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 Liberalism in religion; an 
 
 other sermons 
 

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LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 AND OTHER SERMONS 
 
 / 
 
 V 
 W. PAGE ROBEETS, M.A. 
 
 MINISTER OF S. PETEB'S, VERE STREET, LONDON ; FORMERLY VICAR OF EYE, SUFFOLK 
 AUTHOR OP 'LAW AND GOD* 'REASONABLE SERVICE' ETC. 
 
 ' But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt 
 And by their vices brought to servitude. 
 Than to love bondage more than liberty — 
 Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty — 
 And to despise, or envy, or suspect 
 Whom God hath of His special favour raised 
 As thsir deliverer? If he aught begin. 
 How frequent to desert him, and at last 
 To heap ingratitude on worthiest deeds ! ' 
 
 Samson Agoniste 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1886 
 
 {All rights reserved'^ 
 
TO 
 
 MY WIFE 
 
 CONSTANT COMPANION AND BEST FRIEND 
 
 I 
 
 DEDICATE THIS VOLUME 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 The words Liberal and Liberalism at once arouse 
 a spirit of mistrust in many minds, which become 
 unsympathetic, irreceptive, and resentful. Even those 
 who appropriate these words in politics are less ready 
 to adopt them in religion. Indeed, it seems as though 
 men had but a strictly limited quantity of mental 
 motor energy, and that those who expend it in one 
 kind of movement have none left for any other. 
 Certainly the sects which are supposed to be the back- 
 bone of political Liberalism are the most obstinately 
 immovable in religion ; and men ever ready to catch 
 the first breeze impelling to political change have 
 remained stolid as stone to the impulses of spiritual 
 progress. Like Lot's wife, their eyes are fixed on the 
 past, and they cannot stir. But the title I have 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 given to these Sermons carries with it no poHtieal 
 connotation. I did not invent it. It is used to denote 
 a party which exists in the Protestant Churches, 
 and which has ever had its analogue in the Church 
 CathoHc. Its apostle is St. Paul, and the Church 
 which is without it must have the same fate as the 
 Church of Jerusalem. I should have preferred to 
 speak of the methods of Divine education, or of the 
 dynamics of religion ; but I must take the name 
 which foes have given. Of this, however, I am cer- 
 tain, that Liberalism in religion is Conservatism of 
 religion. If it were not I would not be its apologist. 
 Should this little volume be found useful, I may 
 offer another, intended to show how admirably the 
 Church's Offices of Common Prayer and of the Holy 
 Communion serve to express the worship of a Liberal 
 in religion. The Prayer-Book is for us as well as 
 for our brethren. If in some of its phrases we find 
 simpler meanings — meanings which we think are 
 closer to reality — than the more technical meanings 
 given to them by High or by Low Churchmen, it is 
 none the less dear to us. We do not say to the 
 Ritualist, Go to Rome, or, Go to prison ; nor do we 
 declare that the Evangelical ought to become a Dis- 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 senter. If I may say so without levity, we are 
 ' Liberal Unionists,' and the Prayer-Book is the bond 
 which bmds us all together. Its voice is, *Ye are 
 brethren ... see that ye fall not out by the way.' 
 I may add that the spirit which should animate 
 Liberalism in religion, and the methods it should 
 pursue, are admirably indicated by Dr. Swainson in 
 his invaluable book on the Creeds. He would scarcely 
 care to be called a Liberal in religion, but his words 
 may be laid down as a rule for our proceedings :— 
 
 The fact that religion is a science is very often over- 
 looked ; and one consequence is that we hear far too fre- 
 quently of the opposition between science and theology. 
 But theology is a science ; in the common consent of all 
 intelligent behevers, it has been made into one. Like 
 geology and astronomy, and history and moral philosophy 
 (mental science), it has its pecuHar region of facts and 
 phenomena, its peculiar data, its own principles ; but it is 
 a serious mistake on the part of its advocates to conceive 
 and represent that the laws which are to govern our in- 
 vestigations regarding it are of a character totally differ- 
 ent from those which govern our investigations into other 
 sciences. It must be recognised that this is a mistake 
 before we can hope to draw generally the intelhgence. of 
 mankind or even devote ourselves in the spirit of St. Paul 
 to the study of Christianity. Of course I know that there 
 is much of i/^euSww/ios yvSo-ts m many of the so-called 
 scientific men of the day, as there is in many of the 
 
 a 
 
X PREiACE 
 
 so-called theologians ; and I am not surprised that the chief 
 attacks on the false knowledge of the one party proceed 
 from those who pride themselves most on what is really a 
 false knowledge in regard to the other series of subjests. 
 
 THE LIBERAL DEVISETH LIBERAL THINGS, AND BY 
 LIBERAL THINGS SHALL HE STAND. — IsaiCiJl XXXii. 8. 
 
 Brynygwin-ucha, Dolgelly : 
 September 1886. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FKEDERICK DENISOX MATOICE 1 
 
 SERMON 
 
 I. SCEPTICISM 17 
 
 II. REVELATION — 1 28 
 
 III. BETEIATION — II 38 
 
 IV. LIBERALISM IN RELIGION — 1 51 
 
 V. LIBERALISM IN RELIGION — II 64 
 
 VI. DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? . . . 75 
 
 VII. COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD — 1 89 
 
 VIII. COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD — II 101 
 
 IX. SHAM IMMORTALITY . . . . . . .112 
 
 X. ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 123 
 
 XI. NEED OF SALVATION 137 
 
 XII. MEANS OF SALVATION 147 
 
 XIII. SPIRITITAL DEPRESSION 157 
 
 XIV. ' DEVOTIONALITT ' 168 
 
 XV. THE CALLS OF GOD 178 
 
FBEDEBICK DENISON MAUBICE. 
 
 S. Peter's, Vere Street, Sunday, February 4, 1883. 
 
 To-day there is placed in this Church, by the piety 
 of disciples and wrought by one ' endowed with highest 
 gifts, the vision and the faculty divine,' a memorial to 
 him who from its pulpit taught the Church at large.^ 
 It is the only monument to any of her ministers which 
 this church possesses ; and this will not surprise those 
 for whom the name of Mr. Maurice alone reclaims it 
 from obscurity. But it surprises me, indeed it saddens 
 me. For the bond which unites the minister and the 
 members of his congregation in this church is more 
 than usually close. No parochial obligation constrains 
 them ; no what I may call organic cohesion holds 
 them together. Gathered from far and wide by a 
 kind of natural selection, it is to the minister rather 
 than to the church or to each other they are attached. 
 Some sympathy or mental similitude or spmtual 
 affinity draws them to him. Not for long does the 
 minister address himself to reluctant or repellent 
 hearers. No voice of duty bids them endure when 
 
 ^^^ ' An altar-piece painted by Mr. Burne Jones. 
 
 B 
 
2 FREDEEICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
 dislike to the minister makes worship difficult. The 
 Church, like the world, is wide, and he is wise who 
 tm'ns from the house of unrest and seeks a sure 
 dwelling and a quiet resting-place. And here con- 
 gregations have gathered around teachers in times past, 
 held by the bonds of which I have spoken, and teachers 
 and congregations are gone and have left no memorial. 
 I think it strange that as yet my immediate prede- 
 cessor. Dr. Coghlan, is unrecorded in this church.^ He 
 was a man of more than usual intellectual eminence. 
 Many distinguished in the world of mind as well as 
 highly placed in society gave him admiring attention, 
 and in those whom he found congenial he stirred a 
 deep affection. I do not think of comparing any of my 
 predecessors, however distinguished, with Mr. Maurice. 
 Not often does God give one such man in a century, 
 and this century has been highly favoured, for it has 
 had two. But smaller men and men of another rank 
 in life may yet be worthy of affection and remem- 
 brance ; and the suggestion is chilling, to those whose 
 ambition is to be loved if they dare not look to be 
 venerated, that the attachment of their flock is but a 
 strand of snow, or, to use the words of Burke, ' a largess 
 of inconstancy.' But his claims to be remembered, to 
 whom our monument this day is raised, the whole 
 Church recognises. Only one other Churchman in 
 this century can be placed by his side as an equal. 
 
 ' Since this sermon was i^reached a monumental brass has been 
 placed in the church to the memory of Dr. Coghlan. 
 
FEEDERICK DENISON MAUEICE 3 
 
 Maurice and Newman have had more shapmg and 
 controllmg power over the mmd of Enghsh Christianity 
 than any other teachers the Church, this age, has 
 produced. I have been honoured by the notice of 
 one of them ; and he who has once felt the fascination 
 of Newman will keep its charm until he dies. But 
 of the two, I venture to think that the influence of 
 Maurice has been profounder, as it has been more far- 
 reaching, and cannot but be more lasting. 
 
 I am afraid that many of the younger generation 
 know little of this great Doctor and Saint of our 
 Church, that they do not read his books or know much 
 what manner of man he was. Those who knew him, 
 and sat at his feet, and caught somewhat of his spirit, 
 and watched his influence circling in ever-wider 
 sweeps, may feel impatient as I speak of their master. 
 They must see how inadequate are the conceptions of 
 him formed by one who never looked upon his face, nor 
 heard the voice whose tones still make sad music in 
 their ears. I ask their forbearance and their sym- 
 pathy ; and towards those of this congregation, once 
 so highly favoured, who now accept such ministrations 
 as I am able to supply, I am moved by a grateful 
 affection. But I am not therefore absolved from 
 speaking to them the truth as it is given to me. I 
 dare not hide it, and least of all when the thought of 
 their great teacher is with me. And it is for them to 
 beware lest they be puffed up with a sense of their 
 own finer perceptions and higher knowledge; lest a 
 
 b2 
 
4 FEEDERICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
 subtle Gnosticism diffuse itself as an evil spirit through 
 their minds, making them look down from a height 
 of cold superiority on those who cannot reach the 
 thoughts which they have grasped ; and lest the narrow 
 spirit of sect, so hateful to him they venerate, destroy 
 in them the understanding which is given to sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 But the younger generation, who knew him not, or 
 rather who think they know him not, ask. How is it 
 that he is not more spoken of ? If he was so great, 
 how was it that he was only minister of this little 
 ■church, that other men became canons and bishops 
 and decorated chaplains, while the greatest son of the 
 Church was left out, uninvited by place and prefer- 
 ment ? One of his most devoted friends,^ complaining 
 that * the first theologian ' of the day, who had done 
 more * to widen and deepen English thought than any 
 other,' had been entirely ignored by the dispensers of 
 Church patronage, says, ' Mr. Maurice was not of the 
 stuff of which dignitaries are made ; ' and adds, ' It is 
 a rare chance in Church government which lands 
 prophets or apostles in stalls or thrones.' It was 
 natural that irritation should stir the minds of those 
 who felt the greatness of their master, when they saw 
 small men raised to great place. But it may have 
 been right and best. It is with regret we see a great 
 scholar taken away from the work which he alone can 
 do for the whole Church, and employed in labours which 
 
 ' Mr. Thomas Hughes. 
 
FREDEEICK DENISON MAURICE 5 
 
 other men can do as well, it may be better than he. 
 And if this is true of the great scholar, still more is it 
 true of the prophet. The prophet is not in his place 
 of power when his energies are exhausted by incessant 
 administrative toil. He sees so far into the future, 
 and tells such strange things, that the common mass 
 of priests and people do not understand him ; they may 
 be fascinated or frightened, but he is a puzzle rather 
 than a refuge of rest, and whether he be of heaven or 
 of men they cannot tell — indeed they are not quite sure 
 that he may not be of the Devil. We need not regret 
 that fading honours were given to those whose names 
 are now forgotten. The honours of the greatest men 
 are posthumous, and to them is given a crown ' incor- 
 ruptible and undefiled and that fadeth not away.' 
 
 I said that many of the younger generation would 
 confess that they know little or nothing of Mr. 
 Maurice ; and yet his hand has given shape to their 
 minds. Inside the Church and outside it men have 
 absorbed his teachings, and are ruled by them, and 
 almost regard them as self-evident, who know not by 
 whom God gave them. He has revolutionised religious 
 thought by his silent, ever-working influence. The 
 change which has come over the tone and temper and 
 intelligence of religious teaching, during the last 
 quarter of a century, is something marvellous. Men 
 seem now to be dealing with reality, while in the past 
 they seemed to be dealing in damaged and worn-out 
 scholastic phrases. When the Florentines saw the 
 
6 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
 statue of David, which Michel Aiigelo had hewn out 
 of the deformed marble with which they had been so 
 long familiar, they said, ' A dead body has been raised 
 to life.' And when we look at the lifeless forms in 
 which Christian truth used to be presented, and now 
 listen to the Gospel message in churches and chapels 
 where even much may offend us, we cannot keep from 
 saying that ' a dead body has been raised to life.' 
 
 Perhaps I should be wrong if I claimed for Mr. 
 Maurice the highest place of scholarship in its technical 
 sense; but his wealth of learning was vast. Even Mr. 
 Mill, who thought his intellectual powers wasted, can- 
 didly admitted that ' few men had so much to waste.' 
 Everything he touched he enriched. Where ordinary 
 men saw little, or only that which was commonplace, 
 and where deeper thinkers saw inconsequence or con- 
 tradiction, he saw an explaining truth, something 
 which shed a light in the deep recesses of his soul, 
 an eternal principle, a message of redemption. To 
 him nothing real was commonplace, all was rich 
 and wonderful and vocal, because in all was that 
 which is Divine. * Every fact in nature,' he said, 
 'became a fact of humanity, a fact of divinity.' 
 Some may think that often he gave the riches he 
 seemed to discover, that he himself sowed the pearls 
 he so delighted to gather. I admit that his mind was 
 of the richest, unconsciously pouring upon all it 
 touched its affluent wealth. But he was more than 
 rich, he was original; not merely prodigal, he was 
 
FREDEKICK DENISON MAURICE 7 
 
 XDrophetic. And here he diJEferecl from the great man 
 with whom I have compared him. Newman was a 
 priest, hut Maurice was a prophet. Maurice saw 
 farther into things than other people, he saw them in 
 vaster relations than other people. That which he 
 saw was often more than they could see. He climhed 
 high, and saw visions heyond of new ranges of truth 
 flooded with the radiance of heaven; and when he 
 called from his lofty station to the peasant minds which 
 never gazed beyond the valley, that there were moun- 
 tains great and grand which reached unto heaven, 
 some said he was a dreamer and a mystic, and some 
 denounced him as a heretic. 
 
 That is a sad story, but heaven has now shed its 
 light upon it. I should not refer to it were it not 
 that that harsh taunt of heretic is still flung heart- 
 lessly about by people who ought to know better. But 
 even such wise and temperate men as the late Dr. 
 Mozley, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University 
 of Oxford, who himself names Mr. Maurice ' a pro- 
 phet,' said of one of his writings, ' Many statements 
 and arguments in the chapter appear to us not only 
 highly dangerous, but positively unsound and opposed to 
 the doctrine of the Atonement as revealed in Scripture 
 and always understood in the Church.' In another 
 l^lace, dealing with Mr. Maurice's interpretation of the 
 word Eternal, he describes it as ' an mterpretation 
 ■of Scripture which wholly unsettled, if it did not over- 
 throw, the powerful sanctions of religion contained in 
 
8 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
 the doctrine of Eternal Punishment.' But these 
 teachings of Maurice on the Atonement, and his great 
 faith in God and immortahty, which so disturbed the 
 sober Oxford divine, have entered into all forms of 
 English Christianity and sweetened them with the 
 love of God. It has been said that Newman was 
 hounded out of the Church of England. I could not 
 believe such a thing. Bigotry mightier than Newman ! 
 Impossible ! Newman could never have stayed in the 
 Church of England. If her embrace had been ever 
 so much extended he could not have stayed. It was 
 not a wider Church he wanted. The Church of his 
 birth was too wide already. The great world alarmed 
 him, and he took sanctuary in the Pioman Communion, 
 He could not have stayed in the Church of England^ 
 and Maurice could hardly have been got out of it. 
 Maurice had been called to enlarge her borders and 
 make her wide as the love of God. He looked mto 
 the world with reverence and saw the kingdom of 
 Christ, and said, ' The earth is the Lord's and the 
 fulness thereof.' The one was a cloister mind and 
 the other the spirit of perfect freedom. 
 
 That the Church of England is as strong this day 
 as she is, or, better still, let me say, that Christianity 
 has such firm hold on the minds of thinking men and 
 women, is due to such men as Mr. Maurice. The 
 Church of Eome has no place for them, and so in- 
 fidelity, like a desert, encloses her on every side and 
 ever extends its arid reach. To the Church of Eng- 
 
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 9 
 
 land they have been given, and as yet she has not been 
 able to reject them. It is little to say that, even on 
 the subjects with which Mr. Maurice has dealt — and 
 there are few Biblical subjects which he has not treated 
 — he has left many difficulties showing the same defiant 
 front. He himself would have been the very first to 
 admit it. What he cared to reveal was the truth which 
 could save men's lives. He felt that they might stand 
 staring at difficulties until they were too blinded to 
 see God. I think in his eagerness to tell men saving 
 truths, he failed to see some of the difficulties which 
 challenged commoner minds. Mr. Hutton says, 
 * Maurice's mind was not given to appreciate histori- 
 cal difficulties.' When the great truth was extracted 
 and held up to light, he went on his way, singing his 
 Te Deum, with eyes fixed on heaven. Scepticism and 
 materialism had no place in him. How could they, 
 for he was like Stephen, full of faith and of the Holy 
 Ghost. He believed that the spirit of truth was still 
 guiding men into all truth. Not to find falsehoods 
 and stir unbelief, but to search for the saving truth 
 and proclaim it was his high office. 
 
 Alas ! may not some of us, who look upon him as 
 a master, have given colour to the reproaches so un- 
 justly directed against him — may not we be finders of 
 fable rather than finders of truth ? In one of those 
 simple Gospel explanations which occupy so large a 
 place in his unaffected, unpretentious teaching — a 
 teaching inlaid with large pieces of the Bible, which 
 
10 FEEDERICK DENISON MAUEICE 
 
 the reader is inclined to skip, although he says he 
 believes the Bible is the Word of God, — but which 
 at times blaze out with a sudden revealing light, 
 there is a meaning evoked from the parable of the 
 Unjust Steward which should make us ask our- 
 selves, Are we indeed of the truth ? The Unjust 
 Steward is he who tells his master's debtors that they 
 owe less than they really do. ' Write fourscore,' says 
 the Unjust Steward, instead of a hundred. And Mr. 
 Maurice says that the Jews won friends among the 
 heathen ' by lowering the standard which they had 
 already by substituting an easy atheism for a restless 
 idolatry.' And I will say, is it not possible that we 
 have been pandering to what we may think the modern 
 spirit and the requirements of the day ? We have not 
 been asking for a spirit to guide us into all truth, 
 but listening to a serpent spirit which says there is 
 not much truth at all, and if there is you can never 
 be certain that you have it ; which says you need not 
 believe this, and that is not necessary ; and to burdened 
 souls who ask are they to subscribe Thirty-nine 
 Articles, reply. Take thy bill and write thirty. Men 
 must turn from us if we have no faith. The scepticism 
 of the pulpit is the seed of infidelity. And what would 
 he say to those who once gathered around him, and 
 called him Master, and heard him tell that it was God 
 who was ruling and redeeming the world, and that 
 only by the word of God may men and States be 
 saved, but who now doubt the possibility of Divine 
 
FKEDERICK DENISON MAURICE 11 
 
 words and see no Divine overruling and recognise no 
 I^igdom of Christ, and say that all is of the earth 
 earthy, and give to fugitive phenomena the name of 
 Positive — 
 
 And yet they know where'er they go 
 
 That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. 
 
 Well, he would say with an ancient prophet, ' Cursed 
 be he that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, 
 and whose heart departeth from the Lord.' And yet 
 methinks the curse would be a blessing in disguise, 
 for cursing was ever far from him. 
 
 One other man in this century has been named 
 a prophet ; and, like Mr. Maurice, he too bore his 
 witness that ' the things which are seen are temporal 
 and the things which are not seen are eternal.' With 
 him, too, the spiritual was the real. It may possibly 
 be thought that Maurice was not so strong a man as 
 Carlyle, because his words were more temperate. This 
 does not follow. In all Mr. Maurice's writings there 
 are signs of stern self-control. You can feel, as it 
 were, his soul rismg within him at times all hot and 
 threatening, and then it is stilled by a strong hand, 
 and the eyes grow calm to see justice and judgment. 
 Explosions of temper and tempestuous words may be- 
 tray weakness. To cry ' fool ' with scornful harshness 
 may be only dyspepsia. I have not told the text to 
 my sermon. Well, here it is—' And the Lord spake 
 unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his 
 friend.' This was the secret of Mr. Maurice's strong 
 
12 FEEDEEICK DENISON MAUEICE 
 
 self-control. Beneath the eye of God human passions^ 
 were awed ; and tenderness to men, his brethren in 
 the great Brother, chid away resentments, until his 
 foes were embraced and unexpected virtues found in 
 his enemies. Well might Tennyson say of him ' that 
 he was dear to God.' 
 
 Time will not allow me to tell of his unceasing 
 labours of practical benevolence. To those who are 
 commonly called the working classes he gave counsel 
 and constant teaching. He did the work to which he 
 invited others. The Home for Destitute Girls, and 
 the Working Men's College, owe their existence to 
 him. The last sermon he ever preached was on this 
 Sunday nine years ago, and then it was for a mission 
 of love. And now I have told those of you who knew 
 him not some of the powers and qualities of one too 
 far above me for complete comprehension. You may 
 find difficulties in your way when you study his 
 writings. He has often been called obscure. I think 
 I have been daring enough to say so myself. But 
 one must live as high a life as he lived if one 
 would enter fully into his spirit. Then possibly the 
 clouds would lie beneath our feet. His natural gifts 
 were of the very highest order, and at their dis- 
 position were vast and various treasures of learning. 
 Quick to perceive the finest differences, and subtle in 
 tracking the devious windings of the human heart 
 and mind, pushing behind the shows of things until 
 realities were reached, and inspired by the widest and 
 
FKEDEEICK DENISON MAURICE 13 
 
 warmest sympathies so that the shyest truths came 
 forth to meet him, he was a philosopher, a theologian, 
 a philanthropist, and a saint. Various and subtle 
 and rich as Newman, he was more original. Prophet 
 of the Spirit like Carlyle, he knew not how to curse. 
 Pure a samt as Keble, no shadow of religious material- 
 ism dimmed his vision of God. Wliat he said of the 
 Emperor Marcus Aurelius I will say of himself: 
 • Always shunning the display for which so many were 
 eager, not caruag to decide about the claims of their 
 different schools, but ready to learn from any of them 
 if they warn him of any insincerity to which he was 
 exposed, or show him a better way than he knew of 
 guiding his character and shaping his actions. Philo- 
 sophy was never an excuse to him for avoiding 
 troublesome business.' His hfe was a blessing, and 
 with a blessing he died. I have been told by one ' who 
 loved him well, and whose medical skill mmistered 
 to him in his last hours, that when all seemed over, 
 and the pulse had ceased to flutter and the great repose 
 had begun, strangely the fleeing spirit came back, as 
 though one thing had been omitted, and moved again 
 within its tenement ; and raising himself in his bed 
 the saint looked round on those he best loved to see, 
 and with something of his old animation and the voice 
 which can never be forgotten, he said, ' The peace of 
 God which passeth all understanding keep our hearts 
 and minds through Christ Jesus, and the blessing of 
 
 ' Dr. C. B. Eadcliffe. 
 
14 FEEDEEICK DENISON MAUEICE 
 
 God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost, be with us all evermore ' — and the blessing 
 done, he died. Can that blessing of peace be lost ? 
 It cannot so long as the spirit of him who breathed 
 it animates the Church. Like Christ he knew no will 
 but that of the Father which sent him ; and whenever 
 he heard the voice of Christ, whether it called him to 
 work, to suffer, or to die, like her whose form is 
 pictured on that pure monument, he said, * Eabboni ' 
 — my Master. 
 
SEKMONS 
 
17 
 
 I. 
 
 SCEPTICISM. 
 
 Thy faith hath saved thee.' — Lickc vli. 50. 
 
 The temper of the present time is sceptical, and it 
 will be more sceptical ere it again becomes faithful. 
 For it "will again become faithful. Men drink their 
 cup of unbelief to the dregs before they taste all its 
 bitterness, but it bites them at last. Scepticism can- 
 not be an abiding state ; it is a transition stage. 
 * Scepticism,' says Mr. Carlyle, * as sorrowful and 
 hateful as we see it, is not an end, but a beginning.' 
 And M. de Tocqueville says, * Unbelief is an accident, 
 and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.' 
 There is an age of nobler faith before us, and with it of 
 nobler life, or else the world will die. For scepticism 
 is essentially disintegrating, and demoralising, and 
 destroying. Let me tell what I mean by scepticism. 
 People who think in a foggy kind of way, and express 
 themselves accordingly, apply the word sceptic to 
 everybody who does not believe the doctrines which 
 they consider to be fundamental, to any writer or 
 teacher who denies something which they hold to be 
 
 c 
 
18 SCEPTICISM 
 
 sacred. It is applied, indiscriminately, to liim ^Yllo 
 cannot conceive the personality of God, or who does 
 not assent to the Deity of Christ, or who questions the 
 traditional authorship of some book of the Bible, or 
 who denies the doctrine of unending sin. But men 
 may do all these things, and yet be men whose fibre 
 and substance is faith. The man who denies one thing 
 or disbelieves one system, may believe most firmly in 
 another ; his whole life may be pervaded and ruled by 
 positive convictions and an ardent faith. Such a man 
 cannot be called a sceptic, any more than a Komanist 
 may call a Protestant a sceptic, or a Protestant call a 
 Eomanist a sceptic. You may call a man a mis- 
 believer who holds a different faith from yours, and 
 he will equally look upon you as a misbeliever ; but a 
 misbeliever is a believer, and not a sceptic. 
 
 I have said that scepticism is in its nature and in- 
 fluence demoralising. But I dare not say that Atheism 
 or Agnosticism necessarily leads to immorality, for 
 there need be no scepticism in either of them. I am 
 deeply convinced that real faith in God gives a moral 
 energy and a moral ideal which nothing else can equal ; 
 and that if we in any way, as individuals or as nations, 
 lose this energising faith in God, our moral efforts will 
 have a less lofty reach. But if a man have taken some- 
 thing else instead of God — if, for instance, with the 
 Comtists, he have taken Humanity for the object of 
 his worship and service, have taken it in deed and in 
 truth — then his life will be marked by a noble morality. 
 
SCEPTICISM 19 
 
 He cannot heave the inspiring emotions of piety — 
 at least I cannot think that he can — but he may be 
 an ardent, unselfish philanthropist. He believes in 
 Humanity ; he is no sceptic, and his moral life is saved 
 by faith. 
 
 Scepticism is the exact opposite of faith ; it is, in 
 a word, faithlessness ; it is the state of not believing 
 in anything. Edgar Quinet says, * Eather than half 
 believe, half love anything, I prefer to believe nothing, 
 love nothing.' Scepticism is believing nothing, loving 
 nothing. In its latest development it is a mode of 
 regarding all spiritual things with indifference or 
 contempt. Scepticism has been taught as a system of 
 philosophy, and applied to the whole realm of know- 
 ledge ; at times it has seized upon particular provinces 
 of thought ; and it has been most hurtful as a generally 
 diffused spirit and temper. There is no call in these 
 days to controvert scepticism as a comprehensive 
 system of philosophy. It must stultify itself. Nor yet 
 need I call your attention to those manifestations of 
 scepticism in the past which for a time mocked religion 
 out of countenance ; such, for instance, as prevailed 
 amongst a large section of the educated classes under 
 the empire of the Caesars, to a certain extent during the 
 Italian Eenaissance, and more confessedly in England 
 and France of the eighteenth century. The forms of 
 Voltaire and Gibbon at once rise up before us. The 
 scepticism I am careful to speak about is the scepti- 
 cism of the present rather than that of the past ; not the 
 
 c 2 
 
20 SCEPTICISM 
 
 Bcepticism outside Christianity, but the scepticism 
 inside Christianity ; not the scepticism which leans 
 against the portals of the church, and mocks airily at 
 those who enter— 
 
 And mocking is the fume of little hearts— 
 
 but the scepticism which takes seats in church, and 
 bows at the proper place, and is against innovation. 
 
 It is impossible to deny that thought is more 
 daringly exercised and expressed in religious matters 
 than it used to be. Views are openly put forth, and 
 without fear of rebuke, both by laymen and clergymen, 
 which would scarcely have been ventured upon a 
 hundred years ago even by those who were suspected 
 of freethinking. Great numbers of people have what 
 are called broader views, more liberal ideas, than were 
 allowed to their fathers. Eetaining their connection 
 with religious communities, they j^et interpret Chris- 
 tianity in a way different from that of the past. Our 
 popular literature is saturated with the spirit of criti- 
 cism, and the populace cannot escape its influence. 
 It would ill become me to condemn this new-found 
 liberty. If I am any good in the world, I gathered 
 such strength as I have from the air of freedom. The 
 future of the Church is for the free. With Burke I 
 would say, * When everything liberal is withheld, and 
 only that which is servile is permitted, it is easy to 
 conceive upon what footing they must be in such a 
 place.' But every great movement and form of life 
 
SCEPTICISM 21 
 
 lias its dangers. This freer thinking, which men of 
 all religious parties in the Church practise more or 
 less, may be allied with decay of faith and death of 
 piety ; perhaps these are its special dangers. And we 
 must watch against the foe ; for it were better to be 
 the victim of superstition, if filled with piety towards 
 God, than to be ever so enlightened, with a hard heart. 
 But practically — and do bear with me if I speak 
 plainly, for it is no good acting the part of Chris- 
 tians if we are not; if we cannot be Christians, at 
 least we may be honest men and say so — is it not 
 true that devotion to God and Christ, amongst large 
 numbers who go to churches and chapels on Sundays, 
 and especially amongst those who hold themselves to 
 be progressive thinkers, is not very fervent and im- 
 pulsive ? Do we really find worship —I do not mean 
 music or preaching— do we find worship a delight? 
 How many of us, who dont believe ever so many things, 
 can say with the poet of Evangelicahsm, ' Oh for a closer 
 walk with God ' ? What do we really know of a ' walk 
 with God ' ? What part in our life has such a saying 
 as this— ' My heart and my flesh cry out for the living 
 God ' ? Where is the man, who thinks that the old 
 doctrines are blunders or at least unnecessary, whose 
 spirit murmurs to itself, ' For me to live is Christ, and 
 to die is gain ' ? There are emotions of Christian piety 
 which circulate like life-blood through the soul of 
 him who is devout, which make his Church service 
 a strange joy, and his Communion feast a mystic 
 
22 SCEPTICISM 
 
 rapture, and send him into the world to seek and to 
 save the lost. There are such emotions. But are they 
 ours ? By their fruits shall ye know them. By our 
 fruits must we know ourselves ; and if there are duties 
 and observances which we allow to be Christian, if 
 there is a communion which we name divine, and if 
 we neglect those duties, and do not enter into that 
 sacred communion, then we must put it to ourselves 
 that we are paralysed by scepticism. 
 
