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THE NEW MAN 
 AND THE DIVINE SOCIETY 
 
gS 
 9 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 NEW YORK - BOSTON « CHICAGO - DALLAS 
 ATLANTA » SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LimTEep 
 LONDON - BOMBAY » CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 _ THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lip, 
 TORONTO 
 
omy =| bid} of fp 
 ND” an, 
 
 JAN.13 1941 
 
 THE NEW MAN. 
 
 
 
 
 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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