WAQA 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 HN SO CCE vl . 
 Conference on Christian 
 politics, economics and 
 The nature of God and His 
 purpose for the world 
 
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C.0.P.E.C. Commission Reports. Volume I 
 
 THE NATURE OF GOD AND HIs 
 PURPOSE FOR THE WORLD 
 
C.0.P.E.C. COMMISSION 
 
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 REPORTS 
 
 Tue Nature oF Gop anp His 
 PuRPOSE FOR THE WoRLD 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Tue Home 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE SEXES 
 LEISURE 
 
 Tue TREATMENT OF CRIME 
 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 
 CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 
 INDUSTRY AND PRoPERTY 
 Potirics AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 Tue Socrat Function oF 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 HisroricaAL ILtusTRATIONS 
 OF THE SocraL EFFEcTs 
 oF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 
 
 First published . . . Afpril1g24 
 Second impression SN tp ume 192 
 

 
 
 hg a i 
 
 THE ‘NATURE OF,,GOD — 
 
 AND HIS PURPOSE FOR” 
 THE WORLD 
 
 Being the Report presented to the Conference on 
 Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship | 
 
 at Birmingham, April 5-12, 1924 
 
 Published for the Conference Committee by 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO 
 
 ROMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1924 
 
BASIS 
 
 Tue basis of this Conference is the conviction 
 that the Christian faith, rightly interpreted and 
 consistently followed, gives the vision and the 
 power essential for solving the problems of to-day, 
 that the social ethics of Christianity have been 
 greatly neglected by Christians with disastrous 
 consequences to the individual and to society, and 
 that it is of the first importance that these should 
 be given a clearer and more persistent emphasis. 
 In the teaching and work of Jesus Christ there are 
 certain fundamental principles—such as the universal 
 Fatherhood of God with its corollary that mankind 
 is God’s family, and the law “ that whoso loseth his 
 life, findeth it”"—which, if accepted, not only 
 condemn much in the present organisation of 
 society, but show the way of regeneration. Christi- 
 anity has proved itself to possess also a motive power 
 for the transformation of the individual, without 
 which no change of policy or method can succeed. 
 In the light of its principles the constitution of 
 society, the conduct of industry, the upbringing 
 of children, national and international politics, the 
 personal relations of men and women, in fact all 
 human relationships, must be tested. It is hoped 
 that through this Conference the Church may win 
 a fuller understanding of its Gospel, and hearing 
 a clear call to practical action may find courage 
 to obey. 
 
 iv 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 THE present volume forms one of the series of 
 Reports drawn up for submission to the Conference 
 on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, 
 held in Birmingham in April 1924. 
 
 In recent years Christians of all denominations 
 have recognised with increasing conviction that 
 the commission to “go and teach all nations ” 
 involved a double task. Alongside of the work of 
 individual conversion and simultaneously with it 
 an effort must be made to Christianise the corporate 
 life of mankind in all its activities. Recent de- 
 velopments since the industrial revolution, the vast 
 increase of population, the growth of cities, the 
 creation of mass production, the specialisation of 
 effort, and the consequent interdependence of 
 individuals upon each other, have given new sig- 
 nificance to the truth that we are members one of 
 another. ‘The existence of a system and of methods 
 unsatisfying, if not antagonistic to Christian life, 
 constitutes a challenge to the Church. The work 
 of a number of pioneers during the past century 
 has prepared the way for the attempt to examine 
 and test our social life in the light of the principles 
 revealed in Jesus Christ, and to visualise the require- 
 ments of a Christian civilisation. Hitherto such 
 attempts have generally been confined to one or 
 two aspects of citizenship; and, great as has been 
 their value, they have plainly shown the defects of 
 
 v 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 sectional study. We cannot Christianise life in 
 compartments: to reform industry involves the 
 reform of education, of the home life, of politics 
 and of international affairs. What is needed is not 
 a number of isolated and often inconsistent plans 
 appropriate only to a single department of human 
 activity, but an ideal of corporate life constructed 
 on consistent principles and capable of being applied 
 to and fulfilled in every sphere. 
 
 The present series of Reports is a first step in 
 this direction. Each has been drawn up by a 
 Commission representative of the various denomina- 
 tions of British Christians, and containing not only 
 thinkers and students, but men and women of large 
 and differing practical experience. Our endeavour 
 has been both to secure the characteristic contri- 
 butions of each Christian communion so as to gain 
 a vision of the Kingdom of God worthy of our 
 common faith, and also to study the application of 
 the gospel to actual existing conditions—to keep 
 our principles broad and clear and to avoid the 
 danger of Utopianism. We should be the last to 
 claim any large or general measure of success. ‘The 
 task is full of difficulty: often the difficulties have 
 seemed insurmountable. 
 
 But as it has proceeded we have discovered an 
 unexpected agreement, and a sense of fellowship 
 so strong as to make fundamental divergences, where 
 they appeared, matters not for dispute but for frank 
 and sympathetic discussion. Our Reports will not 
 be in any sense a final solution of the problems with 
 which they are concerned. They represent, we 
 believe, an honest effort to see our corporate life 
 
 vi 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 steadily and whole from the standpoint of Christi- 
 anity; and as such may help to bring to many a 
 clearer and more consistent understanding of that 
 Kingdom for which the Church longs and labours 
 and prays. 
 
 However inadequate our Reports may appear— 
 and in view of the magnitude of the issues under 
 discussion and the infinite grandeur of the Christian 
 gospel inadequacy is inevitable—we cannot be too 
 thankful for the experience of united inquiry and 
 study and fellowship of which they are the fruit. 
 
 It should be understood that these Reports are 
 printed as the Reports of the Commissions only, 
 and any resolutions adopted by the Conference on 
 the basis of these Reports will be found in The 
 Proceedings of C'.O.P.E.C., which also contains a 
 General Index to the series of Reports. 
 

 
LIST OF COMMISSION MEMBERS 
 
 The Commission responsible for the production of this Report 
 was constituted as follows :— 
 
 Chairman :—PROFESSOR W. H. MOBERLY, M.A. 
 Professor of Philosophy, Birmingham University. 
 
 Members of the Commission :— 
 
 BARTLET, THE Rev. J. VERNon, D.D. 
 Professor of Church History in Mansfield College, Oxford. 
 
 CAIRNS, Tue Rev. Davip, D.D. 
 Principal of United Free Church College, Aberdeen ; Moderator 
 of the Assembly of the United Free Church of Scotland. 
 
 DAY, THE REv. FATHER ARTHUR F.,, S.J. 
 Member .of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 
 attached to the staff of the Church of the Immaculate 
 Conception, Farm Street, London. 
 
 *DOUGALL, Miss Liry. 
 (Died October 1923.) 
 
 GARDNER, Miss Lucy. 
 Member of the Society of Friends. 
 
 JACKSON, PayMAsSTER LT.-COMMANDER H. L., C.B.E. 
 Accountant Officer, Royal Navy, now serving in H.M.S. 
 Pegasus. 
 
 MALTBY, THE Rev. W. R. 
 
 Warden, Wesley Deaconess Institute, Ilkley. 
 
 OMAN, THE Rev. Pror. Joun, D.D. 
 Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge. 
 
 * Miss Dougall co-operated in the work of the Commission up 
 to the time of her death, and her colleagues wish to express their 
 indebtedness to her, 
 
 ix 
 
LIST OF COMMISSION MEMBERS 
 
 OXFORD, Tue Rt. Rev. THE Lorp Bisuop or, D.D. 
 Corresponding Member of Commission; formerly Fellow 
 . and Tutor of University College, Oxford; Headmaster of 
 Repton and Winchester, and Bishop of Southwark. 
 
 PHILLIPS, THe Rev. Pror. DAvIp. 
 Professor at the United Theological College (Presbyterian 
 Church of Wales), Bala, North Wales. 
 
 QUICK, THE Rev. Canon OLiver, M.A. (Oxon). 
 Canon of Carlisle Cathedral, author of various theological 
 books. 
 
 RAVEN, THE Rev. C. E., D.D. (CANTAB). 
 Rector of Bletchingley; sometime Fellow and Dean of 
 Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Author of: What think ye 
 of Christ ? Apollinarianism. 
 
 ROBERTSON, Tue Rev. J. A., D.D. 
 
 Professor of New Testament Language and ite nae 
 United Free Church College, Aberdeen. 
 
 TALBOT, THE Rev. FATHER E. K., C.R., B.A. 
 Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield. 
 
 UNDERHILL, Evetyn. 
 
 Lecturer on Christian Mysticism and Religious Psychology; 
 Author of Mysticism, Immanence, etc. 
 
 WOOD, H. G., Esq., M.A. 
 Director of Studies, Woodbrooke; Professor of New Testa- 
 ment Literature and Church History at the Selly Oak Colleges, 
 Birmingham. 
 
 * 
 
Basis 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 List oF Commission MemBers . 
 
 (A) 
 (B) 
 (C) 
 (D) 
 
 (A) 
 (B) 
 (C) 
 
 (A) 
 (B) 
 (C) 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 GOD IN CHRIST 
 FATHERHOOD 
 PERSONALITY 
 SACRIFICE 
 FELLOWSHIP 
 CHAPTER II 
 GOD AND NATURE 
 Tue Cuier DirFicuLtizs 
 Tue TEACHING oF JESUS 
 An INTERPRETATION OF THE Facts 
 CHAPTER III 
 GOD AND MAN 
 Tue REVELATION oF Gop 
 
 Man’s Response 
 
 Tue Divine Society 
 xi 
 
 79 
 89 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 GOD AND SIN 
 (A) Tue Farture or Manxrinp 
 (1) Personal Sin 
 (2) Corporate Sin 
 
 (B) Tue Means or Recovery 
 
 CHAPTER OY, 
 GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 (A) THe Propiem . 
 (B) Present CiRCUMSTANCES 
 (C) Tue Dovsre STANDARD 
 (D) THe Nature or CoMPROMISE 
 (E) Principtes or Conpuct 
 
 (1) Self-knowledge 
 
 (2) Sympathy 
 (F) Tue Way or THE Cross 
 (G) Tue Fruits oF THE SPIRIT 
 
 (1) PERsonALity 
 
 (2) Sranparps oF VALUE 
 
 (3) FettowsuiP 
 
 Xil 
 
 PAGE 
 102 
 
 108 
 113 
 
 119 
 
 141 
 142 
 
 af eas 
 
 149 
 153 
 153 
 155 
 156 
 159 
 162 
 166 
 
 172 
 
CHAR TERS I 
 GOD IN CHRIST 
 

 
CHAPTER 1f 
 
 GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 “Wuatisthis? Anewdoctrine. With authority 
 He commands the powers of evil and they obey 
 Him.” “This man speaks with authority and not 
 like the Rabbis.” His originality and certainty are 
 characteristic of the first impression made by Jesus 
 Christ upon His contemporaries. And modern 
 studies, which have done so much to interpret the 
 records of His ministry, enable us to recover some- 
 thing of the surprise and hope of His earliest hearers, 
 and to verify in our own experience their conviction 
 that “‘ never man spake as this man.” In the world 
 of to-day, a world bewildered alike by the com- 
 plexity of its problems and by its own apparent 
 inability to solve them, there is manifest a growing 
 and wistful desire for guidance. Amidst the clamour 
 of warnings and predictions and policies, men and 
 women are straining their ears to catch the authentic 
 note of one who sees and can declare the way out of 
 chaos, of one who can recall them to the eternal 
 Beauty and Truth and Goodness, of one whose 
 sincerity and confidence carry instant conviction. 
 In their growing anxiety they are quick to seek 
 security even in outworn superstitions or upstart 
 creeds. Asin the ancient world, which in so large a 
 measure resembles our own day, there are false 
 
 3 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 Christs and false prophets in abundance and the 
 people are drawn after them. But in the inevitable 
 disillusionment which is following the upheavals 
 and dreams, the experiments and disappointments 
 of the past decade, there is, we believe, a growing 
 desire to hear and follow Jesus, which summons 
 those who are called by His name to reveal and 
 substantiate their claim on His behalf. 
 
 It is the purpose of this Report to set out plainly, 
 and with reference to the life of to-day, what 
 Christians of all denominations have received and 
 hold in common from their common Lord. ‘They 
 believe, and the experience of late years deepens 
 their conviction, that in Him and His good news 
 of God lies the way to the understanding and the 
 tight use of life in all its manifold aspects and 
 activities. And as a preliminary to the detailed 
 discussion of Christian citizenship, they would — 
 attempt to define and explain the principles from 
 the application of which their concrete proposals are 
 derived. 
 
 It was the note of authority which first drew men 
 and women to Jesus. Before Him, and not least 
 among His own compatriots, there had been seers 
 and prophets, men who had felt and helped to 
 satisfy the hunger for God, and who, in so doing, 
 had been inspired to reveal for their own and 
 succeeding generations the eternal values, and to 
 show them how to live eternally. In Jesus the 
 partial glimpses and incomplete messages of the past 
 found their fulfilment. He and He alone fully knew 
 God and revealed Him: such is His own claim, and 
 such the experience of His followers. Here was a 
 
 4 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 declaration of the Divine nature and purpose fresh 
 and arresting, congruous with human aspiration, 
 and infinitely enriching to human life. Those who 
 had ears to hear and eyes to see, heard an inter- 
 pretation of the ways of God with man, and of the 
 response of man to God, which carried its own con- 
 viction, and saw a character perfectly illustrating the 
 fullness of the teaching, a life worthily representing 
 man to God, and God to man. And as they heard 
 and saw, and still more when the whole revelation 
 had been brought to its focussing point at Calvary, 
 they found in it not only illumination but power, 
 not only example but redemption. ‘The old passed 
 away—or rather it became new—and in the change 
 was manifested God. For these men and women 
 there was henceforth no doubt or fear, but only love 
 and faith and hope. ‘They were themselves trans- 
 formed, and in them was liberated a Spirit who knit 
 them into organic fellowship one with another, and 
 by them continued their Master’s redemptive work. 
 He, not merely as teacher and pattern, but as living 
 comrade, was the source and goal of their new 
 emotion and new thinking and new activity. For 
 them Jesus Christ was the Saviour, and because 
 Saviour, also Lord and God. All things were theirs, 
 for they were Christ’s, and Christ was God’s. 
 
 And the testimony of the eye-witnesses has been 
 confirmed by a growing weight of Christian experi- 
 ence throughout the centuries. Men and women 
 of all nations and languages, of all times and stations, 
 learned and simple, robust and suffering, speculative 
 and practical, have found their satisfaction in Him, 
 and in Him have entered upon fresh and fuller life. 
 
 5 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 Incarnate at a particular time and place, He appeals 
 universally, meeting the needs and receiving the 
 worship of humanity in all its representative types, 
 from the child who announces that He came “to 
 put a face on God,” to the thinker who sees in the 
 drama of His passion and resurrection the clear 
 expression of a pattern which he dimly traces inter- 
 woven in the very woof and warp of the universe. 
 To attempt to condense into a few pages what the 
 generations of Christendom have found in Him is a 
 task impossible of accomplishment. For our own 
 purpose it will be enough to note four main headings 
 of His word and work: its revelation of God, its 
 conception of man’s nature, its vision of man’s 
 calling, its manifestation of power to fulfil that call- 
 ing. ‘These four can be expressed in the four words, 
 Fatherhood, personality, sacrifice and fellowship. 
 
 (A) FaTHERHOOD 
 
 Light on the nature of God and His purpose for 
 the world may come to man through all the avenues: 
 of experience. God discloses Himself in many ways, 
 and some respond to one kind of appeal, some to 
 another. Not a few mystics, poets and scientists 
 find God more readily in Nature, or in the rare 
 atmosphere of pure thought, than in concrete action 
 and human life. ‘They shrink from the personal, and 
 fear to limit the infinity of the all-pervading by the 
 ascription of attributes necessarily relative and 
 anthropomorphic. Others, bewildered by the diffi- 
 culty of reconciling a credal religion with what they 
 know of the universe, yet find in their own conscious- 
 
 6 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 ness of right and wrong a guide for life. Humanity 
 can show few characters more heroic than those who 
 thus without faith fling themselves into “ the lost 
 fight of virtue.” Such men are in fact living by 
 Christian standards which they do not consciously 
 trace to Christ. They approach God in Christ 
 through experience of God as the object of all 
 thought. But whether the first knowledge of God 
 worthy of the name comes to a man through seeing 
 God in Jesus, or whether a man’s faith in Christ be 
 regarded as a supplement to his belief in God, all 
 Christians, whatever their differences in tempera- 
 ment, find in Christ the ultimate standard of their 
 trust in God and their hope for mankind. For us 
 as Christians, God is “ the God and Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ,” and the value and destiny of 
 men must be judged in the light of Christ’s attitude 
 towards them. We turn then to the Gospels that 
 we may learn how to think of God and His purpose 
 for the world. 
 
 And surely we are justified in so doing. What- 
 ever be the ultimate truth, if ‘““ God has many Words 
 for many worlds,” we, while we are human and on 
 earth, can find our highest concept of Deity only 
 when the eternal is translated for us into the terms 
 of our humanity. If we go to the masters of human 
 thought for our philosophy and science, to the 
 masters of creative art for our literature and music, 
 if the expert has a right to be heard, then to reject 
 in religion the revelation of One who was “ defined 
 to be the Son of God by power in accordance with 
 the Spirit of holiness” is to be false to the method 
 of sound study. And if we are to deal fairly with 
 
 7 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 what is set before us in Jesus Christ, we must test it 
 by attempting to interpret all our experience in the 
 light of it. It has been said of William James’ 
 psychology that he endeavoured to explain the 
 psychical from the physical, the consciousness of 
 men from the movements of the brain and action of 
 the nerves; and that when he had pushed explana- 
 tions in terms of the physical as far as they would go 
 he came to the point where he had to admit, and 
 where he frankly and gladly admitted, some inde- 
 pendent spiritual reality. The critic who so 
 describes his work adds that he ought not to have 
 been content with recognising the independence of 
 the spiritual at one or two points, but that, having » 
 admitted it somewhere, he should have gone back 
 over the whole ground again, and asked whether his 
 physiological explanations were really satisfying. 
 Having admitted the spiritual somewhere, he should 
 have looked for it everywhere. We are in like case 
 with the revelation in Jesus Christ. Here God is 
 convincingly present, even when we seem to look 
 in vain for Him elsewhere. But if we become con- 
 scious of God in Christ, then we have to interpret 
 all our experience religiously, and expect to find God 
 where at first we thought He was not. So the 
 coming of Christ gives a new assurance, a new cer- 
 tainty to our faith in the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 We may note, in the first place, that God is 
 supremely real in the experience of Jesus. "To Him 
 the amazing thing was the poverty of men’s faith. 
 ** He marvelled because of their unbelief.” We are 
 amazed at His absolute confidence. ‘‘ He was,” as 
 the Puritan Father, Goodwin, said, ‘‘ the first and 
 
 8 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 greatest believer that ever lived.”” What is to most 
 of us at best a fleeting vision, often forgotten and 
 often denied, a vision which has too little in common 
 with our everyday life, was to Him an abiding cer- 
 tainty, the fact of which His whole life was a testi- 
 mony. It is the evidence of His perfect union with 
 God, confirming His claim to an unique Sonship, 
 that led His disciples, men whose whole heredity and 
 training prejudiced them against such a confession, 
 to acclaim Him “‘ Lord of all.”? ‘The experience of 
 the centuries, enshrined in the belief and creeds of 
 Christendom, warrants us in “‘ looking to Jesus, the 
 author and fulfiller of our faith *”—Jesus who revealed 
 in its perfection that of which prophets and saints 
 have seen glimpses and told as best they could, Jesus 
 who took up and enriched and completed the work 
 of the ages. 
 
 The foundation of “ the social gospel ”’ is the fact 
 that this God, whose thoughts and ways so clearly 
 are not as ours, is none the less our Father. ‘This 
 truth is finally established in the revelation of the 
 Father in His Son. The attitude of Jesus Christ 
 towards His own mission, towards the external work 
 of Nature and towards mankind is determined by 
 the truth of the Fatherhood of God everywhere and 
 in all relationships. Not everything that happens in 
 the natural order or in human society is in accord- 
 ance with God’s will: that will is not yet done on 
 earth as it is in heaven. But the material world is 
 not in itself evil. The creation is good. “Jesus 
 passed on, not as through a wilderness where all 
 is ownerless and homeless, save the thread of way 
 itself, but as through His Heavenly Father’s domain. 
 
 a 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 Wherever He trod, He took possession and exercised 
 authority in His Father’s name.” ‘The revelation of 
 the love of God is not an aspect of the life of Jesus, 
 nor yet specially associated with some aspect of His 
 life. It is the whole significance of His life. His 
 whole work is to reveal the F'ather’s love. 
 
 Nor is the Fatherhood of God as revealed in and 
 by Jesus a merely passive relationship of benevolent 
 interest or patient expectation. God does not 
 simply wait for us to recognise and return to Him. 
 He seeks us out with a love that will not despair 
 nor let us go. Jesus, alike by what He said and 
 did and by what He was, reveals the resources of 
 the Father’s love; His followers recognised in Him 
 the divine initiative— God so loved that He gave” 
 and ‘“‘He that spared not His own Son, shall He 
 not with Him give us all things?’ It is from this 
 conviction of the invincible activity of the Father 
 (“My Father worketh”) that Christians draw their 
 hope. They are called to attempt great things; 
 they can undertake their task if they also expect 
 great things. If, as Herrmann wrote, “Our com- 
 munion with God rests upon God’s communion 
 with us,” then indeed we should not shrink from 
 our calling, nor be dismayed at what it involves; 
 “for it is God that worketh in us” and for us. 
 
 (B) Prersonaity 
 
 More important for our immediate purpose is the 
 character of God’s Fatherhood as revealed in the 
 attitude of Jesus towards men. We may note first 
 
 His interest in men as men. It is true that His own 
 Io 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 ministry was confined to the Jews; but the appeal of 
 His teaching is universal. ‘The study of the actual 
 historic circumstances which determine the imme- 
 diate reference of His sayings is very illuminating, 
 but seldom indispensable to the understanding of 
 their essential spirit. He took the spiritual and 
 moral treasures of Israel and made them available 
 for mankind. He stripped the great prophetic 
 teachings of particularist accretions and associations 
 and brought them within reach of the humblest 
 sincere soul. Man as man was the object of His 
 care. If not a sparrow falls without our Father, 
 clearly we may not despise one of God’s little ones. 
 Jesus devoted Himself to the lost sheep of the house 
 of Israel. By the lost sheep we may understand the 
 Galilean crowds who appeared to Him as sheep 
 without a shepherd and on whose ignorance and 
 helplessness He had compassion. ‘The crowds whom 
 it is so easy for us to condemn, He could not but 
 pity. 
 
 Yet the multitude was to Him never a mere 
 generalisation. It is often declared in Scripture 
 that God is no respecter of persons, that He 
 “‘looketh upon the heart,” not upon the disguise 
 which masks it. Jesus in all His dealings with man- 
 kind, in answering the questions, resolving the 
 doubts, and meeting the needs of humanity, goes 
 straight to the innermost reality of the self. He 
 strips those who come to Him of their pretences, 
 their formalisms and conventions, and deals directly 
 with the individual, recognising and sympathising 
 with the peculiarities, the temperament and circum- 
 
 stances of each. Respect for men’s intellectual and 
 II 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 moral selves is an essential characteristic of His 
 method. He would not override men’s judgments. 
 He would not compel either their faith or their 
 service. His constant appeal to His hearers’ sense 
 of right and wrong; His answers to the demand, 
 “If Thou be the Christ, tell us plainly,” and the 
 question, “Is it lawful to pay tribute?”; His 
 refusal to work a sign from heaven: His avoidance 
 of publicity for His miracles; His refusal of earthly 
 kingship; His insistence on would-be disciples 
 counting the cost—all these features of the Gospel 
 story point to His resolve that men should face 
 realities for themselves. He demanded sincerity and 
 cared only for a loyalty based on conviction. ‘The 
 appeals to mass emotion on which we are so often 
 tempted to rely, He never trusted. Judged by 
 standards that have often been accepted in the 
 Church, her Lord was not a successful preacher. ‘The 
 training of the ‘['welve was more important than the 
 public ministry. It is difficult to say which evokes 
 the deeper wonder—the friendship which Jesus 
 lavished on the first disciples, or the confidence He 
 reposed in them when He trusted His work and 
 His message to their loyalty and discernment. ‘The 
 Mohammedan will sometimes twit the Christian on 
 the ground that the latter possesses no authentic 
 writing of his prophet. Jesus did not put His gospel 
 into a book as Mohammed did. But then Moham- 
 med did not believe in man’s capacity to respond to 
 God’s grace as Jesus did. 
 
 The significance of His valuation of womanhood 
 and childhood has often been pointed out, though it 
 has only very slowly been understood by the Church. 
 
 12 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 Yet the true emancipation of women, even now in- 
 complete, and the care and reverence for children, 
 characteristic of the modern world, are steps in a 
 revolution which Jesus began when the disciples 
 marvelled to find Him talking with a woman about 
 religion by the well in Sychar, and when He taught 
 them that they must become as little children if they 
 would enter the Kingdom. Here too Jesus estab- 
 lished the true human values based on God’s 
 Fatherhood. 
 
 Respect for the image of God in every man carries 
 with it the championship of the poor and oppressed 
 and the care for the fallen. ‘The social divisions of 
 the present do not correspond exactly to the stratifi- 
 cation of ancient society; but it is clear that in the 
 outward circumstances of His life Jesus was more 
 closely associated with the poor and simple than with 
 the rich and influential, and by that very fact He 
 pulled down the mighty from their seat and exalted 
 the humble and meek. ‘To wealth and rank, to 
 political influence and military power, to learning 
 and formal piety, He seemingly attached but little 
 value. He spoke much of their moral dangers, and 
 said nothing of the advantages which it is constantly 
 assumed belong to them. He thought that men 
 who possessed little or none of these things were 
 more favourably situated for sharing in and advanc- 
 ing the Kingdom of God than those who had many 
 such possessions. ‘The Kingdom He came to estab- 
 lish was independent of such aids. ‘This in itself 
 involves a revolution in values which His followers 
 have found it hard to accept. The breach between 
 Jesus and the Pharisees was in no small degree bound 
 
 13 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 up with His association with publicans and sinners. 
 If “‘ the lost sheep ” may stand for the masses of the 
 people, they may also be more particularly identi- 
 fied with the social outcasts and the morally despair- 
 ing. Mr. Montefiore has emphasised the importance 
 of this aspect of the ministry of Jesus in the following 
 terms : 
 
 “This we may regard as a new, important and 
 historic feature in His teaching. And it is just 
 here that opposition comes in and begins. ‘To call 
 sinners to repentance, to denounce vice generally, is 
 one thing. To have intercourse with sinners and 
 seek their conversion by countenancing them and 
 comforting them, that is quite another thing. Did 
 not all respectable persons pray and resolve to keep 
 far from bad companions, to avoid the dwelling- 
 place of the wicked? How can one keep the law of 
 God if one associates with sinners? ” 
 
 This treatment of the erring is fundamental to 
 an understanding of the love and righteousness of 
 God. “ Scarcely anything made Him so indignant 
 as lack of love towards the fallen.” ‘“* This is the 
 vital difference between Jesus and the Pharisees, 
 between goodness which bears the sinner’s burden, 
 and says, ‘Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,’ 
 and goodness which has no sympathy with the 
 sinner, which bears no burden for him, which says, 
 ‘Stand by thyself; come not near me, for I am 
 holier than thou.’ Pharisaic goodness has no 
 redemptive power in it just because it has no love 
 in it and bears no burden: the sinner is not moved 
 by it except to curse it, and in doing so he shows at 
 least some sense of what goodness is. For God also 
 
 cA 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 curses it as a wicked slander upon Himself.” In His 
 life Jesus exhibited, as by His death He established, 
 the standards of a true humanity. 
 
 No form of human need lay outside the range of 
 Christ’s interests. It has been suggested that He 
 was specially alive to the sufferings inflicted by 
 hunger. It is certain that He fed the hungry and 
 healed the sick. He likewise adopted as His brethren 
 the hungry and the naked, the sick and the sorrow- 
 ing, the persecuted and the criminal. He com- 
 forted and relieved men’s outward necessities. Yet 
 undoubtedly men felt that His care for them began 
 where their care for themselves was apt to leave 
 off. He saw that the forgiveness of sins rather than 
 the restoration of the body was the more urgent 
 need of the paralytic. He knew that men do not 
 and cannot live by bread alone. A famine of God’s 
 Word is more serious than a failure of the wheat 
 harvest. He taught us to seek first God’s kingdom, 
 in the confidence that our practical problems about 
 food and raiment would be solved if we had a single 
 eye to God’s service. He came to enable us to 
 realise our highest happiness, through the acceptance 
 of God’s rule. 
 
 Christ’s sense of values is set forth in the Lord’s 
 prayer with its invocation of the common Father. 
 The rest of the prayer is the expansion of all that is 
 implied in this phrase. It declares man’s first need 
 to be reverence for that Name of “ Father”; for 
 when he lifts up his soul to it, he finds his soul as 
 a child of God. His next need is the acceptance 
 of God’s Kingdom, which is not Utopia, but a state 
 of life in which God’s will is fully done, which 
 
 15 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 means working out the eternal things of faith, hope 
 and love, in our relations with one another. When 
 these spiritual foundations have been laid, and when 
 material things have been thus subordinated to our 
 souls’ real good, we are in a position rightly to view 
 the broad question: so too, when we are living in 
 God’s family, we are able to forgive and be forgiven, 
 and to ask with sincere loyalty to be delivered from 
 temptation to fall under the sway of evil. 
 
 (C) SacrRIFICE 
 
 Knowing what was in man and setting Himself to. 
 enable man to become a child of God, Jesus knew. 
 and proclaimed that the needful change was no 
 small nor easy thing. ‘To realise all that is involved 
 in the Lord’s Prayer, and to respond to its call, 
 demands a transformation so radical as rightly to be 
 called a second birth. Over and over again in His 
 preaching and His actions, at the Last Supper and 
 upon Calvary, Jesus enforced the same lesson that 
 “‘whoso loseth his life findeth it.” It is in our 
 endurance that we shall gain possession of our souls : 
 the disciple, like his Master, must take up a cross : 
 the corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die, 
 if it is to become fruitful. If man is made in the 
 image of (God, if, that is, man possesses, in however — 
 rudimentary a form, the possibility of recognising 
 and responding to God, the possibility has been so 
 obscured by ancestral habit and personal falsity that 
 to recover it seems and is a task beyond our powers. 
 Intellectual arrogance, social snobbery, and self- 
 
 16 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 dependence or self-assertiveness, estrange men from 
 God and their brethren. A false humility, a sense of 
 moral failure and incapacity, the consciousness of 
 guilt make men hesitate to believe in God’s love and 
 enter His Kingdom. ‘To free men from the grip of 
 pride and fear, Jesus lived and died. If men could 
 be saved by the law, as by the clear enunciation of 
 philosophic principles, the historic incarnation would 
 have been superfluous. But because God cares for 
 the common people, the truth was embodied in a 
 tale, to enter in at lowly doors. ‘This may offend 
 the philosopher; yet if he has the true child-spirit, 
 which is also the true philosophic spirit, he will 
 rejoice that God has revealed the truth to the babes. 
 Nor is the truth embodied merely in a story. It is 
 incarnate in a living person, of whom we say, He is 
 the Truth. ‘The truth in the person of Christ moves 
 and saves, as abstract principles never could save and 
 move men. It is the triumph of Christianity that 
 its Master not only revealed to mankind its true 
 nature and calling, but provided in Himself the 
 means of achievement. Christ came not only to 
 reveal and illuminate but to redeem and save. And 
 though this salvation is the purpose of His whole life 
 and ministry, it is in the Cross that its quality is 
 ‘supremely displayed, and from the Cross that its 
 effects have supremely flowed. 
 