 Now this paralysing temper — for with many of 
 us scepticism is a temper rather than an intellectual 
 canon — is extending and becoming epidemical. It 
 perhaps may be accounted for by the fact that times 
 of creativeness and originality are often followed 
 by times of indifference, of weariness, of collapse 
 — in other words, of scepticism. Evangelicalism and 
 Tractarianism were both creative or recreative move- 
 ments. Great forces were expended in their accom- 
 plishment. Their oppositions and contradictions, 
 and the fierce passions which their conflict provoked, 
 may have done something to bring about a time of 
 weariness, which turns itself away from the distrac- 
 tions of controversy, and will not decide upon any 
 thing — in other words, is sceptical. Practically, as it 
 relates to individuals, it may result from familiarity 
 with denial. The new form of religious method, 
 soon, to show itself in constructive power — for in 
 each age God has a new teaching and lesson — has 
 had in some cases a work of denial to perform. Just 
 
SCEPTICISM 23 
 
 as the great Eeformation had a work of denial 
 to perform, so must it be with every reformation. 
 But the Eeformation had something else to do 
 besides this. It would soon have disappeared if it 
 had only come to tell men that they were not to 
 believe in this and not to believe in that. Eeligious 
 Nihilism will no more save men's souls than j)olitical 
 Nihilism will save the State. "We must give men 
 something better than the creed of levity, every 
 article of which begins, * I don't believe.' * The 
 affirmative class,' says Emerson, 'monopolises the 
 homage of mankind.' We may have to deny, but it 
 should be that we may more savingly affirm. But 
 getting into the way of denying may establish a 
 habit of denying, until a flippant temper of scepti- 
 cism is established, which babbles, in juvenile improvi- 
 dence, of what it does not believe ; and is so clever 
 as to dispense wdth the supernatural and dogmas and 
 — * well, we don't quite know — but all those sorts of 
 things.' Can anything be feebler than that ? What 
 does it believe ? Men cannot be saved by what they 
 do not believe, any more than a man can be rich in a 
 property he does not possess. 
 
 But indolence may result in scepticism no less than 
 familiarity with denial. On the whole, this is rather a 
 weary time, when men cannot take trouble about any- 
 thing. Look at our popular books, and papers of gossip, 
 and reminiscences, and memoirs. Everything now is 
 done into small summaries, and the great classics are 
 
124 SCEPTICISM 
 
 diluted, and made effervescent with the modern spirit, 
 and suppKed in the smallest quantities required. 
 Instead of thinking out solemnly the grounds of our 
 faith, and knowing what it is we believe, and why, and 
 resting upon it with the consciousness of reasoned 
 conviction, men acquiesce in a traditional orthodoxy, 
 or subside into a shallow scepticism. Where is the 
 hunger for faith which makes men labour for the food ? 
 I can almost agree with the words of Lessing, especially 
 when I remember that in gaining the knowledge of 
 God there may be eternal progress, when he says, 
 * Not the truth of which a man is or believes himself 
 possessed, but the sincere effort to come behmd the 
 truth, makes the worth of the man. For not through 
 the possession, but through the investigation of truth 
 does he develop those energies in which alone consist 
 his growing perfection.' And I am sure that I accept 
 the teaching of the Platonic Socrates in his answer 
 to Menon : ' Some things I have said of which I 
 am not altogether confident. But that we shall be 
 better and braver and less helpless if we think that 
 we ought to inquire than we should if we indulged 
 in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no 
 use in searching after what we know not — this is 
 a theme upon which I am ready to fight in word and 
 deed to the utmost of my power.' 
 
 Again, is not scepticism very often the product 
 of cowardice ? Men seem to see where their thoughts 
 wOl carry them if they dare to inquire, and the pro- 
 
SCEPTICISM 25 
 
 spect alarms them. If tlie}^ come to such a conclusion, 
 they must give up this, or leave that pleasant place, 
 or make that damaging confession ; they must be- 
 come poor, or neglected, or take up some painful, 
 unrewarded toil. And so they give up thinking, and 
 do not look any more at the attracting, alarming pro- 
 spect, and persuade themselves that the land they 
 have seen is only a mirage ; and yet they know it is 
 real. And is not scepticism very often the attitude 
 in which hopelessness expresses itself ? ' Where is 
 thy God ? ' is the cry of blind despair. There can 
 be little surprise if, as it relates to one part of our 
 great empire, political scepticism should take pos- 
 session of men's minds. What's the good of trying 
 any more ? is likely to be the heart-breaking question 
 of those whose efforts have been baffled again and 
 again. We must shake ourselves up, whatever political 
 party we may be allied with, lest a despairing stupor 
 overwhelm us ; and we must watch lest an ungovern- 
 able ferocity seize upon us. Scepticism may produce 
 apathy, it may drive into mania. We must steadily 
 keep going on in the direction of justice and gene- 
 rosity, and never cease to work, and never cease to 
 hope. It has been said that 'indolent scepticism 
 combines naturally with political indifferentism.' I 
 will say that hopeless scepticism may end in reckless 
 raving fury. 
 
 And thus, as I conclude my sermon, I come back 
 upon the statement with which I started, that scepti- 
 
26 SCEPTICISM 
 
 cism is essentiall}^ demoralising. But pray keep in mind 
 what I said or implied, that scepticism does not mean 
 not believing what we believe ; does not mean what we 
 may call heresy. The heretic may be a man strong 
 in faith. The object of his faith may not be, in all re- 
 spects, the same as the object of our faith, but he may 
 be a firm believer. It is scepticism, the unbelieving 
 condition, the faithless state of mind, which is de- 
 moralising. Listen to these words of a German 
 philosopher. ' It is as true of the Greek Sophists 
 as of the French Encyclopaedists, that the morals, 
 which had grown up with the religious dogmas, were 
 impaired with them ; that individualism, sensualism, 
 and a superficial rationalism put an end to all sincere 
 devotion in the search for truth and in the investi- 
 gation of the moral principles of life, until at last an 
 all-destroying scepticism, a dialectic and rhetoric to 
 which everything was mere sport, threatened to take 
 possession of the popular consciousness.' 
 
 Yes, indeed, scepticism is all-destroying because it 
 destroys all energy. A man who has any faith what- 
 ever must do something ; but he who has no faith can 
 do nothing, and may drift into anything, drift into 
 a bottomless unlighted pit. Let us beware of this 
 numbing, paralysing malady. If we are thinking 
 that we believe certain things and do not do them, 
 then let us suspect that the chih hand of scepticism is 
 touching us, that it may embrace us, and hold us fast 
 — a corpse which takes away our vital heat — until the 
 
SCEPTICISM 27 
 
 chills of death are hnpressed upon us. * What does it 
 matter?' says scepticism, indolent, pusillanimous, or 
 hopeless. * What does anything matter ? ' Well, it 
 matters this — the loss of the soul. Of the tree of 
 scepticism the eternal law of God is, ' In the da}^ thou 
 eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' All noble ideals 
 and ambitions and possibilities perish in the presence 
 of scepticism. It leaves — 
 
 No God, no heaven, no earth in the void world, 
 The wide grey lampless deep unpeopled world. 
 
 From such a scepticism as this, good Lord, deliver us. 
 
28 
 
 II. 
 
 BEVELATION. 
 I. 
 
 ' The secret things belong unto the Lord our God ; but those things 
 which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that 
 we may do all the words of this law.' — Dcideronoimj xxix. 29. 
 
 The long and painful experience of mankind has con- 
 vinced men that there are things which they cannot 
 explain, mysteries which are insoluble; about which 
 one thing only is clear, that they never can become 
 clear. And this sense of powerlessness, which at times 
 is distressing, affects not only the deep and laborious 
 thinker, but it tortures as well the humblest man and 
 the weary partner of his life. For if the speculative 
 intellect is only given to some, the feelings are the 
 possession of all, and the feelings rise up in their 
 anguish and despakingiy ask Why? and there is 
 nothing to answer. The mother whose eyes are 
 fastened on the dead child, the powerful and far- 
 seeing mind unable to do its work because of physical 
 disease, the man whose fortune has been destroyed 
 by the faults of others, the philanthropist appalled 
 
REVELATION 29 
 
 at the amount of human misery and sin which no 
 labour seems to diminish — all ask in vain Why ? The 
 questions, Why is there any evil if God is good and 
 God is omnipotent ? and, How can I be free and re- 
 sponsible if all my future is certain and known to 
 God so that nothing can alter it ? and questions like 
 these, which rise up from the poor cradle of the dead 
 babe, and are the despairing perplexity of many an 
 earnest religious inquirer, attest the fact that there 
 are things which, in this life at least, refuse to give 
 up their secret. 
 
 And if the long experience of the race tells us 
 that for some things we cannot get explanations, that, 
 whether we are patient or not, the m3'stery will still 
 stand before us unmoved and unchanging, like the 
 black cruel cliffs which throw back the ever-beating 
 sea, so too declare the materialistic teachers of to-day. 
 These carpenters of science seem to say, there is 
 only one thing you can do, and that is cut up the 
 world into positive planks ; there is only one thing 
 you can look forward to doing in the future, and 
 that is to doing the same thing, only doing it 
 faster, now by steam, then by electricity, and then 
 perhaps by something else ; until knowledge becomes 
 a vast timber yard of regulation planks all positively 
 wooden, with no philosophy, metaphysics, nor theology 
 about them. Yet the materialist, too, is compelled to 
 recognise the existence of that which he cannot reduce, 
 with his saws and planes and chisels, to scientific 
 
30 EEVELATION 
 
 shape, and he says, Leave the unknowable and stick 
 to the positive. I am disposed to agree with the 
 materiaHst, only there are things which he calls un- 
 knowable which I say are freely offered to our know- 
 ledge ; things plain in this world, where so much is 
 mysterious, which he says are obscure ; and the text 
 recognises alike the spirit of uninquiring reverence 
 and of rational freedom. * The secret things belong 
 unto the Lord our God ; but those things which are 
 revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, 
 that we may do all the words of this law.' 
 
 ' But I do not believe that there are any things 
 revealed,' is a likely answer of to-day ; * I do not accept 
 what you call revelation. I accept what Nature teaches 
 me. If Nature teaches a natural religion, I can 
 accept that ; but this supernatural revelation, this re- 
 velation of mysteries inaccessible to the human reason, 
 for the comprehension of which it is utterly inadequate, 
 this I do not accept. It is the resource of irrational 
 pietism and the justification of fanatical intolerance.' 
 Now such a statement as this calls for consideration. 
 It may be that certain things have been called reve- 
 lations which are not properly revelations, and that 
 certain ideas have been attached to revelations, or 
 rather regarded as essential parts of all revelations, 
 which need not be so regarded, and which at least are 
 separable in thought from the proper idea of revela- 
 tion. * We find every day instances of men resting 
 their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know 
 
REVELATION 31 
 
 to be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it 
 sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and 
 know not as yet on what other grounds they are to 
 take their stand. And some men succumb in the 
 trial and lose their faith together with the argument 
 which supported it. But the truth still stands, in 
 spite of the failure of some to keep their belief in it, 
 and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by 
 the old arguments.' ^ 
 
 Mr. Gladstone has lately told us that 'there is no 
 definition, properly so called, of revelation either con- 
 tained in Scripture or established by the general and 
 permanent consensus of Christians.' But one would 
 have thought that its meaning was so obvious that for 
 this reason, while the word has ever been freely used 
 in the Church, it has not been defined. To reveal a 
 thing simply means to make it clearly known, so to 
 X3ut forth a truth, a fact, that it is seen for what it is, to 
 bring a thing out of obscurity into daylight. To reveal 
 a thing is to make known something which previously 
 had been altogether hidden or left very much in 
 obscurity. Some years ago Mr. Maurice published a 
 tractate on the use of the word revelation in the New 
 Testament, proving that it means in all cases ' the 
 giving of light or the removal of a veil.' And the late 
 Eegius Professor of Divinity in the University of Ox- 
 ford, Dr. Mozley, in his lectures on miracles, says, ' A 
 revelation is, properly speaking, such only by virtue 
 " Bishop Temple. 
 
32 REVELATION 
 
 of telling lis something whicli we could not know 
 without it.' But if this be the meaning of revela- 
 tion, * the giving of light, the removing of a veil ' — 
 if indeed it he ' telling us something which we could 
 not know without it ' — then, at first sight, there 
 is something quite thoughtless in a man saying he 
 cannot accept revelation. For to say that, would 
 mean he could not accept anything which was made 
 clear to him. Not to accept revealed truths, or the 
 truths of revelation, primarily, can only mean not to 
 accept truths which have been made quite clear, truths 
 held up in the daylight for a man to look at and be 
 sure that they are and what they are. Not to accept 
 revealed truth must mean, not to accept truth which 
 is plain, from which the veil has been removed ; 
 and such a state of mind would be one of unreason 
 and mental aberration. And yet men thoughtlessly 
 go on saying they cannot accept revelation. They 
 must certainly mean something else by revelation than 
 that which is made clear, or they could not so stultify 
 themselves. 
 
 But I can almost hear the angry rejoinder, ' That 
 is all very well, but it is not to the point. It is quib- 
 bling. You have been dealing with the obvious 
 etymology of the word. We mean it in its technical 
 sense. To put it plainly, we do not accept the Bible. 
 There, that is plain.' But I do not think it is quite 
 plain. At any rate, I do not think it is quite sensible. 
 You cannot mean that there is nothing true in the 
 
EEVELATION 33 
 
 Bible. You cannot mean that you do not accept the 
 truths of the Bible, for of course all men — character- 
 istically men of science — accept truth from whatever 
 quarter it may come. Not to accept a truth, which 
 is seen to be a truth, is not merely a blamable infidelity, 
 it is, I almost think, a mental impossibility. When it 
 is said by any one that he does not accept the Bible 
 and does not beheve in the Bible, he must mean that 
 there are parts which he thinks are not true, or parts 
 which are so mysterious that he cannot understand 
 them. It is quite impossible that he can mean that 
 he puts away from him as worthless or untrue every- 
 thing contained in the Bible from beginning to end. 
 For instance, when he is told that it is the duty of 
 man to love his neighbour as himself, he would scarcely 
 deny that that is a rule of living which would do much 
 to increase the goodness and happiness of man, a law 
 of well-being clearly expressed, a revelation — an ethical 
 revelation — capable of being verified in human ex- 
 perience. So that the very man who, uncritically and 
 without exactness of mind, says he does not accept the 
 Bible or revelation, must admit, when he thmks of it, 
 that there are at least some things which are true in 
 the Bible, some things which are good, and that these 
 things are clear and plam things — in other words, he 
 must admit that there are Bible revelations, that is, 
 truths which are clearly put forth in the Bible, which 
 he cannot refuse, to which he must submit. 
 
 But it is answered, ' We do not reject the plain 
 
 D 
 
34 KEVELATION 
 
 and excellent moral teachings which may be found 
 in the Old and New Testaments. What we mean is 
 that we do not accept them because they are written 
 in the Bible, or because they are said to be super- 
 naturally inspired and authenticated by miracles. 
 We accept these excellent moral teachings because 
 they commend themselves to our reason and to the 
 reason of the race ; but what we cannot accept are 
 these mysteries, these incomprehensible, unthinkable 
 doctrines which are revealed in the New Testament.' 
 In the next sermon I shall consider the connection 
 between revelation and what we call the supernatu- 
 ral. But to the second objection I reply at once, a 
 mystery is not a revelation. It is the very opposite of 
 a revelation. As long as a thing is a mystery it is 
 not a revelation. As long as a thing is a mystery to 
 any man, so long that thing to him is not a revelation, 
 even when it has become a revelation to more powerful 
 minds. St. Paul always put the two things, mystery 
 and revelation, as direct opposites of each other. It 
 was hidden from the Jewish mind, for instance, that it 
 was the purpose of God to join all mankind together 
 in one religion by the revelation of Christ. That idea 
 did not present itself to the Jewish mind as the clearly 
 seen purpose of Divine Providence ; and St. Paul says 
 it was a mystery * hidden from ages and from genera- 
 tions, but now was revealed by God's Holy Apostles 
 and prophets.' But when it was revealed it ceased to 
 be a mystery ; and to talk of a revelation which is at 
 
EEVELATION 35 
 
 the same time a mystery is a contradiction. You 
 may recognise the fact of a mystery. Mysteries may 
 confront us in the Bible as they do in other books, in 
 the works of science as in the events of human life ; 
 but so long as they are mysteries they cannot be 
 called revelations, and our conduct with regard to 
 them may well be guided by our text. In many cases 
 it may well be that of the Agnostic, to leave them 
 alone ; or, with the pious soul, to leave them with 
 Him to whom there is no mystery and all is reve- 
 lation. * Secret things belong unto the Lord our God, 
 but those things which are revealed belong unto us 
 and to our children, that we may do all the words of 
 this law.' 
 
 Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light, 
 A blaze of glory that forbids the sight. 
 O teach me to believe Thee thus conceal'd, 
 And search no farther than Thyself reveal'd.' 
 
 I freely admit that there are mysteries confront- 
 ing us in the Old and New Testaments. Truths are 
 intimated, suggested, pointed at, dimly outlined, like a 
 mountain castle scarce seen through the mists of even- 
 mg which fill the valley ; but, inasmuch as they are 
 not clear, to that extent they cannot be said to be re- 
 vealed. They may be the outlines of gi-eat facts, 
 suggestions of most certam truths; but until they 
 are brought to light they are not revealed truths. 
 And so I think it may be with some of the theological 
 
 ' Dryden. 
 
 d2 
 
36 EEVELATION 
 
 doctrines which are said to be revealed in the New 
 Testament. I should say that they are intimated, 
 suggested, hinted at, implicitly contamed, it may be, 
 in the New Testament, but not revealed. Some are 
 of such a nature that they cannot be made clear to 
 the human mind. They are beyond us. They are 
 Divine mysteries which it is reverent for us to place 
 with the secret things which belong unto the Lord 
 our God. Why even Dr. Newman declared, at a 
 time when he was insisting on the most dogmatic 
 theological precision in the English Church and was 
 the fierce denouncer of * Liberalism in religion,' * that 
 as regards the doctrine of the Trinity the mere text of 
 Scripture is not calculated either to satisfy the intellect 
 or to ascertain the temper of those who profess to accept 
 it as a rule of faith.' It was the theological ages which 
 drew forth the intimations and suggestions of the 
 Bible — in a word, that which it had left as mysteries 
 or dim suggestions — into dogmatic definition. 
 
 Let me advise those who have been perplexed and 
 bewildered by some of these subjects, reverently to lay 
 them on one side, and rather to devote themselves to 
 the revelation which it has pleased Almighty God to 
 make, and that is Himself. ' Eevelation,' as Mr. 
 Maurice says, *is always the unveiling of a person.' 
 It is Christ who is the revelation of God, Christ who 
 is the manifestation of the Father, Christ who makes 
 the character of God plain and clear. He is a revela- 
 tion indeed, for in Him was the fulness of the Godhead 
 
EEVELATION 37 
 
 bodily. He it was who showed clearly the God of all, 
 intelligible, beneficent, adorable, showed Him thus in 
 His own human unquenchable love and devotion to 
 man. Well might He say, * He that hath seen Me 
 hath seen the Father.' God the Infinite Spirit is a 
 mystery. God in the face of Jesus Christ, God as 
 redeeming, saving love in the midst of men, is the 
 Word of life which can be seen and handled. * Look 
 unto Me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth.' 
 
38 
 
 III. 
 
 BEVELATION. 
 II, 
 
 ' The secret things belong unto the Lord our God ; but those things 
 which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that 
 ■we may do all the words of this law.' — Deuteronomy xxix. 29. 
 
 The Bible is not the sole medium of revelation. The 
 Church has been the minister of God in unveiling 
 and drawing forth into dogmatic precision, truths, 
 which have been but dimly suggested in Holy Scrip- 
 ture. But in some cases Churches have fallen into 
 error. It has been recently laid down that ' the 
 Catholic faith and Apostolic order of the Church are 
 unalterable and may not be touched.' ^ Now, if by the 
 * Catholic faith ' be meant the sum of truth, the Mind 
 of God, Eternal Verity which is and which was and 
 which is to come, then we all admit that the Catholic 
 faith is unalterable. But the knowledge of the Catholic 
 faith has never yet been complete and perfect. It has 
 been communicated gradually. The knowledge pos- 
 sessed by Jewish prophets was less than that which 
 Apostles enjoyed. When Christ said to His chosen 
 
 ' Committee of Convocation. 
 
REVELATION 39 
 
 ones, ' I have many things to say unto you, but ye 
 cannot bear them now,' they did not possess the 
 * CathoHc faith ' in its fuhiess. It is perfectly certain 
 that the doctrme of the Divine Trinity was held in 
 clearer definitions and more conscious possession after 
 the first great Councils of the Church than when she 
 had nothing but the letter of Scripture. Cardinal 
 Newman says that Scripture of itself, ' instead of being 
 a source of instruction on the doctrines of the Trinity 
 and Incarnation, was scarcely more than a sealed book, 
 needing an interpretation, amply and powerfully as it 
 served the purpose of proving those doctrines when 
 they were once disclosed.' Bishop Jeremy Taylor 
 says, ' Original sin as it is at this day commonly ex- 
 pUcated was not the doctrine of the primitive Church ; 
 but when Pelagius had puddled the stream, St. Austin 
 was so angry that he stamped and disturbed it more.' 
 Newman declared ' it had often been shown ' that 
 the doctrine of Purgatory was 'no received opinion 
 during the first ages of the Gospel. . . . Hardly one 
 or two short passages of one or two Fathers for six 
 centuries can be brought in its favour, and those, 
 at the most, rather suggesting than teaching it. In 
 truth, the doctrme seems to have occurred to them, 
 as it has been received generally since, first from the 
 supposed need of such a provision in the revealed 
 scheme— from (what may be called) its naturalness 
 in the judgment of reason ; and next in consequence 
 of the misinterpretation of certain texts.' Hagen- 
 
40 KEVELATION 
 
 bach, in his * History of Doctrines,' says that * Pro- 
 testants and Eoman CathoHcs established the doctrine 
 of Atonement on Ansehn's theory of Satisfaction . . . 
 a doctrine estabHshed with an amount of ingenuity,, 
 and a completeness of reasoning, hitlierto iinattained 
 ... a doctrine the first contemporaries and first 
 successors of Anselm were far from adopting in all its 
 strictness.' The Lutheran doctrine of Justification 
 by Faith, was something new to the masses of the 
 Christian world, and was condemned by the Council 
 of Trent. * Formally and literally stated, then, the 
 Lutheran dogma of justification by faith is inconsis- 
 tent with the first principles of common sense and 
 natural religion, that in this shape no human being 
 can possibly believe it. It requires us to believe that 
 that which makes a man pleasing to God, or justifi- 
 cation, has nothing to do with morality or goodness 
 in him ; and being moral creatures, we cannot believe 
 this.' ^ The history of the Church bears witness to 
 the gradual way in which the ' Catholic faith ' has been 
 given to the mind of man. And if the Christian 
 Church shows us the evolution of dogma, and the 
 variations in dogma, the English Church shows the 
 reversibility of dogma and the reformability of dogma. 
 It has denied some things which the Church had pre- 
 viously affirmed, and corrected other things which the 
 Church had before imperfectly expressed. That was 
 one work of the Eeformation, and who shall say it is 
 
 ' Mozley. 
 
EEVELATION 41 
 
 now complete? Certainly Holy Scripture does not ; for 
 we are led by it to look for a day of fuller and clearer 
 perceptions of Divine Reality. ' Now we see through 
 a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in 
 party but then shall I know even as also I am known.' 
 But there are those who say they cannot re- 
 ceive a revelation on the ground that it is super- 
 natural, that they only know that which comes 
 through the mind of man, and is capable of justifying 
 itself to the human reason. Now I affirm that the 
 Bible revelations have come through the mind of 
 man. I am not inquiring how they got there ; 
 but, however they got there, they were convictions, 
 certainties, in some man's mind, which he declared 
 to his fellows. They have come through the mind of 
 man. They are capable of justifying themselves to 
 the human reason, and these things I shall attempt 
 to prove. But first let me deal with those who de- 
 cline to accept revelation on the ground that it is 
 supernaturally or miraculously authenticated. Well, 
 then, accept it on the ground that it is plain truth. 
 For remember it is not miracles which make a thing 
 true. They may lead some one to give heed to a 
 statement which is made as a truth, who might have 
 passed it by but for the wonder or miracle ; but a 
 thing is not true because of the miracle. ' A miracle,' 
 says Professor Mozley, * cannot oblige us to accept 
 any doctrine which is contrary to our moral nature 
 or to a fundamental principle of religion.' A thing 
 
42 EEVELATION 
 
 is true just because it is a fact, a part of the consti- 
 tution of things, a law of their being. Ten thousand 
 miracles could not make an untruth true, and ten 
 thousand miracles would not make a truth a whit 
 truer. If a thing is true, it makes no difference to its 
 truth whether a child, a scholar, a poet, or philosopher 
 declare it ; or whether it be declared by some one who 
 is called an apostle or a prophet, of whom it is said 
 that he healed the blind or cast out devils. A truth 
 of inspiration is no truer than a truth of induction or 
 of demonstration. Truth is simply truth wherever it 
 may come from or however it be communicated. 
 
 The Christian revelation offers itself as a guide for 
 a life which reaches from the present into eternity. 
 It tells the way in which the soul may rise superior 
 to evil of every kind, and so it is said that Christ 
 came ' to save His people from their sins.' Now this 
 law of life, this saving method of Christ, is a thing 
 that can be tried. Men can find out by experience 
 whether it can do what it professes to do. Just as 
 you can try a medicine and find out whether or not 
 it is effective, so you can listen to Christ's words and 
 find out whether they are indeed a revelation of 
 salvation. They commend themselves at first sight 
 to nearly all men as laws which are good and high. 
 They can be tried, and it will be found that they are 
 also true and practicable. Take them then on the 
 ground of their truth — for it is not miracles which 
 make them true — and at least prove their saving 
 
REVELATION 43 
 
 powers before you enter upon the difficult realm of 
 the supernatural. This was the test to which Christ 
 submitted His revelation. He said, ' If any man will 
 do His will, he shall know of the doctrme whether 
 it be of God or whether I speak of Myself.' "What 
 would you think of a man who declined to take a 
 medicine, which had proved by large experience to be 
 efficacious, because it was said to have been whis- 
 pered, in ancient days, to some one m a dream, or 
 a mysterious being had told it to some mage or 
 medicine-man of the past ? The one practical ques- 
 tion is. Does it cure ? The question. How was the 
 cure discovered ? is purely historical ; and it is im- 
 proper, and I thmk I ma}^ say irrational, for a man 
 either to reject or disparage or ignore that which has the 
 appearance of truth, and offers itself for verification 
 in mdividual experience, simply because the revealer 
 of the truth is said to have been a wonder-worker. 
 Any man can try Christ's method of salvation, and find 
 out for himself whether indeed it is the power of God 
 and the wisdom of God. The humblest man can test 
 it and prove whether it is true or not. But to prove 
 whether or not some miracle took place is a very 
 different thing indeed. One man will conclude that 
 the miracle did take place, another that it may have 
 taken place, and a third that it did not take place. I 
 can never be certain what effect upon an mdividual 
 mind may be the evidence which I bring before it for 
 the truth of a miracle. I may be convinced of it, but 
 
44 REVELATION 
 
 I can never be certain that the same evidence will 
 convince some one else, indeed I may be very doubtful 
 whether it will or not. But I am sure about Christ's 
 revelation of the plan of salvation, I am certain of its 
 effect when it is honestly tried and faithfully adopted. 
 Its evidence is in itself, and, as Christ said, * The 
 words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they 
 are life.' No man is justified in refusing Christ's 
 laws for life and wellbeing on the ground that they 
 are miraculously attested. If they are true, that is 
 their sufficient foundation. And yet even Mr. Carlyle 
 has spoken in a thoughtless way more befitting 
 the flighty readers of superficial magazines. He 
 could not believe in a ' revelation technically so 
 called — a revelation, that is to say, supposed to be 
 established by historical miracles.' But surely he 
 could believe in a revelation — that is, something which 
 was made clear to him. There were revelations made 
 to him, truths which came out clearly in his mind, 
 which vindicated themselves as truths, and which 
 were not proved to be true by scientific methods. He 
 might not be able to tell how they came to him, but 
 they were deep and intense personal convictions 
 which rooted themselves in his mind. His sj)irit said, 
 * That is a truth which it were well for men of the 
 world to take hold of.' The revelations which came 
 to Carlyle he communicated to his fellows ; telling 
 them, and in no measured language — for he was an 
 uncompromising preacher of damnation — what would 
 
EEVELATION 45 
 
 take place if they refused to hearken to his words. 
 And men Hstened and were caught by the assevera- 
 tions, and they tried them in practice ; and some of 
 them have told us that the teaching of Carlyle pro- 
 vided them with a religion. * Thy own God-created 
 soul,' says Carlyle, ' is a revelation.' But then some 
 other man's ' God-created soul ' may also be a reve- 
 lation. And if a revelation comes from a man's 
 * God-created soul,' may it not be told to other men, 
 and produce in them the deep conviction that these 
 things are true ? If thy own soul is a revelation, so 
 may be the soul of some other man who is bigger and 
 better than thou. 
 
 Now this truth, enunciated by Carlyle, is overlooked 
 by some men — I mean the truth that the human soul 
 can impart or be the medium of revelations. Modern 
 materialism, which can scarcely be charged with shy- 
 ness or retiring habits or humbleness of mind, does at 
 times seem to forget that man, the human mind, is 
 the greatest factor in Nature ; and that a study of 
 Nature which does not give chief importance to the 
 study of mind, is not the statue but the torso of 
 science. Here are the fine pulpit words of a worshipper 
 of matter : * The volume of inspkation is the book of 
 Nature, of which the open scroll is ever spread forth 
 before the eyes of man ... on the earth it is illus- 
 trated by all that is magnificent and beautiful, in the 
 heavens its letters are suns and worlds.' ' 
 
 ' Draper. 
 
46 KEVELATION 
 
 But let it not be forgotten that the book of 
 Nature has its chapter on man. If the vohime of 
 Nature is the only truly inspired volume, that part 
 of it, the most important part of that volume which 
 we call man, is at least equally inspired; and 
 we must learn what man's nature says as well as 
 what the earth says, and suns and worlds. And as 
 surely as the earth says gravitation, so surely, as a 
 fact of Nature, does the mind of man say God. To 
 refuse to receive revelation while professing to be 
 taught by Nature is to be self-contradictory. 
 
