FACULTIES AND DIFFICULTIES FOR BELIEF AND DISBELIEF BY THE SAME AUTHOR Small Si'O. 2s. THE HALLOWING OF WORK Addresses given at Eton, January 16-18, 1888. RIVING TONS LONDON Faculties and Difficulties FOR Belief and Disbelief BY THE KEV. FRANCIS PAGET, D.D. CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH AND REGIUS PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY SOMETIME VICAR OF DROMSGKOVE SECOND EDITION RIVINGTONS WATERLOO PLACE, LONDON MDCCCLXXXIX Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/facultiesdifficuOOpage_0 PABENTIBUS • DILECTISSIMIS • DISCIPLINAE < EXEMPLI • AMOBIS PBOVENTUM • HUNC • QUANTULUMCUNQUE • DEDICO • preface to ttyc jftr#t cftntton. In sending these Sermons to the Press I am anxious to acknowledge how very little there is in them that is in any sense original. Some were written under the impulse of books which had at the time brought me especial help ; help which, I fear, I may have failed in some cases to trace, after the lapse of several years, to the source from which I drew it, and to acknowledge as I would. All owe much to the influence of a few writers who have taught me most of the little that I may know. Who they are will, I think, be best shown by the recurrence of their names in the notes : but such references cannot sufficiently tell my continual indebtedness to them in all work that I try to do. And so my best hope in this venture of publication is that I may perhaps suggest to some others the lines of thought which I have learnt from these my masters. FRANCIS PAGET. Christ Church, Lent 1887. preface to t^e *a>ecout> QBMtton. I am very grateful for the sympathy which has made necessary a second edition of these sermons ; and in preparing this I have done what I could to mend the faults of detail. A graver blemish, of which I am conscious, I would gladly have set right, had it been within my reach : for I think that the censure which the title of the book has received is, in part at least, deserved. But it seems even harder to change a bad name than to get a good one ; and so, regretfully, I must bide by my mistake. F. P. Christ Church, October 1888. Contents PAGE INTRO D UC TOR 1 ' ESS A Y, 1 PART I. I. THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION, IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like ■unto a man behold- ing his natural face in a glass : for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." — St. James I. 22-24, . 19 II. THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION, IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. Preached in Westminster Abbey. "Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." — Genesis xxii. 10 35 III. THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. rreaehed in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. " The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul." —Acts iv. 32, 47 X CONTEXTS. IV. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. TAC.E ,; The appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." — 2 Tim. I. 10, . 61 V. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY, IN NATURE. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. " And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it teas very good." — Genesis i. 31 74 VI. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY, IN ART. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. " How great is His goodness, and how great is His beauty .' " — Zechakiah ix. 17. "He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him." — Isaiah mi. 2, 86 VII. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY, IN CHARACTER. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. " I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." — Matt. v. 20, 100 VIII. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. Preached in the University Church, at a Festival of the Pusey House. " Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me." — St. Matt. xi. 29, . .113 IX. THE DIGNITY OF MAN. Preached in the University Church, Oxford. " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? . . . " Thou modest him to have dominion over the work, oj Thy hands; and Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet." — Psalm viii. 4-6 . 132 CONTENTS. xi X. READINESS. Preached in the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford PAGE " The preparation of the gospel of peace." — Eph. VI. 15, . 149 PART II. I THE NEED OF HEALING. Preached in Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge. '' By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin."— Romans v. 12, 157 II. THE MIRACLE OF REPAIR. Preached in the University Church, Oxford. ' With His stripes we ore healed." — Isaiah liii. 5, .... 172 III. THE REALITY OF GRACE. Preached in Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge. " He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee." — 2 Cor. XII. 9, . • 186 IV. THE TRANSFORMATION OF PITY. Preached in the University Church, Oxford. "Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?"— St Matthew xviii. 33, 201 V. THE TRANSFORMATION OF HOPE. Preached in the University Church, Oxford. " The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities : for we know not what vie should pray Jor as we ought." — Roman*; vill, 2f>, . 222 VI. THE RECORDS OF THE PAST. Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. '• Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." — Phil. i. 6, . 237 xii CONTENTS. VII. THE FORCE OF FAITH. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. PAGE " The Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain if Mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree. Be thou flueked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you." — St. Luke xvir. 0. 257 VIII. DISCORD AND HARMONY. Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. " Mebellion is as the sin of witchcraft , and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from being ling."— I Samuel xv. 23 269 IX. THE INNER LIFE. Preached in the Parish Church, Brorasgrove. " The Life was manifested." — 1 St. John i. 2. "ire know that we have passed from death unto Life, because we lore the brethren. "— 1 St. John hi. 14, 283 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. It is proverbially dangerous to attempt to define the characteristics of the age in which one lives. It is like trying to sketch a mountain as one climbs up its slopes, or to criticise an elaborate and delicate movement of orchestral music while one is sitting close under the trombones. One is too near to see things in their true proportions — too particularly concerned to be impartial. And there is yet a further peril in venturing upon any analysis of the component forces astir in movements or tendencies hostile to one's own position : it is so difficult to give full reality and vividness to feelings which one cannot share ; so nearly impossible to be as respectful to- wards other people's inconsistency as towards one's own. And yet it is clearly impossible to bear rightly any part, however humble, in current life and thought, without forming some conception of the characteristic conditions under which we have to work, and of the mental and moral climate in which our lot is cast. Without reference to such a conception we shall often misunderstand the case with which we try to deal ; we A 2 INTRODUCTORY ESS A Y. shall miss the point for which we make ; because, though we steered straight for it, we made no allowance for the state of the tide and the drift of the side-currents. We must go about our work, — if it be work of any subtlety at all, — with some belief in regard to the modes of thought and feeling prevalent among those to whom we would appeal, or from whom we are compelled to differ. We must try to understand the qualities of soil and air which affected the early growth and perhaps determined the first appearance of the products which we see around us : we must seek to penetrate below the surface of words and phrases and arguments, and to judge, by their inner history, what they really mean to those who use them. Such endeavours may be hazardous, but they are necessary ; and the best safe- guard against the dangers which beset them is not, surely, to ignore such signs of the times as we can see, nor to shrink from seeing as clearly as we can; but rather to keep our impressions subject to correction : to regard them as tentative, to be lightly held, and quali- fied or discarded at the bidding of any wider experience : and never to be sure that because a man occupies a certain position he must have reached it by the way which we have observed, or be going to follow the lines which our scheme would mark out for him. Briefly, it seems a wiser caution against injustice or presumption INTRO D UC TOR Y ESS A Y. 3 to keep one's mind and heart open, rather than one's eyes shut : to try to be always patient, reverent, gentle, and generous in one's judgment of individuals, rather than to refuse to recognise and define the general characteristics, the peculiar fashions of thinking and speaking, which seem to be prevalent in the present age. One such characteristic has been kept in view in the selection of these Sermons : a characteristic whose reality and importance seem hardly to be disputed. It is surely true that in the present day the discouraging influence of uncertainty in matters of religion works far more widely than any formal criticism of the grounds of faith : that very many educated men are in a state and temper of mind in which, though they may be acquainted with no decisive argument against the truth of the Christian Creed, they yet feel that they are very far indeed from enjoying that sense of security which is attached to the recognition of a Divine and final revelation. They may have framed no logical or express denial of our Lord's Divinity or of His Resurrection ; but they are hindered and unnerved by an indefinite sense that His Name is everywhere spoken against, and His empire, both in the world around them and in their own hearts, much less steadfast than once it seemed. They might be willing to allow that, so far as they know, the old arguments from prophecy, from documents, 4 INTR OD UC TOR Y £SSA Y. from the history of the Church, and from its moral achievements, remain on the whole unaltered, and collectively of great force ; but somehow these lay