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 The returning tide of faith 
 
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THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
The Returning Tide 
 
 of Faith 
 
 /BY 
 
 NEVILLE S. TALBOT, D.D., M.C. 
 
 BISHOP OF PRETORIA 
 
 SOMETIME FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 AND FORMERLY ASSISTANT CHAPLAIN-GENERAL 
 
 New York Chicago 
 
 Fleming H, Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1923, by 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELE COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
CECIL MARY 
 
 EVER-BELOVED 
 

 1 
 
" We looked for peace, but no good came; and 
 for a time of healing, and behold dismay! ” 
 
 Jeremiah xiv. 19. 
 
 “He that hateth his brother is in the darkness, 
 and walketh in the darkness, and knowetli not 
 whither he goeth, because the darkness hath 
 blinded his eyes. 
 
 “ He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God 
 is love. 
 
 “He that abideth in love abideth in God, and 
 God abideth in him 
 
 1 John ii. 11, iv. 8 and 16. 
 
/ 
 
 \ 
 
 
Preface 
 
 T HIS book is put out in the hope that it may 
 help the “ average man ” in the vital matters 
 of faith. These days of confused thought 
 and disintegrating tradition afflict him severely. 
 Of ter—as was most vividly apparent in the war— 
 he has but the vaguest notion of what the Christian 
 Faith is. Often he is the helpless victim of veri¬ 
 table caricature of that Faith, a caricature deriving 
 from deeply wrong conceptions of God. Yet with¬ 
 out a robust and tested faith he is the more captive 
 to himself and to his passions, the more easily 
 swayed by the lying and cruel habits of our semi- 
 pagan and largely Godless civilisation. He cannot, 
 as so many of our race have done in the past, 
 merely live off the capital of inherited instincts. 
 For that capital has run or is running out. He 
 cannot—he should not—merely swallow old tradi¬ 
 tion on authority. He must understand. He must 
 understand that authority bids him receive. 
 
 The “ average man/’ in his misty-mindedness, 
 stands in manifest danger of being exploited by one 
 or other of the many cults and religious move¬ 
 ments which have sprung up like weeds all the 
 world over, not least in South Africa, where this 
 book has been written. Some of them are of the 
 most irrational and dangerously emotional kind. 
 The truth is that we live in a time of the recurrence 
 
 11 
 
12 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 of “ religion.” And, as history abundantly proves, 
 “ religion ” may do much to add fuel to the natural 
 folly, credulity and superstition of mankind. The 
 hopes of scientific men not so long ago (who were 
 jealous for the rationality of the race), that “ relig¬ 
 ion ” would be outgrown, were not wholly unjusti¬ 
 fied. But they have not been fulfilled. The floods 
 of “ religion ” have over-topped the dykes, which 
 agnostic science threw up during last century in 
 order to reclaim as much religious swamp as it 
 could. Odd as it will seem to many, it is clear that 
 the Christian Church, if she knows her business, 
 will have again to be the guardian and champion 
 of rationality in faith in the face of irrationalism 
 in religion. 
 
 I wonder whether she does know her business ? 
 Is she ready boldly to present the Faith to those 
 who, under modern conditions, are willing to think 
 about it ? Certainly the Church of the Province of 
 South Africa, to which I belong, is not nearly so 
 well developed as a teaching Church as she is as the 
 organizer of institutional religion. She is well 
 developed on the side of the ministry of the Sacra¬ 
 ments. She needs reinforcement in the ministry of 
 the Word. The whole Church needs to think out 
 her message again fearlessly. She must claim the 
 discriminating inspiration of the Holy Spirit that 
 she may re-interpret the revelation, of which she is 
 the trustee. This involves risks, but they are life- 
 giving risks. To refuse to take them means 
 
 suicide. The Church need not fear for the truth. 
 
 ■ 
 
 It will not dissolve in the process of being thought 
 
PREFACE 
 
 13 
 
 through. It will rather be renewed in power for 
 the salvation of the world. 
 
 I publish this rough-hewn volume because its con¬ 
 tents seem, so far as I can judge, to stand the severe 
 strains of modernity. If that is true the credit is 
 not mine. It is due to some of the greatly brave 
 men in the last generation. If any credit is due, I 
 ascribe it with unfading gratitude to that most be- 
 • loved master of theology, Henry Scott Holland. 
 
 Books about Christianity abound, and yet it is 
 wonderfully hard to know what to put into the 
 hands of some one who says, “ I’m in a muddle. 
 What shall I read? ” I could wish that this book 
 was simpler and more popular than it is. Yet I 
 dare to hope that it may meet the needs of some of 
 the folk who are troubled or confused in their faith. 
 For the substance of the book has appeared, in 
 weekly portions, in the Johcmnesburg Rand Daily 
 Mail. Johannesburg is, I suppose, not famous as 
 either a producer or consumer of theology. But it 
 is an encouraging sign of the times that one of its 
 daily journals should have allowed space in its col¬ 
 umns for theology. I should not have published 
 this book but for the welcome and interest with 
 which “ men in the street ” in South Africa re¬ 
 ceived those theological articles. I should like to 
 add that in putting the material into book form I 
 have adhered to my original purpose of not treating 
 of controversial subjects. There is nothing, there¬ 
 fore, in this book on the great and primary subject 
 of the Sacraments. 
 
 There only remafns to say a word about the title 
 
14 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 of the book. It was suggested by Matthew Ar¬ 
 nold's “ Dover Beach.” 
 
 The sea of faith 
 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 
 Retreating to the breath 
 
 Of the night wind down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 Such was the verdict of the Victorian poet. But 
 the ebb-tide of faith has turned. The Christian 
 Faith is coming again. Such —despite the many 
 disappointments and perplexities of to-day—is my 
 conviction. I long to share it with such men as I 
 learned to love and admire in the war. To them I 
 commend these pages in all their crudity. I pray 
 that they may help many to the truth, and that the 
 truth may make them free. 
 
 NsvillS S. Talbot. 
 
 Pretoria, Transvaal. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. What of the: Night? . . .17 
 
 II. The: Plight of the: Churches . 22 
 
 III. The Great Question . . .27 
 
 IV. The Jew to the Rescue . . 33 
 
 V. The Religious Expert . . 39 
 
 VI. The Invincible Optimist . . 45 
 
 VII. Behold the Man—I . . .52 
 
 VIII. Behold the Man—II . . .58 
 
 IX. The Great Refusal . . .64 
 
 X. The Crucial Question . .71 
 
 XI. The New Creation . . .77 
 
 XII. The World in Chains . . 83 
 
 XIII. The World Set Free . . . 90 
 
 XIV. The Good News . . . .97 
 
 XV. What Think Ye of Christ? . 103 
 
 XVI. God and Man . . . .110 
 
 XVII. Omnipotence—I . . .116 
 
 XVIII. Omnipotence—II . . . 121 
 
 XIX. The Atonement—I . . . 128 
 
 XX. The Atonement—II . . . 134 
 
 15 
 
16 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 XXL The Church: Is It Necessary? . 141 
 
 XXII. Christ and the Church . . 147 
 
 XXIII. The New Israee . . . .153 
 
 XXIV. The Second Coming— I . .159 
 
 XXV. The Second Coming— II . . 165 
 
 XXVI. Liee Here and Beyond . .172 
 
 XXVII. Liee Aeter Death . . .178 
 
 XXVIII. Heee— I . . . . .184 
 
 XXIX. Heee— II.192 
 
 XXX. The Virgin-Birth . . .199 
 
 XXXI. The Hoey Trinity . . . 205 
 
 XXXII. The Gospee and Liee: The 
 
 Kingdom oe God . . .212 
 
I 
 
 WHAT OF THE NIGHT? 
 
 W ATCHMAN, what of the night?” 
 
 “ The watchman ”—irritating old fel¬ 
 low!—“only said, ‘Though the morn¬ 
 ing will come, the night cometh also/ ” 
 
 His discouraging prophecy seems to have come 
 true. During the war men looked for peace as men 
 in fever look for the morning. The morning did 
 come, but it was quickly succeeded by night. Dark¬ 
 ness has fallen on many of the bright hopes con¬ 
 ceived during the war. And in the darkness gloomy 
 forebodings are heard. “ Europe is rattling into 
 barbarism,” says one: “ Europe is dying,” says 
 another. And cynics are making hay while the 
 sun does not shine. 
 
 Well, if things are dark, let us look into the dark 
 and face the facts. It is madness merely to try to 
 forget or neglect them. ’Ware the ostrich habit. 
 We have tried that too often. 
 
 The first thing to be seen yields comfort. Cold 
 comfort, perhaps, yet comfort. It is the fact that 
 if after-war days were not difficult and perilous, 
 things would be worse and more hopeless than they 
 are. For if war could bring a better world to the 
 birth, then war would be a blessing. It would be 
 creative. But it is not. It is a destructive curse. 
 We did not see this while the fighting was on. We 
 
 17 
 
18 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 see it now and we have to learn the lesson. There 
 may be worse things than war, but that does not 
 alter the fact that war is evil. 
 
 The second thing to be seen is that we must make 
 a clean cut with the idea that the troubles of the 
 world are simply to be put clown to Germany. That 
 idea was good enough for war-propaganda, but we 
 know now that it simply will not do. 
 
 We must own up to the fact Germany had no 
 monopoly in the ideal of national self-interest. She 
 was only more brutal, unscrupulous and thorough¬ 
 going than her neighbours in attempting to 1 attain 
 her ideal. The truth is that a widely-spread epi¬ 
 demic of selfishness came to its crisis in the 
 frantic attempt of Germany to put “ Deutschland 
 iiber alles.” 
 
 The same disease, in less violent and offensive 
 form, pervades the whole of modern civilisation. 
 Ask any man of business in his candid moments 
 and see whether he does not admit that modern 
 business is dominated by the pursuit of self- 
 interest. The Victorian age made a god of the man 
 who—in Mr. Kidd’s phrase—was “ efficient in the 
 promotion of his own interest,” and we have come 
 in for the consequences, Germany brought the 
 competitive individualism of a century to a head. 
 Whether in the market-place or in international 
 diplomacy it has been cut-throat competition which 
 has been dominant in life. True, the war put a 
 moratorium on this deadly system of ideas. The 
 bright lining to its darkness was that, with ruthless 
 insistence, it drew men, classes and interests (less 
 
WHAT OF THE NIGHT? 
 
 19 
 
 the profiteers), from their race to get rich, and in- 
 spanned them to the service of a common end. But 
 it was only a moratorium, and the suspended sys¬ 
 tem of ideas has “ come again.” Many, therefore, 
 whether nations or individuals, who were drawn 
 out of themselves into> co-operation for a common 
 purpose, have flown apart and have resumed their 
 old pursuits. 
 
 Now there is not enough room in the modem 
 world for unbridled competition. And this is the 
 third thing to which we must attend. The world is 
 now a small place. In the course of two 1 or three 
 generations it underwent a remarkable process of 
 shrinkage. Scientific invention, applied to means 
 of communication, was the agent in the process. 
 The result is that the world is a small neighbour¬ 
 hood to-day, and this means the aggravation of the 
 rubs and jars which occur among neighbours. The 
 simple truth is that mankind has not adjusted itself 
 to its recently-narrowed circumstances. It desires 
 elbow-room and finds th!e same curtailed. No 
 wonder the Kaiser let fly that phrase about “ a place 
 in the sun.” It expresses the desire to expand. It 
 implies over-crowding. Hence the growth in in¬ 
 tensity of racial and national jealousies and an¬ 
 tagonisms. If one listens one can hear doors 
 banging all the world over, as nations bar each 
 other out. America excludes Japan, Australia 
 excludes China, South Africa excludes Asiatics 
 (and wishes it had never let any of them in), and 
 so forth. 
 
 Nor is there any sign that modern civilisation can 
 
20 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 make peace among the jostling crowd of motley 
 rivals and competitors which it has so lately knit 
 together. Its great instrument, of which it ex¬ 
 pected so much, namely, education, has had the dis¬ 
 concerting effect of stimulating national ambition 
 and race-consciousness. It goes like wine to the 
 head of younger folk among “ native ” peoples. It 
 upsets the old foundations of life among races who 
 are at many levels of development. It produces 
 unrest all over the globe. 
 
 And this process is now inevitable. For no 
 human power can hope to arrest the spread of ideas 
 in a world which is inseparably one. It is too late. 
 Why, the very air vibrates with wireless messages 
 overleaping what were vast distances. The world 
 is a network of arteries. Stop the circulation of 
 the arterial system of ships, ocean cables, wireless 
 stations, railways, aeroplanes, newspapers, books— 
 and the world in its different parts would be re¬ 
 duced to starvation and anarchy. 
 
 What then? We see the problem. The war as 
 such has bettered nothing. The ideas which pro- 
 * duced the war are still current. There is no room 
 for unlimited self-aggrandisement. The littleness 
 and oneness of the world geographically are acting 
 as irritants to minds aroused by education. 
 
 These are facts to' be faced and understood. 
 There is a power of remedy merely in understand¬ 
 ing the problems of life. Think what a long way 
 the understanding of the facts of a case carries a 
 good doctor. It means that he is half-way towards 
 dealing with the case. So with the facts to which 
 
WHAT OF THE NIGHT? 
 
 21 
 
 we have pointed. Our generation is faced by a 
 more difficult problem than any of its predecessors. 
 It is the aggravated problem of how all kinds of 
 people are to live together. We shall tackle it all 
 the better if we understand the facts underlying it. 
 This will be far more profitable than the indulgence 
 either in mutual recrimination or in the suggestion 
 that mankind is degenerate. Some would have us 
 believe that the present generation is worse than its 
 forbears. History, we believe, would rebut the 
 charge and act as a cordial to such drooping spirits. 
 Very recent history, moreover, has demonstrated 
 that reserves of unselfishness lie hidden in human 
 nature. Yet the understanding of facts and diffi¬ 
 culties will not go all the way. Things are not so 
 simple as all that. Least of all human nature. Its 
 problems are not solved by being understood. Such 
 understanding will make plainer than ever what is 
 the supreme need of men and nations. It is the 
 need for an end beyond their own interests. Some¬ 
 thing that will do all the time what the war in a 
 measure did for a time. Some one goal, the pur¬ 
 suit of which would pull the world together. Does 
 such a thing exist? We seem to hear a familiar 
 whisper—“ In sua voluntade e nostra pace” (In 
 God’s will is our peace). 
 
/ 
 
 II 
 
 THE PLIGHT OF TPIE CHURCHES 
 
 W HAT can unite the world? 
 
 The war bound a big part of the world 
 together for its special purposes. But, 
 since the Armistice, those who' were inspanned by 
 the war and pulled together to achieve victory have 
 tended to outspan and return to their former rival¬ 
 ries. Now, in a world which, thanks to science, has 
 been greatly reduced in size, the friction of compet¬ 
 ing individuals, classes and nations grows inevi¬ 
 tably more acute. What, then, can pull them 
 together in peace? Is there a common object for 
 their devotion other than their own interests? 
 
 “ Ideals/’ says some one—“ a common ideal, for 
 instance; the greatest good of the greatest number.” 
 
 That sounds all right. But then, ideals are dan¬ 
 gerous things. It is ideals—German, Bolshevist, 
 and so forth—which have ravaged or are ravaging 
 the world. Men, after all, are the makers of ideals. 
 And what happens is that ideals get coloured by the 
 ambitions and discords of their producers. Presi¬ 
 dent Wilson came over to Europe: as an idealist. 
 But his ideals simply stuck in the throat of M. 
 Clemenceau. It is true of ideals that “ one man’s 
 meat is another man’s poison.” 
 
 Well, if ideals are not likely to unite mankind, 
 we come back to the question: “ Is there some one 
 
 22 
 
f 
 
 THE PLIGHT OF THE CHURCHES 23 
 
 goal the pursuit of which will pull the world to¬ 
 gether?” A common object or end; something 
 real, not ideal; something for man, not made by 
 man—does it exist ? That is the question. 
 
 Now this is a theological question. That sounds 
 alarming. But it is useless to be frightened by 
 mere words. And the fact remains that the clash 
 of men’s interests and ideals brings up the great 
 inquiry, whether or no the peace of the world is to 
 be found in God. If there is a God, then (unless 
 He be an idol) Fie is not made by man as are ideals. 
 Rather He is the supreme reality. And, if He has 
 a will, there would be the focus or centre for human 
 energies in all their rich variety. 
 
 Having got so far, we naturally turn to the 
 Church. We have reached the point where we may 
 expect that it should come in and have something 
 to say. But as we turn to the Church there is no 
 denying that it disappoints us. For, first, The 
 Church does not appear to exist, only a bewildering 
 number of Churches. If the trouble with the 
 world is discord, it seems to be the same with the 
 Church. 
 
 Religiously the world is as divided as it is in any 
 other respect. And this is true as regards the 
 Christian religion, let alone any others, Christian¬ 
 ity has become cut up in accordance with the secular 
 divisions of mankind. Nationality—to' take the 
 most glaring example—has used the resources of 
 Christianity to promote its own ends. Christianity 
 of a sort has been mixed with national aspirations 
 and religious ardour has inflamed patriotism. Ger- 
 
24 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 many, as usual, has been the most thoroughgoing 
 instance of this. It managed to hitch nearly all the 
 motive power of Lutheranism to the car of German 
 ambition. 
 
 But there are other instances not far to seek. It 
 is so-called Christian passion which burns and flares 
 in the hearts of men on either side of the fratricidal 
 struggle in Ireland. And in South Africa we have 
 our own object-lessons near to hand. The British 
 have their national form of Christianity. The 
 Dutch, perhaps still more, have theirs. Political 
 passions here are aggravated by religious animus. 
 The fact that men of both races are alike called by 
 the Name of Christ seems to afford no bond of 
 unity between them. While all around them are 
 masses of natives who are ever and again being 
 tempted to make some kind of Christian enthusiasm 
 the inspiration of native racialism. Such a divided 
 Christianity is terribly disappointing in face of a 
 divided world. 
 
 Secondly, the Churches are disappointing because 
 so much of their religion is apparently so remote 
 from life. Perhaps that is one reason why the 
 Churches have allowed their Christianity to be 
 exploited by nationalism and other interests. By 
 being employed to foment national and racial feel¬ 
 ings Christianity has at any rate been made to count 
 in human affairs here on earth. Whereas, other¬ 
 wise, it appears to be concerned with death rather 
 than life, with another world rather than this 
 world. “ Pour etre un Chretien, il faut penser 
 toujours a la mort ” (To be a Christian one must 
 
THE PLIGHT OF THE CHURCHES 25 
 
 for ever be thinking of death). So says a Roman 
 Catholic devote in a French novel. 
 
 On the other hand the perusal of the hymn-books 
 of the Evangelical Churches would lead an impar¬ 
 tial observer to believe that Christianity was chiefly 
 an elaborate system of insurance against the life to 
 come. Nothing was more striking in the war than 
 the currency of the notion that Christianity had far 
 more to do with death than life. Nor can it be 
 denied that to men absorbed in modem industrial¬ 
 ism and enterprise the Christian system of ideas 
 seems to be a far-away tale. A voice from Amer¬ 
 ica puts it brutally: “Jesus Christ cuts no ice in 
 California.” 
 
 Of course, it takes two to make a quarrel. And 
 it is only fair to say that if modern “ business ” 
 feels that Christianity is remote from it, it is itself 
 partly to blame. Indeed, it has turned its back on 
 Christian ethic and on a great deal of common 
 morality too. That was part of the doctrine of 
 “ laissez faire ” on which so much of modern civil¬ 
 isation since the industrial revolution was reared. 
 This was the philosophy which claimed the right to 
 let things rip, to let competition decide industrial 
 conditions, to let so-called laws of supply and de¬ 
 mand operate naturally, and so forth. But that is 
 another story. 
 
 Anyhow, as we look to Christianity and the 
 Churches things seem disappointing. 
 
 Yet it is useless to be put off by disappointment. 
 We must be out to face the facts. The need of the 
 world must keep us to the task. It is a spiritual 
 
26 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 need. That is the plain truth. There are no such 
 things as merely political or economic or material 
 questions. The great problems of our day can 
 neither be stated nor solved in terms of money only. 
 There are problems of human character. For man 
 is the measure of every problem and he is a spirit¬ 
 ual animal. And if this is so, then we must turn to 
 the spiritual authorities and swallow our disap¬ 
 pointment at the state in which they seem to be, and 
 press in on them and rouse them to help us. 
 
 Evidently the need of the world is for God. That 
 is what the Churches ought to tell us about. Per¬ 
 haps they have been so busy with this, that, or the 
 other that they have forgotten this one thing need¬ 
 ful. Probably they have come to take God for 
 granted. But that is just what cannot be done to¬ 
 day. It is belief in God which is the very difficulty 
 of the hour. To feel more or less religious every 
 now and then is comparatively easy. But really to 
 believe in God and in His ordering of life in this 
 strangely-tortured world—that is the rub. 
 
 What is God? What is His character? What is 
 Pie doing in face of the world’s suffering and sin? 
 
 “ Come, padre, what is God like ? It is your 
 job—you ought to know ! ” 
 
 So said a soldier in France. He was the spokes¬ 
 man for a multitude. He felt something of the 
 world’s need. And he turned to the Church with 
 this main question. It is a truly Christian thing to 
 do. For was it not said: “ Ask and ye shall re¬ 
 ceive, seek and ye shall find ” ? 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 T HE world needs a centre of unity. In itself 
 it is disastrously like a big dog-figlit. There 
 is snuffling and barking and biting all over 
 the globe. The daily tale of human suffering and 
 misery would drive us all mad if we were really 
 sensitive to it and not hardened by its familiarity. 
 But we are sufficiently aware of what is going on 
 to turn every now and then and ask the great ques¬ 
 tion—What is God doing? 
 
 There is no< doubt that that is the main religious 
 result of the war. It drove through all the easily 
 comfortable philosophies and made multitudes of 
 people feel the pain of the riddle of the world. 
 Shoulders, previously unweighted, felt “ the burden 
 of the mystery of this unintelligible world.” 
 
 That was certainly true of war days, though 
 doubtless many people have since contrived to for¬ 
 get. But, on the other hand, many men during the 
 war were too' busy to pursue the questions which 
 they knew were alive in their minds. It is good 
 policy for a soldier to suppress thought and emo¬ 
 tion. The historic sergeant was right when he said 
 to an officer, “ It would never do, sir, to let the men 
 take this ’ere war seriously.” 
 
 But all the same a mass of perplexed thought 
 was in men’s hearts on all the fronts. And prob- 
 
 27 
 
28 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ably there was still more pain locked away in the 
 hearts of folk at home. And now, in some degree 
 at any rate, this repressed perplexity of mind and 
 pain of soul have been finding expression. Many 
 of course, whether combatants or non-combatants, 
 have settled down and are jogging along again and 
 refuse to go on asking the questions of which they 
 felt the pressure in war-time. But that means that 
 a lot of folk have got skeletons in the cupboards of 
 their minds. The doors may be locked and their 
 owners very likely are not “ bothering.” But the 
 skeletons are there. 
 
 That is one reason why the good folk, clerical 
 and lay, who fondly hoped that the returned soldier 
 would be converted by the war and come home and 
 be found in his place in church, were greatly disap¬ 
 pointed. An effort in the Diocese of London to 
 welcome “ the boys ” back to the parish churches, 
 after the Armistice, met with an almost wholesale 
 lack of response. The truth being that “ the boys ” 
 had been in hell and, oddly enough, hadn’t learnt 
 much about God there. The truth being that the 
 war-experience was widely destructive of faith, at 
 any rate of that which passed for faith. And yet 
 the fact that great questions have stirred in many 
 a mind—even if they have been locked away again 
 in cupboards of forgetfulness—is a great ground 
 of hope. 
 
 For it is faith which asks questions—that has 
 generally been unrecognised. Men have connected 
 faith not so much with candid questioning as with 
 the credulous acceptance of answers. People have 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 29 
 
 been encouraged to think that faith should be care¬ 
 fully wrapped in cotton-wool and kept cosily re¬ 
 moved from the hard knocks of real life. They 
 have been taught to take doses of faith as of a 
 drug which benumbs the mind. Such faith is not 
 the real article, but a counterfeit. The real article 
 is more truly to be seen alive in the sincere per¬ 
 plexity of those who have been “ up against it.” 
 The man who sees a great problem and feels the 
 pain of it is at any rate not indifferent. He is, so 
 far, alive in his mind and soul. Certainly more 
 alive than those who munch their daily meals like 
 cows and put all thinking as far away from, them¬ 
 selves as possible. Certainly more alive than the 
 fatalist who takes everything as it comes and asks 
 no questions. 
 
 So there is this real encouragement to be set 
 against all the disillusionment of war-time and 
 after-war days. Namely this, that perhaps more 
 widely than ever before in history there is enough 
 faith in people’s hearts to make them ask the ques¬ 
 tion—Why? 
 
 Why, if there is a God, is His world as it is? 
 
 An admiral once retorted to a parson’s offer of 
 religious advice, “ Yes, padre, you talk about relig¬ 
 ion—but what I say is, 4 Cook at the world! ’ 
 Why, if one of my captains kept his ship in the 
 condition in which the Almighty seems to keep 
 the world, I’d sack him in a week! ” 
 
 That is the point. If there is a God—Why? 
 
 Now here we have reached the popular expres¬ 
 sion of thoughts which have evolved for long in the 
 
30 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 minds of thinkers. Indeed the sort of dismay, 
 which every now and then clouded the conscious¬ 
 ness of soldiers in France, is a very old thing. 
 India, for instance, has felt it all down the ages. 
 Ever and again it has despaired of belief in the 
 goodness of God owing to the badness of the world. 
 It has been driven by experience to find dismal 
 refuge in a belief in Nothingness. 
 
 The Greeks were a very vital people and great 
 lovers of life. But all the more are their beauti¬ 
 fully-expressed thoughts and poetry tinged by 
 melancholy. Their greatest thinker, Plato, had 
 sorrowfully to own himself beaten by the facts of 
 this world. In his great philosophy he can only 
 say that this actual order of things is a world of 
 shadows. Goodness and truth and beauty are not 
 here but elsewhere. They are in an ideal world—in 
 heaven. He could not bring together the actual and 
 the ideal. 
 
 And latterly, during last century, this pessimism 
 has been very rife. Many thinkers during the 
 eighteenth century were able to take a strangely 
 rose-coloured view of things. They held that the 
 goodness of God, the great Architect, and the 
 benevolence of His scheme of things were perfectly 
 demonstrable. But all through last century great 
 and sensitive minds felt very differently. It is too 
 big a story to tell fully here. But anyone can see 
 what is meant if he turns up his Tennyson. He 
 was a man who longed to think the best of God 
 and the world. He was naturally fond of beauty 
 and rose-colour. But his most lasting (because 
 
THE GREAT QUESTION 
 
 31 
 
 most candid) thought is that which, rises out of his 
 heart as wrung by the problem of the world’s pain. 
 His greatest language is not that of his almost 
 matchless lyrics, but that of 
 
 An infant crying in the night, 
 
 An infant crying for the light 
 And with no language but a cry. 
 
 For he asks: 
 
 Are God and Nature then at strife, 
 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 
 So careless of the single life; 
 
 That I, considering everywhere 
 Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
 
 And finding that of fifty seeds 
 She often brings but one to bear, 
 
 I falter where I firmly trod, 
 
 And falling with my weight of cares 
 Upon the great world’s altar stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God, 
 
 I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what I feel is Lord of all, 
 
 And faintly trust the larger hope. 
 
 There’s the great question poignantly put. Be¬ 
 hind it lies the invasion of eighteenth-century and 
 Early Victorian optimism by the grim influences of 
 Darwinism. Huxley put the same thing when he 
 said that so far from Nature being the divinely- 
 ordered ally of men’s moral ideals, it was “ the 
 headquarters of the enemy.” 
 
 And this is the sort of thing which the thinkers 
 have felt very deeply. It has given them what the 
 
32 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Germans call Weltschmerz; which, being inter¬ 
 preted, means—an acute stomach-ache about things 
 in general. Mr. Wells has suffered thus often 
 enough. It is now almost epidemic. 
 
 We have laid bare the great question—it is the 
 question of God. It is a very old question, asked 
 by the ancients, asked recently by the few, now 
 alive in the minds of average men. 
 
 But we will stick to it that there’s hope in the 
 mere fact that it is so alive. 
 
IV 
 
 THE JEW TO THE RESCUE 
 
 W HEN great questions are being asked—and 
 that they are has been already established 
 in these chapters—there is no doubt about 
 the quarter to which we should turn for help. 
 
 It is to the Jew. 
 
 This will seem surprising to many. “If it were 
 a matter of ‘ raising the wind ’ ”—so the majority 
 of people might be heard to mutter! And there is 
 no doubt that the modern reputation of the Jew for 
 money-making and money-lending and so forth 
 has, in the common estimation of men, eclipsed his 
 ancient significance. 
 
 Yet once the primary problems of existence are 
 felt to be urgent by any sensitive mind, its owner 
 will find comrades in his trouble among that extra¬ 
 ordinary people, the record of whose spiritual ex¬ 
 perience is to be found in the Old Testament. 
 Among all the peoples who have produced a great 
 literature, the Jews are first in seizing and stating 
 the fundamental issues of life. 
 
 Of course this will never be appreciated by any¬ 
 one who allows his mind to lie snowed-under by 
 what he learnt in Divinity lessons at school. A 
 great number of people have been fatally familiar 
 with a variegated assortment of odds and ends of 
 s Old Testament knowledge. They have been led to 
 
 33 
 
34 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 believe—or to think that they ought to believe*— 
 that all the Scriptures contain strict historical truth 
 and that all the characters and stories in Scripture 
 are edifying and exemplary. Thus they have been 
 asked to accept a Sunday-school version of Jacob 
 who, by the slimmest of dodges, swindled Esau out 
 of his birthright, or of Jael, the wife of Heber the 
 Kenite, driving the nail through the temple of the 
 confiding and sleeping Sisera. 
 
 So, too, they have thought that they must think 
 of God as delighted with the massacre of Amale- 
 kites—men, women and children. They have 
 thought that it was essential to a Christian to be¬ 
 lieve that the world was made by God in six suc¬ 
 cessive days. They have a confused memory of 
 lists of kings of Israel and Judah—a memory col¬ 
 oured by a schoolboy’s doubt whether he could ever 
 satisfy an examiner as to the separate individuality 
 of Joash, Jehoash and Jehoahaz! 
 
 Such are a few of what Carlyle called “ Jewish 
 old clothes,” which lie about in the minds of a great 
 number of people as in a very second-hand clothes 
 shop. It is by no means an exhaustive list. It does 
 not include the marvellous incidents of the speech 
 of Balaam’s ass, of Jonah’s sojourn in the whale, 
 or of the falling flat of Jericho’s walls at the blow¬ 
 ing of trumpets. But it is enough to account for 
 the fact that the Old Testament is almost the last 
 quarter to which many a man would turn for en¬ 
 lightenment if he is sincerely concerned with the 
 deep things of life. The Old Testament has, in 
 fact, been overspread in the common estimation of 
 
THE JEW TO THE RESCUE 
 
 35 
 
 men by a thick veil of boredom and incredulity. It 
 is generally and widely a closed book. It is an 
 element in school experience which men thankfully 
 leave behind them on attaining man’s estate. 
 
 Now nothing can avail here but a radical and 
 ruthless revision of beliefs or semi-beliefs about the 
 Old Testament. Minds must be swept clear of de¬ 
 posited lumber. Layers of accumulated and unim¬ 
 portant knowledge must be blown up and the debris 
 expelled from attention. 
 
 There has too often been a conspiracy of silence 
 on this whole matter among teachers of religion. 
 The faith of generations has been so closely inter¬ 
 mixed with the acceptance of the dogma of the 
 verbal and literal inspiration of the ancient Scrip¬ 
 tures, that preachers have hesitated to tell their 
 congregations that they must definitely face the 
 task of leaving that dogma behind. This hesitation 
 and fearfulness has had widespread and fatal ef¬ 
 fects. It has bred the belief that Christianity is in¬ 
 compatible with intellectual candour. A new start 
 must be made—new to a great mass of the general 
 public, but quite familiar to those who have given 
 their minds to the modern study of the Bible. It 
 would take a great many chapters in which to ex¬ 
 pound how rightly to read the Old Testament, and 
 in so doing to recover hold upon its quite primary 
 importance. 
 
 But one or two things can be stated broadly. 
 
 First, in the place of the dogma of inspired writ¬ 
 ings there must be substituted the recognition of 
 inspired men. God never wrote a book. No book 
 
36 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 was ever inspired. He wrote upon the hearts and 
 minds and consciences of living men. The accept¬ 
 ance of so many bits of printed truth must give 
 way to the understanding of a people’s continuous 
 experience. The Bible is a human as well as a 
 divine book. 
 
 Secondly, the centre of gravity, so to say, in the 
 story of the Jews’ experience must be shifted from 
 its earlier to its later stages. And this for several 
 reasons. The story of Jewish faith is the story of 
 a growth. It implies a process of development. 
 And in all growth and development what matters 
 is the later stages and not the earlier, the outcome 
 and not the origins, no matter how interesting the 
 latter may be. And in the case of Jewish experi¬ 
 ence it is certain that the stories and legends of 
 early times were only written down and interpreted 
 quite late in the history of the race. Some of the 
 parts of the Old Testament, which appear to tell 
 the history of the beginnings of things, consist of 
 folklore, inherited by the Jews in common with 
 other Semitic tribes, but used by them to be the 
 medium for expressing the great truths about God, 
 man and the world, which they had been taught in 
 the long school of historical experience. This is 
 best seen in regard to the early chapters of Genesis. 
 The material in them is derived from legend which 
 belonged to' the family of peoples of which the 
 Jews were a part. It has no claim whatever to be 
 scientific history. But it was wonderfully em¬ 
 ployed, adapted and expurgated by Jewish teachers, 
 during or after the exile in the sixth and following 
 
THE JEW TO THE RESCUE 
 
 37 
 
 centuries, for the purpose of conveying the con¬ 
 clusions to which life had brought them—about 
 God as the One creative spiritual reality, beside 
 whom all the idols of Babylon were as nought; 
 about the world as in itself good though marred by 
 evil; about man, as made for God, but nevertheless, 
 in fact, devoted to himself. To be still more spe¬ 
 cific, the story of the Fall has no claim whatever to 
 be a true account of what happened once upon a 
 time, but it is the verdict of the Jewish conscience 
 on life. The Jew found himself at war with him¬ 
 self, in an unnatural condition of internal discord, 
 made for God and for goodness, but in fact and in 
 present experience perpetually falling from his true 
 estate. The priestly writer who edited the story of 
 the Fall made it the vehicle of the most penetrating 
 comment on actual experience. It is psycholog¬ 
 ically perfect. It is daily verified by every mother's 
 son alive. 
 
