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Ri . . + o _ >. = Sa. “ SB a nl wh Pew Lp Pea te ae fae PP Fe vt Wg dt Se Peel tee tee al a yea tA PAS CAS Ae BAA RRL AS Oe Oe) x, POPS aa de . : ew pty Ce ye A a Di ee OO OOO ee MOL ee eI ee EO Io i a ” , SP CAESAR EY J A 4, CITY +>» SD to SHE ve Oe) ¥. cA PEASE AAAS AAAS) + ' Ps a ee AAA +e ree e . * v9 F > * oe, ' oy". ¢ POR i (g* \ LA 0 9S Pa ECME | ee ee oe) Ke Ae Ke Ae * AAA i » PEFR oe Aes 2 x a “xed o> + 0 & teay *~ ; a “* a 7* . y RY * - SK e+ 2+ *e4 4 > - ~ OES < Cio +3 rata ¢ SS ATS st ke > nS ° at : egy “ bb a ? a> 2 POKER RO ee eo er Fanrees ike ek oe ’ + Oe) ES SOC EE 1a ee ah ease 3% weap ned era: AS +h eee eave ay +e eb ora nes eee kee Se hb eepeeere nee CO OOS ee oe Ce Oe ee | eri tveasry CA oe . *, ‘ ot) 79 +2 2) f Theo es he bed bd SHPO eP ARSE AST RDO i ee > “ae 4 ys Ca cot ee Pe ee Rat feeners eearas aeue Sar aaae eereee ve » RO 7% > * OS re oe 24 ry os rae ee ke ee 5 ey rar eae ee ee PD PPD, Sere eee: ERAN AKT . *s IVa Dw. ‘eee Ss Cie ee: LAS MEK - eee >. yyy FFD 4 FY vereves ay BES Cee ie ‘ > * #3 Ke 4 5 AD Pas ae + +e 2 LEK ¥ ¥ yr Rey Dra ptiiy Kf > Ne i * Re BSA AAA RA en Patty ‘ ze *¢ Seon: oA x Oe ony MeN Pal i OC CaN > + + x idk es M07, ee aD Parana SheSesy ng ‘2 ¢ FOS > & > > ee On os OOO FALLS aS IIS, Efg Ke hee om OF. m8 . 74 Sie it hn SPS OS PPa es 9 Fs > > LAS 7%. * me ie R + AZ O P. a ee A ESA E », as ++ ES, Ce xO SEES CX) eee ae 6 a OF eG Ae POF RSS LAS 6 SCESLS LA AA RX) oe > at be ol A es ARR Ke 6s eo CO 2 ” eee + * +o 44 e+e Pe ead +e +2 2 +2 > + oe ¥ .) eae iad “iC « a vo» +> Ply ¥, +e Se? Very < eis 7 o +595 vo ae LAK: ats aaa . ~ See *. rae ate *” = r tentes ee ay) -” Se > Ae a ~ “ ie fol pK LS a rays fe Pe IM mY aS, >, nafia? ? OOOCe Oe en. aS hee we hah x a, im +>, 2 DOG Library of Che Theological Seminary PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY | C=) PRESENTED BY Bret O. sPos Pike, Granville Ross, b. 1656: The divine drama THE DIVINE DRAMA CS ore ent mre WeHEy IDIRYAINBS THE MANIFESTATION OF GOD IN THE UNIVERSE AN INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY isn’ GRANV TEER OSS PIKE “ Gill te all attain... unto a full-groom man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ ”’ Nefy Bork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltp. 1899 All rights reserved CopyRIGHT, 1898, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped September, 1898. Reprinted March, 1899. Norwood Yress J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. Go the Glory of Gov Che Miriter’s prayer Thou, © Father, tha gabest the bisthle light as the first: born of thy creation, and didst pour tnta man the tntellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and gobern this work which, coming from thy goodness, returneth to thy glory. Thou, after thou hadst tebiewed the tuorks which thy hands had made, beheldst that eberuthing fas good, and thou didst rest toith complacency in them. Wut man, reflecting on the works which he had made, sat that all was banity and bevation of spirit, and could by ng means acqutesce tn them. CMherefore if toe labor in thy works with the stoeat of our brows, thou foilt make us partakers of thy Siston and thy sab- bath. Cle humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly tn us; and that thou, by our hands, and algo by the hands of , others, on {hom thou shalt bestotsy the same spirit, fotlt please to congeo a largess of net alms to thy family of mankind. Chese things toc connnend to tho eberlasting lobe, by our Jesus, thy Christ, God with us. Amen. | Hrancts Bacon. i GD ae - coal in iF : + ea er i ~ a _ ne mA. 2 a ; , ‘ ~ : ae . a ‘ a x » 7 y» ’ atten I oe re ia ae ee ' ail a Os. ee = 4 “~, = + 2) ae es) rs : ‘fot i aaah “ +— im yy, ih 5 ur ame Gh ¥. bel flab lea cae y * MNO PIN eb ib ERs Oye bila Rb AD ER Dear READER. — A constantly expanding world — physi- cal, historical, social, political —is demanding new thought- forms of a different pattern and larger mould. Even more necessary than a new statement is a spirit willing to receive the revelation of God however made. The worst infidelity is to be afraid for the truth. When the reconstruction now going on is completed, it will be found that in the change of view-point nothing has been lost to religious faith, but that all the great spiritual realities that are so dear to the devout heart have been enlarged and enriched correspondingly with the grander conceptions upon which they rest. A system of thought, based upon the Divine Immanency, and finding in God’s progressive manifestation of himself the method by which the world and all that in tt ts has come to be, interprets God’s relations to man and the rela- tions of men to each other in the light of these truths. The entire sweep of life is brought under its sway, and theology becomes social and universal instead of individual only —a doctrine of society no less than a doctrine of God. The following pages are an attempt to adjust these new lines to the old landmarks. Doubtless this is not yet that statement of religion which Emerson declared would make scepticism ridiculous; yet its general congruity with the 1x x AN OPEN LETTER TO THE READER conclusions of special students in widely differing fields is sufficient evidence that in this direction truth lies, and that the substantial soundness of the view here set forth has broad recognition among scholars. Foot-notes and references are omitted, not through dog- matic self-sufficiency, but because, to those accustomed to do their own thinking, clear statement is the only authority needed. Where this fails to carry conviction, no citation of weighty names materially adds to its persuasiveness. To your candid sympathy with the author’s aim he sub- mits this effort to “hold the mirror up to nature” and reflect the method of the Immanent God’s gradual unfolding in the Drama of Life. Sincerely, GRANVILLE ROSS PIKE. CHICAGO, February 12, 1898. SECTION iF Iie Ill. LV VIII. . Uniformity of God’s Will a Pledge and a Forecast . GON EEN TS IN THE BEGINNING — GOD CHAPTER I PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL BEING The Idea of God Recognition of God in the Universe The Method of God’s Manifestation : Man’s Knowledge of God beginning from himself CHAPTER Ii PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL SPIRIT Universal Being Spiritual . Increasing Manifestation of Spirit WV EL: The Spirit manifested as One . CHAPTER III PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL WILL The Being of God the Law of his Manifestation Love determining the Unfolding of God’s Will 5a 14 17 23 26 30 xii CONTENTS THE SONS OF GOD CHAPTER WV: MANIFESTATION OF THE SONS OF GOD SECTION PAGE XI. Man’s Advent in Accord with Universal Law . 37 XII. The Gradual Ascent toward Man . : - 30 XIII. The Manifestation of the Sons of God. sy hr CHAPTER AV GOD NOT WITHOUT WITNESS IN ANY NATION XIV. Man’s Earthly Life Educative . é eae pls) XV. God’s Progressive Manifestation among the Nations : : 2 : yon ey: CHAPTER VI GOD COMING TO HIS OWN XVI. The Fulness of the Godhead . ; : SG XVII. One Mediator, himself Man ; ; : NOs XVIII. One with the Father . : ; ; ‘ Tes XIX. Inthe Fulness of Time . ‘ : . Of sert CHAPREER Vil His OWN RECEIVING HIM NOT XX. Their Thoughts accusing them . : : ee fs) XXI. Now is the Judgment of this World . : Se: XXII. Whatsoever a Man Soweth : ‘ (4389 XXII. They will not Come that They may have Life . 94 SECTION XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. XXXVI. XXXVII. XXXVIII. XXXIX. AL: CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII As MANY AS RECEIVED HIM The Sons demanding their Portion The Sons in a Far Country The Sons beginning to be in Want The Sons turning to the Father The Sons met by the Father . The Sons restored by the Father THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAPTER IX Our FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN God Man’s Dwelling-place in all Generations . Have we not All one Father? . All we are Brethren : The Commonwealth of Spirit . CHAPTER HALLOWED BE THY NAME Man’s Approach to God through Personality . Man’s Inspiration through Communion with God . i : : ; : The Bible a Reflection of God’s Communion with Men . ‘ 3 : The Creed a Report of Progress CHAPTER XI Tuy KINGDOM COME The Kingdom of the Father in its Manifestation The Kingdom of the Father in its Realization The Kingdom of Man at Hand xili PAGE Io! 103 104 106 IIO 118 138 168 173 184 Xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER XII THY WILL BE DONE, AS IN HEAVEN, SO ON SECTION > UE 2G TAGE XLII. Harmony with God’s Will Re Test of Social XLIV. 2LV. pd ELE. AEV Ls ALVIII. LLAG EARTH God’s Will the Rule of Conduct Conformity to God’s Will the Measure of Progress Ideals CHAPTER. Ait GIVE US THIS DAY ouR DAILY BREAD The Cry for Bread . . Bread and to Spare Give ye them to Eat To every Man his Work. The Laborer Worthy of his Hire He that will not Work, neither shall he Eat CHAPTER: sky FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS AS WE HAVE FORGIVEN OUR DEBTORS - Our Common Debt of Knowledge . . The Spirit of Stewardship . The Stewardship of Property . Dil. The Stewardship of Personality PAGE 1S i 200 209 221 223 228 249 257 269 CONTENTS XV CHAPTER XV BRING US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL SECTION PAGE LIV. Society delivering its Members from Temptation . 304 LV. Society delivering its Members from Evil . Se A LVI. Society delivered from Evil : P : aig GODSALE TIN ALL CHAPTER XVI GOD FILLING ALL IN ALL LVII. All Worlds One in the Being of God . : ane vie, LVIII. This Earth-Drama continued on Another Stage . 332 LIX. This Mortal putting on Immortality . : | Sets CHAPTER XVII GOD WORKING ALL IN ALL LX. Social Organization perfected ina Future State . 345 LXI. After the Power of an Endless Life. ; ACh, CHAPTER XVIII GOD BECOME ALL IN ALL LXII. Man’s End attained in God Sree : 1350 LXIII. What God hath Prepared . : ; : . 360 PETE eee ee ee (7 te ee YG GOR IN THE BEGINNING—GOD CHAPTER I PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL BEING I. The Idea of God Gop is the basis of existence and of thought. The idea of God is itself creative. As God in reality gives form and substance to the actual universe, so God in thought gives form and character to man’s apprehen- sion of that universe. This constructive power of the idea of God works effectually in shaping all theologies and philosophies, whether avowedly theistic or not. Under this compre- hensive notion each system gathers into one definite conception the inner substance and generative force of existence in its totality. All metaphysics returns at last to him who is conceived as absolute being; all physical science grounds itself ultimately in him who is conceived as absolute force; all moral science derives its authority from him who is conceived as absolute good. Thus all knowledge of the objective world, as well as all activities of the human mind, are both organized by and included in the idea of God. Inevitably, the meaning of the term “God” has changed from age to age and has enlarged with the increase of man’s ability to grasp the objects of his thought in a single conception. The closing quarter of the nineteenth century has marked the entrance of 3 4 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. two great principles, not wholly new, but new in their scope and application, into the interpretation of the idea of God. The first, and most revolutionary of these, relates to the being of God. It is the theory of the Divine Immanence. The profoundest philosophy of the day accords with Lessing’s conclusion. “I can no longer,” he said to Jacobi, “be satisfied with the orthodox conception of a God out of the world.” The thought of an absentee creator, dwelling at a . “distance inexpressible By numbers that have name,” is being replaced by the notion of an infinite energy resident within the universe of realities, and by its operations producing universal phenomena. In the world thus conceived there is nothing real but mind, no force but spirit, no independent existence but God. II. Recognition of God in the Universe Former views of God and the universe as two dis- tinct existences are outgrown. Physical and spiritual laws and forces so interact and pass into each other that we can no longer hold spirit and matter to be separate spheres. There is one infinite being, mani- fested in these diverse forms. Beneath them all subsists an all-embracing unity binding them to- gether in harmony. The activities continually dis- played in the sensible world have their foundation in modifications of that Infinite in which they are comprehended. For the first time human thought has attained an adequate theory of the universe. This generalization completes that subordination of the parts to the unity I RECOGNITION OF GOD IN THE UNIVERSE 5 of the whole toward which human knowledge has from the first been tending. It transforms the cosmos into a real wzzverse, each part of which is related to every other part. Because constituted in this basal and general unity, the most complicated conditions and events supplement and act upon each other according to invariable law, and God is regarded not as apart from the universe but as comprising its vital essence. To this immanency of God all intelligibility in finite things is to be traced. Since we cannot, in actual consciousness, get back of absolute beginning to wit- ness the making of reality or to discover its creator, only. through this existent universe as eternally grounded in God shall we find him who is here externalized. All things exist as part of the process of his revealing, and every spirit of man, every flower, every atom of matter, is an open door into the presence of a God at hand and not afar off. At the same time, identifying the universe with the manifestation of Deity, a product thrown up as it were into visibility in the process of that manifesta- tion, gives no occasion to circumscribe the back- ground of infinite being by even this illimitable reve- lation. Though the totality of phenomena arises from God’s passing into activity, it does not exhaust him. The whole of God is never disclosed. That only is true monotheism, transcending every deistic and pantheistic limitation alike, which contemplates God as neither absorbed in the universe nor ex- cluded from it, but consciously comprehending the whole within himself as the unfolding of his own thoughts and energies. Modern science catches up 6 IN THE BEGINNING — GOD CHAP. the ancient strain of Hildebert’s hymn and sings of God as :— “ Above all things, below all things ; Around all things, within all things; Within all, but not shut in; Around all, but not shut out; Above all, as the Ruler; Below all, as the Sustainer ; Around all, as all-embracing Protection ; Within all, as the Fulness of Life.” III. The Method of God’s Manifestation The second interpretative principle which is power- fully modifying our views of God refers to the method of his manifestation. The mother-thought of many of the ideas which mark off the modern from the ancient world is the changed understanding of the process by which the universe has reached its present stage. Until quite recent years the prevalent concep- tion of creation was that to which Milton has lent the transforming charm of the highest poetic genius. It is but lately that men have begun to inquire more par- ticularly what meaning lay hidden under that ancient symbol, God spake and it was done. As soon as an organic quality was found traceable through every department of the divine activity, it became clear that it was no longer a sufficient explanation of the way in which things have come into being to say of “th’ omnific Word” that . “in his hand He took the golden compasses prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things. One foot he centred, and the other turn’d I THE METHOD OF GOD’S MANIFESTATION ‘4 Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O world, Thus God the Heav’n created, thus the Earth, Matter unformed and void.” In the details of a universe thus outlined the same swift results would naturally follow the creative fiat. The heavenly bodies shine forth at the instant of command. On earth “Immediately the mountains huge appear Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave Into the clouds.” The plants in their varied species arise in full flower, and the trees spring forth laden with fruit. The fer- tile earth - “teemed at a birth Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, Limb’d and full grown.” A widely different idea now prevails. An inorganic mass of observations has been converted into a sys- tematic reading of the world-drama by finding that study of causes and agencies is not a dissection, but a vivisection. The processes of world-building which have produced the earth are seen to be still going on; the crust of the earth itself is continuously form- ing and re-forming in obedience to the same laws that fashioned it originally ; and with the discovery that the living matter on earth yields allegiance to the same constructive principle there was completed the mighty chain from nebulez to man. Following man’s own history through a longer per- spective, it is seen that the influences which have 8 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP, shaped his various institutions are still active. As God did not turn creation off a finished product, like a vase from the wheel of a potter, neither has man deliberately constructed and held in finished form his social life, his laws, his government, his philosophy, or his religion. These things are not made, but grow. The organic structure of the universe is all-embracing. This is the idea of development which, because it binds into one consistent whole all that has been, that is, or shall be in human experience or relations, is deter- mining modern thought. It is evident that no mere change in phraseology can expand the earlier partial views of religious truth to the enlarged requirements of this idea. There must be a fearless change of view-point and a bold expansion of religious conceptions till they com- prehend the whole of human thinking, and replace the former notion of instantaneous creation with the theory of a continuous production which, never fin- ished, yet always corresponds in its progress with the divine purpose. The universe has not yet arrived at its goal, but it is upon the road, and advancing at a rate and in a direction satisfactory to him in whom at once the whole and all its parts live and move and have their being. This view finds a true continuity of the several parts in objective reality, instead of a merely subjec- tive unity in the divine mind. In this conception of God, as slowly evolving the particular forms of phe- nomenal existence from the plenitude of his own being, the whole process is seen to move forward in the divine drama of a universe unfolding from, yet toward, himself. There is thus obtained not only the I MAN’S KNOWLEDGE OF GOD A, harmony which reason requires in the elements of each section of the cosmic history but, what is even more important, the successive order of these periods is firmly knit into one indissoluble whole. IV. Man’s Knowledge of God beginning from Himself Out of these changed views of God’s being, and the process by which all things are produced, grows also a new method of apprehension, a different under- standing of the way in which God may be known. In that ancient epic of the soul, Job cries out for God: O that I knew where I might find him! Be- hold, I go forward but he is not here; and backward, but [ cannot discern him. The spiritual history of the race is the history of humanity’s search for an unrecognized God; its advance measures the degree to which it has found him. In the midst of a cosmos that constitutes one inter-related whole, man occupies a unique place. Self-conscious, self-reflecting, self-objectifying, man everywhere touches yet distinguishes himself from a phenomenal universe which gradually becomes re- vealed to him. Perception by finite minds of that world as a manifold existing in unity implies a self- determining mind through whose unifying action it thus exists as a connected whole. This unity as it exists for the eternal consciousness is reproduced for finite minds in the process of their conceiving it as thus related. In projecting its cosmic thoughts into the form of the outer world thus perceptible, the eternal spirit gives these thoughts a realization objec- tive to itself in the thoughts of these finite spirits. 10 IN THE BEGINNING—GOD CHAP. These perceptions, independent on itself, given to the finite spirit in the self-objectifying of the infinite, constitute the reality of a finite spirit in a world con- sisting wholly of intellectual relations. Itself a repro- duction of the infinite mind, which begets it in the very course of realizing its universal purpose, it is impossible for the human mind not to seek to connect its present life with this external existence by some comprehensive view of the past and the future. A conviction of his participation in that being, whose objectified modes are the reality of the universe, comes to man in response to his mind’s need of some unifying conception, and presents itself as upon the whole the most satisfactory explanation of his being and doing that which he knows himself to be and to do.a In the beginning, therefore, the apprehension of God is subjective. The human mind can know nothing in immediate consciousness beyond its own being and states. But God, as the ground of our being and the eternal consciousness whose reality is continuously individualizing itself in our minds, is in truth the very “light of all our seeing,’ and in our consciousness of ourselves we are also conscious of God. Hence, while in the physical realm and in history we know only God’s manifestations, in know- ing him as manifested in ourselves we know his essence also, and we interpret him by our highest category of thought, and are persuaded that while he may be more, he certainly is not less personal and spiritual than ourselves. The idea of God thus becomes a necessary factor of our consciousness, because thus only do we attain to that unity of I MAN’S KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 11 conception, embracing both our knowledge of our- selves and of the world, which our reason by its very nature is compelled to seek. Man is able to comprehend this entire manifesta- tion because he finds all its converging lines uniting in himself. In his own consciousness which, by its comprehensive activity, recognizes and unites together these divergent relations, he sees himself included in them. He finds the different states and motions of his own spirit other and nobler than they in them- selves would be, because in them energizes and in a measure is realized that infinite spirit which therein finds partial expression. Identified through his body with both animate and inanimate forms in lower stages of existence, man is associated, to the remotest beginnings, with those mighty forces and processes that culminate in his physical constitution. He finds himself also no less closely allied intellectually with an infinitely grander set of potencies that environ his spirit. No better expression of this twofold relation can be given than it received in that classic description by Emanuel Kant, a century ago: “Two things fill my soul with an admiration and a veneration, ever new and ever increasing: the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me. I am not com- pelled to look for these two grand sights through the covering of a mysterious obscurity, nor to ascertain them vaguely through an infinite distance. I con- template them immediately before me; they are bound to the very consciousness of my being. The one, the visible heaven, begins at the very point of the universe where I am, and widens around me in 12 IN THE BEGINNING — GOD CHAP. circles of worlds, in systems of systems, up to the infinitude of spaces and of times in which these worlds are situated. The other, the moral law, equally starts from my invisible self ; it places me in the midst of the intellectual universe, that other infinitude with which my personality stands in a necessary relation.” The meaning of his connection with this universal order has been to man the pivotal point about which all forms of revelation have turned. His questionings on these points invest with intense personal concern the whole cycle of existence. In the past lie its hidden sources; the present is heavy with its re- sponsibilities ; the future conceals its anticipated compensations. Revelation were useless unless man, “ Self-knowing, and from thence Magnanimous to correspond with heaven,” were able to recognize its adaptation to the fulfilment of his nature. So far as congruous with it, the finite is of necessity capable of the infinite. Through this vital relation of the individual and the universe the possibilities of revelation are immeasurable, and the association of man as personal spirit with the under- lying divine reason becomes continuously more con- scious and intimate. Thus man’s apprehension returns upon a backward path from the newest to the old. Before man was, the cosmos was; before the cosmos, that from which the cosmos springs. The order of existence is God, world, man; the order of human discovery is self, world, God. This one inestimable service is rendered the cause of true religion by that scientific hypothesis which we have been following. It has given us just I MAN’S KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 13 that vital and reasoned concept of God of which we stood in need, and in its light God and his revelation of himself cease to be antiques. God spake to our fathers yesterday ; he speaks to us to-day. He is not a fact of history, which may be stated and catalogued once for all, but a living person with whom every man stands in personal relation. Wherefore, a realization of God is the first necessity of each generation in order to determine what man himself is, and is to*do and to be. Professor Tyndall on the summit of the Matterhorn, asking whether his thought as it ran back to the star-dust thus returned to its primeval home, is a universal type of mankind in his recognition of personal responsibility in these mysterious problems of being ; for all science and philosophy and theology are but the endeavor of the human mind, finding itself in a world already existing, to follow back the process of becoming, until it can correlate the outer world of fact with the inner world of experience. CHAPTER “fi PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL SPIRIT V. Universal Being Spiritual THE particular service rendered the requirements of clear thought by this idea of an immanent God is that it presents the cosmos to our apprehension as the direct forthputting in continuous outflow of the divine energy. Thus the task at which Greek philosophy labored so long, and not without partial success, the spiritualization of the universe, has been at last ac- complished. But the Christian philosophy is much profounder than the Greek. The earlier thought which set itself to refute the notion of the universe, as an emanation or necessary product of the divine essence, opposed that view with the theory that the universe resulted from a free act of will realizing itself in time as a fact — factwm— something done, once for all. The newer thinking, both Christian and non-Christian, has advanced to a stronger position. Acceptance of the theory that the things that are have come to be by gradual development has been followed by a general conviction that the only suffi- cient explanation of this process is, that nature is the manifestation of God in the course of attaining his ends, or, as Augustine declares, The order of nature is the will of God — Dei voluntas est rerum natura. 14 CHAP. II UNIVERSAL BEING SPIRITUAL 15 In this phenomenal universe, therefore, the great hidden Life becomes visible in ¢he things that do appear. The universe is God visualized. Creation is a vital and continuous process. The universe is the utterance of God himself in the process of his self-revelation. It is the product, as well as the process, of the manifestation of God. In its entirety it is the immediate and continuous expression of himself. He is revealed in its unfolding, and not until the realization of his purpose is complete will he be completely revealed. That conception of God which sees in him the totality of causation, and in the visible frame of things the result of his ascending manifestation, gives the firmest possible basis for teleology. God’s differentiating himself by self-begotten impulse into a myriad-fold reality is the highest possible manifesta- tion of creative energy and the sublimest conceivable act of intelligence. The nature and succession of the different orders give convincing proof that their progressing hosts have been so marshalled in wisdom, that the highest comes to its supremacy by right of divine appointment. Development is the result of no bare formulative force, but of prescribed changes directed to a definite end. It is the process by which the divine ideas continually struggle to new birth in ° ever higher forms, in. accordance with laws which express the intent of the primal reason. Men never doubt that the physical world will return an intelligi- ble answer to any intelligent question. On this con- viction rests the long array of special sciences and investigations into natural phenomena. The intention of the immanent God is natural law. 16 IN THE BEGINNING—GOD CHAP. Established thus in the eternal spirit as its produc- tive ground, the universe exists only as modes of the divine activity. Its author abides within it as its animating and directing spirit. In its entirety it is flexible to his will, and through this indwelling there is possible the steady outworking of his purpose; at each successive stage it expresses his meaning, all discords and seeming contradictions being taken up into his perfect plan in such a way as still to con- tribute each its portion to the manifestation of the One in his fulness. By this conception the intellect is emancipated from that dualism which has held it so long in bond- age to the idea of a Creator apart from a creature largely unresponsive, if not antagonistic, to himself. Besides this negative result, it has won also the rich inheritance of belief in a God, who is not a mechani- cian controlling his creation from afar, but is himself immanent in that creation, which is no more than the living “ garment thou seest him by.” Acceptance of this idea, that one universal being constitutes the form and substance of the cosmic whole, leads inevitably on to greater consequences. It is impossible to consider ourselves, together with all beneath us, as brought into being in the progres- sive manifestation of the Unconditioned, and still regard it as also the Unconscious. Tracing back the various branchings of this manifold reality, all those individual forms are found to be but phenomena, which have their ultimate source in that original entity whose changes and movements give rise to these fleeing shapes through which it becomes cogni- zable by finite minds. These changes and movements, II INCREASING MANIFESTATION OF SPIRIT 17 since they produce man, cannot be thought to be necessitated, but self-determined and conscious. Self- motivation and conscious unity as the basis of chang- ing states are functions of spirit only. The reflective mind, however, is not content with this vague gen- eralization. It is impelled to lift this abstract con- clusion into specification of spiritual qualities, using itself as the measuring rod by which to reduce these infinite dimensions to terms within human compre- hension. From the vantage ground of his own per- sonality, man is able to trace the process of God’s self-revelation in the visible universe. VI. Increasing Manifestation of Spirit No more impressive exhibit can be made than that chronological arrangement which shows the advance in a single art, or the evolution of a particular species from crude beginnings to perfection. Imagination can scarcely picture the awe-inspiring panorama that should display the gradual emergence and slow pro- cession of successive life-forms before the eyes of one who could watch them from the beginning. All these have reached their various stages of being through the progressive development of that imma- nent causative reality which we call God. Science finds its province in tracing the progress of this world- drama, as it has unfolded in the life-history of the world. Through the slow preparation of the physical frame of earth for bringing forth the lowest forms of life, through the amcebe and mollusks, through fishes, reptiles, mammals, there is marked ascent and a fuller manifestation of spirit. In the protozoa the higher C 18 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. attributes of God have begun, using Boehme’s apt expression, ‘to grow structural.’”’ He continues to unfold himself in ever higher forms, in an ever as- cending scale, disclosing consciousness in nature, intelligence in animal life, reason and moral qualities in humanity, till ultimately he is fully disclosed in manhood perfected. With the advent of man in this ascending scale, God’s true self-expression first comes forth from the silence of inarticulate phenomena, and in the moral life of humanity spirit speaks with spirit. In the production of this spirit, real creation takes place for the first time in the process of God’s realizing himself in the world. In the human spirit God has so fully objectified his own being that man no longer exists solely as a mode of the divine mind, but has passed beyond the phenomenal and become himself a substance, a thinking being, and thus reached an actual, though relative, independence. Man’s spirit is the eternal consciousness under temporal and organic limitations, and by gradual increase in the content of its own consciousness it continuously approximates to the parent spirit. This oneness with God is the ground of all likeness to him which man is realizing in experience. Because of this, God can speak to man and man can answer. When God calls to high spiritual attainment, man can respond to the call by attaining. The human qualities which God reveals in himself, and the god- like qualities which he develops in man, are alike explicable not only, but natural if man’s spirit re- sults from a gradual manifestation of God as univer- sal spirit. I THE SPIRIT MANIFESTED AS ONE 19 VII. The Spirit manifested as One The conception of the universe as resulting from the revelation of God, who manifests himself more and more as spirit, must necessarily modify many important theological tenets. Among these is that metaphysical abstraction which finds an _ eternal necessity for three equal persons within one God- head. Recognition of a threefold root of reality is deeply ingrained in human thought. That triplicity which inheres in the most abstract unity becomes more clearly manifest in larger wholes. So fundamental have the clearest thinkers ever found this distinction, that to them the universe has seemed but the explica- tion of a great rule of three. They have found the primal reason manifested always according to three inseparable laws: The Absolute is conceived as unre- lated; the unrelated, moved by internal impulse, mani- fests itself as the relative ; a correlation between the absolute and the related furnishes the necessary con- dition of their being realized through each other. This general truth runs as a regulative principle through the universe as actualized. God comes nearer and nearer to us through increasing revela- tion. The lines of his approach are fixed by his final purpose, —a purpose conceived with such defi- niteness that the ever-growing reality of the uni- verse springs up along his pathway to that goal; the whole made orderly and sublime in its development by subjection to an unvarying reign of law. This is a glorious eniargement of the old idea of the Trinity. That impulse which forbade the One to 20 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP, abide alone, rightly interpreted, is seen to be the im- pulse of Living Love to share the felicity of his own nature with unnumbered multitudes who shall be in- dividualized from his own substance that these may be his children evermore. Apprehending God in this form supplies just that want of the soul to which the long-standing doctrine of the trinity bears such eloquent witness, a want which it could supply, how- ever, only at the expense of clearly defined ideas. It was, however, a need deep as the springs of human nature which it was sought to satisfy in this way. As it was impossible not to feel that the revela- tions of any given moment must be inseparably con- nected, through both the past and the future, with the whole economy of the universe, so on the other hand there could be nothing independent of that reve- lation. The historical Christ was accordingly con- ceived as necessarily one in eternity with God; and that regulative providence by which evidence of a spiritual presence became increasingly clear was hypostasized as a power working in man for his redemption, and existing from the beginning as a necessary factor of the divine being. In this dog- matic form, however, most believers have regarded this doctrine as little better than an incomprehensi- ble enigma, which to confess not to be able to under- stand betokens a meritorious humility. This confusion of mind springs from the attempt to hold as an article of faith a teaching absolutely at variance with human reason. The history of thought has scarcely a less worthy page than that on which is written the shifts and evasions and subterfuges by which men have endeavored to escape the plain con- II THE SPIRIT MANIFESTED AS ONE 21 sequences of trying to give to words in theology a meaning the reverse of that which they bore in ordi- nary life. It is a great relief to faith to have a view of God which shall suggest, not the consenting activ- ity of three Gods, but the threefold relationship of one God who loves us as a Father, who manifests himself among us as a Brother, whose Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are the sons of God, —a trinity consisting not of three personalities, in the common acceptation of that word, but in the personal © revelation of one God in a threefold unfolding. The triumph of monotheism is at last complete. The diverse deities of the unscientific ages have gradually been forced to abdicate. Last to yield has been the notion of the gods of good and evil contend- ing with doubtful issue for the mastery. The modern theory of the universe, as originating in the self- revelation of God, necessarily removes the premises from which such interpretations spring. Just as we have found the idea of God as universal being to exclude the earlier conception of dualism in mind and matter, so the idea of God as universal spirit excludes the earlier conception of the dualism of God and evil spirits. : The malignant form of an arch-spirit of evil, who has cast his baleful shadow over the human mind from the beginning, and who, until quite recently, has been an awful terror, freezing the pulses and paralyzing the will of mankind, is forced to yield his sceptre and betake himself to the congenial regions of “chaos and old night.” The spirit of God, it is at last seen, has not to strive with a spirit of evil so universal, so subtle, so powerful, as always to hinder and often 22 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. II to thwart the divine effort for human welfare ; but instead has but the slowness of moral growth in humanity, and the wilfulness of souls ignorant of their true good with which to contend. The new concep- tion of God as himself the universe is a proclamation of emancipation from the powers of Satan; it is a declaration that God is always man’s friend, it is also a notice that for his own sinfulness man is himself responsible. The Devil is no more. CHAPTER GLE PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF GOD AS UNIVERSAL WILL VIII. The Being of God the Law of His Manifestation THE eternal spirit, whose being and manifestation constitute universal substance and form, realizes itself in accordance with the self-ordered laws of its own being. In our search backward for what has been, we may expect to find no blind impulse confusing the record with the aimlessness of misrule, but a clear aim and steady pressing forward along well- defined lines of intention. Any satisfactory theory of the universe must give account in an intelligible way of the relation which the archetypal thought sustains to its efficient realization. Religious belief agrees with philosophical idealism, that the sum total of things exist and are such as they are by the will of God, and to this will they owe their significance and position in the universal plan. To say, however, that reality itself is the produc- tion of the divine will is not to accept the popular notion that the existent has been spoken into being by one creative word of God. It is not a specific act of realization to which our conclusions have brought us, but rather a continuous process in which his pri- mal will unfolds into individual forms and objecti- fies itself in a consistent whole. Will is not simply 23 24 IN THE BEGINNING—GOD CHAP. the executive faculty of mind, nor merely the abstract power of self-initiated choice. The act of willing is an expression of the essential nature of the one who wills. The will itself is the living ground of all spiritual faculties, and their activity is conditioned solely by the nature of the being to whom they per- tain. The person willing puts himself into what is willed, whether it be that which exists in eternal reality, or awaits for its realization its proper place in an unfolding sequence. The wide universe of reality has in its origin a cause sufficient to give rise and value to all its subordinate realities, inasmuch as it is no mere mechanical product, but the continuous expression of the inexhaustible will of God. His being is the inner substance of all external manifesta- tion, and while this manifestation is not the measure of the boundless life behind it, yet the infinitude of that life is the assurance of the enduring nature of this presentation of himself. What the world is, it is because God is what he is. It embodies the actual character of the free, personal, eternal spirit, whose intrinsic nature here shows forth its true quality and manifests itself in strict accord with laws which the absolute being itself furnishes. It is a fruitful truth that God, in carrying for- ward this realization of himself, works along lines of self-limitation, grounded indeed in his own essential character, but determined in their application by the ultimate object of such personal unfolding. The being of God is the Constitution of the universe. All his volitions are in harmony with that. He has put into these all law that is needed for government. III THE LAW OF HIS MANIFESTATION 25 He has put himself into the regulative principles of his administration. That unity and order of nature, which science so delights to discover and declare, is but ‘thinking God’s thoughts after him,” as Kepler said, and tracing beneath superficial fluctuations the well-defined lines of purpose within which the whole moves. These compose that framework of laws which appear as there is occasion and bridge the gulf between the purposive intent and the accomplished result. The entire sum and relationships of the universe are none other than the condition under which the universal will is realizing itself. Each event finds its reason and character in its relation to this ultimate source ; for in these events is manifested the inner life of the spirit which produces the results visible in the world’s history. Only in obedience to a carefully wrought plan has the adjustment and re- adjustment of its various elements moved steadily forward toward its appointed end, until the very regularity of the process has led some to think of the unity of nature as of something apart from mind, and to hail the Reign of Law as though by some aimless, unintelligent principle had this harmony and consent been brought about. Such imperfect apprehension is perhaps to be expected as a reaction from conceptions of the divine method which saw him actually putting forth a crea- tive hand to shape the crude materials of chaos into a cosmos of symmetry and beauty. Even that subtler vision, which beholds universal nature rearing its stately forms in obedience to the breath of the Almighty who calls them into being with an omnipo- 26 IN THE BEGINNING—GOD CHAP. tent word, leads often to the same error. The under- standing that what we have here is not creation out of nothing, nor even the shaping of material previ- ously existing separate from God, but an actual emerging of the hidden Deity into visibility, makes it impossible to doubt that not without clearly defined purpose and a consideration of means to ends has this universe become what it is. In this view the elementary conception of a large portion of the Christian Church, that all things are and occur in obedience to the decree of God, is enor- mously expanded and ennobled at the same time that it is established upon impregnable foundations of scientific induction. The doctrine of divine decrees is here removed from its arbitrary position and from its one-sided character as an explanation of the ground of God’s workings into the broader, and at the same time tenderer, notion of the means by which the being of God himself becomes embodied in the products of his gracious intention. It is simply the recognition that in an intelligent order nothing can come to pass without the divine foreknowledge and intent. The limitation of that application to the moral relations of man to God has given a harshness to one branch to modern theology which this view softens even while it extends. IX. Uniformity of God’s Will a Pledge and a Forecast This widespread and fundamental doctrine of the Divine Sovereignty, harsh and pulseless as it has too often been made to appear, becomes to a degree sur- passing all that its most ardent adherent of earlier days ever dreamed, a doctrine of hope and a vision III GOD’S WILL A PLEDGE AND A FORECAST 27 of delight ; for is not this the promise and founda- tion of all progress, the sure ground of prophecy that the present process shall culminate in a glory and perfection which has yet had but dim foreshadowing ? We have had this thought as a metaphysical neces- sity of the world-order; we have had it as the theo- logical necessity of the moral order of the world. In these departments it has been helpful and full of strength. But now we have it in the full and broader meaning which comprehends the theological and metaphysical, and is at the same time the basis of that universal correlation of forces which in its grad- ual disclosure is making manifest the telic aim of the entire creative unfolding, the subordination of all things to the divine will and purpose. Such is our confidence in the unbroken continuity of those laws which control the world-process that though we see them emerge from the wide and un- known region of obscurity which shrouds the earliest recollections of the races, as well as the beginnings of each individual life, yet are we persuaded that before they came into our view they were the same as we find them to be wherever we can trace them. They have moulded life in those plastic periods and made it what it now is; their changeless continuance as the expression of the ultimate will gives confidence that they mould the present life for a better future. Thus the uniformity of nature is eloquent of the unshaken purpose and continuous favor of God far more than would be any interference with its ap- pointed order in man’s behalf. Only because we are persuaded of a settled order are we courageous to undertake or bold to trust. If the established course 28 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. is interrupted for one it may be for all, and chaos were soon come again. Man has no better friend than the invariability of God. Without this no science would be possible, nor the moral character that springs from the necessity of adapting oneself to fixed conditions. Only thus can a sense of secu- rity come, when man realizes that he 1s not the play- thing of blind chance, but the subject of an empire whose laws change not. The nobler our conception of God, the less desire have we for the capricious interruption of his pre- determined order for our sakes, assured as we are that the existing order has been appointed as the means for securing our highest good. We shall learn to recognize his mighty power in the orderly march of events, moral as well as physical, toward a worthy good, rather than in the petty manifestations of his authority over nature by breaking its regular flow. The constancy of the divine laws, so far as they lie within human ken, furnishes our only means of fore- casting the future. From the character of the will and the direction of its energy revealed in what has been, we can predict with some assurance what is the final goal. That obscurity which, in spite of increasing insight into the modes of God’s manifestation, still rests to a degree over all that is to come, results entirely from the partial nature of our knowledge. An insight able to pierce beneath the bewildering variety of phenomena to the inner law upon which their mutual relations and significance depend would disclose the end to which it is directed; for these universal facts become such only as expressing an essential phase II GOD’S WILL A PLEDGE AND A FORECAST 29 of that universal activity which imparts meaning and place to them from its own inherent consist- ency. As a rational being, man, bridging with hypothesis the chasms in knowledge, must endeavor to trace for his own satisfaction the sequence of events, and especially the fundamental reason of the world, in order to discover his own nature and destiny. The rising of the questions Whence are we? and Whither are we bound ? marks the horizon between the night of brute contentment and the dawning day of man’s inquiring spirit. To fill this opening inner life with the rich contents of an ever-expanding experience is the office of all mental activity. These questions are assigned to speculative thought for answer, and, in the person of its chief founder, modern philosophy declares it to be the business of that science to answer three questions: What may I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope? Men feel that this threefold enigma of nature, duty, and des- tiny is