no hold upon their minds, and win no access to the springs of action : — there is certainly much to be said in favour of Christianity, more indeed than they have ever formu- lated for its disproof, and yet they cannot take to them- selves its words, its hope, its life ; they cannot rise and move towards it, or throw their heart into its allegiance. Sometimes its voice sounds to them far-off and lifeless, as the cries that come to us in dreams ; sometimes, when their soul seems waking to answer and obey, it is checked by some dim, discomforting association, such as we may feel, whether we will or no, when we meet a man against whom we know that we have heard some grave charge, which we cannot exactly recall, and perhaps never quite believed. And so they fall back in the twilight, irresolute, discouraged, disabled for the act of faith ; more and more inclined to order their life without reference to claims which yet they cannot absolutely deny. They unconsciously displace religion from its supremacy in thought and action ; and though they may never have declared formally that the throne is vacant, they certainly find themselves more ready to submit to new claimants for its authority. It has seemed to the writer that in many cases two INTRO D L/C TOR Y ESSA Y. 5 groups of causes may be traced behind this pathetic drifting out of the light of faith. The two parts of the following collection of Sermons are intended by him to correspond in their general bearing with these two groups, which he would venture here to indicate as briefly as he can. (i.) It is surely true to say that in any concrete matter the evidence of external argument is only one part — and usually the less cogent and effective part — of the whole ground on which we believe and act. It has been well, and probably often, said that " we never do, in fact, believe anything upon external evidence only." There must always be a certain congeniality, a sense of relation and correspondence, between ourselves and the facts that are proposed for our acceptance, before we can " in- corporate the latter into ourselves by belief." 1 Some- times this sense of correspondence is drawn from an antecedent feeling that the fact in cpiestion is probable or likely : 2 it has already some kindred among our thoughts ; and this gives it the necessary credentials for entrance into our minds ; while on the other hand there are some statements which no external evidence could ever carry further than the sense of hearing: some which could only force the barrier of our assent 1 J. B. Mozley, Lectures and other Theological Papers, p. 3. 2 Cf. R. C. Trench, Notes on the Parables, p. 14 note. 6 IXTRODUCTORY ESS A Y. with such a revulsion of our being that we should almost cease to be ourselves. 1 Other groups of facts there are whose outward evidence is similarly interpreted and brought home to us by their affinity and sympathy with ideas and longings and tendencies so strong and deep, so widely common among men, that we do not hesitate to call them instinctive. Such facts wake in us a peculiar sense that we have a place, an answer, a work already prepared for them ; we apprehend them with a quickness of understanding which is even startling to us ; they do not seem strange to us, but are as though they had been in some way connected with our earliest thoughts ; and we have as we stand before them an experience like that obstinate impression, which some persons feel, that long ago they looked upon some scene which yet they know that they are visiting for the first time. Now it is by such a correspondence with instincts and forms of thought and feeling that the facts of religion are carried beyond the surface of our life. The warrant of assent in religion, as in very many other 1 Cf. E. Dowden, Shakxpere: his Mind and Art, p. 242: "Othello with his barbaric innocence and regal magnificence of soul must cease to live the moment he ceases to retain faith in the purity and goodness which were to him the highest and most real things upon earth." I XI RODUCTORY ESSA V. 7 matters, is twofold : the act of faitli results from the consilience and union of two forces issuing from opposite sides. On the one hand, from without, from the authen- ticated documents, from the history of the Church, from its work upon the world, and from similar sources, there comes a series of arguments which the criticism of centuries, with its continuous pressure and progiessive acuteness, has been unable to dissipate, and which urge upon our most careful study the facts of the historic Creed ; on the other hand, from within, there move towards the reception and recognition of those facts certain instincts and impulses and cravings which, if we know anything at all, we know to be the most stead- fast and imperious characteristics of our soul. It is by the blending and alliance of these powers that we believe in Him that is true ; believe, not in slow sub- mission to a process of inference, but by the recognition of a harmony foreshadowed in our earliest thoughts ; not as helpless captives, fettered and reluctant in their conqueror's triumph, but as sharing in the victory which we own, and welcoming in Him Who draws us to Himself the realisation of our bravest prophecy, and the very fulfilment of our own imperfect life. And as He speaks to us, as He tells the story of His Life and Death and Resurrection, as He offers us the merits of His Sacrifice for our sins, the grace of His Sacraments 8 IXTRODUCTORY ESSAY. for oar renewal, we feel that His words presume and find in us needs and instincts which were hidden, it may be, even from ourselves — " High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised " : " Whence knowest thou me ? " we ask : and then make answer to ourselves : " Lo, this is our God ; we have waited for Him, and He will save us." "Thine eyes, 0 Lord, did see my substance, yet being imperfect, and in Thy book were all my members written. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, but Thou, 0 Lord, knowest it altogether." " I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear ; but now mine eye seeth Thee." There is, of course, nothing approaching to novelty in such a conception of the act whereby truth is discerned. The oldest and the newest inquirers into the nature of assent furnish us with expressions of this belief in regard to it. It may well seem to be present in the strange, suggestive words, which look like a splendid guess, as one reads them in the philosophy of the fifth century before Christ : — yalrj fiev yap yalav OTranrafiev, vSari 8' vBcop, aWepi S' al0epa hlov, drap irvpl irvp diBi]Xov, aropyfi he 1,Topyi]v, Net/co? he re veiicei \vypa). 1 1 Empedocles a p. Arist. de Animd, A. ii. 6. Trendelenburg's note on the passage seems to indicate the suggestion: "Jam INTRO D UC TOR Y ESS A Y. 9 Probably its presence could be traced all through the history of thought, and in our own day it has been set forth, with incomparable skill and characteristic delicacy and subtlety, by Dr. Newman in The Grammar of Assent ; and by Dr. Mozley in the first of his Theological Lectures, with that equally charac- teristic amplitude and penetration of thought, which seem to leave so very little to be said either after or against him. And still more recently, in The Wish to Believe, Mr. Wilfrid Ward has most shrewdly and thoroughly answered the obvious and trite objections which may always be alleged against the position. Plainly, in regard to large tracts of thought and life, " affection is " (in Dr. Mozley 's words) " part of in- sight ; it is wanted for gaining due acquaintance with the facts of the case." But then, if this familiar conception of the conditions under which truth is recognised be true, it has a very grave and wide bearing upon the significance of any change of feeling in religious matters which may be noted in any particular age. For clearly a deficiency or an intensity of the result may be due to a failure or alter sequitur pliilosophorum ordo, qui, misso movendi principio, cognitionem spectarunt. Quibus hcc commune est, quod rerum et cognitionis affinitatem vel cognationem quaerebant, ne mens, quae cognoseit, et res, quae cognoscuntur, quasi dissociabilea dis- tinerentur." IO 1XTR0DUCT0R V ESSA Y. an increase in either of the two forces whose consili- ence is required. It is not only true that, as Dr. Mozley says, "we need not be surprised if" certain " minds are not convinced by the external evidence for Christianity, when they do not possess those inward premisses without which the external are necessarily defective " ; it is also probable that anything which enfeebles, or beclouds, or distracts, or misdirects the inner energy, the contribution which the man himself should bring, will, perhaps without any change at all in the weight of the external force, impair and impoverish the act of belief. Without passing over into a state of recognised disbelief, men will feel themselves less and less affected by the appeal of Christianity, if they are neglecting, or dissipating, or misguiding, or repressing the instincts and cravings which Christianity presumes. 1 For " Christianity is addressed, both as regards its evidences and its contents, to minds which are in the normal condition of human nature. ... It speaks to 1 Without claiming evidential value for experience which cannot be critically examined, it may be suggested that very many persons have known something of the contrary variation, in the Religious life and in times of Retreat. The recall of the spiritual faculties from distraction, the self-recollection thus gained, the liberation of deep instincts which a hurried life had hidden, have in many cases given a new intensity and steadfastness of vigour to the act of faith, though the external appeal was almost unchanged. IN TR O D L/C TOR V £SSA Y. 1 1 us one by one, and it is received by us one by one, as the counterpart, so to say, of ourselves, and is real as we are real." 1 "The counterpart of ourselves": — over against the mysterious depths, the delicate com- plexity, the unfathomed possibilities of our inner life, stands that which claims to be the complement, the satisfaction of all our faculties : — which undertakes to lead our nature to its perfect development, its true and everlasting life ; to fill the mind with light, the heart with love ; to enter into the inscrutable recesses of our being, and to renew its every part and power with the gift of faultless health. It is real to us as we ourselves are real : in proportion as we meet it in the wholeness of our nature, sincere and simple, and natural and whole-hearted and unabashed in the confession of our needs, our ignorance, our weakness, our hopes and fears, so will it bear into our hearts the manifold conviction of its reality ; at point after point we shall own its insight into our hearts, its sympathy with our life, its power to give us health and strength. But every instinct or faculty withheld, bewildered, or dis- torted, invalidates so far our power of recognition and acceptance, or, at the least, delays our discovery of some harmony, some witness of kindred, as it were, which should have bound us closer than ever to the 1 J. H. Newman, The. Grammar of Assent, pp. 400, 491. 