etre Mee aed ‘ et el be ‘ os ER OL Vie) uf fie) / ; 3 eth i Ve ve ; , watt ¥ Phan aye Be fy Ln ee Jy bat af t Mn Ty Pen aaa Te LN Li ‘ . Vb weeaeucit ue Lean eT eel ts Bo Dee ast a ad a y Uy siben t ii Nstes b ¢ iat yey i 4 a Y Wy 429, ae fF Rat : ei : { Ci) An ie Reena eats) { rd een ie Mei ei, 4) eure} Dee ee ed udred ty i ORB thee Wied ghia woe Do. Eat Des ar ia : U wit ‘ t Aaihedierte yy att 4 i ie es ee a aC en eras . 1 whee Sahuekess mare y bse e bed on ab Wop La i aren Ut nf Tar Ustc ot) alt fp y thd , : } : 2) ee ed Se DL | ames | “ ere Seed eet ALLS) So Sy ua i ay Ne fae Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/catholicoprotesta00quic CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT ELEMENTS IN CHRISTIANITY BY THE SAME AUTHOR LIBERALISM, MODERNISM, and TRADITION Bishop Paddock Lectures, 1922. 8vo. ‘7s. 6d. net. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO, BOMBAY CALCUTTA AND MADRAS CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT ELEMENTS IN CHRISTIANITY EY OLIVER CHASE QUICK, M.A. CANON OF CARLISLE LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4 NEW YORK, TORONTO BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1924 Made in Great Britain PREFACE THis book represents the substance of lectures delivered to various gatherings of clergy during 1923. On such occasions, when the purpose of the lectures is to suggest broad ideas and trains of thought rather than to convey information, it is justifiable to skim over vast subjects in a time which would otherwise be absurdly short. But to publish the result in book-form certainly requires some apology. Perhaps I may plead in excuse that the existence of a track at Stone- henge was recently discovered from an aeroplane, and that bird’s-eye views occasionally possess a value of their own. Professor Troeltsch, in his lectures on Protes- tantism and Progress, speaks of current definitions of Protestantism which represent not ‘ a posteriori historical general conceptions exhibiting the real state of the case as a whole,’ but * ideal conceptions attaching themselves to the real, emphasizing one or the other element in it, and thereby seeking to justify their formula as giving its essence or funda- v vi PREFACE mental tendency.’ Such definitions, he proceeds to point out, cannot be historically adequate or true. ‘If we are seeking a purely historical definition of Protestantism, we soon recognize that, for Protestantism as a whole, it cannot be immediately formulated. For modern Protestant- ism as a whole, even when it carries on the ortho- dox dogmatic traditions, is in point of fact completely changed.’ ? | All this is undeniable, and, mutatis mutandis, it applies to Catholicism also. It must therefore be understood from the outset that the Catholi- cism and Protestantism with which these lectures deal do not and cannot represent, in any full or adequate sense, the religious systems which historically have borne these names. ‘They are, contessedly, ‘ideal conceptions,’ abstractions which ‘attach themselves to the real’ and concrete, but are only very partially manifested in them. Such ideal conceptions, however, may have their uses, if their limitations are admitted, and if their value is recognized to be philosophical rather than historical. Philosophical abstractions are not unrelated to historical realities, though they are never completely represented in them. And if these lectures succeed in exhibiting the logical 1 Pp, 43, 44. PREFACE vii connection in certain groups of ideas and practical tendencies, which have to some extent actually characterized and differentiated Catholic and Protestant Christianity, they may be regarded as possessing that measure of truth which they claim. It is for the reader to judge whether the broad generalizations and sharp antitheses, here so freely manufactured, bear too slight a relation to the facts to be of any use at all. It is the author’s hope that they will assist a fuller understanding and appreciation of the facts, even though they only partially represent them. | a se oy oe is ke: , es ! i set \ ie th y * i CMe ok y eon ) i) >. > ¥ i : he vs "ss ‘ “ ‘ wt et J a \ rit Soa a | sa : : % 4 ; co ‘ : ‘ cy “ : 5 , Va ¥e, a ee) 2 ub’ F ms , ; u 1 yi i < aN aah i Le ven aa . bs a4 ; z - ~ 4 ' ‘ 7 : ant! ba (hs - ee P an me 4 ; t * a * “iy fit CONTENTS I. THE HISTORIC FAITH Il. THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS . III. RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS (KNOWLEDGE) IV. RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS (DESIRE) . V, THE KINGDOM OF GOD EPILOGUE INDEX PAGE 107 Ay Lan ‘4 f Pe seh, Pas ws e ‘ss ar 4 gen I THE HISTORIC FAITH THE subject of these lectures has a controversial sound. No theological terms are more calculated to stir eristic passion than the familiar labels ‘Catholic’ and ‘ Protestant.’ For no labels have been more frequently employed in order to beg important questions. Indeed, theological contro- versy is so apt to degenerate into a mere exercise in fastening more or less misleading names upon those one desires either to commend or to dis- credit, that we need perhaps to remind ourselves to-day that theological controversy is not in itself asin. It may even be fruitful and illuminating if the controversialists are all the time honestly seeking to grasp more firmly the ideas for which they themselves and their opponents stand, and to recognize the spiritual values which give those ideas life and power. But such controversy is always undertaken with a more than merely con- troversial purpose. For to grasp the central idea within a system of thought to which one is opposed, is to cease to desire to destroy that system alto- gether, and to seek rather to preserve and to vindicate the essential value wherein its real A 2 THE HISTORIC FAITH strength lies. The real values within opposed systems of thought, belief and practice are often themselves apparently opposed and antithetical to one another. But it is the faith of reason that such real values can nevertheless be ration- ally reconciled and combined; and it is the ultimate aim of all legitimate controversy to advance towards that reconciliation. Synthesis is only reached through antithesis. The first step to reconciliation is the definition of difference. It is the aim of these lectures to elicit and to define some of the different values for which Catholicism and Protestantism have stood, to set them first in opposition and antithesis to one another, and then to suggest that reconciliation is both a need and a possibility. One cannot survey the theological literature of the time without noticing that there are current two quite distinct conceptions as to the starting- point and the primary essence of the historical phenomenon called Christianity. (1) There are those who find its starting-point in the strictly historical or ‘earthly’ life and teaching of the man Jesus Christ, and its primary essence in the endeavour on the part of individual men and women to follow the precept and example which He gave. (2) There are others who find the starting-point of Christianity in the resurrection and spiritual presence of Jesus Christ inspiring the society of Christians, and its primary essence THE HISTORIC FAITH 3 in membership of the society so created and inspired. Whence did the difference arise, and what is its significance? The answer lies in history and in the events which led up to the original opposition of the Protestant to the Catholic. So far as the New Testament is concerned, we must agree that the Christianity there presented is not conceived mainly or primarily as the follow- ing of a dead teacher by his surviving disciples who handed on to future generations _ their memories of his teaching and example. Such a description would be quite false to the historical facts. The first Christians were not primarily occupied with looking backward in memory to the words and acts of the Master Who had left them, but rather with looking forward in anticipation of His second coming, and upward in a mystical experience of His living presence through the Spirit. The difference of course is one of emphasis only, and we have to allow for the fact that the earliest Christian documents preserved to us are Pauline, but it is none the less most striking and important. The great controversy about circum- cision was not settled by appeals to what Jesus had said; nor did such appeals form any con- siderable part of the arguments employed. Even the synoptic Gospels (if we make a_ possible exception in favour of the element derived from Q and other reports of discourses) were not written 4 THE HISTORIC FAITH with a purely historical purpose, but to present Jesus as Christ and Son of God; and they plainly regard the earthly ministry of Jesus as merely the necessary preface to His passion, death and resurrection. The resurrection, and the beliefs and ~ experiences which it inspired, clearly constitute the motive of the evangelists in writing. This essential character of New Testament Christianity determined the subsequent develop- ment of the Christian religion. When the immedi- ate and mystical sense of divine inspiration grew dim, the main subjects of interest and controversy in the Church were not historical, but dogmatic ; Christians disputed not concerning what Jesus had actually said or done, but concerning the true doctrine of His person, and afterwards concerning the sacramental system whereby the grace, which flowed from His present heavenly life, was held to be mediated. We may not unreasonably be sorry that the human example of Jesus was left so far in the background of Christian duty, and that orthodoxy of belief concerning His person was more esteemed than the endeavour to do what He said. Yet the very error is rooted in the fact that from the very beginning the Divine Living Christ had been the centre of Christianity. The following of ecclesiastical rules in belief, conduct and worship, though it certainly falls short of being the full Christian life, may up to a point be justified in certain states of society and THE HISTORIC FAITH 5 public opinion, so long as the ecclesiastical system and the authorities of the Church represent on the whole the best and most Christian conscience of the age. But in the later Middle Ages this certainly ceased to be the case. The officialdom of the Church, from the Papacy downwards, was notoriously corrupt, and the ‘religious life’ was made a laughing stock by the conduct of some of those who professed it. A violent reaction, inter- rupting the whole course of religious development, was bound to ensue. This reaction took the form of Protestantism, and from thenceforth those who profess the Christian faith have been divided into two camps, known respectively as Protestant and Catholic. What did Protestantism essentially stand for ? Its main characteristics were naturally determined by those of the developed system of institutional Christianity against which it was a protest. They may be roughly defined as two. (1) It appealed to origins against developments. The development of Christianity manifested in the great Catholic Church was seen to have led to intolerable abuses. Protestants, therefore, were naturally led to maintain that this development had followed wrong lines almost from the very start. The only remedy was to go back and start afresh. Pure Christianity was to be found only at its historical source. Hence the essential appeal of Protestantism from the Pope to the Bible, from 6 THE HISTORIC FAITH what. was recent to what was primitive. This Protestant element is strongly felt in the Anglican Prayer-book and in the Articles of Religion. It has endured as a permanent influence in Anglican- ism. Even the old High Church party did not attempt to escape it altogether, though it often modified its rigour by accepting the doctrines and practices of the ‘ undivided Church.’ | (2) The second characteristic is individualism. » The Catholic Church against which the Protestants revolted had all along claimed as a society to be under the special guidance of the Holy Ghost. This was the ultimate justification for all the developments and changes introduced. It could not be denied that in externals at least mediaeval Catholicism was a very different religion from the Christianity of the New Testament and primitive times. But external change could be justified, if it was the One Spirit of Christ and of God who had been its Author ; and the presence of Christ’s Spirit in His Church was the strongest plea by which Catholicism could defend its position and maintain its authority. This claim to the Spirit’s special guidance, when urged in support of the official hierarchy, Protestants inevitably sought to disallow. But their loyalty to scripture and their own religious experience obviously forbade them to weaken the reality of the Spirit’s work and mission. They tended therefore to teach that the Holy Spirit is primarily the Inspirer THE HISTORIC FAITH 7 of the individual soul and conscience, not of the Christian community as such. The Church, typical Protestants! began to allege, should not be regarded as belonging to the primary essence of the Christian Gospel at all. Christianity is essenti- ally constituted by an individual relation between the soul and God wrought through the Atonement of Christ and maintained by the presence of His Spirit. Such inspired souls must naturally and inevitably come together into some kind of organized fellowship, partly for practical reasons, and also because love of the brethren is one fruit of the Spirit’s work. But Christianity can only form a Church in what is, logically at least, its second and secondary stage. And a true Church can never be more or other than simply a congre- gation, or even an aggregation, of individually converted and inspired souls. If, then, the out- ward and organized institution called the Church has become cortaminated by the entry of the unconverted and unfit, it is no true Church at all, and it may be the bounden duty of true 1 This argument belongs originally to Non-conformity rather than to the Church-Protestantism either of Luther or of Calvin, which did not tolerate secession from its own ranks and exercised a strong central authority. Nevertheless, Lutheranism and Calvinism were from the first individualistic in the sense that they found the in- dividual’s assurance of salvation, not in obedience to the official hierarchy and sacramental system, but in a simple and personal decision to believe, which can assure itself from the revelation of the Bible (Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, pp. 59-62). Once this position is taken, a more radical individualism must logically follow, as the history of Protestantism seems to show, 8 THE HISTORIC FAITH Christians to reject its authority and to secede from its membership. The Catholic doctrine of salvation only through membership in a com- munity must be wrong. Salvation is in its essence individual. The principle nulla salus extra ecclesiam is to be utterly repudiated. These two characteristics, though intervening centuries have done much to change the manner of their manifestation, still continue as recognizable marks of that school of Christianity which is properly called Protestant. (1) The original appeal from developments to origins soon led to the setting up of the Bible against the Pope as the objectively infallible authority in Christian faith and conduct. Thus Protestantism developed and defined the doctrines known respectively as verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration of the Bible text. But these earlier forms of the appeal to origins were rendered impossible for many Protestants by the work done during the last century in historical criticism of the Bible. Accordingly a school of Liberal Protestantism arose. The Liberal Protestants gave up relying on any infallibility in the text of the Bible. They were among the foremost to deal drastically with the Biblical documents, and to pronounce considerable portions even of the New Testament to be untrustworthy as a record of fact. But none the less they retained unshaken the conviction that the form of Christianity which THE HISTORIC FAITH 9 was historically original was also that which was purest and best. They only pushed the principle of appealing to origins somewhat further than their uncritical predecessors. In their view the New Testament itself contained subsequent accretions, which had to be carefully stripped off in order that the purity of the first gospel might be revealed. St. John’s Gospel might be unhistorical; St. Paul might not be altogether a true interpreter of his Master’s intentions; several of the New Testament books might be pseudonymous and have been written at a much later date than was commonly supposed; even St. Mark might not be altogether credible on the subject of miracles ; but nevertheless it remained as true as ever that, when at last the really historical acts and words -and personality of Jesus had been recovered by the critical process, these represented the way, the truth, and the life of Christianity. Only penetrate far enough back, only remove all later additions, accretions, and misunderstandings, and the pure religion will be found. Such is the essential position of many Liberal critics of to-day. And, without attempting to depreciate the splendid work which many of them have accomplished, one cannot help suspecting that the tendency to think that what is original must be true has at times led them to read back their own philosophy into apostolic minds to which it was probably quite alien. That philo- 10 THE HISTORIC FAITH sophy, for instance, forbids them to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; and they forthwith put forward ingenious arguments to prove that this story of bodily resurrection was one of later origin, which St. Paul either had not heard or else discredited. They explain away what seems to others plain evidence in St. Paul’s writings; and they forget that their own scepti- cism rests on philosophic views about miracle and — on theories of a rigid distinction between spirit — and matter, which St. Paul did not hold. Nothing could be more fallacious than to assume that Pauline distinctions between cap& or coma and veda correspond exactly, or even substantially, to the modern distinction between matter and spirit. (2) The individualism of Protestant Christianity has taken various forms. In its essence it seems to be identified with the view that Christianity, on its subjective side, is a quite definite experience of the individual consciousness, which is identically re- produced in all those who have the right to call themselves Christians. This view naturally opposes itself to that which regards Christianity on the subjective side as essentially a group-experience or group-consciousness, made up by a variety of indi- vidual contributions which differ from one another both in character and value, and only realize their true nature in relation to the community. The conception of the Christian experience as a definite THE HISTORIC FAITH 1] phenomenon identically reproduced in every Christian individual is clearly presupposed in the question asked by old-fashioned Evangelicals, ‘ Are you saved ?’ The more liberal theologians of Protestantism are, of course, less crude in their methods. Yet a similar assumption that the ‘Christian experience must in its essence be identi- cally the same for all, and that experiences which _do not conform to a certain definite type cannot be truly Christian, is to be found underlying the thought of Ritschl and his followers no less than in the preaching of the Salvation Army. On the whole Protestantism, while allowing wide variety in the outward forms of religion or else taking a negative attitude towards them, has insisted strongly and positively on the need for a uniformity in spiritual experience. Catholicism, while insist- ing strongly on conformity in things outward, has tolerated and even encouraged much greater variation in the inward apprehension of spiritual realities on the part of the individual soul. The very individualism of the Protestant may make more searching and more rigid demands upon the individual than any doctrine which, exalting the outward rules of the society, exacts uniformity only in outward compliance therewith. Individ- ualism is not necessarily associated with liberty. In all its various forms Protestantism in its opposition to Catholicism has been led to lay a one-sided emphasis on certain elements in the 12 THE HISTORIC FAITH Christian religion, 7.e. on the need of loyalty to its origin, and on the importance of the direct relation of the individual soul to God. But, since the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic type of theology has also undergone change and develop- ment in the minds of some of its exponents. It also has produced a liberal school of thought, which in recent years has come to be known as Catholic Modernism. And it is particularly inter- esting to compare this Modernism with Protestant- ism, because its tendency and bias, equally one- sided, have been in the exactly opposite direction. (1) It has emphasized the essential import- ance of developments at the expense of origins. Newman was the first boldly to declare it a delu- sion to suppose that the great ideas of Christianity were necessarily purest near their source, and that change in original forms necessarily spelt deteriora- tion and corruption. ‘ Here below,’ he proclaimed, ‘ to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ His line of thought here antici- pated the doctrines of evolution, from which his intellectual followers have drawn support. It is a cardinal principle of evolution that the true nature or essence of a thing is to be found in its development rather than in its origin. And acute thinkers, both within and without historical Catholicism, have applied this principle, some- times in drastic fashion, to the Christian religion itself. Evolution, development, change, is the THE HISTORIC FAITH 13 law of life upon earth. The nature of nothing that lives can be finally or definably fixed in any one of the passing manifestations of its growth. If any one stage shows the true nature of a thing more than another, it will be to the later stages, rather than to the earlier, that we should most hopefully look. And Christianity, no more than anything else, can be bound by its origins. Such is the essential argument of the Modernism we are now considering. Its influence has been widely diffused, strongly felt and variously manifested in many theological and philosophical schools, This Modernism also has criticized, and been rejected by, the Pope. But its criticism has been precisely opposite to that of the Protestants. These latter condemned the Papal system on the ground that it had changed primitive Christianity out of all recognition. Its crime was failure to keep Christianity the same as once it was. The true Modernists, on the other hand, condemned the Papal system on the ground that it fettered the Christian religion to its past. It took the life out of the truth by seeking to fix and petrify it in formulae. Its crime was failure to allow room and scope for the necessary and healthy changes of human thought. | This Modernism also has criticized the Bible ; but again with intention and results quite different from those of the Protestant. It has never 14 THE HISTORIC FAITH assumed that the end of negative criticism must be the final recovery of pure Christianity in the person of its historical Author. Rather it has claimed to find in the Nazarene Prophet only the historical source of certain religious ideas which in the course of their subsequent change and development necessarily passed beyond anything which He personally dreamed of. Critics starting from this general point of view reach very different conclusions as to the actual nature and value of our Lord’s historical words and acts. Some have reduced His teaching to a vaguely religious sanc- tion bestowed on the principle of social service. Others have found its main significance in eschato- logical prophecies, which, though unfulfilled in fact, suggest in mythical form truths of the spirit, for which the advance of philosophy and science has found more adequate and continually varying expression. But in any case the tendency of this whole school of thought is to assert that the main essence of Christianity lies in the great ideas which Catholic theology somehow elicited from Christ’s | life, and which should now receive fresh philo- sophic expression in the light of modern knowledge. In this view the cardinal error of Protestant theology is the attempt to recover essential Christianity by getting back behind the process of historical development which began with Pente- cost. You cannot find the true Christ of Christi- anity by refusing to look for Him through the ‘THE HISTORIC FAITH 15 medium of the historical society which, whether He actually founded it or not, was in any case the immediate result of His life upon earth. (2) The difficulty of this whole theological out- look lies, of course, in its failure to give any definable or determinate essence to Christianity itself. Its essence is what it develops into; but who shall say into what it is developing or will develop? If the preteritism of the Protestant is too narrow, the futurism of the Modernist seems too vague. Newman indeed proposed various elaborate criteria whereby true developments might be distinguished from false. But the appli- cation of these is necessarily subjective and arbi- trary; and in the end he was compelled to rely on the dogma of the Church’s infallibility. On reflection, indeed, it becomes plain that the type of Modernism which we are considering can only give to its conception of Christianity a determinate and intelligible unity by relying in one way or another upon the continuity of the historical society in which Christianity is expressed. It is the unity of the Church which must give unity to its religion. Here, then, Modernism radically opposes itself to the individualism of the Protes- tant. The Church is the essential organism of Christianity, subject, like natural organisms, to the laws of growth and change, but nevertheless, like them, continuously one throughout its changes. Obviously such a position is more easily held by 16 THE HISTORIC FAITH those who adhere to visible membership of a great historical Church. Yet some who regard the present orthodoxy of all the Churches as so errone- ous that they are almost driven into isolation, nevertheless centre their hopes for the future upon possible developments which will bring the organ- ized authority of the religious institution once more into harmony with the science and philosophy of the contemporary age. Even so anti-orthodox a writer as Dr. Kirsopp Lake views with regret, not altogether untinged by hope, the days when Thomas Aquinas united the authority of the Church with the most recent speculation of the schools.1. He is such a severe critic of the historic Church, precisely because he feels that in the end a historic Church is vital to the existence of Christianity. So far, then, we have set in sharp antithesis to one another two radically opposed schools of Christian thought in the modern world: on the one hand, the Liberal Protestantism which seeks to restore original Christianity by presenting the historical figure of Jesus as the object of the individual’s faith and imitation, and on the other, the Catholic Modernism, wider than Catholicism itself, which points out the impossibility of going back on history, accepts historical developments, 1 Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity, pp. 10-12. Ina significant footnote Dr. Lake expressly records his admiration for the work of Tyrrell. THE HISTORIC FAITH Eh and, if ecclesiastical authority would suffer it, would find salvation in membership of a growing religious society continuous through change. For the Liberal Protestant the perfect and God- revealing manhood of Jesus is the one centre of Christianity. For the Catholic. Modernist some form of the doctrine of the apostolic succession would seem almost to take a central place; for this secures that continuity of the society, which is so essential to his philosophy of religion. Be- tween these two theological opposites most liberal- minded Christians steer a somewhat uncertain course. ‘Those of a more Protestant type cannot understand why others attach such importance to sacramental and ecclesiastical system; while those who incline to Catholicism find their joy in membership of a system, and are repelled by others who, by constantly contrasting it with its historical origins, would curtail its freedom to develop itself. The different strands in Christian thought and tradition are, of course, always manifold, and in the minds both of individuals and of societies they display infinite varieties of combination which logic can neither limit nor classify. Little justice can be done to them by such sweeping generalizations as have just been suggested. Yet perhaps the attempt to disentangle the leading ideas of two vaguely defined methods of treating historical Christianity, for which the much-abused B 18 THE HISTORIC FAITH terms Catholic and Protestant are still the best names available, has not been wholly misleading and unprofitable. | When liberalized Protestantism is set over against modernized Catholicism, it seems evident to the Christian observer that two sides of truth, which ought to be complementary, have been separated, pushed to extremes, and then antagonized. On two points Protestantism seems to have the worst of the argument. (1) In its appeal to origins it seems to under- value altogether the essential fact that primitive Christianity did not point first back to Jesus Christ, and then up and forward, but first up and forward and then back. This is indisputably the impression given by the New Testament as a whole. It is, of course, possible for criticism to reply that this impression is simply due to St. Paul’s astonish- ing influence in changing the original gospel delivered by his Master. Nevertheless, the critic here lays himself open to the charge of wilfully preferring hazardous conjecture to trust in the apparent evidence. And in any case it is difficult not to sympathize with the Modernist’s protest against the assumption that all changes and developments of expression necessarily falsify an original truth. Not even in the case of the Christian religion must the appeal to origins be used to exclude development altogether. Some develop- THE HISTORIC FAITH Lis ment and change there must be, if the operation of God’s Spirit in the Church is not wholly contrary to His operation in nature. Some not very liberal Protestants still endeavour to use against Catholics the principle, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, in what is surely an unjustifi- able way. It cannot really mean that any practice or doctrine not explicitly accepted in the first century, or before any fixed point of time, is ipso facto shown to be ‘ un-catholic’ and illegitimate. So interpreted the principle itself becomes, not Catholic at all, but unintelligently Protestant, and can be used at will to exclude practically any form of growth. (2) Again, it is unhistorical to pretend that Christianity was not from the very first the life of a human community, and that its social aspect does not belong to its primary essence. We need not enter into critical controversies concerning actual words which our Lord is reported to have used in founding the Church. The evidence of the New Testament as a whole seems convincingly to show that from the first the Christians regarded themselves as in a special sense the people of God, the true Israel, those who were waiting in the fellowship of Jesus the Messiah for the final mani- festation of His Kingdom. Salvation was through membership in this community, which bestowed or guaranteed inheritance of the promises made by God to His chosen people. However thoroughly 20 THE HISTORIC FAITH the idea of the Church is spiritualized, and how- /— ever unwarrantably Catholicism may have sought | to restrict it to an ecclesiastical institution, it | . remains true that in a sense the doctrine nulla |. salus extra ecclesiam was from the first an integral | part of the Christian gospel. On the other hand, on one essential point the quarrel of Protestantism must be maintained not only against the theories of Catholic Modernism, but even against the practice of the older Catholi- cism itself. The religion of the historical Incarna- tion must always admit some sort of final appeal to the historical life which was its origin. We must not allow ourselves to be diverted from this truth either by the dangerous analogy of natural evolution, or by misconceived doctrines concern- ing the Holy Spirit as the supernatural Guide of the Church. If historical Christianity is a true | religion at all, there must be a sense in which the life of Jesus is not a step in an evolutionary — process, but a finally self-revealing intervention of God ‘from above.’ And if this be so, as the older Catholicism has always in theory declared, developments of doctrine and practice, which appear inconsistent with the mind of Jesus as the New Testament reveals it, must for that reason, and for that reason alone, be unsparingly rejected ; no plea of the Church’s inspiration must be allowed to avail in their behalf. In the New Testament it is taught that spirits are to be tested by their | THE HISTORIC FAITH 21 acknowledgment of the supremacy of Jesus come in the flesh. And in modern times any attempt to override the authority of the mind of Jesus by pleas of more recent inspiration stands self- condemned. Honesty can hardly resist the con- clusion that in certain matters the tradition of Catholicism (and not seldom that of Protestant- ism also) has tended to make His word of none effect. And where that is so, even so-called ‘universal rules of the Church,’ even dogmas of infallibility, may have to give way. If the Incar- nation is a true doctrine (and on that condition only), it must be a sin for the Christian conscience to allow itself to be sophisticated into acquies- cence in what it honestly believes to be contrary to Jesus’ teaching and example. Here even a true Catholicism should make us impenitently Protestant. It may seem a paradox to some, but on the whole © it seems true to say that the characteristic genius of Catholicism is liberal, that of Protestantism conservative. Undeniably Catholicism has de- veloped primitive Christianity, and is capable of developing it further. Its doctrine of Church authority is rigid, but, except in the Anglican com- munion, there is a living organ of Church authority to which it looks, and therefore its potentialities of ordered change remain the greater, however much present actualities seem to contradict them. It may be an exaggeration to say that the most 22 THE HISTORIC FAITH greatly liberal-minded and constructive theo- logians of Christianity have been essentially Catholic. But Protestantism can hardly show many names to rival those of Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas or even Newman in original genius. And it is not improbable that future generations will regard Baron von Higel as the most constructive theologian of our own time. The great principle of continuous historical de- velopment lives not merely as a doctrine and a theory, but as an operative power within the Catholic organism, and, if the tares of ecclesiastical officialdom do not choke it, may yet bear abundant fruit. | On the other hand, the greatness of Protestant | theologians from Wyclif to Harnack seems to have | lain in analysis rather than in synthesis, in expos- ing errors rather than in introducing fresh ideas, in stripping off the husks of tradition and con-— vention rather than in sowing the intellectual seed which bears fruit in new philosophies. Yet one— contribution of priceless worth has modern Protestantism made to the Christian thought of the age, the recovered vision of the human Jesus © as at once the mirror of the Godhead and the | example for men. The determination of Protes- tantism to see Jesus as He really was, and to present Him directly to the mind and conscience of the individual without the intervening medium of any ecclesiastical tradition, does more than THE HISTORIC FAITH 23 command the respect due to all honest efforts of historical science ; it provides the true check and test for the whole mass of secondary beliefs, popular cultus and developing custom, which Catholicism left to itself is over-ready first to tolerate, then to justify, and finally to impose. We need to keep pure and clear our historical vision of Jesus as the test of spirits. Truly seen in all the amazing width of His sympathy and in all the strength of His refusal to forestall and con- demn development by legislation, He will not appear to bid us reject any experience or doctrine or custom which helps men to bear more fruit in the loving service of God and of their brethren. But His severity is no less conspicuous than His sympathy ; and it falls with unmistakable empha- sis alike on the hardness of any ecclesiastical rule which will not suffer the work of love, and on any easy Corban which drugs the moral sense. Christianity is the salt of the world; in a some- what different sense, Protestantism is the salt of Christianity. The crime and the tragedy of our unhappy divisions lie in this, that they have separated the salt from the meat. A Catholicism which could endure the sharp criticism of the Protestant, and a Protestantism content to remain within the many-sided system which it. criticizes, might combine to conquer the world. iI THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS It seems on the whole that the philosophy of sacraments has been a somewhat neglected de- partment of Christian theology. There are, of course, certain broad and general propositions about the sacramental nature of reality which almost all Christians would in principle accept, and such general propositions play an important part in the modern defence and exposition of Christian beliefs. But the underlying and funda- mental differences in Christian thought concerning sacraments are seldom inquired into. They are commonly ‘taken for granted.’ Yet here an important field of study is being left not thoroughly explored. What precisely are the fundamental differences in idea which divide a _ distinctly Catholic from a distinctly Protestant doctrine concerning the nature, value, and meaning of the sacraments of the Church ? Such differences in idea do exist, and, if they are ever to be reconciled, they must first be defined. In spite of all that is said to the contrary, it is confusion, not definition, which is the chief enemy of peace. In the popular mind, of course, Catholicism is 24 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 25 supposed to stand for sacramental religion, Protestantism for the religion of the spirit which thinks little of outward forms. This, like most popular judgments, contains a certain truth, but obviously needs restatement. As it stands it is false. Catholicism has no monopoly of sacra- mental religion, nor Protestantism of spiritual. All agree that the essence of religion is spiritual life, and also that outward and visible things can express and minister to the inward and spiritual. It is evident, moreover, that those who dislike elaborate ceremonial in worship do so, in the main, because simpler externals seem to them to be more fitting and more truly sacramental. Even a Quaker meeting finds aid to the spirit in a certain sort of surroundings and a fixed order of pro- cedure. It does not really attempt to eliminate the external. The attempt at elimination, how- ever futile, belongs to the morbid asceticism of the East, and not to Protestant Christianity. Even Christian Science, by finding spiritual value in bodily health, bears witness against itself that it is radically sacramental. The objections which some Christians make against the sacraments of others are never really objections to sacramentalism as such. And we shall find it convenient to assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that the generally acknowledged sacraments of the Church have a legitimate value in religion, which is recognized by Catholic and Protestant alike. 26 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS We shall then look for the difference we are seeking rather in the kind of relation which is thought of as connecting the outward with the inward element in sacraments. It being agreed that the outward ministers to the inward, and that both are so far necessary, there may still be difference of view as to the kind and nature of that ministration. Here we are at once confronted by the familiar distinction between the ‘declaratory’ and the ‘ effective ’ value of sacramental signs. This gives us two possible relations in which the outward may stand to the inward: (1) There is the declara- tory or symbolic relation, in which the outward is regarded strictly as the expression of a spiritual reality or situation already existing; (2) there is secondly the effective or instrumental relation, in which the outward is used to bring about a spiritual reality or situation which comes into existence only through the outward means. Let us examine this distinction somewhat more closely. (a) The typical and quite general case of the declaratory relation is the relation of words to their meaning in intelligible propositions. Thus, assertions of fact make no difference to what they assert, but simply claim to declare what already exists independently of the assertion. To assert that London is the greatest city in the world makes no difference, and effects nothing, in regard THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 27 to what is asserted; it simply conveys informa- tion of what already exists. Similarly a material symbol, such as a national flag flown on a ship or a fort, has the value of words. It is not an effec- tive means whereby the ownership of the fort or vessel is maintained or altered; it simply makes plain the ownership which exists. It is, of course, a commonplace that the sacraments of the Church may in the same manner be given a declaratory significance. From this point of view baptism declares a universal fatherhood of God already existing, holy communion declares a universal fellowship of faithful souls in God through Christ, absolution declares God’s universal disposition of forgiveness towards repented sin. (b) On the other hand, the typical and general case of the effective relation is the relation not of words to meaning, but of acts to purpose. Every kind of purposive action is designed to bring about or to prevent some change in what exists, and is the means whereby the change is wrought or prevented. Countless human actions have made London the greatest city in the world, and seek to maintain it in that position. The armaments of ships and forts are not symbols of ownership, but means whereby ownership is maintained or altered. _ And similarly it is a commonplace that the sacra- ments of the Church may be regarded as effective means whereby new spiritual situations are brought about. From this point of view baptism makes ¢. 