capable of solution only because they recog- nize in the world not the working of simple formative force, but a determinative thought indissolubly as- sociated with an ethical end. To the eternal worth of this end they look for the explanation and justi- fication of that universal will which expresses itself in this plexus of universal laws. Weighty corroboration for this thought lies in the unanimity with which the noblest souls have been convinced of its truth by the witness of their own hearts. Everywhere the call of duty draws its deepest sanction from the persuasion that its real obligation lies in its fitness to be the act, not merely 30 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. of such persons as we are, but of such as we are to be when this apprehended end is accomplished in us. Still more fully is such conception of God’s arche- typal relation justified by the steady growth, partic- ularly in recent years, of the ethical idea of God, showing the ascending tendency of the world toward a spiritual goal—an ascent toward realization of the ideal which, if continued, will necessarily bring us to God in whom that ideal is realized. X. Love determining the Unfolding of God’s Will A conception of the universe as an unfolding, which finds its law in the being of God, gives a scientific justification to the growing thought that love is the impulse which determines the activities of God manward. This view is destined to prevail more and more as it is increasingly seen that it is an interpretation broad enough to include all those attri- butes, —sovereignty, holiness, justice, truth, or power, upon which earlier systems of theology have rested. While these are either passive or partial qualities, love is the comprehensive term in which is subsumed all those elements which together constitute the idea of the perfect being —the thought underlying the Apostle’s definition, God zs Jove. On the conviction that love, in this broad and in- clusive sense, underlies the universe as its foundation religion rests. While will is character in repose, love furnishes the dynamic element by which that poten- tial energy is transformed into beneficent action. All philosophy which rests in any way upon theistic grounds agrees «with theology that only by the good pleasure of him who was before all things does any- ut DETERMINING THE UNFOLDING OF GOD’S WILL 31 thing exist. That which thus began to be at the impulse of his will partakes the character of him from whom it sprung. All that is, therefore, is directly a gift of God to sentient beings conscious of themselves. In this gift he has put himself forth in kind desire to share his own felicity with those spirits who should rise into existence through his personal unfolding as universal spirit. That love which furnishes the initiative of God’s creative work maintains, also, the continuance of creative activity through the countless ages till his perfect will be fully accomplished. It persists through the slow waiting of preliminary stages. It sustains the divine purpose under the delay of human imperfection and antagonism. It manifests itself in a myriad forms of natural grace and beauty. It culminates in that perfected race in which the divine perfection shall be reflected. The fountain of this love is eternal; its creative energy is with- out slackening or stay, because it is the unfolding of the fathomless self of him whose holy will gra- ciously manifests itself forever as living love. From the conclusion, that in the production of hu- manity God aims to bring that race into moral one- ness with himself, itis clear that his counsel of mercy concerning man is old as eternity. John’s grand conception of an eternal ministry of sacrifice, in the Hebrew vernacular a Lamb slain from the founda- tion of the world, puts to shame the time-serving and ungracious features often forced upon later state- ments of that relationship. There is help in this ‘thought for one who attempts a systematic analysis of the problem of human life. It explains the intimacy 32 IN THE BEGINNING— GOD CHAP. subsisting between God and humanity, despite their present diversity of character. What is obscure to a short view is often clear to a longer view, and looking back to the creative purpose of God we find that mankind exists in order that by the discipline of moral conflict its members shall achieve a moral freedom and a grounding in right- eousness, not indeed apart from God but in codpera- tion with him, which shall ultimately transform humanity into a godly people, worthy of that divine patience and long-suffering which slowly wrought them into his likeness. Earthly life is opportunity, -the open gate of heaven to every human soul. Be- cause conformity to himself was the terminus which God purposed for the race, it was consistent with both the divine holiness and the divine mercy to grant a separate personality to man, even though the path to its realization necessarily led through the dismal and dangerous wilderness of sin. Hence the anomaly of unholiness in persons whose being is a specialization of the holy being of God. This is the root of philosophy’s profoundest diffi- culty. It sharpens the point of the question which Carneades pressed home upon the ancient Stoics in asking how evil was to be found in a world originat- ing from the Good, and how irrational action should be the fruit of creative Reason. These problems have been insoluble from any view-point other than that which recognizes character as the end and moral dis- cipline the means of its attainment. Character has no existence apart from conscious will. A spirit ca- pable of holiness is of necessity capable of sin; in losing the power to sin it would lose the possibility of wi DETERMINING THE UNFOLDING OF GOD’S WILL 33 holiness. The design to develop a creature into the round completeness of personality must anticipate error in that finite will, with accompanying evil in the universe and sin in the individual soul. A holy person must be sinless, not because unable to sin, but because unwilling. Moral character cannot be produced by external agency; it can be wrought only by the consenting effort of the soul itself. God endows man not, primarily, with his own image, but with the possibility of attaining unto it. The moral discipline by which self-conflict succeeds in subordi- nating all volition to the steady mastery of a will de- termined toward rectitude is a process both painful and slow. Self-indulgence, in yielding to the baser impulses, does such violence to one’s true nature as to involve suffering as its necessary correlative. Diffi- cult and baffling as these conditions are, they lose something of their air of impenetrable mystery when considered in their ultimate source. They are insepa- rable from the process of bringing free persons by the discipline of earthly life into conscious and willing conformity with the end of their being. “Take comfort ! Earth is full of sin, But also full of God.” By means of these experiences he is working out in man the full significance of life. Sin and suffering spring from the inevitableness of moral conflict in the making of moral character. Through the codperation of God in many gracious activities, his original relationship to humanity in thought is becoming realized in man’s own constitu- tion. By virtue of this premundane preparation, man D 34 IN THE BEGINNING — GOD CHAP. III enters life, not naked and barren, but heir of a vast provision of aim and intention which receives him as the atmosphere receives the fledgling eagle. He comes unto hisown. He enters upon his career under conditions that have anticipated his needs and fore- seen both his weakness and his strength, and all with direct reference to the carrying out of the will of God for his perfection. Instead of the broken lights and distorted images which made up the picture when we looked no farther back than to an historic creation, we have here the sublime panorama of the orderly march of events from everlasting to everlasting, and the earth- life of man is seen to be only an incident in a great drama which embraces two eternities. a mite SONS OR] GOD x y CHAPTER IV MANIFESTATION OF THE SONS OF GOD XI. Man’s Advent in Accord with Universal Law THERE is a safeguard against superstition in the principle that, in accounting for a result, no greater agency is to be supposed than is necessary to accom- plish the matter in hand. Kepler’s explanation of planetary motions by the hypothesis of a guiding angel for each orb became superstition as soon as Newton’s discoveries brought those motions under the general law of gravitation. This law of parsi- mony, as it is called in science, is opposed to that temper which seeks to except man from the operation of those laws which control all below him. How easily may a prejudice turn the fine edge of the noblest thought ! Once here, man need not concern himself over- much as to the route by which he arrived, — that might be mediate or immediate, direct or indirect, a specific act or a long-continued process with equal indifference,-— but he is profoundly interested in knowing his life’s history accurately. Did he labo- riously climb to his present supremacy up a long ladder of lower animal forms? Is he, or is he not, the crowning consummation of an evolution covering myriads of ages? No specific theory concerning the structure of the world and the record of man’s earthly 37 38 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, beginning, no chasms in the orderly progress of nat- ure, are essential to his spiritual life so long as all the facts find intelligent explanation in the unity of nature, for nature’s unity is God’s singleness of pur- pose. The relation of God to the universe is naturally closest in man. Below and before him everything might supposedly have responded to a word of crea- tive might, such as the fiat theory supposes, and sprung into existence at the call. As a spiritual being, however, man could not be thus produced by power, but only by communication of the divine essence. This ancient saying is also the newest science, God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul. In doing this, however, there was no exception to the law. of divine pro- cedure. first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn tn the ear. Man was not spoken into being full- grown and mature. A finite personality requires time and moral discipline for its unfolding. Humanity as a whole evolves from simple germs, as the perfect tree from the tiny seed. Man’s beginning was not at the same time a finishing It was the divine initi- ation of the process of soul-building which is carried forward continuously by the codperation of God. Much hesitancy to recognize the value to theology of deductions of natural history on this point is due to a sort of pride of ancestry which considers to be moulded from clay directly by an almighty hand, a nobler origin than to come forth as the ripe consum- mation of an indefinite process of divine energizing. Though proud to own himself brother of the sun, and first cousin to the stars, man is rather disposed to IV THE GRADUAL ASCENT TOWARD MAN 39 deny his poorer earth relations. Yet it is through them that he is himself an inseparable part of the universe. On his physical side he is closely bound to all the lower orders of animal life. The upper crust of the earth, the water, and the air are them- selves formed principally of three gases which, to- gether with a few soluble salts, compose all vegetable and animal bodies. This in itself has a profound bearing upon the unity between man and the lower orders. Man draws the materials of his growth from the same source as the plant or the beast ; he assimi- lates these materials into his own structure by analo- gous chemical processes; this likeness in material constituents subjects his bodily frame to the same limitations of strength and durability, and expose it to the same liability to decay; the use of like mate- rials compels corresponding likeness in the mechanics of bodily form and arrangement. It is therefore im- possible that man should get far away in constituent elements, in essential bodily functions, or in physical form from the more rudimentary life of the world. XII. The Gradual Ascent toward Man The wide differences between man and man prove that neither identity of constituent elements nor like- ness of physical structure necessitates sameness in attainment. In fact, it is only from the vantage-ground of a study of man as the apex of the pyramid of life that this law, which we think we discern in the life- history of the globe, is interpreted and justified. From this point the whole pathway can be seen and found to hold its consistent way amid all the entanglements and difficulties through which it passes. Only to 40 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, those who look forward from the crude beginning, and seek to make the primal germ reveal all its future achievements, does there appear confusion and indi- rectness of effort. After the beginnings of individu- ality in the crystal, the commencement of life in capillary attraction, the dawnings of sensibility in the plant, and the infinite variety, beauty, and gradations of ever-increasing complexity and value in the animal kingdom, — “ There wanted yet the master-work, the end Of all yet done.” In the words of Louis Agassiz, ‘Man is the end toward which all the animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the paleozoic fishes.” In the human body the physical order finds its crown. Moreover, it is an epitome of the record from earliest times. The late Henry Drummond suggestively says: ‘“ Hitherto we have been taught to look in the fossiliferous formations of Geology for the buried lives of the earth’s past. But Embryology has startled the world by declaring that the ancient life of the earth isnotdead. It is risen. It exists to-day in the em- bryos of still living things, and some of the most archaic types find again a resurrection and a life in the frame of man himself.” Any hypothesis of the development of man has yet many unsettled problems, and there are numerous lacunz in the documents from which his story must be read. Acceptance of the belief that there has been a gradual ascent in all departments, from the lowest to present forms, does not imply that it is either possible or necessary to trace all the steps of the journey. A much more important office than merely to com- Ni le ie IV THE GRADUAL ASCENT TOWARD MAN 4) plete, by his bodily perfection, the physical ascent of nature is that consciously performed by man himself in gathering up and conserving the slow gains of ages of selective advance toward higher qualities. Very low down in the uniform mass of living matter begin to appear lines of cleavage which broaden into widely distributed functions in a higher stage. Scarcely distinguishable in their beginnings, the sen- sations of hunger and love mark the divergence of the great branches of self-seeking and self-sacrificing life. The primitive separation of early forms into male and female originates those wide differences in constitution, both physical and mental, which dis- tribute all higher life into complementary halves. Lengthening periods of association and care of off- spring among animal pairs anticipate the human family and parental affection. That never-ceasing struggle between the general good and the personal advantage of the individual, which has so largely characterized history hitherto, is the all-prevailing condition in these prehistoric periods. Still there is a noticeable widening and strengthening of the better and nobler qualities as the stages of life grow higher. Elementary morality may be traced to creatures much lower in the scale of being than man. Rudimentary social conditions ap- pear in the animal world with the necessary accom- paniments of a crude sympathy and pity, twin growths from which have sprung all the fair fruitage of phi- lanthropy and charity in the modern world. Is the human mind a further development and com- pletion of the brute mind? With the overwhelming scientific evidence before us an affirmative answer is 42 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. inevitable. Nor in saying this do we commit ourselves to that materialistic psychology which darkened the Grecian philosophy when it reached the conclusion that man’s mind and its action, equally with all else, were a necessary product of the entire universe in its progression. To us the universe is the process of God’s own embodiment, and the successive stages of life are but the ascending forms of his manifestation. “From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began, From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man.” We may therefore unhesitatingly accept the conclu- sion that the rudiments of that truth, that justice, that conscience, and that love which ennoble man are in him relatively higher but not radically different in kind. from their rudest prototypes in the most primitive animal life. XIII. The Manifestation of the Sons of God Along a border-line so dim, how shall we determine when the brute is left behind and humanity begins? Man is not only higher than all his early companions in the upward march, but the highest that any can hope to be. The theory of evolution brings before our eyes a picture of the slow upheaval of the mighty continent of life. In the physical continents, the operation of immanent forces have thrust certain mountain ranges far above the common level, — but their peaks are crowned with the perpetual snow of age. They will never rise higher. Among life- IV THE MANIFESTATION OF THE SONS OF GOD 43 summits man’s physical structure stands solitary lord of all. But he too has attained his utmost ‘phys- ical altitude. The anatomical limits of erectness, symmetry, and beauty are reached. He is no longer advancing along the line of his previous astonishing progress ; nor are any of the lower tribes upon his track. No other animal is advancing manward, nor will there be. The climax of revolutionary ascent has been reached. Physical variations have given place to mental, and man’s thought now rules where natural selection once held undisputed sway. Mat- ter has reached its goal. It has furnished a fitting organ for mind, and in furnishing this has pressed to the utmost the possibilities of physical structure in conformity to earthly conditions, and has thus completed the design of the animal kingdom. Not the production of some higher creature, but the per- fecting of humanity is to be the achievement of the future. This culmination gives a fitting dignity to man’s place in nature. Toward him the ages have been tending, for him the conditions of earthly life exist. Instead of being the product of arbitrary caprice, or a special creation, flung in a moment into the midst of dissimilar surroundings, where, even though given “dominion over the creatures,’ he was like a foreign king forced upon a subject race who might at any time awake to find zs successor and lord appointed over him, man is seen to be inwrought organically into the structure of the universe. From this he cannot be dislodged, and the promises of the future are more radiant than the achievements of the past in proportion as the triumphs of the moral 44 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. exceed those of the physical. Science returns an affirmative answer to Amiel’s question: “Who knows if nature is not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking beings who are ultimately to become free creatures ?”’ This is a turning-point in the long course, and as we survey the path that has been followed we see that all has tended toward an ethical end. With perhaps occasional eddies, the current has set steadily from the lower to the higher and has transformed base and selfish desires into altruistic impulses ; opened the blindness of the animal into the foresight of the man; loosed the dumb impassivity of the brute into the worship of the human soul. The dividing line which we sought we have crossed un- noticed. Pain and pleasure we share with the ani- mals, but the sense of duty which scorns pleasure at the call of conscience distinguishes those who have passed from the realm of brute feeling into the king- dom of spirit. This power to distinguish a higher obligation than personal interest ; to be conscious of the infinite as above and more than all particular finite forms; or, in other words, to know God, is the mark of the human. Instead of spasmodic interventions and impulses there has been a steady influx of the divine life increasingly full and multiplex in its manifestation as fast as it became possible, under the inner law of self-objectification, for this to take place. In this conclusion modern thought turns back and joins hands with the result of a thousand years of Greek speculation. It, too, has reached the belief that the incarnation of God, which is but a short name for his IV THE MANIFESTATION OF THE SONS OF GOD 45 bringing his earthly manifestation into full comple- - tion in man, is taking place as rapidly as is possible, seeing that our progress depends not on the ability or willingness of God alone, but also upon the rate of increase in our capacity to receive him. Just because the divine life is struggling to take ours up into itself its success seems often discouragingly slow ; yet because of that struggle our spiritual ad- vancement is sure. Himself the basis and substance of all that is, it is not difficult to understand that the continuous self-modification of the Infinite should slowly approach its definite end in man and thus finish the cycle at first proposed. This idea postu- lates as fundamental the principle that the universe is one in substance with God, gradually developing in its individualization from the unconscious to the conscious and ethical. Man, partaking thus of the divine nature, slowly emerges through strife and dis- cipline into the freedom and God-likeness of person- ality, and rises, as the outcome of the long process, to conscious participation in the Divine. Heedless of our dead past, fearless of the unborn future, we face the living present, with the assurance, zow are we the sons of God, and tt doth not yet appear what we shall be ! CHAP EER V; GOD NOT WITHOUT WITNESS IN ANY NATION XIV. Man’s Earthly Life Educative OuR conception of God’s relation to the universe determines our notion of his relations to man. Witb the advent of the thought of God as constituting the universe by the unfolding of his own infinitude, there necessarily passes away the idea of the probationary character of man’s earthly life. When we under- stand that God in all that he does is seeking to objectify himself in a spiritual race, it is necessary to consider the earthly life of man as an educational stage, in which he is himself developing into a mani- festation of the divine character. With this changed view of God’s attitude we pass from under the shadow of that thought in which the world has so long dwelt, that we live continually under the eye of a Judge strict to mark iniquity and by whom our spiritual growth is to be tested rather than fostered. Instead, we now feel ourselves to be under parental care, in an atmosphere of love and in a process of education in which our spiritual faculties shall be cultivated, our ignorance replaced with know- ledge, our wavering will strengthened, and our feeble- ness and uncertainty transformed into clear purpose © and power. The temptations and severe experiences of life are the means of our discipline. They come 46 a CHAP. V MAN’S EARTHLY LIFE EDUCATIVE 47 to us not ‘that they may try whether we shall prove obedient to God’s will, but as incidental to that train- ing by which we shall acquire power in ourselves to will what he wills. This free and chastened obedi- ence is God’s true reflection in man. The process by which this condition is brought about, like any other current, has its eddies and its returns upon itself. Progress is never in a straight line of con- tinuous advancement, and the course of man’s spirit- ual development is one of sinuosities, perplexities, and hesitations. In this as in all other branches of his education, only by his failures will man learn the futility of divergence from the true path. This interpretation takes the “Fall” of man out of the category of historical events and transfers it into the realms of the spiritual life, and “ original sin’ becomes more than a figment of the theological consciousness. Not only did our ancestors sin, but we also sin. Our common tendency is to follow our own inclinations, to gratify our passions and natural impulses in the easiest way, unmindful of the greater good that waits upon a subordination of these to the higher faculties of our being. We are placed in the midst of this conflict in the very act of living our lives. The old idea of one historic Fall, which modi- fied the relations of God and man to the end of time, yields to an apprehension of this experience as con- tinuous and personal, a part of the opportunity and responsibility of every man. The thought that the stream of human life was purest near its source must be reversed. With due recognition of the failures, errors, reversions, which mark man’s spiritual path- way, we are privileged to hold the joyous hope of a 48 | THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, Paradise to come instead of the sad memory of a Para- dise lost. Without God’s codperation the struggle toward higher attainments would be hopeless indeed. But God has always cooperated with man. In the early stages of his career, while as yet man had neither thought for devotion nor voice for praise, God still led him along his dark and rugged way. Man has now come to a stage in which they twain can hold converse with each other. Some slight comprehen- sion of the Creator has become possible to the creat- ure. Some spiritual resemblance is traceable at last between the Father and the child. Will God neglect him now? No! The patient tutelage and assistance of the early years are beginning to show their frui- tion ; now the progress will be more rapid, the inter- change of intelligence more perfect, the communion more complete. This upward movement of God into living personality in man constitutes the paradox of human progress. Man’s lingering animalism and his untutored will offer a mass of dead inertia, or active opposition, which the spirit of God must overcome and transform before it can emerge into light. The psychical world has been commonly divided into two kingdoms, of light and of darkness, because of this con- tinuous conflict between man’s desires and his reason. There is, however, an impulse Godward in man’s own constitution, and the various developments of his religious life are but the slow evolving of this divine principle within him. The fundamental law of natural evolution holds true in this case. If the eye has been developed in response to the stimulus of light, and the ear has come forth at the call of i a V MAN’S EARTHLY LIFE EDUCATIVE 49 @ the vibrations of air, so has the spiritual nature of man shown itself in conformity to a spiritual environ- ment. The revelation of God to man is a revelation in man, and produces that spiritual aspiration which it satisfies. The history of religious development is a justification of Tertullian’s claim that the soul is so constituted by nature as to respond spontaneously to Christian truth — O Testimonitum anime naturaliter Christiane. Human history thus becomes a history of God’s manifestation of himself, not externally, not objectively, not spasmodically, but subjectively and continuously in his steadily bringing to bear upon man’s innermost nature the formative principle of a divine fellowship through which, with steadfast pur- pose, man is brought to greater light by increasing his capacity to receive light. This orderly march of humanity toward spiritual perfection is the highest evidence that there is a divine meaning in the world, and that, in keeping with it, man is growing constantly nearer the time when that God whom he has so long known only in part shall be more perfectly apprehended. The conception of man, as reflecting God in his own nature, implies a succession of stages in which this consciousness shall work itself free as the constructive power of his life. Inasmuch as this is a process in history it is not necessary that man in the beginning should be more than capable of God. Under appropriate con- ditions, however, this latent power will be evoked, the obscure will become intelligible, and under the influence of divine fellowship and instruction, man will attain unto increasing consciousness of God. All theories which ground the religious instinct and E 50 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. the idea of God in ancestor-worship, nature-worship, dreams, and similar phenomena, utterly fail in pres- ence of the indisputable truth that the religious in- stinct and the conception of God grow in strength, clearness, and nobility, in proportion as the race grows away from the obscurities, and limitations, and undeveloped conditions of the primitive state of society in which are found the materials whereon such theories depend. This observed progress finds its simplest explanation in the idea of a vital relation- ship between God and man, wherein man is being gradually led by the spirit of God to ever-growing capacity to receive the continuous revelation which God is evermore making. Humanity does, as a matter of fact, show men and races at all stages of moral apprehension. Mankind is slowly gaining a consciousness of historical unity in its living members and also with past generations. The unifying bond is beginning to be recognized in this universal fellowship in the divine manifestation. A unity of spiritual life grows out of the fact that we enter at birth into a world fashioned largely by the beliefs and conceptions of those who have preceded us. These ideas, gradually accumulating through the ages, tend more and more to assume the authority of con- viction and the clearness of a recognized congruity with our own nature. In turn, that which we accept in truth and sincerely believe, be it little or much, be it fragmentary or complete, works powerfully in moulding our own characters and thus fashioning the age to come. The incidents of space and time have their significance only as contributing to establish and clarify the relations of man to God. Thus the i i i Vv MAN’S EARTHLY LIFE EDUCATIVE 51 thinking world has moved forward from the problems of becoming and of being, which formed the burden of ancient philosophy, to present considerations of God and the human race. Since the religious life is a resultant of the two forces, —God primarily working in man, and man with free spirit responding to God, the form which the spiritual life shall assume will vary with the con- ditions of the life thus developing. The physical surroundings have been largely influential toward shaping in the minds of each primitive people that interpretation which they have given to the manifes- tations of God in nature. Much light will be thrown upon the beliefs of the different races by a study of their origins. To account for these differences at the beginning is not enough; the points of widest divergence must be explained as well as those of least. In the primitive stages of human life man recognizes in the powers without him the workings of a will more powerful than his own, and where, as in the North, these activities are gloomy and cheer- less, religion is at the first a reign of terror and of subjection to external forces. In regions of beauty and calm, as in sunny Greece, God is regarded as in- dwelling, and religion is largely a worship of the good under the form of the beautiful. Under the stimu- lating influence of the tropics, where all life is rank, heavy, sensuous, and the processes of nature swift both in growth and decay, God is regarded as wholly in nature, and worship pays reverence especially to the great visible processes through which he is con- tinually being produced before men, — destruction, reproduction, preservation. 52 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. XV. God’s Progressive Manifestation among the Nations Human history in its most significant features becomes a hopeless tangle of clews that end abruptly and of motives that lead to no result, unless upon all the face of the earth God has been revealing himself not only at sundry times and in divers manners, but constantly. With all their imperfection and deficien- cies, other nations display a feeling after God, and a certain finding of him, not differing in kind, but only in degree, from the same knowledge and feeling among the Jews. Various ethical requirements in all the religions and in the history of mankind are a part of the original endowment of humanity, and an insepa- rable part of personality. God’s revelation in man is broader than any visible church; it comprehends the entire multitude of those in whose individual hearts this light Lath shined. The Eden stories in our own Scriptures carry us back to the noble Hebrew interpretation of facts common to all, and with which all the races wrestled in an endeavor to account for the obvious realities of personal existence, of sin, and of death. It is im- possible not to recognize everywhere, under sundry mutations and disguises, the struggle of man’s spirit to come into touch with the spirit of a dimly appre- hended God. The ancient civilization beside the Euphrates witnesses to us in its long-buried litera- ture how old is the cry of the human soul for God. On the obelisk of Tothmes IIL, graven in the hard syenite as long before the Christian era as we are after it, we may still read the promptings of the Vv GOD’S PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION 53 divine spirit in his sublime invocation addressed to the Sun: “Grant power, and cover with the princi- ples of divine wisdom the gentle king. O guardian Sun, vigilant and just Sun, Continuator of Life, guide his innermost thoughts, so that he may show himself active and just in all things. Sublime Wisdom, grant to him the principle of thy essence, and the principle of thy light, so that he may collect fruits in the im- petuosity of his career. Four times he thus distinctly implores thee, Vigilant Sun of Justice of All Time! May the request which he makes to thee be granted to him.” A noble conception of God and a deep consciousness of sin is found also among the earliest remaining literature of the undivided Aryans. Still, in spite of the height to which religious truth thus early attained, the history of humanity distinctly shows the apprehension of God and the conviction of sin to have been increasing in clearness and diffusion through the ages. The equivalent of the Hebrew idea of a racial fall and consequent universal ten- dency to evil is common to many races. The same is true of the idea of sacrifice. Marked progress is visible in the growth of this idea, until in process of time arose the understanding that the true sacrifice was a sanctified will. Zo obey ts better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. The sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite spirit. Slowly the conviction grew that the blood poured out was valu- able only as evidence of an entire surrender, that in this the virtue lay and not in the mere article of death. That was simply incidental to the complete surrender of self to God. The universality of these sacrificial rites and the 54 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. similarity which they bear wherever found show that man is by nature a religious being. His constitution involves these spiritual activities and conceptions no less than the physical and mental. No religious sys- tem has based itself professedly upon the natural, or human, alone. There is a religious common sense of the race imbedded in man’s nature which descends from generation to generation with all the uniformity and indestructibility of a universal characteristic. Mankind can never become a race of atheists. These natural currents of belief have rolled on from age to age, bearing witness to the world’s sense of God. They are inseparable factors of human existence. Society cannot outgrow nor civilization displace them. They have a permanent dwelling-place in the heart of man. Such indwelling convictions must find expression in the life universal of the race. History justifies Max Miiller’s definition: Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man. We are thus enabled to unify under one consistent principle all those extraordinary instances of spiritual attainment among ancient peoples, and more recent cases in environments remote from the ordinary his- toric Christian sources of light. These examples pre- sent a serious problem to the theology which holds that all men are utterly depraved in nature, incapa- ble of any spiritual achievement, and can be reached by the gracious arm of salvation only through his- toric knowledge of the person and work of Christ. They demonstrate, on the contrary, an internal im- pulse within humanity, and even in the individual a V GOD’S PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION 55 heart, everywhere working toward a higher and fuller spiritual life. This principle is divine in its origin wherever found. It is the manifestation of God in the slowly evolving human spirit. Hence there need be no surprise in finding the spiritual history of humanity characterized by a gradual merging of lower into higher forms, and in discovering many equivalent developments to be simultaneous among widely separated peoples. This principle was recognized in the Apostle’s dec- laration that the Mosaic economy was a pedagogus to lead the Jewish world to Christ, and we do find that Christianity took up into itself all the essential and universal elements of Judaism. Judaism itself had received much that it transmitted. More ancient religious cults were schoolmasters to lead earlier generations to Judaism. We have but recently learned how largely Babylonian and other early Semitic elements went into the formation of that faith which Israel took into Egypt; we are also only beginning to understand how much, both of Egyp- tian intellectual conception and ceremonial forms and types, the Hebrews brought forth with them at the Exodus. Each age has profited religiously by the struggles and aspirations of the cruder and more bar- barous age which it succeeded. The religious endowment has grown as humanity has grown, yet no man, nor nation, ever came at once into vacant spaces totally empty of all spiritual heritages, traditions, forms of thought. As Judaism was built upon the elaborate ritualistic basis of Egyp- tian religious ceremonial, so has Christianity been wrought into the native fabric of beliefs, hopes, and 56 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. vague revelations of the nations to whom its gospel has been preached. The religious elements of man’s nature have worked out similar effects under a com- mon divine tutelage in every nation, and God has left himself without witness in no portion of a race made in his own image. The great heavings of the soul of humanity, drawn toward the heavens like the heaving of the tides, so far found articulate utterance for their voiceless groanings as to show clearly that the wants of Jew and Gentile were common and must have the same satisfaction. By the side of Job’s, Oh, that I knew where I might find him, we may put the words of Socrates, “We must therefore wait,” said he in describing the divine Teacher who was to come, “till such time as we may learn how to behave ourselves in the presence of gods and men.” These sentiments evidently show a revelation com- mon to all men and a common response to this reve- lation. Our Master’s own test is the touchstone, By their fruits ye shall know them. ‘Whence got Buddha his purity, or Aristides his justice, or Epicurus his puritanic virtue, or Cicero his search after immor- tality, save from the same source as did Isaiah or Samuel or John the Baptist, or Paul?” In the Bha- gavad Gita episode of the Mahabharatta, the per- sonified god instructs his pupil : “I bear the burden of those who are constantly engaged in my service. They also who serve other gods with a firm belief, in so doing involuntarily and unconsciously worship me.” Shall the heart of man in its yearnings find and express a broader and more tender longsuffering on the part of the gods of its dreams than the reality as it exists in the Father of all mercies and the God of all comfort ! V GOD’S PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION 57 With all the excellences of these ethnic teachings, however, it is not the prejudice of personal interest but the culminative testimony of the natural order that claims for Christianity, as representing under most favorable conditions the longest series of these stages of advance, a superiority to all other manifes- tations of the divine life, because embodying within itself all their most essential features. What in those . systems are scattered rays and partial glimpses find here a clear apprehension and a steady glow. It is not that there was no truth in Paganism, but that there is more truth in Christianity. “I make no secret that true Christianity, I mean the religion of Christ, seems to me to. become more and more exalted, the more we know and the more we appreciate the treasures of truth hidden in the despised religions of the world.” In these words of Max Miiller we have noteworthy testimony from a competent witness. These non-Christian faiths, whether ancient or modern, are not the measure of God’s gift to their adherents, but the measure of the obstacles which that revelation must needs overcome before it could be received by them. The spirit of God has dwelt with man from the beginning, and has spoken to him with many voices. Man could find God symbolized in so many forms of nature and could approach him through so many and such devious ways only because he was truly revealed in them all and had made them a means of communion with himself. Christianity demonstrates itself to be a farther step in man’s journey Godward by its ability to produce in each of its disciples a nobler character. Other creeds produce here and there an exceptional one of lofty, 58 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. V spirit, while the multitude still plod their deaf and heedless way. Spiritual progress is a discipline for the production of character; where worthiest char- acter is produced there is the fullest revelation of God. Equally true and tender, an epitome of the spiritual history of mankind, is the personal wit- ness of the saintly William Ellery Channing, who tells us how, when he had sought all the noble teachers — Lao Tszee, and Kung-Fu-Tszee, with Zoroaster and Buddha, Plato and Epictetus, —‘“‘hand in hand they brought me up to the white marble steps, and the crystal baptismal font, and the bread- and-wine crowned communion table—ay! to the cross in the chancel of the Christian temple, —and as they laid their hands in benediction on my head they whispered, Here is your real home.” CHAPTER VI GOD COMING TO HIS OWN XVI. The Fulness of the Godhead PERSONALITY is the highest form of being. God is not revealed till he is revealed as a person. While the ascending scale of nature culminates in man, man does not culminate except in God. When therefore the perfect man has come, he is also God drawn to human scale. To this great culmination nature has steadily advanced up to man and through man, till its hope is realized in the Son of Man. At last is clear what has been the meaning of those foreshadowings of joy, and love, and sacrifice in nature. A\ll this is God's progressive revelation of himself, a revelation of which man is at once the product and the object. In order to be intelligible to man this revelation must be made to human apprehension. The fullest revela- tion is not made until God has spoken to man at his. highest. Hence the necessity that God reveal him- self in typical manhood. With all men, more or less consciously, the supreme question has been, what manner of being underlies this universe, of what sort of spirit is it the manifes- tation, what is the character of the will here unfolding? By this threefold revelation God both produces and appeals to the tripartite nature of man, — to his intel- lect, to his affections, and to his will. What is this but 59 60 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. God speaking out of the depths of his personality to the personality of man, function to function, faculty to faculty, fitting elements of divine character to human capacity like die to matrix, and thus disclosing by the address of himself to those who bear his image that he himself exists in these threefold faculties too. What is essential in deity has its counterpart in what is essen- tialinman. Revelation through life grows fuller as the lite grows higher. The tendency is away from simplicity and toward complexity of organization as we ascend the scale of being. What is merely rudi- mentary in the lower becomes clearly defined in the higher. The prologue of the Fourth Gospel, Zz the begin- ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, unites essential deity with its most perfect revelation, the Word become flesh. After all these centuries of thought and study, of attack and defence, the Logos, the Word, remains still the best term by which to set forth and to illus- trate this relation of God as transcendent, uncondi- tioned, to God as immanent, conditioned by his relations to the universe, the outputting of his own inner consciousness into objective activity. To see what John saw when he penned these words, we must stand where John stood. His thought ran back to that mysterious “beginning” where whatever has begun began, yet in that beginning was the “ Word,” or the Logos, and the Logos was with God. Stand- ing thus at the beginning we look for God, and what do we see? Nothing! There are certain limits be- yond which human thought cannot pass. The human mind can in no case grasp or know the absolute, that i i i VI THE FULNESS OF THE GODHEAD 6l which has no relation or connection in any way with itself. Our knowledge, whether of things material or spiritual, is through the relations which those things sustain to us. To the blind eye there is no. sun in the heavens, though a world smiles beneath its beams. Sweetest harmonies have no existence to the deaf ear. As we gaze, then, into that impene- trable abyss beyond the furthest reach of human thought, we see nothing. Not because there is noth- ing there. God is there. But he has not yet put himself within the reach of our faculties. Secondary being can know essential Being only through these relations, or, in other words, we can see God only as, and only so far as, he is manifested in the unfolding of himself in self-manifestation. ‘God is known,” says Godet, “only so far as he gives himself to be known.” To that extent, how- ever, we do see him, and this manifestation of Deity, this God thus become cognizable by the universe, is what the New Testament writers know as the Son, and what current theology calls the second person of the Trinity, God the Logos. He is the invisible God coming out of the chambers of invisibility in the pro- cess of realizing his ideal, taking a form that can be apprehended by and made consciously manifest to the intelligent universe thus produced. We can dis- tinguish God thus immanent from God transcendent, though they are one, as we distinguish between the sweep of vision which determines our horizon and the infinite space surrounding it, though they are one. Widen the idea of space until imagination reaches its utmost limit, and still there is the infinite, unmeas- ured, unimagined, background of the unlimited still 62 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, beyond. The Logos is God’s self-revealing to the limit of our faculties’ ability to comprehend him. Each one’s horizon is wide or narrow according to his standpoint and power of vision. The Logos marks the horizon of man’s view of God, for Deity absolute, God unrevealed, no one can see. Identifying God as revealed with God invisible, the Logos has been regarded as the ideal ground of all existence, he in whom all things consist, and at the same time as the active agent by whom and through whom the phenomenal comes into being and the divine idea is disclosed. In this way a worthy substratum is secured for all those mighty relationships which are mediated through him as the manifestation of God. Finite existences have their being through him, through him also as the manifesting activity the ful- ness of divine truth is enabled to enter into organic relation with the mental life of the world. At the same time all discriminating thought, whether in the New Testament cycle or later, has distinguished be- tween God as thus embodied and God as absolute. It is neither Scripture, philosophy, nor reason, to say without qualification that Jesus Christ is God. In him God is manifested, not comprehended. It was inevitable that God, in the course of his self-revealing, should disclose himself as person. Only thus could he give himself expression as the inner reality of the universe, because thus only could he make himself known as the ground of that which changes, suffers, or wills. In this way only could he gather up and complete all contributory manifestations and round them into a perfect unity. As such therefore Christ concludes an historic process with a twofold consum- —_ VI THE FULNESS OF THE GODHEAD 63 mation. All in lower nature that pointed toward man is justified in man’s culmination, and all man’s own experiences, growth, aspirations, find their anti- type in God become manifest in this perfect man. Every manifestation of God is the expression of his endeavor for complete revelation of himself to his creatures. There are successive stages in this pro- cess of unfolding the eternal desire under conditions of time. All natural laws and processes reach their full development only in man. Without him nature is a truncated cone, apart from man all its lines end abruptly, in him they converge and culminate. Yet not in him as final in himself, but only because he connects nature with God, and thus completes the circuit of being. Thus the fundamental fact, upon which all else rests, is the moral kinship subsisting between man and God, by which man and God are capable of each other. Only through this more or less perfect reproduction of himself in man’s soul is God able to address himself to man. The germ of this relation is a common possession of mankind, alike of rude and cultivated peoples. It is not an idea begotten of civilization and reflection, but lies silent, undeveloped, and often unnoticed in the lowest depths of consciousness of the most degraded fetish wor- shipper. In this witness of the spirit within the soul inheres the ability to be led by that light, whzch lighteth every man that cometh into the world, up from this abysmal darkness into the full light of a perfect revelation of God in his true character. Man can think of God’s being only in terms of his own, and best understands the divine manifestation as embodied in himself. 