ae i. Fanaa nan IO EAA EE LAAT RELA LO AED LAE AEE ARENA I ENE eee a nes Se et a te ee eens 7” ts ee , ris hie Feo als ay aus rh = A is A pay a» f Pay vi ah) Vadis | i) I 4 FAITH IN CHRIST BY JOHN J. MOMENT CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK 9 9$ 9% 9 1917 Copryricut, 1917, BY, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published April, 1917. TO THE OFFICERS AND MEMBERS OF THE HIGH STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, IN SINCERE APPRECIATION OF THEIR UNFAILING FRATERNITY, THEIR GEN- EROSITY, THEIR LOYALTY TO CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH, AND THEIR COURAGE IN SERVICE PREFACE WE have travelled a long road intellec- tually during these three or four centuries since the various groups of Reformers, each in its own fashion, revised the creeds of Augustine and the early councils. We have invented new instruments for our science, more revolutionary in their way than the steam-engine and the motor- car. We have developed new processes of thought, more revolutionary still. We have shifted our point of view from its previous proud position at the centre of the universe to a very modest location on a satellite of one of an innumerable conglomeration of suns. Altogether we have achieved for ourselves a new world more radically than if we had packed our baggage and migrated to Mars. One need not be surprised, therefore, if the ancient theologies seem to the ordinary man of to-day, not merely unsatisfactory, which would be bad enough, but uninteresting, which is hopelessly worse. vil vill PREFACE Yet wisdom will not die with us, and neither was it born with Galileo, or with Bacon, or Charles Darwin. Ogniben con- cealed no meagre depth of thought beneath the frivolity of expression when he said: ‘‘A philosopher’s life is spent in discover- ing that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he re-states it, to the con- fusion of somebody else in due time.” Our new truth, when it has at last come to maturity, ordinarily turns out to be but the amplification of a truth so old as al- most to have been forgotten. This book attempts a brief definition and defense of faith in Christ which shall be frankly modern both in its presupposi- tions and in its modes of thought; but I shall be much, disappointed if we do not get far enough in our thinking to become aware, at every point, of our spiritual kinship with the past. I am under peculiar obligations to Presi- PREFACE 1X dent William Douglas. Mackenzie, of Hart- ford Theological Seminary, for his goodness in going over the manuscript and giving me the benefit of invaluable suggestions; which is only a‘small part of my debt to him. He must not, however, be assumed to stand sponsor for any of my theological positions. J. J. M. Vill. VIII. CONTENTS I. THE DEMOCRACY OF TRUTH Tor Prrest- In CLWEFDS (4. «wes 1 Tue Voice WITHIN AS THE VOICE OF Gop 18 Tur INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE... .- . Q7 Mopern BIsnioMANCY ....--+-:-> 32 Tur CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE... . . 36 Our INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE. ... 44 Tue NrEEep oF AUTHORITY .....-.-- 53 Tue AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE .... .- 66 Il. THE SON OF MAN Ture SEARCH FOR TRUTH .....--- 71 Ture Heart oF THE CREED .......- 78 Corn any CONDUCT ai he ee ety = 84 Lirr’s CoMPLEXITIBS .......+-+=+- 93 FartH AND CONVERSION ....-+- =: 98 Tue Travail OF REBIRTH .....- -: 104 Wart 41 APAER Chile Diciesc ells et Meueen os 111 Tur Light or THE WoRLD ...... - 120 xi Xli CONTENTS Ill. THE SON OF GOD Tue Eccentricities or Doust .... . 128 THe Mapness or ATHEISM ....... 135 Tue CuaracteR of Gop ........ 143 SIGNS Aine aa Mew key hus Ver renee Citar 151 POPULAR ALHEOLOGY iyi: aig) re mean 154 THE Imace or THE INVISIBLE. .... . 159 IV. THE HOLY SPIRIT Gop INURE: Sot (000) cue wea 165 Tue Unity or rue Sprrir ....... 180 Gop iin Socrmry ats): .) cus a Pa 184 Tue Kinepom or Gop ......... 191 V. THE CROSS THE PRoBLEM oF PRoviDENCE .... . 208 His Own InrerprereR ..... . . Be Ea 5 Tue REVELATION OF THE Cross... . . 229 Licht FROM THE WILDERNESS. .... . 228 THE First CoMMANDMENT ....... 237 Tae: Loven or Gonlytis i vee Urns | 246 ABP 3009.12 a VA CR Parte Pek AN 253 FAITH IN CHRIST I THE DEMOCRACY OF TRUTH I THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS At the very outset of all religious inquiry the question presents itself of where we are to find our spiritual authority. As in our investigation of the facts of history and science we have our obvious sources and our fairly well-established rules of evidence, so when we come to discuss questions of right and wrong, of God and immortality, those deeper facts of the world of the un- seen which has its centre in the soul of every man and which reaches out beyond the stars and across the grave, there also we must have some substantial basis on which our knowledge may rest. Time was when men in search of spir- itual truth turned with implicit trust to the priest; for the priest was properly the bearer of God’s messages to men no less than of men’s gifts and prayers to 1 2 FAITH IN CHRIST God. He was supposed to be in posses- sion of the hidden sources of knowledge. For common folk a veil hung before the mysteries, but for him the veil parted; while others listened and looked in vain, he heard the Voice beneath the thunder and saw the Face behind the sun. It was very easy in that day for men to think of a particular group of their fel- lows as invested with special powers and attributes. The king’s robes, the peasant’s smock-frock, the national costume of a people, no less than the priest’s vestments, were symbolic of qualities in which the very souls of men were supposed to be clothed. To-day, however, the priest lays aside his vestments to play tennis; an endow- ment so easily relinquished cannot be taken too seriously. King, farmer, soldier, postman, and butler alike discard their liveries when they turn from_ business to pleasure; the regimentals have be- come the mere badge and convenience of a trade. No man but may don the most rigorous uniform of the gentleman after six P. M., and none, in America and England at THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 3 least, may assume such dignity before this hour; during the daytime we are all supposed to be workmen and—with cer- tain concessions to elegance—must dress as such. A New York débutante flutters about the ballroom in a Paris gown, a Chinese mandarin strolls out of an afternoon be- neath a top-hat made in London, and, behold! we are aware that Paul’s astound- ing dictum is no longer astounding but a commonplace; the world confesses that “he hath made of one every nation of men.” The common nature of humanity is an axiom of our thought. And as we know that sovereign and _ subject, swordsman and penman, Aryan and Asian, for all their differences, are yet of one clay, so we know the priest to be a man like other men, with no secret passage into the sanc- tuary. His oracles have to pass muster under the scrutiny of our common sense or find themselves ignominiously dis- missed. The most modest member of my congregation feels himself quite ca- pable of passing judgment on the morning sermon, and he would do so still, I am 4 FAITH IN CHRIST confident, though I should replace my Geneva gown by a surplice and wear my collar reversed. For men of modern mind, the anointed priesthood, with its magic rites and peculiar privileges, is a super- stition. | Within recent generations the Bible has come to occupy the position of the ancient priesthood. To it, we have been told, and not to any man, however anointed and prayed over, we must turn for light on the mysteries of the unseen. But to seek a solution of the problem of revela- tion by this means is much like trying to solve a puzzle by throwing it into your neighbor’s yard. Along our familiar streets no fairies lurk, a man might say, but who knows what gossamer wings rustle among the forests of Arcady? In the twentieth century, we are agreed, no select group of diviners enjoys the privilege of the open vision, but we still cling to the idea that centuries ago conditions may have been very different; that the prophets of Scrip- ture may have been the divinely anointed company to whom, in very truth, the Glory was revealed and the secret mes- sages whispered. THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 3 Clearly enough the writers of Scripture did assume to be in possession of a revela- tion, but we shall do well to ask how far they assumed this as a privilege peculiar to themselves. Peter himself, archetype of our most exalted modern pontifex, ex- plicitly preached that the entire Christian community constituted a “royal priest- hood,”* and though we have commonly as- sumed that to make the priesthood uni- versal amounted to about the same thing as abolishing the institution altogether, Peter evidently did not intend to abolish it; he supposed, in his simplicity, that he was merely extending it. Throughout the New Testament the quaint, old-fashioned doctrine is, that every man may be admitted to the high, priestly privilege; that, as the Reformers insisted, there is an “immediate relation existing between every human soul and the Fountain of Truth.”? John sets forth the doctrine in its most extravagant form: “Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye know all things.’’® 'T Peter 2: 5, 9. *D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation, vol. I, p. 68. 31 John 2 : 20. 6 FAITH IN CHRIST Certain sects have taken the doctrine quite literally, and have felt so sure of their direct, supernatural revelation that they have dispensed with the Bible en- tirely. But to most of us this mysticism has a flavor no less antique and exotic than that of the anointed priesthood it- self. We may have dispensed largely with the Bible, but we have done so rather because we have lost faith in all revela- tions than because we have found a more satisfactory medium elsewhere. Certainly no messages have flashed for us amid the play of the lightnings, no demonic voices call to us in the solitude, and no angel visitants come to lend a meaning to our dreams. Nevertheless, upon us the priest’s blood- spattered mantle has indeed fallen. That we fail to recognize it on our own shoulders comes of the change of fashions it has suf- fered with the years. For its typical mod- ern cut carries no suggestion of altars and liturgies; it is not even that of the gown or cassock or high-buttoned waistcoat—mere toys these for our clerical doll play—but that of those more mysteriously symbolic garments in which John Bright stood be- THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS “i fore the queen, the working clothes of a democracy. The veil of the temple is rent in twain, and we enter, you and I, common men, into the Holy of Holies. We may ap- proach reverently, like the priest of old, for an hour of prayer; more often we drop in casually, to speak our mind on some current political question, or to pass judgment on our next-door neighbor, not at all suspecting the awful Presence into which we have come. For no man expresses an opinion as to what heaven must be, or as to what earth ought to be; as to what is right or wrong in conduct, or what is true or false in principle; no man passes a moral judg- ment, or dares in his own right to criticise the ethics of a political or commercial policy, but he is high-handedly usurp- ing the ancient, sacred prerogatives of the priesthood. And there is none of us so humble-minded but that he is assuming these prerogatives every day of his life. It is not even optional with us; we know that we must play the priest for ourselves whether we will or not, that we are indi- vidually responsible for our own convic- 8 FAITH IN CHRIST tions. The ultimate appeal has definitely passed, from all external authority whatso- ever, to the mind and conscience of the individual concerned. The revolution which has been thus effected, however, has been by no means so fundamental as_ surface indications would lead us to suppose. Even in the old days the people had much more au- thority, and the priest much less, than the forms implied. Men took the priest’s word for it that he had been in direct communion with the Unseen and were willing in consequence to base their be- liefs on the sure ground of his knowledge. But there was a limit to their credence; they insisted that he should tell them nothing except that which they already believed. You never caught the priest coming out of the sanctuary with a bit of news. From age to age, with religious’ fidelity, he mumbled the same formularies, and from age to age he emerged from the mystic Presence to preach the same truths. Or, if there was any advance in his teach- ings, it was carefully disguised as the mere, gradual, inevitable unfolding of the old principles. Let him dare to astonish THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 9 the world with a brand-new revelation, and he would see how his temerity would fare. Men would not, of course, have done anything so revolutionary as to deny the validity of priestly authority; they would merely have torn the robes from him as a manifest impostor. In ancient Israel so utterly did the priesthood fail as the medium of revela- tion that the teaching function passed from its keeping altogether and developed an order of its own, the order of prophets. And the authority of the prophets, even more patently than that of the priests, was rooted in the moral and _ spiritual sense of the audience addressed. The people themselves would doubtless have said that they accepted the prophet’s teachings for the mere reason that he was a prophet and so had received his messages from God. But how did they know he was a prophet? The Deutero- nomic rule,’ that the true prophet should be distinguished from the false by the fulfilment of his predictions, could ob- viously have been of little practical service. Indeed, another rule? specifically provided 1 Deuteronomy 18: 20 ff. . * Deuteronomy 13 : 1 ff. 10 FAITH IN CHRIST that the false prophet should be put to death even though his predictions were fulfilled. The truth is that that prophet was recognized as true whose words car- ried conviction in the minds of his hearers, so that, ultimately, the message was not accepted on the authority of the prophet; on the contrary, the prophet was accepted on account of the compelling truth of his message. And through all the years of Christian history have not devout men consistently testified that their faith in the truths of the gospel was based on their living knowl- edge of God, their consciousness of recon- ciliation and their experience of fellow- ship with him? Cardinal Newman accepted implicitly the doctrine of papal infallibility, but, more thoughtful than most worshippers at the shrine of external authority, he was aware that his acceptance of the papal man- dates must finally rest, not on his belief in papal infallibility, but on his own spir- itual insight into the truths which those mandates presented. ‘Nothing can be imposed on me,” he says, “different in kind from what I already hold—much THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 1 less contrary to it. The new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth. It must be what I may even have guessed, or wished, to be included in the apostolic revelation; and at least it will be of such a character that my thoughts readily concur in it, or coalesce with it, as soon as I hear it.’”