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OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE 
 
OURSELVES 
 AND THE UNIVERSE 
 
 Studies in Life and Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 J. BRIERLEY, B.A, 
 
 ("J. B.") 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3, BIBLE HOUSE. 
 
 1902. 
 
 
Author's Note. 
 
 I have given to the following Studies the 
 title they bear because it expresses the fact 
 which all religious thinking needs to recog- 
 nise, that spiritual teaching must henceforth 
 be a cosmic teaching. The facts and ex- 
 periences on which religion is based, if they 
 are to make to us their legitimate appeal, 
 must be set in the framework of that new 
 Universe which modern research has opened 
 to us. The themes discussed, as will be seen, 
 are sufficiently varied, but it will be found, 
 I believe, that they are united in this one 
 conception. 
 
 J. B. 
 

 Contents. 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I.- 
 
 —A Roomier Universe 
 
 1 
 
 II.- 
 
 —The Divine Indifference 
 
 . 10 
 
 III.- 
 
 —Truth's Spiritual Equivalents 
 
 . 19 
 
 IV.- 
 
 —The Inwardness of Events 
 
 . 29 
 
 V.- 
 
 -The Sins of Saints 
 
 . 39 
 
 VI.- 
 
 -The World's B eauty 
 
 . 49 
 
 VII.- 
 
 —Of Face Architecture 
 
 . 59 
 
 VIII.- 
 
 -Westward of Fifty 
 
 . 69 
 
 IX.- 
 
 —The Art of Happiness 
 
 . 79 
 
 X.- 
 
 —The Mission of Illusion 
 
 . 87 
 
 XI.- 
 
 -The Soul's Voice 
 
 . 97 
 
 XII.- 
 
 —Of Sex in Religion 
 
 . 106 
 
 XIII.- 
 
 —Of False Conscience ,. 
 
 . 116 
 
 XIV.- 
 
 —Religion and Medicine 
 
 . 126 
 
 XV.- 
 
 —Spiritual Undercurrents 
 
 . 135 
 
 XVL- 
 
 —On Being Inferior 
 
 . 145 
 
 XVII.- 
 
 —Our Contribution to Life 
 
 . 153 
 
 XVIII.- 
 
 —The Gospel of Law 
 
 . 162 
 
 XIX.- 
 
 —Life's Healing Forces 
 
 . 170 
 
 XX.- 
 
 —Of Fear in Religion 
 
 . 180 
 
 XXI.- 
 
 —Our Moral Variability 
 
 . 188 
 
 XXII.- 
 
 —The Escape from Commonplace 
 
 . 190 
 
 XXIII.- 
 
 —Of Spiritual Detachment 
 
 . 206 
 
vm 
 
 Contents. 
 
 XXIV.— Life's Present Tense 
 
 XXV.— A Doctrine of Echoes 
 XXVI.— Of Dirine Leading ... 
 
 XXVII. — Amusement 
 
 XXVIII. — Dream Mysteries 
 XXIX.— The Spiritual Sense 
 XXX.— Our Thought World 
 XXXI. — Morals and Eternity 
 XXXII.— The Christ of To-Day 
 XXXIII.— The World's Surprises 
 XXXIV. — Life's Exchange System 
 
 XXXV.— The Spiritual in Teaching 
 XXXVI. -Behind the Veil ... 
 
 PAGE 
 
 215* 
 
 224 
 
 234 
 
 244 
 
 253 
 
 262 
 
 272 
 
 282 
 
 292 
 
 302 
 
 312 
 
 323 
 
 332 
 
Ourselves and the Universe, 
 
 A Roomier Universe. 
 
 Our English winter compensates for its gloom 
 and rigours by offering us now and then a 
 night of extraordinary splendour. The solitary 
 country wayfarer has, on these occasions, his 
 gaze irresistibly drawn by the solemn mag- 
 nificence of the spectacle above. He is 
 tempted to forget earth while he has speech 
 with the constellations. The starry hosts, 
 " that great and awful city of God," gleaming 
 with a lustre rare in these latitudes, send their 
 mighty message straight to the heart. From 
 the beginning men have pondered that message. 
 The earliest theologies have been astronomical. 
 The European and classical names for God go 
 back to the old Sanscrit word for the sunrise. 
 Stonehenge is a temple of the sun, and our 
 
2 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 leading ecclesiastical festivals of to-day are bap- 
 tized survivals of customs, existing in the dawn 
 of history, which had their origin in observed 
 movements of the heavens. 
 
 To-day our theology is again being touched 
 from the stars. The telescope has proved a 
 veritable instrument of revelation, and what it 
 has revealed stirs our inward life to its centre. 
 Since it began to sweep the heavens man has 
 had to domesticate himself in a new universe. 
 In his earlier thinking creation was a compara- 
 tively snug affair. The earth was its centre 
 and man its raison d'etre. Our planet was the 
 fixed point round which everything revolved. 
 The sun was created to give man light by day, 
 the moon and stars to shine on him by night. 
 At a handy distance above him was a paradise 
 for the good, and beneath, within equally easy 
 reach, an avernus for the wicked. The as- 
 tronomer has overturned this theology for us. 
 The scene he discloses is one in which our 
 earth is found to be the insignificant satellite 
 •of a sun nearly a million times bigger, but 
 which in its turn is only a speck in the sur- 
 rounding immensity. He talks to us of fifty 
 million stars as visible with the telescope, each 
 one a mighty sun, the centre probably of 
 
A Roomier Universe. 
 
 planetary systems full, for aught we know, of 
 conscious life. He describes the distances of 
 these worlds by the centuries of years which 
 it takes light, flying at its rate of inconceivable 
 swiftness, to cross the gulf between themselves 
 and us ; or, what is not less bewildering, by 
 showing us that a star viewed by us in January, 
 and then again in June, when we are one hun- 
 dred and eighty million miles from our earlier 
 standpoint, has not altered its apparent position 
 by a hair's-breadth. We are indeed the deni- 
 zens of a roomier universe ! 
 
 But the point for us here is in the effect 
 which this immense widening of the human 
 outlook has had, and is likely to have, upon 
 man's religious conceptions, and his accompany- 
 ing spiritual life. The first result has been 
 undoubtedly one of profound disquiet. It is 
 hardly worth while to blame the Church for 
 her treatment of Galileo. She was acting here 
 strictly in accord with average human nature, 
 which dislikes nothing more than to be turned 
 from its old familiar thought-habitations into 
 a fresh one to which it is not yet accustomed. 
 Man is bound to the old mental home by a 
 thousand ties, and suspects that he will catch 
 his death of cold in the new. Our religious 
 
4 OlTKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 teachers are a long way yet from having got 
 accustomed to the roomier universe. Hazlitt's 
 gibe that " in the days of Jacob there was a 
 ladder between heaven and earth, but now the 
 heavens have gone farther off and are be- 
 come astronomical," suggests a problem that 
 still puzzles sorely many an honest pulpiteer. 
 A well-known popular preacher, in a sermon on 
 heaven, laid it down as a leading proposition 
 that heaven was a place above us, and cited 
 passages of Scripture to prove that the depar- 
 ture of the glorified was always an ascent. In 
 this argument it seemed to ha\e been forgotten 
 that an " ascent " from London and an " as- 
 cent " from Melbourne would take the " ascen- 
 ders" in exactly opposite directions. " Above " 
 and " beneath," so far as space and locality are 
 concerned, have been emptied of their meaning 
 by astronomy, and it is time that religious* 
 teachers of all persuasions took account of so 
 elementary a fact. What is the exact signi- 
 ficance for the inner life of this feature of 
 the astronomical revelation we may inquire 
 presently. 
 
 Meanwhile it is worth observing that the 
 mental confusion, and one may say distress, 
 which the breaking down of the older concep- 
 
A Roomier Universe. 
 
 tions has caused, is by no means confined to 
 the ecclesiastical world or to mediocre minds. 
 It has been felt in an acute degree by thinkers 
 of the first order. The cry of Pascal, "The 
 eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies 
 me," is echoed by our own Watson : 
 
 But oftentimes lie feels 
 The intolerable vastness bow him down, 
 The awful homeless spaces scare his soul. 
 
 Carlyle, too, was dominated by this feeling 
 when a friend whom he had accompanied to 
 the door of his house at Chelsea, and who had 
 pointed to the brilliant starlit heavens as " a 
 glorious sight," got from him the reply, "Man, 
 it's just dreadful ! " It is evident that even 
 the highest human thinking has not yet become 
 fully acclimatised to immensity. 
 
 And yet the signs are multiplying that we are 
 at the dawn of a new and better conception. 
 Man is already feeling his way about in this 
 larger habitation, and we may predict that 
 by-and-by his inner life will be not only entirely 
 at home in it, but gloriously free and exultant. 
 As a proof of this let us note here one or two of 
 the elements which the new conditions are 
 causing to emerge in our spiritual consciousness. 
 
 It is infinitely reassuring, to begin with, to 
 
6 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 realise that to the uttermost verge of these 
 vast spaces we find not only everywhere the 
 presence of Mind, but of the same Mind. 
 The laws of light and heat and gravitation 
 which obtain in London obtain in the 
 Pleiades. The same King's writ evidently 
 runs throughout the whole Empire. The old 
 Roman's pride and sense of being at home 
 when, in farthest Britain or by the remote 
 Euxine, he saw the flash of Rome's eagles 
 and heard the tramp of her legions, is, in a 
 finer way, reproduced in loyal souls, who to- 
 day find the Power they adore exercising a 
 sway which, at no furthest remove in this 
 stupendous whole, is contravened. If the 
 universe, through all its suns and systems, 
 knows but one Master of the House, who is 
 already known to us, there is enough here 
 surely to thaw out all the chill of strangeness 
 and to make the cosmic spaces to their utter- 
 most reach friendly and homelike. 
 
 But this is only the beginning. There is 
 immense spiritual inspiration in this other 
 message of the telescope, that life altogether 
 is larger than our fathers imagined. For the 
 idea grows upon us that if the material realm 
 of which we form a part is so much vaster than 
 
A Koomier Universe. 
 
 we deemed, so in like manner must be that 
 spiritual realm to which we also belong. That 
 our poets and philosophers should sing and\ 
 write as though creation's greatness spells 
 man's littleness is, when one thinks of it, the 
 oddest perversion. It supposes that we are 
 dwarfed by the immensity of the whole, 
 whereas it is this very vastness, properly con- 
 sidered, that enhances the worth of our own 
 life. For we are not only in the universe, but 
 the universe is in us. It plays through us, find- 
 ing in the soul the organ of its consciousness. 
 The greater the whole, the mightier the throb 
 of its pulsation through us who are its parts. 
 
 More than that. The greater the universe, 
 the greater its Maker. The dimension of the 
 one helps us to conceive the proportions of the 
 other. But in a great nature it is ever the 
 moral quality that counts most. If God in 
 these later ages has astonished us by the 
 revelations of His material side, what sur- 
 prises may He not have in store on the side 
 that is spiritual? If His power is expressed 
 in the worlds that populate the Milky Way, 
 what is the love that is proportioned to such 
 a Power, and what may we not expect 
 from it? 
 
8 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 But the most important message of the 
 stars is yet to be stated, and must be put into 
 a line. It is that of the absolute spirituality 
 of true religion. The widening of the outer 
 heavens is the cosmic emphasis upon the word 
 of Jesus : " Neither shall ye say, Lo here ! 
 or lo there ! for, behold, the Kingdom of God 
 is within you." Astronomy puts the veto on 
 external pilgrimings, as aids to religion. We 
 might journey from here to Arcturus and be no 
 whit nearer God. The movement needed is 
 of another kind, in another sphere. Relig- 
 ion's "above" and "beneath" have nothing 
 to do with location. They are states of the 
 heart. To get on here we need not to change 
 our place but our ways. We reach heaven not 
 through the clouds but through our own souls. 
 It comes into us, and we come into it, in pro- 
 portion to the stages we make in faith, in love, 
 in humility of spirit. As we move along this 
 line of things what we are chiefly conscious of 
 is not so much the roomier realm of the stars, 
 majestic though that be, as the roomier realm of 
 the soul. How the two are exactly related does 
 not yet appear. Enough if we realise that the 
 inconceivable vastness of the one stands over 
 against the inconceivable vastness of the other. 
 
A Roomier Universe. 
 
 'Citizens of a boundless physical universe, let us 
 rejoice most in our fellowship in that spiritual 
 kingdom whose treasures an inspired voice has 
 thus described : " Eye hath not seen nor ear 
 heard, neither hath entered into the heart of 
 man, the things which God hath prepared for 
 them that love Him." 
 
II. 
 The Divine Indifference. 
 
 There are times in history when a mortal chill 
 seems to fall upon the human soul. A deadly 
 suspicion spreads abroad that man is, after all^ 
 in a universe that is deaf and dumb to his 
 prayer. The impression gains that morality 
 and spirituality ; faith, hope, love — all the 
 things that make life precious and holy — are 
 phenomena simply of our own consciousness, 
 and that there is no evidence of there being 
 anything corresponding to them outside. Men 
 argue that our moral code is provincial, that its 
 writ does not run beyond given boundaries. It 
 is valid for certain spheres of human conduct. 
 It is, for instance, correct to say that industry 
 produces prosperity, that sobriety and frugality 
 promote health, while dissipation induces 
 disease ; that love and self-sacrifice have what 
 seems an ennobling effect upon our sensibilities. 
 But how far does this carry as related to the 
 immeasurable realm outside ? Nature appears 
 
The Divide Indifference. 11 
 
 to know nothing of our morality. She slays 
 wholesale, and in her slaying takes no heed of 
 ethical distinction. When the ship goes down, 
 or the earthquake engulfs the city, the pious 
 and prayerful are swept away just as remorse- 
 lessly as the murderer and the thief. People 
 living sheltered lives may dream of love as at the 
 heart of things ; but the man on a raft in the 
 pitiless Atlantic, or staggering, lost and hope- 
 less, to his death in the Australian bush, finds 
 no suggestion of this friendliness. 
 
 There are times, we say, when such considera- 
 tions come upon men with crushing force. The 
 earthquake at Lisbon, it is said, made multi- 
 tudes of people atheists. It is strange, by the 
 way, to remember that the call to faith in view 
 of that catastrophe was given in Europe by no 
 other than Voltaire, who wrote a poem coun- 
 selling silent and trustful resignation in face of 
 an inscrutable Providence. In events of this 
 kind Nature seems to outrage our best in- 
 stincts. We should not wonder if the survivors 
 of the tidal wave at G-alveston found their 
 faith as well as their property submerged. 
 At such times men echo Carlyle's outburst, 
 i( God sits in heaven and does nothing ! " 
 And history often staggers us as much as 
 
12 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Nature. We picture to ourselves what happens 
 in a single twenty-four hours on this planet — 
 hideous massacres in China, the kidnapping of 
 •slaves in Central Africa, the brutal orgies 
 repeated every night in the great cities, with 
 their engulfments of virtue, their defiance of 
 God ; these things happen, and there seems no 
 outside response, no faintest sign that any 
 moral sensitiveness beyond our own has thereby 
 been touched. 
 
 Brooding of this kind is very rife to-day, and 
 it has produced the singular result of a re- 
 ligious scepticism that has morality for its 
 chief support. Man has become conscientious, 
 but cannot find a conscience in the universe. 
 He thinks himself better than his world, and is 
 ready to propose an evangelistic mission 
 amongst the unseen powers. The modern 
 mind shows us in every direction the bewilder- 
 ment into which it has fallen. It serves us up 
 afresh the denials of Lucretius, and the despair 
 of Omar Khayyam. It repeats Heine's scoff 
 at the world as " an age-long riddle which 
 only fools expect to solve." It lowers its 
 conception of God to the " For tuna omnipotens 
 et ineluctabile fatum" of Virgil, or declares 
 with the messenger in the Antigone that " it is 
 
The Divine Indifference. 1& 
 
 but chance that raiseth up, and chance that 
 bringeth low, . . . and none foretells a 
 man's appointed lot." The heavens offer to it 
 the grim spectacle of 
 
 Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes. 
 Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand 
 His nothingness into man. 
 
 A Metsche treats man as a mere passing 
 phase of existence, a Watson as Nature's 
 chance child : 
 
 Through untold seons vast 
 
 She let him lurk and cower ; 
 'Twould seem he climbed at last 
 In mere fortuitous hour, 
 Child of a thousand chances 'neath the indifferent 
 sky. 
 
 And yet in all this the chief puzzle to us 
 lies not in the world-problems that are pre- 
 sented, but in the fact that men in such 
 numbers, and often of such conspicuous ability, 
 should so misconceive the whole question.. 
 For, when everything is said, what does this 
 supposed evidence about " the Divine indiffer- 
 ence " amount to? Looked at narrowly, it 
 resolves itself into a series of surface appear- 
 ances of really no weight as against the other 
 side. We will not linger here in the region of 
 
14 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the too obvious, otherwise we might point out 
 that to grumble because the good man as well 
 as the evil perishes in a shipwreck or falls from 
 a precipice is to impeach one of our best 
 friends and safeguards. The unvarying action 
 of the laws of Nature may drown a man here 
 and there, or break him in pieces at the bottom 
 of a cliff, but what kind of a world should we 
 have if this uniformity ceased, and gravitation 
 pulled up or down at any man's whim or need ? 
 Our navigation, our building, our engineering, 
 the whole of our mechanical arts, the whole 
 progress of the sciences ; more than that, the 
 whole education of the mind, its forethought, 
 its calculation, its coolness, its courage, depend 
 upon the faith we have in Nature's guarantee 
 that she will keep to her course and not 
 deviate at random from her established line of 
 things. 
 
 But what of those who get the rough side of 
 this uniformity, whom it buffets or crushes? 
 Why is Nature in places so horribly fierce, so 
 utterly cruel ? As a rule the men who know 
 most of that fierceness, the mariners buffeted 
 in Bay of Biscay gales, the explorers of 
 Antarctic wastes, are just the people who do 
 not complain. Roughness is one thing to a 
 
The Divine Indifference. 15 
 
 nincompoop, another thing to a man. "What," 
 such men are inclined to say, " would you have 
 us cockered up and kept all our days in cotton- 
 wool ? God thinks too well of us to leave us to 
 such a fate." Nature's wild and remorseless 
 energy is the field on which they reach their 
 strength. And when things have come to the 
 worst, and some disaster which no courage or 
 skill can avert crashes down and leaves ruin 
 behind, can we argue as though the world's 
 moral laws have here been defied or annulled ? 
 If we will only look below the surface we shall 
 see that it is precisely here, on the contrary, 
 they get their most decisive vindication. There 
 is no such thing as " one event happening to 
 all." Each man's event happens according to 
 what he is and not otherwise. The shipwreck 
 which carries fifty men to the bottom varies in 
 its aspect to every one of them by the whole 
 range of his moral and spiritual constitution. 
 When the three were crucified at Golgotha 
 there was, to the outer eye, no difference in 
 the foitune of the sufferers. The indifferent 
 soldiers performed their functions, and indif- 
 ferent Nature performed hers. There were 
 equally for all crosses, nails, tortures, thirsts, 
 death. And yet this one event to the three 
 
16 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 who suffered it stood separate as to its^ 
 personal significances by the whole diameter of 
 the universe. Even that old pagan Montaigne 
 had the grace given him to see this, and 
 remarks somewhere that " external occasions 
 take both flavour and colour from the internal 
 constitution." Whatever happens in the 
 region of men's physical and material fates, 
 not a hair's breadth of deviation shows in the 
 operation there of the moral and spiritual laws* 
 But what to the modern conscience is, 
 perhaps, the greatest stumbling-block of all 
 remains yet to be dealt with. This lies in what 
 seems " the Divine indifference " to man's 
 moral and religious aspirations. Earnest men 
 watch with dismay the immoralities around 
 them, the orgies of lust and crime, the pros- 
 perity of villains, the grinding of the poor, and 
 in their struggle against it they seem to get no- 
 help. They read of earlier revelations and 
 interpositions, but the events of to-day appear 
 to carry "no revelation except that nobody 
 cares." At times the dumb silence of that 
 outside universe to which we turn our eyes 
 seems almost maddening. But here again we 
 are out of our reckoning simply because our 
 observations are faulty. There is nothing 
 
The Divine Indifference. 17 
 
 wrong with the heavens ; it is our sextant and 
 compass that need adjustment. For how do 
 we expect God to interfere in the world's moral 
 history ? Shall He visit the wicked with fiery 
 cataclysms ? That would be history in the 
 sphere of phenomena and sensation, but it 
 would in no sense be moral history. If we will 
 only look deep enough we may see that God, 
 conceived as moral and spiritual, is acting 
 precisely in the way we should expect. So far 
 from being indifferent, He offers an ever-grow- 
 ing revelation of His moral care. His universe 
 is not silent on this point. The mistake men 
 make is in looking for speech in the wrong 
 direction. Schelling long ago indicated the 
 law of the Divine working here in the aphorism, 
 " Only the personal can help the personal, and 
 God must become man in order that man may 
 come again to God." His entire approach to 
 us is by immanence and incarnation. The 
 developing sentiment of the moral community, 
 the sentiment which protests against injustice 
 and works for a better order, is simply His 
 voice in the world. He speaks to man through 
 man and no other way. Our very impatience 
 with the oppositions and the slow progress is 
 but the rush of the stream of His life in the 
 
18 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 too narrow channels of our limited nature 
 The revolt of our conscience against the low 
 moral order is His battle-cry for a better one. 
 
 To sum up. " The Divine Indifference " is 
 apparent, and not real. The universe, despite 
 surface appearances to the contrary, discloses a 
 Divine moral order and a Divine moral passion, 
 the revelation of which is in the human con- 
 sciousness. God can only make Himself known 
 morally in the sphere of the soul, and there He 
 does make Himself known. Any man to-day, 
 if he chooses, can have the consciousness of 
 God in his own spirit. In view of this it is 
 well for us " to bear without resentment the 
 Divine reserve. " With a modern French 
 writer we realise that " the sincere acceptance 
 of the inevitable supposes a love for the inevit- 
 able, the consciousness that this obscure universe 
 has a mysterious and kindly significance." We 
 go farther. Those who penetrate to its centre 
 find there clear sky and angels' food. To him 
 that overcometh is given to eat of the hidden 
 manna. 
 
III. 
 
 Truth's Spiritual Equivalents. 
 
 The debt of theology to science is, perhaps, 
 nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the 
 light which modern discovery in the latter field 
 is shedding upon some of the most difficult 
 problems of religious thought. One of the 
 brightest rays of this new illumination is that 
 which streams from the scientific law of the 
 transmutation and equivalence of energy. The 
 fact, now so familiar to us, that force is con- 
 stant ; that it is capable of infinite transforma- 
 tion while remaining the same in quantity ; 
 that so much motion can be turned into so 
 much heat, or light or electricity, and back 
 again through all the series, without the loss 
 of a fraction of it — irresistibly raises the ques- 
 tion whether a similar law may not be discerned 
 in other spheres. We propose here to follow 
 out this suggestion in one particular direction, 
 and to ask whether evidence does not exist 
 of a law of equivalency between moral or 
 
20 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 spiritual feeling and intellectual truth. Can it 
 be said that a given moral emotion argues 
 always the presence somewhere of a corre- 
 sponding truth for the intellect? Is what is 
 noblest in the moral life truest as a fact ? Can 
 what the soul realises as the highest in its 
 inner feeling be taken as a proof of an objective 
 reality that the reason may recognise? Before 
 we have done we shall hope to show that the 
 topic is a practical one, and that the applica- 
 tions of it are of the first importance. 
 
 We need not stop here to investigate the 
 precise philosophical relations between thought 
 and feeling, nor to inquire to what extent, in a 
 given mental state, feeling is amalgamated 
 with thought. It is sufficient for our purpose 
 to go upon the distinction, broadly marked in 
 ever} r man's consciousness, between his reason 
 and his emotions. To indicate precisely what 
 we are inquiring after, let us take a concrete 
 illustration. The first appeal to a man of a 
 volcano in eruption would be to his feeling. 
 After the initial act of perception what he 
 would be immediately conscious of would be 
 sensations of wonder, admiration, awe, perhaps 
 terror. But if he were a scientific man, there 
 would be a supervening play of faculties upon 
 
Truth's Spiritual Equivalents. 21 
 
 this spectacle of a totally different order. He 
 would find himself speculating about the causes 
 of the phenomenon. What has happened to 
 his emotions has suggested a problem to his 
 intellect. Now the point we wish here to bring 
 out is that his investigation would proceed 
 upon the supposition that the feeling just raised 
 in him had somewhere a full objective equiva- 
 lent; that the awe, wonder, terror, in the 
 sphere of his emotions were a correct, though 
 as yet undeciphered, register of outside causes 
 and forces which it was for his intellect to 
 interpret. 
 
 We can proceed now immediately to the 
 application of this to the problems of religion, 
 and especially of New Testament religion. The 
 religious appeal, both to the race and to the 
 individual, is first of all to the emotions. The 
 cry of Faust, " Gefilhl ist alles" is a strained 
 expression of the fundamental truth on which 
 Schleiermacher built, that the heart, the moral 
 consciousness, is the true theologian. We turn 
 the pages of the Gospels and the Epistles to 
 find— what? Not an argument, a definite 
 appeal to the intellect, but an exhibition of 
 emotions and of acts consequent upon emotions. 
 Like our traveller in presence of the volcanic 
 
22 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 eruption, the first Christians, we find, are full 
 of an immense complex of feeling to which they 
 are here trying to give expression. The 
 traveller's phenomenon is the volcano ; their 
 phenomenon is Christ. The traveller, as a 
 scientific man, is convinced that the immense 
 impression on his senses has an exact equivalent 
 behind it of objective fact. And the question 
 of questions for us to-day is whether we are not 
 entitled to apply this same law to the impression 
 made on the first disciples by the Master of 
 whom they write. 
 
 Let it here be observed that the force of this 
 consideration is in no way lessened by the 
 criticism that the language in the New Testa- 
 ment which describes these impressions may 
 possibly be inexact or hyperbolical. We may 
 accept it as perfectly true that the titles given 
 there to Christ, such as the Son of God, the 
 Logos, the Messiah, were not coined by the 
 writers, but were already familiar to the Jewish 
 Messianic theology. When all this is granted 
 we have still this position remaining and to be 
 accounted for, that the life, words, and works 
 of Christ had produced in His followers an 
 emotional and moral condition — an awe, a 
 wonder, a love, a sense of holiness, a hatred 
 
Truth's Spiritual Equivalents. 23 
 
 of sin, a consciousness in them of spirit- 
 ually renovating power such as had never 
 before been reached in the human soul. The 
 question is, What were the dimensions of the 
 objective fact capable of producing this inner 
 effect ? Science demands that for every result 
 there must be an adequate cause. What was- 
 the cause adequate to this effect ? In this 
 conjunction it is really ludicrous to observe the 
 attempts of the Comtists to make Paul the- 
 effective author of Christianity. To exalt Paul., 
 and in the same breath to nullify his one life 
 testimony is surely a strange procedure. To 
 the really scientific student of Paul's utter- 
 ances, of those ever-repeated asseverances that 
 Christ is everything and himself nothing ; that 
 his whole inner life, so far as it is good, is a 
 derivation from Christ — the one question is, 
 What or who was He who could produce such 
 an impression upon such a mind ? 
 
 The argument which looms out of all this is 
 immensely strengthened when we remember 
 that these inward impressions are not an affair 
 of testimony merely, but have been a matter of 
 continuous experience in human history ever 
 since. The inward thrill which Paul and John 
 felt at the presence of Christ, and which they 
 
24 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 tried to translate into words, has been felt ever 
 since, and is felt to-daj. Into the histories of 
 Christ, as we have them, we may have to admit 
 that something legendary has crept. But in 
 the love and joy which He made to spring up 
 in human hearts, the sense of forgiveness, of 
 sonship, of inward sanctifying, there was 
 nothing legendary. There is nothing legendary 
 either about the same experiences which fill 
 the souls of men to-day wherever He is preached 
 and accepted. But what is the intellectual 
 equivalent of such a feeling as this ? Theology 
 has through all the ages been trying to find it 
 for us, and has not succeeded any too well. But 
 whatever the formula we accept as to the Per- 
 son of Christ, this at least the scientific as well 
 as the Christian consciousness demands, that it 
 shall not be lower than the effect. The 
 apostles and first witnesses felt that their soul 
 had been in contact with God, and they said so. 
 The living Church, though it may vary its 
 phraseology, repeats the affirmation. As Her- 
 mann puts it : " None of us can come as a 
 witness to the virgin birth ; one can only report 
 it. But that the spiritual life of Jesus has not 
 proceeded from the sinful race, but that in Him 
 God Himself has stepped into the history of 
 
Truth's Spiritual Equivalents. 25 
 
 the race, of that we can be witnesses, for this 
 knowledge forms a part of that which we our- 
 selves have experienced." 
 
 The value of this line of argument to the 
 central positions of Christianity will, perhaps, 
 not be immediately patent to us all. But in 
 the days of theological storm and stress that 
 are coming, when the tempest of New Testa- 
 ment criticism which already in Germany has 
 wrought such havoc upon earlier conceptions 
 has made its force fully felt in England, it will 
 be realised that here is faith's central and im- 
 pregnable defence. 
 
 And the suggestion we have here been 
 following, that the morally highest has its 
 equivalent in the intellectually truest, and 
 vice versa, will be found to apply with excellent 
 results in other of the problems of religion and 
 life. It may, for instance, be safely taken for 
 granted that whatever contradicts the soul's 
 highest moral witness is thereby proved intel- 
 lectually false. When, for example, the last 
 century listened to the scornful criticisms of 
 Diderot, Condorcet, and the other encyclo- 
 paedists on Christianity as " most absurd and 
 atrocious in its dogmas, most insipid, most 
 gloomy, most Gothic, most puerile, most un- 
 
26 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 sociable in its morals," and so on, the inward 
 sense of untutored Christians knew them 
 wrong, though it took another century for 
 the critically educated intellect to discover 
 precisely where the error lay. And conversely, 
 when from the supposedly orthodox side doc- 
 trines are presented to us as Christian which 
 the moral consciousness revolts against, we 
 may rest assured that, however venerable the 
 authority against which it reacts, the verdict 
 of feeling here will turn out to have its full 
 equivalent in the ultimate presentment of 
 the reason. When the Puritan Cartwright, 
 offering what he supposes is Scriptural con- 
 firmation of religious persecution, exclaims, 
 " If this be regarded as extreame and bloodie 
 I am glad to be so with the Holy Ghost," we 
 know he is wrong long before we discover the 
 arguments that prove it. But the feeling and 
 the arguments tally in the end. In general it 
 may be stated that whatever in the way of 
 teaching detracts from reverence, from love, 
 from self-sacrifice, on the one side, and on the 
 other limits liberty and deadens the instinct for 
 truth, is thereby, without further evidence, cer- 
 tified by the soul as false. The moral criterion 
 is linked indissolubly with the intellectual one. 
 
Truth's Spiritual Equivalents. 27 
 
 From the foregoing exposition a number of 
 results follow which we can here only in the 
 briefest way indicate. One is that the Church 
 which fails to produce the highest inward 
 states is proved thereby defective in its 
 teaching. Conversely, the higher spiritual 
 conditions, wherever we find them, are the 
 surest of all religious evidences. The inward 
 life of a saint points as certainly to an actually 
 existent spiritual world as the colouring of a 
 flower to the existence and potencies of light. 
 When, however, we say that the highest life 
 can only be nourished on the highest truth it 
 is not meant that the form in which the truth 
 is held is always necessarily the best. Some of 
 the noblest lives we have known have been 
 nourished on doctrines many of which, in the 
 form they were held, we should reject. But 
 the very fact that a doctrine has helped to 
 nourish a holy character is, if our analysis is 
 correct, proof that, however defective its form 
 or expression, its substance is true. Whatever 
 has helped to make men better is always intel- 
 lectually as well as morally verifiable. It was 
 precisely this argument, from the moral to the 
 intellectual, that in the second century turned 
 Justin Martyr from a pagan into a Christian, 
 
28 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 and that, in the nineteenth, brought Tolstoi 
 from sceptical pessimism to the optimism of 
 faith. The pagan philosopher tells us how, 
 studying the lives of the early Christians, he 
 realised that such moral effects must have fact 
 and truth for the cause, and the Eussian has 
 testified that when " I saw around me people 
 who, having this faith, derived from it an idea 
 of life that gave them strength to live and 
 strength to die in peace and in joy," the moral 
 logic of the spectacle subdued him. 
 
 The Church need never worry itself about 
 giving a complete intellectual expression to the 
 life that is in it. For what is the meaning of 
 the breakdowns of its past theologies? Is it 
 not simply that the truth hidden behind its 
 life is something vaster than any of its mental 
 forms can contain ? 
 
IV. 
 The Inwardness of Events. 
 
 Ours is the age of scientific analysis, and it 
 might seem at first sight as though the whole 
 of life had come under its sway. While our 
 chemistry resolves every substance into its 
 elements, our psychology proposes to unravel 
 every complex of the consciousness. We put 
 both our outer and our inner world into the 
 crucible, and are ready with an approved book 
 formula for each. There is, however, one life 
 element left out of this calculation. It is that 
 of events and of what they contain. Our 
 science of events is as yet that of the veriest 
 tyro. It is this fact which makes so much of 
 what is called history veritably ludicrous when 
 regarded as a statement of what actually is, or 
 has been. For our historian, in numberless 
 instances, offers us the mere surface and ragged 
 edges of a happening, as though this were the 
 whole of it. A Froissart pictures one battle 
 scene after another, or a Guicciardini describes 
 
30 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 the intrigues and wars of the Italian states 
 "without," as Montaigne remarks, "ever 
 referring any action to virtue, religion or con- 
 science," and they imagine that here they 
 have told us all. As a matter of fact, they 
 have told us almost nothing. It is only when 
 we begin to realise that every event, in addition 
 to its outer form, has an inward life of its own, 
 mystical, infinitely complex, whose full develop- 
 ment may take centuries and millenniums to 
 unfold, that we are in a position to study it 
 aright. 
 
 It is, indeed, when we properly consider 
 events and their inner significance that we are 
 most stirred with a sense of life's wonder and 
 mystery. The event is our predestination. 
 Men propose at times to construct their career 
 from within, as when a Jerome flies to his cell 
 in the desert, or a Descartes, in search of a 
 philosophy, passes three years in his chamber 
 without seeing a single friend, or so much as 
 going out for a walk. But wherever made, the 
 attempt is impossible. The recluse, as well as 
 the man of action, has to reckon with the in- 
 calculable that waits for him outside. These 
 innumerable fates that are in the path of every 
 human being, what is their meaning? They 
 
The Inwardness of Events. 31 
 
 bide their hour till the wayfarer they are in 
 search of appears, and then leap to meet him. 
 They know him by sight when he comes. It is 
 for him they are waiting. From all eternity 
 that event has been travelling to meet me at 
 this particular point and to deliver its message. 
 Its shock of contact becomes immediately a 
 part of my deepest life, for it is the something 
 outside myself that produces what it were 
 impossible for the unaided spirit to originate. 
 It and I were assuredly wedded in heaven 
 before the world was. 
 
 It is a great step in the interpretation of life 
 when we have discovered that all events are 
 ultimately spiritual. Their outside may seem 
 at the furthest remove from any such character, 
 but we have only to go deep enough to find that 
 this is the simple truth about them. The fall 
 of Jerusalem was to Jeremiah and his contem- 
 poraries just a bloody and horrible catastrophe. 
 Within it was contained the movement which 
 led up to the revelation of God as henceforth not 
 the tribal deity of Judah, but the one God and 
 Creator of all nations of the earth. The split 
 in the Papacy, which gave fourteenth century 
 Christendom two rival and mutually anathema- 
 tising Popes, was, to innumerable devout 
 
32 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Catholics, only a distressing quarrel and a 
 grievous religious scandal. At its centre the 
 spectacle held the germ of that appeal of the 
 Christian consciousness from fallible and rival 
 ecclesiastics to Christ Himself, which issued in 
 the Reformation. When shall we ever reach 
 the central inwardness of the event we call the 
 Crucifixion ? In itself, on the outside, it was a 
 sheer, grim fact, a hideous killing. It was not 
 speech, nor music, nor poetry, nor art, nor 
 philosophy, nor saving power. It was the doing 
 to death of a victim in the cruel Roman fashion > 
 And yet, as we press toward the inner recesses 
 of this fact, how much do we meet of art and 
 philosophy and devotion and saving power, and 
 all Divine things that have already come out of 
 it, and how much more, unreached as yet ? 
 remains behind ? 
 
 This conception of events, as all containing a 
 spiritual essence, which they will ultimately 
 yield, should ever be with us in our estimate of 
 the world's religious prospects. It is a 
 ludicrous misconception which regards man's 
 inward [ progress as dependent exclusively on 
 the avowed and professional religious agencies. 
 Guthenberg wore no cassock when puzzling 
 over his printing-press, and George Stephenson* 
 
The Inwabdness of Events. 33 
 
 in elaborating the idea of the locomotive, was 
 conscious of no specially theological inspiration. 
 Yet for their after influence in the develop- 
 ment of religion what purely ecclesiastical 
 procedure could we match against the invention 
 of printing and of the steam-engine? An 
 Egyptian excavator, stumbling some fine 
 morning upon a Greek manuscript, say an 
 Ur-evangelium of the first century, might upset 
 for ever thereby the theological doubtings of a 
 thousand years. Plainly the pulpit is not the 
 only religious teacher. The roughest, rudest 
 block of fact that lies across our path, giving 
 no hint at first of aught in itself but what is 
 purely material, may suddenly open, and from 
 its store of hidden contents pour out un- 
 dreamed-of spiritual treasures. Our study of 
 missions, to be complete, must take a far wider 
 scope than is usual. It must not end with 
 biographies. Events are evangelists of the 
 first order. 
 
 There is this advantage about events con- 
 sidered as teachers, that they are so entirely 
 honest and trustworthy. Unlike so many of 
 our religious instructors, they carry no top 
 hamper of tradition, and they never worry us 
 with preconceived theories. They neither lie 
 
34 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 nor natter, but bring us a lesson crammed with 
 reality, and bid us make what we can of it. 
 And yet here is the mystery. Out of what 
 outwardly is the same thing none of us gets the 
 «ame result. None of us will find this same 
 thing to be the same. And for the reason that 
 what it teaches is precisely according to what 
 we are able to learn. Events yield their 
 -essence in proportion to the quality and char- 
 acter of the being in contact with them. They 
 are thus, in a sense, the looking-glass in 
 which we behold ourselves. " If you journey 
 to the end of the world," says a modern mystic, 
 "none but yourself shall you meet on the 
 highway of fate." 
 
 When we consider the inconceivable numbers 
 of events that sweep across our life pathway, 
 their bewildering variety, their unexpectedness, 
 their often sinister and even terrible aspect, we 
 might easily be led to think that on their side, at 
 least, we were in a world of chance, where was 
 no complete or benign supervision. Events seem 
 so often to be destroyers rather than teachers. 
 A deeper study of them should reassure us. 
 For it will show that in their seeming wildest 
 aberrations they are subject to a spiritual law, 
 the same which rules in our own breasts. It 
 
The Inwardness op Events, 35 
 
 is, indeed, by their constant attrition upon our 
 life that the letters of this law are rubbed into 
 distinctness. It is profoundly interesting to 
 observe at how early a period the world gained 
 a perception of this. The ancient doctrine of 
 fate was a much higher one than we are' apt to 
 imagine. In the teaching of Heraclitus, and 
 also of Plato, that fate was the general reason 
 which runs through the whole nature of the 
 universe, and in that of Chrysippus, who speaks 
 of fate as a spiritual power which disposed 
 the world in order, we have an idea, however 
 imperfect, of the Divine purpose that is em- 
 bedded in events. A clearer revelation has 
 assured us that their source and end are the 
 same as the source and end of the highest 
 aspirations of the soul. 
 
 To discover and be firmly convinced of this 
 higher law underlying events is, perhaps, the 
 greatest result of the education through which 
 they put us. To be quite assured that the 
 event, however grisly its shape, can never hurt 
 you provided you are faithful to the spiritual 
 law ; that, with this condition observed, it will, 
 in fact, infallibly lift you a point higher in the 
 scale of life, is practically the winning of the 
 battle. This is where that stout New England 
 
36 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Puritan stood who, on a certain " Dark Day," 
 when it was supposed that the end of the world 
 had come, and the assembly of which he was a 
 member was about to be adjourned, quietly 
 observed : " If this be the Day of Judgment I 
 prefer to be found at the post of duty ; if it be- 
 not, there is no reason for an adjournment." 
 And what a testimony on this point is that 
 word of the dying Scaliger, given as the fruit 
 of his life experience, to his disciple Heinsius i 
 u Never do aught against thy inward conviction 
 for the sake of advancement. Whatsoever is 
 in thee is God's alone." 
 
 How intimately related the world of events is 
 to the world of spiritual law is, perhaps, even 
 still more vividly exhibited in the happenings 
 to those who neglect or defy that law. It is 
 impossible here to mistake the religious char- 
 acter of events. They become moral avengers ► 
 Schiller's dictum that " the world's history i& 
 the world's judgment," is a simple statement 
 of the fact. " The deed," says the Indian pro- 
 verb, " does not perish." Where it is an ilL 
 deed it lives to track down the evil-doer.. 
 Eugene Arain murders Daniel Clark, and buries 
 the crime under fourteen following years of 
 intellectual activity. He becomes famous as a. 
 
The Inwardness of Events. 37 
 
 philologist, making his name known as the dis- 
 coverer of a European affinity in Celtic roots. 
 But his deed, deep buried, is not dead. It 
 awakes and delivers its blow, and our philologist 
 gets hanged as a murderer. Innumerable mur- 
 derers have escaped hanging, but they can no 
 more get away from their deed and its full 
 results than the earth can get away from the 
 sun. 
 
 The greatest evidence, perhaps, of the 
 grandeur and infinite reach of the human 
 destinies lies in this conscious exposure of the 
 soul to the momentous events that await it. 
 And especially those darker events which cast 
 so chill a shadow before them. It may be that, 
 as Livy says, " Segnius homines bona quam mala 
 sentiunt " : men have a keener sense of ill than 
 of good. But what they feel so keenly as ill 
 bears in itself a message that it is not the end. 
 That deep word of Mrs. Browning, " But pain 
 is not the fruit of pain," verifies itself. No, not 
 pain, but something far other shall be the fruit 
 of what we here suffer. Shall we not say, 
 indeed, with a German writer of to-day : 
 " Everything inferior is a higher in the making ; 
 everything hateful a coming beautiful, every- 
 thing evil a coming good"? An inspired 
 
38 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 apostle has given us the true inwardness of 
 events, in the declaration that the present pain 
 shall be swallowed up in the coming glory, and 
 that no one of all the conceivable happenings 
 in heaven or on earth can separate the people 
 of God from the love of God. 
 
V. 
 The Sins of Saints. 
 
 There is a saying reported of St. Teresa that 
 " she saw one good thing in the world, namely, 
 that it would not condone the faults of saints, 
 and that the power of its murmurs made them 
 the more perfect." The vivacious Spanish lady 
 was here repeating one of the commonplaces 
 of morals. She recounts the penalty which in 
 every age visits those who profess a higher 
 mode of living than that of their neighbours. 
 Their very virtues are a danger. There is na 
 such advertisement for a black spot as a white 
 background. A reputable man may go on 
 doing a thousand good things without attract- 
 ing attention. Let him do one bad thing and 
 the world will ring with it. And if the sins 
 are not there they will be invented. If we 
 judged the early Christians by the accounts of 
 their enemies we should think them a set of 
 scoundrels. According to these stories, they 
 were atheists and child murderers; their 
 
40 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 religious services were the occasion of nameless 
 debauchery. Justin Martyr, in a striking 
 passage tells how, in his heathen days, he had 
 listened to these slanders against Christians 
 until an investigation of their actual character 
 showed him " it was impossible they could be 
 living in wicked self-indulgence." 
 
 But the topic we are discussing is by no 
 means summed up in observations of this kind. 
 The " sins of saints " are not all inventions, nor 
 even exceptions. There are grave faults attach- 
 ing to some forms of the religious temperament 
 against which all who seek a sane and whole- 
 some way of living need to be on their guard. 
 We have scarcely yet waked to the significance 
 of the fact that Christ's severest criticisms were 
 directed against this very type of character. 
 The Pharisees were the Puritans of their time. 
 Anyone inquiring after the saints then in 
 vogue in Jewish society would have been 
 directed to their ranks. The attitude of Jesus 
 towards them, especially when compared with 
 His attitude to less considered classes outside, is 
 a revelation on our subject of the highest kind. 
 It shows us how far, in the Supreme Teacher's 
 estimate, is any one kind of temperament, even 
 the most religiously attractive, from represent- 
 
The Sins of Saints. 41 
 
 ang the wholeness of humanity ; how easy it is 
 to give to certain spiritual qualities a wholly 
 false character value. It was a long experience 
 of .Richard Baxter, and one, let us remember, 
 obtained amongst the severest types of religion, 
 which led him in his old age to say : " I see 
 that good men are not so good as I once thought 
 they were, and find that few men are as bad as 
 their enemies imagine." 
 
