YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

1942

THE RELIGION OF H. G. WELLS
AND OTHER ESSAYS

MR WELLS'S NEW NOVEL
ANN VERONICA:
A MODERN LOVE STORY
Crown Svo, Cloth, 6s.
The heroine of Mr Wells' new book is a
very modern girl — modern in ethics, in
point of view, in habits, and in conduct
generally. The story touches many aspects
of present-day London ; it is full of its life
and all the new movements, social, ethical
and intellectual. London : T. FISHER UNWIN

THE RELIGION OF
H. G. WELLS
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY
THE REVEREND
ALEXANDER H. CRAUFURD, M.A.
Formerly Exhibitioner of Oriel College, Oxford
author of "christian instincts and modern doubt,"
" recollections of james martineau," etc., etc

T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
1909

[All Rights Reserved.]

CONTENTS
PAGE
The Religion of H. G. Wells . > ii
The Alleged Indifference of Laymen to
Religion . . . .119
Christ's Remedy for Fear : A Defence of
the Higher Anthropomorphism in
Religion . . . . 135
The Plenteous Harvest and the Scarcity
of True Labourers . . . 195
Some Thoughts on " The Scarlet Letter " 221

PREFACE
The essays in this volume were not all written at
the same time. Consequently the points of view
may be found to be slightly different here and
there. But I believe that any attentive reader
will easily discover a real underlying unity of
thought, of feeling, and of purpose in the whole
work. All the essays are intended to set forth
the indispensable ethical and spiritual necessity
of a thoroughly broad and yet distinctively
Christian form of Theism. My chief aim has
been to show that man's whole higher life,
intellectual, social, and emotional, as well as
moral and religious, is rooted and grounded in
God, and that without God it must inevitably
lose the greater part of its noblest and deepest
significance/ I have also endeavoured to make
it clear that the original and genuine Christianity,
as contrasted with its many ecclesiastical per-

The Religion of H. G. Wells
versions, is profoundly natural, the faith of the
normal human soul when it " comes to itself,"
when it realises its own vague potentialities,
and is touched to fine issues by the spirit of God.)
To me ! the supernatural is not the cancelling
of the natural, but its interpretation and its
best education and development.
Some critics may be of opinion that I have
devoted too much time, attention, and space to
the consideration of the views of Mr H. G.
Wells, as he is neither a great, philosopher nor
a learned theologian. But he is, at all events,
a man of large and varied knowledge, possessing
at once great intellectual force and very rare
intellectual honesty and sincerity. And, if
Christian thinkers would indeed minister at all
adequately to the wants of this perplexed and
inquiring age, I believe that they must do so
by addressing themselves chiefly to the vivid
thoughts and feelings of detached, unsystematic,
and more or less representative minds, rather than
to the dry-as-dust professors of an antiquated
learning that has well-nigh lost all true vitality.
viii

THE RELIGION OF H. G. WELLS

THE RELIGION OF
H. G. WELLS

In his book called First and Last Things, Mr H.
G. Wells has given us a very valuable and in
structive confession of his personal beliefs on
moral, religious, and social questions. It is an
intensely vivid, sincere, and suggestive docu
ment, at once eminently sane, profoundly human,
utterly fearless and unconventional, and for
the most part ethically Christian. From it we
may all learn much, whilst dissenting from a
good many of its conclusions.
I propose, therefore, to consider carefully
both the strong and the weak points in this
remarkable essay, so far as ethics and religion
are concerned.
In the first place, I think that it must be
owned that the writer's Agnosticism, tempered
by Pragmatism, is in many ways genuinely wise.
Mr Wells might quite appropriately have taken

The Religion of H. G. Wells
as the^text of his whole discourse the warning
words of St Augustine — quoted by Sir William
Hamilton in his Discussions on Philosophy — " Sit
pia confessio ignorantise magis quam temeraria
professio scientise." The philosophical intro
duction to the work which we are now considering
is full of wise and cautious thoughts, a rebuke
at once to the dogmatism of science, and to the
dogmatism of pseudo-philosophical religion.
In his philosophical nescience Mr Wells follows
in the steps of very many of the deepest thinkers
of various ages, though his application of this
doctrine seems to me in some important respects
.jjnnecessarily ruthless and virtually misleading.
The Book of Job and some of the best writings \
of the greater Hebrew prophets are full of frank
confessions of religious Agnosticism. The deep
yearning of baffled Hebraic aspiration found an
eloquent expression in those old words of Isaiah,
"Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself."
And the underlying philosophy of St Paul's
theology was deeply tinged with the same spirit
of aspiring consciousness of ignorance, so that
the great apostle has for ever rebuked the self-
complacent temerity of theological dogmatism

b

The Religion of H. G. Wells
with these memorable warning words, " If any
man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth
nothing yet as he ought to know." St Paul's
deep sense of the lowliness of man's present con
dition in the universe forced him to believe
thoroughly in the relativity and inadequacy of
all our present knowledge. Even in Christianity
itself St Paul held that there is a provisional and !
transient element.
One very good point in the teaching of Mr
Wells- is that he frankly recdgnises the truth
that \in many ways our scientific and logical
conceptions are just as provisional and imperfect
as our theological. He rebukes the dogmatism
of many scientific men and many logicians as
ruthlessly as he rebukes the dogmatism of ordinary
theologjiansj The inner essence or soul of Nature|
is as hidden from us as the essence of God. In our'
search for varied kinds of truth the one abiding
source of endless error is to be found in the in
herent and incurable inadequacy of our own
faculties. In many ways the forms of our
understanding, in which Ordinary logicians dis
play so naive a trust, are partially misleading.
They veil rather than reveal absolute truths.
13

The Religion of H. G. Wells
They distort in some measure almost everything
that they profess to disclose. As Bacon wisely
taught, the subtlety of Nature far surpasses
the subtlety of man's intellect. Our senses and
our understandings are both alike perennial
sources of important errors. Man's terrestrial
point of view for ever prevents him from com
prehending the facts of the universe as they are
seen from a really central point of view. In
order to understand the mysteries of the Cosmos,
we must, in Emersonian language, " leave behind,"
not only " our churches and our charities," but
also, to some extent, our " peacock wit " and our
vaunted system of logic. In the " dimness of our
captivity " here on earth, our ambitious definitions
and classifications are often no better than golden
calves falsely pretending to be an apocalypse of
the great " I Am."
Mr Wells declares that " the forceps of our
minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a
little in taking hold of it." The human mind
cannot deal adequately with the tantalising and
bewildering changeableness of Nature, in whose
realm " nothing is, but all things are becoming."
" It cannot contemplate things continuously,

The Religion of H. G. Wells
and so it has to resort to a series of static snap
shots."/ According to this writer, Hegelianism
receives a good deal of sanction from an observa
tion of the secret processes of Nature. Opposites
tend to meet and fuse themselves together. In
very many different departments of physical
science they pass into one another by insensible
gradations. And so scientific dogmatism is often
as absurd as that of theologians. Nature will
not stand still and be ransacked as the sun is
reported to have stood still at the command
of Joshua. The scalpel of the Materialists is
often as futile and deceptive as the logical de
finitions of the Athanasian dogmatists. As
Emerson wisely remarks, " I take this evanescence
and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip
through our fingers even when we clutch hardest,
to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes
that we should be her fools and playmates. We
•• • may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not
a berry for our philosophy."
\With the philosophical groundwork of the book
that we are considering, I think that thoughtful
Theists may very well agree; but later on in this

The Religion of H. G. Wells
essay I hope to show that some of its implications,
as regards matters of the deepest importance,
may very well and very justly be strenuously
resisted, even though we admire and value
highly the outspoken candour of the brilliant
writer. Not only on account of its extraordinary
sincerity, but also on account of its deep sense
that religion is essentially an intensely social
matter, ought the volume that we are considering
to commend itself to thoughtful Christians.
It is manifest that Christ here reigns " in partibus
infidelium." The writer is far more vitally near
to Theism and Christianity than he thinks himself
to be. " The spirit is willing," even though
the understanding be misled or reluctant. Mr
Wells refuses verbally to go and work in Christ's
vineyard ; but, when he leaves the cloudy heights
of abstract speculation and descends into the
homely realm of practical hfe, he " afterwards
repents and goes." Concerning him we might
truly say that, in the most fundamental things
of all, he is " naturally Christian." Concerning
this honest and benevolent spirit, which as yet
turns its back on God, the Creator might well
16

The Religion of H. G. Wells
declare in the bold words given us by the prophet
Isaiah, " I am found of those that sought me
not." This intrepid heretic will of course be
condemned by all the self-satisfied Pharisees,
of a purblind and ungenerous orthodoxy; but
one cannot help thinking that the verdict of the
great apostle of spiritual freedom and large-
hearted charity would be a very different one.
From afar one seems to hear the tenderer and
more human verdict of a keener vision and a
more penetrating moral diagnosis expressing
itself in those old hopeful words of far-ranging
sympathy, " When the Gentiles, which have
not the law, do by nature the things contained
in the law, these, having not the law, are a law
unto themselves; which show the work of the
law written in their hearts." Contrasting the
genuine and wide-hearted benevolence of this
heretic with the essential selfishness and narrow
ness of many orthodox Christians, one thinks
that St Paul might well find another modern
illustration of the profound significance of his
own old unsectarian declaration: "What shall
we say then? That the Gentiles which followed
not after righteousness, have attained to righteous-
17

The Religion of H. G. Wells
ness, even the righteousness which is of faith;
but Israel, which followed after the law of right
eousness, hath not attained to the law of righteous
ness." The ethical and spiritual core of this interesting
book is to be found in its conception of salvation
and the unifying of human life. It is pervaded
throughout by two profoundly Christian utter
ances, " No man liveth unto himself," and " He
that keepeth his life shall lose it." In devotion
to the welfare and expansion of our whole race
this writer finds the one emancipating and in
vigorating power which alone can deliver us from
the troubled incoherence of conflicting desires
and incompatible aspirations. Herein we may
find a real and abiding centre amidst the un
ceasing flux of things, an ever-satisfying end, a
strong thread on which to fasten the fugitive
beads of our varying moods and feehngs, so that
the old necessitated multiplicity of aims shall
no longer seriously disturb our inner life. We
shall find in self-surrender to the welfare of our
race a blessed repose from the old wearisome
conflict of the multitudinous and contrariant
forces of individualistic selfishness. A wise

The Religion of H. G. Wells
benevolence will henceforth say to every
threatening wave of fierce self-seeking, "Peace;
be still."
Nor will our lower faculties and impulses
henceforth hve in a state of stifled rebellion
and suppressed sullenness and discontent. These
and other higher faculties of the individual will
not be suppressed entirely, but only subordinated,
regulated and utilised. Mr Wells sees clearly
that Asceticism is not the way to true salvation.
For the sake of collective humanity we must
develop ourselves, and not hide our individual
talents in a napkin of spurious humility and
self -contempt. A large and. varied experience
of many diverse phases of life is certainly bene
ficial to our race, even though it be sometimes
injurious or even fatal to the individual. The
fruit of the tree of knowledge, though sometimes
bitter to the individual, becomes in the long run like
the fruit of the tree of hfe to collective humanity.
The genuinely Christian idea of vicarious suffering,
though it would probably be repudiated by Mr
Wells in its more developed forms, is yet latent
in his whole ethical and spiritual system. And
he is really wise in rejecting useless and fruitless
19

The Religion of H. G. Wells
self-suppression, in teaching that self-sacrifice
must always be for some adequate end.
The cheery optimism of this writer is also very
refreshing in some ways. It reminds one of the
bold and invincible optimism of Emerson and
Walt Whitman, though it lacks the firm basis
of Theistic faith in God and immortality on
which the sublime confidence of those deep
thinkers rested. Still, in the ethical and spiritual
world Mark Tapley is far more useful than any
rHsv.ial even though well-meaning Job Trotter
v'th his inexhaustible fountain of useless tears.
Tu moral warfare as in physical warfare, not to
1 .? when we are beaten is often a means of
: Gaining final victory.
And, to a certain extent, the moral optimism
of Mr Wells really has a basis. Like Browning,
this thinker " sees the good of evil." Like
Charles Kingsley, he believes that God teaches us
by evil as well as by good. He sees the soul of
goodness in things evil, which the ethically
Puritan James Martineau never saw. For
strugghng, ever-baffled, and sin-stained humanity
this brilliant heretic sees in the far-off distance
a " celestial city " of peace and goodness, even
20

The Religion of H. G. Wells
though that city come not down from God " pre
pared as a bride " of the Everlasting One, and
gleaming with the deathless splendour of un-
decaying vitality and glory. To " see of the
travail of our souls," even to an inadequate
extent and from a far distance, is certainly some
reward, even though that reward grows pale
and wan when compared with the " exceeding
great reward " of a sorrowless, undying, and
God-embraced humanity, the vision of which
cheered the soul of the aspiring author of the
Christian Apocalypse. That God should love and
visit the human race for a time is better than that
He should never care for or visit it at all. Over
the melancholy ruins of transient human noble
ness, it might perhaps be some very slight consola
tion to sympathetic observers to be able truthfully
to write this inscription: "Some of those whom
ihe gods love die young," even though their
dying should mean their final extinction. To
have " pleased God " even for a short time might
perhaps be reckoned some faint approach to an
adequate reason for the long sad pilgrimage of
man, even though the Most High should not take
man to himself for ever. Perhaps the sympathetic
21

The Religion of H. G. Wells
and pitying smile of transient divine approval
might throw a kind of lingering glory over the
sombre graves of our derelict and outcast race.
Perhaps even the tentative and unsuccessful
thoughts of God, which perish because of their
unsuitable embodiments, may have a kind of
post-mortem suggestiveness to happier beings in
better lands. Perhaps in this way, as in many
other ways, our unhappy race, if we might con
ceive it as dreaming in the long slumber of death,
might apply to itself and its forlorn condition
the old saying of St Paul, " We are made a spectacle
unto the Cosmos, and to angels." Yet, when
compared with the Christian hope of conscious
immortality, this hope of vague posthumous
activity amongst other races, even when com
bined with the hope of fingering in the mind of
God as a kind of faint though lasting regret, is a
poor substitute, a very stifled form of the old
Theistic cry of triumphant assurance, " Non
omnis moriar."
I think that the sagacity of Mr Wells is more
apparent generally in the practical portion of
his book than in the speculative portion. In
the regions of action and daily hfe his abundant

The Religion of H. G. Wells
common sense, his knowledge of the world, and
his keen vision into the heart of things, have
more free play and more scope. Thus he per
ceives clearly that to deal with poverty without
dealing with its fundamental causes is futile
work. He sees that poverty is but a symptom
of a widely-spread and deep-seated mental and
moral disease. Very wise also is his view of
aristocracy and democracy. And his conception
of the true Socialism is very different indeed
from the crude ideas that are so widely prevalent
on the subject. His Socialism is essentially con
structive, not destructive. It is animated by a wise
Conservatism. It knows nothing of schemes
founded on class hatred. Like the late W. R. Greg,
this writer dreads the rule of a half -educated mob.
He says plainly, " So it is I disavow and deplore
the whole spirit of class-war Socialism with its
doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure
and freedom of the wealthy. Without leisure and
freedom and the experience of life they give, the
ideas of Socialism could never have been born . The
true mission of Socialism is against darkness,
vanity, and cowardice, that darkness which hides
from the property owner the intense beauty, the
23

The Religion of H. G. Wells
potentiahties of interest, the splendid possibihties
of hfe, that vanity and cowardice that make him
clutch his precious holdings, and fear and hate
the shadow of change. It has to teach the
collective organisation of sooiety; and to that
the class-consciousness and intense class-pre
judices of the worker need to bow quite as much
as those of the property owner."
This teacher also clearly perceives that any
attempt at a premature Sociahsm, any attempt
to force it on an unprepared world, must
necessarily be injurious in the long run. He
would agree with the view of John Stuart Mill,
as given in his Representative Government, that
the best development of a nation would be
very much hindered if it adopted a very free
form of government before men's intellectual
and moral nature was prepared for it. Sociahsm
resembles some of the more exacting precepts
of Christ in one important particular. Both
imply an ideal state of the world. Neither is
exactly suited to the present provisional and
highly artificial state of things. In order to obey
the spirit of Sociahsm and of Christ's ethical
teaching, we must not scruple frequently to
24

The Religion of H. G. Wells
disobey the mere letter of their laws. The spirit
of human brotherhood incarnates itself in widely
different legislation and widely different conduct
at various stages Of human development.
Socialists must not be " righteous over much,"
lest they should inadvertently destroy them
selves." Mr Wells also displays admirable sense in his
teaching that, though war is in itself utterly
hateful, it is yet in the long run a very salutary
moral teacher, a kind of rough " schoolmaster
to bring us to Christ " and to the deep peace of
a well-ordered democracy. The exigencies of
self-defence against menacing neighbour nations
induce men to submit to a laborious discipline
and training against which they would otherwise
rebel. War certainly often teaches self-forgetful-
ness, comradeship, and heroism, as nothing else
can teach them to the mass of men. And, once
learnt, these fine qualities are sure to persist.
The conceptions of order, willing subordination,
physical fitness, intelligent co-operation, and
loving comradeship will five on in the human race
long after war has for ever ceased. And thus
" out of the eater will come forth meat, and out
B 25

The Religion of H. G. Wells
of the strong will come forth sweetness." From
the loins of fierce barbarians will ultimately come
forth the world's most effective redeemers and
saviours. Our author also gives us many shrewd hints
in his treatment of love. He says that his ideal
Behever will also be a lover and that " he will
love as much as he can and as many people as
he can, and in many moods and ways." Love,
as this writer conceives it, is the breaking down
of the barrier of self, the enlarging and enriching
of our personality. And he adds that no love
is perfect, so that, if we seek adequate emotional,
moral, and spiritual development, we must love
a considerable variety of people. Hence the
romantic dream of an enlarged egoism, of a pair
of lovers being wholly absorbed in each other
and almost indifferent to the rest of the world,
is a great and impoverishing mistake. The
spiritual intercourse or commerce of lovers is then
most effectively carried on when each brings back
to the other a large collection of varied treasures
gathered during many mental voyages to distant
lands. To be always together is to court
iponotony, and monotony is the prelude to
26

The Religion of H. G. Wells
weariness and disgust. Emerson remarks that
of progressive souls all loves are transitory.
This teaching is, I think, unnecessarily harsh
and repulsive. In some rare cases lovers progress
together and move on the same fines to the same
goal. Their differences are a part of a fine
harmony. Their occasional absences add a fresh
zest to their habitual comradeship. If the
lovers are wise, each might apply to the other
what St Paul said of the wandering Onesimus,
" Perhaps he therefore departed for a season,
that thou shouldest receive him for ever."
To monotony or extreme regularity of life
in general Mr Wells is very wisely hostile. This
extreme regularity is usually injurious, even
physically. Our bodies, our minds and our souls
all need variety. Mr Herbert Spencer found, if I
remember rightly, that his very delicate digestion
was often greatly benefited by dining out with
friends on a great variety of kinds of food. In
mental matters monotony tends to develop some
faculties abnormally, whilst leaving others un
developed or even atrophied. Specialists are
often narrow-minded. No doubt in some cases
it is necessary that philosophers or men of science,
27

The Religion of H. G. Wells
such as Spinoza, Kant, or Darwin, should lead
monotonous fives; but even then the injurious
effects of such living are manifest. In his old
age Darwin much regretted the almost total
atrophy of his imaginative and artistic faculties.
In the moral world extreme regularity of hfe
frequently has many and serious disadvantages.
A man's usefulness to his fellow-creatures is
greatly lessened if he only touches humanity at
nne or two points. He often becomes wearisome
'o others and unable to sympathise with them.
Moreover, excessive emotional and ethical regu
larity often tends to develop uncomprehending
Pharisaism. Going every day the same round
of duties, effort becomes unnecessary ; virtuousness
becomes easy and almost mechanical. And so
tne good man of this type becomes incapable of
understanding how " sore let and hindered "
many more vivid souls are in their pilgrimage
towards spiritual excellence. Hence inevitably
arise harsh, unfair, and unpitying judgments
of hot-blooded sinners. And so Francis Newman
declared that many a man is spiritually far the
better after a fall into some gross sin, as he learns
thereby some degree of real humility and compas-
28

The Religion of H. G. Wells
sion for those who err. The " deep distress " of
enforced self -contempt frequently " humanises
the soul " as nothing else could humanise it,
and the deep springs of spiritual aspiration,
once choked by the rubbish of a soulless routine, are
at length liberated. Lot's wife, after the fatal
miraculous change in her bodily organisation,
was, no doubt, eminently respectable; but she
was also utterly uninteresting and powerless
to help others. Professor W. James, Mr Balfour,
and Mr Wells are surely quite right in preferring
the present state of vivid and sinning humanity
to the intolerable insipidity of Herbert Spencer's
"lady-like tea-table Elysium," in which all law
lessness and irregularity and toilsome effort
shall have passed away, and the fiery agonies
of struggling conscience shall be replaced by the
eternal simper of mechanical and self-satisfied
virtuousness rejoicing in the dry-rot of the soul,
as though it were a veritable apotheosis.
As regards the vexed question of free-will,
Mr Wells displays his usual good sense in the
remark that, whatever their theories may be, all
men are obliged to act as if they possessed some
measure of free choice. 29

The Religion of H. G. Wells
As regards marriage this heretical teacher is
scarcely convincing, and one cannot quite believe
that he means all his suggestions to be taken
seriously. No doubt it is extremely difficult to
decide on rational grounds how far divorce is
permissible and for what causes. Probably
Christ's apparent disapproval of divorce in any
case was intended to direct men's attention to
an ideal condition rather than to legislate per
emptorily for any actual state of the world. In
suggesting what he calls " triangular mutuality,"
the union of one man with two women or of one
woman with two men, Mr Wells must surely be
looking onwards to a very remote and doubtful
possibility. He does not think that such an
arrangement is possible in ordinary cases, or even
a thing to be desired in itself, but only permissible.
To me such an arrangement seems almost a
grotesque absurdity. I believe that some
degree of jealousy would always mar such a union.
But Mr Wells perhaps thinks that jealousy will
pass away; for he remarks that "Jealousy is
tlie measure of self-love in love."
Tn the purely ethical parts of the book which
I am considering, perhaps the most startling
30

The Religion of H. G. Wells
thing at first sight is the author's disparagement
or repudiation of the quahty called justice. But
it is really easy to understand what Mr Wells
means, if one reflects a httle, and if one views
matters in the light of his fundamental principles.
The startling paradox is soon found to express
a genuine truth, though in an exaggerated way.
Our author's true meaning is much the same as
that of St Paul when he declared that " love is
the fulfilling of the law," and that " we are not
under the law, but under grace." Sympathy
and wide-hearted benevolence to some extent
take the place of justice, only because they
include it and give it a finer significance. Justice
seems to imply, in its lower meaning, a kind of
niggardly legahty. It carries balances about
with it, and is careful not to give to anyone more
or less than is his strict due. In this sense justice
is opposed to mercy and generosity. It is an
unattractive and almost inhuman quality. Hence
St Paul was led to declare that " scarcely for a
righteous or just man will one die; yet perad
venture for a good man some will even dare to
die." Moreover, as Mr Wells teaches, justice of the
31

The Religion of H. G. Wells
rigid sort implies the possession of a complete
knowledge of the hearts of our fellows which we
cannot really have. It is a pedantic and pre
tentious virtue. It is an assumption of the
prerogatives of God, a futile and impious anticipa-
J ion of the great day of judgment. It is a violation
of the warning of Jesus, " Judge not, that ye be
ftot judged." It implies putting ourselves above
. >ur brethren on a kind of pedestal or throne of
perfect knowledge and moral superiority. It
implies much self-conceit and considerable pre
cipitation of decision. Even Christ, though he
*' knew what was in man," yet declared plainly,
' I judge no man."
A kind of hard and unloving justice is of very
little real value, if we are seeking to uphft and
save our race. The secret thoughts, and innermost
feehngs of men are never adequately disclosed to
the cold inspection of unsympathetic and almost
dehumanised justice. Its touch seems to freeze
the incipient revelations of the hearts of sinners.
Sinners need sympathy, as languishing plants
r^ed the genial rays of the sun. Legahsm lacks
the moral power of a real gospel. Humanity
needs " a high priest who can be touched with
32

The Religion of H. G. Wells
the feehng of our infirmities." The pity of God
works most effectively on human beings when
it is incarnate in man's tenderness and love.
And so, as the Bible declares, " The Father hath
committed all judgment unto the Son." The
brotherly love of Christ constrains sinners to dis
close to him all their sore wounds and sorrows
and all their shocking infirmities. George EL'".'
understood human nature well when she declared
that " the tale of the divine pity was never yet
believed from lips that were not felt to be moved
by human pity." And men instinctively feel
that mere justice, in the lower sense of the word,
is terribly lacking in pity. It would condemn
almost the whole human race. If all men received
their exact deserts and nothing else, few or none
" should escape a whipping," though all certainly
would escape eternal torments.
There is something ungracious in the more
rigid forms of justice. And I may add that, in
many cases, there is also something really unfair
or unjust. The eyes of justice need to be clarified
or strengthened by genuine sympathy. Other
wise it will be unable to see far enough and deep
enough into the present nature and the past
33

The Religion of H. G. Wells
^Wstory of the sinner. It will make no adequate
iWance for the burden of inherited sinfulness.
Tt will not learn how often " the spirit is willing,
t' ¦ xgh the flesh is weak." It will not put itself
to the place of transgressors, and so its
' diets will often be essentially unfair.
Jummum jus summa injuria." Its purblind
eyes will never perceive the " soul of goodness
iu things evil." It will never recognise the im
portant truth that some forms of passionate
sinfulness are but as holiness " strugghng to be
born," as it were, the aberrant instincts of essenti
ally noble natures which have lost their way.
Another argument to strengthen the teaching
of Mr Wells may be derived from the very sig
nificant fact that man's heart and soul are in
some ways naturally antinomian in a high and
legitimate sense. Law is almost always the
result and expression of average opinion and
sentiment; and justice, in its coarser and rougher
phases, is the exponent and guardian of this
mediocre law. Hence Emerson declared that
" the highest virtue is always against the law."
The Mosaic law sanctioned the stoning of the
woman taken in adultery; but the loftier and
34

The Religion of H. G. Wells
more penetrating antinomian moral insight of
Jesus condemned such severity. Ordinary
justice is devoid of ethical genius and originality.
It is, for the most part, fast bound in the fetters
of unreasoning custom. Its apparent and super
ficial goodness often prevents men from seeking
after higher and nobler forms of goodness. It
tends to stereotype the provisional enactments
of ill-informed legislation. It murdered Socrates
and Jesus. Hence arises rebellion in warm
hearts and progressive intellects. Hence arises
the dim perception that ordinary justice is not
wholly fair, that it needs to be " born again "
into the higher kingdom of sympathetic equit-
ableness. And so the Christian spirit, dissatisfied
with Judaic harshness, does not scruple to assign
to the Creator himself a kind of subhme disregard
for mere justice. It represents God as kind and
good even " unto the unthankful and evil,"
and as sending His gracious rain on the unjust
as well as on the just. God gives us " more than
we either desire or deserve." In the immortal
parable of the " Prodigal Son " — a parable for
ever dear to the heart of natural and unsophistic
ated humanity — Christ does not scruple to set
35

The Religion of H. G. Wells
aside, with imperious wisdom, the requirements
of exact justice. The grudging and legally-
minded elder brother represents the claims of
austere and inhuman justice, whilst the tender
hearted and loving old father represents that
pitying Christian sympathy, which, in the form
of a nobler and more satisfying equitableness,
was destined to come forth, in radiant beauty,
from the stern bosom of Judaic legalism.
If justice means giving to every man exactly
what he deserves, and nothing more, Mr Wells
is perfectly right in thinking that it is to a great
extent superseded in the religion of charity or
love. The justice which seizes its neighbours by
the throat, and demands immediate payment
of the whole debt, is neither admirable nor
Christian; nor is it consistent with a genuine
knowledge of a man's own many debts both to
God and his fellows. " Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy." Christ teaches
that we must freely forgive, if we hope to receive
forgiveness at the hands of God. " So likewise
shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if
ye from your hearts forgive not every one his
brother their trespasses." 36