} Designing priests have undoubtedly de- ceived their people many times, foisting on them opinions and beliefs which had little or no relation to the moral judgment of the people themselves. The example of Joseph Smith is evidence enough that to this day the ruse of a special revelation may work, even when it works havoc; and yet the Mormon prophet did not de- lude his followers into any beliefs which, for reasons of their own, they were not abundantly ready to accept. The priest’s power of deception is severely circumscribed, according as_ his power of persuasion is circumscribed. The idea that a people, except, perhaps, in the last stages of degenerate ignorance, may 1 Apologia pro Vita Sua, Everyman’s Library Edition, p. 227. 12 FAITH IN CHRIST be so priest-ridden as to believe anything the priest ‘tells them, is nonsense. They will believe what the priest tells them just so long as he is properly guarded in his utterances. Newman insists that the Pope himself has been scrupulously care- ful not to issue his infallible decrees until the Church at large has leisurely, in the course of centuries, made up its mind as to what it believes and that then he has been content to register the popular decision. According to Newman, that is, the Pope has never attempted to play spiritual leader to his people; and therein he has shown himself wise, in the way of the world; for the prophet, priest of a new message, has of necessity a hard battle to fight. He can never transplant a con- viction, any more than a humorist can transplant his enjoyment of a joke. At best he can but point his pupils to the truth which he has seen, in the hope that they, too, will see it for themselves. He will do well to arrest their attention by all the arts at his command, but, what- ever his powers, he must make up his mind to wait upon the slow vision of the crowd. THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 13 Proverbially, the prophet is without honor in his own country, before his first audience. For his crown he must expect a dunce’s cap, and when the mocking ceases it is likely to be succeeded, not by honor, but by reviling. First we despise him, and then kill him, and then—garnish his tomb! How through the centuries, he has donned his mantle of flame as if it had been a royal robe! In death he has seen, not the final doom of failure, but the first gleaming promise of success. He had known something immeasurably more bitter than death, more cruel than the tongue of fire, the lion’s claw; he had known hearts that were fat, eyes that were blind, ears that were deaf. Men do not kill another for talking Greek; that they cared enough to kill him meant, he knew, that they had begun to under- stand. For every man the perception of spir- itual truth must always be in a sense priestly, immediate. It must flash out of the soul itself, or remain hidden. For example, I may hold this man to be of loftier soul than another because he is more generous-minded toward his 14 FAITH IN CHRIST enemies. If you take issue with me, I may bring such evidence as I please in support of his magnanimity; but if you insist that a generous-minded attitude toward one’s enemies is of itself not a virtue but a weakness, how then shall I set about to bring you to my way of think- ing? The ordinary arguments at once appear predestined to futility, and the testimony of other men will not much avail. For yourself must you recognize the force and beauty of the truth which I preach, appreciate the inherent merit of magnanimity in some such fashion as the artistically trained soul appreciates a masterpiece of painting, or the scales re- main over your eyes. “Whilst the doors of this temple stand open, night and day,” said Emerson, ‘‘and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It can never be received at second hand. Truly speak- ing, it is not instruction but provocation, which I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 15 994 nothing. And the principle is precisely that set forth nearly two thousand years ago by certain other preachers in relation to the truths which they were proclaiming: “The things of the Spirit .. . are spiri- tually judged.”? “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in him- self.’ “Why even of yourselves,” Christ asked, “‘judge ye not what is right ?’’ So far is revelation from within and not from without that, more often than not, it does not come even in the teacher’s presence. Suddenly I become aware of a truth which hitherto had escaped me; for an instant I stand alone on the proud eminence of my discovery; and then, a passage from Carlyle or Browning comes flashing to my mind, a verse from Paul, a paragraph from Augustine, a half-for- gotten word from my father’s counsel in boyhood, mayhap even a sentence from last Sunday’s sermon; no long time is it till my solitary eminence is peopled with poets, prophets, seers, the wise of all time. This discovery of mine, I realize, is none 1 An address delivered before the senior class in Divinity Col- lege, Cambridge, Sunday evening, July 15, 1838. 2J Corinthians 2: 14. 3. John 5:10. 4 Luke 12: 57. 16 FAITH IN CHRIST other than that which they have been trying to teach me from the beginning, but which I have been too dull to understand, and my triumph is chastened by humilia- tion. I remember once, when a boy, reading a book of verses in celebration of that brown season which intervenes between the flam- ing colors of autumn and the white of winter’s snows. I read the verses prob- ably because of some fascination in their language and rhythm, for I certainly had no sense of the beauties they were depict- ing. The glory of budding spring was open to me, of summer fields, of autumn woods, of snow-covered landscape; but the glory of brown earth strewn with wilted leaves and surmounted by barren trees was entirely meaningless and unreal. I had been aware of no such glory, and after reading the verses I was aware of none still. But one day, how long after- ward I have quite forgotten, I walked out through the felds in this unpretentious season, looking, not for beauty, but for rabbits, when of a sudden my attention was caught by the mellow tones of ploughed ground, the faded gold of shrubbery along THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS uty the fences, the tangled grace of leafless branches, and, through the lacework of the trees, the metallic gleam of | light- filled skies. I remembered the verses and knew that the poet had told the truth. Unaided by a quicker eye than my own, I should probably never have seen. This is the inspiration of the artist, that he sees first; the rest of us walk through the world unheeding till he opens our eyes with his magic. And this, likewise, is the inspiration of the real and great prophet, that he finds himself on his em- inence of discovery indeed alone; he is pioneer. For all successors the ascent is easier, but in each the experience of the pioneer must be in part reproduced; each must know something of the initial sense of loneliness, the surprise and joy of per- sonal discovery. Il THE VOICE WITHIN AS THE VOICE OF GOD I wAVE spoken of the revelation, the in- tuition, the inner witness—call it what you will—as coming “from within.” But this, after all, is a very indefinite account of the matter. Yesterday we knew not; to-day, suddenly, mysteriously, we know. From somewhere it has arrived, this that aforetime was not and now is. From men we are aware we have it not; in ourselves we found it and not in another. By what means we know not, but somehow, out of the vast truth-reservoir of the universe it has come to make of us its habitation. They of old said—the same thing, more simply—that it came from God. It may be objected that we are taking a mere figure of speech too seriously in assuming that such knowledge comes from anywhere. When we see an apple lying in the roadway, or a star twinkling in the sky, it is proper enough to ask how it 18 THE VOICE WITHIN 19 happened to get there. But our percep- tion of the apple and our appreciation of the beauty of the star, these are not things at all in any real sense; they are merely activities of the mind, with no actual existence of their own, and to think of them as arriving from somewhere else is utterly naive and unscientific. Well, if we may not speak of them as having a source, at least we may speak of them as having a cause. And what is it that causes this sudden quickening of the mind by which we are awakened to new perceptions and appreciations? We shall agree, I think, that the same creative energies which originally produced the human mind must be the author as well of every succeeding enrichment of mental power. No idea could be more absurdly naive and unscientific than to suppose that creation ceased ten thousand or fifty million years ago. If, then, for the pur- poses of discussion, we consent to- call these creative energies by the primitive name of God, we shall still look to him as the great and sole Revealer of truth. “What sign showest thou?” challenged the Pharisees, and such is still the chal- 20 FAITH IN CHRIST lenge of the critics of the Christian faith. ‘No man cometh unto me,” Christ an- swered, “‘except the Father which sent me draw him.”! Always it needs the creative energizing of the mind itself, this inner voice of a divine persuasion; and if a man finds no such attestation in his own soul, then are argument, authority, and miracle all futile alike. Which, however, is by no means to say that the responsibility for our beliefs and unbeliefs rests entirely with God; not so easily may we slip out from under the burden of our accountability. There are many who attempt it, rigorous Calvinists without the saving inconsistencies of Cal- vinist piety, who give you their opinion with an air as much as to say that the im- portant thing is not that the opinion is true, but merely that it is theirs. With the steadfastness of a cow on the railroad- track they stand their ground in the face of fact and reason, obviously convinced that their faith has seized them from on high without so much as a by-your-leave to their intelligence. In the course of time they are liable to a rude awakening. 1 John 6 : 44. THE VOICE WITHIN 21 In the hands of the logicians, it must be granted, the doctrine of God’s part in the process of enlightenment, known to in- famy under the name of the Doctrine of Predestination, became a libel on the divine character which any impartial judge would recognize as actionable at law. But it.is to be remembered that in the days of its simplicity the doctrine was not the product of logic, it was the product of experience. Men were aware that they had become the instruments of energies which tran- scended them, the recipients of messages, to recur to the older figure, which had their source not in themselves but in the in- finite. They saw multitudes of other men who listened to the same preaching, who read the same manuscripts, of parchment or of life, and yet remained unenlightened. The truths which to them were obvious and compelling were to others foolishness. Yet they were not conscious of being wiser or better than other men; surely they had been chosen, and chosen through no merit of their own. Their vain-seeming confidence that they were the particular favorites of the Almighty was rooted, not in vanity, but in modesty. 22 FAITH IN CHRIST And why was it, in fact, that the great choice had fallen on them? We, certainly, cannot tolerate the thought that God’s act was in any sense arbitrary. “Every one who hath listened to the Father,” said Christ, “cometh unto me.”! “Except ye turn and become as little children.’’