Sr i eS 
 
 Kautencn nar a une cab nek dae 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 = 
 pe ae ee ee 
 er eee eens 
 Spee eee 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ae ons aweass 
 
 
 
i 51 
 A 
 ERE MPD 
 
 
 

 
Cardinals of Faith 
 
 Brief Studies for a Time of Groping 
 
 BYS a9 
 OSWALD W. S. McCALL 
 
 Minister of 
 First Congregational Church of Berkeley, California 
 
 WITH AN 
 INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 DR. JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM 
 
 Professor of Christian Theology in Pacific School of Religion. 
 
 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1924, by 
 OSWALD W. S. McCALL 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
 foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
IF, PERCHANCE, 
 
 YOU SHOULD FIND 
 WISDOM HERE, OR GOODLINESS, 
 OR TENDER DEVOTION 
 TO THINGS THAT ARE BEST, 
 UNCOVER THE HEAD 
 FOR YOU WILL HAVE MET 
 
 filp Mother 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/cardinalsoffaithoOmcca 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 HOR EWORD? enlist eer Na OR ieer ete yaa Gs fi 
 
 IntTRODUCTION by Professor John Wright 
 Buckbamie wrc Aenean capeer een Ta Oar 9 
 CVD peel Mee tei DG Bie ATURE PEE aR te eS 13 
 LEE Nba 1 CAD, aba PRR ca ce PUD a oie VAC UR DIR 37 
 LES WIS UAL IN ie ae i ei a OR gu 49 
 Jesus s(Concluded) io) 2 ee ia) ee. A ahs 
 PA Ee CHRORS teh isis er Gy 8, cate NR IR 78 
 DUA WERT ON Nas ay eht Units © AUa Us Co regen toey aU NC 94 
 SALVATION (Concluded).........5...3... 110 
 PE OGOHTI ROH ee iene os bayer go wet ate a 123 
 PapCuurcn (Concluded). sees foe. 134 
 CARA CTE Chait ON Laem ch MI ate ith 146 
 BUESVIOLIATION (en 9 8, tolls she ai ine tthe cee eee 162 
 PMMORTAEIT Yo Moy i en eat ble metal OEY, 173 
 Mite PININGDOM) OF GOD ef yih elise eck ets 186 
 
 EROGRESSIONA LO Se fete Grier tere suctanca tees 199 
 

 
FOREWORD 
 
 Most of the contents of this volume was 
 prepared in response to an invitation to deliver 
 a series of addresses before the Northern 
 California Congregational Conference at Asil- 
 omar, California, in the fall of 1922. They 
 were received all too generously, the Conference 
 expressing its desire that they be printed. My 
 own congregation, whose unusual wealth of 
 heart and mind is so provocative of new 
 visions to a preacher, also listened to them, 
 and a request coming that they be heard at 
 Pomona College, Claremont, California, some 
 of them were repeated there in February, 1923. 
 On each occasion judgment that I hardly felt 
 free to ignore was cordial enough to wish for 
 them a wider audience. I have felt encouraged 
 to add certain chapters, and to conclude with 
 a forward-looking word, which I have ventured 
 to term “‘Progressional.’’ The “Cardinals” do 
 not pretend to do much more than glance at 
 certain great truths of religion, any attempt at 
 extensive survey being obviously not made. 
 Yet it is to be hoped that even such brief 
 
 glances, taken as they are in the light of the 
 7 
 
8 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 past and the present, will commend themselves 
 as having seen not untruly. Recollection of 
 the purposes for which the material was first 
 prepared will explain the form of public ad- 
 dress it wears, which could scarcely have been 
 changed without extensive rewriting. From 
 no one has encouragement been so discriminat- 
 ing and so helpful as from Dr. John Wright 
 Buckham, professor of Christian theology in 
 the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley. In 
 readily acceding to my request to look over the 
 “Cardinals,” he allowed me to benefit beyond 
 measure by his suggestions, placing not simply 
 me in his debt, but also all who may chance to 
 read what follows. And may that reading 
 leave the Eternal Things at least a little larger, 
 a little dearer, and life a little holier. 
 OswaLtp W. S. McCatx. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THESE arrow flights into the heart of truth, 
 directed by a clear eye from a well-bent bow, 
 need no introduction. They convey their own 
 desired message in their own rare manner. 
 Such few words as are perhaps needed have 
 to do chiefly with the bowman. 
 
 The Rev. Oswald W. S. McCall, of Scotch- 
 Irish stock, came to America by way of Aus- 
 tralia, where he was pastor of Methodist 
 churches for fifteen years, service abroad with 
 the Australian troops, chiefly as preacher and 
 lecturer, increasing in him that deeper knowl- 
 edge of abiding realities and of men, which 
 was one of the few compensative by-products 
 of the Great War. He left Australia with his 
 family in 1921, not knowing whither he went, 
 except that it was to wide-welcoming and oppor- 
 tunity-abundant America, and for purposes of 
 Christian service. He was intercepted on his 
 way to whatever field of service might need 
 him by the First Congregational Church 
 of Berkeley, California, which called him to its 
 pastorate in January, 1922, under circumstances 
 
 which have seemed both to them and to him 
 9 
 
10 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 too spiritually significant to be of a merely 
 accidental nature. , 
 
 Our time has its own problems and its own 
 preferences. Preaching has been in more or 
 less successful practice a very long time—too 
 long for many of the children of this genera- 
 tion, who have quite lost interest in it. Yet it 
 still has its age-long power and fascination— 
 when the man in the pulpit is a true preacher. 
 The people of Berkeley have caught in the 
 accents of the voice of this spokesman of the 
 gospel a note of veracity, of inspiration, and 
 of human sympathy which has won them with 
 an ever-stronger and more widely felt appeal. 
 
 The University of California, Stanford Uni- 
 versity, and Pomona College have all recognized 
 in Mr. McCall a man with a message which 
 commands both heart and intellect, and to 
 their needs he has given himself with unstinted 
 response. Pacific School of Religion conferred 
 upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 
 May, 1924. 
 
 For such as understand the true and in- 
 exhaustible prerogatives of preaching these are 
 sermons. For those who do not, they are 
 simply reverent and courageous ventures in the 
 realm of religious truth—truth which has to 
 do directly and controllingly with life. At 
 the same time, it seems to me that they are full 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 of a well-concealed but vital and balanced 
 theology. 
 
 Their unusual quality—which only those 
 who have listened to Doctor McCall can fully 
 understand—lies, I take it, in their complete 
 freedom as well as grace of thought and expres- 
 sion, blended with a fine sense of the values of 
 the revelation of the Divine Spirit to the men 
 of good will in the past; their kinship with the 
 true literature of the spirit, old and new, both 
 in allusion and in their own texture; their in- 
 sight into the deeper realities of life, and, above 
 all, in their faith in God, as revealed in Christ, 
 and their sympathetic knowledge of the human 
 heart and mind. These qualities will make the 
 volume a source of light and help to very many 
 who are troubled in the midst of present-day 
 doubt and confusion. 
 
 There are here, to quote lines of Francis 
 Thompson which are often upon the lips of 
 Doctor McCall, “the drift of pinions,” which, 
 “would we hearken, beats at our own clay- 
 shuttered doors.” 
 
 JoHn Wricut BuckHamM. 
 
iy 
 1%, 
 
 
 
GOD 
 I 
 
 ATHEISM is not to-day the troubler of the 
 human intellect. Sober minds, perhaps more 
 especially since the coming of the scientific 
 habit of mind, in most cases feel that it would 
 be something like intellectual flippancy to say 
 there is no God. Our increasing knowledge of 
 this universe-machine may have dazed us with 
 the whirr of its wheels, lost us in the com- 
 plexity of its labyrinths, and left us breathless 
 in astonishment and awe before its finesse, its 
 delicate balances, its perfect adaptations; but 
 I take it our knowledge has in no sense led us 
 to say there is no Almighty Machinist. 
 
 The universe is a pyramid pointing to God. 
 Near Cairo, the visitor to the pyramids sees 
 them built in layers, and one of the pyramids 
 still retains a little of the alabaster that once 
 faced them all; crowning the apex, the alabaster 
 still points to the sky. Is there not something 
 like this in the impressive testimony of the 
 universe to God? First, the mineral base, and 
 upon it the vegetable, and then the animal, 
 
 each “layer” narrowing in extent as the pyramid 
 13 
 
14 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 rises; and then the human, and higher still the 
 supermen, prophets and geniuses and _ seers; 
 above them, the few demigods, as Moses, Con- 
 fucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Mohammed; and 
 last, nearest to heaven, the crown and glory of 
 the whole, the alabaster apex, Christ. The 
 testimony of the pyramid is one; each part is 
 eloquent, but what shall we say of the whole? 
 
 The intellect has its demands; less and less 
 are they likely to be satisfied by atheism. 
 
 This is so of the soberer mind. There is 
 abroad a good deal of easy and pert assertion 
 of unbelief which is really no such thing. A 
 man’s faith is like a harp-string; relax it by 
 eareless living and it will thrill with no great 
 music. But let some discipline fall, bringing the 
 silver cord taut with seriousness, and in that 
 serious hour it will be found that it was not in 
 truth broken at all, but suffering from laxity. 
 A man who carries in his heart a broken faith 
 cannot be pert about it. Professor Clifford, 
 having definitely resigned faith in Christianity, 
 pictured himself amid the glory of a spring sun- 
 rise, “gazing on the empty heaven stretched 
 over a soulless earth,” and realizing with a 
 sense of utter loneliness that “the Great Com- 
 panion was dead.” 
 
 This sort of doubt is very different from the 
 ready denials we meet, but this is the only 
 
GOD 15 
 
 sort we can respect. For no one can be an 
 atheist indeed without much reflection; but to 
 reflect upon the significance of atheism must 
 shadow the soul with horror and despair. 
 Respect a denial such as that; but when you 
 find a man retailing his denials with glib 
 assurance, and rebutting your faith with a 
 satisfaction that at times almost suggests 
 gaiety, be neither alarmed at his attacks nor too 
 hopeful of carrying the day against him. His 
 trouble is not intellectual; it is moral. Either 
 he is a child who, not yet having grown to the 
 dignity of a man, cannot realize the solemn 
 significance of his denials, or else he is a man 
 who carries somewhere a false emphasis in his 
 life, and so is dismantling that dignity and inca- 
 pacitating his seriousness. For no man can 
 lightly say, “There is no God!” without, by his 
 lightness, publishing the hidden flippancy and 
 barrenness of his soul, as if one came laughing 
 to you and said, “Your mother is dead!’ Though 
 it were true, yet the laughter would be an 
 awful exposure of the one capable of it. 
 
 II 
 
 But for the majority atheism is not the 
 trouble to-day. The people are not preyed 
 upon by denials of God so much as by carica- 
 
16 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 tures of him. Our business is not the convincing 
 men of the existence of the Almighty so much 
 as the straightening out of their ideas about 
 him. It matters what men believe about God, 
 for their own lives will be affected by it. 
 
 We are embarrassed with gods. There are 
 tribal gods enthroned by the nations, making 
 favorites and awarding priority; there are 
 denominational gods, with special taste for 
 ritual, or independence, or fervor, or dignity, 
 or what not. There are gods dressed up like 
 clergymen, and gods clanking swords and spurs 
 in the manner of Prussians; there are gods 
 who are professors in theology, bending with 
 feverish interest over our disputes about 
 whether the “‘t’? should be crossed or the “T’ 
 dotted first; there are gods with ribbons 
 around their necks like unto pet poodles, to be 
 fed on pious tidbits, spasmodically embraced 
 in paroxysms of religious sentiment, and gen- 
 erally carried about and fondled as quite harm- 
 less and pretty adornment and entertainment. 
 
 We have gods more than we can number, and 
 that is the pity of it, and some of them are 
 fearfully and wonderfully made. 
 
 Contrast the sublime impression of God left 
 with us by Dante when he pictures himself 
 gazing, in ‘“‘suspense and motionless,” into 
 “that abyss of radiance, clear and _ lofty,” 
 
GOD 17 
 
 staggering under the weight of his own concep- 
 tion of God and saying, “O speech! how feeble 
 and how faint art thou, to give conception 
 birth?!” 
 
 Til 
 
 When we speak of God we mean to convey, 
 of course, the Christian conception of him: the 
 God of Mohammed could not satisfy one who 
 has conceived of the higher God of Jesus. 
 “God is Light,” pure, warm, outstreaming 
 with health. This is his character, revealed 
 full-orbed in Jesus, but rays of which have 
 come through many sources since God first 
 began to reveal himself among men. For God 
 has not withheld knowledge of himself, of his 
 nature and ways, shining in many ages through 
 numberless intellects until we are not left 
 destitute. The light, truly, is through colored 
 media, but it is light, and from above, and it 
 is sufficient to read by. No doubt Scripture is 
 right: ““‘No man hath seen God at any time’ — 
 not the undimmed beam, insufferable. Yet 
 also: “He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father,’ says Jesus; aye, In a dimmer sense, 
 he that hath seen the product of any elevated 
 character or of any clear and honest brain 
 “hath seen” glimmerings of the Father. 
 
 -—1Canto XXXIIL. 
 
18 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Ralph Connor concludes his Sky Pilot thus: 
 ‘For often during the following years, as here 
 and there I came upon one of those that com- 
 panied with us in those Foothill days, I would 
 catch a glimpse in word and deed and look of 
 him we called, first in jest, but afterward with 
 true and tender feeling we were not afraid to 
 own, our Sky Pilot.”” If there were nothing to 
 tell about God after so long, we should well 
 question if there were any God to teil about; 
 if nothing of the Great Companion could be 
 glimpsed among men, we might well deny 
 that there had ever been companionship. But 
 now do we believe that in “sundry times and 
 in divers manners” the knowledge of God has 
 come, because he has ever deigned to be the 
 “rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” 
 
 Let us try to pluck some of the fruits of man’s 
 long thinking and experience and set them out 
 before us. 
 
 IV 
 
 We do not conceive of God as blind energy, 
 nor as mere characterless intellect; he is a 
 Person. Many of those who dispute this are 
 denying something which we are not asserting. 
 Personality is not physical, it is spiritual. 
 ‘‘Perhaps no better service for theology could 
 
GOD 19 
 
 be performed by the pulpit,” writes Professor 
 Buckham in his illuminating work, Personality 
 and the Christian Ideal, “‘than to have every 
 minister the world round stand up and say: 
 ‘God 1s a Person; he is not an Indwidual. A 
 person is a free, self-conscious, moral spirit.” 
 “But,” as another has wisely warned us, “when 
 we ascribe personality to God we do not mean 
 to imply that he has the limitations of per- 
 sonality as we know it, but merely that per- 
 sonality . . . just because it is the highest 
 thing we know, is that something from the 
 analogy of which we can derive the least 
 inadequate conception that is possible of the 
 Divine.”! No personality is known much 
 beyond its fragmentary externals; a man’s 
 works are the least part of him, though his 
 character is expressed in them all. It is no 
 wonder if the deeps of the Master Personality 
 remain unsounded, though what we know of 
 him is real. Who knows all that was Living- 
 stone; yet who doubts that the essentials of 
 Livingstone are known? 
 
 V 
 
 But now where is this Person, and in what 
 world may we find him? “TI will tell you where 
 1 Immortality, p. 79. Streeter. 
 
20 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 God is,” said one of the Christian Fathers, 
 “when you tell me where God is not.” There 
 are two truths about God which every man 
 will be the richer for apprehending. They are 
 not novel to the Christian thinker, yet they 
 seem to require stating yet again. 
 
 One of these is the Transcendence of God: 
 God is greater than his universe. 
 
 Years have gone since some of us read 
 De Quincy’s “Dream Vision of Infinite Space,” 
 but perhaps we have not forgotten his picture 
 of how “God called up: from dreams a man 
 into the vestibule of heaven, saying ‘Come 
 thou hither, and see the glory of my house.’ 
 And to the servants that stood around his 
 throne he said: ‘Take him, and undress him 
 from his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision, and 
 put a new breath into his nostrils; arm him 
 with sail-broad wings for flight. Only touch 
 not with any change his human heart—the 
 heart that weeps and trembles.’ Then, in 
 charge of a mighty angel, the man swung out 
 into infinite space, flying amid worlds of life 
 and wildernesses of death, with towering con- 
 stellations upon one hand and upon the other, 
 suns and planets that built themselves into 
 gates and arches and stairs, depths that yawned 
 unfathomable, heights that reared insur- 
 mountable. Suddenly, as thus they rode 
 
GOD 21 
 
 from infinite to infinite—suddenly, as thus 
 they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry 
 arose—that systems more mysterious, worlds 
 more billowy, other heights and other depths 
 —were dawning, were nearing, were at hand. 
 Then the man stopped, sighed, shuddered, and 
 wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in 
 tears: and he said: ‘Angel, I will go no farther, 
 for the spirit of man aches under this infinity. 
 Insufferable is the glory of God’s house. Let me 
 lie down in the grave, that I may find rest from 
 the persecutions of the Infinite; for end, I see, 
 there is none.’ And from all the listening stars 
 that shone around issued one choral chant: 
 ‘Even so it is; angel, thou knowest that it is; 
 end there is none, that ever yet we heard of.’ 
 ‘End is there none?’ the angel solemnly de- 
 manded. ‘And is this the sorrow that kills 
 you?’ But no voice answered, that he might 
 answer himself. Then the angel threw up his 
 glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, say- 
 ing: ‘End is there none to the universe of God! 
 Lo! Auso Tusre Is No Brcinnina.’ ”’ 
 
 It is worth calling back this picture of 
 infinity that we may awe our spirits with the 
 measurelessness of God! It might help to 
 check certain unseemly tendencies in our 
 modern religious life. If the boisterous laughter 
 of Robert Ingersoll helped, by the truth that 
 
22 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 was in it, to sting us out of our artificial inter- 
 pretations of the Bible, the soberer agnosticism 
 of Huxley contributed much toward our 
 emancipation from parochial ideas of God. 
 We are not all free yet, however. It was with 
 a scorn too fine to realize the indifferent pro- 
 priety of his words that an observant “man 
 in the street’? commented impatiently upon the 
 way some religious folk have of comporting 
 themselves before the Infinite: “Why, they 
 pretty well call him by his first name!’ The 
 reproof is not unjust. 
 
 After we have gathered all we may of Him 
 who has written syllables of himself in every 
 heart that has cared enough to seek him, and 
 in every intellect that has counted him worth 
 its strength, we must return to say, “Lo, 
 these are but the outskirts of his ways: and 
 how small a whisper do we hear of him!” 
 
 The transcendence of God must always 
 signify a necessary truth in agnosticism. ‘“The 
 reality back of appearances,” Herbert Spencer 
 assures us with a finality we cannot share, “is 
 and ever must remain unknown.” But do we 
 know nothing of the heavens because we do 
 not know all? On the other hand, our claim 
 to know something is not a pretense that we 
 know everything; we still go exploring in the 
 starry deeps, glad of every new syllable of 
 
GOD 23 
 
 knowledge we collect, in reverence before the 
 brightness and the marvel, lured ever by the 
 abysmal unknown which we persistently ask 
 to know even if in dazed moments we wonder 
 if it be unknowable. But the starry heavens 
 are dead; God we believe is living, and a 
 Person. In our agnosticism let us not fail to 
 discern between comprehension and apprehen- 
 sion, for if the first is important, the second is 
 life. Whatever God is, the testimony of the 
 ages is that the spirit of man -may apprehend 
 him who outranges the intellect—may appre- 
 hend him and by thus finding him may find 
 also that here alone does it fulfill its own self. 
 “This is life eternal that they may know 
 Thee!’ But this knowledge is first experi- 
 menta! rather than intellectual, it is devotion 
 rather than definition. What myriads live by 
 apprehending electric energy who never even 
 begin to comprehend it! 
 
 VI 
 
 But this Transcendence of God is accom- 
 panied by another truth, without which we 
 should be left crushed and orphaned by sheer 
 infinity. ‘This other truth brings God near 
 again, and redeems us with hope of com- 
 munion. It is the Immanence of God; God is 
 inherent in his universe. 
 
24 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Fairbairn speaks of the people of India 
 believing in a God, who, though impersonal, 
 continually impersonates himself in everything. 
 Impersonality is not the Christian conception, 
 but impersonation is closer to it. At least the 
 poets, those seers who “‘clothe sublimest thought 
 in the language of the gods,” have thought so. 
 “IT kiss God’s finger-tip in the spring flower; I 
 feel his presence in the morning’s glory. With 
 the Persian I kiss my hand to him in the star, 
 my head rests on his breast in a knoll of violets 
 and clover: not on wz but on him; not ‘It is 
 beautiful,’ but ‘he is beautiful.’ ’’ So writes 
 EK. P. Powell. But George MacDonald ap- 
 prehends similarly the proximity of God when 
 he sings: 
 
 “A voice is in the wind I do not know; 
 
 A meaning on the face of the high hills 
 Whose utterance I cannot comprehend; 
 
 A something is behind them; that is God.” 
 
 And when Goethe speaks of nature “as the 
 living, visible garment of God’ we are re- 
 minded of a seamless dress that once in Galilee 
 distributed healing virtue to such as touched 
 it; beneath “this living visible garment’’ is 
 “‘a presence that disturbs’ us, a Person re- 
 sponsive, warm, redemptive, whom not a few 
 have found. 
 
GOD 25 
 
 Those who remember the boyhood book, 
 The Flamingo Feather, with its entrancing 
 picture of adventures among the Indians of 
 Florida, in the sixteenth and _ seventeenth 
 century, will recall how the young hero of the 
 story, a French youth, Rene de Veaux, became 
 the chieftain of an Indian tribe. To that tribe 
 he became in some measure both immanent 
 and transcendent, inasmuch as he was on the 
 one hand actual and accessible among them, 
 infusing them and their customs with his spirit 
 till they caught the flavor of him and were 
 animated by him; but at the same time and 
 on the other hand, being superior, he was not 
 limited by them, their manners or traditions, 
 continuing distinct, and in many of his powers, 
 inaccessible. These two qualities of superiority 
 and indwelling cannot be arbitrarily dis- 
 tinguished one from another; they are a 
 natural combination in one personality. Any 
 father is both immanent among his children 
 and yet transcendent. Pass again to the eternal 
 Spirit and intensify this immanence and this 
 transcendence a myriad times until this two- 
 fold truth of the Great Personality be some- 
 what conceived—the untrammeled supremacy 
 of the Absolute, and the inescapable closeness 
 of the Omnipresent. 
 
 “Whither shall I go from thy spirit?” cries 
 
26 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 the old psalmist. ‘Whither shall I flee from 
 thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou 
 art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, 
 thou art there. If I take the wings of the morn- 
 ing, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
 even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy 
 right hand shall hold me.” This is immanence. 
 
 Vil 
 
 What is God like?—not in form, for he has 
 none that we are able to conceive any more 
 than we can conceive the form of our own 
 essential selves, which also are spirit. But 
 what is he like? Persons have character; is 
 God something like Milton’s Satan, magnificent 
 and terrible, but heartless? 
 
 Though one need not lack color even to such 
 a picture, there is one supreme denial of it— 
 the human heart. Suspect the thing to which 
 the human heart at its best will not answer. 
 Keener than logic, unbaffled by mystery, 
 contemptuous of the spurious, the znéwitions 
 read the face of Truth at a glance. Send out 
 your missionaries to tell the nations that God 
 is ike Satan; produce your evidence—suffering, 
 sin, disease—and, though hearing all, the heart 
 of the race will answer: “I cannot understand, 
 I cannot prove you wrong; but this I know, by 
 
GOD Q7 
 
 something deeper than logic, and by the switt- 
 rising scorn in me: it is darkly and blindly 
 false!’ On the other hand, take the brave and 
 bewitching picture of Jesus to men for their 
 judgment. Say to them, “Look upon this Face 
 and answer if God shines here.” You know 
 there is not a healthy heart the world over but 
 will salute the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ! But that is because the universal heart 
 instinctively realizes that God is good. Rather 
 deny God altogether than deny his goodness. 
 Paul folds his arms and gazes into the face of 
 Nero, and through him into the face of the 
 entire Roman power. What can it all do to 
 awe one whose moral integrity makes him a 
 tower before his immoral persecutors? Martyrs 
 die triumphant through sheer moral sover- 
 eignty. An immoral God would be despised by 
 his creatures, and rightly, for he would be less 
 than they. No tyranny of mere power could 
 conquer one who, though feebler, knew himself 
 greater, because goodness is greater than power. 
 
 vol 
 
 But do not enervate the idea of goodness by 
 making it mere spineless benevolence. Good- 
 ness is not limited to mildness. When Jesus 
 weeps, or declines to condemn an erring woman, 
 
28 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 we are quick to feel his goodness; has he ceased 
 to be good because with vibrating indignation 
 he cries: ‘“‘Woe unto the world because of 
 offenses’? ‘God is light’; is light good? It 
 cleanses, sweetens, invigorates. “‘Let the light 
 shine upon your body; it is health,’ says the 
 doctor. “Let the light into your soil; it is 
 nourishment,” says the farmer. Precisely; but 
 what do the bacillz think about it, to whom the 
 light is death? Any conception of the goodness 
 of God which tends to make him indifferent to 
 sin and moral disease is simply wanton cheapen- 
 ing of the idea of goodness. 
 
 Discovery of the Infinite Love has had the 
 effect in some quarters of besmearing the Deity 
 with a sentimentality that degenerates his 
 attitude toward his creature to the level of 
 doting but feeble and characterless femininity. 
 Scripture, whilst abundant in mercy and hope, 
 gives no justification for our enervated idea of 
 God; neither does nature, nor history, nor 
 conscience. These are all garments of God, 
 bearing the peculiarities of his person, and 
 certainly they bear no testimony that their 
 Divine Wearer is a mere benignant anemia. 
 
 If, long ago, Jehovah was pictured as lifting 
 himself up in gloomy terror to hurl headlong 
 his foes, trampling them underfoot and gnash- 
 ing his teeth above them in irreconcilable 
 
GOD 29 
 
 wrath, we must not allow our indignant re- 
 action from such a picture to miss the truth 
 at the back of zt. Still “our God is a consuming 
 fire’ toward some, or you have emptied his 
 holiness of meaning; still there is something in 
 him to fear, or he is an inanity that no one will 
 love; still he rules with iron hand, or no one 
 in the universe is safe. In some quarters the 
 God of love is so portrayed as to become as 
 unnatural as a picture without a shadow and 
 as insipid as a diet of saccharine. One is re- 
 minded of some of those statues that have 
 come down to us from the great ages of art, 
 but which, more from the usage of uncouth 
 hands than from the passage of time, have lost 
 mouth and nose and eyes and cheeks and are 
 become quite featureless. When love dwells 
 intelligent in the midst of power, as in Jesus, 
 one respects it and is subdued. But when 
 uncouth hands strike the character from the 
 face of God, leaving only an unmeaning and 
 unvaried smudge of “love,” the world turns 
 languidly away and goes after its devils to find 
 something interesting. The enlightened theo- 
 logical Canaan we hoped we were journeying to 
 has turned out to be largely a land flowing 
 with sentiment and syrup, and somehow we 
 almost sigh for the wilderness where the frown- 
 ing aspect and the sting of the hail did remind 
 
30 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 us that someone cared if we did wrong—if it 
 were only enough to punish us! 
 
 The love of God is not a capacity for infinite 
 yielding, but it is like the evening softness of 
 great mountains, where the softness reposes 
 amidst granite strength. Unless this is realized 
 the goodness of God can mean little either,to 
 us or to the nation. For God must be allowed 
 to be morally in earnest and not a trifler. 
 
 IX 
 
 Here, then, is the ever-present Person, per- 
 feet in goodness, witnessing to himself in us 
 and in all that is. But still another question 
 urges itself: What is the raison détre of God’s 
 creation? Behind this various universe and 
 behind the fact of human being, a provocative 
 Why? lifts up itself. 
 
 “Why did you paint that picture? It cost 
 you much time and patience. Why? For 
 applause? For money?” 
 
 “T do not despise the applause, yet that is 
 not the reason,” replied the artist. “I need 
 the money, yet neither is that the reason. I 
 had to save my soul.” God is the First Artist 
 and is urged by his own nature: the heavens 
 are his canvas and he paints in worlds. But 
 reflect that God is a person and that persons 
 
GOD 31 
 
 need fellowship; especially must this be so of 
 him who is the Supreme Person and the First 
 Lover. Again, there is the urge of God’s own 
 nature, the urge to fellowship, the imperious 
 urge of love. In Scripture and on the rocks 
 God has told the same story: the crown of 
 creation is personality. The universe has 
 sweated to produce it; by endless selection and 
 labor it has provided a companion for God. 
 To raise questions of possible companionships 
 elsewhere does not alter the truth of them here. 
 With all its imperfections human personality 
 can give devotion to God and receive him, and 
 not be complete apart from him. How pro- 
 found, we may remark, is the responsibility of 
 any soul in refusing God the communion de- 
 manded by God’s own nature! For if man has 
 himself become a person, and if he is built to 
 find God and have him, realizing his dignity 
 and happiness in him, it is deprivation to God 
 and it is disaster to man for anything to pre- 
 vent a steady growth in reciprocity between 
 human personality and divine. God _ needs 
 man, and ultimately every man must learn 
 that it is only God who can be of satisfaction 
 to him. But here we see that God, by all that 
 he has made, principally by man, reveals his 
 hunger for fellowship. Such need can be 
 satisfied only by love, which, in the nature of 
 
32 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 it, cannot be commanded, may be withheld, 
 and must always be voluntary. 
 
 This, then, is the picture: God, essentially 
 personal, infinitely great, thrillingly present, 
 robustly good, hungering for fellowship. 
 
 X 
 
 And now one comes to the supreme climax 
 of the subject, the matter that concerns us 
 most and which is capable of being missed, 
 though we should possess all the furniture of 
 definition and correct views about the Divine 
 Being. It is this: 
 
 How are we to achieve the expervmental, per- 
 sonal knowledge of God, which 1s not made wp 
 of intellectual opinions but of spiritual conviction 
 and fellowship? 
 
 God is the Master Truth, and if any man is 
 asking, Pilate-like, ““What is truth?’ let such a 
 man be warned of Pilate’s attitude. 
 
