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 The gospel and human needs :being the Hu 
 
 3 1924 009 503 495 
 
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THE 
 GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 The Fellowship of the Mystery : being the Pad- 
 dock Lectures, 1913. Crown 8vo, 5s. net. 
 
 Religion and English Society. Two Addresses. 
 8vo, 2S. net ; paper covers, is. net. 
 
 Civilisation at the Cross Roads. Four lectures 
 delivered on the William Belden Noble Founda- 
 tion before Harvard University in the year 1 91 1 , 
 Crown 8vo, 55. net. 
 
 Churches in the Modern State. Crown 8vo, 
 4s. 6d. net. 
 
 Antichrist and Other Sermons. Crown 8vo, 
 5s. net. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. 
 
THE GOSPEL 
 AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 1908-9 
 
 WITH ADDITIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, Lrrr.D. 
 
 OF THE COMkUNITT OF THE KESUSBEOTION 
 HONORABT FELLOW OF S. OAIHASIHE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 SEVENTH IMPRESSION 
 
 LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 FOUBTH AVBNtTB & 30th STBBBT, NEW YORK 
 BOUBAZ, OALOVriA, AKB UADBAa 
 
 1917 
 
 All rights i*((rT«d 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 First printed, March 1909. 
 Reprinted, July igog, Octoler 1900, 
 
 December 1909, March 1910, 
 
 and July 1911. 
 New Introduction added, April 1912. 
 Reprinted, April 191 7. 
 
FRATRIBVS 
 IN . DOMO . RESVRRECTIONIS • DOMINI 
 
 DEGENTIBVS 
 
 HAS • PRIMITIAS • VOCATIONIS • SVAE 
 
 HVMILLIME 
 
 DEDICAT 
 
 SOCIVS . NVPER . RECEPTVS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Not long since a friend said to me that miracles 
 which had once been a support to faith were now 
 a stumbling-block. I made the reply that that 
 stage was at an end, and that once more they 
 were becoming a help, were indeed of the essence of 
 revelation. The following lectures are an attempt 
 to explicate that dictum. For I began to see 
 that it is precisely that characteristic of miracles 
 which makes them so sore a difficulty to minds 
 with the bias of " naturalism," which endears them 
 to men and women who are concerned rather with 
 life than theories about life. Moreover, it became 
 clear to me that what is true of the miraculous is 
 no less true of other elements in the faith, of its 
 mysteries to the intellect, of its sacraments, material 
 yet suprarational, of its emphasis on concrete facts, 
 of its good tidings to the sinner. And so in these 
 four lectures I have tried to set forth a little of 
 that distinction and romance, that extra-ordinari- 
 
Vlll PREFACE 
 
 ness of this "given" revelation, which at this 
 moment men need especially to recognise. 
 
 To some this intransigeance of tone will be re- 
 pellent. Nor do I deny the uses of more conciliatory 
 methods any more than I would question the worth 
 of the doctrines of Divine Immanence and Reason, 
 of which lately we have heard not a little. Only at 
 this moment it seems to me that we do not need 
 any more to emphasise these things. 
 
 The accent ought to be not on the likeness, but 
 on the difference of Christianity from its rivals, 
 whether philosophic or ethical or religious. After 
 all, we are Christians not because our faith resembles 
 that of other men, but because it does not. We 
 shall but confuse our minds if we harp on the 
 superficial resemblances, real though they may be. 
 If the differences were not important it were wiser 
 to combine with the great mass of the religious- 
 minded, and sink or minimise all the strangeness, 
 the imique charm of the Gospel, the things that are 
 at once its appeal and its shame. 
 
 For it is just that strangeness, that conquering 
 charm, which men are feeling just now, and for 
 whose lack they are crying out from other refuges 
 — culture, philosophy, fancy-religions, or what not. 
 
PEEFACE IX 
 
 As I conceive it, the human spirit, in its etern al ) 
 Grail-guest, ^as entered on a new path. It has ; 
 turned from the middle-aged prose of the nineteenth 
 century once more to the poetry of the child. y 
 
 From the selva oscura of mechanical systems, 
 materialist or intellectual, it is willing to be led 
 once more as a Pilgrim even from the tortures of 
 the Inferno up the mountain of purification till it 
 sees once more the rose of glory and the dance of 
 saints. On all sides comes forth the cry for life, 
 newness, joy, romance; on all hands we have the 
 evidence that men are bored with the loud-voiced 
 assurances of scientific iconoclasm, and find it very 
 fatiguing to breathe the rarified air of idealist 
 philosophers with their merely provisional use for 
 religion. That siren-song which charmed men a 
 generation back, as it allured them to peace and 
 rest of spirit in scientific inquiry or idealist systems 
 of benevolence, has changed for us its note ; and it 
 soimds to our ears only as the dirge of the nine- 
 teenth century, with its prosaic and complacent 
 heterodoxy, or its thin and weary intellectualism. 
 
 Alike in our ears and in that of our adversaries 
 there rings the call of a new world, the thrill of a 
 real joy and pain. It is because the newness is most 
 
X PEEFACE 
 
 new, the joy and the pain most real and actual in the 
 light that shone once over Bethlehem and yet shines 
 in men's hearts, that I have -written as I have. 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of the most impressive of 
 his many helpful and impressive utterances, made 
 Undershaft declare that we have had enough of 
 shams, and must at last demand a religion that Jits 
 the facts, I agree. It is because Christianity fits 
 the facts, and helps us to live as real beings in 
 a real world, and not as the puppets of fate 
 or even as the dreamers of an earthly Paradise, 
 that it will outlast all the systems of criticism, 
 philosophy, or morals, which arise one after another, 
 plausible and dazzling in one decade, and disappear 
 in the next, futUe as " snows of yesteryear." 
 
 I do not write this for want of feeling the force 
 of opposite views. There is hardly a difficulty here 
 touched which has not at times threatened to over- 
 whelm the writer ; indeed they do still. Any lack 
 of sympathy which the hostile may discern is to be 
 attributed to the enemy being" felt within no less 
 than without. In respect of one point, much dis- 
 cussed of late, a personal experience is better than 
 a volume of argument. Difficult as may be the 
 belief in the miraculous birth of our Lord, and 
 
PREFACE XI 
 
 plausible as are the attacks upon it, I have found 
 as a fact, that if we attempt to live with that 
 doctrine cut off from the faith, it is all up with 
 Christianity. For the birth does not fall alone; 
 it carries with it the whole supernatural structure, 
 and in the long run, if one allows the tendencies 
 their full force, will leave one face to face with an 
 evolutionary pantheism, which, as Disraeli once dis- 
 cerned, is but atheism in domino. It takes a long 
 time to see what is the e£fect of certain principles 
 when logically carried out; and many of us never 
 do see it. When one does see it, one learns the 
 danger of dealing piecemeal with the great fact of 
 Christianity, and perhaps in time we may learn 
 how this very miracle, so " otiose " as some think it, 
 bears with it some assurance of the breadth and 
 mystery of being. 
 
 In reference to certain criticisms of the second 
 lecture, I would say that we shall use our minds 
 to most purpose when we realise our limits, and 
 that I nowhere even hinted that we ought not 
 to use them. To those who wish to trust the 
 intellect, I would say by all means trust it abso- 
 lutely; on no accoimt confuse yourself with any 
 assumptions drawn from act or emotion; be as 
 
XU PREFACE 
 
 honestly ascetic in your intellectualism as you 
 claim to be; don't be afraid, as most men are, of 
 being too severe. And then its impotence will 
 soon reveal itself, and you will be driven, if not 
 to Christianity, at least to some form of that pure 
 agnosticism which Romanes found the best prepara- 
 tion therefor ; or else its final result will be manifest 
 in some sceptical pessimism, from which, not the 
 intellect revolving on its own axis, but life with its 
 reahties of choice and love, will alone recall you. 
 
 I am grateful to the Rev. E. K. Talbot for his 
 kind help in revising the proof sheets. 
 
 Also, I cannot close this preface without thank- 
 ing all those known and unknown to me, whether 
 in Cambridge or here or in many other places, 
 who prayed about these lectures and for the man 
 who spoke them. 
 
 The additional sermons and appendix may serve 
 to illustrate points in the lectures. They are reprinted, 
 by kind permission of the proprietors, from " The 
 Guardian " and " The Chv/rch Times." 
 
 House op the Resurrkotion, 
 
 MiRFIELD. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO POPULAR EDITION 1 
 
 In this new edition of the Gospel and Human 
 Needs the text is left unchanged. This is not 
 because I think it perfect, or would say every- 
 thing in precisely the same way, after so long an 
 interval. The first person to whom any book 
 becomes obsolete is the writer of it. But it is 
 better to leave the book as it is, interpreted by 
 others, than to destroy its harmony by attempt- 
 ing to reconsider every passage, or to disarm 
 criticism by qualifications. Besides, it expresses, 
 on the whole, what I meant and mean. It has 
 been alleged that it exaggerates one aspect. 
 Doubtless. All utterance is exaggeration. One 
 cannot say everything at once. So I prefer to 
 leave the book as it is, rather than to risk by 
 interference with it, losing whatever service it 
 may be to those who foimd it a help to turn 
 from the theories of the study to the free air 
 of life both natural and supernatural. 
 
 '■ Fablisbed in March 1912. 
 ziU 
 
XIV INTKODUCTION TO POPULAE EDITION 
 
 (1) For that is the import of these lectures — to 
 express the idea of freedom and to assert that once 
 it be accepted it may carry you farther than you 
 anticipated. Freedom to me is the fundamental 
 fact of life and also the final and fatal foe of all 
 rationalism. Moreover, as I tried to show, the 
 objection to miracles is at bottom a disbelief in 
 freedom. As Mr. Chesterton well put it in a 
 volume worth more than any dozen ordinary 
 apologetic works: "No man who believes in an 
 unalterable system of natural law can believe in 
 any miracle in any age. Any one who believes 
 in a will behind nature can believe in any miracle 
 in any age." The fashionable disbelief in miracles 
 (I never denied that it was fashionable) is always 
 based on a preconception and never on the 
 evidence. I owe to a correspondence which I 
 had some years ago with Dr. Foakes-Jackson the 
 first realisation, that the current criticism of the 
 New Testament was for the most part directed by 
 the presupposition (very largely unconscious) that 
 our Lord is not in any real sense Divine. I desire 
 here to express my indebtedness to his " Hulsean 
 Lectures," and to the thoughts aroused by that 
 correspondence. Of course every one knew this 
 was the case with Strauss and Baur ; but that 
 was the poiQt at which there flashed on me the 
 knowledge that it was so with many others, who 
 
INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XV 
 
 Bometimes are unaware of the fact. Creighton 
 ■well said somewhere that the presuppositions of 
 the critical mind need examining no less than those 
 of the orthodox. In obedience to this feeling the 
 evidence is manipulated in such a way that the 
 supernatural elements ultimately disappear. But 
 if we hold to the view that this world is but a 
 part ; that it is very probably surrounded by worlds 
 of spirits, at least as free as ourselves, possessed 
 of wider knowledge and greater power, then the 
 occurrence of miracles so far from being surprising 
 is only natural. Thus the objection to miracles 
 rests on two presuppositions neither of them well 
 founded : (1) that there can be no freedom ; no 
 newness; no real events in the course of develop- 
 ment. This view is equally opposed by any view 
 of human action, which allows of freedom and is 
 further at variance with any doctrine of creative 
 as distinct from mechanical evolution ; (2) that this 
 world is all ; or at least that we know enough of 
 that beyond to deny that it contains free and 
 active spiritual beings. 
 
 It is in this view that I recommend in the text a 
 course which has been misunderstood, that people 
 should have the " courage of their doubts." If 
 they will criticise their doubts and see what they 
 logically involve, they will discern that they carry 
 consequences which in most instances would be 
 
 b 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 repudiated. Take, for instance, this haunting 
 suspicion that " miracles do not happen." See 
 whether it does not drive you also to give up 
 that faith in human freedom which is the pre- 
 supposition of all purposeful activity and of every 
 moral value ; see whether the more thoroughgoing 
 of the rejectors of miracles have not taken this 
 further step. Ask yourself, whether you are pre- 
 pared to go thus far. If, as is very probably the 
 case, you are not, you ought to be willing to take 
 the other horn of the dilemma, and admit the 
 likelihood of miracles. Once this be admitted in 
 reality (and not merely in words) you will find that 
 the historical evidence that they have happened 
 and do happen is overwhelming. People com- 
 plain of an uncritical faith; I was complaining of 
 an uncriticised doubt. 
 
 Certainly I never intended to imply (although 
 the contrary has been urged) that any one who 
 has doubts or difficulties ought to surrender at 
 discretion and give up the practice of the 
 Christian life. I would far rather they took 
 the course suggested by the Head Master of 
 Repton in his Cambridge University Sermon, and 
 " hang on by their eyelids," so long as the worship 
 means anything at all to them. What I did mean, 
 is that most of the presuppositions, which make 
 "reduced Christianity" so plausible, involve a 
 
INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XVll 
 
 much farther advance in the negative direction 
 than its more light-hearted adherents are apt to 
 suppose; that, in fact, if strictly developed they 
 drive right on to Pantheism, if not naturalism, 
 and that those who are not prepared to adopt 
 the latter hypothesis ought on seeing this fact to 
 return to the full beauty of Evangelical Catholicism. 
 (2) This I endeavoured to treat throughout as a 
 distinct thing. However much it may have gar- 
 nered from other sources, or however closely in this 
 or that point it may resemble other philosophic or 
 ethical systems, the Christian religion is after all 
 itself and not something else; a unique life. I 
 thought and think that under the perplexities of 
 the last generation, and through the laudable wish 
 to be sympathetic to some who could not go the 
 whole way, our oflBeial apologetic had rather tended 
 to ignore or at least to disguise this truth. Such 
 a tendency was natural in the general resolve of 
 "spiritualists" to hold their own against the on- 
 rushing naturalism of the '70's and '80's. But its 
 work has been done. Assimilation has gone far 
 enough. We have passed out of the Alexandrian 
 age. Our real adversary now is Nietzsche with his 
 congeners. That orthodox idealism which seemed 
 at one time so helpful, has not developed so favour- 
 ably to the religion of redemption as at one time 
 was hoped ; while M, Bergson has triumphantly 
 
Xviii INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 illuminated the inwardness of intellectualism and 
 shown how all rationalism relates to a world con- 
 ceived mechanically. To me, in my humble way 
 reflecting on these things for long, and greatly 
 worried, it seemed time to make a change ; to 
 develop once more the distinctive challenge of 
 faith; and to disentangle our apologetics from 
 methods and sympathies that were fast becoming 
 obsolete. That this attempt was rash I do not 
 deny; or that many people could have done it 
 far better. But I was there to do what I could; 
 and no one can be any one else but himself. 
 
 It appeared to me, that what the late Professor 
 William James termed " the offensive and defensive 
 alliance that has been struck between certain groups 
 of clergy and idealist monism," while it had done 
 good in guarding against sheer naturalism, was now 
 working evil by enchaining men's minds to notions 
 of continuity and necessary development, which 
 made the unique fact of Christianity incredible, and 
 were hostile to freedom and personality ; and indeed 
 to the newness of a living world. Thus when one 
 critic (I think it was a writer in the Adelaide 
 Church Guardian) took me to task for betraying 
 lack of knowledge of the work of T. H. Green and 
 his disciples, I most readily confess, here and 
 throughout the book, that such knowledge as I 
 possess is lamentably meagre, but I did and do 
 
INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XIX 
 
 mean, that of set purpose I was resisting that school 
 (of whose existence he deemed me unaware), not 
 because it was altogether unfruitful, but because I 
 thought that its work for good had been done. 
 
 Further, it has been a matter of blame, that the 
 tone of these lectures was obsolete ; that I made 
 use of the vulgar term " infidel " to denote those 
 who do not hold the Christian Faith; and that I 
 showed too little sympathy with "patient doubt." 
 Precisely. I meant to be aggressive ; to change that 
 tone too often found in certain apologetic writing, 
 which reminds one only of Uriah Heep, and is mis- 
 understood outside the academic world. It has 
 been recently declared at a Church congress, that 
 for the last thirty years apologetics had been dreary, 
 I do not feel dreary ; and I see no reason to write 
 as if I did. The troops need heartening. If it be 
 indeed the case that we Christians hold " the pearl 
 of great price," and have intimacy with the " Life 
 that is the light of men," and if on the other hand 
 (if I may venture to quote that gospel which one 
 critic pronounces historically and intellectually (!) 
 inadequate) the world is " convinced of sin 
 because it believed not on Him"; then why 
 should we write in hesitating and balanced phrases, 
 implying that on the whole we think it just not 
 impossible to maintain our loyalty to a Lord who 
 died and lives again ? Why should we pretend — 
 
XX INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 we who have the fire from heaven — that we are 
 only just a little different from those who say it 
 does not exist, or that they are really Christians 
 and at hottom agree with us, although they dis- 
 believe every one of our distinctive doctrines and 
 scorn a large part of Christian practice ? 
 
 In using the term " infidel " I used it because it 
 denotes that which I intended to denote — one who 
 does not believe the Christian Faith. Agnostic is 
 too narrow; for not all are agnostics. What are 
 we to call them, if we may not call them infidels ? 
 Where is the hardship or discourtesy of it ? Are we 
 to call them Christians ? They would feel insulted, 
 I am proud to number among my friends many 
 who are unbelievers (I have one here as I write), I 
 know that they do not mind my calling them what 
 they are. What they would mind would be, if I 
 called them Christians and pretended we were agreed. 
 The same is my answer to those who complain 
 that too little allowance is made for the " patient 
 doubt '' unavoidable to many. I said little partly 
 because I felt much, partly because it did not seem 
 to me a good time to say it. But I am not able to 
 believe that any who have known the writer for any 
 number of years could say that a lack of sympathy 
 for the agnostic or the Nietzschean is one of his 
 more obvious qualities. Rather he would be blamed 
 for too much. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XXI 
 
 (3) Finally, it is necessary to say that this work 
 is not a treatise on apologetics. Praise and blame 
 have alike been awarded on grounds to which it 
 has no claim. All I attempted to do was to show 
 that on certain points — freedom, mystery, concrete 
 particularity, undeserved grace — the current objec- 
 tions to orthodox Christianity were no objections at 
 all, that to minds really religious, who felt the 
 pressure of life and not mere theory, they were the 
 elements of attraction, and that to throw them over 
 in panic at the fashionable culture was to court 
 disaster. In the wise words of Dr. Porcher Du 
 Bose in his latest work, " The Eeason of Life " : 
 "The least fact of an actual experience is proof 
 against the strongest conclusion of mere specula- 
 tion; and there is no argument against the 
 essential fact or facts of religion that is not 
 speculative." I tried to remove difficulties which 
 prevent the evidence producing its proper weight ; 
 I did not except incidentally discuss the evidence. 
 Certainly I did not say or imply that it might 
 not be discussed, and in one or two points I 
 mentioned cases in which modem criticism may 
 be held to have proved (so far as proof is pos- 
 sible) inadmissible the older and more literalist 
 interpretation. 
 
 It is this appeal to experience, which I intended 
 by that reference to the plain man whom it is 
 
XXU INTKODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 alleged I consider unduly to the neglect of persons 
 of culture. My point is that whatever its diflB- 
 culties, the Gospel is congruous with life as it is 
 really lived; by the child, the youth, the soldier, 
 the peasant — and all who struggle and sin. Com- 
 pared with this the mere speculations of a certain 
 small class devoted to theory, and a larger class 
 who make use of their theories as a luxury, are of 
 but little weight. One writer has described the 
 trimmings needful, if belief is to be made palat- 
 able to ordinary men, by which he apparently 
 means the more fortunate members of the upper- 
 middle classes. Now this mental habit is largely 
 the result of certain highly artificial economic condi- 
 tions; and there is no more reason to make the 
 " man you meet at the Club " a criterion of truth, 
 than there would be to have made the courtiers of 
 Versailles the judges of political philosophy. In 
 the same way the authority of the Teutonic savant 
 appears to me less great than it might be (despite 
 his mountainous erudition) largely owing to the 
 artificial conditions of his life ; and to the fact that 
 he takes them all for granted. Nobody who was 
 really in the struggle could produce theories like 
 those of Professors Drews and Jensen. The world 
 of educated Europe is a world where the luxuries 
 of life are secure and where thinkers and debaters 
 alike sit served by the unwonted activities of a 
 
INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XXUl 
 
 very complex civilisation ; in which those who are 
 so minded may live and speculate, aloof from the 
 tragedy of sin and the romance of love. This is 
 the atmosphere in which the great bulk of infidels 
 is produced. That a mental habit so narrowed 
 should find thoughts incredible in the Gospel is 
 not surprising, but that is an argument against the 
 mental habit, and the world which makes it. After 
 all, it is no new doctrine that spiritual insight is 
 different altogether from erudition or intellectual 
 force. So much for the alleged obscurantism of 
 this book. 
 
 Further, it is true that the line adopted is what 
 is commonly known as anti-intellectualist. But that 
 certainly does not mean an unfair advantage sought 
 for Christianity. How could I be ignorant of the 
 criticism which for some years had been delivered 
 upon all the rationalist presuppositions — from 
 standpoints in no way those of orthodox religion ? 
 How much of permanent value in these criticisms 
 there is, it may be too early to say. It seems, 
 however, to be commonly agreed that there is a 
 good deal. On the one hand, the pragmatists have 
 subjected to a searching analysis the notion of truth, 
 and discovered in the act of belief many other ele- 
 ments than mere logic. On the other hand. Pro- 
 fessor Bergson — whom I read for the first time as I 
 was writing this book — has shown us all, firstly, the 
 
Xxiv INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 mechanical and external nature of pure intelligence, 
 its relation to a world of space and matter ; secondly, 
 the inwardness of all real knowledge of life, as 
 something quite different from intellectual analysis ; 
 thirdly, the creative freedom of evolution as it really 
 is, compared with that mechanical process which 
 some writers would call by that name. In these 
 views there is no parti pris. Nor were they taken 
 up by the writer in any eifort to bolster up 
 Christianity (indeed the easiest system to fit in 
 as a whole with M. Bergson's scheme is Nietzsche's 
 dogma of the Will to Power). But these other 
 writings have helped me to see that there is much 
 weight in the criticisms of intellectualism, and while 
 to me the part of freedom has always been funda- 
 mental, I have but lately come to see how much it 
 involves.^ Further, it is to be noted that Bergson's 
 theory of the inward nature of all living knowledge 
 is also that of the world at large, outside the philo- 
 sophic paddock. No one could learn by theory how 
 to play football or even what it was like. Specula- 
 tion can give no even approximate account of the 
 experience of love or hate, or even of the sensation 
 as felt of colour or music. Thus the recurrent 
 
 * A farther consideration arises from the fact of the extra- 
 ordinarily various uses of the term Reason. By this means Hegel 
 is able to get under the name reason a, great deal that is not 
 ordinarily called such. Much the same has been said of Mr. 
 Bradley's system. 
 
INTKODQCTION TO POPULAR EDITION XXV 
 
 criticism levelled by practical men at theorists, 
 although it be sometimes exaggerated, has always 
 truth at its back. Life is inexhaustibly concrete, 
 and everlastingly strange; however much scientific 
 external method may tell us about its outward 
 aspects, that can never even approximate to a 
 representation of what it means inwardly to do or 
 refuse an act of courage, to grieve over sins, or to 
 be transfigured by love. 
 
 Lastly, in so far as a genuine faith necessitates 
 some change in the mental habit of modern culture, 
 the presumption would seem to me to be in its 
 favour. Something there is that is wrong. And 
 if we are helped to escape from that indescribable 
 flatness of spirit which has got hold of too many 
 of the educated classes, I would welcome it. In 
 any case it is absurd to make so shoddy and in- 
 adequate a thing a criterion of that great blaze of 
 spiritual experience, which 1900 years ago flashed 
 into Palestine and still dazzles the Church. I am 
 persuaded that our present state will no more 
 endure than did that very similar condition of 
 educated society in which the Gospel was first 
 preached. On all sides there are discernible signs 
 of change, " The little cloud no bigger than a man's 
 hand " may ere long become a storm that will affect 
 not only art and literature and the presuppositions 
 of science (of which we begin to see criticism), but 
 
XXVI INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR EDITION 
 
 the whole scope and range of human life. I do not 
 say that this change will be all favourable to the 
 Christian Faith. In some cases it will mean 
 enmity bitterer than before. But I do say, that 
 the new spirit will restore faith in a world of 
 values, of personality, of romance — there is nothing 
 to be ashamed of in this word in spite of Mr. Shaw 
 — and that these things can only be fully satisfied 
 in the life of the Catholic Church. 
 
 So kind has been the reception of this book that 
 it may seem ungracious to dwell on points like this. 
 But certain critics have devoted not a little space 
 to assailing its main position. Courtesy demanded 
 some reply, and I have taken this opportunity. 
 
 J. NEVILLE FIGGIS. 
 
 HOIJSB OF THE RbSUBKECTION, 
 QUINQUAQBSIUA, 1912. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 PAOK 
 
 I. REVELATION 1-26 
 
 A. Statement op Problem. 
 
 Is there a revelation? — Meaning of intellectual unrest o£ 
 our day — Age is an age of faith — Struggle between 
 different religions, no longer between religion and 
 unbelief ; consequent bitterness — Idealism not neces- 
 sarily Christian — Pantheism. Ethical Difference) — Non- 
 Christians are ceasing to admire character of Christ. 
 Nietzsche — Influence of comparative mythology — 
 Need of realising distinctness of Christianity. 
 
 B. Purpose of Lectures. 
 
 Practical more than speculative — Personal — Fact of diffi- 
 culties met by fact of Christ; better off than in 
 eighteenth century — Moral issue in faith — Involves 
 courage ; assures us of freedom — Theoretic diificulties 
 are strongest practical attractions of Christianity. 
 Miracles — Of late pushed aside ; belief in them 
 essential ; otherwise man is the sport of natural laws ; 
 God is enslaved to world — Miracles harder of belief, 
 but more essential than in the past. Man asks to 
 escape from natural forces ; cosmic emotion not suffi- 
 cient; needs love and freedom — Christianity alone 
 gives men right to be children, 
 xivii 
 
XXVIU CONTENTS 
 
 PASE 
 
 II. MYSTERY 27-56 
 
 Christianity not Mysterious ; expression of eighteenth-cen- 
 tury rationalism — Christicmity as old as the Creation — 
 Books now forgotten — Yet similar movement to-day — 
 Various forms of " new theology "—AH start with same 
 object to accommodate the Gospel to fashionable 
 philosophies — All spring from same notion of rational- 
 istic certitude — Impossibility of intellectualism — The 
 Gospel not primarily for culture, though it stimulates 
 thereto — Mistakes of apologists : in seeking (o) logical 
 demonstration ; (6) historical certitude ; (c) relying on 
 " idealism " — DiflSculties of intellectualist position — 
 Bergson — Need of mystery ; its presence in all actual 
 life ; acknowledged by " the plain man " ; essence of 
 religious sense ; Christ takes this sense for granted — 
 Tutility of attempting to conciliate adversaries — We 
 must invite theircontempt — Does not the New Theology 
 proceed on a false assumption ? — Man's personality 
 deeper than reasoning ; crises of life — his social nature ; 
 English education ; opportunity of English Church — 
 Errors of intellectualism in religion : (a) Scholasticism ; 
 (6) Transubstantiation ; (c) Scheme of salvation — Eant 
 and Spencer — Agnosticism — Mystery and authority — 
 Beligion is the spirit of romance — Summary — Nature 
 of faith. 
 
 III. THE HISTORIC CHRIST 56-91 
 
 Modernist divorce between Christ of history and Christ 
 of faith — Causes of depreciation of historical religion. 
 
 A. Historical Evidencb. 
 
 Certitude impossible— Presuppositions — In what sense is 
 resurrection certain? — Church is supreme historical 
 document — Individual experience — Criticism and 
 devotion — " Interpret the Bible as you would interpret 
 any other book " — A false ideal. 
 
CONTENTS XXIX 
 
 B. Difficulties of Histoeicaii Ebliqion — 
 
 Spring not from miraculous but from actual and concrete ; 
 enhanced by neglect of Eucharist — The thinker wants 
 a world of his own fancies ; hardness of fact — Life 
 concrete for most men, who are not speculators. 
 
 1. Mistorio Christ and Church are " given " — Foundation of 
 
 authority ; repulsive to subjective idealists ; common 
 man needs something outside himself — Creighton: 
 " Life can only be explained by a life." 
 
 2. How attach so much value to one period of past — 
 
 Dangers of opposite view — If nothing be for its own 
 sake but progress to unknown goal ; all life reduced 
 to chaos — Value of particular moments in life, in art, 
 in history — Christian revelation does but express this 
 — Man demands to be more than a link in a chain. 
 
 3. The Incarnation too little for God — But this is very 
 
 source of appealing tenderness of Gospel — Mr. Dickin- 
 son criticised — We can call God " by a pet name"; 
 this is inalienable charm, and marks the distinction 
 of Christian devotion. 
 
 IV. FORGIVENESS 92-119 
 
 Sin ; upsets thinker's scheme of harmonising universe ; in 
 consequence he is apt to deny it or minimise it — But 
 actual facts point to great disorder in the world — 
 Views of new theologians about sin — Sin is centre 
 of controversy, and proves futility of much argument ; 
 cannot convert those without it — What is deliver- 
 ance of religious sense ? — Quotation from William 
 James — Preacher's personal confession — Without re- 
 demption religion is a, mockery — Yet forgiveness is 
 pronounced : (o) impossible ; (6) immoral — If this is 
 so, this world is hell for most — Value of redemption 
 in exact proportion to sense of its difficulty — Its 
 " universality " its attraction ; it shows love beyond 
 all law. 
 
XXX CONTENTS 
 
 FACE 
 
 Condution. — These lectures hare sought to sho^w how diffi- 
 culties in theory are attractions in fact — This is not 
 decisive — It shows how Gospel maintains its hold; 
 does not prove its truth — Exactly, but it does seem 
 to indicate the futility of the " new theology " ; " man 
 is a religious animal " ; and no religion can endure 
 which does not answer to the demands of the religious 
 consciousness — Moreover the difficulties are themselves 
 a support to men filled with a sense of mystery in all 
 life — Credo quia impossibUe 
 
 OTHER SERMONS 
 
 A PLEA FOR OTHER-WORLDLINESS ... 120 
 Preached before the University of Cambridge, Nov. 
 10, 1907. 
 
 THE NEED OP AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH 136 
 Preached in Exeter Cathedral, June 28, 1908. 
 
 NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD 145 
 
 Preached before the Cambridge University Church 
 Society, May 15, 1908. 
 
 LITTLE CHILDREN 155 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, Sept. 27, 1908. 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Thb New Theology and Bishop Butlbe. . . 161 
 Notes to Hdlsxan Lkctubes 172 
 
THE GOSPEL AND 
 HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 I.— REVELATION 
 
 "Blessed be the Loid God of Israel, for He hath visited and 
 redeemed His people." — St. Lttes i. 68. 
 
 Has He? That is the question we are all asking. 
 The trouble in men's minds assumes protean forms, 
 and is concerned about different points of detail. It 
 may spend itself on speculative problems, such as 
 those raised by conceiving the final reality as Per- 
 sonal, and that Person as a loving Father in a world 
 so fraught with evU, or that Divine Nature as a 
 threefold union. It may be occupied in sifting the 
 grain from the chaff in the canonical Scriptures, or 
 in trying to reach certainty in regard to the story 
 of Jesus of Nazareth. It may be disturbed by the 
 problem of adjusting theories of orderly develop- 
 ment with any doctrine of the Fall or indeed of Sin 
 — the supreme discontinuity. But at bottom of it 
 all is the same question, " Hath God spoken to us 
 by His Son ? Were the heavens ever opened and a 
 
 A 
 
2 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 glimpse of the world beyond vouchsafed to mens 
 wondering eyes ? Is it or is it not the case that 
 
 ' A voice which man can trust 
 Has murmured from the narrow house ' I " 
 
 That is what we seek to know. That, no more 
 and no less. And the answer is everything — ^in our 
 hves. 
 
 I apprehend it would be true to say, that Harnack's 
 small book on the essence of Christianity was epoch- 
 making. Ever since it appeared men have been 
 asking with fresh urgency, " What think ye of 
 Christ ? " They have realised more than ever the 
 choice that lay before them, between the natural and 
 the supernatural theory of the most potent person- 
 ality in history. It may well be, as many tell us, that 
 they are but lightly touched by the small points of 
 dogma, and have grown a little tired of theologians 
 contending. But about that which underlies these 
 debates they are by no means apathetic. With more 
 passion than ever they ask for guidance. With 
 eager insistence, before unknown, the reflecting mind 
 is putting the question, "Was Jesus of Nazareth 
 different from other men in kind ? Are we right to 
 worship the Virgin-born as God?" Scorn as they 
 may the distinctions of the schools and academic 
 Christology, they cannot, even if they would, forbear 
 the query, "Was the Ufe of Jesus in any unique 
 
EEVELATION 3 
 
 sense an outbreak from the other world, and an 
 evidence of its reahty ? Or was it but a phase in 
 that which I have heard called in the pulpit 'the 
 harmonious religious development of mankind ' ? " 
 In brief, is Christianity merely an episode, gracious 
 indeed and noble, yet only an episode in the world's 
 history, to be transcended inevitably with the pro- 
 gress of culture ? Or is it the revelation of God, not 
 one cult merely among others, but veritably super- 
 natural religion ? 
 
 The question comes with renewed poignancy to 
 our generation. We live in a new age, to whose eyes 
 "the Victorian era" has become an historical ex- 
 pression. Proud and conscious of its youth, the 
 twentieth century refuses to echo the catchwords 
 of its elders and flames into buoyant life. As one 
 writer says, "a kind of Dionysiac rage of life" ^ has hold 
 of men. Imperious and resistless they seek for that 
 sense of freedom and power, of victory and joy, which 
 Christians find only in One who said, " I am come 
 that they might have life, and that they might have 
 it more abundantly," and, " these things have I said 
 unto you, that your joy may be full." With postu- 
 lates such as this, the instinct, that — 
 
 " The world means intensely and means good," 
 
 the age is naturally one of faith, of positive affirma- 
 tions, as the age just past was one of doubt and 
 
4 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 hesitancy. This is indeed, far excellence, the age of 
 faith, or rather faiths. Men have come at length to 
 see that their directing ideals, alike in thought and 
 action, are based upon certain presuppositions, which 
 themselves are beyond proof, and involve therefore 
 an act of faith for those who live by them.^ Now, 
 Christianity offers itseK as a working hypothesis for 
 life — one among many — and as such it must be 
 appraised by men and women who have to live. As 
 a working hypothesis we claim that it embraces all 
 the facts, as no other does, and that alone it gives 
 enduring meaning to ideals and values which are 
 ineradicable in our souls. In this view the struggle 
 for the Christian faith has a little changed its 
 character. In the last generation it was primarily 
 a conflict between faith and unbelief or between 
 a materialist and a spiritual theory or between 
 idealists and agnostics. Now it has become a 
 struggle for one form of religion against others. In 
 the nineteenth century men accepted the dilemma 
 propounded by Butler, and acted on the belief that 
 there is no halfway house between Christianity and 
 a negative or at best a suspensory position. The 
 object of the struggle all that time was to secure 
 some spiritual interpretation of the universe. Quite 
 commonly it was assumed that Christianity of one 
 sort or another was the obvious expression of that 
 view. If a man gave up agnostic or materialist 
 
EEV^ELATION 5 
 
 opinions, he would most likely proclaim himself a 
 Christian. This might take place in more than one 
 way. If his difficulties had been purely specula- 
 tive, a man who had surmounted the obstacles 
 to beUef in God would take the farther leap into 
 orthodoxy without more ado, finding the Church in 
 possession and deeming it the most natural as well 
 as the noblest expression of the religious instinct. 
 Or he might treat the dogmas of the faith and even 
 its historical facts as mainly symbolic, useful for 
 the vulgar. He would thus label himself as Christian, 
 and accommodate by methods " made in Germany " 
 its special doctrines with the demands of true philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 On the other hand, finding Christianity full of 
 difficulties, both historical and speculative, he might 
 at once range himself on the opposite side, and sur- 
 render all hope of a theistic or indeed of any solution 
 of the puzzle of life. 
 
