YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

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

THE
AUTHORITY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
THE PADDOCK LECTURES FOR 1912

4Sp Cljarlce Letois Slatterp

The Master of the World: A Study of
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Life Beyond Life: A Study of Immortality.
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The Historic Ministry and the Present
Christ: An Appeal for Unity. Crown
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Present-Day Preaching. Crown octavo.
The Authority of Religious Experience.
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THE AUTHORITY

OF

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

BY
CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY, D.D.
RECTOR OP GRACE CHURCH IN NEW YORK

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 80th STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON. BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

Mpk54 SI IS

THE • PLIMPTON • PRESS
[W D- O]
NORWOOD • MASS • U » S ¦ A

PREFACE
THESE lectures were delivered on the Pad
dock Foundation at the General Theological
Seminary in New York in the Lent of 1912. I
cannot send them out in the form of a book with
out inscribing my gratitude to the officers of the
Seminary, who three years ago elected me to
the chair of Ecclesiastical History. After full
consideration I felt obliged to decline the call and
to remain in the parochial ministry. The process
of decision brought to my mind with great force
the complementary contributions which the tech
nical student and the Christian pastor ought to
make to theological knowledge. Because I lay
stress on the value of experience, I am as far as
possible from wishing to minimize the value of
scholarship. I should like to believe that it
might be a help to suggest to scholars in some
detail the theological material that is stored in
the experiences of any hard-working parochial
clergyman. I should like to believe also that
these suggestions might lead some discouraged

vi PREFACE
and lonely worker to appreciate the dignity and
importance of his opportunity.
I make no excuse for introducing a series of
the greatest subjects in a single course of lectures.
By thus applying the principle I have in mind, I
can best illustrate its capacity to serve. Ob
viously the lectures can be only suggestive, in no
sense comprehensive. There must be inconsis
tencies, because experience is full of them; it is
the part of a sound theology not to explain away
inconsistencies and contradictions, but to carry
them up into some higher unity. I have had no
intention of giving even the outline of a system.
I acknowledge a grateful debt to my friend and
colleague, the Rev. George Hill Bottome, who has
read the book both in manuscript and in proof,
and has given me valued help and suggestions.
C. L. S.
Grace Church Rectory
New York
Monday before Easter, 1912

CONTENTS

I. RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE Face
I. Scholarship Cooperative  3
II. The Technical Theologian and the Pastor . 5
III. Constant Revision of Scholars' Views ... 8
IV. The Laboratory Method  10
V. Christianity a Present Theology .... 16
VI. The Pastor's Qualifications  22
VII. The Possible Outcome  39
II. THE BIBLE
I. The Finding of Valid Evidence .... 43
II. Questions of Authorship and Date ... 48
III. The Argument from Silence  63
IV. Defining the Impossible  70
V. The Letter and the Spirit  76
VI. The Word of God  83
III. THE CHURCH
I. Tolerance . . . .'  91
II. Institutional Churches  95
III. Missions  98
IV. Church Unity  105
V. Authority  112
VI. Power  131
IV. IMMORTALITY I. The Wish to Live  142
H. Faith in the Future Life  146
vii

viii CONTENTS
IV. IMMORTALITY — continued Paob
III. Would Religious Experience Welcome Scien
tific Demonstration?  150
IV. Is the Soul Temporarily Asleep? .... 160
V. Shall Souls have Material Bodies? ... 164
VI. Do the Departed Know our Condition? . . 170
VII. Is Heaven a Place?  175
VIII. Does Character Count?  180
IX. Shall We See the Divine?  187
V. JESUS CHRIST
I. The Reliability of the New Testament . . 196
II. The Alleged Differences between the First and
the Twentieth Centuries  200
III. The Difficulty of Christ's Humanity ... 211
IV. The Lightheartedness of Christ .... 218
V. The Second Coming  223
VI. God's Character in Christ  231
VII. Christ's Ability to Create Great Men . . 235
VIII. Christ's Power over the Laws of Nature . . 239
IX. The Present Christ  248
VI. GOD I. The Instinctive Recognition of God . . . 254
II. Why God Made Us  257
III. God So Loved the World  264
IV. The Eternal Change in God  275
V. God Immanent and Transcendent .... 282
VI. The Trinity in Unity  292

I
RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE

I
RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
I
SCHOLARSHIP COOPERATIVE
MEN recognize to-day, as never before, the
immeasurable ranges of knowledge. All
ages have been impressed with the limitation of
human understanding, confessing its littleness
when compared with the vastness of men's
ignorance; but now, though we confess that the
whole world knows little enough, we meditate
upon the mere fragment of that total which any
one man can acquire, though he be as clever and
industrious as, for instance, Lord Acton. Sev
eral years ago a philosopher wrote a careful
monograph in which he boasted that he had delib
erately avoided reading all that his brother phi
losophers had said upon the subject, and therefore
all the thought in his book was his own. No one
seemed to read the book. The reason may have
been that first note, — the admission that it was

4 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
written in isolation, without the help of men in
slightly different fields of research. It is only the
very exceptional man whose mental processes we
care to know, in and for themselves alone.
We say that this is an age of specialists.
Thoughtful men tend to become specialists be
cause they see the futility of covering the whole
area of any one of the branches of learning. They
become authorities in their chosen narrow space.
They are quite aware that it is dangerous to treat
their specialization as if it were the whole of truth.
The historian, for example, knowing thoroughly
the sources in his chosen department, does not feel
obliged to consult the sources in another depart
ment, when he wishes to make a general statement,
provided he can discover an expert whom he
trusts and who has done that work for him.
There is the balance to be kept between the
intensive and the extensive. The eye that looks
only at one tiny object, at last grows dim and sees
nothing. The eye must look off to the distances
in order to see truly what is near. Thus, the
men of our time feel that scholarship, or the
search for truth, is a cooperative matter. No
man can know enough by himself: he must make
such use as he can of those standing about him
who also know. Their knowledge may confirm

TECHNICAL THEOLOGIAN AND PASTOR 5
or supplement or correct his own. The student
who to-day locks himself in his cell is, however
profound and accurate, an unsafe guide.
II
THE TECHNICAL THEOLOGIAN AND THE
PASTOR
In that part of scholarship which we call
theology there has too often been a refined sort
of intellectual contempt marking the relationship
of the practical pastor of human needs and the
theologian to one another. The pastor has
smiled upon the remoteness of the theologian:
he seems to know nothing of men's present
reality. "This man," says the pastor, "is aca
demic." The theologian, on the other hand, has
found the pastor a man of expediency. One
hears Jerome laughing in his monastery, because
the Bishop of (Ea in his active work found the
change from ivy to gourd in Jerome's version of
Jonah a distressing innovation for his conserva
tive congregation, and therefore threw Jerome's
scholarship to the winds rather than lose his flock.
The theologian is apt to despise the mind of the
pastor; sometimes with reason.
There may be reason for criticism on both

6 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
sides. Yet the truth would be more securely
understood if theologian and pastor could see
each as necessarily complementary to the other.
The Bishop of (Ea needed the bracing thorough
ness of the scholar's findings. So too in our day
the practical men in the Church, appalled by the
frequency of divorce and remarriage, need to be
reminded by the scholar of just what they are
doing when they take a certain passage in St.
Matthew and ascribe it to a later hand. Thej
need to be told by the man who knows manu
scripts and the laws of criticism, as they cannot
know them, that by precisely the same critical
method part of the Lord's Prayer must go, the
Lord's commission to St. Peter must go, and
even the formula for Baptism must go. Of
course the practical man in the Church might
decide that these passages were too valuable to
be cut from the narrative. On the grounds of
expediency and use he would have them retained.
"I know of no greater injury that can be done to
the faith of our Church members by their spiritual
leaders," writes a learned living commentator
on St. Matthew,1 " than to lead them to suppose
that the Church is prepared to reject words of
Scripture on critical grounds, only when the words
1 Rev. Willoughby C. Allen, in London Guardian, June 24, 1910.

TECHNICAL THEOLOGIAN AND PASTOR 7
in question are difficult, or inconvenient, to
ecclesiastical theory." There is no doubt that
the painstaking scholar, removed from the stress of
life, has important news for the man at the front.
So too the scholar needs the news which the
pastor can give to him. The pastor cannot com
pete with him in the unravelling of the progress of
Christian doctrine; he cannot sound the verdict
of a sane textual criticism; he cannot group the
facts of history with the same facility. But he
is meeting human souls as no mere scholar can
meet them. He is permitted, in so far as he is a
real pastor, to see the depth of human need, not
in an historical summary, but in the concrete
life of one man; in so far as he is a real pastor he
also receives revelations of what God is, not to a
race, but again to the concrete life of one man.
The pastor unable to write his sermon, his soul
dead within him, often escapes into the streets,
presents himself at the door of some parishioner,
gives help and receives help in that parishioner's
house which sends him home full of God's inspira
tion to write such a sermon as he never could
have preached without this experience, even
though he had known all history and all theology.
Through the life of one man he has, in a valid
sense, seen God face to face.

8 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
Now the man who has such access to living
reality is the man without whom no true theology
can be evolved. There is first-hand information
in that man's keeping which no theologian can
discover in any book or in any train of reasoning.
These lectures are concerned with the contribu
tion which the pastor may make to theology; it
will therefore be necessary to examine the reasons
why we may expect extraordinary help from
the practical ministry in the solution of theological
problems. Ill
CONSTANT REVISION OF SCHOLARS' VIEWS
It is at once the merit of modern theological
scholarship and an evident defect in it that some
of the most distinguished scholars change their
views with startling rapidity. There has of late
been a general movement of scholars both con
servative and radical towards a middle ground.
Conservative scholars, who have said bitter words
against all forms of the higher criticism of the
Old and New Testaments, are now saying plainly
that the method is essential to all honest dealing
with the material before us. Radical scholars
who began with saying that we had only frag-

REVISION OF SCHOLARS' VIEWS 9
ments of Christian literature of the first century
are pushing many of the books of the New Testa
ment down into the fifth and sixth decades of the
first century, in some cases maintaining an
earlier date than that assigned by tradition.
The various estimates of the Fourth Gospel
within the last thirty years by the same scholars
are an illuminating commentary on honesty and
inadequate material for judgment. The scholars,
both conservative and radical, who have thus
changed ground, are not tyros. They are men of
the utmost eminence, commanding the serious
respect of all. They are everywhere honoured as
leaders of theological thought.
When once we have admired their candour, we
must face the fact that their whole attitude has
lacked an element of fresh air and reality. This
element of fresh air and reality ought to have
been given them by the parochial clergy, meeting
their problems in the practical experience of
living religion. Whose fault it is that the con
tribution was not given and received need not
now be asked. Some scholars, for example,
have concocted theories about the Old Testament
that have been no less absurd than the crypto
gram theory that would make Shakespeare's
plays declare themselves the work of Bacon. The

10 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
absurdities have been committed by the extremes
of scholarship, conservative as well as radical.
The pastor has too often read dictionary articles
and heavy books with dazed reverence for the
marvels of scholarship, when he ought to have
thought of the face of some simple parishioner
which he had seen that very afternoon, and, in the
contrast between ingenious theory and living fact,
laughed outright. Instead he has waited pa
tiently for the nimble scholar to swing himself
down from his dizzy heights till he too walked
upon the earth.
These changes in the theologian's point of view
are the first reason for believing that he has
neglected a source of knowledge which would be
of the utmost use to him in guiding him to the
truth. If the pastor must humbly sit at the feet
of the scholar, the scholar quite as humbly must
sit at the feet of the pastor.

rv
THE LABORATORY METHOD
We hear a good deal about scientific theology.
There is an almost cant phrase which calls theol
ogy the queen of the sciences. If these words

THE LABORATORY METHOD 11
are to be more than empty phrases we must
examine the method of modern science.
The first note of science is that it spends its
time on the present moment. It has little to say
of the past, nothing of the future: its record is
always, "This I now see, or feel, or hear." To
this end there has sprung up what is known as
the laboratory method. The laboratory is not
for the famous scholar only; it is for the beginner
in every department of scientific research. What
he has learned out of a book, receiving testimony
from another, however trustworthy, is discounted;
he must with his own senses perceive the laws he
would know. So he is trained in observation;
so he is taught to be wary of all human testimony.
The laboratory method is not confined to the
chemist and the physicist, to the botanist and
the geologist; it is also the method of the psy
chologist and the physician. The most successful
law school to-day trains its students by what is
called the "case method." The best business
man ordinarily is the man who has begun at the
bottom and with his own hands has done the
labour which later he is to direct. In all depart
ments of life the scientific method sends students
away from theory and generalization to minute
and direct observation.

12 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
In this movement toward the preeminently
scientific method, theology has lagged behind.
The chief authority adduced is the record of the
first century, the concurrent witness of the early
councils, or the consensus of history. We dare
not minimize the value of such carefully at
tested authority. But it is not scientific au
thority. Science demands its laboratory. The
theologian cannot search manuscripts, know the
intricate thought and life of remote periods, and
also maintain such a laboratory.
The laboratory of theology is the parish, and
the only man who can work in it effectively is the
pastor who by instinct and choice gives every inch
of his life to the people who are his. The theolo
gian may have been a pastor for a period, but the
fact that he leaves his laboratory for a school
shows, without any disparagement to himself, that
the immediate contact with present religious facts
is not in his estimate so important or so interest
ing as the study of past records. Nor is it easy
to return to the parochial ministry after years in
the scholastic life. Much as they may long for it,
the wisest scholars confess themselves unfitted
for it, and decline all calls to it. Nor, again, can
the contact with a body of students, in a quasi-
pastoral relationship, be a substitute. It can

THE LABORATORY METHOD 13
have small revelation of the human soul, compared
with the revelation that comes to a man who
serves old and young, strong and feeble, learned
and ignorant, the laughing and the weeping, rich
and poor, bad and good; and this not for a year
or two, but through long periods, many of them
for life, and more, — because to whatever field
the pastor may remove, he and his are bound by
ties of sympathy and understanding which not
even death can snap.
If theology is to be the queen of the sciences,
the only man in the Church who has the oppor
tunity to become "scientific" must be invited by
the theologian to give his testimony to theological
facts which he knows at first hand. That man is
the real pastor who has a genius for knowing the
life of the people he serves. He alone can tell
what the present facts of theology are. No
theology, however acute and widely read, can be
scientific without the testimony which he can give.
Within the present generation there has been
one notable act of recognition of the pastor's
contribution to technical theology; this was the
act of one of the few technical theologians that
America has produced. I refer to Dr. Allen's
elaborate estimate of Phillips Brooks's theology

14 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
in his memoir. Phillips Brooks was remarkable
as a preacher, but those who knew him as a pastor
almost forget his preaching in their exalted mem
ory of his personal ministrations. Dr. Allen may
be justly criticised perhaps for his estimate of
Brooks's acquirement by reading. I suppose we
have no right to compare his reading with the
reading of a diligent teacher in a good theological
seminary. But his knowledge of theology was
more direct and sure than can come from reading
books; he daily read human souls. All sorts and
conditions sought him out, because they recog
nized his pastoral genius. God spoke to him
through their troubles and hopes. It is well
known that Brooks was in the deepest things
extremely reticent. Through one medium only
he told what his life as a pastor had revealed to
him; that was through his sermons. Probably
no pastor has ever left a more thorough record of
his wonderful laboratory discoveries. Dr. Allen,
a man who had almost no experience as a pastor,
who was essentially the theologian, had the vision
and the generosity to recognize the right of such
a pastor to have a highly important system of
theology, — important enough to rank with the
technical systems of Augustine and Anselm and
Aquinas and Calvin. And so he wrote the long

THE LABORATORY METHOD 15
and careful chapter on Brooks's theology, the
theology of a man who read the message of God
through the lives of the men and women whom he
himself saw and heard and loved.
The forlorn sequel to this record was the prac
tically unanimous verdict of theologians, great and
little, that it was absurd to give Brooks a title to
be written down a theologian in any sense. He
was, said these superior people, an inspiring
preacher, a mighty force for righteousness in his
day, but he had not read the Fathers since his
seminary career, he read afterward only the con
spicuous theological treatises as they appeared,
he was not a profound student of books. There
fore he could not have any system of theology.
Nothing could more clearly show the need of the
theologian to awake to the scientific method of
his fellow-scholars in other fields.
A few years ago the Rev. R. J. Campbell, of
the City Temple in London, wrote a book which
became widely popular. Principal Fairbairn, of
Oxford, rebuked the book, with what seemed to
many full justice and show of reason. So far
Dr. Fairbairn was within his rights. Then he
proceeded to rebuke the author for even daring
to write the book. Speaking for the Congre-
gationalists in England, with whom both were

16 RESEARCH AND EXPERD2NCE
associated, he said that Mr. Campbell had been
chosen to preach, and it did not become him to
write a book about theology. This is a vicious
distinction. Dr. Fairbairn had every right to
pick flaws in Mr. Campbell's system. But it
was obscurantism of the worst kind to say that
the preacher had no authority to bring his direct
religious experience to bear on theological prob
lems in a formal treatise. For if theology is to be
even a pawn among the sciences, it must pay the
utmost respect to any effort which shall make use
of the testimony of men whose one business it is
to cooperate with living souls to find and know
the living God. V
CHRISTIANITY A PRESENT THEOLOGY
The scandal of the ordinary theologian's atti
tude to the pastor's witness is deepened by the
fact that the theologian would, on theory, be the
first to quarrel with anyone who said that Chris
tianity was a mere set of rules discovered in the
past; he would be the first to quote from the
saints in all ages that Christianity is a present
life. He would read to you phrases from ancient
collects: "O God, from whom all holy desires,

CHRISTIANITY A PRESENT THEOLOGY 17
all good counsels, and all just works do proceed";
"O Lord, raise up thy power, and come among
us"; "Almighty and everlasting God, who dost
govern all things in heaven and earth"; "0
Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly
wills and affections of sinful men"; "0 God, the
strength of all who put their trust in thee"; "O
God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly
in showing mercy and pity." He would quote
St. Paul: "To me to live is Christ." He would
quote mystic and literalist, reformer and reac
tionary, ancient and modern. And yet in spite
of all this excellent theory he would deny the
right of the man who, by reason of his vocation,
witnessed this present religion in abundance, to
make any valid contribution to the ultimate ques
tions of theology. This is not only to discard the
scientific method; it is also to deny, in a practi
cal and emphatic manner, the profoundest truth
of Christianity; namely, its immediate and
present reality.
There is sufficient danger, both within and
without the Church, that men shall be little
better than the deists of the eighteenth century;
they will believe in God, but they will not truly
believe that He is here now. There is a view of
the Sacraments that would make them not the

18 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
perpetual pledges of the Divine Nearness, but
merely the isolated and precarious points of con
tact whereby a distant God vouchsafes to touch
His children's lives. This is dangerously close
to deism. The parable of the Prodigal Son is de
nied; it is, in essence, declared that God is not
on the border of every life awaiting with mfinite
love the first signal of admission, however uncon
ventional that signal may be. Beyond the Church
and its influence is the man who so abuses his
fellow-children of God, drawing them into sorrow
and worse than sorrow, that it is inconceivable
that he can believe that his Maker sees him.
Doubtless he too would say that he believed in
God; certainly he does not believe in a God here
and now.
Quite apart from these practical considerations
is the general estimate of the worth of theology.
It is not the careless passer-by (he does not think
about it), it is the thoughtful and earnest student
who is apt to smile upon theology. It seems to
him an unreal accumulation of by-gone principles,
with which he need have nothing to do. It is
quite useless to explain that this thoughtful man
is shabbily mistaken. It is more to the point to
ask if he has not some sound reason for his preju-

CHRISTIANITY A PRESENT THEOLOGY 19
dice. That reason is found, in most cases, in the
seeming remoteness of theology from present-day
experience. The convincing test of truth is not
what it did in the first, the third, or the sixteenth
century, but what it can do this very minute.
It is therefore no mere courtesy which the theo
logian needs to show to his brother in the thick
of parish work. He must some way incorporate
into his theology, as an essential and illuminating
part of its message, the religious or theological
experience which the pastor can give to him. How
many treatises would grow thin with this light
of common, yet divine, experience shed upon
them! How many others, bare and meagre,
would grow rich! For men in their uncertain
language cry out for a present God who can help
them, for a living Christ who can share their
troubles and inspire their conquests. Theology
in its cold formalism may declare a present God
and a living Christ, but it does not convince.
Could it but catch up the testimony of what
happens every day in neighbouring streets, testi
mony committed to the agile and happy pastor on
his rounds, then it would no longer be cold and
unconvincing. Men would say: "This is for me,
I too may try the experiment. I shall read this
book to see if it may teach me the way."

20 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
At rare intervals a wonderful leader appears in
the Church who is pastor and theologian in one.
The very combination is the secret of his greatness.
St. Paul was such a man. The reader of Romans
finds it hard to decide in what the Epistle more
excels, — exact descriptions of wide human ex
perience or depth of theological insight. Augus
tine, great as he was, would have been greater
had he been more of a pastor. The power of
Luther was that he was equally theologian and
pastor. The morning of the day in which he
was to appear before the diet at Worms to defend
theological positions which depended upon him,
he turned quite aside from theology to visit a
sick nobleman who had expressed a desire to see
him. After giving him spiritual consolation,
Luther heard his confession and administered to
him the Sacrament. It was his supreme day as a
theologian, but the pastor in him was insistent.
The mere theologian would have said that with
a town full of clergy someone else must play the
pastor for that day.
The most assuring example in our time of what
might be done by a union of the theologian and
the pastor in the making of treatises is William
James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Had
one been told of such a book beforehand, I

CHRISTIANITY A PRESENT THEOLOGY 21
fancy one would have asked why a formal phi
losopher should trouble himself to set down the
strange and often distorted experience of many
people, most of them quite different from himself.
As the pastor reads the book he is apt to compare
the record before him with certain records of his
own, hidden away in his mind and heart. He
thinks that stories he could tell of parishioners,
who have opened their lives to him, are saner and
profounder than these varied accounts collected by
William James. Perhaps he is right. When one
contemplates the unique place which James's
book instantly filled among people interested in
practical rehgion and theology, it is evident what
an enormous opportunity the theologian, occupy
ing relatively the same place in theology that
James occupied in philosophy, has been ruthlessly
casting aside. It has its discouragement and also
its hope that the man to lead the way towards
a more vital exposition of theology, making it
tell of a present God and a living Christ, was a
layman, — a layman without a Church.
Christianity is a present theology. It is a
comfort to know its credentials and its history.
But those who understand neither often know its
power, and those who know both are sometimes

22 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
dead to its influence. In so far as a past system
and an array of historical witnesses can guide to
what Christianity can do to-day, we may be
grateful. But the one thing needful is that men
should try the experiment, take the one step, and
there find the power of the God of Love in the
living and present Christ. This experiment they
will try, this step they will take, only when the
theologian convinces them that God does now
speak with men. VI
THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS
If the pastor has not hitherto borne his share
in theological expression, how may he make
himself ready to offer his contribution? There
are two or three requisites which seem obvious.
1. The first condition is genuine fitness for
pastoral work. There are men who serve parishes
effectively by reason of good preaching and
skilful administration who have neither the will
nor the ability to serve people individually. Their
ministry must fall short of the best through this
limitation, but it is still valuable service to the
Church. To the man who has once really found

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 23
the satisfaction of pastoral experience, nothing
can compensate for its lack. He wonders what
people mean who rail at pastoral calls and ridicule
them as formal nuisances or occasions for only
petty gossip. The conversation may be formal
or it may reach no exalted moods, yet to the sincere
pastor it is a rare conversation which does not
reveal deep things of life beneath what to the
superficial caller would seem commonplace. A
woman tells of her boys at school, and instantly
there is the clear revelation of a mother's yearning
love, suffering yet rejoicing, because fear mingles
with hope. A man tells of the former rector with
a frank reverence which proclaims the depth of
his loyalty to friendship and ideals. Another
asks a sudden question which shows a problem
eating out the life of one who, to the outsider,
seems to have no shadow in life at all. Why may
not the clergyman stay at home and let these
people come to him if they wish to see him?
Some of them will come; many for various reasons
would not think of coming. His going to them
seems to show that he cares enough to take some
trouble. They know instinctively that he is not
come for a mere formal reason: he wishes to
know them, or he wishes them to be sure that he
would serve them if he might, and here he is. Is

24 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
it strange if the conversation tells a good deal to
the man who cares to know? It was the habit of
some excellent pastors in years not long past
always to gather the family for prayers when they
called. Though such a custom to-day is practi
cally obsolete, the pastoral call may still be a
sacred duty. Of whatever shortcomings our
time may be convicted, this one virtue is evident:
serious people now more than ever feel religion
in all parts of life; laughter and friendship and
the telling of loyalties may be made the media
for expression honestly religious. If a pastor is not
too stupid and cares enough, the seemingly trivial
afternoon calls on which he started with reluc
tance may send him home with the consciousness
that he has spent his time to advantage. Whether
he can hope that he has been of any use, he knows
that he has learned much of the lives he is called
to serve, and his ministry must be the more
effective for this knowledge.
It is quite clear that the pastor's vocation is to
a large extent a gift from God. It is to be hoped
that it is more commonly bestowed than the gift
of poetry or painting; but it is of the same
heavenly sort. A man who is bored by the
pastoral office, or thinks it insignificant, cannot
make himself a pastor by strenuous effort. Only

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 25
God can make a true pastor. When God has
called him, the man will find that he must give
himself to the duty with all his heart and with all
his might. And he will not allow anyone to
speak lightly of parish calls or any other means
which can teach him to know the lives of indi
vidual men.
2. The second condition by which a pastor may
make his contribution to theology is through
the keeping of a chronicle, intended for his own
eyes alone.
There are two admirable reasons why the pas
tor shrinks from making definite"* use of the in
formation gained through his pastoral experience.
The first reason is that he dreads lest he should
come to treat his parishioners as if they were speci
mens in a museum, and as if their spiritual
experiences were the experiments of a common
laboratory. He knows instinctively that the
pastoral relationship is an end in itself, and must
not be made subordinate in any measure to what
might be called scientific investigation. This is
a valid instinct and must be scrupulously respected.
There must, however, be a way to keep the pas
toral relationship sacred and yet to use for a
wider benefit what is learned within its precincts.

26 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
The best example of such a union of particular
and general responsibilities appears in the life of a
well-endowed physician. As he treats his patient
he sees no object beyond the cure of that one
patient. When, through the skill of his diagno
sis and treatment, the patient makes an astonish
ing recovery, the physician finds a way by which
the science of medicine may know of his experi
ence. No individual case is sacrificed for a
general good, but the general good becomes
the heir of a benefit bestowed upon the in
dividual. The second reason why a pastor hesitates to
use his pastoral knowledge is because it seems like
the breaking of personal confidences. There are,
it must be said at once, conferences that are as
sacred as if under the guise of a formal confes
sional. No promise of secrecy may have been
asked or given; yet there is a proper sense that
the words spoken are to be hidden in the memory,
never to be retold, never to be written down.
Not even the remotest risk may be taken whereby
the sacred confidence might be broken. It is
inevitable that in sermon or private counsel the
knowledge so gained may guide the preacher or
the adviser to more valuable words than he other
wise could speak. But the personal revelation

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 27
is sunk in his general experience, and no listener,
however attentive, could suspect the source or
manner of the speaker's assurance. There is a
large number, however, of the revelations of
pastoral experience which are quite apart from
any wish or need for secrecy. In many cases
the parishioner says, "Tell anyone who is
suffering as I have suffered that I know this or
that." There are other cases where people re
veal mystic experiences, perhaps a realization of
the divine presence, which they would not care
to have reported as theirs, but which they are
glad to have reported as the experiences of one
for whose honesty and sanity the pastor can vouch.
The need of professional care in guarding what
the most sensitive honour proclaims must be
guarded is unquestioned. The right and duty of
proclaiming what is not intended or wished to be
confidential is quite as little open to question.
Once more the good physician is a safe example
for the adjustment of the scales.
Remembering, then, these two reasons for with
holding testimony from pastoral experience, I
plead for the keeping of a written record of such
instances of the revelation of God's present
dealings with men as the pastor may feel himself
at liberty to record. It is not quite enough to

28 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
allow these instances to be reflected in sermons
where the clever may surmise their origin. Nor
is it quite enough that they be merged in the
pastor's general wisdom in helping those with
whom he comes in contact. There is possibly
a wider use for them; against that possibility he
should make himself ready with the most pains
taking and accurate record he can make from day
to day, as he has the revelations clearly in mind.
The book will be his laboratory notebook, from
which perhaps some day theology may draw in
spiring instances of the reality of the ancient
faith for this generation.
3. The third condition of the pastor's effective
contribution to theology is respect for scholarship.
There is a certain amount of training necessary, —
not enough to make the pastor a competitor of
the theologian, but enough to make him appre
ciate the meaning and value of theology. A
good many people do not see why they should
relate their present experience to the experience
of earnest and candid men in the past. "If it is
true to me," they say, "that is all I need or de
sire." This is the attitude of the untrained man.
He is not a safe colleague for the hardworking
seeker for truth. He is apt to confuse values.

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 29
He is impatient of thorough investigation. He
cannot wait, and jumps a^t conclusions.
The chief reason for respect for the theologian
is that the pastor may not be confused by the
abundance of his materials. Macaulay speaks in
one of his essays of "those cold spirits of which
the fire is put out by the fuel." Too often the
pastor is left religiously cold by the very abun
dance of his opportunities. The trained scholar
may teach him how to sift and arrange his weighty
experiences, so that they may have their exact
values in his own mind. The native genius at
the start is prone to resent training as an infringe
ment upon his God-given power; the genius in
maturity always confesses that his genius without
training could never have produced his best poem,
his best picture, his best song. He who would
help the scholar must first receive help. He must
be trained.
Another reason for respecting the theologian
is that the witness of the past is a valuable test
of the witness of the present. The varied testi
mony of living witnesses is always strengthened
if it can be clearly shown that devout and accurate
witnesses of the past left record of similar experi
ences. Often, moreover, a too ready imagination,
mistaking dreams for facts, may meet its cor-

30 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
rection by a comparison with the records of former
ages. The conviction that truth is one grows
upon people who think; so that the man intent
upon present phenomena both desires and de
mands the approval and the criticism of the man
of research.
It is not always recognized that the most formal
system is of necessity in large part a thinly
disguised relation of the theologian's personal
experience. St. Augustine wrote an intimate auto
biographical chapter when he attacked the Pela
gian heresy; his own struggle with sin was so
desperate that his belief in original sin was the
deep expression of the way he read his own life.
The theology of Scotland, as has frequently been
pointed out, received its sternness and gloom from
the ill-health with which John Knox had to con
tend. Jeremy Taylor's theology was generous
and tolerant when the Presbyterians were upper
most, because he saw what the victorious ought
to feel; but when he himself was set in authority
over a cantankerous Presbyterianism, his theology
suddenly contracted. In our own time New
man's theological books might all be classed
as part of his Apologia. Whenever the reader
of any theologian comes to a general passage
which seizes him with its living strength and

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 31
reality, he may be sure that the writer is putting
down what God said or did to him. Once we
perceive this fact we know two things: first, the
theologian uses present experience wherever he
finds it; and secondly, the theologian would be
eager to have the pastor's testimony, as soon as
it dawned upon him that the pastor had it and
could put it in available form.
There is a corollary to all this. It concerns the
reading of books. Though the scholar may
occasionally read widely, the specialization of the
time makes him for the most part an intensive
reader: he must confine himself largely to the
books of his own department. In an equal and
opposite degree the pastor, for the needs of his
preaching and personal ministrations, must be a
general reader. He is like the family physician
who must know how to help all parts of the body.
The very fact that he knows less about one part,
and correspondingly more about all parts, makes
the family physician often a safer guide than even
the greatest specialist. So the theologian may
find his less learned brother in the rectory pos
sessed of a saner outlook upon the whole total of
theology, because it is general and related. What
is lost in accuracy is made up in comprehensive
ness and mutual correction. On the other hand

32 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
the pastor, however well read in science, history,
poetry, philosophy, and theology, may never for
get that he must constantly go to the scholar to
verify his intimations. The pastor, as the phy
sician, must sit at the feet of the specialist with
all humility. For every reason, therefore, the
pastor must have the sincerest respect for the
theologian. 4. The fourth condition of the pastor's power
to help theology is his capacity to worship. This
is sometimes called spirituality. It means the
ability to lose one's self in the contemplation and
adoration of God. It is sometimes called mysti
cism. This suggests that appreciation of truth
is more emphatic and trustworthy than any
description of it can possibly be. We need not
quarrel over titles; the thought behind them all
is obvious. It is a resting in God, willing to
receive the rays from His glory.
In M. Bergson's Essai sur les donnSes imme-
diales de la conscience, there is this striking pas
sage: "The object of art is to put to sleep the
active or rather resistant powers of our personality,
and thus to bring us into a state of perfect re
sponsiveness, in which we realize the idea that is
suggested to us and sympathize with the feeling

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 33
that is expressed. . . . Thus, in music, the rhythm
and measure suspend the normal flow of our
sensations and ideas by causing our attention to
swing to and fro between fixed points. . . .
Nature confines itself to expressing feelings,
whereas music suggests them to us. Whence in
deed comes the charm of poetry? . . . We
should never realize these images so strongly
without the regular movements of the rhythm
by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness,
and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet." *
M. Bergson goes on to speak of sculpture, archi
tecture, etc. He might have found the end of a
climax if he had suggested worship, - — the at
mosphere in which the soul, made still, attains
to heights of truth.
The scholar rightly develops the critical spirit.
Even in church he finds it difficult to let go the
skirts of his being. The pastor standing in the
worshipping congregation, feeling that he is one
with the people because they are his and he is
theirs, abandons his spirit and, by a representa
tive act, the spirits of the congregation, into the
hands of God. His preaching is not merely the
result of study and reflection: its best element is
derived from the Spirit, who joins him to the
1 English Translation, by Pogson, p. 14.