? God’s elect, like the choice spirits of studio or lecture-room, are not the most gifted but the most teachable, those who listen, those who are willing to learn. It needs only that the grace of curiosity be not smothered by conceit; it needs just that modesty of which we have already con- victed the disciples. Modern science prepared the way for the foundation of its substantial structure by the daringly destructive process of a wholesale and merciless doubt. Let us begin, said Descartes, with the assump- tion that we know nothing. And science has maintained its vitality for the very reason that it has held its conclusions per- ennially subject to revision. The very mo- ment it loses its humility it will lose its life. 1John 6: 45; ‘vide translations by Weymouth, Moffatt, and Fenton. 2 Matthew 18: 3. THE VOICE WITHIN 23 The doubt of the scientist, however, is quite different from that of the professed sceptic, whose scepticism stops short at the very point where it might begin to bear fruit for him. Though he insist on doubting all else in the face of evidence, he accepts without evidence the appall- ing proposition that we cannot know any- thing. His real affiliations are not with the scientist, but with the dogmatist; like him, he has found finality. The dogmatist rests because he knows all that is good for him to know; the sceptic rests because there is nothing that he can know. The sincere seeker after truth recognizes that “now we see through a glass darkly,” and because of this he presses toward the day when we shall see “‘face to face.” Sceptic and dogmatist are blood- brothers. The man who has learned the articles of his faith from a priest or doc- ument trembles before every fresh dis- closure of science. He clings to every comma of his creed, not because he is utterly confident of everything in it, but because he is at heart utterly sceptical of everything in it. He is forever afraid that the whole fabric will be proved false. Q4 FAITH IN CHRIST The man whose knowledge springs from within welcomes your discoveries. He is assured that, though you may correct his vision, you cannot make him unsee the truth which with his own eyes he has seen. He holds his knowledge lightly, subject always to expansion and revision, but the lightness is rooted in confidence; his is the only knowledge that is sublimely sure of itself. “That which I have spoken I have received from God”; this testimony of ~Savonarola before his judges is, and ever- more must be, the testimony of every real preacher, in the cathedral or at the cross- roads. Or of what use are sermons? Why, otherwise, is plagiarism in the pulpit a crime? Drill your preachers else in the arts of rhetoric and send them out to re- cite the great, historic homilies of the Church. We desire many things in our sermons, this one thing we demand—that they shall be the preacher’s own and not another’s. Were we less fastidious in this matter, we might listen to better sermons, but we tolerate all mediocrities and stupid- ities rather than be imposed on by parrot speaking. However little the preacher THE VOICE WITHIN 25 may know, out of such knowledge as he has he must speak, or hold his peace. Such is the tribute which every congrega- tion pays to first-hand information. * Yourself must feel it first, your end to capture. Unless from out the soul it well, And with a fresh, resistless rapture Your hearers’ very hearts compel,— You only sit and gum together, Hash up the orts from others’ feast, Blow puny flames with lungs of leather, From ashes whence the life has ceased; Children and apes will gape in admiration, If for such praise your palates thirst; But heart to heart ye will not sway and fashion, Save in your own heart ye feel it first.” ! Men have raked heaven and earth for an oracle, and always at last, like romance and poetry and every other noble thing, they have found it by their own hearth fire, or it has remained undiscovered. ‘‘For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that thou shouldest say, Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it? Neither is 1 Faust, part I, Translation by Albert G. Latham. 26 FAITH IN CHRIST it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”! So long ago the seer told us! And so slow we have been to learn, so loath to believe! “God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find’st not Sinai, ’tis thy soul is poor; There towers the mountain of the Voice no less, Which whoso seeks shall find.’’2 1 Deuteronomy 30 : 11 ff. * Lowell, Bibliolatres. — a a Tit THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE Timp souls still warn us that the Bible is in danger from the findings of the critics. As well might they warn us that the sun is in danger from the prying of the as- tronomers. A devout elder whom I knew once deprecated the study of the history of the canon in a men’s Bible class for the reason, as he put it, that “you are apt to run up against queer things.” I doubt if any man can sleep comfortably with the suspicion that there are “‘queer things” at the foundation of his faith, and happily the fears are quite superfluous. Much of the discussion of Biblical in- spiration has been wholly beside the point. The question is not as to how far the prophets spoke of their own volition, and how far they were under the spell of a higher, unseen influence. So far as they spoke the truth, truth which they had discovered in their own hearts and did not merely echo from another’s words, 27 28 FAITH IN CHRIST so far were they actually, literally, divinely inspired. And the Bible owes its suprem- acy among books first of all to this very fact, that its words are aglow with the burning convictions, kindled in the living experience, of the men who wrote it. Read Ezekiel’s account of his initial vision. Flaming colors, terrible creatures with far-stretching wings, a voice like the roar of mighty waters, the star-studded firmament and over it a sapphire throne surrounded by rainbow splendor—in such imagery the prophet tries to give us a sense of his first realization of the great- ness and majesty of the eternal God. Before the glory of the sight he fell on his face in abject humility; who was he that he should inquire into the awful mysteries or seek to interpret to men the will of the Infinite? But suddenly, out of the glory, a Voice: “Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak with thee.” ! The prophets were no prostrate, passive instruments, receiving and _ transmitting messages which they themselves did not understand. “Thus saith the Lord,” was the solemn sanction of their preaching, as, 1 Ezekiel 2 : 1, THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 29 indeed, it must be the sanction of all ef- fective preaching, but they were not in any remote sense amanuenses. Their reve- lations are testimony to the clearness of their own vision, their eloquence is rooted in the depth and sincerity of their own feelings. Looking out upon Israel, Amos saw luxury and sensuality rotting the heart out of the people of wealth while the poor starved. Ridiculed, rebuked, commanded to silence, he still could not restrain the flood of anger and pity which surged within him. Throughout his brief sermons we are conscious first of contact with the spirit of a righteous man, flaming with indignation at the hypocrisy which would serve God in feasts and sacrifices while it revelled in dissipation and ruthless greed. The songs of praise with which the Old Testament is filled can never be thought of as documents handed down out of heaven, set by some superior wisdom for man’s singing. “The heavens declare the glory of God, - And the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” 30 FAITH IN CHRIST Better than we can tell it ourselves, this poet of a bygone age has told the story of our own emotions as we cast our eyes up- ward. The song which he has flung down the centuries, no man can doubt, is but the echo of a sublimer strain which first sounded in his own soul. The Mohammedans tell us, of their Koran, that it is the work of no man, and of no company of men, but that, un- created and unalterable, it has existed since before all beginnings, inscribed on a tablet set up in highest heaven. The Bible, on the other hand, has never been represented as having come down out of heaven, but as having grown here on the earth. And though we believe that its seed was not vitalized.by any human in- vention, that the showers and the sun- shine which nurtured it came from above and its flowers are the flowers of Paradise, yet its roots, we know, are deep sunk in the soil of our common humanity. De- fenders make 2, mistake when they apol- ogize for the “human element” in the Bible. We are all familiar with their favorite figure of the sun-spots. With so much brightness and warmth, they ask, THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 31 why should one complain of an occa- sional flaw? It is no case for complaint. One need be no scientist to realize that the spots are of the essential nature of the sun’s formation, that without them the sun would not be the sun. And if the Bible had come down out of heaven it would no longer be the Bible. God’s thoughts had to become man’s thoughts before they could become intelligible to men, as Christ himself could not have disclosed God to us had he not first of all been a man. IV MODERN BIBLIOMANCY OnE method of Biblical interpretation, too childish for serious mention, but too prevalent to be passed over in silence, im- plies an origin for the Bible neither on earth nor in heaven, but in subterranean caverns, in witches’ caves, by the light of smoking torches, beside a boiling cal- dron of newts and frogs. The book is searched for obscure references to future events, supposed to be embedded in the text with all the studied ambiguity of the sibyl’s palm-leaves. Here is a passage which foretells the Roman Church of the twentieth century, and here a verse in- tended to describe the present German emperor or the prospective Russian ezar. A river in Revelation prefigures modern Turkey, while a hybrid beast in Daniel has been wandering the earth like a dis- embodied spirit for something over two thousand years, waiting for the British Empire or the Chinese Republic to give 32 MODERN BIBLIOMANCY 33 it substance. The mystery of future times, which Christ confessed was all dark to him,' yields to the exercise of a little in- genuity in discovering the key to a lost cipher ! The prophets of old Israel always made their forecasts contingent on the fidelity or the recreance of the people concerned, but these modern prophets make their forecasts contingent on nothing. They have the future reduced to chart in such mathematical fashion that there is nothing for men to do but to sit aside and watch the specifications of destruction fulfil them- selves. Without doubt, the Bible does contain forecasts of the Roman Church in the twentieth century; and also, by the same token, it contains forecasts of the Protes- tant Church in the twentieth century, not always flattering. It contains convincing portraits of German kaiser and Russian czar, and also of the maid in your kitchen and of the child in your nursery, and of me and of you. It reveals springs of his- tory precisely as true of England and America and Siam as of Assyria and 1 Mark 13: 32. o4 FAITH IN CHRIST Babylon and Israel. Its oracles strike home to-day, with the nation and with the individual, for the very reason that they struck home in the day when they were first delivered; directed as they were, not at anything transitory and accidental, but at that which is permanent and uni- versal in humanity. The Bible is the last book on earth of which to try to make a fortune-teller’s manual. It was not produced in a cave; every page is asparkle with the play of sunlight and fresh air, much of it having been written, literally, in the open, under the wide skies that arch the Syrian hills, with a breeze from the Mediterranean fluttering the parchment. Its songs have nothing even of that stuffy atmosphere of the closet and the death-chamber which lurks in many a corner of our modern hymnals. Entire books were transcribed; almost ver- batim, from the stories which mothers told their children, of the heroes of the nation and the stirring events of the past, in a day when the only public school was at the door-step of the home. More of it yet was transcribed, entirely verbatim, from the words of stalwart preachers, in- MODERN BIBLIOMANCY 35 veighing against the crimes of their age and calling the people to righteousness. From cover to cover there is no place for magic cryptograms and Circean am- biguities. If John was careful not to mention the name of the Beast that he denounced, be sure the purpose of his omission was not to mystify his “little children.”’ More credible is it that he was discreet enough not to incite the Beast to speedy vengeance. In any case, what- ever obscurity we find in the apocalypses exists for us largely by reason of our igno- rance of the times for which they were written; it did not exist for the original readers by reason of their ignorance of our times. The writers did not intend, in cold-blooded mockery, to mystify their readers; they intended to enlighten and hearten them in the face of pressing perils. The Bible is no wonder-book; it is literature. Its appeal is not to the wizard in us but to the man in us. It is not con- cerned with divinations; it is concerned with the conduct of life. Vv THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE I KNow no means of authenticating the Bible in block. On the contrary, there is no questioning the fact that it contains laws which it would be crime or folly to obey, and inconsistencies which it would be dishonesty to evade. So much is con- ceded by the scholars of every school, radical and conservative alike. Here, for example, is a law from an ancient code: “Thou shalt not eat any- thing that dieth of itself; thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is within thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien; for thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God.”' Not a neighborly distinction, we agree; and if we should detect our Jewish butcher serv- ing us meat on this principle, it would re- quire something more than a quotation from Deuteronomy to reconcile us to his 1 Deuteronomy 14: 21. 