 For revelation is one of the facts of Nature, what- 
 ever be our theory of it. It is the fact that certain 
 things have come unto the minds of certain men with 
 startling, convincing clearness — as true, unalterably 
 true, eternally true ; so true, that they have said that 
 they were the words of the Eternal, taught them by a 
 higher reason than their own. And they have told 
 them to their fellows, who have proved them true by 
 experience. You cannot study Nature and yet pass 
 by a whole series of the facts of Nature. And these 
 revelations are facts of Nature. One man may ex- 
 plain them in one way, and another in another ; but 
 the facts of mind are facts of Nature, and if the 
 volume of Nature is an inspired book, so too must that 
 part of it be inspired which we call the mind of man. 
 It is the order of Nature that from time to time 
 great discoveries are made. These are revelations 
 which appear before great men, and are given by 
 
EEVELATION 47 
 
 them to smaller men. But if we believe in God, then 
 we believe that these revelations are given m accord- 
 ance with His mind and will ; in other words, that 
 they are Divine revelations. All that comes by Divine 
 law, by the constitution framed by the Divine mind, 
 is a Divine work ; just as we properly say that each 
 new being born into the world has been created by 
 God. 
 
 Thus revelation is natural, and at the same time 
 supernatural. It comes from the mind of man, it 
 comes according to the mind and determmation of 
 God. And therefore what is called natural religion 
 is at the same time revealed religion. Coleridge 
 distinctly says, ' I know no religion but revealed.' Mr. 
 Maurice says, ' In place of revealed religion, which is 
 set up to compete with a number of other religions, 
 we shall acknowledge a God who has been revealing 
 Himself at " sundry times and divers manners " to the 
 nations of the earth.' And Dr. Newman says, ' No 
 people (to speak in general terms) has been denied a 
 revelation from God.' But it is not pretended that 
 all the religions of the world have been attended by 
 unusual displays of Divine power, or were miraculously 
 imparted. Somehow, certain truths were borne in 
 upon the minds of some men, and were taught by them, 
 with much, no doubt, that was erroneous, to their 
 fellows. Indeed, Dr. Newman says that ' one differ- 
 ence between our revelation and thehs is that ours is 
 authenticated.' So that he at least admits that reve- 
 
48 EEVELATION 
 
 lations may be unauthenticated. 1 cannot agree to 
 this. They may not be authenticated by miracle, but 
 they are authenticated. Whatever portion of truth 
 was revealed to any nation in times past, authenticated 
 itself. If it was a revelation, it was a truth clear to 
 those who received it. 
 
 But it is replied, ' If reason be adequate, where is 
 the necessity for revealed doctrines ? ' Might it not as 
 well be asked. If reason be adequate, where is the 
 necessity for the discoveries of scientific men ? The 
 ' adequacy of reason,' if we must adopt the phrase, 
 does not mean that the reason of every child of man 
 is adequate to discover all the mathematical and scien- 
 tific and ethical truths which the world possesses. To 
 one great man is given the power of making some 
 great discovery or revelation. That discovery is tested 
 by others, and acknowledged by the most capable men 
 to be true. It enters the schools, and descends mto 
 the community. It is taught authoritatively in 
 primers and lesson-books, and is received and jiro- 
 fessed by all. ' Eevelation has a constant tendency to 
 become nature — that is, to transmute itself, as it were, 
 into our human flesh and blood and become part of 
 our ordinary intelligence.' ' In other words, revealed 
 religion becomes natural religion. But the great 
 majority of mankind could not have discovered it for 
 themselves ; and, although it can be verified by the 
 reason, the great majority could not even verify it 
 
 ' Christlieb. 
 
REVELATION 49 
 
 €xcept by experience. By the adequacy of the reason, 
 we mean that the great truths which have been dis- 
 covered and revealed by great men or inspired men — 
 at least discovered and revealed in accordance with the 
 mind and law of God — may be verified by the right 
 use of a reason powerful enough to handle intelligently 
 subjects of such a nature. 
 
 The one ever-speaking revelation of the mind of 
 God is the history of man. It is the history of Divine 
 rewards and punishments. In the growth and decay 
 of nations, in the developments of conscience, in the 
 achievements of art, in the happiness or discords of 
 society, m the discoveries of science, in the efforts, 
 successes, and failures of religions, we have the pro- 
 vidential manifestation of the mind of God, the great 
 Bible, of which our Bible is the most precious part. 
 And for these unveilings of the Divine will and law 
 let us be grateful. * If we miss the truth,' says 
 Jeremy Taylor, ' it is because we will not find it ; for 
 certain it is that all that truth which God hath made 
 necessary he hath also made legible and plain, and if 
 we will open our eyes we shall see the sun, and if we 
 will walk in the light we shall rejoice in the light.' 
 The way of salvation is a clearly marked way. It is 
 not a series of mysteries which we cannot comj)rehend 
 but must assert on pain of perdition. 
 
 Believe it not : 
 The primal duties shine aloft — like stars ; 
 The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless. 
 Are scattered at the feet of man — like flowers. 
 
 E 
 
50 KEVELATION 
 
 The generous inclination, the just rule, 
 
 Kind wishes, and good actions, and pure thoughts. 
 
 No mystery is here. 
 
 Mystery there must be, but thank God for revela- 
 tion which has come ' to give light to them that sit in 
 darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide 
 our feet into the way of peace.' 
 
51 
 
 IV. 
 
 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION. 
 I. 
 
 'Handle me and see.' — Luke xxiv. 39. 
 
 Whether it is to be regretted or not, it is undeniable 
 that members of the Church of England are not all of 
 the same mind on certain religious subjects ; just as 
 it is certain that there never was a Church or sect in 
 which different schools and parties did not exist. In 
 our own Church these differences are seen from with- 
 out as three great groups. Not that there are really 
 sharp lines dividing them, for they intermingle with 
 and gradually shade off into each other ; but roughly 
 they may be regarded as compact parties which have 
 names by which they are known, as Galilean and 
 Ultramontane denote or denoted bodies of opposing 
 thought in the Koman Church. The names which 
 have been given to the three great parties in our own 
 Church may not be the most appropriate, just as the 
 names Liberal and Tory may of themselves very inac- 
 curately describe the great oppositions of modern poli- 
 tics. But it is hard to change these political terms 
 
52 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 and impossible not to use them. And exactly so is it 
 with the names of our Church parties. Whether we 
 like the names or not, we cannot help using them. It is 
 of no use saying, when people wish to know what are 
 our methods or conclusions in certain matters, 'We 
 are Churchmen or Christians.' We cannot make our- 
 selves understood unless we either use the distinctive 
 name which will convey some of the information 
 desired, or enter into long explanations of our private 
 opinions — which, if they cannot be classed under any 
 party, are probably but the vagaries of egotism. 
 
 Nobody disliked these names for Church parties 
 more than Mr. Maurice, and no one was more un- 
 willing to adopt such names. He utterly declined 
 to be described as a Broad Churchman or one of the 
 Liberal party. But it cannot be denied that he came 
 to conclusions and interpretations, on religious and 
 theological subjects, which were not those generally 
 accepted by members of the Church of England, nor 
 by the Protestant Dissenters of his time. It is certain 
 he was a personage clearly marked off from the mass 
 of religious teachers. He was much more clearly 
 marked off, distinct, and original than Dr. Pusey was. 
 No one can deny that his teachmgs on the word 
 Eternal were not those generally received. We know 
 that he suffered persecution because of these opinions. 
 Dr. Jelf described them as * very dangerous and un- 
 sound.' The Council of King's College pronounced 
 them to be of ' dangerous tendency and calculated to 
 
LIBEEALISM IN KELIGION 53 
 
 unsettle the minds of theological students of King's 
 College.' No one can deny that his teachings on the 
 Atonement, which are now so widely dijQfused among 
 all denominations of Christians, were shared in his day 
 by but a few ; they were condemned, as he painfully 
 experienced, by many. ' Have you heard that Dr. 
 Candlish came up to lectm-e agamst me at Exeter Hall ? 
 ... He was much applauded.' ^ Mr. Maurice was a 
 profound philosopher and a profound theologian, and a 
 man who lived in close and constant communion with 
 God. In the devout use of his great powers he reached 
 the conclusions which, he maintained, were the true 
 teachmgs of Christianity, but which were not the con- 
 clusions of the great majority of Christians in any 
 Church whatever. And in his letters he sadly admits 
 his isolation. Here are the first words I light on to 
 this effect. They are on Subscription, and he says, ' I 
 had a moderately clear instinct when I wrote it that 
 I never could be acceptable to any schools in the 
 Church. ... All these parties contain men at whose 
 feet I am not worthy to sit. I have longed for 
 sympathy with them all. But God has ordered it 
 otherwise.' Well, it is indeed hard to give such a man 
 a name, and that he lived a life above a name is 
 evident in that he has left no school. His teaching 
 and his spirit have entered into all schools and all 
 l^arties, enlightenmg and sweetening all. ' The power 
 of genius in history,' says Pfleiderer, ' is just this, 
 
 ' Maurice, Life, 
 
54 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 that it compels its very enemies against their will to 
 submit to, to learn from, and to serve it.' But, as I 
 have said, the conclusions Mr. Maurice reached, which 
 to the majority seemed so original and to many so 
 heretical, were reached by the devout and searching 
 investigation of the Divine Oracles and of the history 
 and products of the Church. He never professed to 
 have had them given him by mhaculous inspiration. 
 They were the Divine rewards of toilful research, of 
 reverent investigation, and of sympathetic openness 
 of mind. 
 
 Now there are those in the Church, who at least 
 in this respect — that is, in respect of method — claim 
 to be his disciples. They may be far inferior to him, 
 alike in natural power and in wealth of learning and in 
 undivided singleness of aim. They may blunder, they 
 may be rash and confident when they should hesitate, 
 and they may speak when silence is a duty. But they 
 do, with such learning as they possess, prayerfully turn 
 them to the Divine revelations, in the Bible, in human 
 history, and in the works of Nature, and seek to know 
 the truth or to advance a step nearer to the truth. 
 They do not believe that every accepted dogma of the 
 past must, of necessity, be unmixed and infallible 
 truth. It may be or it may not. But this they think 
 is open to investigation and to verification. They do 
 not believe that it is impossible to know more of God 
 than was known in other days. They believe that 
 there are new truths, and new aspects of old truths. 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 65 
 
 which will be communicated to man, in accordance 
 with God's method of educating the human race. 
 They hold with Bishop Butler that it is not at all 
 ' incredible that a book which has been so long in the 
 possession of mankind should contain many truths as 
 yet undiscovered. For all the same phenomena, and 
 the same faculties of investigation, from which such 
 great discoveries in natural knowledge have been made 
 in the present and in the last age, were equally in the 
 possession of mankind several thousand years before. 
 And possibly it might be intended that events, as they 
 come to pass, should open and ascertain the meaning 
 of several parts of Scripture.' They do not look for 
 a miraculous inspiration, but they do believe that 
 reverent and capable investigation will be rewarded 
 by Divine illumination. This, I say, was the method 
 and spirit of Mr. Maurice, and it is the method and 
 spirit of a party in the Church which is called some- 
 times the Broad Church party and sometimes the 
 Liberal party. 
 
 Now the assailants of this party are never tired of 
 declaring that its aim is to do away with Christian 
 belief. A learned Eoman Catholic writer, in a recent 
 number of the ' Fortnightly Eeview,' declares that 
 * Liberal Protestantism obliterates the characteristics 
 of the ancient creed,' and the same writer says that 
 Protestantism would have been got rid of but for its 
 Liberalism. ' Except for its Liberal tendency, the 
 Eeformed Churches could never have held out against 
 
56 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 the immemorial claims of Eome.' The one battle 
 Cardinal Newman has been, he tells us, engaged in 
 from Oxford days and the English Church to the 
 Vatican and the Cardinal's hat, has been with 
 Liberalism in rehgion. He says, ' I had fierce thoughts 
 against the Liberals.' When he was indifferent to the 
 teachings of the Fathers, and thought some of the verses 
 of the Athanasian Creed ' too scientific,' he considered 
 that he was * drifting towards Liberalism in religion/ 
 He asserts that the ' spirit of Liberalism is . . . the 
 characteristic of the destined Antichrist.' He de- 
 clared that, ' The vital question was, How were we 
 to keep the Church from being Liberalised ? ' And he 
 explains that, *By Liberalism he meant the anti- 
 dogmatic principle and its developments.' Even Mr. 
 Maurice entertained some such idea of the Liberal 
 party in his day, for he speaks of it as ' the party, 
 which was emphatically anti-theological, which was 
 ready to tolerate all opinions in theology only be- 
 cause people could know nothing about it.' 
 
 Now, if there were indeed in the Church a party 
 opposed to dogma, a party opposed to theology, I 
 myself should say that it was wrong that such a party 
 should remain in the Church. But I do not think 
 that there is such a party in the Church or ever 
 has been. I maintain that Liberal Protestantism, 
 Liberal Christianity, is not anti-dogmatic, is not anti- 
 theological. There are anti-dogmatic teachers we 
 know, anti-theological teachers we know. They mock 
 
LIBERALISM IN EELIGION 57 
 
 at dogmas, and curl the lip of superfine scorn at 
 theologies, but they have no place within the Church. 
 They are not Liberals in religion. Their Liberalism, 
 if it is Liberalism, is Liberalism without religion, it is 
 irreligious Liberalism. Mr. Maurice really meant what 
 are now called Agnostics when he spoke of the Liberal 
 party as emphatically anti-theological, for he says it 
 was so on the ground that * people could know nothing 
 about theology.' But the Liberalism within the 
 Church does believe that it can know something about 
 theology, gives its mind and soul to seek out more and 
 more knowledge on such great subjects. It seeks for 
 dogma ; its prayer, its constant cry, is for a more 
 revealing theology. 
 
 Now why is it that this party has aroused the 
 suspicion in many minds that it is the enemy of 
 Christian dogma, that it is anti-theological, that its 
 principle is anti-dogmatic ? It is, in a word, because it 
 does not submit to every dogma and doctrine affirmed 
 by the Churches, merely because those Churches 
 affirm them. It maintains, with the Nineteenth Article 
 of the Church of England, that * as the Church of 
 Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred ; so 
 also the Church of Eome hath erred, not only in their 
 living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters 
 of Faith.' It maintains, with the Twenty-first Article, 
 that General Councils ' may err, and sometimes have 
 erred, even in things pertaining unto God.' It cannot 
 therefore believe in the infallibility of the Church of 
 
58 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 England. But because Protestantism declines to sub- 
 mit to every Eoman dogma, it is said to be anti- 
 dogmatic. Because the Liberal Protestant declines, 
 it may be, to accept certain dogmas affirmed by 
 Luther or Calvin, or because he thinks that some 
 dogmas or definitions or articles of religion might 
 profitably be revised, so as more closely to represent 
 the Divine Eevelations, therefore he is called anti- 
 dogmatic. He is said to be against all dogmas be- 
 cause, it may be, he denies some, just as the Prayer- 
 Book denies ' the Eomish doctrine concerning purga- 
 tory, pardons, worshipping and adoration, as well of 
 images as of reliques, and also invocation of saints,' 
 as ' repugnant to the Word of God ; ' or because he 
 thinks that other doctrines might be drawn more 
 accurately. But to call this spirit and temper anti- 
 dogmatic is mere slovenliness of thought. To say 
 it does away with the characteristics of the ancient 
 creeds is childishness. It might as truly be said that 
 the Prayer-Book is anti-dogmatic and does away with 
 the characteristics of the ancient creeds. The charac- 
 teristics of the ancient creeds are the positive facts 
 they attempt to exhibit. Their authority is, as the 
 Church positively teaches, that ' they may be proved 
 by most certain warrants of Scripture.' But if 
 some one endeavours to exhibit these facts still more 
 clearly, who ought to say that his real aim is to 
 obscure them or to destroy them ? It might as well 
 be said that the astronomers who proved that the 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 59 
 
 sun is the centre of our system, were in fact secretly 
 determined to get rid of the smi ; that because they 
 had renounced the ancient dogma that the earth 
 is the centre of the system, they had renounced 
 all astronomic dogma, and were anti-dogmatic ; and 
 that in a little time, when they had rubbed down 
 the earth by their ceaseless attrition, and it had dis- 
 appeared in the infinite, these astronomic Liberals 
 — having respect for nothing decided — would soon 
 turn their hands against the sun, and that ' they 
 love darkness rather than light because their deeds 
 are evil.' 
 
 Now I am positively for dogma, and so I am sure 
 is every Liberal Christian, because a man cannot be a 
 Christian at all without explicitly or implicitl}^ holding 
 Christian dogma. Every one must admit that there 
 cannot be a Christian community without some 
 Christian belief, some Christian intention. It is 
 Christian because it has some faith in Christ, because 
 it recognises some relationship to Him. If it says, 
 * Christ was the best and noblest man that ever lived, 
 Christ is to be taken by all men as their example; ' 
 if statements like these, which we can imagine many 
 Unitarians making, really state the grounds of some 
 Christian union, they are dogmas. For what are 
 dogmas ? They are the formal statement of somethmg 
 which a society or class of men holds to be positively 
 true. It is possible for men to feel that a thing is 
 true, simply to apprehend it, without thinking about 
 
60 LIBEKALISM IN EELIGION 
 
 their own apprehension or putting it into words. This 
 feehng is ' the shadow of those truths which unlearned 
 piety admits and acts upon without the medium of intel- 
 lectual representation.' • But the moment men unite 
 in an expression of what they helieve to be true, or 
 rather of what they feel as truth and apprehend as 
 truth, they give utterance to a dogma. A Unitarian 
 is in principle no more anti-dogmatic than we Trini- 
 tarians. When you say, ' There is none other God 
 but one,' or 'that God is Almighty,' or 'that He 
 pardons iniquity, transgression, and sin,' or ' that the 
 soul of man is immortal,' you are giving expression 
 to what you hold to be truths. They are dogmas. 
 If you teach these truths to other people your teach- 
 ing is dogmatic teaching. There can be no other 
 teaching. I subscribe without reservation to Cardinal 
 Newman's declaration, ' Dogma has been the funda- 
 mental principle of my religion ; I know no other 
 religion ; I cannot enter into the idea of any other 
 sort of religion ; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to 
 me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be 
 filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion 
 without the fact of a Supreme Being.' 
 
 Dogmas are human attempts to express in words 
 facts which the mind perceives. If you do see 
 certain things, you cannot help expressing them. 
 Your prayers, your teachings, all contain implicit 
 dogma. If you cry ' Our Father,' your intellect will 
 
 ' Newman. 
 
LIBER.yLISM IN RELIGION 61 
 
 affirm the proposition that God is the Father of all 
 His creatures. And yet such words as dogma, 
 orthodoxy, theology, excite a mocking smile in many 
 a face which looks as though it had a mind hehind it. 
 Not every lawyer who sits in the House of Lords is 
 omniscient, even if he ' look wiser than any man could 
 possibly be.' And it is a melancholy sight, as it is an 
 unusual one, to see a judge trying to amuse an assem- 
 bly, whose manners he has scarcely yet acquired, by 
 comparmg theology to astrology. Professor Freeman 
 says that * law has ceased to be an empirical trade 
 and become a science.' It can scarcely be so when 
 a legal peer can openly gibe at the loftiest con- 
 ceptions of the human mind. Paul and Athanasius 
 and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin were neither 
 fools, nor verbal jugglers, nor manipulators of legal 
 fictions, nor dupes. However they expressed them- 
 selves — and lawyers can scarcely be hard upon bar- 
 barities of style — they knew they were dealing with 
 facts, with Eternal Verities ; and so did their disciples ; 
 and so did the millions who might not be able to grasp 
 their scientific expositions, but who did realise the 
 truth itself. Only a man who can stand securely upon 
 nothing, ' dance on the torrent and ride on the air,' 
 can be independent of dogmas. 
 
 Here is another sample of unintelligent flippancy, 
 ' Comfort benumbs the consciousness as orthodoxy 
 benumbs the reason.' Now orthodoxy is that which, 
 at any time, is held for true. It is a system of con- 
 
62 LIBERALISM IN EELIGION 
 
 victions received as true — evidently true to the scien- 
 tific investigator, and accepted as true by the ordinary 
 pubhc. This is the state of things, for instance, with 
 scientific conclusions or historical conclusions which 
 are held to be correct. Would any rational man say 
 that to hold correct conclusions in scientific matters 
 * benumbs the intellect,' or to have an accurate know- 
 ledge of history benumbs the intellect — in other words, 
 that scientific or historical orthodoxy ' benumbs the 
 intellect ' ? And why should it be any more true that 
 theological orthodoxy benumbs the intellect ? If any 
 sort of orthodoxy forbids examination, re-investigation, 
 then of course it benumbs the intellect ; otherwise it 
 might be said that to believe in gravitation benumbs 
 the intellect. Speaking with less than his usual 
 care. Dr. Martineau has given countenance to the 
 objection to dogmas and creeds. He says the ' ten- 
 dency to persecution exists w^herever there is an 
 incorporated clergy whose Church embodies a creed 
 in its constitution.' Then every Church has a ten- 
 dency to persecution — Dr. Martineau's as well as 
 yours and mine — for there cannot be a Church which 
 does not embody a creed. A Unitarian Church is 
 neither Mussulman, nor Buddhist, nor Parsee, but 
 Christian. In other words, it differs from these 
 religions by some profession of Christianity. It has 
 some Christian faith, a Christian creed, implicit if not 
 explicit. It could not be a Christian Communion 
 without some Christian standing ground or belief. 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 63 
 
 Even the late Principal Tulloch falls into a similar 
 error, * Unity can never come from dogma, as om* 
 forefathers unhappily imagined. Dogma splits rather 
 than unites from its very nature. It is the creature 
 of the intellect, and the intellect can never rest.' Can 
 this be true ? It may be true that the whole system 
 of dogma imposed upon her children by the Koman 
 Church, allowing of no inquiry, no re-examination, 
 may provoke rebellion. But it is not true that dogma 
 splits, that formal, accurate knowledge splits. Each 
 new truth ascertained and made clear removes a cause 
 of contention. It is the uncertain, the undecided, 
 over which men wrangle and fight. But if such 
 dogmas as these can be laid down as certain — yet 
 open without hindrance to examination that all may 
 prove them over again if they will — That there is one 
 God who is the Father of all, and the Saviour of all, 
 because the inspiring, ruling Spirit in all — if thousands 
 and millions can see these truths and rest upon them, 
 and, when it is necessary, can declare them as their 
 undoubting faith, then these dogmas, instead of 
 splitting, unite, and men become one in Christ Jesus. 
 It is as true to say that such dogma splits as to say 
 that identity of opinion divides men into opposite 
 parties. 
 
G4 
 
 V. 
 
 LIBEBALISM IN BELIGION. 
 II. 
 
 ' Handle me and see.' — Lxike xxiv. 39. 
 
 There are two grounds on which men assent to 
 dogmas. One is that they are declared to be true by 
 a competent authority. The other is that their truth 
 commends and asserts itself to the human understand- 
 ing. Rome declares herself a competent and sufficient 
 authority. She demands faith in herself as a suffi- 
 cient authority, and she requires that whatever she 
 puts forth as truth shall be received and professed 
 on her sole authority. And the reason she condemns 
 Liberalism in religion as anti-dogmatic and destruc- 
 tive of the faith is, that Liberalism in religion does not 
 recognise her authority, accepts no dogma whatever 
 on the mere authority of a Church. It does recognise 
 the truth of many Eoman dogmas, but it does so, 
 not because Eome says they are true, but because 
 they can be shown to be true, because they take hold 
 of the human understanding with convincing power. 
 It is because they are true, and not merely because 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 65 
 
 somebody says they are true, that Liberal Protes- 
 tantism accepts them. 
 
 Now there is a suspicion in Eoman minds that 
 many of their dogmas cannot be shown to be true, 
 that they may not commend themselves to the human 
 understanding. They are afraid that if the spirit of 
 Liberalism in religion turns its examining gaze upon 
 them, they will be seen to be corruptions and not 
 legitimate developments of Christianity. Therefore 
 they cry out, 'This Liberahsm is hostile to the 
 faith.' But let not our High Church and our Low 
 Church brethren stand apart from Liberalism as 
 though they were not suspect. The charges which 
 are made against Liberal Christianity are in fact, and 
 indeed in word, made also against all Protestant 
 Christianity; and Protestant Christianity is that 
 Christianity which, as a consequence of the Eeforma- 
 tion, is now separated from Eome. The Anglican 
 who denies Transubstantiation is as much a Protes- 
 tant in the eyes of Eome as the Evangelical who 
 denies Baptismal Eegeneration. With Eome every 
 form of Christianity is Protestantism which, using 
 its mind, ventures to deny anything which she has 
 affirmed, and High Anglicans must bear the reproach 
 of being Protestant as well as their Low [Church 
 brethren. 
 
 ' The spirit of Liberahsm is the characteristic of the 
 destined Antichrist,' says Newman. 'Antichrist is 
 described as the civoixos, as exalting himself above the 
 
66 LIBERALISM IN EELIGION 
 
 yoke of religion and law. The spirit of lawlessness 
 came in with the Eeformation, and Liberalism is its 
 offspring.' Again he says, ' I am more certain that the 
 Protestant spirit leads to infidelity, than that which I 
 recommend leads to Eome.' And again, ' I came to 
 the conclusion that there was no medium, in true 
 philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and 
 that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circum- 
 stances in which it finds itself here below, must 
 embrace either the one or the other.' And another 
 Eoman Catholic writer says that ' the Eeformation 
 was anti-Christian in its nature, as all the world 
 sees it to be in its results.' 
 
 There is one short answer to be made to the 
 charge, that Protestantism leads to infidelity, and it 
 is this. There is ten times more Christian belief in 
 the countries which are Protestant than in the coun- 
 tries which are Catholic. If you want to see a generally 
 diffused and largely operative Christian faith, you must 
 go to the Engiish-spealdng races — in Great Britain, in 
 the United States, in Australia and in New Zealand. 
 This great people — one people, however various their 
 forms of government — this mightiest race in the world, 
 to whom the future belongs, has been fed on Protes- 
 tantism, part of it on the very strongest and most 
 uncompromising form of Protestantism. And this 
 mighty, world-pervading, all-conquering race, the off- 
 spring of Protestantism, is far less influenced by un- 
 belief than races like the Eomance races, which have 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 67 
 
 been formed by the discipline ofEome. When it is said 
 that there are a less number of ' completely eman- 
 cipated minds ' in Protestant countries than in Koman 
 Catholic countries, it means, that the number of 
 infidels in Protestant countries is smaller than in 
 Koman Catholic countries. Is there more Christian 
 faith in France than in Scotland, or in Italy than in 
 New England ? It is idle to answer such questions. It 
 is Eome which is the parent of infidelity, Piome which 
 has made it malignant, and Protestantism which has 
 saved the faith. It is high time that this talk of Pro- 
 testantism leading to infidelity should cease. At least 
 it is time for Eome to become silent in the presence of 
 all the infidelity which has sprung up on ground which 
 has been all her own. 
 
 But is there not something suspicious in the fact 
 that Eomanists and infidels alike are always telling 
 us that we have no logical standing-ground, and that 
 we ought to be either Eomanists or unbelievers ? 
 Well, we are not gomg to be either the one or the 
 other. And that which irritates them is that we 
 have a standmg-ground, that at least we manage to 
 stand, and that we help others to stand also. ' If it 
 were not for you,' cries theEomanist, * millions would 
 have been within the bosom of the Church who now 
 are its foes.' * If it were not for you,' cries the u-ri- 
 tated unbeliever, ' thousands who could not have 
 breathed in the stiflmg chambers of Eome would 
 now have been free from all rehgious influences.' 
 
 F 2 
 
68 LIBERALISM IN KELIGION 
 
 I think we may thank God that such thmgs can be 
 said against us. Long may it be true that we do 
 keep men from the sleepy lotus-land of Kome, and 
 from the stony desert-land of materialistic infidelity. 
 The Romanist has renounced his mind and envies 
 our intellectual liberty. The infidel has lost his 
 religion and envies the higher life of the emotions 
 which we enjoy. We keep our mind and our soul ; 
 and the foes cry out, ' It is not fair, you have only a 
 right to one of them.' 
 
 The reason Protestantism is charged with producing 
 infidelity is that it claims the right of examining and 
 reinvestigating, whenever it feels called to do so, what- 
 ever the Church may put forth as dogmas or certain 
 truths. * If you examine,' says Rome, ' you are certain 
 not to believe.' But why? Is our faith a tissue of lies ? 
 Is there nothing in it which is sure and immovable ? 
 Can it not bear to be tested, and will searching inves- 
 tigation show it to be an imposture, words which 
 are deceiving because they have no corresponding 
 reality? It is a libel on Christianity to say any 
 such thing, a libel which comes the worse from Chris- 
 tian lips. It is not Liberals in religion who say that free 
 investigation will destroy Christianity, it is Romanists 
 and unbelievers. On the contrary, we believe that the 
 prime truths of Christianity are as positive and as 
 verifiable as the ascertained truths of physical science. 
 Science does not say, ' The law of gravitation is this, 
 but for God's sake do not examme mto the matter. 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 69 
 
 If you examine, you will not believe in gravitation, 
 you will be destroying yourself, and jumping off a 
 house or walking over a precipice.' ' Every halting- 
 place in the course of rational inquiry,' says romantic 
 infidelity in the person of M. Eenan, ' is arbitrary.' 
 You might as well say that when a man runs his 
 head against a stone wall his stoppage is purely 
 arbitrary. ' The truth once possessed,' says Professor 
 Mozley, ' is seen to rest upon grounds of natural 
 reason.' * There is, perhaps, no greater satisfaction 
 to the Christian mind than that which arises from 
 perceiving that the revealed system is rooted deep 
 in the natural course of things.' ^ ' It may be even 
 questioned whether there be any essential character 
 of Scripture doctrine which is without its place in 
 this moral revelation.' ^ But if the truth be rooted 
 in the ' natural course of things,' if it be seen to rest 
 upon * grounds of natural reason,' then it may be 
 verified by appeal to the ' natural reason ' and to the 
 * natural course of things.' We are surrounded by 
 positive facts which produce religion, and the more 
 we examine, the more certain are we to be confronted 
 by these everlasting facts. Because we know we are 
 dealing with eternal realities, we are not afraid that 
 they will disappear if we look at them. Facts do not 
 tremble for their existence. It is true that Eome 
 fears inquiry, but Liberal Christianity does not. 
 
 ' Nevrman. " Ibid. 
 
