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 PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER 
 
 ^*. *^- ^j^fi. 
 
 Hankey, Donald William 
 
 Alers, 1884-1916. 
 The church and the man 
 
 BR 123 .H3 
 
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THE CHURCH 
 
 AND THE MAN 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW VORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 - ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE CHURCH 
 AND THE M 
 
 BY 
 
 DONALD HANKEY 
 
 Author of "A Student in Arms," sta 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD BY 
 
 C. H. S. MATHEWS 
 
 Nrm fork 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1917 
 
 AK rights reserved 
 
AU rights reserved 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 In Memoriam vii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I A Personal Explanation ... 3 
 
 II An Average Man's Beliefs ... 14 
 
 III The Troubles of an Average Lay- 
 
 man 25 
 
 IV The Gospel and the Church . . 34 
 V Methods and Weapons .... 45 
 
 VI Revelation and Common Sense . 51 
 VII The Church and Human Rela- 
 
 tions 64 
 
 VIII Missions 78 
 
-- IN MEMORIAM 
 DONALD HANKEY 
 
 Killed in action on the Somme, nth October. 
 1916. 
 
 The news that Donald Hankey had fallen in 
 action brought to thousands of people who 
 had never seen him — and the present writer 
 was one of these — the kind of poignant 
 sense of loss which is usually associated with 
 the death of an intimate personal friend. It 
 was not merely that one felt that the Church 
 and the nation had lost yet another man of 
 brilliant gifts, who could ill be spared. The 
 real secret of this sense of personal loss lay 
 in the rich humanity, the extraordinary sym- 
 pathy, the understanding of all sorts of men, 
 which his writing revealed. We can almost 
 
vili In Memoriam 
 
 apply to him the description, In one of the 
 most perfect of all his essays, of the relation 
 which came to exist between " The Beloved 
 Captain " and his men: — 
 
 " There was a bond of mutual confidence and 
 affection between us, which grew stronger and 
 stronger as the months passed." 
 
 We felt that we really grew to know him, 
 and we were sure that he knew us through and 
 through. This wonderful insight into human 
 nature gave him the power to speak di- 
 rectly to the human heart. That he was 
 no mean theologian was clear from the 
 fact that, though handicapped by having left 
 school at the age of sixteen for the R.M. 
 Academy at Woolwich, and having subse- 
 quently served for six years In the R.G.A., 
 he secured a Second Class in Theology at 
 Oxford. But his great aim, and his great 
 achievement in theology, was the Interpre- 
 tation in life of the learning of the schools. 
 
In Memoriam 
 
 IX 
 
 He sought and he found a gospel for the 
 plain man, educated or uneducated, which 
 took into real account the progress of crit- 
 ical learning. A singularly inept reviewer, 
 In a rationalist paper, gibed at him for say- 
 ing in Faith or Fear? 
 
 " I learnt to reconcile Genesis and the Origin of 
 SpecteSj or rather to read the one without being 
 worried by recollections of the other." 
 
 On this the reviewer in question trium- 
 phantly remarks:^ — 
 
 " Precisely ! Put aside the facts of evolution, 
 and it is quite easy to accept a theory of special cre- 
 ation the day before yesterday, or to mould that 
 theory into a shape which its author could not 
 recognize." 
 
 But of course Donald Hankey neither ac- 
 cepted nor moulded any " theory of special 
 creation." He read the first chapters of 
 Genesis, as every Modernist reads them, as 
 the noblest of all creation-myths, and as far 
 
X In Memortam 
 
 more akin to poetry than to science. He 
 had nothing in common with those extraordi- 
 narily dull and stupid persons who produce 
 elaborate attempts to '' reconcile " the letter 
 of scripture with the teaching of science. He 
 could not have anything in common with 
 them, for he was not stupid, and he never 
 wrote anything that was dull. But though 
 his singular honesty and candour made him 
 ready to recognize and accept whatever re- 
 sults of criticism seemed to him to be as- 
 sured, he himself was not, and he never pro- 
 fessed to be, a critic. He said of himself, 
 in his preface to his first book. The Lord of 
 all Good Life — quite the best book, by the 
 way, to put into the hands of the average 
 person seeking for a positive statement of 
 the truth of the Gospel, without ignoring or 
 explaining away real difficulties, in regard, 
 for instance, to miracles — that he "is not 
 concerned to temper the wind (of criticism) 
 
In Meriioriani xi 
 
 to the shorn lamb," nor anxious to " reas- 
 sure " any one. His object is just to set 
 forth his own honestly thought out faith, and 
 he closes this same preface with this charac- 
 teristic sentence : — 
 
 " To the laity of the Church of England, to all 
 who in shops, and factories, and barrack-rooms, and 
 messes, and colleges, and hospitals, and ships, and 
 wherever else men are gathered together, are try- 
 ing to fight the battle of Christ with the poorest of 
 equipment, this book is dedicated in loving fellow- 
 ship." 
 
 There is no need here to repeat the story 
 of his own inner life, since he has told it in 
 his own words in the first chapters of this 
 book, but it is perhaps worth while pointing 
 out that, after he had lost the second-hand be- 
 liefs of his childhood, his progress towards 
 a vital and evangelistic personal faith had 
 four distinct phases. First, he came to see 
 the impossibihty of accounting for the exist- 
 ence of the human spirit from the rationalist 
 
xli In Memoriam 
 
 standpoint. This led him to Theism. He 
 could not stop there. A vivid, personal ex- 
 perience set him seeking for the personal 
 knowledge of Christ. To achieve this he 
 left the Army, and went to Oxford. Ox- 
 ford, he says, taught him that It was possi- 
 ble to be a Christian without doing violence 
 to his intellectual honesty, but it did not give 
 him " a gospel for ordinary men," nor did he 
 find this at Leeds Clergy School. But he 
 could be content with nothing less, and he 
 saw that in order to get it he must first know 
 ordinary men. To gain this knowledge he 
 embarked on the adventurous odyssey which 
 really only ended with his death. On this 
 odyssey he learnt the secret that only he can 
 aspire to teach men who Is always learning 
 from them. In the Oxford settlement In 
 Bermondsey, In the steerage of a German 
 liner. In the Bush of Australia, in the barrack- 
 room, and In hospital, he learnt to love his 
 
In Memoriam xiii 
 
 fellow-men, and to know them with the in- 
 sight that is born of love. And in them he 
 found the Christ for whom he sought. He 
 found Him, as indeed the Gospel taught him 
 to find Him, very often unrecognized by those 
 who without knowing it served Him, and 
 very often crucified by those who knew not 
 what they did. And so it was that he read 
 the Gospel in the light cast upon it by his 
 insight into the hearts and the spiritual needs 
 of " the common people,'* and then, in his 
 first book, he set himself to re-interpret The 
 Lord of all Good Life to the men he so 
 passionately loved. He had found now the 
 secret of all vital religious teaching, for he 
 had learnt to read the ancient documents of 
 the Faith in the light of the signs of his own 
 times, and to interpret the signs of the times 
 in the light of the ancient records. He 
 " searched the scriptures " Indeed, but, un- 
 like the scribes and the pharisees, he remem- 
 
xlv In Memoriam 
 
 bered that from the rehgious point of view 
 these were valueless except in so far as they 
 led to the recognition of the living Saviour 
 of men. 
 
 So he came to teach, like the Master whose 
 loyal disciple he was, " with authority, and 
 not as the scribes." And, as we all know, 
 the war gave to him, just as he seemed to 
 have mastered this secret, what he believed 
 to be his great opportunity. " With the man 
 in the street," he says, " it is not words that 
 count, but deeds." He, who could have had 
 a commission for the asking, humbled him- 
 self to enlist with " the common people," to 
 share to the full the drudgery and hardship 
 of the life of the camp and the trenches. 
 He hated war with all his heart. He dis- 
 trusted, as every sensitive soul must distrust, 
 his own courage. " I am really not at all 
 brave," he once wrote to me, and, in another 
 letter, he described the war as " Hell — with 
 
In Memoriam xv 
 
 compensations " — the compensations consist- 
 ing for him mainly in fellowship with men he 
 loved and admired. When he was Invalided 
 home from the front, he found his chief re- 
 lief from the boredom of life In hospital, 
 and, subsequently, in training (after he had 
 accepted a commission, only because In view 
 of the dearth of officers he felt It his duty 
 to do so), by writing his wonderful articles 
 in the Spectator, and his share of Faith or 
 Fear? In the former, published In book 
 form, with the title A Student in Arms, he 
 just wrote of life in the new army as he 
 knew It, and of his comrades and his officers 
 as he knew them. It does not profess to be 
 a religious book, but It Is the most religious 
 book yet written about the war. It has none 
 of the ecclesiastical self-consciousness of such 
 a book as Priests in the Firing Line. It is 
 religious because, for Donald Hankey, all 
 life was fundamentally religious. It was 
 
xvi In Memoriam 
 
 just this that made life so well worth living, 
 and so well worth laying down in a good 
 cause. For the chaplain this book is not 
 merely a literary delight, it is a storehouse 
 of materials for better sermons than he has 
 ever preached to his men before. For Don- 
 ald Hankey, Jesus Christ was really and truly 
 " the Captain of our Salvation " — the Be- 
 loved Captain — who shares to the full the 
 experiences of His men, asks them to do 
 nothing He would not do Himself, and is 
 with them at every moment, whatever their 
 need may be. He really believed what many 
 profess to believe without really believing 
 it, that " of ourselves we can do no good 1 
 thing." Therefore, wherever he found 
 goodness he found God. He would never 
 have assented to such an idea as that pro- 
 pounded by the Bishop of London in his 
 preface to Canon Box's recent book, that the 
 Virgin birth marks the difference between 
 
In Memoriam xvii 
 
 One who is divine and one who would other- 
 wise have been *' only a good man." For 
 him " if man is the son of nature he is also " 
 (just in so far as he is truly and fully man) 
 *' the son of God, his Father in heaven." 
 As he says in the first Appendix to The Lord 
 of all Good Life: — 
 
 ** It is only the fact that the Virgin Birth and the 
 bodily resurrection are told of Jesus that makes 
 them appear credible to those who believe in Jesus. 
 In other words, none can be asked to believe that 
 Jesus was the Son of God because He is said to have 
 been born of a virgin, and to have risen bodily from 
 the grave ; though it may happen that a person who 
 believes, on other grounds, that Jesus was the Son 
 of God, and is now alive, may feel that the stories 
 of the virgin birth and the resurrection of the body 
 are for that reason either probably, or even neces- 
 sarily, true. To them the story told by St. Luke 
 will be acceptable. That is to say that though these 
 stories are not evidence of the Divine Sonship of 
 Jesus, they may be regarded as implied by it. Since, 
 however, the Divine Sonship cannot be proved by 
 these stories, it follows that it cannot be disproved 
 by their rejection. It must also be pointed out that 
 
xvlii In Memoriam 
 
 the rejection of these stories does not discredit the 
 remainder of the Gospels of which they are a part, 
 because all higher critics are agreed that they are 
 derived from different sources to the rest of the 
 Gospels." 
 