36 THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 37 business methods. Explicit permission to sell diseased meat to foreigners! We stand aghast at such sheer, brazen immorality. The same verse closes with another in- junction: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” and most of us would not insist on the inclusion of this bit of legislation in modern cook-books for all its threefold repetition in the Mosaic law. Many of the Biblical laws are no longer honored by any of us; like the laws of sacrifice, eating, and dress; like the law prohibiting interest on loans! which em- barrassed the commerce of Europe for many centuries, but which we have now agreed to forget, as far as the socialists will allow us; like the law which sent the leper out to beg his living on the streets, crying “‘unclean”’ to all the passers-by’— we have discovered a more humane method of dealing with lepers. Various historical discrepancies also ap- pear in the Bible which the most uncom- promising defenders of the faith have never thought of denying. At most they 1 Exodus 22: 25. Ezekiel 18: 8. ? Leviticus 13 : 45 f. 38 FAITH IN CHRIST assure us that the errors must have crept in through the carelessness of copyists, that in the original manuscripts there were no such imperfections. And they may well challenge us to disprove their argument, for there is no possible way by which we may know what was in the original manuscripts; but neither, so far as I can see, is there any possible reason why we should care what was in them. They will surely not ask any man to be- lieve that an “‘original” Bible, now lost beyond hope of recovery, has anything in particular to do with the salvation of his soul. Our Bible, we are all agreed, has mistakes in it, and who will can make the most of them. Many Christian people, it is true, are disturbed by the thought of inaccuracies in the Bible and think it impolitic, or im- polite, to mention them. They have be- come persuaded that the validity of their Christian experience is somehow bound up with the historicity of Jonah and Daniel, so that it is really not surprising that they should resent sceptical criticism of these books. And many of the critics themselves have not been wiser; in discrediting such THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 39 narratives they have believed that they were doing just that of which faint-hearted believers accused them, that they were ac- tually undermining the whole structure of our religion. When the scientist declared that the world was round in the face of many plain Biblical references to the contrary, there was panic in one camp and satisfaction in the other. When science announced that the world had not been created in six days, again there was a common feel- ing that the very existence of Christianity was at stake. But Christianity is still with us while the prophets of evil are all but forgotten. And so it will be to the end of time, or until we learn that Chris- tianity is not dependent on the accuracy of Biblical history and science. The writers of Scripture got their science from the age they lived in, and they got their history where they could find it; in scores of instances they tell us just what the sources of their information were. Their claim to distinction lies not in any magical knowledge which they possessed but in that spiritual insight, which was indeed a gift of God, and by means of 40 FAITH IN CHRIST which they took the incidents at hand, whether from history or tradition, and made them the vehicle for the teaching of great spiritual truths. What difference, for example, whether Jonah be history or parable? The moral of the book is not that God is strong enough to rescue a man out of a fish’s maw, but that the love of God is broad enough to embrace a pagan city like Nineveh. And the miracle, were it established, would be to us no evidence of the truth of the lesson. If we have not proven in our own experi- ence that the love of God has been wide enough to reach across the Atlantic and embrace America, we shall surely not be moved to credence by the peculiar marine experiences of a renegade prophet of three thousand years ago. Scoffers point to the many contests between science and religion in which science has achieved final and complete triumph, but they fail to notice that relig- ion has ordinarily emerged from the con- test stronger than before. If history proves anything, it proves that religion with its Bible is proof against such attacks, not as a fort may be—or may not be—proof THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 41 against cannon-balls, but as patriotism is proof against cannon-balls. The doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scripture is not a dogma received from the skies, to be accepted or rejected in ac- cordance with our opinion of its credentials: it is a truth mined out of experience, to be certified only by experience. Through the Bible men have found that their eyes have been opened to spiritual facts which otherwise they had missed, but which, having once seen, they can no more deny than they can deny their own existence. We are under no obligation to believe any word of Scripture for the mere reason that it is Scripture; we also must stand upon our feet. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”; this do we accept ? Then so far, at least, we accept the Bible. This do we deny? Then is there certainly no hope that we shall ever be persuaded to accept it on the authority of Genesis. And so we may go through the book, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, from cover to cover. When the Ephesians told Paul that they had not so much as heard whether there 42 FAITH IN CHRIST were any Holy Spirit, he entered into no theological argument, but when he “laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them.”! There was an argument which they could understand. Suppose he had begun by an exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that they had accepted the doctrine on his authority; well, after- ward they might have passed a_ better examination in theology, but of what particular use would the knowledge have been to them? Merely to know that there is a Holy Spirit somewhere in the universal scheme of things would be about as futile a bit of information as a man could well be possessed of. To have the omnipotent, divine Spirit take possession of your heart and life, this is a different matter ! The Bible is not a book of travel for the instruction of men who prefer the comfort of their chimney-corner to the exertions of the highroad; it is a handbook for travellers.’ It was not designed to reveal mysteries, hidden forever from our eyes, but so made plain to the writers of Scripture that we accept their word as 1Acts 19 : 6. THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 43 we accept the word of the lecturer back from the Sphinx or the Ganges. It under- takes a much more marvellous thing: so to guide us in our own invasion of the land that we may see for ourselves. For in this realm of the spirit there is no farthest journey which any man of us may not take, no remotest country which he may not explore. The Bible demands none of your credence in its teachings, regarding either God or man, except as you are compelled to cre- dence by virtue of the very fact that it tells the truth. VI OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE Tue desperation with which, in the face of facts, men have clung to their belief in the historical inerrancy of Scripture has been in large part due, I suppose, to a fear lest in the general wreck the Gospels also might be involved. While they might have been willing, without much qualm, to admit a question as to certain elements in the story of Methuselah or Jonah, they have not been so ready to dismiss Christ’s life to the realm of legend. And yet how are we to distinguish between the two? If we are to cast doubt on any incident in Old Testament history, what prevents us likewise from casting doubt on any incident of Matthew or John? I am not disposed to insist that men treat the New Testament on any other basis than that on which they treat the rest of the Bible, or indeed on which they treat any other historical documents. I am not afraid to submit the New Testa- 44 OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 45 ment to all the canons of historical crit- icism; its evidence is not of so feeble a sort that we must make an exception in its favor and do not dare hale it before the ordinary bar of human reason. Discard all one will of it, an irreducible minimum remains. The teachings remain. And it is one of those teachings that “The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.’”’! At least, we have the “‘words”; there is no denying them. If Jesus of Nazareth did not utter them, they were beyond question uttered, for here they are, written down before our eyes. And here also is our picture of the Christ life painted; there is no denying 7. It holds its sacred place at the centre of almost every home in Christendom. One may say that the picture, as painted in the Gospels, contains elements that are incon- sistent or incredible. Perhaps; make all the allowance for them that one will, and still, beneath whatever smudgings of the brush, we discern the portrait of a Man of very definite and remarkable character; we catch the outlines of a life of such pur- 1 John 6 : 63. 46 FAITH IN CHRIST pose and meaning as cannot be mistaken. It is quite generally agreed to be the noblest man-likeness ever conceived, the sublimest interpretation of human life ever accomplished on the earth. If we refuse to concur in this agreement, it is of little consequence what we may be pleased to think about the fidelity of the portrait. But if we do concur, and after this begin to cavil as to whether the portrait is real or fanciful, then herein is a marvellous thing, indeed: the one example in history where art has outshone nature, where man’s imitation has transcended God’s original. Turner’s sunsets may sometimes show more brilliant hues, but they are certainly never more beautiful than the glory which breaks across the sky of any summer evening. And when have you ever de- scribed the character of your friend but at the end of the story you have felt the utter inadequacy of your words to make men understand his heroism and at- tractiveness? So, I know, T hackeray felt when he had finished his picture of Colonel Newcome, and Shakespeare when he had done with Rosalind: they had known OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 47 gentlemen and gentlewomen, if not of fewer faults, at least of more excellent virtues and more seductive graces. When have you met a really great man but you have discovered in him a largeness and power beyond anything you had divined from all that you had ever heard of him? But here were men, are we to under- stand, who told the story of their Friend’s life in such fashion that others have seen in him a loveliness and greatness beyond any that he actually possessed, or that any man ever possessed; who have man- aged to achieve a fourfold portrait more exquisite in its compelling charm, more exalted in its dignity, than anything ever produced in the great miracle-shop of Nature herself! And these incomparable artists were a company of humble Judean preachers otherwise unknown to fame! The scepticism calls for heroic credulity. One further fact confronts us, not in the Book, but in life. Down through the wide continent of human history flows no other river so majestic in its sweep as this stream which we know under the name of Christianity. If much pondering 48 FAITH IN CHRIST has confused our thought on this matter, an evening’s reading in the social life of any age or any land apart from its in- fluence, or even an hour. or two in any Bowery mission, will perhaps serve to quicken our appreciations. This stream must have had a source. Does the Source as depicted in the gospels seem exaggerated in view of the river of beneficence that has flowed from it? Would some lesser thing seem more convincing, or shall we think rather, that any error in our thought of Jesus probably lies in our failure to grasp anything like the full measure of his great- ness? But, after all, the first question for us is not as to our attitude toward the his- torical character of the record. There is a crucial, preliminary inquiry which con- fronts us and on which, meanwhile, the question of historic facts may wait. Which is not to say, and I do not mean, that the historical incidents were of minor impor- tance. If Christ had not come, and lived and died as he did, we have no knowledge that the world would not be in darkness to this day. But our belief, or refusal to believe, does not in the least affect the OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 49 historic facts. Whatever specific work was needed for the salvation of men, was performed, as is abundantly evidenced by thousands of men, and thousands of thou- sands, saved. And that work there is no undoing. Marathon and Tours were fought, and the fruits of them are still secure, though their very memory should perish from the earth. Last year’s harvest still fed the multitudes, though we have no statistics of the bushels