34 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
people. The words may have been framed days
before, but the sympathy and the aspiration of
the moment make those words a new creation.
To him and to the people they are immeasurably
more searching than they were the day he wrote
them. The sermon that is greatest is preached
always to parishioners who, through love and
fellowship, contribute to its truth by their re
ceptive attitude and understanding.
For this reason the best sermons must be in
parish churches and not in cathedrals. One who,
for instance, goes through an English summer,
sharing Sunday by Sunday the stately services of
the great cathedrals, comes at last to a parish
church for his Sunday morning worship. By the
time the sermon is reached the stranger is aware
of a power here, which has been absent from the
cathedral services. The preacher is to be no
distinguished visitor; he is the people's, the shep
herd and friend of their souls. The flock look
up with affection; they expect to be not amused
or amazed, but fed. As the sermon progresses
one is conscious of vibrations of truth passing
from people to minister and from minister to
people, caught up through love and worship to
the high places of God.
This atmosphere is enhanced by beautiful

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 35
music and beautiful architecture, making up the
harmony which gives the spirit freedom to walk
in heavenly places. But nothing external can
equal the interior harmony. The artistic tem
perament is often found shorn of the critical atti
tude in a church where the music is inferior and
where the glass in the windows is glaringly bad.
The stranger asks how it is possible. "Here," is
the answer, "I have worshipped since childhood;
here I have had my holiest experiences; I suppose
if I saw these windows elsewhere they would
seem to me vulgar and tawdry, but here my
critical faculty is still; this is indeed for me the
gate of heaven." In such a London church I
found one summer such an atmosphere of worship
,as I had not found in any cathedral, even Win
chester or Canterbury. The simplicity and thor
oughness of religious emotion caught hold even
of the stranger, and he knew himself absorbed in
a united congregation which was consciously in
the presence of God.
We might argue that the scholar can feel this
as well as the pastor. I can only say that, speak
ing for myself, I do not find in ordinary theologi
cal writing any clear proof of it. This highest
fruit of mystical religion is reserved for the man
who preaches to the flock of which he is also the

36 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
pastor; no university or cathedral preacher can
know what he knows, remarkable as the academic
or cathedral sermon may be in itself. "He that
entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but
climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief
and a robber. But he that entereth in by the
door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the
porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice:
and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth
them out. . . . The sheep follow him: for they
know his voice. And a stranger will they not
follow. . . : for they know not the voice of
strangers." Blessed is the man who has proved
what it is to be in any sense a good shepherd.
It may not be unfair to say that, speaking gen
erally, the community of worship gives to the
pastor of a flock this advantage, potentially, over
his brother who is a theologian: the scholar sees
the light which falls upon the facts of life; the
pastor, if he has been submissive to the Spirit of
God hovering over his people, sees "the hidden
light that falls through" these same facts. But
to hope for such a consummation he must be
filled with the spirit of worship.
5. The final condition and the most important,
whereby the pastor may make his contribution

THE PASTOR'S QUALIFICATIONS 37
to theology, is that he expect the material. It is
the confirmation of the old promise, "Ask, and
it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Much
of the pastor's opportunity is nullified by the
pastor's own lack of faith. He tells what the
Lord said to Moses, but has no vivid idea that
the Lord ever says anything to the noble laymen
of his own congregation. He believes too often
that God did His chief work for men in the past.
It was the disciples waiting in the upper room,
expecting vaguely but intensely "the promise of
the Father," who on Pentecost received the Holy
Spirit. It was St. Paul, "obedient to the heavenly
vision," who could write to his rather trouble
some parishioners at Corinth that he thanked
God for God's grace which he found in them, for
their enrichment in utterance and knowledge.
Yet one finds in city and country pastors com
plaining that their opportunity is small. They
expect nothing: the vision of their youth has
faded and they no longer think of obeying it.
The pastor of the village of a few hundred people
may have the greatest opportunity of all, because
he may become vitally part of his flock. A
university teacher, used to the voices of the most
distinguished religious leaders in this country and

38 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
England, recently said that if he wished spiritual
help in any considerable crisis he would turn to
the plain parson of a church in the little hamlet
where he spent a month each summer. Hearing
such testimony you instantly wonder what a store
of fragrant memories that quiet man, knowing
a few souls through and through, must have in
the secret recesses of his mind. The scientist in
his laboratory who dully expects nothing may
by some accident meet a tremendous discovery;
but such unsought revelations must be rare if
they come at all. It is safe to say that it is to
the man who pours and mixes and dreams and
awaits, that the astounding new fact in nature
is uncovered. The man alert is the man re
warded. The pastor with only two or three in
his congregation, though they be persons of no
outward attractiveness or force, has an immortal
opportunity to know the human soul, and through
that knowledge to know the living deeds of God.
Unless the pastor in his laboratory has the
daring to expect commanding news of God, he
can give insignificant assistance to theology. With
the faith and expectation which only God can
give, there is no limit to the account which he may
turn over to the theologian for his testing and
inspiration.

THE POSSIBLE OUTCOME

VII
THE POSSD3LE OUTCOME
The lectures which are to follow will attempt
to illustrate in what ways theology might be
expected to be affected by a close cooperation
between the research of the scholar and the im
mediate experience of the pastor. For this pur
pose I shall select certain great subjects, such as
Biblical Criticism, the Church, Immortality, the
Revelation of Jesus Christ, and the Knowledge
of God. I shall, under each subject, refer to cer
tain difficult problems which have perplexed and
divided scholars, and then ask whether in any
of these problems an appeal to well-guarded
current experience might have helped towards a
more satisfactory solution. My aim will be to
suggest rather than to give categorical answers.
We do not need dogmatism and definiteness so
much as we need openness to conviction, vision,
and a willingness to see the hope of the present.
The scholars may say, "O God, we have heard
with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto
us, the noble works that thou didst in their
days, and in the old time before them." To this

40 RESEARCH AND EXPERIENCE
ancient versicle the pastors must make the due
response, "O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us
for thine honour." So the past may meet the
present, and both together may declare the
goodness and glory of God.

II
THE BIBLE

II
THE BIBLE
I
THE FINDING OF VALID EVIDENCE
IN attempting to marshal the evidence which
practical religion brings to bear upon Biblical
problems, we are obliged to be on our guard
against two tendencies in parochial life. One
tendency is symbolized by the quasi-leader who,
because of innate cheapness or of narrow panic,
plays upon that part of the human organism where
prejudices are stored. The man who writes the
obiter dicta of the religious press provides each
week a page of easy reading. Like a twittering
bird among the branches, he flies from subject
to subject, dwelling on each only long enough to
excite some superficial emotion or to rouse the
hostility of his readers against the particular
heresy which he well knows his readers will like
to have attacked.

44 THE BIBLE
This self-appointed defender of the faith fur
nishes the phrases for the not very thoughtful
preacher, who will now and again, according to
the year of grace in which he is preaching, inter
ject into his otherwise wholesome and positive
sermon some caustic aside, beginning with, "The
evolutionist would have us think," or "These
people who dare to suggest the revision of our
incomparable liturgy are even saying," or "This
worthy preacher who has so much love for those
who scorn the heritage of the historic Church,
in his zeal for unity, has been heard to say," or,
again, "The higher critic would have us believe."
So far as these strictures have touched upon the
critical method in the study of the Bible they
have made no distinction between the conserva
tive and the radical critic; one suspects that there
is complete ignorance of any such distinction.
The careful research of the reverent scholar and
the wild vagaries of the brilliant and irresponsi
ble seeker for something new have been swept
up together and cast into the dust heap. At
last the real leader appears, and, dispersing these
petty usurpers of leadership, cries a halt; and
the subjects change.
The most interesting parallel to this appeal to
prejudice and the creation of shibboleths is found

THE FINDING OF VALID EVIDENCE 45
in the realm of scholarship. There is a class of
scholars, whose erudition is sufficient to give them
standing, who, if for instance they chance to be
radical, gather up all the more recent pronounce
ments of radical scholars, and naively declare that
truth is somewhere in that mass of conviction.
They too are shortly toppled over by the real leader
in scholarship, who is not a striker of averages
nor a prisoner to the latest utterances, but out
of his radicalism takes a position which amazes
and then silences the coterie that formerly ex
ulted in his voice while it was lost in the
chorus. The appeal to prejudice does not pro
duce any valid testimony, wherever the appeal
is made.
The other tendency of which we must beware
is equally superficial and equally fails to be
representative. It appears in the college sopho
more, home for his holiday, who, having learned
some of the modern critical methods in his reading
of Homer or in the study of history, discourses
flippantly to some horrified relative of the elder
generation, about "what everybody now believes "
of ancient landmarks, including the Bible. It is
due to his sophomoric nature that the look of
distress or the fiery word of denunciation only

46 THE BIBLE
adds enthusiasm to his account. The victim is
made to feel quite alone in holding any faith
in the past, and the end of the world seems
imminent. This sophomoric tendency appears among
men and women of all ages. It seemed to the
judges of his day that Ingersoll's sharp attacks
upon the Bible were largely inspired by the de
lightful spectacle of orthodox writhing. Beecher's
famous illustration of the lame man, trying to
cross the street, and having his crutches knocked
from under him by the man who laughingly told
him they were useless, was the most apt descrip
tion of the man helped by the Bible, finally meet
ing the jeers of Ingersoll. To the few people
who now read his lectures, it seems impossible
that they should have startled anyone. But in
their time they brought consternation, and the
man who heard or read, thought in his heart that
all his neighbours held the same views, and he was
alone. There are even sophomoric preachers,
who enjoy seeing the pallor come into some face
before them as they announce that, as for this
miracle or that, no real scholar now accepts it
as an actual occurrence. It is often difficult
to distinguish between the martyr uttering his
lonely conviction and the fool playing with

THE FINDING OF VALID EVIDENCE 47
the trust of generations. But there are a good
many men whom one feels quite safe in class
ing among the intemperate and sportive icono
clasts. They do not guide to a general religious
experience. Evidence from religious people as a whole
upon the problems of the Bible is not easily de
limited. The thorough pastor is fairly sure to
know the genuine from the specious. It does not
come in wide sections from some fluent talker who
maintains that he speaks for "all true Christians,"
or "for the simple-minded," or for "all loyal
Churchmen." It comes rather in unconscious
fragments from sincere and earnest spirits who,
though they may have heard of Biblical problems,
pursue their road as if they were not. Their in
tuitions and experiences may fall now into the
radical scale, now into the conservative. They
are thinking of no system and no school; they
are at no pains to be consistent. Only a pastor
who cared enough for them to gather their evi
dence would suspect its value; only one who be
lieved in its value, would trouble himself to piece
it together. Instances of these fragments of
evidence I shall give as I touch upon the various
problems of Biblical research.

48 THE BIBLE
II
QUESTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP AND DATE
When a devout man is put under catechism
and asked if he believes that Moses wrote Deuter
onomy, he might say, "Yes." Asked if it could
be proved to him that Moses did not write it,
would not his faith in the whole Bible be weakened,
he might again say, "Yes." But when, to his
judgment, the case had been proved against
him, he would still find that the Bible had the
same authority over him. "Underneath are the
everlasting arms," would still be an assurance
come from God, whether written down by Moses
or someone in the days of Josiah. The man who
cries, "Prove that false and the whole Bible must
go," is not a man who has found God in the Bible.
He is one who merely outwardly respects it, having
never truly read it, having never truly allowed it
to take hold of his life.
It is fairly certain that, unless the subject is
definitely brought before them, people who read
the Bible for religious purposes never think of
the date or the author as they read what helps
them. They might have a certain remembrance
that this prophet or that apostle was believed to

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 49
have written the words at a certain period, but
the words would have an authority quite beyond
and above any question of time and man. The
Twenty-third Psalm, the One Hundred and
Twenty-first, or the One Hundred and Thirtieth
do not seem to come from any age or from any
individual. The scholar or the controversialist
may care when and by whom they began to be.
The religious man feels that in their cry to God
they have come out of the heart of all humanity
and from all eternity. The happiest confirmation
of this feeling came with the remarkable popu
larity of Dr. Prothero's The Psalms in Human
Life, in which he showed by concrete instances
how the Psalms became the continuous expres
sion of human yearning and aspiration from the
day when they first trembled on the lips of the
spiritual poets of a great nation.
The part of the Bible where religious people
would rightly be expected to be most sensitive to
authorship is the Gospels. Even here most
absorbed readers would be quite willing to echo
the words of Dale of Birmingham: "I forget
Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. I see
Christ face to face; I hear his voice; I am filled
with wonder and joy." To one who has that
topmost intuition of authority, no lesser authority

50 THE BIBLE
seems to have much weight. The discussion of
sources can have but an intermediate importance,
as defining the method. The primary question
is for ever settled, as firmly as the question
whether the child has heard his mother's voice.
That, the child knows; and no gainsaying nor
argument can daunt his steadfastness.
Here* enters what may seem to the pastor a
contribution to scholarship. A stern discussion
of date and authorship has raged about the Fourth
Gospel. A group of able scholars has been willing
to make it a sufficiently late book with an author
sufficiently remote from Christ's influence to be
merely the graphic reflections of one who wished
to make known his view of Christianity as it
ought to be. The figure who speaks is not Jesus
of Nazareth, say these critics; but simply a
mask for the author's own convictions. The
critic has every right to bring forth his reasons
for supposing that the Fourth Gospel is not his
torical. He may show singular relationship be
tween the events of the Third Gospel and those
of the Fourth, in spite of an entirely different
interpretation. He may point out the unique
ness of certain miracles recorded. But there is a
present-day fact which as a scholar he must also

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 51
weigh. It is a fact of which, as a scholar, he is
extremely shy, because it might seem too in
tangible. The fact is that devout people hear
the voice of Christ in the Fourth Gospel as in no
other book in the world.
The simplest test of this assertion may be
given to any pastor who, let us say, in Holy
Week, hears the fourteenth or fifteenth chapter
of St. John read as one of the Lessons. It may be
read by a young curate with no profound experi
ence of life to infuse into it; he reads simply,
naturally, unmoved; the words go to the people
without addition or subtraction of emotion. The
pastor who is true to his office never hears the
service alone; he is someway part of his flock and
hears the service with and in them. As the pastor
listens he is aware that the people are listening
as they do not listen even to the Sermon on the
Mount or to the accounts of the Passion. There
is a response which is the response to supreme
authority. He has not time to think that per
haps the words are not literally the words used
by Jesus: he cannot pause for his remembrance
of critical grounds, for this or that theory. He is
suddenly aware that the test the Fourth Gospel
itself puts forth is met: "My sheep hear my
voice; . . . they know not the voice of strangers."

52 THE BD3LE
The scholar, isolated from human, hearts, may,
on critical grounds, find the voice of Jesus much
more definitely in St. Mark than in St. John. He
may be amazed that the pastor quite open to the
critical appeal, clings to what seems to the scholar
an outworn hypothesis. To the pastor the living
present witness is an evidence which he cannot
neglect or slight.
It might be asked how such a recognition of
Christ's authoritative voice in the Fourth Gospel
could be interpreted in connection with the scholar's
material. I do not see how it could fail to bring
the Fourth Gospel very close to the traditional
date and authorship. There need be no insis
tence upon literalism in the account of the Sav
iour's words. It might safely be granted that
they had passed through the medium of the
author's life, and so had become not only our
Lord's words but also His words as they had been
the light of one who knew Him. It might be said
that the words were more His words because they
were more, not less, than literal: that is, they
were so lifted out of literalism that they combined
the words with the effect of the words on one who
knew and loved Him. That may not be an easy
thought to formulate, but it must at least suggest
a definite possibility. This thought would be in-

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 53
consistent with an hypothesis that the Gospel
was written by one who knew Christ not after
the flesh, but as the ascended Master, as St.
Paul knew Him. It is, moreover, easier to keep
if not close, at least closer, to the tradition, and
believe that the Gospel was written by one who
knew Jesus of Nazareth in the days of His flesh,
or, at furthest, by one who wrote down the vivid
and thoroughly digested reports of such a con
temporary of Jesus. The difficulties of the
authorship may be frankly granted, but the au
thoritative nature of the words of Jesus compels
the pastor, as he uses the words of the Gospel in
his ministrations to humanity to-day, to protest
when a merely academic reasoning would rob
them of their inherent quality. A sound judg
ment from thorough scholarship must reckon
with a present fact, as well as with the facts of
the past. The Synoptic Christ and the Theo
logical Christ of St. Paul and St. John have their
certain meeting point in St. Luke. St. Luke
certainly knew the Theological Christ of St.
Paul, but in the Third Gospel we have the de
scription of the Christ as the disciples under
stood Him before His Ascension. St. Luke, had he
lived to read, "Let not your heart be troubled,"
would have recognized the Voice that said,

54 THE BIBLE
"Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
have is thine."
Another detail, connected with authorship and
date, is the influence of "the later hand." Be
cause of differences of vocabulary, style, or
thought, passages here and there are by the
critics excluded from what they believe to have
been the original author's, or the original editor's,
document. Conceding this to be possible, the
man of present evidences would have the right to
ask how far the original thought of the author
would be allowed to be changed by the people
who heard or read the documents. The man who
touches religious experience to-day would not be
rash in believing that the hymns of the Wesleys
or of Cowper or of Keble gained currency as
vehicles of religious feeling as quickly as the
sermons of Isaiah or the letters of St. Paul.
John Wesley wrote in 1780: "Many gentlemen
have done my brother and me (though without
naming us) the honour of reprinting many of our
hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome so to
do, provided they print them just as they are.
But I desire they would not attempt to mend
them; for they really are not able. None of
them is able to mend either the sense or the verse.

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 55
Therefore, I must beg of them one of these two
favours: either to let them stand just as they are,
to take them for better, for worse, or to add the
true reading in the margin, or at the bottom of
the page, so that we may no longer be accountable
either for the nonsense or for the doggerel of other
men." It is hard to change any hymn after it
has been long established in the affections of the
people. In precisely the same way it was hard
to change any words of St. Paul after they began
to seem to the people on a level with Old Testa
ment Scriptures. The changes in modern hymns
have therefore a wide lesson for the critic of
ancient texts of Scripture. Most of these changes
are for the sake of literary taste or conventions.
Toplady wrote,
"When my eyestrings break in death,
When I soar through tracts unknown,
See thee on thy judgment throne . . ."
We now sing,
"When mine eyelids close in death,
When I rise to worlds unknown,
And behold thee on thy throne . . ."
In three lines of eighteen words, nine words have
been changed, yet the sense is the same. So,
too, Charles Wesley wrote,

56 THE BIBLE
"Hark! how all the welkin rings!
Glory to the King of kings!"
and we now sing,
"Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the new-born King."
Here again the idea is unchanged, and the words
are altered obviously to avoid the unusual word,
"welkin." There are changes, however, that go beyond
the mere use of words. Charles Wesley wrote
in 1757: "Come, thou Incarnate Word,
Gird on thy mighty sword;
Our prayer attend!
Come, and thy people bless;
Come, give thy word success;
'Stablish thy righteousness,
Saviour and friend."
In a certain hymn-book, published in 1877, we
have this stanza of Wesley's hymn in this form,
the whole boldly ascribed to Wesley:
"Come, thou all-gracious Lord,
By heaven and earth adored,
Our prayer attend!
Come, and thy children bless;
Give thy good word success;
Make thine own holiness
On us descend."

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 57
This is a distinct change of meaning: the stanza
is not addressed to the Incarnate Son but to the
"Father all-glorious" of the first stanza. When
we turn to other hymns in this collection we find
that in Wesley's Christmas hymn the second
stanza, retained in other collections, is here
omitted. Is it because, one asks, it refers to
"the Incarnate Deity?" So in Heber's hymn,
"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!"
the line, "God in three Persons, Blessed Trinity!"
is omitted. Throughout the book we find all
the great hymns changed in the same way. We
therefore believe that the changes are not in any
sense for style or convention but for doctrinal
reasons. The sense is radically changed in most
of the hymns. It is a Unitarian hymnal.
Now the application is this. If the critic, by
reason of words or trick of style never elsewhere
found in St. Paul, should decide that a certain
phrase or sentence in an Epistle avowedly of
St. Paul was the work of a later hand, the critic
must decide what the reason for change was.
From the experience with hymns I think we
should be safe in saying that it was no change
from the original idea in most cases, but merely

58 THE BIBLE
a change to adapt the Epistle to times and con
ditions. Where the change was meant to go
beyond mere language it would almost certainly
be evident from the manuscript as a whole why
the change was made: there would be other
changes showing a drift. Critical scholars, for
example, are easily aware when an Ebionite hand
tampered with the text. When there is no obvious
reason for rejecting an Epistle ascribed to St.
Paul except that its words are largely unusual in
St. Paul's other Epistles, one must ask whether
perhaps the Epistle may not quickly have suffered
from editors, and its very popularity may not
have put it to the same disadvantage which
Wesley found with his popular hymns. Once a
simplified 'edition' was in vogue, it would have
been as hard to go back to the original words as
to reclaim Toplady's "eyestrings" or Wesley's
"welkin." Such a comparison might not make
the scholar's perplexity less; but it might ulti
mately lead a little nearer to the truth, which is
his goal.
In some such light modern critics ought to
study the Pastoral Epistles. They were certainly
popular treatises, because they were practical,
and may easily have been handbooks for those
looking to the ministry. They may have been

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 59
as commonly read as Wesley's hymns were sung.
The Evangelicals and Wesleyans of England
must have regarded Wesley's hymns with quite
the affection and reverence that Mediterranean
Christians had for words of St. Paul, before the
canon of the New Testament began to take form.
The "later hand" in either case, where the docu
ments are close to the hearts of the people, can
rarely be free in anything but language. The
thought is too familiar. Here, too, scholars who
must rely chiefly on the evidence of the past
ought to give some attention to recent religious
experience. A little while ago a strange vocab
ulary made critics reject all idea of Pauline
authorship for the Pastoral Epistles. Now critics
say that these epistles contain large Pauline
fragments. It would not be surprising if later
critics accepted in them the Pauline thought en
tirely, finding an editorship of language only.
An interesting form of the argument of the "later
hand" appears in the discussion of the Epistle
to the Ephesians. Radical scholars in the nine
teenth century dismissed Ephesians from the list
of St. Paul's letters because it resembled Colos-
sians. Lesser arguments were added, but they
were obviously, often confessedly, only orna
mental appendages to this formidable argument

60 THE BIBLE
of resemblance. Recent scholarship, even though
radical, is withdrawing this protest against St.
Paul's authorship of Ephesians, and is inclined
to believe that in perhaps a single week St. Paul
sent from his Roman prison the letters, which we
now have, to the Colossians, the Ephesians, and
Philemon. Scholarship will give weighty reasons;
but common experience may also make its con
tribution. Anyone to whom the task of writing
the biographies of two or three men, recently dead,
has been committed, looks forward with interest,
as he ploughs through the mass of material before
him, to the letters written to different men on the
same day. One finds possibly ten letters written
on a single day from a summer home. Perhaps
everyone will include the account of an event
which has recently occurred in the writer's experi
ence. But if the writer is a man of large heart
and mind he will inevitably and unconsciously
adapt himself to the characters and circumstances
of the people to whom he writes. The event will
be told in almost the same words in several letters,
but with a subtle difference. The style, the vo
cabulary, the temperament will be different. The
letter to the matter-of-fact grandmother, the letter
to the humorous college companion, and the letter
to the rather gay son, who needs solemn advice,

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 61
will hardly seem from the same person, — but
handwriting and date show that the time and the
personality behind them are identical in the three
letters. There is economy of incident recorded,
but variety in atmosphere and in the expression
of personality. An editor of modern letters has
honest right to mocking laughter as he reads the
painful inferences and surmises of editors of letters
written centuries ago. Similarity of narrative
with odd changes of attitude seems to him an
absurd reason for robbing a man of the authorship
of a second letter written, let us say, in the same
week. Learning must keep close to experience,
or go astray. No scholar really ought to be al
lowed to interpret the letters of St. Paul till he
has edited the letters of a Christian man whom
he has known face to face.
Only one other detail of authorship and date
may I mention. What shall be said of such a
complete change of conviction about authorship
and date as is involved in the splitting of the
book of Isaiah into the Prophecy of Isaiah and
the writings of the Great Unknown, commonly
called the Second Isaiah? I suppose every care
ful reader of the Bible, however conservative, is
now convinced that there are at least two wonder-

62 THE BIBLE
ful men, separated by a long period, recording
themselves and God's revelation to them in the
book which men ordinarily call the Book of
Isaiah. The reason for the first protest against
the theory, while it was only a theory, was the
change it made in our idea of Old Testament
prophecy. What had formerly seemed a sort of
vision into the future became God's word for the
prophet's own age with still the vision of a Mes
sianic Future. During these last years congrega
tions have been hearing the hackneyed but good
definition, "Prophecy is not so much foretelling
as forthtelling." And devout people have leaped
to the larger idea. A foretelling of events seems
mere magic; to take the bare events of the day
and give them a meaning for God's people is of
heaven. To have the world shot through with
meaning, to have the assurance for our own time,
"Blessed are the eyes that see the things which
ye see," to believe that God is as near to us as to
Isaiah and the Great Unknown, is the most superb
lesson prophecy yet has taught. We see that it
is interesting that St. Matthew could gather so
many Old Testament incidents and words ful
filled in Jesus Christ. But what excites us to
great joy is that all the hopes of men, vague often,
and fleeting as an evening light, found their end

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE 63
in Him, and then were lost because He was so
far beyond the most daring dream. Because the
prophets opened their fives to God, God gave
them words to say which mean more than they
understood them to mean. For hundreds of
years they believed that God spoke through them.
In a valid sense they saw God and revealed Him
to their own time and ours.
If scholarship from its equipment of manu
scripts and vocabularies and styles and surround
ing history of that far-away past, can prove any
change of attitude towards date and authorship
as necessary, because it is certainly true, the
pastor may assure the scholar that the religious
intelligence of to-day will not hold back, but will
seek and will find the lesson which God is teaching
by this revelation of the truth.
ni
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
There is one argument which the scholar would
use less freely if he took counsel with the man
immersed in the problems of to-day, — the argu
ment from silence. Because a certain book is
not mentioned in surviving documents for a hun
dred years after tradition declares that it was

64 THE BIBLE
written, it is assumed that the date must be at
least one hundred years after the traditional date.
Because a name or an institution or an idea is in
one document of an assumed date and does not
appear in any other document which scholars
would assign to that time, it is commonly decided
that the name, the institution, or the idea, is the
interpolation of a later hand. Once more it is
the argument from silence. The method does
not pass wholly unchallenged in the scholar's
world, but, to the practical man who reflects, it
still seems to have undue weight.
To the practical man the scholar often seems to
lack a normal imagination. This lack he assigns
to separation from the common life of the present
day. He does not find fault with him for positing
his hypothesis, and then bringing together his
bits of evidence to test its workability. That is
a method familiar to him in the science of the
hour; every discovery has come through just
such an hypothesis, which is carefully tapped on
all sides by the hoping discoverer. The criti
cism arises when the argument of surrounding
silence is made a convincing reason for accepting
the hypothesis. He believes that the scholar does
not appreciate the strange silences of common life.
There is the scholar's imagination and there is

THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 65
the imagination of the man who sharply observes
the present course of things. The latter might
reasonably be called normal imagination. It is in
that normal sort that the theologian is apt to be
lacking. Several years ago a man died a tragic death.
His life was written. In the memoir the biogra
pher mentioned several times the name of a close
friend who was with the subject of the memoir at
the time of his death. This man afterward be
came closely associated with the biographer
through their common friend; but, because of
the memory of the tragic ending which haunted
him, he asked the biographer never to mention
their dead friend either in letter or in conversa
tion. So much for actual facts. Now suppose
that after several hundred years a copy of the
memoir and a packet of the letters of these two
men should fall into the hands of a critical scholar.
Let us suppose that the title page of the book
was missing, so that the date of publication was
uncertain. The book would tell of a close friend
ship, which the letters would completely ignore.
There might perhaps survive other letters of other
people which would confirm the book that there
was such a friendship. But here, the scholar
would say, is a packet of intimate letters between

66 THE BIBLE
the biographer and the supposed friend of the
hero, in none of which that common friend is
even remotely referred to. Here is an evident
place to use the argument from silence. The
letters of other people confirming the word of the
biography are spurious; and the name in the
biography may be explained in one of two ways:
either the name was introduced from those spu
rious letters by a "later hand," or there were two
men of the same name, resembling one another
in some other aspects besides name, but certainly
not to be confused. To one who stands on the
outside of scholarship and looks in, this seems a
perfectly possible course in Biblical criticism
through lack of normal imagination.
Another modern instance may help. A bishop
conspicuous in both America and England, lived
in a small American town for the forty years of
his bishopric. During his later life he had a
coadjutor bishop to assist him, and was there
fore at liberty to be often away from his diocese.
In this case, too, let us imagine that a packet of
letters survives the destruction of centuries and
falls into the hands of a critical scholar, — letters
from the rector of the bishop's town to a rector
in a town fifteen miles away. The scholar is well
aware of a tradition that assigns this famous

THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 67
bishop's home to the town of which I have spoken.
The bishop was said to have founded certain
institutions there. But of these thirty-four letters
from his own home not one mentions his name.
Several speak of a musical festival in which the
choristers of the two towns are to unite. One
speaks of an exchange of Sunday duties. Several
are about the election of a new head of one of the
diocesan institutions. In one or two letters
"the bishop" is mentioned, but no clue is given as
to his identity. Most confusing of all, two
ordinations in the cathedral are mentioned, and
Bishop  is spoken of as the officiating bishop.
(This is the name of the coadjutor bishop of whose
existence or office the scholar never heard.)
Armed with his argument from silence, the scholar
sets out for war. Certainly, he says, if this well-
known man lived in this place, the rector of it
could not write thirty-four letters without at
least clearly alluding to him. It is practically
certain that another man was the bishop of the
diocese within the reputed limits of this bishopric.
One thing is settled: the famous man never lived
in the town. There may have been a town with
a similar name in another state which was really
his home; or he may not have been a bishop,
though his name appears on nearly all the old

68 THE BIBLE
lists; or he may have been a myth altogether.
So fast can the argument from silence run to
conclusions. Still another instance may be given. Let us
suppose that the fame of Phillips Brooks should so
survive that after all the paper on which present
volumes of his sermons and memoirs are printed,
had crumbled, people a thousand years hence,
through a succession of reprints, should still be
reading his sermons and his life. The critic,
in taking the life in hand to rid it of the additions
and changes of successive editors, would come
upon a letter which Brooks in his maturity wrote
to a young man, revealing the secret of his inner
life, and speaking in a mystical and intimate way
of his Master, Christ. From beginning to end
of the long life, from the first sermon to the last in
the volumes of sermons, he would find nothing
else like it. Its self-revelation is quite unique.
The argument from silence (which in this case is
called the hapax legomenon) would convince the
scholar that the letter was the letter of some
pupil or admirer of Brooks which had been found
by some later editor and assigned to Brooks him
self. And here it was in the memoir where he,
as the last editor, must either print it in brackets
with a learned note, or else quite remove it.

THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 69
Certainly it could never have been written by
Brooks, though the style was cleverly imitated
by the pupil. I do not doubt that most of the
scholars of that future day would assent, some
what sadly, that the beautiful letter must be
resigned to its proper limbo. Yet a few unschol-
arly souls with normal imagination might fancy
that once in his life Brooks did something for the
first and last time. In any case, the letter is his;
and the argument from silence is again an unsafe
method. A profitable psychological study could be made
upon the silences of life. Why do some people
shrink from every mention of their dead? Why
in some families are the subjects closest to the
hearts of those associated under the same roof
never referred to? Why does a reticent man, by
some whim or seeming accident, open his inmost
secrets to a stranger, and say to him what he
never has said to his intimates? Why do some
men deeply religious never speak of religion?
Why is the age of Cromwell frankly outspoken
in its expression of religious feeling, among both
Roundheads and Cavaliers, when men of pre
cisely the same types to-day would abhor any
open declaration of their religious experiences?
A larger psychological equipment is clearly neces-

70 THE BIBLE
sary for technical Biblical scholars before they
can use the argument from silence with safety.
It is an argument that never can stand in any but
a subordinate position among other arguments.
Alone it proves nothing. IV
DEFINING THE IMPOSSIBLE
To the reverent and intelligent layman nothing
seems stranger than the ease with which the
scholar declares, on a priori grounds, what he shall
strike out of a document as impossible. The
miracles, in so far as they cannot be explained by
known laws, are often rejected, because, say
many scholars, real miracles are impossible. The
account of this or that so-called impossible occur
rence may certainly be granted as part of the
original document. Vocabulary, style, general
tendency, all may declare it inseparably joined
to a completely straightforward and matter-of-
fact narrative. But inasmuch as the phenomenon
described is, to the scholar's mind, outside the
pale of credibility, it is therefore on that ground
alone rejected as a fact.
The academic mind, when shorn of opportu
nity for wide and varied practical experience, lacks

DEFINING THE IMPOSSIBLE 71
a normal sense of the mystery of life. The line
between the possible and the impossible is more
sharply defined than the pastor of a large number
of people, who therefore knows a considerable
experience of daily life at first hand, would dare
to define it. With a marvellous erudition there
is not infrequently a crass ignorance of life. The
seemingly impossible takes its place among cred
ible facts to one who has sounded the depths of
actual living.
Perhaps the most direct means of making such
an assertion clear is to think of a man who has
nominally stood in the place of a pastor, but, not
being born to his task, never really touches the
human life about him. Through no lack of good
will, he is simply preacher and administrator:
he is not a pastor, though outwardly he seems to
be. Imagine, then, such a man, in the midst of
his career, coming to an experience which turns
life upside down. One experience may be the
crash of some awful tragedy in his own household:
instantly the hard walls of life, as he has conceived
it, fall away, and he sees life reaching into infinite
possibilities on all sides, above, below, behind,
before. Perhaps a son, on whom all is staked,
goes wrong, disappears, and is found dead,

72 THE BIBLE
washed up on the river bank some morning. The
preacher, who is the father of that boy, preaches
as he never preached before : the pastoral instinct
in him is born. The crude limitations melt into
unlimited mysteries. Another experience comes
to the man who, never having understood the
failures of life, has a parishioner who out of emi
nent prosperity drops to some criminal act, and
is tried in court. Day after day the pastor and
friend who cannot give up his belief in him sits
beside him in the courtroom, till the truth sinks
into his soul, and the great disappointment, the
worst fear, is confirmed. That winter the people
mark the lines in his face, the hair suddenly grey,
the preaching altogether changed, the personal
ministrations with an unspeakable tenderness
never known before. In that man too the pastor
is born. The impossible for him is set far off in
eternity. He dare not define it.
In recent years there has been no more distinct
illustration of this change than in a good many
of the clergymen who have turned their gifts
towards the healing of nervous wrecks, adding to
their spiritual ministrations a ministry to the
mind and the body. In some instances, these
men have confessed that they never knew before
what it was to be a pastor. The everyday ex-

DEFINING THE IMPOSSIBLE 73
perience of the man born to be a pastor is to them
disclosed in the middle of their ministry. Such
men have often been students rather than pastors.
Many of them have confessed that their attitude
towards the miracles of the New Testament has
changed with the insight into human nature
which their new experience has given them.
Whereas in former years they had been able to
look upon miracles as difficult obstacles to a nat
ural faith, they have now found miracles the
windows through which they see into the infinite
possibilities of God's laws working out for men
through God's chosen instrument. The hard
fixing of the impossible is changed for an open
mind towards the strange possibilities of an always
enlarging present.
Side by side with this growing hesitation to
declare what is impossible in the records of the
Bible is the pastor's acceptance from the scholar
of the rule that when difficulties of the Bible can
be explained on well-understood natural grounds,
it is loyalty to truth so to explain them. The
scholar's research sometimes reveals habits and
a use of language among Oriental peoples which
turns many a former mystery into a familiar
commonplace. It is no lack of faith, but a gain

74 THE BIBLE
of faith, which prompts the unlearned to sit at
the feet of him who knows, and learn his lesson.
An Old Testament book formerly taken as history
may be proved, on convincing evidence, to be in
the mind of its author philosophy or tale or para
ble, the concrete expression of religious teaching.
To cry, "Treason!" before any such proof would
be as faithless as to contend that our Saviour's
Parables would be worthless if they were not
exact history. When, by the increase of human
knowledge, an event formerly called a miracle slips
into the list of ordinary happenings, through the
explanation, for instance, of telepathy or psycho-
theraphy, there is still the veil of mystery over very
much in the Bible. It must always be the simplest
and also the most mysterious of books, because it
is the truest to life of all utterances, — for life is
clearer and more mysterious than any tale.
So the last word about the attempt to define
the impossible is that any adequate knowledge
of present religious experience forbids the sane
man to mark such limits. An old peasant woman
once had a precious bottle of medicine which she
used for all the illnesses of her seven children.
She kept it in a box with other valued possessions.
Time and again she found the bottle unstopped.
Each time she accused child after child of opening

DEFINING THE IMPOSSIBLE 75
it. Invariably the children denied touching the
bottle. "But," she said, "I never sent any but
you to unlock the box; the bottle is unstopped;
one of you must have uncorked it." She had
defined the limits of the impossible. She was so
sure of her theory, that each child was beaten in
turn for what all declared they had not done.
That was her academic certainty. But one day
while she herself was stooping over the box, the
cork flew out into her face. To her ignorant
mind, it was a marvel. But she straightway did
away with her definition of the impossible. That
was because she put away theory and bowed to
experience. It may seem insulting to compare a
great scholar to a rude, ignorant peasant. Yet
when all is said, I am convinced that the difference
between the wisest and the most ignorant is
slight, when the knowledge of the greatest of in
tellects is compared to the knowledge that shall
be revealed to us in God's good time. As Maurice
paused to admire the religious experience of the
washerwoman bending over her tub, so the most
learned man always must stand in reverence before
any experience which leads a child of God out
into the blinding mysteries of the life which He
has given us. Normal religious experience guards
the mystery of the Bible.

