerating work of the Holy
Spirit to a beneficial influence, and making the final
restitution of all men a necessity in the moral
universe. The Apostles' Creed has stood through the centu
ries a witness to the opposite truth. The Church has
persistently affirmed its faith in the atoning sacrifice
of Christ, the renewing agency of the Holy Spirit,
and the blessedness of the united life of the saints of
God; and it has upheld deliverance from sin as the
immediate consequence of this and the path by which
restitution to God is accomplished. The revelation
is given that men may have their eyes opened to see
their helplessness and the shame of their departing
from God, and like the prodigal in the far country,
may arise and go to the Father. The concern is not
with sin as a theological term, but with profligacy and
greed and selfishness and dishonesty and impurity
and worldliness and hatred and all uncharitableness
and unbelief, and whatever separates the soul from
God. To deliver us from sins such as these Christ
has come and died. And because we believe in the
efficacy of his work for us, we believe in the forgive
ness of sins ; of ours, therefore of every man's who

230 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
will avail himself of it. We do not fear to pray, "O
God, show me myself !" because we at the same time
pray, "O Lord, show me thyself." We believe the
one prayer will not be answered without the answer
to the other. We do not fear to know the exceeding
sinfulness of our sin, because we believe that God
knows it already, and, knowing, has, for Jesus' sake,
forgiven it.
Therefore we believe in the forgiveness of sins,
because we believe in the gospel of Christ, which is
before all else a gospel to sinners; because so many
sinners have been forgiven — the great multitude,
from Paul, the chief of sinners, to the last penitent
standing to confess the name of Jesus, all bearing
testimony to what God has done for their souls ; and
because we have been forgiven ourselves — the blessed
consciousness in the heart of every true believer that
Jesus Christ has forgiven him. Because of these
three great facts, we do not hesitate to affirm before
any sinner that we believe there is forgiveness for him
also if he will have it.
What should we have to preach without this as
surance? The wife does not believe her husband
is bad, or the mother her child, or the friend his
friend. Indeed, we are continually humbled by the
beautiful character and the tender kindness of those
we love. But what shall we say when we are face to

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 23 1
face with a soul to whom God has spoken, and the
question is not what you or I may think, or what the
Church or the world may think, but what God thinks
of him? Then the cry is, "Can there be pardon for
such a sinner as I am?" "Is there possibility of a new
life for one who has so long resisted God as I have
done?" Where shall we find our answer? We must
meet the question with a far surer affirmation than
any based upon our own judgment of our friend's
character. In that hour compliments are a mockery.
Here is a soul into whom the light of eternity has
shone. He is dealing with God. Away with your
easy complacency. What our friend needs is to know
that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive
sins. Tell him out of your own deepest convictions,
that though his sins be as scarlet they shall be as white
as snow, though they be red like crimson they shall be
as wool. Then, and then only, do you bring him life
and peace.'
This, then, is the truth to which we ask testimony.
It is found first of all in the renewed life. "By their
fruits ye shall know them." Jesus presented the
beauty of holiness in himself, and men said, "Never
man so spake." His life, as no other's, confirmed his
doctrine. Plato says, "Till the character is set in the
direction of the ideal, a theory of the ideal is of no
1 See Note 2.

232 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
value for the improvement of conduct." Christianity
has upheld the loftiest ideal, because it could always
appeal to the loftiest model. Its one rule has been,
"Walk in the footsteps of Jesus," and its earliest apos
tles faced the world, saying, "Those things which ye
have seen and heard in us, do." It is at once unchris
tian and immoral to adopt any other method. The
injunction "Do as I say, not as I do," has no warrant
in the gospel of Christ, Until the Christian shows the
proof of his doctrine in his life, he carries no healing
to others. It was said in the wars between the Moors
and the Spaniards that a perfect character would be a
man who had the virtues of the Mussulman and the
creed of the Christian. But this is reversing our
Lord's doctrine. Dean Stanley, commenting on it,
indignantly said, "If, the virtues of the Arabs were
juster than the virtues of the Spaniards, then, whether
they accepted Christ or not, it was they who were the
true believers, and it was the Christians who were the
infidels." We may not go so far as that, for we have
not the knowledge to compare man with man, or to
judge righteous judgment. But this is sure, that
immorality cannot hide successfully behind ortho
doxy, and that the first evidence of faith is to be
sought in the renewed life.
Notwithstanding its sins and its failures, the mis
takes and the imperfection of its grasp upon the truth.

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 233
the Church has yet been enabled to work out some
thing of Christ, revealing to the world what is the
beauty of holiness, what is the power of the forgiven
heart in its mastery over itself, what is that perpetual
love which seeks not its own, and which is growing
little by little into the likeness of Him who wrought
"With human hands the creed of creeds.
In loveliness of perfect deeds."
Never boasting of ourselves, but ever of the peace
of God, we can rejoice that he does give something
of victory over our own hearts, that we have some
thing we can offer to the world as ours ; that the
Church of Jesus Christ is proving the reality of its
ideal by something of improvement in its conduct.
Some years ago a distinguished layman, then my
neighbor, a member of another communion that does
not hold the divinity of Christ, one day stopped me
on the street and said, "I have long wanted to say
something to you. I have been watching the work
of your church for some time. We used to say in
New England that you orthodox people have the
theory, but we have the practice. I now want to say
that I think you have both the theory and the prac
tice." I thanked him, and as I walked away said
to myself, "Has there ever been any other standard
and teaching than that for the Church of Jesus Christ?

234 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
Has there ever been a group of men and women bear
ing the name of Jesus Christ who could for one mo
ment justify themselves before men — not to say
before God — as having the faith of Jesus, if they did
not live the life of Jesus?" They may have misinter
preted the pattern, they have often perverted the
teaching, but they have never repudiated the standard
as the mark and test of their high calling. There
fore it is our duty — to state the truth of Jesus? Yes
— but to state still more strongly the necessary appli
cation of that truth — i.e., to live pure and honest and
true lives.
The second testimony, to the forgiveness of sins is
the power to live near to God, the sense of a constant,
divine companionship which the Saviour promised to
those who love him, and which seals the believer's
acceptance. Many have read the story of Brother Lawrence,
the great, awkward footman, who was converted in
such a way that he was led to believe that, as God
renews the life of a tree in the spring, so He could
make even the dry tree of his unprofitable life bloom
and blossom to Himself in daily fruitage. He offered
himself as a lay brother to the Carmelite friars, and, in
the most menial tasks, for more than sixty years, lived
in constant sense of the presence of God. His only
e.xplanation of the singular strength and beauty of his

THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON 235
life was that God was with him from the beginning.
No one had taught him this. God had spoken to
him, and dwelt in him. Of whatever he had to do he
said, "Lord, this is thy work. Thou must see that it
is well done." And the help was invariably given,
until his Hfe attracted the attention of others, and
has survived as a blessed influence upon many for
upwards of two hundred years. With no peculiar
instruction, with no exceptional opportunities, this
man was enabled to enter into the precious secret that
to the man who has learned to "practice the presence
of God" there is given not only power to do the work
of God, but uninterrupted communion with God, as to
a child whose father's arms are always about him,
and his father's love filling his heart.
When we say, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins,"
and seek to apply that assurance to our own hearts,
or turn to our friends, striving to bring them to the
same blessed condition, we need to know that we have
in ourselves these two irrefutable confirmations of our
testimony : we are living a new and Christian life ; and
we are practising the presence of God.
Can there be any doubt that the Christian who so
lives, or the Church which so witnesses, will not fail in
its testimony? Can there be any question of the truth
of the affirmation of the Creed now before us, when
God's Spirit so works in the hearts of sinful men that

236 THE AFFIRMATION OF PARDON
blind eyes are opened to see the glories of God, and
dull hearts are quickened to the truth of the divine
indwelling, and humble, common lives are so irradi
ated with the beauty of Jesus Christ? Can there be
doubt that when any man looks into his own heart,
and probing it to the bottom asks himself what kind of
a life he is living, and what is his greatest need before
a holy God, and feels himself a guilty soul in the
presence of his Judge, and cries to the rocks and hills
to cover him from the divine Presence ; can there be
any doubt that the Son of man has power on earth
to forgive his sins, and that He will do it, and will lift
up and renew his life, and bring into his heart the
presence of God, filling his soul with joy and peace?
One has but to try it, to know.

XV
THE AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY
RESURRECTION

"^be IResurrection of tbe 3Bo^l5 "

" And the God of peace himself sanctify you
wholly ; and may your spirit and soul and body
be preserved entire, without blame at the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ."

IThbss.5 :23.

CHAPTER XV
THE AFFIRMATION .OF A BODILY RESUR
RECTION
We are not now concerned with any question as to
the condition of the soul immediately after death, or
as to the state of the dead prior to the coming of our
Lord in the resurrection, or as to the final condition of
the wicked. The affirmation of the Church is as to
the resurrection of believers ; and it asserts that that
is a bodily one. The question before us then is as to
the truth of the affirmation, and as to its meaning.
This clause of the Apostles' Creed has been in the
Creed from the beginning, and is repeated in innu
merable churches every Sunday, but if you ask the
next Christian you meet if he believes it, he will an
swer No, or hold you for a long explanation. Yet in
the extremest form, carnis resurrectionem, the resur
rection of the flesh, has been the unchanging phrase
from the Creed of Aquileia in 390 A.D. onward. Its
exact equivalent appears in the earliest Greek Confes
sion, that of Marcellus, in 341 A.D. A century earlier
the Creed of Tertullian uses the same words. Our
English translation has read, since the time of Henry

240 AFFIRMATION OP A BODILY RESURRECTION
VIII, 1543 A. D., "body," as a truer equivalent than
"flesh." The original utterance was the Church's prompt
and emphatic reply to the spiritualistic vagaries of the
Gnostic heretics. The heathen world had always be
lieved in the importance of the body to the well-being
of the soul after death. The pyramids of Egypt and
the costly tombs of Thebes were simply an effort to
provide such permanent and indestructible abode for
the body that the soul might be assured of constant
access to it.
The Greeks thought of their dead as shadowy
spirits, haunting the nearer shore of Acheron until
proper burial of the body ensured their ferrying over
to some sort of corporeal life in the fields of Elysium.
Even Plato, while he ridiculed excessive concern for
the body after death, held that the soul must needs
return to it, perhaps after four hundred years.
Inevitably the question of the state of the dead
came up in the early Church almost at once. It was
not a dry speculation, any more than it is to-day. It
was the passionate cry of bleeding hearts, asking
after husband, or wife, or child, with an urgency not
to be put off with vague generalities or any mere
importations from heathenism. The wail
"Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still I"

Affirmation of a bodily resurrection 241
goes back to Eve and Abel. Indeed, it was the oc
casion for the earliest of the New Testament writings.
The converts at Thessalonica had barely settled into
the joy of the new life before their peace was broken
up and their faith all but destroyed by the death of
some of their number. In the faith of Jesus' victory
over death they had been baptized. They had learned
to believe with the apostles in his coming again
quickly. They were expectant of the new heaven and
the new earth. The reality of the new life they had
abundantly proved. Yet while they were in the first
flush of their new joy, honored and beloved members
of the Church were smitten with disease; and with
intolerable distress they saw them go down into the
grave. Was their faith, then, vain? Was sin again
to reign in them? They sent hurriedly to the apostle
Paul, who had taught them the new gospel, and he as
promptly replied: "Do not be concerned, beloved.
Your dead have suffered no loss ; the Lord has taken
them to bring them again at his coming; you who
are alive and remain will have no advantage over them
through your then being in the flesh. Indeed, they
will welcome you into the perfected life. We will
pray that your body and soul and spirit may be pre
served entire, without blame, with them, at the coming
of the Lord Jesus."
Soon after, the same question seems to have arisen

242 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
in Corinth, and in his first letter to that church, Paul
goes into it with still fuller detail. He reviews the
evidence of Jesus' resurrection, first as given to the
disciples, then to the five hundred, last of all to him
self; abundant, cumulative evidence of the indisputa
ble fact that Jesus had died, his body been laid in the
tomb, and then that on the third day he rose from
the dead. The grave was empty. Jesus himself
stood before them saying, "See my hands and my feet,
that it is I myself : handle me, and see ; for a spirit hath
not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having." And
he showed them his hands and his feet, bearing the
wound-marks they knew so well; and he ate with
them, and vanished.
The details of the change Paul did not enter into,
but he staked everything upon the fact. The life that
Jesus brought into the world is an abundant life.
Nothing will be found wanting when the work is fin
ished. Death must come, but it is only a transition.
Every possibility of existence which God implanted
in the soul made in his image, shall eventually be
realized. We shall see him as he is, and be like him
in that large sense in which God shall see his com
pleted work in his ransomed children. Because he
lives, and as he lives, we shall live also.
But some man says, "How are the dead raised? and
with what manner of body do they come?" We see the

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION 243
body gradually fail, until it ceases to be the obedient
instrument of the soul. Then it dies, and is laid
away in the grave, what is of the earth returning to
earth. Is it to be revived and renewed ? "How fool
ish you are," says the apostle. "You have but to
open your eyes to find your answer in the natural
world. The seed you sow grows again, but not the
identical, naked seed you planted. That perished;
but in its perishing, the life hidden in it revealed the
mysterious faculty of reincorporating itself. It seized
upon the dead earth about it, and speedily shaped for
itself a habitation, to each seed its own body. Look
further ; a similar law maintains everywhere in nature.
Birds, beasts, fishes, all have their individuality of
bodily life. Even the stars, those "patines of bright
gold," which "Thick inlay the floor of heaven,"
are not lost in a world of indiscriminate existence, for
"one star differeth from another star in glory.''
There are bodies terrestrial, and there are what cor
responds to this, bodies celestial.'
"How little you understand it! Here the body is
mortal, corruptible, carnal ; there it is immortal, in
corruptible, spiritual. Here death reigns in all; but
death itself, the last enemy, is for us vanquished. The
1 See Notel.

244 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
first man, Adam, became a living soul ; the last Adam
is not merely a human soul, he is a life-giving spirit,
having power to renew and preserve our entire being.
In his coming and triumph we shall see the finished
work. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom
of God. I show you a mystery. The forms in which
you know the material of the body are transient.
They will be changed. But we shall be ourselves,
glorified, entire. Death has lost its sting. The vic
tory shall be Christ's, and shall be complete. There
fore be at peace." '
Paul amplifies this in many another utterance in
later epistles. The emancipation Jesus had wrought
Ijegins in the new spiritual life Christians already
know. This carries in itself the warrant of eternal
existence. As we are redeemed by Jesus' death, we
are to be saved in his life. At his coming, Christ
is to change, not "our vile body" (for the apostle never
vilifies the body), but "the body of our humiliation,"
i.e., the body pertaining. to the life of humiliation into
which our Lord himself entered when he was made in
the likeness of men, into "the body of his glory," i.e.
into a body like his own as it is in the perfected life
of his post-resurrection kingdom. This new body,
old yet new, made of heavenly substance, is the "build
ing from God, a house not made with hands, eternal,
1 See Notes 2, 3 and 4.

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION 245
in the heavens," for which the apostle longed, ear
nestly desiring to be clothed upon with the final house
which is from heaven — a consummation to be attained
when the Lord shall come.'
Everywhere the New Testament represents the life
in Christ as both abundant and progressive. Salva
tion is already begun in all who receive Christ. And
while it is the Lord's will that for a time they shall
continue upon earth and under the law of physical
death, the fashion of this world is passing rapidly
away, and they who are not of this world already have
in them the promise and the potency of a post-mortem
existence, in which, with undiminished faculties, they
shall advance to a final completion in a post- resurrec
tion life, of which perfected corporeity in some form
is an essential condition. "He that raised up Christ
Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal
bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you" (Rom.
8: 11), is the specific promise, and in the light of
other Scripture is not to be restricted to the immedi
ate influence of the Christian spirit on the Christian's
personal appearance. It points to a change in the
whole man, of which heaven is to be the realization.
Our Lord's farewell words as to the "mansions" he is
preparing, gain significance in this connection. He
will finish the work that was given him to do only
1 See Note 6.

246 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
when the redemption he made possible by his sacrifi
cial death shall be accomplished in the renewal of
every man who is given to him, in his entire body.
In spite of Paul's warning about "flesh and blood,"
we are continually stumbling over the difficulties in
herent in the material body. But how little we know
about matter! We think of it as the antithesis of
life. We are accustomed to attribute to it qualities
determined by this antithesis. It is inert, ponderable,
impenetrable, infinitely divisible, and so on. But to
day the physicists announce all matter as in motion,
and the philosophers go so far as to say that matter
and energy may prove to be synonymous terms.
This is enough to make us distrust the seriousness of
the difficulty which our conception of the body im
poses upon the teaching of the Scripture. When we
observe matter as we know it, we see it gathering
about an invisible form, or conception, to make the
crystal, as of quartz or salt, always the same; and in
higher degree the living cell, also, always itself and
identical, which in turn falls into place in the living
body, likewise after its kind — preparing in its most
developed form the habitat of the soul, each also itself
and original, which seems to mark the ultimate pur
pose of the entire process. We remember Spenser's
lines in the "Faerie Queene" :
"For of the soul the body form doth take.
The Soul is Form, and doth the Body make.''

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION 247
Some mysterious force has dominion over what we
know as crude matter. It carries it forwards and
upwards in ever new combinations, with many an in
explicable leap, over seemingly impassable gulfs
where life appears, or sensation, or thought, until it
reaches a seeming finality in man. Then we suddenly
discover that this controlling force, this living power,
is not simply in a man, it is the man himself. What
ever may be true outside him or below him, he is the
center of his own being, he thinks, feels, wills ; and
as for his body when he leaves it, it is no longer what
it was, a part of himself, but simply inanimate clay — a
lump like any other clod.'
Matter, then, is not complete until we find it in the
living man. What possibilities it has beyond, we do
not know. What it has in man we should have as
little known had we not had experience of it. In any
case nature has already widened out to embrace what
once was held the supernatural, for nature now em
braces man, and man is spirit, and spirit reaches up to
the Being of God. We do not know the soul apart
from its life in the body. The term disembodied
spirit suggests something essentially unreal and
vague. Even Dante's imagination lost such spirits in
the "viewless wind." There appears ground for the
conception, not that the soul is material, or the prod-
1 See Notes 6 and 7.

248 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
uct of what is known as matter, but that matter in
some exalted form stands in vital relation to spirit.
Immortality by no means rests on the present physi
cal basis of life, but it is something other than perpet
ual transference to new conditions and embodiments,
spiritual or otherwise. We are every one of us ex -
periencing, so far as we know, primary and enduring
conditions of the spirit's life in what presents itself
to us as corporeity. In our entirety of body and soul
we are ourself. Creation does not lie outside us.
The body is more and other than flesh as we know it.
The philosopher and the poet apprehend something
of the great underlying truth. Lotze defines the body
as a "ripple around a submerged stone;" the atoms
change in the ceaseless flow, the ripple remains. And
Wordsworth in his sonnet on the river Duddon,
mourning the friends of long ago, sings :
"Still glides the stream, and shall forever glide.
The Form remains, the Function never dies."
So nature suggests the riddle which revelation
solves. Life as we know it, individual and corporeal,
is attacked at its center by sin and death. The dis
solution of soul and body is no less a dissolution than
is the decomposition of a seed, or the breaking up of
a chemical compound. Not that the dissolutions are
identical, but they are both more than a mechanical

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION 249
separation, they are a veritable dissolution of elements
having permanent relations, and only in their union
finding the real possibilities of their nature. In the
reunion of those several elements we seek the fulness
of renewed existence. The death that sin introduces
will be undone in the resurrection life which Jesus
brings. Body, soul and spirit will be rescued from
dissolution, and immortality will be no abstract ideal,
but the rich fulness of a life in which all history and
all nature find their place, a life for which we are pre
paring the materials day by day. This earthly life is
in the truest sense not a preparation for, but a part of,
the eternal life. It is in this sense not a probation,
but a participation. We have the answer to Brown
ing's broken-hearted prayer at La Saisiaz :
"Grant me once again assurance we shall meet each some day,
Walk, but with how bold a footstep ! on a way, but what a
way I
Worse were best, defeat were triumph, utter loss were utmost
gain."
Here, then, is proof of the divine economy, and
that becomes proof of the doctrine. Is there any
where in nature such a woful waste as would appear
if our bodies, after all the labor spent upon them,
should go into irretrievable decay? The last word of
science is of the correlation and preservation of every
thing ; and shall the body, our great possession, with

250 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
the care of which and the adapting of which to our
own purposes life has unfolded, is this to perish ut
terly? It has played large part in fashioning my in
tellect and my character, it is true, and they abide ; but
can it be that after standing to me in a relation more
constant and subtle in its intimacy than that of any
friend, it is to be worn out and cast away as a mere
garment? Nothing is further from the truth. The
Christian turns to the promise of his Lord and says,
"Ah ! the dear form that I loved, the lips that I kissed,
the eye that answered to my eye, the touch that
thrilled my very soul, the blessed personal compan
ionship which was open to no other, the fingers that
gained their skill, beautiful, delicate, divine ; the voice
that sang for others and thrilled for me, the very smile
— the first smile on the face of my child, the last
loving look of the young son that I laid away, all these
are mine !" They are to come back in the resurrection.
They are kept, as the treasure laid up in heaven.
They are the blessed dead in Christ, who are to come
with him in his triumph. They are to be the witness
in their person of his finished work. They are to prove
the change of this body of humiliation into the body
of his glory. Nothing has been wasted. No least
particle of personality has been lost. The mother
will embrace her child, her very own ; and the child
will look and breathe and live in the smile on the

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION 25 I
face of the mother. Surely the eye, the ear, the taste,
the voice, the hand, no less than the brain and the
heart, are to find place for their perfected powers in
the occupations of that other life where God's
servants do serve him.'
See what a revolution this also involves in our re
lations to God and God's universe. Here "this
muddy vesture of decay doth grossly shut us in;"
consequently our eyes are dim to the vision of God,
and our interpretations of him and of his ways are
lame and inconsequential. But when in the full pos
session of senses -which are our very self, but are no
longer dulled with the sad entail of evil, or beclouded
and enfeebled from the contact of fleshly lusts and
passions, we shall see God as he is and be like him,
then we shall know as we are known, and all the
sweep of the divine thought and the significance of the
divine guidance will be clear.'
The same applies to our relations to one another.
How much we suffer from half understandings and
misunderstandings ! Even the closest friends get a
new knowledge of each other in the new sorrow ; as
we are distressed by the revelation of unlooked-for
evil in the day of betrayal. What father really knows
his son? At best we grope in the dark in our rela
tions with one another; not only on the side of
1 See Notes 8 and 9. ' Note 10.

252 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
disappointment, but on the side of love and tenderness
and sympathy and all the wealth of unrevealed affec
tion. Think of the meaning of the day when we shall
look through the eye to the heart, when we shall feel
the very soul in the grasp of the hand, and this body
of humiliation shall have become the perfected instru
ment for the expression of hearts that are absolutely
one! Here, then, is the blessed assurance of restoration to
the very loved ones that are ours. Often in weari
ness and pain, always under the shadow of impending
sickness and death, and surrounded with those who
wear the garments of mourning, you and I and all of
us believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are doing our
work, traveling our pilgrimage, bearing our testi
mony ; and with how many vacant seats in our homes,
how much of loneliness in our hearts, if not to-day,
surely to-morrow. The day is coming when not only
shall the anxiety over those we love vanish, but those
who have been smitten by the arrow of death shall
come back unwounded, to change no more. The life
beyond is to be no series of strange vicissitudes and
incomprehensible changes. It is to be the prolonga
tion of the very life that now is. As we have received
that life, with love and forgiveness and trust in God
and joy in the Holy Ghost and divine fellowship one
with another, we have passed from death into life.

AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRICCTION 253
The full reality is yet to be made manifest. Not to
us only, but, as Paul says, "also to all them that have
loved his appearing." It is to be the great day of the
harvest home, the day of Christ's final triumph.
Therefore the Church in this closing testimony of the
Creed, closely connected, as you will now recognize,
with the previous affirmation, "I believe in the for
giveness of sins," by which the resurrection life of the
Lord Jesus Christ has come into my sin-sick, smitten
soul, — says also, "I believe in the resurrection of the
body," in which the final and perfect work of forgive
ness is realized.'
"Not changed, but glorified I Oh, beauteous language
For those who weep,
Mourning the loss of some dear face departed.
Fallen asleep;
Hushed into silence, never more to comfort
The hearts of men ;
Gone, like the sunshine of another country,
Beyond our ken !
"Oh, dearest dead, we saw thy white soul shining
Behind the face.
Bright with the beauty and celestial glory
Of an immortal grace !
What wonder that we stumble, faint and weeping.
And sick with fears,
Since thou hast left us — all alone with sorrow,
And blind with tears !
"Can it be possible no words shall welcome
Our coming feet?
How wil! it look, that face that we have cherished,
When next we meet?
1 See Notes 11 and 12.

254 AFFIRMATION OF A BODILY RESURRECTION
Will it be changed, so glorified and saintly.
That we. shall know it not?
Will there be nothing that will say, T love thee.
And I have not forgot?'
"Oh, faithless heart, the sarae loved face, transfigured.
Shall meet thee there.
Less sad, less wistful, in immortal beauty
Divinely fair !
The mortal veil, washed pure with many weepings.
Is rent away.
And the great soul that sat within its prison
Hath found the day.
"In the clear morning of that other country,
In Paradise,
W'ith the same face that we have loved and cherished
She shall arise !
Let us be patient, we who mourn, with weeping.
Some vanished face.
The Lord has taken but to add more beauty
And a diviner grace.
"And we shall find once more, beyond earth's sorrows.
Beyond these skies,
In the fair city of the "sure foundations,"
Those heavenly eyes.
With the same welcome shining through their sweetness
That met us here —
Eyes, from whose beauty God has banished weeping
And wiped away the tear."

XVI
THE AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE

ant) tbe Xife jeverlasting

" Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy be
gat us again unto a living hope bv the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance
incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not
away, reserved in heaven for you, who by the
power of God are guarded through faith ufito a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.'"
1 Peter 1:3-5.

CHAPTER XVI
THE AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
The Creed begins with the affirmation of faith in
God from whom we come; it closes with the affirma
tion of faith in the everlasting life to which we hope to
go. It presents that life as estabhshed in God, and
as the final result to which the whole redemptive work
of God is directed. There is that in our hearts which
declares that anything short of this would be failure.
We come from God, and we are made to go to him
again. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness.
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home."
We readily believe, with Wordsworth, as he gazed at
the little girl with her ignorance of the meaning of
death, that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy;"
but with our advancing manhood we want something
firmer than the Intimations of Immortality in the

258 AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
Recollections of Early Childhood, as the foundation
of our faith in everlasting life. The Church has had a
clearer vision than this. Her faith in immortality is
no vague fancy, . . "reaching to some great world
In ungauged darkness hid."
She has sung through the centuries her noble hymns
of the resurrection life, and has held fast her confes
sion through every form of sorrow and trial, because
she has known the connection between the tri
umphant Christ and "the land that is fairer than day,"
and has been sure of the home that awaits the believer
with his Lord.
The world has always been hungry for proof of
immortality, and there is no end of books to supply
it. Their number and the variety of their argument
would seem to show that the difficulty of proof is pro
portioned to the greatness of the desire. Science
pauses before the fateful door, and philosophy gives
us only more or less acute speculation as to what may
lie beyond the gates of death. Dr. Newman Smyth
has just now attempted to establish proof of immortal
ity on the basis of the doctrine of evolution, as Dr.
George A. Gordon has done, upon consideration of
the character of God ; and Prof. John Fiske, upon the
worth and dignity of man. Their arguments are in
teresting and suggestive, but do not satisfy. The

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 259
moral worth of man is a most uncertain quantity.
God, however adorable his character, as a matter of
fact tolerates sin and death in this world ; so far as phi
losophy can show, he may therefore endure them in
another world ; and as for evolution, waiving all ques
tion of its being at best but a working hypothesis,
and, its friends being witness, still in the realm of un-
demonstrated dogma, it can point but to a probable
survival of the race, not of the individual ; and what
concerns us is not the final destiny of humanity, but
our individual fate. The life everlasting which now
occupies us and to which the Church bears witness,
is that which the apostle saw before him when he
wrote the confident utterance of the opening words of
his epistle to the scattered and persecuted Christians
of the Dispersion, the living hope of an inheritance
our very own, "incorruptible, and undefiled, and that
fadeth not away," the completion and the crown of
the salvation which our Lord has wrought for us
(i Peter i : 3-5).
Therefore we turn from speculation to revelation.
We gladly recognize the preparatory service the
philosophers have rendered us. Kant, for example,
laid solid foundations in his "We ought, there
fore we can, therefore we are free;" and Hegel when
he added, "because of God," established Kant's postu
lates of God and immortality, upon grounds which, if

26o AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
not adequately and completely Christian, have proved
to many troubled souls enlightening and preparatory
to faith. Bishop Butler's great argument still stands
to show the probability both of the future life and of
revelation; while Coleridge and Emerson and Car
lyle have done much to prepare the minds of men for
the conviction that God is self-revealing, and that
nothing is more reasonable than the faith of the
Christian when he turns to hear what the Lord his
God will say. But our confidence is in the revelation,
not in the philosophy. We believe that Jesus Christ
has risen from the dead, and we believe that we have
eternal life in him. Therefore we turn to his words
to know what that life is.
The New Testament is full of the subject; but let
us take our Lord's conversation with Nicodemus,
when in his ministry he opened up the question in its
deepest relations. To sweep away Nicodemus' con
fession that he was "a teacher come from God," Jesus
announces the doctrine of the new birth. "Except a
man be born anew," or "from above," "he cannot see
the kingdom of God." Not simply to give knowledge
of the new birth, and to awaken in sinful men a sense
of the need of it, but to bring the life which would pro
duce it, was Jesus' mission. He revealed that life in
himself; he bore testimony to a unique personal ex
perience ; and in the strength of that, he summoned

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 261
Nicodemus to believe that the life from God might
be imparted to him also. The ultimate purpose of
his coming he declared when he said, "For God so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth on him should not perish,
but have eternal life. For God sent not the Son into
the world to judge the world; but that the world
should be saved through him" (John 3 : 16, 17).
Here, then, is the definition of eternal life, and the
method by which it is to be attained. It is identical
with the new nature given in the birth from above by
the Holy Ghost. It comes to us through faith in
Jesus Christ. It is a present possession, to be known
in its fulness hereafter. Upon the fact of its present
reality, Jesus dwelt often and fully. "Verily, verily, I
say unto you. He that heareth my word, and believeth
him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not
into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life"
(John 5 : 24). "And this is life eternal, that they
should know thee the only true God, and him whom
thou didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John 17:3).
The great hindrance to faith in eternal life as a
present reality, then as now, was the universal pres
ence of sin and misery. It is the problem of the
Book of Job. The Old Testament saints had not the
clear vision of the future which would enable them
rightly to interpret the conditions of the present life.

262 AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
The Jews of Jesus' time had attained to a clearer pros
pect of the life to come, but, through their legal con
ception of the relation of man to God, this life was to
them merely an occasion for performing religious
tasks of righteousness and self-denial, in exchange for
which they would obtain future reward. Jesus
taught that this life, with all its trouble, is full of mani
festations of God's grace and of experiences that are
a foretaste of heavenly joy, and a fitting preparation
for it. Even death, the great enemy, does not inter
fere to prove more than an incident in the believer's
progress. On the way to the grave of Lazarus, Jesus
said, "He that believeth on me, though he die, yet
shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth on
me shall never die" (John ii :25, 26).'
Beyond the grave Jesus presents a future state of
bliss as the goal to which he is leading his followers.
His parting promise is, "I go to prepare a place for
you." The goal is to be attained at the close of the
earthly service with its mingled experiences of joy and
sorrow, of orphanage and comfort, of answered
prayer, and of the world's hostility, of the burdens of
which his farewell address is full. But the future is
none the less sure and triumphant. "In the world
ye have tribulation : but be of good cheer ; I have over
come the world" (16: 33). Jesus was to rise from

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 263
the dead and come again, because of the life of God
in him. So the believer is to find eternal life, because
in him also is the life of God through Jesus Christ his
Lord. The resurrection is not the condition, but the
result, of eternal life. That life begins in the new birth
of the penitent soul turning to Jesus Christ for pardon
and salvation. It is confirmed in the Christian ex
perience, as the true believer finds that, for him, the
old has passed away and all things have become new.
The resurrection then becomes the introduction to the
final and triumphant stage of the life that is hid with
Christ in God. It is like the entrance of the bride to
her new home ; it is the fruition to which the plighted
troth and the days of preparation have in due time
led.' The characteristics of that life are not left in uncer
tainty. It begins in its completeness with the second
coming of our Lord. The life centers in him; the
resurrection is his triumph; he will bring his saints
with him, and life in its fulness will be realized by them
in perfect fellowship with him. Love alone makes true
life for us now. Where love is dead, or the loved one
is gone, little remains. I stood not long since by the
side of a friend in the bedchamber that had been his
wife's. Her garments still hung in the half-opened
closets, her toilet articles were still upon the dressing-
1 See Notes 2, 3 and 4.

264 AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
table. The beautiful apartment remained just as it
had been prepared for her occupancy ; and she was
dead. My friend has wealth, a great business, the
splendid residence, youth ; but he could not be com
forted. His life had centered in that single, satisfy
ing companionship. With it he was content ; with
out it he cared for nothing. It is a picture, imperfect
but instructive, of the life beyond and its satisfying
promise. All things are yours, for ye are Christ's.
The life everlasting will be attained when the resurrec
tion day gives back to us our loved ones, and the Lord
in whom they and we have found our life.
"Of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even
the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father
only." It is connected with the final judgment. For
that all shall appear; believers to receive the blessed
assurance that they indeed have continued unto the
end. Theirs is to be the reward of those who have
overcome. They have known that He who redeemed
them from sin will keep them unto the end. Now
they have final assurance that they are saved by his
life. What life will be for the unbeliever, and who will
remain unbelievers, or how many, we do not know.
The revelation of the life everlasting is for the be
liever. The bare terms in which those who are de
scribed as "lost" are spoken of, suggest that perhaps

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 265
they may be found; those who are to be "judged."
may yet escape condemnation; those who are "in
danger of eternal fire," may possibly be delivered.
But again they may not ; and the emphasis is certainly
against it. Their condition is described in words of
gravest import; their peril is as serious as language
can depict; the warnings and the imagery of the
Scriptures give ground for a hope, which even the
most eager interpreters find only despairing, for any
space for repentance in the other world; and in any
case the day of judgment fixes a point at which deci
sions become final. The revelation of eternal life is a
summons to every man to repent, in Browning's
phrase, "the day before his death," that is, to-day.
As to the occupations of heaven. Principal Fair
bairn gives us a striking illustration. He says, "Imag
ine immortality realized under the conditions of time,
a man as old as the race, yet retaining, as immortals
must, unexhausted and exuberant, the energies and
hopes of youth. He had met the fallen pair as
"They hand in hand, with wandering step and slow.
Through Eden took their solitary way;"
had looked with Noah from the ark ; had talked with
Abraham after God had met him ; had seen Moses as
he came down from the mount, and rejoiced with the
multitude that accompanied David when he entered

266 AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
Jerusalem; he had visited the empires of Egypt and
Assyria, and watched the meeting of their mighty
hosts; had listened to the discourses of Plato, and
followed the conquests of Alexander; had beheld the
rise of Rome, and had been in Judsea when the Christ
was crucified ; and had, step by step, alongside the
march of events between then and now, walked as
counselor and companion with the great men and
thinkers of the Christian centuries. Now would not
this man — an eager spirit all the time, open-eyed,
hungry for knowledge, communicative, acquisitive,
ever learning by experience how better to learn, to
teach, to live— be a mightier contribution to the
knowledge of the world, a louder call to its wonder,
than the greatest library it can boast? And in the
city of God are there not innumerable spirits of even
immenser experience, riper wisdom, more varied ca
pabilities of knowledge? And why do these live ex
cept to communicate, to teach, to help to lift the ideal
and achievements of the city, to raise its standard of
beatitude and obedience? Immortality is not idle
ness ; it must know progressive obedience to be
happy, increasing activity that it may have growing
beatitude.'" The supreme test that we apply to our occupations
and aims here is their relation to human life. Do
1 The City ol God, p. 368.

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 267
they preserve and promote it? Scientifically, no less
than morally, that is, from the standpoint of the politi
cal economist no less than from that of the preacher,
we find justification for the artist and the musician,
the doctor and the teacher, as well as for the carpenter
and the baker, in that they contribute to the fulness
and joy of living. Whatever does this, has a right
to be; whatever does not, is politically and morally
wrong. See what a place this gives in the life of
heaven for the employment of every faculty, and for
the delight of souls who see that every exercise of
mind or heart is a contribution to the larger life of
those we love, and a helpful participation in the un
folding of the plans of God. In the New Jerusalem
the tree of life bears "twelve manner of fruits," and
the leaves of the tree are "for the healing of the na
tions." There is perfect supply for every need, and
no productive effort is without boundless result.'
The life everlasting is unfolding now under varied
and complicated conditions. The parables of the
kingdom represent it. It is the seed falling, some in
the trodden path, where the soil is thin, some among
the choking thorns, and some in good ground. It
is the wheat growing with the tares. It is the drag
net gathering of every kind ; the great supper with its
rejected invitations and the hardly-compelled partic-
1 See Notes 5 and 6.

268 AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE
ipants; the wedding feast with the unworthy guest;
the wicked husbandmen refusing the tribute of the
harvest; the barren fig tree; the pearl of great price
which to-day so many decline to buy ; and the ten vir
gins of whom five were foolish. But for all the vari
ous conditions and the hidden and devious progress,
it is surely advancing, and so far as we are concerned
the end is near. Many shall come from the east and
from the west and shall sit down with Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom, and the children of
the kingdom, many at least who had opportunity and
privilege which they despised, shall be cast out.'
A sweet spirit, and a great scholar, the late Profes
sor Edwin Hatch, of Oxford, closes his Hibbert Lec
tures with this sentence : "Though you may believe
that I am but a dreamer of dreams, I seem to see,
though it be on the far horizon — the horizon beyond
the fields which either we or our children will tread —
a Christianity which is not new, but old, which is not
old, but new, a Christianity in which the moral and
spiritual elements will again hold their place, in which
men will be bound together by the bond of mutual
service, which is the bond of the sons of God, a
Christianity which will actually realize the brother
hood of men, the ideal of the first communities.''
That dream is to be realized only through the power
» See Note 7.

AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE 269
of a brighter though more distant vision, that of the
resurrection life and the city come down from God
out of heaven. As the Church comes to feel the ac
tual presence of the living Christ leading his followers
on, notwithstanding the pains and resistances of the
present world, to the day, ever drawing nearer and be
coming more real, when he shall come again to finish
his work in bringing back from the dead the ten thou
sand of his saints clothed in the resurrection body,
henceforth to know as they are known, the true adop
tion of the sons of God and the true brotherhood of
men will be realized, and men will be eager to live
it so far as they can in the life that now is. In short,
a firm and illumined grasp upon the doctrine of the
other life and the inheritance waiting to be revealed
is the essential condition of the right understanding of
this life and getting the best out of it.
The testimony of the lay brother of the Carmelite
friars. Brother Lawrence, ought to be the glad confes
sion of every life : "I must in a little time go to God.
What comforts me in this life is that I may see him
by faith; and I see him in such manner as might
make me say sometimes, I believe no more, but I
see." '
1 See Notes 8 and 9.

XVII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE ANCIENT
FAITH AS A WHOLE

amen

" Beloved, while T was giving all diligence to
write unto you of our common salvation, I was
constrained to write unto you exhorting you to
contend earnestly for the faith which was once for
all delivered unto the saints."
Jude 3.

CHAPTER XVII
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE ANCIENT FAITH
AS A WHOLE
We have not completed our task until we deal with
the question of the Creed as a whole. The individual
affirmations may be true and ihiportant, and yet the
question remain unanswered why there should be a
creed. Is not the Bible enough? Do not formal
confessions interfere with liberty of conscience and
that free intellectual life which is so essential to the
best religious growth? Do they not engender hy
pocrisy, intolerance and bigotry? Do they not pro
voke divisions and perpetuate strife?
The answer is suggested in the exhortation of Jude,
the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, when
writing to the "Beloved" he exhorts them to "contend
earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered
unto the saints." It has the ring of a battle cry. It
stirs the blood. It is not a call to military service, the
pomp of arms, and feats of heroic daring, but to that
far more difficult courage which is required when the
issues are moral and spiritual rather than physical.
It is hard to contend earnestly for the faith when the

274 "^^^ AFFIRMATION OF
times are loose ; when much that men have held is in
flux ; when a positive faith is considered ignorance and
bigotry ; when to be "liberal" is the current euphem
ism for being without convictions, and spiritual en
thusiasm is regarded as jejune. It requires a high or
der of courage to "hold the pattern of sound words,"
when the heart is oppressed, as Paul's so continually
was, with "strife . . . divisions, heresies," and a man's
foes are those of his own household.
Writing, as some think, quite at the close of the
apostolic period, Jude has this stirring exhortation
for the Church. He says not a word of persecu
tion. Already the Church has given proof of her
readiness to walk in the steps of the crucified
Christ, and the summons to martyrdom has been
joyfully met. Jude is concerned wholly with
perils from within. He would have believers remem
ber the warnings of the apostles concerning those who
in the last time would make separations ; he would
have them keep themselves in the love of God, and
save those "who are in doubt." Therefore in connec
tion with the most beautiful doxology in the New
Testament, "Now unto him that is able to guard you
from stumbling, and to set you before the presence
of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy, to the
only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord,
be glory, majesty, dominion and power, before all

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A 'WHOL.S 275
time, and now, and for evermore. Amen;" we find
him exhorting them in the words we have quoted.
There is then "the faith," i.e. a definite body of truth,
constituting the apostolic message. When Jesus was
on the earth, he was himself the truth, and faith was
apprehending him. The term is used in the gospels
to describe the act of the believer. He has faith, and
according to his faith it is done unto him. But in the
Book of the Acts and in the Epistles, faith takes on an
additional significance. It comes to be used of the
substance of the Christian doctrine, as when it was
said of Paul, he "now preacheth the faith of which he
once made havoc," and "A great company of the
priests were obedient to the faith." This meaning of
the term gains definiteness as the years go by, and the
word remains permanently intelligible in both senses.
It describes the internal act or state of the believer ; it
defines equally the contents and sum of the message
which he has first received and now offers to others.
This, Jude says, was "once for all" delivered to the
saints. Here again he uses a New Testament term
which has a definite significance. "As it is appointed
unto men once to die ... so Christ also, having been
once offered . . . shall appear." It indicates an act
not necessarily transpiring in a moment, but when it
did transpire, however long it took, complete. Our
Lord's offering of himself was a continuous and pro-

276 THE AFFIRMATION OF
longed act, but, when completed in his sacrificial
death, it was forever done. So the truth which he had
brought from God he had gradually declared. He
could say at last, "The words which thou gavest me I
have given unto them." These words the apostles re
ceived and communicated to others as they were
taught of the Spirit. When they were so delivered,
they came to be the body of doctrine of the Church,
the faith to the elucidation of which the Church ever
gives her strength, but which in its substance is once
for all complete.
Furthermore, the truth is "delivered." It is not the
outcome of human speculation or experience. Paul
distinctly repudiates the thought that it had come to
him with any less authority than directly from the
hand of God. It is therefore for the Church authori
tative. When we know what the teaching of the
Scripture really is, as interpreted in the light of our
present intelligence, we have reached what for the
Christian has always been the end of controversy.
This body of truth constitutes a definite trust. It
has been delivered "to the saints." Every believer is
so far a witness and an ambassador. He has not sim
ply a book in his hand, but a living faith in the essen
tial truth contained in the book, taken up, proved and
illustrated in his heart and life. Each Christian is, in
one sense, a new Bible, as the truth of the Bible gains

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A W^HOLE 277
something of new meaning and power through his
renewed soul. Therefore we are all debtors to the
world. This message from God gradually delivered
unto the fathers in the prophets "by divers portions
and in divers manners," which was taken up by Jesus
and constituted the gospel of salvation for the lost
world, is the faith in which by the grace of God we
live and move and have our being as Christians, and in
trust with which we are sent into the world to make
disciples of all nations. It certainly is something
worth contending for, and worth being in earnest
about. So much, then, for the teaching of the Scripture.
We now ask what reason there is for the Church's at
tempt to state this faith in the form of a Creed.
I. A creed is a formal confession, and as such is
man's answer to God's word. The Bible gives us the
form of the message ; we answer in our own words :
"I believe," etc. ; i.e., I receive and adopt the message,
and now give my understanding of it. It need not be
a formal and studied reply, but for convenience we use
that. Its object is not to produce faith, but to declare
it. It is, even in its most ancient and most widely
accepted form, not coordinate with the Bible, but sub
ordinate to it. The Bible forever stands the norm of
faith, the Creed is the rule of doctrine. It stands or
falls according to its agreement with the Bible. We

278 THE AFFIRMATION OF
make a confession because we find delight in express
ing in definite and sufficient terms our acceptance of
the truth given us of God ; as Paul quotes the Psalm
ist: "I believed, and therefore did I speak." We
make it also because our Lord constituted a public
and express confession of himself the condition of
acceptance in his kingdom. "Every one therefore
who shall confess me before men, him will I also
confess before my Father which is in heaven" (Matt.
10:32).' The earliest suggestion of such a formal confession
in the New Testament is Peter's reply to Jesus at
Cassarea Philippi : "Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God." This Jesus accepts and honors, and
in so doing mentions for the first time the Church as
the end and completion of his work on the earth. Be
fore this in his conversation with Nicodemus and with
the Samaritan woman, Jesus had made use of certain
definite statements of truth, presenting them for for
mal acceptance. Later, on the way to the grave of
I^azarus, he says to Martha, "I am the resurrection,
and the life : he that believeth on me, though he die,
yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth
on me shall never die. Believest thou this?" (John
11:25, 26).
But as the Church was not organized until after the
a See Notes 1 and 2.

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A WHOLE 279
resurrection, we cannot look earlier for a creed.
Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to bring to remem
brance his words, and gave the formula of baptism
"into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost," as the intimation of the formal creed
that would be needed after his death. Accordingly
we find the apostles after Pentecost using a uniform
and definite statement for the truths that were to be
the foundation of the faith of the infant Church and
the bond of its fellowship. Peter rehearses them,
preaching in the beautiful gate of the temple ; again
before the high priest, and again in the presence of
the council. In each case it is substantially the same
confession. "The God of Abraham . . . hath glori
fied his Servant Jesus; whom ye delivered up. . . .
But ye denied the Holy and Righteous One . . . and
killed the Prince of life; whom God raised from the
dead; whereof we are witnesses." John repeats the
phrase "Jesus-Christ-come-in-the-flesh" as the sub
stance of the Creed. "Every spirit which confesseth
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." He
says several times, "These are written, that ye may
believe." The earliest formal and general confession is in the
fourth chapter of the Acts, where it is said that the
assembled company "lifted up their voice to God with
one accord" in the language there recorded, and which

28o THE AFFIRMATION OF
was perhaps sung or chanted in unison. Dean Stan
ley finds in Paul's formal words in the passage begin
ning I Corinthians 15: 3, "For I delivered unto you
first of all that which also I received, how that Christ
died for our sins according to the scriptures," the first
regular confession of the early Church. He says in
this we have the original formula of the Apostles'
Teaching. And this is confirmed by its similarity
to parts of the creeds of the first three centuries, es
pecially to that which under the name of the Apostles'
Creed has been generally adopted in the West.'
We must remember that while the Apostles' Creed
is no piece of mosaic, but an organic unit, it was not a
sudden crystallization of Christian doctrine under
transient influences. It received emphasis and pre
cision at a particular time, as the result of theological
contest, but it had been known as a baptismal creed
from the earliest days. The progress of the Church
was continuous and coherent. We have Professor
Zahn's authority for the statement that "the continu
ity of development from the day of the resurrection of
Christ on to Irenaeus is unquestionable." A creed,
like a boundary line, is intended not to create a differ
ence, but to record it. It draws th§ line between the
Church and the world. Creeds naturally become
fuller and more explicit as the points of difference be-
1 See Note 3.