The Religion of H. G. Wells
Ordinary justice, in some of its aspects or phases,
is a sort of body without the soul of tender
Christian equitableness. And the body without
the soul is a dead and mechanical thing, powerless
as regards any high human enterprise.
Yet the lower kind of justice, like other im
perfect forms of human goodness, may fearlessly
chant its " Non omnis moriar." Its destiny is
to be incorporated into the larger and fairer
kingdom of human equitableness. The rough
John the Baptist, with his partially unfair de
nunciations, was needed to make ready the way
for the coming of the true Messiah. " The law
is our schoolmaster, to lead us to Christ." The
fierce invectives of the greater Hebrew prophets
against tyranny and injustice hve again in a
higher form in the more discriminating anger of
Jesus. Justice in its ordinary form represents the
minimum which we are called upon to give to
our fellow-creatures. And it is useful for us to
keep this minimum before our eyes, lest we fall
shamefully short of God's requirements. This
sterner and cruder form of equitableness is at
least a genuine thing, whereas the so-called
37

The Religion of H. G. Wells
charity of many rehgious people is a deceptive
sham, a kind of veiled censoriousness falsely
pretending to be Christian benevolence. Justice
of any real sort is a difficult thing to exercise.
It implies much careful thought and prolonged
and impartial consideration. It is a far more
intellectual virtue than easy-going and spurious
charity. Many religious people hate the trouble
of thinking. They are not sufficiently interested
in their neighbours to give time and thought
to their needs. And so this slovenly indifference
to the welfare of others, in order to mask its
intrinsically unchristian selfishness, frequently
arrays itself in the stolen garments of divine
charity. It cheats its fellow-men, whilst pre
tending to be generous to them. Its conduct
is much like that of a man who owes us a penny,
and instead of giving us a good penny, with an
air of condescending munificence, bestows on us
a bad sixpence. The good penny of simple justice
is far more valuable than the bad sixpence of a
spurious charity. There is much truth in the old
maxim, " Be just before you are generous." To
be forgiven offences that we have never committed
is very aggravating. We ought to make quite
38

The Religion of H. G. Wells
sure that our neighbours have really injured us
before we proceed to forgive them. The unctuous
charitableness of Mr Pecksniff benevolently par
doning his neighbours, when he himself was in
the wrong, is utterly hateful. Compared with
that mock Christianity, even the sternest form
of wild justice seems admirable.
It must be confessed that this spurious charity
has, to a lamentable extent, supplanted justice
in the so-called rehgious world. Theologians are
proverbially unfair and unjust even in the most
rudimentary sense of the word. In order to
serve what they conceive to be the interests of
religion, theologians often violate the most
elementary rules of that fundamental morality
which is the indispensable basis of all genuine
religion. The late Bishop Colenso was reckoned
a heretic; and so the High-church party in the
Church of England thought themselves justified
in treating him with the grossest illegality.
Before entirely discarding ordinary justice as a
part of his religion, Mr Wells ought to reflect that
it is at least a manly virtue, if not an entirely
Christian one, that it is a layman's virtue and not
an ecclesiastical one; that if we leave it entirely
39

The Religion of H. G. Wells
behind us, and take to ourselves instead what
the churches are often pleased to call Christian
charity, we may eventually discover that, in
seeming to go further, we have fared very much
worse. It seems to me that there is still a sphere for
elementary justice even amongst professing
Christians, just as there was room for many
Hebraic conceptions in the religion preached by
Jesus. It is perfectly true that we ought to aim
at giving to all men very far more than they
strictly deserve; but it is also true that we are
often in much danger of giving to some men very
far less than they deserve, and as a preventive
against this latter serious error, the conception
of simple justice is frequently of much value.
Though Christian equitableness is in some ways
a celestial quahty, it is nevertheless quite true
that it is often much invigorated by contact
with the homely earth, just as kings and philo
sophers may often learn much from simple-
minded peasants whose fives are passed amidst
the coarse and rude details of struggling hfe.
To the more soaring and ethereal forms of justice
we may well give the old warning, " Be not
40

The Religion of H. G. Wells
righteous over-much. Why shouldest thou
destroy thyself? "
Love ought no doubt to be the chief animating
motive of our fives. But we must remember
that, in our long pilgrimage to satisfying goodness,
we need sign-posts as well as motives. These
at least assure us that we are not unconsciously
moving back to the old " city of destruction."
The conception of rudimentary justice may also
often help us greatly in effectually and wisely
carrying out the commands of the higher and
nobler Christian sympathy. Love is often in
great measure bhnd and tends to weak favouritism.
Benevolent people do much harm, whilst trying
to do good. Promiscuous alms-giving is frequently
very injurious in the long run to the recipients
of its bounty. We must try to combine somehow
the wise and discriminating caution of the austerer
kind of justice with the warm feelings of the more
sympathetic kind. The elementary sort of justice
is often as eyes to the half-blind impulses of
fervent but uninstructed benevolence. A kind
of wisely severe love must frequently find a place
in our minds, if our charity is to be of the best
kind, if in exercising it we really aim at the
c 41

The Religion of H. G. Wells
lasting benefit of others, and not merely at the
transient satisfaction of our own impulses.
Besides all this, the range of love is perhaps
necessarily rather restricted. We cannot love
everyone as much as we desire to love them. Our
feelings sometimes grow cold. Then the sense
of simple justice may well come to our assistance,
and at least prevent us from utterly neglecting
those to whom we are not personally attracted.
A stern sense of duty sometimes keeps watch,
whilst love is for a time asleep or drowsy. And
so it sometimes comes to pass that a stern kind of
justice leads men eventually into the fair temple
of divine sympathy. We all tend to love those
w'tom we have helped, just as we tend to hate
those whom we have injured. Beneficence is
sometimes an elementary training to real charity.
The temporary locum tenens of love sometimes
becomes its permanent assistant. Reluctant
service is warmed into ardent benevolence.
Even in the realm of genuine Christian sym
pathy and love, elementary justice is often called
upon to play a very useful part. It gives dis
cretion to charity in the administration or dis
tribution of its gifts. We cannot always help all
42

The Religion of H. G. Wells
who are in need. We must sometimes select some to
help in preference to others; and in making this
selection, simple justice is often an indispensable
guide. In giving pensions, for instance, we
ought to prefer the claims of the unfortunate
industrious to those of the idle and the thriftless,
since by aiding the former we shall do far more
real and lasting good than by partially wasting
our resources in a more or less futile attempt
to aid the latter.
In its more human form of sympathetic equit
ableness it is manifest enough that justice is
indispensable. Scarcely anything rankles in men's
minds so much as the feehng that they are not
dealt with fairly and considerately. In my
long and very intimate intercourse with Enghsh
soldiers I have been greatly struck by their strong
hatred of favouritism and unfairness. The men
do not hate reasonable strictness, provided that
it is accompanied by real fairness. In talking
about their own punishments, soldiers often
confess that in some cases they fully deserved
what they received; and such punishments do
not usually destroy their regard or even their
affection for their officers; but in other cases,
43

The Religion of H. G. Wells
when they consider that they have not been
fairly and considerately treated, the punishments
often produce the very worst effects in the form
of hopeless sullenness and abiding discontent
and hatred. The demand for reasonable fairness
is a strong and lasting one in all ordinary or
normal specimens of human nature.
We must therefore be careful to retain sub
stantial fairness, even though we recognise the
truth that something more is due from us to all
our fellows. We must take care that the lower
part of our religion does not crumble away whilst
we are seeking to adorn its loftier parts. The
transfiguration of justice must not cause it to
part with any of its intrinsically valuable ele
ments. In our theology, as distinct from our practical
religion, it is manifest that a finer sense of equit
ableness is rapidly transforming and ennobling
the old crude idea of justice. A soul of living
love is springing up beneath the old grisly ribs
of death and oppression. Men are beginning
to realise the truth that love, and not merely
elementary justice, is the basal principle of Christ's
rehgion. Years ago, Father Faber, the Roman
44

The Religion of H. G. Wells
Cathohc writer of many popular hymns, evidently
felt that the divine justice must be something
deeper, more human, and more loving than what
men generally call justice. The essential Father
hood of God was the fundamental idea of the
rehgion of Jesus, an idea which was manifestly
the regnant one in the Johannine writings. But
the lower and cruder idea of a kind of stern and
rough justice as the essential feature in the
character of God soon invaded the Christian
church and for many centuries dominated its
habitual teaching. A soul which had been
nourished on the beautiful and tender thoughts
of Jesus might well have exclaimed, during many
years, as it saw religion degenerating from sym
pathy into harshness, " 0 God, the heathen are
come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
have they defiled." To bring harshness into the
temple of God is worse than to bring the money
changers. The conception of a rigid, inexorable, and
inhuman justice as the regnant principle in the
moral universe has been to the Christian religion
in some ways much like the idea of Fate in the
old Greek thought. Graciousness and tenderness
45

The Religion of H. G. Wells
were alien from the very nature of both these
conceptions. Just as Fate overruled the semi-
human feehngs and activities of Zeus and the
other Olympian divinities, so, to a certain extent,
a stern, unbending, and unrelenting justice has
been conceived as domineering over the semi-
human and more gracious elements of the char
acter of God and as almost imprisoning His
generosity. This stern tyrant was conceived
as almost thwarting the benevolent designs of
the Creator. It held the divine love in check.
God was obliged to scheme against it. It held
a kind of mortgage or first charge on the great
wealth of God's pity and tenderness. Its claims
must be paid somehow before God could recover
the free use of his aboriginal benevolence. The
tyranny was none the less real because it was
exercised wholly from within. The stern debtor
had, as it were, entered into possession of the
creditor's estate. " The iron had entered into
the soul " of God. The nobler and more gracious
attributes of God were held in bondage.
From this grim tyrant modern Christian theology
has made its escape. We are now free to love
the Lord our God with all our hearts and all our
46

The Religion of H. G. Wells
minds. Divine justice is perceived to be both'
flexible and gracious, as it were, the other side
of the divine love, the coadjutor and not the
hinderer of the divine pity and tenderness. The
Atonement is now viewed entirely as the result
or outcome of God's love, and not in any sense
or in any degree as its cause. The inner fife of
the Creator is now conceived as " a city that is
unity within itself." The divine attributes
are no longer thought to be at war with each other.
Now, in these later days of its long spiritual
pilgrimage, the human race, as it approaches
more nearly to its long-lost Father, is free to
exclaim gratefully in the glad language used by
one of Bunyan's pilgrims, as he crossed the
dividing river of death, " Grace reigns."
Turning -now to another part of the book before
us, I am glad to find myself in most hearty agree
ment with Mr Wells as to the unwisdom of
secession from the churches in which we were
born and brought up. This writer holds that
the sectarian and separating spirit is an evil
spirit, because it is anti-social. This conclusion
is a necessary corollary from the author's funda
mental idea that salvation is only to be found
47

The Religion of H. G. Wells
by identifying ourselves with the collective hfe
of our race. According to this idea — in my
opinion a very true and valuable one — sectarianism
in all its varied forms is the true sin against the
Holy Ghost, the one fatal and ruinous sin. " The
branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide
in the vine." We must abide steadfastly in
the life of collective humanity; otherwise the
vital sap in us will be dried up, and we shall
wither away. A hand or a foot practically ceases
to be even a hand or a foot, if it is severed from
the rest of the body. The significance of each
individual personality is dependent on its relation
to a larger whole. We cannot really save or
develop ourselves in solitary isolation. We are
as musical instruments on which others must
play, in order to evoke their finest music.
Apart from the releasing co-operation of
others, our best faculties would remain merely
vague potentiahties feebly " strugghng to be
born." Our author sees clearly the difficulties that
beset the path of progressive minds and souls as
regards their permanent connection with ecclesi
astical organisations. Such minds are very often
48

The Religion of H. G. Wells
" in a strait betwixt two." Their dilemma is
a very real and pressing one. Unfavourable
circumstances, like a cruel highwayman, frequently
seem to address pilgrims in these stern words,
" Your veracity or your life." It sometimes
appears to enlightened souls as if the only choice
were between hypocrisy on one side and starva
tion and uselessness on the other. If we resolve
sternly to follow all perceived truth at all costs,
our souls are frozen and depressed by the terrible
homelessness of the pioneers of knowledge, who
too often, like Jesus himself, " have not where to
lay their heads." If, on the other hand, we
chng tenaciously to humanity, and address it in
the old pathetic words of Ruth to Naomi, " Entreat
me not to leave thee, or to return from following
after thee," then we fear lest we should be counted
cowardly and unfaithful to the noblest light and
revelation. It seems at times as if we must
sacrifice either our heads or our hearts. Whether
we enter into the " hfe " of knowledge or into
that of love, it seems as if in either case we must
enter into it " maimed " and mutilated. Truly
the alternative offered to keen intellects and
warmly vivid hearts is often a sad and perplexing
49

The Religion of H. G. Wells
one. And many of the noblest of our race,
following the hint which here seems to be given
us by Mr Wells, will elect to share the fate of
heroes rather than that of sages, and will say to
poor purblind, stumbling, and yet honest and
loving humanity, in the old words of warm
hearted Ruth, " Whither thou goest I will go,
and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people
shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where
thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried."
Perhaps this decision of affectionate souls
may not hereafter be reckoned disloyal by the
gr; at Lord of Truth. I remember that, in the
Pilgrims' Progress, the heroic " Greatheart "
d,: dared plainly that it was part of his sacred
mission to accommodate his pace to the slow
and wavering steps of weak pilgrims such as
"Mr Feeble-mind" and "Mr Ready-to-halt."
Perhaps ampler knowledge and entire consistency
will wait for us in the celestial city. Perhaps
they are amongst those good things that God
has in store for benevolent half-starved spirits
after they have carried out the primal principle
of genuine rehgion, " Bear ye one another's
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." It is
50

The Religion of H. G. Wells
plain enough that we cannot really bear the
burdens of our brethren if we separate ourselves
from them for merely speculative reasons. Per
haps on earth many must bear the cross of an
inharmonious inner hfe. Perhaps they must
even bear the reproaches of their own anti-social
intellects demanding absolute consistency and
branding all compromises as essentially cowardly
and false. Perhaps we may even " take pleasure
in infirmities, in reproaches, and in distresses for
Christ's sake " — for the sake of genuine compassion
and sympathy — knowing that, like Paul of old,
" when we are weak, then we are strong." It
is better to be reckoned by man for a time dis
honest intellectually than hereafter to be reckoned
by God unpitiful, proud, hard, and in some ways
selfish. The philosophy of Mr Wells appears to me
to give ample sanction to his teaching as to the
wrongness of separation from our brethren on
account of intellectual differences. If secession
from churches would lead us to pure and absolute
truth, and would enable us to communicate it
to others, we ought to secede. But since it will
not do this or anything approaching to it, we are
5i

The Religion of H. G. Wells
justified in holding that self-isolation is the chief
thing to be avoided.
After all, we are sent into the world mainly
for action, and not for merely abstract speculation ;
and any course which tends to impede salutary
action is, whenever possible, to be avoided.
Co-operation is absolutely necessary for lasting
work of real value in the great majority of cases.
And it is manifest that " the dissidence of dissent "
is eminently unfavourable to co-operation. It
is unreasonable to expect complete agreement
in religious matters. In other departments of
life we are able to co-operate with people with
whom we only partially agree, and we ought to be
both able and willing to do so in the sphere of
rehgion and morals.
Much evil often arises from men taking their
creeds too seriously, as if they were adequate
and final definitions of that which they endeavour
to set forth. Our present creeds are essentially
" things temporal," and not " things eternal,"
adumbrations of eternal verities, and not exact
descriptions of them. Finite and imperfect
knowledge vitiates our syllogisms just as much
as it vitiates our imaginative efforts. All widely-
52

The Religion of H. G. Wells
accepted creeds must necessarily be compro
mises. If each man insisted on the full expression
of his own pecuhar opinions in the general creeds,
there could be no general creeds. There would
be as many ohurches as there are individuals.
Each soul would carry about its own church, as
the snail adheres to its own peculiar shell. Each
man's creed is to a great extent the result of his
idiosyncrasies. As Ohver Wendell Holmes wittily
observed, " Smith beheves in the Smithate of truth;
Brown believes in the Brownate of truth."
The very same ideas assume a different form
as they are located in minds or souls of a different
order. The sage thinks philosophically, whilst
the multitude thinks pictorially. The doctrine
of the Trinity, for instance, as conceived by
profound reflection, must inevitably be very
different from that same doctrine as depicted to
itself by the uneducated imagination. Yet both
conceptions alike, that of the peasant as well as
that of the philosopher, may embody or at least
dimly adumbrate important practical truth,
having a real influence on man's higher life.
Each conception, in its own way, and in different
tongues, may proclaim the very important fact
S3

The Religion of H. G. Wells
that God's nature is essentially social, and not
solitary. By the philosophical mind the doctrines
of rehgion are recognised as merely useful though
inadequate and transitory symbols — but by the
thoughtless these doctrines are taken for literal
facts or at least for accurate photographs of
things. We ought to try to get behind the forms
of religious doctrines, to trace them to their
source, to find out what they really mean, what
men were endeavouring to express when they
cast their vague guesses at truth into the moulds
yji ecclesiastical formulas. And then I believe that
we shall find that people of different formal creeds
are far more in substantial agreement than they
appeared to be at first sight. Great thoughts
spring from the heart ; and the hearts of men
are far nearer to each other than their heads.
In the Eden of man's primitive instincts and
tendencies we shall find that great undivided
river of universal humanity, which, after leaving
Eden,/'' was parted and became into four heads."
There we shall find the great fontal source of
the many different streams of religious doctrine;
and when we have found this one primal source
of all the varied forms of spiritual life, we shall
S4

The Religion of H. G. Wells
have found the real Catholic Church into which
may at length be gathered all the discrepant
forms of human goodness that have flowed forth
from it at different times and in various directions.
With regard to membership of a church Mr Wells
says, " By conformity I do not mean silent con
formity. It is a man's primary duty to convey
his individual difference to the minds of his
fellow-men. It is because I want that difference
to tell to the utmost that I suggest that he should
not leave the assembly." This seems to me
salutary advice. If we leave a church, we lose
all influence over it. The needed reforms are far
more likely to be brought about by the pressure
of expanding thought within than by hostile
attacks from outside. The leaven must not
separate itself from the inert lump. The true
reformer must to a certain extent conciliate those
whom he wishes to enhghten. He must make his
appeal as to friends, and not as to enemies.
He must show that the higher truths which he
preaches are a legitimate development of truths
already held by his hearers. To the better know
ledge " struggling to be born " in the womb of
the popular theology he must act the part of a
55

The Religion of H. G. Wells
midwife, as Socrates did in the minds of his
disciples, rather than the part of an impatient
and rough reviler.
The wise ought always to remember that to
"have compassion on the multitude" is an essential
and important part of their duty. In the realms
of thought most men are but stammering children,
who as yet know not how to express their feehngs
and their, ideas accurately or adequately. Crude
conceptions are the picture-books of infants.
Fairy tales help to develop infantine imagination,
which in later years may feed itself on the wonders
of the Cosmos as revealed by science. Allegories
are not lies, but avenues to knowledge. They
suggest higher truths which cannot at present
be adequately followed or thought out. Miracles,
or supposed miracles, in the external world are
useful in one way. They nourish imagination
and prepare men's minds for the reception and
contemplation of the far greater wonders of the
spiritual world. They are in some ways hke John
the Baptist preparing the way for the true
Messiah. They bear witness to the power and
living energy of God, whilst not adequately re
vealing it. They are a kind of necessary prelude
56

The Religion of H. G. Wells
to call men's attention to the gentler but more
significant voice of God speaking in the soul itself.
If we wish to educate undeveloped minds, we must
have much patience with them, and we must go
to work very gradually. " For precept must be
upon precept, precept upon precept ; line upon fine,
line upon fine, here a little and there a little."
Nevertheless it must be owned that the work
of gradually emancipating the minds of the more
ignorant from the slavery of childish errors is
often a very disheartening work. Thinkers often
feel inclined to give it up and to leave them alone.
St Paul evidently felt vexed at times with the
slow progress of his disciples; for he says to the
Corinthians, with a kind of sorrowful reproach,
" And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as
unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto
babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and
not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to
bear it, neither yet now are ye able." And the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews makes the
same complaint when he writes thus: "When
for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need
that one teach you again which be the first
principles of the oracles of God, and are become
d 57

The Religion of H. G. Wells
such as have need of milk, and not of strong
meat." This melancholy passage seems to me
singularly applicable to most of the present
ministers of the Church of England. They do
not really lead the spiritual thought of our age.
On the contrary, they lag behind and pour
anathemas on bolder and deeper intellects. The
true rehgious pioneers are generally branded as
heretics. The church at present has a fatal
tendency to look back, or to bury its head in the
sands of worthless ecclesiastical traditions. There
is almost nothing genuinely Pauline in its present
tendencies. Whilst the Scottish Presbyterian
churches, the Established and the United Free
churches, are for the most part dominated and
guided by leaders gifted with real thoughtfulness,
the Anglican church seems to be more and more
in the power of the sacerdotal and unintellectual
party. Hence it came to pass that Dr James
Martineau, who in earlier years had cherished
bright visions of a truly national and reasonable
Anglican establishment, in his later years was
driven to despair, and thought that really broad-
minded divines ought to secede from the Church
of England. He wrote sad and bitter words
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
concerning its clergy, and declared that they
adroitly sought to make up for their poverty of
thought by beauty of ritual, whilst detaining the
souls of their people " at a stage of spiritual culture
not much higher than that of the Salvation
Army." Still, I agree on the whole with the views of
Mr Wells, and not with those of my revered
friend, Dr Martineau, as to the duty of secession
from the Church of England. If all real thinkers
left it, its state would soon become even worse
than it is. " As the shipmen were about to flee
out of the ship, when they had let down the boat
into the sea, Paul said to the centurion and to
the soldiers, ' Except these abide in the ship, ye
cannot be saved.' " Even so it seems to me that
Paul now cries to those rare enlightened minds
in our church who, though few in number and
apparent influence, are yet the real " ship-
men " of the national church, the only men
able to save it from final and irretrievable
disaster. It is cheering to find that Mr Wells, notwith
standing hi§ aversion to own that he is a Theist.
yet counsels men to use prayer whenever they feel
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
able to do so, and also to join in the fellowship
of common worship and the celebration of the
Holy Communion or the Mass. We rather wonder
to whom men are to pray, as this writer will not
affirm that there is really a God, and men cannot
pray to a mere stream of tendency. Still, the
wish for fellowship in devotion is a natural corollary
from our author's fundamental principle that the
summum bonum of human hfe is to be found in
heart-felt union with our race collectively.
I have now come to the end of my agreement
or partial agreement with this original thinker.
Our paths now part from each other. And I must
proceed to point out the reasons which make me
differ profoundly from Mr Wells as regards the
doctrines of God, of immortality, and of the
nature and functions of Christ.
As regards the doctrine that there is a God, I
think that our author is very inconsistent. He
holds that there is a special providence. He
believes that there is a general plan for terrestrial
development, and he also believes that each
individual, with all his weaknesses, uglinesses,
and peculiarities, is really important in the
development of the general scheme. He detects
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
purpose throughout the Cosmos, and throughout
all human life. But he will not admit that
purpose implies necessarily a purposing mind.
His faith is certainly peculiar. He believes
easily what many Theists find a very great
difficulty in believing; but he will not believe
what they find it easy to believe. He believes
in the guardianship and arrangement of human life
down to its minutest detail, whilst yet apparently
declining to beheve in any conceivable guardian
or presiding and arranging mind. Many Theists
find it very difficult to beheve in the doctrine of
a special providence. They tend to beheve in
the reign of general laws, which, though beneficent
on the whole, sometimes act injuriously to in
dividuals for a time. But the faith of Mr Wells
is far more thorough and robust. He believes
that each person and thing, and each event is
specially adapted to a special end. There are
no real failures, no miscarriages, or abortions in
the creation. Everything fulfils its intended
purpose. " Not a sparrow falls to the ground "
through the heedlessness of Nature. The wicked
fulfil a purpose as well as the good. " The Lord hath
made all things for himself, yea, even the wicked."
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
This thorough-going optimistic faith seems to
me quite groundless if one refuses to beheve in
a great presiding mind. The pessimism of Mr
Thomas Hardy seems to me far more logical than
the optimism of Mr Wells. What grounds has
this rejoicing optimist for his robust faith? How
does he know that " all things work together for
good " in this dehghtful way? The phenomena
of Nature and the course of human life, when taken
alone, give no sanction to such a cheerful creed.
Our expectations are apparently disappointed,
when we survey impartially the actual state of
the world. We " look for judgment, but behold
oppression, for righteousness, but behold a cry."
To a really impartial inspection it often seems
that " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
in pain together until now."
Of what nature is this great pervading purpose
or scheme which Mr Wells perceives to be un
ceasingly at work throughout the universe?
Does it really know thoroughly what it is about ?
Or is it only a sort of unconscious mind blindly,
though at present successfully, groping its way
to satisfactory results? Is it hke that queer sort
of mind in which " Robert Elsmere " beheved,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
a mind to which we are strictly forbidden to attri
bute intelligence? Is it truly oonscious and self-
conscious, or does it only dream and walk and
work in its sleep? If it is not thoroughly conscious
and awake, how do we know that it may not some
day fall down a precipice and be killed and drag
the universe with it into final ruin? Has it any
permanent ethical character? Mr Wells writes
thus concerning this mysterious moulding force:
" Behind everything I perceive the smile that
makes all effort and discipline temporary, all the
stress and pain of life endurable." Is this smile
the really encouraging smile of conscious wisdom
and sympathy, or is it only the unmeaning smile
of an unconscious power dreaming and pleased
with its dreams?
Mr Wells sometimes uses the language of de
cided Theism. He speaks occasionally of " God,"
" the purpose of God," and " the service of God."
Why, then, does he hesitate or dislike to use the
word God habitually to describe the innermost
power which sustains and direots the universe?
His reason seems to be that he is afraid that people
will misunderstand his meaning, and will infer that
he believes in a God with a limited personality.
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
But to me it seems that our author's caution is
excessive and not really necessary. We should
in great measure be reduced to dumbness, if we
did not use any words which are of varying
signification and frequently misunderstood. Even
so common a word as " good " is used by different
people in very widely different senses. To the
savage cruelty is good. Mr Wells confesses that
he can give no definition of beauty; yet he does
not scruple to use the word. He also freely uses
the word justice, though that also has a great
variety of meanings.
Why, then, does this writer shrink from the
habitual use of the word God? I think that
he does so from a sort of exaggerated and mis
taken sense of reverence. The word God has been
so degraded and vulgarised by the unthinking
that it has often come to signify only a stupendous
mechanic or a glorified schoolmaster. And so
Emerson sometimes preferred to speak of the
creator as " the nameless thought, the super-
personal heart," in order to rescue the conception
from trifling and lowering associations. Yet
Emerson was at heart a Theist, though in some
moods of mind he used the language of Pantheism.
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
He quite appreciated the great value of the higher
thought of God. He wrote thus: "How dear,
how soothing to man, arises the idea of God,
peopling the lonely place, effaoing the scars of
our mistakes and disappointments! It is the
doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite
enlargement of the heart with a power of growth
to a new infinity on every side." Mr Wells is
quite able, in some of his moods, to sympathise
with these words of the sage of Concord. He says,
" Yet at times I admit that the sense of Personality
is very strong. ... At times, in the silence of
the night, and in rare lonely moments, I come
upon a sort of communion of myself and something
great that is not myself." This writer confesses
that he has a mystic element in him, and I think
that it would be better if he were to listen
more habitually to its significant though vague
suggestions. Our author's use of the word " scheme " rer
minds me sometimes of Herbert Spencer's use
of the phrase " the Persistence of Force." In
both cases alike a result is mistaken for a cause;
effluences are mistaken for independent and self-
existing entities. A " scheme " implies a pur-
65

