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 Gore, Charles, 1853-1932. 
 
 The new theology and the old 
 religion 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/newtheologyoldreOOgore 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 BEING EIGHT LECTURES, TOGETHER WITH FIVE 
 
 SERMONS 
 
 V 
 
 BY CHARLES GORE, D.D., D.C.L. 
 
 BISHOP OF BIRMINGHAM 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 1907 
 
PRINTED BY 
 
 HV2ELL, WATSON AND YINEY, LD. r 
 LONDON AND AYLESBVRY, 
 ENGLAND. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This volume consists mainly of the sub¬ 
 stance of lectures delivered in the Cathedral 
 of Birmingham at the midday services in 
 Lent of this year. The lectures were de¬ 
 livered only from notes, and were not com¬ 
 pletely reported. They have therefore been 
 written entirely afresh, with amplification 
 and rearrangement. They are now in 
 eight, instead of six, portions. But I have 
 still called them lectures, as they retain the 
 form and manner of lectures. 
 
 I have added some sermons preached on 
 other occasions. This involves—in the case 
 of the first three sermons—some repetition, 
 which I hope will be forgiven, as I thought 
 that the point of view of each of the ser¬ 
 mons was sufficiently different from that of 
 the lectures to justify its preservation ; 
 and they amplify and expand points of 
 importance. 
 
 v 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I do not endeavour in these lectures or 
 sermons to discuss the great psychological 
 or metaphysical questions which occasion¬ 
 ally come near to the surface : e.g. the 
 psychological question of the manner in 
 which we are to suppose that the human 
 subject, the prophet or the common man, 
 becomes conscious of a divine communica¬ 
 tion ; or the metaphysical question of the 
 legitimacy of restating the substance of such 
 communications, believed to be divine, as 
 intellectual propositions, valid for the whole 
 area of human knowledge. But I am sure 
 that God, the Father of spirits, has really 
 conveyed true and coherent impressions of 
 Himself to the human spirit, through the 
 medium of the common conscience and of 
 specially susceptible individuals, called pro¬ 
 phets, who have been the enlighteners of 
 the common conscience; and I am sure that 
 these impressions of God legitimately appear 
 in the intelligence of men as convictions of 
 truth : and therefore are legitimately ex¬ 
 pressed as propositions for the intellect which 
 have an equal claim to express reality with 
 propositions based upon the observation of 
 nature. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Vll 
 
 I am sure also that the self-disclosure of 
 God which reached its culmination in J esus 
 Christ is final, and that by the very neces¬ 
 sity of the case. That is to say, if Jesus 
 Christ is God incarnate, no fuller disclosure 
 of God in terms of manhood than is given 
 in His person is conceivable or possible. 1 
 believe, therefore, that we need to hold fast 
 the distinction between the revelation as 
 once given through the prophets and in 
 Jesus Christ, and the dogma which protects 
 this revelation, or the theology which 
 elaborates and seeks to harmonize it with 
 the whole of knowledge. My object in 
 these lectures is mainly to make plain, 
 as against the assumptions of the New 
 Theology, the substance of the original 
 revelation as it touches the nature of God, 
 of sin, of Christ, &c. 
 
 I think the movement called the New 
 Theology is a highly important movement. 
 Mr. Campbell has fastened upon certain 
 tendencies of thought which have been long 
 at work amongst us, and brought them for¬ 
 ward into the arena of common and popular 
 discussion. I have tried to follow him into 
 this arena, and to show the fundamental 
 
Vlll 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 incongruity of his leading ideas with the 
 original Christian revelation, and the essen¬ 
 tial superiority of the ideas which the Chris¬ 
 tian revelation really contains. 
 
 St. Luke’s Day, 1907. 
 
 C. Birmingham : 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 I. THE NEW THEOLOGY .... 
 
 II. THE OLD RELIGION .... 
 
 III. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD . 
 
 IV. THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 V. THE MEANING OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY 
 
 VI. MIRACLES. 
 
 VII. THE ATONEMENT AND THE INSPIRA¬ 
 TION OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 VIII. THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE 
 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND . 
 
 ix b 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 19 
 
 42 
 
 60 
 
 84 
 
 109 
 
 131 
 
 150 
 
X 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 SERMONS 
 
 I. THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE . 
 
 II. THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 III. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 IV. SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS OF CHRIS¬ 
 
 TIANITY . 
 
 V. THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 REPORT ON THE MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 PAGE 
 1 8 1 
 
 205 
 
 231 
 
 251 
 
 274 
 
 CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 
 
 297 
 
LECTURES 
 

LECTURE I 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 There is no doubt that we are passing 
 through a period of unsettlement in reli¬ 
 gious beliefs. Some men are unsettled 
 because they have seriously tried to ‘ think 
 for themselves ’: that is, to grapple with 
 fundamental religious problems, philosophi¬ 
 cal or critical—such problems as 
 
 Hover on the bounds of mortal ken, 
 
 And have perplexed, and will unto the end 
 Perplex the brains of men— 
 
 such problems, I mean, as that of the 
 compatibility of human freedom with uni¬ 
 versal law or the divine foreknowledge. A 
 person of ordinary intelligence and ordinary 
 occupation can receive a creed, and test 
 its working value in experience, and 
 satisfy himself, more or less fully, on its 
 historical grounds, and distinguish well 
 enough between what is reasonable and 
 
 i 
 
2 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 what is superstitious; but it is very few 
 of us who can give ourselves up to the 
 impartial speculative consideration of ulti¬ 
 mate and fundamental problems in meta¬ 
 physics or in criticism with any other 
 result but mental bewilderment. The diffi¬ 
 culty of the subjects in themselves and the 
 variety of the opinions entertained upon 
 them by competent leaders of thought are 
 equally causes of this bewilderment. 
 
 It is not more than the plain truth to say 
 that, in the sense of really obtaining an 
 independent opinion worth having on the 
 fundamental questions of religion, very 
 few of us are qualified, by capacity or 
 training, to ‘ think for ourselves.' 
 
 But also very few seriously attempt it. 
 And an Englishman who has possession of a 
 conviction which he thinks he holds on solid 
 practical grounds—a good working creed 
 —is not very easily disturbed by speculative 
 doubts. He is not easily * afraid of any 
 evil tidings.' But there are a great many 
 people whose convictions on religious sub¬ 
 jects are very far from solid. They would 
 confess that they have very little religious 
 experience, or perhaps spiritual sensibility. 
 They do not read more on such subjects 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 3 
 
 than a newspaper review or a magazine 
 article. Thus, when they hear of every 
 traditional belief being questioned by men 
 of apparent learning and integrity, their 
 convictions, such as they were, even on 
 quite fundamental subjects, are quite under¬ 
 mined. How shall they decide where 
 learned men disagree ? 
 
 Again, there are others—and those a 
 great number—who are disgusted by the un¬ 
 worthiness of the Christianity which they 
 see around them. They are alienated by 
 the divisions among us Christians, by our 
 bitterness or pettiness, or by the worldliness 
 of orthodox believers. The Christian 
 churches seem to them to make no serious 
 struggle against the forces which enslave 
 masses of men in social and moral degrada¬ 
 tion, and to exhibit no real likeness of Jesus 
 of Nazareth. A great many men, that 
 is to say, disbelieve in current Christianity 
 because they desire something more like 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 And there are others who hold their reli¬ 
 gious convictions piously and fervently, and 
 who yet add to the prevailing scepticism : 
 for they are distressed because questions 
 are even raised about subjects of such 
 
4 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 sanctity. They resent altogether the atmo¬ 
 sphere of free inquiry, and by their nervous¬ 
 ness and apparent distrust of the power 
 of truth to prevail in the open field, they 
 do more than they suspect to propagate 
 the opinion that the Christian religion is 
 an old-fashioned superstition which cannot 
 bear investigation. 
 
 In such an age of religious unsettlement 
 it is as well to remember that, after all, it 
 is to ages of such mental ferment as ours, 
 and not to ages of mental stagnation, that 
 we owe our great debts of gratitude for 
 the works of religious construction. It was 
 from an age of universal intellectual fer¬ 
 ment and unsettlement that there emerged 
 the solid structure of the catholic creeds; 
 it was in an atmosphere of serious un¬ 
 settlement that Butler and others in the 
 eighteenth century relaid the intellectual 
 foundation on which Wesley and Simeon 
 and Pusey and Newman built their works 
 of spiritual recovery. If religion is ‘ the 
 pearl of great price ’ we must not expect to 
 win it cheaply, and intellectual trouble is 
 no more to be resented than pain of body. 
 
 The reason of contemporary unsettle¬ 
 ment is not hard to find. Within the last 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 5 
 
 century our ordinary intellectual categories 
 
 J J O 
 
 —that means those large headings under 
 which we think of things, those broaci 
 assumptions which we carry into life to 
 enable us to hold together all our wide 
 and manifold experience—those intellectual 
 categories have been changed. For in¬ 
 stance, the dominance of the conception 
 of evolution—the conception, that is, of the 
 universe with all its forms of hfe and all 
 its mode of thought as being in a ceaseless 
 process of change—and the opening out 
 of the almost infinite vistas of time in the 
 process of the world’s development; and 
 more recently the breaking up of the idea 
 of solid matter into something elusive 
 and unimaginable—such new modes of 
 thought have had a profound effect upon 
 the human imagination, accustomed till 
 quite recently to regard the various kinds 
 of things as stable and fixed, created a few 
 thousand years ago to be what they have 
 been ever since. The change wrought in the 
 imaginations of men is as great as when they 
 first found out, three centuries ago, that this 
 world was not the centre of the universe, 
 that there was no heaven over our heads 
 and no hell under our feet. No one, in fact, 
 
6 
 
 T1IE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 can appreciate in any measure the change 
 in our conceptions of the physical universe 
 since Butler’s day, since the day which 
 saw the rise of the Evangelical or even of 
 the Tractarian movement, without feeling 
 that a convulsion in the religious world 
 also must have taken place ; that it could 
 hardly have been possible for a religion 
 associated as ours was with the old ideas 
 of nature, to be detached from these and 
 readjusted to the new science without a 
 great deal of mental disturbance. And the 
 changes which have taken place in historical 
 criticism since, shall I say, Hume wrote 
 his History of England have hardly been 
 less considerable than the change in physical 
 science. I say, then, that a religion accus¬ 
 tomed to the old intellectual world could 
 not learn to be at home in the new without 
 very deep and wide religious unsettlement. 
 The task which we have got to accomplish 
 is that of going back upon our foundations, 
 of distinguishing what is essential and 
 permanent and really catholic in our religion 
 from what belongs only to some more or 
 less temporary phase of thought, or arrange¬ 
 ment of society, or some more or less local 
 association of belief and circumstance. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 7 
 
 These really essential and permanent and 
 catholic principles and institutions of the 
 Christian faith have to be detached from 
 the decaying order, or the mode of thought 
 which has become antiquated, and set to 
 work afresh to prove their vitality in the 
 new order, and to show their capacity to 
 make a new home for themselves in a 
 modern world of thought and life. 
 
 In doing this there are two classes of 
 persons who have to be resisted—the one 
 conservative and the other revolutionary. 
 
 There are those who seem to think that 
 in dangerous days such as these our only 
 course is to hold fast, with an even blind 
 adhesion, to our religion as it was handed 
 down to us, unrevised and uncriticized. 
 They meet any demand for an abandonment 
 of an old-fashioned view, not by asking 
 whether the view was essential to our faith, 
 but by an appeal to us ‘ not to puzzle the 
 minds of the young,’ or by the assertion 
 that what was good enough for their 
 fathers is good enough for them. To 
 allow mistakes in current teaching is stig¬ 
 matized as ‘ dangerous ’ ; concession is 
 declared to be only a prelude to surrender, 
 and parleying to savour of treason. 
 
8 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 On the other hand, you have the people 
 who seem to think that every clever new 
 criticism is destined to triumph over an 
 established position. They forget that 
 the revolutionists of history are always 
 disappointed; that counter reformations 
 follow reformations ; that old ideas have 
 a wonderfully recuperative power. They 
 forget also the very recent history of 
 biblical criticism. Let us listen to Dr. 
 Harnack’s recent observations in his work 
 Luke the Physician. 1 
 
 This book must be subjected to a separate and 
 stringent examination—so the critics demand ; but 
 this examination, so they say, is already completed, 
 and has led to the certain conclusion that tradition 
 is here in the wrong—the Acts cannot have been 
 composed by a companion and fellow-worker of 
 St. Paul. . . . The indefensibility of the tradition 
 is regarded as being so clearly established that nowa¬ 
 days it is thought scarcely worth while to prove this 
 indefensibility afresh, or even to notice the arguments 
 of conservative opponents. Indeed, it seems that 
 there exists a disposition to ignore the fact that such 
 arguments still exist. Julicher feels compelled to 
 regard the ascription of the book to St. Luke as a 
 ‘ romantic ideal . 5 So quickly does criticism forget 
 
 1 Luke the Physician (Engl, trans., Williams & 
 Norgate, 1907), pp. 6 f. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 9 
 
 its true function, with such bigoted obstinacy does 
 it cling to its hypotheses. 
 
 But in spite of this consensus of ‘ critical ’ 
 authority, Harnack, whom no one can 
 accuse of conservative prejudices, surveys 
 the evidence, and pronounces without hesi¬ 
 tation in favour of St. Luke’s authorship of 
 the whole book of the Acts, as well as of 
 the third Gospel. And no doubt he repre¬ 
 sents the tendency of critical investigation, 
 at least in England. To be conservative 
 in criticism, then, is not always to be wrong. 
 
 What we need is frankness of mind. In 
 any settled period the permanent faith 
 becomes encrusted with more or less 
 temporary elements, the gold becomes 
 mixed with dross ; and when a turn of the 
 wheel of thought takes place we must have 
 the intellectual courage to seek to dissoci¬ 
 ate the permanent from the impermanent, 
 to draw distinctions between essential and 
 accidental, to make concessions and to 
 seek readjustment. 
 
 Is, then, the settlement proposed by ‘ the 
 New Theology ’ the right one ? The New 
 Theology is a convenient name for a 
 current mode of thought which in its 
 teaching about God lays the greatest stress 
 
IO 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 upon what is called the ‘ divine imma¬ 
 nence ’ in nature and man, which regards 
 God, that is, not as the sovereign lord 
 and judge, but as the universal Spirit 
 manifesting Himself in all things and all 
 men ; which accepts most unreservedly the 
 idea of development in nature and human 
 history ; which assimilates Christ to other 
 men as being essentially the same, and only 
 the same, in nature ; which proposes a less 
 grave estimate of sin ; which disparages or 
 repudiates miracles in God’s revelation of 
 Himself. I might point to many writers 
 as more or less representing this school; 
 I must make special reference to its most 
 popular author, the Rev. R. J. Campbell . 1 
 But you will find no better exponent of this 
 tendency than Sir Oliver Lodge, and no 
 manual which exhibits it in so favourable 
 a light as his catechism The Substance of 
 Faith allied with Science . 2 
 
 The New Theology is one result of the 
 breakdown of the old materialism, and 
 the kind of agnosticism represented by 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer. For we are living in 
 a period of reaction from ‘ naturalism ’ of all 
 
 1 The New Theology (Chapman & Hall, 1907). 
 
 2 Published by Methuen. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY II 
 
 kinds. Science, it is now perceived—that is, 
 the investigation of the facts, sequences, and 
 laws observable in nature—is not complete 
 in itself, nor is it man’s only method of 
 arriving at truth. It is not complete in 
 itself, for it starts from assumptions. It 
 assumes the universal order, with all its 
 forces at work, of the origin of which it can 
 give no account. And it is not our only 
 method for arriving at truth. Account 
 must be taken of other faculties : the 
 consciousness of self, the conscience of 
 right and wrong, the will, the heart, the 
 imagination, the spiritual faculties of man. 
 These too bear a valid testimony. They 
 are real means of access to reality. Thus 
 experimental science, by all its methods 
 of inquiry, may discern neither God, nor 
 freedom, nor immortality ; but they may 
 be realities, credible or certain, nevertheless. 
 It is enough that the deliberate and proved 
 verdicts of science should be accepted with 
 the reverence due to them, and given their 
 lofty place in the whole of human know¬ 
 ledge and belief. 
 
 But it is with the whole of human ex¬ 
 perience and knowledge and belief, and 
 not only with the conclusions of science, 
 
12 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 that philosophy and religion in different 
 ways are concerned. And the free and 
 comprehensive thought of philosophy ap¬ 
 pears in our day to be reverting very 
 generally to a spiritual interpretation of 
 the universe. This I believe to be the case 
 both in Europe and America . 1 In France 
 there is, I am informed, a noticeable revival 
 of the intellectual authority of Pascal, which 
 would mean a recognition of the strict 
 limitation of the sphere of science, properly 
 so called, and an open door for reasonable 
 faith. What is plain to see is that there 
 has in quite recent years been a remarkable 
 group of distinguished men of letters in 
 France—Brunetiere, Huysmans, Bourget, 
 Coppee, Verlaine, Rette—who have been 
 converted, and have proclaimed their con¬ 
 version, from extreme hostility to religion, 
 to enthusiastic and devoted membership 
 in the catholic church. This has arrested 
 the interest of Europe . 2 In England the 
 
 1 See G. Villa, Idealismo moderno (Turin, 1905), pp. 
 425ft., and A. B. D. Alexander’s History of Philosophy 
 (Maclehose, 1907), pp. 583-8. 
 
 2 ‘ Les futurs historiens de notre litterature a la fin 
 du xix. siecle seront forces de reconnaitre, par exemple, 
 que Brunetiere, le grand critique, le puissant dialecticien, 
 que Bourget, le penetrant romancier, 1'excellent peintre 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 return to faith of the distinguished biologist 
 George Romanes on grounds which received 
 an incomplete but very interesting statement 
 in his fragmentary Thoughts on Religion 1 has 
 been followed more recently by a simi¬ 
 lar return described by Mr. George Palmer, 
 in his Agnostic's Progress . 1 And I fancy 
 that the progress and recovery described 
 in these books is typical of a very general 
 tendency, so far at least as the acceptance 
 of a spiritual view of the world is concerned. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge’s Substance of Faith allied 
 with Science is not of course in agreement 
 with the Apostles’ Creed on all points, and 
 I am proposing to subject its phrases in 
 certain respects to criticism. Nor, again, 
 would its author claim to have any mandate 
 to speak for scientific men as a whole. 
 But it is a representative work. And we are 
 entitled to call out into clear light the 
 fact that a distinguished representative of 
 science can produce, as ‘ consistent with the 
 
 de la societe moderne, que Huysmans, le rare et precieux 
 artiste en style, que Verlaine, le poete delicieusement 
 naif, malgre ses egarements, furent des catholiques— 
 et des catholiques qui, tous, sont revenus a la foi apres 
 1 ’avoir longtemps oubliee ou perdue ’ (Frangois Coppee, 
 in his preface to Adolphe Rette’s Du Diable a Dieu). 
 
 1 Published by Longmans. 
 
i4 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 teachings of science in its widest sense, as 
 well as with those of literature and philo¬ 
 sophy/ 1 so unhesitating a proclamation 
 of a spiritual creed, such strong affirmations 
 of God and immortality and freedom 
 and the value of prayer, and the real com¬ 
 munion of man with other spiritual beings 
 whom he cannot see but must believe to 
 exist. As Sir Oliver has allied himself with 
 the New Theology, and as I have the 
 intention of criticizing him, it is a pleasure 
 first of all to express admiration for the 
 beauty of temper, the reverence of spirit, 
 and the careful constructive skill of ex¬ 
 pression, which mark his work. And I 
 am venturing, at this point, to quote at 
 length his ‘ creed/ his definition of moral 
 freedom, and his plea for a right kind of 
 agnosticism in place of a wrong. 
 
 I believe in one infinite and eternal Being, a 
 guiding and loving Father, in whom all things consist. 
 
 I believe that the Divine Nature is specially re¬ 
 vealed to man through Jesus Christ our Lord, who 
 lived and taught and suffered in Palestine 1900 years 
 ago, and has since been worshipped by the Christian 
 Church as the immortal Son of God, the Saviour of 
 the world. 
 
 I believe that the Holy Spirit is ever ready to 
 1 The Substance of Faith allied with Sceince , p. 5. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 15 
 
 help us along the way towards goodness and truth ; 
 that prayer is a means of communion between man 
 and God; and that it is our privilege, through 
 faithful service, to enter into the life eternal, the 
 communion of saints, and the peace of God. 1 
 
 For our present purpose we regard the sense of 
 conscience [in man] as the most important and 
 highest characteristic of all,—the sense of responsi¬ 
 bility, the power of self-determination, the building up 
 of character, so that ultimately it becomes impossible 
 to be actuated by unworthy motives. Our actions 
 are now controlled not by external impulses only, 
 but largely by our own characters and wills. The 
 man who is the creature of impulse, or the slave of 
 his passions, cannot be said to be his own master, 
 or to be really free : he drifts hither and thither 
 according to the caprice or the temptation of the 
 moment; he is untrustworthy, and without solidity 
 or dignity of character. The free man is he who can 
 control himself, who does not obey every idea as it 
 occurs to him, but weighs and determines for himself, 
 and is not at the mercy of external influences. This 
 is the real meaning of choice and free will. It does 
 not mean that actions are capricious and undeter¬ 
 mined ; but that they are determined by nothing 
 less than the totality of things. They are not deter¬ 
 mined by the external world alone, o that they can 
 be calculated and predicted from outside ; they are 
 determined by self and the external world together. 
 A free man is the master of his motives, and selects 
 that motive which he wills to obey. 2 
 
 1 ibid., p. 96. 2 ibid., p 27. 
 
1 6 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 We, insignificant creatures, with senses only just 
 open to the portentous meaning of the starry sky, 
 presume—some of us—to deny the existence of 
 higher powers and higher knowledge than our own. 
 We are accustomed to be careful as to what we assert ; 
 we are liable to be unscrupulous as to what we deny. 
 It is possible to find people who, knowing nothing 
 or next to nothing of the universe, are prepared to 
 limit existence to that of which they have had ex¬ 
 perience, and to measure the cosmos in terms of their 
 own understanding. Their confidence in themselves, 
 their shut minds and self-satisfied hearts, are things 
 to marvel at. The fact is that no glimmer of a con¬ 
 ception of the real magnitude and complexity of 
 existence can ever have illuminated their cosmic 
 view. 1 
 
 The position represented by the New 
 Theology is of course to be differently 
 estimated when it is proposed to us, or as it 
 is proposed to us in these extracts, from the 
 side of science, and when it is advocated, 
 in other terms, by ministers of the catholic 
 creed, or of Nonconformist bodies who 
 have been identified with the same 
 fundamental belief. In these latter cases 
 it represents an abandonment of specific 
 beliefs which it will be the business of these 
 pages to show to be really integral to the 
 
 1 The Substance of Faith , etc., p. 63. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 17 
 
 creed of Christendom. In these cases, I 
 say, it represents abandonment, and not pro¬ 
 gress. But, viewed as an advance from the 
 side of science, I desire at starting to give 
 the warmest welcome to so spiritual a creed. 
 
 The author of The Substance of Faith , 
 and those who think with him, are not infre¬ 
 quently quoted as authorities in virtue of 
 what they doubt or deny—or are supposed 
 to doubt or deny—whether it is the fall of 
 man, or the real occurrence of miracles, or 
 the deity of Christ. To those who are dis¬ 
 posed thus to quote them, I would suggest 
 this consideration. 
 
 The belief of most of us must be largely 
 influenced by authority. The authority 
 which ought to make the greatest and most 
 reasonable impression upon our minds is 
 the corporate and age-long authority of the 
 witnessing church. That represents the 
 widest and largest spiritual experience. 
 And, short of that, we must reasonably be 
 influenced by the authority of any indi¬ 
 vidual whose learning and character com¬ 
 mend his judgement as trustworthy. But 
 it is surely unworthy to defer to the autho¬ 
 rity of any one for what he denies, or is sup¬ 
 posed to deny, and to refuse it for what he 
 
 2 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 iS 
 
 maintains. A man, in fact, is much more 
 likelv to be mistaken in what he denies than 
 in what he affirms. What he affirms is what 
 he realizes. What he denies may be only 
 what he fails to realize. 
 
 To any doubter, then, whom I can 
 reach who is supposed to refer for his doubts 
 to the authority of the New Theology, I 
 would say first of all : You are rejecting 
 what these men reject, but are you be¬ 
 lieving what they believe ? After all, if 
 you hold and practise the creed which has 
 just been quoted, you will not be indeed 
 in the full stream of the church’s belief, but 
 you will at least be within sight of the city 
 of God. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 1 
 
 A living theology must always in a sense 
 be a new theology. For theology, rightly 
 understood, is not the same thine: as religion, 
 or as the revelation on which religion rests, 
 or the dogmas which it maintains. But it 
 is the attempt of the intellect of men to 
 express their religious belief in intellectual 
 forms and to bring it into harmony with 
 the thought of their time—with all truth 
 so far as it is known. But the New 
 Theology which we are concerned with 
 is characterized (as I shall endeavour to 
 show) by a very inadequate respect for the 
 old religion which it seeks to reinterpret, 
 and indeed by a very inadequate apprecia¬ 
 tion of its principles and its history. It is 
 an attempt of the contemporary intellect 
 
 1 The subject of the chapter is dealt with again from 
 a somewhat different point of view in Sermons i and ii, 
 pp. 181, 205. 
 
 19 
 
20 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 to express the truth about God and man 
 as seems best to it, with very little regard 
 to the experience of the past. It has the 
 marks of the contemporary intellectual 
 workshop all over it. 
 
 But the speculative intellect of any epoch 
 is of itself very fallible, as experience has 
 shown ; and religious continuity is of ex¬ 
 treme importance. Thus the theology of 
 the time should, as it seems to me, start 
 from at least a serious and respectful con¬ 
 sideration of the old religion, the Christian 
 religion which claims to rest upon a real 
 revelation or self-disclosure of God, once for 
 all given in the person of J esus Christ; which 
 claims to be a catholic religion, for all men 
 and for all time. 
 
 I propose, then, having given some ac¬ 
 count of the New Theology, to proceed to 
 give some account of the idea and method 
 of the old religion. It is, of course, as you 
 would all recognize at once, the claim of 
 Christianity to proclaim a catholic faith— 
 that means a religion for all men, which 
 will satisfy and embrace all men and all 
 kinds of men, and last for all time. The 
 first part of this description of catholicity, 
 that it is adequate for all races and kinds 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 21 
 
 of men, introduces a very interesting sub¬ 
 ject, with which I do not at present propose 
 to deal. What I am concerned with is the 
 second part of that description, the perman¬ 
 ence which is claimed for the Christian 
 faith. 4 Heaven and earth shall pass away, 
 but My words shall not pass away/ The 
 Christian church came out at once into the 
 world claiming to proclaim a message from 
 God, a self-disclosure of God, which had 
 been made in many parts and many man¬ 
 ners, slowly and gradually, and which in 
 the person of Jesus Christ had been made 
 in its final form as far as this world was 
 concerned; so that there could be no 
 disclosure of God to man more perfect, or 
 adequate, and no disclosure of what was 
 possible for manhood in relation to God 
 more complete, than was given in the person 
 of Jesus Christ, Himself God and man. 
 
 Here, of course, at the very threshold of 
 our statement, you are confronted with a 
 surprising claim, which gives you occasion 
 to be critical. You naturally feel that this 
 is a very changing world. Things become 
 antiquated; forms of thought pass and 
 change. How, then, can it be reasonable 
 to suppose that a revelation couched in 
 
22 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 human language, a revelation enshrined 
 in human formulas, can be permanent in 
 a world as changing as our world is? Here, 
 then, arises an important question. Does 
 the whole of our human nature change, 
 even slowly ? or is it the case that under¬ 
 neath what is changing, underneath what 
 develops and grows, there is such a tiling 
 as a permanent humanity, a humanity in 
 which the nineteenth century and the first 
 century are as one, which through the 
 changes of the ages remains in its wants and 
 capacities, speaking practically, constant 
 and unchanged ? You will remember how 
 the poet Wordsworth speaks of another 
 poet, Burns, and gives it as his merit that 
 he appeals to the general heart of man— 
 
 Deep in the general heart of men 
 His power survives. 
 
 You will recognize that a great deal of 
 the pleasure which students find in ancient 
 literature lies in the recognition of this 
 common manhood ; so that we can shake 
 hands across the ages with some one who 
 lived long ago, under conditions socially 
 and intellectually altogether different from 
 our own. You find, for instance, some 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 words of Homer come to you with a quite 
 fresh force and power of entrancing delight, 
 simply because they make you feel the 
 reality of that ‘ general heart of man ’ 
 which is something that under all changes 
 remains constant. And if it makes a really 
 catholic poetry possible, it may make also 
 a catholic religion possible, a religion that 
 will appeal to the same humanity in the 
 nineteenth century and in the first. 
 
 Let us look closer into the matter. Re¬ 
 ligion appeals to a certain set of spiritual 
 needs and faculties which undoubtedly exist 
 in human nature wherever you find it. 
 Any one examining human nature with 
 a merely scientific curiosity would see that 
 the soul of a man moves out in different 
 directions. It moves out towards nature 
 to appropriate its resources ; and it moves 
 out towards other men to knit together the 
 bonds of society. Herein lies the progress 
 of civilization. But there is another move¬ 
 ment which is also universal—that is, the 
 movement out towards God, the feeling 
 after Him and finding Him. Of that move¬ 
 ment of human nature towards God what 
 are the characteristics ? It is at bottom 
 an aspiration tovnrds God, a craving which 
 
24 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 exists in man for divine fellowship and 
 eternal life, a life which is beyond and 
 deeper than the changes and chances of 
 our own every-day life. This craving is 
 rooted in a profound sense of need, and of 
 the weakness, the transitoriness, the fragility 
 of human life. With this sense of need 
 there is the sense of sin, of the pollution, 
 the unworthiness, the rebellion, which pre¬ 
 vent this human nature of ours from 
 finding the free access towards God which 
 it desires. With this again there is the 
 desire for pardon and peace and recon¬ 
 ciliation. And, mingling with this instinct, 
 which is in effect the instinct of prayer 
 and communion with God, there is also 
 the sense of kinship and fellowship with 
 our fellow men with whom we desire to 
 enter into this communion with God, not 
 as individuals, but as members of the 
 human family. Now I ask—Do not these 
 things belong precisely to that humanity 
 which is through all classes and in all 
 periods identical, so that we should find no 
 difficulty in looking for a classical and 
 perfect expression of these fundamental 
 religious wants far back across the ages ? 
 
 Where can we find it ? I reply, in the 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 25 
 
 Psalms. I say to any one who will apply 
 his mind to think about this subject, Can 
 you conceive any better expression of those 
 fundamental human wants than you get 
 in the Psalms ? There are things in the 
 Psalms which are not at all of this permanent 
 and satisfying character. There are impre¬ 
 cations upon the enemies of Israel, or upon 
 the enemies of the individual friend of God, 
 which express something lower than a 
 Christian level of feeling. If the Church 
 of England were not so conservative of 
 doubtful and dangerous things as well as 
 of good things, I fancy it would not have 
 these imprecations, which require so much 
 explanation, recited in the public services. 
 But much more readily there come into 
 your minds passages of the Psalms expres¬ 
 sive of all the feelings I have enumerated; 
 and I ask you, Is there anything in that 
 expression of those fundamental religious 
 wants which you feel could be better— 
 which you feel is antiquated ? Do you not 
 simply find there the expression of exactly 
 what mankind everywhere, in the twentieth 
 century after Christ as much as in the 
 sixth century before Christ, feels, and 
 wants ? 
 
26 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 The Old Testament is confessedly imper¬ 
 fect. In the Old Testament we find human 
 nature gradually being trained to know 
 its own true wants, as well as to receive 
 the word of God which was gradually being 
 spoken to satisfy those wants. There are 
 then, I say, imperfections which we perceive 
 in the Psalms, as we look back upon them 
 in the light of Christ's perfection, as well 
 as obscurities, where the true sense cannot 
 be recovered. But the bulk of the Psalms 
 expresses the soul's fundamental search for 
 God in all its moods and phases of 
 triumph and depression, in all its exultant 
 joy and its profound misery. The twenty- 
 third psalm, ‘ The Lord is my Shepherd ’ ; 
 the twenty-fifth, ‘ Unto Thee, O Lord, 
 will I lift up my soul ’; the twenty-seventh, 
 ‘ The Lord is my light ' ; the thirtieth, 
 ‘ I will magnify Thee, O Lord ' ; the thirty- 
 first, ‘ In Thee, O Lord, have I put my 
 trust ’; the thirty-eighth, ‘ Put me not to 
 rebuke, O Lord ’—these are only instances 
 which could be multiplied till almost all 
 the Psalms were named. Here, so far as 
 expression of the fundamental want is 
 concerned, is permanent religion. Here 
 is the humanity which underlies all develop- 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 2 7 
 
 ments. Here is the explanation of a 
 catholic religion. For it is to this religious 
 consciousness, thus brought to full and 
 conscious expression, that the revelation 
 of Christ appeals : and it can be permanent 
 because it gives a full satisfaction to a 
 permanent want. 
 
 Now I get to my next point. The Chris¬ 
 tian revelation, which is, or claims to be, 
 the permanent response of God to the 
 permanent human need, quite certainly 
 appeals, not primarily to the intellect, but 
 primarily to what in the Scripture is called 
 the heart, which means not only the 
 emotions, but the personality : the whole 
 central self—which moves out in action 
 and expresses itself in thought and feeling, 
 but which, as it were, lies below both in¬ 
 tellect and feeling and action. Our religion 
 appealsto the central self—the heart of man. 
 
 I want to impress this upon you if I can. 
 You will remember that striking scene 
 where our Lord is represented as saying : 
 ‘ I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven 
 and earth, because Thou hast hid these 
 things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
 revealed them unto babes .’ 1 The meaning 
 
 1 Matt. xi. 25, Luke x. 21. 
 
28 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 of this saying becomes apparent if you 
 read the Gospels as a whole. The ‘ wise 
 and prudent ’ among the Jews were the 
 rulers and rabbis and scribes; and the 
 great centre of their authority and their 
 traditional learning was in Jerusalem. If 
 you read the Gospel of St. John you will 
 find that our Lord gave the wise and 
 prudent in Jerusalem their chance, and 
 that they would not accept Him. They 
 were occupied with the traditions of their 
 schools and the pride of their order, and 
 this lay teacher, as He seemed to them, 
 was despised and rejected ; they would not 
 hear Him. Then the narrative of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, the narrative of our 
 Lord’s teaching in Galilee, represents the 
 fresh start which He made in a new field. 
 Galilee was a great and crowded mercantile 
 district, with a population of very mixed 
 origin—‘ Galilee of the Gentiles/ It was 
 about twice the size of the diocese of 
 Birmingham, and Josephus ascribes to it 
 about four times its population. There 
 may be an exaggeration here—such ex¬ 
 aggerations are common in ancient 
 chronicles ; but, at any rate, he must have 
 meant to describe a highly populous dis- 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 29 
 
 trict . 1 There our Lord proclaimed Himself 
 to the miserable and diseased, in works of 
 mercy. But He found His real hearers and 
 chose His disciples among what we should 
 describe as the well-to-do artisan class, 
 men who were neither subject to the 
 temptations of luxury nor, on the other 
 hand, to the corrupting influences of pauper¬ 
 ism ; men who could pray, ‘ Give us day 
 by day our daily bread/ who depended 
 on their daily toil for their sustenance; 
 but who were under no conditions such 
 as are corrupting and degrading. There, 
 among men who had no tradition of learning, 
 but were sensible, practical, whole-hearted 
 men, He found His hearers and chose His 
 disciples. These He here calls ‘ babes/ 
 simple-minded men and women, by contrast 
 with the more sophisticated men who held 
 the chief places in the schools of learning. 
 Observe, He says : ‘ I thank thee, Father.' 
 It is not merely that He puts up with an 
 inevitable condition, but He recognizes 
 that the strength of His religion lies in 
 the fact that it appeals to the average 
 man, with his average intelligence, with 
 
 1 Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah 
 (Longmans), ii. p, 224 (Bk. ii. cap. ix). 
 
30 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 his average human wants, and not pri¬ 
 marily to the intellect of the schools. St. 
 Paul found out and gloried in just the 
 same thing. He approached the learned 
 at Athens and he went away, as it seems, 
 in bitterness of spirit ; his visit produced 
 almost no result. Then he went to Corinth 
 with a determination that he would not 
 have any more of this method, that he 
 would appeal simply to the sense of sin 
 and the need of a saviour, that he would 
 know nothing among them save Jesus 
 Christ and Him crucified. And he describes 
 the result. He points out to the Corinthian 
 Christians how the people who make up 
 their young community are the people 
 whom the world reckons of no account, 
 and that the people of importance are 
 almost left out; and he accepts it as being 
 the strength of Christianity that it was to 
 make its appeal not primarily to the 
 intellect, but to the needs of common life ; 
 and he anticipates, what happened in 
 fact, that ‘ the foolish things of the world ’ 
 would ‘ put to shame the things that are 
 wise / 1 
 
 The method of the Christian church, 
 
 1 i Cor. i. 19 ft. 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 31 
 
 then, is not to propound an argument and 
 say, ‘ Is not this a sound argument ? ’ It 
 does not make its appeal primarily to the 
 intellect. It comes into the world pro¬ 
 claiming something which is by its very 
 nature authoritative—a message from God. 
 And as God is to man, the Creator to the 
 creature, the Father to the child, so the 
 message claims to be accepted, not indeed 
 without inquiry, but still at the last resort 
 in faith. The idea is that of f receiving the 
 word of God.’ It is promised that this 
 message will satisfy your souks felt and 
 experienced wants, will convince you of its 
 own divinity by its applicability to your 
 need, will prove itself at your heart so 
 that you will find the witness of its truth 
 in yourself, if you will receive it in faith. 
 It is anticipated also that as you set your 
 intellect to work, you will find that, in 
 virtue of your faith, you have a rational 
 account to give of the relations of God to 
 man, which will prove better by far, more 
 adequate, and completer than anything 
 else which you could have got by any other 
 way than this way of acceptance in faith. 
 
 Is this method of the old religion, this 
 initial claim upon faith — the receptive 
 
3 2 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 attitude of faith—something which we have 
 a right to resent as unreasonable ? 
 
 Surely not. For, first, it is the method 
 which, if God be our Father, best corre¬ 
 sponds to the real relation in which we all 
 equally, learned or unlearned, stand to Him. 
 Secondly, it is the method by which alone 
 (as far as we can see) men of all kinds 
 and grades of instruction could have been 
 combined or held together in one society. 
 And, thirdly, it is the method that has been 
 justified in experience. Christianity was 
 mocked at by the ‘ intellectuals ’ in its 
 beginnings as ‘ a religion for children and 
 women and fools.’ But not then alone 
 in history the intellectuals were mistaken. 
 Christianity brought into the world a higher 
 knowledge of God and of man, a truer 
 philosophy on the deepest subjects, than 
 had yet existed. It represented a profound 
 advance, an infinitely fruitful movement 
 onward toward truth. And the advance 
 came not by way of intellectual speculation, 
 but through men accepting a divine message 
 in faith, and only afterwards, when they 
 had realized its divinity by its experienced 
 results, thinking about its intellectual mean¬ 
 ing. Men understood by first, in a measure, 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 33 
 
 laying aside their criticism and simply 
 believing. I think that in many of the 
 great forward movements of human life it 
 is not the speculative intellect which has 
 been the real pioneer. It has been the 
 pressure of instinct, the felt need for ex¬ 
 pansion in the heart of man, which has 
 shown the way. I believe that psychology 
 is coming more and more to recognize that 
 the rationality of man lies not only or per¬ 
 haps chiefly in his self-conscious intellect, 
 but as much or more in his subconscious 
 self or soul, with its half-dumb instincts and 
 feelings, out of which his intelligence 
 springs. 
 
 I would venture to put this in a more 
 individual way to any Englishman who 
 shrinks, as most Englishmen do, from the 
 very idea of laying aside his critical faculty, 
 even for a time, and simply receiving a 
 message as divine. 
 
 What we Englishmen need, above other 
 men, is not merely ‘ honest thinking,’ and 
 ‘ obedience to our consciences,’ but the 
 enrichment of our souls, so that we may have 
 both a larger basis for thinking and a deeper 
 and fuller vision of duty. Now it was just 
 this enrichment of soul —of the whole basis 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 of personality—that seems to have resulted 
 in the first Christians from their simple 
 receptiveness. It was because their heart 
 and imagination had been thus enriched 
 that so vigorous an intellectual as well as 
 moral outgrowth was apparent. A similar 
 enrichment, with a similar outgrowth, would 
 always be, and would be for us to-day, the 
 result of a similar receptiveness. 
 
 I can imagine nothing so fertilizing to 
 the intellect of an Englishman (apart from 
 all other considerations) as for him to lay 
 aside his critical attitude for a time, and 
 simply put himself, as it were, to school to 
 receive and assimilate the message of the 
 faith from some adequate teacher, whether 
 by the written or spoken word. Thus he 
 would really appreciate and understand 
 the meaning of our religion from within. If 
 he should sull find it inconsistent with what 
 on other grounds he knows to be true or 
 possible, his rejection of it, or doubt about 
 it, would be at least the rejection or the 
 doubtful holding of a faith which had 
 been appreciated, as it can only be appre¬ 
 ciated, from within. I am persuaded 
 that what renders our English race com¬ 
 paratively and generally unintellectual, 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 35 
 
 is not too much credulity, but too little 
 receptiveness. 
 
 This is, then, what I meant by the method 
 of the old and catholic religion. It pro¬ 
 claims a message of God, a self-disclosure 
 of God in the person of Jesus Christ, ade¬ 
 quate to satisfy the religious needs of men 
 for all time ; which by all men alike must 
 first of all be received as the word of God, 
 in faith : so that all men, learned or un¬ 
 learned, are thus first of all put on a level, 
 as simple receivers in faith of the divine 
 response to human need. And I put this 
 method of the old religion in contrast to 
 the method of the new theology, which 
 approaches us as the best product of con¬ 
 temporary thought, trying to frame an 
 expression of religious ideas which shall be 
 most acceptable to the intellectual aspira¬ 
 tions of the moment. 
 
 I am occupied now in describing the 
 principle of the catholic religion, rather 
 than in giving its justification. But the 
 description I have given of the method of 
 religious revelation may suggest one par¬ 
 ticular objection which it may be well to 
 meet. 
 
 It may be suggested that this supposed 
 
36 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 ‘ divine response ’ is really nothing else 
 than the reflection of human desires. It 
 was because men felt the weakness and 
 bitterness of their lot, because they cried 
 out in pain to the God of their imagining, 
 ‘ Wherefore hast thou made all men for 
 naught ? ’ that, unable to bear the ‘ vanity * 
 of human life, they conceived false hopes, 
 and invested mere surmisings with the 
 dignity of divine oracles, and finally came 
 to find a revelation of God in what was no 
 more than a great and good man’s life and 
 death. The supposed divine revelation is 
 no more than the echo of the human cry. 
 