 This is not the place to enter upon any detailed 
 discussion of this high mystery of our faith, or to 
 examine the various metaphors and doctrines whereby 
 the fact of Atonement has been interpreted. It is_ 
 sufficient to state that Christians throughout the 
 ages have found condensed in the story of Calvary 
 
 c 17 
 
/ 
 
 THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 the fullest revelation of human sin and Divine love, 
 and the source of power and life. 
 
 Jesus Christ went up to Jerusalem to offer to 
 His nation the same opportunity that He had given 
 to the Galileans and to His disciples, to bring them 
 the things that belonged to their peace. He came 
 unto His own, proclaiming to them God and their 
 place in God’s family. And His own received Him 
 not. There is the judgment of this world. Men 
 condemned God, and in so doing revealed their own 
 state and its significance. ‘Thus regarded, the Cross 
 startles men out of their easy self-satisfaction and 
 their contentment with low aims, by demonstrating 
 the petty self-indulgences, the half-recognised sins, 
 as the cause of the suffering of the Holy One and the 
 Just. For the Cross reveals the true character of 
 sin, as it appears in the fact of vicarious suffering. 
 We choose wrongly and others, our nearest and best- 
 loved, suffer for our mistake. ‘The innocent are 
 crucified by the sins, the blindnesses and prejudices, 
 the betrayals and lapses, of others. Individual error 
 results in corporate suffering. Itis doubtful whether 
 there is any sin the effects of which can be confined to 
 the sinner himself: others pay, God Himself pays, 
 the penalty for our self-love. God in Christ suffers 
 the effects, bears the burden, of our sins. Every 
 wrong choice, every injury to another, all our wilful 
 ignorance and perversity and rebellion, is a blow | 
 struck not only at our fellows but at God. If a 
 man in any measure understands this, sin becomes 
 intolerable, and his pride is broken. St. Paul, con- 
 templating himself in the light of Calvary, must cry, 
 
 **O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me 
 18 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 out of the body of this death?” He can, however, 
 add, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our 
 Lord.” 
 
 For the revelation of sin is not all. We might 
 be left in despair if we did not find also in the Cross 
 the assurance of forgiveness and the power to over- 
 come. And this is what men have found there. 
 Though we betray and crucify, yet God’s answer is 
 what Christ shows it to be. He not only suffers, 
 He does not cease to love. Love is an ambiguous 
 word, as we know. To many it implies mere 
 emotion, to others little more than a vague general 
 good-will or a feeling of cold respect. Kant thought 
 that “to love one’s enemies”? meant “ to believe 
 them capable of reform.” It has been difficult for 
 Christians to attain even to that lowly standard; 
 but it is certain that so limited an expression of love 
 has only a limited power of redemption in it. 
 Neither a mere sentiment of good-will nor a cheer- 
 less dutiful hopefulness for others is Love. Only in 
 the Cross of Christ do we learn the true measure of 
 love and find it measureless. For here is “‘ love to 
 the loveless shown that they may lovely be.” ‘“‘ God 
 commends His own love towards us in that while 
 we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Later, 
 St. Paul adds, ‘‘ while we were enemies”; and 
 recent experience has underlined such love. It is 
 love for a moral end, not to save man from physical 
 peril or spiritual suffering, but to undermine his 
 pride and overcome his fears, to enable his repent- 
 ance and to transform his sorrow into joy. The 
 familiar words of the Crucified are symbolic of the 
 meaning of His death: ‘“‘ Father, forgive them,” 
 
 t9 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 assures us that, being what we are, we can still arise 
 and returnto Him: “this day with Mein paradise,” 
 that union with God in Christ is the secret of the 
 new life: ‘‘ Mother, behold thy son,” that this new 
 life involves a new relationship between all those 
 who share it. For love thus revealed must. needs 
 call out whatever we have of humble reverence, of 
 gratitude, of devotion. We can, we must, love Him 
 who so loved us. | 
 
 And our love, thus evoked and thus bestowed, is 
 no mere memory of a dead Lord. Calvary is com- 
 pleted in Easter, in the Ascension, and in Pentecost. 
 When the disciples had passed through the fire of 
 self-loathing and self-contempt, when they had 
 learned the quality of their Master by its contrast 
 with their own, then the ideal became a living 
 presence, the example of a perfect love, a risen and 
 abiding Lover. Henceforward their communion 
 with Him was to be unending, indestructible. As 
 He was in the Father, so were they in Him. “ Jesus 
 lives ”? was their message: “ I live, yet not I; Christ 
 lives in me,” was its consequence. ‘Thus they were 
 made new. Self-centred motives, ambitions and 
 fears were driven out. ‘There was no room left for 
 self in face of the all-absorbing reality of God in 
 Christ. Love had cast out fear and every other 
 selfish thing. By love, their love responding to His, 
 they were transformed in heart and mind and will. » 
 And being united with Him they were united with 
 one another. In the fellowship of His body they 
 shared His life, His Spirit; and in it could under- 
 take and carry on His redemptive work. 
 
 20 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 (D) Frettowsuip 
 
 The essence of social obligation abides in the fact 
 that, in loving our fellows, we love God in them, 
 since they are His children; and in seeking their real 
 good we seek God’s will. ‘This real good of man 
 consists in acceptance of God’s rule, since only thus 
 do men realise their status as His children, and 
 discover the meaning of their own lives. Then 
 they become sons of God, members of His family, 
 capable of living for those things of God which con- 
 cern that human spirit which is made in His image, 
 and which is eternal. This acceptance of God’s rule 
 means bringing our wills into agreement with the 
 will of God. Agreement between our will and that 
 of another brings with it feelings of reinforcement 
 and happiness; the consciousness of disagreement 
 brings conflict and trouble, yet we cannot just 
 seek agreement with other wills for the sake of the 
 peace and comfort so secured. But so far as our 
 agreement is real, so far, that is, as it springs out 
 of our relationship with God, it will impel us always 
 to the best. Fellowship, in the Christian sense, 
 implies much more than amiability or popularity. 
 It is permeated with the quality of Him from whom 
 it is derived, with goodness and truth and beauty, 
 and has for its purpose the ever-widening realisation 
 of the eternal values in the life of time and space. 
 
 For this realisation of the requirements of a rightly 
 ordered human life, the New Testament sets before 
 us the three great doctrines of Individual Salvation, 
 of the Kingdom of God, and of Eternal Life, which 
 
 are in themselves three aspects of the complete 
 21 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 scheme, and involve living as the children of God, in 
 the family of God and for the eternal things of God. 
 There have been forms of religion almost exclusively 
 interested in one alone of these aspects of spiritual 
 life; interested either in personal edification, or in 
 working for a better world, or in a future life. But 
 we cannot have any one of these things truly apart. 
 from the others. 
 
 (a) Thus when we are concerned primarily about 
 our own souls, we become self-centred, introspective, 
 valetudinarian ; precisely as when we are primarily 
 concerned with our bodily health. We gain our 
 souls truly only by forgetting ourselves and by 
 living and working for a better world, and for the 
 faith, hope and love to be realised through it. 
 
 (b) ‘The doctrine of the Rule, or Kingdom of God, 
 equally requires the other two factors. As we find 
 it in the New Testament, it certainly meant that 
 Christianity was intended to be first of all a new 
 world-order. But the conception of this Kingdom 
 is based on the belief that men are the children of 
 God, spiritual creatures, and cannot live by bread 
 alone. Love presupposes this valuation of man; 
 and its exercise is conditioned by setting the same 
 value as God does on pardon, holiness, truth and 
 goodness. When we separate the idea of the King- 
 dom from this basis, we have, what is frequently — 
 found to-day, a mere claim, under humanitarian 
 sanctions, for an equal division of worldly goods. 
 A more equal division with regard to what these 
 worldly goods can truly do for men both in respect 
 of what men have and of what they have not, cer- 
 tainly is involved in a Christianising of life. But it 
 
 22 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 is one thing when we demand justice and con- 
 sideration for our fellow-man as an immortal soul 
 made in the image of God, and because we regard 
 him as one among brethren living at God’s table, 
 where grasping as much as we can is as bad manners 
 and morals as it would be at our earthly father’s 
 table; it is another thing to make these claims if we 
 merely regard man as a superior animal living for a 
 few years upon earth. If this be indeed his nature 
 and destiny, we can hardly blame those who seize 
 all the earthly good they can. Such acquisitiveness 
 can only be wrong if there be a higher good which is 
 thus lost. Moreover, we shall not live to see a 
 wholly righteous social order; perhaps in our time 
 it will not be improved at all. How are we to con- 
 tinue fighting for it with courage and endurance, 
 unless we know that every betterment of human 
 relations is an eternal good which is being taken up 
 into the eternal divine order? 
 
 It is only on this basis that a true view of the 
 brotherhood of humanity can be maintained. Apart 
 from this, the employment of the phrase rests wholly 
 on a basis of sentiment—a sentiment which is either 
 a pathetic delusion or an obstinate camouflaging of 
 the reality. Unless there is a Divine Being who as 
 Father calls His own children unto Him, there is 
 nothing to guarantee, control or inspire our sense of 
 brotherhood one to another. Yet there is nothing 
 commoner to-day than talk of “ the brotherhood of 
 man,” which ignores or denies this necessary postu- 
 late. It is an ideal and guiding principle in much 
 of the present-day agitation for social reform. It 
 may confidently be claimed that much of the strength 
 
 23 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 of the appeal comes from the unacknowledged religi- 
 ous sentiments and instincts of mankind to whom 
 itis addressed. And even those who, acknowledging 
 only a materialistic basis for human life, make use of 
 this conception are also trading on these elements of 
 inherited belief which still linger in the dim recesses 
 of their minds. ‘The kinship of the common dust is 
 no demonstration of brotherhood. From the same 
 dust came the tiger and the snake. An equality of 
 worthlessness robs the conception of all moral value. 
 Brotherhood must derive from a spiritual source 
 or it is nothing. ‘The sense of brotherhood is a 
 religious experience, otherwise it is an unsubstantial 
 dream. It must be a recognition that the faith, 
 hope, love and longing which we share are the > 
 inbreathing of the Spirit of our common Father. 
 Even with regard to the outcasts of society, it must 
 be a recognition, in such broken humanity, of infinite 
 possibilities, of a still unsullied future in God. For 
 it is only the brotherly love that is God-inspired 
 that “‘hopeth all things.”” True brotherhood is a 
 recognition that the origin and true destiny of all 
 souls are in God. ‘This alone leaps the barriers of 
 class and race, enabling men to acknowledge the 
 right of all to freedom in thought and action, to 
 exercise mercy in individual and social dealings, to 
 respect and reverence personality in all efforts to 
 perfect education, to spend thought and love on 
 human suffering and disease, in short to labour for 
 social, moral and spiritual reforms. 
 
 (c) If we seek to isolate eternal life from the idea 
 of the Kingdom, if we regard continued existence 
 hereafter as an end in itself, then eternal life becomes 
 
 24 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 empty of meaning, being reduced to the level of 
 mere continuance. ‘The desire to inherit eternal 
 life, if it be merely a desire to prolong one’s exist- 
 ence, may become a purely self-regarding, even 
 selfish aim, destructive of sound religion and good 
 morals. In so far as we can form any worthy idea 
 of a life hereafter, it is bound up with moral effort 
 and spiritual fellowship here and now. When we 
 are truly living for God’s purpose in the world, we 
 already have ‘eternal life; and our awareness of 
 things eternal enables us to handle aright things 
 temporal. We can look at all our problems sub 
 specie eternitatis. We can live and labour here and 
 now in the power of an endless life, the gains of 
 which do not pass. 
 
 The purpose of God, revealed in Christ, is thus 
 essentially an eternal purpose. It is not only within 
 the world but beyond it. The external world 
 cannot satisfy us because God has “ set eternity in our 
 hearts.” Any goal of human endeavour that can 
 be completely realised on this earth is consequently 
 not the ultimate aim of our existence here. If we 
 accept this view, we can no longer regard material 
 progress, a good world in the physical sense, as 
 necessarily a main object of the Rule of God, nor 
 can we regard the greatest comfort of the greatest 
 number as necessarily the proper aim of Christian 
 social reform. On the contrary, should the satis- 
 faction of physical needs or the achievement of 
 control over Nature be made the chief aim of human 
 effort, civilisation will by this fact have ceased to 
 serve its true end in the Divine plan and will inevit- 
 ably meet with disaster. Such a view of the signifi- 
 
 25 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 cance of the world as lying beyond itself, underlies 
 the message of the prophets, and is also central for 
 the revelation of Jesus Christ. All these taught that 
 God rules the world for His own transcendent ends, 
 and that nothing in it will work for good as long 
 as we act on any other basis. On the other hand, 
 once this eternal meaning is acknowledged, even what 
 we call evil will work for good to them that love 
 God and who are called according to His purpose. 
 If the purpose of God for mankind goes beyond 
 this world and is only to be realised in “‘ that city 
 which hath foundations, whose maker and builder 
 is God,” yet it is to be realised with ever-increasing 
 fullness within the world. It involves all the possi- — 
 bilities of real progress in human history on this 
 planet. Both here and hereafter God’s purpose for 
 us is an unfolding purpose. ‘The very fact that 
 Christianity grows out of Judaism, and that Christ 
 is the consummation of the growing revelation 
 through the prophets, means that God’s purpose is 
 an increasing purpose that runs through all the ages. 
 Thus it comes about that Christianity is the only 
 great religion which is not antagonistic but sym- 
 pathetic to the idea of creative evolution; and 
 Christianity is the final religion of mankind, just 
 because the finality it claims is not the static finality 
 of Islam or Buddhism, just because it is essentially 
 a religion of expanding horizons. In the Gospel 
 according to St. John, Jesus teaches His followers 
 to look for greater things which they shall do 
 because He goes to the Father, and to expect through 
 the Holy Spirit those further revelations of truth for 
 
 which they were not ready in His lifetime. ‘Thus 
 26 
 
GOD IN CHRIST 
 
 the hope of social progress is rooted in Christianity, 
 and it is a hope which no Utopia can satisfy, for the 
 things that await us both here and hereafter it has 
 not entered into the heart of man to conceive. 
 Because the love of God is constant and changeless, 
 His wisdom is richly varied, His providence a mystery 
 and His ways past finding out. For this same 
 reason Christianity is incurably romantic as well 
 as impenitently utilitarian; and life on this earth 
 for the children of God is not the outworking of 
 some mechanical scheme, nor yet simply a time of 
 training in a preparatory school, but a splendid 
 adventure and voyage of discovery. 
 
 27 
 
Ad, wy Ay 
 
 ¢ 
 any 
 
 
 
 ALISA” +d t 
 
CHAPTER tt 
 GOD AND NATURE 
 

 
CHAPTER II 
 GOD AND NATURE 
 
 IF we are to understand the principles of Christian 
 social life and are to see how those principles can be 
 made operative in a material environment, we must 
 first consider the view of Nature and of the material 
 world which they involve; we cannot dismiss the 
 problem of the relationship of God to the universe 
 unrecognised or unexamined. For there can be 
 little doubt that the vast expansion in human 
 knowledge of the natural order during the past 
 century, while it has enriched the material life and 
 enlarged the physical resources of mankind, has also 
 done much to obscure the sense of moral values, to 
 paralyse the energies and crush the aspirations. 
 
 It is not the business of this Report to attempt a 
 complete apologetic or even an outline of Christian 
 philosophy. But it is necessary for us to answer cer- 
 tain difficulties which have been raised, especially by 
 natural science, because the greatest hindrance to an 
 application of Christianity is the vague idea that it 
 is no longer possible for us to live within the same 
 spiritual horizon as Jesus and to keep His spiritual 
 values. 
 
 (A) Tue Curer Dirricutties 
 
 1. The vastness of the material universe-—What 
 was true of the microcosm of Judea in the first 
 31 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 century or of the pre-Copernican universe appears 
 less evidently adequate in the macrocosm of our 
 day. ‘The change of scale terrifies us into wondering 
 whether anything of the old can still remain for 
 our use. 
 
 To claim that God is our Father and that His 
 characteristic attribute is that of creative love seems 
 incompatible with much of what we know of the 
 universe, of the natural world and of its inhabitants. 
 To the contemporaries of Jesus the world was after 
 all a small and comparatively homely place, a few 
 hundred miles of earth and sea, overarched with 
 the dome of heaven, encircled with ocean and resting 
 upon the abyss. ‘Those whose outlook was confined — 
 to the favoured lands around the Mediterranean 
 might well take a comfortable and comforting view 
 of man’s place and destiny in the scheme of things. 
 It was less difficult to believe that God took a 
 personal interest in each of His human children 
 when the number of His family was limited, when 
 humanity stood alone and aloof from the animal 
 creation, and when the world had no rivals in the 
 solar system or in space. To the modern student 
 with his microscope and telescope, the whole 
 conception of such a God, and in particular the 
 belief in an incarnation, is apt to seem ridiculously 
 parochial. He feels sympathy with the philosopher 
 who likened the Christians of his day to a company 
 of frogs croaking in the reeds round a pond in honour 
 of the bull-frog deity. Christianity strikes him as 
 naively anthropomorphic, an impertinent exaggera- 
 tion of man’s place in Nature, a delusion inconsistent 
 with the size and majesty of the universe, with the 
 
 32 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 revelations of astronomy and biology, and with the 
 facts of cruelty and struggle apparent in the evolu- 
 tionary process. For him the world is seen against 
 the vastnesses of interstellar space, a subsidiary 
 planet of an unimportant star; mankind is the 
 transient product of forces which have developed 
 his physical organism from lower forms of life and 
 his mind and soul (whatever this may be) out of 
 animal instincts and primitive needs; the individual, 
 despite his pathetic belief in his own importance, 
 is only one among many myriads, the creature of 
 heredity and environment, incapable even at his 
 highest of the knowledge of reality. It is little 
 wonder that when first given a glimpse of the teach- 
 ing of modern science most of us should be shaken 
 in our faith. Jesus no doubt thought of God as His 
 Father, and impressed His disciples with the possi- 
 bility of such a belief: can we, in view of the 
 astronomy and geology, the chemistry and physiology, 
 the anthropology and psychology of to-day, share 
 His optimism and His hope? 
 
 2. The indifference of Nature.—But it is not mainly 
 or chiefly on the ground of the age and size and 
 complexity of the universe that the scientific student 
 finds it hard to accept creative love as its ground 
 and source. His objections come rather from the 
 apparent absence in inorganic nature of any moral 
 meaning, and among living organisms from the 
 evidence of cruelty and suffering, and in man from 
 the facts of triumphant evil and of the afflictions 
 of the innocent, the wreckage wrought by disease 
 and the tragedies of mental and moral insanity. 
 Striking examples of each of these lines of criticism 
 
 D 33 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 are not simply the stock-in-trade of the atheist 
 lecturer in Hyde Park: they must often wring the 
 heart and strain the loyalty of the devoted Christian. 
 A great ship strikes-an iceberg or a great city is 
 devastated by an earthquake; and the cry is raised, 
 “‘ Can this be the workmanship of love?” We read 
 of the activities of the liver-fluke or the nuptials of 
 the praying mantis, or the habits of the kea or the 
 cuckoo, and are tempted to follow the Gnostics 
 and ascribe the creation of the material world to 
 the devil. War involves half humanity; and homes | 
 are desolated and lives, the lives of the young and 
 innocent, are sacrificed, and the promise of a 
 generation destroyed ; and from hearts tortured with 
 anguish we call to God to intervene; and there is 
 apparently no voice nor any that answers. In 
 sunshine and health and prosperity it may be easy 
 to say “Our Father”; but to keep the faith of a 
 little child in a world full of calamity and struggle 
 and agony and sin is surely to live in a fool’s paradise. 
 Does not the evidence force us to abate our claims? 
 Can we seriously believe in and work for a Kingdom 
 of God in a world like ours, being what we are? 
 Can we regard this earth as we know it as being the 
 sort of home in which a loving Father could place 
 His children? Can we reconcile our faith in God 
 the Father with our faith in Him as Almighty, 
 Maker of heaven and earth? Can we accept the 
 theology of Jesus? Or if not, have we any right to 
 assume that His principles will give us guidance that 
 can properly be followed? 
 
 3. Ihe problem of LEvolution—These two difh- 
 culties, although accentuated by the scientific 
 
 34 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 movement, have been felt since the dawn of human 
 thought, and are familiar to those who have no 
 special knowledge of the modern outlook. But we 
 have to face not merely bewilderment and more or 
 less reverent agnosticism, but definite theories of the 
 nature of the tiniverse and the evolution of species, 
 which leave little room for Christianity or even 
 for theism. The attack upon the Origin of Species 
 was at first directed either against the facts on which 
 Darwin based his conclusions or against the whole 
 scientific movement; and this misguided zeal 
 prejudiced the whole position. The controversy 
 created the belief that science and religion were 
 irreconcilable enemies, a belief largely responsible 
 for the form in which the problem of evolution 
 still presents itself. For in the heat of argument 
 neither side could look at the data impartially or 
 completely. Science became for a time strongly 
 materialistic, and Christians tended to take refuge 
 in obscurantism. As a result there was and still 
 is a wide acceptance of theories involving the beliefs 
 that the order of the world is one of fixed and 
 mechanical law, that the variation of living organisms 
 is accidental and their survival determined by 
 elimination, and that the idea of purposeful creation 
 must be replaced by that of cosmic process. Such 
 views cannot be neglected by those who look to 
 Christianity to supply the motive power for social 
 reconstruction; for they challenge the security 
 of the foundations upon which that hope rests. 
 Can we, in weighing the evidence which has forced 
 the modern world to accept in one form or another 
 the doctrine of evolution, reconcile that doctrine 
 35 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 with our belief in love and freedom, in eternal 
 values, in revelation and redemption? 
 
 Such objections have not been without importance. 
 Indeed the chief gain of our time is that they have 
 enforced upon us a new investigation of the teaching 
 of Jesus Christ and a deeper consideration of what is 
 involved in His attitude towards the universe. We 
 turn first to His teaching, and will then develop 
 the reply which in the light of it we would make to 
 these questions. 
 
 (B) Tur Tracuinc or Jesus 
 
 1. No conception of God is more infinite than the con- 
 ception of ‘fesus.—This appreciation of the size and 
 majesty, the riches and complexity of the universe, 
 does not in itself affect in any way the interpretation 
 which Jesus gave to it. No doubt those who search 
 for Pan are always liable to panic when they approach 
 him. Astronomical space and geological time may 
 crush and terrify. Yet we are not the less men 
 because this planet of ours may be but one among a 
 million others: we are not the less men if our 
 bodies consist of a million separate cells or if a million 
 lower forms of life have prepared the way for our 
 coming. ‘The moral values, the reality of truth and 
 goodness and beauty, are not changed because we 
 have moved from a small house to a large one. 
 Calum non antmum mutant. Nor is there anything 
 parochial in the conception of God as Father as we 
 find it in the teaching of Jesus. He came to a 
 people who had for generations tried to believe that 
 
 Nature was responsive to each man’s mood, that the 
 36 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 favoured of God were rewarded here and now with 
 material prosperity and that disease or disaster 
 were the proofs of the Divine displeasure at particular 
 transgression; to a people who, having failed to 
 reconcile this belief with the facts of innocent 
 suffering, had lapsed into a pessimism which regarded 
 the vast mass of mankind as mere fuel of fire, amid 
 which the righteous must walk with fear and 
 circumspection and from which if he persevered 
 he might hope to be delivered in accordance with 
 the decrees of a Lawgiver as just as He was awful. 
 Jesus refused to sanction either the superstition 
 which regarded the Creator as partial and capricious, 
 or the fatalism which would make destiny or the law 
 the ruthless and mechanical master of mankind. 
 In illustrating His teaching of the universality of love 
 by the character of the Father who sends His rain 
 upon the just and unjust and is kind to the unthank- 
 ful and evil, and in assuring the paralytic that 
 despite his affliction God was neither remote nor 
 unforgiving, He transcended the whole thought of 
 His time. He shares the sense of the grandeur of 
 creation and of the awfulness of the Creator which 
 had been characteristic of the Psalmist and the great 
 prophets of His own people, but He enriches it by 
 revealing that in and through it, if men have eyes to 
 see and ears to hear, the Father is making Himself 
 known, the Father who so clothes the grass of the 
 field and without whom no sparrow falls. It is love 
 that generates and suffering love that regenerates 
 the world—that is the message of His teaching 
 and example. Our experience of love, commonly 
 limited to one or two close personal relationships, 
 37 
 
THE NATURE ‘OF GOD 
 
 may make it more difficult for our imagination to 
 conceive of God in these terms now that we have 
 abandoned a geocentric conception of the universe. 
 But the science which has enlarged our knowledge 
 of the vastness of time and space has also enlarged 
 our knowledge of the infinitely minute, so that, 
 while it gives a new content to the immensity by 
 which the Creator transcends His creatures, it also 
 gives a new witness to the infinity of His knowledge 
 and power in caring for them. ; 
 2. He accepts the order of Nature and gives it a 
 meaning.—As regards the non-moral quality of 
 inanimate nature, we have already noted that Jesus. 
 Himself recognised its impartiality and rejected the 
 idea of “‘ special judgments.” ‘The idea so familiar 
 to the poets and so flattering to our egoism, that 
 Nature meets our every mood and adapts sunshine 
 and storm, heat and cold, to reward individual 
 merits or punish individual errors is not His: 
 the perfection of the Father’s love is shown just 
 because it is not so, because good and evil alike are 
 set under the same natural conditions and live their 
 lives under the same circumstances. He saw that 
 if men were to develop it must be under an ordered 
 regime, and accepted the world as calculated to 
 train as well by its seeming ruthlessness as by its 
 generosity the energies and intelligence of mankind. 
 Jesus accepted it, and in fact we can do no other. 
 For though we may be appalled at the consequences 
 of ignorance or tempted to rebellion by the shock 
 of calamity, we cannot conceive a universe in which 
 things were different ; if we cannot imagine a worse, 
 
 at least we cannot imagine a better. A, fixed 
 38 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 sequence of cause and effect, a reign of law, would 
 seem to be the condition necessary for the evolution 
 and training of character. The alternatives would 
 be the chaos of Bedlam or the cruel comfort of the 
 padded cell. Discipline, the discipline of Nature, 
 is essential to growth. 
 
 The order of the household of God cannot be 
 flexible to caprice; and an important part of our 
 discipline, of service and a right relation to our 
 brethren, is to accept it. Yet it is uniform not 
 because of mechanical necessity, but for the good of 
 His children. ‘The wish to have it all good for the 
 good children and all trouble for the bad arises from 
 a wrong view of God’s purpose, as though He were 
 a mere lawgiver and not a Father. The spring of 
 the teaching of Jesus regarding God as Father is 
 His denial of this equivalence of service and reward. 
 The world is ordered, and it must ever be a disaster 
 to transgress its order; but His perfection is to be 
 kind to the unthankful and evil and to manifest 
 Himself in Him who seeks and saves the lost; and 
 our perfection is not to be angry because our field 
 is not better watered than the field of the wicked, 
 but to forgive those who despitefully use us and to 
 be at one with our Father in working for the salvation 
 of His erring and rebellious children. ‘Then all is 
 ours. 
 
 3. He reveals the method and purpose of the rule 
 of God.—F or although Jesus rejected the sympathetic 
 fallacy which makes the physical world the partner 
 of our personal moods, He does not on that account 
 treat Nature as meaningless. Only her meaning is 
 drawn not so much from us as from God. If we 
 
 39 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 have eyes te.see she is not opaque but transparent ; 
 if we have ears to hear she is not dumb but vocal. 
 Over and over again Jesus took some aspect or 
 incident of the physical sphere, and flung it before 
 His followers with the assurance that in it was 
 manifest the quality of God’s Kingdom. Indeed it 
 is very notable that in His training of them one main 
 object is to develop their faculties for the appre- 
 hension of the inward and spiritual through the 
 medium of the outward and visible, and that only 
 when they have learnt to recognise the method of 
 the Kingdom in the mustard seed and the leaven 
 does He show to them its inmost nature incarnate 
 in its supreme sacrament, Himself. The world 
 in all its manifold aspects is God’s parable. ‘The 
 invisible attributes of God, His eternal power and 
 divinity, become intelligible in the things that He 
 has made ; and if our devotion is to escape anthropo- 
 morphism and sensuousness we must understand 
 these. Then we are privileged to learn that the 
 Creator is also the Father, that His character is 
 revealed most fully for us not in the physical but 
 in the personal, that He is most truly seen not as 
 force but as love, and that awe and godly fear, 
 necessary as they are if our love for Him is to be 
 kept pure and heavenly, are yet not the highest 
 characteristics of our worship, the truest expressions 
 of our Sonship. 
 
 Here again the teaching of Jesus is in strong 
 contrast to that of the bulk of His contemporaries. 
 Greek thought, dominated from the first by the 
 antitheses of the one and the many, the mind and the 
 senses, the real and the phenomenal, had rejected 
 
 40 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 Plato’s attempt to bridge the gulf and establish a 
 sort of sacramentalism by the theory of Ideas, and 
 had relapsed into more or less definite dualism. 
 Those who were not content with such a position 
 sought refuge either in the materialism of the Stoics 
 and Epicureans or in the supernaturalism of the 
 mystery religions. Even in Judaism the faith which 
 had proclaimed that the heavens declare the glory 
 of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork 
 had grown dim. 
 
 We shall refer to this matter at greater length 
 hereafter: meanwhile we would merely note that 
 in the last century, and even at the present day, 
 similar tendencies can be readily traced, and that the 
 general collapse of materialism and of crude super- 
 naturalism is being accompanied by an evident 
 return by thinkers of widely different schools to the 
 sacramentalism of Jesus, a sacramentalism which 
 for the English-speaking peoples the poetry of 
 Wordsworth and Browning has made familiar 
 outside the boundaries of the Church. 
 