 Thirdly, we must go> to the Jew for his interpre¬ 
 tation of history. If anyone begins again with his 
 Old Testament reading and—skipping the earlier 
 stories—makes a start at the eighth century B.C., 
 when Amos and the first Isaiah were facing the 
 political and social conditions of their day, he will 
 find himself in a quite modern world of interna¬ 
 tional politics. It is a world of great empires, sur¬ 
 rounding the little hill-peoples of Jerusalem and 
 Samaria—Egypt on the one hand, Assyria on the 
 other, of which the histories are now known to go 
 back for thousands of years before the time of 
 Amos. Amos and his contemporaries are in the 
 
38 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 full glare of historical times. He deals with a 
 world and its issues recognisably the same as ours. 
 He and his fellow-teachers and their people are in 
 possession of a faith—a certain way of interpreting 
 life. It doesn’t matter, relatively speaking, where 
 that faith came from. Its origins as a matter of 
 fact are veiled by the mists of antiquity. But there 
 is was, a spiritual activity alive in the hearts of 
 men. Not something securely written down and 
 infallibly certain, but something in process of being 
 made, as steel is made in a furnace. For this faith 
 was in the hearts of men who were “ up against it.” 
 They felt to the quick of their hearts the brutality 
 and contrariety of life and its actualities. And they 
 let us know in a matchless literature what they 
 thought and wondered and questioned. They faced 
 reality with a sensitive and living faith in God. 
 
 Hence out of their hearts there came the most 
 piercing cries of faith mingled with doubt, of long¬ 
 ing threatened by despair. They asked all the 
 questions. 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERT 
 
 A S soon as ever great questions are stirring 
 the Jew comes to his own. That is, the Jew 
 whose sensitive heart beats through the 
 pages of the Old Testament. The Jew of more 
 recent times, it must be admitted, has been for the 
 most part engaged in other lines of business than 
 that of raising the fundamental questions about 
 God, about man and the world! 
 
 But it was not always so. He used to be the 
 expert in religious faith. Other nations are expert 
 in other things. If it was philosophy, or the drama, 
 or sculpture—to enumerate no more subjects—that 
 were under discussion, it would still be right to 
 turn to the Greeks for expert advice. If it was 
 civil government the Roman would rightly claim 
 an audience. If it was scientific industrial organ¬ 
 isation the German or the American would be called 
 in. And so forth. But if it is a question of relig¬ 
 ious faith then it is the Jew’s turn to speak. 
 
 This is true not just on grounds of authority, 
 that is, not just on the assumption that the Jewish 
 scriptures are sacred and inspired writings. It is 
 true, because in an almost infinitely long competi¬ 
 tion the Jew came out first. For behind the Jewish 
 literature there lie many ages of spiritual develop¬ 
 ment. The Jews who still speak to the world 
 
 39 
 
40 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 through the Psalms, for instance, are the fittest who 
 survived in a process of religious evolution, the 
 beginnings of which lie hidden by the mists which 
 hang over the early stages in man’s infinitely long 
 story. 
 
 The Jews, out of whose hearts and minds came 
 the great literature, must be set against a deep 
 background of other races akin to them in blood 
 and tradition. There must be, indeed, no hesitation 
 whatever in accepting the contention of the students 
 of comparative religion, that the Jews were only a 
 small part of a wider family of peoples, and that 
 therefore many likenesses and parallelisms in cul¬ 
 ture and tradition are to be found among the 
 peoples who surrounded them. 
 
 At one time it seemed to be thought that all was 
 lost if the story of the Creation or the Flood was 
 found among the traditions of other peoples. But 
 this was pious panic. And the truth is that the 
 research which has shown that the Jews are only 
 one branch on a great parent tree, or that there are 
 many points of similarity between them and other 
 peoples, has but served to throw into greater relief 
 the uniqueness and significance of this one little 
 people. The greater the number of competitors in 
 a race, the greater the honour of the winner. 
 
 The Jews came to the front out of a “ ruck ” of 
 other competitors. They have their roots—to vary 
 the metaphor—in a soil of Semitic culture which 
 grew many other peoples. But they are the finest 
 flower in the garden. Doubtless they were inti¬ 
 mately linked in origin and common culture with 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERT 
 
 41 
 
 the whole family of peoples who for unnumbered 
 generations lived in Mesopotamia. Doubtless, too, 
 they have many affinities with their neighbours in 
 Canaan and Syria. It is perfectly needless to deny 
 it. Rather it is something to be eagerly welcomed. 
 For those surrounding peoples are losers in the 
 race. They are now, as Kipling would say, “ one 
 with Nineveh and Tyre.” The fact that they have 
 any place at all in history is largely due to the cir¬ 
 cumstance that they had some connection with the 
 despised little tribe which occupied the uplands of 
 Palestine. 
 
 The laugh, so to say, is with the Jew. The laurel 
 is on his brow. He is first home, at long last, in a 
 race competed in by all nations, the beginnings of 
 which are lost in the blue distance of time. It came 
 to* pass (it was not only written down in Scripture) 
 that “ ten men shall take hold, out of all the lan¬ 
 guages of the nations, shall even take hold of the 
 skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, ‘ We will go with 
 you, for we have heard that God is with you * ” 
 (Zechariah viii. 23). That is verified whenever 
 anyone, whether in the exaltation of faith or in the 
 ardour of praise, or in the dark mood of doubt, 
 finds the perfect expression of that which is in his 
 heart in some part or other of the Old Testament. 
 There is not the slightest need for “ protection ” 
 for those writings. For the final expression of 
 simple and fervent trust in God “ the last word ” is 
 with Psalm xxiii. For incisive, dramatic and pas¬ 
 sionate discussion of the hoary and ever-present 
 problem of innocent suffering, there is nothing bet- 
 
42 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ter in the whole world’s literature than the Book of 
 Job. For the candid statement of the cynic’s 
 scepticism about progress and the worth of life, the 
 Book of the Preacher (Ecclesiastes) need not fear 
 the rivalry of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam or of 
 any other competitor. 
 
 Nor is there any need whatever to whitewash the 
 savageries or immoralities to be found in the Old 
 Testament. There are many traces in its books of 
 crude and cruel notions of God and of superstitious 
 and primitive religion. They are part of the story 
 of a people’s earlier development. It is not open to 
 question, except by those who are too apathetic to 
 question anything, that no bloodier old ruffian than 
 Jehu is to be found in all history. For slim and 
 fanatical cruelty you can hardly better Jael, as she 
 drives the nail through the temple of the sleeping 
 Sisera. So, again, it is undeniable that Jewish 
 prophecy, which to this day is an unrivalled com¬ 
 mentary on social iniquity, and breathes the atmos¬ 
 phere of purest moral passion, has its roots in quite 
 characteristically primitive fortune-telling—see the 
 story of Saul and his asses. 
 
 But the point of all this—surely a point which 
 “ sticks out ” a long way—is the outcome of these 
 crude beginnings. It is the end of a development 
 which matters most. It is the fruit or blossom 
 rather than the bulb, the man rather than the child. 
 Hence the importance of listening to the voices of 
 those prophetic teachers who, from the standpoint 
 of faith in a righteous God, wrestled with the hard 
 facts of a world dominated by the Macht-politik 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERT 
 
 43 
 
 (Might is Right) of Egyptian kings and Assyrian 
 sultans. Hence, too, the privilege for us of having 
 a mind attuned to all the rich discords of faith and 
 doubt, confidence and dismay, innocence and guilt 
 which are the outpourings of human hearts in the 
 Psalms, 
 
 These men had a past behind them of which they 
 were aware; they were mouthpieces of an intense 
 national consciousness; they shared with their for¬ 
 bears the belief that they had been called by An¬ 
 other to a great destiny; they had a sense of being 
 instruments in the creative hands of God. But the 
 thing to attend to in what they say is not what they 
 report of the past history of their nation, but the 
 way in which, as possessed of a faith in the God 
 of righteousness they grapple with the events of 
 their own day. It is this that is fascinating to trace 
 from the eighth century onwards. The history of 
 those times is secure; the secular historians have 
 dug it up. Sargon, Sennacherib, Cyrus, and all the 
 rest of the great kaisers, their politics, their cam¬ 
 paigns—there is, relatively speaking, no- antiquity 
 about them. They are fellow-citizens with us in 
 the modern world, even though they were without 
 cars, wireless, big guns or poison gas, and even 
 though they thought the world was flat. Their 
 history, we repeat, is known. 
 
 But what has been overlooked by a great deal of 
 Christian tradition, what has been obscured by an 
 unhistorical preoccupation with the stories of cre¬ 
 ation and the patriarchs, what has been buried by 
 literalism—is the comment upon the history, the 
 
44 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 interpretation of its brutal facts, which were made 
 by the men of Israel from the point of view of their 
 national religion. That is the clue to Amos and the 
 first Isaiah, to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. They and 
 their faith in God were ground as grain between 
 the millstones of the facts of history. And along 
 with them and with their successors were nameless 
 others; some of them, whose Psalms we inherit, 
 eager passionate souls, jealous for God; some of 
 them more philosophic men, writers of what is 
 known as “ wisdom ” literature, thinkers, apolo¬ 
 gists, doubters, wrestlers with the riddle of life. 
 
 These are the men to whom to listen. They meet 
 our need to-day. They anticipate our questions and 
 perplexity. They say to us, as it were: “ Ah, you 
 are feeling like that—that is just what we felt.” 
 In the great matters of faith they were, in a word, 
 the experts. 
 
VI 
 
 THE INVINCIBLE OPTIMIST 
 
 T HE point of the two preceding chapters has 
 been to open up the region which lies behind 
 Christ. 
 
 That is quite essential for a vivid appreciation 
 of the good news which was given to the world in 
 Him. Otherwise it is very likely that men will fail 
 to see that the news was really good, despite all the 
 talk about it. Christ is the answer of God to the 
 great questions about Himself. The answer will 
 seem unimportant if the urgency and greatness of 
 the questions are not appreciated. The light of the 
 Gospel will not be gladdening and marvellous to 
 those who have not felt nor groped in the darkness 
 in which it shone. 
 
 Hence the tragedy that, thanks to much of tra¬ 
 ditional teaching and the confused and strange im¬ 
 pressions which it has bred in most people’s minds, 
 the Old Testament has come to be widely thought 
 of as repellent and unintelligible. Hence, there¬ 
 fore, the need of a certain violence in opening doors 
 which have been barred, so that men may enter 
 again, as it were, into what had become a deserted 
 city, and, once inside, enjoy the freedom of that 
 city. That means, as we have seen, a resolute 
 departure from literalism or the belief in infallibly 
 accurate documents; a getting to grips with the 
 
 45 
 
46 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 men behind the documents, and, by so doing, a 
 coming face to face again with the living God who, 
 down the long ages, dealt with those men and re¬ 
 vealed Himself to them. 
 
 For that is the vital truth, wonderfully re-estab¬ 
 lished by modern Biblical study, namely, that in 
 taking hold of the Jew, we take hold of God at 
 work through the Jew. Modern research has re¬ 
 established that truth partly by dint of first putting 
 it aside. Students have tried to unravel a purely 
 human story. They have assumed, for instance, 
 that Abraham was only an ordinary Semitic sheikh, 
 or that the cult of Jehovah was on all fours with 
 the tribal cults, of peoples who were neighbours to 
 the Jews. But such assumptions have proved in¬ 
 adequate. They are too thin or narrow for the 
 facts. To treat Abraham as an ordinary sheikh 
 certainly serves to liberate him in our minds from 
 the unreal conventions of ecclesiastical art and 
 imagery. But the result of so doing is to demon¬ 
 strate what an extraordinary sheikh he was. To 
 treat the cult of Jehovah as merely on a level with 
 other cults is to be brought face to face with the 
 fact that, while they have disappeared, it has sur¬ 
 vived. To treat the Creation-story in Genesis as 
 purely on all fours with Babylonian folklore, is to 
 find that the latter is tainted with bestiality, while 
 the former is crystal-pure. 
 
 And so on all down the long story. The idea 
 that there is nothing in the Jew but certain theories 
 which he evolved out of his inner consciousness will 
 not work. Not that it has not been enlightening to 
 
THE INVINCIBLE OPTIMIST 
 
 47 
 
 get inside the Jewish consciousness and see it 
 wrestling with problems of faith. For the human 
 element in the Jew’s development has been thrust 
 into the background by an exaggerated notion of 
 inspiration, according to which God has been 
 thought of as dictating a book. But that does not 
 mean that they are only and merely human ele¬ 
 ments in the story. That is simply an explanation 
 which fails to explain. 
 
 And the only satisfying explanation about this 
 little and, by all secular estimates, utterly insignifi¬ 
 cant tribe 1 —so closely linked with other tribes, so 
 akin to and so nearly submerged by surrounding 
 peoples—is that tribe’s own persistent declaration 
 that God had chosen them, called them, and was at 
 work in them. God to the Jew, as the prophets 
 most clearly show, was not the conclusion of a pre¬ 
 carious human argument but a living reality over 
 against them, calling them, speaking to them, at 
 work upon them. Only, that does not mean that 
 there was no coming to conclusions on the part of 
 the Jew, as though he played a purely passive part 
 in the business—was, as it were, merely a pipe 
 down which God spoke. But it does mean that he 
 came to the conclusion, and came to it ever and 
 again and often after losing hold upon it, that God 
 was not an idol—the pathetic creation of men’s 
 minds—but the one, the only creative Spirit mani¬ 
 festing Himself in nature and in the history of the 
 world, and in the purpose for which He laid hold of 
 Israel as a people. 
 
 That is the conviction which rings with an in- 
 
48 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 creasingly certain sound through the Old Testa¬ 
 ment. That is the faith of the Jew. 
 
 It is no man-made theory, but the truth which 
 again and again made its way home upon the con¬ 
 sciousness of that people. Particularly did it come 
 home afresh and was verified anew in exile. Cheek 
 by jowl in Babylon with the insolence of imperial 
 power and a monstrous array of idols carried about 
 and made a burden to weary beasts, the Jew learned 
 again—the truth got right home upon his mind 
 and soul—that there was one God and beside Him 
 none else, “ that He had made and would bear, 
 yea He would carry and would deliver” (Isaiah 
 xlvi: 1-4). 
 
 This is the faith—the monotheistic faith—which 
 lies behind Christ, without the appreciation of 
 which He is hardly intelligible. Thus we come up 
 to Him and approach the centre. It is a mistake to 
 try to begin with Him. He comes very late into 
 the infinitely long story of man. He is the climax 
 of the purpose, which, while embracing the whole 
 world, was gripped and passionately embraced by 
 one people. The first beginnings and early stages 
 of that which rose to climax in Christ, lie covered 
 by the impenetrable haze of antiquity. It is folly 
 to think that this is not so. It is wise to be reso¬ 
 lutely agnostic about the prehistoric. But the later 
 stages are ablaze with the light of history. It is 
 essential to appreciate them and to use them as 
 signposts and milestones on the road which leads 
 up to Christ. 
 
 We come therefore to the New Testament. But 
 
THE INVINCIBLE OPTIMIST 
 
 49 
 
 before we leave the Old Testament we will note 
 again that the very faith in the One God, as cre¬ 
 atively or actively at work in His world and in His 
 particular people, was itself the source of passion¬ 
 ate perplexity at the godlessness and confusion and 
 guilt and pain of life. The more a Jew had 
 heard with his ears and his fathers had told him 
 “ the noble works that God had done in their 
 days and in the old time before them/’ the more 
 dismayed was he in the present that God was 
 apparently doing nothing. Hence the bold and 
 clamouring protests which abound in the Psalms. 
 Why is God absent? Why has He forsaken 
 us? What is He doing? Why, if it is God’s 
 world, is the earth full of darkness and cruel 
 habitations ? 
 
 Thus the Jew tussled with the problem of how to 
 reconcile a righteous God with the facts of experi¬ 
 ence, the ideal with the actual. He never solved 
 the problem but he made many attempts. It is 
 worth while attending to' this because: a wrong use 
 has been made in Christian tradition of his only 
 partial solutions. He tried, for instance, to- solve 
 the problem by saying that all suffering was penal, 
 that it was inflicted by God on the wicked and that 
 the righteous would be immune. 
 
 Too much of this idea, though definitely repudi¬ 
 ated by Christ, has passed into Christian tradition. 
 The Anglican Prayer Book service for the visita¬ 
 tion of the sick is tinged by it. There is truth in 
 the notion, but not the whole truth. It doesn’t 
 cover the facts. The wicked do not always suffer; 
 
50 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 many good people are not immune from suffering. 
 The Jew saw the insufficiency of this solution of 
 the problem and said so with great intensity of 
 feeling. We have in the Book of Job not only a 
 statement of the problems of innocent suffering, 
 but also a most vigorous repudiation of the insuf¬ 
 ficient explanations—the conventionally pious ex¬ 
 planations—proffered by “ Job’s comforters.” 
 
 Another attempted solution was to- say that suf¬ 
 fering was good for people—that it was good for a 
 man to have been in trouble. There is much to be 
 said to support this contention. Character is made 
 by being tested. The storms of life make great 
 mariners. But it doesn’t cover all the facts. There 
 is much useless, wasteful and barren suffering and 
 misery in life. Many victims of accidents and dis¬ 
 aster are maimed and embittered thereby in body 
 and soul. 
 
 The deepest solution of the problem to be found 
 in the mind of any Jew lies in the recognition of 
 the wonderful power of self-sacrificing love, if it 
 suffers voluntarily, to transform suffering from 
 within, and make it declare the strength of the love 
 which suffers. But this great and glorious truth 
 is found in only one passage (Isaiah liii.), and it is 
 probably true to say that the other solutions had a 
 voider currency. 
 
 Such, then, is the Jew, the man of unique faith 
 and therefore of most passionate doubt. He found 
 no full answer to his questions. But he held on 
 with an undying patience. He is the invincible 
 optimist (Schopenhauer, the dismal German pessi- 
 
THE INVINCIBLE OPTIMIST 
 
 51 
 
 mist, called him “ the intolerable optimist”), hop¬ 
 ing, waiting, looking for the dawn, because of his 
 faith in God. Rightly we take hold of him, for 
 God was with him. 
 
VII 
 
 BEHOLD THE MAN—I 
 
 H AVING explored the story of the faith 
 (with its unsolved problems) which lies 
 behind Christ, we come to Him. Having 
 opened up the Old Testament, we pass to the New. 
 
 It is essential to> pass to the New Testament and 
 its central Figure by way of the Old Testament, 
 and for this reason—that Christ entirely and un¬ 
 reservedly assumed that there was a faith alive in 
 the hearts of the men of His generation. As we 
 shall see, He began His work by appealing to that 
 faith and by calling it out into action. It was, let 
 us repeat, faith which had been written on parch¬ 
 ment and preserved in a book only because it had 
 first been written and re-written on the living 
 hearts of men. It was faith in God and in His 
 purpose for the world; it was therefore faith 
 troubled by life’s tragedies, fatalities, adversities. 
 It was faith in man as made for God; it was there¬ 
 fore faith oppressed by man’s incapacity and un¬ 
 willingness to serve Him. It was faith still dis¬ 
 satisfied, still in the making. 
 
 We come, then, to Jesus of Nazareth. We will 
 make that Man, as He came into the villages of 
 Galilee, the point of departure. 
 
 Strictly speaking, that is not the right starting- 
 point. The proper historical procedure, in studying 
 
 52 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 53 
 
 the New Testament, is to begin with some of the 
 Epistles. They are the earliest documents in the 
 book. And they imply that, from the very first, 
 what had been carried out to the world in the Name 
 of Jesus was Good News about God, and not 
 merely a story about a good man. And the Gos¬ 
 pels were written down (preserving the teaching 
 that had been given by word of mouth by eye¬ 
 witnesses) by believers in the Good News for the 
 benefit of other believers. That is clear! v stated in 
 the first verses of the Gospel according to St. 
 Luke. Strictly, then, the right starting-point is 
 the Epistles. 
 
 Nevertheless the preferable starting-point for us 
 is the moment when Jesus of Nazareth began to 
 go about the villages of Galilee preaching (Mark 
 i: 14). For that was the beginning of the experi¬ 
 ence of those who followed Him. That experience 
 had as its outcome the Christian faith. But in 
 order to understand that faith afresh it is essential 
 not to read the end into the beginning, not to in¬ 
 terpret the story of the ministry in the light of 
 subsequent doctrine, but to begin as the friends of 
 Jesus began and, in thought, to> follow Him—the 
 Man of Nazareth. 
 
 The starting-point must be the Man and not the 
 Word made Flesh. Reality demands this. For 
 the plain truth is that the personality of Jesus of 
 Nazareth has become unreal to a multitude of 
 people. This has partly been due to familiarity. 
 It has also been due to the infirmities of the devo¬ 
 tional mind. For devotion has surrounded the 
 
54 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 figure of Jesus with a great haze of sweet and 
 sometimes sickly sentiment. Art, too, has had 
 some hand in this de-realising process. Mawkish 
 pictures of Jesus have had a wide circulation. Un¬ 
 doubtedly doctrine has contributed too. The 
 divinity of Jesus has been exalted at the expense 
 of His humanity. 
 
 And on any showing this loss of reality is tragic. 
 It is, for one thing, most incompatible with the 
 Man who was the most resolute opponent of un¬ 
 reality (or sham, or sentimentality, or humbug) in 
 history. It is a grievous loss to orthodoxy. For if 
 the Incarnation means the expression of God’s 
 character in terms of a human personality, then the 
 obscuring and hiding of that human personality is 
 disastrous. It is comparable to having a defective 
 electric light bulb which dims the bright light of 
 which it should be the medium. It is almost as 
 great a loss to those who stop short of belief in the 
 Incarnation and assume some sort of Unitarian 
 position. Such people make much of the example 
 and ideals of Jesus. Obviously they lose greatly if 
 the reality of His manhood has been obscured. 
 Finally, if for no other reason, there is loss, 
 namely, the loss of a great work of art. 
 
 Now this is unquestionably where modern schol¬ 
 arship comes in. It has been suspect by many 
 devout believers, and truly it has often been full of 
 extravagance. In its waters, so to say, the wild 
 asses have often enough quenched their thirst. But 
 it has had great results. It has saved the Old 
 Testament from being a closed book. It has re- 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 55 
 
 established its unique significance. It is doing a 
 like work with the New Testament. And in par¬ 
 ticular it is being the means whereby the personal¬ 
 ity of the Founder of Christianity lives again in its 
 pristine vividness and force. It has shed a blaze of 
 light in a region too long half-lit by a dim religious 
 twilight. Its method has been historical as con¬ 
 trasted with dogmatic. It has, so to say, lifted the 
 halo of doctrinal attributes from the brow of the 
 Master. Sometimes it has done so irreverently, but 
 far more often it has done so with the true rever¬ 
 ence of those who' are in quest of truth. It has 
 mainly been in tune with the courage and candour 
 of Jesus. It has set aside the traditional doctrine 
 through which He has for so long been contem* 
 plated, and in so doing it has been brought to 
 acknowledge afresh—sometimes no doubt with re¬ 
 luctance, but more often with wonder and joy—the 
 truth which that doctrine expressed. 
 
 Its method therefore shall be ours. And in par¬ 
 ticular, as has been indicated, we will adopt its 
 starting-point in the study of the New Testament, 
 namely, the Man, Jesus of Nazareth. Behold the 
 Man! Whatever else is or is not true about Him, 
 it is indubitable that He emerged in the prime of 
 His manhood from a home in Nazareth, where to 
 neighbours and acquaintances He had been known 
 as one of themselves. He had been the familiar 
 carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James 
 and Joses and Judas and Simon. He had been in 
 His own country and among His own kin, and in 
 His own house (Mark vi:2-6). The thing to do. 
 
56 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 therefore, by a deliberate effort, is to make no more 
 assumptions about Him, but simply to identify 
 oneself with those among whom He came with a 
 terse ringing announcement on His lips, and to fol¬ 
 low with those who responded to His call, and to 
 see what comes of it. 
 
 To say, at the very start, that “here is'the 
 virgin-born Incarnate Son of God ” is to- beg great 
 questions. That implies a clear and untroubled 
 understanding of what is meant by God. It im¬ 
 plies, too, a mind at ease about miracles. But both 
 implications are notoriously absent to-day. As has 
 been seen in earlier chapters, the questions which 
 are being asked to-day (often, it is not too much 
 to say, by men in an agony) are questions about 
 God. It is hopeless to ignore that fact and to beg 
 those questions. 
 
 Further, to do so is to neglect the fact, so strongly 
 emphasized in previous chapters, that the faith in 
 Jewish hearts was not a satisfied and peaceful and 
 complete understanding of what was meant by the 
 name of God, but was intimately intermixed with 
 doubt and with the pain of unsolved enigmas. 
 Jesus appealed without reserve to that faith. He 
 counted upon its vitality. But that to which He 
 appealed was not a finished and fixed thing, but was 
 still in the making, and awaiting completion and 
 correction. 
 
 This emerges with great clearness in the dramatic 
 course of the ministry of Jesus. Unquestionably 
 He looked “ for faith in Israel,” but equally un¬ 
 questionably the faith which He found there was 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 57 
 
 inadequate to the task of following Him. It was, 
 as will appear, a faith which could not reconcile 
 God with suffering but only with success. It was 
 a faith therefore which broke under the impact of 
 the terrifying crisis up to which Jesus led His fol¬ 
 lowers. For it was (and it is quite essential to 
 recognise this) faith which had not recognised that 
 Jesus was the Incarnate Son of God. Hence it was 
 faith which could see nothing of God in the dark¬ 
 ness of Calvary. 
 
 That, then, is the justification for beginning 
 again with the Man Jesus. We will refrain from 
 assuming and reading into the story of His life just 
 the very truths about which, as they followed Jesus 
 of old, men were thrown into crucial doubt. 
 
VIII 
 
 BEHOLD THE MAN—II 
 
 HE modern starting-point of New Testament 
 
 study is the Man, Jesus of Nazareth. For 
 
 reasons given in the last chapter it is also 
 the starting-point of these chapters. We will try 
 to beg no questions about Jesus, except that He was 
 a man. We will try the hypothesis that He was 
 only a man. That is the first thing to do. 
 
 Wherever that hypothesis is not faced and tried, 
 it is apt to avenge the neglect. It keeps suggesting 
 to minds confronted by the edifice of Christian 
 doctrine that that edifice is shaky in its founda¬ 
 tions. It hovers, as it were, as a menace on the 
 flank of those who advance, without more ado, 
 towards the further Christian positions. It is, 
 moreover, an hypothesis which has a wide currency 
 in minds of people both within and without the 
 Church (especially among younger folk). For 
 most of the world to-day is semi-Unitarian in 
 belief. And, as has been said, it was the starting- 
 point of the men among whom Jesus came preach¬ 
 ing. The Gospel story is of a friendship which 
 began when a Jew came among Jews with an an¬ 
 nouncement for Jewish ears and hearts. 
 
 The first thing to notice is that this announce¬ 
 ment is the same as that of another man, John the 
 Baptist. 
 
 58 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 59 
 
 John was the breaker of the silence of many 
 generations. For very long no prophet had spoken. 
 Rather there had been men who since the Exile, 
 four or five centuries before, had pondered on the 
 great truths given to Israel in the famous pro¬ 
 phetic times. The intervening years had seen 
 the fixing of a strong, closely-woven ecclesiastical 
 system. It had been the period during which 
 thinkers had reflected on the great past, and had 
 had their reflections (as we have seen) disturbed 
 by deep perplexities which find expression in 
 some of the Psalms and the Books of Wisdom. 
 There had been also a whole school of dreamers 
 and poets who saw visions of the future and 
 were responsible for what is known as Apocalyptic 
 literature. 
 
 But no prophet had spoken. That ancient foun¬ 
 tain had ceased to play. But now, once again, to 
 the agitation and wonder of the whole community, 
 the authentic note of prophecy rang out again, and 
 was acknowledged to> be such (“ for all hold John 
 as a prophet ”). 
 
 His message is rooted in the characteristic faith 
 of Israel. It is faith in God as creative and pur¬ 
 posive, and at work on that for which He had 
 called out Israel and made them the people of a 
 great destiny. And the note of the message is 
 charged with urgency and sense of crisis. John 
 announces the coming of God’s day—the coming 
 to fulfilment of His purposes. His summons is to 
 Jews who are Jews not only in name but in heart. 
 He calls them to a change of heart and mind, to 
 
60 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 repentance and expectation. He bids them be ready 
 for the great Coming. 
 
 And Jesus takes up his message. He, too, looks 
 for characteristic Jewish faith—alive, awake, un¬ 
 extinguished by long waiting. He builds upon the 
 work of His predecessor. He quite explicitly said 
 that a whole-hearted response to the summons de¬ 
 livered by John was necessary for sharing in His 
 own movement (Matt, xxi :23 ff.). He makes it 
 quite clear that what is on foot is that for which 
 prophets and righteous men had waited and had 
 longed to see (Matt, xiii :17). He lays His finger 
 on that message of the great prophet of the Exile 
 which is most fully charged with faith in the com¬ 
 ing of times of divine liberation (Luke iv:16fL). 
 He declares that all the law and the prophets came 
 to a climax in the preaching of John (Matt, xi: 13). 
 He announces the coming of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 Now whatever that last phrase does or does not 
 mean it has one focus—God. That to which Jesus 
 called men is the very centre of things, the living 
 reality, unseen but at work—the One God. And 
 what He demanded that men should bring in 
 answer to the call was nothing less than the whole 
 of themselves—their inmost heart. The essential 
 significance of His terse and ringing summons, as 
 of a bugleman calling an army to its feet, lies there, 
 in the bare elements of religion. That is, it has to 
 do with the living God and the living hearts of men. 
 
 All this will come home to' anyone who will think 
 afresh of the faith of Jesus Himself. It is that 
 into which He grew as a Jew. For it would empty 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 61 
 
 His life of all reality to deny the fact, of which the 
 New Testament is quite unafraid, that He grew up 
 through boyhood to' manhood and that when ar¬ 
 rived at manhood, He had to go* forward to learn 
 step by step that to which God had called Him 
 ( “ though He was a Son yet He learned obedience ” 
 —Hebrews v :8). 
 
 This faith of Jesus had, to use a musical phrase, 
 a dominant. From first to last it had one centre— 
 the Father. His life was one persistent concentra¬ 
 tion—passionate and yet serene—on the unseen 
 Reality which He so named. He had one thing to 
 do. It was to cast Himself, in loyal and unreserved 
 self-giving, into co-operation with the active will of 
 God. The picture of Him, to be drawn by the 
 imagination, should be deeply coloured to-day by 
 the vivid memories, which lie hidden in hearts all 
 the world over, of human nature rising to< its height 
 at the summons of war and yielding itself trust¬ 
 fully and selflessly to> the call to give all. 
 
 The Jesus, whom artists have yet to 1 portray, 
 should be visualised as the captain and leader of the 
 ranks of men, who as heroes, sportsmen, adventur¬ 
 ers, soldiers, lovers have found the secret of life in 
 giving themselves away. Only, in their case it is a 
 secret but half-consciously apprehended and marred 
 ever and again by a mixture of motive. While in 
 Him all was fully conscious and entirely unalloyed 
 by self-serving. He had one thing to< do and He 
 did it—it was His meat to do it—namely, the will 
 of the Father. 
 
 And this is what He wanted and expected others 
 
62 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 to share in. He assumed that there was in the 
 Jewish hearts about Him a faith in God, as wanting 
 the co-operation of His children, which would set 
 them moving with Himself as comrades in His 
 great adventure. He plainly saw that it was His 
 part to invite others to realise that for which they 
 were made in God’s image, and to enter into their 
 birthright as children of God. He looked for 
 brethren who were willing with Him to do the 
 Father’s will (Mark iii :31 £f). That is what He 
 meant by calling others to enter into the Kingdom 
 of God. It was, as He said, an invitation to guests 
 to come to a feast fully prepared. 
 
 And further, this single emphasis of Jesus on the 
 Father as longing for—as wanting—His children, 
 carried with it a certain view of the world as the 
 Father’s world. He had a certain philosophy of 
 life. He looked upon the world around Him as 
 abounding in evidence of what God is. In the 
 flowers of the field, in little children, in the ordinary 
 pursuits of shepherds, housewives, men of business, 
 servants, He saw signs of the unseen Other. Not 
 that He took just a rose-coloured view of life. He 
 was alive to the harsh side of nature—its torrents 
 and floods which sweep human life away. He was 
 aware of life’s accidents—towers which fall and 
 crush men to pulp. He was brought up against a 
 mighty force of evil will holding men captive body 
 and soul. And this in fact was what called out His 
 intolerance. Because it was the Father’s world 
 with the Father’s children in it, He was passion¬ 
 ately impatient of what the powers of evil were 
 
BEHOLD THE MAN 
 
 63 
 
 doing with that world and with those children. 
 Hence His confiding appeal to others to share in 
 His work of bringing release to the captives and 
 recovery of sight to the blind. 
 
 Finally, His interpretation of the world, His in¬ 
 tense zest and interest in its affairs, His valuation 
 of its citizens as each one of infinite value—all this 
 was bound up with His vision of a world beyond 
 this world. This carried with it no depreciation of 
 this world, rather the other way. Every moment 
 of this life and all rounds of daily duty were to 
 Him of importance, because they had to do with 
 the destiny of pilgrims passing through this life 
 to the life beyond. His offer therefore to men was 
 final. He counted on its acceptance. It was that 
 they should close, there and then and for ever, with 
 the eternal reality of God. 
 
IX 
 
 THE GREAT REFUSAL 
 
 ESUS made the supreme offer to the men of 
 
 His generation. He was met, in the main, by 
 
 a great refusal. That is one way of summing 
 up the Gospel story. 
 