76 THE BIBLE
V
THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT
There is the impression that the common
experience of religious people towards the Bible
emphasizes the letter rather than the spirit. There
was a theory called "Verbal Inspiration," which
practically eliminated the human medium in
which the divine message was given, making the
language as infallible as the source of divine
Light shining through it. It is now doubted
whether this theory was ever really included in
the faith of anybody. It is open to serious ques
tion also whether any considerable number of
readers of the Bible ever attempted to learn their
physical science from it. The inconsistency and
agony, one suspects, first arose when some scoffer
pointed the finger, and cried, "See, your Bible
does not teach what astronomers and geologists,
by their investigation, know to be true." Even
the Pope who brought unhappiness upon Galileo
probably had not originally read his Bible for
scientific information. However these things may
have been in the past, it is quite certain that
to-day religious experience does not rely upon
any theory of verbal infallibility, nor does it

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT 77
believe that the Bible ever was meant to be in
any sense whatever a text-book for science.
There was a time when simple people, in per
plexity, had a habit of opening their Bibles at
random, and felt that the first verse upon which
the eye fell was an answer from God. Though
the custom is almost obsolete, I believe that some
people still cling to it. But even such a custom
may not necessarily be interpreted as slavery to
the letter. If a man distracted by grief should
in his distress wildly turn to his Bible and open
it accidentally to, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my
people, saith your God," he could not read the
words and those that follow without feeling that
God had indeed spoken to him. That is a vastly
different matter from being in doubt about a pro
posed journey, and, with eyes shut, turning the
leaves of the Bible and placing the finger on what
proves to be, when the eyes are opened, some
such verse as this, "And God said unto Balaam,
Thou shalt not go . . ." So the man stays at
home. With such oracular deference to the
letter, religious experience now, at least, has little
or nothing to do.
Probably the best test to demonstrate that the
Bible to-day is not read after the letter but after

78 THE BIBLE
the spirit, is the way in which appeals are now
made to religious people. An old method of
persuasion was by proof-texts. Isolated texts,
without reference to context or the general spirit
of the Book, were patiently counted for arguments.
"Let us make man in our own image," was used
to prove the doctrine of the Trinity; we to-day
build upon the general implication of the New
Testament. In much the same way, without
reference to the development of God's dealings
with men, an American bishop sought to prove
slavery permanently of divine appointment. Peo
ple at once saw that, on precisely the same grounds,
we were all at liberty to be Mormons. The ser
mon or the article which attempts to prove to
this generation anything of divine sanction by
the quotation of isolated "proof -texts," is so rare
as to sound or read like a page from the past.
The method as a means of persuasion is dead.
Recently, in a religious journal, the following
texts were used by a Roman Catholic to prove
that our Lord's mother should be called the
Mother of God: "And whence is this to me that
the mother of my Lord should come to me?"
"His Son, who was made to him of the seed of
David, according to the flesh"; "God sent forth
his Son made of a woman." I suppose no reader

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT 79
of the argument who really both rested upon the
authority of the Bible, and knew the Bible, failed
to think of our Saviour's own attitude towards
the possibility of such a title, as that attitude is
revealed with perfect clearness in the scene where
He was told that His mother and His brethren
stood without desiring to speak with Him; to
which He answered, "My mother and my breth
ren are these which hear the word of God, and do
it." Or again there was the scene when "a cer
tain woman in the company lifted up her voice,"
and said unto Him how blessed His mother was,
and He answered again, "Yea rather, blessed are
they that hear the Word of God, and keep it."
Still again the miracle at Cana, with its "Woman,
what have I to do with thee?" reveals the same
attitude. Without lessening for a moment His
love for His mother, He seems to be guarding
against the tendency of the later Church to exalt
her name and honour to divinity. To the man who
knows the value of words it seems impossible to
take from the New Testament any isolated texts
that could make the New Testament in any sense
endorse the title, Mother of God. The only way
to justify such a title is to leave Scripture frankly
behind and find the authority for it in a doctrine
of development in later history. To attempt

80 THE BIBLE
to read it into the Bible is to use the a priori
method of radical criticism in its extremest form.
As lately as July, 1911, I found in a reputable
journal an open letter attempting to prove from
isolated texts the whole scheme of ecclesiastical
life known in the mediaeval Church. Detached
words and phrases from the Epistle to the Hebrews
were especially sinned against. They have their
true meaning only in the context which might be
taken as an expository sermon on the Lord's
words, "I am come .... to fulfil," and "Ye
have heard of old time . . . , but I say unto
you. ..." It distinctly declares that the Old
Testament is fulfilled, once for all, in Christ, and
thereby transcended forever. If the Apostles
had really thought as those teach, who, by "proof-
texts," announce what the Apostles thought, their
apostolic teaching would not have been so ob
scurely hidden away in doubtful phrases. The
proportion would have been reversed. I believe
there is no answer to that criticism.
The attempt to read into the New Testament
that which no scholar or plain man, except by
the a priori method, can find there, is seeming to
the honest intelligence of to-day, more and more,
insincere. The New Testament men lived in the
consciousness of Christ's spiritual presence and in

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT 81
the expectation of a quick return of His physical
person. The mediaeval system was developed
through a time which felt that Christ was farther
and farther away, as we see from the great number
of mediators thought necessary to reach His
forgiveness and love. It is possible to justify the
mediaeval system as divinely given that men in
that age might have at least the assurance of
some points of contact with God. We may not
speak of it with contempt. Men in the same
despair to-day have every right to use that same
mediaeval system if it helps them to find Christ.
But when the spirit of the whole New Testament
is against finding it in the Apostolic Age, it cannot,
to devout religious experience, seem in any way
right that a few "proof -texts" should be put to a
task which they obviously cannot perform. New
man said all this clearly when he justified his
point of view by the book, The Doctrine of
Development. There he was on safe ground,
and could give reasons. To a religious con
sciousness that more and more grasps the spiritual
(that is, real) intention of the Bible, the use of
"proof -texts" is abhorrent.
One cannot speak of the letter and the spirit,
without asking how far ordinary religious experi-

82 THE BIBLE
ence keeps pace with scholarship in its apprecia
tion of the poetical, in contrast with the literal,
or prosaic. There may be little ground of boast
ing on either side. For the mind that gets out of
poetry more than out of prose is rare at best.
Not till a man has felt that poetry has given him
a truth which no accurate and literal description
(which is the height of prose) could give to him,
has he received the gift which poetry holds for
men. One suspects that the very humble are
those who live close enough to the elemental
factors of life to understand why Jacob and
David were saints in spite of vexing and abomi
nable traits. Others try to turn it all into dia
grams and prose, and are bewildered by God's
choice of men. When a man is free of the con
ceit of knowing, and is not burdened with theories
or prejudices, and with religion in his heart comes
reverently to the Bible, his soul glows within him
as he reads what scholars have vainly tried to
make mere prose; he gets a meaning beyond
definition and analysis; God speaks to him in a
language more than human; the reader passes
through the letter to the spirit.

THE WORD OF GOD 83
VI
THE WORD OF GOD
Diligent observation shows that normal relig
ious experience to-day grants to the scholar his
full right to employ modern criticism in his study
of the Bible. This is not to admit, of course, that
he is applauded for every product of the critical
method. With this freedom in the study of the
Bible, it may rightly be asked whether the intelli
gent reader has not lost some of his awe and
respect for the Book itself.
On the surface it seems as if the authority of
the Bible had suffered. The giving of freedom
may spring from indifference as well as from
superabundant faith. There is every reason to
believe that religious people are now reading the
Bible in a way quite different from the way of
their parents and grandparents of equal earnest
ness. It is being read less as a whole; perhaps
more intelligently, and less devotionally. Books
about the Bible are read rather than commen
taries. Many of them give readers of the Bible
deeper and truer insight into what they read.
People read favorite parts of the Bible many
times, and do not, as in the old days, try to read

84 THE BIBLE
it by rote. Most of all they read the Gospels and
the Psalms. With possible gains there are in
evitable losses, incident upcn so thorough a
change of attack as is here involved. Certainly
the present reader could pass a much less creditable
examination on the whole Bible than his grand
father, of the same religious purpose. I rather
think that the grandfather gained from the Bible
less confidence in God's love for us than his de
scendant now gains from what would seem to his
elder a desultory and disjointed reading. Un
questionably the devout amateur student of the
Bible to-day, with the varied and interesting
helps of modern scholarship, has a larger vision
of God's leadership among His children, than
the amateur student of any former generation.
Because the study is less conventional, it becomes
the more real. Through what seems infinitely
close to human experience, there is the assurance
of God's Life leading us on, not on from the heights
of heaven, but lost among us in impoverished and
unexpected places, in the eternal Incarnation of
the Son of God. All that criticism has accom
plished is to uncover the human in the Bible; it
has not explained away the Divine.
Coleridge used to say that the Bible "found"
him. There is good cause to believe that, in spite

THE WORD OF GOD 85
of what seems to some a secularizing of the
sacred volume, the Bible "finds" people now as
truly as ever in the past. The stories of Joseph,
and Moses, and David, still beckon those who
dream of high tasks; the history of the Captivity
still bids those who fail to look to a Loving
Father to turn their very failure into blessing;
to the sorrowful no words have such power to
help as "The Lord is my shepherd," "I will lift
up mine eyes unto the hills," or "Let not your
heart be troubled"; and Christ as revealed in
the Gospels wins every day new and loyal disciples.
In a sense which needs no modification or limiting,
the Bible is still to the religious world the Word
of God indeed.

Ill
THE CHURCH

Ill
THE CHURCH
THE Church is equally the home of technical
theology and of unclassified religious ex
perience. There is an abnormal condition which,
though common to all ages, is to-day somewhat
exaggerated, — the condition by which a large
part of the most influential theology is outside
the approval of any organic form of Christianity.
Nor does this sort of theology lament its loss of
ecclesiastical recognition: it not infrequently
scorns it. It somewhat arrogantly assumes itself
more comprehensive than the Church. In so far as
such scholarship is carried on in a reverent spirit,
the absence of sympathy between the Church and
the scholar is detrimental to both. A general
and historical institution cannot be expected to
turn aside from its dignified traditions each time
a scholar proclaims that he has disproved one doc
trine and discovered a better; but it may, be
cause of the weight of its authority, show patience
with the tentative conclusions of scholarship and

90 THE CHURCH
tolerate the freest investigation. Scholarship
rapidly tends to correct itself. The wild surmises
of one age are toned down or annihilated by the
more thorough investigation of the succeeding
age. The Church need not fall into a panic, now
and again, because the young and brilliant follow
after one who seems, at least, to deny much that
is precious in the faith. The freest of theology
and the most conservative of religious experience
ought to be able to dwell together to mutual
advantage in the home which belongs to both
equally — the Christian Church.
Further, a united effort must be made to com
mend the Church to the intelligent of all classes
in society. The Church cannot be supercilious
or indifferent when told that the artist and the
scientist and the statesman and the skilled me
chanic are withholding their allegiance to the
Church. All might be frank in their devotion to
Christ as they understood Him, and all might aver
that the Church did not to their mind in any way
represent Him. In their charges they would be
apt to attack both the formal statements from
theology and the practical work emanating from
present religious life. One, they would say, was
remote and unreal, the other inadequate and

TOLERANCE 91
half-hearted. So the Church lacks the support
of many brave and earnest men, the variety and
richness of whose lives it can ill afford to lose.
For all reasons, therefore, it is important that
the doctrine of the Church be made both clear
and vital. There are certain tendencies in modern
religious experience which ought to add vision to
the rather dry definitions of the Church. If the
appeal of the Church as it is has been insufficient,
the Church that is possible ought to win all clear
thinkers. Theology may receive help from practi
cal religious experience in its concept of the
Church. I
TOLERANCE
The first note of modern religious experience
in the Church is tolerance. We are becoming so
used to it that we hardly appreciate what a
modern note it is. It was not many years ago
that persecution or exile followed every minority
that set up its own religious ideals or practices in
any community. The Roman obedience in Latin
countries made Protestants unhappy; in England
the Churchmen drove out the Puritans; and in
Massachusetts the Puritans would not abide the

92 THE CHURCH
Quakers and the Baptists. Religion not very long
ago meant intolerance of any following of Christ
which was not strictly one's own.
Now there is tolerance. It is not merely
toleration, forced by the state: it is a spirit of
respect for a neighbour's convictions. It is some
times said that if Pope and Archbishop and Elder
each could have his way, there would be perse
cution again as each gained the strength for it.
But this finds no warrant in the religious experi
ence of any congregation of which any ordinary
pastor has knowledge. There is a real respect for
the variety of religious conviction in every com
munity. Each man tells of the good lives and
the good works of Presbyterian, Roman Catholic,
Salvationist, and Churchman. He would be
glad to see these good men come into his particu
lar fold of Christians, but he never thinks of dis
criminating against them either in business or in
social relationship, so long as they meet the re
quirements that either business or society may
demand of them. Religion, in its outward phases,
is neither help nor hindrance.
There is, it must be admitted, a good deal of
cant in religious tolerance, which, if rightly named,
would be called only indifference. "There is
good in all religions," is one of these cant sen-

TOLERANCE 93
tences; "it does not make any difference to which
one a man belongs, if he is honest and sincere."
To be a howling Dervish, according to this lazy
rule, would be as well as to be Florence Nightin
gale or William Wilberforce. The rule then
appears, to say the least, unintelligent. To
thoughtlessness and shallow good-nature it may
often properly be ascribed; but there is also in
difference behind it, the indifference which puts
business and comfort and recreation first and
thinks religion a sort of elective which one may
take in any form, or not at all, with equal im
punity and lack of benefit. Wherever tolerance
is the result of indifference, nothing favourable
can be said for it.
But there is another kind of tolerance which
permeates the most thoughtful and intrepid
sections of Church life to-day. One catches
glimpses of it when religious journals of one
religious body call upon their co-religionists to
emulate the generosity of neighbouring bodies,
which far outstrip them. The Congregationalist
writes that he wishes Protestants could adopt as
their own the words of Leo XIII in his Encyclical
of 1880 about marriage. The Churchman comes
home from a great missionary meeting, and
laments that, in zeal and self-sacrifice, he is so far

94 THE CHURCH
behind the Baptist or the Methodist who spoke.
It is an echo of the Saviour's praise of the Good
Samaritan. It is tolerance in its high and Christ
like form. Taught to the Church nineteen cen
turies ago, the lesson seems only in this age to be
learned. It is a contribution of the religious
experience of this time to a larger definition of the
Church. It will be seen that such a definition touches
upon the modern doctrine of Pragmatism, which
also was part of the teaching of our Master, when
He said, "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
Our tolerance is therefore not a negative quality
but a positive : it is not so much patience with the
shortcomings of others, as it is generous amaze
ment at their virtues. We are no longer talking
patronizingly about religious people who walk not
with us. Without disregarding Church polity and
Church doctrine, we are finding a higher test of
validity than logic and history and tactual au
thority: we are examining the lives of men who
live under certain polities and under certain
systems of doctrine. The examination is not
simple, for we find that polities and doctrine
often have singularly little to do with the lives of
those who nominally live under them. But we
can thread our way out of a good deal of darkness

INSTITUTIONAL CHURCHES 95
into a good deal of light. Our tolerance is leading
us to put less and less confidence in our own ways ;
more and more in the ways of others. We correct
our narrowness, we discard, we adopt; and even
where we see reason for little change, we remember
that there are twelve gates to the Heavenly City.
Tolerance, without tending to indifference or to
indistinctness, is by its admiration of concrete
goodness, finding a richer and larger content for
the doctrine of the Church. II
INSTITUTIONAL CHURCHES
Within a generation there has sprung up what
we call the Institutional Church. It teaches men
and women how to be successful and happy as well
as how to be good; it makes the buildings about
the church throb with life from Monday morning
to Saturday night. The benevolent work of the
Institutional Church is too well known to need
any description. What may be needed is the
interpretation of the contribution which this
movement has brought to the present-day defini
tion of the Church.
The first lesson taught by the Institutional
Church is that the Church goes out of its way to

96 THE CHURCH
proclaim that God loves men. It is the prag
matic method of doing it. It is not so much
preaching from a pulpit, important as that is, as
preaching by deed all the week through. The
doors stand open wide to all who will enter them,
from whatever motive or reason they choose, that
they may receive any measure whatever of an
offering of love. Jewish children who never
think of attending Church come to learn sewing
or carpentry. The children of infidels and scoffers
come; and perhaps even as they take the Church's
benefit, they try to dissuade Christian children
from going to Church. When all is done it is not
always easy to see that the Sunday services have
grown as they ought, through all this week-day
labour. Perhaps ; but the main lesson is beyond.
It is a lesson from the Saviour learned at last, —
"to do good unto all men." At last, when we
have worked hard enough and in enough faith
and prayer, men shall know that "God so loved
the world . . . ." The Institutional Church is,
through much imperfection that is rightly criti
cized, teaching us that above all correctness of
doctrine and validity of orders, is the command
to love, — in deed, even more than in word, —
even as Christ loved; and not to ask questions
and make exceptions, — even as He, without

INSTITUTIONAL CHURCHES 97
question or limit, gave His love to all, even His
enemies. The socialist and the malcontent criticize the
Institutional Church because it does its work in a
bungling way; because it wastes; because it helps
the wrong people; or because it tries to mend an
order of things which can be mended only by
destruction altogether. All such criticisms are
beside the point. Everyone of them could be
admitted true, and yet the real issue would be
untouched. How much does the Church, which
calls itself Christ's, love men? Will it make every
effort, though it fail time and again? Will it
preach on the streets? Will it tend babies, and
teach children, and put some gaiety into dreary
lives? It is not in the success of this enterprise
and that, it is in the meaning of all the enterprises
put together, that judgment must be found.
When the socialist and the reformer and the utter
revolutionist can wake to see that the great
Church of God is going out in unconventional
haste to carry an honest message of love,
then they may rub their eyes, and cry, "What
does it matter if all these schemes are folly
and nonsense; there is LOVE here, and that is
best of all!"

98 THE CHURCH
Another important lesson from the Institu
tional Church is its power to give to the world
imagination. The Church is the greatest poet
the world has ever known. The first hospitals
were in the houses of the clergy of the early
Church; the monks who planted their monas
teries on beautiful hills taught men the beauty of
nature. It is the function of the Church in its
narrower capacity to teach the world to be a
poet too, and then to pass forward to new lessons
of the imagination. In a town where the Church
has begun manual training, and the public schools
have taken it up, the Church may turn its
attention to public play-grounds; and when play
grounds are supported by a converted city
government, the Church may advance to day-
nurseries ; and so on to the end of time, — always
leading the imagination of the world to do what
an un-Christian world never would think or dare
to undertake. Ill
MISSIONS
Everyone who cares for the life of the Church
has rejoiced in the zeal of the last hundred years
for Christian missions. However we may regret

MISSIONS 99
that all do not help, we who are pastors know
that the sacrifice, both in men and in money, to
carry the news of Christ farther on, goes deep
into the life of the Church. But there are facts
associated with this missionary zeal which may
not be quite so evident. As one examines the
missionary motive during modern times, one dis
covers a large lesson for the doctrine of the Church.
There has been a change in the motive for
missions. It is always dangerous to estimate the
exact beliefs of a past generation, because the use
of language is treacherous in its changes. But
it seems as if in all communions the motive for
missions, let us say a hundred years ago, was to
save men from God's wrath in the world to come.
That word "wrath" might be variously inter
preted; but it could not be quite explained away.
Those who had the missionary spirit most in
tensely often seemed in a sort of panic. Roman
Catholics sometimes went rapidly through a coun
try baptizing people indiscriminately, with little or
no instruction, and with no reasonable hope that
the baptized persons ever would be nurtured in
the Christian life. It is not right to condemn the
method as an example of the vicious theory of
the Sacraments which is included in the words

100 THE CHURCH
opus operatum. Other communions accepted con
versions upon slight investigation. The time was
short and all felt that it would be better to get
people to the. gate of the next world with a
shamefully thin veneer of godliness than with no
godliness at all.
I do not know how it may be with all Christian
missions to-day, but in those with which I am
familiar I know that there is the utmost care,
first to respect God's leadership in the imperfect
religious life which the people have experienced,
and then to take all possible care to make sure
that the convert understands what he is doing
and to what obligations he is binding himself be
fore he is baptized. Christian missionaries to-day
are not worried if they have few converts: it is
the sort of converts which engages their chief
attention. All this shows that the emphasis
has changed from the world-to-come to this
world. Christian missions now would make
the world Christian, not simply make so many
individuals Christians.
When the barbarians swept down upon the
Mediterranean world in the fifth, sixth, and
seventh centuries, there was one fact that saved
the old order from utter confusion. Years before
Christian missionaries had found their way into

MISSIONS 101
the northern forests, and the barbarians respect
ing the South for nothing else, respected the
Christ whose message they had dimly heard.
So on Christmas-day, 800, the barbarian em
peror was crowned by the Bishop of Rome.
It may be that our brave missionaries in the
Orient to-day are performing a similar office for
the world, centuries hence. It may be that
America and Europe will grow feeble and corrupt,
even as Greece and Rome were rejected by the
God of Strength and Purity, and nations of the
Far East, being reborn, will sweep over our hills
and plains to bring us to our senses. Then, what
will it mean to our distant descendants, if these
conquerors come not as scoffers or heathen, but
as disciples of the Lord Christ! How then shall
our children's children bless the missionaries of
to-day, because they saved the world for Christ
in the day of great darkness. That is very much
what happened in Europe centuries ago: it may
quite easily happen again. Without losing sight
of the value of one soul in God's sight, the Church
to-day, as never before, is contemplating what it
means to bring the world to Christ.
Another lesson involved in this change of motive
is the conception which the Church has of salva-

102 THE CHURCH
tion. Once men cried, "No salvation outside the
Church." St. Augustine said that the virtues
of the heathen were only splendid vices. Puri
tanism and extreme ecclesiasticism have alike
drawn a sharp line between the Church and the
world. Theories may draw that line as strictly
to-day as ever. But the Church at work in the
mission field has almost imperceptibly been
changing the emphasis, and a doctrine, — not
new, but often allowed to lapse, — has come to
the top in practical belief. This is the doctrine
of the Gospel, "God so loved the world, that He
gave His only begotten Son." We still believe
that the man who consciously accepts this Sav
iour is happier, by great distances, than he who
does not. But in saying and thinking this, we do
not deny that God is loving and drawing near to
every child that He has made. The covenant is
that the child is made in the Divine image. The
child that does not know, or that knowing does
not understand, or that seeming to understand
rejects, is dear to this All-Father. If we did not
believe that, we should be going frantically to and
fro, baptizing, or superficially converting, every
man we could touch, never stopping long enough
to get one soul established, lest while we tarried
billions perish everlastingly. We do not talk now

MISSIONS 103
about "the uncovenanted mercies of God."
When Jesus Christ came to tell God's love, He
brought salvation to every man, to St. John and
to the man in India who never heard the Name
of Jesus. Someway, — we need not tell exactly
how, — "God so loved the world." No other
explanation can be given to our deliberate modern
missionary method.
Salvation is in one sense accomplished. It was
accomplished the day Christ died on the Cross
for love of all men. It was love put into a selfish
world, as leaven is put into the meal, and instantly
that love of God, so manifested, went out into
the limits of humanity. Salvation in another
sense remains to be accomplished. God uses
men for His instruments. Those who understand
what has happened, have the privilege and the
joy of convincing all who do not understand.
There are men everywhere to-day who know the
Incarnate Christ, but they do not know the
outward facts that spell His Name. The joy
that thrills through them with the splash of
the pool and the glint of the sun and the quiet
of evening shall have its full interpretation in
the Name of Jesus, who went about always
doing good; and the joy that once came by

104 THE CHURCH
flashes shall now be a permanent possession,
established by witness of those who have seen
the greater glory.
We are saying that all men who are baptized
with water in the Name of the Trinity are members
of the Church, whatever the excesses or defects
of their doctrine or practice. That is the logical
basis of tolerance within the various communions
of the Church. There yet remains to be evolved
some convenient formula which shall declare the
faith which the modern Church has in the relation
of the loving God to all His children everywhere.
We do not tremble, as men once trembled, for
God's attitude towards them. That attitude is
love. Being then the children of God who know
this, we would have our brethren everywhere
understand: so, with divine patience and divine
thoroughness, we start forth to make our brethren
glad here and now with the confidence that is
theirs by right. We wish them to be happy in
heaven; we wish them and their children and their
children's children to be happy in this present
world. We long, in the divine compassion, to
have them appropriate the salvation which Christ
has brought to all men.

CHURCH UNITY 105
IV
CHURCH UNITY
In the evolution of modern missions there has
come to the Church at large an insistent demand,
— the demand for unity. Church unity seems
to the man who lives in a great Christian city an
academic question: he chooses from hundreds of
churches the form of worship and doctrine
which best suits his temperament, and he sees no
reason why he should sacrifice his preferences to
meet other temperaments half-way. In the mis
sion field all this is changed. In the frontier
hamlet the community cannot support several
Christian organizations: even if money comes
from without to provide buildings and ministers,
the tiny congregations competing one with another
deny the love of Christ, and make Christianity
absurd. In the heathen land those who hear the
Christian message from several organizations are
confused, and wonder what this religion is which
talks always of a God of love, especially revealed
to it, and yet cannot unite its own members in
one consistent effort. Besides all this, the gen
erous laymen at home who respond to the mission
ary appeal will not allow their gifts to be wasted

106 THE CHURCH
in multiplying agencies for spreading the news of
Christ, when one agency would do the work better
and allow a substantial surplus to send the Gospel
farther still. It will not be many years before
this so-called academic question will be rudely
handled by the able Chinese convert and the
deeply religious man of business at home.
The one legitimate objection to Church unity
is the dread lest the Church, being united in one,
shall gain a tyrannous hold upon the State. What
happened once might, say the critics, easily happen
again. That is not quite true. A free Church
in a free State is the only Church which modern
times will admit, not only for the sake of the
State but for the sake of the Church quite as
much. So far as there was unity in the Church
in the past, that unity led to grave and scandalous
abuse. Men who cared not for Christ coveted
the power which unity gave the Church, and used
it unscrupulously not to serve the world but to
enslave it.
History may seem to repeat itself; he who looks
sharply knows that there is no such phenomenon
as a repetition of history. The differences are
fundamental, the resemblances superficial. The
world has learned the divine meaning of a free
State and will hold it sacredly beside the free

CHURCH UNITY 107
Church. The relationship is not of mastery on
either side, but of mutual service. There might
be the risk that bad and worldly men should use
the united Church for their own end; but it would
not again take a long Protestant revolution to
bring them to terms. Corporate humanity, which
we call the world, does not need to be taught the
same lessons over and over; after a lesson is
thoroughly learned, a hint brings the whole
process to mind. The risk of unity is real; but
it may be counted insignificant. In the face of
present-day demands it must be ignored.
Facing then the inevitability of Church unity,
we may rightly ask what current religious ex
perience predicts for it. This will add lines to
the concept of the Church.
The first prediction of religious experience to
day is that Church unity will come by inclusion,
and not by exclusion. There is one fact eminent:
the organization which spends its time denying
the faith of its neighbours, shrivels and dies. This
is true of the free religionists who carp at all
dogmas, and of the hide-bound ultramontanes
who push all who disagree with them from what
they think the only path to heaven. The pro
cess may be slow, but it is inevitable. As long

108 THE CHURCH
as the Church of Rome insists on exclusion as its
first law it cuts itself off from the main line of life.
A fear of heresy and a fear of contamination are
foreign to the spirit of Christ. He touched both
the Samaritan and the leper, both giving and
gaining strength by the wide inclusion of His love.
We can have in the Church of Christ no narrower
conception of the Church than Christ Himself.
He said, "Let wheat and tares grow together till
the harvest"; and His life said the words again
with supreme eloquence.
This note of inclusiveness is sounding more and
more distinctly over the vision of the Church that
is to be. We are going to ask each organization
to bring of its best and to contribute it to the
common Church, leaving behind all its denials
and negations. The positive words of Christen
dom will someway be assembled, then fused with
love. There will no doubt be uncongenial com
panions side by side, but love will be the peace
maker. There will be strange ways and words
which will make many shiver, but love, in its
white light, will by its positive excellence drive
out all that is unworthy. Christ won by His love,
the Church will win in the same way. Heresy
trials, indexes, the inquisition, are awkward hu
man ways of keeping the great Church true;

CHURCH UNITY 109
falsehood always thrives in such an atmosphere.
Infinite patience, infinite endurance, infinite wel
come, mfinite love, — so God works; — and in
the end men know the truth, because they know
love, — and God.
The second prediction of modern religious ex
perience toward Church unity is that it will come
through the mutual appreciation of present
efficiency. Doctrines and polities will be dis
cussed and weighed. But alone they never can
have a foremost place. They are not to be de
spised or neglected, for organic life must have its
wheels and its rods as well as its steam and elec
tricity. What an organization can do for its
neighbourhood, for the larger community, for the
individual man, is the real question that Church
unity will ask. Here are some of the organiza
tions that cannot have any permanent contri
bution: one that has done nothing but rid its
adherents of all unreasonable convictions; another
that has done nothing but keep its adherents
from associating with those who would disturb
the serenity of the higher life; another that has
driven out all who could not subscribe literally to
all its shibboleths. When God calls upon these
organizations to answer in the day of judgment,

110 THE CHURCH
the best they can say will be, "Here, Lord, is
Thy talent laid up in a napkin: here Thou hast
exactly that is Thine." For they have done
nothing at all. But when an organization can,
by its methods, take a worldling and, making
him forget himself, give his life as Christ gave
His, then the Church longs for the methods of
that organization. When an organization can,
by its methods, take a boor, and make him gentle
and lovable, then the Church demands those
methods in its corporate life. To get the methods
the Church must have the people who guided
them. "What can you do for the world?" is
the question Church unity is going to ask first of
all. Ancestry and dignity of organization will
have their place, but it will be of necessity not
the first place. As God lives now, we shall de
mand the organization in which He evidently
deigns to dwell to do His marvellous lovingkind-
ness. The Church will ask organizations to be
justified by present efficiency.
One more prediction may be ventured from
religious experience. There is the vague feeling
that Church unity will not come gradually by
human devices, beset with bickering and strife,
but will come suddenly because God will bring

CHURCH UNITY 111
Christianity to such a pass that it must unite.
These intimations are vague. Will it be by some
catastrophe? When the English nation was rent
in twain in the summer of 1911 over the discus
sion in Parliament on the veto power of the
House of Lords, there came suddenly the news
that a European war might be started. One day
there had been violent and disgraceful scenes in
the House of Commons, and people wondered
how unity could come again. The next day the
prime minister announced a hideous possibility
of a general war threatening all Europe, and in
stantly all parties united to hold up his hands.
Some such impending ruin may startle the Church
to unity. It may be a crackling of the moral
fibre of the nation, sending religious men to a
common centre from which they may agree upon
an institution which shall teach religion to the
children of our schools, and so revive national
character. In the larger world it may be some
inroad of Mohammedanism or of Asiatic influ
ence. It may be some crash of empires, by which
the modern State created by the Christian spirit
will be taken away from the support of the Church,
and the Church will have to begin anew the crea
tion of a future State. Vague and indefinite
as these forebodings may be, they point to the

112 THE CHURCH
day when God shall arise and, by a divine com
pulsion, bring His Church to unity, in power to
serve, in power to love, in power to create the
heavenly life.
In all these ways, religious experience to-day
is demanding and expecting a unified Church.
An undercurrent so strong cannot long be con
cealed. Prejudice and timidity and blindness
to ways and means must at last give way. Leader
ship, in both thought and action, must yield to
an inevitable love. V
AUTHORITY
The main objection of theology to re-union is
the sufficient guarding of the authority of the
Church. This is of first-rate importance; for the
only unity that can survive is one that is organic,
with obedience as well as freedom, with loyalty
as well as aspiration. The fixing of authority
is a fundamental question in the doctrine of the
Church. It has too often been discussed apart
from actual needs and facts. We may therefore
expect help from current religious experience in
discovering how authority may be enshrined in

AUTHORITY 113
the visible Church, so as to command general
respect and support.
The first contribution of modern religious life
is the increasing emphasis upon outward form.
All phases of ecclesiastical expression tend in this
direction. Congregations that abhorred all man
ner of uniform now delight in vested choirs.
Congregations, whose spiritual ancestors would
have died to prevent badges of difference, now
exult in the fact that the preacher wears a brilliant
doctor's hood over his Geneva gown. The inde
pendence of separated parishes tends to fade in
a missionary ambition to merge the individual
in world movements. Individualism in Church
matters is on the wane: there is a movement
towards some common authority strong enough
to win allegiance from many people.
Meantime, there are groups of people pointing
out what they think sources of authority for all.
One group holds up the Bible; another, the
Bishop of Rome, as the Vicar of Christ; another,
the Historic Episcopate; another, the six Oec
umenical Councils; another, the belief that the
Holy Spirit speaks freely to any man who listens.
None of these groups is able to command anything
like universal conviction in the Christendom of
to-day. And good Christian people in one group