 In the first place, his temper was wrong, 
 being contemptuous, angry, whereas except a 
 man be converted from scorn and pride and 
 become as a little child, he shall in no wise enter 
 into the kingdom of truth. 
 
 In the second place, Pilate’s life was wrong, 
 being place-loving, cowardly, irreligious. No 
 man can weave a net of logic with his intellect 
 
GOD 33 
 
 and catch truth as a fowler catches a bird. 
 Assets of character are necessary. “Blessed 
 are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”’ 
 “Every one that is of the truth heareth my 
 voice.” It is as well to recognize this. It was 
 possible for the Roman to have Jesus Christ 
 stand actually before him and yet miss his 
 value. What had Pilate in him that could read 
 the excellencies of Christ? You desire know]- 
 edge of God? And think you no preliminaries 
 of character are needful for such a quest? Be- 
 ware lest, on a day when you complain that 
 God is unknowable, someone retort: “Sir, 
 thou hast nothing to draw with—and the well 
 is deep.” 
 
 In the third place the skeptical Roman, 
 having propounded his question, straightway 
 “went out.” Brusque termination of the sub- 
 ject may suit a supercilious temper; it does 
 not permit the discovery of truth. All the 
 learning in the world will not compensate for 
 cavalier treatment of the things of God, nor 
 save such a man from being bankrupt of faith 
 to the end. Be advised to cultivate patience 
 and expectant persistence. It is required in 
 every other study; why not in the study of 
 God? Be patient, changes will yet take place 
 within yourself, brought about by experience 
 of living, which, if you are worthy, may give 
 
34 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 you keys to mysteries that are locked to-day. 
 As has been well said, truth must be born 
 again in every individual heart ere it can exert 
 power in that life. But this sort of thing is not 
 for the slammer of doors, nor for him who 
 completes instead of suspending his judgment 
 when puzzled in the presence of great ques- 
 tions. 
 
 There is no question greater than this: How 
 may knowledge of God become a conviction 
 and a potence within us? 
 
 Illingworth! treated this illuminatingly years 
 ago. All knowledge, he reminded us, is a 
 process, or the result of a process. Moreover, 
 even the simplest knowledge, that which comes 
 through the senses, does not come without an 
 active exercise of all the three functions of our 
 personality—thought, emotion, and _ will— 
 though the constant, common use of our ability 
 to see, hear, feel, may have become so auto- 
 matic as to appear involuntary. In realms of 
 deeper knowledge, such as those into which the 
 scientist enters, again our whole personality 
 must cooperate in knowing, and little will be 
 learned without emotion and will, enthusiasm 
 and perseverance. 
 
 This is truer still in knowing persons. We 
 usually know of them an aspect, only—social, 
 
 1 Personality, Human and Divine, Lecture V. | 
 
GOD 35 
 
 commercial, artistic. Love or reverence some- 
 times tempts us deeper, but in proportion to 
 the depth and greatness of the person or 
 character in question is the difficulty of really 
 coming to know him. To know a man as he is 
 —his true motives, the secret springs of his 
 conduct, the measure of his abilities, the 
 explanation of his inconsistencies, the dominant 
 principles of his inner life—this is often a work 
 of years, and one in which our own character 
 and conduct play quite as important a part as 
 our understanding. We all find that self- 
 revelation is possible only to another for whom 
 one has affinity. Plato, the spiritual philosopher, 
 saw more profoundly into Socrates than could 
 Xenophon, Socrates’ companion in arms. 
 Though sleeping under the same stars, what 
 could the careless soldier know of Socrates? 
 
 But when we speak of knowledge of God, 
 knowledge of that pure and uncreated Person, 
 how shall the unholy know the Holy One, or 
 the worldly know that which is spiritual, or the 
 self-centered know him who is Love? Such is 
 the drift of Illingworth’s thought. 
 
 Knowledge of God, conviction that God is, 
 sympathetic and interpretative affinity with 
 him—these things are not the achievement of 
 a day, but they ripen as a process. Neither 
 are they to be won without attention to one’s 
 
36 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 own character. Reverence, the will to believe, 
 hope, patience, all are necessary, and so is 
 action. 
 
 Action—this is the note that may well close 
 this discussion. It is the note struck by that 
 rugged doubter, Carlyle, in his chapter, “The 
 Everlasting Yea.’ It is not surprising that in 
 that chapter wherein he insists that Conduct 
 is the prelude to Conviction, wherein he says, 
 “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except 
 by action,” and writes in italics, “Do the duty 
 that lies nearest thee’; it is not surprising that 
 in that chapter he is able to turn with scorn 
 upon the skepticisms of Voltaire and cry: “Is 
 the God present, felt in my own heart, a thing 
 which Herr von Voltaire will dispute out of 
 me; or dispute into me? ... Feel it in thy 
 heart, and then say whether it is of God! This 
 is Belief; all else is opinion—for which latter, 
 whoso will, let him worry and be worried.” 
 
 But such magnificent belief comes on the 
 wide moors of Action, not in the artificially lit 
 and heated cloisters of Thought, where Faith 
 withers for lack of exercise. Think, in the 
 name of Heaven, but walk as you think! 
 
PRAYER 
 I 
 
 NEHEMIAH was too serious a man for us to 
 suspect him of covert mockery, and yet in the 
 account of his rebuilding of the Holy City, 
 when he was beset by enemies bent on undoing 
 his work, he gives utterance to these significant 
 words: ““We made our prayer unto our God, 
 and set a watch.” He asks God for help and 
 then proceeds carefully to lay his own very 
 practical plans to help himself, posting sen- 
 tinels upon the walls. 
 
 Unfortunately, some of us find it only too 
 easy, in these days in which so many things 
 are superficially different from his, to listen to 
 his account of what he did with such a smile 
 as is provoked by a spectacle of incredible 
 naiveté, or else with that understanding 
 sareasm which thinks it detects in him the 
 same attitude, tired, cynical, knowing, that 
 talks religion with its tongue in its cheek. “‘We 
 made our prayer—appearances demand it, 
 don’t you know? It is the custom and, who 
 knows?—there might just chance to be some 
 
 benefit we do not pretend to suspect. But 
 37 
 
38 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 there is one thing we can trust—our own right 
 arm; we'll set a watch. ‘God helps those 
 who—help themselves!’ ” 
 
 And yet you will not say that it is either 
 Bible teaching or common sense that God will 
 help those who refuse to help themselves. 
 “Give us this day our daily bread,” is our 
 prayer; but “if any would not work, neither 
 should he eat,’ we are warned. Nehemiah is 
 neither a simpleton, unable to see that his trust 
 is really in the “watch” and not in the “prayer,” 
 nor a mocker, well aware of the value of the 
 sentinels but indulging a tilt at an outgrown 
 faith. He was simply one of those sane old 
 Hebrews who had learned—a good deal more 
 than some of his modern critics—the divine art 
 of keeping his feet firmly planted upon the 
 earth while his lungs inhaled the pure airs of 
 heaven. With what puckered disdain would 
 any one of them have surveyed the astonishing 
 examples of crazeology we could offer, ranging 
 all the way from a clod-like materialism that 
 has no eyes to see the sky, up to filmy religiosity 
 that floats so near to heaven it cannot come to 
 earth! Nehemiah would find no difficulty in 
 seeing that God’s help and self-help must be 
 united to make prayer. Perhaps we shall be 
 able to show that both are necessary and are 
 not contradictory. 
 
PRAYER 39 
 II 
 
 I want to lift out of this incident two persons 
 and to invite you to watch their relationship 
 one with another as we make our inquiry con- 
 cerning prayer. 
 
 There is God; and there is Nehemiah. 
 
 Personality is spirit, and here are two per- 
 sonalities. All prayer is between persons. 
 When the disputing mothers presented them- 
 selves with request before Solomon, or when 
 the people of the United States petition their 
 President, on both sides of the supplication 
 stand persons. One does not attempt to sup- 
 plicate anything else. 
 
 Consider, then, these two persons, Man and 
 his Maker. Each inhabits a world of law. The 
 spirit of Man, dwelling in his body, is the best 
 analogy we have of the Eternal Spirit’s dwelling 
 in the universe.! 
 
 Both the body of a man and the universe of 
 God are ordered by a regime of inexorable law, 
 and this it is that constitutes one of the most 
 grievous problems of prayer. We know exactly 
 the conditions and limitations of a man’s body; 
 any physiologist will prophesy what will hap- 
 pen if you cut a nerve or touch the eye-ball; 
 let a wound open the flesh, and nature will 
 
 1See J. R. Illingworth, Divine Immanence, Chapter IIT. 
 
40 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 proceed to healing in a manner which can be 
 predicted to exactitude, and which will be the 
 same as in the case of a million million wounds 
 suffered by our race. Everything has its own 
 laws, and what can the spirit of man do to 
 alter them? Can he defy gravitation, or the 
 nature of fire, or the need for food, and sur- 
 vive? The spirit is his personality, but so long 
 as it is in the body, must it not submit to the 
 body’s laws? It is the law for his lungs to 
 breathe; can he alter it? He does not wish to 
 blush when embarrassed, but it is the law for 
 his blood to flow, hastening to the brain when 
 it is shocked; can he change the law? Like- 
 wise, God is immanent, truly, in his Universe, 
 but you remember Omar’s depressing lines: 
 
 “And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky, 
 Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, 
 Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It 
 Rolls impotently on as thou or I.” 
 
 Even if God is able to affect the universe of 
 law, is he likely to do so merely because we 
 pray? Do you realize what it means to inter- 
 rupt a universe? Somewhere in the paralyzing 
 recesses of space there plunges at incredible 
 speed, as I speak, a vast world of blinding 
 incandescence. We call it Halley’s Comet, and 
 who knows what adventures attend its pro- 
 
PRAYER 41 
 
 longed career amidst the myriad, wheeling, 
 flaming inhabitants of God’s bewildering uni- 
 verse? And yet, however proudly this courser 
 of the skies may shake its burning mane and 
 strike bright stardust into a long trail from 
 its fleeing hoofs, and seem untamable, resistless, 
 in the glory of its going—yet, without faltering, 
 unhastening, the strong hand of Law is upon 
 the rein; the great comet is controlled, will turn 
 upon the bit as a chariot turns in its course, 
 and those of us who live in 1986 will sit like 
 Romans in the Coliseum and watch it come 
 again, and go. Will prayer alter that? 
 
 Somewhere on the mountains the snows are 
 melting, and on the plains flooded rivers are 
 devastating the country. Let us pray that the 
 snows shall cease to melt. “No,” says some- 
 one, “‘that is not feasible; rather let us begin 
 earlier and pray that the snows may not fall 
 so thickly in the winter.” But that will mean 
 a change of wind, a reduction of evaporation, 
 a control of sun-spots, a control of the forces 
 behind the sun-spots, and behind them— 
 “God can do it.” But what sort of a God 
 would he be to play with his universe like 
 that? 
 
 What are we to conclude? Not that God 
 does not love, but that he is unable, having 
 shut himself in? Is prayer, therefore, futile? 
 
42 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 Ii 
 
 Take up our analogy of man being immanent 
 in his body, and therefore inhabiting a world 
 of law which he cannot change. ‘There is 
 something more than immanence; it is tran- 
 scendence. 
 
 Human personality is not a slave in fetters. 
 He inherits a system which he is able to direct 
 to his own abounding benefit. 
 
 “Man has harnessed the lightning to his will, 
 And spanned the ocean’s breadth with bows of steel; 
 He has made the universe his mill, 
 And set the winds to work to drive his wheel.” 
 
 That which is heavier than air should fall, but 
 man sits upon it in the clouds. Though he is 
 naturally a slow-moving animal, he has learned 
 to outstrip the ostrich and the wild wind. 
 Though his voice is feeble, he has made it to 
 be heard across a continent; though his eyes 
 are dull he has shown them how to see through 
 solids. He pounds with heavier hammers than 
 that of Thor; he carries vaster mountains than 
 Atlas; the thunderbolts he hurls make play- 
 things of the terrors of Jove. He outdoes the 
 labors of Hercules, turning the rivers to nourish 
 the desert, chasing the ocean and reclaiming 
 the land, everywhere placing his strong hands 
 upon the laws of nature to show he does not 
 
PRAYER 43 
 
 cringe and simper, but stands up and _ uses 
 them. Some laws he controls by using higher 
 law; some unexpected results he gets by 
 achieving new combinations, of which the 
 variety seems endless. In the realm of his own 
 body he never lifts a hand without overruling 
 the law of gravitation. Thus it is with the 
 personality of man. 
 
 Passing again to the Master Personality, 
 there is an ancient chain of questions which 
 has always challenged answer: “He that 
 planted the ear shall he not hear? He that 
 formed the eye, shall he not see? He that 
 teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know?” 
 Shall we not add: He that giveth man control, 
 shall not he govern? 
 
 By every wonder of the twentieth century 
 we are able to proclaim: Personality is first 
 and greatest. God is transcendent, personality 
 always is. When God and man meet, and man 
 is suppliant, rearrangements of a universe are 
 not necessary in order to answer his need. 
 Even we, though so dim in knowledge of the 
 Almighty’s ways, can conceive of methods 
 whereby he might work. God is Lord in his 
 own universe, and is able to answer according 
 to his will without derangement and dislocation 
 of a single thing that helps to hold together 
 the myriad worlds which he has made. 
 
Ad CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 IV 
 
 What then—a blank check? A moment’s 
 reflection will correct such an idea. The 
 relationship is not that of a man and a limitless 
 but characterless treasury. Prayer is not an 
 Aladdin’s lamp. The relationship, as we have 
 repeatedly said,.is between Persons, and pro- 
 found significance attaches here. Persons have 
 character, and character must not be presumed 
 upon. When Herodias supplicated Herod for 
 John the Baptist’s head he ought to have 
 repulsed her; and if God were to answer some 
 of our prayers, he would be as immoral as 
 Herod. When you pray, it is to the Holy One; 
 you have no right to insult his character by 
 petitions which, if answered, would cheapen 
 the moral values of his universe. He is the 
 Unwersal Father—by what right do you ask 
 him to make a favorite of you? 
 
 That is the significance of Jesus’ repetition 
 of the need for praying “‘in my name.” Ap- 
 proach in the spirit of Jesus, conceiving of God 
 in his terms, and at once some prayers become 
 impossible. It is easy for savages to ask wild 
 things of their idols, but it is different with the 
 God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He 
 who is perfect Love, Wisdom, and Holiness is 
 often more wisely to be intrusted with our 
 
PRAYER 45 
 
 affairs than to be pressed overmuch by petitions 
 that are born of lesser love, wisdom, and purity. 
 
 This is first: no invasion of the integrity of 
 God’s personality. This is second: no tnvasion 
 of the ends of our own personality. The prayer 
 which, if answered, would check our develop- 
 ment is illegitimate. Paul “‘besought the Lord 
 thrice’” and was denied; then it is the Chris- 
 tian man begins to ask why? Paul began to 
 realize that it was better for him to learn the 
 grace of God than to be relieved of a thorn in 
 the flesh. When cholera was raging in England 
 Charles Kingsley was asked to pray for its 
 arrest. He flatly refused. He believed that 
 the responsibility for the cholera lay with man, 
 not with God. “Do not pray for rain: lock 
 your rivers!”’ said a distinguished archbishop in 
 Australia, pointing attention to the millions of 
 gallons of water being allowed annually to flow 
 in flooded rivers to waste during the rainy season. 
 
 V 
 
 And yet there is virtue in such prayer if it 
 is seen to be a means of learning wisdom. To 
 pray is often to learn the incongruity of doing 
 so and at the same time sitting still. Nehemiah 
 prays for protection, and straightway sets a 
 watch. “I knew my cruel brother’s traps 
 would not hurt the little birds, because I asked 
 God not to let them,” said the little girl. 
 
AG CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 “Ts that all you did?” 
 
 “No. I went out and kicked the traps over.” 
 
 A hungry “‘tramp” knocks at the door of a 
 country house, and prays for food. The house- 
 wife eyes him estimatingly, for there are many 
 scamps abroad with. pitiful stories but with 
 hearts of loafers and rogues. How can she 
 know if he is genuine? She offers him an ax 
 and points to the woodpile; and if he is genuine, 
 he will at once appreciate this way of earning 
 his food honorably. If he is insincere, he will 
 find an excuse and move on. But he accepts 
 the suggestion, works at the woodpile, and at 
 length returns with a self-respect that has not 
 been sacrificed. 
 
 But now, who is to be thanked, his own 
 right arm or the housewife? It is plain that 
 had he not prayed, he would not have had the 
 wood suggested and he would still have been 
 hungry. But also, had the housewife given him 
 food too easily, granting he was in health, she 
 would have gratified him at the expense of his 
 personality. If God were to carry us through 
 life in upholstery made out of cheaply answered 
 prayers, we certainly might have an easy time, 
 but at fearful expense. Not the dwellers along 
 the equator, amid abounding vegetation and 
 fruits, but the inhabitants of the stern north, 
 wrestlers with the blizzard, are the men who 
 
PRAYER 47 
 
 have made history. Nehemiah upon the walls 
 is Nehemiah writing his prayer in deeds. You 
 must not ask for what will diminish your own 
 values or choke your own depths. 
 
 All this engenders caution and discrimina- 
 tion. Absence of it explains unanswered prayers. 
 When, however, one can say, as Jesus did, “My 
 Father worketh hitherto, and I work,’ a 
 man’s purpose moving harmoniously with the 
 Father’s, the efficacy of prayer begins to write 
 itself out in the Journals of a John Wesley or 
 the Life of a George Muller. 
 
 VI 
 
 But let me sing the song of this great com- 
 panionship! Let me tell how it rejuvenates 
 faith and courage, creates seers and prophets 
 and moral giants. The man of prayer will see 
 life more truly and will dare more nobly than 
 another. It is this which is most fertile in the 
 production of ideas; the mind which learns to 
 react with the Infinite Mind can never stagnate. 
 When the tide ebbs the seashore is sometimes 
 marked by chains of pools which would soon 
 foul if left thus isolated and undisturbed. The 
 returning tide pours change and disturbance 
 into them, and they are saved. Alas for the 
 man from whose mental shores the Ocean 
 
48 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Mind has long ebbed! who has allowed sand 
 bars of materialism to grow between himself 
 and God! But great is he who knows seasons 
 of divine inflow and disturbance—yes, dts- 
 turbance! Such throb in man of the Infinite 
 Life, such discontenting surge in him the 
 powers of the world to come, have more than 
 once proved the inaugural birth pangs of a 
 new epoch. 
 
 But do we begin to speak the benefits of 
 prayer? As well try to tell the values of going 
 from the city to the mountains with their 
 health, their wide prospect, their redemptive 
 rest. 
 
JESUS 
 I 
 
 *““Anp lifting up their eyes they saw no one 
 save Jesus only.” That is what Matthew has 
 to say of the disciples in that strange experience 
 when Jesus “‘was transfigured before them.” 
 
 What, then, has become of Moses and Elijah, 
 who but a moment since were seen in friendly 
 converse with Jesus? They have merely ap- 
 peared in the picture that they might fade 
 from it, leaving him to fill it all. And what 
 has become of this talk of tabernacles for Jesus 
 and the others? It has simply stopped, because 
 it somehow did not suit then any more than 
 now: Jesus cannot be put on a level with any, 
 even of the world’s greatest. A mysterious 
 voice always singles him out: “Hear Him.” 
 Others were heaven appointed in their day, but 
 once you have heard the voice of Jesus other 
 voices, even of Moses and Elijah, lose their 
 authority. No longer are there many masters, 
 but One. At first we say, “I will bend the 
 knee to Him as to the greatest teachers of our 
 race.” Later we find we have somehow fallen 
 
 prostrate upon our face, and we are not think- 
 49 
 
50 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 ing of the company of the great ones in which 
 He is worthy to stand, but we are thinking 
 only of Him, in whose shining company no one 
 is worthy to stand. The stars lightened our 
 darkness until the sun arose. We lift up our 
 eyes and see no one, save Jesus only, solitary, 
 preeminent, peerless. 
 
 II 
 
 Thus it is when the soul stands upon its 
 summits; the lower ranges of experience do not 
 make so clear and emphatic this realization of 
 the uncompanioned maturity of Jesus. Esti- 
 mate of highest, divinest human loveliness is 
 not aided by the crookedness and materialism 
 of spirits at their lower ebb. Eyes coarsened by 
 selfishness are not in condition to read and 
 realize sublimity such as resides in the face of 
 Jesus. But in the occasional hour of the soul’s 
 best, when our feet stand upon the pmnacles, 
 the preeminence of our Lord is realized. 
 
 It is significant that the soul’s best moods 
 should do such homage to Jesus; surely it is 
 here that the soul may be trusted. This homage 
 is independent of special theories about him, 
 for men of widely different theology have 
 united in it. Here is that rugged Scotchman, 
 Carlyle, saying: “Our divinest Symbol . . . Jesus 
 
JESUS 51 
 
 of Nazareth.... Higher has human thought 
 not yet reached....A Symbol of quite peren- 
 nial infinite character, whose significance will 
 ever demand to be anew inquired into and 
 anew made manifest.” “Thou wilt become to 
 such a degree the corner stone of humanity,” 
 cries Carlyle’s antithesis, Ernest Renan, “‘that 
 to tear thy name from this world would be to 
 shake it to its foundations. Between thee and 
 God men will no longer distinguish.” Reading 
 the Gospels in Saint Helena, Napoleon, in a 
 passage that has become famous, exclaimed: 
 “I am an understander, a reader of men. I 
 tell you this Man was more than a man.” 
 “Christ is surely the most sublime image 
 offered to human imaginations,” Sir John R. 
 Seeley assures us. No testimony to Jesus, 
 however, is more beautiful than that of Theo- 
 dore Parker: “‘The manliest of men, humane as 
 a woman, pious and hopeful as a prayer, brave 
 as man’s most daring thought, he has led the 
 world in morals and religion for eighteen cen- 
 turies because he was the manliest man in it; 
 hence the most divine.” 
 
 One could assemble almost indefinitely such 
 testimonies to the supremacy of Jesus, gathered 
 from the hearts of men who in their day repre- 
 sented opposite schools of thought, and even 
 opposing lines of action. And yet it must be 
 
52 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 admitted that the figure of Jesus does not 
 thrust itself upon the vision with the arresting 
 impact of that of a John the Baptist, or a 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. When he is first seen, 
 his very excellence tends to prevent sudden 
 appreciation. Where there is oddity, there is 
 attention arrested. The overweening strength 
 of a Napoleon, or the righteous austerity of a 
 John the Baptist, lack that balanced symmetry 
 which always must be pondered to be realized. 
 The deep stains of a sunset or the sheer abrupt- 
 ness of a cliff catch the eye at once. But it is 
 only as the mind lives with Jesus until he is 
 known that there grows upon us a sense of his 
 wondrous human completeness. He increas- 
 ingly compels the thought: “Here is the 
 harmony of our discords, the flower of our 
 struggling roots, the completed circle of our 
 baffled sections. This is humanity unblemished 
 and mature, the goal to which our stumbling 
 steps are summoned.” 
 
 Hit 
 
 Nowhere as in Jesus is humanity so trium- 
 phant, serene, strong, gentle. We look in vain 
 for another. Human thought has dreamed 
 such things as he was, but who else has summed 
 up in himself the world’s dreams as has our 
 Lord? Gather our race’s best thoughts about 
 
JESUS 53 
 
 God, most discerning and inspiring thoughts 
 about men; bring your purest, noblest, 
 tenderest codes of human duty, and they may 
 all be shown vital in the flesh, in Jesus. 
 
 There were things in him that were not 
 apparent to Jewish eyes. As Emerson reminds 
 us: “No man can learn what he has not prepara- 
 tion for learning, however near to his eyes is 
 the object. A chemist may tell his most 
 precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall 
 never be the wiser—the secrets he would not 
 utter to a chemist for an estate...”! So it 
 was that the Jewish disciples missed much in 
 Jesus, for while they were merely Jews, he was 
 more than a Jew, being “the Son of man.” 
 Therefore in the stories of him written by 
 Jews such as Matthew we get all that wealth 
 about him which lay open to the eyes of a Jew, 
 and which could not have been so seen by 
 another. But there was much in Jesus that 
 Matthew never saw, and never reported. Pass 
 into the fourth Gospel and feel the change. 
 That Gospel abounds in ideas that were found 
 in the philosophy of that day, the Logos being 
 the most striking example, but here they are | 
 attached to Jesus. How different this Jesus 
 from that of Matthew! The church has always 
 felt it, and used to account for it by saying 
 
 1 “Spiritual Laws.” 
 
54 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 that the fourth Gospel described the divinity 
 of our Lord, and the others the humanity. 
 Others, often critics of the church and outside 
 it, insisted that here was no picture of Jesus 
 at all, but a philosophic amalgam that had no 
 resemblance to Him of Nazareth. But why 
 either? Nothing that is human was foreign to 
 Jesus, and the truth found by the Greek is not 
 likely to be lacking in him. May not the Greek 
 mind gaze upon him and see things withheld 
 from the Jew? It is testimony to the Master’s 
 depth that the Greek mind did not come to 
 him to be sent empty away. And we wait for 
 the subtle Indian mind to discern still more, 
 and the mind of the Mongol has yet to bring 
 its key to open fresh treasure chambers in the 
 mind of Christ. 
 
 Still men see differently, and probably all 
 they see is true, however poorly expressed it 
 sometimes may be. What two men read 
 Shakespeare alike? To one man Hamlet is a 
 fool; to another a startling portraiture of him- 
 self; so differently does experience prepare us 
 to see or to be blind. We have our favorites in 
 Shakespeare for the same reason. Personality, 
 our own or another, never is capable of exhaus- 
 tive delineation, and never is seen quite the 
 same way by two different people. 
 
JESUS 55 
 IV 
 
 This reflection should have taken the sting 
 out of the debates upon the personality of Jesus 
 that have divided friends and families and 
 churches in all the Christian centuries and 
 which have gone so far toward hindering the 
 triumph of his spirit among men. If the elusive- 
 ness and mystery of personality are remembered 
 better in our day, we shall not repeat the follies 
 of our fathers. There are no doubt many left 
 who will still insist upon definition and evalua- 
 tion of our Lord, and who will cry out upon 
 any who see in him something they do not, or 
 who fail to share what they see, but there will 
 be others, and wiser, who, while far from 
 despising “the form of sound words,” will be 
 more appreciative of the elusive nature of 
 truth, which so readily “breaks through 
 language and escapes.” These will love the 
 highest when they see it, even if embarrassed 
 to answer what precisely it is they love, and 
 why. Machinery one may describe, but life is 
 baffling. I have seen what purported to be 
 photographs of thoughts, but always the effect 
 upon me was to shock me with the smallness 
 after all of what I had supposed to be so bril- 
 liant and so wide-winged. Also I have long 
 read careful definitions of the incomparable 
 
56 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Master, and I have been content if I have been 
 allowed to say, “These are fragments, ap- 
 proximations of the truth.” But when I have 
 been told that these are exact, and that I must 
 accept them as the truth which must not be 
 altered or challenged, I begin to shudder as one 
 who has listened to blasphemy! Who are these 
 that with easy pencil fill up the picture of our 
 Lord, as if he were some idol of wood that 
 possessed no mystery they could not explore? 
 And yet we have them with us. They will tell 
 you with precision how far Jesus is divine, 
 what constitutes the atonement, all about 
 what happened to him at his death and 
 after Our Lord is not allowed to be as interest- 
 ing as the commonest man among us, who at 
 least is too much of an enigma to be so con- 
 fidently described. 
 
 The mischievous and false dogmatism about 
 him has alienated many from discipleship who 
 could neither believe nor love the little, hard 
 and unreal presentations thrust upon them in 
 place of the living and magnetic Person. 
 
 Frequently I am pressed to wonder how far 
 such omniscient expounders of the mystery of 
 Jesus realize that they themselves may be 
 grasping a husk rather than the kernel, and 
 how far they have really known him. The ages 
 have been sick with the clash of creeds that 
 
JESUS 57 
 
 have had more champions than the spirit and 
 message of Jesus. He has been recognized as 
 the glory of our race, but we have been far 
 more concerned to analyze and assess the 
 nature of his glory than to reflect it. How the 
 Master has regarded it we have not considered, 
 any more than did those soldiers who left him 
 on his cross while they disputed over his 
 garment. 
 
 V 
 
 When a man says to me, “I do not believe 
 what you do about Jesus,’ I am bound to 
 answer, ““And you never will.”’ Without strain- 
 ing himself to see these things just as others 
 see them, let him reassure himself that truth is 
 quite able to conduct its own arguments. 
 Therefore let him quietly give truth a chance. 
 Let him teach himself to walk with Jesus, 
 think his thoughts, share his judgments; let 
 him get the heart-beat of him, his generosity, 
 sagacity, tranquility, power, purity, and he, 
 Jesus, will do for himself what I could never 
 do. He himself will teach you—well, we shall 
 not quarrel about phrases, but there will be 
 abiding facts whether phrases are found for 
 them or not. The inescapable logic of common 
 experience will bid you say, “He is Mediator, 
 
58 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Reconciler, Saviour’; for, expla it as we may, 
 it is contact with Jesus that pours more reno- 
 vating and reclaiming streams through human 
 personality than are to be derived from any- 
 where else. 
 
 Not any one of the disciples began their 
 fealty to Jesus with ideas of him that have since 
 become current in the Christian Church, nor 
 with ideas of him that they themselves later 
 arrived at. Any zealot who insists to some 
 hesitating mind that he simply must accept 
 all that the church has claimed for Jesus—all, 
 or nothing, who makes the alternative as 
 sharp and as extreme as that, does not do our 
 Lord service, and wrongs the soul of one who 
 might have been ready for discipleship. One 
 who walks steadily with the Master will 
 probably move far in his estimates of him ere 
 he finishes, but for many men there will be 
 no discipleship, no deepening loyalties, no 
 awakened wonderings, if the only Jesus they 
 are offered is a highly debatable thing of 
 metaphysics. Some minds will never be con- 
 vinced or captivated on authority, ecclesiastical 
 or other. 
 
