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 Modern substitutes for 
 traditional Christianity 
 
MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 FOR 
 
 TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 YW BY 
 EDMUND McCLURE, M.A. 
 
 HON. CANON OF BRISTOL 
 
 FANN OF PINGS 
 
 OCT 26 1914 — 
 ww, 
 
 Pp . 
 “i fk e 
 <2 oeicat SEM 
 
 [SECOND EDITION, REVISED: WITH AN ADDED 
 CHAPTER ON MODERNISM] 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE 
 NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C, : 
 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. 
 BRIGHTON : 129, NORTH STREET 
 New Yorx: E. S. GORHAM 
 
 IQT4 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/modernsubstituteOOmccl_0 
 
TO THE 
 
 RIGHT HON, AND RIGHT REVEREND 
 A. F. WINNINGTON-INGRAM, D.D. 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF LONDON 
 
 WHOSE KEEN EYE TO DETECT AND 
 READY HAND TO EMPLOY MEANS OF FURTHERING 
 
 GOD'S KINGDOM NEVER FAIL HIM 
 
 THIS? VOLUME 
 
 WHICH WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITHOUT 
 
 HIS EXPRESSED WISH AND ENCOURAGEMENT 
 
 IS DEDICATED 
 
 WITH MUCH RESPECT BY THE 
 
 AUTHOR 
 
PREBACE 
 
 THERE are many modern substitutes for traditional 
 Christianity. The present work is concerned with 
 six of them only. All of these have taken shape 
 within the last few decades. Two of them owe 
 their origin to the United States of America—that 
 country of new ventures in almost every sphere of 
 thought. 
 
 It is natural, in a country whose history is a 
 short one, that traditional influences should have 
 an ineffective restraining power. In the absence 
 of the check of a deeply rooted, historical senti- 
 ment, the religious emotions are likely to become 
 extravagant, and to pass all legitimate bounds. 
 The careers of individuals like Joseph Smith and 
 Mrs. Eddy would have been impossible in older 
 countries. Other conditions obtaining in the 
 United States contributed largely also to the rise of 
 such personalities and to the spread of their views. 
 
 It is not too much to say that personal vanity 
 has a freer play-room and fewer checks in that 
 Republic than among us in England. Natural 
 self-assertion is thus fostered, and abnormal vanity 
 meets fewer rebuffs. The science of advertising, 
 too, has reached a higher development there than 
 elsewhere, and almost any extravagance can be 
 successfully “boomed.” Constant repetition of the 
 same appeals to the public has, as we know, a 
 hypnotising effect. The astute, who aim at 
 
 Vv 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 material profit, are thus attracted to co-operate 
 in any venture, no matter how foolish, of which it 
 can be said “there is money in it.” Such factors 
 as these have conduced largely to the spread of 
 Mormonism, Christian Science, and Theosophy in 
 America. 
 
 The four remaining substitutes for traditional 
 Christianity dealt with in the present book, are 
 mainly the outcome of the thought of the age. 
 The laws of thought-evolution are on all fours 
 with those of organic evolution. If “ mutations” 
 exist in organic continuity, further investigation 
 will probably render them predictable, and the 
 same may be said of great revolutions in opinion. 
 There is thus continuity throughout. But that 
 continuity is not necessarily “ progressive.” It is 
 conditioned by the struggle for existence, in which 
 many new types of belief go to the wall. In that 
 struggle the best type will doubtless eventually 
 prevail. A natural optimism at least assumes this. 
 Christianity, although a traditional religion, and 
 therefore more or less fixed, has always shown 
 adaptability to new surroundings. It assimilates 
 throughout the ages every good thing in keep- 
 ing with its principles, and on this account is 
 never in antagonism with real progress. It cannot, 
 of course, accommodate itself to views which are 
 subversive of its ideals. Any system, like that of 
 Nietzsche, which reverses Christian standards of 
 value is not only inimical to Christianity, but 
 opposed to the best interests of humanity. 
 
PREFACE vil 
 
 Traditional Christianity is not in conflict with 
 the well-weighed inductions of science. The epoch- 
 making address of Sir Oliver Lodge, President of 
 “The British Association for the Advancement 
 of Science,” delivered at the last meeting, shows 
 that the sphere of religion is not outside that of 
 orthodox science. Everything that belongs to the 
 intelligible universe comes, he contends, within 
 the scientific domain. 
 
 “The psychic region,” as well as the physical, 
 “can be brought under law.” “Where inorganic 
 matter alone is concerned,” he says, “there every- 
 thing is determined. Wherever full consciousness 
 has entered, new powers arise, and the faculties and 
 desires of the conscious parts of the scheme have 
 an effect on the whole.’’ The influence of spirit on 
 matter is insisted upon here and elsewhere in the 
 address. The ignoring of this is at the base of the 
 advocacy of a non-miraculous Christianity. 
 
 Oct., 1913. 
 
 Be PACE TO “SECOND AED ETION 
 
 THE widespread efforts to adapt traditional Chris- 
 tianity to the “thought of the age” have issued in 
 a new theological movement called Modernism. 
 So far apart is it from traditional views that it 
 would remove even from the Apostles’ Creed articles 
 seeming to jar with present-day culture, or would 
 restate them in other terms. Hence the new 
 chapter, which, at the request of many, has been 
 appended to the second edition of this book, 
 May, 1914. 
 
TABLE-1OF (CON PENS 
 
 PAGE 
 INTRODUCTION, DEALING WITH THE REACTION AGAINST 
 A MECHANICAL UNIVERSE, AND FURNISHING A SHORT 
 SUMMARY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 VIEWS AND TENDENCIES OF THE TIME .. oi 1 
 Non-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY tea Te «tt one 
 MYSTICISM DIVORCED FROM DOGMA .. es ue ae 
 MODERN THEOSOPHY TC ae ry <a ee 
 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE we ri a bas ea 
 NIETZSCHE AND THE CULT OF THE SUPERMAN, A 
 REVOLUTION IN ETHICS «.. ves ves tee ose =109 
 SECULARISM AND RATIONALISM ove toe soe oot Tam 
 
 MODERNISM AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY ss. soe 147 
 
MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 “TWENTY years ago,” wrote Professor McDougall 
 in 1911,* “the scientific world was oppressed by the 
 sense of the finality of its own dicta. The inde- 
 structability of matter, the conservation of energy 
 and momentum, the eternal sameness of the 
 chemical atoms, the inevitable extinction of all 
 life on this earth by loss of heat from the solar 
 system, the never-ending alternations of evolution 
 and dissolution of material systems, all these had 
 become ‘axioms,’ whose rejection was said to be 
 impossible for any sane mind. ... But now all 
 is changed ; the scientific atmosphere is full of the 
 hope of new insight; the seeming boundaries of 
 physical knowledge have proved to be spectral 
 creations of the scientific imagination.” 
 
 This summary of the changed outlook in the 
 past twenty years obtains a striking illustration in 
 the views which are taking shape to-day in regard 
 
 * Body and Mind, p. 216, 
 B 
 
2 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 to the constitution of the universe, and to man’s 
 origin and destiny within it. 
 
 The recent discovery of radio-active bodies, 
 infinitesimally distributed in the crust of the 
 earth, yet sufficient to maintain its temperature 
 above that which it owes directly to solar radia- 
 tion: the recognition of the atom as a complex 
 system, containing within it tremendous energies 
 undreamt of before: the new conditions of matter 
 observed at temperatures far below and far 
 above those hitherto obtainable upon this planet 
 of ours—all these have served largely to revolu- 
 tionise physics, and to extend the scientific horizon 
 almost illimitably, The systematic study of the) 
 mental faculties in the new psychology has also 
 led to results which could not have been foreseen 
 a quarter century ago—results which promise to 
 free the human mind from the obsession of a 
 mechanistic slavery. 
 
 The mechanistic hypothesis, according to which 
 all human actions are the outcome of purely 
 physical causation, has still, it is true, its up- 
 holders. But the reaction against this view is in 
 full operation at the present time. . 
 
 Science seems, indeed, aghast at the results of its 
 own deliberations in regard to mental functions ; 
 —that is, that man is a pure automaton, that 
 free will is a figment, that human consciousness 
 is a mere by-product of the brain and incapable 
 of influencing physical events in the slightest degree, 
 and that all things are determined by the laws of 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 3 
 
 matter and motion. If science could accommodate 
 itself to this grim outlook, would it not be at the 
 expense of removing any real interest from life? 
 The reaction is consequently in progress against 
 the submission of human intelligence to such a 
 slavery, against making that intelligence the 
 shadowy outcome of unintelligent matter and 
 forces, and thus robbing it of any significance in 
 the moulding of the world’s history. This reaction 
 has made itself evident among recent leaders in 
 scientific investigation as well as among philo- 
 sophic thinkers generally. Professor McDougall 
 gives a list of eminent scientific men who do not 
 feel compelled, by accepting the theory of the con- 
 servation of energy, to believe that the evolution 
 and life-processes of organisms are capable of being 
 completely described in mechanical terms, These 
 include such distinguished men as the late Clerk- 
 Maxwell, the late Sir G. Stokes, and the late Lord 
 Kelvin, besides such living representatives of 
 physical science as Sir Wm. Crookes, Sir O. Lodge, 
 Sir J. J. Thomson, and Sir J. Larmor: Professor 
 Poynting, lately deceased, held the same view.* — 
 But it is to religion, which would be impossible 
 in a mechanical world, that the reactionary move- 
 ment is especially due—to religion which is rooted 
 in human nature and has its driving principle in 
 the realisation of an Intelligence beyond our own 
 and of a sphere of reality outside the domain of 
 physics. Religion in this general sense is at issue 
 * Body and Mind, p. 253, 
 
we 
 
 4 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 with the mechanical concepts of life and thought, 
 and demands for the speculative spirit freedom 
 from the fetters which science had forged for it. 
 
 Two remarkable men have taken a prominent 
 part in the reactionary movement of religious philo- 
 sophy against this mechanical view of life—Rudolf 
 Eucken of Jena, and Professor Bergson of Paris. 
 
 Eucken emphasises the transcendence of Spirit, 
 and makes it the active element in life and 
 thought, the Infinite Spirit infusing into the 
 finite continuous activities. Nature, the non- 
 spiritual, instead of being a source of enlighten- 
 ment, is to Eucken something alien and obstructive. 
 Matthew Arnold had somewhat similar views, and 
 regarded Nature as cruel, stubborn, and fickle ; 
 and Tennyson saw that she was red in tooth and 
 claw. Wordsworth, on the other hand, embodies 
 in the lines— 
 
 «To the solid ground 
 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye,” 
 
 the view of physical investigators generally. 
 Nature to Eucken is something to be distrusted. 
 To most materialists, Nature is the sum total 
 of all phenomena, fixed, and independent of the 
 observer. To the idealist, it is something that 
 owes its reality to the mind alone. 
 
 Eucken takes up a middle position. Following 
 his German predecessors, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, 
 Eucken regards the external world as not pre- 
 sented to consciousness ready made. ‘The 
 moulding of it is the work of mind, Hence we 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 5 
 
 cannot deduce God, or, indeed, any truth, from 
 the external world alone. 
 
 Eucken, while making religion, and especially 
 the Christian religion, the most important con- 
 sideration for humanity, is opposed to all dogma, 
 and regards uniformity of religious experience as 
 greater than continuity of belief. His views of 
 immortality are hazy, and all definite doctrinal 
 statements he would alter fundamentally, The in- 
 fluence he exercises on contemporary religious 
 thought is owing mainly to the activity he ascribes 
 to Spirit, and it is not a mere accident that the 
 publication in this country of his chief works 
 should synchronise with the revival of non-dogmatic 
 Mysticism, with which Eucken’s neo-Christianity 
 or New-Idealism has much in common. 
 
 The other great religious philosopher of our 
 day, Professor Bergson, has also contributed much 
 to the revival of Mysticism, but he has at the same 
 time afforded us a fresh outlook in regard to the 
 relations of science and religion. Professor Bergson 
 in his philosophic views follows Plotinus the 
 Neoplatonist in several points, and some account 
 of the latter, for this reason, as well as because 
 Neoplatonism has been exploited by the new 
 Sectarians, is here needed. 
 
 Plotinus, who was not a Christian, although 
 probably conversant with Biblical literature, was 
 born in Egypt about 205 A.D. About twenty- 
 seven years later he attached himself to the 
 Alexandrian school of philosophy. He settled 
 
6 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 finally at Rome, where he gave lectures, and where 
 he wrote at length the books which have come 
 down tous. Origen, the great Christian teacher, 
 it may be noted, attended some of his lectures. 
 He lived the life of a recluse, giving ‘himself entirely 
 up to the study of philosophy. Elaborating the 
 conclusions of his master, Plato, he gave to the 
 world a complete system of philosophy, which in 
 all its essential features is represented by the 
 Idealism of our own time. For this reason, and 
 because it deals with the ever-recurring questions 
 concerning man and his destiny, in a form almost 
 as modern as that of Professor Bergson himself, 
 some of the leading points of Plotinus’ philosophy 
 are here given. 
 
 The world of sense, that world which is made 
 up, according to the man of science, of matter and 
 motion—the only realities to him—is to the Neo- 
 platonist only half real and on that account 
 imperfectly knowable. It offers to our senses a 
 multitude of sensations, of sight, sound, taste, etc, 
 which would be meaningless unless the mind had 
 power to classify them and to realise the unity 
 of which they are the varying expressions. It is 
 in the mind they become realities—and the mind 
 realises them because it is akin to the Divine mind 
 in which they exist. 
 
 The world of sense is, moreover, in a perpetual 
 flow. “You cannot step twice into the same river.” 
 “God alone can say ‘I am.’” Before you have 
 taken in the impression of a thing it has changed, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 7 
 
 Perpetual mutability is the law of life. Rest be- 
 longs only to the dead. Hence the sensible world 
 cannot zz t¢ése/f be known. 
 
 The sensible world, moreover, presents itself to 
 us as in a condition of ceaseless antagonisms. 
 “ War,” said Heraclitus, and Hobbes and Nietzsche 
 after him, is the father of all things—“all things 
 are the children of strife.” There would be no 
 progress without friction, and yet it is to this an- 
 tagonism that the disorder we see in the world is 
 due—the moral and physical evil around us—and 
 the recognition of this disorder implies that we 
 have an ideal of order not furnished by the sensible 
 world, Here again the sensible world cannot be 
 understood ix itself. We must look, to complete 
 our knowledge of it, to the ideal, to the mind in 
 which that ideal takes shape, and to which the 
 sensible world stands in the relation of a shadow. 
 
 The sensible world, again, is presented to us as 
 bound in an iron chain of causality. Everything 
 has a cause, the cause is ovtside it and determines 
 its nature. The will, from this point of view, 
 cannot, therefore, act spontaneously, it is not free, 
 but determined by antecedent causes. 
 
 From these considerations the Neoplatonist 
 regarded the world as only half real—a world of 
 becoming, not of being—apprehended by opinion, 
 not by true knowledge. The world, says Plotinus, 
 is like a mirror in which a man sees the shadows 
 of realities. “Only,” he adds, “you see the mirror 
 and you do not see matter.” But “matter pat) 
 
8 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Plotinus was not the matter of the modern 
 physicist, measured by mass. It was nothing but 
 the “shapeless”: that which was as nothing apart 
 from the “form” given to it. Matter to Plotinus 
 is immaterial, and approximates to the modern 
 physicists’ concept of the ether of space. The 
 “form” succeeded only partially at times in 
 suffusing this “matter” with its light. It offered 
 to “form” a certain power of resistance, such as 
 Professor Bergson ascribes to matter, when acted 
 upon by his creative force. It was to the Neo- 
 platonist the cause of evil—limiting God both 
 physically and morally, hence the anxiety of 
 Plotinus to ascribe to it what is a merely hypo- 
 thetical existence. 
 
 All sensible existence, according to Plotinus, was 
 an aggregate of matter and qualities, and the 
 qualities of an object, which produce in us a com- 
 plex group of sensations, arise from the energies of 
 the Logos, 
 
 The Logos * (or Word) of St. John’s Gospel was 
 probably borrowed from the Alexandrians. It 
 answers to the “ creative intelligence” of Plotinus, 
 and, in essential features, to the creative force 
 béhind life in Bergson’s philosophy. It approaches 
 nearly to what is looked upon by science as 
 physical law, but this law is regarded by the 
 Neoplatonist as a /iving force proceeding from, 
 and inseparably connected with, a thought in the 
 
 * Logos might perhaps be better translated as ‘‘ speech,” that 
 is, a description or reasonable definition, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 9 
 
 Divine mind. The Logos is often called by the 
 Neoplatonists spermatic, because, like the seed 
 (sperma), it carries implicitly all the qualities of 
 the mature organism, and is thus equivalent to the 
 agency to which Bergson ascribes his creative 
 evolution. Thus, when the Logos proceeds from 
 the Divine mind and comes in contact with matter, 
 “it makes a thing.” Nothing can be made with- 
 out it, or, in Christian language, according to St. 
 John, “without Him (that is the Logos) was not 
 anything made that was made.” 
 
 Thus we come to the conclusion at which 
 Plotinus arrived: The world is nothing else than 
 the thought of God transmuted into vital law— 
 what we realise therein are the traces, shadows, 
 of intelligence. Or to express it in a modern way, 
 there is no object without a subject, no ching 
 without a thinker. Nothing can exist, nothing be 
 known, except in so far as it is made, arranged, 
 brought into definite relation with other things by 
 an Ordering Reason. 
 
 It will render the position of the Neoplatonists 
 easier of comprehension if we bear in mind that 
 to him existence is thought : every object is zz the 
 sphere of mind: a universe ovéside thought is un- 
 thinkable. The widest sphere of the astronomer 
 as well as the microcosm of the atom, with its 
 contents of revolving electrons, is zz the human 
 mind, and is comprehensible by that mind because 
 both thinker and thought are derived from the 
 Supreme Intelligence. 
 
TO MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Plotinus anticipated, moreover, some modern 
 theories about the soul, which he regarded as 
 coming down to occupy the body prepared for it. 
 He rejects the Stoic view, shared in by some 
 moderns, that mind is a product of matter in a 
 process of evolution. The placing of the soul in 
 a body was, according to the Neoplatonist, in the 
 nature of a chastisement, and this view of the 
 penal character of earthly existence was worked 
 out by the addition of the fanciful doctrine of the 
 transmigration of souls even into the bodies of 
 brutes. 
 
 Plotinus anticipated also the earlier views of the 
 late Professor William James, and seemingly the 
 doctrine of Professor Bergson also, according to 
 whom the soul is not zz the body : the Neoplatonist 
 asserting, on the contrary, that the body is zz the 
 soul as “a net in the sea,” pervaded yet transcended. 
 The soul is never separated from the First cause, 
 although the union may be dormant. We Possess 
 only what we zse, and the realisation of that union 
 depends on our receptivity. It is by having this 
 receptivity that we attain to higher and higher 
 conceptions of our union with the Divine. This is 
 that which was called later “the mystic way” 
 culminating in the beatific vision. Porphyry 
 records of Plotinus that he attained to this beatific 
 vision on four occasions, while Porphyry himself 
 had this grace vouchsafed to him only once. 
 
 It will be seen from this slight sketch* that 
 
 * For an elaborate exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus see 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY Ke 
 
 Neoplatonism has a bearing on many points dis- 
 cussed later on, and anticipates much in modern 
 thought that is commonly regarded as new. 
 
 Professor Bergson has written a good deal on 
 the philosophy of Plotinus, and is evidently much 
 influenced by it. In his Creative Evolution he 
 ‘nsists on a creative will (the equivalent of the 
 creative intelligence of Plotinus) behind develop- 
 ment, thus revolutionising our views of the evolu- 
 tionary theory, and at the same time placing the 
 mind outside the chain of material causation. 
 This freeing of the mind from the fetters forged 
 for it by the evolutionary theory is of the first im- 
 portance. “ For if naturalism be accepted,” as Mr. 
 Balfour says, “then our whole apparatus for arriving 
 at truth, all the beliefs in which that truth is em- 
 bodied, reason, instinct, and their legitimate results 
 are the product of érrational forces. Whence, then, 
 their authority? By introducing creative will 
 behind development, Bergson has profoundly modi- 
 fied the whole evolutionary drama.” * 
 
 Professor Bergson’s philosophy is, as has been 
 already pointed out, a reaction from the mechani- 
 cal concept of the universe. It removes the 
 oppressive weight of lifeless mechanism, by intro- 
 ducing into the cosmic process a creative living 
 force. This creative force, according to Bergson, 
 is the chief factor in organic evolution; it finds 
 Neoplatonism, by the late Professor C. Bigg, D.D., a work to which 
 
 I am largely indebted in the sketch given above, 
 * LHibbert Journal, October, 1gIl. 
 
ry ae MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 its highest expression in mind. What we call 
 mind is before all something conscious, and con- 
 sciousness signifies above all memory. Conscious- 
 ness apart from memory would be momentary—a 
 consciousness that died and was born every instant. 
 
 All consciousness, Bergson says, is therefore 
 memory—a presentation and accumulation of the 
 past zz the present. In all consciousness, moreover, 
 there is an anticipation of the future. In listening 
 to a speech, for instance,' we are always intent on 
 what is coming. The present moment is some- 
 thing, therefore, which hardly exists except in 
 theory. What we call our present has amplitude 
 induration. Consciousness is, as it were, a hyphen 
 between past and present. 
 
 The brain, he continues, is associated with con- 
 sciousness ; but there are organisms which have no 
 brain or nervous systems, suchasthe amceba. The 
 amceba throws out feelers to catch its food floating 
 by, indicating a certain intention or choice, There- 
 fore, says Bergson, choice exists in the whole scale of 
 being in response to stimulation from without. The 
 faculty of spontaneous motion probably exists, he 
 continues, in every living thing, and consciousness 
 is in principle present in all living matter; but it is 
 dormant where spontaneous activity is renounced, 
 and more intense where living matter trends in the 
 direction of movement. Our experience shows that 
 precisely as our actions cease to be spontaneous 
 and become automatic, consciousness withdraws 
 from them, as in the playing of a_ skilful 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 13 
 
 pianist the touching of the keys becomes auto- 
 matic and unconscious. Consciousness, on the 
 ’ other hand, is most acute when we are hesitating 
 between several possible actions. Consciousness, 
 therefore, expresses the amount of choice—or 
 creation—at our disposal for movement and 
 activity. 
 
 The introduction of life into the world, Bergson 
 adds, is like the introduction of something which 
 encroaches on inert matter.* Inert matter reacts 
 in a determined way. With the coming of life 
 we see arise the appearance of indetermination, 
 unforeseeability, choice. Consciousness and matter 
 are antagonistic forces, but which come to an under- 
 standing. Matter constitutes the realm of fatalism, 
 consciousness essentially that of freedom. 
 
 Professor Bergson believes—contrary to all up- 
 holders of the mechanistic theory—that conscious- 
 ness exerts an influence on matter, and that, too, 
 seemingly without a breach in the theory of the 
 conservation of energy. That is, it neither adds 
 to, nor takes away from, the sum total of energy in 
 the universe. 
 
 Consciousness, moreover, when confronted with 
 matter, seizes in an instant under an zudiviszble 
 form millions and millions of events succeeding 
 each other in inert matter. For example, the 
 indivisible sensation of light arises from billions of 
 successive vibrations, all seized at once. 
 
 * << Tife,” says Sir O. Lodge, “ may be called a catalytic agent,” 
 z.¢, acting on matter without contributing energy to it. 
 
14 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Sensation, which is at the point where conscious 
 ness touches matter, is the condensation of a 
 history, which in itself—that is, in the world 
 of matter—is something infinitely diluted, occupy- 
 ing enormous periods in what we may call the 
 duration of things. 
 
 On the one hand, we have matter subject to 
 necessity—an immense machine without memory ; 
 on the other, consciousness, a force essentially free 
 and essentially memory, whose function is to pile 
 up past upon past, and to organise with this past 
 something ew, a real creation. 
 
 Matter and consciousness may, it is true, have 
 had a common origin, and neither matter nor 
 consciousness can be explained in itself. “I see,” 
 says Professor Bergson, “in the whole evolution 
 of life on our planet an effort of this essentially 
 creative force (consciousness) to arrive, by travers- 
 ing matter, at something which is realised in man, 
 and then only imperfectly.” 
 
 This force has evidently met resistance in the 
 matter it had to use; it has been obliged to split 
 up—to share along different lines of evolution—the 
 different tendencies it carried, producing a crowd 
 of failures in the forms of life produced. Two 
 alone seem to have led to a certain success— 
 Arthropods and Vertebrates. At the end of the 
 first stands instinct, in its most marvellous form 
 (bees, ants); at the end of the second, human 
 intellect. This force seems to have contained 
 potentially the two forms of consciousness, instinct 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 15 
 
 and intelligence. Matter all the while is striving 
 to draw consciousness to its own automatism, and 
 succeeds in doing so in the case of the vegetable 
 kingdom. In this struggle liberty is dogged by 
 automatism. The human brain breaks the chain, 
 because it has the remarkable feature that it can 
 oppose to every contracted habit another habit— 
 to automatism another automatism. Thus man 
 becomes free by setting necessity against necessity. 
 
 “The evolution of life,” says Professor Bergson, 
 “will never, I think, be explained by mechanical 
 forces ; there zs a vital impulse—something seeking 
 to transcend itself, and drawing from itself more 
 than it contains—therefore a spiritual force.” 
 
 As consciousness is also memory, one of its 
 functions is to accumulate and preserve the facts ; 
 the brain, therefore, is very probably an instrument 
 of forgetfulness as well as of remembrance, and in 
 pure consciousness nothing of the past is probably 
 lost, the whole of a conscious personality being 
 an indivisible continuity ; and in this passage of 
 consciousness through matter consciousness is 
 tempered, and tests itself by constituting person- 
 alities and preparing them for a higher form of 
 existence. This satisfies instinct, which is, as Pro- 
 fessor Bergson says, nearer life than intellect and 
 science.* In his two Oxford lectures Bergson 
 expands still further his views on intuition or in- 
 stinct. “If our faculties of perception, external 
 
 * Professor Bergson’s ‘ Life and Consciousness,” /77blert Fournal, 
 October, I9II. 
 
16 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 and internal, were indefinitely extended, we should 
 never have recourse to the faculties of conceiving 
 and reasoning ; weneed to make up for the narrow 
 range of perception by the process of generalising : 
 a perfect being would know all things intuitively.” 
 Elsewhere he shows that reasoning refers in the 
 struggle for existence to purely material things, 
 and that it is as yet ill adapted to grapple with 
 the subject of man’s higher outlook. Instinct 
 supplies the deficiency and brings us into the 
 directest relation with what is most real in the 
 universe, 
 
 In his lecture before the Psychical Research 
 Society on May 28, 1913, Professor Bergson gives 
 some further information as to his view of the 
 relation of brain and mind. “If one could see,” 
 he said, “all that takes place in the interior of the 
 brain, one would find that that which takes place 
 there corresponds to a small part only of the life of 
 the mind. The brain simply extracts from the life 
 of the mind that which is capable of representation 
 in movement. The cerebral life is to the mental 
 life what the movements of the baton of a 
 conductor are to the symphony.” 
 
 The reaction from the mechanical concept of the 
 universe has naturally tended in the direction of 
 religion, for which, as we have said, a world 
 given up entirely to physical causation has no 
 scope. The fresh outlook furnished by such 
 thinkers as Eucken and Bergson has inspired 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY Lb} 
 
 a reconstruction of religious ideals—some of 
 them on novel lines. The removal of the 
 leaden pressure of the mechanical view has re- 
 leased instincts—universal in time and space— 
 which can be satisfied only by a recognition 
 of a Supreme Being and of intimate human 
 relations with Him. But in the reaction the flood 
 of religious emotion has, in many instances, over- 
 passed all legitimate bounds. The old paths no 
 longer satisfy the freshly awakened instincts of the 
 explorer after high ideals. He wants to try short 
 cuts, and is ready to accept the lead of any 
 adventurous system which will take him out of 
 the beaten track. He wants relief, moreover, from 
 the harassings of intellectual criticism. He looks 
 for an authority, not based on documents and 
 history, but appealing to him direct. Hence the 
 recent outbreaks in the direction of undogmatic 
 Mysticism, with its zwmediate relations to the 
 Divine, Christian science, with its spiritual per- 
 ception, Theosophy, with its transcendant occultism, 
 and other modern substitutes for Christianity. 
 
 There are still in existence, moreover, some 
 legatees of the mechanical view of the world. 
 These are not prepared to give up altogether re- 
 ligious ideals, and in order to accommodate their 
 religion and their science, would surrender all that 
 rationalism seems to demand. Hence Modernism. 
 Hence, also, the rise of the betief in the possibility 
 of a non-miraculous Christianity. 
 
 There are, again, those, like Nietzsche, who 
 
 C 
 
18 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 would make a clean sweep of all religion and 
 all that they regard as conventional ethics, sub- 
 stituting in their place a Secularism which finds 
 its Garden of Eden, its Paradise in the future of 
 the present world, and its guide in morals in the 
 evolutionary process. 
 
 The following pages will be taken up with 
 the discussion of such modern substitutes for tra- 
 ditional Christianity. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY fe) 
 
 NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY 
 
 TuE Rev. J. M. Thompson may be taken as the 
 representative of those who hold that Christianity 
 will still maintain its position in the world, and 
 that, too, the more effectually, if it plainly relin- 
 quishes all belief in miracles. Mr. Thompson’s 
 treatment of his subject, while frank, is very 
 reverent, and he expresses his belief in Christ in 
 words of much fervour, He denies that the 
 recorded miracles have any organic connection 
 with the Gospel, and expresses himself with some 
 freedom in regard to our Lord—whose Divinity in 
 a certain sense he accepts—as follows. 
 
 “Though no miracles accompanied His entry into, 
 or presence in, or departure from, the world; though 
 He did not think, or speak, or act otherwise than 
 as a man; though He yields nothing to historical 
 analysis but human elements: yet in Jesus Christ 
 God is incarnate, discovered, and worshipped as 
 God alone can be, by the insight of faith.” * 
 
 He is not, therefore, prepared to deny the 
 supernatural altogether. He thinks that science 
 and supernaturalism can survive side by side, 
 but only on the condition that the belief in 
 miracles is rejected. The supernatural with him 
 belongs to the spiritual realm, and no external 
 
 * The New Testament, the Rev. J. M. Thompson, London, 1911, 
 
20 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 signs of it are to be looked for. Mr. Thompson 
 explains away the miracles recorded in the New 
 Testament. Someare instances of faith-healing, or 
 of “suggestion” in cases of abnormal psychology ; 
 others are misrepresentations of natural events— 
 forced applications of Old Testament prophecies, 
 etc. 
 
 It is clear that his criticisms on the evidence as 
 to the miracles of the Gospel are led up to by his 
 frm conviction that miracles from the scientific 
 point of view are impossible. It is with this ques- 
 tion, therefore, that we have to deal. The disbelief 
 in miracles is not confined to modern philosophers. 
 
 In Al’s Well that Ends Well, Act ii. scene 
 iii, expression is given to a view current in 
 Shakespeare’s time. 
 
 Lafeu. “They say, miracles are past ; and we 
 have our philosophical persons, to make modern 
 and familiar, things supernatural and causeless, 
 Hence is it, that we make trifles of terrors; en- 
 sconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when 
 we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” 
 
 Such “philosophical persons” will always be 
 forthcoming, for they will find a public more or 
 less prepared for them. It is no easy matter to 
 believe in miracles. Common everyday experience 
 is against them. The Indian prince, who dismissed 
 as unworthy of credence his informant testifying he 
 had seen solid water, has his representative every- 
 where. The unfamiliar will always be on its trial, 
 and requires strong evidence to substantiate it. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY oe 
 
 Hume was quite right in saying that evidence was 
 more likely to be mistaken than that there should 
 be a break in the invariable course of nature. 
 But belief in an invariable course of nature must 
 also rest on evidence, and it comes at length to 
 the reckoning of the relative values of evidence. 
 The first appearance of a comet to the world must 
 have seemed a miracle, in the sense of its transcend- 
 ing all previous experience, and the testimony of its 
 existence to those who had not seen it must have 
 been received with natural distrust. 
 
 But there isa stronger argument against miracles 
 than that used by Hume. He did not recognise 
 in the world what is called causality. The sequence 
 of events to him was purely chronological. The 
 invariable antecedent he did not regard as the 
 cause of the consequent. Day is not the cause of 
 night, although it invariably precedes it. 
 
 We live in an age in which belief in mechanical 
 causation is at the base of all exact knowledge, that 
 is, of all science. More than a hundred years ago 
 it was imagined by philosophers that the world 
 could be explained on mechanical principles alone. 
 Laplace even conceived a physicist competent to 
 foretell the progress of nature for all eternity, if 
 only the masses of matter, their position and their 
 initial velocity were given. But there is now a 
 still more stable base for prediction than the uni- 
 versality of gravitation. Within our own time the 
 great principle of the conservation of energy has 
 taken form as an undisputed acquisition of science, 
 
22 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 And this is how this principle affects our outlook 
 on the world: “All real process consists in the 
 movement of masses; all motion is caused by 
 motion only, and all change of motion of any body 
 is caused by impact of some other body upon it.” 
 And again, “ All physical energy becomes kinetic 
 energy, or the momentum of masses, and the law of 
 the conservation of energy asserts that the kinetic 
 energy of the universe is a constant quantity.” 
 
 This means that every form of physical activity 
 that comes under our notice is an instance of motion 
 caused by other motion only, and the sum total of 
 the energy causing all motion is constant; it 
 cannot be added to or diminished. Every motion 
 taking place in the universe comes under this law. 
 There is seemingly no room for a miracle here. 
 For if any spiritual influence, it is contended, 
 were supposed to change the rate of motion of the 
 least particle of matter, it must increase or diminish 
 the existing quantity of kinetic energy in the 
 universe, and would be thus a contravention of 
 this law. And it is not too much to say, this law 
 of the conservation of energy is an essential article 
 in the creed of every man of science. 
 
 Is it to be wondered at that Mr. Thompson and 
 those who agree with him should strive to preserve 
 their belief in Christ by rejecting everything in the 
 New Testament seeming to contravene this law ? 
 
 Is there no way of recognising interference in the 
 course of nature without assuming a breach of this 
 law? 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 23 
 
 The late Clerk-Maxwell showed the possi- 
 bility of such interference, and Sir Oliver Lodge 
 has also made it clear that a directive guidance 
 could be imposed on nature without breaking this 
 law, that is, without adding to or diminishing the 
 quantity of energy in the universe. And this 
 directive influence might be of the nature of spirit, 
 that is, of human thought, which no scientific man 
 has ever regarded as material, however much it 
 may be associated with material processes. Here 
 we come to the kernel of the matter. 
 
 Does the law of the conservation of energy 
 really cover every form of activity in the universe 
 —reducing such activity to physical movements 
 which may be measured ? 
 
 Is human thought within its compass, and 
 human will. They cannot be weighed or measured. 
 Are they not factors in the great drama of mun- 
 dane affairs? The upholder of the mechanical 
 concept of the universe consistently denies that 
 Consciousness in any of its forms can influence in 
 the slightest degree the course of physical events. 
 Consciousness, while an attendant phenomenon on 
 certain brain processes, has, it is contended, no 
 more efficiency in the world of matter than the 
 shadows of a revolving wheel have upon the motion 
 of the latter. It is in cerebral changes only—to 
 which consciousness is merely a kind of by-product 
 —that efficiency lies. It has been proved that the 
 cerebral cortex—the thin surface-layer of grey 
 matter—is the part of the brain immediately 
 
24 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 concerned with certain mental processes. This 
 cortex has been mapped out into areas, the in- 
 tegrity of which is essential to certain modes of 
 consciousness, including the highest actions of 
 thought. This and other parts of the brain, 
 together with the spinal cord, are the seat of all 
 nervous processes—and these processes, it is con- 
 tended, are all of the nature of reflex action under 
 varying physical stimuli. Consciousness, including 
 the Will, has no influence, can have no influence, on 
 these processes, and is therefore excluded from 
 any effect on the world around us. The strong 
 natural conviction that we can, by thought and 
 will, exercise a control on our bodies, and, through 
 them, on theexternal world is regarded as fundamen- 
 tally mistaken. A somewhat ludicrous illustration 
 will show what the upholders of this view mean. 
 A man sees a bear, becomes afraid, and runs 
 away. In this sequence of events the intermediate 
 factor between the sight of the bear and the running 
 away is fear. And this is a form of consciousness. 
 Ordinary people would have no hesitation in 
 saying that this form of consciousness exercises a 
 power through nerves on the muscles of the legs, 
 and causes the man to run away. Such a view is 
 in direct contradiction with the assumption that 
 consciousness has no control over the body. But 
 then this is not the way in which the strict 
 materialist regards the incident. To him the 
 physical sequence is this: the man sees the bear, 
 runs away before consciousness comes into play, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 25 
 
 and then is afraid decause he is running away. 
 That is, running away is the reflex action following 
 the stimulus of the sight of the bear, and would 
 take place if no consciousness whatever accompanied 
 the incident. It sounds like something from Alice 
 Through the Looking Glass. The Queen, it will be 
 remembered, screamed de¢fore she pricked her finger. 
 The case, however, is not so absurd as it looks, 
 Many reflex actions are unattended by conscious- 
 ness, and in such cases consciousness cannot be a 
 factor in the action. There are also instances of 
 reflex action attended by consciousness in which 
 consciousness plays no effective part. The assump- 
 tion that reflex action covers every form of human 
 activity is only an extension of the application of 
 a principle, known to be effective in certain cases, to 
 all instances, 
 
 And the result of all this—what is it? All 
 human actions are the actions of automata. There 
 is no freedom anywhere. An iron chain of phy- 
 sical causation links act with act. The phantas- 
 magoria of human consciousness all down the ages 
 is nothing but a futile shadow. The world could 
 have gone on as it has done without consciousness 
 at all. All the great thoughts of men, all systems 
 of philosophy, all the wisdom of the world en- 
 shrined in books, all human conceptions which 
 have led, according to common belief, to the great 
 engineering triumphs of the world, are but needless 
 transcripts, as far as the processes of physical nature 
 are concerned, of reflex materialistic action, 
 
26 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Is it any wonder that scientific men, who have 
 been led to this by what seems irresistible logic, 
 should stand aghast at the result ? Is it any wonder 
 that human nature should rebel against such a 
 slavery as this, and that the mind should endeavour 
 to find freedom somewhere? There must surely be 
 an error in the reasoning that leads to this dire re- 
 sult? The reaction was bound to come, and it has 
 come. It has come, as has been shown in the In- 
 troduction, by making spirit an efficient agent in 
 human evolution. Materialists do not disparage 
 consciousness; they are ready to regard it as a 
 profitable field of study zz ztse/f: placing at the 
 same time an impassable wall between it and the 
 world of matter and motion. Let each region be 
 investigated by itself, they would say, but on the 
 understanding that a closed door is between them. 
 
 That door has now begun to open. Professor 
 Bergson, in shifting all objects of knowledge and 
 the relations between them—that is, the so-called 
 categories—from a dead externality into the living 
 and inward, shows thus that these objects are 
 not things independent of the thinking subject. 
 His creative consciousness can, as we have seen, 
 work upon that object of thought called matter, 
 and mould matter. The mode is not that of one 
 moving mass acting upon another; a directive 
 influence can, as we have seen, come into play 
 without involving a breach in the law of the 
 conservation of energy. Clerk-Maxwell’s and Sir 
 Oliver Lodge’s view of how that directive influence 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY Pal | 
 
 works may meet the case, but Professor Bergson 
 insists, and brings strong proof of his contention, 
 that life and consciousness are creative, and that 
 the object of thought, “matter,” * is controlled by 
 them. This subject has been already dealt with 
 in the Introduction, and it is only necessary here 
 to show how, the efficiency of spirit in the world 
 bears upon belief in the possibility of miracles. 
 