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A WHOLE 28 1
come more accurately known. In the earliest stage
of the development of Christianity the unity of the
Church was only what Hatch calls "a common rela
tion to a common ideal and a common hope." Then
came the period of heresies and conflicts and "the
idea of a definite belief as a basis of union dominated
over that of a holy life." Later it was not sufficient
for a man to be living a holy life, holding the catholic
faith, and belonging to a Christian society, but that
society must also be "part of a larger confederation;
and the sum of such confederations constituted the
Catholic Church." This was the beginning of the
tyranny of the Church and the inquisitory application
of creeds which have wrought such infinite evil.
We need, perhaps, to-day, to reiterate Dr. Marti-
neau's vigorous protest that "a second-hand belief,
assented to at the dictation of an initiated expert, with
out personal response of thought or reverence in my
self, has no more tincture of religion in it than any
other lesson learned by rote." We would guard our
selves equally against hypocrisy and tyranny. But
the point to observe is that there has been constant
occasion for the Church's stating distinctly, on one
important point or another, what she has learned in
the Word of God, and therefore what she believes.
God gives to no age any more of revelation than it is
prepared to use, i. e., enough to help it solve its own

282 THE AFFIRMATION OF
problems, and to supply strength for its own immedi
ate tasks. What if in the elation of doing this, it has
often exulted in its new truths as all its own, forgetting
its debt to the past and the possibility of God's having
more truth yet to break forth for others! Progress
has to be made in this way. There must necessarily
remain the task of setting forth the contents of the
gospel message in the language of current life and in
relation to all other truth. The last word has by no
means been spoken, and in every age the Church may
well stand ready and expectant of new truth, and new
statements of it, because of the place its own
confessions have filled in the past.'
II. We come now to another truth ; that the power
of the Christian faith is proportioned to the clearness
with which it apprehends and the courage with which
it proclaims its distinctive truths.
Religion rests, not on impressions, nor views, nor
feelings, but on facts. Its power is the power of the
truth known and believed. It need not always be
stated in the same terms; the confessions of the
Church have undergone continual modification with
the varying phases of the conflict with the world and
the devil, and with the continual modifications of
human speech. But the substance of doctrtine has
not changed through the ages. The Church of to-day
is in every essential the Church of the apostles, the
1 See Notes 4 and E.

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A WHOLE 283
Church of Jesus Christ. Its Creed now, as then, is
but the restatement of the truth once for all delivered.
When it has wandered, the Scripture has been the
light by which it has found its way back ; and, however
ecclesiastical courts may have disagreed, the Church
as a whole stands true to the contention that he only
is a heretic who teaches what Christ never taught, and
he is a schismatic whoever enjoins what Christ
did not command.
But while the forms of statement have varied, the
necessity for statement has not; and the power of a
definite statement remains unchanged. The duty of
being able to "give a reason for the faith that is in
you" involves the duty of being able to state one's
faith, and a clear statement of faith stands in close re
lations to the enthusiasm which makes the faith itself
a moral force.
The creeds and confessions have been the focal
points in the Church's history. The Nicene Creed
was the confession under which the Church fought out
her battle for the divinity of Christ, as the Athanasian
was at a later day that in which she recorded her abid
ing grasp upon the doctrine of the Trinity. The
Augsburg Confession was the bond of union among
the German Reformers, as the Westminster Confes
sion, with all its limitations, was among the Protes
tants of England ; while our American ancestors bore

284 THE AFFIRMATION OF
testimony to other friends beyond the sea of their lov
ing fellowship, their sturdy independence, their unde
viating devotion to the common faith, in the Cam
bridge Platform.'
At each several period, the Church had a particular
fight to wage. And her Confession marshalled her
forces, and proclaimed and preserved her final victory
It would be easy to show that, in general, hostility to a
creed is not so much hostility ±0 the Confession of the
truth, as hostility to the truth confessed. But this
is not enough. Our contention is that the Confession
itself has power. It gives efficiency to the truth.
Garbett, in his Bampton Lectures, goes so far as to
declare that the principles which are recognized as
distinctive of Christian civilization are all referable to
Christian dogmas, that is, to formal and positive state
ments of Christian truth; where the corresponding
dogmas are unknown, the principles are unknown,
and where the dogmas are preached, the principles
have become influential. All the world over, wher
ever the gospel has been preached, under every di
versity of race and climate, the same teaching has been
followed by the same effects ; and the activity of the
influence is "exactly proportioned to the activity of
the dogmatic belief." In other words, it is not the
Church, but the truth which the Church possesses,
that has the power."
1 See Note 6. = jfote 7,

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A WHOLE 285
It is sometimes asserted that doctrinal preaching
has been, at one time and another, the occasion of the
decay of the Church. But it is not true, except when
it is understood of a narrow preaching of doctrine as
something wholly apart from life — a mere strife about
words. A purely ethical preaching is equally barren.
Dorner, speaking of the decay of religion in the last
century, says it was due to the fact that the pulpit lim
ited itself to setting forth merely moral truths, and
then adds : "Those ages in which morality alone has
been most spoken of, have ever been those in which it
has been least practised." The fact is that when the
Church firmly grasps the great principles of her faith,
then she has power against the world ; and when she
loses her hold upon them, or suffers them to fall into
the background, then she suffers the shearing of her
strength. Testimony to this effect is abundant.
Harnack acknowledges that the strongest argument
against his view of Ante-Nicene Christianity, namely,
that through Greek influences it was largely a pagan
secularization of the primitive faith, is that it is the
old theology which produces "a deep knowledge of
sin, true penitence, and a living Church activity."
Dr. Martineau, the leader of Unitarianism in England,
has lately spoken in confirmation of this, out of his
own long experience ; while Professor Allen, of Cam
bridge, a liberal Episcopalian, says that the fresh-

286 THE AFFIRMATION OF
est impulses in recent religious thought are but a
return to the well-known elements of the Nicene
theology.' "What sort of religious faith is that," exclaims an
old Latin author, "which prohibits the declaration of
what it holds to be true?" The Church has an ag
gressive and constructive work to do in the world. It
is set here to compel men to take sides concerning
Christ. It is not enough that it refute false ideas ; its
task is to replace them with true ideas. The Christian
finds his influence and his peace in knowing what he
believes, and in professing it. The faith that is silent
as to what it believes has no just claim to a superior
reverence for the sacredness of the truth ; more often
it is but "the drapery of a profound skepticism that
lacks the courage to unveil itself before the eyes of
men." A heart that does not utter the truth it knows,
is, as said the ancient Gower, but "a live coal under
the ashes ;" and a faith that will not declare itself,
furnishes a strong presumption that it does not exist.'
III. The essential truth in all creeds is the confes
sion of Christ. Professor Wendt, in his review of the
teachings of Jesus, takes the position that the inner
unity of the whole is so positive and so clear that the
settling of this or that particular detail is compara
tively unimportant. The same is true of the general
1 See Notes 8 and 9. * Note 10.

THE ANCIENT FAITH AS A WHOLE 287
harmony of the creeds. "These are written," says
John, "that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God ; and that believing ye may have life in his
name." The great fact to-day, the one that chal
lenges the attention of the world, is Christianity, and
Christianity is Christ. He has been the sum and
substance of the Church's confession from the begin
ning. To him, and to him alone, it ascribes its power.
Unbelief has recognized this, and has directed its ef
forts to undermining his claims, or to discrediting his
story. Baur, Strauss, Renan, Schenkel, have all had
their day. The Christ of the New Testament remains
the center and the sum of the confession of the
Church.' The aim and value of the Creed, therefore, lie in
this, its expressing for us all our personal surrender to
Jesus as our Lord. It is not inspired as a dogma ; it is
not set forth as a final form, or made a test ipsissimis
verbis; it is not offered for merely intellectual assault;
but it represents the substance of the faith of Jesus as
the Church has held it from the beginning. As
such it is offered to the young convert as the expres
sion of his new-found faith and the interpretation of
his new experience, and it is set in the liturgy of our
public worship as the unchanging confession of the
Church's maturer knowledge. We are joined
1 See Note 11. '

288 THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FAITH
together before all in this, that we are joined to
Jesus Christ. We welcome to our fellowship all who
love him. We respect the truth that may be given to
others. We gladly try it, as we try our own, by its
conformity to the Scripture. We proclaim, "In es
sentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things
charity." We say to the world, We have a confession
because we have something that we believe. We hold
that there is something worse than believing error,
namely, believing nothing. And with the faith that is
in us, and all the earnestness we can command, we
strive to win others to the faith we believe, because
we find that in it is life. It is no groping uncertainty,
no feeling after God if haply we may find him. It
is the established confidence of a soul that can say
with reverence and truth, "My Lord and my God !"
And with this glad confession, believing that in it is
life both for this world and the world to come, we
proclaim the truth we know, and invite all to accept it
and find for themselves the same eternal life.'
1 See Notes 12 and 13.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX

CHAPTER I
Note i. The originality of the Gospel does not consist so
much in the novelty of certain dogmas or of certain moral pre
cepts, as in the novelty of the foundation which it lays for the
whole religious life. It does not present itself to the world as a
system destined to replace older systems, but as a principle of
life sufficiently powerful to change the nature itself of man.
Reuss : Histoire de la Thdologie Chretiennc, II, 602.
Note 2. "J" — a very short word, for in our language there
is but one letter in it ; a very common word, for we are saying
it all day long when we are awake, and even at night in our
dreams ; and yet a very wonderful word, for though we know
well whom it means, yet what it means we do not know and
cannot understand, no, nor can the wisest philosopher who
ever lived ; and a most important word, too ; for we cannot get
rid of it, we cannot help thinking it, cannot help saying it all
our life long from childhood to the grave. After death, too,
we shall probably be saying that word to ourselves, each of us,
forever and ever. If the whole universe, sun, moon and stars,
and all that we ever thought of, or can think of, were de
stroyed and became nothing, that word would probably be
left ; and we should be left alone with it ; and on what we
meant by that little word would depend our everlasting happi
ness or misery. Charles Kingsley : Westminster Sermons, 165.
Note 3. Personality is a being-for-self which apprehends
itself as such, and distinguishes itself from others, which is
not lost in the manifoldness of its modes of activity and ex
pression, but abides, as a constant unity, with itself and in
itself. Pfleideeer : Die Ritschlianische Theologie, 8.

292 APPENDIX
Note 4. We have already noticed that the utilitarians were
challenged to show how the happiness of another is as obliga
tory on every one as his own happiness, and that they were
somewhat at a loss for an answer. The fact that there could be
such a discussion proves at least that the obligation of altru
ism is no more obvious and immediate than the obligation of
self-realization. But there is no occasion to debate the point,
for it is now agreed that the sympathetic feelings are as orig
inal and constitutional as the self-regarding feelings. The
simple fact is that man is a person in society, and that he can
not be thought of apart from the reciprocal relations of the
social organism. The feelings of affection are spontaneous,
and mutual services are indispensable. I am dependent on
others and others are dependent on me. Humanity is incon
ceivable under any other conditions. No person can be
started in life without the conscious cooperation of others,
and there can be no newcomers after us unless we invite their
appearance. Altruism is laid down in the nature of man and
even of animals. The foot cannot say to the hand, the child
cannot say to the parent, the friend cannot say to the friend:
"I have no need of thee and thou hast no need of me." Nor
do these necessities of reciprocity proceed, even on the physi
cal ranges, in unconsciousness. Reproduction, nurture, edu
cation, depend upon preference and intelligent choice. Much
more do the mutual services of society, economic, political,
benevolent, require deliberate purpose. It is a strange conten
tion of Mr. Kidd's that the efforts of individuals are selfish,
competitive, greedy, and that altruism is a rare function of
which individuals are not conscious, and which they cannot
bring under rational justification. It could more reasonably
be argued that actions for the good of others in the family and
the State engage conscious and concentrated attention, and
that actions for self are unreasoned and almost unconscious.
But, whether self-regarding or altruistic actions are more dis
tinct to consciousness, it is entirely certain that duties to
Others constitute a large portion of moral conduct.
Prof. Geo. Harris : Moral Evolution, 146.

Note S. In a collection of Servian popular tales may be
found one that runs somewhat as follows : Once there lived two
brothers, of whom the elder was very incautious and wasteful,
but always lucky, so that in spite of himself he grew constantly
richer, while the younger, although very industrious and care
ful, was invariably unfortunate, so that at last he lost every
thing, and had to wander out into the wide world to beg. The

Appendix 293
poor wretch, after much suffering, resolved to go to no less a
person than Fate himself, and to enquire wherefore he had
been thus tormented. Long and dreadful wildernesses were
passed, and finally the wanderer reached the gloomy house.
Now visitors at Fate's dwelling dare not begin to speak when
they come, but must wait until Fate shall address them, and
meanwhile must humbly do after Fate whatever he does. So
the wanderer had to live in the house for several days, silent,
and busily imitating Fate's behavior. He found that Fate
lives not always in the same way, but on some days enjoys a
golden bed, with a rich banquet and untold heaps of treasure
scattered about ; on some days again is surrounded with silver,
and eats dainty but somewhat plainer food ; on some days has
brazen and copper wealth only, with coarse food ; and on some
days, penniless and ragged, sleeps on the floor, digs the
ground and gnaws a crust. Each night he is asked by a
supernatural voice : "How shall those live who have this day
been born?" Fate always replies: "As I have fared this day,
so may they fare."
Thus our beggar found the secret of his own misfortunes ;
for he had been born on a day of poverty. But when at last
Fate broke the silence, the visitor begged him to tell whether
there could be any way whereby he might escape from the
consequences of his unlucky birth. "I will tell thee," said
Fate. "Get thee home again, and ask thy brother to let thee
adopt his little daughter. For she was born on one of the
golden days. Adopting her, thou shalt henceforth call what
ever thou receivest her own. But never call anything thine.
And so shalt thou be rich." The beggar joyfully left Fate's
dreary house, with its sad round of days, and went back to the
world of labor and hope. There, by following the advice that
he had received, he became in fact very wealthy, since all that
he undertook prospered. But the wealth was his adopted
daughter's. For always he called his gains hers. One day he
grew, however, very weary of this, and said to himself: "These
fields and flocks and houses and treasures are not really hers.
In truth I have earned them. They are mine." No sooner
had he spoken the fatal words than lightning fell from heaven
and began to burn his grain-fields, and the floods rose to
drown his flocks. So that, terror-stricken, the wretch fell on
his face and cried : "Nay, nay, O Fate, I spoke no truth ; they
are not mine, but hers, hers alone." And thereupon flame and
flood vanished, and the man dwelt thenceforth in peace and
plenty. The really deep thought that imperfectly expresses itself m
this little Servian tale may suggest many sorts of reflections.
Just now we shall busy ourselves with only one of the ques-

294

appendix

tions that are brought to mind by the story. Many who now
adays have much to say about what they call altruism actually
explain all altruism as a kind of selfish evasion of the conse
quences of cruder selfishness, so that at bottom they really
counsel raen much as Fate counselled the wanderer.
Prof. RoYCE : The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 63.
Note 6. Man, says Kant, is in his typically rational activi
ties, anEnd-in-himself. The life, that is to say, which is guided
by the ideals of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, and which par
tially realizes these, possesses an absolute and indefeasible
worth. Such a judgment represents a conviction so deep that
we are prepared to stake everything upon it. Strictly speaking,
such a conviction is not the result of argument, or a deduction
from any philosophic system. It might rather be spoken of as
an assumption, the fundamental assumption upon which all
subsequent philosophizing must depend. Without this assump
tion of the infinite value and significance of human life, argu
ment about God is simply waste of time. The man who does
not start with this assumption — the man who can embrace the
opposite alternative — is not accessible to any argument. For
him the world has no serious meaning, and he himself has no
serious function to discharge in it. He has denied his calling,
or, as Fichte puts it, he has elected to be a thing and not a
person. Of such an one it can only be said; He is joined to
his idols, let him alone. Faith in God can only rest securely
on the basal certainty of duty, and the view of human destiny
and the universal purpose that springs therefrom.
Prof. Seth : T-wo Lectures on Theism, 63.
Note 7. The Right is determined by and is correlative to
the Good. Obligation is the requirement we make of ourselves
to realize the Good. I do not regard obligation as ultimate, in
the sense that it is independent, that it is a conviction or senti
ment which rests on nothing other than itself. Unless an ideal
is perceived, there is no meaning in obligation. The good de
termines the right. In this respect, I am aware that I seem to
differ from some ethical writers, who put the right first and
endeavor to determine the good by the right, who maintain
that the good is known by knowing what duty is. This rela
tion is the reverse of the truth. The law which proclaims the
right and prescribes duty is derived from the good to be real
ized. To turn the relation about is simply impossible. It is,
therefore, found that those who discuss the right first and the
good afterwards make implicit in the representation of the

APPENDIX 295
right all that is subsequently made explicit in the exposition of
the good. If duty is for the sake of duty, one thing might as
well be required as another. An apt illustration given by
Janet disposes of that notion : "A moral law which should
require us to break stones without any object, for the sake
simply of breaking our wills, would be a law void of all con
tent, and consequently senseless. The recluses of the The-
baid, who tired themselves out in watering dead sticks, furnish
us with a perfect illustration of a purely formal law, freed
from every material object. Such an action might be useful
as an ifigenious apologue, by which the recluses constantly
remind themselves of the vanity of human labor ; but if we
take it as the perfect type of morality, we fall into the absurd
and impracticable." Prof. Geo. Harris : Moral Evolution, 84.
Note 8. It is in the will, in purposive action, and particu
larly in our moral activity, as Fichte, to my mind, conclusively
demonstrated, that we lay hold upon reality. All that we know
might be but a dream procession of shadows, and the mind of
the dreamer no more than the still mirror in which they are
reflected, if indeed it were anything but the shifting shadows
themselves. But in the purposive "I will," each man is real,
and is immediately conscious of his own reality. Whatever
else m.ay or may not be real, this is real. This is the funda
mental belief, around which skepticism may weave its maze of
doubts and logical puzzles, but from which it is eventually
powerless to dislodge us, because no argument can effect an
immediate certainty — a certainty, moreover, on which our
whole view of the universe depends.
Prof. Seth : Two Lectures on Theism, 46.
Note 9. The fact that the truth I reach is the truth for me,
does not make it, on that account, less true. It is true so far as
it goes, and if my experience can carry me no further, I ani
justified in treating it as an ultimate until it is superseded.
Should it ever be superseded, I shall then see how it is modi
fied by being comprehended in a higher truth, and also how it
and no other stateraent of the truth could have been true at my
former standpoint. But before that higher standpoint is
reached, to seek to discredit our present insight by the general
reflection that its truth is partial and requires correction, is a
perfectly empty truth, which, in its bearing upon human life,
must almost certainly have the effect of an untruth.
Prof. Seth : Two Lectures on Theism, 61.

296

APPENDIX

Note 10. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where
faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane
logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific
evidence is the "lowest kind of immorality" into which a
thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our
scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives !
Prof. James : The IVill to Believe, 29.
Note ii. When I look at the religious question as it really
puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possi
bilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then
this command that we shall put a stopper on our hearts, in
stincts and courage, and zvait — acting of course meanwhile
more or less as if religion were not true — till doomsday, or till
such time as our intellect and senses working together may
have raked in evidence enough — this com.mand, I say, seems
to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic
cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be some ex
cuse. If we had an infallible intellect, with its objective certi
tudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ
of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting
for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe
that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is
in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to
preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed,
we may wait if we will — I hope you do not think that I am de
nying that — but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as
if we believed. In either case we act. taking our life in our
hands. Prof. James :. The Will to BeUeve, 29.

Note 12.

OPPORTUNITY

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream : —
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain ;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. .\ prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge
And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel —
That blue blade that the King's son bears — but this
Blunt thing — !" He snapt and flung it from his hand,

APPENDIX 297
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the King's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand.
And ran and snatched it; and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down.
And saved a great cause that heroic day.
E. R. Sill: "Poems," 1888.

CHAPTER II
Note i.
"Wer Gott nicht f'-uhlt in sich und alien Lebens Kreisen,
Denn werdet ihr ihn nicht beweisen mit Beweisen." RUCKERT.
Note 2. We owe modern atheistic philosophy sincere
thanks for having first made us vividly conscious how incom
parably great a thing it is to affirm the existence of God.
Rothe: Stille Stunden, 43.
Note 3. Certain spirits, by permission, ascended from hell,
and said to me, "You have written a great deal from the Lord,
write soraething also from us." I replied, "What shall I
write?" They said, "Write that every spirit, whether he be
good or evil, is in his own delight — the good in the delight of
his good, and the evil in the delight of his evil." I asked
them, "What may be your delight?" They said that it was
the delight of committing adultery, stealing, defrauding and
lying. I said, "Then you are like the unclean beasts." They
answered, "If we are, we are." Swedenborg: Divine Providence.
Note 4. God is greater and truer in our thoughts than in
our words ; he is greater and truer in reality than in our
thoughts. Augustine : De Trinitate, VII, 4, 7.
Note 5. Underlying a right conception of redemption is an
adequate estimate of sirt, and this connects itself, again, \vith

298

APPENDIX

just views of the character and moral administration of God.
The ordinary theology has a clear and coherent doctrine on
this subject. Sin, in its view, is not simply moral transgression
— deviation from, or falling below, the standard of duty, or
ideal of right, accepted by the individual conscience — but in
volves essentially a Godward relation, and has respect to abso
lute law. This necessitates as its counterpart the view of God
as the Source and Upholder of moral law, himself the ethi
cally Good One, whose commanding will is the expression of
his essential holiness, and whose administration is unchange
ably directed to the maintenance of the good and the punish
ment of evil — the latter partly as a means to the recovery of
the wrong-doer, but primarily as a reaction of his essential
righteousness against that which infringes the moral order of
the universe. Sin, in this view, is not that which must be or
ought to be, but is a violation of the normal relation subsisting
between God and his moral creatures ; the rupture of an orig
inal bond between the soul and God ; an evil which has entered
through the culpable misuse of human freedom, and which en
tails on the race that has admitted it a heritage of depravity
and woe. Corresponding with this conception of sin is the
idea of guilt, as not merely the feeling of self-blame at con
scious deviation from a standard of the mind's own ; but as
having relation likewise to absolute law, and expressing the
sense of accountability to God and of liability to the just
effects of his displeasure.
Orr : The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith, 136,
137.
Note 6. The last and chief word in Lotze's system, how
ever, is not found, any more than in Kant's, in his metaphysics.
"The true beginning of metaphysics," he declares, "is not to be
sought in this, but in ethics. . . I seek in that which should
be the ground of that which u.". .With Kant, accordingly, he
is in agreement in placing above knowledge the idea of the
Good — supremely the ethical Good — and in seeking the ulti
mate principle of the explanation of the world in a "Highest-
Good Personal," which he identifies with "Living Love."
From this highest point of view, the world, in the whole com
pass of its relations, is regarded as originating from, and de
pendent upon, a principle of Creative Love, and as tending to
a blessed end.

Orr : The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith, 40.