 4. He teaches the right use of earth’s blessings.—Yet 
 though Jesus never held out to His followers the belief 
 that their material environment would be altered 
 for their convenience, He refused to regard Nature 
 as impervious to God or un-modifiable by Him. 
 Indeed His attitude here as elsewhere is in striking 
 contrast with the bulk of contemporary opinion. 
 The Greco-Roman world under the influence of a 
 diffused and vulgarised Platonism generally regarded 
 the body as the prison-house of the soul, and material 
 existence as a sphere from which the mind must 
 emancipate itself if it was to attain the knowledge 
 
 41 
 
THE. NATURE OF GOD 
 
 of reality. In the East dualism was still more 
 pronounced: matter if not actually identified with 
 evil was under the domination of Satan, and virtue 
 consisted in a rigid asceticism. ‘his tendency to 
 identify spirituality with abstention and deliverance 
 from the physical was represented in Judaism by the 
 communities of Essenes, and is perhaps traceable in 
 the teaching of John Baptist: at certain epochs it 
 has reappeared among Christians, and even to-day 
 the belief that asceticism is an end in itself is a 
 characteristic prejudice all the more powerful 
 because seldom recognised or defended. Jesus, 
 though He emphasises the value and timeliness of 
 the Baptist’s work, yet definitely repudiated for 
 Himself and for the children of the Kingdom this 
 pessimistic view of the natural world and the morality 
 based upon it. Alike in teaching and life He 
 maintained that Nature’s gifts were of God, serving 
 man’s needs and development and to be used with 
 joy and thankfulness. If He called upon the rich 
 young ruler to give up the wealth which was stunting 
 his spiritual growth, and is constant in His warnings 
 that material considerations are always and every- 
 where secondary and must never be made an end 
 in themselves, He as plainly shows that in the physical 
 world there is nothing necessarily evil or apart 
 from its misuse to be avoided. ‘The Son of Man 
 came eating and drinking, just because He was so 
 sure that the life was more than meat: He was 
 able to use Nature freely to supply material for His 
 teaching and to promote the purpose of His ministry, 
 just because He is always Lord of things and not 
 their slave. Food and clothing, beauty and enjoy- 
 42 
 
GOD AND. NATURE 
 
 ment, sex and social intercourse, these things are 
 in no case wrong in themselves: their right use is 
 determined when it is controlled by the passion for 
 God and for the service of His Kingdom. In that 
 service it may or may not be requisite to surrender 
 all earthly ties and abstain from all normal gratifi- 
 cations. But this is a matter not of law or system, 
 but of spiritual well-being and vocation; for the 
 sake of God and of the Kingdom, home and posses- 
 sions, parents and friends, hands and feet and eyes, 
 even physical life itself, must be held cheap and if 
 necessary sacrificed; but such sacrifice has no merit 
 in itself and is to be undertaken only under the 
 compelling demand of love. It is not for us to 
 judge others: to their own Master they stand or 
 fall; but to the wisdom of God and to the society 
 of disciples inspired by it the vindication or con- 
 demnation of their conduct will be made plain. 
 
 5. He gives us victory over earth’s evils —That the 
 physical has its place alongside the spiritual in the 
 service which men are called to render to God and 
 to their brethren, is further proved by the attitude 
 of Jesus towards disease. He saw that here was evil, 
 something which hampered the full development 
 of mankind and was out of harmony with the fulfil- 
 ment in them of the Divine purpose. He came 
 that we might have life and have it abundantly: 
 and fullness of life means the co-operation of the 
 whole personality, body, soul and spirit, with the 
 Divine will. Jesus never suggests that sickness in 
 any form is good or inevitable: thus while He 
 warns His followers that so long as evil exists they 
 will be called to meet afflictions and persecution, 
 
 43 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 the healing of the sick and the removal of physical 
 suffering are an integral part of His attitude towards 
 Nature. The morbid taint which has often crept 
 into Christianity is as far from the Master’s mind as 
 is the extravagance which makes self-discipline an 
 end in itself or the pietism which sees the world as 
 a vale of tears. Regarding Nature thus as at once 
 the scene on which man works out God’s purpose 
 and the means whereby spiritual values are achieved, 
 Jesus gives to the natural order an abiding value, 
 a value drawn not from itself, but from the ends for 
 which it has been created, a value determined by 
 the use which is made of it. 
 
 6. He shows us the spiritual purpose for which all 
 works together for good.—It is evident from the records 
 of Jesus as it is to a lesser degree from the experience 
 of humanity, that when Nature is thus seen against 
 a background of eternity the faculties for its under- 
 standing and use are vastly enhanced and quickened. 
 Most of us can testify that to those who are facing 
 death the world becomes infinitely more precious 
 in proportion as it becomes less absorbing. ‘The 
 poppies in a Flanders trench, the larks singing 
 amongst the guns, the swallows nesting in the 
 wreckage—these things gain a beauty never before 
 recognised; we are detached from easy acceptance 
 of our normal environment, and can see it with a 
 new wonder and a new reverence. Whoso loses his 
 life finds it—not only by attaining a glimpse of 
 heaven, but by a fresh and startling appreciation of 
 earth. ‘To ride loose to this life is to see it with the 
 glory of Eden upon it, to see it despite its thistles 
 and briars as the garden of the Lord, and to know 
 
 44 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 that in itself and apart from its misuse it is all very 
 good. ‘hat is the secret of romance, of the gaiety 
 and courage and sanity, of the love and joy and peace 
 which are the portion of the children of the Kingdom. 
 
 And the physical world, if sacramental, is to Jesus 
 neither mechanical nor impervious to the influence 
 of the spirit. Ordered law reigns and is revealed 
 in it; but such law has its source in the Divine 
 will, and God is no exile nor alien in His creation. 
 The old contention that He who made the laws is 
 also at liberty to break them states the position 
 inadequately. ‘The spiritual sphere and energies 
 to which many would give the name supernatural 
 are as real and as orderly as the physical, though at 
 present we have no complete or consistent knowledge 
 of the conditions which apply to them. And in 
 the teaching of Jesus as in the experience of the 
 Church it is clear that the two spheres are not 
 mutually exclusive, but that the spiritual inter- 
 penetrates and influences the physical. That is 
 at least the plain conviction of the New ‘Testament 
 writers. It is difficult if not impossible to separate 
 the so-called ‘‘ nature miracles’ from the rest of 
 the Gospels. Nor, despite the protests of certain 
 scientists and critics, does there seem to be any 
 finally conclusive reason for admitting the effect 
 of spiritual and psychic power upon living organisms 
 and denying it upon the inanimate. It is at any 
 rate worth noting that those who now maintain 
 that the stilling of the storm is inconceivable, or 
 that prayers for rain are superstitious, would twenty 
 years ago have maintained as eagerly that the 
 healing of the demoniac was a legend and that the 
 
 45 
 
THE NAVURES OF sGOn 
 
 anointing of the sick was a survival of white magic. 
 In the present state of psychic science it is eminently 
 unwise to assert that we can put limits to the extent 
 to which the non-material can control matter. ‘That 
 the changes of recent years have gone far to vindicate 
 the validity of the records of Jesus and to alter the 
 attitude of scientists to what is commonly called the 
 miraculous can hardly be questioned. And that 
 He expected a vast extension of such power and was 
 constantly amazed at the absence of it in His followers 
 is clear enough. ‘That matter for all its appearance 
 of fixity and obduracy is in reality plastic to the 
 influence of God’s Spirit acting through the prayers 
 of the faithful is a belief warranted by Christian 
 experience and not incongruous with our present 
 knowledge. At least the evidence is sufficient to 
 make the proof of the negative view impossible. As 
 we learn the conditions governing phenomena (a 
 subject of great but not paramount value for the 
 religious development of mankind), and as we 
 recognise the purpose for which the world was 
 constituted, we shall discover more and more fully 
 the potentialities of our home, and realise that in it 
 indeed all things work togther for good to them 
 that love God. 
 
 (C) An INTERPRETATION OF THE Facts 
 
 From this brief examination of the outlook of 
 Jesus we are led to attempt a statement of our 
 present conception of the world in which we live 
 and of the process of its development, of its relation 
 to the eternal and of the character and purpose of 
 
 46 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 its Creator. Such an attempt to bring the witness 
 of Christ to the interpretation of the facts and 
 theories of modern science must needs be hypo- 
 thetical and tentative, for among scientists there 
 is neither any general agreement nor any claim to 
 finality. If we seem presumptuous, we would 
 merely repeat our conviction that those who accept 
 Christianity have the right and duty to examine 
 fresh knowledge in the light of what they themselves 
 know of God, and to maintain that except by so 
 doing they can give little meaning to their claim 
 that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, the Life. When 
 so many are perplexed and restrained from attempt- 
 ing to work for a Christian social order by the fear 
 that Christianity is irreconcilable with modern 
 knowledge, and is at once obscurantist and out of 
 date, such an interpretation is of primary importance 
 for our work. 
 
 The working hypothesis of the Christian student 
 is his conviction that the world-process is not pur- 
 _ poseless, that its object is the creation and develop- 
 ment of free personalities capable of apprehending 
 and reproducing in their characters the eternal 
 values of goodness, truth and beauty, personalities 
 individual and social, finding their own full develop- 
 ment as members one of another, and that their 
 relationship to God is best described under the 
 analogy of the Father and his family. 
 
 Two rival theories have to be examined at the 
 outset—determinism and the dualism which may 
 or may not be combined with it. 
 
 The former has taken very varying forms at differ- 
 ent times, these having in common the belief that 
 
 47 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 the universe is the product of an inexorable and 
 mechanical process. In recent Western thought this 
 has until late years commonly taken the form of 
 pure materialism. By it the attempt has been made 
 to interpret all things in terms of chemistry and 
 physics. Its supporters claim that creation originates 
 in the interactions of material bodies upon one 
 another, in blind purposeless obedience to the 
 character of their chemical constitution and to the 
 conditions discoverable by physical science; that 
 life has arisen as a by-product of these interactions ; 
 that the mental, moral and spiritual qualities of 
 mankind are due to the reaction upon its environ- 
 ment of the elements of his organism ; that emotion, — 
 thought and volition have their origin in the 
 chemical changes in the brain and nerve cells; and 
 that man is an automaton. ‘This conclusion is 
 itself a reductio ad absurdum: whatever we are, 
 we are not automata. In view of the devastating 
 criticism to which the discoveries of the last twenty 
 years have exposed this belief, and to the fact that 
 it has fallen from influence with a speed unparalleled 
 in the history of philosophy, it is not necessary to 
 restate the evidence on which it has been rejected. 
 Christians, recognising to the full the significance 
 of the material world, rightly refuse to interpret the 
 higher in terms of the lower, or to parley with a 
 theory which is as false to the facts as it is to their 
 convictions. 
 
 Determinism has lately reappeared in another 
 form. As the result of the investigations of psycho- 
 logists into the instincts which are the motive power 
 in humanity, and of biologists into cell-formation 
 
 48 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 and the transmission of life, schools have arisen which, 
 while not necessarily accepting materialism, regard 
 human conduct as inevitably determined, as the 
 mere unfolding and operation of forces inherent in 
 the germ-cells and fixing the whole character of 
 the individual. We may not yet be able to analyse 
 all the factors in the complex or to foretell exactly 
 what their reaction to any given circumstances 
 will be ; if we could exactly estimate them we should 
 be able to see every activity of the organism as 
 determinable with mathematical certainty, as in 
 the last resort purely reflex; and if so, human free- 
 dom becomes an illusion, and human effort loses its 
 incentive. It is not enough to reply that even if 
 we are neither free nor responsible, we must continue 
 to act as if we were so; and that, at least until we 
 know all the elements which condition our actions, 
 we are justified in so doing. Rather we must ask 
 whether the evidence supplied by the study of the 
 development of living organisms and of the pheno- 
 mena of man’s behaviour can be satisfactorily 
 and completely explained on such a basis. And so 
 long as it is evident that the determinism of 
 Weismannists and Freudians is rejected by a mass 
 of equally competent opinion it cannot be accepted 
 as conclusive. It is not our business here to state 
 at length the grounds of its insufficiency; it 1s 
 sufficient to refer for the fuller treatment of 
 psychological problems to the next chapter, and for 
 biology to the researches of Dr. Haldane and Professor 
 Thomson. 
 
 In regard to dualism the issue is less simple ; for it 
 is evident that at certain periods it has in a modified 
 
 B 49 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 form been accepted by Christians, and the members 
 of the Conmission are not in complete agreement 
 about it. We would all reject it in the crude shape 
 which identifies matter with evil, or regards the 
 physical world as the “ prison-house of spirit.” 
 But the evidence for the existence of a single and 
 personal power of evil is too strong alike in tradition 
 and experience to be lightly dismissed. None of 
 us would wish to minimise the fact of sin, or to 
 reject the view that the world is the scene of a 
 constant struggle between right and wrong, or to - 
 limit the forces of evil or our individual misuses 
 of choice, or to deny that Jesus and His followers 
 personalised this force under the name of Satan.. 
 But some of us would go on to maintain that evil 
 has no substantial existence, that it arose solely 
 in the development of free personalities, and that 
 to admit the belief in a personal devil as the supra- 
 mundane rival and opposite to God is at once 
 unsubstantiated by the facts and unnecessary to 
 Christian thought. 
 
 To the student of Christian history it 1s obvious 
 that the dualism which regards the material world 
 as itself evil, the conviction underlying the Gnostic 
 heresies and the Manichzan religion, powerfully 
 strengthened the ascetic movement within the 
 Church; especially in regard to matters of sex and 
 diet, the right to possessions and the use of physical 
 force. It still survives in the form of prejudices 
 and conventions which regard certain physical 
 actions as wrong in themselves; and social thinkers 
 have to be constantly on their guard against 
 them. 
 
 5° 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 Similarly, the view which sees evil as an illusion, 
 accepted as it is by the followers of Mrs. Eddy, does 
 not seem reconcilable with the facts or necessitated 
 by the belief that God is the sole ultimate reality 
 and that in Him all things consist. Rather such a 
 view leads inevitably to scepticism, by denying the 
 validity of all sense-perception and of the intellectual 
 processes which are conditioned by a time-space 
 environment, or to the setting up of arbitrary and 
 rationally indefensible authorities. Here again mis- 
 takes of principle will be found to cause mistakes 
 or inconsistencies in social thinking. 
 
 As regards the less extreme form of dualism, 
 instead of examining once more the problem of evil, 
 we propose to set out in summary outline our 
 conception of the nature of the universe and of the 
 development of life. 
 
 As already stated, there seems nothing irreconcil- 
 able with Christianity in the results of astronomical 
 and geological research. Its conclusions as regards 
 the origin and formation of the solar system, and 
 the age and history of the world, do not increase 
 the difficulty of maintaining the existence of the 
 eternal values or their manifestation in terms of 
 space and time. Rather, convinced as we are that 
 the cosmos is explicable only if it serves a purpose, 
 we would urge that it is only in a belief in the reality 
 of such values that this purpose can be found; that 
 the world exists for an object outside itself, an 
 object whose fullness exceeds our grasp, but which 
 we can discern here and now as in a glass darkly. 
 That object we should be content to define as the 
 creation and development of free personalities 
 
 51 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 capable of glorifying God and enjoying Him for 
 
 ever. 
 
 It is, we believe, a profitless task to join issue with 
 all the criticisms that can be raised. Such questions 
 as ‘‘ Why did not God, if He willed to create, do so 
 by a mere fiat? ”’ were taken very seriously by the 
 Christians of the early centuries; and their efforts 
 to answer are ingenious if not always convincing. 
 Suffice it to admit that we do not know precisely 
 why the method of long and laborious growth 
 accompanied. by struggle and suffering, sin and 
 failure, and ending too often in what looks like 
 defeat, was necessary. But we can make some 
 observations about it. Love is in its very nature 
 creative; from it in some form or other spring all 
 the graces and arts, the discoveries and achievements, 
 of man; from it in its higher aspect springs the 
 expansion of the circle of fellowship; the love of 
 one leads on to the love of two, and the love of two 
 to the love of many, as Plato and Emerson have 
 taught. Love to be fully worthy of the name can 
 only exist between persons who are freely united one 
 with another; neither we nor God can love machines, 
 puppets, things without a life and will of their 
 own. Such freedom can only be gained by long 
 development, since it implies individuation, self- 
 consciousness, self-mastery and self-surrender. And 
 this development is what we appear to trace in the 
 story of evolution. If there was to be progress of 
 any kind there must be ordered conditions and a 
 fixed environment; just as we could not play a 
 game if the court were always changing its shape 
 and the rules were arbitrarily altered at every stroke, 
 
 52 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 so if Nature were not obdurate and law-abiding, 
 the whole effort after adaptation to environment, 
 that is after life itself, would be impossible. It was 
 a Greek Christian of the third century who remarked 
 that if the climate had been uniformly tempered 
 man would never have developed his skill in tailoring 
 and building or his knowledge of the uses of fire, 
 that if there had been no limit to the food supply 
 there would have been no agriculture, no hunting 
 or fishing, no hardihood nor training of body or 
 brain. And his words are as true of lower organisms 
 as of ourselves. Gradually under the pressure of 
 struggle we see the simple becoming complex, the 
 shapeless blob of jelly developing into the creature 
 with differentiated organs and the glimmering of a 
 conscious life. Consciousness develops into indi- 
 viduality and a power of choice appears. In the 
 birds and higher animals there emerge traces of 
 self-consciousness, of intelligent in contrast with 
 instinctive action and of the stirrings of a moral 
 sense. And if we are asked why development depends 
 upon struggle and is accompanied by failure and 
 cruelty and what we can hardly not call sin, we can 
 only urge that progress cannot be and is not a 
 mechanical process, that it cannot be and is not 
 merely the onward surge of a life-force, but that it 
 depends at every step upon the efforts of the unit, 
 upon his response to environment, upon his choice, 
 upon his adventuring, upon his endurance and 
 growth; and that if the unit is free to expand it 
 must also be free to contract, if it can within however 
 narrow limits choose its path, it can also follow a 
 blind alley, or beat a retreat, that the possibility of 
 53 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 evil is the price paid for goodness. And further, 
 if evolution seems characterised by a hideous toll of 
 innocent suffering and by a sacrifice and wastage 
 out of all proportion to the results reached, we may 
 at least suggest that innocent suffering is not 
 unfamiliar to Christians and that the principle of 
 life through death is fundamental to their outlook— 
 these two being in fact the central lesson of the 
 Cross. It was the greatest of French naturalists 
 and perhaps of all observers, Fabre, the Homer of 
 the insects, who, while he has disclosed to us horrors 
 ghoulish and grim beyond imagination, has also 
 put on record the question which haunted him—* If 
 each creature is what it is only because it is a neces- 
 sary part of the plan of the supreme Artisan who has 
 constructed the universe, why have some the right 
 of life and death and others the terrible’ duty of 
 immolation? Do not both obey, not the gloomy 
 law of carnage, but a kind of sovereign and exquisite 
 sacrifice, some sort of unconscious idea of submission 
 to a superior and collective interest ? ” 
 
 As we watch and study the stages by which life 
 has expanded and see how, despite many set-backs 
 and much side-tracking, the movement has always 
 been towards the appearance of organisms more 
 elaborate in structure, and more capable of conscious 
 personal existence, we can at least feel that if this — 
 result was only attainable under the conditions that 
 we know, the struggle and suffering and the apparent 
 mistakes and failures have not been in vain. Our 
 humanity cannot be a worthless thing if it has cost 
 so much to bring it into being. Zante molts erat 
 divinam condere gentem. ‘The travail and groaning 
 
 54 
 
GOD AND NATURE 
 
 of creation will be seen to be due to and justified 
 by its end, the appearing of the family of God. 
 
 Yet in view of the facts, the survival of primitive 
 and monstrous elements in the animal world, the 
 failure and retrogression and disappearance of myriad 
 types, are we not driven to accept the hypothesis 
 recently popularised by certain pseudo-scientific fol- 
 lowers of Professor Bergson, and to regard the whole 
 process as the work of an experimenter in creation, 
 of a finite and struggling deity whose inchoate 
 designs produced at first a series of crude and horrible 
 essays, the rough drafts from which finer workman- 
 ship could be developed? 
 
 We do not for a moment deny the elements of ex- 
 periment, of failure, of monstrosity, of what St. Paul 
 calls frustration, lack of success or “‘ vanity.” But 
 if the goal is the creation of free volition, the possi- 
 bility of free development must be inherent from 
 the first in the creative process. It is life, the living 
 organism, which advances or retreats, which in 
 response to its environment develops new faculties 
 and new forms. And life, even if we give it the 
 illegitimate title of the Life-force, is not identical 
 with God, though it derives from and is sustained 
 by Him. In the lower as in the higher stages of 
 evolution creative love is consistent in method, 
 leaving its creatures free to develop their individuali- 
 ties without constraint save that of inspiring them 
 to the best. Ifin the process mistakes are made and 
 suffering, innocent suffering, is involved, this is as 
 evident in man as in his dim and primitive ancestors. 
 If the Cross illuminates it in the one case, it will do 
 sointhe other. A false step is taken, an unconscious 
 
 55 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 perversion is encouraged, the course of evolution 
 is driven into a blind alley, and untold multitudes 
 of living beings are doomed to sacrifice, until at 
 last the type perishes or a break-out in a new direction 
 is achieved. And if life is not to be reduced to the 
 level of the automatic and mechanical, that is, if 
 the nature and purpose of creative love is to be 
 unchanged, the results of evil cannot be annulled 
 by intervention from without: here, as always, 
 suffering and penitence and re-birth mark the path _ 
 of salvation. 
 
 If God is love, such a process is necessary for the 
 production of free and responsive objects for His love. 
 Nor in that case does the old antithesis, ‘*‘ Love or 
 Power,” force itself upon us. It is true that if we 
 limit our outlook to inanimate nature, to the non- 
 moral environment, the message of creation might 
 speak only of power and divinity; but if we regard 
 the physical world as the gymnasium of life and study 
 the results of its training in its highest product 
 known to us, humanity, we begin to see a congruity 
 and consistency about the whole and to confirm our 
 faith in love. 
 
 Power, itself non-moral, could create a machine 
 whose reactions were involuntary and automatic; 
 Love, in order that it may find an object capable 
 of relationship with itself, defines and directs power 
 and creates free life. Power as the mere ability 
 to act, power in the sense often given to omnipotence, 
 cannot be the ultimate attribute of God: or God 
 might well be the devil. And the end is not yet. 
 While it does not appear yet what we shall be, there 
 
 can be no reason to doubt that a similar training 
 56 
 
X., 
 
 GOD AND NATURE 
 
 is even now in process and that individuals will be 
 developed by it immeasurably surpassing all that 
 we know. Progress is neither automatic nor con- 
 stant; but as by the effort and agony of myriads 
 life has been lifted on to new levels of possibility 
 and achievement, so its highest manifestation by 
 the same effort and agony will produce beings 
 capable of attaining heights now inconceivable. 
 - It is the business of Christians to fix their eyes rather 
 upon the future than upon the past; and the 
 record of what has been, instead of constantly 
 discouraging them by the memory of their lowly 
 origin and animal instincts, will inspire them to 
 continue the effort and rejoice in the agony. 
 Throughout the whole world-story runs the recurring 
 motif, ** the best is yet to be.” 
 

 
CHAP DE RO PTT 
 GOD AND MAN 
 

 
CHAPTER III 
 GOD AND MAN 
 
 For the social student some sketch of the universe, 
 God’s nursery for His human children, is an essential 
 preliminary. But man, the highest product that 
 we know of the evolutionary process, is a denizen of 
 two worlds, and if we are to understand and move 
 towards a realisation of his spiritual vocation we must 
 first consider the conditions, the limitations and 
 opportunities of his earthly environment. For it is 
 scarcely necessary to insist that our whole outlook 
 upon the problems of social and industrial and 
 political life will be affected by what we conceive 
 to be the character and purpose of physical nature 
 and of the God revealed in it. So far as mankind 
 is rational, its philosophy of the universe will have a 
 powerful influence not only upon its hope and 
 ambitions, but upon its individual and collective 
 conduct. ‘l’o see the world as a vale of tears is 
 naturally to transfer one’s dreamland from it to 
 Paradise. To regard it as evil is to advocate a 
 rigid asceticism, or perhaps an unbridled licentious- 
 ness; to find in it nothing but the operation of an 
 inexorable machine, is to lose the incentive to effort 
 and to resign oneself to despair. Only if we find the 
 Gospel of Christ consistent with and corroborated 
 
 by the facts of life as we have come to learn them, 
 61 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 can we insist upon His claim to our loyalty and enter 
 the service of His Kingdom with joyful hope. For 
 the other-worldliness which despairs of improve- 
 ment in this life, and would postpone all expecta- 
 tions until a miraculous millennium, is hardly less 
 alien to His Spirit than the materialism which would 
 reduce Christianity to the level of bare ethics and 
 classify its Founder as a Jewish social reformer. 
 Yet to approach the Christian conception of man 
 primarily from the side of his material surroundings 
 and animal ancestry would be dangerously mislead- 
 ing. It has often and truly been noted that the 
 concentration during the past century upon the 
 physical sciences and the exploitation of natural 
 resources has exceeded and distracted attention from 
 the higher studies which can alone guide us to a 
 right use of new knowledge and power. The be- 
 wilderment and chaos of our time is due not least 
 to its failure to produce saints and thinkers who will 
 keep pace in their own sphere with the chemists and 
 physicists, the biologists and psychologists, and 
 restore to mankind a fresh assurance of the eternal 
 values and a truer sense of proportion. We do not 
 wish to disparage the greatness of the debt which 
 humanity owes to the heroic and disinterested 
 labours of a century of natural scientists. ‘They have 
 revolutionised man’s conception of his home, and 
 opened up before him opportunities incalculable in 
 their present value and still more so in their promise 
 for the future. It is not too much to say that if the 
 mass of men and women can to-day, as never before, 
 appreciate and accept Christ’s ideal of the Kingdom 
 with its hope of human health and happiness, of the 
 62 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 control of Nature and the universal brotherhood of 
 mankind, it is to their efforts that we owe it. Nor 
 are they to blame if theologians and prophets, artists 
 and poets, statesmen and philosophers have failed 
 to prevent an exaggerated emphasis being laid upon 
 the sufficiency of material development; or if the 
 people in the first flush of new ideas and new dis- 
 coveries have let their gaze wander from the vision 
 of spiritual truth and beauty and righteousness. 
 
 Here we would simply utter a warning against 
 approaching the consideration of man’s nature and 
 social life too exclusively from the standpoint of his 
 past. Darwin and his successors, in establishing, by 
 whatever precise theory, our physical kinship with 
 the anthropoids and the animal kingdom, have 
 directed attention to those elements in our nature 
 which human thought has hitherto refused to recog- 
 nise as its truest characteristics. Homo sapiens, or, 
 as in an age of machinery philosophers may prefer to 
 call him, Homo faber, is physically and still more 
 spiritually no mere glorified ape. And the analysis 
 of the primitive instincts of his inheritance, valuable 
 as it is for the right estimate of motive, can no more 
 give a true or complete picture of the human soul 
 than a handful of carbonates and proteids and a 
 gallon or two of water can represent the human body. 
 It is important to know the raw material of life— 
 it is even more important not to forget that before 
 it assumes shape as the stuff of which saints and 
 children of God consist, it is profoundly trans- 
 formed, and that for those who would advance the 
 well-being of their fellows it is the process of trans- 
 
 formation that matters. It is inevitable that 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 students of psychology and medicine should have 
 their attention focussed chiefly upon the phenomena 
 of abnormality, degeneracy and disease. Few of 
 them succeed in escaping a certain preoccupation 
 with the morbid. And in estimating the importance 
 of much modern psychology we shall do well to 
 remember that its results are based upon fuller 
 acquaintance with the pathological than with the 
 normal. ‘The tendency of to-day to estimate man- 
 kind by the standpoint of the primitive, the per- 
 verted and the decadent rather than by the measure 
 of the fullness of the stature of Christ, is as anti- 
 social as it is unjust. We have a right to be judged 
 by our best, not our worst, by our future rather than - 
 our past. Mankind is never unwilling to accept 
 excuses for his moral failings; and when psycholo- 
 gists have their theories popularised and distorted 
 by a press which panders to the taste for morbidity, 
 we would protest in the interests of sanity and of 
 moral progress that the resulting conception of man’s 
 nature and destiny is neither worthy nor true to 
 the facts. 
 
 (A) ‘T'xe Revetation or Gop 
 
 1. Progressive and conditioned by man’s response.— 
 If man has emerged as the product of a long series 
 of lower organisms and carries with him abundant 
 proofs of his earthly origin, it is in his appreciation 
 of the spiritual values of beauty, truth and goodness, 
 in his communion with God, and in the influence of 
 this communion upon his whole emotional, intel- 
 
 lectual and volitional life that he shows the real 
 64 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 character and possibilities of his nature. The words 
 of Genesis, “Let us make man in our image,” 
 represent the conviction upon which all religion and 
 in the end all sound thinking are based. For they 
 involve the belief, which common sense strenuously 
 maintains as against the sceptic, that what man at his 
 best recognises as zsthetically, intellectually and 
 morally desirable is no mere delusion or caprice ; 
 and humanity has recognised that the highest 
 element in its nature, the spirit or mind, the self- 
 conscious and God-conscious personality, separates 
 man from the brutes and is not dependent upon 
 nor confinable within the physical sphere. “ ‘I'wo 
 worlds are ours ”’ is a belief almost universal to man- 
 kind. The antitheses, natural and supernatural, 
 physical and spiritual, earthly and heavenly, though 
 the implied contrast is easily exaggerated and the 
 distinction may no longer be regarded as rigid, are 
 familiar from our childhood. ‘The experience of 
 the vast majority of articulate human beings testifies 
 surely if dimly to the reality of the unseen and of 
 man’s place init. As far back as human history can 
 be traced, we can see glimmerings of this experience, 
 and in the infinite variety of folk-lore and legend, 
 of cult and creed, the effort to fix and explain and 
 intensify it. And as the powers of imagination and 
 thought and expression expand, their growth is 
 nowhere more plainly seen than in their concept of 
 the divine. ‘The ancient sneer which would parody 
 the words of Genesis and represent man as making 
 gods after his own likeness has this much truth in 
 it, that from age to age we can trace along with the 
 
 development of new faculties in human nature an 
 F 65 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 evolution in man’s idea of the Divine. If on the 
 one side this process can be described, as it was by 
 Justin and Clement, as a progressive self-revelation 
 of the Logos, the guide and educator of His human 
 children, it is equally true to recognise that the 
 measure of this revelation is constantly conditioned 
 by man’s ability to receive it. “‘ He that hath ears 
 to hear, let him hear,” is a necessary corollary to 
 the belief that God is Love, and that as such, though 
 ever giving Himself to His creatures, He cannot, 
 without robbing them of their freedom and being 
 false to His own nature, force them to accept His 
 gifts. Nowhere is this development in the know- 
 ledge of spiritual values more clearly traceable than | 
 in the pages of the Old Testament which unfold 
 before us the stages by which a people uniquely 
 endowed with religious consciousness strove to trace 
 and explain and justify the dealings of God with 
 them, and in doing so expanded their conception of 
 His nature and purpose, and prepared the way for 
 Christ. As we study the sacred writings we can 
 trace how mankind received the revelation of God, 
 and how prophets and sages were inspired to express 
 it in terms intelligible to their own time and invalu- 
 able still. And if we admit a development in its 
 fullness and maintain that its authority for us is 
 secondary to and must be tested by that of Christ, 
 we shall not thereby destroy the value of such a 
 record or fail to draw warnings and examples from 
 it, because we are disciples of Him who came not 
 to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfil 
 them, because we believe that God who at sundry 
 
 times and in divers manners spoke unto the fathers 
 66 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 has spoken to us pre-eminently and uniquely in His 
 Son. Rather it is in the history of the saints 
 ancient and modern, the Christians before and after 
 Christ, that we can best understand the operations of 
 the Divine Spirit in preparing and moulding men 
 ot differing times and temperaments into a measure 
 of conformity with Him in whom previous ages 
 reach their climax and from whom a new epoch 
 draws its abiding inspirations. It is in the light 
 of such men’s lives rather than of our sub-human 
 heritage that seekers for social righteousness will 
 estimate the difficulties and face the problems of 
 their task. 
 