28 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS those God’s children who were not so before ; holy communion brings men into, and actually keeps them in, fellowship with God through Christ ; absolution is that whereby God forgives the repentant, but hitherto unforgiven, sinner. Can we say that on the whole Protestantism affirms the declaratory, Catholicism the effective, relation of outward to inward in the sacraments ? I believe that here we have a really important principle of difference. But we must be strictly on our guard against exaggeration. ‘The differ- ence is one of emphasis only; and neither view can possibly exclude the other. This impossi- bility of mutual exclusion arises not from any desire for compromise, but from the strict logic of the case. Words spoken or written are always also acts done with a purpose. And purposive acts always convey also some sort of meaning which gives them in part the value of words. Words have their effect as well as their meaning ; acts have their meaning as well as their effect. No symbol is a mere symbol; no instrument is an instrument and nothing more. The mere hearing of the words ‘ You are getting well’ will produce an effect upon a sick man’s condition ; and the mere taking of a medicine may convey to him the meaning of hope. And this impossibility of making a rigid separation between the meaning of words and the effect of acts is particularly plain in the case of the sacraments. If you start from THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 29 a declaratory view of baptism as making plain the universal fatherhood of God, it is impossible to deny that the mere declaration produces some practical effect upon the baptized person’s relation to the heavenly Father. And if you start from the instrumental view, it is impossible to dis- sociate the practical effect of baptism from the general meaning conveyed, that God is the uni- versally loving Father who wills to receive all men as His children. Similarly in all the Church’s sacraments the declaratory and effective aspects, though distinct, tend to pass into each other. Nevertheless, we have here a real and important difference in idea which probably lies at the root of many of the practical differences which at present divide the ecclesiastical parties in the Church. The point of view broadly and roughly called Protestant stresses the declaratory aspect as of primary importance, the point of view broadly and roughly called Catholic the effective aspect. That is why the Catholic attaches relatively greater importance to the outward element in sacramental religion. For to him the outward is primarily the actual means whereby a right spiritual condition or situation is brought about. Evidently, if we so think of the outward sign in sacraments, we attach greater practical importance to it, than if we regard it in the first instance as needed only to declare a spirit- ual situation which we believe already to exist, 30 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS Let us proceed to consider how this fundamental difference in idea is illustrated in many apparent differences of sacramental doctrine and practice which have the closest relevance to most of the ecclesiastical controversies of our time. (1) Take the actual treatment of the sacraments and the method of administering them. We have suggested that the relation of words to meaning is the typical case of the declaratory relation, that of acts to purpose of the effective. So in the a . e . | administration of the sacraments we find, as we should expect, that Protestantism on the whole attaches greater importance to making clear the ~ meaning of the words to be said, Catholicism to — correctly performing the acts to be done. This ° difference comes out most evidently in the Euchar- ist. Clearly, wherever Latin is the language of the rite, little importance is given to the intelligi- bility of the words used. Yet this is not mere unintelligent bigotry. There is a principle behind it. To use a dead language not readily understood has the effect of throwing the whole stress upon the action of the rite. The words no longer stand apart from the rest of the ritual and ceremonial ; they become just one part of the action. In a Latin mass the value of the words used ceases to be the proper value of words, namely the expres- sion of a meaning, but becomes rather the value proper to an act. On the other hand, the value proper to words, namely expression of meaning, THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 31 is supplied by the symbolic gestures of ceremonial. Thus in a Latin mass the words come to have the value of acts, and the acts the value of words; but the total effect is to stress the whole rite as an act. This is exactly congenial to the particular point of view from which Catholicism regards the sacra- ment. It is the fact that something is being done which it desires to stress. I believe that in justi- fication for speed in saying Mass the text has been quoted, “What thou doest do quickly.’ The point of the quotation is the stress on doing. When you are thinking of an effective act simply, speed as such isa merit. It is only when you are thinking of conveying a meaning to the intelli- gence that slowness has an essential value of its own. On the other hand, Protestantism tends rather to minimize the importance of what is done, because it desires chiefly to appeal to the under- standing through what is said. The declaration which the sacrament makes of God’s permanent relation to His people now becomes the primary point of interest, not anything which the action of the sacrament effects. Pushed to extremes, this point of view tends to convert a sacramental rite into a kind of formal sermon. The service, as it has been said, begins to be preached. And evangelical Free-Churchmen are only following out to its logical conclusion this general view of sacraments, when they suggest that the greatest 32 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS sacrament may be the sermon itself. For the sermon through the meaning of language simply aims at declaring God’s constant operations to- wards men. ‘To those, then, who regard the value of sacraments strictly as declaratory, the sermon must be a chief sacrament. No doubt we should all agree that the different schools of thought here lay stress each on a distinct value of the sacrament, which must be combined with the other. That combination is what the English liturgy tries to effect. But it is most important that, when we incline to one point of view ourselves, we should clearly recognize and allow for the value represented by the other. To emphasize the effective act only in the sacrament, apart from the meaning which it declares, is to end in magic. A magical rite is precisely one where acts and words are supposed to produce some effect quite independent of their intelligible significance. Magical formulae may be literally nonsense. And a religious rite which is quite unintelligible is bound to look like magic. On the other hand, to emphasize only the intelligi- bility of the words in a sacrament not only gives the rite the wearisomeness of a too often repeated sermon when a fixed form is used, but it also allows no room for an efficacy which goes beyond the consciously apprehended meaning. It eliminates too much the sense of mystery. Magic cannot be cast out by rationalism. THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 33 (2) The same principle of difference has played a very considerable part in controversies concern- ing Eucharistic doctrine, and has even profoundly influenced divergent conceptions of the Atone- ment and the Incarnation. The mediaeval- Catholic doctrine of the Eucharistic offering had so dwelt on its purely effective aspect that each Mass celebrated seemed to involve an actual sacrifice of Christ which repeated the sacrifice on the Cross. To this the Protestant reformers replied that the sacrifice on the Cross, which had taken place once for all, was the only effective sacrifice for sin. Protestants, therefore, have always been inclined to deny that Christ is really or effectively offered in the Eucharist at all, though the less rigid are now willing to admit that the actual offering of Christ’s manhood to God upon the Cross may be, as it were, dramatically represented and signified in the ritual acts which are properly its memorial. Modern Catholics, on the other hand, while also rejecting the mediaeval suggestion that the sacrifice on the Cross can be in any sense repeated, nevertheless maintain that Christ’s self-offering is, as touching its spiritual essence, eternal and continuous in heaven, and that every offering of Christ in the Mass is one with Christ’s heavenly and spiritual self-offering, and so partakes of its efficacy. The broader Protestant and Catholic doctrines, there- fore, are evidently not so very far removed from C 34 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS one another, though the Protestant prefers to say that the Eucharistic offering only represents or signifies symbolically the self-offering of Christ, while the Catholic maintains that the two are really and actually one, so that Christ’s offering of His manhood before God is truly effected, as well as represented, in the action of the Mass. On the other hand, the more liberal or radical school of modern Protestantism has pressed further the Protestant unwillingness to admit strictly effective value in sacramental acts. The atoning sacrifice of Himself, which Christ once offered on the Cross, is itself sacramental. It represents the eternal truth that only through self-sacrifice and self-offering can all manhood, whether Christ’s or ours, enter the heaven of fellowship with God. The radical Protestant therefore logically tends to affirm that not even the sacrifice upon the Cross ought to be regarded strictly as having effected any change in man’s relation to God. It only symbolizes or declares once for all to all men that for them also self- sacrifice is the narrow gate to heaven. To assert any further efficacy of Christ’s Atonement is, in this Protestant view, a compromise with magic. The Catholic, on the other hand, maintains that the Atonement on the Cross did really and actually open a God-ward way for men, and that no com- promise with magic is implied, so long as we are careful to insist that Christ’s self-offering does not THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 35 suffice instead of our self-offering, but enables us also to offer ourselves. The foregoing discussion will have made it plain how fine and thin this line of division must appear, when it is rigorously examined. For, on the one hand, all symbolic declaration is in a secondary sense effective. And, on the other, one main importance of an effective act may be its universal meaning and example. Nevertheless the same difference of view, which we have just noted in regard to the Atonement, is also found in relation to the Incarnation as a whole, and really lies at the root of modern Christological controversy. What applies to the Cross, applies also to the historical life of Jesus Christ as a whole. Is the character of that life, in relation both to its source in God and to its outgoing towards men, primarily declaratory or effective ? Ought we to say first and chiefly that the life of Jesus Christ is, as it were, the great word or symbol of God, declaring, signifying, expressing a universally and identically active Godhead, and displaying a final pattern of human goodness ? Or ought we rather to say first and chiefly that this same life is, as it were, the great act of God, doing what God had never done before, bringing in a new creation which had never before existed, reconciling and exalting a humanity previously exiled and degraded, vanquishing powers of death and sin before insuperable ? 36 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS Here, I believe, we touch the fundamental differ- ence between Catholic and Liberal Protestant Christology. Christian philosophy has not yet succeeded in fully reconciling their opposite values. But it may help reconciliation to define its problem. (3) Finally, it is not irrelevant to notice that precisely the same difference in idea as to the true relation between outward and inward is a main cause of our divergent views about Christian re- union. The outward union of the Church’s organization is the sacramental sign of the inward unity of Christ’s mystical body, the blessed com- pany of all faithful people. So far all agree. But Protestantism always tends to regard the outward union as right and valid only in so far as it declares and expresses a spiritual unity already existing and realized in the Christian consciousness. To Catholicism the outward union is also primarily a means whereby the spiritual unity is to be wrought. The Protestant tends to say, ‘ Work for unity by inward spiritual methods only, and then the unity will express itself in union.’ The Catholic tends to say, * Unite now in external order: that is the very means whereby the full unity of the Spirit is to be brought about.’ Catholicism is often accused of putting outward order before spiritual fellowship. So, in a sense, it does: but this need not mean that it esteems outward things above inward, but rather the reverse, In the order of time means must come THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS 37 before ends, in the order of importance or value ends before means. And if the outward is re- garded strictly as a means to the inward, it must be placed first in time, because it is last in value. For Protestantism, then, outward union stands as it were for the thermometer which registers the warmth of spiritual fellowship in the Christian body. For Catholicism it corresponds rather to a system of pipes whereby the warmth is con- ducted. The pipes are not as important as the warmth. But we do not wait for the pipes until the warmth has come. The two views again are not really exclusive of one another, and it is plain to see that both are right. But each side needs to recognize more clearly the limitations of its own view and the value of the other’s. External union cannot pro- duce inward unity of itself. The spirit of unity must flow from a spiritual source. Catholics of course have always acknowledged this in theory ; but on occasions they have ignored it in practice, e.g. when wholesale baptism into the Church of really unconverted people has been employed in order to extend the membership of Christ’s Spiritual Body. Catholics have trusted too much in mere conformity to produce fellowship. On the other hand, to say we must wait for outward union and conformity until these do no more than express a spiritual fellowship already realized, is to affirm something which seems contrary to all human 38 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRAMENTS experience. Consider any form of group-con- sciousness, group-loyalty or esprit de corps, as it exists in any human association, school, uni- versity, family, army, nation. Is it not obvious that the spirit of unity existing in such associations has been largely produced by an external and imposed union of rules, law and discipline, which came to some extent first ? And in the Church may it not be a means to full unity appointed by God, that all should enter the body by the same font, kneel together at the same table, and confess the same faith in Him? It seems to be a law of life that people must be thrown together, before they can come together; they must do the same things, before they can be of the same mind. Therein lies the practical urgency of reunion, the need of some sort of common forms and common rules which all observe. So long as all religious observances are looked on as matters of taste or individual predilection, people of different tempera- ment, class or race tend to keep apart from one another; churches become religious clubs, and the universal fellowship of Christ is marred and hindered. It is often said that what we need is unity, not uniformity. This epigram is as super- ficial as it is popular. What we really need is that measure of uniformity which will promote unity, that degree of conformity which will serve to bring and hold us together without eliminating our differences. III RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS (KNOWLEDGE) So far we have attempted to deal with the Catholic and Protestant elements in Christianity considered objectively, first as a historical faith, and secondly as a system of worship. We turn now to consider it subjectively as an experience of the soul. This is, if possible, a still more difficult task. What is Christianity as a phenomenon of personal life, and what is its relation to the human consciousness ? Is it primarily theoretical, in the old sense of the term, 7.e€. the contemplation of an object con- sciously apprehended and set before the mind ? Or is it primarily practical, that is, a method of conduct, action or behaviour ? A full Christianity, it will be agreed, must be both of these. That is what is meant by calling it, in the whole sense of the word, a life. Yet that life may be reached by different methods of approach, and different elements within it may be emphasized as primary. Certainly different schools of thought in Christianity have chosen different starting-points from which progress towards the fulness of Christian life may be made. Broadly speaking, there are two orders of realiza- 39 40 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS tion possible. One starts from consciousness and goes on to conduct. The other starts from con- duct and goes on to consciousness. One seeks Christian action through Christian faith. The other seeks Christian faith through Christian action. St. Paul, and indeed the greater part of the New Testament, certainly incline to empha- size the first order on the whole. St. Paul’s Christianity started from the vision on the Damascus road. And his gospel characteristic- ally bids men apprehend Christ first in conscious faith ; from this Christian conduct will naturally and inevitably follow. But St. John at times seems to be taking the opposite point of view. Imitate Christ in conduct, he seems to say, take His commandments as a practical rule of life; then fellowship with Christ is already a reality, anid the consciousness of it will dawn in the end. Such is the suggestion of several passages both in his Gospel and in his Epistles, though it is impos- sible to quote individual texts which are con- clusive. He is continually emphasizing the fact that love is the one thing needful, and that this love is primarily a matter of conduct and action. ‘He that keepeth my commandments, he it is that loveth me.’ ‘Whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected ; hereby know we that we are in him.’ ‘Let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.’ ‘If any man KNOWLEDGE 4] willeth to do God’s will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself.’ St. John’s stress on doing is utterly different from St. Paul’s. These two orders in the full realization of Christianity as an experience have persisted down throughout centuries of Christian teaching. Pro- testantism, together with Catholic mysticism, has usually emphasized the first. Institutional and legalistic Catholicism the second. SBoth,, of course, are in a measure right. But it is worth while to see more clearly what is the peculiar value of each, and what light modern thought has to throw on the need of combining them. In order to do so, it may first be well to make a brief excursion into elementary metaphysics. What part does consciousness play in the scheme of things which we call the real world? Very different answers have been given to that question by various philosophies. The ancient philosophy, which was dominated by the tradition derived from Plato and Aristotle, hardly asked the ques- tion directly at all. Yet, since for it contempla- tion of the one ultimate reality, which it identified with eternal goodness, was the goal of all philo- sophic effort, it may be said to have maintained, at least by implication, that some state of conscious knowledge, rather than any sort of conduct or action, was the supreme value in life, and the key to the riddle of the universe. In that sense 42 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS Platonic idealism, ancient and modern, has always put conscious knowledge first, conduct or practice second, in the scale of value. In spite of its strongly moral teaching, its tendency from the first has always been to emphasize the superiority of the man who knows the truth over him who merely does the right, or perhaps rather to suggest that only the philosopher, who does know the truth, can be relied upon to act rightly. The modern idealism, which was first dimly adumbrated by Descartes and then developed by Bishop Berkeley, makes consciousness not only first in value, but in some sense also first in exist- ence. It points to the fact that we can only know realities of which we are conscious; and therefore, if there be any reality of which we are not con- scious, we cannot know it and thereiore cannot affirm that it exists or is real at all. All facts only become facts when they appear in consciousness as objects of mind. Facts and things are con- stituted facts and things by being known; con- sciousness therefore in some sense creates the real world. This general line of argument has had enormous influence in modern philosophy. One main objection to both types of idealism mentioned is that they attach no sufficient import- ance to history. The Platonist regards all true reality as eternal, timeless, and unchanging: time is the stuff of history, and change its character ; therefore the world of history is more or less an KNOWLEDGE | 43 illusion of the senses, or at least a mere appearance of an eternal world beyond. The Berkeleian, on the other hand, finds himself challenged by the historical sense which tells him that things existed before we knew them, and by the science which teaches that consciousness is a comparatively late development in the evolution of the world. His only answer is, like the Platonist, to say that time cannot be ultimately real. He points to the apparent fact that the past and the future are only real past and real future to us in so far as both are present in our consciousness; and he may go on to infer some universal consciousness belonging to God, in which our finite, partial minds are unified, and to which the whole of reality is eternally and simultaneously present. What is the effect of these two philosophies of idealism, Platonic and Berkeleian, upon our conception of religious experience ? Obviously the Platonist would tend to identify that experi- ence with the philosopher’s vision of ultimate reality or divine goodness. Hence for him, if he be a Christian Platonist, Christianity on its sub- jective side is both primarily and ultimately a state of consciousness. From that consciousness Christian conduct must flow, and to it again Christian conduct must lead. In that sense he would agree with St. Paul that God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith. To the Berkeleian the place of consciousness in religion is still more 44 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS central. For in his view consciousness is what gives reality; it is in the true sense creative. Ultimately man’s reality is due to God’s conscious- ness of him ; he is, as it were, a thought in God’s mind. But equally it must be true that man’s consciousness of God is that which makes God real to him. Hence the religious teacher, who holds to this school of idealism, will be still more inclined than the Platonist to insist upon a certain state of consciousness as the first and greatest religious need for man. We need not therefore be surprised if we find many religious doctors of to-day tending almost to identify genuine Christianity in the individual with the possession or enjoyment of a certain definite consciousness of God. Evangelicalism of various schools, Catholic and other mysticism, Christian Science, and still more eccentric systems of thought and teaching, all seem to be at one on this fundamental principle ; and there is so much both in the Bible and in the best ancient and modern philosophy to support their unanimity that it seems rash indeed to attempt any challenge of its claims. Nevertheless there is, as we have already hinted, another and, in some sense, an opposite point of view in this whole matter, which is certainly not to be ignored. ‘There is a second type of philo- sophy, also very much alive at the present day, which is radically opposed to idealism, in that it KNOWLEDGE 45 bases itself on the ultimate reality of time. It insists on treating the world historically, that is as a real series of successive events, in which the emergence of mind or consciousness is just one event and no more. It insists that consciousness appears gradually out of the unconscious in the process of the evolution of life from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms. And it is through action that consciousness thus emerges. It is the struggle for existence and development, the constant effort of life after self-preservation and control of environ- ment, that brings it to birth. Consciousness therefore in all its forms is an instrument of bio- logical value. It springs out of vital action, and vital action is the purpose which it ultimately serves. ‘Thus we reach a complete reversal of the idealist’s estimate of the relation existing between theory (2.e. contemplation) and practice, knowing and doing. In the idealist’s view action, or at least right action, springs from conscious know- ledge as its source, and leads up to it as its end. Knowledge of truth is the paramount value, which determines and creates the lesser values of conduct and action. In the view of this other philosophy, for which there is no adequate name available,! 1 Realism denotes the view that true knowledge makes no difference to its object, and is in no sense creative of the reality known. But it often denies that all knowledge subserves practical ends. It then agrees with Platonic idealism as to the independent and absolute value of theoretic (or contemplative) knowledge. Pragmatism denotes the view that all knowledge subserves practical ends; but it differs from realism in holding that true knowledge must 46 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS conscious knowledge springs from action as its source and leads up to it as its end: active life, or practical control of environment, is the para- mount value which determines and creates the lesser values of conscious knowledge and con- templation. The most consistent logicians of this school of thought refuse to regard knowledge as really independent of action at all, even in the most strictly limited and relative sense. All that there really is in the living organism is a certain system of practical responses to its environ- ment. When this system of responses reaches a certain degree of complexity, a certain sensation to which we give the names ‘ consciousness’ or ‘ conscious knowledge ’ arises as a quality of them. All that such terms really denote is a certain capacity possessed by the ‘ higher’ organisms to give to their practical responses a wider range and a more intricate variety. and ought to make some difference to the reality known and even in some measure make it. Here it has strong affinity with Berkeleian idealism. But it tends to teach that knowledge is a specific kind of action. Behaviourism (in epistemology) denotes the view that knowledge is in no sense independent of action, nor even a specific kind of action, but just a felt quality which inherently belongs to actions of a certain degree of complexity. It agrees with pragmatism, therefore, that knowledge subserves practical ends; but differs from it in hold- ing that it is only actions themselves, not the quality of them called ‘knowledge,’ that makes a difference to any reality said to be ‘ known.’ This doctrine, therefore, is the extreme opposite of idealism both Platonic and Berkeleian. Dr. Alexander’s realism approaches very closely to this extreme, though he still maintains the characteristic and independent value of knowledge. KNOWLEDGE 47 The obvious objection to this line of argument is that in the end it seems to make nonsense of knowledge, just as idealism seemed to make nonsense of history. Conscious knowledge, after all, does somehow transcend the succession of events in time, and the extreme attempt to be- little its unique and independent value, and to make it a mere quality of action, must in the long run defeat itself. This doctrine, in its extremest form, is now known as behaviourism. How can behaviourism account for our ideas and ideals of truth and knowledge as things of absolute, supreme and independent value ? How did such a potent delusion as an idea of truth arise? And in what precise sense does behaviourism itself claim to be true? These are difficult questions for the behaviourist to answer. In fact the whole philosophy, which starts by assuming the absolute and final reality of history or time-succession, leads in the end to conclusions even more repugnant to common-sense than those of the extremest idealism. For that reason, and because it has less weight of philosophical tradi- tion behind it, we are apt prematurely to dismiss it as nonsense. Let us correct such haste by con- sidering an illustration which may help to make somewhat plainer the real significance of the behaviouristic doctrine concerning knowledge. The navigating officer of a vessel, and a carrier- pigeon on the wing can both find their way home 48 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS from a given point in mid-ocean. Undoubtedly we affirm that both know the way. Yet clearly the two kinds of knowledge differ from one another in two respects. First, the man’s is much more highly conscious; he is distinctly aware of a very much greater multitude of factors and circum- stances in the situation. Secondly, the man’s knowledge is much more adaptable ; he has much greater capacity for meeting various situations with varying methods of action and behaviour. Now behaviourism suggests that the two differences just mentioned are really one and the same. The difference in consciousness really means a differ- ence in practical adaptability, and nothing more ; the consciousness is simply a certain quality neces- sarily belonging to a highly complex and intricate organ of action. Ultimately, therefore, knowing the way home is the same as being able to find the way home. We say rightly that the navigating officer and the pigeon both know the way, since both find it—it is the same thing. But they find the way by different methods, and the man’s method is much more adaptable and delicately responsive to circumstances than the bird’s. One way of expressing this difference is to say that, while the man and the bird both have knowledge, the man’s knowledge is much the more con- scious. This doctrine, in spite of its one-sidedness, seems to be calling attention to a really important truth. KNOWLEDGE 49 It is true that what we call conscious knowledge appears to be very closely bound up with certain processes of action; so that not only does con- scious knowledge of any kind always tend to pro- duce appropriate action, but also action appropri- ate to a certain kind of knowledge tends to produce that knowledge in consciousness, where it was absent before. Thus we may say that in the history of the race conscious knowledge of the world has been produced, at least in very large measure, by the doing of actions appropriate to that know- ledge after a more or less instinctive and uncon- scious fashion. And the same law holds of the relation between action and consciousness in the individual. The popular recipe for optimism is to keep smiling; and it is not so absurd as it sounds. Action appropriate to cheerfulness can produce cheerful views and beliefs. Spoken affirmations may be regarded as part of the action appropriate to the belief affirmed; and un- doubtedly men come to believe things by repeatedly affirming them in speech. M. Coué’s use of this law, and the formula in which it results, have recently become famous. Yet M. Coué is still too often quoted as one whose method starts entirely from conscious faith; his behaviouristic method of exciting faith receives too little comment. In cases of practical knowledge (7.e. knowing how to swim, bicycle, etc.) it does not require demon- stration that the quickest way to learn is not to D 50 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS study the theory of the art first, or to attain con- scious knowledge of how it is practised, but simply to start practising, leaving it to instinct in the main to guide the bodily movements. At the end of an hour of such apparently blind effort, quite undirected by conscious knowledge, the normal beginner ‘ knows how’ to bicycle. Now the whole philosophy which takes the world of history and events at its face-value and looks at knowledge simply as one fact among others arising from vital action, can be made the basis of a distinct method in religion and a justification for that method when it has been employed in the past. A right religious experience and the full Christian consciousness must grow up gradually out of a system of actions. The Church cannot expect to be able to start from a Christian consciousness of God in all her members. She must provide plain rules of conduct and action for the majority, and, if these are wisely planned, the day may be looked for when a fully Christian consciousness may be developed both in the society as a whole and in the individuals who compose it. Here we have the basis of all ecclesiastical legalism and the religion of authority. It is by no means clear that these things are so self-evidently bad as the British mentality is prone to imagine. It is true that our Lord did not legislate on matters either of moral conduct or of religious observance: it is equally true that His apostles and their successors KNOWLEDGE 51 to some extent did. Were they wrong? How- ever far we press the Pauline doctrine that con- sciously apprehended faith in Christ and fellow- ship with Him free a man from all legal authority externally imposed, what shall we say of those whose religious consciousness is as yet weak and faltering and undeveloped? May not legal authority, both in moral conduct and religious observance, have some part to play in helping that consciousness to grow and establish itself? Is it wrong to bid those who are conscious of little love toward God or their neighbour to conform to rules of loving conduct, in the hope that action appropri- ate to love may generate the inward consciousness of love itself? Is it wrong to require those who are weak in faith to make public confession of the Christian creed, so that by some definite action appropriate to faith the consciousness of faith may become clear ? These are difficult questions, and much may be said for answers both affirmative and negative. But it is plain that they are not to be dismissed off-hand. There is much to be said for clear rules of conformity, both moral and devotional, in any institutional religion. Rome may have pushed to extremes the principle of conformity to rule as a means of training souls to grow in conscious religion. But the results achieved are not to be despised, and there is much in modern philosophy and psychology (to say nothing of common-sense) to support the method. 52 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS The precise point at which a religion of conformity becomes insincere and deadening, or at which ‘works’ become hostile to faith, is by no means an easy matter to decide. Let us now attempt, on the basis of the fore- going discussion, to build some conclusions as to the part which the Christian consciousness of God must play in the whole developing life which we properly call Christianity. As a preliminary, we must determine exactly what we mean to include under the term ‘ Christian consciousness of God.’ It is perhaps most con- venient to include both a definitely apprehended and conscious belief in God through Christ, and that still more distinct and definite consciousness of God’s presence which we call mystical experi- ence. The exact dividing line between the experi- ence of conscious faith and the experience which is properly mystical is very difficult to draw. Faith intensely felt, as in St. Paul, tends to pass into mysticism. But we must not include in conscious belief or faith the merely passive assent of the mind to certain credal propositions, which amounts to no more than a willingness to recite formulae or to return the dictated answer to certain formal interrogatories. Whatever value we may attach to such a proceeding, it clearly falls under the head of action or conduct, and does not require anything that we should classify as positive and conscious belief. Such a ‘ belief’ must be something which KNOWLEDGE 53 the mind believes in, a truth which it has made its own, and is endeavouring to live by. (1) It seems that a definite and individual con- sciousness of God through Christ is the source of the peculiar power of Christian life. The first care therefore of those who profess and call them- selves Christians must be to attain themselves and to stimulate in others this consciousness, whether it be mystical or merely of faith. So only can Christianity change the face of the world. The power of the Church at any given moment depends in no small measure upon the number of its members who possess clearly in consciousness this foundation for their religion. This is the truth to which both Protestantism and Catholic mysticism have at different periods recalled a spiritually slumberous Church. And it certainly implies also that we must pursue conscious knowledge of God for its own sake, not merely as a means to conduct, still less as something which comes of itself as a result of conduct and is not to be directly sought, but rather as an integral element in that fellowship with God which is another name for Christian life. Whatever we may think of the - Berkeleian metaphysic, it remains true that a reality can only have for us the full force and power and value of reality, when it is consciously appre- hended by the mind. Even God cannot fill with the whole power of His presence those who do not consciously as well as truly apprehend Him. 54. RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS (2) Yet this, true as it is, is not the whole truth. There is another point of view from which all conscious knowledge is just one fact in a world of other facts, of which causes and conditions can be traced in the process of historical evolution. From this point of view conscious knowledge is both a result of a vital activity which is prior to it and includes it, and also an accompaniment of that activity in its higher and more complex forms. Our consciousness of God can truly be regarded from this point of view as well. Our conscious knowledge of the world has been produced and prepared for during countless aeons by the instinc- tive and relatively unconscious action of countless millions of organisms which, without knowing it, have been concerned to maintain life in the world, and to extend its dominion. Millions of living organisms moving and guiding themselves by instinct have in time prepared for and made possible man’s method of travelling by maps. Millions protecting their offspring, without know- ing what they did, have in time produced man’s glorious consciousness of parental love. Even so, all good action since time began, however uncon- scious of its true meaning, every instinctive re- sponse to God, however unconscious of its ultimate stimulus and end, have made their contribution down the ages to that serene and triumphant con- sciousness of spiritual communion which comes to its fulness in the experience of the mystic saint. KNOWLEDGE 55 After all, what we call knowledge has as a matter of fact grown out of a system of apparently purposive and appropriate, yet more or less unconscious, responses made by living organisms to their environment; and knowledge is so closely bound up with behaviour that, where such pur- posive and appropriate responses occur, it is almost impossible not to attribute some dim and shadowy sort of knowledge to the organism which makes them. We say that the ant knows its own ant-heap and knows the members of its own tribe from stranger-ants, because it behaves as if it knew them. Are we wholly wrong? And if the omni- - presence of God is a universal environment to His creatures, are we wrong in saying that any organ- ism which behaves as if it were responding to God, in some dim and unconscious way must know Him. Is it nonsense to say that the skylark in its song is praising God? If so, in what precise sense is it reasonable to say that the skylark knows its own nest ? We cannot mean that the bird knows its nest after the fashion of our own conscious and distinct knowledge. We say that it knows its nest, because it behaves in a certain manner towards it. If, then, the lark in its song behaves in a certain manner appropriate to the praise of God, why should we not say that it praises Him, though, of course, without the distinct consciousness which we call praise in ourselves ? Further, it would seem that the most highly 56 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS conscious believer or mystic cannot disparage or belittle the value of the unconscious knowledge of God, which is shown only in behaviour, without disparaging that which has in history prepared the way for his own consciousness, and made it possible. To say even in the case of human beings that consciousness of God in Christ is the only real response to Him and fellowship with Him, is immediately to become narrow, sectarian and uncatholic in religion. Consider once more the comparison made above between the knowledge of the homing-pigeon and that of the navigating officer. The officer is unquestionably on an alto- gether higher level of natural life than the bird. He knows and can do all kinds of things utterly beyond the scope of the bird’s faculties. Yet he may possibly envy, not unreasonably, the simple efficiency of the pigeon’s knowledge of the way home. ‘I wish,’ the man may say, watching the bird, ‘I wish I knew how to get home like that.’ Now suppose that this sailor is of a type not alto- gether unheard of, a man of little conscious religion, what conscious religion he has being mostly a muddle of half-forgotten superstitions, and yet a man of surprising purity of heart, one whose general behaviour is more clearly on the side of Christ than that of many doctors of theology. May not a mystic, who knows so much more about the way to heaven, contemplate the life of such & man in somewhat the same manner as the man KNOWLEDGE 57 himself contemplates the pigeon’s flight ? Un- questionably the mystic lives on a higher plane of spiritual life. He knows and can do all kinds of things in the spiritual world which are beyond the present scope of the sailor’s faculties. Yet may he not in a sense envy the sailor’s knowledge of the way to his spiritual home. ‘I wish,’ he may even say, as he reflects on the spiritual pilgrimage before him, ‘I wish I knew how to get home like that.’ Consciousness is not everything in knowledge after all. And the philosophy, which reminds us most insistently that knowledge is wider than consciousness, may be made the basis of a religious interpretation of the world not less profoundly spiritual than that which the more orthodox idealism has to offer. It is often said that the mystic’s or conscious believer’s knowledge of God must at any rate be more direct and immediate than that of a life from which such consciousness is absent. But is this so certain?! In the case of knowledge of the world the animal’s instinctive knowledge is less full, less wide in range, less articulate, less adaptable, than the conscious knowledge of the human mind; but, so far as it goes, it seems at least to be at no disadvantage in point of directness and immediate contact with its environment. May not the same be said of the instinctive and unconscious knowledge of God, 1 See note at end of Lecture. 58 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS which we infer merely from behaviour, when it is compared with the fully conscious knowledge of God which is the mystic’s characteristic gift ? (3) We must not, of course, allow such argu- ments as have just been advanced to blind us to the fact previously stated, that the Christian con- sciousness is, on the human side, the source of the characteristically Christian power. We must never rest content with any unconscious Christi- anity in human souls, however truly it may seem in some cases to be sufficient for salvation. But, if in the course of the religious evolution of man- kind unconscious response in action to God’s goodness has prepared the way for consciousness of God, and is itself not altogether separable from some sort of knowledge of Him, we should expect to find some analogous process in the religious growth of the individual also. We must not, therefore, insist rigidly on a full Christian con- sciousness as the starting-point of Christian life and conduct in the individual. It must be left in some degree to the conduct to produce the consciousness. Perhaps no intelligent person could disagree with this abstract statement. And yet the different degrees in which the principle of ‘conduct first’ is emphasized and followed mark one of the main differences between Catholicism and Protestantism as practical methods of Christi- anity. Strong emphasis on this principle is peculiarly characteristic of the legal and sacra- KNOWLEDGE 59 mental system of Catholicism. Protestants characteristically press the opposite principle of * consciousness first,’ as far as it can be made to go. That is why, from the Reformation onwards, strong Protestants have found in ‘ conversion,’ rather than in infant-baptism, the true starting- point of the individual’s Christian life. For ‘conversion’ marks a definite moment at which Christian consciousness arrives. And it is con- genial to the Protestant view both to affirm that this is the start of Christian life, and to teach that the moment of conversion must be clearly marked, and not be an imperceptible point merged in an extended line of progress. St. Paul is the Protes- tant’s model. Catholicism, on the other hand, marks the beginning of Christian life by the baptism of infants at an age when no Christian conscious- ness can exist. It follows this up by inculcating a Christian behaviour in outward act, and seeks by a definitely systematized authority to train the various faculties into Christianity as they emerge, leaving consciousness and conduct to act and react upon one another in a gradual process, and not requiring that conscious faith shall appear at any precise moment to mark a new beginning. Its tendency is to be content with only a low degree of Christian consciousness in the majority of those who conform to its rules. Fully conscious Christi- anity it is apt to regard as a special religious vocation which comes to relatively few. 60 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS Truth doubtless is on both sides, however diffi- cult the different truths may be to reconcile ; just as we cannot but feel that there is truth in both the philosophic views of consciousness which we have previously sketched, however radically they may seem, as philosophies, to be opposed to one another. On the one hand, a new conscious- ness of God is in the New Testament clearly seen to be the ground and basis of Christian life and power ; and this is confirmed by the experience of centuries. Conscious faith comes first; conduct proceeds from it. On the other hand, the new consciousness can be prepared for and helped to grow by first doing acts which are appropriate to it, even before it comes. St. Paul’s doctrine — pushed to extremes is one-sided after all. There is something to be said even for legalism and conformity in their subordinate place. And for that very reason we shall beware of imposing rigid tests of conscious and exact belief as a condition precedent to entry into membership of the Christian body. For conscious faith may be often grown into by behaving and acting according to the rules and in the atmosphere of membership. The sin of conformity is to rest content with itself. The Christian life is the growth of a many-sided human nature. For that reason it is wrong to demand completeness on any one side at the beginning, and impossible to determine, as a precise and universal rule, which KNOWLEDGE 61 side must be developed first. But it is a crime to rest content with less than the perfection of the whole. Note ON THE DIRECTNESS OF THE Mysric’s KNOWLEDGE OF GoD As I have indicated in the foregoing lecture I find it very difficult to accept the doctrine, often confidently taught, that the conscious believer’s, and especially the mystic’s, knowledge of God is in some strict sense more direct or immediate than that of others. We are often told that the mystic’s religion differs from that of others in being ‘ first-hand,’ or that the mystic ‘ knows God,’ whereas others only ‘ know about Him.’ The main objection which I feel to such a view is that it does not seem to take the doctrine of God’s omnipresence seriously. God, we say, is omnipresent ; that is, in stricter and more techni- cal language, He is universally compresent. By that we mean that all things are in direct relation to God, and are what they are because of that relation, though, of course, it does not follow that God is to be identified with all things. Thus evil is evil, and error is error, because they are in direct relation to God’s omnipresent goodness and truth, though the direct relation is here one of opposition. God therefore is present in every conceivable situation, and all response of any organism to any environment must be directly a response to God. All knowledge of reality therefore is implicitly direct knowledge of God, 62 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS since God is always present in what is known, making it what it really is. Therefore, again, I must conclude that the knowledge of God which belongs to conscious religious experience is superior to other knowledge of Him in every conceivable quality except that of immediacy or directness. So far is it from the truth to say that the mystic ‘knows God,’ whereas others only ‘know about Him,’ that it is true rather to say that all know God, but that the mystic alone knows about Him, that is, apprehends Him consciously. In the same way, a man and his dog both know directly the environment in which they both live ; but the man knows infinitely more about it, and apprehends consciously many features of it to which the dog unconsciously responds. Almost every conceivable way of stating the superiority of the man’s knowledge would be justified, except the assertion that the man knows the environ- ment, whereas the dog only knows about it. This is precisely false. IV RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS (DESIRE) OvR whole discussion of the religious consciousness has so far been guilty of one grave omission. We have said a good deal about the relation of know- ledge to action, but nothing at all about desire. Yet it is desire that commonly brings knowledge and action together. It is something known as an object of desire that stirs our will to achieve — it by action. And it may be maintained that the true springs of Christian life lie rather in the desire for God, and for life in communion with Him, than in any sort of knowledge or action already achieved in fact. This thought is indeed fundamental in the Bible. The highest experi- ence of God in the Old Testament finds voice in the cry, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison with Thee.’ And it is profoundly true that the New Testament attaches much more importance to a man’s desires than to his achieve- ments. St. Paul’s forward-looking faith contains a large element of desire for something not yet realized. . This desire of faith is the very earnest of achievement which justifies the soul—a thing 63 64 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS infinitely more precious than the realized righteous- ness of the orthodox Pharisee, who thought that he had already attained. Our Lord constantly drove home the same lesson. All His parables about earthly and heavenly treasure suggest that © what really counts in a man’s character is what his — soul values and desires. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. ~The sinner who longs after goodness enters the Kingdom in front of all the just persons who have no need for repentance. Should we not say that Christianity on its subjective side must in this world of ours be measured and judged, not in terms of know- ledge or of conduct, but of desire ? In a sense, yes. But we have still to determine what is the relation of desire to knowledge on the one hand, and to conduct on the other. We are apt to suppose that a man can only desire a thing of which he has some sort of definitely conscious knowledge. According to this assumption, there- fore, conscious knowledge of some kind or degree will still come first in the Christian scheme of salvation. We must in some sense consciously know God’s Kingdom and God’s righteousness, even if it be only with the anticipation of faith, before we can begin to desire and to seek them. So on the whole we shall still adopt the principle of ‘ consciousness first.’ But meanwhile modern psychology is preaching a doctrine of desire which challenges this view of DESIRE 65 its nature. The whole theory and practice of psycho-analysis base themselves on the hypo- thesis that our deepest and most imperious desires are often not conscious at all, and that a man’s consciousness often makes mistakes as to what his real desires are. This sounds paradoxical; but, when the facts are examined, it is seen to stand for an important truth. Our primary desires spring from unconscious pro- cesses of life which other animals certainly share with man. Consider in any of the ‘lower’ animals the operation of the desire for food, which we call hunger. The animal does not really go in search of food because he consciously knows that he is what wecallhungry. It may be most probably presumed that he feels a vague sense of disquiet or restless- ness which impels him to wander. The moment he approaches something that is his natural food, its presence exerts a powerful attraction on one or other of his senses, very probably his sense of smell. Instinctively, under the influence of this attraction, he goes towards the food, eats, and is 1 Tt matters very little to the argument whether or not this account of hunger is accurate, so long as it is agreed that conscious hunger is not the original cause of the search for food. The above is only a rough suggestion as to one possible way in which hunger might be thought to operate unconsciously. Here and in the pages immediately following, my debt to Mr. Bertrand Russell’s Analysis of Mind will be evident to all who are acquainted with that very suggestive, if somewhat cynical, tour de force. I have used some of his observations and arguments the more freely, because the conclusions I seek to draw from them are very different from his own. BE 66 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS satisfied. The restlessness ceases, and he is quiet again. If food is difficult to come by, he may try further and more daring expedients according to his capacities; and something like conscious intelligence comes into play. When hard put to it, some animals show very considerable courage and ingenuity in the search for food. But always, to begin with, it is the primary and not consciously realized feeling of hunger which stimulates intelli- gence in the search, and finally brings conscious- ness into play. Fundamentally and on the whole, living creatures do not search for food because they know they are hungry; but they know they are hungry, because they have already searched for food, and it has been hard to find. In man, of course, consciousness comes much more fully into operation. He has a definite notion of hunger, and gives a distinct name.to that feeling of which he has become aware. He then takes rational and deliberate means to satisfy his desire for food, means which sometimes include a paradoxical curtailing of his breakfast in order to catch an early train into the city. But even in man the desire for food still bears unmistakable witness to its origin in the instinctive, unconscious or ‘sub-conscious’ activity of life. If, absorbed in some study, a man forgets that he has had no food for many hours, the restless movements begin in his body and cause sensations of disquiet which at last penetrate his conscious mind and make him DESIRE 67 think ‘I am hungry.’ Consciousness supervenes upon the desire; it does not cause it. Moreover, it is remarkable that consciousness, when it does thus supervene, may make mistakes. I may feel a restlessness which I attribute to hunger, and, when I begin to eat, discover that I was wrong. Or, on the other hand, I may feel a restlessness which I attribute to some mental or even spiritual cause, and find in the end that after all it was only hunger. The only test which shows what the desire really was, is that cessation of restlessness which we call satisfaction. If, after feeling faint or ill or troubled, I eat and at once feel at ease again, I conclude that I was really hungry. If, thinking that I am hungry, I find that eating does not diminish my discomfort, I conclude that something else was the matter with me; it was not food that I really wanted. The same general relations of consciousness to desire persist in a more complicated form, when we come to consider motives of action less elemen- tary than hunger. It is well known that all the recognized primary instincts of man, acquisitive- ness, self-display, sexual and social instinct and the like, initiate and direct action tending to satisfy them, without being consciously appre- hended by the mind. These instincts operate within us as unconscious desires ; and always our consciousness is liable to be mistaken as to the desire from which our action really proceeds. On 68 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS the higher levels of human life these mistakes are made more frequent and more complicated by the advent into consciousness of the distinctly moral desires and valuations which we denote by the name conscience. It is a peculiarity of conscience that it seeks to govern conduct through the con- sciousness, but finds the consciousness a far easier domain to conquer than the vital springs of action which lie beneath. And the frequent result is a falsification of consciousness itself. We refuse to admit to ourselves that our actions are due to some primary instinct of a not very highly moral or reputable sort. Morality then reigns in our consciousness, but in our consciousness only ; and it maintains its sway only by inventing false explanations of our conduct which we easily persuade ourselves to be true. But then even in consciousness the reign of morality is a deception. For what really rules even there is not the con- science, but the instinct of self-display, which at once satisfies itself by making us think ourselves moral, renders impotent the conscience by mas- querading in its clothes, and so permits the other primary instincts to have their own way with our actions. An intensely complicated situation thus arises - which we would fain declare impossible, did not facts show it to exist. The real desire or motive of action, when it seems repugnant to conscience, is ‘ repressed ’ or driven down out of consciousness DESIRE 69 altogether. Nevertheless it continues to control action, while our consciousness invents some fictitious and worthier-seeming motive to account for what we do. The fable of the ostrich, which buries its head in the sand, and thinks it has escaped its enemies because it no longer sees them, represents no fact in natural history, but in moral psychology, alas, toomany. It is an exact parable of the way in which the moral consciousness of man often deals with the baser instincts which it takes to be its foes. It is a humiliating result of this habit of moral self-deception that so often strangers are better judges of our real desires and motives, than either we ourselves or our most intimate friends. For we ourselves, and those who know us well, are confused by too great familiarity with our deceitful consciousness, whereas strangers have only the appearance of our conduct to go by. It is some- times not even the near onlooker, but the com- paratively distant one, who gets the truest view in the game of life. Thus a man may allow his actions through much of his life to be governed by the acquisitive instinct, and at the same time fully convince himself and his friends that he is acting from the purest motives of public service in industry. But one who has had relations with him only in matters of business may form a truer estimate. Ora man may in his acts be pursuing a ruthless desire for vengeance on persons who have 70 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS wronged him or his, and at the same time persuade himself and many others that his real motive is a quite disinterested zeal for justice, or even a passion to convert his enemies by convincing them of sin. Not a few who believe themselves to be enthusi- | asts for peace seem to the outsider by their con- — duct to be either stirring up strife or promoting © their own comfort. Others, who profess merely a — f zeal for truth at all costs, appear by a sort of strange fatality to find truth always and only in such opinions as enable them to applaud their own insight and to be cynical about their fellow-men. What is the test of the real desire? It is difficult to resist the conclusion of those who say that we should look not primarily to consciousness, but to what gives real satisfaction, 1.e. to what actually puts an end to the restlessness in which desire is manifested. Would the servant of industry feel really satisfied if he were to succeed in performing service which did not bring him profit 2? Would the upholder of justice feel satis- fied if his enemies were converted without enduring painful penalties for their misdeeds ? Would the zealot for dispassionate inquiry feel satisfied if for once he made a discovery which vindicated the judgment of the idealist against his own ? Or, if the truth were really known, would the feeling of all of them in such circumstances be one of considerable disappointment, not perhaps admitted in consciousness, but none the less manifested DESIRE as in indefinable, yet unescapable, disquiet of the mind ? It is not surprising that from premises such as these some philosophers and psychologists have deduced a depressing theory about human nature. We differ from the animals, it would appear, less | in rationality than in capacity for self-deception. Most of our heroism and virtue is but a sophisti- cation of consciousness which veils the sub- conscious realities of selfishness and lust. Yet the conclusion is questionable on many grounds. How is it that a conscience more fully instructed is able to recognize and to condemn the very selt- deceptions of which it has been guilty ? Or why should we so ardently desire to think ourselves noble and self-sacrificing, if we are inherently in- capable of being such ? Hypocrisy, after all, is the homage which vice pays to virtue; and self- deception may be the homage which man’s poor achievements pay to his glorious capacities. It should also be remarked that psycho-analysis on the whole by no means favours the view that consciousness is a mere concomitant or spectator of action, making no real difference to the instinc- tive behaviour in which desire has its root. Even man’s very self-deception about the true nature of his desires certainly makes some difference to his conduct, even if it does no more than make him keep up the appearances of morality and religion. As a matter of fact, no one would deny that the 72 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS ‘secondary’! desires, which our conscious ideals inspire, exert a very large influence upon what we do. But psycho-analysts commonly attribute a deeper value to consciousness even than this. Repressed desires associated with primary instincts and emotions such as those of fear, sex and the like, often cause serious disturbances in the nervous system. In such cases the treatment of the psycho-analyst very often chiefly consists in dragging up the whole cause of the disorder into the patient’s conscious mind. Not infrequently consciousness of the real source of the disordered action is alone sufficient to work a cure. So far from disparaging conscious knowledge, most suc- cessful psychotherapists place great reliance upon it as a curative agent. The old Greek saw, ‘ Know thyself, has been vindicated afresh and with added meaning. . But there is still another line of reply possible to those who endeavour to use the importance of sub-conscious desire aS a disparagement of man’s religious aspirations and ideals. Let their premises be granted; and let us accept also the test of genuine and fundamental desire which they propose, viz. the actual cessation of restlessness 1 Tt might be useful to define primary desires as those which produce the conscious apprehension of their objects, and secondary desires as those which are produced by the conscious apprehension of their objects. Moral desires would be in this sense secondary; but in the view here taken there is a desire for God which, like instinctive desires, is primary. DESIRE 73 and discomfort. What is it that gives man’s © nature most complete and permanent satisfaction in this sense? Not the gratification of any primary instincts, or of any ‘ desires of the flesh.’ Proverbially' the satisfaction thus attained is transitory and delusive. Nothing, we have often been told, is so profoundly disappointing as worldly success; nothing in the end leaves a man so discontented as gratified selfishness. It is one of the commonest tragedies of ordinary experience that a man should believe himself to crave only a larger income, more material comfort or a better worldly position, and then find, when at last these things are his, that his restlessness is only greater than before. What is the explana- tion ? If we abide by the test proposed, we must infer that his consciousness mistook his real desires aiter all. On the other hand, those who attain to some real sense of communion with God, or even to some realization of man’s noblest ideals, do not in the same manner find their desires mocked by the fulfilment of them; they reach some measure of permanent and stable peace even sometimes in the bitterest adversity. We should infer then that these are the better judges of their real desires. Is there not a case for saying that they interpret truly the desires of all men? ‘Thou madest us for Thyself; and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.’ The most primary and fundamental instinct in the world, 74. RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS despite all the aberrations and hypocrisy and blindness of conscious thought, is the desire for God. Such propositions are evidently incapable of proof along the lines of the foregoing argument. For we cannot know for certain what our desires really are till they are finally satisfied in rest ; and our restlessness still in greater or less degree continues. Yet it would appear from the facts that only two things can be expected permanently to end the restlessness of living, either what the Christian calls eternal life, or else the death of annihilation. If, then, the Christian is wrong, it would seem that the oriental religion is right, which maintains that man’s real desire is for death. Such would seem to be the result of arguing strictly and impartially on the hypothesis that true desire can only be judged by what brings restlessness to an end. . Let us now try to formulate some conclusions from our whole discussion, bearing in mind the distinct schools of thought which we have termed Catholic and Protestant respectively. (1) The Catholic attaches relatively greater importance to external behaviour and conformity. And we shall not deny that behaviour alone, apart from religious consciousness, may show, on a certain level of life, both a real desire and search for God and a real satisfaction thereof. An animal or insect may be hungry and search for DESIRE 75 food and obtain it, without any distinct conscious- ness of what food and hunger are. So a human soul may seek and receive from God the daily bread of the spirit, without distinct consciousness of what it is really doing. There is no reason why the religious life of a man should not remain to a great extent on the sub-conscious level even after he has become a regularly conforming member of some Christian Church. A man may go regularly to confession and Mass, and behave at other times in a manner not wholly unworthy of his profession, and yet have nothing whatever to say in answer to a questionnaire about his religious experience, and be quite unable to pass the simplest examination in theology. After all, consciousness is a matter of degree in all of us. Not the greatest mystic knows the whole meaning either of worship or life. The great error of Protestantism is the attempt to make a falsely sharp contrast and rigid dis- tinction between a conscious life of salvation and all other kinds of life, which, being unconscious or wrongly conscious of God, are to be dismissed as evil or ‘unpleasing’ to Him. The so-called ‘new psychology’ and the whole doctrine of the sub-conscious are here unquestionably on the Catholic side. (2) Similar considerations will incline us to the Catholic rather than to the Protestant doctrine of original sin. If the fundamental desire of the 76 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS world is for God, it must follow that the world is fundamentally good, and that there is no absolutely inherent or radical vice in its essential nature. Original sin! is, as Catholic orthodoxy maintains, a defect rather than a perversion, a want rather than a refusal of good. It is perhaps a misuse of terms to call it stn at all. The element of real sin, perversion of good and rejection of God, which we undoubtedly find in human life, is not inherent in nature, and must not lead us to condemn this world as essentially evil. There is real and fundamental goodness, real seeking and finding of God, even before and apart from the conscious acceptance of God’s grace in Christ. Here perhaps we shall be right in saying that both Socrates and Aristotle are more catholically- minded than Plato. The Socratic doctrine that all sin is ignorance or error, merely a misunderstand- ing of what is good, may be represented as imply- ing exaggerated belief in natural goodness. The Aristotelian doctrines that the whole world desires God, and that the relatively unconscious dpdvycis has real value as well as the fully articulated and conscious godia, have undoubtedly Catholic affinities. Lodia stands to ¢dpdvyoiw in some- what the same relation as ‘ supernatural perfec- tion’ to ‘natural goodness.’ Plato, on the other * That is, when it is conceived as a state resulting from Adam’s transgression. See God and the Supernatural, ed. by Fr. Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., pp. 147 sqq. DESIRE [Me hand, seems to twist the ambiguous teaching of Socrates towards the conclusion that the only real value in life is the philosopher’s conscious quest for the idea of the good. ®pévyors, in the Aris- totelian sense, is to be little accounted of. Here Plato approximates to the Protestant interpreta- tion of the principle, ° Whatever is not of grace is sin.’ It is only the highest kind of excellence which really counts as goodness at all.t (3) At the same time we must be careful not to forget the values which Protestantism has made characteristically its own. We must steadily refuse to allow men to rest content with a religion which remains at the lower and less conscious levels, however fully we recognize its worth even there. And in this, as we have already hinted, the modern science of psycho-analysis gives us strong support. For, while emphasizing the reality and power of the sub-conscious, it yet by no means disparages consciousness, or treats it as a mere impotent and superfluous spectator of mechanical processes. A man may be genuinely but unconsciously seeking God, and even in great measure finding Him. But this is not for man a satisfactory state. Consciousness has been given him to use; and if his real desires and motives 1 On the other hand Plato’s doctrine of avdurnors, if applied to the object of desire rather than to that of knowledge, stands for the essential truth that our consciousness can only hail as desirable what we have already in our behaviour unconsciously desired, 78 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS are not what he thinks they are, he is at war with himself. Conversion alone can bring him peace— which is to say, speaking psychologically, that his deep-lying sub-conscious motives must be brought up to the surface and reorganized in consciousness about a new and adequate centre. In order to do this, he has to be assisted to pierce down to the very deepest levels of his psychic being. Possibly his first efforts to dig into his soul may seem to have a disappointing result. He may seem to find that his actions were really dictated by baser passions, by self- seeking, lust of power, sex-instinct or herd- instinct, just where he had imagined justice or self-sacrifice to reign. But still, we may maintain, he is only looking at a comparatively superficial, though true, significance of his own actions. Let him dig deeper still. Let him reflect that, as his very disappointment and loss of self-esteem bear witness, no mere gratification of such primary instincts can ever truly satisfy him. The funda- mental springs of his conduct are not even yet exposed. There is still another level of instinct below even those instincts which are called primary. ‘There is something which stirs him to a more truly original and final quest, a more insistent restlessness and longing, even than these. His quest is for the love of God, which, hitherto eluded by his consciousness, is seeking him. Let him realize that ; and at once his past DESIRE 19 conduct has for ever a new meaning, his future conduct a new course. He is a man changed and healed, as St. Paul was changed when on the Damascus road he realized for the first time that his real desire had been for Christ, and that up till then his consciousness had been kicking against the pricks of his own deepest instinct. (4) But is the deepest instinct of all men really such ? What are we to say of the ‘ homme moyen sensuel,’ or of him who leads a life such as would be called by a Catholic theologian a life of merely natural goodness, the clod of his soul apparently undisturbed by any spark of higher aspiration ? The publican and the harlot go into the Kingdom of God before the Pharisee ; yet even the Pharisee himself at times seems likely to precede the respect- able citizen. The man in the street constitutes a harder problem for the gospel than the woman of the streets. The old-fashioned Protestant pro- nounces him worldly and altogether lost. The more charitable Catholic recognizes his goodness at its own level, and is inclined to assign to him some neutral territory of limbo, not too far from the new Jerusalem.! But we can hardly regard either solution of the problem as altogether satis- factory. It is radically uncatholic to class such a man as wicked, and radically unevangelical to rest content with his apparent incapacity for 1 Cf. Baron von Hiigel, Hssays and Addresses in the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 203-205, 80 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS heaven. Perhaps, after all, his heavenly desires and instincts are existent but repressed, not dead but sleeping. Some words of Dr. Hadfield’s! about neuras- thenia may have a certain relevance to the case we have in mind. ‘In neurasthenia,’ he says, ‘the complex is deeply and effectively repressed, so deeply that there is no expression in conscious- ness of the repressed instinct; indeed, these neurasthenic patients may be callous, indifferent, and devoid of feeling or passion. The neurasthenic A is tired because he spends all his energy in keeping | down or repressing the instinctive forces within him. He succeeds in his effort, but in so doing | saps his vitality. . . . In the moral sphere,’ Dr. | Hadfield goes on, ‘the type is exemplified in the | man whose morality is preserved by the effective repression of all his passions ; he succeeds in being moral but suffers from lifelessness and moral © ‘‘neurasthenia.”” He has no temptations, and denies ever falling into sin; a‘l these years has he served without breaking any commandment.’ © May there not be a religious, as well as a strictly moral, neurasthenia? In it some motion of revolt against God would be deeply, unconsciously and successfully repressed. The patient would exhaust his religious energy in repressing it, so that on the surface, and to himself, he would appear to be without religious feeling. 1 Psychology and Morals, pp. 26, 27. DESTRE 81 Of course this is the merest speculation, and in any case such a diagnosis of religious ‘ neuras- thenia ’’ would only meet the condition of a small proportion of the whole number of those who appear to suffer from religious apathy. Yet Dr. Hadfield’s remarks are important as indicating how deceptive even a genuine and _ persistent apathy may prove to be. The fact suggests far- reaching possibilities. And so long as the true science of the soul leaves such possibilities open, it is surely well for the Christian to cling to the hypothesis that all men are capable of what the Catholic calls the supernatural life, and the Protestant true religion. And here the Protestant tendency to see in black and white only, and to identify the second-best with evil, has at least a great practical advantage. It does at least refuse to allow those who are spiritually dull and comatose to continue their slumber undisturbed. No doubt some methods of arousing them often associated with Protestantism are not well chosen. To awaken a sleeping soul it is better to fling open the shutters of its chamber towards the daylight, than to let off alarums in its ears. But if the heavenly or supernatural capacities of the soul are really only dormant, and neither dead nor lacking, it must be wrong to allow the sleep to continue ; and this is what Catholicism has often in practice been inclined to do. Perhaps we may look forward with hope, though not yet with assurance, to help that E 82 RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS may come to us from the researches of the psycho- analysts. If a technique of psychical healing can be developed, which depends on bringing up into consciousness the ultimate and hidden springs of action, the results may be of incalculable service to religion. This at least is a method which relies on light and hope, not fear and darkness. And if the most fundamental movements and desires of life are Godward and from God, the more we know about ourselves, the more we shall awake to righteousness. To enable a man to see his soul as it is, in all the realities of its baseness and its glory, should be to convert him indeed. Vv THE KINGDOM OF GOD THe term ‘heaven’ and the idea which it represents in its current use are not easy things to define. Perhaps we may most truly say that ‘heaven’ essentially denotes the perfect state of existence to which man aspires, and which he contrasts with the unsatisfactory conditions of his actual and present life. This unsatisfactory con- dition of life he calls ‘earth’ as distinct from ‘heaven, or ‘this world’ as distinct from ‘the next world.’ Primarily, then, the contrast be- tween earth and heaven is one of value. The essence of heaven is to be better than earth. But heaven is not a value merely ; it is also a state of existence which must itself be thought of as existing, and consequently has to be related in terms of existence, as well as in terms of value, to this unsatisfactory earth. How can heaven and earth both exist in one universe? From one point of view this is the central and unsolved problem of religious philosophy. But, though philosophers find no answer to the question which is finally satisfactory, answers for practical pur- 83 84. THE KINGDOM OF GOD poses have to be given, and the limitations of human thought and language decree that these must express the relation between earth and heaven in terms either of space, or of time, or of both space and time. In other words, heaven must be either a ‘ there’ contrasted with a ‘ here,’ or a ‘then’ contrasted with a ‘now,’ or else a ‘there and then’ contrasted with a ‘here and now.’ Tf we are thinking of heaven as the home of perfection simply, spatial language or spatial metaphor may suffice. Heaven as the dwelling- place of God is ‘ heaven above,’ and similarly Plato as a rule speaks of his world of perfect ideas as ‘over there’; it cannot be regarded as either past or future. If, on the other hand, we are thinking of heaven as a perfection shared by what is at present imperfect, as for instance by ourselves or creatures like us, then it is evident that time- language must be used about it, whether or not space-language is used as well. Heaven as the goal of effort or growth or progress is essentially future; as a blessedness from which man has fallen it is essentially past, though either this future or this past ‘heaven’ may be represented as existing here on earth. Conceptions of heaven as shared by man may therefore be divided into two classes: (1) those which express its remoteness from present life in terms of time only, and therefore make it belong THE KINGDOM OF GOD 85 to ‘this world,’ and (2) those which express that remoteness in terms of space and time together, in order to suggest that heaven belongs essentially to ‘another world.’ In class (1) fall the Greco- Roman ideas of the original Golden Age, the Jewish myth of the Garden of Eden, and a host of similar beliefs current among primitive peoples ; also, the Jewish hope of the Messiah’s reign on earth. Into class (2) fall the Greek beliefs about Elysium, the hopes which inspired the devotees of the * mystery- religions,’ and Jewish anticipations of an immortal blessedness which the righteous were to inherit at the end of the world. Later Jewish prophets and apocalyptists, how- ever, combined, and to some extent confused, these two distinct classes of belief in regard to the future state of blessedness. The Messianic Kingdom was to be, properly speaking, a heaven on earth, a heaven belonging to this world. It was to take place in a final period of history. But later Jewish speculation introduced the idea of a divine judgment of the world, which was to bring the world to an end altogether, and finally reward the righteous by admitting them to live for ever with God in another sphere of existence. Attempts to reconcile these two different beliefs were made by teaching that the Messianic Kingdom was immediately to precede the end of the world and to last only for a limited period. But a good deal of confusion and difference of view prevailed 86 THE KINGDOM OF GOD as to the exact relations between the Messianic Kingdom, the divine judgment, the end of the world, and the other-worldly heaven. This incomplete combination of different classes of belief was carried on into the Christian Church, and all down its history has both confused and enriched Christian hopes of heaven and the King- dom of God, and even the Christian doctrine of Christ’s Person. The first or strictly Messianic type of belief passed into Christianity through the title Christ applied to Jesus; it has led to the ancient Christian doctrine of the millennium, and has issued in the persistent idea that Christ is destined to reign over all the earth in some period of history. The second or other-worldly type of belief is more clearly indicated by the title Lord implying the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and it has issued in the idea of heaven as the Church has more generally conceived it, viz., as God’s dwelling- place, not on earth, whither Christ has already ascended, and the faithful are finally to be received at the end of the world. In fact, the faith of Christians has constantly swung backwards and forwards between the different groups of ideas represented by these two conceptions of heaven, and it has not yet reached a quite stable equilibrium. All down the history of the Church, therefore, there have been two distinct kinds of world-hope in the Christian consciousness ; and these have led THE KINGDOM OF GOD 87 to practical differences in Christian conduct and the Christian attitude towards the life of this world. On the one hand, there has been a hope that Christ would reign completely over the earth in history, which hope has at times inspired both an enthusiasm to conquer all the world for Christ and a belief that its whole life must be redeemable and cannot be hopelessly perverse. On the other hand, there has been a tendency to abandon hope for this world as a whole, to pronounce it evil, to urge Christians only to save souls out of it, to keep themselves unspotted from it, and to look in patient endurance for the life of the world to come. History shows a constant swinging of the pendu- lum of Christian thought from one set of ideas to the other. We can roughly trace three great swings of the pendulum within four periods of the Church’s life. (1) It is evident that during the first few centuries after Christ the Christian hope was pre- dominantly of the other-worldly type. This was natural, so long as Christians were members of a comparatively small and often persecuted sect, maintaining itself in the midst of a hostile world- empire. They had no responsibility for the con- duct of this world’s affairs, for the organization of its politics, commerce, or social life. These were under heathen control, and it was therefore natural to assume that