70 LIBEEALISxM IN EELIGION 
 
 ' Private judgment,' says a Eornan Catholic writer, 
 ' is fatal to the notion of a society like the Catholic 
 Church with its objective and infallible creed.' Again, 
 the same writer says, * Should the Eoman Church 
 fall, the Christian religion cannot as a religion live 
 after it.' And Cardinal Newman naively confesses 
 in the * Apologia ' that he determined to be guided by 
 his reason, and that, had it not been for this severe 
 resolve, he would sooner have become a Catholic. 
 
 It is implied by Eoman Catholic writers, when it 
 is not explicitly asserted, that if it had not been for 
 the Divine authority conferred on the Church, the 
 doctrines of Christianity would have been destroyed. 
 * Creeds would have long since been extinct but for 
 the Apostolic Succession of Eome.' In this case these 
 creeds cannot have become necessary to the world, the 
 world cannot have found in them the supply for its 
 spkitual wants and the answers to its most urgent 
 questions. These creeds cannot have justified them- 
 selves in the experience of mankind, or they could 
 stand firm and indestructible on that foundation. 
 They have, so we are told, to stand on the Apostolic 
 Succession of Eome, or they would fall. But this 
 Apostolic Succession is not a thing which can be veri- 
 fied and proved positive in individual experience. It 
 must submit to critical investigation ; and, on such 
 a subject, one student will have one conclusion and 
 another a different one. If the creeds stand on Apos- 
 tolic Succession alone, they have no sure foothold. 
 
LIBERALISM IN EELIGION 71 
 
 Yes, we can understand the terrors of Eome when 
 threatened by free inquh-y and examination. It is true 
 that, as far as some Eoman dogmas are concerned. 
 Protestantism may be called anti-dogmatic. The 
 Church has dared to dogmatise on matters which have 
 not been revealed. She has pushed through the veil 
 of the Temple into the Holy of Holies, and dealt 
 with the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eter- 
 nity as though He were a subject for the biologist. 
 And there are Eoman dogmas the truth of which all 
 forms of Protestantism deny. 
 
 Eemember the New Testament reveals truth but 
 seldom in the shape of dogma. ' The Scriptures were 
 never intended to teach doctrine, only to prove it.' ^ 
 The doctrines or dogmas of the Churches are man's 
 formal statements of, and conclusions from. Divine 
 revelations. Now man may err. He may draw false 
 conclusions from positive truths. He is very likely to 
 do so when he only knows fragments of truths, and not 
 the truth in its perfect unity. He may take that for a 
 cause, or an active factor, which may be modified by 
 some other factor of which he is ignorant. He cannot 
 say always, ' Because this is, that must be,' for he 
 does not know all that is contained in the i-s. Cardinal 
 Newman says, ' The doctrines of theological science 
 are true if rightly deduced, because they are deduced 
 from what is true.' In this case their truth is made 
 
 ' Newman. 
 
72 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 to depend on a correct process of reasoning. But this 
 is Liberalism in religion. We say that some of the 
 dogmas of Eome are not true — as, for instance, the 
 doctrine of Transubstantiation — because they are not 
 ' rightly deduced from what is true.' And, again^ 
 there are other dogmas which contain truths, but 
 which are so expressed as to be misleading, or to con- 
 ceal the truth they should clearly manifest. These 
 dogmas in some cases want re-expressing, so that men 
 may see that they are real truths. There are cases 
 in which the Church has had glimpses of great truths, 
 but she has generalised too soon, she has made a 
 formula before she possessed sufficient material for a 
 judgment. It has been the same in physical science. 
 Great truths were pointed at in the Ptolemaic system 
 of astronomy, but the system was a premature and 
 incorrect generalisation. So, too, has it been with 
 diverse Christian doctrines. Here are two authorities, 
 both unimpeachable. The first, Dr. Ward, in a book 
 so Eomanistic in its teaching as to result in its con- 
 demnation by the University of Oxford, and in which 
 none need fear a taint of Liberalism, says, ' The 
 doctrine which supports men's spiritual life, the prin- 
 ciple on which they live, may very easily be true, while 
 the language in which the}^ have learned to clothe it 
 may be almost to any extent erroneous and dangerous.' 
 And Dr. Swainson, in his most valuable book on the 
 Creeds, asks, 'May it not become necessary in formulae 
 handed down to us to correct a shadow here, to erase 
 
LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 73 
 
 a line there, to bring out a feature more prominently 
 in another place, even as Augustine corrected Athan- 
 asius, and the aged Augustine corrected the young 
 Augustine's writings?' 
 
 The supreme aim of Liberalism in religion is to get 
 more certain hold of positive truth, and that will be 
 the foundation of dogmas which can fear no examina- 
 tion. It may be that some of the doctrinal formulae 
 of the past may be shown to be erroneous conclusions 
 from revelation, and others but imperfect representa- 
 tions of revelation. But the end will be, that if fewer 
 things may positively be affirmed, and some things 
 which have been looked upon as dogmas take the 
 place of pious opinions, or of ' speculative expansions,' 
 the firm foundation will be seen to be secure, and on 
 that foundation union will be possible. The method 
 of authority has been tried and failed. We must try 
 the method of science, the method of unfettered ex- 
 amination. It tends to unity in physical researches, 
 and if that which religious men seek to understand is 
 positive, is real — real as the entities from which we 
 obtain the laws of science — then faith in God will be 
 seen to have no less sure a foundation than faith in 
 the Cosmos ; the mode of God's manifestation in his- 
 tory, I mean the revelation of the Trinity, will be more 
 certain than the laws of physical development ; and the 
 salvation of Christ as sure in its action as the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies. Authority has resulted 
 in dead submission or in open rebellion. Free and 
 
74 LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 
 
 capable investigation will result in a unity which can- 
 not be broken. 
 
 But it is said, ' Liberals reject the idea of mystery.* 
 Tar from it. Spreading around the truths which 
 have been revealed, which we can affirm and which 
 are dogmas — indeed, concerning which disagreement is 
 impossible — there is a land which grows less clear, then 
 clouded over and dark. But we are certain that there 
 is firm land there also. We believe that the day will 
 come when it will be taken possession of, and that 
 which is now obscure will be radiant with light. And 
 yet we know that, when we occupy the land which to- 
 day is enveloped in mystery, a new land of shadow 
 and darkness will still girdle us round, and beckon us 
 on to ever-renewed investigation. * Canst thou by 
 searchmg find out God ? ' ' Canst thou find out the 
 Almighty to perfection ? Clouds and darkness are 
 round about Him, righteousness and judgment are 
 the habitation of His throne.' 
 
75 
 
 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? 
 
 * With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.' — Romans x. 10. 
 
 In what violent opposition to the spirit of the present 
 day are the ' damnatory clauses ' of the Athanasian 
 Creed ! How fierce and intolerant and false they 
 sound in the ears of a languid superficial generation, 
 which is too sensitive and too enlightened for any other 
 creed than this— that it really does not very much 
 matter what a man believes ! I wall admit that these 
 
 * damnatory clauses ' were the product of Provincial 
 rudeness ; that to the unknown author of them they 
 represented a quality of meaning we, happily, realise 
 but imperfectly ; that to ordinary hearers they impart 
 unnecessary and improper alarm, and thus these 
 clauses may render this creed unedifying in common 
 worship — all this I am ready to allow. But I do say 
 these same clauses, however objectionable their form, 
 contain and proclaim a truth on which all creeds 
 and systems of social well-being, good or bad, true 
 or untrue, take their stand — that what we believe 
 becomes the texture of our mind and the law of our 
 
76 DOES IT JIATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 
 
 conduct — in a ^vord, settles our state ; that a wrong 
 belief, a mistaken belief, must put us upon a wrong 
 tack, lead us to a wrong place, and that, as long as we 
 have a wrong belief, our state and position must be 
 wrong. I am amazed to find myself the apologist of 
 phrases which I have always trembled to use, and 
 which are an offence by which many a brother has 
 stumbled. As they are commonly understood, they 
 convey ideas which now revolt the sensitive Christian 
 mind, and force it to say, ' They cannot be true.' 
 
 And yet there is truth in them. If I may say so, 
 the nucleus of them is a truth. That nucleus may be 
 held in a barbaric form. It may be that the form was 
 that of which the unknown author only or mainly 
 thought. But if ever the essential truth disguised by 
 these clauses needed asserting, it is in days like 
 these of stripling infidelity, when universal knowledge 
 can be had from a newspaper and any man can be 
 sceptical for a shilling. The more I think of it, the 
 more I see that these clauses deal with conduct and 
 the influence of belief upon conduct. For they speak 
 about being ' saved,' they say that if certain things are 
 not believed faithfully a man ' cannot be saved.' In 
 other words, they speak of certain moral and spiritual 
 states, and they say those moral and spiritual states 
 can only be gained in a certain way. Just as we 
 say, it is impossible for a man to be a great scholar 
 without work, impossible to be saveW from igno- 
 rance without using the proper means ; so these 
 
DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? 77 
 
 formidable phrases declare that a certam moral and 
 spu'itual state, which is described as being saved, can 
 only be reached in a certain way, and that as long as 
 a man does not take that way he cannot reach that 
 destination. Why, in essence, it is only what is de- 
 clared by every reformer, revealer, and moral teacher. 
 They all say, miless you adopt my scheme, my plan 
 of life, of society, you cannot be all you might be; 
 you must fail of the peace and perfection of your life 
 — in other words, you cannot be saved. Here is the 
 Athanasian anathema which Schopenhauer appends 
 to his Teutonic Buddhism. ' Thus the only ivay of 
 salvation is that the will shall manifest itself unre- 
 strictedly,' &c. Mark, ' the only way of salvation.' 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer teaches that we can only be saved 
 from absurdity by a particular belief. ' Not he who 
 believes that adaptation will increase is absurd, but 
 he who doubts that it will increase is absurd.' ' The 
 truths of science will save you,' declares a recent 
 writer on the ' Creed of Science.' ' They will save 
 your soul in the only way it can be saved.' Mr. 
 Froude says that ' Carlyle's faith . . . was that, 
 without a spiritual belief, a belief in a Divine Being, 
 in the knowledge of whom and in obedience to whom 
 mortal welfare alone consisted, the human race must 
 degenerate into brutes.' Eadically, the very same 
 thing is asserted alike by Positivist and by Catholic. 
 The damnatory clause is in essence — rude and mislead- 
 ing as is its form of expression — a statement of the law 
 
78 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 
 
 of cause and effect in morals, it is a special instance of 
 the uniformity of Nature. Slipshod indolence and 
 short-sighted frivolity may be unable to perceive 
 the necessary connection between cause and effect in 
 ethics ; they may say it does not matter what a man 
 believes ; but science and practical wisdom, with or 
 without faith in God, cannot say so. They must be- 
 lieve that there are such things as necessary truths, 
 truths necessary, that is, for certain purposes, and 
 that without certain beliefs a man cannot be saved. 
 
 For belief is inseparably connected with conduct ; 
 belief is the potentiality of action. With certain 
 beliefs certain actions are quite impossible, they could 
 not take place. Here are two authorities on this sub- 
 ject, neither of whom can be suspected of theological 
 proclivities. ' No belief is real unless it guide our 
 actions.' ^ ' Preparedness to act upon what we affirm 
 is admitted on all hands to be the sole, the genuine, 
 the unmistakable criterion of belief.' ^ All this is 
 plain in everyday life. If you believed that the build- 
 ing in which you are seated was mined, and would be 
 blown up in a few minutes, that already the fuse was 
 lighted to fire the charge, what instant activity to 
 escape would arise ! If you were a large shareholder 
 or depositor in a bank, and were told by the directors, 
 who knew all the secrets of its management, that it 
 was really insolvent, and believed what you were told ; 
 if you believed that the child of your love was hanging 
 ' Professor Bain. ^ Professor Clifford. 
 
DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 79 
 
 from a ■window-ledge ready to drop, — would your con- 
 duct be altogether uninfluenced by your belief ? You 
 believe that some one is bent on your ruin, and that 
 another is a true friend who uses every opportunity to 
 push your fortune and honour your name. You 
 believe that such a one is a liar and a thief, and that 
 this man has a lofty soul. You believe that certain 
 measures are in the direction of social well-being and 
 are demanded alike by generosity and justice, or, on 
 the contrary, that they are the ignoble tribute paid to 
 disloyalty. Is it not certain that your conduct will 
 show marks of these various beliefs ? Is it possible 
 that you would feel and act in precisely the same way 
 if you did not believe these things or believed the 
 opposite ? Would it make no difference whether you 
 believed the glass which is held to your lips contained 
 poison or precious medicine ? Whether your beliefs 
 are right beliefs or not — I mean whether they are in 
 accordance with facts or not — if they are real beliefs, 
 you are altogether made by them, your conduct is 
 decided by them. They may be madman's beliefs, 
 but they make the madman's life. By your beliefs, 
 your happiness and nobleness, or your misery and 
 degradation are decided. It may be that one single 
 wrong belief has led you astray, given the wrong turn 
 to your life, which has ever wandered farther from the 
 right path, and has entangled you in labyrinths and 
 thickets which bewilder you and make you despair. 
 It may be a single belief which once held you, which 
 
80 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 
 
 now 5^011 see has kept you from success, placed you in 
 a position you hate, dragged you down and ruined you. 
 Even accidental misbeliefs may bring condign 
 punishment. A train stops in the night on a viaduct, 
 and the coping of the bridge is taken for the platform 
 of the station, and the lamps are too distant to show 
 the black abyss, and one confidently steps out, and into 
 quick destruction. A mistaken belief may make a 
 very hell on earth, and in such a case as that of 
 Othello ' doth work like madness in the brain.' In 
 the affairs of this life, whether you believe in God or 
 not, you must have a right creed or suffer, a right 
 creed or perish. If there is no life after this, and if 
 this life — the only life — be spoilt by a wrong belief, 
 then in this case a wrong belief, a mistaken belief, has 
 wrought irrecoverable ruin. Stern Nature thunders 
 forth her damnatory clauses. She tortures and kills 
 and buries out of sight those whose actions proceed 
 on a false belief. It is as true of nations as of indi- 
 viduals. Look at their faiths, and you will see the 
 arbiters of their destiny. The real belief of a people 
 is that which is moving it on to greatness or decay. 
 * It has not been a mistake or a delusion,' says Mr. 
 Maurice, ' into which men have fallen, when they 
 have traced all the moral evils of the world, all its 
 political evils, to its superstitions ; that is to say, to 
 its false notions of God ; ' and Mr. Froude affirms 
 that ' Illustrious natures do not form themselves upon 
 narrow and cruel theories.' 
 
DOES IT MATTEK WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 81 
 
 Oh purblind race of miserable men, 
 How many among us at this very hour 
 Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves 
 By taking true for false, or false for true ! ' 
 
 If there is a false saying, as far as this human Hfe is 
 concerned, it is that * It does not matter what a man 
 beHeves.' 
 
 But not only do misbeliefs produce misconduct, 
 but there is also to be taken into account the dete- 
 riorating influence they have upon the mind itself. 
 Each new belief which takes possession of the mind 
 tends to rearrange its parts or to modify their colour 
 and their quantity. Bear in mind that I am speak- 
 ing of those comparatively few intense realisations 
 which alone properly deserve to be called belief. Many 
 of us are indeed nothing but 
 
 Light half -believers of our casual creeds. 
 Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd ; 
 Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, 
 Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd.- 
 
 I cannot now stop to maintain, what here I shall only 
 affirm, that belief is certitude. Belief is not a mode 
 of probability, it is a complete supreme act which fills 
 the mind and moves it to confident action. Belief is 
 the grasp of the whole nature, of head and heart com- 
 bined; it is certitude, well put in the words of St. Paul, 
 * I know in whom I have believed.' These few beliefs, 
 these energismg realisations, infect the whole mind ; 
 they act upon neighbouring parts, they add a new 
 
 ' Lord Tennyson. ^ jjj.^ jj_ Arnold. 
 
 a 
 
82 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 
 
 element to all which was there before, they have their 
 own aflfinities, drawing after them that with which 
 they natm^ally combine, until the whole being is cor- 
 related to the new belief. Now that a new belief has 
 entered, modifying and rearranging the mental struc- 
 ture, it must be taken into account in every emer- 
 gency, it goes along into the world of action with all 
 the other beliefs which it allows to live. The loss of 
 a belief may be a good thing or a bad thing, it cannot 
 be an indifferent thing. A new belieif makes a new 
 creature. Mr. Lecky says, ' He can have observed 
 human nature with but little fruit who has not re- 
 marked how very rarely men change fundamentally 
 the principles they had deliberately adopted on reli- 
 gious, moral, or even political questions, without the 
 change being preceded, accompanied, or very speedily 
 followed, by a serious modification of character.' 
 
 It is a strange thing how beliefs hang together, and 
 are found in cliques. I suppose it is the result of un- 
 conscious logic. Follies, like sheep, are gregarious. 
 When you know that some man advocates an evident 
 quackery, you may be certain that he carries appeals 
 for ever so many more in his pocket. A tenderness 
 for small-pox will extend its sympathy in kindred 
 directions, and Millenarianism probably be combined 
 with strong opinions on the ' Ten Tribes ' and a deep 
 interest in ' Psychical phenomena ' and in Esoteric 
 Buddhism. ' Unsound opinions,' said Sir George Lewis, 
 ' have a certain affinity with one another, and are 
 
DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? 83 
 
 formed in knots and clusters.' They draw after them 
 falsehoods with which they have affinities, they gradu- 
 ally pervert the whole nature; and when an evil spirit 
 is allowed admittance, he holds hack the door until his 
 accomplices have got within. So much does it matter, 
 as far as our mental and moral constitution are con- 
 cerned, what a man believes. 
 
 If, then, our belief decides our conduct, and con- 
 verts and reconstructs our character, it must be evi- 
 dent, even to the most sceptical, that our rehgious 
 beliefs must be potent factors in shaping our destiny. 
 Only the flippancy of fools can say that it does not 
 matter what a man believes in rehgion. But a deeper 
 and more reverent spirit may peradventure be moved 
 to ask. Are there indeed, as orthodox teachers have so 
 strongly maintained in the past, ' neccssarij doctrines,' 
 as well as unessential doctrines, and is the doctrine of 
 the Trinity a necessary doctrine ? Now if by ' neces- 
 sary doctrine' be meant true doctrine, then every 
 doctrine, which reveals itself to a man as truth, is a 
 necessary doctrine. The moment a thing is seen to 
 be true it is as necessary as any other truth. In this 
 sense the smallest truth which the mind perceives as 
 truth is necessary to salvation— that is, to salvation 
 from some ignorance, and to salvation from untruth- 
 fulness of spirit. To turn away from a truth which 
 commends itself to our acceptance is immoral, and so 
 long as a man consciously turns away from a truth he 
 is unsaved, he is a criminal infidel. Whether we like 
 
 G 2 
 
84 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? 
 
 the truth or not, whether or not it fits in with our 
 previous opinions or plans of Hfe, our prospects of pre- 
 ferment or promises of peace and pleasure, if we turn 
 aside our face from a truth which meets us and for a 
 moment looks into our eyes, then, however apparently 
 unimportant that truth, it is most important for us ; 
 and if we reject it, we condemn ourselves as unfaithful. 
 When we are told that a doctrine or truth is 
 necessary, a question properly suggests itself, ' Neces- 
 sary for what ? ' For one doctrine is necessary for 
 one thing and another for another. That we should 
 hold truth as to the constitution of things, especially 
 those which form our practical environment, we have 
 already seen to be necessary. But if the constitution 
 of things is hut one aspect of the mind and will of 
 God, if the great fact of the universe, the embracing, 
 constraining, never-absent fact of the universe, fashion- 
 ing us behind and before and laying its hand upon 
 us, is God, then above all things, because including 
 all things — alike actualities and potentialities — is it 
 necessary that we should have true beliefs about God. 
 If the doctrine of the Trinity is a revelation of that 
 which is, and which was, and which is to come, then 
 the doctrine of the Trinity is a necessary doctrine, 
 necessary to bring us salvation from the fears and 
 bondage which otherwise might overwhelm us ; and 
 to fight against it, must be to fight against the very 
 nature of things. That doctrine through all its subtle 
 explanations — explanations which are but human 
 
DOES IT MATTEE WHAT A MAN BELIEVES ? 85 
 
 reflections of the Divine fact — declares to us the one 
 Eternal Spirit and Eternal Law, in itself for ever 
 inaccessible, the God who is called by some the Un- 
 knowable. It reveals to us God in man, intelligible 
 and adorable and redeeming. And it reveals the 
 reconciling and sanctifying Spirit proceeding from the 
 Eather and the Son^the Almighty Spirit which shall 
 subdue all things unto itself that God may be all in 
 all. If this be true, it is indeed a message of salva- 
 tion. Not to know this, is to be without this message 
 of salvation, and he who will not accept it must lose 
 the blessing it can convey. 
 
 The doctrine of God's pardoning love to all man- 
 kind, which is the very essence of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity — ' for even Eathers and Schoolmen,' as Mr. 
 Maurice reminds us, ' speak continually of the Trinity 
 as the Eternal Charity ' — is absolutely necessary to 
 bring peace and assurance to a mind burdened with a 
 sense of sin. If the sinner does not believe that there 
 is a God who will wash away his sin, if he believes 
 that by Divine sovereignty he is condemned to endless 
 perdition, if he will not accept the true faith of the 
 Trinity — of the Eternal Charity — that God loves and 
 pardons His guilty children, then he cannot be saved 
 from his despair, he will not take the salvation. If he 
 will not believe that Christ hath redeemed all man- 
 kind, and that all his brethren are in the hands of the 
 sanctifying Spirit, he must turn pessimist and despair 
 for the race. 
 
86 DOES IT MATTEE WHAT A 3IAN BELIEVES ? 
 
 But the question, Does it matter what a man 
 beHeves ? usually implies in the mind of the speaker. 
 Does it matter, as far as another life is concerned, 
 what a man believes ? Will men be sent to hell, as. 
 men once were condemned to an mito da fc, because 
 they are misbelievers ? Must heathens and Deists 
 and Christian Unitarians and all who have imperfect 
 or incorrect beliefs about God be sentenced to remain 
 for ever in their ignorance, and to suffer for ever 
 from its consequences ? We know that mistaken be- 
 liefs, innocent or culpable, do bring punishment. If 
 a man can take his mistaken beliefs into another 
 world and retain them when there, as far as we can 
 see, the same painful consequence which they pro- 
 duced here must ensue there. If, indeed, the doctrine 
 of the Trinity reveals an eternal fact, then we must 
 admit that, as long as men do not perceive this fact, 
 do not believe it, and therefore do not act in accord- 
 ance with it, they must be without the light and 
 comfort and strength which this revelation is calcu- 
 lated to impart. They must suffer this loss so long 
 as they do not accept that which alone can relieve 
 them. For if the doctrine of the Trinity be a reve- 
 lation of the Eternal, and if for everlasting ages a 
 man were unable to accept it, then it would follow 
 that for everlasting ages he must be without the 
 special blessings which the truth alone can impart. 
 The priests of Agnosticism are as threatening as 
 those of Catholicism. One of them says, ' No real 
 
DOES IT MATTEE WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 87 
 
 belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, 
 is ever truly insignificant ; it prepares us to receive 
 more of its like, confirms those which resembled it 
 before, and weakens others; and so gradually it laj's 
 a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may 
 some day explode into overt action, and leave its 
 stamp upon our character for ever.' But will men 
 remam heathen, Deist, Unitarian, for everlasting ages, 
 if these faiths are in conflict with eternal reality? 
 Is the real never to conquer the unreal, and are 
 errors for ever to maintain their existence in the full 
 light of truth? There is a promise in the Bible 
 which points to the ultimate triumph of truth in 
 every human soul, for we are told that at the name 
 of Jesus every hiee shall hoio of things in heaven and 
 things in earth and things under the earth, and that 
 every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to 
 the glory of God the Father. 
 
 But the temper of mind represented by the 
 question, Does it matter what a man believes ? is an 
 ignoble and base-born temper. In such a temper 
 there is no principle and the way to dishonour is 
 easy. ' The inquiry of truth,' says Bacon, ' which 
 is the love-making or wooing of it ; the knowledge of 
 truth, which is the presence of it ; and the belief of 
 truth, which is the enjoying of it— is the sovereign 
 good of human nature.' But he who thinks it does 
 not matter what a man believes does not care 
 about truth, is incapable of high feeling, of watchful 
 
88 DOES IT MATTER WHAT A MAN BELIEVES? 
 
 rectitude, and of midefiled sincerity. Such a man is 
 destitute of the * sovereign good of human nature,' 
 and until this corrupting temper is taken away the 
 soul must be condemned to an ignoble life. But an 
 ignoble life is not the life eternal. 
 
89 
 
 VII. 
 
 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD. 
 I. 
 
 • And though they say, The Lord liveth ; surely they swear 
 falsely.' — Jeremiah v. 2. 
 
 I MAINTAINED ill my last sermon that a man's belief 
 affects his conduct, that ignoble beliefs tend to make 
 ignoble lives ; that untrue beliefs — that is, beliefs which 
 are in opposition to the nature of things— pervert and 
 may destroy a life ; and that faith in such a revelation 
 as that of Christianity, faith m the Trinity — Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore — 
 saves a man from the terrors of superstition, from the 
 bonds of evil, and from the impotence of despair. But 
 I think it may be said by some, ' Are there not those 
 who do not believe these doctrines, and who do not 
 accept Christianity as a Divine revelation — that is, as 
 revealing the foundation and constitution of things — 
 who may call themselves Agnostics or be positively 
 anti-Christian, who are quite as noble and self-sacri- 
 ficing as the very best Christian that ever was ? Are 
 not the priests of Positivism as good men as those of 
 
90 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 Catholicism, and the professors of Agnosticism as 
 moral as the preachers of Protestantism ? ' Yes, 
 thank God, it is so. Am I here to deny that good- 
 ness is goodness because it is allied to a faith which 
 I do not share ? Goodness, wherever it is found, is 
 of God, whether men know it or not, and I bow 
 to the manifestation of God's Holy Spirit, whether 
 it be seen in Christian or unbeliever. 
 
 Indeed the non-Christian and anti- Christian 
 teachers of the present day are after all the children of 
 faith. Mostly born of Christian parents, and educated 
 in Christian churches, and shaped by a literature whose 
 roots have been planted in Christianity for a thousand 
 years, and influenced by institutions and customs and 
 modes of speech and manner, by, as I may say, an 
 atmosphere which they have breathed ever since they 
 were born — and for myself I must add, having within 
 their very mental and spiritual structure the deposits 
 of many generations, deposits from the ages of faith — 
 such men can scarcely help being still to a very large 
 extent Christian. They can no more help being 
 Christian than an Englishman can help being an 
 Englishman, even when he renounces his country and 
 changes his dress and speaks with self-satisfied fluency 
 an alien tongue. Nations and men are the products of 
 many generations. They are a series of strata, one 
 imposed upon the other. The unbelievers of the pre- 
 sent day have taken off one stratum of their inherited 
 character, l)ut there are e^er so many more below. 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 91 
 
 As our characters, yours and mine, are this very in- 
 stant affected by twelve centuries of Christian influ- 
 ence, so it would take centuries to undo the work of 
 Christ so as, at last, to leave our characters without 
 one trace of His power. And do you think that the 
 mfidel scratchings and scrapings of one generation 
 alone will do it ? The noble ideals which fill the 
 minds of those who in this day ignore or oppose Chris- 
 tianity have been made for them by Christianity, 
 and we may honour the work of Christ and see the 
 presence of His spirit in those who think they are 
 independent of Him. 
 
 But, it may be said, the majority of those who are 
 orthodox and attend churches and preach in pulpits 
 do not differ from the ordinary run of those who are 
 not orthodox and who do not attend churches. It 
 may be said by some one, ' I know people quite well 
 who believe all the articles of the Christian faith, and 
 reprobate every heresy, who are not particularly 
 pleasant or safe people to deal with. They are self- 
 opinionated and ill-tempered. They are selfish, envi- 
 ous, overbearing. They are not loving and consider- 
 ate and forgiving at home. They are eager to pamper 
 and gratify themselves, requiring that all should give 
 up for them and make way for them, but giving no 
 help to make others happy. Their care for their own 
 interest makes them keen and sly and underhand. 
 They take unfair advantage and are untrue. They 
 come to church, and patronise Bible Societies and 
 
92 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 missionaries, and have family prayers. But they are 
 as heartless and haughty, as selfish and insincere, 
 as prudently sensual and practically indevout, as the 
 commonest clay, that finds a Sunday dinner more 
 congenial than Sunday worship and has not said 
 a prayer for years. Is it not clear that religious belief 
 is really uninfluential ? Take your own congregation, 
 and take as many hundreds who sit in Club windows 
 on Sundaj's, or who lounge at home over the " Field," 
 or who in the country take a walk or look at the hounds 
 while the ladies are at church — is it a fact that your 
 congregation, at home, in Parliament, in professional 
 or mercantile life, is something very difierent, very 
 much finer and nobler, than those who know no wor- 
 ship ? And if they are not, is not belief really without 
 effect ? ' 
 
 Now in return let me ask such an one this 
 question. Do you really think that if the majority of 
 men believed in their very hearts, so, as it were, to see 
 it day by day before them, that God Almighty was 
 looking at them, standing by them, that they were 
 responsible to Him, that they would give account to 
 Him, that every sin they committed He would sooner 
 or later punish, and that they could not evade that 
 punishment as though God might forget or die — do 
 you think that such a belief would make no difierence 
 to them ? Let them believe, so as to be sure of it as 
 of a friend's or mother's love, that that God, so near 
 and so inexorably righteous, is also their Saviour, ready 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 93 
 
 to help them to a finer, hapi^ier Hfe ; close to them 
 each moment, speaking to them from His cross of a 
 higher life, and a life for ever in heaven when death 
 has blanched their cheeks and stilled their tongues — 
 and would this make no difference ? Let them believe, 
 that that feeling towards something better is the very 
 stirring within them of God's Holy Spirit, that in 
 them now is the presence of God Himself bearing 
 witness against the brute and the beast within them, 
 contending with the devil in them which would sink 
 them into loathsomeness and crime and damnation, 
 and that in this world that Holy Spirit is ever work- 
 ing in accordance with Eternal Law for the perfection 
 and happiness of man. Do you really thmk that all 
 that, held before the mind as a fact, as clearly seen 
 as the matter before your eyes, as insejDarably present 
 to the soul, so that in no place could men go, not 
 even in the darkness where shamelessness seeks con- 
 cealment, but that a man believed all that — God 
 present, Christ beseeching, the Spirit making inter- 
 cession with groanings which cannot be uttered — do 
 you believe that all this would be nothing ? Do you 
 think that it would be just the same if a man believed 
 there was no God, that conduct is a mere matter of 
 taste — one man preferring duplicity and drunkenness 
 and sloth, another liking study and sympathy and 
 such things— that there is no order, no life to come, 
 and, except to society, which can punish, no respon- 
 sibility and no judgment day ? You know it is quite 
 
94 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 impossible. Why, many of the noblest of those who 
 have been unable to believe the things which Chris- 
 tians believe have declared they should like to believe 
 them, that they wish they could believe them, and 
 that it would be an unspeakable comfort if only they 
 could believe them. 
 
