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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.
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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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