 Now, however, all this is changed; and it is 
 gradually coming to be recognised that man is a 
 religious animal; and the contest is no longer one 
 for any creed against no creed, but of one creed 
 against many rivals. All our most influential adver- 
 saries are now religions — very queer religions some- 
 times. Even among non-Christians the purely 
 negative standpoint is far less common than it was. 
 In a famous lecture at the end of the last century 
 
6 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 Huxley argued that all the higher life of men rested 
 upon postulates which were not the result of natural 
 evolution and were avowedly directed to counteract 
 it.* Even Herbert Spencer's agnosticism — or semi- 
 theism, as it has been called — proposed to keep alive 
 that consciousness of mystery which he regards as 
 the essence of religion, and is the opposite of mere 
 naturalism, and his personal attitude became more 
 sympathetic in his later years.* Then and now 
 Positivists, like Mr. Frederic Harrison, were as em- 
 phatic as any Christian in condemning the blank- 
 ness of mere materiahsm.^ 
 
 At this moment the most influential of professing 
 non-Christian writers are trying to give to man the 
 po.sitive values of faith, without its theistic impli- 
 cations. Even when they deny the fact, they are 
 posing as makers of religion. This is the case with 
 the socialism of men so different as Mr. Wells and 
 Mr. Blatchford ; and still more with those disciples 
 of Nietzsche, daily more articulate and contemptuous, 
 who make a god out of the will to Uve. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, with his doctrine of life-force — more emphati- 
 cally Mr. John Davidson, the poet, with his deifica- 
 tion of power and gospel of the ether — make at least 
 an endeavour to give to men what they call a " satis- 
 fied imagination";' and, like Nietzsche, the latter 
 stands in spite of himself for the spiritual freedom 
 of man. Stronger evidence comes from Cambridge. 
 
EEVELATION 7 
 
 A writer well known to many here has tried to show 
 that even agnostics ought not to be content with 
 mere negation; and should in some way strive to 
 preserve the springs of consolation and joy, even if 
 needful by elaborating a new mythology.' 
 
 Nothing would be less akin to the miUtant ration- 
 alism of aggressive unbelief than a passage like the 
 following : " Faith in some form or other seems to be 
 almost a necessary condition, if not of life, yet of the 
 most fruitful and noble life. . . . Most men, I think, 
 are significant, and find and make life significant, in 
 proportion to their faith." * 
 
 In one way or another the age is an age of religion, 
 and the question for men to-day is not whether they 
 will have any religion or none, but whether they 
 will have the Christian religion or something else. 
 This adds at once to the bitterness of the conflict 
 and to its importance. It seems Hke to lose the 
 genial courtesy, the gentlemanly languor which 
 characterised the disputants in the days of " the New 
 Republic." There is more fire and more contempt 
 in those who reject our standards, now that they 
 can envisage their own as in some sort a matter of 
 faith. The struggle between natural and super- 
 natural religion will be more protean and unceasing 
 and less sympathetic and chivalrio than was that 
 between agnostics and Christians. It is not worth 
 much trouble to fight hard for a man who really is 
 
8 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 in doubt ; it is worth a great deal if he is certain that 
 he is right and his adversaries are either knaves or 
 fools — unless they are both. No longer do we listen 
 to the wistful regret of " Dover Beach '' : — 
 
 " The Sea of Faith 
 Was once too at the full, and round earth's shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled; 
 Now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy long withdrawing roar 
 Betreating to the breath 
 Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 
 And naked shingles of the world." 
 
 Instead of this one of the most brilliant of modem 
 poets writes : — 
 
 " To purge the world of Christianity, 
 The sacrifice of every human life 
 That now enjoys or nauseates the sun 
 Would not be too exorbitant a price 1 " 
 
 and again : — 
 
 "We mean by war all that war ever meant. 
 Destruction's ministers, Death's freemen, Lust's 
 Exponents, daily like a blood-red dawn 
 In flames and crimson seas we shall advance 
 Against the ancient immaterial reign 
 Of Spirit, and our watchword shall be still, 
 Get thee behind me, God — I foUow Mammon." • 
 
 In the last generation men were unable to take 
 " Jesus as Lord," and they were sad. Now they are 
 choosing other masters, and are glad. There is a 
 world of difference. 
 
EEVELATION 9 
 
 Moreover, shining examples afiford evidence that 
 idealism, so far from inevitably leading on to Christ, 
 does not always lead men even to theistio belief.^" And 
 facts are against the soundness of Butler's dilemma. 
 Life in the Christian Church implies certain truths 
 and raises certain problems with which theism as 
 such is not troubled. The charm of Christianity is 
 in proportion to these additional difficulties; and 
 those who wUl not pay the price, but are yet in- 
 curably religious, are turning with renewed attrac- 
 tion to forms of what may be called natural religion. 
 Pantheism, more or less thinly veiled, is not open 
 to the attacks on Supernaturalism ; and to souls 
 lacking in any feeling of sin, it offers a certain 
 satisfaction, appealing to that sense of awe and 
 wonder and desire of mystical union with the 
 Eternal, which is always a large element of re- 
 ligious feeling.ii 
 
 But this is not all. The great common ground of 
 ethical values has vanished. In the last age, attacks 
 might be made on the Creed, or the lives of Christians, 
 or on the influence of the Church, but one figure 
 maintained its soUtary and appealing supremacy. 
 John Stuart Mill expressed feelings all but universal 
 when he said that we could hardly have a higher 
 aim than that Christ should approve our lives ; and 
 indeed the attraction of the character of Jesus 
 seemed almost to increase with men's disbelief in all 
 
10 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 its non-human elements. So thinking, unbelievers 
 felt like the poet who watched the dawn of faith : — 
 
 " Oh ! had I lived in that great day, 
 How had its glory new 
 Filled earth and heaven and caught away 
 My ravished spirit too. 
 
 No thoughts that to the world belong 
 
 Had stood against the wave 
 Of love, that flowed so deep and strong 
 
 From Christ's then open grave. 
 
 No cloister floor of humid stone 
 
 Had been too cold for me, 
 For me no eastern desert lone 
 
 Had been too far to flee. 
 
 No lonely life had passed too slow, 
 
 Whilst I could hourly scan 
 Upon his Cross with head sunk low. 
 
 That nailed, thorn-crownfed Man." 
 
 To men so feeling, it could only be with a passion 
 of regret that they came to believe it was but a 
 dream long ago and far away, and settled down in 
 stern denial to a Christless world. 
 
 " While we believed on earth he went, 
 And open stood his grave, 
 Men called from chamber, church, and tent, 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 Now he is dead : far hence he lies 
 
 In the lorn Syrian town, 
 And on his head with shining eyes 
 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 Ah I o'er that silent sacred land 
 
 Of sun and arid stone, 
 And crumbling wall and sultry sand 
 
 Sounds now one word alone ; 
 
REVELATION 11 
 
 • TTnduped of fancy, henceforth Man 
 
 Must labonr I — must resign 
 His all too human creeds, and scan 
 
 Simply the way divine | ' " »" 
 
 That condition no longer endures. Differences of 
 creed have at length revealed a yawning chasm 
 between our moral ideals. Apologists of those days 
 were scorned as narrow-minded for venturing the 
 view that Christian ethics were bound up with 
 Christian dogma, and that with the decay of the 
 one the other could not long maintain its hold. 
 What they said, however, has come true; and can 
 be proved in the triumphant jeers of our adver- 
 saries. The irruption of Nietzsche, that strange 
 comet in the serene heaven of philosophy, has meant 
 a revolution. The new ethics discards the notion 
 of love, ridicules sacrifice and pity, and pours a 
 virulence of scornful hatred upon Christ Himselt 
 Christian purity, Christian sympathy and humility, 
 Christian gentleness and even courtesy are set at 
 naught by the new apostles of the will to power, and 
 a saturnalia of selfish pride is set up as our ideal 
 in such a passage as that I quoted ; and many who 
 would be shocked at the words are no less scornful 
 of our moral aims.i' 
 
 The question, "Do you admire Christ?" comes 
 before "Do you believe Him?" One erudite and 
 not unsympathetic investigator gravely shatters the 
 
12 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 claims of orthodoxy because the system could not 
 find room for such men as Goethe and Bismarck." 
 So that the claim to judge a reUgion by its ideal 
 of character, not merely its doctrine, is by no means 
 a dodge of apologists at bay. Personally, I find my 
 belief in the Christian faith immensely strengthened 
 by its incompatibility with the ideals of Bismarck ; 
 and do not see even in Goethe an inspiring substitute 
 for Christ, 
 
 Comparative mythology has widened and intensi- 
 fied the problem. Now that religion is recognised 
 as a universal function of the race, it is being scien- 
 tifically observed and analysed aU the world over, 
 while the religious aspects of ancient cultures are 
 studied with growing sympathy. We cannot now 
 echo the vaunt of St. Augustine about the virtues 
 of the pagan world being splendida vitia ; or treat 
 Mahomet as merely a false prophet. Nor can we 
 deny the immense amount of interaction between the 
 religion of Israel and other earlier systems. Above 
 all, the knowledge of Mithraic worship in the Roman 
 Empire has revealed the striking interdependence 
 of the Christian Church and other cults. So in 
 ever- widening circles, away from the debates of the 
 scholars, the question comes with increasing force : ^^ 
 Is there anything unique in the Christian faith? 
 Is it more than a phase of culture, perhaps the best 
 hitherto, but now ripe to rottenness, and ready to 
 
REVELATION 13 
 
 pass into something better ? Must we take the line 
 of a merely historical sympathy and regard the 
 Church as but an item in an age-long process, still 
 far from its goal — or is she " the heir of all the ages," 
 having in her treasure-house things new and old, 
 and worthy of aU the deeper reverence because in 
 her liturgies, her temples, and her creeds she does 
 but express the garnered experience of all human 
 life and every religious system ? ^® 
 
 On all these groimds it behoves us to-day to ask 
 ourselves once more the question. What do we mean 
 by speaking of the Gospel as a revelation ? We are 
 compelled to try to realise afresh the distinctive 
 nature of the Christian life in presence of forms of 
 worship that are either non-Christian or only partly 
 so, as upholding a very definite ideal of character 
 which is its own and will not flourish in any other 
 soil, and as a society, a peculiar people — making part 
 of human progress and yet having God's especial 
 life — a religion at once historical and absolute. 
 
 To this place and this office the topic is fit though 
 hard. The unique satisfaction of the needs of man 
 afforded by life in the Christian, Chv/rch at once 
 appals and commands one who stands where so many 
 noble and gracious spirits have given in days gone by 
 their witness, and testified the truth that here at 
 least (as I heard in this pulpit) " Faith is not afraid 
 to reason, and reason is not asha/med to adcyre." i' It 
 
14 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 is laid down as the duty of the Hulsean preacher to 
 "defend revealed religion"; and it is of Christian 
 faith as revealed that we are now to think — that 
 faith by which we see the world as a society of free, 
 created, and immortal spirits, a world of real chances 
 and incalculable catastrophes, a world of broken har- 
 monies, of pain and sin ; withal its Maker known to 
 us as Father and Friend, His love flashing out in 
 the most astounding marvels, the Incarnation and 
 Death of the One-begotten — Whose rising is less a 
 wonder than His dying, if He be Who He is — ^Who by 
 His Cross redeems us now, and in His body the 
 Church gives us in Baptism and the Eucharist the 
 very spirit and essence of eternal life. This world 
 with God its blazing fact, and prayer and faith real 
 forces stronger than the armies of evil, though quite 
 congruous to common sense and our imier life, is 
 incongruous with any mechanical system, whether 
 of forces or ideas, or with an Absolute which is un- 
 revealable even in symbol. Above all, this world in 
 which God cares for us, and we can be " in love with 
 God," is not to be reconciled with any of the myriad 
 forms of Pantheism. Pantheism and Christianity, it 
 has been well said, are the two views of life which 
 between them divide the allegiance of men ; and that 
 thought may help us in making the great choice." 
 
 The choice, be it observed, is not speculative so 
 much as practical. It is not whether I am to hold 
 
REVELATION" 15 
 
 in theory a set of propositions — but whether I may 
 go on kneeling in prayer and confession, reciting 
 the Creed in worship, and receiving God in His 
 own sacrament. We might put it in one phrase, 
 Is the Eucharist a sham or a reality ? for that service 
 includes every element and unites them in har- 
 monious praise. Thus in "this great argument," 
 which to-day reverberates through Europe, it is not 
 an academic thesis, the amusement of intellectuals, 
 but the faith of the millions that is at stake — the 
 faith of the worker and the soldier, the redemption 
 of the harlot and the rake, the hope of all who suffer, 
 the joy of all who die: is He real or a phantom, 
 this Lord of ours ? 
 
 And if for this faith I stand to-day, I ask you to 
 beUeve that it is not to make vain show, or to shattei 
 in argument a disdained opponent. To others faith 
 is the bright serenity of unclouded vision ; to me it is 
 the angel of an agony, the boon of daily and hourly 
 conflict. In these years as God's priest I have felt 
 the pressure of crowding doubts, and learned in 
 bitterness that to give up agnostic views may yet 
 leave one far from the Kingdom of God — farther, 
 save by His grace, than ever before. I would ask in 
 humbleness your prayers, both young and old, that 
 neither to me nor others these words be vain. 
 
 I would add that these lectures make no claim to 
 specialist research. They do but express the way in 
 
16 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 which to one man alive " to the currents of troubled 
 thought" the truth of the Cross shines out and 
 what seems a hindrance has been made a help. 
 
 In the first place, it is idle to deny the fact or the 
 pressure of difficulties. The knowledge of them is 
 more widely diffused, the burden more acutely felt, 
 than it has probably ever been before. Yet the 
 Church fighting with other religions is at least no 
 worse off than it was in the first and second centuries 
 when it was on the eve of its greatest triumphs, 
 though opposed by all the powers of this world, 
 " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the 
 pride of life," organised and triumphant as they 
 never were before or since, by hostile worships in 
 possession, and by modes of thought untouched by 
 Christian living. Nor again is the general atmos- 
 phere among cultivated men one whit more un- 
 favourable than in the eighteenth century when 
 Butler prefaced his " Analogy " with the well-known 
 words : " It is come to be taken for granted by many 
 persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject 
 of inquiry ; but that it is now at length discovered to 
 be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if in 
 the present age this were an agreed point among all 
 people of discernment ; and nothing remained but to 
 set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, 
 as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long 
 interrupted the pleasures of the world." 
 
REVELATION 17 
 
 Since those days, -when men regarded the Church 
 as the figment of priests, and looked for its disappear- 
 ance as the great Auflda/ning should spread, the 
 faith has made conquests that even to believers 
 ■would have seemed barely credible, and cast ten thou- 
 sand times its strange spell over the heart of man. For 
 although to us — " upon whom the ends of the world 
 are come " — many things seem hard that were easy 
 to our fathers, we have over them this great advan- 
 tage. The Church goes on. Assailed it has been on 
 aU sides and on every ground, attacked by some 
 because she is other-worldly, by others because she 
 is not ; accused in one breath of an insane altruism 
 and in the next of unworthy egotism ; its title-deeds 
 torn up, its facts disputed, its influence denied ! Its 
 adversaries have demolished it a thousand times in 
 argument and pronounced the Christian Church a 
 dead thing, and cried to carry out the corpse, for 
 aU was over but the shouting. And they have be- 
 taken themselves to shouting, only to find when it 
 was over that the slain hydra had raised a new 
 head, and all was to do again. It is so easy, so 
 very easy, to disprove the Christian religion — to 
 one's own satisfaction ; but it has not yet proved 
 possible to destroy it. The volume of Christian 
 experience goes on increasing — its call to the indivi- 
 dual soul is never quite unregarded. In the darkest 
 days there are thousands — some of them even 
 
 B 
 
18 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 educated — to whom Christ is the one rock, the Cross 
 the one hope, and the Church the abiding home for 
 weak and sin-stained souls. 
 
 None the less the difficulties are there — or rather 
 here. They attack those within no less than those 
 without. Nor may we glibly attribute them to 
 moral turpitude. All of us know, perhaps among 
 our own friends, men better and more devoted 
 than ourselves who yet in no wise worship "Jesus 
 as Lord." ; 
 
 Nevertheless, it is, I believe, a spiritual rather 
 than an intellectual force that is needed to over- 
 come the obstacles; and that is the very meaning 
 of the appeal to faith (without which Jesus could 
 not do mighty works) as the basis of our l^e. 
 Faith like all trust is an act of the will, which 
 decides to take risks; and so whenever it is tried, 
 it must involve cowrage. It is want of pluck, the 
 desire of clinging to the bank, of moving no farther 
 than we can see that makes our intellectual diffi- 
 culties insuperable. 
 
 Consider what courage, ordinary courage, actually 
 does. It does not do away with obstacles or remove 
 pain or danger, indeed it often increases them; if 
 there were no hunting, no football, there would be 
 fewer broken collar-bones or injured knees. What 
 a brave man does is to accept, even invite, pain of 
 one sort or another, and turn it into joy and strength. 
 
REVELATION 19 
 
 He acts on the principle of him whose advice to his 
 son going to school was expressed in the lines : — 
 
 " God gave man pain for friend. 
 And death for surest hope of life." " 
 
 Seventy-fiye per cent, of education consists in learn- 
 ing, either in physical or mental life, that we are to 
 face risks, not shun them, and that so faced they are 
 the condition of a richer and happier life. Courage 
 may not be the one virtue, as a recent writer pro- 
 claims, but it is a very real grace; it embraces a 
 wider scope than is often supposed, and carries us 
 on from the simplest acts to the heights of sacrifice 
 and faith. It is nothing short of amazing how many 
 have learned its lesson in outward Ufe, yet fail to see 
 how it is at the bottom of that "dying to live" 
 which is the philosophy of the Cross. And the 
 dying must be real; if there were no effort, no 
 fatigue, no bruises, no accidents, there could be 
 none of the joy of courage. So in regard to re- 
 ligion, if there were no difficulties or perplexities, 
 if belief were a mathematical certitude, there could 
 be none of that " personal trust in a person," none 
 of that dlan of victory and freedom which belongs 
 to faith. It is not by ignoring our difficulties or 
 treating them as unreal, that we can have the joy 
 of faith; but by finding in them the secret of our 
 power. Our apologetic grows out of the very heart 
 of our trouble. The attraction of the Christian life 
 
20 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 to living men and women with hopes and struggles 
 and sins is just in those very points which it is 
 hardest to justify in pure theory. It is not in spite 
 of these difficulties, but because of them— or rather 
 of the truth which arouses them — that faith has its 
 value for men, who have to live. Because it claims 
 to be not merely part of a historical process (though 
 of course it is that), but 
 
 " The finger of God, a flash of the will that can 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them and lo I they are." 
 
 that revelation is so uplifting to man bowed down 
 with the sense of his own impotence, with the awful 
 vastness and rigidity of natural law, and longing 
 above everything to be assured of his freedom; it 
 is because it tells of mysteries, which no ingenuity 
 of reasoning can grasp, that it enthralls a nature 
 wondering in reverence at the strangeness of itself; 
 because God lived on earth as a growing lad and a 
 common man, the common man finds so close to 
 him this tender and appealing love. Lastly, it is 
 because Christ upon the Cross has won for us an 
 impossible pardon, a deliverance unhoped from sin 
 and the diseased will that the worst and weakest 
 can hail him as Saviour and Friend. 
 
 Let us for a moment consider in the light of this 
 principle the idea of the miraculous. It has been 
 our tendency of late to put this in the background.'"' 
 
REVELATION 21 
 
 Dominated by sonorous commonplaces about irre- 
 vocable law and iron uniformity, most of us find or 
 did find grave difficulty to faith in the miraculous. 
 All the alleged instances we strive to reduce into 
 conformity with natural order. It is with reluctance 
 that we admit any as actual, in spite of the fact that 
 we know that the idea is bound up with a special 
 revelation of what otherwise man could not know. 
 
 It is true that the difficulty lies deeper. Miracles 
 are but the expression of God's freedom ; the truth 
 that He is above and not merely within the order 
 of nature. Disbelief in them really leads on to 
 pantheism. Displaying this truth of God's liberty 
 and personality they arouse no deeper speculative 
 difficulties than does the common daily fact of 
 human free-will — perhaps even less. No reasoning 
 has solved that problem or reconciled the deliver- 
 ance of consciousness with a belief in the uniformity 
 of nature, if that belief be extended into an entire 
 philosophy of things. On the other hand, no deter- 
 minism, " hard or soft," can be reconciled with the 
 psychology of repentance, or with our sense of personal 
 activity, for this view postulates the many, the other 
 absorbs everything into the one. If we have once 
 surmounted the cardinal crux of human freedom, 
 there is no real ground for boggling over miracles.^^ 
 
 But with the increasing pressure of this notion 
 of iron law, there is an increasing sense of the need 
 
22 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of a power above it. Instead of being a drag upon 
 faith, the miraculous, or the idea of revelation, or 
 whatever you choose to call it, is once more be- 
 ginning to be a pillar of it. Without it we cannot 
 consistently retain the notion of freedom, which is 
 essential to our moral life. Miracles were easy of 
 credit in days when personal agency was detected 
 throughout nature, and the physical world was not 
 conceived as an orderly whole. Belief was easy 
 then, but it was also superfluous; for the miracle 
 was simply a fact, like any other fact of daily life, 
 and conveyed none but a particular lesson. Nowa- 
 days the belief is not easy, but it is essential ; unless 
 we are to be deprived of all faith in our own spiritual 
 being, and driven to view the world as a vast system, 
 which may perhaps be a living whole, but without 
 any place for personalities, and with our own loves 
 and fears, our sin or sanctity mere illusions, a sort 
 of phosphorescent by-product of the outer world. 
 The iron law of physical sequences is always with 
 us ; the pressure of the world, environment, heredity, 
 is patent and appalling; what is a mere theory to 
 the student is the most constant and oppressive of 
 facts to the plain man. It is just this very thing 
 he wants to escape from. It is only miracle, revela- 
 tion, that can assure him that behind all this net- 
 work of material forces there is a living will; 
 while God manifest in Christ displays that will as 
 
REVELATION 23 
 
 Love. That is all he wants. That gives him a 
 refuge, a home for the soul, whose deepest emotion 
 and noblest desires may now be satisfied. Just as a 
 man of business or toil needs a home with all its 
 pieties, if his higher nature is not to be starved, so 
 man " who goeth forth to his work and to his labour 
 until the evening " and is ever confronted by natural 
 law, demands the assurance of spiritual freedom, of 
 the living reality of Love and Peace. Such an assur- 
 ance is not now possible if there be no revelation 
 which may prevent all his highest thought from 
 "fading into the light of common day," and being 
 withered by the chill of rigid natural forces. Miracles, 
 in fact, give men just that thrill, that sense of ex- 
 hilaration and freedom which all of us experience 
 in any conspicuous act of heroism. Colonel Picquart 
 apparently ruining his career to defend Dreyfus ; a 
 schoolboy saving another from drowning, have the 
 same lesson. They show that man is not the slave 
 of circumstance. Here, we say, is an act which 
 breaks the chain of environment, which rises above 
 the outward, and uplifts us with a sense of our own 
 freedom — to go and do likewise. This is its appeal. 
 So with revelation. 
 
 Vain, indeed, and a mockery it is to tell a man 
 broken with trouble or a woman who has lost child 
 or Mend, that he should bow before the majesty 
 of law, and worship the changeless harmonies of 
 
24 THE aOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 nature. What to him is cosmic emotion ? It is that 
 very bitterness he seeks to throw off. It is the 
 universe which crushes him. He wants to be free 
 from it. Is there nothing behind the curtain? 
 Have the gates for ever closed behind the dear 
 one ? Is there indeed no voice or any that answers, 
 no feehng behind these cold resistless laws, beyond 
 the stars in the courses that never alter? Is it 
 really all? That is what he asks. Like the hero 
 in " Maud," who has been 
 
 " Brought to understand 
 A sad astrology, the boundless plan 
 That makes you tyrants in your iron skies, 
 Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, 
 Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand 
 His nothingness into man," 
 
 he can only be helped in the same way — by love. 
 
 " But now shine on, and what care I, 
 Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl 
 The ooanter-charm of space and hollow sky. 
 And do accept my madness, and would die 
 To save from some slight shame one simple girl." 
 
 It is Love not Law that is the hope — half 
 smothered and inarticulate — of all who Uve and 
 suffer ; and this we only know by the crash of Christ's 
 coming to earth and showing once for all the real 
 splendev/r de Dieu — so often misconceived. For 
 while miracles show that God has a freedom like to 
 man, and can make nature an instrument of spirit, 
 
REVELATION 25 
 
 Jesus Christ's birth and His death and rising again 
 for us have shown the one immutably rigid law ot 
 things — to be the fact of God's love. That which in 
 its idea is free and gracious, and exhaustless in its 
 riches, is the one principle, 
 
 " The light whose smile kindles the universe," 
 
 that and no other. And if that be, if God's love 
 be the truth of all, bereavement and pain, disaster and 
 gloom, though hard, may yet be borne ; and hope is 
 once more possible. 
 
 That truth can come only from a revealed faith ; 
 for it cannot by any reasoning be extracted from the 
 natural order. 
 
 In an age like this, when the scientific knowledge 
 of the natural world and our power to use it have 
 increased so marvellously, we need some bulwark to 
 guard us against being lost in the sea of naturalism : 
 the danger is great lest we take the part for a whole, 
 lest we extend into a general theory of things con- 
 ceptions useful, as a partial description of the out- 
 ward phenomena, conceived in abstraction, but not 
 an account of life or ourselves.^^ Such a bulwark 
 is afforded by the idea of the miraculous and 
 its content in the revelation of Jesus Christ. This 
 alone can save us from confusing God with the 
 creation which is His will. This alone can point 
 to a way of escape, to a sure refuge from the iron 
 
26 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 chain of cause and effect. For this alone assures ua 
 that we are not items in a series, cogs in a great 
 machine ; but free spirits living in society, the chil- 
 dren of one like unto us, in so far that we may lore 
 Him and speak to Him ; and caring so much that God 
 HimseK died to save us. God revealed in Christ is 
 the one truth, which gives to tired men and women 
 the right — the right to be as little children, with the 
 child's freshness of delight and trust. 
 
 " That is all we know on earth, and all we need to know." 
 
II.— MYSTERY 
 
 *' The Light shineth in the darkness." — St. John i. 5. 
 
 "Christianity not Mysterious" is the title of a 
 book once famous. Descartes and his philosophy 
 dominated men's minds — even to some extent 
 Fenelon's — in the later seventeenth and the early 
 eighteenth century. Clearness and logical consist- 
 ency were idols. Men had a naif faith in the indi- 
 vidual reason, and were resolute to credit nothing 
 that could not be demonstrated; nor had they 
 any notion that words were inadequate to express 
 reality. 
 
 These notions governed the minds of orthodox 
 and deists alike. It was natural that men should 
 seek to accommodate the Gospel to theory, and, 
 under the guise of defence, should minimise the 
 element of mystery in the life of the Church no 
 less than in human society, and should repudiate 
 all authority — even where they were orthodox treat- 
 ing the Christian faith as merely a code of morals 
 with special sanctions. 
 
 Toland's able work is perhaps less unorthodox 
 
 27 
 
28 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 than is commonly supposed, only because there 
 are no wonders at all to him. He asserts dis- 
 tinctly that nature has no mysteries, that faith 
 is based entirely upon ratiocination — for it never 
 occurred to these men to criticise reason — and that 
 Church authority is a figment.^ 
 
 He goes on to adopt a line of argument at present 
 very popular, that Christ's doctrine was corrupted 
 from its primitive simplicity by the infusion of Greek 
 metaphysics and pagan culture, and in this way pro- 
 duced the historic Church and Creeds. 
 
 Another book of the same epoch, Matthew Tindal's 
 " Christianity as Old as the Creation," of which only 
 the first volume was ever published, elaborated the 
 thesis that the Christian faith was natural religion, 
 differing merely in its mode of promulgation. If 
 this be so, any deviation from natural religion in 
 the existing presentment of Christianity must be at 
 best superfluous, at worst a degradation due to the 
 interest and cunning of priests. 
 
 These books are now buried in libraries ; nor is it 
 probable that they wiU ever be republished. Their 
 hard, unimaginative philistinism, their lack of his- 
 torical sympathy and religious awe, would render 
 them repellent to many whose fundamental aims 
 are not different.'' 
 
 Not different ! Are we not to-day in face of a 
 movement in all essentials the same as that of the 
 
MYSTERY 29 
 
 Bentimental rationalism of the eighteenth century? 
 There is the same effort to strip the Catholic faith 
 of everything that is perplexing to the understand- 
 ing, to interpret the life of the historic Church 
 with reference to categories fashionable at the 
 moment. 
 
 The modes of thought of the eighteenth century 
 were different from those now dominant. In those 
 days came the deistic and latitudinarian divines or 
 philosophers, Locke and Hoadly and their congeners, 
 with a loud appeal to clear the mind of cant, to purify 
 religion by divorcing it from ecclesiasticism (i.e. from 
 its social and communal expression), to interpret 
 Christianity apart from the inventions of a corrupt 
 and self-seeking hierarchy, purging it of miracle and 
 mystery, and turning the most gracious and beauti- 
 ful, the most tender and appealing of all God's gifts 
 to man into a rational morality, open to the com- 
 prehension of L'homme moyen sensuel. As for 
 the "dim common populations," they might go on 
 believing what suited them, until such time as 
 enlightenment had spread to them also. 
 
 It is a similar phenomenon we witness to-day. 
 All around us we see new theologies,' up-to-date 
 catechisms,* common-sense religions,* re-births,* re- 
 statements, some profound, some a little crude, all 
 rather depressing. From London and New York 
 and Birmingham, not to speak of the Continent, 
 
30 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 books pour from the press which are all directed 
 by the same bias. 
 
 We are to learn the permanent value of Christian 
 faith bj stripping it of every wonder and every 
 mystery. We are to reject the strange birth as 
 materialistic, the physical resurrection as unscien- 
 tific, sacramental grace as magical — above all, the 
 deity of our Lord disappears in a cloud of phrases ; 
 and all the Churches are invited to join in a caput 
 mortuv>'m of pious sentiment and pantheistic emotion. 
 In brief, we are to capitulate to the enemy on every 
 controverted point except the general need of reli- 
 gion and prayer, and then to trust to the God of 
 philosophy to come down " from the machine " and 
 save from the wrecks of ecclesiasticism just enough 
 to suit men of parts and of polish, while throwing 
 to the wolves the poor man's God, who wrought 
 wonders and rose from the tomb. 
 
 This tendency is to be observed from within no 
 less than without the Church. One priest of the 
 English Church, who wrote volumes to prove New- 
 man dishonest (unlike Kingsley, waiting till death 
 made reply impossible), has proudly elaborated a 
 Christianity relieved entirely of the supernatural; 
 and other instances are obvious.' 
 
 Moreover the same bias is tempting all of us. 
 Indeed, unless God's revelation be compulsory — 
 and ex hypothesi it is not — it Tmust be possible to 
 
MYSTEKY 31 
 
 view it from a rationalistic standpoint. The temp- 
 tation to a purely humanitarian view of Christ is 
 constant and universal. It is very easy for any 
 of us to fall into the snare, and seek to bring the 
 Gospel down to the level of our transitory concep- 
 tions, instead of viewing them in the light of the 
 Cross. The danger is there; we cannot avoid it; 
 but we may protect ourselves against it by prayer 
 and effort. 
 
 The Apostles themselves needed education before 
 they learnt the folly of tying their Lord down to 
 current political notions about the Messiah. So in 
 all ages disciples will be liable to fall into a similar 
 error, and to minimise the greatness and "pecu- 
 liarity " of the Gospel, thus making it the reflection 
 of our thinking, instead of the revelation of God's 
 life. 
 
 In practice we accept the facts of life, however 
 mysterious, and try to deal with them even where 
 we cannot fit them into theory. In religion it 
 seems often simpler to deny the mystery and to 
 make the abstract understanding the measure of 
 all things. That is what they did in the eighteenth 
 century. That is what we are asked to do to-day. 
 True, where our fathers thought of God as a 
 far potentate, we prate of the divine immanence, 
 as though the words were a sort of mystic incanta- 
 tion; and speak with bated breath of orderly and 
 
32 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 continuous change, as though the intellectual 
 difficulty sprang not from the idea of identity in 
 change, but from the time it takes to accomplish 
 itself.* 
 
 But now, as then, there is the same hostility to the 
 notion of revelation, and even greater antagonism to 
 miracles; which it is beginning to call wrong and 
 not merely irrational to credit. These writers are 
 indeed a Uttle more humble as they appear far more 
 earnest than those of the eighteenth century. They 
 are less clear and hard in their outlines. In words 
 they accept mystery and the suprarational, and rise 
 into lyrical raptures over the universe. But this 
 is only words. The moment mystery becomes con- 
 crete in Christ or His Cross or the Eucharist their 
 injured intelligence revolts and they loudly pro- 
 test in the name of rationality and common sense. 
 All this too in the name of Christ. I am not 
 now speaking of agnostics, but of men who believe 
 themselves possessed with the sense of the religious 
 needs of men and their intellectual propensities. 
 Finding in orthodox Christianity great difficulties, 
 they purpose, by what seem to them changes of de- 
 tail, to make it once more acceptable to the culti- 
 vated intelligence. Thus they are in their own view 
 apologists. They look for a great revival. Once 
 more will the Church go forth conquering and to 
 conquer, purged of its grosser elements, the relics 
 
MYSTEEY 33 
 
 of pagan and oriental error, refined to the modern 
 taste, relieved of its ignorant love of marvels, its 
 feminine submission to priests, and its really rather 
 vulgar preoccupation with sin and matters which 
 decent people do not think about. 
 
 It is unfortunate that the Christian Church does 
 not exist for the benefit of decent people; her 
 primary concern is with those who are not. It was 
 the poor who had the Gospel preached to them. We 
 preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling- 
 block, to the Greeks foolishness. This is as true 
 to-day as when St. Paul wrote the words. 
 
