tihvavy of Che Cheolo^icd ^tmxmvy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The I::Ftate of the 
 Rev. John B. V/iedinsf-er 
 
 E^-« :^-L^ 
 
 BS 2665 .H89 
 
 Hutton, John Alexander, isl 
 -1947. j 
 If God be for us ^ 
 
If God be for Us 
 
IF GOD BE FOR 
 
 BY THE REVEREND 
 
 JOHN A. HUTTON, M.A. 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
To 
 
 MY SISTER AGNES 
 
 Mrs. Carroll Neidb Brown 
 
 Printed in 1913 
 
Chapter I 
 
" What shall we say to these things ? K God be for 
 us, who is against us? " 
 
Chapter I 
 
 The task which I propose to myself in 
 this and a few subsequent studies is to 
 make clear to my own mind, and to 
 enter with sympathy and understanding, 
 the world of ideas, of beliefs, of fears, of 
 protests, which lies behind that pas- 
 sionate and militant passage at the close 
 of our eighth chapter of St, Paul's letter 
 to the Romans. 
 
 It is one of those great passages — the 
 fortieth chapter of Isaiah is another 
 — which, by virtue of their spaciousness 
 and exaltation, their simplicity and their 
 ultimateness, rise like peaks out of a 
 tumult of mountains — final ventures of 
 the human spirit into the region of ab- 
 solute truth. They are truly eloquent 
 words, entirely free, indeed, from the 
 affectation and self-consciousness of the 
 lower eloquence. They stagger with the 
 
 3 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 burden of reality, yet glow and leap with 
 a passion which I do not know how to 
 define except to say that it rests upon a 
 kind of terror if it should all prove 
 untrue. 
 
 I think that is a note of all really moving 
 speech. We feel as we listen that the 
 whole of our life is being concentrated 
 into one hope, one interest, one point 
 of view. One thing after another we 
 leave behind. One thing after another, 
 in the triumph of our spirits, we feel that 
 we can dispense with and even despise. 
 Thus we rise and rise into an intense 
 solitude, above thought, though still 
 thinking, knowing only that it is well 
 with our soul, that this is life and truth 
 and reality : and what makes the poig- 
 nancy of the experience is that now we 
 have gone so far that we cannot come 
 back. We must find some resting-place, 
 some justification for our journey. We are 
 like swimmers who have gone too far 
 into the depths to return, who must 
 go on now towards the other shore : or 
 
 4 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 like the dove from Noah's ark, which 
 must find a place to rest itself out of the 
 vortex of the dark floods. And blessed 
 indeed are they whose lonely minds, 
 voyaging through the Infinite, find, like 
 that dove, a leaf — some token of God 
 from that world of realities — ^which they 
 may bear back with them into the world 
 of their daily experience. 
 
 As we yield ourselves up to the passion 
 of such words and ideas as are in this 
 eighth chapter of Romans, we arrive at 
 some such promontory in the Spirit- world. 
 We feel that this is truth, or there is no 
 such thing as truth for man. 
 
 Now, it might be said that such a 
 passage as this with which the eighth 
 chapter of Romans concludes, simply 
 because it is so eloquent and rhetorical, 
 is unsuitable for purposes of exposition : 
 that we must not apply to the inter- 
 pretation of words a spirit different from 
 that in which they were conceived : that 
 to apply the critical reason to words 
 which evidently broke from St. Paul's 
 
 5 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 soul in a torrent is as incongruous as it 
 would be to measure light with a foot- 
 rule, or to interrupt the influence of 
 music by speaking in an arid way of the 
 mechanics of sound. It takes a poet to 
 estimate poetry : and when we do estim- 
 ate poetry, it is by virtue of the poet 
 who still survives within each one of us. 
 The objection is a sound one, and 
 ought to be attended to by many. But 
 it does not apply to the intention which 
 is in my own mind. It is perfectly true 
 that an outpouring like this, which begins 
 with " Who shall separate us ? " — an 
 outpouring which is, by every token, 
 spontaneous and passionate, is not to be 
 subjected to any cold or formal inquiry. 
 I do not propose to consider the passage 
 coldly, and as a thing which may or 
 may not be true. I wish, not to consider 
 the words at all, but rather to feel their 
 rush and volume, to rebuke myself all 
 the time that there is so little in my own 
 life comparable to this passion and con- 
 fidence : to envy this man, the depths of 
 
 6 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 whose life rested so securely upon God. 
 I wish rather to feel the greatness of his 
 soul. 
 
 It is quite true also that in the case 
 of some kinds of so-called eloquence a 
 writer or speaker, far from giving any 
 indication of his true personality, dis- 
 guises and conceals himself. Words and 
 gestures may be assumed for the occasion, 
 and with a view to effect. In this they 
 may even succeed, but it is a poor success. 
 The speaker or writer has approved him- 
 self as a good tradesman in his particular 
 craft, but he has not unveiled the face 
 of truth. 
 
 In a moment of true eloquence, on the 
 other hand, a writer or a speaker permits 
 those who have ears to hear to detect the 
 very stuff and substance of his soul. As 
 you listen, there may be a thousand 
 things which still are unknown to you 
 concerning this one who is swaying your 
 spirit. But what he is essentially, you 
 do know. What this life means to him, 
 you do know. How, in the last solitude 
 
 7 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 of his personal life, his spirit behaves and 
 tends, you do know. For in a moment 
 of great and moving speech a man's 
 ultimate nature is disclosed. All his 
 knowledge, all his experience, is caught 
 up in a flame and melted, and if it must 
 pour out, it will pour out by the way 
 of the man's dearest and final concern. 
 
 There is no hour or moment when 
 we are so true to ourselves, and when we 
 give so much of ourselves to the world, 
 as that hour or moment when some 
 sentiment which has been smouldering for 
 years or for days beneath the surface of 
 our life, having been brooded upon anew, 
 at length tears open a way of utter- 
 ance. In such a moment we give our- 
 selves away. We no longer live, but the 
 truth, as we perceive it, lives in us. What 
 happens when we are moved by great 
 speech is not that we are listening as to 
 one who plays skilfully upon a harp : no ; 
 what happens is that we are seeing, 
 though in a glass darkly, some aspect 
 of the Face of God ! 
 
 8 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 To those who understand these things, 
 to approach a passage hke this, in which 
 the final things in a man's soul betray 
 themselves, will be felt to be one of 
 those tasks which require from us a 
 reverent and susceptible spirit. 
 
 To see the soul in any moment of 
 reality, to look upon the soul engaged in 
 a struggle with some elementary thing, 
 like misfortune, or moral fear, or death 
 — ^is to occupy for the moment ground 
 whereon a man should take off his shoes, 
 for it is holy. At such a moment, when 
 we see the human spirit in its nakedness, 
 we are approaching as near as it is possible 
 for us, to the holy of holies where God is. 
 
 To put the matter in another light, I 
 should like in these studies to ask our- 
 selves : What is it that lies behind this 
 glowing passage ? What ideas ? What 
 view of the world is the Apostle con- 
 tending for ? What view of the world is 
 he contending against ? St. Paul claimed 
 that in preaching he did not simply beat 
 
 9 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 the air — meaning, I suppose, that he did 
 not deal with abstractions and unreaH- 
 ties, that in his preaching he was moving 
 amongst the actual and pressing concerns 
 of man. We may well believe that he was 
 no less real and definite and concrete in 
 an epistle, and in such a considered and 
 careful epistle as this to the Romans. 
 Besides, it was not about nothing, nor 
 was it about things indifferent, that a 
 mind like St. Paul's would take fire, as 
 it does here. I spoke of this great 
 passage as a glowing one : and that 
 indeed describes it. For a glow is pro- 
 duced, not when you bring a light to 
 some flimsy material — ^then you have 
 simply a flame, and next moment black- 
 ness, the surrounding atmosphere in no 
 wise warmed, and your own spirit some- 
 what depressed by the momentary illu- 
 sion. A glow such as you have in this 
 great passage comes when the element 
 of fire has encountered an obstinate 
 hostility, when for a time the two struggle 
 -r-the material mass and the challenging 
 10 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 heat, the one putting forth all its energy 
 and summoning all its reserves in order 
 to destroy the other : the fire steadily 
 winning the day, first with the evidence 
 of smoke, then with the outburst of little 
 flames, then with the final triumph when 
 the very material which at first resisted 
 can resist no more, and yields itself up 
 handsomely, contributing to the warmth 
 and brilliance and comfort. 
 
 So here : they are no indifferent mat- 
 ters that St. Paul is contending against, 
 in these determined and passionate words. 
 Death, life, angels, principalities, things 
 present, things to come, powers, height, 
 depth — we feel from the very strength and 
 desperateness of his protest that in each 
 word he is grappling with some powerful 
 enemy and contradiction of his faith in 
 Christ. 
 
 Let that metaphor from the nature 
 of a glowing fire, viz. that the burning 
 and glow arise from the conflict of flame 
 and opposing things — let that metaphor 
 decide our way of approach. Let us ask : 
 
 11 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 What lies behind St. Paul and on his side, 
 and what lies behind those opposing 
 things, in this precise clash and conflict 
 of ideas and powers and points of view ? 
 St. Paul himself, and on such a matter 
 he alone is qualified to give evidence, has 
 told us that one day something happened 
 to him which made an entire break in his 
 life. Jesus Christ appeared to him out- 
 side the gate of Damascus. The whole 
 of the Apostle's subsequent life took its 
 direction from that experience. It simply 
 meant everything to him. Instead of 
 the influence of it wearing off, as happens 
 in the case of many an exalted mood, it 
 went on deepening and broadening until 
 he could say — and he did not need to 
 say it to convince us : for we can see that 
 it was so — " that he no longer lived, but 
 Christ lived in him." From that day he 
 believed in Jesus Christ as the Lord 
 from heaven, and loved Him, and lived 
 to bring others into the blessedness of 
 his own condition — ^^vith a fidelity and 
 passion and patience which fills us all 
 12 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 with wonder and shame. He affects us 
 as never having thought about anything 
 else but Christ all the days of his life. 
 He became — what we might call him, 
 and what he on one occasion comes near 
 to calling himself — an abandoned servant 
 of Christ. 
 
 There are passages in which he sets 
 aside his habitual reticence and allows 
 us to see for a moment what the manner 
 of his life was. " Are they ministers of 
 Christ ? (I speak as one beside myself) 
 I more ; in labours more abundantly, 
 in prisons more abundantly, in stripes 
 above measure, in deaths oft. Of the 
 Jews five times received I forty stripes 
 save one. Thrice was I beaten with 
 rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered 
 shipwreck, a night and a day have I been 
 in the deep ; in journey ings often, in 
 perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in 
 perils from my countrymen, in perils 
 from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in 
 perils in the wilderness, in perils in the 
 sea, in perils among false brethren ; in 
 
 13 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 labour and travail, in watchings often, 
 in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in 
 cold and nakedness." And so on, until 
 in our secret hearts we cry, " Lord, have 
 mercy upon us." 
 
 Nor did he find it a hard and sad thing 
 to live on this plane of unrelieved conse- 
 cration. He had his own dark hours. 
 But he never once looked back. He 
 envied no one. Great as were his suffer- 
 ings, they were always less than his joy. 
 All this had its source and fountain in 
 that experience outside Damascus when 
 he saw a light from heaven and heard 
 the voice of Jesus calling him by name. 
 
 We know how any deep experience 
 affects our view of God and the world. 
 It will depend upon many things whether 
 our experience at the hands of life will 
 affect us very seriously and whether it 
 will affect us for long. Our Lord pre- 
 pared us for finding people whose natures 
 were of such a kind that good impres- 
 sions, the vision of God even, would 
 soon pass away, losing themselves in the 
 14 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 general interest of the world or in any 
 later excitement. But He assured us 
 at the same time that there were natures 
 of a nobler order, natures which would 
 receive the vision of God with their 
 whole heart and mind, and within these 
 it would germinate, living on the very 
 substance of such souls and transmuting 
 them to its own spirit. Saul of Tarsus 
 was a man of this order, his life being 
 witness. 
 
 But, to dwell upon this point for a 
 moment, any deep experience at the 
 hands of life has the effect of casting over 
 the whole world for us its own light or 
 its own gloom. We cannot but see all 
 things from the standpoint of that ex- 
 perience. Love comes to us, and as we 
 open the door it is not love only that 
 we see : we see a love-lit world, a world 
 which dwells in God, " with the sunshine 
 and the swallows and the flowers." And 
 though to those who love, severe days 
 will come, and even because of their love 
 severe days are sure to come, they will 
 
 15 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 be churlish hearts indeed who, when the 
 clouds assemble, begin to speak foolishly 
 concerning God, as though clouds were 
 the abiding element, forgetting the day 
 when the sky was blue for them. 
 
 But it is not love only which, coming 
 to a human heart, has the power to 
 make new heavens and a new earth. 
 Any great emotion which is fortunate 
 enough to take hold of us, when for 
 certain reasons we are ready to enter a 
 new allegiance, may have the same great 
 power. 
 
 We may one day see the pinched face 
 of a hungry child — and that may be for 
 us the call of God summoning us to a 
 crusade. Or we may read a book where 
 some social shame is stripped of its dis- 
 guise, and by the power of art heightened 
 in its cruelty and pervasiveness ; and 
 that reading may under God save our 
 own soul as by fire, and rally us to the 
 depth of our being, to the side of purity 
 against the squalor of the world. It is 
 what we see, in some hour of personal 
 16 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tension, which decides what we shall see 
 for many a day : and there are visions of 
 such a kind that never afterwards can a 
 man look out upon life except from their 
 standpoint. Saul of Tarsus saw Jesus 
 Christ risen from the dead. That gave 
 him his world. He saw : 
 
 that Face 
 ** Which far from vanish rather grows, 
 And decomposes but to recompose, 
 Becomes my universe and feels and knows." 
 
 Now, the vision of God in Christ when 
 it comes to a man does not come, so to 
 speak, into an empty room, nor do its 
 operations and effects occur in a swept 
 and empty place. It is to a man that the 
 vision comes : to a wonderful nexus of 
 ancestral inheritances and racial preju- 
 dices, to a tumult of impressions, things 
 learned, things seen, things done, and 
 the effects and reactions of all these ; to a 
 being with his memories, his hopes, his 
 faith, his fear, and some predominant 
 temperament or bias. And what the 
 vision of God in Christ does is not to 
 c 17 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 destroy these ; but to compel them to 
 take their places in a new life-system in 
 which the vision of God in Christ is now 
 supreme. 
 
