T"*^ 3 
 
 OCIAL. I JtACniNCr 
 
 Qiarles M/. 3tubb3 
 
The Social Teaching of the 
 Lord's Prayer 
 
The Social Teaching 
 
 of the 
 
 Lord's Prayer 
 
 Four Sermons 
 Preached before the University of Oxford 
 
 By 
 
 Charles WilHam Stubbs, D.D. 
 
 Dean of Ely 
 
 New York 
 Thomas Whittaker 
 
 2 and 3, Bible House 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Dedicatory Letter . . . . vii 
 
 I. Social Order .... 1 
 
 II. Social Progress . . . .28 
 
 in. Social Justice .... 54 
 
 IV. Social Duty . . . . .80 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 TO THE REV. IV. R. HUNTINGDON, D.D., 
 
 Redor of Grace Church, New Yorl\ 
 
 My dear Dr. Huntingdon, 
 
 When I was your guest in New York last 
 autumn, I preached, on your invitation, at 
 Grace Church, a sermon on ^' The Social 
 Teaching of the Lord's Prayer." This sermon 
 I subsequently repeated in the chapel of the 
 Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, in 
 Trinity Church, Philadelphia, and Trinity 
 Church, Boston — in both of which churches I 
 was glad to remember that I was occupying 
 the old pulpit of the late Bishop Phillips 
 Brooks — in Trinity Church, Columbus, Ohio, 
 before the Convention of the St. Andrew's 
 Brotherhood, in Christ Church, Meadville, 
 Pennsylvania, and in Grace Church, Chicago. 
 In response to a kindly-expressed wish by 
 
Vni DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 many of my American friends in these various 
 places, I now venture to publish four sermons 
 on the same subject, preached during my term 
 of office as Select Preacher before the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford. If, in its amended form, the 
 thought which met with your sympathy as 
 expressed in the shorter sermon, should seem 
 to you attenuated rather than enriched by 
 expansion, you will, I am sure, jDut that down 
 to the inadequacy of my method, certainly not 
 to any limitation of my subject. 
 
 For in America, no less than in Enofland, 
 the Churchmen of our generation are awaken- 
 ing to the largeness of the mission which is 
 open to the Church by her recognition of the 
 fact, that the message of the Incarnation of 
 Jesus Christ is social no less than personal ; 
 that Christ, as the supreme Personality of all 
 history, is the most potent factor of civiliza- 
 tion ; that the basis of all true Social Order, 
 Social Progress, Social Justice, Social Duty, is 
 to be found in the infinite creative good, the 
 holy redeeming energy of the Fatherly Will 
 of God, revealed in the Laws of the king-dom 
 of Heaven, and setting like a tide into the 
 currents of history. 
 
 In my shorter sermon I spoke of the Lord's 
 Prayer as the Paternoster of the Christian 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER IX 
 
 Socialist. Such a phrase did not, I hope, 
 seem to you an unnatural one. You would 
 understand that I used the phrase in the 
 sense in which our common master in theo- 
 logy, Frederick Maurice, would have used 
 it fifty years ago. And certainly we must 
 all recognize that the personal cry of the 
 humble and contrite heart, " God, be merci- 
 ful to me a sinner," is individualistic in a 
 sense which can never be true of the " Our 
 Father." A Kyrie must almost always, by 
 the necessity of things, remain something 
 of an Individualist's prayer. A Paternoster 
 belongs to a Socialist. For the very first 
 word of that prayer, as it has often been 
 pointed out, is a plea for universal brother- 
 hood and social union, reminding us that 
 when we pray for ourselves, we are praying 
 also for our human brothers ; that we cannot 
 speak to God for ourselves witliout also speak- 
 ing for them ; that unless we carry their sins 
 to the throne of God's grace, we do not carry 
 our own. And the second word of that prayer 
 is an appeal to the universal fact, not only of 
 our creation by the Heavenly Father, but of 
 our re-creation in the Incarnate Christ, re- 
 minding us that God hath " sent forth His 
 Son, made of a woman, made under the Law, 
 
X DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 tliat we might receive the adoption of sons," 
 that we might never forget that the name of 
 our God would lose all its meaning for us if 
 we tried to use it merely as individuals, and 
 not as members of a society, of a common 
 family. It is, you will see, in this sense that, 
 in the following sermons, I have interpreted 
 the Lord's Prayer, the Prayer of Christ, as a 
 Socialist, not an Individualist, Paternoster. 
 
 And yet you will also see, that if for the 
 moment I think it is the Socialistic aspect of 
 Christ's message that most needs to be empha- 
 sized, I am not proposing to depreciate the 
 Individualistic aspect. Individualism is of the 
 very essence of Christianity. But Individual- 
 ism, to be truly ethical, must put itself wholly 
 into social relationship. " Only a perfect in- 
 dividual," it has been well said by our friend 
 Professor Nash of Cambridge, '' perfectly 
 knowing and mastering himself, can be truly 
 in society ; and only in society can a man 
 become a perfect individual." To the com- 
 pleteness of Christ's gospel both aspects of 
 His doctrine are necessary. Personal Salvation 
 by Christ is true. But it is not the whole 
 truth, nor the only truth. Social Redemption 
 by Christ is true also. Protestant Individual- 
 ism is true. But it is not the whole truth nor 
 
DEDICATORY LETTEK XI 
 
 the only truth. Catholic Socialism is true also. 
 In God's plan for the world the perfection of 
 the individual and the perfection of the society 
 are both part of His design. There is a Chris- 
 tian ideal for society. There is a Christian 
 philosophy of civilization. History has a 
 moral goal. 
 
 And in the development of that divine plan 
 each age of the world, each race of men, would 
 seem to have its own special work to do — a 
 fresh term, so to speak, to disengage from the 
 unknown quantities of the social equation. 
 
 That both your Church and mine, the Pro- 
 testant Episcopal Church of America, the 
 National Church of England, may realize the 
 grave responsibilities of that Social Mission, 
 which it would appear to be the special office 
 of our English Christianity at the present time 
 to accomplish, is, I know, as sincerely your 
 prayer as it is mine. That I was enabled last 
 autumn to speak of this Mission in so many 
 American pulpits, and to pass on to American 
 Churchmen some, I trust, of the lessons which 
 I had learnt in the Cambridge class-rooms of 
 Maurice and Kingsley, of Lightfoot and West- 
 cott and Hort, will always remain one of the 
 great privileges of my life. 
 
 In venturing now to dedicate to you these 
 
Xll DEDICATORY LETTER . 
 
 sermons on the same subject, preached before 
 the University of Oxford, I am not only 
 desirous of offering them as a memento of my 
 very grateful friendship, but also as a testi- 
 mony to my reverent admiration for one to 
 whom a love of true scholarship and sound 
 learning, of wise judgment and vigorous ad- 
 ministration, has led his fellow-churchmen in 
 America to look for inspiration and leadership. 
 Believe me, 
 
 My dear Dr. Huntingdon, 
 
 Very sincerely yours, 
 Charles W. Stubbs. 
 
 Deanery, Ehj, 
 
 Whitsuntide, 1000. 
 
THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE 
 LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 Sfc. Matt. vi. 9, 10 : "Our Father which art 
 in Heaven . . . Thy will be done in earth." 
 
 What is the basic conception of a sound 
 Sociology 1 
 
 In what apjDcars to be God's plan for 
 humanity, does the organism of human society 
 belong by its essence to an invisible world ? 
 Is there any spiritual relationship to which for 
 men, as social beings, the universal bonds and 
 duties of humanity may be traced ? 
 
 Looking back upon history, may wc con- 
 sider that the social evolution of which science 
 claims to trace the method and purpose 
 exhibits also the working out of a spiritual 
 purpose and discipline for man ? 
 
 In that history is there any warrant for a 
 
2 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 belief in an Ideal social state, conjectured as 
 being perfected in the future, natural — and to 
 be naturally evolved ? — and if so, of what sort 
 is that Ideal ? 
 
 These are questions which in an age like 
 our own, of scientific exploration on the one 
 hand and of socialistic agitation on the other, 
 seem to demand an answer from any Christian 
 investigator of social philosophy, social morality, 
 from any thoughtful citizen, that is to say, 
 who believes that Christianity is the religion 
 of the Eternal Word, '' through whom all the 
 ages were made," and contains therefore the 
 key to all the social problems which any one 
 of those ages may propound. 
 
 I think that the answer to those questions 
 may, in part, be found in the Lord's Prayer. 
 At any rate I am proposing in the four sermons 
 which it will be my duty to deliver in this 
 place from time to time, to ask you to con- 
 sider with me some of the elementary prin- 
 ciples of human society which seem to me to be 
 either implied or suggested by each of the five 
 familiar clauses of the Paternoster. 
 
 This prayer, in its comprehensiveness, in its 
 simplicity, has been for nearly nineteen cen- 
 turies the Catholic prayer of Christendom. It 
 has been translated into all languages. It 
 
SOCIAL OEDER 3 
 
 has been accepted by all Churches. In every 
 age and in every society of Christians, the 
 faithful follower of Jesus has taken this prayer 
 upon his lips, and has ever found it to respond 
 to his latest thought. It was enshrined at the 
 very heart of the great Eucharistic sacrifice in 
 all the ancient Liturgies of the Church. It is 
 so placed in our own office of Holy Com- 
 munion to-day. In the daily order, too, of 
 Common Prayer it follows immediately upon 
 the public absolution of the penitent people. 
 It has equally been at the heart of the private 
 devotion of the individual Christian all through 
 the ages. It is the protoplasm of all Christian 
 worship. It is simple enough for the little 
 child. It is deep enough for the wisest 
 theologian. For to both alike the " Our 
 Father " opens and expands in meaning with 
 the growth of human needs. In our age, with 
 its new and developing social conditions, we 
 shall, no doubt, outgrow many things. AVe 
 shall not, I think, outgrow the Lord's Prayer. 
 In the early part of the fourteenth century 
 there was existing in the city of York a 
 religious guild, known by the name of '' the 
 Guild of the Lord's Prayer." In older days it 
 seemed that there had been a custom to enact 
 in the streets of the city a play setting forth 
 
4 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORDS PRAYER 
 
 the goodness of the Lord's Prayer ; "in which 
 Play " — I quote from the okl Guikl ordinance 
 — " all manner of vices and sins were held up 
 to scorn, and the virtues were held up to 
 praise. . . ' Would that this Play,' the 
 people said, ' could be kept up in this city for 
 the health of souls and for the comfort of the 
 citizens and neighbours ! ' And so the Guild 
 was formed of ' bretheren and sisteren of good 
 and worthy businesses to keep up this Play to 
 the glory of God, the maker of the sakl Prayer.' 
 And a table was set up at the Guild expense, 
 and hung against a pillar of the Cathedral 
 Church, showing the whole meaning and use 
 of the Lord's Prayer : and whenever the Play 
 was played the Guild members rode with the 
 players through the streets, and once in every 
 six weeks the bretheren and sisteren met to- 
 gether to offer special prayers 'for the good 
 governance of the kingdom of England.' " 
 
 Times and customs have changed greatly in 
 England since those old days. I at least have 
 no desire to restore them. But there is some- 
 thino- in those old times which it is worth 
 while to restore. I mean that spirit of social 
 devotion and worship which, under whatever 
 even superstitious form of ritual, or quaint 
 aspect of drama, did enable the Englishman 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 of those days to realize intensely his religion 
 in its bearing, not only on his own individual 
 soul, but also on wider human society, did 
 make him associate the teaching of the Lord's 
 Prayer, not only with his private devotions or 
 the highest acts of Christian worship, but also 
 with the daily bonds and obligations of his 
 social and civic life, his conduct of good and 
 worthy business, the health and comfort of 
 citizens and neighbours, the good governance 
 of the kingdom of England. 
 
 That spirit is as much needed as ever it was 
 for the wholesome discipline of the body politic. 
 It is in that spirit, at any rate, that I would 
 wish you to consider some of the social lessons 
 which it seems to me we may profitably learn 
 from a study of the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 Our subject naturally divides itself into five 
 divisions corresponding with the five chief 
 clauses of the prayer. We may set it out, I 
 think, conveniently in this form. 
 
 L Social Order : — its basis in the Fatherly 
 will of God. ''Father . . . Thy will 
 be done in earth." Evolution the way 
 God makes things come to pass. 
 
 n. Social Procuress : — its warrant in the 
 sublime optimism of the Incarnate 
 Son. ''Thy kingdom come . .. . in 
 
6 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYEIt 
 
 earth." The royal law of neighbour- 
 liness. 
 TIL Social Justice : — its clifFerentiation of 
 life from livelihood. " Give us this 
 clay our daily bread." God's bread, 
 not devil's bread. 
 IV. Social Duty : — the identification of duty 
 with debt to neighbour and to God. 
 " Foro:ive us our debts." Foro:ive us 
 our failures in social duty. 
 Y. Social Discipline : — the pressure of 
 heredity and environment, and the 
 ministry of the free and Holy Spirit 
 of God. " Lead us not into temptation, 
 but deliver us from evil." A revolu- 
 tion of thought must precede a 
 reformation of society. 
 
 Social Order. 
 
 Our subject, then, to-day is the basis of 
 Social Order. 
 
 " Our Father which art in Heaven . . . 
 Thy will be done in earth." 
 
 It is possible, no doubt, to contend — it has 
 indeed not seldom been contended — that there 
 is in these words no specially Christian revela- 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 7 
 
 tion of the basis of the social organism, or 
 indeed of any fundamental idea of Christianity, 
 because in this clause of the Lord's Prayer 
 Jesus was simply adapting to His own purpose 
 a doctrine already in common use in the 
 Talmudic and Rabbinical literature of His 
 age, and one which rested of course ultimately 
 on the Old Testament scripture itself. The 
 fact is undeniable. The writing's of the Jewish 
 fathers do contain many expressions, almost 
 verbatim, which are used by Jesus in the 
 Prayer and in the fuller teaching of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. Those of you who care to do 
 so will find the parallelisms drawn out with 
 much careful scholarship in an excursus on 
 the subject appended to Dr. Charles Taylor's 
 Sayings of the Jeivish Fathers. But indeed 
 we may go further, and say that there is not 
 anything in the Lord's Prayer which might 
 not have been the prayer of any pious Jew of 
 Christ's time. But what of that ? A truth 
 revealed by God can never be a truth out of 
 relation with previous thought ! The origin- 
 ality of Jesus is not surely to be measured 
 only by the critical canon of one particular 
 ap^e. That would be to blind ourselves to all 
 that is involved in the doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion. Indeed, it is only as we realize Christ, 
 
8 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORDS PRAYER 
 
 not only in connection with the gospel revela- 
 tion, but as the pre-incarnate Son of God, the 
 same Divine Word, who is and was and ever 
 has been the lio;ht and the life of men, who 
 before what we call Christianity wrought first 
 in mankind at large through the avenues of 
 conscience, and afterwards more particularly 
 in the Jews through a special though still 
 imperfect revelation, that we shall find the 
 difficulties to fall away which beset the lan- 
 guage not only of the Sermon on the Mount 
 or the Lord's Prayer, but much else in the New 
 Testament writings. We must predicate of 
 the Word not only prior but absolute existence. 
 Let us make this then our starting-point, and 
 read boldly into the language of the Lord's 
 Prayer, and especially into its opening clause, 
 that Idea of God, that conception of the 
 Personality of Christ, which is implied in the 
 Doctrine of the Licarnation. 
 
 For my purpose to-day I may venture to 
 state that doctrine broadly thus : — The Chris- 
 tian creed announces to us in the first place, 
 not a world-wide philosophy, nor even a 
 universal religion, but it introduces us to a 
 Supreme Person — Jesus Christ our Lord. In 
 heaven as on earth, over things invisible 
 as over thinsfs visil^le, over thiiws immaterial 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 9 
 
 as over things material, this Person is repre- 
 sented as supreme. 
 
 In the natural creation, in the material 
 universe, His supremacy is that of the Eternal 
 Eeason, the pre-incarnate Word of God, the 
 Logos of Greek thought, by whose agency the 
 world of matter was created, and is sustained, 
 who is at once the beginning and the end of 
 material things. "All things have been created 
 through Him and unto Him." 
 