 The offer was that as Jews—as God’s children— 
 they should close, with their whole souls, with the 
 purposes of God, which then and there and at the 
 supreme hour were in fulfilment. Whatever else 
 was or was not in the knowledge of Jesus—it is 
 wise to be largely agnostic on this subject—He 
 knew that the God of all the earth, whom He called 
 Father, wanted His children, that they might be 
 the instruments of His will. On that subject, that 
 is about the present fact of the living God, Jesus 
 spoke with absolute and unwavering authority. 
 There is no quiver of hesitation or qualification in 
 His words. And He not only spoke, but acted. 
 With singleness of spiritual vision, that looked out¬ 
 ward from self into the unseen, He adventured 
 Himself upon one unreserved and persistent effort 
 to live out the life of a son. And He set Himself 
 to win others to do the same, so that they, with 
 Him, might be caught up into the energetic move¬ 
 ment of the Father’s will. 
 
 The fact that Jesus made this challenge to His 
 contemporaries to close with the Father’s offer—or, 
 
 64 
 
THE GREAT REFUSAL 
 
 65 
 
 in other words, to enter His Kingdom—is what 
 gives dramatic intensity to the story of His life. 
 For the note of “ now-or-never ” ran through His 
 invitation. He was unrelenting in His demand for 
 decision. This means that in exposing men to the 
 call of opportunity, which they had either to seize 
 or to miss, He acted as tester of their very souls. 
 What men actually were at the moment when His 
 call sounded in their ears was laid perfectly bare. 
 By demanding of men a final choice He inevitably 
 brought them under judgment (or testing). This 
 is what has been called the “ stormy north side ” of 
 Jesus. It is utterly sentimental and fictitious to 
 paint Him in only soft and melting colours. He is 
 the Man with the fan in His hand. He is the sifter, 
 the tester, the judge—the most awful figure in 
 history. And all this because of the offer that He 
 made, the offer which was an invitation as to a 
 marriage feast. 
 
 The offer or invitation was a real one, because it 
 left men free to seize or miss it. That is another 
 salient element in the story. Despite His intense 
 eagerness to win others to God, Jesus resolutely 
 refrained from encroaching on their freedom. He 
 was faced by all the temptations which beset those 
 who would “ get at ” others. He wanted to sway 
 the elusive hearts of men. He wanted to win them 
 entirely. What should be His method or strategy? 
 There to His hand were the well-known implements 
 which men use to seduce, bamboozle, stampede 
 others and sway them to their will. Fie could use 
 bread or mystery or force. That is, He could ap- 
 
66 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 peal to their stomachs, their credulity or their fear. 
 But only at the expense of what made them rational 
 beings, fitted for the supreme privilege of freely 
 loving God with all their hearts and souls and 
 minds. So He set aside (see the story of the 
 Temptation) every freedom-destroying method and 
 appeal. He set out simply to win a free response. 
 He made His appeal to the venturesomeness, the 
 heroic, the loving, the selfless in men, and He left 
 it there. 
 
 In the main the appeal failed to call out response. 
 His offer for the most part was refused. The fire 
 (to use His own words) which He came to cast 
 upon the earth fell upon damp fuel. He found 
 men unable or unwilling to attend. The story of 
 the Sower is the summary of this experience. He 
 was met by hardness, shallowness, frivolity and 
 preoccupation of heart, by all that makes the Name 
 of God sound faint in men’s hearing, so that, as a 
 result, what should be first comes last in their 
 attention. 
 
 But He was also met by something more posi¬ 
 tive, to wit, a positively wrong idea of God. This 
 He found in the religious leaders of the day. Pride 
 of race, of ancestry, of covenant had bred in the 
 Pharisees the notion of God as having favour¬ 
 ites. Whereas to Jesus God was the undiscrimi¬ 
 nating lover of sinners. Hence an acute discord. 
 Hence a self-satisfied blindness upon which, as it 
 were, Jesus could only lay the scourge of His 
 condemnation. 
 
 So the offer in the main was refused and the 
 
THE GREAT REFUSAL 
 
 67 
 
 opportunity missed. It was a real offer; there 
 was a real chance of it being closed with. Its 
 refusal was not inevitable or pre-ordained. It takes 
 all reality out of the story to read it otherwise. To 
 do so empties the plain expression by Jesus of His 
 surprise and grief and indignation at the recalci¬ 
 trance and refusal of men to respond to His call—it 
 empties it of meaning. If, for doctrinal reasons. 
 He is understood as seeing the end in the begin¬ 
 ning; if it is not allowed that He faced genuine 
 disappointment, then actuality is taken out of the 
 experience of Jesus, 
 
 Yet the rejection was not entire. He sifted some 
 wheat out of the chaff. He found some faith alive 
 in Israel. Some kindled at His fire. The “ honest 
 and true ” hearts of some were ready for the word 
 of the Kingdom. And with them as His friends 
 Jesus went forward to see things out. Another 
 main element, therefore, in the story is His with¬ 
 drawal from a public and popular mission, in order 
 to concentrate in private upon the education of a 
 few. He set to work to temper to the last degree 
 the steel of the links which bound others to Him¬ 
 self as brethren in the doing of the will of God. 
 These were the men—let us note in passing—from 
 whom the whole story is derived. Jesus used no 
 literary means for getting His message out to the 
 world. He committed everything to the witness of 
 living men. He wrote, not on paper, but on their 
 hearts. 
 
 We ought, then, to follow through the education 
 by Jesus of the surviving remnant of all who heard 
 
68 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 His initial summons. To those that had, He gave. 
 He poured fuel on the fire of their faith and ex¬ 
 pectation. He tested them and put them to the 
 proof. He raised their Jewish faith in God to its 
 highest power. He brought them to the point of 
 receiving from the Father the tremendous truth 
 that He, their Master and Brother, was Messiah— 
 was, that is, the man chosen by God to bring all 
 history to a climax and to inaugurate the reign of 
 God among men. 
 
 The acknowledgment, therefore, at Caesarea 
 Philippi (Mark viii:27ff.) by Peter of Jesus as 
 Messias is the turning-point in the whole story. It 
 meant that Jesus had reached a foundation on 
 which to 1 build. He had dug down through every 
 layer of superficiality, to the very heart’s core of 
 Jewish faith. Though He was almost a vagabond 
 among men, a failure among the many, pursued 
 and antagonised by the influential few, yet His 
 friends saw in Him the means through which 
 the age-long purpose of God was to be wrought 
 out into victory. Jesus had found companions 
 with whom; to go forward to the climax of His 
 endeavour. 
 
 Yet in the end He was bereft of all companions. 
 For the accomplishment of the will of the Father 
 through suffering and humiliation was more than 
 they could understand. The moment it was dis¬ 
 closed to them in word by the Master it was re¬ 
 pudiated. “ That be far from Thee, Lord! ” said 
 Peter in rebuke, only to meet with the fierce 
 counter-rebuke which shot from the fiercely-tried 
 
THE GREAT REFUSAL 
 
 69 
 
 soul of his leader —“ Get thee behind me, Satan! 
 You are,” in other words, “ the advocatus diaboli; 
 you are echoing my life-long temptation.” 
 
 For there was “ a thing of God ” which Peter 
 and the others could not fit into their idea of God. 
 They could not understand how the Father could 
 allow some of His children freely to work their 
 will with His Messiah. Their expectations, burn¬ 
 ing like a flame to a great height, were* quite other. 
 Their thought of God, whose Day and whose Man 
 were present, was just the Old Testament thought 
 of Him as the supreme and all-powerful Monarch. 
 They moved forward, therefore, to the hour of 
 glory which would display the all-rectifying power 
 of God. They dreamed of high places for them¬ 
 selves in the coming Kingdom. But suffering was 
 outside their idea of the divine. In other words, 
 they could not fully think of God as Love. And 
 by no- spoken word could Jesus correct what was 
 wrong in their Jewish faith. All He could do was 
 to go on alone to work out to the last the loving 
 heart-whole obedience of the Son to the Father. 
 So Pie went, with His incommunicable secret. Ex¬ 
 plaining nothing, but facing everything, He went 
 straight on into the deep darkness of the world’s 
 suffering and ignorance and sin. With an all- 
 confiding trustfulness He threw Himself upon the 
 Father, whose will called Him into the darkness. 
 
 Thus He was caught away from His baffled and 
 broken friends. Their high hopes fell to the 
 ground, the fabric of their dreams was .rent as 
 bubbles are burst. For though He had hazarded all 
 
70 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 in faith in God, yet He had been caught up and had 
 been done to death and had gone down in silence, 
 leaving ringing in their ears the cry, characteristic 
 of the age-long agony of man, “ My God, My God, 
 why hast Thou forsaken Me? ” 
 
X 
 
 THE CRUCIAL QUESTION 
 
 w 
 
 HEN I survey the wondrous Cross.” 
 . . . “ Hold Thou the Cross before 
 my closing eyes! ” . . . 
 
 These and many other familiar lines imply that 
 the Cross is radiant with comfort and hope. But 
 to the men who had left all and had followed Jesus, 
 as companions in His great adventure, it was as 
 the stroke of doom falling in the night. 
 
 What had Jesus done when in impotence He 
 came to die between the nameless thieves on Gol¬ 
 gotha? He had done nothing but raise expectation 
 to its very highest pitch. That is the plain mean¬ 
 ing of the Gospel story, once it is understood as a 
 drama mounting to a climax. 
 
 In the earlier stages of their friendship with 
 Jesus His followers were as it were bathed in the 
 sunshine of hope and anticipation. Their souls 
 vibrated in response to the announcement—uttered 
 by John, reiterated by Jesus—of the coming of the 
 Great Day, which for generations others had longed 
 to see and had not seen. Yet over the sunshine 
 crept the shadows. And over the ardour of their 
 souls there blew chilling winds. And in the end 
 the darkness and desolation of night fell upon them. 
 That was undoubtedly the experience of those men. 
 Take Peter. As foremost follower of Jesus he was 
 
 71 
 
72 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 all fire and impetuosity. But in the end he was 
 shivering - by the fire “ in the court of the high- 
 priest/’ a broken man, a-tremble at a girl’s ques¬ 
 tion, overwhelmed by uttermost tragedy. 
 
 It was uttermost tragedy because of the entirety 
 of trustfulness with which Jesus had given Himself 
 to do the Father’s will. He had been the perfect 
 theocrat, embodying all the theocracy of His people. 
 That is, He had yielded Himself entirely to the rule 
 of God. His life had been one persistent act of 
 obedience and one long venture of faith. And yet 
 this was the end—the squalor and filth of Calvary 
 —the darkness and silence of death. 
 
 “ I can forgive God everything but His perfect 
 peace.” That is the kind of wild defiance which 
 the tragic in life wrings from the human heart. 
 Ever and again, in the long—nobody knows how 
 long—story of man such cries break out. They 
 spring from the impact upon faith and hope of 
 brutal and blind fate. “ The world of fact is too 
 bad for God to be good,” says the Indian. “ The 
 world of fact is but so much shadow,” says the 
 Greek. “No,” says the Jew, “ the world is God’s 
 world—where He is at work.” “ Come,” said 
 Jesus, “ put it once and for all to the proof! ” And 
 that, beyond doubt, is what He did. When He died 
 on the Cross He raised one question, the in-the-end 
 only question, the crucial question—whether there 
 is any reality corresponding to what men call God. 
 That is what was at issue in the silence and night 
 of Calvary, when the best Man had come to the 
 worst end, amid the dreadful peace of God. 
 
THE CRUCIAL QUESTION 
 
 73 
 
 There is nothing rhetorical in what has been 
 said. Every man who was at the Front—the real 
 battle-front—knows more or less what is meant. 
 He knows of men’s trustfulness and courage and 
 heroism. He knows how they were poured out 
 unto death. But all the more dark, then, is the 
 question of God—seemingly passive and at peace 
 amid the agonies of men. The war has brought 
 myriads of people up against this crucial issue. It 
 has left the world’s faith mortally struggling with 
 cynicism and disillusionment. Men do not talk 
 much about these tremendous things. It is not 
 their way. There is so much else to be done. And 
 after all here is life and the cup of life. “ Come, let 
 us drink it while we have breath, for there’s no 
 drinking after death,” But underneath, in in¬ 
 numerable hearts, the question is there—the great 
 question, the question to which there seems to be 
 no answer. 
 
 And yet the Cross is not the symbol of despair 
 but of triumph. It was and still is the centre of 
 good news about God. That is the fact which de¬ 
 mands attention. The experience of the last terrific 
 years has brought men up against the facts—the 
 realities—of life. Here, then, is another fact for 
 them to reckon with. It is the fact that the men 
 who were with Jesus, whose hopes and dreams were 
 shattered by the disaster of Calvary, yet carried 
 into the world, at a certain moment in its secular 
 history, a Gospel of God of which the centre was 
 the Cross. Men have contrived to doubt most 
 things in the New Testament. But two facts are 
 
74 , THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 beyond all reasonable doubt. They are, first, that 
 Jesus died upon the Cross, in ignominy and fail¬ 
 ure; second, that His friends, in preaching the 
 Cross, were agents in a religious movement which 
 changed the face of the world. 
 
 The question, then, is what accounts for that 
 extraordinary movement. If the two facts are as 
 two separated piers of rock, what bridged the gulf 
 between them? How did the friends of Jesus, 
 broken at Calvary, come to turn the world upside 
 down? What raised Peter from despair and the 
 depths of moral defeat to victorious Christian lead¬ 
 ership? He tells us. It was the Resurrection. His 
 testimony breaks out in the first line of the letter of 
 his which the New Testament preserves. “ Blessed 
 be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 who begat us again into a living hope by the resur¬ 
 rection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 
 
 That is what has to be faced, namely, the Resur¬ 
 rection. Those who have been brought to think 
 about the questions which came to a head in the 
 Cross, must go on to think about that which an¬ 
 swers those questions. Doubtless this is just what 
 modern thought has been reluctant to do. It has 
 been very chary of the supernatural. It has done 
 its very best to lay no stress at all on the super¬ 
 natural in its study of the Bible. It has tried to see 
 what remains when miracle has been set aside. 
 And, as perhaps may have been indicated in these 
 chapters, its efforts have been fruitful. They have 
 opened the doors of the Old Testament which mar¬ 
 vels had closed. In particular they have admitted 
 
THE CRUCIAL QUESTION 
 
 75 
 
 men to a recovered vision of the real Man, Jesus of 
 Nazareth, whom wonders and doctrines had hidden 
 from them. 
 
 And yet the more determinedly men discard the 
 supernatural, the more thoroughgoing they are in 
 their naturalistic philosophy—for that is what has 
 been dominant in modern thought—the more 
 plainly they fail to account for the fact from which 
 they all agree to start, to wit, that a Gospel was 
 preached in the name of the Crucified. The ques¬ 
 tion, then, is (we will discuss it further in the next 
 chapter) whether that which has been discarded 
 and rejected will “ come again ” and repossess the 
 minds of men. Heart-shaking, mind-stirring times 
 have brought multitudes up to the Cross. They 
 have been made sensitive to the questions of 
 which it was the epitome. Will they go on to 
 receive the answer ? Will they be begotten again 
 into a living hope and into a faith which overcomes 
 the world? 
 
 There is little doubt that the philosophy which 
 has made thinkers intolerant of the supernatural has 
 touched with palsy much of the mind and soul of 
 recent generations. It has been a materialist phi¬ 
 losophy. In the little domain of philosophy proper 
 it has been criticised—blown upon. But neverthe¬ 
 less it has had and has an immense popular vogue. 
 It has bred a certain practical frame of mind in men 
 which, while it does not deny, is in effect doubtful 
 of the reality of God and of the soul. It has en¬ 
 couraged the exaltation of things which money can 
 buy or the body enjoy over the things of the spirit. 
 
76 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 It has relegated the truths of religion to the sphere 
 of fancy and pious hope. 
 
 The question is whether its sway must continue. 
 Or will there be a revivifying of the minds which 
 it has paralysed? In other words, Will the Gospel 
 of the Resurrection repossess the minds of men, 
 and once more as never before transform the 
 world ? 
 
XI 
 
 THE NEW CREATION 
 
 T HE Resurrection was the new-creative act 
 of God which raised the disciples, who at 
 the Cross had been buried in the depths of 
 despair, to newness of life. They were “ begotten 
 again ” by God “ into a living hope.” 
 
 To put it in another way, the Resurrection was 
 the response of the nature of things to the faith of 
 Jesus. That faith was rooted in the Jewish faith— 
 it burnt most brightly in the prophets—that God 
 was not merely the original Source, the originating 
 Architect of the Universe, but was in the present 
 creatively at work in His world, with a purpose 
 which meant the springing forth of new things. 
 
 The Jews were extraordinarily conservative and 
 tenacious of the past. They kept brooding on the 
 things of old. They preserved the tales of former 
 days however blotted by the record of their race’s 
 sins and weaknesses. To do 1 so fortified them in 
 facing the trials of the present. But all the more 
 were they challenged by the prophets to look for¬ 
 ward and not only backward. The prophets called 
 them to expect and be ready for new things. “ Re¬ 
 member ye not the former things, neither consider 
 the things of old. Behold I will do a new thing: 
 now shall it spring forth. For I create new heav¬ 
 ens and a new earth: and the former things shall 
 
 77 
 
78 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 not be remembered nor come into mind” (Isaiah 
 xliii :18; lxv:17). 
 
 It was not enough for Jeremiah that folk should 
 for ever keep chiming about the Lord, who brought 
 the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. 
 Faith in God as active in the past had to be verified 
 and renewed by the discovery of Him as active in 
 the present. “ Therefore, behold, the days come, 
 saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, ‘ As the 
 Lord liveth, which brought up the children of Israel 
 out of the land of Egypt; but, as the Lord liveth 
 which brought up the children and which led the 
 seed of the House of Israel out of the North 
 Country/ ” 
 
 Jewish faith, therefore, at its height was for¬ 
 ward-looking. To it the world was not a closed 
 and unchangeable system, but was big with new 
 possibilities and was still in the making. It looked 
 for a day of new things. 
 
 (It is interesting to note that, nevertheless, the 
 Jewish Church should have admitted into the canon 
 of Scripture a book which gave expression to dis¬ 
 belief in the possibility of new things. This is the 
 Book of the Preacher and is called Ecclesiastes. 
 There might fitly be a copy of it in clubs and 
 smoking-rooms, where men commonly scoff at re¬ 
 forms and ideals on the ground that “ you can 
 never change human nature.” It is the book which 
 contains the best astringent antidote to Utopianism. 
 It is a book of weary scepticism. “ Vanity of 
 vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity. . . . One 
 generation cometh and another goeth and another 
 
THE NEW CREATION 
 
 79 
 
 generation cometh; and the earth abideth for ever. 
 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and 
 hasteth to his place where he ariseth. . . . All the 
 rivers run into the sea and yet the sea is not full; 
 unto the place whither the rivers, go, thither they 
 go again. All things are full of weariness; man 
 cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, 
 nor the ear filled with hearing. That which hath 
 been is that which shall be; and that which hath 
 been done is that which shall be done: and there is 
 no new thing under the sun ” (Ecclesiastes i :2-9). 
 It is well put. There is no need, as we said in 
 Chapter VI., to depend on Omar Khayyam for the 
 expression of disbelief in progress and in the ar¬ 
 rival of new things.) 
 
 But Jesus put His seal to prophetic faith. He 
 came proclaiming the Kingdom—the coming of the 
 new age. He confessed Himself, as having been 
 entrusted with new wine. And He lived in the 
 world on the assumption that it was alive with the 
 creative, restorative powers of the living God. For 
 the world to Him was the Father’s world, filled 
 with boundless possibilities if drawn upon by 
 whole-hearted faith. 
 
 And then there fell upon Him the conservatism, 
 the dislike of new things, the disbelief of both 
 Church and State. The old skins would not con¬ 
 tain the new wine. The old order resented the an¬ 
 nouncement of a new. And, in a sinister confeder¬ 
 acy, ecclesiastics and statesmen—the former in open 
 antagonism, the latter in readiness to be relieved of 
 disturbance and agitation—spilt, as they thought. 
 
80 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 the new wine on the ground. The prophet of new 
 things was suppressed. “ He was crucified, dead, 
 and buried.” 
 
 Yet “ on the third day He rose again.” Though 
 He met with all degrees of disbelief, He went right 
 through with His decisive and crucial experiment 
 of faith. He backed His belief with His life. In 
 so doing He challenged the nature of things. And 
 the nature of things responded. The Father made 
 answer tO' the faith of such a Son. The night of 
 Calvary was followed by the day of new things. 
 The victory of “ things as they are ” was swallowed 
 up by the new creation. And the rest of the New 
 Testament rings and vibrates with this passing of 
 the old and the coming of the new. “If any man 
 be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are 
 passed away: behold all things are become new.” 
 
 We are at the springs of faith which overcomes 
 the world. Nevertheless it is hard to deny that in 
 a great measure the world has overcome the faith 
 of the Church. 
 
 The Church, at any rate since the great early 
 days, has made far more of the Cross than of the 
 Resurrection. It has often been content to despair 
 of the world and to forsake its task of world- 
 redemption in favour of world-renunciation. It 
 has often abandoned the search for a “ new earth 
 in which dwelleth righteousness,” and has rather 
 fixed its hopes only on another world beyond and 
 other than this. Or, on the other hand, it has not 
 seldom allowed the world to secularise it and to 
 taint its faith with cynicism, fatalism and apathy. 
 
THE NEW CREATION 
 
 81 
 
 And, in particular, it has been infected in no little 
 measure by the materialist philosophy whose pres¬ 
 tige, at its height in the middle of last century, is 
 only now waning. We must again reserve the con¬ 
 sideration of this philosophy for another chapter. 
 We will only point, here, to the strangulation of the 
 faith of Christendom, by a view of the world 
 which exalted rigid uniformity and iron necessity 
 and left no* room for new and unpredicted 
 phenomena. 
 
 Everything in Christianity turns upon the Resur¬ 
 rection. Acceptance of the fact of Resurrection 
 results partly from the worth of the evidence for it, 
 partly from men’s verification of the faith of Jesus 
 and their knowledge of Him as their living and 
 victorious Lord. But there is a third factor also: 
 it is a view of the world which does not disallow 
 the possibility of new creation. If such is disal¬ 
 lowed, it follows that men turn from the event or 
 gloss it over and do what they can without it. 
 
 What is left without it? Something certainly. 
 There is the selfless faith and adventurous heroism 
 of Jesus. His life, even though it ended on the 
 Cross in failure, is a glory on the page of history. 
 Let those* who will not or cannot go further than 
 belief in Him as man, who, like others, died and 
 was done with—let them act up to the utmost to 
 the inspiration of His example. 
 
 Granted, then, that something is left; neverthe¬ 
 less, it is but little. For Jesus, trusting utterly and 
 yet tragically done to death, leaves only intensified 
 the problem of God, silent and inactive in face of 
 
82 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 human agony. And He leaves too intensified the 
 problem of man. 
 
 For men found His example inimitable and His 
 teaching beyond fulfilment. They realised that 
 they were not Jesus. They were left by Him in 
 moral impotence and despair. If something is left, 
 it is little to set against the deepened darkness of 
 life’s twin-mystery. 
 
* 
 
 XII 
 
 THE WORLD IN CHAINS 
 
 T HE Resurrection, as we have said, was the 
 response of the nature of things to- the faith 
 and self-giving of Jesus. The vital ques¬ 
 tion therefore is whether the nature of things ad¬ 
 mits of such a response? 
 
 For centuries the men who have studied nature 
 have been doubtful of the possibility of a new cre¬ 
 ation. And in the last century many of such men 
 grew positive that that which God wrought in 
 Christ when He raised Him from the dead (Ephe¬ 
 sians i :20) was a sheer impossibility. For their 
 minds were swayed by the view of the world which 
 is called Naturalism. Perhaps the more accurate 
 name is Materialism. It is the view which denies 
 the reality of anything beyond what can be known 
 by the senses. 
 
 It claims to explain and to explain away the spir¬ 
 itual in terms of the physical. It claims that the 
 physical is governed by iron laws of causal neces¬ 
 sity in the operation of which there is no room for 
 new effects. It has thus been defined by a great 
 authority: “ Naturalism has come to mean the type 
 of theory which so emphasises the continuity be¬ 
 tween man and the non-human nature from which 
 he springs as to minimise, if not entirely to deny, 
 any difference between them. It denies any central 
 
 83 
 
84 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 significance to human life in the play of the cos¬ 
 mic forces. Consciousness is an incident or acci¬ 
 dent of the universe which does not throw any 
 special illumination upon its ultimate nature. It 
 arises and passes away; the physical basis of things 
 remains.” 
 
 Now Naturalism is not an “ ism ” which is the 
 private property of a select number of scholars and 
 students. It has got into the air which everyone 
 breathes. It has formed the everyday habit of 
 mind of plain men, who, while they do not deny the 
 reality of things spiritual, are more certain of 
 things material, and in consequence actually live 
 their lives upon the basis of “ Let us eat and drink, 
 for to-morrow we die.” 
 
 In the war there was a wonderful and glorious 
 exhibition of faith in the reality of that spiritual 
 life which physical death cannot destroy. In 
 “ splendid action on the edge of things ” men 
 showed how strong was their instinctive hold upon 
 the life beyond death. Yet I think there was more 
 of ingrained instinct than conscious conviction in 
 souls of the fighting men. (I speak generally and 
 fully allow for many qualifications and exceptions.) 
 I remember the philosophy of Naturalism, which 
 sees in the end of the body the extinction of the 
 soul—the philosophy which I repeat has greatly 
 swayed the common mind—finding dramatic ex¬ 
 pression in the last words of a London lad as he 
 was just leaving the front-line trenches at Armen- 
 tieres on a stretcher mortally wounded: “Well, 
 chaps, I shall soon be pushing up the daisies! ” 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAINS 
 
 85 
 
 Such a philosophy was at a discount in the 
 trenches or in the air, and yet it was not absent 
 from men’s minds even there. It found ready 
 expression in the naturally reckless life of fight¬ 
 ing* men on leave. It was very prevalent be¬ 
 hind the front, where the air was heavily charged 
 with materialism. And, as I have said, the 
 peace-life of the world is widely directed by the 
 practical philosophy of “ Gather ye rosebuds while 
 ye may.” 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, to consider the 
 claims of Naturalism, and at any rate to point to 
 its history. As we shall indicate, science, which in 
 the latter half of last century seemed as a gaoler 
 to imprison life in the mechanical prison of physical 
 necessity, is now breaking the prison bars. It is 
 within itself repudiating materialism and is cham¬ 
 pioning the “ autonomy of life ” (see next chap¬ 
 ter) and the new-creative nature of things. We 
 live, in fact, at the dawn of a new age, which will 
 bring to the world, if it will accept it, a glorious 
 measure of spiritual liberation. But this is hardly 
 known as yet except to the few. And the popular 
 mind (which is perhaps always a generation be¬ 
 hind the minds of the great thinkers and discov¬ 
 erers, though always influenced by them, sooner 
 or later) is still held down by the materialistic view 
 of life. 
 
 And, further, it is probably true to say that, all 
 the world over, men are doubtful or sceptical 
 whether a scientific knowledge of the processes of 
 nature are compatible with the central stress which 
 
86 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Christianity, still-born but for the Resurrection, 
 lays on the supernatural. 1 
 
 There is no doubt that for many generations 
 there has been a painful discord in the civilised 
 world between men’s heads and their hearts, be¬ 
 tween their scientific knowledge of reality and their 
 religious hopes and faith. The discord came to a 
 head last century in Huxley. Witness his sense of 
 the moral indifference of nature: his denunciation 
 of the cosmic process owing to “ the unfathomable 
 injustice of the nature of things ”: his insistence 
 on the sheer breach between ethical man and pre¬ 
 human nature: his calling nature the “ headquar¬ 
 ters of the enemy ”: his phrase “ the gladiatorial 
 theory of existence ”: his conviction that it is im¬ 
 possible to reconcile the universe with men’s moral 
 ideals and spiritual aspirations. 2 
 
 There was a time in the Christian era when this 
 discord did not exist. In the Middle Ages “ sys¬ 
 tematised knowledge seemed to support the con¬ 
 temporary religious outlook—science and religion 
 spoke with one voice.” But that time is past and a 
 
 1 The subject to be discussed is far too big to be properly 
 handled here. So I venture to point readers who are inter¬ 
 ested in this vital subject to one or two books. First, a popu¬ 
 lar book, “Religion and Science: From Galileo to Bergson,” 
 by J. C. Hardwick. Secondly, two harder books: (1) “The 
 Idea of God,” by Professor Pringle-Pattison, being the Gif¬ 
 ford Lectures for 1912 and 1913; Lectures III., IV., V., and 
 VI. in the first series are the ones more especially to be read. 
 (2) Dr. J. S. Haldane’s “ Mechanism, Life and Personality.” 
 Thirdly, Bishop Gore’s “ Belief in God.” 
 
 2 See his famous Lecture at Oxford in 1893 on Evolution 
 and Ethics, which has been called “ The Swan-song of 
 Naturalism.” 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAINS 
 
 87 
 
 new world has come into being. Its beginnings are 
 not recent but lie back in the Middle Ages. The 
 fathers of the modern world are not Darwin or 
 Huxley, but Copernicus (1473), Galileo (1564), 
 Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo, Francis Bacon 
 (1561), Newton (1642), and so forth. It was 
 through the work of such men that the old-world 
 scheme, about which science and religion were in 
 harmony, broke up, never to return. That world- 
 scheme was based on the physics of Aristotle and 
 the Ptolemaic astronomy. It formed a coherent 
 framework for Biblical world-notions. Its view of 
 the world was static. It made the earth the centre 
 of the universe and made man therefore of central 
 importance to the universe. But it looked upon 
 man as thrust into the material world from above, 
 having a soul and mind separate from its physical 
 processes. 
 
 As against such a scheme the development of 
 science since Copernicus may roughly be said to 
 have established the infinite vastness of the uni¬ 
 verse in time and in space, the dependence of man’s 
 spiritual and mental life upon his physical mechan¬ 
 ism, and the continuity of all that is human with 
 pre-human nature. For at least four centuries the 
 accumulated labours' of men, who have explored 
 the recesses of nature, have tended to account for 
 the world as a material order, standing by itself, 
 with all its phenomena explicable in terms of the 
 interaction of physical and chemical elements, with 
 everything within it under the sway of rigid neces¬ 
 sity and uniformity. 
 
88 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 There must be few educated people who have not 
 felt in some degree at least the sense of homeless¬ 
 ness and desolation engendered by the sheer vast¬ 
 ness of the universe, on the edge of which the earth 
 as a minor planet “ spins like a fretful midge.” In 
 such a universe man seems to have dwindled to 
 nothing. His consciousness, with its thoughts and 
 hopes and prayers, have appeared to be but insig¬ 
 nificant by-products of the physical mechanism of 
 his brain—they have been likened to the whistle 
 thrown off by the material apparatus of an engine. 
 His whole being has appeared to have been ex¬ 
 plained by derivation from animal nature,* and, 
 thus accounted for in origin, he has been depicted 
 as surrounded by a natural order cruel and waste¬ 
 ful in its working, deaf and blind to his ideals, 
 and governed by the law of inexorable and callous 
 necessity. 
 
 True, all down the centuries there have never 
 been wanting protests from within the world of 
 science itself to this soul-destroying view of life. 
 The heart of man too has risen “ like a man in 
 wrath . . . against the freezing season’s colder 
 part ” and has refused to acquiesce in its own 
 dethronement. 
 
 Nevertheless, far and wide, men have been 
 haunted by the sense that there is a chasm fixed 
 between the world as known by science and all their 
 dearest longings and values. And all the while 
 scientific knowledge has armed man with ever- 
 multiplied means of exploiting nature for purposes 
 of gain. And the prestige of learning has en- 
 
THE WORLD IN CHAINS 
 
 89 
 
 couraged the acquisitive heart of man to think, 
 and to live consistently with the thought, that his 
 life consists in the abundance of things which he 
 possesses. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE WORLD SET FREE 
 
 HE accumulated effort of four centuries of 
 scientific inquiry tended to imprison the 
 
 life and soul of men within the walls of 
 materialism. 
 
 This is no partisan statement on the part of a 
 cleric. It, or its equivalent, has been stated by 
 competent men from a point of view quite other 
 than clerical. Listen to the eminent Cambridge 
 philosopher and mathematician. “ That man is the 
 product of causes which had no prevision of the end 
 they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, 
 his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are 
 but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; 
 that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought 
 and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond 
 the grave: that all the labours of the ages, all the 
 devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday bright¬ 
 ness of human genius, are destined to< extinction in 
 the vast death of the solar system, and that the 
 whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably 
 be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins 
 —all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, afe 
 yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which re¬ 
 jects them can hope to stand. Only within the 
 scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm, foun¬ 
 dation of unyielding despair, can the sours habita- 
 
 90 
 
THE WORLD SET FREE 
 
 91 
 
 tion henceforth be safely built ” (Bertrand Russell, 
 “Philosophical Essays, The Free Man's Wor¬ 
 shipT p. 60). 
 
 This is the grim and impressive voice of modern 
 stoicism,. It is the point of view of a man who is 
 driven to defy the universe and to build out of the 
 fabric of his own ideals a shelter for his soul. 
 There is a magnificent courage about it. But its 
 fatal weakness is its joyless lack of humour. The 
 stoic is the tense and solemn bearer of the burden of 
 existence. In the calm of his “ unyielding despair ” 
 laughter dies. Hence his system is never of any 
 use to the mass of men, who always have the in¬ 
 stinct (see the men at the front) that a laughterless 
 view of life stands self-condemned. They will al¬ 
 ways leave that sort of thing to the “ high-brows,” 
 while they themselves go for a “ short life and a 
 gay one.” But at any rate such a stoic as Russell 
 has faced the facts and looked into the dark and 
 made the very gloomiest report on what he has 
 seen. He represents the darkest hour. He sug¬ 
 gests that there must be a dawn. 
 
 The same is true of Nietzsche. He worked out 
 naturalism on its ethical side to- its logical conclu¬ 
 sion. In England, at any rate during the Victorian 
 age, the full meaning of naturalistic philosophy was 
 a good deal diluted and disguised by the fact that 
 its chief champions were such staunch and devoted 
 moralists. Great thinkers and scientists might 
 glory in the name of agnostic, but their agnosti¬ 
 cism left their Christian morality unimpaired. It 
 made them all the more jealous and zealous for 
 
92 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Christian ethics. The latter seemed to them to 
 stand quite independently of the historical truth of 
 Christianity. 
 
 It was the work of Nietzsche—and on the whole 
 we should be grateful to him—to tear off from 
 naturalism the disguise of moral idealism and to 
 expose it in all its brutal nakedness. He passion¬ 
 ately denounced Christian ethics as morbid and 
 servile. He exalted the ethic of ruthless self- 
 assertion. His doctrine went like wine to the head 
 of younger Europe. It was powerfully operative 
 in producing the Great War. 
 