 At the outset it may seem as if the 
 vision of Christ emptied our life of all its 
 former occupants, all our natural ten- 
 dencies, all the results of our learning, all 
 our earlier experience of the world. At 
 the outset there seems to be nothing but 
 Christ and our own direct response to 
 Him. It is a time of something like the 
 bridal joy or the dawn of love, when we 
 have only each other ; and the world 
 of facts and circumstances has no reality 
 for us. And God permits us such a time. 
 But it is no disparagement of love, and 
 no aspersion on its divine truth and 
 quahty, to say that this purely lyrical 
 time passes, and ought to pass. Then 
 come the days when our love is deepened 
 and moralised by duty, by responsibility, 
 by absences that make the heart fonder, 
 by the memory of struggles endured, of 
 difficulties overcome. It may be that 
 18 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 every high emotion is destined to pass 
 from poetry into prose, from ecstasy to 
 duty, from music to the engaging of an 
 enemy : but there is a noble prose ; there 
 is the prose of a Milton, where you have 
 a soul moving still in an atmosphere of 
 poetry, of lofty ideas and hopes, with a 
 background in God, and contending in 
 this actual world of conflicting things for 
 the embarrassed soul of man. 
 
 When Jesus Christ appeared to Saul of 
 Tarsus outside the gate of Damascus, it 
 was to the man Saul that He appeared. 
 It was to a man with Saul's racial and 
 personal qualities. It was to the pupil 
 of Gamaliel. It was to a Pharisee who 
 was the child of Pharisees. It was to 
 an able and serious man. It was to one 
 who by nature, i.e. by the calling and 
 election of God, was a religious man : 
 one who demanded of life that it should 
 mean something, and that it should mean 
 something of such a kind that a man is 
 saved or he is lost according as he devotes 
 himself to that something or neglects it. 
 
 19 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 And above all, it was to one who had 
 conceived it to be his duty to God to 
 blot out from the mind of mankind the 
 pretensions of Christ, that this very- 
 Christ appeared, bearing evidences for 
 Paul no longer to be questioned that He 
 was the Lord from heaven. 
 
 We read that the vision felled him to 
 the ground and struck him blind. The 
 voice in which, out of his overthrow, he 
 whispers, " Lord, what wilt Thou have 
 me to do ? " is the voice of one in whom 
 that great thing has happened which 
 must happen and which is of such a kind 
 that until it happens, somehow, we are 
 none of us soft enough and suppliant 
 enough and lonely enough to pass through 
 the narrow gate ! 
 
 But it is no part of God's design to 
 arrest or annihilate the personality of a 
 man. Personality in its pure idea is the 
 work and emanation of God Himself. 
 We must believe that God called us 
 severally into being because He saw no 
 other way. It had taken all history up 
 20 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 to that hour to make a Saul of Tarsus 
 possible. It had taken Genesis and Exo- 
 dus, and the Exile and the Psalms; it 
 had taken the whole episode of Philip 
 of Macedon and Alexander the Great ; it 
 had taken the history of Imperial Rome 
 up to the time of Augustus — to make this 
 Saul of Tarsus, with his knowledge of 
 Hebrew and his knowledge of Greek, and 
 his agony concerning God, all fermenting 
 in his blood, and it was no part of God's 
 will that Christ's intervention should 
 annihilate that costly piece of work. 
 
 Saul rose from the earth with a terrible 
 silence in his soul : a silence like the 
 silence of an impeded flood just before 
 it finds its way. He arose from the 
 earth and was led by the hand into 
 Damascus. For three days he sat there 
 in silence, in the darkness of total blind- 
 ness also ; and we read that for those 
 three days he neither ate nor drank. 
 What went on within the soul of Paul 
 during those three days we do not know. 
 But we can imagine. In the light of 
 
 21 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 all that he became, we can be almost 
 sure. A man can think a great deal in 
 three days : especially if he be quite 
 alone and if he is suffering — ^without 
 physical pain. 
 
 At the end of three days God sent a 
 good man to open his eyes. In God's 
 view, that is to say, Paul was ready to 
 take the road again. In the book of 
 the Acts we are told that as soon as 
 his eyes were opened, Paul preached in 
 Damascus that Jesus is the Christ. In 
 the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul rather 
 seems to say that as soon as his eyes 
 were opened, he went away into the 
 desert of Arabia. I don't think there 
 is any contradiction : and I have no 
 patience with people who make a great 
 deal about such discrepancies, when what 
 we are dealing with is the agony of a human 
 soul on its way towards God. 
 
 What I suppose really happened was 
 that Paul, after his eyes were opened and 
 he was calm enough to speak about him- 
 self, confessed at once, there and then in 
 22 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 Damascus, that Jesus is the Son of God. 
 That he knew. At that stage perhaps it 
 was the one thing he did know : that 
 Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, whom I beheve 
 Paul had known in the flesh, whose 
 death it is most probable he had witnessed 
 — that that Jesus was and had all the 
 time been the Son and Gift of God to this 
 world, which in its blindness and in the 
 perverseness of its religious prejudice 
 had nailed Him to a felon's cross. Paul 
 knew that, and there and then he said it. 
 So far that was all he knew. Then, I 
 take it, what happened was that the 
 fight, properly speaking, began within 
 Paul, when, after the onslaught of the 
 Risen Lord, the man within him rallied, 
 and Christ, who was well set in the 
 citadel of his life, issued out to subdue 
 and transform the outlying provinces. 
 
 For Paul was one of those who must 
 be unanimous, one of those who cannot 
 endure to live on what I have often called 
 the principle of bulkheads: one com- 
 partment of their life devoted to faith, 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 another devoted to thought, another to 
 things — ^with no mutual intercourse or 
 control, each paramount within its own 
 sphere but no one of them supreme. 
 Paul was one of those ultimately sincere 
 men to whom life must be one, since God 
 is One. And so, I take it, Paul asked 
 to be allowed to go away by himself 
 for a time in order to think about things, 
 to bring things together again in some 
 new and organic system. Especially to 
 think how his whole life had broken 
 down under him, and how he must rebuild 
 it — ^its philosophy, its reading of history, 
 its daily practice — Jesus Christ Himself 
 being chief corner-stone, in whom each 
 several building (or compartment, we 
 might say), fitly framed together, should 
 grow into a living temple in the Lord, for 
 the habitation of God. 
 
 24 
 
Chapter II 
 
"But when it was the good pleasure of God, who 
 separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called 
 me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that 
 I might preach Him among the Gentiles ; straightway 
 I conferred not with flesh and blood : neither went I 
 up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me : 
 but I went away into Arabia." — OaU i. 16-17. 
 
Chapter II 
 
 A GREAT experience condemns a man to 
 the task of reconstructing in his thought 
 and imagination the world in which that 
 experience took place. In a great experi- 
 ence a man has come upon a new order 
 of realities, and he must find room for 
 those realities. Henceforward he must 
 see life and all things under the aspect of 
 that experience which has now become 
 for him the heart of all reality, it may 
 even be, his one indisputable fact. Hence- 
 forward all his earlier facts, all his habi- 
 tual ways of considering life, all the 
 incidents, all the ideas, all the beliefs 
 which went to the making of him, range 
 themselves into two companies or forces. 
 On the one side are gathered those things 
 which seem now to have been leading 
 up to the hour of his great experience, 
 or which seem now to corroborate his 
 
 27 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 great experience — these on the one hand ; 
 and on the other the things which seem 
 now, looking back, to have been all along 
 in conflict with that experience, or to be 
 now most manifestly in conflict with it. 
 
 Paul's one indisputable fact, the one 
 experience which for its depth and 
 authenticity had for the time reduced 
 all other facts to insignificance, was this : 
 that on the way to Damascus, Jesus of 
 Nazareth, as Lord and Risen from the 
 dead, had appeared to him and sum- 
 moned him by name. That was the one 
 thing he knew : and henceforth, so long 
 as he maintained his living contact with 
 that experience, all his interests, habits of 
 mind, prejudices, beliefs, hopes, fears — 
 his entire life-system must be co-ordinated 
 and organised round that central point of 
 light. 
 
 It was a very deep instinct which led 
 this man, as soon as he had recovered 
 from the bewilderment of this crisis, to 
 go away by himself to think about it 
 and to think about everything. To think 
 28 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 about it, not with the view of under- 
 mining its authority, but with the view of 
 doing it honour and giving it its place 
 at the centre of his life, henceforth to 
 dominate everything. 
 
 As our Lord, after the descent of the 
 Holy Spirit upon Him at the Jordan, 
 hurried away into the desert, — to think 
 about all that was involved : to face in 
 solitude the life which the summons of 
 the Eternal Spirit had imposed, to esti- 
 mate the cost and to assure Himself of His 
 Resources in God ; so His servant, Paul, 
 went away by himself into a solitude 
 which would permit and encourage this 
 great Experience to unfold all its implica- 
 tions. Three years later, he tells us, he 
 returned and went up to Jerusalem, and 
 conferred with the older Apostles, not as 
 one who was inferior to them in the mystery 
 of Christ, but as one who also had seen 
 Christ face to face in solitude and agony 
 and peace. 
 
 And now, let us think, with as much 
 29 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 simplicity as we may, of the truth about 
 God which this Revelation of Jesus as 
 Lord would bring to Paul — the truth 
 which for ever afterwards formed the 
 basis and motive of his life, the Rock of 
 Confidence against which the waves of a 
 contradicting world dashed and hissed 
 in vain. And such an inquiry is most 
 relevant to any deep study of this great 
 passage in " Romans." We cannot read 
 that passage or hear it read without feeling 
 that the Apostle is fighting over again an 
 old battle, though now in a more radiant 
 mood, with years of experience of Christ 
 to give power and endurance to his spirit. 
 We feel that once again waves of hostile 
 things, dark, sinister shapes are assailing 
 the last convictions of his soul, and that 
 he is beating them back, not with a 
 weapon hastily forged or chosen in the 
 very moment of fear, but with a weapon, 
 a final attitude of his whole being, pre- 
 pared long beforehand, and found trium- 
 phant in many an unrecorded struggle. 
 He beats back those sinister, insinuating 
 30 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 foes — which later we propose to discover 
 in their more modern guise under such 
 words as " angels, principalities, powers, 
 things present, things to come, height, 
 depth, any other creature " — he beats back 
 those sinister, insinuating foes, not by any 
 weapon of ingenuity, but simply by falling 
 back upon one great truth, upon one well- 
 remembered fact and experience ; the 
 truth and fact and experience which con- 
 fronted him on the way to Damascus and 
 which he wrought into the very fibres 
 of his soul during those silent years in 
 Arabia. 
 
 As we get older, life, considered ulti- 
 mately, becomes simpler. If God is, and 
 if God is according to Christ Jesus, then 
 all is well for those whose lives are con- 
 ducted on the basis and principles of such 
 a faith. If God is the Father of our Lord 
 and Saviour, Jesus Christ, then there 
 may be a thousand things still mysterious 
 and beyond our power to comprehend or 
 imagine, but we have at least a way of 
 looking at our life which enables us to 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 stand up to the contradictions of experi- 
 ence and to meet the affront of death. 
 
 Speaking for myself, I find it more 
 helpful and sustaining to put the ultimate 
 question of our faith thus, and to ask, 
 " Is God indeed the Father of our Lord 
 and Saviour, Jesus Christ ? " than to ask, 
 *' Is Jesus Christ the Son of God ? " The 
 question is the same ; but, speaking for 
 myself, I tend more and more to come 
 to God through Christ, than to come to 
 Christ through God. I tend more and 
 more to clothe God with the qualities and 
 attributes of Christ, than to clothe Christ 
 with the qualities and attributes of Deity. 
 And I venture to think that this is nearer 
 to the theological method of the New 
 Testament, and nearer to what is the 
 behaviour and instinct of our soul in 
 prayer and in any time of spiritual dis- 
 tress. 
 
 The God in whom we Christians believe 
 is not merely a nexus of categories, such 
 as omnipotence, omniscience, unchange- 
 ableness, and the rest. The God in whom 
 
 32 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 we Christians believe is the God and 
 Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ. To use the very language of the 
 New Testament, " we believe in God 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord." Yes, we 
 might go all the length and say we believe 
 in God for the sake of Jesus Christ. We 
 believe that Christ was and is in the bosom 
 of God from all eternity. We believe 
 there is a Cross in the Godhead. For we 
 believe there is a heart in the Godhead, 
 and what is the very function and glory 
 of a heart except that it will break, if need 
 be, in the agony of its love ! 
 
 What I want to be assured of — and the 
 whole effort of Christ is to assure me — is 
 that the Power which brought all things 
 into being and sustains them — a Power 
 which I do not need to be convinced is 
 Infinite, is a Power which is penetrated 
 by Christ. I want to be assured that 
 Christ is the constitution of the Godhead. 
 For we men and women do live in an 
 isle of terror, surrounded by spaces before 
 the bare idea of which our spirit faints 
 D 83 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 and grows cold. We are here for a day 
 and are gone. And soon or late, it all 
 comes to be too strange, too weird, too 
 disheartening : until Something happens 
 either to make it credible to me that Love 
 may be as infinite as Power, and more 
 ancient than Power ; or so to win my 
 heart to a holy life in this world that I 
 shall have no disabling anxiety concerning 
 what may lie beyond. 
 
 Now the Presence of Christ in the world 
 is for me that persuading, reassuring thing. 
 I confront the misgivings of my soul with 
 the testimony, the faith, and experience 
 of Jesus. I know, of course, that here 
 there is no logical necessity. Christ can- 
 not coerce me into believing that the 
 Infinite God is His Father, that the Heart 
 which beat in Jesus beats in God. But 
 He asks me to believe this. Life appeals 
 to me to believe this. The signs of love 
 in the world keep caUing to me to dis- 
 regard the contrary signs. And behind 
 everything, at the end of all my thoughts 
 and despairs, I come upon this Jesus who 
 34 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 lived in this Holy Love, whose Soul dwelt 
 in it, whose Face shone with the Hght of 
 it, who bore up through life on the hidden 
 wings of it, who leaned back in death into 
 the arms of it — and who appeared to one 
 here and there of those who knew Him, 
 in the unworldly glory of it. 
 
 Life, which is the contrivance and 
 hand of the Eternal Spirit, Hfe has its own 
 way of discovering to each of us the nature 
 of reality : life chose its own way of dis- 
 covering to Paul that the nature of reality 
 is Christ. Like a beacon, that light of the 
 knowledge of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ made long inroads and avenues of 
 light backward, forward, upward, down- 
 ward, and in that Hght Paul's spirit abode, 
 issuing forth and returning again until his 
 day was done. 
 
