WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 ."i.V'j-i.-i.'ja.-j:- 
 
DE 
 
 BR 121 .H84 1919 
 
 Hughes, Frederick Stephen 
 
 Where is Christ? 
 
WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
VhERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 A Question for Christians 
 
 BY 
 
 AN ANGLICAN PRIEST 
 IN CHINA 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD 
 
 BY THE 
 
 BISHOP OF EDINBURGH 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 1919 
 
To HIM AND IN HIM 
 
 To Parents who brought us up 
 
 To Liberty and Unity 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 SOME of the best contributions to Christian thought 
 have lately come to us from the Mission Field. 
 Such books as Adventure jor God and Presence ^ by the 
 Bishop of Phihppine Islands, and The One Christ, by 
 the Bishop of Zanzibar, are examples of the depth and 
 width of thought which are gained in new lands un- 
 fettered by tradition or conventionalism. And in this 
 book for which I have been asked to write a short 
 foreword we have another help to our thinking in the 
 great question put to us by an Anglican priest in China. 
 After he had won high honours at Oxford and practical 
 experience in Oxford House, the author obeyed the 
 call that was sounded during the Pan-Anglican year 
 and made the great adventure for God in North China. 
 He reached the land of his adoption to find his life 
 endangered by the Revolution in 191 1, when his friend 
 and coadjutor was killed by his side. Some years' work 
 in the country villages, south of Peking, have led him to 
 feel the great dangers we are in through our unhappy 
 divisions, and in this book he throws out the arresting 
 question, " Where is Christ ? " That question he 
 feels quite rightly cannot be fully met by saying He is 
 in Christians, because Christ must have corporate as 
 well as individual expression. It is just this wliich is 
 
 5 
 
6 FOREWORD 
 
 la'cking. We want to know where He is " in relation 
 to the Church and to the modern world." To the 
 bigoted Roman Catholic such a question would argue 
 the failure of schism. "We know well where Christ is," 
 he would say, " in His Holy Church, and only there will 
 we find Him." But this arrogant assumption has in 
 these years of war received a rude shock. Never has 
 the Church of Rome seemed weaker in the eyes of 
 the world. 
 
 The author, in presenting material which he hopes 
 may help towards an answer, feels clearly that Christ's 
 Presence cannot involve any limitations of time and 
 space, and that it must correspond to the widest con- 
 sciousness of Christian experience. He thinks that 
 the Church's failure, manifested by its divisions and 
 lack of influence, is " a failure to grow up, a failure to 
 keep up with the facts of life. The past has eclipsed 
 the present. Forms and institutions, though neces- 
 sary, have exercised an altogether disproportionate 
 influence, and Christ present in the Body has not 
 been able to express Himself." The question is 
 pursued with eager interest and force from chapter 
 to chapter, and is set forth with much ability and 
 abundance of quotation, with strong reasons not 
 only why we should think it out but along what 
 lines the answer may be found. Not every one 
 will find himself in agreement with all the thoughts 
 that are expressed. That is neither possible nor to be 
 desired in a question so large and difiicult, but our 
 gratitude is earned by one who with originality and 
 insight attacks the main issues and rightly demands 
 that all those in positions of authority and leadership 
 should fearlessly face the consequences to which the 
 Spirit of Christ may lead them. I heartily commend 
 
FOREWORD 7 
 
 this courageous study of the question to the con- 
 sideration of my fellow Churchmen throughout the 
 AngHcan Communion— a subject which is of para- 
 mount importance to all who feel that things that 
 are shaken are being removed in order that those 
 things which cannot be shaken may remain. 
 
 GEORGE, BISHOP OF EDINBURC^H. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE New Testament quotations in the following 
 chapters are taken sometimes from the Revised 
 Version, but more often from The New Testament, a 
 New Translation, by Dr. James Moffatt. What we 
 all want is not the letter but the spirit. A new trans- 
 lation such as that just named seems to make the New 
 Testament a new book : at the cost of the familiar 
 sounds we gain new access to the original spirit. Now 
 this is a notable experience of missionaries in foreign 
 lands, especially in such countries as China and Japan 
 where the genius of the language is utterly different 
 from that of the whole European family. The neces- 
 sity of turning your sentences and paragraphs inside 
 out in order to present them in Chinese form involves 
 the necessity of turning your thoughts inside out in 
 order to find the right presentment to Chinese minds. 
 In giving lessons on the Gospels to keen schoolboys 
 who have grown up to fourteen or fifteen with no 
 knowledge of Christianity, the standpoint and assump- 
 tions of ordinary English lesson-books seem provincial, 
 conventional. 
 
 The question presented in this book seemed to arise 
 out of a class of Chinese schoolmasters studying the 
 New Testament for the first time. On furlough in 
 England I put it to several friends, and found, for the 
 most part, that they, like myself, were not ready with 
 an answer. 
 
 9 
 
10 PREFACE 
 
 We have all been preoccupied. To one viewing 
 with eyes fresh from China English hfe in home and 
 Church in the months just before the war, preoccupa- 
 tion seemed a deepening feature. Out of that pre- 
 occupation has grown this greater : two years of war, 
 and no end in sight — no end of international hatred. 
 What have English missionaries now to offer to sucli 
 a great people as the Chinese ? Surely we are not to 
 win them over just to our ideas of Christianity. That 
 would be an example of the essential devilry of pro- 
 selytism. No : the question for them and for us is, 
 Where is Christ, in relation to us all ? Where are we, 
 in relation to Him ? 
 
 Begun in England in the first few months of the war, 
 and continued by degrees in the interior of China, far 
 from European conditions and facilities, these few 
 chapters are rough and incomplete. There is far more 
 to be said, which can be better said by others : and 
 perhaps before we say much more we may get at the 
 answer to this Question : for on it depends all the 
 sequel. 
 
 The writer professes nothing original, nothing 
 unique in these pages. It is a sifting of old materials 
 rather than a discovery of new that is the urgent need. 
 Two writers among many who have lately sifted out 
 the same pearl of great price are Bishop Brent in 
 Presence, and Dr. A. W. Robinson in Christ and the 
 Church : a Re-statement oj Belief. 
 
 " A man's religion," said Carlyle, " consists not of 
 the many things he is in doubt of, and tries to believe, 
 but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of 
 effort for believing. His religion, whatever it may be, 
 is a discerned fact." 
 
 This book is addressed to fellow-believers ; there- 
 
PREFACE II 
 
 fore what in it may seem egoistic is but an expression 
 of one among many, who all draw life from the same 
 Source, and live it each for himself in individual reality. 
 It is for' the sake of reality that mention is made of 
 personal experiences. 
 
 It is addressed to fellow-believers in the living 
 Christ, who all know Him as their Lord and their 
 God, but see not yet all things subject to Him, even 
 within His Church. That there at least He may be 
 supreme is the hope in which these pages have been 
 written : supreme in His Church first, that thereafter 
 the kingdoms of the world may give Him their alle- 
 giance. 
 
 Somewhere in China. 
 Christmas, 1916. 
 
 War conditions have delayed publication of this 
 book, and thus put some of its time references out 
 of date. But the position is essentially unchanged ; 
 the Church's lack of vision still seems to require 
 prescription of the original "eye-salve." 
 
 May, 19 19. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I The Need of Answer 
 
 In view of His apparent failure . . .19 
 
 He has not failed us individually . . .19 
 
 Just on that account we want to know where He 
 is in relation to the Church and to the modern 
 world ....... 20 
 
 The importance of concentrating attention on 
 this question . ..... 20 
 
 II The Gospel Answer 
 
 The answer cannot involve any limitation of 
 
 time or space ...... 24 
 
 Observe the importance which He gave to this 
 
 point in His final teaching, preparing the 
 
 disciples for His death and its sequel . . 24 
 
 Such is the bearing of the so-called " eschato- 
 
 logical discourses " . . . . •25 
 
 Recent eschatological controversy is due to 
 
 viewing things spiritual out of focus . . 26 
 
 The key to their meaning lies in the nature of 
 
 Love, operative both in old and new, both 
 
 immanent and transcendent ... 26 
 
 The perpetual and unfailing Presence of Christ 
 
 is the culmination of the Gospel story and the 
 
 Gospel teaching . . . . . .29 
 
 Note on our Lord's Eschatology (St. Matt. xxiv. 
 
 and XXV. > ....... 3° 
 
 III The New Testament Experience 
 
 New experience of Christ reunited the disciples 
 after His death ...,,. 32 
 
 13 
 
14 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 III On this experience the Church was founded, and 
 
 into this experience converts were brought . 32 
 
 The goal of human hopes had been reached . 33 
 
 Tradition and the existing order worked against 
 the new Life 33 
 
 The first Church controversies turned on ques- 
 tions of the limits of the fellowship of Life, 
 and were ended by frank recognition of God's 
 present working . . . . -34 
 
 New Testament theology reflects the New Testa- 
 ment facts of experience • "in Christ " ; " the 
 Body of Christ" 35 
 
 Christ is the new Creator of each man, and is 
 therefore God ...... 36 
 
 The religion of loyalty. Professor Royce de- 
 scribes the fact, but professes ignorance of its 
 cause. Harnack on "the Third Race" . 37 
 
 The New Testament experience of Christ as not 
 only sanctifying individuals but as making 
 them a new community was prolonged into 
 subsequent generations of the Church . 40 
 
 Why is it now regarded as a phenomenon of the 
 the past ? 40 
 
 Notes to Chapter III : 
 
 (i) The story of Acts iii. . . . .41 
 
 (2) I and 2 Thessalonians . . . '41 
 
 (3) Eschatological language. ... 42 
 
 IV Absentee Christology 
 
 Lapse of faith in Christ has led to the formulation 
 of schemes of theology which treat Him as an 
 Absentee .....•• 43 
 
 A . Within the Church : 
 
 The Ascension, as implying Christ's de- 
 parture ....•• 44 
 
 Pentecost, as implying a Substitute for 
 Christ 46 
 
 Advent, as implying that the Church 
 must wait for Christ ... 46 
 
 B. Outside the Church : 
 
 Christ viewed as only a man . . 48 
 
 This idea refuted by the progress of 
 criticism, , .... 49 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 15 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 IV Loofs' summary of results of criticism : 
 
 two views discredited — {a) that Christ 
 was not a man, but an imaginary 
 deity ; (6) that Christ was only a man 50 
 Loofs seeks refuge in semi-divinity . 5 1 
 
 Two reasons for flight from the truth : 
 
 (a) The Church's failure to reveal 
 Christ ..... 52 
 
 (b) The moral challenge of the Cross . 52 
 The Mischief worked by Absentee Theology : 
 
 (a) In the Church — disunion . . .53 
 
 (b) In society — competition and war . . 53 
 
 (c) In personal life — helplessness . . 54 
 This mental habit of putting Christ away from 
 
 us is contrary to the vital religion of all true 
 Christians ....... 54 
 
 V Christ in God 
 
 We believe in Christ as the divine ideal both for 
 the individual and for society. Christ is the 
 personal meaning of the individual and of 
 society ....... 56 
 
 Violence, ignoring and violating personal mean- 
 ings, is anti-Christ . . . . -56 
 
 Yet we habitually attribute such violence to God 56 
 
 The idea that things are thus meaningless betrays 
 a loss of monotheistic faith : despite the teach- 
 ing of modem science, and of poets, and of 
 Christ Himself, and of individual experience 57 
 
 Christian faith is a knowledge of what facts mean. 
 The meaning of the universe is Christ : Christ 
 is the meaning of life, of me, of society : He 
 is what we all are for . . . .62 
 
 Belief in Christ involves acceptance of this 
 meaning of things, in heart and will . . 62 
 
 Is Christ in fact thus central in all our thought ? 63 
 
 A Christian is at one with God, and finds fulness 
 of life in the Divine Society ... 64 
 
 Where then is Christ ? Christ is in God, and we 
 find Him by giving ourselves up to love . 65 
 
 But misunderstanding God we misunderstand 
 man : hence divided Christendom : our double 
 failure of love ,.,,,. 66 
 
i6 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 VI Validity of Sectional Experience 
 
 We acknowledge the duty of mutual love, but in 
 fact are ranged against one another . . 67 
 
 For all real Christians are sure of the truth of 
 their doctrines and the efficacy of their means 
 of grace, and conclude that other ways must 
 be wrong ....... 67 
 
 The Mission field brings many into new appre- 
 ciation of their fellow-Christians : as does the 
 war ........ 68 
 
 We learn that God is not tied to our conceptions 
 of His truth and grace . . . .68 
 
 This, however, does not justify disloyalty to our 
 own communion ..... 69 
 
 Many hope that foreign missions will lead the 
 way to reunion ; but the hope is not backed 
 by policy ....... 70 
 
 Acknowledgment of the facts of human life as 
 being the acts of God is the only way out of 
 our trouble ...... 70 
 
 The need of a theology based on psychology : a 
 study of the actual operations of Love : such 
 was the earliest Christian theology . . 71 
 
 Von Hiigel's psychological analysis of religion 
 into three elements, the institutional, the 
 rational and the mystical .... 74 
 
 He shows that every man's denominational in- 
 heritance is inalienable . . . .76 
 
 Mutual recognition of all denominations is there- 
 fore a necessary acknowledgment of God . 77 
 
 Growing evidence of this acknowledgment. 
 The World Conference on Faith and Order. 78 
 The Constructive Quarterly ... 78 
 
 A Roman Catholic acknowledgment . . 79 
 
 A Congregationalist acknowledgment . . 80 
 
 The Student Christian Movement . . . 81 
 
 But the Church remains powerless to move into 
 
 this larger faith in Christ present with us all 81 
 
 VII The Way 
 
 We have found the Way for ourselves, but not 
 for Society ...... 82 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 17 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 VII Human Society has lost its way because the 
 Church has lost the way and therefore cannot 
 lead ........ 82 
 
 The Church's failure is a failure to grow up ; an 
 arrest of growth ; a failure to keep up with 
 the facts of life. The Past has eclipsed the 
 Present ....... 83 
 
 Corporate religion, like individual religion, may 
 be analysed into three essential elements : 
 institutional, rational, mystical. Christendom 
 at present is held up at the first two stages, 
 over-emphasizing either the institutional or 
 the rational element of religion ... 84 
 The result is adult Christians in a stunted 
 Christendom — the deepest tragedy of the pre- 
 sent war. The religion of loyalty has produced 
 loyal men ; but the ultimate meaning of 
 loyalty has not been manifested by the Church, 
 because she has not made the presence of 
 Christ the dominant factor of religion : the 
 institutional has been severed from the mys- 
 tical 87 
 
 This failure of Cluristendom is a failure of faith 
 in Christ as God, a failure to see that He is Love 
 and Love is He. ..... 90 
 
 The Anglican Communion seems to a peculiar 
 
 degree dominated by institutional ideas . 91 
 Responsibility for the failure of Christendom 
 lies with all who hold authority in the Church. 
 The unfairness of our ministry. We too are 
 called to self-surrender to the living Christ. 
 We must surrender our self-important notions 
 of responsibility. The root facts of human 
 life are in Christ's hands, not in ours . . 91 
 
 Not that forms and institutions are to be dis- 
 carded, but they are to be held in entire sub- 
 ordination to the present Christ. Compare 
 the Encyclical Letter of the Lambeth Con- 
 ference of 1908. We have the vision, but not 
 yet the practice. ..... 95 
 
 The great usurpation of Christ's sovereignty con- 
 tinues until we give ourselves up to Love, by 
 personal repentance ..... 98 
 
 Then Christ can work, i.e. work through us, for 
 
 B 
 
i8 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 VII He is working already, (a) Call to witness all 
 
 who have taken part in the Pan-Anglican, 
 Edinburgh, Swanwick, or other such Con- 
 ferences ; and especially the Fellowships of 
 Silence, {b) Call to witness also recent ten- 
 dencies in the political field, and in the British 
 Empire. I.e. Christ is at work, and not only 
 " here " or " there " . . . . .98 
 
 We have to bring the Church into line with the 
 great world forces which are the mighty work- 
 ing of God ; and to bring these forces into the 
 Church 102 
 
 The Church will then be alive as the Body of 
 Christ ; catholic because local ; manifesting 
 infinite variety within its unity ; sensitive to 
 all claims of personality ; in union with the 
 departed ....... 103 
 
 The voices of the prophets call to us priests. It 
 is the Way of obedience here and now for each 
 of us. It is the Call to the Marriage Supper 
 of the Lamb ...... 108 
 
 Postscript — "What shall I do. Lord ? " . . . 112 
 
Where is Christ ? 
 
 A QUESTION FOR CHRISTIANS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE NEED OF ANSWER 
 
 THE apparent failure of Christ hardly needs 
 dwelling on. Christian Europe is at war, and 
 everything that Christ came to save us from is going on 
 before our eyes. The tragedy of Christian disappoint- 
 ment hes on all our hearts. And the failure of Chris- 
 tianity has been spelt, not only by this present war, 
 but by all the social and industrial problems growing 
 in complexity and virulence from year to year and 
 from generation to generation. Moreover, the child 
 of the Church brought up in happy faith in Jesus 
 finds in adult years that the Church of his baptism 
 has no clear voice to utter in face of modern per- 
 plexities, presents no united front to modern evils. 
 It is probably true to say of most members of the 
 Church to-day that the present position of the Church 
 in no sense answers to their convictions. 
 
 Yet there is no waning of our faith in Christ. To 
 us as individuals He is no less the real Saviour than He 
 was to men of old. Every missionary, every mis- 
 
 19 
 
20 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 sioner, knows that His power fails not. To soldiers 
 on the field of battle He is what He has ever been to 
 those who lay down their lives for the brethren. 
 
 Thus the apparent failure of Christianity is not 
 in individual hves, but rather in the world at large 
 and in the Church as a whole. It is the believing 
 Christian that is in trouble about Christ ; the man who 
 has found Christ now yearns to find Him in the new 
 conditions of society. The question, " Where is 
 Christ ? " is asked by us who know Him. 
 
 At least it surely must be asked if we are to keep 
 things in proportion. For if we are assured of the 
 presence of Christ we need not be much troubled 
 about any other question in religion. And yet re- 
 ligious controversy and theological discussion seem to 
 revolve around a multipHcity of topics other than 
 this, so that the minds of Christians are apt to be 
 diverted from this central point. The Kikuyu con- 
 troversy affords a striking illustration of this. One 
 of the Bishops who took part in the united Communion 
 Service, in the subsequent account of the proceedings 
 concluded with the statement that one thing at least 
 was certain, that the Master Himself blessed the 
 occasion with His Presence. Now surely it is note- 
 worthy that in all the controversy that has taken place 
 about what was then done, while many points of doc- 
 trine and Church order have been debated, no atten- 
 tion whatever seems to have been directed to the ques- 
 tion whether this statement that Christ Himself was 
 present was true to fact or not. It might seem that 
 if it be true, then there can be no further question or 
 disputp as to the rightness of what took place ; and 
 on the other hand if it be untrue, such a glaring mis- 
 statement on the only question that mattered ought 
 
THE NEED OF ANSWER 21 
 
 to be capable of some kind of refutation. We surely 
 have not got to the point that everything matters 
 except whether Christ is with us or not. To every 
 one of us Christians it is the one thing that does matter, 
 and it is the one thing that matters to the Church. 
 So Father Kelly in The Church and Religious Unity, 
 explaining why Cathohcs prize the Sacraments, says : 
 *' The position which I am trying to explain can all be 
 expressed in the words ' I want Christ,' and I mean 
 that in just the sense of the child crying in the night 
 ' I want mother.' " No substitute will do. " Lord, 
 to whom shall we go ? " "In Thy presence is the 
 fulness of joy." 
 