 And he concludes this same appendix by say- 
 ing: — 
 
 ** The man who has recognized the freedom of 
 Jesus and has found freedom and power in trying 
 to imitate Him and share His point of view, and 
 by praying in His Name to His Father, and who 
 has found love and fellowship and life as a member 
 of His Body the Church, will not easily doubt 
 either that He was the Son of God, or that He is 
 alive. The man who has not experienced any of 
 these things, nor recognized them in others, has not 
 understood the foundations of Christianity." 
 
 We have quoted this passage at length be- 
 cause, In Its fearless honesty, in Its conse- 
 crated common sense, It Is quite typical of 
 all Hankey's theological writing. 
 
 No theology which could not stand the 
 test of life had any kind of validity for him. 
 
In Memoriam xix 
 
 It was a shock to him to find professing 
 Christians unable to face the perils of the 
 trenches and having to be sent back out of 
 the danger zone. Christianity, for him, 
 made men free, as His Master was free, 
 j from the tyranny of all external circum- 
 stances, and above all, from the tyranny of 
 fear. And always he tested his theory in 
 action. It was wholly characteristic of him 
 that quite deliberately he set himself to dis- 
 cuss the truth about the fear of death. Did 
 men fear death or not? If not, what did 
 they fear? He concluded that most men 
 had no fear of death when they were faced 
 by it, though there was in them a natural 
 physical shrinking from the indignity of 
 wounds and mutilation and physical pain 
 . . . and then having made his observations 
 and written down his conclusions, he went 
 out to test his theories in the thick of the 
 fight. . . . He faced death as gallantly as 
 
XX In Memoriam 
 
 he had faced life, and, true disciple of His 
 Master as he was, he made of death not a 
 defeat, but the final victory of his life. 
 
 C. H. S. Matthews. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE MAN 
 
THE CHURCH AND 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A PERSONAL EXPLANATION 
 
 The object of these papers is to try to help 
 find out how we can make the Church a bet- 
 ter, a more efficient, a more vital, a more 
 healthy body for Our Lord Jesus Christ. It 
 is a subject which no one who loves the Mas- 
 ter and reveres Him as the Son of God can 
 approach without a feeling of the greatest 
 diffidence, the most utter humility, the most 
 searching self-criticism. For the member 
 who has himself failed, as we have all failed, 
 to criticize the failure of the body is a task 
 from which any one may well shrink. More- 
 over, the reader will naturally want to know 
 3 
 
4 The Church and the Man 
 
 what sort of a person it is that is daring to 
 criticize, what credentials he has. There- 
 fore I have been asked to write a personal 
 preface to my chapters, so as to give the 
 reader some chance of forming an opinion 
 as to what weight to attach to my ideas. No 
 one likes to be accused of egoism, and it does 
 seem egotistical to write about oneself; but 
 the request seems so reasonable that I am 
 going to take the risk, and try to comply with 
 It. 
 
 In my boyhood I learnt to connect Church- 
 manshlp with all that was good and noble in 
 life. My mother was a devout Church- 
 woman, and she was also a very humble, very 
 unselfish woman, giving herself up com- 
 pletely to her husband, her children, and the 
 poor and unfortunate among her neighbours. 
 My father, though a layman, was a great 
 reader of theology, and as a proof of his 
 breadth of view I may mention that his fa- 
 
A Personal Explanation 5 
 
 vourlte writers were Maurice, Robertson, 
 Hawels, Dale, Westcott, and McLeod 
 Campbell. I never learnt to connect religion 
 with narrowness, or with smug self-satisfac- 
 tion, or with harsh judgments of others, be- 
 cause these features were wholly absent from 
 the religion of my home. 
 
 When I was sixteen I lost my mother, and 
 went to the R.M. Academy, Woolwich, after- 
 wards obtaining a commission in the Royal 
 Garrison Artillery. In the six years which 
 followed I learnt something of the average 
 immorality of the unrellgious man, which 
 disgusted me, and of the scepticism that is 
 embodied in the publications of the Rational- 
 ist Press Association. At last, when I was 
 in a distant tropical colony, I found that I 
 was on the brink of materialistic determinism. 
 I hated it; but my belief in the Bible as the 
 word of God had been shattered, and the 
 pygmy Insignificance of man considered as a 
 
6 The Church and the Man 
 
 purely physical being had sunk into my soul. 
 Just as I had almost decided that the only 
 honest thing to do was to abandon all pre- 
 tence of religion, I had an experience which 
 revealed to me once for all that It was impos- 
 sible for me to deny the reality of the human 
 soul, and the effective existence of men's con- 
 science and reason and emotions. I suddenly 
 realized that man was not only of pygmy in- 
 significance by reason of his short life and 
 limited strength, but that he was also, by vir- 
 tue of his unique self-consciousness, Immeas- 
 urably greater than any purely physical or- 
 ganism. He was at once an Insect and a 
 god In comparison with the rest of the uni- 
 verse. I can best sum up my thought In a 
 doggerel verse that I wrote at the time: — 
 
 Am I an atom in a soulless scheme, 
 My body real, but my soul a dream ? 
 Ah yes, ah yes, but how explain the birth 
 Of dreams of soul upon a soulless earth? 
 
A Personal Explanation 7 
 
 I have never found another answer but that 
 of Christ, that if man Is the son of nature he 
 Is also the son of God, his Father In heaven. 
 From that day I was a thelst. It was 
 something, but not enough. A mere abstract 
 belief that God exists Is not of much practical 
 use to any one. I longed for something 
 more Inspiring, and one day this sentence 
 flashed across my mind: "If you would 
 know Christ, behold He Is at work In His 
 vineyard." I took the vineyard to mean 
 poorer England, and at the earliest oppor- 
 tunity I resigned my commission with a view 
 to becoming a slum parson. I was advised 
 to go to a university, and In due course went 
 to Oxford and read the Honours school of 
 theology. Oxford proved stimulating In- 
 tellectually. I did not consort very much 
 with what we Irreverently designated " the 
 PI Push," feeling that I should learn more 
 by making friends outside the circle of those 
 
8 The Church and the Man 
 
 who were intending to be ordained. I learnt 
 to reconcile Genesis and the " Origin of Spe- 
 cies," or rather to read the one without be- 
 ing worried by recollections of the other. I 
 learnt to love the prophets and the epistles, 
 and to find in the study of Comparative Re- 
 ligion a strong reason for believing in the 
 especial inspiration of both Judaism and 
 Christianity. I learnt to be intellectually a 
 Modernist, and to find that I could be a 
 Christian without doing violence to my in- 
 tellectual honesty. But I did not learn a 
 gospel for ordinary men. My religion was 
 still mainly an intellectual matter, and not 
 inspiration or power or love. 
 
 After a holiday In the wilds of Africa, 
 and in Madagascar, I went to a clergy school, 
 where I first saw parochial life at close quar- 
 ters. What I saw alarmed me. I felt that 
 I had no gospel for the working man, and 
 that the life of a clergyman offered after all 
 
A Personal Explanation 9 
 
 no prospect of usefulness to me. I funked 
 it, and went instead to a Mission in poorer 
 London. I went as a layman and not as a 
 clergyman, as a learner rather than as a 
 teacher. 
 
 It was there that I remembered the sen- 
 tence which had come to my mind many years 
 before. It was at the bedside of a boy dy- 
 ing of consumption that I felt for the first 
 time that I had realized the presence of 
 Ghrist, working in His vineyard. As time 
 went on, however, I felt more and more that 
 I could not preach to these working boys un- 
 til I had in some way shared their life in a 
 degree far greater than was possible as a 
 manager of clubs. Everything was so easy 
 for me and so hard for them that I simply 
 could not preach to them without feeling a 
 hypocrite. At the same time, it was obvi- 
 ously impossible to become a working man 
 in England. At last I determined to try to 
 
10 The Church and the Man 
 
 become one in Australia, and took a passage 
 in the steerage of a German liner. There 
 I slept in a part of the hold which was fitted 
 up to accommodate more than two hundred 
 men. The men who slept above and below 
 and round me were mostly Welsh miners, 
 and in the following five weeks I learnt a 
 good deal about human nature in the rough. 
 On arriving in Australia I found it much 
 harder than I had expected to become a work- 
 ing man. I worked in all for about six 
 months in the bush, and learnt a little of what 
 it means to do hard manual labour in pretty 
 rough surroundings. At the same time, it 
 was not quite what I had hoped for, and in 
 the end the call of the fleshpots became too 
 insistent, and I became a journalist roaming 
 about Australia in search of copy. 
 
 After this half-success I returned to Lon- 
 don, and again lived near the Mission, and 
 helped to run a boys* club. My year of 
 
A Personal Explanation ii 
 
 wandering had taught me a good deal, and 
 I found myself able to write a book ^ which 
 was an attempt to express in simple language 
 and for simple people a Modernist Gospel. 
 I was also allowed to prepare twelve boys 
 from my club for Confirmation, an experi- 
 ence which I shall never forget, and which 
 led to at least one freindship which I do not 
 think will end. 
 
 Then came the war, and I enlisted in 
 Kitchener's Army. I spent nine months in 
 England and three at the front in the ranks, 
 and feeling that I had learnt a little more I 
 spent my time in hospital writing the first 
 of the Spectator articles which have since been 
 published under the title '' A Student In 
 Arms." Since then I have held a commis- 
 sion. 
 
 Looking back, I think that during my first 
 years in the army I was learning disillusion- 
 
 i"The Lord of All Good Life." (Longmans. 2s. 6d.) 
 
12 The Church and the Man 
 
 ment, the degradation of man under the In- 
 fluence of a pessimistic determinism. Dur- 
 ing the past five years I have been slowly 
 learning what appears to me a sane Idealism, 
 and the wonderful potentialities of man for 
 unselfishness and courage and nobility when 
 he Is under the Influence of a sane and genu- 
 ine religious faith. I speak not of what I 
 have myself attained, but of what I have seen 
 In other men and women, more particularly 
 in those who have been faced with misfor- 
 tune and suffering. It is they who have 
 taught me more than any one else to believe 
 and to hope and to aspire. As I write now 
 I have absolutely no doubt of the power of 
 Christ to transform character and life, to 
 change the poor physical pygmies that we 
 men are Into beloved sons of God and In- 
 heritors of life eternal. And that Is why I 
 feel bound to do what I can to try to Increase 
 the vitality and efficiency of Christ's body 
 
A Personal Explanation 13 
 
 the Church, that it may prove in the future a 
 more adequate medium for the exercise of 
 His wonderful power and love than it has 
 been in the past. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 AN AVERAGE MAN's BELIEFS 
 
 The Average Man is not a Churchman. 
 That Is a statement that needs qualifying. 
 Legally he Is a Churchman — he has been 
 baptized. Actually, however, he would not 
 claim the title unless for census purposes, or 
 on enlistment, he had to state definitely that 
 he was something or nothing. He is not an 
 Atheist He has a religion of a sort. He 
 feels that he is more " C. of E." than any- 
 thing else. But he does not go to church. 
 He does not pray. He does not believe the 
 creeds. He does not attempt to regulate his 
 life by the Church's moral law. To all in- 
 tents and purposes he is not a Churchman. 
 