 Now, the thing which the revelation of 
 Jesus as Lord meant above everything 
 else to Paul was — to put it in a phrase 
 from this passage — that God is for us. 
 In a sense, of course, as a devout Jew he 
 had always believed that God stood in a 
 35 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 definite relation to men. In a sense, too, 
 as later on he saw, the prophets and 
 psalmists had conceived of God in warmer 
 and more loving terms than had been per- 
 mitted by the Rabbinical schools of his 
 own time and of immediately preceding 
 times. 
 
 But it was to Paul, a Pharisee of that 
 day, that the Risen Christ appeared. 
 
 God had been to him as a taskmaster 
 overshadowing his private life, coming 
 upon him suddenly in moments of un- 
 worthiness. The most that even a good 
 man might do with regard to God was 
 to maintain a sleepless vigilance over his 
 own behaviour, occupying himself with 
 appointed ceremonial acts and observ- 
 ances. And when he had done all this, 
 a man had the miserable feeling that still 
 he had fallen short. He was always, as 
 it were, on his trial before God, and in 
 that trial always stood condemned. 
 
 But the Revelation of the Risen Lord 
 had changed all that ; and it is the great- 
 ness of Paul that he grasped what was 
 86 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 involved in this change to such a depth, 
 and with such clearness of vision and such 
 hardihood of doctrine and practice as 
 under God to have effected the religious 
 life and the religious philosophy for ever. 
 
 Paul saw God in Christ — not imputing 
 unto men their trespasses. Henceforward, 
 Paul began with God. He saw God 
 freely giving His Son to the world, not 
 asking first whether the world was fit to 
 receive Him. Indeed, he saw, and this 
 was the amazing thing, which, as he pon- 
 dered it, brought on the revolution in 
 his faith, — ^he saw that God sent His Son 
 into the world not because the world was 
 worthy of Him, but because it was not 
 worthy of Him. " God commendeth His 
 love to us" — so he once expressed him- 
 self — " in that while we were yet sinners, 
 Christ died for us." 
 
 God was not to be conceived, therefore, 
 as a Power seated upon a throne waiting 
 for something to happen : He was a 
 loving Spirit, urging Himself into the 
 hearts of men. 
 
 37 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 What, then, is required of us men is not 
 that we shall work ourselves up to some- 
 thing, but simply that we shall open our 
 hearts to One who is there. Goodness, 
 then, is not mere correctness : it is com- 
 munion, — communion with God, the pass- 
 ing into our lives of the supernatural life 
 of Jesus. 
 
 It was Paul's ignorance of this and his 
 neglect of it that had led to all his rehgious 
 misery. He had been like a man cUmb- 
 ing a mountain, avoiding chasms and 
 shuddering under beetling masses of rock, 
 in order to reach God at the top. Now 
 he could begin with God at the bottom. 
 He saw clearly now that sin was simply 
 the absence of the Holy Spirit, and 
 the misery of sin simply the absence 
 of faith in that full forgiveness which 
 Jesus declared and which Jesus had 
 bequeathed. 
 
 From time to time it has been alleged, 
 
 and attempts have been made to prove it, 
 
 that Paul practically introduced a new 
 
 faith ; that he was the founder of a new 
 
 38 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 religion, which in its characteristic words 
 and ideas is different from the rcHgion of 
 Jesus. And so we have had the cry 
 " back to Christ," with the insinuation 
 that in our devotion to the PauHne inter- 
 pretation of Christ we had departed from 
 the pure witness to God of Christ Himself. 
 Words from the Sermon on the Mount are 
 quoted, and these are contrasted in their 
 simplicity and directness with the strained 
 and controversial language, say, of this 
 Epistle to the Romans. 
 
 But the more deeply the Gospels and 
 the Epistles are studied, the more deeply 
 we breathe the spirit of the one and of 
 the other, — and this we will do, not in 
 our days of easy and complacent curiosity, 
 but in our hours of misgiving and of 
 necessity and of unworldliness, — the more 
 reason shall we have to confess that the 
 Jesus of History whose mind we have 
 in the Gospels has simply become the 
 Christ of Experience in the writings of 
 St. Paul. 
 
 It is true, of course, that Paul is a man, 
 39 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 and a man of very unusual moral and in- 
 tellectual dimensions. And it is no part 
 of Christ's proper influence upon His dis- 
 ciples to paralyse their own individual 
 life, making them impersonal echoes of 
 Himself. Christ works in men as He 
 promised He would in the world — first 
 the seed, then the ear, then the full corn 
 in the ear. The ear is not the seed and 
 is not at all like the seed, but it sprang 
 from the seed by an invincible process. A 
 disciple is faithful to his master, not by 
 repeating in later circumstances words 
 which the master uttered in his day. A 
 disciple proves that he is faithful by em- 
 bodying in his words and in the impres- 
 sion which he makes upon his time the 
 kind of atmosphere and influence and 
 spiritual direction which his master 
 created in his day. 
 
 And what people should ask, who are in 
 any honest doubt as to the relation be- 
 tween Jesus and Paul, is whether there is 
 not in the whole impression and testimony 
 of Paul a background of ideas concerning 
 40 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 God and man and life and duty such as 
 were strange and indeed abhorrent to him 
 until Christ encountered him and first 
 compelled and then convinced him to 
 accept them as the truth. 
 
 It is not at all to be wondered at that 
 St. Paul should say things that were en- 
 tirely his own. He had a story to tell, his 
 own story, the story of how Christ, — and 
 all that Christ meant as to God and men 
 and everything, — how Christ had come 
 into his hfe. It is not to be wondered at 
 that he has much to say of the struggle 
 and the process, of the inertia of his own 
 nature which opposed the great change, 
 of the hostility of his own prejudices. It 
 is not to be wondered at that, in his great 
 desire that others, especially men of his 
 own race and of his own traditions, hav- 
 ing his own difficulties and repugnances, 
 should not allow those traditions and 
 difficulties and repugnances to close their 
 hearts to this Christ who had made new 
 heavens and a new earth for him — it is 
 not to be wondered at that for the sake 
 
 41 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 of these he reasoned and argued and inter- 
 preted. He himself tells us that to the 
 Jews he became a Jew, that is to say, he 
 put himself once again at the standpoint 
 of a Jew, and summoned back to his own 
 imagination all the possible and conceiv- 
 able obstacles to the acceptance of Christ 
 which could occur to a Jew, — and why ? 
 — " if, by any means, they also might be 
 saved ! " 
 
 But pierce through that language of 
 controversy and appeal, and what have 
 you ? What is the conception of God 
 which lies behind ? Is it not that God is 
 the Spirit of forgiving Love, the Father in 
 heaven whose Redeeming Passion in Jesus 
 endured the Cross, who gave Himself to 
 an undiscerning world ? Is not the great 
 Faith behind the entire Pauline litera- 
 ture simply this, — that God is for us ? 
 But that was the Faith and testimony of 
 Jesus, which He sealed by His patience on 
 Calvary. 
 
 It was God's acceptance of Christ, it 
 was the ratification by God of Christ's 
 42 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 whole enterprise on behalf of man — and 
 this the appearance of the Risen Lord 
 attested for Paul — it was this, that is to 
 say, it was Christ, who gave Paul the God 
 whom he preached. 
 
 God is altogether on our side. And if 
 this be so, what hostility from the side of 
 the world, or from the region of our own 
 thoughts and memories and fears, is 
 worthy to be compared with this final and 
 blessed resource ? True, we may be called 
 upon to suffer. We see not all things put 
 under Him ; but we see Christ. It is 
 true that the world will organise itself 
 against us. Without may be fightings, 
 within may be fears. Persecution, famine, 
 nakedness, peril, sword — ^that may be our 
 portion. (Nay, it had been their portion.) 
 The words of the Psalmist may be the 
 only words that suit our case : " For Thy 
 sake we are killed all the day long ; the 
 world regards us as sheep meant for 
 slaughter." But there is always some- 
 thing that can come nearer to us than all 
 these threatenings : " Oh, the deep, deep 
 
 48 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 love of Jesus ! " " Who shall separate 
 us from the love of Christ ? " Surely, 
 *' no conceivable power of life or of death, 
 or of the angelic hierarchy, nothing in 
 present circumstances or future destiny, 
 no possible force ; neither the highest 
 height of heaven nor the deepest depth 
 of hell, no possible creation of God other 
 than what we now know to exist, shall be 
 able to tear us from that which holds 
 us in a grasp strong as the oath of 
 God — His love to us in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord." 
 
 " We are not to build the edifice of a 
 life which at the top is to be within sight 
 of God. We are to start from God, Who 
 from eternity and all along has been 
 beforehand with us : in His external, per- 
 sonal love predestinating, creating, call- 
 ing, pardoning, holding, and keeping us in 
 continual growth for eternal glory. And 
 the one power of religion is, therefore, 
 faith, — that faculty by which we look 
 continually out of ourselves, and, starting 
 from God, committing ourselves wholly 
 44 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 to God, raise the fabric of life, in the 
 community of a true human brotherhood, 
 upon the secure basis of the love of Him 
 who created us and will satisfy utterly the 
 being which He has given us." 
 
 Human speech can go no farther than 
 that. 
 
 45 
 
Chapter III 
 
" Who ahall separate ua from the love of Chriit ? " 
 
Chapter III 
 
 The greater portion of the New Testa- 
 ment was written with the purpose of 
 encouraging those who had become Chris- 
 tians to remain Christians in a world 
 which was steadily becoming more hostile, 
 in a world also which was betraying itself 
 more and more clearly as being opposed to 
 the way of Christ in its very principles. 
 We cannot summarise all the various 
 warnings, encouragements, methods of 
 the spiritual life which the New Testa- 
 ment contains, we cannot summarise 
 these more fairly than to say that the New 
 Testament assures good people who are 
 beset by life, beset by a world-system which 
 is either cruel and persecuting, or im- 
 moral and seductive, that the only safe 
 way, the only happy way of serving Christ 
 is the deep and unreserved way. The 
 question which their leaders and teachers 
 £ 49 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 in the Christian life soon learned to con- 
 centrate upon was simply this : 
 
 Are you satisfied with Christ ? Is He 
 enough for you ? Are you ready to go on 
 in His promises, and with the resources 
 which He in the secret place of your 
 spirit provides for you day by day ? 
 
 At a very early time all hope passed 
 out of the Church that Christians would 
 ever be able to be at home in this world. 
 At a very early time they began to 
 look upon themselves as " pilgrims and 
 strangers " in the earth. And the dan- 
 gers which beset them were felt by the 
 wiser and more sensitive spirits among 
 them to be the same dangers as beset 
 pilgrims always, viz. that they might 
 tire by the way, that the scenes through 
 which they were passing might corrupt 
 them, that the greater obstacles might 
 depress their energy, or that the smaller 
 obstacles might wear down the fine edge of 
 their intention, or that the mere length 
 and monotony of the journey might arouse 
 the spirit of questioning within them, and 
 
 50 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 might even raise in their souls the last, 
 the only question — that question which 
 is of such a kind that the soul which has 
 once even felt its force can never be the 
 same again — the question as to the worth 
 of all high contendings in a world like 
 this, which is girt about with death and 
 silence. 
 
 I seem to see the whole effort of the 
 New Testament, and the effort became 
 more insistent as the years passed, and 
 the light of the first great day of the Lord 
 went down — I seem to see the whole effort 
 of the New Testament to be to rally and 
 reinforce the souls of the faithful. The 
 evils of the world are not made light of, 
 the things which are against faith are not 
 passed over in silence or alluded to with 
 mere defiance. No : but good souls who 
 have begun to face life in the power and 
 love of Christ are urged to make no end 
 of trial of the treasures of compensation 
 and reinforcement and private blessedness 
 which are to be found in Him whom they 
 have chosen. They have meat to eat 
 
 51 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 that the world knows not of ; and the 
 acutest suffering, if wisely endured, may 
 only yield some new delicacy of the love 
 of Christ. Let them, as Christian in 
 Pilgrim's Progress was advised, when he 
 entered upon a way where the lions 
 roared — let them keep well in the middle 
 of the path, and though the very breath 
 of lions may threaten them, they will 
 pass through unscathed to the City of 
 God. 
 
 It is a great part of the teaching of the 
 New Testament — and through the New 
 Testament it has found its way into every 
 serious treatment of this life of ours, so 
 that to-day it mingles in our atmosphere 
 for the support of many who may not 
 pause to thank God for it — that we may 
 overcome the evils of existence by return- 
 ing more deeply into the life of our own 
 spirits, that we may gain the victory over 
 things by the way of some deeper and 
 holier understanding of ourselves ; that, 
 in the language of pure Christian experi- 
 ence, we may " more than conquer 
 52 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord." " We 
 may be pressed on every side, yet not 
 straitened ; we may be perplexed, yet not 
 unto despair ; we may be pursued, yet 
 not forsaken ; we may be smitten down, 
 yet not destroyed, always bearing about 
 in the body the dying of Jesus, that the 
 life also of Jesus may be manifested in 
 our body." 
 
 And there, perhaps, we are at the very 
 point of view and of feeling for entering 
 definitely into this great passage. " Who 
 shall separate us from the love of Christ ? " 
 It is the invincible communion of Christ 
 with the soul which is the basis of all that 
 follows. The hard things of life are not 
 denied. The possibility of weird and un- 
 canny things is not denied. It is even 
 admitted that there may be about us 
 legions of spiritual powers, subtle, per- 
 vasive, diabolical, organised by some arch- 
 fiend. It is confessed that we live our 
 lives in a little world in the midst of 
 appalling spaces, such as would make us 
 feel abject and contemptible in our own 
 
 53 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 eyes if we did not believe, as Christ asks 
 us to believe, that human life means 
 something to God. 
 
 The natural terror and riskiness of our 
 position is in no wise softened ; nor is the 
 attempt made, as has always been com- 
 mon in the mere rhetoric of the will, from 
 Marcus Aurelius to Emerson and the 
 moderns, to disregard and defy our ele- 
 mentary and abysmal circumstances. No ; 
 what St. Paul says and promises and offers 
 as the basis for an unaffrighted and as- 
 piring human life is that nothing — no 
 cruelty at the hands of man, no hot 
 breath from Nature's possible malignancy, 
 no chill breath from her vastness and un- 
 concern, can separate us from, or can, by 
 virtue of its superior power, come be- 
 tween us and the love of God which is in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 There, one's mind comes to a place of 
 cross-roads, where various highways in- 
 vite one to proceed. For example, this : 
 that Christianity is not in the first in- 
 stance a philosophy of things as they are, 
 
 54 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 still less is Christianity a defence of things 
 as they are. 
 