The Religion of H. G. Wells
posing mind at the back of it, and the " Persistence
of Force " indioates only our sense of an abiding
and unsleeping power which sustains and quickens
the universe. Neither of these conceptions dis
penses with the necessity for a great " I Am "
at the root of the universe. Both are merely
delegates and are not self-explaining. They
are only a kind of temporary resting-place for the
mind in its long search for real and adequate
explanations. No doubt, all our knowledge of God is essentially
relative and provisional ; but that does not make
it useless. As Dr Martineau wisely remarked,
" All our beliefs and speech concerning God are
untrue, yet infinitely truer than any non-belief
and silence." To some extent we know the
direction in which some of the divine attributes
lie, though as yet it is not given to us to discern
those attributes adequately. And there are pro
bably many attributes of God of which with our
present faculties we can form no idea whatever.
An idea of God, a vague, provisional, and in
adequate idea we may certainly have ; a coherent
idea free from all mixture of errors and inconsist
encies we certainly cannot have. Our knowledge,
66

The Religion ot H. G. Wells
such as it is, is progressive. We can put no
neat permanent labels of our devising on the
ever-varying coruscations of the divine attributes.
Rational Christians do not look upon their creeds
as descriptions or maps of God, as Matthew
Arnold seemed to suppose that they do. They
rather regard them as being only a record of
transient and partial glimpses of some few aspects
of God, and of God in His relation to us, and not
in His inner and abiding essence. If I may use
a bold expression, no manifestations can disclose
to us the inner core of the divine nature. We do
not pretend to accurate and definite knowledge
on so awful and mysterious a matter. We only
say that, in our highest intuitions, we have re
ceived invaluable hints and suggestions concerning
it. We make no exhaustive catalogue of the
divine perfections — for we see only one side of
God, as we see only one side of the moon — we only
record a few of their ways of manifesting them
selves to us. It would be too ambitious a thing
for the inhabitants of some tiny creek to draw
up a philosophy of the vast ocean with all the
mighty wonders of its inaccessible depths; but
it would not be an unwise thing for these awe-
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
struck inhabitants to keep a kind of record of the
ways in which their poor dwelling-place was from
time to time affected by the ocean's ebb and flow.
The creeds of the more thoughtful amongst the
devout are essentially not much more than such
a record in spiritual matters. Perhaps even dogs
keep in their consciousness some such record of
the varying indications that they receive of the
characters and intentions of their masters.
In our days the philosophy called Pragmatism
has come to the assistance of well-nigh despairing
Agnosticism, and Mr Wells seems quite willing to
listen to its suggestions. Pragmatism has come
as a kind of angel of the agony to sorrowful and
honest souls in their sore conflicts with intellectual
and spiritual bewilderment and doubt. It teaches,
in a reasonable and more modest form, the old
Greek philosophical doctrine that " man is the
measure of all things." To a certain extent
Jesus himself was an exponent of this sort of
philosophy when he declared, " The kingdom of
God is within you." This great saying of our
divine leader is most invigorating. It enables
us to confront the appalling vastness of the
physical Cosmos with subhme confidence and the
68

The Religion of H. G. Wells
calm assurance of faith. Undismayed by the
dizzying and almost petrifying revelations of
modern astronomy, the soul now dares to pro
claim the deeper significance of human intellect
and human goodness. Mere size no longer terrifies
and humiliates us. Our physical littleness no
longer depresses us. We know that bulk is no
real indication of value in God's sight. It is one of
God's inferior gifts, as it were, a kind of pro
visional " guinea-stamp " of immensity, of little
Worth in comparison with intrinsic quahty.
Gazing on the far-shining stars of God as they
disclose some of the wonders of the Most High,
we frail creatures of earth now venture to exclaim,
" We also are His offspring." Exiles though we
now are from the more central mysteries and
glories of the universe, we yet dare to believe that
heaven is our predestined home, that we came
forth from the bosom of the subhme and shall
at last return to it. The strangeness of other
and vaster worlds seems to pass away. We expect
some day to be quite at home in them. We cry
gladly with exultant Paul, " Our citizenship is in
the heavens."
Some such thoughts of the supreme value of
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
ethical and spiritual qualities as compared with
physical vastness and power must have helped
to cheer and sustain the faithful mind of Professor
Huxley when he ventured so bravely to oppose
the ethical intuitions of the human soul to the
dictates of the world of Nature. The faith ex
pressed by this most honest thinker in his Romanes
Lectures may seem a forlorn and hopeless one ; but
it is grounded on the conviction that God's New
Testament is of deeper and more abiding signific
ance than his Old Testament, that the revelation
written in the hearts of the nobler souls by God
is essentially truer and more lasting than the
revelations given us in Nature.
The essence of Pragmatism is the belief that
we must judge of intellectual creeds to a great
extent by their practical results. It is founded
on the conviction that God will not put us to
permanent intellectual and moral confusion,
that there is a real correlation between human
needs and divine arrangements, and that any
system which reduces man's fife to an absurdity
is ipso facto condemned as untrue. Pragmatism
impfies germinal Theism. It implies a belief that
the universe is sound at heart, a rational system,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
and not a chaos. Elijah was a Pragmatist when
he declared, " The God that answereth by fire,
let him be God." The essential temper of the
Pragmatist philosophy was well exhibited by the
bhnd man cured of his infirmity by Jesus, when
he said, in reply to the abstract arguments of
unbeheving Jews, " Whether he be a sinner or
no, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas
I was blind, now I see. Herein is a marvellous
thing that ye know not whence he is, and yet he
has opened my eyes."
Though Emerson often wrote in a semi-
Pantheistic spirit, he yet thought, in other moods
of mind, that man's higher nature is the best
revealer of God. Thus in his httle poem on
Friendship he declares that
" A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs."
Mr Wells has appealed to Pragmatism, and by
Pragmatism he must be judged. And I think
that the final verdict will certainly be that in
practically setting God aside in favour of the con
ception of a kind of vague, impersonal, and rather
unintelhgible scheme, he has acted unwisely and
7i

The Religion of H. G. Wells
deprived himself of a great and lasting source of
consolation, strength, and usefulness.
Equally unwise and contrary to the principles
of reasonable Pragmatism is this teacher's denial
of the doctrine of a future hfe. He absolutely
repudiates all belief in such a hfe, and he does
not appear to wish for it. He is quite content to
be a mere incident in the unending course of
cosmical development. For the loss of our old
ideas of God he attempts to give us some kind of
substitute in the form of what he calls a scheme;
but for the loss of our hope of a future life he gives
us no kind of substitute. He appears to think
that the survival of different personalities would
be a kind of encumbrance to the great scheme
of development. Immortality, if he believed
in it, would be to him a source of distress and
perplexity. He also says, " I cannot beheve
in a God who is always going about with me."
But surely this writer is not so unphilosophical
as to hold that the divine presence with one
personality implies the divine absence from other
personahties. I have known some people to whom the idea of
absolutely eternal existence has seemed irksome
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
and even terrible ; but even they desired a sequel
to their life; they wished for a future larger and
more satisfying existence, though they did not
desire that such an existence should go on for
ever. This wish for a future hfe of limited duration
seems to me far more rational than a total repudia
tion of any future existence. Unless there is
some sequel to our present hfe, it seems impossible
to justify the ways of God towards man or to
show that every human existence has been a
really desirable one on the whole. The failures,
disasters, and irretrievable mistakes and irre
parable tragedies of life on earth make this im
possible. It does not seem consistent with
the divine goodness that many of God's creatures
should suffer almost unceasingly on earth, in
order that a foundation may be made for the
happier life of subsequent races. Equitableness
seems to demand that every man's life, viewed
as a whole, should be to some extent a blessing
and not a curse to himself.
In his later years Herbert Spencer appears
to have realised the truth that, if each individual
of our race is entirely destroyed by bodily death,
e 73

The Religion of H. G. Wells
and if the whole race itself is ultimately destroyed,
human existence must necessarily be full of sadness
to the thoughtful. It was to him an almost
intolerable idea that no human mind would ever
penetrate into the inner and explanatory mysteries
of that vast Cosmos whose ever-varying and
illimitable wonders had for thousands of years
aroused the curiosity and awe of the human
intellect, and filled it with a thrilling sense of the
sublime. Why should the rational author of
the universe thus tantalise age after age the
noblest of His rational creatures? Why does
He not veil the stars from our sight, and force
as to be content with the earthly and the
finite? The view that an eternity of future existence
might be burdensome was cherished in some of
his moods by John Stuart Mill. But I beheve
that it is a mistaken one. We imagine monotony
in another world simply because we cannot at
present realise its immensity or our own capacities
for endless development. Mill's mind and soul
had been greatly depressed in earlier years by
the teaching of his father. The sombre gloom of a
devitalizing Necessitarianism caused him to under-
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
rate the possibihties of the human soul and the
power of the Creator. A kind of bhght brooded
over and impoverished the whole universe for
this thinker. The fountains of ever-fresh spont
aneity were conceived to be easily exhausted.
Mechanism vastly diminished joy. In the soul
of Mill imagination was in permanent bondage
to analysis. The Infinite of thought and the
Infinite of affection were both for many years
virtually excluded, and these are the truest re-
vealers of eternal life. Through their voice in
the depths of our souls God speaks to us most
powerfully concerning things to come, and cheers
us with the old assurance, " Because I live, ye
shall live also."
It is difficult to understand how Mr Wells can
be optimistic, as he is, whilst utterly repudiating
all expectation of a future life for our race. How
does he read or interpret human life ? What makes
him deaf to its unending groans and sighs of almost
perpetual pain and ever-baffled aspiration? Of
what use does he suppose our more spiritual
faculties to be, if their significance is exhausted
here on earth where their fife is one long struggle?
What answer can he give to the view of Mr John
75

The Religion of H. G. Wells
Fiske, the American writer on Evolution, the
view that, since in all the earher stages of terrestrial
development there has been a real correspondence
between healthy growth and adaptation to facts,
this correspondence is very unlikely to cease
suddenly when man reaches the highest stage?
Having adapted the growing creature to the
world of facts through thousands of years, why
should Nature or the presiding power suddenly
proceed to make it extremely wnsuited to the
objective truth of things? Is it probable that the
creature called man should have developed him-
Belf wisely and adequately, through countless
ages, by responding to a real stimulus acting
regularly outside of him, and should yet be forced,
or at least led, to develop himself m his maturest
stage by responding to a wholly unreal and
imaginary stimulus? Has truth been man's
guide up to a certain stage, and then handed
him over to illusion and error to complete his
education? Are the most elevated of our race
the most deceived? Whence came this idea
of a future life beyond the grave? Why does it
persist strongly in those who are furthest removed
from the old sources of semi-animal knowledge,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
in those who have discarded most of the old
original instinctive faiths of wondering brutes?
Why does this strange behef survive, if it is but a
phase of the old behef in ghosts? Why does it
outlast the behef in the fairies?
To these questions I believe that the best
answer is to be found in the teaching called
philosophical Pragmatism, and this teaching
Mr Wells both professes and in great measure
practises. But he does not go far enough in
following out its suggestions. He professes to
make his beliefs as he needs them ; but he in great
measure ignores many of the most imperious needs
of his fellow-creatures. He excludes from his
creed all that he does not himself personally
require. He forgets that God's true revelations
are given to universal humanity, that " no pro
phecy of the Scriptures is of any private inter
pretation," that " that is the true fight which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world. ' ' He
misinterprets and partially deprives of its vital signi
ficance that great motto of philosophical Pragmat
ism, " Securus judicat orbis terrarum." His method
is too sectarian or purely personal. He does not
survey human life as a whole sufficiently carefully.
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
This writer would have us find consolation in
the permanence and unending progress of our
race, though we and all other present inhabitants
of our world are destined to perish entirely. At
times he writes as if he thought that life on this
planet would go on for ever. He says, " I beheve
in the great and growing Being of the species
from which I rise, to which I return, and which,
it may be, will ultimately even transcend the limi
tation of the species and grow into the Conscious
Being, the Eternally Conscious Being of all things."
And in another passage he expresses his behef
that " the individual life guided by its perception
of beauty is incidental, experimental, and contri
butory to the undying life of the blood and race."
In this teaching Mr Wells seems to contradict
the plain verdict of modern physical science,
which declares that, as this world had a beginning,
so also it will have an end, and will leave behind
no traces of its finest products. Nature declares
that " all shall go." Consequently, if there is
no future life for man, if there is to be no permanent
result of the long and weary travail of the human
creation, the whole process of terrestrial develop
ment seems futile and useless. Nor is there any
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
reason to suppose that other portions of the
physioal universe will fare better; so that the
whole cosmical process of alternate development
and disintegration appears to be quite purpose
less, like the work of a half-conscious giant
blowing a series of transient bubbles, in order
to amuse himself. As regards our earth, the
prospect is certainly not cheering. As it draws
near to its end, its state is likely to be worse than
it was in the beginning, and the survival of the
fittest will mean the survival of the worst, the
survival of the lowest and coarsest organisations;
so that perhaps we might say of worlds what has
been said of individuals, " Those whom the gods
love die young."
Professor J. R. Seeley, in his Natural Religion,
has well expressed the devitalising effects of total
loss of faith in a future hfe. He writes thus:
" The more our thoughts widen and deepen, as
the universe grows upon us, and we become
accustomed to boundless space and time, the more
petrifying is the contrast of our own insignificance ;
the more contemptible become the pettiness,
shortness, fragihty of the individual hfe. A
moral paralysis creeps upon us. For a while
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
we comfort ourselves with the notion of self-
sacrifice; we say what matter if I pass; let me
think of others. But the other has become
contemptible no less than the self; all human
griefs seem little worth assuaging, human happiness
too paltry at the best to be worth increasing.
The whole moral world is reduced to a point, the
spiritual city ' the goal of all the saints ' dwindles
to ' the least of little stars ; ' good and evil, right
and wrong, become infinitesimal ephemeral
matters, while eternity and infinity remain
attributes of that only which is outside the realm
of morality. Life becomes more intolerable
the more we know and discover, so long as every
thing widens and deepens except our own duration,
and that remains as pitiful as ever. The affections
die away in a world where everything great and
enduring is cold; they die of their own conscious
feebleness and bootlessness."
John Stuart Mill also said that the chief benefit
of faith in a future life consisted not so much in
any one specific thing as in the general enlarge
ment of the scale of our feehngs.
To me it seems perfectly evident that human
hfe would be immensely saddened, impoverished,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
and deteriorated, if the old hope of immortality
should entirely wither away. We should then
not think it worth while to take very much
trouble. A placid and morally tolerant
Epicureanism would then seem the highest
wisdom. Heroism would appear to be Quixotic
folly. The highest virtue might well seem merely
provincial and sectarian pedantry, a thing in no
way valued by the author of the universe. We
should then take far less trouble to overcome our
vices and faults, especially as we grew old and
approached extinction. Why labour hard to
uproot weeds in a garden which we know to be
destined very soon to be swallowed up in an
earthquake? And yet we cannot help thinking that human
life has a really deep and permanent moral and
spiritual significance. We cannot believe that
we are all unmeaning bubbles. And so we invoke
the aid of Pragmatism. We reject a behef which
reduces our hfe to an absurdity. We refuse to
beheve that God will put us to permanent in
tellectual and moral confusion. We cordially
agree with the teaching of Mr John Fiske when
he says, " For my own part, therefore, I believe
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
in the immortahty of the soul, not in the sense
in which I accept the demonstrable truths of
science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reason
ableness of God's work."
And with our recovered faith in the subhme
destiny of man comes back in full vigour our old
faith in the character of Ood. The divine love,
which is the best light of human hfe, shines upon
us once more, and the gloomy darkness of our
orphaned sorrow passes away. Faith in im
mortality " shows us the Father " and that
" suffices us." We believe that we are the
children of God, and not merely his playthings.
We believe that the deepest purpose of the whole
terrestrial development is to train souls and make
them fit for the Father's presence. We believe
that each world that has in it self-conscious souls
will contribute something of permanent value
to the great spiritual treasure-house of God. And
we sometimes even venture to surmise that
perhaps the long travail and almost unending
pain of man's struggling life here on earth may
eventually contribute something unique and of
special value to the vast collection of the ethical
glories of the Most High. It may be that poor
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
strugghng man's old crown of thorns will shine
hereafter in the heavenly regions with a peculiar
and pathetic splendour of its own. It may be
that human heroism, having come through
" great tribulation," will be very near indeed to
the sacred heart of God, and will minister at one
of His noblest altars. It may be that God would
miss this sorely battered pilgrim, if he should
entirely vanish. Compared with the relatively
easy goodness of unfallen angels and archangels,
it may be that God highly values the wounded
and struggling fidelity of His more afflicted
children; so that, if the whole of our outcast
race should entirely vanish for ever, it may be
that occasionally, in certain phases of the divine
feelings, God might be touched with a kind of
profound regret, and, as He surveyed the shining
hosts of serene and untempted saints, might long
for a vision of aspiring humanity with its garments
rolled in blood, and might to some extent sym
pathise with the words of a bereaved earthly
father when he said, " I would rather have my
dead son than the best of living sons." One
cannot help thinking that sublime though baffled
fidelity is in some ways dearer to God and perhaps
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
more expressive of his central thoughts than any
amount of easy virtuousness. Heroism perhaps
mirrors and expresses what, from lack of better
words, we may dare to call the venturesome
romance of the divine nature.
It is rather difficult to, be sure whether Mr Wells
seriously means what he says as to demanding
that his friends, if they live again at all, should
reappear exactly as he knew them on earth.
The same unreasonable, though natural, demand
of bereaved ones is expressed in the Story of an
African Farm. To me this demand appears
highly absurd. It ignores the probability that,
if the friends of any men are changed in another
world, the souls of those who loved them on earth
will also be changed. It would probably be very
embarrassing and distasteful to Mr Wells if, in
another world, he should find his friends R. L.
Stevenson and Henley just as they were, whilst
he himself was greatly altered. It would seem to
be far better that all should be re-adjusted to the
different conditions of a new hfe. An earthly
father would be very unwise if he wished that his
interesting infants should always remain infants.
Such a wish would be selfish as well as absurd.

The Religion of H. G. Wells
Manhood has deeper joys than childhood. It
would not be wise on their part if some philosophers
among the lower animals were to declare that the
human race must have lost all real joyousness in
losing, to a very great extent, its old instinctive
vivacity of animahty. If God preserves for us
the vital essence of our human love, we need not
greatly trouble ourselves as to the forms in which
it may be clothed hereafter.
I now come to that part of the book before us
which will probably give most pain to Christians.
Mr Wells altogether repudiates Christ as a con
soler or guide for him. He does not hate Christ
as Shelley did when he wrote his ignorant and
foolish blasphemies in Queen Mab, but he is in
no way attracted to him. He writes thus: " I
hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I
assert that this great and very definite personality
in the hearts and imaginations of mankind does
not and never has attracted me."
This author also declares that he does not
beheve that Christians generally have any real
love for Christ. He thinks that this is proved
by the fact that they put various human
ised figures, fike that of the Virgin Mary,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
between themselves and their professed
Saviour. The reasons why Mr Wells cannot feel any
real love or devotion to Christ seem to be two.
One is that Christ was too mournful a being; and
the other is that he was not really human at all.
Let us proceed to examine both these reasons.
This writer says concerning Jesus, " I cannot
love him any more than I can love a man upon
the rack." At first this sentence appears to be
utterly puzzling. If one loved a man before,
would one cease to love him because he was in
torment? On the contrary, I believe that in
some ways our love would be genuinely increased.
When the Mater Dolorosa and " the beloved
disciple " witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus, one
cannot help thinking that their love was vastly
enhanced, instead of being lessened. Christ him
self loved the repentant thief in his hour of agony,
and it is evident that the thief began to return
that love. But I suppose that Mr Wells really
means that he could not have pleasant friendly
intercourse with a man in agony. Horror would
freeze all incipient pleasure. Yet surely there
is a higher and nobler sort of love than that of
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
pleasant social intercourse. I doubt not that
Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, in her long sad
vigil on the rock, loved her dead outcast sons
quite as well as she ever loved them in more
prosperous days. Sadness is not always an enemy
to love. As George Ehot taught, our higher
hfe, the life of mutual love and service, is often
so closely associated with pain that we can
only tell it from pain by remembering that it is
what we should choose before all things. The
sight of suffering often greatly quickens love and
admiration quite as much as it quickens pity.
When Walt Whitman spent long months in
ministering to the wants of wounded and sick
soldiers in mihtary hospitals during the civil war
in the United States, I imagine that he in some
ways experienced much of the deepest happiness
of his hfe. He both gave and received the pro-
foundest affection, and his knowledge of the great
heroism with which these young fellows — many
of them mere boys — bore their acute sufferings
must have tended vastly to increase his love and
admiration both for them individually and for
human nature as a whole. In those sad hours
of his life this great soul dived beneath the super-
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
ficial surface of man's nature, and saw that, in
its ultimate depths, it was far more noble and
lovable than he had hitherto supposed it to be.
If we will not watch lovingly with suffering
humanity, if, hke fastidious Emerson, we avert
our eyes from its sore wounds and sorrows, then
I believe that we deprive ourselves of some
of the very best and deepest sources of
abiding joy. Sympathy leads us by a cross
to a crown.
In the ordinary sense of the word Jesus was
not in the least a gloomy person. Circumstances
and his keen sympathy made him in some ways a
" man of sorrows," but nature had made him
serene and happy. The reahsed love of his
Eternal Father brightened his whole life. He
diffused peace and serenity wheresoever he went,
at least in the hearts of those capable of under
standing him. The home at Bethany was the
happier and the more cheerful for his friendly
visits. Martha went about her necessary house
hold work with a lighter heart and more buoyant
energy when Jesus visited her. At the marriage-
feast in Cana of Galilee, Christ, as his mother
evidently expected, added to the festive enjoy-

The Religion of H. G. Wells
ment of the guests rather than diminished it.
He knew well the great value of happiness in
human life. Moreover, Jesus loved Nature and
knew nothing of the austere gloom of Puritanism.
The hght of his Father's love irradiated all the
homeliest processes of the natmjl world, so that
they became instructive parables to simple souls.
Children were drawn to our Lord by his serene
and whole-hearted benignity. In many ways
he was the simplest, most kindly, and most
natural of men. In his judgment the super
natural in man was no menacing and alien power,
but rather it was the natural " come to itself "
and realising its own deepest significance. It
was a veritable God in our own souls.
Mr Wells also thinks that Christ was not really
a human being, and so that we can obtain neither
consolation nor strength from his example. He
says, "To me the Christian Christ seems not so
much a humanised God as an incomprehensibly
sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness
wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his
white self unchanged. He had no petty weak
nesses. Now the essential trouble of my life is
its petty weaknesses."
f 89

The Religion of H. G. Wells
If we consider this objection, I think that
we shall find that the writer who brings it forward
is really thinking exclusively of the ecclesiastical
portrait of Jesus, and not of that which is given
us in the four gospels. It is in great measure
true that ordinary orthodox divines have to a
great extent dehumanised Christ. Practically
they have sought to prove his divinity by elimin
ating the greater portion of his essential humanity.
As Max Miiller declared, they have virtually
denied the very incarnation which they professed
to assert. Hence arose the worship of the finest
human qualities in the person of the Virgin Mary
and other mediators. For centuries the real
Christ was hidden from men's eyes in a cloud of
metaphysics. But, when we turn back to the Gospels, we at
once begin to recover the true portrait of the
divine ideal man. The metaphysical entity
vanishes, and the unfailing Friend returns.
The profound naturalness of Jesus sometimes
almost startles us. He seems to be more ourselves
than we are. He " tells us all that ever we did."
When we cannot understand the goal of our own
faculties, when " it doth not yet appear what we
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
shall be," the vision of the actual Christ often
seems to shed hght on our future by assuring
us that " we shall be hke him." His developed
humanity interprets our inchoate humanity.
The complete and universal man interprets the
fragmentary and sectional man.
If Mr Wells will read carefully the Synoptic
gospels, I think that he will find in them, as he
might also partly find in the fourth Gospel, that it
was in great measure the intense humanity of
Jesus that led the great majority of his followers
to a befief in his divinity. In their view it was
the actual reahsation of the ideal of humanity
which most effectually suggested a heavenly
origin. Christ's earliest followers were in some
ways anthropomorphic to the very core of their
souls. They would not have appreciated or
worshipped a genuinely non-human teacher. They
could only recognise the divine in the noblest
forms of the human.
Nor was Jesus supposed to be entirely free
from all human limitations and weaknesses.
Even to this day the doctrine called Kenosis,
the doctrine that Christ, at his incarnation, had
emptied himself of some of his highest attributes,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
bears witness, in the Christian churches, to the
intense and lasting impression made on men's
souls by the profound humanity of the man of
Nazareth. The gospels represent Jesus as ignorant
as to, the time of the end of the world. They
hmit his power by declaring that, on one occasion
at least, he could not work miracles because of
men's unbelief. As for weaknesses, it is true
enough that he had no petty weaknesses; but he
had many weaknesses which hard natures would
have despised. He was intensely sensitive and
very greatly dependent on human affection,
though that was so often denied to him. He
often felt utterly weary and discouraged. He
often shrank from anticipated pain. His tender
spirit often recoiled from the fierce hatred of his
enemies. The sinlessness of Jesus does not mean that he
could not have sinned, but merely that he did not
sin. Otherwise his temptation would have been
a farce. The Christian doctrine on this difficult
subject really is that Christ had in him the capacity
for sinning, but that the higher elements of his
nature always kept this capacity in check. Our
Lord's perfection was the perfection of rational
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The Religion of H. G. Wells,
volition and not that of necessitarian mechanical-
ness. Moreover, he thoroughly understood how and
why ordinary men come to yield to temptation.
And that perfect understanding led to deepest
sympathy. It is probably not true, as Mr Wells
seems to suppose, that, in order to render fullest
sympathy possible, two souls must be on the same
moral and spiritual level. Socrates was in some
ways on a very far higher level than most of his
closest friends and followers. The sympathy
between old age and youth is sometimes intensely
keen. The veteran warrior in the spiritual
as in the natural world is not always isolated
from the loving sympathy of the young recruit.
If Christ had not been really human, or if he had
never felt the strong solicitations of evil, if he had
not been a conqueror after long agony, but a
strange being miraculously exempt from all
strife, he would not have been the friend whom
we sinners need. The incarnation would have
been a failure. The wandering human race
would have no " Good Shepherd." Yet even
amongst earthly friends it is not necessary that
the higher nature should participate in the moral
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
failures of the lower. It is enough that it should
understand them and be always ready to make
full allowance for them. In the Pilgrims' Progress
"Mr Feeble-mind" and "Mr Ready-to-Halt "
could genuinely love and appreciate " Greatheart,"
though he was gloriously free from their " petty
weaknesses." To them the vast superiority of
their guide was essentially encouraging, and not
depressing. In his splendid vigour they discerned
a pledge of their own ultimate delivery from their
miserable weakness. The perfection of our divine
leader does not mock or tantalise us. On the
contrary, it helps us. We are not estranged from
Christ, for we know that he was destined to be
" the first-born among many brethren." Those
who have risen to the greatest heights in the
moral and spiritual world often understand best
the misery and degradation of failure, and feel
the deepest compassion for it.
That Christ was genuinely attractive to ordinary
sinners — be the reason what it may — is clearly
proved by the gospel narratives. Few of those
who came into contact with him recognised his
divine nature; but all unsophisticated hearts
recognised his genuine humanity. To most men
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
he was far more a friend than a master, and to
many he was much more of a physician for the
body than a dogmatic teacher for the intellect.
Even hard and hostile Jewish observers perceived
clearly that he really loved Lazarus. Christ's
ethical and emotional nature was discerned by
men far sooner and far more adequately than his
rank in the universe. The recognition of his
position in the Cosmos came, where it came at all,
only as a later inference. Even when his disciples
thought that " even the winds and the sea obeyed
him," they still looked on him as essentially a
man, and not a God. The Pauline and
Johannine theories as to the celestial origin
and cosmical functions of Christ, whether
we regard them as true or as false, are mani
festly the result of later thought, and not of
the immediate experience of the first companions
of Jesus.
Mr Wells exemplifies thus his abiding sense
of the unreahty of Christ's human nature: " One
cry of despair does not suffice. The Christian's
Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not
flesh enough, not earth enough. He was never
foohsh and hot-eared and inarticulate, never
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
vain; he never forgot things nor tangled his
miracles." I have already in this essay made some reply
to this criticism. The truth is, as I have already
intimated, that Mr Wells practically ignores the
historical testimony of the gospels, and takes his
ideas of Jesus from a mass of ecclesiastical dogmas
which really hide rather than reveal the historical
man of Nazareth.
If we go back to the gospel narratives, we shall
find most abundant evidence that the profound
humanity of Christ did appeal powerfully to almost
all sorts and conditions of simple and unsophistic
ated men. One evidence of this is to be found
in the fact that both the Pharisees, and some of
the early heathen critics of Christianity, rested
a considerable part of their disparagement of
our Lord's rehgion on the fact that, in its earlier
stages, it was essentially a popular or plebeian
rehgion. Speaking to officers who had been
much impressed by the words of our Lord, the
Pharisees said scornfully, " Have any of the
rulers or of the Pharisees beheved in him? but this
people, which knoweth not the law, is cursed."
And, in later years, some refined and learned
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
heathen assailants of our rehgion were full of
contempt for the low and motley crowd of
uneducated followers which constituted such
a very large portion of the church of
Christ. The Christian's Christ, who seems " too fine "
for Mr Wells, was certainly not too fine for many
of the most degraded characters in the land of
the Jews; and I am quite sure that he would not
have seemed too fine for the writer whom I am
now criticising, if only that writer could have been
present at some of the friendly ministrations
of the sympathetic prophet of Nazareth.
Mr Wells is manifestly friendly to sinners; so he
would not sympathise in the least with the harsh
and Judaic attack of the late Mr Cotter Morison
on the all-pitying tenderness of Jesus for the
weak, the erring, and the lost. Mr Morison's
indictment of the apparently antinomian com
passion of Christ may serve at least to show that
Christ did thoroughly sympathise with many of
the most lawless characters of his age and nation,
that, in a sense, the Pharisees were right in regard
ing him as a friend of publicans and sinners in a
very close and very intimate way. Mr Cotter
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
Morison's harsh Judaic venom was poured out
on our Lord chiefly on account of his special love
for sinners. This special and clinging love seemed
to this Pharisaical and dry-as-dust moralist a
downright insult to morality. He even censured
Jesus for pardoning the penitent thief on the cross
without forcing him first to make amends to
the society he had injured, as if any man with a
human heart would not judge that crucifixion
itself was a far too severe punishment for theft,
as if it had been in any way possible for the suffer
ing thief in his last agony to make the amends
demanded there and then.
Mr Morison's objections to Christ seem a
very adequate answer to the objections of Mr H.
G. Wells. It is plain enough that the real historical
Jesus was not " too fine " for ordinary men or
for gross sinners. The lepers of the spiritual
as of the natural world turned confidently to the
man of Nazareth. They recognised the truth
that he had a special mission to them, that he had
a special tenderness for those who were failures
on earth, for the weak, the despondent, and the
outcast. Many other rehgious teachers have
had a great general love for sinners as a