 Now to this the reply is twofold : First, 
 that it is impossible to treat so vast an 
 aspiration and effort as the religious aspira¬ 
 tion and effort of man has been in human 
 history, as if it carried with it no ground for 
 a belief that it would be satisfied. On a 
 smaller scale, indeed, we can recognize ‘ the 
 vanity of human wishes ’ ; but the most 
 permanent and universal tendencies of 
 humanity represent man’s fundamental 
 nature. Such a tendency in humanity is 
 the search after God—the feeling after 
 Him, to find Him. It is, then, we must say, 
 man’s nature to require God. He strives 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 37 
 
 restlessly after Him. ‘ Unquiet is the heart 
 of man until he rest in Him.’ He expends 
 infinite pains over long ages and in all lands 
 in the search for God. If, then, there is any 
 order or rational purpose in the world, we 
 cannot conceive of so fundamental and 
 universal a striving and straining without 
 some real object to stimulate and satisfy it. 
 In some such general sense as this, we can¬ 
 not help arguing from desire to satisfaction. 
 But—this is the second part of my reply—- 
 the response to human need which claims 
 to be divine, the message of God, does not 
 for a moment allow of our supposing that 
 it is the reflection of human need. It has 
 indeed been such as to satisfy human need 
 at its best, but not by any means such as 
 men would have desired or imagined for 
 themselves. The prophets of the Old 
 Testament who are the organs of the word 
 of God, are plainly supplying not what 
 men actually wanted, but what they ought 
 to have wanted. When to the prophets 
 succeeded the Son, so little did the mass of 
 men want His message, that they rejected 
 and crucified Him. All the wide and per¬ 
 sistent degradations of which the religion 
 which we claim to have been revealed has 
 
38 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 been in history the subject, from Pharisaism 
 downwards, have been due to its being 
 accommodated to suit human instincts and 
 wants, just as they were, without causing 
 men too much trouble. And in virtue 
 of such accommodation the religion has lost 
 its moral power. This is one of the most 
 impressive features of the revealed religion. 
 It is indeed a profound response to the 
 experienced human need where it is deepest, 
 most genuine, and most disciplined ; but it 
 is very far from being the kind of response 
 which mankind, on the whole, would have 
 desired; and it is, therefore, in vain to argue 
 that it can be the product of the human 
 imagination, which in fact it has had to meet 
 continually with rebuke and chastisement. 
 
 But to the human need of God, at its 
 best and deepest, the permanent divine 
 response was, we claim, given once for 
 all in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, in whom 
 God is revealed in manhood, and manhood 
 revealed in perfect union with Godhead. 
 
 Of this revelation, the best and most 
 authoritative summary statement is given 
 in the great catholic creeds, the Apostles' 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 39 
 
 and Nicene Creeds, as they are commonly 
 called. The Apostles’ Creed, in its earlier 
 form—which does not differ in any import¬ 
 ant respect from its present form—is the 
 expression given in the earlier part of the 
 second century to the faith of the Church, 
 for the instruction of those who were to con¬ 
 fess the faith in baptism. In the Nicene 
 Creed you have a similar baptismal creed, 
 somewhat expanded, especially by the in¬ 
 sertion of the famous clause which proclaims 
 Christ ‘ of one substance with the Father,’ 
 that is, really and truly divine. It happened 
 in the earlier part of the fourth century that 
 a prominent Alexandrian teacher, Arius, en¬ 
 deavoured to introduce into Christianity the 
 idea of a demi-god, an intermediate being 
 between God and His creatures. That is 
 to say, he represented Christ as f divine,’ 
 as God’s agent in creation and redemption, 
 and as a being to be worshipped, but as 
 Himself fundamentally a creature, and not 
 God. The Christian church determined 
 to protect itself against so fundamental 
 an outrage upon the faith which Christians 
 had entertained from the first about their 
 Redeemer, and from so manifest a relapse 
 into pagan ways of thinking, and it adopted 
 
40 
 
 THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 this protective phrase, ‘ of one substance 
 with the Father/ into its creed. 
 
 These creeds, then, I propose to take as the 
 classical expression of the catholic religion, 
 having supreme authority among Christian 
 statements of our faith. When I say that 
 they have supreme authority to represent 
 the Christian church and Christianity I am 
 not speaking of the authority of councils, 
 or of ecclesiastical officers who may have 
 imposed them, but I am speaking of a 
 deeper and more fundamental sort of 
 authority—the authority of the whole 
 Christian body. There is in those creeds 
 the whole mind of Christendom. Before 
 the Reformation and after there have been 
 various schools of thought in Christendom, 
 and great differences of opinion and sharp 
 controversies, and permanent divisions, but 
 I think we may say that practically what¬ 
 ever has been nobly suffered or worthily 
 done in the name of Christ throughout 
 the ages, has been done in the name of 
 that faith in God, three in one, and in the 
 incarnation of the eternal Son, which you 
 find confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene 
 Creeds. You know the famous phrase, 
 quod semper , quod ubique, quod ab omnibus — 
 
THE OLD RELIGION 
 
 41 
 
 that which has been held always, every¬ 
 where, and by all within Christendom . 1 If 
 that phrase applies to anything, it applies 
 to what is contained in those creeds ; and 
 I take them as my standards of faith in 
 the old or catholic religion. 
 
 1 As interpreted by its author, Vincent of Lerins, it 
 means what has been believed among Christians from 
 apostolic days, as opposed to what originated at a later 
 date ; and in all parts of the church, so that what did not 
 hold it fell away from the church or was excluded ; and 
 as the common faith, as opposed to the speculations of 
 individuals. So understood, the canon represents some¬ 
 thing most real and valuable. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 Now I am to contrast the teaching of 
 the New Theology with the teaching of 
 the old religion in certain crucial points, 
 which were enumerated above/ and on which 
 the New Theology lays special stress. Of 
 these the first is the doctrine of the 
 immanence of God—of God as disclosed 
 not otherwise than within nature and 
 within man. 
 
 God, says the New Theology, is ‘ the 
 self of the universe/ and He is ‘ my deeper 
 self and yours/ 2 ‘ God is the mysterious 
 
 power which is finding expression in the 
 universe and which is present in every 
 tiniest atom of the wondrous whole. I find 
 that this power is the one reality I cannot 
 get away from; for, whatever else it may 
 be, it is myself / 3 ‘The real God is the God 
 
 1 PP‘ 9 * I0 * 2 The New Theology, p. 35. 3 ibid., p. 18. 
 
 42 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 43 
 
 expressed in the universe, and in yourself.’ 1 
 The higher self of each man, which is also 
 the higher self of all other men, the unit } 7 
 of humanity, is ‘ in all probability a per¬ 
 fect and eternal spiritual being integral to 
 the being of God ’ “ There is no ‘ dividing 
 line between our being and God’s.’ 3 We 
 are of one substance with God. This 
 position is maintained more unreservedly 
 by Mr. Campbell than by Sir Oliver Lodge. 
 He too tells us that ‘ we are a part of the 
 universe and the universe is a part of 
 God.’ 4 He too speaks of ‘ the humanity 
 of God and the divinity of man ’ ; he too 
 implies that each man should be able to 
 say, with Jesus, ‘ I and my Father are one.’ 
 But he seems to leave more room than 
 Mr. Campbell does for the thought of God 
 as self-complete and beyond and above the 
 universe. 
 
 We may say, however, without any risk 
 of mistake, that the tendency of the New 
 Theology is to bring into exclusive emphasis 
 the idea of the immanent God, of God 
 in nature. Nature is one, and one uni- 
 
 1 ibid., p. 20. 2 ibid., p. 31. 3 ibid., p. 34. 
 
 4 Substance of Fatih, p. 43, and Hibbert Journal , Apr. 
 1906, p. 53. 
 
44 
 
 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 versal Spirit pervades it: this is God. 
 Nature is His expression : and man’s 
 soul is a conscious spark of the universal 
 God. 
 
 Now it is not too much to say that this is 
 not new theology, but very old theology. 
 When Christianity came into the world it 
 found the civilized world full of a religious 
 philosophy, in part Platonic, in part Stoic, 
 which held a doctrine substantially identical 
 with that of the New Theology . 1 We cannot 
 be at all acquainted with the thought of 
 the first and second centuries without 
 realizing that this was the current religious 
 belief of the educated world. For if modern 
 science has given us a much more exact 
 perception of the methods and laws of nature, 
 it can hardly give us a sense of the unity 
 of nature and of the all-pervading Spirit 
 more intense than the ancients had. This 
 
 Sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 
 1 See The New Stoicism, by Professor Sonnenshein 
 (Hihbert Journal, Apr. 1907). 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 45 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things — 
 
 is in every age the fruit alike of philosophic 
 search and of mystical contemplation. 
 Moreover, leaving out of the question for 
 the moment the tendency to identify man’s 
 spirit with this omnipresent God, the creed 
 of God’s immanence in all things is true, 
 and, as we shall see, the Christian religion 
 identified itself with it and propagated 
 it. But for the Christian it was not the 
 first or most important part of his faith 
 in God. 
 
 For there came into the world where 
 this philosophic creed prevailed, amidst a 
 hundred lov T er forms of faith and worship, 
 another thought of God, due not to Greeks 
 but to Jev r s. And the result of our con¬ 
 sideration will, I hope, be to convince 
 us that ‘ salvation ’ —the saving and re¬ 
 deeming knoviedge of God, ‘is of the Jews.’ 
 To the Greeks w~as given the leadership 
 among men in the w’orld of philosophy and 
 the pursuit of beauty, as to the Romans in 
 the v r orld of government and law; but 
 the Jewish race was called to be, by its 
 prophets, ‘ the sacred school of the know- 
 
46 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 ledge of God and of the spiritual life for all 
 mankind.’ 1 
 
 Not by the way of philosophical con¬ 
 templation and inquiry, but by a way which 
 we call ‘ inspiration,’ there was given to 
 the Jewish prophets, through their moral 
 conscience, the sense of God as the righteous 
 sovereign Lord. He was indeed the God 
 of nature, the creator and sustainer of 
 all that is, having all power and might; 
 but, above all, they recognized Him as the 
 eternally Righteous One, who had made 
 men to serve Him in righteousness and 
 holiness, and sat supreme above them, their 
 maker and their judge. This doctrine of 
 
 1 The phrase is St. Athanasius’s. A modern writer, 
 the great Ewald, in sketching the programme of his 
 History of Israel , observes how ancient nations devoted 
 themselves to special branches of human attainment ; 
 and how in Israel ‘ the aim is perfect religion. The aim 
 was lofty enough to concentrate the efforts of a whole 
 people for more than a thousand years, and however 
 much the mode of pursuit might vary, it was this single 
 object that was always pursued ; so that there is hardly 
 any history of equal compass that possesses in all its 
 phases and variations so much intrinsic unity, and is so 
 closely bound up to a single thought pertinaciously held, 
 but always developing itself to a higher purity.' The 
 Jew however was, throughout his history, conscious that 
 he was not discovering God by investigation, but re¬ 
 ceiving His disclosure of Himself. 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 4 J 
 
 the moral character of God—His essential 
 righteousness—is the central idea of the 
 Old Testament. The sense of it bowed 
 men down in utter humility, and made quite 
 impossible any identification of themselves 
 with God. It forced them to think of God 
 as the absolute creator, alone self-existent 
 alone the object of worship; though they 
 knew that He loved the creatures whom 
 He had made, and admitted men, with 
 cleansed hearts and reverent minds, into 
 fellowship and communion with Himself. 
 
 This Jewish thought of God it was 
 which, in its perfect form, found expression 
 through the lips of Jesus Christ. All 
 modern critics of the New Testament 
 see in our Lord the inheritor of the Jewish 
 way of thinking about God, though in His 
 teaching the thought of God, as lord and 
 creator, finds its completion in the thought 
 of Him as father, and the idea of His 
 righteousness in the idea of His love. 
 The disciples of Christ did indeed, through 
 His life and teaching, come to believe that 
 in His person God had come to them in a 
 human nature, and they believed in Him as 
 God’s eternal Son made man. But there 
 was not even the slightest tendency to 
 
48 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 transfer the thought of His deity to them¬ 
 selves, or any other man. No breath of 
 pantheistic identification of Godhead and 
 manhood is felt in the New Testament. 
 Once more, through Christ’s teaching and 
 His promises, and through the performance 
 of His promises, they came to believe in the 
 Spirit of God, who was to come and take men 
 up into the most intimate fellowship with 
 God. But, again, there was not any real 
 tendency to confuse the divine Spirit with 
 the human nature. Rather the thought 
 of God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 
 yet one God, helped the Christian church 
 to maintain the Jewish idea of God as per¬ 
 fect and complete in Himself—as indeed 
 loving to create and to have fellowship with 
 His creatures, but as Himself in His own 
 being perfect, and dependent in nothing 
 upon the work of His hands. 
 
 This is simply an historical statement of 
 the religious heritage which w T e owe to the 
 Jew y s. Granted this belief in God, personal 
 and sovereign and complete in Himself, all 
 the truth of His immanence could be 
 accepted without risk of confusion between 
 the creator and the creature. Already in 
 the Psalms it is recognized that God is 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 49 
 
 active in nature, that His ‘ breath ’ is the 
 life of nature . 1 And in St. Paul’s teaching 
 there is the fullest recognition that ‘ in 
 God we (men) live, and move, and are/ and 
 that in him all things consist/ or ‘have their 
 coherence.’ And this idea of God’s imman¬ 
 ence which, as we have seen, was prevalent 
 in the world into which Christianity came, 
 was taken up most fully into Christian 
 theology, and held its place both among the 
 Fathers and later among the Schoolmen. It 
 would be hard to exaggerate the constancy 
 with which they recognize God as active in 
 the world—its beauty, its order, its system, 
 its ‘ persistent energy,’ the force of nature, 
 and the light of conscience ; but never for 
 a moment so as to obliterai e or obscure 
 the primary belief in God as alone self- 
 existent and independent and supreme, 
 the creator and lord and judge of all. 
 
 This perception of the absolute difference 
 between the creator and the creature came 
 into prominence through the Arian con¬ 
 troversy—already briefly described. In 
 Arius’s conception Christ was, as it were, a 
 demi-god: himself a creature, but supreme 
 over all other creatures, and indeed their 
 
 1 Ps. civ. 29, 30. 
 
 4 
 
50 
 
 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 creator : a being, therefore, both creature 
 and creator. This conception the Christian 
 church absolutely refused. Absolutely, as 
 by an indomitable instinct, it refused to 
 worship or treat as God one who was him¬ 
 self created. The highest archangel, the 
 most exalted creature conceivable, the 
 Christian church felt would be no nearer 
 being God, than the meanest of men. 
 Between God, the self-existent, and any 
 created being, the difference was pro¬ 
 claimed to be absolute. And if Christ was 
 to be worshipped, as assuredly He was, it 
 was because He was, what no created 
 person could conceivably be, ‘ of one sub¬ 
 stance with God.' 1 
 
 Of course the Christian conception of 
 God leaves us with many mysteries baffling 
 cur eager scrutiny. The relation of God’s 
 all-embracing being and personality to the 
 dependent and created personalities of 
 men remains profoundly mysterious . 2 It 
 
 1 See for instance, Athanasius, Or at. c. Arian. ii. 20, and 
 cf. Mozley’s Theory of Development (Rivington, 1878), 
 pp. 74 - 3 1. 
 
 2 I cannot think that Dr. Rashdall’s recent book 
 (Theory of Good and Evil , ii. 238) is on the true line of 
 solution. In some sense God’s being must surely be 
 all-including, and identified with the Absolute. 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 51 
 
 is only one of many mysteries. The early 
 Christian church, living and struggling 
 to express and defend its doctrine, in an 
 age of keen intellectual and philosophical 
 speculation, felt the burden of the mystery, 
 and the inadequacy of human thought to 
 solve or words to express it. But what 
 they believed and relied upon was, they 
 felt, not a human speculation, but a real 
 intelligible self-disclosure of God, made in 
 many parts and manners, but made finally 
 in the person of His Son. His Name, the 
 Name of the Father and the Son and the 
 Holy Ghost, one God, creator, redeemer 
 and sanctifier, saviour and judge, was lifted 
 above all doubt and controversy : for He 
 had revealed it and they had accepted 
 it, and found its power in their whole 
 being. 
 
 To go back, then, from this Christian 
 heritage upon the mere idea of divine 
 immanence as the Stoics had conceived it, 
 is, I contend, to go backward, not forward. 
 The superiority of the Christian idea of 
 God may be stated in three ways. 
 
 First in its moral effect. The pantheistic 
 or philosophic conception of God as the 
 universal being of whose substance we all 
 
52 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 form a part, of whom we know nothing 
 except his expression of Himself in nature, 
 is destitute of moral power. It leads to 
 a kind of moral indifferency. Physical 
 nature is apparently altogether indifferent 
 to moral distinctions. It can be explained 
 indeed as the handiwork of the good God, 
 and as representing a stage in His self- 
 revealing and educative purpose, if once 
 we have got from somewhere beyond nature 
 the disclosure of His person and character. 
 But if we are left to draw conclusions from 
 nature we shall arrive at no clear conception 
 of divine righteousness ; and if we include 
 human nature, we shall still be bewildered 
 by the strange mixture of good and evil, 
 which seem to wage an uncertain struggle, 
 or, very often, a struggle in which the good 
 appears to be defeated. If manhood be 
 identical with godhead, we must ask, is God 
 more good than bad ? or is He becoming 
 better as the generations pass ? And if 
 the human spirit be only an element in the 
 All which is God, is it the element which 
 is dominant ? Or will it not rather be 
 swallowed up in the sea of non-moral 
 forces which is, to all appearance, so much 
 vaster than humanity ? 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 53 
 
 Till, I say, we have got our disclosure 
 from beyond nature, and beyond man, 
 we have got no ground for the worship of 
 an absolutely righteous God, or for the 
 sense of responsibility; or for the striving 
 after purity and love. In history, the 
 philosophic pantheism, such as prevailed 
 in the world into which Christianity came, 
 has shown itself, as we should indeed expect, 
 without the power to arouse and inspire 
 and maintain moral effort and moral enthu¬ 
 siasm in the mass of men. It leaves men 
 content to feel themselves as part of the 
 whole. The moral lift and enthusiasm and 
 hope which Christianity brought into the 
 Greek and Roman world came with the 
 Hebrew belief in the righteous God, who, 
 however much He loves men and however 
 closely He calls them into union with Him¬ 
 self, is yet in His own being independent 
 and supreme and unalterable ; our creator 
 and our judge ; our saviour also—but a 
 saviour whose fellowship we can only 
 attain by purifying ourselves even as He 
 is pure. I can conceive nothing more 
 certain than that with us to-day the 
 morality of the future depends on our hold¬ 
 ing fast the Christian belief in God, and 
 
54 THE immanence of god 
 
 refusing to relapse upon the philosophic 
 pantheism. 
 
 Secondly, the superiority of the Christian 
 belief in God lies in the method by which 
 it was received. There is a memorable 
 passage in the Phaedo of Plato, in which 
 Socrates is represented as expressing his dis¬ 
 satisfaction with the arguments by which 
 he and his friends had been endeavouring 
 to prove the immortality of the soul. ‘And 
 yet / he says, ‘ I should deem him a coward 
 who did not prove what is said to the utter¬ 
 most. For he should persevere until he 
 has attained one of two things : either he 
 should discern or learn the truth ; or if 
 this is impossible, I would have him take 
 the best and most irrefragable of human 
 words (arguments), and let this be the raft 
 upon which he sails through life—not with¬ 
 out risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some 
 word of God which will more safely and 
 surely carry him.' 
 
 It is such a word of God, giving a 
 different kind of security to our religious 
 beliefs from that which speculation 
 could ever attain—a security such as 
 attaches itself to our feelings of right 
 and wrong—it is such a word of God 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 55 
 
 which we believe to have been really 
 uttered. 
 
 The Hebrew prophets knew themselves 
 to be its subjects and its organs. Through 
 many generations of inspired men, there 
 was impressed upon a whole nation a pro¬ 
 found belief that God had really disclosed 
 Himself and His character to them. This 
 faith received its fulfilment, and was 
 made universal, through Jesus Christ. Thus 
 there has been communicated to men 
 a certain conception of God not due to 
 fallible speculation, but to God’s own will 
 to reveal Himself. This message may, 
 nay must, become the subject for philo¬ 
 sophical speculation, and the intellect of 
 men must use the conception of God thus 
 received to interpret the world and har¬ 
 monize the whole of experience. But the 
 revelation itself is given in forms of human 
 speech, and, at least as truly, in forms of 
 human life, such as are intelligible to the 
 hearts of ordinary men. Thus it becomes, 
 not the doctrine of a school of thinkers, 
 but the creed of a catholic church, the 
 faith in the one God, the Father, the Son, 
 and the Holy Ghost. And if in any sense 
 there be a God whom we can rightly call 
 
56 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 our Father, and whose sons we are, then, I 
 say, this method of self-disclosure or reve¬ 
 lation corresponds to the idea of His 
 Fatherhood, and is of a piece with the 
 whole experience of mankind as to the 
 method by which moral and spiritual truth, 
 as opposed to the truth about nature, has 
 made itself known among men. 
 
 Lastly, the Christian idea of God justifies 
 itself to the intellect by its comprehensive¬ 
 ness ; by enabling us to make our own all 
 the truth of the divine immanence without 
 the moral disadvantages which belong to 
 the conception of God as the soul of nature, 
 when we have that and nothing more. 
 
 The Christian conception of God in fact 
 holds a middle point between Deism, against 
 which the New Theology is in somewhat 
 violent reaction, and Pantheism, into which 
 in its reaction it undoubtedly plunges. 
 The New Theology is in reaction against 
 what it describes as ‘ the old idea of God *— 
 as if He were some great emperor who 
 sits somewhere outside and above the 
 world, who made it and set it going and 
 occasionally intervenes to set it right again. 
 This, which has been well called ‘ the 
 carpenter idea ’ of God, is in fact not the 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 57 
 
 old idea, if by that is meant the orthodox 
 or scriptural idea. It is a gross distortion 
 of it. Deism, which is the best form in 
 which this one-sided conception of God took 
 shape, was a theory of a certain school of 
 thinkers in the eighteenth century, but cer¬ 
 tainly not the conception of Christian theo¬ 
 logy. For the Christian, God is in the world 
 in all its parts and at every moment, reveal¬ 
 ing Himself in varying degrees in all its 
 force, and order, and beauty, and truth, 
 and goodness. But the universe does not 
 exhaust Him or limit Him. Beyond the 
 universe and independent of it, He is in 
 Himself, limited by nothing outside Him¬ 
 self , 1 in the eternal fellowship of His own 
 being. He is in all, but also over all, supreme 
 and free. Thus it is not true that ‘ all is 
 God : ’ for this is to identify His being 
 with that of His creatures, which our own 
 self-consciousness, to go no further, pro¬ 
 hibits. It is not true that ‘ God is all : 9 
 for that is to suggest that he has no being 
 independent of and beyond the world. But 
 
 1 It is often said, and may be truly said, that God is 
 infinite, or ‘ unlimited.’ But it is more exact to say that 
 God is self-limited: limited by nothing except the 
 eternal law and character of His own being. 
 
58 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 it is true that ' from him ’ and ' in him * and 
 ‘ unto him ’ are all things; that He is 
 the creator of all things, who has made man 
 especially in His own image; and the 
 sustaining life of all things; who invites man 
 into most intimate communion and corre¬ 
 spondence with Himself; and the end 
 towards whom all things tend, the moral 
 judge of all free and conscious beings. 
 
 I do not suppose that the teachers of the 
 New 7 Theology w 7 ho proclaim a ' human 
 God ’ are in a position to object to the 
 doctrine of the creed as 'anthropomorphism/ 
 that is, as imagining a God in the likeness 
 of man. The fact is that whatever man 
 thinks or imagines he must think or imagine 
 ' anthropomorphically/ for he can think 
 only human thoughts. It follows that if 
 human thoughts are necessarily limited and 
 imperfect, the highest thought that man can 
 think of God is inadequate to its subject. 
 The Christian Fathers, in deepest reverence, 
 were never weary of reiterating that we 
 but know God as in an inadequate reflection, 
 seeing ‘ as in a mirror, darkly.’ But the 
 point is that human nature is at least a 
 truer image of God than mechanical forces 
 or merely animal life. For man pre-emi- 
 
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 59 
 
 nently is made ‘ in God's image.' If God 
 is not in man's image (anthropomorphic), 
 man, with his spiritual and free personality, 
 is in God's image (theomorphic). Thus in 
 Jesus Christ the best that we can know or 
 believe about God is revealed in a human 
 character; and the human relationship 
 of father and son is the best image of the 
 eternal fellowship which is God’s own being. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 1 
 
 The view of sin which the New Theology 
 presents follows from its idea of God. 
 God is the mysterious power which is finding 
 expression in the universe and in mankind 
 as part of the whole. And the process in 
 which God thus realizes Himself in the 
 universe is a process of gradual evolu¬ 
 tion or upward development. In this pro¬ 
 cess sin has appeared. Its existence—in 
 forms of lust and greed and hatred and 
 cruelty and falsehood—cannot be denied, 
 nor its ugliness and hatefulness. But is it, 
 we ask, voluntary and therefore culpable ? 
 There is no doubt that Sir Oliver Lodge 
 would say that it is, though he does not seem 
 to me to follow out this admission to its 
 consequences. And, with much less clear¬ 
 ness and emphasis, Mr. Campbell appears 
 
 1 This subject is treated, from a more hortatory point 
 of view, in Sermon iii, p. 231. 
 
 60 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 6l 
 
 to recognize that sin is in some measure 
 voluntary and culpable. We have, he 
 admits, to ‘ mourn over our own slowness 
 in getting into line with the cosmic purpose.’ 
 Sin is being ‘ false to ourselves and our 
 divine origin.’ 1 But though we have thus 
 a certain power to retard the process of 
 advance in ourselves and the world, we 
 cannot do more than retard it. It goes 
 forward inevitably. Sin is only a phase 
 which is being outgrown and left behind. 
 It is ‘ a mistake/ 2 akin to the mistakes we 
 make in every department of human pro¬ 
 gress. It is an ignorant quest for true life 
 and for God . 3 Through all our mistakes, 
 the upward process goes on. 4 Slowly, very 
 slowly, the race is climbing the steep ascent.’ 
 And in every individual man the true life 
 must finally be realized .’ 4 
 
 And what is sin ? Its essence is selfish¬ 
 ness, we are told. It is seeking our own 
 personal and separate interest or pleasure 
 instead of the whole. And the explanation 
 of this mistaken tendency lies in the animal 
 nature out of which we have been developed. 
 It is ‘ the tiger and the ape ’ in us. Selfish- 
 
 1 The New Theology, pp. 66, 109. 2 ibid., p. 214. 
 
 3 ibid., pp. 52, 153 f160 ff. 4 ibid., pp. 215-16. 
 
62 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 ness, injustice, and cruelty are ‘ relics of 
 our brute ancestor* which civilization is 
 slowly refining away . 1 
 
 Such a theory finds itself in conflict with 
 the common Christian idea of an original 
 fall of man. Thus the only real fall 
 which Mr. Campbell can recognize appears 
 on examination to be a fall, not of man, but 
 of God. ‘ The coming of a finite creature 
 into being is itself of the nature of a fall—a 
 coming down from perfection to imperfec¬ 
 tion.' 2 The idea is that ‘ the universal 
 life ’—that is God—in order to realize 
 itself in the universe, must submit to limita¬ 
 tion in finite forms of life. This is, of course, 
 only ‘ a fall ’ in the sense that the deep 
 humiliation of the incarnation, as St. Paul 
 conceives it, might be called a fall. It has 
 nothing to do with the Christian idea of a 
 fall of man by wilful disobedience. In man, 
 then, there was no original fall: unless we 
 can give this name to the passage from a 
 brute life, unconscious of moral distinctions, 
 to the spiritual consciousness of right and 
 wrong. In becoming conscious of moral 
 possibility and moral freedom man became 
 conscious of a lower self of animal impulse 
 
 1 The New Theology, pp. 61-2. 2 ibid., p. 66. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 63 
 
 which had to be overcome ; and in this con¬ 
 sciousness of contrast between his gross 
 actual nature and actual habits, and the 
 idea of what he ought to be and may become, 
 originates, it is supposed, the idea of ‘ the 
 fall/ That is to say, the soul, conscious of 
 a divine parentage and destiny, finds the 
 unspiritual bodily nature a prison-house 
 and a degradation. But this fall was no 
 fault of man. ‘ The perception of evil is the 
 concomitant of your expanding finite con¬ 
 sciousness of good/ 1 It is indeed plainly 
 no real fall, but a step upwards. ‘ It has 
 no sinister antecedents. Its purpose is 
 good/ 2 It ' is but a statement of imper¬ 
 fection,’ and thus ‘ is not man’s fault but 
 God’s will, and is a means towards a great 
 end.’ From this way of conceiving ‘ the 
 fall ’ and from all the accompanying view 
 of sin, it will follow naturally that Mr. 
 Campbell cannot tolerate the idea of God’s 
 wrath upon sin, or of God punishing sin, 
 or indeed of God as the judge of men, 
 judging, as it were, from outside. 
 
 God is to be sought in myself. He is 
 realizing Himself through me. If mistakes 
 are made in this process of realizing God. 
 
 1 ibid., p. 45. 2 ibid., p. 66. 
 
64 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 there is no other punishment than such as 
 a man thereby inevitably makes for him¬ 
 self, such as is involved in the process of 
 recovery, and there is no other wrath or 
 judgement than of his own self-condemna¬ 
 tion, the judgement of his own higher self 
 which is indeed divine, and which must 
 finally win the victory and realize itself in 
 every single life . 1 
 
 Now it may be questioned whether this 
 view of sin is clearly thought out; whether, 
 in particular, the question of voluntari¬ 
 ness is really faced in the light of its 
 consequences. But in its general lines it 
 presents an intelligible attitude towards sin, 
 and one which we recognize as thoroughly 
 modern : it permeates, one may say, most 
 of the popular novel literature of the day. 
 At the same time we shall probably feel 
 that, as leading us to think of sin as a 
 weakness or an error, pitiable before it is, 
 and much more than it is, blameworthy, 
 and as leaving very little place for indigna¬ 
 tion against sin, and none for the, con¬ 
 ception of sin as leading in the individual 
 to ultimate and irretrievable disorder, it falls 
 very far short of the teaching of the Bible. 
 
 1 The New Theology, pp. 213 fi. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 65 
 
 The Old Testament is quite full of the 
 idea of sin as rebellion. God, who made 
 man, made him, unlike His other creatures 
 in this world, capable of voluntary and 
 glad obedience ; and mankind has proved 
 rebellious ; and this rebellion merits the 
 righteous wrath of God, and brings down 
 His judgement on nations and individuals ; 
 and the true attitude of man, when he has 
 ‘ come to himself,’ is one of profound 
 penitence and earnest amendment and 
 willing acceptance of the divine punish¬ 
 ment, now truly remedial. This, beyond all 
 question, is the prevailing way of regarding 
 the actual state of man in the Old Testament, 
 And the essence of this view of sin is that 
 it lies, not in the bodily nature, but in 
 the will. It is rebellion, the rebellion 
 of the will of man against the righteous 
 God. 
 
 Certain limitations which are to be found 
 in the Old Testament doctrine disappear 
 in the New. In particular the area in which 
 God is thought of as dealing with man is 
 definitely and finally extended beyond this 
 present life, and the much fuller concep¬ 
 tion of the redemptive love of God gives a 
 different colour to the thought of God’s 
 
 5 
 
66 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 attitude towards sin. But in this, as in 
 other respects, it is upon the Old Testament 
 doctrine that the New Testament is built ; 
 and the idea of sin is the same. Our Lord 
 is indeed mainly occupied in directing the 
 minds of His disciples and hearers to positive 
 ideals. He is announcing the moral char¬ 
 acter of the kingdom of God. But His 
 first call to men reiterated John the Bap¬ 
 tist’s claim for repentance. ' Repent ye ’ 
 —that is the beginning . 1 And consistently 
 He deals with men as needing a fundamental 
 change and fundamental renewal: ‘ Except 
 ye turn, and become as little children, ye 
 shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven/ ‘ Except a man be born anew, 
 he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ 2 
 Speaking to His disciples, and speaking 
 about man’s natural goodness, He sees in 
 it the taint of sin : ‘ If ye then, being 
 
 evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
 your children, how much more shall your 
 heavenly Father. . . .’ 3 Quite uncompro¬ 
 misingly he warns men of the possibility 
 of eternal or irremediable punishment for 
 
 1 Matt. iv. 17 ; Mark i. 15. 
 
 2 Matt, xviii. 3, John iii. 3. 
 
 2 Matt. vii. 11, Luke xi. 13, cf. xiii. 1-8. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 6 7 
 
 sin, coming from the divine righteousness , 1 
 and speaks of a certain act or state of wilful 
 sin itself as ‘ having never forgiveness/ 
 and as eternal . 2 Certainly it is the case that 
 Jesus Christ gives no countenance at all 
 to views of sin which lead us to think of 
 it as a temporary error on the right way, 
 But probably the most noticeable point 
 about our Lord’s attitude towards sin is 
 that His indignation, which is as fiery as 
 the indignation of the old prophets, is 
 mainly directed, not against sensual, but 
 against spiritual sin. It is against sin of 
 the kind which we should describe as least 
 bodily, and having least to do with our 
 animal ancestors, that He concentrates 
 His wrath. It is against pride, and calcu¬ 
 lated worldliness, and spiritual despotism, 
 and ambition, and love of power, against the 
 sins of respectable spiritual men, rather 
 than against the sins of ungoverned passion 
 and animal lust. With the utmost em¬ 
 phasis, therefore, we should say that the 
 teaching of Jesus Christ leaves us with 
 a profoundly deepened assurance that the 
 seat of sin lies in the will of man; and that 
 
 1 Matt. x. 28, xxv. 46, Mark ix. 43, 48. 
 
 2 Mark iii. 29, Matt. xii. 32, Luke xii. 10. 
 
68 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 we are, in any true view of human nature, 
 face to face with this awful possibility and 
 reality of the human will setting itself in 
 obstinate rebellion against the will of God. 
 
 Nor is it open to doubt that to our Lord’s 
 spiritual perception (as to that of St. Paul 
 and St. John), the spectacle of human sin 
 was thrown upon the larger background of 
 an unseen world of spirits. Human rebel¬ 
 lion was a portion of a larger and wider 
 rebellion of ‘ principalities and powers/ 
 the devil and his angels. As God is, and 
 remains, the only Lord, so the victory over 
 evil is sure. But meanwhile man’s moral 
 trial is made all the more serious by the 
 opposition of unseen enemies, and his 
 rebellion all the more serious by his unseen 
 allies. 
 
 St. John formulates his theory of sin in 
 the words, ‘ Sin is lawlessness.’ 1 He means 
 by lawlessness, not, as we might mean, 
 merely something anomalous : but simply 
 rebellion against the law of God. He means 
 that the two phrases are coincident: that 
 sin begins and ends with violation of God’s 
 
 1 I John iii. 4 : ?; dfJLapria eaTiv rj dvop(a. The 
 
 use of the articles makes the two terms absolutely co¬ 
 extensive. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 69 
 
 law, and that except in the rebellion of 
 created spirits there is no such thing as 
 violation of God’s law. And in thus making 
 the will the seat of sin, and identifying 
 sin with rebellion, St. John is but formu¬ 
 lating the general view of the Bible. It is 
 also St. Paul’s doctrine : ‘ The wrath of God 
 is revealed from heaven against all ungod¬ 
 liness and unrighteousness of men, who hold 
 down the truth in unrighteousness ’ ; f upon 
 them that are factious, and obey not the 
 truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be 
 wrath and indignation, tribulation and an¬ 
 guish, upon every soul of man that worketh 
 evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek ’ ; 
 ‘ who shall suffer punishment, even eternal 
 destruction from the face of the Lord and 
 from the glory of his might.’ 1 It is needless 
 to go on multiplying quotations. 
 
 It has, however, been said that, for St. 
 Paul, the seat of sin is in the bodily nature, 
 ‘ the flesh,’ and that he regards it as almost 
 involuntary: ‘ I know that in me, that is, 
 in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing : for 
 to will is present with me, but to do that 
 which is good is not.’ Thus ‘ it is no more 
 I that do the evil, but sin which dwelleth 
 
 1 Rom. 1. 18, ii. 8, 9; 2 Thess. i. 9. 
 
70 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 in me.’ ' Not what I would that do I 
 practise ; but what I hate, that I do.’ ‘ 0 
 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver 
 me out of the body of this death ? ’ 1 But 
 closer examination proves this not to be 
 the case. St. Paul perceives that the 
 misdirection of the human will has per¬ 
 verted the body, so that the body of man 
 has become accustomed to evil, impregnated 
 with evil. And even when the will has 
 become wholly right with God—for that is 
 the case wliich he is here contemplating— 
 there still remains an intractable nature 
 which the man’s will cannot draw with 
 it or control, and which forces the man to 
 feel his need of divine grace to transform 
 him and purge him through and through. 
 
 This intractable nature is sin in the body 
 and bodily impulses ; but this is, in St. 
 Paul, the secondary and not the primary 
 meaning of sin. It comes into notice when 
 sin, in its primary meaning of rebellion of 
 the will, is over and gone. It is, in the 
 individual or in the race, a consequence of 
 this rebellion. And it remains true that the 
 real seat and origin of sin, according to 
 St. Paul, is the will; and there is no bodily 
 
 1 Rom. vii. 15-24. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 71 
 
 sin, however gross, which is ultimately 
 anything else than the misuse of a physical 
 nature essentially good by a perverted will. 
 
 And St. Paul’s whole teaching emphasizes 
 the principle of justification by faith; and 
 this principle does indeed mean, at bottom, 
 nothing else than this : that when the will is 
 again set right and enlightened, and wholly 
 redirected towards God and open to God’s 
 offer of love, then the whole nature will 
 be redressed and brought right. Redemp¬ 
 tion begun in the will, by faith in God and 
 Jesus Christ, draws with it the whole nature, 
 body, soul, and spirit, each to its really 
 natural order and harmony. 1 
 
 Christianity, indeed, if it be true to facts, 
 must recognize all that St. Paul says about 
 f sin in the members ’; but the ultimate seat 
 of sin is not the body, but the will, and 
 sin is only really sinful so far as it is the 
 rebellion of the personal will against God. 
 
 This is the fundamental Christian doc¬ 
 trine. It is not stated in the creeds, 
 though it is implied in the phrases ‘ I believe 
 in the forgiveness of sins,’ or ‘ in one baptism 
 
 1 I have dealt with this matter at greater length in my 
 Practical Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Murray), 
 i. 66 ff., 245 ff., 279. 
 
72 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 for the remission of sins/ and ‘ who for our 
 salvation became man/ for these phrases 
 imply that every man lies in sin and needs 
 forgiveness and renewal. But it is found 
 throughout Scripture, and, speaking gener¬ 
 ally, throughout Christian theology. Ter- 
 tullian, who may be said to have been 
 the first Christian psychologist, is right 
 in fastening upon this as the distinctive 
 Christian principle of sin. 1 And if it be 
 true, it is obvious that sin is not anything 
 which civilization has a tendency to out¬ 
 grow. The exhibitions of sin are different 
 in different stages of civilization—different 
 among barbarians and in highly advanced 
 races. But it is as much present in the 
 latter as the former. And throughout the 
 whole history of humanity it is in the same 
 sense destructive in its tendency. Huxley 
 speaks of ‘ that fixed order of nature which 
 sends social disorganization upon the track 
 of immorality, as surely as it sends physical 
 disease after physical trespasses/ and he 
 speaks of its being ‘ the high mission ' of 
 science ‘ to be the preacher of a firm and 
 living faith ’ in that f fixed moral order.' 2 
 
 1 De paen. 3. 
 
 2 Evolution and Ethics (Macmillan), p. 146. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 73 
 
 Substitute for the words ‘ fixed order ’ 
 some such phrase as ‘ the will of God, the 
 moral ruler of the world/ and you have 
 here the doctrine of the prophets about f the 
 day of the Lord’—the judgement of God 
 upon nations and individuals. History, 
 so far as it is able to pass a verdict upon the 
 causes of national disintegration, confirms 
 the prophets’ teaching. As you look out 
 upon the extraordinarily chequered course 
 of human progress, you cannot resist the 
 impression that progress might have been 
 infinitely more continuous and more gene¬ 
 ral but for the persistent tendency in 
 men to follow their lusts and appetites 
 and selfish ambitions instead of conforming 
 themselves to the will of God, as they were 
 able to know it. The history of the race 
 is in fact only the history of the individual 
 ‘ writ large,’ and we know well enough what 
 sin is in ourselves and others; how indis¬ 
 putable is the fact of wilfulness, and the 
 refusal of the divine law which claims 
 authority over us in our conscience, and 
 the degradation and misery which this 
 wilfulness works in us. 
 
 So far as we can trace the history of 
 man, from end to end of our knowledge, 
 
74 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 sin is always there, in the form of man’s 
 refusal to submit himself to his best lights ; 
 and it is there on the largest scale, and 
 always with the same ruinous results, in 
 the individual and in the race. 
 
 It is of course obvious, from any point of 
 view, that the individual man is, from his 
 birth and before it, deeply influenced by 
 the race. It is obvious that the individual 
 does not ‘ start fair ’—that he is largely 
 what the circumstances of his birth and 
 nurture make him. Thus it is certainly 
 true in some sense that sin is in the race 
 before it is in the individual will, and that 
 every individual is born into an inheritance 
 of sin. Whether this inheritance of sin is 
 actually transmitted physically or whether 
 it is, in the deepest sense, the result of en¬ 
 vironment and the social influences which 
 are upon us from our infancy, we need not 
 now consider. The relation of the indivi¬ 
 dual man to humanity, and the manner 
 in which the effects of the individual’s 
 action are transmitted in the race, is a very 
 obscure question. I am not now concerned 
 with it. In any case, whether by physical 
 transmission or by social influence, each 
 individual is born into a world of sin, and 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 / 5 
 
 finds his own nature more or less weakened 
 and tainted before his own personal re¬ 
 sponsibility begins. But it will be admitted 
 by all Christians, except a school of extreme 
 Calvinists which can hardly any longer be 
 said to exist, that this ‘ taint of nature ’ 
 does not reach to the point of annihilating 
 our moral freedom and responsibility; and 
 that wirere the will is set right the viiole 
 nature will ultimately follow. 
 