 I do not know how it has come to pass 
 that the defence of this world as it is 
 to-day should somehow or other have 
 been foisted upon the Christian Church. 
 Those who are opposed to our faith or to 
 any faith thrust the dreadful facts of life 
 before our eyes and ask us with various 
 tones of anger and contempt and sorrow 
 to explain how and why this and that 
 came into being in a world which God 
 controls. But when did the Church of 
 Christ ever declare that things as they 
 are, are all right ? When was the Church 
 so satisfied with things as they are that 
 she should be held as bound to defend 
 the natural order as the very mind of 
 God ? The Church has never once de- 
 clared that things were all right, or even 
 that they were pretty well. In her great 
 days — and, hke every institution whose 
 instruments are human, the Church has 
 had her good days and her bad days — 
 the Churchy in her great days has rather 
 
 55 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 declared that things were all wrong, all 
 bad, all rooted in principles which were the 
 negation of God. Of course I know, when 
 I give my mind to the matter, how it has 
 come about that we who believe in God 
 according to the Gospel of Christ, have 
 had thrust upon us the responsibility of 
 giving an interpretation of the world in 
 terms of God as against the interpretation 
 of the world in other terms. 
 
 It is not our message, and it never was, 
 that " all's right with the world," in the 
 sense that things as they are, are accord- 
 ing to the will of God. On the very con- 
 trary, what we say is that the world as it 
 has come to be is such, and is pervaded 
 and haunted by such powers and organ- 
 isations of spirit, that when He in whom 
 we see God came to our earth, it concen- 
 trated its instinctive forces and put the 
 Holy One to death. 
 
 It is none of our business as Christians 
 
 to explain how the world has come to be 
 
 what it is. It is our business, of course, as 
 
 reasonable beings ; but there we share the 
 
 56 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 responsibility with all who claim to have 
 reason, — to try to co-ordinate this mul- 
 titudinous world into some kind of unity, 
 to relate things to one another, and by the 
 force of certain necessary laws of thought 
 to impose upon the raw material of exis- 
 tence some conceivable idea or order. But 
 this, I repeat, is a task which falls to 
 us, not as Christians, but as reasonable 
 beings, who can no more bear to live in 
 a haphazard and untidy universe, from 
 the intellectual point of view, than we 
 should be able to live in an untidy and 
 chaotic room which we never explored, 
 never mastered and put to rights. 
 
 But if the retort is made that it falls 
 particularly upon us who believe in the 
 Goodness of God to account for, and thus 
 to defend, those dark facts of life which 
 occur to our minds the moment we reflect, 
 there are two answers which suggest them- 
 selves to me at this moment in reply. 
 For one thing, if we who believe must give 
 some account of the evil in things, then 
 those who do not believe will have to 
 
 57 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 account for the equally obstinate and 
 equally undeniable good in things. If 
 men who believe in God stand confronted 
 in all their speculations with the problem 
 of Evil in the world, men who do not 
 believe stand confronted in all their specu- 
 lations with the problem of Good. 
 
 As the poet puts it, our faith is diversi- 
 fied by doubt ; but their doubt is diversi- 
 fied by faith. If we have not brought all 
 things into subjection to our belief, they 
 have not brought all things into subjection 
 to their denial. If we who believe in 
 God must account, for example, for the 
 pain of the brute creation, they have to 
 account for the beauty of flowers, for the 
 glory and order of created things, for the 
 presence in this vexed world of such a 
 love for human beings and for truth as 
 was able to endure the sweat of blood in 
 Gethsemane and the nails and the thirst 
 and the silence of God on Calvary. 
 
 And the other thing which we quite 
 properly and quite firmly may say is that 
 we who believe in God believe that God 
 58 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 gave to man the power of choice and of 
 moral freedom. It would be hazardous, 
 and it is not necessary for our argument, 
 to define the bounds of man's freedom. 
 But freedom there is, and in a world 
 where there is freedom there have always 
 been self-seeking souls, and the tragedies 
 for themselves and for others which self- 
 seeking brings. And so, the world, society, 
 as we see it to-day, is not the pure 
 expression of God ; it is largely the conse- 
 quence of man, his self-love, his self- 
 interests encountering indeed the un- 
 quenched protest and appeal of God. 
 
 I must not allow myself, however, to 
 dwell longer upon such matters, though I 
 do hold there is room for some clear 
 thinking upon them in order to divest 
 ourselves as believers of a responsibility 
 for the intellectual solution of life which 
 was never properly our concern. We 
 shall see what precisely is our concern by 
 keeping closely to St. Paul's thought in 
 this passage, where, in the fullness of a 
 great wave of fervour and confidence, he 
 
 5d 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 reveals for our advantage the things which 
 lay at the basis of his own life. 
 
 We pass our days, he seems to say, in a 
 world of hostile pressure, tribulation, dis- 
 tress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, 
 sword, death, life, angels, principalities, 
 things present, things to come, powers, 
 height, depth. What then ? What are 
 we to make of these things which are the 
 facts of life, as we in our timid speech to- 
 day are too fond of calling them ? For, 
 just as, when we do not like a person, 
 we sometimes indulge our private anger 
 under the guise of being zealous for truth, 
 telling him the unpleasant things we can 
 remember, calling these " the facts," so, 
 when we do not like God, our minds acquire 
 a morbid power of accumulating dis- 
 heartening things which we also call the 
 facts. Well, St. Paul names very gener- 
 ously those disheartening things which 
 those who are so minded might quote to 
 impugn the holy or even the wise govern- 
 ment of this world. But he does not call 
 them facts. Here the Apostle antici- 
 60 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 pates much that modern philosophy has 
 given us. He virtually says, There are no 
 facts. There is only one fact, the fact 
 of God in Christ. All the other so-called 
 facts are mere circumstances of that one 
 supreme fact, and take their place for or 
 against that one supreme fact. Tribu- 
 lation, distress, anguish, persecution, death, 
 life, things present, things to come — 
 they are all here. Yes, but we also are 
 here, and Christ, the power and comfort 
 of God, is with us. 
 
 I know, of course, that there is such 
 a thing as objective reality ; but for the 
 purposes of living it is wise to believe 
 that things in this world are according to 
 the depth and purity and passion of our 
 souls. The spies who went to search out 
 the Land of Promise encountered the same 
 facts : but they were not the same facts 
 for Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the 
 son of Jephunneh, as they were for the 
 others. Seeing what they saw, the others 
 decided that it was a bad business. See- 
 ing the same things, Joshua and Caleb 
 
 61 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 decided that it was well worth while. 
 " We saw the sons of Anak," said the 
 others, " giants of great stature. And 
 we were as grasshoppers in our own eyes, 
 and so were we in their eyes." We impute 
 ourselves, said Tennyson. A man who 
 feels like a grasshopper is sure that he 
 looks like a grasshopper. But that was 
 not how the same set of facts impressed 
 Joshua and Caleb. They said, " If the 
 Lord delight in us, we be well able to 
 overcome them." And there you have 
 what made the difference ; and it is what 
 makes the difference up and down and 
 through and through. There are no factg. 
 There are only impressions of facts, re- 
 actions upon facts, and the nature of the 
 impression or of the reaction depends upon 
 the force and confidence of your soul, and 
 that ultimately depends upon your sense 
 of what lies at the back of things, your 
 sense of God. 
 
 Now that is precisely what St. Paul says 
 here, and saying what he says in the 
 height and fullness of his spirit (which is 
 62 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 the only condition in which we can speak 
 about hfe, for in such a mood we are 
 speaking out of the heart of hfe itself), he 
 has anticipated all Christian philosophy 
 and idealism, and has erected for the 
 long-enduring religious soul an impreg- 
 nable retreat and place of recovery. Shall 
 these things separate us from the love of 
 Christ ? And as he uses the words, they 
 form not a question, but an answer. It 
 all depends, he would say, upon where 
 you begin. I begin with God, with God 
 as He has come to me in Christ. That for 
 me is the one indisputable experience. 
 Every other thing in life, and all life, 
 must in my universe stand up to that one 
 fact. You have not merely to account 
 for those dark things such as tribulation, 
 anguish, death, and the rest, — you have 
 now to account for me, for this fitness 
 which I feel, with which I glow, to pass 
 through the furnace of those formidable 
 things. It is a phrase of the more warm- 
 hearted biologists of to-day that life is 
 a thing by itself and not to be accounted 
 
 68 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 for in terms of chemistry or mechanics ; 
 that this Hfe-urge, this elan vital, is the 
 ultimate thing which uses and refuses, 
 according to its own primordial genius 
 and intention, the world through which 
 it flows. 
 
 In the world of morals, face to face with 
 those sinister aspects of life which would 
 seem to mean that we are all of us the 
 victims of fate, of heredity and environ- 
 ment — in such a world, the one sure 
 datum — and it remains inexplicable until 
 we take our courage in both hands and 
 believe in God, whereupon it becomes the 
 clue to the mystery of existence, — the 
 one sure datum is that a man acts from 
 his own centre. 
 
 So, in the world of spiritual realities, 
 the one indisputable fact is that God in 
 Christ can so deal with the soul that 
 confides itself to Him, that there and 
 then, and so long as the Faith and Com- 
 munion are maintained, there is given 
 to that soul a personal resiliency, a power 
 of happy reaction against disheartening 
 
 64i 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 things, a prospect of eventual triumph 
 which for the reHgious mind is the One 
 Fact of Life, colouring, qualifying, an- 
 nulling, reorganising all other facts, for it 
 implies God and commits God to us in 
 love. 
 
 " What is this psahn from pitiable places 
 
 Glad where the messengers of peace have trod ? 
 Whose are these beautiful and holy faces 
 Lit with their loving and aflame with God ? 
 
 " Eager and faint, empassionate and lonely. 
 These in their hour shall prophesy again : 
 This is His will who hath endured, and only 
 Sendeth the promise where He sends the pain. 
 
 " Ay unto these distribute th the Giver 
 
 Sorrow and sanctity, and loves them well. 
 Grants them a power and passion to deliver 
 
 Hearts from th© prison-house and souls from hell. 
 
 *' Thinking hereof I wot not if the portal 
 Opeth already to my Lord above : 
 Lo there is no more mortal and inmiortal. 
 
 Nought is on earth or in the heavens but love. 
 
 ** Surely He cometh, and a thousand voices 
 Call to the saints and to the deaf are dumb ; 
 Surely He cometh, and the earth rejoices. 
 Glad in His coming who hath sworn, I come. 
 
 F 65 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 ' This hath He done and shall we not adore Him ? 
 
 This shall He do and can we still despair ? 
 Come, let us quickly fling ourselves before Him, 
 
 Cast at His feet the burthen of our care. 
 
 ' Flash from our eyes the glow of our thanksgiving. 
 Glad and regretful, confident and calm. 
 
 Then thro' all life and what is after living 
 Thrill to the tireless music of a psalm. 
 
 ' Yea, thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning 
 He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed : 
 
 Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning ; 
 Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ." 
 
 66 
 
Chapter IV 
 
** Shall tribvilation . . . ? Nay, neither death, nor 
 life . . ." 
 
Chapter IV 
 
 In our last study what I wished to bring 
 out was that Christ offers and secures to 
 the soul which confides itself to Him — a 
 blessedness, a condition of peace, of well- 
 being, of confidence, which it is not in the 
 power of any event or set of events to 
 corrupt or to terminate. And I went on 
 to say that that is still what we claim as 
 the proper influence of Christ in our souls. 
 Christianity, I was meaning to say all the 
 time, is not a philosophy of life, though it 
 is our point of view for the interpretation 
 of life : it is not a defence of things as 
 they are, though we do say that if things 
 are bad, hard to endure even with the 
 help of a faith in God, they are simply 
 appalling and overwhelming without such 
 a faith. 
 
 No : Christ came into the world not to 
 clear away all mysteries. He came into 
 
 69 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 the world to enable us to become good men, 
 and it is as we become good men with His 
 kind of goodness that life becomes intel- 
 ligible. 
 
 And so here, St. Paul does not say that 
 all things become easy to those who are 
 in Christ ; that these cease to have any 
 anguish of the body or any shadow upon 
 their soul. He does not say that they 
 cease to suffer, that they cease to have 
 their perplexities, that life becomes a 
 smooth thing for them and death spreads 
 its dark wings and flies away. He says 
 none of these things. Nay, he says the 
 very opposite. Every single thing that 
 makes life poignant to the human soul 
 remains. Nay, to us Christians, in virtue 
 of our new sensitiveness, those sinister 
 things have a greater power to give pain ; 
 and in addition, our new sensitiveness has 
 introduced us to whole worlds of possible 
 thrusts and wounds and shadows, of 
 which unexercised souls have no experi- 
 ence. Life is more vivid, more acute, 
 more directly assailing to us — what then ? 
 
 70 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 What advantage have we over others ? 
 We have this advantage — nothing can 
 separate us from the love of God which is 
 in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 What, then, we see in this great passage, 
 in the fervour and outpouring of which 
 the Apostle is disclosing the very basis of 
 his spirit, the final fears and final faith 
 which wrestled within him in the depths 
 of his being — what we see is, a man facing, 
 in the power of his experience of Christ, 
 the worst that life can bring, triumphing, 
 in the power of his communion, over the 
 evils of existence, and over such spectres 
 of the mind as he has already known and 
 as he can arouse by the force of his very 
 imagination. 
 
 It is as though he were saying, for the 
 fortifying of his own spirit, " Here stand 
 I, in the blessed communion of Jesus 
 Christ, my heart dwelhng in light, in 
 confidence, in the love of God. This 
 truly, as the Master said, is life eternal, to 
 know God and to know Jesus as God's 
 Son. And now, will it always be so with 
 
 71 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 me ? But why should it not always be 
 so with me ? What will ever be able to 
 happen of such a kind that I shall lose 
 under its pressure the Resource of Christ ? 
 I know that anything may happen to me. 
 I can foresee things that are very likely 
 to happen. I can foresee the world's 
 hostiUty closing in upon me : the tribu- 
 lation, the distress, the persecution, the 
 famine, the nakedness, the peril, the sword 
 [at this point he recalled a verse from 
 an old psalm as precisely fitting his own 
 case : " For Thy sake we are killed all the 
 day long : we are esteemed to be sheep 
 appointed for the slaughter."] And in 
 such trials, alas ! I may for a moment 
 shrink in pain or in fear. But though 
 my spirit, or rather my flesh, may wince 
 and falter. He, my Saviour, will still be 
 to me what He is. He cannot deny Him- 
 self. And surely He will come the more 
 near to me in such a time of pressure, 
 when, if He is to help me at all, He must 
 come closer to me than the fears of my 
 own weak heart. I thank God that in this 
 72 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 matter I am not left to guess-work. I 
 have already in the furnace tasted how 
 gracious the Lord is ; so that I have not 
 only passed through times of affliction, 
 but I have more than conquered in them. 
 For I have come out of them with a new 
 experience of Christ, a new and blessed 
 memory for my soul to carry forward 
 wherewith to meet such trials as await 
 me." 
 