 Not even to-day is it the elaborate Jesus of 
 the creeds who conquers me! It is when I get 
 back across the deserts of argument to cool 
 Galilee and meet him there, real, warm, vital; 
 
JESUS 59 
 
 it is there, where I am not greeted with the 
 hard clash of theological machinery, but with 
 life; where he asks me for no belief about him 
 but the belief that he is my friend, and where 
 he takes me among the quiet hills and talks 
 with me—just talks with me about God and 
 about myself; talks with me until my heart 
 burns, and new dawns arise, and life becomes 
 invested with strange dignity, and heaven 
 draws wondrous near and fills the common 
 day with mystic presences—it is there he 
 conquers me. Then I stand up and gaze at 
 him with trembling lips and ask: ‘“‘Who art 
 thou? Who art thou? Art thou God? Art 
 thou man? What art thou?’ And _ looking 
 back with eyes that do not tremble he replies: 
 “T am the Light of the world.” 
 
 “Aye, Lord, indeed!” 
 
 “TI am the Bread of Life.” 
 
 “Aye, Lord, verily!” 
 
 “He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father.” 
 
 “Aye, Lord, and never till then!’ 
 
 “fT am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
 I am the true Vine. I am the Resurrection 
 and the Life.” 
 
 And then, there in green Galilee, far away 
 from the rasp of polemic and “‘the craft of 
 tongue and pen,” he has put his hands upon 
 
60 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 my shoulders as a man who loves to talk with 
 men, and he has searched my face in gentle, 
 bantering mockery and has smiled and said: 
 *‘And now, what am [?” 
 
 And I have shaken my head and answered, 
 “Nay, Lord; I shall never know what thou 
 art until I know all that God and man is.” 
 
 Then by the shoulders he has drawn me 
 closer, that I might better read his face, and 
 he has spoken more earnestly as if he would 
 bring me to something that mattered more 
 than questions of that sort: 
 
 “Yes, yes; but in the meantime, what am 
 Te" 
 
 And I have understood the thing he really 
 cared for, and with an emotion such as moves 
 the soul that has found the Imeffable, the 
 Lode-Star, the Consummation, I have fallen 
 on my knees before him and cried: ““Thou art, 
 thou art, forever and forever Lord and Master 
 of my soul: for there is none else. Thou makest 
 the stars pale and other masters dumb!” 
 
 Then he has lifted my face and smiled again 
 upon it and said: “So you do not wait until 
 you have explained?” And what, when it 
 came to decision, could I ever answer but such 
 things as amounted on the whole to this: “Ah, 
 my Lord, whither should my spirit turn, if it 
 turn away from thee? Where among the 
 
JESUS 61 
 
 children of men shall I find a beauty as in 
 thee, thus to bind me hand and foot? Where 
 else as here shall I find a magic voice to break 
 profane infatuations, and thrill me upward to 
 my best? Who else will open heaven to my 
 soul and bring me to the Father? Oh, there 
 is no other! To whom else should one go? 
 Thou hast the words of eternal life!’ 
 
 “‘Who should be king save Him who make 
 us free?” But who makes us free as Jesus 
 Christ, our Lord? 
 
JESUS 
 (CONCLUDED) 
 I 
 
 Tue Lordship of Jesus does not wait upon 
 metaphysical interpretations of his Person, 
 and, theological opinions apart, he must ever 
 be Master to all who are ready to surrender 
 to the highest we know, for Jesus is that. 
 Intellectual revolt from the dogma of the 
 church does not absolve an honest man from 
 loyalty to Jesus of Nazareth, whose concep- 
 tion of life, of duty, of God, remains the best 
 guide, revelation, nourishment in divine things 
 that we possess. 
 
 It must be felt, however, that the matter 
 cannot be left here. The custom of Christians 
 from the first is not so light a thing that it may 
 be simply ignored, and that custom has been 
 to pray to Jesus Christ, to believe he is an 
 ever-living Presence, to ascribe to him the 
 nature of God and to call him God. With 
 perfect sincerity many to-day are finding such 
 difficulty in following that custom that they 
 
 frankly, some even militantly, decline to con- 
 62 
 
JESUS 63 
 
 form to it. To them it is a survival of that 
 deification of heroes spoken of by Renan, 
 altogether too naive to be credited by the 
 philosophic mind. 
 
 Yet there were philosophic minds in other 
 ages than ours, and the great doctrines of 
 Christendom certainly cannot be charged with 
 being the plebeian offsprings of intellectual 
 flabbiness. Modifications and developments in 
 our statements of faith may indeed be forced 
 as each new generation feels its obligation to 
 speak in its own accent and according to its 
 own light in order that faith’s reality may be 
 preserved, but surely no changes are likely to 
 come which will cause the thoughtful man to 
 feel that the statements he discards are wholly 
 foolish and entirely without significance or 
 foundation. If Christendom has called Jesus 
 “God” can it be altogether without reason? 
 And if there is impatient reaction from that 
 term in some quarters may it not be that, at 
 least in certain cases, the reaction is the more 
 violent because unaccompanied neither by fair 
 endeavor to understand precisely what is meant 
 by the term, nor by courageous reflection upon 
 the problem of Christ’s Person. For there is 
 undoubtedly such a problem; and if it is not 
 to be solved by the mere claims of current 
 Christology, neither is it to be escaped by a 
 
 \ 
 
64 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 deprecating pout of the lips. Jesus Christ 
 remains, demanding explanation and a category. 
 Our very insistence upon the scientific temper 
 of our age, upon the compulsions of reason, 
 makes us to that extent less able to leave this 
 unique Figure unassessed. “‘What think ye of 
 Christ?” It is not depth but shallowness that 
 lightly replies, ““A man like the rest of us!” 
 and stops there. Scant respect, this, to the 
 intellectual genius of those hosts whose thought 
 has tarried provoked before this enigmatical 
 Figure, and scant respect, also, to the spiritual 
 instinct of still greater hosts who have fallen 
 at Christ’s feet to ery, “My Lord and my 
 God!” 
 
 Il 
 
 This lovable and impressive Jew of the first 
 century had some arresting things to say 
 about himself which cannot fairly be passed 
 unexamined by any who would seek to get at 
 who or what he was. One such saying starts 
 into memory: “He that hath seen me hath 
 seen the Father.’ But no sooner does one ask 
 precisely what this means than a certain 
 difficulty becomes apparent. “He that hath 
 seen me—” but who ever saw Jesus, or who 
 ever saw any man, for that matter, except as 
 he shines through the veils that garb him, as 
 
JESUS 65 
 
 light through a cloud that covers the sun 
 from our direct seeing. Personality, being 
 spiritual, is never seen face to face. Yet the 
 light that filters through the cloud tells of 
 greater glory from which it came, and there is 
 similar testimony in the light that lies about 
 Jesus. Men have loved to bask in his light 
 even when they have not cared to ask its origin. 
 The world has warmed itself in the Light that 
 is Christ, and that Light has been pouring 
 healing into our wounds and cleanness into our 
 sewers and assurance onto our path; but not 
 all who have lived by that Light have con- 
 cerned themselves with questions of its source. 
 Yet the richest and most vital feature of the 
 message of Jesus will have been missed unless 
 the meaning of him is faced—not of his teach- 
 ings nor of his works (though these can never 
 be separated from one) but of himself. 
 
 It may be that we can more easily ask 
 questions about Jesus than answer them. His 
 Person, just who and what he himself is, is 
 one of the most provoking problems of religion. 
 If the intellect balks at the ascription to him 
 of Deity, on the other hand, it does not rest 
 satisfied in leaving him labeled as a man. 
 He is that, but somehow the intellect grows 
 restive under his confinement to this limita- 
 tion, feeling that his unquestionable uniqueness 
 
66 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 has not thus been done justice to. Yet we have 
 no vocabulary to meet his case. He is some- 
 thing apart. ‘“‘We have no word,’ we might 
 confess. “God we know and man we know, 
 but who is this, suggesting both, yet precisely 
 fitting our conceptions of neither?’’ Yet one 
 cannot but feel that the problem, far from 
 being neglected on account of its difficulty, 
 must, rather, be persistently studied as the 
 most ultimate and rewarding of all, for knowl- 
 edge of Jesus Christ is knowledge of God and 
 of man. 
 
 Iit 
 
 In certain quarters it has been customary in 
 speaking of our Lord Jesus Christ to assist 
 toward clear thought by making a discrimina- 
 tion between “Jesus” and “Christ.” It is not 
 necessary to push this discrimination too in- 
 sistently, but for the purposes of our discussion 
 it will be useful to observe it, applying the 
 word “Jesus” to the normal human life of our 
 Lord, and employing the term “Christ” to 
 describe something else. 
 
 There was a Jew, then, who lived in Palestine 
 long ago. His name was Jesus. But that is 
 passed. There was Something or Someone 
 who lived in Jesus and who, as we believe, 
 has never died. We are calling that Christ. 
 
JESUS 67 
 
 Explain it as we may, Jesus brought God 
 nearer to men than they had ever known him 
 before, so that religion has become a new thing; 
 and the hope of the world, the joy of life, the 
 power of the Divine Presence, all have risen 
 to new and unexampled measure since Jesus 
 came. These are mere statements of fact, as 
 one may state facts by declaring that the 
 Northern Lights are playing and that he 
 listened the other night by radio to a concert 
 rendered a thousand miles away. Such state- 
 ments of fact have their interest, but what is 
 of even vaster significance to us is to know 
 what is that mysterious world behind, of 
 which these facts are merely the visible flower. 
 To grow in knowledge of that is to grow in 
 power; for then one, understanding somewhat 
 the universe that God has made, learns to 
 work in sympathy with it, until he can crush 
 rocks to powder, spread his wings in the clouds, 
 and make his voice with the speed of lightning 
 to travel round the earth. It is not enough to 
 acknowledge facts. They are small incidents 
 compared with the vital world behind them 
 and which they are publishing. 
 
 It is a fact that the purity of Jesus was like 
 mountain snow at sunrise, when the cold 
 whiteness is beautiful with gold and warm 
 with rose; it is a fact that his goodness was 
 
68 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 better than snow, which, after all, suggests 
 only an absence of dirt, for not the absence of 
 badness but the rich presence of virtue, mature 
 and commanding, was the splendor of him; it 
 is a fact that he lived with men as one whose 
 joyous social instincts were urgent and im- 
 perative, and that he walked with God as one 
 whose spiritual- apprehensions were natural, 
 effortless, and inevitable; it is a fact that 
 when he speaks of men the heart of humanity 
 thrills as a rich harpstring at the touch of its 
 master; it is a fact that when he speaks of God 
 men sit rapt and hushed and satisfied as if 
 they watched the opening of new and diviner 
 worlds. Facts they are—that no man ever 
 lived as he lived, that no man ever spake 
 as he spake; they are facts which all may test. 
 
 But, after all, they are facts that are nearly 
 two thousand years old, and, if that is all, 
 then are they but little more related to me 
 and not a very great deal more valuable than 
 the wealth of old Lydia and the navies of 
 Carthage. 
 
 The imperishable value of Jesus Christ to 
 us men, however, is not to be looked for in all 
 that dazzling bloom of peerless words and 
 character. The significance of the bloom lies 
 in the inquiry it drives us to concerning the 
 hidden stems and roots of it. The wealth of 
 
JESUS 69 
 
 Lydia and the navies of Carthage are fallen 
 and scattered like withered petals, but not so 
 the forces of human mind and spirit on whose 
 strong stems they once blossomed. Study 
 these out-blossomings of the mind and spirit 
 of man if you would understand a little better 
 the folly, the ingenuity, the power of your kind. 
 From generation to generation humanity still 
 persists; it, at least, does not wither and pass. 
 And continually is it throwing to the surface 
 facts that tell about itself. The facts are of 
 value because of their revelation of the vaster 
 truth. 
 
 Say not, therefore, that the facts about 
 Jesus have no longer any relationtous. He was 
 an efHorescence of Eternal Truth and Being, 
 Being which men have struggled after always, 
 and not without reward, but which was mani- 
 fested fullest in him. The “effulgence’’ of God’s 
 glory, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 describes him, “the very «mage of his substance.” 
 “The image of the invisible God,” Paul says in 
 similar figure. “No man hath seen God at any 
 time, the only begotten Son, which is in the 
 bosom of the Father, he’ writes the mystic 
 writer of the fourth Gospel, “hath declared 
 him.” 
 
 Jesus is a revelation of God as a flower is a 
 revelation of the plant that bears it. 
 
70 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 IV 
 
 That Jesus is thus a revelation of God will 
 probably present small difficulty to many, but 
 the question which is urgent is larger than 
 that. 
 
 In claiming so vast a thing for Jesus we, 
 perchance, will get further in commending our 
 claim if we rely not so much upon recognized 
 arguments which go to show that Jesus was 
 more than a man. If it be at all possible to 
 throw light upon just what we mean when we 
 make vast claims for our Lord, the reasonable- 
 ness thereof may do more toward strengthen- 
 ing faith than any number of arguments that 
 seem to maintain a position which, when all is 
 said and done, seems to be inherently irra- 
 tional. 
 
 We have said that Jesus is an efflorescence 
 of God. Now we raise the question: Is he, 
 himself, God? In seeking to face it, let us ask 
 this: Is the flower then a thing apart, and 
 not itself the plant? No one contends that. Is 
 Jesus Christ then a thing apart from God, or 
 should we call him God? We need not tarry 
 to point out that we do not call the man Jesus 
 by that name, for the flesh perishes and God 
 is Spirit. But what may we call that Someone 
 who dwelt in Jesus as the explanation of his 
 
JESUS 71 
 
 glory? The fourth Gospel, apprehending in our 
 Lord Something that was without birth and 
 without death, in the beginning with God, and 
 itself God, gave it a name which we have 
 translated “Word,” and said, ““The Word was 
 made flesh and dwelt among us.” 
 
 Very well, he used that word to describe a 
 manifestation of God which he believed had 
 been made in Jesus. Others, speaking of the 
 same Truth, used different words, some speak- 
 ing of the “Son,” others of the “Mystery,”’ 
 while yet others called It “Christ.””. Were not 
 all such words laboring to describe Something 
 that is beyond us, Something without prece- 
 dent, for which our vocabulary is inadequate 
 and which we yet find to be inescapably real? 
 
 V 
 
 There was a quality in Jesus which the word 
 “humanity” did not seem adequate to express, 
 and it has been the custom of Christendom to 
 describe it by the word “God.” Have we, 
 after all, any other word quite so suitable? 
 We may give it a more characteristic descrip- 
 tion by calling It “Christ,” but, af by the word 
 “Christ” is meant the Eternal Truth, that was 
 before Jesus was born, that dwelt in Jesus and 
 that persists now that the man Jesus 1s gone—tf 
 
72 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 this is Christ, then Christ 1s God. This it was 
 in Jesus that unfolded itself, or himself, in 
 divine flowers of word and work. The whole 
 life of Jesus was a bloom of God. Mankind has 
 plucked the fragrant bloom and called it ““God,”’ 
 and mankind surely has done well—as well as 
 one who takes a flower and says it is plant. 
 Of course it is plant, of the very life and nature 
 of plant; it is not animal, nor mineral, though 
 something of mineral may be present to help 
 make it shape itself. Yet assuredly it is plant, 
 
 But in admitting this—and here is a feature 
 of this subject which surely ought carefully to 
 be indicated—let us not fail to see that it is 
 not all of the plant. The flower has no roots, 
 no leaves, no stems—has not a plant all these? 
 Yet the flower is plant and without it no plant 
 would be perfect. A mistake is made when one 
 separates flower from stem and seeks to de- 
 scribe each separately as if they were not one 
 —as Jesus said of himself, “I and the Father 
 are one.’ Another mistake is made when one 
 is so zealous to give the flower its true name 
 and to call it plant that the flower is hailed as 
 complete, self-sufficient, possessing all the roots 
 and branches of plant life. Though it is indeed 
 truly plant, it has not all the functions of a 
 plant, any more than Christ, who is God, when 
 he dwelt in Jesus, can be fairly described as 
 
JESUS 73 
 
 complete, and _ self-sufficient God. “Verily, 
 verily, I say unto you,” said our Master, “The 
 Son can do nothing of himself.”” But God, who 
 is the Absolute, Self-existent, Independent, can 
 do all things of himself. And our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, in the days of his flesh, while of the 
 same nature as God, must not be described as 
 the Absolute, the Self-dependent, for he is not 
 God in that sense. These are qualities of Deity 
 which were not manifested in Jesus, in whom 
 God, for our sakes, “became poor.”’ 
 
 Howbeit, if any man puzzled in his questions 
 to find a category for Jesus Christ should pro- 
 test that the limitations of a flower make it 
 inaccurate for one to call it plant, and if he 
 prefers to give it another name, rather than 
 sacrifice this Flower’s ministry to him by 
 making him turn from it with impatience 
 through a mere warfare of phrases, would it 
 not be fair of an adviser to say: “Give it what 
 name you will, but study it as a revelation of 
 the Plant upon which it grows and from which 
 it draws the life that makes its beauty. Through 
 the Flower, be it plant or not, you may learn 
 the meaning of Plant-life, and be sure you 
 come to know that at least; for, after all, the 
 Plant is more than its Flower, though, as we 
 believe, the Flower is of the same nature as 
 
 the Plant’’? 
 
74 ' CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 VI 
 
 The question urging itself upon some minds 
 will, of course, be that this does not make 
 Jesus Christ different from any one of us, 
 seeing that God has flowered in us all, and 
 that, even if Christ be the fairest bloom, there 
 yet remains in him nothing to justify the 
 extreme laudation of the Christian Church. 
 
 One feels no need to resist the contention 
 that it makes Jesus the same as all of us, for 
 if we are to confine ourselves to the words of 
 Jesus in seeking an estimate of his person, we 
 shall be impressed by his preference for the 
 term “Son of man”’ as applied to himself. This 
 is the description he chose and used continually, 
 and it ought to convince us of his seeing unity 
 between himself and us. When, however, this 
 kinship is pushed so far as to mean that he was 
 in no wise different from us, what better can we 
 do than cease discussion and simply stand 
 alongside Christ by way of measurement? 
 
 Somehow there are vast differences, and yet 
 those are the differences which create such a 
 challenge to our explanation. One asks, “‘Are 
 we then all Christs?” and, ‘““With such kinship, 
 may we not all some day grow to his stature?”’ 
 etc. In this connection it may be pertinent to 
 quote President William Jewett Tucker, in his 
 
JESUS 15 
 
 life in Himself: A Meditation on the Conscious- 
 ness of Jesus Christ. 
 
 **A perfect man, of the degree of the perfec- 
 tion of Jesus Christ, reaching ‘unto the measure 
 of the stature of the fullness of Christ,’ is to 
 me more incomprehensible, more impossible, 
 than the incarnate Son of God. I would deny 
 no essential likeness of the human to the 
 Divine; but even if we carry the likeness to the 
 possibility of a divine humanity, we are not to 
 overlook the fact that a difference in degree 
 may amount to a difference in kind. I take a 
 drop out of the ocean. The drop is like the 
 ocean, but it is swayed by no tides, it bears no 
 ships on its bosom, it does not unite continents. 
 I take a grain of earth from a mountain. The 
 grain is like the mountain, but I can dig no 
 quarries out of its bowels, I can cut no forests 
 on its slopes, I do not see it lifting its summits 
 to the first light of the day. Man may be like 
 God, but I locate Jesus, not in the drop and the 
 grain, but in the ocean and the mountain.... 
 I search among the sons of men of all time, 
 and I look in vain for one who had the con- 
 sciousness of ‘life in himself.’ ... No: any inter- 
 pretation of the personal life of Jesus Christ 
 which can satisfy my mind must allow it the 
 substance and quality and fullness of the life 
 of God. I grant the mystery of the incarna- 
 
76 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 tion, but I prefer mystery to insufficiency in 
 my faith. As I watch the process by which 
 men are made to become sons of God, as I 
 follow the stream of human redemption im its 
 ceaseless and widening course, I can trace it 
 to no other or nearer source than the Eternal 
 Sonship of Jesus Christ.” 
 
 Vil 
 
 At the risk of repetition, let us make clear 
 that what we declare concerning Jesus Christ 
 is that he was a manifestation in time of a 
 timeless Truth, a revelation in form and flesh 
 of a spiritual Power and Person who has no 
 form that we are able to conceive. It existed 
 before Jesus came, but many things exist 
 which we never knew until they housed them- 
 selves in form. Electric energy shapes itself in 
 the lightning and is revealed. We might never 
 have known it otherwise. But our business 
 has been to improve our knowledge and then 
 to learn how to use this thrilling force. 
 
 There was a moment in human affairs when 
 the loving, seeking, saving, qualities of God 
 focused themselves into human form as never 
 before. Our eyes have been dazzled with that 
 light! The burning flame that lit our spiritual 
 skies has gone, but not the ageless, exhaustless 
 
JESUS v7 
 
 qualities of God that caused it. We might 
 never have known had Jesus not come, but 
 now we know forever. You cannot picture 
 God, but you can conceive him best when you 
 look into the face of Jesus Christ. You can- 
 not imagine what electricity is like, but you are 
 left less ignorant after you have looked into 
 the face of the lightning. When we speak of 
 Christ our present Saviour, we are not thinking 
 backward two thousand years, except to the 
 extent that we want a likeness of an incompre- 
 hensible truth. We mean by Christ those ever- 
 present, ever-seeking, regenerating realities of 
 God that are as a Shepherd, as Living Bread,.as 
 a Door into a sheepfold, as Resurrection from the 
 dead. There is in the Godhead what may right- 
 ly be called a passion for men—a will to save. 
 
 Mankind had had a glimpse of this before, 
 but the manifestation glowed in Jesus as a 
 beacon on a crag. He was the Saviour, and he 
 is the Saviour, for nothing divine can die. 
 His flesh is perished, but the eternal grace he 
 focused in himself pursues its redemptions for- 
 ever, but with vaster sweep. Therefore, as 
 Paul says, “though we have known Christ 
 after the flesh, yet now we know him so no 
 more.” He hath ascended. He sitteth on the 
 right hand of power. 
 
THE CROSS 
 I 
 
 How is it that the cross of Jesus has come 
 to be so impressive a thing among men? Its 
 shadow is upon all the New Testament; from 
 spire and tower it overtops the towns and cities 
 of Europe; it is Christ upon the cross that 
 Dante finds himself unable to describe; it is 
 the most affecting inspiration of art; and, in 
 Christendom at least, it is the most sacred 
 symbol of holy things. It has created a lit- 
 erature and a hymnody, and from countless 
 pulpits during nearly two thousand years it 
 has been offered to the world as its glorious 
 hope. What is the meaning of it all? Sym- 
 pathy with the suffering of a good man? 
 Then why not the ax that beheaded Saint Paul, 
 or the faggot that burned Saint Mark, or the 
 rope that hanged Saint Luke, or the spear that 
 stabbed Saint Thomas? Or is there something 
 deeper, some passionate significance more vitally 
 related to the deepest needs of men? 
 
 We are familiar with the long custom that 
 associates with the cross of Jesus some achieve- 
 
 ment on our behalf and some mysterious 
 78 
 
THE CROSS 79 
 
 mediation to us of redemption. Redemption 
 and the cross have been ever bound together. 
 How? and why? are questions that have been 
 much disputed; language has been used that 
 no longer convinces us, and which we some- 
 times feel has been even injurious. Resentment 
 on account of language that displeases us has 
 often been allowed to obscure the deep signifi- 
 cance which alone can account for the sus- 
 tained interest in the subject. “God quenched 
 the flaming sword of his anger in the blood of 
 Christ” is an irritating enough declaration, but 
 what shall we say of the man who is so in- 
 censed by the words as not to see that the 
 theologian who said it was wrestling with some 
 fearfully vast idea? Manifestly, the death of 
 Christ was to him the supreme enactment of 
 time. The darkness seems never to have lifted 
 from the hill called “‘Golgotha,” where ‘‘our 
 dear Lord was crucified,” and the centuries, in 
 trying to penetrate it, have felt that the death 
 it covers is somehow different from all others. 
 
 For great numbers Christ’s death remains 
 thus significant, but there are others. To 
 them Jesus and his death exhibit nothing be- 
 yond the death of any good man foully 
 murdered. When such an opinion rests upon 
 many years of ripe study and experience of 
 the subject it must be met with respect, but I 
 
80 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 submit that the intense fascination exerted by 
 the cross of Jesus demands deeper explanation. 
 One feels, as one has said of another matter, 
 “as if he were being offered a box of matches 
 in explanation of the flame of Jupiter, or a 
 child’s box of colors to account for the tint of 
 all the oceans!’ | 
 
 II 
 
 When Shakespeare was preparing to pre- 
 sent the performances of King Henry of 
 England in France he complained, with some- 
 thing like disgust, at the narrowness of the 
 stage upon which he was compelled to arrange 
 his picture. “‘Can this cockpit hold the vasty 
 fields of France?” he exclaimed; “or may we 
 cram within this wooden O, the very casques 
 that did affright the air at Agincourt?” He 
 rather would have “a kingdom for a stage” 
 but is, instead, compelled to call upon the 
 imaginations of his audience to suppose that 
 “within the girdle of these walls are now con- 
 fined two mighty monarchies. Into a thousand 
 parts divide one man,” he invites them, and 
 so, by every means, to look upon this little 
 stage and imagine the vaster. But as a matter 
 of fact, if Shakespeare could have taken his 
 audience to France itself, and shown them 
 
THE CROSS 81 
 
 Henry’s campaign in undiminished action and 
 splendor, he would have achieved little more 
 than the bewildering of the people’s minds. 
 His only way of bringing to them a conception 
 of the truth was for him to lay hold of it with 
 his own master mind, select the salient features, 
 the chief characteristics, and by compressing 
 them into narrow compass, present them to 
 his audience in a measure that they could 
 grasp. In other words, it was necessary for 
 him to take the truth as it stood in its largeness 
 and dramatize it into small but comprehensible 
 measure, thereby not altering the truth but 
 allowing it to be grasped. 
 
 Have we not reason to think that in some 
 such manner as this the infinite truth of God 
 which, in its strength, would simply overwhelm 
 the mind, has, from time to time, been 
 *“dramatized’”’ in one way and another? And 
 is it not just to claim that in the life and death 
 of Jesus we behold, better than anywhere else, 
 the “‘dramatizing’’ of his eternal and infinite 
 reality? There is a striking passage in the 
 book of Revelation: “‘And I beheld, and, lo, in 
 the midst of the throne...stood a Lamb as 
 it had been slain.” “In the midst of the throne,” 
 in the very heart of the being of God, is some- 
 thing of which the cross is our best symbol. 
 Jesus in his life and in his death was the intel- 
 
82 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 ligible expression of something profoundly 
 and permanently essential in the nature of 
 God. 
 
 “But so is any man a dramatizing of God.” 
 Perfectly true—it is our glory! He who doubts 
 it has not grasped the truth of the immanence 
 of God. Every man is in some real sense an 
 incarnation of God. Is this a dream? Then it 
 is also a dream that God can ever mean much 
 to us, for if you insist upon separating him 
 from this intimate indwelling, you also separate 
 us from knowing anything about him. An 
 unrelated abstraction, without character or 
 characteristic is the alternative, lacking the 
 very perfections which we recognize to be most 
 divine, which can only be by his relationships 
 with his creatures. But if God is immanent as 
 well as transcendent, I shall recognize and 
 know him in the highest examples of human 
 excellence. If God dwells and works in men, I 
 shall see no great deed or virtue without feeling 
 it right to say, “It is God’s efflorescence!” 
 
 It is not without import that the ancients 
 believed that the gods sometimes took human 
 shape; we may yet come to see that God 
 continually takes human shape. This is not to 
 say that all that is human is God and that 
 therefore we are God. But it is to say that 
 God, who is infinitely greater than man, yet 
 
THE CROSS 83 
 
 actually dwells in us, and more and more as we 
 show him hospitality. 
 
 Two factors require notice here: (1) God 
 must always be greater than he can ever show 
 himself through man, because man’s capacity 
 as a medium is limited. For example, when we 
 ascribe omnipotence, eternity, to God, and 
 speak of him as “the Absolute,” we are stating 
 ideas about him that seem intellectually neces- 
 sary rather than reporting the revelation of 
 himself he is able to make through man— 
 unless, of course, the “‘necessary idea’’ is itself 
 the result of a subconscious awareness of the 
 nature of God, arising from his indwelling. 
 (2) As a palace provides better entertainment 
 for a king than does a hut, so a man of genius 
 enables a larger and more various manifesta- 
 tion of God than a common man—always 
 assuming in each case the desire to entertain 
 him; for the Great King will cross no in- 
 hospitable threshold, and join no company out 
 of sympathy with himself—no, not though it 
 be housed in the genius of a Voltaire! 
 
 So there are gradations in God’s self-revela- 
 tion; there must always be, so long as men 
 vary. Yet in every good life one may see God 
 manifest in the flesh. In seeing the Great 
 Incarnation let us not be blind to the lesser, 
 for they make more reasonable and intelligible 
 
84 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 the greater. Everest would be an incredibility 
 if all else of the earth were a plain. Handel 
 would be meaningless to us, if in him alone 
 dwelt the spirit of music. Christ could be no 
 Master and Teacher of men if men were not 
 themselves tabernacles of the Eternal Spirit, 
 until spirit answers to spirit, truth to truth, 
 and God to God. As an incarnation of God 
 Jesus is supreme—but not alone. Though God 
 may be said to be diminutively “‘dramatized”’ 
 in every spiritually healthy life, it is a simple 
 matter of fact that we see God “‘in the face of 
 Jesus Christ’? as we see him nowhere else. 
 God is God always, whether found in us or in 
 Jesus; as light is light wherever we find it. 
 Thank God for the stars that illumine our 
 darkness, the great ones of the earth in whom 
 God has in all ages shone with that “true light 
 which lighteth every man coming into the 
 world.” Yet the brightest star that ever shone 
 pales before the rising of that golden sun of 
 truth which we call Jesus! If you would study 
 the nature of light will you gain aught by 
 ignoring the sun? On the other hand, does the 
 glory of the sun demand that you deny the 
 stars? 
 Il 
 
 Holding fast, then, this truth of God’s 
 
 radiant immanence in Christ, the incarnation, 
 
THE CROSS 85 
 
 let us pass again to that other peak of Chris- 
 tianity, the cross. 
 