12 INTRODUCTOR Y ESSA V. truth thus better known. And surely auy man who begins to think that Christianity means less to him than once it did, would do well to inquire very care- fully which of the two consilient forces in the act of faith is really failing : whether the weight of external evidence for the Kesurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ has been certainly and seriously impaired ; or whether, on the other hand, any elements, instincts, powers, senses, in his own inner being, presumed and addressed by Christianity, have faded into listlessness, or swerved aside to some unworthy aim, or been bewildered and neglected in the speed and stress of life. It is the hope of the Sermons grouped together in the first part of this selection to indicate, however inadequately, some of the faculties or desires which are thus called to witness to the things of faith ; to trace their correspondence with the revelation of Jesus Christ ; to suggest how their energy and freedom and simplicity may perhaps be imperilled in the present day. (ii.) The Sermons in the second part were chosen with a different purpose, — with the hope that they misht surest a few of the very serious difficulties which beset the position of disbelief. Foremost, perhaps, among the prevalent discourage- ments of faith is a general impression that very many '• difficulties " may be and have been alleged against 1NTR OD UC TOR Y £SSA Y. 1 3 the Christian Creed ; so many, indeed, that there is hardly anything left that a plain man may hold with any sense of security. And this impression is only slightly modified by the fact that these difficulties are continually being met and dealt with by Christian writers. For there is a very wide difference between the cogency of cumulative evidence in affirmation and in denial ; very few men can, or, at any rate, usually do, give due weight to a group of probable arguments in favour of such a system as Christianity ; while almost all are unreasonably impressed by a succession of de- structive suggestions, even though each in its turn has been answered and, it may be, dispelled. The Christian cause is thought by many to be weak, simply because they see it constantly assailed, constantly on the defen- sive. Dr. Jellett in his striking Lectures on the Efficacy of Prayer truly says: "The word 'apologist,' so commonly applied to those who have written favour- ably of the evidence of Christianity, expresses a dis- advantageous position, which has been very generally assigned to them, and which they have been, I think, too ready to accept." He goes on to show that in many controversies — in all which deal with purely theoretical science — the merely critical bearing may quite fairly be maintained on one side : such contro- versies may quite well and justly be "conducted 1 4 1NTR OD UC TOR Y ESS A Y. between critics on the one side, and defenders, or, to use our former term, apologists, on the other." That is to say, in regard to a pure bit of scientific theory three attitudes are possible : belief, disbelief, or unbelief. " But let the question pass from the region of theory to the region of practice, and the third of these atti- tudes usually becomes impossible. If the question which the theory professes to solve be a practical one, you cannot usually take up the position of unbelief. You may act as if you believed the theory to be true, or you may act as if you believed it to be false ; but you cannot act as if you did not know whether it be true or false. So far as your actions are concerned, you cannot leave the question undecided." 1 This is surely true, and applicable to the main and central questions in regard to Christianity. It is a certain way of life, a certain aim for effort, a certain line of growth, that is set before us : a practical demand is an inseparable and essential part of the Christian Creed : and therefore we cannot simply leave the pro- blem unsolved and the whole matter in abeyance : for to ignore the demand is, with whatever degree of consciousness, to deny the Creed. Elijah was perfectly logical in his challenge to the people of Israel upon 1 J. H. Jellett, " The Efficacy of Prayer." — Donnellan Lectures for 1877, p. 4. INTRODUCTOR Y ESSA Y. 15 Mount Carmel ; there was no middle way between the horns of his dilemma : the choice between Jehovah and Baal necessarily involved practical consequences ; and therefore a position of enlightened uncertainty, of suspended judgment, or of blameless indifference, was simply impossible. But if this be so in the case of Christianity — if every man who thinks must decide in practice, and that with- out much delay, between belief and disbelief — then the question is not " Are there any difficulties in the way of belief ? " but " Are there more difficulties in the way of believing or in the way of disbelieving?" The choice is between two mutually exclusive theories and ways of life : which is the more probable, the more liveable ? — Let then the assailant of Christianity stand sometimes in his turn as the apologist of disbelief : it is not enough for him to make Christians uneasy : let him show that he can make men easy in disbelief: — and tbese not only men of leisure and cultivation, with sufficient comforts, alleviations for all annoyances, and varied interests ; but also the weak and poor and sickly and sorrowful and weary and heavy-laden. It is not enough to be brilliant in negative criticism : disbelief must in turn take up the defensive side ; and then the Christian assailant may have something to say about its difficulties, considered as a positive, practical, and 1 6 INTRODUCTORY ESS A V. universal scheme for living — and dying — men and women. When it is so considered, when it ceases simply to question, to criticise, and to shake its head at the in- conclusive evidence of Christianity, and comes forward to offer its own account of the facts, its own response to the needs, of human life in all its breadth and depth and height, it appears that the attitude of dis- belief has its difficulties as well as the venture of faith. What seemed safe while it was merely negative becomes perilous when it is forced to be positive : and in matters of conduct, be it remembered, one must either affirm or deny : suspended judgment may be often possible and right ; but not suspended action. And so the writer would venture to urge that the method advocated and employed by Dr. Jellett in his Donnellan Lectures ought, if only in charity to those who are depressed and alarmed by the sheer number of the attacks on a system which is, apparently, always apologetic, to be more generally considered, at all events, in regard to the issues raised in modern controversy. The choice is not between the Christian system with its difficulties and a safe and cautious reticence, committed to nothing and involving no perplexity, but between two contrary ways of belief and life, two sharply contrasted views of what a man is, how he must use the little time he has IN TROD UC TOR Y ESS A Y. 1 7 here ; and both must recognise all the conditions of their common problem, all the troublesome, obstinate facts that they would like to ignore or transform into something more congenial with their respective theories. This has surely been too Little recognised by those who have written on the Christian side. And, apart from nearer consequences in the discussion of the several issues, there has resulted, in the minds of many who have perhaps only looked at the struggle from afar off, or heard confusedly, day after day, the strife of tongues, a growing sense of discouragement, a vague feeling that all the difficulties seem to be on one side, and a sus- picion that the ever-aggressive combatants have nothing to fear, and the ever-defensive Little to hope. Perhaps if anything like as much attention had been devoted to the difficulties of disbelief as to the difficulties of belief, fewer men would be drifting out of all real loyalty and devotion to our Lord ; fewer would be thinking that Christianity has lost its grip of human life ; fewer would be wondering what will be left for their children to be- lieve in when they grow up ; and fewer religious people would know anything of those moments of chill and gloomy terror which will break into the life of all faith — unless it be indeed most vivid and robust — when clay after day brings tidings of some fresh assault upon the walls, or some mustering of more forces in the distance. B 1 8 INTRO DUC TOR i ' ESS A Y. It would be plainly absurd to think that a few sermons — necessarily fragmentary, and very loosely con- secutive — can be offered as any real contribution to the work which is here suggested. If there be indeed any real need and opportunity for such work, it must be done in a very different way ; the difficulties of disbelief must be shown with as much care and precision and philo- sophic intensity and justice of thought as has been used in bringing out the difficulties of belief. The writer of these pages is sincerely conscious that his work lags very far behind the demands of the case — almost out of sight of the battle-field. But when he was asked to publish a volume of sermons, it seemed to him that whatever use they might have, in their entire lack of originality, would depend, under God's blessing, upon their being linked together by some common thought. And so, as has been said, he has tried to gather into the first part of this volume a few intended to speak of some faculties of the