114 THE CHURCH
are not depressed because a neighbouring group
counts them disloyal to what it conceives to be
the one legitimate source of authority. The task
then before us is to discover whether in the
Christian consciousness of the present time there
is any fundamental conception of authority that
could unite these different views.
The safest means will be to examine a concrete
case. Let us think of the priest who, having
heard a penitent's confession, says, Ego te absolvo.
How far does modern religious experience approve
this expression of authority? Before attempting
an answer, it may be well to examine in the briefest
possible way the experience of past generations.
In the Christian Church the evolution of authority
which developed into this direct form of absolu
tion, began with a prayer for the penitent said
with him; then the optative form was used, "May
God forgive you"; and not till the eleventh cen
tury was the direct form reached, "I absolve you."
Much in Christian experience to-day would aver
that this extreme form of spiritual consolation
was not suited to any but a most despondent age
which had neither the courage nor the character
to stand before God Himself. Taking thence a
text, much of modern experience would grant
that in the same way, — as with the age, so with

AUTHORITY 115
the individual, — there might be isolated cases
where the confusion was so great that a human
being would have to say, "I stand in the place
of God, and forgive you." But it would be in
no instance anything but a beginning. As soon
as possible, the weak soul should be so built up
that never again would he appeal to any but God
for assurance.
So much we may take from the historical
parallel. A strange witness in behalf of auricular
confession comes from what is called psycho
therapy. Nervous wrecks come to a Christian
minister and ask for peace. One means insisted
upon, I am told, is that the sufferer bare his life,
as in confession, to the clergyman; this, for two
reasons : one, that the sufferer may get his troubles
out into the light of common day where they may
look perhaps less awful; the other, that the min
ister may put his finger upon whatever sin there
is, and ask and demand moral reformation.
Where there is despair, of course the minister
must speak with authority of God's pity, forgive
ness, and love. This is strong witness in behalf
of auricular confession; but it is not complete till
certain questions are asked. The main question
is whether the sufferer is helped in this way to the
highest good. The doubt which sympathetic

116 THE CHURCH
critics have had upon treatment by psycho
therapy is whether by the hypnotic influence,
often more or less unconscious, the minister has
not robbed the patient of his personality. Prob
ably all who have led in the work are eager to
have the character kept independent. It is only
when the soul is sick unto death that they would
breathe into it their own character and force,
that it may start on the way of life. Where the
character remains a limp receiver for the strong
man's suggestions, it is no better than an autom
aton. God cannot accept it, because it is not
its own, but another's.
Psychotherapy, therefore, does not illustrate
any need in current religious experience for habit
ual auricular confession with its accompaniment
of human absolution. Men may reach such a
pass, as the men of the eleventh century, when
extraordinary means must be used. The Prayer
Book still voices what men feel true to-day; "If
there be any . . . who . . . cannot quiet his
own conscience, ... let him come to . . . some
. . . minister of God's Word, and open his grief;
that he may receive such godly counsel and advice
as may tend to the quieting of his conscience, and
the removing of all scruple and doubtfulness."
It is safe to say that modern religious thought

AUTHORITY 117
approves this as earnestly and as cautiously as it
approves the administration of an opiate to a
very sick patient. I say cautiously. For the
thoughtful world is becoming shy of anaesthetics of
all sorts. An opiate may be necessary on a night
of intense illness; but woe to the man who
puts himself to sleep with opium on frequent
occasions !
This may seem too strong language to use
against the frequent use of authority in what we
call confession and absolution, man to man. But
we remember the influence of the French priests
in Acadia by which their simple Indian converts
had pious leave to massacre the English; and as
Anglo-Saxons, quite aware of our own faults, we
instinctively find this particular fault beyond
endurance. Moreover, when we study nations
which have been most firmly held under this
system, we find grave defects of character which
we believe due to it. We find certain admirable
traits in these nations, but in so far as their citi
zens are under this rule of life, there is a certain
lack of reliability, independence, and initiative.
Such nations have obviously gone down hill both
in personal character and in national achievement.
That becomes a serious indictment against the
system when you compare the average man of

118 THE CHURCH
Protestant countries. Lacking many virtues of
their Latin neighbours, these Protestant nations
have qualities which the modern religious man,
whether living in Italy or in Scotland, values
highest of all, — integrity, honour, responsibility.
This is a judgment in the large, but the safest
judgment is often so reached, because the nation
is only the larger man. What appears in the
experience of a nation is only the multiplying of
individual experiences.
In the more immediate experience of any indi
vidual there is the opportunity to study men of
equal earnestness who vary in their ways of cul
tivating the spiritual life. The pastor with an
open mind knows how far he is from accomplish
ing his ideal. Various methods lie before him.
Shall he adopt this mediaeval method of habitual
confession with its Ego te absolvo? He is told by
certain men that it will prove a panacea. But
he must examine the fruits of the method, not
in history or in foreign lands, but among his own
neighbours and friends. He finds that it has ad
vantages for heavy souls, because it reveals to
them standards which they had not hitherto
appreciated. He finds that it has, on the other
hand, grave defects for alert souls, because it
keeps them from seeing the highest and hardest

AUTHORITY 119
which God reveals to one who waits upon Him
with the eye upon Him alone. Further, in gen
eral, he proves the witness of history true: it
develops the Latin virtues, but the Anglo-Saxon
virtues dwindle. The decisive rejection of wrong
without debate, characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon
saint, is exchanged for a nice pleading of excep
tions, whereby a man may do what seems wrong
and yet be right, characteristic of a good deal, at
least, of Latin sainthood. With frank admiration
for the gentleness and devotion thus fostered, I
think it just to say that modern religious experience
finds that habitual confession tends to one of two
results: either a weak character dependent upon
another's rules, or a character which is not quite
straightforward, because it does not of itself
instantly register its decision, so that men are
afraid to yield their whole trust to it. The com
mon explanation that a man errs somewhat easily
because he knows that shortly by mere confession
he can wipe out the account, would apply of course
only to the very ignorant. The root difficulty
with the whole system is that in place of a man's
conception of what God demands, he holds the
conception of what he thinks that another man
thinks that God demands. It is not a question
of the relative strength or goodness of the two

120 THE CHURCH
men: we may possibly admit in every case that
the confessor is better than the penitent. The
question is, What is the man's standard, — his
direct, sharp responsibility to God, or a wavering,
intermediate responsibility? The best illustra
tion is shown in the relationship of husband and
wife. A husband, in a critical business situation,
looks directly to God for his course, decides to do
the tragic and righteous thing; then goes home to
tell all to his wife, as to a confessor. She is apt,
as they talk the matter over, to explain that God
cannot demand quite so much of a sacrifice. A
priest, in so far as he is a good priest, loves the soul
of the penitent. His very love is a danger. Be
cause of it, he is prone to reveal to the penitent
an ideal less than God's command to the man
himself. The frosty ideal begins to melt at the
edges, and the man sees a way by which he may
satisfy both God and himself. Whenever he
thinks of duty in connection with such a coun
sellor he cannot see it exactly as he does when he
thinks of it in the conscious presence of God alone.
There is also the other side, where the wife shud
ders before her husband's crooked plan and thus
reveals to him an ideal higher than he has yet seen.
But, even so, the man does not attain his full
manhood till he' looks beyond his wife's ideal to

AUTHORITY 121
the invariable ideal which a perfect God holds
before him. Fairly good souls may be evolved
from the divided responsibility. Great souls can
be made only by immediate and constant depend
ence on God.
A vital comment on this subject was published
by Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, in 1911, in
an essay on Bishop Wilkinson. Mr. Benson as a
boy had known Bishop Wilkinson intimately.
As a Cambridge undergraduate he came to such
a crisis in his life that he felt that only Wilkinson
could help him, and he went to London to seek
his help. "I had expected," says Benson, "to be
examined, to be taken to task for my doubts and
troubles; but he swept them all aside. . . . He
. . . prayed and blessed me, and sent me away
happy and hopeful. . . . He did not encourage
me to come to him again or to write to him, and
I felt that he had no sort of desire to establish
a personal influence over me, but rather to let
me fight my own battles on simple and straight
forward lines." In the same essay Mr. Benson
says again, summing up his general relationship
to him: "Though he carried in his heart the
stained secrets of hundreds of lives, he never used
his power for personal ends, nor tried to establish
a personal dominance. He had no desire to seem

122 THE CHURCH
to stand between the soul and God, or to retain
a confidential hold over a single heart. What he
did desire to do was to teach the sinner to fight
his battles and to recognize his divine sonship.
And though he probably heard more confessions
than any man in England, there never fell across
him or his penitents the shadow of the confessional.
In fact, it may be plainly said that he used the
confessional in order to enable penitents to do
without it. He wished souls to walk freely be
fore God, and not to be bound to himself." I
remember that Edward Lincoln Atkinson, to
whom all sorts of men revealed their sins, used to
say, when questioned about his method, "I
never pry."
We are now ready to draw some general con
clusion from this testing of one form of authority
by present religious experience. An eminent
clergyman used to hearing habitual confessions,
told me recently that if he were beginning his
ministry over, he would never do more than pray
with the penitent, that the penitent might never
for a moment lose hold of his direct responsibility
to God. Clergymen not inviting confessions
hear many. It seems> to me that they hear more
confessions than those who urge the confessional.
They find the necessity of telling the miserable

AUTHORITY 123
that they must not depend on a human verdict, but
look to God Himself for assurance. Clergymen
of all types of Churchmanship whom I have known
well, and whose own characters are pledges of
their clear sight, reveal to me the conviction that
out of their deepest and sanest experience they
are sure that, as auricular confession has been
only a temporary method in the history of the
Church, so it is only a temporary method in the
development of any single character. For when
it is habitually used, it loosens the hold of the
individual upon God. One may say that this
result is not inherent in the confessional; but such
a protest is merely a theory. The Vicar of All
Saints', Margaret Street, in pleading for habitual
confession, reports with approval this imaginary
conversation : " My wife says that he was brought
up at St. Alban's, Holborn, and that he belongs to
Father Stanton. I don't know what 'belonging
to Father Stanton ' means, but my wife seemed to
imply that it explained Robert." x I find that ex
perience, not only as spelled out in history, but as
declared by different types to-day, so far as I am
able to learn from them, makes me practically sure
that frequent resort to confession does stand be
tween the soul and its clear vision of God. As a
1 The Religion of an Englishman, p. 49.

124 THE CHURCH
temporary help to the soul in a crisis every minister
of Christ knows its use: by it he brings the soul
to God, and then instantly and permanently with
draws. Habitual confession is to God only, and
no mortal has right to overhear.
I have mentioned auricular confession as an
example of authority. I might as properly have
taken the Bible. Whenever a man allows the
Bible, by an isolated text or event, to come be
tween himself and God's voice directly to his
conscience, thereby we feel that the Bible has
hurt the man. If to an age speaking of honour at
all times, a man should allow himself to imitate
the heroism of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite,
on the ground that thus he was true to the Bible
if not to his own conscience, we should in the
same breath condemn his treatment of the Bible
and his deceitful disobedience to God's voice.
If the Bible leads a man to hear God's voice more
distinctly, the Bible is God's word indeed, and all
is well; when the Bible comes between him and
God, all is wrong.
We might leap to the opposite extreme, and say
that a man is to count himself apart from external
authority altogether and is to do only what seems

AUTHORITY 125
good to him alone as God privately directs him.
Theoretically this is a strong position to take.
But religious experience, being an impartial judge,
does not approve the results of it. The people
who cut themselves apart from the rest of the
community, scorning the estimate which others
put upon God's laws, are not attractive person
ally and do not build up righteousness in the
places where they live. Their self-dependence
makes one think that they look more to self-con
ceit than to God, else they would be more eager
to learn the best news others have of God's ways.
They make the attainment of God's will too
simple and easy for the facts which religious
experience has at its disposal.
Where then is the root of authority? It is,
obviously, in that human medium which can
most safely and distinctly reveal God's will for
us. It must be in some way to the individual
directly, and yet not to the individual alone.
One 'other individual, whether priest, or wife, or
teacher, or friend, is not a safe medium. There
is what we sometimes call the universal reason, or
the world conscience. God speaks to man, as well
as to men, to humanity as well as to individuals.
Theology says, "Yes, in so far as humanity is the
Church." That is true; because the Church is

126 THE CHURCH
humanity listening to God; or, on its objective
side, the Church is humanity lovingly elected by
God to hear His voice. The Church is not com
pelled to hear: it starts from God, it is God's,
but in so far as the Church fails to listen, and is
content with its past privileges, or in so far as
humanity outside the Church listens, just in so
far God does not limit His guidance to the Church.
Plato and Darwin have been media for God's
voice, and the wise man is reverently attentive
to their witness of it. When the privileged will
not come to God's Feast of Love and Light, He
sends forth His voice to the byways and hedges,
and those who count themselves outsiders are
compelled to come in. Still, for practical purposes
religious experience agrees with the traditional
ecclesiastical boundaries, and says that the uni
versal reason hearkening to God is the great body
which, though in various divisions, is to-day called
the Church.
The effort to grasp the witness of the Church,
speaking as a whole, is one of the most absorbing
tasks of history. The General Councils, the
centralizing of the witness in the Pope, the repre
sentative character of the Episcopate, the more
comprehensive idea of the Church of England
which includes the presbyters with the bishops

AUTHORITY 127
as guardians of the faith, the still more compre
hensive idea of the daughter of the Church of
England in America by which the laity are
brought in with authority, in the sessions of the
General Convention, — all these are the gradually
widening expression of religious experience towards
the medium of the Divine voice in the Church at
large. At the Council of Nicaea the majority
and influence seemed on the side of the Arians,
but the outcome was a decision on the side
of Athanasius. God spoke through the Council,
as the larger man, or humanity for the time
being. In an even larger way we find Christendom
to-day settling certain vexed questions, like evo
lution or Biblical criticism. A thousand years
ago these questions would have been settled by a
series of General Councils, so far as a council
could have been made general. Probably the out
come would have been slower and more stormy
than by the present method, which is by the
common consensus of the Christian Church taken
in its widest sense. Certain attitudes towards
the hypothesis of evolution have become com
monly accepted, and incorporated in the argument
of the Church. Certain hypotheses about the
results of Biblical criticism have likewise been

128 THE CHURCH
accepted, with the general instinct that the au
thority of the Bible has been strengthened. The
part of Christendom which now seems to be in
worst plight is that section which officially, at
least, would limit the research of its scholars.
Even in this limited section the general consensus
of opinion among the most able and enlightened
agrees with what the rest of Christendom has
found true. The official dictum counts there less
and less.
In all this tendency approved by the modern
expression of religious life, the continuous guid
ance of the Church by the Spirit of God has an
eminent share. The general truth lying behind
the hypothesis of apostolical succession is more
and more acceptable to the present-day religious
instinct. Whether the continuity is preserved
in bishops or presbyters or successors of St. Peter
is not so important as to see that in some organic
and firmly-knit manner God has revealed Himself
continuously and authoritatively to that collective
humanity known as the Christian Church. In
the benefits of this continuity, even those partake
who for various reasons have broken away from
its organic expression. It means something to
Congregationalist and to Methodist that there is

AUTHORITY 129
in the world a band of present-day officials who
can trace their commission through chains of
living witnesses to the great day when Christ
lived His Judaean life into their experience.
Their individual experience is enhanced and
strengthened by this external testimony. I think
it is safe to say that there is a wide-spread appre
ciation of this continuous official witness among
those who for the time being are standing aside
from its more formal connection.
I am well aware that this view of authority in
the Church may seem vague to some men. The
mechanical Churchman will desire a definite ex
pression in a man or an office or an institution
or a book. But modern experience is finding
truth in the mystery of the less definite. The uni
versal reason, humanity, has indeed caught the
accents of the Holy Ghost, and individual reason,
the one man, will wisely seek to have his revelation
harmonize with the revelation to the Church at
large. God still appoints His messengers, but
He does not invariably accept those officially ap
pointed by the Church. The mediator between
God and man may or may not be the priest: it
may be the friend, the relative, the chance pas
ser-by, who by word or character lifts the soul to
God's presence. The priestly commission is not

130 THE CHURCH
a promise but a challenge. Any man who can
rise to the task may speak God's forgiveness with
authority; the priest is set to be the man who by
his office must hear men's troubles if people wish
to tell them, and then convince them if he can
that God forgives them, being truly penitent.
The English Reformation made the priest repre
sentative of the whole Church. The forgiveness
has been made known to the universal reason,
listening humanity, the Church. Through the
priest the whole Church speaks, as the whole life
of one man speaks through the lips. But it is not
individual to individual. It is humanity strength
ening the individual. And the coveted result
is to make the individual, whether small or great,
stand before God. The real priests are rare, in
the ministry and out of it. Not all who are out
wardly commissioned seem to have the inward
gift. "The Law," said St. Paul, "is an atten
dant to bring us to Christ, the Great School
master." So the universal reason, listening
humanity, the Church, is the attendant to
bring us before God, and there to leave us,
that we may learn responsibility to Him and
to Him alone. God is the sole authority of
the Church.

POWER 131
VI
POWER
The final question to be answered concerning
the Church is, What does modern religious ex
perience declare that the Church can do? On
this question hangs the usefulness of the Church
for this generation. The answer is a difficult one
to frame because it must necessarily seem to do
scant justice to the convictions of minorities.
What we must do is to attempt the discovery
of what the Church at large is thinking and ex
pecting. Out of a possibly larger number of
expectations I am going to select two which seem
to me certain.
The first expectation is to find in the Church
the confirmation of God's perpetual nearness to
men, the continuation of the Incarnation in the
presence of the Christ, invisible but felt with
power. I shall speak later of the peculiar em
phasis which this age is putting upon the Im
manence of God. Some ages have dwelt upon
the Transcendence in such a way that God seemed
only to touch the world at infrequent intervals.
Such a period was the age that made the Sacra-

132 THE CHURCH
ments cease to be pledges of a perpetual fact and
made them the only means by which God's grace
could be communicated or the Incarnate Christ
could be brought near. Christ, this age is feeling
generally and most religiously, is present in the
Holy Communion; it also is convinced that He
is present as really as possible when two or three
are gathered together in His name. He is al
together present in both cases. "They thought
I was dying," one of my parishioners once said;
"but their only hope was to keep me free of all
emotion, so they forbade my receiving the Holy
Communion. But Christ could not have been
more present in the service than He was in the
silence of those hours." . . . "A good many
years ago," writes a man I know, "I was camp
ing in the mountains. One night, worried in
mind, unable to sleep, I left my tent and wan
dered up a mountain path. Forgetful of time
and place, I wandered on till suddenly I found
myself high on the side of the mountain, — the
great crags above, the deep valley below. There
was no sign of man or of any of his works.
There was no light except the moon and stars,
no sound except the wind in the trees and the
water falling on the rocks. I knew that I was
utterly alone with my great trouble. Then,

POWER 133
suddenly, I was conscious of a Presence — all-
loving, all-strong — absolutely real to the last
degree. My troubles fell away, and I was at
peace."1 The high value of the Holy Communion
is that, while we may meet Christ in othei
places, here we expect to find Him, and there
fore, by our faith, do find Him. He who finds
Christ by habitual approach, is more likely to
find Him in unexpected places. To obey "This
do in rememberance of me," and share in it is
to realize in a special and unique way the Pres
ence of Christ, so that, the service over, He will
not depart, but go forth with us, as consciously
as really, to do with us and in us the tasks of
the ordinary workaday world. "I do feel Christ's
special nearness in the Holy Communion," wrote
^f. Dr. W. P. DuBose, Turning Points in My Life (1912):
" It . . . occurred to me that I had not of late been saying my
prayers. Perfectly unconscious and unsuspicious of anything un
usual, I knelt to go through the form, when of a sudden there
swept over me a feeling of the emptiness and unmeaningness of
of the act and of my whole life and self. I leapt to my feet
trembling, and then that happened which I can only describe by
saying that a light shone about me and a Presence filled the room.
At the same time an ineffable joy and peace took possession of me
which it is impossible either to express or to explain. I contin
ued I know not how long, perfectly conscious of, simply but in
tensely feeling, the Presence, and fearful, by any movement, of
breaking the spell. I went to sleep at last praying that it was no
passing illusion, but that I should awake to find it an abiding
reality."

134 THE CHURCH
a parishioner, "because He has said that this is
where we shall meet Him most intimately, and
because He himself chose the tokens which I offer
Him here, to be a witness that He is as living
now as when He gave them to the Apostles, and
He does not leave me to make the fight alone."
The Sacrament is a bond of union in Christ,
because it is an act so simple that all can
join in it even though intelligence be slight; it is
not a mere word. We do something that Christ
told us to do, and that is more than saying the
prayer He told us to say, because it carries with it
more of ourselves, and makes us yield ourselves
more implicitly. The modern religious spirit is
chary of denying any definitions which the past
may have placed upon the efficacy of the Sacra
mental life. It tends to reverence all these
definitions as partial expressions of a truth which
will prove larger and more glorious than the most
daring definition. The only criticism religious
experience may care to make is when the Divine
Presence is limited to one or two, or even seven
outward rites. Modern religious experience is
startled by reading that when Newman in 1850
was delivering in a Roman church his lecture on
The Difficulties of Anglicans, his conscience so
troubled him that he wrote: "I am frightened at

POWER 135
the chance of being satirical, etc., before the
Blessed Sacrament. Would a curtain be possi
ble?" One asks helplessly, Can the Divine
Presence be shut out by a curtain? We feel to
day that Sacraments spiritualize material things,
they do not make spiritual things material. "The
time of business," said Brother Lawrence, "does
not with me differ from the time of prayer, and
in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while
several persons are at the same time calling for
different things, I possess God in as great tran
quillity as if I were on my knees at the Blessed
Sacrament." Wherever God and man cooper
ate, there God and man meet. God is always
reaching out to man; therefore, whenever and
however man reaches out to God, man must find
God, for God is always waiting to be found.
Kneeling at one's bed at night is sacramental:
God in all His glory is there with one praying
child. A cup of cold water in the name of a dis
ciple is sacramental: the thirsting Christ is truly
helped. Visiting the sick and poor is sacramental :
Christ, by His own word, is there. But why is
Christ there? That is the significant question.
Because, answers religious experience, one has
learned Christ in the worship of the Church. The
great pledge has been given and accepted. The

136 THE CHURCH
blessing of a perpetual presence has been given.
The Divine Friend and Master shines through all
the happenings of a toiling and pleasant life. All
secular things become sacred, because everywhere
one meets the Lord Christ.
The second warrant of power now felt in the
Christian Church is character. The Church in so
far as it is the Church at all makes men better.
We thank God that the Church makes some men
saints. We thank God that other men are no
worse than they are because they are in the con
scious fellowship of the Church. And when one
man who has been quite reprobate turns to a life
of holiness, we know that all the choirs of heaven
sing for joy because the Church has power. Here
is the summit of the Church's witness. If it can
make over one man, for his own happiness and
the happiness of all who live near him, the whole
history of the Church is justified. If any branch
of the Church fails to make over the people com
mitted to it; if lying, they continue to lie; if
stealing, they continue to steal; if unclean, they
continue unclean; if hating, they continue to
hate, — then in this world as in the next religious
experience cuts that branch of the Church from
the tree of life. It may have the most formidable

POWER 137
outward credentials. It may have an historic
continuous ministry; it may have an absolutely
correct statement of formal doctrine; it may have
ten thousand times ten thousand saints on the
roll of its past; but if it cannot show the saints
it is in process of making this very day, it is a
dead thing, having no connection with the living
God. We may rightly surmise that no body of
men calling itself Christian could display so lam
entable a spectacle. But in so far as a body of
Christians tends to rely upon formal credentials
and ignore the credential of creating present char
acter, in so far modern religious conviction must
despise it.
There is now and then the plaintive , wail that
character is not the most important factor in
religious life. The prodigal son seemed to turn
out better than the elder brother. But this is
specious wailing. The reason why the prodigal
turned out better is because at one leap he ex
celled his hard and exact brother in character:
he allowed the cleansing fire of his father's love
to come in and transform his vileness into beauty.
The elements that go into the total of any man's
character are diverse in themselves and in their
combinations. Men of abounding goodness have
nasty traits. These qualities often attach to

138 THE CHURCH
national expression. In whatever measure these
defects are allowed to thrive, the Church of the
country is weak. There are certain defects more
serious than others in the general estimate of the
world-consciousness in religion; for example, re
ligious humanity prefers the shiftless man with
his honour to the deceitful man with his watchful
cleverness. But in any case it is quite clear
that modern religious experience is determined
to have one supreme test for the Church, its
authority and its power. The people who count,
we may dare to say^in God's sight, are crying
out, "Show me the Church in its truth, sincerity,
and power. Show me, in other words, men who
deliberately walk with God, and who, by their
characters, remind me of the Lord Jesus Christ."
There is no appeal. The Church of this genera
tion stands or falls on its ability to create strength
and integrity of character.

IV
IMMORTALITY

IV
IMMORTALITY
THE effort is sometimes made by theologians
to show that the idea of Immortality has
not a primary place in Christianity. Perhaps if
men were perfect it would not have a primary
place. But all this is theory, and apart from
actual conditions. The most absorbing religious
conversation among intimate friends is likely to
turn upon the manner in which the soul survives:
it is a supreme question put to the clergyman
when there is bereavement in the household.
The preacher meets astonishing response, in
various ways, when out of the conviction of his
heart and brain together he declares his concep
tion of heaven. Probably in no department of
religious thinking is formal theology working
farther from the testimony of every-day religious
experience. William James, with his acute ob
servation, was not far from the truth when he
said: "Religion, in fact, for the great majority of

142 IMMORTALITY
our own race, means immortality and nothing else.
God is the producer of immortality."1
As in all strata of theological thought, scholar
ship has a necessary place in supplementing, in
correcting, in adjusting the thought of one age
to the ages before, and in general enrichment;
so in a doctrine of immortality it has a place more
significant than in other strata, because immor
tality is subject to the treatment of wild surmises
and a dangerously rich imagination. Nowhere
is the steadying hand of the expert scholar more
needed. But for all that, no satisfactory doctrine
of immortality can be evolved without the knowl
edge and consideration of the thoughts and hopes
of the common man in the religious life.
I
THE WISH TO LIVE
The first contribution of personal religion to
the doctrine of evolution is that man wishes to
live. Theology is rather fond of saying that man
is indifferent to life. The evidence brought for
ward is the increase of suicides. This evidence,
however, leaves out of view the other possible
causes of suicide. Whenever any trouble looms
1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 524.

THE WISH TO LIVE 143
large upon the vision, everything, even life, looks
insignificant. When a starving man, coming in
from a wilderness where he has been lost, learns
that his wife is dead, he straightway forgets his
hunger in the new and overwhelming emotion.
But this is not proof that hunger and thirst are
not universal instincts. It is a rational verdict
based upon knowledge of humanity, which de
clares after every suicidal act that the victim was
not himself, was not responsible. Where the act
was not the result of some calamitous crash, like
a failure in business with perhaps attending reve
lations of disgrace, those close to the person recall
that he had been for weeks doing abnormal things.
The reason why suicides have increased in our
time is because the pace at which men live has
reached an insane swiftness, whereby patience is
lost, nerves are filed, and wits fly to powder.
There is nothing in suicide, so far as present relig
ious experience can tell, to determine that man
does not desire to live.
There are strange words after bereavement
which imply that the survivor wishes to die.
There is no reason to question the sincerity of
these words, when they are said calmly. But
they do not declare that life is spurned. Two
explanations are safe: first, that the sorrow is so

144 IMMORTALITY
black that all life seems blotted out, — what
is near annihilates all else in the range of vision;
and, secondly, that the departed one is conceived
as still living, that therefore the coveted gate of
death will again join the lovers in the life which
one of them has entered first. Tennyson gave
expression to the modern mood when he wrote,
"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death."
There are individuals here and there who are not
in sorrow, but who at times, because of ennui,
discouragement, or pain, wish this earthly period
of existence to stop. I am quite sure that they
are exceptional.
The normal man, who may not think much
of the life to come, has an absorbing interest in
this life. The loyal citizen longs to live till cer
tain great plans for his city have been carried
out. The social reformer longs to live till condi
tions among different classes of mankind approach
the ideal relationship which he has been striving
to have them attain. The ecclesiastic, devising
schemes of reunion for Christendom, sighs because
he will not be on earth when Christian unity is
accomplished. Even the agnostic is fretted to

THE WISH TO LIVE 145
think of the possibility that in a score or two of
years he will be as non-existent as he was a cen
tury ago. That there are men who find it diffi
cult to thank God for their being, though their
fate is not beset with any marked difficulties,
does not prove that humanity is in any degree
indifferent to life. At most it only seems to their
brethren that they are abnormal; and generally
they are, in spite of all their complaints, singularly
unwilling to die when the time comes. If living
is gruesome to their morbid thought, ceasing to
live is still more so. The normal man loves life
and says so. He stands in rapt admiration before
the hero who ventures to sacrifice his life for some
higher good, such as service of men, or salvation
of country. He echoes the words of Jesus,
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends." Love of life
is to-day as strong a motive as ever in the past.
It may be said that the Oriental religionist
does not put the same value upon life as his Occi
dental brother. This is a subject on which only
an Oriental who can speak in terms of western
thought has a right to be heard. It seems, how
ever, as if in a dense population like China and
Japan the value of individual life might be merged
in a love of life which is shared with, for instance,

146 IMMORTALITY
a nation, or even humanity. To be somewhat
careless of the individual life might conceivably
mean a richer conception of the individual's part
in a larger life. He who made life the standard
'of value was almost an Oriental, and someway
it seems as if it would be found that the standard
still is true in the East. In any case, religious
experience, so far as I have been able to touch it,
convinces me that love of life is an ineradicable
mark of the normal man. II
FAITH IN THE FUTURE LIFE
Sometimes the pastor, calling upon the man
who has just lost by death one most dear to him,,
hears the desperate words: "I doubt everything."
In a night of agonizing pain the sufferer says that
he doubts if it ever will be day: night seems to
him eternity. Very religious people are capable
of making both remarks with entire sincerity.
They are natural and excusable. Under the cir
cumstances, the pastor's wonder is not that they
are said, but that they are not said oftener. What
surprises him is the strength of religious people's
assurance of the future life, as they allow their
dear ones to pass beyond the life that now is.

FAITH IN THE FUTURE LIFE 147
It is easy perhaps to talk of paradise and heaven
when all is serene; but when the desolation of
separation comes, the warp of faith is drawn so
tight that it all but snaps asunder.
I am convinced that in such testing times
religious people see the vision of life. When a
mother was dying her devoted daughter said
through her tears, "I knew I couldn't keep her:
I knew that father longed to have her come, and
she must go to him." I remember a woman, one
of whose children suddenly died : she seemed in
consolable, but she said the great comfort was
that this child was safe in his innocence and
beauty, — the other children might grow up to
be bad. And again when in another house a son
died who had made a failure of life, those who
loved him said, "Well, now he has his chance, —
we are glad for him." "I wish you had known
my mother," a letter runs; "you would know how
much I have to be proud and thankful for. She
was so little worldly that our thoughts and feel
ings of her seem to need no re-adjustment: her
spirit seems to surround and comfort us almost
as much as her dear presence did." A Cowley
father in Boston came, one hot afternoon, from
a wretched hovel where poverty and disease made
all life a torment. He had on his face a look of

148 IMMORTALITY
great joy. "She is dead!" he cried, as if he were
announcing a victory. This person for whom he
cared was now free from the conditions which
impeded the course of a soul whose intrinsic merit
he knew. And how often the listening pastor
is told that just before the end all the pain faded
from the beloved face, and there came a look of
peace, the face of twenty years before, and those
who gazed almost heard the heavenly music.
Certainly, they say, the soul heard it before the
body had ceased to be its home, for the face
caught the echo of the spirit's exultation.
Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely
from any pastor's experience. They need not be
analyzed too minutely, they are not to be used as
arguments or proofs in any sense, but they show
distinctly and eloquently that modern religious life
does not look sceptically or timidly upon the life
to come. So far as immortality is concerned,
religion is full of faith.
Now what shall we say of the religious temper
ament which refuses to be tied down to any
belief in what cannot be demonstrated to the
senses? A truly religious spirit often appears
in the scientist who calls himself an agnostic.
He perforce meditates upon a future life. It is
not quite clear how far his attitude towards a

FAITH IN THE FUTURE LIFE 149
future life is one of longing; how far one of ex
pectation. It is probably wiser not to draw the
line too definitely. But it seems reasonable to
surmise that the interest which reputable scien
tific experts take in the investigation of psychic
research is evidence that they believe that there
is a life to send its reports across the chasm of
death. This belief may be unconscious or sub
conscious. It may be granted as a cloud no
larger than a man's hand in the dry sky of unbe
lief. To the sympathetic onlooker it seems
likely to spread till the refreshing rain of full faith
comes. I can see no other interpretation of the
phenomenon that scientific men should be willing
to submit to the suspicion and ridicule of a sober
world which believes all mediums either charla
tans or fools. This attitude of religious science,
even though still agnostic, is quite different from
the attitude of the same temperament a genera
tion ago. The indifference to the future is not so
bluffly announced. It may be that the assurance
of such men as Myers, Hodgson, and Professor
Hyslop, that to their minds immortality has scien
tific confirmation, may have'had its effect. Though
they may dissent from their conclusions, they are
not so sure as to deny that further investigation
may confirm them. Science which is reverent

150 IMMORTALITY
seems to be expecting a rational ground for con
firmation. Even remotely to expect is faith.
It is therefore a well-fortified fact that religious
experience to-day has, in view of the difficulties,
a remarkable faith in immortality.
Ill
WOULD RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE WELCOME
SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION ?
To touch upon the possible success of psychic
research is at once to raise the question whether
religious people would be glad to have immortality
scientifically established. Theology answers the
question definitely. "God refuses," says a mod
ern theologian,1 "to be put at the end of a syllo
gism. . . . His existence and character are for us
a supreme venture of faith. Belief in God is
bound up with an optimistic faith in the ultimate
triumph of good. And it is on the basis of that
belief in God that the religious belief in immor
tality arises. This is the basis upon which our
Lord Himself placed immortality : God is not the
God of the dead but of the living. But if belief
in God is itself a venture of faith, why should
1 W. J. Sparrow-Simpson, The Resurrection and Modern Thought,
p. 441.

SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION 151
immortality, which is based on that belief, possess
a certainty which does not belong to that upon
which it is founded? Indeed, the curious feature
of this attempt to establish immortality on a
scientific foundation is that it divorces immortality
from God. It is an attempt to establish tele
pathic intercommunication with human beings:
it is distinctly not a search for communion with
the living God. Rather it appears as a definite
substitute for the latter." This argument is
strongly put. It only remains to be seen whether
ordinary religious experience confirms it.
Everywhere and always there has been a dread
of ghosts. The deepest antipathy to the work of
psychic research is its report of clandestine visi
tations from those supposed to be in quite another
sphere of life. It inspires the same sort of fright
which children have as they go up the stairs in
the dark, — because they fear that strange hands
will reach out of the blackness, and clutch them
by the ankles. The whole subject of psychic
research suggests to many that if it should succeed
in its adventure, it would make us all nervous as
we heard the flutter of paper, the sighing of the
wind, or the tapping of a mouse in the wall. We
should be perpetually expecting that some con-

152 IMMORTALITY
fined soul was trying to transmit its message from
the spiritual realm to the material. And the trust
that our beloved ones were at peace in God's
nearer keeping would be exchanged for the dis
tressing thought that they were trying in vain to
get to us messages of their welfare. When an
aged saint wished to make the most formidable
threat in her power, about a possible course of
action of which she entirely disapproved, she said,
"If you do it, I shall come back when I am dead,
and visit you ! " That shows, in a word, what the
ordinary religious experience thinks of "spirit
return." A practical consideration beyond this is the
vision of the fraud which, even more than to-day,
would prey upon bereavement, if psychic research
should make mediums wholly respectable. It
is quite true that thus far psychic research has
done nothing more useful than to expose the
tricks and shameful devices of nearly all the me
diums with whom the society.has had any dealings.
This has served to warn people who might other
wise, in their grief, have resorted to these treach
erous persons. But as yet psychic research as
organically assembled refuses to say that it has
sufficient evidence for declaring that there is

SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION 153
actual communication between the spirit world
and ours. Once imagine that science should
declare that the avenue of communication was
clearly demonstrated, that moment you may
imagine to what wild efforts people would be put
to know their dead again. If the personalities
of mediums were announced as the thin places in
the wall between the worlds, then it would seem
to ordinary religious experience that the risk of
multiplied deceit and consequent unrest and sor
row would be imminent.
Still beyond this is the experience of the devout
soul after the death of one most beloved. When
the child is taken on whom every earthly affec
tion was lavished, the props of the world give way,
and all life is mad confusion and black despair.
Who will help, who can help — but God ! Upon
God the soul falls back, and as for the first time
the soul trusts God. God is almost discovered.
How many times the pastor, wondering what he
may say to comfort, is transfixed by the witness
of his truly religious parishioner in trouble, "I
never loved God as I do to-day." On theoretic
grounds you would expect all men, religious or not,
to curse God in their agony, but the reply of Job
is the cry of all deeply religious people as they

154 IMMORTALITY
pass through deep waters, "Curse Him? No!
Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." That
is such a result of bereavement as makes the re
ligious nature believe that God must mean the
separation between the worlds to be thorough
while it lasts, which in the span of the eternal
years is but a moment. There is such a lesson
to be learned by the separation, such conviction
of the true nature of the vanished soul, such under
standing of his beauty and goodness as only
separation can give, and such absolute reliance
upon God to keep him in perfect peace, that we
must believe it, religiously speaking, a misfortune
to our common life in its ultimate courses to do
anything to make windows in the wall of that
separation. I hold all these reasons put forward by the
present-day religious consciousness to be both sig
nificant and strong. But there is another side
to the testimony, from the depths of religion
itself. It could never be doubted that the man
who wrote the poem, St. Paul, was remarkably
religious. This man, F. W. H. Myers, wrote
in his treatise in which he announced his belief in
spirit return: "I venture now on a bold saying;
for I predict that in consequence of the new evi-

SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION 155
dence, all reasonable men a century hence will
believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas in
default of the new evidence, no reasonable man,
a century hence, would have believed it." When
we think what has depended and what now de
pends upon a belief in that central fact in history,
and when we hear a religious person making such
an assertion, we know instantly how much or how
little he craves material demonstration of the
survival of the soul. We need not pause to argue
with him what we may believe the hollowness of
his prediction. We may have more confidence in
history to keep facts in their places in a great
train of historic events. The only point on which
we need to put emphasis is the value which one
religious man places upon the scientific demon
stration. The effect of this supposed demonstration of im
mortality upon the personal character of Myers
and those who agreed with him is one of the
startling facts of modern religious experience.
William James has borne his testimony: "Myers's
character . . . grew stronger in every particu
lar. . . . Brought up on literature and sentiment,
something of a courtier, passionate, disdain
ful, and impatient naturally, he was made over
again from the day when he took up psychical

156 IMMORTALITY
research seriously. He became learned in science,
circumspect, democratic in sympathy, endlessly
patient, and above all, happy. The fortitude of
his last hours touched the heroic, so completely
were the atrocious sufferings of his body cast into
insignificance by his interest in the cause he lived
for. When a man's pursuit gradually makes
his face shine and grow handsome, you may be
sure it is a worthy one. Both Hodgson and
Myers kept growing ever handsomer and stronger-
looking." Nor are Myers and Hodgson alone. Men of
eminent gravity as well as of sincere religion have
read Myers's book and the books of similar au
thorities with a strange thrill. They may sus
pend judgment. But it sweeps across them
what it would mean to have scientific demon
stration of a future life. They tell themselves
that they are already sure of it on the ground
of faith. But they find a new element added
to their faith in the possible prospect of material
proof in the present world. They have some
times discovered that they were holding their
faith in the light of an hypothesis which left
a loophole. While the thought of the demon
stration lingered, their present deeds took on a
new importance. The reality of the future life

SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION 157
was vivid, and they felt that the life here was
contributmg to it. Everything seemed to be
more important. They found that they did
not trust God the less; they felt only that
His plan for them and theirs seemed the more
clear. Then there is more to reflect upon. The
religious man with any endowment of imagination
is bound to think that at most the revelation of
that other world to our present limited conscious
ness would be slight. As the child cannot imagine
the thoughts of maturity, as the savage cannot
imagine the ecstasy of the European genius, so no
contact of any sort in this world is apt to reveal
to us the perceptions of those who have entered
a higher stage of God's universe. What con
stantly marks the distinctness of various layers of
life here, seems reasonably sure to be true of this
existence compared with another.
It is futile to predict and quite as futile to dog
matize. But from a sympathetic view of re
ligious experience in this department of life, it is
perhaps safe to venture a suggestion. We might
think it possible that science should make a report
somewhat like this: It is demonstrated, science

158 IMMORTALITY
might say, that the spirits of the dead do live;
it is demonstrated, further, that their life is so
completely different from ours that there is no
medium of communication which can tell us how
they live; consequently it is evident that we and
they must live apart until our death brings us to
the condition in which they live. To most re
ligious folk I fancy this help of science would
make small difference. But to a good many it
might be a help. It would change any part of
faith in immortality which had remained thus
far a mere hypothesis, into solid belief. If they
were building unconsciously on the false assump
tion that death might end all and they need not
be very careful of the life they were building,
science would reveal to them just what they were
doing, and they would live with a new reality
and a new intensity. Everything must count for
better or for worse. And the faith and reliance
must still be put in God alone; for that life, sure
as it is, must still be His supreme secret. We
do not know, and now science would say we
cannot know, what it contains. We should,
even as now, be obliged to trust Him for all things.
Whether such an outcome be possible or not,
religious experience is not eager for scientific
demonstration of the survival of the soul. The

SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION 159
help would be inconsiderable at best. The trust
that has stayed the saints in all the years would
stay them still. Religion still asks God to keep
His great promise of immortality against the
great day.
The whole investigation proves something more.
A man like Huxley under the challenge of a
watching world may be a saint without expecting
a future life. He is an exception. The rule is
sufficiently expressed by these words from a
layman: "The man who sees only death before
him is careless of what he does with his life. Teach
man that he is of the earth alone, and he will be
of the earth, earthy." l Henry Sidgwick, the
great Cambridge teacher, could find no rational
basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality.
He was himself, nevertheless, an heroic and
beautiful soul. But his nephew declares that
Sidgwick "felt that the loss of such a hope from
the minds of average human beings, as now con
stituted, would be an evil of which he could not
pretend to measure the extent; he thought, in
deed, that a dissolution of the existing social
order might follow the loss of such an ideal." 2
It is now quite clear, by actual demonstration,
1 Bird S. Coler, Socialism in the Schools, p. 5.
2 The Leaves of the Tree, p. 93.

160 IMMORTALITY
that this instinctive feeling of the Christian man
is true on its brighter side. A conviction of
immortality is a moral force.
IV
IS THE SOUL TEMPORARILY ASLEEP?
There is no reason, therefore, why we should not
fall back upon religious intuitions as the surest
means of guiding us to some idea of the future
life. Whatever the revelation of science, relig
ious intimations will certainly always outstrip any
bare picture, which is the best science could give.
Moreover, any picture given by theology could
be made only by a comparative study of such
intimations in different ages.
In one distinct way our time is bearing witness
to its conviction; that is, that the souls of the
departed are not asleep in the ordinary sense. I
say in the ordinary sense, because of late years
psychology has been opening our imaginations
to the possibilities of what vigorous life the human
soul may be living during the period when the
body is taking rest in sleep. More and more
rarely are such hymns sung at funerals as
"Asleep in Jesus! blessed sleep!"

IS THE SOUL TEMPORARILY ASLEEP? 161
This hymn was written in 1832; but the mood
which makes it seem to sound the highest truth
is passing. Dean Alford's magnificent hymn,
written in 1867, is the prophecy which catches
up the spirit of our generation:
"Ten thousand times ten thousand
In sparkling raiment bright,
The armies of the ransomed saints
Throng up the steeps of light:
'Tis finished! all is finished,
Their fight with death and sin:
Fling open wide the golden gates,
And let the victors in."
It is practically now a universal conviction of
religious people that those who go from them
through death, go to some wider opportunity of
living. The body sleeps, but the soul is alive and
awake as never before. We do not leave God's
servant sleeping; if anyone is left sleeping it is
we ourselves. He has waked in another room in
God's great mansion, and is most gloriously
alive. This attitude of mind is often met by the
theologian with the objection that the modern
man, even though religious, is apt to confuse
paradise and heaven. It might in that case be

162 IMMORTALITY
asked whether the soul ought not to be conceived
as sleeping in the peace of paradise till the judg
ment day, when, if worthy, it would enter the
gates of heaven. It is quite true that the modern
religious man does make little distinction between
paradise and heaven. Nothing shows this more
clearly than the popularity of Faber's beautiful
hymn, 0 Paradise, 0 Paradise: here paradise
and heaven are almost completely fused. With
the various conceptions of time revealed by
thoughtful men, it may be that it is wise to fuse
them. That is, time seems often to be a passing
conception attached to our earthly consciousness.
If this conception should prove accurate, the idea
which neatly places the judgment day in the
midst of a succession of events, would be wide of
the mark. The judgment day falls in eternity.
The Bible in its highest places "crumples up
time." "A thousand years in Thy sight," sang
the Psalmist, "are but as yesterday." "Before
Abraham was," said Jesus Christ, "I am." The
modern instinct which refuses to partition off
successive stages of the life beyond this, is true
therefore to the highest instincts of the past,
though ignoring lower levels of religious thought
between then and now. These lower levels
ought certainly to be considered; for all history

IS THE SOUL TEMPORARILY ASLEEP? 163
has its divine meaning and revelation. Only
the modern man is in very high company and
must be allowed to cherish his intuitions with
reverence. Even the attempt to make paradise, if the idea
of succession is kept, a place of sleep for the soul,
breaks down when one recalls the belief of the
early Church that during our Saviour's brief stay
in the place of departed spirits He preached to
the spirits in prison. When one contemplates
the elaborate nature of that approach to all the
heroic souls . of the past which a subsequent re
flection tried to build up, it is clear that the days
of our Saviour in paradise were by no means
days of repose.
For all reasons, then, the modern instinct is
entitled to respect when it thinks that the strong
and beautiful soul beating about in a feeble body
is by death set free to live as never before. Even
as Jesus Christ, three days after such weakness
that He could not carry His cross, appeared in
such convincing strength and vigour that cowards
and peasants caught from his vitality the power
to become more than generals and more than
kings, so we think that those who die in Him,
straightway are freed into His risen life, and, so

164 IMMORTALITY
far from sleeping, go forth to superb and mar
vellous action. That is the conviction of modern
religious experience, and must find its place in
all valid description of the future life.
V
SHALL SOULS HAVE MATERIAL BODIES?
One of the subjects that was often brought to
pastors by troubled parishioners, a generation ago,
was the subject of the resurrection of the body.
People often found in this their chief stumbling-
block in saying the creed. They said that they
could believe in the survival of the soul, but it
was a soul without a body. They were somewhat
relieved when they were told that no one expected
them to believe that the exact particles that went
into the grave were to form the resurrection
body; these particles inevitably became the
outward manifestation of various other centres
of life. It helped them to be told that even in
this life, in the course of every seven years, the
soul's body was entirely endowed with new ma
terial, yet someway retained its identity. And
yet they felt that to have any body at all was an
unnecessary adjunct for a living soul. "I wanted
my Rosie here" wrote Ruskin in 1874. "In

SHALL SOULS HAVE MATERIAL BODIES? 165
heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and
Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan't care
a bit for Rosie then, she needn't think it. What
will grey eyes and red cheeks be good for there?"
The mood that found these difficulties and
rested in these satisfactions has almost completely
passed. We are now living in a time that is
daring almost to call matter spiritual. Modern
psychology has proved to us that the only way
we measure our inner spiritual emotions, such as
rage or joy, is by the effect which these emotions
have upon the body. The more intense the
emotion the wider is the surface of nerve and
muscle affected. "It is useless," says a modern
philosopher, "to assert that there is a restrained
rage which is all the more intense. Eliminate
all trace of organic disturbance, all tendency
toward muscular contraction, and all that will
be left of anger will be the idea, or, if you still
insist on making it an emotion, you will be unable
to assign it any intensity." l
There never has been an age since St. Paul's,
I suppose, when St. Paul's teaching about a
spiritual body was more sympathetically under
stood. We find it difficult to think of any living
potency without its material expression. We
1 Bergson, Time and Free Will, tr. Pogson, p. 29.

166 IMMORTALITY
even go so far as to think sometimes that there is
a spiritual body already at the centre of our
present material existence, the most real body,
which shines out of the physical body in the
smile of the face, in the wave of the hand, in
the quiver of the whole frame under some act
of sacrifice and love. And this body, this spirit
ual body, we sometimes think must go with
the departing soul at death, because no living
thing can be without its material side. How
God may further clothe it on some great day
of the Lord is a question with which modern
religious thinking does not much concern itself,
either one way or the other. It is only con
cerned with the thought that body and soul make
up one spiritual life both here and hereafter.
It has often been said that the main idea back
of the necessity of a body is identity, by which
men in another world may recognize one another.
This is no longer the main idea, — the spirituality
of matter is the main idea, — but it is an idea of
first-rate importance. A hint of what the spirit
ual body is or shall be is given by certain outward
"expressions" of the body rather than by the
form or features of the body. When we suddenly
come upon one whom we have not seen for many

SHALL SOULS HAVE MATERIAL BODIES? 167
years, we fail to recognize him till he says or does
something that makes a bridge across the years,
and we feel that it was only yesterday since we
saw him last. It may be a mere trick of taking
off his glasses, a quick retort, an inflection of the
voice, or some luminous glance of the eye. The
mere outline and form of the face or figure have
singularly little to do with recognition. "How
well I remember," records a living preacher,
"many years ago, when my only child was little
more than a baby, I used to go regularly to kiss
her good-night before I went to rest myself. As
a rule she was asleep, and I was careful not to
wake her, but somehow she behaved differently
to me, even in her unconscious or semi-conscious
state, from what she did to most others. When
others caressed her, however lightly, at such times
she was always impatient, although she never
actually opened her eyes; but when I touched
her, even though she were apparently fast asleep,
she always snuggled into my arms. Sometimes
we used to tease her about this, and ask her how
she knew the difference when she could neither
see nor hear anything, and was herself unconscious
of the world around her. 'Suppose,' we said,
'that some one who was not your father should
pet you in the dark in exactly the same way as

168 IMMORTALITY
he does, how could you tell?' 'Well,' replied
the juvenile philosopher, 'if anyone petted me
in your way it would be you, of course; where
would be the use of asking if it might be somebody
else?'" The writer of these words uses them as
an illustration of something quite different, but
we may certainly use them to show in what
subtle ways individual personalities are recog
nized even here and now. Ruskin may not see
the grey eyes and the pink cheeks, but the charm
and sweetness of "his Rosie" will someway shine
out to him in heaven above the sparkle of Socra-
tes's talk. The medium of recognition and
identification need not be bodies like those we
now possess.
The appeal to the risen body of Christ as the
warrant of what our bodies shall be is recognized
as invalid. His body had some attributes of our
bodies, other attributes distinctly different. "A
little reflection," said that most religious of mod
ern scholars, Bishop Westcott, "will show that the
special outward forms in which the Lord was
pleased to make Himself sensibly recognizable
by his disciples were no more necessarily con
nected with His glorified person than the robes
which He wore." This would be the unlearned

SHALL SOULS HAVE MATERIAL BODIES? 169
intimation of the ordinary religious* man who
would recognize that our Saviour had before Him
the task of convincing a scattered band of timid
disciples that Good Friday was not the end, and
used the means which could at once assure them
beyond all theory and debate.
In the thought of the survival of the body for
the sake of identification is wrapped the idea of
individuality. The Orient carps at the Occident
for its insistence upon individual immortality.
We do long for individual expression, but modern
religious experience does not long for it in this
age as in the age just past. One reason for a
keener appreciation of solidarity and unity may
come from the fact that we tend more and more
to live in cities, — and often in enormous cities.
Those who try to take children from soiled and
noisy city streets for a fortnight's holiday in the
beautiful country, instantly discover how the
dread of isolation is growing among us. The open
fields, the splashing waves, the broad sky, all
may have their attractions in a measure, but there
is a persistent craving for the streets teeming with
people. The tired mother and the ragged urchin
long to be merged and lost in the indiscriminate
mass of humanity. And it is not only the poor

170 IMMORTALITY
who feel this craving, else our great cities would
have only the poor in them. Our enormous cities
are testimony to the tendency of all sorts of peo
ple. A people .who long to be merged in humanity
will surely begin to long to be merged with the
composite selfhood in the next world. It is all
a sign of the way in which we are unconsciously
approaching the necessary idea expressed in the
exaggerated doctrine of Nirvana. We are more
and more holding the idea of solidarity while
tenaciously keeping the complementary idea of
individuality. The religious instinct is vaguely
groping for an imagination of a spiritual body
which shall, more than our present bodies, express
the interrelationship of men, while sacredly
guarding the individual centre. But the modern
age is clear that material bodies shall give the
symbolic meaning of the soul's desires.
VI
DO THE DEPARTED KNOW OUR CONDITION?
When we fall in with the modern conception of
the invariable union of matter and spirit in any
single reality, we are forced to ask whether departed
souls have access to our present life. Do they
know and perceive what we do and what we are?

DO THE DEPARTED KNOW OUR CONDITION? 171
The answer of religious experience to this ques
tion is vague, but it is sufficient to make its con
tribution. There is no doubt that many people
do feel that those who are gone from their sight
see them in the paths of earth. A woman fight
ing off a tendency to bitterness and hatred felt
that an old counsellor, long since dead, had come
to her at a critical moment to clinch her trembling
resolve to forgive. When questioned she pro
tested that it was not the mere memory of his
past words, for she had thought of him constantly
all through her struggle. Nor did she dream or
see visions; she is uncommonly practical and
hard-headed. She was conscious only that he
knew, saw, and at the supreme moment gave her
the impulse to do what was for her self-esteem
and determination the hardest thing in the world.
But most people do not feel so definitely that
the dead behold us. One meets the idea most
often in the form of a wish or hope, verging upon
expectation. When some beautiful outcome
marks the work begun by a man now gone, his
friends are sure to exclaim, "How glad he must
be, — if he knows what has happened." This
simple sentence, being analyzed, seems to indi
cate that people assume that the departed one
does know; then they add the "if" to guard

172 IMMORTALITY
against presumption. The thought has its agony
as well as joy; for we dread to think that those we
love see our sorrow and our failure and our sin, as
well as our triumph. It may be, however, that
all such pain of the sympathetic onlooker is
transcended by what we shall grow to be, just as
parents transcend the griefs of their children be
cause they do not see the experiences of childhood
as ultimate. For the dead are in an upper grade
of life, as religious experience believes, and there
fore stand towards our life here somewhat as
maturity stands to childhood. We often have
the feeling that our beloved help us never so much
as when the shackles of earth are taken from
them and they help us with the new freedom;
and we assume that this is an added element in
their joy, because they are able to show their love
in a potency never before within their grasp.
Kipling bears testimony to this modern instinct,
when he writes of the dead,
"They take their mirth in the joy of the earth —
they dare not grieve for her pain —
For they know of toil and the end of toil — they
know God's Law is plain."
Many people have found in this thought one of
the sharpest incentives to goodness. It seems to
have been what the author of the Epistle to the

DO THE DEPARTED KNOW OUR CONDITION? 173
Hebrews was thinking of when he wrote, "Seeing
that we are compassed about with so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and . . .
run . . . the race that is set before us."
A help towards this conclusion comes from the
modern discovery of the minuteness of life. Once,
men thought flies and gnats small; but flies and
gnats are giants in the revealed order, as modern
science knows the myriad forms of little life. We
have won a knowledge of bacteria which do awful
havoc in the human body, .but it is hard to con
ceive that bacteria have any least knowledge of
us. They are probably having the merriest of
careless festivals when they are unwittingly
causing humanity the sorest grief. An excursion
into this variety in life opens the imagination to
what may be in the regions above us. As we see
much in the world which does not see us, so there
may easily be much in the world, unseen to us,
which watches our every motion. There is ample
room, on rational grounds, for believing that the
newly-alive, through death, having attained a
greater stature, see us and help us in spite of our
blindness. The old problem of the possibility of a fourth
dimension, which baffles mathematicians, has its

174 IMMORTALITY
message for our religious experience. That, too,
opens the imagination. As we can think of life
which might have only two dimensions and so be,
as it were, in another world from us who have
three dimensions, though living close to us; so
we may think of life with more than three dimen
sions, living in our neighbourhood, yet quite dis
tinct from us. They might by pure mathemati
cal demonstration be capable of seeing us, yet we
might never, in our limit of three dimensions,
be able to see them. The imagination of such
reality is aided by the observation of the strange
economy in the world which we do see. We
think of the atmosphere which we breathe, made
up of its various gases. Some of these elements
are for us, some for the insects, some for the
plants. In this composite air which we all alike
breathe, through which we see, and so on, each
varied bit of life appropriates what it can use, and
leaves its poison to become another's life and
breath. An atmosphere which can provide sub
sistence for so much that we do see, may easily
be thought to provide space and food for a prac
tically infinite variety of beings which we do not
see. Why then, — religious experience with its
imagination aglow may ask, ¦ — why then not
believe that it is even more than possible that

DO THE DEPARTED KNOW OUR CONDITION? 175
those who are passed from our sight behold us?
I think religious experience tends, however
vaguely, to such a belief. Canon Mason, writing
of Bishop Wilkinson after Mrs. Wilkinson's death,
said that there was no doubt that as long as he
lived upon earth the reality of his wife's nearness
to him was one of the most significant factors
in his life.1 This is important testimony, for
Wilkinson had a genius for religion.
VII
IS HEAVEN A PLACE?
The old assurance from the professional pastor,
"You know heaven is not a place, but a state of
being," no longer means much to the religious
layman. With the modern tendency to give
matter an eternal meaning, or at least a meaning
far removed from the subjective unreality be
stowed upon it by such philosophers as Kant, we
find it easier to think of heaven as a place than
to think of it as merely "a state of being." It is
quite true that some of us cannot forget Kant's
antinomies concerning time and space, but the
mass of religious instinct ignores the difficulties,
and refuses to think of future reality, as well as
1 Life, Shorter Edition, p. 185.

176 IMMORTALITY
present reality, without some definite abode.
Rightly the thought of aspiration and expectancy
must be indistinct, but it is not unprofitable to
try to gather up the fragments of thought which
religious people now put forth concerning the place
where heaven is.
The first note of modern thought about places
is the vastness of the universe as now revealed
to astronomy. It was only a few hundred years
ago that the universe was believed to be no larger
than to provide space for earth and heaven and
hell, — all of about equal size one to another.
Now the imagination is dizzy and faint with
thinking how many places there may be for living
souls. The astronomers speculate whether Mars
is inhabited; and the common man speculates
how many kinds of beings God may have made
to live in the countless planets of unnumbered
solar systems. The common man, having poetry
in him and therefore seeing truth from afar,
decides that God may have made creatures who
could live in conditions utterly different from the
conditions necessary for our life. He does not
boggle at the stories of angels, deeming them not
too wonderful, but not wonderful enough, —
possibly only suggestions of the truth. And then

IS HEAVEN A PLACE? 177
he wonders whether the souls that die to this
world are not admitted to the worlds beyond this.
These are all in his mind the vaguest sort of con
jectures, but they may be intimations conveyed
in due time to the devout reason of humanity.
Perhaps it would be safe to say that instead
of speaking of the place of heaven we now think
of the heavenly places. It is a frequent word
after the death of a good man to hear that now
he is set free. We remember the Saviour's prom
ise, "In my Father's house are many mansions."
We think of the freed soul wandering from place
to place, seeking in each place its joy and peace.
Wandering seems too dull a word; perhaps
flashing would more nearly meet our thought.
Then as we think of our Saviour in the days after
the Resurrection, walking with His old friends
to Emmaus, though they did not know His near
ness, so for others, who have loved us and gone,
there may come days when they shall walk with
us, and our hearts shall glow within us, and we
shall not know why. For as we dream of the
heavenly places there is no reason why this old
earth should not be one of them. In the great
city is the park for all alike; there, too, the king
may come, though he has a spacious garden where
only they may go who are his or are bidden of

178 IMMORTALITY
him. He is the only man who is really free to go
where he will, and if he is a bold and great king,
he goes often where the humblest go. So, in like
manner, the souls set free from earthly conditions,
we think, receive the freedom of the heavenly
city, — which is God's wide universe; and though
there are many places more beautiful in this
boundless heaven to which their bright souls may
flash, they, if they are kingly souls, will often
delight to come to the place where we common
people of earth are permitted to walk, and they,
unknown to us, unrecognized, will walk there
with us, making the morning joy, which we
cannot understand.
One of the perplexities of heaven, one of the
reasons why some people say that they do not
care for immortality, is the endlessness attached
to the thought of it. In this we strike once more
the snag in Kant's antinomies: namely, that we
cannot think of endless time or time that has an
end. In the same way we cannot think of space
that ends, or space that is boundless, — that is,
if we are logical. But religious thought tran
scends logic, exactly as life and experience tran
scend it. Therefore, to religion the thought of
endlessness and boundlessness seems true. Here,

IS HEAVEN A PLACE? 179
then, is the solution to the troubled speculation
about heaven. If it is endless, it is also bound
less. If one, it must be the other, for the two
ideas stand or fall by the same reason and in
stinct. Let the soul be conceived at death as
launched into the endless time; well, if so, it is
also launched into the unbounded heavenly
places. The variety and adventure and con
quest are as endless as the time. The persistent
idea of a number of heavens, figuratively seven,
is thus met by a modern instinct; only they are
someway united: heaven is heaven because there
are heavens.
Then, too, it may be more than poetical license,
when we look at the banks of clouds at evening,
tinged with the brilliance of the setting sun, and
call it heavenly. So, too, it may be more than
rhapsody when we say that the distant mountains
lifting their vague forms through the haze remind
us of what heaven shall be. The glory of the
indistinctness of matter may be the prophecy of
the spirit-world, where the spirit is free to use
matter but not in any way to be hampered by
it. May it be that the reason why the prophet
said, "Thine eyes shall behold the king in His
beauty in the land that is very far off," is because

180 IMMORTALITY
the distant scene is always transcendently beauti
ful? If we have both religion and poetry in us
we love Bernard's Hora Novissima. We feel that
there is more, not less, than literal meaning, when an
unknown poet sings of heaven in words like these :
"Thy gardens and thy goodly walks
Continually are green,
Where grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
"Bight through thy streets, with silver sound,
The living waters flow,
And on the banks, on either side,
The trees of life do grow.
"Those trees for evermore bear fruit,
And evermore do spring:
There evermore the angels are,
And evermore do sing."
The old poet saw one such glorious place. We
of this time feel that the universe is filled with
"heavenly places." VIII
DOES CHARACTER COUNT?
A foremost question in all thought of the future
life is the difference character may make. There
is a view held by a good many men who are not

DOES CHARACTER COUNT? 181
what we should ordinarily call religious: these
men say that since God has made the world and
made it in such a way that it is hopelessly hard
for some men to attain character, His justice must
provide a future which shall make the base as
happy as the noble. There is no need to discuss
this idea of God's justice. The only reason for
speaking of the idea at all is to register it, and to
point out that it is not the idea, at least commonly,
of religious people. There is another idea that
the future of a man depends chiefly upon the out
ward assent to certain ecclesiastical sanctions,
the assent to a creed, the reception of the Sacra
ments, active membership in the Church. Any
one heartily accepting these, though his character
be rather dark, is sure of admission to the holiest
precincts; anyone for any cause refusing them
is left to the chance of God's leniency, with the
supposition that however good the man may be,
he cannot receive the benefits that good men with
the outward marks of the Church upon them re
ceive. This view is held by increasingly smaller
numbers of people every year. The people
naturally and buoyantly religious do not believe
it. What, then, do religious people hold? They
hold, I am sure, that the joy of the future life
depends upon character, however and wherever

182 IMMORTALITY
it is won. It is because the Church, with its
Creed and Sacraments and Fellowship, normally
makes for character, fostering it and developing
it as no other institution under heaven, that re
ligious men link it with what is called salvation.
The religious instinct believes that in so far as it
rules, the Church is of man ; in so far as it serves,
it is of God. And the topmost achievement of
its service is to create, to advance, to perfect
character. If there is any other agency making
for righteous character, the Church rejoices, and
utters its praise. Religious people may vary in
their theories of the means by which character
may be attained; they agree that character won
is the one key that admits to the most beautiful
mansions in the Father's House.
I spoke a moment ago of the sense of injustice
in God's world, because the winning of character
is extremely difficult in some conditions, com
paratively easy in others. A widening experi
ence reveals that the differences are not so great
really as they are apparently. Each station in
life has its own griefs, hardships, and temptations :
character that is both strong and lovable grows
with almost equal difficulty everywhere. But
there is an avenue of the imagination that an

DOES CHARACTER COUNT? 183
astonishing number of religious people are now
travelling. They do not talk much about it, but
they are apt to ask wistful questions about it,
wondering if it appeals to others as it appeals to
them. This avenue of the imagination leads to
the idea that perhaps the same soul is given
to live in various bodies, during its schooling on
earth. Now it lives a life in a labouring man, and
out of that hard life it stores up within itself
certain traits. Then the traits so won are al
lowed to enter the world again in the life of a
great nobleman. Again the soul may live in
the man who constantly fails at all his tasks, not
through his own fault, but through dire surround
ings; and then that soul is fired in the hotter
furnace, a life of perpetual success. It is not a
new idea. It has recurred again and again in the
world's history. It has grave defects in its
credibility. But it must be reckoned in with
the conceptions of life hovering over modern
religious experience. One might say in passing
that it would be wholesome for the snob, impa
tient of any but his own kind, to recall that it is
just possible that God shall some day give him
to live in the career of just such a person as
he now despises, a ragged man out of work, a
cringing, scheming politician, or a self-made man

184 IMMORTALITY
prosperous and vulgar. So the envious man
from his misfortunes may look out upon the
gay and rich, and wonder what he would
make of his character if it should come to such
housing. One result would be that envy might
be exchanged for a sense of the dangers that
beset such different lives. It would perhaps
appear that the inequalities were not glaring
after all.
Another aspect of character in relation to the
future life is the religious man's estimate of death
bed repentances, or similar sudden changes in the
choices of life. If the man is scared by a crisis
we may imagine his waking in the life beyond
death to cry out, "How frightened I was! Things
are not so very different after all! I withdraw
my repentance!" If, on the other hand, the
man has come face to face for the first time with
the best in life, if it has made its appeal to a heart
now tender, though hitherto hard as flint, if the
Spirit of God has been admitted with the joy of a
complete surrender, then no sameness and no
change of surroundings can alter his determina
tion. There has been a change of character
which is fused through his whole soul. The test
in such a case is whether the man has so changed

DOES CHARACTER COUNT? 185
that though formerly a decent man would not have
found him congenial, now a man of light and
leading would be glad to meet this soul in the
heavenly country, because the excellency of the
highest has been admitted there. In other words,
to put the whole matter boldly, it is a soul con
genial to God Himself.
And then we think of punishment and the
goal of punishment, hell. Hell as the logical
outcome of one side of God's justice, does not
convince the modern religious man. Hell as the
thoroughness of God's punishment for some
higher end does appeal to the reason and the
heart of modern religious experience. As God
loves man, we in this time argue, so God longs
for men to love Him. That necessitates natures
congenial to His. Through the fires of affliction
and pain, therefore, in both this world and the
next, by a law sufficiently evident here, the un
congenial souls must pass. It seems to mod
ern religious thought that these things are less and
less arbitrary, more and more in the essential
nature of being. Whether hell is eternal depends
wholly upon the last man who determines to hold
out against God's friendship and love. If pain
and woe can teach men the results of bad char-

186 IMMORTALITY
acter, whether the character be theirs, or a
parent's, or a neighbour's; if inherent results
can lead men to know and appreciate both the
beauty and the joy of holiness; if, on the up
ward path, they can at last feel the response
of God's approval, — then who shall say that
the risk of eternal punishment is not justified
in heaven.
A final thought about character and eternal
life is that character is not merely won by the
man himself; it is also God's gift. This appears
in our present experience. We feel ourselves
growing hard and bitter, in danger of being haters
and therefore hated; and while we are outside
the pale, God puts in our way a friend or a little
child, and thereby our stony hearts become
gentleness and forgiveness and love, — and we are,
by God's gift, congenial both to men and to Him.
So we think of His goodness when He gave to us
Christ, that in Him He may be to us for ever our
most human Friend. So we think of His ap
proach to us and His gift to us all through time
and eternity. We shall win what we can, — and
He will love us for our striving and our winning.
But the best and most radiant in us must always
be His gift. "We love Him," sang St. John,

SHALL WE SEE THE DIVINE? 187
"because He first loved us." That is the story of
character ready to mount up into the heavenly
places. IX
SHALL WE SEE THE DIVINE?
A question which comes often to thoughtful
religion is in what way we shall come, more con
sciously than here, into the presence of God,
when we reach the new life. We are conscious
of God spiritually now, — in His natural world,
in our friends, in the hush of our own hearts.
We pray to Him, and know that He hears. But
we dream that in heaven, or even in paradise, we
must see Him in a way that we do not see Him
here, in a way that will kindle our awe and dread,
and also our loyalty and love. He, who is revealed
in earth as a Father, must there be not more au
thority than pity. Newman, in his Dream of
Gerontius, seems to reveal only half of the expec
tation which men of religion now have of the
vision of God. "Like as a father pitieth his
children," seems to be ignored, as well as the
Parable of the Prodigal Son. God is still the Ori
ental Monarch sitting in some exclusive state; He
is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, hasten
ing to meet the penitent. The deepest part of pres-

188 IMMORTALITY
ent-day religious instinct takes this more Christian
view, and in some way expects to see God.
The chief contribution which modern thought
can make is in its denial of certain attempts of
the imagination. The conception of the artist
Sargent in the mural painting in the Boston
Public Library makes the Sacred Trinity only
three Gods, — the Tritheism for which all New
England suffered a hundred years ago. Every
attempt either in word or in art convinces us that
such conceptions must have the splendour and the
courage of the indefinite. Since all modern re
ligious feeling is intense in its thought of God's
personality, a personality of which our personal
ities are but shadows, it craves and expects the
symbol of His personality. To see God every
where is a stupid Pantheism, unless we believe
that in some way we shall be capable of seeing
the glory and beauty of His life as we see the life
of a man in the face of a man. We dare not talk
too much in terms of anthropomorphism: but
at present, with our limited experience, there are
no other terms to use. So we may say in a poeti
cal way, — that is, in a figurative and most true
way, — that we look forward to the day when we
shall see the face of God.