64 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, XVII. One Mediator, Himself Man God reveals himself increasingly in man; and steadily disciplines him to increase his capacity for the divine. Under this tutelage, man attains, in pro- cess of time, a point where God can show him at once both sides of the shield; what God himself is, and what man may become. To this end a human soul, in fulness of time, is made the vehicle to humanity of this twofold revelation. This soul is filled unto all the fulness of God. Every capacity and faculty is filled to the brim with divinity. He is the normal man. True and unhindered progress in the manifestation of God through a human life must take the form of a human being whose faculties and capacities are all of normal size, that there may be free play for the divine influences, producing a character and manhood capable on the one hand of being forever the standard toward which God is gradually bringing humanity, and capable on the other hand of being the perfect illustration of what help in this direction man may expect from God. The incarnation does not make a new divine person. It is God manifesting himself in a new and closer relation with humanity. The soul of Jesus is so receptive of God and his whole nature is so respon- sive to the divine impulse that God is able to take entire possession of him and thus fully manifest him- self through him. He is the Tent of meeting in which God visibly dwells with humanity. Standing thus on the border line where God and man meet, Jesus of Nazareth sustains a twofold relation, one VI ONE MEDIATOR, HIMSELF MAN 65 which looks both Godward and manward. While on the one side Son of God he is also at the same time the Son of Man. This is the title by which he most loved to speak of himself. The idea of his true humanity lies at the bottom of this descriptive term, and his real manhood emphasizes it. At the same time it enforces his representative character. He is not one among many, not merely an individual frag- ment of the race, but the true type and sum of humanity. He gathers into himself all potentialities, forces, faculties, powers, which the entire race will eventually unfold. Of none other, whether ruler, teacher, sage, or singer, can it be said that in him the conception of humanity has its complete embodiment. But all that man has attained, all that he shall attain, was existent and active in Jesus. Yet he arrived at the consciousness of his powers and attained to their complete mastery by no other way than that by which we must ourselves achieve the same triumph. He, too, was tempted as we are, and reached self-realization through the avenue of self-control. In this representative character lay also that burden of men’s weakness and need which he bore. He shared their nature in all its ranges. His experiences ran the entire gamut of human experi- ence. His wide sympathy, which enabled him to include man’s loftiest possibilities and noblest attain- ment, swept also under man’s care and want and fail- ure and temptations. He carried the sorrows as well as the joys of every man, whatever his age or nation or stage, because he bore within himself all that truly belongs to humanity in its widest reach. He can bring to every individual soul most helpful sympathy F 66 _THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, and strength and comfort because his own experience interprets to him every man’s need. Inasmuch as he was genuinely human, the Christ was also partaker of a nature open and liable to sin. He entered fully into the sphere of man’s thoughts and purposes, and consequently came within range of the law of heredity as well as all other of the great laws that environ human life. No man inherits sin, but only such bias and perversions as lead to sin. If tempted in all points like as we are, it could only be because in him a like nature was susceptible to like influence, endowed with like passions and respon- sive to like motives. There was in him self-will, striving for the mastery; there was ambition, urg- ing to self-glorification; there was consciousness of power, inviting to presumption. What is the lesson of the Temptation, but that he too must determine in the throes of stern conflict to whom allegiance should be given—self or God? The declaration that “e learned obedience by the things that he suffered, points us to a process in him of that self-mastery through which all men must pass. By his self-victory on this common arena he decame the author of eternal salvation to them that obey him. Apart from all necessities of speculative thought which the acceptance of this doctrine of the incarna- tion satisfies, it meets very many practical wants of man’s spiritual nature. It gives a firm and tangible basis for the Christian life. Our beliefs and concep- tions are grouped around no abstract idea, no mere force, nor law, but about a concrete living person, with an actual earthly history which mankind can grasp and appreciate, for they can test it and appre- VI ONE MEDIATOR, HIMSELF MAN 67 hend it in the realm of their own personal experience. Humanity is not left to float upon a sea of abstrac- tions and mystic ambiguities, but having this basis of facts, facts of earthly form and character, facts cen- tring in the historic life and manifestation of a per- son, our thoughts have steadiness, certainty, and precision. It is probable that we await a deeper insight into the laws determining the divine method of revelation to escape from the dilemma of an abnormal entrance into human life, or an abnormal life entered in the normal way. Meantime, however, we can only say that the question of God’s manifestation in Jesus is entirely distinct from the question of his virgin birth, and it is very unwise as well as superficial to con- found the two. We may admit that Christ was the natural son of Joseph and Mary without thereby mili- tating in any way against the uniqueness and help- fulness of his relations to men. It is worthy of notice, also, that the declaration of this fact lies very lightly upon the record of that earthly life, considering the momentous significance which it is usually supposed to bear. From the special-creationist point of view, such an irregular way of entering humanity was both necessary and easily conceivable. The difficulties of a literalistic interpretation of the narrative are re- lieved by a correct idea of inspiration and by recogni- tion of the Scripturesas literature. The wisest course in our present stage of knowledge is to hold firmly to the truth, which indeed grows more manifest each year, that in him the God of our hope and anticipa- tion has been manifested with a fulness which has no parallel and needs no increase. 68 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. If we have firmly grasped that thought, which is destined more and more to mould our conceptions of God’s relations to men, the thought of God as not only immanent in but as himself actually constituting the universe, we will find no difficulty in recognizing this manifestation of himself in a representative man as being truly the Emmanuel familiar to our worship and yet springing out of the same pro- gressive unfolding of himself that has brought all else into being. This gives him a vital identifica- tion with humanity in its historic development and marks the redemptive thought which characterizes the entire relation of the race to God. Such a conception of God as appearing in humanity at the earliest moment possible for the highest possible manifestation, that of perfect personality, and this in strict continuance of the same laws and motives which had prevailed all along, solves many difficulties, and, when once grown familiar to our thought, opens new and rich mines of interpretation and revelation that are sealed to the present view. XVIII. One with the Father The character of Christ is the divinity of Christ. Disputes about his parentage, his relation to proph- ecy, his place in the historic process, are entirely beside the mark in view of this simple truth. He is the disclosure of God to us, not because of his origin, but because of what he was. The life was the light of men. It was not the way in which he came, nor what he did while here, that constitutes him God manifest in the flesh. What he did was the utterance of what he was. That one-sided Christology which VI ONE WITH THE FATHER 69 bases itself almost exclusively upon certain offices which it assumes the Christ to have discharged, needs to be corrected by a true apprehension of him as one, not merely exhibiting certain divine attributes, but vitalizing in his own life such knowledge of God as is possible to a human soul, and as setting forth the moral qualities of God in the static form of a balanced personality. His likeness to God is internal; his character is the reflex of his idea of God. In him, indeed,.God comes to full self-consciousness by the way of nature. This fact explains the sublime consciousness of oneness with God that distinguishes him among all the sons of men. J and the Father are one. This accounts for the calm assurance with which he sets forth the most fundamental of spiritual conditions, with which he makes himself the test by which other men are to be tried, with which he defines the way of approach and conditions of acceptance with the Father. This it is that makes the consciousness of Christ the stand- ard for evermore of our conceptions of God, of man, of life present and to come. No higher standard of worth is conceivable than that which would satisfy an ideal mind freed from all temptations to swerve from its proper course. Christ everywhere displays this freedom of a mind perfectly poised. Consequently it is not surprising to hear this challenge, Which of you convinceth me of sin. By this freedom, which results from a perfect moral equilibrium, he becomes a savor of life unto all who follow him. In the course of history, the outworking of God has thrown up into view many noble souls, both before and since his manifestation in the Christ, who have stood for the 70 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. help and comfort of their brethren. But to these all, without exception, we must walk backward to cover some deficiency or excess with the mantle of charity ; “But Thee, but Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time, O perfect Life in perfect labor writ, What least defect or shadow of defect Oh ! what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?” The cry of the human has at last been fully an- swered in the response of the divine. The gradual approach of God to man, in a revelation increasing in breadth and significance with the passing centuries, gave premonition of a time when mortal vision should see God face to face. Slowly man grew familiar with the idea that Deity would appear most clearly in time of sorest need ; steadily the truth was borne in upon human consciousness, that these partial manifestations were gleams of coming glory, shafts of light in the east that heralded a dawning day. When, by this progressive unfolding, the eye of man had been some- what accustomed to the twilight of revelation, the time was ripe for the disclosure of that Face of glory which man had so longed to see. That long histori- cal course which here culminates is gathered into the singularly compact and beautiful statement: God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath im these last days spoken unto us by his Son. Here is historical continuity ; he who in time past spake to the fathers, hath spoken also to us. Here is continu- ation of one divine revelation; God who revealed himself to man of old, reveals himself still. Here is increase of unity and hence of clearness in the mani- VI IN THE FULNESS OF TIME 71 festation ; God, who spake in former dispensations at sundry times and in divers manners, speaks to this in One. Here is the culmination of the historic revelation of God, for instead of visions, symbols, material forms, prophecies, theophanies, is the Son, the effulgence of God’s glory, and the impress of his substance. Through all the expectant ages the world’s teachers have had no better word for this want of man- kind than that hope which is here finally fulfilled : — “A face like my face shall receive thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand.” XIX. In the Fulness of Time Human history is the record of God’s revelation in mankind. The springtime advancing to the maturity of summer heralds its way with opening leaf and growing bud. All along God’s pathway toward his perfect manifestation in humanity, spring up, before his advent, hopes, anticipations, premonitions, that foretell greater realities to come. By these hopes the currents of life are guided and direction is given to the energies and efforts of men. This action and reaction between the approaching God and the ex- pectant and apprehending spirit of man is the con- dition in which the possibility of history is grounded. A true philosophy of history is possible only on the supposition that there is an actual movement, in a recognizable direction, of mankind as a whole. Such a tendency is clearly observable, though it be like the charging of the tide, playing its watery hammers stroke upon stroke along the beach, each withdrawing 72 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. billow the lifting of the arm for another blow. For as the waves of the incoming tide surround and en- croach upon some lone island peak, so humanity, heaved also by heavenly influences, has pressed with alternate lapse and swell toward that one lonely God- lifted figure of the Son of Man. There was a general shaping of early world-history toward the Christian era. We have accustomed ourselves to think of the Jews alone as preparing for the coming of Christ. All historic study, however, is making it clearer that we greatly underestimate the interrelations between the earlier races and their influences upon those that followed. The great ethnic movements of the gentile races are, undoubtedly, coordinated with the Jewish devel- opment in the historic disclosure of God. Naturally, the primitive races were not so clearly separated. as in later times. Exhumed records of extinct peoples testify to an intermingling of the root-stocks of na- tions, which afterward separated both in geographical location and communication, with common property in race peculiarities, political institutions, traditions, ethical standards, and religious ideas. Still, the work of these earlier races in preparing the theatre for the great drama of the fuller manifestation of God is less clearly visible than that of the three nationalities, Israel, Greece, and Rome. The relation of these was direct and positive. i The education by which the Hebrews were fitted for the~part which they were to play was the longest and most specific. Among them, especially, was nour- ished the expectation of the Coming One. This ideain itself was a powerful factor in their spiritual growth. VI IN THE FULNESS OF TIME 73 It took the form of a belief that God, in continuously revealing himself to their apprehension, would in- crease the fulness of his relation until he should become identified with them in the person of their divine King. There are traces through all their literature of this hope, and also of the effect of this hope in moulding their character through the passing centuries. As the advancing sun throws a shadow before it, so this approaching manifestation of Deity had its forerunning types and shadows in the cere- monial institutes, in the tabernacle, in the priest- kings, in the mysterious promises, in the appearings of supernatural forms, in the rising upon the national horizon of a mighty hope,—fed by prophets and seers, and outlined against the background of popular loyalty to a representative of the Davidic line, — which gathers into its train all their dim anticipa- tions, all their unrealized expectations, all their un- voiced longings, until this king whose coming Israel patiently awaits becomes the desire of all nations, and his disclosure, when he comes suddenly to his own, is the Light of the World. It was inevitable that a people who cherished such a hope as this, accompanied by every element that could fan the flames of enthusiasm and keep constantly before the mind the Holy Presence for which they looked, should exhibit a corresponding spiritual growth. It was in the process of working out the problem of keeping the hearts of men, through the course of history and an unfolding political life, in close touch with God, that the literature which constitutes the Hebrew Scriptures grew into being. They are the flowering into expression of the life existent in the 74. THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. Jewish nation. The source of their inspiration and authority is the theocratic relation of the people ta God, and their consequent responsiveness to his spirit. To be of vital worth to it, the Scriptures of the race must of necessity be an outgrowth of the life of man as actually lived in the process of history. They need to be rooted in a true historical past and present of humanity. The recognition of these docu- ments as literature once was supposed to destroy their unique value. But reverent scholarship has recognized that only thus have they any real hold upon life, or become the true transcript of God’s message to Israel. Accept them as true historical records of race experience, and the voicing of a nation’s response to God’s voice in the soul, and they carry, in a large measure upon their very face, in their lofty spirituality, their confidence and courage, and their dauntless hope, the vindication of their divine origin. Take the ground that they are specifically different from all analogous literature, and all similar experiences of life; owing their form and contents solely to the direct interposition and teaching of God in a way different, in degree not only, but also in kind from anything else of which we have any knowledge, and we render them valueless and without authority wherever their peculiar, divine authorship is not considered settled beyond dispute. Essentially, these Scriptures are the records of an educational process in the development of which grand and fundamental truths were gradually un- folded through God’s manifestation in this people. The national life is fashioned by the popular faith ; the spiritual life of a nation is most clearly shown in VI IN THE FULNESS OF TIME 75 its literature. The aspiration of Israel was voiced in the promises and visions of the prophets, and the deep current of the people’s desire broke forth in the saying, Zhe Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come into his tentple. Buoyant with this hope and armed with these Scriptures, the memorials of God’s fellowship and discipline in the past, wherein this hope was em- bodied, the Hebrews became missionaries of Mono- theism, arousing the nations surrounding them to a recognition of one God who communes with men. The two processes went on side by side throughout the centuries. In their native land the Jews were trained to fuller acquaintance with Jehovah, were rising to higher spiritual capacities, and were de- veloping. the hope whose fruitage should be the blessing of the world. Even their very misfortunes _conduced to the spread of this knowledge and spiritual enlargement among their captors in the captivities into which they were so often brought. In this way ' they became a leavening influence throughout the East. Their synagogues were on the banks of every river ; their wealth was in the marts of all the cities ; their merchandise was on all the seas; their physi- ognomy, their language, their religious traits, were familiar to all peoples. The Israel of the disper- sion was immeasurably wider and greater numeri- cally than in the palmy national days of David and Solomon. The influence of this unwavering and long-continued testimony in the midst of false gods and defective religions cannot be estimated. Hints of its extent are gathered here and there by the record of the position of power and responsibility to 76 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. which in all these gentile kingdoms the Jew attained, and by the vast number of proselytes gathered. This influence was more marked as the centuries wore on, till in the fulness of time throughout the gentile world there was widespread understanding of the doctrine of one God, of his spiritual worship, and of the expected deliverer toward whom Jewish prophecy had so long been pointing. Thus place was prepared in the hearts of most diverse nationalities and most widely separated peoples to be the resting-place of that gospel of grace which found its fulfilment in the cross of Calvary. Parallel with these preparations, other providential movements had been going forward at the same time. The keenly intellectual Greek, with a genius for philos- ophy and language and clearness of thought, erected his civilization along the waters of the blue A¢gean. There, in a period of intellectual activity at home and of seclusion from the world at large, he fashioned a language the. most flexible in form and richest in expression that the world has yet seen. In the meantime the acutest intellect wrought assiduously upon the deepest problems of philosophy, especially upon the moral elements in man considered in his relations with his fellow-men and with the higher powers, and thus stamped that most admirable vehi- cle for the carrying of new ideas with a spiritual impress. Then arose the great Macedonian, who carried the arms of Greece, with its arts, its lan- guage, and its intellectual supremacy over the known world. Greek colonies, Greek cities, Greek univer- sities, made permanent this influence and brought all letters and all life under its sway. Greek was VI IN THE FULNESS OF TIME 77 the universal.language and Greek thought was the current intellectual coin of the cultured world. The Hebrew Scriptures were lifted out of their isolated state in the Aramaic tongue, and set free to roam untrammelled the wide realm of scholarship and spiritual thoughtfulness in the language of Aéschy- lus and Plato. This was a still wider opportunity for the gentile world to become acquainted with the Jewish hope, and the advent of Jehovah for which Israel waited. At the same time with the development of the Greek. civilization, a widely different but not less important contribution toward the common end was in course of realization on the Peninsula to the westward. Here was growing up an empire whose sceptre was to be universal and whose relation to the coming of God’s kingdom was to be most direct and far-reaching. The agency of Rome in preparing the place in history for the more perfect revealing of God is traceable in several ways. Primal among these is the national character, which gave her citizens no rest until their eagles were borne to the -confines of the inhabited world. As a result of this aggressive spirit, just at the proper juncture the world was found to have been welded by the hammer of Roman conquest into at least an outward unity. From the Euphrates to the Firth of Forth one official language was spoken which enabled the Advent to be quickly communi- cated to all parts of the widely sundered empire. The language of letters and philosophy was Greek. Just long enough before had the Grecian ascendency suc- cumbed to the Roman for the conquered in the field to become victors in thought and language. This 78 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, literary language also, with all its spiritual suggestive- ness, was made universal by the same widespread supremacy of Rome. The citizenship of Rome was valid among the wildest tribes and was respected by the most superstitious of the luxurious and cultured East. Thus the heralds of the larger faith were permitted to traverse without let or hindrance the enormous stretches of Czsar’s dominions, protection and passport afforded by the talismanic words czves Romanus sum. To still further facilitate ease of intercourse, a vast labyrinth of roads, highways of stone, radiated from the golden milestone in the Forum to the farthermost boundaries of the empire. Moreover, this world-wide supremacy of Rome threw the zgis of Roman law over all the petty states and principalities under her sway, so that the blinded Jews were not permitted to murder their Messiah in the frenzy and obscurity of an irresponsible mob, but he must be set by all the solemn forms of legal pro- cedure upon the pedestal of Roman jurisdiction, that Pilate’s “Ecce Homo” might summon the civilized world to behold him lifted up on a Roman cross, who should draw all men unto himself. sublimity ofttimes amid the children of the slums and out of the deepest moral obscurity, sufficient at least to prove that man, amid all baseness and grovel- ling, still reads the law of God written on his heart, 94 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. and owns his conscience accusing or excusing. Un- doubtedly, the future life must still be disciplinary. Such cases as the penitent thief, who is promised im- mediate fellowship with Christ in that life; the pas- sage thither of utterly untrained souls of children ; of newly penitent souls who have chosen the light, but have not yet wrought their preference of the holy to the sinful into the fibre of their characters; all these and similar divergences render discipline con- tinuously needful. This, however, does not necessarily imply anything more than was implied and made act- ual and representative in the earthly life of Christ. He learned obedience by the things whitch he suf- fered. He was sinless amid the opportunities and inducements of sin, yet was disciplined by the ex- periences of life. So it is possible that these untried, undeveloped spirits shall acquire maturity of moral character by the stress of moral conflict in the com- ing life, until, confirmed in holiness through the deeper inner preference of God by the whole nature, they are conducted through ascending stages of spiritual in- struction and development unto their ultimate goal, the stature of the fulness of Christ. XXIII. They will not Come that they may have Life Only by overlooking these deep-lying facts does it seem possible to hold the theory of the ultimate sal- vation of all men. There is no sentimentalism like the sentimentalism of shallow thought. ‘There are those who do not hesitate to declare that they can- not see how infinite justice can coexist with infinite mercy, inasmuch as punishment is absolutely required by the one and absolutely forbidden by the other. A VII THEY WILL NOT COME 95 deeper interpretation of the idea of justice covers the point here raised. In the recesses of perfect being mercy and justice are the same. Because The Lord loveth whom he chasteneth; Our God ts a consuming fire. Infinite justice and infinite goodness are one. Yet, like all comprehensive attempts to reconcile the difficulties of a vast area of truth, this idea of a final restoration of all men through the gracious op- portunity of another and post-mortem decision for God does meet, in its implications at least, some of the difficulties which confront one who looks far down the vista of humanity’s future existence, or inquires particularly as to the condition of specific classes in the life that is to come. We are in danger of seri- ously misunderstanding the significance of Christ’s words concerning the immediateness of decision and the fixedness of character resulting from contact with truth in its higher forms, the highest form in fact in his own person, unless we remember that he spoke to the grown men who heard and saw him, and of those who, like these, should have clear knowledge of him. He left untouched, except in the way of infer- ence, a very large class of cases which are to be con- sidered in our attempts to systematize our belief on this subject. His words do not include nor were they intended to include the children of every land, the ignorant childish barbarian, nor the wretched product of the slums. It is not enough to say that death fixes character universally. It is not so. The infant of a few days or hours has no character, only the potentiality of character. Nor will the presence of God and the influence of the holy hosts produce holy character 96 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. inevitably. That would be to make it external and mechanical, and therefore wzmoral. Hence there must be choice, there must be training, there must be spiritual growth in the life beyond this, if all men are to reach the stature of Christ, and God is to be loving and just to all. Inextricable difficulties lie in the crude popular conception that just beyond the river of death rise the shining heights of glory — of moral perfection — which may be scaled at a bound, by a deathbed repentance or a turning to God on the part of the criminal and vicious at the eleventh hour. Far more hopeful for these classes, as well as more accordant with ethical requirements, is the view that looks for the continuance of the same principles of development and laws of growth hereafter as here. If that God who is manifested in Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, his relations to humanity continue the same, and that which has been is the thing that shall be. Eternal life is more than unending existence; it is existence in correspondence with God. Tzhzs zs life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. The doctrine of inherent immortality is a survival of Platonism ; the true Christian doctrine of this difficult subject is the reverse of this. It takes into account the close asso- ciation of man with God. Even the final state of the incorrigibly wicked, if such there shall be, will be best understood from this point of view. To hold the doctrine of the eternal wrath of God against sin in such a way as to establish an eternal dualism is con- tradictory to the idea of one supreme and sovereign God. To hold it in such a form as to imply that the VII THEY WILL NOT COME 97 sinner is brought into a position wherein God aban- dons him and his doom becomes irrevocable, is to bring the idea of fate into the Christian system and to place a portion of humanity under the reign of necessity instead of freedom. But there is a sense in which there is an eternal punishment of sin. God’s opposition to sin must burn till he consumes it. It is a continuation of the Judgment while man continues in the condition of judgment. The hope of man is in this fact of an un- ending expression of the divine antipathy to evil. His despair would begin with the cessation of God’s judgment to follow him. That would be the awful declaration, spoken finally and forever, Ephraim 1s joined to his idols, leave him alone. That would show that God had given him up. It is only because man is related to God that the wrath of God abides on him. The solemn question is, Can this relation ever cease? Not through God’s withdrawing from man. But may it not come to an end through man’s withdrawal from God ? In the mystery of loss and failure of some lives we may see that all is not loss. The falling leaves and blasted blossoms return to nourish the succeeding growth; the very waste of bodily life is converted by the alchemy of nature into the production of new supplies. So in the often unrecognized but infinite interchange and reaction of the social economy, it would be rash to declare any life, however partial or rudimentary, to be without a true use and influence in the sum total of human life. These various begin- nings of existence that come to naught, blasted buds on the tree of life, do not fall into nothingness. They H 98 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. are not lost. They but drop back into God. They are partial individuations of the divine being. May we not believe that those unhappy souls who have proven incapable of receiving the gift of eternal life, thus sinking down, are received into an unconscious ab- sorption into the less specialized substance of univer- sal being? In certain quarters it is denied that temporary evil is consistent with the divine goodness if eternal evil is not. In others it is denied that the divine good- ness demands that God should bring evil to an end, and this on the ground that he is infinitely wise and good and yet permits evil. It is continually asserted, too, that arguments which would prove that sin shall finally cease would also prove that it could never begin, and yet that it is here. The evolutionary in- terpretation gives relief from this closed circle of orthodox thought, particularly in this serious problem of the beginning and end of sin. The fact is often overlooked that the problem of the entrance of sin into the universe, so far as concerns man, stands upon a different basis from its cessation. In its entrance, we have to deal with the erring of free-will in its for- mative stages; in, its cessation, we have to consider the effect of its unchecked ravages. Its very nature is the antithesis of the constructive principle in the world. Will it ultimately destroy the persistent sinner? It may. This is man’s failure, not God’s. In itself sin is destructive of all relations wherein man lives. It separates him from God, in whom alone he lives and moves and has his being. It is destructive of love, for perfect, unmingled love is the expression of VII THEY WILL NOT COME 99 perfect harmony in the relations of man with God. It is the destruction of personality, for personality consists in the realization of the end of our being, which we find alone in God. It is destructive of life, for life consists in unity, whereas sin is essentially discord and dissension among the faculties of the soul. Therefore the wickedness of the obstinately wicked seems to carry the elements of their destruc- tion within itself, and to insure that their lives shall be transitory. Even though prolonged beyond the grave, they must ultimately be extinguished. Each man comes at birth into the heritage of at least incipient personality. He is born in the environ- ment of a race-fellowship. His early days and re- ceptive years tend to develop this power of manhood. He also is born in God’s fellowship. To grow in realization of this is to grow at once in freedom and personality. But he is made capable of morality, that is, the following of right from free choice, and con- sequently also of rejecting it. Sin is selfishness. Selfishness is segregative. The wilful sinner may throw himself outside that communion wherein per- sonality exists; he may repudiate that race-bond wherein humanity- consists; he may yield himself to the impulses of his lower self till he lose that free- dom which constitutes individuality. Now the laws of the conservation of energy and of the persistence of force are no guarantee of persistence of form; they cannot be pressed for a continuation of the sinful soul any farther than they are also a pledge of the conscious immortality of the righteous soul. There- fore, since reversion begins at the top to tear down what development has built, there is no reason, under 100 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP, VII the recognized laws of life, why the sinner should not gradually degenerate till he falls below the level of personality and comes again within the grasp of lower and other laws, to the extinction of personality and freedom. ! CHARTERAV ITI AS MANY AS RECEIVED HIM XXIV. The Sons demanding their Portion OVER against the problem of the appearance of evil in a world that is nothing else than the manifestation of God himself rises the no less difficult inquiry, How can a free intelligence once turned to evil be turned back to God? These are merely the upper and the under sides of the same truth. God is manifest in man, but does not come to full personality in the individual finite mind, except through an educative process of self-determination in that mind. His mani- festation is delayed by a formidable obstacle at the outset. The manifestation of God requires personal- ity, but only that which is free can be personal. The human can realize itself as divine only by loving choice of good where choice of evil were equally easy. Man must, therefore, be left free from domination in order that he may pass from the condition of necessity which environs all infra-moral nature unto self-control in righteousness. He must be free if he is ever to be moral. He has climbed into existence up the long ladder of lower life-forms. Never till the spirit of God came to consciousness in him did man truly live. Till that hour he had his soulless existence as a brute being, but when by any means this poor rudimentary soul became conscious of God and of personal rela- 101 102 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. tions to him, that moment Man was born. There is now discernible in him the stirrings of a divine life, infant and feeble, but capable of waxing more and more. To nourish and fan this spark till man’s whole nature shall flash and sparkle therewith has been God’s endeavor from that moment to this. But this neces- sitates the cultivation of a true selfhood in man, and the beginnings of self-consciousness tend ever to self- assertion. The race, like the individual, claims its inheritance in severalty. Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. The son in early man- hood draws apart from the father, the race in moral youth holds apart from God. In this transition period lie the sphere and opportunity of sin. The very self- love which is essential to a real personality begets in its first awakenings that love of one’s own will and way which is the essence of antagonism to God’s will. In its ultimate source, sin is the revolt of the derived will against the primal will. The only real idolatry is man’s putting his own self in the place of God. Self-gratification is made the end and aim of life. The beginnings of hostility to God, whether racial or personal, are mainly negative, —a refusal to follow the highest, rather than intentional turning against it. Consciousness of sin grows more intense as men or nations rise in ethical scale. The conflict becomes more terrible as it is increasingly realized that the battle-ground is wholly internal; that in en- throning his own will he is not declaring war against an external law, but against the deepest principles of his own nature where he and God are inseparably one. Sin is not measured by amount nor numbered by multiplying; it is divergency of character. VIII THE SONS IN A FAR COUNTRY 103 XXV. The Sons in a Far Country The first consequence of this breaking away by the race from its moorings is that man rests in self instead of God; has no conscious child-relationship to him such as so strongly characterizes his feeling when this relationship has been once recognized ; does not com- mune with him; and, being unlike him in character, is antagonistic toward his will. This centripetal force with reference to himself becomes in man a cen- trifugal force with respect to God, which impels him away from God into darkness and loneliness. He dwells, like the Prodigal, in a far country. Only gradually, and with something of experience, can the disorder of the soul within itself be Overcome, and man learn that God is his true centre; that harmony of will with him is also harmony with one’s own highest good. There is an element of truth in the theory of in- herited evil. The perversions of our ancestors flit through our consciousness, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father through his vision, beckoning us, inclining us to follow them. Worse still, the points whereon they yielded are more vulnerable in us and the lines of resistance which they surrendered are weakened in us, so that simply to maintain the same ground com- _ pels us to even more stubborn battle than they waged. The errors, the weakness, and the wickedness of our progenitors are stamped upon our bodily tissues, our nerves, our intellectual faculties, and our moral capaci- ties. Could sin be transmitted as are these tenden- cies and characteristics, sad were our case indeed. Thanks be to God that history, experience, science, 104 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. and consciousness unite in testifying that while the will may be impelled it cannot be compelled by these things. Sin comes only by consent and conscious- ness. Environment is powerful but not omnipotent. The soul has within itself the determining power, and this, not some shadowy procession of ancestral traits, in its own recesses turns the tide of life to or from God, and is what it wills to be, not what its surround- ings make it. Ifa man refuses admission to the sun- light of God, he necessarily walks in darkness not only, but suffers a moral obliquity, self-invited, which makes him responsible for the errors of reason into which he may fall. In this way he becomes account- able for his own stumbling and for all those whom he may lead into the ditch. XXVI. The Sons beginning to be in Want From highland or lowland the rivers come home to the sea. Upon few of the traditionary doctrines will the modern view of the world have greater transform- ing effect than upon that important section of truth which deals with the coming of man into fellowship with God. So long as we could hold the belief that God bestowed his law in objective form upon one race, leaving all others in the darkness of ignorance, it was easy to suppose these hapless peoples to be sunken in iniquity without hope and without God in — the world. But with the growing acceptance of the idea that spiritual apprehension is gradual, a process of emerging from the brute into the human, we are prepared to recognize in all religious phenomena the confession of a soul conscious of need. Man has sprung from God and naturally tends toward him, Vul THE SONS BEGINNING TO BE IN WANT 105 as the vagrant mists rising from the ocean, and borne away on every gale, return again in myriad streams. His withdrawing into self is the temporary aberration of dawning self-consciousness. The deep- est springs of human nature are divine. As himself a manifestation of God, man carries within his own heart that spiritual germ which, under conditions that God will supply, shall blossom forth into all the graces and glory of the spirit. His religious life is the unfolding of the divine element in his constitution. This instinctive tendency gives rise to his faith, his worship, his sacrifices, his consciousness of sin. It is upon this, the deepest foundation in man’s nature, that the vast superstructure of religious , acts from fetishism to Calvary is reared. , It is not too much to say that the measure of the extent to which man has come unto himself is the clearness of his recognition of separation between himself and God. Everywhere are found traces that the sons of God, even though they at first demand their own portion, and go away into a far country, yet erelong begin to be in want. The soul is con- scious of the presence of God within it, and in its inner nature assents to the demands of that fellow- ship; yet is also conscious of an inclination toward self-indulgence which is at variance with its true essence. Thus sin is experienced as in part at least a foreign element which comes into existence, and increases only as knowledge of God increases. Only in so far as man is conscious that he is a child of God, is he able to feel the burden of guilt, or to be conscious of sin. The very sin that separates, there- fore, unites the soul with God. No less than this is 106 THE SONS OF GOD cHly. taught in all that vast body of literature, running back to earliest times and crudest forms, in which is set forth the continuous tragedy of the soul in its antagonism to God. The old Accadian penitential psalms, the plaintive litanies of the early Vedas, the stern ritual of Egypt’s Book of the Dead, confess with Augustine, Thou hast formed us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee. Similar evidence of the universal sense of lack appears in the pathetic backward look of every people, for the days when God and man walked in friendly intercourse together. The way in which the various nations have worked out the idea of a fall, through man’s own fault, from a primitive state of blessedness which consisted chiefly in the divine fellowship and approval, shows that a natural im- pulse impels men to feel after God, if, haply, they may find him, dimly conscious that he is not far from every one of us. To the same effect are the various propitiations and sacrifices by which men have thought to come into the complacency of such gods as they knew ; and the punishments which have been held to await the ungodly mark the convictions of mankind, that the wicked were blameworthy in being at variance with God, and that the chief element in their penalty was exclusion from his presence. XXVII. The Sons turning to their Father Acknowledgment of error is not easy. It is denial of one’s self. Only by growing into a larger self is one able to see one’s error as error, and condemn it. When God waits to welcome the returning son, and when that son becomes conscious of his orphaned VIII THE SONS TURNING TO THEIR FATHER 107 state and longs for the father’s face, nothing, it would seem, could be simpler than that the desire of God and the need of man should embrace each other, and the perturbed soul speedily find peace in the bosom of its Father. It is found in experience, however, that for man, the return to God is slow and difficult A chief problem connected with man’s continued errancy has been to square it at once with infinite love and omnipotent power. We are coming to see, however, that power is no factor in moral government, and that time, in itself, is no factor in moral character. With the passing of the doctrine of preterition disappears from enlightened circles the last vestige of the idea that God is willing that any should sin to his own ruin. Yet it is clear from the nature of the case that God cannot force moral devel- opment beyond its slow ripening in the atmosphere of freedom. It need not surprise us, then, to find that human progress Godward has been slow and painful. Man’s way to God lies over his own body. This explains why the moral ideal always runs so far beyond its practical realization. The early Babylonian texts reveal a beautiful conception of the fatherhood of God, and a recognition of sin as consisting in aliena- tion from him; yet the most pitiless cruelty was in their habitation. The Scandinavian Eddas disclose the Norseman’s worship of the Al Fadir, and their idea of death asa “heimgang”’; yet this all-father’s sons were all those slain in war, and their delights in that father’s house were to fight endless battles by day, and drink the foaming mead from their ene- mies’ skulls by night. The ancient Hindoo called sin 108 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. “that which throttles,’ and beheld in Varuna one like unto Jehovah, of purer eyes than to behold evil; yet the modern Hindoo opposes to the progress of a purer faith the passive resistance of a soul deficient in any real sense of personal demerit, and serves his deified processes of nature with immorali- ties as great as those for which Sodom burned. The flesh everywhere lusteth against the spirit, and it is not strange that in the age-long struggle against the animalism of the lower nature, and the wilfulness of a budding personality, the spirit should triumph slowly and be often overborne. Still, the long and ghastly record of sacrifices by which man has sought to placate cruel and vengeful deities — an endeavor which has reddened the altars of every race with human blood and made the names of Iphigenia, and Isaac, and Jephthah’s daughter, representative of a countless host of similar victims — bears witness to the universal desire of men to enter into communion with such gods as they know. Originating in fear, as the earliest emotion of the brute mind, the worship of primitive religion must neces- sarily be characterized by mystery and dread. Man can think of God only in human terms, and where man is in the scale of moral ascent there will his God be also. ‘To men cruel, base, revengeful, how should not God appear as altogether such an one as them- selves? Crude, partial, and perverted, as the con- ceptions of men concerning God have mainly been hitherto, this constitutional impulse to worship is still _ the scala sancta by which they have gone up to speak with God face to face. For man at his best determines the completeness of the son’s return to the Father. i VII THE SONS TURNING TO THEIR FATHER 109 In his gradual upward movements man has been steadily coming under new and loftier standards and laws. The advance has not been more conspicuous in those exceptional open-minded souls, who have appeared here and there along the ages to testify to the vision and the ethical grandeur of God, than in the rising of the multitude out of sluggish, grovelling conditions into a more intelligent attitude and a higher spiritual atmosphere. Every one of these great be- holders of God has acted upon the mass of humanity as a central mountain, which in the forming of the earth’s crust drew its foot-hills with it out from the level of the plain. None, however, have opened the eyes of humanity Godward like the Son of Mary. What he sees in God is what humanity will ultimately come to see. In him man has attained consciousness of perfect unity with God, and he is able to bear all men up into the same sense of oneness, because his complete manhood was developed, as theirs must be, in an ethical process with the aid of his consciousness of perfect unity with God. He thus becomes to us a true Mediator, a living Way between the divine and the human. He isa daysman who lays his hand upon both. To him God can speak and be understood. No man cometh to the Father but by him, and to him also do all that have heard and have learned of the Father come. His experience is, therefore, the typical experience of humanity, and by this consciousness shall men determine their closeness to God. By his perfect sonship he has made clear the meaning of the sons of God. In him that pride of self-sufficiency