 But when we talk of the sins of saints we 
 must first of all define, — What are sins, and 
 what are saints ? Both words represent a con- 
 tinuous development of ethical standard. We 
 speak of the Old Testament " saints," and the 
 word is, in respect to them, not at all a misnomer. 
 Nevertheless, the man in the street of to-day, 
 with no pretension to sanctity, would not dare 
 to imitate their conduct. Did he attempt it he 
 would find himself in gaol within a week. 
 David was a true spiritual leader, but his actions, 
 judged by our standard, would fit him for Port- 
 land rather than the pulpit of St. Paul's. It is 
 absurd to judge of religious characters apart 
 from the moral level of their own time. Even 
 Christianity, with all its lustre of spiritual 
 revelation, has had to wait for, and to work 
 with, the tardy evolution of conscience age after 
 
42 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 age. This slow and universal movement has 
 put the common man of to-day in important 
 respects far above the saints of even Christian 
 centuries. And there is no room for a sneer 
 in this. When we read of Augustine advo- 
 cating religious persecution, of Calvin advising 
 our protector Somerset "to punish well by 
 the sword Catholics and fanatic gospellers," 
 and especially to avoid moderation, and a 
 saintly Fenelon approving the dragonnades, 
 there is here no argument against sainthood,, 
 nor against those men as though they were 
 mere pretenders to it. All that such illustra- 
 tions show is, that the noblest personalities 
 obey the law of their environments. The light 
 in them, showing clear and full on certain sides, 
 is on others merged in the common conscious- 
 ness of the time. 
 
 It is not along such lines that the subject is 
 really reached. No enlightenment comes, on 
 this or any other theme, from the process of 
 picking holes in the coats of jgreat men of the 
 past, doing their best under barbarous condi- 
 tions. The really important study here is as 
 to the special dangers of what may be called 
 the spiritual temperament. Religion in its 
 wholeness is, of course, something far other 
 
The Sins of Saints. 43 
 
 than a temperament. There are, neverthe- 
 less, departments of its expression for which 
 certain temperaments seem specially fitted, 
 and the possessors of these are almost certain 
 to be chosen as guides and leaders. There are 
 varieties here, widely differing', and an accur- 
 ate analysis would have to take in a large 
 gradation of subtle shadings. Speaking 
 broadly, however, there are two well-marked 
 forms of religious character, each wielding 
 immense power, each capable of noble service, 
 but open both of them to dangerous and even 
 deadly defects. We may call them, respec- 
 tively, the aesthetic and the ascetic. 
 
 The former, which in certain varieties might 
 perhaps be even better described as the 
 emotional, is singularly open to impression. 
 Delicately strung, with an artist's soul for 
 beauty, vibrating to life's subtlest overtones, 
 with an intense sense of the awe and mystery 
 of life, it is made for the religion of feeling. 
 Its faith at the fullest is a rapture, an ecstasy. 
 It is an epicureanism of the higher sensations. 
 It beholds visions, it listens inwardly to 
 melodies which no mortal music ever made, 
 and when it comes to expression, there are none 
 can speak so pleadingly, so persuasively. Men 
 
44 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 listen as to angel voices. But all this is at a 
 price. Humanity would have got on badly 
 enough for its religion without this tempera- 
 ment, but still worse had it been the only one. 
 As if to teach the lesson of the human 
 solidarity, the lesson that the whole world of 
 us, and no one individual or type, is the true 
 man, we find this character full of weaknesses 
 and leaning always heavily upon others. 
 
 There have been, indeed, souls of this order, 
 with a beautiful spiritual expression, and yet 
 30 halting on other sides that they could not 
 •even preserve a decent morality. No more 
 truly spiritual mind or greater spiritual teacher 
 existed in the England of his time than Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge, but, on the side of conduct, 
 what, to say the least, a poverty-stricken 
 record ! And in the next generation we have 
 poor Hartley Coleridge, with religious instincts, 
 fully as deep and keen, and the speech of an 
 angel, yet mingled with animal outbursts which 
 led him periodically to the sty ! The genius 
 for recognising spiritual beauty has, indeed, 
 been too often weighted with an over-master- 
 ing passion for the sensuous. Our antinomian 
 has soared so high as to get quite out of sight 
 of the Ten Commandments. Within Chateau- 
 
The Sins of Saints. 45- 
 
 briand, says a modern critic, was an obscene 
 Chateaubriand, and the same was true of 
 Lamartine. Often enough the prophet of this 
 order, after the moments of his highest exalta- 
 tion, finds himself at closest grips with the 
 devil. 
 
 Apart, however, from such open lapses, 
 there are other weaknesses of the emotional 
 religious temperament in much need of caudid 
 treatment, but which we cannot stop even to> 
 name. One only may we find room for in 
 passing, and that is its frequent lack of sheer 
 truthfulness. That defect in the religious 
 minds of former ages is giving us no end of 
 trouble to-day. If only the makers of church 
 ehronicles had had the grace to observe accur- 
 ately and record faithfully ! If only Pascal's 
 maxim that "the first of Christian truths is 
 that truth should be loved above all " could 
 have been inscribed on the wall of every theo- 
 logian's study ! As it is we have the era of 
 pious frauds, a Saint Bonaventura stuffing his* 
 life of another saint with impossible legends, 
 and a Ritualist Oxford don of the nineteenth 
 century emitting the sentiment, " Make your- 
 selves clear that you are justified in deception 
 and then lie like a trooper ! " Before we have 
 
46 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 got much further in the twentieth century it 
 is to be hoped we shall have made up our minds 
 that religion shall at least speak the truth. 
 
 We have space in closing for the barest 
 mention of that other variety of the religious 
 temperament — the ascetic — and of the moral 
 defects which beset it. This character, of 
 which every age produces specimens, with its 
 superb reaction against the slothful indulgence 
 of the masses, develops often into a potent and 
 magnificent spiritual leadership. Founding 
 itself on a heroic mysticism that discerns from 
 the beginning the essential emptiness of 
 material and sensuous pleasures, it presses on 
 behind the veil to find its joy in spiritual 
 reality. Ifc is enamoured of renunciation, and 
 finds a marvellous liberty in following that 
 austere road which St. John of the Cross 
 indicates in his motto: "Whatever you find 
 pleasant to soul or body, abandon ; whatsoever 
 is painful, embrace it." Men of this tempera- 
 ment—and Pusey was a conspicuous example — 
 have a sense of sin and shortcoming which 
 causes them at times the keenest anguish. 
 Yet, strangely enough, the defect most con- 
 spicuous in them is one of which they never 
 think of accusing themselves. They have 
 
The Sins op Saints. 47 
 
 found an inner world which is good and 
 glorious, but they have made the prodigious 
 mistake of declaring the world they have 
 renounced to be intrinsically bad. It is not 
 so, and that they have failed to see its good- 
 ness and enjoyableness is, if they only knew 
 it, a fault far greater than those they deplore. 
 
 It is time we were done with the pseudo- 
 Christianity whose leading characteristic is the 
 exhalation of gloom. There is no grace in this 
 November fog. Sourness is a crime of Use 
 humanite. To what, O my bilious brother, do 
 you propose to convert the world? To your 
 own grimness? It were hardly an improve- 
 ment. The world wants saving into soundness 
 and light, and it shows a healthy discrimina- 
 tion in refusing the overtures of morbidity 
 and darkness. When the Church thoroughly 
 understands this it will mend some of its ways. 
 In teaching the higher life of the invisible, it 
 will show always its appreciation of that fair 
 world of the seen which is the other's vestibule. 
 It will teach that man belongs to the two, and 
 may be a proficient in both. It was said of 
 Sir Walter Scott that he enjoyed more in 
 twenty-four hours than other men did in a 
 week. It should be counted to him as a grace. 
 
48 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 The man who enjoys helps others to enjoy* 
 He cannot keep his sunshine to himself. It is- 
 here that, turning from the imperfections of 
 its followers, we see the Divine wholeness of 
 the Master-life. A Prophet of the invisible, 
 Christ knew and loved the seen. The world of 
 birds and flowers, of happy sunshine and 
 human fellowships, was also His world. A 
 Messenger from the Centre, He dwelt with 
 gladness in the outer court, knowing it also 
 was a part of the Father's house. 
 
VI. 
 The World's Beauty. 
 
 In the glowing summer days we are Nature's 
 willing thralls. She invites us into her world 
 to come and play. With the glee of children, 
 we accept her invitation, and wander entranced 
 in her realm of enchantments. To us all, 
 prince or peasant, she offers royal entertain- 
 ment. We step out of doors and are at once 
 encircled by a more than regal pomp. She 
 feasts us with beauty. No need to travel a 
 thousand miles for it ; it is here at hand. Our 
 own island is packed with loveliness. We 
 wander over four continents to discover we had 
 left the best behind us. And this festival has 
 been repeating itself without fail through 
 thousands of years. We talk of the dark ages, 
 but it is pleasant to remember that through 
 them all Nature was giving our ancestors such 
 good times. Chaucer's springs and summers 
 were just as intoxicating as ours. The birds 
 sang as merrily, the wild flowers were as sweet, 
 
 4 
 
£0 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the leaf of elm and oak was as green and 
 comely, the streams were as clear, the skies as 
 blue as in this year of grace. And it was good 
 to be alive. 
 
 Has it ever occurred to us to investigate the 
 meaning of the world's beauty ? How comes it 
 that Nature everywhere, whether in the wing of 
 insect, or the clothing of the forest, or the blue 
 concave above, or the clear depths of the river, or 
 the craggy summit of the mountain, shapes her- 
 self to this loveliness, this grandeur? Why do 
 we call a thing beautiful ? What is beauty ? 
 Here we are upon questions that go deep. In 
 search of answers we find ourselves thrown 
 straight back upon the soul and its structure. 
 For the beautiful is evidently a spiritual per- 
 ception. Put a horse in front of our noblest 
 prospect and it sees nothing of what we mean 
 by the word. And the perception is one that 
 unfolds only gradually in man himself. The 
 savage has little sense of it. It has taken ages 
 to develop this special response. And yet it 
 lies in the depth of every soul, and in propor- 
 tion as that soul moves towards its typal 
 perfection does the sentiment find amplitude 
 and volume of expression. 
 
 But what, we may again ask, is this response ? 
 
The World's Beauty. 51 
 
 What is contained in our idea of beauty ? On 
 this subject philosophers and scientists have 
 discoursed abundantly from varying standpoints. 
 Materialists, who have felt themselves here put 
 on their mettle, have discussed it as an affair 
 of curves, surfaces and sensory impressions. 
 Schopenhauer has treated it with a more than 
 usual exaggeration and incoherence of statement. 
 When all has been said it remains that the 
 recognition of beauty by the mind can be 
 explained satisfactorily in only one way. The 
 term we have just used is in itself the key. 
 Our feeling here is a re-cognition, that is a re- 
 knowing, a reminder of what the soul already 
 knows, of what is native to its realm. Schell- 
 ing is on the track of all this when he treats 
 of the external world as another expression of 
 the same eternal Life that finds itself in our 
 consciousness. The beauty of Nature is the work 
 of a supreme Artist whose fundamental ideas 
 are reproduced, however faintly, in our own. 
 Without such a relationship to begin with there 
 could be no possible recognition of beauty on 
 our part. A painter who exhibited his picture 
 would be astonished to learn that the public 
 were admiring it on the strength of ideas 
 entirely foreign to any he had himself put into 
 
52 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 it. The very basis of our comprehension, not to 
 say appreciation, of a picture's merit lies in the 
 fellowship of our feeling with that of the artist. 
 And the law which obtains in the Academy rules t 
 so far as we can see, through all the worlds. 
 
 But we have not nearly exhausted the pro- 
 blems opened by this theme. Another, and a 
 by no means simple one, comes up when we 
 touch the relation of beauty to morality. We 
 remember once propounding it to a couple of 
 Anglican clergymen, in whose company we were 
 watching a gorgeous sunset on the Jungfrau. 
 "Is there any link between this splendour and 
 the beauty of holiness ? Is there any natural 
 affinity between the grace of sainthood and the 
 grace of external form ? " The question seemed 
 new to them, and to be hardly a serious one. 
 There was an excuse for this attitude, for at 
 first sight the subjects seem scarcely com- 
 pressible into the same category. And further 
 observation appears to add positive reasons 
 against any such alliance. The sense for 
 external loveliness has had apparently no con- 
 nection with high moral character. The ages 
 in which it has been most conspicuous, as that 
 of the Greeks under Pericles, and of the 
 Eenaissance in Italy, were conspicuous, we 
 
The World's Beauty. 53 
 
 are told, for their dissoluteness. The artist 
 world has been generally a Bohemian world. 
 
 But statements of this kind need to be taken 
 with a certain reservation. When we hear 
 these sweeping verdicts upon certain classes 
 and periods, we are reminded of Talleyrand's 
 saying : " II n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi 
 facilement que les faits." As to the Italian 
 Kenaissance, let us remember it produced a 
 remarkable literature devoted to the idealisa- 
 tion of love and the redemption of it from the 
 grosser elements. Nor were all its artists 
 libertines. It produced a Michael Angelo as 
 well as a Benvenuto Cellini. The designer of 
 St. Peter's, the painter of the Sistine Chapel, 
 the writer of the sonnets had artist enough in 
 him for half a dozen ordinary reputations. 
 And yet it is he who could say — we have it in 
 one of his letters to his father — " It is enough 
 to have bread and to live in the faith of Christ, 
 even as I do here, for I live humbly, neither do 
 I care for the life or honours of this world." 
 No man in these later ages has had a mind 
 more teeming with images of immortal beauty 
 than our own Milton, but " his soul was like a 
 star and dwelt apart." Our own times have 
 seen a Wordsworth, a Ruskin, a Tennyson, 
 
54 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 natures all of them in which the sense of 
 beauty both in Nature and in art reached its 
 highest expression, and all of whom found in 
 it an immediate ally of spiritual perfection. 
 And when we mention the contrary instances, 
 what do they prove? Not the immorality, 
 assuredly, of these men's sense of form, but the 
 imperfect development of their other senses. 
 Their report of one portion of God's Palace 
 Beautiful is not the less accurate that they saw 
 not the whole of it. That a given musician is a 
 rake is no evidence that the laws of music which 
 he obeys are not Divine. He has eyes only 
 for a piece of Heaven's law, not its wholeness. 
 The whole argument here, in fact, seems summed 
 in the nature of Christ. If the Gospels speak 
 truly there was never a nature that thrilled 
 more exquisitely to the world's beauty. Yet 
 never nature set forth so surely God's holiness. 
 The more comprehensively the subject is 
 studied the more sure will become our convic- 
 tion that there is in all beauty an essential 
 unity of idea whose root is in God. The gran- 
 deur of great deeds, of great characters, appeals 
 to the same faculty in us, and stirs the same 
 emotions as the grandeur of the mountains or 
 of the sea. If we could realise it as possible 
 
The World's Beauty. 55 
 
 that a pure soul could take form, we feel 
 instinctively that the form would be beautiful. 
 How intimate the alliance is shown by the 
 workings of character upon feature. The 
 nobler spiritual instincts mould the flesh into 
 curves of greatness, suffuse it with a glow of 
 ethereal brightness. As if to put its final seal 
 upon this view of things, the Bible gives us in 
 the Apocalypse a series of magnificent con- 
 ceptions, in which righteousness is clothed withy 
 and set in the midst of, the utmost perfection 
 of external splendour. Often separated and 
 far removed from each other in the earthly 
 struggle, the two elements are here exhibited 
 in their true and everlasting union. 
 
 The topic as it thus opens is far more than a 
 merely speculative one. If we admit what has 
 here been advanced we must admit with it some 
 important practical consequences. For instance, 
 the inculcation of righteousness, the preaching 
 of God's Kingdom, should ever link itself with 
 the soul's innate sense of beauty. The ugly 
 may everywhere be left to the devil as his 
 monopoly. It is curious to note here how the 
 inmost in man has claimed and gained its rights 
 in even the most adverse circumstances. In the 
 barest conventicle and in what has seemed the 
 
56 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 most ostentatious absence of form, wherever 
 men have been attracted and impressed, it will 
 be found that they have been reached and held 
 by their sense of the beautiful. It was the 
 music of the pleading voice, or the glowing 
 splendour of the imagery, or the melodious 
 rhythm of the words, or, deeper even than these , 
 the feeling that a pure, beautiful soul was here 
 revealing itself, which drew them. Other 
 attachments may come later, but these first. 
 The Divine words of Scripture double their 
 power upon us when set to great music. " He 
 shall feed His flock like a Shepherd," gets to 
 the very roots as it sings through us in Handel's 
 strains. How perverse, in view of all this, the 
 avoidance of beauty in our worship as though it 
 were a snare ! To offer a drab service to Him 
 who, outside our conventicle, is filling heaven 
 and earth with the splendour of His handi- 
 work ! It were an appropriate question for 
 Christian conferences how far the cultivated 
 youth of our generation have been alienated by 
 misconceptions of this sort, and what steps can 
 be taken in the opposite direction to recover the 
 lost ground. The business of the Christian 
 persuader is, as a French moralist has said, 
 " to make truth lovely." 
 
The World's Beauty. 57 
 
 But the subject has a wider bearing than its 
 application to Sunday and to Church worship. 
 Our municipal life is as yet only at its begin- 
 ning. There are a hundred different sides 
 along which it has to develop, but one of the 
 greatest and most fruitful will be in its educa- 
 tion and satisfaction of the public sense of the 
 beautiful. The mass of English people are 
 children here where the ancient Greeks were 
 grown men. One wonders what a cultivated 
 Athenian would have thought of our black 
 country ! In coming generations our towns 
 will be, not an outrage upon Nature, but a 
 blend with her, a heightening through art of 
 her primitive graces. And the beauty cultivated 
 will be that which appeals not only to the eye, 
 but to the ear also. Why can we not ha^e in 
 England what one has so often met on the 
 Continent, where, wandering through some old- 
 world city, the ear has suddenly been entranced 
 by delicious choral music, rendered by a mass 
 of trained citizen voices, while a crowd of their 
 fellow townsmen, silent, absorbed, drink in the 
 charmed notes ? We shall be making an 
 approach to the municipal ideal when the 
 whole civic atmosphere is so penetrated with 
 high and ennobling influences, with such 
 
58 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 elements of art and refinement, that the 
 meanest citizen, by the mere fact of mingling 
 with it, will find his own life immeasurably 
 enriched. In these nobler communities of the 
 future there will be no room for the antithesis 
 which Plutarch draws between the different 
 Athenian administrators: " Themis tocles, Cimon 
 and Pericles filled the city with magnificent 
 buildings, . . . but virtue was the only 
 object that Aristides had in view." It will be 
 better than this when virtue blossoms into 
 beauty as the flower springs from and beautifies 
 the tree. 
 
 To sum up. The belief in beauty is part of 
 our belief in God. The Universe strives after 
 it as the realisation of His idea. Ugliness is to 
 be striven against as a frustration of Heaven's 
 plan. Beauty of character and beauty of form 
 are essentially allied, and should be striven for 
 as elements in the wholeness of life. Our com- 
 munal life should be an intimate, harmonious 
 blend of the spiritual and the material, each 
 recognised as a portion of God's holiness. 
 Their true union will produce a social structure 
 whose enduring splendour shall be a reflex 
 of the holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem which 
 John saw descending out of heaven from God. 
 
VII. 
 Of Face Architecture. 
 
 The interest in face architecture is, in certain 
 circles, centred almost exclusively in one 
 department of it, that of decoration. From 
 " smart society " emerge from time to time 
 hints of the ever deepening- mysteries of the 
 lady's dressing-table. Fortune awaits the pro- 
 ducer of a successful wash or dye or powder. 
 There are face artists who specialise upon the 
 lip, the nose, the eye, the eyebrow. There is, 
 indeed, nothing new in this. The story is as 
 old as the world. Montaigne gives us astonish- 
 ing stories of the tortures undergone by ladies 
 of his time in the pursuit of beauty. There was 
 one at Paris who, " to get new skin, endured 
 having her face flayed." He adds : " I have seen 
 some swallow gravel, ashes, coals, dust, tallow, 
 candles, only to get a pale, bleak colour." 
 Things were as bad evidently in the classic 
 times. Tibullus has some amusing lines on the 
 expedients of the Eoman ladies for getting rid 
 
•60 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 of grey hairs and for the securing of fresh com- 
 plexions. And ancient Egypt and antique 
 Babylon were in these respects no whit better. 
 
 Outside the circle of beauties, professional 
 and otherwise, there are other forms of face 
 architecture, still of the external and decorative 
 order, that are not without interest. It is a 
 marvellous gift, which only a fool would despise, 
 that enables a Macready or an Irving to repro- 
 duce the living aspect of a Richard III., to look 
 on us with the face of Hamlet, to make hate 
 and love, ferocity and magnanimity, humour 
 and grief reveal themselves successively 
 in glance and feature. Great mimicry has its 
 place and function. But it is horrible out of 
 place. Cowper has drawn the picture of the 
 pulpit poseur " who mounts the rostrum with a 
 skip," and there scans and arranges hair and 
 feature with a pocket glass. Goethe deals this 
 performer an even heavier blow when, in the 
 conversation between Wagner and Faust, to 
 the former's remark, " A preacher has a good 
 deal to learn from the actor," Faust replies, 
 * f Yes, when the preacher is simply an actor 
 himself." There are, however, face arrange- 
 ments, still only in the region of mere feature 
 drill, which we regard with a kindlier feeling. 
 
Of Face Architecture. 61 
 
 What a moving passage that where Cicero 
 describes the "death etiquette " of the gladi- 
 ator ! " What gladiator, however mediocre,, 
 ever groans ? Who of them ever changes 
 countenance ? Which of them, when down, 
 ready to be despatched, as much as draws back 
 his neck from the stroke ? " It is the demean- 
 our sought by the modern army officer, who in 
 the service books is directed, when his men are 
 under fire, to keep at the front with an uncon- 
 cerned air, and if himself struck to fall with as- 
 little noise as possible. A pose this, if you will,, 
 but one worthy of a man. 
 
 But these, after all, are only surface views on 
 the subject of face architecture. It is astonish- 
 ing, considering the interest people have in such 
 phases of it, that they do not go a little deeper. 
 For we are not yet arrived at the real face 
 artists. To know them and their work is to 
 know the central powers in heaven and earth. 
 The human face, in any approach of it to the 
 ideal, is the greatest creation of time. That 
 such a result should have been brought out of 
 man's prehistoric and animal ancestry over- 
 whelms us with the thought of the measureless 
 duration, the infinite patience, the unswerving 
 continuity of Nature's process. Everything^ 
 
62 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 conceivable of beauty and power is summed up 
 for us in a great face. Plato saw there the 
 consummation of the moral and the physical. 
 " All the greatest painting," says Ruskin, " is 
 of the human face." The true artist always 
 knows this, and makes the rest of his canvas 
 an accessory to those two or three inches at the 
 centre where a living soul looks on us through 
 luminous eyes. In a picture such as that of 
 " Christ leaving the Pretorium" we study in 
 succession the steps, the building, the crowd, 
 the soldiers as all leading us onward to the 
 central interest — that thorn- crowned face, 
 marred and worn, on which we could gaze for 
 ever. 
 
 What builds the face? Environment, of 
 course, for one thing. The degree of latitude 
 in which a man finds himself not only paints 
 his complexion, but alters the ground-plan 
 of his features. America and Australia are 
 developing each a distinct expression of their 
 own. Climate, soil, food and occupation among 
 them have wrought the race physiognomy 
 which separates Turanian from Semite and 
 Aryan from Negro. Buckle and his school 
 have sought to make this the whole explana- 
 tion. Give them these factors and they will 
 
Of Face Architecture. 63 
 
 manufacture our whole man for us, face and 
 all. But their easy induction does not satisfy 
 the deeper thought of to-day. Humanity, it is 
 being discovered, cannot be reckoned up in 
 terms of a rule-of -three sum. We have not 
 yet reached our real face-builder. 
 
 As we traverse that unrivalled picture-gallery 
 the open street, and study what we find there, 
 we get the certainty that what has made the 
 faces here is not so much the force without as 
 the force within. We are in the presence of 
 spirits who are the true artists of feature. 
 Oharles Kingsley has somewhere a quaint 
 sentence in which he sj)eaks of the soul secret- 
 ing the body as a crustacean secretes its shell. 
 It exaggerates, doubtless, but the truth lies on 
 that line. If we try to be materialists on this 
 point, our very language turns upon us. What 
 do we mean when we speak of " a pure face " ? 
 Nothing that can be expressed in terms of flesh 
 and blood. What was it that Charles Lamb 
 saw on the countenances of the Quaker ladies 
 on their way to the Bishopsgate meeting, making 
 them "as troops of shining ones"? Very 
 much, we suppose, like the something that 
 people saw on the face of St. Vincent de Paul, 
 and which transfigured features that were in 
 
64 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 themselves homely to ugliness. It was the 
 gleam of the supernatural in man, the* 
 shining through mortal flesh of a sun behind 
 the sun. 
 
 This is the highest beauty of the world* 
 There are faces that are gospels, and there is 
 only one way of making them. They shine 
 along the course of Christian history as no- 
 where else. It was such a face as looked upon 
 England at the close of the fourteenth century 
 from over the emaciated form of John Wycliffe. 
 We do not wonder that, as his disciple, John 
 Thorpe, says^ " Very many of the chief men of 
 this kingdom frequently held counsel with him, 
 were devotedly attached to him, and guided 
 themselves by his manner of life." There was 
 a sunshine here, they realised, which savoured 
 of another summer than England's June could 
 create. It has been so with all the great souls. 
 To look at these faces people have made 
 pilgrimages and endured all manner of priva- 
 tions. We feel what throbbed in the heart of 
 Peter the Yenerable when, writing to Bernard, 
 he declares : "If it were permitted to me, and 
 if God willed it, I should prefer to live with 
 you and be attached to you by an indissoluble 
 tie, than to be first among mortals and to sit 
 
Of Face Architecture. 
 
 on a throne." We do not know what the 
 features were of Macrina, the sister of Basil, 
 and of Gregory of Nyssa. But we know the 
 kind of light that shone through them when we 
 read what they say of her, how she woke the 
 one " as out of a deep sleep to the true light of 
 the Gospel/' and excited in the other an affec- 
 tion so deep that, as he tells us, " when they 
 had buried her body he kissed the earth of her 
 grave." 
 
 It is this mystery of the face and what is 
 behind it, that has set Christian minds in every 
 age wondering what were the lines of that 
 Galilean countenance, the radiance from which 
 has made another and a higher daylight for the 
 world. Beneath the dust that covers old-world 
 cities are lying, perhaps, precious memorials 
 that may yet be unearthed. Who knows that 
 we may not yet recover the statue of Christ 
 that Eusebius saw at Csesarea Philippi, or some 
 of those portraits of the Master which he had 
 also seen? Which tradition of the face was 
 the true one, that followed by Justin Martyr, 
 by Clement of Alexandria and by Tertullian, 
 which spoke of it as " without form or comeli- 
 ness " ; or that of Jerome and Augustine, which 
 declared it divinely beautiful ? It may be both 
 
•66 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 are true. We are sure, at least, of the latter. 
 With a possible homeliness, or even rugged- 
 ness, of outline there shone through a trans- 
 figuring splendour which awed and fascinated. 
 Christ's " Follow Me " conquered men not 
 so much by the words as bj the look that 
 accompanied. 
 
 When we now ask again how the great faces 
 arise we seem nearer the answer. They are 
 reflections of faces that belong to another 
 world. Behind the fleshly face is the soul's 
 face. And the soul's face is a great spiritual 
 absorbent. As plants spread their surface to 
 the sun and drink in the rays that beat upon 
 them, transforming all into life and beauty, so 
 in these natures the spiritual upper surface 
 along its whole length and breadth, is open to 
 the impact of pulsations emanating incessantly 
 from the Centre by which all souls live. And 
 not one of these pulsations is lost. It is woven 
 into the structure of the soul and reflected in 
 its expression. The face becomes thus a 
 register of the life we are living. It is the 
 book in which our history is written, a faithful 
 record, with no item omitted, and which, to eyes 
 deeply enough initiated, can be read clear from 
 end to end. 
 
Of Face Architecture. 67 
 
 A topic like this teems with practical lessons. 
 The Church should be a great face builder. It 
 has been in the past, but it needs to study its 
 models afresh. Historical Christianity has 
 developed face types that were never in the 
 world before. The spiritual riches to which it 
 has introduced humanity have translated them- 
 selves into new glances of the eye, into fresh, 
 beautiful harmonisations of feature. But its 
 artistry here has not been always of the best. 
 By crude, at times terrible, misrepresentations 
 of Divine things, it has created the morbid face 
 and the fanatic face ; it has overspread honest 
 features with the gloom of religious melan- 
 cholia. Religion must have done with this 
 business. Its work is to weave brightness into 
 human souls. Let us take to heart this saying 
 of Robert Louis Stevenson: "In my view one 
 dark dispirited word is harmful, a crime of 
 lese humanite, a piece of acquired evil ; every 
 bright word or picture, like every pleasant air 
 of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat." 
 Fathers and mothers are perhaps here the most 
 potent workers in humanity's church. It is 
 theirs to mould their children's faces into the 
 comeliness wrought by high thought and noble 
 inspirations. Goodness is the beginning of 
 
68 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 beaut j. Young spirits growing in an atmo- 
 sphere of true thinking and true feeling are all 
 unconsciously being penetrated by harmonies 
 which shape their nature into ideal forms. 
 
 And with an eye thus upon others we are to 
 look also to ourselves. A hundred artists 
 within and without are at work upon our 
 feature and expression, but it is from us they 
 take their orders. The question as to how joy, 
 grief, gains, losses, the shocks of change and 
 fortune are to use their graving tools, depends 
 on the instructions we give them. For no 
 event is wholly outward or has an existence 
 in itself. Its whole colour and aspect are 
 derived from the soul on which it strikes. To 
 be crucified is one thing to a thief, a wholly 
 other thing to a Christ. If we accept all life 
 as a process for the building of the soul, we 
 shall find in the end that the process has been 
 a double one. For with the building of souls 
 there has been also the building of bodies. Not 
 these of flesh through which the soul faintly 
 shines, but spiritual ones, fit for immortal life. 
 And to these shall be given the vision of that 
 Model after which all their Divine lineaments 
 have been fashioned. " For they shall see His 
 face, and His name shall be in tiheir foreheads.' ' 
 
VIII. 
 
 Westward of Fifty. 
 
 A familiar line of pulpit exhortation is that 
 which regards our present life as a preparation, 
 good or bad, for a future and invisible one. 
 What we do here and now will enormously 
 affect what we become yonder and then. It 
 would be fully as much to the point, and with 
 some minds even more efficacious, if, in this 
 view of life as a preparation, the preacher at 
 times, for a change, confined himself to our 
 visible career. The region lying westward of 
 fifty is one which we shall all traverse if we 
 live long enough, and it is a doctrine against 
 which no sceptic voice can be raised that our 
 experiences there will be largely a reaping of 
 what, in, the earlier period, we have sown. 
 That a successful sowing is not too easy is 
 evident from the failures that are everywhere 
 apparent. How frequent and disastrous these 
 failures are is perhaps best illustrated by 
 the bad repute which old age has fallen 
 
70 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 into, both in literature and in the popular 
 imagination. 
 
 There have been philosophers, such as Plato 
 in the remote distance and Fontenelle nearer 
 at hand, who have glorified age as life's 
 happiest time, but the general verdict has 
 seemed otherwise. The early world as a whole 
 regarded the post-youth period almost with a 
 shudder. A line in Mimnermus tells us that 
 " when the appointed time of youth is past it 
 is better to die forthwith than to live." 
 Anacreon the joyous, the poet of love and 
 wine, finds nothing in the last stage but the 
 sense of privation and the prospect of dread 
 Avernus. Horace, his Latin counterpart, sends 
 across his past the futile prayer, " Oh ! that 
 Jove would restore to me the years that are 
 gone ! ' ' Montaigne, who considered himself 
 old at fifty-four, declared that "old age set 
 more wrinkles on the spirit than on the face." 
 Even Wordsworth, with his immense spiritual 
 insight, seems afraid of life's second half. 
 The poet, he found, did not usually fare well 
 in it. 
 
 We poets begin our life in gladness, 
 
 But thereof comes in the end satiety and madness. 
 
 And there is perhaps nowhere in literature a 
 
Westward of Fifty. 71 
 
 more vivid picture of desolation than that of 
 his " Small Celandine " as an image of life's 
 helpless last stage, with these mournful lines* 
 for an ending : 
 
 Oh, man ! that from thy fair and shining youth, 
 Age might but take the things youth needed not. 
 
 And there is undoubtedly a great deal, and 
 that not merely on the surface, that appears 
 to back up this indictment. Age is in a sense 
 a decline, a failure, a disease, which no 
 medicine can cure. Old Roger Bacon's curious 
 "Libellus de Retardandis Senectutis Acci- 
 dentibus," in the various means it proposes for 
 resisting the advance of the enemy, holds out 
 no hope of finally driving him off. On one 
 great side of our life, whatever our earlier 
 precautions and preparations, we are, after 
 fifty, certainly on the down-grade. We have 
 ceased to be athletes. We can no longer draw 
 on unlimited physical reserve. The sensualist 
 must, with however bad a grace, give up his 
 nuits blanches. He finds himself, in fact, 
 disagreeably occupied with the bill for them, 
 long deferred, and with a prodigious interest 
 charged, which Nature is now presenting himu 
 He would sympathise heartily with the senti 
 
72 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 ment of a law lord of the last century whose 
 riotous youth had brought him gout in the later 
 years, when, apostrophising his afflicted ex- 
 tremities, he cried, " Confound the legs ! If 
 I had known they were to carry a Lord Chan- 
 cellor I would have taken better care of 
 them ! " 
 
 But that is not all, nor perhaps the worst. It 
 is brought as one of the fatal accusations 
 against the post-fifty period that it lacks 
 interest. A man has by that time, maybe, 
 gained a fortune to discover that the pleasures 
 he hoped to purchase with it have ceased to be 
 pleasures. A deadly monotony has set in. We 
 have got to the bottom of things, have seen the 
 whole show and begin to find it wearisome. 
 This note, supposedly a modern one, is really 
 nothing of the kind. The whole flavour of the 
 sentiment had been tasted nigh two millenniums 
 a g° D y Marcus Aurelius. "A little while," 
 says he, " is enough to view the world in, for 
 things are repeated and come over again apace. 
 It signifies not a farthing whether a man stands 
 gazing here a hundred, or a hundred thousand 
 years, for all he gets by it is to see the same sights 
 so much the oftener." It is the unhappiness 
 of some men at this period to find in Nature's 
 
Westward of Fifty. 7o 
 
 freshest products nothing new or inspiring. 
 Goethe, in one of his autobiographical notes, 
 remarks of a contemporary that " he saw with 
 vexation the green of spring and wished that 
 by way of change it might once appear red." 
 The German would have found a sympathiser in 
 our Walter Pater who, it is recorded, regarded 
 it as an annual affliction to have to " look upon 
 the raw greens of spring." 
 
 But there is even worse than this. Some 
 physiologists and some psychologists have not 
 hesitated to maintain that there is a decay of 
 moral enthusiasm in life's after period which 
 renders the average man after middle age less 
 ethically valuable. And any one wishing to 
 maintain this thesis need not lack evidence. 
 History is full of stories of a youth of high 
 moral promise dashed by the later years. Had 
 Henry VIII. died young he would have appeared 
 in our annals as a hero instead of a monster. 
 Nero, when the pupil of Seneca, had excellent 
 inspirations. In reading Plutarch's life of 
 Alexander one is struck with his deterioration 
 of character, from the earlier warmth and 
 generosity to that later caprice and cruelty 
 which showed in his alienation from Aristotle, 
 and in the murder of his old friends Clitus and 
 
74 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Parmenio. The " religious rogue " of modern 
 times is commonly a man who unscrupulously 
 exploits the confidence secured to him by a 
 profession which in his earlier days had 
 sincerity behind it. The inner deterioration 
 experienced by some men in their later life 
 was expressed in somewhat startling fashion to 
 the present writer, years ago, by a noted 
 minister of religion of his day. "It is you 
 young men," said he, " who must start the new 
 ventures. It is no use looking to us old fellows, 
 who believe in nothing and nobody ! " 
 
 All this is evidence of something being- 
 seriously wrong somewhere. To declare half 
 of our life to be necessarily a failure is to 
 bring an indictment against life altogether. 
 As it stands, the indictment suggests one of 
 two alternatives. Either the order of the 
 universe which ordains old age is faulty, or 
 the failure lies in our interpretation of, and 
 obedience to, that order. The matter is not 
 cleared, but still further complicated by a 
 Church teaching, for centuries in vogue, which 
 has depreciated the present earthly life, with 
 its old age included, in favour of a future life 
 elsewhere. It is astonishing that Christian 
 teachers have not more generally seen the 
 
Westward op Fifty. 75 
 
 falseness of this view. To put the " now " and 
 " here " of earth in such complete opposition 
 to the " then " and " there " of heaven is 
 to endeavour to extract from time and place 
 what they were never intended to yield. If 
 the life in God, the satisfying life as revealed 
 in and by Christ, cannot be lived here and 
 now, it can be lived nowhere and nowhen. 
 
 We come back, then, to our opening sugges- 
 tion, in which the view of life as a probation 
 is taken in the sense that the after part reaps 
 what the earlier part has sown. The failure, 
 where failure there is, lies not in the game, but 
 in our way of playing it. Properly understood 
 and followed, the human career, if we interpret 
 it rightly, should to its very end be full of 
 freshness and benediction. The whole business 
 resolves itself into the question whether life's 
 after part is to be considered by us as a decline 
 or as part of a growth. To point to physical 
 and even to some aspects of mental deterioration 
 as evidence that it is a decay is, be it here ob- 
 served, quite beside the mark. Decay is always 
 going on somewhere, in every part of the 
 career. The foetus life in some of its aspects 
 perishes when the child is born. Infancy and 
 adolescence have severally their growth, cul- 
 
76 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 mination and ending as the boy pushes on to- 
 wards the man. The whole point lies in what 
 we are thinking of when we talk about life's 
 decline. If it be physical powers and enjoy- 
 ments, or even some forms of mentality, there 
 is no possible controversy, for no one disputes 
 the facts. Unquestionably if this is all man is 
 or has, the pessimists are right, and his later 
 life is a pitiable business, about which the less 
 said the better. 
 
 But may we not see in Nature's blunt exhibi- 
 tion of the failure of this side of old age — in 
 this thrusting of it in all its nakedness before 
 our eyes — her effort to awaken us to a deeper 
 conception ? It is, indeed, only in the light of 
 that conception that it becomes to us at all 
 intelligible. But in that light everything 
 assumes a new aspect. Man appears to us at 
 this period as a being full of desires and thirsts 
 which the world he has passed through no 
 longer attempts to satisfy, to which the organs 
 of sense fail to respond, for which nothing that 
 is of the seen or of the flesh is an answer. 
 This unquenched desire, if it be not a mockery, 
 is surely for him the greatest of prophecies. 
 Naked indeed is he, if there be not an invisible 
 with which he is being clothed upon ! Dying 
 
Westward of Fifty. 77 
 
 also, but if he be awake to the proper signifi- 
 cance of him self , he will realise now that what 
 in him is dying is no more his truest and deep- 
 est than was the passing away in him of the 
 child when he became a man. 
 
 It is well to persuade ourselves, and the- 
 sooner in life the better, that there is no possi- 
 ble way of making our "after middle age" a 
 success except this one of accepting ourselves 
 as in this world mainly and ultimately for 
 spiritual growth. It is this only which will 
 save that after period from monotony. And it 
 does save it most effectually. Aurelius is 
 wrong here. We do not see the same show over 
 again. As our inner nature opens our world 
 becomes ever more beautiful, more mystically 
 inspired. If each new spring does not bring us 
 a deeper message it is because we have been 
 neglecting our inner life. To the growing soul 
 the world is ever miraculously renewing itself. 
 Our fellow-men grow always dearer to us,, 
 always more interesting. And how much more 
 interesting does God become ! 
 
 It is this principle alone, too, which preserve* 
 from age's otherwise inevitable moral wastage. 
 If we do not take faith's leap and " catch on ,r 
 to life's higher order we shall certainly develop 
 
78 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the " moral wrinkles " of which Montaigne 
 speaks. But let no one believe in any psycho- 
 logical necessity here. Paul and Augustine, 
 John Wesley and Catherine Booth did not 
 grow worse as they grew older ; they grew 
 better ; they ripened. And when with some of 
 these, a period has been reached in which the 
 desire to remain longer in the world has visibly 
 lessened, this means, not a diminishing of in- 
 terest in life, but a preparedness for the next 
 evolution of it. 
 
 As years assist 
 Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see, 
 
 such spirits gain so ravishing a sense of that 
 " life beyond the bridge " that they long to join 
 themselves unto it. 
 
IX. 
 The Art of Happiness. 
 
 It is something, as a start in the world, to be 
 convinced on good grounds that the Ordainer 
 of our life on this planet intended joy as one of 
 its chief products. That it means other things 
 — service, sacrifice, education, development, 
 probation, as well as a thousand aims beyond 
 our ken — we may well believe. But one of its 
 governing designs is the joy of living. If there 
 is proof of anything there is proof of that. It 
 peeps out of every detail of the scheme. The 
 material for enjoyment is so inwrought into the 
 world's constitution that we cannot put a spade 
 into the ground anywhere without turning it 
 up. Men reach joy by the most diverse roads. 
 By travel, by staying at home ; by working, by 
 resting ; by strain of the muscle or strain of 
 the mind ; by speech, by silence ; by solitude, 
 by society; by helping, by being helped; by 
 receiving, by giving. One could go, indeed, 
 through almost every process of life and find a 
 
80 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 pleasure as its result. We enjoy as we eat and 
 drink, as we open our eyes upon the world, as 
 we swing our limbs in the walk down the road. 
 If we ask why it is that a rose should ravish us 
 with its perfume and feed our artistic sense 
 with its beauty of form ; that the fresh breeze 
 should be a delight and not a pain to breathe ; 
 that the vision of a countryside makes the 
 heart leap within us — there seems only one 
 answer. The outer has been fitted to our inner 
 with a direct view to these results. Human 
 delight, and not human only but that of all 
 living creatures, is one at least of the world's 
 ultimate ends. 
 
 The happiness idea, while so deeply inter- 
 fused into the constitution of nature, is seated 
 even more deeply in the heart of man. It is 
 touching, and at the same time most suggestive, 
 to see how youth always and everywhere believes 
 in it. An Amiel, when he is forty, may talk of 
 hopes disappointed and of the future as a 
 dreary prospect, but not even an Amiel can do 
 that at twenty. That primal instinct for happi- 
 ness, reborn in each generation, means much. 
 It is not only a thirst but a promise. What is 
 in humanity first as a desire comes out 
 eventually as a result. Man believes in joy 
 
The Art op Happiness. 81 
 
 even when he is sorrowing. " Est qusedam flere 
 voluptas " (There is a certain pleasure even in 
 weeping), said a master of the science of human 
 nature. Even when nursing their spleen people 
 are, in a way, enjoying themselves. When 
 Burton sings, 
 
 All my joys to this are folly, 
 Nought so sweet as melancholy, 
 
 he is simply indicating one of those strange 
 involutions of the human spirit by which it 
 tastes a happiness in what seems its opposite. 
 
 But the happiness material, as we have said, 
 requires extracting, and for this there are some 
 rules. One might call them simple were it not 
 that such multitudes of clever people fail in 
 applying them. It is indeed the cleverness, 
 apart from wisdom, that has so often sophisti- 
 cated man out of his joy. In nine cases out of 
 ten where he is miserable it is because he has 
 allowed his imagination to play tricks with him. 
 It has, for one thing, darkened his world with 
 false religions and malignant demons. Strange, 
 that in a universe which smiled so kindly on 
 him he could have imagined an Enthroned 
 Cruelty as its author. The perversity seems 
 the greater when we find ethnology digging up 
 
82 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 from all parts of the globe evidence of a primi- 
 tive tradition which, amidst the most savage 
 tribes, recognised the Creator as righteous and 
 beneficent. Stranger still that this perverse 
 rendering should have been permitted to distort 
 even the Christian Gospel, and to make, even 
 in our day, its life- scheme so forbidding that a 
 divine of the last generation could suggest it as 
 an improvement that the whole human race 
 should die off at the age of four years ! When 
 Athenagoras, the Greek Father, argued that the 
 heathens' practice of self-torture to propitiate 
 their divinities was evidence of the false origin 
 of their religion, he could hardly have antici- 
 pated that Christianity itself was to produce a 
 similar teaching, and on the largest scale. Yet 
 so it is, and as a result men have to be retaught 
 their inheritance; to learn over again their right 
 to the natural human joys ; to cease to tremble 
 as they sit at life's feast. They have not even 
 yet full confidence that to really enjoy it is to 
 please God and not to anger Him. 
 