 And now, just when all this long-accumulating 
 mass of materialistic thought has yielded its worst 
 results and bidden fair to lay civilisation in the dust, 
 scientific thinkers are (and have been for some 
 time) pleading for a wholesale revision of natural¬ 
 ism. They are witnesses to the passing of the 
 night and the dawning of a new day. 
 
 The turning-point in this emancipating move¬ 
 ment has been the successful fight which has been 
 fought within the world of science for the rights of 
 biology (the science of life) over against physics 
 and chemistry (the sciences of non-living bodies 
 and elements). Science, ever since the days of 
 Newton and his predecessors, has been largely 
 dominated by mathematics and physics. As such 
 it has been concerned to explain living phenomena 
 in terms of simple mechanical interaction between 
 material particles. In so doing it has made mar¬ 
 vellous discoveries and has permanently enriched 
 the world. Its method is perfectly valid so far as 
 
THE WORLD SET FREE 
 
 93 
 
 it goes. For instance, it is quite legitimate for a 
 mathematician for his purpose to treat a number 
 of different things—say the leaves on a tree—as so 
 many identical units. But in so doing he leaves out 
 of account the individuality of each leaf. Simi¬ 
 larly it is legitimate for the physicist in studying a 
 living organism to study its parts as though they 
 were parts of a machine. But in so* doing he leaves 
 out of account the* principle of life in the organism, 
 owing to which its parts are not just externally 
 united, as in a machine, but are essentially bound 
 together in the life of the organism as a whole. 
 
 Thus biology has vindicated the internal auton¬ 
 omy and freedom of organic life as against its 
 sheer external determination by mechanical neces¬ 
 sity. Much has been learned from the endeavour to 
 understand the mechanism of living organisms. 
 But, to quote Professor J. Arthur Thomson, to call 
 that which is “ self-stoking, self-reframing, self- 
 preservative, self-adjusting, self-increasing, self- 
 reproducing ” a machine is an abuse of language! 
 
 Further, this that is true on the levels of plants 
 and animals acquires a multiplied importance when 
 the level of human personality and consciousness is 
 reached. There, again, enormous advances have 
 been achieved by science in its task of understand¬ 
 ing human life, by dint of leaving out of account 
 the principle of personality, with its sovereign 
 function of choice, and of treating the human 
 organism as only a complex machine. But those 
 who have used this method have realised its limita¬ 
 tions. It is valid so far, but not all the way. 
 
94 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 For, in studying parts of human nature, science 
 has realised that those parts never exist at all ex¬ 
 cept as unified by the self-determining personality 
 of a human being. It is useful and instructive to 
 study human thought as it were from below—that 
 is, in terms of cerebral process. But the explana¬ 
 tion of thought merely as the interaction of cells in 
 the brain no more accounts for thought than the 
 rubbing of horsehair on catgut accounts for a 
 sonata of Beethoven. The material or physical 
 mechanism in either case is the means of self- 
 expression used by that which is more than it, 
 namely, the spirit of man. 
 
 There are many other things which have con¬ 
 tributed to the breaking by scientific thought of the 
 prison which it itself erected. There is, for in¬ 
 stance, the criticism of the conception of law 
 whereby it has been realised that laws are not as it 
 were iron bands in nature, but are the ways in 
 which the human mind describes and sums up the 
 order of nature. There is order and continuity in 
 nature which it is man’s supreme privilege to un¬ 
 derstand, but it is not an order fast-bound by 
 necessity. There is every reason to expect that, as 
 we say, the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the 
 grass will be green next spring. But there is no 
 absolute necessity that it will be so. For the whole 
 natural order is in process of creative growth, and 
 therefore the past does not entirely determine the 
 present and future. There is room for the new and 
 the unpredictable. 
 
 All this is the more true to the facts as one 
 
THE WORLD SET FREE 
 
 95 
 
 passes upward through the hierarchy of nature 
 from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic 
 to the sentient, from the sentient to the level of 
 free, self-conscious, self-determining personality. 
 
 There is, again, the revolutionary change which 
 has come over the whole sphere of physics. Here 
 the materialist theory of matter, as consisting of so 
 many indivisible and indestructible atoms, has given 
 way to amazing and fascinating theories, according 
 to which matter is reduced tO' intangible electricity 
 or unknowable ether. Here the layman can only 
 gape open-mouthed. But he can listen to Lord Bal¬ 
 four when he says: “We know too much about 
 matter to be materialists.” 
 
 Thus, in accordance with these rude and crude 
 hints, we can rejoice in the turning by science from 
 an attitude of imprisoning denial to that of liberat¬ 
 ing affirmation of the world as plastic and elastic; 
 as in process creative of new effects ; as intelligible, 
 not from below, but from above; as to be estimated 
 not in the light of its origins, but of its end; as 
 governed in all its wonderful mechanism by spirit. 
 Evolutionary science, which tended at first to make 
 for an all-engulfing materialism and for the nat¬ 
 uralising of man, has come to humanise nature, and 
 to re-enthrone personality and reason as the key to 
 the true nature of things. It has re-instated man 
 —and his spiritual, rational and moral values— 
 as the measure of the whole vast panorama of 
 existence. 
 
 Once more, then, we are given a world capable of 
 responding to the transforming challenge of ere- 
 
96 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ative spirit. Who can tell how it would or would 
 not react to the faith and love of Jesus Christ. He 
 interpreted the world as the Father’s world, as still 
 in the making, as the scene of the Father’s ceaseless 
 and emancipating energies. He staked everything 
 upon the reality of the living God. In the Resur¬ 
 rection we see the response to His faith. 
 
 Neither philosophy nor science has any right to 
 deny its possibility. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE GOOD NEWS 
 
 T HE Resurrection, then, was the ratification 
 of the faith of Jesus. As the centre of the 
 Gospel—the Good News—it can never be 
 understood except in the light of what the world 
 was to Jesus. The world to Him was still in the 
 making, and man, too, in its midst, still in the 
 making. All was in the creative hands of the living 
 God. The whole visible order of existence was 
 enveloped by a world of spiritual energy and life 
 ready to be released at the touch of sacrificial faith 
 and love. There was, as it were, a feast spread for 
 those who could respond to the invitation and come 
 and partake. There were recovery, deliverance, 
 healing both of body and soul immediately avail¬ 
 able. And all this because of the Father and be¬ 
 cause it was His world. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, could be further from Jesus’ 
 interpretation of life than the idea of God as rest¬ 
 ing in some sabbatical peace in heaven, an external 
 Spectator to life’s strange drama, an Architect of 
 a system which He had fashioned and left to itself 
 to run automatically, a Stranger occasionally and 
 arbitrarily intervening from outside in a sphere 
 normally beyond His care. Rather life to Jesuk 
 was wonderful, dramatic, potential, shot through 
 and through with new possibilities, because over 
 
 97 
 
98 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 against men—wrapping them round and sustaining 
 them—was the constant and immediate and active 
 Presence of the Being, who had made them for 
 Himself, to be sharers as sons in His purposes of 
 unvarying and inexhaustible love. 
 
 So Jesus said and so He lived. And in the end 
 He found no one able or willing to share His faith. 
 He looked for brethren who with Him should re¬ 
 spond as sons to the Father, should partake with 
 Him of the feast. But in the end He was left 
 brotherless. In the end He was alone at the feast. 
 Nothing kept Him back, though almost anything 
 sufficed to keep others. Apathy, scepticism, igno¬ 
 rance, half-heartedness met his invitation. Selfish¬ 
 ness, antagonism to change, jealousy, closed in on 
 Him. Faithlessness and fearfulness betrayed and 
 denied Him. But nothing kept Him back from 
 yielding to the Father the entire response of a son. 
 So He went alone, as we have seen, into the dark¬ 
 ness—the darkness of Calvary, where the Father 
 seemed to be not, where the pathetic disaccord of 
 reality with human trust and hope seemed to reach 
 its climax. 
 
 But He rose again. The pent-up love of the 
 Father made answer. All that Jesus said was there 
 in the Father’s hands to be given to His children 
 (and not to be forced on them or else they would 
 not be treated as free children) was released. The 
 fatherly nature of things responded. The hidden 
 springs of life were set free. The Father vindi¬ 
 cated the faith of Him who died, and raised Him 
 from the dead. 
 
THE GOOD NEWS 
 
 99 
 
 Hence the essence of the Good News is about 
 God. It is not just about Jesus. It is about that 
 which Jesus in His crucial experiment—by His 
 supreme venture of faith—had put in all-decisive 
 issue. It is about the Father in whom He had 
 trusted. It is about the world as the Father’s 
 world. It is about the ultimate nature of things. 
 The Good News is that God is love. 
 
 That is the first thing about Christianity to re¬ 
 member and never to forget. It is about God. 
 Jesus had striven to link those who had followed 
 Him to the living reality of God. But they could 
 not grasp nor reach up to it. Yet in the Resurrec¬ 
 tion the unattainable reached them. The truth, 
 which had been too good to be true, laid hold on 
 them. That and nothing else gave them a gospel. 
 That and nothing else can be the Gospel. For Jews 
 there had ever been one all-dwarfing question—the 
 question of God. And so with other peoples in 
 greater or lesser degree. No Jew would ever have 
 carried out to the world good news about Jesus if 
 that good news had left unanswered the question 
 of God. Nor would others have taken any lasting 
 notice of it. For it would have left them still in 
 the ultimate darkness, still knocking at the gate of 
 the innermost shrine, still threatened by funda¬ 
 mental doubts and fears, still in bondage to 
 themselves. 
 
 But the New Testament rings and pulses with 
 no mere gospel about Jesus. It is a Jewish book. 
 Its dynamic is the revelation of God, responsive 
 to the faith of the Crucified. Its world-changing 
 
100 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 power springs from the answer by God to the 
 questions about Himself, felt more acutely by the 
 Jews than by any other people, and finally gathered 
 up and epitomised in the Cross of Christ. 
 
 And yet the gospel, while it is about God is also 
 about Jesus; while it is about the Father it is also 
 about the Son. What raised to its highest power 
 the question of God was the doing to death of 
 Jesus. That had left nothing to be done by His 
 stricken friends but the burial of His mangled 
 corpse, the pitiful last offices, the helpless bringing 
 out of embalming spices—all that broken hearts 
 find to do, though they know of its impotence in 
 face of the finality of death. 
 
 Everything therefore sprang out of the coming 
 back of Jesus in risen bodily presence, triumphant 
 over the grave of death. He was the subject of 
 the new creative act of God. It was He who had 
 been imprisoned and overwhelmed by the sin and 
 faithlessness of men. It was His body which was 
 sealed in the tomb, wherein were buried with it 
 the hopes that He had raised. I cannot believe 
 that there is any relief for minds which are troubled 
 about the supernatural, in theories which try to 
 explain the Resurrection in terms of merely spir¬ 
 itual vision or telepathy. 
 
 Quite true we do not know what exactly is meant 
 by the risen body of Christ. That is because it 
 belongs to an order of things beyond the level of 
 our normal experience. But whatever difficulty 
 attaches to the bodily rising of Christ, far greater 
 difficulty surrounds any other account of the mat- 
 
THE GOOD NEWS 
 
 101 
 
 ter. If Jesus had died and gone through the dark 
 veil of death, leaving His body to corruption, no 
 visionary or mystical assurance that His soul had 
 survived death would have made any difference to 
 His followers. No conviction that all was well 
 with Him could have healed their wounded hearts. 
 For their misery and agony was not so much about 
 Him, as about the Father in whom He had trusted, 
 and about themselves who had failed their Master. 
 They were re-made^—begotten again as Peter says 
 —by the act of God which raised Jesus from the 
 grave and restored Him bodily to them. He was 
 given back to them out of the silence of death. The 
 response of the Father was the return to His lovers 
 of Him whom death had veiled and enveloped, but 
 who was now revealed in victory over death. What 
 this means further, we shall see in the next chapter. 
 
 Here we will only add a word which needs to 
 be added to words so insistent on the all-importance 
 of the Resurrection. The Resurrection was, and is, 
 no sign to convince the incredulous. The Risen 
 Lord was manifested not to the world at large but 
 to those who, forsaking all, had followed Him and 
 had been with Plim in His temptations. He came 
 back to those who had tried to share in the ad¬ 
 venture of His faith. All through that adventure 
 He had steadfastly and under violent pressure of 
 temptation refused to convince men, by means of 
 signs, of that to which He yearned to win them. 
 
 Such was, indeed, the very essence of His temp¬ 
 tation—to sway the minds of men by the exhibition 
 of those powers which were at His command. He 
 
102 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 would never impair the freedom of those to whom 
 He appealed. He would never let His powers be 
 exploited by those who came to Him merely for 
 health or ease. He set out to win the free response 
 of men, not the adherence of a crowd mystified by 
 sensationalism. He knew and He said that a mere 
 wonder, while it might startle the mind, would not 
 win the heart. “ Neither will they be persuaded 
 though one rose from the dead.” 
 
 It is the same to-day. No argumentative plead¬ 
 ing, whether about the illegitimacy of scientific 
 denial or about the sureness of the witness of the 
 disciples, will really clinch for anyone the truth of 
 the Resurrection. It will only come home to those 
 who set themselves to look at the world as Jesus 
 looked, and to live out life as His brethren who 
 share in His faith. That means putting to the 
 proof that He was right about the Father. It 
 means partaking of the feast to which of old men 
 would not come, but which yet was spread and is 
 still spread. In other words: Those who do the 
 will “ shall know of the doctrine.” Those who 
 share in Christ’s sufferings are convinced of the 
 power of His Resurrection. 
 
XV 
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 E come now to the question of the Person 
 of Christ. Hitherto' we have not viewed 
 
 Plim dogmatically. We did not view Him 
 from the start through the lenses of the doctrine of 
 the Incarnation. Rather we wished to do full 
 justice to the truth, which many have felt to have 
 been diminished and obscured by dogma, namely, 
 the truth of His manhood. 
 
 But, as has been seen, the more rigorously every 
 assumption other than that Jesus was a man among 
 men is excluded, the more plainly does it emerge 
 that He brought to a crisis the question not just of 
 Himself, but the question of the Father. Plis Per¬ 
 son, in other words, is entirely bound up with His 
 belief in God and with the view of the world which 
 flowed from that belief. He acted on that belief, 
 and His belief was ratified. The nature of things 
 corresponded with it. This meant the disclosure of 
 who it was that had lived and believed and had 
 died for His belief. The act which revealed the 
 Father as all that Jesus had said that He was, was 
 also the act which revealed the Sonship of Jesus. 
 He was “ declared to be the Son of God with 
 power, ... by the resurrection from the dead ” 
 (Romans i :4). 
 
 The life, indeed, of Jesus during His ministry 
 
 103 
 
104 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 yields no answer to the questions that it raised. If, 
 in the spirit of denial, men look upon it as merely 
 one more life among other lives, which ended (so 
 far as this world is concerned) as they do in death, 
 then Jesus becomes the supreme raiser of unfulfilled 
 hopes. His death, too, and suffering appear as but 
 the one more in the terribly long tale of unrelieved 
 human tragedies. 
 
 But if the life and death be viewed in the light 
 of the Resurrection which vindicated the faith of 
 Jesus, then they become charged with new meaning. 
 They become the revelation of the secret of exis¬ 
 tence. The Father is seen to be revealed in His 
 Son. The Cross, which raised in finality the 
 problem of the relationship of God to human ex¬ 
 perience, is seen to be the laying bare of His un¬ 
 mitigated and all-suffering love. 
 
 This is the essential truth of the Incarnation. 
 It has somehow been obscured and overlaid. It 
 certainly has not got home upon the mind of the 
 average man. The average man has in his mind 
 an idea of God which is uncoloured by Christ. God 
 is one thing to him (and a hazy enough thing too) : 
 Christ is another. And then he is called upon to 
 call Christ God. And more or less explicitly he 
 refuses. 
 
 But the main truth of Christianity—the very 
 essence of the Incarnation—is something deeper 
 than that Christ is God. It is—God is Christ. 
 The first question—the bottom question—is not 
 about Christ but about God. That is the question 
 which was asked and answered in the whole fact 
 
WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 105 
 
 of Christ. The truth of the Incarnation does not 
 mean nor ever has meant the deifying (or, to use 
 the technical word, the apotheosis) of a man. It is 
 not the piling of attributes of deity on to Jesus 
 Christ, as though those attributes were fully and 
 sufficiently known apart from Christ. Rather it is 
 the manifestation of what God is in terms of a 
 human life. It is the revelation of the Father in 
 His Son. 
 
 If men ask, as under the terrible pressure of 
 recent experience they do ask, “ What is God ? 
 What is He doing? Where is His love? the answer 
 is—“Jesus Christ; that is what God is and ever 
 has been; that is what He is doing; that is His 
 love.” The self-giving of God is disclosed in the 
 gift of Himself in His Son. Christ, through 
 whom and through whose sufferings all the ques¬ 
 tions about God were asked, is Himself the answer 
 to those questions. His Cross, raised in the dark¬ 
 ness of the world’s sin and confusion and in face 
 of the dreadful silence of Heaven, stands for ever 
 ablaze with the light of the Father’s love. Just 
 there where it seemed that He was not, there where 
 godlessness seemed triumphant, God revealed Him¬ 
 self. There, He got His heart out. “ God com- 
 mendeth His love towards us in that, while we 
 were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 
 
 It must not be thought that all this was evident 
 to the followers of Jesus immediately after His 
 Resurrection. He not only rose and returned to 
 them, but He was parted from them and entered 
 on His reign in the heavenly places. And He was 
 
106 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 not only “ to the right hand of God exalted,” but 
 He came, through the coming of the Holy Spirit, 
 to be for ever present with His people and to live 
 in them and share His Sonship with them. But the 
 Resurrection was the beginning of the seizing hold 
 of men's hearts by the Good News of God. There 
 the truth to which they could not reach arrived and 
 began to possess them. 
 
 Now it was from the standpoint of the Good 
 News so arriving that the friends of Jesus looked 
 back on His life with them. By itself, as we have 
 said, the life led nowhere. It had led them indeed 
 only to despair. Their intercourse with Him had 
 been one of deepening and darkening mystery. 
 They had known that He was certainly and en¬ 
 tirely human, sharing fully in their lot. But always 
 Fie had been something more, and that was the 
 mystery about Him. Whenever they or others had 
 naturally assumed that He was merely man in the 
 ordinary sense of the word—whenever anyone had 
 tried to confine Him within the limits of their 
 normal conceptions of humanity—He had, as it 
 were, passed through the web of those assumptions 
 and conceptions. 
 
 The entire humanness of Jesus is, for instance, 
 witnessed to by the confidence of His neighbours in 
 Nazareth, where He was brought up, that they 
 knew all about Him. “ When the Sabbath was 
 come, He began to teach in the synagogue: and 
 the many hearing Him were astonished, saying, 
 Whence hath this man these things? What is the 
 wisdom that is given unto this man, and what 
 
WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 107 
 
 means such mighty works wrought by His hands? 
 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and 
 brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and 
 Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? 
 And they were offended in Him ” (Mark vi :2, 3). 
 But the very degree of such confidence only height¬ 
 ened the fact that there was more in Him than they 
 could account for. 
 
 And so it was all through His life. He was 
 certainly human, but he was something more. 
 What that was only came out through the triumph 
 which supervened upon His failure. It was re¬ 
 vealed through the Resurrection and through what 
 followed upon the Resurrection. Then the mys¬ 
 tery was unveiled; the questions, unanswered at 
 the time, were answered. The disciples, looking 
 back, knew who had been with them. They still 
 saw Jesus, their brother, their faithful, serving, 
 joyful, suffering Master. They still saw the Man. 
 But they saw the Man, no longer the subject of 
 unresolved questions and veiled in shadowing mys¬ 
 tery, but all the while radiant with divine Sonship. 
 They saw His humanity, but they saw His deity 
 shining through and transfiguring His humanity. 
 
 And that is the only way now to do full justice 
 to the story of His life which His friends have left 
 us. We can try to realise anew the utter humanity 
 of Jesus by reading the Gospel story on the assump¬ 
 tion that Fie was nothing more than just another 
 man. And yet the further that assumption is 
 pressed the more is it found tO' do radical violence 
 to the story. It means skipping all allusions to His 
 
108 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 powers, the possession of which constituted His 
 special temptation. It means passing over all the 
 tremendous passages where He speaks about Him¬ 
 self. It has meant, too, again and again in modern 
 scholarship, the breaking up of the Gospels into 
 fragments and the currency of strange and irra¬ 
 tional doubts as to whether there ever was such a 
 person as Jesus on the earth. 
 
 The fact is that the life of Jesus at the time only 
 proved intelligible in the light of. its outcome, and 
 it is SO' still. Only from the standpoint of faith in 
 Him as declared to be the Son of God by the 
 Resurrection does the record of the ministry co¬ 
 here. Otherwise it is the account of a madman 
 making intolerable claims: 1 His claim to rein¬ 
 terpret the divinely-sanctioned Law: His claim to 
 forgive sins: His claim to' judge mankind, and so 
 forth. Read those claims again and the essential 
 force of the old dilemma comes home. “ Aut Deus 
 aut non bonus homo ” (either God or not a good 
 man)—either the Son or a deluded fanatic. 
 
 And yet He was entirely man. That must never 
 be lost hold of. Scripture is never afraid to say so. 
 It sets out the deity in the humanity—God coming 
 down to 1 man and coming all the way, sharing to 
 the last in human experience, drinking the cup of 
 human suffering to the dregs. Once the life is seen 
 to be the revelation of the divine love, then no in- 
 
 1 It is interesting to note that the keenest intellect of our 
 time can, in the end, make no more of Jesus Christ than call 
 Him a madman: see G. Bernard Shaw’s Introduction to 
 An dr ocles and the Lion. 
 
WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 109 
 
 sistence on the human limitations and humiliation 
 of Jesus can be too strong. The more complete 
 the humiliation, the more divine is the sacrifice. 
 The narrower the limitations accepted, the more 
 limitless the love which accepted them. The more 
 we “ Behold the Man,” the more we know what 
 that little word “ so ” means in that summary of 
 the whole matter—“ God so loved the world.” 
 
XVI 
 
 GOD AND MAN 
 
 T HE tremendous and central truth of the 
 Christian faith is the self-revelation of the 
 One God in terms of a human life. It has 
 been the subject of much controversy, the main 
 track of which is marked by the great heresies. 
 These are called by long and obscure Greek names, 
 but it would be a great error to suppose that they 
 are dead issues to-day. 
 
 The truth that God became man—that the divine 
 was made known through the human—has con¬ 
 stantly prompted and still prompts men to indulge 
 in two kinds of one-sided emphasis. Some, on the 
 one hand, exalt the divine at the expense of the 
 human. This has been exceedingly common in 
 the devotional history of the Church. Others, on 
 the other hand, exalt the human to the exclusion 
 of the divine. This certainly has been the chief 
 tendency of thought in modern times. 
 
 Both attitudes spring out of the root difficulty 
 which besets everyone in more or less degree about 
 the Incarnation, namely, the difficulty of believing 
 that “ Almighty God could really have sacrificed 
 Himself to the uttermost for such a race as ours— 
 that God can really be as loving as the New Testa¬ 
 ment says He is.” 
 
 But there are several reasons to-day for being 
 
 110 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 111 
 
 confident that, despite the mystery—the “ seeing 
 through a glass darkly ”—that will always sur¬ 
 round this central secret and should prompt a rev¬ 
 erent agnosticism on many points, the truth of God 
 in Christ will repossess the heart and mind of the 
 world. 
 
 First there is the testimony of experience. Many 
 forces contribute to drive men on to verify for 
 themselves in their own spiritual experience the 
 reality of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life. Prominent among them, is the break-up of 
 the sway of infallible authority, whether of Church 
 or of Bible. The absence of hard-and-fast certain¬ 
 ties impel the soul to clinch the truth of the Gospel 
 by taking Jesus at His word. And there are num¬ 
 bers:—they are the very soul of the Church—who, 
 as a result, are able to say: “ We believe, not be¬ 
 cause of the saying: for we have heard Him our¬ 
 selves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the 
 Saviour of the world.” 
 
 Secondly, there is the deep and widely-prevailing 
 perplexity of men about God. In previous periods, 
 notably in the eighteenth century and in much of 
 the nineteenth, it did not seem to many thinkers 
 that it mattered vitally if they did throw over the 
 truth of the Incarnation. They thought that it left 
 their belief in God—their theism—secure and un¬ 
 impaired. They thought, too, that it left morals 
 unaffected. But world-convulsions have rudely 
 shaken and upset such complacency. True, there 
 are now as ever powerful philosophical arguments 
 for a belief in God. Indeed, thinkers to-day are 
 
112 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 reformulating those arguments in renewed force. 
 But those arguments are in the end powerless to 
 deal with the tremendous character of reality, un¬ 
 less they allow that the passion and agony of man¬ 
 kind is met by the passion and agony of God. In 
 other words, no philosophy which leaves out the 
 Cross is adequate to the facts of life. In other 
 words, as we shall see later, no merely Unitarian or 
 bare theistic position is comparable in rational 
 power to the truth which the Trinitarian formula 
 strives to express. 
 
 Thirdly, there is the failure of modern scholar¬ 
 ship, despite its strenuous and prolonged efforts, to 
 account for the historical fact of Jesus Christ in 
 terms of mere humanity, as being merely from 
 below. What, according to the title of a famous 
 book, has been called The Quest of the Historical 
 Jesus —Jesus as only a man among men—has 
 yielded strangely negative and disappointing re¬ 
 sults. The failure of criticism to furnish any 
 consistent picture of Jesus on a “ mere man ” 
 theory is bringing students round again to the 
 truth which they put on one side—that God was in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. 
 
 Fourthly (and here we are only putting in an¬ 
 other way what has been said in the two previous 
 paragraphs) a greater readiness prevails to-day, 
 than for many days past, to acknowledge that if 
 Christianity is true at all, it is the central truth— 
 in other words, that it is the revelation both of what 
 God is and of what man is. Previously men have 
 assumed that they knew what was meant by the 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 113 
 
 terms God and man, and then they have set to work 
 to account for the Person of Christ by means of 
 them. They have on the one hand labelled Him 
 with their preconceived notions of deity: on the 
 other they have essayed to reduce Him to 1 the level 
 of their preconceived notions of humanity. 
 
 But to-day the question what is meant by the 
 term God is precisely the painful question; while 
 the term man, it is being recognised, is nothing 
 fixed nor absolutely determined. For man, in com¬ 
 mon with the whole of Nature, is still in the 
 making, is not enclosed by any iron circle of neces¬ 
 sity, but is the central figure in an order which 
 allows of change, transformation and new possi¬ 
 bility. Both as regards God and man, we may say 
 that to-day the whole creation groans and travails 
 with an added intensity. What can be made of 
 God in face of the long, cruel process of the world’s 
 evolution ? What can be made of man, so different 
 from the animals, yet so akin; SO' conscious of a 
 high birthright, so impotent to realise it; so made 
 for exaltation, so liable to degradation? 
 
 The answer to both series of questions is Christ 
 —Perfect God and Perfect Man, as the old formula 
 puts it. It is God coming forth in His Son to lay 
 bare His heart of fatherly and suffering love, to 
 seek until He finds the souls of His children. It is 
 God living a human life, under all the conditions of 
 human weakness and struggle, and transfiguring it 
 and lifting it to its proper height of free and loving 
 sonship. That is the mystery of Christ, of which 
 the very statement evokes the sense that it is be- 
 
114 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 yond statement, which yet shall again win and save 
 the world. 
 
 Two things need to be said further. First, it 
 was God that became incarnate, though it was in 
 the Person of His Son. Often people have har¬ 
 boured thoughts which implied that because the 
 Father sent the Son, Fie remained outside the 
 struggle and pain which the Son endured. In 
 the language of the war, they have thought that the 
 Father remained “ embusque ” in safety at the base 
 in Heaven, while the Son went to the agony of the 
 trenches—to the Cross. But the war should have 
 killed such ungenerous thoughts. For any loving 
 mother knows that it would have been far easier to 
 have gone herself to the war than to have sent her 
 beloved son. As an old woman said once of “ God 
 so loved the world ”—“ Ah, that was love indeed! 
 I can think of myself as going to save someone, but 
 I can’t imagine how I could give my only son to die 
 for him.” The greater love was shown in the 
 sending by the Father of His Son. The Father’s 
 was the “ hardest part.” 
 
 Secondly, God, in becoming man, came all the 
 way. He became wholly human so as to live as 
 man with limited powers. He knew what it was to 
 be tired and hungry and ignorant of many things. 
 He was tried in all points like as we are. Though 
 He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the 
 things which He suffered. It destroys the human¬ 
 ity of the Lord, which is the revelation of His 
 deity, to suppose anything else. He came down 
 from heaven, and He came all the way. The Om- 
 
GOD AND MAN 
 
 115 
 
 niscient was ignorant; the Almighty felt tired; the 
 Omnipresent was only in one place at a time; the 
 Perfect One knew suffering and death—such was 
 and is the entirety of His love. 
 
XVII 
 
 OMNIPOTENCE—I 
 
 H AVING reached the centre of the Christian 
 faith, it is time to ask what is the bearing 
 of that faith on the burning question of 
 the Omnipotence of God? 
 
 That it is the burning question of our time needs 
 no long labouring. Its popular form; during the 
 war was, “Why does God not stop the war? If 
 He could, He would; but He hasn’t, so He can’t. 
 If, on the other hand, He can and won’t, then I’ve 
 done with Him.” 
 
 It is a hoary old dilemma, how to reconcile the 
 power and the goodness of God. It is not a dialec¬ 
 tical question. It has been scored and seared on 
 the hearts of many all the world over. That has, 
 without doubt, been partly due to the obligation by 
 which many men have thought they were bound to 
 ascribe all that happens in the world to the will of 
 God, on the ground of His Almightiness. 
 
 A General in France replied to the plea that the 
 ideal aimed at by the League of Nations was in 
 accordance with the will of God: “ Oh well, padre 
 . . . God! . . . and this war! . . . the will of 
 God ... I don’t know. . . . Look here, if I met 
 a Belgian who had had his house burnt by the 
 Huns, his son shot and his daughter outraged, I 
 suppose I should have to say to him, ‘ It’s the will 
 
 116 
 
OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 117 
 
 of God.’ . . . You talk about God . . . the war 
 hasn’t done much for Him! ” And with that he 
 stumped off to bed, muttering and shaking his 
 head. 
 
 That is an instance of doubt about God’s good¬ 
 ness arising out of the assumption of His omnipo¬ 
 tence, or, at any rate, the assumption that Tie 
 orders everything that happens. 
 
 On the other hand, the pressure of the problem 
 has driven others, and notably Mr. Wells (ever- 
 alive to the latest issue), to abandon the assumption 
 of God’s power and to save some belief in His 
 goodness by saying that He is only relatively pow¬ 
 erful, but as such is doing His best. And there is 
 quite a school of theologians who 1 say the same sort 
 of thing. A staff-officer of intelligence made an 
 interesting comment on such a view. “ I tell you 
 what! but all this makes the Almighty into a miser¬ 
 able and pitiable being.” 
 
 We have put the problem. What can be said 
 about it? 
 
 But before saying anything from the Christian 
 point of view, it is right to acknowledge frankly 
 that in the history of Christianity there have sel¬ 
 dom been wanting some who 1 have made, as it were, 
 an emergency exit from the heat of tips burning 
 question by having recourse to another world. 
 This was essentially the Deistic position, which had 
 so great a sway in England in the eighteenth cen¬ 
 tury. It solved the problems arising from the 
 strange course of events here by saying that God, 
 having started events on their course, had nothing 
 
118 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 more to do 1 with them, save to watch them from 
 the vantage-ground of another world. 
 
 A striking and modern instance of despair of 
 this world (which involves a despair of there being 
 any answer here to our question) is the Roman 
 Catholic modernist, Father Tyrrell. “ The more 
 widely and deeply a man lives, the more certainly 
 he becomes a pessimist ” : such is his verdict. It is 
 followed by a grim picture of life as governed by 
 the iron law of inevitable failure, so far as the at¬ 
 tainment of ideals is concerned. Only in the life to 
 come will human aspiration be met with realisation. 
 Here, then, is nothing for the Christian to do but 
 to set his teeth and hold on and wait. And over 
 and above these special instances is the very definite 
 stream of Christian sentiment—it finds especially 
 marked outlet in hymns—which views this world 
 and its troubles as of nothing worth, and yearns 
 only for the world beyond, where all will be set 
 right. There has indeed been much to promote the 
 reaction of social democracy against a gospel of 
 “ Kingdom Come,” which, it protests, has left out 
 of account the necessity of building the “ King¬ 
 dom Here.” 
 
 It also should be said that the Christian answer 
 to our burning question cannot be as simple or as 
 glib as it has sometimes appeared to be. The 
 answer used to run, that all was originally well with 
 the completed world as it left the Creator’s hands, 
 but then came the Fall of Satan, and then the envy 
 of Satan tempting man to fall, and thence sprang 
 all the trouble. 
 
OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 119 
 
 It is no disloyalty to the tremendous reality of 
 moral evil or to the tragedy of perverted spiritual 
 powers to declare that this as a complete answer is 
 too thin. It does not cover all the facts. It is im¬ 
 possible fairly to write down to the account of 
 fallen angels or fallen men all the strain, the strug¬ 
 gle, the cost inherent in the prolonged story of the 
 cosmic process. It will never be possible again to 
 take that static view of the world as a completed 
 thing which the old explanation implies. For there 
 is a problem of pain distinguishable from the prob¬ 
 lem of sin, though without doubt the former has 
 been enormously complicated and intensified by the 
 latter. It is in truth profitless to try to escape from 
 this main problem of experience by appeal to what 
 was supposed to have happened at the beginning of 
 things. No hope lies that way of meeting that 
 which is heartfelt and sincere, in the passionate 
 dismay of innumerable hearts to-day at the long- 
 drawn tale of the world’s suffering and tragedy. 
 
 In other words, it is right to' acknowledge that 
 the need of men is not only for reconciliation with 
 God. Despite the danger of saying that which 
 lends itself to challenge, it must also be said that 
 there is the need of God’s reconciliation with men. 
 There is, in a word, a problem of the goodness of 
 God, arising out of the facts of life, as well as the 
 problem of the sin of men. 
 
 In saying this it is justifiable to refer again to 
 the way in which, without reference to Genesis or 
 Satan, the minds and souls of Jewish men felt and 
 saw the problem of the world’s confusion and pain. 
 