APPENDIX 299
^°7/ 7. If God, as Ritschl admits, is the Creator, Upholder,
and Moral Ruler of the universe— he whose will, purpose at
tributes, are expressed in it— it is rationally incredible that it
should not exhibit in its constitution and course some trace
able indications of the Being and perfections of its Author.
The absence of all such indications — if this were conceivable 
would be a cogent argument for atheism.
Orr : The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith, 253.
Note 8. Kant makes the recognition of a moral law within
us fundamental and universal. He calls it the categorical im
perative. Every man hears within the voice which says "I
ought." It determines for him duty and right. In this voice
is also "I can;" there is no "ought" without this. Hegel
makes this voice the voice of God. The presence of reason
within us is the presence of God. A progressive knowledge of
the world about us as a continuous extension of our knowl
edge of God and the analysis of the structure of thought, is
"the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before
the creation of nature or a single human spirit."
Note 9. The prophet is in a peculiar sense the organ of Je
hovah's will. He has listened in the council of the Almighty ;
he has stood, in vision, in the presence-chamber of the Most
High, and heard there words which thrilled through his inmost
being; he has felt within him the impulse, before which he
quailed as at the lion's roar, or which consumed his bones as
a hidden fire; he knows that Jehovah "doeth nothing but he
revealeth his secret to his servants the prophets;" ever and
anon as he speaks, it is "Thus saith Jehovah," "Hear ye the
word of Jehovah," "'T is the oraale of Jehovah." If there are
degrees of inspiration, the highest degree must surely be
sought in those who thus constantly and unwaveringly declare
the plenitude of their inspiration, and claim to bring directly to
men the message of the Most High.
Prof. Drivers : Sermons on Subjects Connected with the Old
Testament, 121.
Note 10. Now, seeing that the Hebrew word Yahveh ap
pears in personal names only as Yo, Yah, or Yahu, and that
Moses expressly states that Yahveh was a new name (Exod.
6:3), (the ancient Hebrew name for God being El Shaddai)
we are evidently warranted in making the following deductions:

300 APPENDIX
firstly, that Yahu and Yah was the earlier form, and not
a later abbreviation from Yahveh; and, secondly, that there
were then thrown into a concrete shape ideas that had been
current from the time of Abraham onwards, and a new signifi
cance imparted to this ancient name, by compounding it with
the ancient Hebrew verb hawaya, equal to "to exist" (imper
fect, or rather present, yahvi) , thus transforming it into Yah
veh, equal to "He exists, comes into existence, reveals him
self." Dr. Fritz Hommel: The Ancient Hebrew Tradition as Illus
trated by the Monuments, 114.
Note ii. Yahveh does not mean "He who strikes down"
(i. e., the God of battle or of lightning) — as the higher critics
fondly imagine — but is an Arabic rather than a Hebrew (Ca-
naanitish) form of the ancient verb hawaya, equal to Hebr.
hayah, equal to "to be, to come into existence," and belongs to
the very earliest language of the Hebrews, as spoken in the
time of Abraham and Moses prior to the epoch of Canaanitish
influence. In the later Hebrew idiom, which was employed
from the time of the Judges onwards, the name Yahveh came
to be pronounced more like Yihyeh, and is actually written as
Ehyeh, equal to I will be, cf. Ex. 3: 14. In so far as form is
concerned Yahveh stands in precisely the same relation to
yihyeh, as Yamlech (i Chron. 4 : 34) does to the ordinary
Hebrew verb-form yimloch. The names of the witnesses in
the ancient Babylonian contract tablets of the time of Abraham
bear witness, therefore, to the correctness of the traditional
Biblical explanation of the All-holy name of Yahveh.
Dr. Fritz Hommel: The Ancient Hebrew Tradition as Illus
trated by the Monuments, 100.
Note 12. The name signifies He who is. according to Ex.3:
14; more particulariy. He who is what he is. But as it is not
the notion of a lasting being which lies in the verb "hayah but
that of a moving existence, of becoming and occurring (comp.
Delitzsch, Genesis, 3d ed. p. 31 [4th ed. p. 26]), so also the
form of the name derived from the imperfect leads us to un
derstand in it the existence of God, not as an existence at rest,
but as one always becoming, always making itselfknown m a
process of becoming. Hence it is wrong to find in the name
the abstract notion of being. God is rather Jahve in as far
as he has entered into historical relationship to mankind, and

APPENDIX

301

in particular to the chosen people of Israel, and shows him
self continually in this historical relationship as he who is,
and who is what he is. While heathenism rests almost exclu
sively on the past revelations of its divinities, this name testi
fies, on the other hand, that the relationship of God to the
world is in a state of continual living activity; it testifies, espe
cially in reference to the people who address their God by this
name, that they have in their God a future.
Oehler : Theology of the Old Testament, I, 139.

CHAPTER III
Note i. The name El Shaddai should be considered the only
one in use in patriarchal times. This word is meant to denote
God as the absolutely mighty One whom no other could with
stand, so that his followers may fearlessly and confidently
trust in him, may build their faith upon him.
Schultz : Old Testament Theology, II, 130.
Note 2. .And why does Jehovah reveal himself (Gen. 17: i)
as God Almighty ? The critics rob this of all its significance
by making it merely the customary patriarchal denomination
of the Most High. But why does this name appear here for
the first time? And why in the subsequent employment
of it in Genesis is there an almost invariable reference
to this occasion and to the promises here made? Why
this appeal to the divine omnipotence enchancing the sense
of the magnitude of the promise, and of the might involved
in bringing it to pass? Considered as the first utterance
of the promise to Abram, the simple word of the Most
High should be sufficient to awaken faith in a believing
soul, as in 12 : 1-4. And it would seem superfluous to
precede it by an affirmation of his almighty power. But if
the promise had been made long years before, and repeated
from time to time, while yet no sign of its accomplishment ap
peared, and every natural prospect had vanished, and there
was danger that faith, so long vainly expectant, might weaken
or utterly -die, unless attention was explicitly directed to the
limitless strength of Him by whom the promise was given, then
there was a gracious and most important end to be answered
by this form of the divine communication, and we can see why

302 APPENDIX
Jehovah's first word to Abram on this occasion should be "I
am God Almighty."
Prof. Green : The Unity of the Book of Genesis, 221.
Note 3. Cyril of Jerusalem explains the word at length
and points its force against those who held false views about
the material universe. "The heretics," he says, "know not
One All-sovereign God. For All-sovereign is he who sways
all, who has authority over all. But they that say that one is
Lord of the soul and some other of the body, say that neither
of them is perfect, by the fact that one part is lacking to each.
For he that hath authority over the soul but hath no authority
over the body, how is he All-sovereign? and he that is lord
over bodies but hath no authority over spirits, how is he All-
sovereign?" Gregory of Nyssa in the course of his interpretation of the
title says: "Just as there would have been no physician had
there been no sick . so there would have been no uni
versal Sovereign unless all the Creation had required One to
exercise sovereignty over it and keep it in being. . . There
fore, whenever we hear the word 'All-sovereign,' we have this
thought, that God holds together all things in being:, both
things intelligible and things material. For it is for this rea
son he holds the circle of the earth, for this reason he keeps in
his hand the ends of the earth, for this reason he encloses the
heaven with his span, for this reason he measures the water
with his hand, for this reason he erabraces all the intelligible
creation in himself, that all things may remain in being since
they are swayed by his embracing power."
In this respect the title "All-sovereign'' stands in a signifi
cant contrast to "world-sovereign," which is applied to adverse
powers, who hold at present a partial and permitted (Luke
4:6) sway. So Scripture recognizes the disorder of the
world as it falls under our present observation, but points to a
larger view and an ultimate fulfilment of life which corre
sponds with the perfect will of God.
Westcott : The Historic Faith, 212, 222.

Note 4. As Abraham had gone forth from the culture of
Babylon to enter upon the pilgrimage life of believing in com
munion with El Shaddai, so Moses went forth from the culture
of Egypt to become the representative of Jahvch, and organize

APPENDIX

303

a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a theocracy, the vital prin
ciples of which became reverential fear and worship of the
personal God of the covenant. Briggs : Biblical Study, 50.
Note 5. The conclusion seems well justified, that, with the
use of the name Jahveh, the idea seized the raind of Moses
and his successors that the God they worshiped was one of
ever-developing potency, an ever salf-manifesting, ever ac
tively-defending God, whose character was not so much de
noted by a quality as by a constant activity, or rather (judged
by the analogy of similar personal names) by a person ever ac
tive; that, in fact, as a nation does not die, so their national
God would ever be with them. The name comes in at a defi
nite historical crisis in the nation's life, and was meant to indi
cate that the deity so named was concerned, not merely with
natural phenomena, but with national and historical events.
Robertson : The Early Religion of Israel, 286.
Note 6. The God of pre-Mosaic times is the same God in
tuiler manifestation still. Moses, says Prof. A. B. Davidson,
"stamped an impress upon the people of Israel which was
never effaced, and planted seeds in the mind of the nation
which the crop of thorns that sprang up after his death could
not altogether choke. Of course, even he did not create a
nation or a religious consciousness in the sense of making it
out of nothing. When he appealed to the people in Egypt in
the name of Jehovah, their God, he did not conjure with an
abstraction or a novelty. The people had some knowledge of
Jehovah, some faith in him, or his name would not have
awakened them to religious or national life. In matters
like this, we never can get at the beginning. The patriar
chal age, v/ith its knowledge of God, is not altogether a
shadow, otherwise the history of the exodus would be a riddle.
Moses found materials, but he passed a new fire through them,
and welded thera into a unity; he breathed a spirit into the
people, which aniraated them for all time to come; and this
spirit can have been no other than the spirit that animated
himself." Robertson : The Early Religion of Israel, 288.
Note 7. It is in itself more likely that such a name was not
invented but simply found by Moses. We may, therefore, in
fer that just as before Mahomet the name Allah was by no

304 Appendix
raeans unusual araong his people, although put into the shade
by the individual deities, so in Israel also this name must have
been an ancient name of God, but that it now obtained quite a
new significance as the name of the one national God, the cov
enant God of Israel. For that Jehovah was the God of Israel,
frora the bondage in Egypt onwards, is a very old tradition.
It is certain that, since the time of Moses, the name Jahve
is the proper name of the covenant God of Israel. It implies
something personal and moral. God is a personal Being, pos
sessed of independent will, under no foreign influence, and
consequently unchangeable, absolutely true to himself, and to
his own Being. Whoever has God has on his side not merely
irresistible power but also the trustworthy, faithful God, whose
will, once revealed, can no longer be limited and changed
from without. It is by this declaration that the highest con
ception of God in the Old Testament religion is first revealed.
Till God unveils himself in the New Testament as the
Father of the Son, nothing higher is said of him than that he
is Jahve in the above sense of that word.
Schultz : Old Testament Theology, II, 137, 138.
Note 8. The combination in i Sam. 17: 45, of "the Lord of
hosts" and "the God of the armies of Israel," testifies that the
two names do not signify the same thing. A higher notion
raust be involved in the former, namely this, that the fact that
the God of the armies of Israel is also the Lord of hosts
makes him so terrible a God. A similar relation exists in Ps.
xxiv between vers. 8 and 10. From the Lord mighty in battle,
the psalm rises to the God of hosts ; the thought in the tenth
verse corresponding with that in the first : so that the ode
celebrates the God of Israel as God of the world both in its
opening and conclusion. This more general meaning of the
name is maintained by a second view, which, referring to
Gen. 2: I, understands the expression "Sabaoth" as applying
to the creatures in general, who in their entirety compose the
great army of the Lord. Thus it is the general sovereignty of
God, as effectively manifested in all creation, of which he
alone has the disposal, which is impressed upon this name.
Oehler : The Theology of the Old Testament, II, 272.
Note g. But the emphasis with which the name is used to
assert the majesty of God, and the use of the word Sabaoth
in the absolute, make it probable that the pious did not think,
in the first instance, of earthly hosts when they described God

APPENDIX 305
as the Lord of hosts. The eye of believing Israel saw God
surrounded with his heavenly hosts, with chariots of fire and
horses of fire, whose warrior princes are angels of the highest
rank. When this people was prosecuting its wars, it saw in
its God the heavenly Helper, who, by the might of his heav
enly hosts, assured his followers of victory. To the eye of
faith, the hosts of heaven and earth formed but a single army.
Schultz: Old Testament Theology, II, 141.
Note 10. First, in regard to the religion of the Patriarchal
Period, the divine name is El, employed even at that date to
the exclusion of other gods, which only very gradually made
their way in from Babylon; it appears also in another name
for God at the time, El Shaddai, in South Palestine El-'Ely6n :
then we have the reform introduced by Moses in connection
with the ancient divine appellation Ai or Yah ; the original
meaning of this name had long been lost sight of, but by trans
forming it into Yahveh (equal to He who exists), it is in
vested, in the account given by Moses, with a new significance ;
next came the stormy era of the struggle between the cult
ot Yahveh and the Canaanite cult of Baal, a struggle which
would probably have terminated with a compromise had it not
been for the intervention of Samuel and the other prophets,
who were not only enabled to preserve the worship of Yahveh
from contamination, but re-instated it also on such a perma
nent basis that it successfully withstood frequently renewed
efforts of the kings of Israel to effect a compromise.
Hommel : The Ancient Hebrew Tradition as Illustrated by
the Monuments, 223.
Note ii. Since the time of Hosea, it is true, the term
"Father," as applied to God, is often found in the prophets.
But it either describes God's special love to Israel and, in
that case, is not so much a name of God as a description
of his covenant-fellowship with his people. In this sense
the term is the foundation of the doctrine of Jesus regarding
God as his Father. Or else, where the word occurs without
any such nearer limitation, it refers to God solely as the great
First Cause and the supreme Ruler, so that nothing more is
implied than in the term "Lord." Consequently, as a real,
divine narrie, this word does not take us beyond the ordinary
Old Testament doctrine of God.
Schultz : Old Testament Theology, II, 138.

306 APPENDIX
Note 12. For ages men had longed to call God "Father,"
but the aspiration appeared to be a vague and visionary hope.
They strove to divest themselves in imagination of all that is
material and mortal, if so be that some unsubstantial spirit
might be left not wholly alien frora a divine kindred. They
unclothed themselves, to use St. Paul's expressive image, of all
that belongs to the fulness of personal life, that even so,
shadowy and phantomlike, they might be admitted to a heav
enly fellowship. The passionate craving remained when every
attempt to satisfy it failed. It seemed as if God were with
drawn more and more from the world as experience gave pre
cision to thought, and yet men clung to the belief that they
were indeed his offspring. They knew that God only could
know God. They knew that men only could be touched with
the feeling for man's infirmities. In the face of this final con
tradiction they hoped still ; and the hope was not vain.
Christ, the Son of God, the Son of man, reconciled what had
been held to be irreconcilable. As Son of God, he knew the
Father perfectly. As Son of man he revealed the Father per
fectly. In his own Person he offered the supreme proof of
the Father's love by taking man's nature upon earth. In his
own Person he offered the supreme pledge of man's divine
sonship by raising his nature to heaven. In a word, he de
clared the Father's name ; he declared that we are not simply
poor, frail creatures of a day, but heirs of an eternal inheri
tance. He declared that helpless, erring, sin-stained as we are,
we can yet be brought back, cleansed through his blood, to our
true home; he declared that in him we too even now may see
the Father. Westcott : The Revelation of the Father, 9.
Note 13. Such a revelation of the divine Fatherhood
through the Son to sons definitely distinguishes the Christian
doctrine of God from Pantheism and Theism. As against
Pantheism it shows God as distinct from and raised immeas
urably above the world ; as against Theism it shows God as
entering into a living fellowship with men, as taking humanity
into personal union with himself. The unseen King of the
divine Kingdom is made known as one to whom his people can
draw near with the confidence of children.
Westcott: The Historic Faith, 212.
Note 14. That place of refuge for those who, to whatever
creed they belong, long for something better, finer, older and
truer than what they can find stated in the services, sacrifices

APPENDIX 307
and sermons of the days in which their lot on earth has been
cast. . . Each will bring to this what he values most — his
pearl of great price — the Hindu his innate disbelief in this
world, his unhesitating beliet in another world : the Buddhist
his perception of an eternal law, his .submission to it, his gen
tleness, his pity; the Mohammedan, if iioching else, at least his
sobriety; the Jew his clinging, through good and evil days, to
the one God who loveth righteousness and whose name is "I
am"; the Christian that which is better than all, if those who
doubt it would only try it, our love of God, call him what you
like, the Infinite, the Invisible, the Immortal, the Father, the
highest self, above all and through all and in all, — manifest
in rfur love of man, our love of the living, our love of the
dead, our living and undying love.
Max Mueller : Hibbert Lectures, close.

CHAPTER IV
Note i. Rothe's explanation of Cosmos is: "Ais zweckvoU
gedachte universitas rerum," — the universe considered as full
of purpose, i. e., God's plan for it.
Note 2. Of transcendent and immovable being we shall
endeavor to prove the existence, and such a nature, if it finds
place in the world of reality, may be said to constitute the
domain of Deity, and to be itself a first and regnant principle.
Aristotle: Metaphysics, x. c. vii.
Note 3. It is a work that requires our choicest thoughts,
the exactest discussion that can be, a thing very natural and
desirable, to give unto reason the things that are reason's and
unto faith the things that are faith's; to give faith her full
scope and latitude, and to give reason also her just bounds
and limits : this is the first-born, but the other has the blessing.
Nathaniel Culverwell : Light of Nature, i.
Note 4. The Energy which had always existed, the "Wis
dom^ which was "from the beginning, or ever the earth was,"
now are by transference changed into material things, and
into the laws which regulate their movements. The idea of
forming something out of nothing is to be understood by ac-

308 APPENDIX
commodation to our methods of thought. "The worlds were
framed by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen
were not made of things which do appear." There was no
material thing at the beginning, and therefore the creation
was out of no thing apprehensible by our senses. The anal
ogy proves this by retrogression. As we go back toward the
beginning of time we find, according to the best results of
science, the solid earth to be in a molten state, even as its
center, held in by the hard crust on the outside, and its oblate
sphericity, now clearly indicate. No substances, even the most
obdurate rocks and refractory metals, existed then, save in a
state of fusion. Still earlier they were in the form of an
immeasurably heated and expanded gas. Yet earlier we have
the star-dust floating in space, no nearer perhaps to the subtlety
of the Spiritual Essence than the ether which now fills
the interstellar regions is to the heaviest substance known to
science. We follow the process backward till imagination
wearies ; but the processes of nature do not stop where we
find ourselves unable to travel even in thought. If, therefore,
matter is eternal, it was at one time in such a degree of subtlety
that by no thought of ours could it be distinguished from
pure spirit or energy. This view is in strict accordance with
the most advanced theory of mechanical cosmology ; and we
are prepared to accept it, because we perceive that it is per
fectly reconcilable with the raost orthodox theistic system
revealed in what purports to be the Word of God.
The world is full of mysteries as insoluble as the method by
which is wrought the change of force into matter, and back
again from material into force, which does its work and then
seems to be destroyed, but is absolutely indestructible. In
truth the whole business of scientific knowledge, nay, of
every species of knowledge, is the investigation and classifica
tion of phenomena which are the e.xpression of this alternate
transmutation. Prof. J. Cooper : Creation, — Article in Bibliotheca Sacra,
April, 1898, 234, 235, 242.
Note 5. My position is that there were two possible
planets, either of which might have caused the observed ir
regular motions of Uranus. Each planet excluded the other;
so that, if one was, the other was not. They coincided in
direction from the earth at certain epochs, once in si:^ hun
dred and fifty years. It was at one of these epochs that the
prediction was made; and at no other time for six centuries
could the prediction of one planet have revealed the other.

APPENDIX

309

The observed planet was not the predicted one. It was ex
cluded through the limitations which had been determined by
Leverrier himself, after a prodigious outlay of profound and
ingenious research. He had proclaimed the investigation of
the limits as essential to the full solution of the problem. It
was certainly its larger moiety, and most intricate portion;
and he had worthily solved it. It is inconceivable how the
great master can have consented to abandon his choicest pro
duction and most brilliant jewel to popular applause and its
ignoble bribery. The potential planet is as splendid a reality
as the true planet, and as marvelous a discovery.
Pierce : Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 173.
Note 6. Molecules measure somewhat between one
twenty-five millionth and one twenty-five hundred millionth
of an inch. The velocity of the atoms or molecules of hydro
gen is six hundred feet per second at zero centigrade,
i. e., six times that of a cannon-ball, and each undergoes at
ordinary temperature and pressure eighteen thousand million
knocks from other molecules every second.
Edmund Ledger : Gresham Lecture on Astronomy.
Note 7. The intensity of chemical action can be measured
bv the enorm.ous liberation of energy attending it. Expressed
in mechanical terms, the combustion of one pound of hydro
gen with eight of oxygen is equivalent to the lifting of a mass
of forty- seven million pounds one foot from the ground; and
the same force would be required for the decomposition of
the nine pounds of water resulting from it. As Prof. Tyndall
said, "The force of gravity as exerted near the earth is almost
a vanishing quantity in comparison with these molecular
forces." Report of Prof. Dewar's Experiments, Edinburgh Review.
Note 8. In the heavens we discover by their light [the light
of molecules], and by their light alone, stars so distant from
each other that no material thing can ever have passed from
one to another ; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evi
dence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that
each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those
which we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example,
whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in
precisely the same time.
*********
No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the
similaritj' of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies con-

3IO APPENDIX
tinuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or de
cay, of generation or destruction.
None of the processes of Nature, since the time when INature
began, have produced the slightest difference m the properties
of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the
existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to
any of the causes which we call natural.
On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all
others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well
said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and pre
cludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.
*********
But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred
and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems raay
be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the
molecules out of which these systems arebuilt — the foundation-
stones of the material universe — reraain unbroken and unworn.
They continue this day as they were created — perfect in num
ber and measure and weight ; and from the ineffaceable char
acters impressed on thera we may learn that those aspirations
after accuracy in measurement, and justice in action, which we
reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because
they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the
beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the
materials of which heaven and earth consist.
Prof. James Clerk Maxwell: Life, 358-361.
Note 9. As the lover and companion of flowers, the but
terfly is a botanist par excellence, and as ally of the Infinite,
a botanist divine. But it is not with either of these functions,
so ably dwelt upon by more learned pens than mine, that I am
at present concerned. In another, more literal and prosaic,
perliaps, but equally marvellous resource — the scientific classi
fication of species — the butterfly has proven a prehistoric an
tecedent to the fathers of botany, and an oracle not sufficiently
regarded in later times. Botanical history is full of learned
dissensions among the wise heads, upon the botanical affinities
of this or that non-committal plant, whether it should be
placed here or there among the natural orders. How many a
martyr blossom has served but as a shuttlecock in the learned
melee, tossed back and forth for years ere it found its final
rest among its congenial kindred, while a mere appeal to the
butterfly might long ago have solved the problem and brought
immediate peace !
Hamilton Gibson : Strolls by Starlight, 124.

APPENDIX 311
Note 10. In fact the whole process of evolution is the mani
festation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of
man. As little in our days as in the days of Job can man by
searching find out this Power. Considered fundamentally,
then, it is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on
earth is evolved, species differentiated, and m.ind unfolded from
their prepotent elements in the immeasurable past.
Prof. Tyndall : Fragments of Science, II, 195.
Note ii. We conceive, in examining the work of those to
whom we owe our knowledge of the laws of nature, and espe
cially of the wider and more comprehensive laws, that such
persons have been strongly and habitually impressed with the
persuasion of a divine purpose and power which had regulated
the events which they had attended to, and ordained the
laws which they had detected. When they had just read a sen
tence of the table of the laws of the universe they could not
doubt whether it had had a legislator. When they had de
ciphered in them a comprehensive and substantial truth, they
could not believe that the letters had been thrown together by
chance; they could not but readily acknowledge that what
their faculties had enabled them to read, must have been writ
ten by some higher and profounder mind.
Whewell: Astronomy and Natural Theology, 307.

Note 12. The act of creation, according to this theory, is the
change of spiritual energy into its equivalent mechanical force,
and this is transmuted farther until it becomes embodied in
matter for its phenomenal action. God was from eternity all in
all ; the only substance, essence, power, intelligence, goodness
combined : the Many united in the absolute One. He contains
within himself potentially whatever was at any time, past, pres
ent or future, in spiritual or material form. For whatever he
could do by his almighty power was actually summed up in
his being. Therefore any change of form that this might be
made to assume — and it could be made to assurae any by his
determination — was simply a transmutation, a change of form,
a materializing and localizing of that which already existed in
him. By this view the doctrines of revealed religion come into
complete harmony with the fundamental principles of science.
There is no other doctrine of science which so corapletely un-

312 APPENDIX
derlies and supports the structure of physical knowledge as the
conservation of force, with its kindred principle, the transfer
ence of energy. These are the corner-stones of every system
of inductive science. They are the middle terms of reasoning,
and raust be assuraed in every form of philosophic thought.
Any scheme of theistic cosmology must assume that all was
potentially in God, and that in creation this potentiality became
actualized, by some process, in material which is apprehensible
by the senses. Creative energy went out from him at his com
mand, and was transformed into a universe of raatter and
spirit, of intelligence and goodness. The One becomes the
Many; and all, like their Source, were very good. Each por
tion of energy becomes a separate individual, a monad, a mi
crocosm, a perfect organization in itself. Each was endowed
with a spirit proper to its sphere of action. Yet all were
united by the golden chain which reaches not only from earth
to heaven, but to the most distant star in the firmament, and
binds them together in an organic whole.
Prof. J. Cooper : Creation, — Article in Bibliotheca Sacra,
April, 1898, 240, 241.
Note 13.
Be not thou enticed by the wisdom of the Greeks,
Which bears only fair blossoms, but never fruit.
What is the essence thereof? That God created not the world.
And that ever from the first it was wrapped in myths.
If to such words thou lendest a willing ear.
Thou shalt return with a talkative mouth, the heart void and
unsatisfied. Jehuda Halevi, Jewish poet of the 12th century.