inner life, the neglect or misuse of which may sometimes hinder the soul from making its answer to the appeal of outward evidence. The realiza- tion of one's own personal existence ; the longing for a life in which to lose and so to save one's self ; the un- hindered and infinite aspiration of the moral sense ; the belief in the reasonableness and worth of life ; a pure sense of beauty, in nature and in art ; the recognition of INTRO DUC TOR Y ESSA V. 19 certain truths about the intellectual life ; the realization of the true dignity of our own nature : these are among the forces which Christianity presumes in us, and on their health and vigour will depend the fulness and justice of our answer to the revelation of Jesus Christ. The second part of the series is even more incomplete than the first. But it may just point to a few of those needs of human souls, those momentous facts in moral history, those indissoluble and calmly realised experi- ences of the spiritual life which it is so difficult to deal with from the standpoint of disbelief, so impossible to arrange in any philosophy which would say that man must live without God in the world. The following plain and noble words indicate, in regard to one class of these phenomena, the sort of evidential value which is here claimed for them all : — " The fact is, Christian people believe that the blessedness they look for is not wholly unknown, but that foretastes and anticipations of it exist on earth. These are deniable ; and they must be denied with absolute determination by every person who rejects the Christian Faith. If they exist they are irrefragable, and prove Christ Lord of all ; if they do not, then His servants are, in a real sense, of all men most miserable: as those who let them pass un- accounted for are of all men least logical." 1 1 R. St. Joha Tyrwhitt, Christian Ideals and Hopes, p. 110. PART I. I. THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION: (i) IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. " Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass : for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." St. James i. 22, 23, 24. There is a very strange and suggestive contrast between the two senses in which it may be said that a man " forgets himself." On the one hand the phrase is sometimes used to mark that high grace of sympathy or love whereby the desire and energy of the heart is transferred from the gratification of a man's own tastes to the pure service of his fellow-men : that true con- version, whereby the will is rescued from its original sin of selfishness and wholly set upon the glory of God and the good of those for whom His Son was crucified. To the very noblest and most fearless impulse of devotion we give the praise of self-forgetfulness : we recognise and are abashed by it in any one who counts 21 22 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION: not his life dear unto himself, that he may finish his course with joy and the ministry which he has received. But it is, surely, an inaccurate use of words to say of such an one that he forgets himself. For he only forgets his own wishes and pleasures and comfort, he forgets those things which other men gather round them and delight in until they seem essential to their very life; but all the while his true self is vividly and actively present in the labour which proceedeth of love : it goes freely out in unreserved devotion, only to come again with joy, enriched and strengthened both by the exercise of its affection and the answering love which it has won. So it has been well said that in the life of love we die to self : but the death is one not of annihilation but of transmigration. 1 It is in the other sense of the common phrase that men do more truly forget themselves : when they so surrender their will to some blind impulse, some irrational custom, some animal craving, that for a while they seem driven as autumn leaves before the changing gusts, they know not how or whither. For then all the characteristics of personal existence seem hurried into abeyance ; the con- scious choice, the criticism and control of circumstances, the sustained and reasonable will, the very conscious- ness of self and of its manifold relations, — all are over- whelmed and forgotten in the vehemence of the storm. 1 J. Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, p. 283. AV THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. 23 Iii regard to some violent forms of passion, this terrible power by which they seem to hide us from ourselves, is even proverbial ; so we say that anger is a passing madness, or that a man is beside himself with rage, or jealousy, or lust. But there are also other ways, less evident and discreditable, by which we can so allow external forces to distract or overcloud that self- conscious life which makes us men, that we may be untouched and unaided by all the deep mysterious powers which wait upon the growing realization of this, our great prerogative of personality. We can so place our faculties and feelings of body and mind at the disposal of circumstances, or of our fellow-men, that the sense of our own personal being, and of the life which we can share with no man, falls far away into the background of our thoughts. A man can live for days, and months, and years, without ever giving any reality or force to the knowledge that he is himself an immortal soul : without ever really feeling his essential separation from things visible, his independence of them, his distinct existence in himself, his power of acting for himself in this way or in that, his personal responsibility for his every choice and action. As he wakes in the morning, as he is regaining from the blind life of sleep the wonder of self-consciousness, at once the countless interests which await him in the comiii" day rush in upon him ; there, in his own room, during 24 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : the one half-hour, perhaps, when he can be alone in all his waking-time, the distractions of the outer world are already around him. There is this or that change to be corresponded with, there is a difficulty to be faced or evaded, a point to be gained, some one to be gratified or conciliated, such and such details of work or pleasure to be provided for, so many letters to be written ; before he sees a face, or hears a voice, all his thoughts are already hurrying into the commerce of business or enjoyment, he is giving up the reins of his life to the forces which are about him, and losing himself in the bewildering currents of a complex society. And so he goes forth to his work and to his labour until the evening ; and all day long he is looking only at the things about him, he is committing the guidance and control of his ways to that blind and alien life which wavers and struggles around him. and of which he should rather be himself the critic and guide. And in the course of a life so dependent on external forces, the range of fashion, or of public or professional opinion, the requirements of other men, or of the man's own pleasures, are ever encroaching on the domain of free and conscious action ; more and more of his energy and interest is transferred and put at the disposal of cir- cumstances, until at last it may be simply inconceiv- able to him that a day will come when all this moving mass of life and change around him will fall away from IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. 25 him as a dream when one awaketh, and leave in the bare and hard reality of its eternal being that solitary self which he has so long neglected and forgotten. For of course our forgetfulness cannot really change or dissipate the self, the soul which God has made us ; we cannot undo or reverse that miracle by which He first called man out of the ranks of all creation, and gave to him alone the gift of consciousness, that he should no longer " nourish a blind life within the brain," but should know himself, the world, and God ; personality may be neglected, or forgotten, or denied ; it can never, we may be quite sure, through all eternity, be alienated or annulled. Whatever mists and clouds we gather round it, it remains, and waits till death shall take them all away ; till, in the world where truths cannot be masked, we stand, our very selves, and hear a voice from which we can no more escape — " Be still, and know that I am God." We can never cancel the act whereby man became a living soul ; we can never cease to be ourselves. But we can so turn away from self-knowledge, we can so forget ourselves and our responsibility, that this first and deepest truth of our being will no longer have its proper power in our lives. 1 It is of such a dim and 1 Cf. Vie, de Monseigntur Dupanloup, i. IDS : "Le mcme jour, M. de Talleyrand ecrivait encore : ' Une foule de gens ont le don ou 26 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : aimless self-neglect that St. James seems to speak in the words of the text. And surely in the characteristics of the present age, both good and bad, there is much to make such self-forgetfulness easy to most men, to some at times almost inevitable. The manifold details of an elaborate civilisation are ready at every turn to save us from the necessity of self-determination ; fashion offers itself as the director of our ways, if not, as sometimes seems to be the case, even as the keeper of our conscience. The intense and splendid activity of professional life, pressing into its service all the mechanism which can in- crease its strength, or delicacy, or speed, draws under its own disposal every thought and faculty of those who seem to find in such high and difficult work a sufficient exercise for all they have and are. But, above all, the ever-growing rapidity with which new impressions from without are poured upon us from every source, by every avenue of sense and understanding, so that the single mind is inundated and distracted by the ex- periences which a century ago would have seemed enough to fill a hundred lives at least ; above all, I say, this multiplication of the external factor in our lives beyond any possible development of our inner powers of judgment and reflection, sweeps over the self- consciousness of our spiritual being, and hurries us I'insufRsance de ne jamais prendre connaissance d'eux-memes : je n'ai que trop le malheur ou la superiority contraire ' " IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. 