 We all " want Christ." We want to know where 
 He is in this modern world of ours. For in our hearts 
 we are sure that if we knew the answer to that ques- 
 tion we could all go forward as one body to claim the 
 world for Him with no less confident enthusiasm, but 
 with far greater resources at our disposal, than were 
 possessed by those first Christians, to whom the answer 
 to the question was not in doubt. Are there not 
 enough Christians in almost any town in Europe to 
 sweep it clean of organized iniquity, if only they were 
 united in Christ's service ? Even in this vast heathen 
 land of China the number of Chinese communicants 
 outside the Roman and Greek Missions has grown 
 from 177,000 in 1907 to 270,000 in 1916. What 
 might we not do if we were wholly united ? What 
 might not He do through us ? 
 
 The Bampton Lectures by Peile on The Reproach 
 of the Gospel, and by Hobhouse on The Church and the 
 World in Idea and in History, voiced our Christian 
 dissatisfaction with both Church and World as they 
 are to-da}^ But do wc not now want less pathos 
 
22 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 and more confidence in our tone ? That our Lord 
 bravely facing the initial facts of His tremendous 
 enterprise frankly acknowledged that the way was 
 narrow and very few were finding it, is no ground now 
 that after His tremendous victories in every land we 
 should harbour any doubt of His ultimate victory 
 over all His enemies, or of His power to accomplish 
 His purpose of saving the whole world. 
 
 But to that end we want. He wants, a different 
 Church from that which is now in evidence. We need 
 to get rid of this outrageous contrast between indivi- 
 dual faith and the corporate expression of it. If He 
 is my God, He must be the world's God ; if He is my 
 Lord in personal communion, He must be the Church's 
 Lord in immediate personal control. If I know where 
 He is for me, I must know where He is for society. 
 
 Hence, the question of this book. This contrast 
 between personal faith and social expression of it 
 will pursue us from chapter to chapter. We shall see 
 (chap. II) that the purpose of Christ was to abolish 
 the contrast between religious authority and individual 
 religion by the fact of His Presence ; and that the 
 early Church (chap. Ill) by faith in this Presence 
 resisted the tendency to this contrast, enlarging its 
 formularies and its boundaries to correspond with 
 the ascertained facts of personal experience ; for, 
 being " alive imto God," it was alive to facts. But we 
 have to acknowledge (chap. IV) that theology has 
 since obscured this fundamental characteristic of 
 Christianity by losing touch with the present Christ. 
 And therefore we still too often fail to understand 
 God (chap. V) or man (chap. VI). But, thank God, 
 the way in which the first Christains walked is still 
 open to us (chap. VII). Heaven lies about us, not 
 
THE NEED OF ANSWER 23 
 
 only ill our infancy. That each of us who have any 
 part or lot in Church Government may realize our 
 responsibility for the hell on earth that might be 
 heaven is the repentant hope of the writer of these 
 pages. Is it not for this that the National Mission 
 has come upon us ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE GOSPEL ANSWER 
 
 " "^T THERE is Christ ? " It is immediately 
 VV obvious that we cannot deal with this 
 question literally as implying spatial limitation. *' If 
 any man shall say unto you, ' Lo, here is Christ,' or 
 ' there/ believe it not." As Christians we all realize 
 that the presence and working of Christ is not limited 
 by any material obstacle. When we speak of the 
 presence or absence of Christ, therefore, we are thinking 
 not of material but of spiritual conditions, conditions 
 which transcend time and space. 
 
 Obvious as this point is, however, it seems well to 
 study afresh the attention which our Lord directed 
 to it during the closing hours of His earthly hfe. 
 
 What was needed during those few days which take 
 such a large place in the Gospel narratives ? The 
 need He saw was to prepare His disciples for His 
 death. That death was to be no dramatic perform- 
 ance ; it was to be the grim reality of the real death 
 that ends the familiar modes of intercourse and makes 
 the great change in the personal relationship of those 
 who love. More particularly for Him and for them it 
 meant the change in the meaning of His Lordship. 
 No longer would He be among them in the guise of 
 the local and temporal Messiah of the Jews : He was 
 to be the universal and eternal Saviour. 
 
 24 
 
THE GOSPEL ANSWER 25 
 
 This new faith was taught mainly by the act — by 
 the death He died. But since the lesson of death is 
 more often misread by us men than any other lesson 
 we have to learn, our Lord set Himself to help the dis- 
 ciples by interpreting beforehand the meaning of the 
 coming change, " that their hearts might not be 
 troubled," " that His J03/ might be within them and 
 their joy complete.'" " He had loved His own in this 
 world, and He loved them to the end." This teaching, 
 of such primary importance to all the first Christians 
 who experienced the transition from the local national 
 faith to the catholic faith, naturally takes a prominent 
 place in each of the Gospels, in the first three no less 
 than in the fourth Gospel. For this surely is the 
 purpose of the so-called eschatological discourses in 
 St. Mark xiii. and the parallel passages. These eschato- 
 logical passages have in recent years been largely 
 ignored or discounted by " Hberal " theologians. 
 Their attention has been focussed on the ethical and 
 social teachings of Jesus, which enable them to repre- 
 sent Him as the initiator of those ideals of social 
 reform on which their hearts are set. Believing in 
 the steady progress of the race by means of social 
 amelioration and reform, towards the removal of all 
 human ills, they like to see in Jesus the exponent of 
 such sane principles ; and they have therefore tended 
 to slur over those parts of the Gospels which seem 
 to repesenc Him as foretelling cataclysmal changes 
 independent of human effort. Such writers are apt 
 to be uncertain or even negative on the subject of 
 Christ's Divinity.^ But the tendency to minimize 
 one part of the evidence has now brought its natural 
 reaction, and we have writers who repudiate the picture 
 1 See below, chap. IV. 
 
26 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 of Jesus as a liberal reformer of the modern type, 
 and insist that He carried on the Jewish hne of belief 
 in a coming Day of the Lord when the Kingdom of 
 God should be established by a catastrophic inter- 
 vention from Heaven. 
 
 Does not this controversy, like others in the history 
 of theological thought, afford evidence that we are 
 viewing the things of the spiritual order out of focus ? 
 What is the discussion ? Is salvation by evolution 
 or by catastrophe ? By human growth or by Divine 
 intervention ? How did our Lord view it ? What 
 did He look forw^ard to ? Note that this question 
 concerns not merely a few selected passages in the 
 Gospels, but the meaning of all Christ came to do 
 and did. It concerns His revelation of God. If 
 then we are to understand His point of view in the 
 matter, the first essential is to recover and hold to 
 more of His thought of God — the simple but all- 
 embracing thought that God is Love. How does 
 Love order the world ? How does Love order His- 
 tory ? How does Love order life for each of us ? 
 Love holds on, lets nothing go, makes the best of 
 everything, is true to all the past. Yet Love is always 
 new, new in devices, new in surprises, new in each new 
 experience through which the loved ones are brought. 
 
 The experience of all lovers is a revelation of God ; 
 and few words are as good as many in the endeavour 
 to express it. The fact of that Love as the ground of 
 the Universe is the basis of all philosophical specula- 
 tions about the One and the Many, time and eternit3^ 
 unity in diversity ; and is evidenced by modern dis- 
 coveries of evolutionary law, showing how present 
 life is built up out of the past. We might take as 
 illustrations the facts of recapitulation in embrj^ology, 
 
THE GOSPEL ANSWER 27 
 
 or the modern science of heredity, based on the fact 
 that *' hke tends to produce hke," and that yet " no 
 two creatures are ever exactly ahke." ^ Other and 
 higher illustrations are suggested by the Historical 
 Method as apphed to all departments of human life 
 and thought. " No age can hope to understand its 
 own mind and temper, its purpose and ideals, except 
 through a study of the past from which it has sprung." - 
 The basal facts of life are the operations of Love, 
 which always uses the old, yet is always bringing to 
 light new possibilities of growth and progress. 
 
 How then does Love work in human history ? By 
 evolution or by catastrophe ? by human growth or 
 by Divine intervention ? From this modern view- 
 point, which takes in all times and all peoples, we can 
 see that God is operative in and through both — the 
 growth and the catastrophe. Men living on the 
 level stretches of history when all seems man-made 
 tend to lose thought of God : and again, in the terror 
 and the darkness, when the old land-marks are blotted 
 from sight, and homes and kingdoms are broken up, 
 men tend to despair of God. But we, from the modern 
 point of view, can trace the Hand of God through all, 
 in the changeless principles and laws of His working ; 
 we know both His immanence in the world, and His 
 transcendence of its circumstances. The modern 
 scientific view, just as far as it is lo3^ally accepted, 
 frees us from the prejudice of local relationships, and 
 the narrow-mindedness of temporary conditions, and 
 brings us out into the broad spaces of the peace and 
 wisdom of God. 
 
 1 See, e.g., Heredity, by J. A. S. Watson ("The People's 
 Books," Jack, 6d.). 
 
 ~ Storr, Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth 
 Century. 
 
28 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Now we Christians are aware that this free outlook 
 on life is our insight into God, as Jesus revealed Him. 
 We come back then to the point that this view of God 
 is what our Lord sought to give to His disciples and 
 to the world. 
 
 How then did He behave to the local and temporary 
 thoughts and feelings of His day and nation ? First, 
 He was conspicuously loyal to them ; loyal to the 
 traditional hope, passionate in His devotion to Jeru- 
 salem. But also, and still more conspicuously. He 
 taught the new fulfilment of that old hope, the new 
 way of self-oblation to that old ideal. For His life 
 was the life of God, and His teaching the truth of God. 
 " My Father worketh hitherto and I work." Life 
 and teaching made known the living God, the Father, 
 with Whom the very hairs on your head are all num- 
 bered. 
 
 So in His last hours we see Him concerned to secure 
 this belief to His followers, through all that might 
 obscure it : through His own death ; through the 
 fall of Jerusalem ; through all future persecutions, 
 wars or troubles of any kind. And belief in that 
 love of God means belief in Him present with them 
 still, despite the impending change of relationship 
 brought about by His Death. The old fellowship is 
 to be continued and deepened under the new con- 
 ditions. 
 
 It is then disastrous to proper understanding of the 
 Gospel to regard our Lord at St. Mark xiii. as abruptly 
 forsaking His habitual attention to present spiritual 
 needs and taking up the role of Lecturer on Apocalyptic. 
 The concentration of attention on external circum- 
 stances is precisely the common human error from 
 which He is seeking to dehver them ; the error of 
 
THE GOSPEL ANSWER 29 
 
 splitting experience up into sections, and making 
 bogies of these lumps of misunderstood facts. His. 
 thought is not so much of distant events, of time and 
 space, as of the spiritual experience of His loved ones 
 in the trials and persecutions that He knew must lie 
 before them, in the near future. And so by famihar 
 parable of the clouds He tells them of that Presence 
 which eye cannot penetrate and which is not limited 
 by material hindrances of earthly distance. To the 
 lonely martyr on distant lands no earthly friend can 
 journey to the rescue, but Christ will come to him in 
 ways beyond his knowing. Yea, from the four winds, 
 from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost 
 part of heaven will He gather His elect. The same 
 truth is impressed by that other striking metaphor of 
 the carcase and the vultures : no matter how solitary 
 the spot in which the dead body falls, soon and with- 
 out fail there gather to it out of the unseen the 
 ministers of God's will : even so Christ will find His 
 faithful. " Go and make disciples of all nations. I 
 will be with you all the time, to the very end of the 
 world." 
 
 Thus interpreted the Synoptic Gospels are at one 
 with St. John's Gospel in representing our Lord's 
 mind during those last hours as almost wholly given 
 to the preparation of His disciples for that change in 
 relationship which was to mean to them not separation 
 but a new and universal mode of Presence. " I will 
 not leave you forlorn ; I am coming to you. A httle 
 while longer and the world will see me no more, but 
 you will see me, because I am living and you will be 
 living too. You will understand, on that day, that 
 I am in My Father and you are in Me and I am in 
 you. ... If any one loves Me he will obey My word, 
 
30 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 and My Father will love him and we will come to him 
 and take up Our abode with him." ^ 
 
 The universaUty of Christ's Presence, then, is what 
 the Gospels make both the culmination of their story 
 and the climax of His teaching. " One greater than 
 the temple is here." ** Neither in this mountain 
 nor yet in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father." 
 *' Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in 
 My Name, there am I in the midst of them." For 
 words like these the Jews killed Him. He was sub- 
 versive of their religious position. 
 
 Can it be that we with our particularist claims — we 
 Catholics who think that others are outside His catholic 
 body, we EvangeUcals who think that others have 
 missed the blessings of the Gospel — can it be that we 
 have all been doing what the Jews did, and in effect 
 crucifying the Son of God afresh and putting Him to 
 an open shame ? Does not every particularist claim 
 to the Christ constitute the essential refusal of Him, 
 the fundamental denial of His Godhead ? 
 
 NOTE TO CHAPTER II 
 
 OUR LORD'S " ESCHATOLOGY " 
 
 Since the above mode of interpretation of the eschato- 
 logical teaching of the Gospels may suggest questions to 
 some minds used to interpreting these passages otherwise, 
 I venture to add here a suggested analysis of the teaching 
 of St. Matthew xxiv. 
 
 1. Do not be misled by any man claiming to be the 
 Christ (vers. 4-5). 
 
 2. Do not regard external troubles as the end : they 
 will come, trouble on trouble : but the Gospel of the 
 
 ^ St. John xiv. 18-23. 
 
THE GOSPEL ANSWER 31 
 
 Kingdom is the appointed end for all the world (vers. 
 
 6-14). 
 
 3. The fall of Jerusalem is inevitable ; but God cares 
 for you through all that is to come (vers. 15-22). 
 
 4. Do not think you have to run after any Christ : 
 Christ will find each of you surely enough (vers. 23-28). 
 
 5. Earth's days of misery will always lead direct to 
 heavenly succour. In however remote a spot they suffer, 
 Christ will rescue His elect (vers. 29-31). 
 
 6. Always take troubles as indicating His nearness 
 (vers. 32-33). 
 
 7. This will be found true in the experience of this 
 generation; and is an eternal truth, not transient (vers. 
 
 34-35)- 
 
 8. No one can determine beforehand the time of Christ's 
 arrival ; it is the crisis of each individual life, coming un- 
 perceived, unexpected, in the midst of preoccupations 
 or indifference. Be always ready (vers. 36-51). 
 
 St. Matthew xxv. — -The universal import of the three 
 parables in this chapter has been expounded by many a 
 preacher. Here, therefore, I would only note two points 
 as following up the thought of the previous chapter : 
 (i) Our Lord is dealing with universal principles of the moral 
 life. Cf. verse 29, " To every one who has shall more be 
 given and richly given : but from him who has nothing, 
 even what he has shall be taken." (2) The personal con- 
 cern of God and of Christ with the details of every man's 
 life. 
 
 "If we would be loyal to His teaching, we shall not 
 allow the bright prospect of His second coming to blind 
 our eyes to the reality of His presence with us all the days ; 
 nor shall we strain our ears so eagerly to catch the sound 
 of the arch-angel's trump, that we fail to hear the call 
 which comes to us day by day on earth : ' Follow Thou 
 Me.' " (Conclusion of Primitive Christian Eschatology, 
 by E._C. Dewick, Cambridge University Press, 1912.) 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 
 
 CHRISTIANITY is nothing if it is not an 
 experience. The Bible is nothing if it is not 
 an expression of men's real experience of God ; and 
 the New Testament is nothing if it is not the record and 
 interpretation of men's actual experience of Christ. 
 That experience was precisely what we have just noted 
 as promised by Him in the Gospels. It was new 
 experience of Christ that brought the disciples together 
 again after His Death. It was in the new unity of 
 behef in Him aHve through death that they became 
 imbued with power from on high to go out and claim 
 the world for Him. They proceeded to gather into 
 one fellowship all who accepted their declaration of 
 the present power of the living Christ : '' about three 
 thousand souls were brought in that day " (Acts ii. 
 41). " Brought in " to what ? Into a life of such 
 unity that all kept together, and none were suffered 
 to go in want, and the root instincts and habits of self 
 were transformed ; and into a life of such power that 
 sickness and disease gave way before their victorious 
 advance (Acts ii. 42-47). " You killed the Pioneer 
 of Life. But God raised Him from the dead, as we 
 can bear witness. He it is who has given strength to 
 this man " (Acts iii. 15-16). 
 
 32 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 33 
 
 " Go and tell the people all about this Life " was the 
 Divine commission to the Apostles that made them 
 bold to obey God rather than men (Acts v. 20-29). 
 
 This experience of life, new life, is the basis of the 
 New Testament : a new life which men could see being 
 lived and expressed in all the manifestations of the 
 unity of the Church ; and into the secret of its source 
 they were admitted by the Christians' preaching of 
 Christ. Seeing the life, men by faith accepted the 
 announcement of its unseen Giver, and being thereon 
 admitted into the fellowship, themselves experienced 
 its power. Such in brief is the history of the early 
 chapters of the Acts. 
 
 This experience of the living Christ brought convic- 
 tion that the goal of human hopes had been reached 
 by that generation. On that conviction the Church 
 was founded. That is the meaning of all those claims 
 to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. These 
 are " the last days " predicted by the prophet Joel 
 (Acts ii. 16-17). The old ideals were now being 
 reaHzed. So we read in these chapters how the fellow- 
 ship grew, the fellowship of men with Christ and with 
 one another — the one Life in its two aspects. ^ 
 
 But it was very hard to keep to it. Worse than 
 external persecutions were all the inner influences that 
 were against them from tradition and the existing 
 social and religious order. A familiar instance of this 
 difficulty is Peter at Antioch (Gal. iii. 11-14). So the 
 earliest controversies of the Church arose out of this 
 new life encountering the obstacles of the old, the all- 
 embracing spirit of fellowship opposed by traditional 
 exclusiveness. What were to be the limits of this 
 fellowship of life, this life of fellowship ? Who might 
 
 1 See below, p. 41, further note on the stcry of Acts iii. 
 
34 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 be admitted, or regarded as true members ? Debate 
 was ended in each case by recognition of the facts of 
 God's working. " What God has cleansed, you must 
 not regard as common." ^ "If God has given 
 them exactly the same gift as He gave us when we 
 believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I — how 
 could I try — to thwart God ? On hearing this they 
 desisted and glorified God, saying, ' So God has actu- 
 ally allowed the Gentiles to repent and hve.' " - "So 
 the whole meeting was quieted and listened to Barnabas 
 and Paul, recounting the signs and wonders God had 
 performed by them among the Gentiles." ^ So the 
 Church learned that fellowship was to be limited by 
 no Divinely-given privileges from the past. The 
 present working of Christ transcended all tradition. 
 The Church accordingly advanced along the lines of 
 God's working. In early days it was indeed known 
 as "the Way." 
 
 Behind New Testament theology lies this New 
 Testament experience of facts — facts respected as 
 the acts of God. It is therefore as interpreting the 
 experience that the theology is to be understood.^ 
 The worship of Christ as God means that man felt 
 His creative love constraining them, knew His creative 
 power transforming them, became new men in all the 
 relationships of life and in their inmost being. ^ It 
 was men whose whole religion was love that could 
 enunciate and hold the doctrine that God is Love. 
 It was men of a fellowship, all governed by one spirit, 
 that learnt to recognize and adore the Holy Spirit 
 
 ^ Acts X. 15. 
 
 2 Acts xi. 17, 18. 
 
 ■5 Acts XV. 12. 
 