 In Gospels and Epistles the writers seem 
 unable to escape the fascination of the cross 
 and a sense of its central importance. The 
 first Christians never contemplated it without 
 emotion. The religious experience of countless 
 believers through the centuries has combined 
 to indorse this importance and share this 
 emotion. Always able to see that it was 
 innocence and love that suffered, and that the 
 suffering was both from the malignance and 
 for the sake of the ungodly, the wondering 
 heart has ever filled before this vision of vicari- 
 ous love. It was “for our sakes” that “he be- 
 came poor,’ and he died—‘“‘the just for the 
 unjust, that he might bring us to God.” Sin 
 wreaked its spite on him. Verily he sustained 
 in himself “the iniquity of us all.”’ 
 
 Yet not as one who could do naught else. 
 Less devotion to the cause of men would have 
 escaped the cross. Compromise with the 
 vicious spirit that was assailing him, which was 
 the Arch-Schismatic, seeing it separated man 
 from his Maker, and which was the spirit he 
 had come to change—less loyalty to the only 
 truth that could set men free and bring them 
 to the Father—would have eluded the cross. 
 Believers, standing in the shadow of “a lonely 
 
86 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 hill,” have continued to be subdued by the 
 love that could thus die. “For,” as we ever 
 say, “the love of Christ constraineth us; be- 
 cause we thus judge, that one died for all, 
 therefore all died; and he died for all, that 
 they which live should no longer live unto 
 themselves, but unto him who for their sakes 
 died and rose again.” 
 
 Many, however, have died for men in just 
 that way, and the spectacle is always moving. 
 In all ages the sublime self-offering of martyrs 
 to truth, suffering on account of the sins of 
 men, has defended by blood the higher way 
 and purchased men to it. The connection of 
 “‘our lesser Calvaries’” with the “green hill far 
 away” was felt by Doctor Harris when out of 
 the red heart of war he looked upon youth 
 dying to save, and wrote his “Supreme Sacri- 
 fice.” 
 
 “Long years ago, as earth lay dark and siill, 
 Rose a loud ery upon a lonely hill, 
 While in the frailty of our human clay, 
 Christ, our Redeemer, passed the selfsame way.”’, 
 
 Not robbing Calvary of aught of its mean- 
 ing, “our lesser Calvaries’” instead lift up 
 divinely kindled torches about Christ’s cross, 
 revealing the awful divinity there. It is the 
 unique significance of Christ’s person that 
 
THE CROSS 87 
 
 gives all that he does a meaning beyond any 
 comparison. We tell with thrilling pulses the 
 story of Livingstone, of Huss, of Savonarola, 
 and of the redemptions wrought through them, 
 but when we come to one “place of a skull” 
 it is to gaze, and falter, and halt for phrase, 
 until we cry with Dante 
 
 “Christ 
 
 Beam’d on that cross; and pattern fails me now!” 
 
 Somehow, there we feel the presence of primal 
 things of God. They are always felt when we 
 are with Jesus Christ. Christ on the cross 
 disturbs us with a species of terror and also 
 with strange joy—terror at the sin of man 
 that could work its outrage here, on him, and 
 joy at the love of God that is greater than 
 man’s sin. Presences move in the background 
 of that cross. 
 
 Out of full hearts the apostles poured their 
 story, straining language to tell what they 
 could not clearly see, employing such meta- 
 phors as their times and training made natural 
 —metaphors not so natural to us. Our attempts 
 to strain their metaphors into definitions, and 
 to find cold disquisitions on theology amid 
 exuberant outpourings of hearts struggling to 
 tell the redemptions of God as revealed in 
 Christ, have led us to much unreal and im- 
 
88 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 possible, if not mischievous, dogma concerning 
 the death of our Lord. We are beginning to 
 see that the great Latin mind, with its mania 
 for precision, its genius for law rather than for ~ 
 literature and art, has tricked us much, filching 
 from us more than we can spare of the coloring 
 and content of scriptural imagery. The meta- 
 phors about Christ cannot all be taken literally 
 even by the most partial literalist. As has been 
 well pointed out concerning these figures, 
 “taken literally, they are mutually contradic- 
 tory. Christ cannot be at the same time 
 Ransom and Redeemer, Priest and Sacrifice, 
 Propitiation and Advocate.”! One has but to 
 ponder the pictures lying at the back of each 
 of these words to realize this. No doubt there 
 will be many who feel themselves unable to 
 breathe much longer the hard atmosphere of 
 Roman law courts and of the forensic theology 
 born there, and these may be in danger of 
 renouncing, with that metallic shell, the truth 
 bound up in it. Even these will feel, however, 
 that Christian experience answers easily and 
 naturally to the great passages about the 
 vicarious nature of Christ’s death, when those 
 passages are freed from forced interpretations. 
 God was incarnate in Christ, and the In- 
 
 ' Christ and the Eternal Order, John Wright Buckham, 
 p- 136. 
 
THE CROSS LAS 
 
 carnate bore the sin of man as truly as love is 
 ever bound to bear the sin of the loved, tasting 
 the cruel spear of it even in the heart. He 
 “bare our sins in his own body on the tree, 
 that we, being dead to sin, should live unto 
 righteousness.” “Christ is High Priest, and 
 Mediator, and sacrifice, and veil, and altar, 
 not because he is any one of these, or even 
 closely analagous to any one of them, but 
 because he has plainly superseded them all’’?— 
 this is the thought of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews; in his life and death he woos us, he 
 shows us the Way, “no man cometh unto the 
 Father but by” him, and through him we 
 receive “the reconciliation.” In its entirety, 
 this is experience. 
 
 IV 
 
 We spoke of presences in the background of 
 the cross—a background that is infinite be- 
 cause of the incarnation. Earlier we suggested 
 that the cross was a “dramatizing”? into com- 
 prehensible measure of deep things of God. 
 
 Observe that there is nothing new in Christ’s 
 death, however; only a vivid culmination of 
 all that went before. In the temptation, the 
 self-forgetfulness at the well, the compassion 
 
 2 How Christ Saves Us, Rev. James M. Wilson, D.D., p. 42. 
 
90 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 for the multitude, the tears for others’ grief, 
 the menial washing of the feet, the same spirit 
 of self-refusal and self-expenditure for the good 
 of men is continually expressed. The cross 
 expresses it, too, but as a burning climax. The 
 sublimity of love and service that shone 
 through all his deeds and words as a soft and 
 lambent light here is gathered into a passionate 
 and awakening focus. The cross becomes the 
 most effective symbol of our Lord, of his 
 character and message, telling of unselfishness, 
 love, service, purity, persuasion, pouring them- 
 selves out in a redemptive enterprise on a 
 scale never seen before—or since. 
 
 But what then? These things are God in 
 man, these redemptive things. “God was in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto himself.”’ If 
 the cross symbolizes them, it symbolizes an 
 eternal truth, eternal because it is of the very 
 nature of God. Gaze upon the cross and be- 
 hold the central moral principle of Deity! 
 That which we call “the Passion” happened 
 not merely once in history; it is always happen- 
 ing. The Lamb was slain “before the founda- 
 tion of the world.” God is always the Good 
 Shepherd, the Tireless Seeker, the Redeemer, 
 the Lover. Calvary was an outward and visible 
 exhibition of an eternal truth; Calvary is past, 
 but the truth it showed continues. We might 
 
THE CROSS 91 
 
 never have known these things except through 
 Jesus, for until one is shown the truth one may 
 live in its company and not see it. But since 
 Jesus revealed it, thousands have seen it 
 testified to in themselves also. Francis Thomp- 
 son is pursued by a Presence he cannot shake 
 off; George Matheson surrenders to the “Love 
 that wilt not let me go.”... The eternal pas- 
 sion is lifted from its cold isolation and becomes 
 an objective, intense, subduing and redeeming 
 reality in the ever-present life of God. 
 
 Vv 
 
 May not one go further and speak of the 
 stricken anguish of Calvary bearing witness to 
 something abiding in God’s all-pitying heart? 
 Indeed, can one avoid so doing? The sin of 
 man frustrates him, deprives him. Redemptive 
 energies are never separate from cost. <A 
 mother expends herself for her erring child far 
 more than her child ever dreams. Who can 
 reckon the toll placed upon the spirit by such 
 emotions as sympathy, solicitude, entreaty? It 
 is pouring out one’s life to save! What does 
 the New Testament mean by saying men 
 “crucify the Son of God afresh and put him 
 to an open shame,” and that they “trample 
 underfoot the Son of God and count the blood 
 
92 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 of the covenant an unholy thing and do despite 
 to the Spirit of grace’? It is all in the present 
 tense! The redeeming solicitude of God our 
 Saviour may still be “trampled on” and “put 
 to open shame” by man. 
 
 No more does God in Christ walk and work 
 in Galilee, teaching and restoring and comfort- 
 ing; no more do the wild lilies see him come, 
 nor the “silver harvest of the sea’’ prompt his 
 thrilling challenge to his own: “‘Follow me, and 
 I will make you fishers of men.”’ Yet the per- 
 fect story goes on: as long as God dwells with 
 men the ministry of Jesus is a temporary picture 
 of a permanent truth. Still God is teaching, 
 calling, comforting, pardoning, reclaiming. 
 
 No more does God in Christ stand in the 
 judgment hall of Pilate, but ever and ever 
 does he take his place in the hall of the soul’s 
 judiciary, fictitiously indicted, gloriously ex- 
 onerated, Conscience saying, “I find no fault 
 in him,” yet miserably delivering him to be 
 crucified in answer to the howling demands of 
 the baser self. And ever God bears his cross 
 and suffers on it as evil men temporarily 
 triumph and darkness settles upon their world; 
 but invariably in wondrous, resurrected power, 
 God comes back to resume his ministry and to 
 endure rebuffs, but by all means, as he is able, 
 to save men from themselves. 
 
THE CROSS 93 
 
 And he will follow, follow, he will follow 
 until that hour come when the baubles that 
 infatuate to-day have lost their gilt, the false 
 sweets have turned insipid, and the tired, 
 jaded soul pauses disillusioned in the charred 
 midst of its bitter, fruited selfishness. In that 
 hour his following feet will pause beside us, 
 and if not to-day, if not to-day, before the 
 wreckage come, perhaps then we will give our- 
 selves to the only arms that can shelter, to 
 the only heart that can see us as we are and 
 yet love us, to the only strong life that can 
 truly feed, repair, redeem the poor futile 
 things we are, giving us such inspiration as 
 sets the feet aspiring up the mountains of God, 
 on whose high crests rest the calm, bright stars, 
 that he alone may reach who learns through 
 God to climb. 
 
 “Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us 
 from our sins by his blood; and he made us 
 to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God 
 and Father; to him be the glory and the 
 dominion for ever and ever. Amen.” 
 
SALVATION 
 I 
 
 ONE is never.quite sure whether to appreciate 
 the note of urgency or to be shocked at the 
 parochial imagination that lies in the question 
 pressed by some ardent religionists: “Are you 
 saved?” “Alas, if I am not!” one might 
 answer. But there would be equal reason why 
 one should say: “Alas, if I am!—for then 
 how small a thing is salvation!’ If one should 
 say both, the replies would not be contradictory 
 so much as complementary. There is a sense 
 in which we are saved in Christ now; there is 
 a sense in which we are not saved in a thousand 
 years. When a man passes beyond hearsay 
 and tradition and makes his acceptance of 
 Christ intelligently personal, in that hour he 
 has surrendered a self-principle that makes for 
 increasing death, and he has embraced instead 
 the Christ principle or spirit, which makes for 
 increasing life. 
 
 It may seem a trifling thing to see a man 
 who has been facing west swing round upon his 
 heel and face east. He stands in the same 
 
 place: what has altered? Yet this is the 
 94 
 
SALVATION 95 
 
 difference, that whereas once he faced toward 
 the approaching night, now he looks toward 
 the awakening day. Is there no material 
 difference between night and day? If a man 
 walks west, will it make no difference from 
 the result had he walked east? If a man walks 
 with self, will it be much the same in the long 
 run as if he had walked with Christ? Is there 
 nothing to fear? Are there no terrible dis- 
 integrations possible—things whatever they 
 be, for which our fathers used the names which 
 we have surely not outgrown: sin, death? No 
 west, no east; no death, no salvation. But 
 there zs salvation, and a man is saved in the 
 hour when he adopts in Christ the spirit that 
 makes for day and life. Many are unable to 
 record that hour, but the important matter is 
 their conscious loyalty to the spirit of Christ. 
 In that spirit a man is as one who faces east, 
 and he is saved. Yet salvation has only begun, 
 and but a little consideration is necessary to 
 show in what sense the man is by no means 
 saved. 
 
 II 
 
 The solidarity of the race, while furnishing 
 us with “the moral momentum of a good 
 ancestry,’ also accounts for many fearful 
 
96 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 problems in us—‘“‘sins of will, defects of doubt, 
 and taints of blood.” Heredity works both 
 ways. Spiritual and moral paralysis, bias, mal- 
 sightedness, remind us of deleterious forces 
 that were at work ere we were born, the effects 
 of which are painfully with us, causing large 
 areas that must be reclaimed before we can 
 be said to be saved. The wide ambitions of 
 God’s salvation are not to be completed in a 
 day. Every new entrance of the divine life, 
 through Christ enhances progress in the long 
 reclamation. “I see a different law in my 
 members, warring against the law of my 
 mind,” cries Paul, expressing a consciousness 
 of controversy between better and worse 
 which every earnest man has known. A man 
 may look upon every good thing in him and 
 say, “There am I saved, by the grace of God!” 
 Upon every blemished and unhealthy thing in 
 him he may look and say, if he is earnestly, 
 cheerfully trusting God through Christ, “‘There 
 am I being saved, and my salvation is nearer 
 than when I first believed!’ : 
 One of the speculations of science has been 
 concerning the manner of life’s first appearance 
 upon this planet. Science gives a picture of 
 the earth lying scarred and barren after ages 
 of upheaval. But, somehow, life came, and it 
 gradually reclaimed the earth from its un- 
 
SALVATION 97 
 
 seemly dearth, spreading wide the forests and 
 the grasses and the flowers, and peopling it 
 with birds and beasts. But how did life come? 
 Lord Kelvin once suggested that a world on 
 which was life may have collided in space and 
 that later a fragment—‘“‘the moss grown ruins 
 of another world,”’—like a meteor fell here. It 
 is a fanciful conception, but it is useful to us 
 in this study. The world was dead. Somehow, 
 sometime, life entered. In that moment the 
 world was saved: however insignificant the 
 germ, no longer was this world lifeless. Yet 
 how much of plain and hill and valley must 
 that life conquer ere the earth could be termed 
 saved indeed? This is how men are saved and 
 not saved. That man is not lifeless who carries 
 so much as a spark of grace in his heart; yet 
 is a man not saved though through years the 
 grace,of God has been spreading and conquer- 
 ing within him. 
 
 Or consider it in this aspect. Certain large 
 tracts of England had for many centuries been 
 known as the fen country. That country was 
 treacherous, noisome, useless, waterlogged, until 
 some man dreamed of a change to happy 
 homes, farms, flowers, and harvests. An 
 audacious scheme of drainage was prepared. 
 But why should the government accept that 
 scheme? Even if drainage should succeed, the 
 
98 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 very soil was rotten. Yet in the hour when 
 the project was accepted by the government 
 the fens were reclaimed—and they were not 
 reclaimed for years! What collecting of re- 
 sources, installing of trench and barrier! What 
 slow running away of water that had poisoned 
 the land for generations unnumbered! But 
 steadily here and there the land rose bare to 
 the sky, and the energies of the sun began to 
 cleanse the soil, pouring into it sweetness and 
 health, and so, gradually, the fens were re- 
 claimed. 
 
 Christ dreamed a thrilling dream of human 
 redemption, and he brings his proposals to 
 each man. Man may raise incredulous objec- 
 tions, but in that hour in which a man’s govern- 
 ment accepts Christ and his plan of recovery 
 the man is saved—yet not saved. The very 
 soil requires sweetening in the sun, and though 
 this end is assured from the beginning, by no 
 means is it achieved from then. 
 
 Til 
 
 This plan of recovery, this “‘plan of redemp- 
 tion,’—if one may dare use the phrase and yet 
 hope to leave the mind virgin of the stiff and 
 artificial ideas so often represented by it— 
 what of it? That we are “saved by faith” is 
 
SALVATION 99 
 
 too prominently written in Scripture, and in 
 experience, not to be recalled to mind. “To 
 him that worketh not,’ declared Paul in a 
 characteristic sentence, “but believeth on him 
 that justifieth the ungodly, his favth is counted 
 for righteousness.” One can imagine the de- 
 light a passage of this sort would have brought 
 to the heart of a John Wesley, and one wonders 
 if a Jonathan Edwards, or any of the older 
 preachers, would have been other than at 
 home with it. Those old warriors of the Un- 
 dying Cause loved to get a text of Scripture 
 that was full of meat, and then they would 
 deal with it mightily, and leisurely, and if they 
 did keep their congregations long at the gospel 
 table, at least they sent them away well fed. 
 The passage quoted is close-packed, and has 
 an old-fashioned flavor about it that is very 
 pleasant, and who knows whether it may not 
 still be able to confer blessings of old-fashioned 
 healing and peace. At least it is a window into 
 the mind of Paul, whose guidance in matters 
 of the soul’s salvation is not to be despised. 
 Observe the word “‘ungodly,”’ once so central 
 to the preaching of the pulpit giants of old. 
 To them the fiercest problem of all, and the 
 most fundamental, was the spiritual derange- 
 ment of men, and I do not see that human 
 nature has changed. With genuine insight 
 
100 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 into essentials those old renovators of their 
 kind used to insist that it was of little use 
 putting patches into rotten garments, or 
 varnishing worm-eaten and decayed timbers. 
 Character, they believed, needed deeper treat- 
 ment than superficial makeshift if it were to 
 be saved. They used to talk of a new birth, of 
 a making of things all new. We have not 
 changed, and still there are those who have 
 not grasped the truth that underneath a hun- 
 dred troubles the central problem is our own 
 ungodly selves. The fault and the cure still 
 lie far down in the heart. “The fear of the 
 Lord is the beginning of wisdom’’; it is also 
 the beginning of soundness at all the roots of 
 one’s thinking and one’s behavior. 
 
 With an insidiousness too refined to be 
 readily traced, and with effects too far-reaching 
 to be easily credible, a moral and _ religious 
 malady known as “‘ungodliness” lies more or 
 less at the hearts of all of us. Like all diseases, 
 it is a thing of degrees, inflicting, in its milder 
 stages, a general debility upon faith and hope, 
 moral sensitiveness, and religious appetite, but 
 in its advanced phases blighting the life itself. 
 The trembling is not the palsy, but the sign 
 of it; the fever is not the poison, but the sign 
 of it; blindness, dumbness, deafness are often 
 enough the outward marks of deeper physical 
 
SALVATION 101 
 
 trouble, and blindness, deafness, in religion, 
 unhappiness, moral paucity, are also, as a rule, 
 to be explained by trouble that may not super- 
 ficially appear. It was not a man’s drunkenness 
 or profanity, his greed or his callousness, his 
 worldliness or his impurity that concerned the 
 older preachers, so much as the submerged and 
 stubborn cause of all this. Therefore they 
 preached to the ungodly, and they brought to 
 men the sovereign cure when they preached 
 the gospel as the cure of ungodliness. They 
 would rejoice in a text such as_ this because, 
 having been faithfully frank in not avoiding 
 the unpleasant word, it joins to it the word of 
 hope, and speaks of “him that justifieth the 
 ungodly.” 
 
 IV 
 
 Justification means more than pardon. A 
 criminal may be pardoned with no change 
 having taken place in himself, but the gospel, 
 in proclaiming pardon, proclaims in_ addition 
 that God so works in the ungodly that the 
 texture of the man’s character is changed, until 
 he becomes just and honorable. 
 
 But “Show can man be just with God?” asks 
 Job, in despair at the immeasurable distance 
 between himself, with all his righteousness, 
 and the perfections of God. In the New 
 
102 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Testament Paul unfolds his gospel of “‘justifica- 
 tion by faith,” claiming that a sinful man has 
 been offered a way whereby he can stand 
 before heaven as one who has been not merely 
 forgiven, but as one in whom God is well 
 pleased. In a moment we shall look at the way, 
 but first it is very important to note that 
 between mere pardon and justification there is 
 such difference as lies between death and life. 
 Unless in pardoning a man there is an accom- 
 paniment of change for the better in himself 
 you have done him little good. One who knows 
 within himself that he is unworthy will find 
 that in that dark knowledge lies what might 
 be called (if the terms are not self-contradic- 
 tory) a progressive devolution; that is, a 
 movement to develop downward, to elaborate 
 unwholesomely. “Give a dog a bad name and 
 he'll live up to it,” or down to it, and most 
 destructive of all is it when you have to give 
 yourself a bad name. Let the conviction grow 
 within you that you are an onlooker at virtue, 
 not a participator, and so long as you have it 
 you can do no other than grow your fruits 
 from that seed. Live upon the clemency and 
 mercy of the Judge, as one who, if he got his 
 deserts, would be unable to stand, and the 
 private knowledge of your continued unfitness 
 will make for further disintegrations. But the 
 
SALVATION 103 
 
 message of Paul is better than that. To pardon 
 is added justzfication, whereby the pardoned 
 sinner lives by mercy, indeed, but also by 
 justice. He has stepped upon certain grounds 
 which have altered his character at its root, 
 and while the past is pardoned, the present is 
 justified, honorable, self-respecting, not de- 
 pending upon the clemency of the judge but 
 knowing the judge has no fault to find. 
 
 You will not forget William James’ defini- 
 tion: “To be converted, to be regenerated, to 
 receive grace, to experience religion... are so 
 many phrases which denote the process, gradual 
 or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, 
 and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, 
 becomes unified and consciously right, superior 
 and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold 
 upon religious realities.” The word “con- 
 sciously”’ is a potent word here. If a conscious- 
 ness of being wrong becomes disastrously 
 creative, a consciousness of being right has in 
 it forces of creative evolution, tempting to all 
 sublime climbing. If there is a way whereby 
 we may achieve that, let us hear of it. 
 
 V 
 It is “not by works but by faith.” “To 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 189. 
 
104 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 him that worketh not, but believeth, ... his 
 faith is reckoned for righteousness.’ Righteous- 
 ness is not simply the absence of badness, but 
 the positive presence of goodness—and a man’s 
 faith in Jesus Christ is reckoned to him for 
 that! How can this be? Because I say, “I 
 believe,’ does God shut his eyes to facts, and 
 treat me as if I were righteous when he knows 
 very well I am not? That might exhibit mag- 
 nanimity on the part of heaven, but not 
 honesty. Well, then, does God practically say: 
 ‘You are a sinner, but ’m not concerned 
 about that. I lay such paramount stress upon 
 belief in Jesus that if you have that, Tl take 
 it instead of the righteousness’? Some might 
 think that that would do honor to Jesus, but 
 few could see what real good it would do to 
 men, whose blessedness lies in the enrichment 
 of personal character, not in faith in Jesus, 
 unless that faith brings us genuine personal 
 righteousness, which it does not if it is only 
 mental assent. Or perchance, Zinzendorf’s 
 hymn states the solution: 
 
 “Jesu, thy blood and righteousness 
 My beauty are, my glorious dress; 
 Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed, 
 ‘With joy shall I lift up my head.” 
 
 What precisely do these words mean? I have 
 
SALVATION 105 
 
 heard them used as if, the moment we believe 
 in Jesus, God sees us no more as we really are, 
 but looks at us through the medium of our 
 Lord, as one might look at a scene through a 
 colored glass until all was tinted by it. Thus, 
 whatever may be the truth about us, God, 
 looking at us through the righteousness of 
 Christ, sees us dressed in a glory not our own, 
 and judges us on that. But I think God does 
 not play tricks either with himself or with us; 
 the plain fact is that no man can be made 
 glorious with another’s righteousness. 
 
 How, then, can a man’s faith in Christ “‘be 
 reckoned for righteousness’? How can it be 
 that such belief makes him a righteous man? 
 
 It cannot be unless it be the faith which is 
 a moral activity, drawing with it the assent 
 and cooperation of the entire personality. 
 Sentimentality is not faith. Faith in the Allied 
 Cause during the Great War could not mean 
 neutrality. Faith in Jesus involves acceptance 
 of his view of the seriousness of sin, his view 
 of your value, of life’s ethics, of God. It is 
 not dependent upon a certain credulity of mind, 
 nor is a mystical temperament necessary to it. 
 The most practical, unemotional man can say 
 of Christ’s view of sin and of God: “Hence- 
 forth that is to be mine!” To be “in Christ” 
 means to be in personal sympathy with and 
 
106 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 loyalty to him—which, of course, includes a 
 similar attitude to his views. 
 
 And it is this faith which is reckoned to a 
 man for righteousness. Yet he knows he 
 continues to be a man of many faults; his 
 exercise of such faith may effect no sudden 
 reformation of his manners conspicuous enough 
 to cause all the world to ery: “Behold, the 
 righteous man!” The judgment of the world is 
 no very serious thing, after all, and God’s judg- 
 ment is that the man is righteous. But why? 
 
 VI 
 
 Here we come to that great Pauline doctrine 
 of “imputed righteousness.”” Again and again 
 Paul comes back to recite a line from the Old 
 Testament: “Abraham believed God, and it 
 was accounted unto him for righteousness.” 
 Abraham was as yet inexperienced and un- 
 tried, how could he be credited with righteous- 
 ness such as can be proved only in the testing 
 years? A mysterious promise had grown in 
 Abraham’s heart, a promise of great inheritance 
 in another land than that of his fathers. Long 
 and fierce hardships and peril might lie between 
 him and his achievement, but the voice that 
 spoke its promise and its call in his heart also 
 offered strength. Then Abraham’s whole man- 
 
SALVATION 107 
 
 hood stood up and said, “Yes!’ He believed 
 God, he adopted as his that myriad destiny 
 which was offering, and the conditions of it, 
 and behold, all that heroism, endurance, 
 loyalty yet to be displayed as he followed on 
 was immediately “reckoned”? unto him. Was 
 it right? Surely; for Abraham was already all 
 that in embryo, and God judged him by his 
 maturity. 
 
 Thus is a man estimated when he makes 
 Christ his own; and it is perfectly right. “A 
 man 2s in the truest sense what he wishes to 
 be.” God judges us by the object of our faith. 
 In accepting Christ with his promise of vast 
 inheritances and of sustaining grace, a man 
 plants within himself the seeds of a thousand 
 trees of righteousness. Give him time, the 
 trees will come to fruit. The Standard Dic- 
 tionary says an orchard is “a collection of trees 
 cultivated for their fruit.”? Not the fruit, then? 
 That in good time, but already an orchard, 
 though very young. The entire “genius” of 
 the trees is right, and the movement is toward 
 fruit; it is an orchard. Our faith in Christ 
 similarly enables God already to call us 
 righteous, for there is wide difference in what 
 is planted in the soil by faith in Christ and 
 what is allowed to gather, weedlike, through 
 indifference to him. 
 
108 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 A shipbuilder walks through his yards (to 
 quote an illustration from Wade Robinson)? 
 and gazes about him with satisfaction upon the 
 unsightly nuclei of mighty ships. Through 
 their gaping ribs the sky appears; scores of 
 hammers rattle inharmoniously upon them; un- 
 shaped, unpolished, they seem little enough 
 able to inspire a poet or encourage hope in a 
 merchant. The shipbuilder, however, looking 
 upon them, beholds them already floating 
 majestic amid summer isles or battling nobly 
 with arctic storms, and in the light of that 
 destiny their present stage of development and 
 the work being done upon them is justified. 
 There is no complaint. Because he sees the 
 end, he sees that all is right. He reckons to 
 them the perfections that are to be. “When 
 God imputes to you the righteousness of Christ, 
 and calls upon you to impute it to yourself, he 
 only asks you to save yourself from the false- 
 hood that you are not like Christ, and to rise 
 into the truth that in the highest sense you are.” 
 
 Therefore in Christ a man is not as a quarry 
 slave who is relieved of his chains only by the 
 clemency of his master: he is free-born, though 
 only a babe. In Christ a man does not slink 
 through life as a criminal who, if he got his 
 deserts, would be overwhelmed with the divine 
 
 2 The Philosophy of the Atonement, p. 61. 
 
SALVATION 109 
 
 displeasure; in the august courts of divine 
 justice he has not to say: “I am a sinner; I 
 am undone; I fling myself upon the mercy of 
 the court.” On the contrary, he is able to cry, 
 *“My pardon I claim, for a sinner I am, a sinner 
 believing in Jesus’ name.” And in those 
 solemn courts the voice of the Great Judge 
 answers: “He speaks well, for is it not written: 
 “To him that worketh not, but believeth in him 
 that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted 
 for righteousness’ ?” 
 
 “To him that worketh not...,” not by re- 
 sisting darkness, but by yielding to light; not 
 by frowning energetically against badness, but 
 by smiling calmly toward goodness; not by 
 life’s circumference trying to set its house in 
 order by good works, but by life’s center chim- 
 ing with the soul of all goodness by faith; not 
 codes, which are static, but faith in Christ, 
 which is indefinitely creative—this is man’s 
 way to conquest, happiness and God. Not by 
 bravely fighting Satan, but by accepting Christ. 
 The “plan of salvation” is as psychologically 
 sound as it is simple. 
 
SALVATION 
 (CONCLUDED) 
 I 
 
 WE should not have failed to see in all this 
 something of the satisfactory nature of our 
 present salvation in Christ. Let us not mini- 
 mize the importance of that or weaken our 
 assurance of it. But just as we saw that salva- 
 tion is a long reclamation impossible of rapid 
 completion, so, from another angle, it is a 
 process of growth into Christ, and one has 
 only to realize the boundless prospects there 
 for him to appreciate how true is the sense in 
 which he may hesitate to say, “I am saved.” 
 When a lady asked, “How may I find the 
 Saviour?” it is conceivable she expected to be 
 informed upon certain “steps to Jesus,” as if 
 one should be able to take such steps and 
 arrive. Verily, this finding of the Saviour is a 
 trifing enough thing, it would seem! There 
 are some who lightly speak of it and who, 
 devoted no doubt but not always imaginative, 
 are ever ready to present you with some per- 
 
 fected method of discovery. Yet we must not 
 110 
 
SALVATION 111 
 
 shun the challenge of that question: “How 
 may I find the Saviour?” . 
 