CHAPTER V
Note i. We may overlook and cloud the fact of the Incarna
tion with subordinate doctrine, with the theories and traditions
of raen, wilh a disproportionate mass of guesses on what it has
not been given us to know, of subtleties and reasonings in the
sphere of human philosophy ; we may recoil from it and put it
from us as something which oppresses our imagination and
confounds our reason ; but we may be sure that on the place
which we really give it in our mind and heart depends the

APPENDIX 313
whole character of our Christianity, depends what the gospel
of Christ means to us.
Church: Pascal and Other Sermons, 182.
Note 2. The fact that men strictly trained in Judaism, like
Paul, give, in their writings, to Christ such high divine predi
cates, which stand in direct contradiction with strict Jewish
monotheism, remains inexplicable, unless we presume a total
and overmastering change of their religious views, by which
they were transposed into an entirely new element of life and
thought. There wants not, indeed, from the beginning, an
objective docrine of the nature of Christ. His declarations
concerning himself would be transmitted ; for the two state
ments stand connected, "I believe, therefore have I spoken,"
and "Faith itself cometh by preaching." But this doctrine
carae to be spiritually appropriated first in the following way :
They had experienced Christianity as a divine history of their
inner being; believing in Christ, they had obtained access to
God, in the Son they had found the Father. In this inner
most, most certain fact of their consciousness, there lay the ne
cessity to place the person of Christ, the founder of this their
new life, in the most vital relation to the Father. In this, all
Christians were at one; but the first preachers of Christianity,
no less than Christians of thfe following times, differed from
each other as to the measure of knowledge they possessed of
the relation between God and Christ.
Dorner : Doctrine of Person of Christ, Div. I, Vol. i, 47.
Note 3. Wisdom literature had been current for raore than
two hundred years, and Plato's elaborate system was wrought
out forty or fifty years before the Fourth Gospel was written.
The apostle did not adopt the word Logos because he was him
self inventing some recondite system of speculation concerning
the person of Christ. He adopted it as a term of current philo
sophical speech, in order by its use to adapt his idea of Christ's
pre-existence and divinity to the minds of his Greek readers.
The personification of the divine Word in the Old Testament
is poetical, in Philo raetaphysical, in John historical. . . .
It is as if John had said to his readers. You are familiar with
the speculations which have long been rife respecting the
means whereby God reveals himself — the doctrine of an inter
mediate agent through whom he communicates his light and
life to men. The true answer to the question regarding this
medium is that it is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is God's agent
in revelation ; he is the band which unites heaven and earth.
Stevens : The lohannine Theology, 86.

314 APPENDIX
Note 4. Thus, when the mind now strove to conceive no
longer the simple idea of the one God Jahveh, but the complex
idea of the person of Christ and the Trinity therein involved,
the Hebrew language was entirely inadequate, and the Greek,
as the most capable, must be strained and tried, tried to the ut
most, to convey the idea of the Logos, who was in the begin
ning, was with God and was God and yet became the Word in
carnate, the God-man, the interpreter in complete humanity of
the fullness of the Deity dwelling in him ; for notwithstanding
the historical preparation for this conception in the theopha-
nies of the Hebrews, the nous of Plato, the logos of Philo
and the wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, it was yet an en
tirely new conception which, notwithstanding the preparation
of the Hebrew and the Greek, the world could not appropri
ate without the transforming and enlightening influence of the
Spirit of God. Briggs : Biblical Study, 71.

Note 5. The early Apologists and Fathers may have given
— no doubt did give — too intellectualistic a cast to their Logos
speculations ; but the Logos doctrine which they defended,
with the transcendental view of the Person of Christ which
it implied, was no product of Greek philosophy, but an ele
ment of Apostolic teaching, to which, in their controversies
with the Ebionitic, Monarchian, Arian, and other heretical
tendencies of their day, these fathers of the Church did well
to be faithful. It is significant that, in a recent utterance.
Kaftan formally discards the whole Logos conception of the
Fourth Gospel as unsuitable to Christianity. If tlie doctrines
in question are to be assailed, it should be frankly recognized
that the blow falls, not solely on the theology of the Greek
fathers who but fought with the best means at their disposal
for what they conceived to be the vital issues of the Christian
faith, but on the theology of the New Testament itself.
Orr : The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith, 194.
Note 6. Strictly, speaking it is not at all a doctrine of
Christ that they proclaim, for then they would have
occupied themselves with the questions concerning the
inner relations of the Father and the Son, the
correct representation of the transition of the Son out of
an eternal and divine existence into a human and
temporal one, the relation of the Son to the Father in the com-

APPENDIX 315
pleted kingdom of God, with which the doctrinal development
of the Church has busied itself so much. It is rather histori
cal facts which they declare, only they are not facts which can
be proved and established in a scientific manner, but facts
which are to be received by faith, and which must prove them
selves true to the religious experience, facts the central point
of which declares indeed the unique greatness of the person of
Christ presented to faith, and the continuous religious signifi
cance of his work.
Their message presents itself with the claim to be a message
from God which demands credence; they know themselves to
be illumined and led by the Spirit of God when they announce
this message, and to possess in this Spirit the power to con
firm its infallibility. There is, therefore, in the last analysis,
no other proof for the establishing of this claim than one's
own experience of the truth of their teaching, that is, in the re
newing and confirming of the religious and moral life as well
as in the peace of the soul and the certainty of future bliss,
gained in this way.
Here a test is found for the modern views which lie at the
foundation of the many new representations of the life of
Christ. We are told that in order rightly to understand the
nature of Christianity, we must go back from the apostles'
doctrine of Christ to the teachings of Christ himself; by an his
torical investigation of the life of Christ, a new standpoint is to
be won for that which Jesus was and wished ; in order so to sep
arate that which first appeared in the apostolic teaching as the
result of influences appearing in their own times arising from
varying conceptions of the person and work of Christ. A
true historical and critical investigation must declare the com
plete uselessness of this attempt. What we possess of the tra
ditions of the life of Christ concerning his words and deeds
goes back in some form or other to the testimony of the apos
tles who continually attended him during his earthly life. If
right in the beginning erroneous representation of the person
and work of Christ had appeared, it is inconceivable that these
should not in an extensive way have influenced their ac
counts of what they had seen and heard ; and where finally
between our written gospels and their recollections the medium
of oral tradition appears, they could only have been shaped by
the representations which came down from the apostolic
preaching. But for the separation of those influences and
these reshapings, we lack every fixed standard, and therefore
it is not to be wondered at, if that process of separation is seen
to be undertaken entirely from a subjective standpoint and ac
cording to philosophical axioms which are altogether outside

3l6 APPENDIX
of historical research. But, most important of all, one thing
is overlooked. At the foundation of the collected apostolic
testimony lies the presupposition that the work of Christ in
its entirety was not completed in his earthly life; that this is
rather only the preparation and comraencement of a work
which with new agencies and with enlarging results will be
pushed forward by the ascended Christ, and only completed
in the time to come. Bernhard Weiss : Das Leben lesu, v. I, lo.
Note 7. It is an illustration of this unity of human life
with that of the divine that Jesus repeatedly sets himself
forth in mystical language as the food of the soul, the bread
that came down from heaven. And if at times his language
grows more striking than our colder western imaginations
often venture, and indeed becomes a hard saying even
to his disciples, he instantly explains his analogy in terms
that are at once profound and intelligible. The same is
true of the symbolical teaching of the Eucharist. So great
and essential did this relationship appear to the earliest
Church that the whole significance of Jesus as a raere ethi
cal teacher is overtopped by it, and in the writings of Paul and
John it becomes the leading conception of both the person and
the influence of the Christ. He was the incarnate God — the
perfect realization of this capacity for union between the hu
man and divine, and at the same time the channel through
whom the race itself might be brought into union with God,
that it might enjoy those blessings promised God's sons. In
deed, it is not too much to say that Christianity as a system is
but an unfolding of the conception of the Godward social ca
pacities of mankind. From this point of view the cardinal doc
trines of the incarnation, — faith, atonement, justification, and
immortality, — cease to be abstract, and appear rather the form-
tjation of actual religious experience, and the description of
psychical possibilities and phenomena.
Shailer Mathews : The Social Teachings of lesus, 30-31.
Note 8. In the Arian age it was not enough to say
that Jesus Christ is God, because the Arians had con
trived to impoverish and degrade the idea conveyed
by the name of God so completely as to apply that
sacred word to a creature. Of course, if it had been
deemed a matter of sheer indifference whether Jesus Christ
is or is not God, it would have been a practical error to hav?

APPENDIX 317
insisted on the truth of his real divinity, and an equivocal
expression might have been allowed to stand. If the Church
of Christ had been not the school of revealed truth, in which
the soul was to make knowledge the food and stimulant of
love, but a world-wide debating club, "ever seeking and never
coming to the knowledge of the truth," it would then have
been desirable to keep this and all other fundamental ques
tions open. Perhaps, in that case, the Nicene decision might
with truth have been described as "the greatest misfortune that
has happened to Christendom." But the Church believed her
self to possess a revelation from God, essential to the eternal
well-being of the soul of man. She further believed that the
true Godhead of Jesus Christ was a clearly-revealed truth of
such fundamental and capital import that, divorced frora it, the
creed of Christendom must perish outright. Plainly, there
fore, it was the Church's duty to assert this truth in such lan
guage as might be unmistakably expressive of it. Now this
result was secured by the Homoousion. It was at the time of
its first imposition, and it has been ever since, a perfect cri
terion of real belief in the Godhead of our Lord. It excluded
the Arian sense of the Word of God, and on this account it was
adopted by the orthodox. How much it meant was proved by
the resistance which it then encountered, and by the subse
quent efforts which have been raade to destroy or to evade it.
The sneer of Gibbon about the iota which separates the semi-
Arian from the Catholic symbol (Homoiousion from Homo
ousion) is naturally repeated by those who believe that noth
ing was really at stake beyond the emptiest of abstractions, and
who can speak of the fourth century as an age of meaningless
logom.achies. But to raen who are concerned not with words,
but with the truths which they enshrine, not with the raere his
toric setting of a great struggle, but with the vital question at
issue in it, the full importance of the Nicene symbol will be
sufficientlv obvious. The difference between Homoiousion and
Homoousion convulsed the world for the simple reason that
in that difference lay the whole question of the real truth or
falsehood of our Lord's actual divinity.
LiDDON : Bampton Lectures, 1866, 434, 435.
Note 9. The real interests at stake in the .A.rian controversy
were those of the Christian religion, not of any particular sys
tem of philosophy. The question of the age was whether the
redemption of humanity had actually been affected by One who
was God, and if so, what was his relation to the God of Chris
tian monotheism. The conception of the Son or Logos as a dis
tinct hypostasis, which had been developed in the struggles of

3l8 APPENDIX
the third century, mu.st now be adjusted with the ancient and
continuous affirraation of his true deity.
* * * * * * *
The leading defenders [of Arianism] understoood the art
of popularizing their doctrine. In itself it had the merit of
simplicity, and early in the controversy Arius composed the
Thalia ("spiritual banquet"), a collection of songs for popular
use. This pubhcation led to a general and terrible irrever
ence. The lowest classes became familiarized with the most
sacred language and doctrines, hitherto only imparted under
the discipline of reserve by the Church. Christian divisions
became a laughing-stock of the theatres. Profane questions
were asked of women and boys in the streets. "Quarrels took
place in every city and village concerning the Divine dogma,
the people looking on and taking sides." In the court, in pri
vate houses, in public thoroughfares, in shops and market
places, there was a "war of dialectics."
In the second (post-Nicene) stage of the quarrel much was
due to court influence. After Nicaea, the Eusebian party be
came merely a secular faction, dependent on the favor of the
emperor. "All authorities," says Mr. Gwatkin, "are agreed
that Arian successes began and ended with Arian comraand of
the palace." The policy of the party was to secure control,
by sheer violence or by cunning intrigues, of all the lead
ing episcopal sees; a plan which they successfully ac
complished in the East, though they never obtained any
real hold upon the West. Further, Arianism commended
itself to heathen philosophers by its abstract and transcen
dental conception of God ; its antithesis of being "create"
and "increate"; its practical denial of any possible con
tact between God and man. On the other hand, it was accept
able to the vulgar, as inculcating the worship of a demi-god.
For it raust be remembered that heathen influences were still
very strong in the empire ; the civil service, the army, and the
courts of law were filled with pagans ; education was largely in
the hands of pagans ; indeed, general society itself was as yet
scarcely touched by Christian ideas.
Ottley : Doctrine of the Incarnation, v. I, 299, 307, 308.
Note 10. Holiest among the mighty, and mightiest among
the holy; who with his pierced hands has lifted the gates of
Empire off their hinges and turned the course of history into
other channels. Jean Paul Richtcr.

APPENDIX

319

Note ii.
But thou, but thou, O sovereign Seer of Time,
But thou, O poet's Poet, wisdom's Tongue,
But thou, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ;
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest —
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect, or shadow of defect,
What rumor tattled by an enemy.
Of inference loose, what lack of grace.
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's—
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, thou crystal Christ ?
Sidney Lanier.

CHAPTER VI
Note i. It looks very strange to me now, that I
once hung a long time over the scandal matter of these
poetic episodes ; till finally I found grace to make the
discovery, that they are exactly what and where they
ought to be, and that, instead of doubting I ought even to
be believing, just because of them. They are, in fact, proper
ties only of the incarnation ; for what have we
in it but the very nearly one event of the world? This, of
course, any one may doubt if he will, but no sane person, I
think, can deny that it is either a transaction so great, or else
it is nothing. It may not be a fact, but if it is, which is the ex
act matter here assumed, it cannot be less than what these in
cidents and demonstrations signify. Furthermore, I will even
dare to aver that the manner of this incarnaton story is natu
ral, as it could be in no other possible way, and is cast in a
form of the strongest possible self-affirmation. It comes to
pass in just the only way conceivable or credible. Thus, if
there were no divine election here of the mother, no annunci
ation to her of her office, nothing but a birth, whence coming
or how she could not explain ; or if it came in wedlock un-
hymned, bringing no evidence but the remarkable quality
finally to be discovered of the child, or if it were a possession
taken of some full-grown man, to be finally empowered and
set on by the visibly deific forces bodied in him ; who could
ever become certified of an incarnation accomplished under

320 APPENDIX
any such conditions? Besides, the very word itself implies a
visible insphering in flesh, and how can that be accomplished
without a birth into it? and how that, without a divine over
shadow to quicken and matriculate that birth? In short,
there must be a Mary in the process, or it will not be done.
And then just all the wonders of story and music of song
that were staggering our faith, are seen to be only the proper
all-hail, or fit salutation of the advent made.
Horace Bushnell : Sermons on Living Subjects, 12.
Note 2. Only in the two later gospels also is the miraculous
conception of Jesus thought of. But although there has been
found therein, Matt, i : 22, 23, a fulfilment of the prophecy Isa.
7 : 14, yet neither can it have been invented as a proof of this
fulfilment, since no pre-Christian interpretation of that pas
sage referred to the birth of Messiah by a virgin, nor is there
any discussion on this fulfilment, since the whole stress from
the context is laid on this, how one born of a virgin can yet be
regarded as the legitimate heir of the royal house of David.
The representation of the evangelists hence certainly presup
poses this fact to be one already resting on tradition, and it is
certainly false to believe this tradition to have arisen as an ex
aggeration of the idea of the anointing of Messiah by the Spirit
of God. But in both evangelists there is brought into promi
nence only the Messianic character in general, but not any de
termination of the nature of Jesus' person as the consequence
of this birth, which had been brought about by God in a spe
cial sense, not to speak then of its being then verified that this
supernatural character would prove thereby the fact of this
birth by a woman.
If the divinely produced conception of Mary is referred to
the Holy Gho.st (Malt, i :2o; Luke i : 35), then is he only re
garded, as in Christ's miracles, as the effective power of God,
which effected miracles; but he is by no means represented,
as Baur, p. 200, supposes, as the immanent, the innermost cen
tral-point of the principle, which forms the personality of
Jesus. To speak entirely of Gnosticizing speculations, which
are to find their expression even in Matt. 16: 16, Luke 9:20
(Schenkel, p. 364 f.) is quite perverse.
Weiss : Biblical Theology of the New Testament, II, 299-300.
Note 3. That Paul herewith [Rom. i : 3] denies a super
natural conception of Jesus (Pfleiderer I., 151) is certainly to
say too much ; for even for the consciousness of the evangel
ists, who relate the miracle of the supernatural conception, the

APPENDIX 321
latter did not exclude the extraction of Christ from the fathers.
If, now, Paul had simply adopted his statement regarding the
descent of Jesus from the seed of David from tradition, which
was altogether unacquainted, at least in wide circles, with the
events that took place at his birth, and therefore thought of
that descent in the common sense, but had also reflected upon
its compatibility with a supernatural conception, it is, of course
self-evident that such a conception was possible only if Christ
was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4), who belonged to the seed
of David i.e., according to Rom. 1:3, to the family which
was descended, bodily, from David. And even allowing that
we had no other indication that Mary was descended from
David (which I, for my part, would be disposed to deny), that
does not hinder Paul or the evangelists from having in this
way reconciled to themselves the traditional descent of Jesus
from the family of David with his (presupposed or tradi
tional) supernatural conception. Whether Paul, however,
has thought at all upon this question can no more be deter
mined than whether he has drawn that dogmatical conse
quence. In his view of Christ as the second Adara there is cer
tainly not yet involved the assuraption of a new creative act on
the occasion of his conception, for it is not permissible to
carry out this typical parallel beyond the tertium compara-
tionis which is clearly stated by himself.
Weiss : Biblical Theology, I, 405.

CHAPTER VII
Note i. Athanasius restored to theology Christ as Re
deemer from sin, and set aside the too prominent idea of
Christ as teacher of self-redemption through self-knowledge.
He united the diverging lines of faith and knowledge in the
thought of forgiveness of sin as the one way to life and blessed
ness. He thus put natural theology nearer to its proper place
and made it but a tutor to lead to Christ. He followed Origen
in holding that Christ wrought both propitiation and redemp
tion by his sacrifice ; but he looked upon salvation as deliver
ance from death, the result of sin, rather than as deliverance
from Satan. He agreed with Origen that Christ offered him
self to the love of God ; but he added the idea that Christ of
fered himself also to the righteousness .of God which must ex
act death as the penalty of sin. No man could be a Chris-

322 APPENDIX
tian by following the "New Law;" he must have the life
of Christ in him, and follow Christ as his example and Lord.
HereAthanasiuslaid stress upon two lines of thought which are
now prominent in m.odern theology ; first, that which connects
Christ's work of atonement with all spiritual laws that help
make it intelligible, and, second, that which unites it closely
with the life that flows from it. But in the center is the Christ
incarnate, who alone can save. Arianism was the logical out
come of the view that Christ is a teacher, and it called natu
rally only for knowledge and virtue as taught by Christ. But
forgiveness of sin, salvation as grasped by Athanasius, meant
both a divine Redeemer and a vital union with him, that in
cluded all that Origen meant by faith and knowledge. A re
deemed man does .not walk to liberty in his own wisdom and
virtue, but through the mercy and help of another.
Scott : Ante-Nicene Theology, 241, sq.
Note 2. That the work of Christ was his achievement, that
it culminates in his sacrificial death, that it signifies the van
quishing and effacing of the guilt of sin, that salvation conse
quently consists in the forgiveness, the justification, and the
adoption of man, are thoughts which are wholly absent in no
Church father. In some they stand out boldly.
Harnack: Dogmengeschichte, III, 50.
Note 3. The divine sacrifice in the earlier epistles of Paul
is, first, a supreme display of divine righteousness and love;
righteousness vindicating the law that sin deserves and nec
essarily involves penalty; love finding a way by free self-
sacrifice to reconcile holiness with mercy. Again, it is
a vicarious self-oblation ; a representative offering, a sub
mission to the law of divine justice made on behalf of men
by One who suffered in their stead ; One who submitted,
though sinless, to 'oe the sacrifice for sin. Again, it is a
redemption, the blood of Christ being a propitiatory sacri-
fi.ce, by which mankind was delivered from the curse and tyr
anny of sin. The phrase "propitiation" (Rom. 3: 25) implies,
according to Old Testament usage, the idea of deliverance, but
at a mighty cost. The self-surrender of Christ to death is de
scribed as a redemption price (i Cor. 6: 20) with wliich man
kind has been purchased, but the thought is combined with that
of propitiation. Lastly, the work of Christ is regarded ulti
mately as a reconciliation, or atonement, by which God again
admits man, on his submission to the divine will, into favor and

APPENDIX 323
friendship. In this connection it is the obedience of Christ, ex
emplified both in his life and in his submission to death, that
is the means of reconciliation, while the ground of it is to be
found in the divine mercy. The result of this act of grace is
the acceptance, or justification, of man and the imparting to
him of the righteousness of Christ. The new life of Chris
tians, however, is the self-communication of the risen Redeem
er's life and grace. If they are reconciled to God by the death
of his Son, they are saved by his life. Thus the work of
Christ as man's atoning sacrifice is merged in his function as
the mediator of salvation.
Ottley: Doctrine of the Incarnation, I, loi.
Note 4. So also Jesus, in declaring his own death to be
the sacrifice of the new covenant, regarded that death as a
valuable and well-pleasing offering or service to God, where
by the new and perfect relation of fellowship and blessing be
tween God and men, denoted in the conception of the kingdom
of God, would be brought to an established condition. He
thereby regarded his death as virtual pbedience to God, in
which the conduct required by God of the members of his
kingdom was represented as fulfilled, and accordingly he also
viewed his death as a pledge that God would on his side
keep faithfully to this gracious relation, and would perform
his promises of blessing to the members of the kingdom, —
and further, in the words at the last supper, he declared his
death to be such a sacrifice as would form a sure seal, of
blissful import for his disciples, on the new covenant of the
kingdom of God, — not in the idea that God needed this sacri
fice in order that his saving grace might have existence, but
yet in the assurance that his obedience satisfied by his death,
because of the actual value it has in God's eyes, would also be
come an actually operative motive for God to ratify his gra
cious will in the case of his disciples.
Wendt: The Teaching of Jesus, II, 2Z7, 245.
Note 5. The system, the dispensation, established by
Christ corresponds in the truest sense to a New Covenant,
and rests upon a covenant. A covenant indeed requires for
absolute validity the ratification by death, as is conspicuously
illustrated by the fundamental covenant sacrifice in Gen. xv
and by the covenant with Israel.
And this condition was satisfied by Christ. He was him
self the covenant-victim. In this aspect he attested the in
violable force of the covenant which he established. Not in

324 APPENDIX
a figure only, but in reality, he showed how the covenant was
valid and must be valid. He made the new relation of man to
God possible and sure. His death was an atonement for sin,
and it was a perfect ratification of the covenant which he
made "in his blood," in his life offered and communicated.
In him humanity fulfilled its part. For here we are consider
ing not a covenant between man and man, but between man
and God. And that man may enter into such a relation he
must yield up life, that he may receive it again. This Christ
has done once for all for men, and in him, in virtue of his life,
all men can draw nigh to God.
Westcott : The Epistle to the Hebrews, Note on Heb. 9 : 16.
Note 6. The gift is communicated to mankind in Christ,
the Author of our redempion by means of his blood. Ac
cording to the divine purpose for the universe, all things are to
be summed up (Eph. i: 10) in Christ. He was foreordained
to be the principal of their unity, the source of their life, the
mainspring of their renewal, the controller of their movement.
His work is one of reconciliation or restitution of all things to
a state which they were predestined to attain ; a restoration of
harmony between God and the universe.
Ottley: Doctrine of the Incarnation, I, iii.
Note 7. When we say the death of Christ was instead of
our punishment, and that it made expiation for our sins, we
are not stating theories but revealed facts. We suppose that
in this fact is contained an answer to the question, "How can
a sinner be pardoned?" and that the answer is, "By faith in
Christ as the sacrifice for our sins, by a belief in his suffer
ings and death instead of ours. . . . The very nature and
essence of the sufferings and death of Christ is that they are
an expiation for sin. This is the very idea of sacrifice. It is
its exhaustive definition; it is the thing itself, and not a de
duction or inference from it. It is the fact, and not a theory
about it. If one does not believe in the expiation, he does not
believe in the sacrifice. We have the shell and not the kernel,
we have death and suffering, and not life and peace. . . .
To require us to believe in the necessity of the death of an in
carnate God, for our redemption, without making that death to
be a propitiation for our sins, is to require us to believe in the
most startling of facts, and to close our eyes to any reason
or availability for it, — is not only to demand an historical
faith, but a faith for which no sufficient reason can be as
signed, in a fact at once monstrous and enigmatical.