 At this point the Apostle in his solitary 
 thinking one day paused. In a little 
 while, we may believe, he resumed his 
 journey, his spirit entering now a dark 
 defile where there is no accustomed path, 
 for a man goes this way once only. St. 
 Paul looked into the face of Death. What 
 has Death to say to Christ ? What has 
 Christ to say to Death ? What will all 
 this glow and tumult of my heart avail 
 me when, one day, I am struggling for 
 my breath ? Ah well, once more I do 
 not know how I shall acquit myself in 
 that lonely hour when, it may be, far 
 from home, with no dear voice to hold 
 
 73 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 my wandering mind to its own highest 
 way, with no touch and movement of 
 dear hands about me, I meet the last 
 enemy. I may pass out of Ufe as in a 
 chariot of fire, erect, confident, antici- 
 pating, hke Stephen, whom I saw die. Or 
 I may struggle out of life in pain and in 
 the disquietude of pain, perplexed, un- 
 sure, afraid. I do not know: I do not 
 know how I shall behave myself at the 
 very end. What then? "Who shall 
 separate me from the love of Christ ? 
 Shall death ? " Nay, surely not ! Surely 
 if there is one moment in which more 
 closely, with a greater passion of assist- 
 ance, Christ will be with me, it will be in 
 that instant when, having let go my hold 
 on life as I know it, I am passing through 
 the momentary void and amazement to- 
 wards the life that is undisclosed. 
 
 I do not know how I shall behave : no, 
 but then I have not for many years back 
 been building myself up on how I might 
 behave. The great thing God working 
 through my moral life has taught me, is 
 
 74 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 that my salvation ultimately does not 
 depend upon my hold on God, but upon 
 God's hold on me. And although I have 
 lived in the light of that belief since that 
 day outside the gate of Damascus, still 
 it may take the whole experience of 
 dying to discover to me how utterly I am 
 nothing, and how utterly the love of God 
 is all in all. I do not know how at the 
 last moment I shall behave, but I know 
 how Christ will behave towards me. I 
 may never for one instant lose the way 
 to His breast ; but even if it should be 
 otherwise, if in the access of some mortal 
 agony my mind should be darkened — that 
 will be His own beautiful subterfuge to help 
 me through, and all the time He will be 
 holding me as a mother would hold her 
 delirious child. 
 
 Here once again, on some unrecorded 
 day of musing, of fear, and of victory 
 over fear, the soul of the Apostle rested. 
 When he resumed, it was for the last 
 stage of the journey, when as a man, and 
 as a thinking man of his own race and 
 
 75 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tradition, he confronted the world con- 
 cerning which, except that it is in the 
 hands of the God and Father of our Lord 
 and Saviour Jesus Christ, we know nothing 
 of a surety, the land which lies on 
 the other side of death. What awaits 
 me there ? And how shall what awaits me 
 there affect this present warmth of my 
 heart in Christ ? "A man giveth up the 
 ghost, and where is he ? " What shall 
 become of me, of this so feeble frame which 
 holds all the treasure of my life, in that 
 dim, high-vaulted, spirit-haunted place, 
 where dwell the souls of men somehow ? 
 Here I have no experience at all on which 
 to form even an imagination. The wise 
 men of my own country declare that that 
 other world is populated to the very full 
 with spirits, organised into hierarchies, 
 good and evil : angels, principalities, 
 powers ; that there, in that world beyond 
 the range of our present faculties, the 
 agents of all things blend and contend, 
 and that the events that take place on 
 the public stage of life are but the visible 
 76 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 signs of the eternal conflict in the world 
 of spirits. 
 
 And how shall the frail barque of my 
 affrighted spirit sail upon the waters of 
 such a raging sea ? Ah well, concerning 
 all this I am in total ignorance. I do not 
 know even a little ; and I praise God that 
 this is my condition. For if I knew even 
 a little I should be thinking too much 
 about it, and how little it was compared 
 with the necessities of the case. Whereas 
 I know nothing about this place to which 
 I am going. I see now that for the lovers 
 of Christ, dying is the last act of faith. 
 For what is faith but a reliance upon 
 something which we do know, and upon 
 that reliance setting out with a kind of 
 innocence towards something which we 
 do not know ? 
 
 Once again, I do not know in what 
 way my soul shall acquit itself in that 
 unexperienced climate ; but I know that 
 if God be for us there also it will be 
 well with me. To the question, therefore, 
 which I asked myself — " A man giveth 
 
 77 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 up the ghost, and where is he ? " — I make 
 this simple answer. There in that un- 
 trodden world, a man is where he was ; 
 he is where, with his deepest spirit, he 
 always wished to be. If Christ is with 
 him here, Christ will be with him there, 
 but closer. He will call, and I will answer 
 Him. He will have a desire to the work 
 of His hands. Shall the world of crowding 
 spirits, shall the cold immensity of space, 
 the height and the depth — shall these 
 separate us from the love of God which is 
 in Christ Jesus, our Lord ? Nay : 
 
 *' Fear death ? — to feel the fog in my throat, 
 
 The mist in my face. 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place, 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm. 
 
 The post of the foe : 
 ** Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form. 
 
 Yet the strong man must go. 
 For the journey is done and the summit attained. 
 
 And the barriers fall, 
 " Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 
 
 The reward of it all. 
 I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more. 
 
 The best and the last ! 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore, 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 
 78 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 No ! let me taste the whole of it, fare hke my peers 
 
 The heroes of old. 
 Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 
 
 Of pain, darkness, and cold. 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The black minute's at end, 
 " And the elements' rage, the fiend- voices that rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend. 
 Shall change, shall become first a piece out of pain. 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again. 
 
 And with God be the rest ! " 
 
 A good way of testing the calibre of a 
 philosophy is to ask what it makes of 
 death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a medi- 
 tation upon death, or rather it is the 
 striving of the soul to escape from the 
 conclusion to which death seems to point, 
 to recover from the affront and insinua- 
 tion which death seems to offer. Perhaps 
 we might quite properly trace all the 
 greatness of the human soul to its brave 
 struggle through all ages with the thought 
 and prospect of death. We ought to 
 remember that great service which the 
 fact of death has rendered man : that 
 it has compelled him to struggle towards 
 some point of view from which he could see 
 
 79 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 through death and over it. What are all 
 the outpourings of the spirit of man — in 
 his art, his poetry, his worship — but so 
 many ways of fortifying himself against 
 the disheartening thought of death ? 
 
 We can conceive of a life without the 
 shadow of death, but in our own best 
 moments we perceive that it would have 
 been a poorer life than the tragic, poignant 
 life we know ; for in the long run it would 
 have been a life without music, without 
 hymns, without prayers, without tender- 
 ness, without mercy, without the qualify- 
 ing presence of a great fear. Ultimately, 
 it would have been a world without God. 
 No : whatever hard things we may say 
 about death, we owe to it, under God, 
 our true possessions. Death is no mere 
 thief in the night. In tender, right-living 
 souls, he leaves more than he takes away. 
 What an instrument for deepening the 
 soul is death ! What a medicine for 
 taking the fever from our life ! How much 
 we should be to one another, who are one 
 day to lose one another ! How expedient 
 80 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 it is for us that they whom we love should 
 go away ! For there are things about 
 them and about ourselves and about God 
 which we should never have known if 
 our hearts had never been torn by a 
 separation and enlarged. 
 
 Speaking for myself, I cannot follow 
 those who make light of death, who regard 
 all mourning and fear as unsuitable to 
 Christians, and who even go so far as to 
 praise death. I cannot follow them in 
 such an attitude. To me death is the 
 enemy, the last enemy. And I am sure 
 that God means me to defend myself 
 against it, and to shrink from it. It is in 
 obedience to God's own ordinance that 
 we should love and cling to life. The 
 grave is still made formidable by fear 
 and silence, lest any one should hurry 
 out of this world before his work is done, 
 before the season of his opportunity is 
 closed. 
 
 ** To be, or not to be, — that is the question : 
 Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 
 G 81 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 And by opposing end them ? To die, — to sleep ; 
 
 No more ; and by a sleep to say we end 
 
 The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
 
 That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation 
 
 Devoutly to be wished. To die, — to sleep, — 
 
 To sleep ! perchance to dream : — aye, there's the rub 
 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
 
 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. 
 
 Must give us pause ; there's the respect 
 
 That makes calamity of so long life ; 
 
 For who would bear the whips and scorns of time. 
 
 The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely. 
 
 The pangs of despised love, the law's delay. 
 
 The insolence of office, and the spurns 
 
 That patient merit of the unworthy takes. 
 
 When he himself might his quietus make 
 
 With a bare bodkin ? Who would fardels bear. 
 
 To grunt and sweat under a weary life. 
 
 But that the dread of something after death. 
 
 The undiscover'd coimtry, from whose bourn 
 
 No traveller returns, puzzles the will. 
 
 And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
 
 Than fly to others that we know not of ? 
 
 Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ; 
 
 And thus the native hue of resolution 
 
 Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; 
 
 And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
 
 With this regard their currents turn awry. 
 
 And lose the name of action." — Hamlet iii. 1. 
 
 I trust indeed that when the hour of my 
 
 necessity comes Christ will give me the 
 
 victory over my instinctive fear, saving 
 
 me from panic and cowardice. But I 
 
 82 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 have no expectation that it will be for 
 me anything short of a victory : that is, 
 it will come to me only by way of a 
 struggle, by way of faith. Any way of 
 considering the end of our mortal life 
 which is merely enthusiastic and contemp- 
 tuous fails in the long run to solace the 
 heart of man. We say : those who speak 
 thus have simply not felt what we feel : 
 they do not understand ; perhaps they 
 are to be envied ; but again perhaps they 
 are not to be envied. 
 
 The human soul has found its strength 
 for the last encounter, not in the experi- 
 ence or testimony of those who have anti- 
 cipated an easy crossing of the River ; 
 but in the experience and testimony of 
 those who anticipated that for them the 
 River would be swollen and in flood. Now 
 St. Paul affects me, recalling his writings 
 at this moment, as one to whom the 
 victory over death was no easy achieve- 
 ment. He affects me, therefore, as a 
 normal man with the natural shrinkings 
 and cravings of a man, one who had to 
 
 83 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 wrestle with this enemy until the breaking 
 of the day. 
 
 In some ways, victory over death was 
 an easier thing for him than it may be for 
 us ; although the circumstances which 
 make the struggle a harder one for us 
 are circumstances for which we ourselves 
 are responsible, and for which, since we de- 
 plore them, we are to be blamed. For one 
 thing, the unseen world was a manifest 
 reality to him. The supernatural for him 
 was not a difficult faith which he had 
 to defend by argument. The super- 
 natural to him was his habitual experi- 
 ence, to which he had been introduced by 
 a fact in his own life. However near to 
 his experience it may please God to bring 
 us, it will probably always be something 
 less vivid and objective than that appear- 
 ance of the Risen Lord which struck Paul 
 to the earth. It is true we have, or we 
 ought to have, evidences of the super- 
 natural which were not available for Paul ; 
 — for example, from the subsequent his- 
 tory of Christ in the world. But encoun- 
 84 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tered as we are by other interpretations, 
 probably no evidence of the Reality of 
 the Unseen and of the actualness of 
 Christ's supernatural power has been given 
 to us, having the physical cogency of the 
 facts which convinced him. 
 
 There are days when we wish it were 
 otherwise, when we fain would have from 
 God an open sign. But we confess that 
 in such a petition we are asking for a 
 lower gift ; we are asking to see rather 
 than to believe, thereby refusing for 
 ourselves Christ's last beatitude. (St. 
 John XX. 29.) And then it must have 
 given the Apostle great confidence, face 
 to face with death, to see how Christians 
 could die. He had seen Stephen sink 
 down in death, his face like the face of 
 an angel. He had seen Christ not separ- 
 ated by death from those who loved Him. 
 He could promise himself the succour of 
 the Lord at the last, for he had never seen 
 that succour fail. 
 
 And there I should like to interrupt 
 myself for a moment. Nothing will ever 
 
 85 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 sustain us in our preaching as will a 
 sympathetic contact with our fellow- 
 Christians in their bearing of sorrows and 
 in their enduring of death. I am sure 
 preaching suffers to-day from the absence 
 of that conviction about the nearness 
 and reality of Christ such as is fed by the 
 actual sight of suffering and death borne 
 beautifully in the grace of Him whom we 
 preach. It may be that we are not 
 invited or even permitted to minister to 
 our people in their bodily distresses, as 
 was wont to be the case. Perhaps our 
 sick people, especially those who are 
 seriously ill, are being wrongfully de- 
 prived of the society and the spoken in- 
 tercessions of those who share with them 
 the Christian hope. Perhaps medical men 
 have gone too far in the exclusively 
 material treatment of human maladies — 
 thereby provoking the equally false exag- 
 geration, say, of Christian Science. Un- 
 less the restriction is released, it may 
 even be our duty to draw the attention 
 of our people to a practice which is 
 86 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 based upon a most defective and irre- 
 ligious interpretation of their nature and 
 necessities. 
 
 But that is not my concern at this 
 moment. My concern is for the loss to 
 the public teachers of the Faith from 
 that inexperience of Christ's supernatural 
 power, which follows from having few if 
 any opportunities of seeing, in those who 
 lie on a sick-bed, the visible response of 
 Christ to our intercessions. For myself, I 
 do not know to what further thinness and 
 emptiness and mere talkativeness and 
 unreality my own testimony for Christ 
 might have fallen, had I not during the 
 first six years of my ministry gone in 
 and out among the homes of unsophisti- 
 cated people, — who would have protested 
 against being allowed to suffer and to 
 draw near to the end of life without the 
 guidance and comfort of God's Word — 
 and seen there on many a face which I 
 can still recall the manifest Presence of 
 Christ, giving victory and reconciliation 
 and peace in circumstances which, apart 
 
 87 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 from Him, made for sheer heart-breaking 
 confusion. 
 
 I am sorry for any of my brethren who 
 must go on talking and talking about 
 Christ, who have never seen and who 
 never see the Christ whom they are 
 talking about in action. 
 
 My point was that Paul could ask, 
 " Shall death separate us from Christ ? " 
 And could answer, No, indeed ; for, to say 
 no more, he had seen men fall asleep in 
 Christ. 
 
 Shall death separate us from Christ ? 
 he asks : and swift upon that comes 
 another challenge, — shall life ? 
 