they were mainly under the dominion of the Evil One. Moreover, there was 88 THE KINGDOM OF GOD no immediate prospect of the general situation being altered by any missionary effort, and at the same time the Second Coming of the Lord from heaven was commonly believed to be more or less imminent. So the Christian Church was content to wait and watch, to produce and to honour martyrs rather than reformers. It did not seri- ously trouble to ask itself what the life of this world would really be like, if Christ were to reign in it, or how exactly His rule would work in the reorganization of secular activities. All this is true, despite the fact that during this period anticipations of a millennium were very widely popular. The belief, however, finds no direct support in the New Testament, outside the book of Revelation. In its primitive form it was simply a relic of Judaism which remained an excrescence on the Christian faith and did not affect the essential other-worldliness of the main Christian hope. To this it made no real difference whether or not Christ was destined to reign on earth for a fixed period before the end of the world, so long as Christians were not called upon to make any special preparation for that reign, but were simply to wait for their Lord to manifest Himself from heaven. Chiliasm, however popular, was not in this original form a really vital or effective part of Christianity. (2) The beginning of our second period is con- veniently marked by the certainly epoch-making THE KINGDOM OF GOD 89 thought of St. Augustine. The doctrine of his which immediately concerns us is the theory he put forward that the reign of Christ on earth with His saints was already present and manifested in the life of the Church. By teaching thus Augus- tine is sometimes said to have put an end to the popular expectation of a millennium. It is per- haps more accurate to say, with the same essential meaning, that he brought back the general idea of the millennium from the fringes to the centre of Christian thought and made it a really operative force in the Church’s life. The doctrine of the present reign of Christ was now possible and intelligible, because Christianity had become an imperial religion with wide secular responsibilities. And the doctrine reflected new potentialities and prospects for Catholicism, which the mediaeval Papacy in its earlier and better days strove earnestly to realize. The Christian hope now ceased to be purely other-worldly. The mission of the Papacy, which had raised itself on the ruins of the Roman Empire, was to organize all the activities of human life in obedience to Christ, and so to establish His rule and Kingdom. It claimed to manage this world’s affairs in the name of Christ, as well as to hold the keys of the other world. It assumed a temporal as well as a purely spiritual power and authority. The Kingdom of God became embodied as a great ecclesiastical institution, controlling science, 90 THE KINGDOM OF GOD politics, commerce, art, as well as morals, worship, and religious belief. The attempt of the Popes to organize the world as Christ’s Kingdom resulted in failure. But only now are we beginning to appreciate its enormous religious value. It was the result of a conception essentially Catholic. It did vindicate the claim of the Divine Kingdom to rule over and to include all the activities of human life on earth. It did witness to the truth that the Christian religion cannot be satisfied with one department of life, but either demands all or is worth nothing. It identified Catholicism with the doctrine and the hope that Christ can reign and must reign over everything in earth as well as in heaven, and that consequently everything in the world is at least essentially redeemable, and not inherently evil. The Popes sought to realize their magnificent aims by the method of clericalism. Seeing that the masses of conforming Christians were still unfit for the full rights of citizenship in an earthly heaven, they created a clerical caste as a sort of inner Church, and, by giving to this caste an almost unlimited autonomy, privilege and autho- rity, they hoped in the end to establish a heavenly Kingdom indeed. The moral corruption of the clergy and of the Popes themselves resulted in the abandoning of the ideal and the failure of the plan. An increasing gloom settled on the later Middle Ages, and, some time before the Reformation, the THE KINGDOM OF GOD 91 real religious life of the times had returned to the other-worldliness of despair. Clericalism has had a bad name ever since. But it is the splendour of its ideal which has made its failure so con- spicuous ; and it is hardly for those to point the finger of scorn whose very different methods in religion led to the débdcle of 1914. (3) Our next period begins with the rise of Protestantism. The original Protestants were endeavouring above all things to throw off the worldly domination of the Popes, and to restore the conditions of primitive Christianity. Such being the aims chiefly in their view, it was perhaps inevitable that they should adopt and seek to re-enforce the other-worldly elements in mediaeval- ism. For this other-worldliness was certainly primitive, and certainly also lent itself to effective use in condemnation of the evil worldliness which had come to be associated with the Papacy. Nevertheless the other-worldliness of Protestant- ism constitutes, from one point of view, the supreme tragedy of the Reformation, and has ever since stood in the way of that very gospel which it was the great hope of the reformers to bring back. The immediate effect of this other-worldliness was to antagonize the religious Reformation to the Renascence in science, literature, and art. The revived humanism of the latter found no echo in the religion of the Protestants, whose general 92 THE KINGDOM OF GOD outlook on life it found even less congenial than the rigour of Catholic ecclesiasticism. And there- fore the Renascence found no spiritual home within any form of organized Christianity. There was no movement on the side of religion to welcome it and supply its spiritual want. Theologians and scholars like Erasmus remained merely sympa- thetic and disappointed individuals ; they did not direct, nor move within, any definite current of the Church’s life. And so it happens that, while we can easily imagine Shakespeare as a Christian, we cannot imagine him as either a Catholic or a Protestant of his own time. This fact is of the utmost importance, when we are endeavouring to estimate the reasons for the alienation of the modern world from the Church in all its forms. The Protestant Reformation, then, represents distinctly a swingback of the pendulum towards the strictly other-worldly conception of the King- dom of God. ‘Troeltsch indeed has reminded us that ‘the genuine early Protestantism.of Luther- anism and Calvinism is, as an organic whole, in spite of its anti-Catholic doctrine of salvation, entirely a Church civilization like that of the Middle Ages. It claimed to regulate state and society, science and education, law, commerce, and industry, according to the supernatural stand- point of revelation, and, exactly like the Middle Ages, everywhere subsumes under itself the Lex Naturae as being originally identical with the Law THE KINGDOM OF GOD 93 of God’! But the claim was too narrowly con- ceived, and in practice had to be abandoned. To the Protestant the Kingdom on earth (apart from vague revivals of primitive chiliasm) came more and more to mean simply a reign of God in the individual soul; and the normal attitude of that soul towards the things of earth and all secular activities should be one of aloofness, if not of actual antagonism. It was, as we have just said, a tragedy that such should have been the tendency of a reformed religion, just when the new ferment of human thought and activity was starting developments so critically important in the life of the world. New lines of growth which have changed men’s whole conceptions of art, science, industry, politics, and of the world itself had their origin in the Renascence period ; and yet almost up to the present day none of the organized ‘ Churches’ has taken a really sympathetic interest in the religious aspect of the new movements, or sought to incorporate them into its life. These movements have therefore grown and organized themselves independently of religion, and set up their own standards of value, right and wrong, good and bad, which are still unrelated to Christi- anity. Science, art, economics, politics, and the rest have become each an independent * world,’ claiming complete autonomy in its own sphere and complete freedom to pronounce what is good and 1 Prolestantism and Progress, pp. 44, 45. 94. THE KINGDOM OF GOD what not good within it. The cry of ‘art for art’s sake’ has mingled with that of ‘ business is business,’ and even sometimes the cry ‘ war is war’ has also been heard. The meaning of each is essentially the same. Each is a claim advanced on behalf of one separated department of human life, one special sphere of conduct, to set up its own standard of right and wrong as independent of any general laws of morality and religion. Inevitably, when such claims are made and admitted, religion has also become one depart- ment of human life among others, regulating only one part of a man’s activities, that part, namely, ~ which is concerned with his worship, his prayers, his home-life and his social relations of a strictly personal and private kind. His religion has then ceased to direct him in the office, the workshop, the studio, the laboratory, the council-chamber, in the activities of his trade, profession, business or public life. Hence the apparently insuperable difficulty of applying Christianity to the whole of human life in the modern world. We are apt to blame the individual who professes Christianity for not carrying the principles of his religion into the conduct of his professional, commercial or public activities. But we do not see that the blame, if blame there be, lies rather with the teachers of the Christian religion itself, who have left him with only negative guidance outside his ‘private’ life. The main hope and interest of THE KINGDOM OF GOD 95 the most spiritual of these teachers have been exclusively ‘other-worldly.’ They have ceased to regard the organized social and secular life of this world as being even potentially God’s King- dom. Because of this other-worldliness they have allowed man’s life in this world to be split up into various independent and autonomous departments, of which religion has inevitably become only one. And, when men have asked how they are to live Christianly in several departments at once, they have found no satisfactory answer. Hence the application of Christianity to the activities of Science, art, commerce, politics and the rest presents an unsolved problem of which we are now becoming acutely aware. The system of mediaeval Catholicism has broken down; but no modern Catholicism has been found to fulfil its function. Protestantism has so far been powerless to enable the ordinary man really to organize his whole life round a religious centre. (4) It was inevitable that the exaggerated other- worldliness, which has permitted this disastrous divorce between religion and the life of the world, should in time provoke an equally exaggerated reaction. This reaction has come with the rise of Socialism, which marks our fourth period. The pendulum has swung again, and further than before. Socialism is not, of course, essentially either a Christian or even a religious movement. Yet to many it has taken the place of a religion, 96 THE KINGDOM OF GOD and many more would agree that it has derived much of its power from making its own some elements of Christian truth which the modern Church has neglected. If we except those forms of it which are based on economic determinism, we may assert truly that its mission has been to recall men’s thoughts and efforts to the realiza- tion of a universal kingdom of good upon the earth. Once more it has restored the hope of a Golden Age in the future. It has definite points of contact both with the primitive anticipation of a millennium and with the nobler ambitions of the Papacy in world-government. But it differs from both in that it preaches a Kingdom to be realized neither by a catastrophic intervention of God nor by the continuous operation of His grace, but by human effort in the natural process of evolution. Socialism has therefore generally turned its back altogether on the other-worldly and even on the divine aspect of the Kingdom. Several of its most influential prophets profess a religion without eternity at all, which is to the Christian a religion without substance. Like Bergson, they cast a vague halo of sentiment around the natural forces of life, and assure mankind that the gates of a glorious future are open to it, if it has the courage to enter them. The general upshot of all these contrary move- ments is the distracted perplexity of the modern -THE- KINGDOM OF GOD 97 world in which we live. Nevertheless it is pos- sible, and not altogether without value, to trace in the general confusion a broad line of distinction between those whose faith and conduct is based on a purely other-worldly conception of God’s Kingdom, and those who still seek to prepare the way for a heavenly Kingdom upon earth. From this point of view Catholicism has essential affinities with Socialism. Both believe in a king- dom of good which is meant to include all the life of earth, and to be realized upon it. Both believe that this kingdom can and must rule all secular activities, scientific, artistic, political, social, economic and the rest. Both are prepared to establish that rule, at least in part, by methods of organized and legally enforced authority. Catholicism severely checks ‘ private judgment,’ Socialism ‘private enterprise. The Roman Catholic authorities condemn Socialism, just be- cause Catholicism and Socialism necessarily find themselves, to some extent, to be competitors in the same field. The same affinity explains why in England some of our Christian Socialists turn back to the Catholic system of the Middle Ages for inspiration and example. In the Church of England socialistic sympathies have been on the whole stronger among Anglo-Catholics than among Evangelicals or theological Liberals. The desire to embrace all human activities under a strong central authority is congenial to the G 98 THE KINGDOM OF GOD Catholic and the Socialist, alien to the Protestant and to those who are liberal either in politics or theology. Typical Protestantism, on the other hand, retains its affinity with primitive Christianity. Its tendency is to leave the world alone, and merely to save individuals out of it. Let the faithful few retain the purity of their religion, separate themselves from worldliness, and wait for the world to come. Political and legal methods are to be eschewed for religious purposes. To use them is to rely on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen. The Lord will vindicate His own. Thus religious Protestantism becomes the unex- pected ally of the economic doctrine of laissez- faire. Forbidding the Church to meddle in politics, Protestantism too often permits the claims of religion to be limited to one department of life. Nevertheless, both these opposite points of view present vital religious values which must be somehow reconciled and preserved. We have already sufficiently indicated the dis- tinctively Catholic values as (1) the insistence upon the universal claim of Christianity over earthly life, (2) the resulting doctrine that all that life must at least be capable of entering God’s King- dom, (3) readiness to use with prudence more or less ‘ worldly ’ means to further the establishment of that Kingdom. It is perhaps the third of these THE KINGDOM OF GOD uo values which appears in principle to be most disputable. Yet hardly any Christians of to-day reject political and legislative method entirely, whether it be the legal machinery of the State or that of the Church, which they desire to employ. Most Christians of all schools certainly agree on a strong legislative programme in regard to slavery, the drink evil, gambling, divorce and many other such questions. It is when we come to questions of economic legislation (wages, housing, etc.) and international affairs, that opinion is so sharply divided, and we are so often told that the Church or its representatives go outside their sphere alto- gether in attempting to recommend any political course of action on religious grounds. We must not permit ourselves to forget, however, the very real and characteristic value which the Protestant conception of the Kingdom, with its other-worldly and individualistic bias, undoubtedly represents. It stands heroically for that essential spirituality of mind and outlook which is not at the mercy of organizations, num- bers or statistics, and, knowing that it is quality that counts, not quantity, is content to be rejected in this world, that it may win the world to come. As the thought of Dean Inge so clearly illustrates, it is in this matter Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, which is the heir of the Platonic aloofness from the mass-movements and organiz- ing methods of the day. To the Protestant it is 100 THE KINGDOM OF GOD the individual’s hold on God that alone matters in the end. God saves by the few, as well as by the many, not necessarily because the faithful few govern the course of future history, but because they have their hearts and their treasure in the eternal world which is able to put history itself to shame, if time rejects eternity. Christian Pro- testantism may go beyond Plato in reminding us that there was a time when the true Kingdom and rule of God was represented on earth by one solitary Man condemned to a criminal’s death. All the scheming of ecclesiastical politicians is impotent beside the lonely figure on the Cross, and even the enthusiasm of popular movements may mean no more than a shouting of Hosanna before a Saviour already misunderstood and soon to be forsaken. It is better for Christians to stand alone and be crucified with their Master, than to seek to establish His rule over the kingdoms of this world by methods to which He Himself refused to stoop. Perhaps the greatest need of modern thought is a philosophy which could combine the real values in both these different ways of seeking the King- dom of God. Possibly a not unfruitful line of reflection may be suggested as follows. The task of Christianity is to make this whl earth fit for the next world. It is an other-worldly heaven for which it must be made fit. The spiritual values of eternity must always be put THE KINGDOM OF GOD 101 absolutely first; and it cannot be too strongly asserted that their strength and authority do not depend upon the numbers or worldly influence of those who seek them, and that they are able to win their greatest victories through apparent defeat. Yet it is the whole earth, and all its life, which must be won for heaven. Nothing may contract itself out of God’s rule. There is no essential aspect or activity of natural life, however secular or commonplace, which is not good enough at least to be redeemable, and capable of receiving the sanctifying grace which flows from God’s Incarnation. No rigid separation between the religious and the secular must be tolerated. That which is truly religious can only express the ulti- mate meaning, purpose and end of what is secular —just as Sunday expresses the meaning, purpose and end of all the days of every week. Again, everything in space and time that through space and time is made fit for eternity becomes partaker in the eternal world, and even through decay and death, which are the law of the spatio- temporal world, is restored in all its essential value. St. John’s inspired insight concludes the New Testament with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth as the final goal of history. In so far as we succeed in establishing Christ’s rule in this present sphere of our earthly life, we are sharing the creative work of God and making things which are capable of rising again from 102 THE KINGDOM OF GOD death, and taking their place in the heavenly earth which belongs properly to the other world. There may be, and there have been, various motives for the missionary work of the Christian Church upon earth. Sometimes the motive has been the desire to save something more out of a wreck doomed to destruction by the forces of evil which are overwhelming it. Sometimes it has been the desire to herald and to advance the reign of Christ upon the earth itself. Other-worldly Christianity has been inspired by the first motive, evolutionary Christianity by the second. Pos- sibly the noblest motive of all is the passion to share and to serve the creative purpose of God, to make something on earth and out of earth, which is fit to be the eternal object of God’s love. To make good souls, good in themselves and in their col- lective fellowship, is the highest end of such missionary labour for men. But we need not limit it even by such a definition. Surely the artist, the musician and the craftsman are in their degree God’s missionaries to the world of matter. They show how a beauty and a worth, which manifest some reflection of eternity, may leave a spiritual impress even on the solid clay, and make even thin air the firm foundation of their dwelling- place. Finally, how can we hope to convert to Christ the various separated and independent spheres of human activity, how can we elicit or express in THE KINGDOM OF GOD 103 these the eternal