 It is not enough, however, for happiness to 
 have got rid of these spectres of the dark. The 
 soul must in some positive directions be trained 
 to enjoy. It must, for one thing, learn to be 
 simple. The art of being happy is the art of 
 
The Art op Happiness. 83 
 
 discovering the depths that lie in the daily 
 common things. Delight in the simple is the 
 finest result of culture. The animal exhilara- 
 tion which the child has in exercise and the 
 fresh air and the sense of life becomes in the 
 trained soul a so much deeper, subtler thing. 
 It ravishes with a sense of something behind. 
 One is intoxicated with the feeling which a 
 modern mystic has expressed when he says, " I 
 see, smell, taste, hear, feel that Everlasting 
 Something to which we are allied, at once our 
 Maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." 
 This training is, we say, a training in simplicity. 
 It indisposes us to rush after the extraordinary, 
 the so-called magnificences of life. It leads us 
 more and more in the way of the common, and 
 to the deeper appreciation of what is there. It 
 sets us longing not so much for the sensation 
 of the millionaire as he shows his new palace, 
 as for that of a Wordsworth, or a Ruskin, as, 
 on a spring morning, they contemplate a green- 
 ing tree. This delight has its guaranteed 
 security in the fact that the materials for it — 
 the common things that, looked into, transform 
 themselves into heavenly wonders and mysteries 
 — are here all around us, filling every inch of 
 space and every moment of time. The man of 
 
84 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 simple mind, of purged eye and pure heart, 
 walks daily wrapt in the consciousness of being 
 in the midst of a universe divinely beautiful, 
 and which is all his. 
 
 It is another facet of the same idea to say 
 that the secret of the joy of living is the proper 
 appreciation of what we actually possess. That 
 kingdom of the unpossessed for which we so 
 foolishly thirst is not half so good as this of 
 what we have. A child sobs with grief over 
 the toy that is broken, and is not comforted by 
 the thought of all its glorious assets of youth, 
 and health and coming years. It has not got 
 the thought. We who are older are often hardly 
 wiser. Coningsby, in Disraeli's novel, when 
 bemoaning the loss of a fortune, is asked by his 
 friend to remember that he has still left him 
 the use of his limbs. It is an excellent sug- 
 gestion, and to be taken in all seriousness. In 
 our moments of spleen there is no better 
 exercise than to reckon up as against our 
 losses the things that remain. When we have 
 fairly understood the worth of our personal 
 gifts ; what it means to be able to swing along 
 in careless freedom of limb, to open clear eyes 
 upon the world's beauty, to eat with appetite, 
 to reason, to remember, to imagine, instead of 
 
The Art op Happiness. 85 
 
 being reduced to the privation of these things, 
 we find we are rich where we thought ourselves 
 poor. The worst is where we lightly value our 
 wealth in love. Multitudes of us are fuming 
 in a false sense of poverty when close at home 
 are faithful hearts that, if taken from us, as 
 they might be next week, would leave a void 
 that not the wealth of Indies would fill. We 
 are only poor by thinking ourselves so. It is, 
 in fact, our perverse thinking that every day 
 makes fools of us. 
 
 As our life studies proceed we discover the 
 infinite complexities, the depths beneath deeps, 
 that enter into the happiness of a growing 
 soul. With increasing capacity it strikes ever 
 grander chords, until its experiences are, as to 
 the surface pleasures, what a Beethoven sonata 
 is to a ditty of the music-hall. The Gospel 
 account of Jesus stands out here as the typical, 
 highest example. In the beginning was the 
 exquisite joy of a pure heart in the presence of 
 nature, when the flowers and the birds pro- 
 claimed the goodness of the Father. At the 
 end this soul, ever learning and growing, had 
 reached a capacity such that the Cross, striking 
 full upon it, evoked only a deeper harmony. 
 The joy which, at the Supper, Jesus offered His 
 
86 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 disciples, was richer than that of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. And this marvel has continued. 
 Men have learned from Christ how to find joy 
 in pain ; how to be happy when suffering and 
 dying. It was not vain boasting nor an unreal 
 idealisation, but the statement of plain facts 
 when Minutius Felix, speaking of the martyrs 
 of his time, could say, " God's soldier is neither 
 forsaken in suffering nor brought to an end by 
 death. Boys and young women among us 
 treat with contempt crosses and tortures, wild 
 beasts and all the bugbears of punishment, 
 with the inspired patience of suffering." In 
 our own day we read of Bushnell that " even 
 his dying was play to him." Such histories 
 are the supreme proof that, to the soul that 
 learns, life at what seems its darkest and its 
 worst, is realised as infinitely worth living. 
 Courage, then, in the gloomy day. " If winter 
 comes can spring be far behind 9 " 
 
 Be our joy three parts pain, 
 Strive and hold cheap the strain, 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the 
 throe ! 
 
X. 
 The Mission of Illusion. 
 
 Amongst the subjects which no Christian 
 teacher of to-day can afford to ignore is that of 
 illusion and the part it plays in life and religion. 
 It is a matter that will not be burked, and all 
 who in any way stand for the interests of 
 faith have to make up their minds upon it. To 
 the present generation it is becoming in- 
 creasingly clear that many things which it had 
 been accustomed to regard as religious fact are 
 really not so, and the revelation is one full of 
 danger to the inner life unless its actual 
 significance is fully explained. The Church 
 has been, in a sense, brought up on illusions, and 
 the plain man who is just becoming conscious 
 of this, is shocked at the discovery. His first 
 impulse is to cry " Treachery ! " Eeligion has 
 betrayed him ; the teacher has proved false, 
 and is therefore no longer to be regarded. 
 What he here evidently needs is a doctrine of 
 illusion which shall remove his misapprehen- 
 
88 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 sions and put him at his ease in the new situa- 
 tion. He has to learn that, as the French 
 Joubert tersely puts it, " Illusions come from 
 heaven, errors come from ourselves." In other 
 words, the existence of illusion in life and 
 religion, is no betrayal, but one of the Divine 
 ordinances for the education of humanity. It 
 works by ascertainable laws, and its operations, 
 when understood, are seen to be wholly benefi- 
 cent. 
 
 The law of illusion is written broadly on 
 every department of life. Children live in a 
 world of make-believe, and Nature's method 
 with the young people here has been her way 
 with man as a whole. Truth is one of her 
 goals for him, but she is in no hurry to get him 
 there. She is content, in the earlier stages of 
 his development, to fit him out with rudimen- 
 tary and provisional ideas, adequate to his 
 growth and requirements at any given stage, 
 but to be replaced by broader ones when the 
 time for them comes. He lives at first in a 
 fancy world where his senses trick him at every 
 turn. They give him what seem facts as to 
 the relation of the earth to the heavens, as to 
 the sun's motion, the blue of the sky, the 
 nature and number of the elements, all of which 
 
The Mission of Illusion. 89 
 
 turn out afterwards to be illusions. And are 
 we sure even that a large part of the so-called 
 scientific perception of the universe of the 
 present day will not, in its turn, prove to be 
 illusion 9 At best our theories are a series of 
 working hypotheses which may turn out to be 
 quite incorrectly based. We are, for instance, 
 resting everything on an atomic theory, without 
 knowing anything as to the interior nature of 
 the atom, or how it came to be there at all. And 
 when our knowledge has reached its utmost 
 bound it will, after all, be an affair only of our 
 particular perceptive faculties. We shall, as 
 Fichte says, go on always making our own 
 world. We can say nothing as to ultimate 
 existence except that, as Spinoza has put it, 
 " things must exist, not only in the manner in 
 which they are manifested to us, but in every 
 manner which infinite understanding can 
 conceive." 
 
 With illusion playing this part in the 
 broadest realms of life it would be surprising 
 if its law should be abrogated in any one 
 sphere of it, such as that of religion. As a 
 matter of fact, we find it in full play there, and 
 it is high time that we gave to its operations 
 the recognition they demand. The successive 
 
90 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 cults of fetichism, of star worship and of 
 polytheism, by which man arrived ultimately at 
 monotheism, have been the differing vessels 
 which in turn have held the treasure of his 
 growing spiritual life. When these prepara- 
 tory ideas had served their turn, the force 
 which developed them provided for their decay. 
 The soul, like the body, has an apparatus of 
 decay which works as surely as its apparatus 
 of growth. By a process which nothing can stop 
 it separates, excretes and rids itself of, every 
 element that has ceased to be of use. The 
 efforts of a Julian to resuscitate the Roman 
 paganism were powerless, though he had the 
 force of an Empire at his back. Paganism 
 passed because its hour had come. 
 
 Theology has been excessively reluctant to 
 admit the working of this law in the Church, 
 but the fact of it can no longer be denied. 
 What we now discover is that the Christian 
 consciousness that forms the Church's life has 
 had successive coatings of ideas which it 
 perpetually outgrows and casts aside. The 
 reservoir of living water has had the roughest 
 material for its embankment. The early 
 Church was cradled in illusions. Whether it 
 looked before or behind it met the mirage. It 
 
The Mission of Illusion. 91 
 
 looked behind to a view of the Old Testament 
 which we now smile at. Many of the Fathers 
 readily accept the view that Ezra miraculously 
 restored the books of the Hebrew Scriptures 
 that had been lost during the exile, as well as 
 the story of the miracle by which, in the trans- 
 lation of the Septuagint, the seventy elders, 
 shut up in separate cells, wrote each one of 
 them exactly the same words. In its forward 
 look the first Christian community had a 
 similar experience. It is pathetic for us, as 
 we gaze back from our far-off standpoint, to 
 observe the absolute confidence of those early 
 forecasts and the way in which events have 
 contradicted them; to see how, in succession, 
 now a Justin Martyr, now an Irenaeus, now 
 a Tertullian and a Cyprian, and anon a 
 Jerome and an Augustine, find in the state of 
 the world around them the sure signs of the 
 Advent and the world's end. In all this they 
 were wrong ; but what then ? Was their 
 religion one whit less centrally true or Divine 
 because contained in this framework of primi- 
 tive ideas ? Their religion was not in that 
 framework, but in the fact that the love of 
 Christ constrained them ; that their hearts 
 had been filled by Him with the passion for 
 
"92 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 holiness; that His infinite pity for all who 
 suffered and were needy wrought in them. 
 Here was the evidence both of its truth and of 
 its divinity. The evolution of its ideas could 
 in the meantime take care of itself. 
 
 To-day we have to recognise that a certain 
 portion of the Church creeds were wrought in 
 an atmosphere of illusion. They were con- 
 structed to the scale of a pettier universe than 
 that to which we now know ourselves to 
 belong. The creeds are, for one thing, 
 geocentric. They conceive the earth as 
 central, with heaven and hell as adjunct 
 and completion. They are unreal to a view 
 which regards our planet as a dust speck in 
 the infinity of the worlds. 
 
 At contra nusquam. apparent Acherusia templa. 
 
 Jacob's ladder no longer reaches to the sky. 
 The heavens have removed far off and become 
 astronomical. In short, the concepts which 
 presided over the Church creeds represent, in 
 the language of a recent writer, " undeveloped 
 science, imperfect philosophy and perverted 
 notions of history." They will have to be 
 revised. Their view of Christianity is steadily 
 giving way in the minds of men to one more in 
 
The Mission op Illusion. 93- 
 
 accord with the laws that govern the outside 
 universe and the evolution of the human soul. 
 What then ? Will this march away from 
 the earlier illusions lead Christian people to a 
 barer pasturage for the spirit ? Will their 
 religion be poorer for the change in some 
 of its surrounding ideas ? The previous 
 history of the human movement should be 
 enough to reassure us on this point. What 
 man has found hitherto is that the new 
 reality which he reaches is always greater and 
 more satisfying than the old illusion which it 
 displaces. The tiny Cosmos of the ancients 
 was not to be compared in grandeur with that 
 which modern astronomy and geology have dis- 
 closed. And if this be so with the external 
 world the whole analogy of things suggests 
 that in like manner will it be with the inner 
 and spiritual world. We shall not go forward 
 in every other department to go backward 
 here. The new concepts which, in our escape 
 from earlier illusions, we are gaining as to the 
 origin and nature of Christianity will be more 
 sublime and more religiously effective than 
 those earlier ones, as they will offer an exacter 
 and more satisfying relation to life's infinite 
 whole. We shall advance, as Goethe says^ 
 
94 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 " from a Christianity of words to a Christianity 
 of feeling and action." And as the investiga- 
 tions of science disclose to us an external nature 
 which becomes more and more immeasurable 
 to the view, so the sense of religion as it 
 develops will reveal ever wider spheres in 
 which love and faith and holiness may grow 
 and expatiate. 
 
 There is another side of the mission of 
 illusion which we can none of us afford to 
 ignore. It is that of its relation to our 
 personal life. Illusion is the charm and 
 poetry of the soul, as well as one of its 
 most effective inspirations. Children live in 
 its enchanted realm, and if we are wise, we 
 who are older will often take up our abode 
 there, too. It is a trick of the present 
 writer, of which he is willing to make a 
 present to his readers, when at a concert where 
 the highest music is provided, to enhance the 
 enjoyment by the simple process of shutting 
 his eyes and imagining himself in his own 
 room, and this glorious feast to be an im- 
 promptu serenade under his windows. By 
 getting rid, in this way, of the claims of ex- 
 pectation, and allowing everything to come as 
 a surprise, one has doubled the delight. It is 
 
The Mission of Illusion. 95 
 
 by illusion also that Nature gets her biggest 
 things out of us. Young men set off on hardy 
 adventures of campaign or of travel with an 
 idea of accompanying pleasure or profit which 
 in nine cases out of ten will not be realised. 
 But they will have done something for their 
 own and the world's furtherance, which 
 otherwise would not have been done. A 
 lad's notion of his own powers, and of his 
 future, is half illusion. But what power 
 he does exercise, and what future he will 
 secure, are owing largely to that illusion. 
 Under this rainbow arch men and women 
 walk together to marriage and the found- 
 ing of homes. Nature smiles at their ideas 
 while securing, at their expense, the harvest 
 of her own. 
 
 Yet is her smile, while carrying in it a trace 
 of irony, ever benevolent. From passion's 
 illusion, by which hearts seem often so cruelly 
 beguiled, come results better than the dream, 
 though so different from it. The family life, 
 consisting often of hard enough realities, will 
 leave higher effects upon character than the 
 sentimental raptures which preceded it. And 
 its disappointments and sorrows show illusion 
 as one of the great training forces of the 
 
96 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 human spirit. It is by the contrast here 
 forced on us between earth's promises and 
 their fulfilment that it urges on the soul, 
 as by an inner necessity, to seek finally 
 its peace in those imperishables which do 
 not betray. 
 
XI. 
 
 The Soul's Voice. 
 
 One of the greatest events in the history of 
 this planet was the beginning upon it of arti- 
 culate speech. Evolution has, as yet, attained 
 no greater triumph than in this discovery of 
 soul to soul by the fitting of thought to sound. 
 How it came about we know not, though 
 science is ever groping towards some answer to 
 the problem. Animals, we know, have their 
 signal codes. In Africa lions hunt in concert 
 and send message notes to each other as they 
 tighten their cordon round the game. The 
 chatter of apes is being spoken of as a rudi- 
 mentary language, and attempts even are being 
 made to translate it. Human speech began 
 probably in similar humble fashion, but its 
 destinies were magnificent. In the process of 
 its development we cannot say what was the 
 order of co-operation, how far the struggling 
 soul shaped its organ of expression, or how the 
 perfecting of the organ gave new capacity to 
 
 7 
 
'98 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the soul. May be that our poet Spenser is 
 mainly right in his Platonic affirmation, 
 
 Of soule the bodie forme doth take, 
 
 For soule is form and doth the bodie make. 
 
 But how the mere effort of the inner life 
 wrought to the shaping and refining of the 
 vocal machinery up to the present range and 
 delicacy is as great a mystery as is that of its 
 [present use. Have we ever properly considered 
 this latter mystery ; of how at any moment our 
 intellect, our emotions, our will establish them- 
 selves at our vocal chords and, without the 
 -slightest hesitation, strike the exact combina- 
 tion of them they want, and set them vibrat- 
 ing to precisely the needed pitch; and how 
 thus the complex of our inmost soul, made into 
 a sound, discharges in this fashion its full con- 
 tent into another soul ? 
 
 Questions of this sort meet us at the threshold 
 of our topic, but it is not on their account that 
 we have introduced it. There are matters con- 
 nected with the soul's voice that touch us more 
 nearly than do the purely scientific problems 
 connected with it. How closely the voice and 
 that realm of harmony to which it is related lie 
 to the innermost of man's moral and spiritual 
 
The Soul's Voice. 99 
 
 life was a point very early discerned. Plato 
 exhibits its full significance when in the 
 " Republic " he speaks of rhythm and harmony 
 as entering into the deepest parts of the soul, 
 and declares that "by the educated sense of 
 harmony we learn to discern between the good 
 and the base, the ugly and the beautiful in all 
 things." Ruskin endorses the doctrine when 
 he reminds us that " all the greatest music is 
 by the human voice/' and that "with the 
 Greeks the God of music was also the God of 
 righteousness." 
 
 It is worth trying to discover what precisely 
 these ideas amount to. That which Plato, in 
 his doctrine of music, seems mainly to convey 
 was that rhythm and harmony of sound, how- 
 ever produced, have a marvellous parallel with 
 man's inner states ; that music, like the soul, 
 can be gay, frivolous, wrathful; or solemn, 
 serene, ecstatic ; that man's heights and depths, 
 his greatness and his littleness, can be inter- 
 preted for him and realised in him through 
 sound. But there is more than that. The 
 relation of sound to our deepest life is not fairly 
 got at till we study a certain phenomenon in 
 speech, not too often met with, but which, 
 where it is, leaves ever its own unmistakable 
 
100 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 impression. When we have discussed the 
 quality of a voice as tested by the usual 
 standards ; when its powers have been registered 
 by the singer, the elocutionist, or the actor, 
 has all been said? The range they cover is 
 immense, but there is an element of voice 
 possibility which they have not touched and 
 never can. It is the element, unique and 
 indefinable, that is furnished by the size and 
 the stirring of the soul behind. 
 
 It is not in life's ordinary intercourse that we 
 catch this note. The voice is employed for the 
 most part in doing the mind's hack work. It 
 retails the news, discusses questions of fact or 
 of logic, expresses in its different registers the 
 usual day-by-day emotions, and all this without 
 any unlocking of its secret doors. But those 
 doors sometimes do open, and a breath from 
 within, of something mysterious, unearthly, 
 passes into the tone. The speaker whose utter- 
 ance is of life's weightier matters knows per- 
 fectly the experience. At times his voice has 
 handed out what he had to say mechanically, 
 by a hard, pumping process, each sentence, as 
 it were, with a separate stroke of the handle — 
 so much fact, so much argument, and there an 
 end. At another time his vocal organs, utter- 
 
The Soul's Voice. 101 
 
 ing, it may be, almost the same words, are 
 thrilling with vibrations from an unseen source ; 
 each note has its myriad overtones, spirit echoes, 
 as it were, of what is said. The man's voice is 
 the instrument of a new music; his soul is 
 speaking, stirred in its turn by an Oversoul 
 mightier than itself. Socrates was describing 
 this note when he spoke of being, in his words, 
 " moved by a Divine and spiritual influence." 
 It thrilled at times in the utterance of Newman. 
 It was this which was felt in the words of Keble 
 when, as Thomas Mozley says of them, "they 
 seemed to come from a different and holier 
 sphere." When the Jewish people said of the 
 words of Jesus, "Never man spake like this 
 man," the reference, we may be sure, was not 
 merely to the meaning conveyed. There was the 
 impression also of the unfathomable soul that 
 uttered them, and that lived in the tone, satur- 
 ating it with its mystic essence. Between words 
 spoken by one man and the same words uttered 
 by another, what a gulf ! It is the difference 
 in size of the one soul behind as compared with 
 that of the other. All which may be summed 
 up in a word, to wit, that no one has discovered 
 the capabilities of his voice till he has dis- 
 covered the capabilities of his soul. 
 
102 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 It is worth while reading history just for the 
 purpose of discovering this magnificent spiritual 
 note as it from time to time breaks in upon the 
 human concert. There are periods when every- 
 thing appears drowned in dissipation and folly, 
 when human speech is a mere chatter, and the 
 deeper man seems dead. Suddenly there breaks 
 upon the air the indescribable vibrant tone. A 
 voice sounds through the night, as the Latin 
 poet says, f* declaring immortal things in human 
 speech,'' and the soul of every man within 
 him trembles in response. Terrena ccelestibus 
 cedunt. It is felt that a prophetic word has 
 been spoken, that the deepest essence of the 
 age, its whole inner burden of feeling, aspira- 
 tion and desire has uttered itself in this cry and 
 has delivered therein its spiritual testimony. 
 It was precisely in this that Luther, as Harnack 
 in his fine study of him has shown, was the 
 prophet of the Western world in the sixteenth 
 century. What filled his voice with a power 
 beyond words was the soul behind, fired with a 
 new consciousness of God. No man need pose 
 as a prophet unless that tone is singing in him. 
 When it is there he is not to be stopped though, 
 as the aforesaid Dr. Martin once himself de- 
 clared, it u should rain devils for seven days." 
 
The Soul's Voice. 10$ 
 
 Wonderful and awe-inspiring as are the 
 effects when the soul comes thus into human* 
 speech, uttering itself to the world, not less so* 
 are they when the music is wholly interior,, 
 meant for one ear alone. The intruding note- 
 coming out of the depths of the spirit has 
 been enough many a time to rend a man in 
 twain. Most instructive here is that story, one 
 of a thousand similar that might be told, of 
 Lacordaire, the great French preacher. As a 
 young advocate at the Bar, after a brilliant 
 university career, irresistible in eloquence and 
 ability, his career assured, the world at his feet, 
 he is found one day by a friend alone in his 
 room, sobbing and heartbroken. What is the 
 matter with Lacordaire ? This : that in the midst 
 of his successes the inner deeps have suddenly 
 broken up and overwhelmed his pleasure-world * 
 A voice has spoken within, proclaiming that 
 world a mockery, and himself a failure. " A 
 delusion," says some one, "a moment of pique." 
 But the preacher's whole career dated from that 
 moment. Paul had such a time, and Augustine, 
 and many another who has carried, as it seemed,, 
 a world's spiritual interests in his hands. As to* 
 whether the voices they heard were trustworthy „ 
 they were perhaps as good judges as their critics. 
 
104 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Domestic life is full of histories, pathetic, 
 of ten tragic, of the soul's strange, long silences, 
 broken at last, and many a time too late, by a 
 cry from its depths. How often happens it 
 that the genuine affection of worthy hearts, 
 covered up and concealed under a vexed surface 
 of irritations and misunderstandings, lies almost 
 unnoted by its possessors until the swift warning 
 of a near parting wakes the soul to a sense of 
 what it is losing, and draws from it the awful 
 cry of its anguished love ! What a lesson writ 
 in fire is that word of Carlyle on the death of 
 his wife : " Oh, if only I could have five min- 
 ntes with her to assure her that I loved her 
 through all that ! " How well were it here for 
 some of us to follow the example of the worthy 
 Siebenkas in Jean Paul Kichter's story when, 
 •concerning Lenette, "Every morning, every 
 evening he said to himself, f How much ought I 
 not to forgive ; for we shall remain so short a 
 time together ! ' " 
 
 It were indeed vastly better for us all if, in 
 our intercourse with one another, we oftener 
 permitted the soul to speak. The surface 
 chatter of the present day is in its emptiness 
 and unreality almost worse than that of the 
 France of the seventeenth century which 
 
The Soul's Voice. 105 
 
 tempted Pascal to exclaim, " Diseur de bons 
 mots, mauvais caraetere ! " If people knew it 
 they could rule by the voice ; not by its vehe- 
 mence and clamour, but by the soul they put into 
 it. Spirit, which can saturate feature, can also 
 saturate sound with its mystic essence. A 
 domestic circle may be made a paradise by the 
 music of one low, sweet voice. There are tones 
 of spiritual natures that seem to visualise holi- 
 ness, under whose pleading an erring man has 
 been as the fallen archangel at the reproof of 
 Zephon : 
 
 And felt how awful goodness is, and saw 
 Virtue in her shape how lovely ; saw and pined 
 His loss. 
 
 The note we have been seeking to fix and to 
 describe is indeed a voice from heaven, and to 
 hear it, as at times we do, is to receive anew the 
 assurance that man is not forsaken of God. It 
 is a note worth striving for in human speech. 
 The elocutionist cannot teach it, nor is it found 
 in the whole scale commanded by the operatic 
 star. To cultivate it we must go deeper than 
 the vocal organs. Its seat is in the soul. 
 
XII. 
 Of Sex in Religion. 
 
 In a study of sex in religion it would be open 
 to us to follow one of two different directions. 
 We might, regarding humanity as the subject 
 of religion, as operated upon mysteriously by 
 its unseen spiritual force, try to analyse the 
 separate effect of this force as working upon 
 the masculine or the feminine nature. Or, 
 contrariwise, taking religion in its aspect as a 
 human product, we might seek to trace in its 
 institutions, its theologies and its varied 
 activities the separate share which each of 
 the sexes has contributed Along either of 
 these ways some noteworthy results would be 
 obtained if they were carefully followed. The 
 differences between man and woman stand out 
 in a quite new aspect when seen under this 
 special light. Each half of the race gives out 
 its own peculiar note when that element of it 
 is touched. It is certain that we shall not 
 properly understand either religion or human 
 
Of Sex in Keligion. 107 
 
 nature until some such inquiry has been made. 
 Many of the greatest mistakes of the past have 
 been due to the neglect of it. In the religious 
 reconstruction of the future the reparation of 
 that neglect will, if we mistake not, form one 
 of the leading features. 
 
 Looking at religion, for a moment, as a pro- 
 duct, one might suppose at first sight that it- 
 was almost entirely a masculine affair. It is 
 man everywhere who explores its metaphysics, 
 who erects its theologies, who founds and 
 governs its institutions. Man is its pope, 
 priest, and prophet ; its legislator, preacher, 
 and pastor. Its divines have all been men. 
 The great world religions, originating in the 
 East, have taken an entirely Eastern view of 
 the man's and the woman's part in this supreme 
 interest. In the Judsean decalogue woman is 
 subordinate and ancillary. Thy "neighbour's 
 wife," in the command against covetousness, 
 is included in the list of his possessions. The 
 Mohammedan was indisposed to concede woman 
 a soul at all. In early and mediaeval Catholicism 
 she is treated with a courtesy almost as scant. 
 In monkish literature she figures as the tempt- 
 ress to be fled from, the one malign influence 
 against which, above all others, the saint must 
 
108 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 •steel his soul. The feeling has its appropriate 
 •expression in that brutal outburst of Tertullian, 
 ■" Woman, thou art the gate of hell." In a 
 later and more enlightened time we find Eras- 
 anus demeaning himself by describing woman 
 as "an absurd and ridiculous animal, though 
 entertaining and pleasant " ; while his con- 
 temporary Rabelais has no epithet too coarse 
 with which to pelt her. In a later century the 
 polished La Bruyere thinks he has said the 
 final word upon woman in declaring that " the 
 greater part of them have hardly principles, 
 but are guided by the heart, and depend for 
 their morals on those they love." From the 
 beginning woman has occupied no position of 
 authority in the Church. Her voice has never 
 been heard at a council, nor has her pen ever 
 formulated a decree. The England of to-day 
 gives a curious illustration of the ecclesiastical 
 ban under which she has been placed, in the 
 status it accords to the wives of Church digni- 
 taries. An archbishop may have social pre- 
 cedence over a duke, while his wife shall be 
 plain Mrs. Smith. It was left for a woman to 
 put the finishing touch on this order of things 
 in the remark of Queen Elizabeth to the wife 
 of Archbishop Parker, on being entertained at 
 
Of Sex in Keligion. 109» 
 
 Lambeth, " Madam I may not call you, and 
 mistress I am loth to call you. I know not 
 what to call you, but yet I thank you for your 
 good cheer." 
 
 If woman were of a revengeful disposition 
 she might easily console herself by reflecting 
 on the price that man has had to pay for his 
 exclusiveness. He has, she might reflect,, 
 assumed the right to legislate for the Church,, 
 to define its doctrine, to build up its whole 
 system of thought, and a pretty mess he has 
 made of it. His ecclesiastical polity has split 
 the Church into a thousand pieces, while his 
 theology has made religion hateful to multi- 
 tudes of ingenuous minds. It is safe to say 
 that the mother side of humanity would never 
 have constructed the hell of medievalism, nor 
 have made it possible to exhibit as orthodoxy 
 the notion of Aquinas that heaven's pleasure 
 would be augmented by the view of the tortures 
 of the lost, or that of Calvin of the preordained 
 damnation of the non-elect. The male eccle- 
 siastic, imagining religion to be an affair of dry 
 intellect, a formula to be ground out of his 
 logic mill, succeeded in making it anti-human. 
 He achieved the surprising feat of so dressing 
 up the primal facts concerning God and the 
 
110 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 soul as to make theology a nightmare, and of 
 turning a region of thought, which ought to 
 have been man's highest inspiration, into a 
 jumble of inconsistencies, at once a barrier to 
 faith and a stumbling block to the moral sense. 
 Nothing has been made clearer than that the 
 attempt to build religion out of elements 
 purely masculine is a blunder for which the 
 outraged nature of things will always take a 
 full revenge. 
 
 But we are anticipating, and, moreover, this 
 is not a quite complete statement of the case. 
 We must remind ourselves of what was sug- 
 gested at the beginning, that it is only, after 
 all, a surface view which fails to recognise 
 woman in the history of religious production. 
 Man has tried hard to shut her out from this 
 sphere, but, happily, he has not fully succeeded. 
 One feels a sort of poetical justice in the fact 
 that, as Professor Brinton points out, in certain 
 primitive tribes it was the woman only and not 
 the man who was regarded as possessing an 
 immortal soul. Polytheism, in all its forms, 
 has vaguely felt after the truth of the feminine 
 element in religion in distributing the celestial 
 government amongst gods and goddesses. In 
 Catholicism the deification of the Virgin Mary 
 
Op Sex in Religion. Ill 
 
 may be said to have found its basis in this 
 sense of the feminine element as necessary to 
 the idea of Deity. Eenan puts it in his own 
 daring fashion in the assertion that in the 
 Catholic system Mary has entered of full right 
 into the Trinity, having displaced there the thin 
 and incomprehensible idea of the Holy Spirit. 
 However we may regard that curious statement, 
 this at least may be said, that the only way of 
 accounting for the success of a cult so badly 
 based both in reason and in history is in 
 regarding it as the clumsy expression of the 
 human yearning after a Divine Motherhood, 
 as combining with the strength of the eternal 
 Fatherhood, at the heart of the universe. 
 
 When we look a little more deeply into re- 
 ligious history we shall be less surprised at 
 finding how, despite all effort to the contrary, 
 ideas traceable to woman's religious intuition 
 have to so considerable a degree found their 
 way into the Church's thought. For behind 
 most of the great teachers has stood a woman. 
 Augustine owed himself to his mother Monica. 
 At the back of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa 
 we discern the figure of their sister Macrina, 
 " who led them both to the faith, and stirred 
 them to their best work," about whom Gregory 
 
112 OlTKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 confesses that he wrote his treatise on "The 
 Soul and the Kesurrection " from her in- 
 spiration. We remember what Jacqueline was 
 to Pascal and what Henrietta was to Renan. 
 Let us not forget either the direct influence 
 which, even in the period when masculine 
 autocracy in religion was at its height,, 
 woman from time to time contrived to exert. 
 Each century of the dark ages is illuminated 
 by some woman teacher. Jerome celebrates 
 for us Paula, the distinguished Roman matron,, 
 the great Hebrew scholar to whom the Latin 
 father was glad to refer difficult points in 
 his commentary on Ezekiel. The eighth 
 century shows us those Benedictine nuns 
 who did so much to evangelise Europe, the 
 workers under Boniface, such as Lioba, 
 Walburga, and Berthgytha, who missionised 
 Germany, and are reported as being versed in 
 all the science of the time. What a figure,, 
 too, is that of Hildegarde, in the eleventh cen- 
 tury, whom Rohrbacher calls the " instructor 
 of the people, the councillor of bishops and 
 monarchs, the restorer of piety and manners,, 
 and oracle of the Church ; who was among 
 women what St. Bernard was among men." 
 What might one not say also of a Catherine of 
 
Of Sex in Religion. 113 
 
 Siena, in the fourteenth century, the beloved 
 of the poor, and at the same time the feared 
 and obeyed of popes ; or of the Spanish Teresa, 
 of the sixteenth, who founded orders, ad- 
 vised kings, and whose " Treatise of Prayer " 
 is one of the most wonderful of devotional 
 works ! 
 
 As we trace the feminine influence in religion 
 through the past and observe its fuller expan- 
 sion in our own times, we realise more clearly 
 the dimensions of the blunder which for long 
 ages sought so persistently to repress it. For, 
 as we now begin to perceive, it is the woman 
 nature that, more intimately than the man's, 
 expresses the innermost soul of religion. It is 
 dawning upon us that those spheres of reason 
 and of logic where man is strongest, and where 
 he loved of old to elaborate his theologic sys- 
 tems, are not, after all, the place where we shall 
 find the thing we are seeking. Faith's true 
 seat is elsewhere in the soul. The statement of 
 a modern investigator that "science arises 
 from man's conscious, and religion from his 
 subconscious states," may perhaps be too sweep- 
 ing a generalisation, but it points undoubtedly 
 in the right direction. We are understanding 
 better now Pascal's profound remark, in its 
 
 8 
 
114 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 application to religion, that " what is founded 
 only in reason is very badly founded." It is in 
 the region beyond reason, in the sphere of 
 intuition, of feeling, of aspiration, of that 
 Formless which Goethe declared to be the 
 highest thing in man, that religion finds at 
 once its perennial spring and its impregnable 
 refuge. And it is precisely because in these 
 regions woman's nature is at its richest that we 
 are beginning to discover how primary and how 
 essential is the contribution which she makes 
 to it. It is because along that side of its 
 nature humanity most quickly and most surely 
 feels the quiver of the Infinite that woman 
 must inevitably in the future be recognised as 
 arch-priestess of religion. 
 
 In proportion as this element of the supra- 
 rational — existing both in man and woman, but 
 in man so frequently deficient — assumes with- 
 out cavil its true place in religion, we shall see 
 going on in it a steady readjustment of values. 
 The bastard religion of dogma, forged in a 
 place which has no proper apparatus for pro- 
 ducing it, will yield precedence to the true reli- 
 gion of faith, hope and love. The Church will 
 cease to frame definitions of everything in the 
 universe, with anathemas attached against all 
 
Of Sex in Religion. 115 
 
 who fail to accept them, and will instead give 
 itself to its proper work of loving, praying and 
 serving. It will labour with all its might to 
 understand, but it will not again commit the 
 offence of offering the world a syllogistic salva- 
 tion. It will know God as every mother's soul 
 has always known Him, and as logic has never 
 known Him. It will bear sinners on its heart as 
 mothers do their prodigal sons. And by this 
 means will it arrive at and abide in the true 
 orthodoxy, the proper knowledge of God. For 
 it is because God's heart has in its centre this 
 mother love that He is our God. It is because 
 Christ's life was the expression of that heart 
 that He is the Saviour of the world. 
 
XIII. 
 
 Of False Conscience. 
 
 The view advocated by Socrates, and by Plato 
 after him, which practically identified virtue 
 with knowledge, has been sharply criticised and 
 can easily be shown to be defective. But the 
 controversy has at least helped us to realise 
 how essential a factor is knowledge to all moral 
 progress, and how fatal an impediment to that 
 progress is ignorance. The saying of Dean 
 Church, that " it is not enough to be religious, 
 but we need to know the kind of religion we 
 are of," is entirely applicable here. It is not 
 sufficient to call ourselves conscientious. The 
 point is to discover the kind of conscience we 
 are using. The habit in many religious 
 teachers of describing conscience as a kind of 
 divinity within us whose judgments represent 
 infallible moral truth, is an evidence of the 
 looseness of thinking which prevails in some 
 pulpits. That there is a Divine working in the 
 human conscience is credible enough, but the 
 
Of False Conscience. 117 
 
 search for it reveals to us at once two elements 
 which have to be decisively separated. One is 
 the central light which from the beginning has 
 been streaming upon humanity ; the other is 
 the human organ or medium upon which that 
 light has played, and which in different ages 
 and races shows itself as a development in all 
 stages of imperfection. The ray which falls 
 on the lens is entirely pure. But the rough 
 and often quite rudimentary character of this 
 instrument, its imperfect polishing, and the 
 foreign matter which inheres in its substance, 
 cause often the most grotesque and distorted 
 images to be thrown. 
 
 It is when we have grasped this fact that 
 those earlier histories of conscientiousness, 
 which form often such unpleasant and puzzling 
 reading, become at least intelligible to us. 
 What we find there is really a blend between 
 the religious impulse and grotesquely false ideas 
 of the universe. When the Lacedaemonians 
 whipped boys to death as an offering to Diana ; 
 when the mother of Xerxes, as he departed on 
 one of his expeditions, buried alive a number of 
 youths to propitiate the subterranean powers ; 
 when the Carthaginians placed their little 
 children on the red-hot lap of Moloch, they 
 
118 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 were acting' in the fear of God; but their God 
 was a bad God. Conscientiousness for many 
 ages and amongst many peoples might be trans- 
 lated as bad-Godism. The cult is in full vogue 
 to-day. The present writer had recently in his 
 hand a photograph of an Indian fakir with a 
 long, emaciated arm stretched at right angles 
 from the shoulder. He had conscientiously held 
 it in that position for some thirty years ! In 
 Paris the other day died an old woman whose 
 body was covered with scars and burns. She 
 had starved and tortured herself to death in 
 the name of religion. The fakir and the Paris 
 Catholic belong outwardly to different faiths. 
 They might be bracketed together as devotees 
 of a divinity who, if he were real, would have 
 to be described as cruel and barbarous ; whose 
 moral character, in fact, would not bear 
 inquiry. 
 
 Most of us will claim to be quite remote from 
 mental conditions of this order. We have out- 
 grown those conceptions in which religion, to 
 use the terrible words of Lucretius, " displayed 
 her head from the heavens, threatening mortals 
 with her hideous aspect." "We have purified 
 our thoughts of God, and concurrently have 
 raised the standards by which we jud^e of 
 
Of False Conscience. 119 
 
 character and conduct. Very likely our self- 
 satisfaction in these respects may be fairly well 
 grounded. In the ordinary and well-worn, 
 tracks, both of religious thinking and practical 
 living, our conscience can be trusted to yields 
 results that in comparison with those cited may 
 be regarded as respectable, and even superior. 
 And yet it requires no very close observation,, 
 even in the circles nearest to us, to discover on 
 every hand badly trained, badly nourished con- 
 sciences, which, from not having enough 
 intellect in their virtue, are playing false in a 
 dozen directions to life's higher interests. 
 
 There is an aberration of conscience which 
 rules specially in religious natures, the subtle 
 working of which has, so far as we know, never 
 yet been fairly analysed. The disturbing cause 
 here might be summed up in a phrase as the 
 short-sighted selfishness of religious enjoyment. 
 The inner history of the conscience which offers 
 this phenomenon may be traced somewhat as 
 follows : Upon a highly sensitive nature there 
 comes, whether by sudden emotional inflow or 
 by quieter inner movements, a condition of 
 spiritual feeling which is recognised as the 
 highest and purest enjoyment that life has yet 
 afforded. Call it what we will — " conversion," 
 
120 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 M reconciliation/' " the sense of God," "the 
 higher life" — it is there, a rapturous experience 
 known to multitudes and recognised by them 
 as an incomparable treasure and luxury of the 
 soul. 
 
 The natural and immediate sequence of the 
 experience is the desire and resolve to retain 
 this joy at all costs. Whatever seems to 
 diminish its intensity or to fail to contribute to 
 its increase is regarded as an enemy to be 
 avoided. And everything, on the other hand, 
 that appears to aid it, or to open up sources for 
 its supply, is welcomed and cherished. But 
 the age-long experience of the human spirit has 
 at last begun to discover that even this loftiest 
 phase of the heart's life has its own dangers ; 
 that its impulses are not all to be trusted, that 
 its verdicts must be tested by another court 
 if they are not to lead us astray. 
 
 The manner in which this feeling, left to 
 itself, has repeatedly and disastrously missed 
 its way is writ large in human history. One 
 can trace three separate wrong directions along 
 which the instinct has operated. In the first 
 place, in the search for what seemed its most 
 appropriate food, it has, especially in earlier 
 days, given a false currency to the miraculous 
 
Op False Conscience. 121 
 
 and the supernatural. Craving ever for its 
 sense of God, it went on the supposition that 
 He was most distinctly to be realised in what 
 transcended the order of Nature. Here is the 
 origin of those " wonder stories " which flowed 
 from the imagination of the pious minds of 
 former times, written and read with the single 
 idea of promoting that religious rapture of 
 which the supernatural alone seemed to be the 
 source. Whether they are Jewish haggadah in 
 which prophets are transported across continents 
 by the hair of their head, or " Gospels of the 
 Infancy," which represent the Saviour as 
 addressing profound sayings to Mary from the 
 cradle, or mediaeval lives of the saints, such as 
 Bonaventura's of Francis of Assisi, stuffed with 
 marvels, they bear the same stamp and are 
 from the same mint. Protestants as well as 
 Catholics have yielded to this impulse. We 
 read in Mary's reign of a voice, thought by the 
 people to be that of an angel, speaking against 
 the Mass from a wall in Aldgate, when the 
 angel turned out to be a girl concealed behind 
 the plaster. This aberration of the old-time 
 -conscience in the interest of the religious feel- 
 ing is pressing specially hard upon us to-day. 
 Jt is burdening the Church with one of its most 
 
122 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 difficult and painful tasks in the unravelling of 
 truth from error. 
 
 The desire of the soul to preserve its God- 
 consciousness unimpaired has led religion along 
 a second fatal track, that of the banning of 
 inquiry and of contrary opinion. Received 
 doctrine being, as was maintained, the vessel 
 that held the treasure, to touch the one was to 
 imperil the other. Hence that " castration of 
 the intellect," to use Nietzsche's terrible phrase 
 which for centuries characterised ecclesiastical 
 procedure; the feeling that led Augustine to 
 assert that schismatics would suffer eternal 
 punishments, " although for the name of Christ 
 they had been burned alive"; which found 
 voice in Cardinal Pole's dictum that murder 
 and adultery were not to be compared in 
 heinousness with heresy ; which in our own day 
 made Newman declare that " a publisher of 
 heresy should be treated as if he were embodied 
 evil," and the gentle Keble to regard scholars 
 who applied modern scientific criticism to the 
 Bible as " Men too wicked to be reasoned with." 
 A milder form of the same feeling is that which 
 burks inquiry from fear that the results will 
 damage one's religious joy. It is this which in 
 the sixteenth century gave occasion to the gibe 
 
Of False Conscience. 123 
 
 of Erasmus that " our theologians call it a sign 
 of holiness to be unable to read." What, if it 
 had not been said in our own hearing, would 
 have been less credible was a recent declaration 
 of thankfulness by a Nonconformist minister 
 that he had never learned German ! " German 
 religious thought was so unsettling ! " That a 
 man whose business it was to know and to 
 teach should in these days express gratitude for 
 ignorance would be inconceivable in any other 
 sphere. But in theology all things are possible. 
 Only very slowly is the religious conscience 
 beginning to understand what Pascal tried to 
 teach it more than two centuries ago, that " the 
 first of all Christian truths is that truth should 
 be loved above all"; only now is it beginning to 
 realise that the God-consciousness, to preserve 
 which it has often so ignorantly striven, reaches, 
 only its loftiest form when the intellect is per- 
 mitted its fullest and freest play. 
 
 The third of the ways in which the unedu- 
 cated instinct for religious joy has tended to 
 mislead the conscience has been by practising 
 what seemed the cheap and easy process of 
 exclusion. Secular pursuits, interests and 
 enthusiasms drew the mind off God and were 
 therefore as far as possible to be barred. 
 
124 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Hence science, the arts, the drama, physical 
 •exercises and pastimes were banned as hostile 
 to the Divine life. To-day in many circles that 
 ban is not yet raised. There is a story of a 
 modern evangelist shutting his eyes when sail- 
 ing up the Rhine lest the beauty of the scenery 
 should prove a temptation. Even learning has 
 with some modern religionists been avoided 
 a.s distracting from true piety. It is distinctly 
 a credit to the Jesuits, with all their faults, 
 that their leader, Ignatius Loyola, saw the 
 fallacy of all this and taught that the religious 
 •emotions, fascinating as was their indulgence, 
 must not be allowed to hinder the acquirement 
 of scholarship and the arts. One must in this 
 sense " go away from God for God ; ad major em 
 gloriam Dei." That is one of the great lessons 
 of the inner life as we understand it to-day. 
 We are, as a French writer has powerfully said, 
 to " beware of a religion which substitutes itself 
 for everything ; that makes monks. Seek a 
 religion which penetrates everything ; that 
 makes Christians." We are discovering now 
 that God is not only the source and object of 
 the religious feelings, but that He is also a 
 musician, an artist, a mathematician, the 
 Oreator and Giver of all beauty, and that in 
 
Of False Conscience. 125* 
 
 seeking perfection in these directions we are 
 seeking Him. It is a false conscience which 
 would shut up our religious interests to the 
 narrow ground of a few elementary ideas. 
 That is to put it in charge of a kitchen garden 
 when its true role is to govern a universe. 
 