 He has a religion of a sort; but he would 
 14 
 
An Average Man's Beliefs 15 
 
 be hard put to it if he had to explain what 
 it was. His behefs are unformulated. 
 Even his code of morals and conduct gener- 
 ally is an unwritten one. We must try to 
 formulate it for him. To do so is not easy. 
 You can't deduce the average man's religion 
 from his actions or character. Religion, 
 when it is as nebulous as his, does not rule 
 a man's Hfe. The clue is rather to be found 
 in the qualities which he admires, despises, 
 or detests in other people. He has an ideal; 
 but it is other people rather than himself that 
 he judges by the standard of that ideal. 
 Himself he does not judge — - chiefly because 
 he has never learnt to pray. 
 
 The Average Man admires courage, gen- 
 erosity, practical kindness, single-minded 
 honesty, persistence in trying to do the right 
 thing. 
 
 The Average Man despises meanness, 
 physical fear, moral cowardice, instability. 
 
1 6 The Church and the Man 
 
 equivocation, narrow-mindedness, subservi- 
 ence to mere rank or wealth or power. 
 
 The Average Man hates " swank," cant, 
 and cruelty. 
 
 These are the kind of things that the 
 Average Man admires, despises, or hates. 
 His ideal is a man who possesses all the 
 qualities that he admires, and is free from 
 all the defects that he despises or hates. 
 Funnily enough, so far as it goes, his Ideal 
 is strangely like the Ideal of the gospels. 
 Moreover, it Is the possession of this Ideal 
 that is the Average Man's religion. In so far 
 as he has one ; so that one would expect him 
 to be some sort of a Christian. So he is. In 
 a rather ineffective way. And he recognizes 
 the fact by calling himself " C. of E." when 
 he enlists. 
 
 But Is the Average Man's ideal really 
 much like the ideal of the gospels? He ad- 
 
An Average Man's Beliefs 17 
 
 mires courage. Is courage a Christian vir- 
 tue? Surely. The only fear that Christ 
 countenanced was the fear of those who have 
 power to kill the soul. The faith which 
 Christ preached made fear an impossibility. 
 The disciples feared the storm because they 
 had not faith. Christ did not fear the storm. 
 The disciples were afraid of the Pharisees, 
 the Priests, Herod, public opinion; Jesus was 
 not. He had faith; they had it not. The 
 disciples were anxious about ways and means. 
 They feared starvation and nakedness. 
 Jesus did not. He had faith; they had it 
 not. Jesus Christ feared absolutely noth- 
 ing, because He had faith in the love and 
 power of God the Father, and He felt cer- 
 tain that as long as He loved and obeyed His 
 Father no real harm could happen to Him. 
 The faith of Jesus was a perfect love of 
 the good God, and perfect love casteth out 
 
1 8 The Church and the Man 
 
 fear. Courage is a fundamental Christian 
 virtue. Fear is the first false god from 
 whose power the gospel frees us. 
 
 Generosity and practical kindness — are 
 these Christian virtues? It Is hardly neces- 
 sary to answer. Jesus was described as a 
 man who " went about doing good.'' If the 
 first law of the kingdom was to love God with 
 all one's faculties, the second was to love 
 one's neighbour as oneself. It Is more 
 blessed to give than to receive. Do to others 
 as you would they should do unto you. Love 
 your enemies — which means want to make 
 them your friends; want them to alter, so 
 that friendship between you may be possible; 
 pray for that. Be willing to give anything 
 — even your life. This is all in the gospels, 
 as every one knows. 
 
 What about single-minded honesty? Let 
 your yea be yea, and your nay, nay. Seek 
 the kingdom, and let other things follow; 
 
An Average Man's Beliefs 19 
 
 and seeking the kingdom means seeking for 
 the things of God — justice, mercy, love, 
 truth. Dishonesty and equivocation are al- 
 ways the fruit either of fear or of selfishness. 
 . The man who has the courage of faith and 
 who loves his neighbour as himself will never 
 be guilty of either. 
 
 Persistence? Be not weary in well-doing. 
 Instability is incompatible with either real 
 faith or real love. 
 
 Was ever any one less narrow-minded than 
 Christ? He feasted with publicans and sin- 
 ners. He healed lepers. He forgave har- 
 lots. He foretold the conversion of the 
 Gentiles. He ridiculed narrow laws and 
 prejudices at every turn. You cannot be 
 narrow if you have once known and loved 
 the Heavenly Father. 
 
 As for " swank " and cant, and snobbish 
 subservience to rank and wealth, they were 
 the very things that Christ loathed and fought 
 
20 The Church and the Man 
 
 against most of all. When the disciples 
 boasted, He set a child In their midst, as an 
 example of humility. He told the Pharisees 
 that their self-satisfied righteousness was 
 nothing but cant, and that it set them far 
 further from the kingdom of heaven than 
 any amount of downright sin. 
 
 No, there is not a single feature of the 
 Average Man's ideal which is not part and 
 parcel of the ideal which Jesus Christ taught 
 and embodied. And once you have under- 
 stood His point of view. His sense of perspec- 
 tive, all these features are seen to be neces- 
 sary. Inevitable, and comprehensible. Once 
 realize the greatness of God, as Christ real- 
 ized and taught it, and the littleness of man 
 follows. Once realize the fatherly love of 
 God, as Christ realized and taught it, and 
 the greatness of man follows — his real 
 greatness. And from that vision of the 
 greatness and the love of God all courage and 
 
An Average Man's Beliefs 21 
 
 love towards men, and humility, and honesty, 
 and independence follow with irrefutable 
 logic. 
 
 Now, you Average Man, how Is it that, 
 since Christ fulfils and embodies and explains 
 ^ your ideal, you are not enrolled under His 
 banner? Why not range yourself under the 
 standard of the Cross with the rest who are 
 trying to embody Him? 
 
 " Why quarrel about a name,'^ you say, 
 "if I am following the same ideal? Did 
 not Christ Himself say, ^ He that is not 
 against us is for us ' ? " 
 
 But what I complain about Is that though 
 you have an ideal you don't make any real 
 attempt to follow it out. Don't you real- 
 ize that your talk of courage is all humbug, 
 and that you are actually living the life of 
 a toady — a toady to convention and class 
 prejudice and public opinion? Don't you 
 realize that your talk of generosity Is all 
 
22 The Church and the Man 
 
 cant, and that you are actually living the 
 most selfish life imaginable, thinking of noth- 
 ing so much as of your own comfort and 
 position and reputation? Don't you realize 
 the cruelty of your profit-mongering and 
 your immorality? Don't you see that your 
 pleasures are bestial, and that your morals 
 are dragging down the whole race? Pull 
 yourself together. If you believe in your 
 ideal, for goodness sake try to follow it out. 
 What? You don't want to " set up to be 
 good"? You know you can't succeed, do 
 you? What's that? However much you 
 try, death and fate will mock you in the end? 
 Ah, my friend, what you need is religion, 
 after all. It is no good having an ideal un- 
 less you are an optimist, and you can't be a 
 rational optimist without believing in God. 
 You can't believe in God? Why, man, the 
 very fact that you can't make a decent fist 
 of life without this belief in God, this ra- 
 
An Average Man's Beliefs 23 
 
 tional basis of optimism, is surely a sufficient 
 proof of its truth ! 
 
 You don't see that you are any worse than 
 the average Churchman, and you don't see 
 that going to church is going to bring you 
 any nearer to your ideal? That is the point, 
 is it? Do you believe in Christ? Yes. Do 
 you believe in the Church which is His body? 
 No. Well, then, join the Church so that 
 you may be in a position to improve it ! 
 
 You won't? I know one reason, O aver- 
 age man! You are human, you have pas- 
 sions, you have given way to them, and you 
 don't believe in your ability to conquer them. 
 Yet stay and consider. In Christianity mar- 
 riage is a holy thing — the consecration to 
 God's service of God's greatest gift to men, 
 the power of creation: a holy partnership in 
 which the Great Giver of Life is a third. 
 Is not that your ideal, too? Don't you 
 agree that you would be better and happier 
 
24 The Church and the Man 
 
 if you tried to live up to it? If so, it is up 
 to you to try to live up to your ideal, and 
 to be pure up till marriage so that your 
 marriage may be really holy. It is a poor 
 thing to have an ideal and not to try to live 
 up to it; and, mind you, this is all that Christ 
 asks of you — to go on trying hopefully. 
 You very likely can't succeed right away, but 
 if you go on trying hopefully, and genuinely 
 hating your failure, you are a Christian. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TROUBLES OF AN AVERAGE LAYMAN 
 
 An Average Man came to the conclusion 
 that it was up to him to become a Churchman. 
 Jesus Christ was his ideal after all. If he 
 could embody even a little bit of Jesus, that 
 was good enough. So he came to Com- 
 munion and found in the breaking of bread 
 and in the drinking of the wine the symbols of 
 the very essence of his faith. He knelt and 
 said, " Lord Jesus, I want to be a bit of 
 Thee. I want to show a little bit of Thee 
 to the world. I want to offer Thee my body 
 to be a member of Thy Body, that it may 
 show to the world a little of Thy Spirit. O 
 Lord Jesus, it is a wretched thing that I 
 offer Thee. Yet Thou canst use it if Thou 
 
 25 
 
26 The Church and the Man 
 
 wilt, and purify it for Thy purpose." And 
 the Lord Jesus gave to him bread and wine, 
 and said, ^' Dear brother, thy gift I accept. 
 So long as thou offerest it, I will receive it, 
 and will live again in the world in thee and 
 in thy brethren. Take this bread, it is My 
 token that thou art a member of My body. 
 Take this wine. It is the token that while 
 thou offerest thyself to Me, My Spirit shall 
 live in thee, and show itself to the world." 
 And to all that were assembled there the 
 Lord said, " By this shall all men know that 
 ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to 
 another." And they all went their ways, and 
 did not meet till the following Sunday. 
 
 The Average Man had become a layman, 
 and he was at once profoundly happy, and 
 profoundly discontented. On the one hand 
 he was clear about his ideal. He was try- 
 ing to follow it, and finding an altogether un- 
 eixpected joy in doing so. On the other 
 
Troubles of an Average Layman 27 
 
 hand, he did not find in the visible and or- 
 ganized Church that fellowship, that straight- 
 forward simplicity, that sure help, which he 
 had been led to expect. 
 
 At the very start he had been discouraged. 
 It was found that after all he had never been 
 baptized. At first he was rather glad of 
 this. He said as much to the parson. 
 