120 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 They were not afraid to cry out to God in protest, 
 and to ask that He should justify His ways to 
 them. And this they did, while at the same time 
 they were acutely and uniquely sensitive to the ter¬ 
 rific facts of human guilt and to the bitterness of 
 which men’s hearts are aware. In fact it is true to 
 say that the Old Testament, properly understood, 
 furnishes no plain solution of the problem of the 
 tragic in life. Rather it puts the problem with a 
 greater intensity than anywhere else in literature. 
 It put the problem with unconquerable faith that 
 an answer to it would be forthcoming. But it had 
 itself no 1 answer in its grasp. 
 
 And when we come to Christ, it is fair to say 
 that no explanation of the problem of evil and of 
 pain can be attributed to Him. Rather He con¬ 
 fronted the problem with no endeavour to explain 
 it away. He saw the world as a battlefield between 
 good and evil. He never said why it was so. 
 There was no solution of that question for Him 
 other than that of plunging into the fray. We 
 shall try to see what the Christian answer is to 
 these deep questions. But we can say beforehand 
 that it is not an answer which explains and clears 
 up everything. There are certain fundamental 
 questions which admit of no complete intellectual 
 answer. There is no way round them but only 
 through them . And that was Christ’s way. To 
 take the world as it was, to face its worst, to set 
 His face steadfastly therein to do the Father’s will. 
 
XVIII 
 
 OMNIPOTENCE—II 
 
 W E have now to try to see what Christianity 
 has to say to the great problem of God’s 
 power. Every time anyone calls Him 
 Almighty he is likely to set the question moving: 
 “If Almighty, then why not more effective? Why 
 does He not come to the rescue of the world and 
 use His power so as to set things right? ” 
 
 What has Jesus Christ to' say about this old but 
 perennial question? Several things. 
 
 First, we find in Him no demand that life here 
 should be smooth, easy, painless. It was a diffi¬ 
 culty, indeed an intense temptation, to Him that 
 people wanted to exploit His power merely for the 
 sake of bodily health. His attitude in this regard 
 differs deeply from the desires of the luxurious, the 
 comfort-loving, the cowardly, the pursuers of phys¬ 
 ical well-being at any price. He holds out no en¬ 
 couragement to those who want to make of life one 
 long round of untroubled pleasure. His sanction 
 cannot rightly be claimed by those who would deny 
 the reality of pain and suffering. Rather He is a 
 comrade in the great company of men and women 
 who have seen that the life of adventure, risks and 
 pains is the real life, by contrast with which the 
 worship of ease and security is tasteless, colourless 
 and morbid. He certainly, therefore, says to those 
 
 121 
 
122 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 oppressed with the problem of pain, that that which 
 they call a problem is of the very essence and salt 
 of life. And in so saying, He has all the lovers, 
 adventurers, pioneers, mariners, soldiers, mountain- 
 climbers, steeplechase-riders, on His side. 
 
 Further, He urges us to drink the cup of life 
 without lamentation, because Fie viewed this pres¬ 
 ent world as not being self-contained, but as set 
 against the background of eternity. In other 
 words, Fie interpreted life on earth as being the 
 testing-place and the school of character, the full 
 significance of which would be disclosed in the life 
 to come. Hymns and so forth may no doubt have 
 caricatured and exaggerated this attitude, of which 
 the centre and focus is other-worldly. But, when 
 that has been allowed for, we see that something 
 remains which is intimately linked with His call to 
 blithe and reckless adventure. For to His vision 
 there lay beyond the horizons of this world a life 
 of greater scope and of larger tasks. Therefore 
 He would have nothing to do with those who 
 hugged the comforts and satisfactions of this 
 world, as though beyond death was nought but 
 shadows and silence. His zest in work and effort 
 sprang integrally from His interpretation of life as 
 a pilgrimage. “ Find,” He cried, “ the secret of 
 life now, not by trying to save your life, but by 
 giving it away—find it now and to all eternity.” 
 We do not then find Jesus Christ quarrelling with 
 the steepness of life’s hill, nor with the risks in¬ 
 volved in climbing it. 
 
 Yet, secondly, He was far from callousness in 
 
OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 123 
 
 face of a suffering world. Rather, as is evident 
 throughout the Gospel story, He was ever being 
 touched to compassion for it. Pie wanted to bring 
 deliverance, both of soul and body, to men. i\nd 
 this because, as He explicitly said, that was the 
 Father’s burning desire. He had been anointed, 
 He said, specifically to declare that. And, what is 
 more, Pie confronted life in the faith that there 
 were in the Father’s hands boundless possibilities 
 of health and restoration and freedom. (Would 
 that the Church had faithfully remembered this!) 
 Undoubtedly He believed in a God, not of weak¬ 
 ness, but of power. “ With God all things are pos¬ 
 sible . . . have faith in God ”—the words were 
 called out by the doubtfulness of others. They 
 point to that which others coveted in Him. “ In¬ 
 crease our faith,” they said. 
 
 Yet, thirdly, His consciousness of power, being 
 available for curing the ills of life, was mingled 
 with the clear-eyed recognition that the power lay 
 in the hands of a Father of children, and not of a 
 king of subjects. Hence His refusal to establish 
 the Kingdom of the Father by means merely of 
 exhibitions of power. The power was there, but 
 Pie could not use it without violating the true 
 nature of men, namely, their birthright of freedom 
 as children, not slaves, of God. Here we come 
 right down upon the subject of Christ’s temptation. 
 His decisive battle with temptation was preceded 
 by His baptism, which brought with it the con¬ 
 sciousness of His own Sonship. He went out into 
 the wilderness to decide how He should win other 
 
124 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 sons of God and bring them under the sway of 
 God’s reign. His temptation was to employ meth¬ 
 ods, seductive, marvellous, compelling, to this end. 
 He felt that there lay to His hand the three great 
 ways of “ getting at ” men—Bread, Mystery, and 
 Force. But He put them away then and thereafter. 
 He chose to respect the freedom of men. He 
 aligned Himself with the Father’s choice to have 
 free children in His world and nothing less. He 
 refused therefore to exploit the power available in 
 the Father’s hands by using it in ways which would 
 override men’s freedom of choice. He went out on 
 the supreme adventure of winning—not forcing— 
 their free response. He had, then, implicit and 
 unwavering faith in the power of God, but it was 
 the power of Him whose name was Father. In 
 other words, He clearly recognised a restraint on 
 the Power of God. 
 
 Of course, it may be replied by someone that it 
 would have been far better if God had not given 
 men freedom. Certainly it would be a tidier world 
 if they were automata. It would be a less painful 
 business if they were solely ruled by animal in¬ 
 stinct. The risk and cost of their being in the 
 world with (in some measure) self-directed powers 
 of creation and destruction, are undeniable. It is 
 always possible to throw in God’s face His fatal 
 gift of freedom. All that can certainly be said. 
 And there is no answer to it. The man who would 
 prefer to be a machine, a vegetable, or an animal to 
 being a man, must be left with his preference. He 
 has sold his birthright. 
 
OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 125 
 
 But to return to Christ. We see Him as con¬ 
 fidently in touch with boundless power, but power 
 restrained by the fact of what God is and what 
 men are. 
 
 Yet, fourthly, He did not look upon the Father, 
 whose power was thus restrained, as inactively con¬ 
 templating the mess that His children are making 
 of their freedom. There is no sign in the Gospels 
 that Jesus thought of the Father as, so to say, sit¬ 
 ting in impotence, faced by a world gone wrong. 
 Rather it was the very essence of His message to 
 men—as it were the very point of the spear zmth 
 which He attacked their hearts and minds —that 
 the Father was in ceaseless activity to transform 
 and emancipate the world. Hence the revolution¬ 
 ary intolerance of Jesus. Hence the fire which He 
 came to cast upon the earth. Hence His denunci¬ 
 ation of acquiescence in evils which were not the 
 will of the Father, but which free and whole- 
 hearted surrender to the Father would abolish. 
 
 Such, then, is the light which Christ throws upon 
 our problem. That is what He says to< it. But He 
 did not only say things. He acted them out. He 
 went through with His divine adventure. In ago¬ 
 nised but in invincibly loyal conformity to the 
 Father’s will, He allowed the worst that men. in 
 their exercise of tlieir freedom, could do to Him. 
 He yielded Himself to the death which seemed to 
 proclaim the triumph of the powers of evil and the 
 impotence of the Father. And thus He set free 
 the pent-up power of the Father. Thus was veri¬ 
 fied the reality of the Father’s love. The Father, 
 
126 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 being the Father, had not intervened to prevent His 
 children doing what they would. But when they 
 had done their worst His love was not impotent. 
 But it poured out, in response, to transform the 
 very symbol of its failure into the manifestation 
 of its victory. 
 
 Thus comes through the Christian answer to the 
 problem of omnipotence. It is the message of the 
 Cross, laying bare the inmost nature of things, de¬ 
 claring that God is no remote and powerless spec¬ 
 tator of events, but is utterly identified with the 
 suffering of the world. It is also the message of 
 the Resurrection, declaring that God, who because 
 He is love cannot prevent the sin of His children, 
 is not defeated by sin, but in the omnipotence of 
 love can overrule it and destroy it. 
 
 It is, let us repeat, the omnipotence of love, not 
 the omnipotence which means the being able to do 
 anything whatever. It is the being able to do 
 whatever love can do. 
 
 The fact is, men have in part created the problem 
 at which they have boggled. They have done this 
 by, as it were, dividing the Deity into two halves— 
 into Power and into Love. And then they have 
 been set wondering how to reconcile the two halves. 
 The Christian revelation allows of no such division. 
 It declares that the essence of God’s power is His 
 love, for that is what He is. What is even more 
 it declares that the fountains of omnipotent love 
 are open for present appropriation. It summons 
 a disbelieving, neglectful, defiant world to take the 
 God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ at His 
 
OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 127 
 
 word and to put to the proof that which was re¬ 
 jected when Jesus was on earth-—that which never¬ 
 theless was opened up by Him for all who will 
 follow Him. 
 
 Argue as we may, in the end the Christian an¬ 
 swer is no clear explanation of life’s problem. 
 Rather it retains the character of an hypothesis, 
 the truth of which must be clinched by verification. 
 It challenges a world in captivity tO' find out 
 whether there is not in God power to change it and 
 set it free. God will never intervene so as to 
 change the world against its will. He will never 
 “ stop the war.” He will not make men different 
 by force. To do so would be to contradict His 
 own nature and theirs. But He has given them 
 the capacity of love—self-surrender, self-giving, 
 co-operation—and that is the means of releasing 
 His omnipotence. 
 
 The world has for long tried every other hypoth¬ 
 esis as a way of life. Modern society is a system 
 which has been built in disregard to God and in 
 defiance of His laws. It threatens to tumble. Yet 
 that is not God’s will. He is waiting to give His 
 children—if by love they will take it—a better 
 world. 
 
XIX 
 
 THE ATONEMENT—I 
 
 HE next great subject of which we should 
 attempt to treat is the Atonement. The 
 
 Gospel has ever been more than either an 
 illumination about God or the example of a perfect 
 human life. It has been an act of redemption, of 
 reconciliation, a bringing together—a making at 
 one—of God, in all His holiness, with men in all 
 their sinfulness. It not only throws light on what 
 is tragic and corrupt in human life, but deals 
 actively and victoriously with it. 
 
 As regards no part of Christianity is there more 
 need for an attempt to consider it afresh and not 
 merely through the lenses of previous theological 
 thought, than in dealing with the Atonement. No 
 subject has attracted to itself more thought than 
 the atoning death of Christ. It comes down to us 
 like a much-voyaged ship, thickly encrusted with 
 barnacles and marine deposits. The metaphor is 
 too drastic, as it implies that the thought of pre¬ 
 vious generations is valueless and deserves only to 
 be scraped off. That is not true, and it would be 
 presumptuous to say that it was true. But we will 
 let the metaphor stand, as signifying the desirabil¬ 
 ity of looking anew at a subject around which so 
 much speculation has clustered. 
 
 Undoubtedly various doctrines of Atonement 
 
 128 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 129 
 
 have left wrong impressions on the general mind 
 and have surrounded the Cross with repellent 
 associations. Notions of an angry God to be ap¬ 
 peased by blood: a God who could by the punish¬ 
 ment of the innocent be disposed to treat more 
 lightly the sins of the guilty: notions of a ransom 
 paid by Christ to the devil: notions of the relation¬ 
 ship between God and men being that of creditor 
 and debtor—such interpretations have had a wide 
 currency at some time or other. They have served 
 to put many men in a pathological frame of mind 
 as soon as the subject of the Atonement is men¬ 
 tioned. It is also only fair to make the same ad¬ 
 mission about the unrestrained use which has so 
 often been made of the imagery of blood-shedding. 
 Doubtless this imagery of the Precious Blood of 
 Christ is as a casket containing a treasure. But 
 unless the casket be opened, the imagery inter¬ 
 preted, the treasure will lie hidden from many by 
 that which is repulsive to them. 
 
 Another way of putting the need of fresh recon¬ 
 sideration of the subject is to point out that, in 
 dealing with Atonement, men have often laid al¬ 
 most exclusive emphasis on the reconciliation of 
 men with God, and have left all but untouched the 
 reconciliation of God with men. Of course, the 
 reconciliation in either case is not the same. To say 
 that God needs man’s forgiveness, as man needs 
 His, is to blaspheme. But if the need of reconcilia¬ 
 tion springs from the fact that there are barriers 
 between God and man, then it is impossible to say 
 that all the barriers are made up of human sin. 
 
ISO THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 For, as we have seen repeatedly, there is a 
 “ darkness round about ” God, and it is a darkness 
 which has been felt more intensely by the saint 
 than the sinner. True, God has not left Himself 
 without witness all down the ages. But that wit¬ 
 ness—all in life that testifies to what He is—itself 
 gives rise to questions the burden and the pressure 
 of which are felt to separate Him from us. Thus it 
 came about that the religiously expert people who 
 were most sure about Him were also in most pain¬ 
 ful doubt about Him. They felt, as they strove to 
 lay hold on Him, that they were met by barriers 
 which they could not pass. 
 
 In the world, therefore, into which Christ came 
 there was, as it were, a double barrier. The posi¬ 
 tion may be likened (though a metaphor drawn 
 from the hostilities of war must not be pressed to 
 its logical conclusion) to that during the war on 
 one of the great high roads in France, across which 
 there were drawn the two tremendous systems of 
 front-line trenches. The road, made for coming 
 and going, was doubly barred; and in between the 
 tangled lines of barbed wire a section of the road 
 was No Man’s Land. So the highway between 
 God and man was barred, by the barrier of the in¬ 
 scrutableness of God and the barrier of human 
 guilt. Man could neither advance across the en¬ 
 tanglements which he had himself erected, nor ever 
 and again did it seem that there was movement 
 outward from the lines of heaven. 
 
 The first significance, therefore, of the action of 
 God in Christ is the overthrowing from God’s side 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 131 
 
 of the barriers between Him and His children. It 
 is the “ coming forth ” of the Son from the Father 
 to find and reach those who could not reach Him. 
 The first meaning of the Cross, set up in the dark¬ 
 ness and squalor of a veritable No Man’s Land, is 
 God commending His love towards men, despite all 
 they could do in defiance of Him. The Cross 
 means movement from God towards man. It is 
 the acting out of the love, as of a good shepherd, 
 which seeks at any cost until it finds those who 
 had lost their way. 
 
 This primary good news of God has tended in 
 the course of the centuries to fall into the back¬ 
 ground and to be overlooked. It is remarkable, 
 for instance, how little the teaching of the Church 
 about the Incarnation has resulted in their being 
 in the average man’s mind a Christian idea of God. 
 This became flagrantly obvious to chaplains during 
 the war. God, to most men, was the Supreme 
 Being, aloft above the troubles of the world and 
 yet somehow responsible for them. 
 
 The Cross, on the other hand, was a far-away 
 episode in the life of some mysteriously good Man. 
 It spoke to few of the Passion of God, of His 
 all-giving identification with the fortunes of His 
 wayward children. Hence that widespread absence 
 to-day of a vivid sense of sin, which the clergy so 
 sorely lament. That varies directly with the sense 
 of the reality, the presence, the love of God. If He 
 is but a heavenly Stranger and His love but a senti¬ 
 mental fancy, men are left with only a certain 
 natural uneasiness about their wrongdoings, which 
 
132 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 is far removed from a genuine sorrow for sin. 
 Such sorrow, as distinct from selfish remorse, 
 springs only from an awareness of what sin does to 
 someone else. By himself and for himself a man 
 will care scarcely at all about doing wrong. But he 
 will be stung into sorrow if it comes home to him 
 that he has broken, say, his mother's heart and 
 betrayed her loving trust. So with our relation¬ 
 ship to God. Only the sense of what that sin has 
 done to His heart of love will evoke penitence and 
 desire for forgiveness. If He is not thought of as 
 love, He will figure in men’s lives only as a dread¬ 
 ful future Judge, who will some day “ get His own 
 back ” and send them to hell. 
 
 This remoteness of God from His children which 
 accounts for their faint sense of sin also finds ex¬ 
 pression in the prevailing association of the Chris¬ 
 tian faith with gloom and depression. It ought to 
 be a radiant thing, overflowing with gratitude, 
 singing with praise, eager in worship. It is com¬ 
 monly thought of as that which threatens and 
 overshadows life with kill-joy influence. It has, in¬ 
 deed, as a faith been deeply tinged by the natural 
 sadness of a religion. For Christianity is or ought 
 to be a faith with, as its radiant centre, an object of 
 trust and love and adoration. Whereas religion, as 
 its history overwhelmingly proves, may be but the 
 expression of self. Its essential characteristic, 
 which is aspiration God-ward, is habitually sad¬ 
 dened and confused by the scruples, anxieties, fears 
 of man’s self-centered consciousness. Thus the 
 world was sick and weary of religion, when the 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 133 
 
 Gospel of God, and of His man-ward love, came to 
 it, with the fear-dispelling", joy-evoking effect of 
 day breaking in upon night. 
 
 So when we consider Atonement and Reconcilia¬ 
 tion we must not begin with offering for sin from 
 man’s side. Otherwise we shall inevitably go 
 astray and get lost in the mire of dark thoughts 
 about an angry Deity, who could only be induced 
 by the suffering of innocence to give up His wrath 
 and think of mercy. 
 
 We must begin with that which comes from 
 God’s side. And what comes is what He is— 
 unmitigated love. That is what Christ means. For 
 He is the mind of God. What He is, God is. His 
 pity in dying for us is God’s own pity. The love 
 of God for His sinful children sent His Son to 
 bring them home from their wanderings in far 
 countries. God did not so hate the world, but so 
 loved it. His love had not got to be won by sacri¬ 
 fice and blood. It was His love which, in utter 
 self-sacrifice even unto death, overthrew the bar¬ 
 riers and re-opened the closed highway. All that 
 must come first. 
 
XX 
 
 THE ATONEMENT—II 
 
 W E have seen that in thinking of the Atone¬ 
 ment (or the reconciliation between God 
 and man) it is imperative to begin with 
 that which came from God’s side. It was the 
 Father who, in love beyond men’s conceiving, 
 bridged the gulf which separated Himself from 
 His children. As a shepherd seeks his sheep, the 
 Father sought, until He found, His children and 
 “ home rejoicing brought them.” 
 
 That is the first meaning of the Cross. “ God,” 
 as St. Paul says, “ commendeth His love towards 
 us, in that, while we were yet sinners, . . . (while 
 we were enemies) Christ died for us ” (Rom. v:8). 
 Once this tremendous truth comes home to men, 
 then they begin to realise what their sin and enmity 
 do to God, who loves them so. And thence spring 
 sorrow and desire for forgiveness. Once there is 
 any understanding of the love which will suffer 
 everything, even to the man-inflicted death upon 
 the Cross, rather than let go of its object, then men 
 long to respond to it. 
 
 And this is where the other side of Christ’s aton¬ 
 ing work comes in. The first side, as we have seen, 
 is His coming out from God in never-relenting 
 search for us. The other side is His bringing us 
 right home to God by making to the Father the 
 
 134 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 135 
 
 response for which the Father ever longs. What 
 He longs for is ourselves—the response to 1 His love 
 of our love. To go back to the metaphor, used in 
 the last chapter, of the doubly-barred highway; 
 Christ comes out from the lines of heaven, and, 
 surmounting every barrier put in His way, leads us 
 forward and brings us home along the re-opened 
 highway. Both movements are from God, and 
 both are accomplished in our human nature, under 
 every condition of trial and weakness borne and 
 overcome by invincibly persistent love. St. Paul 
 puts it finally: “ All things are of God, who hath 
 reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ and hath 
 given unto us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, 
 that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
 Himself.” 
 
 To appreciate anew what we have called the 
 other side—the Father-ward—side of Christ’s 
 work, it is necessary to recognise that the deepest 
 thing in man is not sin, that is self-devotion, but a 
 capacity to give himself to' God. Here as every¬ 
 where we have to go to Christ and His attitude to 
 men, rather than to the traditional systems in which 
 men have sought to interpret Him. Such systems 
 have undoubtedly spread the impression that man 
 is by nature a “ child of wrath,” in utter corrup¬ 
 tion, in total depravity and with “ no health ” in 
 him. It is in fact hard wholly to rebut the accusa¬ 
 tion that Christianity, in its enthusiastic emphasis 
 on human depravity, has tended to blacken the 
 face of man. 
 
 But the accusation does not get home upon 
 
136 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Christ, if His proportion of faith in men is distin¬ 
 guished from the disproportion of the faith of 
 others. True, nothing can be more tremendous 
 than His insight into' the tragic capacity of men to 
 sell their birthright, to plunge themselves wilfully 
 in ruin and outer darkness. Yet, when He came 
 among men, His primary appeal was to their posi¬ 
 tive capacity freely to respond to His invitation. 
 He did not assume that they could not respond; He 
 assumed that they could. He did not call them 
 “ children of wrath.” His appeal was to sinners, 
 but not to irretrievable sinners, but rather to sin¬ 
 ners capable of repentance. He saw that men were 
 evil, but He laid delighted emphasis on the fact 
 that, though evil, they could give good gifts unto 
 their children (Luke xi: 13 ). 
 
 In other words, He appealed to and trusted in 
 man’s true nature as made in the image of God—as 
 made for God and for goodness. He assumed the 
 unnaturalness to man of sin, no matter how much 
 man had compromised himself with it. In a word, 
 He put His seal to the gloriously optimistic inter¬ 
 pretation of experience (embodied in the story of 
 the Fall) which declares that in sinning men fall, 
 violate their own nature, renounce their proper 
 birthright. 
 
 This view of human nature is dynamic with 
 optimism, as contrasted with the dreary verdicts of 
 evolutionary philosophy, which assert that sin is 
 the inevitable expression by man of the survival 
 in his nature of the tiger and the ape (as though by 
 far the worst exhibitions of sin did not come from 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 137 
 
 the heart of the most civilised and cultured refine¬ 
 ment). No, the Christianity which is true to* the 
 thought of Christ has as its background, not the 
 blackness of man’s inevitable degradation, but 
 the light of his great destiny. If he is in the mud, 
 he is still a god in the mud. He is not a creature 
 of the slime. He is made for something far differ¬ 
 ent, and is therefore infinitely worth extricating. 
 If he is in a far country, eating pigs’ husks, he is 
 not at home in his native land. 
 
 The call of Christ to men therefore was that 
 they should rise to the height of their destiny. He 
 saw them to be the sole creatures who could satisfy 
 and bring joy to the loving heart of the Father, by 
 consciously and freely giving themselves to Him. 
 He did not ask of them the subjection of subjects 
 to a king, nor the deference of wrongdoers to a 
 judge. He asked for the response of those beloved 
 to their Lover. Thus He headed a movement of 
 man up to God. He greeted as “ brother and sis¬ 
 ter and mother ” (Mark iii:35) those who' re¬ 
 sponded to share with Him the adventure of 
 co-operation with the Father’s will. 
 
 But in the end He was bereft of His companions. 
 The capacity for self-giving, to which He appealed, 
 proved insufficient. The entirety of free devotion 
 of sons to the Father proved to be not forthcoming. 
 Sin, that is self, arrested His followers. Therefore 
 He had to carry through the common enterprise, 
 alone and comradeless. He did not do so auto¬ 
 matically in virtue of His deity. He did it as Man, 
 beset by temptation, winning His way forward by 
 
138 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 yielding Himself to the constraint of the Father’s 
 love. Whatever might easily deter others from 
 co-operation with the Father, He allowed nothing 
 to deter Him. So He struggled forward and 
 reached alone the position whither He had set out 
 with others. He alone was present—cried “ Ad- 
 sum !”—at the supreme hour of the Father’s pur¬ 
 pose. Surmounting every barrier before which 
 others fell, He flung Himself, in the garden of 
 agony, into union with the active will of the unseen 
 Other. And so He went to the Cross, offering 
 there, under conditions imposed by human sin and 
 weakness, the perfectly whole-hearted offering of 
 a son to the Father. 
 
 On any showing He did something for others 
 which they ought themselves to have done and 
 could not do. He alone, as it were, of all the regi¬ 
 ment which went “ over the top,” reached the ob¬ 
 jective. In so doing He carried the honour of the 
 whole regiment with Him. From man’s side and 
 as man He carried humanity right home to the 
 passionately-desirous heart of God. He brought 
 to final achievement the whole age-long quest of 
 the race. It entailed suffering, which, though He 
 was innocent, He bore. Not that it was inflicted 
 on Him by the Father, but that it was inflicted on 
 Him by others in their blindness to and disregard 
 of the Father. Thus He saw that what brought 
 Himself to the Cross was the repudiation of the 
 Father by His children. The essence of the trag¬ 
 edy was not what they did to Himself, but what 
 they did to the Father. 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 139 
 
 So there broke out in the silence and darkness 
 of Calvary the all-revealing cry—the pleading by 
 the seer for the blind, by the innocent for the guilty 
 —“ Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do.” Is there anyone who will maintain that 
 He does not need the shelter—the propitiation—of 
 that prayer ? Is there anyone who looks back upon 
 the Cross as being what it is, namely, the laying 
 bare of the all-suffering love of the Father—is 
 there anyone who will not want to> be sorry? If a 
 man, unknowing, had hit his mother in the face he 
 would be sorry. That is the sort of thing that 
 averagely respectable people did to the Father when 
 they rejected Jesus, coming in the Father’s name, 
 and brought Him to the Cross. But once anyone 
 is touched to sorrow for sin, he finds, if he is 
 honest, that he is only half-sorry. For he finds 
 himself torn in two in an internal discord. He 
 knows that he is made for love—for self-giving— 
 but, in fact, he prefers to love and to save himself. 
 That is precisely what Peter found. 
 
 Thus we get a glimpse of the saving mystery of 
 Christ’s atoning work for us. We can press in 
 along the way of union of man with God, which 
 He has opened. Though we are not sorry, or 
 only half-sorry, we can identify ourselves with 
 His plea for forgiveness. We can identify our¬ 
 selves—in all our imperfection—with the perfect 
 offering of Himself which He made to the 
 Father. We can cry to the Father, whose love 
 we doubt and outrage: “ Only look on us as found 
 in Him.” We can share delightedly in the Offer- 
 
140 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ing which is the central mystery of Christian 
 worship. 
 
 But that implies a union of men with Christ of 
 which we must treat in another chapter. The 
 Atonement—the at-onement of God with man, and 
 man with God—is only complete when Christ lives 
 in men and they live in Him. 
 
XXI 
 
 THE CHURCH: IS IT NECESSARY? 
 
 T HE concluding words of the last chapter in¬ 
 dicate a point of departure for considering 
 the Church. Doubtless whatever is written 
 by a bishop on this subject will be suspect by some 
 and discounted by others as being special pleading. 
 It is not a popular subject. There are indeed many 
 who share Voltaire’s opinion: “ Pour etre heureux, 
 il faut vivre loin des gens de l’eglise ” (To be happy 
 one must live far from the Church-folk). Never¬ 
 theless even a bishop can fairly ask others to think 
 for themselves about a fact which in this degree 
 and that touches everyone’s life, even though many 
 are on their guard lest it should touch them too 
 closelv. 
 
 J 
 
 It must also be acknowledged that the subject 
 is difficult to treat—more especially in the public 
 press—uncontroversially. Yet it would be faint¬ 
 hearted to shirk the subject for that reason. If 
 the Church has been the subject of intense con¬ 
 troversy, that is itself a sign that it is something 
 vitally worth discussing. Discussion, therefore, of 
 the Church is included in this book. But it is in¬ 
 cluded with the intention and the desire not to 
 score party advantage thereby. 
 
 The writer believes that the Church of Christ is 
 a greater thing than any existing Church, and he 
 
 141 
 
142 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 disbelieves that any Church has a monopoly of 
 divine blessing. The Church of the future—the 
 Great Church as it has recently been called—will 
 never be brought nearer by those who claim to be 
 sole possessors of the Fact of Christ. It is pre¬ 
 cisely such a claim which has rent the One Family 
 or Society or Body into fragments. The revivifi¬ 
 cation of those fragments into one will only result 
 from the recognition on all hands that Christ, as 
 Way and Truth and Life, is more than any section 
 of His followers has apprehended. 
 
 So we ask the question which is the title of this 
 chapter: “ Is the Church necessary? ” 
 
 The question is not unnecessary. It stirs in 
 many minds as a symptom of their dismay at the 
 distance which separates the Church as it is from 
 the character of Him whose name it bears. Un¬ 
 questionably the Church often appears to have 
 undergone decapitation. That is, as a body it 
 seems to have been separated from its Head. 
 Some of the most formidable of the Church’s crit¬ 
 ics are not those who “ care for none of these 
 things,” but those who do not recognise in the 
 Church the reality of that for which Christ lived 
 and died. Hence the inclination to assert that 
 Christ’s religion is something which it is fatal to 
 organise: that it is rather a purely spiritual thing, 
 like the Spirit, “ blowing where it listeth,” and as 
 such never to be caught and caged within the four 
 walls of an institution. Thus the creeds, cere¬ 
 monies, ministries of the Church are viewed as 
 though they were features of a museum, wherein 
 
THE CHURCH: IS IT NECESSARY? 143 
 
 all that once was alive is dead, while the living 
 thing is elsewhere. 
 
 From the same kind of source springs the view— 
 perhaps especially favourite among Anglo-Saxons 
 —that the essential thing in Christianity is moral¬ 
 ity; that it is not a religion but an ethic, which as 
 such is independent of everything ecclesiastical. 
 And to these views there must be added the com¬ 
 mon conviction that it is illegitimate to bind indi¬ 
 viduals in all their rich variety by any corporate tie 
 or any bond of common allegiance. Each must 
 fashion his own creed: each must be his own priest. 
 In a word, to alter a well-known aphorism, 
 “ L’Eglise c’est moi ” (I am the Church). And so 
 forth. Certainly our question, “ Is the Church 
 necessary ? ” is one which needs to be asked. 
 
 Any satisfactory answer to the question must be 
 grounded on history, and in particular on the his¬ 
 tory in the New Testament. 
 
 Briefly, it may be said that the Church is neces¬ 
 sary, because without the Church there would have 
 been no such thing as Christianity in the world. 
 For, but for His getting right home within the 
 hearts of those who had followed Him,, Christ 
 Himself would have come to and gone from earth 
 as a stranger “ who tarries but a day.” It is quite 
 clear that the life of Jesus on earth by itself pro¬ 
 duced little or no result. When He came to die on 
 Calvary, as we have seen, He had not succeeded in 
 doing anything but, by word and deed, by teaching 
 and by living, fan into flame faith and expectation 
 of which the object was the unseen Father. And 
 
144 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 that faith and expectation were smothered, as a fire 
 is smothered by a gale of rain, by the disastrous 
 ignominy of His sordid fate. 
 
 It is also only a little less clear that the Resur¬ 
 rection of Jesus by itself would have yielded no 1 
 lasting result in history. It was not a sign to carry 
 conviction to the general public. That was exactly 
 what Jesus refused to grant to the shallow and 
 sensation-loving multitude. He returned, tri¬ 
 umphant over death, only to those who had been 
 His comrades in His temptations. The experience 
 of being “ glad when they saw the Lord ” was given 
 only to the little band of His friends. Doubtless 
 they would never have forgotten it, but it is hard 
 to see how they could ever have brought it home to 
 others, even to their fellow-Jews, let alone to 
 critically-minded Greeks. It would have been 
 something real to them, but beyond realisation by 
 others. Just as the Ypres salient is real to “ the 
 boys,” but is essentially beyond realisation on the 
 part of those who were not there, no matter what 
 those who have survived its hellish fires may try to 
 do to make it real to them. 
 
 So this is the first word of answer to our ques¬ 
 tion. The Church—the Fellowship of the Holy 
 Spirit, the Body of the Living Christ—is that with¬ 
 out which the memory of Jesus would have faded 
 out of history. 
 
 He would—it is substantially true to say—have 
 subsided into the kind of position held by Theudas 
 and Judas as described by that sagacious old man 
 Gamaliel. He said, when he and his fellow- 
 
THE CHURCH: IS IT NECESSARY? 145 
 
 councillors were confronted by the phenomena of 
 the men who “ had been with Jesus ” : “ Ye men 
 of Israel, take heed to yourselves as touching these 
 men, what ye are about to do. For before these 
 days rose up Theudas, giving himself out to be 
 somebody; to whom a number of men, about four 
 hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and 
 all, as many as obeyed him, were dispersed, and 
 brought to nought. After this man rose up Judas 
 of Galilee in the days of the enrolment, and drew 
 away some of the people after him: and all, as 
 many as obeyed him, were scattered abroad. And 
 now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and 
 let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be 
 of men, it will be overthrown: but if it is of God, 
 ye will not be able to overthrow it; lest haply 
 ye be found even to be fighting against God ” 
 (Acts v:35-39). 
 
 That, then, we repeat, is the first thing to be 
 said about the Church. And by the Church is 
 meant the society animated by the Holy Spirit. 
 And the Holy Spirit is the risen and ascended 
 Christ in action. In fact, the coming of the Spirit 
 was as essential to' there being a Gospel of any 
 kind to pass on to the world as was the Resurrec¬ 
 tion. For after His coming Christ was found to 
 be no longer merely an inimitable example, the 
 teacher of a—humanly speaking—impossible ethic, 
 but the ever-present source of new life and power. 
 Then and only then did He storm the last fortress 
 in human life, and that is the human heart. He 
 got in within those most humanly frail followers 
 
146 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 of His, and remade them from within. And not 
 only so, but through their witness He did the same 
 thing for others who had never seen Him in the 
 flesh. He made all mankind partakers in the vic¬ 
 tory of His death and resurrection. He made the 
 race anew. 
 