 God, the Supreme Spirit, is miracle—the supre- 
 macy of spirit over the material. The immanence 
 of the Supreme Intelligence in the universe is that 
 which makes nature intelligible to us. Intelligence 
 answers to intelligence through the vehicles of 
 phenomena. On this assumption Spirit underlies 
 all matter and all material forces. The generalisa- 
 tions we call Laws of Nature are the expression, as 
 far as we can understand them, not of the spon- 
 taneous activities of matter and energy, but of the 
 Living Intelligence at the base of things. Spirit 
 comes first, and while it is immanent in nature 
 it transcends it. What Bergson says of human 
 life and consciousness: that they are creative— 
 continuously creative, moulding antagonistic matter 
 so as to ensure their fuller development, may be 
 applied, with reverence and setting aside human 
 limitations, to the Creative Intelligence upon which 
 the universe depends for its maintenance and 
 growth. 
 
 * ‘Mass and shape, as a function of velocity, are an immediate 
 consequence of the electrical theory of matter.” Sir Q. Lodge, 
 Birmingham address, 
 
28 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 The universe is not, therefore, like a watch wound 
 up to go for an indefinite period, and left to itself, 
 as the Deistsand materialists believe it tobe. It is 
 in acontinual process of decoming ; and although, 
 owing to the workings of the Intelligence imma- 
 nent in it, we may be able to forecast its operations 
 for a long way ahead, yet it is never for an instant 
 the same. There is continuous growth, not blind 
 evolution, but growth with an intelligent purpose. 
 Human growth is based on the adaptation of means 
 to ends, and on the seizure of opportunities for 
 development. Isit other than a reflection of cosmic 
 evolution? Miracles from this point of view are— 
 like the mutations, or the “Sports,” of modern 
 Darwinism—sudden new departures in what was 
 previously continuous progress, and Spirit is behind 
 them. If sudden mutations in species are possible 
 in nature then a miracle is on a line with them, 
 and continuity is broken only to secure fresh 
 development. [See Note, p. 146.] 
 ~The miracles of the Gospels are not idle wonders ; 
 they are associated with a Personality Who is a 
 tremendous Mutation, a New Departure in human 
 history, and they are associated with the expression 
 of that Personality. His appearance on the stage 
 of the world is not that of one who had been led 
 up to, and conditioned by, his immediate environ- 
 ment, All kinds of contradictory theories have 
 been propounded to account for that Personality 
 on purely naturalistic grounds, but Christ still 
 remains unique among men. Such a character 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 29 
 
 as His, gauged by ordinary standards, appears so 
 impossible that some men, like Professor Drews 
 of Karlsruhe,* deny the historical existence of 
 our Lord, and base Christianity on amyth. The 
 Gospels themselves have been criticised, as by Mr. 
 Thompson, with the view of rendering that Per- 
 sonality, from an external point of view, more 
 acceptable to rational minds, but the narratives 
 in the Sacred Records are so intimately bound up 
 with the Christ of the Creeds that both survive or 
 fall together. 
 
 The subject of miracles was discussed at the 
 Church Congress of 1912, and the speakers chosen 
 were men eminently fitted to deal with the 
 question. 
 
 The late Dr. Strong, of Christ Church, began 
 the discussion by asking if miracles were rationally 
 possible. He did not regard a miracle as an event 
 out of all relation to law. What laws, he asked, 
 do miracles run up against? The laws of matter 
 and motion? But these laws are abstractions, 
 convenient formulas, and not a final account of 
 absolute truths. The mechanical theory, he added, 
 cannot explain consciousness, and is obliged to 
 deny its effect on body. It fails, too, to account 
 alone for the origin of life.t 
 
 * Witnesses to the Historicity of Fesus, by Professor Arthur 
 Drews, translated by Joseph M‘Cabe. 
 
 + At the meeting of the British Association in 1912, the President, 
 Professor Schafer, expressed his opinion that the chasm between 
 
 inorganic and organic nature would one day be bridged. In the 
 Times report of the meeting of the International Congress of 
 
30 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 History, as Professor Meyer writes (Kleine 
 Schriften), depends on will which cannot be ex- 
 pressed in terms of matter and motion. Such 
 objections, Dr. Strong concluded, point to a view 
 in which spirit is a factor. If we accept this, the 
 main difficulty disappears. We have to settle first, 
 therefore, whether we are going to look at the world 
 from the mechanical or spiritual point of view. 
 
 Professor Sanday deals with the subject from the 
 standpoint of the historian. What is the historic 
 evidence for the Gospel miracles? Miracles are 
 recorded in all four Gospels, and are relatively 
 most numerous in St. Mark. The Gospel of 
 St. Mark had assumed its present form, according 
 to Dr. Sanday, in the decade 60-70 A.D. “ Deas 
 which is somewhat earlier than St. Mark, and may 
 have been written within fifteen or twenty years of 
 the Crucifixion, contains one definite miracle at 
 least (the healing of the Centurion’s servant), and 
 some pointed allusions to others (“Go your way, 
 and tell John” ; and, “ Woe unto thee, Chorazin eat 
 Some portions of the special source of St, Luke 
 are perhaps still earlier. 
 
 These sources give a consistent picture of our 
 
 Medicine on August 10, 1913, there is found the following state- 
 ment: ‘It might safely be said that with one single exception the 
 S000 medical men gathered at the Congress all recognised the 
 insoluble problem lying behind the origin of life.” 
 
 * <Q” is the initial letter of the German “* Quelle,” source, and 
 represents roughly the elements common to St. Matthew and 
 St. Luke, and not appearing in St. Mark, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 31 
 
 Lord and His ministry. This picture was not 
 evolved later, as some critics would like to establish. 
 The Gospel miracles rest, therefore, on sound 
 historical foundations. Our Lord “not only lived 
 in a supernatural atmosphere, but was Himself the 
 Creative Centre of that atmosphere. His Person 
 was supernatural and virtue went out from 
 Him.” “By supernatural,” Dr. Sanday adds, “I 
 mean that there is conclusive evidence of the 
 presence of a ‘ Higher Cause’ in the world.” 
 
 Rev. A. C. Headlam distinguishes the three 
 Greek terms * which are usually rendered by 
 “ miracles,” or an equivalent expression, in the 
 New Testarnent. 
 
 St. Paul, referring to things wrought by Christ, 
 but not through the Apostle himself, speaks of 
 them as done “in the power of signs and wonders, 
 in the power of the Spirit of God” (Rom. xv. 19). 
 This shows that miracles were ascribed to a great 
 spiritual force. And this force when put into 
 operation is subordinate to spiritual teaching. The 
 Spiritual gift comes first—“ Thy sins are forgiven 
 thee.” 
 
 It is impossible, Dr. Headlam says, to separate 
 the evidence for the miracles from the evidence 
 for the rest of our Lord’s life. A miracle means 
 really a supremacy of the spiritual force of the 
 world over the material. Can we say, he asks, that 
 there was nothing abnormal in the beginning of 
 
 * répara (wonders), onmeta (signs), Suyduers (powers), 
 
32 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Christianity ? Our Lord’s miracles are consistent 
 with His life, and His life with His miracles. 
 
 This discussion brings out these points: that 
 disbelief in miracles must arise from something 
 else than deficiency of historical testimony ; that 
 is, from the view that miracles run up against the 
 laws of matter and motion, and that these laws 
 are a final account of absolute truth; or from the 
 assumption that spiritual energy is a negligible 
 quantity in the operations of nature; or, lastly, 
 from the idea that our Lord’s personality and 
 the marvellous spread of the religion which He 
 founded imply the employment of no other than 
 purely human means. 
 
 The chief difficulty is that arising from the 
 seeming irreconcilability of miracle and physical 
 law. With regard to this, the words of the present 
 president of the British Association, Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, may find here an appropriate place. 
 
 “The special changes,” he says,* “ produced in 
 matter by will and intelligence are explicable by 
 a process of ‘timing ’—a process adapted to the 
 directing of energy—quite independent of any 
 alteration in its amount, without any interference 
 with—indeed, with full assistance from, the laws 
 of physics.” “There is,” he adds, “plenty of room 
 for guidance amid the laws of physics.... 
 Supervision and assistance may be realities, and 
 yet the struggle may be areal one. We are still 
 
 * Hibbert Journal, January, 1912. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 33 
 
 far more dependent on intuition than on reason. 
 He is impressed,” he says, “with two things: first, 
 with the reality and activity of powerful, but not 
 almighty, helpers to whom we owe guidance, 
 management, and reasonable control; and next, 
 with the fearful majesty of still higher aspects of 
 the universe, infinitely beyond our utmost possi- 
 bility of thought.” 
 
 In his Address as President of the British Asso- 
 ciation on Sept. 10, 1913, Sir Oliver Lodge went 
 still further in his contention for a wider outlook 
 than that of the materialist. 
 
 Dealing with ‘“‘the modern tendency to emphasise the discon- 
 tinuous or atomic character of everything,” he said, ‘‘I myself am an 
 upholder of w/tmate Continuity, and a fervent believer in the zther 
 of space.” ‘‘ Matter,” he says, ‘‘ moves through the ether with 
 perfect freedom ... and the constitution of matter is such that 
 there appears to be no displacement in the ordinary sense at all. 
 The ether itself is so modified as to constitute the matter in some 
 way.” ‘*The wether is the universal connecting medium which 
 binds the universe together and makes it a coherent whole instead 
 of a chaotic collection of independent isolated fragments. It is the 
 vehicle of transmission of all forms of force.” ‘*It is not matter,” 
 and if it cannot be made evident ‘to our senses, ‘‘it is the extreme 
 omnipresence and uniformity and universal agency of the ether of 
 space that makes it so difficult to observe.” ‘‘If everything in the 
 universe had the same temperature . . . nothing would be visible 
 at all.” With regard to the possible functions of the ether in the 
 spiritual sphere, he says, he has been convinced “that memory 
 and affection are not limited to that association with matter by 
 which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and person- 
 ality persists beyond bodily death.” ‘* Discarnate intelligence under 
 certain conditions, may interact with us on the material side, thus 
 indirectly coming within our scientific ken ; and gradually we may 
 hope to attain some understanding of the nature of a larger, perhaps, 
 ethereal existence.” 
 
 D 
 
34 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 ‘¢ To explain the psychical in terms of the physical is impossible.” 
 ‘¢ Tow life exerts guidance over chemical and physical forces” is 
 puzzling, but the fact ‘admits of no doubt.” ‘* The universe is a 
 larger thing than we have any conception of, and no one method of 
 search will exhaust its treasures.” 
 
 Mr. Thompson. is thoroughly honest in his 
 endeavour to make Christianity more easily ac- 
 ceptable to rational minds by removing from it all 
 that seems to conflict with physical laws. He 
 would preserve, it is true, the “supernatural,” but 
 it isa supernatural without any external testimony. 
 Something which responds to, and can be reached 
 only by, inward faith. It is not, therefore, the 
 supernatural with which the Scriptures from 
 Genesis to Revelation are saturated. But would 
 Christianity without the miraculous ever have 
 become acceptable to human souls pining for 
 something transcending the matter-of-fact world of 
 mechanical law, something that would indicate 
 Divine intervention and guidance in the affairs of 
 men? Is not religion itself the expression of the 
 belief that God is continually intervening in human 
 affairs, and that by raising our hearts to Him in 
 prayer we call into operation unseen forces that 
 modify even the course of physical things. Per- 
 vasively in time and space the human mind has 
 sought such contact with the unseen. Must this 
 universal intuition of humanity give way to a view 
 that would shut out all spiritual interference from 
 a world assumed to be given up to jron-bound 
 mechanical causation ? 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 35 
 
 Mr. Thompson and his followers would limit 
 the vision of the human mind to a field that 
 is more that of a philosophy than of a religion. 
 Limitation of mental vision, this is, according 
 to Professor Bergson, the function proper of the 
 human brain, “One of the réles of the brain,” 
 he says," “is to limit the vision of the mind so as 
 to render its action more efficacious.” That is, 
 mind overflows brain—has a province beyond it— 
 and the brain has been developing in the ages 
 by bringing mind to bear upon the problems of 
 daily material existence, and by this action has 
 made it purblind to higher concerns. To set up 
 a Christianity without miracles is to act as the 
 brain does with mind—to limit its scope by 
 material considerations. But has not the mind a 
 province beyond these considerations: is it not in 
 touch with a cosmic spirit, a higher intelligence, 
 pulsating with a life that is not of this world. 
 
 The question asked by S. T. Coleridge in an 
 eatly poem is more germane to the present atti- 
 tude of philosophic thought than that raised and 
 answered by Mr, Thompson :— 
 
 ‘* And what if all animate nature, 
 Be but organic harps, diversely framed : 
 That tremble into thought as o’er them sweeps, 
 Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the soul of each, and God of all?” 
 
 * Address May 29, 1913, to Psychological Research Societys 
 
36 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 MYSTICISM DIVORCED FROM DOGMA 
 
 THE recent revival in England of an interest in 
 Mysticism is to be traced in a measure probably 
 to the influence of the publication of the works of 
 Rudolf Eucken. Dr. Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s, 
 was among the first to draw attention to this cele- 
 brated German philosopher ; and he was the first 
 also in this country to give in recent years an . 
 historic account—admirable for its wide scope and 
 its searching analysis—of Christian Mysticism.” 
 
 Since the publication of the Dean’s Christian 
 Mysticism in 1899, quite a flood of literature on 
 the subject has been poured forth from the English 
 press. It is evident from the interest with which 
 these publications have been received that Mysti- 
 cism has fallen in, to a considerable extent, with 
 the religious aspirations of the hour. One can 
 think of some reasons why Mysticism should find 
 a ready reception at the present time. 
 
 It offers, divorced from dogma, seemingly an 
 accessible refuge from the perturbing influences of 
 materialism. 
 
 It furnishes a promising haven of rest to those 
 who have been tossing on the stormy sea of re- 
 ligious controversy. 
 
 * Bampton Lectures, 1899. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 37 
 
 Those who are weary of the strife of tongues, 
 —those who feel the solid ground of revelation 
 trembling beneath their feet from the volcanic 
 upheaval of Bible Criticism,—those who ex- 
 perience it more difficult everyday to reconcile 
 Christian dogma with the modern outlook, find 
 naturally in undogmatic Mysticism a field, pro- 
 tected from all external assault, for the exercise of 
 the religious instincts, 
 
 What is the nature, we may well ask, of the 
 boon which, at this opportune hour, is presented 
 as a solace to the distracted religious mind ? 
 
 Mysticism has a long history. The name carries 
 us back to the Greek mysteries. It comes from a 
 Greek word meaning “to shut the eyes,” from 
 which was formed a noun designating one who 
 had been initiated into the “sacred mysteries.” 
 
 The term “ mystic” came eventually to have a 
 larger meaning, and at the rise of Neoplatonism 
 in the third century A.D., Mysticism assumed a 
 place, as has been already said, in that philosophy. 
 It was the age of the general disruption of pagan 
 religious beliefs, and in the despairing outlook a 
 longing arose for Divine illumination. Plotinus, 
 as we have seen, endeavoured to meet this 
 want. 
 
 It was not until the end of the fifth century A.D, 
 however, that Neoplatonism found a definite lodg- 
 ment in Christian thought. This was effected 
 through the agency of St. Dionysius, the so-called 
 Areopagite. He developed a system of Esoteric 
 
33 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Christianity which became the source of all later 
 developments of Christian Mysticism. 
 
 The influence of the teaching of Dionysius, who 
 wrote in Greek, was not felt in the West until the 
 ninth century, when an Irish ecclesiastic, John 
 Erigena, translated Dionysius, together with the 
 commentaries of one of his followers, into Latin. 
 The mysticism of Dionysius then began to 
 spread. It had not at this time separated itself 
 in any way from the dogmatic teaching of the 
 Church. 
 
 An antagonism arose, however, between it and 
 the subsequent development of Scholasticism in 
 the Medieval Church. Scholasticism endeavoured 
 to show that the teaching of revelation and that 
 of reason are identical. The externality of 
 religious truth to the mind was fundamental 
 with the Schoolmen. The opposite view was 
 fundamental with Mysticism. The antagonism 
 between them was that of the letter to the spirit— 
 the opposition of rationalising dialectic to practical 
 religion—to personal religious experience. ot. 
 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) is the cham- 
 pion of Mysticism against the rationalistic dis- 
 tinctions and reasonings of Abelard the Scholastic, 
 whom St. Bernard condemns for externalising and 
 degrading the faith. St. Bernard in his De Dzli- 
 gendo Deo makes love of God the mainspring of 
 spiritual progress ; but the cause of loving God is 
 God Himself, and the measure of loving Him is to 
 love Him without measure. The fruit of this love 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 39 
 
 is the ecstatic vision, anticipating the unchanging 
 and eternal life of the soul in the Hereafter. 
 
 From St. Bernard onward there is a continuous 
 line of great mystic teachers. Hugh of St. 
 Victor—an Augustinian Abbey near Paris—wrote, 
 among other mystic works, an elaborate commen- 
 tary on John Erigena’s version of the Celestial 
 Hierarchy of St. Dionysius. The office of the 
 Hierarchy of Angels, according to St. Dionysius is 
 to receive, and to communicate to the religious 
 soul the divine light in a threefold way, that is, as 
 purifying, illuminating, and rendering perfect by 
 unifying with God. 
 
 St. Bernard explains as follows the function of 
 the Nine Angelic Orders. I adopt Mr. E. G. 
 Gardner’s translation.* 
 
 “What then,” he asks, “is meant by this dis- 
 tinction into grades? We think those are called 
 Angels who are believed to be assigned singularly 
 to individual men as guardians: sent to minister, 
 according to the teaching of St. Paul, for them who 
 shall receive the inheritance of salvation (Heb. i. 14); 
 of whom our Saviour said: Their Angels always 
 behold the Face of My Father (St. Matt. xviii. 10). 
 Set over these we think are the Avrchangels, who, 
 conscious of divine mysteries, are only sent for 
 very great and special causes. From these that 
 great Archangel Gabriel was chosen to be sent to 
 Mary, for a cause than which there could not be 
 a greater. Above these we think are the Vzrdues, 
 
 * Dante and the Mystics, pp. 128-131. 
 
40 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 by whose command or work signs and prodigies 
 are wrought among the elements, for the admoni- 
 tion of mortals. Therefore, perchance it is, when 
 thou readest in the Gospels: There shall be signs 
 in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars ; thou 
 hast a little after ; Hor the Virtues (powers) of the 
 heavens shall be moved (St. Luke xxi. 25, 26); 
 those spirits doubtless through whom the signs 
 are wrought. Higher than these we think the 
 Powers, by whose virtue the power of darkness is 
 repressed, and the malignity of the air constrained, 
 so that it cannot harm as it would, nor cause 
 disease except for good. We think the Princi- 
 palities set over these, by whose management and 
 wisdom all principality on earth is set up, ruled, 
 limited, transferred, diminished, and changed. 
 We think that the Dominations so far excel all the 
 aforesaid orders, that, in respect of them, all these 
 others seem to be ministering Spirits, and to them, 
 as to their lords are referred the operations of the 
 Virtues, the wardenship of the Powers, the govern- 
 ment of the Principalities, the revelations of the 
 Archangels, the care and providence of the Angels. 
 We think the 7/rones have soared to a high place 
 apart even from these, and they are called Thrones 
 because on them God sits. Dost thou ask what I 
 mean by this sitting ? Supreme tranquillity, most 
 calm serenity, peace which surpasses all under- 
 standing. Such is He who sits upon the Thrones, 
 the Lord of Hosts, judging all things with tran- 
 quillity, most calm, most serene, most peaceful ; 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 4qI 
 
 and such He hath made the Thrones, most like 
 unto Himself. We think the Cherudim draw from 
 the very fountain of wisdom, the mouth of the 
 Most High, and pour out streams of knowledge 
 upon all His citizens. Is not this that of which 
 the prophet spoke: the stream of the river maketh 
 joyful the City of God (Psalm xlvi. 4). We think 
 that the Seraphim, spirits all aflame with divine 
 fire, enkindle all things, that all its citizens may 
 be burning and shining lights; burning with love, 
 shining with knowledge.” * Passing beyond these 
 Spirits, Bernard says, with the Bride in the Song 
 of Solomon: When I hada little passed by them I 
 found him whom my soul loveth (Song of Songs, iii. 
 4). “What is it? No better answer can be given 
 than fe who zs.” Howcan we know these things? 
 Discussion cannot lead to their comprehension, 
 but holiness. Zhat we may be able to comprehend 
 with all saints (Eph. ili. 18), shows that comprehen- 
 sion 1s possible, but it is by being saintly. If thou 
 art holy thou dost comprehend and know them; if 
 not, be so, and thou shalt know by thine own 
 experience. Holy fear of God and Holy love lead 
 to enlightenment, to comprehension of God. We 
 cannot by discussion find Him out. And St. Ber- 
 nard ends his book (De Consideratione) thus: “He 
 is still to be sought, Who is not yet found enough ; 
 
 * De Consideratione, v. 4, §8. Dante embodies in his nine moving 
 spheres this arrangement, with certain modifications, in the Para- 
 diso, viii. 58-75, 94-148. See Dante and the Mystics, E, G 
 Gardner, London, 1913, pp. 128-131. 
 
42 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 nor can He be sought too much ; but He is sought 
 more worthily and found more easily by Prayer 
 than by Discussion. Therefore this is the end of 
 the book but not the end of our quest.” 
 
 St. Bernard’s mysticism had an ascetic base, and 
 was not in any way independent of the dogmatic 
 teaching of the Church. The Neoplatonic view as 
 to the antagonistic influence of matter, a view, as 
 we have seen, taken up by Professor Bergson, gave 
 to medieval asceticism its essential character, and, 
 as we shall see, it furnished also to Christian 
 Science the base of its chief tenet. Interest in 
 material things was a snare for man’s soul, whose 
 sole aim in this life was union with God. Love of 
 God grows with the knowledge of its object, until 
 even love of self, the last impediment to the divine 
 union, is merged in the love of the Highest. 
 
 The celebrated mystic Hugh of St. Victor 
 (1096-1141) made a greater impression on the 
 later Middle Ages than any of his successors, He 
 was called “a Second Augustine.” The great 
 scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, wrote that “the say- 
 ings of Hugh of St. Victor are those of a master, 
 and have the force of authority.” * 
 
 Hugh was the author of what may be regarded 
 as the first text-book of theology,{ a work which 
 Aquinas frequently refers to. ‘The ascent of the 
 soul to God is thus dealt with in this book. 
 
 “ Ascend whilst thou canst, as much as thou 
 
 * Summa Theologica, II., ii, 5. 
 + Concerning the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 43 
 
 canst, whither thou canst not [ascend ?] too much nor 
 yet utterly. Let thine all be filled out of Him, albeit 
 His whole cannot be contained by thine. He will 
 fill thee utterly and superabound over Himself.” 
 Dealing with the same subject he says in another 
 treatise: “Three were the Ascensions of Christ: 
 the Ascent of the Mountain, the Ascent of the 
 Cross, the Ascent to the Father. Ours are like- 
 wise three: In Ac#, doing penance, whereby we 
 conquer the devil; working justice, whereby we 
 conquer the world; and mortifying our own will, 
 which is victory over self. In Affection, to perfect 
 humility, to consummate charity, and to the purity 
 of contemplation. In Understanding whereby we 
 ascend from the visible things of the world to the 
 invisible things of our own spirit, and from these 
 to the invisible things of God.” * 
 
 Richard of St. Victor, an Augustinian Canon 
 at that abbey, followed Hugh, under whom he 
 studied. Like John Erigena he was Irish by 
 origin, and with a fervid Celtic imagination con- 
 tinued the building up of the fabric of the Church's 
 mystical theology which St. Bernard and Hugh 
 had begun. 
 
 Richard, like his master Hugh, shows how the 
 mind may ascend the “high mountain apart” of 
 the Gospels. | 
 
 “Tf the mind would fain ascend to the height of 
 science, let its first and principal study be to know 
 
 * The translation is here and in subsequent passages that of E, G. 
 Gardner, of. cit. 
 
44 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 itself, The rational spirit’s full knowledge is a 
 great and high mountain. This mountain trans- 
 cends all the peaks of all mundane sciences, and 
 looks down upon all the philosophy and all the 
 science of the world from on high. Could Aris- 
 totle, could Plato, could the great band of philo- 
 sophers ever attain to it?” * “When the mind is 
 rapt above itself,’ he adds later, “it surpasseth all 
 the limits of human reasoning. Elevated above 
 itself and rapt in ecstasy, it beholdeth things in 
 the divine light at which all human reason suc- 
 cumbs.” But the mind must be pure to attain to 
 this exalted height. Purity of heart and know- 
 ledge of self make the soul a mirror in which the 
 invisible things of God are reflected. “ Let him who 
 thinks to see his God therefore cleanse his mirror, 
 purify his Spirit.’ For the soul’s ascent the 
 support of Revelation is wanted as “even if you 
 think,” Richard says, “that you have been taken 
 up into that high mountain apart, even if you think 
 you see Christ transfigured, do not be too ready to 
 believe anything you see in Him or hear from Him, 
 unless Moses and Elias run to meet Him. I hold 
 all truth in suspicion which the authority of the 
 Scriptures does not confirm, nor do I receive 
 Christ in His transfiguration unless Moses and 
 Elias are talking with Him.” f 
 
 The mind, in its upward progress, passes, 
 according to Richard, through several grades of 
 
 * Benjamin Minor, cap. \xxii. 
 ¢ bid, \xxxi, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 45 
 
 contemplation according as the objects of its con- 
 templation are Senszdilia, or “visible things and 
 perceptible by bodily sense;” Jntelligibilia, or 
 “invisible things, but comprehensible by reason ;” 
 Intellectibilia, “ invisible things and incomprehen- 
 sible to human reason,” until at length the object 
 of the mind’s contemplation becomes what is above 
 reason, and seems to be beside reason or even 
 against it. 
 
 Richard is a firm advocate of free will. In a 
 sentence which Dante translates, he, like Aquinas, 
 believes that “no violence can be inflicted on the 
 proper act of will itself.”* “Let all hell,” he 
 says, “all the world, even all the host of heaven, 
 come together and combine in this one thing; 
 they will not avail to extort a single consent from 
 free will in anything not willed.” 
 
 The Blessed Virgin occupies a high place in 
 Richard’s as in St. Bernard’s faith. “She brought 
 forth Grace Himself and is thus the very Fountain 
 of grace which spreads through the world.” 
 
 Among the Mystics who followed Richard was 
 one Joachim of Flora, whose teaching had a wide 
 influence, although some of that teaching was con- 
 demned at the Council of the Lateranin 1215. His 
 teaching has also some reflections in modern 
 substitutes for traditional Christianity. There 
 seem to be more claimants than one for a new 
 “Everlasting Gospel.” 
 
 Joachim divided the periods of the world’s history 
 
 * Che volonta, se non vuol, non s'ammorad, Par. iv. 76, 
 
46 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 into three, corresponding with the three Persons 
 of the Blessed Trinity. The first is the rule or 
 dispensation of the Father, extending from Aaron 
 to Christ; the second is the dispensation of the 
 Son—that is of the Church under the dispensation 
 of the New Testament; and the third will be that 
 of the Holy Ghost, when the “ Everlasting Gospel” 
 shall be preached unto all them that dwell on the 
 earth (Rev. xiv. 6). This will be a new dispensa- 
 tion in which there will be no need for disciplinary 
 institutions, for men will live according to the 
 Spirit, and the letter of the Gospel will be made 
 void and consumed by spiritual understanding.* 
 Mr. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics) finds 
 traces of Joachism in Dante. Thomas Aquinas 
 condemns it.. Had Mrs. Eddy ever heard of this 
 teaching that she claims for her “ Divine Science” 
 that it was predicted in prophecy? It hasa special 
 interest also in regard to some of the develop- 
 ments of modern Mysticism in which the sacred 
 documents of Christianity and the dogmas based 
 on them are all transcended—direct spiritual com- 
 munication with God occupying their place. 
 Bonaventura, the next great figure in the Mystic 
 roll, goes back in his teaching to Augustine and 
 Hugh of St. Victor. He makes use of the mystical 
 doctrine of spiritual gravitation by which the soul 
 is moved by love as the body by its weight. The 
 love of God, as a great spiritual centre of gravity 
 of the universe, is always drawing souls to Himself, 
 
 * E.G. Gardner, of. cit, p. 188. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 47 
 
 Mysticism, as developed in Germany by such 
 men as Eckhart and Tauler (15th century), did 
 not depart from Catholic lines. The goal is still 
 union with God, and the way to this ‘goal is still 
 that of purgation and contemplation. Self-will, an 
 attempt to be something outside God, is the 
 antagonist, and the cause, as Eckhart says, of 
 moral evil. The human soul is not left without 
 a guide to help it towards its goal. The mind, 
 according to Eckhart, is a microcosm containing 
 in a manner all things in itself, and has at its 
 apex the “divine spark” akin to, and one with, 
 God. This divine spark is a higher gift than grace. 
 It is by it God “worketh in us to will and to do 
 of His good pleasure.” It is to this that all divine 
 revelation appeals. The universe to it is the lan- 
 cuage of the Word, the Logos, It is in and by this 
 spark the Holy Ghost works. Under this guidance 
 the soul rejects all creatures and will have only God. 
 Sin lies in clinging to the bodily nature, and not 
 rising to God. Preaching on the conversion of 
 St. Paul, Eckhart says: “When he arose he saw 
 nothing, and because he saw nothing he saw God.” 
 That is, the obstacle to the divine vision is seeing, 
 being taken up with, the world of sense. “What 
 went ye out into the wilderness to see?” It is in 
 the realisation that the world is a desert to the 
 soul that we come to see and respond to the 
 divine. 
 
 In the late developments of mysticism the 
 “ecstatic vision” plays amore and more important 
 
48 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 part. Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, 
 are well-known instances. But the assumption of 
 an inner light granted to favoured persons is beset 
 with dangers. Even those who claimed to have en- 
 joyed these favours have realised such dangers, and 
 have questioned at times whether they were not 
 deceitful illusions. Still, human nature has its 
 abnormal states. The phenomenon of dreaming 
 raises doubts as to whether our waking-states are 
 absolutely trustworthy. This life may be a dreaming- 
 state in regard to a higher wakefulness. 
 ‘6 We are such stuff as dreams are made of, 
 And our little life is rounded with a sleep.” 
 
 These words, in which Shakespeare represents our 
 waking-life as a dream-existence within a sleep 
 which death consummates and ends, stirred up in 
 Goethe, as he tells us, a whole world of thought. 
 
 Language in the present stage of human evolu- 
 tion fails us when it is called upon to describe 
 the deeper experiences of the soul. The devout 
 mystic’s visions may therefore be obscure fore- 
 runners in a general trend towards fuller spiritual 
 development, or they may be the outcome of 
 certain pathological conditions in neurotic subjects, 
 who, owing to the nervous instability consequent 
 upon these conditions, may become receptive of 
 impressions beyond the norm. In any case, the 
 admission of abnormalities in experience tends to 
 open the flood-gates to all sorts of illusions. 
 Theosophy, Christian science, and a host of other 
 aberrations of the human mind are all based upon 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 49 
 
 the assumption of experiences incapable of rational 
 verification, 
 
 A. short summary of the history of mysticism 
 within the Church of Christ was a necessary pre- 
 lude to the discussion of the subject to which this 
 chapter is devoted—CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM DI- 
 VORCED FROM DOGMA. In the foregoing account 
 mysticism is presented as the theological culmi- 
 nation of the traditional faith of the Church. 
 
 Professor Harnack, who regards mysticism as 
 “rationalism applied to a sphere above reason,” 
 calls it “Catholic piety in general, so far as this 
 piety is not merely ecclesiastical obedience or fides 
 implicata.” “The German mystics,” he says, “ex- 
 pressed nothing not to be found in Origen, Plotinus, 
 Dionysius, Augustine, Erigena, Bernard, and 
 Aquinas.” “It will never be possible,’ he adds, 
 “to make mysticism Protestant without flying in 
 the face of history and Catholicism.” “A mystic 
 who does not become a Catholic is,” he says, “a 
 
 dilettante.” * 
 An attempt, however, has been made recently 
 
 to give mysticism a place in Christian thought, 
 not in Protestantism, but in a new undogmatic 
 form of religion which has no counterpart in the 
 history of the past. This new form of mysticism 
 is presented to us in a work by Miss Underhill, 
 entitled Zhe Mystic Way. 
 
 As far as can be gathered amid the odd 
 
 * Quoted by Dr. Inge in the Appendix to his Bampton Lectures 
 on Christian Mysticism, 
 E 
 
50 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 expressions and the somewhat florid imagery with 
 which Miss Underhill has invested her theses— 
 The Mystic Way—her views seem to come to 
 something like this: “ Reality, presumably some- 
 thing distinct from the phenomenal, cannot be 
 reached by what she calls the surface mind.” ‘The 
 “surface mind” seems to be of a nature similar to 
 “ mortal mind,” the boasted grand discovery of Mrs. 
 Eddy. There is in consciousness an intuitive faculty 
 which, in its expansion and illumination, lays hold of 
 Reality. “The mystic transcends the physical world 
 and obtains a footing there [z.¢. in the beyond] by 
 attention, perception, and response. He receives 
 messages from the supernal sphere. The ‘osmosis 
 of spirit’ is made possible by the soul’s impres- 
 sional attentiveness, or Love, the primary condition 
 of our spiritual life” (p. 20). The “scrap of self- 
 creative reality” within us—this is the only driving 
 power of the soul in its path to the spiritual, and 
 this is Love.* “The power of living such a life 
 (the mystic’s) depends on organic adjustments, 
 psychic changes, a heightening of our spiritual 
 tension, not on acceptance of mere beliefs” (p. 33). 
 The soul has to be placed in harmonious rhythm 
 with the Divine by a changed outlook—that is, by 
 
 * The term “ osmosis” is used in physics to express the interchange 
 between two liquids of different densities through an animal mem- 
 brane separating them. Professor Bergson employs it to illustrate 
 the possibility of thought transmission, OF telepathy, between 
 individuals (Address to Physical Research Society), Miss Underhill 
 
 uses it ina kindred sense, The phrase ‘scrap of creative reality” 
 is also Bergsonian, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 51 
 
 metanoia, change of mind. This is the mystical 
 awakening or conversion. “The true object of 
 Christianity—hidden though it be beneath a mass 
 of credal and ritual decorations—is the effecting 
 of the changes which lead to the production of 
 such mystics, such free souls. This is regeneration ” 
 (p. 33). Jesus was the greatest mystic. His 
 “intuitive faculties were nourished by the splendid 
 dreams of Hebrew prophecy” (p. 84). His appear- 
 ance on the field of history at His baptism 
 paralleled upon transcendent levels the psycho- 
 logical crisis of mystical awakening or conversion.” 
 His vision of the Dove descending upon Him at 
 that event was subjective, and the hearing of the 
 voice out of the heavens was one of the “instances 
 of audition of the distinct ‘interior words’ ” (p. 87), 
 “whereby the spiritual genius translates the in- 
 tuition of the transcendent into a form with which 
 the ‘surface mind’ can deal.” 
 
 This is the “cerebral pantomime of voice and 
 vision, or the vivid light, which is nearly always 
 the brain’s crude symbol of that expansion and 
 illumination of consciousness in which Reality 
 breaks in upon it, or it breaks in upon Reality” 
 (p. 88). 
 
 “The Transfiguration marks in Jesus the climax 
 of the ‘illuminated life’” (p. 124). “It marks the 
 achievement in Him, under conditions completely 
 human, of a transcendent life.’ “The Divine 
 humanity is the Son of the Living God.” 
 
 The process is- “the entincturing of humanity 
 
52 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 with Reality, the transmuting of ‘salt, sulphur, 
 mercury’ into Alchemic Gold” (p. 125). Then 
 in His Passion, “the dark night of the soul,” 
 suffering leads to the conviction that the Kingdom 
 is not of this world. 
 
 “The strange glamorous dream in which Jesus 
 lived went with Him still” (p. 129). In the days 
 before His Passion “ His surface intellect projected 
 the shadow of these events against a universal and 
 historical background: and _ this provided the 
 general fluid outline of that ‘Apocalyptic’ picture 
 that ‘Second Coming ’—which the desire, the 
 imagination, and experience of succeeding genera- 
 tions elaborated and defined” (p. 138). 
 
 Then with regard to the “Lord’s Supper,” she 
 regards its institution as “the sudden intuition of 
 a great prophetic mind, an ardent and self-giving 
 heart” (p. 133). 
 
 The significance of the wine in its new relation 
 is in the sentence “The blood is the Life.” “The 
 material and impermanent stuff of things (the bread) 
 was propounded as the actual body of immortal 
 spirit” (p. 134). The whole was to indicate “an 
 extra dower of vitality.” 
 
 “Gethsemane was the dark night of the soul % 
 (p. 135). The process of “self-naughting,” the 
 antecedent to the “self-mergence in the mighty 
 rhythm of Reality, which we call the unitive life” 
 (p. 137). 
 
 “The Crucifixion marks the veritable establish- 
 ment of the Kingdom of Reality: the new way 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 53 
 
 made clear,—emerging from human ruin and dark- 
 ness in the hour of physical death.” 
 
 “Christ’s growth in the Transcendent Order was 
 of an unequalled swiftness; a personal and im- 
 passioned consciousness of unbroken union with 
 Reality was from the first the centre of His secret 
 life” (p. 145). 
 
 Every great mystic is a means of spreading 
 spiritual enlightenment—*“ Each is a thoroughfare 
 whereby the sheaf-like spread of spirit is helped 
 on.” The “barriers that had ring-fenced the spirit 
 of man were effectively broken by Christ.” The 
 Resurrection of Christ Miss Underhill calls a “great 
 confused poem” (p. 148), and her treatment of it 
 is equally confused. It was not, if one understands 
 her aright, the case of the resuscitation of a body 
 that had been dead. She speaks in this connection 
 of “the mysterious art by which spirit weaves up 
 a body from recalcitrant matter,” and dwells not 
 upon the visual testimony of those who had seen 
 Christ after His Resurrection, but on something 
 that had called forth the vision. “Not the thing 
 seen—necessarily seen under the limiting condition 
 of the mind—but the action that evoked the vision, 
 —here is the essential.” And she goes on to 
 quote Professor Bergson, “ There are no things ; 
 there are but actions” (p. 150). So the Resur- 
 rection was not a matter that could be rendered 
 evident by sense-proofs, The disciples of our Lord 
 did not know of it, according to Miss Underhill, in 
 this way. “By intuition rather than by vision they 
 
54 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 knew it” (p. 152). The effect on their mind is the 
 important thing. “All we know about this move- 
 ment,” she says, “is contained in the synoptic 
 records of the Resurrection, and in the mighty 
 wave which rose from it which bore on its crest 
 the Christian Church” (p. 150). Vagueness is a 
 necessary result when simple historical records 
 have to be squared with a transcendental theory 
 wrapped in misty imagery. 
 
 Miss Underhill parallels with the life of our 
 Lord, the spiritual career of St. Paul. 
 
 “St, Paul” to her “is the supreme example of 
 the Christian mystic” (p. 159). His mysticism is 
 first hand. It was from “his long period of self- 
 discipline and self-adjustment, from deep brooding 
 on the Revelation at Damascus, not from any 
 apostolic statement about the human career of 
 Jesus, that the Pauline gospel emerged” (p. 164). 
 It was the “good news” of a new kind of life— 
 experiences, not of a prophecy fulfilled. “ He was 
 the recipient of a triumphant inflow of new vitality.” 
 
 St. Paul was not a subscriber to any common 
 creed. “It is no common creed, but a direct inti- 
 mation of the Transcendent, a /ife by which he is 
 possessed” (p. 169). He had undergone © that 
 slow transmutation of personality, that process of 
 fresh creation which the mystics call New Birth” 
 (p. 183). St. Paul “makes no distinction between 
 those two manifestations of God which theology 
 afterwards described as ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’” (p. 187). 
 
 The doctrine of apostolic succession takes a new 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 55 
 
 form: the mystics are “the real inheritors of the 
 ‘new direction of life’” (p. 190). 
 
 With “bodies of doctrine” Miss Underhill has 
 little sympathy, although she propounds her own 
 teaching in a somewhat dogmatic fashion. ‘“ The 
 mystery of the kingdom consists, not in bodies of 
 doctrine, or closed systems of beliefs, but in a new 
 and amazing series of profound experiences; in 
 the lift-up of his (St. Paul’s) nature, and, therefore, 
 potentially of all human nature to new levels of 
 life” (p. 193). Miss Underhill quotes (p. 195) from 
 Professor Ramsay the one great Pauline principle, 
 “ Only the Divine is real, all else is error.” 
 