 All that I am now concerned to maintain 
 as the indisputably Christian principle, the 
 constant teaching of the Bible, is that the 
 viiole strength and essence of sin lies in 
 the lawiessness of the will, and that it is 
 this, and nothing else than this, which has 
 weakened and depraved our humanity, 
 and been the main retarding and dis¬ 
 integrating force in human development. 
 
 Sin, then, as we know it by experience 
 in the individual, is ahvays a fall, a loss and 
 not a gain. It is ‘ lawiessness/ and to 
 break the law T of our being is never a gain. 
 The returned prodigal, for all the joy of his 
 recovery, can never do otherwise than 
 lament that he left his father’s house. The 
 act of rebellion is always a step along the 
 road wiiich leads to the state of wilich our 
 
76 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 Lord said, * Good were it for that man if 
 he had not been born’—a step, though 
 mercifully not an irrecoverable step, along 
 the way to ruin. And when you look at 
 humanity in the large (so far as his origin 
 can be known or conjectured) from his 
 first beginnings of properly human con¬ 
 sciousness, sin has been always a fall, and 
 at every stage has made, as the individual, so 
 also the society to which he belongs, weaker 
 and poorer and less progressive than might 
 have been the case. 
 
 And this doctrine of sin is in no way 
 dependent upon our regarding the story 
 of Genesis iii. as an historical record. In 
 the early Christian centuries it was com¬ 
 monly regarded as giving us, not a literal 
 history, but, to use the illuminating 
 phrase of St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘ ideas 
 (or ‘ doctrines ’) in the form of a narra¬ 
 tive.’ 1 The materials of the narrative 
 come from sources shared by the J ews with 
 the Babylonians and other races. But 
 amongst the Jews the story becomes the 
 vehicle for a teaching about the meaning of 
 
 1 Oratio Catechetica, 5: iv birjyrjcrecDS ei'Sei hoy para f]fj.lv 
 npoTiOepevos. The phrase refers to the whole opening 
 narrative of the creation and the fall. 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 77 
 
 sin which, conveyed in a form intelligible to 
 children or childish races, is, in its moral 
 contents, for ever true and valuable. It 
 is, as a matter of fact, quite untrue to say 
 that the Old Testament doctrine of sin, 
 which the New Testament inherits, is built 
 upon this narrative. It has no appreciable 
 effect upon the rest of the Old Testament. 
 In fact the doctrine of sin was wrought out 
 in the moral experience of the Hebrews, 
 under the guidance of the prophetic spirit, 
 and the colouring given to the old story 
 was the result of their moral insight into the 
 meaning of sin, and not the source of it. 1 
 
 The great advantage of the Christian 
 view of sin lies in its moral effects. Let 
 all men know the love of God for them 
 individually, and the freedom of which 
 their nature is capable; let them know 
 that only one thing keeps them back from 
 entering upon their glorious heritage, and 
 that is the false desire of independence, 
 the shrinking from God, the refusal of the 
 will to surrender itself to Him, and you 
 
 1 With St. Paul’s doctrine of the fall, and of the unity 
 of humanity in Adam and Christ, and of the relation of 
 sin and death, I have dealt in the work referred to, 
 Romans i., 190 ff., and app. note E. 
 
78 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 inspire men with a great hope. You have 
 an effective gospel. The most degraded 
 of men can be assured that, if he will only 
 surrender himself in faith to God, and 
 accept the divine promise as it is assured 
 to him in Christ, and open his heart to the 
 divine influence, he can break once for all 
 with the past; his nature will be, there and 
 then, brought back upon the track of 
 recovery ; he will regain self-master}/. All 
 the effects of sin, in the habits of his own 
 body or the traditions of his family or class 
 or nation or race, will be at last overcome 
 by the power of the redemptive Spirit. 
 This may happen—as the experience of 
 conversions has constantly shown—with 
 amazing rapidity, or it may be a slow 
 process only begun in this life; but the 
 victory, slow or rapid, lies in the will—in 
 the act of faith by which the whole life is 
 brought again into subjection to God in 
 Christ. 
 
 On the other hand, the more you allow 
 men to believe that the fault lies in their 
 bodies—in an animal ancestry, imperfectly 
 refined, the more certainly you encourage 
 in them (what is the root delusion) the 
 tendency to regard their sins as their mis- 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 79 
 
 fortunes, the inevitable result of their 
 circumstances and their natures. This is 
 no mere theory. It is rooted upon the 
 experience of the past. The tendency to 
 find the secret of sin in the defilements of 
 matter and animal life has prevailed in many 
 ages and many parts of the world. It was 
 the dominant idea when Christianity came 
 into the world. It has at times resulted 
 in an extreme asceticism which has had for 
 its motive the desire to live a spiritual life, 
 separate from the pollutions of the body. 
 But, after all, we cannot live separate from 
 the body ; and if the body is evil we cannot 
 help it. Thus the tendency to find the 
 secret of sin in the bodily nature has in 
 fact resulted in general in a moral apathy— 
 an acquiescence in the life of passion and 
 ^ impulse. A great part of the redemptive 
 power which Christianity confessedly exer¬ 
 cised, when it came into a world where this 
 false idea prevailed,- lay in its giving men 
 the true secret of sin. 
 
 Again, the Christian teaching about sin, 
 as it appears in the New Testament and 
 in the Church generally, forces a man to feel 
 that there is no limit to the disaster which, 
 by his refusal of God and of duty, he may 
 
8o 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 bring upon himself. Without allowing 
 ourselves to close any possibly open ques¬ 
 tion, we may say with confidence that 
 the teaching of Christ holds over the man 
 who persists in rebellious self-will the 
 certainty of a ruin which may prove at 
 last final and irretrievable. I do not 
 think it is possible to doubt that Christ 
 did hold this ultimate possibility over men— 
 in metaphorical words no doubt, but in its 
 unrelieved horror. 
 
 If we let man think, with the New Theo¬ 
 logy, that his nature is in an inevitable 
 progress to perfection, which his selfishness 
 may indeed retard, and in which his sins 
 may involve remedial pains, but which 
 none the less is certain of final attainment, 
 we cannot fail, human nature being what 
 in experience we know it to be, to strengthen 
 the tendency to let things take their course, 
 and to weaken the strength of the naked 
 appeal to the human will as the arbiter of 
 the man’s destiny—his heaven or his hell. 
 
 Once more, what applies to the individual 
 applies to the nation or the race. Chris¬ 
 tianity believes in a divine purpose of 
 progress, and finds the goal of human pro¬ 
 gress assured in ‘ Christ upon the throne.’ 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 8l 
 
 But it knows, in historical fact, that nation 
 after nation has fallen back ; that there 
 is such a thing as the decay and dissolution 
 of civilizations. We look back upon ‘ the 
 giant forms of empires on their way to 
 ruin. , And the prophets of God have in 
 every age carried the message of God 
 to their nation, that progress or catastrophe 
 depends on themselves, and depends at 
 bottom upon moral character ; that, though 
 a nation may subsist with much wickedness 
 in it, its subsistence depends upon the 
 maintenance of the core of righteousness 
 within it—upon the vigorous force of a 
 resisting body of righteous men in whom 
 the nation will consent to recognize its 
 true self. Once more, then, the more you 
 strengthen the belief in a practically in¬ 
 evitable or necessary progress—a belief 
 which indeed is flatly contradicted by experi¬ 
 ence—the more you weaken the prophetic 
 appeal to the social conscience of men. 
 
 It will be said that in all this I am ap¬ 
 pealing only to what is edifying, not to 
 what is true. I am not afraid of this 
 argument. Christianity is a revelation 
 appealing to man’s moral will, and saying 
 in effect, ‘ Try it, and so prove its truth/ 
 
 6 
 
82 
 
 THE IDEA OF SIN 
 
 And if it be the case that the preaching of 
 the Christian doctrine in its purity does 
 as a matter of fact show itself in the fruits 
 of converted living and moral liberty re¬ 
 gained, I feel sure that the Christian 
 doctrine has been proved practically true. 
 It has shown that it possesses the secret of 
 life. That is what actually happened in 
 the first preaching of Christianity and in 
 every subsequent moral revival of its 
 power. This is an actual experience viewed 
 from outside in general history, and viewed 
 from inside in the record which great and 
 conspicuous Christians—from St. Paul and 
 Justin Martyr and Cyprian and Augustine 
 downwards—have given of their moral ex¬ 
 perience as seen from within. The better 
 the men, we notice in passing, the sterner 
 the view they have taken of the sinfulness 
 of their sins. This moral experience con¬ 
 stitutes the subject-matter for a philosophy 
 of sin, and for, what must go with that, 
 a philosophy of the relation in which the 
 soul of man stands to God, of the relation 
 of our dependent personalities to the 
 Absolute. We get here into a very obscure 
 subject. Certainly it has not been satis¬ 
 factorily solved hitherto. Perhaps it never 
 
THE IDEA OF SIN 83 
 
 will be in this world. But Christianity 
 has made a vast contribution to the subject, 
 and the core of the Christian contribution 
 lies in the truth, proclaimed by God’s 
 prophets, reaffirmed by His Son, confirmed 
 by all Christian experience, the secret of all 
 Christian progress in the individual and the 
 race, that sin lies in the rebellion of the 
 dependent or created will against the 
 will of the Father and the Creator. Sin is 
 lawlessness. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE MEANING OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY 
 
 The mode of thought which is known 
 as the New Theology is connected in all its 
 parts. It concentrates its attention upon 
 God as the universal Spirit, manifesting 
 Himself and realizing Himself in the uni¬ 
 verse. Especially in the development of 
 man’s nature upward from the animal to 
 the spiritual does it look for this revelation 
 of God. And, from the ethical point of 
 view, the highest point of achievement 
 hitherto attained is found in Christ. In 
 Him, as in no one else, we can really see 
 God incarnate : we can see, that is, that 
 humanity is really divine and God is really 
 human. And, in the light of that vision 
 we are to go forward to realize our divinity 
 or divinize our manhood. For what Christ 
 is, we are all in various degrees capable of 
 becoming. We are all potentially sons of 
 God, or Christs. However much hidden 
 
 84 
 
Christ’s divinity 
 
 85 
 
 or overlaid, the divine nature is in all of 
 us, and is capable, especially under the 
 influence of Christ, of being evoked into 
 active and effective life. So, as man ad¬ 
 vances, will God become more and more 
 incarnate in all humanity, or in other words 
 the real identity of Godhead and manhood 
 will become more and more evident. Thus 
 ‘ the Incarnation doctrine is the glorification 
 of human effort .’ 1 
 
 This way of conceiving the incarnation 
 doctrine finds a guarded expression in the 
 
 1 Substance of Faith, p. 88. For the whole paragraph 
 see pp. 85-90, and New Theol. pp. 68-111. One point to 
 be noticed is that Mr. Campbell conceives of the spirit, 
 or higher self of humanity, as prior to all individual men, 
 as having a real existence, and constituting ‘ a perfect and 
 eternal spiritual being, integral to the being of God ’ 
 (p. 31). This he elsewhere calls ‘the Eternal Christ,’ 
 ‘ the archetypal eternal divine man.’ It (or should I 
 say he ?) is ‘ an emanation of the Infinite, the Soul of the 
 universe,’ or at any rate is one element of the ‘ infinitely 
 complex being of God ’ (p. 89). This Eternal Christ it 
 is which is manifested in the historical Jesus, and is also 
 the higher self or fundamental being of every one of us. 
 This doctrine of the eternal divine man would not require 
 much restatement to be brought into harmony with the 
 Church doctrine of the Eternal Word or Son. But, 
 according to Mr. Campbell, we all are at bottom this 
 ‘ Eternal Christ ’ in the same sense as was Jesus. Thus 
 the ‘ Christ-man ’ appears again and again in history 
 in different individuals (p. 107). 
 
86 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 section of Sir Oliver Lodge’s catechism 
 from which I have just quoted one phrase. 
 Mr. Campbell does not shrink from the 
 plainest statement of the obvious conclu¬ 
 sions of this doctrine. Two quotations will 
 make this evident. 
 
 General Booth is divine in so far as love is the 
 governing principle of his life. Jesus was divine 
 simply and solely because His life was never gov¬ 
 erned by any other principle. We do not need to 
 talk of two natures in Him, or to think of a mysterious 
 dividing line on one side of which He was human and 
 on the other divine. In Him humanity was divinity 
 and divinity was humanity . 1 
 
 Traditional orthodoxy would restrict the descrip¬ 
 tion ‘ God manifest in the flesh * to Jesus alone ; the 
 New Theology would extend it in a lesser degree to 
 all humanity, and would maintain that in the end it 
 will be as true of every individual soul as ever it w r as 
 of Jesus. Indeed it is this belief which gives value 
 and significance to the earthly mission of Jesus. He 
 came to show us what we potentially are. a 
 
 It is plain that such an idea of the in¬ 
 carnation as is here presented, while it has 
 in it much that is very close to the biblical 
 idea, is at the root fundamentally different. 
 And the difference follows on from the 
 
 1 The New Theology , pp. 75-6. 2 ibid., pp. 83-4. 
 
§7 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 difference in the conception of God. If 
 divinity and humanity are fundamentally 
 identical, the same reality viewed from 
 above and from below , 1 or if ‘ whatever else 
 He may be, God is essentially man,’ 2 the 
 doctrine of incarnation stated above is 
 the only one possible. On the other hand 
 the idea of the incarnation contained in the 
 New Testament and the creeds is based on 
 the assumption, which we find everywhere 
 in the Bible, that there is no difference so 
 fundamental as that between the creator 
 and the creature ; and that Jesus of 
 Nazareth, the Christ, is in His own proper 
 person God, the Son of God, ‘ integral to 
 the being of God,’ in a sense in which no 
 other man can possibly be; even though 
 the abundance of the divine love should 
 give to all men of goodwill such fellowship, 
 through Christ, in God, that we all become 
 in Him 4 sons of God ’ and ‘ partakers of 
 the divine nature.’ 
 
 That is my point. A doctrine which 
 says ‘ Christ is God ’ and then goes on to 
 say ‘ all men are God ’ is really, I fear, 
 
 1 The New Theology, p. 75. 
 
 2 ibid., p. S9. Mr. Campbell adds: ‘ Because He is the 
 fount of humanity ’—i.e. there is no difference in essence. 
 
88 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 farther off the Bible and the creeds than the 
 old-fashioned Unitarianism which said that 
 Christ is not God. For the old-fashioned 
 Unitarianism, in its best exponents, had at 
 least a fundamental agreement with the 
 Christian church up to a certain point—in 
 its doctrine of God, and of His relation to 
 the world and to mankind. But teaching 
 which fundamentally identifies Godhead 
 and manhood can never come near to being 
 really Christian or biblical. 
 
 The view which the Christian church has 
 taken of Christ’s person, and His relation 
 to His fellow men, may be stated in outline 
 thus : 
 
 God made man for sonship to Himself, 
 that is, capable of communion with God, 
 and of intelligent correspondence with 
 God’s purpose in His kingdom of this 
 world, where he was made vicegerent. He 
 must, we feel, have been destined, per¬ 
 haps by some process of orderly evolution, 
 for a fullness of union with God such as 
 has actually been revealed to us in Christ, 
 even if there had been no sin, and conse¬ 
 quently no need of redemption. This, how¬ 
 ever, must remain a matter of speculation. 
 What we know is only what has actually 
 
Christ’s divinity 89 
 
 taken place, and that is necessarily seen 
 on a background of human sin. 
 
 For mankind was disloyal. Men dis¬ 
 ordered their own natures bv self-will, and 
 introduced the disorder of their lawlessness 
 into the world where they were set to 
 exercise their dominion. The evil of sin 
 is so radical in human nature, it goes so deep 
 to the heart and foundation of manhood, 
 that no remedy could be adequate save 
 what must be expressed in such words as 
 ‘ re-creation ’ or ‘ regeneration.’ That is 
 to say, in other words, that God who made 
 man must remake him. God was, all 
 along, ‘ in the world,’ and in man, therefore, 
 as part of the world, sustaining him even 
 in the life which he was misusing. More¬ 
 over, He never left Himself without witness; 
 He was always ‘ the light of men ’ in 
 conscience, even amidst the darkness of 
 his errors, even when ‘ the darkness ’ 
 seemed to come near upon ‘ overcoming ’ 
 or overwhelming the light. And He was 
 always ‘ coming ’ to man by His prophets 
 and messengers in fuller communications of 
 His will and character. Then at last ‘ he 
 came .’ 1 He entered by a new and wonder- 
 
 1 John i. 1-14. 
 
90 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 ful manner of union into human nature to 
 redeem it from within. He was born— 
 taking a human nature of the substance of 
 a human mother—true man but new man ; 
 in a perfect manhood, both to reveal all 
 that can be disclosed of God in manhood, 
 and to reveal our manhood in the highest 
 union with Godhead that can be even 
 imagined. Thus He lived very God, but 
 under conditions of manhood and human 
 experience, a true human life—hiding not 
 Himself from his own flesh, but bearing all 
 the burden of a proper manhood in a world 
 of sin. He makes His life, what man’s life 
 should be—a free-will offering to God His 
 Father ; and when the sin of man rejected 
 Him and put Him to death, He was obedient, 
 with a perfect human obedience, unto 
 death, and thus sealed His sacrifice in blood. 
 And the Father spared not His Son, but 
 accepted His self-sacrifice, and, in Him, 
 accepted our manhood ; and when He died 
 and was buried, raised Him from the dead, 
 and glorified Him—still in our manhood— 
 and exalted Him to His own right hand, 
 there to become the head of the redeemed 
 race of mankind ; for by His Spirit, the spirit 
 of the Father and the Son, sent down into 
 
9 1 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 the hearts of men, He unites the sons of 
 faith together into the fellowship of His 
 manhood, in His society, the church, which 
 is His body. 
 
 That is the faith of the Church. ‘ I 
 believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only- 
 begotten Son of God, very God of very 
 God, who for us men and for our salvation 
 came down from heaven and was incarnate 
 by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and 
 was made man.’ 
 
 There is no question that, though this 
 divine action reaches in its effects as far 
 as the sovereignty of God, backwards to 
 the beginning, and forwards to the end, 
 it is yet an historical event, occurring at a 
 certain point of time, when Jesus of Naza¬ 
 reth lived and died and rose again—essen¬ 
 tially and necessarily unique. It is plain 
 also that in the sense in which Jesus Christ 
 is, in this creed, divine, no other of the 
 sons of men can conceivably be so. It is 
 plain, once more, that this view of the 
 incarnation of God in Christ as something 
 necessarily unique follows from the doctrine 
 of God which belongs to the Christian creed ; 
 just as the belief in the incarnation of God 
 in mankind generally, with Jesus only for 
 
92 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 the completest instance of what is really to 
 come about in every man, follows from the 
 belief in God as immanent in the world, and 
 not to be otherwise thought of or known. 
 
 Are we, then, to substitute the view of 
 the New Theology for the doctrine of Christ 
 in the creeds ? No doubt in part this 
 issue has been determined, so far as we 
 have determined to adhere to the faith of 
 the Church about the being of God and the 
 meaning of sin. But, looking at the doctrine 
 of Christ by itself, what are we to say ? 
 
 Mr. Campbell dismisses the doctrine of 
 the creed with a contempt which is not very 
 impressive on the ground that it ‘ puts an 
 impassable gulf at once between Jesus 
 and every other person/ 1 How is it, then, 
 with the experience of mankind since the 
 apostles taught them to believe the creed ? 
 Have they found an impassable gulf put 
 between them and the Son of Man ? 
 
 Has any of the sons of men who lived long 
 ago, and was man and nothing more, been 
 near to the men of later ages, in felt power 
 and influence, as Jesus of Nazareth, believed 
 to be indeed God incarnate, has been ? Has 
 any example been as close to men since He 
 
 1 The New Theology, p. 8o. 
 
Christ’s divinity 
 
 93 
 
 walked in Galilee, as His example ? Nay, 
 with the profoundest conviction I am sure 
 that the view which declares Christ to be 
 what we are, and essentially nothing more, 
 only the supreme specimen of manhood— 
 it is this view which, should it prevail, 
 would be found to separate Him from us 
 by an impassable gulf. He would then be 
 separated from us, as men of other races 
 or remote times are separated; or, again, 
 He would be separated from us as the men 
 of supreme genius of any kind are separated 
 from ordinary men. If men came to think 
 of Jesus Christ as, in the world of moral 
 character, what a Dante or a Shakespeare 
 are in the world of poetry, the power of 
 His example would be as little effective for 
 us, as the power of the example of any other 
 unique and solitary genius. The more 
 perfect it is, the more totally outside our 
 range it seems. But the example of Jesus, 
 sinless and perfect as He was on earth, 
 is perpetually brought near to every child 
 of man. Because He who set them the 
 example of a perfect life, does also by His 
 Spirit ever work inwardly in the heart of 
 every one of His members, to mould them 
 inwardly into the likeness of the example 
 
94 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 which ever lives before their eyes outwardly. 
 Thus it is that Christ, through nineteen 
 centuries, has ever been brought near to 
 the humblest of the sons of men—yes, 
 brought near to them as man to man—and 
 His example has been made effective as 
 an inspiration and a power. But all this, 
 only because this Christ, who was and is very 
 man, was also and antecedently very God, 
 and the bestower of the life-giving Spirit, 
 and is able thus to give to His manhood a 
 universal applicability, a universal exten¬ 
 sion and access, which, if it had been only 
 the manhood of one man among many, it 
 could never have had. 
 
 Moreover, the idea which the catholic 
 creeds embody of a great recreative act 
 of God to restore from its foundations a 
 ruined manhood corresponds to the real 
 need of man, as the deepest-seeing men have 
 realized it. Philosophers, from Plato to 
 Carlyle, have been found scoffing at contem¬ 
 porary reformers because their proposed 
 reforms did not, and could not, go deep 
 enough to get at the root of the evil in 
 human society . 1 What is wanted, they have 
 
 1 See Carlyle, Past and Present, bk. i., c. 4, * Morrison’s 
 Pill,’ and the argument of Plato’s Republic. 
 
95 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 declared, is in some sense a fresh start for 
 humanity, and a new birth. So the moral 
 philosophers have reasoned—in words. But 
 it is Jesus alone, and He only as believed in 
 by the church, who has in any adequate 
 sense translated this logical and moral 
 requirement into actual reality. In Him 
 we see moving among men a true man, 
 truly the Son of Man. But the perfection 
 of His manhood is found in its sinlessness— 
 in that which separates Him from all other 
 men, in that which makes His moral 
 consciousness so profoundly different from 
 that of Isaiah or Jeremiah, or St. Peter, 
 or St. Paul, or any other of the greatest 
 and best of His disciples, who, the greater 
 and better they were, have felt only the 
 more profoundly their sinfulness and their 
 fallibility. It is true manhood we see in 
 the sinless Jesus, but new manhood : a 
 second Adam in diviner power to redress 
 the balance of the first. And by faith in Him 
 men of all times and races can obtain what 
 is the fundamental moral need of their 
 nature—not only a standard of manhood, 
 but a new birth in spirit and power. 
 
 Now we have to ask the question whether 
 the conception of Christ which is pre- 
 
96 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 sented to us in the catholic creed is really 
 warranted by the facts, so far as historical 
 inquiry can present them to us, in the 
 records of the New Testament; or whether, 
 on the other hand, we can find traces of 
 a merely human Christ gradually divinized 
 by the pious imagination of the church, 
 or of a Christ divine only as other men are 
 divine. 
 
 First, then, let us inquire what the first 
 Christians thought about Christ. We go 
 first to the epistles of St. Paul, and we find 
 there that St. Paul consistently and with¬ 
 out doubt interprets Christ’s person in the 
 sense of the creeds. 
 
 He was God’s ‘ own ’ Son, before He 
 was ‘ sent forth, in the fullness of the time, 
 born of a woman, that he might redeem 
 us men, that we might receive the adoption 
 of sons.’ 1 ‘ Existing originally in the form, 
 or essential characteristics, of God, he 
 thought not equality with God a prize to 
 be clutched at, but emptied himself, or im¬ 
 poverished himself, and took the form or 
 essential characteristics of a servant, and 
 was made in the likeness of men ; and 
 being found in fashion as a man, he 
 
 1 Gal. iv. 4; Rom. viii. 32. 
 
97 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 humbled Himself and became obedient, 
 unto death, even the death of the cross. 
 Wherefore God also exalted him (in the 
 human nature which He had assumed) 
 and bestowed upon him the name that is 
 above every name: that at the name of 
 Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
 heaven, and things in earth, and things 
 under the earth ; and every tongue should 
 confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.’ 1 Once 
 more: ‘ In him were all things created, in 
 the heavens and upon the earth, things 
 visible and things invisible, whether thrones 
 or dominions or principalities or powers ; 
 all things have been created through him 
 and unto him; and he is before all 
 things, and in him all things consist.’ 2 
 It was only because He existed thus in His 
 eternal being and in the universe that, 
 when He was made man and glorified, it 
 could be the Father’s pleasure ‘ that all 
 the fullness of the Godhead should dwell in 
 him bodily,’ 3 and that He should be set 
 ‘ far above all rule, and authority, and 
 power, and dominion, and every name that 
 is named, not only in this world, but also 
 
 Phil. ii. 6-i i, 2 Cor. viii. 9. 2 Col. i. 16, 17. 
 
 3 Col. i. 19, ii. 9. 
 
 7 
 
98 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 in that which is to come ; and that all 
 things should be put in subjection under 
 his feet, who is the head over all things to 
 the church, which is his body.’ 1 
 
 This is not a full account of St. Paul's 
 doctrine of Christ, but it is sufficient to 
 show that what St. Paul believed about 
 Christ makes Him indeed ‘ integral to the 
 being of God,’ and that he could not 
 possibly use such language about any 
 other. ‘ To us there is one God, the 
 Father, of whom are all things and we unto 
 him ; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through 
 whom are all things and we through him.' 2 
 
 Moreover, there does not appear to have 
 been any discussion in the church on the 
 matter of belief about Christ. St. Paul 
 was in controversy with the Christian Jews 
 of Jerusalem on many points ; but there 
 appears to have been no controversy with 
 regard to the interpretation to be given 
 to the person of Christ. The same doc¬ 
 trine of Christ—the doctrine which makes 
 Him properly divine as well as human— 
 appears in the most Jewish of the New 
 Testament books, the Apocalypse , 3 as well 
 
 1 Eph. i. 21, 22. 2 i Cor. viii. 6. 
 
 8 See Swete’s Apocalypse (Macmillan), pp. clvi. f. 
 
99 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in 
 the Epistle of Peter, and in the Fourth 
 Gospel. 
 
 Was, then, this stupendous doctrine 
 about one who had been seen and touched 
 and heard as man among men, who had 
 eaten and drunken and died and been 
 buried as man in a human body—was it 
 based upon His own witness, the witness 
 of His own human lips ? 
 
 Now, we have the strongest historical 
 grounds for asserting that the Fourth Gospel 
 was written in his old age by one who had 
 moved in the innermost circle of the dis¬ 
 ciples of Jesus in Judaea and Galilee, when 
 He was among them ; and also that he was 
 none other than John, the son of Zebedee. 
 So that we have in this Gospel a living 
 memory of ‘ the disciple whom Jesus 
 loved.’ If this be so, as I certainly be¬ 
 lieve, we cannot doubt that our Lord Him¬ 
 self had, even if only rarely, confessed 
 in unmistakable terms His own divine 
 and eternal Sonship. ‘ I and my Father 
 are one,’ ‘ He that hath seen me hath 
 seen the Father .’ 1 But, without dwelling 
 
 1 John. x. 30, xiv. 9. It is impossible to maintain 
 that St. John would have tolerated the idea of such 
 
IOO 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 upon this now, as you will know it to be 
 in dispute among critics, I prefer to rest 
 our case upon the first three Gospels, which 
 present us with the memorials of Christ 
 as they were treasured in the church of 
 the thirty or forty years after our Lord’s 
 death, the church in which His apostles 
 lived and worked and taught. 
 
 Do we find there the humanitarian Christ, 
 a Christ divine possibly, but only as all 
 other men are divine ? Or do we find 
 there the Christ of the church’s belief ? 
 
 I speak the honest truth, I can hardly 
 tell you how often, with the whole sincerity 
 of which I am capable, I have asked my¬ 
 self that question, and reinvestigated it 
 anew to the very utmost of my power, and 
 always with a renewed certainty of assur¬ 
 ance that the humanity of our Lord, as you 
 find it recorded in the pages of the Synoptic 
 
 phrases being put into the mouth of other men to 
 signify that manhood and Godhead are at bottom one 
 and the same thing. Thus he wholly differentiates 
 between John the Baptist, with his assuredly divine 
 mission, and Christ, with His divine origin (John iii. 
 28-36), or between the divine Sonship of Christ—‘ God 
 only begotten ’-—and the divine sonship, the title to 
 which He communicates to those who believe in Him or 
 are in Him new-born (John i. 1-18). 
 
IOI 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 Gospels, is not capable of any other inter¬ 
 pretation, if you are fair to the evidence, 
 than that which the first Christian church 
 gave it. I admit, of course—indeed, I do 
 more than admit—that it was not suddenly 
 and all at once that the first Christians 
 leaped to the clear consciousness of what 
 was contained in their creed, as you find it 
 a little later in St. Paul and St. John. Im¬ 
 mediately after the resurrection they are 
 occupied solely with the thought of the 
 Messiahship of Christ, as foretold in Old 
 Testament prophecies. So great and over¬ 
 whelming a thought as that of the in¬ 
 carnation is not suddenly to be grasped 
 by men’s minds, if it is to be grasped 
 healthily. But it was held by the Christian 
 church under the full influence of the 
 apostles, and if we ask whether the be¬ 
 lief was justified by what they had actually 
 seen in our Lord and heard from our Lord, 
 I say, with complete assurance, that it was. 
 
 I am now assuming that these Gospels 
 are substantially true. But I do not ask 
 any kind of exemption for any historical 
 document from free historical criticism. If 
 you reach the conclusion that the Gospels 
 are really historical, it is sometimes assumed, 
 
102 
 
 THE MEANING OF 
 
 absurdly enough, that you are trying to 
 exempt them from criticism. If you recog¬ 
 nize that there are parts of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment which are not historical, though they 
 are written in an historical form, and 
 then go on to declare that you believe the 
 Gospels are strictly historical, people will 
 say that you are trying to allow criticism 
 of the Old Testament documents, and to 
 disallow it in the case of the New. That 
 is really quite meaningless. In every his¬ 
 tory of every nation you recognize that 
 there are different stages of historicity, in 
 proportion to the character and nearness 
 of the evidence. You do not say, because 
 you are doubtful about the history of King 
 Arthur, that therefore vou cannot be cer- 
 tain about the history of King Alfred, or 
 of Richard the Second, or of George the 
 Fourth. The historical certainty depends 
 on the nature and closeness of the evidence. 
 I do not ask for any use of the Gospels 
 which is not in accordance with the strictest 
 requirements of historical evidence. I do 
 not make any claim for them except what 
 is made in St. Luke’s preface—namely, that 
 he has done his best to draw up the most 
 authentic narrative from first-hand evidence: 
 
ci-irist’s divinity 103 
 
 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw 
 up a narrative concerning those matters which have 
 been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them 
 unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses 
 and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, 
 having traced the course of all things accurately from 
 the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent 
 Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty 
 concerning the things wherein thou wast in¬ 
 structed. 
 
 I believe that self-witness of St. Luke, 
 the Christian physician and companion of 
 St. Paul, to be exactly true. I believe that 
 in his Gospel, as also in St. Mark, and 
 in the first Gospel, you really have, written 
 down by honest recorders, the evidence of 
 those who had been with our Lord, eye¬ 
 witnesses of His life and works, as well as 
 ministers of the word. 
 
 Well, then, let us look at the picture. 
 And first, at Christ’s sinlessness. What a 
 stupendous fact that is ! Read the Old 
 Testament, and hear how every prophet, 
 in proportion as he is holy, feels his sinful¬ 
 ness. Hear how St. Paul feels it, and cries 
 out under the pain of it ; how St. John 
 impugns any one who says that he is not 
 sinful: ‘ If we say that we have no sin, we 
 
 deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in 
 
104 THE MEANING of 
 
 us/ 1 See how the angelic messenger in 
 St. John is represented as jealous for the 
 divine glory of God, refusing all acts of 
 worship : ‘ See thou do it not; I am a 
 fellowservant with thee, and with thy 
 brethren the prophets . . . worship God / 2 
 And then think of Jesus of Nazareth as 
 He moved among men, conscious of sin¬ 
 lessness, never by word or deed giving any 
 indication of that sense of liability to 
 error and sin which has belonged to the 
 whole human race apart from Him, and 
 with deepening intensity in proportion as 
 men have been good and religious. 
 
 Think of the way in which He trained 
 men to trust in Him ; how deliberately 
 and gradually He trained His disciples to 
 believe in Him, to put their whole trust in 
 Him, as in one who was capable of pro¬ 
 viding for them in body and in spirit, 
 capable of supplying and satisfying all 
 their spiritual needs, as well as helping them 
 in all physical distresses, by His love and 
 power. By no single or sudden word, but 
 by the whole process of His training, He 
 brought them to regard Him as that 
 which God only can be for the soul of man 
 
 1 i John i. 8. 2 Rev. xxii. 8, 9. 
 
■ 
 
 Christ’s divinity 105 
 
 —its adequate repose : * I will give you 
 rest/ 
 
 Think of the authority with which He 
 spoke—‘ No man knoweth the Son save 
 the Father, neither knoweth any man the 
 Father, save the Son, and he to whom¬ 
 soever the Son willeth to reveal him/ 1 
 Think of the authority with which He set 
 aside what lawgiver and prophet had said 
 of old—* It w r as said to them of old time . . . 
 but I say unto you/ 2 Think how, in the 
 parable, He distinguishes Himself, as the 
 Son, from God’s earlier messengers, who are 
 the slaves . 3 
 
 Think, above all, of what it must have 
 been to those disciples to be constantly 
 with one who claimed to be the final judge 
 of men in their acts, and also in their secret 
 thoughts. * Many shall come to me in 
 that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy 
 in thy name, and in thy name do many 
 wonderful works ? Then will I (discerning 
 their secret selves) profess unto them, I 
 never knew you; depart from me/ 4 * Before 
 
 1 Matt. xxi. 36-37, Mark xii. 6, Luke xx. 12-13. 
 
 2 Matt. v. 21-22, 27-28, 33-34, 33 - 39 , 43 ~ 44 - 
 
 3 Matt. xi. 27, Luke x. 22. 
 
 4 Matt. vii. 21-22. 
 
106 THE MEANING OF 
 
 him shall be gathered all the nations, and 
 he shall separate them one from another, 
 as the shepherd separateth the sheep 
 from the goats .’ 1 Think, I say, what it 
 would be to keep company with one who 
 in His innermost consciousness knew Him¬ 
 self, and declared Himself to be, the final 
 and infallible judge of all men, not in their 
 outward acts only, but in their secret 
 thoughts also. Such experience could lead 
 to one result only ; it did lead to that re¬ 
 sult—that they came to believe Him to be 
 verily and indeed what the creed asserts 
 Him to be, what the unanimous consent of 
 Christendom has declared him to be—God, 
 the very Son of God, made man. 
 
 I say read, and re-read, that record of 
 Christ in the Gospels, and ask yourselves 
 the question—Is not the old dilemma true : 
 either He was God, or He was not a good 
 man ? There is, I suppose, no subtler, at 
 the same time there is no more tremendous, 
 sin than the sin of one stronger spiritual 
 nature asserting itself in ascendency over 
 others, and leading them to put in that 
 which is only a creature the reliance and 
 the faith which is due to the Creator. That 
 
 1 Matt. xxv. 32. 
 
io7 
 
 Christ’s divinity 
 
 is the real heart of the worst kind of sacer¬ 
 dotal tyranny. Yet we cannot escape from 
 the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth did, 
 in His training of the disciples, deliberately 
 put Himself in that place in their hearts 
 which would have involved the supreme 
 usurpation, had it not been the only 
 legitimate place for Him who was really 
 both their brother and their God. 
 
 Must we not conclude, then, that the 
 Christian interpretation of the person of 
 Christ, the interpretation accepted by con¬ 
 sent in the time of St. Paul, is the inter¬ 
 pretation which the facts, when you scan 
 and scrutinize them, warrant—the only 
 interpretation which is really compatible 
 with those facts ? If we accept this con¬ 
 clusion, we do indeed accept a belief in 
 Christ as divine in a sense in which no other 
 man is or could be divine ; but we are led on 
 by a safer route than that of the New 
 Theology, to an extension of the incarnation 
 of God to all humanity. For it was not for 
 Himself that the eternal Son took our man¬ 
 hood : it was that all other men, through 
 faith in Him and new birth into Him, might 
 become, in their measure, partakers of the 
 divine nature. The incarnation waits for 
 
108 THE MEANING OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY 
 
 its fulfilment upon the completion of the 
 body of Christ, which is the church universal, 
 till God is manifested in the whole of the 
 redeemed humanity, in the new heaven and 
 the new earth wherein dwelleth righteous¬ 
 ness. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 The next point on which we are to con¬ 
 trast the New Theology with the creed of 
 the old religion is in the matter of miracles. 
 It is plain enough that if we think of God 
 as the soul of the.world, manifesting Him¬ 
 self only in the orderly development of 
 the universe ; and of Christ as only the 
 supreme instance of what all men in 
 principle are, or are becoming; we cannot 
 but feel a sort of intellectual resentment in 
 face of the claim for certain abnormal and 
 unique events to be believed in the case of 
 J esus Christ—His birth of a virgin, for 
 instance, or the resurrection of His body 
 on the third day from the tomb, as well as 
 the miracles which He is recorded to have 
 wrought on others. For such events force 
 us to think of God as acting in or upon the 
 world independently of its normal order or 
 sequence. They are miracles—supposed 
 
 109 
 
I IO 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 events which the order of the world and of 
 man cannot account for. Thus the tendency 
 of the New Theology is to depreciate the 
 spiritual value of the belief in miracles, to 
 criticize the evidence for them, and to deny 
 that they actually occurred. The teachers 
 of this school would indeed admit that the 
 minds or wills of certain more or less ex¬ 
 ceptional men may exercise exceptional 
 power over the body—their own bodies or 
 those of other men. Such are the phe¬ 
 nomena of ‘ suggestion ’ and ‘ faith healing.’ 
 And modern critical writers have a ten¬ 
 dency to accept certain of the recorded 
 miracles of Jesus, and to explain them as 
 a form of ‘ mental therapeutics.’ 
 
 4 That He should have had power to cure 
 nervous diseases by words of power or by a 
 spiritual predominance is perfectly natural.’ 
 So writes Prof. Gardner . 1 And Prof. 
 Harnack : 2 ‘ In our present state of know¬ 
 ledge we have become more careful (than 
 earlier critics), more hesitating in our 
 judgement, in regard to the stories of the 
 miraculous which we have received from 
 antiquity. That the earth in its course 
 
 1 The Growth of Christianity (Black), p. 75. 
 
 2 What is Christianity ? (Williams & Norgate), p. 29. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 I I 1 
 
 stood still, that a she-ass spoke, that 
 a storm was quieted by a word, we do not 
 believe, and we shall never again believe ; 
 but that the lame walked, the blind saw, 
 and the deaf heard, will not be so summarily 
 dismissed as an illusion.* 
 
 The miracles of healing are therefore, on 
 the whole, accepted as possible, and treated 
 as instances of the exceptional spiritual 
 power of J esus over the bodies of other men 
 suffering from what are called ‘ functional 
 diseases of the nervous system ’—instances, 
 that is, of what occurs in a whole class of 
 recognized events, which are popularly 
 grouped as cases of faith-healing. A 
 medical authority 1 has recently examined 
 this theory, and shown good reasons for 
 denying that our Lord’s miracles of healing 
 can be accounted for on the neurotic theory. 
 But, besides this, it must be noticed that 
 the earliest record of the ministry of Christ 
 contains, side by side with the miracles 
 which it is proposed thus to explain, 
 nature miracles—such as the feeding of the 
 multitudes, and the walking upon the 
 water, and the withering of the fig-tree, to 
 
 1 Dr. R. J. Ryle, in th e Hibbert Journal , April, 1907, 
 ‘ The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing.’ 
 
11 2 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 which such an explanation is totally 
 inapplicable, but which rest on absolutely 
 the same basis of evidence. So that the 
 problem cannot be thus dealt with. And 
 miracles which resist any such neurotic 
 explanation, Prof. Harnack declares, ‘ We 
 do not believe, and we shall never again 
 believe/ I am thankful to recognize that 
 Mr. Campbell, in the case of our Lord’s 
 physical resurrection, is not thus peremp¬ 
 tory. He is inclined to admit it . 1 But he 
 owns that his friends will not generally 
 agree with him. And the adherents of the 
 movement are unanimous in repudiating 
 the belief in the virgin birth. 
 
 On the other hand, those who hold to 
 the idea of God which finds expression in 
 the creed, believe that, though He is mani¬ 
 fested in the order of the world, He is not 
 limited by it. It is the expression of a 
 will which remains unexhausted and in¬ 
 dependent. Now it is doubtless true that 
 a perfect will must always so act as that 
 its action should not be arbitrary, but the 
 expression of perfect law. Thus the greatest 
 Christian thinkers have always seen that 
 miracles must express and not violate the 
 
 1 The New Theolgoy, pp. 220 £f. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 I 13 
 
 order of the world, in the deepest sense in 
 which the order of the world is the mind 
 of God . 1 But we recognize at the same 
 time that abnormal circumstances require 
 in a free being abnormal actions. 
 
 A man of high intelligence, though his 
 normal action will be methodical and 
 orderly, retains his liberty to deal with an 
 exceptional situation by some unusual and 
 striking mode of action. To be tied to 
 the normal and the habitual, when some¬ 
 thing exceptional is needed, is to be mecha¬ 
 nical and not rational. 
 
 It is the highest order of rational action, 
 as we know it in the world, which is our 
 best image of God’s action, and not mere 
 mechanical uniformity. Thus the more 
 fully we recognize in God the supremely free 
 personality acting in the world, the more 
 ready we shall be to accept the evidence 
 for exceptional or abnormal action on God’s 
 part when the situation demands it. 
 
 The believer in the faith of the creed sees 
 in the circumstances of the incarnation a 
 situation essentially unique. Sin had dis¬ 
 turbed the order of the world. It had 
 
 1 See reff. in my Bampton lectures, The Incarnation 
 oj the Son of God (John Murray), p. 246. 
 
 8 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 I 14 
 
 made the world, so far as man controls it, 
 a manifest disorder. Against this disorder 
 God is represented in the Old Testament 
 as in continual protest by the prophets. 
 He will not, however, even so, deal with 
 man so as to destroy his liberty. He deals 
 with him for the restoration of the lost 
 order, morally, by an appeal to his will and 
 heart and mind. The incarnation of the 
 Son is God’s great act of redemption, or re¬ 
 creation, to restore a disordered world. It 
 is so unique a divine action, in so abnormal 
 a situation, that it cannot surprise us if it 
 requires something more than God’s cus¬ 
 tomary action in nature. 
 