 So far so good. But then the question arises: 
 “ Granted what you have said—but, all the same, 
 did Christ found the Church? Is He responsible 
 for ecclesiastical and institutional religion? ” 
 
XXII 
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHURCH 
 
 T HE Church was necessary to the existence of 
 Christianity. But for the coming of the 
 Spirit to dwell in the fellowship of those 
 who had been with Jesus, no Gospel of God could 
 ever have been preached in His Name. 
 
 And the coming of the Spirit was, as a fact of 
 experience, the coming of Jesus Christ in the Spirit, 
 to carry on through the Church the work which He 
 had accomplished when He was on earth. 
 
 Thus the Master became the inner source of life 
 to others. Before, both in His life and death and 
 rising, He had been external to His followers. 
 They had as it were been spectators of events 
 occurring outside themselves. But they found 
 through a common and shared experience, that 
 they had been admitted into' intimate union with 
 their Lord—that He was in them and they were 
 in Him. His death became to them nothing less 
 than the final death-blow to the tyranny of sin: 
 His rising to life again meant the springing up 
 within them of new life. They went out into the 
 great secular life of Greece and of Rome not to 
 talk about a dead Teacher, but to invite others to 
 realise the immediate presence and transforming 
 power of the Saviour who had lived and died and 
 risen again. 
 
 147 
 
148 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 To put it in another way, they invited others to 
 come not to a John the Baptist, who could only im- 
 potently tell others to repent, but to Him whose 
 baptism was with the Holy Spirit and with power 
 for the remission of sins. 
 
 That from the very first was the Gospel. It is 
 the good news of the saving action of God in 
 Christ. God did not send to men information or 
 a message or illumination about Himself. He sent 
 a Saviour, a Deliverer. He came Himself to 
 deliver His children. And that which He wrought 
 in Christ still goes on. Still tie does more than 
 stand over against men. Still He acts upon them 
 and makes them at one with Himself in the fel¬ 
 lowship of His Spirit. Still He lives in them and 
 changes them and makes new men of them. Still 
 He reconciles Himself to them and them to Him. 
 
 That is the only rational explanation of the rise 
 and spread of Christianity, just as it is the secret of 
 its survival and perennial power of recovery. 
 
 Yet granted what we have said—granted that 
 Christ was first preached as the Giver of Life to a 
 fellowship of believers—the question arises whether 
 and how much He can be held responsible for the 
 foundation and organisation of the Church. 
 
 Certainly it would be idle to deny that He was a 
 vehement critic of ecclesiastical sins and weak¬ 
 nesses. Never should it be forgotten that it was 
 with the official representatives of the Jewish 
 Church that He fell into sharpest discord. On 
 them there fell His severest condemnation. It was 
 they—the leaders and shepherds of the flock—who 
 
CHRIST AND THE CHURCH 
 
 149 
 
 were most responsible for bringing Him to death. 
 Further, it would only be blind partisanship to 
 deny that Church History is a very mixed record, 
 containing exceedingly black and seamy patches. 
 The Church’s net has gathered in fish both good 
 and bad: its field has been widely sown with tares 
 as well as with wheat. The light of Christ has 
 been greatly dimmed and veiled by the inertia and 
 confusion of His Church’s witness. 
 
 Hence the naturalness of reaction from organ¬ 
 ised or ecclesiastical Christianity. Hence the sting 
 in such a taunt as Lessing’s famous —“ that while 
 Christianity has been tried for eighteen centuries, 
 Christ’s religion still remains to be tried.” 
 
 All this is true. And yet there is a “ case for 
 the defendant ” which deserves consideration. And 
 we will attempt to give it. 
 
 First, it should be noticed that the spiritual 
 movement, of which Christ was the centre, could 
 never have made a start but for the existence of 
 the Jewish Church, the Israel of God. There is 
 much that is repulsive in the Church of the Old 
 Testament, but there is more that is wonderful. 
 And what is wonderful is the persistent survival, 
 toughly encased—as indeed in the long run all 
 faith has to be—in ecclesiastical institutions and 
 tradition, of faith in the living God. 
 
 That faith was an unknown folly to the great 
 world-powers surrounding Israel. But it survived, 
 it developed, it was reformed, purified, deepened, 
 moralised, it was nourished undyingly within the 
 four corners of a national and organised cult. 
 
150 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 And when in the fulness of the times the purposes 
 of God came to fulfilment, the response that it met 
 with was from within the very bosom of regular, 
 disciplined, ecclesiastical religion. Zechariah, 
 Elisabeth, Mary, Joseph, Anna, Simeon, such were 
 the pious Church folk; “ righteous before God, 
 walking in all the commandments and ordinances 
 of the Eord blameless ” ; “ which departed not from 
 the temple, worshipping with fastings and suppli¬ 
 cations night and day ”;—such were the simple 
 souls in whom faith, expectant of the “ consolation 
 of Israel,” was found alive. It was the inner world 
 of ecclesiastical piety which was ready for the 
 arrival of the ever-so-long tarrying day of their 
 Lord. This should never be forgotten by those 
 who blandly inform the world that they are “ their 
 own priests under God’s heaven on the hillside.” 
 
 Secondly, when Jesus emerged from the nurture 
 and environment of such piety, His appeal was 
 directed to the Church of His people. His own 
 habit and example was that of a loyal son of the 
 Church. True, He stood out as an uncompromis¬ 
 ing critic of the Church as He found it. But it 
 was criticism and protest—as of the great prophets 
 before Him—not from without but from within. 
 He was never driven into rupture or separation. 
 Rather He set Himself to consummate the destiny 
 of Israel and to fulfill its essential covenant and 
 law. He was not concerned merely with, isolated 
 and separated individuals. Indubitably He sought, 
 until He found, the inmost hearts of individuals. 
 He was satisfied with nothing less, and thus set 
 
CHRIST AND THE CHURCH 
 
 151 
 
 His seal on the inviolable sanctity and value of 
 every child of God. Yet individuals were as such 
 to Him children of Israel, “ daughters of Abra¬ 
 ham/’ members of the Church, representatives of 
 a people. They were not solitary but social units. 
 There is indeed no> such thing in the world as a 
 mere individual, just as there can be no such thing 
 as a human society without the individuals which 
 make it up. Each of us is unique, but each, in the 
 very core of our individual being, is also social. 
 
 Thirdly, when His appeal to His Church and 
 nation (for they were one thing) fell for the most 
 part on deaf ears, Jesus concentrated all His powers 
 on training the remnant which had responded to it, 
 against the day of His final rejection. That His 
 aim was not the attachment to Himself of a few 
 selected individuals, but was the fulfilment of the 
 calling of the whole Church and nation, is wit¬ 
 nessed to by the acuteness of His disappointment 
 and the warmth of His indignation at the apostasy 
 which He found prevalent in the Church. It was 
 as patriot and as churchman that He wept over 
 Jerusalem, the sacred city, the embodiment and 
 representative of Israel’s divine vocation. 
 
 But though He met with and denounced His 
 Church’s apostasy, there is no sign that He de^ 
 spaired of the Church, or manufactured a substi¬ 
 tute for it. Rather, as soon as He had taken the 
 measure of the infidelity and unreadiness of His 
 people’s leaders, He set to work to prepare others 
 to take their place. Finding wicked husbandmen 
 in charge of the Lord’s vineyard, He did not 
 
152 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 abandon the vineyard and leave it derelict, but 
 took measures to commit it to the care of other 
 husbandmen. Faced with the defects of the old 
 bottles, He prepared new bottles for the new wine. 
 
 What we get therefore from the record of 
 Christ’s ministry as regards His relationship to the 
 Church, is not the creation of a new Church, but 
 the completion and recommissioning of the old 
 Church. In a word, He “ came not to destroy, but 
 to fulfil.” But in being fulfilled the old Church— 
 the Old Testament or covenant—was superseded. 
 The old Israel gave place to the new. 
 
 Christ did not found the Church. It was there 
 when He came, founded upon God’s choice of a 
 people. What He did was to give Himself to be 
 the ‘ instrument in the Father’s hands, for the ac¬ 
 complishment of that for which the Father had 
 made choice of Israel as a Church and people. 
 As Messiah—as the Christ of God—though 
 unacknowledged and repudiated, Jesus yielded 
 Himself to the Father, that in faithfulness and 
 righteousness the Father might bring in the New 
 Age. Shut up within the narrow limits of the life 
 of one people, Jesus gave Himself to death that 
 thence might spring the fulfilment of the ancient 
 promise—in Abraham’s seed “ shall all the families 
 of the earth be blessed.” 
 
 We will see in the next chapter how this inter¬ 
 pretation of the place of the Church in the Gospels 
 works out in the rest of the New Testament. 
 
' XXIII 
 
 THE NEW ISRAEL 
 
 I N the last chapter it was seen that Christ did 
 not create a totally new Church. No Catholic 
 Church, furnished complete with everything 
 necessary for its world-wide mission, passed from 
 His hands into the hands of His disciples. 
 
 Yet He did not leave them with the task of 
 making a new Church. The Church was there for 
 them as it had been for Him. It was the family 
 within which as a matter of course they were chil¬ 
 dren. It was as familiarly around them as the air 
 they breathed. Its origin lay far back, in the days 
 of the “ fathers,” when God took unto Himself a 
 people and made it the trustee of a great destiny. 
 
 Yet, again, though Christ did not create a new 
 Church, He did not leave the old Israel unaltered 
 and as He 1 found it. He cannot be quoted as the 
 authority for saddling Christianity with Judaism, 
 whole and entire, or for shackling the world with 
 the fetters of the Mosaic law. Rather He insti- 
 
 4 
 
 tuted the “ new covenant ” which, by fulfilling, 
 wound up and cancelled the “ old.” This was sub¬ 
 stantially in the possession of the remnant of the 
 true Israelites when He was “ parted from them.” 
 They understood the great fact—though they had 
 never understood it until it had happened—that the 
 Great Day of the God of Israel had come and with 
 
 153 
 
154 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 it His Messiah. They had therefore, in the first 
 days of all, the good news of fulfilled Jewish hope 
 to give to their fellow-Jews. The fulfilment had 
 been none of their devising. The Day of the Lord 
 had not brought what they had anticipated, namely, 
 the triumph of God in power like that of an earthly 
 king. But it had brought humiliation and suffer¬ 
 ing. It had brought the Messiah to a cross. Never¬ 
 theless, incredible as it had seemed at that time, that 
 humiliation and suffering had been the means of 
 making known the Father’s love; and the mocked 
 and crucified One was, after and in spite of all, His 
 Messiah. 
 
 So, within the old Jewish Church, the followers 
 of Jesus had at once a message to their fellow 
 “ men of Israel,” as soon as ever the Spirit had 
 fallen on them. The burden of their words is the 
 work which the God of Abraham and of Isaac and 
 of Jacob, “ the God of our fathers,” had accom¬ 
 plished in “ his servant Jesus.” They have no idea 
 of forming a new Church, for they are witnesses 
 to the carrying through to all-completing victory 
 of God’s purpose for the old Church. So they 
 have the privilege of giving Israel a second chance. 
 Their brethren had done what they had done in 
 ignorance. Even now, therefore, though they had 
 asked for a murderer and had killed the Prince of 
 Life, they could still respond to Plis call, conveyed 
 to them by His witnesses from Him who was risen 
 and at the right hand of power. 
 
 Such is the picture of the first days of the Chris¬ 
 tian Church, as it is faithfully given in the early 
 
THE NEW ISRAEL 
 
 155 
 
 chapters of the Acts. It is a great error to read 
 back the Catholic Faith into this first phase; just 
 as it is a great error to read back a belief in the 
 Incarnation into the days of the ministry. Before 
 His death the disciples never got beyond a belief in 
 the Messiahship (or kingship) of Jesus, and even 
 so they were mistaken as to the nature of true king- 
 ship. And after His rising and during the first 
 Pentecostal days they had hold only of a Jewish— 
 a Messianic—gospel for Jews. 
 
 Nothing apparently that Jesus had said to them 
 had brought home to them its catholic (or uni¬ 
 versal) scope. They were only led by the Spirit, 
 not without reluctance and controversy on their 
 part, to realise that the Gentiles had a share in the 
 Gospel. There were indeed, when Christ was with 
 them in the flesh, many things for Him to say to 
 them which at the time they could not bear (John 
 xvi: 12). There was first and foremost the reality 
 of God, not as Supreme Monarch, but as Father. 
 There was, next, the manifestation of the Fath¬ 
 er’s love in His Son. There was, lastly, the par¬ 
 ticipation by all His children of whatever nation, in 
 the Fatherhood thus revealed. The coming of 
 Christ in the Spirit to His Church was indeed es¬ 
 sential to there ever being a Gospel for the world. 
 
 This being so, it is idle to look in the Gospels 
 for precise and complete legislation by the Master 
 about the Church. Far greater things than Church 
 legislation were still at issue and still unappre¬ 
 hended during the ministry. The eyes of the Mas¬ 
 ter were set upon the death to be accomplished at 
 
156 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Jerusalem. Till that was done nothing was done. 
 But when it was done, then the Spirit would lead 
 His misunderstanding followers into all the many 
 things which at the time they could not receive. 
 Conceptions, therefore, of Christ as ecclesiastical 
 legislator must be revised. 
 
 Yet this must also be said (though the writer 
 asks pardon if it be thought controversial to say 
 it), that Christ did deliberately choose, train and 
 send a band of men to be the nucleus of the New 
 Israel which was to inherit the fulfilled destiny of 
 the Old. The pains at which Christ was to* single 
 out and educate the twelve Apostles are plain for 
 everyone to see. As we saw in the last chapter, He 
 prepared new stewards or husbandmen to replace 
 the faithless ones in charge of God’s vineyard. 
 These chosen men (less one, and he replaced), are 
 the unquestioned leaders in the first days of the 
 Church, while still the Apostle’s fellowship was 
 within the Old Church “ continuing steadfastly 
 with one accord in the Temple.” It is they who 
 were, as St. Paul said, “ pillars ” (Gal. ii:9). Yet 
 this does not mean that the Apostles were the 
 Church. The Holy Spirit was not given to them 
 alone. Rather the whole body of believers, as it 
 grew, shared in His inspiration. It was dowered 
 with a diversity of spiritual gifts and functions. 
 So much so that the analogy of the human body, 
 with its different members and organs playing their 
 several parts in the life of the one body, sprang 
 readily to the mind of St. Paul as he thought of 
 the Church and described it. “ Now ye are the 
 
THE NEW ISRAEL 
 
 157 
 
 Body of Christ and members each in His part. 
 And God hath set some in the Church, first apos¬ 
 tles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then pow¬ 
 ers, then gifts of healings, helps, wise counsels, 
 divers kinds of tongues ” (1 Cor. xii :28). 
 
 The Apostles therefore did not make the Church. 
 It was not put together by them or by anyone else, 
 as men put together, say, a trades’ union. It was 
 not made by the adherence of individuals ; though, 
 of course, if there had been no> individuals in it and 
 coming into it, it would not have existed on earth. 
 It was there for all concerned just as it had been 
 there for their Master. It was the God-sent thing 
 which was there—there to be entered, to be ex¬ 
 panded and developed, as it was led forward on its 
 world-mission by its living Head, acting in it 
 through the Holy Spirit. It was not directed by 
 any complete and preconceived programme, nor in 
 accordance with written instructions. Rather it 
 realised the fulfilment of the Masters promises 
 that, when the Spirit was come, guidance and un¬ 
 derstanding necessary for the work committed to 
 it would be forthcoming. 
 
 It had tremendous obstacles to surmount and 
 perplexities through which to be piloted. It had to 
 learn the lesson, the most difficult for any Jew 
 to learn, that the Old covenant and law in being 
 consummated had given way to the New. It had 
 to surrender immemorially-revered national privi¬ 
 leges. It had to realise, what St. Paul calls “ the 
 mystery of Christ, which in other generations was 
 not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath 
 
158 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 now been revealed unto His holy Apostles and 
 Prophets in the Spirit: to wit, that the Gentiles 
 are fellow-heirs and fellow-members of the body.” 
 It had, as we shall see, to survive disappointment 
 about the second coming of the Lord. 
 
 And it had to depend for its existence and its 
 prevalence on no> external credentials. It had no 
 New Testament in its hands to which to appeal. 
 The Gospel of God was enshrined in no document. 
 But it lived in the hearts and minds of those who 
 had been with Jesus, It was verified and appropri¬ 
 ated by those who accepted their witness. 
 
 It was the truth, almost beyond belief, certainly 
 beyond anticipation or invention, of the all- 
 suffering, all-overcoming love of God. Held in the 
 tenacious grip of a living and organised society— 
 the organism, the body of which Christ was the 
 Head—it was given to the world. 
 
XXIV 
 
 THE SECOND COMING—I 
 
 T HE early Church, as was said in the last 
 chapter, had many lessons to learn through 
 the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It had in 
 particular to survive the disappointment—and to 
 profit by the experience—of its first expectation 
 that the Christ would immediately come again in 
 glory at the last day. 
 
 Here we reach that part of Christianity which 
 has to do with the future. It is technically named 
 jeschatology. That barbarous word means, being 
 translated, the Doctrine of the Last Things: death, 
 judgment, heaven and hell. 
 
 These are subjects which have in all ages drawn 
 to themselves the attention of the human heart, 
 charged with all its mingled fears and hopes. They 
 have been the subjects round which imagination, 
 in all its picture-making power, has constantly 
 played. They have been the centre of dark, morbid 
 and pagan speculation. Indeed, it may fairly be 
 said that it is from this quarter that clouds and 
 mists have most thickly arisen to overshadow 
 and darken the glorious light of the Christian 
 gospel. 
 
 In part this has been inevitable. In coming to 
 the future we see, in the famous phrase, “ through 
 a glass darkly.” Clear, precise, naked vision is not 
 
 159 
 
160 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 allowed to us in regard to the future. Yet this 
 does not account for all the veiling of the gospel 
 light which the centuries have seen. For, as we 
 shall see, such terrible and abominable things as 
 manv fervent Christians have believed about hell— 
 to take one instance—point to the distance which 
 has separated much of Christian tradition from; its 
 great Original. 
 
 We have to face the problem to-day that the first 
 Christians lived in the firm expectation of the im¬ 
 mediate second coming of the Lord; and that, at 
 any rate, in the sense in which they expected it, the 
 event did not occur. It is quite useless to minimise 
 the gravity of the problem. It has weighed and 
 will weigh heavily on many minds. It is said that 
 that most—that almost ultra—sincere Cambridge 
 thinker of last century, Henry Sidgwick, was 
 driven out of Christian conviction by this great 
 difficulty. The most serious element in the problem 
 is not so much the mistaken expectation of the 
 early Christians as the question whether their Mas¬ 
 ter was mistaken too. Further, there is the for¬ 
 midable inference, which many scholars in recent 
 times have not hesitated to draw from the fact that 
 the whole New Testament period is dominated by 
 the expectation of the end of the world—namely 
 this, that Christian ethic has no valid claim to 
 govern the life of a world, which, in fact, has not 
 ended. 
 
 Merely to state the problem is to be tempted to 
 run away from it. But running away is no way 
 of escape. To attempt to run is to be overtaken 
 
THE SECOND COMING 
 
 161 
 
 by that from which we run. There is nothing to 
 do but to try to meet the question. 
 
 There is no denying that the first Christians ex¬ 
 pected the “ time to be short.’’ In the earliest book 
 in the New Testament, the First Epistle to the 
 Thessalonians, we read how the “ coming of the 
 Lord ” was expected in the lifetime of those who 
 were then alive. “ For this we say unto you by 
 the word of the Lord, that we that are alive, that 
 are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no 
 wise precede them that are fallen asleep ” (1 Thess. 
 iv: 15). Then the early chapters of the Acts give 
 a clear picture of the little Christian community, 
 as looking for the arrival of the day of the Lord. 
 “ that great and notable day ” (Acts ii :20). It is 
 in that mind that Peter interprets the significance 
 of the coming of the Spirit. That, he says, is what 
 was to be expected “ in the last days,” as said the 
 prophet Joel (Acts ii:17). Indeed, much of the 
 force of the appeal made by Jews of their fellow- 
 Jews at Jerusalem came from the believed proxim¬ 
 ity of the “ times of the restoration of all things ” 
 (Acts iii:21). As was said in the last chapter, 
 those who had in ignorance crucified the Messiah 
 were given another chance to hear and to repent 
 by those who were witnesses to the tremendous 
 fact that, though crucified, He was nevertheless 
 the Messiah. 
 
 The very air, therefore, which the followers of 
 Jesus breathed after He was taken from them was 
 charged with eschatology. This fact probably ac¬ 
 counts for the communism, of the Apostles’ fellow- 
 
162 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ship at Jerusalem. The time being short, there was 
 a withdrawal from the ordinary business of life 
 and a pooling of possessions. This experiment led 
 to the “ Saints at Jerusalem ” becoming a charge 
 upon their fellow-Christians elsewhere. One of 
 St. Paul’s most constant endeavours was to collect 
 money from the Gentile Christians for the relief of 
 the Church in Jerusalem. 
 
 It is clear, then, what was the mind of that com¬ 
 pany—about 120 in all—of those who had been 
 with Jesus. The Messiah they knew had come, and 
 He was about to come again to bring in the New 
 Age—the triumph of the Kingdom of God. Mean¬ 
 while they were in the intermediate time, which 
 allowed them space to prepare for and to beg others 
 to prepare for the final and all-consummating hour. 
 
 The hour did not come. Are we, then, to say 
 that they had been misled by their Master or that 
 He was mistaken in what He had led them to 
 expect ? 
 
 A decided negative to both questions springs 
 from an understanding of how the followers of 
 Jesus came to have any gospel at all to give, first 
 to their fellow-Jews, and, later, in its expanded 
 significance, to the Gentiles. Their expectation 
 about the future sprang out of their certainty about 
 the past. Such expectation seemed the right corol¬ 
 lary to the tremendous truth of God which had 
 been wrought out in the events of the Death and 
 the Rising of Jesus and the Coming of the Spirit. 
 Their main certainty was about God. He, as we 
 have repeatedly noticed, had been in question when 
 
THE SECOND COMING 
 
 163 
 
 Jesus died upon the Cross. He had been in self- 
 vindicating revelation in the Resurrection. Hence 
 God was on the lips of those witnesses. “ This 
 Jesus did God raise up, whereof we are all wit¬ 
 nesses. . . . God . . . hath glorified His servant 
 Jesus. . . . The things which God foreshewed by 
 the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ 
 (Messiah) should suffer, He thus fulfilled” (Acts 
 ii:32; iii: 13 ; iii:18). There is the Jewish—the 
 Messianic—Gospel for Jews. It had taken hold of 
 those disciples and it drove them out to share it 
 with others. 
 
 How had it taken hold of them? By means of 
 events. It had not been understood by being spoken 
 about. That is quite evident in the drama of the 
 ministry. No words of Jesus had the power to 
 admit His followers into a full understanding of 
 the Father’s will. His words as they fell into their 
 minds were inevitably intermixed there with the 
 traditional faith and current expectations of Jews 
 of that period. And the intermixture was such 
 that they never had a clear understanding of the 
 fulfilment of the Father’s purpose in His Messiah 
 through death, until the death had occurred and 
 had been transformed by the Resurrection. 
 
 For they were looking for a Kingdom of al¬ 
 mighty power, not a Kingdom of all-overruling 
 love. And no word of Jesus could persuade them 
 otherwise, but only the acting out of the literally 
 incomprehensible love. But when acted out then it 
 was there to be witnessed to. Then they had hold 
 of the truth of God faithful in promise and fulfil- 
 
164 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ment. They had something 1 —and that the very 
 thing for Jews to receive—to give to others. But 
 undoubtedly that truth was still intermixed in their 
 minds with current Jewish expectations about the 
 future. For Jewry of that time was all agog with 
 what scholars call Apocalyptic expectations, or in 
 other words, visions of the future. The visions 
 were a medley of poetic and imaginative anticipa¬ 
 tions. They contained hopes of a great political 
 liberation for the Jewish nation; of a Messiah 
 reigning triumphant in judgment over the nation’s 
 foes; of the coming of a new age of peace and 
 plenty; of the final and catastrophic ending of all 
 things. Such hopes were in the minds of those 
 essential and characteristic Jews whom Jesus drew 
 to Himself by the announcement of the coming of 
 the Kingdom. They were drawn out into greater 
 power by the realisation, at Caesarea Philippi, that 
 Jesus was the Messiah. They were alive, full¬ 
 blown, in the hearts of those who followed Jesus 
 to Jerusalem, expecting the Kingdom immediately 
 to appear. And though they were quenched by the 
 inexplicably tragic death of the Messiah, they were 
 rekindled by His triumph over death. (Witness 
 that significant question to the Risen Lord: “ Lord, 
 dost Thou at this time restore the Kingdom to 
 Israel?” Acts i:6). And there is no doubt they 
 were still intermixed with the first Gospel which 
 they preached to others. 
 
XXV 
 
 THE SECOND COMING—II 
 
 I T was seen in the last chapter that the Gospel 
 of God, which in the very first days was com¬ 
 mended by the followers of Jesus tO' their 
 brother-Jews, was intimately intermixed with ex¬ 
 pectation about the future. 
 
 They were in “ the last days,” immediately pre¬ 
 ceding the Last Day and the return of the Lord in 
 final judgment. Unquestionably they were disap¬ 
 pointed in their expectation, and the period covered 
 by the New Testament is marked by a progressive 
 change of emphasis in their message, consequent 
 on this disappointment. 
 
 Roughly speaking, the emphasis was changed— 
 the centre of gravity, so to say, was moved—from 
 the future to the present. The Gospel of the King¬ 
 dom became not only the announcement of a new 
 age to come, but the sharing with others there and 
 then in a new life already come—a new life of fel¬ 
 lowship and love. The Lord, in whose Name that 
 Gospel was preached, was realised to be not so 
 much withdrawn into heaven thence to reappear at 
 the Last Day, but as the present source of life, 
 which, though enjoyed under conditions of mortal¬ 
 ity, was already eternal life. Heaven became not 
 merely a future state beyond this world, but an 
 immediate reality. “ Our citizenship is ”—here 
 
 165 
 
166 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 and now, says St. Paul—“ in heaven.’* St. John is 
 positive that his fellow-Christians already know 
 what eternal life is, that they have already passed 
 from death into life, that they are walking in the 
 light which is of God, that they are abiding in Him 
 and He in them. 
 
 Not that future hope and expectation just lapsed. 
 The Lord, known by faith and love in the present, 
 was still to come. To abide in love is to be pre¬ 
 pared for His coming. “ Herein is love made 
 perfect (by abiding in love with others), that we 
 may have boldness in the Day of Judgment” (1 
 John iv:17). It is indeed the intimate and vital 
 connection between the present and the future 
 which is a special note of the New Testament 
 throughout its course. Life in the present is what 
 St. Paul calls an “ earnest ”—a forestallment—of 
 the life to come. Life here therefore receives the 
 enhancement of eternity. It is charged in its every 
 moment and detail with eternal worth as leading 
 on to the life beyond. It is the present testing 
 place of children of God, who, for all their mortal¬ 
 ity, have an eternal destiny. It is already the 
 sphere where judgment is in process. For the 
 exactions of daily and prosaic existence—the de¬ 
 mands of all kinds of human relationship—inevi¬ 
 tably make trial of men’s capacities for love and 
 fellowship. Judgment is in process now, though 
 its verdict or outcome lies beyond. 
 
 There is therefore very little in the New Testa¬ 
 ment which justifies the note of depreciation of this 
 world and its work and business which marks a 
 
THE SECOND COMING 
 
 167 
 
 good deal of Christian tradition. If anyone reads 
 St. Paul carefully, he will find that it is precisely 
 his sense that this world is impermanent and about 
 to pass when the Lord comes again, that drives him 
 urgently to insist on faithfulness and diligence in 
 the round of daily work. It is in view of the day 
 of the Lord coming as a thief in the night that St. 
 Paul charges his brethren “ to study to be quiet, 
 and to do your own business, and to work with 
 your hands, ... to walk honestly toward them 
 that are without, . . . for ye are all sons of light, 
 and sons of the day: we are not of the night, nor of 
 darkness; so then let us not sleep as do the rest, but 
 let us watch and be sober ” (1 Thess. iv :11; v :5 ). 
 
 This is only one of many passages in which it is 
 evident that the all-powerful sanction for energetic 
 and faithful use of present capacities and present 
 opportunities is derived from the belief that this 
 order of things is transient and about to be ended. 
 (See, for instance, the wonderful description of the 
 excellencies of a Christian citizen in Romans, chap¬ 
 ters xii and xiii., ending with “ And this, knowing 
 that it is high time to awake out of sleep. . . . The 
 night is far spent, the day is at hand.”) 
 
 We have, then, indicated how Christians in the 
 times of the New Testament were brought through 
 their disappointment at the non-arrival of the com¬ 
 ing of the Lord, and were led, while not abandon¬ 
 ing their future hope, to learn its meaning for life 
 in the present. 
 
 The question then arises: How is all this related 
 to the teaching of Jesus? There is no doubt that 
 
168 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 He spoke about the future, or that the memorable 
 chief occasion for His doing so was when His dis¬ 
 ciples called on Him to admire the solidity and 
 grandeur of the great Temple (Mark xiii :1 and 2). 
 But, more than this, it is evident that Jesus shared 
 to the full, with the Jewish people, in that view of 
 life of which the focus lies in the future and of 
 which the main feature is judgment. This view, 
 when analysed out, is rooted in the characteristic¬ 
 ally Jewish belief in God as at work with a purpose 
 in history. Life, therefore, is one long opportunity 
 for acceptance of and co-operation with the move¬ 
 ment of the Divine will. On the other hand, if 
 such opportunity is neglected or defied, life is the 
 scene of men being overtaken in catastrophe by 
 that which they have defied. If the purpose of 
 God, arriving in mercy from on high, discovers 
 His children merely absorbed in “ the cares of this 
 life and the deceitfulness of riches ”—if they are 
 found in unreadiness to correspond with God’s pur¬ 
 poses of salvation—then inevitably those purposes 
 bring judgment on them. Doors opened for long 
 are in due time shut. Stewards, of whom faithful¬ 
 ness is expected, are overtaken in their faithlessness 
 by a summons tO' give an account of their steward¬ 
 ship. Bridesmaids are awakened at midnight to 
 meet the bridegroom with—or without—oil in their 
 lamps. The monotony of ordinary and uneventful 
 history is interrupted by sudden, all-exposing, all- 
 testing emergency. The house built in fine weather 
 is suddenly assaulted by a torrent, and its founda¬ 
 tions put on their trial. How life has been based, 
 
THE SECOND COMING 
 
 169 
 
 whether in harmony with the moral law of God or 
 in indifference to it—whether on rock or sand— 
 that question is suddenly and decisively asked. In¬ 
 dividuals living the most purely physical and ma¬ 
 terial life are tapped on the shoulder and asked of 
 what spiritual stuff they are made. Their souls are 
 required of them. Thus life throughout its course, 
 both in its quiet periods and in its great crises, is a 
 matter of momentous importance. It can mount to 
 great heights of achievement or fall to catastrophic 
 depths of failure. 
 
 There is no doubt that this was the way in which 
 Jesus interpreted the world. What is more, by the 
 whole course of His invitation to His people He 
 put that interpretation finally to- the proof. He an¬ 
 nounced the coming of the Great Day. He called 
 men to climb to the heights of ready self-surrender 
 to God, and to share in God’s achievement of His 
 purpose in the world. In so doing He offered that 
 generation of Israel a golden opportunity. But in 
 so doing inevitably He put that generation on its 
 trial and brought it under catastrophic judgment. 
 For the most part it was found wanting, it was 
 exposed as living a life out of touch with God, 
 unready for submission to Him and neglectful of 
 His moral law. But that did not arrest Jesus. He 
 saw the supreme hour was in arrival, even if others 
 were unready for it. So, with the handful of those 
 who had responded to His call, He set His face 
 to meet the hour. It was the hour of the Father, 
 constant in His purpose, of His love and mercy. 
 But it was the hour, which, coming on a people 
 
170 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 unready and indifferent, was bound to bring 
 catastrophe. 
 
 The whole career of Jesus, therefore, was fo¬ 
 cussed on the future. Life for Him was big with 
 coming. But He was never able fully to explain to 
 others what was to come. For, as we have seen 
 so often, they were never able to share in His faith 
 in God as Father. They were never able to grip 
 the true nature of God’s Kingdom and King. Only 
 after the event—when the hour, ungreeted except 
 by Jesus, had come—did they understand. No 
 doubt, there as they looked at the Temple standing 
 resplendent, they asked about the future. No 
 doubt, too, He spoke of it. 
 
 But what He said must inevitably have been 
 hidden from them. What He said about that 
 which lay beyond His death must have been veiled 
 from them by the dark mystery of His death. 
 That death had first to happen and issue in the 
 coming of the King, though crucified, before the 
 veils of misunderstanding were pierced. And, even 
 so, they did not fully understand. More was to 
 come which, before it came, was beyond their un¬ 
 derstanding. The Holy Spirit had to come; Jesus 
 Himself had to come, to be present with them in 
 the Spirit; the day of the bringing in of the Gen¬ 
 tiles had to come; the day of the Fall of Jerusalem 
 and the falling in ruin of the Temple had to come 
 —all this had to come at the time when they asked 
 and He answered. 
 
 The truth is, that little can be made of their 
 report of what He did say on this matter. It is a 
 
THE SECOND COMING 
 
 171 
 
 confused report, in which different things—the Kail 
 of Jerusalem and the end of the world—run into 
 one another. 
 
 It is, further, impossible to say precisely how 
 much Jesus knew of the future. As regards the 
 final end, He Himself said He did not know (Matt. 
 xxiv:36). But the case which asserts that He was 
 mistaken or deluded falls before the fact that it was 
 through His correspondence as a Son with the 
 Father, not only in word but in act and unto death, 
 that the Kingdom of God and of His love did come. 
 It falls before the fact that He came and ever 
 comes in the Spirit. It falls before the fact that 
 successive great emergencies in history, following 
 upon long periods of mammon-worship and defi¬ 
 ance of the moral order of the world, are days of 
 His coming in judgment and catastrophe, and yet 
 in unrelenting mercy. 
 