 _ With regard to the sacramental teaching of the 
 Church Miss Underhill is severe. 
 
 “The sacramental magic of a later day (that is, 
 than that of St. Paul), the ‘one act’ which trans- 
 ferred man from the world of nature to the world 
 of grace, has no part in the Pauline scheme of 
 things” (p. 196). She gives as the base of the great 
 Apostle’s teaching: “ That outward-going, eager, 
 endless push of life—God working within His own 
 creation—which opposes the downward falling 
 tendency of matter, is felt as known, as a funda- 
 mental part of Reality, by this great mystic” 
 (p. 196). 
 
 According to Miss Underhill, Christianity began 
 early to lose its ideals, departing from “interior 
 facts” and emphasising outward “dramatic ex- 
 pression” (p. 275). “The springing up of the 
 divine seed in the soul, the change of consciousness, 
 
56 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 the emergence of the tendence to Reality, 
 which begins the mystic way, was at last supposed 
 to be conditioned by the external sign: as the 
 interior feeding upon the Divine Nature was sup- 
 posed to be conditioned by Eucharistic Com- 
 munion” (p. 276). And all the while the true 
 psychological process was, according to Miss 
 Underhill, in antagonism with sacramental theory. 
 “Psychological fact,” she says, “refused to accom- 
 modate itself to magical theories of baptismal 
 grace” (p. 279). “Participation in Reality, com- 
 munication from the transcendental order,” “re- 
 adjustments towards the Universal Life,” could be 
 effected without external aids. They constitute 
 a process of vital growth in which the nourishing 
 elements are supplied from within. Knowledge 
 even is not a necessary element. She blames 
 Clement of Alexandria for “holding out more 
 knowledge instead of more /ife to the neophyte,” 
 Clement thus showing “that the poison of Neo- 
 platonism has entered his veins”! (p. 283). Vital 
 experience covers, in Miss Underhill’s crced, all 
 needful theology. The Church of the fourth century 
 was engaged in suppressing this, and substituting 
 for it deadening forms. “ The belief in ‘the Holy 
 Ghost, the Lord, and Giver of Life,’ found a place 
 in the Nicene Creed ; but this formula is merely 
 a memorial raised over the sepulchre of vital 
 experience” (p. 264). She contrasts with this 
 degenerate state of things the fervid vitality of 
 earlier Christianity. “The persistent exhibition 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 57 
 
 of ‘Charismatic’ gifts—the excellent courage of 
 the martyrs, the sense of separation from the world,” 
 —these “continued,” it is true, “to a certain extent, 
 though with ever-decreasing radiance, through the 
 first three centuries of the Christian era” (p. 268). 
 In this connection she regards the heresy of Mon- 
 tanism as an attempt at reformation of the Church, 
 which from being a Church of the saints had 
 degenerated into a semi-secular organisation. 
 “Montanism,” she says, “was really an attempt 
 to check the rapid toning down and secularisation 
 of Christianity, the rapid disappearance of Chris- 
 tian ideals” (p. 269). “The aim of Montanus was 
 the establishment of a spiritual Church of spiritual 
 men. -(p..270). 
 
 And this is the aim, it would seem, of modern 
 mysticism, as presented by Miss Underhill—to 
 restore the primitive ideal of Christianity, which, 
 from the third century to the present day, has had 
 its one great object concealed “ beneath a mass of 
 credal and ritual decorations.” For an external 
 organisation, such as has existed for eighteen 
 hundred years, she would substitute a spiritual 
 and invisible communion, made up of “those mys- 
 tical souls, those true citizens of the kingdom, who 
 constitute the ‘invisible Church’” (p, 304). 
 
 Sufficient has been said of this fresh presentation 
 of mysticism to show that it is not that which has 
 always found a congenial place in the Christian 
 Church, but something brand-new. Something 
 of the nature of a blend of recent philosophy— 
 
58 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 mainly that of Professor Bergson—with the “expe- 
 rience” doctrine of Ritschlianism, tags of mystical 
 expressions being introduced throughout to give it 
 the appearance of a development of medizval 
 mysticism. 
 
 From the point of view of this new mysticism 
 it would seem that an external organisation, a 
 priesthood, a systematic theology, creeds, sacra- 
 mental institutions, are not only of no use in the 
 building up of that Church against which the gates 
 of hell were not to prevail, but are actual impedi- 
 ments to the realisation of the true aims of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 We can readily imagine the chaos which would 
 result from substituting for the creeds and teaching 
 of the Church, assertions not less dogmatic about 
 “a Life of Reality,” “organic psychological growth,” 
 “ osmosis of spirit,” “ self-creative Reality,” “inter- 
 vention of the Transcendent,” “growth in the Tran- 
 scendent Order,” “transmutation of personality,” 
 “inheritors of the new directions of Life,” etc., etc. 
 
 A presentation of Christianity, for which there 
 exists no real counterpart in the history of the 
 Church from its origin, would require, one would 
 think, a fresh Revelation to establish it; but Miss 
 Underhill’s mysticism has no such credentials. It 
 is not even a reasoned system which would com- 
 mend itself to the rational mind. So far as the 
 desire to make Religion a life is concerned, there 
 is much in Miss Underhill’s book worthy of praise ; 
 but in the general mass of material which she has 
 laboriously put together there is little that could 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 59 
 
 help the soul grappling with the enigmas of life. 
 To those who, wearied of theological controversy, 
 are seeking for a religion needing no external 
 authority, and satisfying at the same time the 
 natural instinct, this book will not give relief. 
 
 Medieval mysticism might possibly be detached, 
 as the late Father Tyrrell seemed to think, from 
 the dogmatical system which gave it expression, 
 and might thus serve as the religion of many who 
 cannot bring themselves to accept historic Chris- 
 tianity. If Miss Underhill’s aim was to do this, 
 she has not succeeded. She has substituted new 
 dogmas for the old, travestying the latter where 
 she sees her way to adopt them. There is thus 
 little likelihood of The Mystic Way \eading to a 
 new cult, even in an age which is dissatisfied with 
 the old and familiar, 
 
60 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 Tue name “Theosophy” goes back to the third 
 century A.D., and represented in the Greek thought 
 of the time speculation as to the nature of God 
 and the development of the Divine Essence, The 
 late Neoplatonic doctrines regarding “ emana- 
 tions” from the Deity, and the cognate teaching 
 of the Gnostics as to these emanations under the - 
 name of “zons,” belong to Theosophy. But with 
 these early speculations as to God and His attri- 
 butes, modern Theosophy has very little, if any- 
 thing at all, to do. 
 
 Modern Theosophy was founded in the United 
 States by Madame Blavatzky in the year 1875. 
 “The body of doctrine” presented to the world 
 by the Theosophists was, as Mrs. Besant tells us,* 
 “ obtained by separating the beliefs, common to all 
 religions, from the peculiarities, specialities, rites, 
 ceremonies, and customs which mark off one re- 
 licion from another.’ This element common to 
 all religions has amongst Theosophists a myste- 
 rious origin. “The community of religious teach- 
 ings, ethics, stories, symbols, ceremonies, and even 
 traces of these among savages, arose,” Mrs, Besant 
 
 * Theosophy, by Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical 
 Society. ‘I. C. and E. C. Jack, London ; no date, but 1912, p. 12. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 61 
 
 writes,* “from the derivation of all religions from 
 a common centre, from a Brotherhood of Divine 
 men, which sent out one of its members into the 
 world from time to time to found a new religion, 
 containing the same essential verities as its pre- 
 decessors, but varying in form with the needs of 
 the time, and with the capacities of the people to 
 whom the messenger was sent.” That is, religion 
 is not based on God’s revelation of Himself, 
 or on a natural development of humanity, the 
 outcome of the purely human faculties, as sceptics 
 say, but on something communicated by “a 
 splendid array of messengers.” Who are these 
 messengers? “Theosophy has long taught,” says 
 Miss McNeile, a lady who went out to India with 
 the intention of working with Mrs, Besant, “ that 
 great root races succeed each other at long periods 
 on the earth. We are ourselves in the fifth sub- 
 race of the Fifth Root Race, and the beginning of 
 the sixth is shortly to be expected. At the birth 
 of each sub-race a Supreme Teacher appears to 
 guide its destinies, and enable it to make its special 
 contribution to the religions of the world. The 
 present Fifth Root Race is that of the Aryans, and 
 the Supreme Teachers of the second, third, and 
 fourth sub-races were the same Boddhisattva—the 
 word on this occasion denoting a great Being—who, 
 through successive incarnations, had worked off — 
 his Karma, and so had passed beyond the need 
 of rebirth, but who came to earth again to help 
 
 *n7bid., pe TA. 
 
62 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 mankind. This great Being was born as Hermes 
 among the vanished race which dwelt ages ago on 
 the shores of the Mediterranean. He came again 
 as Zoroaster for the Iranians, and as Orpheus for 
 the fourth sub-race, which comprised the Latins, 
 Greeks, and Celts, After this he was incarnated 
 for the last time as Gautama Siddhartha, and 
 received his final initiation by which he became the 
 Buddha, ‘ the enlightened One,’ and so ‘ He passed 
 away and became the Son united with the Father’ 
 (The Changing World, p. 142). To take his place 
 another appeared as Boddhisattva, and manifested 
 himself about the time of the fifth sub-race, the 
 Teutonic. This was the Christ, the name being 
 derived, not as every student of Christianity knows 
 from the Greck equivalent of Messiah, anointed, 
 but from a certain grade in the Orphic Mysteries 
 known as the Christos or Chrestos (xpfjoroc)! 
 But this time he did not incarnate (above, p. 147, 
 and Esoteric Christianity, ch. 4). He made use 
 of the body of a disciple, the man Jesus of Naza- 
 reth; and in the same way He is shortly to make 
 use of the body of another disciple at the dawn of 
 the sixth sub-race, the disciple in this case being 
 the boy J. Krishnamurti. 
 
 “Jesus was an advanced disciple, but not yet in 
 the final stages of the way. He was born about 
 100 B.C, and was initiated in an Essene com- 
 munity, where he learnt much of the wisdom of 
 the East(!). His spotless mind and body made 
 Him a suitable vehicle for the use of the Great 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 63 
 
 One, the Christ. In the scene in the garden the 
 Christ, having finished His great work of teaching, 
 returned the body to His suffering disciple, in 
 whose person the last scenes of the tragedy were 
 enacted.” * “The man Jesus subsequently became 
 a Master, after completing His initiations, in the 
 person of Apollonius of Tyana.... The world 
 Teacher who is coming again is a Being far higher 
 and more exalted. The identification of Jesus 
 with the Christ is due to gross ignorance, and 
 the Gospel narrative is the crude degradation into 
 the semblance of historical fact of sublime truths 
 accessible to occultists alone. The Creeds were 
 originally a summary of the oral teaching given to 
 candidates for initiation, but in their present form 
 are little more than a collection of crude blunders 
 by misguided redactors who ignorantly imagined 
 them to refer to historical facts!” ¢ “What,” Miss 
 McNeile proceeds to ask, “is the authority for all 
 this?” And the answer given is simple. “ Every 
 event in history, every word spoken, every action 
 done, leaves its indelible imprint on the finest 
 etheric matter. These etheric, or akashic, records 
 are accessible to the trained occultist—that is to 
 say, formerly to Mme. Blavatsky, at the present 
 time to Mrs. Besant and Mr, Leadbeater (Lsoteric 
 Christianity, p. 127).” t 
 
 One literally stands aghast before this rigmarole 
 
 * The East and the West, April, 19133; Theosophy and the 
 
 Coming of Christ, by E. K. McNeile, pp. 152, 153. 
 { Lbid., p. 153. t Zdid., p. 154. 
 
64. MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 of balderdash. There are complaints on all hands 
 of the defective state of our educational methods. 
 Could there be a more glaring proof of this con- 
 tention, than the fact that this stuff is presented 
 to Christian men and women as credible, and as not 
 incompatible with Christianity ? The amazement 
 is increased when one considers that two or three 
 clergymen, who are presumed to have some learn- 
 ing and some knowledge of the laws of evidence, 
 have taken up this maddest of mad crazes. Are 
 they sane? But the culmination of these absurd- 
 ities has yet to be told. “The world Teacher, 
 when he comes, will require for the time being the 
 use of the physical body of a disciple, and the 
 choice (as has been already said) has fallen to 
 the boy Krishnamurti, otherwise known by his 
 nom de plume of Alcyone.” 
 
 This boy, together with his brother, it is stated, 
 had been placed by his father under the warden- 
 ship of Mrs. Besant, who took them to Benares, 
 where, in January, I9II, a society was formed 
 among the students of the Central Hindu College, 
 under the title of the Order of the Sun, to promote 
 preparations for this coming. 
 
 “The boy Krishnamurti was made prominent 
 in the order, and it was the practice of the 
 members to prostrate themselves before him and 
 touch his feet, an act of homage well understood 
 to imply an act of worship.” * The order, for 
 
 * Miss McNeile’s article in Zhe East and the West for Apu, 
 1913, P. 155+ 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 65 
 
 certain reasons, was suppressed, but it was speedily 
 replaced by the Order of the Star in the East, of 
 which Krishnamurti is Head, and Mrs. Besant 
 Protector. “The boy J. Krishnamurti was,” says 
 Miss McNeile, “led into improper habits by Mr. 
 Leadbeater while under his influence in Madras in 
 I9!o. The father repeatedly requested Mrs. Besant 
 to remove him (the boy) from this influence, and 
 to this end consented to his being taken to England, 
 Later, alarmed by the reports concerning his son, 
 he requested Mrs. Besant to bring the boys back 
 to India.” She returned without them, and the 
 father thereupon brought a suit against her for the 
 restoration of the boys. In April, 1913, the case 
 was decided by Justice Bakewell in favour of 
 the father.* In the Madras papers of April 15, we 
 find this report: “ His Lordship then dealt with 
 the eighth and ninth issues as to whether the 
 defendant (Mrs. Besant) permitted the children 
 to associate with a person of immoral character, 
 and the evidence relating to the same. In regard 
 to Mr. Leadbeater, his Lordship observed that in 
 the witness box he admitted that he held what his 
 Lordship could only describe as frankly immoral 
 opinions. No father could be obliged to confide 
 in the promises of such a person.” The Makharatta, 
 an Indian newspaper, commenting on the trial, 
 makes these remarks: “It is a case of a boy taken 
 
 * On Mrs. Besant’s appeal the judgment was set aside (May, 1914) 
 by the Fudicial Committee of the Privy Council, on the ground of 
 faulty procedure in the court below. 
 
 F 
 
66 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 from the custody of an educated, affectionate, and 
 well-to-do father, for being exploited in a scheme 
 of spiritual aggrandisement, and refused to be 
 given back, on the strength of a formal document, 
 even after complaint was made against his being 
 in charge of a tutor who was known to preach and 
 justify clearly immoral practices.” Miss McNeile, 
 in the article in Zhe East and the West, calls to 
 remembrance “that similar charges were made 
 against Mr. Leadbeater in America a few years 
 ago, and on Mrs. Besant reinstating him in an 
 official position in the Theosophical Society, a 
 considerable number of influential members with- 
 drew.” The Maharatta proceeds in its comments 
 on the trial: “Is not irony, which is very often 
 the most favourite instrument of Nemesis, as com- 
 plete as complete can be in this case? Can even 
 the most original of minds conceive of a more 
 ludicrous setting for the second incarnation of 
 Christ than the close guardianship of the blighting 
 arms of a professor of Onanism? And what is 
 perhaps more ludicrous still is that high spiritual 
 status and unfulfilled spiritual aims should be 
 solemnly pleaded as an imperative reason in favour 
 of continuing the abominable state of things.” 
 Principal A. G. Fraser of Ceylon comments : 
 “Filthy though the work is, it is but right that 
 this revived mystery-religion should be recognised 
 in its true light, as a work of darkness and fraud.” 
 
 In face of this awful record, any further examina- 
 tion of the credentials of modern Theosophy seems 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 67 
 
 needless. Still, some of the elements of the system, 
 if it can be called a system, must have had an 
 attraction for its adherents, or they could not have 
 persisted in upholding it. 
 
 A certain amount of cunning has been expended 
 in spreading the net wide enough to catch victims. 
 Eastern and Western thought—both ancient and 
 modern —has been explored with the view of 
 selecting elements that have a certain plausibility, 
 and attractiveness for emotional minds, The 
 phraseology even of modern science has been 
 trenched upon to give a scientific aspect to the 
 crudities which are offered to the untrained 
 thinker. 
 
 The system of the Universe, as presented by 
 Mrs. Besant in Section VI. of Theosophy, is an 
 insult to the understanding of a child of the 
 fifth standard in our Board school. It is an 
 astounding jumble of incoherent scraps picked un- 
 intelligently out of quasi-scientific books by the 
 Theosophist leaders. The late scientific guess that 
 matter might consist of “holes in the ether” has 
 been adopted as an ascertained fact. From agere- 
 gates of these “holes” all that is called matter is 
 built up. The holes, or “bubbles,” as Mrs. Besant 
 calls them, “are visible to the sight of the third or 
 spiritual sphere, and one can see that He (that is, 
 ‘the Logos of a solar system enclosing a huge 
 fragment of the universal ether, thus bubble 
 filled’) sets up a great whirl of force, which sweeps 
 the bubbles together in a huge mass,” The Logos 
 
68 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 in another aspect—the creative—builds “ bubbles ” 
 into atoms, aggregates atoms into molecules, and 
 finally builds these into the six familiar sets of 
 combinations which in the physical world are called 
 “sub-atomic, super-etheric, etheric, gaseous, liquid, 
 solid.” By an impulse of the Life-wave of Creative 
 Thought, the “ monadic sphere ” is made of group- 
 ings of the bubbles into atoms—‘“ causing minute 
 vortices, each of which draws in 49 bubbles.” 
 “Each atom consists of 49 bubbles.” “A second 
 impulse of the Life-wave separates out a quantity 
 of these 49-atom bubbles, dissociates them and 
 recombines them in vortices, each of which con- 
 tains 49? bubbles, the atoms of the spiritual world.” 
 A third impulse issues in 49% bubbles, the atoms of 
 the “intuitional world,” and so on by further im- 
 pulses to 494, 49°, 49°, corresponding respectively 
 to the “mental,” “astral,” and “physical” worlds. 
 “The Life of the Logos is the whirling force within 
 the atom that holds its component parts together.” 
 Here there is a reminiscence of Professor Sir J. J. 
 Thomson’s electron theory worked into this wild 
 Theosophic scheme. Mrs. Besant makes short 
 work of the scientific belief that consciousness 
 cannot influence matter. ‘‘ Each change in con- 
 sciousness,” she says, “is at once answered by a 
 change of vibration in the corresponding matter.” 
 “All the matter of the emotional or astral sphere 
 is comprised of atoms, the Life in which is emotion, 
 and the measure of vibration of which is correlated 
 to emotion, to express and respond to it. The 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 whole huge gamut of emotions, passions, desires 
 is played by consciousness in this matter.” Mrs. 
 Besant has no more trouble about the law of the 
 conservation of energy than she has about the 
 possibility of the action of consciousness on 
 matter. 
 
 Then follows a rigmarole about Globes, Chains, 
 Ruler of Seven Chains, Neptunean and Terrene 
 Chains, etc, a condition of things in which the 
 astronomer of the present day would find himself 
 in Bedlam. It is not a little concession to her 
 readers that she adds, “it is naturally very com- 
 plicated.” It is evidently beyond her powers to 
 make it intelligible. 
 
 There is one thing in the Theosophical scheme 
 which may have led some to recognise in it an 
 explanation of the differences between the degrees 
 and conditions of men which one sees in life. The 
 explanation of human inequalities: why one man 
 is born rich and others poor. Why one is born to 
 suffering and another to a joyous existence. Why 
 one man has got a hunchback and another is 
 straight. The revival of the belief in the trans. 
 migration of souls—a doctrine which is more than 
 2000 years old, and had been deliberately rejected 
 at an early date by the Christian Church—gives 
 according to the Theosophist, a complete account 
 of the inequalities in life. Every ill that we may 
 have, or every pleasant thing that we possess, is 
 the result of a good or bad action done in a pre- 
 vious and unremembered state of existence, This 
 
79 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 it is contended, is an absolute law, and can no more 
 be interfered with than the law of gravitation. The 
 doctrine of Karma is at the base of this absolute 
 law. This is a very ancient Indian doctrine. 
 Professor Deussen of Kiel, the great Vedantic 
 scholar, thus describes its working. “ Life in quality 
 as well as quantity is the altogether fitting and 
 measured expiation of the deeds of a previous 
 existence. The expiation takes place through 
 enjoying and acting, which are again converted 
 inevitably into deeds that must be expiated anew 
 in a subsequent existence, so that the clock-work 
 of requital in running down always winds itself up 
 again.” Principal Fraser thinks that, according to 
 believers in Karma, the average number of rebirths 
 of an individual, before expiation is fully effected, 
 is something like 185,000. 
 
 The Theosophist’s belief in reincarnations is not 
 likely to be influenced by arithmetical considera- 
 tions, but the question of rebirths has to be dealt 
 with from that point of view. The relation of 
 births to deaths in the whole world annually shows 
 that there is a margin in favour of an increase of 
 the population every year. That is, the average 
 number of new births annually would supply fresh 
 bodies for those who have died in the same period, 
 and would leave a moderate percentage over. Each 
 person dying could thus be accommodated with a 
 fresh body if he had ove reincarnation, and one 
 reincarnation only. But if we are to take the 
 average number of reincarnations of each individual 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 71 
 
 at anything like 185,000, the impossibility of sup- 
 plying bodies for them becomes glaring. It is 
 not only for those who have died in any ove year 
 for which new bodies have to be provided. All 
 those millions of dead who have not yet com- 
 pleted their pilgrimages through 185,000 reincar- 
 nations, have to find new bodies, The annual 
 births in the whole world would not furnish more 
 than a small percentage of fresh bodies for the 
 dead individuals of by-gone ages who are still 
 clamouring for them. What is to be done? The 
 dead cannot be left without bodies, or they would 
 never get through their incarnations, and thus 
 relieve themselves of their Karma. It is in earthly 
 bodies alone, too, they are to do the work of 
 expiation for former deeds, as Mrs. Besant is 
 careful to explain (Theosophy, p. 58). Man’s three 
 higher bodies are permanent, she says, and the 
 three lower, temporal, “existing through a definite 
 life cycle in three worlds—the earth, the inter- 
 mediate world, and heaven. With his return to 
 earth he assumes new bodies, and this is Rein- 
 carnation.” It is the inequalities shown in d/zs 
 world that Reincarnation is to explain, and, 
 therefore, if there are not enough new bodies to 
 go round, the whole thing must thus come to an 
 untimely and ignoble end. 
 
 A further difficulty has to be got over. Children 
 resemble as a rule one or other of their present or 
 remote parents. Each new being coming into the 
 
 world takes its substance and qualities from doch 
 
72 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 parents, and, through them, from male and female 
 ancestors more remote. If the Theosophists would 
 take the trouble to study the works of Professor 
 Bateson on Heredity, and the theory known as 
 Mendelism, they would discover the impossibility 
 of reconciling the rebirth doctrine with the teach- 
 ing of the latest science, They are ready to grasp 
 at any theory of modern science which may seem 
 to bear out their scheme. Why do they not con- 
 sider the laws of heredity? If Mrs. Besant was 
 born in a previous existence as a Brahman, as she 
 contends, her physical as well as mental qualities 
 ought to be Brahmanic. She cannot take on a 
 Brahmanic Karma without assuming the Brah- 
 manic character, involving all that makes an indi- 
 vidual Brahman differ from any other individual, 
 Perhaps the characteristic of colour is only skin- 
 deep, and therefore Mrs. Besant lacks zzs testi- 
 mony to her origin, but she pretends to remember 
 her Brahmanic existence, so memory (which, she 
 says, “has its seat in the intellect, not in the 
 mind”), if not colour, is hereditable. 
 
 Professor Weissmann’s theory of the non-trans- 
 missibility of acquired characteristics, which is 
 largely accepted by biologists, runs also right up 
 against the theory of Karma. No acquired habit, 
 according to that theory, can be transmitted from 
 parent to child. Karma demands that expia- 
 tions in one incarnation should count in the next, 
 Weissmannism says that nothing acquired is trans- 
 missible, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 73 
 
 Karma, moreover, goes on without interference. 
 “You need not,’ Mrs, Besant says, “be troubled 
 about Karma any more than by the law of gravi- 
 tation. You cannot interfere with it.’* But Mrs. 
 Besant’s philosophy is full of contradictions. Else- 
 where she says, “Karma is a Law of Nature: it 
 compels the ignorant, but it gives freedom to the 
 Wise, .. . Karma being the result at any given 
 time of all the thoughts, desires, and actions of 
 the past, manifested in our character, our oppor- 
 tunities, and our environment, it limits our present. 
 . . . But as we created so we can change it.” 
 
 From one point of view Mrs. Besant regards 
 Karma as involving a belief in the doctrine of 
 necessity. And as it is only Karma that counts 
 in human evolution, fatalism would seem to 
 reign supreme. “There is no escape,” says Mrs, 
 Besant. “There is no such thing in Nature 
 as forgiveness.” Why, then, take any trouble to 
 teach Karma? Why endure the sneers and oppo- 
 sition of an unbelieving world, when everything 
 will go on inevitably without interference from 
 without? It is surely a purely futile and thank- 
 less task to turn the world’s attention to the 
 operation of a law which, in Mrs. Besant’s words, 
 “we are not to be troubled about.” Silence in 
 such circumstances would surely be golden. Mrs. 
 Besant must have seen this possible retort, so she 
 makes Karma elsewhere something which can be 
 interfered with. 
 
 * Quoted by Principal Fraser, Christianity and Theosophy, 
 
74 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Theosophists again claim powers which transcend 
 anything asserted in medixval legend. In Mr. 
 Leadbeater’s Te Christian Creed we are told that 
 “clairvoyant investigators” have seen earlier Chris- 
 tian documents than are accessible to the literary 
 critic, and have thus been enabled to correct the 
 Christian creed by collating it with Greek originals ! 
 Let us see how this faculty works. The redactors 
 of early Christian documents have been more 
 mischievous than those who provided a hard 
 task for the modern literary critic in undoing the 
 mangling of the Old Testament effected by them. 
 In this way the belief “in Jesus Christ” in the 
 Creed is made to be, by a redactor’s “ materialising 
 influence,” a substitute for the clairvoyant’s reading 
 “chiefest Healer,” or simply (for there is a doubt 
 even among the clairvoyants) “ the most Holy 
 One!” The author feels, however, the futility at 
 present of insisting upon these amended readings. 
 “Tt is, however,” he says, “ of little use for us to 
 speak of those various readings until some explorer 
 on the physical plane (he apparently means a 
 literary critic) discovers a manuscript containing 
 them, for then only will the world of scholars be 
 disposed to listen to the suggestions which naturally 
 follow from them” (p. 68). The clairvoyants, 
 moreover, in “the earliest Greek manuscripts they 
 have yet been able to find,” read, for the “ Pontius 
 Pilate” of the received Creed, “a compressed or 
 densified sea,” and the whole clause, “suffered 
 under Pontius Pilate,’ “should be rendered He 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 75 
 
 (that is “the chiefest Healer”) endured the dense 
 sea” (p. 78)! Could ignorant audacity on the 
 one hand go further, and on the other human 
 credulity ? 
 
 To give some sort of credence to the marvellous 
 power claimed by Theosophist clairvoyants, Mrs, 
 Besant (7heosophy, p. 56) introduces what is called 
 in the East Yoga. “The word,” she says, “means 
 ‘union, and is used to indicate the conscious 
 union of the particular with the universal Self 
 (that is, with the Theosophist Pantheistic Deity), 
 and all the efforts leading to that consummation.” 
 This is on the line with the Christian mystic’s 
 “union with God,” but it involves more wonderful 
 consequences, “The method of yoga,” Mrs. Besant 
 goes on to say, “is purely scientific, the knowledge 
 of the laws of mental and intellectual evolution 
 having been gained by observation and established 
 by experiment.” “Thought concentrating itself 
 attentively on any idea builds that idea into the 
 character of the thinker,” and through the prac- 
 tice of yoga one may “unroll and read the im- 
 perishable scroll of the past.” ‘This scroll of the 
 past is called elsewhere “etheric” or “akashic” 
 records, “in which every event in history, every 
 word spoken, every action done, leaves its indelible 
 imprint on the finest of etheric matter,” as writes 
 Miss McNeile. Etheric Vision would thus be very 
 useful to physicists as well as historians, for it 
 “may be used for examining minute objects, such 
 as chemical atoms, or the wave forms of electrical 
 
76 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 and other forces” (whatever these may mean) 
 (Theosophy, p. 27). This vision would be also of 
 incalculable value to the folk-lorists, for it may be 
 used “for studying such of the nature-spirits as 
 use etheric matter for their lowest bodies—fairies, 
 genomes, brownies, and creatures of that ilk” 
 (tbid, p. 27). “Astral vibrations” can be excited 
 also by “some drugs, such as hashish, bhang, 
 opium, and extreme alcoholic poisoning, and 
 then the patients catch glimpses of some inhabi- 
 tants of the astral world.” The hallucinations in 
 D. T. are thus explained. “The horrors,” she 
 says, “which torment a man suffering from delirium 
 tremens are largely due to the sight of the loath- 
 some elementals that gather round places where 
 liquor is sold, and feed on its exhalations!” Is 
 Mrs. Besant laughing at us? Or is this vision of 
 hers, employed in the recognition of occult things, 
 a garbling of the Law of the Conservation of 
 Energy, or is it a paraphrase of Professor William 
 James’s conjectural “cosmic reservoir where the 
 memory of all mundane facts is stored, and 
 grouped around personal centres of association” ? 
 In any case it isa wonderful claim, and if realisable 
 would do away with the British Association and 
 the labour of the investigator in every field. 
 
 It is to be noted in regard to the propaganda 
 of modern Theosophy that the method pursued in 
 England is diametrically opposed to that used in 
 India, and the disciples aimed at respectively in the 
 two countries are entirely different, “In England,” 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 177 
 
 as Miss McNeile says, “the policy aimed at is that 
 of the utmost conciliation. A strenuous effort is 
 being made here to win over Christians, and such 
 Christian nomenclature is adopted as tends to 
 obscure the fundamental differences. In India 
 such fraternising, except in very rare cases, is 
 unknown. Here the coveted ally is the orthodox 
 Hindu pundit.” The Theosophical Society in India 
 “stands as the champion of Hinduism against what 
 it represents as a mere Western religion. A shrine 
 to Sarasvati (the Goddess of Learning) stands in the 
 quadrangle of the Central Hindu Collegeat Benares, 
 an image of Hanuman (the Monkey God) at the 
 gate of the Hostel, and a little red Ganesh (the 
 Elephant God) over the door of Mrs. Besant’s 
 private house” (Zhe East and the West, April, 
 113} p15 1). | 
 
 The seductive appeal made in the programme 
 of the society submitted to the English public is 
 a marvel of ingenuity. All that is required in an 
 adherent is the acknowledgment of “human brother- 
 hood.” “The society has no dogmas,” it is asserted, 
 “and, therefore, no heretics. It does not shut any 
 man out because he does not believe the Theo- 
 sophical teachings. A man may deny every one 
 of them, save that of human Brotherhood.” He 
 could believe in human Brotherhood without join- 
 ing the society, and as he may deny all the 
 teaching of Theosophy while he is a member of 
 the society, why ask him to join the Theosophists 
 at all? Once within the net, however, there is 
 
73 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 hope of his ultimate capture. But “surely in vain 
 the net is spread in the sight of any bird?” And 
 what a net-work of fraud it is. “Its founder, 
 Madame Blavatsky,” as Principal Fraser says, “ was 
 proved to have committed frauds in India, and, 
 of course, never dared to take her challengers into 
 the Law Courts; and before the Psychical Re- 
 search Society, a very competent and unprejudiced 
 scientific body, as you know, she was adjudged 
 guilty of fraud.” “I think there are five who may 
 be considered the chief leaders. Mr. Judge, 
 Madame Blavatsky, and Mr. Leadbeater are three 
 of them. Mr. Judge was proved guilty of forgery 
 and was removed from the headship of the society. 
 Mrs. Besant officially covered up the forgery of 
 Mr. Judge, and called him ‘one of the greatest 
 and noblest workers in our Movement, even though 
 in the last days of his life he made a great rent 
 in the Theosophical Society.”” And Mr. Lead- 
 beater? Enough of his qualifications for leader- 
 ship of a spiritual society has been given, in Mr. 
 Justice Bakewell’s scathing remarks at the trial in 
 Madras, to enable any one to form an adequate 
 opinion. 
 
 “ Beware,” said our Lord, “of false prophets. ... 
 Ye shall know them by their fruits. ... A good 
 tree cannot bring forth evil fruit.” 
 
 ea 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 79 
 
 CHRIS LEAN SCLENCE 
 
 CHRISTIAN Science was discovered and founded 
 in 1865 by an American lady who is styled the 
 “Reverend Mary Baker G. Eddy,” and called the 
 “Reverend Mother of the Christian Scientists,” 
 Her teaching is contained in a book entitled Sczence 
 and Flealth, with Key to the Scriptures, which is 
 said to be “one with the Bible,” and can be bought 
 bound in one volume with it. Of the book, we 
 are told, over 400,000 copies have been circulated, 
 and the result of the propaganda has been the 
 forming of many communities of Christian Science, 
 and many so-called churches in America, England, 
 and elsewhere, 
 
 The foundation of the teaching of Mrs. Eddy 
 is that Spirit is the great reality. “God is the 
 Principle of Christian Science,” she says in the 
 book referred to, and “God is all,’ and “God is 
 the Supreme Being, the only Life, Substance, and 
 Soul, and the only Intelligence of the Universe 
 including man.” The unity of all intelligence is 
 a principle insisted upon throughout her book, 
 Mrs. Eddy writes in one place in regard to the 
 source of her belief in Oneness, in God as our 
 Life, “ Whence came to me this heavenly conviction 
 
80 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 —a conviction in antagonism with the testimony 
 of the physical sense? I know not.” In another 
 place, however, she asserts, “ The Bible has been 
 my only text-book. I have had no other guide 
 in the straight and narrow way of this science” 
 (Science and Health, p. 20). 
 
 And what in the Bible has she found that has 
 escaped the eyes of all commentators from the 
 beginning of Christianity. The Unity of God is 
 there, and no one, perhaps, would dispute that He 
 is the source of all things, the “supreme and only 
 intelligence of the universe.” But she proceeds 
 to elaborate from this foundational principle a 
 quasi-philosophical system, which, it is safe to say, 
 no one but herself and her followers has found 
 within the sacred Book. Yet she calls the method 
 by which she has reached her deductions purely 
 scientific, the “true science of God,” “ though,” she 
 adds, “departing from the realm of the physical, 
 as it must, some may deny its right to the name 
 of Science.” This forecast will be fully justified 
 when her deductions are examined. 
 
 It would be a tedious and unsatisfactory work to 
 follow verbatim Mrs. Eddy’s deductions presented 
 in her two books, Health and Science, and &etro- 
 spection and Introspection, the former of which has, 
 moreover, been frequently revised. The exposition 
 of her philosophy in the works named is so full of 
 contradictions and repetitions that little good result 
 can be attained by quoting from them, but we 
 shall attempt to deal with some of her definite 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 8! 
 
 statements later on. The inconsequential cha- 
 racter of her books, and the imperfections of her 
 grammar, has a natural explanation. For, as one 
 of her ardent defenders has said (A Plea for the 
 Unbiased Investigation of Christian Science, 
 London, 1913, p. 17), “Mrs. Eddy had only such 
 advantages as were available in a small town of 
 New England sixty or seventy years ago, and she 
 was in a great measure self-taught. Consequently, 
 when she wrote her book she did not express her- 
 self as possibly she might have expressed herself 
 had she had the same educational advantages as 
 her critics.’ For this reason, perhaps, she has 
 been wrongly interpreted, and the writer of the 
 work just named tries to make Mrs. Eddy’s mean- 
 ing clearer by presenting her doctrine in a more 
 comprehensible way. He takes as his basis for 
 the right apprehension of Mrs. Eddy the following 
 paragraph from her Health and Science. 
 
 “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor sub- 
 stance in matter. All is infinite mind and its 
 infinite manifestations, for God is All-in-All; 
 Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. 
 Spirit is the real and Eternal; matter is the 
 unreal and temporal, Spirit is God, and man is 
 His image and likeness. Therefore man is not 
 material: he is spiritual.” He then adds: “If 
 Christian Science is true, then Mrs. Eddy has 
 stated in that single paragraph one of the most 
 comprehensive systems of philosophy ever pre- 
 sented to the world, a paragraph that presents 
 
 G 
 
82 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 God’s perfect spiritual creation as being the one 
 absolute fact and reality of life, in contra-distinction 
 to the material world, which, Christian Science 
 teaches, is but a false sense or counterfeit of that 
 perfect spiritual creation. When we think of 
 God’s spiritual creation, it must be borne in mind 
 that the real man and all life are included in that 
 creation, and God must not be thought of as apart 
 from His creation, but that ‘all is infinite Mind 
 (God) and its infinite manifestation, for God is 
 All-in-All.’ In other words, ‘the unseen spiritual 
 world is the real world, absolutely perfect and 
 harmonious, and the physical or material world 
 that is revealed to us by our physical senses is 
 not the real world (although so real to those 
 physical senses), but is a false or incorrect pre- 
 sentation of the real spiritual world that is behind 
 all we see”” The writer goes on to illustrate this 
 point in the following manner: “Imagine a ball 
 of light. Let the ball of light represent God and 
 His perfect spiritual creation. Mortal man, look- 
 ing at the ball of light, sees only a blurred image, 
 as this is all his physical senses present to him. 
 The ball of light is God and His spiritual creation, 
 but the blurred image is not God: it is unreal, or 
 but a counterfeit of the real: it is the material 
 world.” This means that the illusion which we 
 call the physical world arises from the defective 
 character of our senses, The blurring of reality is 
 subjective, and, therefore, has no external counter- 
 part, Andcommenting on Mrs, Eddy’s statement 
 
 a 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 83 
 
 that “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor 
 substance in matter . . . matter is mortal error 
 » ». matter is the unreal and temporal,” he goes 
 on to say, “it is quite clear that we have to 
 regard matter as apart from God, whatever our 
 conception or explanation of it may be.” As the 
 writer of this explanation has, as he says, “sub- 
 mitted a draft of his MS. to the authorised London 
 representative of the Christian Science movement, 
 who has very kindly confirmed the accuracy of 
 the statements,” we may assume that his presenta- 
 tion is authoritative. 
 
 Seeing that Mrs. Eddy has stated, as already said, 
 that “The Bible has been my only text-book,” the 
 foregoing exposition must necessarily be meant 
 to correspond with the account of creation in the 
 first chapter of Genesis, “In the beginning God 
 created the heaven and the earth.” Were these 
 material things, or only blurred images of reality, 
 erroneous subjective impressions? And if they, 
 and the further material things which God created, 
 were unreal, and “mortal error,” how comes it that 
 He called them “good”? It is clear that Mrs. 
 Eddy had some other explanation of the Biblical 
 narrative of creation. 
 