The Religion of H. G. Wells
part of the human race. The peculiarity of
Christ was that he had a very special love for
them. Trinitarians and Unitarians can well agree
in looking upon Christ's nature as undoubtedly
unique in one way, that is, in the marvellous
union in the same soul of supreme personal purity
with unrivalled insight into the character of
sinners and unrivalled compassion and love for
them. Christ actually accomplished, as a matter
of fact, what Mr Wells regards as almost im
possible. His higher nature did not separate him
from the hearts of the weak and the sinful. That
glorious spirit, during his earthly life, was hardly
ever so much at home, so much in his natural
place, as when he was in familiar intercourse
with sinners. Then assuredly did he seem to
himself to be best fulfilling his sacred mission.
He had comparatively little to say to the strong
and the righteous. He sought out the world's
miserable failures, abortions, and moral wrecks.
And he never spoke patronisingly to them. As
Dr Martineau — the noblest mind amongst modern
Unitarians — declared, the Son of Man never
moved about imperiously as amongst a race of
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
spiritual serfs, who must be made to do or follow
an outside will which they could not understand.
He spoke as if his divine nature in no way separated
him from the rest of our race. He spoke to sinnerSj
not as to strangers, but as to souls which had
real kinship with himself; he spoke not to them
as to an essentially inferior race, but as to friends
who in the secret depths of their troubled natures
syere veritable sharers of his own Godward
aspirations. Jesus believed in sinners as no other great
'eligious leader ever did, and therefore he most
powerfully allured them to himseK. He was
not " too fine " for them. He put himself into
tlieir places, saw things with their eyes, and felt
things with their hearts. Therefore he redeemed
and saved them as no other teacher ever did.
Tie gave to the worst of sinners the rare delight
of being perfectly understood and appreciated.
In his serene elevation they saw no inhuman and
tantalising mockery. They rather saw fragments
of their own dead ideals come back again to life.
In a very real sense, the magical insight and
penetrating sympathy of Christ made many
way-worn outcasts feel that he was in very deed,
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
in some very true sense, more themselves than
they were.
I gather from his very interesting book that
Mr Wells is really a very sympathetic and very
human being. And I therefore wish for him
what I have often greatly wished for myself, viz.,
that he could have been present at what I suppose
to have been the most remarkable triumph in the
life of Christ. I wish that he could have stood
near and could have listened to the noblest and
most striking sermon that was ever heard in this
world. " Then drew near unto him all the
publicans and sinners, for to hear him." That
teacher, that audience, that discourse were, I
doubt not, collectively unique in the annals of
the world. None who ever witnessed that im
mortal scene could beheve for a moment that
Christ was " too fine " even for the most degraded
of our race. Probably the intensely human and
loving Walt Whitman was thinking of that
marvellous scene when he declared that Jesus
was the friend of slaves and felons, of the diseased,
of mad people, and of the rejected.
To depict adequately the chief features of that
wondrous gathering of outcasts would require
IOI

The Religion of H. G. Wells
the genius of a Victor Hugo; but, in a dim sort
of way, any imaginative mind fairly well ac
quainted with the character of our Lord can guess
at its nature and its results.
I always imagine that the great assembly of
outcasts came together as the shades of evening
were falling. It evidently came together after
Christ had been to a meal in the house of one of
the chief of the Pharisees. Some sinners of the
bolder sort had evidently found their way to
Christ even there, and had provoked the dis
paraging remark of the Pharisees and scribes,
" This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with
them." But many sinners would be too shy and
too much ashamed of themselves to venture to
approach our Lord in the full glare and pubhcity
of open day.
In the dim light of a quiet evening, however,
they ventured to draw nigh to this strange and
wonderful teacher, whose message to them was
not the usual message of contempt, but the un
wonted one of sympathy and appreciation. To
him, therefore, they stole forth, partially covered
by the friendly darkness, and many of them, no
doubt, anxiously hoping that they might not
1 02

The Religion of H. G. Wells
be seen by their comrades or their neighbours;
for human nature, throughout the world, is often
filled with a kind of shy shame when moved by
its own highest impulses.
That gathering was indeed a motley one, a
veritable miscellany of vice and despair. Bright
young faces, the faces of those whose sinfulness
was not much more than a kind of vehement
and eager curiosity, mingled with the hard
features of heartless and covetous oppressors
and with the hopeless gloom of outcast spirits
trembling on the verge of madness. Many a
coarse sensual face was also there.
And why had all these troubled souls come forth
to hear the man of Nazareth? Doubtless they
were most of them not accustomed to public
worship; for if they had shown themselves in
the synagogues of the professedly righteous,
they would certainly have been received with
scorn, and perhaps, like poor Hester Prynne in
Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, they might have found
themselves used as the text for sermons of un-
pitying severity. Why, then, did they come forth
to hear our Lord? Simply because they were
drawn to him by his wonderfully penetrating
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
spiritual insight and his strange, yearning, and
unfathomable pitying love. From him they knew
that they would receive genuine interpretation,
real appreciation, and loving guidance. In this
wondrous prophet of Nazareth the outcasts of
Jerusalem began to perceive that they might at
last find that gracious being concerning whose
protecting tenderness and heahng ministrations
one of their own great national teachers had
written thus: " A man shall be as a hiding-place
from the wind, and a covert from the tempest,
as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land."
Nor were the expectations of all these sin-
stained strugghng souls in any way disappointed.
To each individual sufferer the manifold wisdom
of Christ seemed to speak in his own language
and to have a special message of interpretation,
pardon, and guidance. At times the serene
and beautiful voice of the divine and universal
man appeared to some of his astonished hearers
as if it came not from without, as if it were the voice
of their own buried higher selves strugghng up
again to the surface after long years of enforced
silence. To some the voices of their own beloved
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
dead relations and friends seemed to stream forth
in sweetest music from the lips of the incarnate
pity. The tender tones of loving mothers, and
the wise warnings of anxious fathers, and the
passionate pleadings of saintly and noble friends
were heard once more. The music of the voice of
Jesus seemed charged with all the varied forms
of human sympathy that had ever refreshed and
gladdened our parched and sorrow-laden earth.
This music stole its way into the dark caverns
of many hardened hearts. The penetrating and
enlightening benignity of Christ softened many
frozen and apparently hopeless souls. What the
law could not do, the gospel was then accom
plishing quite easily. Sullenness vanished at
the friendly touch of comprehending appreciation ;
despair was quickened into real hopefulness;
and many an almost lifelong paralytic of the
moral world, as he felt the warm spiritual life-
blood of the great Son of Man flowing freely into
his veins, exclaimed to himself with eager buoyant
alacrity, " I can do all things through Jesus who
strengtheneth me." So wonderful were the miracles
wrought by the invasive genius of Christ's many-
chambered humanity.
g 105

The Religion of H. G. Wells
It is a very significant fact that it was on this
occasion, or about this time, when in this supremely
sympathetic frame of mind, that our Lord gave to
the human race that immortal epitome of the Gospel,
the old story of the Prodigal Son. It was because
that divine story was then ready to burst forth
in irrepressible fulness from his sympathetic
heart, that Jesus exercised so potent a sway over
the great gathering of outcasts. It is, for all
time, the most expressive of all his stories. In it
are stored up all the pith and marrow of the only
real gospel which can redeem our sinning and
sorrowing race. Pharisaism and hard legality
know nothing of a Father running to meet his
unworthy son. They almost disdain such a con
ception. Yet in this " foolishness of God " is
for ever enshrined the real secret or source of the
very highest ethical wisdom and power.
No reasonable Christian ought for a moment
to blame Mr Wells on account of his failure to
appreciate the true nature and functions of Christ.
Tbe fault rests with the churches, and not with
this interesting heretic. It is manifest, as I have
i Jready said, that he has taken his ideas of Jesus
from conventional ecclesiastics, and they certainly
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
do habitually misrepresent our Lord and his
rehgion. The real Jesus is, for the most part,
only faintly and rarely visible beneath the veil
which ecclesiasticism has cast over him. The
foUowers of Calvin and also those of Dr Pusey
have not been ashamed to represent the Infinite
Pity as threatening God's erring creatures with
unending torments, leaving it to heretics, hke the
great American Unitarian preacher, Theodore
Parker, to give men a true portrait of the real
Jesus. The love of Christ has very often been
far better mirrored in the wild comradeship of
lawless sinners than in the prudential self-regard
of orthodox and decent church members, who
have taken the essential meanness of the " wise
virgins " as the highest type of Christian ex
cellence. All that we convinced Christians of the broader
sort can reasonably ask of Mr Wells is simply
that he will re-read the Gospels for himself in the
hght of his own very real human sympathy,
and cast aside the false and distorting interpre
tations of narrow-minded and narrower-hearted
church teachers.
Then I feel convinced that this very vivid mind
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
and soul will, to a very great extent, find itself in
sympathy with us Christians in our heart-felt
devotion to the Son of Man. He will then, I.
believe, acknowledge that our devotion is natural,
reasonable, and beneficial. He will no longer
think that Christ is " too fine " for him.
In the Roman Cathohc Church there is ap
parently one noble piece of ritual which I wish
that our colder Protestant churches would adopt.
I remember that once, when I was at Mass in a
Roman Cathohc cathedral, a priest read to us,
out of one of the Gospels, a long account of the
crucifixion of Christ; and when he came to the
passage that describes the climax, and declares
that Jesus " cried with a loud voice, and gave
up the ghost," suddenly, to my great surprise
and great satisfaction, the whole congregation —
who had hitherto been standing — went down
on their knees and remained for a minute or two
in an attitude of adoration. This seemed to me
both profoundly natural and profoundly suitable.
It is wise and right that we should seek to
itrengthen our weak, partial, and wavering
humanity and our imperfect, capricious, and way
ward sympathy by the adoring contemplation
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
of the broader humanity and far more universal
and steadfast sympathy of that great being who
loved to be called the " Son of Man " and delighted
in the unintended honour bestowed upon him
by scribes and Pharisees when they scornfully
described him as the " friend of publicans and
sinners." In this fine piece of ritual, in this
most human and natural homage offered on our
knees to the suffering Incarnate Pity, Unitarians
and Trinitarians might well join; for, in that
solemn moment of devout and tender sympathy,
the genealogy of Jesus is not really in our thoughts
at all. It is himself, and not his ancestry, that so
powerfully draws us. It is simply his trans
cendent humanity that so stirs us and makes us
long in some poor way to share it. For the time
the Eternal Father seems purposely to withdraw
himself a httle from our thoughts. The divine
element in the universe seems to concentrate
itself in the noblest form of the human. The
great I Am might well give us the rationale of
his proceedings in those old words used by Him
in the book of the prophet Hosea: " I drew them
with the cords of a man, with bands of love."
Returning now from this defence of Christianity
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
to the more general consideration of the book
which I am discussing, I wish to observe finally that
its religion appears to me to be only a kind of
temporary refuge. The religion of Mr Wells as
here set forth cannot, I believe, be a permanent
and satisfactory one. I think that it must
eventually either perfect itself in some broad
form of Christian Theism or disintegrate itself
into a mere chaos of more or less arbitrary in
dividualistic preferences. It is ill suited to be
a really Catholic church for humanity, unless it
in great measure changes much of its present
form. In the first place, it is not really founded upon
a rock, but on a more or less shifting basis. There
is no assured permanence in that vague scheme
which now seems to turn so smihng a face to Mr
Wells. It is over-burdened with functions that it
can, at best, only perform temporarily. Its
assumed position in the universe reminds me a
good deal of that which Tyndall assigned to his
wonderfully clever Matter, concerning which
the veteran philosopher Martineau observed that
this very clever Matter, which organises itself,
and even builds and endows universities, and
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The Religion of H. G. Wells
obligingly delivers professorial lectures on its
own history, is a httle too modest in disclaiming
for itself the attributes of mind. Even so the
scheme of Mr Wells ought, in my opinion, either
to own that it is only a new name for the old
eternal immanent Mind of the universe, or else
to confess that it is only a delegate or a viceroy
of certain inscrutable powers behind it, on which
really depends the welfare of the Cosmos. The
power of this viceroy is obviously only temporary,
and its ethical character, as made known to
successive generations on each planet, must
inevitably turn out to be self-contradictory.
At present, whilst things are moving upwards,
the scheme has a benevolent aspect, and appears
to be wisely constructive ; but later on, when our
planet is approaching its end, this same scheme
will begin to assume a sinister aspect, and will
become essentially destructive. Accordingly its
ethical code, for those who look to it for guidance,
will be entirely rescinded; it will then forbid
what it now commands, and will command what
it now forbids; so that, as an ethical instructor,
the Cosmos, speaking to us through the lips of
its perplexing delegate, will utterly stultify itself,

The Religion of H. G. Wells
and will disclose no permanent ethical preferences.
To give coherence to the ethical world, to rescue
morality from an unceasing and meaningless
flux, we must recover the old idea of a divine
Mind having a fixed character of its own, dimly
mirroring itself in man's highest spiritual faculties,
and steadily pursuing a determinate end of which
the scheme apparently manifested at each stage
of terrestrial development can give us only a
very partial or fragmentary glimpse. Unless
we supplement the teaching of Mr Wells' scheme
by knowledge derived from our own highest
faculties, we shall always hold our moral hfe on
a most precarious tenure. Unless " the kingdom
of God is within us," we are sure to misunderstand
the Creator's revelation of Himself in the ever-
varying courses of Nature. " Nullus in micro-
cosmo spiritus, nullus in macrocosmo Deus."
Nor are the practical difficulties that will beset
the religion of Mr Wells any less than the specul
ative ones. His theory will be found, I am con
vinced, to demand from human nature what it
cannot adequately perform for any great length
of time. By taking away all hope of a future
life and all real faith in a presiding Mind with
112

The Religion of H. G. Wells
fixed attributes, this writer will eventually find
that he has so depressed and weakened man's
best energies that he cannot respond to the very
exacting demands which are to be made upon him.
Men will be inclined to regard the whole processes
of terrestrial and cosmical development as " much
ado about nothing." Pessimism will come in
hke a flood, and will carry away the fragile temples
of non-Theistic optimism. If men believe that
there is to be no permanent results of all the weary
labours of countless generations on earth, if
Nature has decreed that " all shall go " and leave
no lasting trace behind, our race will eventually
relapse into hopeless apathy, and will become quite
incapable of carrying out the benevolent plans
set before it by Secularists. If God and a future
life do not exist, we must, it would seem, invent
them, if we seek to evoke from humanity its noblest
and most persistent efforts.
Our interesting heretic will find, I beheve, that
he must adopt at least some parts of Theistic
faith and of Christianity. The well from which
spring forth the best and most vigorous ethical
forces is assuredly " deep," and Secularistic
leaders have " nothing to draw with." They
113

The Religion of H. G. Wells
first themselves dry up the very best sources
of inspiration, and then bid men live hke the
prophets of God.
It is probably not necessary for his purpose
that the teacher whom I am criticising should
roceive the whole of our present Christianity.
As the late George John Romanes wisely declared,
" The metaphysics of Christianity may be all
false in fact, and yet the spirit of Christianity
may be true in substance, i.e., it may be the
highest good gift from above as yet given to man."
When throwing away the rind of Christianity,
Mr Wells should take care not to throw away its
kernel also; for he will find eventually that he
cannot carry out his benevolent schemes without
that; and, in my judgment, some of those schemes
are well worth carrying out. It is because I ad
mire and value them that I venture to give this
advice. In many ways this teacher, as I said
at the beginning of this essay, is ethically Christian,
but I believe that all attempts to separate Christian
ethics from that firm Theism on which they rest,
are doomed to failure in the end. When the very
real benevolence of this brilliant though erratic
Socialist comes to itself," when it thoroughly
114

The Religion of H. G. Wells
realises its own necessary implications and indis
pensable conditions, I believe that it will return
to its Father and its God, and will feel "as if
it were at length itself, and ne'er had been before."
Meanwhile, we Christians of the broader sort feel
no inchnation to condemn its deficiencies harshly
or to underrate its beauty; for, concerning every
human spirit that really loves its fellows, we
ever hear our divine master's verdict contain^
in those old memorable words, " By this shall
all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another."

115

THE ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE OF
LAYMEN TO RELIGION

THE ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE OF
LAYMEN TO RELIGION
The four interesting papers on this subject given
us some time ago in the Hibbert Journal afford us
much varied and suggestive material for re
flection ; but I think that they need to be supple
mented by a few other considerations.
No doubt, the excessive pressure and com
petition of different forms of work and of amuse
ment do contribute powerfully to lessen men's
interest in rehgion, as also in other matters
requiring deep thought, such as philosophy and
the more imaginative and reflective forms of
poetry. The dull monotony of hfe has been
greatly diminished. The Sunday gathering for
common worship is now far less needed to give
a kind of mild stimulus or excitement to stagnant
forms of human bxistence. Perhaps in banishing
monotony we have killed leisure. The old vale
of tears has to a great extent been transmuted
into a kind of playground. Men are more greedy
119

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
after positive enjoyment, and less willing to
regard this world merely as a dreary vestibule
of another and more satisfying world.
No doubt, also, the obvious defects of our
church services tend to produce weariness and
distaste for attendance at church. Preachers
are too dry. We have too many sermons, and the
subjects with which they deal are too uninterest
ing. Our services are often far too long and too
monotonous and full of repetitions; and bad,
slovenly, and inexpressive reading often spoils
the effect of our prayers and our lessons from the
Bible. Moreover, as the editor of the Hibbert Journal
suggests, the fact that Christianity is now regarded
by thinking men as a fife rather than a creed
helps to disgust people with the unreality of our
ordinary religion. We are forced to realise the
truth of the teaching of Emerson, that the majestic
doctrines of rehgion agree very ill with the lives
of ordinary men. Even uneducated people per
ceive this. An excellent domestic servant once
said to me that she did not care to attend the
services of church or chapel, because she could
not see that those who attended such services
120

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
were any better in their daily hves than those who
neglected them.
Probably this feehng of discrepancy between
rehgious ideals and actual life is a good deal
increased by a too hteral interpretation of many
of the precepts of Christ. Finding by experience
that these precepts cannot advantageously be
apphed literally to our daily hfe, men are apt to
suppose that their spirit is as inapphcable as their
letter. They fail to perceive the truth that, in
order to preserve and obey their essential spirit,
we must often be content to set aside their hteral
teaching. If an habitual drunkard asks for
money destined to be spent in procuring whisky,
we have no scruple in violating the letter of the
Christian injunction, " Give to him that asketh
thee." But I believe that two of the most powerful
causes of the present indifference to religion are
yet to be named. I believe that they are to be
found in the excessive conventionalism of our
ordinary rehgious teaching, and in the gradual
decay of real and vivid behef in a personal God
who concerns HimseK with our affairs and is
training us for a grander hfe in another world.
h 121

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
Amongst young men — the most conspicuous
absentees from church services — there is a strong
revolt against the conventionality and the anti
quarian spirit of current religion. The ideal of
the churches is in many ways unattractive to
young men of vivid temperament. Such young
men are not wilhng to submit their reason to
authority and precedent, or to have all the colour
washed out of their souls, and to tame the free
vivacity of their natural instincts. To them
the ecclesiastical idea of goodness seems far too
negative. It often appears as K the more rehgious
a person becomes, the more uninteresting he also
becomes. The " godly man " of the churches
evokes no enthusiastic admiration in the hearts
of energetic young men. They prefer Walt
Whitman to Dry-as-dust. They are not wilhng
to become mummies, in order to be accounted
saints. Their shrinking from the moral and
spiritual advice of preachers often reminds me
of a story told by the late Dean Ramsay : A little
boy, when told by his teacher that he must be
" born again," strongly objected to undergo the
regenerating process, on the ground that, K he
were born again, he might be " born a lassie ; "
122

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
and, in a similar way, many young men are in
their hearts afraid that, if they were horn again
after the fashion recommended by conventional
preachers, they might very probably be born
either fools or milksops. A kind of pervading
unmanhness often makes ordinary rehgion re
pulsive to virile natures. Reason is often sus
picious of the bland invitations of ordinary
ecclesiastics. Bold natures agree with Emerson
in thinking it a great advantage to escape a
religious training. The churches usually hate
both intellectual and emotional originality, and
these are dear to the young. And, besides all
this, many reflecting young men are secretly in
strong revolt against some portions of the moral
teaching of conventional rehgious guides.
Coincident, in point of time, with a great
enlargement of the resources of the present world,
there has been a kind of obscuring of the spiritual
world. The Infinite has in great measure gone into
retreat. The old personal God has to a great
extent faded away into a remote and meaningless
abstraction. The Unknowable seems to have
devoured the semi-anthropomorphic God of Love ;
and the life beyond the grave has become to
123

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
many a mere myth. The multitude seems to be
assimilating the conclusions of the Agnostic,
though quite incapable of duly appraising the
cogency of his premisses. Thus I have found,
whilst ministering to Enghsh soldiers, that very
few of them seem to have any real expectation
of a future hfe. They speak of a dead comrade
as being at rest in much the same way as they
would speak of a dead horse. Materialism,
in great measure silenced in the schools of phil
osophers, has turned to the haunts of the busy
and the pleasure-seeking. The most momentous
religious change that has come over the world
during the last fifty years is, I should unhesitatingly
say, the loss of vivid faith in immortality. Men
w y~* W- w ~" ¦»* ••**•¦ —¦
do not generally deny the doctrine; they only
ignore it and yawn with a sense of unreality and
weariness when it is preached. The joys of
heaven, once so" vividly conceived, now often
seem as imaginary and fantastic as the dances
of the fairies.
If we would minister effectively to the spiritual
maladies of our age, we must manfully face
actual facts. We must meet Secularism on its
own grounds, and show its need of some kind of
124

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
rehgion even in its own sphere. Preachers must
deal more with existing human life, and less with
mediaeval theories. They must become more
human and less ecclesiastical. They must learn
to be not afraid of wit and humour. They must
first convince men of the necessity of rational
religion for the welfare of this hfe, before trying
to demonstrate its necessity for another life.
Perhaps it is the non-realisation of God's kingdom
here on earth which chiefly makes men at present
unwilling to beheve in its further and more
adequate realisation in another world. If we
can show men that the kingdom of God is in some
degree now actually present in all normal and
adequately developed minds and hearts, that it is
latent in our love of truth, that it murmurs in
our cries for justice, that it sighs in our pity and
glows in our friendships, that it speaks to us in
all the varied forms of beauty, that it worships
in our sense of awe and wonder, that it nerves
even the homehest kinds of beneficence, and
burns with a far-shining glory in our heroisms
and our seK-sacrifice, then we may perhaps succeed
in persuading men both to cultivate it more
diligently now and to beheve more firmly in its
125

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
infinite extension hereafter. If the multitude
is now estranged from rehgion, I believe that the
reason is because it regards religion as an alien
or foreign thing, as an enemy of mirth and enjoy
ment, as a tiresome yoke rather than as a genial
and invigorating friend.
Rehgion should no longer seek to trample
upon or to wither the natural instincts of man
kind. Let it offer itseK to men as a free and
emancipating educator rather than as a fettering
strait waistcoat. Let it trust more to enthusiasm
and less to penal laws. Let it no longer pretend
to be a thing apart and completely sui generis,
a spectral visitant from another world with no
warm sympathies and no deep affinities with the
lowly requirements of man's present hfe. Let it
cast itseK fearlessly on the deepest instincts of our
race, and gladly recognise the germs of its own
loftiest charity in the unthinking camaraderie
of sinners and of outcasts. Let it, in short,
cease from Judaism and legalism, and become
truly Christian. Let it no longer pose as a kind
of supernatural Minerva starting forth in full
panoply of attributes from the head of some far-
off Jupiter. Let it rather become bone of our bone
126