 In some such way as this we may argue 
 that the admission of the possibility of 
 miracle is bound up with any belief in God 
 as the supreme, and supremely free, person¬ 
 ality. But such abstract argument takes 
 us but a little way. We shall do better 
 to examine the records and see whether 
 there is real reason to suppose that the 
 miracles actually occurred, and what kind 
 of appeal they are intended to make to us. 
 
 I think we shall find the evidence of the 
 actual occurrence of miracles is in the highest 
 degree cogent, and at points overwhelming. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 115 
 
 We are not now concerned with miracles 
 reported from other ages, but with those of 
 the New Testament—with those recorded 
 in connexion with the manifestation in 
 the world of the Christ of God. But we must 
 extend our view beyond the Gospels to 
 include also the records of the first pro¬ 
 clamation of Christ. 
 
 For we find St. Paul witnessing, more 
 than once, in the simplest and most inci¬ 
 dental way, to the ‘ power of signs and 
 wonders 1 which accompanied his own 
 preaching 1 and which he regarded, not as 
 peculiar to himself, but as the signs of an 
 apostle. And this witness is borne out in 
 the narrative of the Acts. 
 
 St. Luke, the disciple of St. Paul, who 
 certainly wrote the Acts, and who was a 
 physician, accustomed to observe diseases 
 and their cures, records in the Acts of the 
 Apostles not only miracles of the earlier 
 period which were reported to him, but 
 also miracles wrought by St. Paul when he 
 was actually with the apostle, such as the 
 raising of Eutychus and the healing of 
 the father of Publius . 2 
 
 1 Rom. xv. 19, 2 Cor. xii. 12. 
 
 2 Acts xx. 7ff.,xxviii. 8,9. Notice the' we’ in each case. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 116 
 
 Then we go back upon the miracles 
 wrought by Christ, and we take note that 
 the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, 
 which we have the best reason to believe 
 represents the preaching of Peter, is full of 
 these miraculous events, some of which, 
 as has already been said, are miracles of 
 power over nature, which can be in no way 
 explained by the influence of mind over 
 mind ; and it will be observed that these 
 miracles are no mere portents such as 
 Matthew Arnold ridiculed, when he asked 
 the question why he should be supposed to 
 make an improbable statement more pro¬ 
 bable if he could turn his pen into a pen¬ 
 wiper. The miracles of Christ are ‘ signs,’ 
 counterparts of His words, teaching the 
 same lesson in another sphere. In fact, 
 the teaching and the miracles are so in¬ 
 extricably interwoven, as web with woof 
 in the same substance, that any treatment 
 of the narrative which seeks to discredit 
 the miracles must discredit the teaching 
 also, and leave us, as the author of Ecce Homo 
 said long ago, ‘ a Christ as mythical as 
 Hercules.’ If the teaching is certainly 
 authentic, so, we are bound to say, are ‘ the 
 works ’ also. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 ii 7 
 
 So natural do Christ’s miracles—His 
 ‘ works/ as they are called—seem in His 
 case that we are inclined to interpret them 
 simply as the laws of His nature. We find 
 that each higher grade of nature has modes 
 of action appropriate to it, which are ‘ super¬ 
 natural ’ from the point of view of the 
 nature which lies below—as animal life is 
 ‘ supernatural ’ to inanimate nature, and 
 human action to the nature that is merely 
 animal. So we may say that in Christ we 
 have a higher kind of nature which has its 
 own new laws of action. These are Christ’s 
 natural works ; but to other men they are 
 miracles . 1 
 
 But, on the whole, this is not the way 
 in which the New Testament leads us to 
 think of them. They are more often 
 regarded as evidences of God working with 
 Him, evidences that the divine power 
 which rules nature was supporting Him and 
 witnessing to Him . 2 
 
 And now we turn to the miracles which 
 the Christian church fastened upon to 
 enshrine in its central creed as of the very 
 substance of its faith. ‘ I believe that 
 Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy 
 
 1 See B amp ton Lectures, pp. 47-8. 2 Acts ii. 22. 
 
118 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary . . . that He 
 rose again the third day from the dead and 
 ascended into heaven/ 
 
 The resurrection of Christ occupies evi¬ 
 dentially in the New Testament a unique 
 place. ‘ He was declared to be the Son of 
 God with power, according to a spirit of 
 holiness, by the resurrection of the dead/ 1 
 ‘ If Christ hath not been raised our preach¬ 
 ing is vain, your faith also is vain/ 2 So 
 cries St. Paul. And St. Peter—‘ God begat 
 us again unto a living hope by the resur¬ 
 rection of Jesus Christ from the dead / 3 
 It was, in fact, as the records show, and 
 as all men agree, by the confident belief 
 of the apostles that Christ had been re¬ 
 peatedly seen by them, risen from the dead, 
 and that His divine sonship and mission 
 was thus made evident by His triumph 
 over death, that the foundation of the 
 Christian church was made possible. There 
 is also no doubt that this was understood 
 to mean that ‘in the same body in which He 
 died and was buried, only transmuted into 
 a higher state and power, he was raised 
 again. St. Paul's words imply this 4 — 
 
 1 Rom. i. 4. 2 1 Cor. xv. 14. 3 1 Pet. i. 3. 
 
 4 1 Cor. xv. 3-4. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 119 
 
 * That he died, and that he was buried, 
 and that he hath been raised the third 
 day.’ This phrase describes what can 
 only be a physical occurrence to the body 
 which had died and been buried, a physical 
 occurrence at a particular moment of time. 
 No apparition in another body would 
 satisfy this language. And there is no 
 event in the Gospel record which rests on 
 more certain ground of evidence than that 
 the women who came early to the sepulchre 
 on the Easter morning found the tomb 
 empty of the dead body. 
 
 The record of appearances is best given 
 in St. Paul’s words . 1 
 
 Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel 
 which I preached unto you, which also ye received, 
 wherein also ye stand, by which also ye are saved ; 
 I make known, I say, in what words I preached it 
 to you, if ye hold it fast, except ye believed in vain. 
 For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I 
 received, how that Christ died for our sins according 
 to the Scriptures ; and that he was buried ; and 
 that he hath been raised on the third day according 
 to the Scriptures ; and that he appeared to Cephas ; 
 then to the twelve ; then he appeared to above five 
 hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
 remain until now, but some are fallen asleep ; then 
 he appeared to J ames ; then to all the apostles ; and 
 
 1 1 Cor. xv. 1-11. 
 
I 20 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he ap¬ 
 peared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, 
 that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I 
 persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of 
 God I am what I am : and his grace which was be¬ 
 stowed upon me was not found vain ; but I laboured 
 more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the 
 grace of God which was with me. Whether then it 
 be I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed. 
 
 St. Paul was writing the Epistle to the 
 Corinthians apparently in the spring of 
 a.d. 55. He records doubtless what he had 
 ‘ delivered ’ in all the churches he had 
 taught since he began his missionary life 
 some eight years before. And he is em¬ 
 phatic that the substance of this proclama¬ 
 tion was common to him with the other 
 apostles : ‘ Whether then it be I or they, 
 so we preach, and so ye believed/ This 
 record is nothing less than the title-deed 
 of the church—the title-deed of a society 
 which based all its authority on witness, 
 the record of chosen witnesses to the life 
 and death and resurrection of Jesus. 
 
 Much is made of the discrepancies be¬ 
 tween the various narratives of our Lord’s 
 appearances. I do not think that they are 
 greater than the discrepancies that will be 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 I 2 I 
 
 found in the narratives of eye-witnesses of 
 many momentous events in history. The 
 matter must be examined in detail else¬ 
 where. 1 But the strength of the evidence 
 is much greater than can be measured 
 by the precise trustworthiness of each 
 particular record. There is no question 
 that the whole apostolic body were lifted 
 out of despair and disheartenment into 
 an absolute confidence of faith, within the 
 compass of a short period of days, by re¬ 
 peated visits, as they were assured, of their 
 Lord risen from the dead. If we may so 
 express it, their lives were driven round a 
 sharp corner, or set on a new basis. 
 
 They were men different in character, 
 but the impression made upon them was 
 the same. They were, as appears in the 
 Gospel narrative, all of them plain, un¬ 
 imaginative men, as unlike ‘ visionaries ’ 
 as possible : the impression was made on 
 them in spite of their being ‘ slow of faith.’ 
 It was the kind of impression, therefore, 
 which only solid objective events can make 
 upon the senses and the mind. 
 
 1 Dr. Sanday’s treatment (Outlines of the Life of Christ 
 (Clark, 1905), pp. 170 ff.) will be found, as usual, 
 singularly candid. 
 
122 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 This place of the resurrection in God’s 
 revelation of His purpose and mind is 
 evident enough. It was the reversal of the 
 impression made by the Christ being left 
 to die. It made evident that the divine 
 power, the power which creates and sustains 
 the world, was on the side of Christ. 
 
 I want to emphasize this point. Nature 
 is, in its normal order, non-moral in appear¬ 
 ance. God maketh the sun to rise on the 
 evil and on the good, and, as certainly, 
 overwhelms in physical catastrophes evil 
 and good indiscriminately. At times no¬ 
 thing lays so great a strain on faith as 
 the totally mechanical or non-moral aspect 
 of nature. If nature can be so cruel, we 
 cry, can the God of nature care ? But at 
 the great central moment in the world’s 
 moral history, in the case of Christ, we are 
 allowed to see that the God of nature and 
 the God of conscience are one. The real 
 meaning of the incarnation, of the Word 
 made flesh, requires, as we may say, that 
 in the case of Christ it should thus have been 
 made evident that there is only one lord- 
 ship in heaven and earth. And the faith 
 of all subsequent generations has rested 
 on that evidence, and been made strong. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 123 
 
 In Christ we see in summary the purpose 
 of God for mankind. In His resurrection 
 we see in summary that at the last the 
 material, as well as the spiritual order, is 
 to take its place in the kingdom of God, 
 in the new heaven and the new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness. 
 
 The account of the physical state of the 
 risen Christ, given in the Gospel records, 
 taken together, is so remarkable and so 
 completely without precedent in Jewish 
 literature, that it is in itself a great witness 
 to its truth. Our Lord, in rising, is pro¬ 
 bably represented as having passed out of 
 the grave-clothes, leaving them to collapse. 1 
 He is certainly represented as having passed 
 out of the tomb before the stone was rolled 
 away to show that He was gone. He passed 
 into the apostolic assembly through the 
 closed doors. He appears and disappears, 
 and in ‘ a different form.’ He is not repre¬ 
 sented as living in any one place, or as 
 passing by the modes of motion which He 
 had used, like other men, in His mortal 
 body, from place to place. He is in a 
 higher state of being. His body has been 
 
 1 John xx. 6, 7. See Latham’s The Risen Master , 
 (Camb. 1904), pp. 26, 43-44, and note. 
 
124 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 so transmuted as to be no longer subject 
 to the laws which restrain the grosser 
 mortal body. He can manifest Himself 
 under those old, lower conditions, so as to 
 eat with His disciples. But He is no longer 
 subj ect to them. The body is now spiritual: 
 that is to say, it is the simple instrument of 
 spiritual purpose. It has lost all its gross 
 and hampering limitations. The idea of 
 the spiritual body, as St. Paul conceives of 
 it, in forecasting the destiny of all the re¬ 
 deemed, corresponds much more than is 
 generally supposed with the facts as re¬ 
 corded of our Lord’s risen body in the 
 Gospels. All the acts of the risen Christ 
 are thus symbolic. They are done from 
 no natural necessity, as eating or sleeping 
 or moving was a necessity of His former 
 mortal state: they are simply exhibitions 
 in outward form of spiritual purpose. 
 Thus, when He rose before His disciples’ 
 eyes and passed upwards in His ascension, 
 the act was symbolic. He was not obliged 
 to go that way to a heaven above the clouds, 
 any more than He was obliged to pass by 
 a particular road from Galilee to Jerusalem. 
 He is above all such limitations. Doubt¬ 
 less the apostles thought heaven was above 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 125 
 
 their heads. And still, though we no longer 
 think so, we cannot help expressing our 
 ideas of what is heavenly by the physical 
 metaphor of ‘ above.' And, whatever 
 our astronomy, the record of our Lord’s 
 rising before the apostles’ eyes upwards, 
 expresses the spiritual truth of His ‘ exalta¬ 
 tion to the right hand of power ’ as no 
 other motion could have done. The ascen¬ 
 sion, as an event in time, was the last of 
 the appearances of Jesus, the same in char¬ 
 acter with those that had gone before. It 
 comes to us only on the authority of St. 
 Luke ; but such an event, witnessed by the 
 apostles, is required to explain the unani¬ 
 mity with which the first church believed 
 that Christ was ‘ received up,’ and ‘ was 
 seated at the right hand of God.’ 
 
 The miracle of our Lord’s virgin birth 
 rests on a different basis of evidence from 
 the rest of the record. It was not part of 
 the original apostolic testimony ; for the 
 church laid the greatest stress on testimony, 
 and the period of which the apostles were 
 witnesses extended only from the preaching 
 of John the Baptist till the time when 
 Jesus was taken up from them. 1 This 
 
 1 Acts i. 22. 
 
I 2 6 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 explains the limits of St. Mark’s and St. 
 John’s Gospels, which comprise simply the 
 apostolic witness. 
 
 Thus the virgin birth was not part of the 
 grounds on which belief in Jesus was asked 
 for. It was on the grounds of what Jesus 
 had said and done and suffered, on the 
 grounds of what God had done when He 
 raised Him from the dead, that belief was 
 asked for in His divine sonship. 
 
 But when men had first believed, and 
 come into the believing circle, they could 
 not but have inquired into the circum¬ 
 stances of Jesus’ birth. Originally there 
 were but two chief witnesses of these cir¬ 
 cumstances, Joseph and Mary; and Mary 
 was still alive in the first circle of believers. 
 When we look at the two narratives we 
 have got of our Lord’s birth, they present 
 all the appearance of coming respectively 
 from Joseph and Mary. They are inde¬ 
 pendent, and certainly both of them purely 
 Jewish in origin. 1 
 
 In St. Matthew we have an account of 
 our Lord’s birth wholly from the side of 
 Joseph—his perplexities, his difficulties, 
 his reassurance, his protection of the mother 
 
 1 See Harnack, Luke the Physician, pp. 166-7. 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 127 
 
 and the child. I believe the account in 
 St. Matthew to be based ultimately on the 
 witness of Joseph, very possibly left in 
 writing 1 with his family to protect the 
 character of the mother. On the other 
 hand, in the record in St. Luke, we have a 
 narrative which, if it is at all trustworthy, 
 must come from Mary, and no one else— 
 Mary, who ‘ kept all these things, ponder¬ 
 ing them in her heart.’ 2 As evidence of 
 its trustworthiness, besides its own con¬ 
 vincing character, we may point (1) to the 
 fact that it breathes the spirit of the Mes¬ 
 sianic hope, before it had received the rude 
 and crushing blow involved in the rejection 
 of the Messiah by His own people. The 
 Child is to ‘ reign over the house of Jacob 
 for ever.’ ‘ God hath raised up a horn of 
 salvation for us in the house of his servant 
 David; . . . salvation from our enemies, and 
 from the hand of all that hate us.’ It is the 
 hope of ‘ the redemption of Jerusalem’ 
 that is to be satisfied. 3 Such expressions 
 
 1 Zechariah could write (Luke i. 63), and therefore 
 presumably Joseph. 
 
 2 Luke ii. 19. 
 
 3 Luke i. 33, 69, 71, ii. 38 : cf. Gwatkin, Knowledge of 
 
 God (Clark, 1907) ii. p. 25. ‘ These intensely Jewish 
 
128 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 could hardly have originated when the real 
 event had been made plain. 
 
 (2) To the fact that the narrative is given 
 us by the careful and intelligent recorder 
 St. Luke, who grounds his claim to write 
 on his having ‘ traced the course of all 
 things accurately from the first.' 
 
 There is good evidence, then, for the fact 
 that our Lord was born of a human mother 
 only, without a human father. The church 
 fastened upon this event, and from the 
 beginning of the second century it is en¬ 
 shrined in the early confessions of faith, as 
 something integral to the Christian re¬ 
 ligion. I believe this instinct was sound. 
 It seems to me that the moral miracle of 
 Christ’s sinlessness is apt not to be duly 
 estimated. It did constitute Him, not less 
 properly human, but distinct from other 
 men by a distinction which goes down to 
 the depths of our nature. His sinlessness 
 agrees with the estimate which St. Paul 
 forms of Him as a new creation—the ‘ last 
 Adam ’— a fresh start for humanity. I 
 think such a fresh start for humanity is 
 
 hymns must have been written by Jews, and at a time 
 b'efore Israel had finally rejected Christ—say before a.d. 
 62.’ 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 I 29 
 
 naturally associated with some physical 
 miracle. It is in itself strictly an inter¬ 
 ruption of the natural order or sequence. 
 The character of Christ’s manhood involves 
 such an interruption. He was not a natural 
 product of the existing order. It is natural, 
 therefore, to believe that the divine action 
 which gave Him birth would be, in the 
 physical world also, exceptional. It is 
 natural to believe, further, that the birth of 
 the eternal Son in manhood should differ 
 in circumstances and conditions from the 
 production of a new human personality. 
 In fact, the agreement of the church’s 
 belief about Christ’s person with the accept¬ 
 ance of the miracle of His birth is so 
 intimate that in history the two have been 
 inseparable. There have been no believers 
 in the doctrine of the creeds who have 
 not been believers in the virgin birth, 
 and in recent years it has become in¬ 
 creasingly evident that those who disbelieve 
 in the virgin birth are in other respects 
 also adherents of the New Theology : they 
 mostly doubt the bodily resurrection ; and 
 give to the incarnation a different sense 
 from that in which the Creed proclaims it. 
 I think the tendencies of the present 
 
 9 
 
130 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 moment strongly confirm the position that 
 the acceptance of Christ’s virgin birth is 
 in vital connexion with the whole of Chris¬ 
 tian belief. 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 THE ATONEMENT AND THE INSPIRATION OF 
 
 SCRIPTURE 
 
 On the conceptions of God, of sin, and of 
 Christ, and on the credibility of miracles, 
 we have been able to present to ourselves 
 a more or less marked contrast between the 
 New Theology and the fundamental ideas 
 of the old religion. There are other doc¬ 
 trines of Christianity—notably the doctrines 
 of the Atonement and the inspiration of 
 Scripture—about which the New Theology 
 has a good deal to say, but on which the 
 contrast between the new and the old need 
 not, and indeed cannot, be brought to a 
 like issue, because the Christian society 
 has never given these doctrines a definite 
 form in any authoritative creed, and we 
 have therefore got no definite standard of 
 belief to refer to. I shall have occasion 
 later again to draw attention to this. It 
 will appear plainly that it was a true 
 
132 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 instinct which caused the catholic church 
 to define its faith in terms of the doctrine 
 of God and the person of Christ, and to 
 leave the belief in Christ’s atonement and 
 the inspiration of Scripture undefined. 
 
 On the subject of the atonement, Sir 
 Oliver Lodge is inadequate, yet reverent 
 and appreciative. 1 Mr. Campbell begins, 
 indeed, by giving a crude parody of the 
 ‘ accepted belief ’ on the subject, 2 but 
 afterwards goes as far in recognition of 
 Christ’s vicarious sacrifice as any one can 
 go, who believes that in our various degrees 
 we are all fundamentally Christs. The 
 fact is that no theology which is based on 
 the principle that Godhead and manhood 
 are at bottom identical, and that what 
 Christ was all other men are, can really 
 come near to the New Testament idea of 
 atonement. 
 
 What I propose to do here is—without 
 defining what has been left undefined, or 
 even seeking to determine anything that is 
 obscure—to state the New Testament idea 
 of atonement in its main principle, so as 
 to guard it from abuse, and to show that 
 
 1 The Substance of Faith, pp. 9S-100. 
 
 2 The New Theology, pp. 114-15. 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 133 
 
 it follows inevitably from the fundamental 
 doctrines which we have already considered, 
 of God and sin and Christ. 
 
 As regards the inspiration of Scripture, 
 it is again plain that a teaching which 
 diverges so far from the fundamental 
 teaching of the Bible about God and man 
 and Christ as the New Theology does, can 
 hold only a very attenuated doctrine of its 
 inspiration. 1 On this subject again I pro¬ 
 pose to content myself with showing that 
 there is a doctrine of inspiration, which has 
 the fullest spiritual and practical value, and 
 satisfies the whole requirement of the church, 
 which any one who accepts the Creed 
 can hardly hesitate to make his own. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT 
 
 Christians, from the very first, saw in 
 Christ’s death not only a crime on the part 
 of His murderers, but also on His part a 
 voluntary sacrifice, and a sacrifice by which 
 their redemption had been won. The 
 Gospels represent Him at the last supper 
 proclaiming the sacrificial nature of the 
 
 1 The New Theology , pp. 176 ff. The Substance of 
 Faith , p. 93, is much more reverent. 
 
134 THE atonement and the 
 
 death which He was to undergo. His body 
 was being given, and His blood poured out, 
 for men and for the remission of sins . 1 One 
 of the earliest speeches in the Acts represents 
 the church as seeing in Christ’s death and 
 resurrection the fulfilment of the great 
 prophecy of the Servant of Jehovah who 
 was to save his people by his vicarious 
 sufferings and death . 2 The heart of Chris¬ 
 tendom has gone out in welcome to this 
 teaching as to hardly anything else. The 
 * showing of the Lord’s death/ as the 
 sacrifice of our redemption, has been from 
 the first the chief service of catholic Chris¬ 
 tendom, and the crucifix generally its most 
 popular symbol; and the proclamation of 
 the glory of the atonement—in hymns such 
 as ‘ Rock of Ages ’—has been the central 
 theme of ‘ evangelical ’ worship. But 
 while the heart has welcomed the doctrine, 
 the intellect has been baffled more con¬ 
 spicuously here than at other points in the 
 faith and worship of Christendom. There 
 have been deeply different theories—as 
 Origen’s and Anselm’s, and Abelard’s and 
 
 1 Mark xiv. 24, Matt. xxvi. 28, Luke xxii. 19, 20, 
 I Cor. xi. 24-6. 
 
 2 Acts iii. 13, 261, cf. Is- lii.-iii, 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 1 3 5 
 
 Calvin’s—which we have all come to recog¬ 
 nize as in various ways inadequate. And 
 the church has never corporately faced the 
 question raised, or embodied its faith in any 
 formula, while all the time the doctrine is 
 liable very easily to be so isolated, and dis¬ 
 torted in popular belief, as to become a 
 dangerous and misleading error. 
 
 It is true to say that, as formalism has 
 been the besetting sin of catholic Christen¬ 
 dom, so the misuse of the doctrine of the 
 atonement has been for Protestant Chris¬ 
 tianity ; and in both cases with the same 
 result : that of weakening the effect of the 
 central lesson of the religion of the Bible—- 
 that salvation means deliverance from the 
 actual power of sin into a state of actual 
 righteousness, and that fellowship with 
 God is in no other way possible than by 
 becoming actually like God in moral char¬ 
 acter. This moralizing of religion is the 
 chief object, we may say, of the religion of 
 the Bible, both in the Old and in the New 
 Testament. The early church, under the 
 first inspiration of the Spirit, was pre¬ 
 eminently a body characterized by its lofty 
 and unworldly ethical tone. It was the 
 moral ‘ salt of the earth,’ The peril under 
 
136 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 Catholicism has been for the church, as it 
 became popular, to be satisfied with outward 
 conformity, and lose the strenuousness of 
 its moral appeal. The peril under Pro¬ 
 testantism has been for people to dwell 
 complacently upon ‘ the danger of thinking 
 to be saved by works,’ and to take Christ’s 
 ‘ finished work ’ as a substitute for their 
 own effort. And the idea of vicarious pun¬ 
 ishment—Christ punished that we might 
 be * let off ’—has, more than anything else, 
 tended to alienate the best moral conscience 
 of mankind from Christian teaching. 
 
 Let us try, then, to grasp at least the 
 main principle of the atonement doctrine, 
 and, if we can, to make sure its safeguards. 
 
 In Christ we saw—not the highest 
 achievement of human nature, but the 
 recreative act of God. It was the eternal 
 Son of God who ' for us men, and for our 
 salvation, came down from heaven, and 
 was incarnate and was made man.’ That 
 is the starting-point of the Christian view 
 of Christ’s work. ‘ God, in the person of 
 Christ, was reconciling the world unto 
 himself,’ and undoing the evil of man’s 
 rebellion. Certainly, as will appear, He 
 will not redeem us without our co-operation. 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 137 
 
 Every faculty of our human nature will be 
 summoned to correspondence. It is within 
 us, and not apart from us, that our redemp¬ 
 tion is to be wrought. But, first of all, 
 the great act is accomplished for us and 
 independently of us. ‘ He trod the wine¬ 
 press alone, and of the people there was none 
 with him/ Alone He set the perfect 
 example of the sinless and flawless manhood. 
 Over against all our wilfulness and weak¬ 
 ness and selfishness and pride, He offered 
 before the Father a perfect obedience. And 
 when human sin laid upon Him the penalty 
 of failure and suffering and ignominy and 
 death, He did not refuse to ‘ learn obedience 
 from the things that he suffered/ He was 
 obedient ‘ unto death/ He sealed His 
 self-sacrifice in the shedding of His blood. 
 And this human sacrifice of obedience 
 perfected in death the Father accepted, 
 and ratified His acceptance by raising Christ 
 from the dead and exalting Him to the 
 heavenly glory. ‘ This is my beloved Son, 
 in whom I am well pleased/ 
 
 Then out of that manhood, accepted and 
 glorified, proceeds forth the Holy Spirit, 
 who is to gather all the sons of faith, all 
 who will accept Christ for their master and 
 
138 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 their saviour, into such intimate union 
 with Him, that they are to share His 
 character and His suffering and His glory. 
 This is ‘ Christ in us.’ ‘ He shall see his seed 
 . . . and be satisfied.’ It is the fruit of His 
 sacrifice. But up to this point it is all God’s 
 act for us, God’s redemption of his people, 
 in Christ. To it we contributed nothing. 
 We can but welcome and receive in faith 
 God’s gift of our redemption in Christ. We 
 can but join the great company of the re¬ 
 deemed who cry, ‘ Worthy art thou . . . for 
 thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto 
 God with thy blood men of every tribe and 
 tongue and people and nation, and madest 
 them to be unto our God a kingdom and 
 priests ; and they reign upon the earth .’ 1 
 ‘ In none other is there salvation : for 
 neither is there any other name under 
 heaven, that is given among men, wherein 
 we must be saved .’ 2 
 
 This is the real point of the church doc¬ 
 trine of the atonement. It is the recogni¬ 
 tion that our redemption is based upon 
 something done simply and altogether for 
 us by the self-sacrifice of Christ. It was 
 His obedience, unto the shedding of His 
 
 1 Rev. v. 9, 10. 2 Acts iv. 12. 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 1 39 
 
 blood, that won for man his new standing- 
 ground in the face of God his Father, 
 and his new power to put all evil under 
 his feet. What our sins had lost, Christ’s 
 self-sacrifice has regained for us. 
 
 It is quite plain that in adhering to this 
 teaching we are in no peril of attributing 
 injustice to God. For it is God who, in 
 Christ, is reconciling the world to Himself. 
 It is divine self-sacrifice which is there at 
 work—one will of love in Father and Son. 
 
 Moreover, there is strictly no justification 
 for speaking of the Father as punishing 
 the Son in our place. We have indeed here 
 the supreme example of what is the noblest 
 element in human history—vicarious sacri¬ 
 fice ; but there is no evidence of vicarious 
 punishment. The Father ‘ spares not ’ His 
 Son, but suffers Him to bear, without miracu¬ 
 lous exemption, all that human sin laid 
 upon Him, all the failure and the desertion 
 and the death. But there is no part of all 
 that Christ bore that was not, in the natural 
 order of the world that He came into, 
 involved in His obedience. There is, so 
 far as we can see, no other ‘ punishment * 
 laid on Him by the Father than that bear¬ 
 ing of the consequences of other men’s sins. 
 
140 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 which fell upon Him inevitably when He 
 came as man into a sinful world, and which 
 falls upon every man or woman, in measure, 
 who enters into the lot of humanity. Nor 
 does His suffering, His bearing the sin of 
 the world, exempt other men from what 
 can be more properly called punishment, 
 the punishment of their own sins. His 
 blood-shedding is indeed said to have been 
 propitiatory, and to have enabled the 
 Father to forgive us. A word shall be said 
 about that expression directly. It warrants 
 us in saying that Christ suffered in order 
 that we might be forgiven; but we are not 
 warranted in saying that Christ suffered in 
 order that we might be exempted from 
 suffering. 
 
 The penalty of sin, as it is presented to 
 us in Scripture, may be said to be twofold; 
 It is in part the alienation from God which 
 lies in the sin itself, and is indistinguishable 
 from the state of sin : and that Christ did 
 not bear. In the case of each one of us it 
 ceases to exist as soon as ever the soul passes 
 from rebellion into surrender. 
 
 But besides this, which is purely personal, 
 there is the penalty which lies in the con¬ 
 sequences of sins, whether our own sins or 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 1 4 I 
 
 the sins of others : the consequences in the 
 way of chastisement. And from these 
 Christ does not save us. They are turned 
 into our healing penance. ‘ Whom the 
 Lord loveth He chasteneth.’ The record 
 of God’s dealings with His saints is that 
 they are ‘ heard/ ‘ forgiven/ and ‘ pun¬ 
 ished.’ 1 The idea that we are f let off ’ 
 punishment because Christ suffered for us, 
 is, as far as we can see, entirely a figment, 
 except in the sense that Christ, by His self- 
 sacrifice, is the means of our redemption 
 from that alienation from God which is the 
 essence of sin and of hell. 2 
 
 We get back thus to that question which 
 the human mind seems to have found 
 especially perplexing—the question why 
 Christ’s sacrifice should have been, as 
 St. Paul and St. John seem to say it was, a 
 necessary condition of the Gospel of for¬ 
 giveness. There is only one passage in the 
 New Testament where this question seems 
 to occur, 3 and there St. Paul seems to 
 give an answer which can satisfy our con- 
 
 1 Ps. xcix. 8. 
 
 2 I have argued this matter more at length in Romans , 
 
 ii. 215 f. 
 
 3 Rom. iii. 25. See the commentary of Sanday and 
 Headlam (Methuen), or my exposition in loco. 
 
142 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 science and mind on the subject. There 
 he seems to say that it was necessary in 
 view of the moral government of the world : 
 because, after man’s age-long lawlessness 
 and God’s age-long forbearance, a mere 
 declaration of forgiveness, without an act of 
 reparation on man’s part would have led to 
 a mistaking of the character of God. As it 
 is, the gift of divine forgivenesss in Christ is 
 bought at so costly a price, so splendid an 
 act of reparation on the part of Christ, the 
 representative head of the new humanity, 
 that we cannot misunderstand the divine 
 love in forgiving, as if it carried with it any 
 abandonment of moral requirement. 
 
 My last point is this : there is no shadow 
 of a doctrine of imputed righteousness in 
 the New Testament, such as will suffer us 
 to imagine that there can be any final recon¬ 
 ciliation of an individual man with God, on 
 any other basis than likeness of character. 
 It is through and through the teaching 
 of the Bible that it is only ultimately the 
 godlike who can see God. All the work 
 of Christ in setting us the perfect example, 
 and in providing for us the opportunity of 
 a fresh start, by the forgiveness of our 
 sins, is only the prelude to that which is 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE T 43 
 
 in the deepest sense the work of Christ in 
 us, the renewing by His spirit of heart and 
 life and character into the divine image. 
 
 Here, then, we get the root principle of 
 the atonement made for us in Christ. 
 Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is the 
 representative man. In Him our manhood 
 is reconstituted, and plays its perfect part, 
 and offers its perfect sacrifice, and wins its 
 perfect acceptance. Finally, each man is 
 accepted in the Beloved, only because he 
 has come to share His character through 
 the permeating influence of His Spirit. 
 But long before this there is an initial and 
 provisional acceptance. It is the great 
 principle of God’s dealings with us, that He 
 deals with us, not as we are, but as we are 
 becoming. At the first moment when the 
 man turns, or as often as after repeated 
 falls he turns, from his rebellion to obedi¬ 
 ence, and welcomes the offer of God, he is 
 accepted and forgiven, and given his stand¬ 
 ing-ground in the Father’s house, long 
 before he is, in his own character, fit for it, 
 because he has taken Christ for his master, 
 and is seen already in the character of his 
 elder brother. 1 
 
 1 That the first movement must be a movement of 
 
144 THE atonement and the 
 
 My object in this discourse is attained if 
 I have made it plain that the Christian idea 
 of atonement is bound up with the idea of 
 Christ’s redemptive work as, first of all, a 
 work done for us, without any co-operation 
 on our part; but that, on the other hand, 
 the safeguarding of this doctrine from 
 moral abuse lies in the recognition that the 
 work of Christ for us is only the prelude 
 to His work in us : that it is Christ in us, the 
 immanent Christ, which is ‘ the hope of 
 glory.’ And it will be apparent what a 
 safeguard for the holding together of these 
 two complementary half-truths—the Christ 
 for us and the Christ in us—is afforded by 
 the sacramental system. The sacraments as 
 a whole are the symbols and instruments of 
 the immanent Christ. The sacrament of 
 the Breaking of the Bread in particular is 
 
 obedience as well as acceptance is seen in the fact that 
 forgiveness is first of all associated with baptism, Acts ii. 
 38 : cf. ‘I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins * 
 —baptism involving the acceptance of the obedience of 
 Christ. And the same principle appears in each subse¬ 
 quent absolution. 
 
 The provisional character of all such initial accept¬ 
 ances is seen most clearly in the Parable of the Unmerci¬ 
 ful Servant, where the subsequent exhibition of a temper 
 incompatible with being forgiven, at once obliterates the 
 absolution already given. 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 1 45 
 
 the continual representation of the atoning 
 sacrifice, one, full, perfect and sufficient— 
 but in the most intimate and inseparable 
 connexion with the communication to us 
 of the once-sacrificed life, the body and 
 blood of the living Christ, to be our spiritual 
 food. 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 The inspiration of Scripture, logically 
 considered, is not the ground on which be¬ 
 lief in Christ is to be asked for. The 
 proclamation of Christ was first made by 
 witnesses, and it was as witnesses that 
 were to be believed. St. Luke, in the 
 preface to his Gospel, makes no other claim 
 than that of producing a careful record of 
 the testimony of eye-witnesses of the Lord 
 Jesus. So far as historical events are con¬ 
 cerned, we must be content in our age to 
 appeal to authentic history. No doubt 
 historical testimony is not all that goes to 
 make belief. There must be the spiritual 
 disposition which makes acceptance pos¬ 
 sible. But the historical claim must be 
 supported by good historical testimony. 
 The Gospel records must make good their 
 
 10 
 
I46 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 claim to be such testimony. I believe, with 
 the profoundest conviction, that they can 
 do so. And that it is those who doubt or 
 deny, and not those who accept the witness 
 of the Gospel narratives, who do violence to 
 the evidence. 
 
 When a man has once believed that Jesus 
 is the Lord, the Christ of God, he will find 
 himself believing in the inspiration of the 
 Old Testament: that is to say, he will find 
 in the Old Testament the record of a pre¬ 
 paration for Christ. He will find in the 
 Jews a chosen people, ‘ the sacred school of 
 the knowledge of God and of the spiritual 
 life’ which was destined thence to spread 
 to all mankind. 
 
 In other words, he will believe that the 
 prophets of the Old Testament made a 
 true claim when they claimed to speak ‘ the 
 word of the Lord.’ That word or message 
 was communicated gradually, ‘ in many 
 parts and in many manners.’ 1 In many 
 parts ; and thus the believer in Christ will 
 have no difficulty in accepting the fact that 
 the Old Testament gives us the record of a 
 gradual process of divine education ; and 
 that a very imperfect moral level was ac- 
 
 1 Heb. i. 1. 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 147 
 
 cepted by God as a stage towards better 
 things. The ancient fathers of the Chris¬ 
 tian church had no hesitation in recog¬ 
 nizing that what we are to look for in the 
 Old Testament morality is not perfection, 
 especially in its earlier stages, but only a 
 right direction. 
 
 And the message of God was given ‘ in 
 many manners/ The Christian believer 
 need not hesitate to recognize in the early 
 chapters of Genesis narratives which are 
 not historical, but give us * doctrines in the 
 form of a story.’ He will not be shocked 
 to find in the Old Testament popular legend, 
 and poetical history, and stories narrated 
 for a moral purpose, as well as history more 
 strictly so called. For all these can be 
 vehicles of the spiritual instruction of a 
 nation. He will read the Hebrew docu¬ 
 ments like the documents of any other his¬ 
 tory, but he will find in them something 
 which he does not find in any other history, 
 to nearly the same extent—a continuous 
 guidance in which he will recognize the in¬ 
 spiring influence of the Holy Spirit, training 
 and guiding a race to right thoughts about 
 God and man, to a right sense of sin, and a 
 right expectation of redemption. He will 
 
I48 THE ATONEMENT AND THE 
 
 find in every one of the books of the Old 
 Testament some element or aspect of this 
 gradual revelation. 
 
 Thus, while he makes no claim for the 
 Old Testament writers to be teachers of 
 science, or to be infallible in matters of 
 history, he will see in them, in their different 
 degrees and according to their different 
 literary methods and human idiosyncrasies, 
 organs of one Spirit working towards 
 one end, and that end the religion of 
 Christ. 
 
 In Christ he will see the full purpose of 
 that Spirit realized : and in the apostolic 
 writers he will recognize a full measure of 
 His inspiration. He will ‘ put himself to 
 school ’ with each book of the New Testa¬ 
 ment in turn, to learn its lessons about 
 Christ and His will. He will find the best 
 reason for believing that the Holy Spirit 
 did guide the apostolic writers ‘ into all 
 the truth ’ about Christ. He need not 
 believe that there are no mistakes or in¬ 
 accuracies in the New Testament narra¬ 
 tives ; but he will recognize that we have 
 there, when we judge the narratives simply 
 as historical documents, trustworthy his¬ 
 torical material; and in the spirit which 
 
 > 
 
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE I49 
 
 animated the writers he will see the Spirit 
 of truth. 
 
 I do not think, then, that one who has 
 come to believe in Christ, on the grounds, 
 partly moral and spiritual and partly his¬ 
 torical, which lead to, and justify, such be¬ 
 lief—I do not think that he will find any 
 difficulty in believing that the Scriptures, 
 both of the Old and New Testaments, are 
 ‘ given by inspiration of God/ and, as 
 such, are ‘ profitable for teaching, for re¬ 
 proof, for correction, for instruction in 
 righteousness ; that the man of God may 
 be complete, furnished completely unto 
 every good work.’ 1 
 
 And the more he believes this, the more 
 thankful he may well become that the 
 church has given no definition of inspira¬ 
 tion, and that he is tied to no doctrine of 
 the infallibility of every statement of 
 Scripture. 
 
 1 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17. 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE CHURCH OF 
 
 ENGLAND 
 
 Throughout these lectures I have been 
 endeavouring to vindicate the superiority 
 of the doctrine about God and nature and 
 man, which is expressed in summary in the 
 catholic creeds, over the ideas of the New 
 Theology. What, therefore, according to 
 my contention, we ought to do is by all 
 means in our power to bring men back to 
 the point of view of the creeds, or to the 
 mind of the church which formulated the 
 creeds. 
 
 For what has given the New Theology its 
 advantage is partly the fact that the type 
 of ‘ orthodoxy ’ which prevailed in Eng¬ 
 land—the Protestant orthodoxy of the 
 earlier nineteenth century—in certain im¬ 
 portant respects had given an expression 
 of Christian truth quite inferior to that of 
 the ancient church. Thus we have been 
 
 150 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1 51 
 
 suffering from a largely legitimate reaction 
 against the defects of this Protestant or¬ 
 thodoxy, just as at the Reformation the 
 disastrous division of Christendom into 
 national or sectional ‘ churches ’ was due 
 to a reaction—again a largely legitimate 
 reaction—against the excesses and perver¬ 
 sions of the mediaeval church. 
 
 In particular the Protestant orthodoxy 
 of the nineteenth century had three special 
 defects. 
 
 First, it was largely coloured by Deism in 
 its conception of God. It disposed men to 
 think of Him as the creator who made the 
 world, and the great emperor who rules it, 
 as from outside, and whose action was 
 exhibited in occasional ‘ interventions/ 
 The evidence for the prevalence of this one¬ 
 sided conception is sufficiently to be found 
 in the fact that the New Theology, in em¬ 
 phasizing, again with a one-sided emphasis, 
 the counter truth of God’s immanence in 
 nature, proclaims it as a new truth, 1 and is 
 even naively unconscious how familiar this 
 counter truth was in the original Christian 
 theology. This oversight—which is in any 
 case strange after so much modern writing 
 
 1 See The Substance of Faith , p. 1. 
 
152 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 on the ancient lines—has only been possible 
 because the aspect of truth expressed in 
 the divine immanence had been so largely 
 forgotten in current orthodoxy. However, 
 if it was not actually expressed in the 
 creeds, it was, as I have said, thoroughly 
 familiar in the church which formulated the 
 creeds. And it is a prominent idea in the 
 New Testament. It is expressed in such 
 phrases as ‘ In him all things consist/ 
 which imply that God, the eternal Word, 
 is the immanent principle of order and 
 system of the world ; or again, ‘ In him 
 we live and move and are/ ‘ We are all his 
 offspring/ which imply that humanity 
 exists in God and is in the image of God, in 
 spite of the hindering or obscuring effect of 
 sin. Here we have the ground for all that 
 reverence for nature and natural law, and 
 all that regard for human nature, which the 
 New Theology found lacking in current 
 orthodoxy. All that proper reverence for 
 nature and for man, as the expression of 
 God, is present in the original Christian 
 theology, which at the same time keeps in 
 the forefront of its teaching that thought 
 of God which forms the substance of the 
 revelation on which it bases its claims to 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 153 
 
 teach—the thought of God as independent 
 of the world and supreme over it, supreme¬ 
 ly free in His own moral personality and 
 power as the creator and the redeemer and 
 the judge. 
 
 Its tendency to Deism was, then, the first 
 defect of the Protestant orthodoxy of the 
 last century. 
 