 And in the spiritual creation, in the Church, 
 this same Person is represented as the inspirer 
 and the illuminator of man in his intellectual 
 being, the light and the life of humanity, the 
 revealer to man of the Divine character, 
 "manifesting God with increasing clearness at 
 each successive stage in the great scale of 
 being," until in the fullness of time He Him- 
 self "for us men and for our salvation came 
 down from heaven, and — was incarnate— rwas 
 made man." And from this conception of 
 the personality of Christ, His mediatorial func- 
 tion in the Church flowing from His media- 
 torial functions in the world, there follows not 
 only the redemption, but the exaltation of 
 human nature, the consecration of all human 
 relations with the visible creation, and in con- 
 nection with the conquest of sin and death, 
 
10 SOCIAL TEACHINC4 OF THE LORD's PEAYER 
 
 there opens up the vista of the glorious destiny 
 of the children of God, proposed before the 
 world was. 
 
 Now this doctrine of the pre-incarnate Word 
 and the Incarnate Christ, though it un- 
 doubtedly stands in the forefront of the pro- 
 logue to St. John's Gospel, though it is hardly 
 less prominent in the opening of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, and though it finds special 
 emphasis in the two great Christological pas- 
 sages in the Epistles to the Ephesians and 
 Colossians, and though lastly it forms the 
 groundwork of the great Creed which is com- 
 mon to all the Churches, in reality exercised 
 very little influence over the direction of 
 theological thought in the early part of this 
 century. 
 
 The loss has been most serious. It must 
 be more than twenty years now since Bishop 
 Lightfoot, in his Introduction to his Com- 
 mentary on the Epistle to the Colossians, 
 said : " How much our theological conceptions 
 suff*er in breadth and fullness by this neglect a 
 moment's reflection will show. How much 
 more hearty would be the sympathy of theo- 
 loorians with the revelations of science and 
 the developments of history if they habitually 
 connected them with the operation of the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 11 
 
 same Divine Word who is the centre of all 
 their religious aspirations it is needless to say. 
 Through the recognition of this idea with all 
 the consequences which flow from it as a 
 living influence, more than in any other way, 
 may we hope to strike the chords of that 
 ' vaster music ' which results only from the 
 harmony of knowledge and faith, of reverence 
 and research." 
 
 That hope of Dr. Lightfoot has during the 
 last decade of the century been largely ful- 
 filled. It must be obvious to any one who 
 is in the habit of listening to any of the more 
 thoughtful preachers of our day, that the 
 Doctrine of the Incarnation finds a place and 
 a prominence in their pulpit-teaching which 
 was quite unusual thirty or even twenty years 
 ago. 
 
 It is not quite pertinent to my present pur- 
 pose to trace the history of that readjustment 
 of doctrine, that "re-focussing of truth" in the 
 scheme of Anglican Theology. You may read 
 the chapters of its modern history in such 
 books as Professor Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy, 
 Idea of God, and Destiny of Man, in Dr. 
 Allen's Continuity of Christian Thought, in Dr. 
 Bigg's Bamj^toyi Lectures on the " Christian 
 Platonists," in Dr. Heard's Hidsean Lectures 
 
12 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORDS PRAYER 
 
 on " Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology," 
 and more readily in Mr. Aubrey Moore's and 
 Mr. Illingworth's brilliant essays in Lux 
 Mtindi. 
 
 But it is pertinent, I think, to my present 
 purpose, and certainly historically just, to note 
 that this readjustment of doctrine, which has 
 so intimately affected the later character of 
 the Anglican Revival, had taken place com- 
 pletely in the teaching of one great Christian 
 doctor — perhaps the greatest — of this cen- 
 tury more than sixty years ago. I mean in 
 the writino^s of Frederick Denison Maurice. 
 
 You will pardon a Cambridge man, I hope, 
 when he says that " the Oxford Movement " 
 is hardly the full equivalent of the "Anglican 
 Revival " ; and further forgive the partiality of 
 an old pupil of Frederick Maurice, if he says 
 that it has sometimes seemed to some of us 
 that here in Oxford your younger generation' 
 of theologians, who *' regard themselves as 
 adjusting the High Church theology of Dr. 
 Pusey and his generation to the newer know 
 ledge of our day," do not, at least publicly, 
 sufficiently recognize the debt which they owe 
 to Maurice for the lead which he gave more 
 than sixty years ago. 
 
 Indeed, there are those who think that it 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 13 
 
 would not be too much to say that it was the 
 doctrine of Maurice rather than that of Pusey 
 or Newman, which for forty years — Maurice 
 began his work in 1835, he died in 1872 — 
 *' kept the whole forward movement in the 
 social and political life of the English people in 
 union with God, and identified with religion," 
 a doctrine moreover which, idealized and 
 transfigured by two great poets of the century, 
 Tennyson and Browning, dominant in the 
 teachinor of the Cambridoe schools of Liohtfoot 
 
 o o o 
 
 and Westcott and Hort, assimilated as it would 
 seem almost unconsciously by the younger 
 Oxford theologians of the Lux Mundi school, 
 has during this last decade of the century turned 
 so wisely the current of our English Christian- 
 ity to the consideration of the great social 
 problems of the age, and is at this moment 
 so profoundly afiecting, moulding, inspiring, 
 transfiguring the social ideals of the present. 
 
 I do not mean, of course, to assert that the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation in its modern re- 
 statement originated with Maurice. He himself 
 freely confessed his obligations to Coleridge, 
 to Erskine of Linlathen, to Alexander Knox. 
 And the history of the heredity, so to say, of 
 the doctrine may easily be traced backwards 
 through the Cambridge Platonists of the seven- 
 
14 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 teenth century — Cudwortli, Smith, AVhichcote 
 — through the Oxford reformers of the fifteenth 
 century — Colet, Erasmus, and More — back to 
 the great Grreek Christian Fathers of the 
 early Church — Clement, Origen, Hippolytus. 
 The doctrine was not, of course, new ; but 
 Maurice was the writer who first in our 
 century set it forth in the new form which 
 the new age needed. 
 
 Compare, for example, Mr. Illingworth's 
 masterly essay in Lux Muiidi on '^ The Incar- 
 nation and Development," especially the pas- 
 sage towards the close of that essay beginning 
 with the words — " The Incarnation opened 
 Heaven, for it was the revelation of the Word ; 
 but it also reconsecrated earth, for the Word 
 was made Flesh and dwelt among us" — with 
 the chapter in Maurice's Moral and Meta- 
 2)hysical Philosoj^hy on '' Philo and the Alex- 
 andrian School," or with the later chapters on 
 the Neo-Platonists, and you will see how clearly 
 sixty years ago Maurice had grasped the truth 
 of the creative and administrative and redemp- 
 tive work of the pre-incarnatc Word and the 
 incarnate Christ, which our age needed, to 
 give unity and breadth and fullness to its 
 theological conceptions, and also no less to 
 connect for the Christian evolutionist ])oth the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 15 
 
 revelations of science and the developments of 
 history — the study of which has influenced 
 so deeply the later phases of the Anglican 
 Revival — with the operations of the same 
 Divine Personality. 
 
 And whatever may be the fact with regard 
 to pure theology, certainly in regard to what 
 we may call applied theology, it cannot be 
 denied that it is to Maurice's teaching that 
 we must look back chiefly for the filiation 
 of those ideas, commonly called Christian 
 Socialist, wdiich have hitherto so happily for 
 England succeeded in turning democratic as- 
 pirations and hopes, both political and social, 
 from revolutionary courses into channels and 
 methods which have led on the whole to stable 
 and conservative, and therefore permanent 
 progress. 
 
 For no one who knows anything of the 
 social and industrial history of England during 
 the last half-century, can doubt that when 
 Maurice and his friends, the Christian Social- 
 ists of 1848, challenged our modern conse- 
 crated regime of individualism and competition, 
 refusing to accept as final the pessimistic 
 doo^mas of an economic science which had for- 
 gotten that in the last resort the problem w^as 
 not about wealth but about men ; that when 
 
16 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORDS PEAYER 
 
 they endeavoured to formulate a social science 
 in which co-operation rather than competition 
 should be the true law of industrial relation- 
 ships, and when they did, in fact, succeed in 
 laying the foundation of what has proved the 
 most hopeful industrial experiment of the 
 century — the organization of the great co- 
 operative movement — that when they fought 
 the early battles of sanitary reform, and laid 
 down those principles of the science of public 
 health, whose legal enforcement now forms so 
 large a part of the administrative work of 
 municipalities and other local authorities; and 
 that when, finally, because the public remedy 
 of social evils always runs up at last into 
 moral considerations, they endeavoured, and 
 not altogether in vain, to awaken the con- 
 science of both the English Church and the 
 English people to regard all these great 
 questions from the Christian point of sight; 
 no one, I say, can doubt that the doctrine of 
 the Incarnation, as Maurice accepted it, as the 
 true basis and centre of all Christian social 
 philosophy, was the master note of their 
 
 teaching. 
 
 And because this was so, because his social 
 teaching was always in close touch with his 
 theology, Maurice could never endure any 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 17 
 
 action on the part of his Christian socialist 
 followers which seemed to imply that society 
 ought not to he l)uilt up on the selfish and 
 competitive instincts of mankind. It was of 
 the essence of his Christian faith to believe 
 that it tvas not. To him the very first words 
 of the Paternoster, of the '' Onr Father," were 
 a proof that God's order vjas founded on 
 mutual love and fellow help. Selfishness and 
 competition were the direct results of man's 
 disorder. Human society, on the warrant of 
 that prayer, he held to be a Divine creation. 
 He could not therefore tolerate any method 
 or system which seemed to imply that it was 
 man's business to construct some new and 
 improved form of society — '' a new moral 
 order," as the Owenite Socialists were fond of 
 asserting — rather than to assume that the 
 existing form of society, with its divinely 
 created obligations of the family, of the neigh- 
 bourhood, of the nation, was the best, if men 
 would only pay reverent homage to these 
 obligations. 
 
 "Christian Socialism," he said, '*is in my 
 mind the assertion of God's order. Every 
 attempt, however feeble, to bring that order 
 forth I honour and desire to assist. Every 
 attempt to hide it under a great machinery, 
 
18 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 call it organization of labour, central board, or 
 what you like, I must protest against as 
 hindering the gradual development of what I 
 regard as a Divine purpose, as an attempt to 
 create a new constitution of society, when 
 what we want is that the old constitution 
 should exhibit its true functions and energies." 
 I well remember hearing him, in the course 
 of lectures on Social Moralitij which he 
 was then delivering at Cambridge, use these 
 ^^lOY^i^ — *' According to the Christian creed, 
 the authority of a father, the obedience of a 
 son, lies at the root of the universe, is implied 
 in its constitution. In a living spirit the 
 authority and the obedience are for ever 
 united. After this image it is dechared that 
 man is created : the perfect humanity is in 
 the Son of God. . . . Absolute faith or trust 
 in His Father is declared to be the character- 
 istic of Him who took man's nature upon 
 Him ; such faith or trust, exalting men above 
 themselves, makes them partakers of the true 
 human life. The Son of INIan is announced 
 as the Brother of all men, one who has entered 
 into the conditions of the poorest, the most 
 sufferinor of them, one who has endured their 
 death. Men are proclaimed to have a universal 
 brotherhood in Him. Lastly, the principle of 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 19 
 
 the kingdom of Heaven is said to be that the 
 chief of all is the servant of all : the Kino- of 
 Heaven having become in very deed a servant 
 of His creatures. . . . This belief in an in- 
 visible and righteous government, a govern- 
 ment over men, over the earth, was involved 
 in the original idea of the Church. If at any 
 time the teachers of the Church lose their faith 
 in this invisible government, they become 
 eager to define their own rights and powers, 
 so the sense of service is lost, so the domestic 
 character of the government is lost." 
 
 I have often thought of these words of my 
 old Cambric! o^e teacher durino^ the social and 
 economic difficulties and controversies of the 
 last thirty years. They are quite simple 
 words. But they contain, so at least it seems 
 to me, a more helpful interpretation of the 
 true constitution of human society than any 
 that I can find in all the other books of 
 sociology that I have ever read. 
 
 At any rate that is the interpretation which 
 I desire to pass on to you to-day. 
 
 Place these words of Christ, "Our Father 
 which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 . . . Thy will be done in earth, as it is in 
 heaven," side by side with the life of Christ on 
 earth, that perfect exhibition of the harmony 
 
20 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 of the human and Divine will, and in the 
 light which is thrown upon that life by the 
 doctrine of His pre-incarnate personality, and 
 do not these principles converge to strengthen 
 our faith in God's good government of the 
 world ? 
 
 Jesus Christ in proclaiming a fatherly 
 will as the origin of all life, and as the root 
 of humanity^ reveals to man the Divine order 
 under ivhich he is living. 
 
 There is therefore an order of society 
 ivhicli is the best, and towards this order the 
 world is gradually moving according to a 
 definite Divine plan. God has been ivorh- 
 ing and still works, and mans duty and 
 true effort lies in letting God work, through 
 conscious hitman wills. 
 
 My friends, without that faith I confess I 
 cannot see how we are to reconcile the per- 
 plexities which abound in the order of nature 
 and of society, much less account for the 
 existence of a Church which uses the Lord's 
 Prayer, which starts from a belief in a Father 
 in heaven. Without that faith I do not see 
 how we are to answer the arguments of the 
 social agnostic, of the man who contends, as 
 does the naturalist philosopher in Mr. Balfour's 
 book on The Foundatioyis of Belief that the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 21 
 
 very existence of man is an accident, that his 
 history of blood and tears, of helpless blunder- 
 ing, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of 
 empty aspiration, is but a brief and transitory 
 episode in the life of one of the meanest of the 
 planets. 
 
 But with that faith all is changed. God 
 has a plan for the world, a great educational 
 plan by which both the perfection of the 
 individual and the perfection of the race is to 
 be accomplished. Order and progress in human 
 civilization are real. Progress is not only a 
 vital fact of human existence, it is its vital 
 law. The principle of human evolution is 
 true, for it means a striving ever towards the 
 holier and the happier. There may be almost 
 infinite powers against us, but at least there 
 is a deep-laid scheme working towards goodness 
 and happiness. 
 
 Of course I am quite well aware of the 
 objections that may be advanced against this 
 doctrine. They are objections in these days 
 which are common to the philosopher and the 
 man in the street. For example, some months 
 ago I happened to be preaching in Leicester 
 on this same subject. At an open conference 
 held afterwards for the purpose of discussion 
 and inquiry, I was asked this question by a 
 
22 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 working-man in the audience — "The lecturer 
 speaks of God's good government of the world, 
 and endeavours to base his faith in a supreme 
 will on the facts of social evolution, but is it 
 not true that in the processes of evolution vice 
 has been evolved as well as virtue, evil men 
 as well as good men, a kingdom of the devil 
 as well as a kingdom of God ? How then, with 
 these facts to face, can he, without violence to 
 his reason, believe in a good God ? " 
 
 The criticism, as you see, was a pertinent 
 one. It is an echo, of course, of the arguments 
 with which many of us were familiar thirty 
 years ago in John Stuart Mill's Essays on 
 Religion. 
 
 " Everything," said that writer, " which 
 the worst men commit, either against life or 
 property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by 
 natural agents. Nature has noyades more 
 fatal than those of Carrier ; her explosions of 
 fire-damp are as destructive as human artillery ; 
 her plague and cholera far surpass the poison 
 cups of the Borgias. Even the love of ' order,' 
 which is thought to be a following of the ways 
 of nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. . . 
 Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are over- 
 matched in injustice, ruin, and death by a 
 hurricane and a pestilence." 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 23 
 
 Four years ago Mr. Huxley repeated Mill's 
 arguments, and carried tliem perhaps a step 
 further, in his Romanes Lectures in this place. 
 
 '' Cosmic nature," said that great writer, 
 " is no school of virtue, it is the headquarters 
 of the enemy of ethical nature. . . The thief 
 and the murderer follow nature just as much 
 as the philanthropist." 
 