 As we trace in history the emergence of the 
 supernatural within the natural, the growth from the 
 animal to the spiritual, we are constantly reminded 
 of the process revealed to us by the studies of 
 geologists and biologists. ‘The analogy between the 
 macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universe 
 and the individual, which commended itself to Plato 
 and fascinated the Stoics, must not be pressed too 
 far; but the parallelism is at least congruous with 
 the belief that both are the outcome of a single mind, 
 the unfolding of a consistent purpose. Man emerg- 
 ing at last with his powers of self-consciousness and 
 reflection sets to work to master the environment in 
 which he finds himself and to make it minister to his 
 needs. At first these are simple, and concerned 
 mainly with the gratifying of his appetites; but 
 from the first there is evidence of a reaching out 
 beyond the animal instincts, of the desire for 
 creative art, the impulse to ask questions and to 
 speculate, the working of the moral sense. If the 
 
 67 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 raw materiai*of his nature can be readily classified 
 into various simple instincts, it is plain that the 
 sublimation of the primitive begins from the first, 
 and that as the family expands into the clan and the 
 clan into the tribe, the influence of life in a com- 
 munity and the dim consciousness of the super- 
 natural begin to exert restraint and to produce 
 higher and more complex psychic states. ‘The 
 original instincts become profoundly modified in 
 adapting themselves to the new conditions, and 
 religion, however crude its form, becomes a forma- 
 tive force of the first importance. If then, as later, 
 the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom, — 
 if such fear expressed itself in strange and often 
 horrible cults, at least we can recognise in the taboos 
 and ritual of primitive man the earliest stages of his 
 progress towards the knowledge of God, the first 
 groping of spiritual infancy towards its parent. 
 ‘The recrudescence of animal instincts and the per- 
 version of higher impulses make the story terrible to 
 the humanitarianism of to-day; our own age with 
 its atavisms and cruelties will perhaps seem hardly 
 less terrible a thousand years hence; for in spite 
 of relapses there is advance, slow, painfully slow, 
 stretching over ages of which hardly a vestige 
 remains, but preparing the way for a time when a 
 more rapid development can take place. ‘Those who 
 are depressed by the evidence of spiritual insensi- 
 bility and ingrained selfishness in themselves and 
 the modern world may well consider the length of 
 time since mankind first appeared on the earth, and 
 contrast that vast period of our babyhood with the 
 
 few thousand years whose history we know, that 
 68 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 primitive humanity with the saints and sages whose 
 names are household words. 
 
 And at every stage in his development the task 
 before manisthesame. Heisa citizen alike of earth 
 and of heaven, conscious of the demands upon him 
 of his spiritual life, responding however slightly to 
 the appeal of goodness, truth and beauty, and driven 
 to express his sense of the supernatural and to bring 
 his physical life into a growing harmony with the 
 dictates of his higher self. By his power of rational 
 thought and constructive ability he can create instru- 
 ments for the subjugation of his environment— 
 instruments which range from the plough and the 
 loom, the house and the boat to the systems of law 
 and social convention. Man the craftsman, unlike 
 his animal ancestors, does not merely adapt himself 
 to Nature; he sets out to understand and exploit 
 her powers, observing and interpreting, moulding 
 and controlling an ever-widening range of his sur- 
 roundings. And through the whole course of 
 civilisation his underlying purpose is to overcome the 
 disharmonies between his body with its animal in- 
 stincts and his spirit with its supernatural yearnings. 
 He is the victim of a continual restlessness unless he 
 can satisfy himself that his earthly life is in some way 
 serving an end beyond itself, is in some sort of con- 
 formity with his ideals and with the ultimate pur- 
 pose. He is haunted by glimpses of spiritual values, 
 of the heaven which is his home, and driven by the 
 promptings of conscience and the lash of remorse to 
 make his earthly life consistent with his concept’ of 
 God. In so doing he is thwarted first by the 
 obscurity and uncertainty of his spiritual vision, 
 
 69 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 since God can only reveal what he is able to appre- 
 hend and understand; secondly, by the difficulty of 
 expressing what he sees under the conditions of 
 material life and the physical limitations of his own 
 body, the domination of unsublimated instincts, the 
 pressure of social conditions, the strength of self- 
 centred motives in himself and others. He is con- 
 strained to make concessions to his lower nature, to 
 choose the second best, to debase his dreams so as to 
 bring them within his grasp, to set up and serve gods 
 whose character, is almost a caricature of his own. 
 But despite it all, the same urge pursues him, and 
 if the mass of humanity acquiesces in a low standard 
 and seems to abandon the effort without regret, 
 there have always been those in whom the thirst for 
 God would neither be quenched nor denied, pro- 
 phets and reformers afflicted with a divine discon- 
 tent and striving by warning and precept and example 
 to arouse a like discontent in their fellows. 
 
 The work of such men is always the same. In 
 some form or another they have seen God, and the 
 sight has awakened in them a passion of revolt 
 against the ugliness and lies and corruption of 
 earthly life. ‘hey feel the vast possibilities open 
 to mankind and contrast them with his present 
 servitude and limitations. ‘They dream of a time 
 when he shall be free to live eternally, when his 
 body shall perfectly obey and express the yearnings 
 of his spirit, when his individuality shall find its 
 liberty in a fellowship of kindred spirits, when the 
 ordered human society shall perfectly reproduce the 
 pattern seen on the mount of vision, when the 
 natural shall be the sacrament of the supernatural. 
 
 7O 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 For despite the tendency to relapse into other- 
 worldliness, the desire to bring the two into harmony 
 and the belief that the ideal can be actualised have 
 never, at least in the West, been long disputed. 
 We have seen grounds for believing that the order 
 of Nature is sacramental through and through, that 
 God reveals Himself to us through the medium of 
 the objects of sense and under conditions of space 
 and time. ‘The same principle is manifest in man- 
 kind, and for those who accept the Christian faith 
 in the Incarnation becomes in some form inevitable. 
 
 2. Given through the medium (1) of the matertal_— 
 Mankind with its animal instincts and material 
 environment is constantly tempted to live solely in 
 the physical. The senses crave satisfaction and are 
 imperious in their demands. That the spirit 
 struggles against the flesh is an experience common 
 to us all; and we all know the ease and peril of 
 capitulation. Indeed for most men there is need of 
 rigid discipline and of times of deliberate with- 
 drawal from the appeal of the material world lest 
 they become wholly earthbound. We can only see 
 our bodily life rightly if we keep it subordinate to the 
 spiritual end which it subserves; and to do this 
 implies the effort to resist the clamour of the senses 
 and remain attentive to God. 
 
 Nevertheless the acceptance of Jesus Christ as 
 God’s fullest self-revelation brings the acknowledg- 
 ment that He gives Himself most fully to us not as 
 *¢ pure Spirit to pure spirit,” but through and in the 
 material world-process of which we area part. This 
 view gives to all nature, and especially to physical 
 life, as the medium of God’s fullest and humblest 
 
 re 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 approach to us, immense sanctity and importance. 
 It means that we must look upon all the data of 
 sense as being also, potentially, the data of spirit ; 
 and that the true line of our physical, social and 
 mental evolution must be towards making the world 
 a more perfect vehicle of the Spirit of God. In 
 considering man and man’s communion with God 
 from the social and corporate point of view, the 
 belief that the visible world is the medium of God’s 
 self-revelation and self-giving to men assumes special 
 importance. For on the one hand men are infinitely 
 graded, in spiritual capacity as in all else; on the 
 other hand, God’s self-revelation in the world is 
 graded too—a process culminating in the absolute 
 self-giving of Jesus Christ. If, then, spirit thus 
 everywhere pervades nature, giving to it all its 
 beauty, significance and worth, this means that 
 through the material world men can everywhere, so 
 far as they are aware of God, find Him giving 
 Himself under the accidents of sense. ‘There is a 
 fundamental cleavage between this conception of 
 God’s presence and self-revelation in the world (a 
 conception which yet fully safeguards His unalterable 
 distinctness and transcendence), and either the en- 
 tirely non-sacramental view of His nature and action 
 which sharply opposes spirit to sense, or the un- 
 bridled immanentism which lands us sooner or later 
 in a pantheistic philosophy. <A belief that the 
 material world is susceptible of God consecrates 
 material life, and makes of it, in so far as it is 
 virtually or actually dedicated to the purposes of 
 His eternal will, a real revelation of the Divine. 
 There is for it no water-tight compartment between 
 72 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 nature and grace, though an invincible distinction 
 between the two. Through the consecration of the 
 natural the supernatural can everywhere reach us; 
 since it is already and unalterably present. 
 
 These considerations give to the social aspect of 
 Christian endeavour a more directly religious and 
 not merely amiably humanitarian aspect. They 
 suggest that the effort to give beauty and rightness 
 to our human world may be our contribution to the 
 full flowering of Divine Reality in space and time; 
 and that whenever we create or permit the ugly, 
 sordid and imperfect, we are directly profaning and 
 impeding the self-expression of God. Carried to 
 their logical conclusion, they would compel us to 
 look upon every act of daily life as implicitly religi- 
 ous, and are fundamental to a really Christian view 
 of man’s every relationship. Such a conception of the 
 universe of sense as awakening and feeding our need 
 of spirit will give a fresh colour to our attitude to- 
 wards the conservation of natural beauty, the creation 
 of civic beauty, the status and vocation of the artist, 
 the moral worth of perfect craftsmanship and honest 
 industry, the exact and finished performance of the 
 humblest deeds. All these can participate in God’s 
 purpose and become in their measure real means of 
 grace. A Christian social order must be one in 
 which such an ordering of daily life, and such a 
 free expansion of beauty, is possible for all. For if 
 the word “redemption ” sums up our best concep- 
 tion of God’s purpose for the world, its gradual 
 approximation to the Divine idea, this must include 
 (though it must never be equated with) the redemp- 
 tion by consecration of its material aspect; the 
 
 73 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 turning of the ordinary stuff of life on all levels into 
 heavenly food. And this must involve a persistent 
 effort to eliminate everything that conflicts with 
 man’s best vision of God; which means everything 
 inconsistent with the Spirit of Christ. Here, as 
 ever, we shall best serve our fellow-men by first 
 serving God. Adoration is the real key to action. 
 If our attitude towards the world of the senses be 
 conditioned by a clear certitude of the omnipresence 
 of an unchanging and perfect Love, then our 
 dealings with that world will be characterised by a © 
 reverence which implicitly involves the Christian- 
 ising of the material setting of life. 
 
 Some kind of sacramental doctrine is involved in a 
 Christian view of God’s nature and purpose and the . 
 workings of Grace, because only on this assumption 
 can the nearness, simplicity and yet “‘ otherness ” of 
 the supernatural come home to us. 
 
 (2) Of the personal—tlf the Incarnation is con- 
 sistent with and illuminates our belief that the 
 material universe and our own physical nature are 
 of abiding worth, since it is through them that God 
 is revealed to us, it indicates also what the teaching 
 of Jesus so fully confirms, that for us human beings 
 the supreme relationship is not with the physical 
 but with the personal, that for mankind the supreme 
 sacrament is Man. In an age when men were in- 
 clined to seek in obedience to law the truest line of 
 development, Jesus stood for the inadequacy of 
 anything so mechanical and inanimate. His values 
 are not abstractions like goodness and truth and 
 beauty, though these have their place, but those of 
 life, love and joy and peace. He takes the concept 
 
 74 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 of goodness, which might otherwise signify, as it 
 has done so often; a cold and arid virtue, and fills it 
 with glowing vitality by showing that its attain- 
 ment consists not in the observance of precepts only, 
 but in a right disposition towards God and our 
 fellow-men, a disposition which alone enables those 
 precepts to be fulfilled. ‘The spiritual values depend 
 ultimately upon spiritual relationships. Love, com- 
 pact of sympathy and devotion, lifts life on to a plane 
 far above the world of correct conduct or logical 
 thought or faultless taste, though love in the Chris- 
 tian sense will contain and inspire all these. It is 
 the glory of St. Paul that under the influence of his 
 Master he could lay aside the legalism of his training 
 and draw out from the teaching of Jesus His contrast 
 between the way of fear and repression and obedi- 
 ence, and the way of liberty and sublimation and 
 the response of faith to grace. Devotion to God in 
 Christ and sympathy with all the body of the godly, 
 these are for him the guiding principles of existence, 
 those alone are the fulfilment of the law. Religion 
 may easily be regarded primarily as a matter of 
 emotion and of an ecstatic cultus, or of intellect and 
 of doctrine and philosophy, or of volition and of the 
 practice of right actions. ‘To Christ and His fol- 
 lowers it involves the whole personality, what 
 matters is what we are, in all that we feel or think 
 or do; beauty and truth and goodness are only 
 attainable if we are ourselves beautiful and true and 
 good, and we can only become so by communion 
 with God in fellowship one with another. 
 
 Indeed it is through personal relationships, the 
 contact of life with life, that we are most intimately 
 
 75 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 influenced for good or evil, and through persons 
 that we most plainly receive the knowledge of God. 
 In the great souls of the past whose experience lives 
 in history, there is massive testimony to the develop- 
 ment and reality of religion; the consensus fidelium 
 carries with it an authority which none can lightly 
 neglect or set aside. And in our own knowledge of 
 our fellow-men, as we discover in multitudes of 
 humble folk evidence of aspiration and effort and 
 sacrifice and the working of a power not their own, 
 our faith in God and our knowledge of His nature 
 and purpose are abundantly confirmed. And as we 
 set ourselves to serve Him in however small a way, 
 as we strive to fulfil in fellowship our ideals of good-_ 
 ness and truth and beauty, we gain confidence and 
 conviction. 
 
 Religion comes to men most commonly through 
 their friendships ; it is imparted by those to whom 
 it is a living reality, those who reveal it not so 
 much by what they say or do as by: what they 
 are. In the early years of home life, from parents 
 and teachers, or at later stages from the touch of 
 others who are themselves in communion with God, 
 we catch, as it were, the infection of His presence. 
 Conduct, the doing of His will, predisposes: us: to 
 receive : argument and study remove obstacles and 
 resolve doubts. But for most of us it is through 
 persons whom we love, persons whose lives make 
 contact with ours, that God comes most plainly 
 and immediately. For sympathy, the intimate 
 communion of person with person, is the strongest 
 and most formative power in the whole range of 
 
 human experience. All of us know the expansion 
 76 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 and enrichment and freedom which accompanies 
 love, how every joy is doubled and every sorrow 
 halved by being shared, and how insensibly the 
 whole quality of our natures is permeated and changed 
 by the influence of another. Impersonal objects, 
 abstract qualities, causes and ideals, all these move 
 and inspire us; but because we are ourselves per- 
 sonal, it is in the personal that we find our truest 
 satisfaction, our closest relationships. Nature and 
 the animate world mediates to us God in its own 
 measure; it is through the sacrament of personality 
 that we discover Him in such fullness as we can 
 apprehend, that we know Him to be neither a 
 force nor a value, but supremely a Person with whom, 
 as with our earthly friends, we can enter into a 
 relationship of love. 
 
 As what we shall call love is cardinal to our 
 interpretation of Christianity, it will be well to 
 define its significance to us. For almost no word in 
 the whole range of religious ideas is more diversely 
 interpreted; and the misunderstandings of it have 
 done grave damage to mankind. In St. Paul and 
 St. John its importance is clear enough; but later 
 generations were perplexed about it; and to-day, 
 even among trained theologians and psychologists 
 the application and analysis of it differ widely. 
 Christian love, in the sense in which we use the term 
 in these pages, springs out of an act of faith, of recog- 
 nition and trust. In it tender emotion and under- 
 standing, the energy of the feelings and of the mind, 
 are combined to form sympathy or compassion. 
 Its primary element is passion, the ‘‘ raw red stuff 
 of the heart” which can be so hideously misused, 
 
 77 | 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 but is none ‘the less the driving force of life, the 
 source of vitality and power. Passion is balanced 
 and directed by reverence, the regard for the 
 sanctity and moral worth of another’s personality, 
 which makes it impossible for us to use him as a 
 means to our own ends or to seek less for him than 
 his own highest good. As these are tested in active 
 goodwill and self-giving they create the disposition 
 of love, by which heart and mind and will are 
 harmonised, when a single object attracts to itself 
 our affection and interest and activity. “ Love,” 
 says St. Augustine, “ draws the soul, as the force of 
 gravity draws the body.” } : 
 
 By love thus defined the self is unified and organ- 
 ised. Each element in our nature makes its con- 
 tribution. A single loyalty dominates and directs 
 and inspires the whole. Only so can the life of man 
 find joy and peace and power. For the personality 
 is not, as some psychologists would lead us to sup- 
 pose, a mere bundle of separate instincts, nor can 
 each instinct be adequately sublimated apart from 
 the complete self. Instincts are not independent 
 entities, but qualities of the living organism; and 
 unless the personality, the synthesis and source of all 
 its functions, responds to and is concentrated upon 
 one all-satisfying object, no true sublimation, or, 
 as we should call it, regeneration, can take place. 
 To unite in this way all the forces of our being 
 involves a measure, a large measure, of discipline. 
 When once the ideal has been found, errant instincts: 
 can one by one be attached to it. But only as they 
 
 1 De Civ. Dei, xi. 28. 
 78 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 are brought into union with the central interest of 
 life will their transformation be accomplished. 
 Our conviction is that God, above all as He is 
 revealed in Christ, can alone be the object of a love 
 which will absorb every fibre of our being. And the 
 love thus aroused and fulfilled will colour with its 
 own quality all lesser relationships. 
 
 (B) Man’s Response 
 
 Involving—1. Unification and freedom.—Man, as 
 we have seen, is always restless and unhappy unless 
 he can find some unity and consistency in his life. 
 In attempting it he is hampered by the disabilities 
 produced by his animal instincts and physical needs. 
 Appetites which he has not learnt to control, passions 
 tyrannous in their power, the accumulated influence 
 of hereditary and personal mistakes, added to the 
 constraints of ill-health and of material circumstance, 
 distract his course and dissipate his energies. He 
 satisfies his desire for freedom by finding it in the 
 gratification of his caprices, by doing whatever he 
 happens at the moment to like. hen at times 
 of retrospect or of exaltation he realises that 
 throughout he has only been a slave, that he has 
 failed to do more than satiate unregulated desires, 
 strive after unworthy ambitions, and obey a multi- 
 tude of incoherent impulses. Fancying himself the 
 captain of his soul, he has kept to no straight nor 
 continuous course, but has merely drifted in the 
 current. ‘To be master of circumstance, to con- 
 centrate all his powers of body, mind and spirit, 
 to unify his nature, controlling and directing the 
 
 79 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 warring elements within it, and to be free to serve 
 with every faculty of his being some purpose large 
 enough to answer every craving and sublimate every 
 instinct—that is his dream. Multitudes when they 
 are confronted with the contrast between such a 
 dream and the facts of earthly existence take refuge 
 either in capitulation to the lower and in a sceptic- 
 ism which excuses them for so doing, or in a rejec- 
 tion of the physical world as a mere prison-house of 
 the soul, in emancipating themselves as far as 
 possible from bodily needs and passions and from > 
 contact with their environment. In the first case 
 the higher self is drugged by pleasure and excite- 
 ment, culture and intellectualism, business interests 
 and a ceaseless round of activities: outlets differing. 
 according to the temperament absorb the vitality : 
 the spiritual nature is deprived of nourishment and 
 might seem to be dead, were it not unexpectedly 
 revealed when loss or suffering or the presence of 
 death breaks the power of the dominant interest 
 and reveals the starved soul to consciousness. In a 
 complex state of society, when all the resources of 
 civilisation are employed to provide substitutes for 
 God, it is hardly surprising that the “* natural man” 
 abounds, or that those who cannot find rest from 
 such opiates despair of the world. ‘The “ apathy ” 
 of the Stoics, the determinism of Calvin, the non- 
 resistance of Tolstoy witness to the protest of the 
 spirit against a world seemingly impervious to its 
 influence and a generation indifferent to its claims. 
 And few Christians can escape perplexity when they 
 see the mass of their fellows blind to the vision and 
 
 deaf to the call which for themselves are so impera- 
 80 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 tive and so satisfying. Even Jesus, who more than 
 any other knew what was in man, was amazed at the 
 hardness of his heart ! 
 
 In view of what we have said of the sacramental 
 principle, it is obvious that Christians will accept 
 neither the worldliness of the homme moyen sensuel 
 nor the other-worldliness which is the reaction 
 against it. Indeed neither extreme is in fact true 
 to the highest experience of mankind. Unification 
 of the different faculties of personality, by whatever 
 method it may be achieved, is necessary for all normal 
 human beings; and they all seek an object other 
 than themselves in whose service they can attain it. 
 Tolstoy’s Resurrection, with its portrait of the 
 prostitute who came to regard sexual intercourse as 
 the supreme end of man in order to justify to herself 
 the dedication of her whole life to it, is typical; 
 for each of us if he is to find an inner harmony must 
 relate his own particular career to some end larger 
 than itself. In the vast majority of cases he sees it 
 as in some sense a contribution, even a sacrifice, to 
 the welfare of his family or his caste or his nation. 
 By whatever devious paths, our self-protective 
 instinct guides us to the conviction that our lives, 
 however sordid or selfish, are actuated and ennobled 
 by motives of altruism. The hunger for God takes 
 strange and scarcely recognisable shapes : the normal 
 man cannot escape it. 
 
 2. The inspiration of an ideal.—But if unity and 
 freedom are sought in a vast variety of loyalties, 
 how are we to examine their respective claims? 
 Jesus left only one test, that of fruits; and His great 
 
 follower in his definition of the fruits of the Spirit 
 G $1 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 and in the governing principle of his own actions 
 expands and illustrates the saying of his Master. 
 We may state it in two questions: Does such a life 
 bring into full and harmonious and productive 
 activity all the faculties which constitute personal- 
 ity? and, Does it promote in every sphere the 
 highest welfare of humanity? or, as a Christian 
 would phrase it, Does it reflect the character and 
 give expression to the Spirit of Christ ? and, Does 
 it build up in love Christ’s Body, the Church or 
 family of God’s children? | 
 Now it is clear that in applying such a test we 
 must look beneath a man’s function in society and 
 the pursuits which occupy his chief energies to the > 
 dominant motive of the whole personality. All are ~ 
 not apostles or prophets: there must be room for 
 the specialist, as St. Paul fully recognised. The 
 whole life of humanity is enriched by variety of 
 vocation, as it is by the great “ natural” varieties 
 of sex and race. Each one of us has his own 
 aptitudes, his own talent; and it is unlikely that his 
 highest development can be reached except by 
 recognising and employing them. Nor is such 
 specialism necessarily a narrowing thing, provided 
 only that the pursuit of it is not made an end in 
 itself. In any calling that is in itself true and 
 honest and just and pure and lovely and of good 
 report, men can serve God; in ministering to the 
 needs of His children they take upon themselves a 
 high, even a sacramental office: in realising their 
 function as members of a divine society they will 
 gain a sense of purpose and of proportion, and their 
 
 service, instead of being a slavery, will be transfigured 
 82 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 into a freely given contribution to the welfare of the 
 whole. We have lately seen how when national 
 need became all-absorbing men and women were 
 ready not only to undertake tasks with a zest astonish- 
 ing even to themselves, but to produce work of a 
 quality far above their previous best, work per- 
 formed with an exhilaration which gave to menial 
 duties a savour of romance. And we know too 
 how immensely the powers of each one of us are 
 heightened under the stimulus of an adequate 
 motive. Given an impulse worthy to enlist his 
 devotion, the most ordinary of human beings trans- 
 cends himself: instincts are controlled, obstacles 
 overcome, inconsistencies straightened out, health 
 restored, faculties enhanced, the whole personality 
 is enlarged and finds in the service of its chosen end 
 its freedom and its happiness. ‘ 
 
 That this “‘ inspiration of the ideal ”’ is the secret 
 of growth, that it unifies and transforms, will hardly 
 be questioned. Psychologists and educationalists 
 are agreed in pointing to it as the source of power. 
 Nor will it be disputed that to men and women of 
 different temperaments inspiration comes under 
 forms appropriate to them. The good, the true, 
 the beautiful, each of these has power to liberate in 
 certain of us potentialities irresponsive to any other 
 appeal: so far as they can be separated no one of 
 them is universally adequate, and those who are 
 satisfied with one alone develop one side of their 
 natures to the exclusion of all else. Religion, which 
 has been too frequently identified with morality, 
 has lost incalculably by being so treated; for to 
 
 identify religion with ethics is only one degree less 
 83 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 disastrous than to separate it from them. Ethical 
 ideals, as has been proved over and over again, do 
 not of themselves transform mankind : indeed, if not 
 enriched by something deeper, they produce too 
 often nothing but despair. For men need not an 
 example only, but the power to achieve it. St. 
 Paul’s analysis of the war in his members is true to 
 the general experience; most of us know, vaguely 
 perhaps and not often fully, what we ought to do 
 and be, but are conscious only of our impotence. 
 If the Sermon on the Mount stood alone, we might 
 accept the cynicism of those who declare that life 
 can never be conducted in accordance with it. 
 
 In order to make it possible for His disciples to 
 fulfil the new and golden law, Jesus appealed to a_ 
 deeper quality in their nature. If it was from His 
 own relation to God that He was able to see and declare 
 the true conduct of man, it was only in so far as His 
 followers shared that relationship that they would 
 bear the fruits characteristic of the Kingdom. So 
 in a multitude of parables He trained their spiritual 
 sensibilities, helping them to learn the reality of 
 the supernatural from its presence in Nature. If 
 they have eyes to see and ears to hear, then they can 
 gain entrance to a new world, to that Kingdom 
 which is at once around and within. And as they 
 enter it they will do so in virtue of the purity of 
 heart and singleness of vision which are the secret 
 of esthetic and intellectual life. The faculty of liv- 
 ing eternally, of realising in and through phenomena 
 the presence of the transcendent, Jesus instilled into 
 His followers in order that living in the Spirit they 
 might impress spiritual values upon the life of earth. 
 
 84 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 As it became a fixed habit of their minds to look for 
 God and His Kingdom everywhere, as they grew 
 used to living in the sense of His nearness, so they 
 would gain that confidence in the ultimate triumph 
 and present power of their cause which could alone 
 inspire them to achieve in the moral sphere the 
 heights to which Jesus called them. Here was a 
 motive, adequate to sublimate and direct all their 
 instincts, to unify their whole natures and to release 
 in them capacities hitherto dormant or dissipated. 
 Yet it may be doubted whether this apprehension 
 of the eternal would of itself have produced the 
 full outpouring of Pentecostal grace. Life “in 
 the heavenlies,” life in complete self-forgetfulness 
 and constant faith, is hard to attain. And the eye 
 for spiritual things, profoundly as it may illuminate 
 a man’s whole outlook, is not, for the normal human 
 being, the supreme source of inspiration. Vision 
 is not the whole of religion, except when glowing 
 with affection and capable not only of awe and 
 ecstasy, but of love. Jesus when He had led His 
 followers to see God in all their surroundings, in 
 His varied parables from Nature and the doings of 
 men, confronted them at last with Himself, the 
 fulfilment of all the parables, ‘‘ Whom say ye that 
 I am?” is the culminating test in His training; 
 and when Peter replied, “ The Christ,” the prelimin- 
 ary task of preparing them for Calvary and Pentecost 
 was finished. It was as they came to see the God 
 whose nature and operations they had been tracing 
 in the mustard-seed and the leaven, the corn and 
 the tares, the shepherd and the pearl-merchant, 
 
 supremely revealed as incarnate in their Master, | 
 85 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 that their whole personalities were saturated by the 
 inflowing of the Divine. ‘Then not only did each 
 individual feel every faculty of his being so liberated 
 and enhanced that he could only describe it as a re- 
 birth, but the fellowship of the faithful found itself 
 an organic body animated by a common life and 
 responsive to a single motive. ‘his double con- 
 sequence is admirably summed up in a couple of 
 sentences from a recent volume. Dr. Hadfield 
 writes: “In its fundamental doctrine of love to 
 God and man Christianity harmonises the emotions 
 of the soul into one inspiring purpose, thereby 
 abolishing all conflict and liberating instead of 
 suppressing the free energies of men.” Dr. Anderson 
 Scott writes: “‘ The coming of the Spirit is to be 
 looked for rather by a group than by an individual, 
 unless it be at the moment when the individual 
 merges himself in the group. ... The first result 
 of the coming would be seen in the removal of © 
 diffinities. Christ being the centre, the centripetal 
 forces would be found to exceed the centrifugal.... 
 The common relation to a universal would outweigh 
 all divisive relations to particulars.” 
 
 3. The fellowship.—lit is this ability of Christianity. 
 to create for the individual whose self-regarding 
 instincts have been sublimated by an ideal appealing 
 to every faculty of his being an organic unity with ~ 
 his fellows which distinguishes it among the religions 
 of humanity. ‘The vision of a theocracy, of a nation 
 holy in itself and in all its members, had inspired 
 all that was noblest in Israel; and the great prophets 
 in their revolt against legalism and the cultus had 
 
 sketched its outlines. But the dynamic which 
 86 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 they could employ had proved insufficient : love, 
 not law nor sacrifices, could alone achieve its fulfil- 
 ment, and love came only when men recognised 
 and confessed God incarnate in His Son. Then for 
 the first time was made attainable a state in which 
 society and its component units, dominated by the 
 same motive and moving towards the same goal, 
 could discover the true liberty, the liberty of whole- 
 souled, consistent and voluntary service, when 
 every member found every function of his nature 
 concentrated upon and unified by a loyalty which, 
 because it was operative over his corporate as well 
 as his personal life, involved no disharmonies and no 
 compromises. For the Christians of those first 
 generations there was no question of other allegiance 
 —duty to self or family or nation were all swept 
 aside unless they could be seen as duty to God. 
 “They dwell,” said the second-century writer to 
 Diognetus, ‘fin their own countries, but only as 
 sojourners. . . . Every foreign country is a father- 
 land to them, and every fatherland is foreign... . 
 They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live 
 not after the flesh. ‘Their existence is on earth, 
 but their citizenship is in heaven.” It seems almost 
 as if fora few years the little communities of Christians 
 came near to realising St. Paul’s dream of the 
 building up of redeemed humanity into one body 
 animated and inspired by one life, wherein each 
 individual consecrating his whole personality to the 
 joyous fulfilment of his membership should find his 
 own nature expanded by sympathy given and 
 received and enriched by sharing in the manifold 
 contributions of his fellows to the common weal. 
 87 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 That the source of power which Jesus taught His 
 followers to discover in love to God, as God was 
 revealed in Him, must necessarily involve the 
 creation of a society is plain alike from the experience 
 of the early Church and from the interdependence 
 of every human being upon his fellows. It is too 
 much to say that no one individual can live a full 
 Christian life until the whole of mankind is Christian ; 
 but it is evident that the attempt to create an 
 individualistic Christianity, and to represent religion 
 as a love-affair between a lonely soul and its God, 
 is false to Christ’s whole method; for its logical 
 outcome is the hermitage. “ Let him that loveth 
 God love his brother also”? is a precept integral 
 to the Gospel. 
 