which is the contradiction of the filial spirit is entirely put LOL THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. away. The souls that have dwelt in the darkness of unbelief, of idolatry, and the limitations of sense are led out into the light and brought into full per- sonal relationship with the Father. This is the great message that he has taught us, that the fatherhood of God is not alone a name nor an ideal, but a helpful and living reality in whose power men may overcome all their antagonism and defects and attain as perfect sonship as his own. Chiefest of all, he gathers into himself all the motives and gropings which underlie the sacrifices and expiations of the world and makes for mankind that typical sacrifice toward which all these tend, but which their broken and inarticulate utterance can but feebly express, that total surrender of the will which yet shall not be its annihilation but its consent. In this attainment he is the representa- tive of all souls filled with the filial spirit who shall come home in loyal allegiance to their Father. XXVIII. The Sons met by the Father The ministries of sunlight and activities of the plant codperate from bursting ovule to opening flower. God’s continuous manifestation is in the ascending spirit of man. The race comes not out of the lifeless womb of inanimate things, but is the fruit of a re- lationship close and vital with One who is fashion- ing man in his own image, —/¢ zs he that hath made us and not we ourselves. Man’s life isin God. Sep- aration from God is death. God has sought from the beginning to impart his life to man. This is the profound truth which found expression in the figure that God breathed into man the breath (spirit) of life, —his own spirit, —and man became a living soul. VIII THE SONS MET BY THE FATHER lll God has been present in the race from the beginning, both guiding and helping it in its forward struggle. No slightest effort has man put forth whether for good or evil but in the power of God. In all his brutalities, ignorance, and crime, he has associated God with him. The divine sympathy is the divine passion. God has agonized in man’s redemption, — In all their affiictions he was afflicted; and he bare them and carried them all the days of old. The Lamb has in truth been slain from the foundation of the world, and God has borne with man that he might at last be able to bear him on to a filial spirit and a son- like life. We are beginning to see that the divine fatherhood is the background upon which ‘is projected every paternity that in heaven or earth is named. There is a kindliness in nature, in the midst of its dumb senselessness and heartless indifference, which faintly forecasts an infinite pity; there is a mutual interdependence of plant and animal, of lower life and higher, witnessing that even thus early no one liveth unto himself; there is a rudimentary altruism in animal tribes —a motherhood even of the tiger — that shows the divine love growing toward its perfect expression. In all these things God is giving himself for the life of the world. The self-sacrifice of Christ is not a unique thing in nature. On the contrary, it is most persistently present everywhere. The idea is stamped upon every material atom, upon every animal structure, upon every human affection, upon all the. higher nature of man, upon the angels of heaven, upon the heart of God. The cross is the foundation of the universe. Not a blade of grass grows but at the cost 112 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. of the soil. The soil itself becomes such only by the self-sacrifice and disintegration of the rocky frame of the earth. All this is decomposed only by the sacri- fice of the sun. All force, all life, all energy, all warmth, all light, natural or artificial, upon earth are gifts of the sun, which, because he is Lord of the solar system, is lordliest giver of all. He gives to his children — he is parent of his system —as God gives . to his, largely, freely, constantly. We trace this principle back through geological periods and we find each new age, or advance of life, coming out of the rock-hewn sepulchre of the preceding./ As far back as we can follow God’s thought in the universe, this element of vicarious service appears. Everything ministers not to itself, but to that which succeeds. And this impulse, unconscious in material things and hence expressing the direct will of the Maker, partially conscious in the animal creation, — certainly so in many cases, —reaches conscious self-determi- nation in man. Thus faintly at first, but with ever increasing clearness, the vicarious principle comes into view. Man has felt the impulse of God, and has responded to it even when unconscious whence it came. His response is in the form of willing service for others, and is freely offered in one form or another by all. The citizen sacrifices himself for the state. Leonidas and his three hundred are repeated and multiplied a thousandfold in every nation. Every cradle is a mother’s cross of sacrifice. Society is organized around this principle, and humanity is uplifted and benefited only so fast and so far as the strong are willing to be crucified for the weak., Men have also 2s at THE SONS MET BY THE FATHER 113 responded to this impulse in a deep-seated religious instinct, which would come before the Lord with calves of a year old; and give the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul. Through the unfolding of this spirit in reference to his fellow-men, man early caught some glimpses of the truth that the healing of humanity is ever a costly thing to God. Typical of this feeling is the Babylonian legend which explains God’s own blood to be mixed with the dust from which men were formed, Of like import is an Egyptian myth to the effect that the sun wounded himself and from his flowing blood made all existing things. Since, then, we find the cross graven upon every physical atom, upon all animal life, upon all human af- fections, upon the will of man, we must conclude that God wrought it there. If it is stamped upon all prod- ucts of his will, we must infer that it is characteristic of his purpose. The fact that blind, inanimate matter is compelled to fall into this plan seems proof of God’s intention. Each lower type is crowned by passing through sacrifice into a higher. That the highest forms of life should assume it, and that willingly, is evidence that the idea expresses the deepest nature of God. Every stage in this process is a step of the Father to meet his erring sons. The vicarious suffer- ings and services of men are the manifestation of the infinite pity and self-sacrifice of God. Man has never had to climb painfully upward alone through trial and failure and pain, along this pathway of moral develop- ment. Each milestone in that toilsome journey is but an Ebenezer testifying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped ws. Man does not wrestle with God to win reluctant blessing, but God wrestles with men that he may over- I 114 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. come their defect of spiritual quality, their ignorance, their wilfulness, and make them capable of the bless- ing that he waits to bestow. We are not to turn back to listen for the footfalls of God only in some lost Eden, but we see him emerging wherever a human soul, though it be with agony and bloody sweat, struggles toward the light. The entire course | of man’s ascent is educational. God has patience with his slowness, but steadily pushes his own inflexi- ble purpose toward the time and the stage when man will justify his care. Always his benevolence is his guide, and for what man is to be, God endures what he is. ‘God loves us,” says Augustine, “such as we shall be, not such as we are.” Zales nos amat Deus, guales futuri sumus, non quales sumus. Unfortunately all men do not advance with equal pace. Even when the ideal is common, each one ap- prehends it with varying degrees of clearness, and approaches it at a different rate. The open secret of the popularity of the masters of expression is that in their work the multitudes find definite embodiment given to sentiments and thoughts of which they are vaguely conscious. They find in the great poem, or picture, or statue, a fitting utterance of what they dumbly mean. Still more does humanity recognize itself at its best in those typical men who set forth in divine reality the worthiest emotions of its heart. This representative office is most perfectly filled in Jesus of Nazareth. He presents in completed ful- ness all those aspirations, duties, and apprehensions. which have been but partially realized in other men. By him, therefore, we interpret the religious history of the world. Earth knows no more passionate long- a. Vu THE SONS MET BY THE FATHER 115 ing than that of orphaned infancy for the embrace of parental love. Throughout the ages, the cry of thé human heart in its deepest yearnings, the voice of a conscious lack involving all other wants, has been for its Heavenly Father. Humanity has groped blindly in the dark for the touch of his guiding hand. It has strained its ear, amid the babel strife and jealousy of men, to catch the accents of a dimly apprehended whisper of the love of God. It has been dumbly aware that somewhere, in some way, could the path but be discovered, its disquiet and weariness might be lulled to rest on the breast of an infinite pity. Hideous perversions and grotesque caricatures of the Universal Father have been the utmost to which the larger part of the human family have attained. Here and there a better and a worthier view was given to one and another, but never till Jesus was born had any mortal soul an adequate conception of the fatherhood of God. In his understanding of that divine relation God was for the first time understood of men. Humanity shall evermore find fit and full expression of what, in its noblest moods and best aspirations, it would think of God in his words, Our Father, who art in heaven. Through all his ascending career, man has felt a growing sense of organic unity and of reciprocal obligations with his fellow-man. He has realized the necessity of this as a part of his approach to God. There has followed a gradual relaxing of the rigors of savage cruelty. There has been a gradual in- crease of brotherly traits and a growing care for others. These tendencies, completed and _ supple- mented, became the rule of life in him whose un- 116 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. varying custom was to do unto others as he would that others should do unto him, and whose conscious- ness of sonship enabled him to assure men One is your Father, even God; and all ye are brethren. Take that other great highway along which man, conscious of his alienation, has set out to return to his Father,—the bloody path of sacrifice. By the smoke of their altars and the costliness of their worship, men have sought to make confession of their estrangement and to give utterance to their penitence. Here again the feeble lispings of his brethren get perfect expression in this representative man. What others blindly meant by lurid rites and bleeding victims or self-immolations, he clearly saw to be the perfect consecration of the will of the worshipper. This sacrifice he made, and in his, Lo / I am come to do thy will, O God, the erring son is brought ‘fully home. While the Christ rises in this way out of the race, and, as the normal man, concentrates all its hopes and fears, its desires and its possibilities, within him- self, and carries with him potentially the whole of humanity up to the God-level of life, there is yet another and no less precious half of the same relation. It is only in the perfect man that God is perfectly manifested to man. It is for lack of a consistent application of the doctrine of the immanent God that our thought grows so confused and weak in its endeavor to describe the meeting of God and man in Jesus. Conceiving of God as a remote Creator and Ruler, we can never make his entrance into human- ity, and all the consequences that follow, seem other than official and extraneous. On the other hand, the VuI THE SONS MET BY THE FATHER tb conception of God as in himself constituting the actual substance of the entire universe and giving rise to all its forms in the process of his own self- revealing, presents to our thoughts a God who is bone of our bone and life of our life; for it is only asa manifestation of him that we exist. With this fuller light that God has given us con- cerning himself, we no longer say that God has come down unto man, but that he has come up with him. Whatever, then, of spiritual quality we have found in man is but the echo of its antitype in God. In practical effect it is indifferent whether we say, Thus far has God brought humanity forward; or, Thus far has God manifested himself in man. The Christ’s entire earthly life, because he was himself the eul- mination of manhood, was at once a perfect expres- sion of God’s nature and of his attitude toward man. The cross of Christ is the measure of the cost at which God is striving to manifest himself in human- ity and bring it unto himself. Through taking form in their own flesh, it is possible for God to set forth in vivid and touching manner to what lengths —to the utmost possible lengths —he will go in order to make his erring children partakers of his own life. The death of Christ is therefore the farthest. possible remove from mere aimless example or illustration of God’s love. It follows upon a calm, deliberate, pa- tient carrying out of the original purpose which had as its end the conformation of the race to the divine character. Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son. The Christ did not suffer that he might exhibit, as ina drama, the divine power or the divine pity. But in him was 118 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. the manifestation of God in love, in compassion, in sympathy, in power, in truth, in life, in antagonism to evil. In him God is bearing our sins and carrying our sorrows. The universe itself, indeed, is but the utterance of the divine thought in self-sacrifice. God has been giving himself to man through all these eons since began this vast unfolding. / To live is to love, and to love is to give self to the loved one’s service. / Hence all the universe, with myriad fingers that never falter, has pointed to Golgotha! The coming of God along this way to meet his children, and to do for them more than they could ask or even think, was but the culmination for which all precedent ages was prepa- ration. The privations, the meek endurance, the scourging, the thorn crown and the cross, the spear thrust, the pierced hands of service and feet of love, the death and burial, — these were merely incidental, but the Father, forgive them was of eternal, un- changing, and unchangeable purpose; to this end came he forth! XXIX. The Sons restored by the Father The Father has come far down the way to meet his returning sons, to which return indeed his own impulse inspires them. But now while they stand without, bowed down with shame and conscious un- worthiness and guilt, how shall they be given peace and made to feel at home in their Father's house? Every epoch that has given attention to this funda- mental question has formulated its answer in different terms. The prevailing conceptions of each age de- termine the form of its reply. As the thoughts of VIII THE SONS RESTORED BY THE FATHER 119 men have been dominated by one idea or another, the process has been described almost exclusively in one or another class of the metaphors in which the Script- ure writers presented it in their striving to make the truths of divine revelation speak the language of daily life. The words “ vicarious,” ‘“expiation,” “substitu- tion,’ “ransom,” “satisfaction,” “imputation,” have been in common use often without much inquiry as to how they got their meaning, or very exactly what their meaning is. These theories contemplate sin as an objective reality, whereas it is not external, but in- ternal ; not objective, but subjective; not superficial, but radical. It is sometimes active, sometimes pas- sive ; it is sometimes sullen, and again openly rebel- lious. But everywhere and always it is proportional with the degree to which the soul is yet apart from the life of God. As sin inheres in the deepest springs of human nature, its remedy must penetrate no less deep. The theory of imputed righteousness was inevitably cor- related with a doctrine of imputed guilt. But when the whole subject is brought down from the realms of bloodless abstractions into the range of real and permanent personal experience in every man’s con- sciousness of his own sinfulness, salvation must be regarded also as equally an experience rooted in man’s Own consciousness. Character is salvation. But character, because grounded in personality, is not transferable. From its very nature spiritual life cannot be vicarious. It is the response of the in- dividual soul to the workings of God within it. It is one’s own growth in the higher ranges of one’s nature. One person can no more grow for another 120 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. than can one tree draw for another the nourishing elements from the soil and convert the vital sap into the waving glory of branch, and leaf, and fruit. It is no remission of sins, therefore, to withhold punish- ment from the wrong-doer; nor can the penalty of wrong-doing be laid upon the innocent instead of the guilty. The offer of God in Christ, then, is not of a salvation ready-made. Christ can never be received by either God or man as a substitute for godly char- acter. Apart from holiness of life there is no salva- tion. The mercy of God is merciful only because it ends in righteousness of life. All God’s dealing with man is in order to a character after the tmage of him that created him. God gives us power to become sons of God; he does not give us Christ to be the Son of God in our stead. Salvation is character per- fected. Destiny is the harvest reaped from seeds of character sown in reiterated choice. Forgiveness cannot be spoken and forthwith be done. It is more than absolution ; it is the putting away of sin itself. In the self-centering of sin there is a severance of the soul’s own unity. It is divided against itself, and torn and rent, because the rudi- mentary personality of the soul is seceding from God, in whom is its completeness and the perfecting of its powers. Wherefore the forgiveness of sins is a healing. It brings peace by quenching the fires of strife. No lasting peace is possible to human souls till they are one in spirit with the Oversoul from which they spring. Sin is put away by putting away the disposition to sin, and personal disposition is put away only by changing it. In this, man cannot be passive. Nocrisis in a man’s life can demand a more VIII THE SONS RESTORED BY THE FATHER 12] intense energy than that act of self-surrender in which he transfers the motive power of his life from its centre in himself into God. He may be in- fluenced to this yielding by the divine spirit, but the capitulation he must himself make. In the inner- most recesses of personality, where the spirit of God presents itself to the spirit of man in its last retreat, having broken down all defences and brought to light all evasions, God does so coéperate with the human will as to enable it to make that exchange of its supreme purpose which effects a total revolution of life. These agonies of decision are the birth-pangs of the child of God. It is the passing out of the state in which the service of self is the ruling motive into a state that finds its ruling motive in the service of God. He is anew man from that moment, and be- cause a new man he stands toward God in a new rela- tion. The essence of his nature is the same as before, but he now recognizes God as akin to him- self and begins to realize the true end of his being. In the opening of the eyes that follows this sight of God, the true relations of things are clearly seen. No one has found the truth until he has found it for him- self; no man has heard the voice of God who has heard but the echo of that voice speaking through books or teachers or tradition. God’s voice in the individual soul is what wakens that soul to newness of life. When this is heard and heeded, the soul is new-born; it is born from above. This conversion is a readjustment of the forces of the soul, their re- arrangement about a different centre, their shaping toward a new end. The “Sanctification” of the I 122 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. schools is but the carrying forward of the soul forces along these new lines, which are laws estab- lished from the beginning for the human soul. The truth of the spirit does not destroy but fulfil the moral constitution of the mind. The soul’s right- eousness is not legal nor imputed; but is real. It is a righteous soul. It has become such through the impartation of the divine power to become the child of God. God and man are united in a harmony that is fundamental. Being reconciled to God, we have peace with God. Accustomed as we are, through long fenehin to think of man’s relations to God in either the com- mercial terms of debtor and creditor or the legal terms of guilt and penalty, we find it hard to accept the consequences of a relationship resting upon the original filial and paternal basis. It is at first hard to realize that God is saving humanity from within rather than from without; through a process of education rather than of administration. Not his law nor his revelation, but God himself, is the salva- tion of the world. He brings man unto himself not by satisfaction of law, but by communication of life. Man does not enter into the legal rights of an heir, but into the filial spirit of a son. In the restoration of his children, God exercises his whole character and is not less just in pardoning than in permitting sin to work out its own penalties till it bring the sinner to himself. This is the aim of all his acts. Punishment for past transgressions and the removal of guilt, the primary problems where God is regarded chiefly as Ruler and Judge, drop into a very secondary place when the whole process is seen to be educational, VII THE SONS RESTORED BY THE FATHER 123 developing manhood till it shall desire to put away evil and put on righteousness. @ “ Heaven Means crowned, not vanquished, when it says forgiven.” God’s restoring man, grown conscious and willing, to spiritual oneness with himself has been often described in terms of the mart, the royal court, the bar, the altar, but so far it never has been systemati- cally and consistently set forth in terms of life. Naturally the formal idea was based upon the notion of a sovereign, and theologies fashioned under its influence are dominated by that figure. Just as naturally the vital idea finds expression in the word “Father.” The Old Testament presents the matter under the formal type; the New, under the vital. Jesus brought about this great revolution in man’s idea of God. Whereas men had been accustomed to say the Lord is a great King above all gods, from him they learned to say Abba, Father. Within this circle of vital relationships the con- sciousness of Jesus moves. He represents in him- self the longing of man for fellowship with God, since in him the spiritual aspiration of the race reaches its meridian. He represents also God’s yearning over man, since in him, as the perfectly normal man, God has. attained perfect manifesta- tion. Hence Christ’s sense of his own sonship and of the fatherhood of God is the standard for all men. We may understand, then, that distinction which the Scripture writers maintain between the “Word” and the metaphysical relation which God in revelation sustains to God absolute, and the name “Son” by which Jesus himself loves to translate into the no- 124 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. menclature of human life that divine relationship to men of which human fatherhood is but a dim and partial reflection. In Christ is shown at once God’s vital union with man and man’s vital union with God, through which reciprocal life the healing of God’s wholeness may pass into the partialness of man’s nature and enable it with a divine power to be triumphant over evil. This is the power which in Christ is given to men to become sons of God. The great want whereof we stand in need is not an enlightening of the- mind chiefly, not merely a declaration even of the divine love, but a strengthening of the weak will powerless to do right. We wait for some motive that will unclench the contracting grip of sin, and open wide the channels of life outward, enlarge the realm and range of the freed spirit, and turn reluctant submis- sion into glad codperation. Our veins that flow so flaccid and sluggishly, throb with an abundant life when they become channels for the vitality of God. The passion of Christ was at once the perfecting of man’s sonship and a revelation of the patient tender- ness of God. In Christ not only was God manifesting himself in man, but, man also in him did actually in the power of God meet the shock of evil and the wrath of wickedness. Hence the warfare, in his case, between humanity at its flower and the forces of evil, which culminate in such bitter antagonism, is still the ‘conflict through which every soul, according to its measure, is to achieve the victory over self and over- throw the world. What riches of revelation unuttera- ble God spake to him in those bitter experiences he is ready to speak to every soul as soon as it shall vil © THE SONS RESTORED BY THE FATHER 125 become able to bear them. Meantime, a hardened and hopeless world sees in the broken heart of their brother — broken through sorrow for them —a revela- tion of the eternal pity ; in his self-sacrifice they see an imperial kindliness of holiness toward sinfulness that subdues and melts them. By recognizing and acquiescing in this divine love, joined to human love as an act of self-sacrifice ‘(for us men and for our salvation,’ the softened heart is brought into harmony with the will of God thus interpreted, and the antag- onism is atan end. The choked fountains of human nature are unsealed. The divine elements in it are called forth and strengthened till they disclose the divine image and likeness. Only in this way can character be transformed. Though the innocent may suffer with, he cannot suffer instead of the guilty. Our relation to God, to be helpful and real, must be genuine and personal, not fictitious and substitutionary. So inclined is human nature, in its moral struggle, to wait for help from without rather than to rally and discipline its own forces, that the chief reluctance to accept this understanding of the divine process will be felt just here where we are asked to surrender the medieval notion of an objective atonement. It is feared that we shall lose the sweet comfort and as- surance which accompany the belief that Christ’s blood has washed us clean and that his sacrifice paid all our debt. Just here, however, where it is most needed, this conception most fully justifies itself to discriminating thought. If it does not say that Christ himself made an atonement for men, or died a substi- tutionary death for men, it only descends to a deeper and firmer foundation and says that in Christ is mani- 126 THE SONS OF GOD CHAP. fested the eternal love of God for men, and his un- wearied endeavor to reconcile them to himself. It brings into clear view the everlasting arms of love as having been beneath us from eternity, and is thus in the line of historic succession to the best that is in any theory of the atonement. It does not interpret this deeply moving revelation of God as the self- immolation of mercy, but rather as an exhibition of that mother-love which from the first spasm of agony gives her life for her child’s life, not deliberately and saying, This I do because I love you, but, with entire self-obliteration, hearing its cry and seeing its need hurries to its relief. The idea of a vicarious expiation has never been ethically satisfactory, and with every advance in recognition of individual responsibility it has become less tenable. It will go far, therefore, toward placing this vital doctrine upon immutable moral foundations to recog- nize in Christ, not merely a victim artificially bridging by his sacrifice a chasm between God and humanity, but the representative typical man who presents in his gracious and blameless life the true life-form for humanity, by which it is to be fashioned and by which we shall interpret forever our high calling of God in Christ Jesus. His was a sacrificial life, exemplifying the normal soul’s responsiveness to God, and since this made him the apex of humanity, it also enabled him to feel and manifest the yearning of God over men. His unmerited death, while testifying how holily and hardily he held his conviction of right and his confidence in God, has its chief significance in bearing witness to God’s love for man, as he saw it, and thus becoming the most effective means of VIII THE SONS RESTORED BY THE FATHER 127 reconciliation. It goes far beyond example, however worthy. It is love and not love alone, but love ripened into sympathy and expressed in service. A~ revelation to the intellect removes doubt, but is not in itself sufficient to reconcile the antagonistic affec- tions. The revelation of sovereignty may subdue resistance, but will not of itself win loyalty. But the revelation of sympathy touches the lowest depths of being. Through this God enters and animates the soul. The darkened intellect is enlightened ; the hostile will is won; the misplaced affections are gained. An influence holy and restoring spreads throughout the soul, and the wandering son enters and dwells gratefully and lovingly in his Father's House. THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAPTER IX OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN XXX. God Man’s Dwelling-place in All Generations As we turn from contemplating the development of existing conditions to consider the character of present influences and to forecast their workings, we seem to pass into anew world. It is doubtful whether so conspicuous and sharply defined a boundary line between two phases of thought can be traced else- where in history as marks the recent transition from the merely successive to the organic as the determin- ing factor in human relations. The life that now is has been shaped almost wholly by ideas which re- garded men as isolated atoms and society as an aggregate of these units. Politics, law, theology, have all been individual. Of late, however, there is a notable change. The controlling idea in all depart- ments of thought is that of the vital oneness of man- kind, and a social element is thereby introduced into all theories and forms of activity. This was the keynote in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and we are beginning to discover that the largest move- ments and principles of the modern world find ample room and a fit setting in the framework of that marvellous summary of man’s privileges and duties which he gave to his disciples, saying, After this manner pray ye. 131 132 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. Human life is a continuous becoming; and to- morrow as truly future as the end of the world. The past does not fall away and perish, nor does the future exist only in the airy fabrics of fancy, but an indis- soluble unity binds that which has been to that which is to be. This unbroken continuity rises out of the duration of that universal being which is the abiding basis of all phenomena. The successive events of time are the several manifestations of this invisible ground. Only as individualizations of this greater underlying life do the separate generations of men attain an organic oneness with each other. The possibility of human history lies therefore in the eternal life of God as the unchanging background of its successive phenomena. It is in him that we live and move not only, but are all alike — whether chil- dren of an earlier or a later day — borne in the bosom of the All-Father. Every advance of knowledge more fully justifies the saying of Pascal: “The entire suc- cession or men, through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as one man.” Inasmuch as man is himself the visible form of the divine life, it is his progress, as he struggles upward into fuller development and individuality, conquering the opposing elements both within and without, that constitutes the substance of history. Because human- ity is an organic whole, developing itself in institu- tions, customs, and laws, each new stage not a new dispensation but the embodiment of forces that reach back to the beginning, all particular forms and influ- ences are interpreted by the general movement and are seen to be the gradual unfolding in orderly process of a deeper and more universal life. This gives IX GOD MAN’S DWELLING-PLACE 133 undying interest to the faintest glimmerings of know- ledge concerning man’s beginnings, however crude and low, and clothes with a present significance every fragment of pottery or sculptured brick or clay cylin- der or papyrus script that brings back into touch with our day peoples, however ancient, whose long silent pulses still throb in our veins. In this way the early civilizations along the Euphrates and the Nile, the ancient dwellers in the Hellenic peninsula and by the Tiber, and they who thronged the Syrian hillsides, as well as the myriads that swarm in China and India or in Africa, are part and parcel of an individual whole. If the story of the nations seems broken and con- fused, marred by unreason and selfishness and pain- ful with misery and gloomy with evil, it is because it is the record of a race in the throes of a moral struggle, of which the beginning with its dust and sweat and blood is visible, but the final victory is 4 largely hidden from our view. To deny, however, that a dawn does lie beyond these shadows of night is to fail utterly to grasp the meaning of man’s life- story and the forces that grapple in this strife. The obstacles which impede him are the materials from which man shall yet build his triumphal arch. It was a profound remark of Schilling that, History as a whole is a successive revelation of God. Re- garding humanity as a culmination of that universal unfolding which results from God’s self-evolution, it is plain that this process both provides for the possi- bility of history and at the same time determines its methods. God is seen to be not wholly outside the race-struggle, but included in it as its mightiest power and its shaping force. Human history, then, results 134 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. from the codperating of God with man in a continu- ous development, each passing phase, so far as it ac- cords with the true destiny of man, rendered durable by being taken up and embodied in the next succeed- ing. The difficulty of recognizing as beneficial very many of the harsher phenomena appearing in the course of this outworking, is greatly minimized by the conception of the earthly life of humanity as a structure still in process of completion, upon which God and man must work together till the head- stone shall be brought forth. This action and re- action between the human spirit and the divine spirit explains the coincidences of preparedness on man’s part at the same time with new and fuller revelations of God, such as characterize the time of Christ’s ap- pearing, the Reformation, orthe settlement of America. At the same time, God is not to be regarded as over- bearing man’s will, but as drawing it forth through a universal educative process which unfolds the separate elements of his constitution, and brings them out into their field in the world. In the history of mankind, therefore, we see God’s chiefest work in time, and are enabled to see how all apparently isolated events form a part of that orderly series which tends to the divine glory through the highest welfare of mankind. -XXXI. Have we not All one Father ? A feature always accompanying the growth of knowledge is the taking on by old conceptions of new and widening meaning at every stage. In proportion as better acquaintance with humanity as a whole supersedes the ancient narrow and jealous tribal notion of relationship with an increasing sense of 1X HAVE WE NOT ALL ONE FATHER 135 unity, not only between man and man but between man and all things else, the idea of a universal Father becomes possible. The power in which the physicist discovers the fountain of all force ; the life which the biologist sees palpitating in every atom of the uni- verse; the law which the student of ethics finds de- termining all intelligent activity toward righteous- ness; this the filial spirit of humanity everywhere hails, Adba, Father. This recognition of a common Father for all men follows naturally upon the widening of the universe through scientific discoveries of modern times. Until the unity of nature was demonstrated, it was impossi- ble to be assured of one universal will. While hu- man history was considered as but a swift passage from nothingness to night, still painful however short, men might recognize a creator, acknowledge a sover- eign, or cower before a fate, but none could lift hope- ful hands of entreaty to a parent pitying and compas- sionate. When once the grandeur of that whole, of which earth forms so small a part, is realized, and when the tremendous sweep of the human ages, both past and future, begins to be understood, and when there comes a sense of that close relationship which links together the most widely separated peoples and in the most palpable way causes the acts of long- buried generations still to trouble Council Boards and Exchanges of to-day, no one has any longer the hardi- hood to claim a special proprietorship in him who is the universal scource of all alike, but is willing hum- bly to join with those of any age or of any nation in the common acknowledgment, Our Father. As the being of God is fundamental to all reality, 136 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. so man’s idea of God is formative of all his secondary ideas. Men necessarily approximate what they wor- ship, since in that is realized their highest ideals. There is no more powerful influence at work among men than the idea which they have of God. The different stages of human progress could have no truer criterion than the predominant meaning which this word conveyed to the general mind. When men have thought of Deity as capricious, they have been superstitious; when they have thought of him as inflexible, they have been fatalists ; when they have thought of him solely as Supreme Ruler, they have become servile; only when they recognize in him that balance of love and law which together make up the idea of father, have they stood upright and loyal in the spirit and power of conscious sonship. Thus by observation of the past we may mark the drift of the historic constellations and discern the far- off end toward which the race is moving. The shift- ing warp and flying shuttles of time and circumstance are steadily revealing the outlines of a majestic Form who, otherwise unseen, is more and more disclosed as the central figure in the lengthening tapestry of hu- man life. God is conceived as the substance of all humanity, manifesting himself most fully in the per- sonal relationships and attainments of mankind. This growing recognition of a universal fatherhood in God is the justification of the idea of a universal brother- hood in man. XXXII. All we are Brethren The natural history of an idea is no less worthy of careful study than that of a plant or animal. Tracing IX ALL WE ARE BRETHREN 137 the gradual expansion of the idea of race unity from the time when the stranger was an enemy and only kin were kind, up to the vigorous sense of human- ity which characterizes the present, will strengthen conviction that there is a tendency toward practical recognition not only of the solidarity of the human race as ascientific fact, but of the brotherhood of man as an accepted moral obligation. Human life is seen to be a cathedral of grander proportions and with closer mutual relationships between its parts than has*been before supposed. Obligations and opportu- nities take on a wider meaning; and with a widening of the social horizon come new and larger social duties. Springing from a common origin, sharing the one di- vine impulse which is marshalling all alike to a com- mon rallying-point, it is impossible longer not to take into account all races and conditions of men. The interests of the individual are seen to be inseparably bound with the interests of society, and there is left no room for class distinctions or for pride of race. Never was the interest in man simply as man so widespread as now; never was the sense of society’s responsibility for its members so strong. This convic- tion of brotherhood, not wholly new but stronger and more general than ever before, seeks expression in many ways. It not only builds churches, but founds industrial schools; it erects the model tenement as well as endows colleges, and trains the unskilful in the elements of domestic economy no less than in the principles of the way of life. The world is drawing close together. If the competitions of trade and in- dustry are no longer local but are controlled by the markets of the world, on the other hand the progress 138 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. and prosperity of each region become the whole world’s concern. Free interchange of thought and faith are gradually bringing all to the same level. He that has eyes can see history move and discern not vaguely that a united brotherhood of man is its destination. Distance no longer makes difference in the morality of treatment of our fellow-men. What is unjust to a neighbor is still unjust half-way around the globe. Thus all questions assume a sociological bearing, and we recognize that the heart of those problems with which society wrestles to-day is not labor, nor wealth, nor organization, but right human relations, — in other words, it is the question, How may the children of a common Father all come most speedily into their birth- right of sonship to God ? XXXIII. The Commonwealth of Spirit Out of man’s consciousness of imperfection has grown his expectation of a time and place in which that struggle for the better, so constantly baffled and defeated here, shall be realized. Crude enough these imaginings have been for the most part, reflecting as they did the moral infancy of the race, but wherever the aspiration has: been the most earnest and the desired attainment most clearly discerned, the concep- tion of that worthier state has been noblest. Gradu- ally the idea has grown definite and influential upon current life. Just tothe extent that the distant bourn of humanity has been understood and God has been felt as a present power, heaven has come to be recog- nized as consisting not in a place of undisturbed felicity but in a condition of unhindered communion with him. IX THE COMMONWEALTH OF SPIRIT 139 This sense of the indwelling of God and his cooper- ation with men has enormously expanded the horizon of human life. Since God is a being not separate from man but one with him, therefore no man is separate from his fellow-man but is also one with him. Since man has had his dwelling-place in God from the begin- ning, his growth and completeness are likewise to be attained only in God. These twin ideas, the father- hood of God and the brotherhood of men, have im- mense consequences in their carrying out. They transform the whole universe into a household, of which the earth is but a single room; it makes of all beings one brotherhood, of which men are but the younger members. God’s intelligence guides them all; his love is the genial home-atmosphere wherein all virtues thrive, and all defect and sorrow is over- come. To recognize this relation and willingly and heartily to work toward its fulfilling is man’s highest privilege. This is his freedom, the liberty of sonship. In this commonwealth God’s will is not law but wish, because accepted gladly, and thus constraint has no place. The idea of God has come therefore to mean far more than Creator or Ruler. It is increasingly coming to mean Father, but not Father only but our Father zz heaven ,; that is, the common Father of all men and the one in whom all the highest ideals of moral excellence inhere. To this region above all change and time relations humanity looks, as furnish- ing the conditions in which what is imperfect shall attain its completeness. It is not to be imagined therefore as a vacant state into which no life nor activity enters, but, when once fully grasped as the 140 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. world of consummation and fulfilment, it is seen to be a busy realm peopled with energies and influences that react most strenuously upon all earlier stages. In this timeless moral sphere the divine purposes are borne forward in the unbroken sequence which forms the continuity of human history. It is unto union with himself in this state that God is striving to bring man, leading him upward from every low and animal estate unto such likeness to divinity in the liberty of holy character as shall make him free with God’s own freedom. In the process of this moral education of the race all its aspirations after holiness, all its tendencies toward righteousness, all its endeav- ors to supplant the evil with the good, by whatever form of religion fostered, have been efficient factors. They have borne witness to the unshaken expectation by the human spirit of nobler things than it has yet attained, and the steady increase in power and defi- niteness, notwithstanding hindrances and failures, of these yearnings witness to the coworking in our spirits of that Father-spirit of the universe to bring us to himself. Of this great conflict all present-day contentions in the social and the political spheres are to be con- sidered part. There is in these activities the build- ing of the kingdom of God that shall consist of no dream-built towers and battlements in the ghostly twilight of a disembodied life, but shall be the sub- stantial habitation, at once eternal in the heavens and firmly planted upon the earth, of those whose labors, wrought into the spiritual progress of earthly men, are borne onward from generation to generation until completed in a redeemed society. The soul of IX THE COMMONWEALTH OF SPIRIT 141 the present enthusiasm for humanity, and the hopeful facing of the grim problems which it uncovers, is this persuasion that God is in the field and is a sharer in all such endeavor, and that the work in which he shares is eternal. This is the great conviction and the final consummation; all else is detail and admin- istration. With the assurance of God’s cooperation with us we enter a new world. As the individual life is seen to be not determined in a few years of struggle and weakness, but to open outwardly into indefinitely wide relationships and interminably long activities, this world takes on a new meaning. It is seen to be not individual, but social; not the realm of human passions, but the range of the commonwealth of God. CHAPTER X HALLOWED BE THY NAME XXXIV. Man’s Approach to God through Personality THE idea of a universal fatherhood once realized, directly there springs up the filial desire for due honor to his name. If the first clause of this wonder- ful epitome of man’s aspiration is objective, looking upward and outward, the second is no less subjective and looks inward. Moreover, the descriptive phrase of the invocation, zwhzch art in heaven, is acknowledg- ment that the divine name — character — of itself is holy, while the first petition recognizes the essential need that man, as a child of God, should hallow his Father’s name in himself by becoming of like charac- ter. But holiness is freedom, and exists only in the free states of a holy person. As God’s being de- termines his revelation without moving cause outside of himself, so every man’s activities have their ground in his being and are determined in his personality. None but free volitions are moral, and no volition is free that does not originate within the being itself. Good exists only as the living states or activities of a good will. It is therefore evident that the attain- ment of personality is the precedent condition of all ethical and spiritual liberty. That essential self- hood, conscious and rational without dependence or limitation, which constitutes personality is perfectly 142 CHAP. X MAN’S APPROACH TO GOD 143 actualized in God alone. Himself existing as a mani- festation of the personal God, man approaches the divine personality to the degree that he can overcome his finiteness and the bondage and impotence of his will in a realization of his own personality. The development of personality is a progressive trans- formation of brutish instinct and the fleeting volitions of the savage into the settled will and clear moral aim which brings man more into harmony with God, till he is free with God’s freedom. The attainment of this state is man’s continuous personal process of actualizing the spiritual potencies of his nature. There results a clearer apprehension of God through the growth of the perceptive powers by which the whole man goes forth to meet him. This vital relation with God fills us to the full with the bound- ing pulse of life. The influx of the spirit of God into our lean and vacant souls liberates them from the thraldom of pride, of baseness, of a thousand stings and solicitudes which cause intensest suffering. It replaces these corrosions and fretting cankers with the healing influences of communion with God. It creates a joy, an enlightening, an enthusiasm, anda power, which ever lift and swell the currents of the soul into nobler channels, and gives these deepened currents that stronger volume which marks the in- creasing ascendency of the higher nature and its con- tinuous approach to God in a growing fellowship of spirit. To prepare a heaven for man may be of love alone; to prepare man for heaven is of love, patience, and labor. For a long time theological thought, by its habit of regarding the factors of religious life as 144 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. objective and external, has tended to obscure the educational character-building process of salvation. Perfect bliss means perfect holiness. All God’s deal- ings with men are disciplinary, having this distinct aim in view. Human life can no longer be imagined as a tempestuous sea upon which God sends forth the saving ark of a vicarious atonement in which certain chosen souls may be borne in safety to a land of rest. Human life is the true university. Here men are brought under the divine’ tutelage and led onward from the simplest rudiments by such experi- ences as are best calculated to call forth, exercise, and mature their separate faculties, graduating them at last into that higher curriculum for which this earthly existence is the preparatory school. Man is the child of God’s spirit, and true sonship consists in spiritual likeness to him. Physical son- ship can be given, but spiritual sonship must be achieved, and it can be wrought out only in the historic process of a moral conflict. The soul has been well described as a self-realizing purpose, but it can realize this purpose only in the struggle upward out of self toward a nobler ideal. Our redemption lies not in a restoration to the infancy and innocence of a lost Eden, but in developing the supremacy over sin that comes through replacing the lower nature with the higher. A race of holy spirits is impossible except as they attain to freedom from sin by van- quishing the antagonisms of every sort that enchain them. Holiness is won and peace assured only by the discipline that overcomes unholiness in all its motives and manifestations. History vindicates this conclusion, since it is the souls that have of necessity x MAN’S APPROACH TO GOD 145 waged fiercest battle with sin whose triumph is most complete and whose peace is in consequence most undisturbed and calm. It is for chastening, then, that we endure, but no chastening is for the present joyous, but grievous. Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. Self-mastery is won only through crucifixion ; yet suffering is the chiefest of ministries known to the soul. Joys impregnate, says William Blake; sorrows bring forth. The deeper fountains send out their sweet and healing waters when the surface streams are dry. In Jesus of Nazareth this truth stands before us in all the moving lineaments of life. He was made perfect through sufferings, and, as the normal man, is in this educational feature, as in other things truly our repre- sentative, embodying what we are and what we are to become. Our part in acquiring the culture and qualities of sons is not passive, but requires that we actively imitate that typical Son in order to grow into his likeness. Whenever God succeeds in developing man unto a perfect sonship, he, at the same time, perfectly mani- fests his own fatherhood. He interprets himself to us through our needs far more than through our ful- ness. The higher spiritual nature of man is best developed through the divine discipline which draws the sufferer close to God. The old Greeks sald, “The gods sell us the blessings they bestow,” and modern life has learned that only from the furrows of pain spring the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Men have ever been lifted into their best living through pressure and need. God can give himself L 146 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, only to the consciousness of want. Love can never be more than imperfectly revealed otherwise than through sympathy, which is of suffering. This is the key to the dark enigma of pain and suffering in the world. They are the avenues along which God comes to man. We might gladly exchange all other gifts for the infinite boon of sorrow; since our ca- pacity for suffering measures our capacity for God. How the mysterious alchemy of sympathy can trans- mute the pain of self-denial, of loss, of lack, into the unspeakable joy and compensation of the divine fel- lowship, only those who have felt it can understand ; but they do know that through the atmosphere cleared by scathing dolor more purely and distinctly do we see God. / Not in the day, but in the night- time do the fadeless stars in their far distant bril- liancy shine, and in sorrow we pass beyond the glare of earth’s prosperity, and feel ourselves natives of eternity and children of God, and his smile is felt to recompense all the ills of life. If God would have us inherit the promise fully, and grow up in perfect possession of our heritage from himself, he could not omit any part of that fatherly discipline in which he dealeth with us as with sons. It is to help us to understand the mean- ing of our sonship that he keeps us so long in the school of affliction. How otherwise shall we learn how strong and restful are the everlasting arms beneath us except by sinking into them for support ; how shall we experience the tenderness of the infinite love except as we lean exhausted upon its bosom; how shall we know the Father of mercies except through consciousness of the unmerited mercy of x MAN’S APPROACH TO GOD 147 him who forgiveth our iniquities and healeth all our diseases ; how shall we receive the God of all comfort except as we ourselves are comforted of God? The richest and worthiest acquaintance with God is mediated by the bread of sorrow and the cup of bitterness, As was Christ’s, so our way in this school of obedience is a Via Dolorosa, perchance with Calvary at the farther end But we cannot, as he could not, spare that element of suffering out of our life without deterioration and loss. This pain- ful discipline, the fruit of the fidelity of God, tolerates no defect, but searches out and strengthens every separate faculty till it sets each son free from vice and limitations, and rounds him into that whole- ness of manhood which is holiness. Under this divine tuition, there is a continuous growth in the soul through which it approaches nearer and still nearer to God. As man’s own personality enlarges and grows free and clear, God becomes more intelli- gible, more personal, more companionable to him in the unity of spiritual contact and sympathetic life. God and man have now a common purpose, and all their movements and relations are harmonious. From this sense of oneness there is begotten a confidence which enables us in the full maturity of our freedom, through full realization of our sonship, to say always, Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight. The first result of growth in personality is in- crease of freedom. The idea of freedom is often obscured by confounding two radically different quali- ties. The problem at which the Stoics wrought so laboriously, and which still persists at the base of 148 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. philosophical and theological thinking, is the purely psychological question as to man’s liberty in decision between motives. From this point of view man is free, if his actions are not predetermined by a superior authority. Entirely distinct, however, from this metaphysical speculation is the inquiry into the nature and process of a practical ethical freedom. This emancipation must be wrought. out by the individual soul in the activities and successive judg- ments of life. Will in operation is more than volition ; it is the soul willing. It is not the simple exercise of choice, but the movement of the entire nature, the ground of volition, in the direction of its inner preferences. Beyond the circle of these one’s will cannot range. The sinful man is not free — fe that committeth sin ts the bond slave of sin. The lower down the moral scale we go, the less liberty we find. Ethical freedom is not a natural ability to choose the right, but the acquired power to will it; it is the un- folding into experience of that inner and true man- hood which, hitherto, has been subject to bondage through predominance of the lower nature and alien- ation of the will from God. Man’s salvation is com- plete when his will is fully accordant with the divine will. A profoundly suggestive truth finds utterance in St. Bernard’s “ Let self-will once cease and there will be no hell,” — Cesset voluntas propria et infernus non ertt. Ordinarily the energies of men in social and busi- ness activities go with the lower faculties. Through contact with God in some form there comes an awakening which arouses the higher and nobler powers. Even among the lower ends of life, ends x MAN’S APPROACH TO GOD 149 which move upon the plane of daily affairs in social and political and industrial relations, there is found room for the play and development of all that is worthiest in man, and these become a summons to larger moods and more open soul. Imagination, responsiveness to the ideal, hope, vision of the invisi- ble, realization of the ever-present God, —all these the Spirit gives in liberating men from limitations aris- ing from absorption in material things. The same process is discernible in the enlarging of the mental faculties which results from enthroning spirit above sense, for he that is enslaved by his senses is sense- bound in his thought. When this emancipation has proceeded far enough inward to reach the centre of being and unclasp the clinging tendrils of thought, affection, and will from the trunk of self, man be- comes free from law, from penalty, from sin, in the process of passing gradually by self-surrender into the oneness of mind and heart with God which Jesus exemplifies, — the glorious liberty of the sons of God. True freedom, then, is not merely the power of choice between right and wrong, the poor liberty of the scale beam, which really is necessity, to yield to the weightier motive, but it is the determination of the will toward righteousness. It is not liberty to do as one will, the simple absence of restraint, but it is the power to live and act according to one’s higher nature. Only that will is free whose centre of gravity falls within itself. ‘The free life is the strong life that commands itself and does not yield to external cir- cumstances nor to internal weakness., The realiza- tion of freedom is not in the metaphysical field, but in the field of actual attainment. It exhibits a true 150 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. progress in its course, and results from man’s disci- pline in the divine order established for him in this world. In this way only is character developed. ‘Even the gods envy him whose senses, like horses well broken in by the driver, have been subdued, who is free from pride and free from appetites.” In such language as this, Hindoo seers anticipated the Stoa in teaching that control of the reason by the passions is the chief evil-and their overcoming the chief good. The realization of freedom is a progressive sanctifi- cation of the soul in continuation of the holy self- determination which begins from its first turning toward God, and is established and completed in the manifestation of sonship to him. The history of the development of personality is the history of humanity. Struggle for self- realization is natural to man. It forms the basis of the profoundest works of literature and art. The power and clearness with which a people is able to seize upon and work out this problem is the measure of their progress. This, more than any other one thing, differentiates the Orient from the Occident and gives the palm of precedence to the latter. The universal apotheosis of the great man, the ever- prevalent tendency to hero-worship, is a projection of the impulse in every heart to aspire to better and diviner things than is yet attained. In supplying this profound and comprehensive want of the human soul, Jesus of Nazareth enters most potently as an impelling force and a norm of character into the — world’s history. In him freedom has attained to sinlessness ; personality reached the consciousness of perfect unity with God. He attained this spirit- = MAN’S INSPIRATION THROUGH COMMUNION 151 ual altitudé by overcoming in that ethical conflict through which all souls must pass, and thus showed that man’s redemption is the attainment of righteous- ness. In him was life, not existence merely, but existence attaining its end. The happiness and holi- ness of a perfect life in normal relation to its source here found expression and embodiment. Life, natu- ral life, earthly life, all the phenomena and accidents of a conscious existence upon this mundane sphere had been known and felt, but the full significance, the high privileges, the sublime possibilities to which every human soul is a potential heir, these were first brought fully to light in him. And this glorious unfolding of the perfect life was the light of men, an unfading star to guide them to their journey’s end. Sanctification of the entire life, though grad- ual, finally results in such comfort and power as are the fruits of walking not after the flesh but after the spirit. When this course is accomplished, and the soul is perfectly freed from the limitations which environ and dwarf it, the true personality of man is realized. That point once reached, communion with God becomes the continuous activity of the soul. XXXV. Man’s Inspiration through Communion with — God Our consciousness of self is the condition and measure of our knowledge of God. The ascending sap gives form and substance to the tree, and is it- self manifested and made permanent in trunk, and branch, and leaf; so, by its energizing, the eternal mind both produces the human mind and is special- ized in individual men, and thus God’s manifestation 152 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. of himself in humanity is progressive. Religion has a history, for the reason that it is the exercise in human nature of that spiritual quality akin to God, whereby they two become increasingly ensphered within each other in the unfolding of personal relations. Only be- cause God is like to man can man be inspired of him. Inasmuch as the development of this God-likeness is gradual, the world’s debate over the boundaries and kinds of inspiration is invalid. Since the uni- verse of beings is the explication of the being of God, human nature and divine nature are essentially one. We will bring our theology into harmony with nature — merely another name for God’s forth-putting of him- self —and with science, which is no more than the observed method of nature, only by the recognition that in man’s spiritual activities we see emerging into human history, in forms that we can grasp and com- prehend, those deep-lying forces and principles which from eternity have determined the progress of the world. God is not honored in being regarded as un- intelligible, for he is the primal Reason which gives substance and coherence throughout to the reason of men. Some things, inexplicable, as yet, and per- haps ever, to the finite mind there must of necessity be, but only as the congruous though unseen foun- dations upon which rests what is experienced and known. It must necessarily be more completely true of God than we find it to be true of ourselves, that much of what is best and most fruitful in our lives always and inevitably remains purely subjective ex- perience, realized in us only in the form of incom- municable emotions, which yet far transcend in worth and influence all that may be expressed or shared. x MAN’S INSPIRATION THROUGH COMMUNION 153 The revelation of God is a living thing, having its beginnings, its growth, and its maturer forms. The divine mind can quicken, modify, pass into, the mind of man, only in an historic process which moves through the successive stages of dawning apprehen- sion, increased knowledge, willing conformity, and realized oneness. It is no derogation of the highest examples of inspiration, therefore, to say that they are the topmost branch of that fruitful vine which, rooted in the infinite wisdom of God, grows up through the activities of men, —their ploughing and reaping, and fashioning of iron, wood, and clay ; through their intellectual processes, —their litera- ture, their art, their architecture ; through their emo- tional outpourings,—their ‘Creations’ and their “Messiahs’’; through their ethical convictions, their laws, and their government; and blooms into the lofty spiritual apprehensions of Isaiah and Paul, and the calm companionship of the Christ with God. These inspirations differ in degree, but spring from a common source. As our acquaintance with the real thoughts and feelings that have moved men increases through careful study of ethnology, and we learn to interpret their folk-lore, their rites, and their religious utter- ances with a more sympathetic intelligence, we can- not doubt that the spirit of God has been struggling to birth in them all, even in the lowest and most leaden-eared. As we come to think of God no longer _ as outside but in humanity, we see that this communi- cation from the eternal spirit, which is named inspi- ration, is not simply an in-spiring but an in-spiriting — that God is not breathing suggestions into men from 154 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. without, but declaring himself within, as the growth of the palm pushes up from the heart outward. We shall soon cease to insist that Christianity is the only revelation, however strongly we may emphasize its superior fulness and life-hallowing power, —and doubtless the more thoroughly we compare it with all others the more its supremacy appears, — but we shall recognize in the longings, the self-condemnings, the aspirations, of all the races, the stirrings of a divine energy and an attempt on their part to gather themselves into a unity with God in response to his call and to overcome their spiritual defect through communion with him. How else can we account for the Hindoo philosophy’s penetration into the course of sin, as expressed in the Bhagavat Gita, ‘“ Repeated sin impairs the judgment, he whose judgment is impaired sins repeatedly”; or the noble aim of the - Buddhist faith, “ Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one’s mind”; or the lofty spiritual creed of the Parsees, “To fear God, to live a life of pure thoughts, pure words, pure deeds, and to die in the hope of a world to come”? Such glimpses into the loftier teachings of all the great creeds verify Paul’s assertion, that the nations which have not the law of Moses still do by nature, through the prompt- ings of their own constitution, those things com- manded in the Law. Is not this because the God who spake to Moses spake also to Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, and Socrates? True, these precepts run far beyond the lives of the peoples from the midst. of whom they spring; but when did ever the practice of the multitude attain the level of the vision of its seers? is — x MAN’S INSPIRATION THROUGH COMMUNION | 155 Inspiration is the continuous expansion of man’s spiritual nature in fellowship with God, everywhere and in all men. So long, therefore, as man has a living God his inspiration will not be a memory, but a present power. It is the increasing disclosure of the life of the spirit, at once a life of righteousness and of freedom, by which the low are constantly exalted and the high made higher still. In the pres- ent, indwelling, and ever-energizing God the hope of humanity rests. The successive generations, guided and nurtured by his spirit, have pressed further tow- ard the mark. A\ll the races, as well as all the ages, have their definite parts assigned them in this divine drama. While Christianity, so far, has played the leading réle, there will still be much added to its comprehensiveness and power when, by its assist- ance, the Mongol, the Tartar, and the African shall realize their personality as have the Hun and the Visigoth. When the still pagan nations shall bring their special aptitudes and characteristics, to lay them as offerings at the feet of the Centre of Chris- tianity, each will find its own ideal in him who, by virtue of his perfect manhood, is able to manifest God equally to all races, and it will in turn contribute its own particular race-characteristics to that complete incarnation of God in humanity for which Christian- ity stands. Though the spiritualization of all men everywhere goes steadily forward, there is room inside the gen- eral process for this inspiration to be most perfectly manifested in the best. Few will deny that the Hebrew prophets and the Christian apostles beheld with clearer vision and set forth in. steadier and 156 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. | plainer terms the presence and character of God than are elsewhere to be found. Above them all, however, stands Jesus of Nazareth representing that ideal for humanity which shall be realized when God dwells in all men as he dwelt in him. In him also were embodied most fully those two lines of activity by which especially this inspiration of man is fur- thered, — faith and prayer. It is impossible to include all the relations of God to man in terms of the intellect. Man is more than intellect, hence something more than rationalistic equipment is demanded for a perfect knowledge of God. Faith is the common name for supersensual vision. Faith is the outreaching of the human soul in eager sympathy toward the divine life and likeness. It is the surrender of the whole man to the control of God in a close and sympathetic fellowship which carries him completely off his own centre to rest upon God alone. There is no special faith-faculty, by which to know God or to interpret his message, except the listening attitude of the soul, which renders it obedient to the dictates of those higher faculties to which God most clearly speaks. But by the realization which it gives to spiritual things, faith is justly said to be the substance, or the substantiator, of things not seen. It has the power, through closeness of relation with God, of throwing forth into objective reality and evidence those spirit- ual verities which, while hoped for, are yet to the organs of sense invisible. The life of faith, therefore, is not a life of easy acquiescence. It is a great war- fare which the faithful has to wage; it is a great victory which he may achieve. It was through this x MAN’S INSPIRATION THROUGH COMMUNION 157 alliance with God that the Christ was enabled to say: I do always those things that are pleasing to him. Not different is the conflict for every man. /It is a great victory to keep the heart pure, the hands clean, and communion with God unbroken. Out of such gradual apprehension of God grows that highest form of communion with him which we call prayer. There is talk of “Natural Law,” as if that were something which made prayer useless and unreasonable. Prayer itself is a natural law. The natural law before which a faithless science stands dumb is the plexus of material earthly forces; but prayer is a cosmic force, finding its source in God himself. His will is manifested in man’s will; and that impulse which on its human side is petition may easily be, on the divine side, the answer thereto, since every finite change is a modification of the entire Infinite. Prayer is taking hold of God’s will- ingness and giving him the leverage upon our lives that he desires. ‘As royal prophet and as royal priest, Jesus,” says Ritschl, “is mediator of the highest conceivable communion between God and man.” And he it is that most fully, both by precept and example, has taught us to pray. As he replen- ished his soul by frequent nightly vigils in company with the Hearer of prayer, so may his brethren come to the same Source and there find that they have come to their best selves and reached their highest manhood. In hallowing the Father’s name, the children themselves grow holy and are able to talk with God face to face, as a man talketh with his friend —and what they hear that they can _ repeat. Thus springs up a literature of the spirit. 158 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, XXXVI. The Bible a Reflection of God’s Communion with Men The religious literature of the race grows out of its consciousness of God’s coworking. The world’s sacred Scriptures have swelled and guided the reli- gious current: they are not its original fountain. As we realize how closely akin the races are, and how deep and divine has been much of the insight and experience of those but recently considered outside the pale of revelation, we are learning that the spirit of God has had all times and all men as the field of his operations, and that it is not here and there an individual, but the human race that has been inspired. Consciousness of this presence of God has found expression among every people in a literature revered as the utterance of that overshadowing intelligence which in shaping man’s spiritual life gave true signifi- cance and direction to human history. Externally, these records purport to give an account of those successive acts of the creative energy by which the things that are have come to be, and of the moral discipline by which an imperfect humanity is to be transformed, and a life of strife and deficiency enabled to pass into a state in which earthly hopes and aspirations shall be realized. These observations and feelings have been common to mankind. Naturally, therefore, the cosmogonies, the ideals of conduct, the expectations of retribution and reward, have a marked similarity wherever found. While this is partially accounted for by the close relationships and admixt- ures of prehistoric races, it is still more directly due to the fact that in these conceptions we have the x GOD’S COMMUNION WITH MEN 159 manifestation of God in a common human nature. The essential point to notice, however, is that all these books, whatever may be claimed for them in the way of revelation, are in reality a history of the religious life of the race, and as such progressive both in character and content. To the Hebrews must be granted supremacy in this regard. From them has come the clearest recog- nition and expression of God’s presence and activity in human affairs, and this is not less but rather more true because the Jew’s religion was so intimately bound up with his political and social life. His Jehovah was a God of history who, using all nature as the footstool of his feet, found the realm of his government and providential care in the moral sphere of the training and well-being of his chosen people. This sense of an ever-present and watchful Ruler gives the high ethical element in the religion of Israel which characterizes it among the ethnic faiths. The freshness and value which the Hebrew Scriptures, even the earliest, have for modern life are due to the vigor with which they lay hold upon the conviction that God is working within the nation, bearing with men’s ignorance and low ideals, impressing his char- acter and will upon them by symbols and methods suited to their condition, and thereby raising them steadily nearer to himself. Adopting, and transfus- ing with a worthier morality, the common stock of traditions and primitive philosophy by which human- ity had sought to account for the origin of things and the observed state of man, the Jewish writers pro- ceeded to rear upon this foundation the noble edifice of their national history considered from the point 160 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. of view of a people peculiarly under the guidance of God. There is much more, however, in a people’s life than can be set forth in genealogical tables, succes- sions of kings, and the chronicling of visible and outward events. The true life is the inner life. This is what the Hebrew Scriptures specially describe, and those portions which are perennially valuable, the vehicles of a true revelation, are those which express the throbbings of the mighty heart of this people, great in their insight into spiritual relations and often sublime in their moral standards. These things are not a revelation external to man, but a disclosure of the soul’s response to God in the crises of life. They are the flowering forth of the divinity in the soul, the God-consciousness of humanity. _ No communication from God could avail except such as man is by nature fitted to receive. Necessarily, therefore, God’s declaration of himself has been pro- gressive. He has spoken to men in the measure wherewith they were able to mete, and still he has ever had many things to say that they could not yet bear. The Bible records the gradual revelation of God in man, and the progressive unfolding of man’s know- ledge of God and apprehension of spiritual things. It is a subjective experience in which God and man are inextricably mingled. It is sacred to man because it embodies man’s truest communings with God. It is divine in that it grows out of those impulses and guidings of God which fashion the soul into his like- ness ; itis human in that it fixes in visible form those fleeting moods, emotions, and ecstasies wherein the x GOD’S COMMUNION WITH MEN 161 soul enjoys fellowship with God. The stern realities of existence have laid hold at times of the pillars of life, and shaken the fabric to its centre. Out of their terror and dismay men have cried unto God and he has heard them. The voicing of their joy, of their sorrows, their doubts, their penitence, their gratitude, make up the life-bearing portion of the Bible. Great souls, with outlook and insight comprehensive enough to grasp their significance, have interpreted with clear vision in luminous words those birth-throes of new understanding and richer expérience that have given rise to the doctrines and beliefs which they have thus formulated. These truths, because they have been once lived, remain evermore the beacon and chart of the living. The greatest difficulty that the Church finds in shifting its understanding of the source of Scripture from an objective word of God to a subjective response of man’s spirit to the divine revelation, lies in the fact that every soul, conscious of its own weakness, longs for some external rule of life upon which to lean. Precept is always more sought than principle. Just this sense of rest and ease to be found in the in- fallible authority of a divine command has given vitality to the various theories of inspiration to which the Church so convulsively clings. We are learning, however, that there can be no sanction outside the soul itself, since that only is ethical in action to which the man willingly assents. No law nor book nor custom has binding power further than it com- mends itself to the conscience as right. An in- fallible authority, therefore, will necessarily continue impossible so long as its criterion is not infallible. M 162... THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. Man grows as God is more fully manifested in him, and that which is imperative to-day will be replaced to-morrow by a different, even though a worthier, motive. Yet the Bible is put forth, and justly, as the word of God to man; for if God has not spoken in those experiences of faith, and hope, and patience, and purity, and love, he has not spoken to men at all. If these lessons, regarded not as an external revelation, but as wrought out in subjective attainment by men of like passions with ourselves, do not convey the evidence and authority of a divine inspiration, there is no way in which such inspiration may be realized. The authority of the Bible, arising from the power of its contents to call forth the highest spiritual qualities .and satisfy the deepest longings of human nature, derives great advantage from a view which, ceasing to regard it as a dogmatic revelation, cherishes it as con- taining above all other literature a record of human souls in their closest contact with God. If the chasm seems wide that yawns between the noblest portions of this ancient Book and modern life, a ready explana- tion is at hand in the fact that the ideal of lofty spirits here finds voice, while the multitude, slower of heart and duller of vision, have lagged far behind in its realization. The fear that removing the seat of authority from the Bible itself, as the objective norm and content of divine revelation, to confer it upon the moral con- sciousness of humanity, will loosen altogether its con- straining power, is seen to be groundless in view of the fact that this implies nothing more than has all along been involved in the asserted right of private x GOD’S COMMUNION WITH MEN 163 interpretation of the universal rule. This new view- point only makes specific application of that gen- eral change of position which no longer sees God controlling man from without, but developing him from within. The sternest test to which any prin- ciple can be subjected is the judgment of life, and it has been abundantly shown that Christian char- acter is developed, the conscience made sensitive, the will directed, and the spiritual ideal exalted by the Scriptures used in this way. “I have been solemnly impressed,” wrote Frederic D. Maurice to Charles Kingsley, “ with the truth that the Bible as a means of attaining to the knowledge of the living God is precious beyond all expression or conception ; when made a substitute for that knowledge it may become a greater deadener to the human spirit than all other books.” If the Scriptures infallibly bring the docile and honest seeker after truth into the pres- ence and power of the Most High, their infallibility is sufficiently demonstrated. They are the only rule, because they are the highest rule, of faith and prac- tice in religious things; and exercise the right of the highest known moral standard, to convince the reason and bind the conscience. The human consciousness, however, to which the ultimate appeal is to be made, is that of humanity at its highest. By perfect realization of human person- ality in himself, Jesus Christ became and remains representative Man, and his consciousness is the typi- cal consciousness to which others progressively attain in varying degrees. What God was to him, is what he is to become to us. All his teachings spring directly from his conscious relations to God, and are 164 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. to be interpreted by his character as developed in those relations. Because he is the highest conceiv- able type of man, he is the fullest manifestation of God, and is, therefore, the supreme authority not only in Scripture, but in that human life from which the Scriptures sprung. Recognizing these Scriptures as the product of the literary activity and historic life of Israel removes very many difficulties. We can thus trace the gradual as- cent of moral ideas from the low standards and crudi- ties of primitive days. The early writers could not announce a vision that they had not seen. The pro- gressiveness of the record accounts for the grotesque and naive stories of a people’s childhood, without bur- dening our faith with a belief in them as historical facts, or subjecting us to the strain of quibble and eva- sion in.a fruitless endeavor to make them credible to an intellectual age. A firm grasp upon the idea that one God is revealed, and one continuous and consist- ent purpose unfolded through all ages and dispensa- tions, at once puts to rest all alarm at the growing belief in the greater antiquity of man. What differ- ence whether his age be six thousand or sixty thou- sand years? The Bible, considered as a record of a disciplinary process, will be allowed to omit mention of sundry links necessary to a perfect chronology with- out despite to its veracity as revelation. The same principles of interpretation will apply to the New Testament as to the Old. By the same rea- soning, which in other departments of learning teach us that creation is still going on, we are forced to believe that history is still living before our eyes. Wherefore the accounts in these sacred documents a x THE CREED A REPORT OF PROGRESS 165 are to be interpreted by the same canons and sub- jected to the same test with which we judge the events of to-day. Many recorded miracles and predictions will cease to perplex the thoughtful student as he re- members under what conditions these records were made. Other events which contravene the known method of God’s working in similar fields may for a time longer remain open questions without prejudice to the spiritual helpfulness of the general message in which they are enshrined. To one who holds the grander modern view of a present God, ever living | and ever manifesting himself in all the terms of uni- versal being, it is matter of sublimest indifference whether those things which transcend God’s usual method in the psychological and physiological realms occurred as recorded or not. With the demonstration of the scope and purpose of God’s progressive mani- festation in man, which the person and life of Jesus Christ affords, all previous views of method and of record may be changed without impairing the vitality of faith, because leaving unbroken our consciousness of sonship. XXXVII. The Creed a Report of Progress The phenomena of creed-making represent the ac- tivity in post-Biblical times of the same principle by which the Scriptures were fashioned. Creeds have been the outgrowth of irresistible desire to gather up and hold in systematic form the results of knowledge and experience in the life of the spirit. Fed by the heavenly manna of the sacred oracles, the early Christian Church felt strong enough to assimilate and subject to the headship of Christ not only the social 166 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. forms and political organization of the ancient world, but its philosophy as well. At each new stage of its advance the Church has set up a new creed —a doc- trinal Ebenezer — for a witness that thereto the Lord had helped her. So far as these formule are used for the purpose of giving clearness to intellectual apprehension, and to show the proportionate spiritual attainment reached in the religious thought and life of the age, they are valuable. Resulting as they do from that subjective process in which each epoch revivifies the essential ele- ments of the past, they are in truth what Dorner calls them, “The precipitate of the religious consciousness of mighty men and times.” When used, as they too often have been, as instruments of ecclesiastical tyr- anny, they become hindrances in the way of the very progress which brought them into being, and, instead of the rallying-point about which all devout hearts can gather upon the great fundamental facts of the reli- gious life, they are made the symbols of party strife and divide the spiritual host into hostile camps. This is the danger which besets all attempts to set forth in logical terms so subtle and pervasive and vari- able a principle as life. Lord Russell’s objection to the codification of international law is particularly appli- cable to the endeavor to systematize in final form the findings of the human spirit. “International law,” said he, “is in a state of growth and transition. To codify it would be to crystallize it; uncodified it is more flexible, and more easily assimilates new rules.” With the acceptance of the idea that continual srowth inseparably accompanies God’s manifestation in men, it will be seen that the spiritual life of humanity is x THE CREED A REPORT OF PROGRESS 167 too wide and free to be cast into stereotyped forms. To attempt this is to defeat the very object in view. Faith is helped more by emphasis upon the broad and demonstrable relations of God with man. To limit belief by authority is to congeal the flowing currents of spiritual apprehension and set men to looking back- ward for truth and evidence of God. Religion con- sists not in tenaciously holding to forms of sound words, but in personal wrestling with the great spirit- ual problems wherein each soul finds its way to God. There is need of applying to the ancient creeds that principle which interprets the Scriptures histori- cally, and thus simplifies them at the same time that it brings their noblest qualities into highest relief. The creeds of Christendom, as well as those of man- kind at large, have embodied with their valuable features much that was local and temporal to the times and places wherein they were written and which, in consequence, is now wholly outgrown. A change in the point of view has rendered obsolete many of the doctrines which once were of the very essence of men’s faith. The fashion of belief passes away. A mature Christianity will recognize the excesses and deficiencies of all the historic symbols, and when it shapes a creed for present use it will do so knowing that it waxes old even while being written, and that the living spirit of man in attaining to an ever closer communion with God will leave behind him these milestones of his progress. CHAPTER XI THY KINGDOM COME XXXVIII. The Kingdom of the Father in its Mani- festation THE being of God determines his manifestation. Essential unity unfolds into organized unity. This unity gives orderly sequence to the universe of things ; it also abides in human history as its directive law. It was reserved for modern speculation to connect and complete the Greek teleology of nature and ‘the medizeval teleology of history in its conception of nature and history as one progressive manifestation of God. In the unfolding of the divine unity is dis- cerned the constructive principle which builds up the organic in nature and produces the social forms of humanity. God himself, as exhibiting that balanced unity of personal qualities which constitutes personality, will necessarily reach his most perfect manifestation in the personality of those deriving their being from him, and the relations and institutions which arise in the course of history are produced, as Herder taught, by the gradually developing constitution of man. The ultimate factor in history is the individual. He alone is conscious of responsibility, and through obedience to the promptings of his higher nature develops into a person; but complete personality can 168 CHAP. XI THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 169 be realized only in the relationships of social life. While it is true that the individual exists as an end unto himself, not simply as the means by which society is constituted, yet each is what he is as an individual because he is part of a race. He becomes truly man only in association with his fellow-men. Naturaliter ergo, said old A®gidius of Venice, homo est animal soctabile. The personal and social ideals are not antagonistic ; they are complementary. How- ever primitive the forms of human life, the self is still deeply affected by its relations with others. While the needs of the individual furnish the motive power in society, it is no less true that society determines the grooves in which mainly the individual’s energies shall run. To realize himself, therefore, a man must be conscious of his inclusion in a greater whole. Society is the condition of man’s development as a person ; and society, in turn, both results from, and furnishes the field for, the individual’s development. In the social and political institutions of men God reveals himself as order. As their mutual relation- ships result from the unity of God, so the increasing effects of that unity are seen in the successive mani- festations of order in the civil and social world. That which, as society, is ill-defined and unformed, attains to definiteness and unity in-the state. The customs and rules which controlled the primitive clan become transformed into definite enactments and principles of political action. An earlier type of thought repre- sented this closer organization of humanity as taking place voluntarily, a conscious subordination of minor individual to general interests for the sake of greater individual advantages resulting. There is, however, 170 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. no such “state of nature” as this theory supposes men to have deliberately surrendered in order to enter into society. Interdependence begins very low down the scale and becomes more complex with the ascent of man. Many animal species display foregleams of social capacities and relations which waited only for that personal element attained in the human to be- come the full-fledged nation of to-day, and to be. capable also of developing into that of the prophet’s dream. The state is not constituted in a surrender of personal rights, but arises in the process of their realization. Only as a member of this organic whole does the citizen become endowed with either rights or duties. His rights pertain to him as an integral portion of this greater unity, his larger self, with which he is identified. His responsibilities, and the realization of his highest possibilities also, necessarily inhere in reciprocal obligations. Law is the vital principle of society. So much of truth was contained in the “social contract”’ theory, that it exalted will above both force and chance as the origin of the state; it erred in imagining this to be man’s will instead of God’s. In the recognition of civic life as the gradual expanding of the political elements in man’s constitution, it becomes clear that the state originates from a further explication of the being of God. The law, then, by which humanity in its different political institutions is governed is the unfolding will of the universal Father. Authority | inheres in him as the primal source of all being. The powers of government are derived not from the con- sent of the governed, but from their identity with this basal authority of God. The science of govern- XI THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 171 ment consists in discovering the original principles and applying them to passing conditions in such a Way as to give the efficacy of objective reality, in specific statutes and regulations, to this hidden, spiritual law. Only as realizing its origin and end in God, by shaping into its political and social forms those moral ideals which tend to perfect the manhood of its members, does the state vindicate itself as actively constructive of rights and duties. The gTOw- ing conviction, that God does not govern arbitrarily but with a self-imposed regard to the interests of all his subjects, is reflected in the democratic principle which sees not only in the institutions of society and state and family the larger embodiment of man him- self, but also a more than human sacredness as manifesting and furthering the divine method and purpose. The limitation of faculties which necessitates our treatment of contemporaneous conditions as though they were successive is a serious hindrance to a clear understanding of human life. Among these institu- tions, founded not upon voluntary contract, but upon personal relationships, in which the kingdom of the Father is manifested, the family is at once earliest and last. Itself the unitary form of society, the family affords the sphere in which the most rudi- mentary social instincts find expression; it persists through all stages of social advance, not as the germ from which either church or nation springs, but the firmest support of each and the object of their com- mon care; it attains to its perfection in proportion as its constituent factors acquire fulness of personal development, and is so vitally influential upon the 172 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. character of its members that the perfect family and the perfect individual shall reach their final earthly stage together. In the treatment of sociological and political prob- lems, the family has received too little attention. On the one hand, its fortunes wax or wane with the conditions which prevail in society; on the other, the ideals which it enshrines and the characters which it develops determine the standing or falling of all other institutions. Far too generally the whole of the family, in the view of both church and state, has been absorbed in the one who stood at its head. There is in the family a corporate unity which makes it greater than any single member and more impor- tant than all separately considered. It is constituted in the commonwealth of affections. Mazzini calls it “the heart’s Fatherland.” In the family more per- fectly than in any other social form are comprehended the relations of God to man. Here is seen his author- ity as father; here the filial spirit of his children. His patient goodness is reflected in its parental love, and in its care for the infant and the wilful is set forth in miniature his tenderness toward the weak and erring of mankind. Man reaches his own per- sonality only as he approaches God. Through the outreaching of his innermost qualities and capacities into activity and self-consciousness in the intimate and complex relationships of the family, man attains a nearness to God and a knowledge of him not else- where equalled. This fact gives to the family its profound religious significance as the primal and the most vital relationship of earthly life. God has not made it necessary for man to seek him in “a fugitive XI _ THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 173 and cloistered virtue,” withdrawn from the round of daily obligation; but has so organized the activities of human life as the method of his own disclosure that the deeper the earthly relationship, the more per- fectly does its realization become to man a revelation of God, and has thus made the normal development of man’s nature in the various relationships of life the highway along which the race has advanced toward him. In the institution and maintenance, therefore, of the correlated spheres of society, the state, and the family, there is manifested the presence and the king- dom of the Father. XXXIX. The Kingdom of the Father in its Realization Deriving their formal unity from the being of God, human institutions have their real unity in no abstract principle, but in the process of realizing God as in- dwelling spirit. A vast enlargement of spiritual life follows the recognition of religion as the unfolding of God through humanity. This furnishes the clew to history, and posits a perfect manhood as civilization’s objective point. Augustine’s antithesis between the realm of God and the political state gives place to the conception of moral development as the granitic foundation of social order. With this understanding, religion is entering more and more into all the interests of men and shaping their organizations, activities, and ideals, filling them all with its abounding life. The reformer and the prophet are finding in this expanding notion a new and larger social righteousness. In the name of scientific accuracy, religion has been defined thus: “A religion is a form of belief, providing an ultra- 174 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, rational sanction for that large class of conduct in the individual where his interests and the inter- — ests of the social organism are antagonistic, and by which tke former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the general interests of the evolution which the race is undergoing.” Again it is said: “A rational religion is a scientific impossibility, repre- senting from the nature of the case an inherent contradiction of terms.” This is wholly wrong. It contemplates religion as an extraneous revelation, unnatural and hostile to reason; whereas religion is the outcropping of the immanent God in man as he realizes himself in society. So far from antago- nizing reason, religion is reason itself conscious of the source of its own light; it is the recognition of the divine codperation in adjusting the interest of the individual and the interests of the social organism as one. This conception of religion, as a growing assur- ance of divine fellowship in producing the moral order of the world, brings it down from the mist-land of abstract sentiment and discovers in it the means of extending man’s ‘sovereignty over materialism — the deadliest foe of his spirit—and over the ani- malism of his own nature. It establishes his spirit- ual life in communion with God, and renders every material process tributary to the higher life of human- ity. The ancient promise is being fulfilled before our eyes, — righteousness shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The kingdom of God is being transformed from an inner experience into visible real- ity. Passing beyond the feelings, thought, acts of the individual soul, it penetrates into all social activities XI - THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 175 and habitudes and gives law to all forms of collective life. “So there will be discovered,” says Maurice, “beneath all the politics of earth, sustaining the order of each country, upholding the charity of each household, a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” The outlines of the Father’s kingdom were blurred and indistinct until clearly revealed in the kingdom of the Son of Man. The ancient religions did little more than consecrate the principal institutions of social life by teaching their divine origin and de- pendence. Christianity has broadened and fulfilled those promises which were darkly foretold, or merely hinted in the ethnic faiths, and has established its divineness in demonstrating its triumphant ability to produce and preserve the highest attainments of mankind, whether social or spiritual. This inter- twining of the fibres of Christianity with history indicates the way in which the kingdom of God, as a social energy, is increasingly realizing. itself in the redemption of the world. The superiority of Chris- tianity to other forms of belief springs immediately from its more adequate conception of God. The vision of God unfolding himself in the various in- stitutions of humanity invests religion with a present- day significance, and expands its application till it is coextensive with earthly life. This gives it a firm grasp upon all those relations wherein the individual is organically knit into the social body. This, also, enables it to effect the salvation of society by trans- forming individual units from never so low a depth into that perfect manhood which can be realized only in a perfect human society. 