SHALL WE SEE THE DIVINE? 189
We pause; and then the conviction comes to
us that God's face is Jesus Christ. As all the
world and all humanity are the body of God,
through which the discerning may behold His
purpose and His love, so all that is here revealed
and infinitely more was once for all caught up
into the earthly life of One Man, Jesus Christ.
For the experience of men in this world Jesus
Christ has been these two thousand years the face
of God. Why is it not simplest and safest to
believe that in the life that is to come the ascended
and glorified Christ shall still be the face of God?
Only we shall see in the freer air of the heavenly
places, in His simplicity and gentleness and
majesty, such concentration of the Divine Char
acter as men in our present conditions could not
look upon and live.
When St. Paul, wearied with work and infirm
ity, wrote that he could not decide whether he
wished to live here and sustain his friends,
or live in the coming world and be with
Christ, he struck a note which many an aged
Christian feels to-day. "He was glad to go,"
people say of a modern saint; "his only regret
was leaving his dear ones to mourn him." To
the religious spirit the dream of immortality is
still to "be with Christ." No hymn appeals

190 IMMORTALITY
more to the modern congregation of the faithful
than St. Bernard's :
"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest."
The voice which in recent years has most authori
tatively summed up the doubt, difficulty, and
faith of our present religious aspiration, sang in
the richness of old age:
"Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
"For though from out our bourne of Time and
Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar."
And there is one other sign of the times. When
the American Prayer Book was revised a collect
for the Feast of the Transfiguration was added to
this old treasury of devotion. The most atten
tive worshippers have already given this prayer
a first place in their use and affections. The
reason for this phenomenon is not its beautiful

SHALL WE SEE THE DIVINE? 191
diction, beautiful though it is; the reason is
rather the central thought which with precision
prays for the fulfilment of the highest wish of the
saints of to-day: "Mercifully grant that we,
being delivered from the disquietude of this world,
may be permitted to behold the King in his
beauty, who with thee, 0 Father, and thee, O
Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, one God, world
without end." The chief joy of heaven is to see
the face of God in the glorified Christ.

V
JESUS CHRIST

V
JESUS CHRIST
PROBABLY there is no department of Theol
ogy that can be so much helped by every
day religious experience as Christology. Learning,
if here left alone, is sure to mislead. "It is
a significant fact," writes a modern thinker, "that
most of the famous Lives of Christ have been
written by young men. The task is one which
requires great constructive power even more than
wide learning. There are few minds which are
not thrown into confusion by the constant accumu
lation of facts and comparison of views in
volved in modern methods of study. Many
theologians learn to read, but few to think. The
value of a Life of Christ depends upon the thor
oughness with which the different parts of the
composition, and their relation to the whole, have
been thought out. No amount of learning in
matters of detail can compensate for lack of
firmness in the essential outlines of the figure." x
1 J. M. Thompson, in The Hibbert Journal, October, 1910, pp. 199f .

196 JESUS CHRIST
To the average Christian consciousness the erudite
conservative seems to go as far afield as the erudite
radical. Christ is made to seem only a dim
figure of the remote past: the scholar often seems
to forget that a multitude in this day know Him
as a living and present Master. The young man
with the vividness of early impressions and with
the daring of youth may instinctively read his
half-conscious experience into the ancient mate
rial, and, though leaving much for the trained
scholar to criticize, may far outstrip him in the
accuracy and truth of his delineation.
We may then glance at a few of the instances
in which modern religious experience stands ready
to make its contribution to the correct under
standing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I
THE RELIABILITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
To the intelligent man who watches as from
the outside the various tides of historical and
literary criticism, there is coming the conviction
that the New Testament is being strangely vindi
cated by those who seem to attack its traditional
message. Dates are being pushed back towards
the middle decades of the first century; portions

RELIABILITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 197
of the Gospels once declared additions are now
proved inseparable parts of the original docu
ments; writers, whose authorship of certain
documents was formerly denied to them, are now,
by the same method, restored to their own.
Events once declared impossible on a priori
grounds are now admitted as sane history because
the phenomena of modern life have furnished
parallel instances. Such gleanings from the world
of technical scholarship give the laymen in these
matters a sense of a tendency: he believes that
he has reason to rest in the appeal which the
old records make to his soul as trustworthy and
authoritative. Such a layman may be far from
timidity or obscurantism. He simply holds his
head high and smells the breeze.
Another modern witness to the uniqueness of
the New Testament is coming from the field of
foreign missions. A few years ago in a little
Japanese village a youth, feeling in his soul the
stirrings of ambition, decided that he would make
the venture and try to enter public life. He left
his secure home in the hill country, and came
down to Tokyo. There he learned that if he was
to succeed in his ambition he must know the
great language of the West. So he wandered one

198 JESUS CHRIST
day into one of our mission schools and was told
that there he should be taught English. Not
long afterwards a New Testament in Japanese
was put into his hands. He opened it casually;
it caught his attention; he read more and more
eagerly; without pausing to eat or sleep he read
it through, then turned back and read it straight
through again. For the time the outside world
was blotted out. He saw Jesus only. Then he
sprang to his feet, crying, "Who will tell me of
this Jesus? He is the Master I have sought all
my life! This is the day for which I have lived."
This suggests to the Christian world what the
New Testament is. We who have been familiar
with its words from babyhood take them too
much for granted, and so grow callous to their
thrilling import. The man who spends his days
digging out the minute meaning of sentences,
phrases, and syllables, naturally loses while he
gains : he gains in knowledge of the technique of
the brush, he loses the glory and truth of the por
trait as a whole. It may be one of the compensa
tions for men in our time who do not read the
Bible as their fathers read it, verse by verse, and
chapter by chapter, as a daily religious exercise,
that, being less familiar with fragments, they shall
pick up the Gospels some day to read as if they

RELIABILITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 199
had never read before, and the freshness and
reality of the picture will bring them with adora
tion to the feet of the Lord Jesus.
There is one more thought to be considered
about the documents of the New Testament.
To the religious instinct they cannot be classed
with the musty records of the past civilizations:
they cannot be called chronicles or even history
in its bare sense. They must be classed with
the greatest music. The Gospel of St. John and
the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians can
not be read as if they were carved on some buried
Assyrian monument. They are as the score of
music that is not complete till the instrument for
which it was written has uttered its notes. The
musical expert can gather the sense of Bach from
reading a sheet of music, but he does not know
it till he has heard the organ roll its tones among
the arches of some great cathedral. So it seems
increasingly that the scholar, often without
imagination, without the full experience of the
richness of life, cannot know or judge the New
Testament till he has seen what it means to some
unprejudiced and saintly Christian who reads it
apart from styles and grammar and authorships.
Once that could be, we should not hear that Christ

200 JESUS CHRIST
was more truly in St. Mark than in St. John and
St. Paul. There might be a trifle less erudition,
but vastly more knowledge. There might be less
to amaze, but more truth to exult in. We should
hear the sound of the New Testament through
the music for which God bade its writing, — the
varied experience of a living, Christ-filled man.
II
THE ALLEGED DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE
FIRST AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES
A goqd deal of the work of modern scholarship
is based upon the belief that the standards of
feeling and temperament in the first century were
quite different from the standards of feeling and
temperament in our time. The man whose ex
perience to-day touches a large number and variety
of human souls doubts this so far as to be almost
ready to deny it in toto. Christianity has intro
duced certain elements which pull against the
tendencies of human nature: they pull against
natural tendencies now, and they pulled against
them in the first century. The law of revenge,
for example, was changed by Christ into the law
of love. Every pastor knows that the Electras of
this year are as keen for revenge as the Electras

FIRST AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 201
in the years of Sophocles. The force that trans
mutes their hate into a finer substance has to
play upon as stubborn a human nature as in the
days of the. Twelve Caesars.
The serious difficulty with a comparison of the
attitudes of the first century with those of this,
is that they are generally made by persons with
only academic training. The historian and the
chronicler, the writer of military commentaries
and the writer of letters, the philosopher and the
statesman, cannot give an intimate picture of an
age. It is only the transcendent genius who is
equal to that task, a man like Sophocles in the
old world or a man like Shakespeare in the new.
These men may take, for the characters of their
drama, people of a past long before their time,
but the characters show forth human nature as
it was in the days of Sophocles and in the days of
Shakespeare. No one can read the work of these
two men without feeling the likeness of the human
nature in both sets of plays. The scholar reflects
that the standards of his colleagues and pupils
are quite different from the Corinthians to whom
St. Paul wrote his epistles. The faithful pastor
in East London or in the East Side of New York
might easily turn the tables on the scholar, saying,
"Yes, and the people out of whom my parish-

202 JESUS CHRIST
ioners are made have standards quite different
from those of St. Barnabas, and St. Luke, and St.
Timothy, and other colleagues and pupils of St.
Paul." Two or three details may make this clearer.
It is often said that pre-Christian civilization
did not love its children. An instance always
quoted is that even the Greeks exposed unde
sirable children. Well, so do modern Americans.
We have a corporate law defining such expos
ure as murder, so that not often, though some
times, is a child found dead by the wayside, left
there to perish. Most often to-day the child is
left where it will be found and cared for by some
stranger. The motive that would allow a mother
to abandon her child in Greece, and the motive
that allows a mother now to abandon her child
may differ, but the motive must be of the same
relative strength. The mother of Oedipus
abandoned him for fear of a dreaded portent,
the mother of the deserted baby to-day leaves him
to strangers or to death for fear of an overwhelming
disgrace. One mother feels the same sorrow as
the other felt. The mother's love, we have every
reason to believe, is exactly the same. A few
years ago when some explorers had entered a
tomb in Egypt, sealed three thousand years before,

FIRST AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 203
they found the marvellously carved sarcophagus
of a little child. This they were about to take
away for a famous museum. Then they paused
to decipher the inscription: thus it read, "O my
life, my love, my little one! Would God I had
died for thee!" Those men instantly uncovered
their heads; tears were on their cheeks. In si
lence they went out and sealed again the tomb.
Nothing should invade that place of love. That
grief of three thousand years ago was as the grief
of a mother in a modern home. It is wise to
pause before we say that the human nature of
the first century was different from that of the
twentieth. We to-day do not abandon children because
they are deformed. We pity them too much.
The ancients did abandon their misshapen infants.
They, too, pitied them too much : they felt that
nothingness was better than a life of torture.
We believe that, since the soul has an immortal
value, it is better to give the poor baby a chance
to fight against hard conditions, that it may live
the more freely in the heavenly country to which
it tends. A difference of belief has given to the
same qualities a different expression. The love
and the pity of the ancient mother was exactly
equal to the love and the pity of the mother to-day.

204 JESUS CHRIST
Another popular comparison is found in the
relative attitude towards woman. The general
ization often made is that woman was then man's
slave; now she is at least his equal. I fear that
for homiletical purposes a wrong emphasis has
been allowed to obscure certain facts. I have
spoken of Sophocles. It is impossible to feel that
Iocasta, Antigone, Clytaemnestra, Electra, and
Deianeira were in different circumstances from
the women of to-day. They had quite as great
influence. If Deianeira was wronged by her
husband, Clytaemnestra was guilty against Aga
memnon. Revelations of recent years do not
allow us to think that women of our submerged
classes are a bit better off than the humble women
were in the centuries just before Christ. The
love of faithful husbands for their wives, the love
of sons for their mothers had exactly the same
depth as to-day. The unfaithfulness and un-
naturalness were then as common as to-day, I
suppose; I am sure not commoner. The bestial
licentiousness of Antioch under the guise of
religion has its modern parallel under the guise
of a certain element in society. Both then and
now the best and most respected condemned
the crimes. The academic training often provides
a more varied knowledge of the first century than

FIRST AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 205
of the nineteenth and twentieth. What might a
future century say of us should it read these
words of one of our bishops: "No wonder to-day
that Christian marriage is being dishonoured by
easy divorce and that common honesty is becom
ing rare — when the whole system of education
is honey-combed with the theory that moral
standards are matters of expediency and not of
religious conviction." 1
Another comparison that is perhaps more im
portant for the immediate subject treats of the
love of the marvellous. The first century, it is
declared, was devoted to miracles, and, therefore,
all agog with credulity; the twentieth is matter-
of-fact, devoted to the orderliness of natural law,
almost a worshipper of science. There is no
doubt that those who are informed stand in awe
of the scientific spirit, but I see no sign that their
love of the marvellous is diminished. No con
versation wins more breathless attention than one
among cultivated people about some unique
incident, all well attested by the honour of the
speaker. Let me name one or two instances.
A woman lost a valuable diamond from a ring;
1 From an address, Education and Religion, by Rt. Rev. T. F.
Gailor.

206 JESUS CHRIST
she searched for it in vain, and at last went to
bed despairing; in the night she dreamed that
she should find it in a crack of the floor in a defi
nite part of the room where she slept. On waking,
the dream was still so vivid that she at once went
to the spot indicated to her in the dream, and
there was the diamond. No known law explains
the phenomenon, but everyone who heard be
lieved that the jewel had been found in this re
markable way. Another woman had a vision that
a friend, who was not known even to be ill, was
being ferried, dead, in a little boat from an island
summer home to the mainland. The vision was
startlingly clear. What she had seen in a vision
proved exactly true, and was happening hun
dreds of miles away at the very moment. This,
too, was beyond interpretation. All listened
eagerly and credulously (for the narrator's integ
rity and accuracy were assured). These modern
women are not different from the wives of Julius
Caesar and Pontius Pilate. The love of the mar
vellous is exactly where it was two thousand years
ago. People with this strange gift are now called
"psychic," and are warned to what elaborate
uses their powers might be put, but prefer
to keep them in abeyance, partly because the
community would class them in an uncanny way,

FIRST AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 207
and partly because they deem a more normal life
happier. So much for the cultivated. When
we turn to the unlettered (a very large proportion
of our modern civilization), we find the love of
the marvellous gigantic, accompanied by a corre
sponding credulity. One needs only to think of
superstitions like the spilling of salt, thirteen at a
table, or the proper way to look at the moon;
or one may remember the little churchyard
shrine in New Orleans with its stack of crutches
left by cripples who have in that miraculous spot
found strength to walk.
Now think of the other side of the picture.
The credulous and the incredulous live side by
side now; they lived side by side in the days of
the Lord Jesus. The document in the New
Testament which, in the estimate of modern
scholarship, most magnifies the miracle is the
Fourth Gospel. In this Gospel is the minute
record of a conversation about a miracle that
reveals the incredulous side of the age. Whether
the Gospel be taken as plain history or as the
dramatic illustration of Christian teaching it
reveals an aspect of the first or early second
century. The conversation in the ninth chapter
between the man born blind and his parents, on

208 JESUS CHRIST
the one hand, and the Pharisees, on the other, is,
if not history, worthy of a genius equal to Shake
speare. It is a lively description of human atti
tudes, which in its essence bears the marks of
verisimilitude. The blind man himself had no ex
planation to offer: he knew only one fact; namely,
that whereas he had been blind, now he saw.
The scientific spirit of incredulous patience in
our age is matched by the religious spirit of in
credulous bigotry in the age of Saul of Tarsus.
One is as proud and self-complacent as the other.
Gamaliel and Saul were quite as dignified and
remote as Huxley and, in his earlier life, Romanes.
People of the rank of Bartimaeus and perhaps
some of the Apostles would in our day be as ready
for miracles as they were in the days of our Mas
ter. People of the rank of Cornelius, the Cen
turion, and Joseph of Arimathea, the Councillor,
were exactly as hard to convince then as now.
From a reasonably varied knowledge of human
nature the pastor dares to say that the miracles
of Jesus, if done now, would have as easy and
as hard a time as they had in the first century.
Human nature is quite the same; and the scien
tific spirit is a very thin veneer to deceive those
who know books better than life. This is not
to say that the records must be read carelessly or

FIRST AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES 209
uncritically. It is to say that they cannot be
dismissed with the easy assumption that they
were written in a time essentially more tolerant
of the marvellous than our own time.
There is a final comparison to which a mo
ment's attention must be given. A great deal
is said about standards of literary honesty in the
first and second century. It is said that what we
should think dishonest was then thought blame
less. This applies to authorship. A man, it is
said, when he had a message, felt that he hon
oured his master by writing in his master's name.
That is a conceivable attitude of an honourable
man, just as we in our time do not accuse of dis
honesty George Eliot or John Oliver Hobbes,
being women, for assuming these masculine
names. Perhaps some misogynist read Adam
Bede because he thought the author a man, but
our age does not accuse the author of deceit;
because no deceit was intended. But when the
modern critic goes on to say that these writers
of the second century assumed St. Paul's name
in order to bolster up some new doctrine or
theory which they knew St. Paul had not taught,
thinking all the time that this was an honest
literary proceeding, the man who knows any-

210 JESUS CHRIST
thing of human nature refuses to believe it. It
is a strange inconsistency that people who can
make intricate distinctions in documents have
no ability to make anything but rough distinc
tions in human nature. People may use tricks
and wiles quite boldly: that is one thing. To
deem themselves straightforward when using
them, is another and altogether different thing.
The apostolic age did not certainly have our para
phernalia for literary judgment, but it did have
quite as keen a sense of honour as the age of Temple
and Harnack. We have our strange devices, they
of those remote times had theirs; but good men
knew an honest act then as good men know it now.
I am sure that modern religious experience may
tell the scholar that he must not approach the
setting of the Saviour's life with any notion that
the human nature then was to any appreciable
degree different from the human nature of to-day.
The man who deals with books only has but a
slender basis for comparison, because literature,
as Goethe said, is only the fragment of frag
ments. But the man who deals with living souls
at first hand has a conviction of what is perma
nently in human nature, and no theory to the
contrary can appall him.

DIFFICULTY OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY 211
III
THE DIFFICULTY OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY
Coming now to the thought of our Lord Him
self, it will suffice if I draw attention to a few
points upon which modern religious experience
has profound convictions. The first of these
concerns the thoroughness of His humanity.
Theology has had a constant battle with the
ancient heresy known as Docetism, by which
Christ is made only to seem to be a man. The
pastor bringing the knowledge of Christ to the
unlearned has met the same persistent difficulty.
When He bids the; sufferer remember the trials
and conquests of Christ, the sufferer answers,
"Oh, do not tell me of Him now: He was divine,
He had resources which I cannot command,
His suffering was not real as mine is." There is
what is called the logical difficulty. If God and
man are not identical, says the logician, then in
so far as Christ is divine, He ceases to be human:
in so far as He is human, He fails to be divine.
That may be convincing to logic; it is not con
vincing to the deepest experience. The little
child, on being told that he has a brother, selfishly
worries lest half of his mother's love will be taken

212 JESUS CHRIST
from him and given to the new child. And logic
seems to be on his side; but a mother's love
transcends logic, and that which was his is still
his undiminished, while his brother has all her
love as well. In some such way Christian
experience feels that the All-Divine is the
All-Human, too, in the Incarnate Son of God.
Modern religious life has been emphasizing
the reality of Christ's humanity. The first strong
note came with a powerful untechnical book,
which sounded and resounded through a respon
sive English-speaking world. The book was
Seeley's Ecce Homo. The timid have always
been afraid that emphasis on the humanity would
destroy reverence for the divinity. But the re
ligious spirit now is sure that love and reverence
go out to Jesus of Nazareth in proportion as His
divinity is recognized as translated into human
terms to the last syllable. There are two marks
of our Lord's humanity upon which all religious
experience is now agreed: the reality of His
temptations and the limitations of His knowledge.
The point of view from which both are approached
is the need of our Lord's identification with
humanity. Religion feels that in His Incarnation
He would not take any advantage over the weakest
of His brethren.

DIFFICULTY OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY 213
There is a good deal in theology which seems
unreal to the man seeking the Saviour because
it is implicitly implied that though "He was
tempted in all points like as we are," He was not
only without sin, but sin was impossible for Him.
It is abhorrent to think that the Perfect Man
could have failed; but if we do not leave that
possibility open we do not see the majesty of His
triumph. Temptations came to Him all through
His life. When He set His face to go up to
Jerusalem there was the record of a genuine
temptation overcome. When, after praying in
the garden that the cup might pass, He said,
"Not my will, but Thine," again He put behind
Him a real temptation. And when, on the Cross,
He conquered His doubt of His Father's love, He
once more met even then the risk of failure. He
did not sin. Religious experience now feels it
both presumption and irreverence to say that
He could not sin. His triumph was beset with
every risk that man can know, because the wealth
and variety of His endowment gave Him the
fullest possible range of incitements. The Gospel
record with its divine frankness can be explained
in no other sense without violence to its evident
meaning. And this frankness touches a sympa
thetic chord in the experience of the man needing

214 JESUS CHRIST
Christ and longing for Him. That man wishes
a Christ who has met what He meets, who has
demonstrated once for all that with all the risk
any man can have He has gained the victory.
Only a Christ who is human in such a way can
convince us that humanity is redeemed. A real
man has banished every temptation. Hence
forth to be human is to be perfect.
Immediately attached to this conception is the
thought of our Saviour's identification with the
sin of the world. We feel this more than ever
because modern religion is increasingly mission
ary. The settlement worker is not content to
carry tracts and jellies to the poor and unfortu
nate, but goes to live in the same street, and as
far as may be in the same house. The foreign
missionary tries to forget his own fatherland that
he may be a member of the nation where his
converts live, that the troubles of the nation may
be his fault, and his to conquer. Well, if Christ's
disciples are inspired to do such things, the Source
must be higher than the stream, — Christ must
have come to be identified with the world's failure
and sin, — He the Man who never failed, who
never sinned. The day He was baptized, He,
having no sin, submitted to a rite which was for
the mystical washing away of sin: so He said it

DIFFICULTY OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY 215
became Him to fulfil all righteousness; that is,
we know, to be absolutely one with His own, even
to bearing their guilt. And when He was dying
He took the poor thief to Himself, — He took him
and his sin. We talk about the Atonement in a
cold theological way, as if it were a hard unreason
able doctrine. We are learning to see all the
Saviour's days fused with sin-bearing, so that
His stainless nature touched the filth of man
kind as His hand touched the repulsive leper,
and by this union of will and of love merged
His life in humanity, till humanity was lost
in Him, and His victory became the human
victory. The other way by which much in theology has
seemed unreal to the modern religious instinct
has been in its elaborate attempts to explain
away what seems, on the surface of the Gospels,
to be the limitation of our Saviour's knowledge.
The strongest outward proof is the Lord's own
word that He knew not the day nor the hour of
the Second Coming. As Dean Church used to
say, if orthodox theologians try to reduce that
sentence to nothing they must not complain
when Unitarians try to reduce words of our
Saviour implying His divinity. But the reasons

216 JESUS CHRIST
of religious experience are apart from exegesis,
and rest upon a need of the human spirit. If the
Incarnate Son of God is Man, — and all thought
that is credited in Christianity says that He is, —
then modern religion has a fixed conception of
one attitude of man: he is not omniscient. He
may grow towards it, just as a very wise person
may with experience and growing wisdom foresee
the inevitable results of certain acts and certain
courses either for individuals or for nations. The
thought arises naturally why when there is a
God-Man we should insist on an attribute of
humanity (limitation of knowledge) and reject
the corresponding attribute of divinity (omnis
cience). The answer gathered from modern
thought is that we feel that God can still
express Himself through limited knowledge,
and that man cannot express himself through
omniscience. That is one of the inner convic
tions of the time which need not and cannot
be put forth as an argument, and yet deserves
respect. There is a corollary that must be put down
here. A limitation of knowledge does not neces
sarily imply mistakes in judgment or prediction.
It is one thing to say that the Day of the Lord is

DIFFICULTY OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY 217
not known, quite another to announce its ful
filment in a thousand years, and have that an
nouncement false by the outcome. I shall speak
of the Parousia a little later, but here it may be
said that religious instinct, apart from scholarship,
prefers to think that the Apostles and Evangelists
were mistaken rather than our Lord, when they
make Him seem to say that He would return
in bodily form within a generation to rule His
kingdom. So this is the place where modern experience
leaves the conviction that the knowledge of Christ
was limited. He had the same handicap that we
have in meeting the dreads and uncertainties of
the morrow. He had to strive against worry and
anxiety, — as we must strive against them.
The morrow had to be left in the Father's hands,
— just as we must leave it. But He who seemed
to His own age and to succeeding ages "without
sin" must, we think, have had that wonderful
exactness of speech by which He said nothing
that He did not accurately know. If His limi
tation of knowledge differed from ours it differed
in this; namely, that He always recognized what
He did not know, while we are prone to leave the
boundary line in the fog.

218 JESUS CHRIST
IV
THE LIGHTHEARTEDNESS OF CHRIST
In no aspect of our Saviour's humanity has
religious experience so radically changed its con
victions as in the proportion of joy to sorrow. So
much of what is best in the religious life has come
through various forms of Puritanism that theol
ogy has tended to become Puritanical and the
place of gayety in religion has been ignored. The
Montanists and the converted Augustine have
made anything that the world does seem pagan.
After Constantine brought the great world into
Christianity wholesale, we are not surprised that
the saints had to assert the sternness of Christ,
lest leniency and joy should rob the Church of its
righteousness. The northern countries with the
chill of their winters found this sadness in Christ
full of sympathy, so that there was reason for
reaching the thought of His natural joy rather
slowly. The gayer southern nations, being wrapped
in the Latin atmosphere, have taken for their
chief mediator with God, the Mother of Christ
rather than Christ Himself, so that to them He
has largely ceased to be incarnate at all. For
all these reasons we find a tendency through much

THE LIGHTHEARTEDNESS OF CHRIST 219
of Christian history to make our Saviour the Man
of Sorrows only, and never the Man of Light-
heartedness. Now the tide has turned. Religious instinct
searches the Gospel narratives to find instances
when Jesus of Nazareth seemed to smile and be
glad. Words hitherto interpreted as invariably
solemn are revolved in the sunlight of life to reveal
the glint of humour. The gravitation of children
to His side and to His touch seems to tell of the
laughter of love. Since we are glad in spite of
trouble and hardship, we instinctively long to
have our Divine Master share the vein of human
gladness which is an inseparable part of honour
able living.
But even if the Gospel gave the seeker less
encouragement than it does give, the religious
experience of to-day would still feel that the
Incarnation demanded a translation of the
divine into human gladness. The keenness of
modern criticism now refuses to call a man normal
who does not have that indefinable attitude
towards life called humour. It distrusts the judg
ment and the essential truthfulness of a man
who looks upon the panorama of daily happenings
with an invariable seriousness. He must extract
from the variety and surprise of them mirth and

220 JESUS CHRIST
joy, as well as sadness and sighing. If he does
not release his nerves from the strain of work and
reflection, one dreads to trust him with any vital
responsibility: he will someway fail to see the
proportion, he will catch at trifles and ignore
mountains. We instinctively fear the man who
does not laugh. It is not the laughter of bitter
ness or cynicism that gives us this assurance of
normal humanity; it is the laughter such as chil
dren know when they rejoice in colour and motion
and the smile of a friend, it is the laughter of pure
lightheartedness. We attach the gift of humour not only to the
normal man; we hold it indispensable also for
the great man. When a man in the course of
history is reputed great, and yet there is no record
of his humour and joy, we instantly infer one of
two things: either those who chronicled his char
acteristics and deeds were stupid, or the man had
such serious defects that we of our time would
refuse to him the title of greatness. Probably
the world might still be thinking that Socrates
was a matter-of-fact person, unaware of the
blitheness of life, had his pupil, who gave the
world his portrait, not been equally a genius with
himself, and so capable of giving us the impression
of the overrunning lightheartedness of Socrates.

THE LIGHTHEARTEDNESS OF CHRIST 221
It is impossible to think the Greatest of Men
lacking in an attribute which, to the modern
mind, belongs to all true greatness.
There is the further conviction that Jesus
Christ ended the dualism of human philosophy,
slow as His followers have been to learn the lesson.
Against the tendency to mark off the secular
from the religious, the glad from the serious, as
distinct and separate compartments of life, the
life of Jesus Christ was a formidable protest.
He of whom it was said that never man spake as
He spake, was also called a winebibber. The
obvious reason for this, it seems to modern
religious experience, was that all life might,
through Him, be brought as an offering to God.
To be glad in the sight of God is as much a part
of devotion as to pray to Him. Some people
think of God only when they are in need, and
consider it profanation to say His Name at a
festival. The highest religious instinct believes
that there is no legitimate function of daily living
with which it is not right and good to associate
God's Name. When years ago a little French
village was in the thraldom of a plague, the citi
zens who were well, marched about the town sing
ing litanies. While they marched, word was
brought that all the invalids had been made well.

222 JESUS CHRIST
At once the mournful litanies were changed to
glad songs, and the slow march was changed to a
dance. And it was all a part of religion. Be
cause by the Incarnation, Jesus Christ made every
inch of human life sacred, an offering to the
Father, therefore we feel that the element of
lightheartedness was in Him with all the beauty
and freedom of eternal childhood.
Again, we know that the man who is light-
hearted, humorous, joyful, is the man of influence.
All sane men abhor the buffoon. They also
abhor the grim person who frightens children,
and around whose presence even the sunlight
seems grey. When the Carthaginian army was
in a hazardous position on the banks of the
Aufidus, Hannibal's staff gathered about him in
dismay. Then in a flash all their anxiety van
ished; for Hannibal laughed. And so they
went out to the victory of Cannae. The laughter
of the loved leader awakened the sense of union
in him and the assurance of the strength in his
buoyancy. Jesus Christ who led the men who
subsequently led the world, had, — religion is
now sure, — that great token of assurance and
influence, lightness of heart, simple and divine
joy. He kept telling them of the tragedy that

THE LIGHTHEARTEDNESS OF CHRIST 223
lay ahead. Yet, one likes to think, the reason why
the disciples were so slow to understand it as they
were, was because He seemed to them to go for
ward to the future with a blithe and even step.
How the world loves and confides in the man in
whom the pathos and the humour lie close to
gether : the laughter breaks through the sobs, and
the dear form of the master looms like a mountain
against the sky, strong and infinitely beautiful.
And one would die for love of him. Such a
Master is Jesus Christ adding to all the other
human attributes of His personality this attribute
of lightheartedness, which, in these days of ner
vous breakdown, has attained the due recogni
tion of its worth, as one of the great gifts of God
for the efficiency of daily life. Religion to-day
knows that Jesus Christ "made merry and was
glad," as in His greatest parable He said was
"meet." V
THE SECOND COMING
No characteristic of our Saviour's humanity has
evoked more intense discussion in recent years
than his prophecy of the Second Coming. He
preached the kingdom to come. To all His dis-

224 JESUS CHRIST
ciples this kingdom seemed an earthly kingdom,
promised by Him within their normal lifetime,
when He would return upon the clouds of heaven
to rule all men, body and soul, as He had ruled
those few men who had understood Him in the
days of the earthly ministry. There are many
difficulties connected with the problem. But the
central issue is whether our Lord expected to
return in this way, or whether His disciples mis
understood His words. Scholars are still debating,
and many are the surprises in the controversy.
Now what is the attitude of ordinary religious
feeling? In the first place, with the conviction
that our Lord's knowledge was limited, it is not
shocked that there should be a discussion. It is
not even prepared to utter threats what it might
do if all scholars flocked to the standards of those
who say that our Saviour was mistaken. His
own word, that He knew neither the day nor the
hour, gives a reason for calmness. If His human
ity required this concession, religious experience
is willing to grant it.
But there are other considerations. The old
explanation that the disciples confused the words
about the Second Coming with the words of gloom
about the approaching fate of Jerusalem, seems
still to religious feeling to have considerable im-

THE SECOND COMING 225
portance. Yet more important is the revelation
to the modern student of the Synoptic Gospels
of the growth of the tradition of our Lord's
apocalyptic utterances.1 It seems evident that
in the document Q, the kingdom is come, though
there are also notes of a future apocalypse. In
St. Mark the ordinary Jewish conception of the
Day of the Lord is enlarged. Then St. Matthew
gathers further details. There is no doubt, then,
that the disciples misunderstood the words of
Christ; but they understood also. For there was
a glorious hope in Jewish apocalyptic literature:
this optimism our Lord certainly used in turning
the faces of His friends to the beautiful future.
He told John's disciples, when they asked whether
it were He who should come, to report what they
saw: this implies that He recognized His Parousia
in the days of Galilee and Judaea. But no
amount of the evolution of literature can take
from Christ's words a future intention. The
kernel of the whole matter lies in the fact that He
did come again in a way which was recognized,
for instance, by the author of the Fourth Gospel
as the way He intended to come. He came
through the Holy Spirit, and was in His Kingdom,
1 Vide Rev. B. H. Streeter's Synoptic Criticism and the Eschato-
logical Problem, in Oxford Studies' in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 426 ff .