 In my next sermon on *' Social Progress" it 
 will be necessary to deal with the fallacy of 
 this argument in further detail. For to-day I 
 must be satisfied to quote to you a passage 
 from a book of ^' Christian Apology " which I 
 venture to think is among the most valuable 
 that our generation has seen. Dr. Abbott, in 
 The Sjnrit on the Waters, lias said, in answer 
 to Mr. Huxley's argument, " We contend not 
 only that cosmic nature must be called a 
 ' school of virtue,' but also that it ought not 
 to be called a ' school of vice.' ... * Cosmic 
 nature,' taken in its fullest sense, shows signs, 
 not only of ethical and non-ethical, divine and 
 diabolical results, but also of an ethical or divine 
 purpose, suhordinating the non-ethical to the 
 ethical, the diaholical to the divine. Tiberius 
 is not to be reo-ardecl as having; followed nature 
 (in the full sense of cosmic evolution) 'just 
 as much as' Socrates. It is as false to say 
 
24 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 this as to say that a mad hound, snapping at 
 the rest of the pack, follows nature 'just as 
 much as ' the dogs that are sane. ' The thief 
 and the murderer' on the whole have not 
 survived in the struggle for existence, but have 
 gone to the wall, thereby proving that they 
 were against 'cosmic nature.' If they had 
 regarded cosmic nature as a school of virtue, 
 and obeyed the teaching, they would have, on 
 the whole, survived ; not having done so, they 
 have, on the whole, perished. . . AVe simply 
 point out, therefore, that unbelievers who reject 
 a ' belief in a good God, under cover of appeal 
 to cosmic nature, are disowned by the power to 
 which they appeal. She rejects them, as she 
 rejects the murderer, the thief,and the adulterer. 
 They can all say, ' Cosmic nature made us 
 what we are.' Cosmic nature answers by 
 destroying them. . . . We contend then that 
 cosmic nature impels us to believe reasonably 
 in a good God, rewards us if we do so, and 
 jjunishes us if we do not. This being so, 
 sensible and reasonable people, who find it 
 difficult to believe, ought not (as it seems to 
 us) to lay the blame on nature or reason, but 
 on some violation of nature and reason in 
 themselves, or possibly on self-deception " 
 (pp. 19-22). 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 25 
 
 My friends, I venture to say, that the man 
 who has mastered this doctrine, he who 
 recognizes the slow and subtle process of 
 evolution as the way iu which God makes 
 things come to pass, as the action of the 
 Eternal Word " through whom the ages were 
 made," has found a Christian faith, which so 
 far from cheapening, as some narrow-minded 
 religionists would tell us, the value of human 
 life, adds immeasurably to the glory of man's 
 destiny, enlarges tenfold the significance of 
 human life, for such a faith shows us how, 
 after all, the grand sweep of things is from 
 the lower to the higher, the vast amount of 
 suffering and struggle and competition, on the 
 whole, doing the work of raising nature, 
 material and human, into a higher condition, 
 making us all feel with St. Paul, that " the 
 sufferings of this present time are not to be 
 compared with the glory that shall be revealed 
 in us." 
 
 *' It is hard to believe in God," said Lord 
 Tennyson once, "but it is harder not to believe. 
 I believe in God not from what I see in nature, 
 but from what I find in man. . . . God is Love, 
 transcendent, all-pervading. But we do not 
 get this faith from nature or the world. If 
 we look at nature alone, full of perfection and 
 
26 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, 
 murder and rapine. We get this faith from 
 ourselves, from what is highest within us, which 
 recognizes that there is not one fruitless pang, 
 just as there is not (as Browning says) * one 
 lost good.' " 
 
 We all know how he expressed the same 
 thought in immortal verse in the cantos of the 
 In Memoriam : — 
 
 " I found Him not in world or sun, 
 
 Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; 
 ]^or thro' the questions men may try, 
 The petty cobwebs we have spun : 
 
 If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 
 
 I heard a voice ' believe no more,' 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 
 That tumbled in the Godless deep ; 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 
 Stood up and answer'd ' I have felt ! ' 
 
 No, like a child in doubt and fear : 
 
 But that blind clamour made me wise ; 
 Then was I as a child that cries. 
 
 But, crying, knows his father near ; 
 
 And what I am beheld again 
 
 What is, and no man understands ; 
 And out of darkness came the hands 
 
 That reach thro' nature, moulding men." 
 
 In our reading then of human life and of 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 27 
 
 cosmic nature let us cherish this optimistic 
 faith — 
 
 " Nature at worst always implies success : 
 Earth changes, but the soul and God stand sure." 
 
 Two central verities, the Divine orderino; 
 of the social organism based on the revelation 
 of a Fatherly will, the steady progress of 
 human character under pressure of the eternal 
 law of filial existence, face us daily when we 
 use the words — *' Our Father which art in 
 Heaven. . . Thy will be done in earth," — and 
 find too irresistible a confirmation in history 
 and consciousness to leave room for doubt. 
 All are parts of a Divine Order. That order 
 is beneficent and progressive. The apparent 
 exceptions are but modes of fulfilment out of 
 which growth in wisdom builds new assurances 
 of faith. 
 
II 
 
 SOCIAL PROGRESS 
 
 St. Matt. vi. 9, 10: *'Our Father which art 
 in Heaven . . . Thy Kingdom come ... in 
 earth." 
 
 Was Jesus Christ an optimist, a social 
 idealist ? 
 
 Was the " kingdom of God " for which He 
 taught His disciples to pray, a Utopia, or a 
 practical possibility ? Does the alternative 
 term, " kingdom of Heaven," imply perhaps 
 only an ideal kingdom, conceived, as it were, 
 in poetic thought, as hovering above all actual 
 societies, civil and sacred, like the Republic 
 of Plato, or the De Monarchia of Dante, or 
 the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, to be realized 
 nowhere on this earth, its true home being 
 among the romantic visions of a supersensible 
 dreamland ? 
 
 Jesus Christ was certainly no idealist, no 
 
 28 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 29 
 
 optimist in the common sense of the word. 
 He was under no deception, either of senti- 
 ment or pathetic fallacy, as to the actual facts 
 of existence. For from the first He certainly 
 taught that the world was full of evil ; that an 
 adversary, an " evil one," was contending 
 against God and against goodness ; that 
 entrance into the " kingdom of God " was 
 difficult, implied a strain and an effort to 
 which all would not be equal ; and that the 
 keenest trials awaited both Himself and His 
 disciples before the consummation could be 
 attained. 
 
 But that Jesus Christ was an idealist, an 
 optimist, in one very true sense, we may infer 
 from the effect which His teaching had upon 
 the minds and conduct of those who first heard 
 it. The disciples of Christ welcomed His 
 teaching as good news ; they conducted them- 
 selves as men who had received a message of 
 gladness and joy. They were no mere pilgrims 
 faring to a distant shrine, grim, gloomy ascetics, 
 self-concentrated devotees, doing penance for 
 their sins. They fasted not like the disciples 
 of John Baptist ; they were rather like people 
 going to a wedding, it was said, children of 
 the Bride-chamber glad in the sunny presence 
 of the Bridegroom, a happy company of ex- 
 
30 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOED's PRAYER 
 
 pecfcant enthusiasts, joyous, hopeful, free, like 
 men looking on towards a golden age just 
 within sight — a city of God, whose gates were 
 open to all comers on one condition only, that 
 they conduct themselves as good citizens once 
 they are wdthin its w^alls — a city of God which 
 is a kingdom of grace, not because it is a 
 kingdom of holiness, but in order that it 
 should become such. 
 
 And it is because of this optimism of Jesus 
 Christ, and of its origin, that not only the 
 disciples of old had grounds for their attitude 
 of joyous enthusiasm, but that w^e who claim 
 to be His disciples now have justification for 
 the same attitude. We believe that Jesus was 
 the prophet of immortality and the prophet 
 of progress. We believe that He was the 
 prophet of the future, because He fixed Plis 
 gaze on the present wdth such intense concen- 
 tration of vision that He pierced into the very 
 heart of things, and saw there the everlasting 
 fountain of the soul, the inexhaustible source 
 from which the stream of human progress ever 
 flows. We l^elieve that He was the prophet 
 of the future, because He was the poet of the 
 eternal present, because He saw the eternal 
 beauty of the present, the beauty of its sorrow 
 as well as its joy. 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 31 
 
 Times and seasons ! — this was the thoufrht 
 at the heart of His message — times and 
 seasons, they pass and are siuaUoived up, 
 hut eternity is notv and ever shall be. Each 
 place, each loorld, may change and dis- 
 appear, hut I remain, and shall alivays say 
 Here I live. Personality persists. Character 
 is eternal. The kingdom is ivithin you. The 
 soul is immoi^tal, its kingdom of Heaven is 
 here, its eternal ivorld is noiv ! 
 
 And because He who held that faith was 
 one who was called the Man of Sorrows, the 
 despised and rejected of men, who had no- 
 where to lay His head, one who had more 
 intimate acquaintance with pain than any one 
 before or since, whose own life was the typical 
 tragedy of mankind, and yet was one of whose 
 sublime optimism, of whose radiant view of 
 human nature, and its potential goodness, no 
 word of recantation could be drawn, either by 
 the moral agony of which in the garden of 
 Gethsemane the bloody sweat was the symbol, 
 or by the physical agony of which on the 
 mount of Calvary the death on the cross was 
 the reality, we believe that we too have 
 grounds for our optimistic faith in the present 
 kingdom ; faith in human nature as it exists in 
 the thouo'ht of God ; faith in man as he ought 
 
32 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 to be and will be ; faith in God as the Father 
 of man ; faith in man as the son of God ; faith 
 that the outcome of the evolution of all things 
 will be found to be good ; faith that good will 
 ultimately prevail over evil ; faith that sin 
 itself will ultimately be seen to have been 
 subordinated to the purpose of a higher 
 righteousness than could have been attained 
 if man had never sinned. 
 
 Let us consider a little more in detail the 
 grounds of this faith. 
 
 The kingdom of Heaven — the kingdom of 
 God — the kingdom of Christ — there are no 
 more familiar phrases to us in Holy Scripture 
 than these. They bring vividly before us 
 the primitive ideas of Christianity. They are 
 an epitome of the life and mission of Christ, 
 of the work by His apostles. '' Tell us where 
 is He that is born King, for we are come to 
 worship ! " are the words in which the wise 
 men from the East desired to do earliest 
 homage to the Child-King in the manger- 
 cradle of Bethlehem. "Art Thou a King 
 then ? " are the words with which the repre- 
 sentative of the Csesars preluded that last 
 scene which ended on the altar-throne of 
 Calvary. The message which the herald of 
 Christ was commissioned to proclaim, the 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 33 
 
 message with which Christ Himself opened 
 His public ministry, was the advent of a 
 kingdom. After His Eesurrection He spoke 
 with His disciples of "the things pertaining 
 to the kingdom of God." 
 
 What then is this kingdom ? How shall we 
 define it to om^selves ? 
 
 TJie words in which it was first proclaimed 
 seem to apply a Judaistic or Rabbinic origin. 
 '' The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of 
 God is at hand." 
 
 Yes, the kingdom was a Divine theocracy, 
 as conceived by the Jewish prophets. But 
 it was something more. The theocracy of 
 Christendom is the Jewish idea expanded, 
 enlarged, sublimated. It is the righteous Eeign 
 of God upon earth. It is the recognition of a 
 divine righteousness in all the relations of life. 
 It is human civilization regarded as the out- 
 come of a Divine order, of a society in which 
 the authority of a father, the obedience of a 
 son is regarded as lying at the root of the 
 universe. It is life itself, the whole of life, 
 in every phase of its progressive activity, in 
 all its realms of thought and action and feel- 
 ing, subordinated to the law of a King, 
 who is " Head over all things to the Church, 
 which is His body, the fullness of Him that 
 
 D 
 
34 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOED's PRAYER 
 
 filleth all in all." It is a present reality in 
 which we may live to-day, if we please, if we 
 are willino^ to rule our lives in subordination 
 to its King, if as citizens we are willing, up to 
 the measure of our powers, to embody its 
 characteristic "notes." It is not "eating and 
 drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy 
 in the Holy Ghost." It is a new social order, 
 "it is the social incorporation of a spirit 
 which penetrates and hallows every region 
 of human activity, of a spirit which con- 
 secrates for the common service every variety 
 of heritao'e and endowment, which combines 
 in a harmonious union the manifold energies 
 of enterprise, which crowns every faithful 
 servant with a blessedness which none can take 
 awav or disturb." 
 
 When, therefore, we pray the Lord's Prayer 
 aright, when we take this petition unto our 
 lips, and say, as we do daily, " Th}^ kingdom 
 come ... in earth," we mean to say, Ma}^ 
 the religion of Christ as a sovereign society, 
 as a power, as a loyalty, as a service, be a 
 conquering, quickening, stimulating, controlling 
 influence on all the realms of human thought 
 and action, history, philosophy, ethics, law, 
 politics, art, science ; may that new order of 
 society, which " by divers portions and in 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 35 
 
 divers manners," is gradually being worked 
 out on the field of history, find at last its perfect 
 fulfilment in that 
 
 " one far-off Divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 It is true that in upholding such an 
 interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the 
 Lord's Prayer with regard to the constitution 
 of society we shall meet with difticulties and 
 objections. Such objections we must be ready 
 to face. They will come chiefly from two 
 opposite directions. 
 
 I. In the first place, we shall meet with those 
 who think that such a doctrine is founded on a 
 false interpretation of Scripture itself. 
 
 For example, I take up from my study table 
 a pamphlet criticism of " Christian Socialism." 
 I find on an early page such sentences as 
 these — ^' Writers professing to be Christian 
 Socialists naturally appeal to Holy Scripture. 
 But their misuse of Scripture is lamentable . . . 
 It is interesting^ to recall that Christ Himself 
 expressly tells us that ' His kingdom is not 
 of this world ; ' and that when one ' said unto 
 Him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide 
 the inheritance with me, He said unto him, 
 Man, who made Me a judo;e or a divider over 
 
36 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 you ? . . . Take heed and beware of covetous- 
 ness.' " And then there follows an argument 
 something of this kind. 
 
 " Jesus Christ did not come in any sense as 
 a social reformer, much less as a politician. 
 ' His kingdom is not of this world.' He 
 came to diseno^ao-e men's souls from the cares 
 of this world. He saw with perfect clearness 
 that man's indiiference to the only true life, 
 the life of the spirit, his want of philosophy 
 and morality, came almost entirely from the 
 distractions of society, the cares of the world, 
 the deceitfulness of riches. ' Beware of 
 covetousness.' Christ proposed therefore to 
 detach men from all these things, to break off 
 his friendship with the world, which in reality 
 meant enmity with God. He taught His 
 disciples that to be wise or to be learned, or 
 to be peaceful or to be happy, much more to 
 be rich, was a snare and a peril to the true 
 believer. Social reform, therefore, was no 
 part of the Christian scheme of salvation. 
 There is no Christian ideal for secular society, 
 only for the individual. Distinctively Christian 
 principles do not govern, and were never in- 
 tended to govern, the corporate life of a 
 community, a state, or a city, until all the 
 individuals in that community were more or 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 37 
 
 less completely transformed by those principles. 
 Business, for example, is business. It goes on 
 with a steady, constant stream. Manufacturing, 
 transporting, buying, selling, banking, have 
 their inexorable necessities, and form" a very 
 large part of human life, regulated by inevitable 
 economic laws, and it is not the part of Chris- 
 tianity to set aside those laws. Christianity 
 must work on the Individual. It can only 
 work on society in that way. It can alter 
 the raw material out of which society is made. 
 It cannot alter the mould in which it is cast. 
 There is no political economy, no princij^les 
 for the social order of to-day, in the Sermon 
 on the Mount, or in the parables, or anywhere 
 else in Christ^s teaching. Such economic or 
 sociological maxims as may seem to be there 
 are entirely metaphysical, and to be interpreted 
 of course in a merely spiritual sense. The 
 discii^le of Christ, as such, is to renounce the 
 world, to lay up no treasure upon earth. 
 Wealth is but a root of evil; elements of 
 progress and civilization are of no moment. 
 Secular happiness is altogether of secondary 
 concern. What the true Christian has to do 
 is to endeavour by patience and perseverance, 
 by humility and repentance, by faith in the 
 Eedeemer, and through the efficacy of the 
 
38 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 sacraments of the Church, to secure eternal 
 happiness in Heaven. To copy Christ in 
 resisting not evil, in giving to him that asketh, 
 in abstaining from food, in adopting humility 
 and poverty and simplicity, is not in order 
 that we may live a more perfectly social, 
 altruistic, neighbourly life here below, but in 
 order that we may prepare our souls for a life 
 of spiritual blessedness hereafter." 
 
 But what a foolish travesty of Christ's 
 Gospel is this ! 
 
 True, Christ did indeed say, " My kingdom 
 is not of this world ... is not from hence." 
 But He certainlv did not mean that His 
 kingdom was to exist for certain objects which 
 are to be marked off as spiritual, apart from 
 the organization of human society which is to 
 be regarded as profane. He certainly did not 
 mean to say that His kingdom claimed no 
 authority over this world, had nothing to do 
 with it. Nor indeed did He say that. AVhat 
 He did say was that His kingdom was from 
 above, that it had not an earthly origin, did 
 not obtain its authority and strength from 
 this world. So He had also said to His 
 Jewish enemies — " Ye are from beneath, I 
 am from above ; ye are of this world, I am 
 not of this world." And it was just because 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 39 
 
 Christ's kingdom was not from this world, 
 not from beneath, but from above, that all 
 the civil order in the world was to acknow- 
 ledore Him as its Head. 
 