176 THE FAMILY OF GOD > CHAP. The introduction of Christianity, through the life and teachings of the Christ, marks the beginning of conceptions so enormously expanded as to have the effect of being totally new. The idea of the Father- hood of God, necessarily correlated as it was with the idea of the brotherhood of man, brought to view an apprehension of the reality of God’s kingdom as a present rule, and the interweaving of eternal life with current activities as a present experience, which lifts man into fellowship with the divine, and makes the working out of his redemption a cooperation with God. The logic of history, from the time that it became social in becoming human, leads clearly to the conclusion that this social, or codperative, element must increase in proportion to our growth in human- ness, until aggregate humanity shall become the social whole, whose collective energies are exerted for the good of the several units, who, at the same time, will find their fullest individuality in the com- plete unfolding of their social constitution. The Christian conception of God as Father and of all men as brethren is the soul of democracy, and the source of that individualism which seems now to be taking possession of the field, and which many deprecate, but which is no more than the initial stages of that reali- zation of personality which, in its final outcome, shall produce a man able to regard his neighbor as him- self. Since man is included in the universal process of ascent, the actual living of life is the only solution of its problems. The significant feature of Chris- tianity is that its principles are embodied in personal life. It is not a theoretical ‘‘constitution”’ of society, XI THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 177 but represents the actual life, humanly lived, of one in the bosom of humanity. Its adaptedness to all exigencies of life is more perfectly vindicated the more fully it is tried. As the Oratorio of Elijah gathers toward, and radiates from, the falling of the fire from heaven upon the sacrifice, so do human aspi- rations and struggles point forward to the Christ as their culmination, and look backward to him as the pattern of their desires. No changes of dogma, no shifting of the centre of Biblical authority, can weaken the constructive influence of that life upon our social progress. In the union of God and man we reach the highest result of man’s development. In the Christ we have this result attained to a degree beyond which, so far, we can imagine nothing further. The Christian conception of man, therefore, is a reali- zation of the kingdom of God in its fulness, because it lays hold upon humanity at the apex of his nature —his spiritual relations to God. It raises person- ality to its highest power in making the measure of its endeavor the stature of him who is the ideal of personal worth. In the production of holy character, as the universal type, is comprehended the governing principle of the highest kingdom that can be sup- posed. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of free son- ship, and restrains the assertion of liberty to holy ends. The realization of such a kingdom is in the recognition of a universal brotherhood after the pattern of him whose life found its keynote in the words, —J do always the things that are pleas- ing to God. Grounded thus in the nature of humanity, the kingdom of God is able to develop itself freely in N 178 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, all circumstances and in all conditions of national or racial life. It propagates itself by transforming those of lower type into proximate conformity to its own standards. To as many as receive it, it gives power to become sons of God—to accept the reign of the Father. Communication of the divine life is hastened by the direct influence of men upon each other. The holy spirit of God has become tangible and definite as the form of the divine self- communication, since its projection upon the - back- ground of the character and consciousness of Jesus Christ. Through him the personality of the spirit is made manifest in holiness of personal life. There is close analogy between social and religious institutions. As the social impulse carried out re- sults in society, so spiritual development produces the self-mastery, the aspirations, and the observances of religion. The social impulse, carried still further, gives rise to organized civil society and the state. The religious elements in the human constitution, when sufficiently produced, take corporate form in the church as an organization. The individual con- gregation holds to the entire religious community a relation similar to that which the family sustains toward society at large. A high development of the human faculties produces these political and social forms; a higher development, by the same law, pro- duces these spiritual forms. Though ofttimes in the church the spirit has been subordinated to the form, yet, even then, by means of its closely welded organi- zation, and its influence as the repository of the richest heritage that humanity had yet secured, the church was able to become the conservator of society xI | THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 179 and the brood-nest from whence new forces and re- generating influences have gone forth for the reha- bilitating of the people’s life. The manifestation of God in humanity tends more and more not only to order, but to order in the highest forms which his revelation is able to assume. Entering into and bring- ing the nation into being in his ascending progress, he passes on to fulfil himself in his church. That civic virtue, which, according to Aristotle, it is the end of the state to produce, is but a stage in man’s devel- opment. In it he fulfils no more than his place as an earthly being. There is a ltigher destiny and a worthier end before him, and this is reached in that continuation of the state in the church which arises from the fuller carrying out of the spiritual possibili- ties of his nature. ‘The political community,” so Aquinas taught, “is to be the preparation for that higher community, the state of God.” The state, then, realizes itself fully only in the Christian state. It is but the beginning of an exhaus- tive series of spiritual disciplines by which humanity is developed. In the words of Rothe, “Christianity is essentially a political principle and a political power. It is constructive of the state, and bears in itself the power of forming the state and of develop- ing it to its full completeness.” The prayer, 7hy kingdom come, therefore, is a prayer not for the Father's realm, but for his reign. God’s sovereignty has been over the kingdoms of earth from the begin- ning, and they are slowly becoming his kingdom in willing subjection. The kingdom of God is essen- tially a social conception, at once real and ideal. It ‘already exists, and it is always becoming. It disre- 180 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, gards the distinctions of nationality, of sex, of status, and seeks to unite all mankind in a loyalty to God which shall subject man’s entire life unto him. Thus it is the kingdom of him who is the truth and is the beginning of the reign of him whose years are eternal. In proportion as the individual subject of this kingdom advances toward the full realization of his own per- sonality, does he bring nearer the perfect kingdom of God. A consciousness of fellow-men accompanies progress in consciousness of self and God. Hence the full self-realization of Jesus and his perfect con- sciousness of God fifid natural expression, and become representative for all men in the prayer for the estab- lishing of that kingdom in which man attains his highest in attaining fullest accord with God. The conception of both the religious and the politi- cal organizations, as natural unfoldings of the human constitution, makes consistent and safe the expectation that the whole of humanity shall sometime become incorporated in this divine kingdom. As the idea that God is in all life takes possession more and more of men, the distinction between church and state will narrow, not by the secularization of the religious life, but by the consecration of all life to the divine ideal. No clear-cut separation can be made between different phases of the common life of humanity. No man liveth to himself. The solidarity of the race is a pro- found reality. The individual is a distinct member, yet. vitally connected with the race. The redemption of mankind, therefore, is social. It is of states and institutions, as well as of individuals, or of the church as a section apart. The guiding principle of the church should be, therefore, a recognition of its high XI THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 181 calling of God in Christ Jesus to take humanity wherever found, and by the compulsion of love draw it into that heart communion with God which is the essence of religion and which, once attained, brings all else into subjection to him. The church should hasten to accept its commission to be the common meeting ground of all those who through similar relation to the universal Father are brethren one of another. It is to exhibit more and more that tenderness for the helpless and the needy which has characterized God-filled souls from the be- ginning down, and gives such winsome attractiveness to the ancient pages of Holy Writ; it is to be the guardian of the rights of the poor; it is to be the vindicator of the oppressed; it is to set forth in all the grandeur and sublimity of personal attainment the revealed justice of God, and in all the gentleness of compassion and charity the longsuffering of the divine mercy. The conception of the church has greatly widened. We now understand that it has to do with the body no less than with the soul of man. Recognizing the goings of God in the advancing social order, it will codperate with the various agen- cies that work for the uplifting of men, whether nominally sacred or secular, assured that, since God is the life of his world, the Zeitgeist is the Holy Spirit. When the church becomes expanded to the boun- daries of the kingdom of God, it will discover that no interest of humanity is foreign to it. Whether work or worship, whether labor or recreation, whether want or luxury, whether men eat, drink, fast, or pray, whatsoever they do, all is comprehended in their rela- tion to that kingdom. The church’s activities are to 182 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, be bounded by nothing short of the necessities of the race —it is the ministering hand of God, and what- ever is lacking to the true advancement of society it is to supply. While the church should hold itself aloof from no public interest, its chief aim is the cultivation in its members of that divine life from whose energizing all ameliorations spring. One quite important, perhaps the most important, function of the church is to give both opportunity and incentive to congregate worship, intensifying the individual’s spiritual aspirations and influences by the reciprocal action of the multitude upon him, and thus furnish at once the fountain and the channel for power and inspiration which go forth in a thousand rills to water the desert places of humanity till they blossom as the rose. A large measure of what seems indifference to religious things, results from arrested spiritual development through habitual neglect of those capacities by which the things of God are assimilated. To such dwarfed souls the struggle for physical existence fills the entire horizon. To such the first gospel needed is the gospel of sympathy and helpfulness, a little true brotherly codperation in lifting the crushing burdens under which they are pressed to earth, that they may have opportunity to look toward a Father in Heaven. The representative of the living growing spirit, which is unfolding day by day in a thousand forms, as the leaves of the forest unfold in the spring sunlight, must itself be no anachronism. It must call men to act in the living present and spiritualize their lives by recognizing the spiritual process everywhere going forward about them. The monks and nuns of old XI THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHER 183 time prayed and fasted and kept their penitential vigils, but the vassal still bowed his head to his burden; the robber baron still plundered and mur- dered ; the strong still oppressed the weak. By them the world was given over to the reign of wickedness. Now the church is coming out from its cloister. It is entering into all the avenues of business, of politics, of social conditions, it is following its Master into all the haunts of men. Basing itself upon the broad, underlying, organic oneness of humanity, the church finds strength and vitality for every duty which grows out of this rela- tion, and is enabled to deal with human life as a unit in all its activities. It may devote itself to relieving social distresses ; to subjecting wealth to the service of poverty ; to capitalizing intellect and culture as a fund held in trust for the common progress; to creating and brightening homes for the homeless multitudes; to the redemption of art and science and trade; to the bringing of the saving influences of Christianity into such vital touch with hitherto neglected masses, by breaking down old forms and minting the imperishable coin of the kingdom with a new impression, that the divine unity and the divine relations of mankind shall be revealed in a society practically realizing and embodying in its daily living that brotherhood of man which becomes the family of God. As the soil, the barren rock, the refuse of the kitchen, yielding themselves to the call of the sun- shine and the vital chemistry of vegetation, ascend to a higher kingdom and are born anew into a noble beauty of blossom and utility of fruitage, so the kingdoms of this world, with all their hardness, their 184 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. coldness, their selfish aims, are transformed, by the upward tendency of souls that yield to the spirit of God, into the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ ; and there may be written upon its walls those words of divine destiny, still legible, in spite of Mohame- dan usurpation and destruction by fire, on the old church in Damascus: ‘Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom ; and thy dominion from genera- tion to generation.” XL. The Kingdom of Man at Hand The kingdom of God is manifested in the realiza- tion of a perfect humanity ; the kingdom of man is realized in a perfect manifestation of God: the king- dom of God and the kingdom of man are one. There. is no antagonism between the two. God and man are working together toward a common end, or rather God is working, in and through man, the accomplish- ment of a purpose which is none other than the perfecting of man himself. All advance in human well-being is but a carrying out of his will and reveal- ing more clearly the kingdom of God. Man has so inseparable a share in bringing in this kingdom — it expands only with his growth, and it furnishes the occasion of his highest development and the sphere of his noblest activities —that when completed it is truly the kingdom of man. When man emerged from his long competitive career at the head of the creature line and entered © into his kingdom as human, there was completed a revolution surpassing in extent and significance any that has since taken place. At that time the sceptre of sovereignty over the existence, the variation, and 4, ate 5 XI THE KINGDOM OF MAN AT HAND 185 the advancement of all earth-life passed from the hand of “nature” into his. Henceforth, he extermi- nated or he multiplied species; he improved the characteristics of those whom he selected more in a century than natural selection had been able to do in ages; he transformed the wild grass of the Asiatic steppes into the food grains of a world; he glorified a few straggling petals into the Jacqueminot rose; he transformed the wild rose-hip into the Northern Spy; he developed a bitter embryo almond into the luscious Crawford peach. Beyond all that he has done for these lower orders man has accomplished for himself. He has enlarged the log on which he timidly crept down the rivers into the great Atlantic liner in which he dominates the ocean ; he has replaced his apron of leaves with the luxurious products of the loom; his scanty meal of shell-fish has become a bountiful feast of viands from every clime and ele- ment ;- his early signal fire on the hilltop now flashes its message around the globe by means of “ Thunderless lightnings smiting under seas”: oD fen} ’ he has yoked his rude sledge to the aurora borealis, made the clouds grind in his mills, taught the sun to paint his pictures; and waits but a little while till he shall mount the blue ether and ride its aerial waves. It is, however, less this dominion over the animal and vegetable kingdoms and this mastery of natural laws and processes, than the steady rise of mankind, as a whole, and the prerogative of self-ownership and self-direction that marks the beginning of the era of Man. Increasing recognition of the universality of God in human affairs, and the resulting continuity 186 THE FAMILY OF GOD, CHAP, of history as the gradual outworking of the welfare of the race, throws the burden of proof, to say the least, upon those who claim that inequalities of condition are now more marked than formerly, and threaten the unity of society. The solidarity of man- kind is not theoretical, but real—it cannot be broken. “In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.” The encroachment of the sea upon the continent is not more steady and resistless than the climbing of the masses of humanity into the prerogatives and favorable conditions once monopolized by the few. The state has won its independence from the tyrant and the usurper; the individual has won his independence from the arbitrary authority of the state; the humble-born has won his independence from the aristocrat; the man has won his indepen- dence from the master. Government has been trans- lated from a military to an industrial basis ; industry itself has been emancipated successively from slavery, from feudalism, and from the hardest conditions of the wage system; and the same influences that have triumphed thus far are still in the field, visibly work- ing to put away the last remnants of injustice and inequality. A great revolution has taken place in the thoughts of men toward each other. Consciousness of kind, from an unknown quantity, or one existing only in the vision of the dreamer, has become an important. factor, with which it is necessary to reckon in all social concerns. The intellectual class, those who have culture and wealth and leisure, the class that formerly looked down with stoical indifference upon XI THE KINGDOM OF MAN AT HAND 187 the multitudes in their pitiful ignorance and poverty and distress, are now giving sympathetic attention to the causes which produce and the forces which may change these unhappy conditions. In becoming a movement from above downward, instead of a blind groping from beneath upward, the social problem takes on a new character and becomes much more hopeful of solution. Not that these problems are about to be quickly and fully solved! Human life will necessarily continue a perpetual readjustment, probably with somewhat stern conditions. When, however, all grades of society begin to codperate in raising mankind to the highest feasible level not alone of material comfort, but also of such just esti- mate of life’s meaning that its higher values shall emerge into view, then it will become generally recog- nized that the life is more than meat and the body more than raiment, and man will have gone far toward entering upon his universal kingdom in hav- ing obtained sovereignty over himself. It is toward this end that events are tending. The mastery over material forces, which has placed these mighty ser- vants at the disposal of man, levels up humanity by placing all nature under its feet. This has changed the form and tendency of our civilization ; for while it has added little, comparatively, to the rich and powerful, it has set a new and higher value upon the man at the bottom of society, made him increasingly necessary to the common well-being, and shown how dependent upon him are all other classes. At the same time it lightens the burdens upon his shoulders, shortens the hours of his toil, increases the rewards for his labor, and develops his human qualities. 188 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. _ The whole tendency is upward throughout the entire social frame. From the first dawnings in the savage mind of thoughtfulness for others, and of seeking an end beyond present wants, the ascent is immeasurable to the spirit of altruism and the subordination of all things to ethical ends which are becoming the standards of to-day. It is the higher qualities that are gaining. One can find only in the backward regions, among the peasantry of Russia, or the fellahin of Egypt, that condition of moral and mental hopelessness which once was universal. There are no longer any hermit nations, no members of the universal body of humanity through which the rich arterial blood does not circulate. A thousand channels of intercommunication and interchange of thoughts, ideals, and hopes are raising gradually and powerfully the average manhood of the race. The entire plane of humanity is being slowly elevated to a higher altitude. A most fallacious method of estimating what is likely to be is to compute future advances by the rate of progress hitherto achieved. To one who gives thoughtful attention to the field at large, the cumulative tendencies manifested in all departments of human activity are startling. The greatest gains for an equal period in the conditions of the laborer have been made within the memory of living men. The wealth of the United States in the decade be- tween the two census years 1880 and 1890 increased beyond the combined previous accumulations since the landing of Columbus. The greatest discoveries of power are the most recent. The scientific achieve- ments of the last five years surpass those of any XI THE KINGDOM OF MAN AT HAND 189 former five years in the world’s history. An im- portant thing to notice is that progress is not only continuous, but the rate of progress is accelerated, and the steps in advance more comprehensive and far-reaching in their results. How vastly did the petroleum beds exceed the sperm whale in illuminat- ing and other value; how surpassingly has structural iron replaced the disappearing forests. More signifi- cant than all these physical triumphs and successes is the swifter progress discernible in the masses of men. Whatever tends to liberate humanity, promotes social prosperity. Forward movements in social life wait upon the convictions of the multitude. It took nearly a century of dishonor, culminating in civil war, to place in the Declaration of Independence Jeffer- son’s rejected clause condemning the slave-trade. The rising tide of public opinion will gradually sweep away kindred barbarities that still linger. Gradual broadening down of privilege and opportunity to all members of society alike, under the impulse furnished by the awakening altruistic feelings, will tend, as it has tended and is tending, to release a vast aggregate of personal power, and to bring into use the entire availability of humanity for the general good. Prog- ress will then be proportionately quickened and its effects diffused in the same way, only over wider areas, that intellect was stimulated in Greece and religion in Palestine. Thus also the vast social worth of such obscure gems as Luther, Stephenson, or of Faraday, multiplied a myriad-fold, will be utilized for the common good. After all, what most gives hope in the midst of discouragement to those who struggle to help men upward is man’s deep-lying 190 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. capacity, when once you can reach and awaken it, for those lofty spiritual verities which reveal the imperishable destiny and the infinitely expanding possibilities that lie in a continuous approach God- ward of the human soul. An inexhaustible future beckons a race that feels the energies of the eternal God tingling in its nerves. We are part of a growing organism, and human prog- ress is a living experience, therefore there is hope ahead. That which is impossible now, is becoming possible. Men are willing to sacrifice the present to the future, and to labor on assured that to-day’s dream will have become the fact to-morrow. Our race is grounded in God, and we shall yet partake in unimagined measure of his infinitude. “Tf twenty million summers are stored in the sunlight still, We are far from the noon of man —there is time for the race to grow.” Humanity’s great terms, its great experiences, its great attainments, are yet to come. Led by its Father's hand it will yet enter and take possession of a kingdom to the hither frontier of which it has as yet scarcely come. A dim anticipation of this even now thrills in the expectation of the seers who are looking for the coming of the promise. A great hope, a greater hope than ever before, casts a glory upon the advancing years. Science is straining for- ward, confident that profounder secrets than any yet discovered are just within her reach. Great increase of population, with its accompaniment of augmented power, is anticipated without the dread which struck terror to the heart of the philanthropist of the last XI THE KINGDOM OF MAN AT HAND 191 generation ; for the productiveness of nature and our ability to use the resources of the universe are seen to increase more rapidly than our ability to turn them to practical use, while great natural food-fields lie yet untouched in the tropic and subtemperate regions. The dangers that were supposed to threaten gov- ernment when intrusted to the multitude are found to sober and ennoble those who exercise its high prerogatives. A common error, one which vitiates much excellent reasoning, is the assumption that human nature re- mains a fixed quantity, while all else changes. One hundred years hence, with many more people on the earth, there will be less bloodshed and less discomfort than now. One hundred years ago there were fewet people, but more conflict and less general comfort than to-day. Things were worse two hundred years before that ; worse still one thousand, five thousand, years earlier. Human nature is improving, and as manhood grows men are increasingly able by inven- tion, by combination, by codperation to take care of themselves. We need not, then, dread the day of increased population, nor the wider spread of civili- zation, so long as the higher man increases propor- tionately. Even should the antagonism of man with man, the evils of war and crime and disease, and the sharpness of the struggle for existence be overcome and pass away, there would still remain in the pursuit of spiritual ends, in enriching and diversifying to the fullest degree the higher life, much and of still nobler quality with which to occupy the uttermost energies of mankind. The kingdom of man will be realized when he has transformed himself and his environ- 192 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. XI ment from these rude beginnings in which, to use the suggestive language of John Fiske, “the physical life is but an appendage to the body into that fully devel- oped humanity in which the body is but the vehicle of the soul.” CHAPTER XII THY WILL BE DONE, AS IN HEAVEN, SO ON EARTH XLI. God’s Will the Rule of Conduct Ho iness lies at the heart of God’s Fatherhood, and Holy Father is the name in which is summed up his ethical relations to mankind. In him holiness counterbalances benevolence, saving mercy from weakening into indulgence by securing that even love shall be just. In its members, humanity springs from the being of God; in its moral quali- ties, it is the progressive manifestation of the divine essence as holy will. The ethics of men rests upon the righteousness of God; his will is the authority of his kingdom. There can be for any person but one rule of right, and that is, perfect harmony with the end and law of his being. The ultimate sanction of our ethical sys- tem necessarily, therefore, is found in the require- ments of perfect personality. By a finite spirit related to other spirits, a perfect personality can be realized only in the perfect fulfilment of its relations. Life upon the earth is, therefore, a course of conduct, and for this, men, in their ignorance and immaturity, need some rule by which to walk. This needed guidance is given in the will of God revealed, not as a perfectly formulated code of instructions de- livered from without, but in man’s steadily increasing o 193 194 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. apprehension of his own destiny through better un- derstanding of the divine will concerning him, as God more and more manifests himself in human life and institutions. Moral science gains a new and firmer basis in this recognition of God as the one ground out of which all human excellences spring. The very postulate of God regards him as the perfect balance of personal qualities, wisdom, justice, and love, which — perfect in him—are rudimentary in man. Their gradual unfolding in humanity is identical with the fuller manifestation of God. In this conception morality attains a new birth. Life is seen to derive its worth from the personal relations which each soul enjoys for itself with the great primal personal source of life. Duty springs out of an obligation lying far deeper than any reciprocal requirements of the social state. It is not the demand for obedience to an ex- ternal command, it is the uprising within a man’s own soul of those eternal principles of righteousness which he has already beheld in God. He needs, therefore, no separate faculty by which to interpret these new phenomena; he needs but to turn in a new direction that same power of knowledge by which he has adapted himself to other requirements, and apply his soul’s entire energies, as occasion may arise, to discover and carry out what is needful to reproduce the divine will in the exercises of his own. Ethical, as well as intellectual, judgment is the result of culture, and grows strong and clear as man’s nature, of which it is an essential factor, enlarges. The moral law is no other than the highest expres- sion of the reason as it addresses itself to giving XII GOD’S WILL THE RULE OF CONDUCT 195 complete expression to the life-ideal. Moral prog- ress results from increased accuracy and extended application of the moral judgment as developed from a rational, rather than from an emotional, premise. There is no duality consisting of the rational and the ethical in man’s nature. These two are one. The struggle in which man seems engaged through all the historic centuries is not between his reason and his moral impulse, but between his lower self, as actualized in the round of common intercourse, and his higher self struggling into birth. Man strives toward his own highest possibilities only under the stimulus of a conscious relation of person to Person. The whole of man’s ethical history is but an explica- tion of the interplay of these two forces, — God indeed recognized as primal and transcendent, but man, also, feeling that there is an actual blending of his will with God’s will in such a way that, while acting in accordance with his own deepest, truest will, he is also doing God’s will, and by that will his life is governed. Here is the true penetralia in which God and man commune. One is what he wills; not what he does. ‘‘ Nothing can be conceived in the world,” says Kant, “or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” Much more than pious volition is comprehended in good will. It is the expression of the soul’s> whole past, —of its temptations, its struggles, its de- feats, its victories, its widening endeavors, its nobler aims, its fuller self-command, in a word it is character. Because it is character, the sweep of good will is over. all the field of life. It kindles the fire of duty and obligation upon every man’s altar, because it is itself 196 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. kindled at the central fire of the righteous will of God. It sets the bow of promise in the western horizon, be- cause its progress is toward a perfect reflection in it- self of the character of him who is perfectly just. It gathers the inspiration for the crucifixion of selfishness upon the cross of a neighbor’s right from a growing intercourse in personal communion with him whose basal impulse is self-denying love. The nature of man determines both his end and the means.by which he shall attain it. And when it is found that the nature of man is at bottom one with God, it is evident that he will realize the true end of his being only ina complete conformity to that divine norm. Life itself is the only answer to that funda- mental question of ethics: “ What is the normal hu- man life?”” This answer, easy enough to state, be- comes actualized in the individual’s experience only by the laborious process of self-reflection, with its result- ing activities, in which the soul is made aware of its capacities and accepts them as responsibilities. Man has no abstract existence, but is clothed with a rich endowment of concrete relations. In fulfilling these, he at the same time discharges all objective obliga- tions to the family, the state, society, and subjectively works out into real existence the potencies of his own nature. Historically, man is seen to make himself in the process of unfolding his own constitution in various social relations. The rule of conduct which he needs, therefore, is one written in terms of life. In recogni- tion of this, everywhere the highest available exam- ples of personality have been used as the standard of judgment by which intercourse between man and man XII GOD’S WILL THE RULE OF CONDUCT 197 has been regulated. In the Christ the law of social relations received an embodiment so satisfactory and comprehensive, that while men of all schools of thought admit that its application would be the perfect solu- tion of these vexing problems, they still debate whether his ideals are attainable by ordinary men. After nineteen centuries he still remains the one prophet of the Moral Order whose declaration of its principles and applications are unchallenged and au- thoritative. It is as impossible to explain the true eth- ical system of the modern world, without taking into account the new light which he has brought to bear upon all questions pertaining to rights and duties, as to describe the motions of the planets without refer- ence to the sun. His interpretation of these relations lifts them at once into the realm of personality, where they cease to be formal and become ethical in becom- ing the conditions under which God is actually mani- festing himself in humanity, and man is seen to be slowly attaining his end as he codperates with God in the development of his own personality. Morality is not quantitative but qualitative. The whole life must be brought under its sway. There is no section into which the ethical imperative does not enter, nor any sphere which rises above its authority. Because Christianity recognizes the all-comprehending sovereignty of the divine will, it justifies Origen’s fine description of it in the words: “Christianity is more than one of the world’s religions; it is the declara- tion of the way of righteousness.”’ Ethics enters the arena of human life as the arbiter of personal relations. These constitute both the precedent condition and the substance of morality. As these relations grow up 198 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. spontaneously out of the common soil of human nat- ure, so ethics deals with them so far as they are al- terable by the human will manifested in society. No antagonism, therefore, exists between the interests of the individual and the interests of society, since soci- ety is determined in the relations of its individual members, and the genuine ethics is the law by which these mutual interests are adjusted. Conscience, as the common term for the mind’s judging and feeling with reference to personal conduct, has unity and authority in that it concerns but one object, — Duty. Ethics likewise has unity and power to command in that it represents the common judgment with refer- ence to social right. But since ethics covers the whole of character, duties and rights are correlative. A man is not less but more a man by being a man in society. His right and his duty, therefore, may be comprehended under the general statement that his right to carry out his true nature to its fruition is balanced by his duty to bear his part in enabling others to do the same. Life is not a vacuum into which the successive generations of men are born; they enter into a con- dition of things already complex and with preéstab- lished order. Law arises as the continuing will. of the people, not unalterable indeed, which reaches forward and back to guard the interests of the unborn and execute the purpose of the dead. This embodied will is that through which the ethical spirit works. Without such organization of the common purpose the righteousness of a cause will not secure its tri- umph. The function of such civic institutions as may be grouped under the name of law is to help each XII GOD’S WILL THE RULE OF CONDUCT 199 man in his endeavor to attain to self-perfection in con- nection with others engaged in the same effort. Law is the expression of the common endeavor to establish conditions under which the will of one may organi- cally unite with the will of all. While, therefore, law is inevitable in society, it is only as the natural pre- requisite of freedom. If it seems at times to con- strain, a closer scrutiny will discover that in obedience to law alone is liberty. Law is the freely chosen course of action of free spirit. On this ground the will of man and the will of God coincide ; for the will of God is the expression of his personality, and the law of man is the expression of his personality realized in freedom. Though we do not consider God as realizing in himself those tran- sient forms in which our differential morality em- bodies itself, and which have significance only for finite spirits in an educational process, yet, as living love, he may become actualized as the foundation of our ethical order. The being of God is the ground of the universe; the character of God is the substance of universal morality. His kingdom is the life of the world organized on a basis of love. This is the nexus between humanity and God, for his love for man is . the utterance of his oneness with him. No perma- nently satisfying ethics is possible, therefore, until one is worked out in harmony with this self-objectify- ing impulse of God, love. Only at the bidding of this does he diversify himself in a human race, and only in living unity with this basal principle will man work out the law of his mutual relations. Only as consciously carrying out the will of the indwelling God will men so regulate their energies that they 200 : THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. may become righteous, and so order the upbuilding of human life that it may truly reproduce the divine. XLII. Conformity to God’s Will the Measure of Progress . It would be difficult to overestimate the gain to ethical science of a general acquiescence in the con- ception that humanity is a manifestation of God. With his own being posited in universal Being, man’s personality will grow to reflect the universal Person, and his will become ultimately a reproduction of the universal Will. Toward this end man moves in free- dom, yet not outside the limitations of finite exist- ence. Because man’s whole personality not only, but the entire course of his development as well, lies within the circumference of the Infinite One, his life’s meaning must also lie within God’s all-embra- cing purpose. Inasmuch as morality resides only in the will, the accomplishment of that purpose, —the convergence of many subsidiary ends, — stated in its simplest terms, is conformity to the will of God. This conformity, however, cannot be secured arbitra- rily. There can be no constraint in character. God is what he is by free choice; to attain his likeness man must be free also. Authority is necessary and is not absent; but God commands in laws, not in spe- cific injunctions. Because he is free, man withholds acquiescence many times, and often antagonizes the divine will; but as the educational process continues, he comes to recognize that his own best good and God’s will concerning him are one, and opposition is transformed into codperation. Thus the will of God finds expression and attains form and realization XII CONFORMITY TO GOD’S WILL 201 through the workings of the human will, and man’s history becomes the history of a progressive realiza- tion of the divine will. Not alone, however, but through his relations to his fellow-men does man work out his true destiny. The effort to realize the capabilities of which he is conscious produces the concrete institutions of society in which he has sought to embody his ideals as they rise in the course of a moral process, which passes continuously through the better toward the best. Thus while men freely choose whether to oppose or to codperate with the ethical aims of the Universal Will, yet since the ethical, as the final end of the Ground of our being, has supreme worth, the test of human progress lies in this moral realm. Not num- bers, not luxury, not learning, not civilization, but the moral status of men is the measure of advance. Thus a most important modification has been wrought by the development theory in the region of ethics. We no longer look to the beginning for the highest moral ideas, nor for the universal moral- ity. Such a habit of thought was inevitable under the influence of the idea that man was created at the summit of perfection, and that the farther up the . stream we go the purer morals we shall find. In accordance with modern conceptions, however, the true view is that in this, as in all else, men advance from less to more. This gives us, then, a progressive morality, and summons all history into court to testify to its growth. Humanity is working out for itself a life task, which can be accomplished only in the actual experiences of living men. In proportion as these have recognized their calling, and have set before their 202 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. eyes a high moral standard, have they been permanent and influential upon the world’s destinies. A miscon- ception of the destiny of mankind has laid a paralysis for ages upon the whole East. These people have not grasped the conviction that in order to achieve their work in the world the elements of obedience, resignation, and mystic communion with God must be balanced and sustained by a rational grasp upon the relations of which these qualities speak, and which require the codperation of man’s intelligence with his emotions before there can be any real progress. Con- sequently, to the millions of the Orient, the idea of individuality, with its corresponding responsibility, is vague and the will is defective, lacking the stimulus of conscious vital connection with the will of God. All along the road which man has travelled lie scattered fragments of civilizations that have fallen apart through lack of that cohesive force given by recognition of a definite goal toward which each one is to struggle. Their weakness was, and it is the weakness of much modern life, that their desires moved mainly in the sphere of pure animalism. They had regard chiefly to the satisfying and equalizing of material wants. There is a widespread endeavor to eliminate difficulty from the conditions of life. Neither the individual nor society can permanently thrive upon the milk and rose-water of a luxurious bodily existence. It is significant of the nature of the relationship between God and man that individuals and communities hear his voice most distinctly when the clamor for self-indulgence, growing out of ease and surfeit, is still. In bleak and hardy surroundings, God’s voice in the soul is most plainly heard and XII CONFORMITY TO GOD’S WILL 203 noblest character responds. Large material success appears inevitably to depress a people into moral deficiency. They are tempted evermore to that nega- tive attitude of mind which characterized the pre- Christian world in its rich and sensuous centres. They have no conception of morality as essential to human life, because they find no trace of it in the round of physical existence, and are tempted by the old epicurean spirit not so much to deny God as to deny that there is any good, for they lack a conscious- ness of God as that vivifying presence by whose activity moral progress is secured. The teaching of history would seem to be that not until men are able to despise the comforts of a materia] prosperity, are they worthy to be intrusted with it. The welfare of mankind consists not in the growth of happiness, but in approximation to moral perfection. Establishment of outer social feli- cities marks not advance but retrogression, unless accompanied or preceded by strife for ethical free- dom. This alone is the spirit of progress. That portion of our nature which can be nourished by temporal good, and even that part which finds its field in the reciprocal duties of social life, is soon satisfied; but that inner voice which demands an expansion of the soul’s own existence is a growing requirement which calls forth a man’s most active effort in the fulfilment of a destiny which steadily enlarges before him. Society and the individual, like the outer and inner portions of a building’s framework, arise together and condition each other. The organic unity of its sepa- rate individuals constitutes the ethical cosmos upon 204 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. the basis of reciprocal needs and duties. Social and political institutions are the forms in which a develop- ing manhood asserts itself, and are transformed from time to time as the ethical ideals of their constituent members vary. Resulting from a common. spiritual activity, social life is codperative not only, and pre- supposes such factors in the human constitution of its several units as enables them to supplement each other, but provides at the same time that general condition under which it is possible for men to fulfil, each for himself, those moral capacities which require the social life for their unfolding. By this correlation of men with each other the interests of self and others are not only reconciled but identified. Apart from his fellows the indi- vidual is but a fragment. He does not complete himself at the expense of another, but each brings to each what otherwise is lacking, and the social fabric is woven of these filaments thrown out to meet the social demands which they supply. As these per- sonal relations cross and mingle, the one becomes incorporated with the many in an identity which grows more complete as the common life develops. A careful study of the conditions under which human- ity has reached its present stage leads to the convic- tion that, as physical selection culminated in the structure of man, enthroning him as the highest creature-form possible to the earth, so ethical selec- tion is enthroning Community as the social ideal. Neither egotism alone nor altruism alone is sufficiently broad to form the moral basis of society ; humanity is not self nor others, but one. A purely selfish life is more than suicidal, it is impossible; altruism XII CONFORMITY TO GOD’S WILL 205 strictly defined