values of love, righteousness, rationality and beauty, which have their source in the one God whom all must serve ? First, we must resolutely unify our standard of values. Here Plato may be to some extent our tutor, and the best of the mediaeval Popes an example. We must not admit that anything in the last resort can be really good art, good politics, good business, good science, which is not also good Christianity. If in the eyes of the world it is good business to pursue a course of action which does not serve the purpose of God for society, or good art to produce that which is degrading to the morality of men, then the world is wrong, not merely in the moral sense, but also in the sense that its judgment is mistaken. Good is funda- mentally and ultimately one, and it means that which is in accordance with the will of God revealed in Christ. There can ultimately be no true discoveries of science which prevent our believing in God’s love, and no real economic laws which make it impossible for men to live and work to God’s glory. But having without compromise laid down this principle, we must go on to renounce as clearly all attempt to bring back the various departments of secular life under the sway of any ecclesiastical or technically ‘religious’ authority. Plato was wrong in thinking that the philosophers, and they alone, could rule in other spheres. And mediaeval 104. THE KINGDOM OF GOD clericalism was guilty of a precisely similar mistake. The revolt of the modern world from organized religion is the measure of that delusion. There is a true sense in which Christianity is a much wider thing than religion. In the narrow and technical sense religion is indeed one depart- ment of life, not concerned with our whole be- haviour towards God, which is all life, but with that part of our behaviour wherein God is the central object of our consciousness. The fact that this is the highest part of our life does not make it the whole. On earth it cannot be the whole. And, in this relatively narrow and depart- mental sense of the word, religion has much to learn as to method from other spheres of action, just as those other spheres must learn their ulti- mate aim and significance from religion. That is the moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Our Lord seems habitually to have been as much concerned that the children of light should make their religion business-like, as that the children of this world should bring religion into their business. Wemay develop thisteaching. Christi- anity would have us learn religious lessons from business, art, politics, and science, lessons which they can only teach if they are themselves rela- tively independent of ‘ religious’ authority. Christianity, on the other hand, covers the whole of life, and within it there must be these relatively independent spheres of human activity. ‘THE KINGDOM OF GOD 105 It is for the experts in each sphere, being Christians and therefore religious men, to say what in their © own sphere Christianity demands. It is extremely difficult to define exactly what the limits of the technically ‘religious’ or ecclesiastical authority ought to be. That it has its own legitimate sphere is manifest from history, in spite of modern efforts to abolish it. Workers in various depart- ments of secular life must be given some clear idea of what that religion is which they are called upon in divers manners to interpret and apply; and we must not forget that the undefeated majesty of the central dogmas of the Christian faith has been preserved for us by an ecclesiastical tradition jealously clung to often in face of great intellectual odds. Yet not less manifest has been the failure of pious ecclesiastics as judges of what is right and wrong in fields of activity to which they are neces- sarily strangers. The ghastly mistakes made in such cases as those of Galileo and Darwin speak for themselves with a warning voice which it is folly toignore. And itis at least doubtful whether an ecclesiastical censorship of literature and art, or ecclesiastical pronouncements as to the right method of conducting industry or politics, can ever carry very serious weight. We must claim these various spheres of activity for Christ and for God; we must not admit that they belong to a world inherently alienated from religion. But what is needed for their conversion is the exercise 106 THE KINGDOM OF GOD not of a ‘religious’ authority from without, but of a Christian authority from within, operating through those who are themselves experts in the several departments. Thus, and apparently thus only, can the kingdoms of this world, kingdoms represented by occupations at least as much as by nationalities, at last bring their treasures into the Kingdom of God, and offer a willing service to the Church of Christ. EPILOGUE Iv has been already admitted that in the course of the foregoing pages the terms Catholicism and Protestantism had undergone considerable abuse. They have been employed not because they are really adequate, but because they seemed on the whole to be the best, and indeed the only, terms available. Even a certain measure of abuse of terms may be excused, if it is consistent with itself, if, that is, each term is used throughout in some one definable and coherent meaning. Can we now at the close of our discussion state clearly the one meaning which each of our terms, Catholi- cism and Protestantism, has borne throughout, and thus elucidate the one fundamental opposition between two types of Christianity, which lies beneath the various particular oppositions hitherto examined ? If we can succeed in this task, the general plan and results of our discussions may prove to have been right and fruitful in their interpretation of religious ideas, even though our nomenclature has been at fault. It was suggested in Lecture II that there are two types of image or analogy under which the relation of the physical to the spiritual, the earthly to the heavenly, the actual to the ideal, may be depicted. The first image is the relation of the 107 108 KPILOGUE act to its purpose, the second that of words to their meaning. When we use the first image, the physical or earthly or actual appears as the means whereby the spiritual or heavenly or ideal is effected or realizes itself. When we use the second image, the physical or earthly or actual appears as the symbol or sign wherein the spiritual or heavenly or ideal is represented and expressed. And the main inherent difference between the two kinds of relation is that the first is temporal, the second timeless. To say that an act effects its purpose is to say that the realization of the purpose is subsequent to the act, and also, prob- ably, to say that the purpose as unrealized idea was before the act. To say that a word or series of words has a certain meaning is to affirm a certain timeless relation between the words and that which they mean. This is obviously true of verbal assertions made in the present tense, e.g. that the earth is revolving round the sun. But it is no less true of assertions about the past, e.g. that the battle of Hastings was fought in the year 1066. Lor what the words mean is not just the actual battle of Hastings as an event of the past, but the fact that the battle of Hastings took place, which, as the thing meant, remains and will ever remain as true as it ever has been since the battle happened. Now the type of Christianity which we have called Catholic chiefly represents the relation of © KPILOGUE 109 the physical to the spiritual as similar to the relation of an act to its purpose, and therefore / emphasizes the importance of temporal process; _ the type of Christianity which we have called Protestant chiefly represents the relation of the physical to the spiritual as similar to the relation of words to their meaning, and therefore belittles the importance of temporal process. This distinction is actually true in fact of the types of Christian thought we have in mind. If we consider the Christian faith as a historical phenomenon we see how Catholicism has identified itself with the idea of a continuous development and growth of dogma, whereas Protestantism has sought to retain what it believes to be the original faith of Christians in a fixed and static form to which temporal evolution is an irrelevance. If we turn to the sacraments we find that there again Catholicism stresses the reality of a change which they actually effect, whereas Protestantism is inclined to limit their function to the declaration of an eternal truth. Even in regard to the Incar- nation itself the same difference reappears. Catholicism still sees in it primarily a great act of the Son of God which created a new type of human life upon the earth, while Protestantism, at least in its modern and developed forms, tends more and more to regard our Lord’s life purely as the revelation of a Deity eternally and statically the same even in its manward relations. Once 110 EPILOGUE more, in the individual Christian life and experience Catholicism sees an actual and infinitely graded development of the soul from earth toward heaven, a development continued even beyond the grave ; while Protestantism has sought either to divides all souls from the beginning into tlie two opposite, classes of saved and lostyor else at least to n- ¥ ; strate the artificial and illusory character “of Catholic gradings. This tendency of Protestant- « | ism to see in black and white only, and torignore all intermediate shades, may be very vario illustrated. As Troeltsch pointed out,! in earliest phase Protestantism identified ‘ the law of nature’ with ‘the law of God,’ whereas in many connections it has seemed rather to make the natural synonymous with evil. At first, again, it was inclined to rank the Old Testament serip- tures on exactly the same level as@the New; whereas recently much Liberal Protestantism of a popular kind has almost wished to rid the Bible of the Old Testament altogether. All this rejection of what is intermediate or in process of development has its philosophic root in a dis- paragement of time. Finally, Catholicism has for many centuries tended to identify the coming of the Kingdom with the gradually extending sway of an ecclesiastical organization, whereas modern Pro- testantism finds the true Kingdom only in the other world of eternity, and is relatively indifferent to what actually happens in earthly society as a whole. “ ~*~ 1 Protestantism and Progress, c. I. EPILOGUE 111 It is therefore not unnatural that the theologian who from our point of view most typically repre- sents the Protestantism of the present day, viz. Dean Inge, should identify himself whole-heartedly with Platonism; whereas the greatest modern exponent of the opposite Catholicism, Baron von ‘Hiigel, should display much greater sympathy with philosophies which seek to adopt the his- torical point of view. Indeed, philosophically considered, the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, in the sense we are giving to those terms, corresponds in some essential features to that between Platon- ism and those philosophies which stress the reality and value of history. Platonism is radically © unhistorical. To it the earthly and the physical is merely the imperfect representation and expres- sion of a perfect spiritual archetype in the heavens. The ‘ideal’ or archetypal world is eternally existent and complete in itself. Nothing essenti- ally can be added to it by its imperfect representa- tion on the earthly plane of space and time. The relation therefore of earthly things to heavenly is at best like that of words to the reality which they signify but do not otherwise in any way affect. Inevitably then to the Platonist it does not really matter whether or not the earthly sphere can be made a better expression of the heavenly than it now is, since in no case is the heavenly or real essentially affected by the failure or success of its earthly representation. And therefore again 112 EPILOGUE the earthly sphere with all its manifold imper- fection is bound to appear as a sort of irrelevant excrescence or appendage to the heavenly, an appendage which has no adequate raison d étre. From this point of view the inherent defect of Platonism is seen to be essentially the same as that of Protestantism. History does not matter. The course and the final result of all the strivings, the changes and chances, the successes and failures, which make up history, are not of any ultimate importance. ‘To see the insignificance of earth is the only true passport to heaven. In other words, earthly and outward things, just because their only positive relation to heavenly things is a relation of meaning, are in constant danger of becoming meaningless. Catholicism, on the other hand, has always refused to belittle the ultimate importance of what happens in time. It sees in history, whether of the individual or of the race or of the whole world, a succession of divine acts achieving a divine purpose, acts which use outward and earthly things as their instruments. Thus God is brought into space and time to do His will, heaven comes down to earth in order to realize itself. ‘ This world’ is organically related to ‘ the other.’ This point of view suggests that modernist philosophy of religion which is opposite to Platon- ism, namely, that which maintains that God’s creation is in every sense necessary to God, and EPILOGUE 113 that God can only realize Himself therein. This inference, of course, Catholicism has sternly rejected. It has retained Platonism so far as to insist on the timeless unchangeable identity and self-sufficiency of the Divine Being. Neverthe- ’ less for that very reason it finds itself involved in more apparent inconsistencies of logic than does Protestantism. If that which is heavenly really acts in and through space and time, and in par- ticular times and places, how do we not make it dependent upon space and time and subject to spatial and temporal limitations? This is the difficulty which always besets the philosophic upholder of Catholicism in every doctrine of a special act of God, whether in the sacraments, in the Church, or in the Incarnation itself. The Protestant philosopher may see no special act at all, but only what is to the human consciousness a specially revealing symbol of something outside the symbol itself, a something to which the symbol makes no difference. But with this the Catholic cannot be content. He wants to affirm, with the Jew, that on particular occasions God acts in space and time in such a way as to make things different afterward from what they were before, that He really uses external happenings as His effective instruments. In some way the par- ticular events of earth must really affect and effect, in divers and manifold manners and degrees, the Kingdom of God. H 114 KPILOGUE Perhaps we should start from the idea that, to our human vision at least, the true glory of heaven consists in the completed self-sacrifice which has conquered evil by passing through death to resurrection. The completed self-sacrifice issues in fulness of eternal life, but that life is ever characterized by a real act of sacrifice which by its inherent nature must take place under con- ditions of temporal limitation. The full eternal life contains the Cross, though it transcends it, and the Cross itself represents an act to which every limitation of what is earthly and outward is neces- sary. The birth, the life, the death, the resurrec- tion and ascension of the man Jesus Christ are truly and supremely the act of God, just because they alone represent and interpret to us the end and purpose of our created world of space and time. This whole world as knowable to man has been determined by God from its foundation not to be an end in itself, but to be an instrument in ful- filling the glory of heaven through the victory of self-sacrifice over evil. The whole course of evolu- tion is a story of life maintained and developed through vicarious suffering because of evil. It is because vicarious suffering is a law of earthly life, that that life is able to reflect the glory of love divine. Thus the story of our Lord’s life, in which vicarious suffering is perfect, is not only, as it were, a microcosm representing the funda- mental meaning of things, but is the history of KPILOGUE 115 One Who is identical with the love coming forth from God into the world and returning to Him when its work is complete. As soon as the sacrifice of the Son of Man is accomplished, He is seen to be seated at the right hand of God. The principle of self-sacrifice is then the only key to the understanding of the relation of earth to heaven. But we must be careful not to inter- pret self-sacrifice in too negative a sense. The good of earth, the life of nature, is a real good, to be entered into, enjoyed, used, spent and finally given up, in order that the good of heaven, the life eternal, may be won in the fulness which not only is constituted by the surrender, but also includes the restoration of all the true values created and realized on earth. If we regard the whole of history under the image of an act whereby the glory of heaven is fulfilled through the sacrifice of earth, the Incar- nation of our Lord, the sacraments of His Church, the experience of the individual and of the race, begin to fall into a true perspective. All are representative and declaratory in different manners and degrees of the ultimate nature of the whole ; but yet the whole is, in different manners and degrees, really and actually fulfilled through each. For the whole process of eternal salvation through sacrifice, which is represented in the Incarnation in the sacraments and in experience, is not some- thing which remains unchangeable outside them, 116 EPILOGUE but something which is taking place in and through them. Nevertheless time and history themselves can never contain or convey all of that which they are helping both to express and to effect. The origin and goal to which they point are in the world beyond, of which the portals are birth and death. It takes time to fulfil eternity, because the Cross is in the heart of the eternal. Nevertheless, because eternity includes and transcends time, that which is really and rightly effected in time always declares and represents the changeless nature of an eternal beyond itself. From the first point of view the relation between time and eternity is represented as itself temporal, since eternity is the cause and effect of time. From the second point of view the relation between time and eternity is represented as itself timeless, since time can only declare the eternal which already is. Each point of view by itself brings us to self-contradiction ; nor has the finite mind yet devised a logic which can reconcile the two. Yet towards that reconcili- ation Catholicism and Protestantism have made their characteristic contributions, and will make them yet more fully in proportion as each is able © to recognize in the other a different operation of the One Spirit Who, in spite of our blindness, reveals and fulfils Himself in both. INDEX ALEXANDER, Prof., 46 n. Aristotle, 76 f. Atonement, the, 34 f. Authority, ecclesiastical, 21, 50 ff, 103 ff. BEHAVIOURISM, 46 x., 47-50, 55- 58. Berkeley, Bp. See Idealism. CATHOLICISM, meaning of term, viet. —— its connection with principle of development, 12-15, 21 ff. —— puts conduct first, 39-41, 54- 61, —— its relation to realism and behaviourism, 44-52. —— and psychology of conscious, 74 f. and original sin,'75-77. —— its recognition of natural goodness, '79-82. —— its affinity {with Socialism, 97 f. —— attaches importance to time and history, 108-116. —— See also Sacraments, Papacy, Incarnation, Atonement, Mod- ernism. Christian Science, 25. Clericalism, 90 f, 104. Conscience, and the instincts, 68 f. Conversion, 59, 78 f. Coué, M. Emile, 49. sub- Cross, philosophic significance of the, 101, 114 ff. Erasmus, 92. Eucharistic offering, ments. See Sacra- God and the Supernatural, 76. HaprieExp, Dr. J. A., 80 f. Hugel, Baron F. von, 22, 79 n, Lilt; Iprauism, philosophic, 41-47. Incarnation, the, 20 f, 35 f, 114 f. Inge, Dr. W. R., 99, 111. Instincts, the, 67 ff. Laissez-faire, economic doctrine of, 98. Lake, Dr. Kirsopp, 16. Liberal Protestantism, 8-12, 34. MILLENNIUM, the, 86, 88 f. Modernism, 12-16, 112f. Mysticism, 41, 44, 54 ff, 61 f. Newmay, Cardinal, 12, 22. Papacy, mediaeval, 5, 89-91, 103. Plato and Platonism, 41 ff, 76 f, 84, 103, 111 f. Pragmatism, 45 n. Protestantism, meaning of term, vy, £ 117 118 Protestantism, its appeal to origins, 5f, 18f. —— its individualism, 6-8, 10-12, 19f, 97f. and Bible, 8-10, 110. —— its conservatism, 21 f. —— puts consciousness first, 39- 41, 44, 53, 77f. —— its connection with idealism, 42-44, intensifies contrasts, 75, 79 ff, 110. —— its otherworldliness, 92-95, 98-100. —— its disparagement of time and history, 109, 116. See also Liberal Protestantism, Conversion, Reformation, Rena- scence, Sacraments, Incarnation, Atonement. Psycho-analysis, 65, 71 f, 77f, 81f. Reauisy, 45 2. INDEX Reformation, the, 5 ff, 33, 91 ff. Renascence, the, 91 f. Reunion, 36-38. Russell, Hon. Bertrand, 65 7. SACRAMENTS, declaratory and in- strumental significance of, 26 ff, 107 ff. —— administration of, 30-32. —— and Eucharistic doctrine, 33 f. St. Augustine, 73, 89. St. Paul and St. John contrasted, 40 ff. Satisfaction as test of desire, 70 ff. Shakespeare, 92. Sin, original, 75f. Socialism, 965 ff. Socrates, 77. TroEttscu, Prof. Ernst, v, 7 2., 92, 110. Tyrrell, Fr. George, 16 n. Printed in Great Britain by T, and A. ConsTaeLe Lp. at the University Press, Edinburgh “¥ vrtrge cata - : F en hey ie ! 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