 The fact is, this theory of some natural 
 separation of the Divine and secular provinces 
 is the mere refuge of a narrow and indolent 
 mind, it will not bear one moment's sincere 
 and thorouo:h thouorht. 
 
 So also of that other misinterpreted text 
 about the disputed inheritance, or of the 
 somewhat similar instance of the paying of 
 the didrachma, or of the dilemma about the 
 tribute money of Csesar. Take the first in- 
 stance. One man out of a multitude had said 
 to Jesus, " Master, bid my brother divide the 
 inheritance with me." But Jesus was evi- 
 dently angry at what He perceived to be the 
 attempt of a covetous man to make use of 
 Him. We may almost assume that the man 
 had tried the ordinary law and had failed. 
 At any rate Jesus indignantly repels the 
 offensive attempt by intimating to the offender 
 that he had come to the wrong quarter for the 
 prosecution of a pecuniary loan. To infer, 
 therefore, from Christ's indignant rebuff thus 
 given to indecent covetousness, that loyalty 
 to the civil order is not a loyalty " from above," 
 
40 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 directly from God, but from beneath, is not 
 only unwarranted, it is almost exactly contrary 
 to what Christ implies. And moreover, it 
 must be remembered in the case before us, 
 that had Christ listened to the probably 
 ex "parte statement of the plaintiff in this suit, 
 reviewed his case, and given a judgment. He 
 might have added a clause to the law of 
 inheritance which the code of every Christian 
 state throughout the ages would have been 
 bound to embody, and which might have 
 landed the lawyers of the future in endless 
 perplexity. But this Christ resolutely refused 
 to do. With a look and a word He lifted the 
 whole question into an atmosphere where the 
 possibly miserly spirit of one brother and the 
 greediness of the other appeared equally con- 
 temptible. " Beware," He said, " of covetous- 
 ness, for a man's life consisteth not in the 
 abundance of the things which he possesseth." 
 Let a man understand that brotherhood and 
 not wealth is the true basis of society, that if 
 you would make society good you must first 
 make men good, and that not what a man has 
 got, but what a man is, is the important 
 thing : then there will not be much difficulty 
 left in settling mere questions of property and 
 inheritance. 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 41 
 
 There is, moreover, another important prin- 
 ciple with regard both to the method of Christ's 
 teaching and also to the working of Christ's 
 kingdom, indicated, I think, in this incident 
 which it is appropriate to note here before we 
 pass on. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount, from one point 
 of view, may be said to contain the new law 
 of the Christian commonwealth. The great 
 features of that commonwealth, the character 
 and influence of its citizens, the inner principle 
 of its legislation, are set forth in that document. 
 And yet no one, I think, can study that Sermon 
 carefully without perceiving that what Christ 
 undertook to do for His society, was not to 
 give it a code of legislation, where in section, 
 sub-section, and schedule all ethical difticulties 
 would be found codified and ticketed with 
 their appropriate fines and punishments for all 
 time, but to give to each member of His 
 society, so far as it was possible, such an 
 inspiration of loyalty to Himself as should give 
 to that member a law-making power for him- 
 self. And Christ's own action was always in 
 practice consistent with that method. 
 
 He found men living in a social system, 
 under certain relations to one another. He 
 did His best to alter those relations, to change 
 
42 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THP] LORD S PRAYER 
 
 that evil social system. He believed it was 
 possible to bring about a better state of things. 
 He believed that He could make men regard 
 one another as He Himself acted towards all 
 mankind. He Himself lived in the eternal 
 world, and acted towards men as citizens of 
 a heavenly kingdom. He wished to change 
 the social conditions and relations of the 
 people, but He laid down no political rules, 
 no constitutional devices for doing this. And 
 why ? Surely, because He knew that if there 
 and then, at that time, in Palestine, He had 
 promulgated a model government for that day, 
 it would have stopped all progress, it would 
 have stereotyped a particular national form, 
 whereas He knew that all nations were different, 
 would be different to the end of time. He 
 knew that to do so would be to deny the laws 
 of true life, to deny the deepest want of 
 human nature, which needs effort and discipline, 
 and choice and failure, in order that it may 
 grow and flourish. But He laid down broad 
 principles of righteousness and truth, and love 
 and helpfulness, and He left His followers to 
 work out the details for themselves. 
 
 And so His kingdom on earth, for which 
 we daily pray in this petition, follows the 
 order of true social life. The evolution 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 48 
 
 of society — the unfolding of God's ruling — 
 the coming of the kingdom, is therefore no 
 sudden process. It is slow and gradual — 
 gradual as the moving of the shadows — and 
 as certain. 
 
 II. But let us turn to another aspect of our 
 subject. I said there was a second direction 
 from which difficulty in the way of belief 
 might come. 
 
 How are we to hold an optimistic faith in 
 the ideal kingdom of God, as the sanctification 
 of the whole of human life in all its fullness, 
 when we think of the history of man as the 
 record of a divinely directed movement to a 
 final goal of goodness ? How is this petition 
 of our Paternoster — " Thy Kingdom come in 
 earth!" — affected by thsit pai'ttis temporis, that 
 category of our age, the scientific hypothesis 
 of evolution ? 
 
 That theory, we all know, confronts us 
 frigidly and firmly, with facts of existence, 
 facts of history and human experience, from 
 which as Christians we might perhaps wish to 
 avert our eyes. 
 
 How, for example, does the Christian social 
 ideal, does the Christian philosophy of civil- 
 ization, look in face of such a verdict of the 
 evolutionist as this ? I quote from Mr. Balfour's 
 
44 SOCIAL TEACHIXG OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 Foundations of Belief, Lis description of the 
 faith of a naturalist philosopher. 
 
 "Man, so far as natural science by itself is 
 able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of 
 the universe, the Heaven -descended heir of all 
 the ages. His very existence is an accident, 
 his story a brief and transitory episode in the 
 life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of 
 the combination of causes which first converted 
 a dead organic compound into the living pro- 
 genitors of humanity, science indeed as yet 
 knows nothing^. It is enous^h that from such 
 beginnings famine, disease, and mutual 
 slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of 
 creation, have gradually evolved after infinite 
 travail, a race with conscience enough to feel 
 that it is vile, and intellioence enouo;h to know 
 that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and 
 see that its history is of blood and tears, of 
 helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid 
 acquiescence, of em23ty aspirations. We sound 
 the future, and learn that after a period, long 
 compared with the individual life, but short 
 indeed compared with the divisions of time 
 open to our investigation, the energies of our 
 system will decay, the glory of the sun will be 
 dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will 
 no longer tolerate the race which has for a mo- 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 45 
 
 ment disturbed its solitude. Man will ^o down 
 into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish."^ 
 
 Or again, let the naturalist philosopher 
 speak in his own person. These are the 
 words of Mr. Herbert Spencer : '^ 
 
 '* There is no pleasure in the consciousness 
 of being an infinitesimal bubble on a globe 
 that is itself infinitesimal compared with the 
 totality of things. Those on whom the unpity- 
 iiig rush of changes inflicts sufi*erings, which 
 are often without remedy, find no consolation 
 in the thought that they are at the mercy of 
 blind forces, which cause, indifi'erently, now 
 the destruction of a sun, and now the death 
 of an animalcule." 
 
 In my sermon last term on the previous 
 clause of this prayer, I quoted a sentence from 
 the Romanes Lecture of Huxley, in which that 
 able writer spoke of the cosmic process of 
 evolution as having no sort of relation to moral 
 ends, being, in fact, "no school of virtue, but the 
 headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature." 
 
 Let me quote to-day a passage from that 
 same writer of a more concrete type. 
 
 " Any one," he says, in his well-known 
 criticism of the methods and work of the 
 
 1 Foundations 0/ Belief , pp. 30, 31. 
 ^ Fortnightly Review, June 1895. 
 
46 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 Salvation Army, " any one who is acquainted 
 with the state of the population of all great 
 industrial centres, whether in this or other 
 countries, is aware that, amidst a large and 
 increasing body of that population, la misere 
 reigns supreme. I have no pretensions to the 
 character of a philanthropist, and I have a 
 special horror of all sorts of sentimental rhetoric; 
 I am merely trying to deal with facts, to some 
 extent within my own knowledge, and further 
 evidenced by abundant testimony as a 
 naturalist ; and I take it to be a mere plain 
 truth, that throughout industrial Europe there 
 is not a single large manufacturing city which 
 is free from a vast mass of people whose 
 condition is exactly that described, and from 
 a still greater mass who, living just on the 
 edge of the social swamp, are liable to be 
 precipitated into it, by any lack of demand 
 for their produce. . . . AVhat profits it," he 
 asks, ''to the human Prometheus that he has 
 stolen the fire of Heaven to be his servant, and 
 that the spirits of the earth and the air obey 
 him, if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to 
 tear his very vitals, and keep him on the brink 
 of destruction ? " 
 
 What, then, we ask, in face of such sci- 
 entific objections as these, based on un- 
 
SOCIAL PROGKESS 47 
 
 doubted facts of existence, should be our 
 attitude ? 
 
 In the first place, I think, as Christians, as 
 men who believe that there is a Christian 
 philosophy of civilization, we should boldly 
 assert our right to have for ourselves no theory 
 of ethics, of conduct, no science of society 
 which affects to be independent of our religious 
 creed. That is surely a very natural demand, 
 but it is one which the Christian student of 
 ethics has not always made upon his rivals or 
 opponents. Apparently he has too often acted 
 as if he thought his only chance of winning 
 consideration in the field of ethics was to 
 occupy no ground which was not also common 
 to those students of morals and society to whom 
 deductions from Christian revelation would be 
 reorarded as obsolete. This action seems to 
 me as mistaken as it is timid. On the con- 
 trary, we ought always to start without any 
 hesitation from our Christian Creed. 
 
 We ought to begin our testimony, as Christ 
 our Master began His, with the plain state- 
 ment — " our kingjdom thouQ-h in this world is 
 not of it." In our view, whatever he may 
 be to others, man is a spiritual being. The 
 organism of human society belongs by its 
 essence to an invisible world. Its structure 
 
48 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOED's PRAYER 
 
 is only explained by its relations with that 
 unseen world. Looking back upon history, 
 we assert that the social evolution, of which 
 science claims to trace the method and pur- 
 pose, exhibits also the working out of a 
 spiritual purpose and discipline for humanity. 
 In that history we think we have warrant for 
 a belief in an ideal social state, conjectured as 
 being perfected in the future, natural, and to 
 be naturally evolved, and we think that 
 that ideal is not merely created by our own 
 imaginations, but has been revealed as part of 
 the original design of our Creator. We regard 
 human life, in fact, as a great educational 
 problem, working itself out according to the 
 plan of God ; and that in the progressive 
 realization of the Divine idea of human per- 
 fectibility there is laid upon man a twofold 
 obligation. We believe, therefore, that for 
 each of us there is a social as well as a per- 
 sonal duty. We believe in personal duty re- 
 quiring that we should each daily strive to 
 render our individual lives more worthy of that 
 filial relationship with our heavenly Father 
 which our Master came to reveal. But we 
 believe also in social duty, requiring that we 
 should be strenuous in that *' fellow work with 
 God " by which, according to His purpose, the 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 49 
 
 collective life of man is gradually being- 
 fashioned after the imaQ;e of the kino-dom of 
 Heaven. We believe, therefore, in the duty 
 of man to study the providential laws by 
 which humanity has been impelled along the 
 path of social order and progress, and to co- 
 operate as far as he can with those laws in 
 order that in human society this double mani- 
 festation of progress may be seen — all men 
 approximating to a common level, but a level 
 which is continually rising. 
 
 But believing all this, the Christian student 
 of civilization is not in the least concerned to 
 deny any of the verified conclusions of the 
 science of evolution. Bather he will welcome 
 with admiration and thankfulness all that it 
 may truly discover, as so much revelation of 
 the creative methods of the Divine Father 
 whom he worships. Nay, he may perhaps be 
 obliged to go further. He may find it necessary 
 even, in deference to the just claims of modern 
 science and the new terms of modern thought, 
 to re-state for the present age the dogmas of 
 his faith, to readjust its doctrines, to refocus 
 its truth. But one thing he will not do. He will 
 not give up his faith in the Divine fatherhood of 
 God, and the filial relationship of man as the 
 true basis of social order, or his belief in a 
 
50 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 good God, controlling all the forces of evolu- 
 tion, as the true source of social progress. 
 Whatever Nature may, therefore, appear to be 
 to the scientific evolutionist, to the Christian 
 evolutionist it must ever remain precious as 
 the sphere in which a Divine life is manifested, 
 as the object on which a Divine love is 
 lavished. If Mr. Huxley was right when 
 he told us that " cosmic force has no sort 
 of relation to moral ends," then as Christians 
 we shall call in ethical force to redress 
 the balance, and we shall say that that 
 theory of evolution is incomplete which claims 
 to estimate the influence of the cosmic process 
 on man in society, and fails to give its due 
 weis^ht to the ethical. Yes, indeed, for us 
 Christians we shall demand a wider and a 
 nobler conception of evolution as the way in 
 which God makes things to come to pass, a 
 conception in which, though the prehistoric 
 triumphs of cosmic nature, the fierce struggle 
 for existence, the ceaseless conflict — " Nature 
 red in tooth and claw with ravin " — cannot be 
 forgotten (shall we ever forget the mystery of 
 evil until perhaps *' behind the veil " we learn 
 its secret?), yet also a conception in which 
 what we shall most care to remember will be 
 the greater and still more marvellous triumphs 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 51 
 
 of the ethical process of evolution, not the 
 miracles, by which out of fierce despotism has 
 come forth liberty, out of slavery freedom, out 
 of selfishness self-sacrifice, out of might right, 
 out of fear reverence, out of lust love, out 
 of the conflicts of self-interest, morality and 
 virtue ; ah, no ! but rather the marvellous 
 triumphs of the grace of God in the human 
 heart, by which out of suff'ering has come 
 moral strength and nobility of character, 
 out of the mystery of pain have grown the 
 marvels of spiritual victory, out of the fires of 
 trial has been won the purity of the soul, out 
 of failure borne nobly in the present has been 
 gained for us hereafter a far more exceedinoj 
 weight of glory, out of martyrdom has grown 
 moral supremacy. 
 
 This, my friends, is the faith of the Christian 
 evolutionist, the only faith, as I believe, which 
 will give us a safe assurance that the social 
 optimist, the visionary, the dreamer is not also 
 the fanatic, the anarchist, the revolutionary, a 
 safe assurance that the hope which seems to 
 be leading mankind onwards is other than an 
 empty illusion, " a marsh fire which is leading 
 astray rather than a star which guides ; " a safe 
 assurance that any social reform which man 
 undertakes is not a desperate adventure 
 
52 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 creating more problems than it can ever 
 solve. 
 
 Such a faith, believe me, is, as Mr. Balfour 
 once said, " no ray of metaphysics float- 
 ing in the sunshine of sentimentalism," for it 
 rests on a positive basis, which only becomes 
 broader and firmer with the widening of human 
 experience. The man of religious imagination, 
 the man to whom his relig;ion, whatever else 
 it may be, expresses his feeling about the 
 highest forces that govern human destiny, who 
 in observing the long processes of time, and 
 appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of 
 human endeavour, is able, in the words of 
 Browning's Paracelsus^ 
 
 ^' To trace love's first beginnings in mankind, 
 To know even hate is but a mask of love ] 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill-success ; to sympathize, be proud 
 Of man's half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, his poorest fallacies, 
 His prejudices, fears and cares and doubts. 
 Which all touch upon nobleness, despite 
 Their error, all tend upwardly though weak ; 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun. 
 But dream of him and guess where he may be, 
 And do their best to climb and get to him." 
 
 The man, I sav, whose religion has thus tauoht 
 him, by what sublime struggles generation 
 after generation of his brethren have added 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 53 
 
 some small piece to the temple of human 
 freedom, or some new impulse to the cause of 
 human progress, or some fresli ideal to the 
 types of beautiful or strong human character, 
 will not only be able to say with Paracelsus — 
 
 « If I stoop 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud 
 It is but for a time : I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast ; its splendour soon or late 
 Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day : " — 
 
 but will also have gained a conception of life 
 and eternity, of duty and of destiny, prompt- 
 ing him to abundant moods of worship and 
 reverence, of deep-seated gratitude, and of 
 sovereign love ; and no less inspiring him to 
 fulfil, with new hope and invigorated endea- 
 vour, all the traditions of beneficent work and 
 strenuous service, to consecrate with joyful 
 energies all his powers to the pursuit of a 
 visible common good, which honour must 
 always demand from any Christian disciple 
 who dares to take daily upon his lips the 
 prayer of his Lord — "Thy kingdom come 
 . ... in earth." 
 