 Observe that scene as Jesus and his disciples 
 emerge from one of the many small villages of 
 Cesarea Philippi. Behind them is yet another 
 informing experience; before them opens the 
 country; the last lingering straggler ceases to 
 follow them and they settle down to the walk 
 to the next village. The green fields slip quietly 
 to the rear as they journey; one by one the 
 hills draw near, pause a moment, and go. The 
 Master is alone with his disciples. 
 
 Have they found the Saviour? Why, yes, 
 surely; they are his disciples; they have been 
 with him now quite a while. But have they 
 found him? Well, if they have not, who has? 
 They have touched him, have left all to follow 
 him. Yes, but have they found him yet? 
 They have verily touched him, and have left 
 all to follow him, and have listened to his 
 wondrous words, and have beheld his mighty 
 deeds; but in the midst of all what has Jesus 
 meant to them? Are they, after all, very 
 deeply different from those old days before he 
 came? Have they indeed found him? 
 
 And so, as they walked, he asked them: 
 “Who do men say that I am?” And they told 
 him. The vital question next arrived—it was 
 personal: ““But who say ye that I am?’ One 
 
112 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 can almost see the Master’s quick glance imto 
 their faces as he spoke, for who could say if 
 he was now about to listen to a repetition of 
 what they had heard? Had they accepted ideas 
 from others, or had they come to some of their 
 own? Was their estimate based on hearsay, or 
 on experience? Was he now to be forced to listen 
 dully to the old familiar but lifeless eulogy, 
 great names truly, but said by rote: “Elijah, 
 Jeremiah, one of the prophets’? Had they been 
 long with him and yet had not known him? 
 
 - At school I was made to study Milton, and 
 he wearied me. Later, because men said he 
 was one of the masters of our language, I felt 
 my duty directing me to him once more, but 
 though I opened his pages again and again it 
 was to lay them down disappointed and un- 
 captured. “Who do men say that I am?” 
 Milton might have asked, and I could have 
 answered him. “Who do you say?” and I 
 should have been dumb, or else have recited 
 the customary thing. But only a few years ago 
 YT “found” him. I argued that reputations of 
 his kind are not made by accident, and that I 
 must know his secret. I shut the door, took him 
 from the shelf and settled down to give him at 
 least one hour undisturbed. Previously he had 
 wearied me in five minutes. On this occasion, 
 in less than fifteen minutes he had flung upon 
 
 
 
SALVATION 113 
 
 me his sublime and awe-inspiring spell, and 
 from it I have never escaped. What had 
 forged the key to open that which hitherto had 
 been locked? No doubt previous attempts had 
 helped; and so had my enlarging experience of 
 life and literature; but that arousal of myself 
 to find his secret, that temporary abstraction 
 that I might find him as a pearl of great price, 
 was the final and essential need. Straightway, 
 while Milton now appeared to me as he had 
 appeared to no one else, I could see life and 
 value in all the great descriptions of him that 
 others had made. | 
 
 It is by a similar way that some pass from 
 hearsay to experience with Jesus. But on this 
 occasion Jesus was wondering if that had yet 
 taken place with his disciples. “‘But who do 
 ye say that I am?” he asked. And it was 
 Peter who broke into the famous personal con- 
 fession of faith: “Thou art the Christ!’ Here 
 was something living in Peter’s voice; no cheap 
 recitation was here. Has he now, then, found 
 the Saviour? If he finds Jesus Christ, he finds 
 the Saviour, for these two are one, and to the 
 extent he finds Jesus Christ he finds the Saviour, 
 and no more. His words have just shown that 
 the significance of Jesus has been growing 
 upon him, and therefore we shall ask, ““Has he 
 yet found the Saviour?” 
 
114 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Yes; in the hour when Peter saw for himself 
 that Christ was Lord and Master—not of the 
 world, but Ais Lord and Master—he found the 
 Saviour. Do not judge him too harshly upon 
 his words; he was only an ignorant man, and, 
 after all, he used the words he felt to be most 
 suitable, the words in current use about the 
 Messiah. The words matter little enough. 
 Many have found the Saviour while using 
 radically different words or none at all. The 
 essential thing was Peter’s arrival at the 
 moment of intensely personal relations between 
 Jesus and himself. To Peter, Jesus had be- 
 come First, Best, King, Messiah, Saviour, All. 
 He had found the Saviour. 
 
 But what is meant—that he had suddenly 
 discovered an emotion toward him? Not at all; 
 emotion is aside. If he knew emotion, there 
 was a perception that provoked it, and the 
 perception was what mattered. Whenever any 
 man personally sees the significance of Christ 
 in such a manner as to say: “This One must 
 henceforth be my Lawgiver and Companion,” 
 he has found the Saviour. 
 
 II 
 
 But now, how can the Saviour thus be found? 
 How can this be told when no two men are 
 alike, and when every man must seek accord- 
 
SALVATION 115 
 
 ing to his own way. Some grow to the Lord 
 as the flowers to the light; others doubt, wan- 
 der, return, finding their way through storms; 
 so different are the manners of our finding. 
 
 As general guidance let three things be said: 
 (1) Place your mind where it will be sure of 
 companionship with Jesus; that is to say, in 
 the New Testament, in the House of Christian 
 Worship, in the conversation or book where 
 he dwells. Give your mind an opportunity to 
 know him. (2) Watch against the perversion 
 of judgment and vision by sin, for selfishness 
 finds little knowledge of the Selfless One, the 
 crooked cannot expect companionship with the 
 straight, what communion hath darkness with 
 light? The fuller the values you bring, the 
 more will you possess the secret of learning the 
 “unsearchable riches of Christ.” (3) Follow 
 each step as you see it, not waiting until “the 
 distant scene” is all unfolded. One need not 
 say that this will provide certain theological 
 opinions about Jesus, but that it will aid to- 
 ward discovery of Jesus himself. 
 
 Ii 
 
 And yet there is danger here of talking as if 
 personality were a sort of jewel, a piece of 
 scintillating mineral, lying in a certain place 
 and only to be looked for to be “found.” The 
 
116 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 stone is found, and that’s the end of it. But 
 personality when found is only begun with: 
 you go on forever finding. First there is dis- 
 covery, and after that, exploration. Though 
 Columbus discovered America, he never saw 
 the great lakes, mighty rivers, mountain chains, 
 rolling prairies of this New World. 
 
 Can one presume to say, “I have found 
 Christ”? Can one plunge into the ocean and 
 grasp it with the hands and ery, “I have found 
 the ocean’? Yes, he may; but as a lad paddling 
 in an Australian bay I might have said some 
 such thing, and it would not have been entirely 
 untrue. The day came, however, when I was 
 tossed in storms off the Cape of Good Hope; 
 later I looked out upon the deeply sleeping, 
 slowly heaving, tropic Atlantic, and watched 
 the shining mirror of waters being broken only 
 by the occasional leap of the bonito and the 
 alarmed skimming of the flying-fish; then I 
 observed the moods of the Arctic, where the 
 icebergs grow; again I stood as upon a ship 
 aflame, gazing at the great, red sun as it sank 
 over Africa, boiling the Indian Ocean into gold 
 and vermilion as it went; and, lastly, there was 
 a day when I looked upon the noble Pacific, 
 island studded, coral ridged, gorgeous with 
 marine gardens through whose flowers and 
 branches floated not birds or butterflies but 
 
SALVATION 117 
 
 fish as lovely as either in radiant colors and 
 delicate shapes. And now, tell me, would it 
 have been true if, as a lad paddling in an 
 Australian bay, I had said, never dreaming of 
 all this, “I have found the ocean’? Yes, 
 probably it would—as true as that the disciples 
 had found Jesus during those first months 
 with him. But that is not the sort of knowledge 
 that can inspire a poem like Byron’s on “The 
 Ocean”; and the only knowledge of Christ 
 that is our ambition is that which gathers the 
 familiar letters of life’s common alphabet and 
 lifts them into a noble poem, infused with 
 noble enthusiasm and singing with noble lyric. 
 And in that sense the disciples had not yet 
 found the Saviour. And in that sense many of 
 his modern disciples who have long been 
 familiar with his words and person have not 
 found him. 
 
 It was not long before Peter was shown 
 that though he had found the Saviour he was, 
 in fact, merely paddling in the shallows. 
 Already Jesus is talking to him of the things 
 that appertain to the Christ—the way of 
 sacrifice and service, the endurance of resent- 
 ment even in its cruelest forms if so be that he 
 might save men from themselves and unto 
 God. At once Peter showed how elementary, 
 after all, was his finding of the Saviour. Christ 
 
118 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 —sacrifice!—these two ought not to be brought 
 together; he is a King. 
 
 What gulis still lie between Peter and his 
 Lord, divisions upon quite fundamental ideas 
 of life! Christ’s task with Peter now, as with 
 all who have found him, is to teach him to see 
 things differently. “You think the way men 
 think,” says Jesus, “not the way God thinks!”! 
 And Jesus pronounces Peter’s ideas as being of 
 the adversary of our souls. Peter must be 
 taught to see things as God sees them, think 
 as God thinks, disown the viewpoint of worldly 
 men and get the viewpoint of God. For a man 
 to be able to think like that would be salva- 
 tion, and every temper and idea in him that 
 yields to God’s way is evidence of salvation in 
 progress. Once Saint John lifted the veil. “It 
 doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we 
 know that when he shall appear we shall be 
 like him.”’ A Saviour indeed, if he makes us 
 Christs!—but not by stamping upon us his 
 image. Rather he arouses the Christ that 
 sleeps in all and guides that Christ at last to 
 completest self-expression, until we are like 
 himself, but uttered through our own gifts and 
 characteristics, our own individuality. And 
 here is his method—the teaching of men to 
 think as God thinks. 
 
 1 See T. R. Glover: The Jesus of History, p. 91. 
 
SALVATION 119 
 
 But that is a long process, and in the mean- 
 time one may say that though in some measure 
 he has found the Saviour, he is merely paddling 
 in shallows; he wants the deeps. Perhaps he 
 thinks of Augustine, Wesley, Beecher, desiring 
 an enthusiasm for Christ such as they had. 
 
 Very well; when the disciples asked to share 
 with Jesus experiences of coronation and 
 power he answered swiftly by questions con- 
 cerning their readiness to share also his “cup” 
 and his “baptism.” There are prices for what 
 you would have. Beecher gloried in Christ, 
 but that was not cheaply bought. No man 
 may put down a dime and expect to reap a 
 treasury; he cannot laze with hands in pockets 
 and expect to master the mountains. Would 
 you discover an enthusiasm based not upon 
 tricks of temperament or upon mystical 
 facilities, but upon sheer judicial perception of 
 Christ’s preeminence—an enthusiasm of the 
 intellect? What price will you pay? There are 
 moral prices of subordination to Christ’s spirit 
 and law, and there are intellectual prices of 
 examination and analysis of him and of his 
 place in world affairs. Therefore, are you pre- 
 pared to study economics until you find that 
 the only healing influences among them all are 
 such as have made Galilee forever beloved? 
 Will you turn to international affairs and see 
 
120 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 the nations at their wits’ ends and find that 
 the only things that are shaping toward perma- 
 nence and which are promising any dawn 
 amidst the darkness are the cry for peace, the 
 demand for brotherhood and justice, the things 
 of Jesus? And will you renounce the Christian 
 faith as not for you and say, “I shall find a 
 religion of my own’? And, having found it, 
 will you not write it down that you may look 
 upon it, and so begin to see with amazement 
 that in essence it is Christianity after all? 
 The Christian ethic, the Christian idea of God, 
 and the Christian regard for man are things 
 that must not be absent from any religion that 
 is likely to feed the soul. Always we thrust 
 him aside and go our way, to find him standing 
 in our path. It is this discovery of how in- 
 escapable he is, of how he indeed is the Saviour, 
 the Way, the Truth, the Life, that lifts one’s 
 enthusiasms high above the realm of the 
 traditional or the conventional, establishing 
 them upon those sound and very satisfying 
 bases that are found in a personal perception 
 of truth. Howbeit, this is achieved by diligence: 
 such assessments of Christ can only follow 
 upon diligent comparisons, examinations, and 
 measurements. It is a great road, leading high; 
 all who have in any measure found the Christ 
 are upon it; some are farther along than others. 
 
‘SALVATION 121 
 
 Though for all the direction is the same, some 
 by quicker travel come to the greater explora- 
 tions earlier. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the meantime, here and now, there is, for 
 every one of us, this: “Believe on the Lord 
 Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” He 
 stands for a certain philosophy of life—do you 
 believe in that? He stands for a particular 
 interpretation of God—do you believe in that? 
 He stands for an evaluation of man—do you 
 believe in that? In the elections you are asked 
 which man you believe in; you consider all 
 each man stands for, and you cast your vote. 
 Whom do you believe in; Christ? Mohammed? 
 Mammon? Mars? Bacchus? Do you believe 
 in Big Business? Big Learning? Big Enjoy- 
 ment? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and 
 thou shalt be saved.” For salvation is not some 
 gift to be had hereafter, nor is it a complete 
 thing which God gives to us upon our fulfill- 
 ment of certain conditions. Rather it is a 
 reclamation of life from selfish and materialistic 
 living; it begins the moment the centers of our 
 life are rightly adjusted; it continues in- 
 definitely, in this world and the next. The 
 right adjustments come when men “believe on 
 
122 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 the Lord Jesus Christ.” If you will not bring 
 your personality to deliberate affirmation of 
 the moral and spiritual attitudes of Jesus, you 
 may describe yourself as “lost,” for declining 
 him you are affirming in yourself the forces of 
 moral and_ spiritual decay and_ blindness. 
 Dogma and detail. aside, we have seen nothing 
 higher than Christ. Henceforth no man can 
 ignore him without being unfaithful to light; 
 but no man can affirm him in the centers of life, 
 believe in him, without at once discovering 
 that health, that redemption, and that recon- 
 ciliation with God and with man, which are 
 “the salvation which is in Christ Jesus,’ and 
 which have ever spread wide the white wings 
 of God’s “good news’’ to the children of men. 
 
THE CHURCH 
 I 
 
 For some years it has been a cheap and 
 popular pastime to abuse the church. Intel- 
 lectuals have flung at her their polished javelins, 
 some of which have struck deep; many whips 
 have been made for less skillful hands to wield, 
 and their vicious hiss has been heard in the 
 streets. Even the rabble have assailed her, 
 counting no sanctity too white to discourage 
 their verbal mud. Very much of this has been 
 as unseemly as the spittal of a toad directed 
 at the moon, which both leaves unsoiled the 
 fair Queen of Night and publishes the where- 
 abouts of toadishness. Reasons for renouncing 
 the church have often been of a kind either to 
 shake all the gods on Olympus with hilarity or 
 reduce them to tears at man’s poverty of 
 invention. “I have given up going to church; 
 there are too many hypocrites there.” 
 
 “Oh, don’t let that prevent you: there’s 
 room for one more!” 
 
 But some of the charges have been seriously 
 
 leveled. We are charged with being conserv- 
 123 
 
124 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 ative and bigoted, the enemies of new light 
 and fuller truth; on the other hand, with being 
 devoid of vital faith in the things we preach; 
 with having so lowered the standard of life 
 demanded of a follower of Christ that it is no 
 longer possible to see whether a man be a 
 follower or not. It is said that we have re- 
 solved Christian character into questions of 
 social caution, guarded pastimes, and church 
 attendance, but have omitted the weightier 
 matters of honor in business, gentleness in the 
 home, purity in society, fairness in sport; that 
 we have pandered to wealth and patronized the 
 poor, rebuked sin in the gutter and ignored it 
 in the parlor, been swift to see industrial 
 selfishness when made unlovely by the sweat and 
 coarse clothes of a class that cannot claim great 
 possessions, but singularly insensible to it when 
 it is dressed in the refinements of wealth and 
 power; we are charged with taking our religion 
 easily, so that it means little to us and costs 
 us less, and with therefore having lost the 
 spirit of daring and of sacrifice. Some of these 
 are serious charges, and I, for one, lest I should 
 be guilty of repudiating lightly indictments 
 that should rather bring me penitential to my 
 knees, will strive to remember before them 
 and apply to myself Cromwell’s exasperated 
 appeal to the Scotch Parliament: “TI beseech 
 
THE CHURCH 125 
 
 you, by the mercies of God, to consider that 
 you might sometimes be wrong.” 
 
 And yet, as one who knows churches and 
 church folks at least as well as many of their 
 critics, I protest that blemish and paralysis 
 and narrowness and bias are by no means the 
 whole truth about them, nor is this the truth 
 that is most characteristic of them. One be- 
 comes gentler in his judgments as his knowl- 
 edge of life improves. He can see that the 
 church is made up of human beings, and that 
 always means imperfection. He can see that 
 the church is not doing its work unless it is 
 gathering to itself the imperfect, the weak, the 
 halt, the maimed, the blind, nursing the 
 broken-hearted, supporting those who stumble. 
 I know the commercialized business man comes 
 to church: thank God he does, it is the only 
 place he can find where commercialism weakens. 
 I know the narrow and bigoted are found there, 
 though by no means only there, and they are 
 made a little bigger by contact with eternal 
 things. The lapsed are found there too, and 
 are in the way of being restored. Insipid and 
 uninteresting folk are present, gathered out of 
 many gray and dull places, their poor lives 
 yielding up a little of their gray and taking a 
 little better color as they hear the great truths 
 that make the rich romance of living. Also 
 
126 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 there come the great souls of the community, 
 the noble dreamers, the eager hands that would 
 serve. And, I have found, these people are not 
 flippant; they are deeply in earnest; they 
 mean business. It is not the church but the 
 thing they find there that brings them, some- 
 thing which picture shows never supply, which 
 books are inadequate for, which is found 
 nowhere else. And men come from their gloom, 
 their cruelty, their ugliness and crookedness, 
 knowing more than ever you can tell them of 
 their baseness and all that, and sick of heart 
 because of it; but they come strangely hunger- 
 ing for the beauty and the sweetness of the 
 Lord. They take their little particles of him 
 and go hence—to forget, maybe, in the swirl of 
 things, but not quite to eseape—bearing a little 
 added flavor in life’s common things, a flavor 
 that is not unfamiliar to such as lingered with 
 Christ in that Galilean land of flowers where 
 he was the fairest, purest, strongest, bravest of 
 all, and a flavor which is quickly recognized 
 again wherever it is met in street or home or 
 shop. 
 
 II 
 
 The story of Jesus could not die. If the 
 church should fail to lift him up, another way 
 
THE CHURCH 127 
 
 would be found. But then any other organiza- 
 tion doing that would be a church, and still, I 
 can imagine, it would not be perfect. We have 
 this treasure in earthen vessels. The thing of 
 paramount moment, however, is the treasure. 
 For this treasure is a living thing and giveth 
 life unto the world, and, of all things else, men 
 need it! The church’s right to live abides only 
 so long as she “guards the deposit,’ Christ, 
 intrusted to her, making him always available 
 to the world. 
 
 Can a forest of firs renounce its type and be- 
 come a grove of palms? Such an experiment 
 would banish the spirit of life from the forest 
 and would lead, by folly and confusion, to a 
 death which would not have even the dignity 
 of a petrified forest, which at least is true to 
 type even in death. The Church of Jesus Christ 
 remains true to type only by preserving the 
 centrality of Christ. The Spirit’s business is 
 the expounding of the things of Christ, not of 
 another—no, not of Bergson, nor of Karl Marx, 
 nor of H. G. Wells, nor of another, though all 
 these are in place in the church when they are 
 made to assist the Spirit in his unfolding of 
 the Christ. Christ will forever increase and 
 change, though he will be the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever. Underneath all that the 
 centuries bring, the church, if it is to remain 
 
128 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Christian, must preserve the Christ as its 
 Root. This idea of the Christ-root tempts 
 examination, being full of suggestion. 
 
 There are those who point out to us that 
 the Christ of the modern church has no counter- 
 part in history; that we have so worked over 
 the original figure of the Nazarene that it is 
 no longer possible for any man to say what 
 part of the picture ever lived and what part 
 has been acquired by centuries of devotion; 
 that we really adore an apotheosis of Jesus, a 
 conception approximating much more closely 
 the idealism of the race rather than anyone 
 who ever walked in Galilee. Hence, “Who is 
 Christ?” we are asked, and “How shall we 
 know any more the original?” 
 
 But any tree, while depending vitally upon 
 its root, yet holds within itself much that the 
 root never knows. There is water present, for 
 instance, In a quantity such as the root could 
 never have held. As the root throws its life 
 up into the tree, it draws from sod and air 
 and sun myriad qualities with which it did 
 not begin, and yet who will say of the tree, 
 “Thou art false! or, perchance, an illusion’’? 
 Conceivably you will say, “Until I can draw 
 some line of demarcation between the original 
 root and what has been acquired, I shall not 
 be satisfied.” Who ever drew lines of demarca- 
 
THE CHURCH 129 
 
 tion in thmgs that live? Who can separate 
 between spirit and body, or mind and brain, 
 or the things which the root began with and 
 the things it has acquired? Life has ever this 
 mystery! We seek in vain its solution. But in 
 the day when I would seek rest from the sun’s 
 burning, or would cut me timber for a house, 
 I will forget my speculations, and, seeking the 
 tree, will accept of it all it can give. 
 
 Because there is something eternally living 
 in Christ, he is the continually increasing 
 Christ. If it be true that he has-added to 
 himself things that make his present. picture 
 difficult to reconcile with the features of him 
 of Galilee, we can only answer: “Nineteen 
 hundred years and more have gone; what else 
 does one expect? For he lives!’ Jesus has 
 shown the power to collect about him the 
 idealism of a world. Man’s highest, tenderest 
 dreams have somehow woven themselves into 
 his garments, and he has worn them as a king 
 for whom such robes are natural. He has been 
 a wondrous magnet, drawing the best out of 
 men to himself, and himself growing larger by 
 what he thus gathers. Thus he is not merely 
 the Christ of the Gospels; he is larger, as a 
 tree is larger than its root. But this Tree 
 which is Christ is as real as the Root which 
 was Jesus. Without the Root there could have 
 
130 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 been no such Tree; yet no longer will men be 
 able to disentangle the elements of the de- 
 veloped Tree from the elements of the original 
 Root. Was slavery abolished because of the 
 ethic of Jesus or because of the improved 
 conscience of the race? Do we thank Jesus for 
 the improved status of women or do we thank 
 advancing civilization? Are our ideas of God 
 gentler because the times are so or because 
 Jesus taught us so? Surely, it is apparent that 
 in none of these can we draw confident dis- 
 tinctions and say, “On this side is Christ, and 
 on that is some other.’ Rather we shall say 
 in answer to each of the questions, as one 
 might answer if asked whether the root or some 
 other part explains the blossoms on the tree, 
 “Both!” 
 
 Howbeit, in the hour when I am beaten by 
 angry winds and need shelter, burned by the 
 sun and need shade; in the day when my heart 
 is breaking and no man gives me consolation, 
 when, spent in moral strength and sick in 
 spirit, I need refuge and support and healing, 
 then I shall not remember my speculations, but 
 shall resort to that Tree whose leaves in all 
 the centuries have proved themselves to be 
 set for the “healing of the nations.” When I 
 would find timbers to build me “more stately 
 mansions’ that my manhood may escape 
 
— ad _ 
 
 THE CHURCH 131 
 
 from its littleness and penury and lift its 
 towers into fairer skies, I shall not pause until 
 the mystery of the tree is solved. Rather I 
 shall seek its ample boughs, that I may take 
 therefrom the only timbers that can nobly 
 build a man. There is enough in our Lord 
 Jesus Christ to exercise the intellect of man 
 for generations yet, and—who knows—forever! 
 But in the meantime, the glad meantime, there 
 abides in him all that the heart and spirit of 
 man may need for their healing, and their up- 
 building. 
 
 Til 
 
 Once, jostled among men in the narrow 
 streets of Milan—not finding there, amidst un- 
 lovely scenes, much to woo the heart to affec- 
 tion for humankind—I escaped into the great 
 Cathedral and mounted by stairways to the 
 roof. Looking down from the roof upon the 
 city, I began to find it possible to acquire a 
 better perspective. Little houses no longer 
 overshadowed me, narrow streets no longer 
 cramped me, and unlovely examples of hu- 
 manity no longer shuffled past, jostling me as 
 they went. I was seeing the city from above, 
 and humanity too. Seeing it thus, I began to 
 realize that if I would know humanity I must 
 
132 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 estimate it in the light of this Cathedral upon 
 which I stood, one of humanity’s vastest sym- 
 bols, an outward and visible sign of what was 
 really man. For wrought into this Cathedral 
 was humanity at its best, and as it loves to be, 
 its dreams and hopes and aspirations, its 
 devoted labor, its sense of God. Thus the 
 dignity of man, hidden in the streets, became 
 impressively apparent in the Cathedral. In this 
 mood I raised my eyes to behold, far beyond 
 the confines of the city, outlined against the 
 sky, closing the distant view, Mount Blanc, 
 Queen of the Alps! In a moment her white 
 forehead, resting there against heaven, had 
 carried my thoughts from man to God. 
 
 It seems to me that this is what Christ is 
 always doing for us. In him we recover noble 
 estimates of man; in him also we see the wide 
 horizons and find God. If it be true that the 
 centuries have wrought into the Cathedral 
 Christ more than was present originally in 
 Galilee, this only makes him more truly than 
 ever the highest personification of humanity 
 and of divinity. In Christ humanity still 
 climbs highest, and divinity still draws nearest. 
 
 John the Divine saw seven golden candle- 
 sticks, representing the church, and in the 
 midst, an the midst of the church, where we 
 must forever keep him, One like unto a son of 
 
THE CHURCH 133 
 
 man. Here is simplicity itself, reminding one 
 of the exquisite charm of the Master who 
 walked with men as one of them, and spoke 
 our human tongue on many a windy hillside 
 and amid the rustling of golden corn, and who 
 poured out a human heart in prayer beneath 
 the Syrian stars. But John makes this son of 
 man say immediately, “I am the first and the 
 last.” This is always the puzzle. He says 
 things that only God ought to say, talks of 
 ultimates and identifies himself with them. Yet 
 somehow he is right, and one day we will see 
 how. But in the meantime what can we do? 
 What else is there to do, for one who ponders 
 the mystery and bright, warm beauty of the 
 Lord, except to do as did John, who, gazing, 
 “fell at his feet as one dead.” 
 
 This, at the feet of the Master, is the only 
 place for the church if she is to retain her 
 inward inspiration, her vision, and her saving 
 message to mankind. We shall not pretend 
 she has lost it, but neither shall we say that 
 she may not make it more conscious and 
 devoted. 
 
THE CHURCH 
 (CONCLUDED) 
 
 I 
 
 From such thoughts as these concerning the 
 church and its mission one turns back to the 
 world in which we live, asking himself, doubt- 
 fully, ‘““Have I been dreaming—or waking?” 
 These values of the church seem to be little 
 enough realized if they be true! Where there 
 is not actual antagonism toward the church 
 there is widespread indifference, and in multi- 
 tudes there is an attitude much like that to- 
 ward an old heirloom. For sentimental reasons 
 it may still be allowed its place on the shelf, 
 but no one will suspect it of possessing utility, 
 and it will be forgotten except when it gets in 
 the way. 
 
 Yet, if count could be made, probably it 
 would be found that no organization under 
 heaven gathers within itself such a weight of 
 first-class intellect as does the Church of 
 Christ. A house burning, however, always 
 arrests more attention than a house building, 
 and the destructive critic is usually more heard 
 
 and published than the constructive. The 
 134 
 
THE CHURCH 135 
 
 superior, and often more than half contemptu- 
 ous, attitude of some intellectuals to the church 
 has had much influence in the world, and is 
 the more regrettable because it is often unin- 
 formed. It is time some things were said very 
 frankly concerning this. 
 
 After all, the merely scientific mind is not 
 the authority on those religious matters for 
 which the church stands. Ability in biology or 
 history is no smallest qualification for apprehen- 
 sion of God, who, being a Spirit, can be laid 
 hold of no more by scientific learning than a 
 physical hand can lay hold of a thought. This 
 is not always realized, and proficiency in 
 chemistry has given sufficient encouragement 
 to some men to pronounce upon religion. How 
 eager certain men of much knowledge of some 
 things seem to be to show how little they know 
 of others! How pathetically the same brain 
 can carry side by side the giant idea and the 
 pigmy notion! What feeble caricatures of 
 religious truth can beset the mind of even the 
 scholar, and how religiously behind his times 
 can be the man who is possibly ahead of them 
 in knowledge physical! 
 
 Thank God for learning; it is helping to 
 emancipate the world; but many things are 
 hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed 
 to babes. Many an illiterate Negro woman 
 
136 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 will annoy us with her obstinate “superstition” 
 that will not yield to our conclusive proofs. 
 Back of the “‘superstition”’ there is an experience 
 which she mangles in phrasing, but what then? 
 Is she to forego the living and burning center 
 of all life at the impatient and undiscerning 
 behest of some materialistic scholar? She has 
 an experience that is a closed world to him 
 and, in so far as she can understand his high- 
 sounding scorn and protest, she knows in her 
 simple way that he is talking dogmatic igno- 
 rance. Across many centuries comes a voice: 
 “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither 
 shall I flee from thy presence?...If I take 
 the wings of the morning and dwell in the 
 uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy 
 hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold 
 me!’ Millions of the world’s choicest in brain 
 and soul have shared that experience. 
 