is equally impossible, and would be not less suicidal were it possible. However zealously preached or self-denyingly applied in action, altruism can never be any more than a temporary resting-place between a brute individualism and a social order which recognizes that the interests of men, singly and collec- tively, are mutual. What is already actual in fact will come to be accepted as truth, and one’s self as a member of society, while consisting of a non-trans- ferable self-consciousness as its nucleus, is yet made up of other selves, which fill it out to the full meas- ure of social being. Only in the act of fulfilling those reciprocal functions which pertain to man as a factor of the social organism, does he realize his own well- being. Refusing this, he is not a man, but a mere parasitic atom without place or meaning in the human whole; expenditure of self is thus seen to be the necessary condition of attaining the true self. While I am sacrificing myself to my neighbor, he at the same time is sacrificing himself to me. The social fabric can advance toward its ideal state no faster than its individual components realize the end of their being. The resulting complexity of relationship, by which the entire community becomes | more strongly influenced by the actions of each of its members, has been thought to indicate a subordina- tion of the individual, whereas this but marks the progress of the majority in pursuit of their divine calling. What retards society as a whole is the undeveloped stage in which a portion of its members rest. Here, in this rank and undisciplined growth, lurk the social evils which persist in spite of intelli- gent and earnest efforts to remove them. That sub- 206 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. jection of private to public interests, which many think increasingly characterizes modern life, spends its force upon those persons who withhold their active cooperation from forward movement. Selfish- ness, whether active or passive, opposes itself to the power and intent of the universal will, both as it exists primarily in God and as it is reflected in humanity. Disastrous as this course must inevitably prove to those who indulge themselves in it, they none the less clog the free movement of the whole. Social ideals can be realized only as all the social units are educated toward their attainment. The remedy, therefore, is in man’s own hands. By applying his best reason, and his noblest spirit also, it is possible for him to hasten the day of better conditions for all. He need not wait the slow evolution of a blind struggle for life, but by bending all his energies to the development of that character through which alone permanent blessing can come he may hasten on its appearing. A sublime call came to man at the moment when advancing attainment brought him to that point from which he was to modify the factors of his own evolution. The struggle for life was then transferred from the individual to the social organism. While an animal, he had no ability, consequently no obligation, to do more than utilize and forward such - accretions of force as came to him from his ancestors. Now, in the complications of social life men are made administrators for each other; the stronger and the shrewder can, if they wish, defraud the weaker. Thus a fearful responsibility is intrusted to men in intrust- ing to them stewardship of others as well as the men- XII CONFORMITY TO GOD’S WILL 207 tal and moral freedom toward which each is personally working. It is, however, becoming clear even under the law of survival, as expanded to meet the require- ments of the social state, man has no right to create or permit such contrasts of opportunity and privilege as still far too largely prevail. Society can find a way if it will, and it must find it or perish, to equalize the conditions of its members. The gentle rule of Jesus is at the same time the thunder of Sinai. The social unit that sinneth —is selfish — shall die. The great law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, is grounded in the social constitution of man. We are not, then, dependent for progress upon the aimless gropings of selfish passions, blind and reck- less. Our course is shaped by our own conscious effort. But in discovering that intelligence is our guide, we also discover that the social forces are personal, internal, and spiritual. It is because of this truth —though the fact itself has often been but imperfectly apprehended or even totally misappre- hended —that the Christ has entered with such vital- izing and formative power into these later ages. He appeals to men not through a vacant awe, inspired by the contemplation of a being from another sphere, but with the helpful consciousness of the partnership of all men with him in his triumph over the material and the animal, and their complete entrance into the fellowship exemplified in him with that divine will whose unfolding is the progress of the world. That great forward movement which takes its way through the generations, a Gulf Stream in the human sea, and which we comprehend with all its myriad meanings and outreaching activities in the word Christianity, 208 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. is the gradual approach of all men, guided by the same indwelling spirit, to that stage which they have reached, representatively, in him. This is no loose association of men, bound together by merely emo- tional ties; it is infinite Being rising into fuller manifestation as it moves toward the fulfilment of its aim in a perfected humanity. The consciousness - of this continuous working of God in human energies and activities is the basis of all true ethics; for this alone can give that sense of universal relationship to him which is the ground of all right relations between men. It is thus seen to be a social as well as organic force which is directing human history. It is the revelation of the kingdom of God, a kingdom grounded in justice and established in love, which God has wrought as a dwelling-place for his children. All the elements of the divine character may there- fore reasonably be expected to reappear in human society. Not at once, however. We look not upon its finished, but upon its preparatory, stages; neverthe- less, we have reached a point from which it is pos- sible to see that steadily the supreme worth of man’s moral nature is becoming recognized, and that all the forms and achievements of society are judged by their ability to further his ethical development. We are discerning that morality, however flouted by the sel- fish impulses, is still the basis of society, and that we grow in goodness as our consciousness of the God within us becomes more clear. Assured conviction that this 7s the will of God, even our sanctification, is the reason that Christianity bears such a buoyant hope in its bosom. Great evils still linger, injustice XII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 209 between man and man is still rife, self still seeks to profit at the expense of others; but more and more expectation increases of the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. The upheavals and _ ine- qualities of history but mark the steps in the as- cending process of conforming the immature and unstable wills of men to the settled, wide-viewed will of God. XLIII. Harmony with God’s Will the Test of Social Ideals The chief anxiety borne through the portals of the opening century by thoughtful men will be to secure to every man all his rights. Despite the number of earnest students working at this problem, results are still fragmentary. All questions tend to become soci- ological, but we await an adequate science of Society. The belief that God is gradually manifesting himself in man, and that approach to the divine character is humanity’s bourn, is an idea at once single and uni- versal, capable of being wrought out into the unity and completeness of a social system. In the last analysis there can be but three basal doctrines of society: the elementary one in which individualism | absorbs all; the later one in which the individual succumbs to the machinery of the multitude’s welfare, and the state becomes all; and the final one in which the developing of the individual produces the institu- tions of social life. Each man’s individuality is an inalienable birthright through his inseparable oneness with God. To develop and mature this oneness, in the process of living out his life in its relations, is the meaning of man’s earthly existence and the will of I 210 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, God concerning him, a will neither distant nor exter- nal, but near at hand, increasingly incarnate in man himself. From the individual to society is the order; but it is also to society through the individual. The princi- ple of social unity has been steadily gaining ground. The earlier prerogative of privileged classes has been counterbalanced by the recognition of political equal- ity ; it remains to secure the general acknowledgment that all social theories and industrial ameliorations find their guiding principle and promise of endurance in the well-being of man as man. This is the bar at which institutions, agencies, theories, must be tried and approved or condemned according as they make for or against his true advance. ‘The test,” says Amiel, “of every religious, political, or educational system is the man it makes.’”’ Nothing less nor other can permanently justify itself in experience. As a person, of. which the distinguishing feature is self- consciousness, man’s ideal of his ultimate good, how- ever imperfectly he may apprehend the particulars of its perfection, can find satisfaction in nothing short of a perfect, self-conscious life, and this can be secured, as he discovers in the endeavor to attain it, only as part of a larger social life in which the entire round of his own faculties may find fullest play in the vari- ous reciprocal activities which constitute the concrete working world. Thus the question, probably the most difficult in all ethics, “ How may the will of God be known in practical affairs?” is answered, as to gen- eral outline at least, in those very aims and endeavors through which men in their individual relations are constantly striving for a better condition in the vari- XII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 211 ous parts of the social body. The best, as the end toward which this desire for a better points, is found, not in forsaking, but in developing the institutions now embodying the social life. The ideal moral state is to be built up by those same internal forces which are now constructing the actual state in the course of producing righteousness, peace, and unity. These are known and unmistakable in daily operation among us. There is still need, however, of just such a science of social relations as Thomas Arnold once proposed to work out from this point of view, showing how knowledge of man’s end would explain the action and reaction between individuals whose relations con- stitute social life. Only thus shall we see how the various social and moral forces, ascending from the grotesque customs and restraints of savagery up to those ethical codes which govern and direct society in its most advanced stages, influence men in the degree to which their capacities unfold, while the consciousness that God is reproducing himself in men by means of these reciprocal activities between themselves endows each man with a transcendent dignity and worth. In a society composed of members whose individu- | ality it is so essential to preserve, the chief corner- stone of any practicable ideal of social reorganization will be justice, not formal justice merely, but justice in the lofty sense which it already bears in Justinian: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuendt,— the steady and abiding will to give to each man what belongs to him. Right for all is the will of the Righteous. The poor man is to have his due as well as the rich; the rich, no less 212 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, than the poor. Rights are relative to duties, and both are subject to the end of man’s being, activity in accord with perfect virtue. The security which the individual claims from society, and the authority which society asserts over the individual, have their common ground in the necessity of these relations as the condition under which a man may accomplish his life-task. The interests of mankind may demand sacrifices from all ranks, but these same interests demand proportionality of rights and duties. If they demand equality for equal, they with no less insist- ence demand inequality for unequal men. Every other limitation is arbitrary. The ends of the social and the individual organism are the same, freedom ; the only path to freedom is obedience to the moral law. Liberty and morality are one. No lesson of all the past has been more often reiterated than the fatal folly of abandoning the right to pursue the politic. “For,” says the Greek poet in Agamemnon, “for black Erinnys, in time, by a reverse of fortune, will rub down into obscurity the man who is prosperous without being righteous.”” Civic and national right- eousness is as essential as personal. Li Hung Chang, a propos of anti-Chinese legislation in the United States, declared: “A government that enacts iniquity is no government’’; and we must confess to having been taught the basal truth of politics by one whom we call heathen. It is not unjust favor any more than pity or charity that those who labor ask, only justice. Equality also they do not demand. That must be won; it can neither be given nor withheld. They do, however, ask for equity. This, society is becoming unwilling longer to xII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 213 withhold, because it is beginning to recognize that the complete fulfilment of his capabilities constitutes man’s ultimate well-being, and that by its tendency to aid or to hinder him in realizing his true self every social theory, custom, rule, or condition is justified or condemned. Natural right and social expediency unite to vindicate Lieber’s pregnant conclusion, ‘I am a man; therefore I have the right to be a man.” Simple truism as this statement seems, it carries within it the demand for reconstruction of society on far different lines than are usually laid down. That neither the more nor the less advanced classes recognize the principle here involved is plainly shown by the different theories put forth in the name of a desire to benefit humanity. These do not exhibit that profound estimate of man’s moral nature nor show that respect for the inalienable worth of per- sonality, which are prerequisites to framing an art of living that shall conserve the individual’s right to the development of his own manhood, and at the same time recognize that his separate development is con- ditioned upon the development of the social whole. No matter how revolutionary the program, if it leaves the man unchanged, it cannot permanently . better his estate. The inexorable logic of nature condemns to sterility most proposed radical reforms, because they seek to bring the conditions of success down to the present level of mankind, instead of laboring to bring mankind as a whole up to the con- ditions of success. The impracticability of Anarchy does not lie in the radical character of its proposi- tions, but in the fact that its inauguration would necessitate at the outset a fully developed manhood, 214 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. one capable of self-government. Meantime, however, this fully developed manhood, in the very process of becoming such, has built up out of its unfolding per- sonality the order and authority of the state. Per- haps but few of the extreme radicals have sufficiently grasped the significance of this forecast by Frederick Engels: “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state property. But, in doing this, 2¢ abolishes itself as proletariat.” Thus the Anarchy of Kropotkine, in reducing the political and financial struggle of humanity to the two tendencies toward greater freedom from authority and a more equitable distribution of material goods, does no more than anticipate the time when the organi- zations of men will so far obey the inner law of right that external government will have little place, and the strong, in obedience to the altruistic impulse, shall bear willingly the burdens of the weak. Desirable and welcome though this state of things will be, when it comes as the gradual product of an expanding sense of mutual relationship and a growing consciousness of kind, yet Communism, as a compul- sorily adopted basis of a new order of things, is no less inherently impossible than Anarchy. Proudhon sealed its condemnation when he wrote: “Com- munism is inequality, but not as property is. Prop- erty is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.’ Even more when carried to its extreme con- clusions in Nihilism, as represented by Bakunin, this enforced equality in goods and status contradicts that justice which is the only rock in whose shadow can rest and safety be found. It is an attempt to base a XII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 215 social order upon the negation of that very fraternity from which society springs. The evangel of a per- fect personality as the true end of human life ex- cludes the gospel of an artificial communism no less than the gospel of a vicious egoism. A true love for men prizes manhood too highly to dissipate it in the indistinguishable sea of a communistic horde, any more than it would petrify it in a self-absorbed indi- vidualism. Under the broad name of Socialism group and flourish a multitude of theories of society and pro- grams for realizing these various social ideals, most of them emphasizing the rule of the state as control- ling the citizen in the acquisition and employment of wealth. So far as it anticipates a forcible substitu- tion of public for private ownership and adminis- tration of a common stock, it is contrary to man’s best interests because subordinating personality to material gain. It violates Kant’s preserving caution> “Always treat humanity, whether in yourself or another, as a person, and never as a thing,” and is impracticable because presupposing the very condi- tion which it seeks to prevent. Whatever of clamor this form of socialism may raise, there is no danger. to be feared, since before it can become sufficiently practical to become general, it must necessarily ac- quire just those qualities which will render it harm- less. There are, however, certain influences at work among men which so manifestly conduce to man’s true end that they are clearly in accord with the will of God concerning man. Among these is the movement for shorter hours of labor. For a man requires first of 216 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, all such leisure from grinding toil or strenuous occu- pation as shall permit him to develop his human qualities. Vast multitudes are still shut out from the possibility of becoming real human beings at all, by a dead wall of misery and weariness. When all available energy is necessarily employed in feeding the body, what wonder that the higher faculties suffer neglect ? This is equally inevitable, whether the sub- ject be slave in‘a sweat-shop or employer hounded into ceaseless activity by the fierce competitive methods of the business world. For this reason, shorter hours of work are a prime necessity for the right of the workman to be a man, and the movement to secure them justifies itself as in keeping with the divine intent by increasing the manhood of the worker to such an extent that on the whole more and better work is accomplished in eight hours than in a longer day. Cooperation is another line of development along which humanity has evidently a long and prosperous course to run. Even now this principle, though dis- guised under many forms, appears able to give advo- cates of all systems what they really desire as fast as men themselves are able to apply its principles. Humanity will search out new courses for its activi- ties, and the*tendency is more and more toward the spontaneous uniting of individuals in a freely chosen cooperation for the more effective accomplishment of some common purpose. The whole present develop- ment, — increasing centralization in the state, larger organization in means of communication, the uni- versal tendency to form large industries, as well as mechanical concentration in general, the association XII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 217 of workmen in large bodies, and their growing un- manageableness by private employers, —all these point to a time when, by the gradual leading up of the results of past civilization to wider and higher accomplishments, there shall be ushered in a much more socialized method of industrial and political life than prevails at present. Both society and the indi- vidual are contributing largely to this result already. Society is educating all its members; conducting public affairs, hospitals, charities, sanitation ; provid- ing water, parks, postal service, and many similar things. Individuals, or, more often, great semi-public corporations, conduct mammoth enterprises that cover the globe in their extent and affect the well-being of entire races. All this is working to the same end — common effort for the common good. With such large portions of humanity in their care, those who are responsible for these operations are learning to respond to the moral accountability which goes with this mighty power. The growth of man is making these things possible, and in carrying on these mutual endeavors he is learn- ing many of the larger lessons of his life. He begins to comprehend that individual well-being is in and through the well-being of the community; that altruism is not a sentiment merely, but a hard scien- tific necessity and the inexorable condition of egoistic success. The individual virtues, — honesty, industry, thrift, temperance, and enterprise, — however essential to the individual’s personal character and therefore true success, do not insure his getting on in the world. Society has become so complex and so much depends upon the relations of the individual with 218 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, others, and the interdependence is so great, that only by linking his interests with others’ will one prosper. The great enterprises which call upon the vast ener- gies and resources of nature and cover the earth in their extension make a proportionate demand upon human fellowship, so that no one can achieve the greatest results for himself without the wide and generous cooperation of his kind. Inasmuch as there is necessarily codperation in utilizing the dynamic forces, and the vital energies, and the larger spiritual meanings of nature, there is also a just claim for equitable distribution of the benefits resulting from this joint activity. Thus the will of God for man’s common good is being revealed to him in the ordinary experiences of his life — spiritual meanings blossom- ing on the hard and thorny stem of practical affairs. God speaks to men in the exigencies of business, and commands attention in the warehouse and counting- room to truths that often go unheeded in the sanctu- ary. Out of this reciprocal dependence of the individual and society upon each other, sundry unexpected and important consequences spring. In proportion as the man improves, his value to himself and to society increases. On the other band, a large proportion of every community is held back by the non-ethical con- duct of those who cannot yet rise to the conception of a common interest. This is not less true where the connection cannot be directly traced. Whole cities and commonwealths are wronged, perhaps for generations, that a few who have the opportunity may dispose of valuable public franchises for personal gain ; millions of dollars worth of property evade the XII HARMONY WITH GOD’S WILL 219 assessors, and thus reinforce the taxes upon what remains; vast watersheds are stripped of their timber, denuded of their soil, made barren forever, climates changed, rivers choked with the detritus, the water supply cut off from immense populations, and all that a few timber thieves may enrich them- selves from the public domain; a large army of tramps, strong, intelligent, and capable, are perma- nently withdrawn from productive labor and form pub- lic burdens in every country, throwing the cost of their support upon the working community, that they may eat the bread of idleness and ease ; labor organi- zations demand the same wages for their most incom- petent as for their most competent members, thus setting a premium upon mediocrity; the employés of large concerns and of the public perform their duties in a perfunctory and careless manner which, while seemingly injuring no one in particular, augments the cost and hence lowers the wages or increases the taxes of all; the lives of many persons are heart- lessly placed in jeopardy by defective materials in building — to spare the contractor’s purse, — or faulty workmanship — to spare the plumber trouble. This lack of moral development everywhere, and not the antagonism of any particular class, constitutes the chief difficulty in that great problem of the world —labor. The workman’s enemies are those of his own household, even more than those without. All barbers must work on Sundays, because a few will ; some employés eagerly cast away their opportunities of leisure for the few pence gained by overwork, con- sequently, all must consent to overtime or discharge ; the well-to-do young woman works for pin money 220 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. XII and occupation, therefore all women who need wages must compete with the amateur army of those who amuse themselves, with little regard to the amount received; ignorant and selfish parents needlessly ex- ploit the wife’s and children’s labors to increase in- come, and the result is that all the family of many workmen must labor for their own support. Wise words, and increasingly significant as power falls more and more into the hands of the whole people, are these of John Stuart Mill: ‘To their own qualities must now be commended the care of their destiny. Modern nations will have to learn the lesson, that the well-being of a people must exist by means of the justice and self-government . . . of the individual citizens.” Social intercourse is steadily bringing to consciousness the moral forces within man and unfolding the moral relations within which he constantly moves. All social remedies wait upon higher moral ideas in men; even the corrective in- fluences now at work will gain in efficiency as men grow morally better. The will of God will be known and done in the commonwealth in proportion as each of its members achieves the true end of his own being through conformity to that which eternally zs, the character of God; and the methods of reformers and the schemes of agitators will justify themselves and be beneficent and permanent just so far as their effect is to bring this about most speedily and uni- versally. CHAPTER XIII GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD XLIV. The Cry for Bread THE prayer for bread is universal. The world is horrified when an entire nation falls into the abyss of famine; it seldom realizes how many hang daily over the edge. In lands most advanced in material comfort there is always a large proportion in constant danger of death from lack of bodily food. Every large city has its submerged tenth, and throughout the country a submerged twentieth suffers the pangs of hunger. The struggle for life, which existence means to the greater number of mankind, is more than half made up of the struggle for food. This item alone absorbs sixty-two per cent of the people’s wages in Germany; in England, nearly as much; in the United States, somewhat more. Lon- don is little, if any, worse off than Paris, Berlin, Vienna, New York, or Chicago. It has merely hada Booth to analyze and exhibit the condition of its needy population. Even his figures and percentages convey a very imperfect notion of the state of multitudes among those nine hundred thousand residents of East London, thirty-five per cent of whom Charles Booth classes as ‘the poor, and very poor.’”’ In American and European cities alike many honest and industrious families prolong death on the scantiest income be: 221 222 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. cause, do what they will, they cannot increase it. Never a winter but respectable persons, cultured, refined, of irreproachable character, in the great centres of wealth and population, perish of starvation. In the Old World or the New, the sad tale is heart- breaking in its piteous frequency. The records of charitable societies, relief agencies, and friendly visi- tors tell how “A widow, with seven children,” or “A mother, with six children and a husband on his death-bed,” or “An old couple, formerly in good cir- cumstances,” are trying to keep life in their bodies and a roof overhead with “four dollars and a quarter,” “two dollars and seventy cents,” or “five dollars and thirty cents a week.” Just a little added burden, a few days’ sickness for the worker, a brief failure of the scanty income, and this family falls to a lower level, and another shelterless group is upon the street. | The words of William Booth are too true: “There is a depth below that of the dweller in the slums. It is that of the dweller in the streets, who has not even a lair in the slums which he may call his own.” Strong and willing’men sleep under the open sky, from the cold stones of the Thames Embankment through Europe and around again; and in the Great Republic, also, the same sad tale is true. Thousands of hunger-bitten children suffer in the public schools of America and Europe, glad of warmth and shelter, y even though in want of food. Oh, the abject, griev- ous misery of the poor! The wan, pinched faces of the children! The hollow-eyed, worn, pitiful mothers! The pathetic, hungry animal-look in the appealing eyes of men fighting the gaunt wolf of famine back XII BREAD AND TO SPARE 223 day by day from their loved ones! The dumb, hope- less resignation of those worn out battered wrecks who get a precarious loaf or bowl of soup at the cheap kitchen, or scramble for the scant and bitter crust of charity! From how many of our fellow-men rises daily to the All-Father the agonizing petition, Lord, » give us this day our daily bread ! XLV. Bread and to Spare The saddest feature of this immense aggregate of suffering is that it is needless, and the pathos of this non-sequence is accentuated by the juxtaposition of direst want and most extravagant plenty. “In the shadow of overflowing elevators and of packing-houses that send forth food for a continent, little ones go to bed supperless, and in the termini of great railroads that stretch out through regions which wait only the developing hand of labor to become new centres of wealth and power, able-bodied men in hordes vainly seek for work, and haunt station-houses for a sleep- ing-place and search garbage heaps for food. It is of course but a superficial solution of this unhappy problem to pile up statistics, showing the enormous aggregates of national wealth and the comfortable sums which an equal fer capita distri- bution would give to each person in the civilized world. Such a dispersion of capital is not feasible, and even if feasible, it were not wise. And yet there is light upon the difficulty in the fact that the present visible wealth of the United States, if evenly divided, would give to each person of its seventy millions some eleven hundred dollars, or the not insignificant working capital of between five thousand and six 224 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. thousand dollars for each family of five persons. The wealth of the United Kingdom would give to its inhabitants two-thirds as much again. It is not from lack of resources in these countries at large to feed their citizens that so many starve within their borders. Still, considered by itself, this means but little, since the portion of this sum-total available for consumption would scarcely feed these common- wealths a single year. The value of such a showing lies chiefly in the fact that so large and general a surplus is possible under present social conditions. Of much greater importance is the fact that the rate of increasing wealth is steadily accelerated. The present century has seen an advance in the powers of production unparalleled in any previous period. The accumulation of wealth has outstripped the most sanguine expectations ; and this is equally true whether population has remained stationary, as practically in France, or increased yapidly by immi- gration, as in the United States. In the latter half of the century, in both Europe and America, wealth has increased three times as fast as population. Machinery has multiplied man’s productive power until, as Huxley said, the seven and a half million of workers in England can produce as much in six months as one hundred years ago would have required the entire working force of the world one year to equal. It is now estimated that less than one-half the manual labor is required to produce the same amount of subsistence as twenty years ago. These representative figures tend at least to show that the general wealth of every reasonably well-governed country not only increases much more rapidly than XIII BREAD AND TO SPARE 225 the population, but that it increases more rapidly from year to year. There is further proof of the divine provision, that man shall not suffer from lack of food, in the exhaust- less resources of the soil—resources which have scarcely been touched as yet. Improved methods of cultivation, more general use of irrigation, the reclaiming of marsh and lowlands by systematic draining, will give great additions to the arable ter- — ritory of the world. Almost limitless, however, is the possible addition to our food supply through application of greater intelligence to the develop- ment of the different edible grains and vegetables. Man’s inventive power, directed to the vegetable kingdom, involves nothing less than a transformation of the whole range of agriculture and horticulture through the working of the intellect upon the laws of vegetable life. Not the natural fertility of the soil, but its rational culture, is the principal element in the food supply of the future. It is not a question of area or fertility, but of man’s control of the forces of nature —a control which increases with the increase of human knowledge. Since man’s power to con- sume is limited, and the possibility of his production almost limitless, that very density of population which the Malthusian philosophy foresaw with such dread is to be really the antecedent condition of a cheaper and more abundant sustenance, since in the new methods a large and constant demand will make possible an abundant and cheap supply. The problem of production has been solved. The stock of potential energy being almost infinite, as the means of availing ourselves of that energy increases Q 226 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. and are perfected, the comfort of mankind will in- crease. Already the application of steam to industry has achieved results which are the equivalent of set- ting sixty slaves at work for every family, or six times as many as were allowed by law to a family in ancient Athens; sixty days’ labor of one man is reckoned suf- ficient to supply goods for the support of one family a year. A more general application of electricity, energy derived directly from solar radiation, imme- diate transformation of the latent energy of coal into electricity, the conversion of the Roentgen rays directly into light without heat, thus increas- ing, results a million fold, these are some of the doors into the great storehouse of nature’s forces which science considers herself just about to open. If her hopes shall prove well founded, the sinews of man will be practicably released from the drudgery of toil and the productive capacity of the world’s population multiplied beyond imagination. Most hopeful, however, of all sources of future plenty in material supply for the race is the pro- spective improvement of man himself. The value of the person is the largest element of a country’s assets. Adam Smith aptly puts it, “The wealth of a country is its sons.” This is an actual fixed capital to the country at large, at the same time that it is a patri- mony distributed to the several individuals with measurably accurate reference to personal right ; for the income —the salary or the wages —of each represents merely the annual interest upon the capi- tal value of the person. This value is capable of steady and unlimited increase. The history of humanity is the record of such gradual development XI BREAD AND TO SPARE 227 from lower to higher organization, not always in regular, but still with certain, advance. Through suc- cessive cycles and epochs “upwards steals the life of man,’ till in every land the people are more intelli- gent, more free, and enjoy more rights. Three great factors codperate in the production of the world’s supply. The first of these is mind. The animal produces nothing until he becomes man. Mind is the source of all progress and advantage. It is therefore primary in the process of fortune-building and of provision for the supply of needs beyond the present hour. The second factor is muscle. It is not primary in the task of production, as many stren- uously assert. Still, brawn is the instrument by which brain builds its habitation. The third element essential to a people’s welfare is materials. These God gives to brain as fast as it can take them; and as fast as brain sees their value and discovers how to use them, it sets brawn to the task of transforming them from lifeless ore and dead stocks and stones into objects of use and beauty. The sum total of human arts are the channels through which the race utilizes the materials and forces of nature. The marvellous progress of inventive science makes the last half or three-quarters of a century appear as if in that period almost all that tends to man’s real material comfort has been produced. Thus the application of mind to man’s conditions has already gone far to realize the socialistic ideal, as stated by William Morris: “First, a healthy body; second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and, fourthly, a 228 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. beautiful world to live in.” The fuller development of mankind in higher qualities means at the same time a more perfect satisfaction of his bodily wants. As manhood increases, wants assume greater individ- uality. The great proportion of production may be given over to machinery. Routine wants may be satisfied by routine effort; but individual wants, only by individual activity. Art will take its place above manufacture. XLVI. Give ye them to Eat How may this abundance be equitably divided, and the pangs of this hunger appeased? The answer is not one that may be left with a pious complacency to God. He distributes his bounty to men mainly through human hands; Gzve ye them to eat. How to give effect to this command is the one question into which all others run. The problem before society to-day —the problem of which relations of labor and capital, of state and individual, of handicapped and irresponsible classes, are but subordinate parts — is distribution. There is yet much opportunity for an. improved balance in the apportionment of the property and income of the commonwealth between its various members. If many of the methods proposed for raising the depressed classes cannot abide the ethical test, still less can many features of the present social system. Private luxury and public want is neither civilization nor Christianity. There is a hopeful sign of better things in the disposition of so many to echo the question which John Stuart Mill somewhere asks, ‘“Who does not abhor your millions as he sees the XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 229 weeping, ragged children lying at night upon the cold pavements of the Strand itself and of Lombard SLreSe iy Nearly half the families of the United States own the real estate they occupy, yet seven-eighths of the families possess but one-eighth of the national wealth, while one per cent of the families hold more property than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. One-eighth of the families receive more than half the aggregate income, the richest one per cent receiving a larger income than the poorest fifty per cent. The wealthi- est one per cent receive from property alone as large an income as half the entire population receive from property and labor combined. More than three- fourths of the people of Great Britain and Ireland are without any registered property whatever, own- ing nothing but their household goods. In these countries less than two per cent of the families hold about three times as much private property as all the remainder, and ninety-three per cent of the people hold less than eight per cent of the accumulated wealth. It is evident, therefore, that the vast wealth of these nations does not bring a fair share of comfort, culture, and independence to the rank and file of their citizens. Political economy has not yet attained its ideal, ““To each according to his wants, from each according to his ability.” This unhappy inequality has one encouraging feat- ure in that it is a condition chiefly within the control of humanity itself. It depends partially upon indi- vidual qualities, but much more upon social institu- tions. There is no “iron law” fixing the laborer’s wages at the minimum of existence; nor is there a 230 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. pampering Providence, arbitrarily to augment the profits of capital. The distribution of wealth, to a considerable degree, is under the control of laws for which the national conscience is responsible. What are economic institutions but the product of human actions, customs, and laws? ‘The position of social classes in general is predetermined largely by these institutions. This brings them within the circle of ethical requirements, and permits us to inquire whether they and their effects are just or unjust. The first requisite for a solution of this modern Sphynx’s riddle is intelligence, not only as regards present conditions, but also of those inexorable uni- versal laws which modify accumulation and distribu- tion of material goods. Below man, the individual animal or plant carries on its growth and specific functions only on conditions of strict obedience to the requirements of that environment from which it derives its existence. In human society, that well- being which is possible for the compound whole may be proportionately shared by each individual only in conformity to such a system of production and distri- bution as consists with the attainment of the common end through obedience to general rules. With this in mind, a dispassionate examination of the facts as they are will disabuse one’s mind of much false and exaggerated theory. The first thing to attract attention in such a com- prehensive survey is the steady, proportional improve- ment in the condition of the multitude. Moderate fortunes and incomes are increasing more rapidly than the larger possessions of the very rich. The working-classes have been steadily securing to their XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 231 own use and enjoyment an increasing proportion of an increasing product; while the richer classes, con- trolling and using capital, are securing a diminish- ing proportion of the same product. The workman has gained, in increased wages and reduced prices together, from seventy to one hundred per cent in the last fifty years. To the great body of people, neither to the extremely rich nor to the extremely poor, has this enormous material improvement of ‘the last half century fallen. In thinking of the aggregate wealth of the country, men think vaguely of the vast sum which represents the total savings of the past, not realizing how large a proportion of that fund is locked up in trust for posterity and the poor in the form of public schools, parks, roads, river and harbor improvements, fire and police protection, churches, almshouses, jails, colleges, libraries, museums, and a thousand other institutions which minister to the safety, comfort, and well-being of high and low alike. The working capital of the community is only that product of past labor which it has been able to set aside from present needs. Labor and capital are partners in securing the common welfare. When either disappears, the firm — is dissolved. Labor taking a ton of ore from the ground and transforming it into iron gives to it a value of fifty dollars; that iron converted into steel and wrought into delicate dentist’s tools or watch springs is increased several thousand fold; but in producing this result the skill and machinery which enter into the product are at least as important and valuable as the labor. It is estimated by careful statisticians that a factory averages one thousand 232 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. dollars capital for every workman employed. A plant furnishing occupation to one thousand men involves a capital of one million dollars. Not capital alone, nor labor alone; but both, massed, disciplined, con- centrated, and intelligently directed, operating to- gether, like the infantry and artillery of an army — that wins industrial success. | Wealth is not a fixed quantity, that what the rich gain must be taken from the poor. The total wealth of the United States in 1850 equalled $308.00 per capita; in 1860, $514.00 per capita; in 1870, $780.00 per capita; in 1880, $870.00 per capita ; and in 1890, $1036.00 per capita. Aside altogether from the question, — which must be answered negatively, — whether the poor get their due proportion of the in- creased aggregate wealth, it is evident that they have not been growing poorer while others have grown rich. During this period also, while the total of wealth has increased most rapidly, its distribution among the people, as shown by its consumption in the form of better food, better houses, better furniture, better clothing, better education, better financial condition, has been most marked. Weare only beginning to understand that consump- tion is the dynamics of wealth. Desires are the motive forces of the economic world, their varying numbers, intensities, and forms shape the activities of men and the myriad phases of industry and trade. The great defect of many social theories is that they over- look the important principle, that distribution of wealth must be so effected as not to sacrifice production itself in the process. This may best be done by stimulating the consuming power of the masses of the XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 233 people. In any well-balanced industrial society pro- duction and consumption will appear as the obverse and reverse of the same organic relation; for a justly ordered life requires that the intake shall balance the output of wholesome energy. In the light of this truth it may be found needful in the name of a higher economic science to revise some of the prudential maxims of earlier days. Hoarding may easily be carried to such an extreme that this excellent virtue becomes a vice. Consumption itself, however, needs to be elevated to a higher plane in order that expen- diture may be for things of more permanent value, and, so far as possible, for objects of social utility and of individual character. If we may accept the saying, ‘‘ Life without work is guilt, work without art is brutality,” we shall find that in proportion as our tastes require us to put our sense of beauty and fit- ness, as well as our vital force, into whatever we do, and demand these same elements in that which we enjoy, the economic condition of a perfect society will be attained. Inability to attain to individualized wants confines the consumer to common products, easily multiplied and definitely limited in the quantity that can be utilized. Every advance in civilization requires a more equitable diffusion of wealth and welfare among the masses of mankind. Every force which stimulates distribution without checking pro- duction is a positive aid to human progress, and every increase in the welfare of the people is through in- telligence to make the best use of materials at hand. Intelligence, then, after all needful deduction is made for the material necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, holds the chief place in the people’s need, 234 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. and its diffusion is the principal factor in the problem of distribution. Judged by salaries paid for superin- tendence and direction in industrial enterprises, the intelligence capable of something more than processes of memory and routine is still far short of the demand. Including the incomes of professional men, business managers, and men of such position, labor in the United States is found to receive three-fifths of the present products of industry, and capital two-fifths. How much of that three-fifths is lost from lack of knowledge to use it to the best advantage! With more than fifty per cent, in many instances as high as seventy-five per cent, of income spent for food, due mainly to lack of skill in buying and wasteful methods in cooking, the poor are inevitably kept poor. Waste is the measure of possible additions to present com- fort with present income. The application of suf- ficient thought to the matter of saving in food and fuel, by more economical buying and cooking of food, would add to the nation’s resources annually a sum greater than the total expenditures of the government. This recklessness is not among the poor only, nor chiefly. The poor.in our cities might be abundantly fed by the waste of the rich, could it be collected and distributed. But waste in the palace means hunger in the hovel. Lazarus always suffers at Dives’ gate. One pronounced advantage in the view-point from which God’s relations to the world are coming to be regarded, is the effect which it will have upon the popular theory and attitude toward work. So long as work is regarded as a curse, it is not strange that many feel the necessity of daily labor, in order that one may eat bread, to be a badge of inferiority, and XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 235 a life of luxurious idleness the thing chiefly to be desired. But when we recognize in the setting of this Biblical statement the method by which ease-loving Orientals accounted for the unwelcome condition and necessity of labor, and remember that in reality this is a preéminent phase of the great law of ascent, laid alike upon the lowest animal form and the highest spiritual qualities, it becomes a badge of honor. It will materially modify the common estimate of work and the workman to get well out from under the idea that this is the badge and memorial of sin, a life sentence for humanity to hard labor as the just reward of ill desert, and to grasp the idea that it is the divine privilege and open sesame by which man has let him- self into all the riches of modern life. Work is not a curse, but a benediction. In the eighteen years that Jesus wrought in the carpenter shop of Nazareth, we see all lowly but needful service spiritualized and glorified. All proposed methods of ae distribution must be brought for a final hearing, not to the economical, but to an ethical, bar. Time will in- evitably demonstrate that in the social expansion of humanity whatever is not right is, in the long run, impossible. We have not to deal with inert materials | nor with abstract principles, but we are to think out the concrete problems of social dynamics as the retir- ing generation thought out the problem of material forces. In the struggle to obtain the full measure of what belongs in justice to the individual, it is essen- tial above all to secure that liberty wherein individu- ality consists. It is not less necessary to resist all external forces, be they institutions, organizations, or 236 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. forms of thought which would circumscribe this free- dom, than it is to open the soul to personal forces which tend to expand and liberalize, in order that narrowness may give place to breadth and isolation to identification with the social whole. The law of solidarity is inevitable and universal. Given freedom of adjustment, and each factor of the body politic will find its proper place with the same certainty that the atoms of the physical body gravitate to theirs. This sense of the organic oneness of humanity is a power- ful constructive force which is influencing our con- ceptions of the relations of men to each other, and modifying their reciprocal actions to such a degree that it is changing not only the conditions of human- ity, but humanity itself. This profound notion of the unity, into which the successive generations and all races are bound, un- covers the deeper meanings of our social history and interprets the struggles and the sufferings of the race. As we trace its beneficent workings through the ages, it reveals the vicarious fellowship in which all men are held, and discloses the sacrificial element which works forever in the, heart of God from whom human- ity springs. The student of social forces finds that in order to understand his own time he must consider not only the influences by which the machinery of our present social condition has been shaped, but also the opinions and actions which have developed the character of the man of to-day. The advantages of this race unity are in a measure recognized; its obligations are more commonly overlooked. Human- ity is one; therefore its most progressive races and portions are tethered to the slowest. The high are XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 237 still kept down by the low. Mankind cannot rise, except as all rise together. While a certain freedom of action is possible to the individual, yet each one’s life, ideals, and attainments are largely determined by those which prevail about him. This race oneness, shining through the defects and discouragements of the present, throws a rainbow of hope upon the future. The history of the centuries is the story of the political and social enfranchise- ment of the people. Among the old written con- tracts, exhumed from the ruins of Babylon, is one by which a laborer hired himself to work three months for one and one-half shekels of silver, eighty-two cents of our money, supplemented by six and three- fourths bushels of meal and about two gallons of oil. Another laborer, one Ijudahum, worked still cheaper ; he hired for four and a half shekels of silver, or two dollars and forty-nine cents a year. Michelet estimates that a general division of the value of the product of labor for one year preceding the French Revolution would have resulted in less than sixty-three centimes. It is stated by students of that period that under Le Grand Monarque the rural population of France wanted bread half the time, while under Louis XV. they were able to eat bread two days out of three. Property, the people had none. The peasantry were forced to eat the grass from the roadside and gnaw the bark from the trees. Versailles cost one hundred and twenty-six | million francs, and the rural population fought with the dogs for a bone. The last of the English serfs were freed as late as 1574. Negro slavery was legal in England until 238 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. 