 The second defect was that it rested its 
 system upon the infallibility of Scripture 
 as a record, so that no seemingly scientific or 
 historical statement of Scripture could be 
 otherwise than true. Now I do not think 
 that I am exaggerating when I say that 
 that position has been riddled by modern 
 science and historical criticism, and is no 
 longer reasonably tenable. It is cruelty 
 to young people to bring them up in the 
 belief that a statement in the Bible about 
 natural processes, or a statement in his¬ 
 torical form, is necessarily ‘ true, because it 
 is in the Bible.' The Bible was not given 
 to teach us science, and its allusions to 
 natural facts and processes are expressed 
 in terms of the beliefs of its day; though 
 doubtless there is remarkably little either in 
 the Old or the New Testament that is con¬ 
 trary to our present science. Again, the 
 
154 the new theology and 
 
 Bible is a literature which, like the litera¬ 
 ture of every other nation, contains ‘ his¬ 
 tory * of the most variable degrees of 
 accuracy. Inspiration, which we rightly 
 ascribe to the books, or, more strictly, to 
 the writers of the Bible, is not the same 
 thing as infallibility or inerrancy. It 
 means that the Spirit of God was ‘ speaking 
 by prophets,’ and, especially through the 
 Jewish race, was guiding men to right in¬ 
 stead of wrong thoughts about God and 
 nature and man and sin and redemption. 
 This work of inspiration has its centre and 
 culmination in Christ, and it is in His 
 person, and the revelation of God involved 
 in His person, that the faith of the church 
 is centred. This is formulated in the 
 creeds. It rests upon the witness of the 
 apostles to the teaching of Jesus Christ and 
 to His acts, and to certain crucial events of 
 His life, especially His resurrection from 
 the dead. Facts thus become of the first 
 importance in our creed; but where the 
 facts become of the first importance, the 
 historical evidence becomes also first-rate 
 evidence, which would be accepted as satis¬ 
 factory in other departments of history. 
 And it is upon the strength of the apostolic 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1 55 
 
 witness, and not upon the infallibility of the 
 history given in the whole area of the litera¬ 
 ture of Scripture, that we rest the security 
 of our creed in matters of fact. We need 
 to return, then, to the point of view of the 
 creeds, and to be thankful that the only 
 affirmation there made about the inspira¬ 
 tion of Scripture is that the Holy Ghost 
 ‘ spake by the prophets/ 
 
 Thirdly, the Protestant orthodoxy cen¬ 
 tred itself upon the doctrine of the atone¬ 
 ment rather than of the incarnation, at the 
 same time as it tended to give that doctrine 
 an expression against which the moral 
 sense of the world revolted. As I have said, 
 you cannot well exaggerate the importance 
 of the doctrine of the atonement, or the 
 appeal which the divine sacrifice has made 
 to the heart of man. But it has been 
 formulated in no dogma, save so far as the 
 creed confesses that Christ suffered ‘ for 
 us/ Our faith is centred by the creeds 
 upon the person of Christ, and the revela¬ 
 tion of God given in Him, and upon the 
 crucial events of our Lord’s life in the flesh, 
 by which our redemption was vindicated 
 and assured. 1 
 
 1 I am not concerned here to ask how far these same 
 
156 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 Once again we need to return to the 
 point of view of the creeds. 
 
 I am well aware that there will be many 
 to tell me that it is mere f obscurantism ’ 
 to maintain that the ideas of the creeds are 
 the best guides to ultimate truth which the 
 modern world possesses. I must leave to 
 others the metaphysical vindication of the 
 Christian idealism. 1 But I must say a 
 word to those who plead that to identify 
 Christianity with a doctrine of miracles is 
 to place it in inevitable opposition to the 
 intellectual spirit of our age. The really 
 cogent evidence of religion, it is urged, 
 must be found in facts of present spiritual 
 experience; not in past events of dis¬ 
 putable evidence, and of a kind which con¬ 
 flict with such a conception of the order of 
 the world as science is perpetually strength- 
 
 tendencies, or other tendencies as harmful, were prevalent 
 in the Catholic orthodoxy of the same period. I am 
 simply taking the fact that there was dominant in 
 England a certain orthodox Protestantism, and am con¬ 
 cerned with the defects of that alone, as it is against 
 that alone that the New Theology is in reaction. 
 
 1 I think that the work of Mr. Inge, Personal Idealism 
 and Mysticism (Longmans), and Mr. Illingworth’s 
 Personality Human and Divine, will perhaps assist 
 the ordinary student to see his way better than any 
 other recent books. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 157 
 
 ening, and which tends to make miracles 
 practically unbelievable. 
 
 I should, of course, be the first to agree that 
 the most cogent evidence of religion lies in 
 present spiritual experience ; for it is pre¬ 
 sent spiritual experience, our own and that 
 of others, which constitutes the present 
 witness of the Spirit. But the present 
 witness carries us back to Christ. And He, 
 we contend, cannot be otherwise legiti¬ 
 mately interpreted than as the church has 
 always interpreted Him. The Christian 
 church has believed in Him, not only as the 
 teacher of the truth, but as God incarnate, 
 who made evident, in one memorable 
 moment of history, by His power over nature 
 and by His resurrection from the dead, that 
 the moral will of the Father, the supremely 
 free will of love, is really the one power which 
 is over all and through all. The real enemies 
 of the Christian spirit are the naturalism 
 which denies the deadliness of sin and the 
 necessity for redemption in each single 
 man, and the pessimism which denies the 
 sovereignty of love in the world as a whole. 
 The victory of the Christian spirit over these 
 constant tendencies of thought and feeling 
 is bound up with its belief in God as He 
 
1 58 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 has revealed Himself in Christ—in God who 
 expresses Himself in nature, but is supreme 
 over nature ; and it is precisely this belief 
 which Christ’s miracles have inspired and 
 confirmed. 
 
 There is the deepest reason to believe that 
 the actual power which Christianity has 
 exhibited in the world, its power to lift 
 human life and to create a new type of 
 civilization, is due to its fundamental and 
 distinctive ideas. In everyday experience 
 we see such evidences of inconsistency 
 between ideas and practice, between the 
 professed beliefs of men and their actual 
 conduct—we see so often pagan practice 
 associated with nominal orthodoxy, and 
 Christian conduct in individuals associated 
 with more or less of unbelief in the Christian 
 creed—that we are disposed to doubt 
 whether theological ideas have very much 
 real influence over life as a whole. But 
 history, on a broad view, corrects this ten¬ 
 dency. As we look at the long reaches of 
 history we see in fact, and indisputably, 
 that the practical character of a civilization 
 coheres with its ultimate theological prin¬ 
 ciples ; that the theology of the Buddha, 
 and of Jesus Christ, and of Mahomet, lies at 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 159 
 
 the root of a quite distinct civilization and 
 type of character, which, when you exa¬ 
 mine it, proves to be in the most intimate 
 connexion with its ideas of God. ‘ The 
 only really important changes in human 
 history, those from which new types of 
 civilization proceed, take place in the ideas, 
 the conceptions, and the beliefs of men. 
 The memorable events of history are the 
 effects of invisible changes in the thoughts 
 of men/ 1 It is the Christian idea of God 
 which has lain at the root of Christian 
 civilization and progress; and the re¬ 
 covery and maintenance and diffusion to 
 new races of this civilization, and its 
 capacity for progress, depend at bottom 
 upon the maintenance of the fundamental 
 ideas of God which are summarized in the 
 catholic creeds, in which the real spirit of the 
 Christianity of history has expressd itself. 
 
 It is the strength of the Church of Eng¬ 
 land to stand upon the faith of these creeds, 
 and on the basis of this fundamental unity 
 to afford the greatest possible compre¬ 
 hensiveness. When Christianity came into 
 the world it took shape in a catholic society 
 which had three chief characteristics. 
 
 1 Gustav Le Bon, Psychologie des joules (Paris 1907), p. 2. 
 
l6o THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 1. Its outward constitution as a coherent 
 society took shape universally in the suc¬ 
 cessions of the bishops, who with their 
 assistant officers were the ministers of the 
 w r ord and of the sacraments of the church, 
 and wffio w r ere in each local church the cen¬ 
 tres of unity, and also the links of unity 
 between the different congregations in all 
 nations and the maintainers of the con¬ 
 tinuous life of the whole church down the 
 generations. 
 
 2. The faith of the church expressed it¬ 
 self (in slightly different forms in different 
 places, but with substantial identity), in 
 the creeds. 
 
 3. The canon of Scripture—that is, the col¬ 
 lection of the writings of the Old Testament, 
 and of the apostles and their companions 
 in the New Testament—was formed, in order 
 that the church might be kept constantly 
 in touch with the original revelation, on 
 the maintenance of which its healthy life 
 depended. 
 
 These three elements of historical Chris¬ 
 tianity, beside which nothing else can, in 
 at all a like sense, claim catholicity, have 
 been preserved to the Church of England, 
 and, in spite of all her weaknesses and un- 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1 6 1 
 
 faithfulnesses, give her a unique opportunity 
 and responsibility in the present Christian 
 world. 
 
 It is with the second of these elements 
 alone, the creeds, that we are now directly 
 concerned. 
 
 The fact that the Church of England 
 stands upon the creeds, and substantially 
 upon the creeds only, by way of doctrinal 
 requirement, constitutes her great oppor¬ 
 tunity. 
 
 When I speak of doctrinal requirements, 
 I am speaking chiefly of requirements upon 
 the officers of the church, the clergy. On 
 joining the church, indeed, in baptism, or 
 on receiving the full status of church mem¬ 
 bership in confirmation, the church claims 
 the assent of the layman, also, to the faith 
 of the Apostles’ Creed. And the creeds are 
 recited in our services in the language of the 
 people, so that profession of faith is prac¬ 
 tically more prominent in our public ser¬ 
 vices than in those of any other part of the 
 church of Christ. But the responsibility 
 of joining in our services, and of approach¬ 
 ing the Communion, is left to the con¬ 
 science of the layman, with whatever 
 assistance or counsel he may like to 
 
 ii 
 
162 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 seek ; and I trust it may continue so to 
 be left. 
 
 On the clergy a more definite require¬ 
 ment is made. Day by day, and service by 
 service, the minister is required, as leader 
 of the congregation, to say ‘ I believe,’ 
 and to profess his faith thus solemnly and 
 constantly in the explicit and unmistakable 
 phrases of the creeds. Now I am sure that 
 it is quite necessary that we should main¬ 
 tain in the whole community the sense of 
 the moral obligation of the man, who thus 
 stands to profess his personal faith as 
 leader of the congregation, really to be¬ 
 lieve what he thus solemnly professes to 
 believe, in terms which are deliberately 
 unambiguous. The maintenance of this 
 principle of good faith is necessary, not only 
 for the sake of the Christian religion, but 
 in the general interests of professional 
 honesty. I have taken occasion before now 
 to make it evident that, as far as I can 
 secure it, I will admit no one into this 
 diocese, or into holy orders, to minister for 
 the congregation, who does not ex animo 
 believe the creeds. 
 
 I am supported in this resolution, I feel 
 sure, by the general mind of the church. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 163 
 
 I know that I am supported by the bishops 
 of this province of the church. Twice re¬ 
 cently the bishops of the province of Can¬ 
 terbury have solemnly declared that they 
 are ‘ resolved to maintain unimpaired the 
 Catholic faith in the Holy Trinity and in the 
 Incarnation, as contained in the Apostles’ 
 and Nicene Creeds, and in the Quicunque 
 Vult , and regard the faith thus presented, 
 both in statements of doctrine and in 
 statements of fact, as the necessary 
 basis on which the teaching of the church 
 reposes.’ 
 
 We must be very gentle with scrupulous 
 and anxious consciences. We must be 
 very patient with men under the searching 
 and purifying trial of doubt. But when 
 a man has once arrived at the steady con¬ 
 viction that he cannot honestly affirm a 
 particular and unambiguous article of the 
 creed, in the sense which the church of which 
 he is a minister undoubtedly gives to it, the 
 public mind of the church must tell him 
 that he has a right to the freedom of his 
 own opinion, but that he can no longer, 
 consistently with public honour, hold the 
 office of the ministry. 1 
 
 1 With regard to the minatory clauses of the Quicunque 
 
164 THE new theology and 
 
 But if a real assent of heart and will and 
 intellect to the teaching of the creeds is re¬ 
 quired of the clergy, I think that substan¬ 
 tially nothing else of a doctrinal kind is 
 required of them. I mean that a man who 
 believes the Creed is not likely to be 
 troubled with any reasonable difficulty in 
 making the doctrinal assent required of 
 him when he is ordained, or when he accepts 
 any particular charge in the church. He is 
 required to profess that he ‘ assents to the 
 Thirty-nine Articles and to the Book of 
 Common Prayer, and to the Ordering of 
 bishops, priests, and deacons ; and that he 
 believes the doctrine of the Church of 
 England as therein set forth to be agreeable 
 to the Word of God ; and that in public 
 prayer and administration of the sacra¬ 
 ments he will use the form in the said book 
 prescribed and none other, except so far 
 as shall be ordered by lawful authority/ 
 
 Vult , the mind of the present church is practically 
 unanimous in the sense which it intends them to bear. 
 In reciting these clauses, with a large qualification which 
 is not expressed, I am certainly only doing what the 
 church which commissions me bids me to do. At the 
 same time I think this unexpressed qualification is so 
 considerable, and the fact that it is unexpressed leads 
 to so much misunderstanding and scandal, that the 
 clauses in question are unsuitable for public recitation 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1 65 
 
 Time was when the clergy were required 
 to profess a very much stricter adherence 
 to the Articles. But the phraseology of the 
 declaration was in 1867, by the combined 
 authority of the Convocations and of Parlia¬ 
 ment, made much more general—i.e. an 
 assent only to the doctrine as contained in 
 a series of documents as a whole ; and I do 
 not believe that any one who believes the 
 fundamental creeds, and is conscientiously 
 prepared to teach the Catechism, and to 
 use the services authorized for common 
 worship and the administration of the 
 sacraments, ought to have any reasonable 
 scruple in accepting the ministry in the 
 Church of England. 1 
 
 1 Of one more scruple, that arising out of the declara¬ 
 tion required by those who are to be ordained deacons, 
 as to faith in the Scriptures, I have spoken in my charge 
 on The Spiritual Efficiency of the Church (Murray, 1904), 
 pp. 70, 71 : ‘We are required, before we can be ad¬ 
 mitted to the order of deacons, to express our “ unfeigned 
 belief in all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New 
 Testaments " ; but that expression of belief can be 
 fairly and justly made by any one who believes heartily 
 that the Bible as a whole records and contains the 
 message of God in all its stages of delivery, and that 
 each one of the books contains some element or aspect of 
 this revelation. In other words, I “ unfeignedly believe 
 all the Scriptures," if I believe them to contain and 
 embody the Word of God. This definition of the mean- 
 
l66 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 We need to make the doctrinal position 
 of the Church of England, both as to its 
 central requirement upon its ministers, and 
 as to the differences of opinion which it 
 allows, much more explicit and clearly 
 understood than it is at present. 
 
 The Church of England requires its 
 ministers to mean what they say when, as 
 leaders of the congregation, they recite the 
 central creeds of Christendom, or say ‘ I 
 believe.' 
 
 They are required to accept the position 
 of the Church of England as stated in its 
 formularies and services in general, and to 
 be able to use conscientiously the forms of 
 worship and administration of the sacra¬ 
 ments which are of authority, and to teach 
 the catechism. 
 
 They are required to give a special 
 
 ing of the question I have often repeated. I am de¬ 
 lighted to find that it agrees with the definition given 
 by one who was the weightiest opponent of what is 
 commonly called the Higher Criticism—I mean the late 
 Bishop of Oxford. “ That is the sum of the sense in 
 which you may interpret this question according to the 
 intentio imponentis : do you believe the Holy Scripture 
 as the Word of life, as containing in the Old and New 
 Testaments the revelation of the purpose and work of 
 Almighty God through Jesus Christ our Lord ? ” ’ See 
 Stubbs, Ordination Addresses (Longmans), pp. 404, 1. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1 67 
 
 promise to teach out of the Scriptures, and 
 to lay nothing upon their hearers, as binding 
 upon their faith, except what is contained 
 in Scripture. 
 
 This gives us a sufficient basis for doc¬ 
 trinal unity, and gives room for different 
 ‘ schools of thought/ such as have existed 
 and will exist, within the church ; but all 
 upon the basis of the great agreement, 
 which should be constantly made evident. 
 
 If these simple principles are, as I believe 
 they are, of general acceptance amongst us, 
 it would be an immense gain if they could 
 be explicitly and constantly declared, so 
 that it should be known throughout 
 Christendom what we really stand both to 
 require and to allow. 
 
 In the matter of ritual, we require each 
 of our clergy, whenever he undertakes a 
 public charge, to promise, in public prayers 
 and administration of the sacraments, to 
 use only the services of the Prayer Book, 
 except so far as lawful authority (which 
 must mean for him, at least the authority 
 of the bishop) allows some additional or 
 exceptional prayers. This is to secure that 
 in all our churches the same services shall 
 be rendered, and intelligently and intel- 
 
1 68 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 ligibly rendered ; and may be so inter¬ 
 preted as to admit of wide variety in the 
 ceremonial exhibition of the services, with 
 due regard to the feelings of congregations, 
 and due regard to such explicit directions, 
 as to the meaning of which there is no 
 doubt, as the Prayer Book contains. 
 
 Here again we need to make as explicit 
 as possible both our basis of unity and our 
 limits of comprehension. But we are con¬ 
 cerned now only with our standards of 
 doctrine. 
 
 It is a great advantage to stand simply on 
 the ancient creeds. If we look in the direc¬ 
 tion of the Nonconformists, we cannot fail 
 to see the difficulty in which they find them¬ 
 selves as regards standards of doctrine. 
 They have stood, in their origin and during 
 their past history, on the old Protestant 
 orthodoxy, of which the corner-stone was 
 the dogma of the infallibility and sole autho¬ 
 rity of Scripture. And it is precisely this 
 position which recent criticism has rendered 
 most untenable. Historical inquiry has 
 replaced the canon of Scripture in its con¬ 
 text as part of the same formative growth 
 with the creeds and the episcopal succes¬ 
 sions—part of the same growth, and resting 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 169 
 
 upon the same authority. It has become 
 more and more difficult to maintain the 
 authority of the Bible, as a standard of 
 doctrine, apart from the authority of the 
 creeds and mind of the church. And still 
 more it has become impossible to maintain 
 the proposition of the infallibility of all the 
 statements of Scripture, simply because 
 they are in Scripture. During the recent 
 discussion of the New Theology there have 
 been signs of a wide-spread anxiety among 
 Nonconformists, who feel the perils of the 
 ‘ down-grade ’ movement, as to the standard 
 of doctrine. There is nothing which in 
 this respect can rival the ancient creeds. 
 
 On the other hand, we hold a position of 
 immense advantage, as compared to the 
 Roman Church, in being free from the en¬ 
 cumbrance of dogmas or doctrines which it 
 is not lawful to deny, but which are a 
 grievous offence to the critical spirit. For 
 instance, the doctrine of the Immaculate 
 Conception of Mary is in the strictest sense 
 binding upon the faith of Roman Catholics. 
 It is, if true, an event in history ; but its 
 proclamation as a dogma rests on no sort 
 of historical evidence or even tradition,— 
 on nothing except the flimsy foundation of 
 
170 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 a logic of the a priori sort which is most 
 fallible, the sort of logic which seeks to 
 determine, apart from evidence, how things 
 must have happened. Again, the Roman 
 Church celebrates, on one of its festivals of 
 greatest solemnity and obligation, the as¬ 
 sumption of the body of Mary into heaven : 
 again a supposed event, which rests upon 
 nothing which can be called historical 
 evidence. 
 
 Once more, the central authority in the 
 Roman Church has repeatedly, of recent 
 years, sought to fasten upon those in its 
 communion the obligation to hold for true 
 every statement of Scripture—to hold the 
 doctrine of verbal inspiration in its com- 
 pletest form. The late Pope, Leo XIII., 
 in his Encyclical ‘ On the Study of Sacred 
 Scripture ’—issued in 1893—wrote thus 
 with absolute decision and complete autho¬ 
 ritativeness of tone : 
 
 It is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to 
 narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy 
 Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has 
 erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid 
 themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to 
 concede that divine inspiration regards the things of 
 faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 171 
 
 they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or 
 falsehood of a passage, we should consider, not so 
 much what God has said, as the reason and purpose 
 which He had in mind in saying it—this system cannot 
 be tolerated. For all the books which the Church 
 receives as sacred and canonical are written, wholly 
 and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the 
 Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible 
 that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that 
 inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with 
 error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and 
 necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the 
 supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. 
 
 Hence, because the Holy Ghost employs men as 
 His instruments, we cannot, therefore, say that it 
 was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have 
 fallen into error, and not the primary Author. For, 
 by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled 
 them to write—He was so present to them—that 
 the things which He ordered, and those only, they 
 first rightly understood, then willed faithfully to 
 write down, and finally expressed in apt words and 
 with infallible truth. Otherwise it could not be said 
 that He was the Author of the entire Scripture. 
 
 It follows that those who maintain that an error is 
 possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings 
 either pervert the catholic notion of inspiration or 
 make God the author of such error. 
 
 And the recent decree Lamentabili sane 
 condemns, among a number of other pro- 
 
172 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 positions, the proposition (xi.) that ‘ divine 
 inspiration is not so to be extended to the 
 whole of sacred Scripture as that it should 
 preserve from all mistake all and each of its 
 parts.’ 1 
 
 We have enough difficulties and short¬ 
 comings of our own in the Church of 
 England. We do well to be humble and 
 penitent. But we do well also to be thank¬ 
 ful that, while we have preserved our stand¬ 
 ing-ground upon the ancient and catholic 
 faith and system of the church, we are 
 exempt from dogmas and proclamations of 
 authority which offer such tremendous 
 obstacles to the critical judgement and the 
 freedom of historical inquiry. 
 
 What we need, then—we of the Church 
 of England—is to make clearer to our own 
 minds, and then to the minds of others, the 
 basis of solid agreement on which we stand, 
 on the ground of which we are able to allow, 
 and ought to be able to allow, without con¬ 
 fusion, a wide comprehension and freedom 
 of opinion. 
 
 If this could be more clearly defined and 
 realized we could for the most part let our 
 
 1 The recent encyclical of the present Pope re-empha¬ 
 sizes this position. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 173 
 
 stale controversies drop for a while, and 
 set ourselves to our great practical tasks, 
 the task of witnessing for Christ abroad in 
 the great non-Christian world ; and, within 
 Christendom, here in our own country, the 
 task of moral witness. 
 
 We are passing through a great crisis. 
 The whole industrial and social fabric is in 
 process of change. The movement that is 
 becoming dominant is what is more or 
 less vaguely called socialist. At the heart 
 of it is a great cry for justice, for a more 
 equitable division of the proceeds of in¬ 
 dustry ; for a better life for the masses of 
 the people ; for a greater regard for each 
 individual life, and especially for those who 
 are too weak to help themselves. Now 
 this is a movement with which the Christian 
 Church ought to have at heart the pro- 
 foundest sympathy. The Bible is full of 
 the cry for justice, full of resentment at the 
 oppression of the poor. It cannot tolerate 
 the exploiting of the weak by the strong. 
 It is, indisputably, in the age-long struggle 
 of rich and poor, on the side of the poor. 1 
 But all its great social force—its great 
 wealth of social teaching—has been with- 
 
 1 In development of this phrase see Sermon v., p. 274. 
 
174 THE NEW theology and 
 
 drawn into the background. It has to be 
 brought to the fore again, and set to work 
 within every Christian conscience and in 
 every portion of the Christian church. It 
 is the witness of Christianity which is most 
 needed by the men of to-day. 
 
 What is wanted is not the alliance of 
 Christianity with a political party, nor the 
 judgement of Christianity on an economic 
 theory ; but the study by Christians of 
 their principles ; the preaching by Chris¬ 
 tians of the real moral meaning of their 
 brotherhood, with its sacraments of fellow¬ 
 ship ; the reassertion in a society which calls 
 itself Christian of the obligations of justice 
 and righteousness. 1 
 
 The doctrines of the creed which we have 
 been considering—the doctrines of God and 
 of Christ, of human destiny and sin and re¬ 
 demption—are precisely the sources from 
 which the Christian church derives its 
 insight and force to aid in social reconstruc- 
 
 1 In elucidation of these phrases I am venturing to 
 reprint (seep. 297) the recent report of the Committee of 
 the Southern Convocation and House of Laymen on 
 The Moral Witness of the Church on Economic Subjects, 
 as giving in some sense a corporate expression of the 
 church’s mind, which is much more valuable than that 
 of an individual. 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 175 
 
 tion. The deficiencies and perils of the con¬ 
 temporary labour movement are sufficiently 
 conspicuous to those who look at it from 
 outside. If the church were only alive and 
 at work in the hearts of the people, with its 
 fundamental moral witness well to the fore, 
 it might supply, or it ought to supply, the 
 moral force and purity which the movement 
 for social redemption assuredly needs. It 
 can supply also, under all circumstances 
 tending to depression and despair, the con¬ 
 fidence of its certain hope. 
 
 Science, strictly so called—it cannot be 
 too often reiterated—has no gospel. It 
 affords us no assurance whatever against 
 the deterioration of our race, or its extinc¬ 
 tion . 1 It takes impartial cognizance of the 
 downward as well as the upward road. 
 ‘ Science/ says a striking modern writer , 2 
 ‘ has promised us the truth, or at least the 
 knowledge of such relations as our intelli¬ 
 gence can seize ; she has never promised us 
 either peace or happiness. Sovereignly in¬ 
 different to our feelings, she does not hear 
 our lamentations. We must try and live 
 
 1 See Huxley’s emphatic declarations, cited below, 
 p. 240. 
 
 2 Le Bon, op. cit., p. 5. 
 
1 76 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND 
 
 with her, since nothing can bring back the 
 illusions which she has banished.’ 
 
 But ‘ science ’ is not our only road to 
 truth. And if the faith in Jesus Christ is 
 grounded in truth and reason, as we may 
 be assured it is, we have in that faith the 
 supreme safeguard of human hopes; in 
 Christ upon His throne, the ultimate se¬ 
 curity of human destiny. Beyond all the 
 decays of civilization, and all the shocks of 
 worlds, there is ‘ the far-off, divine event,’ 
 the establishment of the kingdom of Christ, 
 in which all the transitory disclosures of 
 truth and power and beauty in the world, 
 all the achievements and intimations of 
 human thought and human character, are 
 to be brought together and consummated 
 in the City of God, under the new heaven 
 and upon the new earth, where God is all 
 in all. 
 
 This security of human hopes is bound 
 up with the faith in God as Christ revealed 
 Him, and with the revelation of divine pur¬ 
 pose for nature and man which is given in 
 summary and prophetic form in His person 
 and life and resurrection and triumph. 
 ‘ There shall never be one lost good.’ 
 
 There, where Christ is on the throne, is 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 177 
 
 the anchor of our hopes, and there is the 
 continual warning which hangs over our 
 individual lives and our civilization. All 
 that will allow itself to belong to Christ, all 
 that wall admit His redemption, wall be, 
 quickly or slowdy, gathered under His feet, 
 and into His body—all the real riches of 
 humanity, ‘ the glory and honour of all 
 nations.’ The city of God is thus the 
 assured goal of humanity. The divine pur¬ 
 pose wall surely effect itself. But how much 
 of the redeeming purpose can be carried out 
 in our lives and in our civilization depends 
 upon ourselves. Our share in the great 
 consummation, as individuals, or as a 
 nation, or as a church, depends upon our 
 faithfulness in allegiance to Christ. 
 
 I say, faithfulness in allegiance to Christ. 
 But we must include in allegiance to Christ, 
 the unconscious allegiance which is in the 
 heart of all those w T ho are following the 
 best light they have. We Christians are 
 sure that all honest inquiry after the truth, 
 and all loyal following of wfhat in our con¬ 
 sciences w r e know T and feel to be the best, will 
 one day, if not in this life, yet beyond it, 
 be rewarded with the \ision of God and the 
 knowiedge of Christ. The refusal of the 
 
 12 
 
178 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 light, the declining from what we know to 
 be right, is common enough in human life. 
 That must separate us from Christ. But 
 nothing else can be under His condemna¬ 
 tion. He is the light that lighteneth every 
 man in conscience, even those who know 
 Him not, or who cannot bring themselves 
 to acknowledge Him, because He has been 
 misinterpreted to them. Thus He is the 
 goal of all the strivings after good in the 
 world. There is none other name given 
 among men whereby we must be saved, 
 than the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
SERMONS 
 
 179 
 
SERMON I 
 
 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 1 
 
 In that hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said, I 
 thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou 
 didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, 
 and didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father, for so it was 
 well-pleasing in thy sight.— St. Luke x. 21. 
 
 Nothing is more instructive than to con¬ 
 sider the method of influencing men which 
 is exhibited in the coming of the Christ. 
 Any one who is, even in the vaguest and 
 most general sense, a Christian, must believe 
 that the divine providence is exhibited in 
 the conditions of His coming : that it was 
 ‘ by a determinate counsel and foreknow¬ 
 ledge of God/ It is then, I say, most in¬ 
 structive to consider how the wisdom of 
 God set aside, in the circumstances of our 
 Lord’s coming, all the opportunities and 
 methods of influencing men which the 
 
 1 A sermon preached at Great St. Mary’s before the 
 University of Cambridge, on Oct. 21, 1906. 
 
 181 
 
182 the creed and common life 
 
 imagination of men would have suggested. 
 Thus Christ did not come so as to command 
 any of the instruments of secular greatness— 
 as some great king or emperor or powerful 
 person. Again, he did not come as a 
 philosopher, or so as to have command of 
 the influences of learning. Once more, He 
 did not come so as to fulfil Plato’s hope of 
 one who should combine both the accepted 
 means of influence—that is, as a philosopher- 
 king. He was born in circumstances which 
 do not suggest any opportunities of wide 
 influence : in an outlying and despised dis¬ 
 trict of a subject-kingdom, just about to 
 become more subject. There was, indeed, 
 nothing squalid about His origin. He was 
 born in a family which nursed noble 
 memories and noble hopes—‘ of the seed 
 of David according to the flesh ’ ; but in 
 the circle of labouring men. And in the 
 main it was in the same circle—in the circle 
 of labouring people of the best and most 
 respectable kind—that He found His dis¬ 
 ciples and His agents. He did, indeed— 
 if we believe, as I am sure we ought to be¬ 
 lieve, the Fourth Gospel—give the natural 
 rulers of His people—the classes of Jews 
 who sat in the seats of authority at Jeru- 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 1 83 
 
 salem—their opportunity of hearing and 
 accepting His message. But their refusal 
 compelled Him or (should we say ?) left Him 
 free to found His church in Galilee, where 
 the tradition of learning was weak, where 
 He could build upon the unsophisticated 
 basis of honest human nature in its simplest 
 form. And in doing this He knew what 
 He was doing, and knew that the divine 
 wisdom was in it. 1 l thank Thee, Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst 
 hide these things from the wise and under¬ 
 standing, and reveal them unto babes : yea, 
 Father, for so it was well-pleasing in Thy 
 sight.’ That is the thanksgiving of the 
 Son of Man, who recognizes that the real 
 influence upon the world must start not 
 from the traditions of learning, academic or 
 ecclesiastical, but from the religious con¬ 
 secration of the common life of labouring 
 people. 
 
 St. Paul, whose prejudices went in the 
 opposite direction, was brought to ac¬ 
 knowledge the same divine principle. 1 ‘ It 
 is written : I will destroy the wisdom of the 
 wise, and the prudence of the prudent will 
 I reject. Where is the wise ? Where is 
 
 1 i Cor. i. 19 ff. 
 
184 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 the scribe ? Where is the disputer of the 
 world ? Hath not God made foolish the 
 wisdom of the world ? For seeing that in 
 the wisdom of God the world through its 
 wisdom knew not God, it was God’s good 
 pleasure through the foolishness of the 
 preaching to save them that believe. Seeing 
 that Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek 
 after wisdom : but we preach Christ cruci¬ 
 fied, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto 
 Greeks foolishness. . . . For the foolishness 
 of God is wiser than men.’ Then he points, 
 in evidence of his exultant recognition of 
 the method of God, to the actual composi¬ 
 tion of the Corinthian church. The ‘ im¬ 
 portant people * were practically left out. 
 It was precisely to this that the hostile 
 critic of Christianity, Celsus the philosopher, 
 called attention more than a hundred 
 years later, when he says: ‘ Christians 
 must admit that they can only persuade 
 people destitute of sense, position, or in¬ 
 telligence, only slaves, women, and children, 
 to accept their faith.’ He is only calling 
 attention to the method of the divine wis¬ 
 dom ; to the fact which was disclosed to 
 the world by Christianity, that the people 
 who are really important are the common 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 1 8 5 
 
 labouring people, who have neither time 
 nor means for much learning, and that the 
 true influence, the divine wisdom, must pro¬ 
 ceed from the basis of the common life re¬ 
 deemed or consecrated. 
 
 There is a close analogy between the 
 relation of Christ to learning and His 
 relation to political influence. He deliber¬ 
 ately repudiated the political method; He 
 inculcated upon the poor and the oppressed 
 —not rebellion or agitation, but obedience, 
 submission, indifference. He founded a 
 community which was reviled because it 
 conspicuously ‘ took no part in politics/ 
 But it was a community of human love and 
 mutual help. Therefore it effected an im¬ 
 mense social change, and produced the 
 profoundest effect on the politics of the 
 world, as we may say, without intending it. 
 The meek possessed the earth. 
 
 So it was with learning. The schools and 
 the academies felt themselves, not unnatur¬ 
 ally, disparaged and repudiated by this new 
 community ; and they derided them ac¬ 
 cordingly in their natural confidence. But 
 this community was, after all, made up of 
 human beings ; they had intelligences and 
 talked the language of their time. They 
 
1 86 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 could not help explaining themselves to 
 themselves and to the world outside—ex¬ 
 plaining themselves, and moreover defend¬ 
 ing against attacks the truth which was 
 their life. They must, in doing this, use 
 the intellectual weapons ready to their 
 hand, they must talk the language of their 
 time, the language of intellectual Greece. 
 So their ‘ love ’ did marvellously, accord¬ 
 ing to St. Paul’s prayer, ‘ abound in know¬ 
 ledge.’ The devotion and ethical life and 
 religious faith of the earliest Christian 
 church worked out into a self-conscious 
 theology, which took up and used the in¬ 
 tellectual implements of Greece, just as the 
 church, in another region, used the political 
 organization of Rome. The process is 
 really unique in history, because it is so 
 corporate : so little due to any one man or 
 group of men. As an individual by being 
 cross-questioned about his instinctive 
 opinions—Do you mean this ? Are you 
 prepared to accept this conclusion ? Can 
 you make terms with this proposal ?—as 
 an individual by being so cross-questioned 
 gradually grows to know his own mind 
 exactly, so it was with the church. There 
 is not, I think, in the history of mankind 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 1 87 
 
 any like example of the practical spirit of 
 a whole community making for itself an 
 intellectual expression. 
 
 It was not the influence of any one man, 
 for instance St. Paul, imposing a philosophy 
 upon the church. St. Paul’s most original 
 contribution to thought—his theory of the 
 function of the law, and of the relation of 
 law to grace, of which we hear so much in 
 his Epistles—produced surprisingly little 
 effect upon the church for fifteen centuries 
 after his death, in spite of Augustine’s effort 
 to popularize it. It was the common mind, 
 the common devotion, that expressed itself 
 in the creeds and in the theology of the 
 church. What really defeated Arianism, 
 like the other heresies, was the clear and 
 enthusiastic Christian faith that the Lord 
 Christ was really God. A fathomless gulf 
 distinguishes the Creator from the creature, 
 God from man ; and they were sure that 
 Christ by His essential nature was Creator 
 and not creature. It has been recently 
 argued, as if it were a matter of great mo¬ 
 ment, that the Homoousios 1 dogma was 
 finally accepted at Constantinople in the 
 
 1 The dogma that the Son is of one substance with 
 the Father. 
 
1 88 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 sense of the Cappadocian divines, Basil and 
 the Gregories, and not in the sense of its first 
 champion Athanasius. As a matter of fact, 
 the argument seems to be very disputable ; 
 but what is of chief importance is to observe 
 that the church as a whole was occupied in 
 a practical task—in affirming that it could 
 make no terms with anything that im¬ 
 pugned the true, proper Godhead of its 
 Lord, or of the Holy Spirit, or that in¬ 
 troduced the idea of more Gods than one. 
 It therefore maintained the Trinity of 
 co-equal Persons in the unity of the God¬ 
 head. So it found itself enthusiastically 
 confessing. But it had no independent 
 philosophical interest in the precise terms 
 used to defend its faith. And, as to the 
 differences between Athanasius and the 
 Cappadocians, they were more than covered 
 by the confession of all the wisest minds 
 in Christendom, that men could not define 
 God—that their definitions would always 
 be baffled by His glory. 
 
 The use of dogmas was to hedge round 
 and protect the practical creed. They were 
 negative. That is to say, their first object 
 was to say ‘No’ to what was repugnant 
 to the practical worship and to the common 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 189 
 
 mind of faith. And it follows that till men 
 lost the sense of the end in the pursuit of 
 means, they felt that the fewer dogmas they 
 laid down and the nearer they kept to Scrip¬ 
 ture terms the better. But, of course, just 
 as Christianity, having used secular organi¬ 
 zation became enslaved to it; so, having 
 used terms and method of philosophy, it 
 came to misuse them as religious ends in 
 themselves, and was carried far away from 
 the purposes of Christian life and faith into 
 a region of dogmatic definitions which 
 ‘ ministered questionings ’ rather than 
 Christian faith and hope and love. 
 
 I return to my point. Christianity de¬ 
 voted itself to the consecration of the 
 common life of working people. This life, 
 to express and protect itself, must perforce 
 develop a theology, a learning, a wisdom. 
 But the strength of this early intellectual sys¬ 
 tem of Christianity lay in its unacademical 
 origin ; in its remaining in very close relation 
 to the common life of common people—to 
 their simple worship, their moral wants and 
 satisfactions, their sorrows and joys and 
 labours. This is to say, in other words, 
 that the early dogmatic method of Chris¬ 
 tianity was scriptural and true to Scripture, 
 
190 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 which is practical, moral and devotional, 
 not theoretical or academic. 
 
 Scholars sometimes contemplate the re¬ 
 vision of the ancient catholic creeds and 
 fundamental dogmas. They say—are we 
 not endowed with all that our fathers were 
 endowed with ? Can we not, now that 
 philosophy has changed its terms and 
 methods, revise the ancient formulas, or do 
 over again, for our age, what they did so 
 well for theirs ? There is much to say with 
 regard to a proposition which sounds so 
 reasonable. But at least this may be said : 
 Can you suggest any other or better terms 
 to express the same things, or is it the case 
 that it is not the terms but the funda¬ 
 mental mind that you want altered ? If 
 the church is right in believing that Christ 
 is God, the Creator, who for our redemption 
 from the universal dominion of sin was 
 made man ; and did redeem a fallen world 
 by His life and passion and resurrection and 
 ascension; and did by His Spirit, sent 
 down out of His glorified manhood at Pente¬ 
 cost, regenerate and unite to God in Him¬ 
 self the children of faith all over the world, 
 through the visible society of redeemed men 
 which He founded with its visible symbols 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 191 
 
 and sacraments of brotherhood,—if this, 
 and nothing short of this, is what you want 
 to express, can you then, on this hypo¬ 
 thesis, suggest better terms to guard this 
 faith ? or can you show that such terms 
 
 w 
 
 have not served their purpose ? or are not 
 now needed ? or can you even show to be 
 unnecessary anv one of those four defini- 
 tions which the church universal has made 
 binding ? 1 
 
 I think the answer is No. For, whenever 
 I come to examine the intention of the 
 critics of the church’s terminology, I seem 
 always to find that they want not to im- 
 prove the defences, but to abandon the 
 fortress. They want to allow the divinity of 
 Christ to mean something which would be 
 true in its measure of every other man : 
 whereas the very object of the church was 
 to maintain the divinity of Christ in a sense 
 in which it could not possibly be applied 
 to any created being. Or they want to 
 weaken the other absolutely vital element 
 
 1 (i) That Christ is of one substance with the Father; 
 (2) that He was completely human; (3) that His hu¬ 
 manity had no independent centre of personality in 
 itself; (4) but that in the unity of the one divine person 
 both Godhead and manhood remain, two natures in 
 one person. 
 
192 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 in the common Christian faith and thought 
 —viz. the belief in the universal corrup¬ 
 tion or disorder of human nature and the 
 fact that every single human being needs 
 not progress only, but recovery. I, for one, 
 believe with the profoundest conviction, 
 that the hopes of humanity are bound up 
 with the maintenance of the real Godhead 
 of Christ, the reality of our fallen state, and 
 the universal need for redemption. But at 
 least, whatever our religious opinions, let 
 us admit that the church, in choosing her 
 theological terms, was choosing terms to 
 guard exactly that line of demarcation 
 which it is now proposed to obliterate. 
 What is at stake is not an academic ques¬ 
 tion of terms, but a question which belongs 
 essentially to the common Christian life of 
 experience and worship. It is in practical 
 belief and worship that men adore Christ 
 as their creator, as well as redeemer ; and 
 in practical self-knowledge or penitence that 
 they know the doctrine of innate sin and 
 the need for the new birth. 
 
 i. Christianity, then, in matters of intel¬ 
 lect as in social influence generally, works 
 upwards from below. That is its essential 
 method. It does not lay its basis in learn- 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 193 
 
 ing, or make its start from the learned. 
 Where it attempts this it forsakes the 
 method of Christ. Rather, it exults to 
 recognize in the common life of labouring 
 people and their practical needs that which 
 is really most important, that which is the 
 chief pillar and ground of religious truth. 
 In the propagation of Christianity, then, 
 the Christian does not weep, but rather 
 exults, with St. Paul and Christ Himself, 
 if the learned of any community hold aloof 
 or reject, while the poor accept. It is what 
 we seem to be witnessing in India to-day. 
 I do not know what the witness of your 
 Cambridge Mission at Delhi would be at this 
 moment. The witness of our Oxford Mis¬ 
 sion is that the twenty-five years of its 
 experience coincides with a manifest 
 hardening of the educated Indian mind 
 against Christianity. The hopes enter¬ 
 tained of the coming to Christ of the In¬ 
 dians of caste and position have for the 
 present died down. There are almost no 
 conversions of educated natives. But 
 meanwhile, especially in the South of India, 
 a great and rapidly increasing Christian 
 community is forming itself chiefly from the 
 pariah population; and these despised 
 
194 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 classes are showing themselves capable of 
 an earnest devotion, of an education and 
 a progress, which Indian opinion con¬ 
 temptuously regarded as impossible for 
 them. And, if we are faithful to the antici¬ 
 pations of the apostolic age, we shall not be 
 surprised or apologetic. Rather, we shall 
 thank the Father and Lord of heaven and 
 earth, because He has hid these things 
 from the wise and prudent, and has revealed 
 them unto babes. 
 