 * Cf. Walpole, Vital Religion, chap. xiii. and passim. 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 17 ; Gal. vi. 15. 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 35 
 
 operative in them all. The revelation of the Trinity 
 came to them by degrees in the facts of their life. 
 Their Christology was their verdict on experience. 
 The conditions of Church life enabled the Apostle to 
 say : " He, Christ, is the Head, and under Him, as 
 the entire Body is welded together and compacted 
 by every joint with which it is supplied, the due 
 activity of each part enables the Body to grow and 
 build itself up in Love." ^ 
 
 A profitable line of study of the New Testament is 
 to read through the several books with a view to 
 noting all that they say on the one topic of Christ's 
 relation to men. For most of us it will bring into a 
 new and startling prominence the view of Christ which 
 we may perhaps best express by the metaphor of the 
 atmosphere in which and by which we live. " In 
 Christ," "in the Lord," is the familiar form of St. 
 Paul's most frequent thought of Him. This is the 
 glorious tonic atmosphere of Church life in each locality, 
 the all-pervading, all-embracing atmosphere of the 
 Church universal. It is to St. Paul the essential 
 meaning of the Christian's status : " the saints in 
 Christ Jesus " ; " the faithful in Christ Jesus " ; 
 " one man in Christ Jesus " ; " called in the Lord " ; 
 " sons of God in Christ Jesus " ; "in Christ Jesus I 
 begat you " ; " are ye not my work in the Lord ? " ; 
 " blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ." 
 These terms mean that the Christian fellowship was 
 known to be a fellowship with Christ. No : that mode 
 of expression is and was inadequate : for Christ was 
 not merely the fellow of each, at their side, but above 
 and around them all. The Spirit of the community, 
 which possessed each of them, was recognized as Christ's 
 1 Eph. iv. 15, 16. 
 
36 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Spirit, creative in them of the Hfe of fellowship, the 
 fresh spring of spiritual wisdom. They had experi- 
 ence of arrival at a new plane of consciousness, in 
 which life is new, at peace with God and man, free 
 from conventional trammels, filled with sense of 
 triumph. The essence of Christian status was not 
 individual conversion by individual Apostle, but entry 
 into the all-pervading life of Christ. " There is a 
 new creation whenever a man comes to be in Christ ; 
 what is old is gone, the new has come. It is all the 
 doing of the God Who has reconciled me to Himself 
 through Christ and has permitted me to be a minister 
 of His reconciliation. For in Christ God reconciled 
 the world to Himself instead of counting men's tres- 
 passes against them ; and He entrusted me with the 
 message of His reconciliation." ^ " You have had a 
 taste of the kindness of the Lord ; come to Him then 
 — come to that living Stone which men have rejected 
 and God holds choice and precious, come, and, like 
 living stones yourselves, be built into a spiritual 
 house." '^ " You are the elect race, the royal priest- 
 hood, the consecrated nation, the people who belong 
 to Him, that you may proclaim the wondrous deeds 
 of Him Who has called you from darkness to His 
 wonderful light — j^ou who were once no people and 
 now are God's people, you who were once unpitied 
 and now are pitied." ^ 
 
 This thrilling experience of fellowship produces also 
 the Pauline metaphor of the Church as the Body of 
 Christ. " As the human body is one and has many 
 members, all the members of the bod}^ forming one 
 body for all their number, so is it with Christ." * 
 
 1 2 Cor. V. 17-19. 2 I Pet. ii. 3-5. ^ i Pet. ii. 9, 10, 
 4 I Cor. xii. 12. Eph. iv, 1-16. 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 
 
 ^4 
 
 Presence in Christ and belonging to one another are 
 two sides of one fact. Christ is thus new Creator of 
 each man, and stands to him in the absolute and 
 ultimate relationship of God. In thus constituting 
 the final unity of humanity, He is seen as the Final 
 Cause, and so too as the Efficient Cause, of the universe 
 (Col. i. 14-23). Everything was started for this and 
 is working towards this. vSo the New Testament 
 rings with the note of loyalty — loyalty based on experi- 
 ence and leading each loyal member on to ever new 
 experiences, such as only the loyal can know. ' ' Loyal, ' ' 
 we say ; and in this our day of Christian dissension 
 men ask, " Loyal to Christ ? " or " Loyal to Church ? " 
 But in those first days such question could not be. 
 Men who knew where Christ is could not distinguish 
 between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to the community 
 that lived by His Life, knowing " that open secret 
 which, though concealed from ages and generations 
 of old, has now been disclosed to the saints of God. 
 It is His Will that they should understand the glorious 
 wealth which this secret holds for the Gentiles, in the 
 fact of Christ's presence among you as your hope of 
 glory " (Col. i. 26, 27). In his recent work. The 
 Problem of Christianiiy,'^ Professor Royce finely works 
 out the conception of Christianity as the Religion of 
 Loyalty, and says : "As to the central doctrine of 
 the Person of Christ, it was inseparable, in the mind 
 of the Pauline Christian, from the doctrine of the 
 living Divine Spirit present in the Church." " The 
 exalted and Divine Christ was explicitly known and 
 interpreted by Paul as the very life of the Church 
 itself. And His appearance on earth had its redemp- 
 
 1 The Problefu of Chvistianity. Josiah Royce, Professor of 
 History of Philosophy at Harvard. 2 vols. Macm., 191 3. 
 
38 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 live meaning through its power as the work of the 
 Founder of the beloved community." ^ " The Church 
 was for Paul the very presence of his Lord." ^ But 
 Professor Royce affords a notable example of the 
 tragedy of so much of the best modern thought, which 
 beautifully exhibits Christian principles, but professes 
 ignorance of the Christ from Whom they proceed. 
 Speaking of the origin of the Christian community he 
 says : " Personally I shall never hope, in my present 
 existence, to know anything whatever about that 
 origin, beyond the merest commonplaces. The his- 
 torical evidence at hand is insufficient to tell us how 
 the Church originated."^ So far removed is his 
 actual experience of Christian loyalty from that of 
 the early Christian community in which the religion 
 of loyalty originated, and in which there was no doubt 
 whatever as to how it originated. 
 
 Harnack, in his Mission and Expansion of Chris- 
 tianity, is able to find rather more definite information 
 in the historical evidence. Cf. e.g. the following 
 passage (vol. i., p. 103, Eng. tr.) : " 'Surely He hath 
 borne our sickness and carried our sorrows : by His 
 stripes we are healed.' This was the new truth that 
 issued from the Cross of Jesus. It flowed out like a 
 stream of fresh water, on the arid souls of men and on 
 their dry morality. The morality of outward acts and 
 regulations gave way to the conception of a] life ' which 
 was personal, pure and divine, which spent itself in the 
 service of the brethren, and gave itself up ungrudg- 
 ingly to death. This conception was the new principle 
 of life. It uprooted the old life swaying to and 
 
 1 The Problem of Christianity, vol. ii., pp. 359, 360. 
 * Idem, vol. i., p. 104. 
 ' Ibid., Preface, p. 28. 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 39 
 
 fro between sin and virtue ; it also planted a new life 
 whose aim was nothing short of being a disciple of 
 Christ, and whose strength was drawn from the life 
 of Christ Himself. The disciples went forth to preach 
 the tidings of ' God the Saviour,' of that Saviour and 
 Physician Whose person, deeds and sufferings were 
 man's salvation. Paul was giving vent to no sudden 
 or extravagant emotion, but expressing with quiet 
 confidence what he was fully conscious of at every 
 moment, when he wrote to the Galatians (chap. ii. 
 ver. 20), ' I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. 
 For the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in 
 the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for 
 me.' Conscious of this, the primitive Christian mis- 
 sionaries were ready to die daily. And that was just 
 the reasom why their cause did not collapse." Har- 
 nack goes on to show how the vitalit}' of this faith 
 caused the Christians to be differentiated, both by 
 themselves and by the Greeks and Romans, as " the 
 New People " and " the Third Race." " The inner 
 energy of the new religion comes out in its self-chosen 
 title of ' the New People ' or * the Third Race "^ just 
 as plainly as in the testimony extorted from its oppo- 
 nents, that in Christianity a new genus of rehgion had 
 actually emerged side by side with the religions of the 
 nations and of Judaism. It does not afford much 
 
 ^ " The Greeks, Romans, and all other nations had passed 
 for the first race {gemis primum), in so far as they mutually 
 recognized each other's gods or honoured foreign gods as well 
 as their own, and had sacrifices and images. The Jews (with 
 their national God, their exclusiveness, and a worship which 
 lacked images but included sacrifice) constituted the second 
 race [genus altevmn). The Christians again (with their spiritual 
 God, their lack of images and sacrifices and the contempt 
 for the gods — which they shared with the Jews — ) formed the 
 third race {genus tertimn) " (p . 273). 
 
40 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 direct evidence upon the outward spread and strength 
 of Christianity, for the former estimate emerged, 
 asserted itself, and was recognized at an early period, 
 when Christians were still, in point of numbers, a 
 comparatively small society. But it must have been 
 of the highest importance for the propaganda of the 
 Christian rehgion to be so distinctly differentiated from 
 all other religions, and to have so lofty a consciousness 
 of its own position put before the world. Naturally 
 this had a repelling influence as well upon certain 
 circles. Still it was a token of power, and power 
 never fails to succeed " (pp. 277-8). 
 
 The New Testament experience of Christ was thus 
 prolonged into subsequent generations of the Church : 
 experience of Christ not merely as sanctifying and 
 empowering individuals, but as making out of indivi- 
 duals a new community. The experience of Christ 
 was still the experience of being " in Christ," of find- 
 ing one's real self not in isolation but in membership 
 of a corporate Personality. Christ lived in the Church ; 
 the Church lived in Him. 
 
 Harnack, like many others, in giving us the facts of 
 early Christianity, gives them as phenomena of the 
 past. He finds them not in the Christian experience 
 of to-day, but in the monuments of days gone by. 
 The revelation of the eternal God has come to be 
 regarded as a bygone event. Can we wonder at this 
 failure of modern thought when we consider what a 
 mess we Christians have made of our religion ? 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 41 
 
 Notes to Chapter III 
 NEW TESTAMENT ESCHATOLOGY 
 
 (i) The Story of Acts hi. — The main matter of St. 
 Peter's speech is the present situation, not the future. 
 Accounting for the healing of the man lame from birth, he 
 first shows that in Christ's death and resurrection the God 
 of their Fathers has fulfilled what He had announced 
 beforehand by the lips of all the prophets (Acts iii. 12-18) ; 
 and then urges the people individually to realize that there 
 is nothing more to wait for. " Repent then, and turn, and 
 have your sins blotted out, so that a breathing space may 
 be vouchsafed you, and that the Lord may send Jesus 
 your long-decreed Christ, Who must be kept in Heaven 
 till the great Restoration " (vers. 19-21). When ? Now : 
 for these are the days that have been announced by all 
 the prophets (ver. 24) ; " You are the sons of the prophets 
 and of the covenant " (ver. 25) ; the prophet whom Moses 
 said " God will raise up " has been raised up for you (vers. 
 22, 26) ; the long-decreed Christ whom you have hoped 
 God will send, has been sent " to bless you, by turning 
 each of you from your wicked ways " (vers. 20, 26). The 
 evidence of Christ's presence afforded by the healed cripple 
 is used to convince them of His presence to receive each 
 of them (ver. 16) ; only by listening to Him can they know 
 what life is (ver. 23). The speech was interrupted, and its 
 immediate result on the hearers is not stated, but we can 
 hardly be far wrong if we suppose that, for some of them 
 at least, the case was as later at Caesarea, " while Peter 
 was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who listened 
 to what he said " (Acts x. 44). Iii such coming of that 
 other Comforter Christ Himself came (St. John xiv. 16-18). 
 
 (2) I and 2 Thessalonians. — -The Epistles to the Thes- 
 salonians are often treated as a mine of eschatological 
 doctrine. But their main concern is not the mysterious 
 future, but the real present. St. Paul is addressing a new 
 little community of Christians situated in the midst of 
 corrupt human society. We may distinguish three leading 
 ideas in liis exhortation : — 
 
 (a) We have the glorious prospect of Christ's triunph, 
 
42 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 however dark things seem at present ; we all look for that 
 final issue. 
 
 (b) But for us who know Christ, that Day of the Lord 
 is not a future unrelated to the present. We are already 
 in the Daylight. That Day, therefore, is for us not merely 
 a Future to be waited for ; it is a Present to be conformed 
 to (cf. I Thess. V. i-ii). 
 
 (c) This realization does not mean acquiescence in things 
 as they are. The battle against sin has to be fought out 
 (cf. 2 Thess. ii.). 
 
 The Church of the Thessalonians, while looking forward 
 to Christ, is already in Christ. The position is that which 
 St. Paul elsewhere describes as his own : " to me to live 
 is Christ, and to die is gain." 
 
 (3) EscHATOLOGiCAL LANGUAGE. — Modem scholars have 
 made us aware of the abundance of Apocalyptic literature 
 in New Testament times. "It was inevitable that the 
 Jewish-Christian Church should think of the future in 
 terms of Jewish Apocalyptic. The language and details of its 
 imagery are to be found up and down the Epistles." ^ 
 
 We are therefore unlikely to arrive at a right inter- 
 pretation of such language in the New Testament unless 
 we remember {a) that our Lord was bound to use the 
 current terms, but in using them would give them (in this 
 as in other cases) a fuller, deeper meaning than they had 
 borne in the mouths of other teachers ; (b) that His first 
 hearers may have in some cases failed to grasp the new 
 meaning and thus misrepresented His teaching by an 
 unintelligent literalness ; (c) that we run a like risk in 
 interpreting the language of our Lord and of the New Testa- 
 ment writers who shared His free view of time and eternity. 
 A prosaic treatment of poetry has been a constant bane of 
 theology. 
 
 " The great future belongs to Jesus Christ and to His 
 Church. This is the ultimate meaning of New Testament 
 apocalyptic " (Swete, The Ascended Christ, p. 139). 
 
 ^ N. Talbot, The Mind of the Disciples, p. 195 (Macmillan, 
 1 91 4). A bracing book for the new daj'-s. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 
 
 *' 'T^HE whole Christology of the Church . . . has 
 A been its effort to conceive by thought the 
 reahty it hved on in its faith of Christ's saving work 
 and presence for good and all" (Forsyth, The Person 
 and Place of Jesus Christ, p. 330). Yes : if the 
 Church had been governed according to the theology 
 of its best thinkers, Christianity would surely have 
 escaped this degradation from its high estate. But 
 in fact a great deal of Christian writing and teaching 
 is very confused. So often a matter is but half thought 
 through. We all suffer from the difficulty of com- 
 passing eternities with terms of time and space. 
 Speech is inadequate to experience ; more particularly 
 administrators are too often impatient of deep thought. 
 Much current Christology seems to be definitely at 
 variance with the New Testament experience of 
 Christ. The Church has strayed from the Way, and 
 her experience is not what it was ; or rather, is not 
 understood as it was then understood. For here 
 again we have to note the contrast between the life 
 experience of individual Christians anid the corporate 
 expression of it by Church authorities. 
 
 Let us consider, first, theology within the Church ; 
 then secondly, theology outside the Church : both 
 very briefly. 
 
 43 
 
44 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Within the organized Church, much current theology 
 has hardened into a scheme of Christ's movements 
 which seems to involve ideas about Ascension, Pente- 
 cost and Advent at variance with the Church's funda- 
 mental faith. Let us look at each of these three doc- 
 trines, fiiit from the New Testament and secondly 
 from our modern standpoint. 
 
 TJie Ascension is popularly supposed to convey the 
 idea that Christ departed. 
 
 (i) A person unfamiliar with the Gospels might 
 infer from many sermons and hymns that the Gospels 
 give concurrent testimony to the Ascension as an 
 externa] event involving Christ's departure. In fact, 
 St. Luke alone thus records it : and he ends his Gospel 
 with the disciples' joy and begins the Acts with a 
 reference back to the Gospel as recording what Jesus 
 began to do and teach. Moreover, he associates with 
 his story of seeming departure a promise of return, 
 which was speedily fulfilled at Pentecost and verified 
 throughout his narrative. 
 
 The first Gospel ends with the assurance of Christ's 
 perpetual presence. The appendix to St. Mark (xvi. 
 ver. 19), mentions the Ascension as an article of faith 
 rather than as a temporal and local event, and connects 
 it with the statement that the Lord continued to work 
 with the disciples everywhere ; it is not a fact of 
 departure, but a condition of power, that is here 
 asserted. The fourth Gospel gives no place to any 
 idea of Christ's separation from men. 
 
 To none of the Gospel writers did the " taking up " 
 involve an end of Christ's personal presence with 
 His disciples. 
 
 (2) Nowadays we all understand that heaven is 
 not a place " Taken up to heaven " is a symbol of 
 
ABSENTEE CHRTSTOLOGY 45 
 
 spiritual process. It involves the end of seeing, the 
 beginning of a more intimate, less contingent associa- 
 tion. " As long as our purpose depends for its vitality 
 on any circumstance, though that circumstance be the 
 Son of God Himself, it may be affected by a change 
 of circumstance. Only when a man's purpose is 
 firmly fixed apart from any regard to any circumstances 
 will it be sure to stand unmoved by all chances and 
 changes. So long as the disciples' devotion was 
 governed by Christ visibly present in the flesh it was 
 unstable ; another visible presence could shake it. 
 Only when Christ returned to dwell in them by His 
 Spirit — only when their whole minds and wills were 
 become moulded in the fashion of Christ's, only then 
 was their spiritual life secure. And we have to ask 
 ourselves, which stage of the spiritual life are we now 
 in ? Is Christ for us an attractive and impressive 
 Figure who lived in Palestine two thousand years 
 ago, and left an ideal of religious and moral conduct 
 which we intend, if possible, to follow ? or is He 
 an abiding Presence in our hearts and wills, moulding 
 our purpose and controlling our impulses ? Is He a 
 mere example or an inspiring influence ? Is He for 
 us a dead Man, or the living God ? " (W. Temple, 
 Repton School Sermons, p. 126). 
 
 " When the mortality of Christ was finally con- 
 quered, He delocalized His presence, not to decrease, 
 but on the contrary to intensify it, to make possible a 
 new and inclusive localization. The Christ spirit 
 represents not a lesser but a greater, not a contracted, 
 but an expanded, self-personification or personaliza- 
 tion. The more spiritual a personality becomes, the 
 more intensely real it grows to be, and so the more 
 widely and deeply available. His presence becomes 
 
46 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 an atmosphere and influence, without losing its tran- 
 scendent completeness in the luxuriance of its increased 
 immanence. The presence of the Paraclete took the 
 place of the localized Christ not as a bare substitute 
 but as that which constitutes a superior presence, 
 including all that it held formerly and adding great- 
 ness to greatness, riches to wealth. In going Christ 
 came in a fulness which was wanting before He went, 
 the fulness of added availabihty, a higher degree of 
 presence " (Bishop Brent, Presence, pp. 39, 40, and 
 passim. Cf. also Swete, The Ascended Christ, 
 passim). 
 
 Pentecost similarly is popularly regarded as the com- 
 ing of another than Christ. 
 
 (i) The one passage in the New Testament sugges- 
 tive of this idea of a substitute, giving Christ's words : 
 " I will send you another Comforter," contains also 
 His promise : "I come unto you." The supposed 
 separation of the Spirit from Christ is ahen to the 
 thought of the New Testament (cf. Rom. viii. 9-1 1). 
 
 (2) The idea is philosophically intolerable. It is 
 but a crude outcome of our human separateness, 
 which allows us to speak of Spirit acting apart from 
 Person, or of Christ being " impersonally present." 
 " We know that the Son of God has come " (i John v.) 
 is the New Testament verdict, backed by Christian 
 experience through the ages. 
 
 Advent teaching likewise commonly emphasizes the 
 idea that the Church has to wait for Christ 
 
 (i) The Gospel conviction of the early return of 
 Christ, within that generation, has been already spoken 
 of (see chap. II, above). But as it is now assumed that 
 He did not return, theologians have to discuss this 
 mistake of the early Church, and even of Christ Him- 
 
ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 47 
 
 self.^ This early error, with its sequel of disillusion- 
 ment, has become such a commonplace in theology 
 that it is often taken as a datum for fixing the dates of 
 the Gospels. Is there any evidence of this tremendous 
 experience of disillusionment on the part of the early 
 Church in regard to this central item of its faith ? 
 Is not the central fact of the early Church its experi- 
 ence of the truth of God, its absolute confidence in 
 Christ ratified in every trial, the victory of its faith 
 over the world ? (cf. above, chap. III). 
 