226 JESUS CHRIST
the Church, ruling and guiding it. This suggests
a defect in too much of scholarship; namely, that
it tries to find our Saviour's meaning wholly
within an early document, like Q or St. Mark,
and refuses to interpret His sayings in the light
of subsequent history. For St. Paul and the au
thor of the Fourth Gospel have as much right to
a place in the evolution of the apocalyptic words
of Christ as St. Mark and St. Matthew. Religious
experience is sure that the best commentary on
the New Testament is Church History.
There is no need to assert that Christ used
supernatural power when He spoke of the future.
Any man who lives close to God, and cares, can
see what the future holds in store for individuals
and for nations. The vital distinction to make
between Christ's words about the future and the
words of His brethren, is that Christ was evidently
always speaking of the spiritual realities which
underlie the seeming currents of human history:
"My kingdom is not of this world." It seems
in view of His unparalleled influence, invisible
though He is, that He could have meant to return
in no way but the way in which He did return,
— in the power of Pentecost, in the eloquence of
St. Peter, in the philosophy of St. Paul, in the

THE. SECOND COMING 227
courage of Athanasius, in the gentleness of St.
Francis, and in all the other ways in which He
is known to the passing years. No words of
the Synoptic Gospels about the Second Coming
seem so representative of what our Lord said as
the report of Him in the Fourth Gospel which
makes Him say: "It is expedient for you that I
go away, for if I go not away the Comforter will
not come. . . . He shall take of mine and shall
shew it unto you."
Religious experience now, so far as one can
read it in a parish, is no longer looking for a
Parousia. One remembers perhaps an old man
who was wont to shake his head over the crimes
and omissions of the present age, saying, "The
end of the world is near: Christ will come upon
the clouds to put an end to all this." But the
religious leaders to-day are neither saying nor
thinking that. The Parousia has come, and
those who look deep into history see that Christ
has been reigning, as He said, all these centuries.
Of course He has not always been recognized, —
but He prepared men for lack of recognition: He
told how He would be prisoner and invalid and
pauper, and men should minister to Him as they
gave their loving help, unconscious of His near
ness. We pray, "Thy kingdom come," as we

228 JESUS CHRIST
were taught, and we believe each day that the
prayer is answered: some new messenger goes
into the dark and sordid corners of the city, some
new messenger sails out upon the sea to widen
the kingdom through what we call Missions,
some new messenger goes apart to think of Him
that he may tell men who He is, in ways which
men have not before quite understood.
The doctrine of the Judgment inheres in the
doctrine of the Parousia. We sum it up in the
Creed: "And He shall come again, with glory, to
judge both the quick and the dead; Whose king
dom shall have no end." The debate advances
then one stage farther: If Christ has fulfilled His
promise and has come, within the lifetime of His
contemporaries, "upon the clouds of (spiritual)
glory" to reign in His Kingdom, the Church,
for ever and ever, then must not the judgment
also have come? Of course this phrase of the
Creed means exactly what the New Testament
means: the Creed and the Scriptures can in no
way be separated. It may be conceived that
our Lord might be heard to say now, if we should
listen, words like those He said about the return
of Elijah: "Christ verily cometh first, and re-
storeth all things. . . . But I say unto you, that

THE SECOND COMING 229
Christ is indeed come, and they have done unto
him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of
him." It is not impossible that the Judgment
Day is past. Only it has been a reversal of the
Judgment Day of the Jews. "He came unto
his own, and his own received him not," said
the great saint at the end of the first century.
That was the judgment of a nation. But the
world received Him. "The glorious company of
the Apostles," "the goodly fellowship of the
Prophets," "the noble army of Martyrs," all
thronged to praise Him. Then came the secular
world, Constantine and his courtiers. The bar
barians followed. People from the isles and from
dark continents then came. And to-day the people
of old civilizations are bending the knee to Him.
"The judgment is indeed come," and the splendour
and the hope of it men have not dared to guess.
In such words as these I think common religious
intelligence to-day would find the expression of its
belief. And yet we sing with all sincerity, "We
believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge."
The old idea of a Parousia has not been lost, but
has been carried up into a larger truth. With our
idea of eternity, transcending time, we give the
largest ideas a perpetual scope. "The Judgment "
now stands for a sublimer concept than even St.

230 JESUS CHRIST
Paul conceived. It is the sweep of God's hand
over time and eternity, now warning, now bless
ing. It is an event that is in the eternal Now.
We all think of a moment in the future when
all the flow of judgment through time shall be
gathered up for us and we shall see the selves to
which we have attained. And the way we shall
see that transcendent sight is by looking con
sciously into the face of our Saviour and seeing
there His mingled joy and disappointment, — joy
that we have allowed certain traits to grow, dis
appointment that we have fallen below tempta
tions and burdens which He hoped that we should
overcome and bear. In the conscious vision of
that most beautiful and most loved of faces shall
be the fusion and climax of all our judgment.
It shall be high noon in the eternity of Judgment
Day. The correction which religious experience may
give to scholarship in this, as in so many of the
corners and heights of theology, is to "hold fast
to all things"; not to let some slip in holding tight
to others. Experience is so much more generous
than speculation, that we dare to deny nothing
that the past has held in deep moments. We take
the old and the new up together into our thought

THE SECOND COMING 231
of the Second Coming of Christ to judge the
world. We find all that the saints thought in
the past to be true; we dare to believe that we
see a little more; and what the future saints
must see we fain would know, for they will include
all our dreams and the dreams of those before us
with their own best visions, and the end is like
the dreams of us all, only always better.
Religious experience, I may safely say, sees no
reason to think our Lord mistaken when He talked
with His disciples of His Parousia and the Judg
ment. They understood and misunderstood Him.
Nor was the misunderstanding of negation;
rather was it the misunderstanding that comes of
gradual apprehension of the truth, and so the
misunderstanding was an element in their under
standing. Christianity need not apologize for the
chapters of the New Testament which speak of
Christ the Judge. VI
GOD'S CHARACTER IN CHRIST
When we approach the subject of our Saviour's
divinity, it is clear that modern religious experi
ence has a momentous contribution to offer.

232 JESUS CHRIST
Through a good deal of Christian history the
miracles have been counted the chief bulwark of
His divinity. There are difficulties in the thought
of the miraculous, but these difficulties are not
responsible for a change of view. The best
earnestness to-day does not find Christ's divinity
in anything outside the common advantages of
humanity. Perhaps no sentences of recent years
have more capably voiced the present tendency
than these sentences of Moberly's: "The Incar
nate never leaves His Incarnation. God, as man,
is always, in all things, God as man. He no more
ceases, at any point, to be man under methods
and conditions essentially human, than under
these essentially human methods and conditions,
He at any point ceases to be God." 1
It is part of the greatness of Dr. Sanday that he
has been willing to try to utilize modern scientific
theories in the solution of the stupendous prob
lem which tries to tell in what way Christ is the
Son of God.2 With his accustomed caution he
asks whether the subliminal, or subconscious,
self may not have been the seat of the divine in
Jesus Christ. Not only is the boldness of the
suggestion noteworthy, but the effort to meet the
1 Atonement and Personality, p. 97.
2 Christologies Ancient and Modern, pp. 163 ff .

GOD'S CHARACTER IN CHRIST 233
scientist shows the well-tried scholar still ready to
enlarge his system. So far religious experience is
full of praise; when, however, it is asked to say
yes to the query, it turns aside unconvinced.
One can gather from religious experience in
these times the outline of an answer to the hard
question of the way in which God is incarnate in
Christ. It may not be the best answer in history,
it certainly is not a complete answer, but it is an
answer with which theology is already reckoning.
This answer is that it is the Character of God which
we find in Christ. To everything else the re
ligious man is becoming indifferent. He finds
reason, as I shall try to show, for the miracles, but
He does not find God in the miracles. He is
interested in theories of the subliminal self, but
he does not find God there. He .remembers
vaguely the decisions of the early Councils on the
Person of Christ, and he respects them, admitting
their authority and persuasion; but, for the
present, many difficulties seem solved by admit
ting them and passing to a term large enough to
include them. For him the two supreme facts
about Jesus Christ are (1) that He was a man,
with all our frailties, and nevertheless gained the
victory; and (2) that He was and is the Character

234 JESUS CHRIST
of God. He that hath seen the Christ hath seen
the Father. Great surgeons sometimes show their
innate power and character when, in some wilder
ness, far from all their delicate tools, they perform
a dangerous operation with perfect success. So
God in the limitations of humanity displays His
character perfectly. His character was not dis
played, we may believe, in the same way in which
it might be displayed to the people of Mars, if
there are such, because of the difference of their
limitations and conditions from ours; but we are
sure that the same Character would be manifest.
So, too, we think that in His life which He has in
Himself apart from the world, there are many acts
which He does of which the limits of humanity
are, by His will, incapable. But His character is
not shown with more clearness to the angels in
heaven than it was to the crudeness and narrow
ness of Galilee and Judaea in Jesus of Nazareth.
We are slowly learning the value of proportion,
to fix upon the essential centre of the truth, and
with stubbornness to say with the man born
blind, "One thing I know." We do not know
much about omnipotence or omniscience or om
nipresence or infinity or eternity, — all attributes
of God, — but we do know His Character. We
know it once for all in Jesus Christ.

GOD'S CHARACTER IN CHRIST 235
It is sometimes thought that men have less
faith because they have patience with discussions
of the natural and the supernatural, the mirac
ulous, inspiration, and many other profound and
vital convictions of the ages. There may be a
good deal of indifference. There is also an
abundance of faith, — faith which holds so fast
to the Character of God in Christ that it can
afford to wait. For other matters will fall into
their relative places about this central assur
ance; and the ages of greatest faith are always
before us. VII
CHRIST'S ABILITY TO CREATE GREAT MEN
In nothing is the Character of God in Christ
more manifest than in the power to create char
acter in the men who stood about Him. As a
flower of the field is most often trod under foot
unnoticed, yet is more gorgeous than the most
sumptuous pageant of kings, so this uniquely
creative, and therefore miraculous, work of Christ
is forgotten in discussion over such really minor
miracles as the raising of Lazarus. It may yet
be discovered how the dead can be raised to life,
but it can safely be said that no one but Christ

236 JESUS CHRIST
will ever turn an inefficient Simon, good-hearted
but blundering, into a leader of the whole world;
none but Christ will ever turn a fiery John into the
inspiring revealer of the deep things of the spirit,
the practical beggar for high seats in an imagined
Oriental court into the mystic of mystics; none
but He will ever make over a Saul, mad with
negative zeal, confident in his intellectual pride,
into the steady, patient, positive force that turned
a stubborn world empire to the Light. It is, as
I said, conceivable that many of the acts which
we now call miracles might be repeated, but it is
hard to think that any other man could so touch
a dormant humanity as to wake common men into
greater than the world has otherwise known. It
is an act like creation, if it is not creation itself.
Once God breathed into man the breath of life,
and man became a living soul. Then came the
new creation. In Christ, the Character of God,
— that is, God Himself, — breathed into the
living soul the Supreme Character, and the liv
ing soul became Christlike, Godlike, the fire that
kindled the world into power.
That these words may not seem mere ecstasy,
religious experience asks where is the great hero,
past or present, who has been able to mount to a
great height of conquest and leave successors who

CHRIST'S ABILITY TO CREATE GREAT MEN 237
could maintain the conquest. For Christ must
be counted among men of action, not meditating
philosophers. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon had
no successors. They could be geniuses; they
could not create geniuses. The marvel of Christ
is Christian history. Imagine Alexander or
Napoleon saying to any group of men, "Greater
works than these works of mine shall ye do"; feel
its utter impossibility; and then hear the steady
tone of Christ saying these very words to cowering
peasants, in the face of what looked like utter
defeat, — and you have a vision of what Jesus
Christ did. The words were not, in His utter
ance, descriptions, but creative force, — a force
reaching even to this last year in which we live;
for the empire which He started into being is
still rolling up its victories. And the end is
far away. It is useless to say that it is pos
sible for any great man to leave such a posterity
of influence and continuous growth. We can
not imagine another instance. It is the miracle
of miracles.
The proof that these transformations were not
the effect of what we sometimes call "unconscious
influence" is the confident method by which our
Lord trusted His kingdom to the future. He
evidently left not a single written word. He

238 JESUS CHRIST
evidently made no provision even to have His
words recorded. He left no rules. Matters of
organization seem to have been ignored, or rele
gated to the future. The one source of His
confidence for the stability of the Kingdom was
the character which He imparted to His apostles.
The training of the Twelve might better be called
the creation of the Twelve. Because He had
made them greater than great men He could say
on Calvary, "It is finished." There we behold
the overwhelming outcome of the Gospel; yet
men pass it by as if it were ordinary, and mean
time run to and fro with incredulity because some
other events of the records seem to them so
remarkable as to be impossible.
It is quite true that the miracle of this new
creation is difficult to define and to hem in. It
is beyond the region of science. But it lies solidly
within the bounds of history; and can be looked
at with, relatively, the same exactness with which
men gaze at a leaf beneath a microscope. For
it, too, is magnified and brought close, by the in
fluence which comes down to our own day. We|
not only read about it. We feel it. It is part of
our present religious experience.

CHRIST'S POWER OVER LAWS OF NATURE 239
VIII
CHRIST'S POWER OVER THE LAWS
OF NATURE
So at last we come to the consideration of what
are ordinarily called miracles. The records say
that Christ healed the sick, multiplied food,
raised the dead. By a miracle was He born into
the world, by a miracle He transcended death.
No one can think of our Lord to-day without
meeting the objection to the miracle. It may not
be admitted that it is the great question of Christ-
ology, but it is very important. What is the
contribution of present religious experience to
this difficult problem?
It must again be said that religious people do
not employ the miracles as arguments for Christ's
authority. His authority is above and beyond
miracles. Had He never done one miracle, apart
from the creation of character, He would yet be
the Son of God with power. Miracles are, to
the modern saint, incidents, — - flashes as it were
from the central fire. Once convinced of the
central fire, the communication of the life-giv
ing warmth is fundamental; the visible means is
secondary.

240 JESUS CHRIST
The summer of 1911 brought together three
interesting utterances. One was a book by the
Dean of Divinity in Magdalen College, Ox
ford, on Miracles of the New Testament. Mr.
Thompson argued that miracles do violence to
our Saviour's humanity,1 that His divinity is
the clearer without them,2 and that though sci
entists say that they do not deny miracles, only
asking for the evidence, they at heart despise
t anyone who trusts in them, believing that he has
committed intellectual suicide.3 The second ut
terance was the posthumous book of William
James, of blessed memory, on Some Problems
of Philosophy, in which he pleaded for recogni
tion of novelty in causation: life and nature, he
thought, are not always repetition, but include
always surprise.4 The third utterance was an
article by Sir Oliver Lodge on The Christian
Idea of God. This is what this distinguished
scientist says of the region of the miraculous:
"The existence of such a region may be estab
lished by experience; its non-existence cannot be
established, for non-experience of it might merely
mean that owing to deficiencies of our sense
organs it was beyond our ken. In judging of
1 Op. cit, p. 212. 2 Ibid., p. 213.
3 Ibid., p. 6. 'Op. cit, pp. 147 B., 214f.

CHRIST'S POWER OVER LAWS OF NATURE 241
what are called miracles we must be guided by
historical evidence and literary criticism. We
need not urge a priori objections to them on
scientific grounds. They need be no more im
possible, no more lawless, than the interference
of a human being would seem to a colony of ants
or bees." 1
To the man who stands apart from theology,
philosophy, and science, and relies chiefly upon
his experience for his religious convictions, this
assembly of verdicts is instructive. Beginning
with the last, it is hard to share the theologian's
doubt of the scientist's sincerity when he says
that he really has no a priori objection to miracles.
One suspects that if one were a scientific investi
gator one would daily see such surprises as to be
extremely modest in framing general rules. The
scientific philosopher, — for that seems to de
scribe Dr. James, — warned his confreres to hold
their conceptions in solution ready for any neces
sary change that fresh news from their percep
tions might bring. It seems to be, then, only
the abstract philosopher and theologian who de
clares what cannot be accomplished in the realm
of nature. It seems to religious experience that
the man who stands farthest from concrete details
1Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, p. 710.

242 JESUS CHRIST
is most uncompromisingly dogmatic on what can
not happen, and that he who is in the thick of the
concrete is most cautious in setting bounds to the
possibilities of nature. The instinct therefore
which still views the Gospel miracles with an
open mind has the most respectable confirmation
from the only quarter where confirmation is
valuable. The main difficulty with the abstract condem
nation of miracles as real events, is the definition
in which the dogmatic scholar insists upon im
prisoning them, in case he rejects their credibility.1
They are said to be contrary to laws of nature,
or to be performed only by one who is super
natural, or is in league with supernatural forces.
A definition which includes such terms as these
may be a convenient "conception" for alleged
events beyond the understanding of those who
witnessed them, but it always goes too far. When
we think of the Gospel miracles, at any rate, we
must insist upon less definition, and be ready to
put all the acts of our Lord together in one class,
whether they seem to us extraordinary or com
mon, whether they seem natural or supernatural.
1 It is unnecessary to say that the orthodox theologian to-day
does not attempt to describe miracles in this way. He frankly
assumes that they are included under laws unknown to us.

CHRIST'S POWER OVER LAWS OF NATURE 243
They are His acts. Nothing else really matters.
The wide interest shown in Cosmo Gordon
Lang's Miracles of Jesus, an unpretentious book
assuming the miracles and attempting to demon
strate their meaning as illustrating our Lord's
sympathy and love, is a witness to the eagerness
of present religious experience to put all our
Saviour's acts upon the same high level, the
trivial incident as important as the greatest
miracle. It is not in the province of religious experience
to sift the literary documents which record the
events of our Lord's life. That is in the province
of the critic. But religious experience has the
best of rights to stay the hands of the critics
when they form a theory and cut up the Gospels
to fit it. Whether the evangelists called an act
of our Lord a miracle, a sign, or a wonder, is
immaterial. To each event the plain man of
common sense allows only one name, an act of
Christ. It is possible to think that here or there
an act might have been misinterpreted. It is
not possible that such men as we know the evan
gelists by their writings to have been, — honest,
clear-headed, and therefore trustworthy, — could
have gone far in essential details from the exact
account of what happened. The startling fact

244 JESUS CHRIST
that not one miracle is performed by our Lord in
His own behalf, though no evangelist seems to
make a generalization about it, or to see any
especial significance in it, is an important sugges
tion that they tried, at least, to be exact. With
out attempting, then, any literary criticism of
any particular account of a miracle, religious
experience has full cause to be sure that many
of our Lord's deeds were beyond the comprehen
sion both of His own day and of ours.
Again, religious experience sees no reason what
ever for allowing any act of our Lord to be called
contrary to the laws of nature. We hear men
talk of the "laws of nature" as if they were all
written out and placed on file for ready reference.
The law of nature which does well enough to-day
has to be altered to-morrow to include some new
perception which the day has brought forth; and
the most careful generally call the law simply
an hypothesis. If, then, Jesus Christ walked on
water and fed five thousand people and raised
dead people to life, we must say that He did
these things by laws of nature which we do not
understand. His contemporaries thought His
acts of healing exactly as miraculous as walking
on water, feeding the multitude, and raising the
dead. We in late years have reason to think that

CHRIST'S POWER OVER LAWS OF NATURE 245
we see the edges of the law by which the sick were
healed; so we have separated these acts of heal
ing from the other "signs." Why has not relig
ious experience full right to think that some
centuries hence men will have a law by which the
now so-called impossible acts will be framed in
laws of nature also?
Such thoughts make people ask, "Will other
men do what Christ did?" The answer must be
that it is possible. Without taking away from
the thoroughness of humanity we need to reflect
what humanity such as His must be, quite apart
from His Divine Character. As we like to think
that no one so loved the lake and the mountain,
the plain and the valley and the river, so we are
justified in believing that the clearness of His
human nature allied Him with natural forces in a
way beyond all other men. As genius reaches by
one leap the goal which artisans reach only by
slow and severe stages, so the Supreme Man, being
the Genius of the World, must have reached and
passed the stages which inventors and philoso
phers have reached only after ages of labour. This
is the sort of divine gift bestowed on every gen
ius: we have good cause to think that He had it
to the maximum. It is possible to say still that

246 JESUS CHRIST
Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, lived
the Character of God in terms which belong strictly
to human capacity. What human capacity is,
no sane man dares to say.
An objection sure to be brought against this
reflection is that the miracles were to our Lord's
contemporaries signs of His divinity. Even the
author of the Fourth Gospel, selecting the seven
which he thought most illuminating, builds up
thereby his picture of the Son of God. This is
all true. It is equally true that for religious
experience to-day these acts appeal not because
they are exceptional, but because they are
Christ's. In our hearts it means to us vastly
more that He laid His hands on the heads of
little children and blessed them, than that He
raised Lazarus from the dead. For we exult
in the identification of His majesty with child
hood; but when we come face to face with the
raising of men who have finished their course
here, we really do not desire it. We have a glim
mering notion of what God may be doing for
them elsewhere; and we also doubt the happiness
of coming back to die over again. When some
enthusiast comes forth with a nostrum for defer
ring death indefinitely, we catch at it, and then
fall back. Instinctively we see that we want it

CHRIST'S POWER OVER LAWS OF NATURE 247
neither for ourselves nor for those we love best.
Even in St. John's Gospel it is not the long chap
ter recording the raising of Lazarus which men
wish to hear in deep moments. It may seem to
them all true, but there is something truer, more
divine : they demand the words of the fourteenth
chapter, — only words, but revealing a Saviour
and a God of love as no record of a miracle ever
revealed Him.
So, simple religious experience, it seems to me,
with a divine common sense, discounts many
matters which scholars hold important. With
patience it waits for a distant future to give an
answer even a trifle more approximate. With in
stinctive faith it refuses to have any marvel
come between the soul and the Character of God
perfectly shown in Christ Jesus. The miracles
take their place with His other acts, as important,
not more important. All being in the area of
God's infinite laws for humanity, they sum up
His complete manhood. And through it shines
the face of God, the Character of God, in beauty,
perfection, and love.

248 JESUS CHRIST
IX
THE PRESENT CHRIST
It remains to say a few words about the realized
presence of Christ in our own day. Here schol
arship is dumb. It tells of the historical Christ;
it tells of the extension of His influence in history.
Only experience can speak of the Living Christ.
In the course of history we find records of
Christ's appearing to devout and humble souls.
He appeared after His Resurrection to St. Peter,
to the Twelve, to five hundred brethren at once.
Then He appeared to St. Paul on the Damascus
road. To the seer of Patmos He appeared in a
glorious vision. The mystics of all ages, longing
to receive some token of His presence, have seen
Him in dreams and visions. We do not often
speak of our highest moments, but on some lonely
and beautiful hill, with all about us peace, we
lift our hearts and feel ourselves wrapped about
with an invisible Presence, and wonder if the Lord
Jesus may not have come to us. We kneel with
our brethren at the Holy Communion and receive
the tokens of His love, and again we feel that our
wish to feel His Presence opens our spiritual vision
to behold Him. We kneel in prayer at night in

THE PRESENT CHRIST 249
the darkness of our own rooms, and a light that
never was on sea or land shines about us. To
define such consciousness seems sacrilege. Even to
tell it seems profanation. Our hearts burn within
us, and we go on the journey of life feeling that
in some mysterious fashion we have talked with
Him by the way. He becomes more and more
real to us. He is no longer, first of all, an
historical figure. He is a Living Person.
There is a type of religious experience that is
content with this mystic presence and cares noth
ing for the historic Jesus. That is not the highest
type of religious experience. Just as the intensity
of love drives the lover to ask his beloved all
possible questions about the past, so the devout
worshipper of the Saviour craves a knowledge of
what He was to the people of Palestine, to the
early Church, to the saints of mediaeval Europe,
and to the heroes of the last generation. We
need no such news for verification. We need it
only to make our joy complete.
It is love, and love only, that can reveal Him.
We love Him because He first loved us. It is
the essential characteristic of our religious experi
ence. It differentiates it from the highest in all
other ways of serving God, by whatever name He
is called. A great man who combined in a sin-

250 JESUS CHRIST
gular degree the scholar and what we may call,
without cant, the simple Christian, was one day
trying to explain religious attitudes to a Jewess.
"Do you love Moses?" he asked. "Love?" she
faltered; "scarcely that: we Jews reverence
Moses." "Well," said this man of research and
experience, "that is the difference: we Christians
love Jesus Christ."

VI
GOD

VI
GOD
THE scoffer ridicules the man who pretends
to tell his thoughts about God. How,
says the scoffer, can the finite know the Infinite,
how can the imperfect know the Perfect? Relig
ious experience in all its forms, however, is not
daunted by this criticism. There was a time
when John Henry Newman doubted everything
but the existence of God and his own soul. Every
religious thinker, though with a more varied faith,
must recognize that God and his own soul are
for every man the ultimate considerations. He
then stands reverently before the report of the
soaring rhapsodist, and also before the report of
the devout and simple man. There is no man in
earnest who, if he honestly lives his life, may not
tell us some vital truth about God; for in all the
deepest, hardest places of life he and God live
quite alone, and what God says and does in
those supreme moments are the most precious

254 GOD
records of humanity. We need not fear pre
sumption, then, in attempting to put down what
religious experience has found out about the Most
High. I
THE INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF GOD
All arguments to prove God's existence seem
mockery. They are like arguments to a child
that his mother is his mother. The arguments
seem inadequate and worthless, not because they
are not good, but because every man has in him
an assurance that exceeds all arguments: he has
felt God. No record of modern times is more
eloquent than that of the child, blind, deaf, dumb,
whose instruction in religion was held back by
the one person who could communicate with her,
till she was passing over the age of childhood into
youth. Then a great religious teacher was brought
to tell her, through the interpreter, about God.
The child listened breathless. When the lesson
was over, she said, "I have always known Him, —
only I didn't know His Name." God to the re
ligious person is known so directly and instinc
tively that arguments to prove His being seem
intrusive and irreverent. If an unbeliever asks
questions and demands reasons, no reasons can

THE INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF GOD 255
be given. The only way to convince an unbe
liever is to bring him into God's presence cham
ber, — which is prayer, — and there leave him
alone with God. If the unbeliever honestly enters,
God will then speak for Himself.
So it is prayer which is the test. If a man, let
him call himself what he will, has ever lived who
never prayed, religious experience cannot imag
ine him. The man who in agony cried, "0 God,
if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul,"
touched the pitying hand of God. The man who
physically or spiritually feels the deep waters
covering him, cries out instinctively, "O God,
my Father, help!" Saved, he may repent him
of his fear and superstition. But there is the
record. Out of his flinty heart came the instinct
to pray. Religion dares to think that God so
yearns for men that He plants the desire in him
who spurns all things divine.
A Canadian bishop 1 has told of meeting a man
in the western plains who because of some
bitter experience vowed that he would not pray.
For seven years he tried to shut his life from God,
and no prayer rose from his heart or mind. Then
in desperation he threw his vow to the winds, and
again he prayed. "And how did it seem," asked
1 Most Rev. S. P. Matheson.

256 GOD
the bishop, "not to pray?" "Oh," answered
the man, "those seven years were seven years of
hell." So real is God to the man who once has
prayed, however and for whatever reason he
stop his prayers.
Religious experience now as in the days of
Jacob knows that God must be sought. We
know that men in whom is the instinct to pray
allow that instinct to lie dormant through the
rush and swirl of the modern world. Business
and engagements and pleasure jostle one another
so hard that day follows day with no thought of
God. As I write these words my eye falls upon
this testimony of an English university under
graduate who had volunteered for the South
African War: "I learned to pray in South Africa,"
he said. "You see, I was on sentry-go a good
deal at night, alone in the dark, with nothing to
do but keep a lookout, and think. And the stars
looked so wonderful out there." At last, in other
words, the pressure of the world was removed,
and he entered into the presence chamber, and
there was — God.
It is encouraging that in a time when reasons
were never so sharply demanded for other depart
ments of life, when criticism is most insistent and
lynx-eyed, that the recognition of God should be

THE INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF GOD 257
left not to the reason alone, but to the whole man.
Feeling and will and the power to act are joined
to the reason, and so there is the sum of the per
sonality reaching out with instinctive, and there
fore authoritative, confidence for God.
II
WHY GOD MADE US
Many problems insoluble to philosophy seem
to have a natural simplicity to the man who has
communed with God. Having become convinced
that God cares for the individual life, religious
experience asks boldly why God made men, —
and then presumes to give the answer. It is an
answer which rests upon the affections, and,
though reaching up to the intelligence, must have
its primary authority in the heart.
Having felt God's love, religious experience
makes love the starting-point, and declares bluntly
that God's reason for making the world was to
win a larger field for His love. He wished to make
creatures whom He could love, and who could and
would love Him. The scientist would call that
an hypothesis. We are quite content to call it
such, and straightway fall to asking how it ex
plains the known facts of life. In the language

258 GOD
of the day we may apply to it the pragmatic
test. In the first place it explains the instinct, which
is recorded in the Book of Genesis, that we are
made in God's image. It justifies the poet whom
St. Paul quoted at Athens, when he said, "For
we are also his offspring." It gives reality
to St. Augustine's immortal rapture, "Thou
hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless till they rest in Thee." It gives the
poet assurance to continue his anthropomor
phism, knowing its inadequacy, yet sure of its
true core of meaning. Above all it makes us
ready to receive the teaching of Christ when He
bids us say, "Our Father." God has made us
in a nature so near to His own that, by His grace,
we can be more than friends, even His children.
The second fact explained by this hypothesis
is human freedom. However difficult theology
and philosophy may find the antinomy of pre
destination and free-will, ordinary religious ex
perience is certain that the will of man is free.
God, we assure ourselves, wishes neither slaves
nor machines, however perfect; He longs for
those who choose Him of their own motive.

WHY GOD MADE US 259
Though His love comes out to us in many ways,
though He gives us laws, as hedgerows between
which to walk with Him, yet He never compels
us to love Him. He evidently wishes us to find
out for ourselves, by experience, that, in the words
of the Westminster Catechism, the chief end of
man is "to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for
ever." He yearns, He persuades, He meets us
with joy if we but turn a little towards Him; but
even He who made us stands at the door and
knocks : He will not force an entrance. We are
free to choose or reject Him who first chose us.
We are for ever free.
There is one other hard fact explained by the
hypothesis that God made us to have us choose
Him as our Friend. That is the fact of evil in
the world. The shortest and most comprehen
sive definition of evil is that it is rejection of God.
He who has will and light enough to put God
absolutely first can, while firmly in that mood,
do no wrong. Some have the will but not the
wit, and slay Stephen, Servetus, and others, in
pious ecstasy. Others have the wit, but not the
will, and stand aside to rest or play, while poor
dust-covered heroes march up the road to a
heavenly victory. The wit and the will must be

260 GOD
joined, else evil will come. And evil is unhappi-
ness for ourselves, for our relatives and neighbours,
and for the strangers whom our evil deeds at last
attack. Philosophy asks why some other device
would not have done as well. Religious experi
ence has no answer to that question, but surmises
that God willed to have the choice a real choice.
By finding the alternative sufficiently bad, men
may come to see that they are missing the happi
est. It seems as if the most dangerous hell would
be the moderately good which should make men
content to leave the Best unattained. The
people of theories who do not touch life in its
hardest places and in many people, would like to
see evil whittled down to some shadowy phantom,
which would scare but not bite. The pastor
who loves souls and sees God's love as the prize,
does not shrink from admitting the full horror
of evil. "Flee from the wrath to come" and
"The kingdom of heaven is at hand," are the
complementary notes of all the real sermons that
ever have been preached. The fiercer and hotter
evil is, the kinder is the God who permits it to
be; for so He made the alternative definite; so
the education of man passes through stages of
which probably our life here is but an early grade;
so free men are allowed to experiment in life that

WHY GOD MADE US 261
at last they may find their ultimate happiness in
a mutual love with the Highest.
Then there is sorrow, — what place has the
hypothesis for that? Much in sorrow may be
attached to what we call the natural course of
events. The earthquake, the storm at sea, the
lightning, the tidal wave, the drought, all are
examples of the havoc that may be wrought to
bring wretchedness to human beings. Then there
is death lurking in every family to take away
young or old, sooner or later, with an awful
fatalism: the survivors wrack their brains to
discover what they might have done differently
to avert the disaster, but honestly they find no
cause within their power. Theology and philoso
phy have tried hard to rid God of the responsibil
ity of sorrow and trouble; but religious experience
knows that God is willing to accept it as His.
Religious experience knows this because when
small difficulties smite us, we have recourse to
books, or nature, or friends; but when the blind
ing sorrow draws upon us, dense and black, books
and nature and friends are all mere makeshifts.
We are lost, deserted. Then we demand help,
when help seems impossible, and the demand is so
real, so deep, that we are suddenly aware that we

262 GOD
have God. Reasons and explanations are sec
ondary. The outstanding fact reveals to religious
experience that sorrow and trouble are doors that
open to such profound places in life that God
alone is sufficient to enter them with us. There
upon, even in this life, religious experience,
without abating one jot of the grief, dares to
thank God for the agony which has brought the
soul to know the consolations and the pity and
the love of God. It steals over one's imagination
that as the lover seeks his beloved through all
resistances and difficulties, through anxiety and
doubt, and in the end finds the united life so
resulting the sweeter for these obstacles overcome,
so the soul's union with God is won through hard
quest, beset with sorrows and watchings and the
searchings of doubt; and the peace that God
gives is the more secure because He has truly
been won by the soul. The soul has bought God
with a price, and by so much is made ready to
know the inestimable value of the love to which
it has attained.
It will seem sometimes that even in prayer God
fails to give His beloved child any answer. The
only answer God cares to give is Himself: of that
religious experience is sure. We ask for things;
often these God denies; but still the prayer is

WHY GOD MADE US 263
answered. For if the man who prays is wholly
attentive, he becomes aware that God is saying
No. And God's No is an answer to prayer, be
cause in the No He gives Himself, and the soul
can aspire to the joy of doing or accepting what
a moment ago was bitter and revolting. The
perfect example of this experience was the Sav
iour's prayer in Gethsemane. Our Lord prayed,
"Father, let this cup pass from me": that, we
know, was a real prayer for the Cross to fade away.
But the Father said No to that prayer. And
quickly the new prayer was born, "Father, not
my will, but thine, be done." We must imagine
exultation and not depression in that unanswered
petition, since it was denied in a lower sense to be
answered in a higher. God, in denying it,
and giving Himself, bestowed upon Jesus Christ
to endure the Cross, despising the shame, for
the joy that was set before Him. So even us,
the little brothers of Jesus, poor and weak,
through anguish and prayer, God brings to His
love, and finds in us the marvellous capacity
of receiving Him.
This rapid review of certain deepest subjects
in thought might seem unjustifiable were it not
that only by a condensed grouping such as this,

264 GOD
can one hold the hard facts of life strongly to
gether in the urgent question why God made the
world. Theology will have other and valuable
suggestions and speculations; but, with this naive
assurance, religious experience is willing to face
the evil, trouble, and sorrows of life without con
sternation. Through all, God's hand becomes
visible. In admittedly strange ways His hand is
seen, tenderly seeking His beloved. He is long
ing that His beloved seek Him. And we trust
that in the end He shall not be disappointed.
Ill
GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD
Theology has taught that in the plan which
God had for the world there existed from the be
ginning the outgoing love which should result in
His sending His only -begotten Son. To this
teaching religious experience has given its hearty
assent. The world of men might or might not
choose the good and neglect the bad; in any case
we cannot think that God's love could have
stopped short of the Incarnation in order that,
whether good or bad, all men might feel the com
pleteness of the relationship which God longed to
have exist between Himself and His creatures.