XIV. 
 Religion and Medicine. 
 
 In modem civilisation the clergyman and the 
 doctor stand at such a distance apart that it is 
 almost difficult for us to realise that originally 
 they were one and the same person. Yet there 
 was a time when medicine — the whole business 
 of healing — was a purely ecclesiastical function. 
 In savage tribes to-day the " medicine man " is 
 also priest. And the reason is evident. The 
 primitive belief everywhere connected disease 
 with spiritual causes, and for a cure looked to 
 the supernatural. Throughout rural India, as 
 Mr. Crooke in his " Folk-Lore " informs us, 
 sickness is attributed to spirits or to the anger 
 of offended ancestors, and the priest or " holy 
 man " is in such cases at once called in to pro- 
 pitiate or exorcise the evil influence. We need 
 not, indeed, go so far afield for similar ideas. 
 There are parts of rural England where cramp, 
 ague, the falling sickness and other ailments 
 are held to be due to demonic agency, against 
 
Religion and Medicine. 127 
 
 which the remedy is in charms and mystic in- 
 cantations. It has been by a very long process, 
 in accordance with that law of specialisation of 
 function the working of which Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer has so laboriously delineated, that the 
 medicinal art has, amongst civilised peoples, 
 gained the distinctive place of which we find it 
 in possession to-day. 
 
 Medicine, on its way to becoming a science 
 and an art, has had some rude experiences. 
 Its earlier stages were hardly an improvement 
 on the old supernaturalism. For a charm or 
 an exorcism, if they did no good, at least they 
 hardly did harm. Often, indeed, they wrought 
 their miracles, for they left nature to do her 
 work, assisted by that mighty reinforcement, 
 faith. It was another matter when actual 
 experiment began to be made with drug and 
 with operating knife upon the human subject. 
 This ticklish business of putting, as Voltaire so 
 cruelly insinuated, " drugs of which you know 
 little into a body of which you know nothing," 
 brought the healing tribe for a long period into 
 grievous disrepute. They have been the sub- 
 ject of some of the world's oldest witticisms. 
 There is that of the Lacedemonian, who, on 
 being asked why he lived so long, replied that 
 
128 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 it was because of his ignorance of physic ; and 
 the mot of Diogenes to an inferior wrestler who 
 had turned physician : " Courage, friend, now 
 thou shalt put them into the ground that 
 beforetime put thee on it." Montaigne 
 makes us shudder with his picture of the 
 medical practices of his time. Fancy a pre- 
 scription which included (( the left foot of a 
 tortoise, the excrement of an elephant, the 
 liver of a mole, the blood from under the left 
 wing of a white pigeon, and rats pounded to a 
 small powder " ! It was a hardy race, surely, 
 that stood all this and yet survived to tell the 
 tale. 
 
 It is worth while recalling these earlier 
 phases of the healing art and of the standing 
 of its nrofessors, in order the better to realise 
 the immense change that we witness to-day. 
 Resting on a broad basis of accurate knowledge, 
 master of a thousand secrets, its history 
 crowded with glorious victories in the cam- 
 paign against disease and pain, and with fore- 
 most names, with intellect and worth everywhere 
 devoted to its interests, the medical profession 
 has reached a kind of apotheosis in modern 
 life. Art has expressed the present estimate 
 of it in Mr. Filde's beautiful picture " The 
 
Religion and Medicine. 129 
 
 Doctor," while Ian Maclaren in his exquisite 
 and moving portraiture of the Drumtochty 
 practitioner has written the same sentiment 
 into literature. The feeling has grown upon 
 men that this calling, demanding as it does the 
 constant exercise at once of knowledge and of 
 sympathy, which has the most fascinating 
 problems for the intellect and the most imperi- 
 ous claims upon the heart, whose aim is the 
 furtherance of life and the defeat of death, is 
 emphatically a calling for noble souls, and 
 noble souls in abundance have nocked into it. 
 To-day the personnel, the standing and the 
 achievements of the medical profession repre- 
 sent one of the most valuable assets of civilisa- 
 tion. 
 
 It is precisely on this account that the 
 question becomes so interesting as to the 
 precise present-day relations between medicine 
 and religion. One of our reasons for writing 
 on the subject is the feeling that, in more than 
 one direction, they might be improved. There 
 is, for one thing, an impression abroad that the 
 bent of the physiological mind is toward 
 materialism. The old saying, i( tres medici duo 
 athei," is still quoted. Miss Power Cobbe, in a 
 magazine article some time ago, lamented that 
 
 9 
 
130 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the medical faculty was setting up a new priest- 
 hood which was to replace the care of tlie soul 
 by the care of the body. There is certainly no 
 group of educated men so exposed to that 
 appeal to the senses on which materialism 
 relies as are our doctors and surgeons. More 
 closely to them than to the rest of us comes 
 home the argument of Lucretius : 
 
 Prseterea gigni pariter cum corpore et una 
 Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem. 
 
 " Besides, we see the mind to be born with the 
 body, to grow with it, and with it to decay." 
 They are continually in contact with death, as 
 the apparent conqueror and extinguisher of 
 mind. And so it has happened that some of 
 the strongest attacks against religious ortho- 
 doxy have come from the medical and physio- 
 logical side. Rabelais, the arch-scoffer of the 
 sixteenth century, was a physician as well as a 
 monk. Darwin and Huxley, who gave the re- 
 ligious sentiment of the last generation so rude 
 a shake, were bred in this school. It is also, 
 in this connection, a curious coincidence that 
 the starter of the modern denial of the Mosaic 
 authorship of the Pentateuch should have been 
 a physician — the Frenchman, Jean Astruc. 
 
Religion and Medicine. 131 
 
 It is one of the greatest misfortunes of the 
 modern specialisation of studies that it should 
 make the ablest and most earnest men almost 
 inevitably one-sided. And nowhere is this 
 result more to be lamented than m the sphere 
 of medicine. For here the sheer necessity of 
 overtaking and keeping abreast of the enor- 
 mous accumulation of technical knowledge in 
 their own department has kept numbers of 
 medical men comparatively uneducated on a 
 side of their nature, which, for the purposes of 
 their work, requires the most thorough train- 
 ing. The question here is not that of their 
 persona] attitude towards this or that theo- 
 logical dogma ; it is whether the comparatively 
 small attention paid by some members of the 
 faculty to the spiritual side of human life does 
 not, in some most important particulars, hinder 
 and mar their professional work ? On abstract 
 grounds it would, we believe, be not difficult to 
 show that the modern spiritual philosophy, as 
 expounded by a Caird, a Green and a Mar- 
 tineau, has effectively met the arguments of 
 the later Materialism. But it is much more to 
 the point to show how medicine can neither do 
 justice to itself nor to the humanity to which 
 it ministers unless it both recognise the 
 
182 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 spiritual, and, what is more, receive a definite 
 training in its laws. 
 
 The neglect of this plainly-marked depart- 
 ment of its work has, for one thing, kept the 
 ground open for a swarm of non-experts and 
 adventurers. Heterodoxy has in every age had 
 the function of showing to orthodoxy the new 
 roads ahead, and this has been emphatically 
 true of the schools of medicine. It has been 
 reserved for the outsiders, who have in succes- 
 sive generations stirred the wrath of orthodox 
 medicine, to suggest to it what turn out in the 
 end to be indubitable truths. What, for 
 instance, is the doctrine of faith-healing, for 
 which a "Dr." Dowie is assaulted by a crowd 
 of boisterous medicos, more than the assertion, 
 in an extravagant form, of a truth now on its 
 way to universal acknowledgment, that the body 
 has to be approached first and foremost through 
 the soul? The world is full of unformulated 
 facts on this question. The healings wrought 
 by Christ and the apostles, the cures to which 
 Irenaeus bears testimony in the second century, 
 the marvellous physical results of the preaching 
 of Bernard, the raising of Melancthon from 
 what seemed immediate death at the prayer of 
 Luther, are parts of an immense tradition 
 
Religion and Medicine. 138 
 
 which points all in one direction. It testifies 
 to the existence of secret spiritual energies, 
 potent against disease and for the fuitherance 
 of life, which under certain conditions are at 
 the disposition of humanity, and which it 
 behoves the men responsible in these depart- 
 ments most carefully to study. 
 
 But the relations of medicine with the spirit- 
 ual by no means end here. The best men of 
 the profession recognise growingly, we believe, 
 the immense moral responsibilities attaching to 
 it, and the grave questions which hang thereon. 
 Their position brings them continually into con- 
 tact with life's ultimate problems. They stand 
 between the young man and his vices. They 
 see humanity in its defeats, its exhaustions, its 
 despairs. They are called in to the spectacle of 
 life-bankruptcies when all the physical forces 
 have been rioted away, and there is a famine of 
 power and of joy. Every day they see men face, 
 with what philosophy they can muster, the last 
 enemy. And their entree is to every class. They 
 are called in where the clergy are excluded. In 
 their parish there are practically no dissenters. 
 
 To a man of the nobler instincts the appeal 
 of this helplessness and despair should be irre- 
 sistible. But what has he to meet it with ? In 
 
134 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 nine cases out of ten physical alleviation is the 
 smallest part of what a sufferer needs. The 
 thing he wants above all is hope and courage. 
 But where is our practitioner to find this ; where 
 is he to gain power to stiffen the moral back- 
 bone of tempted youth ; or to cheer the lonely 
 invalid to whom the days are a weariness and 
 the nights a horror; to help men gain the 
 supreme moral victory over suffering and over 
 death ? One must put it bluntly : he cannot be 
 a good doctor who is not fundamentally a good 
 man. Emphatically is it true for his work that 
 " one man with a belief is worth ten men with 
 only interests." What we are here saying has 
 nothing to do with sectarianism ; still less with 
 that professional religionism which is the most 
 detestable of all poses. It is simply the asser- 
 tion of certain fundamental truths that have 
 been lacking in some medical curriculums, and 
 of which, in conclusion, we may give this as the 
 sum : Medical science is ultimately a branch of 
 spiritual science ; bodily healing requires a 
 knowledge of psychic as well as of physical 
 conditions ; and finally, the medical ministry to 
 a diseased and broken humanity can never be 
 adequate unless carried on as a mediation of 
 the Eternal Goodness and Love. 
 
XV. 
 Spiritual Undercurrents. 
 
 If a man who has purchased an acre of land 
 could only comprehend and utilise the values 
 that he has here obtained he would be over- 
 whelmed with the sense of his riches. He is 
 going to make what he can of the surface, but 
 knows practically nothing of what he owns 
 underneath. Hints of what lies there occasion- 
 ally make themselves heard, and the favoured 
 ones in whose ears they are whispered win 
 fortunes in coal, in oil, in gold. But these, 
 after all, are only scratchings of the outer 
 crust, leaving immeasurable depths unsearchedo. 
 Little by little we are learning what a realm of 
 forces we are at the top of. We discover that 
 bodies related to each other by their separate 
 chemical qualities and affinities are under the 
 common sway of mysterious earth-currents, 
 magnetisms and what not, that sweep the 
 central deeps and are felt from pole to pole. 
 The world, as a purely physical system, is 
 
136 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 governed far more by what is hidden than by 
 what we see. 
 
 When we turn our attention from the round 
 globe itself to the being who lives on it, we 
 seem to find all this repeated in another 
 sphere. A man must be reckoned not so much 
 by what he is, as by the sum of the forces that 
 are acting on him. In the purely physical life 
 who is to say when the outside air which he 
 draws into his lungs, or the food of which he 
 partakes, is, and is not he ? When we have 
 taken stock of a man's visible outfit, reckoned 
 up his bit of brain, his level of culture, his 
 apparent reach of faculty, have we here the 
 sum of his life possibilities ? Far from it. To 
 get that we have to take into account the 
 spiritual system to which he belongs, and to 
 estimate what he may do or become under the 
 impact of its mysterious powers. Here, too, 
 we are becoming sensible of mighty under- 
 currents. They sweep along the whole unseen 
 force-region that lies underneath humanity, 
 and to comprehend them is, we are beginning 
 to realise, a fundamental element in the busi- 
 ness of life. There are side branches of this 
 theme along which, at this point, one is much 
 tempted to diverge. One might, for instance, 
 
Spiritual Undercurrents. 137 
 
 discuss here those strange psychical phenomena 
 about which Kant was constrained to say: 
 " For my part, ignorant as I am of the way in 
 which the human spirit enters the world, and 
 the ways in which it goes out of it, I dare not 
 deny the truth of many of such narratives." 
 But these phases of the topic, absorbing as 
 they are to many modern minds, are not the 
 main point. And we want here to keep 
 to that. 
 
 Of the spiritual system to which we have 
 just referred as offering the real measure of 
 our separate possibility, the New Testament is 
 the manual in chief, and yet there is no book 
 that on this point has been more misunder- 
 stood. The Christianity it depicts offers us, 
 for one thing, a marvellous object-lesson on 
 human nature and its unseen environment. It 
 shows us what can be made of the average man 
 when a new force plays on him. Its language, 
 and the facts it recites as to the " endowment 
 with power " and the " gift of the Holy Spirit," 
 are a piece of spiritual geography exhibiting, 
 with a clearness and certainty new to the 
 world, the features of the great power-realm 
 which environs humanity. But the interpreta- 
 tion of the manual has been hitherto a crude 
 
138 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 and unscientific business, and we are only just 
 emerging upon a view of the facts that is solid 
 and satisfying. To listen to some talk still 
 current, one might suppose that the " gift " or 
 " outpouring " of the Spirit were a kind of 
 parochial phenomenon, showing at hazard 
 amongst this or that group of enthusiasts,, 
 and whose chief characteristic was the element 
 of caprice and of the incalculable. Men quote 
 the text, " The wind bloweth where it listeth," 
 and forthwith conclude they have to deal with 
 something that quite transcends any question 
 of law or of uniformity. As though the wind 
 were outside the sweep of law ! We do not 
 indulge in talk of this kind in the other 
 departments in which man is to-day enriching 
 his life. Electricity is an outside power by 
 whose reinforcement we have quadrupled our 
 energies, but we know better than to treat its 
 coming or going as belonging to the uncertain 
 or the inexplicable. The analogy here suggested 
 is wGrth pausing upon. When we call ours 
 the age of electricity, what do we mean? 
 Certainly not that electricity has been bestowed 
 on the world in our time. It was there 
 all the time. The difference is that ours 
 is the age in which its existence has been 
 
Spiritual Undercurrents. 139 
 
 recognised, its laws ascertained, and the appli- 
 cations of its force, in part at least, understood. 
 It may yet be that the twentieth century will 
 be known, in comparison with former times, as 
 the age of the Spirit, and for a similar reason. 
 No new forces will have been created, but the old 
 ones, the spiritual undercurrents that have been 
 running from the beginning, will have been 
 uncovered and tapped, and the human soul 
 bathed in their constant supply. 
 
 What has so much confused our thinking in 
 this matter has been the question of personality, 
 and especially our thinking about the supreme 
 personality of Christ. We speak of the Spirit 
 as His gift, and that on excellent authority, for 
 so is it stated in the New Testament. On the 
 same high authority we speak of the Spirit as a 
 Person, as part of the personality of God. 
 And here also we do well. Not so well, though, 
 in the inferences we are apt to draw. How did 
 Jesus give us the Spirit? How did Faraday 
 give us electricity ? Not by creating, but by 
 revealing. The gift in each case was there, 
 old as eternity, but with a veil on its face. In 
 each case the moment in human evolution came, 
 the ripened time for the unveiling. Jesus, in 
 His historical manifestation, was what He was 
 
140 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 through the new relation of His personality to 
 the spiritual forces, just as, in an immeasurably 
 lower sphere, Faraday was what he was through 
 a new relation to the electric forces. The New 
 Testament is abundantly clear on this point. 
 The Christ had his power through being "filled 
 with the Spirit." According to his own testi- 
 mony He could " do nothing of Himself." His 
 place in history was and is unique, because of 
 His unique receptivity for the fulness of Divine 
 Life. 
 
 The gist of this is that the spiritual under- 
 currents on which the higher life depends are 
 not variants, but constants. It is a question not 
 •of the flow and ebb of their tide, for their tide 
 knows no ebb, but of the extent and delicacy 
 of the surface we can open to their impact. 
 There is no break here between the analogies 
 •of the natural and the spiritual world. The 
 uniformity of the laws on which we depend in 
 nature is not more exact than the uniformity 
 we find in the kingdom of grace. In both we 
 have to do with the same ineffable Personality. 
 In gravitation, as in inspiration, we are in 
 contact with the one eternal Spirit of God. 
 
 The significance of the history of Jesus for 
 <us is, then, partly, at least, the revelation it 
 
Spiritual Undercurrents. 141 
 
 offers of the possibilities of humanity when in 
 fullest union with its spiritual environment _ 
 Verily, here is He the first born of a new 
 creation, the forerunner in a new and higher 
 stage of development. That perfect life, with 
 its Divine self-consciousness, its utter purity, its 
 love, its Calvary-consummated sacrifice, opened, 
 as it were, the sluices through which the pent- 
 up spiritual currents, hitherto hidden, could 
 roll in upon a thirsty humanity, bringing 
 Paradise in their flow. Precious beyond words* 
 is that draught of the undercurrent, and beyond 
 words precious is He to whom we owe it. 
 Mankind, said Goethe, is continually progress- 
 ing, but the individual man is ever the same. 
 The same, that is, in his central need, a need 
 which no progress in civilisation can ever 
 supply, but which is met and satisfied through 
 Christ. As men understand these things more y 
 the more will they enter into that sheer,, 
 adoring love of Christ which perfumes the 
 New Testament. The language of Christina 
 Eossetti becomes our own : " How beautiful are 
 the arms which have embraced Christ, the- 
 hands which have touched Christ, the eyes 
 which have gazed upon Christ, the lips which 
 have spoken with Christ, the feet which have- 
 
142 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 followed Christ ; how beautiful are the hands 
 which have worked the works of Christ, the 
 feet which, treading in His footsteps, have 
 gone about doing good, the lips that have 
 spread abroad His name, the lives which have 
 been counted loss for Him ! " 
 
 The relation of Christ's personality to the 
 spiritual undercurrents is, in a lower degree, 
 that of all His followers. It is, in a way, like 
 what we have in magnetism, where, in addition 
 to the great, central, perennial earth currents, 
 there is the separate and varying magnetic 
 susceptibility of each different object and 
 element. The spiritual currents concentrate in 
 us, form in us reservoirs of power, use us as 
 media of their mighty movement. It is pre- 
 cisely to the extent in which we are in touch 
 with them that, as Churches or as individuals, 
 we are of any religious use to the world. 
 What a spectacle that of a Church with all its 
 organism complete for work, but with the 
 stream that should furnish its driving-power 
 cutting for itself a channel in a new direction, 
 and leaving all this ecclesiastical plant high and 
 dry on the deserted shore ! This is what Carry le 
 had in view when, in a passage written sixty 
 years ago, but which has not yet lost its signi- 
 
Spiritual Undercurrents. 143 
 
 ficance, he speaks of u these distracted times 
 when the religious principle, driven out of most 
 churches, either lives unseen in the hearts of 
 good men, looking and longing and silently 
 working towards some new revelation, or else 
 wanders homeless over the world like a disem- 
 bodied soul seeking its terrestrial organism ! " 
 It is for the Church of to-day to render such 
 a consummation impossible, and now is its 
 supreme opportunity. With all history behind 
 it, with a clearer apprehension than has ever 
 before been known of its mission and its powers, 
 with the humanity it deals with visibly opening 
 to new and deeper apprehensions of the truth 
 and life it brings, the Church has now in its 
 reach the clear possibility of revolutionising the 
 world and of establishing it upon the immutable 
 basis of God's spiritual law. Its new regime 
 will be, in the best sense, a scientific one. 
 Just as, in the electrical sphere, no teacher of 
 the science is possible who is ignorant of, or 
 careless about, the laws which operate in it, so 
 in this spiritual sphere no Church authority 
 will be recognised which is not founded on 
 knowledge of, and obedience to, the inner laws. 
 The idea of a Church subsisting on, or working 
 by, any other power than that which rises in 
 
144 OuESELYES AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 the spiritual world, will be felt to be as absurd 
 as Laputa's project for extracting sunbeams from 
 cucumbers. The Church's speech, its prayers, 
 even its silences, will be channels of the Spirit's, 
 mighty undercurrent. No preacher will venture 
 the impertinence of utterance which, either in 
 substance or in delivery, is divorced from the 
 operation of the kingdom's law. 
 
 As a crater, in an eruption, is only the organ 
 and mouthpiece, as it were, of forces infinitely 
 beyond its own range, working far beneath, so- 
 the worker in this kingdom, be he never sc* 
 eminent or never so humble, will recognise that 
 so is it with him. If his work is worth any- 
 thing at all he will know that its worth consists 
 precisely in this, that it originates in a sphere 
 beyond himself. 
 
XVI. 
 On Being Inferior. 
 
 One of the greatest disciplines of the inner life 
 lies in the choice that is offered us as to the 
 treatment of our own inferiority. It is a dis- 
 cipline which none of us is allowed to escape. 
 Some of us are very low down. There are 
 ranges and ranges of visible human life that 
 are far above us. But the sense of inferiority 
 is by no means confined to the poor or the 
 meagrely gifted. The highest amongst men 
 are really in the same position, and are often 
 made to feel it the most acutely. Illustrations 
 of this will come presently, but meanwhile the 
 point is as to how we regard the fact in itself. 
 That its true lesson is difficult to learn is evident 
 from the stumbles over it that are everywhere 
 made. There are, for instance, the meaner souls 
 who seek to balance matters by an inane and 
 spiteful process of levelling down ; whose 
 
 . . . low desire 
 JN ot to feel lowest makes them level all. 
 
 10 
 
146 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 A variety of the same species is the man 
 whose morbid self-conceit leads him to fix on 
 some chance feature of his individuality in 
 which he surpasses his neighbours as a reason 
 for ignoring the thousand points in which he is 
 beneath them. Often enough the feature itself 
 is of ludicrously small importance. Our great 
 man is some (i Thrasybulus of the ward of 
 Stira, who had the strongest voice of any man 
 among the Athenians." On the other hand, 
 there are men who allow their sense of defect to 
 crush out all manly self-confidence. It was the 
 reverse of the true way of taking his own in- 
 feriority which led poor Benedict XII., on 
 hearing of his election as Pope, to say to the 
 conclave, "Brethren, you have chosen an ass." 
 Yet, again, there are in our day not a small 
 number who gird at their limitation of position 
 and gifts as part of that great system of in- 
 equality which, in their eyes, is the most 
 flagrant instance of the injustice of life, and 
 consequently of the immorality of the universe. 
 
 It is surely not for such results that life 
 brings us under the discipline of being inferior. 
 In searching for the true ends of it let us try 
 first to get at the facts of the case. What 
 meets us at the outset is the circumstance that 
 
On Being Inferior. 147 
 
 our inferiority one to another is mixed up in a 
 most complicated way. There is no absolute 
 superiority. We are all at once superior and 
 inferior. The mixing process commences with 
 an initial difference of rank. Mr. Gladstone 
 was fond of saying that English society was 
 immutably based on its finely-graded and 
 clearly-recognised system of classes, of which 
 the throne was the apex. The New World is 
 spoken of sometimes as having abolished this 
 system and founded another on the basis of 
 human equality. It is hardly so. Names have 
 been changed, but not things. There is no 
 more equality in America than there is in 
 England ; nor can be, for the thing is not in 
 human nature. And it is amusing to think 
 that the stoutest Republican recognises to the 
 full the doctrine of inequality, of absolute 
 monarchy even, in his religion, where he 
 worships one supreme Ruler, and speaks of a 
 hierarchy of saints and angels. No true man, 
 in fact, girds at rank. He knows that it re- 
 presents something worthy, if not in its actual 
 possessor, yet assuredly in the force that 
 created it. It is there, the evidence of a 
 primal life-power that once lifted itself 
 amongst men and made itself respected. 
 
148 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 But the man high in social position is full, 
 in his turn, of inferiorities. When Charles V. 
 picked up Titian's fallen brush and handed it 
 to the painter with the remark that he was 
 proud to wait on so supreme a genius, the 
 master of half the world spoke here with a full 
 sense of an inferior towards a superior. In the 
 artist's great realm of life he knew himself to 
 occupy the lower place. In the yet higher 
 sphere of the moral and spiritual this interplay 
 of values is even more striking. The Stoic 
 Epictetus, who had emperors afterwards for 
 disciples, was a Greek slave. The Galilean 
 peasant whom Pilate condemned did not dis- 
 pute for a moment the higher social rank of 
 the judge. But to-day the judges and great 
 ones of the earth name the Galilean's name 
 with religious devotion, and have no words 
 which adequately express their sense of His 
 rank in the world. Throughout history, in 
 fact, the moral and spiritual superiorities seem 
 by a kind of law to have been wedded with 
 lowliness of outward position. Libanius made 
 fun of the early Christians as a set of tinkers 
 and cobblers who had left their mallets and 
 awls to preach the kingdom of heaven. 
 Spinoza ground lenses for a livelihood. George 
 
On Being Inferior. 149 
 
 Fox and Jacob Bohme got theirs by cutting 
 leather. Literature tells the same story. From 
 Homer downwards the kings of ideas have 
 been, as often as not, bankrupt of pocket. Yet 
 always the wealthy and the great have felt 
 their own smallness beside these beggars. 
 Pauperemque dives me petit. " The rich man 
 seeks me, the poor man," has been the poet's 
 boast in every age. 
 
 But this, it may be said, is only a partial 
 and specious view. To pit intellectual and 
 moral values against material and social ones is, 
 we shall be told, only to trifle with the subject. 
 For when the superiorities both of money 
 and rank and of brain and heart have been 
 accounted for, the real question remains. These 
 rich dowers, inward and outward, belong after 
 all to the exceptional. What of the vast 
 average of men, the dim multitudes, who have 
 no special gift, either of property, rank or 
 mind ? There surely is a " being inferior " 
 with no romance in it ; in which one fails 
 utterly to find the ideal ! No one with open 
 eyes will think so. The higher up a man is the 
 more profound will be his respect for the 
 average humanity, the more humble will he be 
 in its presence. For it is here in the midst of 
 
150 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the common and the normal, in life's mid-stream 
 rather than amongst the exceptions, that he 
 will recognise with awe the existence of a 
 Power in humanity mightier than its own, a 
 Power that is working out ideas infinitely 
 greater than those of the ablest individual man. 
 This study of the superiority that lurks in 
 and beneath the life of the common man is, in 
 fact, the one thing needful and grievously 
 lacking among the present-day accredited pur- 
 veyors of our moral ideas. It would do some 
 of our armchair theologians, who judge man- 
 kind by their prim lists of ecclesiastical 
 " virtues and their contrary vices," a world of 
 good if they could spend some months amongst, 
 say, the common sailors on board an ocean 
 tramp. On Sundays, while the tramp's owners 
 and the pious British public generally are at 
 church, they would find these men at some 
 foreign port loading grain or coal. Their 
 language will not be ecclesiastical, and when 
 they get a day ashore their procedures are not 
 such as are provided for in the Assembly's 
 Catechism. This, without doubt, is very 
 shocking. But by-and-by it will dawn upon 
 our theologian, if he have grace, that the moral 
 and spiritual lack of these men is the sacrifice 
 
On Being Inferior. 151 
 
 they are offering to the interests of the religious 
 British public; that their Sunday and week- 
 day labour, their exposure to the tempests of 
 ocean, and to the thieves and harlots of the* 
 foreign port, are the price at which this stay- 
 at-home public gets its corn and wine, its com- 
 forts and luxuries, three-parts, in fact, of all it 
 eats, drinks and wears. It dawns upon him 
 that if vicarious sacrifice is the highest height 
 and deepest heart of morals, then these men ? 
 who have sacrificed the interests of their bodies; 
 and their souls for the rest of us, are in their 
 unchurched paganism actually a great deal 
 higher up than we. When besides he has 
 touched hands with these men, and known their 
 childlike simplicity, their quick response to 
 what is higher when it is offered, their splendid 
 courage, their noble devotion, he will be more 
 than ever inclined when he comes back to revise 
 his theology. He will search for some new 
 definitions as to who is high and who is low 
 in the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 The superior and the inferior are then, we 
 find, lying everywhere side by side, and we are 
 now, perhaps, furnished with an answer to the 
 question we asked at the beginning, as to what 
 this feature in our life is meant to accomplish 
 
152 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 in us. The true man is simply amazed at the 
 notion that there can be any injustice in 
 inferiority. The sense of it, rightly taken, is, 
 he realises, one of our greatest inward helps. 
 It is a miserable business to be perpetually 
 looking down. What we want is something to 
 look up to. It is the altitudes that make us 
 climbers. An awakened nature is positively 
 greedy after occasions for respect and venera- 
 tion. And he finds them everywhere, and most 
 of all amongst the commonest people. His 
 attitude to a nature manifestly better than his 
 own is that of a man who has come on a new 
 treasure. A great soul is a banquet to which 
 ive are all invited. Shall we be envious that 
 this feast of which we are partaking is so rich ? 
 "Against the superiority of another," said 
 Goethe, "there is no remedy but love." A 
 deep saying, but expressing only half the truth ; 
 for where love is the light of our seeing there 
 will be no question of " remedies " against 
 superiority. The question will be how most 
 fully to open ourselves to its strength, and 
 how to be lifted highest on the wings of its 
 inspiration. 
 
XVII. 
 Our Contribution to Life. 
 
 There is food for abundant thinking in that 
 apocalyptic conception of a great human judg- 
 ment in which books are to be opened. The 
 suggestion here of a kind of celestial book- 
 keeping, in which a debtor and creditor account 
 is kept between us and the universe, sounds 
 startling enough, and yet, the more we ponder 
 it, the closer does it seem to the facts. Life, 
 us we have known it, suggests irresistibly the 
 idea of an unseen capitalist who has invested 
 largely in us, and who is looking for a return. 
 At the beginning the account is all on one side. 
 Our existence is a passivity, a vast continuous 
 reception. Our entrance into the world, as a 
 tiny bundle of fates and destinies, a thin 
 segment of the infinite, a link between nothing 
 and everything, is in itself a momentous con- 
 tribution to life, but it is not our own. The 
 very " I n that we now cling to as most 
 centrally ours was none of our choosing. That 
 
154 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the new consciousness which in us came to the 
 surface should emerge on this tiny planet 
 instead of on a satellite of Sirius, that it 
 should appear in the nineteenth century instead 
 of the sixth or sixtieth, that it should be of 
 this particular physical and mental capacity, 
 of this precise shade of temperament, — these 
 and a thousand other decisions out of ten 
 million " might he's," are all an affair of the 
 Investor, who is not ourselves. One grows 
 dizzy in thinking of the length of the chain 
 of which we form the latest link. That 
 palseolithic ancestor of ours, whom we discern, 
 rude, unkempt, groping his way in the savage 
 conditions of the measureless past — have we 
 any affection, any filial regard for him ? Yet 
 it is on him we hang. Had he not succeeded 
 in his struggle, kept the torch of life burning, 
 spite of every adverse gust, and handed it, still 
 glowing, to the one who came next, we had 
 not been. 
 
 After our arrival we are, for the first part 
 entirely, and for the after part still very 
 largely, recipients and absorbents. Life's 
 hoarded capital is at every turn being lavished 
 upon us. The universe flows in through 
 myriad open gateways of the soul, leaving 
 
Our Contribution to Life. 15; 
 
 deposits of all kinds from its infinite store- 
 houses. We gulp the present and the past. 
 All the histories, all the literatures work at us. 
 We may not have read them, but they create 
 the atmosphere we breathe. The agonies of 
 martyrs, the struggles of patriots, the visions 
 of seers, the achievements of science, the 
 products of adventure, help to swell the 
 revenues we draw. In fact, there is no arith- 
 metic can calculate the cost in thought, in 
 effort, in suffering, in all that constitutes the 
 ultimate values, that has gone to the equip- 
 ment of the humblest of us alive to-day. 
 
 That is one side of this marvellous book- 
 keeping. Not less remarkable is the other. We 
 discover, as we study it, that the capitalist we 
 have to deal with, lavish though he be, is no 
 aimless spendthrift. He looks for a return, and 
 insists upon getting it. Nothing is more won- 
 derful than the way in which this demand utters 
 itself, the way in which we are singled out and 
 sent off to our particular spell of work. It is 
 as though the heavens were opened and our 
 names called. Out of our desires and our will- 
 power, out of our circumstances, out of the 
 impinging upon us of the unexpected, out of 
 our successes, blunders and calamities, there 
 
156 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 emerges, as the years go on, a something, form- 
 less, mysterious, unreckonable, which, never- 
 theless, awed and wondering, we begin to 
 understand as our Contribution to Life. 
 
 Formless and unreckonable we say, for we 
 .are at the furthest remove from any clear com- 
 prehension of what our output amounts to in 
 the sum of things. We have no proper gauge 
 of the importance of this or that. Do we 
 imagine that St. Paul ever dreamed that his 
 stray correspondence, written at the white-heat 
 of the moment, addressed to the passing cir- 
 cumstances of a given time and place, for- 
 gotten, may be, by himself, as our own often 
 is, when the pen is laid down, was destined to 
 be the leading part of a sacred book, to be 
 regarded as the storehouse of doctrine, the 
 centre and foundation of a world's faith ! 
 Often it is what the man himself has thought 
 least of that represents his largest payment. 
 Goethe prided himself more on his theory of 
 colours, which was a false one, than on his 
 Faust. How little did Ken's " Evening hymn " 
 and Newman's " Abide with me " bulk to the 
 writers as compared with the sum of their activi- 
 ties and their interests ! And yet, as the years 
 roll on, it seems more and more as though it 
 
Our Contribution to Life. 157 
 
 were to write these hymns that these men 
 lived. 
 
 But surprises of this kind are only a small 
 part of the matter. The marvellous fortune 
 of a Paul's letters, hidden from himself, is 
 visible to us. But the greater part of our 
 contribution to life, whether it be that of an 
 apostle or a drayman, is hidden, not only 
 from us and our contemporaries, but from all 
 posterity, so long as it keeps on this side the 
 veil. In trying to unravel the riddle of men's- 
 destiny we are apt to catch at the illumined 
 and splendid points, as though we have here the 
 explanation of the parts of it that are dark 
 and troubled. It is nothing of the kind. Do 
 we find, for instance — to take a stray historical 
 example — that the great after career of a John 
 Knox, as evangelist and reformer, is any 
 sort of explanation of his sombre years as a 
 Dominican monk, or of the horrible experi- 
 ence when he toiled as a slave at the galleys ? 
 The prosperity of one period of life or of one 
 part of the world is no answer concerning the 
 suffering of another part. That so large a 
 portion of our contribution to life takes the 
 form of sheer endurance, the doing of things 
 that are irksome and that supply no visible- 
 
158 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 reward, demands a deeper solution. And 
 there is surely one to hand. The pessimistic 
 interpretation of life commits the mistake of 
 supposing that our seemingly unprofitable and 
 disastrous experiences have been transacted 
 once for all; that this is their final form, 
 about which nothing more is to be done but 
 the lamenting. Whereas all the probabilities 
 are that such experiences have only begun 
 their history ; that these seeming unprofit- 
 ables and wearinesses are the rough out- 
 lines, the first stages in a series of immense 
 transformations and results that are yet to be 
 revealed. 
 
 It is only along that line, the ancient line of 
 faith, that we are able to make any satisfactory 
 terms with our past. Viewed in this light our 
 very blunders and failures receive a consecra- 
 tion which makes us at peace with them. The 
 joy we missed and the pain that came instead 
 are seen to form the cross, the manful bearing 
 of which may turn out to be our chief, preor- 
 dained, contribution to life. In the centre of 
 the trial stand we, glad in the midst of it to 
 know that our Commander has assigned us so 
 difficult a post, and determined that the trust 
 reposed in us shall not be betrayed. 
 
Orrit Contribution to Life. 159 
 
 When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet ; 
 But now I deem some searching bitters are 
 Sweeter than sweets, and more refreshing far 
 And to be relished more, and more desired, 
 And more to be pursued on eager feet, 
 On feet untired, and still on feet tho' tired. 
 
 But our contribution to life is still in 
 progress ; with some of us it is as yet only a 
 beginning. What form the unfulfilled part 
 of it is to take is a secret ; so many factors that 
 ♦enter into it are hidden from us. Yet of one 
 factor we can make sure, and that is our own 
 will. No combination of all the natural forces 
 in the planet can vie for one moment with the 
 potentialities of the human volition. In its 
 secret chamber we can forge destinies. The 
 combination of freedom and necessity that 
 goes on there is a mystery we shall probably 
 never explain. The nearest approach to it, 
 perhaps, is in the formula of Hegel : " It is only 
 as we are in ourselves that we can develop 
 ourselves, yet is it we ourselves that develop 
 ourselves." Despite the dense sophistical webs 
 that have been woven round this subject man 
 has always belie 7ed in his freedom . Plutarch well 
 represents this age-long faith when, speaking 
 of Homer, he says, " The poet never introduces 
 the Deity as depriving man of the freedom of 
 
160 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the will, but as moving the will. He does not 
 represent the heavenly power as producing the 
 resolution, but the ideas that lead to the 
 resolution." 
 
 But this life-determining power to be of any 
 service to us has to be trained, and to be 
 reinforced. The supreme human achievement 
 is to make resolutions and to keep them. If a 
 man cannot resolve for a lifetime, let him 
 resolve for one day. His will-power for the 
 morrow will be perceptibly stronger for the 
 effort. The world's emancipation, its advent 
 to an earthly paradise, depends not on the 
 accumulation of capital, but on the rescue of 
 its will-power and the concentration of it on 
 noble living. Imagine the lift toward human 
 felicity if this magnificent sentence in Tertullian 
 were made into a fixed resolve : " To wish ill, to 
 do ill, to speak ill or to think ill of any one we 
 are equally forbidden without exception." 
 
 Here is a contribution to life, the noblest 
 conceivable, which we can every one make. It 
 may not be ours to add to the world's wealth by 
 great inventions or works of genius. We may 
 be prevented from doing the thing we had most 
 set our hearts on. But in one direction lies a 
 sphere of glorious freedom. It is that of help- 
 
Oue Contribution to Life. 161 
 
 ing the world to its new, its Christian temper. 
 When as a daily discipline we resolutely 
 crush within us the first beginnings of unloving 
 thought towards our fellow, when we help him 
 by bathing the facts of each day's life in the 
 radiant atmosphere of our own faith, when by 
 God's grace and our inner struggle we have 
 produced that noblest and most delightful of 
 products, a richly developed inner life, we shall 
 have taken the best possible means of paying 
 back our debt. The world's greatest asset is. 
 the souls it is producing. Let us see to it that 
 our own becomes a worthy addition. 
 
 n 
 
XVIII. 
 The Gospel of Law. 
 
 There are few subjects about which people 
 have indulged more in the luxury of confused 
 thinking than that of law in relation to religion. 
 St. Paul has something to do with this, though 
 the blame does not lie at his door. Men have 
 imagined they were following him in opposing 
 law to grace, in making law the antithesis of 
 gospel. That is their mistake and not his. 
 Paul never attempts to get outside law. His 
 gospel is full of it. With him it is a question, 
 not of law or no law, but of higher versus 
 lower law. He rises above the Sinai and 
 Leviticus sphere in the same way that the 
 organic rises above the sphere of the inorganic. 
 The higher life is still one of law. It takes, in 
 fact, the laws of the region from which it has 
 •emerged into a higher synthesis, where it 
 exhibits them in new forms, with higher 
 potencies. The apostle sums all this in his one 
 pregnant statement : " For the law of the Spirit 
 
The Gospel of Law. 163 
 
 of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from 
 the law of sin and death." 
 
 The idea of law as being the antithesis of 
 
 Gospel has, however, in recent thinking, 
 
 revived under some new forms. It has been 
 
 declared on high authority, and in more than 
 
 one quarter, that the great system of law which 
 
 we designate as Nature contains no gospel for 
 
 man, and no prophecy of one. Professor 
 
 Huxley meant this when he affirmed, in his 
 
 Eomanes lecture, that Nature was non-moral, 
 
 and that human ethics were, in fact, a battle 
 
 against her methods. Modern poetry, too, has 
 
 painted her as ruthless, "red in tooth and 
 
 claw," while there have not been wanting 
 
 religious teachers who proclam that, apart 
 
 from the direct revelation in Christ, man finds 
 
 in the universe no suggestion of grace or love, 
 
 no hint of a Heavenly Father. 
 
 It is worth while examining whether these 
 things are so. Some of us read Nature very 
 differently. That Christ's revelation is the 
 master-key to her problem we entirely believe. 
 But a key, to be of any use, supposes a lock 
 which fits it. If Nature herself is not full of 
 grace, what is certain is that Christ misread 
 her. He found the world writ all over with the 
 
164 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 sign-manual of His Father, and taught us that. 
 We are at a far remove from the standpoint 
 of the Deistical Tindal, but his " Christianity 
 as Old as the Creation " contains after all a 
 true idea. Christianity is largely a rendering of 
 what was in Nature, but which man had pre- 
 viously failed to discern there. We designate 
 Nature as feminine, and truly. For she is full 
 of the mother element. On the whole subject 
 Hooker had a wider outlook than some of the 
 moderns, when, at the end of the first book of 
 his " Polity," he gives of law, as discerned in 
 the general system of things, this magnificent 
 description : " Of law there can be no less 
 acknowledged than that her seat is in the 
 bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the 
 world ; all things in heaven and earth do her 
 homage, the very least as feeling her care, 
 and the greatest as not exempted from her 
 power." 
 
 Law, we say, is full of grace. In its 
 operations, its conditions, its promises, its per- 
 formances, it suggests everywhere what we 
 understand by Gospel. A man proposes to 
 learn swimming or cycling. He finds himself 
 immediately in contact with certain laws. 
 They say to him, " Believe, obey, and accord- 
 
The Gospel of Law. 165 
 
 ing to jour faith it shall be unto you." The 
 neophyte, if he be nervous, imagines that while 
 other men in this matter may be under grace, 
 he is certainly singled out for reprobation. The 
 laws by which a man may keep at the top of 
 the water or in easy equilibrium on the saddle 
 of a bicycle, have assuredly, his fears suggest, 
 a statute of limitations which keeps him out. 
 Let him trust and see. He learns finally that 
 in place of reprobation, of favouritism, of limita- 
 tion, the law says "whosoever will." To all 
 and sundry, to rich and poor, to gentle and 
 simple, to wise and foolish, to good and bad, 
 it offers without restriction all its largess of 
 service, provided only it is believed in and 
 obeyed. 
 
 Granted, we are told ; but then there is the 
 other side. What of the man who disobeys, 
 or who fails to learn? What Gospel is there 
 in Nature's ruthlessness, in her law of gravita- 
 tion, when it smashes a man at the foot of a 
 precipice, in her blind rage of tempest when 
 the howling sea swallows a shipload of shriek- 
 ing creatures within sight of land? What 
 forgiveness is there in Nature, what escape 
 from the chain of her iron necessity? Our 
 human societies, faiths and hopes, are they not 
 
166 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 a protest against her, rather than an inspira- 
 tion from her ? 
 
 Softly, and one thing at a time. Nature, it 
 is true, has her stern, hard side, but is it after 
 all as stern as it is often painted? Expertis 
 crede. Some of us have actually been as near 
 death by foundering, or by precipice smash as 
 could well be, without the actual experience — 
 near enough to know what the immediately 
 previous sensation would be like, and have 
 found it not nearly so bad as the outsider 
 might picture. A famous Alpine climber has 
 described his feeling when, having missed his 
 footing, he found himself dropping from one 
 rock to another down a precipitous descent. 
 He felt certain of being killed, but his one 
 mental occupation during the operation was 
 the calculation as to how many bumps it would 
 take to finish him. Such experiences, be it 
 also remembered, are the great exceptions of 
 life, and they are soon over. "The black 
 minute's at end " before there is time to worry 
 much over it. With animals, where Nature's 
 slaughter is on the greatest scale, both pain and 
 worry are at a minimum. Besides, suffering 
 and death are a part of the scheme of revela- 
 tion, as well as of Nature pure and simple. If 
 
The Gospel of Law. 167 
 
 any odium attaches to them it must be shared 
 by one as well as the other. 
 
 But Nature, it is said, differs from Gospel in 
 her doctrine of non-forgiveness. We are at a 
 loss to know how this notion arises. Rather 
 should we affirm that Nature forgives royally, 
 unto seventy times seven. Nothing, on the 
 whole, is more astonishing than the way she 
 bears with wrongdoers. Generations of men 
 will go on violating her laws and yet survive. 
 She mothers them and keeps them going some- 
 how, spite of their frightful heresies in food,, 
 and air and exercise, and a thousand things.. 
 They break each other's bones or spill each 
 other's blood. Straightway the great Nurse 
 is busy with them, working with her vis medi- 
 catrix at their wounds, weaving new tissues, 
 deftly joining what has been sundered, and 
 giving up never while a chance remains. 
 
 Men talk of the dire inevitableness of heredity. 
 Nature herself makes not nearly so much fuss 
 about it as some modern professors. Gutter 
 children, heirs of generations of vice, who, 
 according to the prevailing doctrine, should be 
 irrevocably damned, body and soul, are daily 
 taken out of the streets of London and put into 
 new conditions, by which their entail of ruin is. 
 