 But, if it is true that the majority of us who recite 
 the Creeds and believe the Articles and condemn all 
 false doctrine, are really just as common and just as 
 animal as the ordinary run of those who care for none 
 of these things — and Bishop Hah has well said, 
 * Lewdness of life and practice may stand with ortho- 
 doxy in some main points of religion ' — then it follows, 
 not that belief is ineffective, but that we have no real 
 belief; that, whatever we think we have, it is not 
 belief, at least not belief in those things of which I 
 have been talking ; and an angel may be standing over 
 our heads in church when we recite our belief, and 
 he may be saying the words which the prophet said 
 in days gone by, ' Though they say, The Lord liveth ; 
 surely they swear falsely.' Is this a harsh saying, 
 that a very large number of those who profess to 
 believe, in fact do not believe, are the victims of self- 
 deception, are indeed infidels without knowing it — 
 infidels preaching and infidels responding * All this I 
 stedfastly believe ' ? Then I will soften down the 
 harsh statement. I will not be so abrupt as the 
 prophet who declared that those who said the Lord 
 liveth were perjurers. I will not say with Coleridge 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 95 
 
 that we are ' orthodox hars for God.' Instead of 
 the ancient prophet, I will take a phrase from a 
 modern historian. Mr. Froude says of one of Queen 
 Elizabeth's most trusted councillors, Sir Eobert Cecil, 
 that ' he believed in God in a common j)laee wa3\' 
 Instead of saying that many of us who profess Chris- 
 tian belief, in fact and in truth do not believe, I will 
 say we believe in a commonplace way. 
 
 Let me describe this commonplace belief, or what 
 Cardmal Newman has more accurately called ' notional 
 assent.' It is the assent we give to something which 
 is told us because we see no reason for thmking the 
 thmg untrue in itself, nor yet for calling in question 
 the trustworthiness of the teller ; we see no reason why 
 we should deny it, it would imply more interest in the 
 subject than we possess to deny it. We assent to it 
 and forget all about it the next minute ; we have other 
 thmgs to think about, other things to take into con- 
 sideration, to arrange for, to be anxious about ; but it 
 makes no difference to us whether it is true or false. 
 If we had been told the opposite we should have 
 believed that in the same way, but it creates little or 
 no interest in us one way or another. It neither ex- 
 cites our mtellects nor warms our hearts. Yes, we 
 believe what we have been told — that is, we do not 
 disbelieve it — but if it is not true, thmgs will go on 
 much the same, however the question is decided. If 
 I am told that ' magnetism is associated with elec- 
 tricity by its mechanical analogies, and still more 
 
96 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 closely by its physical influence,' or that the spectro- 
 scope has made known what but a few years ago 
 Comte declared to be for ever beyond the reach of 
 human knowledge, or that the authorship of the 
 ' Imitation of Christ ' has been finaUy cleared up, I 
 assent. If the opposite of these things had been told 
 me by what I took for competent authority, I should 
 equally have assented. Just so with the religious 
 truths which very early were impressed upon us. We 
 do not doubt them, we do not often think of them, we 
 do not want them disturbed, and we do not want them 
 to disturb us. Such beliefs are not retained long 
 before the mind, they do not become the centre of an 
 intellectual interest, they do not regulate the conduct, 
 they supply no place which without them would be left 
 vacant. That is believing in a commonplace way. 
 But let a man beheve that the dearest being in all 
 the world is unfaithful to him, and mocks at his fond- 
 ness when he is absent, and boasts how easily he is 
 duped. Let a beleaguered garrison closed in by 
 ferocious enemies, with food and ammunition spent, 
 at last about to give in and take its grim chance, un- 
 able longer to resist— let it for a moment believe that 
 to-morrow help will come, let but the sounds of 
 familiar notes be carried on the breeze to ears growing 
 indifferent and dead, and men will start up and cry, and 
 look strong, wasted and gaunt though be their frames, 
 and beat the drums and shout defiance, till the 
 waiting wolves around them, just ready to spring, 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 97 
 
 are daunted. These are not commonplace beliefs ; 
 they are what I will call realistic beliefs. 
 
 Now I maintain that many of us believe in God 
 in a commonplace way, and because we do so the sen- 
 sualists around us, who only care to eat and amuse 
 themselves, are right when they say that our belief 
 makes us no better than they are. For, alas! it is 
 true, men do not think upon God even as they think 
 of their friends who are away, of their children and 
 homes, or of the change of residence, or of the new 
 start in life, or of the approaching loss of place, or 
 of those they love now hidden in the grave. These 
 thmgs, one after another, float through their minds 
 as they go to their busmess, or practise then- art, or 
 charm in society, but God they utterly forget. They 
 do not do certam things, lest they should thereby 
 displease an influential friend, or lose respect among 
 their acquaintances ; and some things they do, but 
 they do them secretly lest then' neighbours or con- 
 stituents or customers or inferiors or children should 
 know. But God is not worth considering. * Tush, 
 say they ' in their hearts, in their forgetful practice, 
 * how should God perceive it. Is there knowledge in 
 the Most High ? ' Oh yes, they believe in God, all 
 powerful, all seeing, all judging; but they do not 
 blush when the}'' cheat or injure then- fellows, or soil 
 their bodies and souls in secret, for no one hut God 
 2ciU find it out. It is quite possible that to many of 
 us it would matter little if there were no God. We 
 
98 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 should be neither much better nor much worse. We 
 should do the same work, think about the same things. 
 We should only have to give up our private and 
 family prayers, and perhaps that might almost be a 
 relief. But there cannot be any worth in such a belief. 
 If you do not believe in God as much as you believe 
 in your children, your office, or your horse, how can 
 you think that saying you believe in Him is a virtue 
 which will secure your everlasting salvation ? 
 
 First amend, my son, 
 Thy faulty nomenclature ; call belief 
 Belief indeed, nor grace with such a name 
 The easy acquiescence of mankind 
 In matters nowise worth disi^ute.' 
 
 We Protestants are in the habit of thinking that 
 Eoman Catholics, for the most part, are content with 
 simply assenting to what the Church declares ; with 
 reciting forms of words, according to order, which are 
 supposed to act like charms. We think that what the 
 Church condemns is an unsubmissive spirit, and that 
 she promises to secure the salvation of those who 
 without question assent to her declarations. In other 
 words, w^e think she teaches that the Church makes 
 men free, and that Protestants, on the other hand, 
 teach, with Christ, that it is the truth which shall 
 make men free. May we not in this respect be unjust 
 to the Eoman Church, and may it not be true of our- 
 selves that we trust in magic recitations ? Take these 
 
 ' Mr. Brownin". 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 99 
 
 words of a doctor of the Eoman Church. Speakmg 
 of one of the mysteries of the faith, he says, ' As well 
 might this awful truth be disbelieved altogether as 
 believed only by the head,' and that ' a practical reali- 
 sation of it is the object to be desired.' ^ But, if this 
 is so, this Catholic philosopher distinctly affirms, what 
 I have been maintaining, that there is no virtue or 
 value in a faith, even if it be true and of the most 
 solemn importance, unless it is realised so as to rule 
 the life. This Catholic says a man might as well 
 disbelieve as believe without a practical realisation. 
 And I say so too. In other words, a man may as 
 well profess the Catechism of Comte as the Athana- 
 sian Creed or any other Christian creed, if the creed 
 is ineffective. 
 
 And one thing more I will say in conclusion. It 
 is quite possible for an unbeliever in Christianity to 
 be more a Christian than some who profess Christi- 
 anity. Our subject is commonplace belief. But there 
 may be commonplace unbelief. An unbeliever ma}' 
 have a latent, but operative and real. Christian faith, 
 and his unbelief may in fact be commonplace. It 
 may be that the system of doctrine or philosophy 
 professed by the unbeliever may be held by him in 
 a commonplace way. He may teach that God is un- 
 knowable, and that morality in the long run is expe- 
 diency, but all this may be on the surface and have 
 no influence on his life. He may really feel the 
 
 ' Dr. Ward. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 wonder and bounty of Nature, and awe towards that 
 which is behind Nature. He may recognise the ever- 
 acting forces which tend to greater happiness and more 
 perfect Hfe. He may be content to sacrifice himself 
 that some good may be gained by the future, that 
 when he is no more, he may live again in the lives 
 which he has blessed, but which will know him not. 
 Such a man has realised certain truths of the Chris- 
 tian creeds, albeit he misunderstands their form, and 
 it is the truth and not the form which makes us free. 
 And it may be, too, that while the explicit faith of 
 some of us who are believers is commonplace — that 
 is, our faith in God and Christ is commonplace, an 
 inoperative Sunday profession — our real belief may 
 be atheistic. For if we are ruled by an indolent 
 scepticism or an unrelenting egotism or a self-indul- 
 gent sensuousness, it may be said of us, ' Whose God 
 is their belly, whose glory is in tlieir shame, who mind 
 earthly things.' 
 
101 
 
 VIII. 
 
 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD. 
 II. 
 
 ' The prophets proiDhesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their 
 means ; and my people love to have it so : and what will ye do in the 
 end thereof ? ' — Jeremiah v. 31. 
 
 ' What will ye do in the end thereof ? ' If, now, the 
 I)reachers pray and preach, and the people are gathered 
 together in the churches, but if, notwithstanding, 
 their belief is as though it were a no-belief, without 
 practical effect — so that if in their sleep it were to pass 
 quite away it would make no difference, leaving behind 
 no aching void — what must such a state of things lead 
 to ? What will it be in our children, and what in 
 generations to come ? Will commonplace belief in God 
 have power to hold its own, or will the orthodox 
 atheism of the present become the openly anti-Christian 
 atheism of the future ? What is the natural history 
 of commonplace belief ? I am persuaded that, of all 
 the countries of Europe, at the present moment there is 
 more real religion in Great Britain than in any other; 
 that below this mass of realised belief there is a wide- 
 
102 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 spread, if commonplace and practically uninfluential, 
 confession of Christianity ; and that anti-Christianism 
 is at present numerically small, is fairly courteous in 
 its manners, and is yet without the malignity which 
 in France, for instance, often shows itself as livid 
 hatred of priests and Church and God — of what it 
 calls Clericalism. How seldom do we see such scenes 
 as those which are frequent in the great cemetery of 
 Paris, when crowds are gathered together around the 
 grave of philosopher, politician, or Socialist reformer, 
 ostentatiously refusing the last ministrations of the 
 Church, and with sentimental heroics rejecting the 
 hopes of immortality. In what country of Europe pos- 
 sessing representative institutions will you see a duly 
 elected member excluded for years from the Chamber 
 because he is a dogmatic Atheist ? I am expressing 
 no opinion on the rights of the case. But I do say it 
 is a tribute to the faith which remains or is thought 
 to remain in the English race, for the fear of con- 
 stituents in some cases has led members of Parlia- 
 ment, not overweighted themselves with dogmatic faith, 
 to take the side of exclusion. You cannot imagine 
 such a thing in Paris, in Piome, in Berlin. 
 
 It is true we have Anglicanism in England, Pres- 
 byterianism in Scotland, Eomanism in Ireland, and 
 Calvinistic Methodism in Wales. But in all there is a 
 good deal of realised religion and a very general assent 
 to a form of Christianity. Is there at the present 
 moment a more orthodox or religious Koman Catholic 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 103 
 
 country in the world than Ireland — a land which in 
 centuries long gone by sent out her scholars and mis- 
 sionaries to every country in Europe, and was looked 
 on by all as the land of saints ? To the present day 
 her children, high and low, are untinged with heresy, 
 and are passionately devoted to their faith. We may 
 attribute it to cruel persecutions in the past, to hatred 
 of a conquering race and its religion, but there is the 
 fact. Of the remaining Protestant parts of our com- 
 mon country, I am prepared to reaffirm that nowhere 
 in Europe can you find so much real and so much 
 honest conventional religion. The British Sunday is a 
 perplexity no less than a purgatory to foreigners who 
 have to endure it. 
 
 And yet how much we are divided, what number- 
 less sects ! What freedom of speculation is thus en- 
 couraged ! In many churches, what an assimilation 
 is there of the truths of science, and what an en- 
 deavour to lead the intellect of the nation ! Where 
 will you find so many men, eminent in science and 
 art and the service of the State, who at the same time 
 are humble Christians, as in Great Britain, her Colo- 
 nies, and in the United States ? These theological 
 differences of ours are signs of faith. M. Eenan has 
 said, to ' innovate in theology is to believe in theology ; ' 
 and these differences of ours, I venture to think, are 
 but the necessary steps to unity in ascertained truth. 
 That unity might possibly have been reached ere this, 
 if the inquiries of the mind had not been gagged in 
 
104 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 days gone b}-, and its movements restricted until it 
 had become numb and almost paralysed. Again to 
 quote M. Eenan, ' France is the country of all the 
 world the most orthodox because she is the most in- 
 different in religion,' I suppose he means that those 
 who profess any religious belief in France are the 
 most orthodox ; for, as the world knows, anti-Chris- 
 tianism of the most malignant kind is the very 
 temper of the great cities. What he means is that 
 those who conform to the Catholic Church, question 
 nothing, accept whatever is said, and do not care 
 enough to look into the matter or to disturb their 
 minds. ' France is the most orthodox because she 
 is the most indifferent in religion.' That is, her be- 
 lievers are believers in a commonplace way, and her 
 unbelievers are the masses. 
 
 As a rule, intense, realistic faith is more likely 
 to be found — special circumstances making special 
 exceptions — and has a better chance in Protestant 
 countries than in Catholic. Where belief means pro- 
 fession, or what Cardinal Newman calls ' notional 
 assent,' and where this general assent with ritual 
 conformity is generally regarded as sufficient, men 
 are contented with themselves when they have done 
 all that is required. And, having been brought up 
 in the atmosphere of general assent, no need for ap- 
 prehensive certainty, for embracing faith, is felt. 
 True faith never exists, and yet there may be neither 
 dissent nor heresy. But that passion to know, that 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 105 
 
 love of truth, powerful as it is in Protestant countries, 
 if it reduces the extent of faith, deepens the intent ; 
 that which is held is held tenaciously, not because it 
 is a virtue to l)elieve as many things as possible, but 
 because truth is precious to the soul. 
 
 But my purpose is not to minister to that Pharisaic 
 self-satisfaction which so often repels from English- 
 men the sympathy of other nations ; it is rather to 
 sound a note of warning, by showing what must be 
 the natural result of general commonplace belief. In 
 the long run it must result in open, avowed infidelity. 
 If, as a nation, we are now in the condition of reciting 
 creeds and attending churches, but are untouched l)y 
 them, uninfluenced in temper and taste and conduct 
 by them, the natural results will be national infidelity 
 and national apostasy. When I say the natural result 
 I mean that, unless some Divine interposition take 
 place, unless some outpouring and contagion of the 
 Spirit of holiness work a revival of real religion, our 
 present state of devout respectability and Sunday 
 sanctity will gradually give place to offensive infidelity 
 towards Christianity. 
 
 The path of descent which will be followed will 
 have some such stages as these : First of all, care- 
 lessness in the matter of religious observance — now 
 falling in with it, and now disregarding it. Already 
 there are symptoms of this descent. It may be seen 
 in the large neglect of that ])ond and s3-mbol of Chris- 
 tian intention and brotherhood — the Sacrament of the 
 
106 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 Eucharist. I know some are prevented from sharing 
 in that Sacrament by perplexing uncertainty as to its 
 meaning and obHgation. But I think that the most 
 careless of us would say that, except for such im- 
 pediments, every very religious man, every man of 
 real piety, whose belief in God and Christ lived in 
 his soul like a fire, warming and kindling his whole 
 nature, would delight in loving thanksgiving for the 
 truth w^hich had brought salvation. You would say, 
 I know, whatever be your practice, that a man who 
 really loved God, and was devoted to Christ, would 
 find His Holy Communion a high and exalted privi- 
 lege. But is it not a fact, too evident for speech, that 
 tens of thousands of those who are quite orthodox, 
 and dread these German wTiters, and these Eitualists 
 and Freethinkers who ' ought to be turned out of 
 the Church,' do pass by this ordinance of Christianity ? 
 They pass it by, and yet are perfectly certain that if 
 they were very religious, if they really, realistically, 
 believed in Christ, they would not pass it by. 
 
 It is said that in Catholic churches the women 
 very vastly predominate in the congregations, and 
 that the men are comparatively few. May not the 
 same thing be said of our own churches in the matter 
 of Holy Communion ? And does not this fact point 
 to the next development, that it will be the same in 
 time with our own Sunday public worship as it is already 
 with our more private Communion — that men will be 
 rare ? Even now, how many men there are who. 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 107 
 
 -vvhen rebuked for neglect of Divine worship, reply, 
 * Oh, I always go to church when I am m the country 
 or at the seaside.' In other words, there is nothing 
 else to do, and you see everybody at church, and it 
 gives you somethmg to talk about, and it has not yet 
 become quite the thing for ladies and gentlemen to fix 
 their tennis ' tournaments ' for Sunday mornuags, usmg 
 the church bell as the signal for assembling. ' And 
 in the country we go to church ; one ought to set a 
 good example to one's tenants and the labourers, and 
 hack up the clergyman a little, who, after all, is a 
 poor creature unless ice stand by him — lay assistance 
 is so very important, you know. But it is quite dif- 
 ferent in London. Nobody knows whether you go to 
 church or not.' Here, you see, is no real faith in 
 God, no devoted love of worship. Do away with 
 such inducements as I have mentioned, and there 
 would be as little church-going at the seaside and in 
 the country as now in London. 
 
 And this temper, with its open mconsistency, tells 
 upon children, who become still more indifferent than 
 theii- parents. ' Why should they go to church, there 
 can be no particular good in it ? Their parents do 
 not think there is much good in it, or else they would 
 act differently.' Thus a generation must be produced 
 altogether ignorant of Christianity or religion of any 
 kind. "When once you have reached the condition of 
 things in which the men ignore worship of every kmd 
 and only the women frequent it, there gradually arises 
 
108 COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 amongst the men secret dislike to religion, a dislike 
 ^Yhich now and again becomes audible. Eeally religious 
 women become unhappy about their husbands and 
 sons and brothers. Eeligion is something very solemn 
 and very elevating and very saving, or it is a prodigal 
 farce. In the latter case women too must fling it awa3^ 
 They will say, 'Why should women — mothers and 
 maidens— be made fools of, and worship waxworks, 
 and be fed on fables any more than men ? Do men 
 think that we need hoodwinking in order to keep us 
 virtuous ? Then they should be a little sharper if 
 they intend to take in their weaker companions, and 
 act as though they themselves believed.' If Chris- 
 tianity is all a fable and a fraud, why should not 
 women speak of God and Christ as of any heathen 
 god and Oriental wonder-worker ? And if women are 
 in the long run constrained to follow the indifference 
 and unbelief of the men of their families, this will be 
 the result. But if, on the other hand, they know in 
 whom they have believed, and if they feel all the loss 
 of ennobling influence, all the blindness to eternal 
 fact and ever-acting Divine law which is perverting 
 those who are dear to them, it will settle down upon 
 them as pain and anxiety. It will make them warn 
 and pray for those they love. There will be two oppo- 
 site courses and dispositions in the home. There will 
 be a separation in spirit which may never be spoken 
 of, which may at length stir in the man irritation 
 and anger and opposition to that which has produced 
 
COJDIONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 109 
 
 the division. He will say, ' It is all these cursed 
 priests with their wiles, leading captive silly women, 
 and the world will never be happy until it is all got 
 rid of. Voltaire said. If there were not a God we 
 should have to make one ; but we are far past that. 
 We must get rid of such fragments of God as are 
 left, for as long as relics remain, men will bow down 
 to them, or rather women will. And so we must 
 cleanse the schools from every contaminating rem- 
 nant of God, and disendow the Churches, and make 
 seminarists serve in the army, and in time we shall 
 be rid of these bugbears which self-interested ecclesias- 
 tics have set up to serve themselves as well as civil 
 despotisms.' 
 
 Can we see ourselves in these words ? Do they 
 sound like anarchism and nihilism ? And yet to 
 that wOl empty, unpractical profession of Christian- 
 ity surely lead, and orthodox formality bring forth 
 active and offensive atheism ; and we conservative, 
 conforming, mechanically devout members of the 
 upper classes, who are too well off to need so 
 much thinking as some people seem to require, in- 
 deed do not know why the classes below us need 
 think at all, if only they are content with their lot 
 and respect their betters — such may be the fathers 
 or grandfathers of those to whom God will be a scoff', 
 and immortality a fragment of old mythology, and 
 judgment the bugbear which once was able to keep 
 the masses in order. Can we bear such a prospect ? 
 
no COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 Have we no love for our country ? Is patriotism dead, 
 and is bourgeois morality to prevail, content with 
 growing fat itself, and letting posterity look after it- 
 self ? Instead of the Creed, shall we chaunt over our 
 steaming tables, ' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
 we die ' ? Instead of worship and solemn Sacrament, 
 shall the ' dog return to his vomit again and the sow 
 that was washed to her wallowing in the mire ' ? Then 
 will have come the day — wished for by waiting rivals 
 and races once crushed beneath our power, whose 
 hatred at last begins to sharpen its knife — the day of 
 England's decadence. * When there is not only no 
 religion among a people, but no belief, when education 
 in the earliest years has relaxed every binding tie by 
 teaching the child to analyse everything remorselessly, 
 that nation is falling to pieces ; it is kept together 
 only by the ligatures of material interest, by the 
 laws of that worship which is the offspring of 
 egotism.' ' 
 
 But when men have lost the ideal of God, when 
 the cross of Christ has no voice to their souls, but is 
 a dishonoured gibbet, when injustice fears no future 
 if only in this life it can be secret, and passion 
 knows no mercy, but gluts itself and flings the refuse 
 away, and self-indulgent indolence simpers out, ' Why 
 should I give up for others, I suppose my happiness 
 is as important as theirs ? ' — when death ends all, 
 and man's last use is to fatten the ground with 
 ' Balzac. 
 
COMMONPLACE BELIEF IN GOD 111 
 
 his carcase — when, instead of heaven as the end, 
 men have for their ideal to be as the straw trodden 
 down for the dunghill — then, I say, will have come 
 the worship of ' false ideals,' which will work ' deep 
 and ever deeper degeneracy,' until, like the Cities of 
 the Plain, men will be burnt up by their consuming 
 vices. It will not be by the advances of science that 
 Christian faith will be driven from the field. It will 
 be that professing Christians have not believed in the 
 great truths which, with orientation and unction and 
 self-satisfaction, they have confessed. Men who have 
 a conscience and a love for their country will surely 
 ask the question. What can I do to be saved from 
 this commonplace belief whose end is to be ' without 
 God and without hope in the world ' ? 
 
112 
 
 IX 
 
 SHAM nniOBTALITY. 
 
 What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give 
 him a stone ? ' — Mattheio vii. 9. 
 
 The Christian belief in a life beyond the grave has 
 had a powerful influence on those who have held it, 
 and that influence has on the whole been for good. If 
 it has made some men undervalue the present life — a 
 work of difficulty, for in doing so it had to vanquish 
 Nature herself — it has certainly been a consolation in 
 suffering, a strength in toil and danger, an impulse 
 towards moral excellence, and a beauty ever filling 
 the horizon in front of us with the undying radiance 
 of hope. And this is confessed even by those who do 
 not hold the Christian belief. Mill says : ' The bene- 
 ficial effect of such a hope is far from trifling. It 
 makes life and human nature a far greater thing to 
 the feelings, and gives greater strength as well as 
 greater solemnity to all the sentiments which are 
 awakened in us by our fellow-creatures and by man- 
 kind at large. It allays the sense of that irony of 
 Nature which is so painfully felt when we see the 
 
SHAM IMMORTALITY 113 
 
 exertions and sacrifices of a life culminating in the 
 formation of a wise and noble mind, only to disappear 
 from the world when the time has just arrived at 
 which the world seems about to begin reaping the 
 benefit of it.' Professor Clift'ord says : ' The conclusion 
 of the matter is that belief in God and in a future 
 life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure to 
 those who can hold it.' Mr. Justice Stephen says: 
 ' But on the whole I think it would be carrying scep- 
 ticism too far to doubt that an habitual belief in a 
 good God who exercises an influence over human life 
 must be a most powerful motive to virtue, or that it 
 has in fact played in various ways a great part in the 
 government of mankind, even when it has not been 
 coupled with a belief in a future state of conscious 
 existence, and much more when it has.' 
 
 Indeed, so much is there in the Christian doctrine 
 of immortality which captivates the imagination and 
 touches the heart, that the apostles of unbelief are 
 constrained to find a substitute for it, and they preach 
 an immortality in words which are anointed with 
 the unction of the pulpit. But all that is true in 
 their doctrine has been a conscious Christian pos- 
 session, and I may say a human possession, since 
 man became capable of reflection ; and all that is 
 new is the sight of infidelity strutting the highways 
 in garments stolen from Christianity. They teach that 
 the dead live on in those who come after them, that 
 the dead have a real place in succeeding generations 
 
 I 
 
114 SHAM IMMORTALITY 
 
 and make them what they are, that the dead are the 
 true rulers of the present, and are often more powerful 
 than when they were alive. It is said by Comte, * The 
 dead more and more control the living.' It is said 
 by Mr. F. Harrison that the dead are to be seen * not 
 in their mortal past as laid to their rest, but as still 
 living around us and as active as they ever were in 
 life.' And another writer asks, * Is it not soberly true 
 of a great benefactor of mankind that he has a larger 
 and fuller human life after death than he had when 
 he actually lived ? Putting off mortality he puts on 
 immortality ; ' and he speaks of a dead mother or 
 sister or lover or child * having a continuing life in us.' ^ 
 Now there is paltering with a double sense in these 
 
 High words that bear 
 Semblance of worth, not substance. 
 
 The apologists of unbelief, when they say * the 
 dead are still living around us and are as active as 
 ever they were in life,' do not mean by ' living ' what 
 men usually mean. They do not mean that they are 
 living in the sense in which they were said to be 
 living before they died. Indeed they mean by * living ' 
 something quite different. For they do not believe 
 in the immortality of the soul — that is, in the 
 continued existence of the conscious rational being, 
 of that unity we call the ego or self. They do think 
 that death is the loss of the life of consciousness, 
 which most men look upon as the very essence of life, 
 
 ' Dr. Maudsley. 
 
SHAM IMMOETALITY 115 
 
 and a loss of that life for ever and ever. ' When, 
 then, we lay our friend in the grave with tears, we 
 do not hope to see his face any more. Be that un- 
 compromisingly admitted.' ^ In this sense it may be 
 said that they believe in annihilation, not of course 
 in the annihilation of the matter of which the body 
 is composed, but they do hold that the * individual 
 perishes,' if 'the world is more and more.' 
 
 This loss for ever of consciousness is terrible for the 
 majority to contemplate. What good is it to tell them 
 that they will be still living after death and as active 
 as ever, if they will not know it, and will not feel it ? 
 If they will see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, 
 will nothing, after death ; if they will remember 
 nothing, be interested in nothing, love nothing ; if 
 with them it will be the insensibility of a block of ice, 
 a black night, in which no sound is heard, no move- 
 ment possible for evermore — then to call such a state 
 * living ' is scarcely honest. When my heart is 
 touched by the vision of the dead mother or child, 
 and the ministers of unbelief soothe me by telling 
 me that they are 'living still,' — that they 'have a 
 continuing life in us,' I say there is sophistry in their 
 pious phrases. The dead mother and child, if their 
 life continues in me, do not know it, do not know 
 themselves. I know them — that is, I remember them, 
 I long for them. Oh what would I not give to get 
 them back again ! Dear dead omes, why will ye not 
 
 ' Mr. V. Lushington. 
 
 I 2 
 
116 SHAJVI IMMORTALITY 
 
 speak ? But there is no voice. If they are near me, 
 they do not know it. That mother in me has no 
 memory of the day when her pangs hghtened into glad- 
 ness, none of the child-talk sweeter than music to her 
 soul, none of the boy's proud kiss when he promised 
 to be the strength of her widowed years. And is it 
 not but a cruel play upon words to say that that mother 
 is still around us, still lives, and is as active as ever ? 
 Is not this but giving a stone to the sorrowful who 
 ask for bread ? If the stone is all that we have to 
 give, it is scarcely manly to wrap it up in a tract of 
 the discarded faith and pass it off as the bread of life. 
 Surely these new teachers are badly off for clothes 
 to dress their doctrines in — shall I not say with which 
 to disguise them ? Are there no fig-leaves, aesthetic 
 or scientific, which they can hang upon them that they 
 steal fragments from the robes of Christ ? What are 
 we to understand by such a statement as this — * The 
 great benefactor lives a fuller human life after death 
 than he had when he actually lived ' ? Then I suppose 
 the death of a benefactor of the race is a blessing to 
 mankind, to kill a great benefactor is to make him more 
 effective, and the world has really been wise and 
 beneficent when it has murdered its prophets and 
 stoned them which were sent unto it. But when we 
 are told that * putting off mortality they put on im- 
 mortality,' men of gentle feeling, whatever their 
 opinions, rise in rebellion against such a perversion of 
 words already appropriated to a very different purpose. 
 
SHAM IMMORTALITY 117 
 
 Cannot materialism go for quotations to its poets of the 
 flesh and its prophets of the earth instead of stealing 
 from psalmist, evangelist, and apostle ? 
 