 2. Again, however long the history of 
 Christianity had been in any country, it still 
 remains true that the strength of any 
 church lies in the common labouring life. 
 It is in being strong there—with the manual 
 worker—that any national church retains 
 the power to show its original spirit and the 
 power of recuperation and revival. In the 
 same way, in any settled Christian com¬ 
 munity, the strength of its theology and 
 Christian learning depends on its being in 
 the closest relations with popular piety and 
 religious life and the teaching needed for 
 common people. This was the case with 
 the Christian learning and theology of the 
 first five or six Christian centuries. It was 
 so closely in touch with popular devotion 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 1 95 
 
 that it was able to maintain a real control 
 over the superstition which always accom¬ 
 panies popular religion. It ceased to be 
 so with the scholasticism of the later Middle 
 Age. A loud cry arose in the fifteenth and 
 sixtenth centuries for a simplification of 
 theology—for a return to what practically 
 mattered. The cry in part took effect in 
 the Reformation. But in England, in spite 
 of Hugh Latimer, the Reformation, as it 
 was expressed in the Prayer Book and 
 Articles, never succeeded in holding or win¬ 
 ning the popular heart. The Established 
 Church has always had this great weakness : 
 that it has worked downwards from above, 
 rather than upwards from below. It has 
 been so with our Anglican theology. In 
 our age theological and biblical learning 
 has mainly started from a critical, and there¬ 
 fore necessarily an academic, platform. It 
 has not had the popular devotion and faith 
 behind it. Popular piety has in fact com¬ 
 monly resented its conclusions. Where 
 it has not done this, it has been apt to 
 pursue its own course apart. As one who 
 has had to live in both worlds—the world 
 of theological learning and that of practical 
 religious life—may I bear my witness ? 
 
196 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 There is a great world of practical religious 
 devotion, Catholic and Evangelical, in Eng¬ 
 land to-day, which expresses itself in oral 
 teaching, in catechism, manuals, prayers, 
 and hymns. But I feel painfully that it is 
 further off than it ought to be from our 
 theological or biblical science, as it is repre-- 
 sented at our universities—that the popular 
 pulpit use of the Bible in our communion 
 is still very generally based upon critical 
 instruments which might long ago have 
 been exchanged for better and truer, if the 
 learned world had been in closer touch with 
 the common religion. For in Christianity 
 it is the common religion which has the 
 prerogative place. Christian learning is 
 meant to react upon it only because it first 
 of all has experienced its meaning and 
 needs, and proceeded out from it. May 
 I respectfully say to those who are the repre¬ 
 sentatives of religious learning, that they 
 should set it before themselves as a de¬ 
 liberate aim to associate themselves as 
 deeply as possible with the common devo¬ 
 tional life of Christianity as it exists in the 
 church to-day ; so that they may learn to do, 
 more effectively than is being done to-day, 
 what is the real business of Christian learn- 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 197 
 
 ing—viz. to help and guide the common 
 life, as they only can do who, besides their 
 critical learning, know and feel the su¬ 
 premacy of the soul’s practical need, who 
 know what will shock it, what will help it, 
 what will hinder—who know what it will 
 welcome, and before what it will fall back 
 distressed, perplexed, and scandalized. 
 
 May I give a single example ? From 
 countless pulpits there is still taught the 
 doctrine of the Fall of Man in a manner 
 which conflicts with what almost every 
 educated person believes to be the matter 
 of fairly certain science. On the other side 
 we have a scientific doctrine of human 
 development and a theory of ‘ sin ’ which 
 is verv often associated with a lamentable 
 ignorance of the most certain experiences 
 of Christian souls and of the Christian 
 church—those experiences which (almost 
 more than anything else) have ministered 
 to man’s moral progress. What we need is 
 men of learning who have first of all passed 
 through or sympathetically entered into the 
 Christian knowledge of sin, and felt its pro¬ 
 found relation to all that makes the Chris¬ 
 tian hope ; and who then , with this in their 
 minds, will study scientific facts and ethno- 
 
198 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 logical data. No one who really studies 
 the original function of Christian 4 wisdom ’ 
 can say that this is a task alien to it. 
 
 Moreover, criticism working by itself 
 teaches us, I think, its own limits. It was 
 necessary for the sake of intellectual liberty 
 that it should, to start with, work on its 
 own pure lines. By working on its own 
 pure lines it has (I must believe) recon¬ 
 structed, for instance, Old Testament 
 criticism and some departments of church 
 history. In these regions the task of the 
 mediator to-day is, so to study the religious 
 needs and feelings of common people as 
 gradually to accommodate the devout use 
 of the Bible to the standard of science. 
 But does not criticism by its own action 
 upon its own lines reach its limits ? Does 
 it not to many of us become constantly 
 more and more apparent, in dealing for 
 example with the miracles of the New 
 Testament, and in particular with those 
 singled out as corner-stones of faith in the 
 Apostles’ Creed, that the determination of 
 truth cannot rest with the critical esti¬ 
 mate of evidence alone ? We have worked 
 very hard at it. We have sifted it very 
 thoroughly. Many of us would say that, on 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE I 99 
 
 the whole, it is those who deny or doubt the 
 occurrence of the miraculous facts who do 
 violence to the evidence. But short of such 
 a position, must not any one admit that the 
 state of the evidence, as based on historical 
 documents, is such that the question 
 whether Christ’s body was really trans¬ 
 formed on the third day, and rose a spiri¬ 
 tualized body, leaving the tomb vacant, 
 does depend for each man on the question 
 of probability, and this is a question of 
 what the practical religious need, which 
 God was confessedly meeting, really re¬ 
 quired and requires ? 
 
 Again, the question of whether we have 
 reason justifying the church in teaching 
 that Christ was born of a virgin, depends, 
 even more, on considerations of what must, 
 or need not, be regarded as probable, in the 
 case of one recognized as incarnate Son of 
 God and sinless Son of Man. I feel that the 
 critic, merely as critic, ought to be at pains 
 to find out why I, a struggling human soul, 
 declare, with the profoundest conviction, 
 that the strength of the appeal of the Christ 
 to me is bound up, as with His character and 
 claim, so with His physical resurrection and 
 virgin birth. The world—great nature— 
 
200 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 seems, day by day, so morally indifferent. 
 It is the hardest thing, in work-a-day life, 
 to believe that what is really supreme is the 
 moral will and the moral issue. The 
 human soul finds consolation, instinctively, 
 in a miracle because it makes plain that 
 the sovereign power in nature is really God 
 the Father—that the moral will is really 
 supreme in and over nature. All over the 
 world, from the first, and still to-day, the 
 common consciousness of man cries out, 
 that the question of miracle at the great 
 crisis of redemption makes all the differ¬ 
 ence between a speculative hope and a 
 jo} r ous confidence. And if God’s provi¬ 
 dence had to do with Christ and His ap¬ 
 pearance, if God had a practical purpose, 
 then the need of the human soul must have 
 a real place in that estimate of probability, 
 which, in the peculiar setting of the evi¬ 
 dence, really becomes the determining 
 factor, or (as I should prefer to express it) 
 which is necessary to break down the bar¬ 
 riers which the critical mind, in its isolation 
 from common moral wants, erects against 
 the real force of the evidence. For the sake 
 of criticism and for the sake of common 
 religion, I plead for a reconsideration of 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 201 
 
 the original or true relation of Christian 
 knowledge to the common Christian life—if 
 Christian worship and faith,on theonehand, 
 is not to become superstitious, and criticism, 
 on the other, barren. I plead with the 
 student to make it his business to study 
 with a more continuous sympathy the re¬ 
 ligion by the help of which common people 
 —Christ’s own special folk—are worshipping 
 and bearing their troubles, gaining victories, 
 and obtaining relief. 
 
 3. Lastly, I would try to speak a word 
 to any young man who has come to Cam¬ 
 bridge with a strict faith, learned at home 
 and centred in the Bible, only to find after 
 a while that he cannot simply say, ‘ This 
 statement is true because it is in the Bible ’ ; 
 and that he needs a more solid basis for his 
 faith than the Bible taken as a book by 
 itself can supply, and more authoritative 
 and consistent than the opinions of in¬ 
 dividual teachers. I would say to such an 
 one : You have got to reconstruct your 
 spiritual fabric ; you have got to use all 
 the helps you can. Amongst these is the 
 intellectual material. You must then trust 
 your intellect; you must face the facts ; 
 you must try your best to use your mind. 
 
202 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 Moreover, I cannot doubt that your wisdom 
 is to go back to the centre, to the question 
 of Christ, and, letting all else for the moment 
 go, ask yourself what you, with your own 
 best mind and judgement, give as your 
 answer to the question—What thinkest 
 thou of Christ ? You are not infallible. 
 But, in the state in which you are, with the 
 conflicting voices around you, you are 
 responsible for using your own mind and 
 taking the intellectual trouble necessary 
 to making it up. So many young English¬ 
 men simply drift away from faith through 
 laziness, through shrinking from doing 
 their intellectual best. They do—what 
 nothing can intellectually justify : that 
 is, they take their doubts on authority. 
 They doubt because other people doubt. 
 
 But intellectual inquiry is not all. I 
 have known many who, thank God, have 
 come back out of mental chaos into 
 clear faith ; and in the case of almost no 
 one of these have the intellectual con¬ 
 siderations been finally determining. It 
 has been love, or sorrow, which has opened 
 some window in their being or set some 
 spring aflow. Or it has been the humilia¬ 
 tion of a moral fall which has brought a 
 
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 203 
 
 deeper self-knowledge. Or it has been the 
 experience of what they needed in order 
 to help others that has brought them to 
 know their own need. You cannot hurry 
 these experiences. But you can resolve 
 not to be a hypocrite—never to let your 
 doubts excuse you from making the best 
 practical use of what religious conviction 
 you still possess. It is a great thing to 
 believe in God. Do not delay to be a 
 devout Theist while you are determining 
 whether you can be a good Christian. But 
 also keep it from the first in mind that it 
 is the strength and not the weakness of 
 Christianity—it is the divine wisdom— 
 which from the first has made it assign to 
 knowledge and the activity of the intellect 
 the second place and not the first, which 
 has made it say that the really powerful 
 thing in humanity for getting at religious 
 truth is the common human soul, as it sets 
 itself, not to be learned, but to struggle, 
 or live, or love. And your power of ap¬ 
 preciating Christianity, with the apprecia¬ 
 tion which is necessary for intellectual 
 sympathy, will depend upon the depth and 
 reality of your spiritual experience, will 
 depend upon your sense of sin and of the 
 
204 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 
 
 need of pardon, your fellowship in the 
 desire to know and love God and obtain 
 purity of heart and divine communion. 
 Yes, and before your own spiritual ex¬ 
 perience is deep enough to be conscious of 
 its own needs, you can have clearly in mind 
 what it is that in St. Paul and St. John and 
 in millions of great and little Christians 
 since then, has made up the mind and heart 
 of Christendom ; what it is that has given 
 the motive to its faith and inspired its hope 
 and love ; and you can realize that the real 
 strength of Christianity lies in awaking 
 and satisfying the common needs of simple 
 people. ‘ I thank Thee, Father, Lord of 
 heaven and earth, that thou didst hide 
 these things from the wise and prudent, and 
 reveal them unto babes.’ 
 
SERMON II 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 1 
 
 Whosoever goeth onward, and abideth not in the teaching 
 of Christ, hath not God : he that abideth in the teaching, 
 the same hath both the Father and the Son.—2 St. John 9. 
 
 The time we live in is a time of wide¬ 
 spread religious unsettlement. It would, 
 indeed, be hard to exaggerate the un¬ 
 certainty of belief in many classes of 
 society. This is due in part to what is our 
 weakness—that the faculty of criticism 
 far outruns the constructive faculty of our 
 minds ; and that in a period of diffused 
 education the materials of criticism are 
 presented to all kinds of minds, and are 
 sufficient to overturn positive beliefs 
 without leading on to any reconstruction. 
 But it is also due to what is a legitimate 
 matter for thankfulness—namely, that 
 
 1 A sermon preached before the University of Oxford 
 on November 13, 1904, and previously published. It 
 was preached and published some years before the 
 activity of the New Theology began. 
 
 205 
 
206 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 there has been a wide extension of 
 scientific and historical knowledge ; and 
 this widening of the intellectual horizon, 
 with the accompanying change in the 
 methods and categories of men’s thought, 
 almost necessarily carries with it religious 
 unsettlement. The creed that had associ¬ 
 ated itself with the forms of thought of the 
 seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, must 
 have a difficulty in adjusting itself to the 
 history and science of the nineteenth 
 and the twentieth. We cannot evade 
 this difficulty. There are, indeed, those 
 who think the only proper way to meet 
 religious unsettlement and scepticism is 
 to hold fast by religious belief as we 
 have received it from our grandmother 
 Lois and our mother Eunice, without 
 concessions or readaptations. To allow 
 mistakes in the common teaching of the 
 church is said to be dangerous. Conces¬ 
 sion is regarded as only the first step to 
 surrender, and parleying is only the pre¬ 
 lude to treason. But, in fact, experience 
 shows us in the past that religion in a 
 settled age becomes encrusted with ideas 
 which do not properly belong to the per¬ 
 manent creed, but to the thought of the 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 20J 
 
 time ; and when a turn of the wheel of 
 thought takes place, those ideas associated 
 with the essential religion, but not of its 
 essence, have finally to be discarded, that 
 the religion may exercise its true strength 
 once more. We cannot reasonably deny 
 that permanent religion at every period is 
 associated with impermanent elements, the 
 gold with the dross, and we must have the 
 intellectual courage to seek to dissociate 
 the two, and to draw distinctions between 
 essential and unessential, and to make 
 concessions, and to seek readjustment. 
 On the other hand are the men who seem 
 to think that every clever new criticism is 
 destined to triumph over an established 
 idea ; and they need reminding that the 
 conservative tendencies of the human mind, 
 and the recuperative power of old truth 
 and old institutions, have disappointed 
 revolutionists at every period. We are 
 not, then, to refuse to reconsider, and to 
 abandon what is untenable, and to readjust 
 the old and the new, any more than we 
 are to abandon the old merely because 
 the new is clamorously asserting itself. 
 We have to consider frankly and estimate 
 carefully. The question is a real and 
 
208 the permanent creed 
 
 living one for us. Granted that in current 
 religion, in the common religious tradition, 
 there are permanent and impermanent 
 elements, there are essential and unessen¬ 
 tial factors, how are we to distinguish the 
 one from the other ? What tests have we 
 by which we can ascertain what is the real 
 and permanent Christian creed, what is 
 really revelation of God, truth permanent 
 and divine ? 
 
 Now, the test which is practically the 
 most convincing is also the least producible 
 in argument : it is what may be called the 
 mystical, or subjective, test. The religious 
 truth that we hold with most confidence 
 for permanent and divine is what, in 
 some sense, by inner spiritual experience 
 we feel we know. We know that our 
 conviction of right and wrong, of duty to 
 be done at whatever cost of pain to our¬ 
 selves, is far stronger than the intellectual 
 grounds by which we can justify it. Or, 
 again, we have from time to time felt the 
 presence of God in response to prayer, 
 or in blessing upon a difficult duty loyally 
 done, or in time of sorrow or joy. God is, 
 and we have felt Him. We know that 
 He is there, though all the proofs are 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 20g 
 
 ineffectual and inadequate. Or, again, the 
 question of Christ’s Godhead is for me 
 beyond controversy. ‘ No man can say 
 Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost’; 
 but there is such a thing as the movement 
 of the divine Spirit in the soul of man. 
 I have heard Christ’s words, and have read 
 of His deeds in the Gospels, and my whole 
 soul acknowledges in Him perfect God in 
 perfect manhood. I have felt His presence 
 in Holy Communion. I know He died 
 for me. He has forgiven me. I am His 
 and He is mine. Argument is unsatisfying. 
 But I know by a conviction inseparable 
 from my own personality that this is the 
 Christ, the saviour of the world ; and that in 
 worshipping Him as God I am only doing 
 my rational duty ; and that He is with 
 us all the days, even unto the end of the 
 world. As to the miracles, I can see in 
 them but the most natural actions, or 
 accompaniments, of His person. 
 
 This is personal conviction. It is some¬ 
 thing far deeper than the intellectual 
 presentation which it can give of itself. 
 It is deep experience, which seems to render 
 argument needless. And we may truly 
 say that, whatever the means by which 
 
 14 
 
2 10 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 religious belief is generated—whether autho¬ 
 rity, or evidence, or logical reasoning— 
 it never becomes belief worthy of the name 
 till it has become in some degree experience, 
 till the Spirit of God has wrought it into 
 the fibre of my personal consciousness, 
 and I feel and know that He is God. So 
 far as we have really believed in this deep 
 sense, the intellectual evidence for our faith 
 is rather the light it throws on the whole 
 of life and the whole of knowledge than 
 any light that it receives from other fields 
 of experience or investigation. It con¬ 
 vinces more and more by giving light, 
 rather than is proved by receiving it. 
 
 But this sort of inner conviction is bound, 
 if not for its own sake, then for that of 
 others, to give a reason for itself. In itself 
 it is not transmissible. It cannot be im¬ 
 parted. But it is a part of a great cor¬ 
 porate conviction which has belonged to the 
 whole Christian society, and it must strive 
 to give itself corporate expression. What 
 is it convinces me, apart from my own 
 incommunicable experience, or as the pre¬ 
 lude and way to such experience, or as the 
 result of it, that such and such a statement 
 is really part of the message of God to man ? 
 
TIIE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 21 I 
 
 To return to our original question—since 
 so many things have been taught as Chris¬ 
 tian truth, and afterwards proved false or 
 uncertain, how do I propose, by more or 
 less objective and producible tests, to dis¬ 
 tinguish essential Christianity from the vari¬ 
 able or uncertain or false accompaniments 
 of it ? 
 
 I 
 
 The first, and to some minds the most 
 obvious, test is that of authority in its 
 broadest sense. There has been a common, 
 a universal, faith of Christendom, which 
 has, most authoritatively, expressed itself 
 in the catholic creeds, the Apostles’ and 
 the Nicene Creeds. There are, indeed, 
 features in the common faith, such as the 
 belief in the atonement, in sacramental 
 grace, in the inspiration of Scripture, which 
 are only slightly or by implication touched 
 on in these formulas of faith ; but at least 
 in what they contain they represent what 
 has been universal Christianity. Hardly 
 anything has been nobly or effectively done, 
 or bravely suffered, for the name of Christ, 
 that has not been done or suffered in the 
 
212 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 profession of these creeds, or the profession 
 of the faith which preceded them. The 
 great movement of humanity which gives 
 glory to Christ as its redeemer, as it 
 traverses the ages and spreads over the 
 world, has confessed itself in these terms 
 almost without exception. Since the Re¬ 
 formation, differences have sundered the 
 visible Christian society into fragments ; 
 emphasis has been laid on one point in this 
 body and on another in that ; but Calvinist 
 and Lutheran, Anglican, Romanist, Greek, 
 and Russian have confessed the same faith 
 in the Holy Trinity, one God ; in Christ, 
 perfect God and perfect man ; in His birth 
 of a virgin and life and death for man, and 
 His resurrection and ascension; in the 
 descent of the Spirit and the formation of 
 the church ; the fellowship of the saints ; 
 the forgiveness of sins ; in judgement to 
 come, and everlasting life. We pass back 
 behind the Reformation to the Middle 
 Ages, and behind the Middle Ages to the 
 centuries of the Councils, and back to the 
 earlier Fathers ; we note the differences of 
 Alexandria and Antioch and Rome and 
 Africa ; but they do not touch this com¬ 
 mon Creed. Even separated heretical 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 213 
 
 bodies, like the Nestorians, seem, so far as 
 the bulk of them is concerned, to have been 
 separated, not from the faith, but, by an 
 accident of mismanaged controversy, from a 
 misunderstood term of theology. And the 
 great Creed finds its justification in the 
 theology of the Epistles and its verification 
 in the words and deeds of Christ in the 
 Gospels. Criticism loves to dwell on differ¬ 
 ences ; but the real unity is unmistakable. 
 And it is a mistake, surely, if we never let 
 this broad and massive unity of the Chris¬ 
 tian faith make its proper impression upon 
 us. The modern student, in his desire to 
 dive below the surface, or in his passion for 
 original work, may bury himself prema¬ 
 turely in some forgotten corner of church 
 history, some study of apocryphal Acts or 
 anonymous and unpublished documents. 
 Let him first tread the broad highway. 
 Let him read the main texts first of all, 
 as they can be read in mass and with 
 rapidity, that the great general impression 
 may be made upon him. There is, after all, 
 a faith which has been held semper, ubique, 
 ab omnibus , in such sense that what frag¬ 
 ments of the Christian body have not held 
 it hardly count in the total effect. What 
 
214 THE PERMANENT creed 
 
 records we have of human life redeemed and 
 consecrated show it redeemed and con¬ 
 secrated in the profession of this faith ; and 
 what lies outside this profession can be 
 left out of reckoning, without the general 
 effect being altered, or the result for human 
 life appreciably affected. And this im¬ 
 pression of unity through all differences, 
 and permeating all divisions, is impressive 
 in a very high degree. It generates in the 
 mind a sense of indissoluble coherence—a 
 feeling that this creed and Christianity are 
 one and the same thing; or that they 
 stand to one another as root and fruit. 
 There may be great differences between 
 the Christian beliefs of the twentieth, 
 and the tenth, and the fourth, and the 
 second century, but the differences will 
 not touch the great central body of faith. 
 
 II 
 
 But this brings us to the second test. 
 This Creed professes to be based simply 
 upon a revelation given, or given in its 
 final form, through an historical person, 
 Jesus Christ. It is a Creed based on facts, 
 which are confessedly unique and, in part, 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 215 
 
 miraculous. As thus claiming an historical 
 basis, it enters the region of historical 
 criticism. It has always from the first 
 taken its stand on testimony. And testi¬ 
 mony must stand criticism. Moreover, for 
 us to-day there is no testimony worth con¬ 
 sidering which is not in the New Testa¬ 
 ment. I say that it is impossible in any 
 way to withdraw the historical basis of 
 Christianity from the freest and frankest 
 criticism. If there exist persons who say, 
 Let the Old Testament be frankly criti¬ 
 cized, for it is not so important, but not the 
 New Testament, for it is vital; the claim 
 must be utterly repudiated. In proportion 
 to the important issues which hang upon 
 the New Testament records, must be the 
 frankness of the criticism to which they 
 are subjected. And the Creed has no other 
 line of defence behind the New Testa¬ 
 ment documents. It is sometimes sug¬ 
 gested that we can hold that destructive 
 criticism has done its work successfully 
 upon the Gospels, but can still go on pro¬ 
 claiming our faith in Christ born of a 
 virgin and risen from the dead, in Christ 
 as God in manhood, on the authority of the 
 church. I am sure this is not the case. 
 
2l6 the permanent creed 
 
 The authority of the church has always 
 professed to rest on the authority of the 
 apostles. It is rooted and based on their 
 witness—their eye-witness. And the con¬ 
 tent of the apostolic witness ‘ as they de¬ 
 livered it unto us which from the beginning 
 were eye-witnesses and ministers of the 
 Word/ is to be found in its most authentic 
 form in the Gospels, and a few other his¬ 
 torical passages of the New Testament. 
 It is very difficult to conceive any critical 
 scholar supposing that, if the New Testa¬ 
 ment narratives are not sufficient to war¬ 
 rant us in believing that Jesus Christ was 
 really born of a virgin, and really fed the 
 five thousand with the five loaves, and was 
 really raised from the dead the third day, 
 there is any other witness which can support 
 the statements, considered as records of 
 actual events. Thus, as between M. Loisy 
 and Professor Harnack, I cannot doubt 
 that, if the critical results in which they 
 substantially agree are accepted as scien¬ 
 tific, we must go with Harnack and not 
 with Loisy in our attitude towards the 
 Creed. 
 
 Once again, the theology of the creed 
 of Nicaea is only the making more explicit 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 2 IJ 
 
 what is already present in the theology of 
 St. Paul and St. John. But I cannot be¬ 
 lieve that the theology of St. Paul and 
 St. John could rank as more than a phase in 
 the history of thought, if it were found that 
 Christ Himself, as a matter of fact, made 
 no such divine claim as, in different de¬ 
 grees, but with equal certainty, the Gospels 
 record Him to have made. Thus we can¬ 
 not refuse to enter the region of free 
 criticism with our Gospels ; nor can we 
 pretend that the validity of our creeds is 
 independent of the issue of such criticism. 
 If the creeds stand, with their historical 
 and doctrinal statements, it must be be¬ 
 cause the Gospels stand. I do not want 
 a complete absence of inaccuracy or dis¬ 
 crepancy in the Gospel narratives. I want 
 only, if I am to believe the creeds, that the 
 Gospels should stand as, in the fullest 
 sense, trustworthy history. 
 
 Well, now, it is my conviction that no 
 fair historical criticism can dissolve the force 
 of the historical evidence we have to such 
 propositions as the following : that Jesus 
 Christ was, and knew Himself to be, sinless 
 in the midst of a sinful world of which He 
 came to be the saviour ; that, moreover, 
 
218 the permanent creed 
 
 He encouraged in His disciples towards 
 Himself, and claimed from them, the sort of 
 allegiance and faith which only God can 
 rightly claim, and which can only be ren¬ 
 dered without impiety to God ; that He 
 worked miracles which no reasoning can 
 allow us to ascribe to anything else than the 
 creative power of God working with Him 
 to authorize His teaching ; that after His 
 death and burial His tomb was found 
 empty on the third (or, as we should say, 
 the second) day, and His disciples were 
 raised from despondency and despair to a 
 sure faith and confident hope by repeated 
 manifestations of Himself risen, in a body 
 transformed and spiritualized, but the same. 
 I am quite sure that it is those who dis¬ 
 believe such propositions, and not those 
 who believe them, who do violence to the 
 evidence. Further, though the manner of 
 our Lord’s birth falls outside the period of 
 His life of which the apostles were personal 
 witnesses, and was not, therefore, among 
 the grounds on which belief in Christ was 
 asked ; yet I see the best reasons for think¬ 
 ing that in the early circle of believers the 
 fact of our Lord’s birth of a virgin was 
 believed on the evidence of the only first- 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 2IQ 
 
 hand witnesses, J oseph and Mary, and that 
 it is Joseph and Mary whose testimony is 
 embodied in the first and third Gospels. 
 I believe, therefore, that the faith of the 
 Creed is supported by free inquiry into his¬ 
 torical facts. And if I am asked how it 
 is that ‘ the critics ’ reach a conclusion so 
 different, I reply : At least in England, the 
 strength of criticism—its strength in bulk 
 and intellectual value—is on the conserva¬ 
 tive side. Also, I reply, that in the great 
 majority of cases I seem to see most clearly 
 that the destructive critics reach the results 
 they reach, not from considerations pro¬ 
 perly historical, but because their mind is 
 occupied with a certain view of the world 
 which indisposes them to the conclusions 
 of the Creed ; just as, on the other hand, 
 I am conscious that my own mind is filled 
 with, a certain belief in God, a certain view 
 of sin, a certain expectation of divine re¬ 
 demption, which makes the evidence of 
 the Gospels acceptable, which makes me 
 susceptible of belief. I seem to see clearly 
 enough that historical criticism, as applied 
 to the Gospels, can take us a certain way 
 without appealing to any presuppositions 
 except what are shared by almost all 
 
2 20 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 sensible men : as that the matter of the 
 Synoptic Gospels dates almost entirely back 
 behind the destruction of Jerusalem; or 
 that when St. Paul wrote his First Epistle 
 to the Corinthians (a.d. 55), and, after re¬ 
 minding them in detail of his original 
 teaching as to the resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ, speaks of his own relation to the 
 older apostles, and says, ‘ Wherefore, 
 whether it were I or they, so we preach 
 and so ye believed/ he could not have been 
 conscious of any difference between his 
 witness and theirs. I think, then, that we 
 might very well reach almost universal 
 agreement that the witness of the New 
 Testament can be shown to have taken 
 shape so early that it may be strictly his¬ 
 torical—that it falls within the conditions 
 which admit of good history. On the other 
 hand, there remain discrepancies, obscuri¬ 
 ties, difficulties ; there remain the large 
 gaps in the evidence, and the historical 
 possibility that conjectures or mistakes 
 might very rapidly have become imaginary 
 memories. Thus it seems as if the question 
 whether these recorded events actually 
 happened, miraculous and supernatural as 
 they are, will almost always be answered 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 221 
 
 in accordance with what a man’s mind is 
 as to the probabilities of divine action— 
 in accordance with what he thinks is really 
 credible or probable. We must all train 
 ourselves in the very rare quality of sub¬ 
 mission to good evidence, when it runs con¬ 
 trary to our prejudices at any point. This 
 quality is as rare among biblical critics as 
 among men of the world ; and as rare 
 among sceptics as among believers. To 
 train ourselves in it is a high intellectual 
 duty. But at the end we are left acknow¬ 
 ledging that a man’s judgement, on the 
 weight to be assigned to historical testi¬ 
 mony, will be found in part depending on 
 his general view of what is probable in this 
 world, as he knows it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 And this brings me to my third test—the 
 rational or logical—by which I would try 
 to distinguish the essential or permanent 
 from the unessential or impermanent ele¬ 
 ments in Christianity. It is the test of 
 rational coherence. 
 
 There is a certain set of ideas, for ex¬ 
 ample, which naturally arise on the con¬ 
 sideration of the Christian religion in a 
 
222 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 mind which views the world mainly under 
 the modern category of development, 
 which, however, has its ancient analogies. 
 Humanity is thought of as in gradual 
 progress of upward development from the 
 brute. Sin broadly appears as the remains 
 of the tiger and the ape-nature in us, 
 which is gradually being outgrown ; or, 
 where it is admitted to be more than that, 
 as the mistake or fault of the individual 
 choosing the lower instead of the higher, 
 which is the fault of his own will only, 
 and does not involve the race as a whole. 
 In this process of upward movement, viewed 
 spiritually, Christ is the highest point. 
 The language of incarnation may be ac¬ 
 cepted. He may be declared Son of God, 
 or the phrase f God in man ’ may be used ; 
 but the idea is that humanity is God’s son, 
 that God is, so to speak, incarnate or 
 becoming incarnate in humanity, and that 
 Christ is in the highest degree what every 
 man is in a measure because he has the 
 Word and Spirit of God in him. Now, 
 Christ’s sinlessness, in an absolute sense, is 
 an encumbrance to this view. The virgin 
 birth is an offence. Miracles, as a whole, 
 including the physical resurrection, are an 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 223 
 
 encumbrance. What is wanted is a more 
 or less comprehensive view of a develop¬ 
 ment in which the divine sonship of man 
 is the climax, and Jesus Christ is the highest 
 specimen. This view is represented con¬ 
 sistently in many German and English 
 Unitarian Theists. In ancient language, 
 we should describe it as a Pelagian view 
 of man associated with a Nestorian view of 
 Christ, and leading to a Sabellian doctrine 
 of God. The cohesion of these ideas was 
 recognized in early times, and it is recog¬ 
 nizable enough in our day in modern forms. 
 
 Now, this sequence of ideas may be very 
 strongly criticized in itself. The idea of 
 sin as something which in the process of 
 civilization we show a tendency to outgrow, 
 is quite contrary to experience. The evi¬ 
 dence of the Gospels, too deeply engraved 
 into the record to admit of dislodgement, 
 postulates in Christ both a sinlessness and 
 a personal claim which force us to recognize 
 in Him something much more than this 
 highest development of our existing man¬ 
 hood. The historical witness to the 
 miracles, and pre-eminently to the physical 
 resurrection, is overwhelming. But I am 
 concerned now not to combat this set of 
 
224 the permanent creed 
 
 ideas, but to confront them with another 
 which, starting from the same fundamental 
 conception of God and man , 1 is distinguished 
 first of all by the severer view of sin. This 
 is the Bible view. Sin is so deep a taint, 
 so profound an evil, and so ingrained into 
 the whole stock of our humanity, that we 
 cry out—and the best specimens of our 
 common manhood most strenuously—for 
 something more than progress—for re¬ 
 demption—for a new birth : that is, a new 
 creative act which shall give our nature a 
 fresh start. This profound sense of sin 
 and need gives a welcome to the Catholic 
 and New Testament doctrine of a divine 
 act of redemption, led up to, indeed, in 
 the course of history, and prepared for by 
 the anticipations of prophecy, but in itself 
 single and unique ; an absolute act of God, 
 by which the Son of God, the eternal Son 
 of the Father, for us men and for our 
 salvation, came down from heaven, and 
 was incarnate and was made man. This 
 is a phrase which could not possibly be 
 
 1 This was written before the conception of the divine 
 immanence (in the exclusive sense) and the substantial 
 identity of Godhead and manhood, had become pro¬ 
 minent. 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 225 
 
 applied to any other event than one—the 
 one incarnation, or to any other person 
 than one—Jesus Christ, believed to be 
 personally God in manhood. This new 
 creative act of God brings into the world 
 a new manhood—perfectly human, but 
 free from all the taint and weakness of 
 sin ; and the startling distinction between 
 Jesus Christ’s conscious sinlessness and 
 the consciousness of other prophets and 
 saints suggests so manifest a moral miracle, 
 as makes the idea of the physical miracle 
 which accompanied His birth intellectually 
 welcome and congruous ; while it leads on 
 naturally to a human life such as the Gospels 
 describe. 
 
 But the divine Incarnation is the con¬ 
 summation of our human nature in union 
 with God, as well as its redemption. In 
 Christ our manhood is taken into God. He 
 is God in manhood. This both puts Christ 
 in a quite unique relation to all other men, 
 so that He can become in a complete sense 
 the head and fount of a new manhood by 
 spiritual regeneration; and also gives 
 a reason of the most weighty kind for 
 His miracles and the resurrection. His 
 miracles are not portents ; they are the 
 
 15 
 
226 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 physical counterparts of His moral teaching 
 and claim. They are the evidences such 
 as we feel in our deepest moments we 
 rationally need, that there is only one 
 lordship in the universe, and that the 
 material world, which commonly seems so 
 indifferent to moral distinctions, ultimately 
 and at the bottom is only the instrument 
 of the moral will of God. This is made 
 manifest by the miracles and the resur¬ 
 rection of Christ as it could be in no other 
 way. Christ presents to us in summary 
 an anticipation of the final victory of spirit 
 in matter ; and assures us of the glorious 
 future, which, through all failure and 
 disaster, awaits the manhood which holds 
 fast by God. Meanwhile the whole relation 
 of the Son to the Father revealed in the 
 incarnation, and of the Spirit to both, 
 establishes the idea of the Trinity which 
 offers its profound solution of the ultimate 
 difficulties of divine personality by dis¬ 
 closing to us a social nature in the depth 
 of the one divine being. 
 
 All this is obvious. It means only that 
 the whole set of ideas about sin and re¬ 
 demption and the Incarnation and the 
 Trinity, which belong to the catholic creeds, 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 22/ 
 
 and are the commonplaces of historical 
 Christianity, cohere and are practically 
 indissoluble. It suggests, what I am sure 
 is true, that to abandon our maintenance 
 of miracles as an integral part of our creed ; 
 or in particular of one miracle, the 
 Lord’s birth of a virgin—as if the rest of 
 the fabric would be unimpaired—is simply 
 due to lack of perception. In fact, the 
 writers who ask for the particular surrender 
 make it manifest enough, if their thought 
 is scrutinized, that what they are asking 
 for is something much more than a single 
 surrender ; it is the substitution of one 
 whole set of ideas for another. And if we 
 examine wherein lies the secret of the 
 difference between the Catholic and the 
 Unitarian set of ideas, we shall find it, I 
 am persuaded, not so much in any view 
 of historical evidence, as in the different 
 views of what sin is and what it needs. 
 The deeper, severer, view of sin is the clue 
 to the whole Catholic sequence of ideals. 
 And what a man thinks about sin is very 
 largely a matter of his own personal moral 
 consciousness. 
 
 I repeat : in current controversies as to 
 what Christian belief does or does not 
 
228 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 necessarily involve, the language used by 
 different sides is, on the surface, largely 
 identical; but what we are really concerned 
 with is a conflict between two funda¬ 
 mentally different cycles of ideas. 
 
 I have tried to face the question : In 
 an age of change and criticism and new 
 knowledge, what are we to regard as 
 permanent Christianity ? what are we to 
 regard as the permanent faith for which 
 we are to contend to death—any ‘ advance ’ 
 out of which, to use St. John’s phrase, is 
 only advance along a road which separates 
 from God and Christ ? I reply, first of 
 all, the faith summarized and expressed 
 in the catholic creeds—that faith in God 
 and man, and man’s destiny; in the 
 incarnation and the person of Christ and 
 the accompanying miracles, and the eternal 
 triune being of God disclosed in Christ’s 
 revelation. Beyond that, I am not now 
 inquiring whether there be anything more 
 of equal value. But that first of all, and 
 every part of it. And my reason is, because 
 in a remarkable manner it obeys all those 
 three tests which I may restate in a different 
 order. First, that this whole faith is 
 
THE PERMANENT CREED 229 
 
 historically identified in all its parts with 
 historical Christianity. It comes to us 
 with the whole weight of Christian 
 authority. Secondly, this is not bare 
 authority. We discover in the articles 
 thus proposed by authority a most con¬ 
 vincing sequence of ideas. It is not a 
 number of isolated dogmas, but one view, 
 coherent and indissoluble. Thirdly, when 
 we approach the historical evidence we find 
 it (at the points material to our present 
 inquiry) cogent in a high degree. It sup¬ 
 ports and justifies our belief that the facts 
 on which our faith rests really occurred. 
 And if the mind is already furnished with 
 the ideas which render it susceptible of 
 the evidence, or, to put it in other words, 
 if it is free from the hostile prejudices 
 which belong to another set of ideas, it 
 will not fail to find the evidence con¬ 
 vincing. 
 
 I have ventured to suggest the considera¬ 
 tion and application of this threefold test, 
 because I feel that our scholars are mostly 
 applying the test of criticism, as if really 
 historical criticism were, what it is not, an 
 abstract instrument which could be de¬ 
 tached from the general furniture of the 
 
230 THE PERMANENT CREED 
 
 mind. It is possible that the intellect of 
 the schools in our own age may become 
 so merely critical as to make it highly diffi¬ 
 cult for the professed student to be a 
 believer. The remedy for this lies, surety, 
 in the deliberate restoration of other modes 
 of approach to Christian truth. If the 
 educated intellect becomes purely critical, 
 we may feel sure that whatever restoration 
 or revival of religion is to be expected in 
 the future, will have to arise out of another 
 kind of soil—out of something more broadly 
 human, more spiritually profound ; in a 
 word, more sympathetic with Christ’s 
 own mind. 
 
SERMON III 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 1 
 
 Repent ye : for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.— 
 St. Matt. iii. 2. 
 
 It is my persuasion, which deepens with 
 every year of experience, that there will 
 be no revival of vital religion among us, on 
 any large scale, or with any adequate 
 results, except through a deepening of the 
 sense of sin : a return to the properly 
 Christian severity of view about the mean¬ 
 ing of sin and its consequences ; and that 
 this is needed equally in all classes of 
 society and among all kinds of men. There 
 is, in the Old Testament, a narrative of the 
 way in which the foolish king, Jehoiakim, 
 and his courtiers, received the solemn 
 warnings of Jeremiah, as Jehudi read them 
 from the roll of the book in which Jeremiah 
 had caused Baruch to write them . 2 ‘ And 
 
 1 A sermon preached before the University of Oxford 
 on December 13, 1903, and previously published. 
 
 2 Jer. xxxvi. 21 ff. 
 
 231 
 
232 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 Jehudi read it in the ears of the king, and 
 in the ears of all the princes which stood 
 beside the king. Now the king sat in the 
 winter-house . . . and there was a fire in 
 the brazier burning before him. And it 
 came to pass, when Jehudi had read three 
 or four leaves, that the king cut it with the 
 pen-knife and cast it into the fire that was 
 in the brazier, until all the roll was con¬ 
 sumed in the fire that was in the brazier. 
 And they were not afraid, nor rent their 
 garments, neither the king nor any of his 
 servants that heard all these words.' ‘ They 
 were not afraid ' of the warnings of the 
 word of God on sin. That seems to 
 describe the attitude of all classes (I do 
 not say, by any means, of all individuals) 
 of our society to-day. The horror of sin 
 and the terror of its consequences have 
 come to be regarded as somewhat old- 
 fashioned. But this false fearlessness of 
 the king Jehoiakim was the ruin of himself 
 and his country. If there is any truth in 
 the Bible, it is this : that sin is not a stage 
 in upward evolution, a mere survival of 
 animal tendencies which is gradually being 
 outgrown ; nor a mere result of untoward 
 circumstances, or lack of education or 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 233 
 
 experience ; but a lawlessness of the human 
 will, a perpetually renewed rebellion against 
 God or neglect of God, which disorders 
 human nature by depriving it of the fellow¬ 
 ship of God, and ruins both the individual 
 and the social life, except so far as repent¬ 
 ance leads towards amendment, and opens 
 the way for that divine redemption which 
 God’s love is ever offering. 
 
 It is quite a mistake to suppose that this 
 teaching about sin is dependent upon our 
 regarding the story of the Fall, in Genesis 
 iii., as historical. If the materials of that 
 story are derived from popular legends, 
 common to the Israelites and the Baby¬ 
 lonians, they have been used by a truly 
 inspired mind, and been turned into an 
 everlastingly true parable of what tempta¬ 
 tion and sin really are. ‘Moreover, that 
 story has strangely little appreciable effect 
 on the rest of the Old Testament. The 
 Old Testament view of sin is simply the 
 result of the moral teaching about the 
 character of God and the nature of man 
 which constitutes the central feature of 
 the Old Testament revelation. In the Old 
 Testament, indeed, the view of sin and its 
 consequences is mainly confined to this 
 
234 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 life. Sin is ruin, here and now, to the 
 individual and the State. It is social ruin. 
 That is permanently true. Professor Hux¬ 
 ley speaks of ‘ that fixed order of nature 
 which sends social disorganization upon the 
 track of immorality, as surely as it sends 
 physical disease after physical trespasses,’ 
 and he speaks of its being ‘ the high mission 9 
 of science ‘ to be the priestess of a firm and 
 lively faith ’ in that fixed moral order . 1 
 Substitute for the words ‘ fixed order ’ 
 some such phrase as ‘ the will of God in 
 the government of the world,’ and } T ou 
 have the teaching of the prophets about 
 the ‘ day of the Lord ’—the judgement of 
 God upon nations. That is permanently 
 true teaching. It admits of no advance. 
 It is given practically in its final form in 
 the Old Testament prophets. It simply 
 passes over from the Old Testament into 
 the New, and receives its reaffirmation 
 through the lips of Christ. And it is 
 verified, if we look below the surface, in 
 the history of the falls of nations and 
 governing classes. 
 