 (2) The Church in allowing itself to suppose that 
 it has to wait for Christ is applying to itself teaching 
 that properly applies to the world, i.e., to human 
 society organized in ignorance of Him. It is attri- 
 buting to God the deficiencies of men. It is true that 
 " the whole world lieth in the evil one " ; i.e., Christ 
 has not yet come to them for judgment and deliver- 
 ance. But " we know that the Son of God is come, and 
 hath given us an understanding, that we know Him 
 that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in 
 His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and 
 eternal Life." Therefore any other form of worship 
 than that of the present Christ, in whom we are, is 
 idolatry. " My little children, guard yourselves from 
 idols " (conclusion of i John). It is putting fancies 
 in place of fact. Certainly there is a waiting for 
 Christ to come ; but certainly there is also, and 
 primarily, the fact of His having come and being with 
 us for ever. And it is only by knowledge of His having 
 already come to us that we can have any faith in 
 His future coming to the world.- Just so far as the 
 Church loses faith in His Presence, she loses power of 
 
 ^ Cf. e.g., such passages as Matthew x. 23, xvi. 28, xxiv. 34. 
 - Cf. Walpole, Vital Religion, conclusion. 
 
48 WHERE IS CHRIST i^ 
 
 proclaiming His coming. The present worldliness 
 and powerlessness of the Church are due to her putting 
 herself in the place of_the world, waiting for Christ to 
 come. The rediictio ad ahsurdum of this type of 
 theology is given in a hymn much used : 
 
 " And so the holy Church is here 
 Although her Lord is gone." 
 
 Absentee theology reflects lack of experience of 
 Christ, and promotes thought of Him as a historic 
 figure of the past. We turn then now to a brief glance 
 at theological writers outside the organized Church. 
 For first we have the Church apart from Christ, and 
 then, as a natural sequel, the study of Christ apart 
 from the Church, The Church's credal assertions of 
 Christ's divinity are of no avail against the testimony 
 of her life. The evidence of the Church's divisions, 
 and inadequacy in face of modern conditions, affords 
 strong presumption to the outsider that she has not 
 in fact found in Christ the Person and the Power of 
 God. I take as typical of a mass of theological writing 
 the following words of Professor Moore (Professor of 
 Theology in Harvard University) in Christian Thought 
 since Kant : " There are two religious views of the 
 person of Christ which have stood from the beginning, 
 the one over against the other. The one saw in Jesus 
 of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling 
 as the Messianic king, endued with special powers, 
 lifted above all men ever known, yet a man, completely 
 subject to God in faith, obedience and prayer. This 
 view is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words 
 and deeds. It shines through the testimony of the 
 men who followed Him. Even the behef in His resur- 
 rection and His second coming did not altogether do 
 away with it. The other view saw in Him a new God 
 
ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 49 
 
 who, descending from God, brought mysterious powers 
 for the redemption of mankind into the world, and 
 after short obscuring of His glory, returned to the 
 abode of God, where He had been before. From this 
 belief come all the prayers to Jesus as to God, all 
 miracles and exorcisms in His Name " (p. 147). " The 
 problem of theological reflexion was to find the right 
 middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, 
 on the one side, with monotheism, and on the other, 
 with the picture which the Gospels gave. Belief knew 
 nothing of these contradictions. The same simple 
 soul thanked God for Jesus and His sorrows and His 
 sympathy, as man's Guide and Helper, and again 
 prayed to Jesus because He seemed too wonderful 
 to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the 
 same wondering and touching combination to-day, 
 after two thousand years. With thought comes 
 trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble 
 difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat con- 
 tradiction, which the two views present, so soon as 
 they are clearly seen " (p. 148). 
 
 With all of us our mental standpoint is (or should 
 be) the outcome of our experience. If therefore it 
 is the case, as it seems to be, that God is not united 
 with man in the Christian world to-day, as He was 
 once, as we hope He will be soon, it need not appear 
 strange that thinkers find it hard to believe that God 
 and man were ever one. We even acquiesce in that 
 curious phenomenon of modern thought that behef 
 in the divinity of Christ has been associated with 
 conservatism and traditionalism, and commonly 
 repudiated by so-called liberal thinkers. The refuta- 
 tion of the so-called " liberal " view of Christ has been 
 effected not so muQh by any evidence of the Church's 
 
50 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 triumphant life to-day as b}^ the further processes of 
 that same hberal research. The Church of the present 
 does not afford the irrefutable evidence afforded by 
 the Church of the past. It is then a momentous fact 
 for us that liberal research has discovered for itself 
 that lower views of Christ are untenable. Though 
 they are still loudly proclaimed in some quarters, 
 as in the passage quoted above, they are already dis- 
 posed of. Critical thought is thus presenting a new 
 challenge to the Church : if Christ cannot be set down 
 as a mere man, can the Church show that He is God ? 
 In this view of the results of criticism I base myself 
 on Professor Loofs' work, Wliat is the Truth about 
 Jesus Christ ; ^ and I hope that it is not beside our 
 point to dwell a little on that excellent conspectus of 
 the course of critical thought during the past century. 
 Men have been very busy about Christ, and we ought 
 to know the outcome of their thinking. Loofs, as 
 it were, leads us out of the maze and shows that there 
 is an outcome of all this multitudinous speculation 
 and research. He shows that there were two main 
 lines of attack on the thought that Jesus was God. 
 The first was " that Jesus was only a deit}^ falsely 
 changed into a man by tradition " ; i.e., that He was 
 an imaginary being, that never really existed. This 
 view now claims little attention, having been destroyed 
 by the process of thought, being " simply disproved 
 by what we know for certain about Jesus from St. 
 Paul." The second and more important view was that 
 Jesus was only a man, this being " the assumption 
 necessary for historical science." But now this 
 
 1 Lectures a! Oherlin. By Friedrich Loofs, Professor of 
 Church History in the University of Halle (T. and T. Clark, 
 1913). 
 
ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 51 
 
 view " cannot prevail before the tribunal of historical 
 science itself, because it does not do justice to the 
 sources and is not tenable in itself." ^ " Science has 
 to respect reahties, and it is a reahty that the faith 
 in Jesus the Saviour has been a power in history, and 
 still is a power in the world up to the present day. 
 Historical science cannot do justice to the sources 
 with its assumption that the life of Jesus was a purely 
 human life. It cannot draw a credible picture of 
 Jesus. . . . The presupposition that this life was a 
 purely human life . . . is false " (pp. 159, 160). 
 
 But Loots is at pains to show that this conclusion 
 does not lead him to accept the " orthodox " belief 
 in the Divinity of Christ. " The conviction that God 
 dwelt so perfectly in Jesus through His Spirit, as had 
 never been the case before and never will be till the 
 end of all time, does justice to what we know histori- 
 cally about Jesus, and may, at the same time, be re- 
 garded as satisfactorily expressing the unique position 
 of Jesus which is a certainty to faith. It also justifies 
 our finding God in Christ when we pray to Him. . . . 
 
 1 " It is bound either to come into such a skeptical attitude 
 towards the sources that it is forced to give up all hope of 
 obtaining a picture of the person and the activity of Christ — 
 and that is not in harmony with our most definite knowledge, 
 viz., that there existed a community shortly after the death 
 of Jesus which revered him very highly and must have taken 
 a lively interest in his words and deeds. Or, if it puts more 
 confidence in the sources, Jesus and his deeds and his experi- 
 ences must seem to exceed the ordinary human measure so 
 far that the only possible frame for his self-consciousness 
 must be found in a highly exaggerated Messianic conscious- 
 ness of majesty, which no longer agrees with normal human 
 life. Then Jesus appears as a religious enthusiast, and it 
 seems natural to ask whether he was psychologically sound. 
 But such a view does not agree with the deepest and greatest, 
 and therefore certainly most genuine, words of Jesus which 
 we have in the Gospels ' (pp. 120, 121). 
 
52 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 My last refuge, therefore, is the term which Paul 
 strongly emphasi^zes in the Epistles to the Colossians 
 and Ephesians, the mystery of Christ. And what is 
 this rnyster}^ ? God was in Christ reconciling the 
 world unto Himself, that is the mystery. It would be 
 attempting impossible things if we tried to under- 
 stand the historical person of Christ " (pp. 239, 240). 
 
 " My last refuge, ' says Professor Loofs ; and, if I 
 may say so, the phrase seems to me to betray the 
 fundamental attitude of the main body of that modern 
 critical and philosophical thought which does not 
 accept belief in the Divinity of Christ. It is essen- 
 tially an attitude of flight. It is flight on the one 
 hand from " orthodoxy " and " ecclesiastical inter- 
 pretations " ; and we cannot deny that orthodoxy, or 
 its exposition in organized Christianity, scares away 
 many honest and true souls. The Church does not 
 now exhibit that original light spoken of in St. John 
 iii. 19-21, that so sifts men that every one that doeth 
 ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest 
 his works should be reproved. But he that doeth the 
 truth cometh to the light, that his works m.ay be made 
 manifest that they have been wrought of God. 
 
 On the other hand this attitude of flight does often 
 involve a moral failure in the fugitive. The Cross is 
 still foolishness to the Greeks. There is still that 
 fundamental difficulty for human thought of seeing 
 in the Crucified the ultimate truth of God ; the diffi- 
 culty that lies in taking up my cross and following 
 Him : my native repugnance to such an ideal of life. 
 
 To return for a moment to Professor Loofs' most 
 valuable summary of the results of critical study of 
 the facts of Christ, we see that historical science has 
 found itself unable to arrive at any tenable view of 
 
ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 53 
 
 Christ. Professor Loofs himself, has hardly found a 
 satisfactory way of escape. If he could dismiss from 
 his mind the fear of irrational " orthodoxy/' and 
 stand and face steadily that " mystery " which St. 
 Paul emphasizes, he would surely admit that to St. 
 Paul the most prominent aspect of the mystery was 
 the mystery of " Christ in you " (Col. i. 27) : not the 
 fact of the past, that God was in Christ, but the fact of 
 the present that Christ is in you and you are in Christ. 
 But this conception takes us out of the plane of his- 
 torical event on to the plane of eternaJ truth. And 
 although ■ Loofs, as we have seen, fully realizes the 
 failure of liberal criticism to confine Christ within the 
 categories of historical science, he shrinks from that 
 passage to the eternal which those take who acknow- 
 ledge Christ as God, and like Arius of old prefers to 
 take refuge in semi-divinity. 
 
 Absentee Christology reduces Christian thought to 
 confusion. It muddles the testimony of the New 
 Testament, partly by applying to the end of the world 
 Christ's teaching about return after His death, partly 
 by assuming that express promises of speedy return 
 were unfulfilled. But far more serious is the fact that 
 it muddles life. We need but briefly mention three 
 outstanding features of the muddle of modern Chris- 
 tendom : — 
 
 [a) The ecclesiastical muddle. Divided Christendom 
 is denial of Christ. We have traditions of the past 
 instead of facts of the present. 
 
 [h) The social muddle. In the supposed absence of 
 Christ His revelation of God is not really accepted by 
 Christians. Other facts than Christ are declared to 
 be fundamental to human nature. It is assumed 
 that you will only get the best out of children, or out 
 
54 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 of adults, by setting them against one another, each 
 for himself. So the Church has allowed the whole 
 social order to be based on competition, not co-opera- 
 tion : on self, not on Christ, Hence war between 
 Christian nations. 
 
 {c) The personal muddle. We need but ask our- 
 selves : Are we, and our families, so living in Christ 
 that all things in peace and order move, and there is 
 immediate remedy for misunderstandings and fric- 
 tions ? Christians sometimes say that " in God's own 
 good time " they will be reconciled (meantime they 
 will not). The faith in Christ present is thus muddled 
 with the idea of His temporary absence. W^e lack 
 that sense of presence of the eternal, of presence in the 
 eternal which St. Paul expressed in the phrase " in 
 Christ," and which is the burden of St. John's Epistle 
 and of the whole New Testament. 
 
 W^e need to repent of this habit of putting God away 
 from us. The Son of God was manifested on purpose 
 to end this aloofness : Emmanuel, God with us. Vital 
 religion consists in acknowledging the presence of 
 Christ. By thus knowing Him I have eternal life. 
 Eternal truths become my personal possession. In 
 religion, to individualize is to eternalize. I and God, 
 the individual and the eternal, are brought together. 
 
 Here Hes the secret of the vital force possessed by 
 each of the opposing religious parties. " Catholics " 
 know that they have an impregnable position as to 
 the reality of sacramental grace ; for every real Chris- 
 tian among them knows that by these sacraments he 
 is here and now linked to the eternal God ; he rightly 
 repudiates any idea of them as mere memorials of the 
 past. " Evangelicals " know that the Bible is the 
 Word of God, because by it He actually has spoken 
 
ABSENTEE CHRISTOLOGY 55 
 
 and does speak to them personally ; every real Chris- 
 tian among them rightly refuses to let questions of 
 historical criticism take the place of this personal 
 contact with the living God. 
 
 The personal contact with God and Christ is sure 
 enough : it is the corporate expression of it that is so 
 fatuous. But then the corporate expression re-acts 
 on our individual faith ; our outlook is blurred, our 
 mind muddled. We need to return to God, to put us 
 all straight. And in God we shall get the final answer 
 to our question ; for in God we shall find Christ. 
 This, then, is the next point in our discussion. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 CHRIST IN GOD 
 
 THIS book is addressed to Christians, who believe 
 in God and in Christ. We know God, His 
 being, His nature. His power, as revealed to us by 
 Christ. We know Christ as the universal human 
 ideal, to which both the individual and society are to 
 grow up. In Him both the individual and the cor- 
 porate personality are to find completion. Christ is 
 Personality. Is He not ? (Eph. iv. 12-16). 
 
 Violence then is anti-Christ : " violence " in the 
 sense of brute force, external force which ignores the 
 inner facts and meanings of personality. For the 
 ignoring of personality is the antithesis of love. Some 
 attribute violence to Christ, e.g., in the cleansing of 
 the temple ; but we can see that this so-called violence 
 on His part was not such as to crush or injure person- 
 ality. Violence, ignoring personality, is anti-Christ ; 
 for it is misuse and misrepresentation of the power of 
 God, and misuse and mutilation of the capacities of 
 men. 
 
 But in our loss of the sense of the presence of Christ 
 we habitually attribute violence to God. " The act of 
 God " stands as the technical term for the loss of 
 property at sea, by fire or storm. Though in our 
 language of devotion we adhere to true religious faith 
 
 56 
 
CHRIST IN GOD 57 
 
 in the all-embracing love of God, from which nothing 
 can separate us, yet in our everyday language we 
 commonly adopt and hear a very different note, about 
 the common accidents (as we regard them) of life, 
 about the weather, about sickness. So it comes about 
 that tragedies such as the Italian earthquakes have 
 formed some of the hardest problems for the faith of 
 the modern man. In a world of blind destructive 
 forces, where and what is God ? where and what is 
 Christ ? 
 
 The trouble is that whatever our individual faith 
 may be, we corporately have lost the essential Chris- 
 tian view of the world. It often seems that our faith 
 is not really monotheistic, or at least that we do not 
 understand the application of monotheism to the facts 
 of Ufe. Some of us indeed have been impressed by 
 teachers like James Hinton, who as a man of science 
 ably maintained that the apparent inertness of nature 
 is reaUy our inertness ; that what we regard as nature's 
 deadness crushing our life is really our deadness clash- 
 ing with nature's life (see e.g. his Man and his Dwelling- 
 Place, passim). But our dull agnosticism persists, in 
 spite of the repeated testimony of modern scientists 
 to the unity of the universe in the laws and the love of 
 God. To quote the writer of a paper for the Pan- 
 Anglican Congress (G. F. C. Searle, F.R.S., in vol. iii. 
 of the Report) on The Modern Conception of the Uni- 
 verse : " The unity of the universe makes it impossible 
 to suppose that we can ever cut ourselves off from the 
 operations of those laws. Did we but reaUze this, we 
 should covet earnestly the spirit of holy fear. When 
 men have this spirit they not only pay reverent atten- 
 tion to spiritual things, but also think and speak 
 reverently of all the things of the material world, as, 
 
58 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 for example, of the weather. They are conscious that 
 they are dweUing in the Temple of God, and it is the 
 joy of their lives to give Him their worship and their 
 obedience." Dr. A. W. Robinson ^ thus summarizes 
 the present position of theological and scientific 
 thought : " There is reason to hope that the bitterness 
 of old controversies will not be revived, and that we 
 have before us a time in which Theology and Science 
 will co-operate and no longer conflict. With deepen- 
 ing insight it is becoming plainer than ever that the 
 phenomena of life, and even of matter, are the expres- 
 sion of a more than physical force. Evolution is a law 
 under which a forward process is moving on, and mov- 
 ing up. There is an impulse of consciousness working 
 from within, and there is a spiritual, as well as a 
 material, environment inviting to correspondence with 
 itself. Freedom and power of choice are admitted to 
 be present in regions where their existence was for 
 long most strenuously denied. Even matter may 
 have its own power of insistence and resistance — ^how 
 much more mind and will. This consideration may 
 give us a yet clearer clue to the mysteries of failure, 
 miscarriage and waste. A world that was to produce 
 self-conscious, self- determining personalities needed to 
 have freedom through the whole of its development ; 
 and the consequent risk and possible cost were inevit- 
 able. Shall we not be led to admire and revere in- 
 creasingly the wonder of it all, as there grows upon us 
 the sense of the quietness and gentleness, the foresight 
 and the infinite patience of the Being of beings, who 
 will never obtrude His presence and action upon us, 
 just because He would help us to be our own, not dead 
 
 1 God and the World : A Survey of Thought, pp. 104-5. 
 S.P.C.K., 1914. 
 
CHRIST IN GOD 59 
 
 but living, selves, and would have us rise with Him to 
 the highest things." So Tennyson: — 
 
 " Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; 
 For is He not all but that which has power to feel ' I am I ? ' 
 Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfillest thy 
 
 doom 
 Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and 
 
 gloom. 
 Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit 
 
 can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
 
 feet." 1 
 
 The fact that in our ordinary thinking and writing 
 we have so lost the romance of monotheism accounts 
 in part for eager welcome given to Gitanjali and 
 other books by Rabindranath Tagore. For he is one 
 who dares to commune and have fun with God in the 
 facts of hfe.'- 
 
 " The quietness and gentleness, the foresight and the 
 infinite patience " of God. So say scientists and poets, 
 and so says every soul that knows Him. And yet we 
 allow ourselves to be fooled by the hallucination that 
 He is violent. We indulge in slipshod newspaper 
 views ; in accounts of earthquakes and the hke, allow^- 
 ing our attention to be fixed on this apparent violence 
 of circumstances viewed externally, and not on the 
 personal attitude and condition of the individuals 
 affected, — not, that is, on the presence or absence of 
 
 1 Tennyson, " The Higher Pantheism." 
 
 2 Much of the charm of R. L. Stevenson, too, is of the same 
 kind, Cf. especially his well-known lines, " The Celestial 
 Surgeon," in Underwoods, beginning : 
 
 " If I have faltered more or less 
 In my great task of happiness." 
 