 In what sense do the great benefactors of the world 
 put on immortality according to the new Evangel ? 
 They themselves, as themselves, ceased for ever to be 
 at the moment they died. Is it that they are had in 
 everlasting veneration by those they have blessed ? 
 But the greatest benefactors of the world are unknown 
 to fame. He who, at will, first produced and utilised 
 fire, the first conscious arrangers of words in speech, 
 the makers of alphabets, the domesticators of cattle, 
 the first cultivators of cereals, to say nothing of those 
 chiefs in the march of human progress, the first co- 
 ordinators of religion — these are utterly unknown ; like 
 the grave of Moses, no man knoweth them. If they 
 may be said to have put on immortality, it is not that 
 they themselves are immortal, nor that their names are 
 immortal ; it is that their discoveries and inventions 
 are immortal. They said something, or they did some- 
 thing, which continues in its effects to the present 
 day. But that is not themselves, any more than 
 Stephenson is the steam-engine or Hargreaves the 
 spinning-jenny. And as for the sacred phrase of the 
 Christian, so rudely appropriated by the unbeliever, 
 it becomes senseless in his hands. He says the 
 great benefactor ' puts off mortality and puts on im- 
 mortality,' and he means by it that the great work 
 is immortal. But there is no connection between the 
 
118 SHAM IMMORTALITY 
 
 great benefactor's putting off mortality and his work 
 putting on immoi'tality. The death of an inventor 
 does not make his work immortal. If the man had 
 not put off mortality, if he had gone on living to the 
 years of Methuselah or had never died at all, it 
 would have made no difference to the great work. 
 The work is not the man, and it lives on without 
 regard to him ; it lives on its own merits. 
 These 
 
 raptures conjured up 
 To serve occasion of poetic pomp, 
 
 simply come to this — Conduct of every kind has its 
 consequences, and these consequences reach to future 
 generations. To quote Mr. Harrison's words : ' There 
 is an indefinite persistence of thoughts and acts and 
 feelings throughout human life, however remote in 
 time ; . . . the least of our words and of our thoughts 
 has its own inevitable sequence. It must act on the 
 brain, the heart, the will of others, and so must pass 
 into the immense consensus of life.' This is the sub- 
 stitute for the Christian eternal life — a substitute 
 which we are told is ' real and inspiring.' That our 
 conduct will influence the future is as much a fact and 
 faith to the Christian as it is to the Positivist ; what- 
 ever ' inspiration such a fact can give is as much 
 ours as his. The Positivist teacher admits that it was 
 ' shared by Paul and Pascal.' But if there is no other 
 immortality than this, that a man's conduct will con- 
 tinue to have its effects in the future, it is for the 
 
SHAM IMMOETALITY 119 
 
 greater part of mankind an immortality which is un- 
 inspiring, and for many an immortality of hopeless 
 night. If a few great spirits go to the tomb, whose 
 black gates shall never more be opened to let them out, 
 sustained by the thought that succeeding generations 
 will be happier and better because they once lived, how 
 few must they be, and the heaven of Positivism be 
 smaller than that of the most exclusive Calvinism. 
 
 How insignificant must be the effect of a single life, 
 such as that lived by thousands and millions of human 
 beings, on the next generation ; still less upon that 
 which is more remote, and ever growing smaller and 
 fainter as the ages advance ! We may say that a pebble 
 dropped from Dover cliff will have its effect upon the 
 storm-beaten rocks of Cape Horn, but the effect of any 
 one ordinary life upon distant generations, * however 
 remote in time,' must be smaller still. And when we 
 remember that if every act has its persisting effects, 
 then our bad acts, our silly acts, our mean acts have 
 their effects, their immortality, just as our good ones 
 have — and there cannot be much inspiration in the 
 immortality of our vices and follies. When we re- 
 member that the sins of our youth and all our base- 
 ness and brutality, the evil spirits we have made 
 guests of in our heart, that * mob of white-faced 
 thieves ' which steals our good resolutions — that these 
 shall be alive and active when we are dead, that they 
 shall be our very selves, * as living and as active as ever,' 
 this is surely a hell as terrible as any which the dark 
 
120 SHAM lilMORTALITY 
 
 ages of Christianity ever painted. If this is to be 
 the life to come, we may well wish for a great sword 
 long enough to smite the future, and strong enough to 
 strike off the heads of the offspring which will bear 
 our names. It is said to have been one of Philip of 
 Macedon's maxims of State, 'that whoever puts to 
 death the father must also kill the sons.' I should 
 like to know how the Positivist is to do that. 
 
 We are told by one whose modesty at least is never 
 very embarrassing that ' Not all peoples survive and 
 advance, nor all sections of a people, nor all families 
 of a section, nor all individuals of a family ; it is only a 
 chosen part, and that a small minority of the whole, 
 which carries forward the progress of humanity ; the 
 huge majority is at best stationary and for the most 
 ]Dart actually occupied in degenerating.' ' I ask, What 
 inspiration has this counterfeit immortalit}^ for the 
 * huge majority ' ? Materialism has no gospel, no glad 
 tidings for the * huge majority.' It can only say, * Poor 
 wretches, you are doomed to degenerate. You will live 
 in your successors, a meaner lower life, and then a still 
 lower one, until extinction is happily reached.' Well, 
 that must be very inspiring to the ' huge majority.' 
 But we are told that the same fate may befall the soli- 
 tary few, who deserve to live, which awaits the ' huge 
 majority.' * It is not unlikely that natural selection 
 will act to lead mankind downhill at last to their extinc- 
 tion as effectively as it now acts to lead them uphill.' "^ 
 
 ' Dr. Maudsley. ^ j^jv^_ 
 
SHAM IMMORTALITY 121 
 
 And if this should turn out to be true, the fact for great 
 and simple alike to contemplate, the ' common con- 
 ception still real and inspiring,' is, that we shall have 
 a continuing life in a race, fated in the long run to 
 degrade, until it hears no voice but that of its belly, 
 until it starves, and its cries grow faint and ever fainter, 
 at length to be frozen into silence and eternal death. 
 
 I am not to-day engaged in proving the truth of 
 the Christian doctrine of immortality. It may be 
 23oetry, illusion, what you will ; but anyhow it is some- 
 thing a great deal more elevating and inspiring, than 
 the prospect of possibly being an atom in the shiver- 
 ing carcase of some starved-out last man. It can 
 scarcely sustain the great and good to labour for such 
 a consummation as this, and the poor and the dis- 
 tressed and the bereaved will not grow patient and 
 hopeful, because they may have an unrecognisable 
 part in men still poorer and more miserable. Such 
 teaching is demoralising, and tends to bring about the 
 degradation it contemplates so complacently. In one 
 of Longfellow's letters, written after the tragical death 
 of his wife, he says, ' Did you ever examine what 
 the photographers call the negative, on which all that 
 is to be light is dark, and the reverse ? If so, you will 
 feel how beautiful was the remark made by a brother- 
 in-law of mine that this world is only the negative 
 of the world to come, and what is dark here will be 
 light hereafter.' Such was the hope which inspired 
 the spotless, tender spirit of the American poet, and 
 
122 SHA]\I IMMOETALITY 
 
 such faith and hope are nourished by the poetry 
 which is dear to the widesf»read EngKsh race. It 
 was more than resignation which sang 
 
 There is no Death ! what seems so is transition ; 
 
 This life of mortal breath 
 Is but a suburb of the life Elysian 
 
 Whose portals we call Death. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield once said that the ' poets were 
 the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.' But 
 whether they are the acknowledged or the unacknow- 
 ledged, we may thank God that they are more potent, 
 in preserving and stimulating faith in God and hope 
 of immortality, than all the unfeeling teachers who, 
 with the recklessness of a savage destroying a work 
 of art no labour of man can re-create, assail these 
 brightest possessions of human life. We cannot listen 
 to the ' scrannel pipes ' of materialism, while such 
 sweet music solicits our ears. There is much in this 
 world which, with all our knowledge, we cannot now 
 explain, but the Christian can afford to wait for an 
 explanation. The burdens which oppress him bear 
 down equally upon those who reject his faith, but for 
 them there is no explanation. Life for them must 
 grow darker, until there falls upon them the eternal 
 night. But the religion of Christ can embrace all 
 true philosophy and science, all which appertains to 
 man, and give it a prospect and a hope no human 
 synthesis can supply. It is the promise of * the life 
 that now is and of that which is to come.' 
 
 Oh welcome, pure-eyed faith, white-handed hope, 
 Ye hovering angels girt with golden wings. 
 
123 
 
 X. 
 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 
 
 ' Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.' — 
 2 Corinthians v. 11. 
 
 Whatever the reason may be, men do not now think 
 much about the terror of the Lord, and preachers do 
 not preach much about it. Even our hymns at 
 Advent, which speak of the descending Judge * robed 
 in dreadful majesty,' and of the ungodly ' filled with 
 guilty fears whose sighs are unavailing,' seem struck 
 in too high a key — at least they do not make the 
 scene stand before us so as to subdue our voices to 
 trembling awe. They are not in accord with the spirit 
 of the present day. That spirit is sceptical. The bold 
 assertions of the past provoke nothing but a gently 
 subdued contempt. Men are now proudly certain 
 of but one thing, and that is that there is nothing 
 of which they can be certain. And this spirit 
 has diffused itself through the abodes of Christian be- 
 lief. It has diluted it until an uninfluential assent 
 has taken the place of a realistic belief, the fires of 
 faith have been put out and only the grey ashes re- 
 main, and the terror of the Lord has become 
 
 A tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. 
 
124 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 Again, Christian teachers, in growing numbers, are 
 yielding to the belief that a day will come when sin 
 shall for ever cease, when the works of the Devil shall 
 be destroyed, * that God may be all in all.' These 
 men are said not to believe in eternal pmiishment. 
 Now, whether they are right or wrong in believing 
 that sin shall all be washed away from the world by 
 the l:)lood of Christ, and the chaff burnt up by the 
 iires of His Holy Spirit which man shall never be 
 able to quench, I think they are misunderstood. 
 They do not believe in eternal sin ; but whether 
 certain consequences of sin may not be everlast- 
 ing they have not so clearly determined. Wliat 
 they affirm is the article of the Apostles' Creed, ' I 
 believe in the forgiveness of sins,' the article of the 
 Nicene Creed, ' I believe in one baptism for the re- 
 mission of sins.' But, since there can be no remission 
 of sins while sins are being committed, they believe 
 that sins will cease to be committed, for there is no 
 other remission of sins than this. A state of sin is 
 a state of enmity with God, and as long as a state of 
 sin continues, a state which is enmity with God con- 
 tinues. Enmity with God can only cease when sin 
 ceases. We need not, however, fasten upon them the 
 belief that the punishment of sin is not enduring ; 
 the two beliefs do not necessarily go together. 
 
 But many of us, whose faith if not vivid is 
 yet what is called sound, are in danger of pervert- 
 ing that great article of Christian belief, the re- 
 
ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 125 
 
 mission of sins ; and the spirit of profligacy does 
 pervert it, and the spirit of moral vulgarity per- 
 verts it, and the spirit of co\Yardly improvidence 
 longs to have it so. The perversion is, that the 
 pmiishment of sin is to be remitted, that the for- 
 giveness of sins practically means letting us off from 
 the penalty of our sins, that it is going to be all 
 right whatever we do, that there is no hell, and that 
 men may make themselves quite comfortable, for 
 there is nothing in the future to fear. Now against 
 all this the Christian teacher must never cease to 
 protest, for it is a great lie ; it is a flat contradiction 
 to the laws of nature. Wliether we believe that, in 
 very literal truth, the Lamb of God will take away the 
 sin of the world, and that Jesus Christ's coming to 
 save sinners will be completely effective ; or whether 
 we believe that evil will last as long as the throne of 
 God, that from the pit its black incense of curses 
 will for ever ascend ; one thing is certain, that there 
 is no remission of the punishment of sin. The saint 
 must bear his punishment, and the impenitent sinner 
 ever augment his. God is not the feeble, good-natured 
 God of languid or frivolous profligacy. The words of 
 the Bible have terrible truth in them : * God is 
 righteous and awful and full of vengeance.' In one 
 sense He is unmerciful and unrelenting. We have to 
 do with unaltering design and intention, and with 
 irresistible power. You may better argue with a 
 Nasmyth's hammer as it falls, or murmur dulcet words 
 
126 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 of peace to the thundering avalanche, than hiterfere 
 "with the retribution which is inseparable from sin. 
 The punishment of sin according to the constitu- 
 tion of Nature, which simply means the mind and 
 will of God, is certain, and often instantaneous and 
 enduring. You ask me. Do I believe in eternal punish- 
 ment? I answer, I do — albeit the words eternal 
 'punishment may not convey to me precisely the same 
 meaning which they do to you. I cannot believe in 
 anything else. At least I can put before my mind 
 the thought of punishment outliving sin, because I 
 see that it does so day by day before my eyes ; because 
 I see that, in a very solemn sense, all punishment is 
 eternal. I can conceive the punishment of sin as 
 being, in one sense, necessarily everlasting, if too 
 often we have misunderstood the law and nature of 
 that punishment. 
 
 What is sin? The Bible has given us an exact 
 answer, ' Sin is the transgression of the law.' The great 
 law of existence is. Conform to the conditions of exist- 
 ence. Whether men believe in God or not, they will 
 admit that. If a man will not take food, or leaps over 
 a precipice, or daily poisons himself with alcohol 
 or opium, God or no God, the punishment is certain, 
 and may never be removed. The law of existence is. 
 Conform to the conditions of existence or perish. But 
 I will lift this thought into a higher realm, and will 
 say that from the conditions of existence God cannot 
 be excluded ; that if we must conform to the condi- 
 
fTTEENAL PUNISHMENT 127 
 
 tions of existence we must conform to God ; that the 
 ultimate and highest law of existence is, * Be ye recon- 
 ciled to God.' Now if we do not conform to the con- 
 ditions of existence we must in time cease to exist. 
 Whether the conditions of existence we ignore, be bodily 
 or mental, or moral or spiritual, from that moment 
 •we begin to destroy our physical, mental, moral, and 
 spiritual life. And so the words spoken to primitive 
 man — one of the earliest revelations made to him, a 
 warning by which his life might be saved — were, ' In 
 the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' 
 The law is inexorable. It says. Only on certain con- 
 ditions may you live. If you do not conform I will 
 kill you, slowly or quickly I will kill you. You shall 
 smart and suffer in the process of dissolution, and the 
 pain may check you and stop you and turn you back 
 into the way of law, which in fact is the way of 
 righteousness, ' The law of Nature,' says an Agnostic 
 writer on Ethics, 'has but one precept, "Be strong." 
 Nature has but one punishment, decay culminating 
 in death or extirpation ; and takes cognisance of but 
 one evil, the weakness which leads to decay.' ^ 
 
 It is the fashion now to condemn the divines and 
 preachers of other days for their fervid assertions of 
 the consequences of sin. I myself have followed the 
 fashion. It is quite possible, and I think quite certain, 
 that they misunderstood the nature and law of Divine 
 punishment. But they did feel the awful solemnity 
 
 ' Mr. Leslie Stephen. 
 
128 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 of human conduct, and their wildest denunciations- 
 were at least more respectable than the frivolous 
 Epicureanism which seems to say, ' Oh yes, there is a 
 very good God, and there is no need to be apprehen- 
 sive or alarmed. He will not punish men for their 
 little follies and the faults of human nature.' And 
 is that the God who is set upon the throne of the 
 universe ? — a God like some feeble, profligate 
 monarch, too old to do much harm himself, but who 
 did not mind it in other people. Does anyone mean 
 that that is the God to whom he says his prayers ? 
 We should be too manly to bow to such a being. A 
 faith of that kind will in the long run take every bit of 
 moral fibre out of a man. It will reduce his charac- 
 ter to a boneless pulp and his worship to a mindless 
 posture. It was said by Mr. Maurice, ' The barest 
 Utilitarianism which is in earnest is better than a 
 Sentiment and a Eeligion which are only an excuse 
 for self-indulgence and contempt.' And I will say, in- 
 finitely nol)ler is the stern God of Calvinism than the 
 Grand Monarque of religious indifferentism. 
 
 Even science has a better God. If the God of the 
 Christian is a languid Eli who only shakes his head 
 condoningly over the excesses of his children, the God 
 of the materialist. Nature, knows how to avenge. If 
 ice cannot speak of the terror of the Lord, science can 
 fulminate the terrors of the Law. Indeed it is sur- 
 prising how fierce some of the new teachers, who ignore 
 Christianity, are becoming. They catch up the tones 
 
ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 129 
 
 of the old threatening prophets. The authorised 
 preachers of churches and chapels have forgotten to 
 denounce. They have eaten the lotus of scepticism, 
 and the old threats which once raged around them 
 now seem ' to mourn and rave on alien shores ; ' but 
 science has her Boanerges who thunder out damna- 
 tion. What we used to call perdition, when we had 
 the use of our tongue, they call 'extirpation and 
 natural elimination.' But I do not think that to be 
 * extirpated ' or * naturally eliminated ' can be a very 
 pleasant kind of thing. It does not seem to me to 
 differ much from what we used to call destruction. 
 Here is an instance in which words of the Bible even 
 are appropriated by an anti- Christian writer : ' There 
 is, so to speak, a broad and easy way leading to 
 degeneration, decay and death, which is the oppo- 
 site of the steep and narrow path that leads to evolu- 
 tion and fuller life.' And here is a threat of punish- 
 ment, which we may almost call a threat of everlasting 
 punishment, once uttered by a brilliant, unbelieving 
 mathematician,' who now knows more of the unseen 
 land than the sons of the living : ' He who stifles his 
 own doubts or hampers the inquiry of others is guilty 
 of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to 
 blot out. When the labours and questionings of 
 honest and brave men shall have built up the fabric 
 of known truth to a glory which we in this generation 
 can neither hope for nor imagine, in that pure and 
 
 ' Professor Clifford. 
 
130 ETEKNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 holy temple he shall have no part nor lot, but his 
 name and his works shall be cast into the darkness 
 of oblivion for ever.' Positivism has also its doctrine 
 of eternal destruction. Although it says, ' There is 
 for us no heaven, no hell, no other world,' it still 
 maintains that there is ' for us, if we be worthy, a life 
 after death.' It is true that life after death is a life 
 in Humanity. But that life is not for all, it is only for 
 those who are ' worthy.' The ' unworthy ones form 
 no part of Humanity.' ^ In other words, there is no 
 life for ' unworthy ones ' after death, and Positivism 
 has its dogma of eternal destruction. 
 
 Well, it all comes to this, that men cannot bear for 
 long the softened voices of Lotus-land. Nature forbids 
 it ; she begins to murmur and threaten and thunder. 
 If old preachers and painters and poets were too lurid 
 in their materialistic representations. Nature says, 
 This is no place of irresponsible dalliance, it is a 
 place of unrelenting punishment. Look at the broken 
 shattered beings who stagger on until they collapse 
 into a grave. Those bright wild days when they were 
 strong and defied results have wrought their revenge. 
 You say. It was more thoughtlessness or pique or 
 daring than real badness of heart. Yes, perhaps it 
 was, but that did not save them. It may be that 
 they have passed away to some strange land to conceal 
 their shame — never more to take the place to which 
 they were born — or to the grave ere manhood had been 
 
 ' Mr. V. Lushin"ton. 
 
ETEENAL PUNISHMENT 131 
 
 fully reached. Every sin against your body has some 
 instant punishment. Every sin is a step to death. 
 No praying will stop it. God's law must be fulfilled, 
 and so it is written, ' Be sure 3'our sins will find you 
 out. . . . His bones are full of the sin of his youth, 
 which shall lie down with him in the dust.' 
 
 Eiches we wish to get, 
 Yet remain spendthrifts still ; 
 We would have health, and yet 
 Still use our bodies ill ; 
 Bafflers of our own prayers from youth to life's last scenes. 
 
 We would have inward peace, 
 Yet will not look within ; 
 We would have misery cease. 
 Yet will not cease from sin ; 
 We want all pleasant ends, but will use no harsh means ; 
 
 We do not what we ought. 
 What we ought not, we do. 
 And lean upon the thought 
 That chance will bring us through ; 
 But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.' 
 
 Sin is always a process of self-destruction, and its 
 most fearful consequences are upon the moral and 
 spiritual nature itself. Its first effect is pain, the 
 pain inflicted by conscience when wrong has been 
 consciously done. Oh happy pains of saving, arresting 
 conscience ! Oh miserable, hopeless state when 
 conscience has been stupefied, and we go with 
 light heart to the sin which has done the deed, and 
 will soon complete our destruction ! For if every act 
 
 ' Mr. M. Arnold. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 of man is registered in his body, so that in some part 
 of his frame each act has left its trace, hke a subtle 
 poison or disease whose effects cannot be expelled 
 from the tissues — if now even from our bodies the 
 tale of our most secret sin could be extracted — so too 
 our sins, that is, as conscious breaches of moral and 
 divine law, are all registered in the spiritual nature. 
 No single act can be lost. It is all marked into the 
 being. It has been said that ' In the living present 
 the incorporate past is active ; ' and, again, * The 
 conscious motives of past years are incorporated 
 structurally as unconscious factors in the motives 
 of to-day ; ' and as the Ninth Article declares * the 
 infection of nature doth remain in them that are 
 regenerate.' Amid the million experiences we have 
 undergone, each single one, in some form, under some 
 modification or other, is there, and the tests of the 
 All-seeing can show the stain. That lie, that lust, that 
 cowardly cruelty, that self-seeking hypocrisy, all that 
 thou hast done has made its mark on thee, has made 
 thee something other than thou mightest have been. 
 On the unseen face which stands behind thine eyes, 
 every sin has marked its line ; leaving a bewildering 
 confusion, like the labyrinth of veins and nerves and 
 reticulations betrayed when the skin is removed. 
 
 Eemember, for God's sake, we can never make that 
 to be undone which once we have done. Omnipotence 
 cannot do it. The blood of Christ cannot do it. It 
 can umsh out the ciuiltij taint, but the fact must remain 
 
ETEENAL PUNISHMENT 133 
 
 a fact about us for evermore. Is not that a punishment ? 
 Is not that an eternal punishment ? If memory remains 
 to us in the world unseen, whenever that deed, which it 
 may be we now hate and would give worlds not to have 
 done, comes to mind, to human seeming it would appear 
 that pain must arise. Perhaps the Divine vision will 
 so fill the enraptured spirit that nothing will be able 
 to bring back the guilty past to memory. But this 
 part of the punishment may well be named eternal, a 
 punishment for the saint and even for an apostle like 
 St. Peter, that each sin we have committed will be a 
 fact about us nor time nor eternity shall wash away. 
 
 But, again, every sin will have this punishment, 
 that it will entail a lower place in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven than we might have had. Sin cannot be a 
 thing of indifference. It must be worse with us to 
 have sinned than not to have sinned. It must be 
 worse with St. Peter that he denied His Lord, than if 
 he had not denied Him ; otherwise sin would be a thing 
 indifferent. If I lose time I can never make that up. 
 If it be said, * Oh yes, by greater work and special 
 effort the lost may be regained.' No ! no ! If we 
 are capable of what we call greater effort, we could 
 have put forth that greater effort even if we had not 
 lost that time. In this case we should have made 
 still greater progress. If, for instance, we have by 
 sinful indulgence deeply ingrained in our souls evil 
 desires, it will take long to erase them. As men 
 know by bitter experience, they have to watch and 
 
134 ETEENAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 wrestle and pray without ceasing to hold back de- 
 sires which, by indulgence in the past, have grown 
 strong. They have, as it were, day by day to rub 
 down the deep engraving, and only by slow degrees 
 will it become fainter and begin to disappear. It can 
 disappear and the stain he washed away ; but all the 
 time and power spent in simply undoing the past 
 might have been used to lift the soul into higher 
 heavenly communion, and the soul has lost a place 
 which otherwise it might have had. Every act in 
 this way has its everlasting consequences, every bad 
 act its own unending effect. 
 
 And so, again, there is what we may call eternal 
 perdition — something lost never to be found again. 
 The oj)portunity lost or misimproved to-day is an 
 eternal perdition. You say, you will make up for it 
 to-morrow. But perhaps you cannot make up for it 
 to-morrow, or you may have no to-morrow ; or, if 
 you have, you might have done something else to- 
 morrow. There is real, irremediable loss, an eternal 
 perdition. * Every day in which some line of God's 
 Image is not traced on your souls,' says Dr. Pusey, 
 * is a loss for eternity.' Some of our saddest self- 
 reproaches are that we did not do what we ought to 
 have done or as much or as tenderly as we ought to 
 have done when the day was ours, and now the night 
 has come when no man can work. The days indeed 
 are solemn. I have not said one word of hellish 
 flames, or curses from sinful souls never to be silenced. 
 
ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 135 
 
 We do not so much express ourselves in that way 
 now. It is archaic, but facts are changeless. I have 
 been speaking of a law of nature whose operation can 
 be seen around us and is felt within us — a. law which 
 must be recognised and obeyed as much by the un- 
 believer as by the Christian — and it is that each 
 day will live, in some way or other enregistered in the 
 living being, as long as that being shall exist. I will 
 not quote the words of divines to enforce what I 
 deeply feel. ' It is much to get rid of superstition,' 
 says a recent writer on philosophy, * it is much to be 
 quit of the notions of Hell and Devil ; possibly it is 
 of still greater ethical value to know that sin is never 
 remediable, that Nature never forgives.^ ^ Take these 
 words of Mr. Carlyle which declare the eternal punish- 
 ment I dare not deny : ' The finger lies on the pistol ; 
 but the man is not yet a murderer — one slight twitch of 
 a muscle, the death-flash bursts ; and he is it, and will for 
 Eternity be it, and Earth has become a penal Tartarus 
 for him ; his horizon girdled now not with golden hope, 
 but with red flames of remorse ; voices from the depths 
 of Nature, sounding Wo, wo on him.' And no less 
 solemn are the words of Mr. Ruskin : ' Wisdom never 
 forgives. Whatever resistance we have offered to her 
 law she avenges for ever ; the lost hour can never be 
 redeemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned 
 for. The best that can be done afterwards, but for 
 that, had been better. The falsest of all the cries of 
 
 ' Mr. Comtenay. 
 
136 ETEENAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 peace, where there is no peace, is that of the pardon 
 of sin, as the mob expect it. Wisdom can " put 
 away sin," but she cannot pardon it, and she is apt, 
 in her haste, to put away the sinner as well, when the 
 black aegis is on her breast.' And now, whatever 
 scepticism may say, and whatever sentimental reli- 
 gionism may say, this is what in her own way science 
 says, and this is what the Bible says, ' Be not deceived, 
 God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth 
 that shall he reap.' 
 
137 
 
 XL 
 
 NEED OF SALVATION. 
 
 ' Without Me ye can do nothing.' — St. John xv. 5. 
 
 One of the most fundamental dogmas of Evangelical 
 Christianity is that we cannot save ourselves, that no 
 man can save his own soul ; and one of our Church 
 Collects asserts, without qualification of any kind, the 
 doctrine of human insufficiency. It says, ' Almighty 
 God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves 
 to help ourselves.' Now this teachmg has always 
 been an offence to those who are full of energy and 
 courage and ambition, and it certainly seems to be 
 in opposition to plain facts. We are disposed to ask, 
 Cannot a man who determinately tries to be better 
 succeed in being better ? Cannot a man who struggles 
 continuously against some evil sooner or later get the 
 mastery over it ? We feel sure that he can. If by 
 saving the soul be meant saving it from the dominion 
 of evil habits, and if a man struggle incessantly by all 
 the means in his power to break down the stronghold 
 of evil habit, then we are certain that a man can do 
 much to save his soul, and that it is his duty to obey 
 
138 NEED OF SALVATION 
 
 the command, ' Work out yom- own salvation.' And 
 yet such a saying as I have quoted from the Collect, 
 *We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,' 
 such a cry as that of St. Paul, * Oh, wretched man that 
 I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? ' 
 such confessions of spiritual insufficiency and im- 
 potency as crowd the pages of Evangelical pietism, 
 do point to a profound truth of human nature, which 
 must be admitted alike by materialist and spiritualist. 
 If by free will we mean freedom to do anything what- 
 ever, then there is very little free will in the world. 
 
 It is clear enough, when we look at humanity at 
 large, that we are hedged round by barriers which no 
 trying can overleap. No free will can convert the 
 Hindoo character into the Scandinavian, or the Teu- 
 tonic into the Celtic. The fibre of national character 
 comes as a fate, a destiny which may not be lifted off. 
 And equally true is it of individual character. No 
 amount of willing can turn the dull, dogged nature into 
 one of eager, trembling sensibility. You cannot make 
 the children of the same parents, whose education has 
 been identical, alike in nature. There is no freedom 
 in the matter. You may direct different natures to the 
 same ends, and you may gradually bring about changes 
 in character, but certain differences of quality cannot be 
 overleaped. The atoms of character are unchange- 
 able. Their arrangements may be infinitely varied. 
 You look with regret, with disappointment, on the 
 career of one for whom you expected such very different 
 
NEED OF SALVATION 139 
 
 things ; but joii see that it cannot be helped, that 
 every movement, every look, every occupation, every 
 pleasure shows you a kind of nature which could 
 not become what you intended. It would require a 
 change which the laws of nature make impossible. 
 There are some people who are essentially common, in 
 whose every taste and pursuit you see a common mind ; 
 and you know that if some new cause, or subject, or 
 career, or pleasure offers itself, they will instinctively 
 choose the least refined, the least magnanimous. You 
 can never make miry clay into fine gold. You may 
 make a useful vessel out of the clay, and you may 
 turn the gold to a base use, but one will be common 
 and the other fine. ' '\^Qlich of joii by taking thought 
 can add one cubit to his stature ? ' 
 
 Look at the victims of certain vices. Y'^ou do 
 not say there is no hope, but you think there is 
 very little, and at length the conviction may grow 
 upon you that there is none at all. Those who have 
 much to do with criminals look upon some as abso- 
 lutely hopeless. They may be well conducted in 
 gaol, and listen to the teachings of the chaplain, and 
 express remorse, and promise amendment ; and yet the 
 trained observer will be sure that, on the first oppor- 
 tunity, the thief will be a thief again. There are some 
 men who seem to be utterly incapable of speaking the 
 truth. Their first feeling is a shrinking from speaking 
 the plain truth. Even when no interest is served by 
 falsehood, it seems to come easier to them, and more 
 
140 NEED OF SALVATION 
 
 natural to them, to be untrue than to be true. This 
 vice seems to pursue them through Kfe. Those who 
 know them alwaj's mistrust them. They do not 
 expect from them any sudden exertion of what is 
 called free will ; they do not think it as likely that they 
 will speak the truth as that they will lie. They know 
 their nature as they know their appearance, and ex- 
 pect to find each unchanged. The case of drunken- 
 ness is too plain to need illustration. The mean, 
 ungenerous miserly nature rarely undergoes serious 
 and permanent modification, and the coward seldom 
 acquu'es a steady and constant courage. I do not say 
 that these diseases are never cured, indeed I want to 
 show the only way by which men can be saved from 
 them ; but I do say that the sphere in which we are 
 absolutely self-competent is a comparatively small one, 
 and that many things are quite impossible for us. It 
 is written down in our nature as an ordinance for ever, 
 Thou at least shall not be that, and many other 
 things for thee must be extremely difficult. I do not 
 say that a man cannot do what he wills to do. On the 
 contrary, I am sure he can. * Good intention,' says 
 Emerson, ' clothes itself with sudden power.' That is 
 the true signification of free will. What we will, we 
 can do, unless we are coerced or restrained by some 
 external power mightier than ourselves. Yes — an act 
 is done, as far as the soul is concerned, when a man 
 has willed it. The will is the whole mind in action, 
 the resultant of the mind's various and conflicting 
 
NEED OF SALVATION 141 
 
 energies. Acts of will are the supreme moments of 
 life. 
 