garnered. The Deed Done is forever proof against the scepticism of later years. But the Thought of yesterday must live on in the mind of to-day, or it is noth- ing. While our opinion of the record of Christ’s life will have no effect whatever on the truthfulness of the record, can detract no iota from the measure of the work that was accomplished for us, our opinion of the thought which the cen- turies have handed down to us is beyond all reckoning fateful for ourselves and for the world. Do we accept the gospel conception of God and of human life, of the relation between man and man and between man and God? This is the first question for 59 FAITH IN CHRIST us to face, and at the outset we need not trouble ourselves in regard to any nine- teen-hundred-year-old facts, however im- measurably important those facts may have been. If we do accept it, we shall find ourselves involved in consequences, unless I am much mistaken, which will make it very easy for us to believe that behind the record is reality, substance, and not shadow. But first we must ask, What think we of these ideas of life and character which the record contains? And the substantia- tion of these truths of the spirit does not wait on any historic testimony or fine-spun argument. Their evidence, the only evi- dence to which in the nature of the case they are subject, consists in those creden- tials which they bear in their own heart. “Not that we have lordship over your faith,”’! said Paul, in a passage strangely seldom quoted; which means, if it means anything, that he had no wish arbitrarily to impose his beliefs on other men. Ut- terly sure as he was of the truth of his con- victions, he desired others to have the same assurance in themselves, not to lean on his assurance. There is enough dy- 111 Corinthians 1 : 24. OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 51 namite in the little clause to blow up whole ecclesiastical hierarchies and whole theo- logical libraries, which is perhaps one reason for the circumspection with which it has been used. And I have no mind to warm any man against Paul’s spiritual leadership; before I have done with the subject I have something very specific to say by way of commending it. But neither have I any mind to quote him, or any other Biblical writer, as an authority whose word must be blindly accepted. For I recognize, as he recognized, that any truth which we should receive merely because he delivered it, because we find it in the Bible, would be no more a part of our life than the bird among the branches is part of the life of the tree. When Paul went down to preach in Corinth, why did the Corinthians accept his teachings? Not, obviously, because of their confidence in a book; not because of any peculiar reverence for apostles, and we hear nothing of miracles. Why was Amos accepted as a prophet by the faith- ful in Israel? His sermons were no part of a Bible then, and again we read of no miracles by which he attested his revela- tion. To his contemporaries he was merely 52 FAITH IN CHRIST an unordained, itinerary preacher. How does the Chinaman know that the mis- sionary is telling the truth when he un- folds the story of Jesus Christ, explaining that the world is under the governance of one supreme God, who is not only the God but the Father of mankind, and that the highest life is to be found in that losing of self which leads to the finding of him? How does your Chinaman know that all this is not a pretty fable from the West? How does it happen that the joy of a great discovery thrills through his awakening spirit and that he also, like the disciple by the seaside, stretches out his hand and cries, My Lord and my God? The answer lies, and can lie, in nothing else than the self-evidencing power of spiritual truth. With the Bible, as with all other books and so-called authorities, so much of it as we find true in us we must perforce ac- cept, and so much of it as we find untrue in us we must assume that we are under the same divine compulsion to reject— though we shall be wise not to be too pre- cipitate with our rejections, remembering that “ great truths are greatly won.” VII THE NEED OF AUTHORITY ARE we then to be plunged into a chaos of individualism, bidding farewell forever to the old dream of orthodoxy, of a body of doctrine accepted in all ages, in all lands, and by all believers: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus? A noble concep- tion was this, worthy to possess the imag- ination of Christendom; the world would be poorer for its loss. But how is it to be saved ? Several expedients, we may remember, have already been tried. Councils of the bishops legislated, under the auspices of the emperor, but they were compelled to take up the sword by way of enforcing their legislation. It is at best a Sorry uni- formity that you obtain by merely killing off the dissenters, and even such mock uniformity was never achieved, for the dis- senters multiplied faster than they could be disposed of. 53 54 FAITH IN CHRIST A single, sovereign pope was the next experiment, but the result was still more conspicuously unsuccessful. The Reformers started with a recognition of the sovereignty of the individual mind and conscience, but the old dream of uni- formity was by no means abandoned. It soon appeared that the grant of liberty was accompanied with the proviso that, though thinking for themselves, all men were expected to arrive at the same con- clusions. And once more the councils were called to determine what these con- clusions were. Once more, likewise, here- sies arose to disturb the peace of the Church. In these latter days, however, the curse of heresy has lost not only its terror but its shame, and correspondingly orthodoxy has lost its pride. We have not only failed to achieve uniformity in our doctrine, we have ceased to desire it. The ordmary man makes a boast of the confession that he is something of a heretic; which is the ‘nevitable end of all efforts at uniformity through decrees of popes and councils. The dream of a world-wide orthodoxy built on the recognition of a common THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 55 authority could never have resulted in any other way. Spiritual truth must be spoken, by divine voice, in the ear of the individual, and this law there is no evad- ing. In the interest of harmony, of con- venience, will you try to soften the rigor of its workings? At best you will secure a false harmony which, honored to-day, will to-morrow be despised. Any faith which we accept merely at another’s word is bogus, and must go the way of all cheats and frauds. Nevertheless, orthodoxy is not yet a forlorn hope. Its promise lies not in any unity of authority, but in the unity of truth. I accept that which is true in me, and you accept that which is true in you, but truth is not therefore duplex or mul- tiple; it is one. If any two men think straight, they think alike; so far at least the Reformers were right. Looking upward at night, we all see stars. If your vision is clearer than mine you may see more stars, and those which I also see you may see more sharply; but where you see stars I do not see dragons and flying-fish. Except in an utterly diseased state of the mental vision, men 56 FAITH IN CHRIST apprehend as true nothing but the truth. They may see the truth dimly, distorted, but it is still truth, reality, that men see, not falsehood and unreality. It is some- thing that is there that impresses itself on the retina, not something that is not there. The religions of India and Arabia owe their power over men, not to their delusions, but to their veracities. No wildest theory was ever promulgated and accepted on the earth, even among the faddists of our pale, parlor cults, but that some sound arguments could be adduced in support of it, and men have believed in it, in spite of its imbecilities, on account of the glimmer of truth which it contained. In the matter of principles, no man has ever yet been entirely sincere and entirely mistaken, unless he was at the same time entirely insane. And history ought to teach us to beware how recklessly we dis- tribute the charge of insanity. For Chris- tians it is enough to remember that cer- tain members of Christ’s own household would have had him withdraw from his ministry because they thought he was “be- side himself.’’! The extravagances of the 1 Mark 3: 21. THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 57 most unconventional of heretics, in art and politics and economics as well as in relig- ion, will generally repay the philosopher’s attention. They will be found always to contain some nugget of true gold, which the rest of us may possibly have overlooked. Certainly we have no right to condemn them until we qualify ourselves as critics by sympathy with the other’s point of view. It is scarcely too much to say, that a man has no right to criticise any creed in which he does not believe; in which, that is, he does not appreciate the ele- ment of truth. | “Every man that hath heard from the Father, and hath learned, cometh unto me.’' So sure was Christ of the reality and unity of truth, and so sure also of the validity of men’s spiritual perceptions. Be- cause he spoke the truth, therefore he knew that every other man who attended to the voice within must ultimately find himself in his presence; as the man who stands on the mountain top knows that every other man who climbs and continues climbing must at last reach the same pin- nacle. 1 John 6 : 45. 58 FAITH IN CHRIST This day is the old dream of a world- wide unity of Church doctrine in no small measure, not promised, but realized. There has been no day since Pentecost when it was not already more of a reality than of a dream. Origen, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, A Kempis, Luther, Cal- vin, Arminius, Grotius, Fox, Wesley, New- man, Brooks—make the list as long as you will, gather it from all the schools— the men are brothers all! We link their names with little sense of incongruity. Their differences were many and con- spicuous; their agreements, however less superficially conspicuous, were much more considerable. The strength of each was not so much in any article of his creed peculiar to himself as it was in that faith which he held in common with the rest. I may seem to have dismissed the au- thorities completely and even contemp- tuously; I hasten to welcome them back with due honor. The truth is, I accept them all; not the Bible only, but popes and councils, tradition, creeds, confessions, and whatever else there may be in which good men have seemed to hear an authori- tative voice. — THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 59 As for my popes, I claim merely the right to a voice in their nomination. One need not be a benighted monarchist to recognize truth in the old doctrine of the divine right of kings, a divine sanction to all duly constituted government; but one may still believe that the man who now happens to occupy the seat of authority has no right to his position, either divine or human. One may agree with Newman in his general contention that a loving God would not leave the world without some living voice through which he might speak to mankind, but it remains a fair ques- tion whether the man who happens to have been elected Bishop of Rome is the chosen instrument. Several score of Church dignitaries have gathered in an Italian hall and, after much formality, have designated the voice through which God is to speak. It is still to be determined whether God will ratify the election, whether he will indeed de- liver his messages through this mouth- piece, so designated. Perhaps the pro- cedure has been as ingenious as any that could be devised; perhaps, even, it may present a reasonable argument for divine 60 FAITH IN CHRIST sanction. No matter; in simple, historic fact, is it the Bishop of Rome through whom God has made his most conspicuous reve- lations to mankind, in whose speech men have most clearly recognized the divine voice, who has chiefly moulded the moral and theological thought of the centuries? Newman himself says not; for purposes of his own, as we have already seen, he draws attention to the very small part the popes have taken in the development of Christian doctrine. “It is individuals,” he says, “‘and not the Holy See, who have taken the initiative and given the lead to Catholic minds in theological inquiry.”’