 When a broad-based, robust, positive soul, 
 knowing whom it has believed, is met by a 
 sort of spindle-shanked spiritual emasculation 
 squeaking shrill denial, I am reminded of a man 
 I heard of in France. He had been a politician 
 before getting into khaki, and evidently had 
 acquired the habit of delivering himself with 
 equal authority upon any and every subject— 
 a task to be cautiously undertaken by any man. 
 Having versed himself in all the military text- 
 
THE CHURCH 137 
 
 books he could get hold of, he became con- 
 vinced that the war was not being won because 
 of inherent falsity in the military methods. He 
 arrived in France imbued with a mission of 
 adjustment and reformation. I forget what 
 became of him, but they used to talk about 
 him in the brigade. He came as a tenderfoot 
 late to the war to teach veterans who had lived 
 for years immersed in all the fierce experience 
 of fighting, who had found the falsity of the 
 textbooks three years before he arrived, who 
 had adjusted and reformed and reformed and 
 adjusted in more ways than he had dreamed, 
 and who knew all his pallid little expatiations 
 about war lacked only one thing—some first- 
 hand knowledge of the thing he talked about! 
 Those men could not stop to argue with him, 
 not merely because they were busy but because 
 it is rather futile to seek to convince a man 
 who lacks experience. When a man knows 
 through having dwelt where shells are bursting, 
 paper theories and contradictions do seem a 
 little sickly! Like Diogenes waving Alexander 
 aside, we may well request such men to stand 
 from between us and the sun! 
 
 If 
 
 Probably more potent than this attitude of 
 a few intellectuals as a foil to the church’s 
 
138 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 work and influence are such practical counter- 
 attractions as the modern picture show, auto- 
 mobile, and the not modern but now more 
 accessible charm of God’s out-of-doors. In 
 accepting this last to a neglect of “‘the assem- 
 bling of ourselves together” in a church, there 
 are many who claim that they lose nothing 
 thereby in spiritual values. “‘Where two or 
 three are gathered together in my name there 
 am I in the midst of them,”’ quotes the church. 
 “But I understood,” these answer, “that God 
 was everywhere. “In the midst of them’: yes, 
 but is he not also in the midst of the hills and 
 the flowers and the stars, and may not one 
 find him as easily by climbing the hills as by 
 coming to church? Is he more in one place 
 than in another, that we should seek him 
 there?” 
 
 While we grant the accessibility of God any- 
 where, it may be well for us to face the huge 
 amount of insincere speech made concerning 
 these meetings with him in nature. “It does 
 me more good to be out in the air and the 
 sunlight than to sit in a gloomy church where 
 nobody thinks oi anything but hats and 
 dresses.” That anyone should be capable of 
 such a conception of church life reasons sad 
 need of grace from some quarter! If one indeed 
 finds God out of doors, he speedily comes to a 
 
THE CHURCH 139 
 
 juster estimate of his brethren. But is it God 
 who is found, or esthetics? Is the tonic physical 
 or spiritual? Granted the disentangling cannot 
 be achieved so easily, is not the spirztual benefit 
 a little over-reported? What is the issue in 
 character and service? After all, if one is find- 
 ing God anywhere, the fact ought to be written 
 beyond dispute in one’s behavior. Though 
 God is everywhere, and everywhere is the re- 
 warder of them that diligently seek him, it is 
 doubtful whether even the theory is sound that 
 he may be found “‘just as well” in nature as in 
 church. But in practical experience, to what 
 extent do the majority desire to find God out 
 of doors? And to what extent are the deposits 
 in their lives actually moral and religious? 
 When in the community a wholesome reform 
 is needed and men are called to the standard, 
 do we find that those who come because they 
 have been learning to see life from the moral 
 standpoint of God, and to feel for men with 
 the earnest solicitation of God, are chiefly the — 
 men who have indifferently neglected the 
 church while spending Sunday elsewhere? Do 
 not misconceive this point: it is not that all 
 virtue is the church’s and all helpfulness. But 
 it is an emphasis of the practical experience of 
 life, namely, that we do not find that non- 
 churchgoers discover the rest of heart, or the 
 
140 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 high direction of life, or the wholesome devo- 
 tion to the cause of God and man which come 
 by genuine life with God. 
 
 The explanation of the Sunday exodus to the 
 country is not to be found chiefly in a search 
 for God. His mystic presence is everywhere, 
 but he is more readily discoverable in some 
 places than in others. It may be true that he 
 is present in any company of men, but it is in 
 the midst of disciples gathered together in his 
 name that he is most likely to be discovered. 
 He is present everywhere, but there is a “special 
 presence,” that is to say, there are places and 
 times when he is specially realized. God was 
 at Bethel before Jacob arrived and while he 
 dwelt there unconscious of anything divine. 
 Yet there came to Jacob an experience which 
 made him say: “‘Lo, God was in this place and 
 I knew it not.”” When it is so often quoted that 
 “Earth’s crammed with heaven and every 
 common bush afire with God,” it is apparently 
 assumed that everybody sees him. Yet the 
 poet continues: “But only he who sees takes 
 off his shoes; the rest sit round it and pluck 
 blackberries.”’ Presence! how little that signifies 
 to some! But, as I am about to point out, 
 while God is present no more in the church 
 than on the sea or the great plains, in the 
 church are certain helpful factors absent else- 
 
THE CHURCH 141 
 
 where, and by these the presence of God is 
 made specially realizable. 
 
 iit 
 
 The first of these factors is the company 
 which, gathered in One Name, is sympathetic, 
 partaking of the same spirit and desire. What 
 then, happens? “‘There is a common telepathic 
 pull which increases the responsiveness of each.” 
 We have seen men of calm blood roused 
 to madness in a crowd by some destructive 
 idea that has possessed it; such is the power of 
 the massed mind. What shall we say, then, of 
 the uplifting and enlarging power of a large 
 company splendidly possessed with the search 
 for God? If but half an audience is gathered 
 with sincere desire to commune with God, one 
 may guarantee, in the name of Heaven, and 
 of the pure constraints of united spirit, that the 
 varying degrees of carelessness and deadness 
 in the other half will break down before the 
 hour of worship is over. If every day I am 
 compelled to submit, whether I like it or not, 
 to influences cast about me from other souls, 
 and if often those influences are drowsing to 
 my nobler instincts, will you not admit that I 
 am not fair to my own soul if I deny it the 
 stimulating company of men and women aim- 
 
142 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 ing Godward? Siren voices and voices celestial 
 are always singing. If there are a thousand 
 influences that quicken my hearing of the 
 lower, how great a treasure will be that com- 
 pany which is able to wrap its sympathetic 
 mind about me until my hearing of the higher 
 is arrested, and aroused! 
 
 In the second place, the church garners and 
 carries onward the inspiration of the ages. 
 From the wide fields of the past treasures are 
 gathered and cast into the lap of the present. 
 Chaff indeed comes with the wheat, and that 
 we are busily blowing away by the help of 
 God. But there is bread from the past, and 
 it may not be too much to say that he who 
 proclaims his entire independence of the past 
 and sets himself to feed his soul only on what 
 he can rear on his own little acreage, will die 
 before his sowing can come to maturity. What 
 would you do with a statesman who declined 
 to learn from Edmund Burke and John Stuart 
 Mill and all the masters of statecraft from the 
 time of Rome and Athens? You would say he 
 was either a madman or a prig, and you would 
 refuse him your vote because you would feel 
 you could not trust such insolently independent 
 strutting in a responsible position. And what 
 would you say of a youth who, setting out to 
 learn the wizard’s art of making sculptured 
 
THE CHURCH 143 
 
 beauty rise lifelike from a block of marble, 
 began by refusing to study Phidias and Praxi- 
 teles and Michelangelo, with the wealth of 
 experience that those names represent. 
 
 What, then, will you say of a man who finds 
 himself the inheritor of personal powers he 
 must learn to govern, and of a crude, unshapen 
 soul from which he should cause to arise a 
 character after the likeness of a god, but who 
 deems himself sufficient for the task and so 
 snubs the spiritual statecraft and sculpture of 
 the past? Nearly two thousand years of the 
 Christian era, two thousand years of experience 
 with Christ, two thousand years of thinking, 
 loving, serving, of the thrilling university of 
 Life, whence each generation learns some new 
 syllable and passes it down into the ever- 
 enlarging treasury of the next—twenty cen- 
 turies of it, and what will you say of the man 
 who thinks he can ignore it and prosper? In 
 the church the ages are focused. We read them 
 in the Scriptures, we sing them in the hymn- 
 book; they utter themselves through the pulpit. 
 While numbers facilitate more sensitive response 
 to God, the giant saints and brains of the past 
 are pressing the immortal part of themselves 
 upon us, giving our response intelligence and 
 direction, warning, advising, calling, encourag- 
 ing. It is one phase of the “communion of 
 
144 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 saints,’ which is scarcely to be had except in 
 the Church of God. 
 
 The third factor is the preacher. We gladly 
 admit that God expresses himself in a sunset 
 or in a breaking wave, but God’s greatest 
 facility of self-expression is through a person. 
 The higher the type—the more excellent the 
 medium for God. For this reason Jesus is the 
 best revelation of God we know. Ethically 
 and religiously, Jesus is the supreme Master, 
 able to lay his commands upon the centuries, 
 because, as he said, “The words that I speak 
 unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father 
 that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” 
 Back of Jesus and through him, was God! 
 
 God’s methods do not change. Still he 
 possesses men and through them shows himself 
 better than anywhere else. I must say that, 
 unless my conception of the preacher’s office is 
 wrong, the preacher should be the most arous- 
 ing and compelling revelation of God the wide 
 world holds. Allowing for faults of learning 
 and ability, for errors of judgment and slips in 
 behavior, the man whose life is dedicated to 
 the highest, who dwells much with thoughts 
 and with masters who teach him to see life 
 from the pinnacles; to whom, isolated upon the 
 summits of the soul, the jangling voices of the 
 moment become a distant murmur, as in the 
 
THE CHURCH 145 
 
 awful silence he hears the solemn and unhasten- 
 ing tramp of God’s permanencies; to whom, 
 his spirit thrilling to fragments of God’s primal 
 music as they rise above earth’s discords, there 
 is audible the Voice that speaks only when men 
 are able to hear, pouring into his heart messages 
 that provoke and burn and impassion until 
 he knows he has heard things it is not possible 
 for a man to utter: I say that that man, when 
 he has come down from the mount, will make 
 no apology for his message, nor will he ask you 
 if you will hear, but he will speak as one having 
 authority, and he will proceed to cast out 
 devils that would yield to no one else. If the 
 preacher has enabled Ged to possess him, it is 
 not_the preacher who persuades his audience; 
 it is God. The mystic presence discoverable 
 among the hills? Yes; but if the preacher is 
 doing his work faithfully (one must write 
 almost in an agony of self-reproof!) when he is 
 done the lesser discovery will pale before the 
 vaster revelation, until the congregation retires 
 with hushed voices saying, “I have seen an 
 incarnation of God!’ 
 
CHARACTER 
 
 I 
 
 WHATEVER to the contrary may be sup- 
 posed in some quarters, words like “‘repression,”’ 
 “emaciation,’ “paucity”? are not typically 
 Christian. Christianity as Christ represents it, 
 never makes for contraction in either man’s 
 work or man’s play, in his intellect or in his 
 worship. 
 
 Such words as ‘“‘amplitude, plentitude,”’ 
 “expansion,” “abundance” are far more sym- 
 pathetic to Christ and the effects wrought by 
 his influence. “life”? is our Lord’s supreme 
 word: he poured it into poor spent bodies as 
 he went; he roused it into drooping faith; he 
 quickened the intellect; he found broken 
 hearts which, under the afflictions of the world, 
 had not been able to hold their treasures, and 
 he gently took them, and bound them, and 
 made of them chalices brimming again with 
 life; he found religion in his day entombed in 
 precise and rigid externalism and ritual, and 
 with the authority of the very Lord of Life 
 he called it to resurrection. 
 
 To increase life is his enthusiastic employ- 
 146 
 
 39 66 
 
CHARACTER 147 
 
 ment, as if he knew that the ache at the world’s 
 heart, the bitterness, the complaint, is always, 
 whether it is so understood or not, from the 
 absence of life. 
 
 The great Master’s mission was the making 
 of men, their enrichment unto life, and life 
 abundant. Under his influence men grow and 
 amplify, the type enhances, the unpronounced 
 manhood lifts itself into vivid self-expression. | 
 
 II 
 
 If we are to appreciate how Christ accom- 
 plishes this, we will do well to inquire of the 
 nature of “life.” Perhaps the old and imperfect 
 definition used long ago by Drummond may 
 not refuse us some help: “Life is correspon- 
 dence with environment.” Eyes that do not 
 see are dead; the paralyzed arm is unable to 
 correspond with its environment; intellectual 
 life unfolds more and more as the intellect is 
 related to wider realms of truth; the soul is 
 dead to the extent in which it has lost corres- 
 pondence with God. A characteristic of life 
 everywhere seems to be capacity for inter- 
 action with environment. 
 
 Man lives in a world wherein his environment 
 is both human and divine. That which cripples 
 his correspondence with either to that extent 
 
148 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 diminishes his life. Therefore the effort of 
 Jesus is to bring men into right relations with 
 both. Men inveterately believe that life’s 
 prizes are to be found in selfishness, and, in 
 their pursuit of pleasure or of possessions, they 
 strain all effort to serve their own selves. 
 Nothing under heaven is harder to break than 
 that infatuation. And yet by the experience 
 of long, long centuries of depleted and dis- 
 illusioned humanity, selfishness is narrowing to 
 enjoyment, deflating to exhilaration; and, in- 
 stead of life, it leaves only ashes. But care for | 
 mankind, an acceptance of responsibility to our 
 fellows—not the pagan disowning of our brother 
 but the Christian assent to our being his 
 keeper—this widens the area of our interests 
 and of our enthusiasms, tempts life to ever 
 wider expansions and never lets it pall. It is 
 by such correspondence with our human environ- 
 ment that we live with life more abundant. 
 
 But there is our divine environment, God, 
 in whom “we live and move and have our 
 being.” To lose God is to be left with a world 
 —and nothing more! Remove from Words- 
 worth that “something far more deeply inter- 
 fused,” and the light will have died from his 
 sunsets, the music from his waterfalls, the 
 mystery from his hills; the world will have 
 become a machine and its explorers merely a 
 
CHARACTER 149 
 
 tribe of skilled mechanics. One needs God for 
 the romance of living. As the soul increases 
 in correspondence with him it increases in 
 exuberant life. 
 
 Til 
 
 Therefore Jesus gives his attention to cor- 
 recting correspondences, for he is anxious to 
 have men live, and live abundantly. He © 
 approaches the problem differently from others, 
 and his voice sounds as a new thing among 
 his people. Familiar with Moses and his neg- 
 atives, and with his stressing of behavior, they 
 were not quick to realize the world of difference 
 between the familiar code of laws and the 
 method of Jesus. Neither are we. Too often 
 have we represented the Master as concerning 
 himself with words and actions, with the 
 things we do or leave undone. Too often, 
 again, we have conceived the Christian ethic 
 to be chiefly “Don’t”; but that is rather 
 Mosaism. Imagine Saul of Tarsus asking Jesus 
 the way of life and being told to abstain from 
 committing robbery and murder. He might 
 reply: “I have abstained from these and many 
 other things all my life, but still I have an 
 empty heart.” So Jesus says: “Except your 
 righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of 
 the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case 
 
150 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven’’; that is, 
 unless your righteousness be superior in kind. 
 
 For the kingdom of heaven is not negative 
 but positive; “Thou shalt love,” says Christ. 
 Neither is it external—a code of laws to be 
 obeyed: On-the contrary, it is a spirit, a 
 temper, a relationship. “Thou shalt love,” says 
 Christ, but love is a condition of the spirit, 
 which, though indeed expressed in behavior, 
 is not itself behavior. But of this key Christian 
 word, Dr. Richard Roberts! makes this timely 
 utterance: “There is little more urgent in the 
 interests of sound thinking and clear speech 
 than some rehabilitation of this word ‘love,’ its 
 rescue from the slough of saccharine senti- 
 mentalism and its recognition as the generic 
 name of those human impulses which constitute 
 the many-colored energy of social cohesion.” 
 And he strengthens this by quoting Professor 
 Rauschenbusch who defines love as “No flicker- 
 ing or wayward emotion, but the energy of a 
 steadfast will bent on creating fellowship.” In 
 that definition Rauschenbusch has achieved 
 something almost classic; the terms of it 
 deserve to be returned to and _ separately 
 weighed, so much significance attaches to each. 
 “Thou shalt love,” insists Christ, and such 
 insistence is neither negative nor external. 
 
 1 The Red Cap on the Cross, p. 62. 
 
CHARACTER 151 
 
 Neither are other great words of the Christian 
 gospel—such a word, for instance, as “‘recon- 
 ciliation.”” Like “love” it is not descriptive of 
 action but of attitude; action may express 
 reconciliation or love but it was the spirit 
 behind action that Jesus sought to correct, and 
 until that was corrected a man was not saved 
 —no, not though he polished his behavior as 
 a sculptor might perfect his marble, leaving 
 it when he had done all, neither warm nor 
 breathing. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount 
 should never be hardened into legislation; 
 rather it is a series of councils and illustrations, 
 seeking, from many angles, to inculcate the 
 same spirit. Obedience to rule can rapidly 
 grow mechanical and fail to touch the spirit. 
 “Thou shalt not kill,” said the law. “It is 
 inadequate,” says Jesus; “if you nurse anger, 
 you are guilty.” “Thou shalt not commit 
 adultery,” said the law, and it was echoed by 
 the scribes and Pharisees. “If you carry lustful 
 intentions,’ says Jesus, exceeding the righteous- 
 ness of the scribes and Pharisees, “you have 
 committed adultery already in your heart.” 
 You see how he passes to the realm of spirit 
 and reason, and demands that there the man 
 shall fight his battles and win his victories, for 
 there is character and not in the outward per- 
 formance of religious or social demands. — 
 
152 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Thus does Jesus endeavor to adjust relations 
 between man and his environment, human and 
 divine. “I came that they may have life, and 
 may have it abundantly,”’ he says. Precisely; 
 he that will learn of Jesus already begins to 
 move into more abundant life. There is a 
 fuller arousal of the man; in the midst of fields 
 of inertia a pulse begins to beat. 
 
 But there are phases in the ensuing develop- 
 ment. They cannot be disentangled, for they 
 grow together, and each becomes increasingly 
 marked as the man comes more under the law 
 of Christ, which is love, and “‘love,”’ be it remem- 
 bered, “‘is the energy of a steadfast will bent on 
 creating fellowship.” 
 
 IV 
 
 It may not be correct to say that man in 
 Christ becomes a law unto himself, for he 
 must live under the reign of the law of right 
 relationships, which, properly speaking, is a 
 spirit, a temper. But he lives no longer under 
 any other law. None can legislate for him; 
 rules and codes exist for him no longer. Possess- 
 ing the spirit of Christ, his one business comes 
 to be exposition of the requirements of that 
 spirit in the presence of each new situation as 
 it arises; he administers the law of the Spirit. 
 The judge on his bench does not make the 
 
CHARACTER 153 
 
 laws but he administers them, arbitrating as 
 each new case is brought before him. For the 
 Christian man there is but one law, and in its 
 light each case is arbitrated upon as it comes. 
 This privilege is denied to two—the child and 
 the man untuned to Christ. 
 
 1. The child, either in years or in develop- 
 ment, cannot be intrusted with this law. The 
 learning of the divine art of right living must’ 
 begin much as that of any other art. Years 
 ago Sir John R. Seely put this so well that he 
 may be quoted: “For the beginner rigid rules 
 are prescribed, which it will be well for him 
 for a time to follow punctiliously and blindly. 
 He may believe that under these rules a princi- 
 ple is concealed, that a reason could be given 
 why they should be followed, but it is well for 
 a time that the principle should remain con- 
 cealed and that the rules should be followed 
 simply because they are prescribed. At any 
 rate, so long as he actually has not discovered 
 the principle, he must abide strictly by the 
 rules, and it would be foolish to abandon them 
 in order to go in search of it. But there comes 
 a time when the discovery is made, a golden 
 moment of silent expansion and enlargement. 
 Then the reason of all the discipline to which 
 he has submitted becomes clear to him, the 
 principle reveals itself and makes the confused 
 
154 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 and ill-apprehended multitude of details in a 
 moment harmonious and luminous. But the prin- 
 ciple at the same moment that it explains the 
 rules supersedes them. They may not be less true 
 than before, they may be seen to be true far more 
 clearly than before. But they are obsolete; their 
 use is gone; they can for the future tell only 
 that which is already well known, which can 
 never again be forgotten or misunderstood.”! 
 2. The man who has not sincerely adopted 
 the law of Christ must not demand its privi- 
 leges. Many a man claims for himself a liberty 
 of decision and arbitration which is entirely 
 without justification unless the temper of his 
 life recognizes that he is here to be a saviour. 
 The judges of this country are privileged to 
 administer the laws of the United States, not 
 of France or of Mexico; neither must they 
 administer according to their own feelings or 
 prejudices or interests, but only according to 
 the laws of the land. You must not claim the 
 privileges of Christ unless you are Christ’s; 
 you have no freedom to do as you like until 
 you have accepted that higher attitude to God 
 and man which lies at the back of all good laws; 
 you must not claim liberty and then proceed 
 to administer not Christ’s law of love, but 
 your own law of selfishness. The world would 
 
 1 Kece Homo, p. 222. 
 
CHARACTER 155 
 
 never be safe in granting you this freedom. 
 And yet it can grant it in security to the men 
 of goodwill and of helpfulness, for “‘love is the 
 fulfilment of the law,” and more than the law’s 
 demands will be fulfilled. 
 
 Law may fill the cup up to the prescribed 
 measure, but love will overflow it; the hireling 
 serves the house within the limits of certain 
 hours and wages, but the housewife supplants 
 all limits with interest in her home, and be- 
 cause she loves serves happily without stint; 
 even the nurse can grow impatient with un- 
 reasonable impositions upon her strength, but 
 whoever heard of anxious love growing weary, 
 or complaining at the lengthened hours, or 
 resenting the endless tasks? Law says, “I 
 have done a fair day’s work; no man can ask 
 more of me than this.”’ Love asks what more 
 it can do. Jesus was conscious of these differ- 
 ences, and showed how while duty is satisfied 
 when you give your coat, love’s impulse is to 
 give the cloak also; how, when the law demands 
 that you must go a mile and is fulfilled when 
 you have done it, love swings along the road, 
 singing and unbegrudging, and has finished 
 two miles ere it realizes. 
 
 In the measure in which this is the spirit of 
 your life you may accept your freedom and 
 administer your own law. But otherwise, not! 
 
156 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Vv 
 
 We said that correspondence with environ- 
 ment was one of the marks of life, and we have 
 seen that Jesus aimed to effect such correspon- 
 dence. By making love the guiding temper of 
 character he showed us that which leads from 
 life to life. The difficulty of continually re- 
 newed adjustment to circumstances and of 
 ever-varying application of the law of right 
 relations, or love, to each new case as it arises, 
 taxes and searches and thus develops the 
 individual. But that is what Christ came to 
 do—to produce life. 
 
 But now we have reached a poimt where we 
 can look for a moment at another definition of 
 life—Bergson’s: 
 
 “Life is freedom asserting itself within 
 necessity, turning it to its profit.” 
 
 The dead body is, shall we say, necessitated 
 by physical and chemical laws; we know 
 exactly what will happen to it. But when life 
 is present, it stands up amid this reign of law, 
 or of necessity, and, without altering any law, 
 asserts itself as superior, learns how to use law 
 to maintain and enlarge life, and proves its own 
 freedom to such an extent that now no one 
 can forecast what will happen. No one knew 
 better than Christ that the great lawgivers of 
 
CHARACTER 157 
 
 the ,centuries have been right, yet none knew 
 better than he that man can lie dead, im- 
 prisoned in laws not any one of which he may 
 break. No room for enterprise, originality, or 
 surprise: “‘faultily faultless, icily regular, splen- 
 didly null—dead perfection!’ He called men 
 to Life: “Life is freedom asserting itself within 
 necessity, turning it to its profit.” Christ 
 stands up amid the imexorable legalism of 
 Judaism. It is life asserting itself within 
 necessity. He will not “destroy the law” but 
 neither will he consider whether he obeys it, 
 any more than Byron will pause to see if he is 
 keeping in step with the requirements of good 
 poetry. The poet will not count his syllables 
 as a mere versifier might; being a poet, he will 
 have no need. Christ, having the spirit that 
 fulfills the law, is not anxious about codes. 
 He is free amid necessity, for the law is as 
 permanent as God’s throne, but he is free in 
 the midst of it because he has the spirit of life. 
 Then he proceeds to show his freedom by using 
 the eternal laws where others are simply con- 
 trolled by them. As Life stands up free amid 
 physical laws, selects them, combines them and 
 then rides in triumph on the clouds because 
 they serve him; as Life takes the laws of sound, 
 which may not be altered, arranges and as- 
 sociates them into unusual service of his com- 
 
158 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 mands until they sing in oratorio; so Life, the 
 Life that Jesus has taught us how to have 
 abundantly, asserts itself free within the un- 
 alterable laws of duty. If to stand free amid 
 the laws, and overrule them, and teach them 
 to serve a spirit higher than themselves is life 
 —if that is life, I can see why Jesus said, “I 
 came that they may have life, and may have 
 it abundantly.” 
 
 There is no flat convention here, no previous 
 assurance of what will happen. On the con- 
 trary, no one can forecast what a Christian 
 man will do, for life runs upon no iron rails 
 of precedent. When he has finished with the 
 moral laws he will have outsoared all that was 
 ever dreamed of, he will have awakened a 
 melody unheard before. The Christian charac- 
 ter is thus one of colorful originality, of daring 
 enterprise, of startling innovation. With un- 
 warrantable departure from custom, he will 
 invent a bill for the abolition of slavery; with 
 scandalous indifference to whether it is written 
 in the law or not, he will protest that wars 
 must cease; though the law says he must not 
 hurt his neighbor’s business, he actually will 
 conceive the insane dream of helping his neigh- 
 bor’s business even at the expense of his own; 
 though the law commands him to keep his 
 social life clean, he will commit the extravagance 
 
CHARACTER 159 
 
 of foregoing on occasion his legitimate pleasure 
 that he might help his neighbor to keep his 
 life clean. It may not seem reasonable, nor 
 according to law; it is according to law, though 
 an unwritten law. It is Life, the abundant 
 Life, free and superior to law because it swallows 
 up the law in fullness as day swallows up the 
 ‘dawn. Under the law personality flows, like 
 the Colorado River, chafing within high but 
 narrow restraints. “I came that they may 
 have life,” says Jesus, and life flows like the 
 Nile within the banks and over the banks, know- 
 ing not where its banks begin or end but carry- 
 ing broad fertility and nourishment to every- 
 thing it touches. 
 
 VI 
 
 “This is my commandment, that ye love one 
 another.” As though he had said: “Moses 
 gave his name to Ten Commandments, and 
 they had to do with behavior; I give my name 
 to one, and it neglects behavior and deals with 
 the spirit; yet, like all the colors in the one 
 golden light, all virtues lie in my one command 
 to love.’ No one can know the New Testa- 
 ment and suppose that Jesus ever meant that 
 this temper of his could be shared by us with- 
 out the open doors to heaven which he him- 
 self so carefully kept free. He knew, as we do 
 
160 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 too, that he who would carry mankind in his 
 heart must carry the Father also. Right rela- 
 tionships with men nourish right relationships 
 with God; and, on the other hand, he who 
 neglects to entertain the Heavenly Guest will 
 soon find his entertainment of Humanity 
 artificial and forced. Jesus has but one basis 
 for Christian character: ““Thou shalt love the 
 Lord thy God with all thy heart, ... and 
 ... thy neighbor as thyself,’ and, that we 
 may be clear in our thinking, let us repeat again: 
 _ “Love is the energy of a steadfast will bent 
 on creating fellowship.” Out of this is abun- 
 dant life, freedom, enthusiasm, happiness. 
 Go thou and learn this one thing, without 
 which all else is as “‘sounding brass and a clang- 
 ing cymbal.” This is the will of God made 
 known in Christ, in his brave and gentle min- 
 istry, in his wise and moving message, in the 
 unstinting spirit that poured itself out unto 
 death to save us all—this is the will of God. 
 Avoid it not, nor seek a substitute, no, not 
 temples nor prayers nor purities. Love is 
 the Christian law, and “love is the energy of a 
 steadfast will bent on creating fellowship.” 
 
 ‘And I remember still 
 The words, and from whom they came, 
 Not he that repeateth the name, 
 But he that doeth the will! 
 
CHARACTER 161 
 
 “And Him evermore I befiold 
 Walking in Galilee, 
 Through the cornfield’s waving gold, 
 In hamlet, in wood, and in wold, 
 By the shores of the Beautiful Sea. 
 He toucheth the sightless eyes; 
 Before Him the demons flee; 
 To the dead He sayeth, ‘Arise!’ 
 To the living, ‘Follow me!’ 
 And that voice still soundeth on 
 From the centuries that are gone, 
 To the centuries that shall be! 
 
 “From all vain pomps and shows, 
 From the pride that overflows, 
 And the false conceits of men; 
 From all the narrow rules 
 And subtleties of Schools, 
 And the craft of tongue and pen; 
 Bewildered in its search, 
 Bewildered with the cry: 
 ‘Lo, here! lo, there, the Church!’ 
 Poor, sad Humanity 
 Through all the dust. and heat 
 Turns back with bleeding feet, 
 By the weary road it came, 
 Unto the simple thought 
 By the great Master taught, 
 And that remaineth still: 
 Not he that repeateth the Name, 
 But he that doeth the will!’”! 
 
 1H. W. Longfellow, “Christus: A Mystery,” Finale. Used 
 by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers. 
 
REVELATION 
 I 
 
 THERE is a persistent tendency in man 
 jealously to cloister the religious truth he 
 treasures, robbing it of liberty and locking it 
 up In narrowness and mechanism. One would 
 think that divine light was meant to be untram- 
 meled enough, yet in no age has man been 
 content to allow it to be so, but, on the con- 
 trary, he has sought to confine it within the 
 small boundaries of creeds or institutions or 
 priesthood or books. To be sure, he has 
 thought to protect the light by thus putting 
 a shell about it, and he has at first been able 
 to see that the precious thing is the light and 
 not the shell. Invariably, however, this dis- 
 tinction has grown dim with time, and the 
 shell has come to be as sacred to him as 
 the truth it was meant to guard, leaving him 
 with the sacred nation, or the sacred church, 
 or the sacred Book, issuing in the hard, exclu- 
 siveness of the Jew, of the Roman Catholic 
 and of the Protestant. 
 