6o WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Christ in their field of consciousness ; not on their 
 understanding or misunderstanding of the whole 
 affair. It was indeed not necessary to wait for modern 
 scientists and poets to reveal to us the true character 
 of the universe. For, as we have seen, it was to events 
 of this kind that Christ specially referred in His so- 
 called eschatological discourses, declaring the trans- 
 formation, the trans valuation of them by His presence. 
 To one therefore who accepts Christ's view of things 
 our modern newspaper view is a hopeless misreading 
 of events, presenting insoluble difficulties to faith : 
 being an attempt to understand the world apart from 
 Christ. It might be supposed that a Christian was 
 one who, by reflection or experience or both, had been 
 led to give up that attempt as futile, having learned 
 indeed that " in Him all things consist." But as a 
 matter of fact the normal level of conversation and of 
 thought, in the Church or out of it, is to regard the 
 events of the world, to describe them, see and feel 
 them, as external catastrophes, not as internal personal 
 experiences of the infinite love of God. In other words, 
 our minds are out of tune with God. If we were in 
 tune with Him, either these things would not happen, 
 because we should know enough of His laws to prevent 
 them ; or if they happened, they would take on an 
 utterly different aspect and character, being treated 
 from the personal and not the impersonal point of 
 view. Throughout this book I am trying to keep 
 close to the actual facts of life, and therefore of my 
 own life among others. So here perhaps I may 
 illustrate from individual experience these two points 
 about catastrophes, their prevention and their inter- 
 pretation. Here in the interior of China my " parish " 
 is constantly suffering from floods, caused by a river 
 
CHRIST IN GOD 6i 
 
 breaking its banks and making new courses across the 
 country year after year ; and the people sit by and 
 starve, seeing no means of coping with this devastating 
 force. We coming from the West know that the 
 trouble is not inevitable ; that if the people or their 
 government had enough of the spirit of love to make 
 them able to work together for the common good, 
 there is engineering knowledge and skill adequate for 
 preventive measures. The catastrophes could be 
 avoided by men coming more in tune with God. And 
 as to the transmutation of external catastrophe by 
 internal reahzation of God, I can myself but testify 
 what thousands in this war can testify from far wider 
 experience : having been under fire from Chinese 
 looting soldiers, with my friend shot dead at my side, 
 I could grieve neither for him nor for myself, and 
 friends who wrote about the " awful experience," 
 " too dreadful for words," did not tally with one's 
 own sense of what happened. They only had the 
 newspaper account ; I had the experience. This 
 is the difference happening all the time between the 
 external view of events and the internal experience of 
 life. And every Christian has this knowledge to him- 
 self, but generally forsakes it when he forms his ideas 
 of things from newspapers or enters into conversation 
 with others in the terms of current speech. This 
 knowledge is a knowledge of the meaning of the uni- 
 verse. 1 It is more than knowing the facts ; it is 
 knowing their meaning, both what they mean to me 
 and what they mean to God (for I can only understand 
 them in proportion as I share God's view of them). 
 For within God's facts there is a meaning, an answer, 
 a response. And that eternal answer to God, the 
 I I John V, 20 ; Eph. i. 9, 10. 
 
62 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 eternal meaning of His universe, is Christ. Christ is 
 within God, His working within God's working. He 
 on the page of history is the answer of human hfe to 
 God who made it : He is the meaning of Hfe. He is 
 historically the revelation of the meaning of God, of 
 God within God, of the possibility and fact of the 
 Cross within the Divine action, and within the Divine 
 Being. So He becomes to men the interpretation of 
 the ways of God. To know Christ is to understand 
 God.i In that understanding man recognizes a 
 personal Divine meaning to himself in all that is and 
 in all that happens, and recognizes too an individual 
 claim on himself for certain action within the general 
 scheme of things, a claim that he too should make 
 response, have meaning, to God. So we may analyse 
 belief in Christ as involving (a) emotional embrace 
 of this Interpretation of the meaning of things ; (b) 
 identification of will with His Will now recognized as 
 operative in and through the whole system of the 
 universe. So St. Paul spoke of " the God Whose I 
 
 1 Christ as the Meaning. The following simple propositions 
 seem true, and expressive of this idea : — 
 
 He is the meaning of man — to God and to himself. 
 
 He is the meaning of each of uS' — what we are for. 
 
 He is the meaning of the universe — what it is for. 
 
 He is thus the answer to God. 
 
 In each of us He is our answer to God. 
 
 We in Him make corporate response to God. 
 
 A man in Christ makes perfect response to environment. 
 
 The Church in Christ is wholly adjusted to the action of God. 
 
 It is important to remember that all such abstract state- 
 ments about Christ are based upon personal experience of 
 Him. Apart from personal religion they are meaningless. 
 But if in fact He is my God, I must in some such terms express 
 my view of life. 
 
 Only believe, and thou shalt see 
 That Christ is all in all to tl ee. 
 
CHRIST IN GOD 63 
 
 am, Whom also I serve." We both love and serve. 
 Is it true of us, of you and of me ? Do we both love 
 and serve ? and that not departmentally but uni- 
 versally ? Too often it seems that we live our lives, 
 or at least we think our thoughts, departmentally. 
 In our worship or in our creeds, for instance, how much 
 do we think of the facts of God's evolutionary pro- 
 cedure which are so familiar to our thought at other 
 times ? Except when we are specifically concerned 
 with Christian Apologetics, do we moderns really find 
 God and Christ central in our ideas of science, and of 
 art and of history ? The word * ' God ' ' seems to have 
 been eviscerated of meaning in modern literature and 
 modern conversation. The Practice of the Presence of 
 God is what we are all needing, what the whole world 
 is needing : why has it been relegated to little books 
 and little times of devotion ? The Cross of Christ 
 gives us the meaning of the universe. We want a 
 devotional grasp of the whole situation, not merely 
 of individual forgiveness. Let us pause before the 
 Fact of the Cross, which is Jesus Christ, our God. 
 
 " God puts His world before you, and it is yours to 
 make of it what you will. It is there. The trees of 
 the garden in which you live may be much or maj^ be 
 little to you ; they may be ' everything or nothing. 
 But they are there. And then here stands this other 
 fact, a fact still ; it is there. Truth holds the door 
 open for the future. You see, there is something more 
 there than any of our theologies. As Rendel Harris 
 once said to me — we were talking of Clement of Alex- 
 andria — ' No one sings, " How sweet the name of 
 Logos sounds." ' You cannot. It is not He, do you 
 see ? But there is He, and there is He dying. The 
 fact stands, and will stand : the great fact standing 
 
64 WHERE TS CHRIST? 
 
 out for you and me, to judge ourselves by, to make 
 what we can of, and to be re-made by it. At any 
 rate, there it is ; beyond all theologies, beyond all 
 dogma — the fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the 
 cross. And it is for you to settle with yourself and 
 with God, by Whose Will it was there and you are 
 here, what you make of it. What will you make of 
 it ? What will it make of you ? *' ^ 
 
 It has hitherto made so little of us, so little of the 
 Church, so little of the world, because we have been 
 making so little of it. " Remember, whatever you 
 make of Christ and His death, past, present and future, 
 are one story — it is, * Jesus Christ the same yesterday 
 and to-day and for ever, ' and whatever He has been to 
 those to whom He was most. He may be again to you 
 and me — and more yet, beyond our thinking." - 
 
 A man in Christ will understand God and what 
 God does. That understanding puts an end to in- 
 dividual isolation : each comes to himself as a social 
 being, linked to all his fellows, partaker in the one Life. 
 In Christ we are members one of another, because we 
 have come into line with the workings of God, who 
 works in us mightily ; we are conformed to the laws 
 of nature. Therefore in Christ, in the absolute society 
 that is in Him, all human faculties have opportunity 
 of fullest development. " All things are yours, and 
 ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." " I thank my 
 God always concerning you, for the grace of God which 
 was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything ye 
 were enriched in Him, in all utterance and in all know- 
 ledge." " In Him all the treasures of wisdom and 
 
 ' T. R. Glover, in Christ and Hitman Need (Addresses at 
 Liverpool), Student Volunteer Missionary Union. 
 2 Ibid. 
 
CHRIST IN GOD 65 
 
 knowledge lie hidden." Here are the proper riches of 
 the Church. 
 
 Where then is Christ ? Christ is in God. His 
 presence to us means the same as, yet more than, the 
 presence of God. For it means the answer of God to 
 Himself ; the world or the man no longer worked hy 
 God only, but working with Him voluntarily. To that 
 presence men and women attained who gave them- 
 selves up to love : such is the testimony of the New 
 Testament, of those who first knew Christ in Palestine, 
 and afterwards knew Him in God : and such is the 
 history of the Church through the ages. 
 
 That real history of the Church has not been and 
 perhaps cannot be written. It lies not in the events 
 and actions viewed externally, but in their inner 
 meaning to the actors and sufferers : not in circum- 
 stances, but in the life that is hid with Christ in God. 
 That is what entitles it to be called the Divine Society. 
 That alone accounts for its continuance till now, in 
 spite of all its sins and blunders in the past, in spite 
 of all the inadequacies and muddles of which we are 
 conscious in the present. 
 
 The Church still exists : but its Ufe is enfeebled, 
 because we have so largely put God away from us. 
 We have misunderstood God. We have neither shaped 
 our minds nor tuned our lips to Immanent and 
 Transcendent Love. 
 
 Only as we priests and ministers of the Living God 
 return to Him can we or the Church or the world be 
 saved. For it is we who are obviously responsible 
 before God and man for the corporate expression of 
 religion, and for its inadequacy over against the 
 adequacy of personal experience of Christ. 
 
 Misunderstanding of God is bound up with mis- 
 
 £ 
 
66 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 understanding of men. Misreading the divine nature 
 we misread human nature. FaiHng to see Christ in 
 God, we fail to acknowledge and adore Him in all His 
 members. Hence the disunion of Christendom, our 
 failure of love. " He who does not love, does not 
 know God, for God is love." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 WE Christians all know that we ought to love 
 one another. By baptism, by profession, we 
 too, like those first Christians, have given ourselves 
 up to love. Our trouble, the tragedy of Christendom, 
 is that in seeking to obey the Christ Who gave us this 
 commandment, in trying to be true to our profession, 
 we find ourselves ranged in mutually opposed sections, 
 between whom the love felt is httle and the love shown 
 even less. We Christians are all (or most of us) so 
 sure of our own position that we cannot allow our- 
 selves to suppose that another position held by other 
 people may be equally right. We have all been 
 schooled in particular doctrines as to the essential 
 means of grace, and the fundamental conditions of 
 membership in the Church ; and more than that, we 
 all know in our own experience that our own way is 
 right, efficacious, proved by the working of God in 
 our own lives and in the lives of others whom we reach 
 and teach. If not, we can hardly be Christians. 
 
 We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, 
 And long to feast upon Thee still ; 
 
 We drink of Thee, the Fountain-head, 
 And thirst our souls from Thee to fill, 
 67 
 
68 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Here may Thy faithful people know 
 
 The blessings of Thy love. 
 The streams that through the desert flow, 
 
 The manna from above, 
 
 " Thou dost assure us thereby of Thy favour and goodness 
 towards us, and that we are very members incorporate in 
 the mystical Body of Thy Son." 
 
 From childhood up, as communicant, as deacon, 
 priest, lattedy as missionary, all I am and know and 
 do as a Christian I owe to my membership in the 
 Church of England. My communion and my com- 
 mission are only mine through the faith and ordinances 
 of this Church. Until I came out as a missionary 
 to China I had personal acquaintance with hardly 
 any member of any other rehgious body. 
 
 But an eye-opening experience comes to many a 
 man and woman sent out by this or that Church to 
 propagate the faith in a heathen land. We are for the 
 first time brought face to face in close association with 
 men and women of other denominations. In the 
 direct conflict with the elemental forces of evil and 
 ignorance the fundamental attitude towards life is 
 the one thing that matters. Association in great 
 enterprises, demanding the utmost that manhood and 
 womanhood can be and give, reveals Christ in a new 
 and stronger light. The war has been serving in the 
 same way to bring members of different Churches, ^now 
 united in a new fellowship of service and sacrifice, 
 into this new attitude of mutual affection, and respect 
 for each other's religious convictions and practices. 
 The sense deepens that ours is not the only way to God ; 
 that other ways are valid too, in that they are in fact 
 what they profess to be, effectual means of grace. 
 
 This indeed has long been recognized by our best 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 69 
 
 teachers. For example, Bishop Woodford, in an 
 address on " The Power of Absolution," quotes Bishop 
 Andrewes : " Gratia Dei non alligatur mediis ; the 
 grace of God is not bound, but free ; and can work 
 without means of Word or Sacrament : and as without 
 means, so without Ministers, how and when to Him 
 seemeth good " ; and he continues, " All that is meant 
 is that here is a Divinely appointed channel for con- 
 veying God's pardon, and they who place themselves 
 under it may be sure of receiving what they look for." ^ 
 That God is not bound to His own laws is a familiar 
 but unfortunate way of expressing this truth that 
 there are facts of God outside our scheme. God is 
 not tied, but we are. Why are we not free to come 
 into line with God ? Where is that freedom with 
 which originally Christ set free His Church ? ^ 
 
 But here comes in another part of the tragedy of 
 Church History. Many a man or company of men, 
 moved by dissatisfaction with the sectional position 
 of their religious life contrasted with the catholic 
 meaning of their faith, and seeking to move out into a 
 wider unity of Christians, has ended informing one more 
 sect. History seems to show that progress to catholic 
 unity cannot be made by breaking away from one's 
 own spiritual inheritance. And the same conclusion 
 would follow from viewing Christianity as the religion 
 of loyalty : loyalty will not grow out of disloyalty. 
 
 The desire and hope for Christian Re-union grows 
 from year to year, and as all roads seem blocked at 
 home, it has become a commonplace in discussions 
 of the subject to suggest that the desired lead will 
 
 1 The Great Commission : Addresses on the Ordinal. By J. 
 R. Woodford, Bishop of Ely (Rivingtons, 1886). 
 
 2 Gal. ii. 4 and v. i. 
 
70 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 come from the Mission Field. Unfortunately this 
 pious hope has hardly yet led to corresponding action 
 by the home authorities ; for it is a too famihar fact 
 on the mission field that the missions are not free to 
 move in the direction suggested, but are more or less 
 rigidly controlled by the home boards. Our AngHcan 
 missions in particular are restrained by the duty of 
 loyalty to the whole Anglican Communion, which 
 allows no local section to advance independently 
 towards fellowship with other kinds of Christians. ^ 
 
 To expedite human action along the lines of God's 
 working, we need knowledge of the actual facts, and 
 not only knowledge but such acknowledgment of them 
 that they become formative of our thoughts and 
 determinative of our acts. By recognition of facts we 
 escape from the bondage and powerlessness of our 
 own preconceptions. It is thus that modern science, 
 and still more the modern scientific habit of mind, 
 is the great means of progress in every department of 
 life. 
 
 ^ Yet on the mission field it seems strange to read such a 
 pronouncement as the following, quoted in a Church paper 
 under the heading " An S.P.G. Boycott," made by a London 
 vicar : — 
 
 " I have postponed making a statement as to the practical 
 bearing of the ' Kikuyu ' pronouncement of the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury on our collections for foreign Missions, in the 
 hope that the S.P.G. might be able to give assurances that 
 its funds would not be distributed to Dioceses where separatists 
 are being admitted to our pulpits and Altars in defiance of the 
 doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. So far the 
 Society has declined to give assurances. It asks us to tell 
 our friends that it sympathizes with their anxieties and begs 
 us to be content with the expression of this friendly sentiment. 
 But we are not content. Until S.P.G. is able to make its 
 position quite clear we shall suspend our annual collection 
 for its funds, and there will be no Association in support of 
 S.P.G. connected with All Saints." 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 71 
 
 Many of us who have had some training in science 
 or philosophy before taking up theology have been 
 troubled by the reahzation that the latter has not 
 hitherto fully shared in that liberation of human 
 thought from its own entanglements which has led 
 to all the advancement of learning in other depart- 
 ments since the time of Bacon's Novum Organum. 
 Archbishop Temple, in 1857, wrote : " Our theology 
 has been cast in a scholastic mould, i.e., all based on 
 logic. We are in need of and are gradually being 
 forced into a theology based on psychology. The 
 transition, I fear, will not be without much pain ; but 
 nothing can prevent it." ^ 
 
 " O my God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after 
 Thee," said Kepler, as he traced the wonders of God's 
 working in the stars. Surely not less should this be 
 our acknowledgment as we trace His working in the 
 minds of His children. But unfortunatel}^ the self- 
 centredness incidental to most rehgion other than 
 that of the living present Christ has till now hindered 
 an unprejudiced study of religious facts, even by Chris- 
 tians. Unless we each of us hold to faith in Christ 
 present we relapse into the exclusiveness of Judaism, 
 hugging our hnks with the past that mark us off from 
 other men. We remain busy with the tombs of the 
 prophets. We study and' we teach what Christ was 
 and did for our predecessors, rather than what He is 
 and does for our contemporaries. We hold to what 
 He said then, and hardly expect to hear Him say 
 anything fresh to-day. The Word of God that the 
 prophets heard we read in books. The very phrase 
 
 ^ Memoirs ii., p. 517. Quoted by his son in Foundations, 
 p. 226, and also by Bishop Brent in Leadership, p. 257. 
 
72 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 " the Word of God," becomes technicalized and limited 
 to the record of His words to the Jews. In our Chinese 
 translation of the Prayer Book, for example, the prayer 
 that Christians " may agree in the truth of Thy holy 
 Word," which at least is capable of a wider meaning, 
 becomes a prayer that they may acknowledge the 
 truth of the Bible. Thus miracles and prophecy and 
 gifts of heahng and other gifts of the Spirit we are 
 disposed to relegate to the distant past : we know 
 little or nothing of such wonders now. For we know 
 so Httle about the presence of Christ in the " beloved 
 community." Bishop Walpole, in Lije's Chance, 
 remarks that in these modern days of advancing 
 science " the knowledge of love has not kept pace with 
 the knowledge of the world." Similarly Bishop 
 Brent : " Human greatness only begins to express 
 itself in that creative power which, in recent years, 
 has rejoiced inordinately in its ability to invent or to 
 organize matter. There is another sphere, as yet but 
 slightly exploited, where work, equally creative 
 though of a much more enduring character, is waiting 
 for human operations — the sphere to which St. Paul 
 refers when he says, ' We look not at the things which 
 are seen, but at the things which are not seen.' We 
 shall never be able to vision more than a fraction of 
 what we may know and be, until we Christians learn 
 as a body to practise eternity unremittingly and 
 arduously." ^ " The Christian experience of to-day, 
 if there be any truth in the indwelling of God's Spirit, 
 is as worthy of respect in its bearing on theology as 
 that of the first centuries. Early Christian theology 
 was of necessity mainly psychological, with a moderate 
 though sufficient regard for historicity as summed 
 1 Presence. Bishop Brent, Longmans, 191 4. P. 51. 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 73 
 
 up in the Hebraic past and for the essence of logic as 
 embodied in current philosophies." ^ 
 
 The unreadiness of theology to accept the data of 
 the present is bound up with ignorance of the facts of 
 love. We do not know what love is doing in the world 
 to-day ; at least we know very little about it ; the 
 Church does not concentrate upon this topic ; theo- 
 logians do not make this their science. The facts of 
 religious psychology, of the actual operations of the 
 Spirit of God in the mind of man, are an almost unex- 
 plored field for most of us, at least in the sphere of 
 Church polity. 
 
 It is true that of recent years there has been a be- 
 ginning made in the scientific exploration and classifi- 
 cation of the facts of rehgious experience. James's 
 Varieties of Religious Experience stands out here. 
 But it is noteworthy that his study was of abnormal 
 types, and not of the everyday facts of the Christian 
 life. A good deal of work in this direction has since 
 been done ; " psychology " becomes almost a shib- 
 boleth in writings on religious instruction. But the 
 Church as a body, as an organized whole, is still un- 
 moved. Her system and methods are not yet revised 
 in accordance with our growing knowledge of the facts 
 of love.^ 
 
 1 Leadership. Bishop Brent. P. 258. 
 
 2 In this connection it seems worth noting that no adequate 
 work seems yet to have been done in the field of social psy- 
 chology, properly so called ; i.e., in the study of the facts of 
 corporate life. Some of us at least have for years been looking 
 in vain for such books. The writings of Le Bon on " the 
 Crowd ' ' are too superficial to satisfy any who see in human 
 society more than a crowd of individuals. McDougall's Social 
 Psychology, in spite of its title, is still a study of individual 
 life, in its social bearing indeed, but not of the corporate life 
 of society. The Church still holds the secret of corporate 
 
74 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Let us indeed recognize that a science of psychology 
 in any complete sense may be an impossibility. Modern 
 philosophy and science will both lend support to the 
 protest of religion against reducing the facts of life 
 to the action of predetermined law. We are not mere 
 examples of general principles. Individual initiative is 
 conceded to beings much lower than man. " No 
 mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common 
 house-fly," says Sir Oliver Lodge. ^ 
 
 Nevertheless these are facts of life, and it is possible 
 to review them impartially and arrange them systema- 
 tically. This has been the proper work of the Church 
 from the first. . The law of forgiveness as declared in 
 the words of absolution is a case in point : " He pardon- 
 eth and absolveth all them that truly repent and un~ 
 feignedly believe." There is therefore a fair field for 
 religious psychology : a field in which the Fathers 
 worked : a field now white unto harvest. 
 