 *' Padre,'' said he. *' I'm glad of this. 
 It's a chance to get things square. I want to 
 be quite clear about the proposition that I 
 am taking up. I want to stand up before you 
 and my witnesses, and to say quite plainly 
 to them that I want to fight beneath the 
 Cross, the standard of Jesus Christ; that I 
 want to be a member of His body, and to do 
 my bit towards showing Him to the world. 
 I want to say that I don't believe in selfishness 
 and material ambition, and that I do believe 
 in goodness, and honesty, and love, and 
 freedom." 
 
28 The Church and the Man 
 
 " M'yes," said the parson. " We shall 
 have to use the service for the baptism of 
 such as be of riper years." 
 
 " What's that? " asked the Average Man 
 in alarm. 
 
 *' Here it is," said the parson, handing 
 him a prayer-book open at the place. 
 
 The Average Man began to read it. 
 
 " I say," he protested. " Why drag in 
 Noah and the Red Sea? I don't think I 
 quite believe in them, you know! " 
 
 " That's all right," said the padre. '' You 
 haven't got to." 
 
 " Well, but can't you leave them out ? It 
 seems to make the thing unreal somehow." 
 
 The Average Man read on. 
 
 " I say," he said again. " This is awfully 
 long-winded. What exactly do you mean by 
 * mystical washing away,' * spiritual regen- 
 eration,' * elect children,' * everlasting salva- 
 tion,' and being * damned ' ? " 
 
Troubles of an Average Layman 29 
 
 " Don't you worry about that," said the 
 parson. " The service is an old one. I am 
 satisfied that you have got the main points 
 right, and that is all that matters." 
 
 " But can't you cut them out? And look 
 here, do you steadfastly believe that Christ 
 was born of the Virgin Mary, and that He 
 went down into Hell, and ascended into 
 Heaven, and that He will come to judge 
 the quick and the dead? And do you really 
 believe In the resurrection of the flesh, be- 
 cause I am hanged if I do? " 
 
 " The Church has always affirmed that 
 the Christ was born of a virgin," said the 
 padre, " though I don't really feel strongly 
 about this point of doctrine. As for going 
 down and ascending I think that essentially 
 I mean the same as the writer of the creed, 
 though I should put it differently. As for 
 the second coming in the lifetime of the 
 world, I believe in it as a possibihty rather 
 
30 The Church and the Man 
 
 than as a certainty. I certainly believe in the 
 survival of personality, which is the only 
 important thing about the ' resurrection of 
 the flesh.' " 
 
 " That's all very well," objected the Aver- 
 \ age Man, " but here am I, at the most im- 
 portant moment of my life, when I am try- 
 ing to make a clean start in a new sort of 
 life altogether, and I have got to make a 
 public and solemn confession of faith with 
 all sorts of mental reservations. I don't 
 like it. Why can't I say straight out what 
 you and I really do believe? " 
 
 " You've got to obey the rules, that's all," 
 said the padre. *' And they aren't up to 
 date." 
 
 " Well, I suppose I must equivocate a lit- 
 tle to obtain so great a fellowship," said the 
 Average Man. " But I must say, I wish 
 it wasn't necessary." 
 
 And as time went on he kept on running 
 
Troubles of an Average Layman 31 
 
 up against the same difficulty. The Church 
 services, instead of being a help to him, con- 
 tinually worried him by their apparent Ir- 
 relevance and insincerity. The preaching 
 that he heard generally seemed off the point 
 too. The choir worried him; because it 
 " rendered " the service in a way which made 
 it Impossible for him to join in, and because 
 he knew that It consisted of choirmen who 
 were only interested in the musical aspect 
 of the service, and of boys who weren't In- 
 terested at all. He felt that one ought not 
 to have to pay men to praise God for one. 
 But what worried him more than anything 
 was that he had no friends among the con- 
 gregation. He felt that this was absolutely 
 wrong, and that as fellow members of 
 Christ's body they ought to be united. All 
 men should know that they were His dis- 
 ciples by the fact that they loved one an- 
 other. Yet most of them he simply could 
 
32 The Church and the Man 
 
 not love. He knew them as reputable men; 
 but they were men who kept themselves to 
 themselves, priding themselves on their re- 
 spectability in a manner which seemed al- 
 most Pharisaical. One or two of them he 
 knew were hard employers, who made a liv- 
 ing by paying their men as little as possible, 
 and working them as hard as possible. The 
 communion of saints seemed to be lacking. 
 The corporate embodiment of the Lord 
 Jesus seemed to be in abeyance. Such keen- 
 ness as did exist seemed to centre round cer- 
 tain committees and meetings, where little 
 matters of procedure and ritual, which 
 seemed to the Average Man of infinite unim- 
 portance, were debated with great heat. 
 
 And all the time he did need the fellow- 
 ship of his brethren so badly. For he soon 
 found that, however much he might like 
 his comrades who were not Churchmen, there 
 was now a gulf between them. The average 
 
Troubles of an Average Layman 33 
 
 joke was a joke that he simply could not 
 laugh at and be loyal to his Master. The 
 average amusement was such that he simply 
 could not go to it. These jokes and amuse- 
 ments were not clean. They were poison- 
 ous. They degraded man and woman to the 
 level of the beast, and he had determined to 
 regard them as the children of God. So he 
 found himself not disliked, not persecuted, 
 but just left out, and that by his own will. 
 It was hard. He was no longer the Aver- 
 age Man, and at times he almost wished he 
 were. Being a Churchman did not make him 
 feel self-righteous. He knew that God had 
 called him to follow a higher ideal than the 
 rest, and that he was to be judged hence- 
 forth by a higher standard; and while he 
 thanked God for that high calling, at times he 
 felt terribly lonely and sore in need of help. 
 The Church had endued him with a new 
 hunger; but It failed to satisfy It. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND THE CHURCH 
 
 The fact is that the gospel for the In- 
 dividual is a simple matter to understand, 
 while the Church is a very complicated affair. 
 The layman in the last chapter had no diffi- 
 culty in understanding the practical meaning 
 of the profession that he had undertaken. It 
 was simply that he had to try to look at every- 
 thing from a new point of view, the point of 
 view of Jesus Christ, a point of view from 
 which the greatness of God filled the land- 
 scape, while the individual disappeared into 
 insignificance except in so far as he stood out 
 in the light of God's love. So things tem- 
 poral suddenly became very unimportant, 
 while things eternal loomed large. The ef- 
 
 34 
 
The Gospel and the Church 35 
 
 feet of this point of view on the man who 
 had assimilated it could be easily foretold. 
 In proportion as the assimilation was com- 
 plete he would approach more nearly to the 
 ideal which is the ideal of every wholesome 
 man, and which was the ideal taught and 
 exemplified by Christ. For the individual, 
 we repeat, the gospel is plain enough. It is 
 simply the imitation of Christ, and there is 
 no real doubt about the manner of man that 
 Christ was. 
 
 But the Church is concerned with a host 
 of other questions, which so occupy it that 
 there is hardly any time left for the gospel 
 The Church is busy with literary and histor 
 ical criticism, comparative religion and aa 
 thropology, cosmogony, embryology, psy 
 chology, metaphysics, apostolic succession 
 symbolic theology, mediaevalism, modernism 
 ritualism, protestantism, preservation of con- 
 tinuity, adaptation to modern needs, rela 
 
36 The Church and the Man 
 
 tions with the State, finance, socialism, re- 
 union, organized philanthropy, foreign mis- 
 sions, and countless other questions of ap- 
 parently vital and pressing importance. 
 Moreover, the Church is " all of a muddle." 
 It can't see its way through. It is rent at 
 every turn by violent antagonisms within the 
 fold. On every question men are calling 
 each other " obscurantists," " traitors," 
 " heretics," " schismatics," " Laodiceans," 
 *' fanatics," and so on. It is very certain that 
 in this, as in other ages of the history of the 
 Church, outsiders would be puzzled to recog- 
 nize the disciples of Christ by the love that 
 they bear towards one another. 
 
 Something is wrong, and an ever-increas- 
 ing number of men and women within the 
 Church are feeling that all this strife and 
 controversy is beside the point; that in it the 
 gospel is lost sight of; that what we want 
 to do is just to drop all these questions, and 
 
The Gospel and the Church 37 
 
 to get back to the main point, which Is, after 
 all, to embody Christ. We know that some 
 people will go on wrangling, but why should 
 every simple child that comes to school to 
 learn how to be a child of God be dragged 
 Into the controversy? Why should every 
 simple workman who comes to Church to 
 worship God be Involved In these unprofitable 
 complications? There Is no getting out of 
 it, they are involved. Every child who is 
 taught the Book of Genesis as part of his 
 religious education Is predestined to an even- 
 tual plunge into the murky waters of con- 
 troversy. Every workman who comes to 
 Church and sings the present psalter and 
 listens to the present lectlonary and repeats 
 the present creeds is going to have his faith 
 complicated by some of these unnecessary 
 and unedlfying wrangles. 
 
 What are we to do — we who only want 
 to get the main issue plain? We are con- 
 
38 The Church and the Man 
 
 fronted by three alternatives. The first is 
 to initiate a campaign for the reformation 
 of the Church and the revision of its meth- 
 ods and textbooks in the interests of sim- 
 pHcity and of the coming of the kingdom. 
 That means that we plunge into the sea of 
 controversy, and try to obtain the mastery. 
 Could we but have a free hand we are sure 
 that we could reform the Church! Ah yes; 
 but so are all our brother zealots of the op- 
 posing camps. They are all in earnest. 
 They are all sure that they are right. All 
 that any of them wants is a free hand. I 
 confess that in former days I have pinned 
 my faith to such a campaign; but lately I 
 have begun to doubt whether any godly re- 
 sult can issue from this fratricidal strife. 
 Moreover, we are, after all, only a section of 
 the Church. Let us be humble enough to 
 admit that if we had a free hand in revising 
 the Church of today, a new generation would 
 
The Gospel and the Church 39 
 
 demand to revise our revision twenty years 
 hence. I think that it is really almost neces- 
 sary that the Church should be something of 
 a compromise, and somewhat behind the 
 times. 
 
 The second alternative is to cut ourselves 
 off from the Church, and its strife and cor- 
 ruption, and to start a new Church of our 
 own, which shall be pure and holy indeed. 
 Alack, my brethren, how many have done this 
 very thing in the last hundred years, and, with 
 what result? Why, narrowness, poverty of 
 life and pride, till they too have become cor- 
 rupt and moribund. No, brethren, the life 
 of Christ is in His body the Church, for all 
 its infidelity. We cannot make Him a new 
 body, other than that which He has chosen, 
 for His Spirit will not dwell therein. 
 