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
and flesh of our flesh. Let it become incarnate
in all the loftiest feehngs and tenderest affections
of an expanding humanity; and then its future
dominion will be secure ; it will be founded on <
the adamantine rock of man's unalterable nature
and man's everlasting needs. Then it may boldly
chant its " Non Omnis Moriar," and the gates
of devastating secularism can never prevail
against it. Then also it may gradually welcome
back its long-lost wanderers. Rational men will
return to church willingly enough when they know
that they will there find the best interpretation
of their own natures and the best guidance to
real and abiding satisfaction of their greatest
wants. Then at last rehgion will become a genuine
reahty. Planted firmly on the homely earth,
whilst eagerly receptive of every divine and
quickening breath that is borne to it from the
nearer presence of the Most High, rehgion may
learn to glory in its God-haunted and irradiated
humanity; the light of its moon shall be as the
fight of its sun; and, with serene though humble
confidence, religion may exclaim, like its noblest
exponent in the days of old: " And I, if I be
127

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto
me; " " All power is given unto me in heaven
and in earth."
If we would lead men to profound and influential
religion, we must first lead them to a true estimate
and a wise interpretation of the significance of
their own nature. " By man must come their
resurrection " from the death of secularistic
indifference. Like Jacob in the ancient times,
man must awake out of his sleep, must awake
out of this sleep of frivohty and seK-ignorance,
must learn that the trivial and the commonplace
are but the outer rind of his veritable being,
must learn to gaze with open and undaunted eyes
on the infinite mysteries of his own interior fife,
must learn to appreciate the frightful abysses
and the glorious Alpine heights of our pilgrim
race ; and then henceforth religion will become to
him as indispensable as the air which he breathes.
Looking backwards and forwards, over the long
process of man's evolution here in this world,
the meaning of it will grow plain. Man will per
ceive " a ladder set up on the earth with its top
reaching to heaven." He will perceive that the
Infinite is the predestined goal of the finite, and
128

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
the perfect of the imperfect; so that henceforth
the prophet within him will enable him to dispense
to a great extent with all external teaching.
God's throne will henceforth stand secure in the
depths of his mind and soul ; and man will learn that
he is himseK a kind of haK-veiled Theophany,
and needs no material altar. Of himseK and his
finest faculties man may henceforth exclaim with
profoundest joy and gratitude: "Surely the
Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. How
awful is this place; this is none other but
the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."
A superficial knowledge of human nature is
quite compatible with irreligion; but a profound
knowledge of that nature almost inevitably makes
us in some sense religious. God is the indispensable
environment of man's whole higher IKe. Our
intellects rest on Him as weU as our hearts. If we
would be adequately human, we must be incipiently
divine. When you find a genuine Son of Man,
you may be quite sure that the Son of God is not
far off. You may be quite sure that, in the
troubled depths of his struggling heart and soul,
there is ever present, though perhaps unrecog
nised, a celestial inspirer and friend " in form
129

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
like unto the Son of God." To a great extent it
is by the quickening of our best natural faculties
that the divine power is most effectively mamf ested.
The incarnations of the divine in the human are
unceasing throughout the ages. Even the peasant
forms of our lowliest human virtues and fidelities
gleam at times with a startling and unearthly
glory which betrays their supernatural origin.
Infinity and eternity seem to shine through them.
We find an infant Christ lying peacefully in the
common manger of our natural affections. And
this marvellous visitant grows with our growth
and strengthens with our strength till he at
length attains complete maturity, and, in claiming
us as his brethren, makes us citizens of an unshaken
kingdom and heirs of immortal hopes, as He cheers
the hearts of the timid and the despondent with
those old words of boldest faith and immeasurable
consolation, " The kingdom of God is within
you; " " All power is given unto me in heaven
and on earth;" " Lo, I am with you always,
even unto the end of the world; " " Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but my words shall not
pass away."
If religion is conceived as almost exclusively
130

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
referring to another world, men are likely to go
on neglecting it, by reason of the pressure of
mundane cares and interests. But if religion is
recognised — as it ought to be — as the best in-
vigorator of all our highest faculties here on earth,
men will assuredly turn to it again. Ecclesiastical
and monkish Christianity is practically dead,
so far as really vivid natures are concerned.
The old methods of Asceticism are perceived to
have been false methods. Yet I am quite con
vinced that Secularism is " penny wise, and pound
foolish," that it necessarily impoverishes much
that is finest in humanity, so that it makes men
essentially poorer here on earth; that, whilst
professing to economise the resources of our
natural hfe, it really tends to impair or diminish
them. In every department of our existence
imagination is of the very highest value — and
imagination, like poetry and music, is closely
akin to religion. Well-developed emotions also
are essential to the health and vigour of man's
highest hfe. And the emotions can scarcely be
adequately expanded and educated without some
form of rehgion. Real rehgion gives enhanced
significance and fresh fire and tenderness to the
131

Alleged Indifference of Laymen
noblest friendships; and it is the very soul of
that blessed spirit of sympathetic co-operation
which alone can mitigate the exhausting agony
of the fierce struggle for existence.
Religion, as I believe, is not destined to die,
but rather to migrate from the rind of man's
higher life to its inmost centre. Henceforth
its most effective energies and its most striking
triumphs will be found, not in multiplied ecclesi
astical ceremonies and in formal creeds and
dogmas, but in sympathetic hearts and in the
sustained labours of genuine and unsectarian
benevolence. Hitherto the " kingdom of God "
has, to a deplorable extent, been an outside king
dom. Now it is about to become an internal
sovereignty. The age of spiritual despotism is
over. Religion of the best kind is frankly re
nouncing its old unwise and domineering ex-
clusiveness. As it gazes with keen and loving
insight into the inner structure of every valuable
human faculty, it appreciates them all, and cries
concerning every one of them, in the language of
its own noblest exponent, " I am come that these
might have hfe, and that they might have it more
abundantly." 132

CHRIST'S REMEDY FOR FEAR:
A DEFENCE OF THE HIGHER
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN RE
LIGION

" Let not your heart be troubled ; ye believe in God,
believe also in me.''

CHRIST'S REMEDY FOR FEAR:
A DEFENCE OF THE HIGHER
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN RE
LIGION
The deepest rehgion is full of apparent paradoxes.
The " Man of Sorrows " is the man of deepest
peace and joy. The world's greatest sufferer is
the world's truest consoler. The dark valley of
the shadow of death is the way to the serene
land of Beulah. The noblest Pessimism is but
as the season of .moulting to the eagle wings of
the most triumphant Optimism. " As the
sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation
also aboundeth in Christ." Wise seK-sacrifice
leads to truest seK-reafisation. Sympathy is
born in agony, and grows into a joy like that of
God. The rehgion of Jesus is the explanation
and the consecration of suffering.
Christ certainly understood the meaning and
the functions of grief as no other teacher has ever
done. He did not seek to ignore or to minimise
i35

Christ's Remedy for Fear
its vast range and its all-penetrating bitterness,
but only to mitigate its poignancy by ex
plaining its hopeful significance. He showed
that our chastisement is the best proof of our
divine sonship, the best proof that we are children
and heirs of God, and not merely His creatures
or playthings; that our struggles and our woes
are a token of our sublime destiny and not of our
disdainful neglect by our maker, a proof that
God does not intend to cast us " as rubbish to the
void," but in very deed to make us " partakers
of the divine nature."
Men were allured to Jesus in great measure
because He was not a Stoic, because He thoroughly
realised the exceeding bitterness of bodily pain
and anguish.
Moreover, we ought always to remember that
our Lord persistently sought to increase human
happiness and to lessen every form of human
misery. He was no friend to gloomy Asceticism.
On the contrary, He has for ever consecrated the
joys and satisfactions of man's natural and
instinctive hfe. Friendship and the profound
depth of human affection meant far more to the
sensitive spirit of Christ than they mean to most
136

Christ's Remedy for Fear
of us. He did not naturally love habitual loneli
ness, but only endured it. He often thirsted for
human sympathy.
In many ways the disposition of Jesus was a
cheerful one. No dark and menacing thunder
cloud of Calvinism and no withering miasma
of hopeless corruption rested either on external
nature or on the souls of men. No real curse
of God rested on His creation. To Christ, as to
Emerson, Nature was a real incarnation of God,
though in some ways an inadequate and inferior
one. To him, as to other deep spirits of his
race, the heavens declared the glory of God, and
the flowers of the field spoke eloquently of His
loveliness. In some ways the soul of Christ
quite transcended the hmits of Judaism. His
spirit was essentially far nearer in some ways to
that of Buddha than to that of the author of the
books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. His ex
quisite parables have more affinity with the
higher Pantheism than with austerely orthodox
Judaism. He saw no great " guKs fixed " be
tween Nature and God or between man and God.
All his most characteristic teaching implies
the immanence of God in the whole creation.
i i37

Christ's Remedy for Fear
To Him Nature was a veritable expression of
certain parts of the divine being, a kind of faint
and imperfect rehearsal of those immortal songs
of beauty, joy, and sympathy which the Lord
Almighty loves, as they are borne to His listening
ears from the deepest souls of the sons of men.
The sun in the physical heavens was to Jesus
a bright and cheering emblem of God's unsectarian
benignity. He did not seek to divorce man from
Nature. Nature, in some of its homelier aspects,
was a kind of friendly dame's school for the
scholars of God destined to learn larger lessons
hereafter in God's universities.
Moreover, our Lord loved Nature disinterestedly
and for its own sake. He viewed it with the eyes
of a poet and not with the eyes of a Utilitarian
philosopher. Nature, in some of its moods, was
a better mirror of God in some ways than the souls
of ordinary men. Nature receives God's messages
with a wise passiveness, whereas men often read
their own harsh and narrow thoughts into the
celestial messages. To our Lord the largeness
of Nature's flowing boundlessness often afforded
a welcome relief from human pettiness. Her
God-haunted peacefulness often seemed far nobler
than man's unresting fretfulness. Some at least
138

Christ's Remedy for Fear
of the secrets of God were better mirrored in the
grander phases of Nature than in the phenomena
of human fife. Mountains are often God's best
cathedrals. At times it seemed wise to Christ
to " cease from man " and to learn from Nature.
The consolatory power of the natural world
sometimes appeared to consist largely in its
contrast to the human world. In some ways
Nature had outrun man in the search for satis
fying beauty and glory. When grieved and
saddened by the fickleness and instability of man,
which might well seem a denial and partial
cancelhng of the doctrine of the Creator's un
changing steadfastness, our Lord perhaps often
felt deeply the abiding truth of that beautiful
teaching of the Hebrew prophet which declared
that God's protecting pity and changeless love
were best mirrored in the unchanging hills which
never relaxed their vigilant guardianship of
the sacred city of Jerusalem. Musing on the
fretful turbulence of human life, perhaps Jesus
sometimes thought of that beautiful saying of
compassionate and yearning love speaking
through the lips of an inspired seer, " Then had
thy peace been as a river." i39

Christ's Remedy for Fear
Nor was Christ's conception of human nature
and destiny in the very least a gloomy one. On
the contrary, it was penetrated through and
through by a robust and ineradicable optimism.
The human soul was a veritable jewel of God,
and though at present it might be dimmed and
tarnished, keen eyes could yet discern its intrinsic
and imperishable splendour. Even the mag
nificence of its present setting inevitably suggested
its great value in the judgment of its - maker.
In the glories of external Nature were dimly
adumbrated the coming glories of the spirit.
The finished beauty of Nature forced the thought
ful mind to realise the inchoate and imperfect
development of man. Her grandeur seemed to
call upon man to rise to a corresponding grandeur.
In the nightly spectacle of the starry heavens,
with their illimitable splendour, the Subhme
itseK might well seem to invite poor struggling
man to a home of unimaginable glory, might seem
to speak to his troubled outcast heart in those
old cheering words in which the Infinite ever seeks
to allure the finite to itseK : "Come, eat of my bread,
and drink of the wine that I have mingled." And
so deep spirits even now in the " dimness of their
140

Christ's Remedy for Fear
captivity," are thrilled at times with the mighty
ambition of unappeasable aspiration and hope
fulness, so that they cry, with the soaring genius
of St Paul, " Our citizenship is in the heavens."
No doubt the splendour of the heavens is not
principally intended for us; but we yet feel sure
that it has some reference to our needs. Outcasts
though we are at present from the central mysteries
of the universe, we are yet permitted even now
to gather up " the crumbs " of glory and of
knowledge that fall from our Master's table,
and thus seem to encourage us and make us hope
for more. We feel the truth of Emerson's re
mark, " Will you build magnificently for mice? "
Our keen appreciation of the Sublime appears
to indicate some degree of essential affinity with
it. We cannot help feehng that we should be
unhandsomely dealt with by our Maker, if we were
destined never to penetrate any further than
we do on earth into the wondrous mysteries of
the Cosmos. The very fact that the human soul,
in the higher ranges of its fife, loves to be spoken
to in tones from the borders of the Infinite seems
to declare plainly that the Infinite is our pre
destined home. 141

Christ's Remedy for Fear
Nor was this great hope falsified or rendered
improbable in the judgment of Christ when He
turned away from the contemplation of Nature
and concentrated His penetrating gaze on the
human soul itseK. Our Lord knew absolutely
nothing of the hideously depressing doctrine of
the total depravity of man. In His view the
groundwork or original idea of man's nature
was good, and its evil was only transitory. The
Eternal Father sowed in our hearts the good
seed long before the enemy — in the form of
adverse circumstances — sowed tares. It may
seem a strange thing to say, but nevertheless it
is profoundly true, that Christ's ethical and
spiritual view of man was in real harmony with
the wisest teaching of the best evolutionary
philosophy in our days. Believing that the
universe is all of one piece, our Lord based His
moral philosophy to a great extent on an observant
and sympathetic study of the processes of Nature.
His teaching was not marred and weakened by
that sharp Dualism which has characterised
ordinary ecclesiastical teaching. In His judg
ment Nature was in many ways a preparation
for man, and man had by the very structure of
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his faculties a tendency towards God. The
teaching of Browning's poem, " Paracelsus,"
gives us a far more Christian interpretation of
man's nature and development than we could
ever gather from the writings of Calvinistic
divines. Our Lord loved far more to dwell upon
the pitiable weakness of man than on his innate
vileness. He knew that the creature was made
subject to vanity " not willingly." He under
stood sinners too well to allow Him to feel harshly
towards them. He knew that the spirit is often
wilhng, whilst the flesh is weak. Inhumanity
and hypocrisy were in his opinion the only un
pardonable sins. He was far more deeply im
pressed by the misery of sinners than by their
intrinsic unworthiness.
Probably the very saddest of the habitual
thoughts of Jesus was forced upon Him by His
vivid realisation of the terrible waste of the finest
material which any true inspection of human
fife must disclose to the thinker. Believing, as
perhaps no other teacher ever did, in the splendid
potentialities of the human soul, our Lord was
pierced with grief as He gazed on its wretched
actual state. And His marvellous spiritual in-
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sight disclosed to Him the supremely important
truth that the fundamental and abiding need
of man's nature is encouragement, and not de
nunciation or even mere instruction. If I were
asked to describe in a few words the really dis
tinctive feature of our Lord's work on earth, I
should do so in the old words of an evangehst
concerning Him, " As many as received Him,
to them gave He pov>er to become the sons of
God." His great passion of penetrating and
comprehending Pity kindled into real hfe the
dry bones of men's dead and withered faculties.
To Him was known in a supreme degree the
regenerating and vitahsing might of sympathy.
He came, not to scare or to punish the lost sheep,
but to gather them in His arms and to lead them.
He knew well how much of human sinfulness
really arises either from mere ignorance and
mistakes or else from the despairing feehng of
hopelessness, which often leads to that state of
sullen apathy and indifference which darkens
the whole IKe of those who think that God does
not care for them, and that they are exiles from
His sheltering tenderness. When that wise
Christian thinker, Ohver Wendell Holmes, after
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being profoundly saddened by the contemplation
of human suffering, wrote thus of himseK, " Pity,
I feel as K that would be all that would be left of
me if I five but a few years longer," he was brought
very nigh in heart to the habitual mood of the
great friend of publicans and sinners.
The keen spiritual insight of Christ disclosed
to Him the truth that anxiety, distrust, doubt,
and the depression resulting from them are in
many cases the worst hindrances to moral progress.
He perceived clearly that the fundamental need
of aspiring humanity is peace of mind or hopeful
serenity. He knew that no really effective work
is done by the despondent. He was a friend to
repentance, but a foe to remorse. He knew that
pardon and the sense of reconcihation are often
far more effective aids to redemption than any
amount of punishment. He knew that buoyant
confidence in the predestined reign of goodness
is the best incentive to ardent and sustained
efforts after spiritual improvement.
But then the question necessarily arose as to
how the depressed and baffled soul of man might
attain this invigorating peace. Our Lord did
not wish to give men merely temporary encourage-
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
ment. He wished to give His followers a peace
firmly based on the abiding rock of solid facts,
and not on the shKting sands of transient high
spirits or on the deceptive quagmire of partial
knowledge. " Peace I leave with you ; my peace
I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I
unto you."
A very large part of the world's peace and joy
has been essentially precarious and procured
by resolutely shutting one's eyes to all the darker
sides of hfe. Such was the optimism of Emerson,
who resolutely averted his eyes from sickness,
ugliness, pain, and despair.
Such also was the greatly over-rated joyousness
of the old Greek fife. This happiness was procured
to a very great extent by a whole series of de
ceptions. Very few of the ancient Athenians
enjoyed for long that untroubled peace of mind
which Epicurus reckoned the best thing in life.
In the careers of most of the Athenian citizens
" fears within " corresponded only too well
with almost unending " fightings without."
Hellenic optimism was based on an evasion of the
besetting problems of the soul rather than on any
tolerable approximation to a solution of them.

Christ's Remedy for Fear
Behind all the gracious forms of the semi-human
gods of Olympus there ever lurked the awful
petrifying power of Fate, which was in truth the
great " I Am " of which all the gods were but as
transient and subordinate manifestations. The
Greeks dreaded the Infinite, just as many of the
ancient Hebrews dreaded the awful vision of the
great First Cause. The Olympian gods were but
as a fragile screen between stern and inexorable
Fate and trembhng human spirits. But the
Infinite could not always be evaded. Fate glared
out through the mitigating masks of anthropo
morphic conceptions, and often made men shake
with hopeless fear. Even in the writings of old
Homer the word Fate or destiny has a predomin
antly sinister significance, though sometimes
it indicated happiness. Even the gossiping
Herodotus was at times full of sadness. He
thought that the gods are altogether envious or
grudging in their nature, and that man is entirely
a creature or a plaything of circumstances. Plato
expressed the appalling thought that man is a
sport or a plaything of God, who alternately
governs and forsakes the world. Socrates de
clared death to be an unspeakable gain even if
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
it meant annihilation. The noblest of the Greek
tragedies are full of a profoundly depressing sense
of the omnipotence of destiny and of the vanity
and futihty of many of men's best and fairest
ideals. The very friendships of the Greeks must
often have been a source of deep sadness. The
sweetness of those marvellous and heroic friend
ships must have added a more appalling bitterness
to the lasting bereavements caused by death.
The fact that the Greeks were accustomed to
speak of the Furies or the Erinyes as the Eumenides
or gracious ones is significant of their whole
attitude towards the darker side of life. The
burden of sin did indeed he far less heavily on
the souls of the men of Athens than on those
of the men of Judea; but the dark, sombre, and
all-encompassing eloud of Fate at times depressed
Hellenic fife far more than Hebraic IKe in its
nobler phases. The Jews had always the hope
of a Messiah; and they did succeed in partially
humanising their dread Jehovah. His very
caprices to some extent afforded a possible relief
from the stifling atmosphere and fearful pressure
of an alien Necessitarianism; but the Greek con
ception of Fate admitted of no mitigation.
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
Jehovah had a heart, though it seemed a stern
and sectarian one. Fate had no heart. Its
representative in modern thought is the idea of
materialistic Necessitarianism.
Where, then, should the disciples of Jesus
find " an anchor of the soul sure and steadfast"?
In what direction could they look for real and
abiding peace?
Our Lord indicates one source of peace when
He reminds His followers of their faith in God.
" Ye beheve in God." That belief ought at
least to give men some degree of abiding mental
satisfaction. Atheism is essentially a cheerless
and depressing creed. It is at any rate something
to know that " the universe is neither dead nor
demoniacal," even though as yet we know not
that it is " the Father's." The thought that the
universe is a mere machine without meaning
and without purpose is an appalling one. In
that direction lies despairing madness. We must
at least find order in the universe, even though we
cannot find love. Our minds are numbed and
frozen by a dreadful sense of homelessness when
we are obliged to believe that intellect in us is
but a chance product of blindly groping forces,
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perhaps only a transient scum of the unconscious,
whilst all that is enduring in the universe is
meaningless. Now Judaic Theism did give its adherents
some degree of intellectual and also of moral
satisfaction. The great I Am, the primal mind,
served as a secure basis for some very real in
tellectual and moral life. Orderliness at any
rate was secured. The universe no longer
staggered unsupported or stared at man with an
idiot's vacant face. Moreover, some provision,
though not an entirely adequate one, was made
for man's ethical life. Israel was profoundly
convinced that the judge of all the earth will
do right, that righteousness is the basis of God's
throne, that the ethical element is in some way
dominant throughout the universe. And some
measure of self-respect was secured by Jewish
teaching. To the wise the very threats of God
were hopeful innuendoes as to the possibihty
of rising to higher things. They marked man off
from the lower animals whose stagnant and seK-
satisfied repose was never disturbed by the
piercing clarion of the Eternal as He went forth
to war against obstructive evil.
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
Yet Judaism, hke all merely abstract Theism,
had many grave deficiencies. Our Lord saw
plainly that, for the development of the best
spiritual peace and nobleness, something more
was needed. The Word must be " made flesh,"
in order to allure and invigorate man's whole
nature. Certainly it is manifest enough that a God
like that of Aristotle, a God who dwells entirely
apart from the world, and is for ever engaged
in seK-contemplation, is of very little real use to
mankind. Such a being is hardly even a basis
for our intellectual life, to say nothing of our
emotional, moral, and spiritual necessities. Of
course the God of Israel was a far more vivid and
vitalising reality than the God of Aristotle. He
was in some ways very closely related to the world,
though in other ways remote from it. He loved
righteousness and hated iniquity.
But in some ways Jehovah was essentially a
God who hid HimseK. Throughout the world
amongst really deep thinkers there has been a
profound underlying conviction that the First
Cause, the primal God, is either unknowable,
or else a source of fear rather than of encourage-
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ment. The world's multitudinous conceptions
of divine Theophanies, Emanations, Incarnations,
and Mediators, bear witness to the fact that the
human soul is in some way dimly aware of the
truth that God as He is in HimseK cannot be
known, that, in order to know God adequately,
one must be God, that any satisfying revelation
of God must be accommodated to the range of
our faculties, that all revelation of God is essentially
fragmentary and provisional, true but not the
whole truth, a diluted knowledge, a kind of veiled
splendour. Together with this haK-conscious Agnosticism
we also find in various nations and ages a strange
kind of shrinking from the Infinite, as though
it were " cold and formless," a thing to evoke
shuddering awe rather than devoted and loving
homage. If an ordinary Jew endeavoured to
gaze on God, he was thought to be in danger of
perishing. The splendour of the legislating God
was in great measure a blasting splendour to
ordinary humanity; so that, when the people
saw it, they cried to Moses, " Speak thou with us,
and we will hear; but let not God speak with us,
lest we die." Not even to Moses could be revealed
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the intellectual glory of God. Even to him the
revelation of God must necessarily be a frag
mentary one, essentially ethical and not meta
physical, sufficient to guide conduct, but not
sufficient to dispel all doubt. When Moses said
to God, " I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory,"
the answer given him was this, " Thou canst not
see my face; for there shall no man see me, and
live; " " I will make all my goodness pass before
thee." The promise contained in these last
words might well serve as a prophecy of God's
revelation of HimseK in Christ. The promise was
never completely fulfilled till the man of Nazareth
came to reveal the unchanging and universal
fatherhood of God.
Until Christ came, the goodness of God was only
partially and inadequately revealed to men. In
Judaism the element of fear was habitually far
more prominent than the element of love. It
was perhaps necessary that man should learn
the severity of God before learning His inex
haustible pity. In Judaism the human race
learnt certain fundamentally necessary lessons.
The majesty of God was so thoroughly realised
that the human spirit acquired the indispensable
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
gift of real humility and seK-contempt. The
basis was thus laid for a fuller and-more satisfying
religion. Moses taught men the transcendence
of God, and made them realise the truth that
" His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts
our thoughts." Christ taught men the imman
ence of God in the whole creation. He sanctioned
and encouraged those higher anthropomorphic
instincts which Judaism habitually tended to
suppress, though, in a purified form, they are
a necessary element of the best religion. Judaism,
like Carlyle, habitually preached the insignificance
and paltriness of man. Christ, hke Emerson,
habitually preached the potential grandeur of
man. The one made men realise the fact that
they were meaner than they knew. The other
made men realise the fact that they were greater
and wiser than they knew.
Yet it must be confessed that, to some extent,
" in Jewry was God known; His name was great
in Israel." The tenderness of man's anthropo
morphic instincts, though habitually suppressed,
was never really destroyed. To these instincts
the poetry of the greater prophets was a kind of
emancipating mediator. The realms of ethical
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
and ceremonial legislation were dark and stern;
but the realms of imagination were often full of
light. Judaism was for the most part a land of
stern and bleak mountains in a spiritual sense;
but between their awful chasms were often found
beautiful valleys full of quiet loveliness and
verdure, and abounding in refreshing streams
of human tenderness, at which the parched souls
of worn and harassed pilgrims might quench
their thirst. God did not leave HimseK entirely
without witness as regards His divine compassion.
Even in ancient Israel thirsting souls often
" drank of the brook by the way," though it was
reserved for Christ to disclose to men the ' ' fountains
of hving water." The passionate emotional
tenderness which expressed itseK in some of the
sayings of David, in some of the Psalms of various
writers, and in the magnificent bursts of the
higher anthropomorphism which flash forth upon
us at times in the writings of the greatest prophets,
was a fight that shone in a dark place till the
day dawned, and the shadows fled away. These
harbingers of the best rehgion might well seem
to call upon Christ to " come over and help them."
And this He assuredly did, and His follower, St
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
Paul, carried on the blessed work. The deep
and sacred instincts of pity and love were " in
bondage " under the Judaic dispensation. Our
Lord came to free them and to give them more
abundant life and power. He at once deepened
men's conceptions of the divine love and also
universahsed them. He gave wings to the divine
love as manifested to man, so that it passed over
all sectarian barriers and embraced the whole
struggling family of man.
When St Philip cried to our Lord, " Show us
the Father, and it sufficeth us," he breathed forth
a profound prayer from the " universal throat "
of sorrowing, struggling, baffled, and doubting
humanity. In those words are contained a veri
table condensation and distillation of the weary
and agonising orisons of generation after generation
of seekers after God. Whilst perhaps only haK
realising the immense significance of his own
words, St Phihp was truly expressing the saddest
and most haunting doubt which, age after age,
oppresses the hearts and souls of the very best
of the sons of men.
The gracious tenderness of his beloved teacher
and friend was already well known to St Philip.
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
But then arose the appalling question whether
this sheltering tenderness was sanctioned by the
author of the universe or not, whether it was
not really mocked at by the depressing phenomena
of actual fife, whether Nature " red in tooth and
claw " did not disown it, whether Jesus was not
a beautiful dreamer, whether the foundations of
the universe are not hard, unpitying and even
non-moral, whether human love and compassion
are not as fragile flowers blooming for a short
and precarious and neglected hfe on the bleak
and sterile surface of uncongenial, unsympathetic
and almost hostile granite.
In some form all deep souls have to face this
fundamental doubt. How far is the higher
anthropomorphism justifiable? How far is the
universe moral in any sense that we can under
stand? Is goodness more than an empty name?
Is it any more permanently significant than the
ethics of bees in a hive? Are duties any more
than local necessities which Utilitarianism has
taken to church and baptised? Does conscience
speak to us all with an illegitimate arrogance?
Do men ascribe to it a celestial authority merely
because they have forgotten its animal ancestry?
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
Is human morality merely a product of accidental
circumstances ? Has each of the planets a different
code of ethics? Are our vaunted moral philos
ophies merely the expression of a transient
sectarianism, forced upon us by our present
surroundings, but regarded with utter neglect,
if not with scornful derision, by those who dwell
nearer to the central core of the universe? Does
the Darwinian doctrine of evolution sound the
death knell of all genuine morahty, as Miss Cobbe
thought that it did? Was Professor Huxley right
when he said, in a letter to Charles Kingsley,
that he saw absolutely no evidence that the
author of the universe is as a Father to us, but
much evidence that the laws of the universe are
stern and hard? Was this great Agnostic right
in declaring, during his later years, that Nature
is the head-quarters of the ethical enemy? Is
goodness a mere invention of man, a local con
venience fraudulently claiming a divine and
universal mandate, a merely provisional custom,
and not a primal and inherent principle of the
whole Cosmos?
Professor Tyndall apparently thought that we
might cherish emotionally, for ethical reasons,
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
a good many doctrines which we know to be
intellectually untenable. But really truth-loving
souls cannot do that for long. The different com
partments of our inner fife cannot permanently
be kept in separation. The mind and the heart
are not in a natural condition when their functions
are regarded as not only different, but also as
opposed. Really vital and operative religion
would soon die out if it were looked upon as a
pretty and salutary fancy rather than as a frag
mentary reflection of everlasting reahties. We
should soon forsake or destroy our gods, if once
we became convinced that we ourselves had
made them. We cannot worship our own shadows
permanently. They are a poor substitute for the
" everlasting arms " of an omnipresent goodness
and an all-conquering love. Even imagination
itseK, in the higher ranges of its activity, claims
to deal with reahties, and not with baseless
fancies, with truths struggling to be born, and
not with decaying fallacies. Its very life-blood
is contained in its intense behef in its own
divine mission, in its intense conviction that the
ideal world, in wliich it habitually dwells, is no
deceptive mirage, but the very source and arche-
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
type of all that is sohd, abiding, and of universal
significance. It is, therefore, far better for us to face our
most harassing doubts, and not to run away
from them, or to seek the precarious peace which
comes from a transient evasion of the soul's
haunting and waylaying problems.
In this dire perplexity I believe that reason is
on the side of Christian Theism. I beheve that
Carlyle was really wise in his teaching that " it
is flatly inconceivable that intellect and moral
emotion should be put into us by an entity
which has none of its own." Assuredly the
stream cannot rise higher than its own source.
God must at least be as good as the noblest of
His creatures.
I am convinced that the higher anthropomor
phism affords the best approach to something like
a solution of our fundamental religious difficulties.
Dread of the charge of anthropomorphism, even
in its highest phases, is but a kind of hobgoblin
of haK-wise philosophers. To me it appears that
Emerson was right in holding that some degree
of the higher anthropomorphism is to some extent
provisionally necessary for our higher hfe. I also
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
believe that Jacobi was right in teaching that our
knowledge of God is mainly derived from the
supernatural in man, and not from external
Nature. The charge of anthropomorphism is in re
ality just as valid against non-Theistic philo
sophers as it is against reasonable Christians.
Even Atheists are compelled to be anthropo
morphic to a considerable extent. Our con
ceptions of causafity and of matter and force as
the dominant agents in the universe are just as
much derived from our own intellect and ex
perience as the conception of God and love.
We can only argue from what we know by ex
perience. In all our speculations we ought to
remember the wise ironical advice of Aristotle:
" Perhaps, then, we must begin from what is
knowable — or most knowable — to us." We
know our own minds more immediately and
more intimately than we know anything else.
We ourselves often create the philosophical hob
goblins which afterwards frighten us. We are
often frightened at our own prejudices. Distrust
of our own highest faculties can only lead logically
to utter Pyrrhonism. Even Atheism must rest
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on some kind of faith. It postulates the com
petence of our present faculties to explore the
heights and depths of the Cosmos and to detect
the immanent God, K there is one. To charge
reasonable and cautious Theists with objectionable
anthropomorphism is just as absurd as for our
old friends the Evangelicals to charge broad-
minded thinkers with an undue reliance on what
they stigmatise as carnal reason. In both cases
the real answer or apologia is the same, viz., that
we can only use such faculties as we actually
possess. The idea that man can transcend
the limits of his own nature, and look at things
from a Theocentric point of view, is evidently
an absurdly ambitious idea.
Ultimately our belief in God's conscious in
telligence and goodness is founded on the con
viction that our own highest faculties, when
carefully used, give us the best representation
that we can at present find of the divine nature,
though that representation is at present confessedly
a very inadequate and partial one. A purified,
chastened, and upward-looking anthropomorphism
is at least superior to a resolutely ignorant fetich-
ism. Probably God is far more akin to the
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highest phases of humanity than to inanimate
Nature or impersonal forces. As I have already
remarked, we cannot transcend the limits of our
own faculties. Some elements of qualifying
error inevitably cling to all our conceptions.
If anthropomorphism lurks in our idea that God
hears and answers prayer, it also lurks in our
idea that He does not answer prayer. If the
one conception implies in our thoughts a quasi-
human compassion, the other implies in our
thoughts a quasi-human indifference or obduracy.
Dr James Martineau wrote thus on this subject
in a letter to the present writer: " The idea that
we get nearer to the' truth by dismissing from
our thoughts all concrete predicates, intellect,
will, affection, and righteousness, and substituting
mere abstracts such as universal, almighty,
unknowable, infinite, eternal, is an illusion, in
my opinion, more hopeless and more harmful
than the older anthropomorphism."
Our true wisdom is, not to try to jump out of our
own skins in an intellectual sense, but rather,
whilst retaining those skins, to do the best that
we can with them, to acquiesce in our own limita
tions, to make allowance for them, to cherish
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intellectual humihty rather than despair, to trade
with our one talent and not to hide it in a napkin,
to have firm faith in progress, to grow in know
ledge, and to look forward to another and ampler
life, in which the dark problems of this life shall
at last be solved, and " we shall know even as we
are known."
The wise Goethe seems, at least in some of his
moods, to have thoroughly understood the
necessity and the significance of the higher
anthropomorphism. Dr Edward Caird, in his
Evolution of Religion writes thus of Goethe's
teaching: " Iphigeneia, in Goethe's tragedy,
meets the objection, ' It is no god that speaks,
'tis only thine own heart,' with the instant answer,
' 'Tis only through our hearts the gods speak to
us.' "
To the veteran spiritual philosopher, Dr James
Martineau, we all owe much gratitude for an
admirable description of the real functions and
value of the higher anthropomorphism in the
realms of ethics and rehgion. From a Unitarian
we have received one of the best expositions of
the real and abiding meaning of the Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation. In one of his beautiful
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discourses Dr Martineau wrote thus : " By visiting
us through a mediatorial mind on the confines of
the human and the divine, steeped in the sorrows
of one realm and kindling with the affections of
another, God has abolished the infinite distance
between us, shown us that what is dear and
beautiful to Him is the supreme of sanctities to
us, and brought us to feel that, however vast the
interval between mind and mind, all hve upon
the same thought, and shine by the same hght,
and contain the rudiments of that creative
reverence for good whence the universe and hfe
have been shaped into forms so fair; " " God's
sternest law, mellowed by the voice of Him who
bore our woes, is turned from the crash of Fate
into the music of love."
And so I beheve that we Christians are really
justified in receiving our Lord and His teaching
as our best inspirer and guide amidst the bewilder
ing perplexities of our earthly pilgrimage. Christ
is our hght and Christ our fife. St Philip and
other anxious and sorrowing spirits need no longer
go about groping for guidance and crying mourn
fully, " Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us."
Jesus has already shown us the Father. Those
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who have really seen Him have seen the Father
so far as it is possible or necessary that we should
see Him in this fife. God has fulfilled to man
that old gladdening promise, " I will make all my
goodness pass before thee." The ethical and
spiritual revelation of God in Christ is sufficient
for our practical needs, though it throws little
fight on merely metaphysical questions.
And so our gain is really great. For, after all,
the problems of the heart are in every age far more
imperious and pressing than those of the intellect.
God's Old Testament, the starry heavens, and
their well-ordered and majestic splendour, revealed
to man in ancient days the mind of God ; but the
revelation of God's heart was only to be given
later on, " in the fulness of time." Only an
ideal man could reveal truly the superhuman
humanity of God. No amount of physical
vastness could in itseK reveal love. Only a
perfect son could reveal a perfect Father. Only
in the purest and tenderest human compassion
could be even dimly mirrored for us the inex
haustible pity and love of the Creator. When
God wished for a suitable mirror in which to
show forth to us His own highest ethical quahties,
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He condescended to seek human co-operation.
He virtually said to ideal humanity, " Friend,
come up higher; " " My son, give me thy heart."
Perhaps many of God's most glorious attributes
can only be effectually made manKest in human
or quasi-human hearts. Perhaps Nature never
can be an image of God's inner and deepest hfe.
The very essence of Christian influence and hope
fulness is bound up in our behef that Christ was
at once Son of God and Son of Man, that in His
sacred heart and soul the old estrangement
between the human and the divine was effectually
ended, that the old hard wall of partition was
broken down, that the haK-conscious Hellenic
aspirations after union with God — which in olden
days found so many tentative and often absurd
and tantalising expressions — were at length really
satisfied, that the divine no longer visited the
human " as a wayfaring man that turneth aside
to tarry for a night," but henceforth dwelt in it
for ever as the very breath of its deepest life,
that the man of Nazareth was at once a revelation
of the highest and a home for the lowest, the
ethical real of God and the ethical ideal of man,
" of one substance with the Father " spiritually,
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and yet in very deed " the friend of pubhcans
and sinners."
To those who can receive this heavenly vision
all human life is altered. We have dimly seen the
heart of God, and we are no longer scared by the
strangeness of His vesture or by the rough voice
with which He sometimes seems to speak to us in
the course of the world. We beheve that His very
nature and property is to forgive and pity, that
the central core of His ethical being is love, that He
withdraws HimseK from us at times, only in order
to increase our hunger and thirst for His presence,
that though " for a small moment He may forsake
us," yet " with everlasting kindness wiU He have
mercy upon us." And thus by His subhme anthro
pomorphism Jesus assuages for His followers all
the worst terrors and sorrows which Nature
brings upon us. Through Him we have learnt
that not only love, but also self-sacrificing love
is no local and transient product, but something
at the very root of the universe, as it were, " the
lamb slain from the foundation of the world,"
a partial manifestation of that which was in the be
ginning with God, of the very soul of God. The
God disclosed to us by Christ is not one who