 But some men cannot will certain things, at least 
 they cannot of themselves ; they can like, and wish, 
 and long, and sigh for them. 
 
 I can intend up to a certain point, 
 No further.' 
 
 Only a power external to themselves can compress 
 them into an act of will. In such cases salva- 
 tion must be by a power outside ourselves. It is 
 true that we have * no power of ourselves to help 
 ourselves.' For a man can only act in accordance 
 with his character. He does not stand apart from 
 his character so that he can say, Now I will act ac- 
 cording to my character and now I will act in ojDpo- 
 sition to my character. Every act is equally a pro- 
 duct of character. Character is self. It is that 
 nature of ours which shows itself in our disposition 
 and mode of conduct. Voluntary conduct is the out- 
 side of character, and character is the inside of con- 
 duct. They cannot be separated ; one implies the 
 other. If a man did not act in accordance with his 
 character, then he must act in accordance with some- 
 body else's character — in fact be somebody else, which 
 is impossible. A man's character at this moment is 
 a positive fact. You are this minute what you are, 
 and your conduct this minute must be in accordance 
 
 ' Mr. Browning. 
 
142 NEED OF SALVATION 
 
 with what you are ; it cannot be in accordance with 
 anything else. 
 
 But when I say you must act in accordance with 
 your character, I do not say you will always perform the 
 same act whatever be the circumstances ; but that in 
 all circumstances, however various, you must act ac- 
 cording to your nature — that you are you and only you. 
 A ruffian may despoil the dead on the night of a battle, 
 and for plunder may murder the wounded who are un- 
 able to defend themselves. There is the opportunity — 
 what we call temptation — and there is the character. 
 The act is certain. But change the circumstances. 
 The skulking cowardly robber and assassin, as he peers 
 around for his prey, sees the lights and hears the steady 
 tramp of soldiers who come to save the wounded and to 
 bury the dead ; and, like some foul night-bird gorging 
 on the slaughtered, the miscreant glides away from the 
 spoil he covets and the doom he deserves. He acted 
 in accordance with his character when he ventured 
 upon the battle-field and when he fled. You may 
 see a man in the goodly company of virtue and 
 religion, where purity of manners and loftiness of 
 temper and piety of soul charm with their fascinating 
 converse, and the man seems to be in his proper 
 place and to move in a becoming attitude. None 
 could think him an intruding impostor. And yet the 
 same man, in another company, speaks ribald jests, 
 and hums the airs of dissipation, and knows not how 
 pitiful is the swagger of irreverence. The miserable 
 
NEED OF SALVATION 143 
 
 creature's character was the same, though the conduct 
 was so different. Some comfort or sustenance was 
 needed, which braggart hcense could not give, and a 
 part was acted where the real nature dared not show 
 itself. The man had one vice more than we have re- 
 counted, and that was hypocrisy. Or it may be that 
 the character was utterly weak, reflecting everything 
 put before it ; good feelings were really present when 
 the air was pure, and the man was not quite so bad 
 in heart as he seemed to be when vulgar vice was 
 around him. 
 
 A man must be himself at each moment of his 
 life. We ask a character before we employ a man, 
 because we expect that his future conduct will accord 
 with his past conduct. Sometimes even one fault 
 clings to a man through life in its disastrous conse- 
 quences. Men take the fault to be the index of the 
 character, and though years have gone by since the 
 fault was committed, people feel as though he might 
 do it again — they feel as if it were in him. The 
 noble characters of some men leave them no freedom 
 to do evil. They could not do that base thing. The 
 triumph of Divine grace in the soul determines the 
 character and blocks the way to badness. ' We regard 
 it as the problem which education has to solve, that 
 not merely the trifling movements to which the inci- 
 dents of every-day life give rise, but, further, our 
 whole moral conduct should appear as the involuntary 
 expression of a noble nature, free from the melan- 
 
144 NEED OF SALVATION 
 
 choly seriousness of deliberate purpose, and therefore 
 free from any thought of being able to be different.' ' 
 The repulsion ^Yhich virtue has for vice is seen in the 
 lofty patriarchal saying, * How can I do this great 
 wickedness and sin against God ? ' * A good man out 
 of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth good 
 things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his 
 heart bringeth forth evil things. A good tree cannot 
 bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring 
 forth good fruit.' 
 
 But may not character change ? Because a man 
 is bad this minute, must he always remain bad ? Is 
 there a stern, absolute fate in human life, and is an 
 iron Calvinism the only resting-place for the perplexed 
 spirit ? Not only may character change — I believe it 
 is changing every minute. But change implies a 
 cause. A thing must remain the same if there is 
 nothing to change it. A change cannot rise up spon- 
 taneously, "without any reason, antecedent, or cause. 
 When naturalists talk of spontaneous variations and 
 sports and so forth, they only mean that the varia- 
 tions are of a kind whose cause is too remote or 
 obscure for them to discover. There is no more spon- 
 taneous variation than there is spontaneous genera- 
 tion. Sports are as impossible as chance. Each has 
 an adequate, if as yet undiscovered, cause. Every 
 variation is a reaction of some kind or other ; it is 
 the result of some change which w^e call a cause. If 
 
 ' Lotze. 
 
NEED OF SALVATION 145 
 
 a change occurs in character, it is the result of some 
 change outside of character. Change comes on 
 change. No man, without any reason whatever, can 
 in a moment determine to change his character from 
 bad to good, still less can he in a moment do it. 
 
 And yet men have in a moment come to a deter- 
 mination and at once set about its accomplishment ; 
 and the usual explanation is that a call from God, 
 some hidden action of the Divine mind upon the 
 human mind, was the cause of the sudden conversion. 
 And it is easy to see that if, for instance, a direct call 
 from God could pierce through some bad man's soul, 
 if some heavenly fascination could act upon it, some 
 awful view of the deeps of evil could alarm it, then 
 such a change from without a man, could make a 
 change within a man and be a new point of depar- 
 ture. But this is a transcendent realm of which we 
 can affirm little. Such a conversion as that of St. 
 Paul is beyond our investigation. It is too mysteri- 
 ous for our analysis, and its law too remote for our 
 reckoning. ' The wind bloweth where it listeth, and 
 thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell 
 whence it cometh and whither it goeth ; so is every 
 one that is born of the Spirit.' 
 
 But there are ways of Divine activity more on a 
 level with our comprehension — the ordinary, natural, 
 established ways by which God acts upon the minds 
 and souls of His children, in all of whom there is 
 that presence of the Holy Spirit which is man's 
 
 L 
 
146 NEED OF SALVATION 
 
 potentiality of salvation. If there were no other way 
 than the transcendent way — the way, as it were, of 
 sudden miracle — then we could do nothing but wait 
 for the miracle, the uncertain troubling of the water. 
 If there were no means of salvation but the super- 
 natural, incalculable voice of God, then men could 
 do nothing but wait till the Spirit moved them. 
 Man could not help his fellows ; each must sit apart 
 expecting if perchance a call should come to him, one 
 being taken and another left. This is not all. There 
 is salvation for man by man, and this as God's 
 verified law. On this law I must hereafter discourse. 
 But the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 
 which was lost. Men need not be left in pining 
 uncertainty, waiting for a secret voice, if only those 
 who know the truth will cry aloud to all they meet, 
 Come unto the marriage, for the doors are open and 
 all things are now ready. 
 
147 
 
 XII. 
 
 MEANS OF SALVATION. 
 
 'Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert 
 him, let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the 
 error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multi- 
 tude of sins.' — St. James v. 19, 20. 
 
 In the previous sermon I made some remarks upon the 
 ever-perplexing subject of the freedom of the will. It 
 was for a practical purpose I did so, not for one moment 
 imagining that I was contributing anything to the 
 solution of problems which have defied human thought 
 for centuries. But we found that the Bible and our 
 Prayer-Book alike declared that man, of his own un- 
 aided self, cannot rise from his natural condition to 
 newness of life — in Evangelical phrase, cannot save his 
 own soul ; and that the facts of human nature said 
 very much the same thing. We are pressed upon and 
 shut in by humanity and by nationality. We are free 
 corpuscles in a great body whose larger life controls 
 and uses our activities. Yet have we individual life 
 as well as corporate. We are carried about, and yet 
 at the same time we move freely in our little sphere. 
 It will not help the superficial sceptic of society to do 
 
 L 2 
 
148 MEANS OF S.ILVATION 
 
 away with the hard facts of human nature, because 
 he makes merry over rehgious phrases, and jauntily 
 declares that he is a free man and can do what he 
 likes. The profound materialist, no less than the 
 unaccommodating Calvinist, knows full well that our 
 conduct is limited by our nature ; and though we may 
 mean somewhat different things by the * saving of the 
 soul,' yet it is true for both that man needs a Saviour. 
 For, as I endeavoured to show, there is no free- 
 dom of the will to act in opposition to the nature. It 
 is not the will which rules the nature, but the nature 
 which expresses itself in the will. Your will and your 
 nature or character are not two separate things. 
 Your will is a part of your nature and cannot be 
 separated from it. You may say ' you could do things 
 if you liked, but that you would not.' Precisely — 
 * if you liked.' But it is because you do not like that 
 you do not do them. To say you could do a thing, 
 only you would not, is a fiat contradiction. You mean 
 that, if it were not for the strong feeling you have on 
 the subject, the mere act would be quite easy. But 
 the strong feeling which would not let you do that 
 thing is you ; it is your character which makes that 
 act impossible. You must act in accordance with your 
 character. A bad man will act badly, and a religious 
 man religiously. * The willing is the doing in this 
 case ; and he that says he is willing to do his duty, 
 but he cannot, does not understand what he says.' ' 
 
 ' Bishop Taylor. 
 
MEANS OF SALVATION 149 
 
 Now if this were all, each must go his fated way 
 to heaven or hell, and the gospel of salvation be 
 an impotent dream. But we do see that character 
 changes ; the common experiences of life show it ; we 
 have seen bad men become good men, and common 
 souls bowed down in worship. Let us see what 
 character consists of, and then we may possibly see 
 where, and in what way, it may be changed. First of 
 all there is that character we bring with us into this 
 world, which we call our nature. And then there is 
 that second nature which education and habit impart. 
 Christian divines in all times have taught that man 
 comes into this world with a decided character, bent, or 
 bias. They call it human depravity, and they account 
 for it by original sin. And modern science is equally 
 strong in maintaining that man comes into this world 
 with the shaping influence of the past upon him, and 
 a depravity inherited from savage or animal ancestors. 
 Anyhow, here is the fact, a man comes into the world 
 a positive and decided kind of being, with a nature of 
 a fixed quality and texture ; a nature which is a kind 
 of concrete, a fusing together of all sorts of broken 
 fragments and dust of the past ; or, to take a more 
 living illustration, a soil with all sorts of buried seeds 
 in it. Which will grow depends altogether upon 
 circumstances. 
 
 Now I am on the whole inclined to think that 
 this first nature is the nature which is capable of 
 least alteration, in some respects of none at all. 
 
150 MEANS OF SALVATION 
 
 * Nature,' says Lord Bacon, ' is often hidden, some- 
 times overcome, seldom extinguished.' And yet, 
 within this first nature may frequently be found the 
 means of making an alteration in character. Often 
 you do not know what is in a man, he does not know 
 what is in himself. Parts of his character have never 
 been called into play ; there may be seeds there which 
 have never had the chance of growing. 
 
 Now we know quite well that one faculty or passion 
 in a man may quite overpower another, and set in 
 motion a totally new activity. You may see a man, 
 who seems to have no aim in life, who does not know 
 what to do, who finds life almost a burden, or who 
 drags on his monotonous daily work cursing its dul- 
 ness. But the seed of love is quickened in his soul, 
 the happy blood of honourable passion warms his brain 
 and braces his muscles ; he has an object, he must 
 win a competence or lay some prize and honour at the 
 feet of the beloved. The seed long hidden grows into 
 a tree, and the tree grows until it occupies the whole 
 ground which once was filled with other growths, and 
 beneath its shade they dwindle or die. So, alas ! is 
 it that we see some one for whom we felt respect and 
 regard fall into a baseness or a crime. There was a 
 bad seed in the character which none knew anything 
 about ; but the ploughshare of life brought it near the 
 surface, and then it started into growth. Again to 
 quote Lord Bacon, ' Nature will lie buried a great 
 time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation.' 
 
MEANS OF SALVATION 151 
 
 Now this first inherited nature, which, as I incHne to 
 think, cannot in its substance be changed, may be 
 variously employed, and by means of one element in 
 it another may be controlled. 
 
 Then there is the second nature, that which has 
 heen formed by habit. This nature is, as we may say, 
 accidental, not essential — that is, it might have been 
 different. The same natural texture of character 
 might have been worked up into other forms and 
 shaped for other purposes. Circumstances took up 
 the texture and made it what it is. Now, since this 
 character, this second nature, is a formation in time, 
 it may be unformed in time ; the habit which came of 
 continuous single acts, by continuous single acts may 
 be destroyed. In the superimposed character there 
 is room for the very greatest change. You may 
 change the building ever so much, if you cannot 
 change the materials out of which it is built. The in- 
 herited natural character is the material ; education, 
 circumstances, build the house. You may build a 
 palace, a shop, a hovel, a retreat of infamy ; but if the 
 natural character be brick or stone or marble or mud, 
 so likewise will be the structure. 
 
 Here, then, we see the two constituents of charac- 
 ter, each of which in its own way may be the subject 
 of change, the one indirectly and the other directly. 
 But what can set up a change ? Change cannot come 
 of itself. Uncaused change is an absurdity. Let the 
 very same character, absolutely unaltered, be placed 
 
152 MEANS OF SALVATION 
 
 again and again in precisely the same circumstances, 
 and the conduct must be the same, for there is nothing 
 to make it different. But, even if the character does 
 remain the same, we know that change in circum- 
 stances will alter the conduct. The drunkard who 
 could not reject a glass of spirits freely offered to him, 
 would refuse to drink it if it were put to his mouth at 
 boiling-point. A man who would steal a jewel would 
 not put out his hand to take it, if he saw that his hand 
 would be caught and crushed in some vice-like trap. 
 There are things of various kinds which people would 
 not do if some one were looking at them. Conduct 
 is ever being changed by circumstances. 
 
 But conduct in the long run modifies character, 
 especially that product of habit which we call second 
 nature. By some means or other you keep a man from 
 a certain kind of conduct. Every time he is going to 
 do it you tell him of it, you keep an eye upon him 
 so that he cannot get the secrecy he wishes. He 
 would do it, but he has no chance. He is ashamed, 
 he dares not. But abstinence diminishes desire. The 
 longer he continues to refrain from indulgence the 
 less difficult does restraint become. By not doing a 
 thing for a time, a man cares less about doing it ; 
 his health is better, his courage higher, his plea- 
 sure with others increased, his self-respect more 
 ample. The old taste begins to decay. A joyful 
 audacity fills the eyes which once had a suspicious, 
 hunted look. New habits and tastes are gradually 
 
MEANS OF SALVATION 153 
 
 formed. In other words, a new character arises from 
 changed cu'cumstances, from a changed condition 
 of things. 
 
 And, again, you want, by means of one part of the 
 primitive character, to bring about a change in the 
 whole character. There may be quahties and capa- 
 bihties in the character of which you are totally 
 ignorant. If the circumstances, which so far have 
 been unable to bring such qualities to the surface, 
 remain unchanged, they never will come to the 
 surface. But a man may see something, a grace, a 
 beauty he never saw before. He may have known 
 nothing but low company, and been thought incapa- 
 ble of anything better. But his lot is changed, and 
 grace and purity and sympathy and generosity take 
 such fascinating hold of him that he cannot leave 
 them ; nay, he fears that they may rather turn away 
 from him. How horrible that past was ! How could 
 he have done it ! How could he have lived in it ! 
 Did he ever really endure such things ? Was it not 
 an unpleasant dream ? Whether you wish to destroy 
 habit, or by means of one native power to overthrow 
 another, humanly speaking it must be by change of 
 circumstances. Leave men, in all which surrounds 
 them and acts upon them, in precisely the same state, 
 without the smallest change, and they must remain the 
 same. They must be brought into contact with new 
 powers, new saving forces, if they are to be renewed in 
 the spirit of their mmds. But since they cannot change 
 
154 MEANS OF SALVATION 
 
 themselves, but must be what they are, change must 
 be thrust upon them, their salvation must be directly 
 set up by a power outside themselves. They need a 
 Saviour. This is the Divine Law, and its great manifes- 
 tation was the Son of God who was Son of Man, who is 
 the perfect illustration of God's dealings with man, the 
 * fulness of the Godhead bodily.' He came to men who 
 without Him must have remained dead in trespasses 
 and sins, and started them from the grave into newness 
 of Hfe. 
 
 And by the same method God still carries on His 
 saving purposes for mankind. Christ is the Head 
 and Model. And still it is true that man must be 
 saved by man. From time to time there appear 
 men who likewise may be called Saviours, for they 
 have put on the Lord Jesus Christ — men of such strong 
 moral and religious power that they take their fellow- 
 men and work wonders of conversion in their souls. 
 These are the special apostles of an age, a nation, or 
 a Church. The law of their appearance we know 
 not. Moral and religious genius is as incalculable 
 as are all other manifestations of genius, yet are all 
 alike in accordance with the Divine Law. Nor is the 
 work confined to these. It is laid upon all whose 
 minds are moved by the sins and sorrows of the world 
 around, it is laid upon all who know that the vices of 
 the world should be strangled in the cradle. An infant is 
 born with a living germ of character whose kind is fixed. 
 It is shaped and formed by circumstances ; by parents, 
 
MEANS OF SALVATION 155 
 
 brothers, sisters, servants, sights, sounds, indeed by 
 all which in any way reaches the mind. Awful shap- 
 ing time, that time of infancy and youth ! Alas ! 
 how terribly hard to undo the work ! You want 
 a man to change. It is your husband, your friend, 
 the people committed to your charge. You must act 
 upon them by all the means in your power, intention- 
 ally, continuously, even if it be by force. You must 
 act upon them by persuasion, by reason, by love, by 
 noble example. Your manner of life may be a 
 heavenly blessing coming down upon those with whom 
 you work or live. That bad man may have no power 
 at this moment to change to good. But, it may be, a 
 thought, a word, a look, a gesture of yours may set up 
 a change, and a new agency come into power, and a 
 revolution begin, until the old man passes away, and 
 all things become new. One drop of moisture in a 
 body may start a whole world into life in that which 
 before was dead and dry. One word from the pulpit 
 may touch a hidden spring, and the water of life 
 begin to flow. Then ' compel them to come in.' 
 
 The evils of the world are great, and the days may 
 be coming when unredressed wrongs will become earth- 
 quakes, shattering the mansions of wealth and impro- 
 vidence. Is there nothing for us to do, no changes in 
 the social and religious condition of our fellow-men 
 which it were wise to bring about ? Is there nothing 
 we can do to create healthy homes, to spread educa- 
 tion, to diffuse good will, to save men's souls ? I 
 
156 MEANS OF SALA'ATION 
 
 cannot tell you in Avhat particular ^^'ay you should act. 
 You ought not to have a Director. Men must walk alone. 
 But it may be that God wills, through my voice, to start 
 in you the saving change, or turn you into a Saviour. 
 There is the pestilence of evil which is killing men. 
 Are you sjDreading the poison which lays men in the 
 dust ? May God stop you in your evil course ! Or do 
 you carry the medicine which revives the soul ? Then 
 be sure, oh faithful spirit, that ' he which converteth 
 a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul 
 from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.' 
 
157 
 
 XIII. 
 
 SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION. 
 
 'Who is among you thatfeareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice 
 of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light ? let him 
 trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.' — Isaiah 1.10. 
 
 Whatever may have been the purpose with which 
 these words were written, they are so full of wisdom 
 that the time will never come when they will cease 
 to convey the secret of peace. I have found them 
 most useful, and especially in the visitation of the 
 sick. For it happens, at times, that those we have 
 known well as gentle Christian souls, whose lives 
 have been the modest embodiments of all Christian 
 graces, are troubled with doubts and fears ; they are 
 not sure that they are right in the sight of God ; as 
 they say, they do not feel ready to die, they are not 
 sure that they will go to heaven. Their bed of sick- 
 ness is made hard and uneven by religious restless- 
 ness ; or in health they have to envy the lot of some 
 who are so confident and bright, whilst they are the 
 victims of depression. Now I have said this text- 
 verse to many a sufferer, because a text has an influ- 
 ence which a conclusive argument very often has not. 
 
158 SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION 
 
 There is a charm in a text, whilst a demonstration 
 may be dreary, for the text is a voice to the heart. 
 It will be a long time before the power of the Bible is 
 done away with. Mock as men may at ' Mesopota- 
 mias,' at any rate the new religions cannot create 
 them. Bring out the consoling sacred texts from the 
 Bibles of the new Gods, the words which impart new 
 life. Let the Great Being, Humanity, speak through 
 his prophet. Let the Unknowable address us in a 
 saving word from the Synthetic Philosophy. Will they 
 be a charm in the ears of the dying ? What sentence 
 of theirs will spring to solemn lips, and speak as from 
 a heavenly land ? Where will they get their ' Mesopo- 
 tamias ' ? Their doctrines are dry and sterile, — arid 
 steppes which may be surveyed if you carry with you 
 the bread by which a man may live, — but incapable of 
 supporting life. And until they have words which 
 are eternal as the heavens and refreshing as their 
 showers, they can never bring salvation to man. 
 
 In other words, science can never be religion. How- 
 ever clear and accurate and comprehensive and illumi- 
 nating Synthetic Philosophies and Positive Polities maj' 
 be, and however fabulous and uncritical and unscientific 
 the Bible may be, it can simply laugh all its com- 
 petitors to scorn. Wliat is their wisdom, their logic, 
 their analysis ? "Wliat are their weights and scales and 
 measures and decompositions and demonstrations ? 
 Simply not powerful enough to rob men, even for a 
 day, of a single text. Religion has to do with that 
 
SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION 159 
 
 Bide of the mind's activity which we call the soul, 
 and nothing but that which reaches the soul, or is 
 adapted to its needs, can be called religion ; and the 
 stupidest superstition which yet answers to the cry of 
 the soul will be more prized and more powerful than 
 all the books of Euclid or the most accurate bio- 
 graphies of the oyster and the ape. Music, art, 
 poetry, religion are all the responses of the soul of 
 man to facts external to himself, and religion is the 
 greatest of these responses because it is the response 
 of the soul to the voice of God. 
 
 The texts of the Bible are inspired by religion. 
 And so I have found this text of mine to-day a 
 blessing to the suffering ; for it is inspired with religion, 
 and at the same time it is an instruction as rational as 
 it is religious. It recognises the fact that really good 
 people may yet be enveloped in gloom, and it tells 
 them how to find relief. Experience has shown us 
 that really good people are often uncertain about their 
 religious state and prospects, and reason does show 
 us that calm reliance on the Eternal, in the midst 
 of darkness, will assuage the tumult of the spirit and 
 strengthen the trembling soul. And therefore I have 
 rejoiced in my text, and murmured in the ears of 
 many a sick and fainting and self-distrusting spirit, 
 ' Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that 
 obeyeth the voice of His servant, that walketh in 
 darkness, and hath no light ? let him trust in the name 
 of the Lord, and stay upon his God.' 
 
160 SPIRITUAL DEPEESSION 
 
 Now we must admit that there is wrong some- 
 where when the mind and soul are not in a state of 
 peace and happiness. Pain is the alarm-bell which 
 tells us something is wrong. If all were perfectly- 
 right within us and about us, satisfaction and thank- 
 fulness would fill the spirit. But if we are dissatisfied 
 and apprehensive and distressed, then there is some- 
 thing wrong; such a state has a sufficient cause. 
 But suppose people who are restless and suffering 
 mistake the cause of their trouble, suppose they think 
 it comes from something from which it does not come, 
 all their efforts to cure it will be useless. They will be 
 trying to make a change somewhere where no change 
 is needed or is possible, and they will leave the real 
 cause of the mischief without interference to continue 
 its disturbances. 
 
 Now it is certain that people who try to do God's 
 will, who try to bring their souls into union with the 
 will of God by prayer, and to carry out that will in 
 daily life, are well-pleasing in the sight of God. 
 In Bible words, they are reconciled to God. For 
 reconciliation with God simply means taking God's 
 will as ours, so that there is no discord between the 
 two. Reconciliation with God can only mean union 
 with God. He who takes God's will, as it becomes 
 known to him, and makes it his own, is one with 
 God, is reconciled to God. However dark or uncer- 
 tain or apprehensive or distressed may be his spirit, 
 that does not in the least interfere with his reconcilia- 
 
SPIEITUAL DEPRESSION 161 
 
 tion with God, any more than the anguish of neuralgia 
 shakes a man's credit with his banker. If a man's 
 will is one with the will of God, that is reconciliation ; 
 and as long as his will is one with the will of God 
 there can be no break in the reconciliation. If a 
 man were to lie long on a bed of sickness, distressed 
 and fearing lest his soul should be lost, and if he were 
 to die and his last words were words of agitation and 
 alarm, that would not in the very least interfere with 
 his reconciliation, it would have nothing to do with 
 it, any more than the vapours and fogs of earth can 
 destroy the sun. Such a reconciled spirit, one with 
 God like his suffering Saviour Christ, would pass in 
 death from the earthly atmosphere of fog and vapour 
 to the serener regions where the sun ever shines ' and 
 there is no night there.' 
 
 But it is quite certain that many of these reconciled 
 souls attribute their perplexities to a wrong cause; 
 they think their sufferings prove that their hearts 
 are not right in the sight of God. Whereas it often hap- 
 pens that their bodies are not right or their heads 
 are not right. However we may explain the alliance 
 between the body and the mind, the mind we know 
 is influenced by the body. In certain diseases, mental 
 depression is an invariable concomitant. Some people 
 are born with a low tone. All their lives long they 
 see, as we say, the dark side of things. They view 
 everything through a gloomy medium. If they had 
 never been taught any religion, nor ever heard about 
 
 M 
 
162 SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION 
 
 God ; or if from childhood they had been led to 
 believe that God would in the long run rescue all 
 His creatures from evil and pain, and that a hell 
 of eternal sin was impossible unless the Devil were a 
 God as powerful as the God of heaven ; still, whatever 
 the creed or no-creed, they would certainly take a 
 sad, apprehensive view of things. Instead of putting 
 this sad view down to its true cause — their bodily 
 health or organic tone — they put it down to the anger 
 of God, to the withholding of the light of His coun- 
 tenance, and employ prayers when tonics would be 
 more useful. Such cases as these are very obstinate 
 at times; they are a distressing perplexity to the 
 minister of religion, who knows how little good can 
 come from arguing with a man's constitution. You 
 can tell such persons to be patient, and say that they 
 may grow out of it, that constitutional changes may 
 in time bring brightness to them, but that in the 
 meanwhile they must be manly and uncomplaining, 
 and bear their burden. They must remember that 
 others too have burdens, it may be of poverty, or the 
 infidelity of those who share their life, or the shame 
 and pang of useless or worthless offspring, while 
 they have a constitutional burden which they must 
 bear, 
 
 With close-lipp'd patience for their only friend.' 
 
 And here comes in the secret of this good text : ' Let 
 
 ' Mr. M. Arnold. 
 
SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION 163 
 
 liim trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon 
 his God,' Such an one can say, and should say, 
 and labour at it until it becomes a great moral 
 conquest, a bearing of the cross, * This burden comes 
 from my frail body, and not from a vacillating 
 God, not from a Sovereign who turns away His head 
 with disdain from some, and capriciously smiles upon 
 a favourite. God is good, and God is wise ; and I 
 am in His great hands, and all shall be well if I only 
 patiently and silently bear. Yes, silently bear, for 
 then only one need suffer ; but if I go about telling 
 my ailments and ills, whether they be those of body 
 or mind, I shall make others suffer as well as myself. 
 I shall be a persecutor rather than a martyr.' 
 
 It may be that silence is gold, but eternally talking 
 about silence being gold is scarcely pinchbeck. If 
 silence commonly is gold, silence when we are worried 
 and perplexed is more than gold, its price is above 
 rubies. And it does distress us when we approach 
 lofty genius, as we do in the lives of Carlyle and 
 George Eliot, to be stunned by the constajit bellow- 
 ings of the one, and wearied with the monotonous 
 complainings of the other. Alas ! neither had in its 
 fulness the faith of Christ in God. His faith was 
 the faith of a Jewish poet, ' I was dumb and opened 
 not my mouth, for it was thy doing,' and of a 
 Jewish prophet, * He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, 
 and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he 
 openeth not his mouth.' Only in His last physical 
 
 M 2 
 
164 SPIKITUAL DEPEESSION 
 
 extremity was one cry of anguish wrung from the 
 Spirit of Christ, ' My God, my God, why hast Thou 
 forsaken me ? ' The triumph of Christianity over 
 doubts engendered by disease can only come from a 
 simple, manly confidence in the unchangeable good- 
 ness of God, To win this may be the life-discipline 
 for some, and noble is the attainment when such in 
 despondency can yet say, ' Though He slay me, yet 
 will I put my trust in Him.' And so it is with many 
 of the sorrows of life which bring a cloud upon our 
 summer day. Why is it, we say ? What good can 
 come of it ? Why am I left desolate ? Is life worth 
 living ? Is not wickedness triumphant and worthless- 
 ness successful ? It is at such times that trust in God 
 brings relief, and staying upon God the power to wait 
 and the power to be patient. And if the thought 
 should arise in you, that you are not ready to die, it 
 simply means, if you are doing your duty, that you 
 are meant to live. If you abide faithful, the readi- 
 ness to die will be given you when the time to die 
 is near. 
 
 But, again, there are many, and especially in 
 seasons of religious excitement, who are troubled and 
 restless because they have not experienced something 
 which some people profess to experience, because, as 
 they say, they do not feel that they have been con- 
 verted, they do not remember any time when they were 
 converted. And people say to them, * Ah ! you do not 
 know the truth, you have not found the Lord.' And 
 
SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION 165 
 
 they cry and weep, they listen to words of instruction, 
 and again they cry for pardon and hearken for a voice 
 from heaven, and no voice seems to come. Now in 
 many such cases no conversion whatever is needed. 
 Ah-eady the hfe is simply and carefully ordered in the 
 way of God's commandments ; there is a desire to do 
 good to others and to be a sweetness and strength at 
 home. If you convert such a character you must 
 make it bad, for conversion is turning a thing round 
 into an opposite direction. Such people have not to 
 be converted, they have to go straight on ; or, if they 
 have been only going slowly, then they must ' run the 
 way set before them,' they must ' go on their way 
 rejoicing.' But the disturbing teacher comes and tells 
 them that because they do not know anything about 
 a conversion, they are in the gall of bitterness and 
 the bond of iniquity. He quotes verses which they 
 cannot answer, verses which speak of being converted 
 and believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, verses which 
 had such a clear and direct meaning when they were 
 addressed to heathens and Jews, but which cannot 
 have the same meaning in reference to those who 
 have believed in Christ from their childhood and 
 walked in the paths of virtue from their earliest days. 
 Nevertheless they are distressed and alarmed by this 
 irrational earnestness. A preacher ' of this school of 
 irrational earnestness says, there is a class of persons 
 which ' has usually its representatives in our morning 
 
 ' Rev. W. H. Aitken. 
 