 We to-day should know that this is true. We 
 live in a Day of the Lord, when the Babylon which 
 we have built on the sand of self-interest is fallen 
 and is falling. We should know, amid the perplex¬ 
 ity of men and the distress of nations, that this is 
 yet another day of His coming, which, if so re¬ 
 ceived will be a day of the coming of His saving 
 kingdom of love and service. We of all gener¬ 
 ations, with our faith ratified by all that has come, 
 should still look forward to the Final Coming, be it 
 near or far—to the end of God’s purpose all down 
 the ages, when Christ shall have “ delivered up the 
 Kingdom, of God, even the Father,” when “ God 
 shall be all in all.” 
 
XXVI 
 
 LIFE HERE AND BEYOND 
 
 W E come now to another of the great sub¬ 
 jects of eschatology (the Doctrine of the 
 Last Things)—to the belief in the life to 
 come, the hope of immortality. 
 
 Christianity has no monopoly in the faith that 
 death is not the end of existence. Rather, so far 
 back as the historian can grope in the story of the 
 race, he finds a spectre-defying hope, now smould¬ 
 ering, now burning, now flickering, now flaming 
 in the invincible heart of man. That faith has 
 assumed many strange forms and has been ex¬ 
 pressed in many pathetic customs, rites and super¬ 
 stitions, but it has itself been more than they. It 
 has been something instinctive and unutterable. 
 But it has persisted. It has waxed, not waned, 
 throughout the long ages. 
 
 Yet Christianity, though without monopoly in 
 the matter, has its own unique reinforcement to 
 give to man’s instinctive hope of survival beyond 
 death. What this is appears when we consider it 
 by contrast with two other main ways of interpret¬ 
 ing the relationship between this life and the be¬ 
 yond. Both ways are partial and lop-sided. On 
 the one hand the unseen, the world beyond this 
 world, is given such an importance that reality and 
 value are denied to the present order of existence. 
 
 172 
 
LIFE HERE AND BEYOND 
 
 173 
 
 This world is viewed as but a shadow-world, or as 
 a vale of tears, or as a prison. It is that from 
 which we must escape if we are to> find the real. 
 This view has haunted and overcast the irrepress¬ 
 ibly religious soul of India. It has found supreme 
 expression in the great flights of Platonic specula¬ 
 tion. It has undoubtedly invaded and deeply tinged 
 a great deal of Christian sentiment. A great many 
 so-called Christian hymns suggest that this life is 
 altogether vanity, that it is only a weary-waiting 
 place for passengers to Paradise. 
 
 On the other hand, there is the contrasted view, 
 which, while not denying the beyond, actually and 
 in the art of living looks upon it as made up of 
 shadows and twilight, while life and light and love 
 are here and only here. This is the view of the 
 roistering drinking-songs of all ages and climes. 
 Life is a cup in the hand and at the lips—“ Come, 
 let us drink it while we have breath, for there’s 
 no drinking after death.” It is a pagan philoso¬ 
 phy of which the infection is betrayed, when a 
 professed Christian speaks of a young man, who 
 has fallen breast-forward on the field of battle, as 
 “ poor boy.” 
 
 As against both these one-sided attitudes there is 
 that which is specifically Christian. As ever, this 
 has a certain doubleness in it. For Christianity is, 
 as it were, a cart which goes on two wheels, though 
 men are often tempted to drive it on one. There¬ 
 fore, as against those who say, “ Shadows are here, 
 life is beyond,” or those who say, “ Life is here, 
 beyond are shadows,” the Christian, true to the 
 
174 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 mind of Christ, says, “ Life here and more life 
 beyond.” 
 
 The truly Christian hope of immortality springs 
 not out of the sense that this life’s flowers wither 
 and fade (that is paganism), but out of the sense 
 that the beauty of a rose-bud has in it now the 
 promise of eternity. The Christ-like interpreter of 
 life does not bring in the next world just to correct 
 or make up for the miseries of this world. He 
 looks steadfastly towards it as that which will fill 
 to the full that which already abounds with Truth 
 and Beauty and Goodness. The life to come, to 
 him, is not a consolation prize for those who run an 
 inevitably futile race here. It is the goal whither 
 the earlier laps of the race—already and in this 
 life—lead. 
 
 The ground for these statements is of course 
 Jesus Christ. And it is found not only in His 
 words but in His intensely zestful life on earth and 
 in His clear-eyed and triumphant dying. “ O 
 Paradise, O Paradise, ’tis weary waiting here! ” 
 has nothing whatever to do with Him. Here for 
 Him was the scene of work to be done—before the 
 night came—such as could employ the whole ener¬ 
 gies of youth and of manhood. Here was the 
 battle-ground in a war of which the issues were of 
 absolute import. Here was the field below whose 
 surface was discoverable a treasure of eternal 
 worth. He lived a life here therefore which was 
 brimful of interest in all the features of present 
 existence. And this was because He saw through 
 them to the unseen. He saw flowers in all their 
 
LIFE HERE AND BEYOND 
 
 175 
 
 fadingness, yet He saw them as signals of the 
 eternal beauty of the Father. He saw the various 
 daily business and occupation of men in all its 
 routine and littleness of detail. Yet He saw it as 
 the school of faithfulness in little things for those 
 whose tested capacities would fit them to be rulers 
 over many cities. He felt—He expressed—the 
 mortality of all that “ the moth and rust doth cor¬ 
 rupt/’ but He saw it nevertheless as the material 
 which even now could be lifted above corruption 
 and laid up as an imperishable treasure in heaven. 
 He lived in this world as the Father’s world, which 
 as a material and secular order spoke to Him of the 
 Father. He did not need to soar in heaven-ward 
 fancy away from this life in order to tell others of 
 the unseen, but He asked others to see what God is 
 as they looked at farmers scattering seed, at women 
 baking bread, and at shepherds seeking sheep. 
 
 And so living, in sensitive and delighted contact 
 with all things natural and human, He declared 
 that life was a treasury, all the locks of which could 
 be opened and all its riches disclosed by those who 
 would not try to grasp it and hoard it, but would 
 freely and recklessly give it all up. He laid down 
 finally the spiritual law that self-saving is self- 
 losing, that self-giving is self-finding. And He 
 acted out the law. He allowed nothing in this 
 world, however lovable and tempting, to hold Him 
 back from leaving all and launching out upon the 
 unvoyaged waters of death. He took His life, 
 when its tide was at the full, and gave it to the 
 death. He set His face towards, He rode towards, 
 
176 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 He rode at, He overleaped the frowning barrier, 
 the last dark fence of death. 
 
 Thus He passed from life to life. Thus He de¬ 
 feated “ the last enemy.” Thus He carried our 
 mortal nature through death—not to a shadowy 
 survival, but to resurrection. Thus He filled this 
 present world and life with eternal worth, by pass¬ 
 ing through it as a pilgrim seeking a city, by run¬ 
 ning it out as a race of which the goal was heaven. 
 
 The Christian attitude to life therefore ought to 
 be in harmony with the life of Christ, both this- 
 worldly and other-worldly. We ought to be both 
 in the world and yet not of it. We ought, we may 
 say, to be amphibious—that is, to be creatures 
 which live in two elements. We should swim in 
 deep waters and yet also belong to the air above the 
 waters, and rise and drink it in. That is, we should 
 be busily occupied with the work and interests of 
 every day, and yet we should not be sunk in them 
 as though there was no heaven above and beyond 
 them. 
 
 But, on the other hand, we should not disparage 
 them as though they were meaningless or worth¬ 
 less, just because they are things that must pass. 
 Rather they ought to have a heightened significance 
 because, though mundane and physical, they are 
 already bound up with heaven. That this is true is 
 corroborated by the familiar experience that it is 
 only when we come to leave people or places that 
 we realise how much they are to us. It is only 
 when some one dies that others recognise his full 
 value. Treat people and things as having only 
 
LIFE HERE AND BEYOND 
 
 177 
 
 present value and meaning, and such value and 
 meaning dwindles and fades and depreciates. 
 Treat them in the light of that which is beyond 
 them and they grow the more precious—in other 
 words, heaven already irradiates earth. This mor¬ 
 tal already puts on immortality. 
 
XXVII 
 
 life after death 
 
 T HE last chapter was given to a discussion on 
 the bearing of the life to come on life here. 
 The question remains what is to be thought 
 and said about the nature of the life after death. 
 It must be said at once that those who wrote the 
 Gospels did not pass on to the world much infor¬ 
 mation on the subject from the Master Himself. 
 Happily in this as in other vital matters we do not 
 need to depend primarily on His words, but on His 
 action. His action, in staking all upon the reality 
 of that which is beyond death, should be the sure 
 and unshakable comfort for those who, in the war, 
 gave their young men-folk to death. The more 
 anyone grips the reality of Christ's human experi¬ 
 ence, the more His life is seen to be a real venture 
 of faith, leading Him along paths never trodden 
 before, teaching Him through the things that He 
 suffered what He had not known before—the more 
 should a light, inextinguishable by death, spring 
 up around those who faced all and gave all. 
 
 Certainly Christ did not say much about the life 
 to come. But His action tells us enough. It looks 
 as though He wished to give His followers a main 
 assurance sufficient for life and work. He can 
 hardly have wanted them to spend their time trying 
 to peer through the veil of death, to the neglect of 
 
 178 
 
LIFE AFTER DEATH 
 
 179 
 
 work waiting to be done for God and man. For 
 those upon whom the light of His Gospel has 
 shone, the first truth about all the pathetic array 
 of spiritualistic phenomena should be that they are 
 needless. 
 
 Certainly little description of heaven as a place 
 has come to us from Him. This fact enforces the 
 truth that heaven is essentially not a place but a 
 relationship to God. Pictorial representations of 
 the external circumstances of heaven—pearly gates 
 and golden streets and harps and palms and endless 
 choruses—these are all very well, but they do not 
 attract, and to many they suggest great ennui, 
 as though heaven were a never-ending church¬ 
 going. But the essential and cardinal note of 
 heaven in the New Testament, compared to which 
 all descriptions are quite secondary and accidental, 
 is the seeing and being with Him, the joy of whose 
 presence, the peace and freedom of whose law of 
 love have already been tasted on earth. 
 
 The life of Jesus on earth, as our Brother, shar¬ 
 ing in all the conditions of human nature, was one 
 persistent yielding O'f Himself to the constraining 
 love of the Father. What the Father was to Him 
 (and what He longed that the Father should be to 
 others) drew Him forward steadfastly and undevi- 
 atingly through every trial in life and every terror 
 in death. When the crucial hour of decision and 
 self-giving arrived it is the Name of the Father 
 which was on His lips. He threw Himself forward 
 into the Father’s arms crying, “ Father, I come to 
 Thee! ” And as it was with the Master, so it was 
 
180 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 with His followers. Only, the thirst and longing 
 of their souls is to see Him who loved them and 
 gave Himself for them. “ When we see Him,” 
 says St. John; “ To be with Christ, . . . to< be 
 at home with the Cord,” says St. Paul. And in 
 the Apocalypse, full as it is with the imagery of 
 heaven, the same essential note rings out, “ They 
 shall see His Face.” 
 
 If this is so, if heaven is the completion of a 
 union between man and God already begun on 
 earth, then heaven is also companionship with 
 others. For the love of God cannot be just a prize 
 for individuals. It is indivisibly bound up with 
 love for others. So St. John kept reiterating. To 
 abide in God is—here and now-—to abide in love. 
 By abiding in love for others we abide in God. To 
 think that anyone can love God and at the same 
 time be out of love for others is to think a lie, and 
 to live so is to attempt the impossible. Heaven, 
 therefore, being union with God, is also a com¬ 
 munion with others. Belief in the life to come is 
 also a belief in the communion of saints. It is the 
 completion in both respects of that which begins on 
 earth. It is the keeping perfectly of the two in¬ 
 separable commandments of love for God and love 
 for man. 
 
 This truth leads on to another. A great deal of 
 language which has come to be used about heaven 
 is suggestive of calm, repose, and sleep. But this 
 is not in harmony with the characteristically Chris¬ 
 tian truth of God, as at w'ork with the activity of 
 love. It was Greek pagan thought which envisaged 
 
LIFE AFTER DEATH 
 
 181 
 
 heaven as the sphere of unbroken calm, and the 
 gods as dwelling in undisturbed repose. An alto¬ 
 gether opposite conception rings through the first 
 words of the Lord’s Prayer. They ask that there 
 may be on earth that which already is in heaven, 
 namely, the glorifying of the Father’s Name, the 
 sway of His kingdom, the doing of His will. This 
 accords with Christ’s promise of greater scope for 
 their energies in the future to those who have been 
 faithful as stewards, as servants in very little 
 things here. The same thing is implied in the 
 answer of Christ to the Sadducees—an answer all 
 the more significant as being the emphatic correc¬ 
 tion of ideas about the dead which they brought to 
 Him. They evidently were thinking of the dead 
 as being in a lifeless state, as being “ dead and done 
 with,” at any rate for the present. Christ told 
 them that they greatly erred, for God was not the 
 God of the dead, but of the living, “ for all live 
 unto Him.” 
 
 This turns the flank of those who jeer at the 
 endless inactivity of Heaven. Any real knowledge 
 whatever of relationship to God which anyone at¬ 
 tains here is linked with active surrender to God 
 and with service for Him, or else it is counterfeit. 
 It is a delusion, according to the Master, to suppose 
 that you can enter into' relationship with God by 
 merely saying, “ Lord, Lord.” The way of en¬ 
 trance is the doing of His will. Activity, service, 
 the energy of love are the obvious implications of 
 such a saying. 
 
 This leads on yet again to the truth, already 
 
182 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 touched on both in this chapter and in the last, that 
 heaven (and hell) begin here and that now is the 
 time to enter it. To drift, to defer, to relegate de¬ 
 cision to the future, to count on further chances, is 
 the habit of life most completely out of accord with 
 the mind of Christ. His urgent advice is to build 
 now on the rock against whatever the future may 
 bring; to get oil for lamps now before it is too 
 late; to deal quickly with an adversary before being 
 overtaken by a day of account. He even lays His 
 finger on what is admirable in an otherwise rascally 
 steward, namely, his prompt enterprise. This is 
 the austerity of Christ. It is part of His hatred of 
 humbug. If Heaven is union with God, then its 
 essence is character. And character is in the 
 making now. And what is in the making tends to 
 permanence. Christ’s insistence on decision is 
 therefore instant and unmitigated. His offer to 
 men is of a “ now or nover ” character. He bids 
 men be ready that they may straightway open the 
 door to Him when they hear Him knock. He sets 
 over against the wisdom of such readiness the fatal 
 and abiding folly of those who are overtaken in un¬ 
 readiness—their “ hearts overcharged with surfeit¬ 
 ing and drunkenness.” 
 
 This emphasis on the need for present decision 
 needs to be borne in mind when we go on to con¬ 
 sider, that nothing in the New Testament forbids 
 us believing that an intermediate period intervenes 
 between our lives here and our final destiny. There 
 is no ground in the New Testament for the expec¬ 
 tation that, after the short span of their existence 
 
LIFE AFTER DEATH 
 
 183 
 
 here, men pass at once to Heaven or to Hell. But 
 equally there is no ground for saying that this life 
 is not of crucial importance. To neglect present 
 chances and opportunities in the prospect of there 
 being second chances is self-deception. The second 
 chance may find us less ready to close with it owing 
 to our refusal to close with the first. Our later 
 state may be worse than our first. That there will 
 be beyond death further opportunities of being 
 fully won by and given to God, is a truth which 
 accords with life as we know it, affording as it does 
 such imperfect chances to so many of God’s chil¬ 
 dren to achieve their true destiny. 
 
 But, if anyone thinks about it, it is evident that 
 that truth heightens the importance of the present, 
 and deepens the urgency of the “ now ” in “ now 
 or never.” For neutrality or a cross-bench attitude 
 towards moral and spiritual issues is impossible. 
 Life is such, whether we like it or no, that it 
 abounds in opportunities for choice and decision. 
 To refuse or neglect to decide is itself a decision, 
 and it makes later decision more difficult. 
 
 On the other hand, present decision does not 
 justify complacency about the future. Nothing is 
 more horrid than the spirit of self-congratulation 
 about what is in prospect beyond the veil of death. 
 “ I do not count myself to have apprehended,” says 
 St. Paul, “ but one thing I do, forgetting the things 
 which are behind, I press on towards the goal.” 
 
XXVIII 
 HELL—I 
 
 T HIS grim subject must not be shirked. If 
 Heaven be union here and hereafter with 
 God, who is Love, what of separation from 
 Him ? What of Hell ? 
 
 Anything that is said about Hell takes its place 
 in a terrible pedigree. The subject comes down to 
 us loaded with black and savage associations. The 
 doctrine of endless torment has cast the darkest 
 shadows over the tidings of great joy. This dis¬ 
 cussion must begin with words of repudiation of 
 much traditional teaching about Hell-fire. The fol¬ 
 lowing is a fair summary of such teaching: “ That 
 God will after death pass on the ungodly a sentence 
 of endless pain, of endless torments; that from this 
 suffering there is no hope of escape, that of this evil 
 there is no hope of alleviation. That when your 
 imagination has called up a series of ages, in appar¬ 
 ently endless succession, all these ages of sin and 
 agony, undergone by the lost, have diminished their 
 cup of suffering by not so much as a single drop, 
 their pain is then no nearer ending than before.” 
 
 This is the appalling prospect which has been 
 held up to the mind and consciences of men by 
 many great divines. Three quotations taken from 
 as many different branches of the Christian Church 
 furnish illustrations: 
 
 184 
 
HELL 
 
 185 
 
 “ Little child, if you go to Hell there will be a 
 devil at your side to strike you. He will go on 
 striking you every minute for ever and ever with¬ 
 out stopping. The first stroke will make your body 
 as the body of Job, covered from head to foot with 
 sores and ulcers. The second stroke will make 
 your body twice as bad as the body of Job. The 
 third stroke will make your body three times as bad 
 as the body of Job. The fourth stroke will make 
 your body four times as bad as the body of Job. 
 How, then, will your body be after the devil has 
 been striking it every moment for a hundred mil¬ 
 lion of years without stopping? Perhaps at this 
 moment, at seven o’clock in the evening, a child is 
 just going into Hell. To-morrow evening, at seven 
 o’clock, go and knock at the gates of Hell and ask 
 what the child is doing. The devils will go and 
 look. They will come back again and say, the child 
 is burning. Go in a week and ask what the child 
 is doing, and you will get the same answer—it is 
 burning. Go in a year and ask; the same answer 
 comes—it is burning. Go in a million years and 
 ask the same question; the answer is just the same 
 —it is burning. So, if you go for ever and ever, 
 you will always get the same answer—it is burning 
 in the fire.” 
 
 “ Gather in one, in your mind, an assembly of 
 all those men or women from whom, whether in 
 history or in fiction, your memory most shrinks, 
 gather in mind all that is most loathsome, most 
 revolting . . . conceive the fierce fiery eyes of 
 hate, spite, frenzied rage, ever fixed on thee, look- 
 
186 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 ing thee through and through with hate . . . hear 
 those yells of blaspheming, concentrated hate, as 
 they echo along the lurid vault of Hell; everyone 
 hating everyone . . . yet a fixedness in that state 
 in which the hardened malignant sinner dies, in¬ 
 volves, without any further retribution of God, this 
 endless misery.” 
 
 “ When thou diest thy soul will be tormented 
 alone; that will be a Hell for it; but at the Day 
 of Judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then 
 thou wilt have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops 
 of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In 
 fire, exactly like that we have on earth, thy body 
 will lie, asbestos-like, for ever unconsumed, all thy 
 veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every 
 nerve a sting, on which the Devil shall for ever play 
 his diabolical tune of Hell’s unutterable lament.” 
 
 More even than this is the vile suggestion, which 
 has too often crept into so-called Christian teach¬ 
 ing, that the bliss of the “ saved ” is heightened by 
 the contemplation of the agonies of the lost. Here 
 again quotations are available from widely different 
 sources. 
 
 “ That the Saints may enjoy their beatitude more 
 thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks for it 
 to God, a perfect sight of the punishment of the 
 damned is granted them.” 
 
 “ Therefore the elect shall go forth to see the 
 torments of the impious, seeing which they will not 
 be grieved, but will be satiated with joy at the sight 
 of the unutterable calamity of the impious.” 
 
 “ The view of the misery of the damned will 
 
HELL 
 
 187 
 
 double the ardour of the love and the gratitude of 
 the Saints in Heaven.” 
 
 “ This display of the divine character will be 
 most entertaining to all who love God—will give 
 them the highest and most ineffable pleasure; 
 should the fire of this eternal punishment cease, it 
 would in a great measure obscure the light of 
 Heaven, and put an end to a great part of the 
 happiness and glory of the blessed.” 
 
 There is nothing to be wondered at in the vio¬ 
 lence of the reaction which such degraded doctrine 
 has set up in countless hearts. Views which repre¬ 
 sent God as doing that which the most heartless of 
 human beings would not do, have promoted pas¬ 
 sionate and far-reaching scepticism. They have 
 been met full-face by men like John Stuart Mill, 
 who roundly asserted that, if Hell was the penalty 
 for believing that the goodness of God was not 
 akin to that which we recognise as goodness in 
 men—“ to Hell I will go.” 
 
 Nor is it to be wondered at that a vision of 
 cruelty at the heart of things has reacted power¬ 
 fully in encouraging men in cruelty. Fires have 
 been lit on earth as a counterpart and anticipation 
 of the everlasting burning. “ As the souls of 
 heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in 
 Hell,” so Bloody Mary said in defence of her per¬ 
 secution, “ there can be nothing more proper than 
 for me to imitate the divine vengeance by burning 
 them here on earth.” 
 
 It is useless to deny that the clear waters of the 
 Gospel of the love of God have been deeply stained 
 
188 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 and defiled, as by black poison, by such savage 
 thoughts of men about endless torment. 
 
 Such a judgment can only rightly be passed if it 
 is accompanied by an attempt to account for the 
 development of teaching so greatly at variance with 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 The main reason for such a development is the 
 difficulty, encountered in full force by Jesus during 
 His ministry, which besets us all of really believing 
 in the love of God. Jesus all His life through had 
 in trust for others the truth of the Father which 
 others found too good to be true. That, as we 
 have frequently noticed, emerged into clearest re¬ 
 lief in the inability of the disciples to understand 
 (before Christ died) that the Kingdom of God was 
 not a kingdom of irresistible force, but a kingdom 
 of resistible love. It emerged in the plain assump¬ 
 tion on the part of specially religious Jews that God 
 had favourites, and that therefore “ publicans and 
 sinners ” were not dear to Him. It emerged in 
 the thought of God implied in the disciples’ sugges¬ 
 tion, that they should call down fire out of heaven 
 on those who were inhospitable to Jesus. It 
 emerged in their request for seats on the right hand 
 and on the left in the Kingdom. Right away to 
 His death there were in the Master’s heart “ things 
 of God ” which could not enter into others’ hearts. 
 All that was left for Him to do was to act out the 
 inconceivable, to make good to others what was too 
 good for them to believe. It is the divine action 
 primarily (as compared with any divine words) 
 which is the essential revelation of God. This 
 
HELL 
 
 189 
 
 must be borne in mind in any discussion of the 
 report of Christ’s words, coming to us as they do 
 through the medium of minds congenitally infirm 
 (as all our minds are) in fully and really seizing 
 the truth of God’s love. It is the truth acted-out, 
 to which the first Christians were witnesses, not 
 truth merely spoken out. “ God commended His 
 love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners 
 and enemies, Christ died for us,” 
 
 There is the one foundation once laid. It is the 
 truth of God made known in Christ. In the earliest 
 days St. Paul recognised the danger of the founda¬ 
 tion being overlaid by layers of material of very 
 different value. “ For other foundation can no 
 man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus 
 Christ. But if any man buildeth on the founda¬ 
 tion, gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, stubble; 
 each man’s work shall be made manifest: for the 
 day shall declare it.” 
 
 And, since the earliest days, the process of over¬ 
 laying has continued. It would take too long fully 
 to illustrate the process. But the overlaying of the 
 New Testament by the Old is a glaring instance. 
 The whole of Scripture came to assume such a 
 position in men’s reverence that they drew indis¬ 
 criminately upon Old and New Testament for their 
 idea of God. And in doing so, unwittingly they 
 have gone far to adulterate the truth of the Father 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ with the idea of Him as— 
 say—plaguing, blighting, and blasting His children. 
 
 Other instances are the various legalist, monarch¬ 
 ist conceptions of God, derived from the current 
 
190 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 politics of different times, which have tended to 
 make of God a supremely magisterial figure, aloof 
 from and out of sympathy with His wayward chil¬ 
 dren. There are also the effects of analytical the¬ 
 ology which have meant the dividing of the Deity 
 into so many attributes, love included. The love of 
 God has thus come to be viewed as alternating with 
 His justice, or as at variance with His power. God 
 has been thought of as fluctuating between love and 
 wrath. Whereas if the original Gospel be true that 
 He is Love, then His power, His justice, His holi¬ 
 ness, His wrath must be attributes of His love and 
 not separate from or alternative to it. 
 
 Then, lastly, there is the perennial inclination of 
 our confusedly guilty and selfish hearts to think 
 several times about ourselves before ever we think 
 of God. This has meant virtually the placing of 
 sin and of fears about our own salvation at the 
 centre of our system of religion instead of God and 
 His grace. It has allowed a spirit of selfish con¬ 
 gratulation about salvation to creep in among 
 Christians, even to the point of their gloating over 
 others’ loss. That spirit has tarnished certain 
 golden words of Christ by calling them the Parable 
 of the Prodigal Son. But the point of the parable, 
 directed as it was at self-congratulating and con¬ 
 temptuous Pharisees, is not primarily the sin of the 
 son—though that sin was flagrant—but the love, 
 despite the sins, of the Father. 
 
 In such ways—and in many more—has idolatry 
 been at work, which is the making of God in an 
 image accordant with our own unmodified concep- 
 
HELL 
 
 191 
 
 tions. Christ appealed to men’s idea of what love 
 is. He said, “ You know what it is, but how much 
 more is the Father’s love.” That “ how much 
 more ” has been forgotten. Thus have veils been 
 spread over the light of the Gospel of God. Thus 
 has He been represented in ways repulsive to con¬ 
 science and reason. 
 
XXIX 
 
 HELL—II 
 
 I N the last chapter we tried to clear away from 
 the subject of Hell some of the associations of 
 cruelty and immorality which have come to 
 cluster round it in the course of the centuries. 
 
 The question now is: What remains ? What is 
 it of tremendous awe and solemnity which cannot 
 be cleared away as so much rubbish overlaying the 
 one foundation once laid, even Jesus Christ? That 
 there is something tremendous— something which 
 utterly condemns mere easy-goingness —in the 
 original Gospel is evidenced by the very vehemence 
 of the writers, many of them most saintly men, 
 whose words we have repudiated. 
 
 It is fatally easy to slip into thinking that the 
 Gospel of God, Who is Love, is a softly indulgent 
 and loosely sentimental thing. For the very word 
 love has been prostituted by sentiment. It has as 
 it were been coated with sugar. Whereas in reality 
 the more truly love is worthy the name, the more 
 plainly does it contain within itself something ir- 
 reducibly terrible and the more trucelessly is it op¬ 
 posed to evil. The fact that, in reaction from the 
 blood and thunder of preachers, men of the world 
 have conceived for themselves a God of indulgent 
 good nature —“ Le Bon Dieu ”—who will not be 
 too hard on any of us no matter what we do, is but 
 
 192 
 
HELL 
 
 193 
 
 another instance of what we laid stress in the last 
 chapter, namely, that we perpetually find it beyond 
 us to apprehend what the full reality of love is. 
 
 But as a matter of fact human experience 
 abounds in testimony to the nature of love as made 
 up of elements compared to which mere indulgence 
 is but a caricature. A purely indulgent mother is a 
 very poor friend to her child. Human society, if it 
 is governed by the spirit of sheer moral toleration, 
 soon festers. What men in their hearts most fear 
 to violate is someone else’s love for them. They 
 are prepared to exchange very lightly with one an¬ 
 other in a smoking-room tales of what they call 
 their “ peccadilloes.” But many of them would 
 have their tongues cut out rather than tell them to 
 their mothers. A schoolboy is remembered as 
 being thrown into an agony of fear when he real¬ 
 ised that after writing two letters, one to his mother 
 and the other—a “ smutty ” one—to a friend, he 
 had put the letters into the wrong envelopes. Most 
 of us will remember the strange dread, mixed with 
 strong longing, which we were in as children when 
 we had to “ own up ” to those who loved us. 
 
 All this points beyond mistake to that in love 
 which is travestied when love is thought of as 
 merely soft. Indeed “ Le Bqn Dieu ” though he is 
 fashionable, is not really enthroned in many hearts 
 or consciences. For the moral sense of men tells 
 them that such a god as he is of no use in a world 
 where right is right and wrong is wrong. For the 
 maintenance of the absoluteness of moral distinc¬ 
 tions is a matter of life or death. Everything most 
 
194 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 precious to the race—all dogma apart—is imper¬ 
 illed by smudging such distinctions. 
 
 Suppose there are wounded men lying out after 
 a battle. Suppose wounded man A gives water to 
 wounded man B, and suppose wounded man C 
 crawls up to wounded man D and stabs him in the 
 stomach. If the moral distinction between the acts 
 is not absolute (no matter what mixture of motive 
 may have come into them), then it is no future 
 heaven or hell which is at stake, but the very ele¬ 
 mentary basis of present human society. To say 
 therefore that love is terrible, is but to say that 
 there is a moral law which it is awful to violate. 
 And our consciences know this, perhaps dimly, but 
 they know it. 
 
 Now when we come to the foundation once laid 
 in Jesus Christ we come to a crime done by man. 
 To deny it is to make moral nonsense of the uni¬ 
 verse. On any showing the treatment He received 
 from others was wrong. But not only so, His love 
 was received with repudiation. That is the in- 
 eradicably tremendous element in the Gospel story, 
 when the Father’s love was offered to His children 
 they rejected it. And what is more, as regards 
 ourselves, we go on rejecting it. It is calling dark¬ 
 ness light to say that this doesn’t matter. There is 
 no ground whatever for bringing in the support of 
 some sweet sentimentalist called Jesus to support 
 so immoral a contention. 
 
 The story therefore of God’s offer to men 
 through His Son is interwoven with emphasis on 
 the sin of its rejection. There was a great wrong 
 
HELL 
 
 195 
 
 done, and it was done by men in the exercise of 
 that freedom which Jesus so deliberately and un¬ 
 failingly respected. He turned away from every 
 method but that of winning the free response of 
 others. It is not to rely on any one text, nor to 
 take too literally this or that bit of imagery as used 
 by Christ, to say that He did not shrink from de¬ 
 claring the tremendousness of the consequences 
 which attend upon the repudiation and the frustra¬ 
 tion of the love which He offered to men. Christ 
 could never have won the place that He occupies in 
 history if He had not been the whole-hearted cham¬ 
 pion of the moral law. He counted implicitly on 
 men’s moral sense. He saw that law in operation, 
 and He declared what He saw. He saw men pass¬ 
 ing under judgment. He saw men coming to the 
 light. He saw them, too, falling into the “ outer 
 darkness.” 
 
 Yet, of course, that is not all. He did not merely 
 leave those who were found in enmity to God under 
 condemnation. He did not leave those who refused 
 to come to the Father’s feast in their self-exclusion. 
 As we have said so often, He went on to act out— 
 under conditions of rejection—the love which loves 
 its enemies and forgives unto seventy times seven. 
 Through His incorruptible loyalty to the Father, 
 the Father’s love, which His children repudiated, 
 sought until it found them. The Cross, interpreted 
 by the trusting prayer of Him who hung upon it, 
 declares that the love of God will never let His 
 children go. 
 
 The Gospel of God therefore is not the story of 
 
196 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 God making an impotent offer to men, which to 
 their ruin they repudiate. Rather it is the mighty 
 act—the act of love which is power—whereby God 
 set men free from all that held them captive in 
 lovelessness. 
 
 But does that mean that all must necessarily 
 enter into the freedom thus won for them? Does 
 it mean that all must be saved? Certainly from 
 God’s side the inextinguishable longing is for each 
 and every one of His children into whatsoever far 
 country they may have gone. He will never give 
 anyone up. The notion therefore of His regarding 
 with indifference myriads of His children endlessly 
 tormented must be struck out of our minds. 
 Rather He will use every means, stern, remedial, 
 purifying to work upon them that at last they may 
 turn and come home. 
 
 Yet, even so, the possibility of an ultimate and 
 final rejection of God by men cannot be excluded, 
 if God remains what He was revealed to be in 
 Christ, and if we remain free—if He is our Father 
 and we are His children. That is the possibility 
 which lends such fearful urgency to the tones of 
 Christ’s warnings—“ Choose now,” He says, “ or it 
 may be that you will never choose ”—it is the possi¬ 
 bility of final self-exclusion from, the love of God. 
 
 But what, then, of those finally self-excluded ? 
 What of their destiny? Here agnosticism is the 
 only wisdom. We do not know. We “ know only 
 in part.” It is as though we cannot see the 
 meeting-point of parallel lines. Those lines repre¬ 
 sent on the one hand the love of God, on the other 
 
HELL 
 
 197 
 
 the freedom, however partial, of His children. No 
 system of thought has ever solved, or tried to solve, 
 the problem of the relationship between God’s will 
 and human wills, without doing violence either to 
 His love or to our freedom. There are indeed 
 depths beyond our plumbing, there are ways of God 
 beyond our searching out. 
 
 It would take a volume to examine all the pas¬ 
 sages which contain reports of Christ’s warnings. 
 They must be read, as we said previously, with the 
 remembrance that the reports come to us from men 
 who, like everyone else, were proved to be incapable 
 of grasping what the Father’s love is. In the pro¬ 
 cess of carrying out the Gospel of that love and of 
 having it often rejected, those men may have let 
 tones of human vengefulness and cruelty creep into 
 their report of the Master’s word. 
 
 But allow that possibility, and yet the main sub¬ 
 stance of the warnings correspond with the heights 
 and depths of experience. They maintain the ab¬ 
 solute moral distinctions. They declare that to be 
 willingly in union with God is to be in the light; 
 that to be wilfully separated from God is to be in 
 the outer-darkness. It would be treason to human¬ 
 ity to empty them of meaning or to gloze them 
 over. For they are bound up with the hope of the 
 final victory of good. And for the individual, while 
 each should refrain from passing words of judg¬ 
 ment on others, and still more from gloating over 
 them, they must remain matters of life or death. 
 