27 away into a brilliant and exciting thoughtlessness. Yet if this, or anything like this, is true of us — if we are faltering in the discernment and recollection of our undying personality, it is indeed a most serious and widely-reaching loss. For, in such a case, we are losing hold on that which is almost essential to the life and growth of religious belief, and to the progressive recog- nition of God's truth. Such blurring of our own self- consciousness will always obscure and invalidate for us the evidences of Christianity, always hinder and imperil our progress in the life of faith. Let me try briefly to show the certainty and manner of this result by speaking of three chief points in the Christian revelation which essentially presume, and require for the very understanding of their terms, that we should know ourselves as personal and spiritual beings. First, then, in the very front of Christianity, in the very Name of Him Whom the Church preaches and adores, is set the thought of our salvation from our sins ; and unless we are able to understand what sin means, unless the word touches and wakes some ex- perience in our consciousness, we are without a sense which is presupposed by every form in which the work of Christ can come before us. We are about as likely to understand a book written in a language of which o o we know only the prepositions and conjunctions as to enter into the truth of the Christian Creed without any 23 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION: appreciation of the meaning of sin. For now, as of old, in the history of every soul as in the history of the whole world, before the day of the Lord Elias must first come, before we can see the Lamb of God we must have heard the voice crying in the wilderness, before our hearts can feel by what authority the work of Christ is done they must have owned their need of the Baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. The fact of sin is to Christianity what crime is to law, what sickness is to medicine ; if sin, it has been truly said, were not an integral feature of human life, Christianity would long ago have perished. 1 Hence the consciousness, the appreciation of sin, is essential to any sufficient estimate of the claim which Christ's message has upon our attention and obedience ; even as it is necessary for the interpretation of almost every page throughout the Bible, and presupposed in psalms, and histories, and prophecies, and types. We can only grasp the significance of the Old Testament when we read it as the manifold record of one great longing and anticipation, quickened, ordered, and sustained by God, greeted and satisfied at last in the revelation of our Saviour, Jesus. The Gospel of His Incarnation and Atonement loses its central meaning for those who think of sin only as a term in theology or a preacher's 1 Cf. H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, p. 129. IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. 29 commonplace ; its evidence is duly weighed by those alone to whom sin is at least as real as sorrow, or poverty, or death. But it is obvious that our sense of sin depends upon the deep and steady recollection of our own distinct and personal existence. We shall not be troubled by the thought of it, or sensitive to its presence, while we are forgetting ourselves in the world around us, and throwing our souls into the flood and eddies of its business and pleasure; and though that world be indeed groaning and agonising with the misery which sin has wrought, yet shall we miss the secret of its discord and anguish unless we come to it ourselves with a broken and a contrite heart. For it is only when we draw back from the commerce of society, when we possess our souls in the resolute effort of self-know- ledge, when, to borrow a vivid metaphor, we sink a shaft into the depths of our consciousness, that we touch the real home of sin, and know its significance and its terrors. In the recognition of the enfeebled and perverted will, of the early promise unfulfilled, of early hopes obscured or cast away ; in the presence of hateful memories ; in the sense of conflict with desires which we can neither satisfy nor crush, and pleasures which at once detain and disappoint us ; above all, in a certain fearful looking for of judgment, we begin to enter into that great longing, which, through all the centuries of 30 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION ■ history, has gone before the face of the Lord to prepare His way ; and we learn to rise and welcome the witness of Him Who cries that our warfare is accomplished and our iniquity is pardoned. And secondly, in proportion as the consciousness of our personal and separate being grows clear and strong within us, we shall be able to enter more readily and more deeply into the Christian doctrine of our immortality ; we shall be better judges of the evidence for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come: for it is as personal spirits that we shall rise again with our bodies and give account for our own works. It must be hard for us to give reality to this stupendous and all-transforming truth, so long as our thoughts and faculties are dissipated among things which know no resurrection, and interests which really shall for ever die. For the fashion of this world passeth away, and the life which is committed to its guidance and lost in its pursuits is sure to catch the temper of its transience. There is a conviction of our immortality bound up with the exercise of self-conscious thought and self-determined will : whatever difficulty we may at first find in regard to the resurrection of the body, there is surely at least as much in conceiving how a personal spirit could ever cease to be. And, accordingly, the denial of a life beyond this world has IN THE LITE OF THE INTELLECT. 31 generally appeared, in theory or in practice, in con- junction with a state of things which has made it easy for men to put away or enfeeble the haunting thoughts of their own personal and separate being. And equally significant is the fact that in connection with such an obscurity of self-consciousness the strange passion for suicide appears in those who have not the strength or clearness of conscious thought and self-realization to project their personal existence beyond the cloud of death. In the dim and dreamy life of the Hindu, in the bewildering and absorbing chaos of sensuality which engulfed the society of Rome under certain of her Emperors, in the dissolute and fantastic paganism of the Renaissance, men could so fearfully forget them- selves that they were conscious of little or nothing which seemed beyond the reach of death ; and they gladly hailed or hastened its awful advent as though it were merely the final closing of a dreary game. 1 Shakespeare is, as always, true to human nature when he makes the suspicion of his own undying personality the restraining thought in Hamlet's mind : — " There 's the respect That makes calamity of so long life : . . . Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 2 1 Cf. H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Keligion, pp. 121-124. 2 Hamlet, in. i. 68, 83. 32 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : And so it is with deep truth that George Eliot makes the fading sense of personal existence herald and preface in the distracted and exhausted soul the thought of suicide : " The strength/' says the suffering and terrified girl, " the strength seemed departing from my soul ; . . . the more I thought the wearier I got, till it seemed I was not thinking at all, hut only the sky, and the river, and the Eternal < rod were in my soul. And what was it whether I died or lived?" 1 For indeed it is the steadfast self-realization of a personal spirit which gives the true sanctity to this life, and reaches with irresistible confidence beyond the death wherein it hardly seems to die. In that which each one of us means, or should mean, when he says " I," there is already latent the prophecy of a personal immortality, and the assurance that though worms destroy this body, yet " in my flesh shall I see God ; Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another." 2 The message and the evidences of Christianity pre- suppose in us the clear sense of our own personality when they speak to us of sin, and when they point us to a life beyond the grave ; and we are fit critics of their claim in proportion as we can realise this, our deep and separate existence. But there is a yet more 1 Daniel Deronda, Bk. in. Ch. xx. 2 Cf. R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions, pp. 49-51, 61-63. IN THE LIFE OF THE INTELLECT. 33 awful and controlling truth, which we shall either penetrate with an ever-growing knowledge, or to our unspeakable loss disfigure and obscure, according as we remember or forget this mystery of our self-conscious- ness. For it is by means of our own selves that God reveals Himself to us : it is this gift of personal and conscious and self-determined life, this image and like- ness of our Maker, which at once lifts us into dominion over everything that moveth upon the earth, aud also enables us to enter more nearly into the revelation of the Three Blessed Persons in the Holy Trinity. We must know ourselves as personal before we can enter into the import of God's Self-revealing : He will seem far-off and uncertain to us while we are lost in the impersonal life of the world around us : when we are drifting aimlessly along upon the tide of fashion, letting others think and feel and will for us, then it is not strange if hazy thoughts of tendencies and laws begin to steal over our confession of the Personality of God. For with the holy He will be holy, and with the perfect man He will be perfect : the pure in heart shall see Him, while those who never have patience to possess their own souls are at least in danger of thinking that He is even such an one as themselves. It is when we recall ourselves from the scattered activity of our daily life ; it is either when we have courage to go apart and c 34 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION. stand alone and hear what the Lord God will say con- cerning us, or else when sickness or age has forced us into the solitude which we have always shunned : it is then that we know ourselves, and our need of a suffi- cient object in which the life of the soul may find its rest for ever. As one after another the interests of this world are removed ; as we begin to see that our work is not an adequate or lifelong scope for all we are ; as the friends whom God has given us go before us into death, and one by one the channels of our love are closed ; we may feel at last that deep, mysterious energy of the soul which must be set towards another Spiritual Being like itself ; and so we may prepare ourselves to listen with a new sense of hope and adora- tion, when " through the thunder comes a human Voice, Saying, 0 heart I made, a heart beats here : Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine : But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love Me who have died for thee. 1 ' 1 1 R. Browning, Poetical Works, vol. v. p. 229. II. THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION: (2) IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. "Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son."