Christ's Remedy for Fear
regards the terrible drama of human suffering from
afar, but one who HimseK shares our strife and
bears our woes. Christ gave us the conception
of a God who actually leads struggfing souls on
personally, and is not content with merely pointing
out the road to them.
It is scarcely necessary to prove that our Lord
did actually preach the higher anthropomorphism.
His whole teaching is pervaded by it, and without
it His whole rehgion would be baseless. The
very essence of that rehgion is to be found in the
firm conviction that man is naturally related to
God, that all man's highest faculties have a
tendency towards God, that immediately a man
" comes to himseK," immediately he realises
the significance of his own inner being, he
necessarily comes into the presence of God, that
a man cannot be adequately human without being
also incipiently divine. The fundamental note
of all the spiritual music of Jesus is to be found in
that grand, consolatory, and daring saying of
His, " The kingdom of God is within you."
Therein we find the one abiding basis of really
vivid and operative religion. In that great
motto of Christ, in that most pregnant truth,
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is expressed at once the rationale of the world's
highest philosophy and the world's deepest piety.
The knowledge of seK, if only it be adequate,
brings with it some measure of the knowledge
of God. The Infinite lurks in all our highest
faculties. Human nature, in its higher phases,
is " an awful place," the very vestibule of heaven,
the chosen hierophant of many of the most
wondrous mysteries and glories of the universe.
Impartial and careful thinkers can scarcely help
recognising the eternal truth of the soul-emancipat
ing motto of Christ's rehgion. It holds sway
alike in our intellectual, moral, and spiritual fife.
Philosophy, in any high sense, is impossible with
out the preliminary behef that the human mind
has some real affinity with the divine, that, from
the constitution of our faculties, we are in some
degree able to " think God's thoughts after
Him." And our ethical and spiritual nature
seems to postulate this affinity still more strongly.
We cannot believe that heroism and seK-sacrificing
love are of merely local significance, as it were,
the flickering lamps of our provincial dwelling-
place. All human goodness or nobleness, when
it rises to a certain height, seems to betray or
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reveal a more august origin than any to be found
in local Utihtarianism. As Dr Martineau well
said, " The souls of the sons of God are greater
than their business; and they are thrown out,
not to do a certain work, but to be a certain thing,
to bear some sacred lineaments, to show some divine
tint of the parent mind from which they come? "
When human goodness rises to a certain elevat-
tion, it seems assuredly to shed much of its
relativity and finiteness as the prophet dropped
his mantle in his ascent to heaven. The high
mountain peaks of human nobleness seem at
times to gleam with a kind of supernatural
splendour, with " a hght that never was on sea
or land." In making us capable of absolutely
disinterested heroism and love, God appears to
have made us capable of a kind of potential
divinity. Our lower virtues often seem to be
"of the earth earthy"; they appear to be the
product of environment rather than of God; but
our higher virtues seem to speak of a higher
origin and a higher sanction. They declare
plainly that they " seek a better country, even a
heavenly." Looking backward over the realms
of merely conventional and provincial goodness
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and its utilitarian ancestry, each exalted form
of human heroism seems to declare, " Now is
my kingdom not from hence." No unsophisti
cated heart of man can really beheve that fidelity,
pity, and boundless seK-sacrificing love are
merely a distillation of animal fife with no uni
versal significance. Both infinity and immortality
seem to be implicit in heroism of the best sort.
Emerson spoke for most of us when he expressed
his profound conviction in these words: "But
the love which will be annihilated rather than
treacherous has already made death impossible,
and proclaims itseK no mortal, but a native of the
depths of absolute and Inextinguishable being."
As the universe seems to be all of one piece,
there is perhaps nothing absurd in believing that
the spectacle, or at least the knowledge, of man's
prolonged and faithful, though sorely baffled,
struggle after goodness may, in the wise economy
of God, be of some real value to those fiving in
regions remote from our planet. It may be that
the deepest and most sorrow-laden of the souls
of the sons of men are, in the language of the
apostle to the Gentiles, " made a spectacle unto the
world, and to angels, as well as unto men." It
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may be that, in other worlds remote from this
one, some of the most afflicted of the sons of men
may find eventual consolation in the knowledge
that their abortive efforts here on earth have in
some inconceivable way led to the glorious
redemption of other kindred spirits in far-off
regions. It may be that the different portions
of the universe are far more closely connected
spiritually than we imagine them to be, that in
some real way they are members one of another.
It may be that the most tormented human souls
are in some mysterious way " filling up that which
is behind or lacking in the sufferings of Christ "
and also in the sufferings of remote brethren, so
that, as these strangers gaze with loving appre
ciation on the scarred and battered wrecks of our
present humanity, grateful inhabitants of more
favoured regions of the Cosmos may hereafter
cry concerning them, " Surely they have borne
our griefs and carried our sorrows; the chastise
ment of our peace was upon them; and with
their stripes we are healed." And thus much
apparently hopeless suffering on earth might
find a cosmical explanation, though all merely
terrestrial explanations should utterly fail. If
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God is the Lord of the whole vast universe, it
seems very unlikely that He should keep each
compartment utterly isolated in a spiritual sense,
that He should fail eventually to teach His widely
separated children that they are " members one
of another " and must seek conformity to the
intensely social nature of their Maker by bearing
each other's burdens to some extent.
I do not beheve that Christ would have been
scared by the Darwinian doctrine of Evolution,
as Miss Cobbe was. The fact that the noblest
morahty has, for the most part, not been dropped
down into our hearts straight from heaven, but
has come to them gradually through the lowly
channel of animal hfe, does not necessarily lessen
its value. In the vast majority of His activities
God does not appear to act directly, but through
the instrumentality of inferior agents. He uses
the physical and the temporary as a transient
vehicle by which to convey to His creatures the
germs of the spiritual and eternal. We have the
" treasures " of eternal hfe in the frail " earthen
vessels " of slowly developing faculties. God
often chooses the apparently weak things of the
world to confound the wise. We must look to the
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
end, K we wish to understand the intentions of
God. The simple fact that human experience
has resulted in a lofty code of morahty is enough
to convince Theists that God intended it to result
in this, that human experience has been different
from that of bees in a hive, chiefly because God
intended that experience to lead to a vastly
different result in the form of moral conceptions.
Thus we really recover and retain that sanction
for our higher hfe which Miss Cobbe imagined
to be destroyed by Darwinism. The sanction is
none the less sure, though it comes to us in a less
direct way.
Perhaps the most popular and most generally
convincing argument in favour of reasonable
anthropomorphism which Christ ever gave us is
contained in those memorable and soul-cheering
words of His, " If ye, then, being evil, know how
to give good gKts unto your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give
good things to those who ask Him." In this
teaching Christ casts HimseK and His doctrines
fearlessly on the higher instincts of mankind.
He ignored learned theories, and appealed to the
actual facts of ordinary human hfe. He appealed
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
to the common sense and right feeling of the
human race. He left metaphysics, and appealed
to psychology. And His appeal remains to this
day as powerful as ever. It spoke to the inmost
soul of the forlorn " Silas Marner " very effectually
through the lips of a tender-hearted peasant
woman. It is impossible to believe that we men,
in this insignificant httle planet, are the highest
part of the universe morally. Directing our gaze
upon far-off higher regions of spiritual nobleness,
we declare with ineradicable conviction, " A
man can receive nothing except it be given him
from above . ' ' Though clouds and darkness may be
round about us, though the difficulties of rational
faith may seem at times almost insuperable, we
need not despair. The very impulse which made
bewildered Job exclaim, " Oh that I knew where
I might find him " was itself a strong suggestion
that a divine being existed somewhere.
The best and most secure Theism is, in my
opinion, based on the undeniable fact that our
present actual knowledge and experience of some
degree of real goodness in our own hearts and in
those of our fellows almost force us to beheve
that there are somewhere in the many mansions
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of the universe higher and grander forms of the
same goodness. And these higher forms of good
ness are substantially a very large part of what
we mean by the word God. These forms of good
ness may perhaps be still to some extent in a
struggling condition. There may even yet be
" war in heaven." There may be evil forces as
well as good ones in the higher worlds. But still
we are justified in believing that the good forces
really exist, and that they will ultimately be
victorious. Even now, in this " dimness of our
captivity," we can discern the fact that goodness
has in it many signs of the power of an unending
hfe which are denied to evil. Goodness has even
now a force of coherence, a power of co-operation,
a recuperative energy, and a persuasive im-
periousness which are lacking in wickedness.
Conscience is to Theists the voice of God, and
conscience is gradually growing both wiser and
stronger. We are also learning to perceive that
the vast majority of civilised men are really on
the side of goodness, that the spirit is often
willing while the flesh is weak, that men instinct
ively love goodness for its own sake, and love evil
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And thus the evidences for a wisely anthropo
morphic Theism tend to grow stronger in some
ways. We are learning day by day more of the
profound and undying significance of that great
saying of our Lord, " The kingdom of God is
within you." The hand-writing of God over the
inmost structure of our best faculties is becoming
more and more distinct and legible, whilst the
disfiguring and distorting handwriting of ahen
and evil powers is dying away. Our allegiance
to all that is highest is growing stronger, more
enhghtened, and more unswerving. Notwith
standing all arguments to the contrary, we re
main persuaded that the highest human morality
is " born of God " and must eventually overcome
the world. We are gradually learning to perceive
more clearly the direction in which God is leading
the human race. We are learning to separate the
permanent truths of rehgion from the transitional
forms in which they have been clothed in various
ages. Anthropomorphism is dying, in order to
hve more truly. The old carnal things in it are
dying, and the spiritual things are living and
growing in it. Deeper thought is enabling us
to do without the picture books and the fairy tales
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of our childhood. Romance is not banished either
from the Cosmos or from our own souls. It is
only assuming a more rational form. We no
longer seek to find God in His apparent anomalies.
We rather seek to find him in His habitual
working and His steadfast laws. The more that
the outward man perishes, the more is the inward
man renewed and strengthened. The less we
find of God in our lower nature, the more we seem
to find of Him in our higher faculties. The very
insignificance and transiency of our animal hfe
seem to draw attention more than ever to the
abiding and profound significance of our spiritual
life. The scaffolding is falling down, in order that
the imperishable beauty of God's altar may be
revealed. Provisional moral theories are passing
away. Ethics seem to be emancipating them
selves from their old incoherence and their old
provincialism. They seem to be gradually learn
ing something of the one language of the immortals,
so that to us, far more than to men of earlier ages,
Christ might well exclaim, " the kingdom of God
is within you." Looking at our own God-haunted
faculties, as they are seen to emerge gradually
from their old state of dimness and vexation, we
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might well exclaim to the immanent God within
them,
" So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I hav£ loved long since, and lost awhile."
Perhaps the angel faces are our own long-lost and
blasted ideals.
From Christ also we learn to overcome the fear
of death. In great measure He has taken away
its utter strangeness and its appalling loneliness.
The Fatherhood of God is omnipresent, K we
believe the teaching of Jesus. And our great
Companion, the glorious and tender humanity
of our divine master, will never leave us or forsake
us. He has descended into hell for us. We are
persuaded that goodness, as we aspire after it,
is the very hght and soul of the whole universe,
that through it the most ancient heavens are
strong. We are convinced that higher worlds
than this are the chief dwelhng place of that
Supreme Mind with which we have had com
munion here on earth; and we are equally con
vinced that in those far-off regions we shall some
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
day find that great fontal compassion and love
which once dwelt so fully in the human heart of
the divine Man of Nazareth. There we beheve
that we shall find at last " the lamb slain from the
foundation of the world." There we hope to
gaze on the original and underived source from
which has flowed every refreshing stream of human
affection and human pity. There we beheve
that the higher anthropmorphism will be fully
justified, that it will be proved to have been no
deceptive mirage, but a hght that shone in a dark
place. When God puts the best robe of a divine
righteousness on the sin-stained and way-worn
forms of His returning prodigal sons, we may
rest assured that He will not strip off their under
lying fundamental humanity. Perhaps St Paul
had a glimpse of this truth when he exclaimed,
" Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed
upon, that mortality might be swallowed up
of hfe." The apotheosis of humanity imphes its
legitimate and normal development, and not its
practical annihilation. Not Pantheistic absorp
tion, but conscious union with God, was the goal
of our race in the judgment of St Paul. Whilst
putting off the shoes of our mundane infirmities

Christ's Remedy for Fear
and limitations, we shall not hereafter be called
upon to put off any really intrinsic element of our
higher nature.
The religion of Jesus, when thoroughly under
stood, in great measure frees us from our pristine
provinciafism. By making us reafise the Infinite
in our own souls Christ prepares us for all mani
festations of the Infinite in other regions of the
Cosmos. He delivers us from the depressing
feeling of our own httleness. As sharing some
small measure of the divine reason and the divine
love, we feel that, to some extent, we are en
franchised and made citizens of infinity and
eternity. Higher beings become our elder brothers
rather than complete strangers. The bleakness
of merely physical vastness is illumined by the
gladdening hghts of human and superhuman
benignity, so that we may say confidently, as we
gaze into the unpenetrated recesses of far-off
non-human immensities, " If God be for us, who
can be against us? Who shall lay anything to
the charge of God's elect? Who is he that con-
demneth? Who shall separate us from the love
of Christ? I am persuaded that neither death
nor hfe, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
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nor things present, nor things to come, nor height,
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord."
We beheve that the divine humanity of Christ
will be our guide over all the dark waters of un
known oceans. We beheve that our great Kins
man and Friend " has the keys of death and
hell " and of other mysteries. We beheve that the
universe is at heart really ethical, that it means
intensely and means good. We believe that the
ideal is older and more enduring than what we
call the real. We believe that reason and love
will finally subdue all things to themselves. We
are not ashamed of our own higher nature;
for we know that God has honoured it : We do
not think that the sons of men will hereafter be
regarded as unauthorised intruders in the heavenly
land. And, K any of the older and more developed
inhabitants of that central and sacred region shall
hereafter wonder at our apparent audacity in
treading the courts of God's house and in searching
for His Eternal Word, and shall demand of us,
" Whom seek ye? ", we shall not fear to answer
them in the bold words of the wise men from the
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East, " We have seen Christ's star in the East, and
are come to worship Him." And it may be that
from the soul of Jesus will come forth a profoundly
human voice, reproving the pride of many a more
advanced pilgrim of eternity in those old words
of divinest sympathy and charity, " Shouldest
not thou also have compassion on thy fellow-
servant, even as I had pity on thee? "; " When
thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren."
For we believe that not only human happiness and
salvation, but also the weKare of the whole
sentient Cosmos depends ultimately on that
immense quasi-human benignity of the Creator
which found its noblest and most adequate
mamfestation in the tender pity of the man of
Nazareth. If there were nothing quasi-human
in God, then were we all orphans; all the pro
longed and sorrowful orisons of our baffled and
bewildered race would be utterly futile and utterly
meaningless; and the highest inhabitants of
heaven itseK would hold their glory and their
goodness on a most precarious tenure. Not only
on this our earth, but throughout the whole
universe, we believe that the truest and only
adequate basis of the loftiest ethical hfe is to be