 Moreover it is a test of truth. 
 
 Tou cannot search for religion merely from the side 
 of intellectual inquiry and arrive at a Christian 
 result. It is impossible. For the intellect demands 
 necessity, and freedom is the postulate of the 
 Gospel. If Christianity is the marvel it claims to 
 be, to those who fail to recognise this Christians 
 are bound to seem fools. If we do not, it is either 
 because they are more Christian than they know, 
 or because we are less Christian than we imagine; 
 and it is far more probable that we have uncon- 
 sciously surrendered to their assumptions than that 
 they are coming nearer to us. 
 
 It is true that the Christian Church has done 
 more to make life more beautiful and gracious, 
 more to stimulate men's minds, more infinitely to 
 
 
 
34 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 inspire artists and poets, than any other cause m 
 history. For Christ alone gives enduring mean- 
 ing to those values without which work is vain, 
 and unlocks the treasure-house of love, that is joy, 
 which is the soul of art. Yet it is not to culture, 
 as such, that the Gospel ever can or ever does 
 address itself; but to the common heart of common 
 men and women, on fire with life and love, torn 
 with struggle and loss and sin, and appalled by 
 death. What is the use of judging Christ by 
 standards He does not profess to satisfy? Quite 
 plainly He declared that unless a man were 
 willing to enter the Kiagdom as a little chUd he 
 could not belong to it. It wiU not be Christ's 
 Kingdom, but something else which will result, 
 if you transform the Church into an institution 
 which might be agreeable for a university ex- 
 tension meeting, but has no fields where children 
 may play, and is too respectable for the poor. 
 
 For these can readily embrace the love of a Father 
 in heaven, of His Son who died to save them, and of 
 a Spirit who helps and understands them. Would 
 they feel at home in that adult religion now de- 
 manded, or find themselves at all in a sentimental 
 altruism, spiced with pious phrases, decked out in 
 a half-scientific, half-philosophic termiaology, which 
 may be a comfort to those who use it, but to us is 
 colourless and dispiriting.* Others may exhibit a 
 
MYSTEBY 35 
 
 real reverence for the human figure of Jesus, and 
 admire — with a certain patronage — His selfless and 
 gentle spirit. But they denude the story of all that 
 makes it unique, and treat the Church, not as a 
 society wherein His Spirit dwells, but as a human 
 institution, mainly bad. Thus they eliminate Christ 
 first from the other world and then from this ; while 
 bidding us admire a few isolated moments and 
 phrases in the Gospels, they plume themselves on 
 having secured a form of Christianity in which, if 
 the intelligent can find few objections, the "plain 
 man " discovers fewer charms. 
 
 The truth is that apologists are constantly tempted 
 to concede the claims of their adversaries by arguing 
 upon their assumptions, and these assumptions are 
 inherently opposed to the Christian faith, as re- 
 vealed and supernatural. If that faith be what it 
 claims, its defenders have only one course open 
 to them. They must help man's eyes to see the 
 King in His beauty; must set forth the grace of 
 Christian truth as the veritable splendour of God; 
 and show that it is more congruous with life, as 
 it is lived, than is any proffered substitute. I 
 think that since the time of Descartes, the process 
 I am condemning has been specially dominant. 
 
 For a long time men attempted to establish the 
 being of God by irresistible arguments, the only 
 deity thus attainable being a creation of the reason. 
 
36 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 God, if He exists, is not the conclusion of an argu- 
 ment but the most stupendous of facts. This, 
 however, has long been abandoned except among 
 professed scholastics; Butler's' maxim that "pro- 
 bability is the guide of life" made a revolution. 
 Since then, however, there is a somewhat analo- 
 gous danger in the attempt to secure irrefragable 
 historical certitude. But the evidence for such facts 
 as our Lord's birth and resurrection cannot be 
 appraised apart from our pre-suppositions. There 
 is therefore no prospect of any real agreement 
 among scholars upon the root facts of which the 
 creeds are the expression. 
 
 With some a different line is proposed. Idealism 
 in various forms displays the inadequacy of mere 
 rationalism, and develops what its adherents regard 
 as unanswerable arguments for the spiritual nature of 
 reality. A firm basis in reflection is thus believed to 
 exist for theistic behef, and it is anticipated that these 
 benefits will soon be universal when philosophic 
 training is extended to all. This is a great act of 
 faith, for neither the past nor the present position 
 of philosophic controversies observed as facts afford 
 much ground for any hope of general agreement. 
 This temper often brings with it a refusal to consider 
 as vital any belief not in this way acceptable to the 
 philosopher, and develops the tendency to trans- 
 mute religion into philosophy. It is often hostile or 
 
MYSTERY 37 
 
 apathetic to all the historical elements in Chris- 
 tianity, and though quite compatible with orthodox 
 beUef, tends to treat religion mainly as a system of 
 ideas, a luxury for the study rather than the lord 
 of Ufe and death. All these methods spring from 
 the same error — the desire to do away with the 
 element of risk in faith, and a dislike of what is 
 unfathomable to the intelligence. To all the forms 
 of the new theology there is one common assumption 
 — a naif faith in the intellect of man. 
 
 This faith is not only improbable but is contra- 
 dicted daily by the facts of life. If we were able by 
 thinking to plumb the secrets of things, it is clear 
 that no revelation is needed, nor could there be any 
 place in religion for mystery, which in its very notion 
 is something unfathomable. On this view it would be 
 true, as Browning said in irony that there is now a 
 higher tribunal than God, the educated man.i" and 
 the Christian religion must be made subject entirely 
 to our intelligence, and shorn of all elements which 
 transcend it. 
 
 But is this the case ? Is the abstract understand- 
 ing so completely master of life that we can afford 
 to dismiss without further ado all those apparent 
 facts which seek to elude or transcend its categories ? 
 Is it not rather the case that every single fact of real 
 life lies beyond us, and the problem is solved only 
 by living I 
 
38 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 All nature may be movement, but does any one 
 really understand motion or change ? We are told 
 that science has not yet explained one single fact, 
 and in the simplest things in outward life we find 
 a mystery unfathomable. ^^ It is but the universal 
 experience which is summed up by the poet : — 
 
 " Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide. 
 Like all created things, secrets from me, 
 And stand a barrier to eternity. 
 And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 
 From where I dwell upon the hither side. 
 Thou little veU for so great mystery 
 When shall I penetrate all things and thee 
 And then look back ? For this I must abide, 
 Till thou Shalt grow and fold and be unfurled 
 Literally between me and the world. 
 Then I shall drink within beneath a spring 
 And from a poet's side shall read his book. 
 Oh ! daisy mine, what will it be to look 
 From God's side even of such a simple thing ? " i' 
 
 But even though this were not the case, and the 
 outer world were quite within our intelligence, it is 
 the inward life that is the real, and that is always a 
 mystery, and speaks of something beyond. Bergson, 
 the supremely acute observer of this life declares, after 
 minute and positive examination, that the intellect is 
 by its nature incapable of comprehending life (and he 
 gives the ground, as none else before him has done), i' 
 This is the iostinctive deliverance of every man and 
 every boy, of all who have loved, or suffered, or 
 chosen, however it may be obscured by the obsession 
 
MYSTERY 39 
 
 of scientific uniformity or rational categories. The 
 partial, relatively superficial, character of intellectual 
 processes is revealed in a flash at the crises of life. 
 To one who is straining eyes through the gates of 
 death for his friend who has passed beyond them, how 
 unreal seem all studious delights! What a futile 
 mockery in the face of fact are all men's specula- 
 tive projections of reality. We may dwell at other 
 times in an abstract world and make ourselves 
 happy with conceptions. But life crashes in with 
 " its wonder, its beauty, and its terror " — our house of 
 cards trembles ; and we are kicked as it were froin the 
 rational to the real, from the surface to the depths. 
 
 Religion has been described as living with the 
 deepest depths of being ; its raison d'itre is the sense 
 of mystery.^* All its rites do but give form and 
 body to the instinct that things are greater than we 
 know; that we cannot grasp in our minds the real 
 things of life ; that there is an everlasting beyond in 
 ourselves, as in God. Mystery is, in fact, no less 
 needful than miracle in our world of thought to-day. 
 The one saves us from a world of cast iron; the 
 other from that profounder slavery of the mind tc 
 its own creations, from that superstition of the logical 
 process, which is willing in its blindness to treat the 
 real life of struggle and hope and joy as mere 
 illusion, if only at the cost it may preserve its 
 self-consistency. This is to make an idol out of an 
 
40 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 instrument. The perfection of theoretic harmony is 
 dearly bought if life be the price we are to pay for it. 
 
 Mystery, which it is sought to eliminate from 
 the creed, is of its very essence ; for the creed is a 
 " symbol " in its old name, the expression partial and 
 inadequate of something greater — life. Man's sense 
 of the greatness of things, of the profound wonder 
 in his daily life, is too deep to be eradicated by 
 any dialectic cleverness, and is proof against all the 
 ridicule of philosophers. 
 
 It is this sense so deep and universal that makes 
 the laity so conservative, for the theologian may be 
 tempted to construe the creed mainly as speculation ; 
 to the layman it is life. It embodies to him his 
 instinct of the greatness of things, and the profound 
 wonder of his daily life. And thus he is cool and 
 unregarding of aU the merriment discovered by 
 theorists in the speculative difficulties of his faith. 
 Demonstrate to your heart's content the contradic- 
 tions of the Divine Personality, of a Triune God, 
 of the Incarnation, and he is undismayed. He is 
 not concerned to explain his creed; his business 
 is with living, and he discerns no real relation 
 between your fine-drawn theories and life as he 
 knows it. Confuse, if you like, the Christian God 
 with the Absolute of philosophy, and then use this 
 confusion to argue that God is either not good or 
 not almighty, and he is no more perplexed than 
 
MYSTEBY 41 
 
 by so many conundrums, quite unanswerable and 
 equally cbildish.^^ He knows that the threads of 
 life pass out beyond him ; that " talking's puzzling 
 work"; and he resents your efforts "to pluck the 
 heart out of his mystery." His mystery; that is 
 the very root of the religious sense, and those who 
 attempt to tamper with creeds on that ground, and 
 on that ground alone, are doomed to failure. For 
 Christ appeals to men who have this sense ; and He 
 takes it for granted. 
 
 No reasoning can affect those who have it not. 
 We cannot by modifying the faith make it one whit 
 more acceptable to the thorough-going unbeliever. 
 Despise us he does and will ; all the more if he sees 
 that we are afraid of him. I think that one ground 
 of the respect which infidels have for the Roman 
 Church is that they feel that here is a set of men 
 who brave all their taimts and do not budge an inch ; 
 for whom the tyrannous rhetoric of naturalism or 
 rationalism is scatheless as the idle air. Fools of 
 course they are, but so are aU Christians ; they are 
 neither the better nor the worse for that; but at 
 least they have the courage of their stupidity, and 
 do not attempt to whittle away their faith and 
 "meditate emasculate Immanence." Now we are 
 tempted to do this ; for we do not like it being said 
 that no candid and intelligent man can be a Chris- 
 tian.^' We ought to like it, or at least to bear it. 
 
42 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 To be scorned as fools is the one way in whicli those 
 who work with their minds can say with truth that 
 " Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and say 
 all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake." 
 It is the offence of the Cross, and we may not shrink 
 from it. You cannot serve God and Mammon with 
 the mind any more than with the heart. Somewhere 
 there comes the choice between worshipping God and 
 idolising your own miad. You cannot escape the 
 choice ; and you must stake your all upon the leap. 
 
 " He either fears his fate too much, 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 Who dares not put it to the touch. 
 To gain or lose it all." 
 
 Idle it is and waste of breath to argue with men 
 like the author of "The Churches and Modem 
 Thought," or Mr. J. M. Kobertson.^' Their outlook 
 is anti-Christian to start with. The rose of Dante 
 with the Saints of Christ is to them as ugly and 
 unmeaning as the harmonies of Whistler to a jury 
 of bagmen, or the Fioretti to the late Mr. Samuel 
 Smiles. There is no common ground between us 
 and a man who could read the New Testament and 
 then pronounce that " some of the sayings of Jesus 
 display a relatively high moral standard." ^^ He 
 is indeed a strength to one's own faith> for in 
 his extreme cleverness and logical consistency he 
 shows us the true meaning of ideas, which others 
 
MYSTEKY 43 
 
 deck in more favourable colours. There can be 
 no question of satisfying such men, or inducing 
 them to think better of us, or say that we are less 
 ignorant than other Christians. Their contempt is 
 the only boon we can ask of them. 
 
 Far in truth from these vulgarities are the men 
 who in the name of Christ demand a revolution in 
 the Church ; but are they not, and we also, in danger 
 of being hypnotised by notions, which such writers 
 carry to their conclusion ? Is not this the case alike 
 with that obsession of natural uniformity of which 
 we spoke last week, and with that dream of rational- 
 istic certitude which we are considering to-day ? and 
 does not each of them do violence to the religious 
 consciousness ? 
 
 Taking the religious sense as a given fact, are we 
 right in supposing that a religion without mystery 
 would satisfy its needs? Are not those very mys- 
 teries, which are most repugnant to the rationalist, 
 the very elements which make the faith so great ? I 
 take one instance — the cardinal one — the Eucharist. 
 Believe it or not, you cannot deny that no other rite 
 has gathered round it such tenderness of devotion, 
 or stimulated so deeply man's sense of God's near- 
 ness and love ; nor will it be disputed that here is 
 mystery enshrined in the actual and the concrete 
 — ^not far off, but in the daily life. For this reason 
 the Eucharist is inevitably the first object of dislike 
 
44 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 to the rationalistic temper, and offends men -who will 
 accept other and less immediate mysteries. Yet 
 Europe, since Wyclif, affords ample evidence that 
 where this mystery is ignored or denied, religious 
 life— except for spurts of individual piety and 
 mysticism — becomes chill and commonplace, and in 
 time the other supernatural aspects are also seen 
 to vanish, as in Germany and Geneva.^' 
 
 Does it not then appear a rash undertaking to 
 reconstitute the Christian Church by excising all 
 its most wonderful elements ? Are not the accom- 
 phshed and respectable persons who preach the 
 crusade a little muddle-headed, if we may be par- 
 doned the word ? Is not even an eminent man like 
 Sir OUver Lodge making a blunder, and mistaking 
 futile concessions to an implacable foe for defence 
 of that religion which he loves so dearly ? The aim 
 is to strengthen the ark of the Church ; the danger 
 is (as Carlyle once said of a similar effort) that we 
 are boring holes in the bottom. Truly it would be 
 pitiful, if while we are overthrowing the cargo to 
 lighten the ship, we should lose the rudder too, and 
 drive it on the rocks. Before we turn the house of 
 our God into a glorified Polytechnic Institute, it were 
 well to pause and ask ourselves whether the age-long 
 instincts of humanity are to go for nothing ; whether 
 the love and devotion which gather round the Cross 
 have not some deeper root than stupidity or fear. 
 
MYSTERY 45 
 
 I think there is such a root ; it lies far down, and 
 ineradicable within us. It is man's own conscious- 
 ness that is the abiding home of mystery, and offers 
 resistless front to all the thrust of dialectical attack. 
 Dominated by the daily pressure of the outward, or 
 by the intellectualist fantasy, we forget to ask our- 
 selves what is most vital. Is not the reality of life 
 to us all, neither sense nor intellectual process, but 
 that dark inner world — that twilight of reflection — 
 in which we grope and wonder from day to day, 
 fighting with devils whose name is legion, whose 
 bewildered gloom is lit by strange lights of love 
 and pain, and transforms itself a hundred times 
 an hour ? Love and pain and death, but above all 
 things chance and choice are present for us all ; they 
 are the most real things in life ; " divine anarchists," 
 they baffle all efforts to sum the series of being, 
 and defy prediction. These are the things we really 
 know, and all else is secondary and subordinate, or 
 partial and abstract. It is in the " abysmal depths 
 of personality" that we find the final and fatal foe 
 of mere intellectualism. 
 
 But this sense is not developed in isolation. It 
 is home and school, social and communal life, which 
 reveal man to himself, and show him at once his 
 littleness and greatness, his powers of sacrifice and , 
 joy, his need of sympathy and love. The idol of 
 self-sufficient individualism is the danger of aU 
 
46 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 rationalism, and it is destroyed only by life in 
 society and by the need of love. Love is the mystery 
 of man's nature no less tban of God's ; nothing else 
 inspires the whole being, just because we cannot 
 reach its end. The man who loves will never weep 
 that he has no more worlds to conquer, for love 
 knows neither end to its sacrifice nor bounds to 
 its desire. In the words oi a great living writer: 
 " Mysteries which have no direct ethical value bear 
 tnost directly on Love, which ever seeks a certain 
 infinity and hiddenness in the object of its life. A 
 thoroughly comprehensible personahty would have 
 no attraction for us; it would afford no scope for 
 the unitive effort in which Love consists. There 
 must always be a beyond, a new territory to conquer, 
 a new difference to overcome. ... It is neither what 
 we seem to understand about God, that feeds our 
 Love ; nor the fact that He is definitely beyond our 
 understanding, but the fact that man can ever pro- 
 gress in knowledge and love, and always with a 
 sense of an infinite 'beyond.' It is at the margin 
 where the conquering light meets the receding dark- 
 ness that love finds its inspiration. To the savage 
 He is but the biggest and strongest of men ; to the 
 rationalist He is but the most intelligent and moral ; 
 to Faith He is the hidden Infinite of which these are 
 but the finite symbols." ^^ 
 
 Now rationahsm in all its forms is directly con- 
 
MYSTERY 47 
 
 trary to the instinct expressed in these words. It 
 tends to destroy the spirit of awe which is of the 
 essence of religion, and it is assisted by certain other 
 characteristics of our time, its want of quiet and 
 control, its habit of mistaking mere instruction for 
 education, and information for culture. These ten- 
 dencies, though powerful just now, are at bottom 
 alien from the English mind, whose rooted dislike of 
 theory is based on the sense that " reality is richer 
 than thought " ; and that action is the true life. 
 Doubtless our sense " that we can muddle through " 
 has its dangers, and indifference and folly are partly 
 responsible for the Englishman's refusal to think 
 things out. But when this is not exaggerated, and 
 the due rights of the intellect are recognised, this 
 very genius for action gives to the English mind 
 the best opportunity of making progress; it is not 
 speculation that is the danger, but speculation 
 merely for its own sake and apart from action. The 
 English vagueness which some condemn springs 
 largely from this sense, that the springs of life are 
 deeper than all reasoning, and are to be found in the 
 power to act and love, in those primal instincts and 
 unconquerable emotions which cannot be reduced to 
 formula. And this, when coupled with real intellectual 
 activity, produces the noblest results ; for it combiaes 
 the respect for tradition and authority with the ardour 
 of inquiry, which preserves it alike against rashness 
 
48 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 and stagnation. In the present problem the office 
 of mediating between new and old may not unfitly 
 repose upon that Church whose genius is displayed 
 in the serene and gracious intelligence of Hooker, 
 in the glowing thought of Westcott, in the wise 
 refusal of Butler to require demonstration in the 
 matters of life where "probability is the guide." 
 It is the temper fostered by our school and college 
 systems, whatever their defects. Perhaps we do not 
 always apply their results to the sphere of religion ; 
 although the deep reverence for the mysteries of the 
 faith which can be found still among many of our 
 educated classes in a higher degree than on the 
 Continent is at least a partial consequence. I 
 imagine that, however little devout he may be, the 
 attitude of the English officer or professional man 
 would be much less hostile to the Faith than it 
 is in France. 
 
 It is partly due to this cause. We learn, whatever 
 else we do not learn, at school and college, the in- 
 calculable worth of traditions, of reverence, of obed- 
 ience ; and the way in which the spirit of corporate 
 life alone develops our manhood. We learn, or may 
 learn, the futility of mere individualism, and the 
 abstract and partial character of purely intellectual 
 processes ; we can see their value, but we do not as 
 a rule tend to overrate them — although other causes 
 may make us do so. 
 
MYSTERY 49 
 
 There are many faults in our education, but it 
 has lessons for higher and more important matters, 
 both social and religious, than we are always ready 
 to discern; above all things it is congruous with 
 that sense of the mystery of things, and the value 
 of action, and the need of authority — that is, the 
 social development of personality — which are the 
 real foes to the aridity of pure rationahsm. 
 
 I think we can find in this temper part at least 
 of the hostility to scholasticism and certain other 
 aspects of Roman behef. We resent its hard out- 
 lines, its clear distinctions, its arrogance of certitude ; 
 while its attempt to secure an intellectually coercive 
 proof of God's being strikes us as both ineffectual 
 and unattractive. It is not valid; and if it were 
 valid, it would destroy the very belief it proves, and 
 it would make God inferior to our intelligence. 
 
 So with the doctrine of Transubstantiation. It is 
 not to the truth therein enshrined that the Eng- 
 lish mind objects, but to the attempt to rationalise 
 a mystery. The same feature was prominent in the 
 revolt of the last century against the cruder forms 
 of " the scheme of salvation," as it used to be called. 
 Men did not so much object to the doctrine of 
 the Atonement, but they shrank from the familiar 
 and almost vulgar way in which coarse analogies 
 were pressed, and attempts were made to measure 
 a profound and glorious mystery by line and rule. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 Now indeed the reaction has gone too far; and, 
 while making due reserves against any belief in 
 the absolute value of formulae, or words, we need 
 to emphasise those vital truths of which all these 
 doctrines are the inadequate symbols. 
 
 It all comes to this. The plain man's readiness to 
 accept the mysteries of God's grace rests at once on 
 his ignorance and his knowledge. He feels that in 
 all things there is mystery, and that what is the 
 constant factor of his inner being is somehow part of 
 the stuff of the universe. He places no reliance at 
 all upon the optimistic faith of men who, like Du 
 Bois Reymond, look forward to the day when 
 the world can be reduced to a mathematical for- 
 mula; or in the more common assertion that the 
 whole of being is penetrable to thought; for even 
 the delight in a poem or a piece of music can prove 
 the contrary .^^ He knows that, though you may 
 explain the world, he remains inexplicable to himself. 
 On the other hand, he feels that there must be reality 
 in that love and joy and willing resolve which are 
 the deepest and most real things in his life. The 
 Christian faith asserts this truth at once of the 
 mystery of things, of the eternity of love, of the in- 
 finite worth of choice, as does no other creed. And 
 this is its warrant. 
 
 To such an one belief in God is not dependent 
 upon formal proof; like his own existence, it is a 
 
MYSTERY 51 
 
 postulate, not a conclusion. Indeed, if God be, as 
 we say, a loving Father, it is clear that our know- 
 ledge of Him cannot rest on a basis of reasoning; 
 or it would be unlike our perception of any other 
 personal relation. 
 
 We cannot, indeed, too deeply take to heart the 
 lesson impressed from without by Kant and even 
 Herbert Spencer, and from within by Pascal and 
 Newman — that we cannot find God merely by the 
 understanding, that there is no coercive proof of 
 His being, and that all our terms to express Him 
 are but symbols and figures. No longer do men 
 attach absolute value to what are merely inade- 
 quate formulae, or waste energy over rational proofs. 
 These things are regulative, the best possible; they 
 do but suggest, they cannot comprehend, that awfiil 
 splendour of holiness which is far beyond word and 
 thought, and like all personal differences can only 
 be bridged by love and faithful souls. We might, 
 indeed, grant nearly all that a reverent agnostic could 
 demand — if only he would let us go on to say that 
 " God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." 
 What more He is we know not ; it is enough that 
 He is " our Father " and sent His Son to live and 
 die for us. 
 
 It is obvious — and our adversaries admit it — that 
 the sense of mystery, of the limits of the individual 
 reason, of Church authority, all alike reveal the need 
 
52 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of resting in the community, and finding in the 
 traditions, the rites, and the regulative powers of 
 the Church a value which would not be warranted 
 if we could make our faith by ourselves, or if the 
 Church were a merely voluntary association which 
 Christians were free to join or not as they pleased. 
 
 It will be said that this or any notion of 
 authority may give the rein to credulity, and is 
 the mother of all the tyrannies. But the abuse of 
 a principle does not destroy its use. Authority 
 alike in Church and State has real rights, which 
 misuse does not abrogate ; and the ground of it all 
 rests on the fact that it is "not good for man to 
 be alone." We are bidden to beware of superstition, 
 and Newman's example is quoted as a warning. 
 This example has no terrors. Apart from his per- 
 version (which is not here relevant), since Pascal and 
 perhaps Butler no single man has done such service 
 to true religion; and that by his life-long hostility 
 to "hberalism" in religion, by his sense of the 
 mystery of thiags, of the Umits of logical method, and 
 of the primary facts of God and the individual. ^ 
 
 Is it seriously a blind credulity that you can call 
 the danger of to-day, whatever class or circle you 
 consider ? Is it not rather a wilful superstition of 
 unbehef ? Doubtless credulity is a bad thing no less 
 than unbehef. But why are we to suppose that there 
 is more risk in believing too much than too Uttle ? 
 
MYSTERY 53 
 
 Whicli is the more compatible with humble 
 penitence, and what is any religion without it? Is 
 there any one here to-day who would not choose to 
 be an ignorant peasant kneeling at the foot of the 
 crucifix and crying, "God be merciful to me a 
 sinner," rather than the accomplished dilettante, who 
 thanks God that he is critical and cultivated, not as 
 other Christians are, or even as the parish clergy? 
 At least we know enough to condemn the second; 
 do we know enough to blame the first ? 
 
 For, indeed, man is all mystery to himself, and in 
 his heart are the undying springs of romance, of 
 that strangeness and joy in the heroic which strives 
 ever to reach beyond. " To find God," as has been 
 said, "is the true romance of every soul." Our 
 adversaries teU us in scorn that Christianity is in- 
 curably romantic — thank God it is; the great, the 
 supreme adventure, and beside it all others seem 
 dull and mean. 
 
 The Christian's sense of mystery encompassing, 
 his faith in the ever fresh love of God, of the reality 
 (that is), the creative newness of our personal life, 
 have made earth a place of vision and revealed the 
 smile behind the tears of men. This spirit it is 
 which fills the Church with grace no less than truth, 
 which gives to Christian saintliness its rare aroma, 
 which finds form in the arches of Rouen or the 
 mosaics of St. Mark's, which flames into legends 
 
54 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 like the Quest of the Sangreal or paintings like 
 the Adoration of the Lamb. This above all in its 
 mingling of tenderness and awe invests with such 
 winning appeal that worship, the true Divine 
 Liturgy, wherein earth and heaven are united, 
 and the Lord of all things once more veils His 
 glory to dwell with sinful men. 
 
 We have seen that resolute and widespread 
 attempts are being made now, as at other times in 
 the history of the Church, to reduce Christianity 
 to a religion purely rational and non-mysterious. 
 The attempts differ in form with the fashionable 
 tendencies of the moment; but whether they be 
 made by Gnostics or Arians, by Abelard or Socinus, 
 or by adherents of the New Theology, their aim 
 is unchanged. The argument is always an appeal 
 to the rational understanding to set aside those 
 elements in the faith which run counter to current 
 prejudices. The hope is to satisfy the non-rehgious 
 mind ; and in this aim its assumptions are borrowed 
 — assumptions antagonistic to mystery. 
 
 This argument, however, has no weight for the 
 religious sense. For the sense of mystery lies at the 
 root of that consciousness ; and, although individual 
 difficulties remain for discussion, the system as a 
 whole gains incomparably by those very elements 
 which invite attack. 
 
MYSTERY 55 
 
 Let us then' not be afraid of assaults, which from 
 the nature of the case the Christian Church must 
 endure. Prayer alone is a supreme mystery; so 
 long as that be retained it is vain to quarrel with 
 the faith because it tells of regions beyond thought, 
 A Christianity not mysterious would not, indeed, 
 be so open to attack as the CathoKc Church, but 
 neither would it be worth defence. 
 
 Faith without risk, without uncertainty, without 
 difficulty, would not be faith but sight. Keligion 
 does not end in wonder — but it begins there. A 
 religion without wonder would be no religion at all. 
 
 Take from the Christian faith its mystery and 
 strangeness, and see what is left. Is the creed when 
 " trimmed and stripped of all that touches the skies " 
 a beautiful or even a helpful thing? Is not the 
 life and faith of the Church a living whole which 
 we cannot mutilate any more than you could pre- 
 serve the charms of the PriTnavera or the Venus 
 de MHo, after you had torn the canvas or broken 
 the statue.^* Leave out, if you must, the mysterious 
 birth, the availiag death, the empty tomb, and the 
 sacramental presence, and what would you have 
 left ? Would it be very much to live by ? Would 
 it be anything at all to die for ? ^ 
 
III.— THE HISTORIC CHRIST 
 
 " The Word was made Flesh."— St. John i. 14. 
 
 In a moment of irony Huxley once prophesied that 
 a time would come when apologists would be telling 
 Christians to hold fast to their faith, quite apart 
 from the irrelevant question whether or no there 
 were any facts to confirm it ! ^ That prophecy has 
 come true. On all sides we are being instructed 
 that faith in the Gospel is at bottom adherence 
 to certain general principles of conduct and belief 
 in a spiritual universe; but that it is vulgar and 
 superfluous to chain that belief to the historicity of 
 any actual occurrences. 
 
 One defender of Modernism says: "If the faith 
 of Christendom in an eternal, present, and living 
 Christ could be overthrown by the historical proof 
 that his body was never raised, its foundation would 
 always contain an element of uncertainty." * 
 
 In R Programrrui dei Modernisti there are one 
 
 or two sentences of a similar kiad. They declare 
 
 that for faith it is of no importance whether or no 
 
 historical investigation can justify the salient facts 
 
 eg 
 
THE HISTORIC CHEIST 57 
 
 alleged of our Lord.* M. Loisy says much the same 
 in his distinction between truth of faith and truth 
 of fact, especially as that has been glossed by his 
 subsequent utterances.* Even ia England divines 
 of the Church are found asserting that the evidence 
 for the miraculous is of so indeterminate a nature 
 that we cannot use it as a foundation of any doc- 
 trine ; ^ while others seem to assert that the religious 
 value of the resurrection is independent of belief 
 in its actual occurrence.* 
 
 In aU this there is nothing strange. To minds of 
 the purely reflective cast religion is always largely 
 a matter of ideas ; and the historical elements will 
 detain their attention but little, even if they credit 
 them. Such men inevitably tend to treat faith as 
 a thing of subjective values and ideal dreams, re- 
 moved so far as may be from the unromantio prose 
 of common life. Men to whom " action is always a 
 little vulgar " will place their religion, if they have 
 one, in a region of imagination or speculative har- 
 monies where the steel of fact cannot touch it. 
 
 These tendencies are reinforced from many sides 
 to-day. Hegel set men disentangling the kernel of 
 idea in Christianity from the external husk of his- 
 torical facts and institutions. Kitschl had perhaps 
 a yet more potent influence in the like direction. 
 He did not, perhaps, himself deny or even depre- 
 ciate the importance of the historical foundations 
 
58 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of the faith ; but the stress he laid on the judgment 
 of value, as opposed to the judgment of fact, on 
 all the subjective elements in religion has led many 
 of his disciples, and some who are not consciously 
 his disciples, to emphasise the ideal and symbolic 
 aspects of Christianity, and to ignore, or even to 
 disbelieve, its historical foundations.' 
 
 A like result has come from the reaction against 
 literalism. We have learnt how untenable is any 
 theory of inspiration which asserts the factual accu- 
 racy of stories like that of Adam and the Serpent, 
 allegorical poems like the book of Job, narratives 
 like those of Balaam or Daniel. When every one 
 was maintaining that whether or no these stories 
 were true, the Christian faith was unaffected, it was 
 not surprising that some should go on to declare 
 that historical criticism is in its nature irrelevant, 
 and that in all essentials Christianity would remain 
 untouched even though the stories of the birth and 
 the resurrection of Jesus were dismissed as symbohc 
 rather than actual. 
 
 If religion were a thing of personal fancy, this 
 might be the case. Some few might be so rarely 
 gifted with imagination or mystical emotion that 
 their sense of God's nearness would undergo no 
 serious change, even though they believed M. Loisy 
 when he says that our Lord was not born of the 
 blessed Virgin; that he did not work miracles, 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 59 
 
 save a few cures; and that, so far from rising 
 from the empty tomb, he was never buried by 
 St. Joseph of Arimathea at all, but was thrown 
 casually into a ditch.* But this attitude is out of 
 the question for the great mass of men. Christian 
 faith does not rest upon history by itself, for its most 
 compelling arguments are the lives of the saints and 
 our own experience. But it is so bound up with the 
 events of at least one period of actual history that 
 if you destroy men's beUef in the substantial accuracy 
 of the one, you will not long retain even the name of 
 the other,* 
 
 Apart from the portrait of Jesus, it is idle to talk 
 of the Christian religion ; and whatever details in that 
 portrait may be irrelevant, the main impression of a 
 being at once natural and supernatural, unique in his 
 origin, in his action, and in his rising from the tomb 
 is inseparable from the portrait. And most men are 
 like children asking of a story-teller "Is it true?" 
 Convince them in regard to the story of Jesus that 
 it is not true, but only a symbol of the religious 
 aspirations of ages, and men will repudiate either 
 in scorn or sorrow the claims of the Church to be 
 the home of the soul, and seek for themselves some 
 other refuge. The New Temple may be grander or 
 nearer, more beautiful or uglier than the Christian 
 Church, but it will not be the Christian Church ; it 
 will be something else. 
 
60 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 The thesis of the creeds that God entered this 
 world in the life of an actual person places the 
 record of that life before us as a piece of history 
 and subjects our belief to the laws of evidence. 
 The attraction of the view which we have been 
 considering lies in its removal of the whole ques- 
 tion out of this sphere, and in making historical 
 criticism irrelevant. But from the very nature of 
 the case this is impossible, unless we divorce the 
 Christ-notion from that of Jesus, making Christ 
 but a name for religious experience. We cannot, 
 however tempted, separate a rational belief in Chris- 
 tianity from the careful investigation of its early 
 records. The century now past has been greatly 
 busied in this matter, and I need not here do 
 more than refer to the work of the scholars who 
 made Cambridge famous in European learning, and 
 the more recent Hulsean lecturers who have de- 
 fended the historical worth of the Gospels and the 
 Acts. From the crucible of severe investigation to 
 which the New Testament has been subjected two 
 facts appear to issue with some certainty. Nothing 
 in that investigation has resulted which hinders the 
 sound scholar from Nicene Christianity apart from 
 other hostile presuppositions. Details may here and 
 there be modified, but the decision of men like 
 Westcott and Hort in the past; of men like Dr. 
 Sanday and the Dean of Westminster or our own 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 61 
 
 Regius Professor in the present, is in this respect 
 quite unequivocal. 
 