 This also may be said, that scholars have estab¬ 
 lished that certain words used by Christ have been 
 
198 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 maltreated in the process of translation, and that 
 they do not form a legitimate basis for the doctrine 
 of endless torment. Damnation should be condem¬ 
 nation, everlasting should be age-long or for the 
 age, hell should be Hades or Gehenna. (But here 
 I must refer readers to such a book as Dr. J. Pater¬ 
 son Smyth’s The Gospel of the Hereafter.) 
 
 Finally, it has been our concern in regard to all 
 the great questions of the future which we have 
 discussed in the last six chapters, to lay stress on 
 this—that a right mind about them depends not on 
 trying to pierce the veils which hide the future 
 from us, but on learning the lessons of the present. 
 Life—eternal life—is here already, it is not only to 
 come. Judgment is already in process. Heaven— 
 the heaven of peace with God and man—is to be 
 entered now. 
 
 And, lastly, there is hell on earth. Ask a brother 
 or a son about Flanders, and he’ll tell you if this 
 was not true. Read any faithful book which tells 
 you of the reality of social ills and oppressions of 
 modern civilisation. Read the daily newspapers’ 
 record of pathetic moral tragedy and despair. 
 Read them for yourselves first hand in the life 
 around you. Finally, ask your own heart of its 
 own bitterness. “ There is no harder hell than 
 sin.” And sin is self. Individually, socially, na¬ 
 tionally, the world has idolised self-interest. We 
 are learning the consequences, and it is a bitter les¬ 
 son. But, what if we learnt it? What if we saw 
 that we were in a “ far country”? What if we 
 came to ourselves and turned home to God ? 
 
XXX 
 
 THE VIRGIN-BIRTH 
 
 E ARLIER in this book we deliberately left on 
 one side the birth of the Christ. We did 
 not begin at Bethlehem: we began “ when 
 Jesus came unto Galilee, preaching the Gospel of 
 God.” We did not wish to beg any questions about 
 Jesus, but to start from the point at which, to the 
 eyes of those who followed Him, He came just as 
 a man among men. In other words, we wished to 
 give a fair trial to the supposition, which does de¬ 
 mand trial, that Jesus was only another man, and 
 that that is the real heart of the matter when 
 stripped of all doctrinal and devotional wrappings. 
 We have seen that this supposition breaks down 
 entirely. For it fails to account for the certain 
 fact, namely, that the men who followed Jesus 
 were put into possession of a Gospel of God, which 
 they carried as a blazing light into the prevailing 
 “ twilight of the gods.” Doubtless, then, there are 
 many differences to be detected between the various 
 writers and the various strata of the New Testa¬ 
 ment. It is possible to play off St. Peter against 
 St. Paul and both against St. John. But the dif¬ 
 ferences are secondary compared to the main thing 
 which is common to them all, and makes them of 
 one mind. That main thing is conviction about 
 God. Whether St. Peter is saying in the earliest 
 
 199 
 
200 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 days at Jerusalem : “ The God of Abraham . . . 
 hath glorified His servant Jesus ”: or in his letter, 
 “ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ ”: whether it be St. Paul avowing that, 
 “ God commendeth His love towards us ”: whether 
 it be St. John throwing an intense energy into his 
 message, “ God is light and in Him is no darkness 
 at all ”—there is an identity of evangel and con¬ 
 viction in them all. They are one and all witnesses 
 to something from God, a sending, a coming, an 
 arrival from God. And the something is Jesus 
 Christ, come from God, not from, below but from 
 above. God has come forth in Him. The love at 
 the very heart of things has come down and been 
 revealed in terms of a human life. Through the 
 sheer humanity of Jesus deity has been self- 
 disclosed. The love which took Jesus to the Cross 
 manifested the eternal self-giving of God Himself. 
 
 That is whither we are led in the trial of our 
 supposition. And from this point we turn back to 
 consider the question of the Virgin-Birth. 
 
 There is much wavering about it in many minds. 
 This is due partly to the fact that the evidence for 
 the Virgin-Birth is not very strong; partly to a 
 desire to be rid of the supernatural; partly to a be¬ 
 lief that that mode of birth means little or nothing; 
 partly to a jealousy for the sanctity of married 
 love; partly to a fear lest the real humanity of 
 Jesus should be whittled away by the fact of His 
 being virgin-born. 
 
 What shall we say? 
 
 Anyhow the real humanity is there in the New 
 
THE VIRGIN-BIRTH 
 
 201 
 
 Testament. Bcce Homo! Only, as was repeatedly 
 found both by friend and foe, Jesus could not be 
 fitted into men’s ordinary idea of humanity. The 
 more certainly others assumed that they knew all 
 about Him, the more clearly it emerged that they 
 did not. Anyhow, again, Jesus is the great cham¬ 
 pion of marriage. He, indeed, has pitched the 
 standard of marriage uncomfortably high for the 
 average sensual man. He puts His seal to marriage 
 and His hands of blessing on the heads of children. 
 
 Does, then, His birth of a virgin matter? Cer¬ 
 tainly it is not like the Resurrection, in the sense 
 that it is not that without which Christianity could 
 never have been. It looks as though St. Paul and 
 St. Peter (if St. Mark’s Gospel is his story) and 
 perhaps St. John knew nothing of it. It is, there¬ 
 fore, too much to say that conviction about the 
 birth is absolutely necessary for a Christian. It is 
 too much to say that we believe in Christ because 
 He was virgin-born. 
 
 But if the truth of the whole fact of Christ is 
 what we have stated at the outset of this chapter, 
 namely, the coming forth of God Himself, then the 
 Virgin-Birth is of a piece with the rest. It is of a 
 piece with what we called, in an earlier chapter, the 
 new-creative act of God. It is in harmony with the 
 fact that Christ is inexplicable as being “ from 
 below.” It fits with the truth that, in the whole 
 drama of Jesus, the initiative, the action was God’s. 
 Say what others may, the writer cannot agree that 
 there is no meaning or value in the Virgin-Birth 
 and that it may without loss be dropped out. God 
 
202 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 made a new humanity in that which He wrought 
 in Christ. Men, whom the confiding appeal of 
 Jesus displayed as held captive by their own in¬ 
 firmities, were born again into a new life. God, in 
 a word, made a new start for the race. 
 
 There was desperate need of a new start, not 
 least in the vital matters of sex. Is there any 
 respect in which men stand more in need of deliv¬ 
 erance from engrained frailties than as regard sex? 
 Is there any function of human nature in which 
 men have more disastrously fallen from their 
 birthright—have more pathetically abused gifts 
 good in themselves—than the function of sex? 
 There has been much easy talk to the contrary 
 about all this. Some of it, to be rather cruelly 
 frank, has come from spinsters in the “ women’s 
 movement.” But most men know in their hearts 
 that there is need of penitence as regards any 
 man’s love for a true woman. If so that is a pow¬ 
 erful witness to the need of a new creation. It 
 witnesses to the fact that sexual intercourse has 
 been pervaded by human weakness. 
 
 Something, therefore, very vital is lost if the 
 initiative in the birth of Jesus was but a husband’s 
 love for his wife. Something precious is retained 
 if the initiative was from God. And that is the 
 meaning and value of the Virgin-Birth. The 
 meaning is—to use words of St. John, which do 
 not certainly refer to the matter—that Christ was 
 born “ not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will 
 of man, but of God.” 
 
 We will not enter again upon the question of the 
 
THE VIRGIN-BIRTH 
 
 203 
 
 supernatural. It is enough to say that there is no 
 reasonableness in a dogmatic rejection of it. 
 
 But there is the question of evidence. We will 
 not go into the suggestion, which was early made, 
 that if the story of the Virgin-Birth is untrue, 
 there is more evidence for Jesus being born out of 
 wedlock than for His being the son of Joseph. 
 But we will come to the main issue, and that is the 
 trustworthiness of St. Luke. It makes a very great 
 wound in the witness of the New Testament if St. 
 Luke’s story is untrue. For he is explicit in car¬ 
 rying his narrative back to those “ who' from the 
 beginning were eyewitnesses ” (Luke i:l-4) : and 
 he comes forward, at a time when many others 
 were also drawing up narratives, to “ trace the 
 course of all things accurately from the first.” The 
 dominant note in the minds which produced the 
 New Testament writings is that of “ witness.” 
 For in following Jesus men had found that their 
 own ideas or inventions were exhausted and, at the 
 climax of the ministry, were proved wholly in¬ 
 adequate. Their part therefore in preaching the 
 truth, which had been acted out without their co¬ 
 operation, was to be faithful witnesses. That was 
 the attitude into which the whole dramatic action 
 of the ministry had wrought or moulded them. 
 St. Luke sounds emphatically the note of witness. 
 It cuts a great hole into the trustworthiness of the 
 New Testament, to say that St. Luke, in setting 
 himself to trace the course of what happened, al¬ 
 lowed legend or pious fancy to adulterate the wit¬ 
 ness of others. We know (better, perhaps, to-day 
 
204 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 than ever before) into what a hive of human specu¬ 
 lation and theory, both Jewish and Greek, the wit¬ 
 nessing Church went, when it launched out into the 
 world. The existence of the New Testament is 
 evidence of the strong, clear-eyed fashion in which 
 a witness was maintained to what was true and 
 really happened. And it is also fair to say that, of 
 all authors in the New Testament, none has come 
 more honourably through the jealous fire of mod¬ 
 ern criticism than St. Luke. 
 
 After all, whence did he get the story? Was it 
 not from the Mother? It was one of the things 
 which Mary “ pondered in her heart ” ? We can¬ 
 not be dead certain, but we can be certain enough 
 to be full, year by year, of Christmas joy. 
 
XXXI 
 
 THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 HRISTIANITY is a Gospel—a good news 
 
 ■because it is about God. That, as we 
 
 have seen, sprang from the essential char¬ 
 acter of the historical drama into which the dis¬ 
 ciples were brought as they followed Jesus. He 
 brought to a head the long travail of the one people, 
 itself representative of other peoples, which had 
 most persistently “ felt after God, if haply they 
 might find Him.” He led them to the supreme 
 religious crisis in the history of the whole human 
 race, when one reality was at issue—God. That 
 issue did not go> by default. The outcome of the 
 crisis was a Gospel of God. There is therefore a 
 Christian doctrine of God. It is the doctrine of 
 the Trinity, which is to< the effect that the unity of 
 the Godhead is not bare and single, as though God 
 were the Great Alone: but that there are within 
 the Unity of the Godhead relationships which we 
 cannot call anything less than personal—relation¬ 
 ships between the Father, the Son and the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 We must not run away from this great subject, 
 however its excess over the capacity of human 
 thought may tempt us to do so. 
 
 The doctrine, undoubtedly, dwells in an un¬ 
 happy association of ideas in most men’s minds. 
 
 205 
 
206 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 One word in the Athanasian Creed has stuck to 
 their minds, and it colours their thought of the rest 
 —it is the word “ incomprehensible.” And more 
 than this, their thought has been darkened and em¬ 
 bittered by resentment at the damnatory introduc¬ 
 tion to the Creed. They angrily repudiate the use, 
 as a test of salvation, of what seems to be highly 
 speculative if not unintelligible doctrine. 
 
 The writer cannot but express sympathy with 
 such resentment. He does not attempt to defend 
 the making of intellectual assent to doctrinal 
 formulae a test of salvation. For Christ undoubt¬ 
 edly made life rather than belief the test of human 
 destiny. That is one of the things which lends 
 such formidable urgency to His words and work. 
 
 But grant what has been said and there remains 
 this, that the truth, which the Church maintained 
 so fiercely in the face of deadly attacks, is not a 
 human speculation. It is the interpretation of that 
 which was not made by man but was wrought out 
 by God alone. The Church has been right to wit¬ 
 ness to this. She is the trustee of truth about 
 which she cannot, despite all solicitations, be just 
 vaguely tolerant and easy-going. She has been 
 right to insist, in view of the inveterate irrational¬ 
 ity and indolence of thought with which the world 
 is so easily content in things religious, that there 
 is a positive truth of God which the mind can ap¬ 
 prehend, even though only in part: that men can 
 think rightly about God, and that it matters vitally 
 whether they do so or not. A world, laid well-nigh 
 in ruins by lies about God, should be willing to 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 207 
 
 learn that no greater practical force exists in human 
 affairs than the ideas—whether true or false—of 
 God, which men have in their minds. 
 
 There is this also to be said. The charge that 
 Trinitarian doctrine is beyond comprehension is 
 often made on the assumption that, by contrast 
 with it, there is some simple and reasonable Uni¬ 
 tarian truth of God. It is taken for granted that 
 the truth of the Oneness of God, or at most the 
 truth of the Fatherhood of God, is securely in the 
 possession “ of all good men ”: that such truth 
 stands solidly on its own base and is in no need of 
 any dogmatic support. Yet no assumption is less 
 borne out either by history or by present experi¬ 
 ence. We will only speak of the latter. 
 
 As we have seen, it is precisely belief in God— 
 theism—which is hard hit to-day and has been hard 
 hit for many a day. It is hard hit by what we 
 have called the riddle of the universe—the im¬ 
 mense array of dark and painful facts, both within 
 and without men, which seem irreconcilable with 
 the goodness, still more with the love of God. 
 Once men are sensitive to these facts their theism 
 is troubled. That has ever been so. It is so to-day. 
 Great questions of reconciliation become urgent: 
 how to reconcile God’s power and His love; how to 
 reconcile His transcendence (His being above the 
 world, immune from the miseries of the world) 
 and His immanence (His presence in the world, 
 immersed in so much that is evil in the world) ; 
 how to reconcile God and sinful men: how to recon¬ 
 cile the ideal and the actual. And so on. It is true 
 
208 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 to say that philosophy by itself is powerless to effect 
 the necessary reconciliations: the irreconcilable 
 facts tear holes in its successive systems. 
 
 But the Gospel is that reconciliation was made 
 by God Himself, in that which He did and does in 
 Christ. And the doctrine of the Trinity declares 
 that the nature of God is such as makes this recon¬ 
 ciliation possible. It says that the Father is not 
 only above the world, but (in His Son) is within 
 and identified with the world’s painful processes; 
 is not only over-against man, but (in the Spirit) is 
 travailing in the human heart. The doctrine of the 
 Trinity sets the Cross at is were in the heart of 
 God. Let anyone try to say anything on a Good 
 Friday about the infinitely tragic suffering and 
 death of Jesus, and he will be brought to see what 
 at any rate the doctrine of the Trinity is about. 
 A bare theism—any candid Unitarian conception 
 of God—is confounded by that representative trag¬ 
 edy and crime. For the Cross, apart from the 
 truth of the Trinity, is eloquent of nothing but the 
 glory—and the pathos—of human heroism. It is 
 only the word of God to a world in which crucifix¬ 
 ion is common, if it is true that it is God Himself 
 who is on the Cross. 
 
 No' speculation of man produced this almost in¬ 
 credible truth. It had not entered into the mind of 
 man so to think of God. The truth took hold of 
 men’s minds through what God did in Christ. The 
 assertion of threefoldness in the nature of God 
 was not a quasi-mathematical fancy. It sprang 
 from the succession of distinct moments or com- 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 209 
 
 ings in the Divine action. There was the sending 
 of the Son by the Father : that sending by which 
 the reality of the Father’s love was revealed even 
 in and unto the death upon the Cross. There was 
 the sending of the Holy Spirit: that sending by 
 which the Son, who had given Himself to the death 
 and thus had brought men under judgment, came 
 to live within them in recreative power. All was 
 the action of God. To think anything else would 
 have been intolerable to Jews (as were the Apos¬ 
 tles), into whose hearts a jealousy for monotheism 
 (belief in one God) had been burnt as by fire. It 
 was God come in Christ: God come in the Spirit. 
 And yet not three Gods, but one God. It was not 
 God, and then a man (Jesus) and then an in¬ 
 fluence (the Spirit). But it was God acting in His 
 Son, and God acting in the Spirit. God first, midst 
 and last. 
 
 Historical event, then, lies at the heart of the 
 truth of the Trinity. No man wove it, in spider- 
 like fashion, out of his inner consciousness. The 
 witness of the New Testament is absolute that the 
 truth of God was not reached by man but came and 
 reached man. And the Church in the face of a 
 multitude of speculations, which cut as it were at 
 her main nerve, maintained the witness. “ It was 
 God who came,” she said, “ not another man, not a 
 demi-god. It was God of God, and not another.” 
 
 The upshot is a doctrine which makes the nature 
 of God as personal far more intelligible than any 
 doctrine which conceives of Him as merely one or 
 single or solitary. For personality, as we know it 
 
210 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 on the human plane, is never merely individual, 
 still less solitary. It never exists, it is never ex¬ 
 pressed, except in relationship with others. The 
 individual person is always socially representative. 
 Further, it is revealed in action. A man’s person¬ 
 ality is revealed in what he does. It is most re¬ 
 vealed in outgoing sacrificial action. A man is 
 never so much his real self as when he gives him¬ 
 self away in self-sacrificing love. The boy flinging 
 himself “ over the top ” at the front is more of a 
 person than the man saving himself at the base. 
 He is more of a clue to the nature of things than 
 the other. Further, human personality is not a 
 centre of bare identity like a pin-point. There is 
 distinction or relationship within the unity of per¬ 
 sonality. This comes out in self-consciousness, I 
 am conscious of myself and can send myself hither 
 and thither. I can give myself. 
 
 All this, that is true of man as made in the 
 image of God, is wonderfully corrobated by the 
 Christian revelation. God as personal is known in 
 His relationship to others. From out of the dim 
 past comes a word telling of friendship between 
 God and Abraham. For though the Jew had not 
 the word personality, he knew the thing. His na¬ 
 tional story was the experience of relationship with 
 Another, an experience surviving and expanding 
 through many vicissitudes. To the Jew, too, the 
 Other was known in action. He was at work in 
 history. So in the fullness of the times God was 
 revealed in all-fulfilling action, in the giving of 
 Himself in love which suffers all things for the sake 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 211 
 
 of the beloved. He did not send someone else. He 
 came, He gave Himself. That very essence of the 
 Good News is utterly irreconcilable with any 
 merely Unitarian conception of God. But it is pos¬ 
 sible if He is not a bare unity or single centre of 
 consciousness; if there is relationship within the 
 unity of His nature; if—in a word—in Himself 
 He is love. And what He is in Himself was made 
 known in self-revealing action. What He is eter¬ 
 nally was made known in time. 
 
 But, let it be repeated, it was the action in time 
 which unveiled the eternal. No man conceived a 
 theory of triune personality and imposed it upon 
 the fact of Christ. It was the other way about. 
 The fact of Christ went beyond all theories and 
 speculations. The triune action was other than any 
 human anticipation. God wrought out the truth of 
 Himself in action. On that truth so given human 
 thought ponders and draws thence a whole phi¬ 
 losophy of existence. Thus did the Church ponder 
 on the original witness given to what God had done 
 in Christ. Thus did she draw out the doctrine of 
 the Holy Trinity. 
 
XXXII 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND LIFE: THE KINGDOM 
 
 OF GOD 
 
 W E have considered some of the great ele¬ 
 ments of the Christian faith. There re¬ 
 mains that in the last pages of this book 
 we should discuss further the application of that 
 faith to life. At the centre of the Gospel is the 
 Saviour of the world. The world, on the other 
 hand, needs salvation. We need not labour that 
 point again. Our starting-place was the whole 
 world’s need. “ Human society,” in the words of 
 Lord Grey, “ has received an ultimatum.” 
 
 Is it possible to indicate a little more plainly how 
 the Gospel can help the world in its need ? 
 
 In asking this question we are really asking 
 another, namely, What is the Kingdom of God? 
 The reference of much of Christ’s teaching about 
 the Kingdom of God was the entangling business 
 of ordinary life. It was in regard to the most 
 prosaic and necessary needs of daily existence— 
 food, clothing and the like—that He said with 
 sharpest decisiveness: “ Seek ye first the kingdom 
 of God and His righteousness, and all these things 
 shall be added unto you.” 
 
 But what is the Kingdom of God? What is it 
 and where is it? Is it the Church? Or is it a 
 renovated and transformed secular world-order? 
 
 212 
 
THE GOSPEL AND LIFE 
 
 213 
 
 Is it, for instance, the League of Nations in being? 
 Is it here on earth amid earth’s mortal conditions ? 
 Or is it only in the beyond? Is it only “King¬ 
 dom come ” ? 
 
 What did Christ mean by it? Was it to Him 
 only a future state? Was it linked in His mind 
 with the expectation that this present order of 
 things was about to end ? 
 
 Does it take shape in the external world ? Or is 
 it only “ within you ” ? Why does mention of the 
 Kingdom nearly die away in the course of the New 
 Testament? The teaching of Jesus in the Gospels 
 is full of it. Why is there but little mention of it 
 in the Epistles ? Why are there two names for it— 
 the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven ? 
 
 These are real questions. To some of them we 
 have given incidental answers in previous chapters. 
 No subject to-day needs more thoroughgoing dis¬ 
 cussion. Space at the end of this book forbids such 
 discussion. But this at any rate we will say, in 
 passing, that when questions are put in the form of 
 Either-Or, the right answer is commonly—Both. 
 There are also a few things which can be said even 
 in a short space. 
 
 Probably some of the difficulties surrounding the 
 subject arise from our disposition to think too 
 much of the meaning of the word “ Kingdom,” 
 and too little of the words “ of God.” We begin 
 to frame ideas of a scheme, system, order of 
 things. We feel after some “ -ism.” And we are, 
 the while, suspicious of “ -isms.” 
 
 Let us start with “ of God.” The Kingdom of 
 
214 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 God cannot be less than the final goal of the pur¬ 
 pose of God in the whole creation. The very fact 
 that it is so all-inclusive is the reason why it is so 
 hard to grasp or to define. It is “ of God.” As 
 such, therefore, it must not be thought of in other 
 terms than those of personal reality or personal 
 relationships. It is more than any external organi¬ 
 sation. More than any “ -ism ” or system. It is 
 beyond reduction to programme or exhaustion by 
 “ schedule.” It is not a result attained just by 
 human endeavour : nor a burden propped upon 
 weary human shoulders. Rather it is “ of God.” 
 It is the personal reality of God, given by God and 
 received by persons. It is God arriving, welcomed, 
 possessed by men. 
 
 And it is already here. Whatever Jesus said 
 about it, or others thought He said, He established 
 it. It arrived in Him. It was quite other than any 
 one expected. Clearly the word Kingdom set up 
 misleading associations in the minds of the dis¬ 
 ciples. It is apt to do so to this day. The word is 
 saturated with associations of mere power. But 
 the Kingdom of God is the reign of the power of 
 love. It is the reign of the love of God. And that 
 reign was established, all defiance and opposition 
 to the contrary, at Calvary. A hymn (as usual) 
 misleads by asking: “ Thy Kingdom come, O Lord, 
 Thy rule, O Christ, begin.” The Kingdom has 
 come, the rule has begun. The Kingdom was 
 manifested in victorious supremacy in the Cross. 
 It was planted at the depth of honest and true 
 hearts. Whatever the final goal of God’s purpose 
 
THE GOSPEL AND LIFE 
 
 215 
 
 in history may turn out to be, it will be the com¬ 
 pletion of that which He wrought out in Christ, 
 even to the death upon the Cross. It will be the 
 outcome of the truth, indelibly engraven on human 
 hearts, that God is love. 
 
 Further, as it is “ of God ” it is more than ideal¬ 
 ism. “ I get a kind of nausea, when faced by 
 idealism/’ said a young journalist of late. Life 
 again and again seems intractable to idealism. The 
 futility of pious intentions and good resolutions 
 clings to idealism. “ Real-politik ” seems to go 
 through it like paper. It seems related to life as a 
 rainbow to a storm. But the Kingdom is “ of 
 God.” It is that which is. It is already and for 
 ever in heaven. Already, in the unseen, the Fath¬ 
 er’s Name is hallowed, His Kingdom has come, His 
 will is done. As in heaven, therefore so on earth. 
 The already real is to be realised, reproduced on 
 earth. Heaven comes down to earth, invades and 
 masters it. Already, therefore, amid the almost 
 hopeless thick of history, the end is sure. Already 
 though the ploughshare sticks in the stubborn clay 
 of things, the harvest is certain. The Kingdom is 
 real-politik, for it is the nature of things. It is 
 the reality of what God is and intends. And it 
 is that reality vindicated and proved triumphant on 
 earth. For established in the Cross—where all 
 that beggars human optimism seemed victorious— 
 it has taken the measure of all that breeds disillu¬ 
 sionment in men. It is, in virtue of its source and 
 lodgment at the depths of things, proof against 
 the “ moth and the rust.” It is harder than the 
 
216 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 rock of human apathy and ignorance: tougher than 
 the whole entanglement of human sin. Amid 
 changes it stands; amid hopelessness it arrives; 
 over futility and despair it prevails. For it is of 
 God in Christ. 
 
 Its organ and instrument is character. Its 
 means to leaven the whole stuff of life is conse¬ 
 crated lives. And those lives are not isolated units, 
 mere individuals, for a mere individual is but an 
 abstraction, a figment of human thought. But the 
 lives being individual are also, to their core, social; 
 they are cells in an organism, elements in a fellow¬ 
 ship, members of a family, limbs of a body. For 
 the Church is the leaven, howsoever its record may 
 belie the fact. The Church is the organ of the 
 Kingdom. It is, in the divine intention, the Body 
 of which the creative and directing Head is Christ. 
 Through it He completes the work already victori¬ 
 ously begun. Alive in the lives of its members He 
 goes out to subdue the whole world to the rule of 
 the Father’s love. He works until the “ whole is 
 leavened,” until the kingdoms of this world are 
 His Kingdom. 
 
 The process is radical, for it goes to the root of 
 all human maladies, namely, of the human heart. 
 It changes the heart, let all the cynics in smoking- 
 rooms say what they may. If Christ cannot change 
 human nature from the heart outwards, He is in¬ 
 deed a pretender to the Kingdom, of God. If He 
 cannot make character, He can make nothing. If 
 He cannot pierce “ even to the dividing of soul and 
 spirit, of both joints and marrow,” and is not 
 
THE GOSPEL AND LIFE 
 
 217 
 
 “ quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart/' He is not the Word of God. 
 
 But He can and does, and it is for that final 
 reason that He is the Saviour of the world. For 
 nothing external to the hearts of men—those in¬ 
 most factories and laboratories of good and evil— 
 can save the world. There is light comedy and 
 grim tragedy in the external remedies—policies, 
 legislations, nostrums—with which men would 
 plaster over the wounds of a world sick to its core, 
 that is sick at heart. There is a flood of shallow 
 talk, slopping through contemporary literature, 
 which tells of some simple salvation to be found in 
 Jesus as a mere ethical teacher, shorn of all redeem¬ 
 ing power, abstracted from all affirmation about 
 the nature of reality. There is—so the talk goes— 
 an undogmatic essence, compounded of ideals and 
 good intentions, which is to save the world. And 
 all the while the world, individually and socially, is 
 in slavery—to self. Men in their multitudes are 
 bound in bondage to their appetites. Within them, 
 as in an inner shrine, an idol is enthroned. It is 
 the idol of self. And the outcome is a world rav¬ 
 aged and threatened by ruin. A war, which struck 
 at the vitals of human society, sprang out of the 
 lusts and avarice which reign within the hearts of 
 men. Other worse wars will spring likewise unless 
 that idol be struck down and society be turned to 
 God; unless He is in the heart and men be changed 
 in heart because changed in motive; unless He 
 saves them who cannot save themselves. 
 
 For the virtue which has gone out of the world 
 
218 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 is theological virtue, pace all the modern aversion 
 to theology and dogma. The saving contribution 
 of Christianity to life—the leaven required—is 
 theological virtue. Character, that is, moulded to 
 the core by Godwardness. The character of men 
 who, with a saving unconsciousness, bring God 
 with them because their hearts are wide open to the 
 light of what He is; who by an inmost obedience, 
 are internally free; who are conduits of the loving- 
 kindness which is at the heart of things. Their 
 lives are the leaven, the salt and the light of the 
 world. They embody and spread the virtue of the 
 Beatitudes, which is, in all its elements, theological 
 —rootless unless rooted in God. They are detached 
 from the greedy clutches of the world, for they 
 are lifted above its fever in the detachment of lives 
 hidden with God. Yet they are in passionate sym¬ 
 pathy with others, for they see them in the light of 
 what they are to God. They are disinterested and 
 self-effacing, for they are turned from self to God. 
 Yet they are ardent and irrepressible in the battle 
 for reform, for the fire of the intolerance of God 
 over evil is burning in their hearts. They are kind, 
 because He is love. They are pure, because He 
 draws their warring impulses into the harmony of 
 single-heartedness. They make peace, because they 
 are at peace with God. They are at war in the 
 world, because it is at variance with God. 
 
 “ Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they 
 that mourn, that are meek, that hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness, that are merciful, that are pure 
 in heart, that are peacemakers, that are persecuted 
 
THE GOSPEL AND LIFE 
 
 219 
 
 for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the Kingdom 
 of God.” 
 
 This is the leaven of the Kingdom. This is 
 God’s remedy for the world’s heart-disease. 
 
 But the leavening process leaves—it must leave 1 — 
 the secular world free. That is a vital point. The 
 arena of the Church’s warfare for the Kingdom is 
 the whole wide world. But the Church must re¬ 
 frain from encroaching on the rightful autonomy 
 of the world, in all its departments, to work out its 
 own salvation. Theocracy, that is the domination 
 of life by the ecclesiastical, is over for ever. That 
 self-appointed critic of men and things—the self- 
 styled Gentleman with the Duster—complained that 
 the leaders of the Church did not dictate world- 
 policy at Washington. It would have been utterly 
 impertinent of them to try to do so. It would have 
 been a theocratic invasion of the rightful autonomy 
 of politics. It would have been the fatal assump¬ 
 tion by ecclesiastical powers of the right to carry 
 two swords, the temporal as well as the spiritual. 
 That Middle-Aged assumption has gone for ever. 
 The whole body of secular life—its thoughts, its 
 science, its economics, its art, its politics—has 
 (since the Renaissance) painfully rewon its free¬ 
 dom from ecclesiastical dictation and control. It 
 will never surrender it again. Nor can the Church, 
 no matter what the spiritual need of the secular 
 world, ever rightly ask the world to do so. For 
 secular life has its own rights and sanctions. Its 
 “ powers are ordained of God,” and “ there is no 
 power but of God.” 
 
220 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 Yet the Church as the organ of the Kingdom is 
 within the body of secular life. True, it has no 
 pattern to impose on the secular arts and sciences; 
 no patent remedy for statesmen or business men to 
 swallow; no short cut to Utopia for proffer. Yet 
 it is within the secular process, leavening the whole 
 dough, transfusing new,’ life in;to the cells and 
 arteries of the body politic, penetrating and trans¬ 
 forming everything. This it does by the characters 
 of individuals who, as members, are (the unoffi¬ 
 cial) representatives of itself. They find them¬ 
 selves relieved of no fraction of the normal task 
 of mastering the secular arts of life. To be a 
 Christian is no qualification as such for any pro¬ 
 fession, still less for laying down the law to other 
 professionals, any more than prayer is a means by 
 itself of passing an examination. But Christians 
 who are brought, by due qualification, right inside 
 the secular sphere, transform it from within by the 
 vehement virus of lives dominated by a motive 
 other than self. They themselves make all the 
 difference by the judgment that they bring to bear 
 on every question. They re-direct life’s energies; 
 alter its values; consolidate it by honour and trust¬ 
 worthiness; sweeten it by comradeship and kind-^ 
 ness; enhearten it by faith and hopefulness; cleanse 
 it by humour ; glorify it by sacrificial public-spirit, 
 Thus they apply Christianity to life. Thus the 
 Kingdom of God is extended. Thus heaven in¬ 
 vades earth. 
 
 Much of this whole process is (and I think is 
 meant to be) unconscious. It is more than argu- 
 
THE GOSPEL AND LIFE 
 
 221 
 
 able that the most potent instruments for social 
 amelioration in history have not been those who 
 have consciously and solemnly bustled about to set 
 everything and everyone right. Rather it has been 
 those who have brought to bear on the world 
 around them the irresistible infection of a human¬ 
 ity singly and entirely given to God. And it is 
 probable that the Kingdom of God is not so effec¬ 
 tively spread by the members of tired and tiring 
 social reformers and committee-mongers—with 
 their Lo, here! and their Lo, there!—as by those 
 who, more deeply and humbly immersed in life, in¬ 
 fluence it by what they are. In other words, the 
 world is most deeply affected by the God-possessed. 
 
 Yet the process cannot be altogether unconscious. 
 For everyone in lesser or greater degree has to 
 share in the task of consciously building society on 
 some foundation, of consciously directing its re¬ 
 sources towards an end. Build man must willy- 
 nilly. On what shall he build? Voyage he must, 
 by what star shall he sail? Move he must, but in 
 what direction? Faced, as all are, by this unescap- 
 able necessity, the Christian in the world con¬ 
 tributes to the mass of public opinion, the guidance 
 of certain main principles, the dynamic of certain 
 cardinal motives. For he is entrusted with a cer¬ 
 tain whole philosophy of life, certain radical 
 affirmations about the reality of things. Follow¬ 
 ing His Lord he says: “ Build on hate, on revenge, 
 on greed, on fear, on selfishness, on ignorance, and 
 you will build on sand, and down your building 
 will come. For you build on that which is at dis- 
 
222 THE RETURNING TIDE OF FAITH 
 
 cord with ultimate reality. But build on love, on 
 forgiveness, on trustfulness, on humaneness, on 
 public-spirit, on truthfulness, and you build on the 
 rock: for you build on the reality of God and His 
 moral ordering of His world.” And he says more. 
 For he counters all the cynical weariness and half¬ 
 heartedness of the world, dismayed as it is by the 
 incompleteness and complexity of its labours, by 
 bidding it lift its eyes to the end beyond the tran¬ 
 sient present. He contributes that which is, as we 
 saw at the outset, the supreme need of men and 
 nations, namely, an end beyond their own interests. 
 For he brings into the nearly futile details of 
 human affairs the vision of their fruition in the 
 whole purpose of God, which works to an end. He 
 enheartens others, as they build and can never 
 finish, with the faith that their unfinished build¬ 
 ings shall nevertheless be built into the Eternal 
 City, “ whose Builder and Maker is God.” 
 
 Printed in United States of America. 
 


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