 She regards the account of Creation in Genesis 
 as referring to what she calls “Spiritual Creation,” 
 and the man, too, whom God made must have had 
 no material sense, That is, Creation was invisible 
 to mortal sense. And man must, therefore, have 
 been made without those misleading sense organs 
 
84 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 to which are to be ascribed his recognition of the 
 majesty and beauty of the Universe. How, in the 
 absence of these sense organs, did he hear or read 
 anything about God? How could any one apart 
 from them read Mrs, Eddy’s revelations? But 
 where did she get-all this incomprehensible stuff 
 from? Not from her “only text-book,” in which 
 she will certainly find no disparaging words con- 
 cerning material creation; but, on the contrary, 
 terms that make it a vehicle of divine teaching. 
 “The heavens declare the glory of God”—“ Con- 
 sider the lilies of the field.” No! she did not get 
 her views of matter from the Bible. She must have 
 got them from philosophy, or from a fresh revela- 
 tion that renders obsolete the old. The writer of 
 A Plea for the Unbiased Investigation of Christian 
 Science says (p. 49): “The Bible is not the com- 
 plete book it has been assumed to be. Once,” he 
 continues, “the fact was brought home to the re- 
 ligious world that the Bible could not be accepted 
 without question, but must be regarded as a mine 
 in which the pearls of inspired truth are hidden, 
 the harsh doctrines, so cruel to men and dis- 
 honouring to God, were sooner or later bound to 
 go.” “Christian Scientists,” he goes on to say, 
 “are among the sincerest seekers after truth, and 
 do not accept anything as true simply because 
 they find it in the Bible, or because Mrs. Eddy 
 wrote it, but only when intuition, spiritual per- 
 ception, and experience have proved its truth” 
 (p. 51). The Bible needs, therefore, something 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 85 
 
 other than itself for its interpretation. The guid- 
 ance of the Church, however, must give place to 
 the Christian Scientists’ “intuition, spiritual per- 
 ception, and experience.” We shall see how these 
 work later on. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy has clearly had, in drawing up her 
 philosophy, many collaborators, whose hands are 
 seen in the alterations and revisions of her Health 
 and Science. From the very beginning of her 
 “discovery” they seem to have been at work to 
 cull from current philosophic literature means for 
 helping her to develop her foundation statements 
 “God is all,” and “God is mind,” “therefore there 
 is nothing else than mind.” 
 
 Among the ancient philosophies which have been 
 more or less popularised in modern times, and thus 
 made accessible to Mrs, Eddy’s coadjutors, is that 
 of the Neoplatonist Plotinus. Perhaps Mrs. Eddy 
 and her helpers never heard of him, but Neoplatonic 
 ideas have been in recent years at the base of 
 many speculations in America and elsewhere. In- 
 the short summary of the philosophy of Plotinus 
 given in the Introduction, it was pointed out that 
 he considered every object as in the sphere of 
 mind, and that a universe outside thought is un- 
 thinkable. The world, to him, was nothing else 
 than the thought of God transmuted into vital 
 law. Thought, he said, is cause, and not effect, 
 determined only by the laws of truth and goodness. 
 The facts of sense, which we think most certain, 
 are really, Plotinus thought, least certain. Matter 
 
86 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 itself, to him was immaterial: it has “no body.” 
 It cannot be said either to exist or not exist. 
 Actually it is nothing. And Plato, the master of 
 Plotinus, said that we conceived of it by a “ bastard 
 reasoning.” Another favourite image of Plotinus in 
 describing matter was used also by St. Paul. “The 
 world,” Plotinus says, “is like a mirror in which 
 a man sees the shadows of realities. Only,’ he 
 adds, “you see the mirror, and do not see matter.” 
 
 Compare this with the blurred image of the ball 
 of light, the counterfeit of the real, the material 
 world. Is the discovery of Mrs, Eddy anything 
 different from what Plotinus had found out nearly 
 seventeen hundred years before? The only differ- 
 ence between the two views is in the fact that the 
 philosophy of Plotinus is clear and consistent, 
 having been fully thought out, while that of Mrs, 
 IXddy is halting and contradictory. There are 
 curious coincidences in the world, and this may 
 be nothing more, but when we come further to 
 compare the views of Plotinus about evil in the 
 world with those of Mrs, Eddy, the resemblance 
 will be found so striking that the chances of 
 coincidence is hardly thinkable. Let us examine 
 in the meantime the one fundamental statement 
 from which Christian Science deduces its con- 
 clusions—conclusions which are assumed to be 
 indisputable. 
 
 “God is perfect, God is good.’ That is the 
 foundation upon which the indestructible edifice 
 of Christian Science is built. Can any one dispute 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 87 
 
 it? And if hecannot, does it not follow inevitably 
 that everything which proceeds from God must be 
 perfect and good? But the material world is not 
 perfect, the Christian Scientist declares, and man 
 as we see him is far from being perfect and good. 
 How explain this anomaly? God did not create 
 the material world, they say, but only the spiritual. 
 He did not create the mortal mind of man—that 
 is, the human senses by which man perceives the 
 visible world. The “false human consciousness” 
 also, which makes evil appear so real to us, we 
 must seek an explanation for “apart from God, 
 into whose perfect consciousness no evil can enter” 
 (op. cit, p. 29). God’s creation is therefore a 
 spiritual creation only, and all that is not spiritual 
 did not proceed from God. Nay, more; God is 
 not conscious of the material world. ‘God,’ says 
 the writer already cited, “has no knowledge of 
 evil, and is not conscious of this material world, 
 with all its sin, sickness, and suffering” (p. 35). 
 This is an astounding position. God not only 
 did not make the material world, or the material 
 part of man, but He is unconscious of their exist- 
 ence! “ All things were made by him (the Word),” 
 said St. John. But Mrs. Eddy’s defender writes, 
 “ Christian Science does not say that because cer- 
 tain passages in the Bible are not logically in 
 accord with the accepted bases they are not true, 
 but that they must have a deeper meaning than 
 appears on the surface, and that spiritual percep- 
 tion will reveal the meaning to the sincere seeker 
 
88 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 after truth.” Perhaps “spiritual perception” will 
 see that St. John here refers to the spiritual world 
 alone, and everything else either made itself, or 
 was the product of some Demiurge. 
 
 The defender of Christian Science must often 
 find himself in a difficult place in attempting to 
 explain to the neophyte the existence or non- 
 existence of the “mortal mind,” and the universe 
 with which it deals. He can hardly say to the 
 inquirer they are xothing, The tongue he employs 
 to teach the aspirant, the waves of air that convey 
 the sounds, the ear that hears, are all material 
 things, counterfeits, as they may be, of “reality,” 
 but without these or similar materialistic vehicles 
 no one would have ever heard of Mrs, Eddy, or of 
 spiritual creation, or of new methods of healing 
 the ills of humanity. 
 
 Let us try to help the defender of Christian 
 Science in his difficulties, by showing, if we can, 
 whence the trouble proceeds. Does it not lie in 
 the major premiss of Christian Science—in the 
 words “perfect” and “good.” These words re- 
 present ideas gathered in what Mrs. Eddy would 
 call our “false consciousness,’ by comparisons 
 made within a material world. They are what 
 is known as relative terms; that is, the word 
 “perfect,” which etymologically means “complete,” 
 implies that there is something in our experience 
 which is less “perfect” or “complete.” It is not, 
 therefore, an absolute word, because its full import 
 depends on our experience of things, and it may 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 89 
 
 thus be applied to-day to something which to- 
 morrow’s experience may rank among the “im- 
 perfect” or “incomplete.” Thus, to take a word 
 which plays a considerable part in Christian Science, 
 “pain.” Indeed, we may take it from Mrs. Eddy’s 
 writings that the chief object of Christian Science 
 is to get rid of it, and of disease of which it is the 
 symptom. Christian Science rests its appeal to 
 the world on its being an agency of healing— 
 something far excelling in efficiency all the means 
 of combating disease brought before the world at 
 the recent International Medical Congress. It 
 strikes at pain as if it were the greatest evil to 
 be overcome, for this is a decided “imperfection” 
 according to the Christian Scientist healer. But 
 a little more knowledge than what the average 
 “healer” has at his disposal would show that, on 
 the whole, it is beneficent and not an imperfection. 
 For all “pain” is ultimately nerve irritation, and 
 nerve irritation, physiologists tell us, is at the base of 
 all human activity. No Christian Scientist could 
 breathe if the nerves that control respiration were 
 not irritated by the accumulation of venous blood 
 in the circulation. Let any one try to hold in his 
 breath for a minute, and he will experience what 
 the irritation is which arises from a deficiency of 
 oxygen in the blood. This irritation of the nerves 
 controlling respiration is a stage of pain, and 
 without that irritation being continuously repeated 
 we should cease to breathe at all, and therefore 
 cease to live. And, as has been said, all human 
 
ele) MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 activity is stirred up by nerve irritation, so that 
 every human act has a stage of pain at its back. 
 Pain, moreover, when it becomes more intense, is 
 nature’s beneficent way of calling attention to 
 something that has gone wrong, and needs the 
 “healers” aid. “Pain” is thus what an eminent 
 physician calls “that kind guardian of health.” 
 Pain has, of course, a deeper significance. It is 
 punitive, and, in this sense, also remedial. It would 
 require, however, a larger than human experience 
 to define its functions in full, We know enough, 
 however, to be certain that the import of the terms 
 we use depends upon our knowledge. Now, to 
 be able to call the world of sense “imperfect” or 
 “not good,’ we must know a great deal more 
 than comes within the experience of the Christian 
 Scientist or, indeed, of any man. And to assume 
 that a world in which there should be no “ pain,” 
 or “ suffering,” or “death,” would be “ perfect” in 
 comparison with that which we inhabit, is not only 
 beyond our power, but flies in the face of a full 
 knowledge of the beneficent character of these 
 factors in our experience. Death, the greatest of 
 these so-called “imperfections,” comes as a bene- 
 ficent anodyne to give rest after years of weary 
 labour. And if this “imperfection” were not an 
 unavoidable thing in the “material world,” that 
 world in a few hundreds or thousands of years 
 would not have standing room for its inhabitants, 
 Now, to take ideas of “perfect” and “good” from 
 an erroneous conception of the material world, and 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 9QI 
 
 to apply these to the Almighty, is an instance of 
 unparalleled audacity, The words “ perfect” and 
 “good,” with the narrow import attached to them 
 by Christian Scientists—excluding from their mean- 
 ing anything that seems “imperfect” in the material 
 world—cannot be rightly applied to the Almighty. 
 They are terms of purely human signification— 
 with human limitations. We cannot predicate such 
 human terms of God without the assumption of 
 omniscience. But this is exactly what the Chris- 
 tian Scientists do. And having applied them, they 
 proceed to deduce from the words applied—with 
 their limited sense attached to them—the astound- 
 ing conclusion that God did not make anything 
 which the Christian Scientists call “imperfect ”— 
 that is, the material world from which alone they 
 could gain any ideas of “perfect” or “imperfect.” 
 Nay, more; the material world cannot, owing to 
 the “imperfections” which ¢ey find in it, come 
 into the consciousness of Him to Whom they 
 apply the term “ perfect,’ in the limited sense 
 they attach to it. The “spiritual perception” by 
 which they think they apprehend “reality” cannot 
 import into the terms “ perfect” and “imperfect ” 
 other meanings than those which the Christian 
 Scientists have gathered from that “ false conscious- 
 ness” which deals with purely human affairs. A 
 more glaring instance than this of an argument in 
 a circle could hardly be found anywhere. 
 
 Mrs, Eddy presses home very forcibly in her 
 writings how completely and continuously our 
 
Q2 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 physical senses deceive us. The writer of the 
 Plea for Unbiased Inquiry, referring to this, gives 
 instances. It is important to take note of this, for 
 the untrustworthy character of our senses is the 
 reason why Mrs. Eddy regards them as con- 
 stituting “mortal mind,” or the “false conscious- 
 ness that alone manifests and expresses evil.” 
 “For instance,” says the writer of the book 
 mentioned, “our physical senses tell us that the 
 sun travels round the earth, and that it rises in 
 the east and sets in the west: that the earth is 
 flat: that two parallel railway lines come closer to 
 each other, and eventually meet; and many other 
 things that are absolutely untrue. Yet, although 
 we know as a fact that they are untrue, our 
 physical senses so continually tell us they are 
 true that we frequently talk as though they were.” 
 He then goes on to say, “Christian Science 
 teaches us that we are constantly and continually 
 accepting the false evidence of our physical senses, 
 and that the troubles of the world, and our 
 ignorance of real causes, are in the main due to 
 this false evidence. In no case would this appear 
 to be more true than when our physical senses tell 
 us that we are human beings, having a knowledge 
 of good and evil. Nothing would appear to the 
 physical senses and to the human consciousness 
 more certain than this apparent fact, but the 
 philosophy of Christian Science teaches us that 
 this is essentially untrue... . We are not human 
 beings, knowing good and evil, but we are perfect 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 93 
 
 spiritual beings, knowing and expressing only 
 good, and it is the false human consciousness 
 that alone manifests and expresses evil” (0p. cit. 
 p- 29). 
 
 But do our physical senses really deceive us? 
 We perceive the movement of the sun in the 
 heavens from east to west. That is an undoubted 
 fact of perception. The explanation of what we 
 see is not a matter of physical sense at all; itisa 
 matter of reasoning on what we see. The per- 
 ception is quite correct, but the cause of the per- 
 ception lies outside the domain of the physical 
 senses. So it is not szght that deceives us, for 
 the explanation of the phenomenon is not, and 
 cannot be, given by it, but only by the reasoning 
 faculty, which, although it belongs to that “ false 
 consciousness,” rightly elucidates it. 
 
 Do the physical senses tell us that the earth is 
 flat? If they did they must be able to take in the 
 whole globe at a glance. They take in but a very 
 minute portion, and that, too, merely as an ex- 
 tended surface. The question of flatness does not 
 come in as a testimony of sight. The “earth- 
 flatteners” make irrational inferences from what 
 the senses correctly tell them, but correct reason- 
 ing in the sphere of “false consciousness” gives 
 us the fact of the rotundity of the earth. Again, 
 in regard to the perspective of two parallel railway 
 lines coming closer and closer together, that is an 
 undoubted presentation of sight. And if sight did 
 not give us this testimony it would mislead us, but 
 
04 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 it does give it, and the reasoning faculty in the 
 sphere of the “ false consciousness” draws from the 
 testimony the all-important laws of perspective, 
 without the guidance of which laws we should fall 
 into perpetual blunderings. 
 
 Do our physical senses tell us that “we are 
 human beings, knowing good and evil.” They 
 testify truly that we are human beings, and not 
 dogs or elephants, but how do they perceive that 
 human beings know good and evil, That is nota 
 matter of the physical senses at all, but of the “ false 
 consciousness” of the Christian Scientist, which 
 has to be corrected, according to the Christian 
 Scientist, by something which is neither reason 
 nor rational. 
 
 The syllogism, “No evil can enter into perfect 
 consciousness; man’s consciousness is_ perfect, 
 therefore no evil can enter man’s consciousness,” 
 is a marvellous logical method for disposing of 
 “evil.” If syllogisms such as this could have 
 reformed the world, it would have been “ perfect” 
 long ago. Christian Science is full of these neat 
 arguments, which seem to exclude all questioning. 
 
 “The vital point on which Christian Science 
 teaching,” says the writer quoted above, “differs 
 from all other philosophy and religious teaching, 
 viz. that God is not, and cannot be, conscious of 
 evil, or of the material world as we know it, for in 
 order to be so He would need to possess the 
 imperfect human consciousness to present to Him 
 wrongly His own perfect Spiritual Creation.” This 
 
 EEE 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 95 
 
 limitation of the Almighty—* He is not and cannot 
 be conscious, etc.”—seems tantamount to a claim 
 to omniscience, but it may be merely an adaptation 
 of thoughts appropriated from other people. 
 
 Mrs, Eddy’s views on this point had been antici- 
 pated by Plotinus the Neoplatonist. The better 
 soul, which he called an image of Intelligence, has, 
 according to him, no emotions, no consciousness, 
 
 of the world below, no senses and no faculty that _\- 
 
 requires sense as the correlative of its exercise. 
 Plotinus, moreover, would not allow evil to be 
 in any way connected with God. So Christian 
 Science in this as in many other respects does not 
 “differ from a other philosophy and religious 
 teaching.” 
 
 To sum up Mrs, Eddy’s “ Philosophy.” 
 
 “Nothing possesses reality or existence except 
 God.” 
 
 “God is All in All.” 
 
 “God is good. God is mind.” “Allis mind.” 
 
 “God, spirit, being all, nothing is matter,” 
 
 “ Divine Science, moving above physical theories, 
 resolves. things into thoughts, and replaces the 
 objects of material sense with spiritual ideas,” 
 “Matter is the falsity, not the fact of exist- 
 ence,” 
 
 “Knowledge gained from matter, and through 
 the five senses, is only temporal—the conception 
 of mortal mind, the offspring of sense, not of soul, 
 spirit—and symbolises all that is evil and perish- 
 able, Natural Science, as it is commonly called, 
 
96 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 is not really natural or scientific, because it is 
 deduced from the evidence of the physical senses.” 
 
 “The so-called laws of matter are nothing but 
 false beliefs in the presence of intelligence and life, 
 where Mind is not. This is the procuring cause 
 of all sin and disease.” 
 
 “To be on communicable terms with spirit 
 persons must be free from organic bodies.” 
 
 “The only evidence we have of sin, sickness, or 
 death is furnished by the Five Personal Senses: 
 but how can we rely on their testimonies when 
 the senses afford no evidence of truth.” 
 
 “The so-called material man and these personal 
 senses, with all their evidences of sin, disease, and 
 death, are but a disease.” 
 
 “Life is divine mind. Life is not limited. If 
 life ever had a beginning it would also have an 
 ending. Death and finiteness are unknown to 
 life.” 
 
 “Man is spiritual and perfect. Man is in- 
 capable of sin, sickness, and death, inasmuch as 
 he derives his essence from God, and possesses not 
 a single original or underived power.” 
 
 “God without man would be a nonentity.” 
 
 ‘Sin, sickness, and death are comprised in 
 human material belief, and belong not to the divine 
 Mind. They are without a real origin or existence. 
 ... If sin were understood as nothingness, it 
 would disappear. The less said or thought of sin, 
 sickness, or death, the better for mankind morally 
 and physically,” 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 97 
 
 “Evil has no reality.” 
 
 These statements are taken verbatim on the 
 Suras of Mrs, Eddy’s new Koran. ‘They are 
 not taken out of their logical context, and may, 
 therefore, be rightly considered as not distorting 
 the meaning which Mrs, Eddy had in her mind. 
 What that meaning was cannot, however, be easily 
 gathered, owing to the mutually destructive pro- 
 positions which the statements contain. It seems 
 clear, however, that Mrs, Eddy had two worlds 
 before her mind, a spiritual and a material. The 
 spiritual world to her is the only reality. The 
 material, including the physical nature of man, 
 does not proceed from God, for if it did it would 
 be perfect, and this it is not. It is outside God’s 
 consciousness, for God, Spirit, cannot, on Mrs. 
 Eddy’s showing, be associated with “ matter,” 
 which is “nothing” because it is not “spirit.” And 
 because the material world, including man’s physical 
 nature, is outside spirit and thus not created by 
 God, it must have, as Mrs. Eddy says of sin, sick- 
 ness, and death, no real origin or existence; that is, 
 as seems clear, it must have made itself. This 
 is a form of dualism savouring of the Manichean 
 heresy: God, spirit, on the one side, and matter, 
 evil, on the other; but Mrs. Eddy will have no 
 mingling of the one with the other. They stand 
 to each other as light and darkness. When the 
 light is present the darkness vanishes. 
 
 This absolute exclusion of the world of mortal 
 mind—that is, the material world and physical 
 
 H 
 
95 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 man—from any contact with God’s Spirit and the 
 Spiritual Creation raises serious difficulties. 
 
 If God, Spirit, communicates with man, who is 
 also spirit, by spiritual means alone, how can 
 His messages reach mankind otherwise than by 
 “spiritual perception” ? 
 
 How can Mrs. Eddy’s “ Divine Science ”—which 
 she understands to be the promised Comforter 
 (section 16)—make use of material means for its 
 propagation? The vibration of the air which occa- 
 sions sound, and is necessary for oral teaching, is 
 material. The book Sczence and Health is material, 
 made up of material paper, printer’s ink, and cloth 
 binding. The 12s. 6d. asked for the cheapest 
 edition of it is also material, whether expressed 
 in dollars or shillings. Mrs. Eddy as spirit, divested 
 of the five senses, would be much more perfect 
 than Mrs. Eddy burthened with “mortal mind,” 
 but then we know of no means by which Christian 
 Science could have been given to the world except 
 through “mortal mind.” She has had to employ 
 one or other of the five senses, and a strong 
 financial sense besides, to reach the thousands of 
 people whom she is supposed to influence to-day, 
 And if it were not for these things which she calls 
 “nothing ”—sickness, disease, and death—she 
 would have no adherents at all. No orthodox 
 doctors would be then needed, and no “ treatment” 
 by unlettered healers. Even Sczence and Health 
 would have nobody to appeal to. 
 
 But if “sickness” is “nothing,” is “health,” 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 99 
 
 which has many degrees, anything more? It is 
 a condition of the material body, and how could 
 it be produced by ignoring the existence of 
 other conditions of the material body—sickness 
 and disease? Both health and disease alike are, 
 as material affections, outside the orbit, and thus 
 beyond the influence, of the Spiritual Creation. 
 
 Mrs, Eddy interpreted the Bible by her divine 
 Science. Some of her theological conclusions by 
 the help of this guidance are furnished in Sctence 
 and FTealth, 
 
 Of the Blessed Trinity she says, “The theory of 
 three Persons in one God suggests polytheism, 
 rather than the one ever-present I AM.” 
 
 In regard to the Word mentioned by St. John, 
 she says, “The true Logos is demonstrably 
 Christian Science.” Mrs. Eddy did not suffer 
 from modesty in making claims for a supernatural 
 element in her teaching, but that the farrago called 
 Christian Science should be identified with Him 
 Who made all things, transcends any instance of 
 audacity recorded in history. 
 
 Of the Incarnation she writes, “Jesus was the 
 offspring of Mary’s self-conscious communion with 
 God. The Bethlehem Babe was the nearest ap- 
 proximation, since the record in Genesis, to the 
 science of Being, in which spirit makes man.” 
 Owing to “matevial belief entering in part Mary’s 
 spiritual conception of Jesus,” He had to endure 
 the struggles in Gethsemane. The lack of “entire 
 science in the advent of Jesus produced its own 
 
100 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 discord, and met its fate in death.” “Jesus was 
 not God’s Son in any other sense than every man 
 +s God’s Son. Had wisdom characterised all the 
 sayings of Jesus He would not have prophesied 
 His own death and thereby hastened or caused 
 it!” “The name Jesus Christ indicates a dual 
 personality.” Here she identifies her teaching 
 with an ancient heresy condemned over and over 
 again by the Church. 
 
 As to our Lord’s disciples she says, “ Jesus sent 
 forth seventy students at one time, but only eleven 
 left a desirable record.” Mrs. Eddy’s disciples 
 need “no intellectual proficiency,” “but sound 
 morals are most desirable.” As to Prayer she 
 says, “The ‘divine ear’ is not an auditorial nerve,” 
 whatever that may mean. “The danger,” she 
 adds, “from audible prayer is, that it may lead 
 us into temptation. Lips must be mute and 
 materialism silent.” 
 
 She does not seemingly believe in a Personal 
 God, for she says, “Clothing Deity with per- 
 sonality we limit the action of God to the finite 
 senses.” 
 
 As to the Lord’s Prayer, she says, “ Only as we 
 rise above all material consciousness and sin can 
 we reach the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual 
 consciousness which is indicated in the Lord's 
 Prayer, and instantaneously heals the sick.” Then 
 she gives a travesty of the Lord’s Prayer, which 
 would be regarded in a sane person as rank 
 blasphemy. 
 
 a tl 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY IOI 
 
 Speaking of the Blessed Sacrament Mrs. Eddy 
 says “the true sense is spiritually lost if the 
 sacrament is confined to the use of bread and 
 wine—this supper closed for ever Jesus’ ritualism, 
 or concessions to matter!” 
 
 Christ, according to Mrs, Eddy, did not die: 
 “ Jesus was merely fainting,” she says, “when pity- 
 ing friends took Him down from the cross. The 
 lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge 
 from His foes” (Faith and Works of Christian 
 Science, by Stephen Paget, London, 1909, p. 41). 
 There was consequently no Resurrection of our 
 Lord. 
 
 The Second Coming is thus described by Mrs. 
 Eddy. “The Second Appearing of Jesus is unques- 
 tionably the spiritual advent of the advancing 
 idea of God as in Christian Science.” As to the 
 coming of the Holy Ghost Mrs. Eddy asserts 
 “That influx of Divine Science which so illu- 
 minated the Pentecostal day is now repeating its 
 ancient history,’ and she goes on to say that the 
 promised Comforter is now represented by her 
 revelation, Divine Science—“ This Comforter,” 
 she says, “I understand to be Divine Science.” 
 
 The place for herself in this new creed is shadowed 
 forth by Mrs, Eddy in the following words: “ No 
 person can compass or fulfil the individual mission 
 of Jesus of Nazareth. No person can take the 
 place of the author of Sczence and Health, the dis- 
 coverer and founder of Christian Science. No 
 one else can drain the cup which I have drunk to 
 
IO2 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 the dregs as the discoverer and teacher of Christian 
 Science.” And as she makes “the advancing idea 
 of God in Christian Science” to be unquestionably 
 “the Second Appearing of Jesus,” her position is 
 clearly that of an instrument by which that Appear- 
 ing is to be brought about! “I should blush,” she 
 says, “to write of Sccence and Health with Key to 
 the Scriptures as I have, were it of human origin, 
 and I, apart from God, its author. But I was only 
 a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven in divine 
 metaphysics.” The light of revelation which she 
 received seemed, she says, to have a strange coin- 
 cidence or relationship with solar light. For, she 
 adds, “I could not write those notes after sun- 
 set.” 
 
 Enough has been extracted from Mrs, Eddy’s 
 writings to show that, whatever it is, it is not 
 Christian, and also abundant proof that it is not 
 Science in the dictionary sense of the word. How 
 then, we may well ask, did this farrago of un- 
 christian unscience come to be _ propagated. 
 Johanna Southcote had followers, we learn, 
 still living in our own time, and the teaching 
 of Joseph Smith is still accepted by the Mor- 
 mon community. The race of the credulous 
 will never become extinct, and the tribe of 
 those who fatten and batten upon credulity are 
 never lacking. Some one in that land of financial 
 exploitations had seen in Mrs. Eddy’s Christian 
 Science at an early date that “there was money 
 in it.” Each of her three husbands seemed to 
 
 an 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 103 
 
 have realised this, but none of them had the 
 financial ability of Mrs. Eddy. The last ought to 
 have had some vocation in this way for “he had 
 been a sewing-machine agent.” He became a 
 pedlar of her book, but he died, too soon, perhaps, 
 to fulfil Mrs. Eddy’s expectations. A post mortem 
 examination showed that he died of an extreme 
 valvular disease of the heart. The physician is 
 alleged (see Mr. Paget’s book already cited, 
 p. 74) to have shown Mrs, Eddy the heart, and 
 yet she still insisted that her husband had died 
 of “malicious mesmerism” or “arsenical poison- 
 ing mentally administered.” The circulation of 
 the book—containing in its present shape 214,000 
 words—began to grow, and as the cheapest 
 edition was sold at 12s. 6@., while the cost of pro- 
 duction could not have been more than one-twelfth 
 of this sum, there was a fine margin of profit. Every 
 neophyte was pledged, moreover, to circulate 
 it, and interesting advertisements were used to 
 impress the public of its value, not only for the 
 restoration of human health, but even for curing 
 the diseases of pet animals. Zhe Christian — 
 Science Fournal was one of the vehicles used for 
 these encouraging advertisements. In the number 
 for Sept., 1897, it is stated “a white Pekin duck, 
 unable to take a step, was given two treatments, 
 when it was cured.” Another cure, which was 
 quoted in the Daily Telegraph of August 31, 1907, 
 is related “of a little girl who read Science and 
 Health to a lame sparrow till it flew away,” and 
 
104 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Mr. Lyman Powell records, as stated by Mr. Paget 
 (op. cit.), a story of the treatment of a wilted india- 
 rubber plant. 
 
 It was, however, in advertising Auman cures that 
 the appeal for new clients was most eminently suc- 
 cessful. There is hardly a malady of which a cure has 
 not been advertised in the Christian Science Ffournal, 
 And it is in this advertising of the miraculous 
 cures of human diseases by Christian Science that 
 the propaganda is still chiefly maintained. 
 
 It is “wrong thinking,” as the author of a Plea 
 for Unbiased Investigation says, and not microbes 
 or other imaginary causes, that produce disease. 
 Therefore, all that is required to cure disease is 
 to set up in the patient’s mind “right thinking” ; 
 and the entire “treatment” of Christian Science 
 practitioners is to induce in the patient right 
 thoughts, that is, the thoughts given to the world 
 in Sctence and Health by Mrs. Eddy. “The hosts of 
 fEsculapeus”’ (sic), she says, “are flooding the world 
 with disease.” The recent meeting of the Inter- 
 national Medical Congress, representing these 
 hosts, must, to the Christian Scientist, seem a band 
 of assassins. Ah! if they could only realise, the 
 Christian Scientist might exclaim, the evil they are 
 causing by the exercise of their “mortal minds” 
 upon the cure of disease, and by investigating its 
 material causes, they would at once relinquish 
 their profession and follow the Divine Science of 
 Mrs. Eddy. 
 
 The wonderful record of the results of that 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 105 
 
 meeting must be very disheartening to the 
 Christian Science practitioner, putting off, as it 
 does, the millenium which they are trying to 
 bring about. Still there are other inducements 
 which prevent the Christian Scientist practitioner 
 from giving up in despair the work of convert- . 
 ing the world. The thing pays, and it pays like 
 any other nostrum, because it is “boomed.” The 
 testimonials in newspaper advertisements of cures 
 effected by this or that patent medicine sink into 
 insignificance before the array of cures continu- 
 ously announced in the Christian Science Fournal, 
 the Christian Sctence Sentinel, the Christian Science 
 Monttor, etc, not to speak of “nearly 5000 
 testimonies given every week in the Christian 
 Science Churches,” * The effect on poor credu- 
 lous sufferers of the announcement of these cures 
 must be great, and the consequent inflow of 
 dollars for the cause, a subject of much satisfaction. 
 The cures advertised are not in the main of 
 alleged serious diseases, and they do not include 
 many that would come under the head of surgery. 
 Indeed, Mrs. Eddy seems inclined to leave the 
 cure of the latter to “mortal mind.” “ Until the 
 advancing age,” she says, “admits the efficacy of 
 mind it is better to leave surgery and the adjust- 
 ment of broken bones and dislocations to the 
 fingers of the surgeon.” That is a pity. For if 
 “wrong thinking” were the cause, say, of a leg 
 
 * Plea for Unbiased Investigation of Christian Science, pr 
 {2I, 
 
106 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 being blown off by a shell, right thinking surely 
 ought to be efficacious in restoring it. Still, per- 
 haps, Mrs. Eddy was right, at least for the present, 
 in leaving such matters to the surgeon. 
 
 Mr. Stephen Paget* has put together two 
 hundred consecutive testimonies of healing from 
 the weekly journal, the Christian Science Sentinel, 
 April to August, 1908, Mr, Paget has also 
 annotated these cases. 
 
 Some of these cures are wonderful reading—and 
 one is inclined to despair of education if such 
 things can be really believed. The Bill dealing 
 with the feeble-minded cannot be passed too soon. 
 Here is one testimonial: “Mrs. W. testifies that 
 her child, six years old, had several attacks of 
 trouble with his neck, she read Sczence and Health 
 to him, and in less than ten minutes he said, 
 ‘My neck is all right now.’” This reminds one of 
 Lord Macaulay’s story of the prisoner who pre- 
 ferred the galleys to having Guicciardini’s History 
 read to him. No wonder the book ran to 400 
 editions. As each of these editions of this talis- 
 man probably consisted of 1000 copies at least, 
 and as the profit on each copy was somewhere 
 about IIs. 6d., the funds of Christian Science must 
 have increased from this source alone by something 
 approaching a quarter of a million pounds! 
 
 But powerful as are the remedial properties of 
 the mere reading of the book, the Christian Science 
 
 * Faith and Works of Christian Science, London, 1909, pp. 119 
 ét seq. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 107 
 
 practitioner resorts to “treatment,’ and that too 
 in a large number of instances “at a distance,” 
 Doctors have now to use motor cars, the Christian 
 Science practitioner has thus a decided advantage 
 over him, There are also, in some cases, cures 
 effected by Christian Science which the orthodox 
 physician might hesitate to attempt. Such was 
 that of Mrs. O., who “ for ten years studied ‘ mysti- 
 cism, occultism, and vedastic (? vedantic) philo- 
 sophy,’ and at the end of this time she felt ‘con- 
 fused, restless, impatient, irritable, and nervous.’ 
 Healed.” The only wonder in this case is that 
 Mrs. O. had sufficient intelligence left, after these 
 exhausting studies, to believe in Christian Science. 
 Perhaps her weakened mind was a necessary 
 antecedent to accepting the teaching. 
 
 The people who give these testimonials constitute | 
 a mysterious class. Most of them are women. It 
 would be interesting to ascertain their antecedents. 
 Feeble-mindedness seems evident in many cases, 
 The latest was the poor man who was under a 
 charge of manslaughter owing to the death of his 
 child, whose cure he had entrusted to the Christian 
 Science healers. All he could plead on behalf of 
 his trust was. that “God is good.” He was 
 mercifully acquitted. 
 
 Such cases when they come before the Law 
 Courts let in considerable light on the methods of 
 Christian Science. At the back of it there seem to 
 be sagacious financial controllers, who may be self- 
 deceived in their beliefs as to the value of 
 
108 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Christian Science, but there seems no self-deception 
 in their case in exploiting it financially. There 
 have been, and will perhaps always be, hallucina- 
 tions of the human mind, but this wild incoherent 
 conception of Mrs, Eddy seems to excel others 
 in fatuity. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 109 
 
 NiEiZoGHE AND» THE CULT OR STHE 
 SUPERMAN, A REVOLUTION IN 
 Paice 
 
 DISCUSSION has been confined in the previous 
 sections to certain modern forms of religion which 
 come into conflict with traditional Christianity. 
 Here we have to deal with a system which ex- 
 cludes Christianity altogether, and is largely taken 
 up with the denial of validity to its claims, and 
 with the denunciation of its ethics. It substitutes 
 the cult of Superman for the worship of God, and, 
 for the heaven of the Christian, a future paradise 
 here on earth, which will at length be reached by 
 purely human means. It would, then, appear at 
 first sight to be beyond the scope of this volume. 
 Nietzsche’s system, however, although largely 
 made up of negations, has a certain constructive 
 character. He aims at establishing a new cult, 
 which is to replace all the religious ideals and 
 ethical systems of the age. 
 
 It is a mighty venture, and one would naturally 
 like to know something of the man who was bold 
 enough to undertake it. A short biography of 
 Nietzsche will not, therefore, be out of place here. 
 
 Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the village of 
 Roécken, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, in 
 
IIo MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 the year 1844. His father was the pastor of the 
 place, and his grandfather and great grandfather 
 had also been pastors. Some indication of the 
 source of his future mental instability may, per- 
 haps, be traced to a family strain, for his father lost 
 his reason, dying shortly afterwards, when his son 
 Friedrich was some six years old. The widow 
 removed, thereupon, to the neighbouring town of 
 Naumburg, where Nietzsche, a few years later, 
 entered the Grammar School. At the age of four- 
 teen he removed thence to the somewhat celebrated 
 Public School of Pforta. Here he showed some 
 brilliancy in classics, but, as his leaving certificate 
 indicates, he was weak in mathematics. 
 
 From Pforta, he proceeded, in 1864, to the 
 University of Bonn, and, a little later, to that of 
 Leipsic. Professor Ritschl was among his teachers 
 there and took much interest in the youth, im- 
 planting in him an ardent love for Greek culture. 
 “Without Ritschl,’ says one of Nietzsche’s bio- 
 graphers,* “the sudden meteor-like official career 
 of Nietzsche would never have been possible.” 
 
 At Leipsic he became fascinated with the 
 writings of Schopenhaur, whose influence he dis- 
 plays in all his books. Zhe World as Will and 
 Idea revolutionised Nietzsche’s outlook on life, and 
 completed his renunciation of Christianity. 
 
 In 1869 he was elected to the chair of Classical 
 Philology at the University of Bale. It was here, 
 in the same year, he encountered Wagner, of whom 
 
 * Friedrich Nietesche, by M. A. Miigge. London, Jacks, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY III 
 
 he wrote to a friend in August, “I have found 
 a man who personifies to me as no one else does 
 that which Schopenhaur calls ‘genius,’ and who 
 is entirely pervaded with that wonderful heart- 
 stirring philosophy. Such an absolute idealism 
 prevails in him, such a deep and stirring humanism, 
 such a lofty seriousness of life that in his neigh- 
 bourhood I feel as near something divine.”* And 
 Mr. Miigge adds, Nietzsche called Wagner, in 1888, 
 a “clever rattlesnake, a typical decadent.” This is 
 but one instance of the capricious changes in his 
 friendships. Naturally a hero-worshipper, he lost, 
 in the isolating process of his thinking, all his 
 early ideals, his works becoming more and more 
 charged with strongly worded denunciations of 
 all modern men and things. 
 
 His first book, for which he could not at first 
 find a publisher, and which fell quite flat on its 
 publication, appeared in 1871, under the title of 
 Birth of Tragedy. It was a homage, as Mr, 
 Miigge says, paid to Wagner. Here he seems 
 to escape for a moment from the pessimism of 
 Schopenhaur, and finds in art that which recon- 
 ciles him to the world. “Art,” as Mr. Miigge 
 quotes, “supplies man with the necessary veil of 
 illusion which is required for action. For the true 
 knowledge as to the awfulness and absurdity of 
 existence kills action.” 
 
 His health broke down in 1875, and in the 
 following year he was invited to Bayreuth by 
 
 * Jbid, pp. 17, 18, 
 
Lie MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 Wagner. Everything at Bayreuth seemed to 
 jar upon him, and he left the place disenchanted 
 with art and metaphysics. He wrote several 
 books in the intervals between his phases of ill- 
 health, couching his teaching in the garb of 
 aphorisms, which at this time was his favourite 
 vehicle for giving his thoughts to the world. The 
 first volume of Auman, All-too-Human appeared 
 in 1878 and the remainder in 1880. A Socratic 
 influence is strongly manifested in the aphoristic 
 sayings of this work. 
 
 The Dawn of Day, published in 1831, showed 
 a further development. “It is only,” he says here, 
 “from the science of physiology and medicine 
 that we can borrow the foundation stones of new 
 ideals.” To which quotation Mr. Miigge pertinently 
 adds, “Here Nietzsche has become a pioneer of 
 Eugenics.” 
 
 At this time he began to be seriously in- 
 terested in the subject of “ Eternal Recurrence.” 
 Everything happens in recurring cycles, and there 
 is no goal. Heworked this out later, and although 
 it seemed to exclude all definite progress, he clung 
 to this explanation of the phenomena of the universe 
 to the last, and regarded his elaboration of the view 
 as a new discovery. He seemed not to be 
 troubled with the mechanical difficulty in making 
 the universe a reversible machine. 
 
 In the midst of his gloomy views of recurring 
 cycles without issue he gave to the world in 1882 
 a bright book called The Foyful Wisdom which, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY EIS 
 
 in the way of reaction, overflows with joy. His 
 great work, Thus spake Zarathustra, appeared in 
 the same year. Here he begins to see an inspir- 
 ing goal, and makes the sage the mouthpiece of 
 the new philosophy he offers to the world. The 
 blind, hopeless recurring cycles of monotony, 
 while they still colour his thought, are at the same 
 time issuing in a goal—a goal that can be 
 reached in the future—the Superman. “I teach 
 you the Superman. The Superman shall be the 
 meaning of the book.” Buoyed up by this, to 
 him, inspiring ideal, he looked for an immediate 
 appreciation—but the book fell quite flat. 
 
 Beyond Good and Evil, which was to be a 
 prelude to the Philosophy of the Future, was pub- 
 lished in 1886, at his own expense, for he could 
 not get a publisher to undertake it, 
 
 His magnum opus, which was to be called The 
 Will to Power, never took a final shape. The 
 notes he had collected for it fill two volumes of 
 S00 pages in the English edition. 
 