 If we were always true to what we know 
 about ourselves in our own best hours, 
 we should be more afraid of life than of 
 death ; in the sense, I mean, that we 
 should be more on guard against the ten- 
 dency of life to separate us from Christ 
 and to interrupt the highest Communions 
 of the Spirit. Whatever hard things we 
 may say about death as it appears when 
 88 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 it comes close to ourselves, one thing we 
 cannot deny ; it brings us face to face 
 with reality. Death delivers us from the 
 confusion and incubus of a thousand 
 petty cares. The very thought of death 
 draws in the slackness of our souls, and 
 puts us upon the strain, making us, it 
 may be for the first time, capable of 
 responding to the holier prospects and re- 
 quirements. The shadow of death takes 
 all commonness out of the soul. One 
 perceives a kind of aristocracy in the 
 bearing and in the tone of voice of one 
 who has been deeply bereaved. And it 
 is an old observation that a certain king- 
 liness of aspect descends upon the faces 
 of the dead : so that we who are still 
 alive acknowledge that something has 
 come to them which makes us inferior. 
 
 Far from death and the things which 
 accompany death separating us from that 
 world which lies beyond our sense-experi- 
 ence, nothing has such power to purify 
 the soul and fill the empty space with God. 
 Jacob and Esau, two brothers, separated 
 
 89 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 for long years, the heart of the one bitter 
 for revenge, the heart of the other trem- 
 bling with fear — Jacob and Esau, coming 
 together again in friendliness over their 
 father's grave, helping each other to lay 
 the old man's body in its last resting-place : 
 that is a parable of the proper function 
 of death in life. 
 
 " O earth, so full of dreary noises ! 
 O men with wailing in your voices ! 
 O delved gold, the wailers heap ! 
 O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall ! 
 God strikes a silence through you all, 
 And giveth His beloved sleep." 
 
 We cannot say whether it was such an 
 idea that flashed through the mind of St. 
 Paul as he poured himself out in this 
 passage, the idea that the thing which we 
 are to be on guard against, as having the 
 greater power to alienate our soul from its 
 greatness, is not death, but life. We 
 cannot say that that is what he intended : 
 but on the other hand, we cannot say that 
 he did not intend that. Great words, 
 deep words, words that rise out of the 
 depths of a whole life, always convey more 
 90 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 than their first or precise meaning. They 
 mean everything that they may mean to 
 hearts which have come within sight of 
 their depth. 
 
 Certain it is that it is not the deep 
 things of human experience, but the shal- 
 low things which have the most disastrous 
 influence upon the soul. All through 
 his long career, man on the whole has 
 borne honourably the inevitable facts, he 
 has found within himself and in God 
 resources with which to quieten himself 
 in prospect of his own departure from 
 this world. This may have happened to 
 him because, confronted with something 
 which, like death, is inevitable, he has 
 ceased even to try to sustain himself, 
 whereupon, leaning back in his weakness, 
 he has come upon some hidden allevia- 
 tion of nature or, as we should state the 
 matter in our warmer and more logical 
 speech, he has come upon the Everlasting 
 Arms of God. 
 
 Certainly it is a fact worth pondering 
 that we all of us do better face to face 
 
 91 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 with the big things than with the Uttle 
 things. We are greater when we bend 
 under a burden than when we are still 
 quarrelling with some mere care. Thus 
 it often happens that we are most thor- 
 oughly made free from cares, not by a 
 wind from God cleansing our sky, but by 
 a wind from God filling our sky with 
 overhanging, thunderous, electric clouds, 
 beneath which the cares that a moment 
 before had seemed so important hide 
 themselves in a kind of shame. A drown- 
 ing man is not aware that he is getting 
 wet ; for when a man is getting wet, it 
 is his comfort that is being invaded, 
 whereas in drowning a man is fighting 
 for his life. We might go so far as to 
 say that the only remedy for the smaller 
 evils of existence is to feel, in fact or 
 in imagination, the threat of some deeper 
 and more ultimate evil. 
 
 There is more danger of atheism in the 
 
 management of the little things of life 
 
 than in the management of the deep 
 
 things. In the management of the smaller 
 
 92 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 things, we imagine that we are sufficient 
 for ourselves ; and therefore, we become 
 harassed, moody, liable to a thousand 
 fears ; whereas, in presence of the great 
 things, the inevitable things, the ultimate 
 human things of life and death, we know 
 and we acknowledge that we are not suffi- 
 cient, that unless God be with us, there 
 is no hope ; and in such a moment, before 
 we know where we are, the soul within 
 us, which is always ready to go further 
 than the strict evidence, has already 
 reached the heart of the whole matter, 
 declaring to itself that if God be with us, 
 all is well. 
 
 But the question, " Shall life separate 
 us from the love of Christ ? " must have 
 had for Christians of the first century a 
 quite definite meaning and one quite free 
 from subtilty or over-refinement. Let 
 me try to say what I think the meaning 
 would be for those who first heard these 
 glowing words. One day, as we are going 
 about at our work, or travelling, or look- 
 ing out of our window in an idle moment, 
 
 93 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 our eye may fall upon some one doing 
 something which is evidently his daily 
 occupation ; and we suddenly ask our- 
 selves how is it possible for any one, who 
 must do such a thing day in and day out, 
 year in and year out, to keep his soul 
 alive. For it sometimes comes home to 
 us, with a force which brings us to a 
 standstill, on what innumerable lives of 
 obscure monotony — to say no more — the 
 fabric of our own personal comfort is sus- 
 tained ! And no good man will permit 
 himself to escape from that moral uneasi- 
 ness until he has convinced himself, first, 
 that he honours those nameless victims 
 of civilisation, and, second, that he also 
 is doing something with the spirit of the 
 Cross in it. 
 
 I say, a day comes when our eye falls 
 upon some person, meanly engaged, occu- 
 pied in some task for the sake of his or 
 her livelihood, so exacting, or so petty 
 and so monotonous, that we wonder how 
 any flower of the spirit, of the imagina-tion 
 and affections, can bud or blossom on such 
 
 94 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 a soil and in such sunlessness. Some 
 time ago I was passing through a huge 
 factory, and there, amidst heat and the 
 clanging of machinery, I saw a man punch- 
 ing holes with a hammer. Stroke upon 
 stroke, stroke upon stroke, his arm rose 
 and fell. I watched him for some time, 
 but there was no variation, no need, it 
 would appear, for any further mental 
 resource on his part. That is his work by 
 the hour and the day and the year — 
 until, I suppose, his hand becomes faulty, 
 and he has to stand aside. I know it is a 
 very mild illustration of the kind of life 
 that countless thousands must meanwhile 
 lead. 
 
 Here and always, we mvist of course 
 remember that the heart knoweth its own 
 joy, as well as its own sore ; and one 
 who merely looks on is disqualified from 
 pronouncing on the things that may be 
 happening beneath the surface in any 
 other life. We must take care lest our 
 pity for our fellow-men become really 
 disrespect and contempt for the soul 
 
 95 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 within them. It may very well be that 
 the life which we lead in the world is 
 quite as hardening, quite as ruinous to 
 the imagination and spirit, quite as piti- 
 able from the standpoint of the soul, as 
 that other's work which we shrink from 
 because it is mean and haunted by poverty. 
 Indeed, we must take care, in our expres- 
 sions of idle pity, that we do not simply 
 betray our own essential worldliness, 
 speaking as though happiness and the 
 life of the soul were altogether dependent 
 upon material conditions, denying to a 
 human being the power to transform and 
 triumph over conditions by the force and 
 joy of his spirit. When you or I feel a 
 wave of shame and pity for the hard lot 
 of any of our fellows, let us see that it 
 is first of all an active passion and no 
 mere reaction of personal distaste and 
 self-satisfaction ; and second, that it is 
 free from the taint of contempt for the 
 soul in others and for its amazing and in- 
 exhaustible resources. For it may very 
 well be that there is a point of view, and 
 96 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 this nearer to the mind of God, from which 
 things are seen in a totally different per- 
 spective, and apprized on a totally differ- 
 ent scheme of values, where those whom we 
 count first are last and those whom we 
 count last are first. 
 
 It is not to be wondered at, however, 
 that in an age like our own, so rich in 
 material things, the sense of the resource 
 and cunning which dwell within human 
 souls for finding always a basis of joy, 
 should have almost died within us, so 
 that our philanthropy, and sometimes our 
 very religious interest in the poor and 
 outcast, is vitiated by a veiled contempt 
 and disregard of the soul within them : 
 as though life, with its merely external 
 conditions, could after all separate men 
 from the love of God which is in Christ 
 Jesus our Lord. We are all too ready to- 
 day to forget the power of love, of affection, 
 of imagination, of moral ambition, of 
 faith, of prayer, to pierce the gloom and 
 monotony of circumstance and to recover 
 for life that soul on which, through all the 
 H 97 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 ages, man has mounted up on wings, or 
 has run without weariness, or, in the 
 steepest places, has walked without faint- 
 ing by the way. 
 
 Still, when all is said, there are certain 
 conditions which more than others dis- 
 pose such as are under them to think in 
 a mean way about themselves and to lose 
 heart. There are always those — and in 
 a complicated and heedless civilisation 
 they must be a great host — ^who, unless 
 they have an exquisite faith, might well 
 suppose that life, the kind of life they 
 must daily lead, had cut them off or was 
 slowly shutting them out from any free- 
 dom of the spirit, from any personal 
 initiative or high communion. And indeed, 
 apart from our faith that we have a 
 private life within the love of God, apart 
 from our faith that God cares for us one 
 by one, with all that that implies and 
 shall lead to, what are we better any of us 
 than so many conscript soldiers, so many 
 victims and prisoners of life ! But this 
 was a thought which might with much 
 
 98 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 reason come over the minds of the first 
 Christians. They were for the most part 
 slaves. All the old civilisations rested 
 upon a basis of slavery. 
 
 Now the thing that makes slavery in- 
 tolerable to Christian minds is not simply 
 the physical hardship that accompanies 
 it. What makes slavery, — and if the 
 same can be said of any existing social 
 arrangement, then it also is contrary to 
 the mind of Christ, and must go, — what 
 makes slavery obnoxious to Christian 
 minds is that it disposes its victims to 
 accept as the truth their own sense of 
 worthlessness. 
 
 But what had those first Christians 
 wherewith to overcome within themselves 
 this sense of worthlessness ? They had 
 the wonderful knowledge that Jesus Christ 
 had thought them worthy. He had given 
 Himself for them. We cannot to-day 
 even imagine the thrill of self-respect, of 
 self-recovery, which would run through 
 their veins like fire to read or to hear 
 such words as " Who being in the form 
 
 99 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 of God . . . humbled Himself and took 
 upon Himself the form of a slave. '^ 
 
 Shall life separate us from the love of 
 Christ ? Shall it put us away from Christ 
 that we are poor ? For our sakes, He 
 became poor, that we through His poverty- 
 might become rich ! Nay, then, far from 
 life, our life — so poor, so friendless, so 
 difficult, so obscure — far from our life 
 separating us from the love of God, what 
 if the truth rather be that it is just such 
 a life as ours, and only such a life in 
 spirit, that can maintain within souls the 
 tenderness and humility and passion of 
 necessity which unite us to our Blessed 
 Lord in faith and hope and love ! 
 
 100 
 
Chapter V 
 
" Nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, 
 nor things to come, nor powers." 
 
Chapter V 
 
 In dealing with words Uke these, words 
 which are unusual, words which embody 
 ideas that are strange to us, it will help 
 us towards the true understanding of 
 them to remember, once again, that it was 
 always a serious thing to live. It will 
 help us also to remember that anything 
 which was ever passionately believed con- 
 tains an abiding truth ; it was an attempt, 
 affected, of course, by the limits of human 
 knowledge at the time, to account for 
 matters which are probably quite as 
 mysterious to ourselves, matters for which 
 our explanation may appear equally 
 strange and unenlightened to those who 
 come after us. Anything that was ever 
 heartily and persistently believed repre- 
 sents, we may be sure, a way of looking 
 at some mystery of life or of thought 
 which at one time helped people to bring 
 
 103 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 some kind of order into the world, so that 
 they might feel more or less at home in it. 
 
 We are " dwellers in tents," not merely 
 from the point of view of our physical 
 life passing through youth and manhood 
 and decay to what lies beyond all experi- 
 ence ; we are dwellers in tents in matters 
 of the soul, in matters of knowledge, of 
 thought, and in the region of ideas. But 
 this is not to say that because one set of 
 ideas comes to be forsaken for another, 
 which in turn becomes obsolete, therefore 
 all are equally false. For a serious and 
 sympathetic student of history, it should 
 rather mean that through all time man 
 has found himself confronted with a world 
 which he has insisted upon understanding, 
 a world which he has girded up the loins 
 of his mind to meet and master by virtue 
 of his own quality. 
 
 At each stage the interpretation arrived 
 at may have been defective, or in the 
 light of later knowledge false, though 
 false is too strong a word for any theory 
 of things which in its day represented 
 104 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 the highest and most serious effort of the 
 human mind. At each stage, I say, the 
 interpretation which served for the time 
 being may have been inadequate, or, to 
 the wiser minds which were being formed, 
 even fooUsh, but though the interpreta- 
 tion may have been wrong, the instinct 
 to seek an interpretation was right, and 
 its persistence is one of the precious 
 evidences of man's distinction. 
 
 And again, though this interpretation 
 and that may have been wrong, inade- 
 quate, quaint, foolish, this is not to say 
 that there was not all the time something 
 that required an interpretation. It may 
 be that this gnostic account of the cos- 
 mical process, for example, which ascribes 
 to hierarchies of spirits the creation and 
 control of things, can no longer satisfy 
 our reason or our moral sense. But when 
 we have discarded the gnostic account, 
 we have not thereby taken any positive 
 step towards the solution of the mysteries 
 which that account attempted to relieve. 
 We may, of course, content ourselves 
 105 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 with an agnostic attitude, and say that 
 the entire matter is beyond us, that we 
 are quite incompetent for absolute truth, 
 that we had better mind our own busi- 
 ness, that nobody knows anything, or can 
 ever know anything ; — and so on. 
 
 But such an attitude, we must confess, 
 is less worthy than theirs who at least 
 did believe that the human mind was not 
 incapable of finding truth, who, without 
 saying it in so many words, did by their 
 thinking claim that man stands in an 
 organic relation to all things and to the 
 absolute God and to all intervening and 
 mediating spirits and principles. That, I 
 say, is a nobler attitude than to give up 
 all thinking ; for to give up thinking in 
 any ultimate way about this life of ours, 
 and to devote ourselves to our own petty 
 and ever-contracting circle of interests, 
 resembles rather the alleged delusion of 
 the ostrich when it buries its head in the 
 sand and supposes it is safe. 
 
