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AND THE DIVINE SOC sent A STUDY IN CHRISTIANITY VOLUME [| BY RICHARD ROBERTS NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY : 1926 All rights reserved Copyright, 1926, Br THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1926, Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. INTRODUCTION The substance of the following pages was given as the Southworth Lectures in the Theological School in Harvard University in April of this year. The book is intended to be the first instalment of a study which has engaged me for some time; and if circumstances enable me to carry out my design, two more volumes will follow this one, dealing respectively with the revelation of God in Christ and with the Christian experience and ethic. I am well aware of the hardihood of so pretentious an enterprise on the part of a person whose days are spent in an exacting city ministry; and I have no doubt that the work will show many signs of the pressure under which it has to be done. I desire to say something at this point concerning the presuppositions that underlie the argument of this book. 1. In a recent symposium of great importance, published under the title of Science, Religion and Reality, the upshot seems to be that, in the dilemma between the mechanistic and the religious views of life, ““we have no choice but to acquiesce provision- ally in an unresolved dualism.’”’ It appears that we are to find an ad interim refuge in a delimitation of frontiers. Mechanistic biology is evidently here to stay; but its jurisdiction over other fields, and par- ticularly over religion, is not to be admitted. , 5 6 INTRODUCTION Religion and Science need not, henceforth, so we are assured, regard each other as enemies; let each do its own work in its own way, showing to the other the good-will and the courtesy of a peer. The fight is ended by separating the parties, not by reconciling them. They are, in legal phrase, bound over to keep the peace; but not yet are they to be yoke-fellows. For my own part, I have no objection to a pro- visional dualism, that is, a dualism regarded merely as a bivouac on the march; and where the masters pronounce for a provisional dualism as between mechanistic and religious views of life, a journey- man can do no more than acquiesce. But even a journeyman may be permitted to wonder whether, if the march had been pressed a little further before calling a halt, a more satisfactory inn might not have been found. At least it may be asked whether we might not conceivably (to vary our figure a little) have turned the flank of the present obstruc- tion and sought out a line which would not have compelled us to immure theology and science so implacably each in its separate cell. Should we not decline any longer to regard religion as lying outside the world of “‘nature’’ and treat it frankly as a biological phenomenon? If religion is not a mani- festation of life, then it is nothing; and if it is a manifestation of life, then it must stand somehow in an organic relation to the rest of life; and the religious life becomes a part of the subject matter of biology. I am of course aware that there have been psy- chological essays in the reduction of religion into INTRODUCTION 7 certain primitive elements of nature; but I am not now thinking of that, even though it were worth thinking about. The common result of this pro- cess has been to display religion as an eccentricity or an aberration of life. This result fails in a quite absurd degree to do justice to the historical achieve- ment of religion; and in any case, the process by which the result has been reached is subject to all the errors commonly accompanying an analysis which from the nature of the case must be chiefly speculative. Meantime, until psychology knows its own mind more confidently than it does to-day— each psychologist appears to “‘say his say, His scheme of the weal or woe’’— we had better go on quietly and unperturbedly with the normal business of religion. There is much to be gained from treating religion as a part of the subject matter of biology. If any- one supposes that this is to expose religion to the peril of being involved in the general reign of biological mechanism, the answer is two-fold. First, if religion is an affair of bio-physics and bio- chemistry, the sooner we know it the better. Second, if religion is a genuine biological phenome- non, then its own special characters must have their own place in the totality of life and must so far enter into our final biological constructions. It is true that, if religion is an organic part of the life- process, it must display the general characters of that process; but equally if it has any special and distinctive characters of its own, these too must be 8 INTRODUCTION taken as being involved in the total life-process and must be accounted for in any complete inter- pretation of it. It may not inconceivably turn out that the inclusion of the study of religion within the compass of biology may furnish us with the clue that will reveal to us the actual scope of the mechanistic principle in life and tell us where and why it ceases to operate. Mr. Needham maintains that “though mechanism in biology is perfectly justified and indeed essential, it cannot be applied to psychology.”* But why? Where does the mechanical principle run out? Perhaps if we approach the problem from the other, that is, the religious end, we may find our answer. However, that is not the special purpose of these pages. Roughly, the standpoint here taken may be stated in this way: Supposing we look at relig- ion as a biological phenomenon, what shall we make of it? I propose to show—not as a complete interpretation of Christianity, of course—that there are important ways in which Christianity may be regarded as continuing the development of life as evolutionary biology has revealed it to us. Natu- rally, I do not pretend to cover the whole ground here; indeed, I shall here follow throughout only a single line, but I hope to show that the argument has some significant consequences for our practical thinking upon the present task of Christianity. 2. That the religious life is here assumed to form part of the subject matter of biology does not imply that religion is regarded by the writer as * Science, Religion and Reality, p. 256. INTRODUCTION 9 belonging only to what is known as the domain of natural science. On the contrary, I wish to affirm that religion involves revelation as much as evolution (to my mind) seems to involve religion. And this brings us to another dualism to which we must provisionally consent. It seems to be commonly accepted among folk of a liberal turn that the fundamentalist controversy in the United States is an eruption of obscurantism pure and simple. Walter Bagehot in his essay on Lady Mary Wortley Montague says that, when she brought back the practice of inoculation from her Eastern travels, “‘like every improver, she was roughly spoken to. Medical men were angry because the practice was not in their books; and conservative men were cross at the agony of a new idea.’’ It is a short and easy explanation of funda- mentalism that it is an epidemic of crossness pro- voked by the agony of the idea of evolution; and that consequently it does not deserve to be taken seriously by the enlightened. It is, however, not quite so simple as that. When we have said all that should be said in criticism of the ignorance and the intolerance on which the fundamentalist ferment feeds, it still remains worth asking whether it is so much ado about nothing as we too easily suppose. I venture to suggest that, when the con- troversy has been stripped of its extravagances, it turns out to be a projection into public of a private dilemma present to-day in most minds that are both religious and liberal. The bugbear of the fundamentalist is evolution. No doubt he acquires some of his following because 10 INTRODUCTION the evolution doctrine casts an unpleasant suspicion on Mr. Babbitt’s family-tree. But this is adventi- tious, and not of the essence of the matter. What is at issue is the change in the conception of God which you must consent to if you are going to shelve “‘creation”’ in favor of ‘‘evolution.’’ (It does not help you in the least at this point to say that what you believe in is “creative evolution.’’) Crea- tion implies a transcendent God; and while logi- cally evolution may not require us to conceive of God as immanent, it is nevertheless true that evolu- tion and immanence make good company in the mind. Creation requires a God standing outside the Universe, bringing it into being by his fiat, and operating upon it from without in perfect freedom according to His Will. Evolution, on the other hand, suggests a God within the Universe, involved in and therefore limited by its processes and some- how fulfilling Himself in its development. From this follows much more. The traditional theology is conceived and stated against the background of a God regarded exclusively as transcendent; and to admit the idea of evolution is therefore to imperil the whole faith once delivered to the saints. For a transcendence-theology cannot, so far as I see, be dialectically reconciled with a thoroughgoing immanence-theology. In these matters evangelical liberals have rather seriously compromised them- selves. “They find themselves unwilling to be “‘off with the old,” and they nevertheless want to be “on with the new.’’ They adhere to the tradi- tional terminology, but try to invest it with an immanental content; and the fundamentalist cap- INTRODUCTION il tains are not altogether wrong in challenging the honesty of this procedure. In any case, the feeble- ness of the modernist parry to the fundamentalist assault is not to be denied. You cannot fight suc- cessfully if you are trying to straddle a pair of horses what time your adversary is solid in the saddle of one of the pair. I am not now speaking of the defense of the principle of evolution against the rhetoric of the late Mr. Bryan; that was a simple matter. I am thinking rather of the indifferent figure cut by the apologists of what in the United States is called ‘“‘modernism,’’ when the term is a convenient label for a Protestant Christianity which has truckled to the evolution heresy. But to say that the liberal evangelical is not honest when he reads a ‘modernist’ content into the traditional terminology is not the last word upon the matter. He is in a cleft stick. For being both religious and liberal, he cannot rule out trans- cendence and yet must acknowledge immanence. Being religious, God must be present to him as a Real Other—prayer, which is the most character- istic exercise of religion, is not prayer without a conviction of the ‘‘otherness’’ of God. Moreover, he sees that the logic of a self-consistent transcen- dentalism leads to the sterility of a deraciné Deism; while the logic of immanentalism ends in the moral paralysis of Pantheism. And so when he invests the traditional terminology with a modernist con- tent, he is trying to find a modus vivendi in the face of the dilemma. It is at best a feeble and clumsy compromise, and it leaves him open to the charge that he says one thing and means another. 42 | INTRODUCTION What the traditional theology calls the Incarnation is a specific and direct intervention of God in the person of His only-begotten Son in the affairs of the world; and no amount of clever manipulation can square it with the theory of evolution. It means only and starkly that the Incarnate Word came down from the throne; and it excludes any view that represents Him as coming up from the ranks. Yet if the doctrine of evolution is true, and if we are to take it as a mode of the Divine Immanence, how can we say that Jesus stands out- side of it? Yet by what possibility can an act of Incarnation be construed as a process of evolution? It is not the theologian alone who is in a tight corner. ‘The philosopher has a similar dilemma on his hands. FP. H. Bradley was a stern unbending fxbsolutist—one might almost say a philosophical fundamentalist—who carried out the logic of his System to a point at which one seems to be left with a static, colorless Absolute in which right and wrong, black and white, manage to exist together only by the process of canceling each other out. He does not truckle to the heresy of a “growing God” or anything like it; and it is a serious matter, for it introduces contingency and chance into the universe. But what is one to do? There is devel- opment in the universe; and nowadays the idea of development is applied not merely to life on this planet but to the whole universe. How then can the Absolute not be involved in the process? In which case, what becomes of the Absolute? It is plainly either the relatively Absolute or the abso- lutely Relative. “The greatest of all difficulties,” INTRODUCTION 13 says Edward Caird, “‘is the union of the conception of God as a self-determining principle manifested in a development which includes nature and man, with a conception of Him as in a sense eternally complete in Himself.’”’ That is the problem; and it still awaits solution. Why [wrote Sir Henry Jones to A. C. Bradley] does Nettleship say that a “‘process to a constantly higher being seems a logical impossibility?’’ Or as the question pinches me, how can the Absolute be or do anything if the static conception is valid? And why is the impossibility of new and higher perfec- tions higher than their possibility? Is it non- sense to think of the most perfect as that which is a self-enriching love, a love growing by its own activity? Was Spinoza’s God capable of endlessly new radiations? Is that perfect which is at the end of its power and possibilities? Can the whole whose existence is due to itself only, and within which all activities take place, be in and of these activi- ties and yet static? If it is not static, why should its activities be reiterative and not purposive? I don’t know anyone who thinks this notion worth discussing in these days, but I don’t like an Absolute which is aye at its limits. If they are his own, is he not beyond them? Where Edward Caird confesses difficulties and Sir Henry Jones can only ask questions, it is not for a journeyman to speak. But it is evident that the 14 INTRODUCTION philosopher has his cleft stick no less than the theologian; and it is essentially the same dilemma in both cases—how Eternal Perfection is to be reconciled with the idea of Process. The dilemma, of course, is not new. But it is not within the scope of these pages to follow its history. For our purpose, it is enough to note its presence in St. Paul. It would perhaps be wrong to say that it exists in St. Paul as a dilemma. But St. Paul has two distinct theologies, the one deriv- ing from his Jewish origins, the other from the Greek atmosphere which he breathed for a consid- erable part of his life. From his Judaism, he inher- ited a God wholly transcendental; and with this God were associated ideas of monarchy, legislation and jurisdiction. "The theology which he builds upon this foundation is a theology of transac- tions; the great terms are Justification, Redemption, Propitiation, Adoption, all being representations of things done for or upon men by an outside God. But from the Stoics, whether as Sir William Ramsay suggests, through teachers at Tarsus, or by way of the Book of Wisdom, he acquired ideas of immanence; and so he has a theology according to which God does not work upon man so much as within him. “It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure’: and in his later mind, the idea of the “Christ within you” evidently occupies the foreground. The two theologies reflect the same experience; but in the one the Christian experience is interpreted as a change of status wrought from without: in the other it is described as a change of nature wrought INTRODUCTION 15 from within. It is not suggested that St. Paul was aware of a contradiction between these two constructions. He was occupied with a practical task which precluded much concern for an academic coherency of thought. He was expounding some- thing that had happened to him; and now he did it in a Jewish idiom, and at another time in a Greek. But if St. Paul was not troubled by the dilemma, we cannot escape it. In modern times it has become acute because of the felt need of reconciling the traditional acceptances of thought and religion with the idea of a cosmos in process. We were brought up on the cosmogony supported by a fixed and unchanging framework of time-space. Biological evolution disturbed our grandfathers; but their grandchildren have become reconciled to it, being convinced that, whatever might take place in the sphere of life on this planet, the cosmos itself was solid and safe. But now we cannot be sure of the cosmos. Our measurements of time and space seem to have only a local applicability; and Euclid who once held undisputed sway in geometry is now ‘apparently one of a company, each with a different geometry. We seem to be living a wide-open universe, not in a closed system. We have to accommodate ourselves to the idea of an unfinished universe; and this must inevitably affect our theology. We contemplate a process of develop- ment which seems to embrace everything that 1s, to include ourselves and somehow to involve God. The idea of God that did duty at Nicea is no longer adequate. Obviously, we have started a question that 16 INTRODUCTION requires for its discussion more than a few lines in an introduction. I hope to return to it at a later time. What I have to do here is to state the attitude that I take up to this dilemma. Logically, trans- cendence and immanence are irreconcilable notions; yet the facts as I see them compel me to accept both. In consequence, I have to settle down to an insuper- able dualism in my theology. Insuperable, that is, for the present; for I do not believe that this dual- ism is permanently insuperable. Sometime it will be resolved. In the meantime, I have to make up my mind to live with two theologies at the same time—on the one hand the substance of the tradi- tional theology of the creeds, and on the other the nascent theology of immanence. Obviously, I can hold neither as final. But for the time being, I - mean to hold fast to the great doctrines of Inspira- tion, Revelation, Incarnation, Redemption and Grace; and also to accept the elements of an imma- nence-theology—tthe Inner Light, the Indwelling Christ, the Kingdom of God as a phase of the unfolding of life, and Jesus as the crown of biologi- cal evolution. I[ refuse to accept the dilemma “either—or’’; I prefer to affirm a comprehensive ‘““‘both—and’’; and I believe that to be truer to the facts, as I apprehend them. I shall naturally involve myself in many verbal inconsistencies; but in a world of relative knowledge that is hardly to be avoided. If I am charged with uttering contra- dictory things, I will answer simply that I cannot help myself, things being as they are. I mean to ee a traditionalist and a modernist, as far as in me ies. INTRODUCTION 17 What is intended in the pages that follow is a modest and unpretentious essay in the theology of immanence; and it is offered rather tremulously as a contribution toward that ultimate synthesis of thought concerning the truth and the life of Chris- tianity out of which the theology of the future will be built up. How much the essay is worth, it is not for me to say. RICHARD ROBERTS Montreal, April 1926. \ fae % v2 A gat PART I MAN AND HIS SOCIETY THE MOVING PICTURE OF LIFE . NATURE AND MAN . INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP . ; THE IMPULSE TOWARD FREEDOM ; THE INSTINCTS OF ASSOCIATION . . THE SOCIAL BASIS OF ETHICS . . THE BELOVED COMMUNITY . . SOCIETY AND THE STATE. . . STATE AND EMPIRE . ; . THE REACTIONARY MIND . THE RADICAL MIND . THE ECONOMIC MOTIVE . PAR EI THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY DUT IN WN . MAN AND RELIGION . THE ‘‘GooD NEws’”’ : THE NEW “EMERGENT” . THE NEw MAN AND THE NEw SOCIETY : . THE QUICKENED SOUL Danita THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH PART III THE GREAT MISADVENTURE . THE EARLY CHURCH AND THE WORLD . ST. AUGUSTINE . AWA aT Oe . THE DARK AGES 67 NS © ear It 2 3 4 aH 6 7 8 No CONTENTS PAGE THE MEDIEVAL DAWN i euGeeeciaeh sees eee THE MEDIEVAL (UONITYiio (os tala ae eae eee DISINTEGRATION: c3b6 beeen alk. ee a THE ETHICAL REVOLT ci whi iicse ere eae OTHE INTELLECTUAL REVOLT yr) uate “THB CRELIGIOUS REVOLT) tanwiie so ie eee . PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM .. . 145 PART IV THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH AND THE CHRIS- TIANIZATION OF TXTFE ee 2) Co - Tir’ STRATEGY ‘OF THE’ CHURCH’. 7) .3 eros . THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. . 169 . CONSIDERATION AND DEVELOPMENT. . . 178 MORALS AND VALUES S20 24 7 ee ee Tee CHRISTIAN ETHIC 3120 ae Tie NEED OR RENEWAL.i4)0 55) sure ‘Tie SPRINGS OR LIFE 22 ee PEST f ROME AUN PI NY i OS A aa THE NEW MAN AND THE DIVINE SOCIETY PART I MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 1. THE Movinc PicTuRE oF LIFE. The world is evidently biocentric.1 The round earth is the frame; life is the picture. It would appear that, though the frame was made before the picture, it was made to suit the picture, but it is not easy to say where the frame ends and the picture begins. Vast as are the achievements of biological science, it has not yet divined the secret of the amazing spectacle of life. Concerning the forms which life has taken upon itself, and the processes by which it is sustained and propagated, biology has told us much and is daily telling us more. But the origin and the end of life are still hidden in mystery. Experimental embryology, bio-physics and bio- chemistry may some day solve the problem of cell- organization; but even then we shall be faced with the enigma of life itself. If we speak of life as a picture, it is necessary to add that it is a moving picture. Man cannot see ‘The hills where his life rose Or the sea where it goes’; but we are on more hopeful ground when we ask whether the movement has direction. Biology has gathered a large body of data and has set them out in orderly fashion; and no candid mind looking upon the facts finds it easy to escape the conviction 23 24 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY that there has been a long process of development from invisible biococci up at last to man. Some- thing that began as a very minute, perhaps ultra- microscopic, unit of chromatin has grown into something that thinks and wills, tills the earth, bridges the seas and ranges the skies; that has built the Parthenon and Notre Dame de Chartres, com- posed the Messtah and the Ninth Symphony, writ- ten the Republic, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet. The growth has taken an inconceivable length of time. It has proceeded by a countless series of small advances—small, that is, in retrospect, but each at its own moment a sort of miracle—and not without failures and miscarriages. And the end is not yet. It is true that there are many gaps in our knowl- edge of this long pilgrimage, but these are slowly being filled up. We should with our present knowl- edge be able to gain some idea of the direction of the goal. 9. NATURE AND MAN. The crown, so far, of the process of life is man; and man’s first business, would he know himself, is to learn that he is of a piece with all life. He has risen from the ranks, but he is still “‘sib’ to the rank and file. His roots are in the lowly soil of living nature; and while in his pride he may be disposed to ignore his origin, he can in nowise disown it. He is a “biological phenomenon” as all his fathers were, back to the first biococus. Nevertheless, he has climbed to a place on the ladder which puts him some rungs above the next living climber. Those empty rungs once gave foot- MAN AND HIS SOCIETY PAs hold to living things; but they had climbed beyond their strength. Being unable to hold on, they fell off and perished. A few of them have left their bones about; and we have made fancy pictures of them as they were in life. Perhaps we shall some- time be able to assign a tenant to every rung of the ladder; but in the meantime, there is a great gulf between man and his nearest living kin. There are, to be sure, striking family-likenesses that bear Witness to the kinship; but there are differences, vast and deep. On this account, there is need of much caution, whether we are bringing man to the interpretation of living nature or bringing living nature to the interpretation of man. In this region there are a hundred pitfalls awaiting the unwary. Herbert Spencer fell into one of them when he discussed the state as an “‘organism’’; and many of us have fallen—and for that matter are still falling—into the pit of applying the aesthetic and ethical valua- tions of mankind to the processes of nature. When we speak of the ruthlessness or the wastefulness of nature, we are applying tests which doubtless have validity for the criticism of human conduct, but we have no means of knowing whether they actu- ally correspond to anything that is actually going on in a pond or a jungle. Things are not always what they seem, even nearer home than a forest. Besides, there are still considerable tracts of unex- plored territory in the world of living nature; and generalization even yet should be diffident. Nor should we forget, despite the marvelous power and beauty of the instruments by which man pursues 26 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY and acquires knowledge, that there are palpable limits to the range of human understanding. Our affirmations should always be attended by modesty. It becomes clearer that there are in the human ensemble obscure powers of which we are only fitfully and dimly aware, and which we do not know how to evoke and to use. But there seems to be no reason to suppose that these powers will go unused forever. A day may conceivably come when our present scientific constructions may seem to our successors as crude and impertinent as alchemy does to the modern chemist; and the road ahead of us is very long. Here as elsewhere we have to make what we can of “‘a reign of relativity.” Still, there are some gains which even in the present state of our knowledge we have good reason to believe permanently valid. It is hard to conceive that there will be hereafter any doubt raised con- cerning the continuity and the evolution of life or even concerning the general direction of the process. In any case, it is upon our present convic- tions about these matters that we of to-day must build our house of life. 3. INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP. Speaking broadly, it would appear that one of the main factors in determining the general character of the life-process has been the interplay of two co- efficient principles of individuation and organ- ization. There was probably a long span of time and evolution between the first emer- gence of life and the appearance of the first living cell; and of this process we know nothing. MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 27 But in the cell we have a unit of life, a closed system (so to speak) with a complete if rudimen- tary life of its own. It is not etymologically indi- vidual; for it is characteristic of the cell that it is divisible, and that at this stage it is able to divide itself into two such units as were its own original self. But it has an identity of its own; it is a separate and single thing. Following the cell, there was a long experimental period in which the cells joined together to form a larger and more elaborate unit. First came what is commonly called the colonial form, in which the cells—in obedience to who knows what blind instinct of association—attached themselves to- gether in groups, yet not so closely that the group might not break up again into individual cells and the individuals resume their separate lives. “The term colonial is a somewhat ambiguous description of this form of association, as the historical “‘col- ony’ has always been something more than a mere aggregation of individuals; and it is suggested that homogeneous is a more exact description. “There- after appeared an association in which the cells of the group began to be modified for different tasks. They were, so to speak, told off to different jobs and were accordingly specialized and codrdinated into a new multicellular organism. In this form of association, the cells ceased to be capable of an independent life of their own. The multicellular organism, in its turn, becomes the unit of a new group. It possesses some instinct of association and proceeds to foregather with its kind. The association may at first be no more than 28 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, a device of self-preservation, a safeguard against the hazards of an unknown environment. But whatever its origin, it seems to be there. The resulting groups appear to be of two kinds, roughly corresponding to the homogeneous and the organic grouping of cells. In the former case, the indi- vidual units are joined together without any loss of individuality and are in no way specialized. They are able to break away from the group and to live independent lives. Of this kind are the pack of wolves and the herd of cattle: In the latter case, there is a new vital unit with all sorts of specialized and coérdinated functions. The unit is seen in its extreme form in a beehive or an anthill. This kind of unit is achieved, however, at some cost to its individual members. No ant, it appears, is a com- plete ant or ever can become.one. It is fashioned for its own specific task and is capable of nothing else. In the beehive, the queen bee is a specially contrived egg-laying organism; the drones are merely contributory to the queen bee’s task of maternity; while the honey-gathering bees are sexually neutral. “The unitary life of the beehive is gained at the cost of truncated bee personality. We may for convenience of later reference speak of the first class as the herd-type: of the second as the hive-type. In the first there is no real solidar- ity; in the second there is solidarity, but it is gained at the expense of individuality. We may surmise that nature is aiming at producing at once a real individual and a real society. Its intention is pre- sumably to preserve a full individuality without sacrificing the society, and an organic society with- MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 29 out sacrificing the integrity of the individual life. It is this circumstance that seems to create the peculiar problems of man in relation to his society. 4. THE IMPULSE TOWARD FREEDOM. To begin with, nature has always given the individual something of a fight for his life. Perhaps the “struggle for existence’ has been too narrowly conceived when it has been regarded as a fight for mere survival. In any case, it has had other conse- quences. It has helped to evoke certain qualities of adaptability, resourcefulness and plasticity, quali- ties which at least pave the way to a comparative independence and freedom. Something of this we may trace even in the primitive forms of life. Among the Protozoa, where at one time it was confidently supposed that life was wholly con- trolled and automatic in its reactions, recent research has shown that behavior is not forced and mechan- ical, but within certain limits flexible and spon- taneous, and is ultimately fixed by a process of trial and error.* This flexibility of adaptation increases on the road until, with the evolution of the cen- tral nervous system, it grows into a positive if incomplete control of environment and a relative independence of it. Connected with this is the impulse toward mobility with a corresponding extension of the environment. At the point where the main trunk of life bifurcated into plant and animal, the plant because it clung to the soil forfeited the possibility of advance in the direction of freedom and inde- pendence and probably consciousness.? The imme- 30 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY diate future was for the free-moving animal; but every gain it made in mobility was made at a risk, for it had to shed more and more of its protective impedimenta. This was the price of its srowth; and because it paid the price, it reached ever higher levels of flexibility and plasticity, which carried with them increasing independence and control of the environment. Moreover, the environment was correspondingly extended;; and it seems to be true that the expansion of the environment may be taken as a measure of the progress in evolution. The stabilization of blood temperature in the higher forms of life, which enables them to range over larger areas of the world’s surface by making them comparatively independent of variations of tem- perature, is an instance of a modification favorable to the extension of the environment. The last term of this process was the improvement of the mind. which brought still more control and independence of the environment. Little by little grew processes of reasoning, the formation of ideas, the quickening of imagination, the faculty of generalization; and presently appeared the power to store up experience in the form of tradition, so that the present might be seen in a longer perspective and dealt with in the light of general principles. “The whole process seems to have been intended to produce at last some free and independent individual with a faculty of bringing his environment increasingly under con- trol and an impulse to push the frontiers of his environment ever farther into the unknown. This is what some writers mean when they say that the end of the process of evolution is freedom. MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 31 It is, in any case, bred in man’s bone that he was called to freedom; and it would require some hardi- hood to deny the biological lineage of this vocation. The most significant and moving episodes of his history are those in which he stands affirming his right to be and to grow into the full human thing that it is in him to be, and fighting for room to realize himself. In these latter days of the world, it is true that the worst enemies of his freedom have been of his own house, and that the struggle for freedom has been a civil war within mankind. But it has been the occasion of noble and heroic achieve- ment, and it has now become so deeply rooted in his nature that nothing is able to stir his blood so effectually as the report that freedom is in danger, though it does not always appear that his appre- hensions are well grounded. 5. THE INSTINCT OF ASSOCIATION. We may be falling into anthropomorphism when we sup- pose that the evolution of multicellular organisms and the growth of social groups—whether of ants or of men—are phases of the same tendency. Yet the analogy between them is sufficiently close to lend some color to the thought of their natural kinship. Even the tendency in both cases toward increase in the size of units seems to show that an analogous impulse is at work in them, and so indeed does the circumstance that, in one as in the other, there seems to be a point beyond which increase in size brings with it a decrease of fitness to survive. Overgrown animal species and overgrown human societies tend to disappear; so also do overspecial- 32 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY ized forms of both. But it is not necessary to labor the point. An impulse of association is undoubt- edly present on both planes. or the rest the special problems of human association arise not so much from their similarity to, but their difference from, the forms of multicellular organisms and of the more highly developed sub-human societies. It may be said summarily that the peculiar problem of human association is to produce a society that is neither a herd nor a hive. In man, nature has produced a form of life pos- sessed of conscious freedom and of the desire to live out its own life and to realize itself, but which is nevertheless incapable of realizing itself save in and through a social existence. Just as the struggle for existence was probably at first a fight for mere survival, but produced other important results, so the association impulse may have been in the begin- ning nothing more than a survival-device, a special form of protective armor which, however, revealed other possibilities of which life was not slow to take advantage. The association seemed even to gain a value for its own sake; for it is evident that some animals find a real satisfaction in sociability. Without question, the codperative life has made for the expansion and the refinement, that is, for a specifically qualitative improvement of life, no less than for its preservation and increase. It is to his social existence that we must ascribe the intellectual and aesthetic characters that are the peculiar distinc- tion of man. “In fellowship,’ says George Mere- dith, ‘‘religion has its founts.’”” And so indeed do all other things that give man his real singularity MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 33 among his living kin. It was a social existence that made possible speech and writing, systematic thought and the creation of aesthetic and ethical values. But it hardly needs proof that man has not yet reached a form of social life which is in keeping with the height of his individual achievement. It may be true that society lags behind the individual on other planes; it certainly does so in mankind.* Even without his social life he could not be what he has become; but how comes he to outstrip his society so conspicuously? “The answer appears to be that, having become self-conscious, free, capable of a life of his own broader than any specific func- tion which he may perform within the group, he tends to be at odds with the group. His impulse is to be himself, to realize his own complete indi- viduality; and that in some degree tends to make him anti-social, despite the fact that he cannot be his whole possible self except in and by a social existence. He stands to his society in a relation at once of attraction and of opposition. He cannot do without a social life; yet he makes war upon his society. His desire for self-realization, working itself out in self-assertions and self-indulgences, ‘injures the human environment which is necessary to his growth. Because the other individuals who compose this human environment are doing the same thing, the social existence of men consists in little more than getting and keeping near enough to one another to be able to exploit one another. Human society is at best a precarious equilibrium of forces of mutual association and mutual repulsion; and 34. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY as we see it to-day ameng ourselves, it is ‘‘the lim- ited and legalized struggle of men and women to get the better of one another.’’® Nevertheless, man’s social vision transcends his social achievement. His reach exceeds his grasp; and he is still seeking out that form of social exist- ence which will meet his need and help him to his undiscovered goal. He apparently alone among animals reaches out for a social contact beyond his own immediate group; and he is continually push- ing onward the frontiers of the social unit. Why he has invariably failed in his effort to sustain the larger social units we shall inquire more particu- larly at a later stage. But there can be no question of the tendency toward the enlargement of the social group. In our day, owing to the new facili- ties of travel and communication, we have been able to conceive of a single social unit covering the whole earth. Nor is this conception a gratuitous and baseless fancy. It is simply the final term of the inherent logic of the human social instinct. Nor is it the size of the social unit only that has engaged his speculation and his experimentation. His literature of social organization is the measure of his preoccupation with the character of his society. 6. THE SOcIAL BAsis oF EtHIcs. Most sig- nificant of all is the circumstance that the human test of behavior is its effect upon the group, that is to say, its social value. In the process of evolu- tion, it is probable that the criterion of the sound- ness or the error of a particular kind of behavior MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 35 was its value for the survival of the species. An injurious mode of behavior was discarded; and behavior that ensured survival was preserved. To this the growth of “‘morals’’ bears a certain analogy. The social group has had increasing importance in the evolution of the higher forms of life; and in man all further progress appears to be linked up with the community. The community may have been in its origin only a successful experiment in the interests of survival; but it has been discovered to be the condition not of survival only but of the improvement and refinement of life. On this plane, therefore, those modes of behavior have survival-value which make specifically for the sur- vival and the strength of the group. At bottom, the difference between good and bad in human conduct is the difference between those types of conduct that make for the solidarity and strength of the group and those that hurt the group. Social behavior is righteousness; anti-social behavior is sin. If men are to live together in peace and to good purpose, there are certain things they must agree to do and others to abstain from doing. These limitations and accommodations are the mores of the group, the technique of conduct by which it secures its own survival. These agree- ments are subsequently systematized into codes of law. Generally, among primitive peoples, they were enforced by a system of taboos, and with the growth of culture they acquired strong religious sanctions. But their fundamental justification lay in their value for social survival. At bottom, what is morally right is that which makes for social sur- 36 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY vival and vitality; what is morally wrong is that which enfeebles or destroys the social bond. The integrity of the group is the fountainhead of ethics. The fact that mankind has accepted a social valuation and criticism of conduct, has come to judge this type of behavior right and that wrong by its effect upon the life of the group, shows how deeply the social instinct is laid in his nature. In spite of the individual’s tendency, in pursuit of self- realization, to assert himself against the group, and in spite of his failure hitherto to evolve a form of social existence in which he may preserve his inde- pendence and live out his own life, it remains that he feels it in his bones that without a social life he must soon or late perish. 