 It was to substitute, as Mr. Miigge puts it, 
 “Lhe Will to Power for the Struggle for Existence ; 
 to fight Socialism (which Nietzsche calls ‘The 
 tyranny of the meanest and most brainless’); to 
 refute Christianity ; to attack the English philo- 
 sophers—‘that blockhead John Stuart Mill? and 
 ‘Herbert Spencer’s tea-grocer’s philosophy,’ and 
 to prepare the way for the Superman.” The first 
 part, to which he gave the chapter-heading, The 
 Anti-Christ, was put into shape in 1888. In 
 
 I 
 
II4 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 January of the next year his brain gave way: he 
 went mad, and never recovered, his death taking 
 place at Weimar in August, 1900. 
 
 The spirit of abnormal self-assertion, which 
 alienists tell us is a premonitory symptom of 
 insanity, dogged him throughout his sane years, 
 and persisted even in the hallucinations of his 
 madness. “I am God,” which he repeated at 
 times, was among the illusions of his last years. 
 
 This short summary of Nietzsche’s life throws a 
 sidelight on the origin and drift of his philosophy, 
 which is now to be examined. This examination 
 will follow the.chronological development of his 
 thoughts. 
 
 “While a boy of thirteen,” Nietzsche writes,* 
 “the problem of the origin of evil haunted me. 
 _.. As regards my solution of the problem, well, 
 I gave, as is but fair, God the honour, and made 
 Him Father of Evil. A little historical and philo- 
 logical schooling... changed my problem in a 
 very short time into that other one: in what cir- 
 cumstances and conditions did man invent the 
 valuations of good and evil ?” 
 
 “Good” and “evil,’ to the ordinary person, 
 seem to be fixed values, not to be questioned. 
 Nietzsche put aside all current views, and started 
 quite independently on the solution of the question. 
 The terms “good” and “evil,” he tells us, are 
 merely a means to the acquisition of power. 
 
 “ Zarathustra found no greater power on earth 
 
 * Introduction to Zhe Genealogy of Morals, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY I15 
 
 than good and evil.” “No people could live with- 
 out first valuing: if a people will maintain itself, 
 however, it must not value as its neighbour 
 values,” * 
 
 Good and evil have not, therefore, fixed and 
 permanent values. He found the base of his view, 
 that they are relative and shifting terms, in the 
 Greek writer Theognis. This Pnthor used the words 
 “good” and “bad” as synonymous with “ aristo- 
 cratic” and “plebeian.’ “Bad” was what was 
 dangerous to the aristocratic power, “good” was 
 what served to maintain it, 
 
 The whole question of right and wrong rests, 
 according to Nietzsche, upon values. In deter- 
 mining values he eliminates those things which in 
 his opinion have none. 
 
 Here are some of the values he eliminates. The 
 gods are dead, therefore there are no sanctions 
 external to this world, no values. The “clumsy 
 solution of things called gods,” he dismisses, for, 
 to him, the more important consideration of physi- 
 ology. It is “upon nutrition, a question upon 
 which the ‘salvation of humanity’ depends to a 
 greater degree,” he concentrates his attention. 
 Here he agrees with Herbert Spencer’s dictum, 
 “To be a good animal is the first requisite to 
 success in life.’ That is a real value. 
 
 Has the soul or “self” a value? “Body am I 
 entirely,” he says, “and nothing more—self, it 
 dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.” So soul is 
 
 * Zarathustra, pp. 63, 65. 
 
116 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 eliminated from values. Schopenhauer is more or 
 less visible in all that Nietzsche wrote, but Schopen- 
 hauer carried his pessimism further, and would 
 consider life itself as of questionable value. 
 
 Free will, Nietzsche eliminates, as a figment. “It 
 is,” he says, “the extravagant pride of man, this 
 desire for freedom of the will, this desire to bear the 
 entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions 
 oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, 
 chance and society therefrom. No one is re- 
 sponsible for the fact that he is constituted as 
 he is,” * 
 
 The universe from a moral point of view has no 
 values. It is wmoral, “ There are,” he says, “no 
 moral phenomena, there is merely a moral interpre- 
 tation of phenomena.” Good and bad are terms that 
 have a meaning only in respect of man. There is 
 no goal in the drift of the universe. “Tf it had 
 a goal that goal would,” he says, “have been 
 reached by now. If any sort of unforeseen final 
 state existed, that state also would have been 
 reached. The universe is a monster of energy 
 without beginning or end.” As it consists of a 
 definite number of centres of energy it must go 
 through a calculable number of permutations and 
 combinations. “At some time or other every 
 possible combination must once have been realised ; 
 not only this, but it must have been realised an 
 infinite number of times: hence, he says, “a 
 circular movement of absolutely identical series is 
 
 * Quoted from Mr, Migge. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 117 
 
 thus demonstrated.” Thus the processes of Nature 
 are to Nietzsche merely unprogressive and recur- 
 ring cycles of events. Any value arising from 
 its consideration in a moral sense is therefore 
 void, 
 
 Having thus dismissed God, the soul, the free- 
 dom of the will, and any teleological significance 
 in Nature from his considerations, Nietzsche pro- 
 ceeds to the discussion of the genesis of morals. 
 There is for him no moral sense. Pleasure and 
 pain are not factors in producing the ideas of good 
 and evil. Herbert Spencer’s view as to the genesis 
 of the notions of right and wrong, and of conscience, 
 he rejects in the main. Spencer thought that 
 moral ideas took shape in the evolution of the 
 community life. A state of internecine strife, 
 occasioned by each individual desiring to possess 
 what he longs for, without consideration of others, 
 could not continue. The community would soon 
 disintegrate. There is, therefore, a necessity of 
 concession on the part of the individual to the will 
 of the majority. The will of the individual is 
 restrained from overt action by fear of conse- 
 quence. Fear and custom, therefore, give origin 
 to the idea of what is permissible and what is 
 forbidden. The tribal will overrides that of the 
 individual, and thus generates a tribunal of right 
 and wrong, a conscience. 
 
 Nietzsche accepts this in a measure, but sub- 
 stitutes for the will of the whole community that 
 of the strong. The community, thus divided into 
 
118 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 the strong and the weak, has a twofold morality, 
 that of the strong and that of the weak. The 
 strong, the “masters,” regard and denominate as 
 “good” all that makes for their growth in power, 
 and as “evil” all that is opposed to it. The weak, the 
 helots, naturally regard the “good” of the masters 
 as “bad,” and wice versd. Both master and man 
 have to come at length to an accommodation in 
 order that they may live together at all. Still the 
 respective moral values remain. There is the 
 master morality and the slave morality. The 
 lion’s “ good” is still the antelope’s “ evil,” and the 
 antelope’s “good” the lion’s “ evil.” The mutual 
 antagonisms are kept under; hypocrisy covers 
 them up. This has its counterpart in the “ mimi- 
 cry” of the animal world. The mimicry of pro- 
 tection, and the assumption of harmlessness in the 
 beast of prey. The wolf wears sheep's clothing, 
 and the ass puts on the /zon’s skin. 
 
 It is not “the struggle for existence,” “the will 
 to live,” which has brought this state of things 
 about, according to Nietzsche. It is “the will to 
 power.” That is the keystone of Nietzsche's 
 whole fabric. Everything is measured by it, all 
 progress is conditioned by it. “The criterion 
 of truth lies,” he says, “in the enhancement 
 of the feeling of power.” This passion for power 
 is at the base of all living action. ‘“ Wherever I 
 found a living thing,” he says, “ there found I the 
 will to power.” And it is to this passion that 
 Nietzsche looks for the progress of the race, at least 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY II19 
 
 for that of the future leaders of the race. “It is 
 the earthquake which breaketh and upbreaketh 
 all that is rotten and hollow.” It must not be 
 impeded, however, by slave morality. It is not 
 to be restrained by any considerations of pzty. 
 Christian ethics stands in its way and Christian 
 ethics must go. It is the great enemy of progress, 
 it is that which hindereth the coming of the 
 highest, the Superman. ‘Thou shall not kill, thou 
 shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, 
 thou shalt not covet—these prohibitions with their 
 extension by Christianity into the sphere of wish 
 —must not be allowed to arrest the progress of 
 the leaders of humanity towards the goal—the 
 Superman, the Anti-Christ ! 
 
 Christianity was, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a plea for 
 degeneracy—degeneracy which is worse than any 
 vice. It is the purveyor of a slave morality. It 
 regards the poor, the sick, the weak, the wretched, 
 the waifs and strays of humanity, as subjects of 
 its special care. It makes pity and compassion 
 divine. It turns men’s eyes away from this world 
 to an idealistic region beyond—écrasez Pinfame, 
 In Christian values, Nietzsche read nihilism, de- 
 cadence, degeneration, and death. Christian 
 morality, according to him, favoured the multipli- 
 cation of the least desirable upon earth, and 
 he condemned it root and branch. 
 
 “© my brethren,” he says, “ with whom lieth the 
 greatest danger to the whole human future goa it 
 not with the good and the just? 
 
120 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 “Break up, break up, I pray you, the good and 
 the just.” 
 
 This condemnation of Christianity Nietzsche 
 regarded as his greatest service to mankind. He 
 came, he says, in the nick of time. 
 
 “Tt is time for man to fix his goal.” And, 
 although the physical universe offered to him no 
 goal, he invented one. He fixed it in the Super- 
 man. “ Dead are all Gods!” Nietzsche exclaims, 
 “now we will that Superman live. * The concept 
 of the Superman involves not only the reversal of 
 all current morality, but a new view as to the mean- 
 ing of life. Herbert Spencer had defined life as 
 “the continuous adjustment of internal relations 
 to external relations.’ Nietzsche’s definition is 
 “appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange 
 and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its 
 own forms, incorporation, and, at least, putting it 
 mildly, exploitation.” ¢ Christianity assumed from 
 the start that these undesirable things could be 
 overcome ; that God was working in the world to 
 effect such a conquest. ‘“God’s in His heaven,” 
 said Browning, “all’s right with the world ”—but 
 to Nietzsche all is wrong. He _ substitutes for 
 Darwin’s “struggle for existence” and “natural 
 selection,” something similar to what Bergson calls 
 “the creative impulse of life,” which makes environ- 
 ment and natural conditions subservient to it, 
 Darwin, Nietzsche contended, had tacitly admitted 
 
 * Zarathustra, p. Ot. 
 t Beyond Good and Evil, p, 226. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 121 
 
 the subserviency of environment when he said 
 “there are two factors, namely, the nature of the 
 organism, and the nature of the conditions. The 
 former seems to be much the more important.” 
 Bergson believes that in the “creative impulse of 
 life” man is ever transcending himself, producing 
 something greater, but that greater is ot the 
 monster Superman, of the earth earthy, but a 
 higher spiritual type. Nietzsche will have nothing 
 to do with spiritual values. He has cast meta- 
 physics aside, together with all prevailing values, 
 substituting for them the exaltation of brutal 
 strength and self-assertion. 
 
 The Anti-Christ is the ideal. There is something 
 pathetic in the irony of Nietzsche’s position. He, 
 the valetudinarian, with a hereditary unbalanced 
 brain, endeavours to set up an idol which reflects 
 nothing of his own physical nature. We admire 
 most in others, it is said, what we lack ourselves. 
 So it was with Nietzsche, and his glaring exal- 
 tation of his own importance, the premonitory 
 symptom of mania, gave the lead to his task of 
 astounding the world by his new discovery of the 
 Superman. Vanity means emptiness, and he would 
 make it the main characteristic of his ideal man. 
 One encounters advertisements nowadays, offering 
 to teach young men how to succeed in life. The 
 method is by self-assertion. ‘ Believe in yourself.” 
 “You can conquer and win if you have the will.” 
 This is the teaching of the charlatan who accumu- 
 lates dollars by putting the doctrine of Nietzsche 
 
ira MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 to a practical issue. We have read the humorous 
 account of the encounter between the two self- 
 assertives who had been prepared for the battle 
 of life by the astute advertiser. Greek meeting 
 Greek was nothing in comparison with this con- 
 flict, and we may gather from it what the world 
 would be as an arena for the contests, wherein 
 Superman endeavoured to “exploit ” his fellow 
 Superman, A war of giants it would be, ending, 
 perhaps, in the melancholy tragedy of the Kil- 
 kenny cats. 
 
 What was the extent of the field of induction 
 upon which Nietzsche built up his fancy-fabric of 
 Superman, and from which he arrived at his trans- 
 valuing of all human ideas of worth? The position, 
 as he found it in Theognis, of the aristocrat and 
 - the helot among the Greeks, gave him the note for 
 his elaborate harmonies of life. Everything had to 
 be squared with that view. 
 
 The uncertainty of all values but those which 
 contribute to power, this is his first gleaning from 
 inductive experience. There is no moral sense 
 because the value it attaches to actions varies 
 geographically. 
 
 But is this conclusion warranted by the facts? 
 He might with equal justice say there is no seeing 
 eye because its objects vary in different parts of 
 the world, The sense is different from the odject 
 of it, and according to Nietzsche’s own showing, 
 the sense is not generated by the object. In the 
 words of Darwin, which he approves, the nature of 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 123 
 
 the organism is more important than the nature of 
 the conditions. very one has the sense of right 
 and wrong. It is part of man’s equipment efore 
 he exercises it. The exercising of it may lead to 
 varying verdicts, but this does not lead to a denial 
 of its existence. It can be educated, and Nietzsche 
 must believe in this, for otherwise, one would like 
 to ask, to what other sense does he appeal, when he 
 presents to humanity for approval his Superman? 
 The universality of the verdicts of this moral sense, 
 against which he declaims, furnishes a higher 
 sanction than his “transcended values.” Besides 
 from his own belief in “ determinism,” the develop- 
 ment of these values is not accidental but the zz- 
 evitable outcome of things. According to “ deter- 
 minism” the existence of a thing is its sanction. 
 There is no distinction, according to determinism, 
 between what zs and what ought to be. 
 
 It may be retorted that Nietzsche’s concept of 
 the Superman has thus its sanction, for z¢ evists. 
 But although disease exists it does not mean 
 that it is to be preferred to health. This fancy 
 of Nietzsche’s has no higher sanction than 
 the wild dreams of the opium smoker, and has 
 probably as little chance of being adopted by 
 sane men. Abnormal things, it is true, may be 
 produced in the processes of Nature and may 
 become starting-points for fresh developments, 
 The theory of “ mutations,’ in the later forms of 
 the evolutionary hypothesis, implies that individual 
 departures from the norm may become the origins 
 
124 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 of new species. Nietzsche may have thus regarded 
 himself as a “ mutation,” but whence did he get his 
 inspiration to enable him to prophesy the coming 
 of that tremendous mutation Superman? He cer- 
 tainly did not consider that the Superman would 
 be a development of thingsasthey are. An earth- 
 quake, a cataclysm, would be required, according 
 to him, to upset and revolutionise human values, 
 before the process of developing Superman could 
 come into operation. 
 
 But would a change in human values—the 
 earthquake which was to prepare the way of the 
 Superman—be efficient for the purpose. Changes 
 of views on morals, or on anything, do not touch 
 the factors of physical evolution. “ The tendency 
 of recent work on genetics,” Professor Bateson said 
 at the recent meeting of the International Medical 
 Congress, “is thus more and more to exhibit the 
 definiteness and fixity of the laws of descent... . 
 Whatever influences may be brought to bear by 
 hygiene or by education, the ultimate decision 
 rests with the germcells. Evolutionary change is 
 effected not so much by gradual transformations of 
 masses under ameliorations of detrimental condi- 
 tions, but in the main by the occurrence of in- 
 dividual and sporadic variations.’ Now, whatever 
 Nietzsche might be able to do in changing moral 
 views, the production of “individual and sporadic 
 variations” is beyond his powers, and beyond the 
 sphere of his contemplated productions. If he 
 succeeded in reforming human morals after his 
 
PORVURAU Lun ACe Gili MAN TTY Ue 
 
 standard, he might, or he might not, provide a 
 congenial atmosphere for the new human types 
 which Nature may still have in her womb. It 
 would be more prudent, however, to reserve our 
 judgment on the value of the new morals until the 
 higher type of man appears—for the new morals 
 cannot produce him. 
 
 In the meantime it is wise to hold fast by what 
 Nietzsche admits to be the prevatling values of the 
 age. They work, and from a pragmatic point of 
 view that is sanction enough. Would the adoption 
 of Nietzsche’s values work? Imagine a world in 
 which pity was regarded as a vice, in which hate 
 and injury predominated over love and well-doing, 
 in which war was to be the normal state of things, 
 and “appropriation” the rule! One can realise 
 the result. True, Nietzsche does not expect every 
 one to become eventually a Superman. He does 
 not address himself to the democracy, which he 
 holds in profound contempt, and for which, in their 
 despicable conditions, current morality is good 
 enough. It is to the strong, who exploit the 
 democracy, he appeals. These are they who, when 
 they reach the goal, will by largesse and noble 
 deeds benefit the herd ; but the herd will be always 
 with us, and the superman shall rule them. 
 
 He would prevent any cross-breeding by mésal/i- 
 ances of the aristocratic class with the insignificant 
 and miserable slave-caste. “ Every elevation of the 
 type-man,” Nietzsche says, “has hitherto been the 
 work of an aristocratic society, and so it will 
 
126 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 always be—a society believing in a long scale of 
 gradations of rank and differences of worth among 
 human beings, and requiring slavery in some form 
 or other.” * “Elevation of a type by human 
 means” runs up, as Professor Bateson shows, 
 against “recent work on genetics.” The germ 
 cells control the type. It is not to be wondered 
 at, therefore, that Nietzsche clung to the La- 
 marckian hypothesis and rejected Darwinism, 
 except where it fell in with his scheme. The Super- 
 man cannot be generated by any moral hygiene. 
 He must be Nature’s product, and not that of the 
 Nietzschean philosophy and ethics. 
 
 The question of Eugenics is in the air, and much 
 credit has been given to Nietzsche for his share 
 in emphasising the necessity of considering it in 
 all schemes for social progress, The word “ Eu- 
 genics,” however, does not occur in the writings of 
 Nietzsche, and it was Sir Francis Galton, and not 
 he, who originated the idea underlying the name, 
 Nietzsche had read in 1884 Sir Francis’s book 
 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 
 whence he doubtless borrowed the idea. Sir Francis 
 Galton had said that “ Eugenics must be introduced 
 into the national conscience like a new religion. 
 It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox 
 religious tenet of the future. I see no impossibility 
 in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among 
 mankind” (Jnguiries into Human Faculty). And 
 Dr. Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s, is also fully 
 
 * Beyond Good and Evil, p. 223. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 127 
 
 convinced of the compatibility of Eugenics with 
 religion as presented in the doctrines of Christianity. 
 
 To Nietzsche, as we have seen, the enemy of 
 all progress, on the other hand, is Christianity. 
 He exhausts the vocabulary of vituperation in 
 denouncing it. “I condemn Christianity,” he says,* 
 “and confront it with the most terrible accusation 
 that a man has ever had in his mouth. To my 
 mind it is the greatest of all conceivable corrup- 
 tions. I call Christianity the one great curse, the 
 one enormous and innermost perversion, the one 
 great instinct of revenge, for which no means are 
 too venomous, too underhand, too underground, 
 and too petty—I call it the one immortal blemish 
 of mankind.” Why does he thus stigmatise it? 
 Because it has pity for the weak and the down- 
 trodden. Because, in his mind, “ Christianity is the 
 reverse of the principle of selection.” Because itis 
 the advocate of what he calls “slave morality.” 
 Anarchism and Socialism, he contends, are the 
 fruits of this Christian morality. Then with regard 
 to the “other-worldism” of Christianity, he says, 
 “The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let 
 your will say: the superman sia// be the meaning 
 of the earth! I conjure you, my brethren, remain 
 true to the earth, and believe not those who speak 
 unto you of super-earthy hopes! Poisoners are 
 they, whether they know it or not.’f Oh, the 
 irony of it! The secular Socialist—the bugbear 
 
 * Quoted by Mr. Miigge, Friedrich Nielssche, p. 66. 
 t ldid., p. 69. 
 
128 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 whom Nietzsche despises with all his soul—has 
 obeyed his exhortation in being ¢rue to the earth, 
 and in discarding saper-earthy hopes ! 
 
 But we have to answer /zs charges against 
 Christianity. Does pity, does care of the weak 
 and oppressed, does love of your neighbour, does 
 belief in a spiritual world beyond the grave, mili- 
 tate against the progress of humanity? The 
 answer will depend upon the view we entertain 
 of man. If vigour of body and “will to power” 
 alone constitute the highest human characteristics, 
 then Nietzsche is right. But has any thoughtful 
 analysis of human endowments ever come to this 
 conclusion? “What a piece of work is man! 
 How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! 
 ... In apprehension how like a God!” But 
 Shakespeare, in Nietzsche’s eyes, which had no 
 reverence for any existing Awman greatness, was 
 “that marvellous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis 
 of taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the 
 circle of A<schylus would have half killed himself 
 with laughter or irritation.” 
 
 “Ts not the life more than the food,” said a 
 greater than Shakespeare. Is not the thinking 
 something within man more than the earth, to 
 which Nietzsche charges us “to be true.” And 
 has not this thinking self an outlook with a wider 
 horizon than that limited by space and time, an 
 ideal that no Superman, though he had the strength 
 of a prize-fighter and the ruthless thirst for power 
 of a Napoleon, can ever satisfy, 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 129 
 
 Christ’ on the cross—naked, bereft of bodily 
 vigour, fainting, forsaken; there is the refuge in 
 thought for all who have failed to find anything 
 on earth to satisfy their highest ideals. Tyere, 
 lifted up throughout the ages, He draws the best 
 in every man to Him. 
 
 There, on the other hand, is the Superman—the 
 Anti-Christ—away in the distant and uncertain 
 future, depending for his development on biological 
 principles which have been proved inoperative ; 
 and, even if he could be developed by human aids, 
 a monster of ruthlessness and self-assertion—zhere 
 is Nietzsche’s ideal for whom you are to sacrifice 
 yourself to-day, sacrifice your love of all else 
 besides, “ Thus demandeth,” Nietzsche says, 
 “my great love to the remotest ones: be not con- 
 siderate of thy neighbour! Man is something that 
 must be surpassed.” 
 
 Eugenics, it is true, must from even a Christian 
 point of view have a goal, and man surpassing 
 present man must be its aim, and degeneracy of race 
 that which must be avoided. But what obstacle 
 does Christianity present to the realisation of this 
 aim? Is Christian pity a factor in producing de- 
 generacy? Pity, like every good thing, can be 
 abused, and Nietzsche saw its abuses, In his 
 view it made the weak the ideal, and thus lowered 
 the standard of values. But does pity do this? 
 It is true that it develops in some minds a form 
 of hysteria manifesting itself in a supersensitiveness 
 to every kind of pain, as if pain were the greatest 
 
 K 
 
130 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 evil in the world. We have already pointed out, 
 however, some of the beneficent aspects of pain, 
 and if we had a wider experience we should 
 probably realise more fully the benevolent part it 
 plays in all human affairs. Has it not, moreover, 
 been consecrated for ever by Him Who drank the 
 cup of pain to its very dregs? It is the hysterical 
 shrinking from pain, and wot pity, that marks 
 degeneracy. Pity is a necessary element in human 
 progress, even in the development proposed by 
 Eugenics? A world without pity would soon come 
 to an end. If a mother’s pity were not aroused, 
 would she sacrifice her own comfort for her weak 
 infant? All the world of men and women have 
 been at one time weak and helpless infants, and 
 depending on pity for their weakness, whether they 
 are to be helped to grow up at all. Even the 
 future Superman, with his “will to power,” will 
 have, as a powerless infant, to appeal to some one’s 
 pity to bring him up. 
 
 Is it not owing to pity, too—pity over the lot of 
 the unfortunate in life’s race—that recent legislation 
 has endeavoured to improve the hygienic con- 
 ditions of the people, and to spread knowledge of 
 the laws of Nature—necessities, both of them, to 
 human progress ? 
 
 Mr. A, M. Ludovici, who is the special pleader 
 in this country for Nietzsche’s transcended values, 
 feels a difficulty at Nietzsche’s denunciations of 
 pity. He quotes Nietzsche to show that he did 
 not deny absolutely all value to pity. “A master 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY at 
 
 by nature, when such a man has sympathy, well! 
 that sympathy has value! But of what account is 
 the sympathy of those who suffer, or of those even 
 who preach sympathy!” * But sympathy means 
 “suffering wth” a person, and consequently he 
 who suffers not cannot sympathise, The “master 
 by nature” does not suffer. 
 
 “Ah, where in the world,” says Nietzsche, “ have 
 there been greater follies than with the pitiful?” 
 “Myself,” he adds, “I would sacrifice to my design, 
 and my neighbour as well—such is the language 
 of creators, All creators, however, are hard.” t 
 
 “Weakness” with Nietzsche has no double 
 meaning ; he denounces it on all occasions. It is 
 “botched” work, and ought to be stamped out. 
 It is Christianity that maintains and perpetuates 
 it. But if there were no weakness could the strong 
 man, on Niectzsche’s own hypothesis, win? His 
 coming to the top presupposes, as a necessity, the 
 existence of the weak. Take away the weak, and 
 how could the superman exploit humanity? The 
 physically weak, moreover, may be, and often are, 
 mentally strong. Nietzsche himself would not call 
 his own mental qualities weak, and yet physically 
 he was “botched” by ill-health, and by the pre- 
 monitory symptoms of mania. 
 
 Recent investigations of the laws of heredity also 
 
 * Nietzsche, by Anthony M. Ludovici: Constable and Co., 
 London, 1912, p. 89. Quotation from Beyond Good and Evil, 
 Pp. 257. 
 
 t Zarathustra, pp. 104, 105, 
 
132 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 show, as we have said, that the germ cells, and not 
 external influences, determine the future of the race. 
 It has been shown even that drunken parents, 
 “botched” humanity, may have normally healthy 
 children. The weak find a place, in fact, in Nature’s 
 plan. They are set over against the strong as a foil. 
 It is only by comparison that we know the better 
 from the worse—it is only by realising the nature of 
 the worse that we can attain the better. Eugenics 
 would have no meaning if there were nothing that 
 needed development. Christianity, the greatest of 
 all developers, sees the good in every one, sees it, 
 and aims at promoting its further growth—not at 
 sweeping the weak off the face of the earth. It is 
 this principle in Christianity that gives it a hold 
 upon humanity. “All creators are hard,” says 
 Nietzsche, “and their rule severe.” The yoke of 
 Christ, on the contrary, is easy. And yet Christ, 
 the meek, is more severe than Nietzsche’s super- 
 man upon all that mars real human progress—upon 
 aims lower than the highest, upon moral cowardice, 
 upon hypocrisy, upon injustice. The cardinal moral 
 virtues, prudence (or foresight), justice, fortitude, 
 temperance, have been consecrated by Christian 
 teaching from its origin. Are these s/ave values, and 
 calculated to promote a slave race? Are the three 
 intellectual virtues—always upheld by the Church 
 —wisdom, knowledge, intelligence, opposed to 
 high ideals? Are the seven capital sins, pride, 
 covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, and sloth, 
 conducive to producing a higher type of humanity ? 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 133 
 
 Nietzsche includes, it is true, self-assertion and 
 ‘appropriation,’ among his superman’s virtues, 
 and would approve of some of the other capital 
 sins on occasions; but human nature—not a slave 
 morality—is against him. Would it be better for 
 humanity if the prohibitions in the six command- 
 ments that bear upon duty to our neighbour were 
 removed? Murder and theft, covetousness and 
 lying could have no sanction in any society that 
 means to maintain itself. They might help in 
 the development of the Superman, according to 
 Nietzsche ; but what society would give free play 
 to such factors in hope of the development of a 
 higher type of humanity ? 
 
 A careful student of Nietzsche will no doubt 
 find that he points out many real abuses, many 
 obstacles to true progress, and from this point of 
 view his criticisms on the existing state of things, 
 and his consequent contributions to progress, are 
 valuable. It will be clear, however, at the same time, 
 that his views on humanity in general, and on the 
 Christian religion in particular, are all distorted 
 by his extravagantly self-assertive outlook. He 
 has seen Christianity in a caricature of the real 
 thing. An hysterical sensitiveness to pain, as 
 evinced in the vivisection controversy, a morbid 
 compassion, of which the undesirable is the object, 
 as shown in the opposition to hygienic restrictions, 
 a weakness of will, displayed in the love of ease and 
 of freedom from danger, these are singled out by 
 Nietzsche for his scathing denunciation, But these 
 
134 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 are not Christian. Christianity is something more 
 robust than the pale, anemic thing he would 
 make it. It has within it a divine incentive, driving 
 it to war to the death against all evil—all that 
 stunts the growth of true humanity. That incen- 
 tive has made it powerful in the past to overthrow 
 the mightiest of mighty monarchies, which were 
 the real enslavers of the world. In the future, if 
 the self-asserting Superman—who, like Milton’s 
 Satan, exclaims, “Evil, be thou my good”—be 
 ever produced, he also will be obliged to cry out, 
 with one of his prototypes, “O Galilean, Thou hast 
 conquered,” 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 135 
 
 SECULARISM AND RATIONALISM 
 
 SECULARISM is a mode of regarding human affairs 
 which at first sight would seem to be beyond the 
 scope of a work dealing with modern substitutes 
 for traditional religion. Secularism not only does 
 not present itself as a religion at all, but it is 
 a negation of all religions. It accepts the two 
 fundamental principles—which in the gospel of 
 Nietzsche’s Superman remove every sanction for 
 religious belief—“ the gods are dead,” and “the aim 
 of human life is to be true to the earth” and to dis- 
 credit all appeals to supermundane values. These 
 foundation principles being accepted, secularism 
 has no base for religion. Still its adherents would 
 regard it all the same to have a claim upon the 
 suffrages of mankind as a counter-ideal to that 
 presented by Christianity. As a substitute for all 
 religious ideals, secularism may, therefore, properly 
 claim a place for treatment here. 
 
 Secularism rests on rationalism. A rational 
 interpretation of man’s place in nature excludes, it 
 is contended, all beliefs characteristic of what 
 secularists call other-worldism. Science—that is, 
 rationally acquired knowledge—has, from the point 
 of view of the secularist, no room for religion, and 
 
136 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 science to him is the sole and sufficient guide for 
 human belief and conduct. 
 
 The business of science, roughly, is the study of 
 the phenomena of nature with the view of ameli- 
 orating man’s lot upon this earth. No sensible 
 person would deny that there is here an all- 
 sufficient scope for scientific investigation. The 
 real benefit of mankind—that is the goal at which 
 it aims, or ought to aim. Its triumphs in this field 
 have been so great that no one is now inclined to 
 dispute its well-considered verdicts on the subjects 
 of its investigations. “Nature” furnishes the wide 
 area for its methodical explorations. 
 
 But what is the field embraced under this name 
 of “nature”? A little thought shows that 
 “nature” is not something purely external to 
 man—something of which he is a merely passive 
 spectator ; something which would possess all the 
 features we ascribe to it in the absence of the 
 observing mind. It is man’s outlook on something 
 not himself; man’s outlook, conditioned and 
 coloured by his faculties. Nature is not the szmple 
 thing that the casual thinker considers it. It isa 
 complex whole made up of the object of thought— 
 an object which is transformed in the process of 
 observation—and the thinking subject itself. 
 
 Thus the field of scientific study is not an 
 assumed external and independent world, extended 
 in time and space, but the world as presented 
 in human consciousness—as seen by the human 
 observer himself. A science that neglected the 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 137 
 
 study of human consciousness in order to explore 
 an external world assumed to be independent of 
 that consciousness, would be a false science. 
 
 But modern scienceis not of this nature. It has 
 come to regard the study of mind as a proper 
 subject of scientific investigation, and Psychology 
 is now admitted as a department of science at the 
 meetings of the British Association. The President 
 of that Association has just shown us in his Birming- 
 ham Address how far apart modern science is from 
 the “ Rationalists’”’ standpoint. 
 
 It is in the sphere of Psychology that religion 
 finds a rational basis. Once we recognise the reality 
 of psychological facts the whole drama of human 
 history assumes a new import. We begin then 
 to see that human experience has been continuously 
 rationalised more and more into harmony with 
 human ideals. 
 
 The appearance of a dead chief in the dream 
 of the savage may have borne in upon him 
 the conviction that personality survives death, 
 and may have thus become a first step in the 
 genesis of belief in gods and immortality. His 
 fear lest the dream-survival might still have power 
 to injure him, may naturally have led to efforts to 
 propitiate it. But this process of thinking and acting 
 arose not from the odyect of it, but from the innate 
 aptness of the mind for such impressions. Delusive 
 as the inferences are to us, they were in consonance 
 with the constitution of the human mind of the 
 time, and were steps in a true evolution, 
 
138 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 In the fight of early man with his antagonistic 
 environment, terror must frequently have beset him 
 —fears of living foes, fears based on his belief in 
 invisible inimical forces—this perhaps gave origin 
 to his concepts of deities and demons, and to the 
 idea that they might be propitiated. Fear alone 
 was not, however, the factor in this step in religious 
 progress—for if this had been the case, it would 
 never have been rationalised into something higher, 
 Fear led to the feeling of need for a helper, a 
 Divine Helper to exorcise his terror, and to save 
 him from the ruthless natural powers of his world. 
 The actual facts of his experience would not, zaken 
 alone, have led to this religious outlook of the 
 savage. There must have been something within 
 him to which these facts appealed, and which gave 
 to them a bearing. To designate it as a re/zgious 
 sense is most in keeping with the experience of its 
 working throughout the ages, 
 
 The physical senses limit perception to material 
 things. This “religious sense” was throughout the 
 ages feeling after something beyond them. The 
 events that stirred it into activity did not create it. 
 “Fear” did zot¢ “in the beginning of things create 
 the gods,” but it called this religious faculty into 
 play, and the gods were the answer to its develop- 
 ing vision. Here, as elsewhere, there was evolution. 
 The pantheon that offered aid to man in his fight 
 with antagonistic events became unified by the 
 growing religious sense, and took on at the 
 same time more elevated characteristics. The 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 139 
 
 psychological principle, this it was which had been 
 elaborating religion all the time, and concurrently 
 becoming developed itself. Once we admit this 
 psychological character of religion, rationalism and 
 secularism have no standing ground. 
 
 But a secularist objector may say this psycho- 
 logical principle gives us no criterion whereby one 
 might discriminate between religious presentations, 
 or furnishes no means of knowing whether any- 
 thing corresponds to the subjective impressions 
 we experience. These presentations may have 
 the one and the same pragmatic characteristic— 
 they work, but that does not give validity to them. 
 
 This objection is natural. But comparison of 
 things in various stages of growth is not possible, 
 even if we premise that all these stages are on 
 the way to unity. Their relative values depend 
 on the fact that some turn out to be more fitted 
 than others to meet experience. The truest pre- 
 sentation is that which works best—it is a case 
 of the survival of the fittest. But it could not 
 work at all if it had not “faith” as the stimulant 
 to activity, and faith itself would evaporate if it 
 were not continually receiving sanctions from the 
 objective order of things. The eye in permanent 
 darkness would cease to function. So if the con- 
 cept of “God” did not respond to the psychological 
 religious sense, that sense would not function. 
 The fact that the religious instinct, exhibited in 
 a thousand forms, has maintained its existence 
 throughout the ages—and that, too, amid the 
 
140 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 disabling influences which would be naturally im- 
 posed upon it ina world where material concerns 
 predominate—is a strong proof of its validity. The 
 convergence also of all religious instincts towards 
 unity—towards the concept of a God that meets 
 all subjective demands—is a further evidence of 
 the validity of such instincts in the progressive 
 evolution of humanity. The unity also to which 
 the drift of the religious instinct tends is not a 
 mere pantheistic conception of an all-pervading 
 power. It is a unity constituted by a personal In- 
 telligence, sympathetic with the struggle of lower 
 intelligences towards union with Himself. It is 
 a unity where all the good in humanity finds its 
 source and sanction, and where man has a real 
 refuge from the numbing oppression of a mechanical 
 cosmos. 
 
 In Dr. Frazer’s The Golden Bough there are 
 gathered together, from many lands and different 
 ages, the beliefs and religious practices of almost 
 every human type. The reader of this book 
 might naturally come to the conclusion that all 
 the various religious customs recorded therein had 
 proceeded from some common base, and that this 
 base was the outcome of misapprehension of 
 natural phenomena. Religion in all its forms 
 would thus seem to be the result of 7//usion. The 
 book named seems to have led many to this 
 conclusion. But is there not another aspect in 
 the facts presented? From what has been said 
 above, the consensus of religious beliefs in space 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY I4I 
 
 and time points to an ever-present instinct driving 
 man to realise, through phenomena, something 
 beyond. The phenomena are the occasions which 
 waken the instinct, and not its cause. Has not 
 science itself, in its development, passed through 
 similar illusions before it became “rational.” But 
 reason was at work here all the time. So the re- 
 ligious instinct also has been at work continuously, 
 as The Golden Bough conclusively shows, and to 
 consider the products of its activity as vain illu- 
 sions, to be relegated to the waste-heaps of history, 
 would not certainly be scientific. The expla- 
 nation of the workings of the human mind can be 
 successful only when we take a// mental phenomena 
 into consideration, and deal with the psychological 
 facts as we deal with those presented in the 
 material world. 
 
 The spirit, which man finds first in himself, 
 associated with a material decaying body, is felt, as 
 man reaches higher stages of development, to be of 
 the nature of an effluence from the eternal Intelli- 
 gence—the Great Spirit uncircumscribed by space 
 or time. The assumption at the base of secularism, 
 that there is no higher intelligence than the human, 
 or if there be, that it is not a matter of concern to 
 humanity, implies omniscience, and is unparalled in 
 audacity. Nature itself would not be intelligible if 
 Intelligence were not at the base of it. Science is 
 only possible because the objective universe is 
 orderly, and thus implies an ordering Intelligence 
 controlling it. And science in its investigation 
 
142 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 of that orderly nature is also reaching a unity of 
 control, which harmonises with the anticipation of the 
 religious instinct. The cosmic processes, moreover, 
 are not limited to the narrow area of this planet, 
 to which the secularist would confine them. The 
 speck we call the earth depends for its place and 
 existence on the play of extra-mundane forces. 
 To limit man’s hopes and aspirations by ignoring 
 other than material external agencies could but 
 issue in degeneracy—a degeneracy at once apparent 
 when we contrast this outlook with that of the 
 highest minds. 
 
 It is not meant by the preceding attempt to 
 trace, on the naturalist’s own principles, a natural 
 evolution of religion that there is nothing else 
 involved. Without Revelation religion in its 
 fullest sense would be impossible, The Christian 
 religion is based on Revelation, and takes a stand 
 apartfrom a religion elaborated by the human 
 faculties exercised on temporal experience. 
 
 The secularist and the rationalist rely on 
 science, but it is not on the science of to-day. 
 For the science of to-day is constructive. We 
 have seen how it has given a place to the study 
 of mind within its wide domain. But even in 
 objective nature it is reaching conclusions that are 
 shaking the foundations of the older materialism 
 upon which the secularist builds. Take, for in- 
 stance, its most recent researches into the nature 
 of “matter,” a word which gives all its significance 
 to “materialism.” I append here an extract from 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 143 
 
 a paper of mine printed a few years ago, in which 
 I attempted to show the drift of recent science. 
 “Although science has a ready definition for 
 ‘matter’ in its conception of ‘mass’ and ‘inertia,’ 
 it is beginning to have views about it which seem 
 to suggest that ‘mass’ itself, and ‘shape,’ too, are 
 not w/timate things. The most recent views about 
 ‘matter’ are still fluid, so fluid indeed that no 
 existing physical text-book is quite up to date. 
 These new views have been led up to by various 
 modes of experimenting. or some time back we 
 have been accustomed to see matter, and that, too, 
 in its subtlest gaseous forms, reduced to a tempera- 
 ture never, as far as we know, realised in nature. 
 The oxygen, which is the vitalising element in the 
 atmosphere we breathe, has been cooled down to 
 a temperature at which it becomes liquid and can 
 be poured from one vessel into another. The 
 remarkable thing about it, however, is not this. 
 As the gas loses heat, that is as the average 
 motion of the molecules which compose it becomes 
 more circumscribed and less rapid, the gas itself 
 seems to lose its most active properties. It loses, 
 for instance, its capacity for making chemical 
 compounds, and—as it is this capacity of oxygen 
 which makes it able to sustain our life—vital 
 existence, if it could be otherwise maintained at 
 this low temperature, would be for this reason 
 alone impossible. The lowest temperature attained 
 in the latest experiments has been some 3° C. 
 above the absolute zero, that is some 464 degrees 
 
144 MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
 
 of frost Fahrenheit. One distinguished professor 
 at least was of opinion that if we could expose 
 matter to the temperature of the absolute zero, it 
 would possibly have no properties which could 
 affect our senses, that is, it would be zo ws non- 
 existent.* This is a theoretical, but possible, view 
 of matter which may affect our belief; but there is 
 another view of matter which has been arrived at 
 only within the last five or six years, which may 
 bring about a readjustment of our conceptions re- 
 garding the material world. 
 