 On the other hand, it is abundantly clear from the 
 mere observation of facts that historical criticism of 
 itself and alone is not sufficient to induce certainty 
 in the minds of those who, on other grounds, assume 
 the impossibility of the miraculous.^" 
 
 From the very nature of historical evidence this 
 must be the case. Evidence of alleged facts is 
 never demonstrative ; that is, the contrary is always 
 thinkable, and we are at liberty to explain the 
 evidence on that view without contradicting any 
 of the laws of thought. From this it follows that 
 it is only for men of very open minds, or in matters 
 of everyday reference, that evidence of facts will 
 seem to be conclusive : and this condition ex hypo- 
 thesi does not hold in the case of the cardinal facts 
 about Christ's life. The reception given in modem 
 times by minds biassed in the mechanical direction 
 to the evidence of hypnotism and thought trans- 
 ference is a cardinal instance of this. 
 
 AU belief in alleged historical facts depends partly 
 on the actual evidence, partly on a presupposition 
 that the facts are not in themselves and under 
 certain conditions improbable — i.e. on a faith in a 
 certain order of things, with which such facts are 
 congruous. In the case of ordinary events we ignore 
 these presuppositions because they are common to 
 
62 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 every one outside a lunatic asylum; though even 
 here we have exceptions which prove the rule. But 
 in the case of miraculous or very abnormal occur- 
 rences the consensus a priori as to what is likely 
 does not exist and never will exist, so far as I can 
 see ; and hence the evidence alone is not and never 
 can be suiEcient to convince every one that such 
 events have occurred, and we do wrong in expecting 
 a degree of certainty which, from the nature of the 
 case, is unattaiaable. The more abnormal or unique 
 any event is the larger part must be played in the 
 belief by our sense of its being likely; and the 
 greater divergences of opinion must therefore exist 
 as to the value or origin of the evidence. I think, 
 therefore, that they greatly err who hope to found 
 the Christian religion on a certain basis by pure 
 historical inquiry, isolated from other considerations : 
 and such a conviction if carried out will infallibly 
 lead to the circle of belief being confined to those 
 events, which being of a normal though perhaps 
 unusual type do not require to establish their credit 
 by any further presuppositions about the world than 
 those drawn from everyday experience by thinking 
 men. Though even here, as all literary criticism, 
 especially modern German scholarship, demonstrates, 
 the merely academic and abstract conception of 
 human nature is apt to narrow unduly men's notion 
 of what is possible.^^ 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 63 
 
 I have heard that an eminent historian considers 
 that our Lord's resurrection is a fact of history as 
 certain as the death of Julius Caesar. With all 
 respect I submit that this view is untenable and 
 is disproved by the very large number of instructed 
 persons who disbelieve in the one, while of the other 
 there is practically no doubt whatever. Belief in 
 the resurrection of Christ cannot be possible, apart 
 from certain presuppositions as to what the world 
 means or may mean, which enable a man to view 
 the evidence sympathetically. Otherwise some form 
 of the vision-theory or self-hypnotism is an obvious 
 way of overcoming the difficulty without impugning 
 the veracity of the narrators. If you study history 
 with the presupposition of M. Seignobos, that since 
 miracles do not happen the evidence for them must 
 be ruled out beforehand, it is a foregone conclusion 
 that you will not find any convincing evidence of 
 the miracles of our Lord, nor of those of the Church, 
 and that you wiU set down all answers to prayer to 
 coincidence or mere suggestion.^^ On the other 
 hand, to a Christian behever who has both examined 
 and approved the evidence and has appropriated to 
 himself the presence of the Hving Christ in the 
 Church and the Eucharist, the resurrection may 
 seem a fact infinitely more certain than an event 
 like the death of Julius Csesar, which strikes him 
 as merely external fact. 
 
64 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 Indeed nothing is clearer than that all the results 
 of historical investigation tend to confirm the view, 
 that of all extraordinary facts the belief, and of all 
 ordinary facts the interpretation and the causal con- 
 nections, i.e. of all history as a fruitful study, depends 
 on our presuppositions at least as much as on the 
 documentary evidence. Even Lord Morley declares 
 that the " historian can only approach the cupboard 
 with his bunch of keys in his hand." ^^ 
 
 Here, again, another consideration meets us. Part 
 of the evidence for any fact is not the narrative of 
 the witness, but the knowledge of its results. For the 
 witness may be a bad narrator or self-deceived, even 
 if he is not interested. And we cannot isolate the 
 inquiry into our Lord's rising from the tomb, and 
 discuss it apart from the actual alleged effects of 
 that risen life. The Church is the supreme historical 
 document; and it is mere folly to leave it out of 
 account. We have to explain on the naturalistic 
 hypothesis, not only the statement that the events 
 occurred, but the actual observed results of belief in 
 their occurrence. I do not say that they cannot be 
 explained on that hypothesis ; as a fact they are, and 
 will continue to be so explained by men with a 
 strongly naturalistic bias. But to me that explana- 
 tion seems unnatural and forced, and if carried to its 
 consequences absurd. 
 
 As Creighton said, " The presuppositions of the 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 65 
 
 critical mind need examination, no less than those 
 of the orthodox ";i* and in discussing any theory 
 about the documents as narratives of the early 
 Church, we need to ask ourselves what are the 
 assumptions, often unconscious, in the writer's mind 
 which have gone to the making of that theory? 
 Above aU things, there is the assumption, so common 
 that it is often unexpressed, that Christianity is 
 merely an episode, a phase of social progress, and 
 that its so-called supernatural elements are merely 
 the ideal dreams of an undeveloped culture. You 
 can make this assumption, if you will; and if you 
 have no reUgious experience of your own to con- 
 tradict it, it is probable that it will seem to you well 
 founded. Only be sure what it is you are doing; 
 and let your method carry you to its due results. 
 Do not take it by halves. 
 
 The New Testament and the Church are so deeply 
 saturated with supernaturalism that the interpre- 
 tation of the narratives on a purely naturalistic 
 basis is not reaUy possible, provided you admit the 
 historicity of Jesus. It seems to me, as Dr. Poakes 
 Jackson says, far more reasonable to carry your posi- 
 tion to its consequences and declare with Mr. J. M. 
 Robertson against this, than it is to cut and carve the 
 portrait in the Gospels, and proclaim your belief in a 
 purely human Christ.^ At the same time this method, 
 when thoroughgoing enough, is self-destructive. 
 
 E 
 
66 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 Mr. Robertson's book, "Pagan Christs," in which 
 this theory is developed, will seem eminently 
 plausible to those who are unaware of the multi- 
 plicity of critical theories, and the ingenuity with 
 which they are all defended; and have no deep 
 inward experience to fall back upon.^* 
 
 For that is the final point ; criticism must always 
 be in part devotional, if it is to lead to sound results 
 for the religious mind (and here as elsewhere we 
 take that for granted). We cannot divorce our 
 inquiries either from what the Church has shovm 
 itself in the lives of the saints or from what Christ is 
 to ourselves. "Interpret the Bible as you would inter- 
 pret any other book," in so far as it is not a truism, 
 is a maxim futile and impossible. Nobody does. 
 Nobody can. The Bible has entered so much into 
 the fibre of Christendom, it is so deeply inwoven with 
 our thought and imagination, that we can no more 
 treat it like any other book than we here can think 
 or act as though our schools or colleges had not part 
 in making us what we are. Civilisation, in its ideals, 
 Its hopes, its morals, is largely what the Bible has 
 made it ; and one cannot effectively stand apart from 
 all those influences which have gone to produce the 
 world in which we live. 
 
 Hegel used to say that a man could no more get 
 out of his own age than he could jump out of his 
 skin. If this be true of the fashions of thought and 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 67 
 
 feeling that change so quickly, still more is the 
 maxim true of any attempt to take the Bible purely 
 apart from the society of which it was the outcome ; 
 from that whole course of development in which it 
 has been so potent a factor. The Bible will never 
 look the same to a man within and a man without 
 the Church, and neither can see it with quite the 
 same merely critical interest that he would bring 
 to bear on the Nibelungenlied. Our criticism can 
 only be undenominational by becoming either non- 
 Christian or nugatory. You can establish nothing 
 that way except the matters which from the reli- 
 gious standpoint are least important. As Pro- 
 fessor Burkitt said at the Pan-Anglican Congress, 
 "It is vain to study the Bible apart from the living 
 Church." " 
 
 Let our criticism be honest and sincere ; but do not 
 let us, whether Christians or non-Christians, imagine 
 that we really approach the subject with minds un- 
 biassed and empty, i.e. with no minds at all. Let 
 us get clear our own assumptions, as to belief in God, 
 the value of the Church, or personal experience of 
 Christ : let us try to unmask the assumptions of our 
 opponents, and above aU beware of accepting on 
 their assumptions results which are valid on no 
 other condition. 
 
 But, if after all inquiry, we find ourselves unable 
 to retain beliefs so dear, it would be wiser, though 
 
68 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 less agreeable, to " face the music," and to give up 
 the name of a faith which has no other basis than 
 our own aspirations. "Things are what they are, 
 and their consequences will be what they will be; 
 why then should we wish to be deceived ? " If we 
 are convinced that Jesus was not unique in His 
 birth, His acts. His words, in His death, and what 
 followed death, but was born and lived and died 
 merely a man of noble virtue and a holiness sup- 
 remely gracious, then for heaven's sake let us say 
 so. In the long run we shall conquer our doubts 
 best if we follow without flinching where they lead. 
 Our dangers to-day are a faith blind to its terrific 
 meaning, and a doubt that dares not look itself 
 in the face. Let us have done alike with faith 
 disguised and an unbelief decorated. If we cannot 
 believe our faith, let us at least believe our doubts 
 and act on the belief. 
 
 What makes the supreme difficulty about the 
 historic Christ is also the ground of His unique 
 appeal — His implication with earthly life, God self- 
 revealing under human conditions, in an actual 
 historical person, subject to the limits and con- 
 ditions of a particular race at a particular epoch. 
 This to many is the crux — the projection of God 
 into the outside world in history, in the life of 
 Jesus, in His body the Church, and His approach 
 to man in visible sacraments. It does seem hard. 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 69 
 
 Those for whom life means largely reflection are 
 tempted to make their religion a matter of ideals 
 and personal fancies; and they resent the harsh- 
 ness 01 external facts. Observe, it is not so much 
 the miraculous, not perhaps at aU the mysterious, 
 but the actual that makes the trouble here. The 
 religion is real enough; but as Newman said of 
 his ideal gentleman, "his religion is one of ima- 
 gination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of 
 those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, 
 without which there can be no large philosophy." " 
 
 Now Jesus Christ, the Church, the sacraments, are 
 hard facts, at first sight purely external; and fact 
 seems prosaic to men who live in a realm of dream 
 and speculation, untroubled by the more urgent 
 temptations. Such is the happy and sheltered lot 
 of many of us in an Arcadian peace of high pur- 
 suits and congenial society. Each of us here has 
 more or less to encounter this temptation — living 
 for the most part in a world of refined debate, 
 saved by education and circumstance from the 
 spectacle of the grosser sins, enjoying the varied 
 conveniences of a high civilisation, seen on its least 
 seamy side — we are aU inclined to turn our faith 
 into a private philosophy or a personal mysticism ; 
 to resent the stress laid by less fortunate Christians 
 on mere fact, and to find almost insuperable the 
 obstacles real and grave to belief in that concrete 
 
70 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 and particular gift of God in Jesus and that unique 
 worth of one moment which is to the plain man 
 of the essence of his faith. For I take it that to 
 the plain man the one sure basis is in fact; in 
 the belief (to avoid theological terms) that some- 
 thing passing strange did as a fact take place in 
 Syria when Tiberius was head of the Roman world 
 and Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judaea. 
 
 But it is just this leap into the concrete that is 
 so hard to many of us to-day, and no one has felt 
 this more strongly than the speaker. God's revela- 
 tion in Christ means this, if it means anything ; and 
 yet to all of us who live largely in the realm of 
 thought and inner feeling, it seems almost vulgar; 
 and to those with any strong mystical sense of union 
 with a living power it seems quite needless even if 
 true. In this state of mind it is just as hard to 
 credit as of any real value the circumcision or 
 the cleansing of the Temple, as the transfiguration 
 or the feeding of the five thousand. They are 
 facts outside of us; they may have happened, but 
 as mysteries embodying truths of vital significance 
 we cannot understand them ; they are far off and 
 finished. This tendency has, moreover, been in- 
 creased by the habit of Protestants of ignoring or 
 neglecting the continued presence of Christ's Spirit 
 in the Church and the sacraments, which makes 
 these past events a part of the living present, and 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 71 
 
 guards against that sense of remoteness ■which to 
 the mind athirst for God here and now is so dis- 
 tressing. This doctrine has been indeed in some 
 sort arrested by the Evangelical notion of mystical 
 union; but that is apt to be individual, while the 
 Church and the sacraments are social and com- 
 munal. It may indeed be doubted whether even 
 those who have held high sacramental doctrine do 
 not in some cases rather over-emphasise its indi- 
 vidual side, as a gift to each personally; and the 
 discontinuance in so many churches of the Eucharist 
 as the great corporate act of praise has rather tended 
 to emphasise this view. It is only as we see this 
 restored as a social, not merely individual act, 
 the praise of God in aU its splendour, that we are 
 likely to correct an evil so widespread. Still it wUl 
 always remain a difficulty to those who by cir- 
 cumstance and temperament find their religion 
 adequately represented by their own inward sense 
 of union with God or by a set of ideal principles. 
 The concrete story of Jesus, the actual society of 
 Christians, the immediate grace of the sacraments, 
 as partly a gift from without, will seem to such, 
 if not false, at least superfluous, not fuller and 
 richer but emptier than our dreams of eternal 
 righteousness. For the concrete must partake of 
 the limitations of this actual world, and that is 
 the meaning of the Incarnation. The teaching of 
 
72 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 children is perhaps the best corrective of this state 
 of mind. I have learnt more apologetic from cate- 
 chising children than from many books. For that 
 brings our religion at once from the speculative to 
 the concrete, and shows us the danger of turning 
 the faith into a philosophy, and placing abstractions 
 instead of the richness and colour of real life. 
 
 It is indeed the absence of this sense that the 
 child is a part of the Church that is the great 
 strength of the undenominational principle, and 
 makes men wilhng to treat a few ethical principles 
 as a substitute for the wonder and beauty of the 
 Christian Church ; or at best to turn the faith into 
 a set of propositions, which can be acquired in isola- 
 tion and have no organic interconnection. 
 
 Ever since the sixteenth century this tendency 
 has been at work, and we have seen many forms 
 taken by the desire to make of religion something 
 mainly experimental and inward, and to cut it off 
 from the limitations of outer fact, or the vulgarity 
 of institutional life. In the pietistic form, belief in 
 Christ and the Atonement, and the sense of union 
 with Him, is still strong, and exhibits itseK in many 
 saints, Ln the spiritual ardours and austere morality 
 of Puritanism at its best. But it despises the 
 Church as carnal and full of sinners, and dislikes 
 the sacraments as gross and material, degrading to 
 God's majesty and to man's freedom. This view, 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 73 
 
 however, retains a strong sense of the authority of 
 some religious community. A little further we find 
 this denied, all forms of priestly authority are re- 
 sented, as interfering with individual freedom, an 
 attempt to come between God and the soul. Finally 
 we reach the modern form, when an attempt is 
 made to take the leading ideas of Christianity quite 
 out of their historical setting, and Christ becomes 
 a name for religious experience. We see on all 
 sides the conception of religion, subjective and 
 manufactured, differing greatly according to tem- 
 perament, but uniform in scorn of the common 
 faith and practice of Christendom. 
 
 Now it appears to me that the principle which 
 we have seen exhibited in regard to the miraculous 
 and mysterious elements in our faith is still more 
 clearly true in this matter of its historical character. 
 Dreams and golden fancies, individual and personal 
 ideals, speculations and abstract principles, are the 
 privilege of the few. To them religion may be 
 made up largely of such elements. To the great 
 majority, however, life is above aU things concrete ; 
 they are not greatly interested in thought; but of 
 their relations with other men, of their weakness and 
 insecurity and of their own inner struggles they are 
 acutely conscious. In a faith which is above all 
 else "personal trust in a person" who once lived 
 upon earth, in a society which co-ordinates their 
 
74 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 highest aims and directs them by its authority in 
 the outward given grace of sacramental life, they 
 find that strength and support, that sense of 
 anchorage, of being at home, of having something 
 like themselves to cling to, which no philosophy 
 and no religion merely individualist could give 
 them. The claim of the Gospel is not so m/uch to 
 solve problems as to come nea/r to hv/man lives. It 
 is to man, as he lives and works, as he fights and 
 sins, as he loves and hopes, as he feels the need of 
 outside support to sustain him in his weakness, of 
 Love from Beyond to console him in his gloom, 
 of social institutions and environments to prevent 
 his spirit being crushed by the world or throttled 
 by comfort, that the Christ appeals. To everyday 
 men and women, with the pettiness and stains of 
 sordid vulgar life, but also with the tenderness and 
 heroism never far from any lover, never unknown to 
 parent or child, to these it is that the Christian 
 Church makes its appeal, resting on definite facts 
 issuing in clear statements, and ministering gifts 
 real but supernatural. 
 
 Making abstraction for the moment of its alleged 
 miraculous character, let us take into account the 
 ways in which faith in the historic Christ at once 
 ministers to the needs of the common religious con- 
 sciousness and awakens inevitable criticism. 
 
 (1) First of all, here is something "given." 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 75 
 
 Without question, if Jesus be the Word made flesh, 
 and His Spirit be continued in the Church and com- 
 municated in the sacraments, -we are participating 
 in a benefit, in theological language, a grace, which 
 comes to us from without, which is not due to our 
 own moral effort or intellectual zeal, which could 
 not have come without a special act of God's will 
 intending to reveal Himself in a unique way, apart 
 from His revelation in the world and our own con- 
 sciousness. It is true that both sides are needed; 
 God does not do all the work. The gifts of grace 
 can never avail to our healing unless by our own 
 act and deed we appropriate them. Nor can we 
 worship that life which reveals Him, without the 
 use of mind, no less than will. The simplest creed 
 involves all sorts of implications, which it is for 
 the intellect to develop. Nevertheless it remains 
 true that if Jesus, His life and death, as interpreted 
 and expressed by the society which He founded, are 
 to us of any final worth, it is just because He is 
 something given to us, something we could not have 
 done or discovered for ourselves. With this notion 
 of the given goes that of Church authority. We 
 cannot accept Jesus as Lord without surrendering 
 the claim to be our own masters or even to follow 
 merely the inner light. 
 
 This will always constitute a difficulty for certain 
 minds. Those for whom religion is largely a matter 
 
76 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of thought and inner aspiration find something re- 
 pulsive in the notion of external authority, in the 
 fixity of a faith bound to a definite person and 
 forms. They object, too, to what seems distant, 
 to the worship of one who lived so long ago. It 
 is true, as we said, that this distance is done away 
 in the Church and the sacraments, which embody 
 Christ in a Uving society, and bring Him close to us 
 in the Eucharist. But to such men this also seems 
 distant, as being external, material, not spiritual ; if 
 they remain Christian they will incline to some 
 form of mysticism or Quakerism, which assures the 
 soul of immediate union with God, and does away 
 with all instruments; grace without the means of 
 grace. 
 
 But with the common man this is not the case. 
 It is this sense of an outside power to relieve his 
 weakness and to reassure his trembling faith which 
 he needs above all else, and finds in the historic 
 Church. By bitter experience he knows that without 
 help given he is powerless to bring his life into har- 
 mony with his aims, and to introduce order into the 
 chaos of his passions and desires. Besides he wants to 
 feel at home, to have something to catch hold of; this 
 want is to him suppUed by the actual story of Jesus 
 upon earth, and the visible institutions and ordi- 
 nances which express His life. Above all things it 
 is in God revealed as man that he finds a religion 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 77 
 
 to understand. Persons we are and in personal in- 
 tercourse our life is passed; so far from Christian 
 dogma being unintelligible to children or ignorant 
 people, the Gospel is the simplest and easiest of 
 all religious systems for the plain man, if we avoid 
 technical terms. Everybody who has experience 
 in teaching the young knows this as a fact, if he 
 compares the simple facts and dogmas of the 
 Church with any speculative ideas he might be 
 inclined to make a substitute. 
 
 The Gospel with its story of Jesus, and the Church 
 as the family of His love, do but carry to its highest 
 all that world of uplifting joy revealed to us through 
 human love and society. The sense of personal de- 
 pendence it inculcates is entirely in accord with our 
 life, in so far as it is not overlaid by the fallacious 
 individualism which is the result of sophisticated 
 culture and artificial economic privilege. It may 
 be that the Gospel, with its claim to give us a 
 home in the Church, a food in the sacraments, a 
 friend and saviour in 
 
 " Jesus who lived above the sky 
 Came down to be a man and die," 
 
 seems hard of credit to those who, neglecting the 
 circumstances which have made them critical and 
 independent, start arguing from their own minds 
 in a high state of culture; but to the mass of 
 
78 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 struggling men and women, in so far as they are 
 religious, this is not the case. In the story of 
 Jesus, in the life of His Church, in the power of 
 sacraments, they find truths precisely germane to 
 their own experience, and are helped to organise 
 it more fruitfully. As Creighton put it in letters 
 which will ever remain among the classics of 
 apologetic : — 
 
 " Life can only be explained by a life ; and I see 
 in Jesus that life of which all other hfe is but a 
 partial reflex."^* 
 
 " Relationships founded on a sense of lasting affec- 
 tion are the sole realities of life. This is obvious. 
 It is the burden of all literature; it leads straight 
 on to Christ. Faith is personal trust in a person. 
 Christianity does not call upon me to commit 
 myself to something contrary to my experience. 
 It asks me to discover its law already written in 
 the world. In Christ all becomes plain. In my 
 relationship towards Him all my other relation- 
 ships find their meaning and reality."^ 
 
 Two main objections there are which in the pre- 
 sent age the historical revelation of God in Christ 
 arouses in nearly all minds : (a) that it is historical, 
 fixing our thoughts on one particular period long 
 past; (b) that it is concrete, and professes to find 
 the Eternal Spirit in a particular personage. Let 
 us take them in order. 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 79 
 
 (2) Dominated by the notion of continuous upward 
 growth, men find it increasingly difficult to attach 
 absolute value to a series of events which took place 
 nearly two thousand years ago. They are willing more 
 than ever to see in Christianity a very fruitful phase 
 of spiritual progress; they can discern in it some 
 of the noblest purposes and finest characters in 
 history. But intellectually, morally, and spiritually 
 the world has greatly changed since the days of 
 Herod the King, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem 
 of Judsea. Our whole world, inner more than outer, 
 is larger and more complex than it was to them, or, 
 so far as we can judge, to Him. Is it not a mockery 
 to ask us in the twentieth century to bow in worship 
 to this obscure teacher, who betrayed no knowledge 
 of art, who was unconscious even of the thought of 
 Plato and Aristotle, and showed no acquaintance with 
 sociology and politics ? The substance of a recent 
 article in the Hihhert Jov/rnal puts nakedly and 
 brutally a thought that in less repulsive form has 
 probably occurred to most of us.^^ The world looks 
 forward not backward. Is not to turn our eyes to 
 the past in the way Christianity bids us to narrow 
 our outlook ? This feeling seems bound up with 
 the historic sense, the faith in the world as de- 
 veloping. Yet here again the appeal is from theory 
 to facts — facts personal, historical, artistic. 
 
 The sense of life as continuous change contains 
 
80 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 truth, but it is not the whole truth. If it were, 
 we should not be able to attach any worth or 
 meaning to special moments in our lives, or indeed 
 to ourselves at all, as persons. All would merge 
 itself, decisive events, passions, personalities, into 
 one endless stream of process and there would be 
 no foothold. If you really carry this notion to 
 its conclusion (allowing no contrary facts), you are 
 left with the sense that nothing happens at all, 
 that there are no classical moments in history or 
 in art or in individual life.''^ We are lost in the 
 ceaseless flux; we contemplate everything, includ- 
 ing ourselves, as one whole, in such a way that 
 no part has any significance for itself, but only 
 as passing into something else. The individual 
 pictures himself the passive resultant of outside 
 forces, a wind-driven straw. It is only the reality 
 of our inner life that prevents us seeing this to 
 be the logical issue of all theories which make 
 of life process and nothing else. In our own life 
 we know, and act on the knowledge, that each of 
 us is in some way an end in himself, not a mere 
 cog of a machine. In words that have become 
 classical Walter Pater expressed this feeling of the 
 impotence and insignificance of experience seen 
 under this category: — 
 
 " This at least of flamelike our life has ; that it is 
 but the concurrence for a moment of forces parting 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 81 
 
 sooner or later on their ways." ... "To such a 
 tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the 
 stream to a single sharp impression with a sense in 
 it, a relic more or less fleeting of such moments gone 
 by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is 
 with this movement, with this passage and dissolution 
 of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves 
 off — that continual vanishing away, that strange 
 perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves." '^ 
 
 To all this talk of ceaseless development there is 
 only one answer, the appeal to fact. The most real 
 and pertinent truth of our life is the actual worth 
 of the present. Difficult though it be to conceive 
 or to justify to the critical intelligence, it is the 
 present reality of our existence expressed in our 
 own sense of choice and freedom, of pleasure 
 and pain, which is our guiding star. Without 
 it our experience might be more logical, but it 
 would cease to be experience. This alone makes 
 virtue possible or even thought real, while in respect 
 of pleasure the reality of the moment is proved by 
 every postponement of all future goods, even self- 
 interest, to some transient and guilty gratification. 
 We may prate as we please of the present having 
 no reahty, being merely the product of the past and 
 the parent of an inevitable future. If it were this, 
 no more and no less, we must surrender as illusions 
 aU that consciousness, acute in times of crisis, of the 
 
82 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 absolute worth of the here and now; the reality of 
 what we experience at this definite moment. The 
 shining evidence of this Ues in the great moments of 
 our own life, or in the supreme and classical examples 
 of art. 
 
 To all of us there are times, days, of such tran- 
 scendent, normative worth, that we fall prostrate, 
 crying— 
 
 " Verweile doch, du bist so sohon ;" 
 
 or in the words of the English poet who has done 
 most to express this truth, we cry — 
 
 " That eternity shall afiSrm the conception of an honr." " 
 
 This value of monumental moments, this feeling 
 before some work of beauty that here at last is 
 something finished, done for ever, that time and 
 chance have no power upon the idea thus embodied, 
 is inseparable from the sense of all greatness in art 
 and life, and is clearly subversive of that notion of 
 progress incessant and unretarded, of which we spoke. 
 It is a thing in itself, a possession for ever that we 
 value in the Hermes of Praxiteles, the tombs of the 
 Medici or the Sainte-Chapelle, not a mere phase in 
 illustration of culture-history. Our very notion of 
 what is classical, raised by its own worth above debate, 
 the thing of beauty which is in itself " the joy for 
 ever,'' shows how the moment we take to comparing 
 values we are driven to this feeling of there being 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 83 
 
 crises, moments whose significance is something 
 quite different from that ascribed to them as mere 
 items in the historical series. 
 
 Now all this is bnt carried to its highest power 
 in the doctrine of the worth of Jesus to man, the 
 unique value of His earthly life, for instance, the 
 moment when hanging on the cross He used the 
 words, " It is finished." ^^ 
 
 By asserting the eternal value of that moment 
 in the life of men it redeems us from the sense 
 of nothingness and impotence which the spectacle 
 of the changing world is bound to awaken. It 
 does for us as persons in history what miracles do 
 for us as bodies in nature. By asserting the reality 
 of life in the present, the value of moments, it saves 
 us from the terrible grip of fate which men are 
 always in fear of. For it is no new thing, this 
 sense of being caught in a machine, though recent 
 tendencies perhaps enhance it. It needs no science 
 to see the link between present and past; the 
 Juggernaut of fate is oppressive to the primitive 
 no less than to the modern mind. 
 
 What man needs, what as a religious and moral 
 being he demands, is to be assured that there is 
 something more than this linking of moment to 
 moment, of act to act, in a chain whose ends he 
 does not see. Is it, he cries, that his inner life is 
 all an illusion ? Is the agony of choice, the rapture 
 
84 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of achieved resolve, the peace of love, the vivid 
 hues of beauty, the loneliness of pain all a sham, 
 "a tale of little meaning though the words are 
 strong:" and himself the centre of it all but a 
 stone in an eddy? Or are his moments gifts of 
 God, real in their worth and meaning, transient 
 in time, but eternal in mystery and value? This 
 great spectacle of the Cross, this act done as theo- 
 logians tell us, " alike in time and eternity," is the 
 supreme assurance that the thoughts of our hearts 
 are not all vain, it confirms the deliverance both of 
 individual life, so sorely striving and deeply feeling, 
 and of artistic beauty, so frail and yet so enduring. 
 At this day, when external and mechanical theories 
 seem to dominate our thought and life, and express 
 themselves clearly even in economic relations, there 
 is the danger that all the "living interests and 
 hopes and achievements" of man wUl be seen but 
 as items in a series, and denuded of their worth 
 for personal beings. Here as elsewhere life is too 
 strong for theory. Man knows that his agony and 
 his joy are real and vital. This knowledge is 
 deepened by belief in the value of the historic 
 Christ, the doctrine that His life, though lived in 
 Palestine, is of absolute value; that the moment 
 of His death was decisive, classical, in heaven no 
 less than on earth. 
 But this is not all. There is another and deeper 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 85 
 
 objection to belief in the eternal worth of Jesus as 
 God's revealing Himself. It is, I suppose, the supreme 
 and peremptory crux in the Incarnation. Though 
 congruous with the last this diflBculty is not quite the 
 same. It is possible to overcome the difficulty of 
 attaching such value to a special moment and yet 
 remain staggered at the claim that Jesus was God. 
 We are asked to believe that in one, who was for a 
 time a helpless child and then lived as a small Jew 
 tradesman, there dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead 
 bodily. Is it seriously to be thought of? Can we 
 credit that the abiding Spirit which sustains the world, 
 which directs the course of human and even celestial 
 hfe, should express Himself in a fashion so riotously 
 insignificant ? Think what it means. That infant at 
 Bethlehem, God, the centre of all our worship, the 
 source of all our being, the meaning of all our 
 thought. Is it not "a thing imagination boggles 
 at"? It does. We shall do well to picture our- 
 selves the claim of Christ in all its naked terror 
 before we give ourselves to adore " the splendour 
 of God," more dazzling in the manger, the shop, 
 or the cross, than when shining amid the armies of 
 heaven. 
 
 It is this central paradox of the Gospel which 
 gives it at once its charm for the common heart and 
 its perplexity to the speculative thinker. If we 
 work it out, it will be found that the God of the 
 
86 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 latter is never more than an abstraction. We have 
 in fact to choose between an abstract God, a necessity 
 of thought, and God concrete in Jesus. All the 
 divisions come at last to that. We have to make 
 up our mind, as between some form of "cosmic 
 emotion" and the sublime madness of the faith, 
 which bids us worship a babe, a carpenter, and a 
 criminal. 
 
 And yet it is just this which wins us. For we 
 need no Christ to assure of God's greatness. The 
 universe may be a mistake, but if it is, it is a very 
 great mistake. Cosmic emotion is obvious enough, 
 and comes to all in certain moods. It may be, as 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison says, but a poor religion ; but 
 it is a religion, and it is open to all.^* It does not 
 need knowledge or culture to discern how sublime is 
 the order in which we are placed ; or to find in the 
 grandeur of things, despite if not because of its 
 cruelty, an uplifting thought which may shame our 
 pettiness and lead to a stoical patience. "God is 
 great," the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which 
 needed no supernatural being to teach men. 
 
 That Ood is little, that is the truth which Jesus 
 taught man, and we find at once so tender and so 
 perplexing. It is of the nature of love to be infinitely 
 minute, as well as soaring in its imagination, and this 
 nature is shown us by Christ. All His most appealing 
 qualities reveal this aspect ; the heart of Christendom 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 87 
 
 has gone out to the story of Bethlehem and the 
 manger, of the shepherds, and the wise men ; to the 
 blessing of the children, the words about the sparrows 
 and the lilies. This is what gives to Christian devo- 
 tion its distinctive, poignant note, so different in its 
 simple gaiety from the honour paid to the First 
 Cause, or the Absolute, or the Necessary Being, 
 the SuTTimum JBonum. The mother and the child, 
 the helpless sufferer on the cross, the " gentle Jesus " 
 of the hymn — these are images that come close to 
 the toiling and wayworn, the disinherited and the 
 'neffectual; sometimes perhaps to the neglect of 
 austerer truths. It is not God in His power and 
 majesty, the pride of Deity, which was revealed in 
 Jesus, but in deed and truth God in His humiha- 
 tion, scorned, spat upon, dying, that has been 
 the force which changed the world more than all 
 the armies of all the emperors. And even to this 
 day and by the confession of our adversaries, "'tis 
 Christendom's the matter with the world." And not 
 Caesar nor Napoleon, not Plato nor Bacon, counts as 
 a fact in the life of to-day for a tithe or a thousandth 
 part of that eighteen months' ministry of the pro- 
 vincial carpenter. Admit His claims or not as you 
 please, but in His case it is a mere matter of obser- 
 vation that " God hath chosen the foolish things of 
 the world to confound the things which are wise, the 
 weak things of the world to confound the things 
 
88 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 which are mighty, and base things of the world and 
 things which are despised hath God chosen, yea and 
 things which are not, to bring to nought things 
 which are." 
 
 Like all the real things of hfe this truth is hard to 
 fathom ; yet it is the case that the revelation of the 
 manger and the Cross has given to men that which 
 elsewhere they seek in vain. It may be easier for the 
 Church to believe in God as the moral governor of 
 the universe, or the immanent Spirit, or the un- 
 changing idea — but to the despairing conscience, 
 to the worldling satiate with pleasure and seeking 
 rest, all this is words and emptiness. But tell him 
 of the tender love which gave its only begotten 
 Son, speak to him of the child of Nazareth, and 
 at once, if he can trust you, his heart leaps up. 
 
 " 'Tis the -weakness in strength that I ciy for, 
 My flesh that I seek in the Godhead," 
 
 The vision of God's greatness is ever with us to 
 appal and oppress, and we withdraw trembling from 
 His glory. Show us the vision of His littleness and 
 weakness, love self-emptying and suffering, and we 
 can cry in the old hymn — 
 
 " Jesn, Lover of my soul, 
 Let me to Thy bosom fly." i 
 
 One who contemplates the faith from a superior 
 standpoint dismisses these words in the phrases : 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 89 
 
 "The Power which made the stars and the tiger 
 to be addressed by a pet name ! Need I say more ? 
 Can I say less? "« 
 
 Certainly not. In these words and this rather 
 obvious comment lies the whole distinction between 
 the Christian attitude and its opposite. God does 
 allow us to address him by a pet name, if you must 
 have the phrase.^^ He is as in the old English 
 mystical writer, "full-homely and fuU-courteous." 
 That nearness and tenderness, that "embrace of a 
 personal loving-kindness " it is which Jesus came to 
 reveal to man on God's side, and make possible on 
 his own. It is this intimacy with God for which the 
 Gospel stands and wUl stand, without which it would 
 lose its meaning and sink perhaps nearly to the 
 level of the substitutes for it suggested by the same 
 writer. 
 