 But as to the consequences of sin to the 
 
 1 T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (Macmillan, 
 1903), p. 146. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 235 
 
 individual, the Old Testament teaching was 
 much more imperfect. ‘ The soul that 
 sinneth it shall die/ meant at first that 
 God’s judgements on individuals accom¬ 
 plish themselves in this world. Sin is 
 punished by misfortune and death. Moral 
 experience broke down this simple faith 
 and forced the conscience of man forward 
 to see, in a wider area, and a course ex¬ 
 tending out beyond the limits of this life, 
 the fulfilment of the dealings of God with 
 the human soul. But the Christ, when He 
 came, with His full disclosure of divine 
 love and human destiny, did not mitigate, 
 nay, rather He intensified, the severity of 
 Old Testament teaching about the con¬ 
 sequences of sin to the individual soul. 
 He would have men still tremble—till 
 perfect love should cast out fear—under 
 the terror of the w r rath of God, ‘Yea, I 
 say unto } T ou, fear him.’ So long as the 
 fear of temporal disaster in this world is 
 an inevitable element in human nature, 
 an inevitable stimulus to avoid the disaster 
 that threatens, I cannot conceive why men 
 should endeavour to eliminate from our 
 ordinary human motives the fear of eternal 
 ruin. We may, indeed, regard hell as 
 
236 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 nothing else but the inevitable outcome, in 
 another world than this, of the process by 
 which, in this world, we have formed for 
 ourselves a character incompatible with 
 God. We may rid the doctrine of any 
 inequitable associations. We may recog¬ 
 nize to the full the compassion of God, the 
 love which binds Him to do the utmost 
 possible for every human soul which He 
 has created, and to be equitable with a 
 father’s equity, in taking into account 
 ignorance, or hard circumstances, or lack 
 of opportunity. But there is such a thing 
 as self-willed independence of God; as 
 lust which will not be controlled; as 
 avarice or ambition which will not brook 
 restraints ; as malice which will not forgive. 
 There is the possibility that men may—nay, 
 there is the experience that men do— 
 harden themselves in persistent habit, 
 passing into indelible character, into a moral 
 state incompatible with the fellowship of 
 God. Death does not change us. It only 
 strips us bare, and transplants into a world 
 where only God is, and His judgements : 
 and the man there reaps the consequences 
 of what, in defiance or neglect of God, he 
 has become. If men are to be dealt with 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 237 
 
 in accordance with moral laws, God Himself 
 cannot alter those consequences. And, 
 unless we are prepared to play fast and 
 loose with language, we must admit that 
 those consequences, according to the teach¬ 
 ing of the New Testament, may have 
 become final and irreversible—an eternal 
 sin—an eternal perishing, a state of being 
 finally outcast and of knowing it, which is 
 the weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is 
 because the New Testament takes this 
 tremendous view of sin, and treats it as a 
 universal fact in human nature, that its 
 whole teaching about man treats him as 
 being the subject of redemption—as needing 
 in each individual case to be bought back 
 out of a slavery in which he lies. 
 
 The divine method of this redemption 
 is, so to speak, from within the human race 
 itself. It is a new creative act of God 
 restoring in human nature a moral creation 
 which had been ruined. The Saviour is 
 man, but new man ; born, but virgin-born. 
 He moves out into experience and history 
 as ‘ in all points * tried as we other men, 
 his brethren, are, but with one significant 
 exception—He knew no sin. He was with¬ 
 out sin in Himself. He set the pattern of 
 
23S THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 our manhood, not as we have made it, but 
 as God would have it be, and will (if we will 
 let Him) remake it. The sin which was 
 in the world marked the Saviour’s steps 
 with blood and nailed Him to the cross. 
 But His willing obedience, unto death—the 
 willingness of a manhood wholly in con¬ 
 formity with God—turns the death which 
 a God-refusing world recklessly inflicted, 
 into a perfect offering of a perfect manhood 
 consecrated by self-sacrifice—an offering 
 which brings back our wilful nature into 
 the fellowship with God which it had lost. 
 It was as our representative that He lived 
 our life, conscious of Himself as the Son of 
 Man. It was as our representative that 
 He offered for us and in our stead the 
 sacrifice that we had been withholding. 
 And living, risen and glorified through 
 death and beyond it, it is still as our repre¬ 
 sentative, the second Adam, the head of 
 a redeemed race, that He builds up a new 
 humanity, a temple on a secure basis, a 
 city that hath foundations, in which the 
 real divine purpose for man is to be realized, 
 even into an everlasting fulfilment. But 
 still for every individual, the sin which 
 taints every man and woman, aye, and 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 239 
 
 every child, makes it a moral necessity 
 that there should be a new birth, a fresh 
 incorporation upon a fresh stock, the stock 
 of the new man, Jesus the Christ : and this 
 incorporation upon the new stock, if it is 
 to be efficacious, must be a real personal 
 act of faith and repentance, a real ‘ turning ’ 
 of the will. f Except ye be converted (or 
 ‘ turn'), ye cannot enter into the kingdom 
 of God. And because sin is ingrained into 
 our nature, therefore the recovery of the 
 dominion of the spirit needs all through 
 life a continual ‘ mortification/ a putting 
 to death of the old man that the new may 
 grow—a dying to live. 
 
 But do you say to the preacher, this 
 is all very commonplace and very old- 
 fashioned ? We have heard it very often. 
 But you do not seem to have been reading 
 modern literature. We have got a some¬ 
 what different version of these things. The 
 law of humanity is progress. The sphere 
 of progress is this world. We look before 
 and after, and find in the scientific doctrine 
 of development the guarantee of this 
 progress. This is the gospel of modern 
 science. What you call sin is a survival 
 of the animal propensities of a pre-human 
 
240 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 ancestry—it is the tiger or the ape in us— 
 which we are slowly out-growing in the 
 upward movement of the human race. 
 Nay, the preacher may make rejoinder: 
 This comfortable doctrine is not science, 
 nor based on science, properly so-called. 
 Professor Huxley, who was a scientific man, 
 when he came to Oxford to speak his 
 Romanes lecture many years ago, told us, 
 and it is as true to-day, that science has 
 got no gospel of progress at all. ‘ The 
 survival of the fittest ’ means not the 
 survival of the best, but the survival of 
 those best suited to their surroundings. 
 The ‘ survival of the fittest ’ may mean, 
 and may come to mean, for all that science 
 can say to the contrary, ‘ the survival of 
 the worst.' ‘ The theory of evolution,’ 1 
 he went on, ‘ encourages no millennial 
 anticipations. If, for millions of years, 
 our globe has taken the upward road, yet, 
 some time, the summit will be reached and 
 the downward road will be commenced.’ 
 And science knows not when : neither in 
 the individual case, nor that of the nation, 
 nor that of the race. Science simply ob¬ 
 serves changes which are sometimes from 
 
 1 lee. cit.y pp. 8o, 85. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 241 
 
 worse to better and sometimes from better 
 to worse, and she traces, when she can, 
 the conditions and the law of these changes : 
 but she indulges in no prophecies and 
 would have no reason at all, so far as she 
 is science, to be disappointed when an 
 epoch of change passes into an epoch of 
 deterioration. 
 
 Nay : science most certainty gives us 
 no message of necessary human progress. 
 How could she, in view of the facts of past 
 history ? Take a tour in imagination round 
 the Mediterranean Sea, beginning with 
 Morocco and ending with Spain. Examine 
 country after country, race after race, city 
 after city. One after another, almost with¬ 
 out exception, through the whole tour, 
 they yield the answer : Our contribution 
 to the sum of human knowledge, human 
 virtue, human progress, was made centuries 
 ago, millenniums ago. Our glories live in 
 the past. We are interesting mainly be¬ 
 cause of very remote memories or very 
 ancient history. And there is little hope 
 of recovery here, except, perhaps, through 
 the intrusion of some strange race to dis¬ 
 possess a fallen one. Nay, extend your 
 view. Take a map and go over the surface 
 
 16 
 
242 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 of the globe, and ascertain accurately of how 
 many races you can say that there is 
 evidence of progress, if you compare what 
 they are now, with what they were a thou¬ 
 sand years ago. You will be astonished 
 at the vast area of stagnation, the vast 
 area of retrogression and decay, as com¬ 
 pared to the line of progress. Nay, take 
 but the progressive races, and you will 
 find even more ambiguous the relation of 
 civilization to moral progress. Nations do 
 not always become better as they grow 
 more civilized. Sometimes you trace moral 
 progress, as history records it, and find it 
 passing into an age of general moral de¬ 
 terioration. We seem to be morally better 
 than we were a hundred years ago in 
 England. But what reasonable man but 
 owns that the moral condition of our 
 country is very precarious ? Who then 
 can reasonably say—with his eyes on the 
 indisputable and widely-spread facts of 
 moral deterioration in races—that sin is a 
 survival which men are seen to be out¬ 
 growing ? Science indeed ! Such an idea 
 is mere wilfulness. 
 
 And if you begin to examine individuals, 
 how utterly contrary to experience is any 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 243 
 
 idea of regular advance 1 How many men 
 disappoint hopes ! how many deteriorate 
 —grow worse, not better ! How many 
 men and women are wrecks—the mere 
 ruins of what they might have been ! 
 
 Have we no doctrine of human progress, 
 then ? Indeed we have : it is grounded 
 on the ineradicable consciousness of hope 
 which God, who made man, has inspired; 
 it has been nourished by His prophets ; it is 
 confirmed and realized by our Lord, Son 
 of God and Son of Man. Yes, men, accord¬ 
 ing to Christian teaching, are meant for 
 progress. There is an assured goal. There 
 is to be a perfected humanity, a city of 
 God in which no good thing shall be lost, 
 into which all the gains of all mankind 
 shall be at last stored up and accumulated. 
 ‘ They shall bring the glory and honour of 
 all nations into the city of God.’ But this 
 perfection cannot be won by taking our¬ 
 selves as we are and languidly hoping for 
 the best, by treating sin as if we should 
 naturally outgrow it ; but by awakening- 
 from sin; by knowing it to be disease 
 which needs sharp remedies, for it is 
 mortal; by conversion ; by confession ; 
 by bearing our penance ; by a new birth 
 
244 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 into a new manhood ; by a dying to the 
 old manhood to live in the new. 
 
 There is, of course, a theory or way of 
 conceiving of the world which is called 
 scientific, which is in the most direct conflict 
 with the Christian teaching about sin—I 
 mean, the theory which refuses to see 
 anything in the world but the inevitable 
 sequence of physical phenomena, according 
 to physical law, which would have good 
 characters and bad characters to be merely 
 physical products, like good apples and 
 bad apples, and which refuses, accordingly, 
 to recognize the possibility of any actions 
 which ought not to have been done, and, 
 in fact, need not have been done. But 
 such a fatalism really ignores a whole class 
 of facts involved in our moral consciousness. 
 Confessedly it will not work ; that is, it 
 has to be repudiated in order to deal with 
 real life. You cannot dare to educate a 
 child in the belief that nothing he may do 
 could have been otherwise. All possibility 
 of moral progress is bound up with the 
 belief in moral freedom. You can give no 
 account on such a theory of the ineradicable 
 consciousness of guilt and shame which 
 belongs to a fairly good man when he has 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 245 
 
 done really wrong—‘ the self-contempt, 
 bitterer to drink than blood/ On the other 
 hand, the postulate of voluntary action, 
 the power, that is, to direct a certain 
 amount of force in the channel of one kind 
 of action or of another, does not result in 
 any conclusion incompatible with any ob¬ 
 served or observable facts of the physical 
 world. You may defy any one to show 
 you any observed or observable fact which 
 must have been otherwise if the postulate 
 of moral freedom were true. I think we 
 are not wrong in saying that the denial of 
 the fundamental axiom of moral responsi¬ 
 bility is due, not to any contrary facts, but 
 to an abstract refusal to recognize any 
 other class of facts than those which fall 
 under the purview of physical investigation. 
 May we not hope that in this region, at 
 least, a better relationship is already afoot 
 between religion and moral thought on the 
 one side, and physical science on the other ? 
 We have lost a really great man in Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer—really great, because he 
 determined to view the sum of ascertainable 
 reality as a whole, and to deal with it as 
 a whole, and pursued this great ambition 
 with such indomitable industry. But may 
 
246 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 we not say that so far as his was an attempt 
 to bring all facts, including moral and 
 spiritual facts, under a single formula of 
 physical evolution, it belongs to a bygone 
 age, to the hot and arrogant youth of 
 science ; and that science, since Herbert 
 Spencer began to write, has become wonder¬ 
 fully more modest and conscious of its 
 limitations ; even as its old rival, theology, 
 has quite changed its attitude and become 
 wonderfully deferential and respectful to¬ 
 ward physical science—even, perhaps, at 
 times too submissive to its more hasty or 
 conjectural utterances ? 
 
 We must be true both to physical reality 
 and to that which is moral and spiritual, 
 and interpret each apart, and on its own 
 ground, and by its own methods, if we 
 are to attain more nearly to completeness 
 of knowledge and fullness of outlook. 
 
 But if you set aside a fatalist view of the 
 universe—if the fact of moral choice and 
 moral responsibility is admitted—then I 
 cannot understand how there is any stop¬ 
 ping on the way to the acceptance of the 
 Christian view of sin. 
 
 Let it be granted that the doctrine of 
 physical evolution has occupied the ground 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 247 
 
 of human thought, and permanently dis¬ 
 placed the idea of special creations—let 
 it be granted, that is, that our race de¬ 
 veloped out of an animal ancestry ; let 
 it be granted that the early chapters of 
 Genesis give us in forms of the imagination 
 certain elemental spiritual truths about 
 God, and nature, and man, and human 
 sin—that they most assuredly do—but 
 no actual history of the origins of things; 
 still the fact remains—the development 
 of the human race has not been what it 
 might have been, what it ought to have 
 been, what in the purpose of God it was 
 intended to be. I know this for a fact, 
 because I know it in my own history. I 
 am not what I was meant to be. And 
 the reason of my miserable failure to be¬ 
 come what God meant me to be, is nothing 
 whatever but my sin, my faithlessness, 
 my wilfulness, my impatience, my lawless 
 lust—my fault, my own fault, my own 
 great fault. I know this is true of myself, 
 if I like to think. I know it is true in 
 countless others. I see their wilfulness, 
 waywardness, selfishness spoiling homes, 
 ruining friendship, alienating love, corrupt¬ 
 ing life, on all sides. I work this out on 
 
248 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 the great scale, and see sin—human law¬ 
 lessness—retarding the divine purpose for 
 man’s development all through, turning 
 into evil what was meant for good. I see 
 this sin in the individual writ large in 
 the race, and I know its true character 
 in my own heart. I go back in imagination 
 to the beginning, and I know that, however 
 and wherever and whenever the human 
 consciousness, the consciousness of self, 
 the consciousness of choice, the conscious¬ 
 ness of fellowship with the divine, dawned 
 in the animal organism, there, back in the 
 dim beginnings, under conditions which I 
 can but dimly realize, it must have been 
 the same thing in principle. What re¬ 
 tarded, impeded, destroyed at the begin¬ 
 ning, in the rude beginnings of our race, is 
 what retards, impedes, destroys now— sin. 
 
 I am saying nothing about the tainting 
 of the stock of manhood and the inheritance 
 of sin, though I find it wholly impossible 
 to doubt that sin has weakened the race 
 by an inherited taint or disorder. And I 
 do not anticipate that careful biological 
 or psychological science is likely ultimately 
 to find itself in ascertained conflict with 
 this idea. I recall a remark of George 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 249 
 
 Romanes that Weismann himself would, 
 he doubted not, be the first to allow that 
 his theory of heredity encounters greater 
 difficulties in the domain of ethics than 
 in any other—unless, indeed, it were in 
 that of religion. 1 But I make no assump¬ 
 tion here of the quasi-physical transmission 
 of sin. I look now only to the universality 
 of actual sins in experience, and to the 
 light in which they reveal themselves in 
 the inner consciousness ; and I say, the 
 Bible is right. Sin is the great enemy. 
 There is no illusion so extraordinary as 
 the light-heartedness of men in view of 
 the mastery which sin manifestly has over 
 them and in them. And as the Christian 
 message is a message to men who feel the 
 burden and the guilt of sin, so true is it 
 that what we need to-day is some John 
 the Baptist to prepare the way of the 
 Lord by arousing us again in all classes, 
 and under all sorts of conditions in life, 
 to a wholesome and a godly fear of sin and 
 of its consequences. 
 
 The kingdom of heaven is at hand. 
 
 1 See Darwin and After Darwin (Longmans, 1895), 
 ii. p. 90. 
 
25O THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 
 
 There is no optimism so strong as the 
 optimism of the forecast for humanity 
 which our religion offers us, if only we will 
 set ourselves deliberately to face, and 
 recognize, and deal with the one great 
 obstacle, in the only way in which it can 
 be dealt with—the obstacle of sin. We 
 must deal with it first in ourselves, and if 
 in ourselves we have realized something 
 of the joy and thankfulness which belong 
 to those who know themselves to be 
 redeemed men—men in whom the divine 
 redemption is actually taking place—then 
 and then only we can go out into the world 
 to do the work of evangelists, and make 
 men feel that the kingdom of heaven is 
 among us and within. 
 
SERMON IV 
 
 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY 1 
 
 Whosoever he be of you that forsaketli not all that he 
 hath, he cannot be my disciple.— St. Luke xiv. 33. 
 
 The genius of the Christian religion is 
 sacrifice. When our Lord began to pub¬ 
 lish the kingdom, He first of all accom¬ 
 panied His proclamation by revealing the 
 character of God in acts of compassion, 
 the compassion which had power in it to 
 heal and to lift ; and all this disclosure of 
 the powerful pity of God was made very 
 freely, and so as to involve very little 
 claim on the lives of the men who were the 
 objects of it. But when He proceeded to 
 build His spiritual kingdom, it was different. 
 Then we see Him standing, as it were, 
 over against the wills and hearts of men, 
 inviting, attracting to sacrifice, claiming 
 sacrifice, welcoming the sacrifice when it 
 
 1 The Commemoration Sermon, preached before the 
 University of Oxford, on June 17, 1906. 
 
 251 
 
252 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 is offered. He prepares the apostles by a 
 preliminary discipline, and then claims of 
 them the sacrifice of their profession and 
 its prospects by His * Follow me/ So it 
 is with the fishermen ; so it is with the 
 tax collector. And these are no mere 
 episodes. They exhibit the principle which 
 our Lord loves to state in the most para¬ 
 doxical form. If a man ‘ forsake not 
 all that he hath ' ; if he ‘ hate not his 
 father, and mother, and wife, and children, 
 and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his 
 own life also, he cannot be my disciple/ 
 The kingdom of heaven is a pearl of 
 great price, and a man must sell all that 
 he hath to buy it. 
 
 Our Lord educates His disciples to recog¬ 
 nize the justification of the sacrifice which 
 He demands. His dealings with them 
 are all directed to fostering in their minds 
 the sense that He Himself is absolutely 
 to be trusted in all emergencies, for all 
 the needs of body and spirit, in all the 
 critical moments of life and death—that 
 He is all they need. When He had 
 fostered this sense, He draws from Peter, 
 as He had before drawn from him the 
 confession of His name, so now the pro- 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 2 53 
 
 fession of His service : ‘ Behold, we have 
 left all and followed thee.’ And He meets 
 this profession with a like benediction: 
 ‘ Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye 
 which have followed me, and every one 
 that hath left houses, or brethren, or sisters 
 or father, or mother, or children, or lands, 
 for my name’s sake, shall receive an 
 hundredfold, and shall inherit eternal life/ 
 And this welcoming of sacrifice is not 
 limited to any particular class. It is the 
 characteristic mark of all our Lord’s deal¬ 
 ings with human souls. The rich man 
 Zacchaeus is blessed, because, when our 
 Lord had arrested his attention, and con¬ 
 verted his will, he stood out publicly, and 
 made public sacrifice, going far beyond 
 what could be said to be required of him. 
 ‘ Behold, Lord, the half of all that I 
 possess I give to the poor, and I restore 
 fourfold any wrongful exaction which as 
 a tax-collector I have made/ And the 
 solemn benediction falls on him : ‘ This 
 
 day is salvation come to this house/ 
 Just in the same spirit our Lord blesses 
 the woman who publicly showed her lavish 
 love by costly sacrifice, who poured the 
 cruse of exceeding precious ointment upon 
 
254 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 His head. Just in the same spirit 
 our Lord meets the rich young man who 
 wanted to know the way of perfection, and 
 claims of him the total sacrifice of his 
 worldly possessions, and when he would 
 not make it, lets him go away sorrowful. 
 Just in the same spirit He welcomes the 
 widow’s mite, not because it cost her 
 nothing, but because it was ‘ all her living.’ 
 This, I say, is the principle of our Lord’s 
 dealing. 
 
 We rightly claim the Sermon on the 
 Mount as the moral law of the Christian 
 kingdom. But it is very unlike ordinary 
 legislation. It does not consist of pro¬ 
 hibitions ; nor does it enjoin for the more 
 part such external actions as can be 
 required in a settled community of all its 
 citizens. But it deals with the motives 
 of the heart and of the will; and when it 
 embodies its claims in characteristic actions, 
 they are actions which have, as it were, 
 the character of individual paradox—the 
 paradox of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Against all this must be set the fact that 
 our Lord was preparing an organized 
 society, and solemnly and repeatedly im¬ 
 parted to the organized society the proper 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 255 
 
 legislative authority over the members 
 of the society which is essential for corpor¬ 
 ate life—that is, the power to bind and 
 loose. The facts of the earliest Christian 
 church cannot be fairly interpreted except 
 on the supposition that Christ was the 
 conscious founder of a visible society, and 
 prepared the way for its corporate and 
 continuous life. In only one particular of 
 moral conduct did He Himself legislate, 
 in the spirit of the ordinary legislator, 
 and that was with regard to the sanctity 
 of marriage. But our Lord recognizes and 
 provides the conditions necessary for the 
 continuous life of any society—the per¬ 
 manence of the social law in its ordinary 
 sense. This, however, is not the most 
 characteristic part of His method. Within 
 the area of what can be required of the 
 ordinary good man, He stands over 
 against the souls of men already pious and 
 God-fearing, over against those who would 
 turn from sin to God, inviting to sacrifice, 
 claiming sacrifice, encouraging and welcom¬ 
 ing sacrifice, meeting it with His supreme 
 benediction, as if it were in that alone 
 that the true relation of the soul to God is 
 exhibited and realized. 
 
256 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 And it is exactly the same principle that 
 we find in the Acts and in the apostolic 
 epistles. The church promptly shows her¬ 
 self a legislative body, binding and loosing, 
 that is, forbidding and allowing, prescribing 
 the necessary minimum for common and 
 corporate life. ‘ It seemed good to the 
 Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no 
 greater burden than these necessary things : 
 that ye abstain from things sacrificed to 
 idols, and from blood, and from things 
 strangled, and from fornication. From 
 which if you keep yourselves it shall be well 
 with you.’ There is the binding and loos¬ 
 ing church, prescribing the minimum neces¬ 
 sary for corporate life ; but within the area 
 thus marked out, the life of the church 
 exhibits itself freely and delightfully in 
 voluntary sacrifice, so that the very dis¬ 
 tinctions of thine and mine are for the time 
 obliterated. 
 
 Again St. Paul shows, as much as any 
 man, the consciousness of what is required 
 of the church, if it is to be held together 
 as a continuous corporate society. There 
 must be the ordinary action of legislation. 
 St. Paul perceives that legislation consists 
 mainly in negatives, and that its object 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 257 
 
 is to keep down wickedness. ‘ Law is 
 not made for the righteous, but for the 
 ungodly/ And for all the strong contrast 
 that St. Paul draws between the charac¬ 
 teristic of the Old Covenant, which is law, 
 and the characteristic of the New Covenant, 
 which is grace, still from the first he 
 appears as the organizer and the legislator 
 of the churches—and that without any 
 scruple or hesitation. He legislates with 
 regard to women’s veils, and for the regula¬ 
 tion of prophecy and tongues, in his earlier 
 epistles to the Corinthians, quite as readily 
 as he legislates for the requirements of 
 the churches of Ephesus or Crete, through 
 his apostolic legates Timothy and Titus, 
 at the end of his life. But within the area 
 secured thus by legislation from the over¬ 
 flowings of wickedness, the positive and 
 characteristic spirit of Christianity has its 
 vantage-ground, and that is the spirit of 
 sacrifice. 
 
 St. Paul, in his conception of the sacrifice 
 of Christ which redeemed us, treats it in¬ 
 deed as a vicarious act, in that it is God’s 
 pure gift to us, to which we contributed 
 nothing, and which was done of Christ’s 
 own love and the Father’s love for our 
 
 I 7 
 
25S SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 sakes, and in our stead. But, also, St. 
 Paul’s whole conception of this vicarious 
 sacrifice is that it stands over against 
 us, as a challenge or appeal to us to 
 do the like, and that as a matter of 
 course. It is something which rests on 
 the incontrovertible logic of the heart. 
 ' Because we thus judge, that if one died 
 for all, therefore all died ’ ; that is, in His 
 person, all who believed in Him were, 
 once for all, alienated, as by death, from 
 the world which had put Him to death ; 
 ‘ and he died for all, that they which live 
 should no longer live unto themselves, but 
 unto him who for their sakes died and 
 lived again/ The sacrifice of Christ is, 
 to St. Paul, simply an appeal to us to go 
 and do likewise ; and in his own practice 
 he delights to recognize that he is doing 
 something over and above what anybody 
 can say is required of him. It is required 
 by his very vocation that he should preach 
 the Gospel; and that, with all its attendant 
 risks and dangers, is what all men can claim 
 of him, as God claims it of him. But he 
 delights to offer a free-will offering over and 
 above this ; and the free-will offering is that 
 he should receive no pay, though he can 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 259 
 
 claim it if he would, for ' the labourer 
 is worthy of his hire/ by Christ’s own 
 declaration. 
 
 We need not attribute to St. Paul a 
 doctrine of merit, against which his whole 
 theology is in revolt. Merit, we may say, 
 lives, for St. Paul, ‘ from man to man, and 
 not from man, O God, to Thee.’ But the 
 evident truth is that St. Paul thought 
 it a characteristic exhibition of the Chris¬ 
 tian spirit that a man should offer a free 
 sacrifice, something over and above what 
 could be required or expected by one man 
 of another, over and above what could be 
 required by the church of all its members 
 or officers. 
 
 We shall find this same principle charac¬ 
 teristic of the other writers of the New 
 Testament. The characteristic of love in 
 St. John’s Epistles is sacrifice: 'Hereby 
 know we love, because he laid down his 
 life for us, and we ought to lay down our 
 lives for the brethren ; ’ that is, sacrifice 
 can only be met and responded to by like 
 sacrifice, the sacrifice of God by our self- 
 sacrifice. And in the Apocalypse the char¬ 
 acteristic Christian assemblages, the gather¬ 
 ings before the Throne, appear to be 
 
260 sacrifice, the genius 
 
 gatherings of men who have made the 
 great sacrifices. They are martyrs and 
 virgins. 
 
 Thus the conception we are led to form 
 of the church in the New Testament sug¬ 
 gests a picture to which the facts of the 
 church correspond very generally in all 
 its best periods in history. It is the picture 
 of a society visibly organized in the world 
 with an ordinary legislation, keeping it 
 distinct from other societies and guarding its 
 necessary boundaries. But within the area 
 thus marked off, the characteristic life 
 of the society is found not merely in con¬ 
 formity to a normal rule, but in the exercise 
 of personal and voluntary sacrifice. The 
 characteristic spirit of the church is seen in 
 the martyrs, who are allowed to combine 
 in one act the necessary requirement upon 
 every one—that he should not deny his 
 Lord—with the highest ecstasy of voluntary 
 joy. I say the characteristic spirit of the 
 church is seen in her martyrs, her virgins, 
 her hermits, her missionaries, her evan¬ 
 gelists. These are characteristic, because 
 they exhibit the spirit in a striking form. 
 There is no need to say that they are better 
 than the fathers and mothers, and Christian 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 26 l 
 
 men of business, and theologians, and 
 ordinary clergy, whose sacrifices are in¬ 
 conspicuous, ‘ who live faithfully hidden 
 lives/ But what it is necessary to say is 
 that where the true spirit of Christianity 
 is kept alive in the community, there it 
 will always be recognized that self-sacrifice 
 is the normal and characteristic thing ; 
 
 and it will be continually exhibiting itself 
 outwardly and visibly in special charac¬ 
 teristic acts, such as the abandonment of 
 wealth, or the abandonment of family life, 
 or the abandonment of home; and if 
 the spirit is not finding expression in 
 these and the like ‘ evangelical counsels/ 
 
 it must be reckoned in all probability 
 that the church is being unfaithful to her 
 true self. 
 
 Our minds naturally go back to the 
 English Christianity of the eighteenth 
 century, with its detestation of enthusiasm , 1 
 when a man like Bishop Butler could say 
 
 1 I do not deny that what Butler and his contem¬ 
 poraries meant by ‘ enthusiasm ’ was something different 
 to what we mean by it, and that we ought to condemn 
 what they condemned as enthusiasm ; but I think that 
 this condemnation of enthusiasm in a bad sense, involved 
 a wonderful ignoring of the place in the Christian 
 character of enthusiasm in the right sense. 
 
262 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 of a man like George Whitefield : * Sir, 
 
 the pretending to extraordinary revelation 
 and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid 
 thing, a very horrid thing/ The idea 
 then seems to have been that enthusiasm 
 was something contradictory to settled 
 organization and order, or to rational re¬ 
 ligion ; but this is the greatest possible 
 mistake. It is the function of the intellect 
 to appreciate the facts and motives and 
 conceptions of the Christian life, and to 
 bring them into relation with the whole 
 of human knowledge, and to bring out 
 clearly, for the enlightenment of the Chris¬ 
 tian spirit, what our religion really means, 
 and what intellectual propositions it must 
 necessarily maintain and contend for, if 
 it is to subsist in the world of thought 
 and controversy. As a matter of fact, 
 the enthusiasm of the first Christian church 
 could not have won the world, if the 
 theologians of the Christian church had 
 not been maintaining their intellectual 
 position in the face of the world’s thought. 
 As a matter of fact, the great periods of 
 Christian enthusiasm have always been 
 in some close relation to the great 
 periods of intellectual revival. In the 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 263 
 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is 
 not easy to exaggerate how much the 
 revivals of religion, evangelical and catholic, 
 owed to the fact that the great apologists, 
 the Berkeleys, the Butlers, the Paleys, had 
 secured the intellectual standing-ground. 
 But to secure the intellectual platform is 
 one thing—to mark out the area of Chris- 
 tion thought in its broad outline is one 
 thing—and to live the life within the area 
 is another. The apologist of the eighteenth 
 century has been compared to a landlord 
 who accumulates the title-deeds of an 
 estate which he neglects to cultivate. 
 
 Once again, there is, or ought to be, no 
 kind of conflict between organization and 
 enthusiasm. That is to say, there is no 
 necessary conflict. And in fact the clearer 
 and more definite the recognition of the 
 authority of government in the church, 
 the easier the welcoming of enthusiasm. 
 It has been the clear recognition of au¬ 
 thority—the clear action of organization— 
 in the Roman Church which (as has been 
 very often recognized) has been the chief 
 advantage which the Roman Church has 
 had in welcoming and giving free play 
 to the enthusiasm of sacrifice. It has 
 
264 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 been because the idea of ecclesiastical 
 authority in the church of England has 
 been confused and mixed up with the 
 totally distinct idea of civil authority, that 
 the life of the church has been hampered. 
 The lines of what the church allows and 
 does not allow have been confused and 
 broken down ; and as a consequence we 
 have had such a frequent exhibition of the 
 conflict between enthusiasm and authority ; 
 not because the enthusiasm is necessarily 
 lawless, or the authority narrow, but be¬ 
 cause authority has not been free to la}' 
 down the lines within which the fresh life 
 of the church can be allowed its heroic 
 ventures, and can feel the strong founda¬ 
 tion under its feet for enthusiastic devo¬ 
 tion. 
 
 This, then, is the point : The church 
 is a visible, continuous and organized body. 
 It must have its laws, therefore, positive 
 and negative. They are contemplated by 
 Christ, who gave the church divine autho¬ 
 rity to govern. * Whatsoever ye shall 
 bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; 
 and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, 
 shall be loosed in heaven/ He made it 
 part of the obligation of discipleship to 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 265 
 
 hear the church. The church has thus 
 fulfilled her function rightly in laying down 
 necessary limits, doctrinal and practical. 
 In doing this there must be a minimum 
 prescribed. A man who does not do such 
 and such things; who needlessly works on 
 the Lord’s day; or fails to attend the Lord’s 
 service ; or does not observe such and such 
 requirements ; or repudiates such and 
 such a truth, must be excommunicated. 
 That is to say that his conduct or belief 
 is inconsistent with the fundamental re¬ 
 quirements of membership. It is the same 
 with the positive moral law. It must 
 subsist for the lawless, the unholy and pro¬ 
 fane ; to warn them off, to say ‘ Thou 
 shalt not ’ ; to say, once and again : 
 ‘ They that do such things shall not inherit 
 the kingdom of God ’ ; to say, here and 
 now, that they cannot be allowed the 
 privilege of Christian fellowship. But it 
 is within the area secured thus from the 
 ravages of lawlessness ; within the area 
 where there are thus established certain 
 accepted principles of thinking and feeling 
 and living and worshipping,—it is within 
 this area that the real Christian motive 
 can be brought freely into play. The 
 
266 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 drawing of the limits is, in every sense of 
 the word, the beginning and not the end. 
 It is the necessary condition of the life 
 itself. But the life itself means the up¬ 
 holding and keeping in conspicuous pro¬ 
 minence of the Lord’s sacrifice, as that 
 which must appeal to men to meet like 
 with like, to give all for all. 
 
 I have tried to describe the place of 
 sacrifice in the Christian life ; the place 
 which it holds by relation to intellectual 
 effort and to organization ; the place it 
 holds by relation to the function of posi¬ 
 tive law. I have tried to draw this picture 
 of where law ends and sacrifice begins—or 
 rather where law passes into love, for 
 it is all of the same moral substance—and 
 the spirit of conformity passes into the 
 spirit of sacrifice. I have tried to do this, 
 because when we endeavour to attain to 
 quietness, and to take a comprehensive 
 view of the times we live in, we appear to 
 be running a great risk of missing the op¬ 
 portunity offered to our church, for no 
 other reason than because we fail to recog¬ 
 nize these necessary conditions of the life 
 of the Christian society. I mean that we 
 neither draw limits—we neither exercise 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 267 
 
 the proper function of law; nor do we give 
 its true place, or anything like its true 
 place, to the free spirit of sacrifice. We 
 resent law in religion. We dislike laying 
 down necessary conditions of orthodoxy. 
 We dislike saying that any positive dogma 
 is really a necessary limit for the exercise 
 of Christian communion, or even of the 
 Christian ministry. We resent the require¬ 
 ment of anything specific—for instance, 
 the requirement of confirmation. We are 
 always finding individual excuses such as 
 seem to require us to dispense with the 
 Christian law of marriage in its strictness. 
 We seem to have lost the art of saying 
 positively ‘No.’ It seems to me, however, 
 self-evident that, though the specific re¬ 
 quirements of the church—its positive 
 and necessary laws—should be as simple 
 and as few as possible, yet some positive 
 limits, such as must be insisted upon, and 
 such as involve saying : ‘ If you will not 
 conform to this, you cannot share our 
 fellowship, and must be, from our point 
 of view, outside and not inside our body ’ 
 —are necessary to the life of any society 
 which would call itself Christian. We 
 should lay on people no more than the most 
 
268 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 necessary things ; but this necessary mini¬ 
 mum we must lay on them, as a condition 
 of communion or as a condition of ministry. 
 It is not too much to say that what an 
 individual or what a society really means, 
 depends in the long run, at certain points, 
 on what he or it is definitely prepared to 
 exclude. 
 
 The Church of England has a vocation 
 to be broad. Let us praise God for it. 
 But breadth is quite consistent with know¬ 
 ing what our principles are and respecting 
 them. We suffer then from this point of 
 view from lack of definiteness. If we are 
 to play our part, we must be content as 
 a church to define our limits, to know 
 where we are bound to agree, as well as 
 where we are content to differ. What we 
 want is that it should be evident before 
 the eyes of our members, and before the 
 eyes of the world generally, that we stand 
 for a certain body of agreement, as well 
 as for a large toleration of indifference. 
 That is a quite intelligible standing-ground 
 —to my mind the best and more Christian. 
 Granted that, we want not to make too 
 much of our dogmatic limits, but to treat 
 all these as simply affording the necessary 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 269 
 
 starting-point for what is the real life of 
 the church. I speak now only of the 
 church's spiritual life. But here, again, 
 we appear to be defective, almost as much 
 as we appear to be defective in the main¬ 
 tenance of positive law. The perilous 
 tendency among us is to appeal always 
 to averages or majorities ; to ask ourselves 
 what sort of religion we can induce men 
 in general, rich or poor, to accept and 
 welcome; to make religion easy; to 
 abstain from asking too much ; to accom¬ 
 modate the requirements of religion to 
 what we suppose men in general will be 
 ready to accept. Nothing could be so 
 directly contrary to the method of Christ. 
 He never will suffer the best to be sacrificed 
 to what may be supposed to be the average 
 requirement. He moves on His way re¬ 
 lentlessly, presenting the high and com¬ 
 plete claim, though it became more and 
 more evident that His people as a whole 
 would reject it. He never turns aside to 
 remodel His religion, and to accommodate 
 it to what would be found generally to 
 commend itself to each class, to Sadducee 
 or to Pharisee ; to accommodate it to what 
 would be found compatible with the politics 
 
2JO SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 of the one and the prejudices of the other ; 
 or to what the mass of the people might 
 be prepared to accept without too much 
 effort. Our Lord chose and sanctified 
 exactly the opposite method. He appealed 
 with the whole truth, for the whole of the 
 man's heart. In various ways He is con¬ 
 tinually saying : ‘If a man will not let 
 My appeal, the appeal of God, be a thing 
 altogether without competition in his heart, 
 and give all for all, he cannot be My dis¬ 
 ciple.’ True, His appeal was welcome only 
 to the few. It was a little band that 
 gathered round Him. The wisdom of God 
 within Him perceived and saw that the 
 way to produce real moral results is through 
 the few who are the light of the world, 
 and the salt, and the city set on a hill. 
 
 There is a great claim, a claim over¬ 
 whelmingly great, made upon the church 
 to-day. Our colonies are crying out for 
 help ; our missions are so miserably under¬ 
 staffed that they are indisputably failing 
 to meet the obvious and unmistakable 
 requirements laid upon them. At home 
 there are men and women in multitudes 
 needed for the work of teaching, the work 
 of evangelization, the work of social re- 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 271 
 
 covery, in the great towns and villages of 
 our country. Great sins are flaunting 
 themselves in England, as in America, 
 stalking, as it seems, in almost unrebuked 
 insolence. Truly there is a work for us 
 to do ; and in this place to-day, we may 
 well be girding ourselves to do it. We are 
 the inheritors here of the great past. We 
 are thanking God for founders and bene¬ 
 factors who have bestowed so much upon 
 this incomparable place, who have made 
 this name of Oxford a name of irresistible 
 charm. We have entered into the labours 
 of other men ; the labours of schoolmen, 
 with their gigantic intellectual efforts ; the 
 labours of philosophers and early dis¬ 
 coverers, who prepared the materials and 
 opened the ways of knowledge ; the labours 
 of monks and friars > who established schools 
 and nourished the principle of education ; 
 the labours of preachers, and pastors, and 
 reformers, and professors ; the benefactions 
 of those who have endowed us with wealth ; 
 and of those, who are much more important, 
 who have entrusted to us the true riches— 
 the things that make for the enlightenment 
 of mind, and the strengthening of con¬ 
 science, and the sanctifying of life. It is 
 
272 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS 
 
 a great heritage. And we may be quite 
 sure that if there is any one of us who has 
 joined the society of one of our delightful 
 colleges, and is bent on the whole to make 
 it a playground, a place of agreeable pastime 
 and social initiation into a comfortable 
 position in life, or to make it a place for 
 winning honours and seeking a name 
 among his fellows—upon him there rests 
 the curse of barrenness and of remorse, 
 to be realized, we may hope, before it is 
 too late. The things that come easy to 
 our hand to-day are things, like our civil 
 and religious liberty, bought by the sweat 
 and blood of those who have lived before us. 
 And we may be sure that whatever is noble 
 and generous in us responds to this 
 appeal: that we, who have been allowed to 
 inherit these riches, material and spiritual, 
 should own that we must use them as a 
 trust from God. We have been allowed to 
 appropriate the great heritage—to become 
 fat on what we did not earn—only that 
 we may make the sacrifice of our own 
 lives full and complete, in the name of 
 Him who spent the glory of His own being 
 in making the idea of sacrifice beautiful 
 and acceptable to man’s heart. 
 
OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 273 
 
 Over all our store of possessions, gathered 
 through the quiet and laborious and strug¬ 
 gling centuries ; over all our great fortunes 
 and vast gains ; over all our knowledge 
 of nature and man ; over all our elaborated 
 amusements ; over all our aesthetic subtle¬ 
 ties and our mechanical skill; over all 
 that we call our own; within sight of the 
 still crying needs of corrupted and down¬ 
 trodden and feeble men and women and 
 the child-life squandered and perverted,— 
 still there falls the claim of One who 
 pleads for abandonment, for sacrifice, if we 
 would live and work in His name and with 
 His blessing: ‘ Whosoever he be of you 
 that forsaketh not ... he cannot be my 
 disciple.' 
 
 18 
 
SERMON V 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 1 
 
 And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his dis¬ 
 ciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the 
 kingdom of God ! And the disciples were amazed at his 
 words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, 
 Children, how hard is it to enter into the kingdom of God ! 
 It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a 
 rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were 
 astonished exceedingly.— St. Mark x. 23-26 (R.V. marg.). 
 
 These and the like words of our Lord 
 have stood over against the church in many 
 ages and many lands, convicting it of a 
 great unreality ; but over against no 
 church and in no age have they sounded a 
 more solemn protest than against our own 
 to-day. I shall need no apology if I ask 
 for a leading place in the thoughts of those 
 who have assembled in this Congress of 
 Churchmen for what ought to be, I believe, 
 our chief anxiety, our most anxious subject 
 of self-questioning : Are we of the Church 
 
 1 A sermon preached at the Church Congress, Oct. 2, 
 1906, in St. James’s Church, Barrow-in-Furness. 
 
 274 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 275 
 
 of England to-day faithful, as a great body 
 of disciples should be, to our Master’s 
 teaching about wealth ? 
 