 And there is a worker in this field, Baron von Hiigel, 
 whose work is of inestimable value for the solution 
 of the present difficulty about the re-union of Christen- 
 dom : the difiiculty of combining loyalty to the past 
 with freedom in the present. In his monumental 
 work on the Mystical Element in Religion he has helped 
 us to gQ,t deeper into the problem than most of us 
 could get without him. He shows how religion essen- 
 tially consists in three elements : the institutional, the 
 rational and the mystical, corresponding broadly to 
 the predominant instincts and interests of the three 
 stages of human life, childhood, youth and manhood. 
 
 life : to her failure to divulge it is due this blank in our modern 
 outlook. 
 
 1 In Presidential Address to the British Association, 191 3. 
 Quoted in God and the World, by Dr. A. W. Robinson. 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 75 
 
 He speaks of " Sense and Memory, the Child's means 
 of approaching Rehgion " ; " Question and Argument, 
 the Youth's mode of approaching Rehgion " ; and 
 " Intuition, Feehng and Vohtional requirements and 
 evidences, the Mature Man's special approaches to 
 Faith." 1 
 
 Every one in childhood accepts the facts of his own 
 environment and of his own teachers as the facts. Not 
 only his words, but his thoughts and his views, are for 
 the most part taken over wholesale from them into 
 his own inner hfe. He is interested in all the external 
 organization and manners of his home, his school, his 
 church ; these are the facts that hold him. Only 
 later comes the stage of questioning — not the child's 
 superficial "why," but the youth's probing "why." 
 Then things have to justify themselves to his reason ; 
 he must trace their causes and connections. This 
 stage also passes for most of us in adult Hfe ; we pass 
 from argument to action ; we settle into the proved 
 verdicts of experience : we are concerned with effect- 
 ing results rather than with investigating causes. 
 Life now contains many things that cannot be reduced 
 to formulas. 
 
 Though the stages are distinguished, yet the three 
 elements successively predominant are concurrent 
 throughout life. Though one comes to the top, the 
 others are below. Together they constitute our 
 spiritual life. Von Hiigel shows how these three 
 elements go to make up all our mental activity. " At 
 the very source of all our certainty, of the worth attri- 
 butable to the least or greatest of our thoughts and 
 
 1 In The Threefold Strand of Belief (Modern Oxford Tracts : 
 Longmans, 6d. net). Dr. H. Scott Holland gives a clear view 
 of these three elements of religion as analysed by Von Hiigel. 
 
76 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 feelings and acts, we already find the three elements : 
 indubitable sensation, clear thought, warm faith in 
 and through action." 
 
 The value of this kind of scientific analysis of re- 
 ligion is that it enables us to deal with facts instead of 
 prejudices. The fact of supreme importance for our 
 present discussion is that the denominational inherit- 
 ance in which we have been brought up is our inalien- 
 able and ineradicable possession. We are likely to 
 find ourselves fighting against God if we try to break 
 away from it. We look down on God if we look down 
 on others because their inheritance is different from 
 our own. Von Hugel says : " This traditional element 
 not all the religious genius in the world can ever escape 
 or replace : it was there, surrounding and moulding 
 the very pre-natal existence of each one of us ; it will 
 be there long after we have left the scene. We live 
 and die its wise servants and stewards, or its blind 
 slaves, or in futile, impoverishing revolt against it : 
 we never, for good or for evil, really get beyond its 
 reach." ^ 
 
 God would have each of us true to his own past, 
 loyal to the community that has brought him up. 
 
 Modern science has thus brought us face to face 
 with the same facts on a large scale that the early 
 Church faced and obeyed on a small scale. " If God 
 has given them exactly the same gift as He gave us 
 when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was 
 I — how could I try — to thwart God ? " The 
 Church then learned that fellowship was not to be 
 limited to the holders of special Divinely-given privi- 
 leges from the past. The present working of Christ 
 then outweighed all tradition. To-day we are in 
 
 ^ Op. cit., vol. i., p. 59. 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 77 
 
 face of religious facts vaster than any that they could 
 know. Can we equally obey ? Can we similarly 
 allow facts to transcend tradition ? 
 
 Let us try to make this point a Httle clearer : for 
 there is an apparent contradiction. On the one hand 
 we say that the traditional element of religion is 
 ineradicable, an essential part of each man's spiritual 
 life. On the other hand we say that traditions must 
 give way to present facts. The point lies in the dis- 
 tinction between God's tradition and man's tradition ; 
 between what God hands on from generation to genera- 
 tion in fact and life, and what man hands on in word 
 and theory. The latter divides men into disputatious 
 sects ; the former unites men in reverence for the Father 
 of all. For God's traditions are the facts of human hfe, 
 or rather of the Divine life in men, the facts of the one 
 Spirit " dividing to each man severally as He will." 
 
 We are faced with facts : as Christians we should 
 rather say that we are faced with God. The denomi- 
 national grounding is an essential factor of each man's 
 religion, not because this may be proved from the 
 Bible, nor because Church fathers and formularies have 
 so declared, but because the living God does in fact so 
 work in the hves and minds of His children. Mutual 
 recognition thus becomes not an aloof toleration, but 
 a humble and whole-hearted acknowledgment of God. 
 
 come, let us worship and fall down, 
 And kneel before the Lord our Maker. 
 
 1 will give thanks unto Thee, for I am fearfully and wonder- 
 
 fully made. 
 
 The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that 
 have pleasure therein. 
 
 Mutual recognition : the healing of the wounds of the 
 Church : communion : the return of the Church to 
 
78 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 the feet of God : the return of the Bride to Christ : 
 with men it is all impossible, but not with God. Faith- 
 ful is He that called us, who also will do it — if we but 
 yield ourselves to Him. 
 
 Already many who believe in God are giving them- 
 selves to the accomplishment of this end. The pre- 
 parations for the World Conference on Faith and Order 
 have been proceeding steadily since 1910. " It is 
 desired to invite every autonomous Communion which 
 confesses our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour to 
 appoint a Commission to co-operate in arranging for 
 and conducting the World Conference. Fifty-five 
 Commissions have now been appointed, representing 
 almost every part of the world, and numerous invita- 
 tions are pending. Notable letters have been received 
 from Cardinal Gasparri expressing the deep interest of 
 the Pope and himself in the movement and promising 
 their prayers. Two of the leading magazines of the 
 Russian Church have published articles by eminent 
 theologians urging the co-operation of the Russian 
 Church. Similar articles had been published, before 
 the war by Protestant reviews in Germany, Finland, 
 Hungary, Norway and Sweden. . . . The letters 
 received both before and since the outbreak of the 
 war show a wide and increasing interest in the move- 
 ment and a clearer recognition that nothing but the 
 visible unity of the Church which is the Body of Christ 
 will suihce to establish His law of peace " (Leaflet 
 issued October, 1915). 
 
 The existence since 1913 of the Constnictive Quarterly, 
 a Journal of the Faith, Work and Thought of Christen- 
 dom, is another sign of the times. Here leading 
 thinkers of every Church give of their best in con- 
 structive statement of the convictions and experience 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 79 
 
 of their own communion. " The immediate purpose 
 of the Quarterly is to induce a better understanding 
 and a truer sense of fellowship. Its final hope is the 
 unity of the Family of God in the Body of Christ, where 
 the liberty of the children of God will be attained." 
 
 A French Roman Catholic writer in this Quarterly ^ 
 reviews a recent work of Pere Bainvel, a professor in 
 the Catholic Institute of Paris, on Outside the Church 
 no Salvation, which, he declares, exactly reflects the 
 common teaching. All through, in fact, the distin- 
 guished professor incessantly leans upon declarations 
 of the Sovereign Pontiff and the best theologians. 
 The view of this representative Roman Catholic 
 theologian is as follows : " While men necessarily 
 halt at the exterior of things, and can judge only 
 after appearances, the divine sight sees what is : it 
 sees hearts, it sees souls. . . . For God, souls are 
 what they are within, v/hat they are by intimate dis- 
 position and by will. The outward act itself, while 
 counting for much in His eyes, nevertheless counts 
 only through the will and intention which animate it 
 through whatever of heart and of soul is found in it. 
 We understand then that to belong or not belong, by 
 visible ties, by external communion to the Church of 
 Christ is for Him a secondary matter, if we may so 
 express it. The distinction of visible and invisible is 
 valid only in relation to us ; to Him, all is visible." 
 The reviewer continues : " And this is why, in His 
 eyes, they are already in the true Church of Christ, 
 all those souls unknown to us whom circumstances 
 stronger than their will keep_f ar away from the ecclesi- 
 astical body, but who in reahty are joined to it by the 
 
 1 Jean Riviere, Professor in the Grand Seminaire, Albi : 
 Constructive Quarterly, September, 191 4. 
 
8o WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 imperceptible bonds of the heart. Thus may we, 
 with our Fathers in the Faith, repeat the ancient 
 formula: 'Outside the Church no salvation.' For 
 we know that beyond the narrow boundaries of the 
 society which in this world holds Christ's faithful in 
 one group, there stretches the vaster and fairer Church 
 of souls. The contemplation of this unity, which is 
 withheld from our mortal view, will no doubt be one of 
 the joys of the heavenly Fatherland. Meanwhile we 
 can only hasten by our prayers and our exertions the 
 day when that ' building of Christ's Body ' shall be 
 accomplished in which we shall all meet each other 
 again ' in one and the same faith and in the knowledge 
 of the Son of God,' where ' there shall be but one flock 
 and one Shepherd.' " 
 
 " Underlying all our disunions," writes a Congre- 
 gational Professor of Theology,^ " there is not only a 
 common Christian experience which is basal and 
 binding, but also a body of common conviction, a 
 vital doctrinal consensus far richer than has ever been 
 recognized. The Church at large has been bhnd to its 
 own unity. We have not seen the forest because of 
 the trees, and the groves. The Church has failed to 
 realize that underneath all its doctrinal outgrowths, 
 feeding the roots even of its tangles and underbrush, 
 is the inexhaustible soil of a common vital spiritual 
 experience, out of which have grown certain great 
 essential convictions which, the more firmly and vitally 
 they are reaHzed, the more surely will they draw us 
 toward one another." 
 
 Mutual recognition is the keynote of all this new 
 
 1 John Wright Buckham, D.D., Professor of Christian 
 Theology in the Pacific Theological Seminary. Constructive 
 Quarterly, December, 191 5, p. 824. 
 
VALIDITY OF SECTIONAL EXPERIENCE 8i 
 
 movement in the Churches, a movement which is 
 thus seen to be vitally connected with the whole 
 course of progress of modern thought and life, in 
 that it takes facts as facts and honours them as such. 
 The Student Christian Movement is probably the most 
 notable and potent embodiment of the ideal. The 
 ideal of a dead uniformity is in itself nearly dead. The 
 ideal of unity in diversity is what we are all after : 
 only we still fail to arrive. 
 
 The present position of Christendom would be 
 ridiculous if it were not so tragic. We have ceased to 
 persecute one another. We read each other's books, 
 and draw mental and spiritual Hght and strength 
 from teachers of other denominations. We even 
 actively co-operate in some few moral and social 
 enterprises. In short, we know that we are fellow- 
 Christians. 
 
 But the official Church — the Church as organized — 
 cannot move : she is paralysed. In every proposal 
 for conference or joint action there is the proviso that 
 of course the several Churches are not committed to 
 anything that may be done or decided. We unite in 
 everything except the distinctive practices of our 
 rehgion. Our Church systems make it seem that the 
 nearer we get to Christ the further we get from one 
 another. Which is absurd. 
 
 The children are come to the birth and there is not 
 strength to bring them forth. 
 
 " Weep, dear Lord, above Thy bride low-lying ; 
 Thy tears shall wake her frozen limbs to life and health 
 again." 
 
 In spite of all we know, the official Church remains 
 powerless to move — until she comes under the direct 
 control of Christ. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE WAY 
 
 ' T AM the Way/' 
 
 -L We know Him as the Way for ourselves as 
 individuals. But we have not yet recognized Him as 
 the Way for human society. Human society has lost 
 its way ; we do not know where we are going. Society 
 has been compared to a rider on a runaway horse, 
 named Civilization ; we are all inordinately proud 
 of the strength of our steed, and of his ever-increasing 
 speed. But what is the good of speed if it has no 
 goal, and if all peace is lost in the progress ? 
 
 But the "Hound of Heaven " pursues mankind no 
 less than He pursues the individual : 
 
 Nigh and nigh draws the chase, 
 
 With unperturbed pace, 
 
 Dehberate speed, majestic instancy. 
 
 And past those noised Feet 
 
 A Voice comes yet more fleet — 
 
 " Lo ! naught contents thee, who content 'st not Me." 
 
 And so at last we begin to understand that our 
 trouble is God's trouble, and our pain His. May we 
 stop and think. 
 
 The root of the trouble is that the Church herself has 
 lost the way, and therefore cannot lead mankind. 
 Even at the oncoming of war she was speechless, she 
 who is or was the Body of the Prince of Peace. 
 
 82 
 
THE WAY 83 
 
 Christ is the Way : only He can bring us to God ; 
 only He can bring Christendom into Hne with God. 
 And He can do so only as Christendom recognizes 
 Him and yields to Him : recognizes Him in God ; in 
 every one as that which links or would link us together, 
 taking us out of the little self into the larger self. 
 
 The Church has lost the way because she has for- 
 gotten how to grow up. For the way is the Way of 
 Life ; and hfe involves growth. At the beginning she 
 attained to a complete hfe, the records of which must 
 remain a pattern and inspiration for us in our feeble 
 second childhood of religion. She started growing up 
 in all things unto Him, which is the Head, even Christ. 
 But now her tragedy is arrested growth : she has 
 stuck : she cannot get there. The world looks wonder- 
 ingly at her vast powers, cabined and confined. 
 
 Now this arrest of growth in religion is a pheno- 
 menon whose causes and effects have become fairly 
 obvious. What has happened ? The Church began 
 with Christ. Men found in Him the fulfilment of past 
 ideals, the attainment of present reality, the assurance 
 of a complete future. But the Present was the dominant 
 factor in their consciousness — the present Christ, Who 
 never failed them. This is the essential mystical 
 element of adult rehgion. So long as the Church 
 retained the sense of Christ's presence and remained 
 under His direct control, she knit in one rich life all 
 those elements of religion which at other times have 
 been sundered — the corporate loyalty, the intellectual 
 vigour, the devotion of personal faith. Later, the 
 Past eclipsed the Present. Christians ceased to 
 cohere in Christ. Institutionalism prevailed, with 
 rationalism ranged against it as hereditary foe. 
 
 This eclipse of the present is what always happens 
 
84 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 if we lose or think we have lost our leader or lover. 
 In the present blank we treasure the old words and 
 chng to the old ways of doing things ; the past is 
 sacred ; innovation is apt to look like sacrilege. 
 
 Christ founded the Church to save us from this 
 pathetic malady. For understanding of this malady, 
 this arrest of growth, we again draw help from Von 
 Hiigel's analysis of religion into the three elements : 
 institutional, rational, mystical. The corporate 
 Church no less than the individual Christian needs the 
 co-ordination of all three religious forces. In Church 
 history, as in individual life, the three elements of 
 religion are present throughout ; but only in the full- 
 grown life are they properly co-ordinated. Except 
 in the golden Apostolic Age we are apt to find each of 
 them dominant at different stages of Church history : 
 religion becomes one-sided, either as traditional, or as 
 rationalist, or as subjective. The primary stage, 
 corresponding to childhood of the individual, is that 
 in which the Christian community goes on happily in 
 entire satisfaction with its own ideas and its own 
 methods and its own plans. It is intensely conserva- 
 tive, attaching Divine sanction to all it has inherited 
 from the past. This is the stage of keen denominational 
 life, in which the interests of the denomination are 
 supreme, and its ordinances are regarded as of uni- 
 versal obhgation. Throughout Christendom we are 
 all famihar with these phenomena, and with this 
 experience ; with making such claim ourselves, and 
 resenting it when made by others. This institutional 
 element of religion is more particularly characteristic 
 of Church officials and Church councils. We are 
 aware of its action in ourselves in those capacities : 
 there too often we are other men than when we kneel 
 
THE WAY 85 
 
 alone with God, other men than we are in ordinary 
 intercourse with our friends. It causes the character- 
 istic weakness of episcopacy, which but for this lop- 
 sidedness might well be recognized by all as part of 
 the Divine plan for Church order. A religion that 
 makes a particular tradition determinative of its 
 action prejudices to the modern mind its claim to 
 Divine sanction. For to modern men as to the first 
 Christians what is primary in religion is not the Then 
 and There but the Now and Here of God's relation 
 to men. 
 
 The secondary stage of Church life is that of intel- 
 lectual and critical activity. This too is conspicuous 
 in these days. ^ It is essentially individualist — each 
 man following the truth whithersoever it seems to 
 lead him : yet it becomes characteristic of a society 
 of individualists (for they cannot be purely indivi- 
 dualist). So we have that mass of theological criticism 
 and speculation which owns no allegiance to the organ- 
 ized Christian community and cuts itself off from the 
 traditions and authority of past thought. The Church 
 thus seems for some time past to have been held up 
 at the crisis which Von Hiigel well describes as it 
 occurs in the individual life : " The transition from the 
 child's rehgion, so simply naive and unconscious, so 
 tied to time and place and particular persons and 
 things, so predominantly traditional and historical, 
 institutional and external, to the right and normal 
 type of a young man's religion, is as necessary as it is 
 perilous. The transition is necessary. For all the 
 rest of him is growing — body and soul are growing in 
 clamorous complexity in every direction : how then 
 
 ^ Cf. above, chap. IV. 
 
86 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 can the deepest part of his nature, his religion, not 
 require to grow and develop also ? " (Von Hiigel asks 
 this question as to the individual youth : we can ask it 
 likewise as regards Christian society), " and how can 
 it permeate and purify all the rest, how can it remain 
 and increasingly become ' the secret source of all his 
 seeing, ' of his productiveness and courage and unifica- 
 tion, unless it continually equals and exceeds all other 
 interests within the living man " (or society) " by its 
 own persistent vitality, its rich and infinite variety, 
 its subtle, ever-fresh attraction and inexhaustible 
 resourcefulness and power ? But the crisis is peri- 
 lous. For he will be greatly tempted either to cHng 
 exclusively to his existing, all but simply institu- 
 tional, external position, and to fight and elude all 
 approaches to its reasoned, intellectual apprehension 
 and systematization ; and in this case his religion 
 will tend to contract and shrivel up, and to become a 
 something simply alongside of other things in his life. 
 Or he will feel strongly pressed to let the individual 
 intellect simply supplant the institutional, in which 
 case his religion will grow hard and shallow, and will 
 tend to disappear altogether." ^ 
 
 Look at Christendom to-day. Is not its condition 
 correctly diagnosed in the passage thus quoted ? Has 
 not religion become " a something simply alongside 
 of other things in our life " ? Or over large tracts of 
 " enlightened " society does it not " tend to disappear 
 altogether " ? It v/as an immature Church that had to 
 face the oncoming of war : as a wondering child, or 
 an argumentative youth, not the man full-grown in 
 the stature of Christ. 
 