 The third alternative seems to me to be 
 the right one, and it is to take full advan- 
 tage of the liberty that is allowed within the 
 
40 The Church and the Man 
 
 Church. I have in mind a little settlement 
 in one of our great cities, where a few uni- 
 versity men and many men of the place have 
 grown into a brotherhood which is, as it 
 seems to me, very real, very Christian, very 
 pure in its ideals, very simple in its teaching 
 and worship and manner of life, and which 
 combines a very real unity with the English 
 Church with a very real freedom from un- 
 necessary complications. The premises of 
 the settlement consist of a central house, 
 wjiere the secretary and a house-keeper live. 
 The house contains a common-room, dining- 
 room, chapel, and bath-room which are free 
 to all members of the committee of the men's 
 clubs, and the " officers " of the boys' clubs. 
 Besides this house there are two men's clubs 
 and four boys' clubs. The constitution is 
 extremely democratic, and remarkably elastic 
 in every way. Short prayers close each club 
 every evening. On Sunday there is a sim- 
 
The Gospel and the Church 41 
 
 pie and elastic service in each boys' club, and 
 an equally simple service in Church for the 
 men. Once a month there is corporate Com- 
 munion in the church, followed by a simple 
 breakfast taken in common, and paid for by 
 those who attend. Every Sunday evening 
 there is a quite indescribable service in the 
 chapel for the '* officers " and communicants, 
 which alternates according to circumstances 
 between a Bible class, a prayer meeting, and 
 a fellowship of silence, and is always a mix- 
 ture of the three. By agreement with the 
 rector of the parish the candidates for Con- 
 firmation are prepared under arrangements 
 made by the " warden," who is always a lay- 
 man, and seldom a professional theologian. 
 Of course I am describing pre-war days. 
 The result was. In my opinion, quite ex- 
 traordinary. The brotherhood was con- 
 tinually faced with crises, such as the loss of 
 its indispensable members; yet in the event 
 
42 The Church and the Man 
 
 no one was found to be indispensable. Mem- 
 bers have been scattered broadcast over the 
 world, yet I know of hardly one who has 
 forgotten, or who, having once been a com- 
 municant, has since ceased to be one. When 
 the war came it seemed as if the brother- 
 hood would have to be for the time dis- 
 banded, yet it is, so far as the junior clubs 
 are concerned, more flourishing than ever, 
 though almost without personnel to manage 
 it; while a monthly news and correspondence 
 sheet shows that there is hardly a member 
 who does not feel that absence has even 
 strengthened the invisible bond that unites 
 him to his brethren and his spiritual home. 
 
 This is just one example of the way in 
 which in loyalty to the English Church a free 
 society may grow up and flourish, and with 
 the benediction of bishop and rector unite 
 men in a simple faith such as is almost im- 
 possible in the ordinary official parochial or- 
 
The Gospel and the Church 43 
 
 ganization. By means of such groups within 
 the Church, ideals may be pursued and de- 
 veloped and justified without schism or dis- 
 loyalty, without the danger of narrowness 
 that comes from complete separation. By 
 remaining within the fold they both nourish 
 and are nourished by the Church, without 
 losing any reasonable degree of freedom. 
 Further, it is remarkable that in the particular 
 instance described above the relations be- 
 tween the brotherhood and the official 
 Church have steadily grown in cordiality. 
 Suspicion, which was rife at first, has died. 
 It is, I am convinced, by using the free- 
 dom of the Church to pursue our ideals that 
 we shall both avoid the pitfalls of separat- 
 ism and commend our ideas to the Church. 
 It is not by talking, but by being and doing 
 that truth is made known, and purged of 
 error. Had Jesus Christ been but a prophet 
 there would have been no Christian Church 
 
44 The Church and the Man 
 
 today. It is because He was the Son, and 
 because He lived and died perfectly, that 
 He is our Lord and Master now. And so 
 with His disciples, it is not by controversy or 
 organization, but by holy living and holy 
 dying that they will purify His Church, and 
 fill the world with the knowledge of God. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 METHODS AND WEAPONS 
 
 Supposing that a new movement did 
 spring up within the Church, and that men 
 and women who felt that they were clear 
 about the main issue did form groups within 
 the Church where they could work for their 
 ideals with loyalty and reasonable freedom, 
 what should be their methods and weapons ? 
 To begin with, it is probably essential that 
 the movement should not be organized or 
 centralized. At the present juncture con- 
 tralization would mean controversy and loss 
 of freedom. We want to keep out the peo- 
 ple who have a passion for regulation and 
 diplomacy. We want plain humble effort, 
 with any amount of variety and experiment. 
 45 
 
46 The Church and the Man 
 
 We don't want notoriety or advertisement. 
 We don't want to be labelled. We don't 
 want to be dragged into the regions of crit- 
 icism and controversy. We want to be the 
 leaven that works unseen. 
 
 In the matter of worship and life and rela- 
 tions with the parish church, there must 
 necessarily be infinite elasticity, to correspond 
 with an infinite variety of conditions. In 
 the matter of teaching, if we confine our- 
 selves to the practical issue there will be lit- 
 tle temptation to divergence. The gospel 
 in its practical bearings is plain enough. All 
 that we do want is a literature. This litera- 
 ture must not be prepared or issued by au- 
 thority. That would immediately arouse 
 suspicions and drag us into the arena of con- 
 troversy. In character the essentials are 
 that it should be positive and simple. Too 
 much time and energy have already been 
 spent in attacking what is false. What is 
 
Methods and Weapons 47 
 
 now needed is the promulgation of what is 
 true. And the ultimate test of truth for 
 the ordinary man is experiment. Anything 
 that can be tested by experiment is vital. 
 Anything that cannot be tested by experi- 
 ment can be left on one side. Was Christ 
 born of a virgin? We cannot test that by 
 experiment, and therefore it is not vital to 
 the ordinary man. Leave it to the Church. 
 Is Christ alive? That is a matter that can 
 be tested. It is vital. Assume Him to be 
 alive, and see whether it works. Does He 
 really live in us if we offer Him our bodies 
 for His dwelling place? Try to see. This 
 is vital. Is love really stronger than fear? 
 Is it really true that humihty and unselfish- 
 ness are more important than wealth and 
 power? Is it true that life is eternal? As- 
 sume these propositions true, and if in do- 
 ing so you find a new happiness and peace 
 yours, the balance of probability is in their 
 
48 The Church and the Man 
 
 favour. And if other men and women see 
 that the fruits of your life are good, they 
 will come and ask you to teach them too how 
 to be happy and useful. 
 
 This is the new apologetic, which is as 
 old as Christianity. Not controversy but 
 demonstration, not logic but power. In the 
 long run it is the only apologetic that counts. 
 
 But in talking of literature, what of the 
 Bible? There again the same test must be 
 apphed. We want as much of the Bible as 
 can help us practically. We don't want any 
 of the stuffing, or of the parts that are going 
 to land us in controversy. We want a short- 
 ened Bible for the use of plain people, and 
 sooner or later some one will have to take 
 this task in hand. Probably there will be 
 many experiments in this direction. Parts 
 of the Bible which are of infinite value to 
 the educated man are quite useless to the 
 workman or the child. But in the Bible is 
 
Methods and Weapons 49 
 
 the kernel of the faith, and we have got to 
 dig it out and make it easy of access to all 
 who need it. 
 
 There is one other way in which in some 
 places it might be possible for us to help the 
 Church. There is little doubt that one of 
 the chief difficulties of the Church lies in the 
 traditional status of the clergy. The par- 
 son's job is such that it does not bring him 
 into very close touch with the ordinary lay- 
 men of his parish. Very often they fail to 
 understand each other. It has been sug- 
 gested in a certain parish that one or two 
 laymen who have long worked In the parish 
 in a more or less independent fashion should 
 cement the union between their work and 
 that of the parish church by becoming dea- 
 cons for Sunday duty, while still continuing 
 to earn their livings during the week by their 
 civilian occupations. Such men, it is thought, 
 would be a valuable link between the clergy 
 
50 The Church and the Man 
 
 and the laity, and the experiment might be 
 worth trying in some places. 
 
 Above all, we must not aim at finality. 
 This movement of which we have spoken may 
 develop, it may be maturing even now, it 
 may never begin; but If it does mature, it 
 must be content to be fike leaven, working 
 unseen, and ready and glad to be absorbed 
 more and more Into the life of the whole. 
 Unlike a separatist movement, it must aim 
 at rendering itself unnecessary. Its ultimate 
 object must be its own disappearance. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 REVELATION AND COMMON SENSE 
 
 The word " faith " is made to cover a 
 great deal of timidity and a great deal of 
 laziness. Young people who ask questions 
 about theology are told that they must re- 
 frain, and accept by an exercise of '' faith " 
 what they cannot hope to understand. That 
 is one reason why young people who have 
 had ^' a Christian education " so seldom know 
 anything about Christianity. There are a 
 great many doctrines which are not only 
 highly agreeable to common sense, and eas- 
 ily understood, but are of absolutely vital 
 practical importance, and yet hardly any one 
 attempts to understand them because they 
 have always been taught to accept them in 
 51 
 
52 The Church and the Man 
 
 " faith " instead of asking questions about 
 them. 
 
 To begin with, the question of whether 
 there is a God or not, is one which Christian 
 teachers are often very unwilling to discuss. 
 They feel that intellectually the case for the 
 existence of God is a weak one. They say 
 that there is only one thing to do, and that is 
 to make an effort of faith and believe it. 
 Consequently lots of people go away with 
 the idea that it does not really matter very 
 much whether they believe that God exists 
 or not, as long as they try to " play the 
 game." Yet really the question is one which 
 should be absolutely of vital moment to 
 every man. If there is a God he must look 
 at life in one way, and if there is not he must 
 look at it in another. His whole attitude 
 towards life should vary according to the 
 answer that he gives to this question. For 
 if there is a God the evidence for His exist- 
 
Revelation and Common Sense 53 
 
 ence is found, not In antiquity, but in the 
 present-day man. The real question is, 
 *' What is man? " If a man really has rea- 
 son and will-power and conscience — all the 
 qualities which appear to distinguish him 
 from the mere creature of impulse and in- 
 stinct — then they must have come from 
 somewhere. They must either be latent In 
 nature, or they must have come from some 
 Being outside of nature who possesses them. 
 In other words, either nature must have a 
 divine origin, or man must be the child, not 
 only of nature his mother, but also of God 
 His father. In either case God exists. But 
 if man's reason and conscience and will- 
 power are not real; if they have no effective 
 existence; if they are, as has been said, no 
 more than the by-products of a blind, insen- 
 state, conscienceless process, bearing much the 
 same relation to that process that the whir- 
 ring sound of the wheels of a piece of ma- 
 
54 The Church and the Man 
 
 chinery bears to the machinery, having as 
 little significance, and as little practical ef- 
 fect, then there is probably no God. The 
 fact is that if a man is determined to take 
 his will and reason and conscience seriously, 
 he is implicitly assenting to the proposition 
 that God exists, while if he decides to adopt a 
 flippant, pessimistic, sceptical, invertebrate, 
 jelly-fish sort of attitude towards life, he is 
 implicitly denying the existence of God. Un- 
 less there is a God, goodness and generosity 
 and nobility and heroism are mere names 
 without any real meaning. They are 
 dreams, vanity, nonsense. Few men will be 
 willing to regard them as such, for to do so is 
 to deprive Hfe of all its interest and meaning. 
 The theory of psychology which does not 
 give a meaning to life as we have to live It is 
 not likely to commend itself to us as likely 
 to be true, however academically logical It 
 may be. 
 