! I do not doubt that Newman’s own in- fluence on the thinking of Christian Eng- land, even of Roman Catholic England, was larger than that of all the popes who reigned during his career. | As my pope I shall choose the man who seems, to me and to others, actually to have spoken with divine power. The real spokesmen of divinity, the true leaders of the Church, have ever been elected by very informal methods, sometimes be- latedly, always with many dissenting voices 1 Apologia, p. 236. THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 61 in the beginning, but their attestation has at least lain in their own words of fire and works of power and not in the ballots of a college of cardinals. The doctrine of papal infallibility was not made an article of faith till less than a half century ago, and it was then guarded by strict limitations. I sympathize with the hesitancy of the Roman Church to cominit itself to this doctrine, finding my- self of much the same mind in regard to my popes. It is a large and dangerous word, infallibility; and yet, guardedly and with due time for explanations, I should be willing to risk it. I recognize the clearness of vision of these outstanding figures in the history of Christian thought, these spiritual geniuses of the ages, and I gladly avail myself of the privilege of walking by their light. What they announce I must, of . course, “find true in me, or reject’; merely to accept their doctrines in the raw with- out myself seeing and feeling the necessary truth of them, would be as pusillanimous as it would be profitless. And their nega- tions do not weigh heavily with me, for no one of them, I know, compassed the 62 FAITH IN CHRIST whole range of truth. But when one of these, the Great, the Far Seeing, the Quick to Hear, announces a discovery in the world of the spirit where he is most at home, then shall I peer into the dark- ness to catch the same vision, I shall strain my ears to hear the same message; sure of this, that that which they saw was real and not hallucination. I accept the doctrine of the papacy; only my popes shall be the real and great popes, fathers, in the line of the veritable Apostolic Succession, appointed of God to their high office and acclaimed by the unanimous voice of Christendom. The Roman doctrine of the papacy is a sublime truth frozen, a kingly form decked out in the crown and all the regalia of its rank and preserved in ice. “If any man willeth to do his will,” said Christ, “‘he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God,” ! according to which principle Alexander VI, for example, was not the one man on earth conspicuously qualified to be chosen as an oracle. Likewise I believe in the councils. But, once more, my councils shall be real par- ; 1 John 7 : 17. a THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 63 liaments of Christendom, not nominated by scheming politicians, Roman emperors, or Italian prelates, or even American divines, and not constituted of those who happen by devious ways to have attained to high ecclesiastical office, but represen- tative of the vast Christian democracy; their decisions no smooth political com- promises which express the actual faith of nobody on earth, no dominating fiat of majorities, but the unanimous expres- _ sion of the Christian consciousness. And there is, as I have suggested, a large body of so-called cardinal Christian doctrine in which all Christian men believe, accepted and preached wherever the name of Christ is known. Among the various articles of faith which have been commonly accepted by the Christian consciousness of the ages, if I find some which at first reading seem to me false or meaningless, I shall not lightly trust my own perceptions, denying the thousand fold testimony of my peers and superiors; I shall be at pains to under- stand their meaning, hidden as it may be under the forms of ancient verbiage or outworn scientific conceptions, and to dis- 64 FAITH IN CHRIST cover for myself the light of truth which they contain. I am making no plea for the reduction of any man’s creed to the terms of some common deposit of truth. It is a fair question whether the creed of the Church, or of the churches, ought not to be so re- duced, but for the individual such a sur- render would be suicidal and fatal in its effect on the progress of knowledge. It would be as if two men were climbing a mountain, making their way upward by different paths, each having an outlook of his own, and were of a sudden, in the interest of unity, to turn and go back tll their paths should converge. The unity to be sought is not below but above. The controversy between the advocates of external authority and the advocates of inner enlightenment is a case in point. Newman’s demand for an external au- thority is not to be met by the mystic’s account of a direct communion between the human soul and God, for we need the revelations of other men in order both to educate our own spiritual perceptions and to safeguard these perceptions against ec- centricity and illusion. But neither is THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 65 the mystic’s doctrine of direct communion to be categorically denied in favor of New- man’s divinely appointed oracle, for all the oracles mean nothing to us except as through them our own vision is quickened to gaze, open-eyed, upon the Truth. We cannot fully understand either Newman or the mystic until we arrive at a point from which we can see that both were right, and also by the same token that both were partial and therefore so far wrong. Whatever there be in the history of Christian thought, or of human thought for the matter of that, which any pure soul has discerned as true, especially what- ever there be that any considerable group of pure-hearted men and women has dis- cerned as true, I shall be very hesitant to dismiss as mere illusion. My faith in my own spiritual perceptions would not stand the strain of such sweeping denials; for if these men were utterly confident only to be utterly mistaken, what reason have I to assume that my own confidence is not as deceptive? Vill THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE For nearly two thousand years Christen- dom has united in paying peculiar respect to a certain company of men, some known by name, others anonymous, as the pioneers in all spiritual discovery, the only wholly trustworthy guides in the land of the un- seen. | The various books of the Bible were chosen out of a vast literature, not by the mere judgment of ecclesiastical assemblies, but in the gradual process of a democratic recognition of their spiritual qualities. It is true that the councils legislated a few doubtful books into the collection and, largely on doctrinal grounds, legislated a few out, but in the main they only set their seal on documents which had already established themselves in the hearts of the people. And the democracy which thus culled and preserved the books of Scripture, like the democracy which has since stamped them with its approval, consisted of those 66 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 67 very men and women whose own religious thinking and emotions have most con- spicuously commended themselves to the. respect of the world. If we had an anthology of Greek prose and poetry collected during the course of the classical history of Greece in accor- dance with the consensus of the opinions of the Greek people, we should have some- thing corresponding to the Bible in the field of pure literature; its standards esthetic instead of, as in the Bible, re- ligious or theological. Whatever literary crudities might be found within its covers, one would be slow to believe that any production which had been accorded a place there by the common judgment of the Greek mind was totally lacking in pronounced and even distinguished literary qualities. Literary crudities, however, we should undoubtedly find, especially in the earlier sections, and in like fashion we must expect to find theological and moral cru- dities in the Bible. It is to be remembered that the Bible did not spring into life full-grown, but is the record of a gradual revelation. 68 FAITH IN CHRIST Sceptics point to Samuel’s cruelty when he reported God’s will to Saul, command- ing that the king was to “smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” 1 And the picture does not brighten as we read on that the prophet, angered by Saul’s single act of mercy in sparing the life of his fellow king, drew his own sword and “‘hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord.” What manner of “spiritual perception” was it that so interpreted the mind of God? It was one step in a gradual revelation, or if you please in a gradual understand- ing of the divine character. Saul’s act of mercy, be it noted, was not really an act of mercy at all, for he spared the king not out of magnanimity but in order to swell the glory of his triumphal procession. If others had been spared, they would have owed their lives only to Saul’s thirst for slaves, not to his humanity. Samuel did not make war any more merciful, it is true; he merely made it less mercenary; he merely did not consider mercy, belong- 1T Samuel, 15: 3. THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 69 ing, as he did, to an age when the idea of mercy to a conquered foe had not yet arisen in the most sensitive conscience. But he did see the evil of predatory raids: there is to be no plunder, was his oracle, and this represents the only change on which he was insisting in the military code of the time. Many of the Arab tribes virtually lived on the product of their armed excursions, but henceforth we hear of no such excursions in the history of Israel. Even the command in regard to diseased meat was doubtless an advance over former customs, in that it did prohibit the sale of such to brother Israelites. The duties a man owed to those outside his own nation had to wait until the brotherhood of Israel was widened to embrace the brotherhood of man. Later years brought riper wisdom. From century to century the human con- science was gradually enlightened. Any schoolboy of to-day could instruct Samuel in the mind of God, but any schoolboy would not be so well qualified to instruct Paul and John, or. even Amos and Isaiah. Not that these men compassed the full 70 FAITH IN CHRIST range of spiritual truth, for we know they did not; the world has since learned lessons as to the application of their principles to the question of slavery, for example, which we have no reason to suppose they ap- preciated, which certainly they did not teach. But they were men of peculiarly sane judgment and sound convictions, of peculiarly original and genuine spiritual experience, and there are few of us, I take it, who after reading them do not feel our- selves better qualified to sit as their pupils than as their masters. I have no desire to thrust them on any man as divinely attested authorities, as I know it would serve little purpose to try. Merely, I recognize the clearness of their spiritual vision and find my own perceptions quickened and clarified by their revelations. I remember that a very great number of other men, including the best men I have known, the best men of his- tory, have had the same experience. And I am confident that if any man will read them, sympathetically, he will find in them what others have found, because truth is one, and every human heart re- sponds, in its best moments, to the truth. II THE SON OF MAN I THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH In these latter days theology has fallen upon disrepute, and men take pride in the possession of a creed which may be en- grossed in red and gold on a bit of card- board to be hung over their beds. The probability is, however, that in such crisp confessions certain of the articles are missing. A man’s creed, his actual working creed, must contain his philosophy of the universe, including, for example, his politics, his business code, his definition of success, his opinions on war and music and socialism and baseball and churches and spelling-reform and monogamy. In the reasons he gives himself for the make-up of his ballot you might find a few of the missing articles; in the letter he writes to his salesman a few more, and a few more still in the thoughts with which he con- Peal 12 FAITH IN CHRIST templates a trip to the seashore or to Eu- rope, in the phrases with which he greets his children on coming home of an evening, in the prayer which he breathes in one of life’s emergencies. I doubt if in any case it may be compressed within the limits of a pretty motto. The suggestion is frequently made that the hope for church union lies, not in the adoption of a common creed, but in the recognition of a common purpose. The difficulty is, of course, that it is our creed— our veritable and real creed, not the phrases we learn by heart in church—which de- termines our purposes. If men are at variance politically, who would think of proposing that they should give up the attempt to agree in principles and be content to unite on a common platform ? The suggestion nevertheless has this merit, that if we should learn to think less of creeds and more of purposes we might discover what our real creeds are—an enterprise in which heretofore we have not been signally successful—and might find that they contain fewer conflicts than we had supposed. Our theology, moreover, if it is to be THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 73 true, may not be simpler than life, and life is not conspicuously simple; on the contrary, it is quite overwhelmingly com- plex. The real weakness of old theologies was not in their overelaboration, it was precisely in their logical simplicity. The theologians whose ‘‘systems” are still em- bodied in our standard creeds and con- fessions, all lived before the time of Bacon and Descartes, in a day when the processes of logic were honored, even in the sciences, above any careful research in field and laboratory. Logic has a way of moulding its sym- metrical forms while the stuff of life slips from under its hands and spreads away formless, unmindful of the potter’s art. This lesson the physicist and biologist learned long ago, the psychologist has been learning it of more recent years, and if the theologian has been slower than others in learning, the lesson is still his to learn, soon or late. The change of method must, in the nature of the case, involve confusion. One newly discovered fact in the realm of physics is enough to throw all our physical theories into chaos; very foundations have 74 FAITH IN CHRIST given way under the antics of radium. When the theologian in turn leaves his study to go out on a deliberate search for facts in the world of the spirit, it need be no occasion for surprise if now and then he comes upon an item which hitherto had escaped him; and certainly, when the discovery is made, it need be no occasion for surprise if he finds that his former theories need a considerable