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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.
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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.
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BEING THE
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GAYLORD
PRINTEDINU.S A.
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~
ies —
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