 It is this tender and delicate love, which has 
 flamed into myriad forms of devotion, some wise, 
 some unwise, which has found the world's greatest 
 gifts of art in painting that ever-new and ever- 
 old theme of the Madonna and Child, the Wise 
 Men and the Shepherds, the Agony, and the Cruci- 
 fixion; this which breathes through the whole of 
 Christian mystical writing, making "The Imitation" or 
 "Grace Abounding" or "The Confessions" so different 
 from the reflections of Marcus Antoninus or Epictetus ; 
 which invests with its childlike and incommunicable 
 
90 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 grace the frescoes of Fra Angelico and Giotto, and 
 gives their distinctive charm to men like St. Francis 
 or Damien or Dolling, and adds depth to the force 
 of natures like Hildebrand or Dominic, like Luther 
 or Wesley. 
 
 This sense ot greatness greater in the little than 
 in the sublime, of the nearness of that which in 
 other systems is far off, this presence here and 
 now of the Eternal Spirit, embodied in Jesus or 
 veiled in symbol in the Eucharist, gives its pecuUar 
 distinction to all Christian thought and emotion. It 
 is because the historical Jesus can mean this, and 
 came to say it and prove it in His life, that of His 
 Incarnation we "need say no more, we can say no 
 less," than that He is God, "God of God, Light of 
 Light, Very God of Very God," one being with 
 the Father; that we may ourselves share a little 
 in that life, and follow with faltering steps the road 
 to Gethsemane. This truth, if we combine it with 
 that of the sacramental presence and the living 
 Church, removes alike the danger of the far-off 
 potentate of Deism and the merely immanent prin- 
 ciple of Pantheism. For it reveals God as distinct 
 from the world and yet mingling with it ; " far off but 
 ever nigh " ; for whose dwelling the heaven and the 
 heaven of heavens are not too great, and the heart of 
 the child or the sinner is not too little or too mean. 
 
 It is because we have this value in the actual 
 
THE HISTOEIC CHRIST 91 
 
 historical person, Jesus of Nazareth the carpenter, 
 that in spite of all the difficulties (and they are 
 very real), we know that we are on the side of 
 the victorious forces of the world ; and in this sign, 
 the sign of Bethlehem and the Star, we shall con- 
 quer. It is that little child that shall lead us; 
 that poor tradesman is worth all other teachers; 
 that dying criminal redeems. Provided only we 
 trust Him, not our own fancies; prayer, not our 
 own cleverness; and even in His defence rely on 
 His grace, not our own skill; then we shall find 
 this strength in ourselves enlightening, arresting, 
 driving: and daily will love lead to union and 
 union to more love, until the veil shall be rent 
 and the spirit be at last at home in a rest which 
 not the devil and all his angels may violate. 
 
 " Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? 
 Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or 
 famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in 
 all these things we are more than conquerors 
 through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded 
 that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
 cipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things 
 to come, nor heightj nor depth, nor any other crea- 
 ture shall be able to separate us from the love of 
 God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 
IV.— FORGIVENESS 
 
 " If we Bay that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the 
 tnith is not in us ; but i£ we confess our sins He is faithful and just 
 to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." — 
 1 St. John i. 8, 9. 
 
 Sin is not merely a tragedy to the individual. It 
 is a nuisance to the systematic thinker. It destroys 
 the idea of a single self-consistent order harmoni- 
 ously developing under unalterable laws, and dis- 
 plays an incoherent world. 
 
 Suffering creates a somewhat different problem. 
 However many the difficulties it raises, we cannot 
 but discern in practice the vast utility of pain. And 
 this quite apart from its alleged refining influence, 
 which is by no means necessary or universal. But 
 many of the virtues are to us unthinkable apart 
 from suffering. Without pain there can be no 
 courage, and no sacrifice, nor any of the graces 
 and delights bound up therewith. Through all 
 life there runs the lesson of the Cross; I must 
 lose my life to save it. In a world in which we are 
 to be trained to virtue through freedom wherein 
 love is the highest virtue, suffering, alike to resist 
 temptation and to embody the giving-ness of love 
 
FORGIVENESS 93 
 
 is inevitable.^ With sin, however, the case seems 
 difierent. 
 
 Repentance, or at least remorse, is an ineradicable 
 instinct. And remorse involves the sense that 
 what has happened ought not, and need not, to 
 have happened. 
 
 If we transfer our gaze from our own inner hfe 
 to that of the world at large, and contemplate 
 the spectacle of a world of free spirits, chaotic and 
 awry through this contradiction, we find it ugly 
 and upsetting. Picture to yourself the thoughts 
 and feelings of the millions alive at this moment; 
 and is it not disorder, misery, a feehng that 
 things are wrong, and they are wrong, that is most 
 general? It is not the superficial harmony, but 
 the profound inner contradiction of men's souls 
 that is the reality of the living world; the whole 
 "creation groaneth and travaileth in pain until 
 now." Taken from the psychological, not natu- 
 ralistic, standpoint, it is not disorder, but even the 
 modicum of order that is the miracle. Truth of 
 actual present fact, of men's inner mind and feehng, 
 is the truth of " a land without any order." 
 
 It is an act of faith, at bottom of faith in God, 
 to see in all this chaos of conflicting wUls, and 
 the will itself divided and diseased, a process that 
 makes in the long run for harmony. Yet this is 
 the assumption of the rationalist and the Christian 
 
94 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 alike; only the Christian religion asserts that the 
 harmony is slowly being wrought out through the 
 love of God, and requires the miracle of Christ's 
 death on the Cross to effect it. The rationalist 
 assumes that the order is here and now and always 
 has been; and since facts without and within are 
 so strongly against it, he is forced to adopt the 
 policy of the ostrich and to say "so much the 
 worse for the facts," 
 
 They tell us that evil is but the idea realising 
 itself by opposition, positing its own negativity. 
 Sin is a moment soon to be transcended in the 
 progress to a higher unity. Or, adapting a different 
 method, that it is a survival from the animal stage 
 gradually and inevitably working itself out ; or that 
 it is a morbid illusion based on a fallacious behef 
 in freedom and fostered by priests; or that it 
 carries its own forgiveness provided we eschew a 
 mawkish penitence and stand upright before God; 
 or else that, though small in volume, sin is essen- 
 tially unpardonable, and that to talk of atonement 
 is moonshine. 
 
 Such views are commonplace nowadays. Nearly 
 all those who propound some one of the newer forms 
 of Christianity, in spite of all other divergences agree 
 in this — they belittle the Christian doctrine of sia 
 Thus one of the latest, Mr. Algernon Sidney Crapsey, 
 expresses himself: " The man of the new dogmatic 
 
FORGIVENESS 95 
 
 will not look upon himself as of necessity and 
 essentially a sinner. He will not believe that he 
 is impotent to keep the true law of his own being. 
 . . . The man of the new dogmatic will not only 
 observe all good laws ; he will love them. He will 
 not lie nor cheat nor steal, because he hates lying, 
 cheating, and stealing. Such an one will not be 
 guilty of fornication or adultery, because these sins 
 are repugnant to his soul. Until they are hateful 
 to him he is not a man of the new dogmatic. . . . 
 The old dogmatic erred in laying the great stress 
 of its preaching upon the fact of sin." * 
 
 Even Horace knew more of human nature than 
 this complacent preacher of the facility of righteous- 
 ness. 
 
 Another more eminent teacher, Sir Oliver Lodge, 
 declares that : " As a matter of fact the higher man 
 of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, stiU 
 less about their punishment; his mission, if he is 
 good for anything, is to be up and doing." ' 
 
 In opposition to St. John, who declares sin to be law- 
 lessness, the author of " The Creed of Christ " asserts 
 that " sin so far as it is illegahty and nothing more 
 is not sin " ; but, on the other hand, " moral iniquity 
 is both too real to be cancelled and too serious to 
 be ignored."* . . . " If we retain our power of loving, 
 we shall be able to outgrow and live down our sins, 
 we shall be able to prove that our sins were no sins. 
 
96 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 that they did us no lasting moral harm." Mr. R. J. 
 Campbell, who pursues to extremes the thought 
 that sin is selfishness, refuses to see any " sin except 
 in ofiFences against the altruistic principle, Sin 
 against God is sin against the common life." This 
 would deny the sinful character of much impurity 
 in thought and act, and puts the welfare of the race 
 in place of the Eternal God. It is in fact a purely 
 socialistic ethic quite different from Christianity 
 which is in the true sense individualist. In this 
 view, since all religion is altruism, the altruistic sen- 
 timent is the only atonement. "This love force, 
 this intense loyalty to Jesus, was and still is the 
 redeeming thing in the life of mankind; There 
 is not and never has been any other Atonement. 
 It is but a step from sinner to Saviour. To cease 
 to be a sinner is perforce to be a Saviour. To escape 
 from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to 
 become a power in the hand of God for the uplifting 
 and ingathering of mankind in Himself; this is the 
 Atonement." ^ 
 
 Finally, Mr. Lowes Dickenson declares: "The 
 sense of sin is the centre of all Christian ethics. 
 Now this, I believe, is an attitude becoming increas- 
 ingly unreal to most serious men. Christianity 
 insists upon the essential weakness of man. It 
 allows him no strength, save what is derived from 
 somewhere else, from Jesus Christ."' 
 
FORGIVENESS 97 
 
 These illustrations occur in writings designed to 
 advocate religion and (with one exception) the Chris- 
 tian religion. They are not the language of men pro- 
 fessing a naturalistic or non-religious view of things. 
 
 If the views therein adumbrated be true, it is 
 clear that Christianity as a religion of deliverance 
 is a thing of the past. It becomes a sort of spiri- 
 tualised method of social amelioration. Sin is 
 indeed the centre of the controversy; Christianity 
 appeals and professedly appeals to those only who 
 are full of it. " I came not to call the righteous 
 but sinners to repentance." The Gospel may make 
 a few into saints; it is a gift to all because they 
 are sinners. Now the sense of sin is so personal 
 and inward a fact that it is idle to think of con- 
 vincing by argument any one who is without it. 
 Such an attempt is like trying to make a man in 
 love by mathematics. It is only by ignoring the 
 emphasis laid upon sin that we can for a moment 
 deem it possible to convert our adversaries by con- 
 troversy. This is a condition which is too often 
 absent from the minds of apologists with the result 
 that their work is ineffectual. 
 
 Controversy may sometimes reassure Christians 
 assailed by many perplexities. It may help to 
 determine men on the brink of faith to take the 
 final plunge. It may now and then cause fair- 
 minded unbelievers to look at facts they had left 
 
 G 
 
98 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 out of account. Or it may insinuate here and there 
 a seed which after experience may render fruitful. 
 But it is vain and even silly to expect to convince 
 men of the need of a Saviour who are as yet un- 
 troubled by conscience. 
 
 But since the Gospel addresses itself to the re- 
 ligious needs of men, it is worth while to interrogate 
 the religious consciousness and to ask whether as 
 a matter of fact the writers we are discussing are 
 not mistaken as to its deliverance. Do the utter- 
 ances of rehgious men in all ages give countenance 
 to this claim, that religion does not imply a sense 
 of sin or implies it in a very much slighter degree 
 than we have been apt to think? No one indeed 
 denies that many Christians do not feel it acutely 
 at all times and that their contrition is very per- 
 functory; and the language too often used about 
 the obvious way of Confession tends to confirm this 
 laxity. Nothing is more cruel than the way in 
 which, from a standpoint of cultured superiority, some 
 divines despise and depreciate what is to many of 
 us the only reasonable hope of overcoming temp- 
 tation — sacramental confession.' But is this laxity 
 the mark of good Christians or even of the most 
 religious non-Christians ? Do we, as a fact, find that 
 the higher we go in the scale of religious insight 
 the less and less place do we find for sin and the 
 need of forgiveness ? 
 
FORGIVENESS 99 
 
 To ask such a question is to ans-wer it. The 
 evidence of the saints in all ages is at one on 
 this point. The words of St. Paul, "sinners of 
 whom I am chief," are not the mock modesty of 
 a popular preacher; they are the deep and poig- 
 nant cry of the God-stricken soul in every age; 
 so genuine that at times we deem them morbid. 
 Morbid or not, they are the actual utterance of 
 the inmost being of men so diverse as St. Augustine, 
 Pascal, Bishop Andrewes, Pusey, Bunyan. Even in 
 other and less perfect religions there is the same 
 dehverance — the feeUng that man is weak and by 
 his own doing comes short ; that there is something 
 out of joint in the world ; and that he cannot of 
 himself heal the breach. In this respect the study 
 not only of the Christian Church but of the whole 
 religious history of the world, speaks with an accu- 
 mulation of force. In all the elaborate ritual of early 
 sacrifice and purgation, in Mithraic and Neo-Pla- 
 tonic mysteries, even in the pessimism of the East 
 or of Schopenhauer,® there is a sense sometimes 
 deep, sometimes superficial, of the unworthiness of 
 man, of the "awryness" of the world and its need 
 of redemption. This sense varies greatly in form and 
 even in its relation to God or His existence, and in 
 the practical conclusions which it inculcates, but in 
 every case mingle notions fundamentally the same, 
 that we have all sinned and come short of the glory 
 
100 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 of God. And if indeed God be love, this must be 
 the case ; the first sense of the lover is his own un- 
 worthiness. Whether late or early in life, whether 
 dim or dazzling, comes the vision of the " first and 
 only Fair," there comes this other in its train, this 
 sense of the gulf between what we are and what we 
 might be. 
 
 Even apart from this inner torture of contradic- 
 tion and weakness we see or know enough of the 
 appalling ravages wrought in the world by drink 
 and lust and avarice to realise that something is 
 wrong ; and no sober judgment can attribute them 
 entirely to circumstance ; and if it were there must 
 be something very wrong in circumstance — some 
 breach in the universe. It is the highly specialised 
 departmental nature of modern life that — abstract- 
 ing personal causes — makes so many blind to-day 
 to the outer or inner meaning of sin. A high per- 
 sonal standard, a sheltered life spent in manifold 
 activities, intellectual and beneficent, aloof from 
 the mass of men, inevitably tends to diminish the 
 emphasis of sin, and with it the need of religion. 
 
 If, however, we consider the world so far as it 
 finds vent in the religious consciousness, then we 
 cannot fail to conclude, in the words of an observer 
 not of our faith, that : " There is a certain deliverance 
 in which religions all appear to meet : — 
 
 " (1) An uneasiness. 
 
FOEGIVENESS 101 
 
 "(2) A solution. 
 
 " (1) The uneasiness reduced to its simplest terms 
 is a sense that there is something wrong about us 
 as we naturally stand. 
 
 "(2) The solution is that we are saved from 
 the wrongness by making proper connection with 
 the higher powers."* 
 
 This dictum is not the utterance of a fanatical 
 friar. It breathes none of that atmosphere of 
 abasement which inspires the Miserere or the Be 
 Profundis, and strikes so harshly on the cultivated 
 ear in revivalists. It is the conclusion drawn from 
 an array of observed facts by a student of psychology, 
 with no other interest than stating what these facts 
 imply. Yet it is to be noted that that conclusion is 
 diametrically opposed to the case of the new theo- 
 logians as we saw it; that it confirms that sense 
 of a world in need of redemption to which the 
 Gospel makes its appeal. 
 
 Moreover this sense has nothing to do with the 
 origin of this corruption, so poignant and tragic 
 in its consequences. It is not for our purpose 
 material whether or no this sinful tendency be 
 due to the fault and corruption of Adam, or the 
 willing acceptance of certain animal passions that 
 have come up through the course of evolution. 
 
 The question is, Is it there, this sense of sin? 
 not, How did it get there? Do we as a fact 
 
102 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 experience this sense of guilt, of weakness, of a 
 diseased will; and are we most conscious of it 
 when we are most conscious of the call to the 
 higher life? And to answer this, each of us can 
 only appeal to his own consciousness; he can go 
 no further. St. Paul had to go to himself for his 
 evidence : " We know that the Law is spiritual, but 
 I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I 
 do, I allow not; what I would, that do I not; 
 but what I hate that do I. ... To will is present 
 with me, but how to perform that which is good 
 I find not; for the good that I would I do not, 
 but the evil which I would not, that I do. . . . 
 Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver 
 me from the body of this death ! " ^° 
 
 Either these words awaken an echo in our hearts, 
 or they do not. They may seem to represent our 
 own deep and constant experience ; or we may feel 
 ourselves members of that fortunate band who can 
 say with a different teacher, " the higher man of 
 to-day is not worrying about his sins; he wants to 
 be up and doing." 
 
 It is only Lf St. Paul's words represent the facts 
 that the Gospel has any foothold in my soul. 
 
 For myself I find them true, and the other not 
 true to my inner life. It is that very "worrying" 
 about sin which I cannot escape that obstructs all 
 my desires to be up and doing and blights even my 
 
FOEGIVENESS 103 
 
 highest and purest thoughts. Doubtless I might 
 be happier, could I feel myself a man of the new 
 dogmatic, not " essentially a sinner " ! But I cannot. 
 I cannot help it ; I have this burden, like Christian 
 in the story, and I cannot roll it off except at the 
 foot of the Cross. Miserable and ■well-nigh hopeless 
 in face of the future, I have to live. Taught by oft- 
 recurring failures to distrust my best resolves, and 
 finding sincerest love and all the hardest sacrifices 
 vain, stained with the past, frightened in face of 
 the tempter, aware how easy it is to yield and what 
 little rest he gives, tortured with lustful passions, 
 a prey to pride and malice, contemptible even more 
 than odious in my weakness, divided in my inmost 
 being, torn every hour between God and the devU, 
 to whom shall I go ? What must I do to be saved ? 
 Alas ! I know that I can do nothing. I have no quid 
 pro quo to offer God, and cannot win my pardon by 
 any virtue or gift ; I am naked, beaten, prostrate. 
 
 " Nothing in my hand I bring, 
 Simply to Thy Cross I cling : 
 Naked come to Thee for dress ; 
 Helpless look to Thee for grace ; 
 Foul I to the fountain fly ; 
 Wash me, Saviour, or I die." 
 
 What is true of myself may probably be true of many 
 others — though I hope not of all even here. To all 
 so feeling, the facile optimism of the new theology 
 is sheer unreahty. How are we to approach the 
 
104 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 drunkard or the harlot, and many sinners neither 
 drunkards nor harlots, yet deeply conscious of their 
 "soul's tragedy"? Are we to tell them that "the 
 deeper sins never are forgiven," or that they are to 
 forget all about it, and be up and doing? How 
 can they with this open wound ? Until the sickness 
 of the soul is healed, the call to be up and doing 
 is futile and irrelevant. It may indeed be the truth 
 that there is no forgiveness ; that man is the sport of 
 a mocking fairy who gives him a sinful nature and 
 offers no help to overcome its irresistible allurements. 
 But if this indeed be the case, if the story of 
 redeeming love is a lie, then for many of us our 
 whole life is in ruins. Even the highest and noblest 
 of truths but add insult to injury and change torture 
 into madness. Religion without deliverance, though 
 it may appeal to a few favoured and noble spirits, is 
 no hope, no treasure to me. I and such as I could 
 in that case only say of the Incarnate Lord, " I shall 
 see Him but not now ; I shall behold Him but not 
 nigh." 
 
 Preach to the stricken sinner every truth of which 
 we have hitherto been speaking, and apart from 
 redemption you will but deepen his gloom. Tell 
 him that God has revealed the other world as by 
 a flash, that He is a Spirit, not tied down to the 
 sensible universe, that death does not close all. He 
 will answer, " So much the worse for me unless you 
 
FORGIVENESS 105 
 
 can rid me of the barrier which divides me from 
 God and leaves me lonely." TeU him again that in 
 the mystery revealed he can find things analogous 
 to the mysteries of our own life, so strange and real ; 
 that our vague dreams of a world vaster than our 
 own petty interests have their roots in reality ; and 
 he will say, " Perhaps : it sounds beautiful, but that 
 world so bright and gay of prayer and praise and 
 work is not for me. Tell it to my friends, if you 
 will be kind. Bid them keep the innocence I have 
 lost. I am not one of those pure in heart who shall 
 see God. The land that is very far off is eternally 
 far from me; I am stuck in the mire, and every 
 struggle I make to get free only plunges me deeper." 
 Go further, and tell him how, not away and above, 
 but here upon earth One came and Uved the Ufe of 
 God, and showed as child, as youth, as man what 
 true life is ; how not as a poetic dream, or an idea 
 of thought, but as life personal and human, God 
 revealed Himself; you will but increase his despair, 
 and deepen the sense of dividing guilt. "What is 
 your Christ-God to me, or Mary, the most blessed 
 among women ? They are come with a curse. Take 
 away this image of perfect love, of " a joy in which I 
 may not rejoice, a glory I shall not find." I cannot 
 share this holiness which makes my guilt blacker. 
 Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." 
 Such and so despairing would be the thoughts of 
 
106 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 any sinful man or woman, if the Gospel in all its 
 beauty and wonder came before him, and no place for 
 pardon and deliverance were seen. 
 
 And yet we are told that forgiveness is against 
 the nature of things, and that it is immoral to expect 
 it. It is true that we see it daily among lovers 
 or in families, in all personal relations. But that 
 mere human fact is ignored. And pardon, where it 
 is not said to be a matter of course, costing nothing, 
 is pronounced beyond even God's power to grant. 
 The assumption on which this notion rests is 
 that the world is made up of forces interacting with 
 mechanical necessity, and not of free spirits. Forgive- 
 ness is impossible unless God be free, and not the 
 slave of His own laws. The iron uniformity of 
 nature, the unalterable bonds of cause and effect are 
 insuperable difficulties to those who look only 
 without. "The new dogmatic teaches that there 
 can be no such thing as the forgiveness of sins ; the 
 law of consequences forbids such a thing," ^^ A 
 great novelist and thinker of the past generation, 
 George Eliot, made this belief that forgiveness is 
 unthinkable the centre of all her teaching.i^ 
 
 Cause is followed by consequence, character is 
 built up slowly from irrevocable acts; and unless 
 there is in personality some inner spring of freedom 
 the hope of redemption seems an absurdity; while 
 in some cases the almost mechanical operation of 
 
FORGIVENESS 107 
 
 the grosser sins, like intemperance, seems to confirm 
 this view. It is only our inward consciousness of the 
 power of love, and the actual fact of human forgive- 
 ness and its regenerating influence, that act as a 
 bar to such an argument. But those who stifle this 
 sense or ignore it urge that to preach this doctrine 
 of pardon and recovery is to mock men with an 
 illusion ; further, that it is dangerous for the know- 
 ledge of a possible forgiveness leads to lax morahty ; 
 although the Psalmist of old declared, "there is 
 forgiveness with thee, therefore thou mayest be 
 feared." 
 
 If this be true, then it is not over the gates 
 of heU but the threshold of birth that the motto 
 should be carved: — 
 
 " Abandon hope all ye who enter here," 
 
 for earth is the place where repentance is im- 
 possible. Sinfulness is a universal fact, and if there 
 be no pardon, we shall all, or most of us, sink 
 lower in the scale of being, and morality and law 
 will be saved at the expense of the damnation of 
 the race. 
 
 For what they tell us is not so much that forgive- 
 ness is impossible as that it is immoral. It is indeed 
 remarkable how all the principal objections are 
 now urged from the ethical rather than the in- 
 tellectual side. Non-intellectual presuppositions are 
 
108 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 by no means the monopoly of tlie Christian. It is 
 immoral and superstitious even to hope for miracles 
 instead of resting in the natural order ; immoral and 
 obscurantist to desire mystery and withdraw from 
 the cold abstractions of rationalism; immoral and 
 childish to worship in the stable, and offer gifts to a 
 babe; but above all things it is immoral, the proof 
 of a mean and coward spirit, to seek for forgiveness, 
 fit only for children. Precisely. We are children, 
 and cannot and will not be satisfied without a child's 
 pardon. Like children or beggars we refuse to take 
 no for an answer. " Forgiveness is a beggar's refuge ; 
 we must pay our debts," says Mr. Bernard Shaw. 
 Exactly. I am a beggar; I cannot pay my debts, 
 and never shall be able; and I will knock at the 
 doors of God's House imtil He grants me pardon. 
 For " the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and 
 the violent take it by force." 
 
 It is because I know forgiveness is so hard, and is 
 opposed to strict justice, that I need it so terribly. 
 I do not need your talk of nature's inevitable 
 sequences to show me that pardon is a difficult 
 thing, or that any but God can make those whose 
 sins are as scarlet as white as wool. That is clearer 
 than the sun at noonday : it is precisely that which 
 weighs upon me. It is the impossible in forgiveness 
 that makes its beauty and gives wonder to the 
 good tidings of the Cross. Like you, I can hardly 
 
FORGIVENESS 109 
 
 credit it, this strange gift of pardon and reunion. 
 But I do credit it; it is my one hope. It is, as 
 you tell me and we say in common speech, too good 
 to be true that on me, me stained and broken, me 
 weak and contemptible, not on my respectable neigh- 
 bours this great gift has come, and I am allowed to feel 
 I am forgiven, at one with my Father, that peace of 
 God is " mine, mine, for ever and ever mine." 
 
 With this pardon in my heart, all penalty in this 
 life I wilhngly and gladly undergo, indeed I would 
 rather. Once assure me of forgiveness and that 
 the past is no more, and that victory may one 
 day be mine, and I care not what outward punish- 
 ment there be. I can dance lighthearted through 
 the rough places, and like Paul and Silas sing 
 hymns in prison. 
 
 That is the answer in actual fact of the shriven 
 penitent. Many are the forms it takes. Some to 
 us seem vulgar. But whether the Hallelujah of 
 the Salvationist, or the cry of the Methodist, or 
 the voice of him who speaks to you now, all are 
 one, all exultant and in tune with the angels, 
 in whose presence "there is more joy over one 
 sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine 
 righteous persons who need no repentance." 
 
 The joy of the redeemed is in proportion to 
 that difficulty of redemption told us in pompous 
 commonplaces by those who can see its hardness, 
 
110 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 but forget that what is impossible to men is possible 
 to God, and turn their eyes away from that figure 
 on the Cross, which bids men learn the depth alike 
 of the needed sacrifice and the love which under- 
 took it. Christians assert no less strongly than 
 their adversaries that " no man can dehver his 
 brother or make agreement unto God for him; 
 for it cost more to redeem their souls, so that he 
 must let that alone for ever." They would not 
 rate the Cross so high, and place what seems to 
 many so excessive a value on the death of Christ, 
 if they did not feel that the forgiveness thereby 
 wrought is just the one boon on earth that God 
 Himself could only offer at a sacrifice within His 
 own Being. 
 
 So again with its alleged immorahty. Whether 
 or no pardon is against justice, or vicarious death 
 an outrage, if only the fact is true we who have 
 the gift will not trouble greatly over its so-called 
 immorality. After all, this sacrifice of Christ does 
 but carry to its highest power that law of unselfish 
 service which illumines all our life, whUe forgive- 
 ness is a fact of daily life, potent in influence. 
 Nor again are we at this place and time contend- 
 ing for any one theory of the Atonement, but for 
 the fact and reality of forgiveness. 
 
 The forms in which past ages have expressed 
 their sense of the gift are neither satisfactory nor 
 
FORGIVENESS 111 
 
 authoritative. Yet even the most grotesque testify 
 to the extreme value of the truth such explanations 
 ■were designed to guarantee, and to the real sense 
 in which forgiveness is so hard that it needs the 
 miracle of a dying God to accomplish. It were 
 better to accept the crudest and most forensic 
 doctrine of substitution rather than surrender the 
 truth it is intended to set forth. Yet in the 
 alleged immorality of pardon there lurks a pro- 
 found truth, the truth that love is above all codes, 
 and God's mercy goes beyond man's deserts. What 
 Christians mean when they use the words — 
 
 " Just as I am — without one plea, 
 But that Thy blood was shed for me. 
 And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee, 
 Lamb of God, I come," 
 
 is but the counterpart of what our adversaries 
 mean when they tell us the Atonement is immoral. 
 It would he immoral if it were not true. That is, 
 it affords the same revelation of love as above aU 
 law as that we find in a child's or friend's or lover's 
 pardon, and indeed in all self-sacrifice. It springs 
 from no merit, nothing done. Like all the beauties 
 and graces of life it is based, not on necessity or 
 justice, but is an unbought gift of that heart of 
 the Eternal that is "most wonderfully kind." For 
 the world of spirits lives on the rich generosity of 
 God. And of all its instances none is comparable 
 
112 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 to that of pardon; none so dear and wonderful as 
 that grace of forgiveness for which His Son once 
 died upon the Cross, that men, the worst and the 
 weakest, might live unto Him for ever. 
 
 " Eternal Light 1 Eternal Light I 
 
 How pure the sonl must be, 
 When placed within Thy searching sight, 
 It shrinks not, bat with calm delight 
 
 Can live, and look on Thee I 
 
 The spirits that surround Thy throne 
 
 May bear the burning bliss ; 
 But that is surely theirs alone, 
 Since they have never, never known 
 
 A fallen world like this. 
 
 Oh I how shall I, whose native sphere 
 
 Is dark, whose mind is dim, 
 Before the Ineffable appear. 
 And on my naked spirit bear 
 
 That uncreated beam I 
 
 There is a way for man to rise 
 
 To that sublime abode : 
 An offering and a sacrifice, 
 A Holy Spirit's energies, 
 
 An Advocate with God, 
 
 These, these prepare ns for the sight 
 
 Of Holiness above ; 
 The sons of ignorance and night 
 May dwell in the Eternal Light ! 
 
 Through the Eternal Love."" 
 
 In these four instances — and doubtless they might 
 be multiplied — we have seen how the Gospel rests 
 
FORGIVENESS 113 
 
 for its attractiveness on these very characteristics 
 which, as coropared with other rehgious systems, are 
 most potent in arousing hostility, and involve us in 
 genuine difficulties, perhaps insuperable, so long as 
 we approach the problem from a merely critical 
 standpoint. The notion of revelation and miracle 
 is of necessity repugnant to those who make of the 
 uniformity of nature an idol instead of an instru- 
 ment, a law to govern God instead of His creation. 
 But it is precisely because the miraculous exhibits 
 the truth of God, as not Himself entangled in the 
 endless chain of natural causes, that it has so uplift- 
 ing and exhilarating a force. 
 
 Further, the notion of mystery in religion, the 
 claim to be beyond reason, the speculative difficulties 
 inherent in the Personal and Trinitarian doctrine of 
 God, or in the Sacramental Presence, are repugnant to 
 the rationalist temper, with its hatred of the incom- 
 prehensible, its worship of clearness and logical con- 
 sistency. Yet they come home to the religious sense, 
 conscious of the vastness of the order of the world, 
 and feeling instinctively that the threads even of this 
 life pass far out beyond our understanding. Thus 
 what is given as difficulty is proved to be a help. 
 
 The idealist temper again finds infinite difficulties 
 with little corresponding advantage in the notion of 
 a particular historical manifestation of God, and in 
 the fixing as of a special and unique importance on 
 
 H 
 
114 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 one moment in the shifting kaleidoscope of human 
 life. But to the plain man mere ideal principles 
 or a system made by the mind, however well 
 grounded in reason or noble in aim, will always 
 appear a little fanciful, divorced from reality. It 
 is the concrete, the particular, the personal, that 
 alone appeals to him, and he feels safe, anchored, 
 at home with God, Who can manifest Himself in 
 the flesh, and can cling with hope and love to the 
 gracious figure of the Carpenter, Who went about 
 doing good and spake as never man spake. 
 
 Lastly, we have seen to-day how the very diffi- 
 culties in the way of forgiveness, its seeming rever- 
 sion of the law of cause and effect, its hyper-moral 
 removal from a man's shoulders of a burden he has 
 himself placed there, must always arouse doubt in 
 the minds of those to whom a uniform scheme is the 
 sine qud non of thought, who clamour for a world 
 in which there shall be no discontinuity, that is, a 
 mechanism. Yet these very difficulties, the hard- 
 ness of pardon, the knowledge that it is undeserved, 
 are what endear the Cross to the mind of the sinner, 
 whose sense of the might of his past sins and their 
 binding nature is deeper in its misery than that of 
 any theorist; and on that very ground he is more 
 passionately concerned in their removal. 
 
 Moreover, we have seen in practical life very 
 similar incongruities to those offered by the Gospel ; 
 
FORGIVENESS 115 
 
 and we found that they are resolved not by thinking 
 but by action. The difiSculty of miracles is only one 
 aspect of the difficulty of freedom. Formidable from 
 the speculative standpoint, in the practical world it 
 is not found at all. Nobody refrains from judging 
 or stimulating others for all the determinists that 
 ever proved the self a nullity. Mystery and con- 
 tradiction can be discerned in our simplest and most 
 ordinary notions. We are not merely unable to ex- 
 plain life or personality, but change and motion are 
 beyond all grasp. Yet we cannot eradicate these 
 expressions of the fact that we are ahve in a living 
 world. So they are quite congruous with a religion 
 which is no less difficult theoretically to comprehend, 
 and equally possible to make use of in practice. 
 Further, the objection found to the unique value 
 of our Lord's life on earth is of a similar order 
 with the difficulty on purely evolutionary doctrine 
 of reconciling our instinctive sense of the value and 
 meaning of decisive moments in our own life with 
 the conception of that life as ceaselessly developing. 
 The objection to a historical religion, as concerned 
 with the particular, wiU be found to lie with equal 
 force against any system which gives reaUty to the 
 individual life. Those who find the one insuperable 
 ought in consistency to take the oriental view of 
 human life as but a bubble in the air, a mirage in 
 the ever-changing maya, soon to disappear into the 
 
116 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 maw of the Absolute. The difficulties incident to 
 the notion of sin and forgiveness are incident no 
 less to the life of man in society and are resolved 
 in the same way. Nothing is easier than to prove 
 it impossible to pardon an injury. Yet nothing is 
 easier, if the will be once turned, than to do it. 
 The difficulty is only theoretic, and rests on the 
 assumption that love is not above law. With that 
 assumption removed, the problem disappears, and 
 Christianity asks no other condition. 
 