7. THE BELOVED COMMUNITY. It would appear to be true that the main business of evolution on the human level so far as we have any knowl- edge of it has been the effort to create a form of social organization in which the individual can find himself at home, uncramped and unconfined—that is to say, to solve the problem of reconciling the individual’s desire for freedom with his need of society. During the whole period for which we have data, the purely physical changes in the human structure have been of a minor and unimportant character; and the recorded history of mankind may be interpreted as a journey in search of an adequate and fitting social life. That is why Utopia has so long and so persistently occupied the mind of men; and what has been called “utopian philosophy” is a reflection of the bio- MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 37 logical urge toward a perfect society. It is inter- esting to recall how this form of social anticipation has gathered around Jerusalem. For this there is sufficient explanation in the New Testament ideali- zation of Jerusalem. In the main, the idealized Jerusalem of the Old Testament is the city itself, grown into the metropolis of a politico-religious empire, wide as the world, with Israel in the seats of the mighty, and the Gentile nations bringing to it humble and grateful tribute. In the New Testa- ment, Jerusalem is detached from time and place. It appears as “‘the Jerusalem which is above,’ which is free and is our mother, “‘the heavenly Jerusalem”’ and “‘the holy city, new Jerusalem,’’ which came down out of heaven from God. Thus it has come to pass that the ‘“‘New Jerusalem” has been the familiar name of the city of human dreams. When it has seemed to be in the high heavens, far removed from a perishing world, a St. Bernard sang of “Jerusalem the golden’; and when its fair walls have been descried rising upon the solid earth, its name was still “Nova Solyma,”’ as an unknown Puritan dreamer called it, or plain “Jerusalem,” after the fashion of William Blake who set about building it in ““England’s green and pleasant land.” It has had other names, to be sure. Plato called it the Republic, and St. Augustine The City of God. It was Utopia to Sir Thomas More and New Atlantis to Francis Bacon; Campanella called it The City of the Sun, and Samuel Butler called it Erewhon. But by what name soever it was called. it was a dream of that to which Josiah Royce has given the most beautiful of all its names, The 38 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY Beloved Community.* Besides literature of an imaginative kind, there is a vast discursive literature of the Beloved Community. The student of Nevill Figgis will know how voluminous was the medie- val and post-medieval discussion of the City of God. The controversies of papalist and conciliarist were at bottom waged concerning the real nature of the ultimate human society. To this class belongs all the literature of social integration from Plato to Sidney Webb; and it is pertinent to observe that its catalogue includes entries that are classics in their own kind and have profoundly influenced for weal or woe the course of human affairs. Dante’s De Monatchia, Machiavelli's Il Principe, Milton's Areopagitica, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Bellers’ Colledge of Industry, Lamennais’ Paroles d’un Croyant, Mills’ Liberty—-to name but a few obvious instances—each in its own way and at its own angle is an endeavor to show the way to the ultimate society. This imaginative and intellectual quest of the New Jerusalem is an outworking of the biological need of an adequate and suitable social existence; and it is this same need that explains the long rest- lessness of the human race. We have gathered some evidence, here a little and there a little, of an ancient Wanderlust, long before the dawn of what we call history. Not enough indeed to tell a coherent tale, but enough to hint at what was going on in those dark hinterlands. There is something about the coming of the broad-headed man into Europe from Asia and his diffusion to the south and west, crowding his predecessor, the long-headed MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 39 man, to the fringes of Europe. We trace another Asiatic immigration that left a trail of its speech as far west as Lapland and Finland. We infer a double Celtic invasion of Great Britain; and there was a migration of Franks into Gaul from what is now Northwestern Germany. So the story goes— a series of broken glimpses of a busy ‘‘coming and going” in those far-off days; and so it is to this day. In these latter days, the discovery of the New World opened up fresh fields to this restlessness. From Spain and France, from Holland and Britain and elsewhere, came a host of adventurers and colonists; and these, their successors, their children and children’s children have swept across the North American continent, redeeming its waste places, clearing its forests, making of it a home for a human society to its farthest coasts) And why? ‘The United States of America has been called “an experiment in democracy’’; but that is only to say that it is an attempt to realize the human dream of a perfect society. The French Revolution in its own day, and the Russian Revolution in ours, were attempts of the same kind. But it is plain as daylight that man has not found the society he is looking for. Perhaps this is the clue to history; and none has set it forth more nobly than the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen and greeted them from afar; and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, For 40 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of their own. ... But now they desire a better coun- try, that is, an heaven-like; wherefor God is not ashamed of them to be called their God; for he hath prepared for them a city.’ Here surely is the key to the age-long human odyssey—this lure of a city of God, this ‘‘unappeas- able nostalgia for a beloved community’’; and Karl Marx’s economic interpretation of history is only a version of this amazing pilgrimage in terms of bread and cheese. But may it not all be a mirage of the desert? Is this long quest but a chasing of the rainbow? Some modern minds seem overshadowed by the presumed certainty of the final extinction of life on this planet. The solar system is cooling, its energy is running down; in course of time the earth will become uninhabitably cold. In that day there will be an empty planet, strewn with the memorials of a vanished race, a forsaken graveyard, unbroken by the sound of any living thing. In the telling of it, it sounds a dismal prospect. But we are not compelled to give it house-room in our minds. The certainty is no more than a specu- lation. Science may presently have another thought about it, as it has had about other confident predic- tions—the myth of a fated Progress, for instance. In any case, this desolation seems to be dated for a time so far off as to be inconceivable in our minds: and in the meantime many things may happen. We cannot tell what transformations and possibilities MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 41 of life may be brought about by a sound social evolution and a thoroughgoing spiritual culture. There is, however, a nearer problem of some gravity, to wit: Will the “human experiment’ succeed on this planet? Now that we have dis- carded belief in a fated automatic progress, in the Spencerian ‘‘mighty movement,’’ it has become an open question whether the race will climb to the height of its possibility and do and behold those things that “‘prophets have spoken of and angels have desired to see.” Humanity has obviously the materials of growth and progress; it would appear that human nature possesses an incalculable store of unused reserves; but these reserve materials are useless without the will to grow. Can mankind evoke and sustain the will to further progress? If it cannot, then it will become extinct, and life will no doubt evolve some other form by which to reach its inscrutable goal. That would be no new thing. Life proceeds by ‘‘trial and error’; and some of its experiments have come to nothing. Perhaps humanity is the latest of its “‘errors,’’ and it too may have to be abandoned. It is not easy to con- cede the possibility of final human failure; but no candid mind finds the present state of the world reassuring. The peculiarity of man in the scheme of evolu- tion is that his destiny has been placed in his own hands. That is at once the consequence and the significance of his freedom; and however narrow his freedom may be, it is palpably wide enough to make it almost certain that all future advance depends on his will to advance. And the unanswer- 42 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY able question that remains is whether man in the exercise of his freedom will give himself to the creation of the social existence which is essential to his own fulfilment, or will he go on grinding his own axe—every man for himself and the devil take the society? Be that as it may, human society is for the moment checked in its evolution; and it is necessary that we should consider some of the reasons for this arrest. 8. SOCIETY AND THE STATE. The forms of human association are endless in their variety. F,. W. Maitland, speaking of ‘‘the structure of the groups in which men of English race have stood since the days when the revengeful kindred were pursuing the blood feud,’ gives an impressive catalogue: churches, and even the medieval church, one and catholic, religious houses, mendicant orders, nonconforming bodies, a presbyterian system, universities old and new, the village community, the manor in its growth and decay, the township, the new England town, the counties and hundreds, the chartered boroughs, the gild in all its manifold varie- ties, the inns of court, the merchant adven- turers, the militant “‘companies’ of English condottieri, who returning home help to make the word ‘“‘company’’ popular among us, the trading companies, the companies that became colonies, the companies that make war, the friendly societies, the trade unions, the clubs, MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 43 the group that met at Lloyd’s Coffee House, the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, and so on even to the one-man company, the Standard Oil Trust, and the South Australian Statutes for communistic villages.°® This—a mere fraction of the whole story— shows how vital and flexible is the human capacity for association. Any common interest, however trivial, is sufficient to create a social group. Such sroups as these that Maitland enumerates are in the main formed by voluntary association; and he speaks of them in connection with the problem that is raised by their existence within those larger groups to which men belong by accident of birth or location—the commonwealth, the State and the nation. For a reason to be presently considered, the normal attitude of the larger group toward these lesser groups is one of suspicion or even of active hostility; and it has steadily affirmed that their right to exist is a concession of its own. ‘The motto of the absolute state,’’ as Maitland calls it, was the French declaration of August 18, 1792, which affirmed that the truly free State cannot suffer in its bosom any corporation, not even such as had deserved well of the country by its devotion to public instruction. For this reason a great deal of what has been called the struggle for liberty has been specifically the struggle for the liberty of the voluntary association. ‘The struggle for religious liberty in England has been colored throughout by its first phase, the fight for life which the early separatist communities had to make. ‘The principle 44 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, at issue was the right of free association, for the autonomy of the freely associated group, that is to say, for the liberty of the social impulse. In the early nineteenth century there is a striking instance of the hostility of the state to the voluntary group in the repressive legislation which was passed against private associations of employers and of workmen alike. It cannot be questioned that a part of the human failure to create a worthy social order is due to the still existing deadlock between the political unit and the voluntary group. In the measure that the political unit claims—as in theory it always does—an absolute authority over the life of its members, this deadlock will continue. As Mr. Cole has well put it: “the State even if it includes everybody is still only an association among others; because it cannot include the whole of anybody.’’*° The individual will be subject to the strain of a divided loyalty until we have achieved—if we can achieve—a modus vivendi between the political unit and the free groups in which the nonpolitical elements of the individual life embody and exercise themselves. The reason why the large political unit tends to check the luxuriance of the associative impulse may be summed up in the expression “‘biological pressure.”’ In an exhaustive study of the social formations of the Teutonic peoples, Mr. Edward Jenks discovers three types of groups." First comes the clan or the gentile formation, which is presently superseded by the state or the military formation; and he perceives the minute beginnings of a third type, partnership or the contractual formation. MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 45 The clan is a social group which rests upon blood- kinship and is otherwise but loosely bound together. Before its members belong to the clan, they belong to the family or the household; and the clan is not able to act directly upon its constituent members. Where and so long as there is no great biological pressure, as in the vast spaces of ancient Germany and undiscovered America, the clan system has a chance of survival. But in the face of enemies it is always in danger. When natural increase and consequent biological pressure put the clan in jeopardy, out of its necessity arose the war-chief and his band, who are “‘the earliest form of the State.’ The new unit was an organization for power in the interest of survival; and in the com- petition between groups force was proved to con- stitute fitness to survive. Consequently the new institution had come to stay; and not only to stay but to expand. For size and power properly organized are in this region convertible terms. As out of the clan that became the first state, there grew the national state, so out of the national state have grown such vast aggregations as the British Empire and the United States of America. 9. STATE AND EMPIRE. The State grew out of military necessity; but it found other fields in which it could exercise itself—so much so that the word omnicompetent has been used to describe its implicit doctrine of itself. The scope and variety of these activities have tended to hide its origin, and it is only in time of war that its essential character and the spirit of its organization become apparent. 46 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY For the loose organization and the respect for the autonomy of its constituent groups that we find in the clan, the State substitutes the absolute and direct obedience of all its individual members to its acknowledged head. In war-time this leads to a regimentation as complete and as strict as ever; and it is only when the pressure of danger from without is relaxed that the more free and spontaneous groupings of men have any chance of effectual existence. So long as groups of men are exposed to the operation of natural selection, it is likely that the State will continue in something like its present form; but it will not be the only case in which a survival-device which proved to have value at one stage has become at another stage an obstruc- tion to further development. It is perfectly true that the original function of the State is held in abeyance during periods of peace; and in conse- quence it allows for those growths and variations that are characteristic of life; but so long as nations are subject to biological pressure, those growths are liable to arrest at any time. It would therefore appear that the elimination of war is a condition of the further evolution of mankind; and in that event the State would evolve into something of different nature. The case is not altered much when the “‘consti- tution” of the state is changed. The State, whether in an autocracy or in a democracy, will always tend to operate in the same way. Indeed, it is always possible for a democracy to regimentate its members more effectually than a despotism. ‘“The true democratic principle that none shall have power MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 47 over the people is taken to mean,” says Lord Acton, “that none shall be able to restrain or to evade the power of the people. The true democratic prin- ciple that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like is taken to mean that it shall not be required to tolerate what it does not like. ‘The true democratic principle that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible is taken to mean that the free will of the people shall be fettered in nothing.’’*? How true this may be is clear to any- one who observes the current reign of uniformi- tarianism in the United States of America. It is beyond doubt that this tendency is hostile to the continued development of mankind. In the course of evolution, we observe that life has provided for rich and luxuriant variation. Nothing is indeed so evident as the almost total absence of regimentation and mechanical uniformity in its display of types. However necessary for national defense a social organization capable of swift mobilization for war may be, biologically it will remain a constant obstacle to social evolution. The State as we know it is a conservative force, for while indeed it may conserve the group, it tends to conserve it in the same condition and at the same level, and makes difficult any further development. It represents the hive-type of human association. At this time of day, so far as the evolution of the race is concerned, the sovereign State is a biological carry- over which has largely ceased to serve a genuine biological purpose. The nation and the State are sometimes discussed as though they were identical. The State is the 48 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY nation organized and functioning as a political unit—where the term political is used to cover the formal external relations and the internal peace of the national group. It is the organ by which the nation exercises its collective authority both without and within its own borders. From its very nature it tends to be exclusive, to emphasize and to per- petuate the identity of the group it speaks for over against other groups. But it is important to notice that there is nothing invincibly exclusive or neces- sarily self-regarding in the nation. ‘The nation is a group of people who live together in a society formed partly as the result, at first, of geographical or historical accident. By living together, working together and suffering together they have created a tradition, a national memory which binds them together by ties of sentiment far stronger than the physical ground or the political occasion of their community. It has been argued that the nation is the largest social group that the human mind at its present level can grasp. If this means that the nation represents the largest group within which the social instinct of the average man can and does function effectually, it is doubtless true. Indeed, it is too generous a measurement; for it is doubtful whether the ordinary man behaves with a true and authentic sociability outside his own class or caste. But if the statement means that the social vision and feeling of the individual is confined within the circle of the nation, it is palpably untrue. “In human society,’”’ says Trotter, “‘a man’s interest in his fellows is distributed about him concentri- cally, according to a compound of various relations MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 49 they bear to him which we may call in a broad way sheer nearness.’’*® “Trotter goes on to show that there is a centrifugal fading of interest as it passes through the successive circles of his kinsfolk, his fellow townsmen, his fellow countrymen, his race, “until a limit is reached beyond which all interest is lost.’ But he points out how ‘‘freedom of travel and the development of the resources rendered avail- able by education’’ have increased the area of human acquaintanceship until there has grown “‘a sense of international justice, a vague feeling of being responsibly concerned in human affairs.” “The fact appears to be that the inherent logic of the social instinct compels it at last to embrace all mankind, and that the nation is a stage in the evolution of mankind by which the cave man is to grow at last into a citizen of the world. We have observed the biological tendency toward increase of size in multicellular organisms and in human societies; but the large human aggregations that have appeared in history have lacked stability and have disappeared. On one view, human his- tory may be regarded as the record of the rise and fall of Empires; and perhaps the final explanation of the instability of these large aggregations lies simply in the circumstance that they were Empires. Their cohesion was secured by pressure from with- out rather than from internal sociability; their unity was political rather than social. It is hardly too much to say that the turning point in the his- tory of the Roman Empire was reached when it abandoned its policy of toleration and substituted for it a rule of uniformity. Whatever “reason of 50 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY State’ lay behind it, the institution of Caesar- worship was intended to “‘iron out’’ dissent; and the persecutions of Flavius, Diocletian and Decius were carried out in the interests of a close regimenta- tion of the human material of the Empire. We shall have occasion to see the same tendency in the history of the medieval Church, the tendency to impose the goose-step upon its members; and it seems almost beyond argument that this is a process which provokes its own nemesis. It is the impulse to turn a people into an army, to organize society for the sake of efficiency and power. ‘There are biological reasons for supposing that such a process is unfriendly to the advance of life. Professor J. A. Thomson quotes the paleontologist Marsh as saying “‘that the epitaph of the Iguanodon might be: ‘I and my race died of overspecialization;’ ”’ and he goes on to speak of “‘the graceful graptolites, the robust trilobites, the highly specialized euryp- toids, the great labyrinthodents, ichthyosaurs, ple- siosaurs, and the pterodactyls,’’ who died of the same disease.** High specialization must necessarily set a limit to the variety of reactions of which the organism might otherwise be capable; it is achieved at the expense of plasticity; and in a changing world a fixed organization is in danger of finding itself in situations with which it has forfeited the faculty of dealing. The close regimentation of human societies in the interests of ‘‘efficiency,”’ whether for survival or for aggression, or for material prosperity, must in the end have conse- quences not dissimilar. Human aggregations of the “‘empire’’ type are ill-fitted for survival; and MAN AND HIS SOCIETY OL the stability of the British Empire to-day is noto- riously due to the degree in which it has departed from the traditional imperial type of organization and has become in the main a commonwealth of self-governing political units. It is not impertinent to point out, in further confirmation of this view, that the British Empire has been in recent years in danger of disruption just as those points at which the “imperial’’ idea has lingered on—in Ireland, Egypt and India; and the pacification of South Africa after the Boer War shows how much more effectual a principle of integration is the federal than the imperial. The Empire is a natural growth out of the State; the family-likeness is unmistakable. Both alike are achievements of power; and they live by a tech- nique of power. This is not to say that State and Empire have not had a part to play in the evolution of human society. At their own stage in the process they involved a discipline which was probably necessary to the survival of human society in the midst of anarchy. We shall have occasion to see how even the Church had to resort to something like a ‘‘State’’ organization and discipline in order to save the life of the spirit from the anarchy of the Dark Ages. But life has again and again dis- carded techniques and modes of behavior which had been found helpful at the earlier stages of its development; and when any form of life has clung too tenaciously to its survival devices, it has been left to stagnate or to perish. ‘The crustacean still remains in its crust; and the iguanodon is dead. In due time the State as we know it will become obso- 52 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY lete as an instrument of survival and growth and may become the prison and even the grave of human society. If biological analogy is to be trusted, it is a passing and transitional stage in the progress of mankind. 10. ‘THE REACTIONARY MIND. It would how- ever be idle to pretend that there are not powerful elements in human nature that seem to guarantee to the State a lease of life yet tolerably long. So long as men are still anarchic and only partially socialized, so long will dangers within and without argue with the ordinary man for the preservation of the military State. But there is also in human nature an inborn inertia which resists change. Inborn, for we may trace its origin to a far sub- human past. It may be indeed that we owe the whole vegetable kingdom to this inertia: and the evolution of the animal has been much retarded by its tendency to fall back into the vegetative life. However full, however overflowing the activity of an animal species may appear, “‘torpor and uncon- sciousness are always lying in wait for it.’’= There may be also a disinclination to leave the shelter to which life has reached and become habituated. Some habit or some armament has had a survival- value; and sometimes a species has preferred to leave well enough alone and to stay where it was rather than risk an adventure into the unknown. This is only to say that life is inherently conservative, but that it sometimes overdoes it—to its own loss. This is true also of man; he too is by nature con- servative; he too often overdoes it. MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 53, This conservatism in human nature is reinforced by the unshed inheritance of herd-mind. It has already been pointed out that, while the associative impulse runs through the whole of life, human society has tended toward a character different from other associations. For, elsewhere, the individual is merged in the group, whereas man is seemingly intended to become independent and autonomous, to live out his own life and to grow into a full and complete manhood. ‘The hive and the pack have but a single mind; man was meant to have a mind of his own: and his society was meant to leave him with an independent mind. But that independent mind the mass of men have not yet achieved; they still are subject to the law of the pack when they are not under the law of the hive. The old entail of herd-mind still clings, and at its worst becomes the mob-mind, that ugly and horrible thing which is indeed no mind at all, but a wild contagious impulse that puts the mind out of action. The psychology of the herd-mind in man has in recent years been ably discussed by a number of writers, and it need not now detain us. Every class and caste, every community and country has built for itself a house of life, has elaborated for itself a code of orthodoxies and habits, of familiar ideas and customs, within the pale of which the individual is at home. But let any new idea enter into this circle; immediately the community scents danger, feels its security imperiled, closes its ranks and is up in arms against the intruder. It will have nothing to do with it; it hurls hard and ugly names at it; it charges it with criminal intention; and as 54 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, often as not it kills the individual who imported it. That is the herd-mind at work; and the war period showed its survival in all the belligerent countries. It is the inevitable lot of the new idea that it is charged with affronting every kind of human sus- ceptibility and with endangering social security. In Jerusalem, Christianity was treated as an outrage upon religion; at Athens as an outrage upon philos- ophy; at Philippi, as an outrage upon patriotism.” The further progress of mankind is bound up with the liberation of the individual from the herd- mind; and for this we have to look chiefly to educa- tion. But if education is to give to men independent and self-directing minds and to equip them with a principle and faculty of valuation and criticism, its processes must be radically revised. However, we must be prepared to watch the herd-mind disap- pear very slowly. Nothing has in recent years so chilled the hope of rapid democratic progress as the discovery of the low average of intelligence in civilized communities. While the Binet tests are open to grave objection in many respects, it is probable that their general results give a rough approximation of the state of intelligence in a com- munity; and in England an investigation conducted by other methods gave results that correspond with the general impression left by the Binet tests in the American army, namely, that three-fourths of the people in an average community are a long distance away from the possession of a mental equipment that would make them capable of independent judgment and fruitful personal initiative. Our MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 55 present education, both in its methods and its sub- ject matter, tends to indoctrinate immature minds with the orthodoxies of the herd and aggravates the social inertia which obstructs the continued evolu- tion of mankind. The herd perpetuates itself; and its success in doing so is a check upon all social and cultural progress. It should be added in any discussion of the influences that make for a static or reactionary condition of society that Law must be included among them. “It would appear that the force exercised by society through the medium of law is a wholly conservative force. It makes steadily for the maintenance of the existing order.’’’” Law is the definition of certain modes of conduct which experience has shown to be of advantage to the social group; and in its original intention it was intended to be no more than a declaration of exist- ing custom; but formal definition—whether in conduct or belief—tends to become authoritative and mandatory, and the Law comes to be clad with attributes first of majesty and finally of divinity. Law-abidingness becomes ‘‘the law and the proph- ets,’ and the gospel as well; and to transcend the Law is as grave an offense as to transgress it. “That is why the moral pioneer and the prophet have commonly been treated as criminals. Whatever moral sense a man may have is constrained to oper- ate in a mechanical stereotyped fashion within the prescribed limits. Its reactions to moral evil become conventional and formal; and its ideal is a stand- ardized goodness without independence and origin- 56 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY ality. The total effect of law is to maintain the status quo; and the difficulty of bringing about a change in law is notorious. 11. THE RADICAL MIND. Nevertheless, in spite of all conservative influences, human society does change; and its changes come very much as do the new beginnings that have been made in sub- human life. There is a breaking-away from ancient security, an adventuring-forth from trodden paths. In all life there is a pioneer instinct; and human society now and again brings forth out of its loins a pioneer-soul, a son whom it neither owns nor honors, until it has slain him. Mr. Trotter speaks of stable-minded and unstable-minded persons in society—a description somewhat overcomplimen- tary to the former and less than just to the latter. For it is the latter class that furnishes the pioneer, the inventor, the prophet, the rebel, the dissenter and the nonconformist, the people who have proved themselves the growing-points of society. Mr. Trotter is right in insisting that this class represents a specific human type. Some day perhaps a com- petent student will give us a scientific account of the rebel-psychology. That there is something typical about the mentality of the great rebels may be gathered from the comparative reading of a few biographies. All alike display an abnormal mental sensitiveness combined with great physical restless- ness, a keen craving for fellowship combined with a fondness for solitude and lonely meditation, a vivid perception of present evils together with a passion for a future that should restore some primi- MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 7, tive simplicity, a tendency once the first step in rebellion has been taken to extend the rebellious front to other issues, a frequent admixture of integ- rity of character with a certain irregularity of conduct. But the paradox of the rebel has always been that, while he has always been assailed as a subverter of the social order, his own driving force has been a social sense quicker and broader than that of his orthodox contemporaries. He attacks the existing social organization only to break down walls that excluded some class from its legitimate share of what is going on in life. He hears the call of the disinhesited, and he seeks to lead them into the heritage of opportunity of which they are cheated by the cunning and the cupidity of the great. He endeavors to push out the frontiers of privilege in order that the poor and the outcast may enter upon a larger life. Indeed, it may be said that the whole historical struggle for freedom has been a struggle to broaden the basis of fellow- ship. Mr. Wells has lately said that “from the first dawn of the human story,’’ mankind has been “‘pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” But the prime agent of this pursuit has been the dissenter. Dissent has again and again proved itself to be the social growing-point. Yet the dissenter has usually been shot at dawn or hanged. We shall not have achieved a genuine freedom or the condi- tion of a pacific and steady social evolution until we have at least reached a state of society in which there will be not only a generous toleration, but a serious encouragement of dissenting thought. Meantime, the dissenter must be regarded as a bio- 58 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY logical thrust; and historically we are justified in regarding him generally as a thrust in the direction of a more humane social form. This accords well with the view, already affirmed, that at the present stage the impulse of life is directed toward the evolution of the appropriate and adequate human © community. | The effort to maintain a static condition of society is foredoomed to failure. The impulse of life cannot be suppressed or stereotyped: and the past history of human societies and their present problem lie chiefly in the inherent conflict between the conservative and the creative elements within life itself. If some sort of modus operandi could be devised which would enable these conflicting elements to discharge their proper function without involving life in a perpetual civil war, we should have struck the elusive trail which leads to our social goal. For it is not to be denied that the conserva- tive instinct has an important role to discharge in evolution; and especially on the human plane where independence is apt to breed anarchy, and freedom to bring forth folly, a possibility always at our doors so long as we suffer from inadequate knowl- edge and defective wisdom. Where conservatism is disinterested caution, it is then an indispensable factor in social advance. Unfortunately, however, conservatism is rarely of that kind, but is for the most part a selfish conviction in favor of the status quo. It is notorious that political conservatism is the monopoly of the privileged classes, who are, no doubt, sincerely persuaded that their advantage is the advantage of the whole. But even a selfish MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 59 conservatism—in the absence of a conservatism of disinterested caution—serves to countervail hasti- ness and impulsiveness of change. Selfish conserva- tism is, however, all too ready to step into militant reaction, which in its turn provokes militant radicalism—so that the train is ready laid for revolution. Now, the favorite weapon of militant reaction is the suppression of dissenting opinion by means of espionage, censorship and such judicial procedure as may be available; and it can always succeed in mobilizing the popular herd-mind by raising the cry of ‘‘danger to the State,” so that it can count generally upon adequate public support. Now, it is no doubt true that many new ideas may be dan- gerous to the community; but before they can be dangerous there must be conditions of distress or hardship in the community to which the new idea can make an appeal. Revolutionary propaganda can gain no hearing except where there is discon- tent. Butin any case there is no surer way to secure currency for a new idea than by the forcible sup- pression of it, which not only advertises it but increases its dangerous quality by driving it under- ground. Of the ultimate consequences of this policy we have enough historical evidence to leave us in no doubt. For force provokes force; and they that take the sword perish by the sword. A revolution carried through by force must live by force. It has to maintain itself by ruthlessness and terrorism. But the actual effect of revolution is to create a new 60 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY type of privilege and a new class to enjoy it. The aristocratic privilege which the French Revolution destroyed made way for the economic ascendancy of the bourgeoisie; and the economic privilege of the middle classes is seriously affected by the shock it received in the Russian Revolution, which already seems to have produced:a privileged class of prole- tarian bureaucrats. The tables have been turned; power has changed hands; there are new top-dogs for old; the poison has been redistributed. There has been a fresh deal of the cards, but it is still the same old pack. Just as upon the institution of War, so upon the principle and method of Revolu- tion there is written plainly, so that he who runs may read, the legend ‘‘No thoroughfare.’ Assur- edly here is no road of assured social progress, It is indeed true that at the worst the principle which has supplied a reason and a driving force to revolution gets soon or late inserted into the social technique of a people; but there are nevertheless grounds for the belief that, though revolution seems to be the short cut, it is actually the longest way to the goal. There is wisdom and truth in Mr. Sidney Webb’s aphorism that “nothing sudden is revolutionary; and nothing revolutionary is ever sudden.’ And for the biologist this needs no dem- onstration. Meantime, a reign of toleration seems to be the first condition of a pacific and steady social progress. So far from clapping the innovator in prison, let the new thing be brought into the Agora where it can run the gauntlet of valuation and criticism; and it should not be beyond human wit MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 61 to devise the means by which whatever truth the new idea contains may be peacefully and securely integrated into the social technique. 12. THE EcONoMIcC MoTIvE. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether we shall achieve a state of toleration until we have become agreed concerning the ends of life. As things are, we are governed in our social outlook by the group of human interests which we gather up under the label “economic’; and in the modern world we are chiefly concerned about the production and the distribution of wealth. “The wars of prehistoric men were caused by “biological pressure,’’ which simply meant a problem of food-supply; and while we may deny Karl Marx’s economic interpretation its claim to be regarded as the only clue to history, it has to be regarded as one of the most important clues. “To a vastly greater extent than any of us supposes, our public affairs are at bottom governed by the problems of food, clothing, shelter, heat, light and the like, with their derivative interests such as property, wages, employment. The main difference between the greater political parties in Great Britain and North America gathers around protective tariffs. “The saying that ‘‘trade follows the flag’ suggests what is undoubtedly true, that the motive of imperialism is markets. Our common discourse upon our public social concerns is devoted largely to considerations of material prosperity. Our navies are built for a commercial purpose— that of safeguarding commerce at sea. The primary social purpose of commerce is frustrated by the 62 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY motive of private acquisition of wealth—whether in the form of profits or of wages. Virtually all our social troubles to-day spring out of economic discontent. But it is not at all likely that we shall achieve toleration until man has overcome his self-regarding motive. This observation is admittedly among the tritest; but it remains true, however trite. So long as the individual conceives of his own private advantage as an end and orders his life accordingly, so long will massed self-regard in the form of vested interests hold up the traffic of social evolution. The orthodoxies and conventions which hold the exist- ing order together will be defended to the last ditch. But it is also to be observed that self-regard in the main concerns itself with certain material ends and in particular busies itself with the acquisition of wealth and whatever wealth can buy. Hence arises the undue importance laid upon the processes of wealth-production and wealth-acquisition. And the main trouble and tragedy of contemporary society is that its processes are governed chiefly by the requirements of commerce. I am not here concerned with the economics of a commercial civilization: I only wish to point out the obstacles that are cast in the way of the evolu- tion of a rational and fully human society by the ascendancy of what we have learned to call the economic motive—which is simply the desire to acquire pecuniary wealth. It is of course true that the mere possession of money cannot be an end for any save a disordered mind; money is desired because it is a means of power or of pleasure or of MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 63; some other form of self-indulgence. To this an exception must be made of rare cases where money is desired and used for philanthropic purposes. By and large, money is sought for uses of personal self- gratification. And the processes of society as a whole are directed to the acquisition of pecuniary wealth, whatever the individual may do with the wealth. Industry and commerce have the right of Way. It would, of course, be foolish to suggest that modern society alone has had its processes governed and controlled by the economic motive. But while the production and distribution of a sufficiency of food, clothing, shelter and the like have always been social concerns and have so far governed the social processes of a community, in our time these same processes are directed toward the production of superfluity for the sake of pecuniary wealth. The original social purpose of industry and commerce has been overlaid by the motive of private gain; and so far from commerce and industry serving society, society to-day serves them. Outside what has been called ‘‘the leisure class,’’ men live in order to manufacture and sell; and they manufacture and sell in order to live; and the great part of life is spent in this rather fruitless circle. To be sure, there are goods of another nature which we may pick up by the way. We fall in love and marry; we build us houses and beget children; and we have our favorite diversions in which we seek occasional escape from the monotony of the economic routine. But these are largely footnotes or postscripts to the main business of life, which is commerce; and we 64 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY are all involved in it—having to “make a living”’ and hoping to make a fortune. This subordination of the common life to wealth-production necessarily keeps society rotating around a fixed center—in motion but not moving; and social progress will remain an empty hope so long as society is so governed and organized that it is forever making material wealth its immediate goal. Even the most violent critics of the existing social order offer us no real escape from this cul de sac. The communist agrees with the capitalist upon the primacy of wealth; they disagree only about the present methods of its production and especially its distribution. They represent hostile sects within the same church—the church that worships ‘“‘this world’s unspiritual god.”’ There is as we have observed no stopping-place in wealth; and its sequel is in the main a reign of self-indulgence. Self-indulgence would appear to be a peculiarly human characteristic; in the sub- human world it seems not to exist. “The acquisition of freedom and intelligence by man involved the risk that he might use them for his own ends rather than for their appointed end, which is the continued evolution of life. Self-indulgence simply means that a man makes of himself an obstruction to the traffic of life, a dead end, a blind alley; and the penalty that he pays is degeneracy. Because we can perceive no end beyond ourselves, we naturally turn in upon ourselves and indulge ourselves in whatever form of self-gratification makes most effectual appeal to us. Nor is it the possessor of wealth only who is exposed to the habit of self-indulgence. He MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 65 may set the pace; and his poorer neighbor does his best to keep up with him. It seems to be the logical end of a way of life which descries no goal for its effort beyond the acquisition of material and tem- poral good. For man cannot be satisfied with the possession of wealth; and seeing no other end upon which he may spend his superfluous money, he spends it upon himself—to minister to his vanity, to gratify his senses, to escape from his ennui. The modern consequence is the wide commercialization of pleasure, of sport and of vice, in order to meet the unsatisfied hunger of life in a materialistic society. The survival of power as a regulative idea of social organization, the atavistic faith in force; the strength of the herd mind, intolerance and the sup- pression of dissent, the organization of self-regard unto “‘vested interests,” the domination of the community by the ideology and technique of wealth-acquisition, self-indulgence—these things and their like are they which to-day constitute the drag upon social evolution. And thus it seems ever to have been. Man and his society appear to be caught in a net of frustra- tion. Civilizations, states, empires rise and pass away, describing monotonously the same curve of change from their beginning to their fall; and that ultimate human society, which is removed equally from the herd and from the hive, is yet to seek. Mr. Bertrand Russell has said truly that the two forces that determine the distribution of power among nations are cupidity and fear; and Dr. Jacks commenting upon this statement adds: “In every 66 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY atrangement of power this formula repeats itself; the final arrangement like the present one being only the old farce of cupidity and fear performed by new actors.’’** ‘“The world,’’ said Newman, “‘has cycles in its course, That once has been is acted o’er again, Not by some fated law that need appal Our faith or binds our deed as with a chain, But by men’s separate sins, which blended, still The same bad round fulfil.” Perhaps it was some sense of this frustration that led St. Paul to say that the creation was “‘subjected to vanity,’’ doomed to futility, as it were rotating around an immovable axis, in unstaying movement, yet ending where it began. Yet St. Paul recognized that out of sight this same creation was straining toward “‘the liberty of the glory of the children of God.’”’ Indeed, it was his profoundest conviction that “‘the same bad round” in which the world seemed to be prisoned had already been broken. PART II THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY 1. MAN AND RELIGION. So far, on the plane of nature, man has failed to create a society in which he can fully be himself; and on the face of it, after so long a failure, a certain misgiving concerning his future may be justified. If indeed men are incorrigibly vicious and self-regarding, there is no hope of a City of God; and it has been the fashion in recent times to suppose that the struggle for existence must continue on the human plane and that therefore the only thing that it is safe to assume concerning men is that they will naturally pursue a course of self-interest. We have had occasion already to see that the struggle for existence is not the only factor in the evolution of life and that there are impulses of association and codperation active on every level of life. But there is, moreover, some ground for supposing that the anarchic indi- vidualism which has characterized historical man is in some way a “‘fall’’ from what appears to have been the state of more primitive man. It has been our custom to regard the “‘cave man’”’ as the symbol of human brutality, and he is usually depicted belaying his wife or his neighbor with a club; and when we have desired to characterize some unusual cruelty, we have been as likely as not to drag in an allusion to the Old Stone Age. But as Mr. Chesterton has pointed out, the one fact that we 67, 68 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY do certainly know about the cave man is that he drew some very remarkable pictures on the walls of his cave; and it is necessary to point out that this was a brand new thing in the world; the animal had turned artist. “That was the real debut of man. As for the men of the Old Stone Age, it appears that, whatever else they may have left behind them, they did not leave any weapons for combat, and that we may even look back to a golden age of peace, when violence was practically absent from human relations.” Moreover, students of cultural anthropology incline to the view that there was in primitive mankind a more powerful social intuition and a deeper sense of social obligation*® than has ever been evident in what we are pleased to call civiliza- tion. ‘The doctrine of the Fall may be on the way to a scientific rehabilitation. Be that as it may, we know concerning human nature that it is not satisfied with itself and that it is forever trying to rise above itself. It has been said that table manners are a set of devices by which we try to hide the fact that a number of animals are feeding together. This is a whimsical way of speaking of a certain innate impulse toward refine- ment of nature that is evident in mankind at its best. But man’s face has been turned from the clod in more important ways. Professor Dewey says somewhere that the end of education is more education; and similarly we may say that the end of life is more life. But this does not mean mere continuance and extension of life, but the refinement and improvement of life. ‘The end of life is finer life. If it were merely a NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 69 matter of survival, our problem would resolve itself into an affair of bread and cheese; if it were a matter of happiness, we should want more than bread and cheese, but the remainder of the needful provender should be readily got at. But if we are to accept the moral of biological evolution, we must at least say that the end of human life is the produc- tion of a nobler, finer, more sensitive form of life. That this is a latent tendency in mankind is evident from its continuous effort to transcend its physical environment and to create for itself other worlds in which its finer ingredients might have the oppor- tunity to grow. Out of the world of things in which he found himself, man has created a new unseen world of ideas. And out of his world of ideas, he has built a world of values. From which it is very evident that he is consciously concerned with his future. We dramatize our “‘values’’ into ideals; and an ideal is a picture of some desired future; it is life projecting itself beyond the existing fact. It would take us too far afield to consider the travail of mind that made the discovery of the “ultimate values,’’ the good, the true, the beautiful. It is necessary, however, to set it down here as a significant fact in the story of man’s effort to rise above himself. Nevertheless, it is germane to our purpose to observe, first, that this definition is his- torically of very long standing and it still holds the field. It registers an advance from which there has been no recession. Second, it is to be regarded as the result of a speculative effort to descry the ends of life. Third, it is significant that these “ultimate 70 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, values’ are of a kind accessible only to the disin- terested. Here if a man would gain his life, he must lose it. “The good, the true, the beautiful are to be attained only by those who seek them for their own sakes and for no private end; and self-renun- ciation becomes the law and the prophets. The “ultimate values’’ that man has defined for himself are such as he must (so to speak) leave himself behind in order to reach. Fourth, these “ultimate values’’ are to be taken as recording life’s own discovery of the direction of its further evolution. But the most manifest of all the endeavors of man to transcend himself and his immediate envi- ronment has been that long, various, persistent aspiration that we call religion. However lowly the origins of religion may be, it is at bottom the product of an instinctive feeling that the horizons of sense do not fix the boundaries of life. Funda- mentally religion is the expression of man’s concern with the unknown. As soon as it dawned upon him that there may be being beyond the range of his senses, he began to be religious. For he began, however crudely and ignorantly, to try to establish some kind of “‘entente’’ with the unknown, the dim and mysterious environment which was hidden from his senses and withdrawn from his sure knowledge. It may be true that, having come up out of the brute with an inheritance of ancestral suffering and ancient fear, he surmised that the unknown might be peopled with enemies that had to be placated. But he became persuaded that his own destiny was in some way related to whatever lay within the unknown. His religion became an NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY, 71 expression of his passion for survival, as indeed in its cruder forms it is to-day. [he popular con- ception of salvation still preserves this early instinct of self-preservation. Religion originated as a bio- logical function; and rightly understood, it serves the same purpose still. It holds out before life its transcendental end and inspires it to pursue that end. In The Legends of Smokeover Dr. Jacks describes the evolution of a great agency for redeeming the world out of the grubby and not overcleanly soil of the show-grounds at English fairs. It is the story of the growth of the sporting instinct from its lowest and dingiest levels into a constructive faith, and its consecration to the highest conceivable ends. This is a true parable of the way in which life has traveled. In its primal wilderness it put forth little struggling ill-shapen shoots of aspira- tion, of awe, of wonder; and these have by some incredible, continuous miracle grown into great trees that give both fruit and shade to the children of men. That is essentially the story of religion; and because it has brought to us and established in us a sense of the transcendental end of life, it has also set us on the road to the revaluation of life as it is. This is seen in the growth of the conception of the “holy.”4 The “holy” in its origin was the thing that was supposed to have some special rela- tion to the Unknown. It appeared in the crude taboos of primitive society; then came sacred animals, sacred places, sacred times, sacred persons; and it has brought forth the classic division of life 72 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY into sacred and secular which overshadows us to-day. The movement, however, is still going on. ‘The area of the sacred has been steadily grow- ing; and Christianity has laid down the principle that all life is holy ground. The Church was eatly taught that there was nothing common or unclean—no easy lesson. for men cradled in the conviction that they belonged to an elect nation and that the gentile world lay outside the pale. ‘They had their holy places; but they learned that God was to be found wheresoever there are those who seek Him in spirit and in truth. They had had their holy days; but they were taught to regard every day as holy. ‘They had had a holy caste of priesthood; but they came to see that every believ- ing soul was a priest of God. This yeast has gone on working in many ways. The ancient belief in the actual divinity of kings has been displaced by a more rational belief in the potential divinity of men. We have here an important—perhaps the most important—movement in the later evolution of life. First a tiny cleansing in the wilderness: now a promise that all the wilderness may be turned into holy ground. And indeed, not only are we on the way to the consecration of all life, that is, on the way to regarding it and treating it as dedicate to God; but our sacraments are meant to teach us that life itself is sacramental, that is to say, that it is a revelation of God itself, a manifestation of ultimate Reality. Probably it is here that we have to find the real differentia of mankind. Whatever of his endow- ment man may share with his lowlier kin, this NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 73 religious aspiration seems to be a thing peculiarly his own. Prayer, which is the characteristic and fundamental expression of religion, is simply the restless aspiration of life toward the unseen. Faith is the conscious form of the impulse with which life from its first beginnings has faced the unknown; but the fact that it has become a conscious thing in man has given the unknown a new character. For man, it is something to be sought, a world to be explored; and the quest and exploration of the unseen supplies the momentum and determines the subject matter of religion. For the moment, we are concerned only with the biological aspect of religion. It is not to be sup- posed, however, that this exhausts the significance of religion. The religious man does not conceive of religion merely as the thrust of life into the unknown: he believes that the Unknown comes to meet him—in revelation. Moreover, it should be observed that the great religions of the world are less obviously concerned with a process of evo- lution than with the pressing business of redemp- tion. This does not conflict with our thesis; for redemption is the task of restoring a miscarried and frustrated process to its true original course. “These are matters which cannot be treated at this point. For our precent purpose, it is necessary only to insist upon religion as recording man’s sense of a destiny within the unknown and his effort to win into the unknown. It is the present phase of the odyssey of life toward its inscrutable goal.® But it has this special significance for the present discussion, that it sets before man an other-worldly 74 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY end. We have seen that man’s failure to achieve an adequate social life has resulted chiefly from his preoccupation with and his domination by ‘‘this world’s unspiritual god.’’ His own growth is arrested by his worldly-mindedness; he is impris- oned in a material-temporal order. We have seen moreover that his own speculation concerning life has shown him that his end lies by way of values which are not market-values—things to be bought “without money and without price’’—an intima- tion clear enough that his further advances must be of a spiritual kind. ‘To this, religion, the intui- tion of “other-worldliness,’” adds the conviction that there is a new world of life to be entered and conquered, and in that new world a new quality of life and experience—some new ‘‘emergent”’ character—to be realized. In contrast with the world of sense, this new world is called the world of spirit, and it is to be attained by the present accep- tance and practice of a spiritual evaluation of life. If religion then is in line with the whole evolution of life, it should hold the promise of a new kind of man and of a new kind of society. It would be a story too long to tell here how the mind of man came slowly to conceive of the Unknown as a unity and to believe that it was a unity because it was indwelt by a personal being. ‘That—the achievement of monotheism—is one of the great landmarks in the human pilgrimage; and it brought to religion a definiteness and a resolution which could not be induced by the attraction of an indefinite Unknown. Probably there has been no greater incentive to fine and disinterested human NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 75 endeavor than the motive that our fathers knew as ‘‘the glory of God’; and some such motive we too must have—by whatever name we may call it—if the forward movement of life is to continue. Only so shall there be borne a race of men like gods and a society which finds its sanction, its interests and its cohesion in a common devotion to God.° 2. THE Goop News. At any time during the reign of the Emperor Claudius, a traveler in the Eastern Empire might have met—either on the great imperial highroads or in the cities of Asia Minor and Greece—a Jew who was gaining con- siderable publicity by proclaiming wherever he could get a hearing that God had recently given the human race a new start, and that it was God's purpose to create a new human commonwealth, wide as the world, in which all the existing distinc- ‘ tions of race and class would vanish, and which would be held together by a cohesive principle different from that of any known political society.’ The second part of the preaching fell upon ears familiar with the idea, for the Stoics had taught something like it: and the first part fell upon many ears that were famishing for some such news. As for the preacher himself, he was wholly sure that the world he was acquainted with needed a new beginning very badly. Being a religious Jew, he saw that world with the eye of a moralist; and the report which he gives of it is one of the gravest indictments of a civilization that has ever been set down in writing. It is not long, but it would be difficult to add anything to it; and the sum of 76 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY the matter is that it was a world given over ‘“‘to a reprobate mind.’’ It was a moral cesspool. Like all wholesale indictments, it is subject to qualifica- tions and exceptions; but there is some contempo- rary evidence in support of the preacher’s strong language. ‘There is, moreover, evidence that goes to show that that world was intellectually decadent and bankrupt in religion. Yet it was a world spiritually hungry; and there was abroad a longing and a searching for tidings of salvation from what- soever quarter they might come.® The preaching carried conviction to many who heard it. Small groups of men and women, usually of the “‘lower’’ class, were gathered together on the strength of this hope in many of the cities of the Empire; and in these groups the preacher pro- fessed to find the beginnings of that divine com- monwealth of which he so confidently spoke. ‘These people displayed some peculiarities which did | indeed suggest that they were an unusual human type. An unknown writer at a later time said that they were not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or speech or customs; they inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do they use any different form of speech, nor do they cultivate any out-of-the-way life . but while they live in Greek and barbarian cities as their lot may be cast and follow local customs in dress and food and life generally, yet they live in their own countries as sojourn- ers; they take part in everything as citizens NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY hs and submit to everything as strangers. Every strange land is native to them, and every native land is strange. “They marry and have children and like everyone else, but they do not expose their children; they have meals in common, but not wives. ‘They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They continue on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the laws ordained; and by their private lives they overcome the laws ...in a word, what the soul is to the body, that is what Christians are in the world.°® This description we may set down as somewhat excessive in its generosity; we know that there were those in the early churches who hardly justify this picture. But this was what they were meant and wanted to be like; and what very many did in truth become. And these were the people who were “‘the house- hold of God” and were to grow “unto a holy temple in the Lord”, of which temple, one Jesus was ‘‘the chief cornerstone’; and says our preacher, “other foundation can no man lay save than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” “This Jesus, who was the heart of the “‘good news,”’ the person in whom God had given the race a new beginning, and the one foundation of the divine common- wealth that was to come, had been crucified at Jerusalem some twenty years before. On the face of it, this preaching seems so pre- posterous that it is no wonder that the educated public thought it a little more than a bad joke. 78 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY They said outright that it was folly; but our preacher had he known a Greek equivalent for the proverb would have said in the face of their laughter that “‘he laughs best who laughs last.”’ 3. THE NEW VARIATION.” Nietzsche has familiarized this generation with a doctrine of the superman, a being who shall be as much in advance upon man as man is upon the higher primates. But St. Paul had anticipated Nietzsche; and he afirmed, moreover, that the first superman had already appeared. He found in Jesus the embodi- ment and the anticipation of a new humanity. We are to “‘come unto a full-grown man of the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’’; and Jesus is appointed to be “‘the first-born among many brethren.”’ Jesus is the disclosure of the human future: he is the true superman, the man-beyond- man who is to come. Plainly St. Paul descried (and not he alone) an ultra~-human quality in Jesus; and this same impression accounts for the traditional Christian attitude to Jesus. He was human-plus, and in that plus St. Paul found divinity. He saw the “‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’’ To St. Paul, Jesus was not only the anticipation of the human future, but the revelation of the divine nature. How far such a view of Jesus may be maintained out of the scanty records which we have of his life is a question which must be for the moment deferred. What cannot be questioned is that the main Christian tradition has accepted the Pauline NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 79 view, and that undeniable and important historical consequences have come from it, To deny the Pauline view on a priori grounds is possible only to those who regard nature as a closed system, having reached its final term in man. The logic of evolution not only allows but requires us to anticipate a superman; and inasmuch as on the physical side there appears to have been no impor- tant structural modifications in man within any time of which we have knowledge, we are com- pelled to conceive of any possible supermanhood as being of a “‘spiritual’’ sort. And from the nature of the case, the superman will be a fresh revelation of God who is ‘‘a self-determining principle which manifests itself in a development which includes nature and man,’”’ and whatever may lie beyond man. And who will say that the anticipation of the human future and the revelation of the divine nature may not be at bottom the same thing? There is a modern philosophy which holds that the whole universe is tending toward deity. Within the all-embracing stuff of Space- Time, the universe exhibits an emergence in time of successive levels of finite existences, each with its characteristic empirical quality: the highest of these empirical qualities known to us is mind or consciousness. . . . Deity is thus the next higher empirical quality to mind. which the universe is engaged in bringing to birth. That the Universe is pregnant with that quality we are speculatively assured. What that quality is we cannot know; for we 80 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God. If we could know what deity is, how it feels to be divine, we should first have to become as gods,** I cannot persuade myself that there is here a final accounting of the mystery of things; but something like it must needs be thought if we are to have a coherent view of a universe in process, and it cer- tainly tallies well with that part of the process that lies within our range. It was a thought akin to this that found expression in St. Paul’s picture of the creation groaning and travailing in pain while waiting to be delivered into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. If St. Paul had been living to-day, he would probably have said that in Jesus had appeared a new “‘emergent’’ in the human species. He would have shown that there were premonitions of the new thing in the Old Testament Scriptures, but in Jesus, it is present substantially and uniquely. The name which he gives to this new quality of life is “spirit.”” Throughout his writings the spirit is steadily regarded as describing a new plane and power of life; it is the cause and the content of the supernatural dimension of life, involving a super- natural understanding, a supernatural strength of life and immortality. The spirit makes us sons of God and joint heirs with Christ; and of those v-ho have risen to this plane, the destiny is “‘to be con- formed to the image of the Son, that he might be the first-born among many brethren.’’ The antithe- NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 81 sis of flesh and spirit clearly corresponds to that of nature and supernature; and while Adam is the symbol of the former, Jesus is the symbol of the latter. ““The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving spirit.’’ There is a plane and a succession of nature of which Adam is the origin and the archetype: there is a plane and a succession of spirit of which Jesus is at once the beginning and theend. The spirit is called indiffer- ently the spirit of God and the spirit of Christ. Elsewhere the spirit is spoken of as the organ of God’s self-knowledge. The conceptions dissolve into each other; but it is clear that spirit represents the strain of deity which is common to God and Christ, and of which man is capable. In Jesus, manhood is joined to deity; and in Him God was starting a new race. 4. THE NEw MAN AND THE NEw SOCIETY. Jesus had set Himself out to win His people into the Kingdom of God in the hope and expectation that they would become its heralds in the world. In this enterprise He failed; His people rejected Him and His hope for them. But while He was leading this forlorn hope, a greater and deeper process was also afoot. The writer of the Fourth Gospel, with a true biological insight, has perceived that the real achievement of Jesus lay not so much in the accomplishment of a specific set task as in the kindling of His own life in men and women. It shows us Jesus quickening life in bound, diseased and dead souls; and those wayside operations that seem in the Synoptics to be merely incidental to 82. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY His public task appear in the Fourth Gospel to be the real business of His ministry. He was laying the foundations of the future by evoking a new quality and dimension of life in ordinary folk, in the disciples and in other persons whom He encoun- tered. So that even at the moment when His public work was undone, there stood at the foot of the Cross a little group in whom this life had been awakened and who were presently to become the New Israel which should take to mankind the vision and the message that the Old Israel had rejected. That they were not then aware of what had hap- pened to them is little to the point; but their subse- quent record shows that a new thing had been born in them which was destined to expand far beyond their own group. Within a short time the disciples who had hitherto been held together by their com- mon devotion to Jesus were consolidated into a society which has maintained its continuity to this present time. St. Paul came upon the scene a little later; and though he was not of the original group of dis- ciples, it was he who gave the world the classic interpretation of Jesus and His significance. It is sometimes laid against St. Paul that he actually distorted the mind of Jesus and set the Christian tradition on a wrong track. But this is a position that cannot be taken seriously by students who have the patience to dig beneath the temporary and transient elements in St. Paul to the essential core of what he had to say to the world. An unimagi- native and pedantic reading of his Epistles and a failure to take account of the movement of his mind NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 83 may lead us to suppose that he loaded the Gospel with much extraneous and irrelevant matter. But, to take a single instance, the eschatology which dominated him when he wrote the Thessalonian Epistles shrinks to a very small place even in the first Corinthian Epistle, which probably comes next in order of time; and though there is a clinging strain of eschatology in the later epistles, it is evi- dent that it has very little to do with the general current of his thought. Nor is it just to forget that the controversial atmosphere of Romans and Gala- tians involves an emphasis for which allowance must be made before we reach the normal and balanced mind of the writer. Moreover being a child of his own time and having a peculiar relig- ious, intellectual and social background of his own, he introduces much that seems irrelevant and remote to us to-day. “The main fact that has to be taken into account in any examination of St. Paul is his own conversion, his own participation in the life of the spirit; and his whole effort there- after was to expound what had happened to him and what seemed to him to issue from it. That he should interpret his own conversion primarily against the legal and moralistic background of his own Judaism was natural; but as the years went on it is evident that this view of the matter somewhat paled, and he tends more and more to interpret the experience in more subjective and mystical terms, acquired perhaps directly or indirectly through his Greek contacts. That “justification by faith’’ and the “‘new creation” refer to the same critical religious experience is evident. But the 84 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY former reflects an outward change, a change of status; the latter a change of nature. Indeed, it may be said that broadly his tendency was toward a more biological idiom in his treatment of the idea of conversion. ‘“‘And you hath He made alive’; “the new man”; “‘Christ formed in you’’—such expressions as these represent a much more vitalistic feeling about the essential Christian experience. ‘This tendency is carried much further in the Fourth Gospel which is almost entirely vitalistic in its tone. There is a dualism similar to St. Paul’s in St. Augustine’s interpretation of his own experience. In his moralistic exposition of his conversion and his doctrine of grace, he even out-Pauls Paul, but alongside of this there is a mystical account of the same experience which apparently derives from the saint’s Platonism. But it is not difficult to extricate the essential elements in St. Paul’s thought out of the special thought-forms in which he necessarily expressed them. ‘The two cardinal points around which his mind turns are the ideas of the “new man’’ and the new society. Perhaps nowhere in the Pauline writings do we find these two ideas more succinctly stated than in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is indeed asserted by some scholars that this Epistle is not the handiwork of St. Paul; and the view appears to be supported by an exami- nation of the text. But even though the Epistle was written by another hand, the mind is unmis- takably St. Paul’s; and the thought of the Epistle has a clear family relationship to what are allowed to be authentic Pauline writings. “Che Epistle may NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 85 be regarded, moreover, in the light of a circular or open letter—which may account for the verbal and stylistic peculiarities that lend color to the doubt of the Pauline authorship. When a man sits down to write a formal communication, he inevitably modifies his style and his diction; and it is evident that in this Epistle there is a deliberate endeavor to state the essential truth of the Christian Gospel inasummary form. It may well be that Ephesians is an epitome of the mature Pauline philosophy; certainly its main elements may be traced through all the previous Pauline documents. Moreover, there is in it no strain of controversy. In Romans and Galatians, the necessity of refuting the Juda- izers threw the emphasis upon justification by faith; but now with that controversy past and the next still to emerge, there is a juster proportion in St. Paul’s statement of the faith and the hope that he held. The second chapter of the Epistle falls into two parts. The first part has to do with the ‘‘new man. It is to be observed that none of the figures in which St. Paul had previously described the transition from the old man to the new appears here. Justification, adoption, redemption—the essential experience reflected in these figures is here, of course; but the picture is different. In these three metaphors, which are characteristic of the controversial period, the common denominator is the idea of a new beginning. An offender is pre- sented with a clean slate; an outsider is adopted into the family; a slave is bought into freedom. The individual in every case is conceived as having 86 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY the opportunity of a fresh start. But these three figures represent external and quasi-legal transac- tions. “Iwo terms, which can hardly be called figures, are used in the second Corinthian Epistle which also convey the idea of a new beginning. The Judaizers had made little or no impression at Corinth—at least at the time when the Epistles were written—and the discussion has a flavor less legalistic. There St. Paul uses the terms “new creation”’ and “‘reconciliation.’’ But here again the notion of a new beginning is explicit. A man is remade; the enemy is turned to friend— in either case there is a new beginning. ‘There is a definite break with the past, and the individual has a fresh start in a new direction. But in Ephesians II we have the most radical of all St. Paul’s figures, namely, the figure of resurrection from death, of quickening a dead soul; and it is in this same Epistle that he speaks of ‘‘the new man.” In the second half of the chapter, St. Paul speaks of the new society, the divine commonwealth into which the new man is embodied; and it is plain that he conceives of it as the ultimate human society, transcending all frontiers of race and superseding all other human societies whatsoever. 