Revelation and Common Sense 55 
 
 Equally, the doctrine of the incarnation is 
 agreeable to common sense. We human be- 
 ings may be *' spiritual," but it is quite im- 
 possible for us to understand or perceive the 
 spiritual unless we can establish contact with 
 it through the medium of our physical senses. 
 Just as we see electricity revealed in its ef- 
 fects on matter, though the stuff itself eludes 
 our senses, so we can only understand and 
 perceive the divine Spirit in so far as He is 
 revealed in His effects on physical beings. It 
 is, we have argued, in man, the most highly 
 developed of Nature's children, that we see 
 the only clear and convincing evidence of the 
 existence of the spiritual and of God. So 
 too it is in man, and in the most perfect of 
 men, that we shall see the fullest revelation 
 of God, if we see Him at all. In fact, the 
 most perfect man is necessarily the fullest 
 revelation of God that we could possibly un- 
 derstand. By His freedom from all the 
 
56 The Church and the Man 
 
 fears and meannesses that degrade other 
 men, by His peerless spiritual liberty, we 
 acclaim the Christ as that most perfect Man, 
 that fullest possible revelation of God in the 
 only terms that we mortals can understand. 
 So, again, the " mystical union " between 
 Christ and His Church is not nearly so hard 
 to understand as the difficult words make one 
 think. If men are still to know God revealed 
 in Christ, Christ must have a body through 
 which to reveal Himself to men. We can 
 only know other men through their self-ex- 
 pression in their bodies, and we can only 
 know Christ through His self-expression in 
 a body. But there is no man living who can 
 show His wonderfully many-sided freedom 
 and power to men. Yet each can show some 
 part of Him. So, each showing a part, the 
 Church corporate should show the whole, if 
 the different members are really united in 
 spirit. 
 
Revelation and Comntori Sense 57 
 
 Again, In the same way the mystery of 
 Holy Communion becomes clear. We offer 
 our bodies to Christ, that He may take them 
 and show in each some part of Himself; and 
 the bread and wine are the age-long pledge 
 that what we offer He accepts. We pledge 
 ourselves to be loyal to Him and to one an- 
 other, and to combine to show the spirit of 
 Christ to the world. So explained, the serv- 
 ice of Holy Communion is clearly seen to 
 contain the very epitome of our Christian 
 faith and hope and duty. It is there at the 
 altar that we perceive, most plainly and suc- 
 cinctly set forth, just what it means to try to 
 be a Christian, and just where we are to look 
 for help. Yet how many candidates for 
 Confirmation fail to understand that Holy 
 Communion is anything but a " Holy Mys- 
 tery," incomprehensible and almost magical! 
 
 Priestly absolution, again, is very rational 
 when it is properly understood, and very com- 
 
58 The Church and the Man 
 
 forting too. Yet there are many who hon- 
 estly believe that we hold the almost blas- 
 phemous doctrine that without the pronounce- 
 ment of absolution by the priest, God does 
 not forgive! What is the truth? Why, 
 simply that Christ declared that as soon as a 
 sinner repented and tried to amend, God for- 
 gave him. Christ announced this as a fact, 
 and because men trusted that Christ was the 
 Son of God they believed Him, and took 
 advantage of God's forgiveness. Christ still 
 proclaims this fact through His new Body 
 the Church, and the members of that Body 
 whose function It is to make that declaration 
 In His name are the priests. 
 
 Even the mystery of the Holy Trinity Is 
 not repugnant to reason nor wholly Incom- 
 prehensible If It Is explained historically. 
 As a fact of history, the first Christians 
 stated that they believed in the Father and 
 In the Son and In the Holy Spirit. Why? 
 
Revelation and Common Sense 59 
 
 Because of their experience. Peter first 
 learnt the love of the Father through know- 
 ing the Son; but it was not till the Holy- 
 Spirit entered him and transformed him that 
 the coward became infinitely brave, and the 
 ambitious follower of the Messiah became 
 the self-forgetful apostle of the gospel of 
 salvation, Peter believed in one God; but 
 he had known Him through two revelations, 
 the revelation in Jesus Christ, and the revela- 
 tion in his own transformation of character. 
 So nothing would satisfy Peter's disciples 
 but a belief in one God and in the three Per- 
 sons who were the revelation of that God. 
 The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was the 
 creation, not of a subtle, philosophic mind, 
 but of plain men who had had a certain ex- 
 perience, and who refused to accept any ex- 
 planation of that experience which did not 
 fit in with and allow for the facts as they 
 had known them. 
 
6o The Church and the Man 
 
 Over and over again one finds that the 
 Church in her teaching is lacking in sim- 
 plicity, in the courage to try to understand 
 her heritage, in the realization that her doc- 
 trines that have been handed down from the 
 earliest days are not mere arbitrary and 
 mysterious revelations to be accepted with 
 an irrational and uncomprehending assent, 
 but doctrines pregnant with vital meaning 
 for life, and destined to revolutionize the 
 whole outlook and character of the man who 
 tries to understand and believe and apply 
 them. 
 
 It is very much the same with the Chris- 
 tian ethic. Only too often the practical 
 words of Christ, which were meant to de- 
 fine for us our attitude towards our fellow 
 men, are dismissed as a kind of idealism only 
 meant for a better world; and this is often 
 simply because the teachers of the Church 
 have not the courage to apply common sense 
 
Revelation and Common Sense 6i 
 
 to their interpretation of these sayings. 
 When Christ said, " Love your enemies," 
 He meant it literally. He did not mean, 
 *' slobber over them." He did not mean, 
 " condone their evil deeds." But He did 
 mean, " wish them to be your friends." 
 Christ loved the Pharisees as individuals, 
 not for what they were, but for what they 
 might be. He showed His love, not by shut- 
 ting His eyes to their hypocrisy and pride, not 
 by calling them " dear brothers," but by do- 
 ing all He could to make them dissatisfied 
 with themselves, so that they might become 
 different, and so that they might become His 
 friends. So we should love the Germans, 
 not by letting them do evil and shutting our 
 eyes to it, not by being blind to their hideous 
 cruelty and lust for power; but by doing all 
 we can to alter their attitude. Love must 
 be wise. After the war we must be ready to 
 be generous at the right moment ; but it were 
 
62 * The Church and the Man 
 
 a very mistaken love to forget, even where 
 one is ready to forgive. Even God does not 
 forgive the Impenitent sinner. To do so 
 were to condone his crimes. 
 
 Again, consider that other vexed question, 
 the question of the sexual union of men and 
 women. How often Christ's words are re- 
 garded as a mere arbitrary commandment, 
 and how seldom does any one apply his com- 
 mon sense to interpret them. Yet Christ's 
 point of view is easy to understand. *' What 
 God hath joined together, let no man put 
 asunder." " He that looketh on a woman 
 to lust after her hath committed adultery 
 with her already in his heart." Sexual love 
 among animals may well be a matter of 
 physical instinct, for the resulting beings are 
 beings which shall be guided by instinct. 
 But the children of men and women are not 
 children of nature, guided solely by physical 
 instinct. They are, according to Christ, po- 
 
Revelation and Common Sense 6^ 
 
 tential children of God. Therefore a man 
 and woman must regard their marriage as a 
 holy thing, for which they are responsible to 
 God, since they are to bring into the world 
 children for Him as well as for themselves. 
 The crying need at present Is for the 
 Church to realize the reasonableness and 
 the simplicity of her gospel, and not to be 
 afraid of explaining it to boys and girls and 
 men and women In a simple and practical 
 way. We want fewer long words, less 
 philosophy, less mystery, more simple state- 
 ment of vital and practical truth. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CHURCH AND HUMAN RELATIONS 
 
 Doctrines, creeds, rites, ceremonies, con- 
 stitution, discipline, all these are vain if the 
 Church does not teach and show to the world 
 the new life. " Though I speak with the 
 tongues of men and of angels . . . though 
 I have the gift of prophecy and know all 
 mysteries and all knowledge, and though I 
 give all my goods to feed the poor and my 
 body to be burned, and have not love, I am 
 nothing." In the long run the most dis- 
 astrous failure of the Church is the failure 
 to love. It is that which does more than any- 
 thing else to alienate the man of good will. 
 When he finds in the Church the spirit of 
 exclusiveness, the spirit that sets store by 
 
The Church and Human Relations 6^ 
 
 class distinctions, and class prejudices, the 
 spirit of self-satisfied aloofness from the 
 troubles of the unfortunate, then he con- 
 demns the Church, not for her Christianity, 
 but for her lack of it. And he is entitled to 
 do so. Did not the Master say, " By this 
 shall all men know that ye are my disciples, 
 if ye have love one to another " ? 
 
 Let us be frank. In spite of the multi- 
 tude of her alms, the wide-spread net of her 
 " charity," the Church Is lacking In love. 
 Church people are apt to thank God that 
 they are not as other men. The man or 
 woman who has poor garments Is not made to 
 feel that In the house of God, at any rate, he 
 or she is welcomed as an honoured guest, 
 which is undoubtedly how Jesus Christ would 
 wish such to be welcomed. '* I cannot go to 
 church because I have no clothes," says the 
 poor woman. " I have given up going to 
 Communion till I can get a new suit. The 
 
66 The Church and the Man 
 
 people stared so," said an emigrant in an 
 Australian mining town. " I didn't go to 
 church because I was always put in the back 
 seats, and didn't seem to be welcome," said 
 a poor man who had shown wonderful faith 
 during a long and painful illness. " Suit- 
 able accommodation is reserved for the poor 
 of the parish," ran the legend in a large 
 country church. " I wouldn't go to church 
 if I had nasty smelly people next to me," said 
 a lady church-goer. Such things should make 
 us blush for very shame. 
 
 We have got to face this question of the 
 Church and social distinctions. We have 
 got to settle this question of human values. 
 It is not going to be easy. It is not going to 
 be a matter of gush. No amount of mere 
 talk about *' brotherhood " is going to slur 
 over the existence and the recognition within 
 the Church of a sort of pride that is about as 
 definitely unchristian as anything well could 
 
The Church and Human Relations 67 
 
 be. Further, we are not going to solve this 
 question by denying distinctions which obvi- 
 ously do exist, and by proclaiming an equal- 
 ity which obviously does not exist. Our 
 brotherly love has got to be a practical thing 
 which will take count of facts. 
 
 It is perfectly true that some men are better 
 educated, have better taste, liner Instincts 
 than others. It is perfectly true that some 
 men are better fitted to teach or to govern 
 or to direct than others. It is perfectly 
 true that in the life of Church and na- 
 tion there must be authority and discipline. 
 It is useless to deny these very patent facts. 
 It is also quite evident that it is not within the 
 power of the Church to decide whether the 
 privileges of education and responsibility are 
 to be hereditary or not. The Church has to 
 deal with the social structure that has been 
 evolved by the nation, and to make the best 
 of It. It is not the business of the Church 
 
68 The Church and the Man 
 
 to identify herself with definite political 
 movements. Individual Churchmen may 
 properly do so. The Church as such may 
 not. 
 