 1 Vol. i., pp. 5-1, 55. 
 
THE WAY 87 
 
 Christendom indeed is not merely the scene of 
 conflict between institutionalism and rationahsm, or 
 of isolated development of one or the other of these 
 elements. It contains much more than the assertive 
 simplicity of childhood, or the crises and conflicts 
 and dogmatism of youth ; it contains the religion of 
 mature life. Everywhere are those who through the 
 institution and through the reasoning have followed 
 on to know the Lord. " Here religion is rather felt 
 than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather 
 than analysed, is action and power, rather than either 
 external fact or intellectual verification." 
 
 But it is individuals of Christendom that have 
 reached this adult religion, not Christendom as an 
 organized whole, not the Church or Churches as such. 
 Christendom is full of grown-up Christians, but itself 
 fails to grow up. This is the deepest tragedy of the 
 present war. Christian men in all these nations 
 through the very passion of their loyalty, through the 
 utterness of their self-surrender, are ranged against 
 one another. Because they are willing to die, they 
 are obliged to kill. Because they are devoted to 
 truth and honour, they are involved in breaches of the 
 fundamental rules of even schoolboy honour. The 
 horror of it all is voiced by writer after writer from 
 the trenches, wilHng to go on in absolute self-sacrifice, 
 but loathing the whole thing utterly. 
 
 Here again we are up against the contrast between 
 personal religion and the corporate expression of it. 
 Christianity as the religion of loyalty produces loyal 
 men : but the Church has not shown them clearly 
 what loyalty really is : and therefore loyalty, instead 
 of uniting, divides. For in every part of human life, 
 so long as we are content with superficial views, we 
 
88 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 find ourselves mutually opposed ; when we get to the 
 deep views, we find ourselves at one. We attain to 
 unity in diversity. 
 
 Loyalty in every land is a spiritual force attaching 
 itself to material objects. We need but call to mind 
 what the national flag means to us. The flag is a 
 focus of all that attachment to the things of home and 
 country. But behind the things lies the hfe that they 
 embody and express, it is to that larger life that 
 loyalty devotes our individual lesser lives. Many hold 
 that loyalty attaches ultimately to the nation or the 
 State. But we must remember that it takes other 
 forms than that of patriotism. Before the war, 
 parties and classes were taking the place of the nation, 
 and men and women were throwing themselves into 
 those narrower causes with hardly less devotion than 
 they now give to the national cause. Many of us will 
 remember our early loyalties to School or House, and 
 our inabihty to feel that any rival attachment could 
 be as good and real as ours. Loyalty, then, is an 
 ultimate factor of our spiritual life — ^spiritual as tran- 
 scending time and space. It belongs to the first of 
 those three essential elements of religion, the institu- 
 tional, the rational and the mystical. It binds us 
 corporately to our institutions. But we must acknow- 
 ledge that though an ultimate factor of religion it 
 is not ultimate in its ordinary forms, as attached to 
 this or that object, though at the time we think (or 
 rather feel) that it is. There are many excellent 
 instances of party transference, of religious transfer- 
 ence, of naturalization. The man brought up in 
 loyalty to one community Hves later as a loyal member 
 of another. This is to say that no State, no party, no 
 Church, as standing in distinction or opposition to 
 
THE WAY 89 
 
 another, has the ultimate claim to man's allegiance.^ 
 Only Christ has that. Christ alone is the absolute 
 society. No other is catholic. The tragedy of Chris- 
 tians in this war is therefore due to the Church's over- 
 emphasis on the institutional side of religion : she has 
 given men loyalty, but has not given them the present 
 Christ to claim that loyalty. The Church has hitherto 
 failed to present Christ as the ultimate Corporate 
 Personahty, to hold together all His members for ever. 
 So we come back to the point that corporate religion 
 is incomplete, inadequate to human Ufe and need, if 
 either the institutional or the rational element is 
 allowed to be domnnant. Through the institution and 
 through the reasoning the Church too, Hke the in- 
 dividual, must follow on to know the Lord. She 
 cannot attain to full-grown life unless the mystical 
 element is dominant : not exclusive, but inclusive 
 of the other two elements of reHgion. This does not 
 mean that individual " mystics " must be called upon 
 to govern : it means that the whole body must be 
 mystical. There is no question here of subjective 
 mysticism, "laying such an emphasis on the relation 
 of the individual soul to God as to obscure its relation 
 to men and to nature." We are deahng with the 
 development of corporate rehgion, claiming that in 
 the Church the Presence of Christ must be recognized 
 and acknowledged as determinative of action and of 
 thought (not merely of religious emotion). The 
 present state of Church life would seem to imply that 
 He is an absentee, or else lacking in wisdom, or prac- 
 tical abihty, or adaptability to new needs and great 
 crises. Such seems to be our unconscious assumption 
 when we allow either the institutional or the rational 
 1 So Edith Cavell has shown us. " Patriotism is not enough." 
 
90 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 element of religion to dominate the whole : as though 
 Christ were something in the past, or something to be 
 reasoned about, and not the present Lord of all our 
 life. 
 
 For this question of the three elements of rehgion is 
 really the question of the Divinity of Christ. Mysticism 
 is the recognition of the Person of Christ, the acknow- 
 ledgment of His Presence as God : for God is He 
 Who cannot be absent unless I put Him from me. The 
 institutional and the rational elements of religion 
 are therefore failures if they are not crowned by the 
 mystical, for they just stop short of Christ. Institu- 
 tionalism grounds us in good habits ; rationaHsm gives 
 us clear thought and intelligent grasp of our situation ; 
 but it is mysticism that launches us out for service, 
 in all the activities of Love. Neither habits nor 
 thoughts make up a full life ; Love alone does that. 
 Worshippers of Christ are worshippers of Love. Ser- 
 vants of Christ are servants of Love. To look back 
 on the course of our discussion to this point, we recall 
 Christ's promise to be with us for ever ; we remember 
 the New Testament experience of Him, creating new 
 men and building them up into one Body in Love, 
 which is Himself ; for they found Him by giving 
 themselves up to Love ; and we realize that through 
 the Christian centuries the real life of the Church has 
 been the knowledge of Christ in God, which is the 
 knowledge of Love in God. All this means that Love 
 is alive and intelligent and capable : not a mere emo- 
 tion, but the Hfe and intelligence and capacity of the 
 eternal God : not my or your caprice, but the rational 
 principle and constant power of the universe : claim- 
 ing our trust. 
 
 Now as being myself an Anglican, I feel called upon 
 
THE WAY 91 
 
 to realize that the Anghcan Communion is to a pecu- 
 liar degree dominated by institutionalism, and thereby 
 restrained from the full life of faith. ^ In our relations 
 with other Christians our constant claim is that we 
 are in the true Hue of succession from the past. Ours 
 is " the ■ historical faith." The " Lambeth Quadri- 
 lateral," defining the points essential to the Anglican 
 Communion in any projects of reunion, is a statement 
 of the great things from the past which we must not 
 let go (Orders, Sacraments, Scriptures, Creeds). In 
 our practical ministry we are dominated by this con- 
 ception of a historic institution of whose inherited 
 treasures we are the responsible stewards. We are 
 apt to treat the Prayer Book as among the ultimate 
 data of religion. From it we take God's message for 
 the day ; on it we base complete schemes of religious 
 instruction. Cur controversies are not about^ the 
 meaning and methods of love, but about our tradi- 
 tions of doctrines and ceremonies. For the sake of 
 these we lapse from love. 
 
 Responsibility for the present failure of Christen- 
 dom lies with all of us who hold executive or doctrinal 
 authority in this or other branches of the Church. 
 We are responsible for the fact that in actual practice, 
 in contrast with her ideal character, the Church so 
 largely reflects the minds of men and not the mind 
 of Christ. Whoever may have been responsible in the 
 past, it is we who are responsible to-day — v/e who till 
 
 1 " Fundamentally our religion consists in preserving a 
 tradition," writes Dr. Headlam, and that in an article admir- 
 ably bringing out the need of " a revived intellectual life, 
 which will mean the application of thought to everything 
 instead of acquiescence in unmeaning custom or bad tradi- 
 tions." Church Quarterly Review, October, 1916 : "Where 
 does the Defect of the Church Lie ? " 
 
92 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 now have accepted the situation and smugly hved our 
 Hves and exercised our ministry within its set con- 
 ditions. We who stand professionally for the tradi- 
 tional doctrines and ceremonies are responsible for 
 the Church's one-sided development, for her failure 
 to attain the full stature. If Christ at the outset 
 willed us to be perfect, have not we. His representa- 
 tives, set at naught His commandment by our tradi- 
 tion — that is, by our over-emphasis on the tradition 
 as tradition, as linking us to a past rather than to 
 the present ? Lop-sidedness is not perfection. 
 
 The unfairness of our ministry may in some respects 
 have struck us. For why should our professions and 
 employments be held sacred, and those of laymen be 
 set down as secular ? Why should we have much 
 more constant access to means of grace than others 
 can have ? ^ But one particular unfairness is apt 
 to escape our attention. In the ministry of con- 
 version we call on men and women to break the habits 
 of a hfetime, and to cast themselves in Christ's inimit- 
 able power to re-create them : and we know that they 
 and He can do it. But we do not often think of 
 making such a plunge ourselves : we do not contem- 
 plate a revolution in our own personal habits or modes 
 of speech and thought. We have stamped these as 
 sacred. Such heroism of self-surrender to the hving 
 Christ, of self-committal to the untrod Way, we only 
 expect of comparative beginners. As for ourselves, 
 we have settled down — settled to our own concep- 
 tions of religion, to our regular enjoyment of what 
 appeals to us. 
 
 1 Cf. Ezekiel xxxiv. We may disclaim the intention but 
 we can hardly deny the fact of this broad distinction between 
 clerical and lay life. 
 
THE WAY 93 
 
 Christ did not say " Stand with Me," but *' Follow 
 Me," and His call to every generation is the same — 
 the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. He is nearer 
 to us, not farther, than He was to those fishermen 
 in Galilee ; but we seem slower to forsake our boats 
 and nets than they were. He means us through His 
 all-embracing, all-reconcihng presence to do greater 
 works than ever He did as an individual there — not 
 to spend our time and energy in arguing about those 
 less great works of His, whether and how they were 
 ever done. 
 
 We know how to trust Him with the part — our own 
 personal life : why do we not trust Him with the whole ? 
 If I know Him adequate for myself, why do I count 
 Him inadequate for the persons and causes for which 
 I am responsible ? Why do we stake all on the main- 
 tenance of a tradition or the victory of a part3L? 
 
 As the Church's commissioned officials we feel 
 responsible for the Church's heritage, and are disposed 
 to take its maintenance into our own hands. Some 
 insist that all must walk in the old ways ; others insist 
 that the memory of old persecutions must be kept 
 fresh : seemingly ignorant of the Life that is always 
 moving on, so that no to-day is the same as yesterday, 
 save only as linked up in Him Who is the Life of all. 
 Our fatal vice is this anxiety about our inheritance ; 
 in other words, our want of faith. Our very faith- 
 fulness is faithless. 
 
 We need not be so anxious about our inheritance, 
 and if we need not, we ought not. For we really can 
 safely leave it to God, to the nature with which He has 
 endowed us all. We have already seen that denomina- 
 tional self-assertion is uncalled-for, because the de- 
 nominational inheritance is an ineradicable part of 
 
94 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 our spiritual make-up. And we have the present 
 facts of patriotism : in every land we are in the grip 
 of this mighty force ; we need not anxiously grip it. 
 An illustration of these latent forces in modern man 
 is presented by the glorious efficiency of British 
 soldiers, men from offices and factories and fields, who 
 were supposed to be unfitted for war because never 
 trained to it, but have been found in a few months 
 equal to the best. There are mighty forces in us all 
 which the Church has not yet mobilized. 
 
 It is not for us to be anxious about preserving these 
 forces of our human nature. But it is for us to under- 
 stand and control them. We can only rise above 
 facts, and use them, by understanding them. Let us 
 therefore understand our own and others' loyalty. 
 
 Understand it ; i.e. understand Him. ** / am the 
 Way.", That which seems an impersonal force, mov- 
 ing us all on resistlessly, welding us together in our 
 corporate loyalties, is He, after all. To agree in 
 acknowledging this would be to rise to adult religion, 
 to bring the Church into line with God, into line with 
 the experience of us all. 
 
 To this end we clergy and ministers must repent and 
 alter. We must truly lead the way. The future is 
 in our hands. 
 
 We are not asked to disown our own convictions and 
 experiences of grace ; but mutually to own the con- 
 victions and experiences of others. For example, I 
 for my part shall ever treasure as most sacred the 
 times when I prepared boys for baptism, and the 
 Ember-tide retreats of candidates for ordination : 
 together with the constant sacramental grace which 
 I share with all my fellow-communicants. Such 
 solemn times afforded by the institutions of the 
 
THE WAY 95 
 
 Church have brought us right inside the workings of 
 God. There can be no disillusionment about them. 
 But we want to go on to proclaim that there is no place 
 for any disillusionments in Christianity. 
 
 Jesus lives. Our hearts know well 
 Naught from us His love can sever. 
 
 Really we all have this faith, expressed in words and 
 forms that we love, if we will but use it. ^ 
 
 There is no question of giving up the forms endeared 
 to us by long experience. Mysticism does not mean 
 scrapping our institutions. The mystical element 
 must include those other elements which we now allow 
 to dominate our religion ; but it must now dominate 
 them. There must of necessity be estabHshed forms 
 and ceremonies (a) for the sake of children in years, 
 {b) for the sake of children in the faith, (c) for the 
 sake of us all : for to the end of our days we all need 
 outward order and system if we are to have stability 
 of inward life, and if we are to have social cohesion in 
 a common loyalty, and if we are to build in ordered 
 progress on the past. (And we have already noted 
 that we cannot eliminate this institutional element 
 even if we would.) Also there will be perpetual need 
 for intellectual vigour and candour, the unfettered 
 use of all our mental powers, in the cause of truth and 
 honesty. But above all and in all and through all 
 there must be direct acknowledgment of Christ present 
 in our God. 
 
 The doctrine of Christ's Divinity is the pecuUar 
 boast of Christendom ; that it applies to all life is a 
 famihar truth, famihar as a theory or an ideal : it is 
 the complete practice of it that seems so hard to arrive 
 
 1 Cf. Swete, The Ascended Christ, pp. 162, 163. 
 
96 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 at. Yet, maybe, it will not prove so hard if we really 
 turn to Him for that application to all Hfe. To do so, 
 we must of necessity rise above our old institutional 
 ruts : not necessarily to leave them, but at least to see 
 that they are ruts, and not the whole road. Institu- 
 tionalism means being inside the institution ; ration- 
 ahsm means rising above it to view it from outside 
 and in relation to other institutions ; mysticism means 
 recognizing God present and working in it and in them 
 and in yourself who thus view His processes. Now 
 though the institutional aspect of Anghcanism is what 
 seems to loom largest before the world, it is not really 
 the most important aspect. If we re-focus our view 
 of religious facts, we may see that a far bigger thing 
 in Anglicanism than the historical elements defined 
 in the Lambeth Quadrilateral is the essential character 
 of the Church as declared in the Encyclical Letter of 
 the Lambeth Conference of 1908. It is the character 
 of Service. " How the Church, in the Name of 
 Him to whom all men are dear, may best serve for 
 the true welfare and happiness of all^ — this, through 
 all the diversity of detail, has been the constant theme 
 of our study and discussion. ... At the heart of 
 that conception of the Church which Christ our Lord 
 has taught us is the thought of Service. For He came, 
 ' not to be ministered unto, but to minister/ and a 
 Church is set to portray and represent Him amongst 
 men ; to keep the vision of Him, of His work, His 
 ways, before the eyes of men. Therefore the Church 
 must take for its own this central note of His purpose 
 and His mission ; the Church will be true to its calUng 
 in proportion as it can say to the world, by word and 
 deed, by what it refuses and by what it claims : * I 
 come, not to be ministered unto, but to minister ' ; 
 
THE WAY 97 
 
 and it must be feared that the Church's forgetfulness 
 of this, its obscuring or effacing of this central charac- 
 teristic, has at times disastrously hindered the world 
 from recognizing the true nature and office of the 
 Church. The power to witness to Christ depends on 
 being like Him. Men will always learn of Christ 
 from those whom they see living with Christlike sim- 
 pHcity for their sake." ^ And as to our connection 
 with the past, this Encyclical of our Bishops states 
 that " we realize that the links which bind us to that 
 historic past are not fetters upon the free and enter- 
 prising spirit which is essential to progress. We be- 
 long to a Church which ... is the Church of free men, 
 educating them into a knowledge of the liberty where- 
 with Christ hath made them free." " We must set 
 before us the Church of Christ as He would have it, 
 one spirit and one body, enriched with all those ele- 
 ments of divine truth which the separated communities 
 of Christians now emphasize severally, strengthened 
 by the interaction of all the gifts and graces which our 
 divisions now hold asunder, filled with all the fulness 
 of God. W^e dare not, in the name of peace, barter 
 away those precious things of which we have been 
 made stewards. Neither can we wish others to be 
 unfaithful to trusts which they hold no less sacred. 
 We must fix our eyes on the Church of the future, 
 which is to be adorned with all the precious things, 
 both theirs and ours. We must constantly desire 
 not compromise but comprehension, not uniformity 
 but unity." 
 
 Such was the vision of our two hundred and forty- 
 two Bishops in 1908. But AngHcanism remains out- 
 
 * Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Comniimion, 1908 
 (S.P.C.K.), pp. 23, 24. 
 
^8 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 wardly as before, tied up in institutionalism. Our 
 leaders \vould lead us out into the Way of God, but 
 they have not been able. We are all alike : when we 
 meet in the presence of God, Christ shows us the Way ; 
 but then we disperse and relapse into hugging our own 
 inheritance. 
 
 The great usurpation continues to displace Christ 
 from His rightful sovereignty in the Church. We are 
 the usurpers, so long as we conduct the affairs of the 
 Church according to our own stereotyped ideas, and 
 refuse to give ourselves up to Love. We are usurpers 
 if we behave as present representatives of an absent 
 Christ. Personal repentance of us all is the only way 
 out. We have to apply to our official Hfe the practice of 
 our private devotion. " We have erred and strayed 
 from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too 
 much the devices and desires of our own hearts." 
 
 " O Love, I give myself to Thee 
 Thine ever, only Thine to be." 
 
 Then God can work, and will work, as He is working 
 already when and where we allovv^ Him. Call to wit- 
 ness ail those who have experience of the corporate 
 vitahty and efhcacy of such conferences as the Pan- 
 Anglican, or those held at Swanwick. " There was no 
 faintness of heart in facing great questions, and no 
 narrowness of mind in deahng with them. The 
 genuine wish to work together swept away all thoughts 
 of partizanship, and brought instead the reality of 
 mutual understanding. Minds and hearts were lifted 
 up on high, and as from the Mount of God men saw 
 visions of Service." This testimony of the Lambeth 
 Encyclical Letter to the experience of the Pan-Angli- 
 can Congress voices the experience of multitudes of 
 
THE WAY 99 
 
 us, at that and at other conferences. What is often 
 spoken of as the " atmosphere " of the Edinburgh 
 Missionary Conference, or of Swanwick, or of many 
 Student Movement Conferences, is an experience of this 
 mighty power of God in Christ, and a revelation of the 
 Way for us to walk in. For there men and women 
 meeting are brought into a unity that they had not 
 dreamt of. There the biggest problems are tackled, 
 and the Way begins to open out through the political 
 or ecclesiastical tangles which have held us up. In all 
 such experiences we need to get beyond the thought 
 of the atmosphere to the thought of Christ, from the 
 impersonal to the personal. For it is He. We are 
 not merely enjoying an atmosphere which we create 
 by warmth of numbers. He is the New Creator, not 
 we. We are out on the hill-tops, breathing the fresh 
 breezes of heaven. We plunge into the fresh springs 
 of the water of life. It is not a matter of our numbers. 
 Throughout Christendom, countless experiences of the 
 " two or three " prove the truth of Christ. He is the 
 Way, when men will meet. That it is He and not we 
 is being realized most vividly and most completely 
 in the Fellowships of Silence, where through union in 
 silence before God people are led into a unity of life 
 transcending any they could attain by their own 
 efforts. ^ We leave the strife of tongues and find that 
 in His Will is our peace : '' to them that beheve, both 
 Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the 
 wisdom of God." 
 