166 SPIRITUAL DEPEESSION 
 
 congregations ' — I ^Yonde^ where they go at night, or 
 do they only go once a day to church ? — and he says, 
 * This class consists of those ^Yho are leading outwardly 
 decent, respectable, and even religious lives.' He 
 does not hint, when he uses the word outwardly, that 
 perhaps in secret they are bad and indecent and irre- 
 ligious, he clearly means that their lives are decent, 
 respectable, and religious, for if it were not so they 
 would be hypocrites, and would not be the people 
 referred to. He means — or else the passage is with- 
 out meaning — really decent, respectable, religious 
 people; for a man who is outwardly decent, respec- 
 table, and religious, and is not so inwardly, is simply 
 a cheat, an impostor. Now he says, what I cannot 
 agree with, that this class ' found in our morning 
 congregations,' leading ' decent and respectable and 
 even religious lives, and who attend church regularly,' 
 may be ' without any personal experience of the 
 justifying grace of God.' I should say that that 
 is simply impossible. Justifying grace is the grace 
 which makes a man just, the grace which puts him 
 into his right place, which makes his will one with 
 God, reconciles him to God. It is the grace which 
 makes him decent, respectable, and religious. He 
 whose life is in accordance with the will of God does 
 possess this justifying grace ; it has wrought its effects 
 in him ; * every good gift and every perfect gift is 
 from above — by their fruits shall ye know them.' Do 
 not allow your minds to be harassed and disturbed by 
 
SPIEITUAL DEPKESSION 167 
 
 irrationality, however earnest. It may be that even 
 to-day the words of the prophet Ezekiel may be 
 appHcable to some, ' Because with Hes ye have made 
 the heart of the righteous sad whom I have not made 
 sad.' But we are sad, say you ; this teaching has 
 laid hold of us ; we must go on our way, but we can- 
 not go on our way rejoicing. And why not ? Is not 
 God your Father and Friend? Is not Christ your 
 redeeming, saving Brother ? Does not the Spirit bid 
 you say Father ? All this is true, true as heaven and 
 earth, and truer, for they shall perish. But may I 
 really be sure that God is my Father, and may I 
 say it and believe it and hold it fast ? Yes, indeed ; 
 say it noiv and press it to your heart, and never 
 let a doubt arise upon it. Be sure that while you 
 live seeking the will of God in all things, and pray- 
 ing daily that it may more and more abide in you, 
 be sure that you are the child of God, every day be 
 sure about it. Be sure, when sickness or sorrow or 
 shame or ruin befall you, that you are the child of 
 God ; and when your last breath rises to your lips 
 with the flitting spirit, let its last word be * Father.' 
 
168 
 
 XIV. 
 
 ' DEVOTION ALITY: 
 
 ' Stablish Thy word unto Thy servant, who is devoted to Thy 
 fear.' — Psalm cxix. 38. 
 
 Insisting, as I ever do, that religion rests upon a foun- 
 dation as solid and as positive as that upon which 
 physical science is built — the existence of God and the 
 existence of Nature being alike affirmations of the 
 human mind, ultimate, or in other words dogmatic — 
 piety is the response which the soul spontaneously 
 makes when this great reality is perceived. Eeligious 
 emotion, ' effusion,' addressed to the Great Unbounded 
 Nothing, I do not understand. It is as rational as 
 the gas which escapes from a balloon, dissi]3ating into 
 the empty infinite. But if religious emotion is only 
 rational when it is evoked by some sufficient reality, so 
 also I am unable to conceive a religion whose essence 
 is not devotion. It never occurred to me that any one 
 might think a devout temper of mind undesirable. It 
 has always seemed to me that certain emotions were 
 the natural response to certain objects, and that, in 
 the presence of God, devotion was not only appropriate 
 
• DEVOTIONALITY ' 1 fi 9 
 
 but inevitable, and that it was well that the loftiest 
 feeling a man was capable of should tinge his whole 
 activity. Indeed, I should have been disposed to 
 say, that every man with a heart must feel a kind 
 of devotion to something — if not to the highest, then 
 to something lower ; that to be incapable of devotion 
 is to be without a heart, and to be without a heart 
 is to be an evil spirit ; or, to use the figurative words 
 of the Bible, to be a child of the Devil. The highest 
 expression of devotion we call worship, and its great 
 opportunity is the general assembly of the Church. 
 But there is a saying of Arthur Clough, on which by 
 accident I lighted, which made me look at these 
 thoughts of mine and reconsider them, and which in 
 a minute I will quote, but with which the more I 
 think of it, the more I disagree If it be true, then I 
 cannot conceive the utility of public worship, nor of 
 private worship either ; nor of that tender overflow of 
 the spirit of worship we call devotion on the whole 
 life; nor, indeed, the possibility of any worship at all. 
 For I suppose we none of us think that by certain 
 regulated formalities and ecclesiastical machinery we 
 can manipulate the heavenly world, as the sails of a 
 mill are managed from below. We do not think we 
 come to church to work upon the Almighty by a pre- 
 scribed ritual ; nor, by a kind of celestial wizardry, to 
 make heavenly spirits do our biddmg. We do not 
 think we come here to alter the mind and law of God, 
 which are holy and just and good. It is to express 
 
170 ' DEVOTIONALITY ' 
 
 our own minds and souls, and to alter our own minds 
 and souls, we come here to draw nigh to God. But if 
 we do not^attain to worship, and if worship is not to 
 be aimed at, and is undesirable, then I think some use 
 should be found for the churches. They are utterly 
 wasted now. If they are only lecture-halls and music- 
 halls, then we have enough without them and better 
 than they. The lectures at the Eoyal Institution are 
 better than the generality of sermons, they are more 
 various and interesting. We are confined to a limited 
 region of topics — there the study is the world. If we 
 want the finest music, then, as a rule, Monday will 
 become the sacred day rather than Sunday. And even 
 if the church music and the church lecture be of the 
 best, they are spoiled, if there be no real worship, by 
 wearisome, unmeaning, and unprofitable prayers. The 
 one thing I wish my preaching and our singing to do 
 for you is, to help you to go up to the high altar of 
 worship, there to sprinkle the incense that it may 
 ascend in fragrant sacrifice. If I do this for you, 
 then I need not be cast down because I am less 
 various and eloquent and interesting than the popular 
 lecturer, or because our music is that of simple 
 psalm and hymn, and not that of the Mass, the 
 oratorio, or the opera. But this is the saying of 
 Clough to which I take exception, and I quote it 
 because it may represent the conclusion of more 
 minds than the writer's. * The belief that religion is, 
 or in any way requires, devotionality, is, if not the 
 
' DEVOTION ALITY ' 171 
 
 most noxious, at least the most obstinate, form of 
 
 irreligion.' 
 
 The question arises. What is meant by devotion- 
 ality ? We should most of us be disposed to say, a 
 devotional spirit and tone of mind. But surely a 
 devotional spirit is not only appropriate, and in ac- 
 cordance with the fitness of things, but also the 
 highest, in quality, of our various emotions. Mr. 
 Clough has said, in the very same essay, ' Our faith 
 must not rest on historical facts, however strongly 
 attested, not on theological articles, however ancient 
 and venerable, not on any written semper iiUqne ah 
 omnibus, but on the instincts of the spiritual sense, 
 the demands of the spiritual nature.' But with what 
 must the spiritual senses be employed ? AVhy, with 
 that which is spiritual, with that which cannot be seen 
 by mortal eye, with the things unseen which are eternal. 
 It is the sense by which, to use the Bible words, we 
 see God. And if the spiritual sense sees God, what 
 does the spiritual nature demand when God is seen ? 
 That we bow down in solemn, dehghted, yet adoring 
 awe. The only emotion which is appropriate, rational, 
 I may say natural, when the Mighty Presence of whom 
 are all things is revealed— a Presence which is greater 
 than Humanity, vaster than the universe, holding all 
 things together in unity, yet without and beyond and 
 above and around all things in limitless sweep, the 
 infinite, everlasting, omnipresent mind— is awe. When 
 that Presence is brought still nearer to us in a saving 
 
172 'DEVOTIONALITY' 
 
 form, and through Christ we find a lovmg, pardoning, 
 heavenly Father, the only emotion possible is adoring, 
 confiding reverence. Is this devotionality ? Then a 
 man who is incapable of it is less than a boor, he is a 
 clod — to quote a verse of the same writer, 
 
 Neither man's aristocracy this nor God's, God knoweth. 
 
 One may well say, ' Better not be at all than not be 
 noble.' 
 
 But it is possible that by devotionality may be meant 
 the neglect of practical life for absorption in Divine 
 contemplation. For the writer speaks of devotionality 
 as more common in Eoman Catholic countries than in 
 England. He talks of absorption in the contempla- 
 tion of the Deity being the whole life. Now that this 
 is to be condemned is evident. For he who neglects 
 his worldly duties is as imperfect and one-sided as he 
 who does not respond to his heavenly environment. 
 The world is a fact as God Himself is a fact, and we 
 must respond appropriately to each. We are not only 
 religious beings, but social beings ; and if we are to be 
 perfect, we must be all that we are capable of being, 
 we must live all round, live our complete lives. The 
 patriot is not to ignore his family, the intellectual 
 man his body, nor any his soul. It is true that ab- 
 sorption in religion, while the other relationships of 
 life are ignored, is perverting and mutilating. For a 
 human being to live an exclusively religious life is to 
 be half dead ; as it is to be half dead to lead a merely 
 
• DEVOTION ALITY ' 1 '3' ^ 
 
 worldly life. But is there much danger of our leading- 
 a life of absorption in religion ? There may be more 
 dancrer of it in Catholic comitries. The cloister 
 has "constrained many to find in spiritual raptures, 
 reached by asceticism, the joys denied them elsewhere. 
 But is this a danger against which the generality of 
 Englishmen need to be particularly guarded ? Are you 
 afraid, you men of high position and active profession 
 and crowded affairs, that you are really in danger of 
 becoming too religious? Do you feel that you need 
 pluckm- up from your knees, lest you should forget to 
 go down to the House, or to be in Court, or Chambers, 
 or society, because you are absorbed in devotion? Do 
 you think you will lose many fees, or dinners, or 
 dances, because you are so entranced by heavenly 
 ecstacy that the world is an alien and forgotten thmg? 
 — while „ , 
 
 deep asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, 
 And music in his ears his beating heart did make. 
 
 No, that is not the danger. The danger which most 
 of 'us feel, which drives some of us to church on 
 Sundays, that perchance we may escape it, is that of 
 absorption in the world and destitution in rehgion. 
 The danger is the hurrying life of business or of 
 society-dressing and dining, talking about the same 
 things until we are tired to death of them, and pushing 
 into^'new places which soon become as monotonous as 
 the old, working and worrying year after year, trying 
 to look young when unkind age is scoring his lines 
 
174 ' DEVOTIONALITY ' 
 
 upon US ; and still each year coming back to the same 
 dull round of work and pleasure, ever growing duller, 
 until men shake their heads over us and say — ' He is 
 gone,' having lived without God in the world. I know 
 you are not afraid of becoming too prayerful. There is 
 no need to guard you against an encroaching devotion- 
 ality. I would we had a little more of this Catholic 
 spirit. It is a rational spirit and a becoming sphit. 
 It is the only reasonable response to the greatest of 
 facts. Other facts we must also respond to. But I 
 venture to think that devotionality will add new 
 energy and warmth to sociality. 
 
 Why, even science herself encourages a kind of 
 devotionality; and we can see the reason and the 
 necessity for it, in cases where God is ignored. Then 
 Nature or Humanity becomes the highest thought and 
 presence, and to that which is highest, the mind is 
 constrained to pay its homage. Take these words of 
 the late Professor Clifford on the nature of ' Cosmic 
 emotion,' and do they not implicitly contain the 
 essence of devotionality — unless you prefer to describe 
 them as ' poetic religiosity ' ? He says, ' When we try 
 to put together the most general conceptions that we 
 can form about the great aggregate of events that are 
 always going on, to strike a sort of balance among the 
 feelings which these events produce in us, and to add 
 to these the feeling of vastness associated with an 
 attempt to represent the whole of existence, then we 
 experience a cosmic emotion — which may have the 
 
' DEVOTIONALITY ' 1 75 
 
 character of awe, veneration, resignation, submission.' 
 Or take these words of the author of the book called 
 'Natural Keligion.' 'It is true,' he says, 'that the 
 scientific man cannot feel for Nature such love as a 
 pious mind may feel for the God of Christians. The 
 highest love is inspired by love, or by justice and 
 goodness, and of these qualities science as yet dis- 
 covers little or nothing in Nature. . . . This arrest- 
 ing, absorbing spectacle, so fascinating by its variety, 
 is at the same time overwhelming by its greatness ; 
 so that those who have devoted their lives to the con- 
 templation scarcely ever fail to testify to the endless 
 delight it gives them, and also to the overpowering 
 awe with which, from time to time, it surprises them.' 
 Or, again, take the following words of Comte, for whom 
 Humanity is the Great Being, the highest thought, 
 the object of adoration. He says, ' Next to the prac- 
 tice of good deeds, nothing tends more to develop the 
 sympathetic instincts than due expression of the 
 emotions as a familiar use.' That expression he tells 
 us is prayer. ' To pray,' he says, ' is to love and to 
 think in one ; ' ' Prayer in its purest form offers the 
 best type of life, and conversely life in its noblest 
 aspect consists in one long prayer.' These are the 
 very words of Comte ; it is the founder of Positivism 
 pleading for devotionality. Or take the words of a 
 Deist overflowing with devotionality. ' The single 
 thought, " God is for my soul, and my soul is for 
 Him," suffices to fill a universe of feeling. Spiritual 
 
1 7 G ' DE VOTIONALITY ' 
 
 persons have exhausted human relationships in the 
 vain attempt to express their full sense of what God 
 (or Christ) is to them.' ' 
 
 It is clear that the devotional temper is necessary 
 to all who can perceive greatness. Take an illustra- 
 tion of what I mean from one of our most engrossin g 
 emotions, the emotion of love. True it is a warmer, 
 more corporeal feeling than that of devotion or wor- 
 ship. But love, without the movings of tenderness, 
 admiration and delight towards the beloved object, 
 would be just as natural as religion without devotion. 
 And here let me say that those who remember or 
 retain the emotion of devoted love, can tell how it 
 tinged the day with its brightness, or now shines 
 down upon it a happy content ; it gave new hope 
 and new energy to life, it gave happiness, and 
 happiness can always do the best work. The joy 
 of love has made men first-rate, it has at times put 
 a new fervency and gratitude into their prayers. It 
 may collapse into maudlin fondness and unbraced 
 languishment. Everything is liable to disease. But 
 a healthy body is not to be despised because you may 
 poison it. And just so it is with true devotion. 
 It has its rare moments of intuition, of spiritual de- 
 light. But these moments shed a refreshing dew 
 on all the life, 
 
 And touch the apathetic ghosts with joy. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, * The true meaning 
 
 ' Mr. F. Newman. 
 
' DEVOTIONALIT Y ' 177 
 
 of religion is not simply morality, but morality 
 touched by emotion.' And he calls this touching of 
 morality by emotion * the elevation and inspiration 
 of morality.' There is much I agree with in this. 
 But I would rather reverse the sentence. For the 
 essence of religion is not morality. Eeligion arises 
 from our relationship to God, morality arises from a 
 social condition. * "What is religion but the system 
 of relationships existing between us and a supreme 
 being ? ' ^ Even if there were no God, some sort of 
 morality must exist or society would perish. There- 
 fore I would not quite say that 'religion is morality 
 touched by emotion.' Eather would I say, religion 
 is emotion touching morality and the whole life, 
 emotion inspiring morality, and so giving it new 
 sanction and new energy. It is devotion, casting 
 upon life a radiance which comes from God. 
 
 ' Newman. 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 XV. 
 THE CALLS OF GOD. 
 
 ' Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, 
 and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that 
 I will shew thee : and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will 
 bless thee, and make thy name great ; and thou shalt be a blessing : 
 and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth 
 -thee : and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. So 
 Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him.' — Genesis xii. 1-4. 
 
 This is the account of what is named the ' Call of 
 Abraham.' It not only shows us the way in which 
 the Jewish people, long centuries afterwards, believed 
 that their nation had started on its course — and that 
 which a nation believes about its own history must 
 always be acting on its character, whether it be fact 
 or fable, and noble traditions make noble races — but 
 these words, containing the story of Abraham's call, 
 point distinctly to a nucleus of positive history. 
 Although Dr. Kuenen, the learned Professor of the 
 University of Leyden, says that 'the narratives of 
 Genesis are founded upon a theory of the origin of 
 nations which the historical science of the present 
 day rejects without the slightest hesitation,' and that 
 the patriarchs 'as progenitors of tribes are but 
 
THE CALLS OF GOD lV9 
 
 personifications,' he yet asks, 'What should hinder 
 us from assuming that some centuries before Israel 
 settled in Canaan, a mighty shepherd prince named 
 Abraham had set up his tents near Hebron ? ' Ewald 
 more confidently declares that * he who could still doubt 
 the reality of the lives of Abraham and Lot can 
 scarcely be even beginning to see anything with cer- 
 tainty in this field of history.' 
 
 The certainties for us are, that a family or small 
 tribe migrated from Mesopotamia into Palestine, whose 
 head or sheik was Abraham ; that the impulse which 
 moved it from its original dwelling-place was religious ; 
 and that from this family or tribe, powerful enough 
 to engage in wars and form equal alliances with the 
 kinglets of Palestina, the Jewish nation arose ; that 
 that which governed the small tribe became eventually 
 the bond of a nation, a bond so strong that Egypt and 
 Assyria, and Babylonia and Greece, and Rome and 
 all the wrenchings of the modern nations have been 
 unable to force it away— and that bond was religion. 
 The religious spirit and genius, which moved the Abra- 
 hamic nomads, was inherited and augmented by their 
 descendants, and has never been equalled, as yet, by 
 any race of mankind. And that is the reason why we 
 Western Aryans still turn to Semitic history for our 
 religious teaching. Apart from religion, Jewish his- 
 tory is a less profitable, certainly a less interesting, 
 subject of study than English history. Of themselves, 
 Alfred and Harold are more to us than Saul and 
 
 N 2 
 
180 THE CALLS OF GOD 
 
 Ahab ; and the Eeformation of Henry more touching 
 than that of Jehu or of Josiah. But you cannot rid 
 the Bible of rehgion. The history is steeped in reh- 
 gion. Its whole attitude is that of no other history. 
 Its explanation is singular. Its power is undying. 
 In a word, it is inspired. And so I am going to speak 
 on the Call of Abraham because of its inspiration ; 
 and we shall find that it is a picture of God's method 
 of dealing with each one of us. 
 
 For I am sure that, at some time in our lives, a call 
 from God sends its trumpet tone through each of 
 our souls, as it did when Abraham heard it, and he 
 went forth with the future stretching broad and far 
 before him, empty now, and yet to be filled by his 
 ever-increasing offspring. From what did God call 
 Abraham, and to what did He call him ? It is said 
 that God called him from his kindred and from his 
 father's house ; and, in doing so, we know that God 
 called him into closer communion with Himself. The 
 great fact about Abraham, which has stamped itself 
 upon the minds of countless generations, is his re- 
 ligiousness — in Bible words, that he was ' the friend 
 of God.' To this moment the town near which he 
 dwelt so long, and w^here tradition unquestioned has 
 fixed his burial-place — Hebron — is called El Khalil, 
 the Friend. We have no reason to believe that 
 Abraham's knowledge of God was as pure and clear 
 as that of the later prophets ; but it was a step for- 
 ward, and a very large one, in the evolution of Divine 
 
THE CALLS OF GOD 181 
 
 revelation, or it could not have made the lasting im- 
 pression it has done. Remember, Abraham came out 
 of what we should call a heathen or polytheistic home. 
 Tradition says that his father was a maker of idols; 
 and the words of Joshua prove his heathen origm, 
 'Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, your fathers 
 dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even 
 Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of 
 Nachor; and they served other gods. And I took 
 your father Abraham from the other side of the 
 flood ' His descendants for many generations were 
 infected with idol worship. The kindred nations 
 around them remained idolaters. Only by a slow 
 process of ascension were higher views of God 
 
 attained. i i -i. r 
 
 In olden times men were much in the habit ot 
 regarding the state of things which they saw around 
 them as a fall from a purer primitive condition. We, 
 in these days, rather think of a Divine education, 
 leading man upward as he is able to bear it ; of a 
 continuous ascension, with heaven as the summit. 
 The inspiration of Abraham, in this respect, was 
 modern, and his face was to the future. But how 
 long is prophecy before it is fulfilled ! Great thoughts 
 are uttered, but it takes ages to assimilate them, so 
 that they become part of the mental tissue of a whole 
 nation or age. Take, for instance, the condemnation 
 of human sacrifice imphed in the offering up of Isaac. 
 Human sacrifice could scarcely have been unfamiliar 
 
182 THE CALLS OF GOD 
 
 to the mind of Abraham ; for when the voice, which 
 is to him Divine, bids him slay his son, he does not 
 appear to be distm'bed by sm'prise, or moved to re- 
 monstrance, or smitten with a great horror. We 
 cannot put it to ourselves what we should think, if 
 we believed we were commanded by God to commit 
 murder. If we could think at all at such a frightful 
 moment, we should rush away to some one who could 
 hold us back from a deed of irresponsible insanity. 
 If even the impression seized upon us, for an instant, 
 that it was God's will we should kill our child, if we 
 fancied that we heard a Divine voice calling upon us 
 to kill our child, we should feel that we were going 
 mad, and we should fly to others to save us from the 
 terrible danger. 
 
 But Abraham was not without a sense of the moral 
 character of God. When the destruction of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah was made known to him, and the thought 
 that the righteous and the wicked were to be involved 
 in one undiscriminating doom was presented to him, 
 his moral nature did rise up in protest. The protest 
 of his soul against what seemed injustice was, ' That 
 be far from Thee that the righteous should be as the 
 wicked. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
 right ? ' But, as I have said, he uttered no cry nor 
 remonstrance when the command to slay his son was 
 forced upon him, as though some unheard-of, horrible 
 thing had happened to him. The absolute right of 
 the Divine Being to the lives of His creatures must 
 
THE CALLS OF GOD 183 
 
 have been with him an ingrained conviction. And it 
 was a new revelation, a new ins^Diration, a new starting- 
 place in the history of religion, an epoch to be had 
 in everlasting remembrance, when the voice, like the 
 voice of discovery, sounded in his soul, ' Lay not thine 
 hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto 
 him.' This was indeed the voice of God. It was 
 a new commandment which in fact bade him and his 
 descendants take the animal for sacrifice instead 
 of the man, until the perfect idea of sacrifice should 
 be revealed, and the summit of revelation reached by 
 Christ, who came to put away sin by the sacrifice of 
 Himself. 
 
 But how long, notwithstanding this great reve- 
 lation made to Abraham, human sacrifice lingered 
 on, even among his descendants, we all know. The 
 daughter of Jephthah and the hewing of Agag in 
 pieces ' before the Lord ' are instant recollections. 
 The redemption of the firstborn seems to point to it ; 
 and the custom l)urst forth again after it had been 
 for a while suppressed, stirred into activity by the 
 neighbouring races, in the times of some of the later 
 kings, who made sons and daughters to ' pass through 
 the fire.' It has been said, ' Ordinary men see the 
 fruits of their action ; the seed sown by men of genius 
 germinates slowly.' ^ And it is just as true of that 
 specially Divine genius which we name inspiration, or 
 Divine revelation through the mind of man. 
 
 ' Mommsen. 
 
184 THE CALLS OF GOD 
 
 How God called Abraham we are not told. We 
 rather incline to fancy that, in old Bible da3's, God 
 called people in a different way from that in which He 
 calls them now, instead of perceiving that the only 
 difference is the difference in the way of expressing 
 the fact. We materialise the poetry of Eastern ex- 
 pression mitil we are in danger of forgetting that 
 God is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever ; 
 and that it was as true in the far-off past, and in 
 the tent of the nomad chieftain, as it is to-day in 
 the crowded city and in the kneeling chm'ch, that 
 * God is a Spirit,' and that ' no man hath seen God 
 at any time.' Such sayings as that ' God talked face 
 to face,' and that ' Abraham stood yet before the 
 Lord,' cannot for one moment change the nature of 
 the Eternal whom ' no man hath seen or can see.' 
 We may forget it, but God is as really seen by the 
 intuition of faith in the soul, as He would be were 
 men's senses overwhelmed by an unspeakable mystery, 
 and His voice is as Divine when it is heard in the 
 reason and in the conscience, as when it thunders 
 through the sky. 
 
 In whatever way God called Abraham, it was a call 
 to his soul. In whatever way the call came, all must 
 admit that its purpose was to reach his soul. It made 
 him begin to question the truth of the religion in which 
 he had been brought up ; it forced him to see the gods 
 and the worship of his fathers and of his home in a new 
 and painful light. It drew him away in thought and 
 
THE CALLS OF GOD 185 
 
 view from those who were nearest and dearest to him. 
 It called him to think, and think thoroughly and under- 
 stand, whether the gods of the earth and the gods of 
 the seas and the gods of the skies were still to have his 
 worship ; or the God who, he believed, had spoken to 
 him and beckoned him away. He must have suffered 
 from long and lonely and painful thought. The past 
 does not loose its hold upon us easily. The doubt 
 arises, when we feel called to take a new step, a 
 different work, a strange and unwelcome position — 
 
 The tremor that intrudes 
 Wlien firmest seems our faith ' — 
 
 ' May I not be mistaken, am I not excited, did I 
 really hear what I thought I heard, did I really see 
 what I thought I saw ? If I am right, then my 
 father and mother and relations, and the wise and 
 good who have lived before me, have all been in error. 
 Is it not more likely that I should have made a 
 mistake than that so many, better than I, should be 
 wrong ? Is it not presumptuous in me to doubt what 
 so many wise and holy people believed through life 
 and in death ? ' And still the voice of God, like a 
 hand, keeps beckoning away, and, for awhile, a man 
 is joyless and irresolute. His mind is not made up. 
 He dare not tell the doubts which consume him, for 
 his friends will be horrified. He will inflict bitter 
 pain on those who care for him and believe in him, 
 
 ' Mr. Brownin". 
 
186 THE CALLS OF GOD 
 
 but who know not, and who cannot hear the voice 
 which keeps speaking to him. 
 
 God's call to a man is always, at first, a call into 
 loneliness. For, in the hum and chatter and profitless 
 jingle of common life, a man called of God cannot stay. 
 Through it all he hears the solemn tolling call, and he 
 must be up and away and come to the life or death 
 decision. So doubtless was it with Abraham. His old 
 forms of worship and religious symbols would become 
 tiresome to him, unreal, untrue. He perhaps tried for 
 awhile to put new and higher meanings into them, 
 to see them in the light of a new idea ; but a man 
 cannot live in illusions long. The cry of the soul is 
 for reality. * Let me be sure, let me be honest, let me 
 be true ; for I cannot live and seem to be that which 
 indeed I am not. I must arise and go forth into the 
 lonely ways of life, for a voice is calling me which I 
 cannot disobey. Day and night a magnet is drawing 
 me, and though I stand still and ponder and hesitate, 
 yet I know how it will all end. Bitter as is the pang 
 of separation, and hard as it is to seem to be a traitor 
 and renegade in the eyes which have beamed in 
 tenderness upon me, yet I must hurry away ; for the 
 voice keeps sounding which will not let me stop, and 
 the attraction is drawing which will not let me stand, 
 and I must arise and depart, for this is not my rest.' 
 So must it have been with Abraham, the father of the 
 faithful. Human nature alters but little essentially, 
 and each man's own experience tells the tale of duty 
 
THE CALLS OF GOD 187 
 
 and its first reward, loneliness and pain. ' So Abram 
 departed as the Lord had spoken unto him.' 
 
 Here, then, we may leave our little study of the 
 Call of Abraham. But of this I am sure, that until we 
 can be manly and true enough to follow the voice of 
 God, as it sounds in our consciences and in our souls, 
 into loneliness — away from common men, with their 
 common aims and common hopes and common plea- 
 sures — until we can dare to cut the cords which bind 
 us by nature to those whose lives and faith we can in 
 truth no longer share, there is no great salvation for 
 us. It is quite certain that God has spoken at some 
 time to every one of us. In your soul the voice Divine 
 has sounded. It may have come to you m church. It 
 made you tremble, and you almost said, ' I will arise.' 
 It may have come to you in sickness, or when death 
 just looked at you, and m his stony gaze your heart 
 near stopped for chilhiess. It may have come to you 
 in hours of bitter pain and sorrow, in hours when you 
 waited for some terrible stroke. It may have come to 
 you by the grave of one you tenderly loved. In many 
 ways it may have come. It bade you leave that 
 sin which is your disgrace and misery. It bade you 
 forsake those companions whose influence degraded 
 you, and made you harder and coarser and less reve- 
 rent and less religious. It bade you rise above that 
 decent conformity to religious services — a worship 
 which is but a passionless performance and a reverent 
 absence of mind — and cease to act the play of a once 
 
188 THE CALLS OF GOD 
 
 living religion. It may have called you to think for 
 yourself, to follow a truth which has arisen like a 
 guiding star upon you. It may have told you to 
 take your place as a man of God and a worker for 
 God. It may have called you to wear upon your 
 brow the stamp and seal of heaven. Oh ! one cannot 
 tell to what degree of singular eminence that voice 
 of God may not have called some of us, who may 
 now be tame as a desert flat, and unimpassioned as 
 ashes. And I know why so many of us, who are 
 good and honourable men, never become men of 
 great use, and example, and higher thought and 
 true devotion. We dare not be singular. We dare 
 not leave our kindred nor our set. We will not leave 
 our traditional views and sentiments, and we cannot 
 leave our secret sins. Other voices have more power 
 over us than the voice of the Almighty. Pleasure 
 speaks, and we say, I come. And greed speaks, and 
 we say, I come. Ambition speaks, and we say, I 
 come. And God speaks, and we close our eyes, and 
 turn away our heads, and our coward hearts give 
 back the response they dare not clothe in words, I 
 will not come. How long will all this last ? Will it 
 last until another solemn voice shall speak to us, and 
 at the call of death we say, I come ? 
 
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