168 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 cut off. Transplanted to Canada or some other 
 region of open air and hard work, they slough 
 off their legacy of heredity and develop into 
 wholesome farmers and citizens. Man's 
 recoverableness from seemingly desperate con- 
 ditions is, in fact, the wonder and the lesson of 
 history. When we read of the early triumphs 
 of Christianity ; how, out of the inconceivable 
 vileness of the society of the time, there arose, 
 in Rome, in Ephesus, in Corinth, the Divine 
 character described in the letters of Paul or in 
 the Epistle to Diognetus, we think of all this, 
 and rightly, as a marvel of grace. But not les s 
 is it a marvel of Nature. Leaven, however 
 good, could not make bread out of a stone. 
 The new force could only operate through the 
 power of response in the raw material. Men 
 became Christlike because they were ante- 
 cedently capable of becoming so. The greatest 
 spiritual victories the world has known are 
 equally victories of natural law. 
 
 Any other theory is, in short, logically un- 
 thinkable. The universe has no antinomies of 
 nature and grace. The one works through the 
 other. The humanity which has evolved ethics 
 — more, which has evolved, because of having 
 first received, Divinity — has done and won all 
 
The Gospel op Law. 16i> 
 
 this through Nature, and no otherwise. Out of 
 the one force, which fashioned and keeps the 
 visible world, which gives us the blasts of 
 winter and the infinite grace of spring, which 
 evolved from lower types the human form, and 
 lifted us from brute to man, from this has come 
 also the capacity for the spiritual and then the 
 spiritual itself. Eevelation in its forms of in- 
 tuition, of Prophet, of Christ, of Spirit, is the 
 working of the One Divinity immanent in 
 every part and portion of the visible as of the 
 invisible universe. The laws of that universe 
 are everywhere permanent, and trustworthy, 
 and good simply because they are God's 
 habits, the expression of His character. 
 
XIX. 
 Life's Healing Forces. 
 
 In that creed of experience which people, by* 
 the time of middle age, have generally built up 
 for themselves, a central article will, with most 
 of them, we fancy, be a conviction of the 
 immense healing power hidden away in every 
 department of the world's life and available for 
 every circumstance of it. Tor some of us who 
 have reached the " grand climacteric," or are 
 beyond it, the reflection that we are alive at all 
 is a source of constant astonishment, while the 
 consciousness that we are happy is yet more 
 wonderful. It is the men and women who 
 have been well knocked about who are most 
 sensible of nature's marvellous doctoring. 
 When we have had the body laid low by all 
 manner of ailments and yet have survived;: 
 when fate's ploughshare has gone clean through 
 one after another of our most cherished pro- 
 jects, to leave us, as we discover afterwards,, 
 not one penny the worse ; when, after our in- 
 
Life's Healing Forces. 171 
 
 most affections have been smitten by shattering^ 
 bereavements, we rise from the blow not only 
 still loving, but still enjoying, we become con- 
 scious, as no tyro or mere surface skimmer can, 
 of a vis medicatrix naturae, of a vast system 
 and force of healing, spread through the whole 
 constitution of things, which becomes hence- 
 forth one of our most delightful and most in- 
 structive studies. 
 
 Apart from its great speculative outlooks, to 
 which we shall come presently, the subject is, 
 we say, for itself most pleasant to linger over. 
 Is there anything in the world so tender, so 
 entirely motherly, as that caress with which 
 Nature, when we are sick or overwrought, woos 
 us back to strength? Eobust health is very 
 well in its way, but there is a subtle happiness 
 it does not know. It is that tasted by the man 
 of nervous organisation when, strained to ex- 
 haustion point, he flies for recovery to his 
 healer ; when, away on the sea, or meeting the 
 keen breeze of the moorland, he knows that 
 every breath he draws, every glint of the 
 open heaven, every bit of scenery his eye 
 rests on, every moment of the delicious 
 resting-time, is forming part of one great 
 system of beneficence that is working to make 
 
172 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 hini well. One might expatiate, too, on 
 Nature's surgery ; how, when the bodily 
 •economy is broken in upon by sword-cut or 
 bullet- wound, she immediately summons her 
 forces to the point attacked ; how there she 
 •commences a process of stanching, of spinning 
 and weaving of tissues, of expulsion of dan- 
 gerous matter, and building up of new and 
 healthy substance, all in a way so wonderful 
 and masterly. Not less beautiful is her 
 manner of handling wounds of the mind and 
 heart. When in our grief we refuse to be 
 •comforted, and put joy from us as something 
 forbidden, she waits, and gently insists until 
 we smile again. Tourgenieff's statement of the 
 •difference between youth and age — that " youth 
 will eat gilt gingerbread and fancy it is daily 
 bread, too; but a time comes when you're in 
 want of dry bread even," is one of those ex- 
 aggerations which are the bane of antithesis. 
 Nature is kinder than this. The after-life 
 affords us dry bread and something more. The 
 middle-aged world has had wounds enough of 
 body and mind to kill it a dozen times over ; 
 but it is alive and cheerful ; it has found heal- 
 ing for its hurts. 
 
 But we may launch out now a little and 
 
Life's Healing Forces. 17 : > 
 
 touch, cautiously, one or two of those specula- 
 tive points to which this topic directly invites. 
 The first of these is the question, " How far do 
 these remedial agencies go ? Is there, in the 
 realm either of the material or of the spiritual,, 
 anything that is irremediable?" One of the 
 most impressive features, it will be remem- 
 bered, of " Butler's Analogy " is his conception 
 of Nature's teaching of the irremediable. 
 Courses of conduct relating both to body and 
 mind that contravene her laws may, up to a 
 certain point, be condoned, and their evil 
 results averted ; carried beyond that point, theii? 
 penalty is utter ruin. This, he says, is true of 
 the physical body, where the sentence is deaths 
 and of communities and nations, where the 
 judgment is final destruction. And the ana- 
 logies here from the present life, he argues, 
 may be taken to hold of the life to come. 
 
 We doubt whether, if Butler had lived in our 
 day, he would have been so ready with thi& 
 particular argument. For he would have had 
 to take into consideration the fact, of which 
 modern science and the modern philosophy of 
 history are continually reminding us — that the 
 final judgments on which he lays so much 
 stress are, after all, not finalities; that the 
 
174 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 destructions, when looked into, are not so 
 much destructions as healings. Of the national 
 "days of judgment" few have been more 
 impressive in their apparent hopelessness than 
 the fall of the Jewish State under Nebuchad- 
 nezzar, and its after and completer destruction 
 by the Romans under Titus. But we now 
 realise that to the former the Jews owed their 
 highest conception of God, their greatest 
 literature, in short, their spiritual selves ; while 
 to the latter, with its consequent dispersion of 
 the race over the face of the earth, we trace 
 the immense world-wide Judaic influence of 
 to-day. The " destruction " was, in fact, a 
 remedy. When Augustine penned his " Be 
 Civitate Dei," the shadow of the impending 
 Vandal invasion was already over his beloved 
 North Africa, and the Roman State was every- 
 where crashing into hideous ruin. It was 
 natural that he, with the other Christian 
 thinkers of the time, should see here the final 
 doom of the world-powers; the coming cata- 
 strophe in which everything outside the Catholic 
 Church was to perish. We, who are on the 
 farther side of these events, judge them differ- 
 ently. The old Rome fell, it is true, but it 
 died only to rise again — to rise in a dozen new 
 
Life's Healing Forces. 175 
 
 and vigorous communities, who in their laws, 
 their institutions and their spirit, inherited 
 what of it was fitted to live. Eome's day of 
 judgment was neither a ruin nor a finality. It 
 was, again, a remedy. 
 
 May we not say the same of death itself? 
 On the physical side it is Nature's way out of 
 an impossible situation. It is her heroic 
 surgery. When the forces of disease have 
 prevailed against her ordinary methods of 
 healing, she dissolves in this way a combina- 
 tion that has become simply painful. Nothing 
 has been destroyed. What has happened is 
 that the arrangement of particles round a 
 hopelessly weakened centre has come to an 
 ond, leaving these particles free for a new and 
 sounder grouping. And even in this, the 
 harshest of her processes, it is wonderful to 
 observe Nature's tenderness. In a recently- 
 published German work, which has gone 
 through eight editions, "Vom Zustande des 
 Menschen kurz vor dem Tode," the author, 
 Professor Hornemann, gives a scientific 
 analysis of the experiences of the dying. He 
 declares that the " death agony " is painful 
 to the spectator rather than to the patient; 
 that the sense of dread of death which haunts 
 
176 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 so many during life almost invariably dis- 
 appears at its actual approach ; that, in fact, a& 
 is shown by the testimonies of people brought 
 back from the verge of the grave, a special 
 consciousness of remarkable calm and peace 
 is a normal experience of the closing hour. 
 From beginning to end, and even through 
 what we call the "end," Nature appears ever 
 as the healer. 
 
 But having come so far we must go farther. 
 We are confronted now with the question, 
 "What bearing has all this upon spiritual 
 disease, and specially upon the Christian 
 doctrines of sin, redemption, and the future ? '* 
 We must remind ourselves, to begin with, that 
 Christianity contemplates man's spiritual his- 
 tory as, throughout, a pathology. It considers 
 him as morally infect. It starts with the 
 doctrine of a Fall. The science of the sixties,. 
 we remember, hotly joined issue at this point 
 with religion, declaring that Evolution knew 
 nothing of a fall, but only of a perpetual rise. 
 It forgot, what it has since thought of, that 
 there might be such a thing as a fall upwards, 
 a fall as part of the process of rising. Indeed, 
 when, according to Pascal's famous analogy, 
 we consider the whole race as a single human 
 
Life's Healing Forces. 177 
 
 being perpetually growing and perpetually 
 learning, we realise that some such event is 
 exactly what we should expect. In the history 
 of every child a moral tumble is part of its 
 process of inner growth. Beginning on the 
 purely animal plane, with physical instincts in 
 place of moral perceptions, it gradually 
 evolves the moral sense and with it the 
 capacity of sinning. Its first spiritual failure 
 is thus at once a rise and a fall. 
 
 The line of thought here opened points to 
 more than a reconciliation between physical 
 science and Christian theology, though that 
 is something. In the minds which it fairly 
 enters it will react with immense effect on 
 the shaping of the theology itself. It will, 
 for instance, influence our whole conception of 
 evil, both as to its nature and its final 
 results. While not dogmatising about evil, or 
 pretending fully to understand it; while 
 avoiding, on the one hand, the Neoplatonic 
 optimism which regarded it as merely a not- 
 being, the necessary foil of the good, the 
 shadow of the light, " the transitoriness cleaving 
 to the many in opposition to the one " ; and on 
 the other the pessimism, orthodox and un- 
 orthodox, which has made evil a hopeless 
 
 12 
 
178 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 blackness that must for ever cloud the 
 universe, we do at least along this line of inves- 
 tigation come across some rays of light. When 
 we see in the physical world a system of diseases 
 kept in check by a ubiquitous counter system 
 of remedial powers, and this carefully limited 
 action positively used as one of the great moral 
 educators of the race, we may well ask whether 
 a similar thing may not be predicated of man's 
 spiritual condition. Without going the length 
 of the daring " peccando 'promeremnr " of some 
 early Christian thinkers, we may, at least, 
 with St. Paul, believe in the abounding of 
 " grace over sin " ; believe even that the 
 action and reaction, in this sphere of evil 
 and its remedy, will produce some high result 
 impossible without it, but as yet not ascertain- 
 able by us. 
 
 We have touched here the merest fringe of 
 an immense subject. We have said nothing of 
 the factors in this system of spiritual healing ; 
 of the Cross which is its centre ; of the vicarious 
 suffering which is its principle ; of the myriad 
 human ministries by which that principle is 
 applied. It is enough to have emphasized the 
 fact that the human sickness of body and soul 
 is no ground for despair, but rather for hope. 
 
Life's Healing Forces. 179 
 
 It is something if we can believe that the 
 world's evil is not irremediable ; that for its 
 diseases there are remedies ; that in these very 
 diseases themselves may be discerned an 
 ulterior purpose of good. 
 
 But hush ! For yon can be no despair : 
 There's amends ! 'Tis a secret ; hope and pray. 
 
XX. 
 
 Of Fear in Religion. 
 
 The point is often discussed whether the com- 
 parative absence from the modern pulpit of 
 those appeals to fear characteristic of the 
 earlier evangelism has not militated against 
 its power. The question here opened is 
 one that has to be faced afresh by this 
 generation. Under the reaction caused by 
 the crudities and falsities connected with 
 earlier presentations of judgment and punish- 
 ment there has been a disposition to give the 
 whole subject a wide berth. But this can 
 never be a permanent attitude. The Church, 
 as trustee of the human spiritual interests, 
 cannot afford to be in two minds on the 
 question, still less to have no mind at all. 
 And there is no reason for such a position. 
 The Christian consciousness, in its fuller de- 
 velopment, has attained to a view of God, the 
 soul and the world sufficiently precise to enable 
 it to pronounce here with perfect clearness. 
 
Of Fear in Keligion. 181 
 
 The preacher of to-day, awake to the spiritual 
 revelation that is going on around him, should 
 have no difficulty and no hesitancy about the 
 place he assigns to fear as one of the religious 
 working forces. 
 
 In endeavouring to ascertain what that 
 place is, it may be well to begin with a glance 
 backward. Man's earliest impressions of reli- 
 gion carried with them undoubtedly a large 
 element of terror. Timor fecit Deos, " fear made 
 the Gods," says Statius, and the statement has 
 its truth. The sense that he was in the 
 hands of vast unknown powers, which might 
 at any time become fatally hostile to him, was 
 the impression on the savage which first drove 
 him to prayer and sacrifice. The gleam of 
 the lightning, the roar of the thunder, were to 
 him certain indications of supernal wrath. In 
 religion terror came first and love last. Every- 
 where in the early world, as in the primitive 
 races which represent it to-day, the feeling 
 seems to have been that man's fate was in the 
 hands of hostile rather than benevolent powers, 
 and that his pressing business was to placate 
 them, or protect himself from them. The 
 Dyaks of to-day, after an illness, change their 
 names so that the demon who sent it may not 
 
182 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 recognise them and continue his persecutions. 
 Modern anthropology is full of similar illustra- 
 tions. The latter Pagan philosophy both of 
 Greece and Rome reached what it conceived 
 to be its highest achievement in ridding the 
 mind of these fears. Lucian turns them into 
 a jest ; while perhaps the best quoted line in 
 all Roman literature describes "the happy 
 man " as " he who could put all fears and 
 inexorable fate under his feet." 
 
 But the element of fear which classic philo- 
 sophy sought to eliminate came back into the 
 world through Christianity. The New Testa- 
 ment does not hesitate to strike this note. 
 What it had in view in so doing we will 
 discuss later. Nowhere, however, did the 
 primitive Church conception suffer more from 
 that " secondary Christianity," to use Harnack's 
 expressive phrase, which eventually flooded 
 Christendom with the old Paganism under a 
 new name, than in the later ecclesiastical use 
 of terror. For long centuries the prevailing 
 conception of the spiritual powers was 
 demonic. God was demonic as well as Satan. 
 He was taught as capable of inflicting endless 
 physical tortures on little children, on beings 
 powerless to resist, and of using the Devil and 
 
Of Fear in Religion. 183 
 
 his angels as willing henchmen in the business. 
 It is a symptom of the essential healthiness of 
 the normal mind that at heart the people never 
 believed in these horrors. Anyone who reads, 
 the old mystery-plays of the Middle Ages, in. 
 which the traditional hell, with its devils, was 
 made the subject of the coarsest burlesque, 
 must feel that there was no sense of reality 
 here either to terrify or restrain. And this 
 revolt steadily grew. Rabelais, who representee! 
 one large note of the Renaissance, treats hell 
 quite in the manner of Lucian. The lesson of 
 history here should surely suffice. It shows 
 that appeals to fear of this type, whether under 
 a pagan or a Christian name, lead only to 
 cynicism and unbelief. 
 
 Apart from history the Christian conscious- 
 ness, where it is allowed full play, makes it for 
 ever impossible to use the mediaeval conception 
 of hell as an appeal to fear. What forbids it 
 is the New Testament conception of God. The 
 supreme Gospel offered there to man is that 
 God is Love. But if God is Love anywhere He 
 is Love everywhere, as much in the place called 
 hell as in the place called heaven ; as much the 
 moment after a man's death as the moment 
 before it. To imagine it possible that because 
 
184 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 the breath is out of a man's body the Provi- 
 dence which hitherto has cherished him should 
 suddenly become his torture r, with mocking 
 fiends for executioners, is as reasonable as to 
 suppose that a mother, because her child has 
 fallen asleep, should straightway cease to be a 
 mother and change into a murderess. The 
 heart, which Schleiermacher says is the true 
 theologian, will not permit such conclusions as 
 these. 
 
 But what of the New Testament appeal to 
 fear ? Is not the book full of warnings ; is not 
 hell in its list of contents ; and have not those 
 preachers and those Churches been most suc- 
 cessful who have most insisted on this side of 
 its teaching ? If we answer these questions in 
 the affirmative, as we find ourselves compelled 
 to do, where is the reconciliation between such 
 a position and those others we have just been 
 urging ? It is well that such demands are made 
 on us, for they render it impossible that we 
 should remain indifferent or negative. They 
 compel us to a solution. 
 
 And the solution is not, after all, far to seek. 
 The Christian appeal to fear finds its explana- 
 tion, not in the vindictive character of God, 
 but in the stupendous possibilities, up or dow n, 
 
Of Fear in Religion. 185 
 
 of the human soul. What science is at length 
 tardily recognising has lain revealed, all these 
 centuries, upon the pages of the New Testa- 
 ment — that man essentially is spirit ; that he 
 belongs to an unseen order, and that he plays 
 a part there in which infinite issues are involved. 
 The insistant warning note of the Gospel is 
 that man is making or marring himself ; that 
 it is an immense and wondrous self he is making 
 or marring ; and that the process is going on 
 now. Heaven and hell are truly in this busi- 
 ness, for, as said the old Persian poet : 
 
 Behold, myself am heaven and hell. 
 
 The one is the zenith of our possible spiritual 
 fortunes, as the other is the nadir. To-day we 
 are weaving the structure we are henceforth to 
 inhabit. The profound speculations of Ulrici 
 in his Leib und Seele, where he conceives the 
 thoughts, volitions and actions proceeding from 
 our daily inner life as constructing the spiritual 
 body of the future, are entirely in a line with 
 the genius both of modern Science and of 
 primitive Christianity. Surely there is ground 
 here for the most urgent and compelling appeal 
 that one man can make to another ; ground for 
 utmost awe and fear lest our folly should 
 
186 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 baulk these possibilities ; lest our course should 
 be towards blindness instead of to the heavenly 
 vision ; down deathwards instead of up to the 
 ever fuller life ! 
 
 Mingled with this element of the Christian 
 fear is the dread of offending God. We have, it 
 is hoped, outgrown that precious piece of theo- 
 logical casuistry which argued that man's sin, 
 because against an infinite Being, was there- 
 fore infinite, and demanded an infinite punish- 
 ment. It was forgotten, surely, in this syllo- 
 gism that an infinite God would have an infinite 
 capacity of forgiveness. The theologians here 
 had got hold of infinity by the wrong end. 
 What holds the enlightened conscience of to- 
 day is not a consideration of that kind, but the 
 thought of the Love which it sins against, and 
 the intimacy with the Holiest against which 
 sin is the bar. We cannot bear the thought of 
 that Heart being smitten with our ingratitude, 
 of that Face turned away in grief from our 
 shortcoming. Jean Ingelow has put with unsur- 
 passable force this side of the Christian fear : 
 
 Come, lest this heart should, cold and cast away, 
 Die ere the Guest adored she entertain ; 
 
 Lest eyes that never saw Thine earthly day 
 Should miss Thy heavenly reign. 
 
Op Fear in Religion. 187 
 
 Such fear will also react on our whole con- 
 duct towards others. Everywhere around us 
 we see spiritual destinies in the making, souls 
 on the upward or the downward way. It will 
 be impossible, holding such convictions, for us 
 to be indifferent towards them. Rather will 
 the Christian fear in us work as a Divine solici- 
 tude for their inner welfare, impelling us to 
 such courses of life as shall be for their help 
 and not their hindrance. And thus fear, which r 
 as we have seen, entered as first and lowest 
 element into the religious concept, comes out,, 
 transmuted by love, as its last and highest. 
 
XXI. 
 Our Moral Variability. 
 
 One of the supreme questions concerning a 
 man's character is that of the range of its 
 variation. We want to know about him not 
 simply what he is to-day, but what he may be 
 to-morrow. He is never in one stay, but is 
 perpetually passing from one moral grade to 
 another. This movement will be within certain 
 limits. A correct estimate of him will require 
 that we know these limits, and that we are 
 able to strike the middle point between his best 
 and his worst. But a closer observation will 
 reveal a movement not only of the man within 
 the limits, but also of the limits themselves. 
 And here a curious thing is to be noted. In 
 the order of human development extremes 
 meet. For the two points of least variation 
 •are at the bottom and the top. The rudest 
 savage and the most perfect character agree in 
 presenting the minimum of moral variability. 
 It is on the way from the one to the other that 
 
Our Moral Variability. 189' 
 
 we find the maximum of oscillation. The brute 
 and the saint can each be reckoned on for what 
 the j will do under certain conditions. The 
 man and the woman between these points, that 
 is, shall we say, our noble selves, are the 
 puzzling, if not the unknown, quantity. 
 
 It is difficult to say anything about a cha- 
 racter, even our own, until it has been put 
 through certain tests. Our progress through 
 life is a progress from one astonishment to 
 another at the vagaries of our own particular 
 ego under the continually varying conditions 
 which time and the world bring. The craft 
 which behaved so beautifully when sailing 
 down stream reveals quite new features when 
 the swell of ocean smites it and a sou'-wester is 
 on the beam. To take, for instance, what is^ 
 now almost a universal experience, the test of 
 travel. The old reproach that the Anglo- 
 Indian dropped his Christianity at the Cape on 
 the voyage out, and picked it up again there on 
 his return home, is to some extent rolled away ; 
 but are we quite sure how our staid village 
 churchwarden is going to behave during his 
 fortnight in Paris 9 The Parisian himself will 
 tell you that the reproach of debauchery 
 brought against his city arises from the con- 
 
190 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 duct, not of its regular inhabitants, but of the 
 strangers who rush through its dissipations 
 and then go home to gravely denounce Con- 
 tinental immorality. Certain it is that a 
 change of sky and the absence of home cyno- 
 sure and restraint is a test that will surely find 
 a man's rotten spot, if there is one. 
 
 But enormous moral variations may come 
 without our stirring a step. There is that 
 arising from the mere movement of time. In 
 the course of a couple of years a growing lad or 
 girl will often slough off their earlier likeness 
 and take on something quite new. Robert 
 Louis Stevenson tells how, by a process he 
 could not explain, he found himself at that 
 period changed from an inveterate shirker of 
 hard work into a patient toiler, wrestling with 
 all his force to get the best out of himself. He 
 came about like a good ship. There must have 
 been, he concludes, a Pilot at the helm. Every- 
 one agrees, also, that advancing age is a great 
 modifier of the morale, though in what way and 
 to what degree are matters on which observers 
 are widely at issue. A medical author declared 
 some time ago that the moral sentiments dis- 
 tinctly declined with the advance of years. 
 Montaigne, too, avers that " old age sets more 
 
Our Moral Variability. 191 
 
 wrinkles on the spirit than on the face," and 
 that there belongs to it "a ridiculous care for 
 riches after the use of them is forfeited, besides 
 more envy, injustice and malignity." Fonte- 
 nelle, on the other hand, finds there the period 
 in which " our passions are calmed, our duties 
 fulfilled and our ambition satisfied." As a 
 matter of fact, old age is the day of judgment 
 on youth and manhood. It is the hell or the 
 heaven which these have made it. 
 
 Perhaps the most momentous possibilities of 
 moral variation, both for good or ill, lie along the 
 line of our human fellowships. The impact on 
 us of another soul is potent, not only in reveal- 
 ing ourselves, but in creating, as it were, a 
 new self. There seems to be a kind of spiritual 
 chemistry here, which from two combining 
 elements produces a fresh something, a moral 
 condition which was not there before. This 
 power of the character to blend and almost to 
 lose itself in that of another is wonderfully 
 illustrated in what Montaigne, to quote him 
 again, says of his friendship with La Boetie, a 
 friendship which, he avers, " having seized all 
 my will, induced the same to plunge and lose 
 itself in his ; which likewise having seized all 
 his will, induced it to plunge and lose itself in 
 
192 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 mine, with a mutual greed and with a like con- 
 currence." The sublimest examples are those 
 where neglected and demoralised natures are 
 brought into contact with a high spiritual 
 character, and, yielding to its mysterious force, 
 begin straightway to form after that likeness. 
 This, with what is implied in it, and with 
 what lies back of it, is our divinest guarantee 
 of human unprovability. 
 
 But the variation through companionship 
 has also its sinister side. The meeting of the 
 strong with the weak is too often the wreck of 
 the latter's moral equilibrium. Arthur Clough 
 has given us on this point one of his subtlest 
 studies where, in that fine poem, " The 
 Bothie," he delineates the special danger of a 
 girl of the humbler class when solicited by " a 
 gentleman." The peril is that the sense of 
 class helps to confuse the moral standard. 
 
 To the prestige of the richer the lowly are prone to be 
 
 yielding ; 
 Think that in dealing with them they are raised to a 
 
 different region, 
 Where old laws and morals are modified, lost, exist 
 
 not ; 
 Ignorant they as they are, they have bnt to conform 
 
 and be yielding. 
 
 Certain temperaments have more to struggle 
 
Our Moral Variability. 193 
 
 against than others in the matter of moral 
 oscillation ; and of these most of all, it would 
 seem, the artistic and the poetic. We are not 
 in a position to properly adjudicate upon the 
 aberrations of genius. We cannot compare the 
 immense swing backwards at times of a Burns 
 or a Heine with the moral equanimity of the 
 placid burgher who stumps with undeviating 
 pace along his turnpike. It is the climbers 
 who are in danger of the abyss. Must we not, 
 for instance, forgive something, perhaps a 
 good deal, on this account, to that most 
 dazzling of artists and of rascals, Benvenuto 
 Cellini ? It was surely not hypocrisy, but 
 partly the madness of his time and partly 
 the madness of his artist blood, which made 
 him capable now of quoting St. Paul and 
 discoursing eloquently of heaven, and anon of 
 plunging his dagger into a rival and boast- 
 ing of the deed ! The extraordinary thing, 
 indeed, about those times, and of some later 
 ones, is that men were capable of what seem to 
 us the most monstrous inconsistencies without 
 apparently themselves discerning in them any 
 moral incongruity. What a picture is this, 
 for instance, which Horace Walpole gives us of 
 what he saw in the Chapel Eoyal at Versailles : 
 
 13 
 
194 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 " There was Mme. du Barry, the King's reign- 
 ing mistress, close to the altar ; her husband's 
 sister was with her. In the tribune above, 
 surrounded by prelates, was the amorous and 
 still handsome King." The piety, the pomp, 
 and the carnality seemed to everybody appar- 
 ently to go perfectly well together. We are 
 by no means all we should be to-day, but we 
 bave, at any rate, progressed to the point of 
 being able to see some difference between 
 these things. 
 
 But with the best of us, with those who have 
 been diligently using every means, human and 
 superhuman, for inward advance, there re- 
 mains a disheartening consciousness of moral 
 variability. A sleepless night, an excess of 
 mental exertion, will make us uncertain in 
 temper. The strangest reactions come. We 
 -have heard a preacher say that he felt him- 
 self a mere Pagan on Monday morning. 
 Amiel notes, as Browning has done, the 
 advent of spring as waking up every kind of 
 desire. "II fait tressaillir le moine dans 
 ■I' ombre de son convent, la vierge derriere les 
 rideaux de sa chambrette." Worthy people on 
 whose general charity and probity we can 
 always count, seem as to their tempers to be 
 
Our Moral Variability. 195 
 
 possessed at times by two totally different 
 spirits, whose successive entrance or exit 
 changes the whole set and shape of the 
 features, the light in the eye, the quality of 
 the voice. 
 
 It will be the mark of a growing inward 
 life that with an ever-widening range of 
 knowledge, feeling, and capacity, our area of 
 moral variation steadily diminishes. More and 
 more the central governing force of our life 
 will hold us to itself. Outward circumstance 
 of every kind will lose power to confuse and to 
 upset. People will know with an increasing 
 certainty where to look for us in the spiritual 
 realm. The only movement they will learn to 
 anticipate will be a movement upwards. What 
 is possible in this sphere is expressed for us in 
 a way that can hardly be surpassed in the 
 eulogium which the sceptic Gibbon passed on 
 the mystic William Law, who spent some 
 years as tutor in his father's house at Putney : 
 " In our family William Law left the reputa- 
 tion of a man who believed all that he pro- 
 fessed, and practised all that he enjoined." 
 

 XXII. 
 The Escape from Commonplace. 
 
 There is the story of a man of leisure who 
 found his future — an endless vista, as it 
 seemed, of days in which he would go through 
 exactly the same round of getting up, dressing, 
 feeding, and going to bed again — too appal- 
 ling in its monotony, and so escaped from it by 
 suicide. In such a position we could sympa- 
 thise with his feeling if we did not proceed to 
 his extremity. One of the greatest of human 
 burdens is the sense of being imprisoned by 
 the commonplace. A man spends his working 
 day in making the eighth part of a pin, or in 
 totting up columns of figures, or in selling 
 calico. His wife, meanwhile, is occupied with 
 an incessant cooking, cleaning and arranging, 
 which has all to be begun over again to- 
 morrow. " If only there were a respite, and a 
 chance of travel and change ! " They take it 
 for granted, and are here voicing the almost 
 universal feeling, that the escape from com- 
 
The Escape prom Commonplace. 197 
 
 monplace is simply an affair of change of 
 circumstances. 
 
 How great an illusion this is will be patent 
 to any one who has the opportunity of study- 
 ing his fellows under widely varying conditions. 
 Eiches in themselves furnish no escape from 
 the commonplace. They can purchase in- 
 numerable things, but not this. There is a 
 mob of rich people to-day, and they are on the 
 whole less interesting than the poor. Their 
 money can, if they choose, buy them laziness, 
 which they share with the tramp, and to about 
 as good purpose. It can secure the indulgence 
 of animal sensations with all manner of luxuri- 
 ous accessories. But some fatal laws block the 
 way to felicity along this line ; the law of 
 familiarity which robs the sensation of its first 
 flavour, and the laws relating to excess which 
 exact the grisliest of after penalties. Leading 
 performers in this line, a Tiberius and a Sar- 
 danapalus, offer great rewards for a new plea- 
 sure. The new pleasures, alas ! turn out to be 
 neither new nor pleasant. Consumed with the 
 thirst for enjoyment, and with a whole world 
 waiting to minister to it, they are at last un- 
 able, from the whole complicated apparatus, to 
 extract one satisfying drop. 
 
198 OUESELVES AXD THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 People who have to stay at home imagine, 
 we have just said, that a sure escape from the 
 commonplace is by travel and change of scene. 
 It is enough to rub shoulders with the average 
 globe-trotter to be disillusioned on that head. 
 He carries, alas ! the commonplace everywhere 
 about with him. We call to mind how, at a 
 Swiss hotel, when an expedition was being 
 planned, a British tourist who was listening 
 exclaimed, wearily, " I suppose it is just the 
 same there as here, a lot of mountains and that 
 kind of thing ! " The Alps awakened in him 
 absolutely no response. He wanted Paris. It 
 was a brother soul who, on the iEgean, with 
 Salamis and the mountains that look on Mara- 
 thon in full view, grumbled in our ear, " I can't 
 for the life of me see what people find to rave 
 about in these places ; a lot of barren rocks and 
 tumble-down ruins ! " One meets Americans, 
 spending half their holiday in railway carriages, 
 rushing Europe and Asia, the driving power 
 behind them the fear that their neighbours in 
 Philadelphia or Indianapolis will want to know 
 if they inspected this mosque or saw that pic- 
 ture, and will triumph over them to their life's 
 end if they did not. To be carted round the 
 planet by contract is, after all, a thin, surface 
 
The Escape from Commojtplace. 199 
 
 business that will never turn a fool into a wise 
 man, nor put insight into a blockhead. 
 
 So far, then, as at present appears, the busi- 
 ness of escaping the commonplace is a difficult 
 one, out of the reach apparently of any but the 
 rarer natures. But that would be a hasty con- 
 clusion. The most important factors in the 
 problem have not yet been touched. To begin 
 with, Nature does not seem to have organised 
 man's life here with a view to its being a purely 
 humdrum aifair. That she placed him in such 
 an astonishing universe, and with a relation to 
 it so marvellous, is in itself the answer to such 
 a supposition. When, a million years ago, she 
 turned this new-comer off the track of hi& 
 fellow mammalian primates and began to add 
 to his brain-power while these others were- 
 merely developing limb-power; when, bit by 
 bit, she brought him along this fresh line until,, 
 with a body in the same zoological kingdom as 
 the chimpanzee, he attained to a mind that 
 demanded infinity for workroom and playplace, 
 she gave notice that here was a being whose 
 experience and destiny were to be certainly not 
 common. Nor will she allow any one of us to 
 forget this. The knowledge of good and evil 
 that she rubs into us ; our encounters with paia 
 
200 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 and trouble, the fact that we can never get 
 through a day without some rebuff, some tangle 
 of circumstance ; and, most striking of all, 
 that in full view there is placed before every 
 mother's son of us, for wind up of our present 
 career, the tremendous adventure of death, 
 are all Nature's stern refusal to man to permit 
 himself to be trivial. 
 
 And with this plain hint from headquarters 
 to start us, we may now profitably turn our atten- 
 tion to the ways in which, imprisoned as we 
 most are in our narrowing labours and posi- 
 tions, we may yet individually escape the 
 commonplace. There is but one way and it is 
 an inward way. The only change as to our cir- 
 cumstances that is really effective is the change 
 of our mental and moral attitude towards them. 
 It was to this that Madame Swetchine arrived 
 as the result of her wide experience, " At 
 bottom there is in life only what one puts into 
 it " ; and which Montaigne, from an experience 
 still wider, has expressed in the aphorism, 
 4< External occasions take both flavour and 
 colour from the inward constitution." Pre- 
 cisely in proportion as we become in ourselves 
 deeper, purer, more refined, more open-eyed, 
 does our environment become more wonderful, 
 
The Escape from Commonplace. 201 
 
 more wholly removed from tedium or vulgarity. 
 There is no need to travel a thousand miles in 
 search of the sublime. A starry night is vastly 
 more sublime than Niagara. Samuel Drew, the 
 Cornish shoemaker, without going from his 
 last, sounded the deeps within him to such 
 purpose as to produce an astonishing work on 
 the soul. Let any one to whom the hedgerow 
 by his door has become common take with 
 him on his next visit there some handbook 
 of botany, say that treasure of delights, Anne 
 Pratt's "Flowering Plants of Great Britain," 
 and he will find his hedge bottom grown 
 miraculous to him. The moment we take 
 ourselves in hand this way and realise that 
 the whole question of change, whether it 
 be of scenery or circumstance, is from begin- 
 ning to end a question of our own interior, and 
 of what goes on there, our deliverance has 
 begun. Maeterlinck, in his u Wisdom and 
 Destiny," strikingly illustrates this in what he 
 says of Emily Bronte. Here, says he, is a 
 young woman, daughter of a country clergy- 
 man, without means or the excitements of 
 travel or of society, who never had lover or 
 husband or family of her own. And yet, as her 
 one wonderful book shows, she lived out all 
 
202 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 these experiences in her own soul and in their 
 highest forms. The world for us, let us repeat, 
 is our own interior. 
 
 We are not all, it may be said, constructive 
 geniuses like Emily Bronte. But if we cannot 
 speak we can at least listen, and in the great 
 literatures which come now to our doors almost 
 gratis, we may at any hour escape from mean 
 surroundings into the rarest society. If Homer 
 and Socrates and St. Paul and Shakespeare are 
 of our circle, we can dispense quite easily with 
 an invitation to the next Lord Mayor's dinner. 
 We have touched literature here, however, not 
 to dwell upon it, but for something to which it 
 leads us. The power of a great book, we soon 
 discover, is the power of the personality which 
 it enshrines. What moves us is that we are 
 there in contact with a soul, and the more soul 
 there is in the book the more we are moved by 
 it. A treatise of mechanics is not literature 
 simply because this personal element is lacking. 
 It is here that literature helps us to understand 
 religion. The life of literature, its whole 
 emancipating power, lies in this contact with 
 personality. It unites us with the world's great 
 spirits. And it is because of its revelation of 
 the Greatest of all Personalities that religion 
 
The Escape from Commonplace. 203 
 
 is for us the everlasting deliverer from the 
 commonplace. The humblest peasant who has 
 felt God steps at once into the world's selecter 
 circle. He can never be henceforth, either to 
 others or, what is more important, to himself, 
 common or unclean. 
 
 It is to us one of the mysteries that so high 
 and serious a nature as that of Comte should 
 have been able to live and die in the belief of a 
 world that had no Supreme Personality behind 
 it. The deadly chill upon the spirit which such 
 a system casts — a system in which we find 
 ourselves in a universe only of things — a dead 
 universe with, as Richter puts it, a ghastly eye 
 socket glaring down upon us where an eye 
 should have been — makes us shiver even now 
 as we remember the experience. It took a 
 Frenchman to prick this French system with 
 one touch of the pen. " The All," said Victor 
 Hugo, "would not be the All unless it con- 
 tained a Personality, and that Personality is 
 God." 
 
 Religion, we say, in the sense of an abiding 
 consciousness of God, is the supreme deliverer 
 from the commonplace. It is, as Joubert has 
 put it, "the poetry of the heart"; it is for 
 every man the open door into the infinite. 
 
204 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 There seems a corollary to this, a special instruc- 
 tion to the religious teacher of whatsoever name. 
 What his fellow-man requires of him, what, 
 indeed, constitutes his chief raison d'etre in the 
 world, is that for himself and for his fellows he 
 escape the commonplace. And he is to do it, not 
 so much by genius or by learning as by enlarge- 
 ment and cleansing of his interior life, by the 
 infiltration into it of the life of God. There is 
 something pathetic beyond words in men's 
 yearning for the Divine, in the eagerness with 
 which they recognise any trace of it in their 
 teacher's speech and life. By a sure instinct 
 they know the reality and its counterfeit. 
 ■" Art thou Brother Francis of Assisi ? " said a 
 peasant once to the saint. " Yes." " Try, 
 then, to be as good as all think thee to be, 
 because many have great faith in thee, and 
 therefore I admonish thee to be nothing less 
 than people hope of thee." Yes, truly ! Here 
 spoke the deepest heart of humanity, and so 
 speaks it to-day. Our chief debt to our fellows 
 is the obligation to be good, to live the highest 
 life we know. A child-like, God-loving soul, 
 that begins its life afresh every morning, 
 whose history is that of a perpetual soaring, 
 is the most refreshing, heart-healing thing 
 
The Escape from Commonplace. 205> 
 
 that exists. Beneath the world's cynicism 
 lives the consciousness that its chief treasure, 
 its rarest product, its pearl of price is the 
 saint's supernatural life. When humanity 
 sees this plant growing in the wilderness it 
 takes heart in its journeying, knowing it is not 
 forsaken of God. 
 
XXIII. 
 
 Of Spiritual Detachment. 
 
 In the coming reconstruction of theology the 
 builders will seek both their ground-plan and 
 their materials in the region of the spiritual 
 laws. These laws, which operate throughout 
 the universe, focus and realise themselves in 
 man. All the revelations, all the external 
 facts that make up human religious history, 
 have their origin and their interpretation here. 
 Some of the laws lie very deep down, and yield 
 themselves only to a very careful investigation. 
 Of this number is the principle of spiritual 
 detachment, with which we propose now to 
 deal. How difficult its trail is to discern is 
 evident by the numbers who have lost their 
 way in trying to follow it. The Indian 
 devotees who give themselves up to voluntary 
 tortures, or who leave their families for a 
 solitary, homeless life in the forest, are types 
 of these bewildered explorers. But their very 
 aberrations point to a something beneath, 
 
Of Spiritual Detachment. 207 
 
 which is distinctive not only of the devotee 
 but of every man of us, and which must be 
 taken into account if we would reach any 
 proper comprehension either of history or of 
 ourselves. 
 
 The law of detachment lies close by the side 
 of the law of association in religion. The two 
 co-operate in denning the soul's movement 
 somewhat as the centripetal and centrifugal 
 forces co-operate in defining the orbit of the 
 earth. The operation of detachment is by a 
 constant breaking away of the mind from the 
 objects of its earlier attraction in search of 
 what is wider and higher. The spiritual move- 
 ment here has a close parallel in the mental 
 progress of a country-bred man who has after- 
 wards seen the world. In his earlier years his 
 view has been confined to the parish he was 
 born in. He knows no other scenery and no 
 other opinions. He applies to everything the 
 parochial standard of measurement. He 
 
 Thinks the rustic cackle of his bourg 
 The murmur of the world. 
 
 But the later years of travel and observation 
 snap the cables which tie him to this small 
 world. He finds himself part of a larger 
 
208 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 system. He lias a new measuring line, a 
 fresh standard for judging what is big and 
 little. Many things which loomed on the 
 rural horizon as of portentous moment are 
 now reckoned as of small account. All round 
 the man there has, we perceive, gone on a great 
 process of detachment. 
 
 But this, while it represents relatively an 
 immense development, is, after all, only a 
 beginning. Before a deeper insight such a 
 world-culture stands, in its turn, as something 
 only parochial. For a true cosmopolitanism 
 there must be excursions in a yet wider realm. 
 An imperious necessity drives man beyond the 
 region of flesh and sense. When these have 
 yielded him their utmost he still finds himself 
 
 Galled with his confines, and troubled yet more with 
 
 his vastness ; 
 Born too great for his ends, never at peace with his. 
 
 goal. 
 
 Everything in the sense world bears, we 
 discover, the stamp of the evanescent. The 
 saying of Heraclitus that we never cross the* 
 same river twice, because the water we first 
 passed over has fled to the ocean, is a parable 
 of all our relations to the visible. While we 
 look at our possessions they melt before our 
 
Op Spiritual Detachment. 209 
 
 eyes. And could we hold them, they are not 
 good enough. We drink of this water and 
 thirst again. That immense Weltschmerz of 
 which we read in the life of Lacordaire, when, 
 as a brilliant young advocate, with the world 
 at his feet, he suddenly saw all its hideous 
 emptiness, and fled from it to the life of the 
 cloister, is known to us all. If we listen to the 
 deep within us we hear a cry there as of a live 
 thing in prison, sighing for its true home. Like 
 some sea-bird in the centre of a continent that 
 seeks a way to the ocean that is its habitat, 
 the truest within us calls to the illimitable, the 
 unseen, and the imperishable as its only proper 
 abiding-place. 
 
 It is not till we have reached this stage 
 of thought and feeling that we are in a 
 position to estimate the real significance of 
 the message of Christ. Its central teaching 
 is that worldliness is a stupid provincialism. 
 It is not so much that it is wicked as that it 
 is so absurdly limited. Christ brings us 
 tidings from a larger world on which He 
 proposes straightway to launch us. His 
 proposition is that we should 
 
 Here on this bank in some way live the life 
 Beyond the bridge. 
 
 14 
 
210 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 The parochial view finds its end in the gain- 
 ing of sensual pleasures, of wealth and worldly 
 honours. Christ proclaims this to be the pastime 
 of babes, and suggests that we take up pursuits 
 worthy of manhood. He speaks as the 
 citizen and emissary of a larger universe, to 
 whose vaster and more splendid careers He 
 invites us. And the magnificent detachment 
 manifest in His teaching shines even more 
 resplendently in His life. In a fine passage in 
 one of his essays Holt Hutton has pointed out 
 how this appears specially in Christ's attitude 
 to His own sufferings. It does not occur to 
 Him that there is any hardship to Himself in 
 being scourged and crucified. Nothing is 
 further from His mind than any consternation 
 at the shame and disaster of His own earthly 
 destiny. He is occupied here entirely with the 
 wider purpose of the Divine Mind. He takes 
 suffering and want, and all the affronts the 
 world can offer, as moments simply in a con- 
 stant spiritual progress, as factors and instru- 
 ments for making visible on earth the invisible 
 things of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 It appears after all then that, despite the 
 scoffs with which the phrase has been greeted, 
 the only successful worldliness is an other- 
 
Of Spiritual Detachment. 211 
 
 worldliness. To master this world we must be 
 free of another. Any lesser conception reduces 
 our life movement to something like the 
 navigation of the pre-compass period ; a petty 
 steering by capes and headlands instead of 
 bold ventures across the ocean, guided by the 
 stars. Let us see, however, in more detail, 
 how this law of detachment works. 
 