 For in fact it is only when we are rapt out of 
 ourselves by spontaneous sympathy for others that 
 most of us begin to break loose from the prison of 
 self-interest. Family life and the loving discipline 
 of the home first train us to respond to higher 
 motives than our own appetites. Friendship, and 
 especially the first flowering of the emotional life 
 which comes to us at our adolescence, gives a new if 
 transient glory to existence and reveals the sheer 
 joy of living for another. Sex and the love of man 
 and woman can lead us further still into the under- 
 standing of the truth that selfishness is death and 
 that to gain life we must lose ourselves in devotion 
 of feelings and mind and will to another; for 
 sex-love is only complete when it has ceased to be 
 an affair of the heart,” has been tested and 
 approved by the head; and has become an inseparable 
 
 union in every activity of life, Nationality too 
 88 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 has its place in the process; and patriotism, though 
 like sex it can be grossly misused, can call out qualities 
 little short of the highest in man’s nature. If they 
 are real, all these natural relationships prepare us 
 to look for our own highest development not in 
 solitude, but in fellowship, not in a barren self- 
 culture, but in the freedom and enrichment which 
 come from loving service. To find God Himself 
 as the ground and source of our devotion, and 
 His world-wide family as the society of which we 
 are members, is to reach the satisfaction of our 
 natural yearnings, the goal to which our experience 
 
 has already pointed. 
 
 (C) Ture Divine Society 
 
 This conception of humanity as a kind of organism 
 whose life is the life of God permeating it as every 
 member responds and yields to the appeal of the 
 Divine love involves certain consequences. 
 
 A. For the individual it involves a recognition 
 of his own true worth in.relationship to God and 
 the Divine society, a recognition both of what he 
 is and of what he isnot. He7zsa free and responsible 
 member of the family, a “‘ fellow-worker ” compelled 
 by no law save that of the love in which he finds 
 his glory and his inspiration. ‘‘ God loves me” 
 confers an infinite value upon his individuality. 
 Indeed the grandest gift bestowed upon any of us 
 is to discover that someone knows us through and 
 through; knows not only the face which we show 
 to the world or the pose with which we flatter our 
 self-respect, but all our secret shame and meanness, 
 
 89 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 the thoughts and deeds which we dread to reveal 
 even to our own consciousness ; and knowing does not 
 cast us off. When we reach such a friendship with our 
 fellow men, our whole lives are transfigured by it : 
 we are delivered from the sepsis of loneliness and 
 introspection, and the wounds of sin are purged 
 of their poison. We can face life sanely and cleanly, 
 humble yet exalted. And if the giver of this 
 healing love is God, then, though the effects of our 
 sin remain and we know that we are mutilated and 
 scarred, yet our penitence does not involve grovelling © 
 or despair. God loves us, being what we are; and 
 in the strength of that certainty we can start again 
 to become what He would have us be. 
 
 But we learn also what we are not. If our 
 individuality is glorified, if our poor talent takes a 
 new preciousness because we have found One to 
 whom it can be offered, we gain also a new apprecia- 
 tion of the gifts and graces of others. If love has 
 in it a passion for utter union with its object, a 
 passion which easily becomes jealous and narrow, it 
 has also and equally a sheer joy in the beloved 
 because he is not ourselves: his personality thrills 
 us to awe and reverence by its eternal distinctness 
 from our own: we are constantly discovering in 
 him new depths of temperament, new powers of 
 sympathy, new faculties, new resources, and the 
 discovery, while it stimulates us to respond, floods © 
 our life with an ecstasy of thankfulness. In true 
 sympathy there can be no envy: into it must enter 
 a large element of worship. He is himself, not me; 
 and to absorb him in myself would be to degrade 
 him and to destroy love. He is himself, and yet 
 
 go 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 helovesme. Alongside of union goes differentiation 
 —that is perhaps one meaning of the doctrine of 
 the Trinity: at least it is fundamental to a right 
 understanding of corporate life. For to see our 
 fellows with a spontaneous respect for their freedom 
 and personalities, to rejoice in the little peculiar 
 gifts which each can contribute to the common store, 
 to realise their faults without self-flattery and to 
 heal them without self-righteousness, this is to catch 
 something of the Spirit of Jesus, which is the Spirit 
 of God. | 
 
 B. For the society it involves three things: (1) 
 the existence of a personal relationship between 
 all its members ; (2) the subordination of each to the 
 service of the whole; (3) a constant recollection of 
 the end which it is called to serve. 
 
 (1) We are united not by any legal or local 
 bond, but by our birthright as children of one 
 Father. Each has his own freedom; each is a 
 person. And in such a case he can never be treated 
 mechanically as a mere convenience or a mere 
 cipher. How vast a change the acceptance of this 
 truism would produce in our habits of thought and 
 action may be seen if we contrast our attitude 
 towards the wrongs of which we read and those 
 where we know and understand the wrongdoers. 
 Nathan’s parable is typical. So long as the guilt 
 affects one whose personality is to us simply an 
 abstraction, we can cry out, ‘‘’The man that has 
 done this thing shall surely die.” The blaze of 
 moral indignation consumes us with a passion for 
 the punishment of the sinner; only if he is visited 
 with retribution can our sense of justice be appeased. 
 
 o 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 We lose all desire to understand his point of view, 
 or even to treat him as we would treat ourselves : 
 he has ceased to be human, save that he has a life 
 which we can destroy with torment. But suppose 
 that between us and him there has been the touch 
 of person upon person, so that we know his motives 
 and limitations and temptations, suppose that we 
 love him, then the dominant cry is not, ‘‘ Let him 
 die,” but “‘ How can he be saved? ””? We shall not 
 loathe his sin the less, rather will our suffering be 
 infinitely more bitter. But instead of the lust to 
 kill there will be in us only the desire to enable 
 him to recover. Knowing him we may still feel 
 that punishment, even death, is the best consequence 
 for him and for the community. But it will be 
 love that strikes. He will never become a thing, 
 a case, a criminal; never be less than a person, a 
 prodigal son like ourselves; and our purpose will 
 be to help him as we best can to come to himself 
 and arise and go to his Father. 
 
 At first sight it would appear that if we are to 
 treat every case as a hard case, we shall plunge 
 headlong into anarchy. For law depends upon 
 generalisations ; true justice is proverbially abstract 
 justice; to sympathise with its victim is to have 
 one’s judgment warped by partiality ; it is to forfeit 
 all consistency in favour of sheer casuistry and 
 special pleading. It is not for nothing that St. 
 Paul, when he laid down the great claim that “ all 
 things are lawful unto me,” and attacked law as 
 impotent to do more than define and stimulate 
 evil, was accused of antinomianism, or that he so 
 constantly struggles to meet the charge of under- 
 
 92 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 mining the strongholds of morality. It is not for 
 nothing that in our corporate and even our personal 
 dealings we lapse back so easily from Christ to Moses, 
 from the liberty and crushing responsibility of the 
 life of grace to the cut-and-dried sanctions and 
 prohibitions of legalism. For the way of love is 
 not easy, even when love is understood to mean 
 the sentiment rather than the tender emotion. 
 Sympathy, its necessary condition, implies the 
 sublimation of instincts and the abandonment of 
 habits ingrained in us through the ages. For most 
 of us a truly personal relationship exists only within 
 the narrow circle of our intimates: we can hardly 
 begin to regard even our acquaintances in such a 
 light: the mass of mankind are names to us and 
 nothing more, and their presence rather repels than 
 attracts.” Lo} lovey them); to’ feel, for; each)! one of 
 them a distinct and personal friendliness, seems 
 wholly impossible; and the difficulty of it is vastly 
 increased by the change from a rural to an urban 
 type of civilisation. At our best we seem only 
 capable of a “‘ love of humanity ” which is often as 
 impersonal as a love of postage-stamps, a philan- 
 thropy as “ cold as charity.” Isit not cant to claim 
 that we can love all men? Are we not forced to 
 adopt a double attitude, ‘‘ one to face the world 
 with, and one to show a woman when we love her? ” 
 
 Such doubts are natural and must be honestly 
 faced. We cannot expect to begin except at the 
 beginning—within those lesser groups with which 
 our sympathies naturally lie. But to stop at that 
 is our shortcoming, a part of the huge problem of 
 the behaviour of the would-be Christian in an un- 
 
 93 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 Christian world, to which we shall turn later. 
 Meanwhile, and whatever our actual difficulties, 
 we can admit that such a personal bond linking us 
 all together would be capable of re-creating the 
 whole life of mankind. And we can see how even 
 here and now we can train ourselves for it. 
 
 St. Paul’s attitude is specially illuminating. 
 Accused, as we have said, of opening the door to 
 licence by his gospel of liberty, he declares and in his 
 own actions proves that this is not the case. Love is 
 an authority not less but far more exacting in its 
 demands than law; for law is concerned only with 
 conduct, and a bare conformity with its regulations 
 is all that it can secure, while love touches motive 
 and affects not only what we do but what we are. 
 All things may be lawful, but plainly all things are 
 not expedient. And to decide where our true 
 course lies is not now a matter of rule of thumb, of 
 statute and precedent, but involves a searching 
 answer to the questions, “‘ What will best secure 
 the building-up of the body in love?” or “ What 
 is God’s will for His children, and how in this 
 particular issue can I best interpret and fulfil His 
 will? ” It is very notable that it is by his sympa- 
 thetic perception of the needs of the body corporate 
 that St. Paul tests the validity of his personal 
 judgments, that he, the Jew with his Greek training 
 and Roman citizenship, transcends the limitations 
 of character and education and reaches something 
 of the universality of his Master. ‘To keep sensitive 
 to the guidance of the Spirit, to shape our conduct 
 by it, and in so doing to serve the highest needs of 
 our brethren is to live under an authority as much 
 
 94 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 transcending law as a living friend transcends a 
 machine, an authority which secures obedience just 
 because its demands are based not upon compulsion 
 but upon love. 
 
 (2) But if every member of the body is himself a 
 person with full and equal rights and responsibilities, 
 this does not mean that there will be no differentia- 
 tion of function, no subordination, no obedience. 
 Fach has his own office; eye and ear, foot and hand, 
 are equal in “honour” but not identical in the 
 manner of their service to the whole. And.in any 
 organism there must be some whose task is that of 
 leadership, some who can under God co-ordinate 
 and control the activities of-the whole. In these 
 days, when the virtue of obedience and the value 
 of discipline are so generally criticised, it is necessary 
 to point out that however utilitarian, mechanical 
 and soulless they may be, their existence is essential 
 unless society is to be reduced to pandemonium. 
 Correlation of parts is a condition of life both for the 
 individual and the fellowship. In such a body as 
 we have been considering, where all the members 
 are united to one another and to God freely and by 
 love, the formal assertion of authority will be 
 reduced to a minimum; for those who exercise it 
 will be saved from the pride and self-seeking which 
 identifies delegated responsibilities with personal 
 merit, and regards its own advantage as synonymous 
 with the common welfare. Government would be 
 democratic in the sense that there would be equality 
 of opportunity for all and that those selected to 
 rule would do so with the consent of their fellow- 
 members, but it would escape the present perversion 
 
 95 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 of democracy, wherein too often authority is vested © 
 in the hands of a committee representative of rival 
 or partisan interests, and with no possibility of 
 reaching more than a highest common factor of agree- 
 ment. If the whole community were controlled 
 by a single ideal, authority would be exercised in 
 the spirit of fellowship rather than of superiority, 
 of a religious order, not of a state: the meek would 
 rule, as servants, not as lords, and obedience would 
 be that of sons, not of slaves. Under such conditions 
 there is nothing demeaning in obedience, nothing - 
 to provoke resentment in subordination. Jealousy 
 and the ambition from which it springs may be 
 the subtlest and most persistent of all the mani- 
 festations of self-regard: even the Apostles only 
 lost them when they passed through the fire of 
 Calvary, when at last love triumphed, trans- 
 forming them into the sheer delight of fulfilling 
 the proper task with all the powers and into a 
 selfless pride in the excellence of others. If St. 
 Paul could draw metaphors and examples from the 
 athletes of his time, surely we may point to the 
 sportsmanship of our own for an illustration: if 
 no member of a team covets the captaincy or asks 
 more than the opportunity to use his own skill 
 when required, and if the captain can rely on them 
 all to do what he tells them without grumbling or 
 envy, surely it is not impossible in the Divine society 
 to maintain a spirit of comradeship in adventure 
 not less free from bitterness and arrogance. 
 
 (3) And if such a fellowship seems hopelessly 
 unattainable, we believe that as both the members 
 and the body ‘devote themselves to the end for 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 which they exist, the difficulties will disappear. 
 God’s human family was not created for purposes 
 of mutual admiration, for that hearty recognition 
 of its own merits which sometimes masquerades 
 as Christian comradeship. Its task here and always 
 is the same—to do His will, to work with Him for His 
 greater glory, to share in the creative and redemptive 
 activity of love. We shall consider later the problem 
 of the behaviour of Christians in an unconverted 
 world, when we have surveyed in greater detail 
 the forces that are opposed to us. Here it is enough 
 to claim that Jesus Himself never failed to stress 
 the magnitude or the urgency of the adventure to 
 which He commissioned His followers. Whatever 
 be the precise significance of His use of Apocalyptic, 
 it at least served to impress on them that they were 
 living in a time of crisis. And rightly viewed every 
 hour is critical. In these tremendous days, at least, 
 there is need to remember His claims upon us... And 
 in the light of them, if once they are fully realised, 
 the unattainable becomes the actual, and idealism 
 is merely common-sense. For when great deeds 
 are in the doing, and great dangers being faced, 
 and a great cause served, the values of which we 
 have written are called into eminence. Material 
 standards and artificial distinctions lose their meaning. 
 The real man slips off the mask and reveals his true 
 self. ‘There is no room for shams and lies, for false 
 modesty or false dignity. Hope, self-sacrifice and 
 comradeship—these three were noted as the first 
 impression made upon a new-comer to the line 
 by the fighting soldiery; and every crisis evokes 
 them. In calm weather we may grumble and swagger 
 H 97 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 and criticise the captain of the ship: in a storm 
 there is no time for such things; we can only thank 
 God for discipline, and trust our shipmates, and do 
 our best. And if once we could see the present 
 opportunity and responsibility of Christendom, if 
 we could shake off our comfortable optimism and 
 conventionality and acquiescence in defeat, if we 
 could recover a due appreciation of the grandeur 
 and romance of taking part in “the lost fight of 
 virtue,” if we could imagine ourselves a handful of 
 men and women sent out like the Apostles to go and» 
 baptise all nations, we should awake. And still 
 the Master cries, ‘‘ If thou hadst known, even thou, 
 at least in this thy day, the things that belong to 
 thy peace”; and still they are hid from our eyes. 
 Needless to say it is because we are convinced that 
 a full, unified and harmonious life is God’s will for 
 men, that the society in which it could be attained 
 is under God no merely utopian dream, and that the 
 supreme task of Christians now as always is to call 
 mankind to work and suffer for its realisation, that 
 this Report is being presented. Far from agreeing 
 with those who declare that there can be no such 
 thing as a Christian sociology, or Christian economics, 
 we would urge that it is only in so far as the scientific 
 study of the problems of man’s corporate life takes 
 account of the revelation in Christ and of the power 
 manifested by Him, that it is true to human nature 
 and that its conclusions are worthy of respect. 
 Indeed, judged by the test of history, that is, by 
 the test of fruits, it is plain that none of the substi- 
 tutes which the materialism of the last century or 
 the empiricism of the last five years has set up have 
 98 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 much reason to claim support. Christianity alone 
 in all the culture of Western Europe has succeeded 
 (if only partially and for a time) in transforming 
 mankind and creating a fellowship fit for humanity. 
 Christianity alone has lived through the bank- 
 ruptcy of a civilisation. Its acceptance might 
 yet save us from a repetition of that experience—a 
 repetition which at present it seems that nothing 
 else can avert. 
 
 ea 
 
ats Ai ys o| aD Sip 
 Nie 
 
 rey \ yi 
 
 f rash re A 
 
 diy ne My ps y ; 
 
 Ben 
 
 
 
CAR DB RY LY 
 GOD AND SIN 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 GOD AND SIN 
 
 (A) Tue Farture or Manxinp 
 
 To outline an ideal, to show that it satisfies the 
 needs and aspirations of humanity, to be convinced 
 that nothing else will, in the long run, be found — 
 practicable, and to devote oneself to its advocacy, 
 is but half, and the easier half, of the Christian’s 
 task. He has still to consider why it is that after 
 nearly two thousand years his ideal, so congruous 
 and appealing, so loyally and resolutely served, has 
 apparently commended itself so little to the general 
 conscience. It is true that the record of the Gesta 
 Christi is full of encouragement, and that Mr. 
 Chesterton’s oft-quoted dictum is more epigram- 
 matic than just; but if there is no sufficient founda- 
 tion for the moments of pessimism to which all are 
 liable, there 1s good reason to examine the principal 
 reasons which have thwarted the efforts of Christians. 
 To underrate our own weakness or the difficulties 
 of our task is to invite and to deserve disaster. All 
 who desire to build the City of God must first sit 
 down and count the cost. 
 
 We have already indicated that the character of 
 the material environment in which we are placed 
 
 imposes definite limitations upon the free activities 
 102 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 of mankind. Although we believe that matter is 
 not wholly obdurate nor impervious to the action 
 of spirit, it is plain that Nature must be understood 
 before she can be controlled, and that at present 
 our knowledge both of her and of the psychic and 
 spiritual elements in ourselves is relatively slight. 
 In both directions our ignorance handicaps us in 
 working for social righteousness; for we can only 
 act in accordance with what we now know, not with 
 what we expect or hope ultimately to achieve. The 
 progress of scientific knowledge in the physical and 
 in the psychological spheres will doubtless reveal 
 to us new and perhaps revolutionary possibilities, 
 placing at our disposal fresh stores of wealth and 
 energy and teaching us how we may use them more 
 fully and wisely. Meanwhile we can only accept 
 and act upon what we possess—with the reasonable 
 confidence that what we do is tentative and that 
 at any moment our resources may be vastly enlarged. 
 
 To take an illustration. A century ago Malthus, 
 calculating the available food-supply of the world 
 and the rate of increase of its population, proclaimed 
 the doctrine that the reproduction of mankind 
 would always be in excess of the capacity of the earth 
 to support its human inhabitants, that disease, 
 famine and vice were inevitable for the elimination 
 of the surplus, and that the masses must always 
 live at the level of bare subsistence. His views were 
 naturally regarded with horror by those who 
 accepted unintelligently a cheerful belief that 
 “God will provide”; and they were exploited by 
 those who resisted all social reform in the interests 
 
 of a policy of laissez-faire. But deeply as our feel- 
 103 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 ings may be shocked by the cold and seemingly 
 inhuman logic of the early economists, Malthus and 
 his followers were doing good service in forcing 
 their generation to abandon its sentimentality and 
 face the fundamental problems of economic and 
 political science. And these problems still remain, 
 though Malthus’ original argument and the theories 
 of Ricardo and of Marx which were based upon 
 it cannot now be justified. During the century 
 three lines of answer to Malthus have been deve- . 
 loped. In the first place his postulate of the 
 absolute limit of natural resources has been seriously 
 shaken by the progress of science. The discovery 
 of fresh sources of energy, improvements in the 
 method of agriculture and manufacture, the opening © 
 up of new countries, the development of transport 
 and commerce, have shattered his statistics; and 
 the possibility of a still more startling extension 
 of our powers from the researches of the physicists 
 make it unsafe to predict any limit to the natural 
 capacity of the earth. Secondly, even in Malthus’ 
 time his argument would have been more cogent 
 if the existing wealth had been less unequally 
 divided, and the progress towards an order of 
 society in which the struggle for existence shall be 
 less crudely animal has already done much to modify 
 his conclusions. Finally, and ultimately of more 
 importance still, is the factor of moral restraint 
 which Malthus introduced into the second edition 
 of his essay. The rapid fall of the birth-rate in 
 civilised countries, whatever be the Christian verdict 
 upon the means used to attain it, shows that mankind 
 
 is awakening to its responsibility in the matter and 
 104 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 no longer regards the careless production of large 
 families with unqualified approval. 
 
 Yet although it is impossible to speak dogmatically, 
 as if the conditions of our environment were rigid 
 and unalterable, it is plain that at present economic 
 considerations impose a definite constraint upon the 
 progress of reform. Until we grasp this sorry 
 scheme of things entire, we cannot shatter it to bits 
 and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire. We 
 must be content to cut our coats according to our 
 cloth; to pay due regard to the guidance of those 
 who have studied the problems of our material 
 life, and to translate our dreams into the region 
 of practicality. And it is not only in the play of 
 natural forces that we find ourselves subject to 
 necessity. ‘There is an equal rigidity in some of 
 the conditions of man’s own activity. In his 
 dealings with Nature, in his pursuit of wealth, he 
 cannot step outside the realm of law. Sociology 
 and psychology disclose to him a framework of 
 unescapable conditions. It is true that in economics, 
 sociology and psychology generalisations are often 
 advanced as ultimate laws which are only attempts 
 to perpetuate habits and customs, usually bad habits 
 and customs. But there are laws in these sciences 
 even if their nature be but imperfectly understood ; 
 J. S. Mill, for example, perceived that some economic 
 laws depend on unchanging characteristics of 
 Nature, while others are merely descriptions of 
 possibly modifiable characteristics of men. The 
 law of diminishing returns was his example of the 
 first kind of economic law. ‘This may not be a 
 
 permanent law, though it is likely to be, and so long 
 105 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 as it is truesthe problem of population and food 
 supply will compel human attention. But some of 
 the economic laws that describe elements in human 
 nature are also unchangeable. ‘The law of diminish- 
 ing utility describes a fundamental psychological 
 fact. The fundamental economic activity, the 
 attempt to get the greatest possible satisfaction 
 from our resources, is a simple necessity of life which 
 we cannot escape. If the full sense be given to the 
 word ‘‘ economise,” we are bound to economise. 
 There is a truth in the much-abused phrase, ‘‘ Busi- 
 ness is business.” For if an archangel were to go 
 into business, his chief activity would turn on 
 making the best use of his means of production 
 and securing the largest return in real wealth for 
 the energy expended. Christianity has much to say 
 as to the nature of true wealth, but it obviously does 
 not criticise the economic activity itself. Christi- 
 anity does not promise to set us free from the 
 necessity of earning our bread by the sweat of our 
 brows. In fact, it bids us feel uncomfortable if we 
 are getting our bread in any other way. 
 
 But after all, the fixity of our resources, though 
 it imposes very definite conditions on our progress, 
 is not of itself the main obstacle to the realisa- 
 tion of the Kingdom. Unpopular as the word 
 has become to certain sections of modern life, the 
 enemy now as of old is sin—the wrongdoing of 
 individuals and of society. We must deal with 
 this somewhat more fully in both its aspects, the 
 personal and the corporate, for it is evident that here 
 lies the fundamental cause of our failure; and 
 
 evident too that Christianity is essentially neither 
 106 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 a way of knowledge nor of morality, but of salvation. 
 ‘He shall save His people from their sins ”—that 
 was the primary task of Jesus; and if His religion 
 cannot fulfil it, if it merely shows mankind an ideal 
 without setting men free to fulfil it, then it has 
 failed—failed wholly in the very matter in which 
 failure is disastrous. 
 
 For it is plain to any observer that man’s condition 
 is a parody of God’s purpose in human history ; 
 and this is perhaps the best line along which to 
 restate in modern terms any doctrine of a “ Fall.” 
 Man as we know him does fall below any pattern 
 worthy even of humanity’s limited vision of Divine 
 Wisdom and Love. He feels at his best and most 
 conscious a craving to get right; yet he can neither 
 understand nor fulfil the dimly apprehended purpose 
 of God by the development of his innate capacities 
 alone. His push-up “from below” has to be 
 completed by something freely given him ‘“ from 
 above,” and willingly accepted and used. He needs 
 Grace, the energy of God, if he is to be redeemed 
 from his animal past and the misdirections of 
 impulse which have accompanied his emergence 
 from it. ‘The Incarnation, in which human nature 
 was found capable of expressing God’s fullest 
 self-revelation, is an earnest that humanity can so 
 be redeemed. 
 
 “To will God completely is to have Him,” said 
 St. Augustine. Not to will God completely is to 
 fall short of reality, to fail to actualise all the possi- 
 bilities of life; since ‘“‘ We are only real in so far 
 as we are His order and He isin us.” ‘lhe responsi- 
 bility of man abides in the fact that he is able, at 
 
 107 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 least dimly, to realise this, and is called by the 
 united witness of creation to live according to his 
 best lights. Hence, for him, knowingly to be out 
 of God’s order is “‘sin’’; and the presence of sin 
 in human life means a reduction in the reality of that 
 human life, a steady devitalisation of the individual 
 or corporate soul. ‘The wages of sin, in the deepest 
 sense, is death. God’s order, since Christians hold 
 His creative Spirit to be Love, must involve the 
 development and explication (perhaps in relation - 
 to the human time-span very slow) of all that is 
 implicit in perfect love. The question here for 
 us is not whether this full explication will take place 
 within the theatre of what we know as the physical 
 world. Wherever and however it takes place, we 
 may be sure that every movement towards the 
 triumph of love serves its ends. So too in human 
 life, the way out and up, the only safe field for the 
 soul’s expanding energy, must be found in the 
 practice of that same pure love; which, says St. 
 ‘Thomas Aquinas, “ alone has no limit to its increase, 
 for it is a certain participation in the Infinite Love 
 which is the Holy Spirit.” Sin represents every- 
 thing which opposes or checks this process of the 
 unfolding and fulfilment of Love: sanctity, the 
 soul’s achievement of it. 
 
 1. Personal sin.—Religion has tended to resume 
 under the name of sin several quite different sorts 
 of wrongfulness and checks to the triumph of love. 
 Historically the word sin denotes any tendency, 
 character or action discordant with God, whether 
 virtually present or deliberately purposed. ‘This 
 
 failure to realise the whole mind of God is due in 
 108 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 some measure to the incompleteness of our develop- 
 ment. ‘There is a truth, though by no means the 
 whole truth, in the saying that sin is ignorance. 
 Much of the pain and shame of life are due to our 
 inability to understand and control our environment. 
 To live in conformity with Nature and with Nature’s 
 God would involve a knowledge of the conditions 
 of spiritual and physical health and a complete 
 compliance with them. In this respect, vastly as 
 mankind has developed, it is likely that we are still 
 in our infancy. Religion and science join hands 
 in their common task of discovering and fulfilling 
 the content of the Divine purpose: science, mental, 
 moral and physical, shows us the means to fullness 
 of life; religion enables us to use those means to 
 their proper end. 
 
 Our ignorance is reinforced by the constant 
 tendency to relapse to lower levels of response, to 
 hark back to behaviour which was once justifiable 
 and even necessary, but is now outgrown. In 
 this drag-back to primitive standards, in the invita- 
 tion of animal impulse to conduct discordant with 
 God, we can still find justification for a doctrine 
 of Original Sin. ‘The first human animal, inevitably 
 preoccupied with his own material interests and the 
 safe establishment of his race, could not but bequeath 
 to his descendants instincts which, if uncontrolled 
 by civilised and socialised man, have the character 
 of sin. Many of our sins are capitulations, more or 
 less rationalised, to such animal impulses; as, for 
 example, when modern commerce and finance take 
 a sinful character from the opportunity they give 
 
 to the acquisitive, combative and other forms of the 
 109 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 primary instinct of self-preservation to assert them- 
 selves in a crude form. Some of these impulses 
 are gratified in our games, dances and sports, which 
 have in the civilised state an important cathartic 
 office to perform as safety-valves for energy. But 
 such impulses as these, being as they are our most 
 vigorous springs of action, ought neither to be re- 
 pressed nor merely run off into useless if safe channels 
 of expression. ‘They should be redeemed and made 
 to do work for Christ. Experience proves, and 
 psychology explains, that those instincts which are’ 
 the raw material of character can be sublimated, 
 that is, diverted from their original and primitive 
 ends and redirected to purposes which satisfy the 
 individual and are of value to the community. 
 Ignorance and even atavism, while providing the 
 conditions of our moral conflict, mark the stage of 
 our development rather thanits direction. Indivi- 
 duals vary enormously in respect to them, so that 
 one man’s task seems easy and another’s incalculably 
 hard, with the compensation that the fiercer the 
 struggle the greater the victory, and the larger the 
 resources made available by it for future attainment. 
 We may not have moved far along the road to our 
 goal: that is a relative matter and in itself com- 
 paratively unimportant. ‘The real obstacle to pro- 
 gress is the fact that we so constantly stray from the 
 path and turn our backs upon God, or if careful 
 to avoid actual error are content to stand still when 
 we ought to be moving. Sin as involving guilt 
 is this misdirection of our energies; it is a wrong 
 attitude towards the true purpose of life. Sins, 
 
 particular acts of transgression, are only symptoms. 
 IIo 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 To remedy them piecemeal is by no means to cure 
 the disease; for abstention from wrongdoing, the 
 negative virtue which we associate with conscien- 
 tiousness, is in itself a wholly different thing from 
 positive virtue, the hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness. Sins of omission are condemned by Jesus 
 Christ at least as strongly as those of commission. 
 That is why the law failed. It might warn men of 
 error and put up a fence along their road; it could 
 not inspire them with power or impel them to go 
 forward. ‘The escape from sin is thus properly 
 called conversion; for it is a turning round of the 
 whole personality from self to God. 
 
 These more or less deliberate misdirections of 
 our efforts have been variously classified by moral 
 philosophers. For our purpose we may distin- 
 guish two elements, perversion or deordination and 
 rebellion. 
 