 Many fanatical Jews have died for their 
 faith that in their chosen nation was deposited 
 
 the truth while other peoples sat in darkness. 
 162 
 
REVELATION 163 
 
 Many Roman Catholic martyrs have shown 
 how deeply they believed that the voice of 
 Holy Church was the highest religious author- 
 ity possible. To-day many Protestants are 
 ready to protest with equal energy that it is 
 not the nation or the church but the Book 
 which is the infallible and perfect authority 
 in faith and morals. The tendency still works. 
 Each view has truth in it, or it could not’ 
 have survived; its error lies in making all truth 
 reside there. Who can read his Bible without 
 feeling that God’s glorious light has been con- 
 centrated in it as a burning-glass catches and 
 focuses the rays of the sun? Yet how many 
 there are who imagine they do the light honor 
 by insisting that it shines here but nowhere 
 else! A Roman Catholic or a Protestant, if 
 told that he was cramping the truth would be 
 shocked, pained, indignant; yet this is precisely 
 what he tries to do. Instead of being universal 
 and permanent as the sun, truth is made to be 
 exceptional and intermittent as a lamp. 
 
 Il 
 
 Observe how vast is the conception of divine 
 Revelation in the Prologue of the fourth 
 Gospel: ““There was the true light, even the 
 light which lighteth every man, coming into 
 
164 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 the world. He was in the world, and the 
 world was made by him, and the world knew 
 him not.” 
 
 1. God has revealed himself in the heart of 
 every man; there are no boundaries of tribe 
 or tongue; one feels the shadow of no temple, 
 hears the leaves of no book. Direct as the 
 rays of the sun he has shone upon all races, 
 the white and the black and the yellow, the 
 brown and the red. 
 
 2. This Light, this Life, is not merely uni- 
 versal; there is something about it which may 
 be described as cosmic, as wrought into the 
 warp and woof of the physical universe; this 
 Life of God, which everywhere has touched 
 the life of man, is the same creative thing that 
 made the worlds—thus mighty are the forces 
 that have touched man’s heart. This cannot 
 be gone into, but it indicates how impossible 
 and how presumptuous it is to hope to enclose 
 all this light in a church or in a Book. 
 
 3. This Light was Christ. Do not dismiss 
 this as an anticlimax, but examine it. The 
 whole idea of Jesus in the New Testament is 
 that he was a limited expression of Something 
 infinitely vast, a concise though not neces- 
 sarily exhaustive epitome of a Divine library, 
 upon whose face one could look and see the 
 glory of God, and who could say, “He that 
 
REVELATION 165 
 
 hath seen me hath seen the Father.” The 
 Light which has shone in “every man coming 
 into the world”; which shone brighter among 
 the Hebrews than among their contemporaries; 
 which has shot golden rays through the ancient 
 and the modern church, and which has bathed 
 in beauteous and ever-ending splendor the 
 pages of the Bible; the Light, moreover, which 
 visited the sacred writers of India, which 
 burned in the soul of Zoroaster and flashed 
 from the soaring pinions of Plato—this time- 
 less, universal Light burned deepest and 
 warmest, flashed brightest and cleanest, was 
 crowned kingliest and godliest, in Him of 
 Galilee, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
 
 He is the supreme revelation, in whose light 
 all others should be tested. The light that 
 shone through others came through the painted 
 windows of personal blemish, tainting the 
 golden glory; only in him were the windows 
 crystal clear. This is not said by special 
 pleading but by mere comparison: compare 
 and see; He invites you. The challenge still 
 remains: “Which of you convinceth me of 
 sin?” Who else ever dared to issue a 
 challenge like that, much less who else ever 
 could survive it? If ever the Light has reached 
 us uncolored, clean from God, it is through 
 the inimitable windows of Christ,—windows 
 
166 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 broadest spread in unparalleled genius, clearest 
 wrought in unequalled religious comprehen- 
 sions, and preserved unspotted in a miracle 
 of moral cleanness and development. 
 
 He is the Light of the World, not because 
 from him shines a Light which shines nowhere 
 else, but because through and from him shines 
 the true Light which shineth everywhere. 
 But what filters through chinks and crannies 
 in others, and mingles with shadows, in him 
 comes flooding. He seemed to know it: “He 
 that followeth me shal! not walk in darkness, 
 but shall have the light of life.” 
 
 Jesus, then, is the norm, the rule, the reli- 
 gious court of appeal before whom we bring 
 our lesser light for disentanglement from error. 
 We know he is the Truth, because our hearts 
 answer to him. ‘Truth is self-attesting. Like 
 answers to like. In the great religions of the 
 world resides much which is neither in agree- 
 ment nor in conflict with Christ; about that 
 we can suspend judgment. But all have 
 features in agreement with Christ. Where they 
 are in conflict with Christ, we say Christ is 
 the greater Master. 
 
 Il 
 
 To all this most of us will readily assent; 
 it is when application begins to be made that 
 
REVELATION 167 
 
 revolt results. It is seen to be proper to test 
 Buddha or Zoroaster thus, but Moses or David 
 must be spared! 
 
 Yet Jesus himself did not hesitate to set 
 his word above that of the Hebrew Scriptures: 
 “It was said to them of old time, ... an 
 eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but J 
 say unto you....’ His followers have not 
 always kept him so supreme; in anxiety for the’ 
 authority of the whole of Scripture, fearing to 
 allow that any part might be in error, many 
 have been prepared to exhaust invention to 
 prove it all of equal authority and exactness. 
 When Abraham tells a falsehood, when Samuel 
 hews “‘Agag in pieces before the Lord,” when 
 the psalmist, in vindictive mood, prays that 
 even his enemy’s prayer might be turned into 
 sin, these unchristly things are glossed over 
 and a pathetic attempt is made to justify them. 
 
 But if Christ is right, they are wrong, and 
 we shall not exalt our Saviour or advance his 
 cause by refusing to see it. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are two ways of speaking of the Bible 
 to-day which seem to me to be equally unfor- 
 tunate. One is: “I believe in it from cover 
 to cover; I believe every word is inspired by 
 
168 — CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 God and without error.” The other is: “There 
 is a lot in the Bible that I can’t accept; I don’t 
 believe it is all inspired; much of it has to be 
 taken with a grain of salt, and that’s the way 
 I take it.” If the first is mechanical and 
 unreal, the second often savors of the flippant, 
 and is no truer than the first. If the first has 
 rigid ideas about this wonderful Book, the 
 second often appears to have no ideas at all. 
 
 One almost blushes to have to mention a 
 few elementary facts which, if only they were 
 realized, would dismiss at once both the rigid- 
 ity on the one hand and the flippancy on the 
 other. The Bible is not a book, but a collec- 
 tion of books, written in far different centu- 
 ries and by people of widely different ideas 
 and experience. It is a library, in which is 
 represented, not the dead level of a religious 
 homily, but all the gorgeous variety of one of 
 the most remarkable literatures extant. There 
 is history, poetry, drama, allegory, narrative, 
 folklore: as though one had turned to English 
 literature and bound together in one volume 
 Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Green’s Short History 
 of the English People, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 
 Hymns Ancient and Modern, Stories of King 
 Arthur, the Letters of F. W. Robertson, and 
 other writings. But there would be _ this 
 difference: in the English collection there would 
 
REVELATION 169 
 
 be ne connecting theme, whereas in the Bible 
 is the one sustained subject of religion. God 
 has used every literary instrument and every 
 kind of fact and, if you will, various sorts of 
 fable, in order to reveal his light. : 
 
 And that light has been like a gray dawn 
 moving toward the perfect Day, which is 
 Christ. What is to be gained by pretending 
 that the light known to Moses or David was 
 equal to that of Christ? or that all their opin- 
 ions about God and human duty were correct? 
 Hither they are wrong, at times, or Christ is! 
 
 Yet again, and on the other hand, what is 
 to be gained by saying that these old patri- 
 archs were not inspired? The light they had 
 was much superior to their times; if they are 
 seen to have been in error when they are 
 measured by Christ, they were not so when 
 judged by the men and ideas of their own age; 
 if in religion we see them to have been like 
 babes trying to speak, and if their naive ideas 
 tempt our smile, yet they learned their language 
 from the Father, though they had not the 
 tongue to speak it with purity and without 
 a lisp. 
 
 Can you tell all your heart to a child, or do 
 you not, rather, impart it as the child is able 
 to bear it? Thus did God, of necessity, deal 
 with the children of men. If the psalmist is 
 
170 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 vindictive, it is because of his passion for 
 righteousness, a strange thing in his age—and 
 whence came it? It was light, twilight, much 
 mixed at times with human shadows. It did 
 not come from below. 
 
 Let us admit the shadows; let us admit the 
 light, for both are true. It is easy to be frank 
 with ourselves since we have the bright day 
 in Jesus; what disagrees with him is false; 
 what fails to measure up to him is lacking, 
 either in the Bible or out of it. 
 
 V 
 
 But what agrees with him, inside the Bible 
 or out of wz, in past ages or in this, is the true 
 light. For still the true light lighteth every 
 man coming into the world. Some men are 
 poor windows, others are better, and ever and 
 anon arises one through whom the light streams 
 wondrously. As the race climbs upward, and 
 as men bring larger capacities and clearer 
 windows, the light is sure to grow. What 
 shall we say of those who speak as if God had 
 ceased to reveal himself since the last word of 
 the Bible was written? What a libel upon 
 God! and what an ignoring of the plain facts 
 of history! Where does the Bible condemn 
 slavery? And yet when Wilberforce, and 
 
REVELATION 171 
 
 Garrison, and Patrick Henry and Lincoln arise 
 to free the slaves, we know it was by the 
 light of God they did it. And then we see, 
 what was hidden before, that this new light 
 agrees with the Light of the World. Where 
 does the Bible direct all nations to join to- 
 gether in abolishing war? Yet when Woodrow 
 Wilson becomes the mouthpiece of a world 
 and calls the nations to a better way, we know 
 it is by new revelations of God that he did it, 
 and by the same revelations that we desired it. 
 Method and detail are accidental; the essential 
 thing is the spirit of that great movement; 
 we know it is right, because it agrees with the 
 spirit of Christ. 
 
 And so God reveals himself as the centuries 
 grow. In philosophies and sciences and cus- 
 toms and dreams; in the sins of men and in 
 their virtues, always the light is growing, 
 Things and thoughts new to the world are 
 happening every day, God is active every day. 
 The preacher proclaims some things never 
 found in the Bible, and he knows they are of 
 God because they testify of Christ. The 
 philanthropist gives his strength to help a 
 cause never dreamed of in Bible days, and he 
 knows this vision of service is of God because 
 it is such as Christ would have. 
 
 God’s unfolding of the Light is not finished, 
 
172 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 nor is the duty of man to keep the windows 
 unshuttered heavenward. And ever we bring 
 the new illuminations to Christ to find if they 
 be of God. We know not from what quarter 
 unexpected light may come, but unfearing— 
 yet with discretion; with caution—yet with 
 composure; we await all God has to offer by 
 that Spirit of Truth which was promised as the 
 Revealer of the things of Christ. 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 I 
 
 WHEN anyone announces that man’s sur- 
 vival of what we call death has never been. 
 proved my first impulse is to look at him in 
 astonishment, but in a moment I understand 
 him, and agree. I agree, because I realize 
 that here is probably one of those who have 
 not escaped from the stifling cage made for us 
 by physical science, in which most of us have 
 sat, like eagles with folded wings, eying wist- 
 fully through the bars the ample spaces that 
 are our heritage, but being prevented from 
 them by the artificial, narrow and yet arrogant 
 proof-methods in vogue in some quarters. 
 With a docility unworthy of our powers of 
 wing we have accepted confinement, relin- 
 quishing the infinite horizons because, forsooth, 
 they have not been proven to exist! Men 
 who are still unescaped from this limited 
 method of “proof” will of necessity tell you 
 that immortality is not yet proved. For, of 
 course, it is not proved by having been explored 
 
 by the microscope, or by having been passed 
 173 
 
174 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 through a prism broken up into rays and 
 assessed, like the light, or by having been set 
 out like a problem of figures, to be added, 
 subtracted, multiplied, and divided until a 
 mathematical result is achieved. But then, 
 “nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor 
 yet disproven’—not by these methods. The 
 superficial matters of life can be captured by 
 them, but not the deepest. Across, in fact, the 
 very warp and woof of life must be written, 
 “Not proven!’’—not by these methods. Love 
 has not been proven, nor thought, nor virtue, 
 and certainly not life beyond the grave when 
 we have not yet “proved” that man exists on 
 this side of it. “I think, therefore I am!’ 
 cried the old philosopher, formulating testi- 
 mony of his existence, and, though no one 
 contests the soundness of his formula, whoever 
 has yet been able to prove by actual demon- 
 stration, safe from illusion and superior to 
 mere hearsay or personal opinion (1) what 
 thinking is, (2) that he does indeed think, (3) 
 that it necessarily follows that if he does think 
 he also exists? And yet if we allow that man, 
 if he is to know anything, must take some 
 things for granted, we shall have allowed that 
 which may open the way not only to belief 
 in man’s existence here but also to belief in 
 his existence hereafter. 
 
IMMORTALITY 175 
 
 il 
 
 For the grounds of the two beliefs, or, rather, 
 of the one belief of our personal existence now, 
 and of the persistence of it, are really much the 
 same. Normal man is intensely conscious of 
 his personality, and man has always and 
 everywhere been so. But man has similarly 
 been sure that death does not conquer person- — 
 ality. If it be retorted that some men have 
 often doubted and denied the second, the 
 reply is that men have often denied our present 
 existence, and in both cases from an inquiry 
 into the subject which has bewildered the 
 eyes with accidentals whilst the essentials were 
 lost. We analyze the body in vain for per- 
 sonality; we watch the body die, and doubts 
 arise; we are ready to say that personality no 
 longer exists, though we have not “proved” 
 it to exist at any time. So we grow befuddled, 
 and handle delicate truth with thick fingers 
 that can never grasp it; and all the while the 
 normal man knows better, though he does 
 not pause to realize that he knows. He 
 walks out of the jungles where the feet sink 
 in uncertain foundations, where the stars 
 cannot penetrate and where the cobwebs 
 gather about the brain,—he walks out under 
 the high heaven, upon the wide plain, and 
 
176 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 feels the clean wind upon him, and in the simple 
 joy of living he knows he cannot die. 
 
 “A certain presage,” Cicero calls it, but it is 
 a@ presage insisted upon by all our knowledge 
 of ourselves, and that knowledge is based upon 
 man’s serene, unshaken consciousness that he 
 himself is something superior to death. He 
 has watched his body change from his youth 
 up; but he has not changed, except to grow. 
 Not a cell of his body is now the same as when 
 he was a youth: he, in fact, wears a different 
 body; but he is not different: the brain that 
 was the vehicle of thought six months ago no 
 longer lives, but the thought does, and uses 
 another brain. Change and flux swing around 
 him, he watches the rise and fall, the going and 
 coming of many things, yet nothing touches 
 him, he remains himself. He does not argue, 
 he simply knows he lives. The well-nigh 
 universal belief in a “future life” is nothing 
 else than the refusal of personality to confine 
 itself within the artificial boundaries of time 
 and _ place. 
 
 Man feels himself to be independent of and 
 superior to both. All his experience of time 
 has been that he has conquered it, and if place 
 has seemed to enchain him, he has been a mon- 
 arch greater than his chains and only waiting 
 to be freed. He carries in himself an instinct 
 
IMMORTALITY 177 
 
 of something unfulfilled. He feels he lives in 
 fragments rather than in completeness, and 
 that there is something he has either missed 
 or not yet arrived at. There are moments 
 when he glimpses fairer landscapes than he has 
 ever walked, nobler devotions and _ nobler 
 powers than he has ever known; it seems to be 
 himself that he is glimpsing, yet ere he has 
 properly decided what it is he sees, the fair’ 
 prospect has gone, and he has eluded himself. 
 When a storm raves on the ocean he watches 
 the wild grandeur until he is exhilarated, as 
 if it were a symbol of vaster powers within 
 himself—and yet he is left saddened. When 
 beauty spreads its wonders in the night, in the 
 daytime unfolds its panorama of mountain, 
 sea, and river, man gazes, loves it—but is left 
 hungering for what no earthly scene has ever 
 been able to give him. Why can “the meanest 
 flower that blows” move the poet to “thoughts 
 that do often lie too deep for tears’? We are 
 aware of presences we cannot describe, of 
 truth for which our language was not made. 
 The soul seems to be aware of a country 
 fairer than flowers, of domain wider than 
 oceans, of nobility more regal than mountains. 
 These outward scenes sadden with a feeling of 
 restriction, and the higher they soar with 
 wonder itis only to confess the plainer that 
 
178 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 they cannot soar high enough to satisfy a man. 
 Has this thing of life, called man, to falter in 
 his step and “prove” to himself that he lives 
 before he can believe that he does? And must 
 he then proceed to debate whether he shall 
 continue to live, suddenly distrusting the 
 soul’s affirmation, which a moment before he 
 had found sufficient? 
 
 iit 
 
 Death is never so ridiculous as when a man 
 gets beyond seventy. Physically he is in 
 the autumn; nature is finished, tired, fruited. 
 But spiritually he is at the spring. He is like 
 a sown field over which a green hue speaks of 
 hidden seeds sprouting toward harvests yet 
 hidden in the deeps of the future. He is a 
 hundred times more vigorous than when his 
 mind lay fallow at eighteen. The area of his 
 interests is enormously wider. The experi- 
 ences of life have been stimulating until he 
 is like a forest set in motion by the first warm 
 eall of spring, roots and buds and sap suddenly 
 roused to a forward activity that nature does 
 not intend to mock by checking. Shall he 
 then say: “Now I am awake; now the roots of 
 climbing worlds are struck; now there beat 
 within me the strong pulses of the ocean; come, 
 
IMMORTALITY 179 
 
 let me surrender my treasures—to the dark 
 abyss! and yield myself up with all my powers— 
 to oblivion! Unto this end have I been pre- 
 pared, nature’s mightiest production, that I 
 might, in a masquerade of dignity, exhibit on 
 the stage—nature’s hollowest farce! I am a 
 majestic prelude to—everlasting silence! I 
 am accumulated wealth about to be lavished 
 on—annihilation’’? 
 
 To all this the profoundest intuitions of 
 healthy man rush up into protest and denial. 
 “No!” they ery, “It is artificial, and it is 
 false!’ Yet, ask us to prove our right to 
 protest and we cannot. As Emerson reminds 
 us: ““We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. 
 The argument refuses to form in the mind. 
 A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury 
 is ever hovering; but attempt to ground it 
 and the reasons are all vanishing and inade- 
 quate.’ 
 
 IV 
 
 I place the emphasis here because here it 
 belongs. If a man’s assurance of immortality 
 means anything more than words to him, it 
 will be because he knows rather than because 
 he reasons. It is not quite enough to say 
 
 1 “Tmmortality.” 
 
180 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 some do not know, for that is doubtful. It 
 is probably no more true than it would be to 
 say some do not know they exist here and 
 now. The African bushman and the Aus- 
 tralian black fellow are low types that are in 
 no way so self-aware as the more reflective 
 among us: testimony of our very existence 
 varies in intensity, therefore, but is never 
 wholly absent. It is not remarkable that the 
 same should be true with respect to our aware- 
 ness of immortality. There are stages of 
 spiritual civilization; one does not go to a 
 drinking house or to a gambling den to seek 
 burning premonitions of life eternal. Mate- 
 rialistic thinking and acting does not intensify 
 such consciousness. While this great truth 
 is not dependent upon our realization of it, 
 realization is the master testimony to it. 
 Where men live and think nobly there will 
 consciousness of survival be cloudlessly affir- 
 mative. 
 
 V 
 
 Therefore, if you would share the immortal 
 hope, live greatly. But if you allow life’s 
 finer intensities to relax until there is not that 
 in you which of itself is testimony, by what 
 may you be convinced? When Orpheus plays 
 his harp a hundred harps may surround him, 
 
IMMORTALITY 181 
 
 but only those whose strings are taut can 
 catch the strain and answer it. The others 
 with listless strings may be told that here is 
 the master music of the world, but if they 
 cannot know it for themselves, how shall it be 
 proven? The music is all right but the strings 
 need tightening! 
 
 When a gentleman announced to me with 
 scorn that he would not trouble to cross the’ 
 road to hear a certain famous botanist lecture 
 on flowers I did not argue. Why should I? 
 Where should I begin? If a man sees no 
 beauty in flowers, can I convince him? What 
 is beauty, that I should analyze it for him? 
 All the evidence of a botanist would not suffice 
 to capture beauty and give it to a soul that 
 could not see it for itself. 
 
 We have our “evidences” for immortality, 
 singly inadequate enough, but, taken together, 
 capable of creating immense impressions upon 
 some minds. But what shall we do? Shall 
 we enumerate them to convince the unbe- 
 lieving of the truth of immortality? Shall we 
 speak, as Socrates did, of the indestructibility 
 of matter and argue that if matter is unable 
 to cease how much less the mind that, organ- 
 izing and controlling it, ever proves _ itself 
 superior and more worthy to live than the 
 imperishable thing it handles? Shall we show 
 
182 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 how, though we have seen trees and flesh 
 reach maturity and pass it and seem ready to 
 die, we have never found a mind do so, its 
 powers appearing always to enlarge and renew? 
 Coleridge left behind him about two hundred 
 outlines of books that he had never had time 
 to finish. We all do some such thing as _ this. 
 We leave fragments of dreams, fragments of 
 hopes, of love, of aspiration, of character, of 
 religion: we live in fragments. Shall we ask 
 whether the spirit which produces outlines so 
 majestic can be prevented from somehow, 
 somewhere carrying them to completion? Or 
 shall we, rather, say that an unfinished column 
 is all of God’s plan for us, or a foundation 
 without a building, or a lifted anchor without 
 a voyage and a distant harbor?—Shall we say, 
 with Dean Inge, ‘““There is a life which is below 
 consciousness and there may be a life above 
 consciousness?! Shall we reason from deep 
 instincts and discontents of the soul, pre- 
 saging life eternal, or shall we, perhaps, tell of 
 the world’s greatest in all ages being convinced 
 of life beyond the grave, as they stand like 
 mountains, and above them that Mount Eve- 
 rest, Jesus, catching already, the glories of the 
 new day? 
 
 Any one of these roads, leading us to the veil 
 1 Outspoken Essays. First Series, p. 276. 
 
IMMORTALITY 183 
 
 of the great mystery, and leaving us there 
 hoping but unseeing, might do little more than 
 hold us for a few delicious moments ere we 
 decided with sadly shaking head that no delec- 
 table country could possibly be beyond that 
 veil, or many roads would lead to it. But 
 when road after road converges to the same 
 point and passes purposefully on, while we 
 stand on this side of the mystery, watching, we - 
 begin to say: “One road might have been an 
 accident; but so many—? What pulsing Fact 
 lies beyond the veil that, like a magnet, draws 
 thus so many highways to itself, setting upon 
 each its pointing sign-posts with the legend, 
 *To the Life Immortal’ ”’? 
 
 Of what value could such reasons be to one 
 who has no witness in himself? They cannot 
 convince. They might stimulate a sudden 
 wish to share a conviction so desirable, but 
 that would be very temporary unless life were 
 aroused to become more reflective, devoted and 
 responsible, for it is everyone who is “of the 
 truth’ who hears the “Voice.” It is not on 
 external botanical evidence alone but on inter- 
 nal artistic quality that flowers are loved; 
 it is not the perfect music only, but the strings 
 in tune to receive it that leave no need for 
 argument, but, rather, make place for enthu- 
 slasm. 
 
184 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 “The wish that of the living whole 
 No life may fail beyond the grave, 
 Derives it not from what we have 
 The likest God within the soul?” 
 (“In Memoriam,” LV.) 
 
 VI 
 
 Therefore I return, still again, to this: all of 
 us know quite well that the wide sweep of our 
 personality cannot be “cabined, cribbed, con- 
 fined” within the narrow compass of time, 
 that the real part of us is immune from “famine, 
 fire, and sword.” All of us know it, but with 
 some the consciousness is dim. It is not 
 reasoning first, but living, that brightens the 
 inward testimony. “If I but had your faith 
 I should begin to live your life,” said a lady to 
 Pascal. “Begin to live my life,” replied the 
 great man, “and you will soon come to have 
 my faith.” 
 
 As this assurance of the greater things grows 
 it comes to be realized that if there is illusion 
 and unreality anywhere, it is in the phenom- 
 ena of this present world, including its passions 
 and its pleasures. If anywhere there are 
 mockery, intangibility, and “broken cisterns,” 
 it is here, where too often the palate is tickled 
 only that it might be nauseated, the feet 
 allured that they might be bruised, the prizes 
 
IMMORTALITY 185 
 
 offered that they might break the heart. ‘“Ex- 
 cept a man be born from above he cannot see 
 the kingdom of God.” As Martineau stated 
 it: “The very gate of entrance to religion, the 
 moment of its new birth, is the discovery that 
 your gleaming ideal is the everlasting real.’ 
 Do not suppose that I have been dealing with 
 mere hopes and dreams, slender-based, ethereal. 
 These are the realities—if any are. These 
 are the realities, and they reveal their secrets 
 to the nobility, but never to baseness; they 
 liberate the soul from the bondage of this 
 world’s complex and illusory masquerade, intro- 
 ducing it to the iron lines of permanence. 
 These realities never disappoint; they never 
 mock; but, on the contrary, in old age they 
 reaffirm the immortal assurance of youth and 
 prepare the soul for new beginnings. 
 
 Thus Theodore Parker, dying, was able to 
 recite with deeper significance than ever the 
 lines written by himself when young: 
 
 “Oh welcome, then, that hour that bids thee lie 
 In anguish of thy last infirmity; 
 Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air, 
 The visage drawn, the Hippocratic stare; 
 Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control, 
 The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the Soul.” 
 
 1 Study of Religion, vol. i, p. 12. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 I 
 
 In one of his Messianic flights Isaiah ex- 
 claims, “For that nation and kingdom that 
 will not serve thee shall perish.” 
 
 Yes; and we may add: “‘That international 
 policy, that industrial legislation, that socio- 
 logical doctrine that will not serve Christ shall 
 perish; that league, or combine, or program 
 that will not serve Christ shall perish; among 
 the rich or the poor, the powerful or the weak, 
 whether the plans be shaped at White House, 
 or at the labor union, or at the board of direc- 
 tors, that which will not serve Christ shall 
 perish.” 
 
 With whatever “boast of heraldry” or “pomp 
 of power,” flourish of trumpets or weight of 
 gold the plans may be framed and launched, we 
 have lived now long enough to know, by the 
 inexorable logic of plain events, that that 
 which is not of Christ has already the worm 
 at the roots, and that only that carries within 
 itself the vigors of unquenchable life and 
 triumph among men which is conceived in the 
 
 spirit of Galilee. 
 186 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 187 
 
 For Christ it is who is referred to here, 
 though Isaiah himself could hardly have known 
 it. Isaiah could never have meant or dreamed 
 that there lay in the arm of his people sufficient 
 strength for all nations to feel it; he could not 
 have felt confident that in the tribe known as 
 Israel were the qualities bound to make all 
 people serve it, or perish. Not in the tribe, 
 nor in the arm of Israel, but in the presence of | 
 God in Israel was his hope. If God dwelt in 
 Israel, the peoples would pay homage to the 
 God who dwelt there, or ignore him at their 
 peril. Isaiah was simply proclaiming the Mes- 
 sianic hope of his people. A strange hope it 
 was, ancient, persistent, at first crude enough— 
 being political and physical; steadily it shed 
 its crudities as the years passed. The nation, 
 trampled on, exiled, almost extinguished, yet 
 clung with a tenacity that was surely inspired 
 to the golden hope of a Deliverer to come, and 
 a Kingdom that would extend unto the ends 
 of the earth. 
 
 Yet by the time Jesus came there were many 
 shades of popular opinion concerning the 
 nature of the Kingdom, the vast majority being 
 assured that a warlike prince was about to 
 appear, gifted with an ability of leadership, 
 sufficient to cast off the Roman tyranny and | 
 restore Israel to the glories of Solomon. 
 
188 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 It is not hard for us to detect in many of our 
 current doctrines of the Second Advent a sur- 
 vival of this old Jewish frame of mind. 
 
 In this the Jews had really sunk below the 
 elevated expectations of some of their ancient 
 prophets. A more spiritual view, however, 
 seemed to have prevailed alongside the other, 
 although it was by no means so prevalent. 
 And Jesus completed the evolution of this 
 long dream of a kingdom of God, continually 
 resisting the materialistic view and insisting 
 upon the spiritual. The kingdom of God, he 
 stressed, is withm, and unseen. Even his 
 occasional use of picturesque and dramatic 
 language must not be so interpreted as to make 
 him seem to lapse at times into grosser con- 
 ceptions; Jesus was too big to be inconsistent 
 with himself, and the entire emphasis of his 
 message was inward. Only too many of us 
 possess a certain vulgar lust for pomp and 
 display, and we shall not rest until we take 
 our Lord and make him a King after the 
 pattern of earth’s little potentates, have him 
 wear a crown of stars and, accompanied by a 
 shining concourse of angels, have him over- 
 turn opposition by the conquering force of his 
 mighty arm. In the days of his flesh, he was 
 much grieved at his disciples’ disposition to 
 read physical meanings into his poetry, and 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 189 
 
 one can imagine the dismayed gasp of a John 
 Bunyan or a John Milton should their high 
 symbolism ever come to be treated with the 
 dull literalism that has so often and so long 
 perverted the teachings of our Lord. 
 
 The long dreams of a kingdom of God 
 culminate and clarify in Jesus. “My kingdom 
 is not of this world,” he said; yet it is an this 
 world. But the whole method and ideal of it © 
 are other than what we have come to know as 
 worldly. Jesus is himself the symbol of his 
 kingdom, representing in himself all the essen- 
 tials of his kingdom. Tif I should seek to epit- 
 omize the marks of the kingdom of God, I 
 think I should say they are Spirituality and 
 Brotherhood—but these as Jesus represented 
 them, for both have been so loosely used as 
 to have become more or less emptied of their 
 primal wealth. 
 