Ill 
 
 SOCIAL JUSTICE 
 
 St. Matt. vi. 11 : "Give us this day our daily- 
 bread." 
 
 A PITHY and a pointed comment on this 
 
 petition of the Lord's Prayer is that of Bishop 
 
 Isaac Barrow. H.e said — " A noble heart will 
 
 disdain to subsist like a drone on the honey 
 
 gained by others' labour ; or like vermin to 
 
 filch its food from the public granary ; or like 
 
 a shark to prey on the lesser fry ; but will 
 
 one way or other earn his subsistence, for he 
 
 that doth not earn can hardly l)c said to own 
 
 his daily bread." 
 
 The good bishop, I think, was right. For 
 
 although of the seven petitions of the prayer 
 
 — three for God's glory, three for our own 
 
 souls, one for our bodies — one only is for 
 
 earthly need, yet that one can be no purely 
 
 selfish, egoistic prayer, for wdien we pray 
 
 54 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 55 
 
 this petition as we ought to pray it, *' Our 
 Father, give us day by day our daily bread," 
 we pray surely even in that one word that 
 we may live lives of honest industry and noble 
 aim and social service ; we acknowledge even 
 in that one word that our daily bread is a 
 gift, a gift from God, and that therefore the 
 trade or profession or calling by which we 
 get it, is something about which, in its daily 
 transactions, we are not ashamed to pray to 
 God ; we mean, or ought to mean, that as 
 our Master rejected the tempter's offer, " Com- 
 mand that these stones be made bread," so we 
 are prepared to reject that offer; we mean 
 that we ask for God's bread, the bread that 
 comes in the slow natural way of honest toil 
 and happy industry and fellow work, and that 
 we reject the devil's bread, that would seem 
 to come by some quick magic or gambler's 
 luck, or false work, or plausible trade trickery ; 
 we mean that we ask for God's bread, not 
 the devil's bread, an honest worker's bread, 
 not a thieving swindler's bread, bread which 
 carries with it no curse upon ourselves or 
 others, but bread upon which we dare to ask 
 God's Ijlessing for ourselves and for our 
 children. 
 
 It is at any rate from tliat point of view 
 
56 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PEAYER 
 
 that I am proposing to ask you to consider 
 this petition to-day. 
 
 Social justice as the basic principle of all 
 true economics, that is my subject. 
 
 We are all familiar, no doubt, with the 
 interminable discussion as to the exact mean- 
 ing of the Greek word — sTrioixriog — used in 
 this petition for the first and only time in 
 Holy Scripture, and nowhere else in all Greek 
 literature, and with the various English render- 
 ino's of the word, accordino^ as one or other 
 derivation of it is accepted — as by both 
 the Authorised and Revised Version, " Give 
 us this day our dail}/ bread," or as in the 
 margin of the Revised Version, *' bread for 
 the coming day give to us," or as by others 
 — " our bread continual of the day give to 
 us" — " our sufficient bread," " our convenient 
 bread," "the bread of our portion," "-the l)read 
 for our essential life, for our eternal, spiritual 
 life give to us," or in a more sacramentarian 
 and mystic sense, '' our consubstantial or super- 
 substantial bread," following the interpretation 
 of the African Fathers, and the implication 
 of St. Jerome, who, in his revision of the old 
 Latin text, substituted supersuhstantialem 
 for quotidianum in St. Matthew's version of 
 the prayer, a substitution which at a later 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 57 
 
 time, when knowledo^e of the Greek tonoue 
 died out, led to many a bitter debate in the 
 Western Church, as in the celebrated contro- 
 versy of Abelard with St. Bernard. We are 
 familiar too with the conjecture, founded on 
 the variation in the two Gospels of the text 
 of the closing phrase of the petition — a-rj^sfiov 
 or xaS' ri^spav, "this day" or " day by day" 
 — which suggests that St. Matthew may be 
 giving the common formula for Morning 
 Prayer, while St. Luke gives that used at 
 Evening, or at any hour of the day for the 
 oncoming space of time that is left, and with 
 the further surmise, leading to the two con- 
 tradictory interpretations, on the one hand 
 that our Lord is adopting tlie common habit 
 of the most pious of the Rabbis, not to pray 
 for the thincrs of the morrow — '* rive us the 
 bread of to-day in its day " — and on the other 
 that He is suggesting the true form of prayer 
 for the future, for a succession of morrows — 
 '' Provide to-morrow's bread, and give it us 
 to-day, lest we be solicitous for to-morrow." 
 
 And whether we have been puzzled, as 
 St. Chrysostom was before us, with all these 
 variations of the text and its interpretation, 
 or whether more happy, like the old Jewish 
 Rabbi, Jacob of Serug, who, caring little for 
 
58 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 philology as sucli, was intent only to find new 
 meanings in the Word through each fresh 
 derivation of it, we are satisfied to combine 
 the religious lessons thus deducible from all 
 the various readings, matters perhaps hardly 
 at all to us to-day. 
 
 But there is one less obvious allusion to 
 be found in the form of this petition, which 
 I think we may find suggestive of practical 
 teaching and useful for our purpose. I 
 mean the allusion to the teaching of the 
 nature-parable of the manna gatherers, as 
 recorded in the old eJewish history, and as 
 interpreted in the Ral)binic writings, and as 
 finding an echo in the teaching of St. Paul 
 in his second letter to the Corinthian Church. 
 
 It was sufiiciently probable, a priori, that 
 the Lord's Prayer should contain some refer- 
 ence to the o-ivinor of the manna. For indeed 
 all through the Pabbinic writings we find prayer 
 and thanksgiving closely associated with the 
 memory of the miracle of the manna, of the 
 heavenly bread, descending on the earth like 
 dew from above. As in the Book of Wisdom, 
 we read of how " God gave to His people 
 angels' food to eat . . . bread having the 
 virtue of every pleasant savour . . . tempering 
 itself according to every man's choice . . . and 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 59 
 
 yet when simply warmed by a faint sunbeam 
 melting away, that it might be known that 
 men must rise Ijefore the sun to give God 
 thanks, and must plead with Him at the 
 dawnino* of the lio-ht." So over and over 
 again in the sayings of the Fathers, the l)read 
 from heaven, the manna, is descriloed as bread 
 of wisdom, food for body, soul and spirit, 
 agreeable to every taste ; and over and over 
 again tlie guiding principles of God's good 
 providence and of man's dependence on the 
 Almighty Father's care are deduced from the 
 method of its provision and distribution. One 
 can hardly miss, for example, the analogy 
 between the " clay by day " of the Lord's 
 Prayer, and the certain rate for every day, 
 a day's portion in its day, and a day's portion 
 only, in the provision of the manna, or doubt 
 that such a. comment as that of Eabbi El ha 
 Modai would seem to the disciples quite in 
 the spirit of their Master's prayer — " Who- 
 soever has what to eat to-day, and says 
 ' What shall I eat to-morrow ? ' lo, such an 
 one is wanting in faith." 
 
 I think, however, perhaps the most interest- 
 ing allusion in the New Testament to this 
 old nature-parable is that of St. Paul in the 
 passage in his second letter to the Corinthian 
 
60 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 Church, in which he hays down the principles 
 of true almsgiving, the principles of true 
 Christian Socialism, shall we rather say, to 
 be observed in face of the difficulties of the 
 problem of poverty and wealth as he knew 
 it at the beginning of the Christian era in 
 Greece and the Greek colonies of Syria. It 
 is to be found in the eighth chapter of the 
 Second Epistle to the Corinthians. It is the 
 same chapter, you will remember, in which 
 occur those words that in their issue oave 
 rise to the movement of Saint Francis of 
 Assisi, and the estal:)lishment of the mendicant 
 Orders in Europe, and for so many years 
 furnished almost the central question of theo- 
 logical controversy — " For your sakes He 
 became poor, that je through His poverty 
 mio[ht become rich." 
 
 The deep poverty — >i Kara ^aSoug Trrco^sia — 
 of the Churches of Macedonia, and the neces- 
 sity of the Jewish Christian poor in Syria, were 
 both probably traceable to the same cause, the 
 long series of miseries which, in the case of 
 either province, had succeeded and accom- 
 panied its conquest by the Komans. St. Paul 
 of course has to deal with but a very small 
 portion of the whole problem. He has to 
 consider it in a purely local form — how best 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 61 
 
 to make the liberality of one little circle of 
 his followers at one place and time, minister 
 to the poverty of the saints at another, and 
 yet be so managed that justice shall not be 
 sacrificed to generosity, that the end shall be 
 pro23ortioned to the means. 
 
 The apostolic decision is an excellent illus- 
 tration of St, Paul's " sanctified common 
 sense." 
 
 "Let your generosity," he says, "be pro- 
 portioned to your means. This must be 
 so always. Your generous zeal, it is true, 
 proves your Christian sense of brotherhood, of 
 comradeship, your love to men for Christ's 
 sake. You are actino; to them as He acted 
 to you, when on your behalf He exchanged 
 riches and poverty. But I have no wish that 
 you should be too heavily pressed for the 
 relief of others. There must be reciprocity 
 among Christians, a fair equality of service, 
 mutual co-operation and assistance. If you 
 help now, they must be ready to respond 
 hereafter if need come, so that in any present 
 deed of liberality, or in any future redistribu- 
 tion of wealth, the saying of the old Scrip- 
 ture about the nature-parable of the manna 
 gatherers may be fulfilled — * much was not 
 too much, and little was not too little,' that 
 
62 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 there may be equality, as it is written, ' he 
 that had much had nothing over, and he that 
 had little had no lack.' " 
 
 Have we not here, as I said, the true 
 principles of Christian Socialism, the germinal 
 idea at least of true economics, from which 
 the whole duty of man in relation to his 
 industrial life may be evolved, and the pro- 
 duction of wealth and its distribution be 
 brought into due moral subordination to the 
 wider and nobler aims of his intellectual, 
 spiritual and social life ? 
 
 At any rate, if we place this summary of the 
 Apostle's appeal to the Church of Corinth in 
 relation to the industrial problem of his day, 
 in the light of the essential principle of social 
 justice, which Bishop Barrow thought he had 
 found imbedded in this petition of the Lord's 
 Prayer, we shall find ourselves, I think, in 
 possession of ethical principles quite sufficient 
 to solve, if only Christians would be Christians, 
 not only the comparatively simple problem of 
 poverty as it existed in the little Grecian 
 seaport in the first century, but as it exists 
 to-day in England in regard to the more 
 tremendous modern problem of capital and 
 labour in some great Christian city. 
 
 Let me endeavour to set out some of those 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 63 
 
 principles in definite proportions, that you 
 may judge how far they can be legitimately 
 read, one by one, into the terms of this petition 
 of the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 I. The principle of social justice. — The loss 
 of one cannot on the whole be the gain of 
 another in the unity of the Christian life. 
 God is no respecter of persons. Inequalities, 
 indeed, of every kind are interwoven with the 
 whole providential order of human life, and are 
 recognized emphatically by Jesus Christ. But 
 the Christian social order cannot ignore the 
 interests of any of its parts, and must, more- 
 over, be tested by the degree in which it 
 secures for each one of its members freedom 
 for happy, useful, untrammelled life, and 
 distributes as widely and equitably as may 
 be social advantages and opportunities. A 
 system of industry under which one man 
 may acquire in a lifetime — to quote a quaint 
 American figure — as much money as Adam 
 would have laid by out of his earnings if he 
 had lived to our time and saved one hundred 
 dollars a day, cannot be a perfected system of 
 human brotherhood. '' The much must not 
 be too much, and the little not too little." 
 In a Christian state every citizen ought to 
 have a subsistence before any one has super- 
 
64 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOUD's PRAYER 
 
 fluity. Luxury can only justifiably come into 
 existence when honest penury has vanished, 
 for luxury only then ceases to be culpable 
 when it serves to make a man a more useful, 
 a more loving, a more helpful member of the 
 community. " Luxury can only be enjoyed " — 
 it was an old saying of Mr. Ruskin — '*by the 
 ignorant ; the crudest man livino^ could not 
 sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold." 
 
 " Our Father which art in Heaven, . . . give 
 us this day our daily bread ! " Give me, 
 my Father, on this new day of Thine, bread 
 sufficient for my need, and teach me to seek it 
 always as a gift from Thee, not only that I may 
 eat it so in gladness and singleness of heart, 
 but that I may thus be saved from the feverish 
 desire to heap up riches for myself And 
 because my true life consisteth not in the 
 abundance of the things which I possess, save 
 me from the spirit of the rich fool, that I may 
 be tempted to injure none, to defraud none, to 
 keep back their due from none. Teach me to 
 accept the lesson of the old Greek ascetics, 
 that a man is rich and poor not in his house- 
 hold goods but in his soul. Give me daily 
 bread, the strong wholesome food of character, 
 that I may give myself to the cause of 
 social progress, to the increase of human 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 65 
 
 power over circumstance, to the growth of 
 humanizing wants, to the raising of the 
 standard of life, to the enlargement, the enrich- 
 ment, the ennoblement of human joy. 
 
 And to pray this petition in that spirit is 
 surely to pray the Lord's Prayer aright. 
 
 11. The 'principle of social sei^vice. — " He 
 that doth not earn his daily bread," said Bishop 
 Barrow, " can hardly be said to own it ; " in 
 other words, this principle declares that every 
 man is bound to service ; the wilfully idle man, 
 and the man who lives only for himself, have 
 no place in a Christian community ; that all 
 service is honourable and all idleness a dis- 
 grace ; that no wealth is legitimately earned 
 which is not an exchange value for actual 
 services rendered, services which minister to 
 life and help on the common good ; that to 
 get money by whatever strategy, by the 
 ganlbling method . whether of Turf or Stock 
 Exchange, without furnishing an equivalent, 
 is dishonourable spoliation ; that private pro- 
 perty exists for the sake of society, not 
 society for the sake of private property ; 
 that wealth is a trust, and that men are to 
 be measured not by what they possess, but 
 by the use they make of their possessions ; 
 that wealth does not release its possessor from 
 
66 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOED S PRAYER 
 
 the obligation to work, but only enables bim 
 to do what appears to be unpaid work for 
 society, the only difference ethically between 
 the rich man and the poor man seeming to be 
 this, that the poor man receives his wages at 
 the end of the week, and does not ofet them 
 unless his work is first done, whereas the 
 wealthy man receives his wages first and is 
 bound in honour to earn them afterwards ; that 
 thino's are for men, and not men for thino^s ; 
 that any industrial system which grinds up 
 men and women to make cheap goods is an 
 un-Christian system ; that no industrial system 
 can be a Christian system until it is so 
 oroanized that every honest and willino- worker 
 can find work, and work so remunerative that 
 not only can he maintain his own working 
 powers in health and efficiency, but also 
 is able to give to his children a decent, a 
 joyous, and a reasonable life according to 
 the standard of comfort of his class. 
 
 *' Our Father which art in Heaven . . . mve 
 us this day our daily bread." 
 
 In the breaking of my daily bread, grant 
 me, Lord, to know Thy presence, and in 
 return for Thy gift, and as my bounden duty 
 and service, may I offer to Thee the reasonable 
 and holy sacrifice of my daily life and work. 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE ^7 
 
 I am Thy workman, Christ, and all that I 
 do is Thine. Prosper Thou the work of my 
 hand upon me, oh, prosper Thou my handiwork; 
 make it sound, and good, and honest, worthy 
 of Thy blessing ; may it never be half work 
 done for whole pay, or sham work palmed off 
 as true. And as my daily bread is a gift from 
 Thee, a holy gift for Thy service, may I ever 
 be strong to reject the tempter's offer to turn 
 stones into bread, to win success in life by 
 base means, hy the thieves' way, by taking 
 advantage of the weakness or ignorance of my 
 neighbour, and rendering him no equivalent in 
 reciprocal service. May I never eat thieves' 
 bread, bread which I have stolen, not earned, 
 lest, like the manna of old, it stink in my 
 nostrils and become an abomination and a 
 loathing. Fix firm my character and life in 
 integrity and fearless truth. Quicken in me 
 the higher life of social duty. And as the 
 bread I eat passes into my veins, and under 
 the spell of bodily life becomes myself, and as 
 my life-blood builds up my frame, and by my 
 actions done in that strength passes out into 
 God's world, and still is myself in all I do, so 
 may the living Bread from Heaven, the Life 
 of Christ, in answer to this my daily prayer, 
 pass into my spirit and become myself, and as 
 
68 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 a life-spirit build up an unseen frame of living 
 strength to be offered as a Eucharist to God, and 
 by my actions done in that strength pass out 
 into God's world as a quickening spirit, giving 
 life and strength to others, inspiring others 
 to strive for simplicity in the personal life, for 
 luxury only in the sharing of common joys, 
 helping on, if it may be, in however small a 
 degree, the coming of that new fellowship of 
 humanity, that new order of society, founded 
 on industrial peace and forethought, which 
 shall one day put hope and pleasure in the 
 place of fear and pain, as the forces which 
 move men to labour and keep the world 
 a-going. 
 