 On the other hand, the Church is not being 
 true to her Master unless she can show how 
 the social structure can be permeated with 
 real unity and real love. If it Is not possible 
 for master and man, employer and employed, 
 landlord and tenant, officer and soldier, to be 
 united in Christ's fellowship of love, then the 
 Church cannot be true to her Ideals, Chris- 
 tianity Is unpractical and impracticable. We 
 had better give it up. If, on the other hand, 
 Christianity gives us a point of view from 
 which it is possible to recognize both dis- 
 tinctions and the brotherhood of man, the 
 Church must try to show an example of how 
 this double recognition can be effected. St. 
 Paul tries to show us how he thinks this can 
 be done. We are all members of one Body 
 
The Church and Human Relations 69 
 
 — the Body of Christ; but every member has 
 not the same function. The foot is not the 
 hand, nor the hand the eye. There are di- 
 versities of gifts; but there should be the 
 same Spirit. Each member has his partic- 
 ular gifts and his particular functions. All 
 are necessary. All are interdependent. To 
 the full working of the Body the efficiency of 
 every member is essential. No one member 
 can suffer without all the others suffering. 
 None are to be despised. All are to be 
 honoured, for all are indispensable. Indeed, 
 very often it is just the member which is least 
 attractive, least " comely," whose efficiency 
 is most important. 
 
 Here is the basis of sound democracy — 
 sane mutual respect. We cannot all be man- 
 agers, foremen, officers, masters. The 
 master without the man is as useless as the 
 man without the master. At the very start 
 it is necessary that they must respect each 
 
70 The Church and the Man 
 
 other, and recognize that the other's func- 
 tion is a necessary and therefore an honour- 
 able one. We must get it out of our heads 
 that manual labour, dirty labour, labour in- 
 volving obedience to orders, are degrading. 
 No labour is degrading. All honest, neces- 
 sary, useful labour is honourable. The clean 
 hands and tidy clothes of the clerk or the shop 
 assistant do not constitute him a superior per- 
 son to the navvy with his hard rough hands 
 and his muddy breeches. Nor do the strong 
 muscles and tanned skin of the navvy consti- 
 tute him a superior person to the pale and 
 puny clerk. In so far as each is doing neces- 
 sary and useful work each should respect the 
 other. They belong to different classes. It 
 is inevitable that, as a rule, each should find 
 his most congenial friends among those who 
 follow his own manner of life. It is inevit- 
 able that each should have his own way of 
 spending his leisure. It is inevitable that 
 
The Church and Human Relations 71 
 
 they should eat different food, drink different 
 liquids, and wear different clothes. But they 
 should not despise one another. Above all, 
 they should not forget that they are sons of 
 one Father, servants of one Master, temples 
 of one Spirit, members of one Body, and that 
 each is necessary to the other In the building 
 up of that Body. 
 
 All this is such platitude that it seems 
 hardly worth writing down, and yet when one 
 comes to think of it our national life is simply 
 made up of Individual pride and mutual con- 
 tempt. Each little section of society sets 
 store by the distinctions in appearance and 
 manner and intonation and way of living that 
 divide It off from others. Each little section 
 fights for Its own political Interest, completely 
 oblivious of the Interests of those other sec- 
 tions whose well-being Is none the less inti- 
 mately bound up with Its own. Each little 
 section prides itself on keeping itself to itself 
 
72 The Church and the Man 
 
 on every possible opportunity and in every 
 department of life. Men impose limitations 
 on themselves, conventions and prejudices 
 that narrow their sympathies, hamper their 
 generous instincts, destroy their freedom; and 
 then they hug to themselves those -limitations, 
 glory in their self-forged chains. Jim and 
 Jack may be friends at school. They may 
 worship at the same church. They may be 
 kindred spirits; but if Jack works with his 
 coat off and Jim with his on, if Jack has a 
 large family and has to live in a poor neigh- 
 bourhood while Jim has no family and lives in 
 a suburb, they will no longer be seen together. 
 In this matter women are even worse than 
 men. A man while he is single may make 
 what friends he likes, and keep what friends 
 he likes. He may live and give his affections 
 in freedom. But let him marry and he is 
 Immediately pigeon-holed, labelled with a 
 
The Church and Human Relations 73 
 
 class, and henceforward he must not stray 
 beyond that pigeon-hole. 
 
 Class distinctions as we honour them and 
 as the Church recognizes them are a form of 
 slavery. They limit freedom. They check 
 natural impulses and affections. They pro- 
 mote jealousy and pride and strife. Christ 
 offers us liberty, and commands us to love. 
 
 The foundation of Christian liberty, in this 
 matter as in every other, is simply the vision 
 of God. Once realize how far God is re- 
 moved from man, and realize how His Love 
 has bridged that gulf, and then all the petty 
 pride and jealousy of human distinctions 
 vanish from sight. If when men and women 
 knelt or (for fear of bagging the knees of 
 their trousers) bowed their heads in church, 
 they realized that they were approaching the 
 Infinite and Eternal, they could not go on 
 priding themselves on the petty distinctions 
 
74 The Church and the Man 
 
 of class, the soft white hands, the well-fitting 
 clothes, the clean, starched collars, and well- 
 brushed hair. Their sense of humour would 
 set them free. But there is no real worship 
 in our services. There is no sense of pro- 
 portion in our prayers. God forgive us, we 
 have no eyes, no ears, no understanding, no 
 sense of humour, no faith. We need 
 prophets to get up in our pulpits and mock at 
 us. We want sain»ts who by abandoning 
 rank and wealth, and by living humble loving 
 lives, will hold up to derision our false gods. 
 With the " man in the street " it is not 
 words that count, but deeds. It has always 
 been so. He needs the symbolism of action. 
 It is not the words of Christ but His Cross 
 that makes men love Him. It is not the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, but the spitting and the 
 scourging and the naked body exposed to 
 mockery and insult that makes men take Him 
 seriously. So with His Body the Church, it 
 
The Church and Human Relations 75 
 
 Is not sermons which are going to win the 
 souls of men, but the symbolizing of faith in 
 action. The chaplain who descends from the 
 first or second class of a liner to address the 
 steerage does not have one-quarter the hear- 
 ing that he would have if he travelled steer- 
 age. The steerage passengers know that he 
 is the representative of the great Teacher of 
 humility, and they feel that he is not living 
 the gospel that he preaches. The army 
 chaplain who lives at brigade headquarters, 
 and ministers to such battalions as are in 
 reserve or at rest, does not get half the hear- 
 ing that he would have if the men had seen 
 him sharing their privations, their dangers, 
 their boredom, in the front line trenches. 
 To the man in the street the religion of Christ 
 is before everything else a religion of love 
 and humility. The preacher who shows him 
 these will be listened to with respect, however 
 faltering his tongue, however faulty his 
 
76 The Church and the Man 
 
 logic. It is the same with the Church as a 
 whole. The man in the street does not be- 
 lieve in the Church because he does not be- 
 lieve in her sincerity, and he does not believe 
 in her sincerity because he sees in her corpo- 
 rate life neither humility nor love, but only 
 the repetition of the same class pride, 
 party strife, prejudices, and divisions that he 
 sees in society as a whole. 
 
 I have written elsewhere of the men who 
 at this time of national danger have sunk 
 their differences, swallowed their pride, over- 
 come their prejudices, and enlisted in the 
 citizen army to fight with those whom for- 
 merly they despised and disliked, for a com- 
 mon ideal. In the army, men are learning 
 what poor things their pride and prejudices 
 were. They are learning the value of the 
 virtues which are common to all classes, the 
 fundamental virtues of courage and cheerful- 
 ness, and unselfishness, and honesty. They 
 
The Church and Human Relations 77 
 
 are learning to love and honour men with 
 whom in civil life they would have had no 
 dealings. When the war is over It must be 
 the care of the Church to show these men 
 how In the fellowship of Christ's Body they 
 may still use their diversities of gifts, In the 
 same spirit of mutual respect and loyalty, and 
 for the furtherance of a common ideal of 
 life. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MISSIONS 
 
 There are few subjects about which the 
 keen Churchman is more convinced and the 
 average man more dubious than the neces- 
 sity for and utility of foreign missions. The 
 'keen Churchman feels that it is one of the 
 chief duties of the Church to spread the gos- 
 pel until *' the earth shall be full of the knowl- 
 edge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." 
 The average man questions whether the 
 Church is fit to preach till she has set her 
 own house in order, and points to travellers' 
 tales of the failure of missions as a proof 
 that his scepticism is justified. 
 
 For both these views there is a certain 
 amount of justification. On the one hand, it 
 78 
 
Missions 79 
 
 is a law of nature and of God that that which 
 does not fulfil its destiny shall die. If the 
 Church is not missionary she will die. On 
 the other hand, it is indisputable that the suc- 
 cess of missions is not what one would expect. 
 Missionaries do an enormous amount of 
 good in the way of education and medical 
 relief; but the number of their converts, and 
 the character of their converts, is disappoint- 
 ing, and so is their total effect on the life of 
 the people among whom they work. Some- 
 thing is wrong with missionary methods. 
 
 Personally I can only speak from the point 
 of view of a traveller in missionary countries 
 {e.^, Madagascar, British East Africa, 
 Mauritius, Ceylon) — a traveller who has 
 wished to think well of missions, and has 
 been at some pains to understand their diffi- 
 culties, and to estimate their degree of suc- 
 cess. Perhaps it may not be out of place for 
 me to say, as a proof of my good will towards 
 
8o The Church and the Man 
 
 missions, that some six years ago I did actu- 
 ally volunteer for missionary service in Cen- 
 tral Africa but was rejected on medical 
 grounds. 
 
 Generally speaking, the charge against mis- 
 sions is that they make few converts and have 
 a pernicious effect on those whom they influ- 
 ence. It is an old story that the mission boy 
 is the biggest rascal to be found, far more dis- 
 honest than the unregenerate savage. Of 
 course, I am talking chiefly of Africa. I 
 honestly do not think that it is enough to 
 answer that charge by a denial. It has ap- 
 peared to me that a great many natives at- 
 tend the mission schools, and even simulate 
 conversion, for purposes of their own. 
 They want to become servants, or in some 
 fashion to be the go-between to the white man 
 and the native, which Is often a profitable 
 occupation. Unfortunately, It is often not 
 a very honest one. A native head-boy will 
 
Missions 8 1 
 
 often cheat the other boys of part of their 
 wages, and deduct a percentage for himself 
 when paying his master's bills. Native 
 guides are generally rogues, and often pimps. 
 In order to enter any of these lucrative and 
 rather dishonest professions, the first essen- 
 tial is to learn English, and the easiest way to 
 do that is often to attend the mission school. 
 I have even known cases where natives have 
 become priests in the English Church solely 
 for mercenary reasons, and very unpleasant 
 people they are. It would almost seem as 
 though, in order to make real converts, it 
 would be necessary to take precautions 
 against its being worth while from the 
 worldly point of view for natives to become 
 converts. 
 