 This teaching is not a matter of a few 
 words here and there. It is embodied in 
 His whole life and method. The purpose 
 of God expressed itself in the circumstances 
 of His earthly origin. As we may rever¬ 
 ently say, with all the possible human 
 careers open before Him, the Father chose 
 for Him, and He chose, to be born of poor 
 and humble parents ; not to become in¬ 
 carnate in some position of political power 
 or commanding influence; not to have- 
 natural control of the forces which make 
 up secular greatness ; nor, again, to appear 
 as a philosopher or to have command of 
 the natural instruments for intellectual 
 influence ; but to be born in circumstances 
 least calculated to suggest power of any 
 kind—in a despised district of a subject 
 kingdom, just about to become still more 
 confessedly subject, remote from the centres 
 of political or intellectual influence, and in 
 the circle of labouring men. There is, 
 indeed, nothing about our Lord which 
 suggests any love of squalor, or any glori¬ 
 fication of what we may call the pauper 
 
276 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 lot. He was born of the seed of David ; 
 that is, of a family with noble memories, 
 and haunted with noble hopes ; of a family 
 in the deepest sense respectable, but of 
 the class of artisans ; of the class that 
 ranked itself as the poor over against the 
 rich. The Magnificat of Mary already gives 
 expression to the purpose of God : f He 
 hath put down the powerful off their 
 thrones, and exalted them of low degree ; 
 he hath filled the hungry with good things, 
 and sent away the rich empty/ 
 
 Our Lord, then, chose to belong to the 
 class of the honourable artisan ; and, on 
 the whole. He chose His apostles from 
 the same class. Again, there was nothing 
 squalid or disreputable about them or 
 their circumstances. He succoured the 
 miserable, while He chose His instruments 
 from among the morally excellent and the 
 respectable ; but from the class accustomed 
 to live hardly, and to depend for sustenance 
 upon daily labour. To this class He gave 
 the prerogative position in His church. 
 It is people of this kind who can pray most 
 naturally the prayer to God the Father, 
 ‘ Give us to-day the bread for the coming 
 day/ And going out into the world with 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 277 
 
 such associations and surroundings, He 
 made His deliberate intention more em¬ 
 phatic by associating blessedness with the lot 
 of poverty—Blessed are ye poor.’ If He 
 said also, ‘ Blessed are the poor in spirit ’— 
 that is, those who are detached from wealth 
 —yet He claimed in general that the de¬ 
 tachment should be made actual and visible. 
 
 He seems to stand over against each 
 single human soul which comes before Him 
 to seek the position of the disciple, eliciting, 
 claiming, welcoming, and blessing the re¬ 
 nunciation of wealth. In various ways 
 and forms this appears ; in His calling of 
 the Twelve away from their professions ; 
 in the care and awful earnestness with 
 which He warned them off the first ap¬ 
 proaches to ecclesiastical wealth—this, I 
 think, is the real meaning of the parable 
 of the unrighteous steward, and of other 
 plainer passages ; in the welcome He gave 
 to the public renunciation of Zaccheus, 
 and to the costly offering of Mary of 
 Bethany, and to the widow’s sacrifice of 
 her meagre ‘ living ’ ; in the claim made 
 on the rich young man who would move 
 onward in the way of perfection—'‘ Go 
 and sell all that thou hast and give to the 
 
278 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 poor ’ ; and in the tremendous warning 
 which followed his withdrawal—‘ How 
 hardly shall they that have riches enter 
 into the kingdom of God/ a warning, we 
 must remember, from which the corrected 
 texts have removed the modification, ‘ How 
 hardly shall they that trust in riches.’ It 
 is the possession of riches which remains 
 the almost insuperable obstacle. 
 
 The primitive church was, in its temper 
 and characteristics, just what we should 
 expect from all this teaching. In the ever¬ 
 lasting opposition of rich and poor, beyond 
 all possibility of question, it ranked among, 
 and spoke for, the poor. It did not so 
 much exalt the dignity of labour, as make 
 the obligation of labour positive and abso¬ 
 lute on all its members. ‘ If a man will 
 not work, neither let him eat.’ Each man 
 is to labour ‘ with his own hands,’ and so 
 ‘ eat his own bread.’ There is to be support 
 for those who cannot w r ork, but not for 
 those vTlo will not. The Christian is to 
 be content with the bare necessaries of 
 actual life —‘ having food and covering.’ 
 What he earns over and above this he 
 should not accumulate for his own enjoy¬ 
 ment, but give av 7 ay ‘ to him that needeth.’ 
 
/ 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 279 
 
 The Lord’s warnings are reiterated upon 
 those who seek to become rich men. They 
 can hardly escape perdition . 1 
 
 It is quite true that the New Testament 
 does not absolutely condemn the mere pos¬ 
 session of wealth. There is such a phrase 
 as St. Paul’s, ‘ I know how to abound.’ 
 A rich man, retaining possession of his 
 wealth, might have lived unrebuked in 
 the churches of St. Paul, provided that he 
 was treating his superfluity as a stewardship 
 for the common good. But it is not too 
 much to say that, in spite of the moral 
 impartiality of the New Testament, in spite 
 of the equality of its moral claim, its regular 
 assumption is that God is on the side of 
 the poor against the rich. It does not, 
 indeed, encourage the oppressed poor to 
 resistance by direct methods. It em¬ 
 phasizes the blessedness of submission to 
 injury, while it supplies the most powerful 
 remedy for injustice that the world has 
 ever known, in the form of a brotherhood 
 of labour and prayer—an immense or¬ 
 ganization for mutual help. But if it does 
 not stimulate to resistance, it associates 
 wealth with tyranny and wrong, and un- 
 
 1 1 Tim. vi. 7. 
 
280 the church and the poor 
 
 veils the judgement of God upon the selfish 
 rich : ‘ Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl/ 
 
 ‘ Hath not God chosen them that are poor ? ' 
 The late Master of Balliol 1 used often to 
 say, in his detached way, that he was 
 afraid there was much more in the New 
 Testament against being rich and in favour 
 of being poor than we liked to recognize. 
 And all the teaching which I have tried to 
 summarize, as I believe without any ex¬ 
 aggeration, represents the permanent mind 
 of Him who is our Master. It suggests 
 universal principles, which belong to all 
 states of society. He is ‘ the same yester¬ 
 day, to-day, and for ever.’ He is the head 
 
 of the church—of our branch of the church. 
 
 ♦ 
 
 He is still speaking to the angel of the 
 Church of England. We have won vic¬ 
 tories ; but they have proved barren. We 
 stand far stronger on the merely intellectual 
 or apologetic ground than we stood thirty 
 years ago. We have vindicated the liberty 
 of biblical criticism and have still the 
 weight of free New Testament scholarship— 
 here in England, at least—on the side of 
 our creed. We have practically won the 
 battle of the liberty of catholic ceremonial. 
 
 1 Dr. Jowett. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 281 
 
 What is much more important, we have 
 had great revivals of spiritual life ; and, 
 if only there were more driving-power 
 behind our organizations, we should be on 
 the way to get rid of many old-standing 
 abuses. The idea of the church, free and 
 self-governing, with its great heritage of 
 truths, human and divine—the truths of 
 the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood 
 of man—is awake and alive again. We 
 understand, again, our great mission in 
 the evangelization of the world. Above all, 
 we have laboured very hard for the poor 
 and amongst them. And yet—and yet— 
 it all hangs fire. f We have been with 
 child, we have been in pain, we have, as it 
 were, brought forth wind ; we have not 
 wrought any deliverance in the earth, 
 neither have the inhabitants of the world 
 fallen/ ‘ Surely I have laboured in vain 
 and spent my strength for naught ! ’ Such 
 a feeling is in the mind of very many of us 
 as we take stock of the powerlessness of 
 the church, in spite of even splendid ex¬ 
 ceptions in this or that parish, to produce 
 any broad, corporate effect, to make any 
 effective spiritual appeal by its own proper 
 influence, in the great democracy of England 
 
282 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 to-day. We are not in touch with the 
 mass of the labouring people. 
 
 Is not the reason of this because we are 
 the church of the rich rather than of the 
 poor—of Capital rather than of Labour ? 
 By this I mean that in the strata of society 
 the church works from above rather than 
 from below. The opinions and the pre¬ 
 judices that are associated with its ad¬ 
 ministration as a whole are the opinions 
 and the prejudices of the higher and upper- 
 middle classes, rather than of the wage- 
 earners. This becomes the more apparent 
 if you contrast the Church of England 
 in this respect with the Roman Catholic 
 Church in Ireland or with the Presbyterian 
 Churches of Scotland—at least as they have 
 stood, up to the rise of the vast industrial 
 cities, like Glasgow or Dundee, where I 
 suppose that ‘ labour ’ stands as much 
 aloof from any existing religious organiza¬ 
 tion as in our English cities. 
 
 But I return to the Church of England, 
 and to our confessed failure to be the 
 church of the people in an effective sense 
 in town or country. It is, I believe, the 
 chief test of the vitality of a church of 
 Christ in any country that it should repre- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 283 
 
 sent the poor, the wage-earners, those who 
 live by manual labour; that it should be 
 a community in which religion works up¬ 
 ward from below. There is our great 
 failure. In the older feudal constitution 
 of things in the country, or in the older 
 industrial period in the towns, when the 
 masters lived surrounded by their ‘ hands,’ 
 it might have been supposed possible for 
 a church specially identified with the point 
 of view of the then governing classes still 
 to be the church of the whole community. 
 But the state of things has passed away. 
 Capital and Labour are names now for great 
 class interests and organizations represent¬ 
 ing men in masses, and the church finds 
 itself in fact, and on the whole, moving in 
 the grooves which are precisely those from 
 which Christ warned us off; it finds itself 
 expressing the point of view which is 
 precisely not that which Christ chose for 
 His church. 
 
 Can this be doubted ? Let us judge by 
 the officers of the church. The incomes 
 of the bishops range us, and are meant to 
 range us, in our manner of life, with the 
 wealthier classes, the squires or magnates 
 of the county, the great merchants of the 
 
284 the church and the poor 
 
 towns, with whom all our education has 
 accustomed us to associate and to feel. 
 Our incumbents and clergy, with their 
 wives and families, have their natural 
 friends among the gentry or professional 
 classes. It is quite rare to find an artisan 
 or his wife really at home with the clergy. 
 At every point we find ourselves depending 
 upon the support of the capitalist. Our 
 whole system of church charity expresses 
 a bounty administered out of benevolent 
 feeling, by a wealth which makes no apology 
 for enjoying itself, to a poverty which it 
 makes no pretence to share. Our church 
 meetings for counsel only rarely, even in 
 parishes, much more rarely in rural 
 deaneries, never in Houses of Laymen or 
 Church Congresses, discover or express the 
 point of view of the artisan, except by an 
 exceptional effort made for a particular 
 occasion. Committees of church ladies for 
 all sorts of purposes acquiesce in an attitude 
 of patronage towards the wife of the 
 artisan, even more markedly than com¬ 
 mittees of church laymen. The arrange¬ 
 ments of the great majority of our churches 
 in country and town, in spite of the quite 
 unmistakable language of St. James, and, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 285 
 
 I must add, in startling contrast to the 
 churches of Roman Catholic Europe in 
 almost all parts—give a marked preference 
 to the well-off. 
 
 I have said before that, with all this, we 
 have laboured very hard for the poor and 
 amongst them. At the hand of Him who 
 said, ‘ Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
 one of the least of these my brethren, ye 
 have done it unto me/ there is laid up a 
 rich store of benediction for men and 
 women, priests and laymen innumerable, 
 whose unselfish, unremitting, unrequited 
 toil is really known only in the heart of our 
 Lord. That is our real comfort. We are 
 sure that all this labour will not be in vain. 
 It , as it were, authorizes us to claim illu¬ 
 mination and guidance in reversing the 
 great wrong and in averting the great 
 judgement, or rather it authorizes us to 
 claim strength to make the right use of 
 divine chastisements. But meanwhile the 
 facts are as I have stated them. I hardly 
 think the truth of what I have been saying 
 can be denied on the whole. The question 
 which ought to hold a prerogative place 
 in the interests of churchmen is, how we 
 are to return to a condition of things nearer 
 
286 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 to the intention of Christ—if it may be, 
 without violence or revolution, but, if not, 
 then anyhow to return. 
 
 But this—suggestion of remedies—is not 
 the first thing. The first thing is that we 
 should, in the whole bulk of the church, 
 feel and acknowledge, in deep penitence, 
 that we are on wrong lines, so that at 
 present our very victories must prove 
 barren. This sermon is only the cry of a 
 permanently troubled conscience which can¬ 
 not see its way. Certainly no one has a 
 right to speak with any degree of self- 
 satisfaction or contemptuously of others’ 
 failures. The worst feature of the present 
 ‘ catholic movement ’ in the Church of 
 England is that its more prominent organs 
 and representatives seem to be so ready 
 to speak scornfully of others, and so little 
 conscious of the failure of the catholic 
 movement really, on any considerable scale, 
 to do the proper work of a Christian church 
 by becoming identified with the working 
 people. Meanwhile, we may trustfully feel 
 that the work which has been done so 
 zealously and faithfully for the poor gives 
 us the best ground for expecting an answer 
 to our penitent prayers. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 287 
 
 I have no time to do more than barely 
 enumerate what seem to me to be some 
 lines of hopeful recovery. 
 
 1. First of all, I would say, the church 
 must set itself deliberately and of set 
 purpose, as far as possible, to get rid of 
 the administration of poor relief. We must 
 deliberately set ourselves to dissociate the 
 administration of relief from the ministry 
 of the word and sacraments, and to asso¬ 
 ciate it with the state, the municipality, 
 and voluntary organizations of citizens on 
 a purely secular basis. Our Lord’s and His 
 apostles’ miraculous ministries of help to 
 the sick and needy afford very little analogy 
 for our present methods. You know the 
 famous story of the Pope, luxuriating in 
 the wealth of his Jubilee-offering, and 
 saying to the saint by his side, ‘ Peter 
 cannot say now, “ Silver and gold have I 
 none,” ’ and how the saint replied, ‘No, 
 your Blessedness ; neither can he say now, 
 “ In the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and 
 walk.” ’ The church can do its utmost to 
 relieve the poor in any way love can sug¬ 
 gest, if it be itself poor and of the poor. 
 But where the charity of the church is 
 understood to mean the patronage of the 
 
\ 
 
 288 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 rich, it can do nothing without disaster. 
 I am quite sure that our first and most 
 necessary step towards regaining our right¬ 
 ful place in the regard of labour is to take 
 the administration of relief-money almost 
 altogether out of the hands of our clergy 
 and church-workers, and to let it be so 
 administered, and by such hands, as that 
 none may think they can either merit it or 
 lose it by attendance or failure to attend 
 at the services of the church. It is not 
 possible to exaggerate how alienating an 
 effect upon exactly that type of independent 
 labour on which our Lord most relied, is 
 exercised by our present system of ad¬ 
 ministering alms. Here, then, is one of 
 the first and most necessary steps of our 
 redemption, and till this is taken all else 
 will be in vain—I mean, till it has ceased 
 to be a plausible taunt that a man or 
 woman goes to church for what can be got. 
 
 2. Secondly, we want to make the most 
 of what we have already. We have a 
 really considerable body of communicants 
 who are artisans ; but we need to give 
 them their true place and influence, and 
 to mass them, so that their corporate 
 effect shall tell. We must prevent the 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 289 
 
 parishioners of poor parishes being ousted, 
 or put into a secondary place, by those 
 who come from outside. We must dili¬ 
 gently consult their tastes and convenience 
 in respect of the services, hours, and 
 arrangements. We must do our utmost 
 to let them feel that the management of 
 church affairs is in their hands. In matters 
 not belonging to the church’s essential 
 order, their mistakes are likely to be more 
 profitable than wiser judgements which are 
 not yet their own. We must take the most 
 serious pains to bring it about that they 
 shall be represented, in sufficient number 
 to make them feel at home, in ruridecanal 
 meetings, and then, gradually, in diocesan 
 assemblies and in the Houses of Laymen. 
 
 3. To do all this safely, we must act on 
 the basis of a true sacerdotalism. The 
 ministerial priesthood is in charge of the 
 word and sacraments. It is the duty of 
 the priesthood to maintain unflinchingly the 
 catholic heritage ; to suffer no tampering 
 with those things which catholic authority 
 has laid down, or the authority of our 
 own part of the church. But, after all, 
 many of our characteristic arrangements 
 stand, not by catholic authority, but by 
 
 *9 
 
290 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 the force of use and wont, and pure, un¬ 
 reasoning conservatism. And it is part of 
 a true sacerdotalism that the clergy should 
 help every confirmed person to claim his 
 or her place in the priestly body, and 
 should learn to act, or at least sincerely 
 desire to act (how far we are yet off that !) 
 on the apostolic pattern—‘ It is not meet 
 that we should leave the word of God to 
 serve tables. . . . We will give ourselves 
 to prayer and to the ministry of the word/ 
 To be effective ministers of the word and 
 sacraments—that is the special business of 
 the clergy. Here we have entrusted to 
 us the principles and the instruments of 
 the true socialism, and the safeguards 
 against the false and misleading socialism 
 which ignores the fact of sin and the need 
 of personal redemption. Oh ! how differ¬ 
 ent would be the position of the church 
 if we clergy would sacrifice everything to 
 concentrate ourselves upon really bringing 
 out the social meaning of our sacraments, 
 upon really understanding and giving voice 
 to the spirit of Christian brotherhood, 
 upon really making ourselves the organs 
 for expressing social justice and uttering 
 effectively the divine wrath upon all that 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 291 
 
 degrades and crushes the weak and igno¬ 
 rant and poor! Oh ! how different would 
 be our moral appeal if Christ’s claim upon 
 wealth—Christ’s claim for great sacrifices, 
 great abandonments, as the normal ex¬ 
 hibitions of a converted heart—were really 
 once again the claim of the actual church 
 upon the clergy and laity! 
 
 In all this I am only asking that we should, 
 in penitence and prayer, give ourselves to 
 teaching the faith and practice of Christen¬ 
 dom as it is in the Bible. How quickly, then, 
 would many of the questions which now 
 bulk biggest as * church questions ’ take 
 a very subordinate place ! 
 
 Truly we have protected the letter of 
 Scripture, while its spirit of judgement and 
 justice was being ignored ; we have con¬ 
 tended for ceremonial liberty, while the 
 fundamental meaning of our sacraments 
 of brotherhood was being parodied by 
 a miserable religious selfishness. 
 
 4. Once more, we must dissociate the 
 clergy from being identified with the 
 wealthier classes. We who know may say 
 much to palliate the scale of our episcopal 
 incomes. But nothing we can ever say 
 will obliterate the false impression which 
 
292 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 our present system makes upon the imagi¬ 
 nation of the classes of labour. It would 
 be an immense improvement if the bishop 
 received a very much smaller personal 
 salary, with allowances for official expenses, 
 and with a fund for diocesan objects put 
 at his disposal, of which he should give 
 public account. 
 
 With the mass of benefieed and un¬ 
 beneficed clergy there is at least no difficulty 
 from excess of income. What we want to 
 do is to gain, what we at present largely 
 lose, the moral advantages of small in¬ 
 comes. We need, and we are, thank God, 
 realizing the need, to lay open the way 
 to holy orders to promising young men 
 of every class. We must provide for their 
 receiving, fully and adequately, an educa¬ 
 tion liberal and theological. What we 
 want to secure is that, while we train 
 their minds and characters, we should 
 not suffer those of them who are sons of 
 working parents to lose in the process the 
 sympathies and tastes of the best of those 
 amongst whom they had their origin. We 
 want to secure, so far as we can, that 
 when they are ordained, their houses and 
 their tables shall be such that those of the 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 293 
 
 class they come from should feel themselves 
 at home with them, as they do with the 
 clergy of some other countries. We want 
 utterly to rid ourselves, as of a shameful 
 thing, of the sense that a clergyman whose 
 original home was a workman's home 
 should desire to conceal it. There is no 
 reason in the world, if there were but more 
 of the Christian spirit among Churchmen, 
 why our clerical estate should not come to 
 be utterly freed from the association of 
 class. The real remedy for the evils sup¬ 
 posed to be incidental to such a state of 
 things lies in the requirement of an ade¬ 
 quate training before ordination. 
 
 ‘ These things are difficult. Such funda¬ 
 mental social changes are hard to bring 
 about. We are an unimaginative and con¬ 
 servative people.' True, quite true. But 
 the beginnings are in prayer and penitence 
 and right desire, and in giving the first 
 place in our minds and counsels to the 
 matters that are really of first importance. 
 Meanwhile we must all continue to do our 
 best in the states of life into which it has 
 pleased, or shall please, God to call us. 
 
 When our Lord came into the world as 
 man He found the ecclesiastics of His time 
 
294 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 
 
 and the church parties of His time occupied 
 upon the wrong problems, intent upon the 
 wrong subjects of thought, or at least 
 putting them in the wrong order. They 
 were conservative of things as they were. 
 Their eyes were not open to fresh light. 
 Thus, seeking their own righteousness, they 
 refused to submit themselves to the right¬ 
 eousness of God. 
 
 May God give us grace, us who are the 
 representatives of the church of God in 
 this land to-day, not so to excuse ourselves, 
 by the pleas of natural conservatism and 
 natural disposition, as to miss His funda¬ 
 mental message for us in our time! 
 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 295 
 
MORAL WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 
 ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 
 
 A REPORT PRESENTED TO THE HOUSES 
 OF CONVOCATION OF CANTERBURY BY 
 A JOINT COMMITTEE (April 16 , 1907) 1 
 
 The subject with which your Committee was specially 
 appointed to deal, viz. the moral witness which the 
 Church ought to bear against certain misuses of 
 money, seemed to us to require, as a preliminary, 
 some more general consideration of those positive 
 principles involved in the production, accumulation, 
 and distribution of wealth which are properly Christian 
 and in the light of which current practices must be 
 judged. 
 
 Accordingly, a Sub-Committee was appointed which 
 sought and received communications from a number 
 of students of Christian ethics and of current 
 economics, and from some business men and others 
 interested in social reform. Others allowed the 
 Sub-Committee to receive them and ask them ques¬ 
 tions. On the basis of these communications, written 
 and oral, the following report has been drawn up, 
 and is presented. 
 
 1 This Report must be taken as having the authority 
 only of the Committee by which it was prepared. (Sold 
 by S.P.C.K. and National Society.) 
 
 297 
 
298 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 I. The Changes in the Economic View .—There is 
 no doubt that the change which of recent years has 
 come over the attitude of economists towards ethical 
 questions gives the Christian Church a fresh oppor¬ 
 tunity. The old political economy thought it neces¬ 
 sary to isolate the study of the production and 
 distribution of wealth ; to deal with it as if no 
 motive were to be admitted into this economic region 
 except the selfish desire of the individual to enrich 
 himself. Abstract laws of supply and demand, in 
 combination with a certain theory of population 
 (Malthus), were supposed to rule out in the scientific 
 treatment of commerce and industry all questions 
 of justice and mercy to the wage-earners, and all 
 moral considerations in the relations between em¬ 
 ployers and employed. An economic world was 
 postulated in which there was nothing but individuals, 
 each free to pursue, and certain to pursue, his own 
 interest. But, abstract and hypothetical as this 
 economic science professed to be, it ministered un¬ 
 doubtedly to the common human tendency to regard 
 commercial and economic dealings as outside the 
 control of morality and religion. And in spite of 
 the protests of some deep-seeing men (Carlyle, 
 Maurice, Ruskin), the Christian Church allowed itself 
 to be silenced by the terrors of supposed inexorable 
 laws. 
 
 But a great change has passed over economics, 
 most of all in Germany, but also in other countries, 
 including England. It has been found that the 
 abstract science was too abstract to be applicable 
 to facts. A man, though engaged in making his 
 living or his fortune, still remains a man, influenced 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 299 
 
 by manifold passions, prejudices, and feelings, which 
 in countless ways disturb the action of the purely 
 economic motive, or the desire to buy in the cheapest 
 and sell in the dearest market. Moreover, the 
 majority of men are found to be not free to bargain, 
 or to pursue their own interests. They are too 
 weak and ignorant. They cannot move freely. 
 They are exploited by the strong. This very weak¬ 
 ness and ignorance is in itself an economic loss. The 
 ‘ cheapest ’ labour proves to be often the dearest. 
 For the truly cheapest labour (in the long run) is 
 the most efficient labour ; and experience is now 
 showing that, in far more cases than might be sup¬ 
 posed, the gain in the efficiency of the workman, which 
 follows upon such an improvement in his standard 
 of living as secures for him better food and more 
 wholesome surroundings, more than outweighs the 
 additional cost. 
 
 Wealth again is more clearly recognized by the 
 present generation of economists to be a means 
 rather than an end. Mere production of material 
 commodities is not considered as the matter of chief 
 importance. The real end of industrial organization 
 is to combine efficient production with such a dis¬ 
 tribution of the commodities produced, as will 
 enable the greatest number of people to find a full 
 opportunity of self-realization and joy. The true 
 riches of a nation are vigorous and happy men and 
 women, willingly and intelligently co-operating for 
 the good of the community. 
 
 II. Christian Principles of Society .—An economic 
 science which exhibits this new tendency is no longer 
 an antagonist to Christian principles. Christianity 
 
3 °o 
 
 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 can breathe freely again in the atmosphere which it 
 generates. For what are the fundamental social 
 principles of Christianity ? We may state them as 
 follows : First of all, Christianity inherited from 
 the Old Testament certain social principles, in part 
 embodied in the Law and in part enforced by the 
 prophets and moralists. Thus we find in the Old 
 Testament a profound regard for the poor and help¬ 
 less (widows and orphans), 1 a reiterated denuncia¬ 
 tion of those who exact their labour without 
 paying them a sufficient wage. 2 * The Lord will 
 enter into judgement with the elders of his people, 
 and the princes thereof : It is ye that have eaten 
 up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is in your 
 houses. What mean ye that ye crush my people, 
 and grind the face of the poor ? saith the Lord, the 
 Lord of Hosts.’ 3 The tendency of the legislation 
 was to raise the status of the Israelite slave to that 
 of the hired workman, who was to be treated as a 
 ‘ brother.’ 4 * 
 
 We find a prohibition of usury between Israelite 
 and Israelite 6 ; and provision is taken against the 
 
 1 Amos v. 12 ; Isa. i. 17, 23, x. 2 ; Jer. vii. 5 f., xxii. 3 ; 
 Deut. x. 18, xxiv. 17 f., xxvii. 19. 
 
 2 Deut. xxiv. 14 f. ; Jer. xxii. 13; Lev. xix. 13; 
 Mai. iii. 5. 
 
 3 Isa. iii. 14, 15. 
 
 4 Hastings’ Diet. iv. 465 ; cf. Lev. xxv. 39 f. 
 
 6 Exod. xxii. 25 f. ; Lev. xxv. 35-37. This was in 
 the Old Testament a provision for the protection of the 
 poor. There is no reference to it in the New Testament, 
 nor need we enter into the later discussions on the 
 
 subject. 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 3OI 
 
 permanent alienation of the land 1 ; various enact¬ 
 ments protect labour—e.g. the danger of falling from 
 a roof is to be averted by a railing. 2 The general 
 well-being is a supreme consideration, restricting 
 the selfish acquisition of wealth. Luxury is de¬ 
 nounced. 3 4 Manual labour is held in honour ; it is 
 the necessary basis of all society; the labourers 
 ‘ maintain the fabric of the age ; and in the handi¬ 
 work of their craft is their prayer ’—i.e. for them 
 labor are est or are.* 
 
 Christianity did not take over the formal legisla¬ 
 tion of the Old Testament, but it did inherit its moral 
 principles, * which J esus Christ deepened and uni¬ 
 versalized. The ‘ neighbour ' to whom we owe duty 
 is now not the fellow member of the Jewish race, 
 but it is every man who has need, though in a special 
 sense the fellow-Christian. The Christian is ‘ to 
 love his neighbour as himself ’; that is, he is not to 
 regard any other person as an instrument for his own 
 advantage, but to consider his brother’s interest and 
 well-being, as he considers his own. This is the law 
 of love. Moreover, Christianity assigns to every 
 individual soul or life an absolute and infinite worth 
 which makes it once for all impossible to sanction 
 any one being treated as a mere means to another’s 
 
 1 Lev. xxv. 10, 13 ; cf. Isa. v. 8, against the accumula¬ 
 tion of the land in a few hands. 
 
 2 Deut. xxii. 8. The regulation about sanitation in 
 the camp is interesting. Deut. xxiii. 12-14. 
 
 3 Amos iii. 15, vi. 1 f. 
 
 4 Ecclus. xxxviii. 24-34. 
 
 6 e.g. S. James takes up the language of the Old 
 Testament prophets about wealth and wages (v. 1-5). 
 
302 
 
 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 end. The Christian society is a body in which the 
 interest of the whole and of every part is the governing 
 law for every member. The Christian ethic is thus 
 essentially social. And a special reverence is due to 
 the helpless and weak. They are the ‘ little ones ’ 
 whom we are not to offend. Christ died for the 
 weak, as for the strong ; and 1 there is no respect of 
 persons with God.’ Moreover, all the members of 
 the body, whether more or less important, depend 
 one on another, and the suffering of any member 
 of the body is the concern of all. 1 Thus the law of 
 the Christian’s life is the service of the brethren. He 
 is set ‘ not to be ministered unto, but to minister/ 
 His aim is to serve, not to get as much as he can for 
 himself. There lies upon each one the duty of work, 
 that he may ‘ eat his own bread/ 3 Indeed, St. Paul 
 states the law sharply : ‘ If a man will not work, 
 
 neither let him eat/ Moreover, work is regarded 
 as a means of co-operating with a divine purpose 
 of love. It is not to be a means for the selfish ac¬ 
 cumulation of wealth. The individual wants are 
 to be sternly restricted. Luxury is no more allowed 
 than idleness. Stern warnings are uttered regarding 
 the pursuit of riches. 3 Each is to work with his own 
 hands that he may support the weak, 4 or that he 
 may ‘ have to give to him that needeth/ 5 
 
 It is true that all this social conception regards 
 primarily the Christian body, ‘ the brethren/ But 
 there are indications in the New Testament itself that 
 it is to be extended to society at large. The Christian 
 
 1 i Cor. xii. 22-27. 4 Acts xx. 35. 
 
 2 2 Thess. iii. 10-13. 6 Eph* iv. 28. 
 
 3 1 Tim. vi. 8-10. 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 303 
 
 is to ‘ honour all men,’ as well as to * love the 
 brotherhood ’ ; the ‘ love of the brethren ’ is to 
 extend itself into universal ‘ love.' 1 The State, 
 as well as the Church, is regarded as a divine 
 institution, even though Pagan 2 ; its ministers are 
 God’s ministers ; and the idea of public spirit is 
 thus extended (so far as circumstances allow) from 
 the Church to the State. 
 
 We are persuaded that in the effective reassertion 
 of such Christian principles lies the present opportunity 
 of the Church and one of its chief duties as a witness 
 for Christ. We are persuaded that some of the 
 matters which have held, and still hold, the first place 
 in ecclesiastical or clerical interest are such as the 
 New Testament would lead us to believe to be of 
 quite minor importance. We are further persuaded 
 that the idea of individual salvation has been dis¬ 
 astrously isolated in Christian teaching and in 
 current Christian belief from the social idea of original 
 Christianity and the teaching of brotherhood. It 
 was largely because the Church appeared as a society 
 making the welfare of all its members its controlling 
 principle in the acquisition and distribution of wealth, 
 that it made the great progress which history records 
 in the world of the Roman Empire. 3 That at least 
 was one of the chief factors of the impression which 
 it made upon men’s hearts and consciences. In our 
 day it appears that the re-enforcement of the obliga¬ 
 tions of brotherhood is what is needed to rekindle 
 
 1 1 Pet. ii. 17 ; 2 Pet. i. 7. 
 
 2 Rom. xiii. ; 1 Tim. ii. 1, 2 ; 1 Pet. ii. 13-17. 
 
 3 See, for instance, Harnack’s Expansion of Christianity , 
 vol. i., pp. 183-249. 
 
304 
 
 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 among the mass of the workers the perception of the 
 supreme worth of Christianity. 
 
 But apart altogether from such questions of present 
 opportunity, the Christian doctrines of the Father¬ 
 hood of God and of the Incarnation imply the teaching 
 of brotherhood with all its social consequences. The 
 Christian cannot fail to recognize that Christ, our 
 Master and our severe Judge, holds us responsible 
 for every one of His members whose life has been 
 wasted by our common neglect. 
 
 III. The Duty of the Christian as an Individual .— 
 In view, then, of the economic change described above 
 and of the Christian principles of society which we 
 have endeavoured to indicate, what are the matters to 
 which the moral witness of the Church should be 
 specially directed at the present time ? 
 
 In part what is needed is that the Church should 
 teach the individual his duty to his neighbour more 
 completely, and with more reference to actual con¬ 
 ditions. We have heard too much of the rights of 
 property. We have heard enough of the duties of 
 property towards the Church in its narrower 
 sense. But we have heard too little (from the 
 authorized Christian teacher) of the fundamental 
 Christian principles in respect of ‘ getting ’ and 
 * spending.’ 
 
 The duty of the Christian as an individual may 
 be considered in three ways ; he may be regarded 
 (i) as a worker, (2) as a capitalist and employer, 
 and (3) as a consumer. 
 
 (1) The Church should declare that the first duty 
 of the Christian, whatever may be his circumstances, 
 is that of work; for every man according to his 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 305 
 
 ability must contribute by his service to the common 
 well-being. Idleness, whether it is that of the rich 
 or the poor man, is an offence against God and man. 
 And by work we ought to mean the sincere applica¬ 
 tion of all the man's faculties to his business ‘ in 
 that state of life unto which it shall please God to 
 call him.’ The shirker and the trifler in any class 
 of society are men who have failed to recognize the 
 claim of God upon them. 
 
 (2) The Church should teach that the Christian 
 who is an owner of property must recognize that, 
 whether he has inherited or acquired it, he holds it 
 as a sacred trust. He has indeed, for good or evil, as 
 society is now organized, legal authority, within 
 certain limits, over the manner in which it is used, 
 but before God his authority is that of a trustee for 
 society, not of an absolute owner. 
 
 And especially, the owner of property as an em¬ 
 ployer must remember that he is responsible for the 
 conditions under which his business is carried on. 
 The Christian Church which holds that the individual 
 life is sacred, must teach that it is intolerable to it 
 that any part of our industry should be organized 
 upon the foundation of the misery and want of the 
 labourer. The fundamental Christian principle of 
 the remuneration of labour is that the first charge 
 upon any industry must be the proper maintenance 
 of the labourer—an idea which it has been sought to 
 express in popular language by the phrase ‘ the 
 living wage.’ 
 
 The Church should also urge upon its members the 
 moral, as distinct from the legal obligation, of pro¬ 
 viding and making efficient whatever in the way of 
 
 20 
 
MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 306 
 
 apparatus or arrangements is necessary to safeguard 
 the life and health of the worker. 
 
 (3) The Church should teach the moral responsibility 
 of the consumer ; that is, that no Christian has the 
 right to demand commodities at a price which he 
 knows, or can ascertain, to be incompatible with the 
 adequate remuneration of the workers and proper 
 conditions of industry; or, again, by deferring pay¬ 
 ment, to render it more difficult to secure these objects. 
 
 But in carrying out such ideas of a man’s duty the 
 individual by himself is no doubt hampered in a 
 thousand ways. The single employer or capitalist is 
 often almost as powerless to alter the system of which 
 he is a part as is a labourer. When f the system ’ 
 makes it necessary for him to do what his conscience 
 condemns, he can of course, with whatever difficulty, 
 refuse to do it, and suffer the financial loss or ruin 
 involved. We have almost dropped out of our 
 current Christian teaching the idea that a Christian 
 may be called upon to make any great financial or 
 other sacrifice for conscience’ sake. But it is doubtful 
 whether any more effective instrument of reform in 
 our industrial or financial system could be found than 
 the multiplication of such protests of the individual 
 conscience against wrong, which at present are made 
 but rarely. We believe that nothing would so effectu¬ 
 ally stir the common conscience as such examples of 
 splendid renunciation. 
 
 IV. The Duty of the Christian as Citizen .—But 
 undoubtedly, as we have said, the individual by his 
 private action is able to do little to alter what is 
 amiss. The law must help—that is the expressed 
 will and power of the whole community; and all 
 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 307 
 
 serious students of society are at the present time 
 ready to recognize this. Hardly any one could be 
 found to advocate a return to the 1 laissez faire ’ 
 policy of the days preceding the Factory Acts. Here 
 then we touch a new department of duty. The 
 individual Christian is also a citizen. As a citizen he 
 must inform himself on economic matters and take 
 his share in public service. 
 
 Thus (1) he must support the existing law in the 
 restrictions which it imposes upon the methods 
 actually pursued in the production of wealth. 
 
 At present we are, as a nation, much more jealous 
 for the maintenance of the laws which exist for the 
 protection of property than of those which exist for 
 the protection of the worker. These latter are at 
 present in many cases ignored or violated—through 
 the fault both of employers and of the workers them¬ 
 selves. But they embody the attempt of our society 
 as a whole to protect its weak and ignorant members 
 against others and against themselves. They are thus 
 among the most important elements in our legislation, 
 and what is necessary is that society as a whole 
 should rally to their support, for in fact it is the 
 absence of a sufficient public opinion which often 
 makes them a dead letter. In this matter the 
 Church has the responsibility (which it has certainly 
 not realized hitherto) of teaching its members their 
 duty as individuals. And moreover it has at its 
 disposal a parochial machinery extending all over 
 the land which, valuable as it is at present, might 
 be made much more valuable if there were a wider 
 diffusion among its workers of necessary information. 
 The district visitors who are at work in almost all 
 
3 o8 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 parishes of our Church might, if properly instructed in 
 the rudiments of industrial and sanitary law, without 
 unwelcome interference, do a great deal to promote 
 its observance and to defend the poor against their 
 own carelessness and ignorance. 
 
 (2) But the maintenance of the existing law is 
 only one aspect of the Christian man’s duty as a 
 citizen. It is time, we think, that the Christian 
 Church should make clear to itself the nature of the 
 demand for the reconstruction of society which is 
 at present urged upon us. Behind the more technical 
 (industrial and political) proposals, lies a fundamental 
 appeal for justice, which the Christian Church cannot 
 ignore. It is bound to make a much more thorough 
 endeavour than it has yet made to appreciate this 
 appeal in all its bearings, and to consider whether 
 the charge made against the present constitution 
 and principles of the industrial world, and the present 
 division of the profits of industry, is a just charge. 
 Certainly the Christian society is competent to deal 
 with the fundamental moral question, and is bound 
 to press upon its members the duty of facing it. 
 
 Then, in consequence of such deepened reflection 
 upon the fundamental moral issue, it is undoubtedly 
 the case that we shall need an advance in our present 
 law touching social and industrial problems. It 
 is time, we think, that the Christian conscience of the 
 country voted urgency among parliamentary and 
 municipal questions for all the group of problems 
 which concern the grossly unequal distribution of 
 wealth and well-being ; the waste of life and capacity 
 through lack of proper nourishment and training ; 
 the sweating of women’s and children’s labour ; the 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 309 
 
 deficiency, in the surroundings of so many, of those 
 things which are the ordinary essentials of physical 
 and moral well-being. 
 
 We do not desire that the Church as a body should 
 take a side with this or that political party ; nor, 
 again, that the Church should favour any one class. 
 We would have it apply its moral teaching to all 
 classes indifferently, to the labourer as to the employer. 
 There is as much need to teach the workman the 
 duty of conscientious and efficient work, as to teach 
 the employer his responsibility in dealing with his 
 workmen; and there is perhaps quite as much 
 misuse of money at the present time among the poor 
 as among the rich, relatively to what they receive. 
 But with whatever class the Church is dealing, we 
 are convinced that it has a teaching which it ought 
 to give on all matters which concern the acquisition 
 and distribution of wealth, in its bearing on human 
 lives ; and that this teaching involves not only 
 private effort, but municipal and political reforms. 
 Thus we want the Church as a body to come forward 
 to the support of such legislation as embodies or 
 tends to render more practicable the Christian view 
 of the worth and meaning of human life, and the 
 belief in the divine principle of justice. 
 
 (3) It is no doubt the case that any industrial 
 readjustment may involve an increase in the financial 
 burden upon the community, temporary or permanent. 
 This is a complicated question. It will of course be 
 urged that a better industrial system will, in the 
 long run, increase and not diminish the wealth of 
 the community. But this question we do not touch. 
 Only we are sure that for the Christian citizen there 
 
3 IO 
 
 MORAL WITNESS OF THE 
 
 are public objects for the attainment of which public 
 expenditure is to be accepted voluntarily and not 
 grudgingly. 
 
 Thus we want ever) 7 Christian to set himself against 
 the false but very prevalent view that the contribu¬ 
 tions from income which are required of every 
 citizen for public purposes are on the whole to be 
 regarded as burdens which it is natural to resent, 
 and even, where possible, to evade. The Christian 
 conscience ought surely to approve in principle of a 
 large public expenditure on objects which are cal¬ 
 culated to strengthen and enrich the common life. 
 
 We cannot leave this part of the subject without 
 urging that the Christian, and, we must add, more 
 particularly the Churchman, ought to be ready to 
 make the sacrifices of various kinds which are involved 
 in standing for, and holding, municipal and public 
 offices ; and whether as a voter, or himself an officer 
 of the community, we must look to him to maintain 
 the fundamentally Christian principle as to the 
 woith of human life, and as to the duty of the whole 
 community towards its weakest members. 
 
 (4) Finally, we feel that the existing methods by 
 which the Church relieves the poor—that is, the 
 administration of ‘ charity ’ by the Church, as by 
 Christian bodies generally—has been shown in its 
 results to be singularly unproductive of permanent 
 good. ‘ As regards the poor, the results have not 
 proved satisfactory in the past, and neither response 
 nor result are greatly different now.’ 1 On the other 
 
 1 Booth’s Life and Labour, 3rd Series, vol. vii., pp. 406 ff. 
 The agreement among men of experience on this subject 
 is very impressive. 
 
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 3 1 I 
 
 hand the existing system is responsible for much 
 alienation from the Church, and from religious 
 worship, of self-respecting workers, who are afraid of 
 being supposed to come ‘ for what they can get.’ 
 We think that such considerations as we have urged 
 above will tend, not indeed to make Christians dis¬ 
 parage or neglect the duty and privilege of almsgiving, 
 but to make them feel that something more is wanted 
 than improvements in our methods of administering 
 charitable relief. We have to go deeper to the 
 grounds of the existing misery and want and un¬ 
 employment ; and, while we do our best to deal 
 with the present distress, direct our chief attention 
 towards furthering the reorganization of society 
 on such principles of justice as will tend to reduce 
 poverty and misery in the future to more manageable 
 proportions. 
 
 Printed by Haiell, Watson & Viney, Li., London and Aylesbury, England. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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