 Perversion is a wrongful direction and balance 
 of present impulses and interests. It is concerned 
 with attention and interest, the controlling factors 
 of our conative life. The total concentration of 
 interest on anything less than God, an excessive 
 preoccupation with matters good in themselves but 
 distracting if placed in the foreground of life—in 
 fact, lack of proportion—covers a wide range of 
 behaviour which deflects from God’s purpose, and 
 thus has the character of sin. Such perversions 
 are largely responsible for the wrongs and confusions 
 of social life; and the practical application of St. 
 Augustine’s definition of virtue as “‘ the ordering 
 of love”’—1.¢. the direction to right objects of 
 
 man’s will and desire—might do great things for 
 EG 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 us. ‘The deordination of love leads below the full 
 human level to the aberrations of impurity, greed 
 and sloth; and on the human level to the capital 
 sins of pride and self-centredness—varieties and 
 degrees of egoism. Deordination might be regarded 
 as the Freudian Jibido taking an unchristian path; 
 and producing on the level of sense an unbalanced 
 craving for material goods, sensual pleasure, 
 agerandisement, self-satisfactions, whether personal 
 or corporate; on the level of spirit the soul-stifling 
 entanglements of self-adoration, self-gratification - 
 and self-cultivation. National pride, class hostilities, 
 passionate clingings to self-chosen comforts and 
 rights; all these in the clear light of Christ are 
 perceived to be perversions of human will and 
 desire, signs of the impurity and maldirection of 
 man’s love. 
 
 It would be superficial as well as unchristian to 
 deny the obvious existence, both in the individual 
 and in the social order, of deliberate and conscious 
 rebellion against God, and of hostility to His pur- 
 poses. It is part of man’s freedom that he should 
 possess this capacity both for conscious obedience 
 to and for conscious revolt from the moral demand : 
 a being incapable by his very nature of falling 
 away from or rejecting his best lights would not 
 be man at all. ‘The willing concurrence of the 
 personality in that which it knows to be wrong in- 
 volves a degree of sinfulness different in kind from 
 the relapses to lower levels and failures to sublimate 
 impulse, or the vagaries of unmortified desires. 
 Here we reach positive moral guilt, as distinct from 
 
 weakness or instability: the fullest, but also the 
 II2 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 ‘rarest degree of human sin—the apotheosis of pride 
 and self-will. Any scheme of redemption which 
 aims at bringing back the society or the individual 
 into accord with the purposes of God must reckon 
 with its existence; and must not content itself with 
 rectifying those tendencies to regression and to 
 aberration which haunt human instability and are 
 doubtless the source of the greater part of man’s 
 wrongfulnesses and failures. 
 
 2. Corporate sin.—lf evil were simply a personal 
 affair with consequences limited to the individual 
 wrongdoer, the problems occasioned by it would be 
 relatively simple, although if each one of us could 
 suffer and suffer alone for his own errors, the chief 
 incentive to moral effort would be a selfish one, and 
 in consequence inadequate. But, men being mem- 
 bers one of another, if it is true that when one 
 member suffers the whole body suffers with it, 
 it is not less true that the whole society is involved 
 in the sin of each individual. The consequences 
 of every evil action, even the most apparently 
 personal, act and react upon those who are wholly 
 innocent of it. I sin, and my nearest and dearest 
 are the first but not the last to feel its effects. 
 And this is true not only of acts of rebellion, but of 
 the ignorances and blindness, the prejudices and 
 mistakes of us all. Indeed the simplest lesson of the 
 Cross is its revelation of the true bitterness of sin: 
 men like ourselves, men not specially wicked, men 
 narrowly pious like the Pharisees, and worldly-wise 
 like the Sadducees, and harassed by practical 
 difficulties like Pilate, and disappointed of a mis- 
 taken hope like the common people, crucified the 
 
 I 113 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 innocent; the world’s supreme tragedy draws its 
 universal appeal from the normal human qualities 
 of those who perpetrated it. In them humanity 
 passed sentence upon its judge, and in so doing was 
 itself judged and condemned. ‘There was no one 
 great act of special wickedness—unless it be in 
 Iscariot : the Cross was in one aspect simply the con- 
 sequence of a multitude of common human errors, 
 the action of characters formed, as are we all, by 
 countless seemingly insignificant misuses of our 
 freedom of choice and therefore almost inevitably 
 constrained to reject their Lord. No one individual 
 was solely responsible, no one individual can dis- 
 associate himself from participation in similar guilt. — 
 
 And in this consists the primary quality of 
 corporate sin. The effect of a vast number of selfish 
 and therefore God-denying lives is to create a mass- 
 consciousness tolerant of selfishness, a mass-conscious- 
 ness against which even the most altruistic find it 
 almost impossible to contend unless they are pre- 
 pared to face martyrdom, and by which the lax 
 and loose-fibred find themselves swept away. It 
 is plain that men and women acting in a corporate 
 capacity accept and even initiate practices of which 
 privately they would be ashamed. It is unthinkable 
 that any one individual would have sent Christ 
 to the Cross: public opinion fortifies the evil 
 instincts and lulls the conscience. It takes courage 
 and conviction to resist it, even if a clear opportunity 
 to do so presents itself. And in fact such an oppor- 
 tunity is a rare occurrence. ‘There is in most cases 
 no single decisive moment; at each step the indi- 
 vidual finds himself already committed to a course 
 
 114 
 
GOD AND SIN> 
 
 from which he can hardly break away without 
 disloyalty to his fellows. The inducements to 
 acquiescence are so many and so subtle. ‘‘ Who am 
 { that I should protest against what better men 
 accept? One cannot move faster than the world.” 
 ““Have I not a duty to society? If I share its 
 advantages I must take the rough with the smooth.” 
 “Tf I act, I shall sacrifice friends and family and 
 achieve nothing; surely to accept the standards 
 of society and work quietly from within it for their 
 improvement is the way which Christ chose when 
 He became incarnate? If He did not rebel against 
 slavery, why should I?” The weight of such 
 questionings consists in the fact that they are not 
 wholly unjustifiable. 
 
 We have raised these arguments now merely to 
 illustrate the character of corporate sin; we shall 
 discuss them in a later section. Meanwhile we 
 would simply note that in any ancient society where 
 habits of thought and methods of organisation have 
 become securely established, the individual member 
 finds himself almost inevitably a partaker in other 
 men’s sins, sins for which he cannot be held personally 
 responsible and which, however influential he may 
 be, he cannot single-handed either eradicate or 
 even wholly escape. While we are anxious not to 
 exaggerate the difficulties of the struggle against 
 corporate evil, or to put a limit to the power which 
 a group of consecrated and fearless reformers could 
 accomplish, it is plain that it is through corporate 
 action, following upon a multitude of individual 
 protests and possibly martyrdoms, that change is 
 effected. And history proves over and over again 
 
 I$ 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 how rapidly this can take place. Public opinion, 
 if it is naturally inclined to laxity, is not essentially 
 in favour of evil: its failure is the result of sloth 
 and ignorance and doubts of the possibility of 
 alteration rather than of active ill-will. And when 
 once a cause is so presented as to capture the 
 imagination and touch the heart, the whole outlook 
 of a community can be transformed and action 
 hitherto regarded as impracticable achieved in a 
 space of time so brief as to startle even those 
 who denounce most vigorously the fickleness and 
 instability of the populace. 
 
 It is important to notice that under the conditions 
 of to-day the corporate life has become not only 
 far stronger but far more plastic. The aggregation. 
 of vast masses of people into cities, the multiplying 
 of contacts, the spread of education, the creation 
 of a press and a platform which aim at influencing 
 the whole body politic, have affected the whole 
 relationship of the individual to society. ‘The 
 interdependence of each of us upon his fellows has 
 taken the place of the old self-sufficiency of the 
 household. A century ago every large estate, and 
 to a considerable extent every family, was a self- 
 contained unit, supplying the majority of its own 
 needs by its own labour and living in comparative 
 economic isolation. The nation was hardly a 
 unity so much as a federation: public opinion, 
 apart from the views of a number of influential 
 landowners, hardly existed: the individual was to 
 a vast extent dependent upon his own resources. 
 We are often told that the Church to-day produces 
 
 no Wesleys, that leadership of the familiar historical 
 116 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 type, the leadership of a single dominant personality, 
 is no longer discoverable. ‘Those who bring such 
 charges seem to ignore the change of circumstances. 
 Of old the evangelist or reformer had mainly to 
 rely upon convincing individuals and small groups : 
 his task involved great exertion—long journeys— 
 endless speaking—a multitude of detailed and 
 personal activities; but he had comparatively few 
 rivals and little effective public opinion against 
 him. ‘To-day such a worker has to contend against 
 world-wide and highly organised interests, against 
 a press which is suspicious or hostile, against the 
 distraction of a multitude of other claims on popular 
 attention, and against the complexity of the social 
 order, in which conversion in the old sense is becom- 
 ing more and more difficult. Wesley if he won a 
 household could set its members to live out their 
 faith with comparative ease: their lives were 
 independent of others, their sins were mainly such 
 as by God’s grace they could fight and conquer for 
 themselves. Nowadays the household no longer 
 stands alone: it is linked by countless ties, social 
 and industrial, economic and political, with the 
 common life of the nation and of the world. Social 
 evils and industrial exploitations in South America 
 or China directly affect and infect the life of Britain. 
 Each citizen is no longer a single combatant against 
 evil: he is a member of a highly organised army 
 and his own ability to fight is conditioned by the 
 army’s activity or capitulation: if in any particular 
 it refuses to join battle it is difficult for its members 
 not to give up the conflict. 
 
 If we think of sin in the older fashion as a matter 
 
 117 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 for each person and for him alone, and try to apply 
 this conception to modern conditions, the task 
 may well seem hopeless. But if the process of 
 organisation, the process which has unified the world 
 and threatens to submerge the individual in the 
 multitude, has immensely weakened if not destroyed 
 the methods of a century ago, it has also opened 
 up new possibilities. The ease and speed with 
 which successful experiments can be made known, 
 the world-wide influence of ideas, the repercussion 
 of a single event upon the whole life of mankind 
 and the very force of public opinion itself, are not 
 symptoms to be set down as adverse: rather they 
 present an unrivalled opportunity. We have 
 reached for the first time in human history a point 
 at which rapid and universal evangelism has become 
 possible. If the corporate life is lax and low, it is 
 not so inevitably: if it is disciplined and organised, 
 this solidarity can be used for religion as easily 
 as against it: if evils, new or newly-recognised, 
 hold us in thrall, mankind once realising its power 
 can break the chains. If Christians will understand 
 the changed circumstances of the time, and the need 
 to meet corporate evil by corporate effort, the 
 Church which was from the first a fellowship and 
 has so powerfully assisted in the creation of political 
 and social communities, has only to take up the side | 
 of her task which she has tended to neglect, at least 
 since the Reformation, in order to influence pro- 
 foundly and possibly with the speed of apocalyptic, 
 the future destiny of man. 
 
 And to such a task we are called by the tragedy 
 
 of innocent suffering. As corporate life grows more 
 118 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 complex, the massacre of the innocents becomes 
 more evident. It is in lives diseased and stunted 
 and thwarted through no fault for which they can 
 be held personally responsible that mankind finds 
 its strongest incentive to spiritual effort. As we 
 learn to recognise in the Cross a call to corporate 
 as well as individual penitence and conversion, 
 as we discover that all sin involves incalculable 
 and inevitable consequences upon the well-being of 
 the community, and must be expiated in the blood 
 and tears of others, sin in all its aspects becomes a 
 thing intolerable, an outrage to humanity as it has 
 always been an outrage to God. And salvation 
 becomes no longer a matter solely or principally 
 of the saving of one’s own soul, but rather a conse- 
 cration to service for their sakes, lest one of the 
 Father’s little ones perish through our indifference 
 or callousness or vice. And recognising the feeble- 
 ness of our lonely efforts, Christians will rediscover 
 the meaning of the Church, of that fellowship of the 
 followers of Jesus which exists in order to fulfil its 
 double purpose, the conversion of the sinful and 
 the building up of a society in whose life the children 
 of the Kingdom can find a home. 
 
 (B) Tue Means or Recovery 
 
 The Christian recognition of sin, of all the 
 tendencies in life which impede or conflict with the 
 love and will of God, is balanced and completed 
 by the recognition of redemption as a real fact of 
 Christian experience, whereby the individual or 
 society is established on new levels of freedom and 
 
 11g 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 power, living for andin the things of God. Religion, 
 and especially Christianity, can and does generate 
 an energy which transmutes the very stuff of human 
 life, overcoming that ingrained irresponsibility 
 which some moralists consider the essence of 
 * original’ sin. Such redemption can no more be 
 expressed in terms of law than the fact of Christ 
 can be expressed in terms of science. It involves, 
 so far as our human realisation is concerned, the 
 fresh coming in of power and of life, in an exhibition 
 of the free, spontaneous action of God; and if on 
 the one hand the inpouring of redemptive love and 
 power is the response of God to man’s need, faith 
 and desire, on the other, such consciousness of need. 
 and such acts of faith and desire are themselves the © 
 earnest of the Divine energy working on the soul— 
 “the Spirit prayeth in us.” ‘The central fact of 
 redemption is the losing of the egocentric life in 
 order to find the complete and theocentric life. 
 It is a freeing of the soul’s energy for the purpose 
 for which it was intended, and involves the gradual 
 or abrupt utter turning-over of the individual or 
 society to the interests of God. ‘The redeemed or 
 fully Christianised individual or group has access 
 to new sources of power ; and in this power can and 
 should face the complexities and oppositions of the 
 human world and deal with them; becoming in 
 its turn a redeeming instrument in the hand of 
 God. ‘The object of Christian redemption is not 
 a holy self-cultivation, but to “be to the Eternal 
 Goodness what his own hand is to a man.” ‘The 
 redeemed personality must exhibit to others in 
 some measure that saving, serving, unlimited love 
 120 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 by which he was himself redeemed. It follows 
 
 from our previous consideration of sin, and its 
 presence in all forms and degrees right through 
 the fabric of human life, that full Christian re- 
 demption will only be worked by a power suffi- 
 ciently strong to overcome the tendencies to 
 regression, to aberration, and to rebellion which 
 are present in the individual or society. It must 
 therefore act directly on the impulsive nature, and 
 not on reason alone; for it is called upon to effect 
 the redirection of the whole of life. Such a psycho- 
 logical account of the redemption of personality 
 is met and completed by the declaration of religion, 
 that redemption can only be effected by faith and 
 love of God; that is, the placing before individual 
 or group of an assigned end so transcending all the 
 ends proposed by self-interest, and so perfectly 
 satisfying all the obscure cravings of the heart, as 
 to bring about first a complete and generous sur- 
 render and then an eager self-dedication. ‘This love 
 and this faith brace the will to oppose the downward 
 drag of atavistic impulses, and the inordinate desires 
 of the self; and so concentrate both energy and 
 feeling in their fullness upon the purposes of God 
 revealed in Christ. ‘The self in whom this surrender 
 has been effected is redeemed not merely from the 
 entanglements of sense, but from the far more deadly 
 entanglements of spirit, the stultifying inclinations 
 to self-adoration, self-gratification and _ self-culti- 
 vation. 
 
 The same necessities may be discovered to govern 
 social redemption. This too is bound up in the 
 
 need of a corporate surrender to the purposes of 
 121 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 God. The biological character of human develop- 
 ment is such, that it has involved the setting up 
 of innumerable worldly and self-interested habits. 
 The cave-dweller’s scale of values still largely prevails. 
 Man’s will is in origin a will to live in the narrow 
 sense. If he is to achieve his full stature it must 
 be transmuted into a will for life in the fullest 
 sense, a sense oblivious of selfishness. ‘This is 
 reconciliation to the deepest purposes of the uni- 
 verse; and since our narrow consciousness, and in 
 general our status as creatures, makes it impossible 
 for us to grasp these purposes in any fullness, this 
 is only possible to us by and through a loving and 
 trustful surrender to such revelation of God’s 
 nature and love as we are able to grasp: we are 
 reconciled to God in Christ. In this reconciliation 
 we are redeemed from the limitations of the merely 
 natural order, and are set on our feet as free spiritual 
 entities, called by love and responding with love. 
 
 1. Penitence.—'The process of redemption, 
 whether corporate or personal, is found to demand 
 certain conditions. It requires, in the first instance, 
 a deep recognition of its necessity, a clear realisation 
 of the state of sin from which we are to be redeemed ; 
 in other words, repentance. In the light of Jesus 
 Christ we can perceive how far we lag behind, 
 wander from, or oppose the love and will of God 
 in our social or secret life. That is to say, He 
 “convicts us of sin” and destroys that self-satis- 
 faction which is an absolute bar to grace. When 
 religion says that love and humility go together 
 in the soul, and are the twin foundations of all 
 spiritual life, it means that to yield oneself to God, 
 
 122 
 
ca 
 
 GOD AND SIN 
 
 which is the ultimate form in which man can face 
 reality, brings with it a drastic self-knowledge. 
 The social repentance which must initiate social 
 redemption equally involves a definite and heart- 
 stricken attempt to see ourselves and the order we 
 have created as we really are and it really is, unflinch- 
 ingly facing reality. ‘The application to our social 
 problems of the touchstone of the love of God, at 
 once accuses innumerable institutions, conventions 
 and activities of cruelty, injustice and self-seeking. 
 We are called upon as Christians to confess the 
 extent to which society has capitulated to its dis- 
 guised animal impulses and ingrained pride and 
 self-love; and to apply the love of God revealed 
 in Christ, not as an ideal but as a dynamic, trying 
 to unify our vigorous corporate impulsive action 
 with our still rudimentary corporate conscience, 
 and so redeem the life and behaviour of society. 
 This we shall do, as the individual must, not by 
 repressing any of its miscellaneous instincts and 
 tendencies, but by their utilisation: not undue 
 simplification, but rich harmony best satisfies the 
 ends of God as we glimpse them in life. Thus we 
 may hope to rescue our social institutions and activi- 
 ties, and make it possible to say to the really penitent 
 group as to the really penitent individual, “ Go, 
 and sin no more.” 
 
 Such social redemption demands a social change 
 of heart not to be confused with a change of feeling 
 —a transformation and enhancement of will. As 
 the Love and Will of God are one, and form together 
 His Holy and Creative Spirit, so what humanity 
 
 loves and what humanity aims at must be the same. 
 123 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 When, in human society, the cleavage between will 
 and desire is abolished, society will be redeemed : 
 just as each individual soul in which that disharmony 
 is resolved on Christian levels is redeemed. ‘This 
 means the consecration of energy and intelligence 
 as well as feeling: the remaking of the whole of 
 human life in accordance with the spirit of Christ, 
 so that not merely the Church but the whole social 
 order becomes His mystical Body. So closely 
 entwined are the truest corporate and the truest 
 individual interests, that personal and social redemp- 
 tion cannot be dissociated. A perfect life can 
 hardly be lived by us except in a perfect society ;_ 
 and a perfect society can only be brought about 
 through the grace of God acting on certain indivi- 
 duals within it and inciting them to heroic actions 
 in conformity with their apprehensions of Him. 
 
 2. Grace.—lf it is the vision of God which shows 
 us the character of sin and initiates in us a change 
 of attitude towards it, it is from God, not from 
 ourselves, that we draw the power to make this 
 change of attitude effective. It is not enough to 
 recognise and repent of evil: the burden of it would 
 crush us into despair, if we had to rely only upon our 
 own wills and our own strength in the struggle for 
 freedom. ‘The love which arouses in us a passion 
 of self-contempt inspires also not only the desire 
 but the power to make a fresh start. Here as always 
 the operation of grace upon us is conditioned by 
 our response. God is ever giving; we can refuse 
 His gifts and shut out His influence. And in 
 different people the method and effects of grace 
 vary greatly. ‘To one man it comes as a sudden 
 
 124 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 liberation: to another there may be no conscious 
 moment of conversion; he grows up into a know- 
 ledge of God. Some receive grace from the regular 
 use of means hallowed by the authority of the Church 
 and attested by the experience of generations: 
 others who reveal in their lives the evident fruits 
 of the Divine Spirit have explored and developed 
 their own ways of approach and communion. 
 From them all there is a volume of testimony to the 
 reality and effects of their experience: God gives 
 Himself to them as they empty themselves to receive 
 Him. Something is done for them which they could 
 not do for themselves. In them, in spite of their 
 heritage and quality, Divine grace is operative; and 
 in certain saintly lives at least it culminates in that 
 perfect freedom which St. Augustine describes as 
 the beata necessitas non peccandi, the constraint 
 which makes sin impossible. 
 
 3. The means of grace—Grace must, however, not 
 only be received, but sustained; for the redeemed 
 life, like the natural life, requires food and self- 
 expression in action, if it is to be healthy and 
 vigorous. It must grow, or die out; it is not the 
 attainment of a static condition. Its continued 
 effectiveness, as a redeeming force within the world, 
 depends on continued abiding in the Divine Order. 
 A constant reaching out to God and willed com- 
 munion with Him are the conditions of all effective 
 Christian action. In religious language, man’s love 
 and prayer are both the occasions and the effects 
 of grace. “I cannot do the work without God, 
 and God may not or will not without me”—or, as 
 
 the scholastics expressed it, Will and Grace rise and 
 125 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 fall together.» Grace fully accepted by will, and will 
 fully energised by grace, bring about that “ world- 
 conquering temper ” characteristic of all full religion. 
 The appearance and the triumphs of that temper 
 in history assure us that the “‘ power of Christ ” 
 is not an idle phrase; but, duly evoked and steadily 
 fed and maintained, could effect unguessed trans- 
 formations of the human world. ‘The social or the 
 individual will, fully energised by it, should be able 
 to organise its whole surroundings about this 
 principle. 
 
 A technical treatment of the traditional means 
 of grace would be less appropriate to our purpose © 
 than an attempt to express their significance and 
 efficacy in simple terms. We have seen that it is 
 only when individuals by devoting themselves to a 
 single end find their personalities enhanced and 
 expanded and liberated, and by entering into a 
 society whose whole order subserves and is permeated 
 by this same common purpose, that full life is made 
 possible for each and all. We have claimed that 
 the end which can command such private and public 
 devotion must be personal, since love, the relation 
 of person to person, can alone satisfy every need of 
 heart and head and will, of body, soul and spirit. 
 And we have argued that love for God in Christ 
 has had and still has this effect. It is in such terms, 
 and using the analogy of human friendship as the least 
 inadequate at our disposal, that we would speak 
 of the means of grace, of the Church, of prayer and 
 intercession, of corporate worship and of the 
 sacraments. 
 
 The fundamental nature of the Church is plain 
 126 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 enough. It represents the fellowship of all those 
 in whom is the desire for God, the mind of Christ, 
 the influence of the Holy Spirit. When St. Paul 
 speaks of Christ as “‘ dwelling in us,” he is not using 
 a hyperbole or a metaphor, but stating a simple 
 fact. He and his fellow-disciples had so responded 
 to the appeal of their Master’s love that they had 
 begun to feel as He felt, to think His thoughts, and 
 to reproduce His actions; these men and women 
 had been literally remade by the inflowing of the 
 Spirit of Christ. And sharing in their devotion 
 to Him, they became, again literally, of one mind 
 one with another. The common life animating 
 them all was His life. ‘They were one body, the 
 physical instrument of one Spirit. Self no longer 
 counted; for they had found One so all-absorbing 
 that they had no room for anything but Him. 
 Through suffering and failure and shame and utter 
 penitence they had died unto sin and risen again 
 to life in God. 
 
 Such a Church knows no boundaries of time or 
 space: it is indeed the blessed company of all 
 faithful people, the fellowship of the redeemed, 
 the Communion of Saints. But since man is body 
 as well as soul, and on earth can only express his 
 spiritual relationships by membership in an earthly 
 society, an outward organisation with ordinances 
 and officers, a rite of initiation and corporate 
 activities, of whatever kind, is a necessity. Jesus 
 Christ declared that the new wine must be stored 
 in new bottles, that the spiritual grace bestowed 
 by Him would be dissipated unless it was given a 
 visible embodiment. And from the first the Church 
 
 127 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 on earth has continued her mission, representing 
 though not being identical with the Kingdom 
 of God. Christians differ widely in their interpre- 
 tation of the relation between the outward and the 
 inward, and still more widely as to the precise nature, 
 authority and organisation of the institution to 
 which they belong. But it seems clear that some 
 institution is necessary as a guide to the Way, a 
 witness to the Truth, and a channel of the Life 
 of Christ ; and that membership in it is a necessary 
 condition of spiritual health. 
 
 For the Church represents not only the corporate 
 expression of the Christian life, but also its attach- 
 ments with history. It gives to the fluctuating 
 and individual aspirations and perceptions of its 
 members the support of tradition as well as of 
 comradeship. All phases and types of Christian 
 experience, from the most naive to the most sophisti- 
 cated, can here make their contribution to the 
 common life, and find their fullest opportunity of 
 Christian action in a humbling self-subordination 
 to the common good. And the Church repays, 
 or should repay, this surrender of individualism by 
 applying to the necessarily limited experience of the 
 individual member the hoarded wisdom of the race. 
 In its widest sense it includes all Christian souls 
 living and dead, and those who truly enter into its 
 fellowship enter also into communion with all 
 saints. 
 
 It is true that most Christian communions as 
 they exist at present are far from fully actualising 
 their possibilities; and within these bodies an 
 
 important step towards the Christianising of society 
 128 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 must consist in a rekindling, a fresh expression, of 
 the corporate side of Christian life, a fuller realisation 
 of the responsibility of each member for the life 
 of his Church, and of the Church as a genuine 
 means of access to a fuller life in God and a reservoir 
 of spiritual power. ‘The criticism of institutional 
 religion which is now common, and more common 
 among Christians than among those outside the 
 official folds, is really a criticism of ourselves. We 
 have, so to speak, let down our home-life, and so 
 do not get from it the nurture and shelter which 
 should fit us for working for Christ in the world. 
 
 If the Church exists primarily to symbolise and 
 enrich the communion of His children with their 
 Father, its chief activity must be the fostering of the 
 means of communion, prayer and the sacraments, 
 which are special and dramatised forms of prayer. 
 For prayer is in its widest and truest sense the 
 offering of all human activity to God; and therefore 
 at once the condition and the culmination of the 
 Christian life. It is both individual and corporate. 
 For every member of the society is striving to bring 
 his personality into full harmony with the Divine 
 will, to open every channel of his being to the 
 inflowing of Divine grace; and the first reason 
 for the existence of the Church is that this private 
 relationship with God may be extended to and 
 accomplished in the sphere of social life. Each 
 of us separately and all of us together are called to 
 turn away from self and selfish interests, to surrender 
 ourselves utterly to the love revealed to us in Jesus 
 Christ, and to abide continually in the knowledge 
 of God which is eternal life. 
 
 K 129 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 To do so involves escape from self, and we can 
 only do so if we are freed from our egoism by contact 
 with One who loves us, with One who satisfies all 
 our desires, answers all our questionings and inspires 
 all our activities. ‘That is why true prayer normally 
 begins with worship, with an effort to concentrate 
 every faculty of our being upon God in adoration 
 and penitence. As the reality of His presence 
 makes its impact upon us we are lifted on to a 
 different plane of existence. The prison-house 
 of our animal heritage no longer confines us; the - 
 fetters of past sins slip off and are forgotten. God 
 becomes all in all. As we lose ourselves in Him, 
 His love and His power become operative in us; 
 inspiration flows into us and through us to others. 
 And when worship is expanded into petition and 
 intercession, all that we are doing is to let this love 
 and power range through us to those for whom we 
 
 ray. 
 
 If this sounds remote or conventional, an illustra- 
 tion may give it meaning. Suppose that we are 
 visited by someone in anxiety or distress who comes 
 to us for advice or help. Our natural instinct at 
 such a time bids us to be prudent and sympathetic ; 
 for we are slightly flattered by the visit and want 
 to produce the right effect upon the visitor. If that 
 is our frame of mind, if we are self-conscious, or, 
 however slightly, affected, we may speak with the 
 tongue of men and angels, but our friend will go 
 away with nothing beyond what our knowledge 
 and experience can give. He will not have been 
 helped to see God. If, on the other hand, we have 
 
 forgotten ourselves and our poses in spontaneous 
 130 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 interest in our visitor and contact with God, there 
 will pass from us to him something not from our- 
 selves. ‘Che words may be few, and as we look back 
 we shall be conscious of their inadequacy, but he 
 will have gained what we alone could never have 
 given. God through us will have touched and 
 healed. Now prayer is in this respect akin to 
 inspiration. And as the inspired writers established 
 contact with God and were able to transmit to 
 others the Divine presence and power, so we in 
 our measure, whether through the spoken word or 
 the unspoken communion of soul with soul, can pass 
 on that which we are receiving. The impulse 
 given to us as we empty ourselves to receive it flows 
 out from us. The light shining upon our spirits 
 is reflected by them into the world. 
 
 We may well expand here our consideration of the 
 reception of grace through persons, the way and 
 degree in which God acts on man through man. 
 Intercourse with and learning from deeply spiritual 
 souls—discipleship—has always been realised by 
 Christianity, indeed by all the higher religions, as a 
 real means whereby the spiritual life is propagated 
 and fed; and such souls have always been regarded 
 as existing not for the sake merely of their own 
 relation with God, but as givers of new life to the 
 world. Spiritual fruitfulness, a creative personality, 
 according to the mystics, is the real guarantee of 
 union with God. Nor need we limit such inter- 
 course to those of our own generation. ‘That 
 spiritual reading which the Church ranks with 
 meditation as an aid to a healthy inner life, really 
 
 involves a life-giving contact through their books 
 137 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 with the great religious souls of the past. It is 
 one aspect of that great and still dimly realised fact 
 of the interpenetration of spirits, the immense 
 extent to which, even as regards the deepest things, 
 we affect and depend on each other, which has never 
 yet been given its rightful position in the psychology 
 of religion. The doctrine of the Communion of 
 Saints, and the belief in their continued influence, 
 witness to this truth. As we owe to the special 
 powers of artists our awareness of many subtle 
 beauties revealed by them, so we owe at least some - 
 of our spiritual apprehensions to the special insights 
 and experiences of great souls, whose perceptions 
 were not for themselves alone, and whose loving 
 spirits have set countless other spirits on fire. 
 Man’s spiritual sensitiveness, at least at his present 
 stage of development, is very unequally distributed. 
 It seems as though certain souls are brought forth 
 in order to be “ the eyes of the Body of Christ.” 
 Society, in so far as it is Christian, ought surely 
 to treasure and make room for these. ‘The value 
 attached by the Church to intercession and the 
 cloistered career points to a dim recognition of the 
 social service rendered by lives of prayer. <A great 
 deal of social Christianity is very carnally minded, 
 and fails to “ look beyond the world for ‘Truth and 
 Beauty.” But the full redemption of the social 
 order must be intimately connected with the 
 presence within it of a body of devoted contem- 
 platives, working like leaven in the hiddenness and 
 providing ever-open channels for the action of the 
 Spirit of God. 
 