 A further very real difficulty of the present 
 system is that as soon as a native becomes a 
 Christian he ceases to be uncivilized, and 
 becomes semi-civilized. He wears trousers 
 
82 The Church and the Man 
 
 and a jacket instead of a blanket and a coat 
 of grease. A female wears petticoats and a 
 blouse instead of the old short skirt which in 
 European eyes is so immodest. It is hard to 
 see how this can altogether be avoided, for 
 undoubtedly in the case of unregenerate sav- 
 ages the introduction of Christianity is bound ' 
 to revolutionize the whole social outlook. 
 The Christian native can no longer buy a 
 dozen wives, and amuse himself by hunting 
 and fighting while his wives do the work. 
 And I suppose that the modest attire of the 
 white woman is only a sjmibol of the altered 
 attitude of her menfolk towards her. Yet 
 the effect often is to make the savage into a 
 bad imitation of a white man, and to cause 
 him to thank God that he is not as other men, 
 which Is a definitely unchristian frame of 
 mind to be in. To say the truth, when the 
 mission boy is not a rogue he is often some- 
 thing of a prig. 
 
Missions 83 
 
 I fancy that if I were a savage I should 
 regard the Christian life, not as a fuller, 
 freer, nobler life than mine, but as a duller, 
 more restricted kind of life, with certain com- 
 pensations in the form of self-esteem and 
 comfort and opportunities for making money. 
 
 I confess that with regard to some mis- 
 sions that I have come across I have found 
 myself wondering whether after all they 
 were teaching Christianity, or a kind of 
 adapted English respectability which was not 
 really a religious thing at all. I have heard 
 the same sort of criticism made even by mis- 
 sionaries themselves of missions in India. 
 
 Perhaps we are not sufficiently clear our- 
 selves about the real content of Christianity. 
 Perhaps we confuse It in our minds with ele- 
 ments which, though associated with Chris- 
 tianity in England, are not really a part of 
 Christianity at all. Perhaps we adopt a 
 wrong attitude towards our black brethren. 
 
84 The Church and the Man 
 
 Christianity, after all, Is not a matter of 
 clothes or of speech. It Is possible to be a 
 Christian and wear a blanket and be unable 
 to speak a word even of pidgin-English. 
 Brother black is probably a good deal less 
 immodest than he looks, and possibly we are 
 a good deal more prurient than he. Chris- 
 tianity will not change his colour or his cli- 
 mate or the shape of his skull, and so pos- 
 sibly we ought not to permit him to Imitate 
 us, but rather urge him to be his own best 
 self, in a manner suited to the conditions of 
 his existence. The two chief Christian vir- 
 tues are, perhaps, humility and unselfishness, 
 and I somehow fancy that these have been 
 Insufficiently insisted on in some missions. 
 
 I have not said anything about the wicked 
 settlers or the district commissioners, whose 
 unchristian example Is so often alleged as a 
 cause of the failure of missions, because I 
 am quite sure that the less the missionary 
 
Missions 85 
 
 has to do with them, and the less he identifies 
 himself with them, the better he will suc- 
 ceed. Generally the official Is a good friend 
 to the native. Often the settler is not. 
 Neither is apt to favour the missionary. 
 Unfortunately, at first the native is apt to 
 lump all white men together, rather to the 
 missionaries' dismay. But they must play 
 their own game as Independently as possible, 
 and trust to time to set matters right. Nev- 
 ertheless, it is a great advantage if the mis- 
 sionary can be first in the field. In the Hova 
 country in the centre of Madagascar the mis- 
 sionary arrived first. After he had made a 
 good deal of headway, he was expelled from 
 the country, and the native Church was ex- 
 posed to a severe persecution. The result is 
 that in the Hova country one finds the nearest 
 approach that I know of to a native Church 
 racy of the soil. Every village seems to 
 have its place of Christian worship. Tan- 
 
86 The Church and the Man 
 
 anarive is full of churches of all denomina- 
 tions, and when I attended Holy Communion 
 in the cathedral I found myself in the midst 
 of a huge Hova congregation, listening to the 
 service in the native tongue, and felt as I 
 have never felt before or since the possibil- 
 ities of foreign missions. I believe that in 
 some measure the U.M.C.A. and the C.M.S. 
 In Uganda have* also profited by being 
 first In the field, arriving In the country 
 with no protection, and depending for their 
 success almost wholly on the power of Christ 
 crucified. 
 
 I have not mentioned Christian disunion as 
 a source of failure, because I am convinced 
 that the real cause of failure lies much 
 deeper, and because I am also convinced that 
 organized co-operation is only a very small 
 step towards success. There Is only one way 
 to win men to Christ, and that Is to show to 
 them something of His love, and humility, 
 
Missions 87 
 
 and quiet strength, and humorous common 
 sense, His distrust of the efficacy of human 
 aids to success, and His quiet confidence in 
 the power of love and truth. 
 
 There are, dotted about the world, many 
 * poor missions, where men and women, often 
 lacking in tact and breadth of mind and edu- 
 cation, toil year after year to win the heathen 
 by loving and humble service. They do not 
 succeed. They are often despised alike by 
 European travellers and by the natives them- 
 selves. Yet inasmuch as they are witnessing 
 in their lives to the truth that love and humil- 
 ity and purity are stronger than money and 
 organization and wisdom, I am convinced 
 that they are sowing a harvest which another 
 will reap. No one is such a vulgar, snob- 
 bish materialist as the native when he first 
 comes into contact with civilization. Civil- 
 ization comes with arms full of glittering toys 
 for which the native reaches out both hands, 
 
88 The Church and the Man 
 
 and for which he will submit to discipline, 
 and sacrifice his most ancient customs and 
 habits. As yet he has no eyes for spiritual 
 riches, yet their turn will come, and it is for 
 the Church to witness to them meanwhile in 
 humility and love and patience and faith. 
 
 This may sound inconclusive; but after all, 
 is not our experience of home missions much 
 the same? It is easy enough to succeed in 
 filling clubs, but much harder to fill churches. 
 And the cause is often that the missionaries 
 themselves have not a clear enough idea 
 about where middle-class respectability ends 
 and Christianity begins. Too often the boys 
 and men whom they convert show but one 
 sign of their change of mind — a shame of 
 their work and poverty and class and the 
 genesis of a social ambition. Too often the 
 outward sign of conversion is a collar rather 
 than unselfishness, and too often the collar 
 
Missions 89 
 
 Is really the symbol of a new servitude rather 
 than of a new liberty. 
 
 Perhaps this chapter Is an Impertinence. 
 I have written it, not because I regard myself 
 as an expert, but because I have tried to be 
 a friendly critic. Six years ago at Oxford 
 I joined a " Missionary Campaign," and 
 stumped the country uttering perfervid de- 
 nunciations of the critics of missions. I 
 could not do that quite In the same way now. 
 As a Churchman I feel that the hour of self- 
 crltlclsm and repentance should not pass us 
 by without some thought of the failure of 
 missions. 
 
 PRINTED IN THB UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
'HE following pages contain advertisements of a few 
 of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 
 
A Theology for the 
 Social Gospel 
 
 By WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 
 
 Author of " Christianity and the Social Crisis " and 
 "Christianizing the Social Order" 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 
 
 This book, which embodies the Taylor Lec- 
 tures given at Yale during Convocation Week in 
 April, 1917, takes up the old doctrines of the 
 Christian faith, such as Original Sin, The Atone- 
 ment, Inspiration, The Sacraments, and shows 
 how they can be re-interpreted from a modern 
 social point of view and expanded in their scope 
 so that they will make room for the salvation of 
 society as well as for the salvation of individuals. 
 The work is practical and inspiring and covers 
 ground not previously traversed by writers. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Are You Human ? 
 
 By WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE 
 
 50 cents 
 
 "Like a stinging fresh breeze laden with the very 
 salt of life and vigor. . . . Every man in his young days 
 ought to get and digest this book." — Pacific Churchman. 
 
 " A song of quick hope for the living." — Oakland 
 Tribune. 
 
 " A vast amount of wisdom Is compressed into small 
 compass." — Charleston News and Courier. 
 
 "An admirable little gift to lay upon the table of 
 every high school and college boy in the land." — Unity. 
 
 " Inspiring and encouraging thoughts presented in at- 
 tention-arresting fashion for busy people." — Nashville 
 Banner. 
 
 It's All in the Day s Work 
 
 By henry CHURCHILL KING 
 
 50 cents 
 
 "Good bracing counsel, such as the young men and 
 women, at Oberlin or anywhere else may profit by, 
 abounds in Dr. King's pages. It is a book for all who 
 wish to acquit themselves well in the battle of life." — 
 The Dial. 
 
 "A fine combination of the essay and the sermon, 
 with none of the stilted style of the former, and with 
 the directness of the latter, but better than either be- 
 cause of the sustained interest and the personal touch. 
 
 " It is a fresh, breezy, and brave appeal to face life 
 as it is, and to make the best of it. It is only a little 
 book, but it is a book for big men, whether sixteen or 
 sixty." — Universalist Leader. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Why Men Pray 
 
 By dr. CHARLES L. SLATTERY, 
 Rector of Grace Church, New York 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, p. 00 
 
 Dr. Slattery's handling of his subject is fresh, 
 unconventional, and remarkably liberal in tone; 
 he writes with sympathy and deep religious in- 
 sight of a question close to the thought of a great 
 number of people. The theme is developed in a 
 steadily climactic line toward the heights of spir- 
 itual thought, with frequent pertinent illustra- 
 tions from personal experiences. The author is 
 in the front rank of the younger men in the Epis- 
 copal Ministry; his book carries an authoritative 
 and appreciative message to the steadily increas- 
 ing number of people who find prayer of intimate 
 and significant value in their daily lives. 
 
 " A little volume of unusual power and insight. 
 . . . The meaning of prayer, its value and results 
 in life and character are very practically and 
 helpfully explained." — Independent. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
CHURCH PmNCIPLES FOR LAY PEOPLE 
 
 The Episcopal Church : 
 Its Faith and Order 
 
 By GEORGE HODGES 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 
 A concise statement of the doctrine and disci- 
 pline of the Episcopal Church. 
 
 Why Men Pray 
 
 By dr. CHARLES L. SLATTERY, 
 Rector of Grace Church, New York 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 
 " The meaning of prayer, its value and results 
 in life and character are very practically and 
 helpfully explained." — The Independent. 
 
 The Apostles' Creed To-day 
 
 By EDWARD S. DROWN, D.D. 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 
 Written to satisfy the doubts of the sceptical, 
 to clarify the thought of Churchmen, and to 
 vitalize the work of the adult Bible class. 
 
 The Christian Ministry and 
 Social Problems 
 
 By bishop CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 
 
 -' A little book of undoubted sincerity that can- 
 not fail to appeal to the many of Mr. Williams 
 mode of thought." — Boston Herald. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64r-66 Fifth Avenue New York