1772, and in the United States till 1863. The con- dition of the British workman has, on the whole, immensely improved since Thomas Carlyle could write: ‘My own stone-mason father has dined on water and cresses, and I was myself a poor starveling in a peasant biggin.” In forty years, or between 1850 and 1890, the annual value of manufactures for each operative in the United States rose from $1120.00 to $2117.00, or eighty per cent, and the aver- age of wages to workmen rose in the same time from $240.00 a year to $517.00, or one hundred and fifteen per cent, while during this same period all manufact- ured articles were greatly cheapened in price. The law of improvement indicated in the above facts is shown in manufacturing statistics throughout the world. The workingmen are to-day better housed, better fed, better clothed, have better education, and are more able to exercise the functions of man than in any period of the past. Unaided human labor could not provide the various articles which are in daily use in the cottages of the poor as well as in the stately mansions of the rich. Fifty years ago a barrel of flour produced in Illinois would have cost ten times its value for transportation to Boston. It can be carried now for $1.25. This class of benefits affects the laboring man vastly more than the rich employer of the present or the great landowner of former days. Not only in entire harmony with these improved conditions, but a further evidence of them, is the widespread unrest that prevails among the less com- fortably situated classes; for it is a well-nigh, if not wholly, universal law that dissatisfaction with condi- XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 239 tion increases as the condition improves. Opportu- nity is the occasion of unrest; men become most exacting when they feel there is a chance for better things. This is the reason for the apparent anomaly of greater improvement in the condition of working- men during the last half-century than in any five centuries previous, while that same half-century has seen the rise of the largest number and most deter- mined efforts for still greater privileges and opportu- nities. In so far, however, as the present order and existing institutions are the outgrowth of the nature of man, as it has unfolded in the process of history, they can neither be arbitrarily changed nor artificially replaced. Industrial improvement necessarily involves highly organized capital. Only with and through these higher forms of organization has the general social advancement of the present century come. All attempts, through appeals to social prejudice, to array the laboring class against the forces which in a single generation have nearly doubled their power to command the benefits of civilization, are social crimes. Competition will tend to work its own remedy in the formation of large trusts and corpora- tions in self-defence. Trusts, as the latest form of - concentrated capital, represent more fully than any- thing else the true nature of the economic movement. Aggregated capital is part and product of the world’s progress. Men will inevitably work together in larger and more closely related groups, and produc- tion will be on a larger and more economical scale. Unscrupulous men attempt, it is true, to engross the benefits of science and invention, but their success 240 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. can be no more than temporary. The world’s whole movement is against them, a movement which nothing can stop. It is impossible permanently to monopolize any important line of industry. Public sentiment, which eventually is law, will hold toward the monopo- list the feeling which Plutarch records that Dionysius held towards one who had acquired a large sum of money by a monopoly of iron. He forbade him to continue any longer in Syracuse, “as being one who contrived means for getting money inconsistent with his interests.” The growth of man and of social con- ditions cannot long be cramped in any single hand. In all combinations of business the principle holds, no less than in mechanics, that every reduction of friction is a direct gain in the application of energy to the work in hand. No legislation can make it profitable to ignore that law, and nothing which ignores that law will ultimately succeed in holding its place by the side of other and more economic methods. The peculiar characteristic of civilized beings is their capacity for codperation; and like other faculties this tends to improve by practice, and becomes capable of constantly widening application. Accordingly there is no more certain element in the changes now taking place than the continued growth and widening application of the principle of codpera- tion in the social and industrial world. The whole lower part of the universe points to codperation as its end. The tendencies of the times are from inde- pendence to interdependence; from competition to combination, in the ranks both of wealth and of labor. Profit-sharing is an offer made to labor from the capi- talist’s side; codperation is a deeper principle, arising XI GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 241 spontaneously from union of the two. Society is progressive, and the right of one age becomes the wrong of the next. The frequent complaint that law fosters abuses and favors capital and monopoly finds seeming justification in the fact that, in growing periods, the forms of civilization always lag behind the movements which they are unable either to interpret or contain. The legal principles of the eighteenth century are inadequate for the industrial conditions developed in the closing years of the nineteenth. The pools of to-day, however, are not creatures and pets of the law, as were the monopolies of past centuries or the guilds of the Middle Ages, but rise and grow strong in obedience to the modern demand for combination. There are survivals of feudal notions and relations in which lurk and hide very many of our most annoy- ing problems. Among these, is that notable case of unequal distribution, the unearned increment on lands held for speculative purposes. Unearned by the landowner, this increment has yet no fraction of added value which has not been earned by toil, by enterprise, by culture and progress, by everything that makes the difference between savage wilds and civilized society. The value thus given by the indus- » try and character of the community cannot always be absorbed by those who have contributed nothing thereto. The social element contributed by the com- monwealth will before long be taken into account, and this increased value redound to the advantage of those who in their organized capacity created it. Ability to manage large business enterprises is an element of productive capacity too commonly over- R 242 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, looked or too cheaply regarded by wage-earners. The common assumption, in which too many econo- mists acquiesce, that the riches of the few are taken from the products of the many is really in strict truth to be reversed. There is little comparison between labor, or the energy put forth by one man directly upon a material object, and the ability by which a single man, through the putting forth of his energy, affects simultaneously the labor of many men. For this reason it were far nearer true to say that the present competence of the many has arisen from the products of the few. Proudhon cites the case of two hundred grenadiers who raised the obelisk of Luxor in a few hours, and asks whether one man could have accomplished this task in two hundred days. From this he argues that the employer receives as a gratu- ity the marginal result of combined effort on the part of his laborers, while he pays only as many times one day’s wage as he employs laborers per day. The combination itself, however, as well as the enhanced result, is the special contribution of the mind capable of converting a multitude of units into an organic unity and directing it to a definite end. This in- equality in men is a fact which cannot be anni- hilated by being ignored. It is a law of nature asserting itself regardless of humanity or of human theory. Equality, then, is only proportionate, and each member of society is justly treated when he is enabled to produce according to his faculties and to consume according to his wants. The inherent criticism of all schemes of social betterment based upon an artificial equality is that they propose to reduce all members of society to XI GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 243 one dead level of mediocrity, whereas the method of nature is just the opposite. The further up develop- ment is carried, the greater the diversity. The realization of personality consists in the raising of the better faculties of the individual to their highest power. The notion of progress, so far, has been too largely material. It is likely to turn, and indeed signs are not lacking that it has already turned, to higher things. It is being recognized that, as lord of himself, a man has an indefeasible right to live out his own life as a man, and therefore has a just claim upon whatever is necessary to enable him to do that. All his rights spring from his personality. Inevi- tably, the distribution of wealth is largely affected by differences in men’s character and conduct. The spiritual is stronger than any material force; thought rules the world. Great men, says Emerson, are they who see this. The social problem is a condition to be lived through. Asa matter of personal relations, it is to be solved in terms of life. Because society in all its operations and activities consists of persons in relation to each other, there is no means of remov- ing frictions and misunderstandings except by better adjustment of the personal relations between the . different elements of the social cosmos — or chaos on its way to become a cosmos. Business conditions cannot, in the nature of things, continue forever as they are. With intelligence becoming common, as drudgery is laid more and more upon the iron shoulders of machinery, and labor gives place to leisure, and by living in freedom the mass of mankind learns to live and wisely use a free life, the rewards must inevitably be more equitably distributed, since 244 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. the contributions to the common earnings will be more nearly equal. It will be acknowledged that a man has not daily bread, in any full Christian sense, until he is able to supply the wants of his higher nature and to exercise this higher nature in activity for the welfare of himself and others. There is quite general recognition of the fact that increased material prosperity accompanies every advance in the moral condition of a community. The other half of this truth is less observed, but is none the less real. Everything that diminishes general prosperity and beats every effort of individuals and communities down toward the physical level where the struggle is severe and constant to maintain even bodily existence, curtails by so much the energy and means available to higher uses. The efforts for social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual betterment of men that are forced to a standstill by depression in business and industry go beyond the imagination of any but those actually conversant with the facts, There is a vital relation between the material well- being in the general community and the possibility of its mental and spiritual uplifting. For this reason the moral advance of the working classes has gone on as the material condition of the workman has been improved by the introduction of machinery. The inventor who enables us to harness nature to our industries and compel her to do our drudgery, or rather to accept her standing offer to put her illimitable strength at our service, is placing a lever under humanity and slowly elevating the race. The growth thus brought within reach of men, as they are enabled to communicate across continents and seas, XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 245 —as they are enabled to drop the implements of manual toil for a larger portion of the day and take up the book or the pen,—as they are enabled to absorb the fruits of genius, of science, and of art, — as they are enabled to develop the higher nature and supplant the lower impulses by better and worthier motives and ideals, will make the progress of human- ity swifter and more assured. All property is raw material that has been shaped to use by intelligent skill. Wealth is the investiture of material things with personal qualities. The more personality, the greater the possibility of wealth. Where intelligence is low, the power of producing property is low. The world’s coal fields and ore beds were useless until mankind advanced sufficiently to use them. Civilization is knowledge applied to life. Knowledge of the mineral kingdom is turned into masonry, metallurgy, agriculture; knowledge of the vegetable kingdom is turned into cotton looms, horti- culture, carpentry ; knowledge of chemistry, electri- city, and similar forces is converted into power which makes one man, plus a machine, as strong as a thou- sand, and a hundred men in England as rich as a million in Arabia. Equality of property, however, is not the social goal. Every man does not need the same amount of money. The social goal is the equalization of oppor- tunity and privilege, and the elimination of social disadvantages which have hitherto grown out of in- equality of property. We are approaching a time, we have reason to hope, when the destitute poor and the unsocial rich alike shall disappear. Civilization may yet slough off penury as it has already sloughed 246 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP, off slavery ; it may outgrow the oppressing capitalist as it has outgrown the feudal lord, but it is not likely to attain equality of possessions for all men. The chief result of the emancipation of the masses of men from grinding bodily toil, which is the evident end of processes now visible, will be that there will be leisure. The resources of nature are ample; ma- chinery can develop them; the hours of labor may shorten ; life, the complete, perfect, harmonious de- velopment of self, the perfect man, may come, and the vast energies of humanity, accumulating thus a surplus of force not needed for material use, will furnish the mental, moral, and altruistic capital by which the less advanced shall be nourished by the higher. Time is the one great commodity. Fill that with higher values, and it will command any price and produce any result. Class privileges are already disappear- ing as the rear ranks deploy into line. They are moving up abreast of the foremost files. The distribution needed, then, to give every one his due includes intelligence and character as well as food and clothes and shelter. In order that the entire body politic may be healthful, this circulation must be complete. Each community will be truly live just to the extent that it develops this mutual exchange. Stop the blood in any member and it mortifies. Civilization is more than utilization of the forces of nature; it is more than a great literature and wide- spread education. It is thought for-the poor and suffering ; it is recognition of human brotherhood ; it is abhorrence of what is mean and cruel; it is devo- tion to the claims of justice. Social justice has only made a beginning when it gives a decent sustenance XIII GIVE YE THEM TO EAT 247 to the toiler. It owes him sympathy, fellowship, that sacrament of human communion, embracing the whole wide circle of the children of God, that is symbolized in the universal elements comprising the Lord’s Supper. It means a divine compassion for the weakness and error of those who suffer from these limitations, and a transformation of the dust and din of present social agitation into some worthier and holier relationship between man and man. A principal remedy for present needs and inequali- ties will be found in still more boldly entrusting the masses themselves with the power and responsibility for dealing directly with these questions. The multi- tudes are poor and blind, and do not clearly see the limitations of life and of character which often forbid the best-intentioned efforts at legislation to be effec- tive. _ Wider experience of actual affairs will teach them many things. Individualism is not a spent force; it is a force as yet undeveloped. Such growth of individuality is the necessary preparation for social codperation. In proportion as this becomes high and general, it will become possible to attain to unity. It is toward this that all the distracting diver- sity of efforts in social organizations, in church activi- ties, in the outreaching of classes toward each other, are tending, and this they are helping to attain. The spirit of Christianity, the divine sympathy, is brood- ing over the weltering chaos of a social condition still too largely without form and void. God is moving upon the face of the waters. “Believe it, ‘tis the mass of men he loves ; And, where there is most sorrow and most want, Where the high heart of man is trodden down 248 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. The most, ’tis not because he hides his face From them in wrath, as purblind teachers prate ; “Not so; there most is he, for.there is he Most needed.” The chiefest hunger of a community is, after all, the lack of means and ability to produce. Without execu- tive ability, without trained and developed resources in themselves, without the instruments of creative work in their hands, the great mass of the population are limited to scant food for the higher faculties, and hence continue deficient in manhood, even though not suffering bodily hunger, and not exposed to the inclemencies of the seasons. There is no untapped reservoir of wealth to which the needy may resort for the supply of their wants ; there is no vast reserve of leadership or directive power, apart from the rank and file of men and women, to which they may look for help. No new régime, no novel method, no redistri- bution of either resources or personal force, can create those qualities of character and efficiency for lack of which the individual and the community suffer to- gether. These must come by growth and painstak- ing. cultivation, and other and lesser goods will be added to them. Inequality of capacity and of oppor- tunity accounts largely for present inequalities of condition. The long struggle for an equalization of opportunities and rewards has achieved its pres- ent results through a realization, in the process of history, of the higher qualities of humanity in codper- ation with God. Whatever ameliorating tendencies are seen at work may justly be reckoned part of the equipment of humanity as a whole, operative alike in XI TO EVERY MAN HIS WORK 249 all grades proportionately to their moral attainment, for the overcoming of evil, the establishing of good, and the genuine nurture of men in the process of giving them to eat. XLVII. To Every Man his Work Numerous social animals —ants, bees, beavers -— labor; man alone works. With admirable discrim- ination, Professor Marshall defines labor as ‘any exer- tion of mind or body undergone partly or wholly with the view of some good other than pleasure derived directly from the work.” This element of an end out- side of itself distinguishes labor from work. Animals go forward in their routine activity without either freedom or progress; man works with a purpose. The animal acts from inherited impulse ; man’s work is spontaneous and prophetic. Work is free action directed to an intelligent end. The ethical demand that each member of society should have his clearly defined and secure sphere of work assigned him, has not received sufficient attention from those who have attempted to deal with the problems of social life. There are few so little developed as not to be at least vaguely conscious that it is by their activities in pro- ductive industry that they enter into fellowship with their generation, and thus acquire a definite place in _ the ordered whole. When once this bond of common work is broken, the individual feels himself to be no longer identified with society. Homage to law, in- dustry, and honesty — virtues which spring up in social relations — fall away, and the individual sinks below the level of manhood and becomes a parasite. Anything that interferes with the free initiative of 250 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. the individual deprives him of the chief source of en- joyment. Human labor is an integral part of the process by which crude materials are converted into the means of human life and happiness. Even the best of nature’s products are improved by man’s con- structive touch. The potato is a crude root, the peach a poisonous fruit, the flower little more than an unsightly weed, till his care transforms them. A more striking evidence of the divine element in human activity is the fact that the happiness of the worker is graduated by the graduations of his work. In pro- portion as his work is high does he rise in improve- ment and blessedness. Physical exertion gives health, subdues the lower passions, multiplies material com- forts. Intellectual effort opens new worlds of thought and of ideal life to the student. He that achieves a great material work finds probably greater consolation in the achievement than in any pecuniary advantage ; he that discovers a new truth knows an incomparably higher joy; but when a man rises higher and enters with strenuous working powers into the moral sphere, how much more sublime, even divine, becomes his consciousness! This capacity for the highest work brings man into near affinity with God and makes him partaker of his bliss who worketh even until now. Man’s character is moulded by his every-day work more than by any other influence except his spiritual ideals. The chief formative agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic. For this reason the question of employment for all members of society is distinctly ethical. This is the channel through which alone they shall be able to work out their true selves as human beings. In the XI TO EVERY MAN HIS WORK 251 edict of January, 1776, issued in the name of Louis XVI., Turgot, his great prime minister, said: ‘God, in giving to man wants, rendered it necessary that he should have property. The right to labor is not only the property of all men, but it is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescribable of all property.” When society as a whole becomes con- scious of its collective obligation to each of its mem- bers, it will recognize that facilities for earning an honest livelihood are a universal birthright. In this sense Lowell is right in saying that no man is born into this world whose work is not born with him, but if, when he says further, “there is always work and tools to work withal for those who will,” he means to say that under existing conditions there is, or has ever been, opportunity for remunerative labor for each one who sought it, his saying is not true. The causes for the non-employment of those will- ing to labor, a term by no means commensurate with the number of those who profess to be desirous of employment, are numerous and complex. The deepest abyss in the matter of the unemployed is the principle that lies at the bottom of our present industrial system: “I have all the help that I can profitably use.” Labor’s surplus value, profit, is the motive power in our present economics. When the profit-bearing avenues are glutted, the hungry are not fed. But if there is sound political economy in the principle that whosoever will not work neither shall he eat, the demand is equally sound that who- soever is willing to work should be able to eat thereby. The number of the unemployed marks the imminency and magnitude of this phase of the problem. This is 252 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. a fruitful source of other evils. Investigation cover- ing fifteen thousand cases in England, Germany, and the United States shows that while the chief single cause of poverty is sickness or death in the families of the poor, lack of work stands second. If, however, the averages as to the lack of work, insufficient work, and poorly paid work, be added together, lack of work forms the supreme cause of poverty. Modern times are characterized by a lack of harmony between realities of life and the ideals of living. The tendency in both government and religion is-toward individual freedom. But there is no industrial free- dom to the man who has no liberty but that of seeking work with no assurance of finding it; no property, except to seek employment. A question of ethics which must soon be seriously asked, is whether the industrial power obtained by utilizing the forces of nature through invention and machinery is a right or a responsibility ; are those who control this hiring of labor proprietors or are they trustees? “You take my life When you do take the means whereby I live.” From whatever side considered, the problem of the unemployed is grave. We are told that of the pop- ulation of East London, seventy-seven per cent is of low skill, or wholly unskilled labor. We are further told that on an average fifteen per cent of the un- skilled laborers are constantly unemployed, and that “it seems probable that in the richest city in the world one in every four adults dies dependent on public charity.” Nor is it easy to see how the wages of low and unskilled workers can be materially ad- XIII TO EVERY MAN HIS WORK 253 vanced, so long as this standing pool of excessive labor remains from which to drain into surrounding industrial opportunities. The mass of the unemployed is much greater than we are accustomed perhaps to think. It is estimated that in England, with its population of 36,000,000, there are generally about 700,000 out of work. Charles Booth declares that the 24,000 adult men included in those whom he classes as “the very poor, with casual earnings,” do not, on the average, get as much as three days’ work a week. Nor is it to be charged that these people are loafers by prefer- ence. John Burns pertinently asks, “Is it the loafer by trade, do you think, who is willing to shiver for hours under the dock gates, in the black gelidity of a December morning, for the chance of a shilling’s worth of work, and work that needs as much muscle as will?” He continues, “I have seen dock hands fighting for the gates, like people tussling in the passages of a burning theatre, with a fierce physical energy (moral inspiration apart) which the chronic loafer, even if he would, is powerless to exert.” The latest report by Carroll D. Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor, on statistics of occupations, shows that of the 22,735,661 persons, ten years of age and over, engaged in gainful occupations in 1890 a total of 3,523,730 were unemployed during some part of the year, an equivalent, approximately, to 1,139,672 persons unemployed for the entire twelve months, or five and one-tenth per cent of the workers. The luxury of maintaining this pathetic host of the industrially disarmed is as expensive as that of sup- porting the standing armies of the world in times of 254 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. seace. Negatively, every idle man is a sheer loss to the community, withholding just so much creative energy from the general stock. Positively, every such non-producer adds an extra unit to the divisor of the common dividend, and thus diminishes the bread of all. Naturally, the propositions for relieving this unfor- tunate state of things are numerous, and of every degree of intelligence and practicability. There is work enough to give employment, and money enough lying idle to give living wages to all who desire to earn, and there is something so abhorrent to human reason in the waste of the labor of more than a million workers in a continent whose resources wait only the developing touch of human labor to multiply the com- forts of all its people to almost any degree, that one involuntarily feels a certain sympathy with any method, however irregular, which promises to benefit either the unemployed or the commonwealth. A large proportion of remedial plans are impracticable, how- ever, because unjust. If every man has the right to opportunities of labor, implicit in his right to exist- ence, attempts to monopolize those opportunities are ethically as indefensible as attempts to monopolize materials of life. Any set of men have the right to combine and act in concert, for this is of the essence of manhood and of human freedom, —to be denied this is less than animal, but to compel others to abstain from the work which they are willing to do is tyranny. The compulsory strike is, therefore, but a passing phase. Trades unionism alone cannot solve this problem. The growth of unions, however, is the sign of a grow- XIII TO EVERY MAN HIS WORK 255 ing tendency to organize. The refusal of so many to join these various labor organizations is evidence of the independence of the individual with which any scheme must reckon. It is possible, however, that the union principle may ultimately furnish the needed check on the surplus loafing population which curses the great cities. It can neither be permanent nor ultimately successful, however, so long as erounded in a selfishness contrary to the true interests of man- kind. Recognizing that only by including as many as possible and preventing all others from obtaining the means of subsistence can they succeed, the labor unions grow hard and unjust in their ideas and deal- ings. Says the editor of the London Labor Elector, “When dock work becomes more regular, a large number of dockers will no doubt be thrust down among the loafers, criminals, and semi-criminals, and will starve or go to the workhouse.” He further proposes that “the casual and his kind be shut up in a home colony until they die out.” The state- ment is significant as illustrating the readiness of the progressive unionist to deal hard measures out- side his circle. This perplexing problem of lack of gainful occupa- tion arises in large part from the massing in the cities of those seeking employment. Concentration of pop- ulation occasions concentration of misery. There are not too many people, but too many in one place and too few in others. Better distribution of workers will do much to restore the balance. While the army of unemployed in the Coxey movement were making their way to Washington, the farmers of the states through which they passed were lamenting the im- 256 THE FAMILY OF GOD CHAP. possibility of securing help for their spring work. Honest and thrifty persons starve in the cities, while the rural districts are hampered and their production limited for lack of labor. For sufferings consequent upon this unwillingness to accept work where work is to be had, many have but themselves to blame. By more general distribution of intelligence, much might be done to assist those willing to work any- where to learn where help was wanted. Many cities now have free employment bureaus; but they do not as yet find work for all who apply. 3, 20035.2) bes. 36.10, Lye Time.as related to spiritual experi- ence, 345. Trades-unions not able to solve problem of the unemployed, 254. Transition from the successive to the organic, importance of, 131. Trinity, conception of, modified, 20; origin of doctrine of, 20; meaning of “second person” of the, 61. Tripartite nature of man, God’s revelation appealing to, 59. Triumph, grandeur of a Roman, 350. Trust possible only because of uniformity of nature, 27. 377 Unconditioned, the, not also the unconscious, 16. Unearned increment, the, 241. Unemployed, numbers of 253 Unity of the whole, subordination of parts to, completed, 5; of the cosmos, how reproduced, 9; of spiritual life, source of, 50; of nature and history, 134; the divine, the constructive social principle, 168. Universal Fatherhood, growth of idea of, 135; Fatherhood of God increasingly manifest, 135; en- ergy welling up in man as con- sciousness, 333. Universality of the kingdom of God, 18o. Universe, the, God the vital essence of, 4; existing as modes of the divine activity, 16; being of God the constitution of, 24; an utter- the, ance of divine self-sacrifice, 118. Unpaid service, amount and value of, 299. Unreason of conscious life termi- nating at death, 348. Unrepentant, the, remaining in the region of judgment, 88. Unrest of the working-classes a sign of advance, 239. Unsocial conceptions of life dan- gerous, 298. Vicarious elements in the universe, 112; salvation impossible, 119. Vicariousness of Christ’s life its exaltation, 301. View-point, the new, 8. Virgin-birth, dilemma of the, 67. Vital identification of Christ with humanity, value of, 68; quality of man’s relation to God, 124. 378 Wages, per cent of, expended for food, 221; the struggle for bet- ter, 257; the problem of, far- reaching, 262; the standard of, 266. Want and plenty existing side by side, 223. Wants, growth indicated by in- creasing, 268. Waste, suffering caused by, 234; the higher the organism the less, 337: Wealth, amount of per capita, 223; rate of increase of, accelerating, 224; not equitably divided, 229; proportion of, devoted to public use, 231; not a fixed quantity, 232; made feasible by intelli- gence, 245. Well-being of man, as man, the test of social theories, 210. Wicked, the, and eternal life, 341. Will, of God, the, all things exist by, 23; the seat of sin, 81; more than volition, 148; blending of man’s with God’s, 195; contents of a good, 195; of God for man’s good revealed in business, 218; of God the arch spanning all worlds, 332. INDEX Witness to God’s indwelling grow- ing with time, 358. Woman’s personality added to the world’s assets, 259; industrial competition with man, effects of, 262. Work, view of, modified, 235; and labor discriminated, 249; a social bond, 249. Worker, happiness of the, gradu- ated by his work, 250. Workingman, the, underrating the student, 276; studious of in- dustrial conditions, 276, World, building, process of, con- tinuous, 7; drama, impressive- ness of its unfolding, 17; the, is what God is, 24; the ancient, ushering in the day of the Son of Man, 79; drawing closer to- gether, 137. Worlds, all, one in the being of God, 329. Worth of man’s moral nature in- creasingly recognized, 208. Wrongs sometimes permitted by outgrown forms, 241. Yama to Nachiketas, 358. Yearning of the human heart for » its Father, 115. THE GOSPEL FOR AN AGE OF DOUBT. By HENRY VAN DYKE. BEING THE YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1896. 12mo. Price $1.25. “The volume is one of the solidest and most quickening of all those which beae the title of ‘Yale Lectures on Preaching.’ It is a grand book.” — Rev. GrorGE B. Stevens, D.D., Professor of Theology, Y ale. “Tt all is so brilliant, painstaking, and scholarly, that I have been swept along with an enjoyment not often felt. ‘The last chapter, on the election to service, seems to me to announce, as almost no other utterance has done, the gospel of the pest time.” — Rev. Francis G. Peapopy, D.D., Professor of Christian Ethics, arvard, ““The book is going to do a splendid work for the entire Christian Ministry.” — Rev. Lyman Assott, D.D., Pastor of the Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. Editor- in-Chief of Tie Outlook. “Its literary charm and singular cogency will make it a most helpful and perma- nently valuable contribution to our theological literature.” The Rr. Rev. HENRY C. Porrer, D.D., Bishop of the Diocese of New York. (In a personal letter to the author.) “‘A most timely book. It meets the questions which are stirring in the minds of many, especially of young men, with candor, with ability and in an attractive manner, The literary illustrations of the author’s positions do more than add charm, they strengthen his points; and the copious notes in the appendix have pertinence and force as buttresses to his argument. The work throughout is full of the spirit of Christ. It is the best one of a very few books I should venture to put in the hands of a young man troubled by doubts, with a reasonable assurance it would lead to a settled faith in the Gospel of Christ.” — James O. Murray, D.D., Dean of Prince- ton University. CHRISTIANITY AND IDEALISM. The Christian Ideal of Life in its Relation to the Greek and Jewish Ideals and to Modern Philosophy. By JOHN WATSON, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in Queen’s Untversity, Kingston, Can. 1z2mo. Price $1.25, net. ‘‘ The author is a clear thinker and elegant writer on philosophical subjects. The lover of philosophy will read it with pleasure, and the believer in idealism will rejoice to find so able an advocate of his theory.”— Zzon’s Herald. “Vou will be stirred and uplifted by the trend of thought throughout the work and by the noble and inspiring views presented.” — The Christian Upiook. ‘“An able book, written in a clear comprehensive style, and shows earnest re- search... . The simplicity and purity of style, the wide range of reading displayed, and the attempt to maintain the idealistic as opposed to the materialistic in philosophy command our attention.” — Vew York Observer. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUB, NEW YORK. QUTLINES OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY. By WM. DeWITT HYDE, D.D., President of Bowdoin College, and Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy. 1zmo. Cloth. Pp. 260. Price $1.50. Part I. Theological; II. Anthropological; III. Sociological. “Tt contains something more than commonly well worth reading. The keynote of the volume, as we read it, is sounded in the first sentence of Chapter IV-: ‘It is impossible to separate God from man or man from God. They are correlative terms.’ The author plants himself firmly on this social conception of theology and holds it. The book is, all through, very much out of the ordinary line. It does not fly in the face of settled convictions, nor contradict the traditional creeds. The sub- ject is set up for discussion in a different light and in new’ and delightfully suggestive relations.” — The Independent. “The message of a twentieth century man to the twentieth century. President Hyde believes that the Christianity of Christ and His disciples was pre-eminently a social movement, and that the emphasis hitherto of an individualistic aspect of theology has been excessive, and disastrous to Christianity. ~This volume is in con- sequence a contribution distinctively to social theology. “* Readers of the author’s luminous articles in magazines will not be surprised to find this book letting in new light from psychology and sociology upon some dark places of theology. The origin of man, the doctrine of original sin, the scope of prayer, the question of church unity, and the larger relations of theology to anthro- pology and sociology are discussed with a freshness and frankness rarely found in. theological treatises. Not a page could be spared, and not a page should be passed lightly over.” — Philadelphia Citizen. “We have to thank Dr, Hyde fora peculiarly original, interesting, and suggestive study. Protestant Christianity is to be congratulated on possessing the allegiance of so wise and earnest a scholar as the author of this book.” — The Church Standard. “‘A most welcome book. It is something far better and more desirable than its title would indicate. We think he deserves credit for something more thorough and lasting than he is willing to claim. At any rate, he traverses from end to end the whole region of religion, on the side both of theory and of practice, and explores it in the light of the science and thinking and spirit of our day. The author’s gift of telling utterance, his fine feeling, and lofty purpose seem never to fail him. He shows that he has in rare degree the gifts of the preacher, and that these chapters were first spoken as sermons. They lose in print none of their reality and practical efficiency. It is a good omen that this first attempt at a thorough restatement ot Christian doctrine should command the service of the art to please and convince, and partake both of the ‘grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ.’ — The Congregationalist. “* President Hyde has thus given us in this unpretentious little book, a stimulat- ing restatement of old truth; a new starting-point for religious thought; an admi- rable example of the modern passion for reality... . Noman who is endeavoring to work his way through a traditional theology into the heart of Christian thought can afford to miss reading this work.” — The Biblical World. “Tt is a long time since we have read a volume which has so thoroughly interested and pleased us. Our readers will do well to examine it for themselves if they wish to become acquainted with some of the best and most advanced thought of the day on the weighty subjects whereof it treats.” — The New-Church Review. - “The dominating idea of Dr. Hyde’s book is indicated by its title, ‘Outlines of Social Theology.’ It is not sociology viewed theistically; it is theology viewed socially. It does not, like Kidd’s ‘Social Evolution’ or Drummond’s * Ascent of Man,’ contribute one notably new and crystallizing thought to a familiar discussion. It is rather, as its title indicates, an ‘outline. But it is not a skeleton. It is full of life, of blood, of nerves. In it the author reflects, in fresh and vital statements, the latest, and what The Oxtlook regards as the best, theological thought of our time. But this he does not as a mere reporter; he is a thinker who has felt the influence of the Zeitgeist, and reproduces in remarkably clear statements truths which lie in modern consciousness, either as undefined experiences or as individual but not correlated truths.” — The Outlook. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. SOCIAL EVOLUTION. BY BENJAMIN KIDD. New Edition, revised, with a New Preface. Cloth. 8vo. $1.75. EXTRACTS FROM SOME OF THE PRESS NOTICES. “The name of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, author of a very striking work on ‘Social Evolution,’ is, so far as we know, new to the literary world; but it is not often that a new and unknown writer makes his first appearance with a work so novel in conception, so fertile in suggestion, and on the whole so powerful in exposition as ‘Social Evolution’ appears to us to be, . a book which no serious thinker should neglect, and no reader can study without recognizing it as the work of a singularly penetrating and original mind.” — Zhe Times (London). “Tt is a study of the whole development of humanity in a new light, and it is sustained and strong and fresh throughout. ... It is a profound work which invites the attention of our ablest minds, and which will reward those who give it their careful and best thought. It marks out new lines of study, and is written in that calm and resolute tone which secures the confidence of the reader. It is undoubtedly the ablest book on social development that has been published for a long time.” — Boston Herald. “Those who wish to follow the Bishop of Durham’s advice to his clergy —‘to think over the questions of socialism, to discuss them with one an- other reverently and patiently, but not to improvise hasty judgments ’— will find a most admirable introduction in Mr. Kidd's book on ‘ Social Evolution.’ It-is this because it not merely contains a comprehensive view of the very wide field of human progress, but is packed with suggestive thoughts for interpreting it aright... . We hope that the same clear and well-balanced judgment that has given us this hefpful essay will not stay here, but give us further guidance as to the principles which ought to govern right thinking on this the question of the day. We heartily commend this really valuable study to every student of the perplexing problems of socialism.” — The Churchman, THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. VERBUM DEI. THE YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1893. By ROBERT F. HORTON, M.A. Price $1.50. “His intensely sensitive spirit makes him eager to be in the high- est degree helpful to the faith and holy living of the people of his time. He knows well the thoughts, the questionings, the doubts, the longings, of the immense number of thoughtful people who are in danger of tumbling over some mistaken idea or unfounded preju- dice before getting at the truth.” — Zhe Advance. ‘Such a book is not alone for the young theological student. It contains a revelation for every preacher, every pee every under- standing mind.” — Zhe Ram's Horn. “The author opens a fresh field.” — Boston Traveler. HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN PROBLEMS. By AMORY H. BRADFORD, D.D. 12mo. Cloth. Price $1.50. “Tt is a most timely corrective to the drift of popular exaggeration, and it is a most clear and forcible presentation of many widely mis- understood truths.” — From a letter to the author from Bishop Potter. “A popular and instructive discussion of the vexed question of heredity.... Dr. Bradford discusses it in a robust, intelligent, straightforward, and thoroughly Christian way, and his book will be a solid help to every student of human nature.” — 7he Christian Advocate. “The really fine and characteristic feature in the scheme of reform presented by Dr. Bradford is his faith in Christianity as a divine and spiritual power in the world, set to operate along the lines of certain intelligent methods.” — The /ndependent. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. =~ j~—o to € ©.) 7 Moby li a -> [vs ‘al GAYLORD PRINTEDINU.S A. a” ee Fes ~ ies — < Spee