 It is on this ground that intercession is so essential 
 
 132 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 a part of the Christian’s work for social reform. 
 It is the knowledge of this power, not our own 
 though operating through us, which should urge 
 us to pray without ceasing. We may use many 
 methods in doing so, For one man intercession 
 will be best accomplished in solitude, when, to use 
 a crude metaphor, holding out one hand to God 
 and the other to the world, he brings them into 
 effective touch. Another will find the same task 
 best fulfilled in corporate and formal petitions. 
 Another will live out his prayer in the activities 
 of daily life, bringing with him everywhere a sensi- 
 tiveness to God and his fellows. None can dispense 
 with definite self-discipline, with austerity and 
 renunciation and, normally at least, with the habit 
 of regular and ordered devotions. We have to be 
 on guard against forgetfulness not less than against 
 formalism, to create a habit and prevent it becoming 
 only a habit. But the means are relatively unimpor- 
 tant for our present purpose; it is the end, com- 
 munion with God and the bringing of others into 
 communion, that matters. And in our own lives 
 here as always we shall need repeatedly to start 
 afresh. We are all in measure earth-bound, and 
 for the most part of our lives are hardly conscious 
 of our bondage. If we are to respond to the offer 
 of freedom, the response will involve for most of 
 us at least an agony and a crucifixion, and even then 
 a protracted struggle. Yet whatever effort it may 
 cost, the task is supremely worthy, is indeed essential 
 to our calling. As we are trained to “ die daily,” 
 we are allowed to discover that we can daily re-arise. 
 
 Alongside of our personal prayer-life will go the 
 
 133 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 duty and joy of corporate worship, a duty and a 
 joy with which none can safely dispense. For 
 however we may analyse the content or interpret 
 the significance of corporate activity, it is a matter 
 of common experience that the “assembling 
 together”? of the fellowship bestows upon its 
 members something greater than each could attain 
 in isolation. It is familiar to all who have been in 
 danger or difficulty that the courage of two comrades 
 vastly exceeds the mere sum of the courage of each: - 
 they respond far more readily when together to the 
 appeal of their ideal; they become capable of 
 endurance and gallantry which neither alone could 
 achieve. And ina group, as those of us who have 
 seen a battalion going into action can testify, a 
 common soul is developed of which all become 
 conscious, from which even the strongest draw new 
 strength and to which the weakest dare not be false. 
 Something of the kind happens and has always 
 happened in corporate worship. Barriers are broken 
 down; fears and inhibitions removed ; sensibilities 
 quickened ; impressions deepened; the whole is 
 knit together into a unity greater than the sum of 
 all its parts. In considering corporate sin we have 
 already noted this and urged that it cannot be neg- 
 lected. In public worship we have the most. power- 
 ful instrument whereby this common mind or — 
 mass-consciousness may be directed to its rightful 
 end. We can sublimate the instinct of the herd by 
 attaching it to the fellowship of the Church; and 
 our Christian life, personal and social, will be 
 enriched and invigorated by the experience. 
 
 The fellowship will findfmany methods adapted 
 
 134 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 to the expression and development of its corporate 
 life. Denominations and groups of Christians differ 
 widely in the relative importance which they attach 
 to each of these, and to the interpretation which 
 they would place upon them. It is unnecessary 
 and would be inappropriate here to engage in any 
 detailed discussion of the sacraments of the Church, 
 or to set out the varying doctrines associated with 
 varieties of usage. It is enough to repeat our 
 previous conclusion, that some kind of sacramental 
 doctrine is involved in a Christian view of God’s 
 nature and purpose and of the workings of grace, 
 and to register the conviction that God comes to 
 man through things and through the senses, and 
 that any wholesale rejection of the material world 
 or any undue etherialising of spiritual experience 
 involves a rejection of one of the chief means by 
 which grace reaches the soul. And if this is the 
 case, it is also clear that for all of us certain special 
 objects and uses draw a spiritual quality from 
 association and memory. ‘The flower from a grave, 
 the photograph of a friend, the hand-clasp of 
 welcome have a significance for us far beyond the 
 general sense in which all things can mediate to us 
 God; for there is in us something which at once 
 connects the symbol with its meaning and makes 
 it effective as a means of communion. Such 
 analogies illustrate one aspect of the sacraments of 
 the Church: they are linked up with the history 
 of Jesus Christ and with an unbroken tradition of 
 Christian usage. If we take them rightly as means, 
 
 1 Many of the members of the Commission for various reasons 
 regard this paragraph as specially inadequate. 
 
 135 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 not as ends, they bring us into such contact as we 
 can bear with the full and unchanging reality of 
 God. All of us would admit that such means, 
 whether we regard them as symbols or as instruments 
 (and the distinction is possibly one of emphasis 
 rather than of principle), can be misused. Many of 
 us would maintain that it 1s appropriate, indeed 
 inevitable, in view of His attitude to the material 
 world that Jesus Christ should have appointed 
 and instituted special sacraments, and that the ~ 
 Church, having regard to His sanction, to their 
 historical significance, and to the experience of 
 communion with God through them, should lay 
 stress upon them. Where they are used they take | 
 a primary place in the life of the fellowship. For 
 they are essentially the action not of any individual, 
 but of the whole society, celebrating and confirming 
 its union with Him whose Spirit it embodies and the 
 union of its members in Him with one another, 
 dedicating itself and being dedicated for the 
 continuance of His redemptive work. 
 
 To sum up, the Church, considered as the typical 
 Christian fellowship, the body held together and 
 inspired by one Spirit, is or should be a primary 
 means of grace to its members and to the social 
 order in which it exists. It gives to the religious 
 intuitions and enthusiasms of the individual men 
 who compose it a social and traditional support. 
 It applies to the necessarily limited experience of 
 the individual the spiritual wisdom of the race, 
 gives him roots in the spiritual history of humanity, 
 provides him with a home and a favouring environ- 
 
 ment, does or should educate the spiritual conscious- 
 136 
 
GOD AND SIN 
 
 ness, forming in it by means of regular and ordered 
 devotion the habit of attention to God. In cor- 
 porate worship, souls are welded together and 
 disposed to receive Christian impressions; in its 
 most perfect achievements the congregation is 
 welded into a unity in which the weak personality 
 is uplifted and braced by fellowship with the 
 stronger, the assertive is humbled by contact with 
 the common experience, and all are conscious of 
 being inspired by the One Spirit. Such a religious 
 employment of the resources of group suggestion 
 may surely be regarded asa genuine means of grace ; 
 for it is essential to the Christian position to acknow- 
 ledge that God works on man through man. ‘There- 
 fore the Churches have a definite part to play in 
 social redemption; not only by corporate witness 
 to Christian ethical demands, but also by such a 
 deepening and enhancing of the institutional 
 religious life as shall infect every individual brought 
 within the circle of its influence with a more ardent 
 passion for fulfilling the purposes of Christ. Ruys- 
 broeck said, “Then only is our life a whole, when 
 work and contemplation dwell in us side by side and 
 we are perfectly in both of them at once;” and the 
 social function of the Church in a Christian world- 
 order involves the provision of the contemplative 
 side of full life, balancing social action by the stead- 
 fastness of its corporate attention to, and adoration 
 of, God. It is beyond the scope of this Report, 
 representing all types of Christian feeling, to suggest 
 the ways in which this may best be done. Each 
 branch of the Church of Christ will use the machinery 
 most apt for its purpose. All types of services, 
 137 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 sacramental and other, corporate silence and cor- 
 porate praise, devotional fellowships, the Retreat 
 movement, are a few of the methods by which this 
 end may be served and new volume and vividness 
 given to the love and devotion of the members. 
 Through the diversity of gifts and of vocations 
 found in those members, grace penetrates, or should 
 penetrate, into every intricate channel of our social 
 organism. ‘The possibility of this depends ulti- 
 mately on the life towards God of the individual, . 
 and of the religious group to which he is, and for 
 his full spiritual health must be, joined. ‘The full 
 redemption of society will only be accomplished 
 when all we mean by “Church” leavens and 
 vitalises all we mean by “ State.” For, in general, 
 the perfect life requires as an environment the 
 perfect community attentive to God, and in every 
 particular in accord with God; and this means a 
 Christian fellowship capable of becoming the Body, 
 or human expression, of the Spirit of Christ. 
 
 138 
 
CHAPTER V 
 GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
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CHAPTER V 
 
 GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 (A) Tue Prosiem 
 
 Tue aim of this Report is to demonstrate that 
 the Christian faith “ rightly interpreted and consis- 
 tently followed gives,” and, we would add, can alone 
 give, “ the vision and the power essential for solving 
 the problems of to-day.” Hitherto we have tried 
 to show that our faith is congruous with what we 
 know of the world in which we live, that it meets 
 and satisfies every requirement of full human life, 
 and that, if the obstacles to its fulfilment cannot 
 be overlooked, and often appear almost insuperable, 
 it provides means by which they have been and can 
 be overcome. 
 
 There still remains the problem of its practical 
 applicability. Many who read thus far will feel 
 that they need not be greatly distressed by the 
 three common types of objection to their religion. 
 These objections are: ‘‘ It is not true: your claims 
 rest upon evidence incapable of justifying them ;”’ 
 or, “It may be true, so far as the evidence goes, 
 but I don’t like it : its morality is a slave morality— 
 or (as some would put it) is founded ona subtle and 
 enlightened self-interest ;”’ or, finally, “It is true 
 and beautiful and good, a wonderful dream; but 
 
 141 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 it merely mocks my weakness: how can I find in it 
 power to fulfil its demands?” We have still to 
 meet a criticism less radical but more widespread, 
 the criticism of those who say, “ It has my entire 
 allegiance as a theory; and I don’t doubt that for 
 some rare souls it is practicable, but under my 
 circumstances, the world being what it is, and I 
 having to live immersed in it, it simply doesn’t work. 
 It isn’t that I haven’t tried or that I do not long 
 to succeed; but I am compelled over and over again 
 to give up the attempt in face of the facts of life. 
 How can one live out the Christian faith in an 
 unchristian world?” ‘That is the final problem. 
 
 (B) Present CrRCUMSTANCES 
 
 As we have pointed out, the conditions of a highly 
 complex civilisation intensify the difficulty, especially 
 when, as in our present situation, that civilisation 
 has been built up by motives and for purposes 
 largely unchristian. Where the social order is 
 simple and unorganised—as it was, relatively speak- 
 ing, in the first century of our era—the individual 
 was largely free to go his own way. He could with- 
 draw, as the early Christians to a certain extent 
 withdrew, from contact with recognised evil, from 
 professions and practices alien to his own standard 
 of conduct. His needs were few and easily supplied, 
 his dependence on his fellows was a matter of choice 
 rather than of necessity. Later on, when the evil 
 effects of compromise were discovered, it was 
 possible to constitute communities of Christians 
 apart from the world, supplying by their own 
 
 142 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 labour the food and clothing, buildings and work- 
 
 shops and government, and regulating these in 
 full accord with the spirit of their brotherhood. 
 They might hope to infect others with a similar 
 spirit and so reform the whole civilisation of their age. 
 
 Such examples of community life have been 
 followed constantly and with varying success from 
 that time to this. ‘To-day, when we are all conscious 
 that our civilisation has developed with intense 
 rapidity along lines which Christianity has been 
 unable to control, and cannot wholly approve, we 
 may rejoice that experiments towards a more 
 Christian corporate life should be freely made and 
 studied. At the same time it is plain that the mass 
 of our countrymen cannot look for a solution of their 
 problems in such fashion. For them such sheltered 
 virtue is no longer possible. Much as we may 
 deplore its character, we cannot contract out of the 
 social order, and start a community for ourselves 
 in isolation without shirking our responsibility to 
 the world. For in modern days none of us can be 
 self-suficing. We have broken down the barriers, 
 flinging our railroads and shipping, our communi- 
 cations and our commerce across all the frontiers 
 by which our ancestors were isolated. Only by the 
 maintenance of international trade, only by mass- 
 production and specialisation, can our vast popu- 
 lations be kept alive. To return to the days of 
 small communities and home industry sounds very 
 attractive. What it means is that those who so 
 withdraw from the world are refusing to share in 
 the fight against starvation. It may be that, for the 
 good of humanity, such experiments should be made 
 
 a 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 on a small scale, just as it is good that certain people 
 should be sét free to follow vocations not directly 
 contributing to the physical welfare of the race. 
 But as a permanent or universal solution of the 
 problem, such a course would only be possible 
 if births were diminished to a fraction of their 
 present rate. Utopian dreams of this sort have 
 their value—but not as practicable policies. It is 
 useless to say, ‘Scrap modern industrialised civili- 
 sation: break up your sordid cities: refuse all 
 contact with pagan finance and pagan politics: and. 
 return to the simple life of an earlier day.” Such 
 advice is equivalent to an order for wholesale 
 massacre. Nor is it obviously the part of a Christian 
 to withdraw his contribution to the support of a 
 system which may indeed be gradually transformed, 
 but cannot be abruptly changed without hideous 
 and almost world-wide suffering. 
 
 We have thought it well to state the position 
 vigorously because we believe that here is the real 
 issue before us. Material progress during the last 
 century has brought us into a condition totally 
 unprecedented in history ; and to look back wistfully 
 to other times and habits is only valuable if we 
 recognise that our way cannot possibly be an imita- 
 tion of theirs. Principles remain; and we have 
 tried to state them. ‘Their application differs from 
 age to age, almost from year to year. 
 
 It is not the business of this section of our Report 
 to make any detailed statement of the reforms which 
 could now be made or are in the future desirable. 
 Other Commissions accepting the common faith 
 are considering how in face of present circumstances 
 
 144 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 it can be made operative in the corporate life. 
 But it is necessary for us to speak about the general 
 problem which presses hard upon _ individual 
 Christians, and upon the Church. How can we 
 and our society, accepting the gospel of Jesus Christ 
 as the sole satisfaction of our heart’s desire, as the 
 sole solution of the problems of thought, and the sole 
 inspiration of righteous action, feel, and think and 
 work worthily in a world where the standards of 
 our faith are not, in fact, anywhere fully accepted 
 or followed ? 
 
 (C) THe Dovusize STANDARD 
 
 It is this existence of varying standards of conduct 
 which brings us first into touch with the issue. 
 The Church proclaims to its members certain 
 principles which commend themselves to the normal 
 conscience, and particularly to the idealism of 
 youth; for all normal men desire love and joy and 
 peace, and have their vision of comradeship and 
 service and sacrifice. And then the Christian goes 
 out into the world, into social life or business or a 
 profession, and at once discovers that the principles 
 on which he has been trained are loosely interpreted, 
 if not rejected. He has been taught to be pure; 
 he finds prostitution condoned. He has believed 
 in the golden rule; he finds “‘ smartness ”’ applauded, 
 and the weakest crushed against the wall. He has 
 heard it said “ Love your enemies ”’; the irony of it 
 in a world of class-strife and national hatreds bites 
 into his soul. An inevitable bewilderment paralyses 
 his judgment. On the one side are his ideals and 
 
 L 145 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 all he holds sacred, on the other the facts of the 
 workaday iife, its codes of morality, its appeal to 
 self-interest, its professions and practices, and its 
 seemingly immovable strength. His first instinct 
 is to cry with the prophets, “ Woe to the accursed 
 city,” and to shake off the dust of it from his feet. 
 But somehow he must live. He has parents who 
 have sacrificed much for his career. He has friends 
 who do not share his scruples. He has instincts to 
 which the ambitions and struggles and lusts of the 
 life about him make a powerful appeal. Gradually. 
 his dreams and hopes and beliefs fade. He accepts 
 the average standards of his calling, and comes to 
 feel that apart from the haunting figure of Christ 
 they would be adequate enough, and even to be 
 content with them as under existing circumstances 
 the best that could reasonably be demanded. He 
 accepts a life of compromise. Is it possible to do 
 otherwise ? 
 
 In attempting to answer such a question we must 
 first remind ourselves that the Christian is called 
 not only to full membership in a society, the Church 
 whose existence is due to the possession of a common 
 faith and a common love, but that both the member 
 and the fellowship have as their supreme task the 
 fulfilment of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. 
 
 The Church does not exist solely for the saving 
 of its members’ souls—or rather they can only be 
 saved as they take full part in its missionary activity. 
 It is because Christianity can only be fully realised 
 in a wholly Christian world, that it is driven by its 
 own inherent nature to take part in and seek to 
 
 harmonise with itself those activities and institutions 
 146 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 of the world’s life which are at present opposed 
 to it. If the whole world were not essential to 
 Christianity, Christianity need not be essentially 
 concerned to redeem it. There has come to 
 Christians of all denominations in recent years a 
 revival of this conviction, that only in service and 
 sacrifice for the winning of the world can they attain 
 spiritual health; that their duty is not simply 
 mutual edification but active sharing in a great 
 enterprise. Contemplatives and sufferers, teachers 
 and evangelists, laity and ministry, are united in a 
 fellowship of active service: their life is not static 
 but dynamic. 
 
 This of itself means that mere abstention from 
 the world, mere refusal to take part in worldly 
 pursuits and callings, can only be justified if it is 
 the surest way to Christianise the whole. To keep 
 ourselves unspotted is only part of our duty; and 
 it is our duty principally not for our own sakes but 
 for God’s and for our fellows. Christ Himself came 
 down into the common life of men, sharing its 
 limitations, and in measure accepting its compro- 
 mises, in order that from within it He might reform 
 and recreate it. He did not forbid to pay tribute 
 to Cesar, though taxation then as now served many 
 dubious ends. And His Apostles went further in 
 accepting the government and institutions of their 
 time. The early Church, whose withdrawal from 
 the world we have already noted, found itself from 
 the first involved in certain contacts with heathen- 
 ism, and was perplexed where to draw the line. 
 If military service or public office was impossible 
 for a Christian, what was he to do about mixed 
 
 147 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 marriages and slavery, marketing and his daily 
 business? And soon, whether we accept or deplore 
 the change, the prohibitions grew fewer, the 
 seclusion less rigid, as Christians more and more 
 took their part in the secular activities, until at 
 last a Christian, in name and intention at least, 
 took his seat upon the Imperial throne. 
 
 It is easy enough to condemn Constantine and 
 to point out the abuses which followed the estab- 
 lishment of Christianity as the religion of the 
 Empire. ‘There was, beyond dispute, compromise 
 and even secularisation. But to deplore the price 
 then paid for the diffusion of the Gospel is not 
 necessarily to suggest that the principle of adaptation 
 to the circumstances of the time is mistaken. It is 
 pathetic that Christians as they gained number and 
 prestige seemed to lose their purity and lower their 
 standards. But though individuals failed, the 
 general process was inevitable if the Master’s com- 
 mand to teach all nations were to be obeyed. We 
 shall naturally form different judgments as to the 
 gains and losses recorded in the history of the Church 
 according to our views of its nature and authority ; 
 but few will doubt that in a very real sense its life 
 and progress has been guided by God’s Spirit, and 
 that in refusing to withdraw its members wholly 
 from contact with the world, it was acting in accord- 
 ance with its Master’s precepts and example. And 
 throughout its history, even in periods of general 
 laxity and decay, there have never been wanting 
 those who stood out against dominant evil, and in 
 the name of Christ recalled His followers to their 
 
 allegiance. 
 148 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 We conclude, therefore, that there is no sanction 
 for a general rule of withdrawal from secular affairs, 
 that our duty is to be in the world though not of it, 
 and that to fulfil this involves the constant effort to 
 realise God’s will, and much prayer and thought as 
 to how best to follow it. If this be granted, then 
 each one of us will have to face problems of conduct 
 which will strain our faculties to the uttermost, 
 problems for the solution of which each must face 
 a great responsibility. It is true that the individual 
 here as elsewhere does not stand alone, that as a 
 member of the Church he has the support of the 
 moral witness and stored experience of the fellowship. 
 Naturally he will strive to regulate his life in accord- 
 ance with the discipline of the society to which he 
 belongs, and will use the help, the spiritual strength 
 and practical guidance, that he can obtain from it. 
 But even so, in the last resort, his own conscience 
 must be the supreme authority. Rules and tradition 
 may be an invaluable help; and the verdict of the 
 Church has a sanction which none dare lightly 
 dismiss. But in whatever proportion we adjust 
 the individual and the collective responsibility 
 (and Christians differ widely in the emphasis which 
 they lay upon each), the discovery of the right course 
 of action is in certain circumstances extraordinarily 
 
 difficult. 
 
 (D) Tue Nature or CoMPrRoMISsE 
 
 To illustrate the difficulty we need only refer to 
 the problem of the Christian’s attitude towards 
 149 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 war, and to the searchings of heart which many of 
 us experienced in 1914. War indeed presents a 
 case typical of a vast number of others, where the 
 individual has either to refuse participation in 
 admitted evil at the expense of breaking the bonds 
 of fellowship and national obligation, or to share 
 the consequences of corporate evil by taking part 
 in what he believes to be in itself wrong. But the 
 question of war is being fully treated elsewhere ; 
 and before trying to reach a conclusion it is well to 
 mention certain general categories under which 
 cases of compromise commonly fall. 
 
 1. First, we may place the position of the Christian 
 who finds his citizenship involving him in duties and 
 obligations of which his conscience disapproves ; 
 he is called to serve on a jury and has doubts about 
 the Christian character of the penal system; or to 
 send his children to an elementary school where he 
 knows that the moral tone is low; or to pay taxes 
 to an exchequer some of whose activities seem con- 
 trary to the Spirit of Christ. The New Testament 
 exhorts him to “ be in subjection to the powers that 
 be.” ‘To what extent is he to carry his obedience ? 
 
 2. Next there is a group of problems turning on 
 action in a representative capacity. 
 
 (a) One such case is that involved in representa- 
 tive government in communities not wholly 
 Christian. ‘The representative is obviously limited 
 in his official action by the public opinion of his 
 electors : he cannot disregard their wishes and follow 
 simply his personal convictions: by retaining his 
 position he may be able to do valuable service to 
 religion, yet to retain it he will frequently be called 
 
 150 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 upon to support policies of which he does not 
 altogether approve. 
 
 (6) Somewhat similar is the problem raised for 
 every elector. As a Christian he must desire to see 
 the Christian standard accepted in legislation. 
 Yet legislation must be adjusted to public opinion, 
 since its effectiveness depends not simply on the 
 enlightened views of a section of the populace, but 
 upon the consent of the whole body. Ifa proposed 
 law, although Christian, would be too far above 
 the general level to command support, ought he 
 to urge it? And in any case should he enforce 
 Christian precepts upon an unchristian or partially 
 Christian people, and compel a minority to obey 
 against its will? 
 
 (c) The problem of representative action is not 
 confined to politics. A business man who owes a 
 duty to his shareholders and to his staff and to the 
 public: a subordinate who is under obligations to 
 his firm and yet doubts if their goods are fairly 
 priced or of specified quality: a barrister called to © 
 defend a client of whose guilt he is morally certain : 
 a cleric who loves his Church, and yet questions the 
 truth of a point of doctrine: all these and many 
 other similar cases raise the same issues. ‘The 
 individual would take one line; the same individual 
 as representing interests other than his own is not 
 free to do so. It is easy to cite instances where the 
 alternatives seem so exactly balanced that to dis- 
 criminate with certainty between them is almost 
 impossible. 
 
 3. Even more universal are the conflicts between 
 personal ideals and group loyalties, conflicts which 
 
 151 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 arise in some form in almost every family. The 
 parent has certain hopes for his child: to what 
 point is he justified in compelling obedience? ‘The 
 child cherishes a definite purpose, but to fulfil it 
 will be to neglect home ties: which should be 
 sacrificed? A man has a young family and works 
 in a shop: he is asked to connive at fraud, and if he 
 refuses will be dismissed: which cross is he called 
 to bear? Examples can be multiplied indefinitely. 
 
 4. Finally, there is the personal problem. A man. 
 has two courses open to him. One offers definite 
 Christian service: he desires it, but in view of his 
 character and record is convinced that he cannot 
 worthily fulfilit. ‘The other is as definitely a second- 
 best, but is within his capacity and will give his 
 particular qualities larger scope. If he is a man of 
 one talent rather than of ten, his restrictions cannot 
 be neglected and may occasion very grave perplexity. 
 
 We have stated details at disproportionate length 
 because the matter is perhaps the most generally 
 perplexing in the whole range of Christian conduct. 
 As we have previously noted, there is no hard-and- 
 fast rule, and every case must be considered on its 
 merits and in terms not of law but of personal 
 relationships. Hence what is right for one man might 
 conceivably be wrong for another, even if the 
 circumstances were identical. This may seem to | 
 involve mere casuistry, and to leave to the individual 
 conscience an intolerable burden of responsibility. 
 He cannot, and should not, shrink from the obliga- 
 tions of his liberty. But certain principles will help 
 to a right judgment. 
 
 152 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 (FE) Princrpites or Conpuct 
 
 It will be noticed that in every case the issue is 
 one between conflicting loyalties and arises out of 
 the fact that each one of us belongs or can belong to 
 many different groups. As a member of the State, 
 of the firm, of the family, and of the Church, 
 certain obligations are laid upon him, and between 
 these where they are incompatible he has to choose. 
 To do so is to consider how best to adapt means 
 to ends. As a Christian, his end is the redemption 
 of the world, the building up of the body of Christ ; 
 and he, like St. Paul, must judge which means will 
 achieve this end. Hence personal motives, save 
 as they affect his own capabilities, are ruled out. 
 “What wouldest thou have me to do?” must be 
 the substance of his prayer. Self-knowledge and 
 thought, and sympathy for the needs and well- 
 being of others will be required: without them 
 prayer, the opening-up of the problem in the 
 presence of God, will be superficial and unreal. 
 
 1. Self-knowledge—We urge the necessity for 
 self-knowledge because the influence of selfish 
 instincts is, as psycho-analysis has once more 
 demonstrated, extraordinarily subtle and strong, 
 _ and nothing is easier than to mistake our own sub- 
 conscious desires for the guiding of the Divine 
 Spirit. It is our duty to examine ourselves sincerely 
 and unreservedly in the light of our vision of God 
 and with every help that the guidance of the Church 
 and the advice of friends can give, stripping ourselves 
 of ambitions and fears, and of regard for material 
 considerations, whether they affect ourselves only 
 
 153 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 or our family and colleagues. We must know 
 ourselves, our limitations and our endowments, our 
 aptitudes and our temptations. We must repent 
 and dedicate ourselves, being what we are, to God. 
 Realising His presence and concentrating solely upon 
 worship, we shall see ourselves and our perplexities 
 from a different angle and in relation to the one true 
 goal of life. Difficulties will be resolved and the 
 complexities disentangled if and as far as we recognise 
 that no other consideration whatsoever, neither. 
 personal reputation, nor domestic obligations, nor 
 business ties, nor national interests, can be put in 
 the first place, and that we are set in these lesser 
 relationships solely in order that in them we may 
 serve His Kingdom. We shall not attach less but 
 far more and truer importance to the claims of 
 others upon us, because we are seeking first God’s 
 will for us and for them. | 
 In cases of conflicting obligations such as we are 
 considering our uncertainty too frequently arises 
 from a conflict of motive in ourselves: one group 
 of instincts pulls us in one direction, while others 
 resist and draw us elsewhere. If we can settle the 
 war in our own personalities by bringing all the 
 elements of our nature into harmony with God, 
 we shall have simplified the issue, and shall see 
 clearly what we ought to do. And as we grow in | 
 grace, as our characters become more Christ- 
 informed, our sensitiveness to God will develop, 
 and His guidance will become ever more real and 
 more imperative. Even those who have made 
 but little progress in the Christian life can look back 
 upon earlier times in which conduct now intolerable 
 154 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 to the conscience was hardly challenged, when we 
 accepted blindly or with plausible excuses motives 
 now recognised and inevitably rejected, when we 
 were distressed by problems and dallied with tempta- 
 tions which have now wholly ceased to distract our 
 course. Othersremain: the struggle still continues ; 
 but in the light of what has been we can engage in 
 it humbly and with hope, confident that in Christ 
 all things are or should be possible for us, that He 
 whom we have known will not leave us unaided. 
 
 2. Sympathy.—The quickening of our Godward 
 sensibilities brings also a deepened sympathy with 
 our fellow-men. Our lives are for the most part 
 influenced by abstract principles, by law and custom 
 and convention, and the standards prevalent in our 
 circle. We find it easy to order our conduct by 
 reference to a rule; such and such things are not 
 done: such and such persons are beyond the pale. 
 Rules, however mistaken, have their place in life: 
 “‘ the law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ ”’ ; 
 but for the Christian, the discipline of simple 
 obedience is only preliminary, and if he presses on 
 towards perfection will be less and less valuable 
 to him. For, as we have urged, it is with persons 
 and personal relationships, not with abstractions or 
 general principles, that he is concerned. Sympathy 
 with the particular needs and characters of those 
 who will be affected by his action will be a potent 
 factor in God’s guidance. For it is his duty not 
 merely to consider his own soul’s welfare, but to 
 correct the motive and achieve the result of self- 
 development by seeking always how he may best 
 minister to the highest needs of others. “ For their 
 
 155 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 sakes I sanctify myself,’ strikes a note characteristic 
 of the whole method of Jesus; and when St. Paul 
 has to consider cases of compromise submitted by 
 his converts it is to the interests of the “‘ weaker 
 brother ” and the well-being of the whole community 
 that he turns in giving his answer. We are not here 
 to please ourselves but to serve God and our brethren. 
 It is plain, therefore, that in such cases we must 
 accept nothing which will destroy or endanger our 
 sonship to God or the eternal welfare of any of His - 
 children. For it can never be God’s will that any 
 of His family should do evil or attempt to be less 
 than perfect in the particular conditions of each. 
 case. And we cannot do His will by using means 
 contrary to it. Compromise is always wrong if it 
 means the acceptance of any line of action which 
 is not absolutely the best possible in the circum- 
 stances. Christ’s standard in such matters is 
 rigidly uncompromising: ‘‘ Whoso loveth his life 
 shall lose it,’ and “‘ Whoso loveth parents or friends 
 more than Me cannot be My disciple.” He knew 
 that to follow such an ideal would involve in some 
 shape or other the bearing of a Cross. Here as 
 elsewhere the Cross is the condition of discipleship. 
 
 (F) Tue Way oF THE Cross 
 
 In claiming that each one of us is called to be a 
 partaker in the sufferings of Christ, we would utter 
 first a word of warning. Jesus Himself did not 
 provoke, indeed definitely avoided, a crisis until 
 His teaching of the ee was completed. Only 
 
 15 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 when Peter had confessed Him to be the Christ 
 did He set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, 
 and begin to warn His followers that a cross, not a 
 crown, awaited Him there. We are called to spend 
 and sacrifice our lives without stint, keeping back 
 no part of the price; but we are called not only 
 to lay them down but to lay them out in His service 
 to the fullest and truest advantage. ‘There is in 
 some of us a temper that is merely quixotic. Such 
 people are inclined to tilt at windmills; to suspect 
 evil in every normal activity, and think that to be 
 “agin? the Government” is necessarily to be on 
 God’s side; even to enjoy the consciousness of being 
 persecuted and live in a series of cheap martyrdoms. 
 That is not Christ’s way; nor can we take up His 
 Cross for motives of subtle self-flattery. 
 