 Doubtless it may be said that these considerations 
 are not decisive. They render it easier to understand 
 how Christianity arose and still maintains its power, 
 still they leave the difficulties of the mind unsolved. 
 We are being invited to accept the Gospel upon 
 faith. We are, therefore, free to reject it as un- 
 certain, and have no more warrant than before for 
 believing in Christianity merely because it can be 
 shown to be attractive to persons in particular cir- 
 cumstances, mostly without developed culture. I 
 do not deny it. But so far as the Gospel appeals 
 to men at all, it appeals to them as religious; it 
 makes no attempt to appeal to the non-religious, 
 if there be such. Although the considerations we 
 have discussed do not perhaps tend to make Chris- 
 tian faith any more acceptable or perhaps probable to 
 those who are without religious feeling, they ought 
 surely to be of weight with the numerous persons 
 
jrORGIVENESS 117 
 
 who' are devoutly religious, yet non-Christian; or 
 Christian and genuinely perplexed; or Christian in 
 sentiment but anxious, as they say, to lighten the 
 ship of dogmas which are at once superfluous and 
 self-contradictory. For they seem to show that as 
 against other systems the Christian faith meets the 
 common religious needs of man, and includes more 
 facts ; and that its difficulties spring from this very 
 cause, that it is first of all a revelation of life and 
 joy, and not like some mere abstract system of 
 thought, which is only unanswerable in that it starts 
 from assumptions artificially limited. " Scepticism," 
 it has been well said, " narrows the real problem." " 
 But the Gospel takes facts as they are and includes 
 them all. No explanation of life that has yet been 
 offered but is fruitful of difficulties and inconsis- 
 tencies. What the final explanation in its fulness 
 may be we know not, nor are hke to know. But 
 it is reasonable to accept that system which comes 
 closest to the facts and refuses to burke them. 
 Scientific method and theories are admittedly ab- 
 stract and partial, and can never give more than 
 a skeleton of reality, the Gospel with its revelation 
 of God in human life and a living society is above 
 all things concrete; and in its doctrine of freedom, 
 of sin and forgiveness it includes what no other 
 system has yet adequately done, that mixture of 
 strangeness and chaos, which is before our eyes in 
 
118 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 actual human life as it is and is only to be fitted 
 in to the doctrines of a uniform world by stripping 
 facts of all their meaning. As Sidgwick used to 
 say, " We are forced to admit that the world is an 
 odd place." It is because we are so impossible to 
 ourselves that we need an impossible God ; because 
 we are so full at once of doubt and belief, of courage 
 and timidity, that faith with its venture has so 
 golden a guerdon ; because we are to ourselves and 
 in our dealings with men so strange and mysterious, 
 that a mystery at the heart of things can alone 
 satisfy us; because we are living spirits we need a 
 living God, and find our needs met in Christ and 
 His Church ; because we are always children, that we 
 need one who can show the great in the Uttle, and 
 meet with wonder and delight the Christmas gift 
 of the Manger-Child ; finally, because we are so pro- 
 foundly tortured with sin and temptation, so miserable 
 in our guilt and impotence, that we need a pardon 
 which it required God's dying to accomplish, and 
 can rest secure in the victory of the Cross. 
 
 The presence of these theoretical difficulties and 
 apparent inconsistencies, so far from being an argu- 
 ment against the truth of the Gospel, is to some of 
 us a help to its acceptance. Uncertain and per- 
 plexed as we are about many things, and divided 
 between countless opposing views, of one thing we 
 feel convinced, that our Hfe is infinitely wonderful; 
 
FORGIVENESS 119 
 
 that the Tvorld in which we are placed is strange 
 and weird beyond all romancers' dreams ; and that in 
 all we do and think, all we admire and love, there is 
 an element beyond comprehension ; that the realities 
 of life, of joy and suffering, of courage and sacrifice, 
 even of sin and penitence, are mysteries of so pro- 
 found and awful a nature, that they are thrown into 
 relief, rather than interpreted by that small element 
 that is clearly articulate and consistent. To us the 
 facts, the daily and hourly facts are the supreme, 
 the unfathomable problem. These facts we find 
 included and transfigured in the Gospel, and we 
 welcome it with responding joy. Credo quia vm- 
 possihile. 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER- 
 WORLDLINESS ^ 
 
 "My Kingdom is not of this world." — St. John xriii. 36. 
 
 It is time that defenders of the Christian faith gave 
 up apologising for it. If Christians are to conquer 
 it will be in the sign of the Cross ; not by adopting 
 the principles of their adversaries, but by the com- 
 pelling audacity with which they display their own. 
 I desire to-day to examine the charge often brought 
 against the Church of being other-worldly. That 
 charge is true. But it is our glory, not our shame. 
 There is a sense, of course, in which the Church 
 ought to be this-worldly. This sense, however, is so 
 obvious, and is emphasised so much just now, that 
 it is perhaps more profitable to dwell for a little 
 upon the other aspect of the truth — provided we 
 bear in mind that it is only an aspect. 
 
 The reproach of other- worldliness is inevitable. It 
 is natural for writers like George Eliot or Cotter 
 Morison, whose horizon is limited by death, to be 
 distressed, when they see some of the best men 
 
 * Preached before the University of Cambridge, Nov. 10, 1907. 
 
 110 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER- WORLD LINESS 121 
 
 occupied in matters which appear, and must appear, 
 to them as futile, va prayer which they must deem 
 elaborate triviahty, or in preaching a repentance 
 which is only by fits and starts socially beneficent. 
 It is not, of course, the worse but the better Chris- 
 tians whom altruists grudge to the service of God. 
 They are glad enough for the Church to occupy 
 ecclesiastics like Antonelli or Manning; or perse- 
 cutors like Laud or Calvin, like Knox or Torque- 
 mada; statesmen like Innocent III., or Wolsey, or 
 Julius II. ; or self-seekers like Warburton or Hoadly, 
 whose heroic attempt to serve God and Mammon is 
 imitated in everything but success by two-thirds of 
 the Christian world in every age. It is not for their 
 sakes that this cry is raised. But it is saints like 
 St. Francis, thinkers like St. Thomas, prophets like 
 St. Catharine, mystics like St. Teresa, teachers like 
 F^nelon or Newman, whose life offers so lamentable 
 a spectacle. For taken at their highest they left a 
 root of harm, and shifted on to a side track the 
 thoughts and the hopes and the activities of men. 
 Instead of preaching practical benevolence, glorify- 
 ing work for its own sake, they ministered to idle 
 dreams; instead of denouncing social injustice and 
 denouncing nothing else ; instead, that is, of treating 
 suffering as the one supreme evil, they have wasted 
 their own powers and those of others in gazing at 
 a mirage; in striving for peace of mind, they have 
 
122 THE GOSPEL AND HTJMAN NEEDS 
 
 often been indifferent to comfort of the body, have 
 at times actually belauded pain as a means of im- 
 provement, and in the very abnegation which they 
 taught, have sought a vision of a Kingdom of the 
 other world rather than effective reality in the 
 amelioration of this. To make up for the lack of 
 good prose in the world they have given it in- 
 different poetry; and added to human misery by 
 so doing. 
 
 The fact is true. For the Cross rather consecrates 
 suffering than diminishes it. Our Lord came "not 
 to send peace on earth but a sword." Christians will 
 always be " dreamers." If the Church should become 
 reaUy efficient, its days as a spiritual power would 
 be at an end. Those who desire the Church to be 
 " forceful " in the American sense, ought to imitate 
 the methods of that Company of Jesus, in which 
 practical efficiency has been carried to a point with- 
 out parallel in history, and of whose success we have 
 recent illustration. 
 
 On the other hand, " other-worldliness " may mean 
 this-worldliness of the worst kind. You may talk of 
 the value of treasure in heaven when you merely 
 mean that you do not desire to be disturbed in the 
 enjoyment of your treasure on earth. It is mere 
 hypocrisy to say that suffering is a means of grace, 
 and that comfort does not matter, when you mean 
 that it does matter to you, and does not to those 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER-WORLDLINESS 123 
 
 ■who have to endure the results of your selfishness. 
 If our critics force us to the question, how far the 
 Cross is anything real to us, or how we fulfil the 
 duty of brotherhood, we ought only to thank them 
 in deep penitence. 
 
 Stm, though the reproach may be true in detail, 
 taken as a whole it has no grounds. Christianity is 
 other-worldly. It is not merely a system of thought, 
 or a moral code, or a philanthropy, or a romance, or 
 all of these added together, that render it a mystery 
 so " rich and strange." It is something unique. It 
 attracts alike and repels men because it is itself, and 
 not anything else. Alike in basis and nature, in 
 motive and method, in ideal and result, the Chris- 
 tian faith differs from all its rivals far more than 
 it resembles them. This is the very reason why it 
 always eludes and yet evokes their criticism. From 
 the non-Christian standpoint we are bound to appear 
 irrational, quixotic, futile, silly. If we do not appear 
 so, it is because we have lowered the flag and are 
 striving to fight the world with its own weapons — a 
 course which nothing could redeem from insincerity 
 save its inherent stupidity. For the children of this 
 world are, in their generation, wiser — very much 
 wiser — than the children of light. 
 
 Christianity is not, in its basis, of this world. It is 
 no mere system of thought based upon reflection. 
 It is a life rooted in faith. Thus a supernatural 
 
124 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 grace, a gift from beyond, is its foundation ; for faith 
 is more than an intellectual conviction. It is, of 
 course, arguable that we are under a delusion in 
 claiming this high prerogative; it is not arguable 
 that having made the claim, we are free to discuss 
 the creed, as though it rested on some foundation 
 other than faith, such as reasoning or historical 
 criticism, although it may gain support from both. 
 The creed may well find illumination in many 
 different philosophies, which wiU vary with the 
 temper of the time and with the temperament of the 
 individual. But it can never be identified with any 
 one of them without ceasing to be itself. 
 
 An illustration of this is an obvious topic to-day. 
 The recent Papal Encyclical is far more obscur- 
 antist in what it affirms than in what it denies. If 
 Modernism means all that that amazing document 
 declares it to mean, it is as a system non-Christian. 
 Complete severance between the Christ of fact and 
 the Christ of faith would, in the long run, be 
 destructive of belief in either. But when the Pope 
 goes on to identify the Christian faith with a par- 
 ticular philosophy, he is giving the case into the 
 hands of those whom he attacks. Were it true that 
 Christian faith is an intellectual system reached by 
 investigation, men can hardly be blamed if they select 
 their system from the twentieth rather than the 
 thirteenth century, especially when they have the 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER- WOBLDLINESS 125 
 
 terrific triumphs of modern science for compurgators. 
 In fact, if the Pope were right in his underlying 
 theory, the Modernists could hardly he wrong in 
 their philosophic system. The value of this instance 
 to us lies in its reminder that Christianity does not 
 profess to make appeal except to faith, and that we 
 shall only cover ourselves with ridicule if we ignore 
 the other-worldly hasis of the creed. 
 
 What is true of the basis is also true of the nature 
 of the faith. As a recent writer of great power, Dr. 
 BusseU, in his Bampton Lectures, has pointed out, 
 the appeal of the miracle of redemption is so en- 
 thralling, just because it comes from the other world. 
 Men are crying for a way of escape, for freedom, for 
 something beyond the iron law of natural uniformity. 
 It is the very quality which wins the attack of those 
 who do not make this cry which wins disciples. Were 
 it, as some ask, to be bereft of this "unworldly," 
 irrational character, then it would no longer be 
 worth either attack or adhesion. It would be like 
 Cleopatra, " withered by age and staled by custom." 
 Men neither love nor hate what has become a centre 
 of indifference. To-day, at least, there are abundant 
 signs that Christianity may be mocked and assailed, 
 but remains the most interesting and vivid of 
 human facts. Surely it would be a pity if, while we 
 endeavoured to make the mystery intelligible, wo 
 should only succeed in rendering the wonder — dull. 
 
126 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 But this is not all. The motive of practical acti- 
 vity lies for the Christian in the other world. I 
 think we have lost something by our disuse of the 
 terms dear to our forefathers, pilgrimage and pro- 
 bation. Doubtless, we can overdo this and treat the 
 truth that we are pilgrims in this life on the way to 
 another in such a one-sided way as to neglect the 
 real joy of life here and now. And instead of the 
 old words we ought surely to sing : — 
 
 " I'm not a stranger here, 
 Heaven is my home," 
 
 for both are true. We should learn to see in the 
 beauty and gladness of earth, not enemies to be 
 shunned, but evidence and hope of " the glory that 
 shall be revealed in us." 
 
 The true proportions can be seen by an instance. 
 Youth is a time of preparing. But it would be a 
 very poor boyhood that was spent in thinking only 
 of the future. Perhaps, indeed, the reason why the 
 intellectual results of public school education are so 
 inferior to the bodily is just this fact. In regard to 
 bodily training the youth soon learns its value, not 
 merely for the future, but for the moment. In re- 
 gard to mental training, too often the only thought 
 for a future profession is made a stimulus. We 
 might, perhaps, get more results if we could make 
 him see that intellectual activity makes everything 
 else (games included) more interesting and joyful 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHBE-WORLDLINESS 127 
 
 here and now. At the same time, nobody treats 
 youth as though it were anything but a part of an 
 episode in life. So with the Christian. This life is 
 only an episode in a career whose grandeur we can 
 but dimly imagine. All our values must be dif- 
 ferent from those of men who treat it as a whole. 
 
 Stni more is this the case with social ideals. 
 The Christian, like the non-Christian philanthropist, 
 is appalled at the vast spectacle of ugliness and 
 tyranny which is the modern notion of civilisation. 
 But such changes he demands, he demands because 
 man is primarily an other-worldly being, and existing 
 arrangements tend to turn him from his true end, 
 not because suffering is for him the supreme evil or 
 social amelioration the one ideal aim. As an acute 
 modern critic hinted when he called himself a 
 voluptuary, the doctrine of the Cross is the very 
 antipodes of the non-Christian view of physical 
 suffering. Very often, too, the Christian pays less 
 attention to such matters than reformers approve. 
 This is inevitable. It is not his first business, which 
 is to seek " the Kingdom of God and His righteous- 
 ness.'' The duty, however arduous, of making earth 
 a fairer place to dwell in, yields in stringency to that 
 of helping men to see what is harder still, that they 
 have not long to dwell here, that how they live is 
 more important than what they live on. 
 
 The truth is that the social millennium, if it were 
 
128 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 once attained, would merely afford a more salient 
 proof of the gulf that divides the Christian from his 
 non-Christian fellow-worker. Juster distribution of 
 wealth, more widely diffused culture, and lasting 
 international peace, might diminish external evils, 
 but apart from faith could effect no redemption of 
 human nature. The true function of the Church 
 will be discerned, and its supreme task will begin, 
 when men are tempted by contentment to apathy 
 and by universal education to unbelief. Every im- 
 provement in the means of life, whether intellectual 
 or physical, brings with it a development of the 
 substitutes for religion, and the acquiescence in these 
 substitutes by numbers of men who, less educated 
 or less comfortable, would have been submissive, 
 exemplary Christians. This is, indeed, no reason 
 why Christians should not forward such improvement 
 by every means in their power. But it is a reason to 
 prevent them imagining that their task will be done 
 when its difiSculties are only beginning, or that the 
 reality of the other world, the sense of sin, and the 
 romance of sacrifice will more readily appeal to the 
 majority when there is less on earth of which they 
 can complain, or because the grosser tyrannies and 
 more palpable vices are no longer obvious. A world 
 wherein everybody is respectable might very well be 
 a world wherein no one is religious. 
 The real task of the Church in the future will 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER- WORLDLINESS 129 
 
 neither be the preaching of the Gospel to the ill- 
 equipped nor the redemption of the ultra-luxurious, 
 but the awakening of the vision of God in a world 
 rationally cultivated and enjoying moderate though 
 not excessive comfort. 
 
 The means, moreover, even to this end are different 
 for the Christian from what they are to the world 
 without. As a citizen the Christian has his own 
 views, and seeks to promote them in the ordinary 
 way by legislation in a society which is not, and 
 in one sense ought not to be anything but, hetero- 
 geneous in religion. But as Churchmen, Christians 
 are bound by other sanctions. And I doubt whether 
 any external force could produce any effect at all 
 comparable to that of the private lives of Christians, 
 if they really beheved what they say they believe ; 
 and felt as their Master in His amazed inquiry, that 
 it was simply not worth whUe scrambling for the 
 means of ostentation when they already possess the 
 food and raiment with which they are bidden to 
 be content. For it is, surely, not the struggle for 
 existence, but the making haste to be rich and the 
 practice of idleness, as a profession, that is the cause 
 of the specifically modern social evils. And, if the 
 Christian were as other-worldly and careless as his 
 Master, and would learn to stop when he had enough, 
 and not make the world's opinion the standard of 
 comfort, the diminution in the causes of economic 
 
 I 
 
130 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 wrong would be far greater than would be effected 
 by mere legislation. The gaiety of the nations owed 
 more to the mediaeval habit of keeping saints' days, 
 than it is ever likely to do to legislative bank holi- 
 days. We are scarcely in danger to-day of the 
 undue reverence for the character of Mary. If we 
 were, even Martha might find her task greatly 
 simplified. 
 
 This leads us on. Whatever Christianity means 
 or does not mean, it means prayer. Prayer is 
 as necessary to the spiritual as breathing to the 
 natural life. And yet to the non-Christian it is 
 bound to seem unwarrantable trifling, waste of 
 energy, to be tolerated, if at all, as a form of re- 
 creation, an added spaciousness to life. There is 
 no gulf comparable to that which divides the man 
 who prays from the man who does not pray. Yet 
 many Christians have so far yielded to the pressure 
 of their adversaries that they seem to regard prayer 
 as little more than a necessary evil, the siTve qud 
 non indeed of Christianity, but no real part of it, the 
 dull though inevitable prelude to genuine activity. 
 And yet "prayer is work" is a truer maxim than 
 its customary converse. In the end the most 
 important part of our lives will prove to have been 
 neither our thoughts, nor our deeds, but our prayers. 
 In the long run, says Bishop Creighton, one learns 
 that the only thing we can do for others is to pray 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER-WORLDLINESS 131 
 
 for them. And may God forgive those of us who 
 have neglected this duty. 
 
 Prayer is perhaps the most shining instance of 
 the truth that other-worldliness is the very essence 
 of the Christian hfe. I am not here asserting that 
 Christians are better or wiser than other men — very 
 often they are neither the one nor the other — but 
 they are different. This is even truer of the ideal 
 and the resulting character. Above all this, the 
 Christian is gay. Was there ever a more uncon- 
 ventionally joyful spirit than St. Paul, or any 
 schoolboy so playful as St. Francis ? Not peace nor 
 unison, not joy, not strength nor earnestness is the 
 cachet of the Christian, but gaiety. He is ever 
 shocking worldly men, strenuous moraUsts, by some 
 play of the spirit which seems sacrilegious. This 
 gaiety is other-worldly in origin — it comes from the 
 love of One unseen ; it is grounded on the belief that 
 nothing really matters if all things work together 
 for good to them that love God, and it is nurtured 
 by the daily denial and sacrifice which is the in- 
 evitable and invariable consequence of love. There 
 is no true love, earthly or heavenly, which does not 
 issue in sacrifice and giving. And the suffering in- 
 herent is its glory and its crown, and the Cross its 
 symbol. It is this eternal romanticism, this paradox 
 of the Crucifix, that makes Christians incompre- 
 hensible to every one else — now as ever, to the Jews 
 
132 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness. Like 
 the poet whose heart dances with the daffodils, the 
 Christian delights in the world of things and events 
 with a sense of their inner glory that seems all but 
 blasphemous to the serious moralist and the educated 
 worldling, who associate gaiety with the frivolous, 
 and are staggered by a religion so light-hearted and 
 full of colour, so passionate and reckless. 
 
 Yes. In aU these things, in its ground which 
 is faith, its motive which is eternity, its method 
 which is prayer, its ideal which is gladness, does 
 the other-worldliness of the Christian life display 
 itself as a " gazing-stock." And we have to choose. 
 Either our ideals are to be of this world or not. 
 No passing resemblance and no ingenuity of reasoning 
 can avail to save us. The choice is forced upon us 
 by the very fact of our being. Hard though it be 
 to take whichever side we do take, let us not delude 
 ourselves with the pleasant fiction that we can take 
 both sides or take neither. 
 
 My brothers, for some of you at this time the 
 choice is beginning to be realised as it had not 
 before. Upon you especially, who have but entered 
 upon the glories of this place with its rich traditions 
 and the splendour of its hopes, there has just dawned 
 " the vision of the world, and all the wonder that 
 may be." What form shall that vision take? To 
 some it will come as the harmony of bodily powers, 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER- WORLDLINESS 133 
 
 the progress in health and joy of the outward life, 
 and the gifts of character it brings in its train. To 
 some wiU dawn the vision of the human spirit, 
 as disciplined by a hundred generations of culture, 
 the ministry of beauty with the rest it teUs of in 
 the glories of earth and the imagination of man. 
 Some will be held by the austere but enthralling 
 charm of knowledge, with the hope of correcting the 
 shallow frivolity of current opinions, and adding 
 something real to the heritage of thought. To some 
 wni come the dream of duty done for country or 
 profession, in careers truly liberal. Others will be 
 caught by the heroism of service, the selfless aim 
 of brightening the lives of the disinherited, and 
 of giving to " the dim common populations " a little 
 — it can be but a little — of those myriad boons alike 
 of gladness and opportunity showered upon us here. 
 AU these aims are worthy; and in their due 
 degree appealing. But in themselves they are not 
 enough, and must, if taken alone, ere long reveal 
 their hollowness. Even the life of this world cannot 
 wisely be spent without thought of the other. Out- 
 ward exercise, clean and courageous hving, are good ; 
 but soon, too soon, men learn that they are but a 
 part, and that a small one, of human life. Culture 
 in every form is high and noble, but only if it points 
 beyond. For it turns either to a selfish and fastidious 
 cynicism, or to a despairing emptiness, unless earthly 
 
134 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 beauty and poetic passion are seen as the symbols of 
 the " altogether lovely." Erudition for its own sake 
 arouses ere long the cry, To what purpose was 
 this waste? Even discovery and the certainties 
 of science, the sequences of unalterable law, only 
 generate their own extinction, the desire for escape, 
 the cry for deliverance, which finds no answer but in 
 Christ. Social and philanthropic ideals seem for a 
 time to drag out of a man more than was in him, 
 and endow the self with a life beyond life; but so 
 long as he looks no farther he finds them pall, and 
 the question is forced upon him. Are men any 
 better or happier for all my striving ? And if they 
 are, what does it matter? Where does it lead? 
 The aims of this world, taken at their highest and 
 purged of all that is base, or ugly, or selfish, leave 
 us at the last unsatisfied, and crying, "Is this 
 the end, is this the end?" For in these things 
 alone there is — 
 
 " Neither joy nor love nor light, 
 Nor certainty nor peace nor hope for pain, 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain, 
 Swept with confused alarm of straggle and fight, 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night." 
 
 It is God we are seeking for; the other world, 
 which alone can give reality to this, alone can invest 
 duty with enduring meaning, can find for beneficence 
 a certain value, for knowledge an ordered place, and 
 
A PLEA FOR OTHER-WORLDLINESS 135 
 
 flash upon the shows of earthly beauty some hint at 
 least of the eternal loveliness. Men bid us limit 
 our aims and hopes to this life, and turn from 
 the dazzling mirage of the other. Our answer is 
 that we cannot. We may try, try hard, try — as a 
 race — for generations, for centuries; but we cannot 
 do it. God is calling us. 
 
 In all ages He calls men to their home. More 
 than ever are the signs of His call apparent in 
 the restless, childish, pathetically eager world in 
 which we live. "For here we have no continuing 
 city, but we seek one to come." It is not so much 
 impious or sinful to seek to chain to earth beings 
 bom to give gladness to angels, or to treat as things 
 of this world only spirits who may be the friends 
 of God, as it is futile. It is impossible. It may 
 not be. " For God created man to be immortal, and 
 made him an image of His own eternity." 
 
THE NEED OF AUTHORITY IN 
 THE CHURCH^ 
 
 " Feed My sheep."— St. John xxi. 
 
 We enter this evening upon the Festival of St. 
 Peter, the apostle to whom this cathedral church 
 is dedicated. It is not unfitting that the place 
 which has been so intimately associated with the 
 fortunes of the English Church, which breathes in 
 the dignity of its venerable aisles the very spirit 
 of our national Christianity, should own as patron 
 that chosen and pre-eminent apostle to whom was 
 first given the great commission to teach and to 
 rule. At such a moment and in such a year as 
 this — with the echoes of the great congress still 
 in our ears — it seems a duty, and indeed almost 
 a necessity, that we should strive to gather up and 
 crystallise our notions of authority, and to express 
 that mingling of liberty with order which a great 
 prelate once declared to be the distinctive note of 
 our branch of the Church Catholic. 
 For the words of my text have proved the centre 
 
 ' Preached in Exeter Cathedral, June 28, 1908. 
 
NEED OF AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH 137 
 
 of many conflicts, and they are still employed to 
 justify the claims of the Roman Patriarch to be 
 absolute monarch of aU Christians. At this stage, 
 however, and in this place, it can hardly be need- 
 ful to repudiate afresh those notions of illimitable, 
 inalienable dominion in the Church, of political 
 supremacy over the State, or of doctrinal infalli- 
 bility, of which the world has heard already too much. 
 At least I shall not to-night re-argue that old cause. 
 It is enough that we are here. We stand as a 
 Church to witness that Romanism is not Catholicity, 
 that the absorption of all power by one person is the 
 worst form of individualism, that national and par- 
 ticular Churches are no mere accidents, but have as 
 Churches a place in the whole body ; that they have 
 a distinct and real life, or as we say now, a mind and 
 a will of their own, though always as sharing with 
 others the order, the creed, and the sacraments 
 common to all. We stand, in brief, for the social 
 and federal idea in the Church against a doctrine 
 which is as autocratic as a Caliphate, and (in the 
 long run) as subjective as that of Luther or Calvin. 
 That is the issue between England and Rome, between 
 the Catholic view and the Ultramontane. Attempts 
 are many to explain away this conception, and in some 
 form or other to deny the reality and meaning of our 
 English heritage. But they will not endure. For 
 the forces of life are against them, the traditions and 
 
138 THE GOSPEL AifD HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 history of the English nation as well as the Church 
 will interpose an impassable barrier ; Englishmen may 
 conceivably recognise too little, they will never re- 
 cognise too much, of the claims and powers of other 
 branches of the Church. The individuality of our 
 Church is a real thing, and we are not likely to lose 
 it so long as the Church exists. 
 
 But it is the individuality of a Church or com- 
 munity that is ours, not the unregulated freedom 
 of mere personal caprice. We stand, as I said, 
 against the tyranny, theoretic even more than 
 practical, of Rome, but we stand no less strongly, 
 no less distinctly, against the anarchy and indis- 
 cipline of a merely subjective religion. It has been 
 said that an Englishman always realises himself as 
 a member of a group, school, or college, ^ regiment 
 or a union, a sect or a party, while the French- 
 man (except his membership of the State) is rather 
 seen as a separate isolated individual. This is true. 
 But it is a truth which needs emphasising a great 
 deal more than is always the case in regard to our 
 Churchmanship. No more in our religion than in 
 any other part of life (indeed a great deal less) can 
 we live to ourselves alone. We are members of 
 a society, a fellowship; to that society we owe 
 allegiance, and it has over us — so long as we 
 remain its members — authority, power. We can 
 leave it if we please; but if we do not, we are not 
 
NEED OF AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH 139 
 
 at our own pleasure as to obeying its rules or 
 sharing its faith. 
 
 Because we deny the authority of the Pope in 
 its developed form, we are not therefore to deny all 
 authority in the Church, or to suppose that to the 
 enlightened modern man the claims of his Church 
 shall mean little in doctrine and nothing in dis- 
 cipline, save and in so far as he finds it more 
 convenient to worship in company with his fellows. 
 Yet this is the clamour of the hour. " To us eccle- 
 siastical discipline has ceased to be even an im- 
 pertinence," says one writer with a sneer. "The 
 religions of authority are decaying, to be supplanted 
 inevitably by the religion of the spirit," says an- 
 other. Books pour from the presses of England 
 and America which reiterate this notion. Differing 
 in many things they commonly agree in this, that 
 the writers repudiate the Church and the creeds, 
 and tell us each his own view — not ol what the 
 Christian faith is, but of what he would like it to be. 
 
 They would be right if all they meant were that 
 faith is given for life rather than theorising, that 
 God's revelation teaches us of ourselves no less than 
 of Him, that, so far from being ahen and external, 
 or merely imposed, it finds its verification in our 
 most inward experience; for "in Him we live and 
 move and have our being." Keligion is essentially 
 personal. The appeal of the Crucified comes with 
 
140 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 fresh poignancy to every sinner. The hope of the 
 Resurrection uplifts with new joy every sufferer. 
 
 But far more than this is claimed by writers of 
 the school or schools I am discussing. They would 
 treat creeds and Churches as at best utilities, at 
 worst encumbrances, Man's intercourse with God, 
 it is said, is direct. AH the elaborate system of 
 doctrine and ritual and sacraments, all the parapher- 
 naha of ecclesiasticism, are indeed paraphernalia; 
 they are nothing compared with the immediate 
 vision of God or with the knowledge given us by 
 reason and conscience. So far as the vision is im- 
 mediate and the knowledge direct this may be true. 
 But reasoning is not an immediate process ; and for 
 most of us knowledge of God does, as a fact (not 
 as theory), come mediated by friend and teacher, 
 through family and Church, through human love 
 and earthly agonies, we " mount, and that hardly, to 
 eternal life." As somebody said, it would be truer 
 to assert that all things and persons are mediators 
 — schoolmasters — to lead men to God, than that 
 none are. Otherwise it could make little difference 
 whether we had heard of the name of Jesus or no. 
 
 The claim of the Church to authority rests upon 
 two principles — the social nature of man and the 
 lordship of Christ. As Christians we are disciples, 
 pupils, learners, and we owe loyalty to our teacher; 
 and we are also Churchmen, members of a fellowship, 
 
NEED OP AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH 141 
 
 inheritors of a kingdom, and owe allegiance to the 
 great community whose hfe we share. Through the 
 Church we become " heirs of all the ages," and enter 
 into the whole religious experience of the race. To 
 attempt to do without it, to throw it off as useless, 
 is as idle and as wrong as it is to hide our talent in 
 a napkin, and leave men unenriched by the special 
 gifts of our day and generation. It would be analo- 
 gous in politics for an Englishman to strive to forget 
 the story of his race and start as though he were a 
 Kamschatkan. We cannot, if we would, repudiate 
 the past ; we ought not, though we might, leave our 
 heritage untransformed — rather, like a wise house- 
 holder, we shall bring forth from our treasure-house 
 things new and old. 
 
 Christianity is in its essence social. Whatever 
 else the doctrine of the Trinity means, it means 
 this — that God is Himself a fellowship ; and we. His 
 Church on earth, are to express, as best we may, 
 that divine harmony. If God is love and we ought 
 also to love one another, society — i.e. a Church — is 
 of the very foundation of our religion, and society 
 implies authority, submitting ourselves one to 
 another with mutual forbearance, distinctions be- 
 tween "some prophets, some apostles, some pastors 
 and teachers." Read the Acts of the Apostles, the 
 Epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter, the Apocalypse of 
 St. John, our Lord's own words about the kingdom, 
 
142 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 and you will see how impossible is the notion of 
 religion as a purely personal and private thing, how 
 it is intertwined with notions of common life, common 
 faith, common worship — ay, with government and 
 subjection. If then Christianity be a society, if its 
 end is to endure, and its meaning not to be 
 obliterated, it must have within it organs and officers, 
 must issue rule and discipline, must formulate its 
 basis of union in belief. The claim to dispense with 
 authority in religion is at bottom the self-assertion 
 of personal pride, of the self-centred and self-suffi- 
 cient individual, too often the ideal of modern culture, 
 whose gift seems rather to make a critic than a man. 
 But this is not all. Those who repudiate all 
 Church authority cannot in the long run maintain 
 that of Christ. It is futile to declare that by our 
 own unaided reflection on life or by a sort of intuition 
 — this is apparently the means — we can arrive at the 
 wonder of the Incarnation or at the tenderness of 
 the Atonement. We cannot. But we can, if we 
 will, eviscerate the miracle of its wonder; we can 
 attenuate the Atonement into some merely natural 
 process if we apply our ingenuity to such an end; 
 though the ideas have to be " given " before we can 
 reduce even the value of the gift. More than this ; 
 contemptuous of all Church authority — i.e. of the 
 accumulated wisdom of the saints and sages of God 
 — we are certain to be critical of Christ; we shall 
 
NEED OF AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH 143 
 
 agree with Him when we like, and disagree when He 
 is difficult. We shall degrade Him from our Master 
 into a servant; we shall sit in judgment on His 
 teaching, sift His acts and words, and ignore His 
 claims — for they are claims — to rule. 
 
 There is no way out of the dilemma. You cannot 
 accept Christ as Master and be as though you had 
 not accepted Him. You must think differently, will 
 differently, act (or at least try to act) differently — 
 because He is your Lord. How often we use these 
 words as though they meant a title and not a claim. 
 In brief, you surrender to the principle of authority 
 the moment you say " Jesus is Lord," and nothing 
 can make you your own master after that. 
 
 True, this lordship brings the truest freedom, and 
 in the long run is expressive of your inner self. 
 But it does not seem so at the time any more than 
 the first term at school reveals the freedom which 
 will be yours when you have learnt the fruits of 
 its discipline, or than the first trial to take an oar 
 in a boat seems natural or easy. It is only by trust- 
 ing the " coach," whether in boats or learning, that 
 you learn in time what freedom of muscle or brain 
 can mean; only by submitting yourself to the 
 common life, which is your inheritance, to family 
 or school training, can you become in time "free 
 of the fellowship." Even so it is only by humility, 
 by submitting, by haUing Christ as Master, by accept- 
 
144 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 ing our own limitations and weakness and recognis- 
 ing the wisdom and grace committed to the great 
 society we call the Church — so, and only so, after 
 struggle and agony, can we enter at last into the 
 " glorious Uberty of the children of God." 
 
NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD ^ 
 
 " I came not to send peace, but a sword." — St. Matt. x. 34. 
 
 Not peace but a sword. What words from Him, 
 the meek and gentle! How shocked His hearers 
 must have been — Jesus was always shocking people. 
 They had witnessed His daily kindness, His rare 
 and beautiful courtesy. They had seen Him bless 
 little children, taking them into His arms. They 
 had seen His wonderful cures, had nearly all of 
 them, doubtless, had some kindred or friend helped 
 by Him ; tenderness and sympathy and quiet love 
 they could all discern. But where was the sword 
 in the gracious words and acts ? Where was there 
 a word of severity or strife — unless quite occa- 
 sionally when the Pharisees provoked Him, or 
 some hardness of the selfish rich stung Him into 
 denunciation? He was not even as John the 
 Baptist, an ascetic, severe and aloof. He did not 
 disdain the common haunts of men ; He could take 
 part in their social pleasures, eating and drinking 
 like any one else. As they saw Him going about 
 
 » Preached at Cambridge before th« Uniyeruity Church Society, 
 May 15, 1908. 
 
 1« rr 
 
146 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 doing good, and felt how sweetly attuned His 
 nature was to God, they must have expected great 
 miracles of concord to be wrought by His help. 
 That influence, they thought, would bring peace 
 where there had been strife, joy for pain, the 
 garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. 
 
 So they hoped. And then how all this is dashed 
 by these words — not peace but a sword. I am not 
 set to unite but to divide; to emphasise the dif- 
 ference between those who follow my call and 
 those who do not. And so it proved. The faith 
 of Christ, if it has added immeasurably to our 
 stores of love and devotion, has also deepened the 
 fires of hatred, and made selfishness more deliberate. 
 Even inside His own fold, what bitter and piercing 
 hatred has come from mere differences of view- 
 far deeper and sharper cutting than any before. 
 We witness in history, not only the patience of 
 martyrs, but the strength of persecutors; greater 
 saints and lives of wonder and love, but also 
 worse sins and far uglier. It is a common taunt 
 against Christians that their belief in the Prince 
 of Peace has manifested itself in innumerable and 
 bloody wars, that more divisions have been aroused 
 concerning the "name of our salvation" than for 
 any other watchword. Christ came to preach for- 
 giveness and peace, and His saints have led men 
 to battle. This taunt is true. Nor can we answer 
 
NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD 147 
 
 it entirely in the commonplace retort. Men say 
 that it is because Christ's teaching has been so 
 strangely misconceived, because under His name 
 men have often disguised their own worst passions, 
 hatred, and cruelty, and pride of race. All this 
 may be and has been; but it gives but a partial 
 answer. 
 