Christ's Remedy for Fear
found in a firm faith in the superhuman humanity
of God. We beheve that the higher anthropo
morphism is not merely a local and tempor
ary conception. We believe that it also ex
presses, though partially, an eternal truth
whose sway knows no hmits either of time or
place. Though we beheve generally that all forms of true
goodness are ultimately derived from God, a very
real difficulty arises when we proceed to consider
how we can rightly ascribe to the divine character
those forms of goodness which appear to be dis
tinctively human, and inseparably connected
with the conditions and limitations of our finite and
struggfing nature. Can we reasonably ascribe
to the infinite and perfect Creator such quahties
as humihty, fortitude, temperance, gratitude,
faith, and heroism? Is there any sphere for the
exercise of such qualities in the divine life? If
God has humility, towards whom and on account
of what is He humble? If God has faith, in whom
does He trust? If He has gratitude, to whom is
He grateful? Are not these qualities essentially
marks of a limited and imperfect being? Aris
totle manifestly thought that they are. He held
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that it is absurd to attribute them to the Creator.
Is it not true that in some very important par
ticulars human virtue is sharply differentiated
from the divine virtue? Are there not some
quahties which, though admirable in God, would
be very far from admirable in man? For instance,
it is a part of the divine glory that God " neither
slumbers nor sleeps "; yet such unsleeping vigil
ance is a sign of infirmity and disorganisation in
man. Was Spinoza right in teaching that " neither
intellect nor will appertains to God's nature " ?
Was Herbert Spencer right in declaring that, K
we think correctly, we cannot attribute either
consciousness or vohtion to the Creator? Is
not even the highest kind of anthropomorphism
radically absurd in some respects? Can man
really be a " partaker of the divine nature " ?
I believe that the answer to these doubts is to
be found by realising the truth that, though every
thing that is admirable in man proceeds ultimately
from God, yet our "having this treasure in the
earthen vessels " of our limited faculties necessarily
alters to a considerable extent the mode in which
these ethical quahties manifest themselves. The.
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
divine virtues, in becoming incarnate in us, to a
great extent lose their absoluteness and are tinged
with relativity and finiteness. The divine reason
does not need to syllogize or infer as the human
reason does. The divine will operates in some
ways very differently from the manner in which
our human will operates.
And so too with regard to ethical virtues, I
believe that human goodness is akin to the divine
goodness, yet in some ways manifestly differenti
ated from it. The greatness of God makes His
goodness in some ways very different from ours,
though having real kinship with it. For instance
we cannot say that God is humble as good men are
humble — yet theologians rightly teach that God
is full of condescension; and condescension implies
the absence of arrogance; and the absence of
arrogance implies something very hke the quahty
that we call humility. Neither can we ascribe to
God gratitude or temperance as we know those
qualities : yet we are obliged to beheve that there is
something in the divine character essentially akin
to these necessary human virtues. Sir Oliver
Lodge boldly says that God manKestly has a sense
of humour — perhaps it would be more philosophical
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to say that Godmarufestly has something analogous
to or faintly resembhng what we call a sense of
humour. The fundamental principle of virtue displays
itseK in very various ways at different stages of
elevation. Yet, in its ultimate origin, we believe
that it is the same. Traced back to their ultimate
source, all forms of goodness are essentially one.
In its origin the great ethical river, like that of
ancient Eden, was one; but at a later period it
was parted and became into various heads. All
the streams of goodness take their rise in the
far-off inaccessible mountains of the divine nature;
but their subsequent courses are widely different
and much influenced by the regions through which
they flow. And so their appearance and their
functions are extremely varied and dissimilar.
Probably there is originally one great source
of ethical power, just as there is one great source
of physical force; and, just as physical force
undergoes the most astonishing transmutations
in its career of development, so perhaps does
moral force. Perhaps the apparent variations
and seemingly fundamental differences between
the multitudinous ethical forces are in reality no
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greater than the corresponding variations and
differences between physical forces. The divine
agency really operates in the human soul, though
it masks itseK in a multitude of inferior forms.
Perhaps God wishecTto reveal His moral quahties
on the lower ranges of the spiritual world as well
as on the higher. Perhaps these lower ranges
afford a necessary sphere for the development of
some of God's glorious potentiahties. Perhaps
the eternal ethical ideas, as Plato would call them,
or at least some of them, could only be adequately
expressed or developed through the instrumentality
of inferior natures. Perhaps the Incarnation was
an indispensable stage in the development into
actuality of some of the abiding thoughts of God.
Perhaps His love of sympathy, fidelity, and heroism
was best mirrored in the struggling hearts of
the sons of men. Perhaps throughout the long
years of eternity God has been for ever unfolding
and realising some of His most cherished ethical
preferences in the souls of His aspiring creatures.
And thus, perhaps, we may venture to say that
God's sons are in some sense necessary to Him.
I believe that there is some real evidence that
moral or spiritual force, in streaming but from one
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soul into another, does often undergo quite wond
rous transformations, so as to be scarcely recognis
able. When virtue went forth from Christ, it often
assumed a quite different form in those who
received it. That moral force which exists in the
saintly spirit as dehght in holiness often takes on
the form of penitence and shame for sin when it
streams forth into the hearts of outcasts. The
highest human qualities, though their ideas
existed in the divine mind from all eternity, are
not just like anything in the character of God.
They are not exact copies in miniature of the
virtues of God. They are imperfectly embodied
ideas or faint reflections of certain inconceivable
quahties in God. They are in some ways like
John the Baptist. They "are not that Light,
but are sent to bear witness of that Light."
An old Hebrew prophet perceived this truth
of the vast difference between divine and human
quahties when he declared that " God's thoughts
are not our thoughts, neither are His ways our
ways," and that, in view of the divine holiness,
" all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." But
he also perceived the fundamental kinship that
underlies all apparent differences between the
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
divine and human mind when he represented the
Creator as saying to His poor imperfect creatures,
" Come now and let us reason together." The
prophet did not beheve that he was entirely
ignorant as to the character of God. He knew at
least that " God's thoughts are higher than our
thoughts, and His ways than our ways."
We beheve that all the best human goodness has
its veritable archetype in some ineffable mysteries
of God's inner life. Our highest quahties are the
poor relations, as it were, of God's glorious
holiness. They are in no sense outcasts or of
merely transient and local significance. Their
citizenship is in the heavens. Even now their
faithful peasant hearts often burn within them as
they receive the noble inspiration of their redeemer
and saviour. They feel that the voice of the
Infinite has a native sound. All the paths of human
goodness lead ultimately to the very heart of God.
God may seem to forsake or neglect our souls;
but He does this only in order to train us and to
develop in us the grandest kinds of fidelity.
When human nobleness shall stand hereafter
before the throne of God's infinite perfection,
we believe that it will in no way lose its identity
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Christ's Remedy for Fear
or feel itseK to be an utter stranger. We beheve
that it will feel at home, as the prodigal son once
felt in the arms of his father. We beheve that
God is indeed the " Soul of our souls," the ideal and
most lasting element of our truest fife. We believe
that God is in some sense more ourselves than we
are. Our social nature even now bears the faint
impress of the Everlasting Love. Even now it is
haunted by God — even now the sympathetic and
the benevolent for ever cry with dehberate and
impassioned conviction, " In God we live, move,
and have our being."

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THE PLENTEOUS HARVEST AND
THE SCARCITY OF TRUE
LABOURERS
"But when he saw the multitudes he was moved with
compassion on them, because they fainted and were scattered
abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto
his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the
labourers are few. Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the
harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest."

THE PLENTEOUS HARVEST AND
THE SCARCITY OF TRUE
LABOURERS
Jesus Christ saw deeply into man's troubled
hfe and its many and varied needs. He had deep
compassion on those who were " ignorant and out
of the way." His keen eyes descried the immense
potentialities of man's nature beneath all super
ficial appearances of sinfulness, paltriness, and
failure. He grieved much over the terrible waste
of the very finest moral materials. He was willing
to descend into hell in search of these. Christ
was a wise educator of the soul. He did not seek
to create new faculties in his disciples, but rather
to evoke and develop those which already existed.
He called His followers friends and not servants.
Such was His magnificent faith in the predestined
sovereignty of goodness that He dared to stand
serenely amidst blasted wrecks of humanity, and
declare fearlessly to those lost ones, " The kingdom
of God is within you." The spiritual optimism
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The Plenteous Harvest
of the " Man of Sorrows " was very remarkable.
Unlike Calvinists and Cynics, He knew all that
is in man, knew that there are more things in
sinners' hearts than are dreamt of in conventional
religious philosophy. In the depths of man's
sinfulness He ever heard noble and God-given
instincts bemoaning their forlorn condition and
crying for enhghtenment and true sustenance,
hke plants in mines dreaming of the sun and
vainly essaying to reach it.
But whilst genuinely realising the vast potential
wealth of human nature, Christ also reahsed the
fact that masters in Israel are very scarce, that
very few know how to minister wisely to diseased,
tormented, and baffled hearts and minds. The
incapacity to cast out devils displayed by some
of His immediate followers was to Him a sad
indication of the exceeding rarity of profound
and penetrating knowledge of the infinite mystery
of man's strangely complex being. With deep
sadness Jesus perceived that many of His professed
disciples were destined to distort rather than to
reveal that most blessed evangel of which His own
soul was full. Want of sympathy and deep
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The Plenteous Harvest
thought was destined to work almost unending
evil. The gospel itseK was doomed to lose its
most vital characteristics, and so to become well-
nigh powerless. From afar the sad eyes of Jesus
saw conventionahsm stranghng genius, saw meta
physical subtleties displacing the keen intuitions
of noble hearts, saw formahsm withering genial
freshness and spontaneity, saw harshness ostracis
ing pity, saw orthodoxy stifling awe and wonder,
saw decency frowning on lawless heroism, saw
friendship marred by selfish religion, saw cere
monies elevated above justice and humanity,
saw charity suspected of deadly heresy, saw
pharisaism and sectarianism fettering sympathy,
saw churches and chapels turned into mausoleums
of the Infinite, melancholy tombs of a once fiving
energy which had promised to penetrate and
vivify all the best elements of man's varied being.
In our own days thoughtful spirits are often
saddened as Christ was, as they1 contemplate the
rich harvest offered to the churches and the futile
and inadequate manner in which they seek to
deal with it. Rehgion seems to have lost its old
penetrating power. It no longer understands
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The Plenteous Harvest
human nature, and so cannot secure its confidence
and friendship by " telling it all that ever it did."
It speaks with the voice of magisterial authority
rather than with the voice of intelligent sympathy.
It is content to be to man an external monitor
rather than the friend who is as his own soul. It
is no longer a great educational force. It seeks
to " cram " men with an ill-digested mass of
dogmas rather than to train them into habits
of deep and independent thinking. It aims at
producing in the minds of its followers a kind of
meek docility rather than a convinced and open-
eyed loyalty.
Our age is not really irreligious, though it is
to a great extent anti-ecclesiastical. The harvest
which wise reapers might gather in is very great,
but such reapers are indeed few. Whilst our
laity in general have become far broader in their
religious ideas, it often seems as if our clergy and
our clerically-minded laymen have grown narrower.
The demands of thinking people in our days have
grown greater than ever, and yet it often appears
as if the resources of our rehgious teachers had
grown more and more slender. Our people ask
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The Plenteous Harvest
for the nourishing bread of really reasonable
religion, and our ministers give them the stones
of old petrified dogmas. Our Rituafists seek to
make amends for poverty of intellect by the beauty
of external decorations. Whilst detaining their
followers at a stage of spiritual culture not much
above that of the " Salvation Army," they seek
to soothe them by fine music and all the varied
pomp of external ceremonialism.
Meanwhile, thinking people can see plainly
enough that there is in our days a great harvest
that might be gathered into the temples of true
religion. Science is no longer so hostile to rehgion
as it was. Philosophy, for the most part, now sees
clearly that it must find its very soul in the
broadest and deepest religion, that it must either
perfect itseK in rehgion or disintegrate itseK into
a veritable chaos of contradictions. Education,
poetry, art, literature, friendship, and the course
of daily fife, all begin to feel their affinity with
the Infinite and Eternal; all cry aloud to genuine
rehgion to " come over and help them."
Modern doubt is, for the most part, a widely
different thing from the doubt of other ages.
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The Plenteous Harvest
It is really serious, and has none of the flippancy
of earlier phases of unbelief. The doubt of our
age is often more fike the profound bewilderment
of Job than the mocking sprightliness of Voltaire.
Its savageness sometimes arises from its profound
sadness. It is a kind of moulting faith. Some
times it is like a sorrowful demoniac, moaning
disconsolately amongst the tombs of dead creeds.
Its very fierceness and discontent prove its
ultimate celestial origin.
Above all, modern unbelief has dropped its
old irritating airs of infallibility. True Agnosticism
is genuinely modest. It does not pretend to have
searched the infinite heavens and made sure that
there is no God there. Agnosticism has taken the
place of Materialism in our days. The universe
seems to have grown larger and mof e wonderful.
Astronomy seems to call for a grander conception
of God. Awe and wonder have been greatly
vivified; our sense of the subhme calls aloud for
some form of reasonable Theism.
Assuredly there is a great work to be done in so
re-stating the truths of religion as to make them
fit for minds trained in scientific accuracy. Re-
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The Plenteous Harvest
figion ought now to " put away childish things,"
and begin to lay the foundations of a manly and
rational creed. The old war between reason and
emotion ought now to cease. We ought to cast
aside intellectual timidity and be ready to launch
out into the deeps of profohndest thought, strong
in the assured befief that the truths of Nature
and the truths of the soul cannot be really irre
concilable. The harvest indeed is great, if only
we knew how to gather it in. The best men and
women of our time have found Atheism intolerable
and almost fatal to the highest interests of humanity.
Literature abounds with pathetic confessions of
the absolute necessity of some form of Theism.
But the labourers are indeed few. Even now
the churches do not understand the signs of the
times. They still adhere to the futile old methods
of deahng with doubters. They still seek to
dictate to reason and to force it to wear blinkers.
They still prefer edification to truth. Orthodox
divines are still strangely wanting in candour
and intellectual honesty. They are still far too
much afraid of really free thought. Their con
cessions to science are grudging and haK-hearted.

The Plenteous Harvest
They seek to keep back a part of the debt which
they owe to modern thought. They pretend to
accept the doctrine of evolution, whilst seeking
to evade many of its inevitable consequences.
They are apparently friendly to many of the
highest conceptions of our age, but this friendli
ness is the cloak of a deeply cherished hostility.
Divines now amiably offer to baptize men's
loftiest ideas, but, when baptizing them, they take
good care to emasculate them as well. The
tamed and domesticated reason of the orthodox
church is a very different thing from the free and
bold reason of philosophical inquirers. And so
many of the very finest minds of our age stand
apart from all churches. The best friends of
rehgion are often those who are apparently in
antagonism to it. Priests debase religion, and
then complain that men cannot discern its in
trinsic glory.
If Christians would only be rational, they might
find, I think, a very powerful ally in a very un
expected quarter, I mean amongst the Pessimists.
Nowhere else, perhaps, might Christian Theism
gather so rich a harvest as amongst these des-

The Plenteous Harvest
pairing spirits. To understand and thoroughly
appreciate the real significance of modern Pessimism
would be to perform a real service at once to
sufferers and to reasonable Christianity. Our
Lord now seems to call upon His ministers to
leave their formal altars and descend with Him
into this hell of despair, and preach to its unhappy
and hopeless inhabitants. Here, in that place of
darkness, in that lowest pit, are now to be found
many of the deepest spirits of the age, many who
are potentially the nearest of all to Jesus, who
drink unceasingly of His cup of sorrow. If the
definition of God given us by an old mystic,
" God is a sigh in the depths of the soul," be at
all a true one, we might well think that there is
often more true rehgion in the dark regions of
Pessimism than in the gorgeous temples of jubilant
orthodoxy. After all, the better kinds of Pessi
mism are but a prolongation of the sorrows of
Job, a wailing cry after a God who for ever hides
himseK. Discontent with the actual is a sort of
homage paid to the lost ideal. The inextinguish
able thirst for God can at times only express
itseK in the most sorrowful aspirations.
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The Plenteous Harvest
Pessimism is, to a great extent, the result of
the immense development of compassion in our
days. This seeming devil is really only a baffled
archangel. Cursed, perhaps, by most of the
churches, it might well exclaim, " I am crucified
with Christ," " I thirst, I thirst." Human hfe
is indeed full of irony, as Thomas Hardy so clearly
perceives; but, perhaps, the very strangest irony
of all is incarnate in modern Pessimism, which
makes its followers in some ways the nearest of
all our race to Christ, whilst nominally almost
the furthest away from Him.
The harvest that might be reaped by Christianity
from modern despair is indeed great, but where
are the labourers? Where shall we find wise
" sons of consolation " communing as brothers
with these suffering and hopeless prisoners and
helping them to erect temples of immortal hope
" out of their stony grief? " And yet surely
the way of peace and consolation is plain. That
very idealism which, when baffled, gives rise to
Pessimism, is itseK a source of hope. Why do
men expect- progress? Why are we so indignant
about the woes of the creation? Because we have
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The Plenteous Harvest
in our own souls a faint but undying prophecy of
a far-off city of God wherein peace, righteousness,
and love shall reign for ever. The best Pessi
mism of the age is not a foe, but a friend to the
noblest sorts of Christianity. It pleads power
fully for the doctrine of a future hfe, pleads with
a penetrating and persuasive vehemence unknown
to the contented and happy. It is "a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief " bearing away
the deficiencies of shallower teachers. Even
whilst, in some cases, repudiating hope, it yet
inevitably suggests it. It may often seem to
itseK to have " no form nor comehness " ; yet this
great sufferer even now travails in pain till
the soaring Christ of a measureless hope be formed
in it. To some of us it seems as K the deepest
human pity were destined to be re-incarnate in
our present despair, and by-and-by to irradiate
human existence once again with the abiding
fight of an undying confidence.
Pessimism is a very valuable page of our New
Testament, the soul of man. External Nature
is, as it were, God's Old Testament, and therefore
unsatisfying. If we could only induce scientific
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The Plenteous Harvest
men to study themselves as well as the Cosmos,
we might bring them into agreement with our
faith in God. They would then learn that, in
very deed, " the kingdom of God is within us."
Man is the true Shekinah, and in that great
revelation of the divine no element gleams with
such a prophetic and supernatural glory as that
profoundly human passion of pity which sometimes
casts itseK in anguish on the ground, and prays
God to annihilate the whole sentient creation.
Besides intellectual people, there is another
and much larger class which is repelled from
ordinary Christianity in a very unnecessary way;
I mean the young, the vivid, the fervent, the
warm-hearted, the energetic, and the heroic.
These are often filled with a great distaste for the
stale conventionalism of ordinary rehgion. To
these the almost crawhng timidity of the churches
is very unacceptable. They crave for something
bolder, fresher, and more original. . They are not
wilhng that their hves should be mere echoes of
the lives of former ages. Not content with
baptism by water, these seek for baptism by fire.
They want a religion of robust manliness, a religion
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The Plenteous Harvest
to brighten daily fife, a religion to make life more
interesting and friendship more satisfying. Such
spirits are willing to be directed, but not willing
to be tamed. They do not see why rehgion should
be made so intensely dry. They do not like to
leave their sense of humour outside church, as
they might leave their bicycles. Such souls
prefer to linger in the outer court of the Gentiles
rather than to approach the altars of orthodoxy.
Their warmest homage is now given, not to com
plicated metaphysical creeds or childish wranghng
about sacraments, but to active beneficence, to
broad humanity, to deep disinterested sympathy
and charity, to divine philanthropy, to the fidelity
that will never desert and the love that will never
fail. Now, K these vivid and active natures can at
present only find the divine in an apotheosis of
the human, I think that the ministers of rehgion
should dare, for once in a way, to be bold. Let
them willingly leave their gKts at God's altars,
listen to the demands of their starving and
neglected brothers, and hasten to commune
freely with those most promising proselytes.
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The Plenteous Harvest
And though in that despised outer court of the
Gentiles no ecclesiastical sanction may be given
them, yet in their ears will sound the sweet
approving voice of the great Son of Man, vindicat
ing their lawless sympathy, disclosing His own
sacred human heart as man's best Theophany,
and crying confidently, as in the days of old,
" I am the way, the truth, and the fife; no man,
cometh unto the Father, but by me."
Religious people ought also to remember that
our Lord's very deepest sympathy was reserved
for the multitude, for the bhnd, the ignorant, the
ungifted, and the uncultivated, for those leading
an almost entirely instinctive life. The keen
eyes of Jesus discerned the immense moral and
spiritual potentiahties hidden in the hearts of
the common people and waiting for a wise educator
to develop them. Pharisees, in their inhuman
pride, might declare that " this people that
knoweth not the law is cursed," but Christ knew
well that God often dwells more truly in the
faithful instincts of the ignorant than in the
enlightened seK - satisfaction of the learned.
Humihty, faithfulness, seK-sacrifice, and heroism
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The Plenteous Harvest
are as dear to the people in their rags as to
kings in their royal robes or to professors in their
academical gowns. Indeed it often seems as if
the people were, in some ways, in a much more
promising spiritual condition than the rich and
the learned. Labouring men are at least in con
tact with the realities of hfe; they gain Vigour
by contact with the homely earth. They are
generally free from that deadening frivolity which
so often characterises the rich and that impenetrable
seK-conceit which so often characterises the learned.
Want and sorrow frequently plough the soil of the
hearts of the labouring class so as to render it
especially fit to receive the good seed of the IKe
eternal. In many ways it is hard for those who
have riches to enter into the kingdom of God;
but the common people hear Christ gladly. This
harvest is indeed plenteous.
But I think that we must also own that here
again, in this very promising department of moral
and spiritual work, " the labourers are few."
Conventional religious teachers do not put them
selves in the place of the people, see things with
their eyes, or feel things with their hearts. They
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The Plenteous Harvest
do not recognise the fact that, if we wish to help
the multitude, we must be content to follow the
slow and indirect method of Jesus, we must
minister to their bodily necessities first, and
only afterwards minister to their minds and souls.
And, in preaching rehgion to them, we ought
principally to give them that which they already
see to be necessary, that for which their whole
natures even now hunger and thirst. We ought
to try to make human brotherhood a more real and
vital thing, and so help, by wise co-operation, to
mitigate the keen misery of the struggle for
existence. Practical experience of human love
and its heahng and uplifting effects will gradually
make the multitude willing enough to beheve in
divine love.
Nor ought religious teachers to speak to the
multitude in a condescending way, as though they
were mere vassals of the church. We ought not
to keep them ignorant in order that they may be
orthodox. We ought to endeavour to share with
them all our own choicest gKts, to give them
science, poetry, art, music, and such elements
of philosophy as they may be capable of receiving.
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The Plenteous Harvest
Above all, we ought to try to make them see that
the very grandest things in the moral and spiritual
universe are open to them as well as to the more
cultivated, that they may approach very near
to Christ; that in benevolence, pity, sympathy,
good nature, fairness, equitableness they have
already a truly acceptable rehgion; that in their
present comradeship they already have the germs
of the loftiest charity; and that in their present
capacity for seK-sacrificing heroism they are at
heart united with all that is most glorious in the
kingdom of God. We should tell them that even
now all things are theirs, K only they will be faith
ful to their own loftiest instincts.
But alas! the churches do not usually thus
address the multitude by stirring appeals to
the divine fire which God has hidden in their
hearts. For the most part, orthodox divines
speak to the people in a kind of artificial and
unmanly voice. They are afraid of the natural
man and profoundly distrust him. They hardly
ever dare to leave their altars and their pulpits
and cast themselves confidently upon the instincts
of our race. They offer the multitude a rehgion
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The Plenteous Harvest
ill suited to its present condition. Their moral
and spiritual training school is an unaccommodat
ing bed of Procrustes, rather than the " many
mansions " of the Eternal Father's mind and heart.
And so simple people, such as labourers, miners,
soldiers, and sailors are estranged from rehgion,
and fail to learn that in very deed the kingdom of
God is even now hidden in their souls.
A striking instance of the spiritual unwisdom
of conventional preachers has been given to us by
a well-known correspondent of a newspaper during
a recent war. He told us that, on one occasion,
a chaplain was called upon to conduct a religious
service for some thousands of soldiers on the eve
of an expected battle. We are told that all was
peaceful and quiet, and that the faces of the men
plainly showed that they were solemnised by the
dangerous circumstances in which they found
themselves, and very willing to join in prayer and
to listen carefully to wise and sympathetic advice.
But, alas ! we are told that the minister was not
equal to the occasion. He began to preaeh about
the walls of Jericho falling down in the days of
old. The spirit of antiquarianism stifled the
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The Plenteous Harvest
spirit of sympathy. The soldiers looked for a
Son of Man to address them, and there was given
to them a dry-as-dust instead. The church
simply hid from their longing eyes the " Eternal
Father strong to save." And so we are told
that the men's faces were changed through dis
appointment, and that they entirely ceased to
hsten. And yet surely that was an occasion that might
have produced glorious results. Then, K ever,
a sympathetic observer might have exclaimed,
" Should not the shepherds feed the flock? " A
really human preacher, with some vividness of
imagination and some real tenderness of far-
ranging pity, might have done a divine work.
He would first have projected himseK into the
hearts and souls of his hearers, and then have
wisely ministered to their wants, speaking to
them in the depths of their own spirits. He
would have sought to banish fear, sorrow, and
regret, and to strengthen calm resolution. Know
ing at once the affections and the anxieties of
soldiers, he would have addressed himseK freely
to these. He would have discerned that in some
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The Plenteous Harvest
young hearts the sorest grief was the prospect
of being wrenched away by death from all whom
they loved on earth. To these he might have
given peace by reminding them that human love
does not cease at death, that their parents and
their friends would never forget them, but would
love them more for their heroic deaths than they
had ever loved them before, and that there is
another world in which souls that have really
loved each other shall meet again. A true
preacher might also have comforted many soldiers
by assuring them that, K they fell, they would be
for ever numbered in the ranks of the world's
best heroes who died for the sake of duty and
fidelity, that in God's large world beyond the
grave they would be gladdened with the company
of the brave of many nations and diverse tongues,
be reckoned with the heroes of ancient Greece and
Rome and with their own kinsmen who died
willingly for England in earher wars.
A wise preacher would also have addressed him
seK to the secret anxieties gnawing at the hearts
of his young hearers. He would have reminded
them that death is common to all men, that we
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The Plenteous Harvest
must all die some time, and that quick and sudden
death is in many ways to be preferred to death
after a long illness. He would also have tried to
remove religious fears from their hearts. He
might have reminded sinners that now they had
a rare opportunity of redemption, that now was
their salvation nearer than when they first believed,
that God had showed them a quick and easy way
to heaven, that now they might rapidly cast off
the slough of evil habits and emerge into the fair
beauty of goodness. A real discerner of hearts
might have told the men that simple fidelity and
love are dearer to God than anything else in man,
that to those who love much very much is always
forgiven; that it never can be unsafe to follow
our own highest feehngs ; that God loves all men
better than they love themselves; that the
" friend of publicans and sinners," the Good
Shepherd himseK, will be our only judge hereafter;
that, even then, in that hour of solemn thought
and prayer, the great fontal heroism of God was
glorying in man's nascent heroism, and whispering
into the ears of every sin-stained faithful soldier's
soul those deep words of appreciating pity which
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The Plenteous Harvest
can never be wrenched away from us, " Be
thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a
crown of hfe." In some such way as this a deep-
souled preacher might have ministered to listening
Eiighsh soldiers. And thus he might have done
much. The calmness of an invincible persuasion
might then have been added to that dogged valour
which usually characterises English soldiers. And
the dying and the wounded might to some extent
have been consoled. The worst sinner could no
longer have thought that there was no one to care
for him. Death would, for many, have assumed
a gentler aspect; and the wounded might have
assuaged their burning fevers of pain with the
cooling and refreshing waters of Christ's im
measurable sympathy.
Sometimes it almost seems as K our narrower
church teachers were emissaries of antichrist
rather than ministers sent by Jesus. They too
often insist on giving the people, not what they
really want, but what orthodox divines consider
that they ought to want. The shepherds feed
themselves instead of feeding their flocks. They
give them ecclesiastical sawdust instead of the
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The Plenteous Harvest
nutritious bread of hfe. They want to sub
ordinate hving men to dead dogmas ; they appear
to think that man was made for sacraments, and
not sacraments for man.
Even the good work done by ordinary ecclesiastics
is often of a precarious and temporary kind.
They erect temples, not on the firm rocks of
abiding human instincts and well-reasoned truth,
but on the shKting sands of unreasoning dogmatism
and insecure ecclesiastical traditions. And thus,
in the long run, they imperil the cause of the best
morahty and religion. They make goodness
depend on docile ignorance ; and thus they make
it appear to many that enlightenment is fatal to
hohness, that we cannot at once freely develop
our intellects and serve the Lord our God. It is
always dangerous to give men bad reasons for
right conduct.
And so I think that we have much need to pray
that God would awaken the churches, that He
would send forth wise labourers into His plenteous
harvest, that the terrible waste of the finest moral
and spiritual materials may be stopped, that the
profound naturalness of true Christianity may be
o 217

The Plenteous Harvest
made^manifest to all, so that men shall perceive,
that to " come to themselves " is to come at once
into the presence of God, that to be adequately
human is to be at least incipiently divine. Then,
when God at length besets men behind and before,
when His benignant Fatherliness at once ir
radiates and cheers the commonest phases of
ordinary IKe and guides and guards our souls in
all their hours of perplexity, of sorrow, and of
aspiration; then at last the kingdom of God will
really be within us, and the temples of Jerusalem
and the mountains of Samaria may pass away.
" After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my
law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be
my people. And they shall teach no more every
man his brother, saying, k Know the Lord ' ; for
they shall all know me from the least of them
unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord; for I
will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember
their sin no more."