 “Not many years ago the atom was considered 
 to be the most minute possible portion of matter— 
 indivisible and permanent. It was the w/tima thule 
 beyond which investigation could not be profitably 
 pursued. It is now known that ¢he atom 1s a com- 
 posite system, and that the elements which make 
 it are among the most active things in nature— 
 the atom is, in other words, a world in miniature, 
 full of activities. The very active ‘things’ which 
 give the atom being are called electrons, and the 
 point of interest to religiously minded people is 
 this, that we have, in these bodiless electrons, ac- 
 cording to an investigator of world-wide reputation, 
 the nearest analogy to the concept of a disem- 
 bodied spirit, that is a charge of electricity pure 
 
 * This opinion was formed when the cessation of atomic or mole- 
 cular motion was alone in question, when consequently motionless 
 matter was conceived as powerless to excite motion in other matter, 
 The discovery of the motion of electrons within the atom raises, 
 of course, further questions—among them, whether such motion is 
 or is not subject to Newtonian mechanics. 
 
FOR TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 145 
 
 and simple. And the suggestion, moreover, has 
 been made that electricity—which is not ‘material’ 
 in the ordinary sense—is the only source of mass, 
 imertia, and shape *—which are assumed to be the 
 differentie of matter. This is still a matter of 
 speculation, but work is going on at a rapid rate in 
 this new field of investigation. Every day brings 
 out something which tends to impress us with the 
 conviction that we are on the eve of some great 
 and simplifying discovery. Even while this paper 
 is in the press, the discovery of a positive electron 
 has been announced to the French Academy,t 
 and the assumption has been made that electricity 
 is a transition stage between ether and matter. 
 
 “A new world is gradually being revealed to us. 
 As the fifteenth century gave us a new continent, 
 and stirred thereby the productiveness of English 
 minds to furnish us with the immortal literature of 
 the spacious age of Elizabeth, so this fresh insight 
 into the arcana of nature cannot but inspire us 
 with still higher ennobling thoughts, and awake in 
 us at the same time more of that wonder, which 
 is the source of all true philosophy, and the mother 
 of new ideals, 
 
 “Face to face with this new world of science 
 we shall be disposed to recognise more fully 
 than before that nature and revelation are not in 
 antagonism—not even similar to parallel lines of 
 railway which do not meet—but are lines already 
 
 * See note, p. 27. 
 
 t Prof, Sir J. J. Thomson has dealt quite lately with this point, 
 
 L 
 
146 NOTE TO PAGE 28 
 
 in the process of converging towards that point 
 where, at the consummation of things, God will 
 make ‘the pile complete.’ ” 
 
 NOTE To PAGE 28. 
 
 It is now believed that the principles of Newtonian mechanics 
 are not applicable to systems of atomic dimensions. Prof, Planck’s 
 theory of Quantum also, as applied to radiation, seems directly 
 contradictory of the conceptions of the older mechanics (Wazure, 
 Jan. 22, 1914, p. 587). Prof. Planck, in his address as the new 
 Rector of the University of Berlin, Oct. 15, 1913, says, ‘‘ The 
 constancy of all dynamic operations has been an unquestioned 
 assumption of every physical theory which, based on the teaching of 
 Aristotle, maintains that Nature on facit sa/tus, But even in this 
 ancient fortress recent investigations of physical science have made 
 an important breach. In this case it is the principles of thermo- 
 dynamics with which, owing to newly observed facts, the sentence 
 just cited has come into collision, and if all the indications are not 
 deceptive, the days of the validity of that saying are numbered. 
 Nature, in fact, seems to work by leaps, and those, too, of a 
 singular character.” The professor then explains his Quantum- 
 hypothesis, according to which changes take place in Nature which 
 are not constant or continuous in character, but inconstant and 
 explosive. We have here a parallel in physical science to the theory 
 of ‘‘mutations” in natural history referred to on p. 28. If the 
 Newtonian mechanics do not cover all the phenomena in Nature— 
 and Dr. Bohr rejects their universal application, while the most 
 conservative of physicists are slowly taking up the same position— 
 then the strongest, nay, the only argument against the Possibility 
 of miracles breaks down, See further on this subject, p. 202. 
 
 i 
 
MODERNISM AND TRADITIONAL 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 MODERNISM owes its name to a recent movement 
 in the Roman Church. The leader of this move- 
 ment in France was a priest named A. Loisy, and 
 its representative in this country was the late 
 Father Tyrrell, of the Society of Jesus. If 
 Modernism were confined to the Roman Com- 
 munion only, there would be no need, perhaps, to 
 treat ofithere. It has a much wider range, however, 
 and represents a far-spreading attempt to accom- 
 modate Christianity to the assumed demands of 
 modern science, philosophy, and criticism. 
 
 The literature of Modernism belongs to the 
 present century. M. Loisy’s first work, Zhe Gospel 
 and the Church,* was published in Paris in 1902, and 
 produced a considerable sensation both within and 
 without the Roman Communion. It was followed 
 by other works of the same author, and by others 
 from the same school. M. Loisy applied what he 
 called critical methods to the study of the Gospels, 
 with the results here summarized. 
 
 The Gospels, according to him, are, like the Penta- 
 teuch, a patchwork in which history and legend are 
 
 A L’Evangile et P Eglise, 
 
148 MODERNISM 
 
 compounded. There are, in M. Loisy’s opinion, un- 
 mistakable contradictions between the chronicle of 
 events presented by the separate Evangelists. There 
 is also a wide difference between the presentation of 
 Christ in the Synoptics and in the Gospel of St. 
 John. “Christ in.the Synoptics is historical, but 
 He is not God ; the Johannine Christ is Divine, but 
 not historical.” * The Gospel of St. Mark is later, 
 according to Loisy, than the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem, and was put forth about 75 AD. by an 
 unknown Christian, not a native of Palestine, but 
 of Hellenic culture. The tradition connecting it 
 with St. Peter implies the possibility of its having 
 been composed at Rome. The Gospel of St. 
 Matthew was probably written about the begin- 
 ning of the second century, by a non-Palestinian 
 Jew residing in Asia Minor or Syria. The narra- 
 tives peculiar to St. Matthew are rather of the 
 nature of legendary developments, which have no 
 historical value, than of real reminiscences. The 
 chapters about the birth of Christ have not, ac- 
 cording to M. Loisy, the slightest historical foun- 
 dation. St. Luke’s Gospel, which, he says, was 
 probably written (but not by a disciple of St. 
 Paul) between 90 and 100 A.D., is much better 
 constructed than that of St. Matthew. Certain 
 touching passages in it—such as Christ weeping 
 over Jerusalem, His prayer for His executioners, 
 His promise to the penitent thief, and His last 
 words—may be in conformity with His spirit, but 
 * Loisy, Simple Réflexions, p. 168, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 149 
 
 have no traditional basis.* Loisy considers the 
 account in this Gospel of the descent of Jesus, 
 through Joseph, to have been interpolated in order 
 to support the /ater idea of a Virgin-birth. 
 
 As for the Fourth Gospel, the author, M. Loisy 
 says, is in no sense a biographer of Christ, but the 
 first and greatest Christian mystic. 
 
 Dr. Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s, in his masterly 
 criticism of Modernism (Quarterly Review, April, 
 1909), thus sums up the results of M. Loisy’s 
 critical examination of the “ Career of Jesus ’— 
 
 Jesus was born at Nazareth about four years 
 before the Christian era. His family were pious, 
 but none of them seemed to have accepted the 
 Gospel during His lifetime. 
 
 Jesus, like many others, was attracted by the 
 terrifying preaching of John the Baptist, from whom 
 He received Baptism. When John was imprisoned 
 He at once attempted to take his place. He began 
 to preach around the Lake of Galilee, and was 
 compelled by the persistent demands of the crowd 
 to “work miracles.” This mission, lasting only a 
 few months, was long enough to enable Him to 
 enrol twelve auxiliaries, who prepared the villages 
 of Galilee for His coming, travelling two and two 
 through the north of Palestine. His adherents 
 were found rather among the déclassés of Judaism 
 than among the Puritans. The staple of His 
 teaching was the advent of the kingdom of God 
 —the sudden and speedy coming, or return, of the 
 
 * Les Evangiles Synoptiques, p. 119, 
 
150 MODERNISM 
 
 Messiah. His teaching was not acceptable either 
 to Herod Antipas or to the Pharisees, whose hos- 
 tility obliged Jesus to fly for a short time to the 
 Phoenician territory north of Galilee. 
 
 A conference with His disciples at Czsarea 
 Philippi led to a visit to the capital in order to 
 proclaim Him there as the promised Messiah. 
 
 As they approached Jerusalem His disciples 
 were frightened at the risks they were running, 
 but Jesus calmed their fears by promising that 
 they should soon be set on twelve thrones, judging 
 the twelve tribes of Israel. “Jesus did not go to 
 Jerusalem to die.” The doomed Prophet made 
 His first entry into Jerusalem as the Messiah, and, 
 as a first act of authority, cleansed the Temple 
 courts by an act of violence, in which He was 
 doubtless assisted by His disciples. For some 
 days after, He preached daily about the coming 
 of the Kingdom, and foiled with great dexterity 
 the traps set for Him. “But,” writes M. Loisy, 
 “the situation could end only in a miracle or a 
 catastrophe, and the catastrophe happened.” * 
 
 Jesus was arrested after a brief scuffle between 
 the satellites of the High Priest and His disciples, 
 and the latter, without waiting to see the end, fled 
 northwards towards their homes. When brought 
 before Pilate, Jesus probably answered “Yes” to 
 the question whether He claimed to be a King; 
 but, adds M. Loisy, “the Johannine phrase, ‘My 
 kingdom is not of this world, could never have 
 
 * Lek vangiles Synoptiques, p. 218, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 151 
 
 been uttered by the Christ of history.” This con- 
 fession led naturally to His immediate execution, 
 after which, M. Loisy continues— 
 
 “We may imagine that the soldiers detached 
 the body from the cross before evening, and placed 
 it in some common ditch, into which it was cus- 
 tomary to throw the remains of the executed. 
 The conditions of burial were such that after the 
 lapse of a few hours it would have been impossible 
 to recognize the carcase of the Saviour, even if it 
 were sought for,” * 
 
 The disciples, however, had been too profoundly 
 stirred to accept defeat. None of them had seen 
 Jesus die; and though they knew that He was 
 dead, they hardly realized it. Besides, they were 
 fellow-countrymen of those who had asked whether 
 Jesus was not Elijah, or even John the Baptist, 
 come to life again. What more natural than that 
 Peter, while fishing one day on the lake, should see 
 the Master? 
 
 “The impulse once given,” M. Loisy adds, “this 
 belief grew by the very need which it had to 
 strengthen itself.” Christ “appeared also to the 
 Eleven.” So it was their faith brought them back 
 to Jerusalem, and Christianity was born. 
 
 The English edition of the Italian Programme 
 of Modernism thus sums up the result of this 
 reconstruction of the Gospel history— 
 
 “The supernatural life of Christ among the faithful 
 and in the Church has been clothed in an historical 
 
 ® Jes Evangiles Synoptiques, p. 223. 
 
152 MODERNISM 
 
 form, which has given birth to what we might 
 somewhat loosely call the Christ of legend.” “Such 
 a criticism,” it adds, “does away with the possi- 
 bility of finding in Christ's teaching even the 
 embryonic form of the Church’s later theological 
 doctrine.” 
 
 One naturally pauses in breathless amazement 
 at this new Christology. Apart from its being in 
 direct conflict with the accepted results of critics 
 (including Harnack) as to the origin of the 
 Gospels, it astounds one by the cocksure explana- 
 tion of the records themselves which Loisy provides. 
 Our amazement is tempered, however, when we 
 learn the principle with which Loisy sets out. 
 ‘The historian,” he says, “does not need to draw 
 his inspiration from Agnosticism to eliminate God 
 from history. He (God) is never found there!” 
 
 A twentieth-century Parisian journalist, with 
 this principle as his guide, might have given a 
 similar “report” on the proceedings in Palestine, 
 if he had been on the spot in our Lord’s time. 
 The scribes and Pharisees, much better equipped, 
 came practically to the same conclusion, and the 
 acceptance of this at the outset might have saved 
 the Modernists much work and worry in their re- 
 construction of the Gospel narrative. 
 
 Our wonder at the result attained by Loisy in 
 his “critical” research is further subdued when 
 we keep in view the various currents of recent 
 religious thought which have been flowing in that 
 direction. 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 153 
 
 Some of these may be here noted. 
 
 Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Fesus 
 (English translation, London, 1910) revived a view 
 —put forward first by Reimar tentatively in 1768, 
 and made a complete theory by Johann Weiss 
 (1892)—as to the leading element in the Christo- 
 logy of the Gospels. 
 
 The aim of Schweitzer’s work is to show the 
 complete adaptability of the eschatological element 
 in the Gospels (ze, the teaching concerning the 
 coming end of the dispensation) to the explanation 
 of the whole of our Lord’s life and work. Our 
 Lord is considered by the author as having 
 accepted the Jewish conception of the “ Kingdom 
 of God,” especially as developed in Apocalyptic 
 literature, and to have accommodated all He said 
 and did to this conception. A short summary of 
 Schweitzer’s views, which have had a pervasive 
 influence not easily to be accounted for, may not 
 here be out of place. 
 
 Schweitzer, accepting, in opposition to Loisy, 
 the Synoptic Gospels, as, on the whole, a true 
 history, proposed to set before his readers the real 
 Christ as therein portrayed. The concept of the 
 Messiahship in its relation with the immediate 
 coming of “the Kingdom of God” furnishes a con- 
 necting thread which gives coherence to the 
 Gospel narrative. This connecting thread is not 
 set forth zz the narrative itself, but, employing 
 it, we see a logical nexus between the initial 
 announcement, “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” 
 
154 MODERNISM 
 
 and the revelation of the Messiah. Schweitzer’s 
 problem is to express the work and life of Christ 
 in His Messianic consciousness. Our Lord is 
 primarily not a Teacher at all, but a Hero, a 
 National Hero, Who comes predicting the end of 
 the present order of things, and the sudden 
 advent of the Kingdom of God and of the 
 Messianic age—a Kingdom in which those who 
 have accepted the Messiah and have abandoned 
 everything for Him shall have a share. Jesus 
 becomes conscious that He is, or rather will be, 
 that Messiah. This thought He keeps to Him- 
 self, while sending out His disciples, not to 
 teach, but to proclaim the Kingdom. He is 
 confident that before they have gone through the 
 cities of Israel, the Kingdom will have begun. 
 Disappointed in His expectations, He realizes that 
 the mere proclamation is not enough, and that the 
 only way to bring about the Kingdom is to give 
 Himself up to death. He goes up to Jerusalem 
 for this very purpose, but before this, the secret of 
 His Messiahship has leaked out—at first, at the 
 Mount of Transfiguration, and then through Peter 
 at Caesarea Philippi. Schweitzer here reverses the’ 
 sequence of events as presented in the Gospel 
 order. All His disciples, including Judas, know 
 the fact. Christ enters Jerusalem, not to teach, but 
 to provoke the authorities to put Him to death. 
 Judas betrays Christ’s Messiahship to the Chief 
 Priests, and his witness is confirmed by Christ’s 
 own answer to the question of the High Priest, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 155 
 
 “Art Thou the Christ?” Further evidence is 
 unnecessary, and He is condemned and executed. 
 
 The real teaching of Christ, according to 
 Schweitzer, is very simple: “Give up all and 
 follow Me.” The present age is of no real im- 
 portance, The new order alone matters—the 
 Messianic age, when the Son of man shall come 
 in glory to establish triumphantly His Kingdom, 
 “Give up all and follow Me ””—that is the essential 
 thing. All else is ¢xterimsethic. Still Schweitzer 
 attaches great importance to “the present living 
 Christ.” All that men have. since learnt or are 
 learning in Christianity is the direct teaching of 
 Christ, living and working in the present. 
 
 This, it must be confessed, is an entire re- 
 construction of the gospel, and, if true, the only 
 right attitude of Christian men is that of absolute 
 renunciation of the present world. 
 
 As to the view of “Liberal Protestants,’ 
 Schweitzer says— : 
 
 “The Jesus of Nazareth who came forth 
 publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic 
 of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom 
 of heaven on earth, and died to give His work its 
 final concentration, sever had any existence. He is 
 a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with 
 life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology 
 in an historical garb.” * 
 
 All this arises from the theory that our Lord’s 
 
 * Schweitzer, Loisy, and Tyrrell agree in showing that ‘‘ Liberal 
 Protestantism ”’ is logically untenable, 
 
156 MODERNISM 
 
 life and teaching rested on, and derived their 
 meaning from, the delusion that a new dispensation 
 was at hand.* 
 
 * As an instance of how the tide of criticism is sometimes turned 
 by accidental circumstances, attention may be called here to the 
 Book of Enoch, which has been a subject of much interest of late. 
 Although referred to by St. Jude (ver. 15), regarded by St. Barnabas 
 (Epist.) and Tertullian as canonical (De Cultu Fem., i. 3), quoted 
 by Clem. Alex., Origen, etc., only short excerpts (in Greek) were 
 known until the traveller Bruce brought home in 1773 three MSS, 
 of the Ethiopic Version from Abyssinia. 
 
 A complete version of this was not given to the world until 1838, 
 and Dillmann’s critical edition, followed by a German translation, 
 was not published until 1853. He ascribes the work to about 100 B.c. 
 Canon Charles makes it earlier, It was recognized by Dillmann that 
 the book presented a real development of Jewish Christology, and, 
 generally, the most advanced teaching concerning the Messiah which 
 Judaism before Christ had produced. He is careful, however, to add 
 that it is not a ew departure—that Jewish tradition had not been 
 broken in the presentation of the Messiah. The most noteworthy 
 development of the teaching concerning the Messiah is the ascription 
 to Him of pre-existence and predestination to His task. He is called 
 ‘“the Anointed, the Righteous, the Elect, the Son of man,” and to 
 Him is committed the judgment of the world, in which the wicked 
 are to be cast into Sheol, here for the first time identified with the 
 New Testament Hell. There is no evidence to show that the 
 Apocalyptic literature was known to the Essenes, to which sect, as 
 certain critics think, some of our Lord’s disciples belonged. 
 
 According to Canon Charles, the various sections are of different 
 dates (ranging from 170 B.C. to 60 B.c.). The influence of this 
 work on the New Testament was assumed to be considerable, and 
 some recent eschatologists seized upon its correspondence with the 
 eschatological element in the Gospels to minimize the original 
 elements in Christ’s teaching, and to limit His knowledge to the 
 current beliefs of the time. Shakespeare on such an hypothesis 
 would have no originality. It is mainly owing to the concentration 
 of interest on the Book of Enoch and other Apocalyptic literature, 
 that Christology has been made of late to take a perfectly new aspect. 
 
 To any one who reads carefully Canon Charles’s learned article 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 157 
 
 The assumption in Schweitzer’s Quest of the 
 Historical Fesus, that the end of the dispensation 
 was regarded in the Gospels as immediate is one 
 of those conclusions which further considerations 
 prove to be toorash. There are many statements 
 made by our Lord which run up against such a 
 view. It is not true criticism which would explain 
 Christ’s words, “ Of that day or that hour knoweth 
 
 on Eschatology in the Encyclopaedia Biblica it must be amazing that 
 Schweitzer’s views should ever have attained the prominence given 
 to them by modern critics. This article presents us with a careful 
 analysis of the whole subject, every pre-Christian source dealing 
 with the coming of the Messiah and the end of the dispensation 
 being meticulously examined. The material collected together 
 is of the most varied, inconsistent, and often contradictory nature, 
 from which no unbiassed critic could possibly gather the cut-and- 
 dried theory of Schweitzer. And in the development of the 
 eschatological ideas in the New Testament writings this variety of 
 view is no less apparent. There is nothing like a consensus of 
 views presented therein that would lead naturally to Schweitzer’s 
 theory. The ready acceptance of the latter by Modernists is not, 
 therefore, to be ascribed to ‘‘ scholarship,” but rather to a natural 
 tendency to accept any key that seems at first sight fitted to open 
 the lock. See further, note, p. 209. 
 
 The question is far too complicated to be solved by a plausible 
 theory, and it is much safer to take the form of eschatology as it 
 has been developed in the Christian Church than to resort to views 
 that are at best purely conjectural. One thing alone stands out in 
 both Old and New Testament Apocalyptic and throughout the 
 history of the Christian Church—the Judge is always at the door, 
 And as long as there exists an unredressed wrong it will ever be so, 
 Every generation can truly say, in the words of the twelfth-century 
 poet—- 
 
 ‘‘ Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, Vigilemus ! 
 Ecce minaciter imminet Arbiter Ile Supremus : 
 Imminet, imminet, ut mala terminet, aequa coronet, 
 Recta remuneret, anxja liberet, aethera donet,” 
 
158 MODERNISM 
 
 no one,” etc., as merely valid within a few days. The 
 same may be said of other predictions of our Lord 
 as to the hour of the end. There are, besides, 
 passages implying a long absence of our Lord 
 before the Great Day: “ The days will come when 
 the Bridegroom shall be taken away from them” ; 
 “After a long time the Lord of those servants 
 cometh”); “The Lord of that servant shall come 
 in a day when he expecteth not,” etc. 
 
 The parables of the tares and of the fish also 
 point in the same direction, indicating that the 
 world is to be a probation-place for a long time 
 before the end. 
 
 It has also been pointed out that there are two 
 catastrophes in our Lord’s vision, to either of 
 which He may have referred in His eschatological 
 discourses—the fall of Jerusalem and the Last 
 Judgment. 
 
 The importance of the question raised by the 
 Eschatologists is not restricted to that of our 
 Lord’s use of current Apocalyptic visions. 
 
 The question for plain men is this: Was our 
 Lord under a delusion all through His ministry? 
 If this is answered in the affirmative, as it is by 
 the Modernists following Weiss and others ; and 
 if the eschatological problem is the key to our 
 understanding of the Gospel, as Schweitzer and his 
 followers insist,—how can we escape from the con- 
 clusion that our Lord’s teaching and the Insti- 
 tution which He founded are alike based on a 
 delusion? There are, it is true, thoughtful men, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 159 
 
 like Dr. E. A. Abbott, who seem to regard 
 spiritual progress as conditioned by t/usions, The 
 pillar of cloud and pillar of fire which guided the 
 Israelites in their devious wanderings through the 
 desert were thus symbols of the illusions which lead 
 men step by step to higher privileges—to Canaan, 
 and a richer land than Canaan. Dr. Frazer's 
 Golden Bough is a presentation, from this point 
 of view, but not probably from the standpoint of 
 the author, of the great procession down the ages in 
 which men were being led by illusion after illusion 
 to a fuller and fuller reality (see anée, pp. 140, 141). 
 This may all well be in the history of the older 
 world, and in that of the lower races; but to make 
 Him “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and 
 knowledge hidden,” a deluded teacher is another 
 matter. 
 
 Here we are brought face to face with the ques- 
 tion as to how far our Lord’s knowledge was re- 
 stricted to that of any well-informed Jew of the 
 period, and what such restriction would involve. 
 It is necessary to go somewhat fully into this 
 point, for the limitation of our Lord’s knowledge 
 is fundamental to Modernism, and to the views of 
 those who, like some of the sectaries of St. Cyprian’s 
 time (first half of third century), endeavour to 
 institute a Human Church (//umanam conati sunt 
 Ecelesiam facere, Ep. lv. 24, ed. Hartel). The idea 
 of a “Human Church” is not, therefore, new, 
 although the Humanists or Pragmatists regard it 
 as such, If our Lord’s knowledge were simply the 
 
160 MODERNISM 
 
 common knowledge of His age, His Church would 
 indeed be human; but would modern humanity 
 take much trouble to follow its prescriptions ? 
 
 The question was discussed in this country 
 somewhat fully in 1889-99. The meaning to be 
 attached to the words of St. Paul in Philippians 
 ii. 7, “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a 
 servant,” seemed to havea direct bearing on it, and 
 was dealt with then by Dr. Gore, in his essay in Lux 
 Mundi, and also in his The Incarnation of the Son 
 of God.* Dr. Gore, while affirming strongly the 
 infallibility as well as the deity of our Lord, ad- 
 mitted that He was ignorant on such questions as 
 the authorship of the Books of the Old Testament, 
 and this ignorance was not confined to the opera- 
 tion of His human mind, but was rather expe- 
 rienced by the Divine Person of the eternal Son of 
 God. The explanation of it was to be found, 
 according to Dr. Gore, in the abandonment of 
 Divine knowledge by that Person within the sphere 
 of the Incarnation. 
 
 This explanation was regarded as not satis- 
 factory: for how could we reconcile with it, it was 
 contended, the evidence of our Lord’s supernatural 
 knowledge shown here and there throughout the 
 Gospels ? 
 
 Dr. Sanday, some twenty years later, dealt with 
 the same subject in his Christologies Ancient and 
 
 * I am indebted to Dr. Darwell Stone for much of what is here 
 
 stated about the Aemosts. See his article in the Church Quarterly, 
 October, 1910, on Dr, Sanday’s Christologies. 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 161 
 
 Modern, and put forward another, which he con- 
 siders to be a reassuring view, presenting some 
 novel and interesting features. 
 
 The distinction—largely due to Mr. F. W. H. 
 Myers, and popularized by the late Prof. W. James 
 —between the conscious and subconscious self was 
 used by Dr. Sanday to furnish an analogy to explain 
 the nature of the connection between the human 
 and the Divine in our Lord’s Person, and to eluci- 
 date a subordination in which the Divine might 
 at times cease to be active in consciousness. 
 
 A series of short extracts will show Dr. Sanday’s 
 position on the question. 
 
 “Besides the upper region of consciousness, 
 there is a lower region into which the conscious 
 mind cannot enter. ... This lower region is a 
 storehouse of experiences of the most varied kinds : 
 in fact, of all the experiences that make up human 
 life... .. In some form or other they must be 
 there, and from this inner cornucopia one never 
 knows what will come forth—whether it will be 
 weighty memories of the greater shocks of life, its 
 deepest tragedies and its highest joys, or whether 
 it will be things the most trivial and insignificant. 
 And—most wonderful of all—these impressions, 
 experiences, inferences, principles, which so crowd 
 and jostle each other down below, are not so many 
 passive and disconnected items (like dried peas in 
 a bottle), but they are endowed with an active 
 power of combining and recombining, of modifying 
 and being modified, so that when they come up 
 
 M 
 
162 MODERNISM 
 
 to the surface again it is often in quite different 
 shapes from those in which they sank beneath it. 
 All these things are latent. . The door of that 
 treasure-house, which is also a workshop, is locked, 
 so far as the conscious personality is concerned. 
 ... And yet, in some strange way, there seem to 
 be open chinks and crevices through which there 
 is a constant coming and going. . . . The invisible 
 _ processes of this life are just as active as the visible. 
 It appears to be the function of the subconscious 
 and unconscious states to feed the conscious... . 
 But only in part are they subject to the will and 
 conscious reason. Only in part do they come af call. 
 And only in part do they come in fully organized 
 form. .. . The under-world is a repetition or re- 
 flexion of the upper-world, Inthe one, not less than 
 in the other, character is moulded. And, though 
 the processes are not seen and cannot be followed, 
 their results appear in the conscious responsible 
 acts and thoughts of the waking man. The won- 
 derful thing is that, while the unconscious and 
 subconscious processes are (generally speaking) 
 similar in kind to the conscious, they surpass them 
 in degree. They are subtler, intenser, further- 
 reaching, more penetrating. It is something more 
 than a mere metaphor when we describe the sub- 
 and unconscious states as more ‘ profound.’ It is 
 in these states, or through them, that miracles are 
 wrought—especially those connected with person- 
 ality. They doubtless played the largest part in 
 the historical miracles of the Gospels, just as they 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 163 
 
 are to this day most active in what we are still 
 inclined to call miracles—the more successful 
 examples of efforts that often fall short of suc- 
 Besse A 
 
 “The work of the Holy Spirit, the true and 
 proper work, the active Divine influence brought 
 to bear upon the soul, does belong to this lower 
 region, It is subliminal, not supraliminal. We 
 know it only by its effects. ...” 
 
 And in these same lower strata of the subcon- 
 scious region “whatever there is of Divine in the 
 soul of man passes into the roots of his being.” 
 Therefore the “ proper * seat or locus of all Divine 
 indwelling, or Divine action upon the human soul, 
 is the subliminal consciousness, . . 
 
 “On the one hand, we think of the human con- 
 sciousness of the Lord as entirely human; we 
 make no attempt to divide it up and fence off one 
 part of it as human and another part as Divine. 
 Whatever there was of Divine in Him, on its way 
 to outward expression, whether in speech or act, 
 passed through, and could not but pass through, 
 the restricting and restraining medium of human 
 consciousness. This consciousness was, as it were, 
 the narrow neck through which alone the Divine 
 could come to expression. This involves that 
 
 * Dr. Sanday adds here a very important note : ‘* Some stress 
 is laid upon ‘proper,’ for which I might almost have written 
 ‘primary.’ I do not, of course, mean to deny that this Divine 
 element makes itself felt, and at times directly felt, in conscious- 
 
 ness. But it seems fo come up (as it were) into consciousness, as if 
 from some lower and deeper sphere.” 
 
164 MODERNISM 
 
 only so much of the Divine could be expressed as 
 was capable of expression within the forms of 
 humanity. We accept this conclusion unreservedly, 
 and have no wish to tamper with it. The life of 
 our Lord, so far as it was visible, was a strictly 
 human life; He was, as the Creeds teach, ‘very 
 Man’ ; there is nothing to prevent us from speaking 
 of this human life of His just as we should speak 
 of the life of one of ourselves. Over this we can 
 shake hands with those continental (Modernist ?) 
 theologians who insist on taking the humanity of 
 our Lord in real earnest, and as no mere matter of 
 form. But, on the other hand, we no less em- 
 phatically refuse to rule out or ignore or explain 
 away the evidence which the Gospels and the rest 
 of the New Testament afford that this human life 
 was, in its deepest roots, directly continuous with 
 the life of God Himself. 
 
 “The mystery of the relation of the Son to the 
 Father stretches beyond our ken. The Deity 
 which rules the universe is in the last resort the 
 same Deity which took human flesh. So much I 
 believe ; and that belief seems to me enough to 
 connect the faith of the patristic age with our 
 own.” 
 
 The “divine in man” has “its abiding-place 
 and home” in the dim regions of the subconscious 
 soul, so in the Divine Person of our Lord these 
 regions were the seat of Deity. 
 
 “Our Lord Jesus Christ, when He became In- 
 carnate, assumed such a disability as this. He 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 165 
 
 could not—by His own deliberate act of self- 
 restraint He could not—wear His Deity (as it 
 were) upon His sleeve. He knew that the con- 
 dition which He was assuming permitted only 
 degrees of self-manifestation. He knowingly con- 
 demned Himself, if the phrase may be allowed, to 
 that inadequate expression of which I have spoken. 
 But just as in the man the whole Self, conscious, 
 subconscious, and infra-conscious, is indefinitely 
 larger than the conscious Self taken alone, so even 
 in our Lord the manifested Life was only, as it 
 were, an index to the total Life of which the 
 visible activities were but a relatively small por- 
 tion,” # 
 
 Pondering on Himself as Son of God, the 
 Messiah, and Son of Man, “ He knew,” Dr. Sanday 
 adds—“ every Israelite knew—that in Him all the 
 nations of the earth were to be blessed.” Such 
 blessing was to come through the kingdom of 
 heaven ; and “to bring about the coming of that 
 kingdom” was “His chief mission.” Gradually 
 He came to see how the kingdom was to come. 
 It was to be not “from a throne,” but “from a 
 cross.” Yet, notwithstanding the suffering, the 
 prophecies of blessing were to be fulfilled. So 
 
 * This is on the same lines as Bergson’s views about the ‘‘con- 
 tent’ of soul (see p. 15 ef seg.). But Bergson makes actual con- 
 sciousness an affair of a mere fraction of a second—a hyphen between 
 memory of the past and the onrush of the future. Anevent rises into 
 consciousness only to become instantaneously merged in the past. 
 Bergson’s ‘‘memory’”’ seems thus to be practically identical with 
 the ‘‘subconscious””’ of Myers. 
 
166 MODERNISM 
 
 the question had to be asked, How will the fulfl- 
 ment take place? 
 
 “When that question came to be asked How ? 
 our sources leave us in some ambiguity. The 
 solution that lay nearest at hand was that of the 
 Jewish Apocalypses. And it would be very natural 
 and very probable that our Lord would, at least at 
 times, have recourse to this solution; He would 
 express Himself in the familiar language; and 
 His disciples were evidently allowed to fall back 
 to a large extent upon that language.... The 
 human thought and tongue even of Jesus—and it 
 was only through human thought and human 
 speech that even He could communicate with His 
 disciples who were also His brethren—could only 
 express themselves in terms of current meaning, 
 could only express themselves with that inadequacy 
 and relativity of utterance which attaches to all 
 that is human. The language of Apocalypse, in 
 one or other of its forms, was almost the only 
 language available. What applies to language 
 applies also to thought.” 
 
 Whatever we may think of Dr. Sanday’s appli- 
 cation of recent psychology to throw light on the 
 seeming limitation of our Lord’s knowledge—and 
 Archbp. Temple looked to psychology as a key to 
 many Christian mysteries—there can be no doubt 
 as to the cogency of the closing words of the fore- 
 goingexcerpt. Language zs a limiting factor. The 
 speaker, in putting thought into speech, has to ac- 
 commodate himself, not only to the crude vehicle 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 167 
 
 of words, but also to the Auow/dedge of his audience. 
 One could not make one’s self heard in a vacuum. 
 The knowledge possessed by any audience con- 
 ditions the utterance of him who speaks to it. 
 
 That only can be heard, that is, assimilated, 
 which falls in with the experience and knowledge 
 of the hearer. “If any man have ears to hear, let 
 him hear.’ That He should adopt current beliefs 
 and fill them with fuller content was quite in keep- 
 ing with all His teaching. He came “not to 
 destroy, but to fulfil.” Limitation, however, of 
 means of expression, is no evidence that our 
 Lord’s knowledge was limited also, or that in the 
 unity of humanity and Deity in His Divine Person, 
 He did not know all things, as the Church, both 
 East and West, has always maintained. In His 
 infallibility, however, He accommodated His teach- 
 ing to the capacities of His audiences. 
 
 Supposing, if we may assume it for argument’s 
 sake, that Christ had been aware of the difficulties 
 attaching to the story of Jonah and the whale, 
 would He have spoken otherwise in referring to it? 
 
 “This man,” said the Pharisee, “if He were a 
 prophet, would have perceived who and what 
 manner of woman this is.” But He did perceive 
 all this, and more than this. Christ's actions, are 
 they to be measured by our limited experiences? 
 “If He were a prophet, if He knew the truth of 
 things, would He have cited,’ the critic asks, 
 “Old Testament passages which run up against 
 modern knowledge ?” 
 
168 MODERNISM 
 
 If our Lord, for instance, had known as much 
 as the critics as to the authorship of Psalm cx,, 
 would He have expressed Himself differently ? 
 
 The scribes and Pharisees, without the equip- 
 ment of modern critics, rejected the application 
 of this Psalm to Christ, and all the other claims 
 made by Him. The Modernist critic and the Jew 
 have similar difficulties with the position of Jesus, 
 but from different standpoints. There is some- 
 thing lacking in both; in ¢/zs they agree. What 
 we get from any teaching depends—as our appre- 
 ciation of a work of Art—on what we bring to it. 
 “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he 
 shall have abundance.” 
 
 The attitude of Modernists of the French school 
 to the traditional presentation of Christianity, de- 
 pends on complicated causes, but chief among 
 these is a conviction that an accommodation of 
 the Christian Creeds to the critical views of intelli- 
 gent men is absolutely essential. Scholarship, they 
 contend, has given us the rea/ Gospel—which differs 
 much from the traditional—and enables us to 
 construct afresh the true portrait of the Central 
 Figure. If the Christian religion is to meet the 
 needs of the present age, it must, they urge, be 
 rebuilt upon this new base. They do not deny, 
 but rather maintain, that the Roman Church of 
 to-day is a natural evolution of the ¢radztional 
 New Testament. The base it is which is faulty, 
 and the whole structure must be rebuilt. 
 
 The attempt to do this is on all-fours with the 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 169 
 
 efforts of the naturalist who would reconstruct, let 
 us say, the horse of to-day from a modernized 
 tapir-like progenitor of the fossil age. He could, 
 doubtless, point out the imperfections of the former, 
 and show, perhaps, how a better start might have 
 been made, and a superior animal finally produced. 
 But the wnmodified tapir-like progenitor was in 
 possession, imperfect as he may seem, and there 
 has been a //ving continuity between it and the 
 horse of to-day. It is too late, even if the naturalist 
 had the power, to substitute a new fossil ancestor 
 for any existing quadruped. Is there any “ving 
 connection, we may ask, between the reconstructed 
 Gospel of the Modernist and the Church of Christ 
 as presented to us in its organic development 
 throughout the ages? Can any efforts to con- 
 nect them organically ever be successful? The 
 Modernist does not even attempt this. He wants 
 a new Church built on a fresh base. Protestantism 
 used to contend that it was the old Church “ with its 
 face washed.” But here it is a new face altogether, 
 and no effort of washing can make it identical with 
 any facial presentation of the Church throughout 
 the ages. 
 
 We see at the moment how the process of lay- 
 ing new foundations and making a new structure 
 has fared at the hands of one of the leaders in the 
 Modernist movement. M. Loisy has given us 
 lately a species of autobiography under the title of 
 Choses Passées, that is, we may roughly translate 
 it, “ Things Outlived.’ We had ministered at the 
 
170 MODERNISM 
 
 altar of his Church until November, 1906, and even 
 then, when the authorities had prohibited him from 
 saying Mass, all he could say was that “ This act 
 had not lost for me all religious significance.” He 
 had lost, as he tells us, not only the faith of his 
 childhood, but he no longer accepted any article of 
 the Creed in any ordinary sense, unless the clause, 
 “ Suffered under Pontius Pilate!” With this small 
 residuum he had sstill, before his excommuni- 
 cation, strange to say, faith in Christianity, that 
 is, his concept of it, as a tremendous force; and 
 even towards the end of his ecclesiastical career 
 consented to a proposal made to Rome by the 
 Prince of Monaco, that he should be appointed 
 Bishop of Monte Carlo! In 1908 he was excom- 
 municated. Wasit any wonder? ‘The reasons are 
 summed up in the encyclical Pascendt Dominict 
 gregis, of which something shall be said hereafter. 
 
 The views of the Modernists seem to lead legiti- 
 mately to one or other of two issues: either to an 
 accommodation of Christianity to. secular philo- 
 sophy by removing its supernatural sanctions, or 
 to identifying it with some form of mysticism, 
 which would remove it out of the sphere of 
 criticism, M. Loisy seems to have taken the 
 former course, and the late Father Tyrrell the latter, 
 
 Father Tyrrell has also given us an autobio- 
 graphy, which has been admirably supplemented 
 by the Hon. Miss Petre. 
 