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 265
The relation of Christ to the Father has been
the most absorbing problem in Christian theology;
and though in its theological form it passes the
comprehension of religious intelligence, it yet
enters largely into religious experience. A lay
man sometimes feels that in the recurring seasons
of the Christian year the preachers of the Church
dwell too exclusively upon Christ, and do not
always make it clear that "God is all in all."
There is the instinctive feeling that the words of
Jesus, "The Father is greater than I," must be
harmonized with the conviction of the Church,
founded also upon words of Christ, that He is the
co-eternal, co-equal Son of the Father. Christ is
still revealing God in Himself with authority;
he that hath seen Christ hath seen the Father;
but the Father is always beyond.
A great deal of earnestness is expended to-day
on the thought of the way in which God sent
His only-begotten Son into the world. There are
many who explain that on idealistic grounds the
Virgin Birth is not a fitting means of the Incarna
tion. They plead that God would be more likely
to allow every natural law to have its free course,
and that through a wholly natural birth He would
bestow the gift from on high which should make

266 GOD
Jesus, the son of human parents, to be indeed the
unique Son of God. The weak point with all
this reasoning is that it does scant justice to
historical records. The delicate literary question
why the Virgin Birth should be recorded in only
two of the Gospels, and passed over in silence by
the two great theological writers of the New Testa
ment, St. Paul and the author of the Fourth
Gospel, will still be discussed; yet to the religious
man standing aside from the discussion there
seems just now an increasing strength to the
witness to the fact in the New Testament and in
the Church. The question of a priori fitness seems
then to the plain man beside the mark. And
whether a man finds it difficult to accept it or not,
religious experience wonders how any man dares
to deny it.
The main duty before religious experience is to
apply the pragmatic test, and see what difference
the Virgin Birth makes to one's thought of the
Incarnation. I throw out a few rapid sugges
tions. (1) May it not help us to feel that even
the humanity of Jesus was a new creation? We
are prone to forget that every birth is supernat
ural: it is a creation. If God was to add to the
life of man, is it strange that He should introduce
a new element? If He should do so, that birth

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 267
would, strictly speaking, be as natural and as
supernatural as any other birth. All one could
rightly say of it, is that it was different. (2) May
not the Virgin Birth help us to see that the ma
terial universe has a meaning? There is not spirit
in one place, and matter in another; but every
where spirit and matter are expressing one reality.
It is all very well to say that God does not need
to use material means. We have a vulgar notion
that it would be more God-like to let everything
in such a transcendent event go in the ordinary
outward course, and then by a mere fiat God
could make the difference. But we are slowly
learning that every outward manifestation means
something. If then the new creation was to come
into the world, there must be the material evidence
of it fresh from the hand of God. (3) Further,
should not religious intelligence begin at the other
end of the story? What did this new creation,
Christ Jesus, become? Two unique facts stand
to His credit: He was sinless, and He has ruled
the world for centuries with a sway that daily
grows in power: the men who conquer are His.
When you discover an entirely new train of events,
and when you believe that the bodily aspects
count upon the spirit, you are driven to expect a
quite new force in nature at the inception of such

268 GOD
a series. (4) A final suggestion is this: if there
were no record of a Virgin Birth, if there were no
phrase including it in the Creed, if no one had ever
thought of it, would there not be, in this age of
eagerness to find due cause for events in life, a
respected school of thinkers setting forth hypoth
eses of ways in which the life of Jesus Christ had
been started into the flow of human history? The
Virgin Birth might never be one of these hypoth
eses, but the introduction of some theory positing
a new force from God would, it seems to me, be
inevitable. This suggests the central meaning
of the recorded fact. To be worried over the
exact details of a process all beyond our compre
hension is bad thinking, whether we are theolog
ians or plain religious men. The main duty is to
see the great truth for which the incident stands,
whereupon the incident will deliver its meaning
and be lost in the larger story. Religious experi
ence is awaiting fuller interpretations of the way
in which God sent His Son into the world,
and stands by the ancient records, modestly,
expectantly. There is a heresy called Patripassianism, in con
demning which the early Church declared that
the Father did not suffer in the tragedy of the

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 269
Eternal Son. This is a heresy with which relig
ious experience has to-day a close affinity. Much
of the popular theology of our day comes close to
it. We say that God suffers with us in our sor
rows and troubles. We think that as the Son of
God died upon the Cross, the Father, loving more
than earthly father ever can love, must have
suffered more than the Saviour Himself. The
appeal to love that suffers is searching; but
religious experience is tending to recede from this
popular tendency and to return to the estimate
of the early Church. The avenue of this return
is through the simple appeal to the relationship
of father and child. Imagine a man who had
blessed his son and sent him on a perilous journey
for his country's honour; imagine the letters bring
ing news of suffering for the son and abundant
tokens of the success of his mission. In general,
the father knew that that for which he had sent
his son forth was being accomplished through the
whole life of his son, given in spite of every risk
and every grief for the cause. What is that
father's emotion? In what direction does his
parental sympathy go? Is it in sorrow for his
son's sorrows? Certainly not; for those sorrows
are the price he pays for victory. The father then
even exults in the sorrows because they bear

270 GOD
witness to his son's innate heroism. The father's
mood is one of sorrow transcended by joy, because
the life he loves best is made to live to a glorious
purpose, and death is swallowed up in victory.
That seems to religious experience a valid though
wholly inadequate illustration, which if carried
from imperfect human fatherhood into the perfect
fatherhood of God must mean a joy because of
sorrow. The Cross which meant the sorrow of
the Son, was the instrument which, to religious
imagination, meant the supreme moment of joy
to the Father. The highest joy is made up of
elements that seem strange to careless thinking.
There is another aspect of the overcoming of
Patripassianism. The people who lean to Patri
passianism are, strangely enough, the people who
have not had the deepest sorrows. They live in
a serene aloofness from turmoil. Those who
really come to deepest waters, over whom the
storm crashes most wildly, long not so much for
sympathy as for the assurance that at the heart
of the universe there is peace, where the wicked
cease from troubling. One wonders if the reason
why our Lord cried upon the Cross, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was not
so much because He feared that God took no
heed, as because He feared that the Father, too,

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 271
might be overwhelmed in the same agony. When
one is drowning one longs not for another to
drown too, but for a stronger, who can reach
down from above and pull one from the depths.
Religious experience, remembering the sorrows
of Christ, demands when passing through its own
tragedies, to feel that the Son of God is all under
standing and sympathy, and also to feel that the
Father ignores the trouble and points only to the
joy into which He plans to receive the scarred and
battered soul at the last.
Still I do remember a woman who had passed
through the multiple experience of sorrow, ex
pressed by a drunken husband, consequent pov
erty, bodily pain, and bereavement. She was
urged to read cheerful books, that in the absorp
tion of the story she might forget her own ills.
"I do not like cheerful books," she said with a
weary smile: "I like only the sad ones." One or
two comments might be made upon this. First,
it was easier to bear the even trend of hardship
than to forget it and come back to it with a con
trasted sense of its dreariness. Then, besides,
there was no assurance that the joy was ultimate :
it was only a phase of life caught in the net of the
novelist. And finally there was behind all, the
craving for sympathy in the sense that all life had

272 GOD
pain in it. So, in spite of seeming inconsistencies,
it may be interpreted as a longing for Patripassian
ism. I note the incident as frankly as possible,
believing it typical of a minority of suffering hu
manity. The great majority long for the assur
ance that in spite of the mass of calamity the
centre of life is peace, "the beginning and the end,
victory." Perhaps it would be safe to say that religious
experience looks to the Son for sympathy, to the
Father for the confidence of eventual success in
the struggle. We might say that mediate sym
pathy is posited of the Son; and ultimate victory
of the Father. For ultimate can, strictly speak
ing, be spoken only of the Father. Thus in
the Godhead we attain what all good men, in
varying degrees and proportions, desire of the
highest. This leads to the final thought in the relation
of Christ to the Father. This joy, one might say,
would be quite natural for the victorious Son, but
what shall one say in view of the tragedy of sinful
men who remain still in their wickedness? Christ
suffered and conquered through His sufferings.
Do not other men suffer and fail? The only
answer comes in what theology means by the

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 273
Atonement. The doctrine of the Atonement, as
put forth at different times, has often a hard
sound to the religious intelligence. Religious ex
perience reaches its meaning to-day through an
undogmatic approach. The first fact evident is
that religious experience now is singularly assured
of its salvation. People are not ordinarily wor
ried about the final condition of their souls. They
may be indifferent; but even when men are
neither indifferent, nor callous to their sins, they
have a confidence which would have perplexed
the congregation at Northampton in the days of
Jonathan Edwards. There may be an unfortu
nate side to this startling confidence; there is also
an encouraging side. It assumes that humanity
is becoming conscious that it has been brought
into right relationships to God. From this
patent fact one may go back step by step to the
Cross. Whether all men who have the confidence
know it, certainly religious men know that their
confidence has its beginning there. For the
Christ who died on the Cross was not more the
Son of God than He was man. He was man with
the power of a new humanity. God had made
man to put aside all that was less than God, and
to love God all in all. For the first time in history
man had fulfilled, to the last moment, that for

274 GOD
which man was created. The victory of the Cross
was God's victory, and it was in exactly the same
proportion man's victory. The only difference
was this: God's part in it was the expression of a
love which had been from the beginning; man's
part was the expression of a love which was in
that instant first attained in all its fulness. There
had been wavering efforts, more or less successful,
and God had called the men who made them His
friends. But in Christ mankind turned the hard
corner, and emerged — perfect. As no man liveth
to himself and no man dieth to himself, so the
Son of Man lived and died only as an inseparable
part of humanity. The sin besetting every man
was conquered by Him, and every man in Him
shared, by his community in Christ's humanity,
Christ's human victory. The Atonement may
mean infinite blessings which no man can fathom;
it is sufficient now to point out this blessing of
which religious experience in our day has laid
hold. We scent, as never before, the victory in
humanity. The reason is that, consciously or
unconsciously, we lay claim to the humanity of
which that Man was part who first loved God as
God loved Him. And so the plan of God came
full circle: He made men to love Him; and one
Friday a Man paid the price, and loved God with

GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD 275
all His life. Before this, only God loved enough.
Now man and God are friends by a love that is
mutual. IV
THE ETERNAL CHANGE IN GOD
There is one idea that religious experience is
groping to express in these days which falls
athwart a conception of past theology. Theology
is wont to speak of the unchangeableness in God;
and religious instinct is obliged to accede to the
necessary truth in the thought. But with this
concession, the tendency of the time is expressing
a feeling, however illogical, that there must also
be perpetual change in God. Without denying
one truth, religion in its most vital forms demands
the other. As we find our own happiness in
change and growth, we feel that our experience
is but a faint reflection of some complete process
in God. Doubtless an historical experience may
be obliged to adjust and correct our experience
of a particular period. But it is worth while to
ask if the tendency may not have an intimation
of a truth not hitherto grasped by theology.
We are accustomed both on the part of theology
and on the part of science to hear much of laws.
The reason given for them is that God is a God of

276 GOD
law. Many people stop there, and God for them
is only Fate. If one begins with the principle
that God is love, laws immediately take a second
ary place. We think of laws as not necessarily
part of God's nature, so much as they are aspects
of His consideration for us, in the process of edu
cating us for His friendship. This may seem a
wild surmise, but it must be admitted as possible.
When a learned man declares, "This God cannot
do," he seems to the simply religious man sacri
legious. No mortal has right to say such words
of God. God can do anything. The laws He
made He can unmake. Of course it is quite
another matter whether He will or not. But the
highest news religious experience yet has of God
is not law but love. If ever love needs the tran
scendence of law, law shall be transcended, we
dare to think. Incidentally this is the view of
childhood. "Do you mean," asked a child who
was told of God's subjection to His own laws,
"that if He ties a knot, He can't untie it?" That
query of childhood strikes deep. The durability
of law depends upon the end for which aspiring
humanity believes it was created. People some
times put caprice over against law. Caprice is
only one alternative. The real opposite is love.
If the infinite wisdom sees a day in which laws

THE ETERNAL CHANGE IN GOD 277
block the way to love, that day laws must vanish.
Perhaps no such day is possible. The mere
thought of it is enough to put laws in their place.
It is hard for religious intelligence to believe
that God would endow men with freedom without
committing to their future an element which even
He willed not to know. To leave any part of the
lives of those whom He loves in doubt is certainly
to leave open a way for surprise. Free will is
incomprehensible on any other grounds. Part
of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repents
is due to the uncertainty, the element of unex
pectedness. We do not necessarily rejoice in
the coming of the morning after the night. If the
morning is cold and wet we are depressed. If the
air sparkles, if the sun is bright, if the birds sing
among the branches, if the hills are beautiful on
the far horizon, then we rejoice. Life is richer
that day for the surprise of the morning. So
high a quality we think must be reflected in some
way from the life of God : we believe in our hearts
that God has His noble surprises.
But the opportunity for surprise means con
stant risk. Once you admit that God desires
the love of men by a free choice, the element of
compulsion is removed. God does not desire, we

278 GOD
say, mechanical dolls, however clever at walking
and talking. He desires men who do right not
because they must, but because they will. As
the concept of God as an Oriental monarch fades
and the concept of God as a Father grows clearer,
we see the risk which He took in making us.
Failure was possible. Those who venture to
imagine races on other planets of the universe
speculate whether perhaps they may have come
to the end of the divine experiment in failure.
That is a legitimate speculation. The only thing
one can say is that the possibility of the glad sur
prise is worth the risk of ultimate failure. As
for our own planet it has not failed.
Religious experience is seeing more and more
in our Lord's definition of greatness in the king
dom of heaven, when, by a living parable, He set
a little child in the midst of His disciples. It is
difficult to keep from thinking that this implies
that at the heart of the universe there is the spirit
of eternal childlikeness. A daring writer has
suggested that, as a child clapping his hands for
joy, the Creator joyfully watches the revolving
planets with their constantly recurring days and
seasons. The child's untiring love of repetition
may be the subtle suggestion why God's world is

THE ETERNAL CHANGE LN GOD 279
a world of law. The idea is fanciful, but by no
means irreverent. Men are no longer shocked as
they once were by the thought of God's laughter:
too many devout spirits have expressed confi
dence in the idea.
"Methinks in Him there dwells alway
A sea of laughter very deep,
Where the leviathans leap,
And little children play."
What would shock the religious temperament is
any suggestion that God could laugh at our
pomposities, our strut and swagger, as we go to
and fro in the earth. That is the laughter of the
cynic, the unsympathetic stranger, void of the
music of love. It is neither kind nor glad. If
God laughs it must be as the father laughs with
his dearest child, the laughter of sympathy and of
an overwhelming pity, as we His children try to
do our good works, and as we try, in our awk
ward way, to understand Him. God's laughter has
only the note of joy, the joy that befits the child-
likeness and trust of His omnipotent love. His
interest in us, we think, is so intimate and con
stant that He rejoices in every pathetic effort
which we make to respond to all His goodness.
Where we fall short without sin, because of im
petuosity or ignorance, may we not believe that

280 GOD
there is no solemn record against us, but only
the smile of encouragement. This is all anthro
pomorphic, and stands for a reality beyond our
understanding, but in the childlikeness of God,
religious experience has discovered what we may
term a necessary idea, which theology may some
day develop into a stately doctrine.
The thought of change or growth in the life of
God culminates in the victory of Jesus, when,
through the perfection of human love in Him,
the Complete Life of God received the joy of
humanity as part of itself. Theology balks at
the intimation that what is already perfect could
receive enrichment. In so far as theology takes
such a position, it thereby holds to a frigid logic,
and does violence to life. A dead perfection is
finished. A living perfection must grow, and
when the perfection is in its nature infinite, the
growth must be infinite. No tangling of logical
necessities ought to blind us to this fact, which
seems abundantly clear to practical experience
in the life reflected from God's life. All in all,
therefore, we cannot say that God received the
victory of Christ unchanged. We rebel against
the hideous concept that a suffering Son of God
converted an angry Father into a God of love.

THE ETERNAL CHANGE IN GOD 281
We believe that He was infinite love from eter
nity, and Christ but expressed His love. But
man hitherto had not loved, and when in Jesus
man attained to a love that satisfied even God's
severest longing, that moment God received what
He had desired, but had not as yet attained.
Humanity that instant became His friend on
equal terms of intimacy, able to give as well as
to receive. As a human father is aware of an
addition to his inmost soul in the triumph of his
child, so, in some mystical and intense way, we
believe that the life of the Most High was en
riched by the admission of a perfected humanity
into the bonds of an eternal friendship. The
risk of failure till that moment beset His plan for
the race which He had made. The life of Christ
is not understood till we admit that even He
might have failed. Temptations beat against
His soul but made no scar. When the risk was
past for Him, it was in process of being past for
humanity also, because He is the crown of hu
manity; and, the victory being won, He made in
Himself the offering of human love to God, and
God received the gift into the life of the Godhead.
With what joy that gift was received we cannot
comprehend. But we must imagine it. We
cannot conceive that even God was unchanged

282 GOD
by it. The love that had been complete must
have burst the limits of perfection and set the
new boundary of love. The suggestion is full of
baffling difficulties, but these are for theology to
overcome. One hears the philosopher making his
protest: "God's relation to time cannot be merely
our own present human relation. We expect what
is not yet. But if God is God, He views the future
and the past as we view the present. . . . What is
future is, from the Divine point of view, a presen
tation. Time is in God, rather than is God in
time." 1 One recognizes excellent theology in
such words; but one intimate with the life of
religious experience still feels that theology is not
at liberty to ignore this modern tendency to see
even in God the joy of growth from glory unto
glory. Both ideas must some way be true.
V
GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT
The time through which we have just passed
has been remarkable for its revelation to the
religious intelligence of God's immanence. The
eighteenth century emphasized God's transcen
dence so nearly exclusively that He was thought
1 Dr. Josiah Royce, WiMam James and other Essays, pp. 262 f.

GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT 283
of by a leader in thought as a watchmaker who
had made the watch, and then, withdrawing to his
far-off state, had left the instrument to get on as
best it might from such a divine start. That was
an age of deists. Among a good many people in
our day, when the pendulum has swung to the
other extreme, there have been theories to explain
that God is altogether immersed in His world, and
has no life outside its energy. And so there are
the many forms of pantheism. These terms sound
as if the thinking that lies behind them must be
confined to profound students; but the attentive
observer knows that they lead to the vagaries
and hopes and fears of the plain people. What
possible contribution, therefore, can religious
experience to-day bring to the solution of the
world-old problem of immanence and transcen
dence? Modern life shows great movements of
action and thought which find their ultimate
significance in the bearing which they have upon
the concept of God as both immanent and tran
scendent. The largest modern experiment is democracy.
It starts from the idea that the voice of the people
is the voice of God. It implies that as divine
justice is incarnate in humanity, there is more

284 GOD
justice in the combined rule of the all than in the
selected, hereditary, or anointed rule of the one
or the few. There are those who grimly judge
democracy already a failure, fit only to be cast
out among outworn civil experiments; but the
great leaders of democracy are in no mood to listen
to such pessimism. God is recognized as safely
lodged in all His people. But not all of God is
there. The highest spirits hold something more
authoritative than the voice of the people, even
of all the people acting together; and this some
thing is symbolized by the words, "I ought."
The man who says "I ought," faithful democrat
though he be, hears a voice beyond the authority
resident in the world: he hears the transcendent
voice of God. He says with St. Peter, "Whether
it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto
you, more than unto God, judge ye." And
democracy, whatever its temporary wrath, holds
the man who stands out against it on such
grounds to be a hero, and, if he suffers, to be a
martyr whose blood is seed for the greater
democracy which is to be. Those who study the
outward government of the world see the steady
march towards democracy, which stands for God's
immanence; at the same time the supreme au
thority is recognized by the individual soul, which

GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT 285
cries, "I must," and men thus know that God is
also transcendent.
The problem is also approached from the
ecclesiastical side in the wane of two related tend
encies in the Church. Among the more thought
ful there is the movement away from Latin
thinking, whether it is expressed in the Decrees of
Trent or the Institutes of Calvin, and a return to
the more commanding thinking of the early Greek
Fathers. This movement has had its expression,
in a popular way, in the revolt against what for
convenience we may call Puritanism. There is
one root difficulty which modern religious experi
ence finds both with Latin thought and with
Puritanical thought. Both of them make part of
life secular. The Puritan scorns to think of holy
days, and the setting apart of chancels as partic
ularly holy. But while doing this he is apt to feel
that certain rather adroit practices are legitimate
on Monday, — the separation between Monday
and Sunday being conveniently and shockingly
wide. The outward forms of Latinism and Puri
tanism are quite dissimilar; the inner spirit
is quite the same. Both make a distinction
between the secular and the religious. This
distinction is more and more irrational to the

286 GOD
religious experience of to-day. In the middle of
the last century a Scotchman preached a sermon
before the Queen on Religion in Common Life.
This sermon, which would now seem commonplace,
marked an epoch and called to the wiping out of
the word secular in religion. For all life, we now
know, belongs to God.
Side by side with this tendency has been the
religious revolt against various forms of panthe
ism. With the popular rejection of the secular
as apart from the religious, there have come the
crude and unbalanced theories that God is the
world as we now see it. This sooner or later
identifies God with the evil of humanity. The
strange speculations then culminate in the syllo
gism that since God is good and all the world is
God, therefore all the world is good. So we be
hold men who, whether or not they understand
their principles, feel themselves free to besmirch
themselves with the evil, on the ground that it
only seems to be bad and is actually a disguised
form of good. It is called the necessary shadow
or variety in life. A man who does not experience
it, lacks the wholeness of life, and cannot reach
the highest good. Or, it is said, evil is non
existent. The distinction between man and God

GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT 287
is obliterated by all these theories, and God is
made to be no better than the frail gods of Olym
pus. These theories are sufficiently absurd, but
when they are translated into a system of human
conduct, the results are appalling. Then relig
ious experience brings its solemn denunciation
against it. As Latinism and Puritanism are the
expressions of the thought of God exclusively
transcendent, so pantheism is the expression,
under one guise or another, of the thought of
God exclusively immanent. In withdrawing itself
from both these attitudes of mind and action,
religious experience is showing itself capable of
believing, by word and by deed, in the God who is
both immanent and transcendent.
One of the severest questions for the human
mind to contend with is this: "How far does
nature express God?" It is easy to think of God
in the May sunlight, in the song of birds, in
the ripening fruits, in the grandeur of mountains,
and in the peace of a quiet sea. But when the
hurricane destroys a city of innocent people, when
a train of external events makes a man insane,
when a human craving can reduce a man, through
strong drink, to the level of a beast, then nature
seems cruel, heartless, — and the Father of the
Lord Jesus Christ has, we think, nothing to do

288 GOD
with the forces of such a grim monster. We
straightway spell nature with a capital N, and
give it a personality apart from God. I shall
speak later of the impossibility of any such dual
ism in God's world. Meantime I think we may
safely say that in nature man is now setting
himself religiously to work out the problem of
God's justice as related to His love. Were it not
for the sternness of nature one suspects that man
might be tempted to think of God as too soft with
us. He longs to be loved, we know; but He longs
to be loved not by spoiled and pampered children,
but by men. As life is God's great school to train
men to His friendship, so nature, one thinks, is
His school-house. It contains beautiful rooms
where all is gentleness and fragrance; and it
contains great bare laboratories where all is ugly
and beset with frightful danger. Hardly any
one who studies here with the experiments of
God's teaching will escape maiming in feature and
limb, and these scars may be carried in the soul
to the end of eternity. But, if in such training,
God makes a great soul to love and to be loved by,
both the soul and God must forget the scars for
the joy of the being made meet for such compan
ionship. And so religious experience need not try
to evade the difficulty by saying that God only

GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT 289
permits nature, and is not truly in it. Far better
let us face the necessity of God's complete owner
ship of His world, and let us say that God is in
His nature.1 Only one reservation must we make:
He is not all there. God is also transcendent.
God the Schoolmaster is God in nature; but God
is also above the water-floods, and to the tran
scendent God we may look when the toils of earth
and sea, which are His school-house, bind us hand
and foot, and the love of the Father on high shall
set us free. Nature speaks of the God who is at
once immanent and transcendent.
One more consideration remains in this con
nection. As the world beheld the character of
God completely in Jesus Christ, His only Son, so
it beholds fragments of God's character in all men,
— "broken lights," as the poet said. Whenever
we see conspicuous goodness in any form, we feel
the hush of reverence coming over us, we would
take the shoes from off our feet, because we feel
ourselves in a Sacred Presence. The sacrifice of
lCf. T. H. Huxley, Life and Letters, Vol. 1. p. 236: "I am no
optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Government
(if we may use such a phrase to express the Law of the Customs
of Matter') is wholly just .... In short as we live we are
paid for living . . . The absolute justice of the system of
things is as clear to me as any scientific fact."

290 GOD
a fireman saving a child from burning, and
thereby giving his own life, makes us feel
that God was in him (whether the man called
himself religious or not), impelling him to the
topmost duty of life. The patience of a mother
with a petulant, disagreeable child has in it more
than a mere natural love of offspring; however
won, such patience is from the heart of God.
When a man is horribly wronged, — by, for in
stance, the murder of his son, — and from the
depths of life's mystery rises from his grief to for
give the murderer, we do not call the man either
a stoic or a fool, — but we say, " God is there."
Instances like these religious experience could
multiply indefinitely, but there is no need of more.
We recognize, with sympathetic observation,
that the character of God is enshrined, a bit
here, and a bit there, in the life of His earthly
children. So much for the Divine Immanence
in humanity.
Now is that all? No: it is not all. It is not
only that we feel that such characteristics scat
tered must be infinitely more wonderful when
gathered into one Personality, but we have an
instinctive appreciation of the higher fact that
each characteristic must lose something from its
deflection through the human soul. There is a

GOD IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT 291
transcendent perfection which each trait must
have above the splendour which we acknowl
edge in the human media. One illustration will
make this clear. Imagine a father who was
mourning the death of a son who had been wild.
Imagine that father in the depths because he
feared what God might do with him in another
world. The comforter might accidentally ask,
"What would you do if you had the power?"
Instantly you imagine a new light in the eyes
heavy with pain. He would forgive, he would
correct, he would give another chance with
more incentives to right, — and, — and, — Yes,
he might punish, he might make him feel the
horror of the sins, so that he would loathe them, —
but he would bring him out into safety and joy at
the last. What can the comforter then say, but
one thing? "This, O man, is what you would
do," the words would begin, "and you would do
it all for love. Now dare you believe that your
human love is more painstaking and thorough
than the love of the perfect God, of whom you are
the tiny image? Dare you believe that your
affection for your boy is more than His who
made him? In every direction in which your
love would go, God's love will also go, only
it will outstrip you by infinite distances."

292 GOD
Such reasoning is appealing to religious experi
ence with increasing weight in these days. It is
giving us the vision of God transcendent. We
catch glimpses of the larger hope, and we also
catch such glimpses as we never had before of the
awfulness of sin, — because we imagine how God
above must view it. We see the importance of
theology, but we see its eternal inadequacy. The
revelation of God which we see in man and nature
gives us the start. Then we see God Incarnate,
in our Saviour Jesus Christ, and we have gone
far in the divine lesson. But even with this vision
of God's glory there is yet more to await. An end
less vista opens before the imagination. We bless
God for all that in His love He has revealed of
Himself; and we look forward to the eternal years
in which He may give us the ever-lengthening
vision of His transcendent beauty and love.
VI
THE TRINITY IN UNITY
Indolent preachers sometimes excuse them
selves from attempting to translate the theology
of the doctrine of the Trinity into intelligible
terms by saying that it is a mystery and the laity
cannot be expected to think about it. There

THE TRINITY IN UNITY 293
are several fallacies in this lapse from prophetic
duty. Certainly the Being of God is a mystery,
but in so far as the Church has gathered up what
has been revealed to the keenest minds and the
most receptive hearts of the ages into a compre
hensive doctrine, the doctrine itself is not a
mystery. Philosophical training may help in the
grasp of it, but if it means anything to anybody,
that meaning can be translated by him into con
crete terms which shall approximately carry for
ward its meaning. If this seems merely theory
we have but to remember the havoc wrought in
the ecclesiastical atmosphere of New England a
hundred years ago when preachers so misstated
the doctrine as to spell tri-theism rather than
trinity in unity. The laity understood enough of
their own religious instincts to reject the idea of
a loving Son propitiating an angry Father; and
though, in avoiding one error, many glided un
suspectingly into another, one can never again say
that the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery with
which everyday religion has no concern. Even in
this last and highest question of all, religious ex
perience may be expected to make its contribution.
Probably no expression of modern life has
brought so much light to this conception of God's

294 GOD
Being as the self-realization of the social organism.
For three hundred years individualism has been
having its victories. They have been deserved,
they are important, and they are permanent. The
reactionary, aware of the evils which an exag
gerated individualism may, and sometimes does,
bring in its wake, decries the whole campaign,
belittles all the battles, and groans over every
victory. That is absurd and stupid. We are
tending to organization and solidarity, but it is
not of the old sort. It is richer in content, freer
of tyrannical control, in essence democratic,
yielding to the highest actual leadership and not
to a conventional or formal leadership. So we
are discovering the ideals of cooperation, mutual
responsibility, mutual service, mutual love in
the organism of human society. Men cannot
reflect in this manner without sooner or later
thinking of God. When men, having praised the
individual, cease to be satisfied with the indi
vidual; when they think that a righteous and
noble nation is a finer object for praise and rejoic
ing than the righteous and noble man, that
moment they must think that the Supreme Being
(from whom are all these blessings) must have in
Himself, quite apart from the world or any cre
ated person or thing, what in our life stands for

THE TRINITY IN UNITY 295
relationship, cooperations, mutual responsibili
ties, mutual service, mutual love. To put it
roughly, but not untruly, there must be social
relationship in God. This instantly brings us to
the recognition that the ancient doctrine of the
Trinity, which declared God a Being in whom
variety and unity meet, is a doctrine of vital
interest to modern thought. If there were no
doctrine of the Trinity, hallowed by the gratitude
and reflection of the ages, the ordinary thought
of our day would be moved to posit a doctrine
which could not be far removed from it. Even
as it is, this modern movement of the people
makes its contribution, by illustration and by
enforcement. Further, the philosophic and scientific thought
of the time has much to say of pluralism. The
effort of philosophy (which includes science) from
the days of Thales has been to find a unifying
principle for the world. The effort is still going
on under various guises. The Absolute, the First
Cause, God, are some of the names which men find
for the unifying Force or Substance or Will or
Person. For the present we may not quarrel
with the terms. The only fact to notice is that
the Absolute does not seem to be a bare unity,
but a wide flinging of forces from some central

296 GOD
source, which are now so separated in their tasks
and achievements that it is difficult to understand
how they can be traced to a common origin or
can ever be gathered into the life from which they
went out. It would not be strange if this con
viction of pluralism joined with the instinctive
search for unity might some day soon bring
philosophy to put forth an hypothesis which
should be very near the essential meaning of the
doctrine of the Trinity. It would be impressive
confirmation of a necessary idea. Even so far as
the tendency has gone, it is full of significance.
There is no doubt that the doctrine of the Trinity
will have to be translated more fully than it has
yet been translated into modern terms. Psy
chology makes more of will than of substance in
the estimate of life. And the word Person, ac
cording to modern use, must change its place and
become the inclusive term. The three Modes
of Being must now be thought to exist in one
Supreme Personality. These are suggestions how
changes in definition of terms make necessary the
restatement of doctrines. To leave them in their
old garb is to make them unintelligible, so that
what once bore a message of life becomes the cold
symbol of death. Into this restatement must
enter the concrete illustration of the variety of

THE TRINITY IN UNITY 297
reality, which has strongly seized one side of
modern thought. The doctrine is still best under
stood in the concrete names of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, — the Father who made the world,
the Son who has redeemed all mankind, the Holy
Ghost who sanctifies all the people of God. The
technical language of philosophical theology has
its revelations also, but the concrete opens more
windows of the imagination than the profoundest
abstractions. In other words it was the religious
experience, rather than the philosophy, of the
early Church that formulated the doctrine and
made it appeal to the Christian reason. It will
be religious experience, and not science, philoso
phy, or theology which will interpret it and
enrich the interpretation, for the thought of
to-day. The contradictions which men find in experi
ence, — such as revenge and forgiveness, the benefi
cence and the cruelty of nature, the good and the
evil pulling hard upon the motives of humanity,
— all drive to the instinctive necessity for the
Supreme Personality. The thought of God's Va
riety is clear in our day. The fact that again and
again man finds peace, demonstrates that he rests
his tired head, as if he were a little child, on

298 GOD
the bosom of the One God who unites all con
flicts and varieties in His Supreme Personality.
We shudder at the thought of living for ever, and
we shudder at the thought of time's ending; we
shudder at the thought of limitless space, and we
shudder at the thought of space bounded by —
nothing. Then, as perplexed and weary children,
we flee to the Father, and leave all to Him, trust
ing His love to do for us what we cannot under
stand, believing in His will and His power to
untangle all our misgivings and fears, and to bring
us out into His gift of peace. "What argument
is this?" the sceptic may ask. Just this: we do
find peace. "But that," continues the sceptic,
"is peace only in thinking." Well, we answer,
we do not believe it such; for in a wonderful way
our experience coincides with the recorded ex
perience of thousands of human souls before us;
in that peace, thus received, they rose up to bear
and to do marvellous things. And the life
quivers in us also, so that we, too, start forth to
the victory. In God's unity we rest. And our
peace becomes to us the highest test to our own
experience that He holds all the threads of life
in the strength of His right hand. He flings the
forces to the corners of the universe, and gives to
each the terrifying liberty to work out its life.

THE TRINITY LN UNITY 299
There is cruelty and sorrow and sin and pain;
but they flow from the permission to be free, and
not from His will that they should be what they
are. He wills neither sin nor the death of the
sinner, in any sense. Widely as these forces are
scattered, distant as they are from His ultimate
purpose, we believe, in our trust of Him, that He
holds the end of each in His power; and some day,
we believe, He shall bring back all these forces
purified, utterly clean, into His own life. We
believe that the unfailing Purpose issuing from
the Source of our Peace, wandering hither and
thither in what seems to us wild confusion, —
and thereby demonstrating God's patience, — will
come back to Him who willed it, accomplish
ing all His desires. The peace which reaches
our hearts from the heights is the assuring symbol
of the harmony at the centre of all things. And
that harmony is the symbol to religious experi
ence of the Unity of God.

PRESENT DAY PREACHING
By CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY
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Alexander Viets Griswold Allen
1841— 1908
By CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY, D.D.
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