218

SOME THOUGHTS ON " THE
SCARLET LETTER"

SOME THOUGHTS ON "THE
SCARLET LETTER"
To most people the character of Hester Prynne
always seems far the most interesting of all in
this famous story. Her nature was marked
by considerable intellectual power and great
speculative boldness. In her person and ex
perience universal human nature seems to speak
to us far more than in those of any other character
in the book. And she is made the vehicle for con
veying to our minds most of Hawthorne's own
deepest and most original ideas as distinguished
from the thoughts of the current Puritanism which
pervade the whole drama. Nature fifts up her
voice in Hester Prynne and to some extent in the
child Pearl, and dimly reveals to us many facts
and truths wholly unknown to the conventional
world; whereas in the minister, Arthur Dimmes-
dale we see principally the unrelenting working
of moral law, not in itseK, but under the con-

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
ditions of an artificial and transient religious
consciousness. Hester's bold words sometimes,
in the language of Emerson,
" Shock our weak ears with a note
Breathed from the everlasting throat."
She looks forward rather than backward; her
mind is more full of suggestions for the guidance
of a race to come under happier circumstances
than of vain remorseful regrets concerning the
errors of past hfe with all its arbitrary and
cramping limitations. There was a good deal
of the prophetess in her spiritual composition.
This victim of Puritanical narrowness and un
wisdom reminds one to some extent of Faust.
Like him, she studied the supernatural and the
elemental. Her nature was large, and had in it
many chambers; and so it is in some respects
far more interesting than that of her partner in
sin, the morbidly sensitive, weak, and rather
monotonous Arthur Dimmesdale.
No doubt " The Scarlet Letter " is the product
of a profound and subtle genius, a work for all
time, abounding in various suggestive hints and
tempting openings into unexplored by-ways of
222

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter "
man's haunted and inexplicably mysterious being,
full of a deep sense of the way in which the soul
influences the body, as well as the body the soul.
In it we find a strange and perhaps unique blend
ing of rigid moral Puritanism, of keen ethical
insight, of deeply human antinomian compassion,
and of weird natural supematuralism, lit up with
the lurid fight of unknown magical forces, yet
sombre with the abiding gloom of an oppressive
and inwoven fatalism. The forest, in this great
story, inevitably recalls to our minds Faust's
varied excursions into the haunted region of
primal elemental forces, which, though for the
most part unrealised by man, yet hem in and
condition his weak and fragile fife on every side.
In these days of moral tolerance and moral
laxity it is difficult for us to sympathise very
greatly with Arthur Dimmesdale. His extreme
and corroding remorse cannot but appear to us
somewhat exaggerated and fantastic. But we
must remember, in order to do justice to Haw
thorne's story, that the minister's whole nature
was saturated with austere Puritanism, and at
the same time destitute of intellectual boldness.
223

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
The mind of the author himseK was also of the
extremely unworldly, recluse, spiritual, and saintly
type, even though it had obtained from pro
longed communion with Nature a kind of Pan
theistic breadth and enlargement. On rare occa
sions a spirit hke that of Goethe invades Haw
thorne's mind; but habitually it is governed by
an ethical severity not unlike that of Dr James
Martineau. In " The Scarlet Letter " one is
more frequently reminded of the moral gloom of
Cardinal Newman than of the optimistic moral
tolerance of Emerson. This great Puritan drama
naturally brings back to our thoughts the hard
teaching of Newman, that it would be better that
the whole world should perish together in ex-
tremest agony of suffering than that one single
soul should commit one venial sin of the very
mildest sort. To us such teaching seems grossly
exaggerated and unreal. For, together with a
keener sympathy with suffering, we have in this
age learnt that God often brings great and lasting
good out of transient evil. We have eaten of
the tree of knowledge, of which the innocent
inhabitants of Eden might not eat; and though
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
our moral nature has suffered in consequence,
our intellects are vastly expanded and invigorated.
In many ways Hester Prynne's views appear to
us more reasonable and more salutary than those
of anyone else in this book. The gloom which
enwrapped the soul of the penitent preacher seems
to us very like that which darkened the equally
sensitive spirit of the poet Cowper. For both
these weakened sufferers Calvinism was far too
drastic a medicine. These anaemic invalids of
the spiritual world would have been benefited
more by tonics than by bleeding. Hebraic
medicine only aggravated their diseases, whereas
Christian medicine might have cured them.
Hester Prynne says to the preacher, wisely enough,
though perhaps with a mistaken object, " What
hast thou to do with all these iron men and their
opinions? They have kept thy better part in
bondage too long already. Why shouldst thou
tarry so much as one other day in the torments
that have so gnawed into thy hfe, that have
made thee feeble to will and to do, that will
leave thee powerless even to repent? Up, and
away!" The psalmist spoke with deep wisdom
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
when he said- of the Creator, " There is forgive
ness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared."
The extreme severity of ordinary Old-Testament
moral sternness begets in sensitive souls an en
ervating despair and a hopeless apathy most un
favourable to the growth of true repentance.
Christ freely forgiving the woman who was a
sinner evoked a far more real, profound, and
salutary penitential sorrow than any ever yet
produced by harsh Puritanical threatenings.
I think also that Hester Prynne's truly Pauhne
advice, to " forget the things behind, and reach
forth unto the things before," was genuinely
wise. It cannot really be pleasing to God that
any of His creatures should be reduced to the
powerless condition of an ever-aching spiritual
nerve or of an incarnate trembling vacillation.
Arthur Dimmesdale's sin would certainly not have
appeared to Christ either fatal or unpardonable.
Nor do I beheve that the greatest of all moral
teachers would have agreed with Hawthorne in
holding that open confession to the Puritanical
world around him was an indispensable condition
for the preacher's restoration. Why should a
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
man confess to those who could not genuinely
understand him? Except for the sake of Hester,
there was no reason for confessing.
There is much that is untrue and exaggerated
in our author's setting forth of the real evils of
this sinner's almost enforced hypocrisy or unreality.
To a certain extent we are all unreal, K unreality
consists in passing in our neighbour's eyes for
what we are not. The world would be intolerable if
all souls were openly unveiled with all their latent
potentiahties of evil and all their festering spiritual
ulcerations. Arthur Dimmesdale never professed
to be a saint; and he was powerless to prevent
the misconceptions of his hearers as to his real con
dition. If he had gone on sinning wilfully, whilst
he was preaching so eloquently to others, then,
to a normal soul such a state of things might indeed
have been full of unreality and mockery. Then
these words of Hawthorne might in all probabihty
have been, in great measure, applicable to the
case : " It is the unspeakable misery of a hfe so
false as his, that it steals the pith and substance
out of whatever reahties there are around us, and
which were meant by heaven to be the spirit's
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
joy and nutriment. To tho untrue man the
whole universe is false — it is impalpable — it
shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he
himseK, so far as he shows himseK in a false light,
becomes a shadow, or indeed ceases to exist. The
only truth that continued to give Mr Dimmesdale
a real existence on this earth was the anguish in
his inmost soul and the undissembled expression
of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to
smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have
been no such man."
But, as things actually were, Hawthorne's
language is full of exaggeration. In the first
place, our reality does not depend on our success
in revealing ourselves adequately to others. We
are what we are, however much our moral features
may be altered or distorted in the mirror of our
neighbour's perceptive faculties. As Cardinal
Newman teaches, there are times when to each
human spirit there appear to be only two exist
ing' realities, God and the solitary soul itseK.
Surely the lonely Jacob wrestling with the
Almighty was not an unreality, but was full of
the most vivid and genuine vitality. To give
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
reality even to a precarious material world,
Bishop Berkeley did not consider that contact
with individual intelligences was necessary; con
tact with the one omnipresent divine intelligence
amply sufficed. At times we see all things in
God; and then, perhaps, are we least unreal. The
soul of the tormented preacher was in genuine
contact with the Creator. With Him it was on
perfectly natural terms, and so it experienced the
quickening thrills of highest hfe.
In the next place, it is very far from being a
fact that the sinful soul, whilst still vacillating as
to duty and rehgion, is always the most unreal.
It has been wisely said that great sinners, at least
when fully conscious of their real state, seldom
doubt concerning immortality, because the very
agony of the moral nature vivifies the soul and
preserves it from torpor, so that it cries for ever,
" I thirst, I thirst." The sinful Augustine, in
the wildest aberrations of his early life, was pre
eminently alive, almost overcharged with vitality.
Nor does sin-stained Robert Burns, with his
oscillations between penitence and debauchery,
seem to me in the least devoid of genuine reality.
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
To me it appears that unreality is the characteristic
of widely different natures. An unreal soul is
not a sinful soul at times grieved and abashed at
receiving undeserved praise from its fellow-men.
Rather, an unreal soul is a soul compacted of
frivolities, a flimsy and, shallow soul dealing only
with the rind of the universe, a soul with no genuine
internal fife, never nourished with the actual
truths of man, of Nature, or of God, a mere
simulacrum of humanity, a petrified bit of con
ventionalism, a veritable sharer of the dismal
fate of Lot's unfortunate wife, a living death, an
unmeaning nullity. Conventionalism often steals
away our reality far more effectually than sin does.
Nor can I admit that the preacher would have
become an unreality K he had forgiven himseK
and learnt to smile. We need not be always
irritating our abiding spiritual scars. The
Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins really
means something. And, as Hester Prynne points
out, the sorrowing preacher's present repentance
and elevated IKe were just as much a fact as the
one great sin of his past life. She says, " You
have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
left behind you in the days long past. Your
present fife is not less holy in very truth than it
seems in people's eyes. Is there no reality in the
penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good
works? And wherefore should it not bring you
peace? " Even then Arthur Dimmesdale was
trying to carry out Hawthorne's advice of miti
gated severity which we find near the close of
the book: "Be true! Be true! Show freely
to the world, K not your worst, yet some trait
whereby the worst may be inferred." It was not
his fault that his repeated declarations of his
own sinfulness were regarded as unreal by his
hearers. I think that a soul of a more heroic mould than
that of this Puritan preacher might have been
content to remain where he was for the sake of
others. The Spartan boys were not unreal when
they hid from others, under a cloak of Stoicism,
the keen pains inflicted by the savage animals
hidden in their breasts. And it may very well
be the case that the prolonged torments, caused
to some abnormal and afflicted souls by the un
ceasing gnawing of the foul vultures of uncon-
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
querable moral evil, are in many ways of real
efficacy for the redemption of others. Many
save others just because they cannot save them
selves. And silence, like that of the Spartan boys,
is to such sufferers an indispensable condition of
their usefulness. Much wisdom is sometimes
learnt by frequently descending into hell; but
ordinary people would refuse to receive such
wisdom K they knew its source. Many who have
done great good to their fellow-men have done it
by reason of their own hopeless internal discord.
Such men carry with them to their graves a moral
burden of darkness and of sinfulness which it
would in no sense have been wise, to disclose to
others. Are they unreal? Are they not often
true vicarious sufferers?
The whole history of man's varied moral
struggles throughout the ages bears witness to
the deep wisdom of St Paul's method of seeking
goodness by oblivion of the past, combined with
onward-looking hopeful aspiration. In the
Apostle's judgment, a foul past was no fatal
hindrance to a glorious future. After mentioning
some of the worst sins of which our nature is
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capable, Paul immediately exclaims concerning
those who had committed them: "But ye
are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are
justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus,
and by the spirit of our God." The great
apostle's method with sinners was the very
reverse of that employed by old Roger Chilling-
worth. The one was for the peace and strength
that come by seK-f orgiveness ; the other delighted
in keeping up the weakening sore of a hfe-long
remorse and despair of self. And, strange to
say, Hawthorne himseK appears to a certain
degree to sanction the harsh method of the
minister's terrible and unrelenting enemy. The
real futility of this method is shown in the fact
that the minister feels httle sorrow for his greatest
sin, his leaving Hester alone.
To me it seems that there is such a thing as
too great remorse for an erring past. As Emerson
remarks, " We must not harbour such discon
solate consciences," K we would be strong with
Nature's strength. Man would gain nothing
by looking back to the moral offences of his semi-
animal ancestors. The butterfly is not haunted
p 233

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
by grief for the low offences of the grovelling
grub. The doctrine of evolution, in explaining
sin, has modified remorse. To the seekers after
genuine goodness there is no entirely adequate
wisdom in the past. " Excelsior " is our animat
ing motto and motive. To flee far from the
" city of destruction," and not to sit moaning
just outside it, seems to us the wisest course.
Jean Valjean was wiser far than Arthur Dimmes
dale. He repented of his erring past, and then
forgave himseK, and went forth to a career of
noblest charity and beneficence. Beneficence
is the best healer of the wounds caused by remorse.
To "take up its bed and walk" on errands of
mercy and of pity is the best remedy for spiritual
hypochondria threatening to degenerate into
paralysis. " Appetite comes in eating." To
love much is the best way to make sure of being
forgiven much. The moral boldness of Victor
Hugo's glorious outcast is far more admirable
than the self-tormenting vacillation and morbid
scrupulosity of Hawthorne's preacher. Jean
Valjean does not reveal his past hfe, when to do so
is likely to hinder his future work of benevolence.
234

Thoughts on u The Scarlet Letter"
The too austere moral sense of a Hawthorne or
a James Martineau might, perhaps, sometimes
take upon itself the injurious functions of the
unforgiving Javert. The great outcast accepts
an office of trust and responsibihty. His solicitude
for others brings him the blessed balm of forget
fulness of seK and its evil past. He will not
permit conscience, with its stings, to make him a
coward, as it did to a great extent make Arthur
Dimmesdale. The preacher, with his attention
fixed almost exclusively on his own individual
woes — for he never seems much troubled about
Hester's moral state — finds no blessed redemp
tion through obhvion of the past. It is only he
who "loseth" his hfe that really "finds" it;
and the melancholy penitent never really " lost "
his. He ought to have learnt to " live in fives
made better by his presence."
As I have already hinted, even sin is sometimes
a valuable education. Poisons are turned into
tonics. " He drew his rents from rage and pain,"
might truly be said of many. Knowledge is
power. Through our own personal agony we
often learn important secrets, by whose agency,
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
we are enabled to heal the diseases of others.
Hawthorne discloses what might have been a real
consolation to the afflicted minister when he
writes concerning him: "But this very burden
it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with
the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his
heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received
their pain into itseK, and sent its own throb of
pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes
of sad, persuasive eloquence." A soul like that
of St Paul might assuredly have found great joy
in thus moving and saving others, even though
he himseK should remain " accursed from Christ."
Even though to " depart and to be with Christ "
might in some sense be " far better " — better for
his own individual weKare — nevertheless, in cir
cumstances like those of Arthur Dimmesdale, the
heroic apostle would probably have been quite
wilhng to " abide in the flesh " — to go on enduring
the keen agony of moral ignominy and failure —
K that had been " more needful " for his hearers
and disciples.
But it is plain enough that the soul of the
repentant minister was cast in a far different
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
mould from that of St Paul. His timidity led
him into deplorable meanness. Far worse than
his original offence, in my judgment, was his odious
moral cowardice in leaving Hester Prynne to bear
alone the terrible penalties of their sin. The
woman was far greater than the man. She refused
altogether to imphcate her fellow-sinner in her
crime and punishment. Well might the weak
and cowardly preacher exclaim of her : " Wondrous
strength and generosity of a woman's heart!
She will not speak! " We almost wonder how
Hester could care so much for such a poor creature
as the preacher.
The character of Hester Prynne had much
that was noble in it. She was anxious to
bear the punishment of her fellow-sinner as
well as her own. " Would that I might endure
his agony as well as mine! " Well might old
Roger Chilhngworth, her injured husband
and implacable enemy, declare concerning this
erring outcast : " Woman, I could well - nigh
pity thee! — Thou hadst great elements. Per
adventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better
love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
thee for the good that has been wasted in thy
nature." In portraying Hester Prynne our author for
the most part casts aside his moral Puritanism,
and reveals the deeply sympathetic, mystical, and
almost antinomian side of his nature. Very keen
is his perception of the undue harshness and
senseless futility of the Pharisaic method of dealing
with sinners. Again and again he declares that
the heart of the multitude with its instinctive
pity is a better judge of erring humanity than the
most learned Puritanism. Very unlovely were
the ways of the rehgious world as portrayed by
this our great " master in Israel."
At first Hester's moral isolation seemed com
plete. " In all her intercourse with society,
however, there was nothing that made her feel
as K she belonged to it. Every gesture, every
word, and even the silence of those with whom
she came in contact, implied, and often expressed,
that she was banished, and as much alone as K
she inhabited another sphere, or communicated
with the common nature by other organs and
senses than the rest of human kind. It was not
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
an age of dehcaoy; and her position, although
she understood it well, and was in little danger
of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid
seK-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest
touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we
have already said, whom she sought out to be the
objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that
was stretched forth to succour them. Dames of
elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered
in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to
distil drops of bitterness into her heart; some
times through that alchemy of quiet mahce, by
which women can concoct a subtile poison from
ordinary trifles; and sometimes also by a coarser
expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless
breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated
wound." Religion also, in flat defiance of the
teaching of its noblest exponent, added greatly
to the woes of this sorrowing woman. " Con
tinually, and in a thousand other ways, did she
feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had
been so cunningly contrived for her by the
undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan
tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street to
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
address words of exhortation, that brought a
crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around
the poor sinful woman. If she entered a church,
trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Uni
versal Father, it was often her mishap to find her
seK the text of the discourse."
Nor did Hester at this period find much real
consolation in her child Pearl. This infant
almost seemed at times as though it were a gift
from an enemy. " Gazing at Pearl, Hester
Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,
and cried out with an agony which she would fain
have hidden, but which made utterance for itseK
betwixt speech and a groan — ' 0 Father in heaven,
K Thou art still my Father, what is this being
which I have brought into the world? ' " Thus
forsaken apparently both by God and man, it is
no wonder that this suffering woman's nature
lost many of its graces and beauties, so that
Hawthorne relates that " the effect of the symbol,
or rather of the position, in respect to society, that
was indicated by it, on the mind of Hester Prynne
herseK, was powerful and peculiar. All the hght
and graceful foliage of her character had been
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long
ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline,
which might have been repulsive, had she possessed
friends or companions to be repelled by it."
Perhaps we scarcely any of us realise how much
the mellowness, beauty, and sweetness of human
dispositions are dependent on the sunshine of free,
happy, and varied intercourse with our fellows.
Perhaps misanthropy is in many cases only a
sort of distorted love, a kind of petrified tenderness.
Hester Prynne was only saved from misanthropy
by directing all her energies to practical beneficence
and profound thought. She might not share the
joys of her race, but she might share and mitigate
its sorrows. Her position fitted rather than
disqualified her for the work that she undertook
to do. " None so seK-devoted as Hester when
pestilence stalked through the town. In all
seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of
individuals, the outcast of society at once found
her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a
rightful inmate, into the household that was
darkened by trouble; as K its gloomy twilight
were a medium in wliich she was entitled to hold
241

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
intercourse with her fellow-creatures. There
glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort
in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin,
it was the taper of the sick chamber. It had even
thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity,
across the verge of time. It had shown him where
to set his foot, while the fight of earth was fast
becoming dim, and ere the hght of futurity could
reach him. In such emergencies Hester's nature
showed itseK warm and rich, a well-spring of
human tenderness, unf aihng to every real demand,
and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast,
with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow
for the head that needed one. She was seK-
ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather
say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her,
when neither the world nor she looked forward
to this result."
The people perceived Hester's noble quahties
and were practically reconciled with her long
before the religious world ceased to frown sternly
on her. As Hawthorne remarks: "The rulers,
and the wise and learned men of the community,
were longer in acknowledging the influence of
242

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
Hester's good quahties than the people." Haw
thorne evidently hated the conventional religious
world. But Hester Prynne's life always remained
essentially a solitary one. " Her life had turned,
in a great measure, from passion and feehng to
thought." And so her intellect was greatly
expanded. " Standing alone in the world — alone
as to any dependence on society, and with httle
Pearl to be guided and protected — alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she
not scorned to consider it desirable, she cast away
the fragments of a broken chain. The world's
law was no law for her mind. . . . She assumed a
freedom of speculation, then common enough on
the other side of the Atlantic, but which our
forefathers, had they known it, would have held
to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by
the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage by
the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared
to enter no other dwelhng in New England, shadowy
guests that would have been as perilous as demons
to their entertainer, could they have been seen
so much as knocking at her door." " She had
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral
wilderness, as vast, as intricate and shadowy,
as the untamed forest. . . . Her intellect and heart
had their home, as it were, in desert places, where
she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his
woods. . . . The scarlet letter was her passport
into regions where other women dared not tread."
She was forced to interrogate the whole realm of
morals. In fact, this outcast woman, hke so many other
sufferers in other ages, had been down into the
deeps. She had found ordinary morality and
religion powerless to help her there, and had
sought vainly for better guidance. To her, as to
sorrowing Job, fife did not seem worth fiving.
Neither the heavens nor the earth seemed adequate
to producing or sustaining real justice; and her
questioning spiritual eyes could but gaze with
vague, wistful yearning on the first faint streaks
of a struggfing dawn in which it might please
God to reveal a new heaven and a new earth.
Idealism was her only solace.
Very perilous and very pathetic is such a
spiritual and moral state. To lose our provisional
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
ethics before we have learnt the eternal ethics of
the universe, to put away the " childish things "
of conventional rehgion before we have grasped
the abiding truths of rational religion, to be on
earth prematurely " unclothed " as regards moral
principles, must always be attended with much
perplexity and many practical disadvantages.
Hester saw plainly that the human soul was
indeed naked; but as yet she could not find even
transient " fig-leaves " with which to make
temporary " aprons." Hawthorne very wisely
intimates that profound experience of the workings
of sin in our own hearts often makes us keen-eyed
to dive down beneath the surface of respectabihty
and discern the old mystery of iniquity in the
hearts of others: " She felt or fancied, then, that
the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new
sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not
help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts." A
sword pierced her own soul, and, in piercing it,
revealed the thoughts of many hearts.
This suffering sinner exhibits a boldness of
speculation in the region of morals with which
245

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
our author himseK was only partially and occa
sionally in sympathy. Even when, with master
hand, the piercing moral insight of Hawthorne is
tracing the sad progress of this intrepid spiritual
pioneer as she walks through the very " valley
of the shadow of death," even then his more
superficial Puritan religiousness is lying in wait,
ready to " improve the occasion " by a few Tupper-
like sentences of commonplace reproof, even as
the Greek chorus was wont to utter high-sounding
platitudes as it looked with a feehng of complacent
superiority on the wild, lawless struggles of baffled
heroism. After noticing Hester Prynne's sin-
bought power of penetrating into the evil recesses
of apparently respectable people, Hawthorne
bows himseK in the house of Rimmon, or throws
a sop to outraged conventionalism, by the following
exclamation: " 0 fiend, whose talisman was that
fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether
in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?
Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results
of sin." If man will eat of the tree of knowledge,
he must take the consequences. To the most
piercing vision of all, our human nature must of
246

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
necessity at times appear full of hopeless moral
squalor and paltriness, its virtues being scarcely
distinguishable from its vices. And so the deep
despairing spirit of the Hebrew prophet often
cries with bitterest truth, " All our righteousnesses
are as filthy rags."
Hester Prynne's ethical emancipation and
perilous boldness culminate in the memorable
interview with the timid preacher in the forest.
There the heart speaks untrammelled by the
fetters either of law or of practical expediency;
for in the forest the heart was in its own native
land, and might reveal its very depths without
fear of being stoned. And so the heart does reveal
them, and discloses to our eyes the old terrible
discord between instinct and reason, between
emotion and law, between heroism and ordinary
goodness, between the profoundly human and
the superficially divine. Very startfing, yet full
of deep suggestive significance are those words of
the outcast woman to the partner of her sin:
" What we did had a consecration of its own. We
felt it so. We said so to each other."
Until morality and rehgion have learnt to reveal
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Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
to deep-souled sinners some more excellent way
than that of their present lawlessness; until
didactic wisdom has learnt how to direct and
guide passionate natures without chilling their
divine fire, or diminishing their emotional richness,
perhaps they had better refrain from pronouncing
sentence on those strange paradoxical wanderers,
whose real home might be either heaven or hell,
but could never be the well-ordered decency of
bourgeois respectability. I think that Hawthorne
might well have allowed Hester to be buried in
the same grave with the man for whose sake she
had nobly endured so much. In the eternal
world we are told that " they neither marry, nor
are given in marriage "; but we are also told that
" they are as the angels of God," that is, the out
ward forms of human affection have passed away,
but the affection itseK is enhanced a thousands
fold. How should it be otherwise, seeing that the
angels are ever in the nearer presence of the great
primal heart of the universe whose chosen name
is Love? If our author only means that it was
the prevailing Puritanism which decreed that the
" dust of these two sleepers had no right to
248

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
mingle," no doubt he is historically correct, but
I fear that he may have been expressing his own
fastidious ethical judgment in this matter.
In fact this whole book is full of deep inherent
antagonisms. It is a kind of dim setting forth
of the eternal war between law in its many aspects
on the one side and the strugghng human affections
on the other side. Hawthorne's intellect is chiefly
with the law, but his heart is with the human
affections. This is plain where he intimates his
opinion that the minister's mother might even
in heaven have sympathised with her sinful son.
The dead seem to visit the tormented preacher:
" Now came the dead friends of his youth, and
his white-bearded father, and his mother, turning
her face away, as she passed by. Ghost of a
mother, thinnest fantasy of a mother, methinks
she might yet have thrown a pitying glance to
wards her son! "
Speaking through the person of Hester Prynne,
Hawthorne faintly suggests the coming of some
higher phase of hfe on earth, wherein the affections
shall become ministering angels, and not seducers
to evil. This great writer was essentially a seer;
Q 249

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
and his dim vision was of a more satisfactory fife
for man, wherein fate shall be reconciled with
freedom, wherein deeper laws shall supersede;
the more superficial laws, where Hebraism and
Hellenism shall work together, where the world's
outcasts shall be turned into heroic leaders and
successful pioneers, where many a Hester Prynne
shall become a prophetess, where the perplexing
waste of the noblest moral materials shall cease
to grieve us. Beyond the regions of our present
" dimness of captivity," Hawthorne almost saw
a great kingdom of hght, where the discords of
the universe shall at length be turned into harmony,
where reason shall not " envy " instinct, and
instinct shall not " vex " reason, where all local
temples shall have passed away, where the throb
bing heart of Nature (stored with such tantalising
treasures of conflicting wisdom) shall at last be
brought into unison with order and religion, and
the forests shall gleam for ever with a " hght
that never was on sea or land " — the strange
commingling rays of reconciled opposites; where
the mountains shall bring peace to the people;
where the Subhme shall at last assume a friendly
250

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
aspect to human life, swallowing up death in
victory, swallowing up failure in success, swallow
ing up the conventional in the original, swallowing
up rules in spontaneity, cancelling much of our
poor hoarded moral wisdom, and guiding our
wondering spirits with the bold, revolutionary,
yet well-authorised declaration: "Verily, verily,
I say unto you, except a man be born again he
cannot see the kingdom of God."
"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for
the first heaven and the first earth were passed
away." " And the city had no need of the sun,
neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory
of God did hghten it, and the Lamb is the hght
thereof." Hawthorne saw plainly that there is much that is
merely provisional both in morahty and in religion
as we have them at present. Earthly failures
may be heavenly successes. Some of the highest
natures are fundamentally unsuited to their
present environment. They are " born out of due
season." They are on earth forced to be sinners,
though in many ways intended to be saints. They
live as foreigners in our present conventionahsm.
251

Thoughts on "The Scarlet Letter"
But their time wiU come eventuaUy. We are
slowly moving on towards a more rational religion
and morafity. Meanwhile, our wisdom is to
recognise clearly the provisional nature of our
present ethical and spiritual knowledge. AU
our present religions are but symbols. AU our
present moralities are but as narrow and fragUe
stairs sloping through unmeasured regions of
darkness up to far-off unknown heights of genuine
perfection. It is indeed little that we know about
the grand unchanging morahty of the " city of
God." If we worship even useful symbols too
much, K we ascribe anything like absoluteness
o* exhaustive accuracy to our present ethical
standards, we are in danger of becoming idolaters ;
for aU our knowledge is relative ; the ways of the
Eternal are not our ways, nor are His thoughts
our thoughts.

THE END

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