 Nor can we look upon the Cross merely as an 
 unpleasant episode, a temporary pain for the sake of 
 future bliss, an investment which prudence recom- 
 mends. If in‘reality our motive is the desire for 
 reward, then one thing is certain, that we shall 
 neither deserve nor attainit. That crucifixion leads 
 to resurrection, that those who give up houses and 
 lands and kinsmen and friends for the Kingdom’s 
 sake receive an hundredfold, is utterly true; but 
 they do so just in proportion to the extent to which 
 their sacrifice is for the Kingdom and not for them- 
 selves. Our motive must be love, not self-interest ; 
 our gain will be the discovery that the Cross itself 
 is the supreme joy because upon it we are with 
 Him who for us was nailed there. 
 
 This is indeed the central fact. We use words 
 like sacrifice and suffering; but the experience of 
 
 157 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 the Christian makes him doubtful of their current 
 appropriateness. As we learn to love, as we come to 
 say in reverence and sincerity, ‘‘ May my name perish, 
 so His will be done,” the Cross becomes inevitable. 
 If Christ was crucified, we must be crucified with 
 Christ. ‘The constraint of love leaves us no choice ; 
 we can no other. And love turns into joy, love 
 compensates and rewards an hundredfold. We are 
 with Him, sharing in His work, filling up in our small 
 measure what was lacking in His sufferings, and 
 entering into a peace which passes earthly under- 
 standing. | 
 
 “To do God’s will.” ‘Those who can live out 
 Christ’s prayer spontaneously, sincerely, whole- 
 heartedly, have attained their end. Difficulties 
 no longer perplex them : like their Master, they are 
 not worried about the morrow and can deal unerringly 
 with the problems and evils of the day: like their 
 Master, they have lost the fear of “them that kill 
 the body and after that have nothing they can do”’: 
 like their Master, they can face the Cross serenely 
 and unfalteringly : for, like their Master, they can 
 take long views, loving wisely, and not shrinking 
 from driving the sword into a mother’s heart when 
 love, austere and compassionate and holy, bids them : 
 like their Master, they can walk among the snares and 
 subtleties of temptation undisturbed, and resolve 
 life’s complexities at touch. For He is in them, © 
 and they in Him. To them to live is Christ. 
 
 We have dared to set down what we conceive to 
 be our calling. None dare imagine that he fulfils 
 it. St. Paul, even in the Epistle which breathes 
 most fully the joy of self-surrender, though he can 
 
 158 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 say, “I can do all things through Christ who 
 strengtheneth me,” must also say, “ Not that I 
 count myself to have apprehended . . . but I press 
 toward the mark.”? We shall be very slow to claim 
 progress or to judge others, or to set ourselves as 
 guides to the blind. For few of us have suffered 
 unto death; and our vision of God, however dim, 
 forces us to our knees. But it is because we believe 
 with utter conviction that here lies the road to joy 
 and knowledge and power, to the re-creation of the 
 whole life of man, that we can go forward, bearing 
 ever before our eyes the picture so characteristic 
 of the Christendom of to-day—“ ‘They were in the 
 way going up to Jerusalem ... and Jesus went 
 Detore “tiem. .,./And they were -amazed.,.).'s 
 And they that followed were afraid.”+1 He still 
 leads on—to the New Jerusalem of our desire: 
 He bewilders and perplexes us; for His way is not 
 our way, nor are His thoughts our thoughts; and 
 the little groups falter and fear, as the shadow of the 
 Cross falls over them. ‘They fear, but yet they 
 follow : for He leads and love constrains. 
 
 (G) Tue Fruits oF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Such an appeal will seem to many readers emotional 
 and vague. In religion, as in other vital interests, 
 phrases once fresh and full of meaning lose their 
 brightness and value by constant use. It is common 
 experience that those who are continually hearing 
 and reading St. Paul’s descriptions of the indwelling 
 
 1 Mark x..32. 
 159 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 Christ never realise that they refer to actual happen- 
 ings within a human soul, and in lesser measure 
 are common to multitudes of believers. The com- 
 bination of accurate scholarship and sympathetic 
 imagination which can understand and interpret for 
 to-day the language of the first century is the more 
 needed because the texts are so familiar. Such words 
 as “I am crucified with Christ,” “‘ I die daily,” “I 
 live, yet not I; Christ lives in me,”’ were written 
 as a plain statement of their author’s deepest 
 convictions and most vivid experience; they have 
 become through the ages stereotyped formule, 
 mysterious rather than literally correct, and distorted 
 by a mass of alternative and often tawdry interpre- 
 tations. ‘he stark grandeur and truth of the change 
 which the Apostle records have been softened and 
 weakened until even crucifixion has come to be 
 applied to acts of trivial sacrifice or self-conscious 
 renunciation. It is necessary for us, therefore, to 
 expand our statement of the way of the Cross and 
 to show the momentous and eminently practical 
 character of the demand made upon se: who 
 would follow it. 
 
 If in love as we have defined it there is power to 
 change the very stuff and substance of our natures 
 into the likeness of God, if by it we are enabled to 
 have the mind of Christ, this will involve, as we have 
 seen, a radical renewal of our attitude towards God, 
 towards man, and towards human society. ‘The 
 necessity for this change is inherent in the whole 
 theology and organisation of the Church, and its 
 practical significance is too often misunderstood or 
 
 neglected. We believe that its accomplishment 
 160 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 in the individual and in society is the only solid 
 foundation for Christian citizenship. For it there 
 are no substitutes. Other reforms are at best 
 palliatives and temporary measures. It is the soul, 
 the values and outlook of humanity, that must be 
 altered, not merely its environment and its way 
 of life. For action, if it is to be true and consistent, 
 can only be so in proportion as it is the outcome of 
 right attitude and motive. ‘This is the issue which 
 mankind is unwilling to face. We are all ready 
 within limits to change our behaviour; we are not 
 ready to change ourselves or to give free play to 
 influences that would change us. The greater 
 difficulty of the task is at once the cause and the 
 consequence of our unwillingness. ‘The debasing of 
 the standards of Christ and the encouragement of 
 cheap alternatives for self-oblation have so obscured 
 the simple and complete Gospel that even among 
 Christians its scope and character are hardly ever 
 realised. We cannot here do more than outline 
 and illustrate something of what is involved in 
 discipleship. 
 
 To regard God, as Jesus did, as always and wholly 
 the Father, means not only a ruthless rejection of 
 much which passes for Christian thinking, but a 
 revolutionary change in our relations with our 
 fellow-creatures. Many of the cherished convictions 
 so dear to the hearts and so familiar in the hymns 
 of Christians will not bear examination if God is 
 Love. Many of our own prayers with their taint 
 of formalism and of self-seeking are plainly not the 
 utterances of a child of God. If we were amazed 
 
 and horrified at the emergence in time of war of 
 M 161 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 primitive, »tribal and national deities, this was 
 nothing more than an exposure of our failure to 
 appreciate in more normal circumstances the magni- 
 tude of the revelation in Christ. To grasp and hold 
 and use continuously the implications of the first 
 two words of the Lord’s Prayer is too often immeasur- 
 ably beyond us. 
 
 But it is in its consequences upon our relationship 
 to God’s family that our failure is most apparent. 
 For “the Mind of Christ” challenges and over- 
 throws every conventional opinion and every worldly 
 judgment. What is involved in uncompromising 
 discipleship is a change so vast and so universal that 
 to imagine and describe it in its fullness is and must 
 be beyond our power. Only those whose lives are 
 hid with Christ in God can share and tell the sweep 
 of its effects. We will only attempt to put down a 
 few of the more obvious results in simple shape, 
 taking the three main categories of personality, 
 standards of value and fellowship. 
 
 1. PERSONALITY 
 
 In realising the nature of God we cannot but realise 
 His relationship to our fellows and consequently 
 their kinship with ourselves. ‘‘ All ye are brethren ” 
 is the necessary corollary of “‘ One is your Father.” . 
 Indeed if our attitude towards God is to be in any 
 measure Christian, we shall best test its development 
 by observing its effects upon our conduct towards 
 others. So far as we are envious or critical, patronis- 
 ing or servile to them, so far we may be sure that the 
 
 Divine Father is being given by us something less 
 162 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 than His full character. He is our Judge; and it 
 follows that some are acquitted before Him and 
 others condemned—and we feel at liberty to 
 anticipate His sentences. He is our King: pre- 
 rogatives belong to His favoured subjects, penalties 
 to the rebels—ought we not to help Him in bestowing 
 them? He is our Friend—intimacies proper to us 
 are refused to others—we can show His displeasure 
 as proof of our own privilege. Only then, if these 
 lesser attributes are expanded and brought into 
 proportion by union with the concept of Fatherhood, 
 can we find the true basis for the brotherhood of 
 man, and learn to be, and to behave as, members 
 of His family. 
 
 Herein lies the stimulus and the guide to social 
 reform. If God is partial, if some men are His 
 chosen and others His enemies, then it may be just 
 that some should be outcasts and others should 
 prosper like green bay trees. On such a doctrine 
 social evil may be only an anticipation or reflection 
 of Divine judgment. We may go on in our self- 
 satisfaction content that men and women less blessed 
 than ourselves should live under conditions which 
 degrade and defile. Nothing is more congenial 
 to the national character of our countrymen than 
 to give a person or an opinion a label, and to store 
 it in its proper pigeon-hole. We talk of profiteers 
 or prostitutes, Bolshevists or atheists or the idle 
 rich ; and the words conjure up familiar caricatures. 
 But the real men and women so dismissed are not 
 caricatures: beneath the stains of the far country 
 with which they and we are disguised are the 
 
 features of prodigal sons and daughters, whose 
 uM * 163 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 underlying. nature and relationship to God should 
 be, and on His side are, the same as our own. And 
 when once this fact strikes home to us, then they 
 can no longer be dismissed. ‘Their surroundings 
 and opportunities, their temptations and struggles, 
 their disease of body and soul are matters of vital 
 concern. She is my sister; it is intolerable that 
 men should use her so. Heis my brother; and I, in 
 part, his keeper. Each individual one among them, 
 however twisted or self-willed, is of the family; 
 and we cannot, for God will not, cast him off. 
 Within God’s family there are many groupings. 
 We are linked close with some; others hardly 
 touch us; multitudes unnumbered are wholly 
 outside our range. Our intimacies are not to be 
 neglected or merged in a general and insipid 
 benevolence. Rather from the love of parent and 
 partner and child we are to learn ever more fully 
 the sanctity and splendour of our birthright. The 
 joy and graces of our earthly home will teach us new 
 lessons of our Father and of His great household ; 
 and the sympathy trained in the narrow circle will 
 deepen and expand until love, the fixed sentiment 
 of compassion, colours our whole selves and affects 
 all our most casual contacts. ‘To feel our kinship, 
 to know and approve its meaning, to act upon its 
 reality, these are the firstfruits of Christ’s Spirit. | 
 And our first task is to accept God’s Fatherhood and 
 personalise by it our relations with His family. 
 Only if we have in us a passion for the eternal well- 
 being of our brothers and sisters, only when we feel 
 in our hearts the truth of Christ’s words, ‘* Ye have 
 
 done it to the least of these . . . ye have done it 
 164 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 unto Me,” only as their sorrows and joys, shames and 
 triumphs become our own, will the energy sufficient 
 to redeem be generated and set free. 
 
 The effect of such a recognition of brotherhood 
 must be to produce a simplification in the Christian’s 
 way of life. Luxury, inconsiderate enjoyment, self- 
 gratification regardless of others are a flat denial 
 of the faith. When a great cause grips and unites 
 the community, all merely personal indulgence is 
 recognised and condemned as bad taste and bad 
 morality. If during the war the knowledge of the 
 sufferings of the soldiery and the need of the nation 
 could create a voluntary austerity and self-denial, 
 the present knowledge of the tragedy of unemploy- 
 ment and of the starvation of Europe should be not 
 less potent to stir the imagination and enforce 
 simplicity in food and clothing and furniture and 
 amusements. If I am in any real sense a member 
 of Christ, I cannot lightly squander money and time 
 which might be the means of life to others: ‘‘ How 
 can I best serve the welfare of God’s family?” 
 should be the guiding consideration in all matters 
 of personal expenditure and effort. My work 
 may demand a measure of comfort and equipment 
 if it is to be effective. But, for most of the well-to- 
 do, what is really luxury often masquerades as 
 necessity. It is easy to make excuses for one’s right 
 to pleasure and for the securing of advantages for 
 one’s children—and in so doing to deny God’s 
 Fatherhood and forget the need of His world. 
 
 Similarly for the Church, when once the claim 
 of religion to influence the whole of life and to 
 possess a message for all men is admitted, a sense of 
 
 165 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 proportion will be recovered. At present too many 
 Christian congregations spend the bulk of their 
 energies and resources in providing spiritual luxuries 
 for the favoured few. ‘The world-wide mission is 
 obscured by the trivialities of ecclesiastical interests. 
 Nice, but eminently petty, points of procedure and 
 organisation and conduct of services and the adminis- 
 tration of finance arouse the keenest interest and the 
 most strenuous partisanship. ‘The great mass of 
 the people, of those common people whom Jesus. 
 loved and who heard Him gladly, is forgotten, and 
 then repelled by what they regard not unjustly as 
 a denial of brotherhood. 
 
 2. STANDARDS OF VALUE 
 
 If personality is “‘ the holiest fact in the universe,” 
 if what we are matters vastly more than what we 
 do, then a drastic modification if not a reversal of 
 the scale of values accepted by the world must 
 follow. Save in Christ, the worth of life is all but 
 universally measured by its success, by the attain- 
 ment of great position or even great wealth, by the 
 accomplishment of great deeds or even great 
 crimes, by the production of much work, by its 
 fame or notoriety. It is indeed natural and right 
 that those who have served humanity well should | 
 be held in grateful remembrance; but that the best 
 service of humanity qualifies for reputation and 
 honour is in most cases simply untrue. Any student 
 of history will be at times amazed at the false ideas 
 of greatness which permeate and are fostered by it ; 
 
 and those who have met men reputed great often 
 166 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 share his wonder. If the supreme reality is God and 
 if life’s true goal is knowledge of Him, on what is 
 the claim of greatness founded? Surely if to walk 
 humbly with God is still man’s highest calling, the 
 good men living peaceably in their habitations who 
 have left no memorial are as likely to have fulfilled 
 it as those who have captured a city. Status and 
 wealth, education and discovery, science and civilisa- 
 tion, the family and the nation are means, not ends, 
 and are valuable just so far as they are able to give 
 fuller and more abundant life, to make us what God 
 means us to be; and opportunity brings responsi- 
 bility, and ascent a greater peril of falling. If the 
 good Christian is a more Godlike man than the 
 good pagan, the bad Christian is the Pharisee, the 
 sinner whom Christ most severely condemned. 
 Corruptio optimt pessima. 
 
 This matter is of vital importance to our subject. 
 Our heritage and the habit of generations have made 
 the assumption of false standards almost inevitable. 
 They are ingrained in the fibre of our being; and 
 their effects are as subtle as they are widespread. 
 To take a common instance. Nothing is more 
 urgently necessary or more plainly Christian than 
 that men and women should understand and use ia 
 full and equal partnership the fact of sex. ‘The 
 special problems of sex-life are dealt with elsewhere. 
 Here we are concerned with it only as illustrating 
 the present subject. Sex obviously involves a 
 difference, the plainest natural difference of function. 
 The commonplace definition “man subdues the 
 
 1 C}. Report on the Relation of the Sexes. 
 167 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 world, woman maintains the home,” however 
 expressed, represents a broad truth. If this differ- 
 ence is to be rightly appreciated and a true co- 
 operation attained, a clear perception of the common 
 goal, the Kingdom of God, and of each other’s 
 contribution to it, is essential. And at present the 
 persistence of a false standard is an almost unsur- 
 mountable obstacle. For the world rewards and 
 reckons great the work of man, his inventions and 
 business, his efficiency and intellectual prowess, his 
 triumphs of ambition and energy, and lightly regards 
 the work of woman, the expression of her personality 
 in creating home-life, in forming children, in tending 
 and sustaining others, in worshipping God. And 
 the world’s view is that of the men and unhappily 
 also of many of the women in it. Few husbands, 
 at least among those who work for their living, 
 regard the housewife as equally a worker. ‘To them 
 the home and the children, the garden and the party — 
 of friends are essentially relaxations, amusements, 
 not labour. ‘To see their wives’ work, with its lack 
 of regular hours, its close relation to personal 
 interests, its simplicity and its charm as equally 
 great, equally exacting, equally enriching, with 
 their own, demands of them a sympathy and a 
 freedom from tradition rare and difficult. And 
 women, in identifying equality of worth with 
 equality of function, in their desire to be “ just 
 like men” and their revolt against the dullness of 
 domesticity, have come near to a capitulation to 
 the prevalent standards. We do not wish to set 
 one sex’s function against another or to deny that 
 they are overlapping as jek as complementary: but 
 168 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 to pay lip-service to equality while half-unconsciously 
 assuming the superiority of the male is to make 
 effective comradeship, and with it the whole progress 
 of the race, well-nigh impossible. 
 
 And what is true of the most fundamental of 
 functional differences is true, as has often been 
 pointed out, of all lesser distinctions. ‘There must 
 be, if there is to be an ordered society, some who 
 rule and some who obey orders; there must be 
 grades of work as there are grades of ability. But at 
 present in the body politic the uncomely parts are 
 without honour; difference of function is regarded 
 as equivalent to difference of worth. The collier, 
 the coal-merchant and the coal-owner are all the 
 children of their Father, and the true end of life 
 is for them all the service of the family. All of 
 them are doing useful work; can we maintain that 
 their respective earnings bear any fair relation either 
 to their skill or to their value to the community? 
 At present honour and power depend firstly upon 
 what we have, then, but to a much less degree, upon 
 what we do; they bear hardly any relation to the 
 one thing of supreme importance, which is surely 
 what we are. The inherent and equal value of each 
 personality is ignored, if not denied; and so long 
 as this is the case, so long as men renounce brother- 
 hood by their accepted standards of value, all talk 
 of democracy and of the dignity of labour will 
 sound a note of irony. 
 
 In a rightly ordered society it should be possible 
 for every member to see his own function as a 
 vocation, that is, to feel that in fulfilling it he was 
 
 satisfying the highest need of his own nature and 
 169 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 promoting to the best of his power the accomplish- 
 ment of the Divine purpose. Work, however 
 menial and monotonous, if motived by love and 
 performed for the sake of an accepted end, becomes 
 a spiritual ministry : from it we gain the satisfaction 
 and happiness of freely offered service: whatever 
 sacrifice it involves will bring with it an enrichment 
 of life. For those who have the opportunity to 
 choose a career suited to their capacities and in 
 accordance with their ideals, it is possible to regard 
 their life’s work, whatever it is, as a calling: they 
 can feel that they are in their proper place in the 
 scheme of things. ‘The gravest indictment of our 
 present civilisation is based upon the plain fact that 
 vocation in this sense is possible for so few. Work 
 for the mass of mankind is apportioned not by choice 
 but by necessity, and its relation to the common 
 welfare, or indeed to any worthy purpose, is hardly 
 recognisable. Christianity demands that all men 
 should see their lives as lives of service to God’s 
 Kingdom. In many cases, even of the dullest, 
 least rewarded work, it is only lack of imagination 
 that prevents it from being universally recognised 
 asa ministry. But in many others to talk of vocation 
 is mere cant ; work is unrelieved drudgery to be done 
 because it earns money, not because it either serves 
 a great cause or expresses the personality of the - 
 worker, and it is apt to become in such cases morally 
 and spiritually degrading. It is not for us here to 
 discuss details or to consider how far certain tasks 
 must at present be inevitably mechanical and 
 uninspiring: but we must point out that in so far 
 
 as men and women cannot consider their function 
 170 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 _ in society as a vocation, the requirements of Chris- 
 tianity remain for them unfulfilled. If we realise 
 the Fatherhood of God and our relationship with 
 the rest of His family we shall be bound to resent 
 and strive to overthrow conditions which make it 
 difficult for our brethren to walk worthy of their 
 calling. So long as the advantages of civilisation 
 are obtained at the cost of stunted bodies and 
 impoverished souls, so far as our social order is 
 dependent upon what is, in fact if not in name, slave 
 labour, we cannot be content to remain indifferent 
 or inactive. : 
 
 Recognising the futility of mere emotion and the 
 need for wisdom to direct feeling and initiate action, 
 Christians will set themselves to think out what is 
 involved in the standards of value laid down by their 
 Master and to discover how these can be accepted 
 and reproduced in the organisation of corporate 
 life. It is as our passion for persons is examined and 
 studied and interpreted by our minds, and a drastic 
 revision of our standards undertaken and accepted, 
 that it can be guided into useful channels and 
 applied to the task that awaits us. Passion of itself 
 is merely explosive; if undisciplined by knowledge, 
 by the conscious effort to challenge habits of thought 
 and to reject what is inconsistent with man’s true 
 end, it is dangerous and may well be disruptive. 
 
 Here again a change of outlook will imply, and its 
 sincerity will be tested by, a change of practice. 
 If the supreme purpose in life is the service of God, 
 then we must examine anew our personal motives 
 and habits, our behaviour to others, and our ideals 
 for corporate life. The question which should 
 
 17! 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 determine, our conduct will be not “ What is best 
 for me?” nor ‘ What will the world say?” but 
 ** What is God’s will and what would He have me 
 do?” To ask it is at once to challenge not only 
 our outlook but our actions. We must either 
 dismiss it as unpleasant or unanswerable (and in 
 either case little will remain of our Christian pro- 
 fession), or we must be prepared for serious and 
 disturbing thought and highly inconvenient action. 
 There are some, indeed very many, who sincerely 
 desire and strive to accept Christ’s standards. But 
 it is idle to pretend that the mass of Christians 
 face their responsibilities fairly or consistently or 
 attempt to apply these standards to the whole field 
 of corporate life. 
 
 3. FELLOWSHIP 
 
 It is as the power of passion is connected with the 
 engine of an intelligent policy, and as this in turn 
 is made operative upon the whole mass of the 
 community, that progress will be achieved. We have 
 said that the starting-point of Christian citizenship 
 must be a radical change of soul in the Christian ; 
 but soul and conduct are so closely interrelated, that 
 the change, while not created by the influence of 
 environment, can never be independent of it. We 
 cannot reach our own fullest consecration, let alone 
 use that consecration effectually, except in fellow- 
 ship, that is, in an environment which develops the 
 social side of our nature, and relates our personal 
 contribution to the larger life of Christendom, 
 
 correcting and adjusting the individual experience 
 172 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 of the member by setting it in its place within the 
 body. Each one of us is limited and incomplete— 
 a ray in the spectrum of the many-hued light of 
 God. It is the vocation of humanity to recombine 
 the individual colours into the whiteness realised 
 in Christ, so that every shade may take its true and 
 proportionate place and the world reflect not a 
 patchwork of tints but a unity of radiance. 
 
 We have already noted how vastly the energies 
 of a group exceed the mere total of individual 
 contributions. It was to a band of men and women 
 consecrated by the agony of Calvary and reunited 
 to their Lord by the Resurrection, and. convinced 
 of His oneness with God by the Ascension, that the 
 Spirit of power came. It will be in fellowship 
 that those who have suffered and seen and under- 
 stood will be enabled to act. So long as the first 
 disciples stood alone, each united only with his Lord, 
 and each jealous of his fellows and eager for pre- 
 cedence, even their loyalty to Jesus was weak and 
 easily shattered. When once they had discovered 
 one another and the call to definite service they 
 found in a comradeship of adventure a power 
 immeasurable and irresistible. When the Church 
 sets herself to fulfil in action the commission of her 
 Master, she will not want for strength. Vzres 
 acquirit eundo. It isin taking up the task of realising 
 upon earth the gospel of the Rule of God that she 
 will also realise for all her members fullness and 
 unity of life. 
 
 And it is in such united energy that both the 
 individual and the community discover the confirma- 
 tion of their faith. Human love, so long as it 
 
 173 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 affects only the feelings and the mind, is at the mercy 
 of circumstance; it is only when the lovers test 
 their mutual passion and understanding in the sharing 
 of activities, it is only as they live and work and 
 suffer together, that the bond between them 
 becomes permanent and secure. So in Christ; we 
 may love Him in bursts of emotion, or love Him 
 by study and thought; and our faith may be real, 
 but is unstable and incomplete. We shall only 
 know Him in whom we have believed as we carry 
 our faith into the crises of our history and as we 
 reveal to ourselves its reality and His efficacy by 
 putting His precepts into practice. And so again 
 in the Church, our fellowship will be a thing of 
 sentiment and theory until we begin to act together 
 and to learn the joy and confidence of the comrade- 
 ship which has dared and struggled and achieved. 
 The weakness of our Christendom lies not so much 
 in our lack of devotion or in our intellectual doubts, 
 as in the fact that we so rarely transfer our faith from 
 a passive to an active existence. When we venture 
 to undertake practical service; our whole attitude 
 to God is altered; what was a vision and a belief 
 becomes a certainty; the theory is found to fit the 
 facts; God’s way works. Our moments of conscious 
 communion, if they stood alone, might be delusion ; 
 our reasoning, however profound, can never carry 
 complete conviction; only when we have accepted 
 the risk of acting upon our faith do we find in the 
 victories and in the defeats the certainty of His 
 presence, of His love and power, and of our unity 
 in Him. 
 
 If Christians, the great multitude in the land 
 
 174 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 who are numbered in the membership of the Church, 
 could be so filled with the Spirit as to forget the 
 things that are behind, the memories of past failure 
 and past quarrels, and realising their opportunity 
 and God’s power to press on towards perfection, 
 the perfection which can only be won by service and 
 sacrifice, their influence would be literally immense. 
 There is everywhere a desire for the Kingdom of 
 God, an abundance of good-will, a readiness for 
 adventure and self-oblation. In action, enthusiasti- 
 cally demanded and intelligently planned, lies the 
 fulfilment of our duty and the vindication of our 
 faith. A time of crisis is evidently awaiting us, a 
 time when we must judge and be judged, must 
 accept or deny. May God grant that in these 
 great days His Church, “hearing a clear call to 
 practical action, may find courage to obey.” 
 
 Herein lies the urgency of our appeal. If the 
 Christian fellowship will .but follow up with united 
 action its common emotion and its common study, 
 it may or may not save the world; at least it will 
 deliver its own soul—that is, its profession will 
 become real, its convictions immutable, its consecra- 
 tion complete. It will achieve the triumph of 
 faith when through penitence and resurrection, 
 in hazard and peril, by suffering and endurance, 
 knowing nothing save Christ and Him crucified, it 
 enters into love’s unity and love’s power and peace 
 and becomes the Church indeed. 
 
 It is, then, for a full and general acceptance of 
 all that is involved in the Christian Gospel that we 
 would plead. As individual disciples and as His 
 Church we are called to comradeship in adventure, 
 
 1%5 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 to a life of love and service, of inward peace and 
 outward struggle, of sacrifice and suffering. In the 
 light of the Cross earthly standards of value are 
 transmuted: ambition and success, anxiety and 
 disaster, the rewards and penalties of this world, 
 look tawdry and cheap beside the story of Jesus 
 Christ; and those who have found the pearl of 
 great price have not hesitated to sell all else for its 
 possession. In the cause of social righteousness 
 we believe that the first duty of the Christian and 
 of the Church is not with programmes or policies, 
 not with acquiescence or with revolution, but with 
 God: we believe that it is only the God-possessed 
 and God-inspired who can rightly and radically 
 reform themselves and the world: we believe that 
 such reform, initiated and carried out in the Spirit 
 of Jesus Christ, would bring its own commendation 
 to multitudes of men and women who are now lifting 
 blind hands above the turmoil and groping for a 
 deliverer: we believe that the time is ripe for a 
 renewed acceptance among Christians of the full 
 responsibilities of their Master’s commission to His 
 followers, that those who accept it will find His 
 strength sufficient for them, and that in the world of 
 to-day a widespread spiritual awakening will follow. 
 
 It is our immediate task to try to discover the 
 significance of the present, to try to learn and publish. 
 abroad the truths new and old which God is now 
 pressing on the attention of men, to try to carry 
 forward the tasks which God is laying on the con- 
 science of our generation. In entering upon our 
 Conference we cannot do better than recall the 
 
 noble words in which, in the midst of the confusion 
 176 
 
GOD AND PRESENT CONDUCT 
 
 and darkness of a dying world-order, St. Augustine 
 summoned all who bore the name of Christian to 
 co-operate in the Divine work of giving light to 
 the world : 
 
 “Let us not leave Thee alone to make, in the 
 secret of ‘hy knowledge, as ‘Thou didst before the 
 creation of the firmament, the division of light from 
 darkness; let the children of Thy spirit, placed 
 in their firmament, make their light shine upon the 
 earth, mark the division of night and day, and 
 announce the revolution of the times; for the old 
 order is passed and the new arises; the night is 
 spent, the day is come forth; and ‘Thou shalt crown 
 the year with Thy blessing, when Thou shalt send 
 forth labourers into Thy harvest, sown by other 
 hands than theirs, when Thou shalt send forth new 
 labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest 
 shall be not yet.” 
 
 Signed :— 
 : Watter H. Moserty (Chairman). 
 James VERNON BartieT. ® 
 Davip S. Carrns. 
 
 AL BS Day. 
 
 Lucy GARDNER. 
 
 H. L..Jacxson. 
 
 W. R. Matrsy. 
 
 Joun Oman. 
 
 Husert M. Oxon: 
 Davip PuIttites. 
 
 Ouiver C. Quick. 
 
 Cuarzes FE. Raven. 
 
 James Arex. RoBErTson. 
 177 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD 
 ELD Ar ROTC, 
 
 Evetyn UNDERHILL. 
 
 H. G. Woop. 
 
 ~ 
 
 * Note of Reservation.—It will be evident to anyone at all 
 familiar with Catholic Theology that it is not possible for me 
 to adopt several of the statements in the Report on the Nature 
 of God, or to recommend them to others as being in my judg- 
 ment sound or orthodox. At the same time, the document is a 
 valuable contribution to religious thought and calculated to help 
 large numbers less advanced to approach much nearer to the 
 spirit of Christ and Christianity. Appreciating its vital import- 
 ance in this direction, it would be exceedingly mortifying for me 
 after having collaborated most pleasantly with men and women of 
 great ability and evident sincerity to stand aloof when the results 
 of our labours are on the point of being given to the public. With 
 this reservation, I gladly wish Godspeed to the Report and to 
 the Conference.—A. F. Day, S.J. 
 
 The members of the Commission who, having 
 co-operated in the preparation of the above Report, — 
 attach their signatures, do so as individuals and in 
 no way commit the Churches or Societies of which 
 they are members. ‘The acceptance of the Report 
 by a signatory denotes agreement with the general 
 substance of the Report, but not necessarily with 
 every detail. 
 
 MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT Britain. RicHarp CLay & Sons, Ltp., 
 PRINTERS, BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. 
 

 
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