 And to pray this petition in that spirit is 
 surely to pray the Lord's Prayer aright. 
 
 I T I . Tlie 2yri7iciple of social resijonsihility . — 
 It was a fine saying of Frederick Maurice, that 
 ^' no man can say sincerely, ' Our brothers who 
 are on earth,' wlio has not first learnt to say, 
 ' Our Father, which art in heaven.' " But 
 that principle of fraternity, founded on Christ's 
 revelation of the filial relationship of man to 
 God, implies that in the Christian's daily duty 
 of setting up the kingdom of God upon earth, 
 the society not the individual must be the 
 first centre of thought, that social duty must 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 69 
 
 always take precedence of private right ; that 
 though there will always be variety of function, 
 distinction of office, in the one body of which 
 every true Christian is a member, there need 
 never be, there ought not even to be confusion 
 of responsibihty in multiplicity of service; 
 that while character, individual character, in 
 the Christian citizen is the first of social needs, 
 it must never be forgotten that individual 
 character is influenced at every point by social 
 environment, and that therefore in a Christian 
 order of society the Christian community as a 
 whole is morally responsible for the character 
 of that order, for the conditions of the social 
 environment ; that a corporate conscience, an 
 active enlightened public ojjinion must have 
 authority in a Christian community to decide 
 to what extent matters affecting social order 
 shall be left to individual initiative, to the 
 unregulated play of material forces, industrial, 
 economic, or shall be brought under direct 
 administrative control; that such a public 
 conscience, awakened and active, will best 
 secure the right administration of our existing 
 social system, or such a modification or chano-e 
 of it as seems to be demanded by the progress 
 of knowledge, thought and life. 
 
 Once again then, as in the thought of this 
 
70 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 principle of social responsibility, I take this 
 petition of the Lord's Prayer, " Our Father 
 which art in heaven . . . give us this clay 
 our daily bread," upon my lips, what shall be 
 my own personal prayer? Shall it not be 
 this, or something like this ? 
 
 Oh, my Father, from whom all fatherhood in 
 heaven and earth is named, may my prayer for 
 daily bread pass upward, and be transfigured, 
 and become a prayer for that Bread from 
 heaven which is Christ Himself, broken for 
 humanity and given evermore for the life of 
 the world. Thou who hast knit together thy 
 children in one communion and fellowship in 
 that mystical Body, and hast made us all par- 
 takers of that one Bread, members of that one 
 Body, grant to me the spirit of that Body, 
 help me to carry that spirit not only into all 
 the daily transactions of my own secular call- 
 ing, but also, as far as my personal influence 
 extends, to create and strengthen such an 
 enlightened and active public opinion, in 
 regard to all social and industrial problems, 
 as shall tend to promote a more active spirit 
 of social service as a part of Christian duty, 
 as shall tend to permeate economic and in- 
 dustrial life with the regulative spirit of applied 
 Christianity ; and that the Passion of Thy Son 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 71 
 
 may be verified, and the law of His Incarna- 
 tion — from men to men — may be utilized, help 
 me to fulfil more consistently my membership 
 in the Church, as the storehouse of Christ's 
 redemptive manhood, as the witnessing body 
 to the all-sufiiciency of His Divine and in- 
 carnate grace to solve all the problems of 
 human society, to the transforming, enlighten- 
 ing, cjuickening power of His Holy Spirit upon 
 all human character and life. 
 
 And to pray this petition in that spirit 
 would be surely to pray the Lord's Prayer 
 aright. 
 
 But to pray in that spirit would be to work 
 in that spirit also, for, as Lord Tennyson said 
 in his last poem — 
 
 " To pray, to do : 
 To pray, to do according to the prayer, 
 Are both to worship Allah : but the prayers 
 That have no successor in deed are faint 
 And pale in Allah's eyes ; fair mothers they 
 Dying in childbirth of dead sons." 
 
 And to pray this petition aright is to recognize 
 that the special call of Christ to the present 
 age is a call to Social Service, it would be 
 to acknowledge that the Mission of Christ's 
 Church in this closing year of the century, 
 whatever else it may be, and it is of course 
 much else, is a Social Mission. 
 
72 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 And if you ask me — and I am speaking 
 now of course to the junior members of the 
 University — how, as individuals, you shall 
 obey Christ's call, you shall help to fulfil this 
 mission, I will say to you : — 
 
 1. In the first place, while you are in this 
 University, study these industrial and social 
 problems carefully and scientifically in your 
 economic text-books, and with the methods 
 you learn in your economic class-rooms, but 
 study them also in the light of the Law of the 
 Incarnation — that God's way out to men is 
 from men to men — and you will come to see, 
 I doubt not, that in all economic problems, 
 in the last resort, the question is not about 
 wealth, but about men ; and you will begin to 
 wonder whether after all human nature is so 
 changed or sunk, that spiritual forces may not 
 once more outdo the miracles of chemistry and 
 mechanics, or forethought and faith prove 
 themselves even stronger than electricity and 
 eas in mouldino^ the social destinies of man. 
 
 2. And then, when you go out from this 
 place of learning, "furnished completely unto 
 every good work," be determined that you will 
 carry with you into the daily practice of life, 
 not only your science and your learning, but 
 your faith. If you are an employer of labour, 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 73 
 
 take care in the first place — my own parochial 
 experience leads me to say in the first place — 
 take care that your Christian philanthropy 
 grows naturally out of the management of 
 your own business, that is to say, if you are 
 a ship-owner, see that your first efi'orts at social 
 service, social reform, are on behalf of your 
 own seamen ; if a coal- owner or iron-master, 
 on behalf of your own miners ; if a cotton- 
 spinner, on behalf of your own factory hands ; 
 if a cotton-broker or merchant, on behalf of 
 your own clerks, or porters, or labourers. Look 
 to the lives of your own workmen first of all. 
 Let your name by all means appear as fre- 
 quently as it ought in the subscri^^tion lists of 
 the great public charities of your city or neigh- 
 bourhood, but do not leave it for the revela- 
 tions connected, say, with your candidature of 
 some contested city election, to discover that 
 your charity has not begun at home, in kindly 
 human relationship, direct and personal, with 
 your own work-people. Care, T say, first of 
 all, for the lives of the men in your own 
 employment. And. when sometimes, perhaps 
 on Sunday in church, you hear the words 
 telling how Christ came that men " might 
 have life, and have it more abundantly," and 
 you consider that for yourself, no less than for 
 
74 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 your men, life means something more than 
 livelihood, means joy, means art, means com- 
 radeship, do not forget that for your men, even 
 more than for yourself, life does mean liveli- 
 hood, that where livelihood is not adequate, 
 life not only begins— as to the last of time 
 with most men it must begin — in livelihood, 
 but that it ends there. And if such thoughts 
 of the true meaning of the adequacy of both 
 life and livelihood, of wealth and well-being, 
 should lead you to consider also St. Paul's 
 doctrine about "the labourer who worketh 
 being first partaker of the fruits," and to 
 wonder whether, after all, in a right system of 
 economics, it may not be true that the living 
 wage should be the bed-rock of price, the first 
 charge on the product of work, and whether 
 therefore, in a Christian system of trade, some 
 way ought not to be found for prices to follow 
 wages, rather than wages prices, [ should not, 
 if I were you, greatly care if men call you 
 Socialist, for it is not, remember, the Socialism 
 which comes to a rich man because he is a 
 Christian that is dangerous; it is the Socialism 
 which comes to a poor man because other 
 people have ceased to be Christians which is 
 dangerous. 
 
 3. Again, if it should happen — as in this 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 75 
 
 congregation it well may happen — that your 
 lives in the future shall be cast, not amid the 
 great cities of England, but among the country 
 villages, then I say that upon you and upon 
 such as you very largely lies the responsibility 
 for the future happiness and stability of your 
 country. For no one, I am sure, can have 
 thought seriously upon social questions with- 
 out feeling that the true key to the solution 
 of the city problem lies in the village. You 
 must have often heard how one of the great 
 difficulties in connection with the surplus of 
 the workers in the town arises from the steady 
 influx of the rural laljourer, attracted not only 
 by the larger wages, but by the larger life of 
 the city. The problem for you, as a possible 
 country squire in the future, to solve is how 
 to make English village life more attractive, 
 village citizenship more honourable, how to 
 break the monotony and commonplace with 
 some stimulant which shall not be vicious, 
 with some pleasure which shall not be merely 
 gross and sensual, how to quicken citizenship 
 and local patriotism with noble aims of good- 
 ness and wholesomeness and righteousness. 
 And believe me, you will find no better way 
 of doing that than by making evident in your 
 leadership, your own personal faith in the 
 
76 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 royalty of Christ and the ultimate authority 
 of His law in the realm of villag-e ethics, 
 village economics, village politics. For most 
 certainly it is that Faith which will best create 
 in the citizen that true sense of individual 
 responsibility, strengthening him to resist the 
 tyranny of village tradition and prejudice, 
 habituating him to live for an unseen and 
 distant end, which is so necessary both in city 
 and village, to counterwork that impatience 
 for quick results and legislative short cuts 
 which is always one of the great dangers of a 
 democratic electorate. 
 
 4. And if some of you are called to be 
 country parsons, as others are called to be 
 country squires, to them I would say, if I 
 may pass on the advice that was once given 
 to a country parson by one of the noblest 
 country gentlemen of our generation, who 
 was himself I think quoting Charles Kingsley 
 — " Above all do not let your people discover 
 where the man leaves off and the parson 
 begins." And that advice I take it means, 
 not that you are to distinguish between the 
 secular and the spiritual, in order that you 
 may make the parson as much secular as 
 possible, but that you are to recognize in your 
 practice and in your teaching that Life is one 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE ^7 
 
 and that man is one. That Life is one — that 
 you have no right to say to your people 
 social life, industrial life, civic life is one 
 thing, and spiritual life, religious life, quite 
 another; and Man is one — you cannot dis- 
 member his soul, and divide it in halves, and 
 so contrive that part of it shall be kept 
 for secular work and part for religious work, 
 that one half shall be used when he is buy- 
 ing and selling on a week-day, and the other 
 half when he is praying and singing on a 
 Sunday. 
 
 Least of all must the country parson cease 
 to believe in the wholeness, in the unity of 
 Life. Li the new democratic future, whether 
 in the English city or the English village, the 
 call is for leadership, and for leaders, who, 
 while believing in the possibilities of democratic 
 control, know how essential to efficient admin- 
 istration are all the qualities which go to 
 make up the ideal Christian character — justice, 
 patience, hopefulness, modesty, integrity, 
 frankness, fellowship. 
 
 We need clergy, therefore, who will insist 
 that it is the duty of the Church, as an inter- 
 preter of life, as a preacher of Christ's king- 
 dom on earth, so to act, so to speak, that every 
 citizen shall feel that it is a point of honour 
 
78 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 and of Christian obligation to build up, as far 
 as his influence extends, the life of the civic 
 brotherhood to which lie belongs, and every 
 sphere of action which it contains, in justice, 
 righteousness, and the fear of God. 
 
 And yet, while I most earnestly counsel 
 those of you w^ho may be country parsons in 
 the future not to separate yourselves from the 
 civic life and the social enthusiasms, perhaps 
 even the political ideals of your parishioners, 
 I do counsel you most earnestly to beware of 
 the danger of secularizing your ofiice. It is, I 
 fear, in these days a very real danger, especially 
 to the younger clergy, partly from the always 
 powerful spirit of worldliness, and partly also 
 as a reaction against a somewhat seminarist 
 type of priestliness, which seems to be growing 
 wp amongst us. 
 
 There is a story told of the old Scotch 
 Presbyterian divine. Dr. Leighton, that on 
 one occasion he was publicly reprimanded by 
 his synod for not " preaching for the times." 
 He inquired from them who was in the habit 
 of doing so ? " All the brethren," they 
 replied. " Then," he said, " if all of you preach 
 for the times, you may surely allow one poor 
 brother to preach for Christ and eternity." 
 
 My friends, I know not whether the story 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 79 
 
 is true or not. But the lesson of it for us 
 seems to be true, and it is this. The Church 
 demands from every one of her ministers that 
 he should " preach for the times," but only on 
 the condition that the preacher himself has 
 first striven to bring his own life, every day 
 and every hour of it, into the presence of 
 Christ and under the light of His eternity, 
 and for the rest has learnt to feel — 
 
 " That God and Heaven's great deeps are nearer 
 
 Him to whose heart his fellow-man is nigh ; 
 Who does not hold his soul's own freedom dearer 
 
 Than that of all his brethren low or high ; 
 Who to the right can feel himself the truer 
 
 For being gently patient with the wrong ; 
 Who sees a brother in the evil-doer, 
 
 And finds in love the heart's blood of his song." 
 
IV 
 
 SOCIAL DUTY 
 
 St. Matt. vi. 12, 13 : ^'Our Father . . . for- 
 give us our trespasses, as we forgive them that 
 trespass against us : and lead us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from evil." 
 
 " Oratio Dominica," says St. Augustine, 
 " forma est desideriorum." The Paternoster 
 is the mould of prayer into which we are 
 to cast all our needs. There is no necessity 
 to go beyond it, for it is normal for all other 
 prayers. There is not, he affirms, any possible 
 request that a faithful man ought to make, 
 which cannot be brought under one or other 
 clause of this prayer, which is not an unfolding 
 of something which is shut up in it. It is 
 only such a prayer as ought never to be 
 prayed, something that *' we ask amiss," which 
 will not range itself under one or other of its 
 petitions.^ 
 
 1 *' Nihil invenies quod in ista Dominica non con- 
 tineatur et concludatur oratione." — E]). cxxx. 12. 
 
 80 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 81 
 
 In the three sermons which, at intervals 
 during my term of office, it has been my 
 privilege to preach in this place, I have 
 endeavoured to apply St. Augustine's principle 
 of exegesis. I have asked you, on the one 
 hand, to find shut up, as it were, in the 
 petitions of the Lord's Prayer, certain prin- 
 ciples of social action which seemed to me to 
 characterize God's good government of the 
 world ; and, on the other hand, I have asked 
 you to appraise the value of certain of our 
 own social hopes and aspirations in regard to 
 the future of humanity by seeing how far they 
 will bear the test of being prayed, of being 
 cast into the mould of the Lord's Prayer. 
 Social order, social progress, social justice — 
 these have been the subjects of our thought 
 hitherto. 
 
 In my first sermon I spoke of the principle 
 of Social Order. 
 
 The Fatherly will of God as the only true 
 basis of human society, as the only ground for 
 a rational faith that social evolution is true ; 
 that evolution is the way that God makes 
 things come to pass; that the history of 
 humanity has a definite moral goal ; that there 
 is no iDlace in God's plan for the world for any 
 permanent force which is out of sympathy 
 
82 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 with human progress ; that the Christian doc- 
 trine of the inherent dignity of " the soul " of 
 man gave birth to the idea of personality, and 
 personality involving freedom; that individual 
 freedom ujDon which personal and social re- 
 sponsibility can alone rest, is further guaran- 
 teed by the conception of a fatherly Creator ; 
 that there is therefore a fixed objective point 
 towards which society is being guided by God, 
 and a consequent prescribed duty for society 
 to fulfil — in other words, that there is an order 
 of society which is the best, and that towards 
 this order man is gradually being led accord- 
 ing to a definite Divine plan — all this we 
 thought we found implied in the first clauses 
 of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father which art 
 in Heaven, Thy will be done, as in Heaven, so 
 in earth." 
 