 For Christ is at work among us, and not only " here " 
 or " there." He is in God, and therefore in the world ; 
 not hmited to this or that Church ; not limited to 
 
 ^ Cf. The Fellowship of Silence ; also Fruits of Silence, 
 by Cyril Hepher. 
 
lOO WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 ecclesiatical organizations. He is working in men as 
 men, in all the nations, preparing them for allegiance 
 to His Kingdom. We are finding that conference 
 works better than conflict. In our own country in 
 particular we can already note " the rapid growth of 
 reasonable methods in politics. More and more 
 questions are settled by general agreement and with- 
 out the mihtary pomp of a full-dress debate." " Pro- 
 gress is in theory, and has been in fact, the steady 
 development of the principle of co-operation and 
 fellowship as compared with that of competition and 
 antagonism. The acceptance of Majority-rule, as if 
 the will of the majority were the will of all, is a step 
 in that direction ; but still more important and sig- 
 nificant is the gradual substitution of settlement by 
 discussion in committees for the official party-combats 
 in the House of Commons. Throughout the industrial 
 and commercial world the same tendenc}/ is observable. 
 If our labour disputes are nowadays more serious than 
 in the past, it is precisely because both labour and 
 capital are becoming more co-operative and less com- 
 petitive in themselves." ^ 
 
 So Christ is working His purpose out. And if we 
 further look out upon the British Empire and con- 
 
 1 W. Temple on "The Nature of Government," in Some 
 Aspects of the Woman's Movement, pp. 153, 154 (Student 
 Christian Movement, 1915). To any persons still prepossessed 
 by the idea of party government, a study of recent politics in 
 China may be commended. In this Republic the imitation 
 of our Western party system ruined the first attempt at parlia- 
 mentary government and now almost stultifies the second. 
 That which absorbs the attention and efforts of politicians 
 i^ the formation and conflicts of parties, while great social and 
 economic miseries of the people go unregarded. Is it the 
 real England that is thus being followed ? Is this what 
 England's political development means to the world ? 
 
THE WAY loi 
 
 sider, as in these days we must needs consider, what it 
 is for, we may dare to find here too that Christ is 
 working out His original purposes. " Our Empire 
 rests on hberty ; but this is also the root principle, on 
 the human side, of that Kingdom which Christ came to 
 proclaim and found. At the beginning of His Minis- 
 try our Lord repudiated the only ways that there are 
 of controlling men's conduct otherwise than by secur- 
 ing the free allegiance of their hearts and wills. He 
 would not use His power for the satisfaction of creature 
 comforts ; He would not force men into His obedi- 
 ence ; and He would not overpower their wills with 
 irresistible evidence. He would not, that is to say, 
 either bribe them or coerce them, or convince them 
 against their will. But He would live before men 
 the life of Perfect Love and die before them a death of 
 Perfect Love, so drawing them to Himself. In other 
 words. His Kingdom on its human side rests on free- 
 dom. There is, then, a real affinity in root principle 
 between what we call the British Empire and the 
 Kingdom of God itself. Our Empire has many great 
 and glaring faults which need to be purged away, 
 but it is the first great world structure which has 
 rested on this spiritual foundation. It is ready, as 
 no other Empire has been, for the consecrating touch." ^ 
 The process of the British Empire (may we not say, 
 the process which is the British Empire) is that of the 
 larger Will to which the latter wills submit while they 
 contribute. It is this process which gives us " the 
 problem of the Commonwealth." " Our British pro- 
 blem is a bigger, more compUcated one than any the 
 Caesars had to deal with, for the ideal that animates 
 
 ^ The Call of the Kingdom, by W. Temple (National 
 Mission Pamphlets, A). 
 
102 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 and justifies our Imperialism is that of progressive 
 self-government. ' ' 
 
 These problems, whether of Church or of State, are 
 the problems of human relationship. What is hap- 
 pening in this modern world of ours is the discovery 
 that we are members of a larger entity, that our life 
 is but part of a larger life. We have not yet quite 
 found out what that Whole is to which we belong, but 
 we shall soon find out that it is Christ — He whose 
 service is perfect freedom, He in Whom we all are one. 
 If I speak specially of the British Empire, it is not to 
 Hmit Christ thereto, but because it is my part as an 
 EngUshman to understand my own national hfe. 
 Others will know of Christ's working in their national 
 Hfe towards the same end. 
 
 " The Lord has opened the windows of Heaven, and 
 has poured out the Spirit of fellowship upon us. And 
 that Spirit is amongst us, patiently waiting until we 
 have tried all other means, and are v/ilHng to cast 
 ourselves upon His help. When we are ready to do 
 this we shall discover that He can work in ways that 
 are beyond our present comprehension. It will be 
 the next Church movement. The call is to go forward. 
 We may be certain that a special reward awaits those 
 who have the faith and the daring to obey. ' ' ^ 
 
 This will be to bring the Church into line with the 
 great world forces which are the mighty working of 
 God ; it will be to bring those forces into the Church. 
 It has been well said that the problem before us is not 
 that of free Churches in a free State, but of free States 
 in a free Church. ^ " By its light will the nations walk ; 
 
 1 Christ and the Church, by A. \Y. Robinson (S.P.C.K., 1915). 
 
 2 Church and Nation, by W. Temple (Macmillan, 191 5), p. 
 
 52. 
 
THE WAY 103 
 
 and into it will the kings of earth bring their glories ; 
 the gates of it will never be shut by day, and night 
 there shall be none." 
 
 When we all make this new plunge into fellowship, 
 the Church will be no congeries of petty groups, for the 
 fellowship is the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, and 
 the new life will be one of participation in the life of 
 God. Our individual plunge will not imperil the 
 catholicity of the Church ; she will at last be true to 
 her character as the Body of Christ, " welded together 
 and compacted by every joint with which it is sup- 
 plied, the due activity of each part enabling the Body to 
 grow and build itself up in love " (Eph. iv. 16). The 
 Church in each place will be the Catholic Church in 
 miniature.^ The Christians in each place will be one 
 Body, knowing that wherever men are gathered in 
 His Name, there is He in the midst of them. Then it 
 will be seen that Church order is the order of love, the 
 order of mutual honour, of honour shown to our con- 
 temporaries, but also to our forefathers and theirs : 
 v/ith a tender respect for all that we have inherited 
 from them, seeing that they with us are alive in Christ. 
 The facts of the actual situation in every place must be 
 determinative of action, because we recognize facts as 
 God's acts ; and because the whole modus operandi 
 of love is to act on the present facts without restraint 
 of prejudice or fear. This does not mean parochiaHsm, 
 not that type of Congregationalism which has found 
 
 1 See two articles by Rev. Herbert Kelly in The East and 
 the West, April and July, 191 6, on " The Pattern of a Mis- 
 sionary Church" and "The Pattern of the Early Church; 
 the Formation of the Ministry " (S.P.C.K.). Cf. Bishop 
 Walpole, Vital Religion, p. 170, on local variations in forms of 
 worship. 
 
104 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 out its own inadequacy. 1 For all such narrowness 
 rests on blindness to facts, or ignorance of what 
 others are doing or have done, or of our vital depend- 
 ence on others, especially on those who are leaders of 
 thought. 
 
 The Church will thus attain to that unity in diversity 
 Vt^hich is the essence of fellow^ship, as it is the essence 
 of Christ's religion. Then religion will " continually 
 equal and exceed all other interests by its own per- 
 sistent vitality, its rich and infinite variety, its subtle, 
 ever-fresh attraction and inexliaustible resourcefulness 
 and power." ^ 
 
 Thus freed by Christ, because ruled by Him, the 
 Chiirch will give us " the moral alternative for war." 
 " WTien nations come to understand the great Chris- 
 tian adventure, and learn that in pursuing it they will 
 find their own highest life, then war will drop out of 
 the world's hfe just as swords are dropped by men 
 who want to paint, or make music, or tend gardens, or 
 write poerty. It will seem so mean an interruption 
 to Hfe's real business that men will refuse to debase 
 themselves with it. Then, imieed, there will be peace in 
 the smaller sense, but only because the world will be 
 fuU of the noise and the joy of the warfare of God. It 
 is Christ and Christ alone who can offer to men some- 
 thing so great that for the sake of it they will forego 
 the joy of battle." ^ 
 
 The Church will then show that absolute respect 
 for personality which is essential to the character of 
 Christ and is the goal of all self- discipline, the ideal of 
 
 ^ See * ' Congregationalism and its Ideal. ' ' Meredith Davies. 
 Constructive Quarterly, September, 191 5. 
 
 * Von Hiigel: cf. above, p. 56. 
 
 3 Papers for War Time, No. 27, The Only Alternatine to 
 War, A. Herbert Gray. Oxford University Press, 1915. 
 
THE WAY 105 
 
 modern education, the true motive of all popular 
 movements. " There is nothing so exquisitely and 
 increasingly sensitive as the Christ fellowship or body, ' ' 
 writes Bishop Brent. Utter respect for the individual 
 is the antithesis of that impersonal treatment of 
 people in the mass which is the ground of all partizan- 
 ships and wars. This impersonal treatment of people 
 in the mass is what confuses the anti-pacifist argument 
 about defending the attacked, and muddles our minds 
 on the subject of violence. Violent resistance to 
 brutal assault on the weak is one thing when you mean 
 the actual persons concerned ; quite another when 
 you lump together myriads of guilty and innocent 
 under some imaginary general category which does 
 not fit the facts of life. The partizan view of men in 
 masses is un-Christian because it is untrue. There 
 is no room for party organization in the CathoHc 
 Church of Christ. 
 
 In the CathoHc Church of Christ the riddle of death 
 will be solved, not merely doctrinally, but practically. 
 For when the Church comes back to the way of love 
 we shall know what the Communion of Saints means. 
 We shall be quiet enough, unhurried enough, sensitive 
 enough, to realize our spiritual environment ; we shall 
 have time and attention for our friends whom we set 
 down as " lost." We shall perceive that " death sets 
 powers free so that presence may be extended. This 
 is not a speculative assertion, but a fact of history 
 capped by the common experience of men of to-day. 
 . . . The presence not only abides, but continues to 
 operate here in a refined manner. It is not that it 
 alters its mode of operation, but that we who remain 
 perceive that which was hitherto only partially appar- 
 ent to us. We often attribute influence to the in- 
 
io6 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 cidentals of personality instead of to the eternized 
 personality which death unveils." ^ 
 
 By throwing ourselves on Christ we can enter into 
 that communion of saints ; we can enter into the full 
 life and powers of the Church which is His Body. 
 Why let our institutions or our prejudices hold us 
 back from this glorious consummation for which the 
 whole world waits ? 
 
 St. Paul had vision to see that the Jewish Law had 
 served as a tutor to bring Israel to Christ. To-day we 
 should likewise see that all the various systems of the 
 Churches have now made it possible for us all to enter 
 into the liberty of fellowship in Christ. We have 
 been " under guardians and stewards until the time 
 appointed of the Father " : now He calls us to enter 
 on the privileges of sons. 
 
 That, we must repeat, does not mean giving up our 
 sacraments. That would be contrary to the whole 
 argument of this book. It would certainly be contrary 
 to the meaning and practice of St. Paul. Sonship to 
 him meant enrichment, not impoverishment, " All 
 things are yours." As sons we are freed from pre- 
 judice, our sympathies are broadened, we can be " all 
 things to all men," true to ourselves, but able to enter 
 into the life of others. I have never yet communicated 
 except as an AngHcan, under the Anghcan rite : but 
 why should I not, under this reahzation of sonship ? 
 
 What becomes of the sacraments if we relax our 
 disciplinary restrictions ? They become what they 
 are, not memorials of the Dead, but actions of the 
 Living ; not symbols of an absent Christ, but tokens of 
 His Presence ; just as with other friends the hand- 
 
 * Bishop Brent, Presence. 
 
THE WAY 107 
 
 shake or the kiss are an acknowledgment of present 
 union. ^ 
 
 Christian baptism was originally a real entry into 
 a real Hfe, a transition from one society into another, 
 actual incorporation into the Christian fellowship. 
 Later it became a rite in itself, as applied to an 
 individual apart from any real entry into fellowship. 
 If we restore the Christian fellowship, the sacraments 
 will again be matters not of theological speculation, 
 but of immediate fact ; the focus of all social effort. 
 
 The constant peril of religion is petrifaction ; the 
 substitution of one legalism for another, a Christian 
 law for a Judaic, a Protestant for a Catholic. Psy- 
 chology, like other sciences, dissolves the arbitrary 
 distinctions, and reveals the real processes of life and 
 death, whether operative through circumcision, or 
 through baptism, or through any other rite. But 
 that impartiality of science is what we religious people 
 so grievously lack. St. Paul's call to sonship thus 
 comes home to us to-day, recalling us to personal 
 relationship to the Father of all. 
 
 " My one thought is, by forgetting what lies behind 
 me and straining to what lies before me, to press on 
 to the goal for the prize of God's high call in Christ 
 Jesus. For all those of our number who are mature 
 this must be the point of view ; God will reveal that 
 to any of you who look at things differently. Only 
 we must let our steps be guided by such truth as we 
 have attained. "2 
 
 *' I am the Way." The Way is well known in the 
 
 1 " Our hope rests not on Institutions, nor on Sacraments, 
 but on a Person, and He is very near." The Dean of West- 
 minster, in the National Mission, November, 1916. 
 
 - Phil. iii. 13-16. 
 
io8 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 Church, though the Church does not yet walk in it. It 
 is the vision of all our prophets, though obscured by 
 aU us priests. Our prophets indeed have most of them 
 been also priests : there need be no antagonism or 
 antipathy between these two functions of the Church's 
 ministry : but it is as prophets, interpreting the 
 present and revealing the future, rather than as 
 authorized exponents of the past that our great 
 teachers have taught us. West cot t and Hort were 
 such — teachers to whom the Church has not yet 
 listened, men to whose vision we have not opened our 
 eyes. " That which hath been is and ever will be. 
 If the Presence of Christ seem in some sense to be taken 
 from us in these later days, the apparent removal 
 calls out a blessing never before given. Each move- 
 ment, each semblance, of separation becomes for 
 believers the revelation of Divine Majesty. The words 
 written of the first disciples will be found true of every 
 disciple in every age : He led them out until they were 
 over against Bethany — out of the sacred precincts which 
 enclosed all that they held most sacred, past the scene 
 of the Agony and the scene of the Weeping — and He 
 lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to 
 pass while He blessed them, He parted from them, and 
 was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped Him 
 .and returned to Jerusalem — returned, having lost the 
 Lord from their sight that they might have Him for 
 ever — with great joy ; and were continually in the 
 Temple, blessing God.*' ^ So Bishop Westcott ex- 
 pressed his own faith in the Risen Lord : " We require, " 
 he said, "to be taken up out of our little circle of 
 strifes and questionings, as it were, into the mountain, 
 
 1 Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, pp. 183, 184 ; and 
 passim. 
 
THE WAY 109 
 
 that so we may regard our King in His glory, as He 
 has there revealed Himself. It is not by narrowing 
 our vision or our sympathy, by fixing our eyes on that 
 which is congenial to our feelings, by excluding from 
 our interest whole regions of Christendom, that we 
 can gain the repose of faith. We must dare to look 
 on the broad and chequered aspect of life." ^ 
 
 Dr. Hort too writes of Christ as the Way.- "As 
 He who had been leading a chosen few along a way 
 which He shared with them revealed Himself in that 
 hour as the one universal Way, so the same revelation, 
 when understood and embraced in its full breadth, 
 delivers His Church from helpless dependence on any 
 partial tokens or recognitions of His guidance. It 
 beckons onward not to some laxer and feebler form of 
 allegiance to Him as safer and more lasting ; but to 
 a faith in Him, and in the treasures hidden in Him, 
 both deeper and wider in itself, and more complete 
 in its mastery over our whole nature, than any to 
 which we have yet attained. It is not ill but well for 
 the Church that some temporal and external character- 
 istics which marked the time of probation and appren- 
 ticeship should vanish, even though we can scarcely 
 distinguish their loss from the loss of Him to whom 
 for long centuries they have borne witness. If He 
 takes away any familiar signs of His presence, it is 
 because they are becoming hindrances to the ripening 
 of discipleship. New knowledge of Him has to be 
 learned : new works for Him have to be undertaken. 
 It is His own voice which bids us ' arise and go hence,' 
 that we may find Him and follow Him elsewhere." 
 
 The words of the prophets are useless unless we lay 
 
 ^ Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, pp. 162, 16 
 2 Hort, The Way, the Truth, the Life, pp. 33, 34. 
 
no WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 them to our hearts. God grant that we may take 
 time to meditate on such words as these just quoted. 
 
 " We do therefore solemnly enjoin upon pastors 
 and preachers that their first duty is to retire periodi- 
 cally within the veil, and walk with God, in order to 
 come forth and proclaim His clear revelation of Him- 
 self made through the ages ; and to re-affirm in this 
 our day of distress that He understands and rules the 
 race which He shaped with His own Hand, and with 
 which He irrevocably identified Himself when He 
 became the Son of Man ' ' (Pastoral letter of the Ameri- 
 can Bishops, General Convention, 1916). 
 
 To attempt here to map out the way would be to 
 stultify the argument of this book. The whole point 
 is that we none of us know, but that we can know as 
 we go if we unite in Him. But since the Way is He, 
 and we all know something of Him, we can outline 
 some of the features ; and that we have been trying 
 to do in these few pages. 
 
 Do we still feel that the programme is too vague ? 
 So too is that of lovers at their marriage, if mutual 
 trust is vagueness : if their dispensing with detailed 
 drafts of future action is vagueness. If we at once 
 repudiate the charge as levelled against any such 
 true lovers, we may, with equal vigour repudiate it as 
 levelled against that other Married Couple, Christ and 
 the Church. Indeed, all who know anything about 
 love and faith know that these involve a " setting out, 
 not knowing whither they are going." 
 
 I loved to choose and see my path, but now 
 
 Lead Thou me on, 
 I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene ; one step enough lor me. 
 
 And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, 
 
THE WAY III 
 
 and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of 
 mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah : for the Lord 
 our God, the Almighty, reigneth. Let us rejoice and 
 be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto Him : 
 for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife 
 hath made herself ready. 
 
 Blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage 
 supper of the Lamb, 
 
112 WHERE IS CHRIST? 
 
 POSTSCRIPT 
 
 THE whole point of the foregoing pages Hes in 
 action, here and now. The actions required 
 of me as a priest are actions of repentance : in view of 
 the condition of the Church and of the world to-day, 
 such actions alone can be actions ol hope. I have 
 said that we cannot lay down a detailed programme for 
 the future of the Church, for that is her Lord's con- 
 cern. But it is essential for each of us to lay down a 
 definite programme for himself, that we may come 
 into line with Him. " The transition, I fear, will not 
 be without much pain," said Archbishop Temple (see 
 above, chap. VI, p. 71) ; but our repentance will be 
 worthless without that pain. We have to put into 
 practice our new^ vision of God : knowing that to quarrel 
 is to put Christ from us, to love is His embrace. Christ 
 is not divided. If I am living, or teaching, or wor- 
 shipping in separation from fellow- Christians, in the 
 ending of that separation Hes my way of repentance 
 and of hope. 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London. 
 
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