 Throughout the New Testament one 
 encounters in every page references to 
 106 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 what would appear to have been a more 
 or less accepted body of ideas, imagina- 
 tions, beliefs with regard to the presence 
 in this world and over it of demonic or 
 angelic, immaterial forces and powers. 
 These references when they do occur 
 affect us as arising out of a traditional 
 basis and doctrine of existence, such as 
 the writer or speaker could assume as 
 present. 
 
 At the stage of spiritual development 
 which has been reached at the close of the 
 Canon, there is no distinct repudiation by 
 the Church of the general outlines of 
 that cosmogony. In this, as always, the 
 Bible is not a book of philosophy. It is 
 willing to begin with men as they are, 
 content that they embrace the living 
 truth concerning God as that is revealed 
 from age to age, leaving it to themselves, 
 to their sense of honour towards God, to 
 amend, adjust, or abandon such thought- 
 systems and life-systems as they have 
 been living by, according as these systems 
 betray under the new light any embarrass- 
 J07 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 ment or hostility. Just as the one interest 
 of nature is life, and for the sake of life 
 she will allow types and species to perish, 
 so the one interest of God in history is 
 the advance and refinement and freedom 
 of the spirit, and for the sake of that 
 God will permit the overthrow of every 
 institution of man, as a thinking being, 
 in doctrines, and as a social being, in 
 laws, when those doctrines or laws have 
 become intolerable to the demand and 
 requirement of life. 
 
 The function of the Spirit of God in Holy 
 Writ is to keep pouring in the new wine ; 
 it is no part of His function to manufac- 
 ture the wine-skins. It is left to us, 
 using our good sense, our sober judgment, 
 exercising also from time to time a 
 certain fearlessness, and that willingness 
 to take a risk which is such a true part 
 of our nature, it is left to us, when an 
 old wine-skin can no longer contain the 
 precious wine — when, it may be, the old 
 wine-skin is beginning to taint and dis- 
 qualify the wine — ^to prepare new skins, 
 108 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 new habitations of the spirit, new thought- 
 systems and Ufe-sy stems, lest the wine of 
 God be lost to us and we are left with only 
 the old skin, with but the memory of the 
 days when it was full. 
 
 Throughout the New Testament, I say, 
 we see cropping out, like rock above the 
 soil, a whole system of beliefs with regard 
 to the immaterial nature of things. I 
 think it is fair to say that nowhere in the 
 New Testament is there any thorough- 
 going repudiation of the habitual beliefs 
 of the people. Again and again, very 
 deliberately in the Colossian Epistle, 
 believers are put upon their guard against 
 the dangers of these demonic or angelic 
 or spiritualistic theories, and are charged 
 to abandon without the slightest hesita- 
 tion any habit of thought or of imagina- 
 tion which appears to be in conflict with 
 the moral majesty of God, and with the 
 Immediate and Sovereign rights of Christ. 
 But here, as always, the line which Christ 
 takes is first of all to knock at the door 
 of a man's heart. If the door is heartily 
 109 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 opened and Christ is made welcome, He 
 will come in and sup with the man. He 
 will come in, that is to say, and make 
 Himself at home with the man, sharing 
 his daily, habitual life with him. But 
 Christ on the whole leaves it to the man 
 into whose life He has come, himself to 
 say what things are worthy to remain in 
 his life in view of the fact that this Holy 
 One is now a sharer of all his intimacies. 
 On the whole, Christ leaves it to the man 
 into whose life He has come, to say what 
 kind of thoughts are going to stay on 
 with him as guests. 
 
 We have all of us some kind of philo- 
 sophy of life, some kind of way of looking 
 at things, and Christ does not begin by 
 either approving it or disapproving it. 
 He begins by coming into our life : and 
 He leaves it to ourselves to act loyally 
 upon any sense of uneasiness or incon- 
 gruity which, under the new light and with 
 our new point of view, we may discover 
 between Him and the things we used to 
 think, or used to believe, or used to prac- 
 110 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tise. If our old ways can accommodate 
 themselves to His wonderful way, well 
 and good. But if our old ways begin to 
 jar upon some fine sense of life which 
 Christ has given to us, if things we used 
 to do without thinking we find ourselves 
 now compelled to think about and to 
 think about very sadly, why then it is 
 part of " the manner of love the Father 
 hath bestowed upon us to call us sons 
 of God," that Christ trusts us to act 
 honourably by our private sense of the 
 fitness and unfitness of those interior 
 arrangements. 
 
 Here I cannot do better than recall an 
 old story from the Bible ; a story which 
 I believe was preserved not simply as a 
 piece of history, but as a parable of the 
 method by which God always works and 
 makes His way. The Philistines, you 
 will remember, once upon a time took 
 captive the Ark of the Lord, and placed 
 it in the house of Dagon, their own god, 
 and, it would appear, even alongside 
 Dagon ; not knowing what they did, 
 111 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 There they stood, those two, — symbols of 
 the only two ultimate Spirits, the only 
 two Gods who finally and in principle 
 divide the allegiance of man. There they 
 stood, to begin with, side by side. But 
 it was only for a moment that they even 
 appeared to be at peace with one another. 
 Night fell, night and darkness, which puts 
 the test to gods and men. Night fell, 
 and in the darkness, in a region beyond 
 the eyes of men, the terrible struggle 
 began. In the morning Dagon lay with 
 his face to the ground, and the Ark stood 
 alone upon its place. The Philistines, sup- 
 posing it had been an accident, — thougli 
 Dagon, so far as we know, had never 
 staggered until that day, — set him back 
 in his place again. And the night fell : 
 and through the darkness once again 
 those two struggled for supremacy. Next 
 morning, Dagon was down again, and this 
 time he had fallen with such violence 
 that his head and the palms of both 
 his hands were broken, and nothing 
 was left to him but his stump. 
 112 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 Now all that, I say, is not merely 
 history, it is fact, it is truth. And it 
 describes the way of the living God 
 always. For us in these last days the 
 interpretation is, that Christ comes into 
 our life. In His great love He does not 
 ask before He enters whether we are 
 worthy to receive Him. He comes in. 
 He sets Himself right down in the midst 
 of all our habitual ways, leaving it, I 
 repeat, to ourselves not to put out our 
 hand to save anything which at the rebuke 
 of Christ is beginning to totter from its 
 place in our heart. If things as they 
 were with us before He came can endure 
 His Presence happily, let them stay. 
 But if, without speaking, the Face of 
 Christ sets up within ourselves a distaste 
 for them, if before Him they feel uneasy 
 and ashamed, let us rise and once again 
 open the door, and let those conflicting 
 things go out of our life, as indeed, at 
 that moment, they wish to go out. 
 
 Now, if you have grasped the spirit of 
 my words so far, and of this old illustra- 
 I 113 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tion, I can pass on to deal briefly, and yet 
 quite fulfilling my intention, with the 
 body of ideas and fancies and beliefs 
 underlying these words : " angels, princi- 
 palities, things present, things to come, 
 powers." In these words it is evident 
 that St. Paul is marshalling before his own 
 imagination certain aspects and shapes 
 which, apart from his faith in the love of 
 God in Christ, would dishearten or appal 
 his spirit. What were those formidable 
 aspects or shapes ? 
 
 It would take me far beyond the limits 
 of my purpose to deal even inadequately 
 with that view of God and the world 
 which probably lay at the back of the 
 minds of those to whom the Gospel first 
 was preached. I should, to begin with, 
 be under obHgation to describe the rise 
 of the spirit of speculation amongst the 
 Jews, dating historically from the time of 
 the Exile. I do not mean to say that men, 
 still less men with such a faculty for 
 religion as the Jews, never concerned 
 114 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 themselves with abstract questions con- 
 cerning God and the soul until they were 
 taken captive. But what I do say is that 
 the captivity — in the judgment of the 
 later writers and editors of Holy Scrip- 
 ture — (witness the message of the Book 
 of Jonah and the burden of many of the 
 Psalms), had the effect of deepening 
 human life, of raising questions which 
 pierced deeper and deeper until they 
 touched the very frontier where the human 
 mind must pause. This is an effect 
 which, in the light of our own experience, 
 we are prepared for. It is life and death, 
 it is experience, it is defeat, it is over- 
 throw, it is disappointment, which lays 
 open the depths within us, and discovers 
 the depths around us. 
 
 When all prospect of Israel or Judah 
 ever becoming a nation again was re- 
 moved, the soul of the people, represented 
 by its prophets and saints, began to turn 
 in upon itself. Here as always there was 
 first that which was natural and after- 
 ward that which was spiritual. When 
 115 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 the dream of being a great nation, the 
 peer of Egypt or Assyria, had been 
 shattered, there and then the soul of this 
 God-discipHned people fell back upon 
 more essential things. Good men per- 
 ceived God's will and stated it in the 
 exclamation " that Zion is her bulwark 
 and her God her glory." 
 
 But before this solution and interpreta- 
 tion of her long experience had been 
 perceived and accepted, — and we can 
 trace the whole story in the Old Testa- 
 ment, in some of the more rebellious 
 Psalms, in the Books of Chronicles, in 
 Ezekiel, and in Haggai; the beautiful, 
 pathetic story of the soul of a people 
 being braced by God to forego a worldly 
 ambition and to accept a career of the 
 Spirit ; the soul of a people, we might say, 
 contending like our Saviour in the wilder- 
 ness, tempted of the devil, and later, 
 dropping sweat and blood in a Gethsemane, 
 learning to say, " Thy will be done " ; — 
 before accepting such an interpretation 
 and solution of her long experience, there 
 116 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 was many a bitter cry when good men 
 wrestled with the contradictions of life, 
 with the baffling triumph of the great, 
 godless powers of the world, and with the 
 apparent silence of God. But at last 
 the great light broke upon the holiest 
 souls, — that God's purpose for His people 
 was not and had never been that they 
 should be great, having chariots and 
 horsemen like the uncircumcised nations 
 of the world, but that they should be holy 
 unto the Lord. 
 
 Now, in all this process and passage 
 from merely natural ambitions to the 
 acceptance of a mission of suffering and 
 testimony to God, the soul in man had 
 been profoundly intensified. Baffled of 
 its outlet towards the world, the soul 
 turned in upon itself and discovered an 
 inlet towards God. Faith built for itself 
 an house not made with hands, eternal 
 in the heavens. There is no more won- 
 derful proof of God's peculiar intercourse 
 with the soul of the Jewish people than 
 to observe how they faced the disaster of 
 117 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 all their worldly ambitions and became 
 deep enough to be satisfied with an over- 
 throw at the hands of life which flung 
 them on the breast of God. 
 
 When a puissant nation is denied its 
 freedom, when it sees no happy issue and 
 occupation for its natural force, you will 
 inevitably have psychology, mere think- 
 ing in a circle and pessimism. For pessi- 
 mism is simply insight without faith. It 
 is tenderness without faith, tenderness 
 refining upon itself, and failing to com- 
 plete itself and recover from itself in 
 some hearty activity. 
 
 It was in that period, doubtless, when 
 the nation, having abandoned its merely 
 worldly ambitions, was falling through 
 space towards God — it was then, we may 
 believe, that interest in the unseen, in 
 what might lie beyond experience, in 
 theories of existence, in apocalyptic, be- 
 came a necessity. 
 
 It may be said that the Jews picked 
 up their apocalyptic in Babylon, and that 
 in order to understand what they believed, 
 118 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 we must study Babylonian sources, and 
 beyond them the behefs and supersti- 
 tions of still remoter ages. I do not think 
 so. Here again I agree with Mr. Chester- 
 ton, that to understand religion to- 
 day there is no need to acquaint oneself 
 with the habits of the undisturbed South 
 Sea Islanders. The way to understand 
 religion is to go to church. Nay, I 
 should say the way to understand religion 
 is to have had any one of those shattering 
 human experiences, the loss of a wife or 
 of a child, or the prospect of a surgical 
 operation, you still being a young man 
 with the world before you, or to have 
 found yourself out in some moral shame. 
 These are among the things which quicken 
 the soul to search for God. 
 
 Let it suffice to say that in Apostolic 
 times there was abroad in the world a 
 spiritualistic philosophy which had arisen 
 doubtless in the first instance in all finer 
 souls as a refuge from the sense of futility 
 and despair, a philosophy which, to begin 
 with, was a faith and even something of 
 119 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 a gospel, and which, Uke every other faith, 
 was compelled to develop itself to meet 
 the difficulties from the side of the human 
 reason, and to accommodate itself to 
 established pieties and prejudices. The 
 consequence was that an elaborate gnosis 
 or interpretation of all things in terms of 
 spirit, of demonic or angelic influence, 
 was current in the world, and was indeed, 
 in one aspect of it or another, the first 
 enemy of the Christian faith. 
 
 I might proceed to indicate some of the 
 outstanding principles of this spiritualistic 
 philosophy. But I shall content myself 
 with a word or two. Its first and per- 
 vasive principle was that matter is evil. 
 The question thereupon arose. How did 
 this world come into existence ? It must 
 have proceeded from God. But how could 
 what is evil proceed from Him who is 
 pure spirit and goodness ? To overcome 
 this dilemma, it was alleged that in the 
 immense gap between pure Spirit or God 
 and matter or creation, there is an im- 
 measurable host of spirits organised and 
 120 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 graded, becoming lower and lower in 
 quality as you proceed from God to the 
 earth, but the difference of spiritual grade 
 between one rank and another is extremely 
 fine. According to this scheme, it was not 
 God who created the world but an inferior 
 Power, the Demiurge, who of course must 
 have been in some relation to God, but 
 between God and the Demiurge it was 
 felt not to be so impious to suggest a 
 relation as it would have been to bring 
 God into direct contact with the finished 
 product of creation. The Demiurge in 
 turn established and sustained his agency 
 over things by means of hierarchies or 
 levels of spirits, angels, principalities, 
 powers, thrones, and so on. 
 
 It was a naive attempt to solve, by a 
 system which one might picture to one's 
 own mind, a problem for which perhaps 
 there is no solution of the kind. At the 
 outset most probably these intervening 
 spirits were not supposed to be evil. 
 They were, from the moral point of view, 
 indifferent and plastic: and in the New 
 121 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 Testament the line which is taken is not 
 that they are necessarily evil. The line 
 in the New Testament is, as we shall 
 go on presently to say, that whatever 
 they are, Christ has triumphed over them 
 and can endue the soul with a power 
 which sets us free from their influence. 
 
 It was inevitable, however, that as soon 
 as men began to be troubled by the obvious 
 evils of the world, these should be traced 
 to the operation of some of those inter- 
 vening ranks of spirits — to the imperfec- 
 tion of their particular work in the organ- 
 ised scheme of existence, or to their abuse 
 of the freedom which had been measured 
 out to them by their superiors. 
 