readjustment. Nor need we expect that he will be ready with his readjustment on the in- stant. A child may have his blocks all nicely arranged, but hand him a new block and bid him fit that into his structure; the process may entail a good deal of tearing down, and you will not blame him if the first result of his efforts is disorder. In the great game we play with truth new blocks are forever forthcoming. It is no child’s puzzle, done up neatly in a hardwood box, to be worked over dili- gently, but at last, once for all, to be solved. It is characterized by the baffling quality of infinity. The truth about so fragmentary a thing as a drop of water is infinite; or, if it has borders, they are far beyond any of our comprehension. a noe - THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 75 We shall surely be unsafe in assuming that the facts are all known regarding human souls and their relation to the universe and its God. That old theologians were logically consistent meant only that the facts then at hand, or so many of them as happened to be chosen for attention, were symmetrically arranged. If the ar- rangement had been less symmetrical, less of the nature of a closed system with no place for further facts, it would not have been to the theologians’ discredit; on the contrary, an occasional paradox might have been accepted as a very hall-mark of genuineness. That the average preacher of to-day is less ready with his answer to a “hard question,” is by no means necessarily an evidence of the degeneracy of the age. The man who thinks of religion as the ingenious invention of the theologians themselves, rather than as a thing of life and reality, will naturally continue to prefer a theological structure which is symmetrical and complete; while they are about it, is the idea, they might as well turn out a finished product. Here cynical folk, like the editors of metropolitan dailies, join 76 FAITH IN CHRIST hands with the multitudes who still hold by the traditions of the anointed priest- hood. But the man who sees in theology the effort of a poor human intelligence to deal with the very materials of life, and of life in its highest forms, realizes that we are in a different world from that of the mathematician. If we were to write out the story of each of our days with all their arduous labors, at the end of how few of the pages should we have the confidence to set down Euclid’s boast, quod erat faciendum—which was to be done! And with all our attempts at the solution of life’s problems it has not, I think, been the wisest men who have been readiest to write at the last chapter’s end, quod erat demonstrandum—which was to be proved. | For all of which it will not do to forget, even in passing, that life itself, in its un- assuming, matter-of-fact way, brings its own certitudes. While the scientists are groping hesitantly toward the secret of the seed’s growth, the farmer goes on sow- ing his grain and gathering his harvests. While the theologians are speculating about THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH ad. the relation between God and the human soul, Christian experience testifies con- fidently: “I know him whom I have be- lieved, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.’’! 11I Timothy 1 : 12. I | THE HEART OF THE CREED “Wuat must I do to be saved ?”?! cried the Philippian jailer, and at once the answer came, with firm assurance: “Be- heve on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” But what if the jailer had never before heard of Christ? When a man lives in a prison, great events may betide in the world without his knowledge. ‘Believe on Christ!” we may imagine his astonished exclamation: “‘Who is Christ, and what has he to do with me, and in what fashion am I to believe on him?” It was not necessary for him to suggest the question, for the disciples must have realized the inadequacy of their reply. We read on, significantly, that “they spake unto him the word of the Lord.” That first, brief injunction was merely the pregnant in- troduction to their real answer. The whole Bible is commentary on the 1 Acts 16 : 30. 78 THE HEART OF THE CREED 79 meaning of this apparently simple formula. And even the Bible is not a complete commentary. Practical implications are involved in it which from day to day men have to discover for themselves. A half- century since conscientious men were still at odds over its bearing on the question of slavery; that a man believed on Christ, did it mean merely that he should deal with his slaves kindly, or that he should set his own slaves free, or that he should join in a crusade to abolish the whole in- stitution of slavery from the earth? The Bible did not speak so clearly on the sub- ject but that it left room for much honest and bitter difference of opinion. It was only a couple of generations ago that a distinguished Brooklyn clergyman preached a sermon on the text, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate’’; and the sons of Belial from whom the faithful Brooklynites were bidden to hold them- selves aloof were none other than the abolitionists. All our creed, and confessions, our theol- ogies, our treatises on Christian ethics, are but expansions of the disciples’ concise formula. Happily, however, it is not nec- 80 FAITH IN CHRIST essary that a man should master libraries in order to share in the benefits of Chris- tian discipleship. After one evening’s in- struction, we are told, the Philippian jailer was baptized and rejoiced. It would be exceedingly interesting to know precisely of what this instruction con- sisted. We are not told in the narrative, but it is not difficult to surmise with a close approximation to certainty. The New Testament begins with a four- fold story of Christ’s life, and no doubt the answer of Paul and Silas to the jailer’s question began with, and in the main consisted of, a recital of the most signif- icant events in this same life story. It was quite inevitable that. when the dis- ciples went out to preach their new gospel their first effort should have been to give men a knowledge of Christ, what he said, what he did, how he died, and how he rose again from the dead. Only after such a recital could there have been any point in their demand that men should believe on him. And when the story was told there was still no pressing need for explanations. After the recital I do not imagine that THE HEART OF THE CREED 81 the disciples were ever confronted, at the outset, with the further question which seems logically necessary: “‘But what do you mean by believing on him?” For the story comes to every man as a chal- lenge and an invitation; it makes a cer- tain definite and immediate appeal to the human heart, as unmistakable as the ap- peal of the sunrise. And the natural, spontaneous response to this appeal is what the disciples meant by belief, or faith. The human mind, however, is never entirely unsophisticated; it insists at once on rationalizing its intuitions. No doubt, there were very excellent Christians before there was anything of a formulated Chris- tian theology. Very excellent Christians are produced to-day—in some of the mis- sions, for example—entirely apart from the intellectual atmosphere of the schools. And because of this certain men would abolish theology altogether; they would have us believe that Paul was much to be blamed for introducing it into the Church. But Paul was no confirmed dog- matist, cumbering his disciples with a mass of doctrine in regard to matters about 82 FAITH IN CHRIST which they had not otherwise inquired. They had already inquired, and in many instances had received false answers, which were reflected in loose living. A man cannot forever continue to think crookedly and live straight. In the very earliest days we find the young Christians analyzing the leap of faith which they had hazarded, with re- sults that were anything but successful. They interpreted faith as a mere cold acceptance of certain external facts of Christian teaching, and one after another we find the apostles combating this shal- low, but apparently prevalent, conception. There was desperate need of combating it, for the young converts were content to lve as if faith were nothing more than this. And it would not serve now to re- call them to the early intuitive response of their hearts to the story of Christ’s life. Nothing would serve but that their false definition should be replaced by a definition that was adequate and true. Paul’s great theological passages in- variably issue in practical injunctions to godliness, and so all vital theology has found its principal motive in the desire to THE HEART OF THE CREED 83 prevent the divorce of religion from con- duct. Various expedients have been de- vised by way of abolishing this most inveterate and calamitous of divorce evils. One of our historic confessions discovers the bond of union in gratitude: If Christ Saves us on the mere ground of our faith in him, it is argued, then ought we out of common thankfulness to live such lives as he would desire of us.1. But though there is no Christian who fails to recognize every day of his life this compulsion of gratitude, we yet realize nowadays that this does not go to the root of the matter. More pro- found was another historic solution: that if any man turns to Christ in faith he is in some miraculous manner filled with a new spirit of righteousness.2 A proper understanding of Christian teaching re- veals the bond as yet more vital. Religion and conduct, faith and good works are seen to be no longer separable, the twain become in reality one flesh. ' Heidelberg Catechism, Question 86. * Westminster Confession, chap. XIII. iil CREED AND CONDUCT Farr is the key-word of Christianity, but likewise is it the key-word of all human life. That which a man believes deter- mines his character, determines of neces- sity all that he does, all that he is. Here, for example, is a man who believes exclusively in the value of money. He asks for nothing else, desires nothing else, in nothing else recognizes either pleasure or profit; his only satisfaction is in the thought of the money he has gained, and his only hope is in the prospect of gaining more. Offer him a possession of different sort, a beautiful house, the love of a child, the respect of his neighbors, the pride of work well done, any of the things that stir the sentiments of other men, and he will have none of them. In these he has no faith, he sees in them no value, for him; he has faith in money, and in money alone. Knowing so much about your man, you know all that is to be known. In the 84 ee ph CREED AND CONDUCT 85 knowledge of his faith are laid bare his character, his career, and his destiny. He is a miser; he will spend his life grubbing for gold; and at last, if he have soul enough left to make the Great Transit, he will be lost, as how could he but be with his sole occupation gone and his sole passion left objectless ? Every voluntary action of a man’s life is performed with the deliberate intention of securing some good, for himself or an- other. If he had no faith in anything he would sit dormant on a log until he starved to death. Herein, in fact, lies the secret of most of the apathy and indolence which we find among men. All their lives they have never had a taste of anything really wholesome and appetizing. They have been so poor perhaps that they have known nothing except squalor and drudg- ery, or they have been so rich that they have known nothing except frivolous plea- sures. And it makes little difference which; in one case they become stolid and sottish, in the other they become blasé and bored. In neither case is there any zest in living, because they know nothing they can have that is worth having; worth fighting for, 86 FAITH IN CHRIST worth working for. They lack faith in the values of life. At the centre of the kingdom of every man’s mind is set up a throne, and on the throne sits a king, being the Thing-in- which-he-believes. If his homage is half- hearted his life will be inert, but if his homage is genuine he will live vigorously. And the manner of his life will depend, absolutely, on the character of that sover- eign seated, invisible but majestical, on the throne of his mind. He who believes primarily in the ma- terial is a materialist; in pleasure, a Syb- arite; in duty, a Puritan; in the develop- ment of his own character, a prig. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’! The reader may protest that we all know better than we do; which may be true in a sense, or it may be merely a little phrase that we learned in Sunday- school, as Job says.?, We do indeed play false oftentimes to our convictions, and I shall have more to say later in regard to these inconsistencies, but we do not plunge off to right or left inconsequently, 1 Matthew 6 : 21. *Job 12: 2%. CREED AND CONDUCT 87 like a horse with blind staggers. What- ever path we take, we take it because at the end of it, or along the road, we see the promise of a reward which seems to us at the time most worth going after. When we refuse a particular course of action, we refuse it because the gain that it offers does not seem to us worth the price of the effort and renunciation which it involves. This does not mean that we choose our course in life after painstaking calcula- tion, deciding at last that the course on which we determine offers the highest satisfactions. On the contrary, we com- monly calculate very little, we do not stop to think, and our judgments are mostly of the surface. But, wise or foolish, superficial or profound, they are the only judgments we make, and in general we invest our lives in those enterprises which promise the most desirable returns. While the man who spends his evening in drunken dissipation may have a haunt- ing notion at the back of his head that he is a fool, nevertheless any alternative which suggests itself to him seems tame and uninteresting in comparison with the 88 FAITH IN CHRIST excitements of the bar. Up to the point where disease paralyzes the will, up to the point, that is, of irresponsibility, of in- sanity, he chooses the saloon because he believes in it. In a little book of the memoirs of H. Page, published by the American Tract Society about seventy-five years ago and full of the peculiar piety of that remote age, occurs this extract from a _ letter: “Last Sabbath morning heard Rev. Mr. D., from ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, etc. His object was to prove that the impenitent sinners do not really wish the pure joys and employments of heaven, which he did most clearly.”” The writer does not tell us if this was offered as a consolation to the sinners or, other- wise, Just what was the purpose of the demonstration, but it is not difficult to believe that the preacher succeeded in proving his case. And he might still have proven it though the promised employ- ments had been less exclusively musical than in the heaven of 1838. The joys of a Puritan preacher could not be expected to appeal at once to the revellers at the a2 inn, for their idea of a “good time” was ee ee ee ee ee ae = CREED AND CONDUCT 89 entirely different from his. The life they were living was sufficient evidence of where to their mind the most alluring satisfac- tions were to be found. It is always entertaining to catch a man outside his busy hours and discuss ‘“religion”’ with him. One finds that men do a good deal more thinking on such subjects as the word suggests than we commonly give them credit for. The day’s work done, they may find a subtle pleasure in pondering the great questions of the soul, the Supreme Being and the future life. The week’s work done, they may enjoy a church service with its fra- grant atmosphere and its outlook on large, far prospects. But our real religion is not what we think as we nestle by the evening lamp for an hour’s discussion, nor what we feel as the music of the anthem pours over our souls of a Sunday morning. Our religion begins with that of which we have just been speaking, with our con- ception of the meaning of life and life’s values; the things we are living for, what we wish to get out of life, what we wish to get done in life; with the question not 90 FAITH IN CHRIST vy so much of how we are resolved to make our way, whether honestly or dishonestly, generously or ruthlessly, but of where we wish to arrive. It is true that people do not ordinarily imagine that this is the province of relig- ion. They have an idea that religion is a sort of umpire standing over the game insisting that it be played fair. On the contrary, it is little bothered about how the game is played; it assumes the right to a preliminary word as to what the game shall be. In his memorable lecture before the Bradford Board of Trade, John Ruskin said: You know that we are talking about the real, active, continual, national worship; that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nom- inal religion, to which we pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time; but we have also a prac- tical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property, and _ six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion; but we are all unanimous about this practical one, of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally de- scribed as the Goddess of “Getting-on.” 1 1 The Crown of Wild Olives: “ Traffic.” CREED AND CONDUCT 91 And at the end of the lecture, after quot- ing some of Plato’s words about the idol of riches, he looked into the faces of those respectable, honest, churchgoing British merchants and charged: “This idol is yours.” ) It is not impossible that this idol is ours, too, ours when we do not in the least sus- pect that we are idolaters. And the danger is not peculiar to the very rich; they are too few to occupy much of our attention, and in any case I am not sure that they are the chief blasphemers at this shrine— more than most others they have had opportunity to learn that the shrine is a sham. But there are millions of others who worship afar, who see at a distance the golden flame and imagine that it is sacred fire with the magic of happiness in its burning; young men and young women whose dream is to “get on”: older men and women whose pride is that they have got on so well, or whose disappoint- ment and shame is that they have got on no better. The world is gradually doing away with its established state churches, but we still have our abundantly well-established state 92 FAITH IN CHRIST religions. In seeking them it will serve little purpose to investigate the cathedrals and the theological seminaries; rather must one walk the streets, enter the homes, shops, factories, playhouses, legislatures, and, by observing how men live, discover what it is in which they really believe. IV LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES Ir it requires a prophet to reveal a new religion, scarcely less does it require a prophet to discover an old one. No in- quiry is more difficult than the attempt to penetrate the motives by which men live. In the preceding paragraph, for example, I did not mean anything so crude, and comforting, as to suggest that men are commonly engrossed in mere money-mak- ing; such an indictment would let us all out, for there are many things about which we care besides cold cash and its material products. But the mere fact that you love your wife, or that you are interested in old prints or golf or Foreign Missions, does not of itself absolve you from the charge of mammon-worship. The outright miser, such as I have lately described, is a pure figment of the imagination, as utterly mythical as the unicorn. The world has 93 94 FAITH IN CHRIST known, and knows to-day, many miserly men, but never a man whose character was exhausted in miserliness. The dram- atist could not portray such a man, for the picture would be so monstrous as to lose its human resemblance. Shylock passes for a miser; on the discovery of his daughter’s flight he could exclaim: “A diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort.” But occasjon came when he exclaimed, even more pas- slonately: “Tf every ducat in six thousand ducats Were in six parts and every part a ducat, I would not have them; I would have my bond.” The conflicting passion saves the portrait to humanity; without it our Shylock would not be even the caricature of a man. Our ruling faith is never easily de- scribed. Like the princes of any reigning house, it is the proud possessor of a fine array of names, upon some one of which men will fasten for the sake of convenience, but no single word is ever fully expressive of a man’s character. And if human character as we actually LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES 95 find it baffles us with its complexities, we become not less involved in complexities when we set out to describe character as it ought to be. Moralists condemn the love of riches and the craving for pleasure, but they surely do not mean that riches and pleasure have no real value and are not, within measure, proper objects of pursuit. The danger is that we shall set too much value on them; but how much is permissible? Who would ever hope to assess the various goods of life and to indicate precisely, or even approximately, the emphasis which should be placed on each? To what extent should a man be willing to subordinate wealth to charity, with the monks; or pleasure to piety, with the ascetics; or life to knowledge, with Browning’s Grammarian? How far should we sacrifice the welfare of our family to the interests of the nation, our own comfort to the comfort of the beggar at our door? These questions, with the whole array of questions which they suggest, are not to be answered satisfactorily in the ab- stract. But in the concrete, fortunately, they prove less difficult. We manage to 96 FAITH IN CHRIST recognize virtue when we see it, as An- tony recognized Brutus: “the elements So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ ” Christianity does not undertake the hopeless task of tabulating the multi- tudinous goods of life in such fashion as will be valid for all men at all times; it points you to a Man. There, we say, is the perfect life of humanity. . Learn to value things as he valued them; count it success when you achieve what he achieved, when you win what he won, when you become the man that he showed himself to be. And the true order of human values becomes intelligible to a child when it is thus embodied in a personality. Faith in Christ is nothing unless it be- gin with such a recognition of him as the only true and adequate revelation of human life, with the vision of him not only as supreme beauty but as the light of the world. But those who do thus believe in him, ac- cepting the valuations disclosed in his life, and sharing the faith that was in him, will find themselves at once not only Chris- ~~ LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES 97 tian but Christlike, actuated by the mo- tives which actuated him, his character becoming reincarnate in them. Christian faith does not so much produce Christian character; of itself it zs Christian char- acter. V FAITH AND CONVERSION Tue faith which determines a Chris- tian character, however, must be sharply distinguished from a mere amiable ad- miration of Christian virtues. To a certain degree, it is true, the adage holds good that “we become like that which we admire.” The man who ad- mires truthfulness, for example, will be truthful. If it is objected that every one admires truthfulness, the retort is ob- vious, that every one is truthful—up to the point where truthfulness interferes with the acquisition of some advantage on which he sets a still higher value. But it cannot be shown with the same simplicity that the man who admires gen- erosity will at once be gifted with a gen- erous soul. Paul tells us that he despised covetousness and fully recognized the wrong of it, but his stanchest resolutions were futile; he continued to do the thing he de- sired not to do; he was covetous in spite of 98 —_ ee =? 2 eae ei ee. on FAITH AND CONVERSION 99 himself. And the reason is entirely plain: that generosity toward one’s neighbor is not born of a love of generosity, it is born only of a love of one’s neighbor. The heroism by which a man risks drown- ing to rescue a comrade does not spring from a desire to be a hero but from a desire to save his comrade’s life. Character indeed depends comparatively little on what a man wishes to be; almost entirely it depends on what he wishes to do, what he wishes to get and to give. “For what is this Thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins? Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself As Galahad.”’ ! Napoleon was fond of paying tribute to the beauty and power of Christ’s life, and we have no reason to suppose that his eulogies were not sincere. But Napoleon did not believe in Christ. Out in the wilderness of the temptation he would not have chosen as Christ chose; in the wilderness of his own life’s decision he did not, in fact, choose as Christ had chosen. 1 The Holy Grail, Tennyson. 100 FAITH IN CHRIST He preferred the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them. We accept the Pharisees as our arch- hypocrites, but there is one lowest depth of hypocrisy which the Pharisees never fathomed. In their rejection of Christ they were entirely frank. Much of what he said and symbolized was dark to them, but they sensed the meaning of his life clearly enough to know that to recognize him would imply a revolution in their whole attitude toward God and the world; in their religious system—Sabbath, sac- rifice, ceremonial, and the rest; in their political ambitions, aflame since time im- memorial with the hope of world-conquest; in their social organization, now comfort- ably adjusted for the benefit of the people on top. And the irrational expedient of acknowledging Jesus as the Christ, while still clinging to their old philosophy of life, apparently did not suggest itself to them. They: did not hail him as divine while they scouted his ideas as impractica- ble, nor did they call him the Lord of heaven while they murmured secretly that he was sadly lacking in his knowledge of business and politics. “‘Blind guides” —_ es eo - FAITH AND CONVERSION 101 they may have been, but they were not too blind to see that the acceptance of him implied the remoulding of their lives in accordance with the revelation of his life, and they were not such utter hypo- crites that they ever sought to evade the implication. In his commanding presence I doubt not that the issue was too plain for any man to think of evading it, and if in later years we have stooped to hypocrisies of which the Pharisees themselves were in- capable, the reason, I am glad to believe, lies not in our deeper depravity but in this rather, that we have lost sight of the man Jesus behind the clouds of our spec- ulations and superstitions. Really to see Christ, is to see all life anew, and the acceptance of a new view of life involves a transformation of char- acter. “We all,” said Paul, “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.’’! Such sudden changes of character as are here implied have been the object of no small amount of ridicule. ‘‘Con- 1 TI Corinthians 3 : 18. 102 FAITH IN CHRIST version,” says Leslie Stephens, “appears to me to be an absurdity ”’;! which is precisely the way I feel about chameleons —