 The truth is that Christ's call, being more abso- 
 lute, more enthralling than any other worship or 
 service, makes more difference than any other, digs 
 deeper lines of division. Inevitably and naturally 
 it means a greater effort to acknowledge the call; 
 a more vivid and piercing discipline to pursue 
 it; a standard of belief and action, distinct and 
 separating. 
 
 If Jesus be what He is said to be; if the Car- 
 penter of Nazareth is not merely the teacher and 
 friend of man, but the Only-begotten Son of God; 
 if by a sacrifice unique and inexplicable He has 
 cleansed us from the guilt and power of sin; if 
 that Cross is to be our ideal and our glory, not 
 our burden and our shame, then we as Christians 
 are moving in a different world from our fellow- 
 men. We have before us a faith and an aim like 
 others, in that they, too, have faiths and aims, but 
 far more unlike than like them. And we must 
 be as strangers and sojourners among those who 
 do not bow their knee to that lone Figure with 
 
148 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 its strange piercing crown. Nor shall we hear that 
 compelling call, and not be as though we heard not, 
 without cost and sacrifice, without bitterness and 
 agony. Our own hearts, too, will be pierced by a 
 sword. 
 
 I want for a little to draw your thoughts to one 
 or two ways in which this truth exhibits itself. 
 First of all, the truth holds for the intellectual 
 sphere. Christ's claims are tremendous and start- 
 ling. They cannot be reconciled with any ordinary 
 standards or methods. Many elements doubtless 
 combine to make a Christian; but faith — ^burning, 
 living faith — is the one indispensable basis. When 
 He was upon earth. He always demanded faith 
 before He could effect anything. We are told 
 that in one place " He did not many mighty works 
 there because of their unbelief." As our adver- 
 saries never tire of telling us. His Eisen Body 
 appeared to none but believers. Christ comes to 
 us demanding that we shall believe, I don't say 
 without evidence or against it, but upon evidence 
 that is not conclusive apart from faith; that He, 
 the Babe of Bethlehem, is very God; so that, as 
 one adversary puts it, people make a pet name 
 of Him who made the stars and the tiger; that 
 He was born in a strange way; and after living 
 for a time, as any ordinary boy or young man, 
 startled his countrymen with a series of unheard- 
 
NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD 149 
 
 of wonders ; was executed by an ecclesiastical cabal ; 
 rose again by a process of which we know nothing ; 
 that He still lives as man, no less than as God, 
 and in the sacrament of His ordaining gives us 
 His flesh to eat and His blood to drink in a 
 mystery, wonderful and unspeakable. 
 
 Now, whether this be true or false, no ingenuity 
 can make it merely one religion a Httle better than 
 many others, but essentially the same. Still less can 
 it be sophisticated into a mere system of philosophy. 
 The faith of Christ is a thing unique and strange. 
 At all times — and at no time more than the present 
 — we are being tempted to do this, tempted to try 
 and treat Christianity as fundamentally the same as 
 other systems, worked out by other methods, resting 
 on other foundations. In truth, it is the resem- 
 blances that are superficial; the differences are 
 vital. Somebody has said, Any one can believe 
 that Jesus was a god — what is so hard to credit 
 is that He who hung upon the cross was the 
 God. That is what you are asked as Christians to 
 believe. 
 
 And it is the sword, glittering but fearful. It 
 must cut your life away from the standards of this 
 world, away from its thought and its measures, no 
 less than its aims and hopes. Hard and bitter is 
 the separation; and you will be parted from many 
 great and noble men, some perhaps your own 
 
150 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 teachers, who can accept about Jesus everything 
 but the one thing needful. The Christian faith, 
 if accepted, drives a wedge between its own adhe- 
 rents and the disciples of every other philosophy 
 or religion, however lofty or soaring. And they 
 will not see this; they will tell you that really 
 your views and theirs are the same thing, and 
 only differ in words, which, if only you were a 
 little more highly trained, you would understand. 
 Even among Christ's nominal servants, there are 
 many who think a little goodwill is all that is 
 needed to bridge the gulf — a little amiability and 
 mutual explanation, a more careful use of phrases, 
 would soon accommodate Christianity to fashion- 
 able modes of speaking and thinking, and destroy 
 all causes of provocation. So they would. But 
 they would destroy also its one inalienable attrac- 
 tion; that of being the romance among religions — 
 a wonder, and a beauty, and a terror — ^no dull and 
 drab system of thought, no mere symbolic idealism. 
 The same thing is true in practice. Jesus came, 
 as has been said, to effect a " transvaluation of all 
 values' to make all things new — a new heaven 
 and a new earth. The pupils of Jesus have learnt 
 to put a different price upon all the wares this 
 world can offer. Above all. He teaches us to put 
 a different value on ourselves and our own lives. 
 He teaches us to value as little or nothing the 
 
NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD 151 
 
 goods of this world; what shall it profit a man 
 if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? 
 He tells us that ii we will not take up the Cross 
 we cannot be His disciples. Self-denial is not an 
 accident, unfashionable, but inevitable, it is the very 
 essence of His service. It is a mockery to say we 
 can live as though this were true and be as other 
 men are, save for a few unimportant differences 
 Even the most earnest of our adversaries are be- 
 ginning to deride Christian chastity — a hard thing 
 enough — a veritable sword (as you well know) even 
 to those who know it is God's will — impossible to 
 those who do not. 
 
 More than this, Christ demands a humility which 
 is foolishness to the world. A life of penitence, of 
 confessing our sins, of childlike trust and childlike 
 simplicity is the very antipodes of what the modern 
 man seems to desire. More than ever is Christian 
 humility anathema to the world. More than ever 
 are men preferring "the lust of the flesh, the lust 
 of the eyes, the pride of life " not merely as 
 pleasant and convenient in practice, but veritably 
 as Gods to worship. Be yourself, they tell us ; be 
 a man. Have done with the vain image of re- 
 nunciation and agony with a penitence fit only 
 for priests and women. 
 
 " With this futile message to a beaten race 
 Under the heel of Rome." 
 
152 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 Or again — 
 
 " By Thy Name that in hell-fire was written and bnmed at the 
 
 point of the sword, 
 Thou art broken, Lord, Thou art broken, Thy death is upon 
 
 Thee, Lord. 
 And the love-song of earth 'as Thou diest resounds throngh the 
 
 wind of her wings. 
 Glory to man in the highest, man is the master of things." 
 
 Men have, for the most part, done with lamenting 
 their lost faith. Sentimental tears over the happy, 
 simple Christendom of their fathers are a thing of 
 the past. They are proclaiming now their contempt 
 for Christ's character, and their disgust at the very 
 name of love. 
 
 Scorn and hatred, difference and division, must be 
 more than ever our lot, if we would be the followers 
 of Christ in these days. Conventional religion and 
 pohte unbelief are gone for ever. You cannot live 
 as comfortably if you are a Christian, as if you are 
 not — so do not try. Penitence alone is a sword to 
 pierce the heart. Nothing blinds to faults like selfish- 
 ness. Worldliness, in all its forms, is like a cushion 
 round the soul, but Christ arises to help us to know 
 ourselves. " The word of God is sharper than a two- 
 edged sword piercing, and the dividing asunder ot 
 soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and a discerner 
 of the thoughts and intents of the heart." If you 
 want a comfortable and pleasing existence, don't, I 
 beg of you, don't try to be a Christian, 
 
NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD 153 
 
 For we must face the facts, and not shirk them. 
 Christ did come not to send peace but a sword 
 There is no use our trying to live or think, as 
 though it made only a superficial difference whether 
 we call ourselves Christians or no. If you serve 
 Christ, He will be content with nothing less than 
 the whole of you. The service means taking up 
 the Cross; being hard where others find it easy, 
 being regarded by some as unintelligent, by others 
 as bigoted, by others as uncharitable — for Christ's 
 lordship is intolerant. We are His sworn men and 
 owe Him "life and hmb and earthly worship" and 
 service against all other lords ; and we cannot reduce 
 our faith into mere commonplace morals or respect- 
 able citizenship. Whatever Christianity is, or is 
 not, it is not commonplace or respectable, and good 
 sense always condemns it. It is not to pleasant 
 days, and well-fashioned lives, and sheltered peace 
 that Christ summons you, but to tears and the splen- 
 dour of sacrifice, and the height and depth of Uves 
 lived in warfare, a world of wonder and of joy, but 
 of anguish and agony. Riot paints a city red, 
 religion dyes the whole world purple. 
 
 Let us live, then, as Christ's servants under no 
 delusive dreams; for life will not be easier, but 
 harder, infinitely harder if you are to be His 
 soldiers against sin, the world, and the devil. Em- 
 brace if you will the banner of Love, Love flaming. 
 
154 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 intolerant, revolution incarnate. Follow Christ to 
 joy and to worship, to exultation and to agony. 
 But never for an hour or an instant, never forget 
 — it is not peace, but a sword that you bear and 
 wield. 
 
LITTLE CHILDREN^ 
 
 "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall 
 not enter into the kingdom." — St. Matt, xviii. 3. 
 
 Well as we know these words, we do not know 
 them well enough. Yet the call to be children is 
 Christ's supreme call. Failure to meet it was the 
 cardinal sin of the respectable religious people of 
 that day. It was because they would not bow them- 
 selves, could not be anything but grown men before 
 God, that He told them that many should come from 
 the east and the west and sit down with Abraham and 
 Isaac and Jacob, and the children of the kingdom be 
 left in darkness without. The oflfence of the Cross 
 lies just in this — its simplicity. It is not because 
 the faith is hard that men despise it, but because 
 it is easy. It is hard, but believers feel most of 
 that. What repels people is its direct appeal — its 
 command to us to shake off the paraphernalia of 
 sophistry with which we love to envelop our life. 
 
 One critic attacks us for worshipping the symbol 
 of an execution, for making a Cross the crisis of all 
 history. How silly to make of that vulgar occurrence 
 
 » Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, Sept. 27, 1908, 
 
 1S6 
 
156 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 — the murder of a harmless prophet — the one great 
 fact, the supreme gift of God to men! We shall 
 never, he tells us, make Christianity modem and 
 effective until we get rid of this ridiculous emphasis 
 on the Crucifixion and put the Cross in its proper 
 place. And so throughout. How trivial the sprink- 
 ling of unconscious babies with a little water 1 And 
 there, men are asked to believe, begins the spiritual 
 life. How slight a bond it is to receive in common 
 a little bread and wine ! Yet we are to say that in 
 that sacrament God gives us Himself, and we are in 
 touch with the heart of things. How supremely 
 ridiculous! The great God, "Who made the stars 
 and the tiger," can never be working in so mean 
 a fashion. Sacramental doctrine is pretty and 
 useful for children — but that is alL That is all. 
 We are children where God is concerned. We do 
 not need Christ to teach us the majesty of things, 
 and the sublimities of the starry heavens. All can 
 admire the splendour of the sunset on the rose- 
 crowned hills, or bow before the glory of a Shake- 
 speare or a Newton. But Christ alone can consecrate 
 the trivial and give distinction to commonplace 
 things. Not the greatness of the great, but the 
 greatness of the little — the worth of the Uly and 
 the manger, the infinite value of the poor and 
 the publican; that is the message of Jesus, His 
 message and our hope.; 
 
LITTLE CHILDREN 157 
 
 For it is we, the poor and sinful, to whom He does 
 such honour, calling us friends, and raising us to 
 His level. Kaising, but on one condition. First, we 
 must be lowered. Even Eternal Love must "stoop 
 to conquer." We must repent, and be like children. 
 How easy and simple it is for a chUd to repent — 
 how bitter for us! The truth is we are afraid — 
 afraid to repent lest love and faith should carry 
 us we know not where. We cover ourselves with 
 many wrappings of position, calling, philosophy, just 
 because we are cowards, and dare not face our- 
 selves. Half the problems we think so dark, half the 
 difficulties we multiply so proudly, take their origin 
 in this. We dare not be alone. " I was afraid and 
 hid myself, because I was naked." 
 
 And yet the natural line is that of Christ — to 
 feel sorry like a chUd, humble like a small school- 
 boy who knows he is at the bottom. This is all 
 we can do, when the facts stream in upon us. This, 
 above all else, divides us from the world. We do, 
 they do not, think repentance and humility a duty. 
 Our enemies tell us that we are not better than they 
 are, and often worse. Alas ! we know it. It is be- 
 cause we are bad that we want to touch the hem 
 of His garment, not because we are good. Many 
 who do not own Christ's call overtop us in courage 
 and perseverance. We wish we were like them, but 
 we are not. We have no power of ourselves to help 
 
158 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 ourselves, and cannot get on at all but by God's 
 grace. And even then we move slowly, and fall 
 so often. Again and again we must kneel in peni- 
 tence, and weep like St. Peter. Yet this, more than 
 anything else, makes us what we are — weak and 
 untrustworthy, but real and affectionate children 
 of God. We do — and others do not — feel the duty 
 of being humble and confessing our faults like 
 children. And like them, we are not to trouble 
 at the contempt of others, or when they laugh at 
 us. They do laugh. The man who cries Abba 
 Father, who bows his head in confession, has a 
 different ideal from those who do not, and to such 
 he seems absurd and weak, below the dignity of 
 educated modern man. Quite right. There is 
 something wrong about your religion when the 
 world does not think it silly. 
 
 But though it begins with humbled grief, re- 
 pentance does not end there. The child who says 
 he is sorry always adds, I'll try and never do it 
 again. That faith in the future, even more than 
 the grief, is the note of the Christian. He believes, 
 the world does not believe, that with God's help 
 he may become better. For a certain number of 
 years, say twenty-five, we take it for granted that 
 not only mentally but morally and spiritually a 
 boy or man may change. After that we label them, 
 put their characters into pigeon-holes, and expect 
 
LITTLE CHILDREN 159 
 
 our rough classifications to be eternal. But Christ 
 teaches the opposite of all this — the whole sacra- 
 mental system of the Church implies a belief in real 
 progress, in genuine power of amendment. The 
 world laughs at this optimism, and we too find it 
 hard to credit, unless of set will we remain of the 
 child's mind with faith undimmed by the clouds 
 of appearance. 
 
 That is the essence of it all. For the chUd's re- 
 pentance and the child's amendment we need the 
 inexhaustible faith of childhood, its infinite and 
 inalienable romance. The faith of a Christian, that 
 faith we have agreed to call child-like, is at once 
 the crown and the basis of all his efforts, their goal 
 and their starting-point. It is the inward "peace 
 at home" amid the outer conflicts of will and cir- 
 cumstance. That which springs up naturally in 
 human chQdhood is for us the supreme gift, a 
 grace to be sought with prayer — this faith, that 
 is at the root of the careless gladness of children, 
 and of the ease and buoyancy of saints like 
 St. Francis — this faith, so uplifting, so hard to win, 
 yet so essential. For without it where are we? 
 Whether we look at the prospects of the Church 
 or our own life, probability, rational calculation, 
 common sense are all ranged on the cynic's side. 
 
 People talk of the Church in danger— the Church 
 is always in danger ; the miracle is not in her weak- 
 
160 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS 
 
 ness, but in her existence. The betting is always 
 in favour of the devil. It was not human chance, 
 but God's grace, that gave to the early Church its 
 victory over the most imposing civilisation and the 
 strongest government the world has known. It is 
 only as we throw ourselves on God that we shall 
 certainly conqilpr — for " of ourselves we have no 
 power to help ourselves." Yet with that aid victory 
 is not merely likely, but certain. "For God hath 
 chosen the foolish things of the world to confound 
 the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak things of 
 the world to confound the things which are mighty ; 
 and base things of the world, and things which are 
 despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which 
 are not, to bring to nought things that are; that 
 no flesh should glory in His presence." 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 BISHOP BUTLER' 
 
 The apparition of the New Theology is interesting 
 in various aspects, and I do not think that it can 
 be dismissed with contempt. The arrogance and 
 superficial smartness of Mr. Campbell's well-adver- 
 tised work, doubtless, conduce to this view, and lead 
 to our imagining that there is " nothing in the move- 
 ment ; " but this is greatly to misconceive the situa- 
 tion, and to underrate the importance of certain 
 permanent tendencies in the human mind. 
 
 The New Theology is really but a recrudescence 
 of " natural religion " in a Christianised form, ex- 
 pressed under the conditions of pantheistic rather 
 than deistic assumptions. As such it is certain, 
 whether within the Church or without, to exercise a 
 powerful attraction upon the minds of the cultivated 
 or semi-cultivated " masses," for it will never appeal 
 fco the uneducated or to the multitude. But we 
 
 » The Church Times, Sept. 27, 1907. 
 
162 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 have to face the fact that there exists, and has ex- 
 isted for a long while, a very large class of people, 
 removed by position and training from the grosser 
 evils of life, of which they know only by hearsay, 
 interested in religious topics and desirous of finding 
 some ideal with which they can square their intel- 
 lectual convictions or assumptions. Indeed, for two 
 hundred years the great discussion between Chris- 
 tianity and its opponents has been carried on within 
 this charmed circle. Nearly all apologists make the 
 assumption that their opponents are equally disin- 
 terested with themselves, and equally certain of the 
 main dictates of conscience, if not of creed. Conse- 
 quently, the condition sine qud non for Christianity, 
 man's need of redemption, is apt to be ignored or 
 thrust aside by apologists, except the vulgar sort 
 who argue that unbelief is never the result of any- 
 thing but moral turpitude. Granted, however, the 
 hypothesis that the grosser sins are not actually 
 in question, and that men in general desire a high 
 ethical standard, the attraction of natural religion 
 in some form or other will always be irresistible for 
 many, perhaps the majority, of cultivated men. To 
 them the claims of a human Christ are quite sufiS- 
 cient, and the belief in a noble aim will in their view 
 speedily eradicate the relics of sin, which are besides 
 being removed by the general course of progress. 
 An evolutionary philosophy, masquerading as a 
 
NEW THEOLOGY AND BISHOP BUTLER 163 
 
 spiritual religion, gives them all they feel the need 
 of, while on the intellectualist assumptions the objec- 
 tions to the Christian faith must always appear very 
 nearly insuperable. At least they make it easier to 
 "interpret" than to accept the creeds. It is only 
 the individual's passionate insistence that he Tuust 
 be redeemed, that carries him beyond the ordinary 
 assumptions of idealism, to a belief in a personal 
 Saviour, in the Church, the Cross, and the Sacra- 
 ments. "I am not come to call the righteous, but 
 sinners to repentance," is a maxim to be remem- 
 bered by the apologist, no less than by the mission 
 preacher. Unfortunately the academic atmosphere 
 which surrounds the former is apt to make him 
 forget what his comparatively despised practical 
 brother has had burnt in upon him by his daily 
 work. (A notable exception is Dr. Bussell's recent 
 Bampton Lectures.) 
 
 Here, however, what I desire more especially to 
 insist upon is the interest of the new movement in 
 showing us the inadequacy of the famous argument 
 of the " Analogy." It is generally supposed that as 
 an argv/mentuTn ad hominein the " Analogy " is irre- 
 fragable. Butler's thesis was that probable evidence 
 was all that could be expected in favour of a religion ; 
 and that this was sufficient. In this he probably 
 did permanent work, although it is work which 
 constantly needs renewing ; for people in whom the 
 
164 APPENDIX 
 
 intellectualist attitude is strongly marked are always 
 demanding more in the way of external evidence 
 than can possibly be secured; and are at this 
 moment striving to substitute a purely outward 
 historical certitude for faith. They have given up 
 the old idea of demonstrating Christianity, but much 
 of modern criticism seems to proceed from the 
 notion that it wiU sometime be possible to get all 
 educated men to accept the same account of the 
 Gospel narratives, apart from their philoaophio and 
 religious prepossessions ; and this will never be the 
 case, in dealing with professedly abnormal narratives, 
 even if it be so (though that is very doubtful) in 
 other case^. 
 
 Butler, as is well known, went on to argue that the 
 natural religion of the Deists was equally open to 
 objection with Christianity; and that either they 
 must go back or go forward. Koughly speaking, his 
 dilemma was accepted in the nineteenth century, 
 and the majority of educated men were either 
 Christians or agnostics, and attempted no longer to 
 dwell in a half-way house. Now it is the weak point 
 of this position, accepted, be it remembered, by the 
 foes no less than the friends of orthodoxy, that is 
 the real ground of the attack made upon our 
 position in favour of a transformed edition of 
 "Christianity not Mysterious." Butler was quite 
 right in urging that mystery was inherent in our 
 
NEW THEOLOGY AND BISHOP BTJTLEE 165 
 
 experience and that Christianity did not introduce 
 it ; that natural rehgion did not remove it ; and that 
 many of the difficulties which disturbed the Christian 
 were found in an equal or increased degree in the 
 system of the Deists. I am not sure that Butler's 
 own language goes further than this, but in the 
 general interpretation he has been thought to mean 
 more. His book is taken alike by friends and foes 
 as an argument to show that the difficulties of 
 natural religion are not merely the same as those of 
 nature, but the same as those of " revelation," and 
 that nobody who has found it possible to accept the 
 one ought to have any reasonable trouble about 
 receiving the other. Now this is not the case. And 
 the fact that it is not the case is the great leverage 
 of the new theology. Whether or no natural re- 
 ligion in the form proposed is really more easily 
 capable of something like demonstration than Chris- 
 tianity, I wiU not inquire. Personally, I think that 
 it is not, and that it rests on an equally unsupported 
 series of assumptions — the assumption that the 
 world is that of modern scientific inquiry. But I 
 am sure that the difficulties of revealed religion are 
 different in many cases from those of natural reli- 
 gion ; that the grounds which make those plausible 
 make the other improbable; and that neither in 
 degree nor in kind are the two conceptions of life at 
 all parallel. For instance, both the charm and the 
 
166 APPENDIX 
 
 stumbling-block of the Christian faith is that it 
 worships a definite historical person — One whose 
 actions upon earth were subject to the same methods 
 of appraisement as those of any other carpenter. (It 
 is amazing how the modern " snob " will go to church 
 and ignore this fundamental fact.) Secondly, Chris- 
 tianity by its whole idea consecrates a particular 
 moment in past time, the moment (shall we say ?) of 
 the Eesurrection ; and is thus radically opposed to 
 the assumption of the progressive evolutionist that 
 everything is always moving on, though to what end 
 he does not know. Our faith finds, in fact, an 
 eternal meaning in the particular, the isolated, and 
 the exceptional. Natural religion dwells in a world 
 of abstractions and ideas, and owes its strength to 
 this very fact; it appeals to those persons to whom 
 "conceptions" are everything and persons little or 
 nothing. It lives and breathes in an atmosphere 
 of notions. Again, natural religion treats the world 
 as a "closed circle," abhors the thought of the 
 "miraculous," and harps upon the unity of Being, 
 riding roughshod with the Juggernaut-car of uni- 
 versal notions over the intimate, the individual, over 
 the suflfering and the sad and the sin-stricken. 
 
 The Christian faith does just the opposite of all 
 this. It has the Nachtrag of miracles, exceptions, 
 revelations, hard to reconcile with the notion of a 
 mechanical universe, and the majesty of law. But it 
 
NEW THEOLOGY AND BISHOP BUTLER 167 
 
 also has its advantages. It appeals to the average 
 man's desire for "some voice that we could trust" 
 to " murmur from the narrow house." It ministers, 
 not to the love of law, but to the hatred of an iron 
 imiformity; to the desire of the spirit of man to 
 be raised above the apparently inextricable web of 
 causes and effects in nature, to that passion for " the 
 Beyond" which is too deep and permanent ever to 
 be eradicated by materialism or even utterly de- 
 graded by superstition. Natural religion is primarily 
 a philosophy and deals in ideas. The Christian faith 
 is primarily a living trust and is essentially bound 
 up with the concrete. Sacramental doctrine — often 
 ignored or thrust aside by the apologist as only 
 concerned with the internal content of the religion — 
 is, in fact, the differentia, by which its whole system 
 may be discerned. Indeed, one main reason why 
 sacramental doctrine has been, pa/r excellence, the 
 stumbling-block of the rationalists is, that it con- 
 tains in solution nearly all those elements in reli- 
 gion which the modern world finds it hardest to 
 assimilate. 
 
 The Sacramental System stands for a belief in 
 the concrete presentment of eternal truth; for its 
 embodiment in ritual and cult as in one form vital 
 to man's religious life ; for the lasting significance of 
 a moment in human history, the death of Jesus upon 
 the Cross; for the consecration of suffering as the 
 
168 APPENDIX 
 
 highest expression of love ; for the socially authori- 
 tative nature of religion; for the depth of sin, the 
 reality of forgiveness, the possibility of redemption; 
 for the union of God and man through Him, Who is 
 both " very God of very God," and yet " man of the 
 substance of His mother." 
 
 Now it is just these conceptions which are the 
 supreme difficulty to the minds of men enraptured 
 with the miracles of modern science and enthralled 
 by the siren-song of evolutionary philosophy. Such 
 minds will accept an immanent God, provided 
 nothing is said to disentangle Him from His works ; 
 they can bow before the majesty of eternal law and 
 strive for some harmony of emotion which may 
 bridge the gulf between themselves and the universal 
 mind; they may even go the length of saying, 
 " Our Father," and, recognising the duties of human 
 brotherhood, may strive for noble and disinterested 
 service; this ideal, they think, is sufficient to drive 
 out the relics of sin, and they can " move upward 
 working out the beast," not without effort indeed, 
 but with no need of supernatural assistance; and 
 the theology of "grace" is to them not so much 
 false as superfluous. In some degree this is true 
 for men with happy temperaments and cultivated 
 interests and sheltered lives. But for the toiling 
 masses, for the profligate, the luxurious, and the 
 scoundrel; for those who are ruined by pleasure, 
 
NEW THEOLOGY AND BISHOP BUTLEB 169 
 
 and those who ruin themselves in the effort to 
 acquire the means of it, no such rosewater creed 
 can ever be a gospel. It is useless to talk to the 
 drunkard or the harlot, to the man enslaved either 
 by passion or greed, of the upward progress of the 
 race and the gradual amelioration of life — useless, 
 even if it were true to the facts, which it is not. 
 Either he will not listen, or if he is in a mood to 
 listen — in other words, under conviction of sin — it is 
 redemption, atonement, miraculous grace, that he 
 cries for, and repudiates the abstractions of idealism 
 as the stone offered for bread. 
 
 What I want here to point out is that the kind of 
 difficulty to which natural religion is subject is not 
 the same as that under which Christianity labours ; 
 and that the kind of appeal it makes is also different. 
 Our faith is something sui generis, more akin, indeed, 
 to other "institutional" religions, which, at least, 
 have ministered to great masses of men, than to 
 this comfortable philosophy of cdteries. The "new 
 theology " is a sort of university extensionist's re- 
 ligion. Our faith, even if it were false, is something 
 bigger than that. The ordinary assumption since 
 Butler is that everybody who is not an agnostic 
 ought to find no difficulty at all in passing from 
 Theism to Christianity; and that there are no real 
 difficulties that are not common to both. That 
 some such difficulties — e.g. those of freedom and a 
 
170 APPENDIX 
 
 spiritual world — are common to both, I do not deny. 
 But I do emphatically deny that our faith has no 
 greater difficulties, or that it has not correspondingly 
 greater advantages, than that system -which bids 
 fair to be its rival. There are all the difficulties 
 connected with its historical character. To the 
 mind fed on universal notions, it seems degrading 
 to pin so much faith to a particular life on earth, 
 even apart from any question of the miracxdous, 
 A great many modern critical prepossessions start 
 from the claim of Christianity not so much to be 
 miraculous as to be actvMl. Then there is, of 
 course, the perennial difficulty of miracles. Their 
 old evidential value may be gone; though I think 
 too much ought not to be conceded here. To the 
 average man in the street, not to the learned, the 
 miraculous is the assurance that there is a " beyond," 
 that man is not bound hopelessly to the iron rule 
 of nature. So with forgiveness. This is always the 
 crux of the philosopher, and the consolation of the 
 vulgar; the reason being that to the philosopher 
 sin is a sort of growing pain which man will soon 
 transcend, to the vulgar it is a daily agony, an 
 everlasting tragedy, the torment and the centre of 
 his moral life. I need not go on. This paper is 
 merely meant to indicate and suggest. What seems 
 to the writer increasingly important is this. Do not 
 let us make too much of the argument from analogy. 
 
NEW THEOLOGY AND BISHOP BUTLER 171 
 
 It is useful, but in no sense adequate. Do not let us 
 imagine that if you can make the agnostic a theist, 
 there is no valid intellectual ground for his re- 
 maining a theist. There are plenty of such grounds, 
 and they are intellectually quite respectable. Do not 
 let us underrate the significance of this recrudescence 
 of natural religion. (Of course I am using this term 
 in the old sense, not in that given to it in his admir 
 able essay by Father Tyrrell.) It appeals to argu- 
 ments and to temperaments very common, and 
 likely to become commoner among the more or less 
 cultivated members of society. 
 
 It is not, in fact, by any argument from analogy 
 that men can make the leap over the tremendous 
 gulf which divides Christianity from its rivals. 
 There is one argument, and one alone, which has the 
 force to carry reflecting minds on so far and perilous 
 a journey — that argument is the personal need of 
 redemption, the refusal of the sinful soul to be put 
 off with anything short of forgiveness. Redemption 
 is the supreme miracle of all ; if that can be accepted, 
 nobody will really think it worth while to " boggle " 
 over the details of a system which must be super- 
 natural, if it be not a mockery. 
 
NOTES 
 
 I.— REVELATION 
 
 (1.) A. L. Lilley, " Modernism," p. 242. 
 
 (2.) F. W. Bussell, " Christian Theology and Social Progress," 
 pp. 75-76, also p. 281. 
 
 "It has been maintained in them that the present age is the 
 real 'age of Faith,' because the function of reason has been 
 reduced to a registry of phenomena, because no single tenet of 
 the scantiest theology or of the most attenuated moral code 
 remains at the present moment unshaken. Let it be clearly 
 understood, and let men face the issue honestly, that the 
 doctrine of purposive creation and moral plan in the world, 
 the very definition and use of 'virtue,' the justification of 
 unselfishness (otherwise aimless), stand on no different level to 
 the particular dogmas of Christianity." 
 
 Again, p. 289 : " The ' Ages of Faith ' in reality began with 
 the Reformation. The emphasis on belief has been ever since 
 growing more intense. The discord of faith and facts — facts 
 political, social, domestic, scientific — has never before been so 
 acute. And yet the world walks still or tries to walk by faith 
 and not yet by sight. . . . Examine what you will of the tenets 
 of reforming propaganda, in one and all you will find the 
 scientific view of man and society conveniently forgotten and 
 obscured, whenever that comes into conflict with the 'dim 
 mythologic postulates' of man's freedom and worth; — which 
 must still animate the eloquence or the appeal of secularism." 
 
 (3.) " Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process 
 at every step and the substitution for it of another which may 
 
 172 
 
REVELATION 173 
 
 be called ' the ethical process.' "—Romanes Lecture, 1893 : 
 " Evolution and Ethics." 
 
 The position adopted by Huxley is, of course, the exact 
 opposite of that of Nietzsche, "the only man perhaps who 
 rigidly applied logic to life " (Bussell, p. 317). It is, indeed, 
 asserted by some that Huxley painted too dark a picture, and 
 that evolution develops the altruistic qualities no less than the 
 egoistic — as was argued by the late Henry Drummond in "The 
 Ascent of Man." On such a point the unscientific can offer no 
 opinion ; but, in any case, Huxley's lecture remains a noble 
 protest in favour of human against merely naturalistic ethics, 
 and against the innumerable forms of pantheism, which shut 
 their eyes to facts and assert, in the ironical words of Mr. 
 Bradley : " The world is the best possible of worlds and every- 
 thing in it is a necessary evil." Of Pope's famous line, the ethics 
 of pantheism — 
 
 " One truth is clear, whatever is is right," 
 
 Huxley says : " Its fittest place would be as an inscription 
 in letters of mud over the portal of some stye of Epicurus " 
 (p. 25). 
 
 (4.) It is called " semi-theism " by Dr. Caldecott in his " Philo- 
 sophy of Eeligion." 
 
 There are evidences in " The Autobiography " that Spencer's 
 position towards the Church became far more understanding 
 towards the close of life. On the other hand, his attitude to 
 the classics and to art as such are an Illuminating instance 
 of what is the logical result of rationalism, if it be applied 
 remorselessly to the whole of life. 
 
 (5.) Of. Frederic Harrison, " The Creed of a Layman." 
 
 " We must give human nature its fair chance and accept what 
 it demands ; and if human nature call out for Religion, religion 
 it must have " (p. 219). 
 
 Again : " How will free thought teach discipline to the young 
 and self-restraint to the wUdP What sustenance will the 
 imaginative and the devotional nature receive from the 
 principle of fre« inquiry? Human nature is not a thing so 
 
174 NOTES 
 
 docile and intellectual that it can be tamed by fine thonghts, 
 nor is society amenable to pure ideas " (p. 224). 
 
 This book and others since published, " The Philosophy of 
 Common Sense," afford illuminating and pathetic evidence 
 of the need of a religion in human nature so strong that it 
 attempts to make one with the sorry basis of mere humanity. 
 But in the assertion oft repeated of man's real freedom, of 
 the inadequacy of the intellect to save him from moral ruin, 
 and the futility of mere analysis to satisfy the soul, which 
 lives by " admiration, hope, and love," Mr. Harrison has few 
 equals. 
 
 (6.) John Davidson, in Epilogue to " Mammon and his 
 Message," pp. 171-173. 
 
 " What we require is a renewal of Imagination, . . . There 
 cannot be a rise of Rationalism. There was only a decay of 
 Imagination. . . . Rationalism evacuated the old form and 
 substance of Imagination and rested there wondering what 
 had happened. One thing had happened ; the world had come 
 to an end for the Rationalists. By Imagination men live. 
 Surgery has found out that, unlike the holothure, man can get 
 along without a stomach ; but Art knows very well, that 
 the world comes to an end when it is purged of Imagination. 
 Rationalism was only a stage in the process. For the old 
 conception of a created Universe, with a fall of man, an 
 Atonement, and a Heaven and Hell, the form and substance 
 of the Imagination of Christendom, Rationalism had no sub- 
 stitute. Science was not ready; but how can poetry wait? 
 Science is synonymous with patience ; poetry is impatience 
 incarnate. If you take away the symbol of the Universe, in 
 which since the Christian era began, poetry and all great ait 
 lived and had their being, I for one decline to continue the 
 eviscerated Life in Death of Rationalism. I devour, digest, 
 and assimilate the Universe ; make for myself in my Testa- 
 ments and Tragedies a new form and substance of Imagina- 
 tion ; and by poetic power certify the semi-certitudes of science." 
 