 It disconnects for one thing the centre of 
 gravity of our life, the sum of its purpose, 
 inclination and desire, and lifts it to a 
 plane from which everything takes on a new 
 aspect. At this height we find men taking 
 their sorrows as personal possessions and en- 
 richments. They may not with a Goethe turn 
 them into song ; but they will certainly trans- 
 late them into character, which is even better. 
 A Boethius under sentence of death calmly 
 occupies the interval in writing the " Consola- 
 tions of Philosophy"; a St. Teresa when 
 persecuted "finds her soul in its true king- 
 dom with everything under its feet." What a 
 splendid height of detachment is that described 
 for us by the Roman annalist, of Canius Julius 
 condemned to death by Caligula ! At the last 
 stroke of the executioner he is asked by a 
 philosopher friend standing by, " Canius, in 
 
212 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 what state is your soul now ? " The answer is, 
 " I thought to keep steady with all my force to 
 see whether in this instant of death I might 
 perceive some dislodging of the soul, and 
 whether it would show some feeling of its 
 sudden departure. ,, In this supreme moment, 
 that is, he is occupied simply in the calm 
 scientific analysis of his own sensations ! 
 Small ground, surely, for the howl of the 
 pessimist when life at its worst can hurt no 
 more than this ! 
 
 An example of this kind shows us the extent 
 to which the pagan world, at its best, had 
 learned the secret of spiritual detachment. Its 
 achievement, however, was largely a negative 
 one. There is not much good in a detachment 
 from the lower if one has not, to meet it, a 
 satisfying attachment to the higher. Stoicism 
 had a grey sky over it, and a north wind 
 blowing. It was bracing, but the scene lacked 
 sunshine. It is here that the Christian 
 sanctity so far surpasses the Stoic sanctity. 
 It gives a positive for the pagan negative. It 
 offers a home in the invisible such as we search 
 for in vain in Epictetus or Seneca or Aurelius. 
 They have hardened themselves into a noble 
 scorn of pain and loss, but they have not that 
 
Of Spiritual Detachment. 213 
 
 fine sense of harbourage far up in the will of 
 God which enabled our Baxter, shut up in 
 prison, to sing : 
 
 No walls or bars can keep Thee out, 
 
 None can confine a holy soul ; 
 The streets of heaven it walks about, 
 
 None can its liberty control. 
 
 A detachment of this kind, which makes the 
 soul, in old Tauler's words, " so grounded in 
 God that it is dissolved in the inmost of the 
 Divine nature," is far more than a defiance of 
 the world's disabilities. Its note is not defi- 
 ance, but delight. The spirit revels in the 
 thought of having attained at last to life's 
 inmost secret, of being launched at last on a 
 career which answers its deepest aspiration and 
 calls forth all its powers. 
 
 It is not less interesting to trace the work- 
 ing of spiritual detachment in the sphere of 
 human relationships. It is, for one thing, 
 the secret of loving. There is no enduring 
 attachment apart from a high detachment. 
 Where two souls hold together it will be 
 by a mutual breaking off from the lower 
 and the unworthy in each other, and the 
 cleaving to and working upon what is really 
 lovable. When our friend insists in seeing 
 
214 Ourselves axd the Universe. 
 
 only the best in us, trusting it, taking it 
 always for granted, and ignoring the lower, 
 he is going the surest way to kill this 
 lower. Our evil is here in a vacuum where it 
 cannot breathe. It is by a similar detach- 
 ment that creed wars and theological hatreds 
 will finally die out. All great souls, says 
 Schiller, are akin. And as souls become greater 
 everywhere, they will refuse to deny their 
 kinship. They will detach themselves more 
 and more from the divisive element in their 
 separate formularies, to unite on the deeper 
 life beneath. 
 
 To sum up. We have in the law of detach- 
 ment a principle of separation in view of a 
 higher union. Its presence in man proclaims 
 him born for citizenship in two worlds. As 
 the earth's motion is explicable only by its 
 relation to a larger cosmos, so is the movement 
 of humanity explicable only by reference to an 
 unseen cosmos. Christ's life and message are 
 the completest example and demonstration of 
 this greater cosmopolitanism. The spiritual 
 detachment which He teaches secures the 
 highest forms of union, and by linking the 
 seen to the unseen shows us how to possess 
 and enjoy them both. 
 
XXIV. 
 
 Life's Present Tense. 
 
 Grammar, in our school days, was the desert of 
 Sahara. In its dreary sand realm of rule and 
 form grew no single flower of human interest* 
 How differently it opens to us in these later 
 years ! Grammar, we find, is a page out of the 
 soul. Its every line is burdened with the 
 mystery, lit with the romance of the human 
 spirit. Take a list of pronouns. In its "I," 
 "Thou," "He" we have man's dawning 
 sense of himself and his neighbour. A 
 verb's moods open all the unfathomables of 
 volition and responsibility ; its tenses confront 
 us with the stupendous problem of Time. 
 What is the real meaning of " Now " ; and how 
 is it related to a "then" and a "to be"? Our 
 grammar study may concentrate itself on this 
 point. There is enough in it to keep us busy. 
 
 We are approaching these themes to-day from 
 some startlingly fresh standpoints. For ages 
 men have, for instance, mused upon the transi- 
 
216 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 tory, upon the impossibility of holding the 
 present moment, of calling " halt " to the 
 eternal flux. Physical research has now its 
 own say on the matter. It shows us how the 
 sense of change is necessarily intertwined with 
 our consciousness, for there could be no con- 
 sciousness without it. Every state of feeling is 
 the result of an impact of object on subject, a 
 play of oppositions. Our knowledge of our- 
 selves and the world results from an incessant 
 movement in the primordial mind-stuff, in 
 which, during every second of time, thousands 
 of infinitesimally small changes, of readjust- 
 ments of fleeting groups of pulsations, are 
 taking place. Our sense of a present that 
 mever stops with us, that is ever ceasing to be 
 a present, has, then, one of its origins in the 
 physical conditions of thinking. Our "now" 
 cannot abide with us because the very thought 
 of it is itself a movement. From another 
 side, then, than that along which Tennyson 
 approaches the theme, we reach his conclusion : 
 
 Thus 
 Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time. 
 
 But our Time relation has of late set men 
 thinking in other and perhaps less profitable 
 
Life's Present Tense. 217 
 
 directions. We have revivals of the old meta- 
 physical objections to the Christian outlook 
 derived from the ideas of existence and suc- 
 cession. When, for instance, we speak of 
 personal survival in a future life, we are asked, 
 " Survival of what ? Survival of our childhood, 
 of our youth, of our manhood or of our old age ? 
 Why this talk of an after life, when by the 
 mere process of living, if we are old enough, 
 three- parts of us are already dead? Where is 
 our childhood ? Why do we not clamour for 
 that ? What is gone is for ever gone." From 
 another side, Life's Present Tense is used as 
 an argument against the Divine Goodness. 
 " What use," we are asked, "is it to point to 
 some possible state of future felicity as a set-off 
 against the evil and misery of the present? 
 That to-morrow may be good is no answer to 
 the fact that to-day is bad. If God's world is 
 •evil now, a coming millennium takes no black- 
 ness from the present fact." 
 
 Plainly, if we constitute ourselves the vindi- 
 cators of the universe as against all comers, 
 we have enough on our hands. Our rdle is 
 assuredly not that. With a good conscience 
 we can leave the universe to take care of itself. 
 We cannot, however, help thinking that the 
 
218 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 objectors here, the new as well as the old, might 
 conceivably have found a healthier occupation. 
 As to the non-survival argument, our own 
 experience supplies, surely, the best answer. 
 Its message is that while, in one sense, our past 
 has gone, in another it most truly lives with us. 
 For our man-consciousness holds in itself our 
 child-consciousness, while old age contains both. 
 The " now " of the actual life is never only the 
 present moment. It is a compound, a distilla- 
 tion. Its essence is an extract of all that has 
 gone before. The argument, then, as regards 
 a future life gains reinforcement rather than 
 opposition from the time sense. Its suggestion 
 is, under new conditions, of a further sublima- 
 tion, in which the resultants of all the phases 
 of the old life shall combine into a new and 
 higher whole. 
 
 And to those who bring life's present tense, 
 with its apparent evil, as a charge against God 
 and His world, and who admit no plea of a 
 coming better in mitigation, the answer is 
 practically the same. Their " now " is a 
 fictitious one. For there is no such thing as a 
 present without a future. As Schiller has it, 
 "all is fruit and all is seed." The "to come " 
 is not only ahead of the existent, but is in it 
 
Life's Present Tense. 219 
 
 and a part of it. The one would not be itself 
 without the other. And the soul is deeply 
 conscious of this, and in the highest tumult of 
 the outward is sure of its good. " My body," 
 says a modern thinker, "weeps and sighs, but 
 a something in me, which is above me, rejoices 
 at everything." When Walt Whitman, in his 
 daring fashion, declares, " I say there is in fact 
 no evil, or if there is, I say it is just as import- 
 ant to you or to me as anything else," he 
 means practically this. The totality to which 
 we belong, including all to which it tends, as 
 well as all from which it comes, is a good at 
 which the soul rejoices. The Areopagite, the 
 old Greek Christian thinker, whose thought 
 ruled so many ages, in declaring that evil was 
 a shadow, a non-being, a finite to set off the 
 perfection of the Infinite, sounds the same note. 
 A German poet thus re-echoes it to-day : 
 "Everything inferior is a higher in the 
 making, everything hateful a coming beauti- 
 ful, everything evil a coming good. And we 
 see it, all incomplete as it is, and laugh and 
 love it." 
 
 On ultimate questions we shall perhaps not 
 get much nearer than that. Meanwhile, Life's 
 Present Tense suggests matters more immediate 
 
220 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 to ourselves. Our own age is not strong in its 
 appreciation of the present tense. In its 
 desperate chase after what it has not, the ques- 
 tion might occur whether, as Goethe so pro- 
 foundly says, " we are not farthest from the 
 object of our desires when we imagine we pos- 
 sess that which we desire." A man consumes 
 his life in gaining wealth, and finds at the end 
 that he has lost the power of enjoying it. He 
 postpones his happiness till to-morrow ; he 
 forms the habit of so doing, until the postpone- 
 ment becomes sine die. Meanwhile the world 
 men are rushing through without stopping to 
 observe it belongs really to him who has 
 learned that " Now is the accepted time." The 
 whole art of living, properly considered, is the 
 art of the present moment. " Can this hour be 
 sordid," I ask, " when it is a piece of God's 
 •eternity ? " If God is not Love at this moment, 
 He never was or will be. If that Love is not 
 filling me at this moment with its own heaven 
 that is my fault. To pure minds there are no 
 sordid moments, and there is no sordid world. 
 What fools we are not to taste our " now," to 
 feel its whole content, to distil from it the 
 wonders, the mysteries, the ecstasies that lie 
 there ! 
 
Life's Present Tense. 221 
 
 To extract this savour of the moment re- 
 quires the perpetual discipline and enlargement 
 of the soul. We cannot taste time's full flavour 
 till we have pierced through to something that 
 is beyond time. As a mediaeval thinker puts it, 
 " Our passing life that we have here in our 
 sense-soul knoweth not what our Self is." 
 Spinoza, the Jew grinder of lenses, who refused 
 a fortune in order to conserve his inner wealth, 
 had mastered the lesson. To love only the 
 perishable, says he, means strife, envy, hatred 
 and fear, while "to love the eternal and 
 infinite feeds the mind with pure joy, and is 
 wholly free from sorrow." When we have 
 reached this point, of seeing the Divine in the 
 present and the actual, we are free of the uni- 
 verse. We belong no longer to that category 
 of men who, in Emerson's words, "seem as 
 though whipped through the world, the hacks 
 of invisible riders." Rather are we of those 
 who, to quote a modern philosopher, "have a 
 degree of existence at least ten times larger 
 than others — who, in other words, exist ten 
 times as much." 
 
 There is one sphere is which life's grammar 
 of the present tense imperiously calls to be 
 mastered, if we would avoid failure's deepest 
 
222 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 hell. It is that of the affections and of the 
 family. We burn to reconstruct the characters 
 of our acquaintance and kinsfolk, and forget 
 that, just as they are, they are full of a lovable- 
 ness which only our prejudices hide, and which 
 we shall see as with a flash when it is gone 
 from us. How many are there in the plight of 
 Marie Bashkirtseff when she says of her 
 mother : " I believe she is really fond of me, 
 and I am really fond of her too, but we cannot 
 be two minutes together without irritating 
 one another to tears." " Nevermore," the 
 saddest word in language, gains tenfold 
 bitterness when uttered of an intercourse 
 snapped by death, where love has failed of 
 its expression. 
 
 For she is in her grave, and oh ! 
 The difference to me ! 
 
 is then the cry from a tragedy too great for 
 words. 
 
 The full appreciation of the present tense is 
 one of the privileges of the later years. Life, 
 to the youthful palate, is a somewhat raw and 
 acrid product. It is full of froth and ferment, 
 and has not had time to mature. It takes 
 years for the liquor to clarify and gather its 
 
Life's Present Tense. 223 
 
 true relish. That is why a career of spiritual 
 growth blossoms into such rare beauty towards 
 the end. We say of such proficients what 
 Morris sings, with a different application : 
 
 In such Saint Luke's short summer lived these men, 
 Xearing the goal of three score years and ten. 
 
 They can say with a French wit, though 
 with a better application, " Je prerids mon bien 
 oil je le trouve." They eat and drink, not 
 because " to-morrow we die," but because 
 their day has a taste in it of eternity ; their to- 
 morrow suggests not death, but life. Life's 
 present tense is to them not only an existence, 
 but a becoming. Half its joy is an aspiration. 
 It holds a good which has only begun to be 
 fulfilled. An old mystic has struck its note 
 with a sweet exactness in the words : " I saw 
 Him and sought Him ; I had Him and I 
 wanted Him." 
 
XXY. 
 A Doctrine of Echoes. 
 
 An echo may, for general purposes, be con- 
 sidered as made up of two main factors, a 
 
 sound and a reflecting surface. In multitudes 
 of cases it would be difficult to say which of 
 the two has the greater share in the efiPect. In 
 the world's famous echo spots, such as Killar- 
 ney, or that at the Castle of Simonetta, in 
 Italy, which repeats a note sixty times, the 
 result is, here as everywhere, in direct propor- 
 tion to the loudness of the trumpet-blast or 
 pistol-shot. But that is only half the matter. 
 The marvellous repetitions, as well as the 
 quality and volume of sound, depend not so 
 much on the emitted note as on the number 
 and character of the reflecting surfaces. Of 
 all echoes it is true that if we change either of 
 the two factors, the original sound or the sub- 
 stance on which it impinges, we have a corre- 
 sponding change in the phenomenon. This 
 play of forces in the dead world of rock and 
 
A Doctrine op Echoes. 225 
 
 mountain has impressed most of us at one time 
 or another with its strange, startling and often 
 weirdly beautiful results. If we have been in 
 a reflective mood, it has probably set us think- 
 ing. As these great sound combinations have 
 rolled round us we have realised the quickness 
 of Nature's response, and also the variety of it. 
 We see how every substance answers the call 
 made on it according, not simply to the intrin- 
 sic nature of that call, but according, also, to- 
 rts own intrinsic nature. The moment we 
 strike that truth, we are at the centre of life 
 and of history. An illuminating flash gleams 
 over a hundred mysteries, and, if it does not 
 penetrate their secret sets them at least in a 
 new light. Let us see, in some different direc- 
 tions, what the light seems to reveal. 
 
 The true echo realm is, let us premise, not 
 the mountains but the field of human life. 
 Rock and hill give back nothing comparable 
 for variety and mystery with the notes that 
 reverberate through the ages, with human 
 souls for their sounding-boards. Our thought- 
 world is full of deep undertones that roll in 
 upon us from an immemorial past. The com- 
 monest words we use are blocks of mind-stuff 
 rolled into their present shape by the attrition 
 
 15 
 
226 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 of measureless years. The ideas of the antique 
 world are all alive to-day, only yielding new 
 tones as they strike fresh mental surfaces. 
 Continually in history have we the phenomenon 
 of voices that had slumbered for millenniums, 
 waking up suddenly and beginning again to fill 
 the world. So was it at the Renaissance, when 
 Europe, sunk for centuries in media? val scholas- 
 ticism, listened entranced to the mighty musi- 
 cal note from ancient Greece. To-day the 
 hoary East, from an even greater antiquity, is 
 whispering its mystic word into the modern 
 ear. It is wonderful to note the tricks which 
 the echo plays in history ; with what strange 
 and sometimes sinister varieties it throws back 
 the original sound. Luther's gospel rolls on 
 him from one point in the shape of a Peasants' 
 War ; the liberalism of a Locke and a Boling- 
 broke, so restrained and ordered as first uttered, 
 striking on the fevered imagination of France, 
 echoes back in wild eighteenth-century revolu- 
 tion; the calm research and cautious affirma- 
 tions of our English Darwin rebound from 
 answering brains on the Continent as a system 
 of materialism and of no religion. 
 
 But our real theme is waiting. What has 
 been said on the natural history of echoes was 
 
A Doctrine of Echoes. 227 
 
 with a view to its special application to the 
 question of religion. There are points here, 
 obvious enough when we actually face them, 
 but which have been strangely overlooked in 
 average religious teaching. It was seen a 
 moment ago that our echo varies directly, not 
 only according to the character of the produc- 
 ing sound, but also to that of the material it 
 strikes on. Have we fairly considered what 
 this means in its bearing on our theories of 
 Gospel and Christianity? An evident first 
 result is that Christianity, as a received fact, 
 must vary with every race and every individual 
 that it severally touches. For here, as with 
 the mountain and the bugle note, it is not the 
 sound only but the surface it reaches that pro- 
 duces the result. The whole problem is raised 
 in that parable of the sower, the real signifi- 
 cance of which is generally so entirely missed. 
 The seed is from one basket and of a like 
 quality throughout. But it falls upon a variety 
 of soils and the results are entirely in accord- 
 ance with the diiference in them. The Gospel 
 as thus conceived is, then, a revelation, not 
 simply of the truth contained in itself, but of 
 the mental and spiritual condition of those it 
 reaches. The proclamation of it is a kind of 
 
228 OlTESELVES AND THE UnIVEESE. 
 
 judgment-day, in whose light stands revealed 
 the precise height to which its hearer has risen. 
 It seems strange to say that a man's gospel is 
 what his pre-existing disposition makes of it. 
 That, indeed, would not be entirely true, for 
 the message brings something of its own, 
 apart from any qualities of the receiver. But 
 these latter, we repeat, tell, and that de- 
 cisively, at every point of the result. 
 
 But what is the outcome of this ? For one 
 thing, that Christianity, as received by nations 
 and individuals, is never an entirely new 
 thing. It can only reach the soul by mingling 
 with what is already there, and taking on its 
 shape and colour. We teach what we call 
 " the same things " to a cultured, subtle 
 Brahmin and to a cannibal of New Guinea. 
 Are they the same things ? Assuredly not to 
 them. The mental product in these separate 
 minds is different with all the difference of 
 their training and of their past. Evidently we 
 cannot make our Christianity a thing separate 
 and apart from the world's earlier culture. 
 The thing is forbidden by everything in 
 history and by everything in the human soul. 
 There is a Greek Christianity, and a Latin, a 
 Saxon and an Indian — as many Christianities 
 
A Doctrine of Echoes. 229 
 
 as there are races and types, as many, indeed, 
 as there are minds. And these forms owe 
 their speciality to the earlier training which 
 they found. The New Testament religion, so 
 far from being isolated and out of relation with 
 other disciplines, could not, the human mind 
 being what it is, do anything at all except in 
 union with them. To what, in the " sower " 
 parable, is owing the thirty or the sixty fold 
 product of some natures ? How did the ground 
 in these cases come to be so good ? There is 
 only one answer. The Gospel here recognises 
 the goodness of the Gospels that went before it. 
 We find here, in fact, a recognition of what 
 a study of the nature of things, especially as 
 seen in the laws of the mind, makes inevitable 
 — that Christianity can only be properly under- 
 stood as forming part of a great redemptive 
 world-process, embracing all nations and all 
 ages, and working as certainly beyond as within 
 the sphere of its own direct influence. This 
 truth was indeed recognised in earlier ages of 
 the Church more clearly than it is in some 
 places to-day. The Alexandrian fathers were 
 emphatic in their acceptance of what Clement 
 calls the " dispensation of paganism " ; in their 
 admission that the Greek philosophy was a 
 
230 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Divine teaching, and that the whole earlier 
 world was taught of God. What a fine 
 breadth, at once of faith, of insight and of 
 charity, have Ave in that utterance on this 
 point of Clement in the " Stromata " : 
 " Wherefore His are all men ; some actually 
 knowing Him, others not as yet; some as 
 friends, others as faithful labourers, others as 
 bond servants. He it is who gives to the Greeks 
 their philosophy . . . for He is the 
 Saviour, not of these or those, but of all. . . . 
 Dispensing in former times His word to some, 
 to some philosophy, now at length by His own 
 personal coming He has closed the course of 
 unbelief ; Greek and barbarian being led for- 
 ward by a separate process to that perfection 
 which is through faith." 
 
 The New Testament religion, then, as offered 
 the world is not, nor was intended to be, in 
 itself an absolute. It is a relative, avowing in 
 its very terms a dependence for its results on 
 the cultures which had preceded it. But to 
 leave the matter here would be to leave it in 
 halves ; we should have, in fact, precisely one of 
 those half truths which make a whole false- 
 hood. To get the entire truth we need now to 
 look at the other half of our echo. We have 
 
A Doctrine of Echoes. 231 
 
 seen some of the things included in the reflect- 
 ing surface. What now of the producing 
 voice ? There are laws on this side as well as 
 on the other. When, in the same surroundings, 
 coming back from the same mountain side or 
 cliff formation, we have at different times a 
 different echo, we know the difference here 
 must be in the originating sound. Variation 
 of tone, of quality, of intensity, will be accord- 
 ing to what is found in that. It is when we 
 apply to the Gospel this other side of an echo- 
 doctrine that we can re-make the Christian 
 affirmations that our earlier study seemed to 
 question. Innumerable other voices have, be- 
 fore and since Christ, thrown themselves against 
 this mountain mass of humanity. The mass 
 was the same, but what of the response ? 
 
 It is here that the consideration comes in 
 with such effect that Harnack has urged in his 
 latest work, " Das Wesen des Christentums." We 
 cannot, as he says, judge a great personality 
 simply by himself ; we cannot measure him 
 merely by his own words, his own deeds. To 
 approximate to his full size we must study the 
 effect he has produced on others. And where 
 we cannot hear the voice itself, we can measure 
 it by its echo. When we carry this method to 
 
232 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 our estimate of Christ there is no doubt about 
 the result. The most merciless critic of the 
 New Testament must recognise that it repre- 
 sents what the first generation of believers 
 thought and felt about Jesus. This is the 
 echo of His personality in human hearts. Was 
 there ever such an one, before or since ? 
 Imagine Luther's or Wesley's most enthusi- 
 astic followers using language about them such 
 as is used of Christ in the gospels and the 
 epistles ! And the echo is not in language only, 
 but in lives. Let any one read the account 
 of early Christian living and character in the 
 Apology of Aristides, and ask himself what 
 force must have been operating to produce 
 such effects upon the dissolute and degraded 
 humanity of the Roman Empire ? The Divine 
 life in man as here depicted, be sure, had 
 Divinity for its origin. 
 
 What is here written is the merest fragment 
 on our doctrine of echoes. All life and history 
 could indeed be presented in terms of it. Our 
 truest art is ever an echo. It is the reproduction 
 of a pattern in the Mount, the reflection of an 
 Eternal Beauty subsisting before the worlds. 
 And music also. Our Beethovens and Mozarts 
 are none of them inventors or creators. The 
 
A Doctrine of Echoes. 233 
 
 music was there, with all its laws, its inmost 
 •essence and meaning, before they came or 
 humanity was. They are only explorers of 
 what was waiting to be found. Like St. 
 Cecilia, they are listeners to a harmony that 
 floats down from heaven. Our world is indeed 
 full of echoes from that better country. Were 
 our faculties more attuned we should hear them 
 sooner. A saintly life makes a man an auditory 
 nerve of the eternal. That others hear nothing 
 is no disproof of his message. The deniers are 
 simply asserting that they are deaf. The men 
 who have seen do not contradict the blind. 
 They pity them. Says Erasmus of Sir Thomas 
 More : " He discourses with his friends of the 
 life to come in such a way that one cannot fail 
 to recognise how much his mind is in it, how 
 good a hope he has of it." "A reporter of 
 echoes," say you? Yes, but the echoes imply 
 a voice. 
 
XXYI. 
 Of Divine Leading. 
 
 After some thousands of years of conscious 
 life on this planet our race continues to ex- 
 hibit a strange confusion of opinion concerning* 
 the terms on which we inhabit it. Across the 
 gulfs of time one generation calls to another 
 as to what cheer, and gets only dubious 
 replies. Watchers' eyes are turned night and 
 day to the heavens, but the report is often of 
 nothing but the incessant drift of impenetrable 
 cloud. Some of the acutest minds have made 
 of the Universe only a chance medley. The 
 messenger in the Antigone, who declares u it is 
 but chance that raiseth up and chance that 
 bringeth low/' represents a mental habit 
 strangely fashionable both in the old and 
 modern world. People in both periods have 
 fallen back upon this theory with positive relief 
 as a refuge from current theologies. Lucretius 
 proclaimed his doctrine of materialistic no- 
 religion as a real gospel. He thought men 
 
Of Divine Leading. 235 
 
 avouM become happy by ridding themselves of 
 the notion of a Providence and a hereafter ! 
 Nietzsche, in our day, reappears with the same 
 notion. He apostrophises the idea of God in 
 the language of Charles the Bold when com- 
 bating Louis XL, " Je combats l'universelle 
 araignee." 
 
 But the old atheist had an excuse which we 
 cannot allege for our modern one. The gods 
 the former was asked to worship were, assuredly, 
 not worth the trouble. They have gone since, 
 and are not missed. Think of a " divine 
 guidance " under which an Agamemnon must 
 see his loved Iphigenia, the delight of his eyes, 
 in the bloom of her virgin youth, lifted on the 
 fatal altar, "face downwards," as JEschylus 
 describes, and a knife drawn across her throat ! 
 Well might the Latin poet, thinking on these 
 horrors wrought in the name of piety, conceive 
 of religion as a kind of Medusa head displayed 
 from the clouds, " threatening mortals with 
 her terrible aspect." 
 
 Spite of these outbursts, however, the main 
 stream of human thinking has set broad and 
 deep in the direction of an overruling Provi- 
 dence as at once the ground and the explana- 
 tion of life. The " Fate " of Stoic doctrine. 
 
236 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 when examined, comes mainly to this. We are 
 in a world that was arranged for us and not 
 loj us. The thinking out of the business was 
 done before we arrived. Our own mental 
 exercises are at best a very subordinate affair. 
 They are something like our perambulations on 
 board a vessel. As we move about on the deck 
 our steps may take by turn a northerly or 
 southerly or westerly direction, but they do not 
 alter in the least the course of the ship, nor 
 the ultimate point to which it will bring us. 
 As to whether this providential supervision 
 regarded the world only as a whole or ex- 
 tended to the concerns of individuals the early 
 thinkers seem divided. Homer puts his heroes 
 under the special protection of this or that 
 divinity, but lets the mass take care of them- 
 selves. Cicero, with his doctrine of the vir 
 magnus inspired afflaki divino, seems of the 
 same opinion. Victor Hugo has somewhere 
 •expressed himself similarly. Geniuses (like 
 himself) were certainly looked after in this 
 world and the next. As to the rest, it didn't 
 much matter. Epictetus, who in this seems 
 very likely to have been in contact with Jewish, 
 if not even with primitive Christian sources, 
 strikes a far more certain note. He proclaims 
 
Of Divine Leading. 237" 
 
 a divine leading for us all. "There is no 
 movement of which He is not conscious. To 
 Him all hearts are open. ... As we walk, 
 or talk, or eat, He Himself is within us, so that 
 we are His shrines, living temples and incarna- 
 tions of Him." 
 
 Of the Christian doctrine on this subject, as 
 recorded in the original documents, there can 
 be no doubt. The religion of the Sermon on 
 the Mount is above all tilings a democratic 
 religion. "The hairs of your head are all 
 numbered " applied not only to patrician locks 
 but to the unkempt polls of the cobblers and 
 fishers who heard first the Divine words. It 
 was, indeed, the eager acceptance and handing- 
 on of the doctrine by the "dim common 
 populations " that so excited the wrath of its 
 " superior " opponents. Libanius, like Sydney 
 Smith with the Methodists, could not away 
 with teachers who "had left their tongs, 
 mallets and anvils to preach about the things 
 of heaven." His sneer reminds us of that 
 later one by Cornelius Agrippa : " Blessed are 
 the poor in spirit, blessed are illiterate people 
 like the apostles ; blessed is the ass." 
 
 Yet this doctrine of the highest guidance 
 for every mother's son of us is really the only 
 
238 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 one this side atheism. As a modern writer 
 has bluntly put it, "Unless the hairs of our 
 head are all numbered there is no God." The 
 doctrine is so logical. Any one who, under 
 good scientific guidance, has examined the 
 structure of a human hair, has to say whether 
 this marvel is a product of blind chance or 
 of a high intelligence. If it is intelligence 
 which made it and is still looking after it, 
 then, a fortiori, intelligence is looking also 
 after its wearer. It is amazing we do not 
 more definitely settle this matter with our- 
 selves. It would resolve so many questions. 
 We should go on working, but leave off 
 worrying. As it is, we imagine the world is 
 on our shoulders. We groan over the con- 
 dition of the Church, and the back ebb in 
 which religion finds itself. If we believe in 
 the sermon our own hair teaches us as we 
 brush it of mornings we shall stop this 
 lamentation. As if religion began when we 
 took up its business and will end when we 
 retire ! Of the amazing tricks men resort to, 
 in the notion that thereby they are keeping 
 religion going, there will also be a final end. 
 Orthodoxy will cease to be alarmed about 
 Biblical criticism, under the assured persuasion 
 
Op Divine Leading. 239 
 
 that God knew its conclusions and results long 
 before Wellhausen. 
 
 It is, however, in the bearing of this 
 doctrine on our personal life that it gains 
 its weightiest import. If a man can only get 
 some reasonable assurance that in this welter 
 of a world he is not left to fight his own 
 battle, or to muddle his way through as best 
 he can, unhelped or ud guided! What for the 
 twentieth century is the assurance on this 
 point? Apart from the consideration just 
 urged the evidence is of two sorts, an external 
 and an internal. In that first, outward sphere 
 there is to be noted what strikes us as a 
 feature most significant and affecting. It is 
 that the evidence is usually reserved to the 
 period when it is most needed. In early life, 
 when the blood leaps in the veins, when the 
 sensation is of an inward vigour that can crash 
 through everything, when parents and friends 
 are at hand for what aid is needed, the notion 
 of a providential guidance is little thought of. 
 But when that other half of our life opens, 
 that old-age half which Bishop Warburton 
 characterised so truly as " a losing game," the 
 half which will contain our suffering, our 
 decaying, our dying, then is it that for the 
 
240 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 loyal and disciplined soul there arises the 
 steadily accumulating demonstration of a 
 wonderful and beneficent leading. And, as 
 Ritschl has here observed, "the belief arises 
 not from the study of the fortunes of others, 
 but in each case from the study of our own 
 fortunes and experience." Nor is it the least 
 tried people who get the deepest assurance. 
 It is Robert Louis Stevenson, in his youth 
 such an outrecuidant sceptic, who in his later, 
 broken invalid years writes : " If you are sure 
 that God, in the long run, means kindness to 
 you, you should be happy." He had become 
 sure of that himself. 
 
 The evidence we go upon is often such as we 
 cannot talk about, and which would appear by 
 itself quite inadequate in a law court. It was 
 not meant for the law court, but for our- 
 selves. It is its mysterious inner appeal to us 
 that counts. A conjunction of circumstances,, 
 which has no special meaning to others, seems 
 to whisper a message in our private ear. It 
 is to us in that moment as though Nature had 
 broken her long habit of silence, and told our 
 heart that we are known, and cared for, and 
 loved. There are innumerable stories abroad 
 of what are called special Providences. Some 
 
Of Divine Leading. 241 
 
 of them, doubtless, need to be received with 
 caution. People are apt to put a large 
 quantity of subjectivity into narratives about 
 themselves. The demand for the wonderful 
 creates a supply. We do not forget the speech 
 reported by Henry Wilber force of a certain 
 Archdeacon : " It is remarkable that all the 
 most spiritually-minded men I have known 
 were in their youth extraordinary liars. " The 
 sphere of religion, because it is the sphere of 
 the marvellous, has suffered more than any 
 other from the lack of simple accuracy. Yet 
 when all deduction has been made, the 
 evidence is overwhelming that testifies to the 
 visible footprints of the Guide. It comes from 
 every age and quarter. Paul's story of his 
 experience outside Damascus, and Augustine's 
 of the " tolle, lege," which converted him at 
 Milan, are not more wonderful than histories 
 poured into our own ear by people who are 
 walking about to-day. 
 
 But the satisfying evidence for this belief 
 will be, for each of us, an internal one. The 
 conviction of a guidance of our outward life 
 will grow in proportion as we realise a 
 guidance of the inward life. Barclay, in his 
 " Apology," has put the principle of all this 
 
 16 
 
■242 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 in language that can hardly be bettered : 
 " That Christians are now to be led inwardly 
 and immediately by the Spirit of God even in 
 "the same manner, though it befall not many 
 to be led in the same measure, as the saints 
 were of old." The higher spiritual life is just 
 as much a reality as the higher intellectual 
 life. Precisely as a man who devotes himself 
 to the culture of his intellect will rise to a 
 plane superior to that of the mass and bring to 
 the decision of questions a faculty of which 
 they are scarcely conscious, so in the most 
 central sphere a similar devotion will yield a 
 like result, only a higher. To those who lodge 
 in the soul's uppermost chambers there opens a 
 prospect unseen by those below, unbelieved in 
 by these latter, may be, but none the lees real. 
 " What," says Bagehot somewhere, " will ever 
 be the idea of the cities of the plain con- 
 cerning those who live among the mountains ? " 
 This inner discipline, wherever it is pursued, 
 brings sure conviction, amidst all vicissitudes, 
 of a Divine and most gracious leading. And 
 thereby does it disestablish personal pessimism. 
 It recognises the present circumstance, how- 
 ever gruesome seeming, as the best for it. It 
 greets each event as a spiritual messenger. It 
 
Of Divine Leading. 243 
 
 welcomes the hardship that makes for progress. 
 It recognises to the full that 
 
 Nor for thy neighbours, nor for thee, 
 Be sure was life designed to be 
 A draught of dull complacency. 
 
 And it moves to the final scene with the calm 
 certitude that the Guidance which through 
 the earthly career has become ever more 
 manifest will not, at that hour, quit its gracious 
 function. 
 
XXVII. 
 
 Amusement. 
 
 Keligion and amusement; the two things 
 are here together on this God's earth of ours ; 
 have been here from the beginning ; and we 
 have not found yet the formula which unites 
 them. Piety still looks askance at comedy, 
 and knows not what terms it should make with 
 it. It is singular that in a world which has 
 never been without philosophers there should 
 have been all along, on a theme so vital, a con- 
 fusion so utter. Cicero introduces the ques- 
 tion of the significance of laughter only to 
 dismiss it as insoluble. Christian thinkers 
 handle amusement from all manner of stand- 
 points, but end generally by leaving their 
 theme in the air. 
 
 There is, for instance, the solution of what 
 may be called the Christian pessimism, of 
 which Pascal was so great an exponent. To 
 him the world's amusements were the most 
 sticking illustration of the essential misery of 
 
Amusement. 245 
 
 most human lives. Men sought amusement in 
 order to escape from themselves. The very 
 name " diversion " let out the fatal secret. To 
 "divert" a man was, what? To turn his 
 thought away from his wretched self. People 
 gathered in crowds, talked, laughed, gazed at 
 spectacles, did anything rather than face the 
 ordeal of their solitary thought. Pascal's 
 is, though with a different application, pre- 
 cisely the picture which Lucretius draws of the 
 blase Roman of his day, who rushed from town- 
 house to country villa, and was happy in 
 neither. "In this way each man flees from 
 himself ; but this self, whom he cannot escape 
 from, still clings to him, and he hates it." 
 The description is true enough of those who 
 are in the sorry plight of making amusement 
 their one business. " What is your occupa- 
 tion ? " is the question put to a young Parisian 
 in a French romance. " Je m y amuse" is the 
 reply. Poor wretch ! His occupation will grow 
 harder every day. 
 
 But the pessimistic point of view, both 
 Christian and non-Christian, despite the sup- 
 port it receives from the miserable misuse of 
 amusement, does not satisfy us. Nor does 
 another religious view, still in vogue in some 
 
246 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 quarters, which regards gaiety and laughter as 
 not countenanced by the example of Christ or 
 by the teaching of the Gospel. The Puritan 
 found the New Testament a tremendously 
 serious book, as undoubtedly it is. But he 
 discovered no laughter there, which is a pity. 
 Had he discerned it he had been a wholesome r 
 man, and perhaps have won England, which is 
 a laughter-loving country, to his side. As it 
 was the Puritan verdict was a partisan verdict, 
 the verdict of a sect, and fatally open to the 
 raillery of the wits : 
 
 These in a zeal to express how much they do 
 The organs hate, have silenced bagpipes too ; 
 And harmless inaypoles all are railed upon, 
 As if they were the towers of Babylon. 
 
 The mediaeval Church, with all its faults, 
 understood this side of human nature better. 
 In its miracle plays, out of which, let us 
 remember, the modern theatre arose, the full 
 swing of broadest humour in immediate con- 
 tact with all that was sacred, while giving rude 
 shocks to our modern susceptibilities, con- 
 tained, nevertheless, the hint of a truth which 
 the Puritan could not see. It was the truth 
 that gaiety belongs to the cosmical scheme, that 
 laughter lies at the inmost heart of things. 
 
Amusement. 247 
 
 If for a moment we could conceive of life in. 
 its wholeness, see it as God sees it, we should 
 perceive a strange thing-. We should fend that 
 everywhere the world was, at the same tiine r 
 laughing and weeping. The gay and the* 
 solemn blend there at every moment. The 
 marriage feast synchronises with the funeral 
 service. While manhood confronts its sternest 
 problem the child is playing in the street. 
 One such God-view of the world, that took all' 
 in at a glance, would be enough to convince us- 
 that these things at the root are essentially- 
 one ; that neither can forswear the other, nor 
 call itself complete without the other. We 
 should be yet more deeply convinced of this 
 did we consider the inter-relations of work? and 
 play, of the serious and the jocular. All 
 amusement is, on its other side, serious work. 
 A drawing-room entertainment means hard 
 toil for servants ; the world of spectacle is, to- 
 a great host of our fellows, the business which 
 earns the daily bread ; the man who jests on 
 the stage does so often enough with deepest 
 tragedy at his heart. There could be no such 
 subtle interchange if gay and grave were not 
 woven of the same life-stuff. 
 
 Wherever, indeed, we cast our eyes the 
 
248 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 same lesson meets us. The universe is serious 
 enough, but its surface everywhere ripples with 
 gaiety. It is ready always for a laugh. 
 iEschylus saw that ages ago, when he wrote of 
 the " anerithmon gelasma n of Old Ocean. The 
 depths below might be sombre and fathomless, 
 but at the surface was " unreckonable laughter." 
 Nature's handiwork completes itself always 
 with a smile. Sunshine is not only warmth 
 and light; it is festivity. The young of all 
 animals salute life with gay gambollings. 
 Their glee is Nature's theology, asserting 
 against all comers that the world is a good 
 world and a wholesome. 
 
 What is passing strange is, that any one 
 coming from such a view of things to the New 
 Testament should imagine an incongruity. k.s 
 a matter of fact, Christ in His teaching takes 
 the cosmic laughter always for granted. His 
 world is a festive world. The parables take 
 merry-making as their natural background. 
 The children pipe in the market-place ; the 
 prodigal son comes home to music and dancing ; 
 the kingdom of heaven is as when a man 
 makes a great feast and invites many. The 
 gladness of Jesus at the Galilee spring-time, 
 His rapture at the song of the birds and the 
 
Amusement. 249 
 
 beauty of the flowers, are to us a religious 
 revelation just as much as are His most solemn 
 words concerning sin, sorrow and death. For 
 they are His reading of life. Clouds are here, 
 for Him and us, but they do not stop the 
 shining of the sun. The laughter of the 
 universe is the reflex of God's joy which He 
 -would share with us. 
 
 The mistake about amusement is that men 
 invert its position. They go to amusement to 
 get from it a satisfaction in life, whereas it is 
 not till men have obtained life's satisfaction 
 that they are in a condition to be amused. The 
 soul can never be satisfied with anything lower 
 than itself. Until its deepest want has been 
 met its harp is on the willows. It cannot sing 
 in exile. Men called Napoleon " the TJnamus- 
 able." Talma might play before him, and " a 
 pitful of kings," his vassals, form part of the 
 audience, but the conqueror extracted no gaiety 
 from the performance. That is the Nemesis of 
 self. When, on the contrary, the soul has 
 found its true life, the simplest things will 
 serve. A man then learns "the heart's 
 laugh." He will be another example of 
 what an acute thinker has declared to be a 
 psychological law : " The more a man is capable 
 
250 Ourselves and the Univeese. 
 
 of entire seriousness the more heartily can he 
 laugh." 
 
 The Christian Church needs in the present 
 day to know its mind on the subject of 
 amusements. It cannot ignore or taboo them, 
 for its own teaching, properly interpreted, 
 shows them to enter deeply into the Divine 
 scheme of life. On the other hand, it must 
 never forget that the prime function of 
 religion is to supply the inner reconciliation 
 without which there is no true amusement 
 possible. The soul cannot laugh its own laugh 
 till God has filled it. The Church has also to 
 teach the world the ethics of amusement. The 
 " gaiety of nations " can only increase as men 
 imbibe Christ's unselfishness. It will come 
 never, let us be sure, out of greed, or pride, or 
 egotism. When, in society, we are passing a 
 pleasant evening, be sure that at the bottom 
 of it lie somebody's loving thought and self- 
 sacrificing labour. And any amusement 
 worthy of the name means, let us remember, 
 culture of some sort. Field sports train the 
 eye, the hand, the foot ; are an education of 
 sense, nerve and muscle. The growing pas- 
 sion for them in modern times is wary Nature's 
 set-off to the lowering of vitality which town 
 
Amusement. 251 
 
 life and sedentary toil are bringing upon 
 civilised peoples. 
 
 Good amusement is, then, an education ; but 
 it is something more. For the masses it is a 
 diversion of the life-force from brute gratifica- 
 tion to something healthful and humanising. 
 When a man has choice of half a dozen 
 skilled exercises for his free hours, he is less 
 likely to occupy them in drink or vice. A 
 nation's morale in this respect may be said to 
 be largely a question of its progress in amuse- 
 ment. We have advanced from the time, not so 
 far distant, which made possible that terrible 
 story Mozley tells of Magdalen College in 
 Bouth's day. 6 Says Eouth to the chief college 
 officer, one morning, ' Stop, I know what you 
 are going to tell me. One of the Fellows has 
 died drunk in the night.' ' It is indeed so.' 
 The President exclaimed, i Stay, let me guess.' 
 He guessed right. ' There, you see, I knew 
 very well. He's just the fellow to die drunk.' iy 
 In England, within span almost of our own 
 time, to drink oneself to death was the diver- 
 sion of a gentleman at which no one seemed 
 surprised. 
 
 The Church, for ages, with more or less 
 success, has been teaching men to pray. It 
 
"252 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 has also, it now realises, to teach them to play. 
 It must widen its programme until it takes in 
 the whole man. It must renounce for ever the 
 view which made seriousness take offence at 
 mirth, knowing that each is from the same 
 source, and works to the same end. Its 
 attitude to humanity must be less of a menace 
 and more of an encouragement. For ages has 
 it busied itself with the religious meaning of 
 tears. Let it now investigate a little more the 
 religious meaning of laughter. Men, we learn 
 on the highest authority, are to become chil- 
 dren to understand the kingdom of heaven. 
 The children's play is God's pledge. The 
 child-heart delivers to us the open secret. In 
 the midst of this tremendous universe, with all 
 its mystery and all its tragedy, these little 
 ones, nearest to the centre, are light of 
 heart. The Church can build its doctrine on 
 that fact. In it is contained the whole 
 "Gospel. 
 
XXVIII. 
 Dream Mysteries. 
 
 The position accorded to dreams as a factor 
 in religion is, we might almost say, one of the 
 curiosities of modern thought. Schools of 
 belief and teaching that are wide as the poles 
 asunder are united in regarding them as, in 
 this respect, of the highest importance. The 
 Agnostic and the Christian believer are here 
 at one. On the one side we have the system 
 of evolutionary philosophy represented by Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer which looks to the phenomena 
 of dreams, as experienced by primitive and 
 savage races, for the explanation of man'& 
 belief in the soul, the future state, and the 
 whole circle of ideas generally associated with 
 religion. The savage, say these authorities, 
 identified dreams with realities. When in a 
 dream he saw a person he knew to be dead 
 he concluded he was still alive in the unseen. 
 When he awoke in the morning, after hunting 
 during the night in dreams, and learned from 
 
254 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 his companions that his body had lain motion- 
 less all the time, it was his " soul" that must 
 have been in action. And the souls outside 
 man eventually developed into gods. If this 
 theory be taken as simply a natural history of 
 ideas it is well enough. When, as is sometimes 
 the case, it is employed to explain away 
 religion, or to belittle its authority, it is apt 
 to recoil heavily upon the hands of those who 
 thus use it. For when all is said this dream 
 theory simply exhibits savage man as in con- 
 scious relation with a spiritual world. That he 
 blunders pitifully in his apprehension of that 
 world is what we should expect. But what 
 destructive criticism has to face is the fact 
 here elicited that, from his earliest beginnings, 
 man has been haunted by these apprehensions, 
 pursued by these intimations from an invisible 
 around him, and that, despite science's latest 
 developments, he is so still. 
 