 II 
 
 Spirituality is not a matter of temperament; 
 there is a distinction between spiritual and 
 spirttuelle. It has no necessary connection 
 with emotion, and not even with mysticism. 
 Spirituality is a philosophy. It is opposed 
 to materialism. A thing that could never be 
 said of Jesus is that he was a materialist. 
 Yet he was practical, active, constructive, 
 
190 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 but as he went, he saw! He saw the hand of 
 God, believed in the plans of God, felt the 
 heart of God. The universe was not barren 
 matter; human life was not orphaned, un- 
 visited, unguided. Jesus was one whose hands 
 were filled with the tasks of the day, but 
 whose reading of life and things was discerning 
 of spiritual presences and purposes; he counted 
 God in, not pausing in the realms of theory, 
 but actually. Thus he never suffered the 
 corroding influences that always eat at the 
 soul where materialism has settled. 
 
 And this attitude to life is vital to the king- 
 dom of God. There is no hope for the world 
 without spirituality—not the pseudo-religion 
 that conventionally speaks the Divine Name, 
 but never ponders its significance, that recog- 
 nizes excellent sentiment but never shoulders 
 responsibility. The religion that cannot direct 
 behavior is not the kind that Jesus illustrated. 
 But there is an apprehension of God that is 
 warm and energizing; it is creative of new 
 scales of value; it arouses new conceptions of 
 human worth and destiny; it provokes new 
 convictions that God is Governor, Nourisher, 
 Redeemer. Moreover, it is not the product 
 of a hermitage, or of a temperament, and it is 
 open to the common man. Between it and 
 materialism is the difference between life and 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 191 
 
 death. It is a philosophy of life and it is one 
 of the essentials of the kingdom of God. 
 
 iit 
 
 The other mark of the Kingdom is Brother- 
 hood—as Jesus showed it. It overleaped 
 boundaries of nation and class and sect; the 
 Samaritan and the Jew, the rich and the poor, | 
 the Pharisee and the peasant shared the un- 
 stinted heart of him. In such a spirit there 
 are obvious implications of service; one of his 
 most affecting lessons was that “‘the Son of 
 man came not to be ministered unto but to 
 minister.” Such a spirit does not necessitate 
 a supine ignoring of ugly facts, for Jesus saw 
 sin with open eyes; neither does it require a 
 scrapping of all words that do not purr with 
 softness and geniality, for the words of Jesus 
 could be barbed with truth as with flint, and 
 could leap from the taut indignation of his 
 soul like arrows from the string. Neverthe- 
 less, his spirit was ever that of the brother of 
 us all, and in no clash of principles, however 
 violent, in no provoked criticism, however 
 caustic, could that spirit in him be spoiled. 
 And this is the spirit of the kingdom of God. 
 
 The kingdom of God, then, is not a shape, 
 an institution, or anything to be handled, any 
 more than the life which dwells in a tree. But 
 
192 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 that plant life is the explanation of trunk and 
 branch and leaf, and these can be handled. 
 There is a living Spirit, which is the spirit of 
 the kingdom of God, and only the presence 
 of this spirit in the affairs of men can ever 
 produce those institutions, laws, and prosper- 
 ities which have been dreamed of from time 
 immemorial as the Golden Age. When John 
 saw the New Jerusalem coming down out of 
 heaven from God, there came ‘a great voice 
 out of the throne saying, Behold, the taber- 
 nacle of God is with men.” ‘Then all things 
 began to be made new, and when John was 
 shown the New Jerusalem in detail, again 
 God and the Lamb were the center of all things, 
 the Temple, the Light. What can one say 
 but that about a center like that such glories 
 are bound to group? Give us a right spirit, 
 with all that that registers in change of mind 
 and heart, and we shall not be long in creating 
 right conditions. 
 
 The penury of the world is not from wicked 
 economics but from poverty of soul, and 
 when the soul is poor you cannot make con- 
 ditions rich. The Romans hated kings as much 
 as Americans do, and they boasted the lib- 
 erties and benefits of their republic. Yet 
 the later Roman republic abounded in tyran- 
 nies and travail, so little can a form of govern- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 193 
 
 ment avail when the spirit of the people is 
 wrong. God knows our world needs reforming; 
 but there is not likely to be much reformation 
 until we are relieved of the vast army of simple 
 folks who think they can reform it from the 
 outside instead of from within. The air is 
 filled with the shouts of those who cry their 
 wares, of those who offer their panaceas of all 
 ills, guaranteed to disperse oppression and 
 produce prosperity, happiness, and peace. The 
 confidence of them! Republicans and Dem- 
 ocrats; Bolsheviki and I. W. W.; Labor, 
 Liberal, Conservative! A vast. amount of 
 propaganda is conducted to-day as if we should 
 have a new world if only men had plenty of 
 money without any work. Be not so deluded! 
 I have seen an ignorant man inherit money 
 and travel the world over and see nothing and 
 enjoy nothing; so little do conditions com- 
 pensate for lack of character. Says Ruskin 
 in a well known line: “There is no wealth 
 but life: life, including all its powers of love, 
 of joy and of admiration. That country is the 
 richest which nourishes the greatest number 
 of noble and happy human beings.” The 
 common happiness and the common nobility— 
 that, and that only, is the common wealth. 
 But you will never get it by a reshuffling of 
 the international or the economic or the indus- 
 
194 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 trial situation. The need is deeper than that. 
 
 Because the spirit of modern life is wrong we 
 are suffering a social system which grinds some 
 men to powder. But let Labor smash the 
 system and install another; what would we 
 have except a new tyranny, unless Labor is 
 animated by the spirit of brotherhood and is 
 possessed of a spiritual conception of things? 
 Neither Capital nor Labor is able to survive 
 a frank test of the marks of the kingdom of 
 God. Labor will chase a chimera so long as 
 it misses the spirit of the Kingdom. It is 
 not neglect of the church which is to be stressed, 
 but neglect of God. Selfishness, commer- 
 cialism, greed in rich or poor, in capital or 
 labor, will never save the world. “By no 
 political alchemy can you get golden conduct 
 out of leaden instincts.” Czesar and Napoleon 
 each created empires; Rienzi failed, from lack 
 of worthy human material. The sculptor and 
 the architect are crippled without substance 
 suitable to their work. How are you going to 
 build a new world out of humanity as we so 
 often find it? Christ undertakes to set the 
 material right, and that is to be done by us 
 men accepting a right attitude to our Maker 
 and also to one another. Thence are all 
 nourishments and brotherhood. But apart 
 from this is certain disappointment. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 195 
 IV 
 
 The church is no professor of economics, but 
 it is a prophet of the kingdom of God, and 
 it is an observer of human life. And this it 
 can aver, “That nation and kingdom that will 
 not serve Christ shall perish!’ It does not 
 hesitate to say it to Capital, which having 
 ignored the spirit of spirituality and brother- 
 hood has brought upon itself the raging waves 
 of industrial unrest. It cannot withhold the 
 same warning from Labor, which similarly 
 missing too often a proper spirit, while 
 achieving shorter hours and better conditions, 
 threatens the very foundation of society and 
 its own prosperity and existence with the rest. 
 The only permanencies, constructive contri- 
 butions, salvation, are those that express and 
 carry the spirit of Christ. Observe the world 
 to-day and see whether the things that redeem 
 our hope be not those that make for healing 
 and_ brotherhood. 
 
 The leaven of the Kingdom is very active. 
 Distinguished labor leaders in America and 
 Britain are Christian men; ministers are con- 
 cerning themselves with the economic welfare 
 of mankind; a new literature has come into 
 being; new dreams are forming, new disgusts 
 are burning—disgusts at crass selfishness in 
 any class, at shallow panaceas that do not 
 
196 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 cleanse the blood. Things are happening in 
 our day which for excellence would have made 
 our fathers gasp as at the incredible. Men 
 with rough hands and rolled-up sleeves are 
 feeling their way toward a healthier spirit; 
 men with keen brains, others powerful in 
 leadership, still others possessed of wealth 
 and influence are throwing their weight toward 
 creating a better, deeper spirit. 
 
 The spiritual view of things is returning, and 
 that alone can nourish genuine brotherhood. 
 Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world if 
 he would employ a method indorsed by men 
 from time immemorial. Because he believed 
 in God he turned from that tried but false way, 
 and set out to conquer the world by a deeper 
 method and a truer. He could never have 
 dared this had he not believed in God, but 
 this one belief is enough to enable any man 
 to challenge the example of ages when it con- 
 flicts with what God stands for. The world 
 that loses this sense of God loses the taste that 
 can distinguish corrupt fruit from sound, and 
 the daring that lays the ax to the root of the 
 tree. There are men who are teaching our 
 world to catch that spirit. Because Jesus 
 believed in God he “‘endured the cross, despising 
 the shame.” Such belief enables any man 
 to follow his vision in face of the worst that 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 197 
 
 men can do, and to save the world in spite of 
 itself. And this is what many men are doing 
 to-day. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto 
 leaven, which a woman took, and hid in 
 three measures of meal—til it was all 
 leavened.”” Throughout the world the leaven 
 worketh. 
 
 In the passionate midst of a great movement 
 of reform I heard, some years ago, one of the 
 most brilliant orators and most dauntless 
 spirits produced by Australia, repeat to a vast 
 audience some lines that may fittingly close 
 our study. He had not long emerged from an 
 operation which had become necessary partly 
 as a result, it was thought, of his strenuous 
 labors in the cause of righteousness, and when 
 I saw him on this occasion, the most dividing 
 force in the country, beloved and hated, a 
 storm center and clearing the air like a storm, 
 he limped onto the platform holding his side 
 which had never properly healed. He is 
 dead now, but the radiant message of spiritual 
 vision and faith flung out that day by that 
 golden voice and peerless spirit speaks to 
 us here seven thousand miles away in 
 distant America, as an example of the death- 
 lessness of the word of hope and life. In the 
 midst of antagonism and hate, these were his 
 words: 
 
198 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 “Can you see the great wheels turning? 
 Can you see God’s lightning burning 
 In the tireless dynamo? 
 Can you catch the hum of power? 
 Catch the keynote of the hour? 
 As the cap of death is settled 
 On the forehead of the foe! 
 
 ‘‘Wheels of destiny are turning; 
 
 Fires of faith are hotly burning; 
 God is on the giving hand; 
 
 Giving courage to the fighter, 
 
 Giving death-blows to the smiter, 
 Giving leaders to our land, 
 
 Who will keep the great wheels turning, 
 
 Who will keep the white truth burning, 
 Till the dread foe is consumed. 
 
 ‘‘When the foe falls prone forever, 
 Heaven may know, 
 Our earth can never 
 Know, a greater shout of glory 
 Than shall usher in the story: 
 How the children, with their mothers, 
 Sweethearts, fathers, friends and brothers, 
 All are safe! O, Nations, 
 Hear ye! From all evil! 
 Faint hearts, cheer ye! 
 God’s own hand these wheels are turning! 
 God’s own heart this fire burning! 
 The Eternal Dynamo!” 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 
 I 
 
 Tue church has always believed that Jesus 
 meant something significant when he spoke of 
 a Spirit about to be granted who should take 
 of the things of Christ and show them unto us. 
 In the book of Revelation we find that Spirit 
 already active, speaking to the early church: 
 ‘He that hath an ear let him hear what the 
 Spirit saith.”’ 
 
 There is peril in dullness of hearing. Cas- 
 sandra poured her prophecies into ears that 
 could not hear, but the warnings were true, and 
 the noble towers of Ilium bowed their proud 
 foreheads to the Greek. The Soothsayer 
 warned Ceesar of his fatal day, the ides of 
 March, but provoked only a smile from the 
 great man. “The ides of March are come,” 
 Cesar laughed as he passed to the Senate. 
 “Ay, Cesar, but not gone!” replied the Sooth- 
 sayer, portentously. Cesar could not hear, 
 and ere that day was done Cesar was dead. 
 The voice had spoken, but there were ears 
 that were holden. Wherever the Church of 
 
 Jesus Christ has grown deaf to that Spirit 
 199 
 
200 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 which tells of the things of Christ, a deadly 
 malaise has fallen. 
 
 The Spirit speaks unto the churches, and 
 some there be who deem they do him honor 
 by shutting the ears and crying, as the familiar 
 gospel song has it, “It was good for our 
 fathers, and it’s good enough for me!’ It 
 was good for our fathers, but he who has 
 not advanced beyond the fathers, as they did 
 beyond theirs, is like the father of Abraham 
 who stayed in Haran and died there; he died 
 in the land of his fathers, indeed, but his son 
 went onward into a new world and a vast inher- 
 itance, carrying with him the best that his 
 fathers had given. What man among us can 
 believe at forty precisely as he did at fifteen? 
 If he can, alas for him! Then the years have 
 taught him nothing, the Spirit has spoken in 
 vain; he may as well not have lived. 
 
 Yet your belief of to-day is not a break with 
 the past but the crown of it. It is not a 
 waxen model of a flower, man-made, artificial 
 and unconvincing; it is the inevitable outblos- 
 soming of all the processes of your tree of life. 
 
 Can the church have in it the Spirit of life 
 and truth, and yet not grow? Will you insist 
 that I stand where Calvin stood? or Wesley? 
 or another? I shall go further because they 
 stood where they did, outgrowing them as all 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 201 
 
 things livmg must outgrow the past, the more 
 when that past was vigorous in health. 
 
 Yet shall the blossom look down and despise 
 the branch and trunk? Shall any man to-day 
 forget that he simply blossoms upon the tree 
 of the centuries and has no explanation of 
 himself apart from the past? Writes H. H. 
 Powers in the “Atlantic” for April, 1923: 
 “Trust not the man who lightly turns his back — 
 upon the past. Trust, rather, him who comes 
 not to destroy but to fulfill. Fulfillment 
 means destruction just the same, but oh, such 
 a different destruction!’ Starlight might be 
 destroyed by catastrophe to the stars, but it 
 is destroyed every morning by the rising of the 
 sun. The living Spirit in the church dis- 
 preads an increasing light of Christ, and unto 
 the end of time, whether they like it or not, the 
 children must resign, as inadequate, truth 
 which was enough for the fathers. 
 
 The spirit of the forest moves in a tree with 
 restless energy, and the tree grows stout of 
 trunk and breaks into leaf and flower. It is 
 never two seasons the same, and yet it is never 
 essentially different. It is always a tree; the 
 type remains. But so certainly as that spirit 
 is the spirit of life the tree cannot be static. 
 You cannot play under it as a boy and then 
 return after many years to behold it again. 
 
202 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 Though it is the same tree, it has altered with 
 the seasons, and so have you. Go to the pet- 
 rified forests if you would be sure of what you 
 are to find. There, from year to year, is no 
 change. With perfect security you can tell 
 your friend what he is going to see. If you 
 wish you may say: “My father roamed among 
 these ancient forests, and he brought me to 
 them when I was a boy. I recall how awed 
 I was by their static grandeur. Here they 
 have been from age to age. Neither frosts nor 
 suns affect them; they defy the elements, and 
 are unchanged yesterday, to-day and forever. 
 Come, and behold something that is not fickle, 
 not unsure.” Verily, for what is less fickle 
 and more assured than death! Of all the trees 
 in the wildwood, only that tree or that branch 
 is static which has lost its life, and these, men 
 gather into ovens and they are burned. 
 
 The living Spirit, restless and vocal in the 
 Church of the Lord Christ, is the very genius of 
 change. Where any branch of the church 
 loses its capacity to change, it abides for a 
 while as a contrast and a warning, and then 
 falls. 
 
 II 
 
 Not least arresting among the Master’s 
 similes of the Kingdom was that when he said: 
 “Therefore every scribe who hath been made 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 203 
 
 a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto 
 a man that is a householder, which bringeth 
 forth out of his treasure things new and old” 
 (Matt. 13. 52). The striking element here is 
 that any scribe should ever, under any circum- 
 stance or by any chance, bring forth out of 
 his treasure anything new. One has only to 
 understand the function and spirit of the 
 Hebrew scribe to realize this. The work of 
 the scribes was to make careful copies of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures for distribution, and their 
 work was greatly reverenced. Their order 
 began with Ezra, who returned from the Baby- 
 lonish exile to find the sacred writings scattered 
 and, in part, destroyed. He had them reas- 
 sembled, reproduced, and copied, the copyists 
 becoming known as scribes. Thereafter the 
 scribes continued to play an important rdle. 
 Thus began the era of the scribe. 
 
 This era of the scribe had been preceded by 
 that of the prophet, in every sense a far greater 
 era. The prophets seldom wrote, and when 
 they did, it was the message stirring in their 
 hearts that they wrote, not the message that 
 had stirred the heart of some distant ancestor, 
 however great. If they quoted him, it was 
 that they might indorse his word and apply 
 it to their own age. The contrast between the 
 two eras is great. That of the prophet rings 
 
204 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 with daring challenge of wrong; it is original, 
 progressive, passionate, living intensely in its 
 own time; that of the scribe is bound to the 
 past; it cannot be original because its business 
 is to quote the fathers; it cannot be progressive 
 because its business is to remain faithful to 
 the measure of light possessed by a previous 
 generation; it cannot be really passionate, be- 
 cause its business is not to think until the fire 
 burns but, rather, to accept and to copy. The 
 prophet was venturesome, independent; the 
 scribe was cautious and a lover of precedent. 
 When the prophet would strive for the kingdom 
 of righteousness it was with invincible faith 
 in the ever-living, ever-present God; therefore 
 with an energy that was often fierce he would 
 even overturn practice and convention, where 
 such seemed obstructive, and carve new paths 
 in the name of the Lord. But the scribe, 
 worshiping the past, would reform his times 
 by consulting the methods and messages of 
 other generations, painfully copy down all the 
 prophets had said, and, supposing there was 
 nothing to be added, with flat and stale pre- 
 cision would publish the wonders that God 
 wrought in the great yesterdays; but he would 
 never start up with the inspired conviction 
 that God is also the God of our to-days and our 
 to-morrows. ‘The prophet might not be so 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 205 
 
 exact, so precise, so safe, but he was more 
 colorful, more dynamic. 
 
 Emerson! tells us how the world demands 
 of us conformity to its customs and creeds. 
 That is the type of the scribe—careful of con- 
 formity, regarding, scandalized and_ horrified, 
 any breakaway from the rule. But Emerson, 
 urging faithfulness to our own light and to 
 our own God, adds: ““He who would be a man ° 
 must be a non-conformist!” That is some- 
 what the type of the prophet, who asked not 
 what was the fashion, nor how the fathers 
 phrased their faith, but, rather, what was true 
 for themselves and their own times. “He who 
 would gather immortal palms,” cries Emerson 
 again, “must not be hindered by the name of 
 goodness but must inquire if it be goodness.” 
 Inquire! Explore! Your scribe does not ex- 
 plore—he accepts! 
 
 iit 
 
 Judaism, at the time of Christ, might almost 
 be described as being scribe-cursed. “The 
 law and the prophets” were read, learned, 
 quoted, debated, and deferred to with a rever- 
 ence which had degenerated into superstition. 
 The teachableness that sits respectfully at the 
 feet of the great days that are gone that it 
 
 1 Self-Reliance. 
 
206 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 may add wisdom learned there to the wisdom 
 taught by latest knowledge and experience was 
 absent, and in its place sat the obduracy that 
 makes the ancient a fetish, shuttering the mind 
 to every voice that speaks not down the long, 
 familiar aisles of the past, admitting no wis- 
 dom that is not hoary with years, and for- 
 getting that it is out of the mouth of some 
 new-born babe of knowledge that God some- 
 times ordains strength. Therefore that gener- 
 ation lacked largeness, virility, freshness, 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 Into this world came Jesus, a new and whole- 
 some experience. Unlike the rest, he spoke 
 the truth as he saw it, even daring to alter 
 “the law’? where he had something better to 
 offer. That is why they said “he taught as 
 one having authority—not as the scribes.” 
 They quoted, he proclaimed. They went back 
 to Moses, who lived in a different time from 
 theirs and which knew not their problems. 
 Jesus did not despise Moses, but neither did 
 he pervert the worth of that great man by 
 making him the dead end of progress; he 
 could on occasion quote Moses with confidence 
 because he had learned to quote the supreme 
 authority of all—‘‘the words which thou gavest 
 me I have given unto them.” 
 
 But Jesus felt no impulse to scorn the scribes, 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 207 
 
 except where they had hardened into something 
 actively injurious. Instead, he could not have 
 been unconscious of the value of their work, 
 and it would seem from the parable we quoted 
 that he was less inclined to alter their back- 
 ward look than to add to wz a forward. He 
 said that the scribe, when he became a dis- 
 ciple of the kingdom of heaven, became as a 
 householder preparing to minister to some 
 wayfarer. From his stores the householder 
 produces some well-known staple foods; also 
 he brings forth some newer and improved. 
 Isaiah ate wheat and so will this wayfarer, 
 but advancement in cookery, say, will not be 
 despised by him these centuries after Isaiah. 
 So, Jesus seems to teach, the man who lived by 
 rote, attached too closely to the past, confident 
 only when he could fortify himself with prece- 
 dent and example, on entering the kingdom of 
 heaven becomes imbued with a larger spirit. 
 Still retaining the essence of old truth, he 
 discovers new. To feed the present age which, 
 like a wayfarer, passes his door, knocking ere 
 it goes, he will bring from his treasury “things 
 new and old,’’—new truth and old. 
 
 IV 
 Thus it became apparent that the kingdom 
 of heaven was not to find its type in the scribe, 
 
208 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 but in Jesus. It was to be a kingdom of enter- 
 prise, passion, originality, inspiration. “Miul- 
 ton, thou shouldest be living at this hour,” 
 wrote Wordsworth; in his youthful enthusiasm 
 over the French Revolution, convinced that 
 so splendid a lover of freedom as Milton could 
 never be alive in any generation without 
 having something excellent to say in humanity’s 
 cause, and something intensely suitable not 
 only to the days of Cromwell but to any 
 moment in which he should live. The scribe’s 
 conception of Milton, however, would, rather, 
 be that he has completed his message, having 
 nothing further to say, and certainly nothing 
 new. To the scribe, however valiantly truth 
 may have striven and prevailed in days long 
 ago, we must not expect her to be audible 
 now. Instead, we should reverence her tra- 
 dition and rear statues to preserve the likeness 
 of the pure, strong glory that was. From 
 age to age men may look at that face, but they 
 will ever see an expression that is the same. 
 
 . But the Kingdom of which Christ is Lord 
 does not regard truth as a statue, perfect in 
 curve and poise, but static; rather, truth is as 
 a Milton who is neither dead nor inactive, who, 
 so long as it live, must speak. Glorying in 
 the achievements of truth in the past, the 
 scribe that hath been made a disciple of the 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 209 
 
 kingdom of heaven invites truth to break silence 
 in the present; he is prepared for the unex- 
 pected and to be surprised, not because truth 
 is likely to be false to its own type, disap- 
 pointing all we have been led to expect of it, 
 but because not being like a statue, but, 
 rather, like a living person, it changes its 
 expression, adjusts itself, unfolds new deeps. 
 
 V 
 
 Had this been better realized, there had 
 been fewer panics in the church and fewer 
 lapses into infidelity on the part of men because 
 of new light. In the twentieth century, after 
 the lessons that have crowded the generations 
 and written themselves, one would have 
 thought, as with a pen of iron upon the heart 
 of humanity, we still have our heresy hunts, 
 and still our attitude, too often, is not to 
 “prove all things,” and not to ask “Ts it true?” 
 but rather, “Has it the sanction of the past?” 
 Distant fields look green and the far past 
 seems strangely God-filled. But go back and 
 stand with those giants of God whose words 
 we love to quote to-day, see how few blades 
 were then green after all. Watch those men 
 straining to apprehend a God who seemed to 
 speak all too uncertainly, and observe those 
 
210 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 nourishers of the world stoned angrily with 
 words plucked from the “fathers.” The 
 loneliest, the bravest, the divinest, but also 
 the most hated and the most feared have in 
 all ages been the prophets of the new day, in 
 which men walk in new extensions of the old 
 paths and speak, in new words, the old truth. 
 
 The world has ever stoned its prophets. 
 But this occurs to one: What if they had been 
 allowed their ministry? What if the world 
 had not sawn Isaiah asunder, and struck the 
 head from Paul? What if the flames had not 
 silenced John Huss and Servetus and Latimer? 
 The truth is living still, and marching still, 
 “in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword,” but 
 is it quite as wondrous as it might have been? 
 Suffer we nothing from this wholesale mur- 
 dering of the saviours and leaders sent unto 
 us? If we had welcomed and pondered the 
 prophets of “‘the Christ that is to be,”’ do you 
 think we should have this absurd suspicion 
 between religion and science? this imagination 
 that faith flourishes best in the cradles of 
 ignorance? this present international tangle? 
 this fratracidal, internecine struggle? §Soc- 
 rates and Sir Thomas More, and all their kind 
 —ah, we could not well spare such brains and 
 spirits as those! Whatif the world had allowed 
 them to give us all their message? Was it a 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 211 
 
 little thing to slay such men? We have 
 suffered more than they—we are a thousand 
 years behind the times! 
 
 VI 
 
 But there is another side to this. The 
 spirit of the kingdom is not a wanton wrecking 
 of the past and a crazy worshiping of novelty. 
 It is inevitable that religion be conservative; 
 responsibility cannot afford to be harebrained. 
 Having decided that Newton’s theory of 
 gravitation is probably correct, science is not 
 likely to capitulate a theory that has done 
 good service for years simply because Einstein 
 challenges it. Yet science will listen to Ein- 
 stein, and test his claim and accept it if it 
 holds. This, we may hope, will become much 
 more the spirit of religion, which has nothing 
 to fear from frankness. 
 
 Howbeit, this modern jangle of new voices 
 is not all made up of voices prophetic. At 
 the behest of the latest unripe experiment or 
 speculation must experiences of centuries 
 decamp? We shall feed our wayfaring age 
 upon poor fare if, without something better, 
 we deny it the food proven through centuries 
 of toil and sorrow to be good for the soul. 
 Are the old words “God” and “Pardon,” 
 
212 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 “Christ”? and “Heaven,” “Prayer” and ‘“‘Sal- 
 vation” to yield simply because we have added 
 “Evolution” and “Psychology,” “‘Astronomy” 
 and “‘Eugenics,” “Geology” and “Sociology?” 
 Long before Astronomy was telling us the 
 marvels of the skies, those old words were 
 bringing mysterious dawns to human darkness 
 and teaching souls to range the universe 
 in a new-found vastness. Long before Geology 
 unfolded the story of the rocks, those old 
 words were shaking the foundations of the 
 world into spiritual dislocation and rearrange- 
 ment. It is by these words that men have 
 “stopped the mouths of lions .. .” that men 
 have cried: “He brought me up also out of an 
 horrible pit...’ that men have died as 
 Moody did, saying: “I see earth receding, 
 heaven is opening, God is calling me!” or as 
 did Beecher, eager for new worlds to conquer and 
 saying, ““Now comes the mystery!’ Will you 
 have us believe that suddenly all this has been 
 discovered a blunder, a twilight mist that can- 
 not abide the risen sun of new knowledge? 
 
 Vil 
 
 It will appear to you that this makes both the 
 fascination and the difficulty of Christian work 
 to-day. Sagacity, vision, acumen were never 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 213 
 
 more needed in companionship with religious 
 devotion. The world will dare to think, 
 whether the church dares or not, and unfor- 
 tunately unless the church leads the way in 
 conserving the treasures of the past, and 
 inviting the treasures of the future, we shall 
 simply find men scorning us and the past we 
 hug too dearly, and embracing, without dis- 
 crimination, the future. which we _ suspect. 
 In a world lost in a wilderness the church may 
 yet become as a guiding pillar of cloud toward 
 a Promised Land. But the task will be 
 arduous, and not lacking in peril. Heart 
 alone will not do it, nor brain alone. It will 
 demand both, and tax them to the limit. 
 
 For that reason one can only regret some- 
 thing akin to tragedy whenever the church 
 is compelled to accept for its ministers young 
 men whose piety is beyond challenge but whose 
 type is otherwise weak. We have not had 
 too much education in religious emotionalism, 
 but we must insist that it be experienced by 
 men who are also capable of coolly using their 
 brains unwarped by it. No _ devotional 
 abandon can long compensate for insult to a 
 world’s intelligence, and the penny of our 
 wisdom will be small pay for the ultimate 
 pound of our foolishness. As has been said, 
 “the way to make the next generation rife 
 
 ~— 
 
214 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
 
 with infidelity is to feed the present gener- 
 ation on credulity.”” Men of broad brows 
 and keen eyes are necessary for the task we 
 have in hand; they must also be able to stand 
 upon their own feet, know their own heart 
 and their own God, and behind lips that are 
 framed in kindness there must be teeth able 
 to set in firmness, so that the protests sure 
 to be met from many excellent quarters will 
 not dismay. Of such a build were the apostles 
 and prophets of old. 
 
 When Greece was arming for the Trojan 
 War it was insisted that young Achilles must 
 be found. I[t was not Ulysses’ display of 
 glittering trinkets that revealed him as the 
 warrior-hearted among the women, but the 
 blue gleam of an unsheathed sword and the 
 proud bravery of a crested helm. To such the 
 spirit of the youth made eager answer, and 
 Ulysses, observing, smiled and claimed him 
 for the labors of a man. 
 
 The times are searching us out! They 
 offer their beads and mirrors and laces, pretty 
 playthings for the soft-spirited; but they are 
 spreading before us also the strong steel of 
 honor, of sacrifice, of enterprise, faith and 
 endurance. The times are searching for men, 
 and only the virile spirited will answer. In 
 these days, so strenuous in matters of faith, 
 
PROGRESSIONAL 215 
 
 the work of Christ will be done by those who, 
 knowing the stern entail of the long campaign, 
 the hard knocks, the lonely vigils, are prepared 
 to accept all in the holy name of him who said 
 “TI am—the Truth!’ Men of such kind will 
 follow him, although knowing the while that 
 those who would slay them will think they do 
 God service! 
 
i 
 
 Fete a 
 ; age 4 
 
 a! A £ 
 The fl i, 
 
 Renta gate 
 
 eer aty an 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 SS Te Sree woes sare = 
 SENS so ene 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 LS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 SS SSS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 co 
 
 
 
 Ss TSS 
 eens - SSS 
 
 oes 
 
 nt eh ene