 In my second sermon I dwelt upon the 
 principle of Social Progress. That the idea 
 of the kingdom of God gives birth to Social 
 Optimism ; that the belief in the Keign of 
 Christ here and now is the source of every 
 true Christian's militant certitude, for which 
 history too he thinks gives warrant, of the 
 ultimate establishment upon earth of an ideal 
 social state, natural and to be naturally 
 evolved ; that human life is therefore rightly 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 83 
 
 regarded as a great educational plan working 
 itself out according to the design of God ; that 
 in the jDrogressive realization of the Divine 
 idea of human perfectibility a conception of 
 social duty as well as of personal duty is 
 evolved, in other words, that society exists 
 quite as much to create new duties as to 
 insure old rights; that in the fulfilment of 
 this twofold obligation, personal and social, it 
 is man's duty to study the providential laws 
 by which humanity has been impelled along 
 the path of social order and progress, and to 
 co-operate, as fiiv as he can, with those laws, in 
 order that in human society this double mani- 
 festation of progress may be seen — all men 
 approximating to a common levels but a level 
 which is continually rising — all this we thought 
 we found revealed or implied in the second 
 clause of the Paternoster, " Father . . Thy 
 kingdom come ... in earth." 
 
 In my third sermon, on the first Sunday of 
 this term, I spoke of Social Justice. 
 
 And in that petition of the prayer in which 
 we pray that "our daily Bread may be given to 
 us day by day," I thought we found, in the 
 fact that the daily bread is stated to be a 
 gift from God, God's bread, not devil's 
 bread, bread therefore to be legitimately earned 
 
84 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 before it can be said to be honestly owned, 
 the social principle implied that all service is 
 honourable and all idleness a disgrace ; that 
 no wealth is legitimately earned which is not 
 an exchange value for actual services rendered, 
 services which minister to life and help on the 
 common good ; that to get money by whatever 
 strategy, by the gambling method of Turf or 
 Stock Exchange, without furnishing an equiva- 
 lent, is dishonourable spoliation ; that private 
 property exists for the sake of society, not 
 society for the sake of private property ; that 
 wealth is a trust, and that men are to be 
 measured not by what they possess, but by 
 the use they make of their possessions ; that 
 luxury can only justifiably come into existence 
 when honest penury has vanished, for luxury 
 only then ceases to be culpable when it serves 
 to make a man a more careful, a more loving, 
 a more helpful member of the community ; 
 that life means more than livelihood ; that 
 things are for men and not men for things ; 
 that any industrial system which grinds up 
 men and women to make cheap goods is an 
 un-Christian system ; that no industrial system 
 can be a Christian system which is not so 
 organized that every honest and willing worker 
 can find w^ork, and work so remunerative that 
 
SOCIAL DVTY 85 
 
 not only can lie maintain his own working 
 powers in health and efficiency, but also is able 
 to give to his cliildren a decent, a joyous, and 
 a reasonable life according to the standard of 
 comfort of his class. 
 
 To-day we come to the last clauses of the 
 Prayer : — 
 
 "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive 
 them that trespass against us : and lead us 
 not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 
 
 What is the social message of these words ? 
 
 *' Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive 
 them that trespass against us:" so at least 
 runs the chiuse in the familiar words of the 
 Prayer-Book version — the version adopted, I 
 fancy, by all English Christians, Nonconformist 
 as well as Churchmen. But, as you are well 
 aware, the words do not run so either in the 
 Authorised or the PiCvised Version of St. 
 Matthew or St. Luke. " Forgive us our debts, 
 as w^e also have forgiven our debtors," are St. 
 Matthew's wwds. '* Forgive us our sins, for 
 we ourselves also forgive every one that is 
 indebted to us," are St. Luke's. 
 
 There are special lessons no doubt — there 
 always are— to be learnt from a careful 
 exegesis of the varying words used in trans- 
 lation of the Greek equivalents for "sin," 
 
86 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD S PRAYER 
 
 '' debt," " trespass," but a consideration of 
 the Syriac texts, both old and Vulgate, as 
 representing most nearly the original Aramaic, 
 seems to leave little doubt that in St. Matthew's 
 word translated "debt" we have the most 
 accurate reproduction of the original. 
 
 There is certainly no need, for our special 
 purpose to-day, to go beyond that word. 
 There could not well be a better text for a 
 sermon on Social Duty than this petition, 
 '' Forgive us our debts." " Debt " and '' duty," 
 moreover, are practically the same word, being 
 but Middle-English variants of the Latin 
 " dehita,'' a sum which is due, a duty, a debt. 
 
 This petition then of the Lord's Prayer, 
 " Forgive us our debts," we may quite fairly 
 for our purpose to-day translate — " Forgive us, 
 God, our failures in social duty ! " 
 
 Social duty — ah ! my friends, when in the 
 light of Christ's Incarnation we bring ourselves 
 face to face with the great social problems of 
 our age and country, does not this petition of 
 the Lord's Prayer — so read — touch our con- 
 sciences ? When, on the one hand, we consider 
 the ideals of the Church of Christ, "the splendid 
 having and royal hope," the zeal for souls, the 
 sympathy for bodily needs, which are the 
 undivided fruits of a single love, exhibited 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 87 
 
 in the one blessed life of Jesus, to be reflected 
 in His Church, as witnessing for Him, as 
 re23resenting Him in this present world, as 
 occupied with His work of setting up the 
 kinordom of God under and amidst the natural 
 every-day conditions of human life ; and on 
 the other, when we consider the Babel life of 
 our great cities, that black cloud of pauperism 
 brooding over the richest of the countries of 
 the earth, of drunkenness, with all its foul 
 brood of folly and sensuality and crime, of 
 social revolt, of the almost standing feud 
 between capital and labour, of endemic misery 
 and avoidable disease, of all the countless ills 
 which make up the terrible inheritance of 
 ancestral error, of our social heredity and 
 environment — when we think of these things, 
 what a sorry compromise, what a miserable 
 evasion, what a vast conspiracy to be blind, 
 does not even the best side of our Christian 
 civilization in England to-day seem ? Or again, 
 when, in the ethical realm of life values, we 
 consider the office of the Church of Christ, in 
 regard to the greatest of her social duties, the 
 formation and building up of human character, 
 and the provision of the civic securities of 
 character in a candid, enlightened, vigorous 
 public conscience, and we compare the ideal 
 
88 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 citizen of tlie kingdom, as revealed in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, as set forth for us in 
 the apostolic writings, with its measure in the 
 stature of the fullness of Christ, thinking first 
 of all of whatsoever things are lovely, pure, 
 just, noble, and of good report, with the actual 
 result as seen, I do not say, in the exceptional 
 saintly characters of Christendom, but as seen 
 in the unit of citizen life as we know him 
 to-day, the common man of the road, the street, 
 the workshop, the field, the downmost man 
 among the rudest, homeliest life of the people 
 — a French peasant, an English agricultural 
 labourer — surely the mind must indeed be 
 dull, putting these two types side by side, 
 which is not conscious of the depth of contrast. 
 Many of you are, no doubt, familiar with 
 Jean Frangois Millet's picture of ''The Man 
 with the Hoe." Some of you perhaps may 
 know the fine interpretation of that picture by 
 a modern Californian poet — 
 
 ''Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans 
 Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
 The emptiness of ages in his face, 
 And on his back the burden of the world. 
 Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
 A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox 1 
 Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw ? 
 Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 89 
 
 Whose breath blew out the light within this brain 1 
 
 Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave 
 
 To have dominion over sea and land ; 
 
 To trace the stars and search the heavens for power ; 
 
 To feel the passion of eternity ? 
 
 Through this dread shape the suffering ages look ; 
 
 Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop ; 
 
 Through this dread shape humanity, betrayed, 
 
 Plundered, profaned and disinherited, 
 
 Cries protest to the Judges of the world, 
 
 A protest that is also prophecy. 
 
 O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, 
 
 Is this the handiwork you give to God, 
 
 This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched 1 
 
 How will you ever straighten up this shape ; 
 
 Touch it again with immortality ; 
 
 Give back the upward looking and the light ; 
 
 Rebuild in it the music and the dream ; 
 
 Make right the immemorial infamies, 
 
 Perfidious wi^ongs, immedicable woes?" 
 
 All, but perhaps you say this is but the 
 exaggerated note, the hysteric scream of a 
 Socialist Poet ! 
 
 Well, then, take this very prosaic statement 
 of fact, made in Parliament three weeks ago, 
 by a speaker whom no one will accuse of being 
 either Socialist or Poet. It is a bald description 
 of the provision made to-day in the capital of 
 Christendom for the housing of English citizens, 
 who, however huml)le they may be, have still 
 the right to claim suffrage in the kingdom of 
 God, have still, so at least we declare in our 
 
90 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 Christian creeds, the possibility of highest man- 
 hood pent up in their souls, the splendid estate 
 of God-likeness held in fee. 
 
 "The medical officer of the London County 
 Council showed, that in London alone four 
 hundred thousand persons were living in one- 
 roomed houses, thirty thousand were living 
 six ill a room, nine thousand seven in a room, 
 three thousand eight in a room. The medical 
 officer, even for the aristocratic district of 
 Kensington, reported a case where five adult 
 women slept in one room — three in one bed, 
 two under it. Li Camberwell seventeen were 
 found living and sleeping in a single room. Li 
 some cases two families lived in one room, with 
 a partition of sacking. In the East end things 
 were worse, and beds were let out on the eight 
 hours' system to night and day workers in 
 turn. . . Moreover, crowding means unnecessary 
 deaths. The averag;e death-rate for London to- 
 day is seventeen. But that average rate is 
 made up from the total of different districts 
 which allows such individual differences as 
 these — St. George's in the West, Hanover 
 Square, thirteen ; St. George's, Southwark, 
 twenty-three; St.George's-in-the-East, twenty- 
 
 six." 
 
 My friends, these are significant figures, and. 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 91 
 
 alas ! it is not difficult to find corresponding 
 figures in other great towns. In Glasgow, for 
 example, one hundred thousand, or about one- 
 fifth of the total population, are living in single 
 rooms, and the average death-rate is cor- 
 respondingly high. 
 
 In the rural districts of Eno^land the housino; 
 question is hardly less scandalous, although 
 the cottage question in the English village is 
 a very old and a very stale one indeed. 
 
 More than twenty years ago I remember that, 
 at a conference on village life held in Oxford, 
 speaking from my experience as a country 
 parson in this diocese, and bringing forward 
 certain vital statistics with regard to village 
 homes in Buckinghamshire, I asked these ques- 
 tions — " How is it possible, under such physical 
 conditions as I have described, to expect from 
 my parishioners any approach to that * pure 
 relicrion breathing; household laws' which 
 it is yet my duty as a parish priest to in- 
 culcate ? How, with such huts for homes, can 
 the distinctively home virtues, parental love, 
 filial obedience, household thrift, cleanliness, 
 modesty, chastity, self-respect, purity and 
 simplicity of heart, find any room for growth ? 
 Can I honestly ascribe the meagre growth of 
 these virtues among my people solely to failure 
 
92 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOED S PRAYER 
 
 of individual will, or must I not rather trace it 
 to circumstances of life and sleep so degrading 
 as to leave no moral room for their growth ? 
 What provision can there be under such 
 conditions of home life, not only for the three 
 essentials of physical life — pure air, pure water, 
 pure food — but also for the three essentials of 
 spiritual life — ' admiration, hope, and love ' ? " 
 
 Well, but, my friends, after twenty years 
 the conditions to-day are very little improved. 
 I might quote many pieces of evidence in 
 proof of this. Take this one paragraph only 
 from the report of the late Commission on 
 Labour. This is how Mr. Little, the special 
 Agricultural Commissioner, officially sum- 
 marizes the evidence brought before the 
 Commission — 
 
 " There is abundant evidence," he says, '* to 
 show that a large proportion of the cottages 
 inhabited by labourers are below a proper 
 standard for decency and comfort, while a 
 considerable number of them are vile and 
 deplorably wretched dwellings ... It is im- 
 possible to read these reports without experi- 
 encing a painful feeling that too frequently 
 and too commonly the agricultural labourer 
 lives under conditions which are physically 
 and morally unwholesome and offensive." 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 93 
 
 How, then, shall we set about remedying 
 these existing evils so discreditable to our 
 civilization ? In the first place, I think, we 
 are forced to acknowledge that some further 
 legislation is needed. In connection with the 
 housing problem in the towns, at any rate, the 
 monopoly of the landowner ought in certain 
 directions to be further restricted; the principle 
 of betterment should be more widely extended; 
 something should be done to prevent the whole 
 increase of land values, caused by the growth 
 of population, merely going to the enrichment 
 of individuals ; eligible building sites ought 
 not to be kept out of public use that that 
 enrichment may be the greater. Still it is 
 not only, or chiefly, fresh legislation that we 
 need. It is not only the law that is to blame. 
 Compulsory powers of the amplest description 
 are given to the local authorities, and if they 
 were used to their fullest extent the position 
 of the working classes as regards their housing 
 might be very different indeed from what 
 it is. 
 
 What then is wrong ? The motive force in 
 an enlightened public opinion, in. the various 
 localities, to set these Acts in motion is too 
 often absent. 
 
 Here, then, lies an obvious duty, social duty, 
 
94 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 of the Christiaii community, of the Church. If 
 it is true, as surely it is, that the Christian 
 community as a whole is morally responsible 
 for the character of its own economic and social 
 order, and for deciding to what extent matters 
 affecting that order are to be left either to 
 individual initiative, or to the official adminis- 
 tration of the civil power, or to the unregu- 
 lated play of economic forces, then it is for 
 the Church an occasion so to waken and to 
 foster the public conscience, the Christian 
 conscience of the community, as shall secure 
 the best administration of particular systems 
 while they exist, and the modification or 
 change of them when this is required by the 
 progress of knowledge, thought and life. And 
 as, in this case before us of the housing of the 
 people, the health-right of the working classes, 
 and the fair and sanitary conditions of their 
 working life, is so directly involved, I do not 
 hesitate to say that it is the direct duty of 
 the Church, as a matter of practical religion, 
 to create and foster such a public opinion as 
 shall overcome the supineness, the ignorance, 
 the apathy, the sluggish indifference of the 
 existing civic authorities in town and country. 
 When one remembers, on the one hand, that 
 immense army of human beings — it far ex- 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 95 
 
 ceeds in its total the numbers of our killed 
 and wounded in the South African War — 
 annually stricken down by preventible disease, 
 in plain words, slain either by culpable care- 
 lessness or by ignorance, scarcely if at all 
 less culpable ; and when one remembers, on 
 the other hand, the immense engine of influ- 
 ence which the Church might bring to bear 
 upon the public conscience of the community, 
 it does indeed seem lamentable that there 
 should be any hesitation to embark in the 
 great work, not only of denouncing that care- 
 lessness, but also of instructing that ignorance. 
 To any man who believes, as I do most 
 firmly, that the body of man is not only the 
 shrine which contains the soul, but a shrine 
 which, under certain conditions, fashions and 
 modifies the soul itself, there can surely appear 
 no task more noble, no aim more worthy of 
 the energies of any Church or Christian com- 
 munity than that of securing for the industrial 
 workers of the nation those fair and healthy 
 conditions of home-life and work, which lead 
 to happy, useful, and untrammelled lives, and 
 removing those evil conditions of ignorance 
 and squalor and disease which are among the 
 chief obstacles at present in the way of man's 
 attainment to that fullness and perfection of 
 
96 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD's PRAYER 
 
 moral stature which is the true height of his 
 destiny. 
 
 And certainly, my friends, it is only in so 
 far as you and I have this faith, it is only in 
 so far as you and T know, and act upon the 
 knowledge, that the public conscience never 
 can be healthy when individual consciences 
 are weak, that we shall learn how to pray the 
 Lord's Prayer aright. 
 
 Let us never, then, take this petition — 
 " Forgive us our sins " — upon our lips, with- 
 out the determination that at least some- 
 thing like this shall be included in the 
 interpretation of it to our own hearts—" Oh, 
 our Father, forgive us our social sins, for- 
 give us our failures in social duty, in civic 
 obligations, in the realization of public respon- 
 sibility ; help us to take home to ourselves as 
 a matter of private conscience the arraign- 
 ment of public wrong-doing, of corporate irre- 
 sponsibility, the fact that too often we do in 
 the mass what no one of us would do as an 
 individual ; make us to be faithful stewards 
 not only of the personal gifts of light or grace, 
 but of the manifold gifts of knowledge and 
 civilization ; help us, each one of us, as far as 
 our influence goes, in however small a degree, 
 to build up in the community of which we are 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 97 
 
 members a strong public conscience, which 
 shall be zealous for great causes, carrying in 
 them the hope of future progress, and creating 
 that spirit of Christ-like courage by which 
 the kingdom of God shall one day come upon 
 earth, and the goal of social evolution be 
 reached, when Christ shall reign, King of 
 kings and Lord of lords." 
 
 " Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive 
 them that trespass against us : and lead us 
 not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 
 
 I must hurry to a conclusion, and yet I 
 ought not to close without emphasizing the 
 lesson of social warning which this last clause 
 of the Prayer seems to contain. 
 
 Every new popular movement has its foolish 
 fanatics. And the Christian Socialist move- 
 ment in the English Church is, I suppose, not 
 free from them. There are men who speak 
 hastily, and who appear to think that this 
 final petition of the Lord's Prayer may be 
 read in this way — " Deliver a man from evil 
 environment, and then he cannot fall into 
 temptation, but will quite naturally and 
 spontaneously live a good life." 
 
 I cannot, of course, pretend in the few 
 moments that remain to us to discuss the 
 relations of the laws of heredity and environ- 
 ment to human life, conduct, belief, but it 
 
 H 
 
98 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LOEd's PEAYER 
 
 would be disingenuous to ignore the influ- 
 ence of these two great facts of human life 
 upon the social aspects of our religion. No 
 intelligent Christian who knows anything of 
 modern social problems can sincerely say, 
 " Deliver us from evil . . . bring us not 
 into temptation." without serious thought of 
 the evils of vital inheritance, and the special 
 temptations of bad and vicious environment. 
 While, therefore, we cannot afford to ignore 
 the facts of life, or to think that vice and 
 pauperism and crime will ever be eradicated 
 from society until we have learnt to regard 
 them as symptoms of a deep and deadly dis- 
 ease, the tendency to which is remorselessly 
 transmitted from generation to generation, 
 and can be helpfully treated only by a radical 
 and long-continued change of environment, yet 
 we must never allow ourselves to forget that, 
 after all, the most potent influence on character 
 and life is a change of spiritual environment, 
 is, in other words, what as Christians we are 
 accustomed to call, the presence of the Holy 
 Ghost acting at the seat of human will. 
 
 In the eternal world in which our spirits 
 live, soul makes body, character creates 
 environment, life, true life, always works from 
 within outwards. That is the truth which 
 you remember our great English poetess 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 99 
 
 grasped when she said in the well-known 
 passage in Aurora Leigh — 
 
 " I hold you will not compass your poor ends 
 Of barley-feeding and material ease, 
 Without a poet's individualism 
 To work your universal. It takes a soul 
 To move a body : it takes a high-souled man 
 To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye : 
 It takes the Ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off 
 The dust of the Actual. Ah, your Fouriers failed 
 Because not poets enough to understand 
 That Life develops from within." 
 
 Yes, and where Fourier failed Christ wins. 
 "Life develops from within." We need to 
 reiterate this doctrine. The kinwlom of heaven 
 is within you first of all. No change of con- 
 dition, no bettering of environment is sufficient 
 to make o-ood men. No rearrano:ement of 
 society, no social transformation is possible, 
 has ever been possible, or ever will be possible, 
 except as the application of a religious prin- 
 ciple, of a moral development, of a strong and 
 active common faith. And for this reason. 
 Men may easily re-make institutions, but they 
 do not so easily re-make themselves. It is 
 indeed a law of social forms, of national 
 institutions, that they are always expressive 
 of national character. That is indeed the 
 ground for the common statement, the per- 
 fectly true statement, that legislation which 
 is too far in advance of public opinion is 
 
100 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORDS PRAYER 
 
 always futile. National institutions come into 
 existence bearing of necessity the impress of 
 national character ; they live only so long as 
 it supplies them with vitality. To change 
 institutions for the Letter we need to change 
 men for the better. And to do this we need, 
 and shall ever need, religious motive. A great, 
 a momentous social revolution, it is true, 
 waits to be accomplished. But the social 
 revolution must succeed, not precede, a revolu- 
 tion of thought. We might be all quite safely 
 Socialists to-morrow, provided only we were 
 quite sincerely Christians to-day. 
 To sum up, then, in conclusion : — 
 
 I. To know that Social Order is based on 
 the Fatherly will of God, to know that our 
 filial relationship with the Heavenly Father 
 throuoh Christ is the sjround for our faith 
 that social evolution is true, that evolution 
 is the way that God makes things come to 
 pass, that there is an order of society which is 
 best, and that towards this order humanity is 
 gradually being led according to a definite 
 Divine plan — this is to be able to pray the 
 Lord's Prayer aright. 
 
 II. To believe that the present kinghood of 
 Christ is the ground of a true optimistic faith 
 in Social Progress, faith that here is the king- 
 dom, now is eternity, and that therefore, in the 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 101 
 
 idea of its Founder, the Church, the Christian 
 kingdom had for its object the reorganization 
 and restitution of society, no less than the 
 salvation and deliverance of the individual, and 
 that in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ 
 the eternal principles of the Divine plan, the 
 laws of the kingdom of Heaven are revealed — 
 this is to be able to pray the Lord's Prayer 
 aright. 
 
 III. To know that Social Justice requires 
 that our daily bread should be God's bread, 
 given in return for honest work, not thieves' 
 bread, devil's bread, filched from our fellows, 
 our swindled, cheated brothers or sisters, to 
 know that wealth is only legitimately earned 
 when it is the result of services rendered 
 which minister to life and help on the common 
 good — this is to be able to pray the Lord's 
 Prayer aright. 
 
 IV. To know that the law of Social Duty, the 
 law of Christ's kingdom, is the law of service, 
 and that that kingdom is to be advanced, not 
 only by the conversion of individuals, but by 
 the gradual raising of social customs, by the 
 transforming of institutions, to cherish social 
 ideals, to dream dreams and to see visions, 
 and to hold fast, in spite of broken hopes, to 
 the faith that God will bring life to its perfect 
 
102 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORd's PRAYER 
 
 end at last — this is to be able to pray the 
 Lord's Prayer aright. 
 
 V. To know that Heredity and Environ- 
 ment are facts of human existence, but to 
 know also that however bad the vital inherit- 
 ance, it may be modified and changed by good 
 environment, and yet that the most potent of all 
 influences upon human character is change of 
 spiritual environment ; to know therefore that 
 social reform must begin first in the sacrifice 
 of self, and the building up of individual 
 character ; that the public conscience can 
 never be healthy where individual consciences 
 are weak, but to know also that environment 
 counts for much ; and that as all life is of the 
 kingdom of God, the Church of Christ is 
 concerned in the ways of His disciples, however 
 secular they may seem to be, and must help 
 to build up the civic life of the nation, and of 
 every sphere of action which belongs to it, in 
 justice, righteousness, and the fear of God — 
 this is to be able to pray the Lord's Prayer 
 aright. 
 
 THE END 
 
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 By M AGG I E SYM I NGTON, Author of " Working to Win," " Two 
 
 Silver Keys," " In the World's Garden," "Trixy," &c. &c. 
 With Etched Title and Frontispiece. 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 6s, 
 
 The Child and His Book. 
 
 Some Account of the History and Progress of Children's Literature 
 
 in England. 
 By Mrs. E. M. FIELD, Author of " Ethne," "Mixed Pickles," &c. 
 Illustrated, large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 6s. [Second Edition. 
 
 " It is a series of studies, well worth careful reading, of a subject of the 
 greatest importance and interest ; and the studies are made more valuable by 
 being the work of a very thoughtful and accomplished writer.' — Spectator. 
 
 3 Paternoster BuildingSj London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.'s Populai Books. 
 
 The Story-telling Album. 
 
 For Our Boys and Girls. 
 With an Illustration on every page. 
 Crown 4to, cloth boards, gilt edges, 5s. 
 
 A very elegant book for children from Jive to eight. 
 
 Chatterbox. 
 
 Annual Volume. Illustrated with high-class Engravings. 
 Handsomely bound in extra cloth, bevelled boards, gilt edges, 6s. 
 Also in illustrated boards, 3s. 
 
 " No nursery would be complete without a ' Chatterbox.' "—Punch. 
 
 " One of the best children's books we have seen."— Times. 
 
 " Publishers in describing their own books are not unfrequently apt to say 
 of them a little more than they deserve, but the publishers of * Chatterbox ' are 
 not guilty of any exaggeration in describing it as ' the most popular volume for 
 children ever published.' Both pictures and letterpress are very good."— School 
 Guardian. 
 
 Sunday. reading for the young. 
 
 The Annual Volumes. With upwards of 250 Original Illustrations 
 by Gordon Browne, A. Forestier, Helen Miles, T. Pym, 
 and others. 
 
 Bound in cloth, bevelled boards, gilt edges, 6s. each. 
 Also in Illustrated Board, 3s. each. 
 
 " Delightfully artistic. The young will be hard to please if they do not like 
 the letterpress." — Times. 
 
 " In these days children require what is cheerful and agreeable, as well as 
 serious, in order that Sunday may not be puritanically grave and solemn. 
 Such is the provision made for them here, and both they and their parents 
 may feel much indebted to Messrs. Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. for this 
 excellent publication."— ^^/^f^/z. 
 
 3 Paternoster Buildings, London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.'s Popular Books. 
 
 Nigel Bartram's Ideal. 
 
 By FLORENCE WILFORD, Author of * A Maiden of Our Own 
 
 Day," &c. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 "Admirably worked out ; indeed, we do not remember that a similar situa- 
 tion has ever been more thoughtfully and sympathetically handled. Mrs. 
 Bartram's character is delineated in all its true nobility with really exquisite 
 insight. . . . 'Nigel Bartram's Ideal' is a fine study of character, and deserves 
 to be read." — Spectator. 
 
 A Feast of Stories from Foreign Lands. 
 
 By JAMES F. COBB- 
 
 Illustrated. Crown 8vo, extra cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 The Lost Princess; or, The Wise Woman. 
 
 By GEORGE MACDONALD, Author of *' Phantastes," "At the 
 
 Back of the North Wind," "Robert Falconer," &c. 
 With numerous Illustrations by A. G. Walker, Sculptor. 
 Crown 8vo, fancy cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 The Watchers on the Longships. 
 
 A Tale of Cornwall in the Last Century. 
 By JAMES F. COBB. 
 
 Illustrated with Four full-page Engravings by Davidson Knowles. 
 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth, bevelled boards, 3s. 6d. \\^th Edition. 
 
 "A capital story, and one we heartily commend to boy readers, both gentle 
 lUd simple." — Guardian. 
 
 Off to California, a tale of the gold country. 
 
 Adapted from the Flemish of Hendrik Conscii;nce. 
 By JAMES F. COBB. 
 
 Illustrated with Six full-page Plates by A. Forestier. 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 "The scene of this story is laid in exciting times. The adventurers go 
 through the greatest perils ; and they find a wonderful treasure in a pool of 
 a mountain. . . . This is a good story of its kind, told with spirit, and admir- 
 able in tone and moral." — Spectator. 
 
 " This is a capital story for boys, full of adventure and stirring incident, but 
 of excellent tone and good moral tendency. '1 here are half-a-dozen spirited 
 Illustrations, and the book is attractively bound." — Nonconformist. 
 
 3 Paternoster Buildings, London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
 1 
 
Wells Gardner, Darton & Go.'s Popular Books. 
 
 Bridewell Royal Hospital, Past and 
 Present. 
 
 A short account of it as Palace, Hospital, Prison, and School, with a 
 
 collection of Interesting Memoranda never before published. 
 By ALFRED JAMES COPELAND, F.S.A. 
 Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. 
 
 "Mr. Copeland has told the unvarnished tale of his Hospital from the un- 
 impeachable records of contemporary documents," — Saturday Review. 
 
 Honor Bright ; or, The Four = Leaved 
 Shamrock. 
 
 By the Author of " One of a Covey," " Robin and Linnet," &c. 
 Illustrated. Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. [6//? Edition. 
 
 "It is tastefully bound, with illustrations, and will be sure of a hearty 
 reception by all. The style is quaint and bright, while the story is sensible and 
 amusing. We congratulate the authors upon their happy choice of title." 
 — Public Opinion. 
 
 "A cheery, sensible, and healthy tale." — Times. 
 
 A Lost Piece of Silver. 
 
 By the Author of '* Edith Vernon's Life-Work," &c. Illustrated. 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth boards extra, 3s. 6d.. 
 
 " Told without exaggeration, without any fine writing, but with considerable 
 power. " — Spectator. 
 
 Martin the Skipper. 
 
 A Tale for Boys and Seafaring Folk. 
 By JAMES F. COBB. 
 Full-page Illustrations. Large crown Svo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 " We should imagine those queer folk indeed who could not read this story 
 with eager interest and pleasure, be they boys or girls, young or old. We 
 highly commend the style in which the book is written,- and the religious spirit 
 which pervades it." — Christian World. 
 
 Dogged Jack. 
 
 By FRANCES PALMER. 
 Illustrated. Large crown Svo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 " It is a first-rate boys' book. It is confidently recommended as a present 
 or prize." — Church Bells. 
 
 "A capital story: the characters are well drawn, and the incidents are 
 perfectly natural." — Church Times. 
 
 3 Paternoster Buildings, London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
Wells Gardner, Darton & Oo.'s Popular Boohs. 
 Count up the Sunny Days, and Four 
 
 Little Sixes. a book for Boys and girls. 
 By C. A. JONES. With full-page Illustrations. 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 "An unusually good children's story." — Glasgow Herald. 
 
 Eight Years in Kaffraria. 
 
 With Illustrations and Map of the Diocese of Kaffraria. 
 By the Ven. Archdeacon GIBSON. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 "One of the most complete and minute records of the kind we have read 
 for many a year." — Saturday Review, 
 
 Merrie Games in Rhyme, from ye Olden 
 Time. 
 
 Collected and Edited by the Hon. EMM ELI NE PLUNKET. 
 Printed in red and black. Crown 4to, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Each Rhyme is accompanied by a rubric indicating how the game 
 is played, and a musical score of the traditional tune to which it is 
 chanted. 
 
 Topsy Turvy. 
 
 ByS. M. CRAWLEY BOEVEY. 
 
 With upwards of Thirty Illustrations by H. J. A. MiLES. 
 
 4to, extra cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 " The illustrations add largely to the interest of this amusing volume. Jack 
 falls asleep, and is very much surprised presently to find himself an inhabitant 
 of Water-world, where he goes through wonderful and edifying adventures." — 
 Literary World. 
 
 Two Blackbirds. 
 
 By the Author of " Honor Bright." 
 Illustrated. Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 ^ The Proprietors of " Chatterbox " offered three prizes, and out of 
 several hundred manuscripts, "Two Blackbirds" was awarded the 
 first prize. ,^ 
 
 3 Paternoster Buildings, London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.'s Popular Boohs. 
 Out of the Way. a village story. 
 
 By H. L. TAYLOR. 
 
 With Tvrenty-four Original Illustrations by A. H. COLLINS. 
 
 Large crown 8vo, extra cloth boards, gilt edges, 3s. 6d. 
 
 " Really an interesting story. . . . Excellently carried out. . . . We were 
 half-way through the book before we found out that it was a temperance tale 
 at all." — Guardian. 
 
 "The book deserves warm praise; we wish there were more temperance 
 tales like it." — Christian World. 
 
 The Old Ship ; or, Better than Strength. 
 
 By H. A. FORDE. Illustrated Title and Frontispiece. 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 •'A very pleasing narrative." — Record. 
 
 The Queen of the Goblins. 
 
 ByWILHELMINA PICKERING, Author of " The Adventures of 
 
 Prince Almero," «S:c. 
 Profusely Illustrated by Olive Cockerell. 
 4to, fancy cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 " In the stress and struggle of prosaic existence, children, even those of a 
 larger growth, may turn with satisfaction to ' The Queen of the Goblins.' . . . 
 There are no half-measures in this book, which takes us away into Goblindom 
 and Witchland, and rejuvenates us." — Daily Telegraph, 
 
 One of a Covey. 
 
 By the Author of " Honor Bright." 
 
 With Thirty Original Illustrations by H. J. A. Miles. 
 
 "Full of spirit and life, so well sustained throughout that grown-up readers 
 may enjoy it as much as children. It is one of the best books of the season." 
 — Guardian. 
 
 Only a Girl, a story of a quiet life. 
 
 A Tale of Brittany. 
 Adapted from the French by C. A. JONES. With upwards of 
 Forty Illustrations. Large crown 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 " We can thoroughly recommend this brightly wTitten and homely narrative." 
 — Saturday Review. 
 
 3 Paternoster Buildings, London; 44 Victoria Street, Westminster. 
 
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