5. THE QUICKENED SOUL.” When St. Paul speaks of the quickening of dead souls, what does he mean? It is to his Epistle to the Romans that we have to turn for our answer. It has already been observed that the world St. Paul looked out upon seemed to him to be under sentence of death. It was a world “‘given up to a reprobate mind,” NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 87 “subjected to vanity,’’ a world under arrest, a world “in the bondage of corruption,” festering in its stagnation. Yet it was expecting and groaning in the hope of deliverance, waiting for the emergence of a new regenerate race. From this bondage it would be delivered when “‘the sons of God” appeared. ‘The expression “‘sons of God’’ had a history previous to St. Paul’s use of it; and it some- times embodied vaguely the expectation of a race of men which should partake of the nature of God. Some of us, says St. Paul, have already been rescued from this slough of death; we are “‘the first fruits of the spirit’’; we are indeed not finished products, but we are at least on the way. We have become sharers of divinity, for we possess the spirit. It has frequently been observed that in this passage St. Paul seems to have anticipated the idea of evolu- tion. Certainly the notion of the elan vital seems to be implicit here. It is not impertinent to suggest that his picture here is of an evolutionary cul-de-sac. On the face of it, the main current of the process has been arrested; it has turned back upon itself and is becoming degenerate. Yet out of sight the urge of life is plainly in travail with a new thing, in the labor of bringing forth the new race of the sons of God. In some of us, says St. Paul, the elan vital, which is the spirit, has made a beginning and is bringing us to perfection. This then is the specific Christian experience. We are lifted up from the plant of ‘‘nature,”’ of natural manhood, on which we are doomed to degeneracy and extinction, to a new level of life and a new stage of development. Perhaps St. Paul 88 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY would not have put it in precisely this form, but certainly this mode of statement does no violence to his thought. “This however does not exhaust his view of the matter. For there is not merely a change in the nature of the new man, but a change also in his status and relationships, and in particular in his position in relation to God. The quickened soul stands in a free, direct, unmediated and friendly relation to God. ‘This apparently is the idea con- veyed by the word “‘grace’’—with the additional notion that this relationship is the free and uncon- strained gift of God, unmerited and unbought by the individual. The Fourth Gospel adopts and develops the Pauline view of the new nature. In that Gospel, the Logos incarnate is described in a number of episodes as quickening his own peculiar quality of life in men and women whom He encountered; and this aspect of the writer’s intention culminates in the great parable of the resurrection of Lazarus. ‘This is not the place to discuss the critical questions started by the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel; but without prejudice to the historical character of the narratives, it is hardly to be doubted that the intention of the Gospel is interpretation rather than history. Moreover, there appears to be a systematic effort in the first part of the Gospel to indicate some of the characters of the newly kindled life in man. (1) Itis presented as possessing a new range and quality of perception, as it were, a new “‘sense.’’ This is implied in the characteristic and ubiquitous emphasis on sight and light. We meet the idea NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 89 first in the prologue: ‘The life is the light of men”; and it appears in Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus as the first consequence of the birth from above: “Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’’ The subject is treated more fully in the story of the man born blind, ‘hat is plainly a parable of the new super-sight, and it is evidently intended to convey the idea that the new life is endowed with the faculty to perceive reality otherwise unseen, to apprehend a world of ultimate values. William James says in one of his letters that the position of man in the universe is very much like that of a dog in a drawing-room. Just as there is a world of ideas, judgments and tastes beyond the dog’s world of smells and sounds and sights, so there is a world of experience and values beyond our workaday world; and the mark of the new life is that it has become aware of that trans- cendental world, that it sees (as Jesus said) the Kingdom of God. (2) The new life is characterized by a new dimension in the sphere of human relationships. This is evidently the main moral of that marvelous and intricate piece of symbolism which we know as the story of the woman of Samaria. ‘The story has indeed many morals—but this most of all— that when men have made a living contact with God they are raised above secular distinctions of race and even the accidental separations of religion. (3) The story of the healing of the impotent man is a parable of another aspect of the new expe- rience. The impotent man is most of us. Bergson in a notable passage speaks of the torpor which lies 90 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY in wait for any animal species that desists from effort;** and it is a commonplace of human experi- ence how native inertia may overtake us and cause us to “‘settle down,”’ until at last we become incapa- ble of effort. “The impotent man is a symbol of this condition; and in his healing we are to discern the restoration of his capacity for effort. Our last glimpse of him is as he takes up his bed and walks away with it. But it is not merely that impotence is here transformed into power, but also that a parasite is restored to an independent life. (4) Common to both St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel is a consistent emphasis upon freedom. The new life is emancipated from the bondage of tradi- tion and custom. But this emancipation is wrought not by a violent breach with the common religious and social inheritance, but by an advance beyond it. As Jesus said, it was not his business to destroy the law but to fulfil it, to carry out its logic beyond its own existing frontiers. The new life is made free of the law not by denying the law but by transcending it. The letter of the law without was superseded by the spirit of the law within; and conduct which had been an affair of obligation and prescription becomes a spontaneous outworking of a living interior principle. ‘“The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, good- ness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.’’ In con- sequence, the new life will not be subject to a standardized morality; its ‘‘righteousness’’ will be original, spontaneous and creative, not only exceed- ing the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, but its own as well. The new righteousness is of NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 91 a dynamic sort, forever engaged in transcending its own best. But this brings us to the question of the new status of the quickened soul; and it is to St. Paul that we are chiefly to look for light upon the matter. (1) In the Pauline use, the word righteousness signifies chiefly not a character but a condition. In the Synoptic Gospels, the word may without strain be translated goodness; but in St. Paul the word signifies the state of being right with God. Justi- fication is the act by which we are set right with God. The discussion of the Greek verb translated to justify—whether it means to make or to declare one righteous—is beside the point. or to be declared righteous before God is to be made right- eous before God. ‘This condition is regarded as the reversal of a state of enmity toward God in which the natural man is said to be; and this suggests that the other Pauline word “‘reconciliation”’ is a richer and more direct description of what takes place between the sinner and God. ‘The position is best described in Dr. Oman’s expression ‘“‘a gracious relationship.’’** (2) That it is a gracious relationship means that it is free and unconstrained. No man is brought into it against his will; God so respects the freedom with which he has dowered human nature that He compels no man to come to Him. Yet the final meaning of our natural freedom is that we should come to God. And as it is free in its beginnings, so it continues free. It becomes the last term of freedom. » On the plane of nature, we can have at best no 92 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY more than a relative freedom; and in the life that we live in the flesh, we can never be free of the limitations of time and space and of the thousand exigencies of secular existence. But even on this plane, the worst enemies of our freedom are of the moral sort. We are born and bred with the dead hand of tradition upon us; we are brought up in awe of public opinion and the policeman. We are never wholly emancipated from the bonds of custom and fashion; and our wills are never free of the tyranny of fear. Indeed, fear is the last enemy of our freedom. But when we enter the new life in grace, we are delivered from this enemy. For in this gracious relationship to God we have found an inalienable security. Nothing is so impressive in the New Testament as its consistent confidence in the security of the quickened soul. “No man shall be able to pluck them out of my Father’s hands.”” “I am persuaded that neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’’ With such security, we have perfect freedom. (3) Because the English-speaking people are politically-minded, they are apt to think of freedom as an end in itself. But freedom is not an end but ameanstoanend. It is the condition under which a man can be himself and grow into the full dis- tinctive human thing it is in him to be. And the freedom of this gracious relationship to God is the NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 93 condition under which we can reach the full stature of personality. For one thing, it is the only condition under which he can achieve a full self-consciousness. The gracious relation to God is direct and unmediated. The soul is confronted by the Absolute. On the plane of nature, there is no absolute against which We can measure ourselves, no clear unshadowed mirror in which we can see our own faces. In that region, our measurements have reference not to absolutes but to averages. But there comes a moment in experience when a man sees himself in the mirror of God. His individuality stands out stark and separate. For the first time he can say an absolute I and Me and Mine. It is the moment of absolute self-discovery. For most men it is, alas, a self-discovery in shame; it is a disclosure of failure, of having come short of the glory which it beholds. And no one ever says “‘I’’ so convinc- ingly to himself, with so unqualified a certitude, as when he has to join it to the verb to sin, as David had once to do: “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.’ But because the relationship is of grace, it is, as we have seen, a state of reconciliation. And the reconciled soul henceforth stands in a condition in which it can grow toward its destiny, which is to be conformed to the image of the son of God, to “‘come to the full-grown man of the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’’ (4) Nevertheless, this gracious relationship is - not to be conceived merely as a status between two separate entities. For the soul partakes of the divine nature, enters into some kind of organic 94 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY oneness with God. “It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”’ In the Fourth Gospel, this union is conceived in terms of the indwelling Word or the indwelling Spirit. In St. Paul it is chiefly the indwelling Christ, “Christ in you,’ though, as we have seen, the Spirit is also regarded as the organ of this union with God. Moreover, in St. Paul the Christ-life is to be reproduced in the redeemed soul. Christ is to be “formed within’’; and the soul thus indwelt by Christ is to enter into the fellowship of His suffer- ings, to be conformed to His death and to share in the resurrection. Yet there is nothing in this process to destroy the identity of the soul. “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ that liveth in me.’ The self would appear to be even more vividly and consciously itself than before. We have seen that there is reasonable ground for the presumption that there was a biological tendency toward the evolution of a free self- governing individual. This achievement was pos- sible, however, only in so far as the individual was able to rise to some measure of independence of his environment. So long as his growth was to any substantial extent conditioned by his environment, there was an evident limit to his progress; and from the nature of the case, so long as his development was on the purely physical or rather ‘‘natural’’ plane, it is clear that he would be largely dependent and his growth conditioned by his physical environ- ment. We have recalled man’s persistent effort to rise beyond his physical environment through the NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 95 srowth of his mind and the development of relig- ion. May we not now add that what we have just been considering is the process by which man is to reach what so far as we can now seen is the final term of freedom and individuality? Of this new manhood Jesus is the type and the promise; and the present business of Life is to produce men who are growing into the likeness and the nature of Christ. From which we may fairly infer that the undying human aspiration called religion and in especial that form of religion which crowns this aspiration, namely, Christianity, is the onward thrust of life toward the next level of existence, which, in a Pauline idiom, we may call the King- dom of Grace. 6. THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH. The second part of the second chapter of Ephesians shows us a picture of the society of ‘‘new men’; and while here St. Paul chiefly emphasizes the universality of the new society, we may from his general treatment of it divine its main features. The first distinction of the new society was that it was composed of people who stood to God in a gracious personal relationship. Its basis was religious. We must not suppose that St. Paul’s conception of the new society had any analogy with the mystery-cults that flourished in his day. For him Christianity was not a superior cult, for the cult was exclusive and sectarian. Nor was it a new type of piety that showed some improve- ment upon Judaism. It was a way of life which embraced the whole of life. St. Paul’s view of the 96 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY new society was no doubt colored by his Jewish background; for there he saw a nation or a state which was also a church. ‘That at least was the Jewish dream. And St. Paul’s conception of the church was that it was to be a self-contained and self-sufficient society, which would in time develop its own political and economic life, but which did rest not upon the accident of geographical neighbor- hood, but upon the common personal relation of its members to God. This personal relationship to God being one of grace, the mutual relationship of the members must naturally be of the same order. It was to be a commonwealth of freedom. Most human societies were held together by outward compulsion; their unity rested upon force and coercion, and that necessarily implied limitations upon the freedom of their members. But just as God respects the autonomy of the soul, so the members of this society were to respect each other’s autonomy. Ina purely political society there will always be limitations on personal freedom: the anarchy of the natural man has to be held in check lest it encroach upon the liberties of his neighbor. But here within this society of regenerate souls there must needs be another bond of union; and that bond of union is love. Here is the regulative principle of the Pauline ethics. For him Christian conduct was conduct that made for the unity and the increase of the divine commonwealth. The energy of social cohesion in the divine commonwealth is love. It is hardly necessary to observe that to St. Paul love NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 97 had a connotation somewhat different from that of modern popular and sentimental usage. Further, because this society rested upon a per- sonal relation to God, it transcended all those distinctions of class, caste, nationality and race which entered so deeply into the constitution of natural societies. “here was no difference between the slave and his owner, between the Jew and the Greek, even between the male and the female. The walls of partition that divided mankind had disap- peared within the Church. Just as there was no respect of persons or peoples with God, so there Was none in the divine society. Other societies were divided against each other and within them- selves by accidents of blood and color, of race and station, but not so the Church. Here there is “‘one man in Christ Jesus.’”’ ‘The note of the new society was its universality; membership was accessible to every man upon the same terms. The first corol- lary of this universality was its missionary office; and the early Church seems to have entered upon the business of propaganda as a matter of course. The history of the early Church is indeed the story of a wide and rapid diffusion of the new society, and the rate of its growth indicates the release of a very powerful tide of spiritual vitality. Another sidelight upon the universality of the early Church is its mutual helpfulness. It is not perhaps without its significance that the Church at Antioch distin- guished itself both by the help it sent to the famine- stricken brethren in Judza and by its mission of Paul and Barnabas on their journey of propaganda to the West; and that it was here that the disciples 98 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY $ were first called ‘‘Christians,’”’ which signifies that they had been identified as a separate and distinct body that needed a name of its own. But because it was established on a religious basis, its life must gather around its worship. The foundations must be strengthened by a common worship of God; and from the first the new society was a worshiping society. It recognized that at the very heart of its life there must be a systematic and continuous renewal of its religious source. This then was the new commonwealth, a society established upon the relation of its members to God, a society which lived in freedom and was bound together by love; which conceived itself to be uni- versal in its constitution and in its obligations; and which renewed and confirmed its life by ordered worship. ‘This does not mean that it was in any sense a loosely knit and unorganized society. We know that it had officers, and that as time went on there was increasing differentiation of function within the society. It evolved a technique for its life; and it had its own rules and disciplines. But it is of special importance that we keep in mind that, though it was a religious society, it was not a society that began and ended with religious exercises. Just as it was universal in its terrestrial outlook, so it was ideally universal in its qualitative outlook upon life. It intended to embrace all necessary human concerns within itself. It was to be a new type of human society which would per- form for its members and for which its members would perform all the operations necessary both for its own and for their maintenance and increase. It NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 99 conceived itself to be in some sense from the begin- ning what was afterwards called a societas perfecta, a complete self-governing and self-sufficing society. For instance, it established judicial processes for its own members, who were expected not to go to law with one another before the secular courts; and while its members were not forbidden to have busi- ness and social intercourse with the pagan society around them, it was to be done with the under- standing that they did not in any way compromise their own society. And it is fair to gather that in St. Paul’s mind this new society was to supersede or to assimilate into itself all other societies what- soever, even the Empire itself. We have one echo of St. Paul’s preaching which suggests how much he had in his mind. ‘These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. . . and these all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.” Dr. Moffatt’s happy translation of Phil. iii. 20, We are a colony of heaven, also throws light upon the function of the new society. A Roman colony was founded in order to romanize the surrounding territory and to assimilate it to the Empire. Philippi was such acolony. The city of Philadelphia was established as a Greek colony for the purpose of diffusing Hellenic speech and culture in the Phrygian tableland, at the gateway to which it was settled. “We are a colony of heaven,” likewise; and we exist in order to assimilate the surrounding world to the divine commonwealth. By living its own life and by spreading its own light, it was to chris- tianize the pagan society amid which it lived and 100 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY to absorb it into the Kingdom of God. It would gather the life of the world to itself; and the exist- ing machinery and institutions of the social life of mankind would perish from sheer functionlessness. It would draw the water from their wheels into its own. When Jesus saw the futility of His first hope that a new order of life might be brought into the world through the existing institutions, He spoke the parable of the new wine and the old wineskins. He saw that the new life could not function through the old organs; and instead of following the usual course of the reformer and the revolutionary in an effort to destroy the old organs, He set Himself to the creation of a new organ. ‘That was the first company of disciples; and perhaps it is fair to infer that his expectations were that the new organ would absorb more and more of the life of the nation, leaving the existing organs to decay because they had no office to perform. It had seemed to him at that point possible to win his people as a whole into the great enterprise, given sufficient time. But in this expectation he was disappointed. Nevertheless, the new organ which He had brought into being for the purposes of the new life came to function, perhaps even more swiftly and on a much larger scale than He had anticipated. We may perhaps gather also that He proposed that the new organ should make obsolete not the existing institutions of Judaism only, but those of the Roman Empire as well. He did not share His fellow countrymen’s attitude to the Romans. To Him, the Zealot movement only promised to NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 101 tighten the Roman bonds. As things were, the Romans allowed a sufficient margin of liberty to enable the people to live their own independent religious and cultural life, and even to fulfil their destiny, as He saw it. Possibly to Him the very proximity of the Roman made him the first external object toward which the new life should direct itself. But, in any case, His thought was of a new order of life, with its own appropriate organ, real- izing itself and expanding in entire independence of existing institutions. And such indeed the Church became and remained for a considerable period of time. It is hardly necessary to add that in the new society St. Paul saw the legitimate successor of his own nation. He was Jew enough to be unable to recognize this without great sorrow; but he saw clearly that the Jew had renounced his office and his destiny in the divine providence, though he believed that his people might yet be rescued by a change of heart. Israel had made perhaps the greatest of all contributions to the growth of the race by its achievement of a monotheistic faith; but when it failed to see the logic of that faith, first of all in the vision of its prophets and finally in Jesus’ doctrine of the Kingdom of God, it renounced its place of primacy in the spiritual evolution of the race. Yet it was out of the loins of Jewry that the new manhood and the new human society came forth; and St. Paul had not only legitimate senti- ment but historical right behind him when he thought and spoke of the young Christian Society as the New Israel. 102 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY But the last stage in St. Paul’s view of the Church is his conception of it as the Body of Christ. It is difficult to assign a satisfactory meaning to this figure unless we interpret it with Bishop Gore as implying that, in St. Paul’s mind, the Church was the extension of the Incarnation. The Word that became flesh in Jesus is made flesh continually in a historical society. The Eternal Christ who was incarnate in Jesus in a body of flesh abides incarnate in the Church in a body of believers. The new principle and quality of life which were manifested fully and uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth continue active and creative in the world in the society of His followers, PART III THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 1. THE EARLY CHURCH AND THE WORLD. Now and again an effort is made to bring about social change by setting afoot within the com- munity an independent movement having its own institutions and organs, in the hope that it may absorb the common life into itself and leave the existing social institutions to atrophy from lack of use. Robert Owen in the last century, having no hope of social amelioration through the political institutions of his time, preached a doctrine of political indifferentism and induced the workers to form codperative societies by means of which they could establish a new social order quite independent of the society which surrounded them. ‘This movement showed great promise; and it is impos- sible to say how far it might not have gone had it not become involved in Owen’s fantastic labor- exchange and its disastrous collapse. Later the Christian Socialists associated themselves with the Trade Unions, having a similar end in view and Winning similar initial success; and there are grounds for supposing that its failure was at least partly due to the effort to give the Trade Unions a recognized civil status through parliamentary legis- lation. When Sinn Fein established its own judicial courts in Ireland, functioning alongside the existing courts and intended to displace them, it was acting 103 104 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY on the same principle; and Mr. Gandhi's recent policy in India seems to aim at organizing the social processes of India independently of the imperial processes with a view to making the latter function- less and nugatory. The parable of the wineskins suggests that Jesus had in mind the creation of a society within the Jewish nation that should ultimately absorb the whole life of the nation and gradually displace the existing institutions both ecclesiastical and political. In any case, it is quite certain that in the early stages of its history the Church lived a life apart from and independent of the life of the Roman Empire. ‘The early Christians,’”’ says Lord Acton, “avoided contact with the State, abstained from the responsibilities of office and were even reluctant to serve in the army.’ Nor did the Empire encour- age the Christians to take up a different attitude; it was an accepted principle that “‘a Christian was necessarily disloyal and outlawed by virtue of the name and confession.’’? ‘The persecuting attitude of the Empire drove the Christian society more and more in upon itself, and in so doing helped the Church to evolve a more or less complete social life of its own. While it is true that the Church’s members had social and commercial relations with their pagan neighbors, it was in the Church that, according to Ulhorn, “they found their life’s center.... [he Church became a State within the State. [he Christian found his point of support in the Church; to it belonged the first of all his affections and his service; there he sought not only the word of life and what conduced to his salvation. THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 105 but he there sought also, in the episcopal tribunal, his rights and aid when he was in trouble.’’® At the end of the third century the Christian community numbered little more than a twentieth part of the population of the Empire; but ‘“‘what the Christians lacked in numbers they more than made up by their organization, unity, wealth and driving power.’’* The Empire was decadent, the Church still full of youthful vigor; ‘‘the State grew poor, the Church became rich; the State lost ‘its influence on popular life; the Church acquired what the State lost.’’® It is agreed that it was the impres- sion made by the vitality, power and unity of the Church upon Constantine that first led the Emperor to consider whether it was not indispensable to the preservation of the Empire.* Followed upon this the conversion of Constantine and the compact by which the Church was accepted as the established religion of the Empire. So began the great misadventure. ‘That the Church could have accepted this asso- ciation with the Empire seems to indicate that there had been some change in its temper and its concep- tion of itself; and an examination does actually reveal a tendency to incrustation. It is a common- place that two hostile institutions living face to face with one another tend to become like one another: and when Ulhorn speaks of the Church having become a “‘State,”” he is more right than he sup- poses. There was a definite movement in the Church toward centralization of authority and incorporation, a hardening of spirit which made 106 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY the compact with Constantine a less difficult affair than it might have been at an earlier stage. What actually happened was that two cor- porations entered into a concord by which the one party attained a certain recognized pres- tige and power as the price of subordinating itself to the ultimate purposes of the other. The Empire did not become Christian in any sense; henceforth the Church was less than Christian. Constantine, it has been said, rendered lip-service to the Church; and the Church promised life-service to the Emperor. It was henceforth delivered from persecution, but it had surrendered its independence. For men to whom this tendency toward centrali- zation and incorporation had seemed impor- tant, in whose minds the idea of authority had gained a position never contemplated in the New Testament, it seemed a great oppor- tunity for the Church that it should become the recognized religious cult of the Empire. It meant political and social prestige, effective discipline, immediate safeguards for orthodoxy and much more; and it is not strange that they accepted the new situation.’ In effect, the Church became a part of the imperial civil service. But the Church did not save the Empire. In less than a century the Empire was in ruins and Alaric and his Goths had taken Rome. The Church was involved in its downfall. However, it sur- vived; and it was the Church that preserved to the THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 107 world the elements of permanent value in the Roman civilization. Not yet has it outgrown the consequences of the evil day of its compact with Constantine. For the four or five centuries follow- ing the Fall of Rome, its history, apart from a few scattered oases of light, is of a piece with the general degradation of Europe during that period. 2 ote AUGUSTINE: 1f,.\ with, Dr:~ Hastings Rashdall,* we fix upon the year 1000 A. D. as the time whereabout Europe arose out of the long death of the Dark Ages, we may not forget that it arose bringing a good deal of treasure with it. Most of all there was St. Augustine. Whether St. Augustine was last of the ancients or first of the moderns is a pretty question which you may answer as you will, and none may prove you wrong. For in fact he was both. He has been described, not inaptly, as the “‘conduit’’ by which the living elements of the old world were carried over into the new. Much that was of abiding value in the mind of antiquity seems to have been gathered up in him. The spiritual treasure of three classic cultures—Greece, Jewry and Rome—went into his inheritance; and with these he had the New Testa- ment and the tradition of four Christian centuries. He lived at the latter end of a great civilization; and in that desolate time, he stands by himself, like a lone Alp amid a wilderness of undistinguished foothills. His wide scholarship, his incomparable mind, his courage—these alone would have given him a natural preéminence among his contempo- raries; but in that hour of the world, they imposed 108 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY upon him a vocation in which his achievements gained for his name an authority to which at this distant day we respectfully and confidently appeal. In the schools they still say that everything goes back to Augustine; and the saying is true. Before all else St. Augustine was a great Chris- tian. He had been (to use a vivid modernism strictly appropriate to his case) “‘soundly con- verted.”” ‘This capital experience kindled in him a passionate flame for the Kingdom of God, to which all his inheritance became fuel; and this burning was henceforth his life. He spent his days in expounding the great thing that had happened to him and all that was contained in it. He tells the story in his Confessions; but the experience itself is felt as a glow and a throb in everything that he wrote. ‘There are those who tell us that St. Augustine gave the world its first philosophy of history; yet it was the last thing he meant to do. When he sat down to write the De Civitate Dei, only one thing was in his mind. He would uphold the truth of Christianity against all comers.® Yet the truth of Christianity did not lie in his mind as a self-consistent whole; it is indeed proba- ble that it will not so lie in any man’s mind. Per- haps it was rather St. Augustine’s role to state the problems which they would have to solve who came after him. He accepted the twin Pauline doctrines of Grace and the Divine Society; but on the one hand he never fully reconciled his Platonism to his Paulinism in the interpretation of his religious experience, nor on the other did he resolve the contradiction between the biblical ‘‘communion of THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 109 saints’ and the institutional Church. Beside these two radical dilemmas, there are others of a lesser kind which derive from them. ‘The final impres- sion we receive is that on many matters St. Augus- tine never reached a settled mind; and in conse- quence there has hardly been a controversy in Christendom since his day in which he has not been triumphantly quoted on both sides of the argument. Perhaps no single Christian document outside the Scriptures has provoked so voluminous a comment or so prolific a literature as St. Augustine’s De Civi- tate Det. ‘The central idea of the book may have been borrowed from the Donatist Tyconius; but it is in fact implicit in the New Testament—a divine society living in a world organized without God. ‘There are two cities, says St. Augustine, one of the earth earthy, the other from heaven. The earthly city is the “‘world,’’ the common secular mass; the heavenly city is the community of the redeemed. It isa city whose eyes are turned heaven- ward, “the pilgrim city of King Christ’; but it has citizens in the flesh who constitute the Church, the promise and the terrene counterpart of the eternal city. “It is recorded of Cain that he founded a city, but Abel was a pilgrim and built none. For the city of the saints is above, though it have citizens here upon earth, wherein it lives as a pilgrim until the time of the Kingdom come.’’” It is with the story of these two cities that St. Augustine occupies himself. It is a double thread upon which on his way he hangs much philosophy and theology and history, both sacred and profane; and numberless 110 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY treatises might be written upon the various aspects of the great argument. Of the civitas terrena, he says no more than he must. The first earthly city, he tells us, was founded by a fratricide, alluding to Cain, but with a pertinent side-glance at Romulus. And justice apart, he asks, what is a kingdom but a srand larceny? He observes that pagan societies somehow manage to hang together and to enjoy an inward peace; and this he ascribes to the presence in them of justice (that is, the rule of legal right) or of general consent. But their essential character remains unchanged. ‘They were conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity; and they only stand because in the wisdom of God they have been enabled to reach an elementary level of morality.” From the nature of the case, the frontier line between the two cities was hard to draw. The saints may be strangers and pilgrims on the earth; but they cannot avoid entanglement in the terres- trial society. He even conceives of them as loyal citizens of the earthly city; and in one of his most famous passages he shows what manner of man a Christian prince would be.** Under these circum- stances, it was impossible to maintain consistently the view of the civitas Dei as a world-fleeing com- munion of saints. The effect of the contiguity of the two societies, in fact and in his own mind, was to introduce a ‘‘political’’ bias into his thought of the Christian society; and it is possible to gather from his writings two contradictory views of it. On the one hand, it is the communion of saints on its way to its heavenly home; on the other, it is THE GREAT MISADVENTURE Lu an institution, an organized polity, equipped with the needful machinery for the conduct of its affairs and the maintenance of its life. In opposition to the chiliasm of his own time, he affirms the Church to be the millennial reign of Christ. It is true that a theoretic distinction may be made between the civitas Det and the Church; they are related but not quite identical, but in practice the distinction is hard to maintain. “The Church claims for itself certain attributes of the earthly city; and presently making confusion worse confounded, it makes use for its own ends of the resources of the civitas terrena. St. Augustine, albeit reluctantly, consents to the use of the secular arm to constrain the Donat- ists into conformity; and consequently he has to make a more kindly estimate of the civil state than his premises actually allow. Yet there can be no question as to his position and meaning. Granted the existence of such a thing as a Christian state, its place is in the bosom of the Church; it exists to serve the ends of the Church.** Plainly we are at the beginning of an argument which in capable hands may grow to prove that the Church may first use, then direct, then control, and finally absorb, the State—which argument did in due time reach its final term in the doctrine of the Church as a societas perfecta, a complete and self-sufficing society. That St. Augustine did not foresee such a con- clusion to his argument is as sure as anything can well be. Certainly he gives us no ground for sup- posing that he anticipated anything comparable to the medieval idea of a universal Christian Church- 112 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY State governed by a hierarchy. True, he did speak of a single commonwealth embracing all Christians; but he was then thinking less of the economy than of the universality of the Kingdom of God. ‘The Middle Ages built their own edifice out of St. Augustine’s unfinished philosophy; and he is not chargeable with the result. And if he was not always consistent with himself, he was not the first to be dogged by the inconsistencies which must follow at the heels of those who venture into what Lord Acton describes as ‘‘the undiscovered country where Church and State are parted’’—that same country where also heaven and earth, the unseen and the seen, the spirit and the flesh, meet. Massive as St. Augustine’s equipment was, he lacked the sure amphibious instinct which a man must have if he is to traverse this uncharted borderland without many an entanglement. The failure to effect a reconciliation between the civitas Dei which was on its way to heaven, and the Church which had taken lodgings (however temporary) on the earth was only one of the dilemmas with which he left posterity to struggle. It is said of him that he rediscovered the Pauline doctrine of grace; and of his own experience of the irresistibility and the sufficiency of grace his Confessions tell the story. But his far more than Pauline doctrine of predestination on the one hand, and on the other the necessity of allowing to the Church the mediation of grace through the sacra- ments rob grace of the freedom and the spon- taneity that it has in St. Paul’s treatment of it. Moreover, his personal experience of grace came to THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 113 a mind steeped in Neo-Platonism, and his inter- pretation of his experience is a not whoily congru- ous blending of scriptural phraseology and Neo- platonic ideas. As time went on, he seems to have approached a more purely Pauline position, but he did not live long enough to complete the journey. His doctrine of grace, however, was destined to have significant consequences for a later age. 3. THE DARK AGEs. Lord Bryce thought that it was hardly too much to say that the Holy Roman Empire was built on the foundation of the De Civi- tate Det. ‘This doubtless goes beyond the fact. But St. Augustine’s influence upon the thought and the affairs of succeeding generations can hardly be over- stated. His word was authoritative in his own lifetime, and a few years after his death a Pope rebuked the Bishops of Gaul for allowing his authority to be questioned in their dioceses. But in those days darkness had covered the earth. The Roman civilization was dying a miserable death. Its dissolution let loose barbaric passions; culture almost wholly disappeared; and religion was with- out life or energy. “The degradation of the Papacy is at once a symbol and a measure of the degeneracy of religion. For four centuries the only interval of light amid the darkness is the pontificate of Gregory the Great, who did somewhat rehabilitate a dis- credited Papacy. But it is significant of the depth into which culture had fallen that this same Gregory should denounce secular learning.