APPENDI.X 325
The great fact of objective Christianity is incarnation in order
to atonement; the great fact of subjective Christianity is union
with Christ, whereby we receive the atonement.
Prof. Henry B. Smith : Christian Theology, passim.
Note 8. Thus the two — the Blood and the Death — corres
pond generally with the two sides of Christ's work, the fulfil
ment of the destiny of man as created, and the fulfilment of
this destiny though man has fallen. The first would have
been necessary, even though sin had not interrupted the due
course of man's progress and relation to God. It becomes
necessary, therefore, in order to gain a complete view of the
sacrifice of Christ, to combine with the crowning act upon the
cross his fulfilment of the will of God from first to last (10: 5
ff.), the sacrifice of life with the sacrifice of death. And
when we look back over the facts of Christ's sacrifice brought
forward in the Epistle, we notice two series of blessings
gained for men by him, the one series answering to the resto
ration of man's right relation to God which has been violated
by sin, and the other answering to the fulfilment of the purpose
of creation, the attainment by man of the divine likeness : on
the one side we recognize a reopened entrance into the Holi
est, closed against fallen man, and fresh access to God, on the
other side sovereignty over "the house" and free intercourse
with God.
Westcott : The Epistle to the Hebreivs, Note on Heb. 9 : 14.
Note 9. I believe in a real atonement, a real reconciliation of
man to God in the body of Christ. I believe that this at9ne-
ment was vicariouslv made, that we never could have attained
to it unless Christ had prepared for us that union with God
which I have called the new religious synthesis. I believe,
further, that in preparing this atonement Christ offered satis
faction to God by presenting to him a humanity m which he
could be well pleased ; and that, in fine, he became a propitia
tion by giving the answer of a perfectly approving and submis
sive will to that Divine indignation which must ever be excited
by the spectacle of defiant wickedness.
Bishop Moorhouse: Dangers of the Apostolic Age, 108.
Note 10 The Atonement works in the universe as the
manifest and embodied judgment of God against sin, but ot
thisiudgment as chasteningand regenerative rather thanjurid-
ical and penal. It is designed to create in man all the effects of

326 APPENDIX
corrective and remedial sufferings, to do the work of restora
tive and reformatory penalties, only it accomplishes this in
a more efficient mode than could the sufferings themselves.
It burns into the soul of the sinner the sense of the evil and
the shame of sin, forces him to look at it with God's eyes, to
judge it with his conscience, to hate it with his hate — in a
word, to change his own attitude to it for God's. And when
this is the case the sinner is saved, but so saved that his salva
tion is the supreme victory of righteousness and sovereignty
as well as of love and grace. The Atonement may therefore
be described as the method by which God has so judged sin in
the very home of the sinful as to achieve the salvation of the
sinner. Fairbairn: The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 4S2, 483.
Note ii. The atonement for our sins which was made in
his death could not effect the result of our actual appropria
tion of salvation unless it had been followed by the resurrec
tion from the dead. . . The representation that sal
vation is appropriated through an ethical dying and rising to
new life with Christ is passed upon the causal connection be
tween those events and the believer's spiritual renewal. .
Salvation is not wrought merely by the acceptance of the can
cellation of man's debt which another has discharged, but by
the actual entrance of the soul into life-fellowship with Christ.
If Christ's satisfaction were merely rendered to law,
so that the extreme penalty might be withdrawn, as the more
extreme governmental views would represent, then the appro
priation of the benefits of that satisfaction would naturally
bear a legal character also, and salvation would be defined as
an acceptance of the fact that Christ had discharged our obli
gation for us. The apostle, however, defines salvation in
terms of life; it is a matter of actual spiritual relations. . .
If Christ was the adequate revelation of God in his essential
perfections, his work raust have been in some way a satisfaction
to God's ethical nature — a perfect expression at once of "the
goodness and severity of God." In that case the appropria
tion of the work is no mere formal acceptance or assent, but
is an entrance into fellowship with those perfections of God
which Jesus revealed, honored and satisfied. ... If, how
ever, the formal modes of thought are adhered to as contain
ing the essence of their meaning in their very form and not
in the moral relations and truths which they, by analogy, rep
resent, a construction of the doctrine of the atonement results
which can make small use of the terminology that pictures sal-

APPENDIX 327
vation as a moral process, if indeed it admits of reconciliation
with such terminology at all.
Prof. Geo. B. Stevens : The Pauline Theology, 255, 257.
Note 12. The idea of law in the New Testament has very
little in common with the idea of law in our juridical theol
ogies. The Roman lex was not the synonym of the Greek
¦u6/tos, especially when used to translate the Hebrew torah.
Into lex whole systems of jurisprudence were packed; it
raised the image of the Cssar, who was its source, the judex
who was its interpreter, the procurator who was its guardian,
the lictors with their fasces, and all the apparitores who
waited to be the agents and instruments of justice, when
engaged in its noble but often hard and painful work of vindi
cating authority. But to a Jew who, though he used Greek,
thought in Hebrew, v/yfiog had other and larger associations.
It was primarily instruction, a method of discipline through
the trutli and ordinances given of God, received and revealed
by prophets and priests, written in the sacred books, explained,
transmitted and enlarged in the schools, read in the syna
gogue, observed in the Temple, incorporated in the religion.
When a Roman jurist, even though he had become a Chris
tian Father, thought of law, it was as known in the schools
where he had studied and in the courts where he had prac
tised ; all its associations were judicial, all its processes foren
sic, all its judgments aimed at the suppression of crime and the
satisfaction of justice by penalties. But when a Jewish scholar
who had become a Christian Apostle thought of law, it was as
the moral and ceremonial, the social and sacerdotal system in
which he had been instructed as a religion and as the peculiar
revelation granted to his people. There were points indeed
where the ideas touched, but these were incidental, while the
points where they differed were essential. Hence if a man reads
the Pauline v6fmg as if it were Roman and magisterial lex, he
will radically misread it, especially in all that concerns its re
lation to the death of Christ. "Christ hath redeemed us from
the curse of the law ;" certainly, but this was the law which the
Jew loved, and which was thus forever abolished, not th? uni
versal law of God. He became "a curse for us" ; certainly,
but under the same law, for by it he was "hanged upon a
tree." But the law that thus judged him condemned itself;
by cursing him it became accursed. His death was not the
vindication but the condemnation of the law. And this is the
characteristic attitude of the New Testament writers. The law
which Christ at once fulfilled and abolished was not the law of

328 APPENDIX
the judge and jurist, but the law of the rabbi and the priest,
the law of ceremonial and service, of works and worship, of
prophecy and type. The language which describes his rela
tion to it and its to him cannot be used to describe his rela
tion to the absolute law or righteousness of God. This
relation we must interpret through our idea of God, not
through our very mixed notions of law and justice.
Fairbairn : The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 480, 481.

CHAPTER VIII
Note i. The first appearance of the clause, "He descended
into Hades," is in the latter half of the 4th century, in the
creed of the church of Aquileia. Pearson (Creed, Art. V.),
by citations, shows that the creeds, both ecclesiastical and
individual, prior to this time, do not contain it. Burnet
(Thirty-nine Articles, Art. Ill) asserts the same. Rufinus,
the presbyter of Aquileia, says that the intention of the Aqui
leian alteration of the creed was, not to add a new doctrine,
hut to explain an old one; and therefore the Aquileian creed
omitted the clause, "was crucified, dead and buried," and sub
stituted for it the new clause, "descendit in inferna." Rufinus
also adds that "although the preceding Roman and Oriental
editions of the creed had not the words, 'He descended into
Hades.' yet they had the sense of them in the words, 'He was
crucified, dead, and buried.' " (Pearson, Article V.) The
early histor3' of the clause, therefore, clearly shows that the
"Hades" to which Christ was said to have descended was
simply the "grave" in which he was buried.
William G. T. Shedd: The Doctrine of Endless Punishment,
69, 70.
Note 2, Whatever be the interpretation of i Peter 3 : 18-
20, such a remarkable doctrine as the descent to Hades should
have more foundation than a single disputed text. The doc
trine itself is so obscure that it has had five different forms of
statement. I. Christ virtually descended into Hades because his death
was effic.'icious upon the souls there. 2. Christ actually de
scended into Hades. 3. Christ's descent into Hades was his
suffering the torments of hell. 4. Christ's descent into Hades

APPENDIX

329

was his burial in the grave. 5. Christ's descending into
Hades was his remaining in the state of the dead for a sea
son. The Westminster Larger Catechism (50) combines the
last two : "Christ's humiliation after his death consisted in
his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and
under the power of death, till the third day, which hath been
otherwise expressed in these words, 'He descended into hell.' "
William G. T. Shedd : The Doctrine of Endless Punishment,
77, note.
Note 3. The article is important as proving the verity and
completeness of Christ's manhood ; the descent into Hades
shows that he had a human soul as well as a human body. It
was accordingly customary among the Fathers who opposed
the error of ApoUinaris to lay special stress on the doctrine
of Christ's descent into hell.
Ottley : The Doctrine of the Incarnation, II, 323.
Note 4. The Fathers of this period (80 A.D. to 254 A.D.),
with the exception of Origen, limited the direct efficacy of
Christ's death to this world. But several writers of the sec
ond and third centuries thought that it was also retrospective
in its effects, and inferred from some allusions in Scripture
that Christ descended into the abode of the dead (underworld.
Hades), to announce to the souls of the patriarchs, etc., there
abiding, the accomplishment of the work of redemption, and
to conduct them with him into the kingdom of his glory.
PIagenbach : History of Doctrines, I, 187.
Note 5. The ancient Fathers differed much respecting the
condition of the dead, and the nature of the place into which
souls, before our Saviour's death, were gathered ; sorae looking
on that name which we now translate hell. Hades, or infernus,
as the common receptacle of the souls of all men, both the just
and unjust, while others thought that Hades, or infernus, was
never taken in the Scriptures for any place of happiness; and
therefore they did not conceive the souls of the patriarchs or
the prophets did pass into any such infernal place.
Bishop Pearson : The Creed, Art. V.
Note 6. Many of the Fathers thought that Christ's soul
went locally into hell, and preached to some of the spirits
there in prison; that there he triumphed over Satan and

330 APPENDIX
spoiled him, and carried some souls with him into glory.
But the account that the Scripture gives us of the exaltation
of Christ begins always at his resurrection. Nor can it be
imagined that so memorable a transaction as this would have
been passed over by the first three Evangelists, and least of all
by St. John, who, coming after the rest, and designing to sup
ply what was wanting in them, and intending particularly to
magnify the glory of Chri.st, could not have passed over so
wonderful an instance of it.
Bishop Burnet: Thirty-Nine Articles, Art. III.
Note 7. Through sixty generations raen of every tongue
and of every land and of every church have discovered for
themselves that He is living still. Penitents have received ab
solution from his lips. At his word an evil passion has
sometimes withered to its roots ; at the touch of his hand evil
habits have sometimes fallen away from men as the fetters fell
away from Peter at the touch of the angel. More commonly
he has given to those who have trusted him strength to
struggle with their baser life and to subdue it — strength to
achieve by vigilance and self-discipline a righteousness which
they knew was impossible to them apart from him. He has
given them peace in times of great trouble, courage in the
presence of great dangers ; and they knew that the peace and
courage carae from him. In prisons and solitary places they
were not alone, for he was with them. In Christ — not in
the remembrance of Christ, but in the living, personal Christ —
a great multitude that no man can number have found God.
Those who deny his supernatural power have only begun
their task when they .have stated the case against the raira-
cles which are recorded in the narratives of his earthly life.-
They have to descend through the Christian centuries and to
destroy the trustworthiness of the long succession of penitents
and saints who have testified, on their own knowledge, that
he was living still, and that his compassions failed not. and
that his power was unspent. For the life of every Christian
man adds to the great story of Christ new miracles of mercy
and of power. The canon is not closed. Every age contrib
utes materials for new gospels. Four brief narratives contain
the record of Christ's earthly ministry, and they are incom
plete, for "manv other signs did Jesus in the presence of his
disciples," and many other discourses were spoken by him of
which the evan.gelists have said nothing; but if the history
were to be told of the greater miracles of grace which he has
wrought since he ascended to the throne of God, "I suppose

APPENDIX 331
that even the world itself would not contain the books that
should be written." R. W. Dale: Fellowship with Christ, 41-43.

CHAPTER IX
Note i. Now it is the doctrine of the New Testament
that this work of renewal is accomplished by the ascended
Christ, acting through the medium of his glorified humanity.
The human nature of Christ is raised by the Spirit of God
into the resurrection might. Spiritualized, quickened with new
capacities of life, but not dehumanized, the God-accepted, God--
united humanity is lifted to the divine glory, to be thence, as
the second Adam, through the ministry of the Spirit, the
source of regenerating, re-creating life to his body the
Church. "The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit," is the
pregnant statement of St. Paul ; in its glorified state Christ's
manhood becomes the medium whereby the fulness of the di
vine life is communicated to man ; by the resurrection and as
cension it acquires an inexhaustible power of self-communi
cation to man. And so, as Leo tersely expresses it, Christ
"caepit esse divinitate praesentior qui factus est humanitate
longinquior." Ottley : The Doctrine of the Incarnation, II, 330.
Note 2. While St. Paul dwells on the resurrection in
each group of his epistles, the writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews refers to it once only (13:20; comp. 5: 7), fixing
his attention on the ascension (4 : 14 ; 6 : 20 ; 7 : 26 ; 9 : 11 f..
24) , and the session on the right hand of God ( i : 3 ; 8 : i ; 10 :
12; 12: 2). This difference follows from the unique teaching
of the Epistle on the work of Christ as King-priest.
From what has been said it will be seen that there is a very
close connection between the Christology of the writer to the
Hebrews and the Christology of St. Paul. Both apostles fix
the minds of their readers upon what Christ is and what he
did and does, and not upon what he taught ; with both his
prophetic work falls into the background. Both again rise to
thethonght of the glorified Christ through the work of Christ
on earth. But in this respect the writer to the Hebrews forms
a link between St. Paul and St. John. He dwells upon the

332 APPENDIX
eternal nature and unchangeable work of the Son before he
treats of his historic work ; while for St. John even the suffer
ings of Christ are a form of his glory. ... It follows
also from the prominence which the writer gives to the priestly
work of Christ that he represents the Lord as more active in
his passion than St. Paul does. Even on the cross he shows
Christ as working rather than as suffering. Christ in St.
Paul is regarded predominantly as the Victim, in the Epistle
to the Hebrews as the Priest even more than the Victim. In
this point again the Epistle comes near to the gospel of St.
John, in which Christ on the cross is seen in sovereign maj
esty. Westcott: The Epistle to the Hebrews, 427, 428.

CHAPTER X
Note i. Accordingly, inasmuch as the whole race are
sinners, and as death, the separation of soul and body, is the
fruit of sin ; so this one additional notion seems throughout
the Bible to cling to Hades, the invisible world or spirit-land.
— that it is a place of terror to the natural man, and even to
the regenerate man, except as that terror is overcome by
Christ. It is sometimes personified as one of the great
enemies of the race, and of Christ's ransomed and but partly
sanctified followers. Here, then, we find the full but simple
Scripture idea of Sheol and Hades; it is the state of the dead
or the invisible world in general, but viewed as a foe or object
of terror to man, even to the regenerate man partly sanctified.
Though not in itself designating absolutely anything more
than the state after death, and sometimes even looking no far
ther than the grave, its coloring is that of aversion, and not
of desire. It is the designation of a region of dread. Accord
ingly, it is so used uniformly, we think, in the Old Testament,
and still more distinctly in the New.
Bartlett: Life and Death Eternal, 365.
Note 2. The New Testament has very little to say about
Hades, and nowhere unequivocally teaches that all men de
scend into it. It may be inferred from Rev. 20 : 13, where
death and Hades are described as giving up the dead that are
in them — that all the dead are in Hades ; but the passage

APPENDIX 333
does not say this. Luke i6 : 23, the most important passage
bearing on our question, teaches that bad men go to Hades;
but that the good go there cannot be inferred from it, espe
cially as Lazarus is not spoken of as being in Hades, while the
rich nian is so spoken of. This contrast goes far to favor the
doctrine that, according to Christ, the good do not go to
Hades. His promise to the thief, moreover, refers to Para
dise, not to Hades. And in general, v/herever in the New
Testament Hades is mentioned, it is as being an unattractive
place, associated with the enemies, not the friends, of the
kingdom of Christ ; and, when it is last mentioned, it is as be
ing cast into the lake of fire. . . .
The general purport of the few intimations given to us is to
the effect that the believer enters at once into a state of happi
ness and of conscious fellowship with Christ (Luke 16 : 22 ;
23: 43; Phil. I : 23), and that the wicked enter into a state of
unhappiness (Luke 16: 23).
Me.-^d; The Soul Here and Hereafter, 179, 180.
Note 3. So far as I can see, finality is involved in Christ's
whole way of viewing the consumraation of the kingdom.
The "end," whensoever it may come, means for him the time
when the process of historical development is complete, when
characters have become fixed, and men are what they will be.
Whether the end for the individual be the hour of death, or
whether development of character may go on beyond that cri
sis, is a cuestion for the determination of which few materials
are to be found in the Gospels. The parable of Dives and
Lazarus, when it speaks of the great gulf fixed that cannot be
passed from either side, seems rather discouraging to those
who cherish "the larger hope."
Bruce : The Kingdom of God, 318.
Note 4. Reason did, as it well might, conclude that it
should finally be well with the righteous, and ill with the
wicked ; but it could not be determined upon any principles of
reason whether human creatures might not have been ap
pointed to pass through other states of life and being before
that distributive justice should finally and effectually take
place. Revelation teaches us that the next state of things
after the present is appointed for the execution of this justice;
that it shall no longer be delayed, but the mystery of God,
the great mystery of his suffering vice and confusion to pre
vail, shall then be finished; and he will take to him his great

334 APPENDIX
power, and will reign, by rendering to every one according to
his works. Butler: Analogy, Part i, Chap. 2.
Note S- This judgment of sin is a necessity. For sin is
not a fact which an act of oblivion can annihilate ; facts are
not capable of annihilation, especially when they are evil deeds
that have by recognition and confession been committed to
the keeping of two memories and two consciences, one ac
cusing, the other accused. And so forgiveness cannot make a
sinner feel or be as if he had never sinned ; he cannot so stand
in his own eye, or believe that he shall ever so stand in the eye
of God. And strangely, yet justly enough, it is less easy to
forget an unjudged than a judged sin. We are forced ever to
remember what we have never confessed or been called to ac
count for. We live in fear lest the slumbering justice we
have hitherto eluded should awake and exact tenfold penal
ties for the silence added to our sin. And this is only one side
of the necessity for judgment. That could not be a grave evil
which the Author of all good was willing to pass lightly over.
What it cost God no pain to forgive it would cost man no
pain to repeat. Hence, if man's relation to sin is to be
changed, if the guilty is to be forgiven, it must be on terms
that leave him in no doubt as to the nature and desert of his
sin. And so if God saves man, it is certain that his method
will be so to judge sin as to condemn and overcome it more
completely than would have been possible by any judicial proc
ess or any system of cumulative penalties.
Fairbairn : The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 481, 482.
Note 6. I would not speak too positively upon this subject.
God knows that I would welcome any larger hope for those
who have fallen short of God's purpose concerning them, not
only for the heathen and others who have never heard of
Christ through the preached gospel, but also for those who
have heard of him and have rejected him. I should rejoice to
have all men saved. But the question for me is not what I
should like, but what God likes. I know very little. God
knows all about it. The question with me, therefore, is. How
much hope God's Word justifies me in cherishing and in
preaching to my fellow men. Better the silence of faith, than
a too eager effort to justify God's ways to men. I am sure
that God is love and righteousness, and sure that he condemns
no man who has not had ample opportunity to accept his
grace. I think, judging from all the intimations I can find in

APPENDIX 335
the Bible, that God gives every soul possessed of mature
moral capacity such an opportunity in the present life. It
seems to me reasonable to believe that any souls which have
no such opportunity for any reason — as in the case of those
dying in infancy, or of older persons who have not attained
their full moral stature — are saved without a probation. I
see no need of assuming an extension of probation into the in
termediate state, and no Scriptural warrant for it.
Stearns : Present Day Theology, 497.
Note 7. But it is not at all a matter of such a priori cer
tainty that the apostles viewed the parousia of the Lord as
near at hand. They simply viewed it as possibly at hand, and
that rightly. A prediction of its actual nearness would place
them in the same class with all chiliastic fanatics. The ex
pectation of its possible nearness stamps them as meek disci
ples of that Lord who had decided nothing as to the time, and
who, therefore, by this very omission left the door open for
belief equally in its nearness or in its remoteness, and for
bade to no time the Christian longing for and hope of the
speedy occurrence of his return. Matt. 24: 36; Acts i: 7.

The Lord's return may rightly be viewed as possibly near at
any time, since the precedent condition, the entrance of the
pleroma of the Gentile world, may be fulfilled at any time.
The fact that we, on our part, further regard as probable a
more comprehensive development of the Church upon earth
before the approach of the end, need not prevent our holding
fast by the thought of the Lord being near; for in prophetic
perspective the separate revealed elements of this nearness
converge together. In the time of the Old Covenant the mani
festation of the .glory of the Son of God was still distant, be
cause there must first intervene his incarnation, his passion
and death, or his manifestation in a state of humiliation as the
revealed element in God's kingdom then near at hand. In the
time of the New Covenant the revelation of the glory of Christ
is near at hand, because this is the element standing next in
order of occurrence after the resurrection and ascension, an
element which no doubt again is realized and revealed in suc
cessive degrees. A first revelation of this element was the de
struction of the holy city of Jerusalem, and along with this the
complete absorption into the New Testament Christocracy of
the Old Testament theocracy. A second main point in the
realization of Christ's coming will be the entrance of the Gen-

336 Appendix
tile pleroma, the conversion of Israel, and the consequent ef
florescence and dominion of the Lord's Church over the na
tions of the earth. The third and last main element in the
realization of the parousia consists in the visible return of
Christ himself, and in the end to which that return is the in
troduction. All these are elements of his parousia, which are
now prophetically seen in unity, now presented by the Spirit
to the prophets of the New Testament, and by them to the
churches of Jestis Christ, as distinct and separate elements.
That the apostles, in their inquiries respecting the nearness or
the remoteness of the Lord's coming, already indicate a simi
lar mode of reconciliation between its nearness predicted and
longed for on one side, and its distance, intimated by the ad
vancing experience of the Church, as well as by the separate
features of the eschatological pictures drawn for them by the
Spirit, on the other, is shown by 2 Pet. 3 : i-io.
Philippi : Commentary on Romans, II, 222, 223.
Note 8. Students of the Gospels not specially biased in
favor of orthodoxy, such as Holtzmann, have recognized three
distinct comings : an apocalyptic coming at the end of the
world, a historical coming at any great crisis, as in the des
truction of the Jewish state, and a dynamical coming in the
heart of believers. The parousia assumes this third aspect
chiefly in the fourth Gospel, but traces of it are not wanting
in the Synoptics, as in the saying, "The kingdom of God com
eth not with observation . . the kingdom of God is within
you;" and in the promise: "Where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." The
three senses are all intelligible and important, and it is a
priori perfectly credible that they were all present in the mind
of Jesus. Bruce : The Kingdom of God, 287.