 Father Tyrrell was born in Dublin in 1861, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY I7I 
 
 His people were Protestants. In 1875 he notes 
 in his autobiography, as an event in his life, his 
 first attendance at Grange Gorman—a somewhat 
 High “but not ritualistic” Church. Here he 
 acquired his first real experience of religion. “As 
 far as feeling goes,” he says, “the quiet early 
 Communions and the Church Evensongs at Grange 
 Gorman appealed to me as nothing has done 
 since.” At this time he met Father Dolling. 
 “All my evangelical sympathies,” he says, “all 
 my revolt against the Pharisee and the Canon- 
 Lawyer is the outgrowth of the seeds of his in- 
 fluence.” In 1878 he matriculated at Trinity 
 College, Dublin, and began about the same time 
 to attend surreptitiously Mass at Roman churches. 
 In March, 1879, he came with Father Dolling to 
 London, where he attended St. Alban’s, Holborn. 
 He became less and less attached to Anglicanism, 
 and shortly afterwards was received into the 
 Roman Communion, but, as he says, “ Personal 
 relation of the whole matter to God was then, as 
 now, very weakly conceived and felt.” 
 
 He entered the noviciate of the Society of Jesus 
 in 1880, and from that time until his dismissal in 
 1906 his critical and somewhat irritable mind was 
 almost in continuous conflict with the principles 
 of the Order. 
 
 He was captivated at first with Scholasti- 
 cism, or rather with its great exponent, Thomas 
 Aquinas; but he came finally to see that “the 
 realism it defends plays,” as he says, “into the 
 
on tae MODERNISM 
 
 hands of idealism.” Yet, he adds, “it is perhaps 
 not a more gross thought-system than that which 
 Christ had to use as the vehicle of His revelation.” 
 Scholasticism was, at any rate, the ov/y philosophy 
 of the Roman Church: “it was, in fact,” as he 
 says, “Catholic philosophy by which our religion 
 must stand or fall,” and “every other system is, 
 therefore, non-Catholic and heretical.” 
 
 He saw that it is “necessarily the most coherent 
 of all systems: every possible objection has been 
 raised, and an answer found for it in accordance with 
 the general underlying assumptions. To question 
 or criticize these last is to put one’s self out of 
 the pale of intelligence, and even of civility: as 
 Kant and the critical school have done.” And he 
 cradually put himself outside this pale. 
 
 Scholasticism, while borrowing much from Aris- 
 totle, was a reaction against the view that the 
 intellectual side of our nature was not zzdzvidual 
 but of a wziversal character. The “unity of the 
 intellect” theory was regarded as a kind of Pan- 
 theism. It was, in the view of Aquinas, an ille- 
 gitimate deduction from the philosophy of Aris- 
 totle. The active intellect could not be regarded 
 rightly as a manifestation of a universal mind— 
 —as an attribute of a Cosmic Being or Existence. 
 In the eyes of the Schoolmen such a doctrine 
 would destroy individual personality and the root 
 of morality. 
 
 The philosophy of Kant has a certain resem- 
 blance to that of Plotinus (pp. 6 ef seg.) which the 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 173 
 
 Schoolmen overthrew. The Kantian philosophy, 
 as represented and developed by the late Professor 
 T, H. Green, Mr. H. Bradley, and Mr. W. H. 
 Moberly, one of the writers in “Foundations,” 
 assumes an all-inclusive Absolute. 
 
 To make the Kantian system more intelligible, 
 a further short popular explanation is needed. 
 We can assume the external universe to be pos- 
 sessed of al/ the attributes we ascribe to it quite 
 independent of the observer :—extended in space, 
 existing in time, manifesting continuous changes 
 arising from the flow of energy throughout it. 
 On this assumption man is a part of the universe, 
 but his functions of perception are limited to 
 reflecting, as in a mirror, what goes on within it. 
 The world is like a theatre into which he is 
 introduced as a spectator at birth, and when the 
 drama, lasting some three score years and ten 
 more or less, is over, he cedes his place to another. 
 That is the ordinary popular view. 
 
 The Kantian philosophy regards things from 
 quite another standpoint. The drama takes place 
 mainly, not outside, but witiin the perceiving 
 mind. The world of the spectator is a theatre in 
 which he himself furnishes the actors, and the 
 scenes, and the various incidents, from the con- 
 stitution of the mind itself. The only thing really 
 external to the spectator is “Nature in itself,” 
 which is uxknowable. In the Kantian view, there- 
 fore, the world is not given to intelligence; the 
 order of the universe, its causal sequence, all that 
 
174 MODERNISM 
 
 makes it intelligible, in fact, comes from mind 
 itself. Allthis is in direct opposition to the Scho- 
 lastic philosophy, and, according to Archbp. Mercier, 
 to that of Bergson (?). “No one,” says the Arch- 
 bishop, “has contributed more effectively than 
 Bergson to rid us of Kantian idealism” (Construct. 
 Quart., March, 1914). 
 
 It is quite natural, therefore, to find it main- 
 tained in the Papal Encyclical Pascendi, which 
 condemns Modernism, that the source of the latter 
 is attributed to the Kantian philosophy, or to 
 “ Agnosticism ”—used in the sense that our know- 
 ledge is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach 
 the absolute. A system which assumes an un- 
 knowable “ Nature in itself,” and regards all phe- 
 nomena as subjective, can be readily employed 
 to make history, dogma, and all that goes by the 
 name of revelation, symbolical in character,* 
 
 * The Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Gore, in the Constructive Quarterly 
 for March, 1914, limits the use of symbolism to the expression of 
 truths which deal with ‘‘what lies outside our possible or actual 
 human experience,” or ‘concern the transcendent God, or 
 regions of existence which lie in the beyond” (p. 68). ‘* We are 
 now urged,” he goes on to say, ‘*by our Modernist friends to 
 extend the application of this principle so as to recognize that the 
 phrases, ‘He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the 
 Virgin Mary,’ and ‘He rose again the third day from the dead,’ 
 are symbolical phrases.” This Dr. Gore denies. ‘It cannot, 
 with any show of reason, be denied,” he goes on to say, ‘‘ that 
 the point of Christianity was that these things and the like miracles 
 had actually happened ; and that provision had been made that 
 they should be proclaimed by competent witnesses. The insistence 
 
 upon actual occurrence and competent witness in the New Testa- 
 ment is unmistakable” (p. 64). ‘With regard to the Bible 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 175 
 
 Father Tyrrell, whether consciously or not, was 
 under the influence of this philosophy and of the 
 paradox that history might be demonstrably false 
 and yet eternally true. That was the opinion of 
 Loisy, and one can sce in all the later works of 
 Tyrrell astronger and stronger tendency to regard 
 things as symbolical. The fact, as a fact, it is 
 contended, does not carry its explanation with it. 
 It isasymbol. The narratives in the Gospels are 
 not to be taken as more than symbolic records— 
 records of perhaps greater truths than the Evan- 
 gelists had any conception of. But who is to in- 
 terpret the symbols? we may well ask. Is any 
 agreement on this point at all likely? Is any 
 other issue probable than that told in the story— 
 by Voltaire, if I mistake not—of the Professor of 
 Signs and the one-eyed butcher ? 
 
 It may be interesting here to contrast the views 
 of two of the most eminent physicists on the con- 
 tention as to the symbolic character of our per- 
 ception of the external universe. 
 
 The present Rector of the University of Berlin, 
 Professor Planck, in his Address on the 15th of 
 
 language about angels and devils, it is one thing to recognize the 
 language about the devil ‘going about as a roaring lion, seeking 
 whom he may devour,’ or about the ‘unclean spirit’ going through 
 dry places, etc., or about the Angels of little children beholding 
 the face of God in heaven, is symbolical language; but it is quite 
 another thing to dismiss from our minds the whole idea of good 
 and bad spirits, and their relation to us and influence upon us % 
 (p. 57). ‘Again, the same principle applies to the revelation of 
 what is ‘above’ and ‘below’ our present sphere of experience—to 
 heaven and hell” (p. 32). 
 
176 MODERNISM 
 
 October last (1913), said (I give here my trans- 
 lation) :— 
 
 “Five and thirty years ago Hermann von Helm- 
 holtz stated in this same place that our percep- 
 tions can never give us a picture, but at most 
 merely a symbol, of the external world. For we 
 are altogether lacking in a standard which would 
 serve to show any kind of resemblance between 
 the character peculiar to the external impression 
 and the character peculiar to the consciousness to 
 which it gives rise. 
 
 “All conceptions which we may form of the 
 external world are, in the last analysis, reflections 
 merely of our own consciousness. Is there any 
 rational sense at all in setting up opposite our 
 self-consciousness a ‘ Nature in itself’ independent 
 of the latter? Are not rather all the so-called 
 ‘laws of Nature’ merely at bottom more or less 
 serviceable rules by which we sum up, as accu- 
 rately and conveniently as we can, the flow of 
 events in our consciousness ? 
 
 “If this were the case,” says Professor Planck, 
 “then not only the ordinary judgments of men, 
 but even exact investigation of Nature would at 
 all times be in a fundamental error. For it is 
 impossible to deny that the entire development of 
 physical science up to the present aims, as a matter 
 of fact, at as wide and deep a ‘separation’ as 
 possible of the processes of external Nature from 
 those that take place in the world of human 
 consciousness, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 177 
 
 “ The escape from this entangling difficulty very 
 soon presents itself if we follow for only a step 
 farther the thought-process involved. 
 
 “Let us assume for the moment that a physical 
 picture of the world has been found which satisfies 
 all the claims which may be made upon it, and 
 thus is capable of exhibiting perfectly accurately 
 all the empirically discovered laws of Nature. 
 In that case the assertion that the picture referred 
 to resembles only after a fashion ‘actual’ Nature 
 can in no wise be proved. 
 
 “But this subject has also a reverse side, 
 which is generally much too little accentuated. 
 Equally true is it that the still far bolder 
 assertion, namely, that the supposed  world- 
 picture represents absolutely truly ‘actual’ Nature 
 in every point without exception, is not in any 
 manner to be refuted. For in order even to 
 enter on a proof to the contrary it would be 
 necessary to be able to say something with cer- 
 tainty about ‘ actual’ Nature—but this confessedly 
 is altogether out of the question. Here, as we 
 see, a monstrous void lies before us into which no 
 science may ever penetrate, and the filling up of 
 this void is not the business of the Pure Reason, 
 but of the Practical—the business of a sane view 
 of the world. 
 
 “Little as such a view of the world may be 
 susceptible of scientific proof, we may safely rely 
 upon it that it will stand fast against every storm, 
 so long as it remains in agreement with itself and 
 
 N 
 
178 MODERNISM 
 
 with the facts of experience. But let us not 
 delude ourselves with the idea that it is possible, 
 even in the most exact of all sciences of Nature, 
 to make any progress entirely without a concept 
 of the world, that is, altogether without unprovable 
 hypotheses. Even in Physics the statement is 
 valid, one cannot be saved without Faith—at least, 
 faith in a certain reality outside ourselves.” 
 
 Professor Planck seems to return to the Aristo- 
 telian, that is, the Scholastic view of Nature-per- 
 ception, or rather to the later presentation of it 
 by the Scotch metaphysicians, Reid and Dugald 
 Stewart. Father Tyrrell, in giving us the Scho- 
 lastic view, gave with it the Scholastic belief in a 
 fixed world of revelation, which does not depend 
 on purely human concepts. He finally, however, 
 discarded both. F 
 
 Any attempt to fix the records of Christianity 
 as a permanent thing, to consider them as a sacred 
 and unchanging deposit of truth, to be drawn upon 
 for the guidance of future ages, is in direct an- 
 tagonism to Modernism. To accommodate tras 
 ditional Christianity to the age and not the age 
 to Christianity, that is the aim of the Modernist, 
 and he scruples not, in accomplishing his task, to 
 rewrite the Gospels in order to satisfy the exi- 
 gencies of an assumed valid criticism and valid 
 science. 
 
 In his early disputes with the Jesuit authorities, 
 Tyrrell contended that the Order of Jesus had 
 departed in their theology from the teaching of 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY V79 
 
 Thomas Aquinas, whom they, in common with the 
 Dominicans and Augustinians, regarded as their 
 master. The Jesuits had, according to Tyrrell, 
 accepted what he considered the debased form of 
 Thomas’s doctrines advanced by Suarez (died 
 1617). Tyrrell, from his study of the Swmma 
 Lheologie of Aquinas, had at this time come to 
 the conclusion that the difficulties raised by 
 modern thought could be met by a whole-hearted 
 following of the great Scholastic. A short sum- 
 mary of the teaching of the latter will make 
 Tyrrell’s position at this time clearer. | 
 
 Thomas Aquinas was born in 1227, and died in 
 1274. Following his master, Albertus Magnus, he 
 adapted Aristotle toa complete scheme of Christian 
 theology—with this result: God makes known His 
 will to men in two ways, by Reason and Revela- 
 tion. These are not in antagonism, but support each 
 other. Revelation consists of Scripture and Tradi- 
 tion; the latter is gathered from the teaching of 
 the Fathers, the decisions of General Councils, etc. 
 Reason is not the reason of any one person, but that 
 of which the working is exhibited by the great 
 philosophic minds of the past, Plato, Aristotle, etc. 
 And just as it was necessary, in order to get a 
 rational view of the universe, to trace back the 
 successive contributions to it of the great thinkers 
 of the past, so was it needful to work back to 
 Scripture through the commentaries of its great 
 exponents. Aquinas began with his immediate 
 great predecessors, and traced back the chain of 
 
180 MODERNISM 
 
 teaching through them, and through the Fathers 
 of the Church, to Scripture itself. His connected 
 commentaries of the Fathers on the Gospels, based 
 on this method, came afterwards to be called the 
 Catena Aurea, or “Golden Chain.” An English 
 version of this was edited by Dr. J. H. Newman, 
 who, in conjunction with the Rev. Mark Patteson, 
 J. D. Dalgairns, and T. Dudley Ryder, made 
 the translation. It was published at Oxford in 
 1841-45. 
 
 The philosophy of Aristotle, with the Arab 
 commentaries upon it, all in a Latin version, 
 furnished Aquinas with his outlook on the 
 Universe. He himself wrote commentaries on 
 several of the works of Aristotle; and, thus 
 equipped, he began his great work, the Summa 
 Theologie, or “Sum of Theology,” which he did 
 not live quite to finish. That work is divided into 
 three great sections, treating respectively of God, 
 Man, and the God-Man. He thought, with Aris- 
 totle, that the existence of God could be proved 
 by Reason, but he departed from his master in 
 believing that the world was created and not 
 eternal; and also as to the soul, which he regarded 
 as created by God when a body was ready for it. 
 
 Like Aristotle, he regarded man from the point 
 of view of the end to be accomplished. In deal- 
 ing with this section of his subject, he discusses all 
 the ethical, psychological, and theological ques- 
 tions which naturally arise. But the greater part 
 is taken up with ethics, He distinguishes between 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY I81 
 
 the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity 
 —which are revealed, and the natural virtues, 
 which are founded on Reason. Faith, it is to be 
 noted, means, with Aquinas, belief in a proposition 
 under the direction of the will acting on reason- 
 able proof, and not trust in a Person. 
 
 The third section of the Swmia centres the 
 Christian religion on the Incarnation, whence all 
 srace flows, through the Church and its Sacraments, 
 for the redemption of the world. God became 
 man that men might become partakers of the 
 Divine nature. Aquinas did not live to finish this 
 section, but it was completed later by other hands. 
 
 “Till about the date of my first essay,” writes 
 Tyrrell (Life, ii. 164), “I had, not a firm faith, but 
 a firm hope in the sufficiency of the philosophy of 
 St. Thomas studied in a critical and liberal spirit.” 
 His hope was not realized, and he began to cast 
 about for other means to bring about his recon- 
 ciliation of the Church with what he considered 
 the demands of modern thought. Newman’s 
 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 
 (London, 1845) seemed to Tyrrell at first to offer a 
 means of solving his difficulties. 
 
 The doctrine of development was not new in 
 theology. Even as far back as the Commonitorium 
 of Vincentius Lerinensis (434 A.D.), it had been 
 advanced as illustrating how what was implicit in 
 doctrine might come to be explicit.* The theory 
 
 * St, Vincentius writes: ‘‘But some one will say, perhaps, ‘Is 
 there, then, to be no religious progress in Christ’s Church?’ 
 
132 MODERNISM 
 
 of development was soon to become, in the hands 
 of Darwin, a principle to be applied to all organic 
 
 Progress, certainly, and that the greatest. For who is he so jealous 
 of men and so odious to God who would attempt to forbid it ? 
 But progress, mind you, of such sort that it is a true advance, and 
 not a change, in the Faith. For progress implies a growth within 
 the thing itself, while change turns one thing into another, Con- 
 sequently, the understanding, knowledge, and wisdom of each and 
 all—of each Churchman and of the whole Church—ought to grow 
 and progress greatly and eagerly through the course of ages and 
 centuries, provided that the advance be within its own lines, in the 
 same sphere of doctrine, the same feeling, the same sentiment. 
 
 “‘The growth of religion in the soul should resemble the growth 
 of the body, which, though it develops and unfolds in the course of 
 years, yet remains the same. ... 
 
 ‘In like manner it is proper that the doctrines of the Christian 
 Religion should follow these laws of progress, so as to be con- 
 solidated by the course of years, amplified by time, refined by age, 
 and yet remain uncorrupted and unimpaired, full and perfect in all 
 the measurements of its parts, and in all its proper members and 
 senses (so to speak), admitting no further change or loss of dis- 
 tinctive characteristics, allowing no variation of boundary... . 
 
 ‘*For it is right that the ancient doctrines or heavenly philo- 
 sophy should, as time goes on, be carefully tended, smoothed, 
 polished; it is not right for them to be changed, maimed, muti- 
 lated. ‘They may gain in evidence, light, distinctness, but they 
 must not lose their completeness, integrity, characteristic property. 
 
 “‘Tf once a licence of impious fraud be permitted, I should 
 shudder to say how great will be the risk of Religion being destroyed 
 and wiped out. For if any part of the Catholic Doctrine be laid 
 aside, then another part, and also another, and likewise another, 
 and yet another, will go as a matter of course and right. But when 
 the parts one by one have been rejected, what else will follow in 
 the end’but that the whole be equally rejected ? 
 
 ‘* Again, moreover, if what is new begin to be mingled with the 
 old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, this custom will 
 creep in everywhere, until the Church at last will have nothing 
 untampered with, nothing unimpaired, nothing complete, nothing 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 183 
 
 growth. Newman applied it, some years before 
 Darwin's discovery, to explain how the original 
 unchangeable Deposit of the Faith could be called 
 the same as that held by the Roman Church to- 
 day. Newman had before him, as one chief aim 
 throughout, to prove the invalidity of the Anglican 
 position. He begins the Essay by showing that 
 development is a necessity— 
 
 “From the nature of the human mind,” he says 
 (Introduction, p. 27), “much time is necessary for 
 the full comprehension and perfection of great 
 ideas: and that the highest and most wonderful 
 truths, though communicated to the world once for 
 all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended 
 all at once by the recipients, but, as received and 
 transmitted by minds not inspired and through 
 media which were human, have required only the 
 longer time and deeper thought for their full 
 elucidation, This may be called the Theory of 
 Developments.” He goes on to show how develop- 
 ment has rendered Christian dogma more open 
 to attack. 
 
 “The facts,’ he says (p. 28), “of revealed re- 
 ligion, though in their substance unaltered, present 
 a less compact and orderly front to the attacks of 
 its enemies, and allow of the introduction of new 
 
 pure, but there will only be a brothel of impious, shameless error, 
 where formerly was a sanctuary.of chaste and undefiled Truth. May 
 the Divine Pity turn aside this wickedness from the minds of His 
 own; be it rather the frenzy of the ungodly!”—Dr. Bindley’s 
 Translation of the Commonitorium, 
 
184 MODERNISM 
 
 conjectures and theories concerning its sources and 
 its rise. The state of the theory is not as it was 
 when an appeal lay to the supposed works of the 
 Areopagite, or to the primitive Decretals, or to 
 St. Dionysius’s answer to Paul, or to the Cena 
 Domint of St. Cyprian. The assailants of dog- 
 matic truth have. got the start of its adherents of 
 whatever Creed: philosophy is completing what 
 criticism has begun; and apprehensions are not 
 unreasonably excited lest we should have a new 
 world to conquer before we have weapons for the 
 warfare. Already infidelity has its views and 
 ideas, on which it arranges the facts of ecclesias- 
 tical history ; and it is sure to consider the absence 
 of any antagonist theory as an evidence of the 
 reality of its own.” 
 
 Newman describes later on (p. 37) what he 
 means by development. “This process is called 
 the development of an idea, being the germi- 
 nation, growth, and perfection of some living, 
 that is, influential, truth, or apparent truth, in the 
 minds of men during a sufficient period, and it has 
 this necessary characteristic—that, since its pro- 
 vince is the busy scene of human life, it cannot 
 develop at all except either by destroying, or 
 modifying and incorporating with itself, existing 
 modes of thinking and acting. Its development, 
 then, is not like a mathematical theorem worked 
 out on paper, in which each successive advance is 
 a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried 
 through individuals and bodies of men ; it employs 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 185 
 
 their minds as instruments, and depends upon 
 them while it uses them. 
 
 “Tt grows where it incorporates ; and its purity 
 consists not in isolation, but in its continuity and 
 
 sovereignty.” “It is,’ he continues, and here he 
 uses Darwinian language before Darwin, “the war- 
 fare of ideas, striving for the mastery... . It is 
 
 elevated by trial and struggles into perfection. ... 
 Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect 
 is to have changed often.” 
 
 One would have thought there was ample scope 
 here for Father Tyrrell’s reforming instincts, but 
 he found at length the view defective. “ Personally,” 
 Nensays (17/2, it.) p.-200),- “1 doenot think “his 
 [| Newman’s] effort to unite theconception of develop- 
 ment with the Catholic conception of tradition was 
 successful or coherent... with his acceptance of 
 the Roman Catholic idea of the Depositum Fidei, as 
 being a divinely communicated ‘Credo,’ or theo- 
 logical summary—no synthesis with evolutionary 
 philosophy was possible. I have only gradually 
 come to realize this: so that I was formerly more 
 of a Newmanite than Iam now.” And yet he felt 
 bound to add, “It was the fictzon of an unchanged 
 and unchangeable nucleus of sacred tradition that 
 saved the Christianity of the Apostles from being 
 quickly transformed out of all recognition” (Life, 
 iLeps 278). 
 
 All hope of a reformation by the application 
 of development gradually died in him. Liberal 
 Catholicism demanded not a reformation, but a 
 
186 MODERNISM 
 
 revolution. Like Christianity on Judaism, Liberal 
 Catholicism would have to be a graff on, and 
 not a growth from the existing Church (cid, 
 p. 289). The Deposit of the Faith was like the 
 Ptolemaic astronomy, Tyrrell contended: it 
 could not be developed into the Copernican. 
 
 There was one phase in Evolution in which 
 Tyrrell believed as likely eventually to bring about 
 his aim: that is, the principle of the non-survival 
 of the unfit, the valueless. All that is out of keep- 
 ing with the environment must naturally slough 
 off. Pragmatism always preserves values only. 
 As Tyrrell’s attitude was destructive rather than 
 constructive, this view of evolution ought to have con- 
 soled him for his previous failure to change things, 
 
 The process of “dropping” things that have lost 
 “values” to the ordinary mind, has always been at 
 work (see ante, pp. 122 et seg.). It needed not 
 Pragmatism to tell us this. The meanings attached 
 in popular thought, for instance, to “devil,” “de- 
 moniac possession,” “casting out of devils,” “hell,” 
 “punishment in the hereafter,’ “anointing of the 
 sick,” have become to some minds, if they have 
 any significance at all, of the vaguest nature. The 
 same is the case largely with such concepts as 
 “angels,” “principalities,” “powers,” “the world 
 rulers of this darkness,” “the spiritual hosts of 
 wickedness in the heavenly places.” 
 
 They are all in Scripture, and yet they have, to 
 many minds, lost “values.” How is this?* We 
 
 * Mr. William Temple (Foundations, P. 353) has a striking 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 187 
 
 might regard this result as the work of advanced 
 knowledge and culture, as some modern writers 
 think; but there is another way of looking at 
 the matter. | 
 
 ‘* The spirit-world is not locked away : 
 Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead.” * 
 
 Tyrrell had not perhaps before him the possi- 
 bility of the environment changing for the worse ; 
 merging in a materialistic conception of things 
 which shuts eye and ear to all the appeals of the 
 Geisterwelt, the spirit-world. He may not have 
 considered that society might, as it had done 
 before, furnish an environment in which not even 
 the holiest things could live. Nay, might it not 
 be possible that his own views and those of his 
 colleagues, if spread wide-cast, should provide an 
 
 passage on the dangers of setting up individual opinion against 
 ‘‘the accumulated experience of Christendom,” which ‘‘is the 
 basis on which the belief and practice of the Church is grounded.” 
 ‘*There may be,” he says, ‘‘some parts of the Church’s whole 
 belief which are not part of the religious life of this or that indi- 
 vidual believer, and are yet a necessary part of the whole Christian 
 doctrine, and will be needed by others; and thus, because only in 
 the whole body can the whole Spirit live, they become indirectly 
 part of the support of his own faith. What comes home to me will 
 only be part of the whole truth: I may be the eyes, sensitive to 
 light, but not to sound: I may be the ear, sensitive to sound but 
 not to light. The whole facts of the world are known, if at all, 
 only when each of the senses has received its own impression, and 
 contributed to consciousness what it can tell. 
 * “ Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen, 
 Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt.” 
 
 (Goethe’s Faust.) 
 
188 MODERNISM 
 
 environment uncongenial to the propagation of 
 any real religion? If he had had a definite 
 programme, he might have met such a difficulty, 
 but he had none. 
 
 “To ask of me a definite programme is from the 
 nature of the case ridiculous, unless you can tell 
 me where progress, mental, moral, and social, is 
 soing to end” (Life, ii. p. 110). 
 
 He seems at length to have taken refuge in a 
 kind of Mysticism divorced from dogma, and to 
 have trusted to Pragmatism to propagate it. 
 “Such is the truth of religion, namely,” he says, 
 “its utility for eternal life, ze. for the life of corre- 
 spondence with the Absolute” (zdid,, p. 178). 
 
 “From the continual and endless variations of 
 belief and devotion which originate in one way or 
 other, the Spirit of holiness eventually selects and 
 assimilates the good and useful, and throws away 
 the worthless or mischievous by the slow logic of 
 spiritual life and experience” (zdzd., p. 180). 
 
 Here we come face to face with Pragmatism 
 pure and simple: the non-survival of the unfit. 
 What is Pragmatism? [In the Popular Science 
 monthly for January, 1878, Mr. C. S. Pierce in- 
 vented the name to designate a rough-and-ready 
 test of the truth or “value” of anything. His 
 friend, Professor Wm. James, took up the name 
 and developed Pierce’s views, thus giving a wide 
 currency to them. Pragmatism is practically an 
 attempted answer to Pilate’s scoffing question, 
 “What is truth?” Intellectualism, according to 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 189 
 
 Professor James, could not give a satisfactory 
 answer, and yet an accessible solution of the 
 question was continuously needed. \ 
 
 A thing that is true, works. Empiricism—that is, 
 a philosophy based on practical experience—is 
 decisive in settling what is true or the reverse. 
 Truth depends on application. What cannot be 
 applied can have no meaning—that is the principle 
 of Pragmatism. “It matters not to the Empiri- 
 cist,” Professor James says, “from what quarter an 
 hypothesis may come to him; he may have 
 acquired it by fair means or foul; passion may 
 have whispered or accident suggested it; if the 
 total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that 
 is what he (the Empiricist) means by its being 
 true” (The Will to Believe, p. 27), Truth, con- 
 sequently, demands verification, and verification 
 means successful emergence from the ordeal of 
 experience. Initial certainty may, therefore, be 
 dispensed with in our reasonings if they afterwards 
 receive the support of continuous verification. So- 
 called “necessary truths” are to be measured by 
 what they lead to. It would be difficult, if not 
 impossible, to apply the Pragmatical principle to 
 science. The mathematics, for instance, of Conic 
 Sections, remained va/ueless for many hundreds of 
 years before Kepler found a value for them, and 
 changed our outlook on the Solar System. Prag- 
 matism seemed to Tyrrell, however, to meet the 
 case Of religious traditions, Verification by survival 
 from the ordeal of experience—both past and 
 
190 MODERNISM 
 
 future—capacity to be assimilated and corrobo- 
 rated in the process, distinguishes true ideas from 
 false. This is practically the position taken up by 
 Ritschl and his school. The justification of Chris- 
 tianity proceeds from spiritual experience, and 
 from that only. This appeal to the sanctions of 
 experience—which enters largely into Tyrrell’s 
 later views—seems an unstable base, taken alone, 
 for a world-wide Religion. Human experience 
 varies with the type of mind in which it originates, 
 and in all experience the material interests pre- 
 dominate, 
 
 Would the Gospel, as Loisy and other 
 Modernists understand it, work on this principle? 
 Would any creed which consists mainly of nega- 
 tions have a capacity to be assimilated and 
 corroborated by experience so as to become the 
 motive power of a religion? Even if we could 
 infuse life into the dry bones of Loisy’s skeleton- 
 gospel, by attributing an allegorical or symbolical 
 meaning to it, would it work? In the past a 
 dying mythology had recourse to allegorical inter- 
 pretation. It was the sign of its approaching end. 
 If Gnosticism had found an entrance into early 
 Christianity, Church and Creed would, humanly 
 speaking, soon have disappeared. Can we hope 
 for different results now? Judged by Pragmatism 
 traditional Christianity is true in the sense that it 
 works. Has anything constructive come so far out 
 of the criticism of the Modernists—anything that 
 “works”? Mysticism, developed from Christian 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY IQI 
 
 dogma, and dealing in symbols, may work as it has 
 worked throughout the centuries, but it is for the 
 few. Father Tyrrell seems to have found at last 
 in a kind of counterfeit of this the only solution of 
 his difficulties and rest for his restless spirit. 
 
 His last book, Christianity at the Cross Roads, 
 published after his death, may be assumed to 
 represent his maturest views, qualified possibly by 
 a faint hope that the Church’s censure might at 
 length be removed. In this book he still regards 
 Roman Catholic Christianity as one organism— 
 with a living continuity. But its vitality was inde- 
 pendent, nay, in spite of its dogmas. He was 
 obsessed here, as formerly, by the idea that religion 
 as religion, could perpetuate itself without dogma at 
 all. Here he held much in common with Schweitzer, 
 in his concept of a “living Christ,” a species of 
 spiritual sublimation of the eschatological and dis- 
 appointed Christ which Schweitzer found in the 
 Gospels, ‘Tyrrell, in his Christianity at the Cross 
 Roads, gives us a depressing picture of the Christ of 
 the Gospels subjected to “the results of Criticism.” 
 Christ believed Himself to be the “Son of Man,” 
 “the Messiah,” the centre of His own Apocalyptic 
 teaching. His mission was to warn His fellow- 
 countrymen of the end of the dispensation as 
 close at hand. His moral teaching, he alleges, as 
 against Liberal Protestantism, was an insignificant 
 feature, subordinate altogether to the coming 
 cataclysm—after which “ Ethics would be super- 
 seded.” Christ’s ethical teaching, moreover, was 
 
192 MODERNISM 
 
 not His own—“ there is nothing original in the 
 righteousness preached by Jesus” (p. 51). Tyrrell 
 interprets even the Lord’s Prayer as having its chief 
 bearing on the celestial cataclysm and its sequel 
 (p. 54). “Pessimism is the verdict of experience. 
 Whether in himself or in the world: if a man has 
 ideals for both, he is bound to find not only 
 failure, but an iron law of inevitable failure” 
 (pp. 117, 118). Christ had no hopes of an amelio- 
 ration of the lot of humanity on earth. His gospel 
 was to be good news to those who despaired of 
 the world (p.119). He supposed Himself to be the 
 Central Figure in a tremendous cataclysm which 
 never occurred. 
 
 And yet Tyrrell could say, “ Between Christ’s 
 idea of Himself and the Catholic idea of Him 
 there is no practical or substantial difference ” 
 (p. 83), while he could also add (p. 94), “ To con- 
 tend that the Church's ¢hevlogy has been always 
 the same is preposterous: such a view is only 
 possible from the standpoint of those who have 
 confounded revelation with its theological pre- 
 sentment.” This antagonism between revelation 
 and theology is his constant theme, and yet he is 
 always employing a theology of his own to com- 
 mend his anomalous position. 
 
 Although he adopts the “ Apocalyptic Jesus,” 
 he says, “it was not the Creation of His Spirit: 
 He found it at hand” (p. 102). It was our “duty, 
 however, to abandon the Apocalyptic form and 
 retain what it stands for” (p. 102), “The idea 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 193 
 
 of Jesus remains symbolic,” and “the only remedy 
 lies in a frank admission of the principle of Sym- 
 bolism.” “ What each age has to do is to interpret 
 the Apocalyptic Symbolism into terms of its own 
 Symbolism,” “When we realize,” he says (p. 111), 
 “how purely symbolic even our best and-most 
 fruitful scientific hypotheses must be ... we can 
 see that revelation involves no violation of the 
 usual processes of thought, zor calls for any special 
 faculty.’ Were we see at one and the same time 
 how “human” has become revelation to him, and 
 how protean and elusive also» has Symbolism. 
 For symbols have to be interpreted into new 
 symbols by each passing age. 
 
 Tyrrell’s Essays on Faith and Immortality, which 
 Miss Petre has published quite lately, shows to 
 what length he had at last gone in his limitation 
 of our Lord’s knowledge. He reduces it to that 
 of ordinary, not to say stunted, humanity, “If 
 Jesus had,” he says, “a theology at all it was that 
 of His people, full of all the errors and limitations 
 which belong to every effort to bring the Bound- 
 less within bounds,” | 
 
 From the foregoing summary of the views of 
 Loisy and Tyrrell we can form some kind of idea 
 of the impassable chasm between Modernism and 
 the Roman Church. No possible bridge could be 
 thrown across it, and no resource was left to the 
 Roman authorities but to condemn Modernism 
 root and branch. 
 
 The Papal Encyclical (Pascendi) condemning 
 
 O 
 
194 MODERNISM ~ 
 
 “Modernism” is a closely reasoned document, and 
 examines one by one the positions taken up by 
 the Modernist on philosophy, belief, theology, 
 history, criticism, apologetics, and Church - ad- 
 ministration. The Rev. Sydney F. Smith, S.J., 
 has put forth a short popular summary of it, 
 entitled The Encyclical on “ Modernism” (Catholic 
 Truth Soctety). 
 
 The philosophical base of Modernism is that of 
 “Agnosticism” according to the Encyclical, but 
 its exposition rightly shows that by the term 
 therein used is meant the philosophy of Kant, 
 which limits human knowledge to phenomena, as 
 has been previously pointed out. Such a view, 
 according to the Encyclical, excludes natural 
 theology, which attempts to deduce the existence 
 and some of the attributes of God from erfernal 
 evidence. God cannot be reached, the Modernists 
 contend, by any reasoning process, but only by what 
 they call “vital immanence,” which is to be sought 
 for in human experience, that is to say, in a 
 pervasive feeling of need of the Divine, which 
 implies the existence of its object. 
 
 This feeling takes its rise in the sawd-comscious 
 self, from which it emerges into actual conscious- 
 ness only when circumstances bring the Unknow- 
 able impressively before the mind. It is in this 
 “vital immanence,” and not in anything external, 
 that revelation takes place. If this revelation is as- 
 sociated with any phenomena of nature or human 
 personality, it can only be so at the expense of 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 195 
 
 distorting it, and hence arises the necessity of the 
 historian and critic to restore it to its true 
 character. This process constitutes the founda- 
 tion of historical criticism. The Person of Christ, 
 for instance, has been thus distorted from the real 
 form in which It appeared on earth, by ascribing 
 to It miraculous powers, but science and historical 
 criticism, the Modernists contend, show that there 
 cannot have been anything in the historical Christ 
 which was not purely human. “Whatever, there- 
 fore,’ says the Encyclical, “savours of the Divine 
 must, according to the Modernists, be ‘ eliminated 
 from His history.” | 
 
 All religion, continues the Encyclical’s expo- 
 sition of Modernism, “is only a development of 
 this religious sentiment (or consciousness).” It is 
 “the cause of all the things which have ever been, 
 or ever will be, in any religion.” This sentiment, 
 being “vague at the best,” needs illumination. In 
 it “God indeed presents Himself to man: but so 
 darkly and confusedly that He may scarcely, or 
 not at all, be recognized by the believer.” It has 
 consequently to be made clear. “This is the 
 office,” the Encyclical proceeds, “of the intellect, 
 whose function it is to think and analyze,” and to 
 form into concepts the “ vital phenomena” as they 
 take rise, and to express them in words. “Hence 
 the maxim common among Modernists that a 
 religious-minded man should ¢hink his faith,” 
 that is, “the intellect must work upon it “as 
 the painter brightens the faded impression on 
 
196 MODERNISM 
 
 his canvas to make the figures stand out more 
 clearly.” 
 
 The secondary formulas thus acquired become 
 dogmas, which “are intermediate between the 
 believer and his faith.” In regard to the latter 
 they are “mere symbols”; in “regard to the 
 believer they are.mere zvstruments.” 
 
 Dogma must always be merely tentative and 
 subject to frequent changes, and thus must exclude 
 anything of a fixed character. In the process of 
 thinking his faith the religious mind cannot “ suffer 
 a dualism to exist in him, and the believer feels 
 within him an impelling need to harmonize faith 
 with science.” ‘This is to be achieved by sub- 
 jecting the former to the latter.” 
 
 With regard to theology—which, as ordinarily 
 received, takes the data of faith, and from a pro- 
 found study of them arranges them in a system— 
 the Modernist makes it an adjustment of the 
 religious sentiment with the intellectual demands 
 of science, which latter, being progressive, demands 
 a continuous harmonizing. The principle of zm- 
 manence, according to which the religious sentiment 
 is the final judge of what is true in the plane of 
 religion, effects the reconciliation with science by 
 introducing symbolism. This symbolism is tenta- 
 tive, and furnishes only provisional representations 
 of unseen realities, which have from time to time 
 to be “restated.” 
 
 “What Modernists really mean by zmmanence,” 
 says the Encyclical, “it is not easy to determine, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 197 
 
 for all are not of the same opinion. Some of 
 them use it in the sense that God working in man 
 is more intimately present in man than is man 
 himself; and this view, if rightly understood, may 
 not be censured. Others understand by it that 
 the action of God is one with the action of 
 Nature.” 
 
 The law of tmmanence rejects the idea of the 
 historical Christ having done anything involving 
 superhuman authority. The Sacraments were not 
 instituted by Him, but developed later from the 
 felt need of giving to religion some sensible mani- 
 festation. They are mere “symbols and signs,” 
 having no other kind of efficacy than historical 
 phrases, “which, having had the good fortune to 
 impress minds, have proved to be powerful instru- 
 ments for propagating certain great and impressive 
 ideas.” 
 
 The Holy Scriptures are to the Modernist a 
 “collection of experiences, not indeed of those 
 that may come to anybody, but of those choice 
 and extraordinary experiences which may have 
 happened in any religion.” They are not com- 
 municated from any external authority, but come 
 from “God speaking from within through the 
 impulse of vztal tmmanence and permanence.” 
 
 The Church does not owe its existence to the 
 immediate institution of Jesus Christ, but is “the 
 product of the collective conscience (or conscious- 
 ness).” 
 
 According to this New Theology, “in a living 
 
198 MODERNISM 
 
 religion everything is subject to change—according 
 to the law of evolution—dogma, Church, sacred 
 books, faith itself—the changes being brought 
 about, not by the accretion of new and purely 
 adventitious forms from without, but by an in- 
 ereasing penetration of the religious sentiment into 
 the conscience” under the stimulus cf new needs. 
 
 The foregoing is a very short summary of the 
 Encyclical as interpreted by Father Sydney F, 
 Smith. It will be seen from it that the Modernist 
 movement therein described is not confined to the 
 Roman Church. 
 