*° Despite the recovery of papal respectability with Gregory, the years that followed him were darker than those 114. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, which had preceded. For two centuries Europe was at the lowest ebb of its civilization; and it seemed as though the world had been hopelessly wrecked. Yet the names of Boniface and Willibrod remind us that, even in that dismal period, a few oases of life remained; and Ireland stands out in lone distinction as the only part of Europe which had escaped the general decay.*° There religion and scholarship went hand in hand with a missionary passion that brought light to many places in the continental darkness. The reign of Charles the Great brought another break in the clouds; and though the brightness waned, Europe was never so dark, even in the miserable tenth century, after Charles as it had been in the seventh and eighth centuries. We may even go so far as to say that Charles set afoot the recov- ery of Europe; and it is at this time that St. Augus- tine’s influence began to make way. Charles was something of a student; and his son-in-law Einhard tells us that the De Civitate Det was his favorite reading. It is probably more than a fancy that Charles found in the ‘‘Mirror of Princes’ a picture of himself as he would like to be, and in that event he would modify Augustine’s doctrine to fit his own case. That he did so cannot be proved, but it is a fair conjecture that he, being a Christian prince, might have regarded himself as the head of a commonwealth such as St. Augustine’s una res- publica omnium christianoroum. What seems clear is that he took a religious view of himself and of his empire; and while he can hardly be said to have founded the Holy Roman Empire, he did at least THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 115 dream of something like it, and tried to make the dream come true. Of a commonwealth which embraced both Church and Empire he did indeed consider himself the head; nor was this his own thought only, as is evident from the circumstance that Pope Leo, who put the imperial crown on Charles’ head (Christmas Day, A. D. 800), never- theless conducted himself as Charles’ subject. Charles’ most lasting distinction rests upon his zeal for learning and education; and in this he did undoubtedly lay the train of European recovery. But the time had not yet arrived when the forces of recovery could overcome the inertia and chaos of the age. Charles’ effort was almost submerged in a powerful reaction; and the Papacy sank into unspeakable depths of degradation. It was ‘‘the period of pornocracy.’”’ The Empire of Charles the Great was broken up and it finally disappeared with Charles the Fat (A. D. 888). But the names of Claudius of Turin, Agobard of Lyons, John Scotus Eringena and others serve to inform us of a stream, however meager, of independent intellec- tual life, even in that desolate period. This we may indeed ascribe to Charles the Great’s revival of education, which lasted in spite of the influences of reaction and lived to become the great intellec- tual renaissance of the twelfth century. ‘The tenth century was the darkness before dawn; indeed, it had not gone far beyond its first decade before we observe a very pregnant sign of the dawn. In 911 the monastery of Cluny was founded in order to initiate a return to the faithful observance of the Rule of St. Benedict. To the significance 116 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of this movement we must presently return; mean- time, it is enough to record it. The movement spread widely and rapidly. The independent Benedictine monasteries were federated around Cluny; and the system was organized on the basis of the prevailing feudalism. At the beginning of the twelfth century, theré were two thousand Bene- dictine houses associated in the Cluniac system. It is also pertinent to note that in A. D. 962 Otto the Great was crowned Emperor of Rome. ‘He was the true founder of the Holy Roman Empire, Germanic in its seat of power, Roman in its conse- cration, its idea and its claim to Italian suprem- acy.” The moment is important, for it represents a definite stage in the development of the relations of Church and Empire. Leo might crown Charles the Great and yet regard himself as his subject; but the specific doctrine of the Holy Roman Empire as it henceforth appears is that the Church and State are regarded as “the names of two great departments, ecclesiastical and civil,’’ each with its own head, the Pope and the Emperor. Under Otto and Pope Silvester, who were friends, this appor- tionment of the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s might, as it did, work. But plainly it contained the seeds of discord. From this time onward, we follow an incessant struggle for supremacy between the Empire and the Church,* a struggle in which the issue was largely determined by ideas and influences which we have to trace back to the Cluniac revival. Two further circumstances of this period have a certain bearing upon our study. ‘The first of THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 117 these is the Norse invasion, which began as early as the reign of Charles the Great and continued till the cession to the Norsemen by Charles the Simple, in A. D. 911, of the territory since known as Normandy. At that time the Norsemen agreed to become Christians; and in their zeal for their new religion they became its protectors and founded monasteries within their domain. The great impor- tance of this invasion is that it brought an infusion of new blood into the native stock; and the acces- sion of strength to the life of France from its invad- ers is beyond question. For like other invaders in other lands, they were slowly assimilated into the people of the soil; and they became so French that in the later Middle Ages they were “‘the main agents in the spread of the French language and civiliza- tion.’’*® This reinforcement of the French stock meant not a little to the religious renewal that was then approaching. | The second circumstance was the evolution of feudalism. With the stages of the process we are not now concerned. It is, however, germane to our purpose to note that it reached its highest point of development in France. In Western Europe its special character was given to it by the combination of three factors: the relation of lord and vassal, the tenure of land and private jurisdiction over the fief. The system began with the king and descended through a hierarchy of vassal-lords to the vassal-freeman who held and used the soil. The grant of the fief at every stratum of the system was contingent on the agreement to render certain services to the lord, services which might be of a 118 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY military, judicial, civil or pecuniary character. Theoretically it was an admirable system of social integration, though it was less admirable in practice. It became the model for the organization of the Cluniac system, and had far-reaching consequences on the religious history of succeeding ages. 4. THE MEDIEVAL DAWN. It has been said that the revival of the Benedictine Rule was due to men of the military class who introduced into it the feudal spirit in which they had been nursed. The Benedictine houses had been affected by a gen- eral laxity, and the newcomers restored to the order something more than its original austerity of disci- pline. But in addition they organized this new, ordered life of religion on a feudal basis. ‘The monk’s vow to the abbot was the vassal’s to his lord—in a new setting; the abbot like the feudal lord was absolute within his domain, and as the Cluniac system grew he visited the subordinate abbots, as a feudal lord might visit those who held their fiefs from him; the associated monasteries made con- tributions to the mother house at Cluny. The whole order became a religious replica of the sur- rounding civil organization. This combination of strict religious discipline with a feudal organiza- tion was to have consequences far beyond anything its originators could foresee. “The Cluniac move- ment was essentially puritan in intention. Within the Benedictine Order itself, the short lived reforms of Benedict of Aniane had been followed by a deplorable reaction. “The age was a wilderness. Mankind was compared by a contemporary bishop THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 119 to “the fish of the sea who live by devouring one another.’” Into this confusion the Cluniac move- ment introduced a principle of order. It began to canalize the vagrant and chaotic life of the time. The period may be compared to a waste marshland in which both land and water are useless and fruit- less; and Cluny started to dig a trench into which the waste waters were gathered, and both water and land were redeemed. This is indeed the ‘biology’ of all puritan movements. “They appear when the customary sanctions and disciplines of life have disappeared, and society is falling to pieces. The river banks are swept away, and the unchan- neled waters turn life into a pestilent swamp. Then the puritan appears—to construct a new riverbank into which the waste waters may be gathered and life redeemed from destruction. Puritanism is always associated with discipline and austerity; it is necessarily “‘narrow,’’ because there are times in history when it is a narrow way that leads to life. Looking at the puritanism of England and New England, it is not easy to think well of its unbeau- tiful and ungenerous aspects; but a deeper historical insight may suggest that puritanism was life itself girt for its own rescue. It was a doctrine and tech- nique of economy in the interests of survival and fertility. It is not beside the point to observe that a similar ‘discipline’ among a group of men at Oxford in the eighteenth century gave them the nickname of Methodists and set afoot a great and revitalizing religious movement in England. So it was in France in the tenth century. The Cluniac reform drained the marshland that life 120 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY -was in that day; and its economy—its disciplines and its austerities—did indeed make for survival and fertility. For with the beginning of the eleventh century we find a general and promising efflorescence of life. “This renewal did not continue without its setbacks; even the Cluniac impulse fell off sadly. But it is worth noting that the recoveries that followed came about in every case through a return to an ordered and disciplined religious life. Between the foundation of Cluny and the middle of the thirteenth century, it is possible to observe three great resurgences of life; each greater than its predecessor, each beginning in a “‘canalization”’ of life into religious order and discipline, each set- ting afoot a ferment of intellectual and aesthetic activity and each in its turn declining into routine and apathy. The first was that which sprang directly from Cluny, reaching its height in the early eleventh century. It was marked by the foundation of the Camadulian (1014) and the Vallambrosian (1038) Orders; the business of education was revived under Fulbert of Chartres; and the building of Jumiéges Abbey inaugurated a new age in sacred architecture. Then came a decline—but not of long duration. The new life was not yet so enfeebled as to be incapable of a revival. In the last quarter of the eleventh century we discover a new movement, beginning with the foundation of the Grandmon- tines (1076), Austin Canons (1078), the Carthu- sians (1084), culminating in a fresh revival of the Benedictine Rule at the abbey of Citeaux and THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 121 in the Cistercian movement. Nor did the impulse stop there; for in 1100 the abbey of St. Victor was founded; in 1115 Clairvaux; and the Premonstra- tensian Order in 1120. Of the intellectual activity of this period, it is enough to say that its bright star was Abelard; but Lanfranc and Anselm may also be included in it; and William of Champeaux and Bernard of Clair- vaux, Roscellinus and John of Salisbury, Gilbert de la Porrée and Richard and Hugh of St. Victor each played his part in it. The building of the “Norman’’ Cathedrals of Noyon (1150), Senlis (1155), Laon (1166), Soissons (1175) owed its impulse to this revival and is a definite step forward to the great age of church-building. This second upsptinging of life had not spent its force before a third began. A new type of religious discipline appeared—more essentially Christian than the monastic—which did not withdraw men from the world but directed them and equipped them for service in the world. Of this we have the foreshadowing in the Cruciferae (1169) and the Poor Men of Lyons (1179), but its great and characteristic expression was reached in the Fran- ciscan (1209) and Dominican (1216) move- ments. With this comes the great age of scholasti- cism; and its heredity is clear enough, for its great “‘doctors’’ were Franciscans or Dominicans—Bona- ventura, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Duns_ Scotus and others, reaching as far as William of Ockham, with whom, however, we are within hail of a new and different world. It is not amiss to point out that two of the greatest and most attrac- 122 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY tive figures in the history of the public life of Western Europe belong to this age, Louis, Saint and King of France, and Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. This revival originates the golden age of Gothic architecture and saw the building of Notre Dame de Paris, and the Cathedrals of Reims, Chartres and Amiens. — Of the exuberance of the life of this period there can be no question. Between 1170 and 1270 the French alone built eighty cathedrals and five hun- dred churches of the cathedral type. ‘‘One of the most singular phenomena of the literary history of the Middle Ages,’ says Renan, “‘is the activity of the intellectual commerce, and the rapidity with which books were spread from one end of Europe to another. . . . Such and such a work composed in Cairo or in Morocco was known at Paris and at Cologne in less time than it would need in our days for a German book of capital importance to cross the Rhine.’’*? In this time there were also new beginnings of freedom—slavery was abolished in the whole of Europe except Spain, and in 1215 Magna Carta was signed. ‘There were other other new beginnings too. That age produced Roger Bacon, the morning star of modern experimental science; both in music and in medicine there were fruitful new departures. And it may be plausibly maintained that it was this wealth of life that reached a golden and glorious sunset in Dante, But there is another side to this story. 5. THE MEDIEVAL UNITY. It is a common- place that the medieval mind was governed by an THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 123 ideal of unity, a unity of all life in God; not alone St. Augustine’s una respublica omnium Christian- orum, but a unity of every part and every interest of life. The great medieval controversy was whether the Empire or the Church was to be the groundwork and organ of this unity; and in the end the Church was bound to win. The Empire was interested primarily in a political unity, and its effort to realize it was never successful and only fitfully promising. England and France remained stubbornly outside the Empire, when they could not remain out of the Church; and France was on the whole with the Church against the Empire. Nevertheless, the Empire was, says Neville Figgis, “the grandest attempt in human history to base the structure of institutions on righteousness, political, social and economic, no less than religious’ ;*? and elsewhere he adds that the attempt was inspired by the ideal of a unity of religion, of government, of economics, of morals, of social life and outward culture.22, The Empire and the Church intended the same thing; their quarrel was as to who should direct the operations; and even if the Church had not had superior resources of scholarship, intellect and statesmanship at its disposal, it was certain to win if only for the reason that religion cannot for long be made the handmaid of a political system— a truth that the Church itself forgot in the days of its triumph and by its forgetfulness of which it was undone. But there can be no argument about the power — which the idea and the ideal of unity exercised in the Middle Ages.** Neither can there be any ques- 124. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY tion of the extent to which unity was achieved or that this realized unity was the work of the Church. Indeed, the only living interest of a general kind that the controversy between the Church and the Empire still has is in its effort upon the fortunes of the Church’s ideal of unity and its endeavor to realize it. | Into this subject, of which so much has been written, it is not necessary for our present purpose to enter in detail. As between the Church and the Empire, the honors were fairly evenly divided until the Papacy of Hildebrand. Hildebrand had indeed been the brain of the two previous pontificates— extending over a period of twenty-five years—and before he sat on the throne of St. Peter he had already stamped the image of his own mind upon the Papacy. Now, Hildebrand had a Cluniac mind, that is to say, a mind in which the Church assumed the shape of a religious feudal system. Cluny had formulated the idea and the method of Church reform with great clearness; the Church was to be the monastery writ large, an organization in strict dependence on a single head; and it was with this in his mind that Hildebrand ordered the affairs of Church during the quarter-century prior to his own pontificate. In him the claim to papal absolution became complete; for him the Papacy was the supreme governing power over all things and per- sons, temporal and spiritual; and a strict ecclesias- tical obedience was the only way of salvation. We have traveled a long way from St. Augustine and his civitas Dei; and indeed there was no room for such a civitas Dei in Hildebrand’s scheme of a THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 125, Church-State. Yet Hildebrand found aid and com- fort in St. Augustine. He accepts St. Augustine’s characterization of the political state as a magnum latrocintum, and shares his view that the place of the State is in the bosom of the Church. While it is plain that Hildebrand placed the Church in a strategic position from which the Empire never succeeded in dislodging it, he did so at the expense of curtailing the freedom and the spontaneity which is the essence of a living religion. He tried to make permanent and universal an order and a discipline which are fruitful only at special times and in particular circumstances—and perhaps only for some persons at any time. Hildebrand was sincerely anxious to build a Christian world, but he proposed to do it by feudalizing the com- munion of saints. And whatever St. Augustine may have thought of the Church and the hierarchy of his day, he would have been much astonished by the Hildebrandine organization of the Church on the basis of a secular polity. Hildebrand died in 1086, and it took a long time for the logic of his doctrine to work out its conclu- sion in the life of the Church. The brilliant epi- sode of Abelard in the next century proved that the thought of the Church was still far from the uniformity which later became the rule. The growth of the universities, moreover, shows that there was a very considerable latitude for enquiry and speculation. As the power of the monastic orders declined, education and learning found them- selves in a freer air; and while the overbold ran the risk of ecclesiastical trial and censure, there was 126 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY not until the next century any body of thought to which authoritative appeal could be made. To be sure, there was St. Augustine; but he was hardly relevant to the purely intellectual controversy of the twelfth century. Indeed, one whole side of St. Augustine seems at this time to have been in process of elimination. His doctrine of grace, like St. Paul’s, implied a direct and unmediated relation between God and the believer; and the actual effect of this was to leave the main business of religion outside the jurisdiction of the Church. The Church was claiming authority over the whole of life; and if it was possible for the individual to “‘contract out’ of the scheme and to enter into private and independent relations with God, what then became of the Church? And to meet the case, gradually there was a withdrawal of the operation of grace from the realm of free- dom; and in its stead, a doctrine of grace mediated by the Church through the sacraments took shape and reached definite formulation, notably in Hugh of St. Victor.** Finally, at the Lateran Council of 1215, the process was completed by the inclusion of Transubstantiation among the dogmas of the Church. It would be untrue to the facts to regard the growing power of the Papacy as the consequence of a mere lust of power. The motives were mixed, no doubt—human nature in Popes being much like that in the rest of men. ‘There is in authority a tendency to grow fat upon itself, an inherent momentum that leads it to extend its scope and to increase its power, and with this goes a keen eye THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 1 Wad for things that mean power—wealth, prestige and the like. The medieval Papacy was never immune from this liability to degradation, and again and again its greed and corruption became a public scandal. Yet, by and large, it remains true that the medieval Papacy meant to build up a Christian world; and its actual influence upon society was of a purifying and humanizing quality.2> Innocent III, both in his dealings with France and England, insisted upon right and morality, “‘even when political advantage was risked by his action.’’?¢ And even in the act in which papal authority teaches its apogee—the institution of compulsory private confession in 1215, Innocent was directly concerned to remedy certain evils which had over- taken the older practice of public penance before the congregation. But this very circumstance shows how immensely the papal power had grown. The Pope was strong enough to impose a rule of uniformity throughout the Church; and it does not appear that there was at the time any effective lay protest against it. It is also significant of the drift of the papal mind that, while certain previous Popes had stood out as defenders of popular liberties, Innocent III issued a bull against Magna Carta. And perhaps most significant of all, it was this same Innocent who provided the authoritative theoretic justification for the exploits of the Inquisition,®? then only in its first puling infancy. The Inquisition may be said to have been born at the Lateran Council of 1179. Before that time there had been unorganized and local persecution 128 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of heretics, notably the Cathari in Northern Italy and France; but at this stage the influence of the Church seems to have been of a mitigating kind. On the whole it discountenanced harsh measures; and the death-penalty was not recognized. The first stage in the organized pursuit of heretics was the work of Alexander III, who in 1179 invited princes and others to take up arms against the Cathari and other heretical sects, and offered indul- gences to those who undertook the good work. In 1184 severer measures were promulgated against heretics—exile, confiscation of property, demolition of their houses, loss of civil rights, and the like. But the significant innovation at this stage was the inception of episcopal enquiry. Bishops were ordered to take steps to examine suspected persons; the public was ordered to denounce all heretics, secret or overt; and public persons and bodies were called to assist in the work of repression on pain of forfeiture of office, excommunication and inter- dict. To this Innocent III added nothing, save the theoretical justification already spoken of; and acting upon that justification, the Emperor Fred- erick II instituted the death-penalty for heresy in 1224. With this, the machinery of the Inquisition is virtually complete. It is not necessary to follow further this unedi- fying story. It sprang inevitably out of the logic of Hildebrandism. The religion of authority—in Church and State—is conformity; its method is regimentation; its ideal is the goose-step. And always, its end is revolt. The Inquisition had to come into being because the philosophy of the THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 129 Hildebrandine ideal required it; there was need of an adequate organ to compel a conformity which could not otherwise be achieved. The Inquisition became for large portions of Western Europe a symbol of pitiless ecclesiastical despotism; and to this day the memory of it remains one of the great- est and most intractable obstacles to the reunion of Christendom. Coercion is, soon or late, always self-defeating; and the tragic futility of the Inqui- sition is shown by the circumstance that, during the period of its greatest activity, the Church was moving most surely and most rapidly to its greatest disruption. Yet we may not forget that in spite of all these tendencies there was still a rich religious life afoot— the life that produced Arnold of Brescia, Robert Grosseteste and St. Francis. Yet those three names foreshadow a new day. It is worth while to remind ourselves of the three critical happenings of the first quarter of the thirteenth century. In 1215, the inclusion of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation among the dogmas of the Church marked the final withdrawal of grace from the sphere of freedom: and the believer's right of way into the Holiest is henceforth formally denied to him. In the same year, the believer is brought further under the yoke of ecclesiastical authority by the institution of private compulsory confession. In 1224, the death-penalty was im- posed for heresy; and henceforth spiritual and intellectual freedom was under the ban. Obviously, henceforth the society is to be everything and the believer nothing save only as he subserves the ends 130 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of the society. The divine commonwealth had been organized on the model of the hive; and the finish- ing touches were given in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. But no sooner was the work complete than signs began to appear which boded ill for its stability. 6, DISINTEGRATION. The Hildebrandine ideal had been realized; but it had overlooked two im- portant elements in the case. It had not reckoned with human nature; and it had left out the New ‘Testament. Human nature can stand just so much of the “rubber-stamp’’; and when that point has been | reached it becomes restive. And once discontent is afoot, it is quick to seize upon occasions of criti- cism and revolt. One such occasion lay to hand. It was the growing wealth and pomp of the Papacy which were found to be in conflict with the sim- plicity of the Christian life as it was described in the New Testament. The father of this movement of criticism and of return to the apostolic ideal was Arnold of Brescia, a man of saintly and austere life who preached against ‘“‘the lawlessness of worldly possessions for spiritual persons.”’ ‘‘His contention that the clergy should forego worldly wealth and political power, that their functions and powers were purely spiritual struck a note which runs right through to the Gregorian papal system.’ In this attitude St. Augustine begins to reassert himself once more; for according to him the civitas Dei has no property rights save by suf- ferance of the civitas terrena. That Arnold derived THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 131 his doctrine from St. Augustine cannot be proved; and it is more likely that it grew in his mind from his study of the Scriptures. Nor was he the only voice that was raised for apostolical simplicity. Waldes, shortly after the death of Arnold, sold his goods and gave all he had to the poor and began his great movement of lay-preaching—which despite cruel suppression and persecution survives to-day in the Waldensian Church. And after the death of Waldes the same witness was borne by St. Francis of Assisi. During his lifetime the Franciscan move- ment was kept in obedience to the Church despite the fundamental opposition of his ideal to the wealth and power of the Pope and the cardinals. After his death this opposition almost proved fatal to the order, and in the event it was the order that survived and the ideal that died, so far as the order was concerned. It must be observed that this movement, like others that we shall have to notice, was the product of the Church, an outcome of its own life, and that it was directed not against the Church, but against the Hildebrandine doctrine and practice of the Papacy. The Waldensian movement did indeed become strongly anti-ecclesiastical, but that was the result of the persecution which it suffered. But despite the feudalized habit of the Church, its life declined to accept the forms imposed upon it and broke out here and there in various kinds of insurgency. Indeed, Arnold of Brescia’s insurgency embraced another point besides the protest against ecclesiasti- cal wealth, namely, against the political pretensions 132 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of the Papacy. Here also Arnold was in the tradi- tion of St. Augustine: for though St. Augustine could conceive of and did actually describe a Chris- tian prince, it was unthinkable to him that the Church should ever arrogate to itself political power. It is true that he was willing that the secular arm should be called to the aid of the Church, but it never entered his mind that the Pope should claim or exercise a temporal sovereignty. But in this matter Arnold was not so much an originator as the symbol of a movement already afoot. The old tradition of Republican and Imperial Rome had never died out; and for some years Rome was governed on the republican pattern under the inspiration of Arnold—so completely that the Popes had to acquiesce init. But this spirit was to be found elsewhere than in Rome. ‘The doctrine of municipal self-government, stimulated by the growing importance of the middle classes in the towns of Lombardy, was beginning to take shape and to add to the forces that were under- mining the Empire. The principle of nationality was already beginning to assert itself, and with it the first slender shoots of democracy. It is curious that it was from churchmen who accepted the Hildebrandine Papacy that the movement toward political democracy received its first stimulus. In his discussion ‘‘Of the Rule of Princes,’’ St. ‘Thomas Aquinas, while he allows the advantage of heredi- tary monarchy in special circumstances, strongly commends the elective form as a general rule, evi- dently because each new election gives opportunity for placing restraints upon the royal power. ‘THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 133 This opinion may fairly be used in justification of democratic forms of government; and we may trace a similar view through to later writers. Within the Church it took shape in the conciliar move- ment—the effort to reduce the Papacy to a consti- tutional monarchy, an effort which failed, though an attempt to purchase success was made at the Council of Constance at the terrible price of the condemnation of Hus. Indeed, the whole conciliar movement represents at bottom the attempt of the layman to regain his footing in the Church. The principle of repre- sentative government is one whether in Church or in State; and the logic of Aquinas’ position was applied by the conciliarists as well to the Church as to civil society. It is true that the conciliar move- ment did not admit the laity into active participa- tion in the affairs of the Church. The Council was to be a council of clergy; but the logic of the repre- sentative ideal was carried to its conclusion by Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, who admit the laity into the government of the Church through its councils. Ockham was still early enough to think in terms of the Empire; and in his scheme the Emperor was the representative of the laity in the councils of the Church. Further discussion of this point would lead us too far afield. What is to be noticed here is the growth of movements of criticism and protest against the Hildebrandine doctrine of the Church. And here in the revolt of the layman we have one of the main elements in the movement which was ultimately to bring forth the Reformation. After 134. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY all, there was nothing new in their view. One has only to read the Didache or the Apostolic Constitutions—second-century documents—to dis- cover that the government of the Church in its early days was representative; and in this movement the Church was only reverting to its own original principles. But the movement, despite the opposi- tion of the Papacy, was well afoot; and it was the defeat of Gerson, the leader of the conciliarists, at Constance, that at last made the Reformation inevitable. 7. THE ETHICAL REVOLT. Reference has al- ready been made to the rise of the principle of nationality; and the two great forerunners of the Reformation, Wycliffe and Hus, were leaders of national religious movements. It is certain that the nationalist unrest was due very largely to the weakening of the power of the Holy Roman Empire and its defeat at the hands of the Papacy; but it is no less certain that the behavior of the Papacy itself went far to accentuate it. For the Papacy stood in men’s minds as a Church-State in rivalry to the lay State. It is, for instance, impossible to read the story of Robert Grosseteste’s dealings with the Papacy without realizing how much the papal taxation of the Church was alienating the English mind, and in consequence accentuating and confirming it in its ‘nationalistic’ character. In France, St. Louis made frank and emphatic protest against the papal exactions and the abuses to which they led, and Robert Grosseteste’s sermon at the Council of Lyons ‘THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 135 in 1245 was a very remarkable and courageous protest against the luxury and corruption of the Papal Court. But Grosseteste was a papalist never- theless, “‘holding the Papacy to be the bond of union of Christendom and pleading for the purifi- cation of the Church in order that it may the better withstand its enemies in England and remove the dangerous disaffection of the lesser clergy and the people.”’*? It was at a later time that the Papacy succeeded in throwing England into a state of discontent and kindled the most formidable of movements of revolt against itself. The story of the movement gathers around the name of Wycliffe; and the distinction of Wycliffe lies in this, that the reaction against the power of the Pope and the hierarchy is extended into a criti- cism of the current theological orthodoxy. In Wycliffe, St. Augustine once more reappears—in his doctrine of the Church as a society of the elect characterized only by its observance of the rule of love, humility and poverty. On the whole, Wycliffe concerned himself chiefly with the reform rather than the doctrine of the Church; but he is remarkable in his deliberate popular appeal. Per- haps we may say that Wycliffe was responsible for the revival of preaching—itself a revolt of the prophetic element in Christianity against the pre- vailing sacerdotalism. It is true that he may have derived his “‘poor preachers’ from the friars, with whom he was at first in sympathy; but his russet- clad preachers with their homely speech represent a different type of appeal. And, moreover, the fact that he wrote “‘in the rough clear homely English”’ 136 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of the ploughman and trader of his day represents a new type of appeal, ‘“‘memorable,” says John Richard Green, “‘as the first of such a kind in our history’; and it was essentially ‘‘an appeal to England at large.” In the same way, Hus carried his appeal to the Bohemian people. Hus had caught the flame from Wycliffe, and the Hussite movement was own brother in intention—and alas in result—to the English movement; though indeed its immediate consequences were more tragic, for it filled Bohemia with war and confusion. But though the Lollard and the Hussite revolts ended in apparent failure, in the light of the events that followed we perceive in them foreshadowings of the disruption that was on the way. One other protest against the usurpations of the Papacy, which for the moment was equally futile but which derives importance from its author, was that of Dante. Dante’s concern was for the inde- pendence of the Empire as against the claims of the Papacy. Pope Boniface (1294-1303) had embodied the logical conclusions of the medieval doctrine of the Papacy in the Bill Unam Sanctum, wherein, under the figure of the seamless coat of Christ, he asserts that ‘‘a body politic with two heads is a monstrosity.”” From the “two swords’ passages he proves that the secular sword is to be used for the Church, though not by it. The tem- poral power is accountable to the spiritual, while the supreme spiritual power answers only to God. The other side was stated by Dante in his De Mon- atchia. He showed that universal monarchy is THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 137 ordained of God, that the Roman Empire won its position through God’s grant and that the Emperor derives his authority, not from the Church, but immediately from God. Since all power is of God, if the emperor’s power is lawful at all, the only question is whether it comes from God directly or through the medium of the Church. Dante occu- pies himself with a careful demolition of the papal- ist argument; and his work was to remain for centuries the one effectual answer to all claims of the right of papal and clerical interference with the freedom of secular government. Now, of all the long series of protests—which all alike go back to the reassertion of the principle of Holy Poverty whatever other reinforcements they may have gathered on the way—begun by Arnold of Brescia, continued by the Waldenses and the Franciscans, by Grosseteste and Wycliffe, by Hus and Dante, found their answer in ‘‘the undis- turbed splendor of the Papal Court of the Age of the Renaissance.”’ 8. THE INTELLECTUAL REVOLT. The refer- ence to the Renaissance carries us back once more to Robert Grosseteste, and this time in company with another Englishman, Roger Bacon, who together are the morning stars of the revival of learning. Medieval thought during the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries was dominated by Aristotle, known almost wholly through a translation from the Arabic version. ‘The tour de force of the intellec- tual life of the time was the Summa of St. Thomas 138 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY Aquinas, in which he gathered up all things in heaven and earth upon the basis of an Aristotelian schema, and dominated by the traditional doctrine of the Church. This was and still remains the standard text for the scholastic theology. But apart from the Arabic version of Aristotle and a few minor works, the thought and literature of the ancient world were practically unknown in Western Christendom. It is the peculiar distinction of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon that they set afoot the movement for the collection of ancient texts and their translation. Grosseteste and Bacon were indeed almost wholly concerned with sacred and patristic texts; but the importation of Greek manu- scripts which became a busy commerce in the Renaissance period seems to have its first beginnings with “‘the aforesaid glorious Bishop,’ as Roger Bacon calls him. Half a century after Grosseteste’s death, Petrarch was born, and by 1341 he was recognized as the foremost man of letters in Europe. ‘The great interest of Petrarch’s life was the classical past of Italy, and he desired to see the ancient glories of Rome revived. He was the first who zealously collected Latin manuscripts and coins, and set him- self to cultivate a Latin style. He also applied himself to the study of Greek and advised Boccaccio to do likewise. It was not, however, till the end of the fourteenth century that there was anything like a revival of Greek learning. Thereafter the doors of the ancient classical world were thrown wide-open, and the new life of the Renaissance began. THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 139 It is no part of our business to follow the com- plex course of the Renaissance. It had both its good and bad sides. It was a new birth of thought and art; and many priceless consequences have accrued to the world from it. But it also had its sinister aspects. What distinguishes the Italian Renaissance from such epochs of luxury and corruption as the French Regency is its contempt of human life, the fury of private vengeance, the spirit of atrocious faithlessness and crime. Italian society admired the bravo as much as imperial Rome admired the gladiator; it seemed that genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality. Only a giant like Michel- angelo escaped the deadly climate. We see the violence of Michelangelo’s sublime despair in the immortal marbles of the Medicean Chapel, executed while Machiavelli was still alive—Lorenzo, nephew of Pope Leo X and father of Catherine de Medici, silent, pensive, finger on lip, seeming to meditate under the shadow of his helmet some stroke of dubious war or craft, while the sombre super-human figures of Light and Dawn and Day proclaim it is best to sleep and to be of stone, not to see and not to feel, while such misery and shame endure. This demoralization was one of the inevitable consequences of the opening up of the archives of old paganism, which tended to make for the secu- 140 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY larization of life; and to this tendency the Church had no real resistance to offer. The Papacy had been seriously weakened by the ““Babylonish Cap- tivity’ in Avignon (1309-1378) and the great schism which followed it—in all a period of over a century; and its own essential worldliness made it incapable of resisting the drift of secularization in the world around it. How far this drift had gone is evident from the importance of Machiavelli (1469-1527). ‘Our religion,”’ said he, “‘has glori- fied men of humble and meditative life, and not men of action; it has planted the chief good in lowliness and contempt of mundane things; pagan- ism placed it in high-mindedness, in bodily force, in all other things that make men strong. If our religion calls for strength in us, it is for strength to suffer rather than to do. ‘This seems to have rendered the world weak.’’ ‘“‘He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art,’’ says Lord Morley; “‘the end of that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the funda- mental principle from which he silently started, without doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application of moral standards to that business is as little to the point as it would be in the navigation of a ship.’”’* The Prince, “‘the most direct, concentrated and unflinching contribution ever made to the secularization of politics,’’ shows how far a distance we have traveled from the medi- eval dream of unity. It is the measure of European anarchy; and that in its turn is the measure of the failure of the grandiose dream of organizing the world on a basis of righteousness. And to this THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 141 failure the Church itself by its worldliness, corrup- tion and luxury had contributed not a little. But this demoralization can hardly be laid at the door of the Renaissance. It was no more than a by-product. The spiritual significance of the Renaissance and its permanent worth lay in that side of it which we know as Humanism. And this must be regarded as a revolt from the shackles which the medieval system had put upon the human mind. It was in its origin an attempt to emancipate thought and education from the narrow scholastic routine of the medieval Church by appealing to the cultural value and significance of litterae human- tores—that is, of classical literature. Petrarch was the first of the humanists; but with him the human- ities were still to be regarded as aids and enrichments of the spiritual life. Later the movement went its way without much sense of its subsidiary function; and in its later aspect, as a more or less conscious revolt against scholasticism, it elevated itself into a pursuit valuable per se. But apart from its own direct literary and artistic achievements, its signifi- cance lay in the emancipation of the mind from the barrenness and dogmatism of medievalism. It was reaction from the wholesale regimentation of the Hildebrandine tradition and the rigid schematiza- tions of the schoolmen. For one thing, the recov- ery of the works of Plato sent Aristotle into the shade; and a new era of Platonic and Neo-Platonic speculation came not only to Italy, but to the whole of Europe. It was a bid for human freedom from the bondage of the politico-ecclesiastical system of the Middle Ages. 142 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY It has been said that at the Renaissance ‘‘Greece came up from the dead with the New Testament in its hands.’”’ Undoubtedly the circulation of the New Testament in Greek and of the early Fathers showed glimpses of religion in an older and purer form; and Erasmus, greatest of the humanists, declared ‘‘that the highest object of the revival of philosophical studies will be to become acquainted with the simple and pure Christianity of the Bible.’’*? His aim throughout his life was a Chris- tian Renaissance, the source of which was to be found in a return to the New Testament and the older Fathers. His Greek Testament published in 1516 and his editions of the Fathers were designed to promote such a movement, as indeed they did, but in a fashion which Erasmus had not expected and did not approve. 9. THE RELIGIOUS REVOLT. We have had occasion to refer to the growth of nonconforming movements—the harbingers of the revolt against the reign of ecclesiastical uniformitarianism—in the early thirteenth century; and in spite of suppression and persecution they multiplied and extended their range over a great part of Europe. ‘They called themselves the “‘Brethren,’”’ and their position of dissent from the medieval Church was virtually identical wherever they were to be found. In the last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century they were extremely active all over Europe. Their members were drawn from among the artisan class and especially from the printers of Augsburg and Strassburg. THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 143 This was a movement of evangelical noncon- formity and was part of an active lay religion that existed and thrived in independence of the Church and despite its opposition. It was in a manner the wider diffusion of an earlier movement which had been born of a desire to cultivate the inner life. The complete schematization of the Christian life which reached its climax in the institution of com- pulsory private confession had in some respects deprived the individual of his spiritual independ- ence and freedom; and this turning toward the culture of the inner life was a natural reaction toward freedom from the life of outward rule and prescription which the Papacy had imposed on the faithful. “There had been mysticism in the Church previously; but it had become the sacramental mysticism of the Victorines. This later movement was—despite its social setting—intensely private and personal in its teaching and practice. It may be that it owed something to the Platonic aspects of St. Augustine—of whose teaching at that time none remembered much save what was grist for the papal mill. Nevertheless, the seeds of a genuine Christian mysticism were in his writings and may have sprouted in the mystical movements of the fifteenth century. In any case, we are justified in regarding these movements as efforts toward a free personal religious life at a time when the practices of religion had been largely reduced to external forms. Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, Henry Suso, John Ruysbroeck, the Friends of God, the Brethren of the Common Life—known best through their most 144. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY distinguished member, Thomas 4 Kempis—are the names which represent this mystical reaction. It is worth noting that they are all drawn from the German and Dutch area, and must therefore be regarded as a part of the ferment which was pres- ently to bring about the Reformation, though they themselves acknowledged the supremacy of Church and Pope. But this culture of the inner life could not go on without producing reactions without; and the growth of an inner spiritual freedom must needs create a demand for an external freedom. We have seen already that on the ecclesiastical side the time was ripening for the layman’s assertion of his right and duty to take his part in the affairs of the Church; and it was this, together with the devel- opment and diffusion of an independent religious life, that culminated in the protest of Luther and inaugurated the Reformation. It is true that it was a background of ecclesiastical corruption and rapacity, symbolized by Tetzel and his peddling of indulgences, against which the protest was formulated; but the positive principle of the Refor- mation was the affirmation of the full citizenship of the laymen in the Church, resting upon the truth of an independent personal religious life in which a man carried on his business directly with God. It was the great and triumphant return of the Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of grace. With the immediate consequences of the Refor- mation we are not now concerned. What is impor- tant is to grasp it in its historical perspective. We may fix the watershed of the period between 1000 and 1518 somewhere within the first quarter of the THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 145 thirteenth century. During the first period we observed that the dominant current was that of the consolidation of the Church on a feudal basis, in which the individual was made wholly subservient to the purposes of the society as determined and dictated by the Pope. “The second period is a period of disintegration; the system gradually fell apart; dissenting and protesting movements grew in number and power; a new spirit of freedom and personal independence began to reassert itself; and all this current of dissolution culminated in the Reformation, the blow beneath which the medieval system crumpled and was finally destroyed. The soul which the society had enslaved turned upon the society and rent it in twain. “The hive was broken up. 10. PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM. The bifurcation of Western Christendom at the Refor- mation has governed Western history for the last four hundred years. “The two main features of modern history are the development of nationalities and the growth of individual freedom’’;** and while the period covets such outstanding episodes as the discovery of the New World and the Industrial Revolution, the main interest of the records gathers around the dual movement toward the independence of national groups and individuals. It may not unfittingly be called an era of particularism. St. Augustine had held the view that the right secular organization of the world was that of a multitude of small societies** and toward the close 146 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of the Middle Ages a Frenchman quotes the passage in support of the doctrine of national states. St. Thomas Aquinas held that nationality, involving community of manners and customs, was the best basis of a state and that small states are better than large ones. And there was therefore, had it been needed, a theoretic justification for the diffusion of the national principle to be found in ecclesiastical sources of the first rank. But such justification was hardly necessary. The gradual waning of the power of the Empire and, after the Reformation, the virtual disappearance of the Church as the organ of European unity made the separatist movement irresistible; and even down to our time the division of the world into national states has gone apace. The Irish Free State is only the latest term of a movement which probably even yet has not run its course. With the resignation of the imperial crown by Francis II in 1806, the last vestige of the secular unity of the Middle Ages disappeared. The Church, however, did not recognize the national principle within its own domain; and within the regions in which its authority still ran #t remained extra-territorial and non-national, and indeed became more unitary, more compact, more autocratic than in the Middle Ages. ‘““There was far less of the federal spirit at Trent than at Con- stance; and the letter of Carl Borromeo declaring that the last thing that the Pope would consent to was the voting by nations is expressive of the spirit which became dominant in the Roman Church. Everywhere we see the triumph of the unitary system.’’ And it was this tendency that gave rise THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 147 to the ultramontanism to which more than one national state found itself compelled to make resist- ance. “The Decree of Papal Infallibility was the logical term of a movement which we can trace from the Council of Trent and the rise of the Society of Jesus; the doctrine of the divine society has finally hardened into an institutionalism which is catholic only in name. But at least the Catholic Church was free from secular domination from without; and it was this evil that befell the Reformation movement. Despite Marsilius and Ockham, the time for popular gov- ernment had not yet arrived; and the influence of Roman Law in Europe, while the Empire was in dissolution, led to the ascription to the lesser terri- torial rulers that which had hitherto belonged to the Emperor alone. This included a claim by the princes to spiritual supremacy within their own borders; and of the power which the Church had claimed and sometimes exercised over the civil authority, nothing was left in the reformed coun- tries. ‘The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio was laid down; and so came into being national churches whereof the titular head was the secular ruler of the nation. In effect the Church in the reformed countries became a purely national organization helping at once to maintain and to vivify the prin- ciple of territorialism. How far the nationalistic principle has entered into the heart of the Church is evident from the performances of national churches in war-time. The Church in the Prot- estant world has lost the note of catholicity and has materially added to the forces of divisiveness, 148 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY Just as the medieval Church had to pay the penalty of ignoring the independence and freedom of the individual in its zeal for the divine society (and is paying it still), so Protestantism has had to pay the penalty of subordinating the doctrine of the society to the individual. What the Prot- estant Fathers meant to do was to affirm the place and the duty of the believer to deal directly with God without priestly mediation. Here was the spiritual ground of their revolt against ecclesiastical tyranny and hierarchic monopoly. ‘The doctrine of Free Grace asserted the soul’s “right of way” into the Holiest of All; but this was, perhaps naturally, expanded into a general doctrine of “‘rights.’’ “The time was indeed ripe for a declara- tion of the rights of the individual; but the affirma- tion of rights without a compensatory emphasis on “‘duties’’ is centrifugal and divisive, and a society governed by a doctrine of rights tends to be fissi- parous. It is no far cry from an emphasis upon rights to an undue exaltation of the subject of the rights; and it is doubtless this stress upon rights that has grown into the insolent and anarchic indi- vidualism of the Western World. This is the disease which is enfeebling and destroying democ- racy. For democracy was meant to be a manner of living together; to-day it amounts to little more than freedom to exploit one another. Puritanism was undone by its pride. It began with the idea of a theocratic universe; to-day in practice its uni- verse is ego-centric, and its fine flower is the modern doctrine of “‘success.”” “This doctrine of success is, like its first cousin, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 149 superman, the product of a despiritualized and desocialized Protestantism. Just as Catholicism has by its exaltation of the society above the indi- vidual become an institutionalism which is not catholic, so Protestantism by exalting the individual above the society has fostered an individualism which is not evangelical. This unbalanced individualism is the root of the fissiparous impulse in Protestantism and of its present polychrome sectarianism. Schism is born of spiritual pride; for the pride of the group is only the pride of the individual writ large. But it requires a double pride to provoke a schism— the pride of orthodoxy and the pride of dissent. Other ages have known the same disruptive temper; but it is doubtful whether dissidence has ever gone to so great lengths as in Protestantism. It is even true to say that where Protestantism is most rigorously logical, as among the Plymouth Breth- ren, it is also most vigorously divisive. A faint variation in emphasis or a shade of difference in the interpretation of a text seems to have sufficed to bring a new sect into being. It is some reassur- ance that the scandal of this wild sectarianism is beginning to shame Protestant churches into some effort—albeit timid and hesitating—to heal the breaches. It is not here suggested that some of the greater disruptions, like the Reformation itself, were not inevitable and even necessary in their day; but by this day the casus belli in most of these con- troversies has become a dead issue. In any case, respectability of historical origin does not justify a Christian society in perpetuating the separations 150 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY of yesterday in the divisions of to-day. Our sectarianism is the reductio ad absurdum of Protestanism. So here we stand, amid the ruins of the medieval synthesis. On the one hand is the stationary hive of Romanism, on the other the wayward, unstable herds of Protestantism. Our hope of the Divine Society hangs upon our readiness and our power to make a new beginning; and that new beginning depends on a recovery of the original Christian impulse. PART IV THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 1. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH AND THE CHRIS- TIANIZATION OF LIFE. The nineteen centuries of its history have carried the Church far from the point at which it started. “That this should be so belongs to the nature of things; no institution can continue to exist in this world without continual modification, if it is to meet the changing needs of changing times. And though no existing church displays much family-likeness to the New Testa- ment ecclesia, yet every church may justly trace its lineage to it—-which circumstance carries with it the duty of the Church to review its record and its present condition in the light of its origin. In a world which has accepted the distinction of sacred and secular, of temporal and spiritual, the existence of Church and State as two permanent elements in life is taken for granted. But it seems almost certain that this situation was not contem- plated by St. Paul. A clinging loyalty which sprang from his Roman citizenship led him at some points in his career to ascribe a certain divinity to the office of the civil magistrate; but his conduct when his Christian loyalty came into conflict with the State showed plainly where he believed that his superior obligation lay. Moreover, if the doctrine of the societas perfecta is not explicit in the New Testament, it tended in that direction from the tor 152 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY start, as the communistic experiment in Jerusalem and the subsequent development of judicial machin- ery within the Church show. But while the charge against St. Paul at Philippi, that he was proclaim- ing ‘“‘another king, one Jesus,’’ may be fairly taken as indicating his hope that a new empire would supersede the old (that is, unless the form of the charge is a misunderstanding or a fabrication), we have only slender grounds for thinking that St. Paul supposed the supersession of the State to be an immediate part of the practical politics of the Church. But when the Roman Empire assumed the shape of Antichrist in the eyes of Christians, the situation became different; and the apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of this world becoming the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ seems to embody the expectation that a universal Church would become the terrestrial form of a world-wide theocracy. But the New Testament does not finally make up its mind between the view of the Church as a pilgrim body whose destiny lay wholly and exclusively in eternity and the view that it was a society that had an office and a destiny in history, whatever may be awaiting it beyond the horizons of time and space. And though through its contact with Constantine it had actually assumed for itself a position and a function as a part of the historical order, St. Augustine still thinks of it as ‘‘the pilgrim City of King Christ,’’ and he sees it passing through the world to the unseen heaven to which it belongs. He was not able to adhere to this view of it in a pure form because of the complications introduced by the now palpable existence of the Church as an THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 153 organized polity in a recognized relation to the secular State. But, in any case, this secular aspect of the Church was to St. Augustine a purely transi- tory condition, for the world was to pass away as soon as God had made up the number of the elect. After St. Augustine’s time the pilgrim aspect of the Church faded away; and the medieval polity shows us the Church as an established institution, having made for itself a permanent dwelling in the world; and as we have seen, its relation to the other established institutions—the political body—raised innumerable questions and a long controversy. St. Augustine’s doctrine of the sinful origin of the State, and his consent, albeit reluctant, to the use of the secular arm for the suppression of the Dona- tist heresy gave the Church the materials of a doc- trine which in time asserted the supremacy of the Church over the State, and claimed for the Papacy the supreme temporal authority in Europe—and theoretically in the world. When this doctrine was falsified by the event, the papal claim to temporal sovereignty became more modest, and to-day it amounts to no more than that the Pope shall be sovereign within his own territorial domain, how- ever narrow that may be, because it is not thinkable that the Vicar of Christ should be politically subject to any earthly monarch. When the ideology of sovereignty and power began to color the thought of the Church it is impossible to say; but we may suppose it received its main impetus from the compact with Constan- tine, which was in effect a surrender to the tempta- tion which Jesus had withstood when he rejected 154 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY the dream of secular power. But beneath the claim to being a societas perfecta and to the temporal overlordship of Europe there lay a spiritual dream and purpose that is of the very essence of the Church. It was a tragedy that this hope and mis- sion should have been stated in a secular or political idiom, and that the Church should have supposed that a secular form of organization was necessary in order to make the dream come true, for it thereby mated incongruities. “The Church’s task was the consecration of all life; and it supposed that that was to be reached by universal obedience to the Vicar of Christ. But the aim was to bring the whole of life under the rule of God; and it was this and no other purpose that underlay, at least in its beginnings, the papal claim to the secular no less than the temporal overlordship of the world. However perverse and self-defeating the strategy was, we should do the medieval Church less than justice if we forgot that the aim of the Papacy was to christianize the world. Nor is it realized always how much was actually done by the Church in establishing or at least in encouraging a Christian standard in human rela- tions. ‘The late A. L. Smith speaks of the Papacy in its earlier phase as ‘‘a power making for right- eousness’’ and goes on to illustrate the statement by a discussion of the order which the Church brought into the anarchical conditions that sur- rounded the marriage relation in the Middle Ages.* It should be remembered also that the consecration of marriage was carried so far that at the Council of Trent it was declared to be a sacrament in the arnerORCMALN! HE WORLD. 155 full sense of a means of grace; and this can only be regarded as an effort to lift the relation of men and women from the plane of nature to the plane of religion. In the same way, the Church endeav- ored to bring the day’s work into the sphere of religion, of which the charter of any medieval guild would furnish evidence. Here are some clauses from the Charter of the White-Tawyers (leather dressers who finished leather in white) : In honor of God, of our Lady and all Saints and for the nurture of tranquillity and peace among the good folk of Megucers, called White-Tawyers, the folk of the same trade have ordained the points underwritten: First, they have ordained that they will furnish a wax-candle to burn before our Lady in the Church of All-Hallows, near London Wall: And it was in this temper that the rules proceeded: Also, that each person of the said trade shall put in the box such sum as he shall think fit in aid of maintaining the said candle... . If by chance any of the said trade shall fall into poverty, whether through old age or because he cannot labor or work, and shall have nothing with which to keep himself, he shall have every week from the said box seven pence for his support, if he be a man of good repute: If any one of the said trade shall have work in his house he cannot complete, and if for 156 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY want of assistance such work shall be in danger of being lost, those of the same trade shall aid him so that the said work be not lost. The record of the medieval guilds is on the whole ambiguous; but at least some headway was made in the business of the including industry within the Kingdom of God. And it will be no ill day when the Church and the Workshop know they belong to one another in the unity of life. And the Market-place. For the distinction of commerce in the Middle Ages was the doctrine and the practice of ‘‘the Just Price.’” No doubt the law of ‘‘supply and demand’’ operated to some extent, but in the main Aquinas’ view held, that to sell more dearly or to buy a thing more cheaply than it is worth is in itself unjust and unlawful.” Aquinas’ discussion of the matter shows that the commercial malpractices of modern times were common enough in the Middle Ages, but the Church did by the doctrine of the Just Price intro- duce a principle of equity and order into commer- cial dealings. The Just Price was the central economic idea of the Middle Ages. The mainte- nance of the Just Price presupposes the existence of just men; and the extent to which the Just Price actually prevailed is testimony to the ethical dis- cipline which religion had induced in society. And this same fact is confirmed by the regulations of the guilds and by the standard up to which they endeavored to live until they became, as they did in the course of time, demoralized. The spirit of brotherhood and of communal responsibility was Ae GHORCH ING THE WORLD? 157 increasingly diffused, as is shown by the regulations for the prevention of bad work and of the sale of defective goods, and especially by the statutes secur- ing the craftmen from unfair competition and providing for mutual help. This development went on chiefly in the cities; but in the country there was an effort to check the anarchy which the feudal system made possible. The institution of the Truce of God did much to mitigate the injury caused by the private wars of the feudal nobles. The Truce secured immunity for “‘clerks, peasants, merchants and noncombatants in general, even for animals, from violence; and religious edifices and public buildings were safe- guarded. During the whole of Advent and Lent and at Ember days, hostilities had to be suspended altogether between Wednesday evening and Mon- day morning.”” Nor was this all that the Church did for the socializing of life. “The growth of the merchant class and the religious practice of pilgrim- age set afoot much traveling; and the growing Christian conscience of the period did much to expedite travel. Fraternities were formed to protect merchants and pilgrims, to repair and keep bridges in order and to provide hostels for travelers. The few lighthouses that existed were maintained by the Church, and to this day in England lighthouses are controlled by the Brethren of Trinity House, a name which attests the ecclesiastical origin of the body that bears it. The Church undoubtedly was a power of social integration within its sphere of influence; and it is beyond question that despite the externalization and 158 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY regimentation which were involved in the papal policy, there was a great deal of genuine popular religion of a personal spontaneous type. Its social effects, moreover, prove that it was a religious life essentially Christian. Mr. Coulton has recently shown the credulity and degradation of the popular religion of the twelfth century;* but there was nevertheless a religious life abroad which could produce a St. Bernard and a St. Louis, a Robert Grosseteste and a St. Francis, and it was out of tnis religion that the mystical and dissenting movements of later days emerged. It was also the spring of that ‘‘simple evangelical piety’ which existed in numberless German homes in the end of the fif- teenth century.* It was inevitable that this type of religious life should have come into opposition to the formal and institutional religion which was associated with the hierarchy; but it would be an error not to regard it as a product of the life of the Church, even though at a later time it could not find house-room within the Church. The inference is irresistible that there was a double stream of life during this period: one of a genuine personal religion with a definitely social outlook and effect; and the type of religious life, external, formal, authoritative, which was implied in the doctrine of papal absolutism. We should, however, do some injustice to the latter if we over- looked the fact that the papal authority did to some extent diminish the anarchy in personal relations, as in the case of marriage and private wars. It is worth some notice that in the regions in which it did a solid work of this kind it proceeded with THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 159 caution, not hastily imposing regulations beyond its power to enforce. In the one case in which the Church, acting on the traditional view, con- tinued an unqualified prohibition—namely, against usury—it seems to have been unsuccessful. Where prohibition has an element of persuasion and can therefore evoke a measure of consent, it has some hope of being effectual—a moral not without its point to our own times. Moreover, it must be acknowledged that, during the period when the Papacy was not yet overwhelmed by the glamour of secular greatness and wealth and by the corrup- tions that follow this frame of mind, it meant to use its authority in the interests of the christian- ization of mankind. But the question remains whether that is a process which can be permanently expedited by the instrument of authority. The reaction from the medieval system would seem to show that, however effectual it may be at this point or that, or under a particular set of circumstances, authority as the permanent sanction of a society is foredoomed to failure. That order and discipline within the Church may require some organ of authority may be admitted; but it is questionable whether this authority can be exercised within the Church by the use of force. Indeed, it is quite evident that the Church had some qualms upon this point—the fact that it called upon the secular power to execute its sentences shows that it felt that the use of physi- cal force was incongruous with its own nature. But there is no final difference between the Church using physical force itself and calling upon the 160 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY temporal power to execute it on its behalf. The Church in either case acknowledges the final appeal to force and with this acknowledgment accepts a secular basis for itself. Even the Reformers who looked to the secular magistrate to carry through the Reformation within their own territory seem to concede the Church’s dependence upon the use of physical force in the last resort. And it is to such people as Robert Browne, leader of the English separatists, that we owe the recovery of the idea that the Church has no concern with the civil mag- istrate at all save only in respect of its own few necessary temporalities. In his Treatise of Refor- mation without Tarying for Anie (1582), he asserts that ‘‘to compel religion, to plant churches by power, to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties belongeth not to them (the magistrates), neither to the Church.” But the medieval Church was deeply committed to the use of force. The story of the Crusades from the first, which Urban II urged for the recov- ery of the Holy Places from Moslem hands and the subjection of the schismatic Greeks to Catholic Christendom, to the later enterprises under that name which were turned against Christians nearer home, registers the measure in which the Church was secularized. War is the final court of appeal within the temporal realm; and under all circum- stances it is the sign of the failure both of reason and of humanity. When the Church in the inter- ests of its own inner peace or of its expansion resorts to war either directly or by proxy, it classi- fies itself finally among the temporal and secular THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 161 kingdoms of the world. Nevertheless, with some exceptions, the Christian—or what was accepted as the Christian—intention of these enterprises must be acknowledged; but at the best, when the Church adopted the temper and method of war it not only defeated its own purpose but became a house divided against itself. After all it is not possible to serve God by the arts of Mars or the artifices of Mammon. Even Machiavelli might have supported the moral of The Prince by an appeal to the policies of the Pope. 2. THE STRATEGY OF THE CHURCH. ‘The attempt of the medieval Church to bring political and social relations under its own mantle was implied in its conception of itself as a societas per- fecta stbi sufficiens. But the question must be raised whether its self-sufficiency required the assumption of political power, and whether its growth and its inward peace would not have been secured more fruitfully, as they were in its primi- tive period, by another kind of power altogether, namely, the power to suffer, which is, in its New Testament setting, an aspect of the will to love. ‘The Church in its early days was a society which rested upon the common relation of its members to God and was bound together by their mutual love. “The Church of the Middle Ages became more and more an army, an organization of the military type, with its hierarchy of officers under the papal commander-in-chief; and the characteristic medie- val tendency reached its climax in the military organization of the Society of Jesus. 162 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY But the Church would have been well advised had it preserved the Augustinan view of the origin of the State and accepted the logic of it. St. Augus- tine held that in origin it was the product of vio- lence and in effect a magnum latrocinium, a wholly unregenerate institution. But while it is impossible for us to accept St. Augustine’s account of its origin, nevertheless the actual circumstances of its historical origin as an organization for power make it inevitable that, in any association with the Church, it must either impose its own character on the Church, or the Church must give it a differ- ent character. This indeed the Church held it was able to do; the State might be brought within the covenant of grace and be baptized into the Kingdom of God. But in the event, it was the State which impressed itself on the Church: and while in turn the Church did to some extent mitigate the natural operations of the State, it is the politicalization of the Church that chiefly strikes the student. Now the State, as we have seen, actually arose out of the biological pressure which transformed tribal society into an organization of men for the sake of power; and that still remains the fundamental character of the State. With Thomas Aquinas we see the first beginnings of the idea of popular sovereignty and of government by consent; later, Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham expounded the principle of popular representation in government: and this current of thought has borne fruit in modern democracy. Yet even existing forms of democratic government retain, beneath all their apparatus of representation, the principle of the ihe GHURCH IN, THE WORLD: 163 appeal to force; and their behavior in war-time, in the forcible suppression of discussion and dissent, shows the underlying principle of their organization. ‘This is of course not to say that there is no place or need in society as it is for the use of force; but the difference between the essential State and the essential Church is that the former is in the last resort held together by force—whether the force be vested in a despot or in a representative oligar- chy—while the latter is held together by love. As regulative principles of social order, force and love are antithetic, and are not to be reconciled. When the Church counted itself to be not only the King- dom of Heaven but a Kingdom of this world as well, it was trying to run these two hostile steeds in double harness; and in the event it failed. Moreover, this does not suggest that there is no need of civil government. There are and always will be certain public services which must be gov- erned and regulated by some central authority; and it is hardly to be expected that humanity will soon outgrow the need of police and judicial institutions. But we have lived to see the State claiming such an episcopate over the whole of life as the medieval Church sought to acquire; and the life of indi- viduals and groups has come to be “‘regulated’’ to an extent which seriously impairs personal freedom. The tendency of the modern State has been to become unitary and absolute, and to gather under its own mantle as many of the concerns of life as it can. It declines to admit that there can be any association of persons within its frontiers with any 164 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY authority over its own members save such as it *““concedes’’ to it; and the logic of its claim embraces final authority over life and limb, over the mind and the property of its members. It is rarely that the State can make this claim effective; but the claim and the effort to validate it seems to be inherent in the State’s modern doctrine of itself. But the State can have no absolute character, for the simple reason that it represents only a provi- sional and transitory stage in the development of human society. In some ways it may be said—in these days of national states—to represent the crus- tacean stage in social development. In spite of the humanization of many of its processes within its own borders, it represents human society clad in a protective armament which may be used not only for the maintenance of security but for aggressive purposes. Its military, air and naval establish- ments are its crust; and as in the sub-human world, evolution was able to continue because some animals had the wit and the courage to shed their protective armament, so social evolution requires that human society shall put off its present crust. Disarmament is of the essence of further social progress; but with disarmament the State must necessarily assume a different character. The capital error of the Church was its neglect to carry out the implications of its own original doctrine of itself. It represented a higher type of life and a consequent higher method of social organization; and it lowered its own standard when it began to lay claim to political power. The State stood to the Church not so much in the relation of THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 165 secular to temporal as in the relation of nature to supernature. When once the Church had accepted a mission in history, it should have remained in independence of the temporal powers and lived its own life in the world. It was a pure illusion that in its character as a societas perfecta it needed to exercise a secular authority. It was right in affirm- ing that the secular powers should be gathered into the Kingdom of God; but that was not done by the Pope assuming or claiming a temporal overlord- ship. It was to be done by a peaceful penetration of the surrounding world by its own life and its own principles. ‘That was its primitive strategy, and it succeeded. To be sure, the early Church suffered persecution; but persecution, so far from hindering, helped the diffusion of its life. The aims of the medieval Church were on the whole sound; but it accepted a strategy which was self- defeating. St. Paul’s figure of the Church as a “‘colony of heaven’ supplies us with’a clue to the real strategy of the Church. As we have seen, the purpose of a Greek or Roman colony was to diffuse the life, the speech, the culture of the homeland in an alien territory; and this it did by reproducing to the last detail possible the life of Athens or Rome in the settlement. Neither this nor any other metaphor is to be pressed in detail; and for our purpose its significance lies in the fact that the Church fulfils its own purpose in the measure in which it evokes its own quality of life—the life of the spirit—and its own social temper in the secular society which lies about it. It was to fulfil its mission by its 166 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY preaching, its teaching and the witness of its own inner life and behavior. It was the strategy of “peaceful penetration.” It was no part of its program to capture the political machinery of the Empire and to use it for its own ends; it was rather to kindle the life of the spirit in the people of the Empire, so that the Empire itself might become a Kingdom of Heaven, and its machinery consecrated to the ends of that Kingdom. In the event, the Church would become the Empire and the Empire the Church; and both the Empire and the Church would be fused and resolved into a new society which would be both Empire and Church and yet neither. How much the Church has already done to diffuse its own spirit through human society is insufficiently recognized. Slavery was doomed to extinction when the Church acknowledged no dis- tinction between the slave and the freeman, and opened every office to the slave so that the slave Callistus could become Bishop of Rome. The modern hospital sprang out of the hospitality of the early Church; the school was at one time the peculiar charge of the Church: and the university grew and thrived under the wing of the Church. The sense of corporate responsibility for the poor came to secular society through the charity of the Church. We have already had occasion to remark the service which the Church rendered in minimiz- ing the perils of travel and navigation. And the measure of the Church’s achievement in the world is the extent to which these and other public serv- ices in which the Church was the pioneer have been THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 167 taken over by society as a whole. It was out of the merciful ministries of the Franciscans that the scientific curiosity was awakened that produced Roger Bacon and the beginnings of modern experi- mental science; and it was under the shadow of the Church and in the service of the Church that Art awoke from the coma of the Dark Ages. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Church educated the world into a new valuation of life; but it is plain that it kindled in many ways a new interest in life and in a spiritual culture of it. In the main, the story of the Church as an imperial enterprise is a story of eventual failure. Its permanent suc- cesses are those which it achieved in its ‘‘colonial’’ character which was never in abeyance even in the period of its most grandiose imperial dreams. It is worth observation that such enterprises as public hospitals, the poor law and education have largely passed out of the control of the Church; and this may suggest to us the real mission of the Church on the historical plane, in so far as it has to do with social evolution. The dream of the Church spreading its canopy over the whole of life and gathering within its more or less direct juris- diction all the processes of the social life was an extravagance. Ina world which was delivered over to anarchy, it became its duty again and again to make some effort to introduce humanity and order into human affairs. Its organized charities and its schools were enterprises intended to redeem life from destruction. But when the city had itself by these means acquired the spirit of charity and a sense of the need of education, the Church could 168 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY hand over these functions to it. It is, alas, only too true that the spirit in which and the purpose for which these services were originated are often for- gotten in the secular administration of them; but the fact remains that both the services and the sense of social responsibility under which they are con- ducted were brought into the world through the Church. It may not be the business of the Church to carry on education save only for its own imme- diate domestic needs; but it was and is its business to diffuse a spirit in society that will recognize the need of education and provide it—and in due time discover and provide the right kind of education. It may not be the business of the Church to main- tain hospitals, but it is the business of the Church to kindle in human society the recognized duty to maintain hospitals both for the relief of present suffering and for the scientific development of the arts of healing. And the more the Church can divest itself of the responsibility for these and other public services and entrust them to society, the more effectually is it fulfiling its own specific office in the world. For the Church itself is not the Kingdom of God: it is the organ and the instrument of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is an order of life and not an institution. It will have its institutions; and of these the focus and the source of inspiration and guidance should be the Church. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,’’ and there is a sense in which we may apply this saying to the terrestrial City of God. It has its mansions of Art and Learn- ing, of Industry and Commerce, of Compassion THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 169 and Healing; but they gather around the central mansion which is the Church whence they derive their vision and their vitality. It is never to be forgotten that the Church appears in the New Testament under the figure of the Body of Christ. By which St. Paul appears to mean that the Christ who in Jesus became incarnate in a body of flesh continues in the Church incarnate in a body of people; and it is the office of this Body to assimilate to itself more and more of the unredeemed tracts of life, assimilating first the nation and in turn being absorbed into it until the whole nation has become a body of Christ. The nation has then become the Church and the Church the nation— and the institutions of the nation, its organs of administration, its industry, its education and the rest have become functions of the Body of Christ. And the Church’s work in the world will be done when the School, the University, the Workshop, the Market-place, the Studio and the Farm know that they belong to one another and work together in the unity of life in God. “I saw no temple therein,’’ says the writer of the Apocalypse. The New Jerusalem will have no temple because it is all temple, a single house of God. We do not see as clearly as we should that it is the business of the Church to make itself superfluous, to disappear as a separate institution, by diffusing its own character and ministry through society as a whole. 3. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. ‘The Church is concerned therefore with life as a whole—nihil humanum alienum a me puto. The 170 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY modern heresy that religion has nothing to do with business or politics is a symptom of the disintegra- tion that has befallen life. “hat the Church should not try to impose its own will upon commercial or political institutions goes without saying; but it belongs to its duty to declare what the regulative spirit and principle both of commerce and govern- ment, of education and art should be. Of formal relations with the State it should have none beyond those necessary to its tenure of such meager tem- poralities as its ministries may require. And it is obvious that it cannot endorse any specific political or economic doctrine or function. It has indeed the duty to criticize and even to condemn—if that be necessary—policies, whether economic or polit- ical, that violate or deny the values of life as it understands them. Here it stands where Jesus stood; for it was His way to put to two tests every policy, mode of behavior, dogma and whatsoever else affected the society He lived in: Does this thing make for the unity of life? Does it make for the increase of life—life more abundant for ever more and more people? All economic and political doctrines are relative and provisional; in a changing and moving world they must necessarily be so. The business man who speaks of the “‘law’’ of supply and demand as though it were absolute and universal is merely a ‘fundamentalist’ in business. For it is obvious that every governmental regulation of prices, every trust, every monopoly, every gentleman’s agree- ment not to sell below a given price, does interfere with the operation of the law of supply and de- THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 171 mand; and there are regions of commerce in which the law is nowadays hardly operative at all. “The law of supply and demand is only a statement of how prices will adjust themselves under conditions of free and unfettered competition; and the law is put out of action whenever competition is to any extent limited. And all economic laws are of the same relative character. In the same way, the whole laissez-faire philosophy derives its cogency from its individualistic premise; and socialism in whatever form rests upon a collectivist presuppo- sition. But neither individualism nor collectivism is an absolute principle; for the individual and the group have both alike their place and importance in a sound social philosophy. “The Church cannot therefore be concerned with either; and its own social philosophy requires a synthesis which em- braces both the individualist and the collectivist emphasis and transcends both in a single organic doctrine. But even then it cannot be concerned with the mechanics of industry and commerce; its interest in this region is in the spirit which animates, and the principle which governs the organization of the processes of production and distribution, and in the mutual relations of the persons involved in them. To be sure, the spirit and the principle may profoundly affect the mechanics; but that is the affair not of the Church but of the engineer. In the same way, political doctrines are relative in their nature. The Christian view of the infinite worth and therefore of the presumptive equality of every living soul may be said to point toward a democratic form of government. But so far no 172 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY form of democracy has been evolved which would satisfy a Christian test of government. The party system with the doctrine of majority rule, govern- ment by debate and decision by counting noses, the party machine and the crack of the whip make all political discussion notoriously trivial and ephem- eral. And doctrines and policies that are evolved in the heat and smoke of party polemics seem to be a good many removes from the actual business of life. Dr. Jacks’ criticism of “‘government by talk’? derives its strength from the circumstance that the talk is chiefly party talk and is hardly ever illumined by a single eye to the good of the whole; and Professor Muirhead’s rejoinder that what we need is not the abolition of talk but government by the right kind of talk is well founded. But so long as the discussions of parliaments are governed mainly by the tactics of the party game, the right kind of talk will be the exception rather than the rule. It is difficult to see where nine-tenths of the political discussion of the present day touches the main business of life. This is not to say that we shall or that it would be well for us to outgrow the system of parties. There is need for the conserva- tive and the radical emphasis in the social organi- zation; and as in its present half-evolved state human nature finds it difficult to make a conserva- tive and a radical to dwell within the same skin, we shall continue for a long time to hive off into parties. But that will do no harm so long as the conservative party upholds the conservative ideal rather than the conservative party, and the radical party gives itself to the advocacy of the radical THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 173 ideal rather than the discomfiture of the conservative party. Mr. Edward Jenks after tracing the evolution of society through the tribal and military stages—the latter being represented by the national state as we know it—speaks of the emergence of a third stage, the contractual, or the stage of partnership.* It may be that the significance of the political and economic revolts of modern times lies in the effort to disentangle the individual from systems of gov- ernment and industry which deny him the inde- pendence and freedom to which he has a natural title, and that this new political and economic free- dom may be the prelude to a new type of social synthesis. Mr. Jenks sees the premonition of the partnership stage of social evolution in Rousseau: and the French Revolution may be regarded as the first step in clearing the ground for the new syn- thesis. Mazzini, after premising that the note of modern history from the Protestant Reformation to his own day had been that of individualism, Went on to say that the note of the future would be association or synthesis. There are already some signs of the coming of an era of partnership in industry. For some time past experiments have been made in the direction of profit-sharing, co- partnership and the like. The movement toward what is unfortunately called the democratic control of industry has made enough headway for its dis- cussion without heat. Practice however lags behind, partly because of the fears which the employers have of the effect of democratization upon indus- try and—too often—upon their own position; 174. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY and partly because of the incapacity of the great majority of the workers to rise above questions of wages and hours. Nevertheless, many more or less thoroughgoing experiments are being made, and in many cases with good success. “The extension of the partnership idea in industry will probably fol- low the road that it has traveled in the political region, namely, the gradual diffusion of the indus- trial franchise through the various grades of worker until every individual has his own standing and voice in the conduct of the industry. The extension of the political franchise must be regarded as an approach to the notion and practice of partnership in public affairs; and as in most countries of the West there is now a franchise virtually universal, the groundwork of political partnership has been laid down. ‘The next step is to supersede government by debate by government by conference. At the other end we have the League of Nations which, given a fair chance, may create the habit and practice of international part- nership. In that case, a great part of the functions of the modern national State will become super- fluous, and it will be able to give more thought and to spend more of its resources upon more domestic concerns. With the possible and even probable diminution of the need of preserving its unitary character, the State will regard the processes of decentralization with less reluctance than in the past; and in consequence politics will come nearer to the actualities of social life. But it is not at all improbable that, if our hopes of a coperative world are realized through the League of Nations, and the THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 175 reason for the basic military character of the State is removed, the State itself will have less importance and be superseded in its present primacy by the industrial and commercial organizations. It is not inconceivable that its functions may be confined to the oversight of judicial processes and police, of public health, and of means of communication, that is, to precisely those services which are rendered by the administration of a municipality. That event may still be far off, but it is at least not unthinkable. Now, this idea of the conduct of life by the method of partnership is a first principle of the life of the Church. The transition from coercion as a social principle to codperation is foreshadowed by Jesus; and St. Paul’s use of the metaphor of the body and its members shows us where he believed the cohesive energy of the Church to lie. The Kingdom of God is an order of life in which the regulative principle is partnership—which is simply another name for love. The word love has been so degraded by cheap and foul usage that its essen- tial meaning is not understood. In the New Testa- ment it is a comprehensive term which covers all the impulses and influences which make for human unity. It is an energy of integration born of the perception that we are members of one another, “the energy of a steadfast will bent on creating fel- lowship,’’ as the late Walter Rauschenbusch put it; and it ranges all the way up from the simplest act of willing codperation through varying intensities of comradeship and fellowship until at last, in asso- ciation with sexual affinity, it becomes the strange and beautiful fire that fuses man and maid into one 176 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY flesh, one soul. The Christian exaltation of love is itself the evidence that its outlook is toward a society; and in what direction soever the principle of partnership begins to operate, there the Church will necessarily see the promise of the Kingdom of God. | If we are right in supposing that we are ap- proaching a time in which this principle of part- nership is to become regulative, then the Church is facing another period of great opportunity. At the Reformation, with its failure to realize its dream of human unity, it was the Church itself (Protes- tants are apt to forget that their churches are as much legatees of this Church of the Middle Ages as the unreformed papal Church) that broke up the fabric it had erected, and began its dissolution into its constituent elements in order to make ready for a new building; and now that there are signs that new building operations are—albeit somewhat tentatively—afoot, the Church has an important function to discharge. For it is the one society on earth which professes to be held together only by love: and it is its peculiar business to teach the world the meaning and practice of love. But for this function it is at present ill-fitted. Its divisions bewray its lovelessness. Its sectarian- ism shows its insolvency in love; just as in the evo- lution of mankind individual man has outstripped the evolution of his society, so the Christian society lags far behind the Christian man. Yet even here there are signs of hope. The greatest of all modern achievements in reunion, namely, the coming of the United Church of Canada, absorbing into itself the tHE CHURCH IN THE: WORLD) 177, witness and the tradition of Presbyterianism, Methodism and Congregationalism, and a number of movements of kindred intention show that in the Church the tide of love is on the turn after the long ebb. But it is not only in reunion at large, but in the witness of the single congregation, that love must be manifested as a working principle; and here it has sorrowfully to be admitted that the Church makes a poor showing to those who have any knowledge of the inner life of an ordinary con- gregation. The joyous fellowship that should be the life of the Church is notable chiefly by reason of its scarcity; and it is a commonplace how favor- able an air the congregational life of the Church provides for the poorer things in human nature. This condition can only be traced to the poverty of the spiritual experience of the members of the Church; and it must be regarded as a pathological symptom of extreme gravity. Nor is it likely to be removed save by a renewal of the life of the Church at its sources. This renewal must however be provided by a fresh discovery of the mission of the Church in the world; and for that it must go back to its own origins. There it will find that it came into being as the nucleus and the organ of a new type of — human society possessing a new quality of life; and if it interprets this in the light of modern knowl- edge, it will recognize itself as being the beginning and the instrument of a new phase of the divine pui pose in the evolution of life. It is the standard- bearer of a new advance. So far its performance has been meager and punctuated by failure; and by 178 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY its dullness and perversity it has again and again made less for progress than for reaction. It must once more grasp the august and epic design of the Spirit of life in bringing it into being; and it will do that the more effectually according as it realizes itself to be the divinely appointed torch-bearer of the march of Life to its inscrutable goal. The Church has believed itself to be in the main line of the religious development of mankind; but it should startle it into a new self-consciousness and a new power, to understand that its ancestry goes back far beyond the awakening of the religious sense to the first minute beginnings of Life itself. 4, CONSERVATISM AND DEVELOPMENT. There are in the life of the Church as in all life two ele- ments which we may perhaps describe as static and dynamic. It is this same distinction which the late George Tyrrell makes when he says that the Church requires two principles for its development; one a principle of wild luxuriance, of spontaneous expan- sion and variation in every direction; the other a principle of order, restraint, unification, in conflict with the former, often overwhelmed by its task, always more or less in arrears. On the one hand is the biological thrust, forever pressing on; on the other the instinct of conservation, the function of which is to secure and to conserve the gains which have been made. ‘The besetting danger of the con- servative principle is that it may degenerate into inertia and apply itself not merely to conserving what has been achieved, but to preventing any further achievement. It is indeed characteristic of THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 179 human societies that, once having dug themselves in, they are unwilling to quit their dugouts. The acquired inertia of institutions constitutes the gravest difficulty of all vital progress. ‘This is the biology of the movement which has gained considerable notoriety in our time under the name of fundamentalism. The conservative im- pulse in the Church expressed itself in the formula- tion of creeds. Now, so long as a confessional formula is regarded as a device for securing and con- solidating ground gained in the understanding of truth it serves a useful and necessary end. Even then it must be regarded as relative and provisional, as indeed it will always be regarded by those who remember that we live in a world in which knowl- edge and experience are progressive. It isa terminus a quo and not a terminus ad quem, in no sense a goal but a starting-point. Nevertheless, the inertia which is always lying in wait for life tends to make the creed a definition of ultimate truth, the final limit of the advance. The Church becomes en- crusted in its creed and invites the fate of all crustaceans. Meantime, all advance and explora- tion beyond this limit becomes suspect; and the person or group that is sufficiently venturesome to make a pioneering experiment is apt to find itself shut out of doors. Fundamentalism is, however, not merely a phenomenon of inertia; it is inertia become malignant, for it has not hesitated to threaten the excommunication of those who venture beyond the prescribed frontiers. It is good evidence of the essential vitality of the Church that the tendency to inertia has never been 180 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY able to strangle its living impulse. Its essential life has always in the end won out and gone ahead, and the creeds have had to be patched up and expanded in order to enable them to keep pace with the Church’s life. Betwen 150 and 740 A. pD. the Apostles’ Creed appeared in no less than twenty forms. The biological thrust in the Church has never been wholly suppressed; it has refused to sub- mit to the restraints of definition and tradition, and it is impossible to say at what point it will overflow the neat and trim banks which schoolmen and doc- trinaires have built for it. ‘The fundamentalist reaction is however unim- portant and must under the pressure of existing conditions disappear. For the movement of life has outstripped the definition of mid-nineteenth- century evangelicalism no less than that of medieval and post-medieval catholicism. To-day, the ortho- doxies of the Christian religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, have been outstripped by life; life has reached a new world of knowledge, of thought, of outlook. And as at the end of the Middle Ages, when the Church was trying to do business with the dogmas and the forms of a day that was already dead, the Spirit of Life through the Protestant fathers worked out a new faith out of the old Gospel that met the need of that new day, so in our day the Spirit of Life must once more call forth those who will state for us a new faith out of the old Gospel, if life and religion are not to be buried together in the same grave. And this new faith, while it retains all that is living and true in Protes- THE GHURCH IN THE WORLD. | 18] tantism and Catholicism, must yet transcend both as we know them. In the Protestant churches the most significant movement in recent years has been the reawakening of the sense of social responsibility—-which theo- logically has been connected with the idea of the Kingdom of God; and there has been an effort to achieve a “‘social’’ interpretation of Christianity, which however does not sit easily upon our funda- mental individualism. “The best we have been able to do hitherto is to add a Christian social theory as a sort of postscript to our evangelical orthodoxy. But this is a position which cannot be accepted as final, though we shall have to consent to it until Protestants have received what is, after all, the essential Christian experience, which is both per- sonal and social at the same time, so that men will not be able to disentangle their relation to God from their relation to society. And that experience when it comes will be a vision of life as a whole, dram- atized under some image of a City of God, of a divine commonwealth of men and women who seek together the true ends of life. And this new faith and experience will when it comes inaugurate a departure more momentous and far-reaching than the Protestant Reformation. It would be idle to say that it is the business of the Church to seek this vision. In a sense the Church has never lost it; but in these latter days of the world it has suffered great obscuration. But it will come as new revelation has always come. The chosen method of the Spirit of Life is to let light break upon groups of serious and patient 182 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY seekers. [he spiritual experience which brought the Reformation was prepared and achieved in the groups and brotherhoods—‘“The Brethren of the Common Life,’ ““The Friends of God’’ and the like—who foregathered to cultivate a personal re- ligious life in the midst of the institutional religion of the medieval Church. And there are to-day— and for some time have been—groups of men and women who have seen afar-off the promise of the City of God, seeking together the vision and the power which will mobilize the Church once more for its great task. If historical analogy is to be trusted there will come through this corporate search a revelation which will in good time spread throughout the Church and set it on its true original course. “That the Protestant churches are moving in this direction needs no demonstration to any who know their recent history. The sense of social compunction has driven virtually all these churches to proclaim social creeds and programs; and the notable gathering in England familiarly known as Copec registers the ground gained by the renewed social consciousness. But we have yet to see a massive forward movement all along the line. But it is evident that the modern vision when it comes will not lead to the medieval development of the Church into “a social entity inclusive both of the sociological circles of religion and of the politico-social forms.’’® For while the modern movement is toward unity, it will be suspicious at any attempt at a unitary organization of the world. Both biology and history offer evidence that sug- gests that a free and abundant efflorescence of social Peer enone IN THEO WORLD: “183 groups within and across national frontiers is not inconsistent with and may minister to the ends of unity even more than a central unitary control such as the medieval Papacy sought to establish. In the modern world the primary function of the Church is of the prophetic order; it is specifically a ministry of revelation, and it is by passing on the revelation and kindling in men and groups a longing and a passion for the City of God that it will accomplish its own purpose in the world of to-day. 5. MORALS AND VALUE. There is very little more necessary in the realm of religious thought than that we should discard the notion that it is the business of religion to teach morals. “The business of religion is with ends and values. Morality was in its origin a discovery made by 2 process of trial and error. Certain kinds of con- duct were found to be deleterious and others favor- able to the well-being of the group and its mem- bers; the former were condemned and prohibited, and the latter became the recognized rule. “They were the mores; and together they constituted the morality of the group. Of course, the difference between moral and immoral conduct has its roots in the human constitution and in the nature of things. The universe is so made that this behavior makes for well-being and that for harm. But the character of any mode of conduct could only be discovered by trying it out. Our moral codes have grown out of the racial experience of life in the world. The man who discovered that honesty is the best policy was probably a primitive business 184 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY man who had his fingers burnt in a crooked trans- action; and it is probable that the market-place has always been a more effectual school of pure morals than the church. For morals are discoveries made upon a strictly empirical basis. It is of course true that, with the appearance of a moral philosophy, something in the nature of moral education became possible; and the habit of moral conduct, and with it the development of social life, helped to foster the growth of certain supra-moral values such as honor, sportsmanship, chivalry and the like, which tended. to encourage conduct that went beyond the strict requirements of the prevailing moral code. But morality grew out of the soil of life; it was the result of discoveries made in and through the actual business of living. But once morals have been codified, they tend to keep society in a static condition. It is indeed not necessary that the morals should be set out in a formal series of rules and prescriptions. “The con- ventional morality of an average English-speaking community is in the main an unwritten code, and none the less potent on that account. But whether the mores have been codified and have acquired the force of law or merely remain an unsystematized sittlichkeit, they tend to be regarded as registering the maximum of social obligation. "That was the position to which the Hebrew mores that had been formulated in the Mosaic Law had come in the time of Jesus, who saw that they were impeding the spiritual growth of the people. It is not indeed unnatural that a society should come to regard its mores as being permanently valid and sufficient. THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 185. They have given the society survival and security; and when to this is added the weight of the herd- mind, it is inevitable that a society should resent and resist any infringement or alteration of its mores. Nevertheless, such an attitude brings on an arrest of development; and it was because He saw this that Jesus told His disciples that unless their goodness went beyond the conventional limits pre- scribed by the Scribes and Pharisees they could not enter the Kingdom of God. Probably most people who have looked upon the title of one of Nietzsche’s books, Beyond Good and Evil, have been too shocked by it to open the book. But Jesus’ teach- ing did actually require conduct which lay beyond the conventional good and evil of the rabbinical schools. Moral codes, like other human achieve- ments, are purely relative, save only in their recog- nition of a distinction between good and evil; but the classification of behavior as good or bad has notoriously varied with time and circumstances. Religion is concerned with morals only in a sec- ondary way. Its first interest is with the realm of ends. Now, so far as Christianity is concerned, its first postulate is One who is the ultimate source of life and the ultimate end of itsends. And its funda- mental interest is that men should be brought into the knowledge of this One and to share His life. Its primary ministry is to transform the natural man into the spiritual man, who partakes of the spirit or the nature of God. But while this is the primary aim of Christianity, it also embraces its corollary, the growth of a spiritual society which will also share the divine nature and be, as St. Paul 186 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY suggests, a dwelling-place of God. Such a society the Church is ideally even now; and its business is to transfigure the world by the diffusion of its life through it. Its ultimate end is God, but what that means we cannot now know; and however inspired imagination may dramatize it, it can do nothing better than give us pictures that display a refinement and an enhancement of terrestrial beauty and happi- ness; and it can do nothing to show us what it means to God in terms of His own purpose. So that for the practical purpose of its terrestrial activity, it has to define a nearer and provisional end; and it does this in its ideal of the unity of life in time under the image of the Kingdom or the City of God. Here in this conception is the ground of those values which it is its business to reveal and to communicate to mankind. The Kingdom or the City of God is the regulative principle of the Church’s thought and teaching upon the conduct of life. Now, the values which the Church is called to proclaim and to reveal are of the “‘spiritual’’ sort as contrasted with the ‘‘worldly.” In the New ‘Testament the term “‘world’’ carries two meanings. It is used to describe the universe of human life— ‘God so loved the world’’; and it is used also to connote the sphere in which the end of life is con- ceived to be in immediate and palpable goods of the “temporal” kind—in wealth, fame, power, the satisfactions of sense. And over against this world the New Testament sets up the Kingdom of God, and while it respects and may sanctify temporal good, it yet exalts above it a spiritual good, It tHe CHURCH IN THE WORED:: . 187, shifts the emphasis from the outward to the in- ward; and while the “‘world’’ assesses a man by what he does or possesses, in the Kingdom of God he is assessed by what he is. The world’s criterion is quantitative; that of the Kingdom is qualitative. The center of gravity of interest is removed from the possession of things to the spiritual enjoyment of things. A modern novelist has said that “‘life is a number of little things intensely realized,’’ which saying is not far from the Kingdom of God; and the society that we live in is sick with acquisitiveness because it is deficient in the faculty of realization. Mr. Santayana has said that it is not the length of life that matters but its height; and that saying also is of the Kingdom of God. For in the spiritual region, the stress is (as I have said) upon quality rather than upon quantity; there the goods of life are the imponderables. But of this no man can be persuaded. It is acon- clusion that may indeed be established by a reason- ing process; but it may be a conclusion without being a conviction. It requires something more than a syllogism to make it an active principle of life. It only becomes a vital and regulative influ- ence when a man perceives that life has a tran- scendental meaning and end, which is an affair of revelation or vision. "The Kingdom of God does not begin or consist in doing or even in believing something but in seeing something. And this seeing is an experience of the kind sometimes called “‘mystical’’; but by whatever name you call it, it is a real and well-authenticated experience. And in those who have received the vision, the vision vali- 188 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, dates itself by its results. Seeing something is fol- lowed by believing and doing corresponding things. Of the psychology of spiritual vision, this is not the place to speak. Here we are concerned with it as the initial Christian experience. It is pertinent to observe that the idea of vision fills a very consider- able place in the New Testament; and there is a word concerning Moses in the Epistle to the Hebrews which seems very succinctly all that I am now endeavoring to say: “By faith Moses, when he Was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill- treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, accounting the re- proach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked unto the recompense of reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the King, for he endured as seeing the invisible.” Faith, according to the same writer, is “the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen”; it is the organ by which we per- ceive the supra-sensible, transcendental setting and end of life. In the Fourth Gospel, the initial Chris- tian experience is said to involve “‘seeing the King- dom of God’’; and the story of the man born blind is meant to be a dramatic exposition of the miracle of revelation. The perception of spiritual values is the breaking-in of a new and transforming light; and the experience is not wrongly described as a conversion—which is to say, an inner revolution. “All things are become new.” ‘“The former things are passed away.”” The man who undergoes this revolution is described as a ‘“‘new creation’: and the THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 189 experience may be assigned to the category of “emergents.”’ As we have already seen, the first business of the Church is to bring this experience to man; but though the word “‘conversion”’ still remains in its vocabulary, it has largely left the business of con- version to the small sectarian groups that flourish upon its frontiers. ‘This at any rate gives the Church an opportunity of reconsidering what it means by conversion. For—in Protestant evan- gelicalism at least—conversion has largely been understood with reference to the current canons of decent conduct. It has directed chiefly at the vari- ous types of moral anarchy and self-indulgence which are commonly regarded as constituting ‘sin’; and the transformation of a drunkard into a decent member of society is described as a con- version. A conversion no doubt it is; but conver- sion in the Christian sense is something much more radical than the rescue of derelict and degenerate individuals and their reformation into self-respect- ing and law-abiding citizens. William Blake seems to have grasped the distinctive idea of a Christian conversion rather more clearly than orthodox evan- gelical Christianity has done. That the natural man needed conversion Blake did not doubt: and he held a doctrine of original sin hard and definite enough to satisfy the straitest sect of evangelical Christians. But the result of conversion according to Blake differs very profoundly from the conven- tional view. According to the latter at its best, we are transfigured into saints; but Blake holds that we are turned into artists. ‘A Poet, a Painter, a 190 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY Musician, an Architect, the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.” But the main idea that underlies Blake’s doctrine is something that applies to the saint no less than to the artist, when it is properly understood. A phrase used by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch concern- ing John Donne really describes the sort of per- sonality that Blake sees emerging out of conversion. “He was one of the tribe of strong generative giants. . . .’ It was such a breed that Blake de- sired to see. For him, the evil of the world con- sisted in the icy iron-bound systems of thought and conduct which bind men’s souls and suppress their imaginations; and the redemption of men lay in releasing their creative instincts from their fetters. But the saint may be as creative as the artist. Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, on another page of the volume from which I have just quoted, repeats an observation of Newman’s that to invent a style in literature is “‘like crossing a country before roads are made from place to place.”” And we may adopt the figure as a good description of the kind of good- ness which is essentially Christian. Goodness is in the common acceptation the sincere effort toward conformity to a stereotyped system of conduct, a standardized moral regimen. But the entire mean- ing of Jesus in Matt. v is that the impulse of good- ness must be released from the bondage of precise rule and prescription and become creative, crossing a country in which there are as yet no roads. For instance, love begins timidly by setting a bound to revenge—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and no more; but, says Jesus, set love free and see how WHE GHURGH IN THE; WORED 191 far it goes. It will abstain from retaliation alto- gether; it will go on to show that there is no ill-will by turning the other cheek; it will even go so far as to attempt to turn the aggressor into a friend by serving him along the very lines of his aggression— it will give him the cloak with the coat, and carry his baggage a second mile. Burke in a speech on India pleaded for a policy of ‘“‘hazardous benevo- lence’; and that may be a good way of describing the peculiar quality of Christian goodness. It is not conformity to a law however exalted and exact- ing; it is an impulse, imaginative, hazardous, origi- nal, creative. And here we find the essential difference between the effect of teaching morals and of revealing values. Morals make for a static character which moves in settled and well-marked grooves; but a perception of values sets the spirit free to take a road to which there is and can be no end. It mounts one peak only to see a higher ahead; it is impelled to outdo its own best, to transcend its own utmost achieve- ments; it is forever moving into a country in which there are no roads. But its perception of values gives it a direction; and though it may not know whither it is going, the way it knows. ‘This, I venture to suggest, is what St. Paul means when he speaks of being free from the law. He is free henceforth because his conduct is determined from within himself. His life is no longer an affair of rule and prescription; and his conduct will be determined at any given moment not by reference to a code, but by the reaction of his sense of values to the circumstances of the moment. It is not 192 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY permissible to speak of Christian ethics as though there were a definite and fixed system of conduct, classified under headings and sub-headings, and obligatory upon the Christian man. ‘The tendency to regard the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount asa ‘law’ is untrue to the genius and intention of Christianity. In the fifth chapter of Matthew when Jesus bids us turn the other cheek to the aggressor, he is not laying down a commandment but giving an illustration of how the man of good- will will act under particular conditions; and Jesus is not afraid to carry the logic of his principle even to the length of making the man of good-will act in ways that worldly wisdom deems absurd and fantastic. But that is always how a man looks when he makes a road into a roadless country. Blake is right when he thinks of conversion as emancipation. But he is no less right when he conceives of it as much the release of imagination as the release of will: for it is a release of the whole man. [If it were true that no man can be a Christian who is not an architect or a poet or a painter or a musician, it would go hard with many of us; for the absence of the technical faculty which can give outward and visible embodiment to a great emotion is a mis- fortune rather than a crime. And Blake would no doubt open the door of the Kingdom to the man who would be a poet but cannot. But that the quickening of the spiritual life stimulates the imagi- nation and quickens the faculty of aesthetic appre- ciation is beyond doubt. I remember reading many years ago a statement by a missionary in Central THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD = 193 Aftica that, when their converts began to appre- ciate natural beauty, they knew that their work was beginning to tell. A good historical case may be made out that genuine religious revivals are often accompanied by an efflorescence of art. We have indeed seen how with the three successive spiritual renewals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries there came also the three architectural thrusts, the last of which culminated in the great triumphs of Gothic building. And if, in more recent times, spiritual renewal has not brought with it a renewal to art, it is because of the reign of the deplorable heresy which supposed that art was alien if not hostile to religion. It is one of the most reassuring signs of the times we live in that we are learning that there is not only no incompatibility between relig- ion and art, but that, separated from one another, they “‘both suffer impoverishment and decay.”’ But it is not into saint and artist only that con- version may turn a man; he may equally be a scientist. For the life of the spirit is concerned with truth no less than with goodness and beauty. Here Blake would perhaps demur; for to him the Reasoning Power of man it was that enchained the Imagination; and his fulminations against Bacon, Newton and Locke and others, “‘who teach doubt and experiment,’’ were inspired by his fear that a pure intellectualism might destroy faith and take the soul out of art. Nevertheless, while it is true that intellectualism has generally tended toward scepticism, even Blake could not in his quieter and more reflective moments have raised any protest against the disinterested pursuit of truth that science 194. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY ideally is. And had he lived into another century he might have modified his judgment. That the chief interest in science nowadays is its usefulness as an aid to earning a living or its value as an acces- sory to commerce and to the military arts does not alter the fact that its intention and its spiritual use is as a pursuit of truth; and the only true scien- tist is he who practices science as a disinterested search of truth, because truth like goodness and beauty is an absolute value. ‘The rest are mere hucksters. A conversion that is genuinely spiritual will be a conversion to these ultimate values of Goodness, Truth and Beauty; and it is the business of the Church to go out to make such converts. But before it can do so it must set itself to recover that “word of God which is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and... piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit,” and is able to release and to enthrone the spirit in the lives of men. 6. THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC. But with the mat- ter of goodness it is necessary to dwell somewhat longer. For while science and art may in their practice be the monopoly of specially fitted people, the practice of goodness is the concern of every man. It is indeed necessary that the spirit of truth and the spirit of beauty should inform the practice of goodness—that our good works should be works of truth and beauty as well. But the practice of goodness is an affair of daily, of momentary con- duct; and it is essential that we should have some THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 195 notion of what it consists in. To the ordinary man it is something that he sees in Jesus of Naza- reth; by common consent he was goodness in the flesh. And in Him goodness has been translated once for all into an image which he who runs may read. It has been said that Jesus had less to say than the Greeks had upon the other ultimate values; and that is true. Nevertheless, it remains that goodness, truth and beauty did dwell together in Him and dwelt so closely that they seem to be but a single thing; and that single thing St. Paul would have said was the Spirit. He exhaled goodness as a flower its fragrance, and His good deeds were as a fruit of a tree. The truth that was in Him spoke in simple unstrained words that were lucid and self-authenticating as stars. And the beauty that was in Him went forth to the beauty of the flower of the field and of the faces of little children, and clothed His wayside tales with an immortal loveliness. Having the moralistic background of the Jew, He had little to say of beauty; and He was less concerned in his public teaching with truth than he was with goodness. But goodness and truth and beauty dwelt in Him and are there for the understanding eye to see. Now, it is sometimes held that St. Paul threw a sort of speculative smoke-screen over the sim- plicity of Jesus; yet when he comes to matters of conduct no one may doubt his truth to the mind of Jesus. It has to be remembered that St. Paul’s writings were addressed to Christian societies, and that his teaching upon conduct is governed by that circumstance. It is moreover true to say that his 196 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY interest is engaged only in showing and encouraging the kind of conduct that will make for the unity and the strength of the Church. But inasmuch as we know that he conceived of a time when the Church should have colonized the world, we may take his teaching as the exposition of the Christian idea of goodness. And it may be added that upon this question he had nothing to say which had not already been said by Jesus. It amounts to this: that the practice of goodness is the practice of the society-making graces. In other words, goodness is synonymous with love. The Christian mind can never lose sight of the divine commonwealth; and its valuation and criti- cism of conduct, whether personal or collective, is its effect in helping or hindering the City of God. Good conduct is social conduct; bad conduct is anti- social conduct. I have suggested already that the criterion by which Jesus judged behavior was the question whether it made for the increase and the unification of life—which is only another way of saying the same thing. And it is the same thing that Dr. Schweitzer appears to mean when he says that the rescue of civilization hangs upon our learning anew a reverence for life. But when we speak of social conduct we should be clear that we mean something different from the discipline and obedience by which an army is held together. We are concerned with an organic and not a mechan- ical society; and social conduct in the Christian sense is that collective and personal behavior that starts from a respect for the freedom and the integrity of personality. THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 197 Here once more William Blake has something to tell us. He starts from his doctrine of the Minute Particular, which is the individual man, and at the same time “‘a divine member of the divine Jesus,”’ that is to say, an organic part of the ultimate human family whose soul and center is Jesus. Blake as we know waged ceaseless and furious war against the tyranny of abstract ideas, and denied that they had any real existence except as actual relations between persons. It is easy to utter loud-sounding generali- ties about justice and liberty, and to speak and to think of them as objective realities in themselves; but they have no actual being apart from persons. That is why so many crimes have been committed in the name of justice and of liberty. It is possible to deny them to men in the very act of defending them. We may belie our ideals by the very means we use to reach them. ‘The one sovereign sanctity is personality; the sacredness of justice and liberty is a derivative from this. They are holy because they are the only conditions under which person- ality can rise to its full stature; and they are not to be fought for by any method which dishonors personality. “That were to subordinate the greater to the less, to undermine and destroy the founda- tions on which one professes to be building. It is personality—at once a Minute Particular and the one real Universal—that supremely matters. “Labor well,’’ cries Blake. “Labor well the Minute Particular: attend to the Little Ones.’’ 198 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY And this is the heart of his ethic: He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars, General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer, For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power. The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Here surely is bedrock—the actual personality of individuals. This is the one sure, fixed point for thought and conduct. ‘True reverence for and a right relation to personality—this is the law and the prophets. But this right relation is defined by the social nature of personality. Its name is fellowship; and whatsoever destroys fellowship is anathema. Self- ishness, whether of the individual or of the group, is the abiding curse. Is this thy soft family love, Thy cruel patriarchal pride, Planting thy family alone, Destroying all the world beside?® This is Blake’s comment upon the jingo patriot- ism of his day, and it retains its original sting. Walls, whether of steel or stone, whether tariff walls or walls of false pride, are of their father the devil. The law of God for the life of man is reciprocity, mutuality; call it what you will. Ina world where THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 199 men need each other and cannot do without each other, where exclusiveness spells starvation of spirit, the tempers and policies which sunder men from one another spring from a kind of atheism. They are, as Dora Greenwell says in a similar connection, a denial of God because a denial of men. Instead of the healing and unitive influences which should produce the fellowship of his vision, Blake saw the world overrun with passions of vengeance, and doctrines of punishment, which, while they are supposed to repress the evil of the world, deepened and widened the gulf which divides man from his fellows. Our human frailty makes it impossible for us to live together except upon a basis of mu- tual forbearance and forgiveness. The true life is that which in all its activities makes for human brotherhood. That man has found himself who has learnt to bind his brother-man to his heart in healing, forgiving, long-suffering love. Blake saw with his swift insight that this was the real distinction of the Christian principle of conduct. “There were great and notable virtues which men practiced and praised before Jesus appeared—there was love of country, the sense of honor, the passion for righteousness, the love of justice, the capacity for sacrifice. There is nothing distinctively or exclusively Christian about these. The one point at which Jesus taught a definite advance in the region of personal relationships was in His command that men should love their ene- mies. But this was a profound and far-reaching revolution. It broke down forever the traditional notion that the world was permanently and incura- 200 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY bly divided into friends and enemies; it destroyed the midmost “‘wall of partition’; and His emphasis upon forgiveness is the sequel to this new principle. Forgiveness is the bridge that spans the gulf between me and my enemy. It was the faith of Jesus that the forgiving spirit was not to be resisted, and not even the infamy of His own condemnation and crucifixion shook that faith. This point Blake grasped with characteristic thoroughness; and though no good forgiver himself, he was the inde- fatigable preacher of forgiveness. ““The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of sin.’ ““TUhe glory of Christianity is the conquer by forgiveness.”’ Why should punishment weave the veil with iron wheels of war, When forgiveness might it weave with wings of cherubim?® Blake has summed up his philosophy of conduct in his vision of Jerusalem: Lo! The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections, Enameled with Love and Kindness; and the tiles engraven gold, Labor of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are Forgiveness, The mortar and cement of the work, tears of Honesty; the nails, And the screws and iron braces are well-wrought Blandish- ments, And well-contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten, Always comforting the remembrance; the floors Humility, The ceilings Devotion, the hearths Thanksgiving. . . .1° And never more truly than this was drawn the image of that City of God toward which the Christian Gospel looks. THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 201 7. ‘THE NEED OF RENEWAL. The task of the Church is plain enough. It has to make a revelation, to speak a word that will kindle in men a perception of spiritual values and enable them by faith to see the New Jerusalem as the goal of their hope and their effort. Call this critical and decisive experience what you will— conversion, the new birth, redemption—it is for the individual the door of a new quality and power and direction of life, a creative synthesis, and his initiation into that ultimate society, the realization of which constitutes the present phase in the evolu- tion of life and which is the prevailing interest of the New Testament. ‘The task is clear, but the power is sadly to sack. The world is waiting to-day for the resurrection of the prophetic ministry of the Church. It is easy to pass judgment upon the failure of the Church and to reflect critically upon its present impotency, and we have had in recent years much diagnosis of the Church’s trouble and much prescription of remedies. On the whole it has been an amazing spectacle of shallowness and futility. Meantime the Church goes on ploughing the sands with admirable assiduity, but with no more profit than was to be expected. Yet all the time it should be as plain as daylight that none of its programs or “new era’’ movements or “efficiency devices’ is going to help it one single jot or tittle; and until the Church, through its ministry—whether clerical or lay—discovers the word of God for this day and learns how to utter it, it will remain in its present state of arrest. 202 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY This is not to say that the Church is not dis- charging a number of useful functions in the community; perhaps, indeed, for that very reason it is not discharging its own first function. Too often the Church has resolved itself into an organ of social service and supposes it is justifying its existence in that way. It would take much paper and ink to tell of the extravagances which have transformed public worship into public entertain- ment, and of the curious mentality which supposes that something has been accomplished because a crowd has gone to church. Not long ago a confer- ence of advertising men in London discussed the problems of church publicity. One wonders what on earth the kind of thing has to do with a King- dom which cometh not with observation. Reason- able announcement of church services is obviously permissible and desirable; but to suppose that there is anything gained for the Kingdom of God by a campaign of ingenious publicity is itself evidence of a complete insolvency of spiritual insight. Indeed, we shall have to confess that the Church devotes itself to social service and resorts to pub- licity schemes and entertainment in order to keep going at all, since it seems to be no longer able to do its proper work. I am by no means suggesting that there are not churches which are discharging a fine ministry of consolation and encouragement; but even at that they are helping men and women to endure the world rather than moving them to transfigure it. By its sacraments the Church is doing no little to keep alive in men’s minds the idea of the sacred THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 203 and to suggest to them the obligation to make of the whole of life a consecrate and a sacramental thing. Nevertheless, even so, the Church is chiefly marking time. The measure of its failure to meet the need of this time is to be found in the condition of its preaching ministry. That a man [wrote Carlyle in Past and Present] stand there and speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful even in its great obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifullest, most touching objects one sees on the earth. This speaking man has indeed in these times wandered terribly from the point; has, alas, as it were, totally lost sight of the point; yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him? Of all public functionaries, boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has? A man pro- fessing and never so languidly making still some endeavor to save the souls of men: con- trast him with a man professing to do little but to shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find the point again, this Speaking One, and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him yet. “The Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living voice, nay, in a living shape and as a concrete practical exemplar: this with all our Writing and Printing functions has a perennial place. Could he but find the point again... . 204 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY That was written in 1840; and the intervening eighty years have not robbed it of its point, nay, indeed, they have rather sharpened it. For by general report—for one who is himself a preacher must in these things go by hearsay—there seems to be but little point in the preaching that is to be heard nowadays. It is in many ways not to be wondered at. ‘The preacher has become a sort of maid-of-all-work to the community; a useful public functionary and committee-man; an admin- istrator and organizer of ecclesiastical machinery; a Jack-of-all-trades and master least of his own. After a week spent in good works, most of which he should have left to others, he settles down on Friday to put together a hurried salad of senti- mental and pious commonplaces on the basis of his conventional technique of text, expository introduction and three heads—as though the whole art of the sermon were that of stretching a scripture to cover a skeleton—and then he wonders why folk are not at church on Sunday morning. Here there is little hope until the preacher takes his ser- mon seriously and treats it as what it is—the main business of his life, not one of the irons which he _ has to keep in the fire, but as the fire itself—and orders the remainder of his active life on that under- standing. Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has lately done a good service—especially to preachers if they but knew it—by publishing a selection of passages from John Donne’s sermons, and in his introduc- tion he summarizes Donne’s own idea of his preaching office. THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 205 Donne, indeed, often makes use of musical metaphors when he speaks of preaching; the preacher, he says, is a watchman, placed on a high tower to sound a trumpet; his preach- ing was the trumpet’s voice; it was thunder; it was the beating of a drum, the tolling of a bell of warning; it was a lovely song, sung to an instrument; the preacher should not speak with “‘uncircumcized lips or an extem- poral or irreverent or over-homely and vulgar language’; his style should be modeled on that of the Holy Ghost, whose style was a diligent and an artificial style, and who in penning the Scriptures ‘‘delights himself, not only with a profusion, but with a delicacy and harmony and melody of language; with height of Metaphors and other figures, which may mark greater impressions upon the hearers.”’ It is true that Donne lived in the great days of English speech; Mr. Pearsall Smith speaks justly of ‘‘all the music and splendor of the great con- temporary speech’’; and the modern preacher is like all other modern men afflicted by the general debasement of English speech in our time. Never- theless, the preacher is not excused from holding his vocation in the high and august temper of John Donne: and he is in nowise excusable for poverty and sloppiness of speech, since he is living, or should be, within the daily hearing of the incom- parable music of the authorized version of the Bible. Mr. Augustine Birrell is reported to have 206 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY said, in answer to a question concerning oratory in the British House of Commons, that there was none, and that what the House nowadays required of a man was “the just word, the clean phrase and no frills,” than which there is no more precise description of the speech of the English Bible. And into some such speech as that preaching should be cast—however great the requisite pains—if it is worth engaging in at all. The technique of preach- ing alone requires much more attention than the present ordering of a preacher’s life permits. But of more moment than this is the circum- stance that the preacher is set to declare ‘‘the word of God,’’ which means that the final significance of his utterance lies not in what he consciously says, but in the undertones and the overtones which by some sure and incredible miracle go with it. It is a well-known experience of the preacher that now and again the poor thing that leaves his lips is transformed on its way to the hearer’s ears into a living quickening word; and so poor did he think his thing to be that he hears of its effect with sincere astonishment. But it may be taken as sure that such effects are produced only as the stuff of his own life has gone into his utterance, aye, and some strain of life that transcends his own. His colors must be mixed with his own blood, and perchance also with the blood of Christ. Yet this cannot be unless he is sedulous and faithful in the culture of his own inner life, and in the discipline that keeps his mind informed, his reason supple, his imagina- tion lively and his intuitions swift and sensitive. Preaching the Word of God is a costly enterprise. THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 207 But preaching is not the affair of the preacher only. It was said of the ‘Old Vic’’—that theater in a London working-class district which has pre- sented every authentic play of Shakespeare—that there the audience is a part of the cast. And it is no less true that the air and temper of the congrega- tion do either make or unmake the preaching. But there is a consideration that takes us far beyond this matter of “‘rapport’’ between pulpit and pew. Dr. Moberly has shown that the Christian priest is but the representative and organ of the priestly function of the Church as a whole; and in the same way, however strongly individual a preacher may be, he is to be conceived as the representative and the mouthpiece of the prophetic office of the Church. It is true that nowadays he is assumed to be teacher as well as preacher; but it is in his preach- ing that his first importance is still conceived to lie. And as preacher, he is as much the voice of the Church as a voice to the Church, perhaps even more the former than the latter. Not indeed that he is merely the exponent of the Church’s tradi- tional mind; he is rather to be the revealer of its living soul, the spokesman of its longing and desire and its “good news.’’ He does not stand and say: “Thus saith the Church,” but ‘Thus saith the Lord,”’ the Lord of the Church, who sends His word to the world through the Church. So that the renewal of the preaching-office of the Church is bound up with the renewal of the Church itself; and that is in the Church’s own hands. 208 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 8. THE SPRINGS OF POWER. The victory of Jesus on the Cross lay in the invincibility of the faith that bound him to God, and of the love that bound him to man; and the life of the spirit in the individual and in society depends upon the vitality and vigor of its faith and its love. Faith is a word which has varied meanings in Christian usage, and Dr. DuBose gives us a defini- tion which covers them all; it is “the setting of our entire selves Godward,’ a disposition which includes belief, trust, submission, obedience, expect- ancy and whatever else may be implied in our relations to God. It lies beyond our present pur- pose to discuss the psychology of faith; but biologi- cally it may be regarded as a conviction that there is a transcendental meaning and end to life, a conviction that expresses itself in a longing and an effort to attain that end. In the specific sphere of religion that end is identified with a living God who is love; and faith becomes an aspiration toward God and an effort to establish a vital relation with Him. Consequently, faith becomes a spirit of dis- covery and of exploration; it acknowledges no fron- tier to knowledge and experience short of God; it becomes what we may rightly describe as a biologi- cal impulse, not only the Godward disposition, but the Godward thrust of life. It is life’s organ for listening-in into the silence and looking out into the dark; its territory is the unknown region beyond the land’s-end of sense and reason. It has its own characteristic activity, which is prayer. It is worth recalling how much Jesus prayed and what place prayer had in His teaching; THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 209 and the little company in the Upper Room when it found itself alone in the world fell to prayer as simply and as naturally as it sat at meat. And they thus continued until prayer opened out into vision and power. Essentially prayer is simply “‘the prac- tice of the presence of God’’; and it is a necessary and inevitable function of the spirit. It requires neither word nor gesture, though human frailty must have its word and its gesture as a gauge of teality; prayer is a mind turned purposefully God- ward and sending some hailing thought, a longing, a desire into the Unseen—and keeping on doing it. That is all; that is all that was done in the Upper Room; and the end of it is Pentecost. St. Paul tells us in one place that we do not know what we should pray for as we ought; but never- theless our prayers have to do with the Spirit who maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered. So that they become part of the travail of God, in creation and in life, to bring us men to our estate of divine sonship, and the universe to its consummation. It is well to remind ourselves how stupendous a matter this of prayer is. We stand prisoned in a world of sense, closed in by horizons beyond which our eyes cannot pass, burdened with a common mortality; yet there is in us that which bids us look out into the dark beyond and to speak into that silent unknown; and it is the profoundest and most serious thing that we ever do. We do indeed degrade it to mean and selfish ends, making of it no more than a vehicle of little wayside desires; but the real measure and manner of this great thing is the gesture of Him 210 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY who through the eternal spirit offered Himself without blemish to God. Every word of prayer however halting is the sign that “that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home.” It is perhaps better not to bow the knee in prayer except one think of it as the greatest thing that mortal man can ever dare to do. It is part of the vast travail that brings this caravan of life ever nearer its goal. | But the life of the Church depends no less on its love than it does on its faith, We are as yet no more than apprentices in the art and experience of love. We have still to learn how much more love brings to us than it takes from us; and we have hardly begun to realize how much living fellow- ship adds to the strength of our life. It brings us balance and wholesomeness of judgment, knowl- edge and understanding, and certain intensifications of experience, things which are the salt of life. We have good reason to know how valuable can be the fun and good fellowship of the easy cama- raderie of an idle hour; and that is only on the surface of life. But when we reach the deeper levels of fellowship in a common purpose or a common hope, then more goes on than we are for the moment aware of. Our fellowship becomes a mystic market-place where we barter lite for life in a communion of love, a mutual transfusion of spirit by which life is fertilized and multiplied. The more momentous the concerns of our fellow- ship, the more deep-running and the more vital does it become. We become each other’s stepping- stones to the high places of life, THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 211 Personality stands between God and man, bound to God by faith and to man by love; and its growth depends upon the practice of faith and love. ‘The characteristic expression of faith is prayer; the characteristic expression of love is fellowship. But neither prayer nor fellowship reaches its full power except as they are practiced together; and in this lies the final secret of Pentecost. “There was prayer and fellowship; faith and love were fused into each other; the prayer created a new power of fellowship; the fellowship created a new power of prayer. Out of that fusion came forth the power and pressure of life that broke down the barriers of fear and timidity, and swept hostility and preju- dice out of the way; and the quickening, cleansing stream of new life started out on its course through the common ways of mankind. Pentecost still holds the clue to renewal. ‘The discipline of faith in prayer, the discipline of love in fellowship, simply and patiently accepted and exercised—than this there is no other way to revival. We are too much busied with “‘efficiency’’ and organization and machinery—all of which are good in their own place. But our preoccupation with these things is the symptom of the deficit of life in ourselves. Yet the attention we devote to them is thrown away if we have not the life which gives them the only meaning they have. We have to make a business of seeking this increment and renovation of life, if we are to find it. It is not enough to wait for it to happen; we shall have to go out of our way to secure it, to forsake trodden paths that have lost their vitality 212 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY and resiliency, and to learn anew the neglected practice of faith and love in prayer and fellowship. It is a commonplace that the great forward strides of life in the Church of God have been made through little companies who did this very thing and went on doing it until the floods descended; and there is no other known way of spiritual renewal than this. nN SN Ut b&w ia; le: NOTES PART I L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, p. 312: “The whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one; and the biologist may now regard the universe as biocentric.”’ H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, p. 252 (Quoted in J. Y. Simpson, Man and the Attainment of Immortality, p. 238). . Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 138. On this, see Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist, p. 46. . H. G. Wells in Men Like Gods, p. 66. . The bibliography of the Beloved Community is more extensive than is supposed. For other names see Lewis Mumford, The History of Utopias. See also Hertzler, History of Utopian Thought. . Heb. xi. 13-16. . Vernon Kellog, Human Life as the Biologist Sees It, p. 135: ‘Future man may be consciously deter- mined by man to-day. . . . Human evolution has been turned over to human kind itself to direct.”’ . F. W. Maitland in the Introduction to O. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 27. . G. D. H. Cole, Conflicting Social Obligations, Proceedings of the Aristotlian Society, 1914, p. 154. In Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, Ch. VIII. In The History of Freedom. 213 214 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 13 ats 15. 16. Ly’; 18. wow Ne W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 122. J. A. Thomson, The System of Animate Nature, II, pp. 574 f. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119. Acts xvi. 21: ‘These men do exceedingly trouble our city and set forth customs which it is not lawful for us to receive or to observe, being Romans.” Edward Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, p. 300. L. P. Jacks, The Faith of a Worker, p. 16. PART II . G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 25 ff. W. J. Perry, The Growth of Civilization, pp. 195 ff. W. H.R. Rivers, Social Organization, p. 169. . On this, see Dr. Oman’s fine essay in Science, Relig- ton and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham, pp. 261. . In maintaining this view, I find general confirma- tion in C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution. The word “‘emergent’’ as used in this book has the sense given to it by Morgan in this volume. . The subject matter of the latter portion of this section will be more fully treated in the pro- jected second volume of this work. . See C. H. Dodd, The Meaning of St. Paul for Today. . Jackson and Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, I, p. 252; Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 103. . Ep. ad Diognetum 5-6 (Quoted by T. R. Glover in The Conflict of Religions in the Roman Empire, pp. 159 f.). 10. 1g —a\ Noe — Ww a Ooo co N Sy Ui -b& WwW Ne NOTES pals; This section is to be read as a summary of conclu- sions; and the discussion upon which these conclusions rest is reserved for the second vol- ume of my projected “‘trilogy.’’ But the sum- mary here given is necessary to the general argument of this book. S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity. Alexander's view is accepted, with certain modifications, by C. Lloyd Morgan in Emergent Evolution. . This section is a very inadequate summary of the subject. I hope to discuss the nature of the distinctive Christian experience and ethic in the third and last volume of this series. . Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119. . See John Oman, Grace and Personality, passim. PART III . In The History of Freedom, p. 27. W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Chutches, ani 2s . Ulhorn, Christian Charity in the Early Church, Davey . Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, IV, p. 76. . Ulhorn, op. cit., p. 226. . See Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, pp. 242 f. (ed. 1883). . The passage quoted is from the present writer’s The Chutch in the Commonwealth, p. 35. . Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, I, p. 51. . Retractions, II, 40. s DeCiv: Det, XV. dbs Tt 8 A . Ad Marcell, 138, c. 15 (Quoted in Nevill Figgis, The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City of Giod'p.57,)" palJesoiu, Det:, Vi 24: 216 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 28. . On this episode see A. L. Smith, Church and State SUED LOL OD s Oy hoe . Seein R. L. Poole, Medieval Thought and Learn- ing, p. 7, a translation of the letter in which Gregory forbade the study of the Classics. wilbids pps 9k, . Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 242. . On this see Nevill Figgis, Political Aspects of St. Augustine, pp. 84 ff. . D. B. Munro, The Middle Ages, p. 177. - Quoted by Henry Adams in Mont St. Michel and. Chartres, p. 140. . The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City of God, p. 101. . Ibid., p. 100. Figgis frequently makes this state- ment in other of his works. . Otto Giercke, The Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 10; cf. for another angle, Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel & Chartres, p. 44. . On the neutralization of the Augustinian Doctrine of Grace, see B. B. Warfield in The Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, Il, p. 224. . See A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages, p. 6; Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 276. . Robertson, op. cit., p. 265. 27. Epp. II, 1 (addressed to the magistrates of Viterbo 1199): “According to civil law, criminals con- victed of treason are punished with death and their goods are confiscated. . . . With how much more reason should they who offend Jesus, the son of the Lord God, by deserting the faith, be cut off from Christian communion and stripped of their goods?”’ Robertson, op. cit., p. 261. in the Middle Ages, Lecture III, and F. S. NOTES 217 Stevenson, Robert Groesterte, Bishop of Lin- coin, Ch: XIII. . Lord Morley, Miscellanies, IV, p. 16. weheidis pn. OO; . Quoted in Marcus Dods, Erasmus and Other Essays; see also Preserved Smith, Life of Erasmus. . Cambridge Modern History, I, p. 3. . See Nevill Figgis, Political Aspects of St. Augus- tine’s City of God, p. 58. PART IV +» In Church and State in the Middle Ages, Lecture II. . The relevant passages are quoted in H. C. O'Neill, New Things and Old in Saint Thomas Aquinas, pp. 244 ff. . G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, I. . T. M. Lindsay, History of the Reformation, pp. 12658 . Edward Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, pp. 291 f. . The quoted words are from E. Troeltsch; but I have failed to recover the passage. . William Blake, Jerusalem, f.55, lines 51, 60-64. MIDI ike 2s, . Ibid., f. 20, lines 34, 35. . Ibid., f. 12, lines 29-37. . W. P. DuBose, The Gospel in the Gospels, p. 149. 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