CHPTER XI

Note i. Knapp shows that the Latin advocatus, like the
Greek paraklctos, answered more nearly to our general term,
counsel, having to advise, to direct, to support, rather than to
plead ; and it is only in this sense that the name is applied to
the Holy Spirit, who was not to plead for the disciples, but to

APPENDIX 337
plead in them, to direct them what they were to say, to prompt,
to encourage, to support them and to lead them to the Truth.
Hence the English word advocate would not represent the
office of the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete. It would have been
well indeed if a word coextensive in significance could have
been found, so that the unity of the office which our two
blessed Paracletes have vouchsafed to assume, — and which is
implied where our Lord says that the Father will send them
another Paraclete, thereby designating himself as the first,—
should have been as manifest in our version as in the original.
Still, the sense of Comforter, as it was so closely connected
with the word according to its Hellenistic usage, is also very
appropriate, both to the general work of the Spirit, and to the
special reason for which our Lord here promises his help.
Only we should bear in -mind that the Spirit is the Comforter
in the primary as well as the secondary sense of that word,
and that he did not come merely to console the disciples for
their loss, but mainly to strengthen their hearts and minds,
by enabling them to understand the whole truth, and to feel
the whole power of the gospel.
Hare : The Mission of the Comforter, 349, 355.
Note 2. The name Paraclete is here applied to Christ as
well as to the Spirit, and properly ; for it is the common office
of each to console and encourage us and to preserve us by
their defence. Christ was their patron so long as he lived in
the world ; he then committed thera to the guidance and pro
tection of the Spirit. If any one asks whether we are not to
day under the guardianship of Christ, the answer is easy:
Christ is a perpetual Guardian, but not visibly. As long as he
walked on earth he appeared openly as their Guardian ; now he
preserves us by his Spirit. He calls the Spirit another Com
forter in view of the distinction which we observe in the bless
ings proceeding from each. It was the appropriate work of
Christ, by expiating the sins of the world, to appease the anger
of God, to redeem men from death, to obtain righteousness
and life. It is the office of the Spirit to make us partakers of
Christ himself, as well as of all his blessings.
John Calvin, in Hare's Mission of the Comforter, 353.
Note 3. If you are thankful that Christ is "the way" to
the Father, vou ought to be equally thankful that the Holy
Spirit is the guide to and in that v/ay. Did you ever pause to
consider how much love the Spirit displays in thus leading

338

APPENDIX

sinners to God by Christ ? It is worthy of your special notice
and gratitude. It will not divert nor divide your attention
fromi the love of God in giving his Son, nor from the love of
Christ in giving himself for us. It will increase your love to
God and to the Lamb, to trace the love of the Spirit as that
shines in the conversion of sinners.
Now, there is no conversion from sin until there be convic
tion of sin. And there is no conviction of sin, which tends to
Christ or to holiness, but that which the Holy Spirit im
plants in the soul.
********
If you understand these hints as I intend them, they will
suggest to you a very satisfactory reason why conviction is so
calm and gentle in the case of many converts. Do you not see
at a glance that the Spirit's point (which is to glorify Christ)
is gained, when unbelief gives way? There is, then, no occa
sion to "set on fire the whole course of nature." Its pride and
self-righteousness are demolished when Christ becomes
precious to the soul. •
Were this duly considered, you would not be afraid lest your
convictions, if they have been gradual and gentle, be not the
work of the Holy Spirit. He does not work for the sake ot
working, but in order to bring the soul to the Saviour as its
only refuge, and as its supreme example. And, therefore, if
you have given your heart to Christ, you have as little occa
sion to doubt your own conversion as to question Lydia's,
whose heart the Lord opened without tempest or terror.
********
Do speak well of the Holy Spirit to those of your friends
who have not yet asked for him. Some of them may be afraid
of him. So little is said of his love by many who say much of
his power, and the need of it, that not a few are discouraged.
Do speak a word in season to those who are thus weary and
heavy laden. It will increase your own love to the Spirit, and
the Spirit's love to you, to commend him as love to others.
Robert Philip: The Love of the Spirit, 22, 31, 33.
Note 4. The principle and fountain of all the Spirit's
actings for our consolation, is his own great l-3ve and infinite
condescension. He willingly proceedeth or com.es forth from
the Father to be our Comforter. He knew what we were and
what we could do, and what would be our dealings with him.
He knew we would grieve him, provoke him, quench his mo
tions, defile his dwelling-place. And yet he would come to be

APPENDIX 339
our Comforter. Want of a due consideration of this great love
ofthe Holy Ghost weakens all the principles of our obedience.
Did this dwell and abide in our hearts, what a dear valuation
must we needs put upon all his operations and actings toward
us ! And what are we towards whora he carrieth on this
work? Froward, perverse, unthankful; grieving, vexing,
provoking him ; yet in his love and tenderness doth he continue
to do us good. John Owen : Communion with God, 287.
Note 5. If men believed there was a divine Person sent
down from heaven, and that he was really present with us, to
be looked to as directing the assembly, working by whom he
would, do you not think that this would be the great promi
nent fact? I do not mean his merely operating; for the Holy
Ghost may work in a Wesleyan Chapel, or by an Anglican
clergyman. I entirely admit that, without the operation of the
Holy Ghost, none could be converted, or get any truth from
the Word of God. Thus the operation of the Spirit is like his
own sovereign grace ; or, as the Lord compared it, to the wind,
blowing where it lists. This is altogether another thing from
the recognition of the presence of the Holy Ghost, and his
acting freely and sovereignly by such of the members as he is
pleased to employ in the Christian assembly.
Do Christians believe that there is such a presence of the
Spirit to be counted on? Surely the Word of God is plain;
and this is what the saints of God are called to own, and find
their blessing in.
********
But holding this, I do not admit it to be of God that every
one who is received should be required to possess previous un
derstanding or exercised faith in his presence. There are
many individual members of Christ who are but feeble in it,
and do not enter into its preciousness in any appreciable de
gree. But so long as the meeting, as a whole, is guided by the
Spirit ; so long as there is a recognition of his presence, with
out any known, fixed, or sanctioned hindrance to him; so long
as there are no human devices or rules of raen, or other ar
rangements which interfere with the action of the Holy Ghost
according to the Word, there, I am persuaded, all children of
God are bound to be, and may be, thoroughly happy. Pos
sibly, no doubt, mistakes may be made — we 'are all liable to
error ; but our comfort here is to know that we have One
present who is alone equal to the correction of all errors, and
who, in his own grace, has come down from heaven for the ex-

34° APPENDIX
press purpose of seeing to the saints. Therefore we need
never despair, no matter what the difficulties ; we should never
give up our soul's confidence that the Holy Ghost, who is pres
ent with and in us, will see to every hindrance and danger.
Let our faith only be towards him ; let us only call on the
name of the Lord ; let us only be sure that he is here for the
purpose — I will not say of honoring our faith, but, what is
surer and better, for glorifying Christ. This can never fail.
At the same time, if there be faith in his presence, as that
which after all is the great thought of the meeting as a whole,
though not necessarily of every member of it, divine power
will be there. But unless the raeeting be so far governed by
this great truth, it is evident there raay be all kinds of human
rules brought in which contradict the action of the Holy
Ghost there.
W. Kelly: The New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
io6, io8.

CHAPTER XII

Note i. The nature of the Church and its relation to the
kingdom of God are explained in the remarkable words ad
dressed by Jesus to Peter after his bold profession of faith in
the Messiahship of his Master. In these words, which are
highly animated and dramatic, Peter appears as a most ira
portant man. He is the rock on which the Church is to be
built ; into his hands are committed the keys of the kingdom ;
his acts in binding and loosing, forbidding and permitting,
are valid in heaven. All this belongs to the form rather than
to the essence of the thought. It says in a highly emotional
and Hebrew manner what can be expressed in abstract, didac
tic language which eliminates Peter's personality as of no
fundamental moment. The imagination that the fact is other
wise is one of the gigantic, tragic mistakes through which the
Church has become to a large extent a deplorable failure.
. . It was natural in the circumstances, and characteristic,
that Jesus should put the truth concerning the Church to be
founded in that concrete, dramatic _ way. Here he was a
fugitive from an unbelieving people, in presence of the first
man who had said with clear intelligence and firm conviction.

APPENDIX 341
"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." How
natural that he should speak of this man as the first stone of
the new edifice ; and that, as if in gratitude to him, he should
ascribe to him supreme power and privilege in the society about
to be instituted ! Nevertheless, all that is said admits of being
translated into impersonal language; nor is the sense clear
till this has been done. Jesus then gave utterance to three
great truths : first, that the Church to be founded was to be
Christian, or, to put it otherwise, that the person of the
Founder was of fundamental importance ; second, that as such
it should be practically identical with the kingdom of God
he had hitherto preached; third, that in this Church the
righteousness of the kingdom should find its home.
Bruce : The Kingdom of God. 260, 262.
Note 2. By the kingdom of God Jesus meant an ideal
(though progressively approximated) social order in which
the relation of men to God is that of sons, and (therefore) to
each other that of brothers.
******
Is, then, this new social order, as it develops in scattered
groups and attempts to transfigure the world, coextensive
with the life of the Church ?
Jesus gives us no clear answer, but his position, to judge
from the few uncertain expressions of the gospel, seems to
imply that the Church is one form of the attempt to realize the
principles embodied in the kingdom of God. But there is not a
trace of any belief on his part that the two would ever be co
extensive. The new social order was to be religious; histori
cally, it has made much progress through the aid of religious
organizations. But it is as much grander than the Church as
an ideal is grander than the actual ; as much wider as social
life is wider than any one institution ; as ranch raore catholic
as Christianity is more catholic than ecclesiasticism.
Shailer Mathews : The Social Teachings of Jesus, 54, 76.
Note 3. The kingdom is a separate society in the world
in which there is a real union of persons who are conscious
that they have what binds them to each other and separates
them from the world; but there is nothing forraal or institu
tional about it. Denney: Studies in Theology, 175, 176.
Note 4. These writers [apostolic] know nothing of the

342 APPENDIX
notion that the Church depends for its being on a special
polity; to them such a notion would have seemed like an at
tempt to change the new law into the old. They would have
found all the elements essential to it, all the ideas that most
distinguish it — its orders, its authorized channels, its coven
anted and uncovenanted mercies, its priestly claims, and its
ceremonial sanctities — in the law they had escaped from,
whose burdens they and their fathers had not been able to
bear. And they would have added : The Church is the people
of God ; wherever they are he is, and the Church through him
in thera ; and as God's are a free people, he allows them to or
ganize their own polities, the best polities always being those
raost deeply rooted in love, and so most creative of the spirit
ual and redeeming graces.
Fairbairn : The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 530.
Note 5. To make the Church was a great work, even for
God himself. It needed the Son to go to heaven after redemp
tion was wrought, and the Holy Ghost to come down to the
earth, for the purpose. The world he made by his word for
the first Adara, though in ultimate purpose, no doubt, for
Christ, when he shall be displayed as King in his glory. But
even God himself did not (and I think we may say with rever
ence, could not) make the Church until he had the second Man
its glorified Head above, and the Holy Ghost sent down to
form the body below. Death and resurrection alone could be
an adequate basis ; the risen, ascended Lord Jesus alone the
suited head. Thus God's Church on earth is not a govern
mental provision of religion for a nation, nor a society framed
to hold and carry out the plans and pecular views of the best
of men. It is the body which the Holy Ghost has formed here
below for Christ, whom in its very first principle it con
fesses as Lord. But the manner of the practical working is
in diversities of gifts, though the same spirit.
W. Kelly : The New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
246, 247.
Note 6. Thus it is not the simple fact of being members
of Christ's body that constitutes the Church. No doubt this
is the personal title and all Christians are members of him,
and this constitutes their responsibility to abandon^ every
thing that falsifies their relationship in conduct, position and
objects; but what constitutes God's Church here below is not
that the individuals composing it are members of Christ —
though that, of course, is essential — but that they assemble

APPENDIX 343
and walk together according to the Word of God, the Holy
Ghost being allowed his own place of sovereign action for the
glory of the Lord Jesus. It is only a circumstance whether
they be two or three, or as many hundreds, thousands or mil
lions. The number of those who gather is a wholly subordi
nate point.
W. Kelly : The New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
252.
Note 7. Neither a communion of believers, nor an invis
ible Church, as is falsely believed, did the Reformers have in
view, but their object was to improve the old Church of priests
and sacraments by dissolving her hierarchic monarchical con
stitution, by abolishing her assumed political powers and by
carefully sifting her priests according to the standard of the
law of Christ, or of the Bible. On these conditions she was
also esteemed by the Reformers as a visible holy Church,
through which God realizes his predestinations. They did not
recognize that the carrying out of this Donatistic thesis was an
impossibility and that this reformed Church must again be
come hierarchical. Harnack : History of Dogma, 449.
Note 8. We await no kingdom of God which is to descend
from heaven upon the earth and destroy this world ; but we
hope to be assembled with the Church of Jesus Christ in the
heavenly Basileia. In this sense can we yearn and say as did
the ancient Christians: "Thy kingdom come."
J. Weiss : Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 76.
Note 9. Reunion is possible only through refusion, and
refusion is possible only through new religious intuitions and
enthusiasms. There raust come a change in the nature of our
interest. At present the supreme interest of the majority is
in their Church. For them, as for the woman of Samaria, the
great question is — Gerizim or Jerusalem, which of them is
the place where men ought to worship? Union will come
when men have learned that the vital question is not, where
but, how. "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth."
The "hour" Jesus spake of was the Christian era, which abol
ished old enmities, antiquated old institutions, upset partition
walls, traversed party lines, and established a new society in
which old distinctions were ignored, and once alienated men

344

APPENDIX

were forraed into a close brotherhood. Can such an hour
come again; or can a religion, can even Christianity, have
such an hour only once in its history? If, as both faith and
philosophy attest, Christianity be the absolute religion, per
ennial because perfect, not destined to be superseded by
anything better, because better is impossible, it must possess
the power of rejuvenescence. It must be able to shake itself
clear of whatever hampers the free expression of its eternal
vitality. It is the worship of the Spirit, and the Spirit must
and will rid itself of all bonds. The need of a new hour of
emancipation is a prophecy of its coraing. One of the things
that show the need is the divided state of the Church. Divi
sion is an infallible sign that the spirit of Christ immanent in
the Church is in bondage. If Christ's spirit were araong us
in power, our divisions would appear ridiculous and intolera
ble. Hence we learn what is the hope of deliverance. It lies
in the increase of men to whom Christ and Christianity are
first, and everything else secondary. Every man to whom is
given a fresh intuition of Christ will become an apostle of
union, if not in the sense of ecclesiastical reconstruction,
which may or may not be a great boon, according to circum
stances, at least in the sense of a real spiritual fellowship that
will either make existing churches serve its purpose, or create
for itself new media of self-manifestation.
Bruce: The Kingdom of God, 337-339.
Note 10. Men are brothers through the possession of a life
derived from the same parent. So in the new social order of
Jesus, those men who have satisfied the deepest possibilities
of their nature and are living in union with God — that is. are
righteous — are brothers. Here again we meet with an accu
rate use of terms. The members of the kingdom alone are
called brothers by Jesus. Outside of those that clearly refer
to physical relationship there is not a saying of Jesus pre
served for us that does not restrict this most expressive term
to the description of this new social relationship, the possi
bility and nature of which it was his mission to reveal. In ac
tual society as he saw it, fraternal relations were not preva
lent. Men quarrelled. lusted, hated, deceived, fought. Their
very philanthropy and religion were tinged with selfishness.
But in the new social order he sought to portray and inaugu
rate none of these things were to be. Men were to be perfect,
as their heavenly Father was perfect, and among them reconcil
iation, purity, love, were to be the outcome of their conscious
ness of their divine brotherhood. ,\nd what is this but say-

APPENDIX 345
ing that the ideal society that awaits the world as a fulfilment
of man's social capacities is no mere collocation of dissimilar,
repellent individuals, but a union of men similarly righteous,
all alike possessed of a consciousness of noble possibilities,
seeking the good one of another, with moral impulses spring
ing from their religious life — a unity whose bonds are organic
and spiritual.
Shailer Mathews : The Social Teachings of Jesus, 68, 69.

CHAPTER XIII
Note. i. It is not a vain and false, but an exalted and re
ligious imagination which leads to the contemplation of a
myriad of fellow beings with which God's goodness has peo
pled eternal space. So also it is neither false nor vain to con
sider ourselves interested in and connected with our whole
race through all time; allied to our ancestors; allied to our
posterity; closely connected on all sides with others, our
selves but links in the great chain of being which begins with
the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive
generations binding together the past, the present and the
future, and terminating at last with the consummation of all
tilings earthly at the throne of God.
Daniel Webster: Plymouth Rock Oration, 1820.
Note 2. These words n6'h,s and civitas were to the
Greek and Roman respectively the parents of the terms that
expressed their noblest ideas as to the collective and corporate
life of their peoples, the qualities which gave them distinction,
made them freeborn and privileged raen. Outside the n6XiS
men were but slaves or barbarians ; within the civitas men
were civilized, lived ordered, kindly, courtly lives.
And the city we here speak of bears this high, ideal sense,
only enlarged, exalted and transfigured by the relation in
which it stands to God. It is the society he has created, the
community of raen who know that they are his sons, re
generated and inspired by his truth, possessed of his Spirit,
obedient to his will, working for his ends.
What the Jew meant by the kingdom, the Greek meant by
the city of God; but they viewed the truth they so expressed
under different aspects and from different standpoints, The

346 APPENDIX
kingdom accentuated the idea of the reign of God realized in
the righteousness or the obedience of man ; but the city ac
centuated the idea of the divine law or will realized in^ his
free and ordered and richly beautiful social life. Spirits
were needful to the realization of this ideal, but still more the
creative and constitutive truths which made the spirits
and organized the society. It was too immense to be limited
to earth : the sainted dead and the saintly living were alike
citizens. It was too imperishable to be bounded by time; the
possibilities of obedience were inexhaustible. The realiza
tion of the ideal — though not the ideal itself, that was as
eternal as God — had its beginning in time, but it would pro
ceed throughout eternity. The more perfect a spirit becomes,
the greater its conformity to the divine will. But above the
highest degree reached, higher degrees rise in endless pro
gression. The city of God is the society of godlike spirits
with all their godlike capabilities and affinities in exercise and
development, moving, as it were, out of their imperfection as
creatures to the perfection loved and desired of the Creator.
Fairbairn : The City of God, 357, 358.
Note 3.
They will link the past and present into one continuous life;
While I feel their hope, their patience, nerve me for the daily
strife.
For it is not all a fancy that our lives and theirs are one;
And we know that all we see is but an endless work begun.
Part is left in nature's keeping, part has entered into rest;
Part remains to grow and ripen, hidden in some living breast.
Clerk Maxwell: Life, 249. After his father's death.
Note 4. Friendship appears in the highest intensity as
religious friendship, as the drawing together of friends in con
sequence of the definite affinity of their religious individuali
ties. For, in consequence of the central place of moral purity
in man, the definite religious sympathy of individuals is their
actual sympathy in the totality of their moral nature, and in all
their innermost being, ?
Rothe : Christliche Ethik.
Note 5. I would see afresh, I would have you see, how
sacred becomes the Church of Christ, when from and through
its worship, its sacraments, its holy fellowships, one lovingly

APPENDIX 347
enfolded and nurtured in them goes up to join the choir in
visible, leaving a glory upon that which here continues
apparent from that which there is sublimely attained. I
would have you feel, as I would feel, how sacred is life, while
we are walking, day by day, in intimate companionship with
those who are the heirs of heaven ; and >vho, not daring them
selves, it may be, to believe it, are drawing nearer with every
hour to the sweet sublimities of the Father's house. I would
press the truth on your hearts, as on mine, that death brings
only consummation to highest aims and purest tendencies, in
those whom we have lovingly watched; and that, however
suddenly and appallingly it comes, it only lifts to realms un
seen the bloom and beauty, the unfolding of which was here
our joy, the perfection of which shall be to us there our
inexpressible and immortal delight.
Richard S. Storrs, d.d. : First the Natural; Afterward the
Spiritual, 22.

CHAPTER XIV
Note I. Harnack acknowledges (Dogmengeschicte III,
743) that "the strongest argument " against his view of Ante-
Nicene Christianity, namely, that through Greek influence it
was largely a pagan secularization of the primitive faith, is
that it is the old theology that produces "a deep knowledge of
sin, true penitence and a hving church activity."
Note 2. This sense of sin, which lies like a black pall over
the entire face of humanity, has been all along the point of
departure for every preacher, writer and thinker within the
Hebrew or the Christian fold; and it is the gradual and pal
pable decline of it, in the literature of society to-day, that is
the darkest among all the signs now overshadowing what
is in some respects the bright and hopeful promise of the
future. W. E. Gladstone : The Impregnable Rock, 105.

CHAPTER XV
Note i. The resurrection which Paul looked for is by
no means what was looked for by the Jews, a siraple restora-

348 APPENDIX
tion of the present body. ¦ What was indeed hinted at in the
teaching of Christ he has developed still further. He
illustrates the details of this by the similitude of the seed-
corn, which must perish in order that there may spring from
it a vegetable body ; and it is an entirely new one (because
seed-corn generally had no body, but was a "naked grain"),
and yet one peculiar to the particular seed-corn (i Cor.
15:36-38). Thus it is the body of the particular individual
which has decayed which is quickened at the resurrection ;
and yet is it, so far as its properties are concerned, an entirely
new one, as there are even elsewhere very different "bodies"
according to the differences of materials of which they con
sist, and according to the differences in glory which belong
to them. (vs. 39-41).
Weiss : Biblical Theology of the New Testament, II, 60.
Note 2. It is not, then, necessary to the blessedness of
the soul that it be detached from a body of any kind whatever,
but that it receive an incorruptible body. And in what in
corruptible body will they more suitably rejoice than in that
in which they groaned when it was corruptible? For thus
they shall not feel that dire craving which Virgil, in imitation
of Plato, has ascribed to them when he says that they wish to
return again to their bodies. They shall not, I say, feel this
desire to return to their bodies, since they shall have those
bodies to which a return was desired, and, indeed, shall be in
such thorough possession of them, that they shall never
lose them even for the briefest moment, nor ever lay them
down in death. Augustine: City of God, II, 532.
Note 3. All is comprehended in the fundamental contrast
(i Cor. 15: 44) according to which the body sprung from
Adam, made of the dust of the ground, was earthly (ver. 47,
48), and therefore physical (ver. 45, 46) ; while that springing
from the heavenly second man will be heavenly (ver. 48),
and therefore, like the body of the risen Christ (ver. 45),
spiritual. Therefore likewise are given the incorruption and
the fulness of power, but above all that heavenly light-sub
stance which is peculiar to spiritual beings dwelling in heaven.
In this glorified body the spirit has just found an organ com
pletely corresponding to it ; it is a building coming from God
himself, as "a house not made with hands, eternal." In hope
it already ideally exists in heaven, to be given at the resur
rection. (Comp. Col. 3:4.)
Weiss : Biblical Theology of the New Testament, II, 60, 61,

APPENDIX 349
Note 4. The idea of "the body of Christ" has a very
wide and important bearing upon the apprehension of the
truth of the Incarnation. The "body" is the one complete
organism through which the life is realized under special con
ditions. The body, if we may so speak, is the expression of
the life in terms of the environment. Thus the one life of the
Son of Man is equally manifested under different circum
stances by "the body of humiliation" and by "the body of
glory." The conception of "the body" is fundamentally different
from that of "flesh and blood," the symbolic (representative)
elements, which go to form our present bodies. Of these "the
blood" is taken to symbolize the principle of the earthly life.
That in us which is represented by "the blood" has no place
in the body of the resurrection. (Luke 24: 39, flesh and
bones.) Westcott : The Epistle to the Hebrews, 340.
Note 5. For as those bodies of ours, that have a living
soul, though not as yet a quickening spirit, are called soul-
informed bodies, so also those bodies are called spiritual — yet
God forbid that we should therefore suppose them to be
spirits and not bodies — which being quickened by the Spirit,
have the substance, but not the unwieldiness and corruption of
flesh. Man will then be, not earthly but heavenly — not be
cause the body will not be that very body which was raade of
earth, but because by its heavenly endowment it will be a fit
inhabitant of heaven, and this not by losing its nature, but by
changing its quality. Augustine : City of God, II, 547.
Note 6. The resurrection body will be a spiritual body,
that is, not composed of some tenuous spiritual substance, as
some would interpret (for it is to be a body, not a spirit, ma
terial, not immaterial), but a body adapted to a state in which
the spirit, the higher, religious principle in man, will have the
predominance, a life of perfect comraunion with God and
Christ and holy beings, in which eating and drinking will be
subordinate, in which there will be neither marrying nor giv
ing in marriage, but likeness to the angels (Matt. 22: 30).
Stearns : Present Day Theology, 523.
Note 7. Tennyson writes to Alfred Locker, "After all,
what is matter? I think it is merely the shadow of something
greater than itself, and which we poor short-sighted creatures

350 APPENDIX
cannot see.'' And again, "Yes, it is true there are
moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and
know the flesh to be the vision, God and the spiritual to be the
only real and true. Depend upon it, the spiritual is the only
real, it belongs to one more than the hand and the foot. You
may tell me that my hand and my foot are only imaginary
symbols of existence, I could believe you ; but you never could
convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the
spiritual is not the true and real part of me."
Tennyson : Life II, 69, 90.
Note 8. A gift of personality which is at the same time
the dissipation of the personality in question, a harmonizing
which means disappearance, recall too forcibly the Roman
method of pacification — they make a desert, and they call it
peace. Professor Seth : Theism, 54.
Note 9.
The love of home or race.
Which doth transfigure us and seems to bring
On every heaven-lit face
Some shadow of the glory of our King,
Fades not on earth, nor with our years doth end;
Nay, even earth's poor physical powers transcend
The narrow bounds of space and tirae.
The swift thought by some mystic sympathy
Speeding through desert sand, and storm-tost sea.
And shall we hold the range of mind
Is to our little lives confined;
That the pure heart in some blest sphere above.
Loves not, which here was set on fire of love;
The clear eye scans not still, which here could scan
The confines of the universal plan ;
The seer nor speaks nor thinks his thoughts sublime.
And all of Homer is a speck of time?
Nay, friend, let us forget
Our haunting doubt and fears a little while.
Again our springs shall smile ;
We shall not perish yet.
If God so guide our fate.
The nobler portions of ourselves shall last
Till all the lower rounds of life be past,
And we, regenerate.