 If this be not an appeal to faith of a sort, it would be hard 
 to know what is. Mr. Davidson's views are never disguised 
 
REVELATION 175 
 
 and can be read at large in " The Triumph of Mammon," " The 
 Testament of John Davidson," besides the work from which 
 this quotation is derived. He stands as a reviewer stated not 
 long since for the newness and glory of life, the breach with 
 the past, the unconquerable audacities of the human spirit ; 
 while, on the other hand, his contempt for Christianity and 
 desire to shatter every relic of it, and to abolish every form of 
 culture, including wit and humour, are so loudly, not to say 
 blatantly, expressed, that they are likely to be innocuous. 
 
 (7.) G. Lowes Dickinson in the Hibbert Jov/rnal, April 1908. 
 
 (8.) G. Lowes Dickinson, " Religion : A Criticism and a 
 Forecast," p. 90. 
 
 Cf. also the following passage, p. 93 : " Faith is the sense and 
 the call of the open horizon. If we abstract it from the forms 
 in which we clothe it, from the specific beliefs which are, as 
 it were, its projection into our intelligence, it presents itself 
 as the spring of our whole life, including our intellectual life. 
 It is the impulse to grow and expand; and just because it is 
 that, it has itself no form, but may assume any form. It is a 
 taper burning now bright, now dim, and changing colour and 
 substance with every change in the stuff it consumes. The 
 frailest thing we know, it is also the least perishable, for it is a 
 tongue of the central fire that burns at the heart of the world." 
 
 On page 70, Mr. Dickinson discusses the relative value of 
 Christianity and paganism as symbolised by their architecture. 
 I think he is quite right in taking the two forms Gothic and 
 classical as expressive of the two religions, though I do not, 
 of coarse, accept his strange account of the beauty of a 
 cathedral, where he apparently sees nothing but gloom in 
 stained-glass. Without in any way subscribing to the heresies 
 of the Gothic revival, with its depreciation of every other form, 
 I do think it true to say that the attraction and meaning of 
 Christian faith was never more fitly enshrined, and would 
 willingly take the other horn of the dilemma which Mr. 
 Dickinson offers. 
 
 (9.) John Davidson, "Mammon and his Message/' pp. 103, 
 
 13& 
 
176 NOTES 
 
 (10.) E.g. Dr. M'Taggart, Mr. Bradley, and Mr. A. E. 
 Taylor. Cf. an interesting article on "Absolutism and 
 Religion," by Dr. Schiller, in "Studies in Humanism." 
 
 In addition to this, fashions in philosophy are very variable, 
 and to tie Christianity down to a particular phase of idealism, as 
 some would do, is an extremely dangerous policy. It must be 
 evident that the idealist position or positions has nothing Uke 
 the strength to-day which it had in the palmy days of T. H, 
 Green and his followers. Evidence of this can be found not 
 merely in the apparition of pragmatism, but still more in writings 
 like those of Bergson, or Messrs. Moore and Russell, or such 
 an essay as the opening one in Professor Pigou's new book. 
 
 (II.) Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his article, "Pantheism, 
 Cosmic Emotion," states and rejects the claims of pantheism, 
 which ever since the great vogue of Hegel has more or less 
 dazzled the Western mind. 
 
 Pantheism in the widest sense is become the " great halting- 
 place between the devotion to God and the devotion to 
 Humanity " (" Creed of a Layman," p. 196). 
 
 He sees that the real question is between a belief in per- 
 sonality and its denial. 
 
 " If the starry night is beautiful, it may be nothing to the 
 smile of a child. One speech of Prometheus or of Hamlet or 
 Faust teaches more than ten thousand sunsets " (p. 200). His 
 view is essentially practical. " The main daily business of 
 Religion is to improve daily life, not to answer certain intel- 
 lectual puzzles." "The weak side of the official Christianity 
 after all is not so much its alienation from science, its mystical 
 creed, or its conventional formulas, as the palpable fact that 
 nineteen hundred years have passed since the death of Christ, 
 and the Gospel has been preached by millions of priests, and yet 
 in spite of it the practical order of society is so cruelly hard 
 . . . that it still is a world for the strong." This is to ignore 
 the fact well pointed out by Dr. Inge that Christianity is 
 "still a very young religion." 
 
 He sees, however, the true source of religion, and the danger 
 of making a god of nature. 
 
BEVELATION 177 
 
 " There lies in the heart of the poorest and meanest child a 
 force that cannot be even stated in terms of the deepest philo- 
 sophy of the physical universe. ... If we are to seek the 
 sources of religion in the rushing firmament of suns, or in the 
 withering waifs and strays of humanity who are yielding up 
 their last breath in mutual trust and love, we shall have to 
 look for it in [these latter] " (p. 214). It is strange that the 
 writer should not see how all these aspirations are satisfied 
 in the Incarnation. 
 
 (12.) Matthew Arnold, " Obermann Once More." 
 
 (13.) For evidence of this, see the writings of Mr. Dickinson 
 passim. His review of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, published in 
 The Independent Review, is peculiarly illuminating. 
 
 See also Mr. Bradley on " Social Surgery " ; and Mr. A. E. 
 Taylor on "The Problem of Conduct." The subject is dis- 
 cussed by Professor Sorley in " Kecent Tendencies in English 
 Ethics." 
 
 (14.) Bousset, "What is Beligion P " (pp. 274-277). 
 
 After an inspiring description first of Goethe, then of 
 Bismarck, the author goes on : — 
 
 " Christianity in its essential idea, dominant up to the 
 present, is based on a fundamental conception utterly opposed 
 to the ideal of life, which has just been described. ... In the 
 centre of religion is placed the consciousness of sin, and the 
 consolation of freedom from sin and gtiilt. ... If we accept in its 
 entirety this conception, if, that is, we take from modern life its 
 very essence and force it to self-renunciation, we shall have 
 absolutely to cast on one side such complete and great figures 
 as those of Goethe and Bismarck." If this frank recognition of 
 the facts were more fully realised by orthodox Christians, 
 perhaps we should see less of the essays to strengthen the 
 faith by accommodating it to a spirit fvmdamentally its 
 adversary. But as Mr. Davidson well says : — 
 
 " The inbred fault and meanness of the time 
 In art, in thought, in polity, in trade 
 I charge directly to the rained will 
 
 M 
 
178 NOTES 
 
 That neithertakes nor leaves the Omnipotent 
 Creator, the Immortal soul of man, 
 Heaven, Hell, the Cross of Christ, and all that once 
 Was great in Christendom, when Ood meant Qod." 
 
 — Mammon wnd hii Message, p, 50. 
 
 (15.) See the use made of this by Mr. J. M. Robertson in 
 "Pagan Christs," and, on the general topic, Robert Blatch- 
 ford, "God and My Neighbour." The strongest point in this 
 very able and honest book is its insistence on this historical 
 argument, and also the use it makes of certain statements in 
 Dr. J. G. Fraze^s "Golden Bough." 
 
 (16.) This position is admirably set forth by Mr. Tyrrell in 
 the first essay in "Through Scylla and Charybdis": "Reflections 
 on Catholicism." 
 
 (17.) In a sermon by Dr. Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh. 
 
 (18.) T. T. Hunger, "The Freedom of Faith." 
 
 (19.) Henry Newbolt. 
 
 (20.) Dr. Illingworth, in his "Reason and Revelation," 
 p. 163, says that "miracles cannot be for us what they were 
 tor those to whom they first occurred." Doubtless, but that 
 28 because they are more to us than to them, not because they 
 are less. 
 
 On this question of the value of the miraculous, see an 
 interesting article by Father Kelly, S.S.M., on "Revelation 
 and Religious Ideas," in the Ghurch Quwrterly, January 1909. 
 
 " Law is coextensive with Nature, and there is therefore no 
 way in which a Revelation of that which transcends Nature can 
 be given within the natural sphere, except by transcending the 
 law by which the natural is normally bound. Miracles in this 
 sense do not guarantee or authenticate, they actually constitute 
 the Revelation, exactly as it is his talking ' freely ' outside the 
 strict terms of the ofiicial programme which reveals the man 
 behind the official " (p. 334). 
 
 The whole article is most valuable. It is to be noted that it 
 is only with the growth of the sense of law in nature that this 
 essential need of miracle becomes evident. 
 
MYSTERY 179 
 
 {21.) The notion of freedom at once upsets the idea of a 
 universe perfectly "given," and predictable. Moreover, the 
 actions of a free being such as a man would seem miraculous to 
 anything in the purely mechanical order, such as a stone, could 
 we conceive it endowed with consciousness. The idea of the 
 miraculous does not do more than apply to God what every one 
 who believes in freedom applies to man in regard to his use of 
 the natural order. 
 
 On the whole question of freedom, c/. James in " The Will to 
 Believe"; Schiller, "Freedom" in "Humanism," pp. 391 sqq.; and 
 above all, Bergson, Les Donn^es im/mediates de la Conscience, chap, 
 iii. I think M. Bergson does not quite adequately discuss the 
 phenomena of remorse in the actor ; he seems to treat it only 
 from the spectator's standpoint. 
 
 See also Margaret Benson, " The Venture of Rational Faith" ; 
 W. H. Mallock, "Religion as a Credible Doctrine on the 
 Practical Basis of Belief " ; and Professor Pigou's valuable 
 essay in his volume on " Theism." On Bergson's view that 
 free acts are of rare occurrence, cf. a popular exposition of 
 the same truth by E. H. Hutton on " The Limits of Free- 
 will," in his "Aspects of Scientific and Religious Thought," 
 pp. 353 sqq. 
 
 (22.) Cf. Bergson, L'Ewlution Criatrice, and Ward, "Natu- 
 ralism and Agnosticism." 
 
 II.— MYSTERY 
 
 (1.) "Christianity not Mysterious.'' 
 
 " They trifle then exceedingly and discover a mighty scarcity 
 of better arguments, who defend their mysteries by this pitiful 
 shift of drawing inferences from what is unknow:a to what is 
 known, of insisting upon adequate Ideas ; except they will 
 agree, as some do, to call every spire of grass, sitting and 
 standing, fish or flesh, profound mysteries " (p. 78^. 
 
 " All faith now in the world is (of this last sort and by con- 
 
 M 2 
 
180 NOTES 
 
 sequence) entirely built upon ratiocination. The last sort is 
 acquiescing in the words and writings of those to whom we 
 believe God has spoken." 
 
 (2.) It is to be noted that these works seem not even plaus- 
 ible to us to-day, and even to many unbelievers would seem 
 more deficient in grasp of reality than the faith they attack. 
 Being only one particular fashion, they have no interest for an 
 age in which that fashion no longer rules. There is every 
 reason for supposing that the "New Theology" will prove 
 equally ephemeral. 
 
 (3.) "The New Theology," by R. J. Campbell. 
 
 (4.) "The Substance of Faith allied with Science,'' Sir 
 Oliver Lodge. 
 
 (5.) " Common-sense in Religion," by Martin R. Smith. 
 
 (6.) " The Re-birth of Religion," by A. S. Crapsey. 
 
 (7.) E. A. Abbott, "The Kernel and the Husk"; his works 
 on Newman are " Philomythus," " Newmanianism," and "The 
 Anglican Life of Cardinal Newman," 2 vols. 
 
 (8.) See especially Bradley, "Appearance and Reality." 
 Whatever be the detects of Mr. Bradley's system, "our 
 absolute," as he calls it, he has certainly done great service in 
 showing the difficulties inherent in the commonest notions. 
 
 (9.) "The Creed of Christ." Li this author's view the 
 Christianity of the Creeds takes for granted that man is 
 ... a naughty child. 
 
 " The morality that is based on obedience, though suitable for 
 children and for childlike souls, is fatal to soul-growth in its higher 
 stages " (p. 142). 
 
 The whole chapter is expressive of hostility to the childlike 
 ideal, which is of the essence of the religion of Jesus; and is a 
 very interesting piece of self-expression. 
 
 (10.) Browning, "The Ring and the Book." 
 
 " The Pope : 
 
 ' There's a new tribunal now 
 
 Higher than God's, the educated man's,' " 
 
 (11.) Hoffding, "Philosophy of Religion." 
 
MYSTERY 181 
 
 "It is personality which in the world of our experience 
 invests all other things with value " (p. 279). 
 
 " The fundamental axioms of science can never be strictly 
 proved. They appear as fundamental hypotheses, as principles 
 which guide our searchings and inquiries by directing us how 
 to ask and how to state our problems " (p. 245). 
 
 " Our knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of any personal being 
 partakes of the nature of faith rather than of knowledge" 
 (p. 145). 
 
 " Experience will always retain the stamp of individual 
 personality ; ' common experience ' is more or less an illusion, 
 because, as a matter of fact, different individuals interpret and 
 apply this ' common ' experience each in his own way " (p. 105). 
 
 " The intellectual interest prompts us to conceive existence 
 as a great immeasurable system of causal groups and causal 
 series ; the religious interest moves us to a conception of being, 
 as the home, as the development and conservation of value " 
 (p. 93). In other words, the intellectual instinct drives us to 
 make of the universe a single system, which in the long run 
 means a mechanism — the religious instinct lays stress on 
 personal forces, and meanings, a world of freedom, of the many 
 — it is the struggle between the Pantheistic and the personal 
 conceptions of life. 
 
 " Mysticism joins hands with critical philosophy which asserts 
 that our ideas are not adequate to express that which exists 
 outside the form of our limited experience" (p. 81). 
 
 " Every particular individuality is a little world " (p. 40). 
 
 "I%e given is never ended, new experiences are always ap- 
 pearing which demand a new determination of our concepts " 
 (p. 39). 
 
 " Every individual is holy as a centre of value and as a centre 
 of experience " (p. 298). 
 
 " Scientifically regarded, personality is the last — perhaps in- 
 soluble — riddle, the concluding point dimly discerned in the 
 distance. For scientific thought is itself a spiritual activity, 
 which can only be exercised by a person — and the last riddle 
 would remain unsolved, even if science could explain everything 
 
182 NOTES 
 
 else so long as it did not explain its own ultimate presup- 
 position. . . . But in life personality is the first; it is that 
 which supports all — even science, and which impresses its seal 
 on all things" (p. 317). It is this contrast which is at the 
 bottom of the opposition between religion and science, or to be 
 more accurate between the personal and the rationalist stand- 
 point — an opposition which is real and is not, as some apologists 
 seem to imagine, merely transient and apparent. It is, of 
 course, to be resolved by recognising with Bergson the abstract 
 and partial character of scientific inquiry. The trouble comes 
 not from natural science, but from the scientific philosophy of 
 the universe. 
 
 " No one can ever prove that the genesis of the valuable in 
 the world is due to an accident " (p. 340). 
 
 " A too anxious adherence to experience is apt to dull our 
 sight and blunt our instinct for new possibilities ; this holds 
 good in the practical equally as in the theoretical sphere. 
 Heart and courage make many things possible which would 
 otherwise never be realised, at any rate in the case of some 
 individuals. Here, again, W. James's thesis that there are cases 
 where faith creates its own verification holds good " (p. 340). 
 
 " It may be that poetry is a more perfect expression of the 
 highest than any scientific concept could ever be " (p. 376). 
 
 "The last word must lie with the principle of personaUty'' 
 (p. 381). 
 
 I quote these passages as illustrations of the lecture, not 
 because I accept the main views of the author, with his pre- 
 ference of Greek to Christian ethics. 
 
 (12.) Alice Meynell, "Poems." 
 
 (13.) Bergson, L'Evolution GrMrice, p. 179. 
 
 (14.) This phrase is that of Mr. W. G. Williams in " Newman, 
 Pascal, Loisy and the Catholic Church." 
 
 (15.) M'Taggart, " Some Problems of Religion." 
 
 (16.) Dickinson in the Eibbert Journal. 
 
 (17.) " The Churches and Modern Thought," by Philip Vivian, 
 "A History of Free-thought," by J, M, Kobertson. 
 
 (18.) J. M. Robertson. 
 
MYSTERY 183 
 
 (19.) It must be admitted that this argument is less strong 
 to-day than it appeared some years back. We are now witness- 
 ing, not merely in the Church of Rome, the claim, as Dr. Gore 
 has described it, " to hold a very high sacramental doctrine com- 
 bined with extreme dogmatic weakness at the centre." Still, 
 that does not alter the fact that we can see historically how 
 the weakening of the hold on the sacraments leads in the 
 long run through subjectivism to the surrender of the creeds j 
 though it takes centuries to work out the immanent logic 
 of Zwinglianism, and the very strong personal and mystical 
 religion of many Puritans has been for a long while an effective 
 barrier against the tendency. No one could rate more highly 
 the value of this mystical and personal element in religion 
 than the writer. But it ought not to exist alone, and needs to 
 be balanced by the other factors of religion, a truth admirably 
 expounded by Baron von Hugel in his new book on "The 
 Mystical Element in Religion." 
 
 (20.) Tyrrell, Lex Orandi. 
 
 Gf., also on the subject of this lecture, p. 18 : "Compared with 
 this invisible spiritual world, that of physical Nature is mere 
 shadow. For nothing can be more real to me than myself. 
 Self is the very test and measure of all reality. . . . Further- 
 more it is in willing, acting, and originating that we recognise 
 our selfhood or reality. . . . We are most real, when we are 
 most free, conscious, and energetic." 
 
 (21.) Bergson quotes this statement of Du Bois-Reymond, 
 Z' Evolution OrMrice, p. 41. 
 
 Mr. Wells sums up in a lucid and concise form much of 
 Bergson's system, e.g. ("First and last Things," p. 25): — 
 
 " The human mind has to hold a thing still for a moment 
 before it can think it. It arrests the present moment for its 
 struggle as Joshua stopped the sun. It cannot contemplate 
 things continuously, and so it has to resort to a series of static 
 snapshots. It has to kiU motion in order to study it, as a 
 naturalist kills and pins out a butterfly in order to study life. 
 
 " You see the mind is really pigeon-holed and discontinuous in 
 two resnects : in respect to time and in respect to classification, 
 
184 NOTES 
 
 whereas one has a strong persuasion that the world of fact 
 is unbounded or continuous." 
 
 (22.) Newman's theory o£ belief is propounded in his 
 "Grammar of Assent," its essential characteristic being that 
 real belief is a function of the whole personality and not 
 merely of the ratiocinative faculty. 
 
 (23.) The slight mutilation of the statue is of no importance, 
 as the imagination can readily fill up the missing lines, and it 
 may be taken as symbolic of that transformation in regard to 
 certain details which our view of Jewish history has undergone 
 in the last generation without any way impairing the main lines 
 of Christian doctrine. 
 
 (24.) Besides writers mentioned in the lecture, see also, on 
 the general topic of this lecture, Balfour's "Foundations of 
 Belief" and "Defence of Philosophic Doubt," the chapter in 
 Dr. Illingworth's " Reason and Revelation," " Christianity an 
 Appeal to our Entire Personality ; '' also cf. p. 209 : — 
 
 " Rational certainty ... is only possible in the case of an 
 abstract subject matter, while the kind of knowledge which 
 deals with human experience in the concrete, with life as it is 
 lived, never admits of exact exposition or logical demonstra- 
 tion ; " and ef. the following letter from Creighton (" Life," ii, 
 p. 253) :— 
 
 " There can be no convincing proof of anything that affects 
 our inner character. What ' convincing proof ' have you that 
 your wife loves or your child ? Yet you believe it ; and that 
 belief is more real to you than anything that you know or can 
 prove. Religion must he a matter of belief not proof. It 
 depends on a consciousness of the relation between our soul 
 and God. Immortality depends on the knowledge of the 
 meaning of our soul's life, which we obtain from looking at it 
 in the light of God. The more we find our soul, the more 
 readily do we see God in the person of Jesus Christ. Look 
 back upon your own life, your growth, the traces of Providence, 
 the presence of God's love. Do you think that all this wonder- 
 ful process can come to an abrupt end ? 
 
 " All purely intellectual positions break down, They go so fai 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 185 
 
 and no further. They are heset by limitationB. . , . We a/re 
 clear by missing out half the elements involved. It is not 
 vague emotion when we grapple with immensity, and there is 
 immensity in every human soul. Its progress is marvellous 
 and inexplicable. The simplest soul is full of amazing problems. 
 Try to explain yourself as you can, there is a vast residuum 
 which you cannot turn into shape. How is all this to be dealt 
 with F I answer only by conscious communion with a Person, 
 who is Life and Truth " (ii. p. 409). 
 
 III.— THE HISTORIC CHRIST 
 
 (1.) Nineteenth Century, July 1890, p. 22. "The Ughts of 
 science and the lights of the faith." 
 
 " No longer in contact with fact of any kind. Faith stands 
 now for ever proudly inaccessible to the attacks of the infidel." 
 
 (2.) H. 0. Corrance in the Nineteenth Century and After, 
 February 1908. 
 
 The writer continues : " But the idea of such a possibility 
 is based upon a false view of the nature of faith, which is really 
 not concerned with the phenomenal except as a basis for the 
 ideal. Its true home is in the ideal, the supersensuous, the 
 unseen. Its object is not in time but in eternity, not in the 
 finite but in the infinite, not in appearances but in reality. It 
 uses these relativities only as a means of passing through them 
 to the absolute. 
 
 (3.) II Programma dei Modemisti. 
 
 "Importo poco alia fede di sapere se la critioa puo o no 
 accertare la nascita verginale, i miracoli clamorosi, in fine 
 la risurrezione del Redentore ; se riesce o no ad attribuire al 
 Cristo I'annuncio di alcuni dogmi, e la fondazione della Chi^sa. 
 Quei fatti sfuggono per il loro carattere iperfenomenico alle 
 prese della critica sperimentale e storica ; e questi ultimi essa 
 non li dimostra." 
 
 (4.) This is most obvious from M. Loisy's two latest books. 
 Similes B4flexions and QiiAques Lettres. 
 
^ 1 
 
 186 NOTES 
 
 (5.) Dr. Bashdall at the Liverpool Church Congress. 
 
 (6.) Canon Hensley Henson, in " The Value o£ the Bihle,'' 
 Sermons xiii and xiv. Gf. also the same writer in " Sincerity 
 and Subscription." 
 
 (7.) See on this point an interesting essay by Dr. Garvie on 
 " The Bitschlian Theology," more especially p. 222 ; but com- 
 pare also Orr, "The Ritschlian Theology and The Evan- 
 gelical Faith." 
 
 (8.) QvAcpua Lettres, pp. 93, 94. 
 
 (9.) Miss Benson, in her admirable book, " The Venture of 
 Eational Faith," puts the exact relation of historical inquiry 
 to the whole of Christian evidence. 
 
 " There is all the difference in the world between believing 
 in a religion which is bound up with certain historical facts, 
 and believing in that religion on the ground alone of the 
 historical evidence for the facts " (p. 136). 
 
 " Historical evidence in the narrower sense is not enough to 
 prove miracles, but neither is it enough to prove any funda- 
 mental Christian position. . . . 
 
 " What we want to ask with regard to historical records, when 
 we regard them as contributing to the proof of fundamental 
 Christian doctrine, is not altogether are 'they adequate'? 
 but rather are they suitable ? not ' do they amount to demon- 
 strative proof ? ' but do they go as far as any such proof can 
 goP"(p.l39). 
 
 " There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold 
 the converse view : that counting, classification, measurement, 
 the whole fabric of mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the 
 world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the 
 objective truth " (Wells, op. cit., p. 34). 
 
 " Man, thinking man suffers from intellectual over-confidence 
 and a vain belief in the universal validity of reasoning " (p. 42). 
 
 The position is well summed up by Westcott (" Gospel of 
 Lite," p. 304) :— 
 
 " Miracles and prophecies considered separately and in detail 
 are not the proper proof of Christianity, but as parts of the 
 whole testimony of experience they have an effective power. 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 187 
 
 Historical testimony originates and commends a religion but it 
 does not establish it. Therefore I say the confirmation of the 
 Gospel is as ' complete as life can give,' for in the end we must 
 make our appeal to lite, life as a whole. We were made for action, 
 made to gain a character, made, in the words of the Bible, to 
 grow into the likeness of God. The final influence of opinions 
 there upon the conduct of life may be taken generally as a test 
 of their truth for us. We are so constituted as to recognise the 
 truth which we cannot discover, and life seals the confession of 
 the soul." 
 
 (10.) On the need of presupposition in historical inquiry, see 
 Dr. lUingworth, " Reason and Revelation," chap, v., and also 
 Miss Benson's book already cited, chap, viii, p. 93. 
 
 " The demand for an unprejudiced witness is strangely un- 
 historical. It is the demand for one who has the perspicacity 
 to see the weighty bearing of obscure facts without the sym- 
 pathetic or imaginative nature which could be influenced by 
 them. One part of the evidence of Christianity, on the contrary, 
 is that the writers are " prejudiced." It is because of the 
 inherent conviction of the story recorded that the witnesses 
 cannot be unprejudiced." 
 
 (11.) Eg. the habit of bracketing lines in classical authors as 
 spurious on purely subjective grounds has, it is said, grown 
 to a quite extraordinary degree among certain continental 
 critics. An instance of the way in which prepossessions affect 
 minds on a similar level of culture, and even contemporaries, 
 might be taken from the two books on Jeanne d'Arc produced 
 respectively by the sceptic M. Anatole France and by Mr. 
 Andrew Lang. 
 
 (12.) Langlois and Seignobos, "Introduction to the Study 
 of History," pp. 206-208. 
 
 " The observations whose results are contained in historical 
 documents are never of equal value with those of contemporary 
 scientists. We have already shown why. The indirect method 
 of history is always inferior to the direct method of the 
 science of observation. If its results do not harmonise with 
 theirs it is history which must give way," In other words, the 
 
188 NOTES 
 
 very poBsibility of the miraculous is ruled out of court because 
 it does not happen to be in agreement with the opinion current 
 at the moment among scientific men. It is difficult after this 
 to blame any apologist for straining the evidence so as to 
 support a preconceived opinion. 
 
 (13.) Miscellanies. Fourth Series, p. 229. 
 
 " Talk of history being a science as loudly as ever we like, 
 the writer of it will continue to approach his chests of archives 
 with the bunch of keys in his hand." The passage is a criticism 
 of Professor Bury's inaugural lecture, and the whole of these 
 three pages, 227-230, are well worth reading in this connection. 
 They express the need of the personal element in the historian 
 with moderation and truth. 
 
 (14.) "Life." 
 
 " It is an impossible claim to take up a detached, impartial, 
 outside attitude to any subject which is intimately connected 
 with individual life. ... It has always seemed to me that the 
 preconceptions of the critical mind need examination just as 
 much as the preconceptions of the credulous mind. Human 
 morality would disappear before the treatment which is some- 
 times dealt to revealed religion." 
 
 (15.) Dr. Foakes-Jackson's essay in " Cambridge Theological 
 Essays,'' p. 518, and the note there. 
 
 (16.) Mr. Robertson, who denies the historicity of Jesus, 
 finds himself driven by parity of reasoning to question that of 
 Buddha and even of Montanus. His book illustrates the ex- 
 treme danger to any sane view of history in ignoring tradition 
 as a source of knowledge comparable with the documents. 
 
 Cf. Creighton, " Life," i. 216 : " A case can, of course, be made 
 out always about anything ; and I always feel that one set of 
 arguments is as good as another. The real question is the 
 nature of evidence. Once abolish tradition, and I am free to 
 confess that one theory is as good as another. How does one 
 know that there was such a man as Julius Caesar ? A little 
 ingenuity could prove his books to be forgeries and himself a 
 myth. I really only believe it because it is the traditional belief 
 of mankind since his day to this. About any historic event or 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST 189 
 
 the origin of any institution I could produce an equal nebulous- 
 ness as does the tract, if I assumed that everything that 
 everybody before me had said was necessarily mistaken because 
 it had been said or believed. I mean to say that the primary 
 position assumed in that tract [A Quaker Tract] that every- 
 body was deluded till the year 1680 or something of that sort, 
 that the words on which they reUed were capable of other mean- 
 ings, that they had stupidly gone on doing something on the 
 supposition that Christ meant it, when He didn't, I would 
 never be prepared to allow — it would reduce all human know- 
 ledge to arbitrariness. . . . 
 
 " Without outward helps to spiritualise life, I am afraid that I 
 for one am too feeble to get on. The writer of the tract says 
 that the frame of mind of the recipient of the Lord's Supper 
 is the important thing, not the reception. But without the 
 opportunity of the reception is one sure of getting the frame 
 of mind." 
 
 (17.) "Report of Pan-Anglican Congress." The gist of Pro- 
 fessor Burkitt's speech appears to be an expansion of the 
 dictum that the Bible is "not a revelation. but the record of a 
 revelation." The purely critical and intellectual study of the 
 Bible is indeed recommended but not as a substitute for 
 devotion, which is to be stimulated by the "still living 
 Church." The speech is indicative of that divorce between 
 devotion and criticism which is the result of the Bibliolatry of 
 the past and of the Protestant habit of isolating the Bible 
 from its milieu. Against this tendency the speaker is in reaction. 
 
 (18.) "Idea of a University," p. 210. 
 
 (19.) Creighton's "Life," ii. p. 408. 
 
 (20.) Ibid., ii, p. 212. 
 
 These letters are also printed in the smaller book, " Counsels 
 for the Young," pp. 86-91 and p. 118. 
 
 {21.) Hibbert Jov/mal, Ja,n\ia,Ty, 1909; "Jesus or Christ," by 
 Rev. R. Roberts, Congregational minister. 
 
 22.) This argument is excellently put by Mr. G. K, 
 Chesterton in " Orthodoxy," pp. 58, 69. 
 
 " If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an 
 
190 NOTES 
 
 ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, 
 then it is stingless for the most orthodox ; for a personal 
 God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, 
 like the Christian God, He were outside time. But if it means 
 anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an aps 
 to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. 
 It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best there 
 is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and any- 
 thing. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the 
 mind. I cannot think, if there are no things to think about. 
 You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject 
 of thought." 
 
 This position is obviously directly contrary to that Hegelian 
 and neo-Hegelian Pantheism, which does resolve the universe 
 into a flux in the way described. 
 
 (23.) " The Eenaissance," Epilogue. 
 
 (24.) Browning, « Abt Vogler." 
 
 There is an admirable statement of this side of Browning, 
 his emphasis on monumental moments, in Pater's essay on 
 Winckelmann, " Benaissance," p. 205 : " His poetry is pre-emi- 
 nently the poetry of situations. The characters themselves are 
 always of secondary importance ; often they are characters in 
 themselves of little interest. They seem to come to him by 
 strange aKxsidents from the ends of the world. His gift is 
 shown by the way in which he accepts such a character, and 
 throws it into some situation, or apprehends it in some deli- 
 cate pause of life, in which for a moment it becomes ideal." 
 
 (25.) Bergson's theory of the reality of time overcomes the 
 difficulty raised about conceiving it as a series of infinitesimal 
 moments. 
 
 (26.) See the article in " The Creed of a Layman " on this 
 topic. 
 
 (27.) G. Lowes Dickinson in HMert Journal, May 1909. 
 
 (28.) Of course the phrase " pet name " is not really a fair 
 description, but even this expresses a truth greater than the 
 objection. It is not merely in h3rmns, but in books like " The 
 Imitation," or " The Revelations of Divine Love," or poems 
 
FORGIVENESS 191 
 
 like " The Hound of Heaven " that the notion of the Divine 
 Lover can be found, and it is universal in Christian devotion, 
 and all the mystics. 
 
 On the " romantic" character of Christianity, see Chesterton's 
 " Orthodoxy," chap. viii. ; also article in the Hibbert Journal, 
 July 1908, by S. G. Dunn ; ef. also Dr. Barry's " Newman," which 
 shows the relation between the Oxford movement and the 
 Romantic revival ; and Wilde's De Profundis. It is the burden, 
 also, of many of Mr. Bernard Shaw's attacks. 
 
 IV.— FORGIVENESS 
 
 (1.) I do not say that this solves the problem of suffering 
 wholly, as that we may not have to admit the theory of an evil 
 agency, as developed in that most suggestive book " Evil and 
 Evolution." 
 
 (2.) Crapsey, "The Re-birth of Religion," p. 240. 
 
 (3.) "Man and the Universe," p. 220. 
 
 (4.) "The Creed of Christ," pp. 153, 155. 
 
 (5.) "The New Theology," pp. 146, 167. 
 
 (6.) The article in the Hibbert Journal, already quoted. 
 
 (7.) Cf. William James, " Varieties of Religious Experience," 
 p. 462. 
 
 " Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a 
 more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the 
 general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels 
 oneself in need of in order to be in right relations to one's 
 deity. For him who confesses shams are over and realities 
 have begun ; he has exteriorised his rottenness. If he has not 
 actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with 
 a hypocritical show of virtue — he lives at least upon a basis of 
 veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession 
 in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. 
 Reaction against popery is, of course, the historic explanation, 
 for in popery confession went with penances and absolution 
 
192 NOTES 
 
 and other inadmissible practices. Bvi on the tide of the mam 
 himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept 
 so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in 
 more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the 
 pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that 
 heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic Church, for 
 obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular confession 
 to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We 
 English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and 
 unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough, if we take 
 God alone into our confidence." 
 
 (8). Of course " sacrifice " in ancient religions embodies many 
 kinds of religious aspiration, and its purgative, expiatory 
 element is not always in the foreground, but recent research 
 seems to emphasise this element in every kind of "mystery." 
 
 (9.) William James, "Varieties of Beligious Experience,'' 
 p. 608. 
 
 (10.) Rom. vii. 
 
 (11.) Crapsey, « Re-birth of Religion," p. 247. 
 
 (12.) On this point see Acton's essay on George Eliot in 
 " Historical Essays and Studies," p. 284. 
 
 " The doctrine that neither contrition nor sacrifice can ap- 
 pease Nemesis or avert the consequences of our wrong-doing 
 from ourselves or others, filled a very large space indeed in 
 her scheme of life and literature. Jfrom the bare diagram of 
 Brother Jacob to the profound and finished picture of ' Middle- 
 march,' retribution is the constant theme and motive of her 
 art. It helped to determine her religious attitude, for it ia 
 only partly true that want of evidence was her only objection 
 to Christianity. She was firmly persuaded that the postpone- 
 ment of the reckoning blunts the edge of remorse, and that 
 repentance, which ought to be submission to just punishment, 
 proved by the test of confession, means more commonly the 
 endeavour to elude it. She thought that the world would 
 be infinitely better and happier if men could be made to feel 
 that there is no escape from the inexorable law that we reap 
 what we have sown." 
 
FORGIVENESS 193 
 
 (13.) This beautiful though comparatively little known hymn 
 is by a famous Oongregationalist of the last generation, the 
 Eev. Thomas Binney. 
 
 (14.) Creighton's " Lite," vol. ii. p. 408 :— 
 
 "Scepticism narrows the real problem, refuses to face the 
 actual facts, substitutes energy in reforming the world tor 
 power to deal with it as it is. I can sympathise with all that 
 it has to say and all that it tries to do : but there is so much 
 beyond." 
 
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