 It is not too much to say, indeed, that many of 
 our religious leaders are Modernists of one kind 
 or another; that is, they feel it necessary to 
 establish a harmony between the Christianity 
 which they accept and cannot relinquish, and the 
 knowledge they have acquired from other sources. 
 Knowledge increases day by day, and there arises a 
 natural question in every sincere Christian mind as 
 to how this knowledge will fall in with the re- 
 ligious ideal which has previously become part 
 of his mental life. But this is a procedure which 
 does not necessarily involve an abandonment of 
 the Catholic Faith, or such a “restatement” of it 
 that would throw it out of organic connection with 
 the “ faith that was once for all delivered unto the 
 saints.” It proceeds from conviction of the truth 
 of the latter, and looks to fresh knowledge as a 
 means of better interpreting it, 
 
 It is clear that the question of the admissibility 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 199 
 
 of fresh light as a modifying influence on religion 
 can be satisfactorily solved only when the Christian 
 thinker is fully satisfied as to the validity of lately 
 acquired knowledge and its compelling power upon 
 assent. 
 
 This is the problem which is now occupying the 
 minds of those Christian thinkers who feel it to 
 be a kind of dishonesty to maintain a belief in 
 traditional Christianity without taking into account 
 what they consider to be the assured results of 
 human research. The feeling would be a natural 
 one if it were merely a matter of accommodating 
 secular knowledge with secular, but the case is 
 otherwise with Religion, which touches the source 
 of conduct. The religious man cannot hold his 
 faith in suspense until he has examined a@// the 
 “light” from other sources. Still, there are minds 
 which demand satisfaction for their intellectual 
 even prior to their religious exigencies. They 
 want intellectual satisfaction at all costs. 
 
 The writers in Foundations, for instance, set 
 before them this task. “The world,’ says 
 Mr. Streeter, in the Jxztroduction, “is calling for 
 religion; but it cannot accept a religion if its 
 theology is out of harmony with science, philo- 
 sophy, and scholarship. Religion, if it is to domi- 
 nate life, must satisfy both the head and the 
 heart,—a thing which neither obscurantism nor 
 rationalism can do. At such a time it seems most 
 necessary that those who believe that Christianity 
 is no mere picturesque survival of a romantic 
 
200 MODERNISM 
 
 past, but a real religion with a real message for 
 the present and the future, should set themselves 
 to a careful re-examination, and, if need be, re- 
 statement, of the foundations of their belief, in the 
 light of the knowledge and thought of the day.” 
 This is the task, therefore, which the several 
 writers in Loundations have set themselves to do, 
 and so far they are falling in with the aims of 
 the “ Modernists” previously dealt with. 
 
 “In the light of the knowledge and of the 
 thought of the day,” the re-examination and 
 possible “restatement” of the foundations of the 
 faith have to be made. The validity of the know- 
 ledge and of the thought of the day is there- 
 fore necessarily the first task for the examiners, 
 who here limit the field of their investigation to 
 the areas respectively of science, philosophy, and 
 scholarship, with all of which Christian theology 
 has to be brought into harmony. It will be well 
 to consider these in their order. 
 
 We have to set Christianity at one with modern 
 science. But here we need to discriminate. 
 Kirchhoff said, and many scientific men agree 
 with him, “ There is only one science—mechanics.” 
 If we were to accept this dictum, there would 
 seem to be no room for any accommodation 
 between science and Christian theology, if that 
 theology claims to meet ¢zwtellectual demands. 
 Christian theology, in such a case, cannot be of 
 any interest to those who accept Kirchhoff’s de- 
 scription, and may be ruled out, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 201 
 
 The “ Uniformity of Nature” is another asser- 
 tion of science which seems incompatible with the 
 foundations of Christian faith—and Mr. Thomp- 
 son, as we have seen (pp. 19 ef seg.), has removed 
 from the Foundations of the faith the incompatible 
 basic rock of Miracle. 
 
 But this “ Uniformity of Nature,” resting as it 
 does on testimony, would have no compelling 
 power upon our assent, if it were not supported 
 by the doctrine of the “Conservation of Energy,” 
 a doctrine which some think to be on all-fours 
 with Kirchhoff’s dictum. A mechanical universe— 
 that is, a state of things in which Newton’s three 
 Laws of Motion cover every change in Nature— 
 seems, at first sight, the outcome of scientific 
 research, and if we assume it as valid, Mr. 
 Streeter’s “restatement” of the Resurrection, for 
 instance, would hardly meet the case, as the 
 alleged fact itself, however explained, would seem- 
 ingly be ruled out. 
 
 But science is progressive, and to the qualifi- 
 cations of the mechanical hypothesis already ad- 
 duced (pp. 26-28 and 146), there must now be 
 added grave doubts as to the wmiversality of the 
 Newtonian Laws. 
 
 As has already been said (Note, p. 146), the con- 
 nection of the “whirl” of negative electrons with 
 the positive “nucleus” in the atom seems not to 
 be covered by any known mechanical laws. If 
 this is finally established, as the great authorities 
 adduced (p. 146) seem to anticipate, the “restate- 
 
202 MODERNISM 
 
 ments” of all occurrences seemingly opposed to 
 the “mechanical” hypothesis may eventually be 
 pronounced as premature. At any rate, it is well 
 to be conservative until we know more. 
 
 Dr. Norman Campbell, writing in Mature of Jan. 
 22, 1914, raises, as has been already said (p. 146), 
 the question of the universality of application of 
 mechanical principles. Dealing with the difficulty 
 of accounting for the motion of electrons within 
 the atom, he says, “It has recently been proposed 
 to solve this difficulty by denying that the principles 
 of mechanics are true in their application to systems 
 of atomic dimensions. Such a solution may appear 
 heroic rather than practical to those who have not 
 followed the trend of modern physics ; those who 
 have, know that it is completely in accordance with 
 the recent development of our ideas. The new 
 conceptions, which were first introduced by Planck’s 
 theory of radiation, and have been applied with 
 such striking results to the theory of specific heat 
 and elasticity, are directly contradictory of those 
 of the older mechanics.” 
 
 Again, “ Bohr’s theory not only rejects the prin- 
 ciples of mechanics, which the most conservative 
 are being driven to abandon, but it indicates that 
 fundamental propositions are to take their place,” 
 
 It seems clear from this extract that mechanical 
 principles, applied to the constitution of the atom, 
 are not in undisputed control of the Universe, 
 and it is only prudent to wait for further light 
 before we adapt our theology to the demands of 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 203 
 
 a mechanical system which may have to give place 
 to a wider generalization, more, perhaps, in keeping 
 with the Christian view. 
 
 The lurid picture of the results of modern 
 science depicted in the first Essay of Foun- 
 dations (p. 9), might have had a “ foundation” 
 some twenty or more years ago; zow it is some- 
 what anachronistic, The use of the word “ Causes,” 
 moreover, as having brought about the wild and 
 fearful events as therein pictured, is hardly scien- 
 tific. The late Professor Poynting and Mr. Ber- 
 trand Russell, whom the writer quotes in the same 
 article, would discard the employment of “ Cause” 
 altogether from scientific phraseology. All we 
 know in physical changes, which science inves- 
 tigates, is transference of motion from one par- 
 ticle of matter to another; and the attribution of 
 causality to the process arises from extrinsic con- 
 siderations. Mr. Knox (Some Loose Stones) is quite 
 correct in ascribing the idea of “Cause” to our 
 anthropomorphic concepts. If men’s nerves were 
 all paralyzed, he says, we should have no con- 
 ception of cause, but only of motion. He seems 
 to be right also in ascribing to some at least of the 
 writers in Foundations a limited imagination, owing 
 to which they keep before them as an imaginary 
 opponent some particular “ Jones,’ who has mis- 
 givings about the faith, rather than the general 
 body of intelligent doubters. Mr. Blatchford, for 
 instance, may bulk large among those who have 
 to be met, but he is not an average intelligent 
 
204 MODERNISM 
 
 sceptic, and “Science” is certainly not on his 
 side. To “restate” the Christian faith in order to 
 meet such exponents of the scientific outlook is 
 purely labour wasted, is it not? And yet, in view 
 of the fancied objections of such sceptics, and 
 with the object of conciliating them, some of our 
 liberal theologians would regard belief in the 
 Apostles’ Creed as too exacting a test for any 
 one who is willing to become a teacher of Chris- 
 tianity. In the name of intellectual freedom they 
 would leave certain statements in the Creed an 
 open question. Belief in the Virgin-birth, and in 
 the Resurrection—to limit freedom of acceptance 
 to two articles only—ought not, they urge, to be 
 insisted upon as a test of membership of the 
 Church. Loisy, as we have seen, rejected in any 
 natural sense a// the articles except “suffered 
 under Pontius Pilate.’ Would the contenders for 
 intellectual freedom regard this as a sufficient 
 “minimum of orthodoxy’? 
 
 The second modern necessity demanding a re- 
 adjustment of our presentation of the faith is 
 philosophy. The Scholastic philosophy is, it is 
 contended, no longer in harmony with modern 
 thought. We need a new Aquinas to give us a 
 satisfactory presentation of the Christian religion 
 in a theological terminology of a philosophical 
 character. 
 
 Mr. W. H. Moberly, in the ninth “Essay of 
 Foundations, strives, with many misgivings, to 
 sketch out what such a philosophy must be. He 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 205 
 
 is so absolutely fair in presenting the arguments 
 of his opponents that he seems more than half 
 convinced by them himself. The Hegelian philo- 
 sophy, which seems to be the foundation of the 
 article, “God and the Absolute,” is not easily 
 grasped, and whether it can ever obtain a hold 
 over thoughtful men in general is open to serious 
 doubt. At any rate, the writer himself is not 
 very hopeful. “ We have raised,” he says, “a very 
 ambitious problem, and our suggestions towards 
 its solution are, at the best, fragmentary and un- 
 satisfying. The reader can hardly avoid feeling 
 this, for the writer himself feels it strongly.” 
 
 His own criticisms on his article, in fact, could 
 not be improved on, and are the best commentary 
 on his attempt. As we have seen (p. 178), the latest 
 views of distinguished men of science about our 
 conception of Nature are drifting further and 
 further from that initiated by Kant and developed 
 to its natural consequences by Hegel. These 
 views are much nearer, seemingly, to the Aristo- 
 telian attitude as presented by Thomas Aquinas, 
 or to the Scotch metaphysical school of Reid, and 
 more in harmony with that collective wisdom of 
 the world called “ common sense.” 
 
 Mr. Moberly, who is candid to a point that 
 eliminates all idea of partisanship, has given a 
 warning to all academic critics who would deal 
 with the foundations of the faith—a warning which 
 applies to some of the writers in the same volume. 
 “We all know,” he says, “the special danger of 
 
206 MODERNISM 
 
 academic minds; their proneness to a one-sided 
 development of criticism with a corresponding 
 atrophy of the constructive powers.” He himself 
 has kept this warning steadfastly before him in 
 another Essay in the series, “The Atonement,” 
 which, for this reason, most people will consider 
 the strongest of. the whole series. His colleagues 
 seem not to have been so careful in this respect. 
 
 The philosophy with which Christian theology 
 must be accommodated seems, from what has just 
 been said, to be yet to seek. Perhaps Eucken 
 and Bergson may come to our aid, but our duty at 
 present seems to be to await developments. 
 
 The last of the triad with which modern Chris- 
 tian theology must be harmonized is “ Scholar- 
 ship.” And here it is necessary to make a few 
 preliminary remarks. The “discoveries” of 
 scholars obtain a hearing all the more readily 
 if they traverse prevailing beliefs. Affirmations 
 do not naturally attract as much attention as 
 negations, and the knowledge of this fact is 
 not without its influence on students of theology, 
 whose temporal future may largely depend upon 
 their making their mark in the world. Strauss 
 and Baur found a Victorian public to take interest 
 in their destructive criticisms of the then pre- 
 vailing Christology. Have these critics made a per- 
 manent impression on religious thought? Drews 
 in our own time has found a translator to put 
 into English his myth-theory of Christ, but with 
 no effect. The discussion as to the origins of the 
 
AND TRADIBIONALS CHRISTIANITY. 207 
 
 Synoptic Gospels, and as to their respective dates, 
 has ended, as Harnack himself admits, in practi- 
 cally establishing the traditional views. So there 
 is not much more to be done by scholarship in 
 this domain. It is in the reconstruction of the 
 mental environment of our Lord that recent 
 research claims to have made startling discoveries, 
 
 Weiss and Schweitzer—strange as it may seem 
 to those who have carefully studied their views— 
 have given “ Modernists ” their chief material for a 
 reconstruction of the Person of Christ, and of the 
 faith of the Apostolic Church. Even Mr. Streeter, 
 in Foundations, regards Schweitzer as a factor in 
 modern theology, although he seems to acknow- 
 ledge that Schweitzer’s views are pushed to 
 extremes, “Fresh light,’ he says, “is always 
 blinding, especially to those who see it first, and 
 new views rarely secure attention except when 
 pushed to extremes. That this is the case with 
 the eschatological school, and especially with 
 Schweitzer, its literary genius, few will deny” 
 (p2976).) Mr." Streeter even’ admits (p. 76), that 
 “Recent researches in the field of what is known 
 as apocalyptic eschatology have shown (those 
 religious hopes and ideas) .to have dominated the 
 minds of so many of His (our Lord’s) contem- 
 poraries” (p. 76). The resuscitation of the Book of 
 Enoch, and of pre-Christian Apocalyptic literature 
 generally, was a God-send for the German critics. 
 Schweitzer, with a naively patronizing air, says, as 
 quoted by Mr. Streeter, “ As of old Jacob wrestled 
 
208 MODERNISM 
 
 with the Angel, so German theology wrestles with 
 Jesus of Nazareth, and will not let Him go until 
 He bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve 
 it, and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the 
 Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and 
 our civilization.” 
 
 The rediscovered Christ of Schweitzer, “drawn 
 by the Germanic spirit,” is to replace the Christ of 
 the Church Catholic! What a demand upon faith! 
 Even supposing that Judaism at the time of our 
 Lord were interpenetrated with the concepts of the 
 Book of Enoch, and of other Apocalyptic litera- 
 ture, in the process of the spiritual evolution of 
 the Church, that is, under the guidance of the 
 Holy Ghost, such concepts must have sloughed 
 off at an early date. The fact that we have to 
 go to Abyssinia, converted to Christianity in the 
 fourth or fifth century, for the only complete MSS. 
 of the Book of Enoch, and that we cannot find in 
 their original languages most of the other Apoca- 
 lyptic documents in question, is sufficient proof 
 that the views contained within them had ceased 
 to be of interest to the early Church. The evi- 
 dence, moreover, that these particular views were 
 generally current in our Lord’s time is not of a 
 convincing character. There were, as any one 
 reading Dr. Charles’s articles (referred to in note, 
 p. 209) must see, many and varied eschatological 
 views presented in pre-Christian-Jewish Apoca- 
 lyptic literature. What reason, then, is there for 
 assuming that our Lord culled from a mass of 
 
“ 
 
 AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 209 
 
 conflicting opinions that form of eschatology, 
 adopted by Schweitzer, and made it the sub- 
 stance of His teaching? There is no indication 
 that the custodians of the Jewish records knew 
 anything in Christ’s time about the Schweitzer- 
 view, and no one has as yet, I believe, pointed out 
 any survival of these cataclysmic views in post- 
 Christian-Jewish literature.* 
 
 * Canon Charles’s articles in the Encyclopedia Biblica on Apoca- 
 lyptic Literature and Eschatology furnish all that is required to 
 enable the reader to come to a sane conclusion on Schweitzer’s 
 views. Dr. Charles gives us an analysis of the Apocalyptic litera- 
 ture current in the period shortly before and after our Lord’s time. 
 The works dealt with include the Fourth Boop of Esdras (called 
 the Second in the English Apocrypha), which is ascribed to 81-96 
 A.D. ; the kindred Afocalypse of Baruch (50-100 A.D.) ; Zhe Ascen- 
 ston of Isaiah (50-80 A.b.); The Book of Fubilees (72-104 A.D.) 3 
 The Ascension of Moses (4 B.C.-30 A.D.) 5 Testament of the XII. 
 Patriarchs (from second century B.C.-30 A.D.) 3 The Psalms of 
 Solomon (anterior to 64 B.C.); Zhe Book of Enoch the ground- 
 work written before 98 B.c.) ; The Stbylline Oracles (the Jewish 
 portions, iii, 1-62, written before 31 B.C. 5 11. 97-817, about 190 
 B.C., book iv. about 80 A.D, ; the Christian portions, iii, 63-92, 
 and ii, 167-170, late Christian; book v. is mainly Jewish, 
 written about 80 A.D. ; books vi. and vii. are Gnostic, written about 
 the third century A.D.; book viii. is Christian, and belongs to the 
 second and third centuries A.D. ; the earlier and later books are 
 partly Jewish and partly Christian, and were written in the second 
 and third centuries A.D.), 
 
 It is from these Apocalyptic documents and from certain portions 
 of the Old Testament that the Eschatologists have endeavoured to 
 present a new view of the environment of thought and feeling in 
 which our Lord moved when on earth, and a fresh conception of 
 His Person and mission. It will be seen fromthe dates ascribed 
 to these documents by the critics that most of them belong to the 
 period after the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.). Hilgenfeld 
 (Die judische Apokalyptik, Jena, 1857), who dealt with this subject 
 
 P 
 
210 MODERNISM 
 
 The theory of evolution—a department of science 
 with which modern theology must be harmonized 
 
 long before Weiss and Schweitzer, saw (p. 240) that this class of 
 literature arose from the pressure from time to time of the Gentile 
 world upon Judaism. 
 
 At various crises in Jewish history Apocryphal writings under 
 the name of some well-known prophet appeared in order to foster 
 hopes for the z/¢imate triumph of Israel, and for future vengeance 
 upon its adversaries. The destruction of Jerusalem was the last 
 of these crises, and after it five of the documents mentioned above 
 took their origin. These documents, therefore, could have had 
 nothing to do with our Lord’s attitude, or that of the writers of 
 the Synoptic Gospels, in regard to the last things summed up in 
 ‘‘the day of the Lord.” The Fourth Book of Esdras (2 Esdras in 
 our Apocrypha) is typical of this class. St. Jerome calls it and 
 1 Esdras Apocryphorum tertii et guarti somnia, The Roman Church 
 excludes these and the Prayer of Manasses from its Canon, 
 but prints them at the ‘end of the Vulgate, ‘that they should not 
 be lost, as they are cited by some of the Fathers, and occur in 
 some old Bibles, both printed and MS.” (Preface). 2 Esdras isa 
 Jewish work with certain Christian additions, including the first 
 two chapters. Upon these have been based apparently the ‘‘ Re- 
 proaches” used on Good Friday, and from chapter il. an adap- 
 tation of the words, Requiem acternitatis dabit vobis... et Lux per- 
 peitua lucebit vobis, used in the Roman Office for the Dead. The 
 work is, therefore, composite, as the Rev. G. H. Box shows in his 
 recent work on the subject, although Dr. Sanday, in his Preface 
 to that work, would regard it as having proceeded from one, and that 
 a Jewish, hand. The work had at one time considerable currency, 
 St. Ambrose, and Gildas the British writer having used it freely. 
 The Eschatological element in it occurs in chaps, ji. 27, 37, and 
 Ki. 32; 
 
 The Apocalypse of Baruch is of a similar character, and with Zhe 
 Ascension of Isaiah, The Book of Fubilees, and the later portions of 
 The Sibylline Oracles were written after our Lord’s time. 
 
 It is to Zhe Book of Enoch especially, which has been previously 
 dealt with, that the Eschatologists look. The fragment which has 
 come down to us of Zhe Ascension of Moses was written in Hebrew, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 211 
 
 —if applied to the growth of Christianity, shows 
 that the only survival in the Church of to-day of 
 
 but contains no reference to a Messiah, if Joshua is not to be 
 regarded as representing Him. 
 
 The Testament of the XII, Patriarchs sees the eventual triumph 
 of Israel, the Conversion (or destruction) of the Gentiles, and the 
 establishment o# earth of the Messianic kingdom, in which there 
 will be only one people and one tongue, Then follow the Resur- 
 rection and Judgment. 
 
 The Psalms of Solomon deals with the triumph of Israel, the 
 return of the ten tribes, a period of prosperity following, ending with 
 vengeance on adversaries, 
 
 The documents here briefly described, together with the Biblical 
 passages dealing with the ‘‘last things,” form the basis of the 
 startling views of the Eschatologists, The chief Biblical passages 
 are here given, that the reader may have before him the whole of 
 the real foundations upon which such a wonderful superstructure is 
 raised. 
 
 1 Sam. ii. 10; Ps. xcv. 13; Isa. ii, 10-223 xiii. 6-13 3 xxvii. 
 Weare xet, b3% si IXVin, 15-24 5) \ [ere XXX,)-7, | 24)s) Dan. vit. os sJoel 
 li, 1-173 liv 18-32; Amos v. 18-20; Zeph. i, 7-14; Mal. 
 iv. 1-6, 
 
 Matis. <1i..30 3 Silly, 40-43 So XVi. 2773) Xxly, >> xxvVe 3Y. to ends 
 Mark xiii. ; Luke xvii. 20 to end ; Acts i. 7; il. II ; iil. 20 to end ; 
 Palin a eee OMuv dle. 5 20 2-X1V 103 2, Core xvi.e 2. Cors.vii los 
 Poti ts suit. 102 To Dhess, -ivi (16: to: end:;'v. 12 3-2 Thess. 1: 
 Pee ee aay, & situs. 11,.13.5 tleb, ix,.27 2 ret. Wl. 3-9e.s 
 Jude 14, 15; Apoc. i. 7 ; lil. 3; xvi. 15; xx. 15 to end. 
 
 The value of the pre-Christian Apocalyptic literature on the 
 eschatological question, in the eyes of Jewish writers such as Jost, 
 Graetz, etc., is regarded as nil. The stream of Jewish tradition since 
 the time of Christ offers similar evidence, as does post-Christian 
 Jewish literature, which is purely legalistic, . 
 
 Canon Charles, however, is of opinion that it helped much in 
 the transition from Judaism to Christianity. He is also of the 
 opinion that ‘‘ the expectation of the nearness of the end formed a 
 real factor in Jesus’ view of the future,” but he is cautious, in dis- 
 cussing the other side of the question, to add, ‘‘ There are, on the 
 
 4 
 
le MODERNISM 
 
 anything like Schweitzer’s cataclysmal theory is 
 the persistent belief in the Second Advent of our 
 Lord—which can be otherwise explained. 
 
 The Apocalyptic elements in the canonical books 
 of the Old Testament lend, if they are considered 
 without bias, little or no support for the views that 
 the coming of the Messiah would be attended by 
 an immediate and cataclysmal ending of the age. 
 The “kingdom of heaven,” to all competent com- 
 mentators before the rise of the eschatological 
 school, had its beginnings here on earth and its 
 consummation in the far future. It was iden- 
 tified later with the Church of Christ. St. Augus- 
 tine’s Czty of God is the exposition of this. 
 But the eschatologists have no patience with such 
 a view. The catastrophic end of the age, which 
 our Lord in His ignorance thought to be at hand, 
 that is the only key to the Gospel and to the 
 knowledge of Christ’s Person. The Church, ac- 
 cording to the eschatologists, has persistently 
 throughout the ages presented a wrong concept of 
 Christ’s mission, which was simply to warn all 
 men to withdraw their thoughts from temporal 
 
 other hand, many passages which just as clearly present us with 
 a different aspect of the future.’”’ He shows his attitude towards 
 the Weiss theory by dismissing with little ceremony the latter’s 
 contention (in support of his eschatological theory) that there is no 
 conftict between Mark xiii. 32 and xiii. 30. 
 
 A reaction against the Weiss-Schweitzer view is already at work, 
 and the hasty patrons of it in this country must feel more and 
 more that they hare damaged, by supporting it, their reputations as 
 unbiassed critics, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 213 
 
 things, and to centre them on the coming cata- 
 clysm,—any teaching of incidental morality being 
 merely zuvterimsethic. 
 
 Is it not more than astonishing that intelligent 
 men should give even a cursory attention to such 
 a theory? Yet some of the Modernists regard it 
 as an assured result of scholarship, and contend 
 that our concepts of Christology must be altered 
 accordingly. If students of Palaeontology were 
 to present us with a fossil-man of the Pleis- 
 tocene age—such as that exhumed at Piltdown 
 recently—and tell us that from his cranial struc- 
 ture he surpassed the Homo sapiens of to-day, 
 and that Nature had made a vast mistake in not 
 evolving this type instead of that which she had 
 selected, we might, if the proof were strong enough, 
 believe this. If we were asked, however, to regard 
 the environment of the Pleistocene man as the 
 highest, and to adapt our mode of existence to that 
 environment—if we could discover it—should we 
 give the proposal a moment’s consideration? And 
 yet we are virtually asked to set aside Catholic 
 tradition, the result of a long process of selection 
 and survival under Divine guidance, for a thing 
 of shreds and patches gathered together by modern 
 experts from an alleged independent study of the 
 original documents, and from a new examination of 
 our Lord’s temporal environment. Scholarship, it is 
 contended, has now become strictly scientific, and 
 its results to be depended on as we depend upon 
 those of scientific experts. Would scientific men 
 
214 MODERNISM 
 
 accept this contention? Science can always submit 
 its conclusions to exacting tests. To what tests 
 are we to submit the modern reconstruction of the 
 Gospel records ? 
 
 It is a little over a hundred years ago since the 
 Battle of Trafalgar was fought. Experts have 
 from time to time examined log-books, remini- 
 scences of the survivors, letters written immediately 
 after the battle, and yet we see, from a quite recent 
 controversy in Zhe Tzmzes, that the mode of Nelson’s 
 attack is still a matter of question. Are experts 
 of to-day likely to succeed better in dealing with 
 documents, none of them quite contemporaneous, 
 describing events of nineteen hundred years ago? 
 As the world of to-day inherits in its civilfzation 
 all that was worth preserving of its past, so the 
 Church of Christ of to-day, a living organism, 
 inherits all that under Divine guidance has been 
 worthy of permanence in the deposit of the faith 
 once for all give to it, and developed throughout 
 the ages. 
 
 Historical scholarship has its uses. It can show 
 the steps, for instance, by which our monarchy, 
 from the reign of King John, became, through 
 Magna Carta, “the Bill of Rights,” “the Act of 
 Settlement,” etc., what it is to-day. But could it 
 reimpose by any rational process the political 
 system of King John’s time on the nation of 
 to-day? And something like this is the attempt 
 of the eschatologists —to give us, under the 
 sanction of “scholarship,” a new Christ and a 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 215 
 
 new Gospel for that which evolution, under Divine 
 selection, has secured for us. The Church of 
 to-day, with its long career of conquest behind 
 it, has in its living energies a prestige and promise 
 with which the substitutes advanced by Modernism 
 could never compete. 
 
 Since that which precedes was written, Bishop 
 Gore’s “Open Letter” and the subsequent action 
 of the Bishops in the Southern Convocation have 
 called into the arena some English Churchmen as 
 champions of Modernistic views. The contentions 
 of these champions might have well been left to 
 speak for themselves, had they not called forth a 
 manifesto from the pen of a reverent and devout 
 Christian scholar whom every Churchman honours. 
 It must savour of temerity, if not of something 
 worse, for the writer to venture to call in question 
 the views of so great a man. The issues, however, 
 are of such tremendous importance that it would 
 be a serious defect in this book to pass by that 
 manifesto in silence. 
 
 Dr. Sanday’s reply to “ Bishop Gore’s Challenge 
 to Criticism” will, as he himself frankly antici- 
 pates, give pain to many. “I must begin,” he 
 says, “by associating myself more definitely with 
 the croup of writers whom the Bishop has in his 
 mind. It is only within the last two years—or 
 rather through a process of thought spread over 
 the last two years—that I have been led to go, 
 or come to feel inclined to go, as far as some of 
 
216 MODERNISM 
 
 them do. Iam not sure that I still go quite as 
 far. I ought perhaps to add that, if I know my- 
 self, I should say that the advance has been mainly 
 due to the development of my own thought, though 
 it would be unfair not to admit that I may have 
 been sub-consciously influenced by younger writers 
 like Professor Lake and Mr. J.M. Thompson.” “I 
 have argued against them, and I found, and still 
 find, not a little to criticize, especially in the 
 attitude of Mr. Thompson. But still ‘the dart 
 sticks in the side.’ ” 
 
 Mr. Thompson’s exclusion of the miraculous 
 from our Lord’s birth, death, and history has 
 been already dealt with in the first article of the 
 present book, and Dr. Sanday believes he is not 
 really taking up Mr. Thompson’s position. Still 
 he seems to accept both the “nature miracles” 
 ascribed to our Lord, and the miraculous in His life- 
 history, with certain qualifications only. Ofthe two 
 alternatives, viz, that the former “were performed 
 exactly as they are described,” or “that they came 
 to be attributed to Him in this form by the imagi- 
 nation of the early Church,” “the latter,” he says, 
 “is the more probable.” “I believe,” he continues, 
 “most emphatically in His Supernatural Birth ; 
 but I cannot so easily bring myself to think that 
 His birth was (as I should regard it) unnatural” ; 
 that is, if I do not mistake his meaning, it did not 
 exclude the natural mode of physical generation 
 (an hypothesis with tremendous issues), although 
 the operation of the Holy Ghost in the process is 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 217 
 
 fully accepted. But here one dreads overstating 
 or understating what Dr. Sanday means. Still 
 he seems clear in saying that the assertion of 
 the Virgin-Birth is “deeply metaphorical and 
 symbolical, and carries us into regions where 
 thought is baffled.” “Whatever the Virgin-Birth 
 can spiritually mean for us,” he continues, “is 
 guaranteed by the fact that the Holy Babe was 
 Divine. Is it not enough to affirm this with all 
 our heart and soul, and be silent as to anything 
 beyond ?” 
 
 As to the Resurrection, he says, “ The accounts 
 that have come down to us seem to be too con- 
 flicting and confused to prove the actual resuscita- 
 tion of the dead body of the Lord from the tomb.” 
 “The body which the disciples saw was not the 
 natural body that was laid in the grave.’ The 
 great fact for Dr. Sanday seems to be “that the 
 Risen Lord as spirit still governed and inspired 
 His Church,” and he would deprecate any further 
 attempt to define the manner of the Resurrection, 
 about the exact mode of which “we may go on 
 disputing for ever.” 
 
 These particular results of Dr. Sanday’s re- 
 examination of two fundamental articles in the 
 Apostles’ Creed were, he says, “incidents in a 
 comprehensive inquiry into the general subject of 
 miracles and the supernatural.” He did not start 
 on that inquiry with a presupposition against 
 God’s interfering with Natural Law. 
 
 “Tt could not be said of me that my attitude 
 
218 MODERNISM 
 
 was based on a mistaken view of natural law, and 
 on something much less than a Christian belief in 
 God.” “I did not for a moment doubt the power 
 of God to make what exceptions He pleased. I 
 only asked for better evidence of His will to make 
 them.” He was “perfectly ready to accept and 
 believe whatever. could be explained by the opera- 
 tion of a higher cause in the course of nature. But 
 as we see the Divine Providence in action, the 
 higher cause never contradicts the lower. It over- 
 rules it and diverts it from its original direction, 
 but it never breaks the proper sequence of cause 
 and effect.” Here the sequence he assumes of 
 “cause and effect” is not in keeping, as we have 
 seen, with the latest scientific views. 
 
 “By degrees,” Dr. Sanday proceeds, “there had 
 hardened in my mind a distinction which is per- 
 haps most conveniently expressed asa distinction 
 between events that are supra naturvaim—e€XCep- 
 tional, extraordinary, testifying to the presence 
 of higher spiritual forces—and events, or alleged 
 events, that are contra naturam, or involve some 
 definite reversal of the natural physical order.” 
 
 The Virgin-Birth and the Resurrection of our 
 Lord’s Body come within the latter class. “ There 
 remain,” he says, “in this category of contra 
 naturam miracles only the two great events—the 
 Supernatural Beginning and the Supernatural 
 Ending of the Lord’s earthly career.” 
 
 And he gradually arrived at this conclusion, as 
 he says, because “it was quite impossible for me 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 219 
 
 to dismiss from my mind the pracjudicium which 
 had been gradually forming itself against the 
 permanent valldity of the conception of miracles 
 contra naturam.” 
 
 Dr. Sanday, with that candour and conscientious 
 sincerity which mark all his writings, sees that his 
 views conflict with those presented by the Church 
 Catholic from the beginning. “I must in candour 
 add,” he says, “that, although I believe emphatic- 
 ally in a Supernatural Birth and a Supernatural 
 Resurrection, and in all that follows from these 
 beliefs, I know that it is not all that the Church 
 of the past has believed. I must not blink this 
 fact.” 
 
 He concludes by saying, “For the moment I 
 know that the suggestions I have made will come 
 with a shock to the great mass of Christians; but 
 in the end I believe that they will be thankfully 
 welcomed. What they would mean is that the 
 greatest of all stumbling-blocks to the modern 
 mind is removed, and that the beautiful regularity 
 that we see around us now has been and will be 
 the law of the Divine action from the beginning to 
 the end of time.” 
 
 It cannot be a misrepresentation of Dr. Sanday’s 
 views to say that the praejudicium which has led 
 him to his conclusions is based on the so-called 
 “Uniformity of nature’”—“the law of the Divine 
 action from the beginning to the end of time.” He 
 could not, as he says, dismiss this from his mind. 
 In this he is at one with Mr. Thompson, and if he 
 
220 MODERNISM 
 
 cannot follow the latter in excluding everything 
 miraculous from our Lord’s career, it is owing to the 
 distinction which he is able tosee between miracles 
 that are supra naturam and those that are contra 
 naturam. Is this distinction scientifically valid ? 
 Mr. Thompson’s conclusions from the assumed 
 premisses seem to be the more logical, for in order 
 to bring what he calls “the supernatural” into 
 harmony with his assumed results of modern 
 Science, he says no erternal signs of the super- 
 natural are to be looked for. 
 
 It is not, moreover, easy to gather what Dr. 
 Sanday means by miracles supra naturam ; whether 
 they have external signs or appeal only to the 
 spiritual element within us. His quotation from 
 St. Augustine, the most modern, perhaps, of the 
 Fathers, that “a prodigy happens not contra na- 
 turam, but contrary to what is known as the order 
 of Nature,” does not enlighten us as to Dr. Sanday’s 
 distinction. Perhaps he drew his distinction from 
 another passage in St. Augustine (Contra Laustum, 
 lib, xxvi.). St. Augustine, after showing that 
 “God the Creator and Upholder of all natures, 
 effects nothing contra naturam, for that will be 
 natural in everything that is done by Him from 
 Whom is every measure, number, and order of 
 Nature,” goes on to distinguish, “But not im- 
 properly we say that God works contra naturam, 
 something which He effects contra that with which 
 we are acquainted in Nature. For this that we 
 call Nature is the customary course of nature 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 221 
 
 known to us, contra which, when God works any- 
 thing, we pronounce it to be marvellous or 
 miraculous.” But these two meanings of contra 
 naturant do not help us much to understand Dr. 
 Sanday’s distinction. Perhaps this distinction is 
 based on the fact that some of our Lord’s miracles 
 are on a line with Nature’s operations on a grand 
 scale, as, for instance, when St. Augustine, com- 
 menting (77. ix.) on the change of water to wine at 
 Cana, says, “This miracle of our Lord’s, turning 
 the water into wine, is no miracle to those who 
 know that God worked it. For the Same that 
 day made wine in the waterpots, Who every year 
 makes wine in the vine; only the latter is no 
 longer wonderful, because it happens uniformly. 
 And, therefore, it is that God keeps some extra- 
 ordinary acts in store for certain occasions, to 
 rouse men out of their lethargy, and make them 
 worship Him.” 
 
 The Virgin-Birth, it is assumed, has no such 
 parallel, and Dr. Sanday thus makes it to be contra 
 naturam. But what about the recent biological 
 researches on Parthenogenesis, even among certain 
 higher organisms? Are these not parallel in- 
 stances in the wide realm of Nature? 
 
 There is here a further consideration to be noted. 
 We have learned of late that abnormal developments 
 in the mental and physiological constitution of 
 human beings are held in check by what is called 
 the function of “inhibition.” This preservative 
 function, which has been begotten in the long 
 
222 MODERNISM 
 
 process of evolution, has its parallel in the genesis 
 of ‘‘self-control” in the progress of civilisation. If 
 this inhibition of restraint, which is normally active 
 everywhere, is removed, we have as a result start- 
 ling departures from the uniform course of Nature. 
 The late Dr. Romanes, indeed (Before and After 
 Darwin), contended that Parthenogenesis, even in 
 the higher mammals, was possible if certain in- 
 hibiting elements in the ovwm were mechanically 
 removed, 
 
 But the whole question raised by Dr. Sanday 
 depends on the validity of his assumption of the 
 permanence of what he calls “the beautiful regu- 
 larity that we see around us.” This regularity of 
 Nature, consistent as it must be with tremendous 
 cataclysms—as we see marked in the upheavals of 
 the earth’s crust and in the catastrophic evidence in 
 stellar outbursts—is logically based on a mechanical 
 concept of the Universe. But this question has 
 been already discussed in the section of this book 
 dealing with non-miraculous Christianity (pp. 19 
 et seq.), amplified by the note on p. 146, and in the 
 passage dealing with Mr. Streeter’s contention 
 that Christian theology must be harmonized with 
 science.* To save needless repetition, the reader is 
 referred to these portions of the present book. 
 
 To give that mechanical concept an indisputable 
 position, the influence of mind or spirit on 
 matter has, as we have seen, been rigorously 
 excluded by Materialists. This mecessarily leads 
 
 * See further note at end, 
 
AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY 223 
 
 to the exclusion of God from the operations of 
 Nature, and zo doctrine of “ immanence,” other than 
 the identification of God with Nature-mechanics, is 
 consistent with this position. If we would avoid 
 the logical implications of this beautiful regu- 
 larity of Nature, we are driven to believe, with the 
 Church of Christ, that spirit does control matter, 
 and, if so, there can be no logical difficulty about 
 well-attested miracles on the ground that they are 
 contra naturam. As St. Augustine says (De Civ. 
 Dei, x. 11), “Those who deny that the invisible 
 God works visible miracles are not to be listened 
 to, since, even according to them, He made the 
 world, which they plainly cannot deny to be 
 visible. Whatever, therefore, is wonderful in the 
 world is naturally of a lesser wonder than the 
 whole world itself, which, without doubt, God 
 created—that is, the heavens and the earth and all 
 that therein is.” 
 
 Mr. Knox concludes his work (Some Loose 
 Stones) by predicting a common-sense reaction 
 against the attempt to reconstruct Christianity, 
 or at least the theology which expresses it, by 
 bringing to convergence the separate views of 
 modern experts. “There will be a reckoning,” he 
 says. “There will be a common-sense reaction, 
 which will immolate the synoptic problem upon 
 the embers of the Homeric problem.” He might 
 have added also, as an issue, the overturning of 
 the science of the reconcilers, with which modern 
 science is day by day more in conflict, 
 
22 NOTE TO: PAGE +123 
 
 This is not an isolated fancy. Christian 
 thinkers are beginning to realize more fully that 
 God the Holy Ghost—Who cannot be divided 
 against Himself—has always been and still is the 
 Divine Guide of Christ’s Church, against which 
 the Gates of Hell shall not prevail. 
 
 NOTE TO PAGE 122. 
 
 Much attention has been directed of late to what is called “The 
 Theory of Relativity,” from which it is deduced that the so-called 
 “Laws of Nature” depend on the position of the observer. Pro- 
 fessor Carmichael (Zhe Theory of Relativity, New York, 1913) 
 presents us with the startling results of this theory and the logical 
 methods by which these have been obtained. It is, in fact, ‘‘a 
 fresh analysis of the foundations of physical science,” and calls in 
 question the validity of our units of space and time, and our con- 
 cepts of ‘‘ mass,” ‘‘ energy,” and other fundamentals. This work 
 asks the question, ‘In what respect are our enunciated laws of 
 Nature relative to us who investigate them, and to the earth which 
 serves us as a system of reference? How would they be modified, 
 for instance, by a change in the velocity of the earth?” (p. 8). 
 ‘‘The beautiful regularity which we see around us,” which Dr. 
 Sanday assumes to be ‘‘the law of the Divine action from the 
 beginning to the end of time,’”’ and on which he bases his exclusion 
 of miracles contra naturam, is not such a certain result of science 
 as he thinks. At any rate, accommodators of revelation to science 
 ought to try to learn something of the drift of modern research 
 before they attempt to dogmatize, 
 
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