APPENDIX

351

We, too, again shall rise.
The same and not the same.
As daily rise upon the orient skies
New dawns with wheels of flame.
So, if it worthy prove,
Our being, self-perfected, shall upward move
To higher essence, and still higher grown.
Not sweeping idle harps before a throne.
Nor spending praise where is no need of praise,
But through unnumbered lives and ages come
From pure laborious days.
To an eternal home,
Where spring is not, nor birth, nor any dawn.
But life's full noontide never is withdrawn.
Sir Lewis Morris: Works, 85.
Note id. "It is surely a frivolous notion," says Isaac Tay
lor, "that the vast and intricate machinery of the universe,
and the profound .scheme of God's government, are now to
reach a resting-place, where nothing more shall remain to ac
tive spirits through an eternity, but recollections of labor, an
thems of praise, and inert repose."
Again he says, "All the practical skill we acquire in man
aging affairs, all the versatility, the sagacity, the calculation
of chances, the patience and assiduity, the promptitude and
facility, as well as the highest virtues, which we are learning
every day, may well find scope in a world such as is rationally
anticipated when we think of heaven as the stage of life which
is next to follow the discipline of life."
John Watson: The Mind of the Master, 308, 311.
Note ii. Both Christ and the apostles teach that the resur
rection is a future simultaneous event, to take place on the
last day. They never represent it, as some modern interpre
ters would fain make them do, as the rising of the soul at
death into a spiritual body.
The resurrection is man's deliverance from the power of
death, his phy.sical redemption. We have seen that man was
made to be a unity of soul and body ; both are essential to the
complete man. Sin has severed this connection through
death. Death is not natural to man, but the consequence and
punishment of .sin. Even believers, although death is turned
into life through the power of Christ's redemption, and they
pass when they die into the heavenly blessedness, are
under the sway of death in this respect, that they are sepa-

352 Appendix
rated from the body. Even if they should have some tem
porary organism in the intermediate state, it is not the earthly
body. But in the resurrection death is destroyed, the great
phy.sical enemy of man is overcome; death is swallowed up in
victory (i Cor. 15: 26, 54). From this time forward man
is himself once more in all the fulness of his essential being.
Stearns : Present Day Theology, 520, 521.
Note 12. Paul scarcely thought of the soul of the believer
in this fellowship with Christ as in Hades, which, according to
Rom. 10 : 7, is thought to be in the abyss (comp. Phil. 2 : 10) ,
since the exalted Christ is verily in heaven ; but rather as in
Paradise (2 Cor. 12 14) ; and this is by no means to be sought
(as Luke 23 : 43) in Hades, but beyond the third heavens
(2 Cor. 12 : 2), therefore in the special dwelling-place of God.
This fellowship with Christ is by no means, as Pfleiderer
(i : 263), supposes, the being "glorified with him," Rom. 8 : 17,
since "a glorified body" belongs to the latter. That Paul sup
poses the clothing with such a body to come iraraediately after
death (which would only furnish a contradiction accepted by
him to the doctrine of the resurrection, unless recourse were
to be had to the idea of an intermediate body, an idea which
he rightly rejects), follows neither from 2 Cor. 12: i where
the existence of a resurrection body in heaven is but the ex
pression for the possession ideally present by hope, nor from
2 Cor. 12: 3, where, according to the correct reading
and the connection, only the supposition can be expressed,
that he will be found clothed and not naked (i.e., yet alive)
at the Parousia. But even if one were to accept Pfleiderer's
interpretation, which is supported by an untenable reading,
then the whole interpretation would proceed on the supposi
tion that those who survive till the Parousia will not be
unclothed (i.e., dead), but clothed upon, it cannot therefore
admit the idea of a consummation commencing immediately at
death, for that would contradict the hope of a Parousia. It
may be incomprehensible to modern views how the consum
mation should not begin immediately after deliverance frora
the fleshly body ; to Paul, however, to whom the consurama-
tion of salvation is an act of divine grace which can be
brought about only by the return of Christ, it cannot
commence at death.
Weiss : Biblical Theology of the New Testament, II, 57.

APPENDIX 353
CHAPTER XVI
Note i. The blessings of God's kingdom Jesus did not
regard as consisting in any special prosperity and glory of
an external, earthly kind, such as, on the ground of Old Testa
ment prophecy, the great majority of the Jews expected as
the benefit to be realized in the Messianic latter-day; but pri
marily in the future, spiritual, heavenly, and eternal life which
God has prepared for his own in his kingdom. Yet the
benefit of the kingdom of God is not merely a future one,
which only begins in the life to come. But the heavenly
Father permits his children already in the present life to
share only in that, and in all that which tends to insure their
true and heavenly well-being. Neither can earthly ills and
distresses do them real harm and disturb their inward rest
and contentment; nor if they but trust in and pray to God.
will this world's good things and the powers of the spiritual
life be denied them, in so far as these are means of their prov
ing their fidelity to the will of God upon earth. In this sense
Jesus recognizes a blessedness granted by God to his chil
dren even on earth — a blessedness which we can by no means
understand if we do not firmly grasp the connection which
this earthly life is meant to have with the future, everlasting,
heavenly life. But they whose names are written in heaven
recognize it as a truly blessed life, and have joyful experience
of it. Wendt : The Teaching of Jesus, I, 240.
Note 2. What were the essential elements of this life
is clear from this, that he had again and again pointed back to
this, how he had beheld God in his original existence with
the Father, and he traced his peculiar knowledge of God back
to this beholding him. But even in his earthly life all the
blessedness of the eternal life seemed already realized. A
life in uninterrupted fellowship with his Father, whose high
est satisfaction was the fulfilling of his will (John 4 : 34) a
life full of peace (14: 27) and joy (15: ii)_ such as the
world cannot give nor take away; a life which is ended b.y a
going home to the Father, as it began with a coming down
from heaven — that was eternal, blessed life even here. And
what formed the deepest essence of this life could be but the
one thing which he always testified he had had before all
others — his matchless, intuitive, perfect knowledge of God.
Weiss: Biblical Theology, II, 349.

354 APPENDIX
Note 3. What then is eternal life? It is the fulfilment of
raan's true destiny in fellowship with God as revealed in Jesus
Christ ; it is life after the divine pattern — Christlike life It
is the correspondence of man to his true idea, the realization
of that sort of character of which Christ is the type. . . . The
idea covered by the phrase "eternal life" is declared to .be
spiritual fellowship with Christ. The term is qualitative
rather than quantitative; it emphasizes the source and nature
of the life which it describes rather than its continuance. . . .
Since it is not the perpetuity of God's existence but his moral
perfection which chiefly constitutes his glory, it would follow
that the dignity of the life which springs from union with
him is found, not primarily in its continuance but in its God
like quality. Stevens : The lohannine Theology, 320 sq.
Note 4. A life lived in fellowship with God is not lived in
vain. He who lives it discovers his affinity with God, knows
that he raay cease to walk with men, but not to be with and
for his Father. To be and to feel loved of the Eternal is
to be assured that his eternity will be ours ; to believe that we
are sources of joy to him is to know that we shall rejoice in
him forever. Our immortal hope does not then build on the
instincts and anticipations of the human soul ; it springs,
victorious and confident, from our faith in him who so loves
us that he will not lose us from his love, for to lose us were
to empty his bosom of its joy, his heaven of its beatitude.
Fairbairn: The City of God, 211, 212.
Note 5. "Eternal life" is that which Paul speaks of as the
life which is life indeed. It is not an endless duration of
being in time, but being of which time is not a measure. We
have, indeed, no powers to grasp the idea except through
forms and iraages of sense. . . If now we endeavor to bring
together the different traits of "the eternal life" we see that it
is a life which with all its fulness and all its potencies is
notv; a life which extends beyond the limits of the individual,
and preserves, completes, crowns individuality by placing the
part in connection with the whole; a life which satisfies while
it quickens aspiration ; a life which is seen, while we regard it
patiently, to be capable of conquering, reconciling, uniting the
rebellious, discordant, broken elements of being on which
we look and which we bear about with us ; a life which gives
unity to the constituent parts, which brings together heaven
and earth, which offers the sum of existence in one thought.

APPENDIX 355
As we reach forth to grasp it the revelation of God is seen to
have been unfolded in its parts in creation ; and the parts are
seen to have been brought together again by the Incarnation.
Westcott: The Epistles of John, 215, 217.
Note 6. We discover primarily at the foundation of this
conception of eterna! life (in the theology of John) the idea
of a real existence, an existence such as is peculiar to God
and to the Word, that is to say, imperishable, not subject to
the derangements and imperfections of the finite mind. It is
a doctrine which goes far beyond all that philosophy or the
common theology has formulated, and which rests upon con
ceptions and premises utterly different. In fact it has need
neither of the philosophical thesis of immortality and of the
indestructibility of the human soul, nor of the theological
thesis of a miraculous, corporeal resuscitation of our per
sonality, theses of which the first is absolutely foreign to
Biblical religion, and the second absolutely contrary to reason.
In the second place the notion of life, such as is presented
in this system, .raphes the idea of power, of action, of com
munication, since this life is no longer shut up, or, so to speak,
latent or passive in God and in the Word, from whom it comes
to the believer. It is not a neutral, dormant affair; it is not
a plant without fruit ; it is a germ which must develop in the
most joyful form. It reveals itself in labors and results of
apostolic and Christian activity, which appear as so raany
flowers and fruits of the union of the disciples with the
Saviour. Finally, we know already, by the conceptions that we get
from Mosaism, that the idea of life includes that of satisfac
tion and of felicity. Satisfaction and felicity are the direct
effect of union with Christ. The terms which designate this
and which are at the same time synonymous with that of
having life, are used equally for the condition of happiness.
Thus the phrase "You shall see me," which raust necessarily
be taken in a spiritual sense, is intimately associated with, and
employed ultimately for the other, "You shall rejoice." This
Christian joy, by virtue of the fact that it springs directly from
an unalterable union, is in its turn indestructible. It is true
it is to be won by hard trials, by a corabat full of pain, by an
apprenticeship full of griefs and privations; but the joy which
is to follow all that is by so much the more pure and com
plete ; sorrow disappears when the probationary stage is
passed. The happiness of the believer is the peace of the
heart, that imperturbable tranquillity which is sure of pos
sessing the true good, and does not desire the pleasures of the

356 APPENDIX
world which do not give contentment. This peace, the Mas
ter, in going to rejoin his Father, left to his disciples as a last
farewell. ^
Reuss : Im Theologie Chretienne, II, 553-555.
Note 7. All spirits are akin; we are human not by
virtue of our bodies, but by virtue of our souls, and man
stands related to man through all time and over all the world
as brother to brother, because all have been made in the same
image and bear the same nature. And the city of God but
means that the ideal of each man and of all his relationships
is being realized. Variety is not thus destroyed but rather
created. In this city there will be father and mother, sister
and brother spirits, spirits married in the wedlock of mutual
affinities, and spirits whose paths shall lie as far apart as the
poles of God's intellectual universe. But variety only deepens
joy and enlarges duty. Uniformity is the death of happiness.
Men must differ if they are to rejoice in each other, to serve
and be served. If the life of John was love, heaven must be
to him an enlarged home of the heart. That were no heaven
to Paul where he was forbidden to speculate, to 'reason, and
to teach. Abraham, as he gathers his children into his bosom,
must have in a growing degree the father's joy. Every spirit
that enters the city must be, to the ancient citizens, the spirits
of just men made perfect, a new object of love, a new call to
new duty, a nev/ source of pleasure.
Fairbairn : The City of God, z(>7, 368.
Note 8. And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and
has not perished, and may be our salvation if we are obe
dient to the word spoken ; and we shall pass safely over the
-river of Forgetfulness, and our soul will not be defiled.
Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly
way, and follow after justice and virtue always, consider
ing that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort
of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one
another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when,
like conquerors in the games, who go round to gather gifts,
we receive our reward, and it shall be well with us both in this
life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have
been reciting.
Plato: Republic, Bk. x, II, 621. (Jowett's Translation.)
Note 9. In that day it shall no more be said, as in scorn.

APPENDIX 357
This or that was never held so till this present age, when men
have better learnt that the times and seasons pass along under
thy feet to go and come at Thy bidding: and as Thou
didst dignify our fathers' days with many revelations above
all the foregoing ages since thou tookest the flesh, so thou
canst vouchsafe to us, though unworthy, as large a portion of
thy Spirit as thou pleasest, for who shall prejudice thy all-
governing will? seeing the power of thy grace is not passed
avvay with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men im
agine, but thy kingdom is now at hand, and thou standing at
the door. Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O Prince
of all the kings of the earth ! put on the visible robes of thy
imperial majesty; take up that unlimited sceptre which thy
Almighty Father hath bequeathed thee ; for now the voice
of thy bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed.
Milton : Animadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defence,
Sec. iv.

CHAPTER XVII

Note i. It is not possible to love and hope for that which
one does not believe. F. DuRAMiN : Medical Philosophy, loi.
Note 2. There is one kind of faith that revels in words ;
there is another that can hardly find utterance. The former is
like riches that come to us by inheritance ; the latter is like the
daily bread which each of us has to win by the sweat of his
brow. The former we cannot expect from new converts ; we
ought not to expect it or exact it, for fear it might lead to
hypocrisy and superstition. . . . We want less of creeds but
more of trust, less of ceremony but more of work, less of
solemnity but more of genial honesty, less of doctrine but
more of love. There is a faith as small as a grain of mustard
seed, but that grain alone can raove mountains, and, more
than that, it can move hearts.
Max Mueller: Lecture in Westminster Abbey, Dec. 3, 1873.
Note 3. The Apostles' Creed is no piece of mosaic but an
organic unit, an instinctive work of art in the same sense ^5

358 APPENDIX
the Gloria in Excelsis, the Te Deum and the classical prayers
and hymns of the Church.
ScHAFF : The Creeds of Christendom, I, 23.
Note 4. In this is conveyed the lesson which it is well
to lay to heart, that the religious consciousness of the churches
has no sympathy whatever with the domineering arrogance of
any heresy which seeks to proclaim its own frigid intellectu
ality as the one valid canon and the infallible authority in
matters of faith. This will be repeated in every period when
a doctrinaire pedantry tries, with the ridiculous claim of pos
sessing the only true system of doctrine, to force itself upon
the churches. And we must add that it is precisely true the
ological science which, perceiving the irreconcilability of any
such claim with the proper nature of theology, must most
thoroughly justify the protest and the practical consciousness
of the churches. Pfleiderer : Development of Theology, 93.
Note 5. The inclination to formulate the content of re-.
ligion in Articles of Faith is as natural to Christianity as the
effort to verify these articles with reference to science and to
history. On the other hand, the universal and supernatural
character of the Christian religion imposes upon its adherents
the duty of finding a statement of it which will not be impaired
by our wavering knowledge of nature and history; and, in
deed, which will be able to maintain itself before every pos
sible theory of nature or of history. The problem which thus
arises permits, indeed, of no absolute solution, since all knowl
edge is relative; and yet religion essays to bring her absolute
truth into the sphere of relative knowledge and to reduce it to
statement there. But history teaches, and every thinking
Christian testifies, that the problem does not come to its solu
tion. On that account the progressive efforts which have been
made to solve it are of value.
Harnack: History of Dogma, l, 2.
Note 6. I am content to say that neither my intellectual
preference, nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the
Unitarian heroes, sects or productions of any age. Ebionites,
Arians, Socinians, all seem to contrast unfavorably with their
opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought and character far
less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.
I am conscious that my deepest obligations, as a learner from

APPENDIX 359
oth«(Es, are in almost every department to writers not of my
own creed. In philosophy I have had to unlearn most of what
I had imbibed from my early text-books, and the authors in
chief favor with them. In Biblical interpretation, I derive
from Calvin and Whitby the help that fails me in Crell and
Belsham. In devotional literature and religious thought, I
find nothing of ours that does not pale before Augustine,
Taylor and Pascal. And in the poetry of the Church it is
the Latin and German hymns, or the lines of Charles Wesley,
or of Keble, that fasten on my memory and heart, and make
all else seem poor and cold.
Dr. James Martineau. Quoted in Scott's The 'Ante-Nicene
Theology, 379.
Note 7. Now if none of the principles in the combina
tion of which the strength of Christian civilization is to be
found had any influence in heathen civilization, but are all
characteristic of the Christian; if when the corresponding
dogmas were unknown they were unknown, and wherever the
dogmas have been preached they have become influential; if
all the world over, wherever the gospel has been proclaimed
and under every diversity of race and climate, the same teach
ing has been followed by the same effects, one conclusion only
can follow. The differences distinguishing Christian from
heathen civilization must be due to the difference of its prin
ciples, and these principles are the dogmas of the Christian
faith. The conclusion is confirmed by the further fact that
the activity of the influence is directly proportioned to the
activity of the dogmatic belief. That the character of our
civilization has spread beyond the circle of believers in dograa,
and leavens more or less the entire community, is most true.
It would be strange indeed if it were otherwise. But that
among the believers of the dogmatic faith the distinctive prin
ciples of Christian civilization exist with the greatest intensity,
admits of an easy proof. Garbett : The Dogmatic Faith, 184.
Note 8. Among these are the view that the Church is
not identical with any form of ecclesiastical organization, the
little stress laid upon priestly mediation and sacramental
grace, that baptism is not essential to salvation, the freedom
of the will in religious choice, the love of God in Christ
rather than the sight of the law showing men their sins, that
redemption is the imparting of the new life of Christ rather
than paying a debt to the devil or to justice, that the appear-

360 APPENDIX
ance of Christ is the great supernatural revelation of.^God
carrying his miracles with it rather than making them proof
of his revelation, and, above all, that the incarnate and glori
fied Christ is the sum and center of all doctrine and life.
These ideas, he says, so much heard of in modern times,
were all familiar elements in the Nicene theology.
See Allen: Continuity of Christian Thought, 17 ff.
Note 9. Nothing can, I conceive, be more superficial or
erroneous than the reasonings of those who maintain that the
moral element of Christianity has in it nothing distinctive or
peculiar. The method of this school, of which Bolingbroke
may be regarded as the type, is to collect from the writings of
different heathen writers certain isolated passages embodying
precepts that are inculcated by Christianity; and when the
collection has become large the task was supposed to be ac
complished. But the true originality of a system of modern
teaching depends not so much upon the elements of which it
is composed, as upon the manner in which they are fused into
a symraetrical whole; upon the proportional value which is
attached to different qualities, or, to state the thing in a single
word, upon the type of character that is formed. Now it is
quite certain that the Christian type differs not only in de
gree but in kind from the Pagan type.
Lecky : History of Rationalism, I, 335.
Note 10. The life which comes from God, so soon as it
is in the hands of men, hastens to frame itself as dogma, to
mold itself into formulas, we had almost said to commit
suicide ; and the efforts, whether of the heart or of science, to
reanimate it and to restore it to itself, instead of being recog
nized as the sincere homage rendered to the truth, are only
too often looked upon as heresy. The authority of forms is of
all authority the most suspicious. In the face of prejudice
and antipathy, the conscientious historian must find his com
pensation in his work itself. A subject like that dealt with
here is constantly in touch with ideas the most sublime, the
most fruitful, the most capable of nourishing the spirit of
man, and of elevating him above the petty quarrels of the
world and of the schools. The pains he devotes to it are for
him an inexhaustible source of moral and intellectual pleas
ures. They familiarize him with models which must con
tinually nourish his strength, and if he is grieved at seeing
how often in all ages men are divided precisely over that

APPENDIX 361
which ought to have united them, it is, certainly, neither in
difference nor the spirit of party which will console him, but
only assiduous search after the truth, which never hides itself
from those who do not hold that they exclusively possess it.
Reuss : Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne, II, 608.
Note ii. The final reason for holding that for our recogni
tion of the teaching of Jesus the previous settlement of all
critical questions is comparatively a matter of indifference,
lies in the magnificent inner unity of the teaching of Jesus.
If the preaching of Jesus consisted of a sum of particular
truths, it would indeed be of the greatest importance to fix
precisely as. to its details the contents of the teaching, so far
as Jesus has given it. But since the preaching of Jesus is an
organic unity in regard to religious views whose governing
principle is involved in the idea of God, and whose character
istic exposition and application have been recorded in har
mony in all the sources, therefore it is comparatively a mat
ter of indifference for our understanding of the whole of the
teaching of Jesus, whether or not we can determine the au
thenticity of this or that detail and application of the col
lective view. Wendt : The Teaching of Jesus, II, 413.
Note 12. A great creed is not unlike a great cathedral, only
far more permanently vital. Yet every cathedral is for use
and reverence, not for forgetfulness and scorn.
In some transfiguring hour of your life you have perhaps
found yourself in York Minster or under the great nave at
Chartres, or beneath the spires of Cologne, at vespers, it may
be, an hour before sunset, when "the lights like glories fall."
Of course, you were not there to fling cheap cavil upon the
old centuries that built the pile. On the contrary, you were
one with the old ages. The shafts of the hoary columns, the
vast arch of the nave, the blaze yonder of the great rose win
dow, and, high in the misty dome, that ray of light as from
the quiver of the cherubim; these were not symbols and syn
onyms of mediaeval superstition. No, no. Life beat here,
you say, life built these walls, the life of faith and love, the
vision of realms ineffable; these reared this pile and are elo
quent through it forever.
But so, and far more so, of the great Creed. Love built it.
Faith built it. Christ is in it. I love it. It shall not enslave
me, for the same Christ may speak to me also, but neither
will I be disloyal to it. Back of the verbiage, the "time ves-

362 APPENDIX
ture," as Goethe called it, is a soul of immortal verity. I must
assert, not raerely historic venerableness, not merely antique
beauty, but also a certain perennial truth and continuing
authority in the common doctrine of the Church universal. I
cling to this more sinewy and, as it seems to me, more spiritual
estimate of the great, wrestling past, in which also Christ
dwelt, as truly as he dwells with us to-day. This is no bigo
try. It is siraply the Pauline logic of a redoubled and rever
berating Incarnation applied in the intellectual field.
A. J. Lyman : The Truth of the Incarnation, 9.
Note 13. The Creed is of no one age. As often as we re
peat it we are guarded from forgetting the articles which our
circumstances do not force upon our notice. All the facts re
raain, and when a crisis coraes, that will be ready to our hand
which our fathers have delivered to us. We want nothing
new, but the old rekindled by a fuller light.
Westcott: The Historic Faith, 22.