 When we have disposed of the savage's 
 dreams we have to deal with our own. It is 
 only their familiarity as experiences which 
 makes us blind to the profound mysteries they 
 open up. As a recent German writer has well 
 said, it is unnecessary for us to look, as we 
 commonly do, to "the other side," "the 
 
Dream Mysteries. 255 
 
 beyond," for the unseen and the spiritual. 
 We have it all here with us, woven into our 
 flesh and blood. And when we come to 
 examine, nowhere is it more markedly in 
 evidence than in our dream-life. While 
 science is, as we have seen, endeavouring to 
 explain religion by dreams, religious men from 
 another standpoint offer concurrent evidence. 
 The Bible is a great dream-book and never 
 apologises for the fact. The prophets dealt 
 largely in dreams and, if we are to believe the 
 Acts, it was to a dream dreamed at Troas that 
 Europe owed its Christianity. 
 
 There is, of course, a psychology of dreams, 
 but before looking at that, and as a prepara- 
 tion for it, let us put together one or two 
 facts. It is a circumstance significant enough 
 in itself, that, inquire where we will, and 
 amongst the most cultivated of our acquaint- 
 ance, we find almost invariably that in this 
 department of their life there is some mystery 
 to confess. 
 
 Which of those who say they disbelieve, 
 Your clever people, but has dreamed his dream, 
 Caught his coincidence, stumbled on his fact 
 He can't explain ? 
 
 Goethe was not exactly a superstitious per- 
 
256 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 sonage, but lie says that his grandfather had 
 revealed to him in dreams beforehand some of 
 the principal events of his life. Robert Loui& 
 Stevenson avers that it was to his dreams he 
 owed his best ideas. In his work, "The Un- 
 conscious Mind," Dr. Schofield speaks of a 
 clergyman he knew "whose whole life was 
 changed by hearing a sermon preached to 
 himself in a dream." 
 
 Stories of this kind, and they could be multi- 
 plied indefinitely, are not to be disposed of by 
 talk of stomachic derangements. But it does 
 not require, in order to be in contact with the 
 deepest dream mysteries, that we rake about in 
 the pages of literature. It will be enough to 
 turn to our common experience and to examine 
 what we find there. The subject is a difficult 
 one, not only from its elusiveness, but from our 
 natural reticence. We touch here too closely 
 "the deep reserves of man." About these 
 entirely subjective passages of our life weak 
 natures are apt to exaggerate, and stronger 
 ones to conceal. " Dicencla, tacenda locuti ; 
 things that should be said, and things better 
 left unspoken, get uttered." But most of us 
 can admit experiences similar to the following. 
 In our sleep we have had flung upon the canvas 
 
Dream Mysteries. 257 
 
 of our consciousness a series of vivid pictures, 
 each perfect in its grouping, colour and per- 
 spective. The present writer had thus flashed 
 before him, not long ago, a stage full of people, 
 numbering apparently nigh a hundred figures, 
 of the time of the French Ee volution, where 
 each face in the foreground was a vividly out- 
 lined portrait, and where the costumes and sur- 
 roundings were marvellous in their historical 
 accuracy. 
 
 Now in a dream perception of this kind — not 
 at all, we imagine, an uncommon one — observe 
 the problems which immediately offer them- 
 selves. There is first of all that of personality, 
 It seems that two intelligences, at least, are 
 here palpably revealing themselves. There is 
 first the " I " to whom the picture is presented, 
 and who is vividly conscious of being, not the 
 producer, but the passive spectator of it. If 
 he knew himself as the producer he could not 
 be, as is so frequently the case, filled with 
 astonishment at what he sees. But if this 
 " ego " does not make the picture, who does P 
 Who is the artist who has conceived this 
 scene, grouped it, drawn the portraits, clothed 
 the figures, and all in the twinkling of an eye ? 
 You say all the materials were stored in the 
 
 17 
 
258 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 memory-chests of the brain. Perhaps, but 
 who determined on making this particular 
 show of them, who arranged them into this 
 perfect conception ? The subject of the dream 
 is himself, as a rule, no artist. How comes he, 
 then, into the presence of this magnificent 
 artistry ? 
 
 Any attempt at explanation here seems to 
 involve us in one of two hypotheses. The first 
 is that worked out with so much ingenuity by 
 the American writer, Mr. T. T. Hudson, of 
 Boston, in his " Law of Psychic Phenomena," 
 the theory, that is, of the possession by each of 
 us of a dual mind. A modification of that 
 view, and perhaps an improvement on it, would 
 be the supposition of powers in the soul lying 
 quite hidden during our waking hours, and re- 
 quiring, in our present life, the psychic condi- 
 tions of sleep or trance for their activity. And 
 that this contains, at least, a part of the truth 
 seems borne out by another, and perhaps a 
 rarer, of the dream experiences. The writer 
 speaks again with some hesitancy, not sure 
 whether on this point he is reporting what is 
 "to any extent a common experience. But he 
 can testify with certainty as an individual to 
 occasions, coming at widely separated intervals 
 
Dream Mysteries. 259 
 
 in the career, when the soul, under the condi- 
 tions of sleep, has become conscious of itself 
 with a power, a freshness as of immortal 
 youth, a felt relation to the illimitable and the 
 eternal, accompanied by a thrilling rapture, as 
 of heaven's central life, to which no waking- 
 state can offer a parallel. In remembering 
 such times one recalls Philo's description of 
 "the spiritual ecstasy," when "the soul having 
 transcended earthly things, is seized with a 
 sober intoxication, like the frenzy of the 
 Corybantes, only with a nobler longing, and so 
 is borne upward to the very verge of spiritual 
 things, into the presence of the great King." 
 
 The other supposition, not, be it observed, 
 contradictory to the former, is that the second 
 personality involved apparently in some of our 
 dreams is a reality, an intelligence, that is, out- 
 side of our own, and making use of us tempor- 
 arily as its instrument. That such a use of our 
 bodily and mental organs by another will and 
 intelligence is possible is abundantly clear from 
 the experiments of the Charcot and other 
 schools of hypnotism. But once we have 
 granted this of the relations of visible human 
 beings we have nothing, either in logic or in 
 fact, which permits us to deny the possibility 
 
260 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 of a similar " possession " of us, under certain 
 conditions, by intelligences beyond our ken. 
 It is indeed only when we admit some such 
 hypothesis that certain facts otherwise inexplic- 
 able in man's spiritual history become intelli- 
 gible. It is along this line mainly that a 
 doctrine of prophetic and apostolic inspiration 
 credible to the present age seems likely to be 
 built up. The idea of a lower personality 
 entered into, dominated and used for its own 
 purposes by a higher, the possibility and fact 
 of which is rapidly being established as among 
 the truths of science, will become the modern 
 rendering of the New Testament doctrine of 
 inspiration, that " holy men of old spake as 
 they were moved." 
 
 However this may be, enough, perhaps, has 
 been said to show that our common experiences 
 as dream-haunted, whatever the special explana- 
 tions of them to which we incline, are mysteries 
 which enter very closely indeed into the whole 
 subject-matter of religion. We have no quarrel 
 with the Evolutionist for tracing the beginning 
 of the history here. His mistake commonly 
 lies in not pushing the investigation far 
 enough. When he has accepted all the facts 
 on the subject which are to hand, and faced 
 
Dream Mysteries. 261 
 
 the deductions which seem fairly drawn from 
 them, he will, if we mistake not, find him- 
 self approaching conclusions for which his 
 philosophy has not yet provided. In our poet's 
 word, "we are such stuff as dreams are made 
 of," lies more than appears on the surface. 
 We shall appreciate it better when we more 
 clearly understand what dreams are made of. 
 A study, however slight, of the problems they 
 present is enough at least to shatter the 
 materialist theory of life, and to bring home to 
 us with fresh power a sense of that 
 
 Sweet strange mystery 
 Of what beyond these things may lie 
 And yet remain unseen ! 
 
XXIX. 
 
 The Spiritual Sense. 
 
 The history of religion has been, for one 
 thing, largely a history of false alarms. Again 
 and again has the enemy breached and stormed 
 positions supposed to be vital for her defence, 
 to discover that the captive they hoped to make 
 was not there. The history of that defence is 
 indeed the most grotesque of stories. In some 
 aspects it approaches to comedy. We see men 
 in turn entrenching religion behind an infallible 
 Church ; again building around her a rampart 
 of infallible Bibles ; anon barring the way of 
 attack by a chevaux de /rise of metaphysics. 
 History, philosophy, science, criticism, are 
 summoned to her aid, and then, when the fight 
 is hottest and the defences seem giving way 
 at every point, behold ! the beleaguered one is 
 walking quietly and unhurt through the very 
 ranks of the foe ! At last men are beginning 
 to discover the ludicrous blunder they have 
 been making. On their astonished eyes the 
 
The Spiritual Sense. 26o 
 
 truth is beginning to dawn that while Church, 
 Bible, history and philosophy have all their 
 religious uses, it is not upon any of them that 
 religion ultimately rests. Her stronghold is- 
 not in anything that man has done. It is in 
 what he is in himself. Her final evidence is a 
 psychological one. It lies in the existence in 
 humanity of " the spiritual sense." 
 
 What is meant by this will perhaps be best 
 indicated if we institute a parallel. We all 
 know what is meant by the musical sense.. 
 Now, there is a history of music and a logic of 
 it. Any one who has worked at harmony and 
 counterpoint understands how intimately it is 
 allied to purely intellectual processes. It has, 
 besides, institutions, patrons, endowments. 
 But the prospects of music as a force rest upon 
 none of these things. They rest on its appeal 
 to a distinct, yet fundamental, element in 
 the human soul. When its notes fall on 
 the ear something in us responds. And the 
 response is peculiar. It is not an answer of 
 the intellect, the sensation of a problem solved, 
 or the stir of any of the senses. It is a deep 
 thrill of consciousness, unique, different from 
 aught else, unable to interpret itself in any 
 other way except than that it is an answer. 
 
264 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 And the answer is to some external reality that 
 fits exactly this special quality of the soul. 
 As the harmonic sense develops, and especially 
 where it blossoms out into the flower of the 
 higher musical genius, it becomes ever more 
 vividly conscious of this external reality that 
 answers to it. The musical creators, so called, 
 create nothing. They only discover what is 
 there already. They find a harmonic universe 
 with its laws framed from eternity, becoming 
 ever more wonderful, more beautiful in 
 proportion as their inner sense develops. 
 
 The point here is that this external, har- 
 monic world fits exactly our internal one. 
 There are multitudes of unmusical people. 
 There are races that have the feeblest musical 
 perception. But always in proportion as the 
 gift is developed does there come the sense of 
 the reality of its outer source ; the sense that 
 the music is a true witness of it. Our 
 ignorance or indifference makes no difference 
 to the objective fact. Moreover, this ignorance 
 and indifference will in time be certainly and 
 universally conquered. What music has 
 already accomplished in man is evidence, then, 
 for one thing, of its future general predomi- 
 nance, and for another of its perfect corre- 
 
The Spiritual Sense. 265 
 
 spondence with a harmonic system outside of 
 man, deeper and wider than himself. 
 
 But what has this to do with religion and 
 the spiritual sense ? Everything. For all that 
 has just been said applies here with an almost 
 absolute exactness. The part played by the 
 musical sense in relation to its world is the 
 precise counterpart of that played by the 
 spiritual sense in relation to religion. Perhaps 
 the loosest and most badly-defined word in our 
 language is the word Faith. In the lips, not 
 only of the people but also of scholars and 
 divines, it has been made to connote all manner 
 of dissimilar and incongruous elements. But 
 in its primitive and Biblical signification it 
 stands for the precise function of the soul with 
 which we are now trying to deal. It means 
 neither more nor less than the spiritual sense, 
 the faculty of response in man to the spiritual 
 world around him. It is the soul's retina, on 
 which alone the light that streams thence can 
 register its pictures. Like the musical faculty, 
 it has been slow in its emergence. For long 
 ages of his history man seems to have felt no 
 stir of it within him. The paleolithic times 
 offer not a trace of a religious sense. Even 
 now it is most irregularly distributed. In 
 
266 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 multitudes it seems entirely dormant, if at all 
 existent ; in a few it has from time to time 
 exhibited itself in a commanding and over- 
 powering potency. The parallel, so far, seems 
 complete. 
 
 Can we go further and say that, as with the 
 musical faculty, the inner affirmations of this 
 sense can be trusted as corresponding always 
 to an outer reality? Here lies the whole 
 religious question, as the best minds of to-day 
 realise. And the answer tends more and more 
 to an affirmative. Calvin was groping towards 
 this position in his statement that Faith is a 
 matter not so much of the intellect as of the 
 heart. Schleiermacher is so sure of this 
 ground that he is ready to stake Christianity 
 upon it. Pectus est quod theologum facit is the 
 corner-stone of his system. The one thing for 
 the religious teacher to accomplish, says he, is 
 to reach that stratum of the consciousness 
 where this sacred instinct lies concealed. 
 With Ritschl the idea of the spiritual sense 
 lies at the bottom of his doctrine of "value 
 judgments." It is singular, however, that 
 having gone so far, he does not go further;, 
 that while regarding the souPs instinctive 
 feeling in the presence of Christ as the 
 
The Spiritual Sense. 267 
 
 greatest of the Christian evidences, he should 
 speak as he does of those inner responses to 
 the spiritual universe outside which he dis- 
 parages as mysticism. What else was Christ's 
 own attitude to the spiritual universe but a 
 mystical one ; what revelation had He to offer 
 except the response of His perfect spiritual 
 sense to the infinite spiritual system which 
 corresponded to it ? But that is mysticism, 
 which not Ritschl nor any one else will ever 
 eliminate from the essence of religion. 
 
 But to come closer. What is the function 
 of this spiritual sense, and how does it affirm 
 its authority ? We have only to look carefully 
 at its operation in ourselves to discover at once 
 how absolutely different it is from the pro- 
 cesses of mere reasoning. It mingles at every 
 point with reasoning, but is in itself as distinct 
 from it as is the emotion raised by a Beethoven 
 sonata. One might describe it as the soul's 
 thrill at the approach of the Divine. Religious 
 literature is the attempt to put that thrill into 
 words. Religious history is the story of the 
 great creative spirits who have felt it at first 
 hand, and of its communication by them to 
 others. What in varying degrees was realised 
 by these founders, and by Christ in a trans- 
 
'268 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 cendent degree, was a sense of the universe 
 as spiritual, of holiness as the supreme value, 
 •of the external world, with its natural forces, 
 as the veil of a Supreme Thought and Love, of 
 man as in himself a revelation of God, and as 
 in immediate contact with God. The spiritual 
 sense immediately recognises itself in other 
 souls and rejoices in the contact. Eeligious 
 fellowships arise from the play of its law of 
 affinity. It knows instinctively where its 
 nutriment lies, and has processes of its own 
 for extracting and assimilating it. It finds 
 in itself a supreme mandate to develop at the 
 •expense of the lower nature allied with it. It 
 works towards the evolution of a body more 
 expressive of its needs. In the rarer natures 
 "the effort leads often to physical disaster. A 
 St. Francis, a Pascal, a Catherine of Siena, 
 
 Die of having lived too much 
 In their large hours. 
 
 But what they attempted too early and too 
 strenuously the race will arrive at later. We 
 need not be impatient with the rate of move- 
 ment if God is not. The pace, after all, is not 
 a, sluggish one when we consider the obstacles 
 in the way. The spiritual sense is so far only 
 
The Spiritual Sense. 26P> 
 
 at the beginning of its work. It is at present 
 not so much a master as a reporter. The flesh 
 is still in possession. When Massillon preached, 
 before Louis XIV. on the carnal and the 
 spiritual in man, the monarch exclaimed, " Ah ! 
 here are two men I know very well ! " Of the 
 two it is to be feared he preferred the acquaint- 
 ance of the former. He represented here that 
 majority of whom it may still be said — 
 
 With the true best alack ! how ill agrees 
 The best that thou wouldest choose ! 
 
 But the history of the spiritual sense, how- 
 ever disappointing to our impatience as the 
 record of a religious triumph, is almost perfect 
 as a piece of religious evidence. We need 
 scarce any other. If, to revert to our earlier 
 analogy, all the musical institutions were 
 destroyed, the world's present harmonic sense 
 and culture would make it impossible for even 
 such a catastrophe to result in any real loss.. 
 The same may be said of religion. Could all 
 the external record of its past, its systems, its 
 literatures, be imagined as lost, its power and 
 authority would hardly be affected. The- 
 spiritual sense as we now have it contains the 
 essence of these things in itself, and would 
 
-270 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 reproduce them, with new elements added of 
 the eternal revelation. And that this sense is 
 -authoritative, that its report of the spiritual 
 world is authentic and trustworthy, is a 
 conviction as well founded as that of the 
 trustworthiness of the musical faculty, or 
 indeed as that by which we affirm the outside 
 world revealed to us by the senses. All these 
 affirmations rest ultimately on an act of Faith 
 — the belief, namely, that our nature is not 
 being befooled ; that its reporters are telling us 
 the truth, and not a lie. 
 
 It is the business of the Church, and 
 specially of the religious teacher, to develop 
 the spiritual sense. The real end of worship 
 and of exhortation is not to root men in tradi- 
 tion or to drill them in logic, or to cram them 
 with facts. It is to find the mystic chord 
 which vibrates to the breath of the Unseen. It 
 answers always to the true note. Often the 
 thrill comes apart from any words. Tolstoi was 
 converted from Atheism by studying the faith 
 of simple people. When a man has felt God 
 his neighbour knows it. That is where the 
 true preacher's power lies. Beyond all elo- 
 quence, all learning, its secret is in the fulness 
 and fineness of his spiritual sense. And that 
 
The Spiritual Sense. 271 
 
 grows in him by careful cultivation. He 
 above all others needs to ponder the old Greek 
 saying : " The gods sell us all the goods they 
 give us." We cannot, that is, get the best 
 without paying for it. Inferior substitutes for 
 the true power can be had at specified rates, 
 but for this there is no haggling and no 
 cheapening. Those who, in pulpits or else- 
 where, desire to be irrefutable evidences of the 
 heavenly kingdom must offer their whole selves 
 as the price. 
 
XXX. 
 Our Thought World. 
 
 We are all of us absolute monarchs and govern 
 each an empire compared with which old Rome 
 or the modern Greater Britain are, in their 
 extent, as a country parish. Every man's- 
 house, we say, is his castle ; but his mind is a 
 world. It is hardly an extravagance of Jean 
 Paul Richter's that " a new universe is created 
 every time a child is born." All our life is a 
 thinking. According to the quality of our 
 thought is the quality of our being. Our 
 humdrum and bourgeois age has dulled its 
 taste for real pleasure. It might take lessons 
 from those old Greek philosophers who, instead 
 of blocking themselves with expensive arrange- 
 ments, reduced their physical wants to a mini- 
 mum in order to enjoy, day by day, untram- 
 melled, the luxury of their own thoughts. 
 For, as they had discovered, our thought 
 world is our real world. It should surely be 
 our first consideration to explore this realm, 
 
Our Thought World. 273 
 
 of which we so strangely find ourselves in 
 possession ; to trace its boundaries, to under- 
 stand its laws, to unearth its hid treasures, to 
 investigate the Beyond of which it gives such 
 wonderful hints. 
 
 We have just said that our thought world 
 is our real world, and it may be worth while 
 at the beginning to show that the statement 
 is more than a phrase. Some of us have a 
 confused enough notion of reality. Nothing, 
 for instance, seems more certain to us than 
 the solid " outside of things," with which we 
 are constantly in contact. Dogmas and doc- 
 trines may be illusion, but the earth we tread 
 on, the wall we run against, the cloud that 
 rains on us, the sun that shines, are, at any 
 rate, a piece of solid fact which nobody can 
 dispute. This "solid fact" of the visible and 
 touchable, say some aggressive disputants, is 
 indeed all we do know. The invisibles about 
 which metaphysicians and theologians discourse 
 are mere doctrinal ghosts. When we talk of 
 the things we see and handle we at least know 
 where we are. 
 
 Yet a moment's reflection should show us 
 the shallowness of this view. The outside 
 world is nothing to us but a series of 
 
 18 
 
274 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 thoughts. Our mind really constructs it for 
 us. We talk of the world's colours, its scents, 
 its sounds, but there would be no such things 
 as colours, scents, or sounds apart from a mind 
 which can be affected in these particular ways. 
 The fact of one set of vibrations producing in 
 us a sensation we call * sound," and another 
 set a sensation we call u sight," is a mystery 
 first and most of all of the perceiving mind. 
 That the external world can be in any sense 
 the same thing as the image of it formed in 
 our brain, is a notion which the crudest 
 thinker, as soon as the problem is fairly 
 before him, must dismiss as impossible. That 
 the " something outside " which affects us in 
 these myriad ways is a reality, and that our 
 relations with it are truly represented by the 
 reports of our senses, is a thing of which we 
 have and can have no logical proof. The 
 world's very first demand of us — to believe, 
 namely, that it is such a world as our thought 
 presents — is a sheer act of faith. 
 
 That things are thus with us, that our 
 thought world, far more than any external, 
 is the one we know, will appear more plainly 
 when we consider the mental laws and the way 
 they work in constructing our world for us. 
 
Our Thought World. 275 
 
 Have we ever considered what happens when 
 we * see " an object, say, a boat moving on a 
 river? Light rays, propagated by vibrations 
 of inconceivable velocity, falling upon the 
 retina have produced there an image. Upon 
 this retina-picture the mind now begins its 
 marvellous work. By one act it gathers all the 
 colour and form impressions it has received 
 into a single unity ; by another act it classifies 
 this unity, separating its individual qualities 
 from its common ones, and by virtue of these 
 latter placing the object into the category 
 called "boat " ; another act gives to the boat's 
 motion a cause, either the action of rowers, or 
 perhaps of a steam propeller. Vastly more are 
 the mental actions and laws concerned than 
 these, but enough are here to show that our 
 boat on the river, as known at least to us, is a 
 work, a very large proportion of which belongs 
 to our own brain. The sense perception ; the 
 acts by which we unify and classify it; the 
 placing of it in space and time ; and that 
 strange last act by which we are irresistibly 
 led to attribute its motion to a cause, are all 
 the products, not so much of the material 
 object as of the marvellous laws within us. 
 The external world, before it reaches us, has 
 
276 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 we see, become a manufactured article, and the 
 machinery is in ourselves. The wonder of it 
 all and the awe of it grow upon us as we 
 realise that these laws are none of our making"; 
 they were here, we perceive, in all the minds 
 that were before us ; are in all the minds 
 around us ; and the very world itself is built 
 and framed in accordance with them. 
 
 Indeed, from whatever aspect we view this 
 inner kingdom of ours, the mystery of it 
 deepens. What are called clever people are 
 apt to be vain sometimes of their mental 
 achievements. They would be less so if they 
 remembered that most of these achievements 
 are carried on by a power that, while within 
 them, is yet outside their own will and even 
 their own consciousness. Our thought world 
 carries on its operations largely without con- 
 sulting us. The real creator in us is the 
 Unconscious. In that abysmal depth, lying 
 somewhere beneath our formulated thought, 
 the operations are going on which, by-and-by, 
 emerge on our view as completed ideas. Every 
 thinker, for instance, knows precisely the 
 experience which Stevenson thus hits off about 
 his own work : " Unconscious thought, there is 
 the only method; macerate your subject, let it 
 
Our Thought World. 277 
 
 boil slow, then take the lid off and look in — 
 and there your stuff is, good or bad." An 
 excellent prescription for the young writer, but 
 the very terms of it show that, instead of 
 having been the performers ourselves, we are 
 mainly spectators, waiting on the operations of 
 another, who in mysterious ways and in obscure 
 depths beneath the surface, is doing the think- 
 ing for us. "Is this my idea ?" we say as it 
 flashes into our mind. Why, no one is more 
 surprised at it than ourselves. It is as much 
 ours as the sunshine reflected on our lens. The 
 illuminated lens is ours, but the light has- 
 travelled from afar. 
 
 But the fact that our thought world is, to so 
 large an extent, worked for us rather than by 
 us, must not blind us as to our share in the 
 operations. Over a large part of its surface 
 our will reigns supreme, and can make of it 
 either a desolation or a paradise. Our thoughts 
 are our companions, which we cannot get rid 
 of. We may shake off every other society, but 
 not this. It is the merest common-sense, 
 therefore, to make it as good as possible. But 
 there is no royal road. A man may buy his 
 way nowadays into all manner of social circles, 
 but his coin is not current in this domain. 
 
278 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Nor will rank serve. The son of Louis XIV., 
 the Dauphin, had for instructors Bossuet and 
 Huet. The one wrote for him "The Discourse 
 on Universal History " ; the other edited for 
 him " The Delphine Classics." After he had 
 outgrown his schooldays the object of these 
 cares never touched a book, and about the only 
 thing recorded of him is that he was fond of 
 killing weasels in a barn. The lad was heir to 
 a throne, and this was his inner empire ! Of 
 all the waste that goes on in our extravagant 
 world the waste of our thought possibilities is 
 the worst. Lords of this inner realm, we might 
 stretch its boundaries till they touch the 
 illimitable; could make every inch of its sur- 
 face rich with flower and fruit ; could populate 
 it with the noblest minds; could open it to 
 highest inspirations, to the very breath and 
 prospect of the Infinite. Instead, most of us 
 are content to run up a log hut on its border, 
 to scratch its surface for a few kitchen 
 vegetables, and to leave the rest as barren as 
 Sahara. 
 
 With a well-tended thought world all his 
 own, no man need call himself poor or fettered. 
 Moneybags may voyage in his yacht to southern 
 seas and be very much bored over the business. 
 
Our Thought World. 279 
 
 The worker at his bench, if he know his inner 
 privilege, can voyage to fairer realms and feel 
 no fatigue. Let no man think his taskwork a 
 monotony, though it be pin -making, or trench- 
 digging, while his mind-realm is his own. 
 There, as he hammers or digs, he may call up 
 what scenery or what action he wills. It is 
 here that thought life surpasses experience. 
 In experience we take what comes, the rough 
 with the smooth. In our inner world we can 
 choose. And surely this is enough to give zest 
 to the commonest career that, at will, we can 
 live over again our choicest moments, recall 
 those elect days when we touched life's best, 
 and make our whole interior radiant with that 
 reflected glory. 
 
 There are innumerable aspects of this theme 
 which we pass over in order to touch, in 
 closing, one on which the modern mind is 
 painfully exercised; the question, that is, of 
 our thought world as related to a future life. 
 Eeaders of Schopenhauer will remember how, 
 in pursuit of his favourite doctrine of the 
 priority and predominance of the will, both in 
 man and the world, he seeks to belittle the 
 intellect. Our consciousness, he declares, is 
 the mere product and parasite of the brain ; 
 
280 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 grows with it, decays with it, dies with it. It 
 is the old argument of the Epicureans, which 
 their great poet Lucretius has expressed with 
 unsurpassable force. But it all rests upon a 
 fallacy which a schoolboy ought to perceive. 
 For when we propose to make reason depend 
 upon a brain we must extend our reference, 
 and make the Universal JReason, the mind we 
 discern everywhere at work in the cosmos, 
 dependent upon a brain also ; u which," as the 
 logic books say, " is absurd." True psychology 
 is coming more and more to realise that the 
 thought world within us uses the brain as an 
 instrument rather than as a cause. The 
 instrument is no more the creator of the 
 thought than Beethoven's piano was the 
 creator of his music. The instrument might 
 wear out, but the music can be reproduced 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The truer and higher our mind life becomes 
 the more sure are we that our mind is fed, not 
 by brain activities merely, but more, and 
 chiefly, by Another Mind whose celestial ray 
 streams into ours, and in whose Immortal Life 
 we live. The fine thought of Plutarch con- 
 cerning the daimon or guardian spirit of 
 Socrates, that it was "the influence of a 
 
Our Thought World. 281 
 
 superior intelligence and a diviner soul operat- 
 ing on the soul of Socrates" can be taken as 
 true of all the nobler thought life. Our bodies 
 may wear out and our brains ; but the thought 
 world which lies behind them is, as we have 
 seen, a realm of its own, with laws of its own. 
 By no possibility, as Tyndall himself confessed, 
 ■can we find the nexus between muscular and 
 nerve energy and a state of consciousness. 
 They are a world apart. Death, which divides 
 the two, destroys neither the one nor the 
 other. An ancient word still expresses as 
 much as we know. " Then shall the dust 
 return to the earth as it was ; and the spirit 
 >shall return unto God who gave it." 
 
XXXI. 
 
 Morals and Eternity. 
 
 The conception of eternity is a differentia of 
 humanity. Apart from any question of a 
 future life, the mere fact that man is capable 
 of this immense idea, that it lies there as part 
 of his permanent brain furniture, places him in 
 a class apart. Said an English farm labourer 
 once to the present writer : " There are two 
 things that press upon my mind ; one is the 
 thought of boundless space, and the other the 
 idea of time without end." It was pleasant to 
 hear the words. The humble toiler, unassisted, 
 had come upon the two things that have gone 
 most to the making of man, considered as a 
 thinking being. "The capacity of becoming 
 conscious of the Infinite," says Lotze, " is the 
 distinguishing endowment of the human 
 mind." 
 
 But the study of infinity, especially in its 
 aspect of eternity, has had some curious 
 results. The effect on the human conscious- 
 
Morals axd Eternity. 283 
 
 ness and on human conduct has not been by 
 any means uniform. There have been, in fact, 
 the widest divergencies in the mode of conceiv- 
 ing eternity, with all manner of strange corre- 
 sponding effects on morals and life. Nowhere 
 than on this theme has religious thinking been 
 more confused; nowhere has religious action 
 blundered at times more pitifully. A glance 
 over some of the diverse paths along which 
 thought has stumbled here may help us in our 
 quest for the proper track. 
 
 There is, for instance, a view of eternity 
 which, followed to its logical issue, would 
 leave us simply with a morality of " go as 
 you please." In this scheme the only eternity 
 is an eternity of matter and force. Matter is 
 eternal, force is persistent. The universe dis- 
 closes no such thing as final causes, no such 
 thing as pre-determined ends. We must 
 dismiss all idea of progression, of dramatic 
 denouement. A complete universe can, by the 
 very terms, make no advance. The changes 
 which science records are, as an American 
 advocate of this view puts it, to be considered 
 simply as " variations of cosmical weather." 
 This odd combination of Spinoza and Buch- 
 ner, of an outworn idealistic determinism, 
 
284 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 with an equally outworn materialism, is not 
 likely to keep any lengthened hold on modern 
 thinking. Science, for one thing, is too dead 
 against it. An a priori philosophy which 
 -denies progression because it contradicts an 
 unproved abstract idea, has little chance 
 against an ever accumulating body of facts 
 which spell progression and nothing else. 
 Evolution becomes here, as against con- 
 tradictors of this order, the modern basis of 
 faith. It sweeps magnificently into line with 
 the New Testament doctrine of great consum- 
 mations, of the 
 
 One far off divine event 
 
 To which the whole creation moves. 
 
 But the concept of eternity which pictures 
 for us a changeless universe, an eternity of 
 endless and aimless rearrangements of matter 
 and force, is not only unscientific ; it is un- 
 moral. Were it accepted the only morality 
 could be one of convenience. To the extent 
 it is believed in, human life becomes a jest or 
 a pessimist tragedy. 
 
 Quum tamen incolumis videatur 
 Summa manere, 
 
 •cries Lucretius. Despite all surface appear- 
 
Morals and Eternity. 285* 
 
 ances, "the great sum of things is seen to- 
 remain unchanged." And the conclusion is, as 
 it must be of all thinking along that line,. 
 " Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."' 
 Eeligious aspiration in a brute universe, 
 in which by some strange chance man's 
 fevered consciousness figures for one brief 
 moment, must be a joke for the stars. The 
 only logical life course should be Omar 
 Khayyam's : 
 
 Drink, for we know not whence we came nor why ; 
 Drink, for we know not why we go, nor where. 
 
 Sanctity is absurd in a cosmos of indifference.. 
 The foundation for what morality were left us 
 would lie in Voltaire's answer to the man who 
 wanted to know why, on such principles, he 
 might not commit robbery or murder. " Be- 
 cause, my friend, if you do, you will probably 
 get hanged." 
 
 It is not, however, solely in outside specula- 
 tions of this order that we find a misuse of the 
 idea of eternity. In quarters nearer home- 
 misconceptions about it have brought strange 
 and sinister results. Eeligious thought on this 
 theme has been continually stumbling upon 
 two mistakes. One is the identification of 
 
286 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 eternity with the idea of cataclysm and 
 catastrophe. Successive generations of Chris- 
 tian people have gone on dividing their 
 world-system into two parts — one the time in 
 which they lived, which was about to come to 
 an end, and the other, " eternity," which was 
 to be ushered in by an overwhelming cosmic 
 outburst. This idea, borrowed in the first 
 instance from the Jewish apocalyptic systems 
 which flourished so abundantly in the post- 
 exilic and pre-Christian eras, had full 
 possession of the Early Church, and has, 
 since then, continually been renewed. The 
 Christian Fathers, age after age, see in the 
 circumstances of their time exactly the 
 prophetically declared conditions which are to 
 usher in the final scene. Under this idea great 
 panics have at different epochs swept over 
 society. One can hardly imagine a more 
 terrible state of affairs than that which 
 prevailed in Western Europe when Christen- 
 dom reached the eve of its thousandth year. 
 Prophets everywhere declared that this was 
 the end of the age. The people believed them 
 and shut up their shops, left the crops to rot 
 in the fields, broke off from family relationship, 
 and gathered in famine-stricken bands to await 
 
Morals and Eternity. 287 
 
 the dread Appearing. The sensation of sheer 
 terror probably never reached such a height in 
 this world as when the ebbing moments of the 
 fated year ran out to the close. 
 
 The lesson of these delusions has, however, 
 not even yet been universally learned. In a 
 recently published " History of the Plymouth 
 Brethren " the author, a competent and 
 cultured observer who has studied the move- 
 ment from within, declares that " if any one 
 had told the first Brethren that three-quarters 
 of a century might elapse and the Church be 
 still on earth, the answer would probably have 
 been a smile, partly of pity, partly of disap- 
 proval, wholly of incredulity." The moral 
 result of such a view, as pointed out by the 
 same writer, is instructive. The men and 
 women who have held this persuasion have 
 systematically withdrawn themselves from large 
 and important parts of human interests and 
 responsibilities. They have left it to others 
 to fight the battles of reform and of freedom. 
 The early Brethren stigmatised the movement 
 of Clarkson, Macaulay and Wilberforce for the 
 abolition of the slave trade as "unholy." 
 They discouraged philanthropy and even 
 missions. Had the world been left to them 
 
288 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 it would have had no art, no science and no 
 literature. It is surely time that this view of 
 eternity, as of a kind of approaching tidal wave 
 that will by-and-by roll in and submerge every- 
 thing that is, should be recognised by sensible 
 men as provedly false and provedly immoral^ 
 and as such to be henceforth dropped and done 
 with. 
 
 And with this must go another idea that ha& 
 prevailed even more widely. It is that view 
 which has regarded eternity as a kind of infinite 
 Topsy-turvydom, in which all the principles of 
 Divine government which we recognise in the 
 present state are to be neutralised and reversed. 
 The idea that the God we know could be also 
 the God of the torturing hell of mediseva] 
 theology is to a really serious mind simply 
 unthinkable. That because a man dies God's 
 whole character should change towards him 
 and become wholly dreadful, is a notion 
 possible only to a barbarous and illogical age. 
 It is as if a mother should love and cherish her 
 child so long as it keeps awake, but, the 
 moment it falls asleep, should change to a 
 monster and devour it. There is only one 
 consolation in studying the long reign of this 
 theological nightmare, and that is, that the 
 
Moeals and Eternity. 289 
 
 laws of the human mind have always declined 
 to deal with it seriously. The imagination 
 refused to grasp it. Conscience would not be 
 governed by it. In the ages when its reign as 
 a dogma was most complete, character and 
 morals were, in fact, at the lowest ebb. 
 Humour made havoc among its terrors. The 
 fourteenth century bards laughed at the priests 
 and their stories. The human reaction reached 
 its culmination in Rabelais, who treated hell in 
 the manner of Lucian, and made Europe roar 
 at the jocosities of the under- world. 
 
 It is time we reached that nobler concept of 
 eternity which is at once the essence both of 
 true religion and of true morals. The more we 
 study it, both in the New Testament and in 
 that other revelation given in the ever-growing 
 human consciousness, the more we shall realise 
 the inadequacy and the falseness of the 
 travesties we have been sketching. In this 
 clearer light we shall recognise the Apocalyptic 
 thunderings and trumpetings as poetic repre- 
 sentations of a something that in itself is 
 entirely spiritual. The true eternity which 
 Christ taught has, it is true, duration in 
 it; death also and the Beyond in it; but 
 these are the smallest part of the idea. 
 
 19 
 
290 Ourselves asd the Universe. 
 
 For, essentially, His eternity is not only then, 
 but now ; not only there, beyond the stars, but 
 here, in the conscious soul. The eternal life 
 He offers is not a mere uncountable sum of 
 years. Its chief element is a conscious relation 
 to, reception of, and fellowship with, that im- 
 mutable spiritual Order which exists behind the 
 veil. It is the sharing of that Divine reality of 
 which the soul's most ardent aspirations are the 
 faint adumbration; to taste of which is to 
 know at once life's meaning, and its inmost 
 satisfaction. To the man who inhabits this 
 region, time and eternity are not two things, 
 they are one. He sees the visible in the light 
 of the invisible, sub specie cetemitatis. The 
 world is to him like one of those dissolving 
 views, in which the scene we watch is already 
 transfused by the gleam of the one that is 
 behind. 
 
 It is eternity under this aspect that gives 
 morality its one vital and efficacious motive, 
 and to human life its true value and perspective. 
 It is a view which inspires the whole man. 
 ^Citizenship, science, art, politics, social law, 
 become ennobled as part of a world-order which 
 rests on an immutable spiritual scheme. The 
 truth of all this carries its evidence in the fact 
 
Morals and Eternity. 291 
 
 that our fellow becomes only entirely human to 
 us, truly dear and valuable, as we discern in 
 him something of this eternity. The man who 
 gives clearest proof to his brethren that his 
 habitual dwelling is in that region, who can 
 bring to them largest spoil of this sacred 
 Invisible, will be always recognised by them in 
 the end as of all benefactors the highest. 
 
XXXII. 
 
 The Christ of To- Day. 
 
 The title, without explanation, might seem 
 almost an impertinence. Is the Christ of 
 to-day, then, different from the Christ of 
 yesterday or of to-morrow? Is not the 
 doctrine of His unchangeableness the centre 
 of Christian orthodoxy ? That may be, and yet 
 our title holds. For it is an expression simply 
 of the relativity of our knowledge. In a sense 
 Christ is the creation of each fresh generation, 
 because each generation creates the world 
 it ]ives in. The universe is to a worm 
 what the worm can make of it. We cannot 
 get an absolute knowing, because we cannot 
 cut ourselves loose from the variableness of our 
 knowing faculty. The universe grows with 
 our growth. It is bigger with every addition 
 to our own mental height. And this law of 
 relativity holds equally in our religious 
 knowledge. The difference between the per- 
 ception of Christ which recognised Him simply 
 
The Christ op To-Day. 293 
 
 as " the carpenter's son/' and the perception 
 of the writer of the fourth gospel marked, let 
 us remember, no difference in the object, but 
 only a difference in the perceivers. And the 
 point of view which gives us our vision is one 
 which, apart from our will and apart from our 
 moral condition, is perpetually changing. The 
 twentieth century cannot see the Christ, if it 
 would, with the eye of the middle ages. It 
 sees with its own, and the later view will carry 
 in it something different from the earlier. We 
 may not quarrel with this fact, far less reproach 
 ourselves because it is so. It lies in the nature 
 of things. It is God's way with us. 
 
 What we want, then, is to discover the 
 content of the consciousness of to-day con- 
 cerning Christ and to reach some conclusions 
 about it. And the first point we note is that 
 our age brings to this study some fresh 
 measuring instruments. By its new scientific 
 process, and especially by its all-comprehending 
 formula of evolution, it proposes to reinterpret 
 all the phenomena of life, and amongst them all 
 the Christian phenomena. The historical facts 
 are studied in the light of a new science of 
 history, including a science of the growth of 
 legends and myths. The New Testament 
 
294 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 literature has in our time been put under the 
 microscope and every line of it critically 
 examined. All the facts, all the historical 
 material of that first century, all its mental 
 and moral conditions, all the sources from 
 which light, from however distant a point, 
 could be thrown upon the central story of the 
 Christian origins, have been investigated with 
 a patience and an accuracy to which no earlier 
 time offers a parallel. A great theological 
 school, the Eitschlian, to which modern Chris- 
 tian thought is, in many ways, so much 
 indebted, declares that only along this line of 
 historical investigation is the truth to be 
 reached, and discards accordingly what it calls 
 the metaphysics of religion. In other direc- 
 tions there is exhibited a similar tendency to 
 strip off from Christianity its element of 
 mystery. The emphasis is put on the moral 
 teachings of Christ. The splendid analysis of 
 these teachings by a Wendt and a Bernard 
 Weiss has given the world a new sense of the 
 supreme equality of the Gospel ethic. A 
 Tolstoi, cutting himself loose from the conven- 
 tional orthodoxy of the Church, finds in these 
 teachings alone what he considers a complete 
 theory of living. 
 
The Christ of To-Day. 295 
 
 The historians and the critics have, indeed,, 
 laboured hard to give us the real Christ, and 5 . 
 especially in their work upon the teaching, it 
 must be said not without fruit. And yet when? 
 we examine the Christian consciousness of 
 to-day, where, at least, it is to any adequate 
 degree developed, we are struck to find to how 
 small an extent the external, visible history of 
 Christ enters into the totality of its possession 
 in Him. The history makes Him tangible to 
 us as a human personality, fixes Him firmly 
 upon the ground, gives Him a date in time and 
 a place in nationality. He is there as visible 
 and actual as Tiberius or as Tacitus. And yet, 
 compared with what He stands for in the 
 inner life, this purely personal story is as a 
 cloud that forms upon a corner of the sky 
 compared with the infinite blue beyond. 
 
 If one might speak of final causes in this 
 connection, it could be said that from the 
 beginning it seemed fore-ordained that Christ's 
 external history should play only a subordinate 
 part in His total representation. We seem 
 ever unable to reach Him that way. A man 
 travels over Palestine, studies the topography 
 of Jerusalem and Nazareth, and feels as he 
 comes away that he is not nearer but infinitely 
 
296 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 further from his quest. The world contains 
 no monument of Christ, no authentic picture. 
 The early fathers who venture descriptions of 
 His personal appearance fall into hopeless 
 contradiction. Apart from the doubtful cor- 
 respondence with the King of Edessa, we have 
 not a line from His hand. We know Shake- 
 speare by Hamlet and Goethe by Faust, but 
 Christ published no book. Even that part of 
 His career of which alone we have any written 
 details, the period of from one to three years 
 of His public service, we do not know how 
 coherently to piece together. All we can say 
 is, there is a personal history, but as compared 
 with the totality of our Christ of to-day it is a 
 fragment, a suggestion. 
 
 Who and what, then, is the Christ of to-day? 
 First of all, He is the Power behind the New 
 Testament. Not, to the modern mind, so much 
 visibly in it as behind it. Just as science finds 
 in all phenomena the manifestation of an un- 
 seen, ever-present Force, so the investigator 
 to-day, turning over the Christian records, feels 
 himself at every point in contact with the 
 mystery that made them possible. Here, to 
 the scientific mind, is the real question. For 
 to whatever extent the inaccurate or the 
 
The Christ op To-Day. 297 
 
 legendary may have crept in to the New 
 Testament, there is one thing in which its 
 absolute reliability can never be questioned. 
 It represents, with the accuracy of a hair 
 balance, the impression made upon its writers 
 by Christ's personality. The fourth gospel is 
 the echo from the soul of its writer of the 
 heavenly voice that had spoken to it. The 
 Pauline Epistles show us what one of the 
 deepest minds the world ever produced felt 
 about Jesus. The different reports of these 
 manifold collaborateurs vary with all manner 
 of individual idiosyncrasy and standpoint. But 
 not one of them fails to make us understand 
 that the One whom he wrote about had made 
 on the writer the impression of something 
 heavenly, mighty, beautiful beyond all that 
 was human, of One who had opened new 
 powers in, and disclosed new horizons to, his 
 own soul. But, by the law of dynamics, a 
 given impression requires an adequate cause. 
 If this was the impression, what of the cause ? 
 Thus is Christ to us of to-day for one thing, 
 the Power, the radiant mystery behind the 
 New Testament. 
 