 Now here again I would ask you to 
 remember that it was always a serious 
 thing to live. However defective and 
 impossible of belief such a doctrine may 
 be to ourselves, let us not forget that 
 it was at any rate a protest against the 
 despair of the human reason face to face 
 with a universe whose final processes are 
 still inscrutable. The questions in which 
 122 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 this gnosticism interested itself are ques- 
 tions which lie at the root of our religious 
 consciousness, and will under new terms 
 and dialects continually recur. " The 
 impulse was given to its speculations by 
 an overwhelming sense of the unapproach- 
 able majesty of God, by an instinctive 
 recognition of the chasm which separated 
 God from man, from the world, from 
 matter. Its energy was sustained by 
 the intense yearning after some mediation 
 which might bridge over this chasm, 
 might establish intercommunion between 
 the finite and the Infinite." 
 
 Confronted with this philosophy, en- 
 countering it in the general atmosphere, 
 aware of its principles in his own mind, 
 how does the Apostle deal with it in this 
 spontaneous outpouring ? For in these 
 glowing words, I repeat, we are not deal- 
 ing with the momentary excitement and 
 sudden enthusiasm of a man, but, as I 
 believe, with deep, reasoned principles of 
 thought and of belief which in many a 
 lonely, unrecorded struggle, perhaps in 
 123 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 those three silent years in Arabia, Saul 
 of Tarsus had wrought into the marrow 
 of his soul. There is heat in the passage 
 certainly, but the heat only serves to 
 melt the last restraint and reticence of his 
 spirit, permitting us to see the inmost and 
 final things which all the time were there. 
 St. Paul does not argue here for or 
 against those theories. They may be 
 partially true. They may be wholly 
 false. He simply falls back upon what 
 for him is the one truth and fact. God 
 is for us, Christ being witness. God is 
 according to Christ. Christ is the nature 
 of God. Everything else must take its 
 place or keep its place beneath or within 
 that final and all-penetrating fact. For 
 it is an all-penetrating fact. In our 
 language, what St. Paul means at least 
 is this (and may not this be the all- 
 embracing truth of the Doctrine of the 
 Deity of Christ to which the Church 
 has clung, with sometimes even a blind 
 tenacity, through history, even consenting 
 to shed rivers of blood rather than add an 
 124 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 iota to the " homoousion " ?) : that there 
 is one order of mind throughout the 
 universe, that the Power with whom we 
 have to do is not merely Uke, but the same 
 as, that which dwelt in Christ Jesus in 
 bodily form. 
 
 In short, it might be maintained that 
 the innermost contention within the belief 
 in the Incarnation of God in Christ is 
 that life is sane. If God is for us, and that 
 is equal to saying, if God is in Christ, 
 then neither angels nor principalities, nor 
 things present nor things to come, nor 
 powers — ^nothing in that immense space 
 which our minds conceive as lying between 
 us and the final habitation of our souls, 
 no intervening substance or spirit, can 
 keep us apart from this Immediacy of 
 Christ with us. Everywhere, anywhere. 
 He shall be with us so long as our Spirit 
 maintains its unity and identity. 
 
 And so it happens as a necessary conse- 
 quence that Christianity soon or late 
 makes for the overthrow of all supersti- 
 tion, of all spiritualism, of every tyranny 
 125 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 over the mind of man in the name of the 
 merely gigantic or occult or weird. For 
 Christianity declares, and rests upon, and 
 recovers itself in, the faith that the Content 
 of the Eternal Mind is — ^goodness, the 
 simple, real, intelligible, human goodness 
 which we see in our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 It is a Face like His Face shall receive 
 us, a Hand like His Hand shall throw 
 open the gates of new life to us. 
 
 I read in the New Testament that Christ 
 " spoiled the principalities and the powers 
 and made a show of them openly, tri- 
 umphing over them in His Cross." I do 
 not know all that these words and many 
 others like them may mean. I can, how- 
 ever, feel what they must have meant to 
 those who were asked at the beginning 
 to believe them. And what these words 
 and those many others which have the 
 same burden would mean for them — and 
 it is what they mean for me — is this : 
 that surrounded as we are by the unknown, 
 by a spiritual order, in which, it may be, 
 the ancient evil of the world has its 
 126 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 throne and complicated system of govern- 
 ment and relations, — a spiritual head- 
 quarters to which the evil influences of 
 lives return and from which, it may be, 
 they descend to the earth again to vex 
 and seduce the ever-new race of men ; 
 surrounded by such a world of possi- 
 bilities (to say no more), we believe in the 
 reign of that God who dwelt in all fullness 
 in Christ Jesus ; we believe that He is 
 there as He is here, that no spot exists 
 in the Universe of Spirit which is given 
 over to Chaos or to undisturbed and un- 
 threatened devilry. 
 
 " I am persuaded that neither . . . 
 angels nor principalities, nor things present 
 nor things to come, nor powers, shall be 
 able to separate us from the love of God 
 which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." It 
 is as though St. Paul were saying : You 
 and I know nothing for certain about 
 the immaterial world which one day shall 
 receive us. I may have my own beliefs, 
 and those beliefs of mine I may clothe 
 with such imagery and circumstance as 
 127 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 help me to realise them. But in all these 
 things it may be that I err. The Lord 
 has not spoken plainly concerning such 
 things : it may be that by His silence 
 He would discourage all mere curiosity 
 concerning the unseen world. One thing 
 I know ; God is supreme, and for me God 
 is Christ. 
 
 Luther's hymn, indeed, is a fair transla- 
 tion and comment on the passage which 
 has been engaging us. 
 
 " A safe stronghold our God is still, 
 A trusty shield and weapon ; 
 
 He'll help us clear from all the ill 
 That hath us now o'ertaken. 
 
 The ancient prince of hell 
 
 Hath risen with purpose fell ; 
 
 Strong mail of craft and power 
 
 He weareth in this hour ; 
 On earth is not his fellow. 
 
 " With force of arms we nothing can. 
 Full soon were we down-ridden ; 
 
 But for us fights the proper Man 
 Whom God Himself hath bidden. 
 
 Ask ye who is this same ? 
 
 Christ Jesus is His name. 
 
 Of Sabaoth the Lord, 
 
 Sole God to be adored, 
 
 'Tis He must win the battle. 
 
 128 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 ' And were this world all devils o'er. 
 And watching to devour us, 
 
 We lay it not to heart so sore ; 
 Not they can overpower us. 
 
 And let the prince of ill 
 
 Look grim as e'er he will. 
 
 He harms us not a whit ; 
 
 For why ? his doom is writ ; 
 A word shall quickly slay him. 
 
 * God's word, for all their craft and force. 
 One moment will not linger. 
 
 But, spite of hell, shall have its course ; 
 'Tis written by His finger. 
 
 And though they take our life, 
 
 Goods, honour, children, wife. 
 
 Yet is their profit small ; 
 
 These things shall vanish all. 
 The city of God remaineth." 
 
 129 
 
Chapter VI 
 
Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation. 
 
Chapter VI 
 
 In the work of the poet whom best I 
 know, to whom, under God, I owe more 
 than to any other for insight, for respect 
 and sympathy for the human soul, for a 
 point of view from which to interpret 
 experience in terms of God, there are 
 four hnes which never fail to raise in my 
 own mind the very spectre which con- 
 fronted the soul of St. Paul when he asked 
 himself this question : " Shall the height 
 or the depth, shall the utter vastness of 
 things separate us from the love of God 
 which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ? " 
 
 In the Epilogue to " Ferishtah's Fan- 
 cies," Browning has left us some twenty 
 lines which will always have for some souls 
 the power of a " Marseillaise." 
 
 ** Thronging through the cloud -rift, whose are they, the 
 faces 
 Faint revealed yet sure divined, the famous ones 
 of old ? 
 
 133 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 ' What,' they smile, * our names, our deeds so soon 
 erases 
 Time upon his tablet where Life's glory lies en- 
 rolled ? 
 
 ** * Was it for mere fool's-play, make-beheve and mum- 
 ming. 
 So we battled it like men, not boylike sulked or 
 whined ? 
 Each of us heard clang God's ** Come ! " and each 
 was coming. 
 Soldiers all, to forward face, not sneaks to lag be- 
 hind I 
 
 ** * How of the field's fortune ? That concerned our 
 Leader ! 
 Led, we struck our stroke nor cared for doings left 
 and right ; 
 Each as on his sole head, failer or succeeder. 
 
 Lay the blame or lit the praise : no care for cowards : 
 fight ! ' 
 
 "Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's 
 under, 
 Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and 
 strife's success. 
 All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder. 
 Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing 
 less." 
 
 And now listen to the four lines in 
 
 which, as it seems to me, a man might 
 
 express the last, the final despair. They 
 
 are a paraphrase, I believe, and exposi- 
 
 134 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 tion of that mood of blankness and empti- 
 ness, when the horrible insinuation of our 
 ultimate futility, the laughter and con- 
 tempt of death, offers itself to us, — a 
 mood which even the Great Apostle had 
 known, nay — ^why should not we say 
 it and claim it with great wonder and 
 gratitude ? — a mood which our Lord 
 Jesus knew for one awful moment on 
 the Cross, a mood which He triumphed 
 over on that battlefield which lies some- 
 where between the " Elohi, Elohi, lama 
 sabachthani " and the " Father, into Thy 
 hands " ; the last awful fear that things 
 may mean nothing at the end and there- 
 fore may have intended nothing all the 
 time. Listen to the poet : 
 
 ** Only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror 
 
 Sudden turns the blood to ice : a chill wind dis- 
 encharms 
 All the late enchantment ! What if all be error — 
 If the halo irised round my head were. Love, thint 
 arms ? " 
 
 *' What if all be error ? " A man who 
 
 can say those words in pain is standing 
 
 or has stood upon the last promontory^ 
 
 135 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 overlooking vast, sad waters. Even a 
 great man had better stand there once 
 only, and then, but for an instant. 
 Ordinary men had better never go so far. 
 Fortunately, ordinary men have not the 
 faculty for such loneliness, for such separa- 
 tion of their soul from their body. This 
 is the experience, I venture to think, which 
 the Hebrew belief had in view, which 
 declared that to see God is to die. The 
 sense of the Absolute brings Death. We 
 sometimes in our folly ask for an open 
 vision, for a direct immediate contact with 
 reality. We know not what we ask. 
 Thanks be to God who hideth Himself, 
 who discloseth Himself to us, here a little 
 and there a little, and all within the aspect 
 of His Grace in Christ — ^lest the truth 
 should at any moment be too much for us. 
 I have written elsewhere of this sense 
 of vastness and its natural effects upon 
 faith ; how, unless we take care, there 
 may come a kind of giddiness over us, 
 occupying such a precarious place between 
 such a depth and such a height. It is 
 136 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 this sense of vastness which makes for 
 the pathos of Tennyson, and for the dignity 
 and pride and aggrievedness of Arnold, 
 and for the cynicism and pitifulness of 
 Hardy, and for the frivolity and sensuality 
 of smaller irresponsible writers. These 
 are the various consequences which are 
 inevitable, and they threaten us all 
 peculiarly in these days when we have 
 become aware, as no age ever could be 
 aware, of the intolerable duration of time, 
 and the aching immensity of space. 
 
 I cannot but believe that it was essen- 
 tially this very challenge which St. Paul 
 is facing here : " Shall the height or the 
 depth separate us from the love of God ? " 
 Of course the ideas which those words 
 called up for him would be other than they 
 suggest to us. But beneath the surface 
 here also is a man facing the universe, 
 overcoming the terror and discourage- 
 ment of it by the power of his faith in 
 Christ. 
 
 When all is said, there is no other way. 
 " We have but faith, we cannot know." 
 137 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 " This is the victory which overcometh 
 the world, even our faith." " By faith 
 we know that the world was made by 
 God." " Faith is the giving substance 
 to things hoped for, a conviction con- 
 cerning things not seen." " Let not your 
 heart be troubled," so our Lord besought 
 us, " believe." 
 
 Faith is a venture upon God which we 
 make on the invitation of Jesus ; and the 
 peace of God, the total sense of well- 
 being, which comes to us in consequence, 
 we hold to be sufficient verification. From 
 this point of view, the thing that makes a 
 man a Christian is that he has staked, not 
 this or that, but himself (the very phrase 
 used by St. Paul of Epaphroditus) — ^he 
 has staked himself upon Christ. A man 
 is a Christian — from the point of view of 
 this region of things with which we are 
 dealing now, — who can say : I am in for 
 Christ. I believe in Christ. I believe 
 in Christ's belief. I see the things which 
 seem hostile, but Christ saw them with a 
 clearer eye than mine. He saw the stars, 
 138 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 but they did not make Him shudder with 
 fear. They did not move Him to any 
 mere pity for man, — having such thoughts 
 of Himself and so soon to be engulfed in 
 the ocean of eternity. Beneath the stars, 
 in desert places. He knelt, yielding Him- 
 self up to God, thinking Himself into God. 
 He met, He encountered. He transformed 
 the Ancient Silence by His moral Passion 
 and Insight. He thereby saved my in- 
 tellectual soul, as in His Patience of Love 
 on Calvary He saved my moral soul. 
 And what makes me a Christian is that I 
 believe all that of Him and love Him for 
 all that. 
 
 The question whether ultimately I am 
 right or wrong is not, properly speaking, 
 open to me. What makes me a Christian, 
 once again, is that here also, in the words 
 of a hymn of my childhood, " I want to 
 be like Jesus." Jesus called the Power 
 behind all things — Father. The stars 
 moved across the heavens for Him, the 
 night-wind sighed : He was at home with 
 God. The clouds massed over His head 
 139 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 from the sixth hour to the ninth hour. 
 He tasted the bitterness of Hfe, He tasted 
 the bitterness of death. For one instant 
 His Soul seemed to hover in the balance. 
 " My God, my God," He cried, " where 
 art Thou ? " But next moment the deep, 
 deep peace was come again. And Jesus 
 whispered, " Father, into Thy hands." 
 
 And once again, what makes me Chris- 
 tian is the faith which is at the same time 
 a necessity for my very sanity as a man — 
 that Christ's experience of God is the 
 final truth of things. 
 
 Who shall separate us from the love of 
 God ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or 
 persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or 
 peril, or sword ? 
 
 Nay, in all these things we are more than 
 conquerors through Him that loved us. 
 For I am persuaded — (I am persuaded, — 
 I am in the condition now of one who has 
 been persuaded, not overborne by an 
 argument, but moved, melted, won by the 
 gentle, loving pressure of another upon 
 140 
 
If God be for Us 
 
 me) — I am persuaded that neither death 
 nor Hfe, nor angels, nor principaHties, 
 nor things present, nor things to come, 
 nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any 
 other creature shall be able to separate 
 us from the love of God which is in Christ 
 Jesus, our Lord. 
 
 Primed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England, 
 
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