 Bat the Christ of to-day is something more, 
 in a sense we may say, something much greater 
 
298 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 even, than the Christ of the New Testament. 
 There we behold Him in the restrictions of 
 bodily life. But now we see Him, as a sheer 
 spiritual Power, traversing and transforming 
 the ages. Psychological facts are just as real 
 as any other — more so, indeed, for they are the 
 only ones we really know. And the candid 
 inquirer upon our theme has now to investigate 
 the meaning of that Christ of the inner man of 
 whom the subsequent ages are full. We have 
 here to step beyond the bounds of Judsea and 
 of Galilee, beyond the bounds of a.d. 30, and 
 to discover the significance of the Christ in St. 
 Paul, in Augustine, in Bernard, in Wesley. 
 We have to compute here the whole content 
 and quality of that stream of spiritual life 
 which from the first century has been flowing 
 in upon human souls and producing such won- 
 drous experiences. What is the force that, in 
 an Ignatius, condemned to a torturing death, 
 impels him rapturously to welcome fire, cross, 
 and wild beast if only he may " attain unto 
 Jesus Christ " ? That is one of a million of 
 the inner testimonies. But they are all to the 
 same effect. It is the simple fact to say that 
 to all ages and conditions Christ has been the 
 life of the soul. In this view the Christ of 
 
The Christ op To-Day. 299 
 
 to-day is an invisible world power, whose 
 operations are in the interior of human hearts. 
 And the force seems as continuous, as persist- 
 ent, and as penetrating as that of gravitation. 
 
 If the facts are thus, or anything like this, 
 what is the explanation? There is an early 
 one that, so far as we know, has never yet been 
 bettered, and the full significance of which we 
 have perhaps scarcely yet fully grasped. It is 
 that given us in the history of St. Paul. No 
 human being probably has ever been more 
 profoundly under the power of Christ, and yet 
 he had never seen Christ in the flesh, and he 
 scarcely ever refers to the facts of His earthly 
 career. Yet he was persuaded of Christ as yet 
 living and as the very centre of man's unseen 
 world. His own inward life and the resulting 
 external career were made, he unceasingly 
 declared, by His touch from the invisible. 
 Paul's assurance here is the more remarkable 
 as he has nothing to say of the birth stories 
 and nothing about what Harnack calls the 
 Easter stories. What he knew was his own 
 soul and the power on it of this unseen 
 Christ. 
 
 What we have reached, then, as our Christ 
 of to-day is, a human history, a personality 
 
300 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 and a power behind. A cloud in the heavens, 
 shall we say, and the infinite blue beyond, 
 from out of which the cloud has drawn itself ? 
 And the cloud and the blue are one. The 
 mystery is beyond words, and yet this is finally 
 how it shapes itself : The Infinite to be the 
 Infinite must contain the element of person- 
 ality. It contains more than force ; it 
 contains, also, truth, love, purity, holiness. 
 But these to have their true effect in the 
 human sphere must personalise. The Infinite 
 here must take shape. The limitless blue must 
 yield its cloud. And it has done so. "When in 
 the secret place of our soul we build our God, 
 we form Him not out of cosmic forces, not out 
 of gravitation and chemical attraction, but out 
 ■of holiness and love. And, lo ! as we look, the 
 form is as of the Son of Man ! The Absolute 
 as Absolute is not enough for the religious life. 
 Man must have some fixed, visible point, some 
 crystallisation, as it were, of the All on which 
 his love and reverence may rest. That is 
 where the New Testament story meets him. 
 Here he finds the humanising and person- 
 alising of the Infinite Goodness. In the study 
 of this Life he tastes eternity. And as he 
 believes, the power to be good flows into him. 
 
The Christ of To-Day. 301 
 
 Therefore knows he to-day the Christ, not 
 only as human, but also as Divine; not only 
 as a figure in history, but as the eternal 
 Now. 
 
 God may have other Words for other worlds, 
 But for this world the Word of God is Christ. 
 
XXXIII. 
 The World's Surprises. 
 
 Max Mulier says of the early Aryans that 
 they seem never to have got over their first 
 surprise at the world, their sense of its utter 
 sfrangeness, and of themselves as strangers in 
 it. It is a refreshing utterance. We have not 
 sufficiently appraised our sense of wonder as 
 a spiritual asset. In fact, not to wonder has 
 been in more than one age lauded as a virtue. 
 We remember how Aristotle, in the " Ethics," 
 speaking of his u Magnanimous Man," says 
 that " he is not apt to admire, for nothing is 
 great to him." And the tendency of modern 
 research seems, at first sight, all in favour of 
 nil admirari. Science has swept the universe 
 clean of the old elements on which wonder fed. 
 The gods and goddesses have ceased from 
 Olympus ; dryads and genii no longer haunt 
 the woods and streams. The world's poetry 
 seems in danger of extinction under the empire 
 of universal law. Where is romance when 
 
The World's Surprises. 303 
 
 everything has been explained? Long ago 
 Keats protested at science's dry-as-dust pro- 
 gramme : 
 
 Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : 
 We know her woof, her texture : she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 
 But our poets need not be afraid. It is not 
 in the power of science to extinguish the soul's 
 wonder at itself and the world. Busied for 
 awhile with the new explanations, it discovers 
 in the end that the problem has been thrown 
 only one step further back. The primal 
 mystery looms out behind more unfathom- 
 able than ever. There are people who talk 
 about the improbability, almost the incon- 
 ceivability, of a future state of existence. Has 
 it ever occurred to them to speculate on the 
 antecedent improbability, inconceivability even, 
 of such a state as the one we actually find 
 ourselves in ? After it has been made certain 
 to us that such impossible beings as we are 
 actually inhabiting so impossible a world, the 
 a priori objections against another life for us 
 in another world become in comparison 
 ridiculously small. It is worth while to catch 
 
304 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 this view sometimes in its full force. We get 
 it now and then when, in waking slowly from 
 a dream state, after lying for a while in semi- 
 consciousness, the reality gradually dawns upon 
 us. " Is it actually true, then," we say, " that I 
 am what I am, and where I am, and that 
 things around me are as they are?" We 
 taste to the full in that moment the world's 
 strangeness. To have waked up in another 
 sphere had been hardly less startling than to* 
 have waked up in this. 
 
 No scientific explanations, no cosmic 
 theories, can take away the essential marvel of 
 things as they are. When we explain the 
 motion of suns and planets by a law of 
 gravitation, which acts, we say, "as the 
 square of the distance," we simply run up 
 against another question that we are powerless 
 to resolve : Why should there be a law of 
 gravitation? and why should it act as the- 
 square rather than, say, as the cube of the 
 distance? When we account for the world 
 by tracing all back to an original revolving 
 fire mist, condensing into planets and evolving 
 in succession atmosphere, rocks, soil, water, 
 plants, animals, and finally man, "why," we 
 must ask, "did the original motion work along 
 
The World's Surprises. 305 
 
 these, out of all possible, lines, and what 
 was there in the first impulsion that could 
 produce such effects?" How, along this 
 line of thinking, did the original blind force 
 contrive to endow us, at this far end, with 
 souls, and sympathy and religion ? To reach 
 this actual, what inconceivable hosts of im- 
 probabilities have been trampled over ! The 
 miracle of man, as conceived by the Hebrew 
 cosmogonists, is nothing as compared with 
 the miracle of man as conceived by the 
 scientists. 
 
 To thoughtful minds the world's greatest 
 surprise lies in its two-sidedness. To gaze in 
 one direction gives us a fit of pessimism. We 
 cannot look five minutes in another direction 
 without being swept on the tide of a glorious 
 optimism. It is this mixture of the divine and 
 the sordid that makes the riddle. On the one 
 side we have a sense of the splendour of life 
 which makes even such a scoffer as Nietzsche 
 break into rapture : " And truly," says he, 
 " divine spectators are necessary in order to 
 appreciate the spectacle which is here inaugur- 
 ated, and of which the outcome can not as yet 
 be imagined, a spectacle too fine, too wonder- 
 ful, too paradoxical for its possibly being a 
 
 20 
 
306 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 mere meaningless side-show upon some ridicu- 
 lous star." But then that other side, the side 
 of darkness, failure, pain and evil ! How it 
 has racked the human brain to find here some- 
 thing that is intelligible ! We turn the pages 
 of Plato, with his idea that the Creator, having 
 to mix together necessity and thought, made 
 the Universe as like to Himself as He could ; 
 of Aristotle, with his distinction between the 
 inner form of the Universe and the outer 
 matter, identifying the Divine perfection with 
 the form and the imperfection with the matter; 
 of a Leibnitz holding this to be the best world 
 possible, the best solution of the problem in 
 maxima and minima, of the union of the 
 infinite with the finite. Every age has, in 
 fact, had its solution, and ended by leaving the 
 matter very much where it was. But it is this 
 darkest side which leaves us most certain that 
 we form part in no commonplace scheme, and 
 that a world which offers us such surprises to- 
 day has yet greater ones in store. 
 
 This conclusion, which the general outlook 
 suggests, is greatly strengthened when we 
 come to the study of history. A modern view 
 has disparaged history as "dealing, not like 
 philosophy and science, with ideas and concep- 
 
The World's Surprises. 307 
 
 tions, but only with endless particulars, with 
 things that happened once and then ceased to 
 exist." This conception by Schopenhauer of 
 history, as a jumble without laws underneath 
 it or purposes running through it, is matched 
 in fatuity by that of another non-Christian 
 thinker, Buckle, who, going to the opposite 
 extreme, makes all history an affair of natural 
 law, and reduces the difference between men 
 and races into an affair simply of climate, soil 
 and food. One might ask here why on this 
 hypothesis a Germany, having the same 
 climate, soil and food as Luther knew, does not 
 continuously produce Luthers ? Neither of 
 these teachers offers a satisfying answer to the 
 problem of history. As against Schopenhauer, 
 we see in its events and persons the sequences 
 of an ordered movement; we see its back- 
 ground crammed with purpose. As against 
 Buckle, we discover it to be full of the unex- 
 pected, of the incalculable. It is because the 
 universe exists not for the sake of laws, but of 
 persons ; because its, to us, invisible spheres 
 are full of them, that we may expect continu- 
 ally vast births of time, the appearance of 
 great natures, whose solitary thought and voli- 
 tion change the destinies of generations. 
 
•30$ Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Unpredictable indeed and miiiaaginable are 
 the t^irning-points of history. Imagine a 
 Buckle in the year 1 a.d. studying Palestinian 
 Judaism, and from what was there to see in the 
 present, and from a past that for long centuries 
 had been so arid, foretelling its probable 
 future ! What was there in the circumstances, 
 and the outlook, to make possible the New 
 Testament and the history of Christendom? 
 And yet all this came. (i Unto us a Child is 
 born," and the key is turned in the door of 
 destiny. On a minor scale the same thing is 
 continually happening. At the end of the 
 eighteenth century poetry seemed dead in 
 England. Who remembers the names of the 
 laureates of that time ? Decades of barrenness 
 succeeded each other, and then suddenly arose 
 a whole galaxy, and the firmament shone with 
 a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Byron, a Shelley, 
 a Keats. To-day the literary drought is sore, 
 but a new Shakespeare may be in the cradle. 
 The world indeed, both of thought and action, 
 is prepared for immense surprises in the imme- 
 diate future. Those of us who are middle-aged 
 have seen within our lifetime a change in 
 ideas in the mode of conceiving the Universe, 
 greater than any that has taken place before 
 
The World's Surprises. 309 
 
 through thousands of years. And the rate of 
 movement now promises to be cumulative. 
 We may be on the eve of discoveries, or 
 coming within the sweep of influences, that 
 will alter the whole face of humanity. 
 
 But the theme, treated thus far on general 
 lines, has some personal applications. At the 
 beginning we spoke of wonder as a spiritual 
 asset, and we can now return to that. Men 
 think a good deal to-day of their surprise 
 faculty, and pay large sums to feed it withal. 
 The Roman Emperor who offered a fortune to 
 the man who could procure him a new sensa- 
 tion would find sympathisers to-day. People 
 travel round the globe in search of its big 
 things, the views that will startle and astonish. 
 But this is, after all, a worn-out way of seeking 
 the wonderful. The true way of travel here 
 is not the lateral, but the vertical. The secret 
 is not so much that of roaming as of mount- 
 ing. A man who has seen the prospect, every 
 day of his life, from his native village would 
 scarce know it as viewed from a balloon. If as 
 individuals we would seek the world's surprises 
 it must be by the inner way. When we change 
 a habit, when we start a fresh study, when we 
 take on a new service, when we open a 
 
810 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 hitherto untouched side of our nature to the 
 free plaj of God's Spirit, we shall find our- 
 selves in a new world. Life, as Madame 
 Swetchine says, consists mainly of what we put 
 into it. Natures that by constant endeavour 
 and aspiration preserve their freshness, find an 
 intoxication in every fresh dawn. To them, 
 happy souls, is it given — 
 
 To see a world in a grain of sand, 
 
 And a heaven in a wild flower ; 
 Hold infinity in the palm of the hand, 
 
 And eternity in an hour. 
 
 They have learned Emerson's lesson, that every 
 day is the best day in the year. 
 
 That, too, is a poor life which, in the retro- 
 spect, does not abound in reverent wonder at 
 the Divine goodness in the whole ordering of 
 it. It is a fine observation of Bitschl that each 
 man's belief in a personal Providence arises 
 out of his own experience of God's leading. 
 Stevenson found it hard to forgive God for the 
 sufferings of others, but melted at the thought 
 of His fatherly dealing with himself. And yet 
 what a sufferer was he ! It is the marvellous 
 history of that hidden Love toward us in the 
 past that heartens us for the future. When 
 we steer towards some menacing fate that 
 
The World's Surprises. 311 
 
 fronts us we may meet it without fear. Its 
 utmost shock will be a surprise of grace. 
 
 That is what will happen to us in death. 
 Dying will not hurt us. Sir James Paget said 
 that he had scarce known a patient who, when; 
 the end came, regarded it with fear, or with 
 aversion. He believed, indeed, that it had its 
 own pleasure, as has every other physical func- 
 tion. It was said of Bushnell that, " Even his. 
 dying was play to him." And why not? We- 
 agree with Erasmus that "no man can die 
 badly who has lived well." And all that we 
 have experienced in this world, the wonder of 
 it, its deliverances, its trainings, its thousand 
 gracious interpositions, lead us in our turn to 
 the saint's trust of every age, that our passings 
 hence will be to encounter the grandest and 
 most blessed surprise of all. 
 
XXXIV. 
 Life's Exchange System. 
 
 The world has abundance of written creeds, 
 but it is the unwritten ones that really count. 
 Each man carries his own. After a certain 
 number of years on this planet we most of us 
 gain a conception of life which becomes hence- 
 forth our working belief. Part of it inherited, 
 and part of it home made, the whole gets 
 shape and colour from our special experience. 
 This private creed of the modern man differs 
 often from the Catechism as much in what it 
 contains as in what it leaves out. It is 
 strange that theology should have failed so 
 signally in furnishing the really vital formulas. 
 The man in the street if asked for his idea 
 of life, instead of quoting the Thirty-nine 
 Articles, is more likely to turn to the utterance 
 of some rank outsider. How immense, for 
 instance, the vogue of Huxley's famous simile 
 of a game of chess, where man is pitted 
 against an unseen player, inexorably just, 
 
Life's Exchange System. 313 
 
 demanding strict adherence to the rules, allow- 
 ing no move back, awarding full recognition to 
 -skill and care, but meeting ignorance and 
 negligence with certain overthrow ! 
 
 And yet the illustration was a poor one. It 
 is not true. At least not true enough, not 
 la Verite vraie. In chess the win of the one 
 party is the loss of the other, unless the game 
 is drawn, when neither has any advantage. 
 We refuse to accept any such result as the 
 summing-up of life. Far nearer to the fact, 
 surely, is the conception of it as a commerce, 
 a system of exchanges. In a true commerce 
 both sides win. Buyer and seller, the one who 
 delivers and the one who receives, are alike 
 benefited, and the series of transactions works 
 for the individual and the general enrichment. 
 The facts are certainly more solidly behind this 
 view than that of the chess game. There are 
 enough of them to permit us to say that, in 
 the long process of the years, life's exchange 
 system has wrought, not for a win at the price 
 of an equivalent loss, but for a steady gain all 
 round. 
 
 But we are anticipating. Our formula has 
 not yet justified itself. Is it allowable to 
 speak of the universe as summed up in an 
 
314 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 exchange system? It would be presumption^ 
 indeed, to use the phrase as a complete 
 explanation of the Whole to which we belong. 
 But it may fairly be said to contain a great 
 deal of it. For one thing, inanimate nature is* 
 as we see, a perpetual commerce. Everything 
 changes into everything else. Force is 
 Protean. The same energy becomes in turn 
 heat, light, electricity, motion. The chemical 
 elements rush into continual new combina- 
 tions. There is no such thing in this sphere 
 as the solid and the immutable. The " ever- 
 lasting hills " are none of them everlasting. 
 The Matterhorn, as Tyndall said, is in ruins. 
 Snowdon was once probably twenty thousand 
 feet high. Its debris is scattered to-day over a 
 dozen counties. The history of a planet is of 
 an unceasing transformation, from moment to 
 moment, and from seon to seon, until the fire 
 mist from which it sprang resolves itself once 
 more into the central heat. 
 
 It is, however, when we come to the plane 
 of human affairs that our formula reveals its 
 chief contents. And here it is not so much 
 the mere process of change, though that bulks 
 largely enough, as the give and take in it, the 
 sheer barter element, that most strikes us. 
 
Life's Exchange System. 315 
 
 Nature sits at her seat of custom and drives 
 her bargains with an unfailing zest. Her 
 weights and scales, her currency and values 
 vary immensely as we mount to life's higher 
 spheres, taking on, as we near the summits, a 
 fineness, a quality of the ethereal, which baffle 
 our own calculations. But from bottom to top 
 there seems ever the rule of a quid pro quo, of 
 a something for something, and never of a 
 something for nothing. 
 
 So strict is her rule of payment here that it 
 obtains rigidly in directions where Optimism 
 would have asked for relaxation. She allows 
 no advance without a seeming loss. The step 
 forward must pay toll. Civilisation gives us 
 watches and roads, but robs us of the savage's 
 intuition of the time, and his unerring trail 
 through the forest. We build towns and 
 forfeit the countryman's virility. We reach 
 our era of peace and lose the heroic virtues of 
 the old war time. One revolts against Mark 
 Pattison's dictum that " a time of peace and 
 security inevitably tends to foster an umbratile 
 and academic science ; curiosity is withdrawn 
 from the momentous questions which have 
 interest only for noble souls," but one is unable 
 to contradict it. Men win what seems mental 
 
•316 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 freedom, and often enough pay for it in moral 
 energy. "Only think," says Vinet, "of 
 France ! So much liberty and no beliefs ! " 
 What a price for a supposed intellectual 
 •enlargement that which Clough expresses in 
 his agnostic days : 
 
 We are most hopeless who had once most hope 
 And most beliefless that had most believed ! 
 
 England could not get her Eeformation even 
 without paying over what seemed a large part 
 of her moral assets. Froude's picture of 
 the position under the Somerset protecto- 
 rate is terrible, yet hardly exaggerated. 
 "Hospitals were gone, schools broken up, 
 almshouses swept away . . . and the 
 poor, smarting with rage and suffering, and 
 seeing piety, honesty, duty trampled under 
 foot by their superiors, were sinking into 
 savages." 
 
 This particular ledger of nature offers 
 material that, it must be confessed, is 
 sufficiently confusing to the moral sense. We 
 have to leave it with the feeling that our 
 knowledge of the accounts here is not suffi- 
 cient to permit of our striking a balance. 
 There are other volumes in which we can see 
 
Life's Exchange System. 317 
 
 our way better. Weighted with immeasurable 
 significance are, for instance, the facts we 
 come across relating to the exchanges between 
 man's visibles and invisibles. The world's 
 history is largely one of this incessantly trans- 
 acted human barter of the seen for the unseen, 
 or of the unseen for the seen. We get glimpses 
 also of the results, though they are but 
 glimpses. From the beginning men have 
 revolted against the system which demands* 
 that we should give up one thing to get 
 another, and have asked why we cannot have 
 both. How true to the heart of all time is 
 this lament of an old thirteenth-century 
 writer : " But no advice was I able to obtain 
 how one should appropriate to himself three- 
 things in order to possess the fulness of his 
 powers. Two of these things are honour and 
 wealth. . . . The third is God's grace, 
 worth more than the other two." He wants 
 all three, but goes on to complain that he 
 cannot find out how they can be all combined 
 in a single life. 
 
 Pathetic bewilderment of each human soul, 
 that from the beginning it is besieged by the 
 rival claimants, with their cry of "Choose!" 
 No line can we conceivably follow but it 
 
318 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 involves the giving up of others that seem, as 
 we leave them, so desirable. To energise is to 
 forfeit quietude ; in society we lose contempla- 
 tion ; in the city's gaiety we have missed the 
 country's charm. At every step we pay. 
 Nothing is given ; all is bought. The Great 
 Temptation is strictly on these lines. " All 
 the kingdoms of this world will I give thee if 
 . . ." and the price is named. A man gains 
 a million and finds himself inwardly beggared. 
 The mischief here is that men can reckon and 
 put into exact figures the coarse visibles that 
 entice them, while for the final treasures they 
 give in exchange they have no calculus. There 
 is no harm in a man's desire to be rich if only 
 he will define properly. To be rich is ulti- 
 mately a consciousness. One man is ten times 
 more alive than another, at a height ten times 
 the height of another. That is being rich. 
 " Give me health and a day," says Emerson, 
 "and I will laugh to scorn the pomp of 
 emperors." Pagan Horace approaches the 
 truth in his 
 
 Cur valle permutem Sabina 
 Divitias operosiores ? 
 
 To exchange the quiet of his Sabine valley, 
 
Life's Exchange System. 319 
 
 with its life of poetic contemplation, for the 
 fevered rush for gold was to exact too hard a 
 bargain. How much of life's highest range had 
 been forfeited to make possible that inscription 
 on the monument of Sardanapalus : " Eat, 
 drink and (sexually) love, for all else is but 
 little worth ! " 
 
 The bartering of invisible for lower values, 
 and its inevitable life impoverishment, which 
 makes up so much of the human story, serves, 
 however, to set off the more vividly the peculiar 
 and supernatural splendour which attaches to 
 the opposite form of commerce. u Something 
 •divine/' to use the words of Aristides, is surely 
 mingled with a humanity that has made such 
 ventures of faith, such offerings of visibles for 
 invisibles as are on record. What was the 
 inward reckoning, what the uncountable coin 
 paid over to the man's spirit which made a 
 Tyndale satisfied to devote his splendid abilities 
 to a task which he was beforehand convinced 
 was to bring him, not riches nor honours, but 
 torture and the stake ! What motive, what 
 inner force is this that sets a man on a work by 
 which we, without paying him a penny, obtain 
 our English Bible, while he for reward gets 
 long lodging in that dismal Belgian dungeon 
 
320 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 where he sits through the cold winter nights 
 shivering in the dark, until its door opens to- 
 his executioners ! Who shall say that a race 
 whose annals contain such stories is born to 
 commonplace destinies? The prophets and 
 martyrs know better. The path they tread, 
 and the goods they offer and receive hint at 
 transactions of the soul, in its commerce with 
 the Infinite, which make the bargains of Wall 
 Street or our Capel Court the mere huckster- 
 ings of the gutter. 
 
 And this leads us to a question in which all 
 that has gone before is summed up. What is 
 the ultimate nature of life's exchange system ? 
 We have insisted that Nature keeps tally and 
 demands payment for everything she offers us. 
 But is that the final word on the subject ? No. 
 When we get to the matter's deepest heart we 
 find the word there is not debt but grace. 
 Nature's business habits, her exactions, her 
 demand always of a something for something, 
 are only a modus operandi which veils a deep 
 mystery of Good that lies behind. The pay- 
 ment got out of us is really a gift to us, and 
 one of the most precious. Listen here to the 
 confession of a modern spirit, one of our most 
 gifted and representative. Robert Louis 
 
Life's Exchange System. 321 
 
 Stevenson has laid bare the innermost of the 
 thing in this marvellous utterance of his own 
 experience : " But indeed with the passing of 
 the years, the decay of strength, the loss of all 
 my old, active and personal habits, there grows 
 more and more upon me that belief in the 
 kindness of the scheme of things, and the 
 goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent 
 and pacifying compensation." Nature's hard 
 bargaining with her suffering son had let him, 
 the one-time sceptic, into the secret of a 
 boundless Love ! 
 
 And must we not include death itself, that 
 ultima linea rerum of the ancients, as only a 
 part of " Life's Exchange System " ? Science 
 joins religion in ignoring the old " ultimate 
 boundaries." Seeming destructions are in its 
 view only new beginnings. It was both science 
 and Christianity which mingled in the senti- 
 ment of Wordsworth when, as Aubrey de Vere 
 records, he " frequently spoke of death as if it 
 were the taking of a degree in the university of 
 life." We shall have come well out of our life 
 commerce if, as the account draws near its close, 
 the give and take, the gain and loss, have left 
 for final result the full assurance of this great 
 Christian hope; if we are in the company of 
 
 21 
 
322 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 those to whom apply the noble words of our 
 Edmund Waller : 
 
 The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
 Lets in new light through chinks that time has made ; 
 ♦Stronger by weakness, wiser men become 
 As they draw near to their eternal home. 
 
XXXV. 
 The Spiritual in Teaching. 
 
 Teaching is often thought of as a class 
 function, but it is vastly more than that. 
 When we have reckoned up the twenty 
 thousand odd Anglican clergy, the yet greater 
 array of Nonconforming ministers, and the 
 vast host of public instructors, who in all 
 spheres, from the infant class to the University 
 lecture-hall, are drilling the nation's youth, we 
 have only touched the fringe of our national 
 army of teachers. Artists, poets, statesmen, 
 physicians, are all in it ; so is every business 
 man; so, par excellence, is every father and 
 mother. The teaching comes by word and 
 deed, and by things that are beyond either. 
 For, in addition to what we are specifically 
 doing in our trade or calling, we are all 
 in our daily habits and conversation ex- 
 hibiting a certain philosophy of life, a mode 
 of regarding the universe and the human 
 relation to it, which makes us, whether we 
 
324 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 recognise the fact or not, the exponents of a 
 doctrine. 
 
 Looking over the immense and wonderfully 
 varied fields of human activity we discern 
 in them all, we say, a teaching, and the ques- 
 tion now is as to the relative value of this 
 teaching. What we want here to point out is 
 that in all these departments, however seem- 
 ingly remote from one another, the quality of 
 the work depends on the presence or absence of 
 one element. In painter or politician, in 
 architect or business man, in parent, school- 
 master or preacher, the note which Nature 
 demands, and which will decide their real 
 worth, is the note of the spiritual. 
 
 By the note of the spiritual we mean the 
 recognition, back of every form of living and 
 working, of an Unseen Holy, of a Divine and 
 Infinite Purity, Beauty and Love, by which 
 these several activities are to be inspired, and 
 to which they are always to look for final 
 appraisement. This view of things is one 
 against which, in different quarters, very 
 vigorous revolts have been made ; but the 
 issue of those revolts confirms the fact that 
 the universe will tolerate no other. In art we 
 have seen a fleshly school; in literature a 
 
The Spiritual in Teaching. 325 
 
 realism which "boasts of describing the naked 
 fact with no ideal behind it ; in public affairs 
 there have been men who have formed them- 
 selves on Machiavelli. These attempts are 
 sometimes described as wicked ; it would be 
 much better to call them mediocre. A 
 really great nature can never endure itself 
 in such conditions. The proof is when we 
 see such a nature and study what it 
 instinctively seeks for and founds itself 
 upon. Arnold was reverenced at Rugby not 
 for his specialty in teaching classics or his- 
 tory, excellent though that was ; his unique 
 hold on English young manhood lay in 
 something outside text-books. It lay in 
 character, and the character, again, rested on 
 a sacred mystery behind. And there is no 
 schoolmaster worth his salt of whom a similar 
 thing may not be said. 
 
 A great painter puts all this on his canvas. 
 To gain mastery of form and colour is only the 
 alphabet of his work. The task which fires 
 his soul is that of making " the light that 
 never was on sea or shore " to stream through 
 a landscape or to inspire a countenance. So 
 when men carve or build. It is not only in a 
 St. Mark's at Venice, where the whole New 
 
326 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 Testament has been translated into marble, 
 that architecture represents the spiritual idea. 
 There is no structure, ancient or modern, as 
 our Ruskin has magnificently shown, but 
 either defies it or does it homage. And if, in 
 public affairs, we note the career of politicians, 
 statesmen, or rulers, it will be found, without 
 exception, that, in the long run the men who 
 really impress their fellows, and whose work 
 endures, are citizens of the Unseen. Whether 
 it is a king like Alfred, or a revolutionary like 
 Mazzini, or a middle- class Radical like Bright, 
 their power lies here. 
 
 What we want now, however, specially to 
 deal with is the place of the spiritual in the 
 teaching more definitely recognised as religious. 
 An Italian ex-priest and professor, the Abbe 
 Casami chela, who became a convert to Pro- 
 testantism, and so knew both sides, said that 
 while Rome hid behind her gorgeous exter- 
 nality a miserable poverty of thought, Pro- 
 testantism made up for its simplicity of 
 external worship by a glorious affluence of 
 ideas. The antithesis is flattering to Pro- 
 testantism, but needs to be taken with a certain 
 reserve. Affluence of ideas is an excellent 
 thing in religion, but it is not the only nor, 
 
The Spiritual in Teaching, 327 
 
 indeed, the highest thing. The teacher's 
 power here will depend on something more 
 even than his intellectual range, and that is 
 his relation to the spiritual world. An Indian 
 sage gives us the whole secret in his saying 
 that "the best preacher is the man who has 
 attained a true liberation of soul." In Laur- 
 ence Oliphant's phrase he is one who " has 
 lived the life." 
 
 It is curious, in this connection, to see the 
 efforts men make after originality in religious 
 teaching. They annex foreign languages and 
 literatures, look up all manner of obscure 
 subjects, cultivate at times the wildest phan- 
 tasies in the frantic endeavour to find some- 
 thing new. They forget that the only true and 
 healthy originality is that which comes from 
 the constant growth of their own soul. If we 
 want our " old things " to become " new " the 
 method is to see them from the variant stand- 
 point of an ever-deepening life. And this 
 deepening will come by practice, by action, 
 more even than by study. When a man knows 
 a religious truth simply as a doctrine he will 
 preach it in a certain way, probably a very dry- 
 way. When he has ventured something on it ; 
 lived with it ; suffered over it ; triumphed in it, 
 
328 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 he will preach it in a very different way. The 
 teacher becomes inexhaustible by putting him- 
 self thus in right relation in his inner world ; 
 by going ever deeper into it, not speculatively, 
 but actually, and offering always what he finds. 
 Such a man discovers that the false in teach- 
 ing lies not so much in its wrong relation to 
 outside fact as in its wrong relation to his own 
 spirit. The heresy of heresies is to proclaim 
 and urge upon others what we ourselves have 
 not realised. On our soul's peril let us not talk 
 of a thing we have not lived. Eather let there 
 always be more lived than we can utter. Mon- 
 taigne has a passage somewhere in which he 
 expresses his scorn for Cicero and Pliny for 
 seeking glory by the mere style of their writing 
 and speaking. Csesar and Xenophon, he says, 
 would never have written of their actions had 
 they not felt that the actions in themselves 
 were greater than their words. Which reminds 
 us of what Plutarch so finely says of Csesar, 
 that " his ambition was nothing but a jealousy 
 of himself, a contest with himself, as if it had 
 been with some other man, to make his future 
 achievements outshine the past." The am- 
 bition here was not on the highest plane, but 
 the principle is one for us all. There is no 
 
The Spiritual in Teaching. 329 
 
 way of retaining freshness as a teacher but by 
 a life which, in its ever-increasing possession 
 of the spiritual world, continually outshines 
 the past. 
 
 And it is a deepening inner life that con- 
 stitutes the best of all securities for a sound 
 doctrine. As we become surer of God and 
 more acclimatised in His truth, holiness and 
 love, we can look upon the bewilderments of 
 dogmatic utterance from a very safe stand- 
 point. Not that we are going to be infallible. 
 We may make abundance of mistakes ; only, 
 as Joubert says, " there are some minds which 
 arrive at error by all truths ; and others which 
 arrive at great truths by all errors." The true 
 soul will be wrong often enough in its argu- 
 ments, but right in its conclusions. A teacher, 
 for instance, may state the Christian doctrine 
 of the Atonement in a way which, from the 
 philosophic or the forensic or the scientific 
 standpoints, may be riddled with objections. 
 But if he has stated it so that men have gone 
 away with a new hatred of sin and passion for 
 holiness ; with a deeper insight into the love of 
 God, and his law of sacri6ce ; and with a fresh 
 great hope for the utter redemption of this 
 sorrowful world; we say that whatever the 
 
330 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 faults and ragged edges of his theory, as a 
 religious teacher he has not gone far wrong. 
 If we are in right relation with Eternal Love, 
 Truth and Kighteousness, we shall steer our 
 way through doctrines without fear of ship- 
 wreck. 
 
 Such teachers will find the movement of the 
 modern world as full of spiritual meanings as 
 the old allegorists did the stories of Job and of 
 Jacob. That line of the German Claudius 
 which so shocked Dr. Pusey — 
 
 Es kam mir ein Gedank von olingefahr 
 So sprach' ich wenn ich Christus war, 
 
 in this view seems not at all shocking. They 
 realise that they are interpreting the world of 
 to-day on the lines of the Christ-spirit, and in 
 their measure, are speaking of it as He would 
 were He here. 
 
 To sum up. Our work and life form a 
 teaching the value of which depends on our 
 relation to the spiritual world. Unless we and 
 our work are rooted there, we and it are as a 
 bubble that breaks on the passing wave. In 
 religion we can teach nothing effectively that 
 we have not first lived. Our measure as 
 teachers will be in the measure of our experi- 
 
The Spiritual in Teaching. 331 
 
 ences. We can give only of what we have 
 received, and we are receptive only as we prac- 
 tise inner obedience. The men who are mighty 
 in this field are those whose height of attain- 
 ment gives a quality of its own to the words 
 they use, who use speech as a channel along 
 which flow influences that no words can trans- 
 late. 
 
XXXVI. 
 
 Behind the Veil. 
 
 Humanity, says Comte, consists more of the 
 <lead than of the living. We who are now 
 here are the veriest fragment of those who 
 have looked upon the sun. Life is a glimpse 
 and a vanishing. The crowd that rolls in and 
 out of London every day is as great this year 
 as last, but its constituents have altered. Vast 
 gaps would yawn in it were it not for fresh 
 recruits. Uno avulso non deficit alter. The 
 newcomer fills the vacant place. But the 
 vanished ones, what of them ? They were so 
 completely one with us, so much at home in 
 our midst. Their laughter is still in our ears, 
 the light in their eye haunts us. They were 
 more to us than all the world, and now . . . ! 
 The journals are full of news, but of these 
 there is no word. The earth is a Babel of 
 noises, but on this one side the silence is 
 absolute. Our planet rolls in space from end 
 ifco end of its vast orbit ; the solar system itself 
 
Behind the Veil. •*>:*: n 
 
 is sweeping, with us in it, toward an unknown 
 bourne, but never are we carried within sight 
 of that undiscovered country into which our 
 beloved have passed. How well the heaven& 
 keep their secret ! No, it is not the world's 
 uproar that plays havoc with our nerves. It is 
 its maddening silence, where we pant to hear a 
 voice. 
 
 There is no subject on which the teacher of 
 to-day, who is supposed to have any message 
 for his fellows, is more eagerly questioned than 
 this, of what, for us and ours, lies behind the 
 veil. We all have such heavy stakes in this 
 venture. If we have reached the middle age, 
 half our friends are already over the border, 
 and in a few years their lot, whatever it is, will 
 be ours. What is the outlook ? Is there any 
 new light on this theme ? In one respect we 
 note a striking change of position in the 
 educated mind of to-day. If it has not dis- 
 covered any fresh ground for belief, it has very 
 clearly recognised the futility of what, not so 
 long ago, were regarded as very excellent 
 reasons for disbelief. We have in view all 
 that has been said on the negative side, from 
 Lucretius to Schopenhauer, and it is surprising 
 how little it amounts to. The French encyclo- 
 
334 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 psedists imagined they had settled the question. 
 Their arguments to us are simply amusing. 
 We turn, for instance, to Diderot's Entretien 
 d'un Philosophe, and find our philosopher talk- 
 ing as follows : " If you can believe in sight 
 without eyes, in hearing without ears, in think- 
 ing without a head, if you could love without a 
 heart, feel without senses, exist when you are 
 nowhere and be something without extension 
 and place, then we might indulge this hope of 
 a future life." Could a more parochial view of 
 things be imagined than this ? Spinoza might 
 have taught our Diderot better. Anyone with 
 the smallest modicum of philosophic imagina- 
 tion could picture for himself beings in other 
 spheres to whom the connection of thinking 
 with a brain would be as impossible as that of 
 thinking without one appeared to the encyclo- 
 paedist. 
 
 The whole negative argument from material- 
 ism, is, in fact, out of date. We are beginning 
 to realise that the problem of a life to come is 
 involved in a new way with the problem of the 
 life that is. "Behind the veil" relates to 
 "now" as much as to "then." To the 
 instructed eye the material world by which we 
 are encompassed is itself a veil, from behind 
 
Behind the Veil. 335 
 
 which a partially hidden reality dimly shows. 
 Plato's enigmatic utterance about matter, v\r) 
 akrjdivov 'sjrevBos "matter the true falsity," 
 stands here for us as the shadow of a truth. 
 What we think we know of the visible world is 
 largely a projected image of ourselves. The 
 "thing in itself" behind the show our senses 
 create for us is an unsolved riddle. The suppo- 
 sition that the universe amounts to just what our 
 five senses report would be a philosophy worthy 
 of Bumbledom. For ought we know a thousand 
 new senses might be created in us, and each 
 find outside its answering world. And the 
 senses we have stop short on a track they have 
 not half traversed. There are colour and 
 sound vibrations going on perpetually around 
 us of which our eyes and ears report nothing. 
 What, on the one side, lies beyond the millions 
 of stars revealed by our telescopes, and, on the 
 other, beyond the minutest visible open to our 
 microscopes? We are left without a guess. 
 All we know is that we are in the midst of a 
 system of infinite life and potency, where every 
 advance of our powers of perception reveals 
 new depths and possibilities of being. The 
 veil that hides things from us is not death. It 
 is our own limitations. 
 
336 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 The sense of the visible as only the shadow 
 of a greater reality behind conies with more- 
 difficulty to some races than to others. The 
 Western peoples are not specially gifted on this 
 side. Theirs has been largely a material 
 mission. To root themselves solidly on the 
 planet, to learn its surface laws, to enrich them- 
 selves by the clever manipulation of its forces, 
 this has been the Western function. The 
 East gained an earlier sense of what lay 
 beneath. The world's great religions are 
 Oriental. Egypt lived thousands of years 
 before Christ in the acutest perception of an 
 invisible world. In its Vedanta philosophy 
 India also, in a far antiquity, beheld the world 
 as phenomenal, resting on a Divine which alone 
 was real, declaring man's hold on immortality 
 to be in the surrender of what in him was 
 earthly and transitory. But no race of man, 
 whether in East or West, is permitted to escape 
 this discipline. Sooner or later, after our first 
 intoxicating experience of the visible, does it 
 dawn upon us that all this is only a screen. 
 The very senses that linked us at first so firmly 
 to earth turn traitor to it later, and cry 
 " illusion ! " The world is in this respect a 
 Church, whose teaching and ritual none may 
 
Behind the Veil. 337 
 
 evade. As friend after friend departs, and our 
 own years tell their story, life becomes more 
 and more a vast expectation, a wait till the 
 curtain shall be raised. That humanity, spite 
 of itself, is drilled always into this attitude is, 
 for those who see any purpose or coherence in 
 life, a sufficient hint of what is yet to come. 
 
 While these thoughts have been with 
 humanity, as it seems, almost from the be- 
 ginning', there are considerations belonging 
 specially to our own time which point all in the 
 same direction. Evolution, for instance, gives 
 us life as a perpetual ascent. Each grade of 
 being takes in all that is beneath it, with some- 
 thing of its own added. Man, as we know 
 him, sums up in himself the laws and forces of 
 inorganic matter, the vital principles of vege- 
 table and animal life, together with a whole 
 higher world of his own. His organism, by its 
 subtle magic, transmutes air and water, vege- 
 table and animal, into its own superior form. 
 Why should not this ascent continue ? Why 
 should not the inner economy of the human 
 spirit contain, in its turn, a principle by virtue 
 of which the essentials of the personal human 
 life shall be lifted to a yet higher term, in a yet 
 higher sphere ? The argument gathers weight 
 
 22 
 
338 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 in proportion to the values which are being 
 dealt with. If matter, as we now know, is 
 indestructible, preserving its being through 
 infinite changes of form, what is there in the 
 nature of things to forbid our belief that its 
 nobler partners, spirit and personality, are no 
 exceptions to this rule ? And when to all this 
 we add the considerations opened by the later 
 evolutionary researches, showing as they do 
 that the lower organisms are practically 
 immortal ; that death has come in as part of 
 the struggle towards a higher structure — come 
 in, that is, not as the lord and tyrant of life, 
 but as a fellow-labourer working towards its 
 furtherance — we realise how the evidence 
 accumulates which bids us look for higher 
 fruitions, as well as for the solution of our 
 enigmas, " Behind the Veil." 
 
 There is one side of this theme which we 
 hesitate to touch. The subject of spiritual 
 communications from the unseen has been too 
 often the hunting-ground of the religious 
 adventurer, of those who exploit the human 
 yearning for purposes of their own. The world 
 seems hardly yet sufficiently trained, either 
 scientifically or morally, for a safe exploration 
 of this enchanted land. Yet things from this 
 
Behind the Veil. 339 
 
 side have swum into human ken which refuse 
 to be ignored. More and more are they arrest- 
 ing the attention of the leading minds. It was 
 Kant who said of ghostly appearances : " For 
 my part, ignorant as I am of the way in whicL 
 the human spirit enters the world and the ways- 
 in which it goes out of it, I dare not deny the 
 truth of many of such narratives." The late 
 Professor Sidgwick held that the evidence of 
 the apparition of persons at the point of death 
 to others at a distance amounted to scientific 
 proof. On the question of the actual communi- 
 cation between spirits of the departed and 
 those now living, the result of the researches 
 of a London committee of eminent men of all 
 schools of thought, appointed some years ago 
 for this purpose, was sufficiently suggestive.. 
 Its finding, in substance, was that communica- 
 tions were made which could only be accounted 
 for on the supposition of an invisible personal 
 agency ; but that this agency, in the majority 
 of instances, seemed in point of intelligence to 
 be below the normal human level. The plain 
 inference from this would seem surely to be, 
 that the souls we have known and loved when 
 disengaged from the body enter upon spheres 
 of being too refined and too remote to be 
 
340 Ourselves and the Universe. 
 
 cognised by our mortal sense, and that those 
 within reach are only inferior or degraded 
 types. 
 
 What we have mainly to note is that life's 
 silences and separations are a purposed disci- 
 pline. The pains here are the spirit's " grow- 
 ng pains." The heavens are mute, not be- 
 cause there is nothing to say, but because the 
 time is not yet. Meantime our business is to 
 develop more and more that spiritual sense 
 which gives us, here and now, the vision of life 
 in its wholeness. "Heard you not that sweet 
 melodious music ? " said Jacob Behmen to his 
 son, when dying at Gorlitz. There is a more 
 than mortal music already audible to attuned 
 ears. The elect souls are already free of the 
 world behind the veil. They are on pilgrimage 
 towards that fatherland. " For they that say 
 such things declare plainly that they seek a 
 country. . . . But now they desire a better 
 country, that is, a heavenly." 
 
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 11 Practical, suggestive, and well worthy of the earnest 
 attention of all who would see the influence of the Church 
 extended and adapted to the new conditions of the present 
 hurried, active and restless age." 
 
 Dundee Advertiser. 
 
 "A book that should be read by all Church workers." 
 Croydon Advertiser. 
 
 " This is too timely and able a book to be neglected." 
 
 The Freeman. 
 
 44 A valuable contribution to animportant discussion." 
 Leicester Chronicle. 
 
 "JKV Brierley's essays are short and pointed, and 
 are invariably worthy of frank and patient considera- 
 tion."— British. Weekly. 
 
 " Mr Brierley wields a trenchant pen, and hits with 
 precision and force many of the hindrances which retard 
 the progress of the Free Churches in this country .The 
 book" is a healthy one and is ^^ffSSS&. 
 
 London : 
 JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14, FLEET STREET. 
 
' 
 
 LONDON: 
 IPEAIGHT AND SONS, PRINTERS-, 
 FETTER LANE. 
 
ceton Theological Seminary-Speer Lib ary 
 
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