— Genesis xxii. 10. The unfading interest of men in the sacrifice of Isaac is a noble instance of the persistent and controlling- power which a great deed exerts over succeeding generations, and of the conservation of force through all the changing conditions of moral history. Though every circumstance which made the deed to be praise- worthy, or possible, is gone beyond recall : though even the imagination refuses to realise that fearful crisis, and hangs back as we try to lead it to the rough altar, the piled- up fuel, the patient victim : — still, as we read the story, hardly the less does it compel our attention and demand our reverence. Its strength seems un- diminished by the lapse of time, and unrestricted by differences of nationality and belief. The Christian 35 36 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : Church, as it looks back to that accepted offering, recognises the spirit of a more perfect Sacrifice, and feels that One greater than Abraham or Isaac is here. For the Jew, the importance of the type may be even emphasized by his ignorance of its fulfilment, as year by year he still pleads in the worship of the synagogue : "Look Thou, 0 Lord, upon the ashes of Isaac, and remember this day unto his seed his being bound upon the altar." 1 Such an act can never sink below the horizon of history ; whose course seems hardly to travel beyond the shadow of that moral height, but rather to wind like a river round its base, that men may always lift their eyes to the steadfast glory of the everlasting hills. Thither let us look to-day, confident that, for the individual and the race alike, these Divine lessons of childhood are ever ready to yield new meaning and new help to later days, forsaking not in the time of age, showing God's strength to this generation, and His power to them that are yet to come. Dr. Mozley, in his Lectures on " Ruling Ideas in Early Ages," has first expressed with the utmost clearness and strength, and then dispelled beyond recall, a thought which rises in many minds as they are turned towards Abraham's great act, and hinders their 1 Cf. Archdeacon Freeman, Principles of Divine Service, vol. ii. pp. 106-112. IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. 37 acknowledgment of its grandeur. He has shown how the outward form of the act, the undeserved death, and the violent inroad on a human life, for which Abraham stretched forth his hand, are not of the essence of the Divine command, and do not touch the heart, the central principle, of the patriarch's obedience ; but belong only to the age through whose very im- perfections the manifold wisdom of God achieved the most vivid expression of inspired faith. He, in His unwearied condescension, speaks at each stage in the growth and education of mankind, in terms which each can receive, and asks from every generation the noblest service which it, being such as it is, can render. It is the triumph of His skilful mercy, that through the im- perfect conceptions of those earliest days faith should break out in a form such as she never again could wear ; that a rude and almost pitiless age should leave behind it such a bare and plain, and, so to speak, abrupt confession of His supremacy as the culture and light of later periods would utterly forbid ; and that the very fierceness of man should turn to His praise. The crushing of a father's tenderness, the stern purpose of that three days' journey, the deliberate infliction of suffering, the seeming wrong, the uplifted knife : we must not dwell on these ; they are but as the circum- stance of the great act itself, the scenery of the true 38 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : spiritual drama : they belong as closely to primitive culture as forms of language or social distinctions ; and through them the faith of Abraham comes forth to meet the voice of God. They are past and gone with the period of which they were characteristic : long ago they yielded place to gentler ways and wiser laws : but through all the changes of civilisation, through all the shifting shapes of our environment, the inner form, the heart of the great sacrifice remains unchanged, to quicken and guide the souls of men by the challenge of an un- hindered obedience. This is for us the meaning and substance of the act ; we are not chiefly concerned with the antiquarian or anthropological interest of its out- ward conditions and appearance ; the road of our thought leaves these on either hand to pass on to the inner depth where will is blending with will, and the faith of man is throwing itself in hope upon the Love of God. And there we find the secret of the act's unrivalled greatness, of its power with God, its control over men. For we see a human soul in quiet and steadfast obedience surrendering to God the richest wealth and highest hope which the service of a life has ever earned. — If God were to ask from us the full reward, the nearest blessing, the dearest achievement of all our past work, and with it the most helpful hope with which we ever encourage or delight ourselves, He IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. 39 would still be asking far less than Abraham offered in the sacrifice of Isaac. For on the life of Isaac hung the fulfilment of that unbounded promise which made the meaning and purpose of his life ; for whose sake he had left country and kindred and father's house, and gone out, not knowing whither he went ; for whose sake he had cast out the bondwoman, and Ishmael, the child of his love and prayer. It seemed as though all else which could enrich his life had fallen away or been thrust aside in order that this one hope might engross the whole strength of his being, the whole range of his sight. Confirmed by the repeated assurance of God, defined more nearly at each repetition, concen- trated now in the person of Isaac, that hope, that in him should all the families of the earth be blessed, stood before Abraham as the one expression and fulfil- ment of his life, almost as immortality itself : and for the sacrifice of that hope he now stretched forth his hand. 1 As we contemplate such an act of sacrifice, as we try to realize what was involved in such an unreserved and summary surrender of the whole content of this life, we must feel, I think, that the character of Abraham recedes into a far distance from all that we know of the thoughts, motives, and powers which are used in our 1 Cf. J. B. Mozley, Lecture* on the Old Testament, Lectures ii. and iii. 40 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : ordinary life. Wholly apart from all the vast change which severs us from the outward expression of his obedience, we feel ourselves to be, so far as we know ourselves, incapable of such unquestioning heroism. There is another gap between us and him besides that which has been caused by the restriction of a father's authority over his son, and the truer recognition of the rights of the individual. We see in the fulness of his self-surrender a moral strength to which we must look back somewhat as Homer looked, regretfully, to the lost vigour of the Trojan heroes. 1 In the sustained, deliberate, decisive effort of such an act there is a gathering up of all force, a fulness of self-realization, an intensity and singleness of determination, which seems impossible in the complexity and bewilderment of our life. Through all the stages of the trial, the will of Abraham is fixed in single, unswerving loyalty to a Voice which he alone has heard. Secondary considera- tions and thoughts of compromise do not trouble him : he knows himself: he knows Whom he has believed. 1 "EKTcop 8' apnd^as Xaav (pepev, os pa Trv\da>v tOTf/Kft npoo~6e, npvpvbs, Irakis, alrup vnepOev 6£iis erjv' tov 8' ov Ke b~v dvepe bijpov aplarto prfidiws en apa£av an ovbeos d^Xlaaeiav, oioi vvv fipoToi elo-'' 6 be piv pea ndXKe kui olos.'' II. xii. 445-449. IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. 41 For him, as he rises iu the morning, and cleaves the wood, as he journeys from his tents, and clinihs the hill and stands beside the altar, and stretches forth his hand, there are but two beings in the world : himself and God •} — himself, free, conscious, called for a service which none but he can render, to God, the Author and Upholder of his being, in Whom, and for Whom alone, he lives, and from the brightness of Whose Presence the whole world falls back as though it were not. In the loneliness of this communion he rises to receive into every depth of his soul the revelation of God ; he brings without reserve the full power of a single heart, and with undivided will gathers up the whole worth of life to make one worthy sacrifice. Is it not true, brethren, that all the greatest acts of faith which rise above the level plains of history have been done in the strength of such self-realization, such high self-confidence, as this 1 — that it is the power to stand .alone with God which makes men heroic and triumphant ? Look back, for one example, to their courage, of whom, in the Church's youth, the world was not worthy. Try to conceive the strain of stand- ing alone in the centre of the vast amphitheatre, in those minutes, perhaps, which were allowed to elapse 1 Cf. J. H. Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. i. pp, 15 seq.: Sermon ix. in the "Selectiun for the Seasons." 42 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTIOX : before the beasts were let loose upon their victims; standing there, ringed round with tier upon tier of scornful, hating, lustful faces ; deafened by the derision and blasphemy of those with whom from childhood you have lived ; waiting in utter isolation on the bare sand before that howling mob, to taste the bitterness of death. All your world is against you: the whole city thinks you mad : you have broken away from the wisdom and worship of the past, and rebelled against the common sense of the present: for reasons which are folly in the eyes of all that vast encircling crowd ; for a Love which only your own heart knows : for a Voice which no one else has heard : for a hope which even you cannot conceive, you are going to make the utter, irrevocable sacrifice of your life. Surely for such an act as this the soul must have laid aside every weight, and looked away from all that is not God: and in the certainty of an unfaltering gaze, the intensity of a single allegiance, must have known itself and Him ; — even as also we are known. By far gentler ways, it may be, and with issues which seem less vivid and decisive, our faith has hitherto been tried, and our choice declared to God and men. The broad and the narrow way diverge so gradually, and the means of access from one to the other seem so frequent and easy, that perhaps we hardly know when IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. 43 our course was settled and where we lost sight of the rejected road. We can recall no voice that ever spake with us, we have never known ourselves summoned to any decisive sacrifice ; no sudden strain has ever threatened to drag us apart from the basal principles of our faith and life. Yet surely, brethren, we dare not anticipate that such a strain will never come : that we shall never in this time of our probation need all the spiritual strength which God has placed within our reach. Only a shallow view of modern life can let us think that its crises are less real or less dramatic than those in which the faith of Martyrs was tried, and triumphed. Destructive arguments which now we find it easy to reject, may, by better advocacy or by the unnoticed growth of some defect in our own judgment, acquire strange force and break in with startling novelty on our confidence : the fading faith of some whom we have loved and honoured may make scepticism seem a very different thing from that which now we think it : failure and adversity may overtax the strength of theories which were barely adequate for the guidance of easier days, and the storm of sorrow may wreck a faith which seemed fairly safe under a cloud- less sky : temptations which now seem far away from our life may come round about us daily like water, and compass us together on every side. How are we pre- 44 THE VIRTUE OF SELF-ASSERTION : paring ourselves for the approach, or the recurrence, of such trials as these? Are we ready, at their first threat, to gather all the forces of our being, and to meet the attack in clear and trustful consciousness of that immortal spirit which is each one of us ? Do we know what it is to realize our self — to recall from all distraction, to separate from all accidents, to rescue from the importunities of sense and the mists of fancy that undying personality, that self-possessed, self-governing being which God made, knows, and will judge ? Only tlms can we calmly, gladly meet the trial of our faith, girding up, as St. Peter bids us, the loins of our mind, answering, as Abraham, to the voice of God — " Behold — T." For, to quote the words of a living teacher, " This real self it is which apprehends God with the understanding, which embraces Him with the affec- tions, which resolves through the will to obey Him." " As personal spirits we are linked and bound to the Father of spirits ; as spirits, we believe, we hope, we love ; as spirits, we enter into the complex mystery and activities of prayer ; as spirits, we take in each other that deep and penetrating interest which pierces beneath the outline of the human animal, and holds true converse with the supersensuous being within. All that weakens or lowers our consciousness of being spirits, weakens in that proportion our capacity for IN THE LIFE OF THE WILL. 45 religion ; all that enhances that consciousness, as surely enlarges it." 1 It is sometimes said, and perhaps often thought, that the language of the Church in regard to the season of Lent is marked by an anachronism which may justify some neglect on the part of modern society and common sense ; and that principles and restrictions which in a violent and licentious age were not without their use, are, among the altered circumstances and habits of our day, entirely unpractical. Doubtless we may find them so, if, after annoying ourselves, and perhaps others, by the laborious observance of a few self-chosen rules, we emerge from the forty days without having gained any deeper knowledge of the things which belong to our peace. But the result may be very different if, by God's grace, we so use the challenge and the opportunities of those days as to learn, before they are past, more of that buried life which the haste and clamour of our pleasure and work encourage us to forget ; if by prayer and watchfulness we recover some- thing of that true self-mastery which brings men near to God. Above all, a very practical advantage will have been attained by any one who, when the light clouds of Lent grow to a great darkness and hide the noonday sun over the prevailing Sacrifice, can kneel 1 H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of RelUjion, p. 94 4 6 THE VIRTUE OF SELF ASSERTION. before the Cross with a new sense of his own immortal personality, and of the eternal issues which lie before him : who can rise from the adoration of the Crucified to say, " The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself for me." 1 1 Cf. R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions, p. 61 : " When our public service is done, then comes the time to meet ourselves alone. We have to meet ourselves in our weakness, in our ignorance, in our sin, in the awfulness and mystery of our separate existence. We hear voices speaking to us as if our personal fate were the one object of interest of the Infinite Com- passion and the Eternal Love : ' Who loved me, and gave Himself for me.' ' The Body which was given for thee — the Blood which was shed for thee — remember that Christ died for thee.'' Let us not for any outward interest, tempted by the fascination of the widest thoughts and most absorbing aims, shrink from that contact with the inward discipline of our souls." III. THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. " The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul."— Acts iv. 32. There are two aspects in which we may consider that separation and distinction from the world around us which belongs to our individual existence as souls living and responsible in the sight of God. There are two sides, as it were, to this mysterious truth of our self-consciousness, two points of view from which we may approach the thought of our essential independence of all created things. One side is positive, the other negative : one is in light, even in the light of God's image ; the other is in darkness. "We are quickened and ennobled as we look at the former; we instinctively recoil from the sight of the latter. The former is that of which I have spoken as personality, that which each one of us means when he says, "I": the latter is the awful thought of isolation. Even as the steady dis- cernment of our own personal existence and responsi- bility is required for the due unfolding of the life and 47 4S THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. powers that make us men, so also it is true that in isolation those powers and that life can never approach towards the fulfilment of their spiritual calling and destiny. We do not need the record of God's Voice to assure us that " it is not good that the man should be alone " : for knit into the very stuff of our personality, and quick with the very life of our soul, is the in- stinctive dread of loneliness, the deep dependence upon other souls, the craving after intercourse and communion with our fellow-men. We know, quite as surely and necessarily as we know ourselves, that it is only in fellowship with others, only in relation to beings like ourselves, that the life which belongs to us as men can find its essential exercise and development : the primary desires, the simplest judgments of our hearts, and all our noblest faculties, are concerned with and imply these relations : so that if it were possible for a man to be completely isolated from his fellows, almost all his thoughts and efforts and powers would either be re- pressed and die, or else be wasted on the unchanged, nnanswering air, like music wandering over the rocks of a wilderness. Conscience, justice, sympathy, honour, pity, love : these are but a few of the words whose whole wealth of meanin" lies in a man's dealings and communion with his fellow-men. Every principle of morality, every safeguard of reason, every canon of taste, depends for its significance, if not for its sanction, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 49 on our position as members of a great community : the very thought of our own personality is inseparable from the existence of others like ourselves : and it was with a true and deep insight that the Greek declared that he who willingly would live in utter solitude must be either more or less than man. The social instinct is astir in the very act of self-consciousness : and any conception or principle of life which does not provide for its satisfaction need hardly be tried in order to be found wanting. I would endeavour, by God's help, to show something of the reality of the satisfaction which is offered to it in the Church of Christ. If the instinct is, as can hardly be doubted, an essential element in the health and fulness; of a human life, then we may well expect to find it presumed in God's answer to the needs of man : and if it be indeed so presumed, then, in pro- portion as we have kept the instinctive desire keen and pure, we shall be likely to appreciate the hope and earnest of its fulfilment which is held out to us by Christianity. There are clearly two ways 1 in which we may measure the adequacy of any communion and fellow- ship into which we are invited. Sympathy lives, so to 1 Cf. Lacordaire, Conferences de Nbtre-Dame de Paris, 29 me Conference ; and J. Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Rcliyion, chap. ix. D 50 THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. speak, ill three dimensions : it lias length, breadth, and depth : and we may call it great either for the extent which it can cover, or for the inner depths which it can reach. So too it may he cramped and narrow, either because it moves within a scanty range, and knows nothing beyond some close-encircling wall, or else because its diffuse activity hardly goes below the surface of life, but hurries over its vast field as lightly, if as freely, as the wind. And in correspondence with these two measurements of sympathy, there are, if we may speak very generally, two distinct ways in which the desire for communion may seek and seem to find its answer and satisfaction without reference to Christianity : two means by which this world may try to stay the imperative hunger of the social instinct. On the one hand we may find an almost infinite scope for sympathy, and a fellowship that is practically unrestricted in extent, if we will enter generously and earnestly into the great national, or even wider life which stirs and strives around us : if we will try to share or understand the wants and hopes and aims of our generation, and to bear our part in its corporate and organic action. Probably there never was an age which offered wider range, more varied opportunity, more hopeful schemes for such an exercise and de- velopment of the social instinct. The marvellous THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 51 elaboration of the means of intercourse joins with the patient efforts of science and the industrious accumula- tion of statistics to bring the whole world within the ambition of our sympathy. Whatever light we have seen, whatever hope we have conceived, whatever help we have to give, we can pass at once into relation and commerce with hundreds of our fellow-men : while every day assails us with new and wider interests, and pours out before us endless means of entering, with clearer insight and appreciation, into the lives and thoughts and sufferings of unnumbered thousands whom we shall never see. "Whether the feelings with which we go out into the world are mainly benevolent, political, or scientific : whether our first desire is to relieve, to control, or to classify the miseries and vices of our kind : we are at once admitted to a tract of interest and work in which the social instinct moves without the fear of limitation, and, if it could measure sympathy only by extent, might seem to find its rest for ever. It is when the other measurement is forced upon us that we feel the practical defect of a purely natural communion, however wide and intelligent, with our fellow-citizens or with mankind. Doubtless, it is incomparably nobler and happier so to live than to grope about in the pettiness of ignorance and prejudice and self-regard : but every human soul has energies, mysterious and profound, which hud no exercise or 52 THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. answer in that diffusive interest which is ever losing in intensity what it gains in width. We may be, we must be, enlightened, quickened, purified, ennobled by every act which takes us out of the service of self, and sets our feet in a large room, and widens our view of life : but so long as the widening intercourse and communion of our souls rests upon the purely natural basis of a mutual understanding, and depends upon our being able to enter into the natural thoughts and ways of other men, it will never satisfy a craving which is just as deep and complex as our whole moral constitution. For it has been truly said that while our inner life looks out to no horizon, in our social relations we are hemmed in on every side : in each wider range of fellowship, more of our personal feelings and convictions have to be repressed or misunderstood : as we pass from love to friendship, from friendship to acquaintance, from acquaintance to association, at each stage we feel that less of our true self is active and satisfied, that we are exchanging the full and blessed sympathy "where hearts are of each other sure," for the excitement and effectiveness of living in a crowd. " But often in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life." 1 M. Arnold, Dramatic and Lyric Poems, p. 112. THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 53 Yes, from the partial and superficial communion which thus beckons on and disappoints in ever-widening fields of ever more restricted feeling, most men turn to seek in friendship or in home a sympathy which has less to fear from the second measurement of which I spoke. Probably we all know the intense relief of passing from the jar or compromise of society at large into some inner sphere of a love which has been tried for years and never yet found wanting, some sheltered and fear- less home where " what we mean we say, and what we would we know." Most men and women, by God's mercy, know something of such happy peace, and the blessing of a communion into which they enter without reserve or self-repression. There are some to whom we speak almost in a language of our own, with the confi- dence that all our broken hints are recognised with a thrill of kinship, and our half-uttered thoughts discerned and shared : some with whom we need not cramp our meaning into the dead form of an explicit accuracy, and with whom we can forecast that we shall walk together in undoubting sympathy even over tracts of taste and belief which we may never yet have touched. And having found the refreshment and confidence of such sympathy, most men come to live a double life : passing across day by day from the diffuse and shallow fellowship of the wide world to the quiet trust and 54 THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. swift intercourse of the chosen few: trying to supplement the extent of one communion by the depth of the other : and gratifying the social instinct with the combined enjoyment of public life and private love : even as the great poet of our day cries — "God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her." 1 But is this then all ? Must this division always be ? Must we put away for ever all thought and hope of any communion which shall be at once both wide and deep ? Is this the ideal and type of human brotherhood, that we should always be trying to hold together an outer life into which we do not wholly enter, and an inner life whose entrance is concealed and barred for almost all our fellows ? We know the perils which hang about such a severance of work and sympathy : the perils of mutual admiration, of scornful thoughts and words about the uninitiated, of narrowness, of self-culture and self-copying, till character is disfigured into caricature, and friendship into a slightly expanded egotism. Dangers such as these may well make us sure that the theory of life which gives them place is not the very and eternal truth which God would have us see, and strive after : that there must be a safer and simpler 1 R. Browning, Poetical Works, vol. v. p. 320. THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 55 satisfaction for the craving which He has linked with the deepest movements of our spiritual life. Have we then ever heard of any fellowship which claims to overcome the severance ? Is there any power which from within or from without can possibly bring the souls of men together in a sympathy without either exclusion or reserve ? " I believe in the Communion of Saints." This is the answer of the Christian Church : she, and she alone, still clings to the hope and promise of a fellowship and sympathy which shall be at once deeper than any depth which a man can fathom in his own soul, and wider than the world itself : a brotherhood into which the most ignorant and outcast and sinful may through penitence find entrance, a brotherhood in which the most sensitive and thoughtful and exacting soul shall never feel or fear the touch of cruelty or stupidity, but ever be led on from height to height, from strength to strength, from glory to glory, by the answer of a love which never is out of sight, and yet never can be outstripped. Clearly, if there is any warrant for the promise of such a communion, if it has any earnest or analogy which can bring it within the range of our aspiration, if we can see even dimly how it might be reached and realized within the Church of Christ, then the very offer of the hope should stir in us a sense of 56 THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. welcome and obedience, as we recognize the fore- shadowed fulfilment of an instinct which we may have enfeebled and misused, but cannot wholly repudiate or destroy. By what means then does the Church propose to make good her promise of a sympathy both wide and deep ? By what links does she connect with our daily life her faith in the Communion of Saints ? Must we look back, brethren, for the plainest answer to these questions to the days of which the text was ■written : the days when " the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul" ? It is, in deed and truth, a humiliating necessity which forces Churchmen thus to turn away from the outward aspect of their own times, from the divisions and distrust which have broken in upon the Kingdom of God, and to seek in earlier ages the clearer manifestation of the Com- munion of Saints. But still we cannot doubt for a moment that the Divine spirit of that Communion is with us now : we know that, for all the noisy and obtrusive quarrels which are the shame and plague of a divided Christendom, the strong love which held together the souls of Martyrs and Evangelists, the love which was stronger than death, is among us still : that in pure homes, in the fellowship of Christ's work among the poor and suffering, in many a crowded parish and lonely mission station, we can still see, in the perfect THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 57 harmony of self-forgetful work, the inherited secret of Christian unity and the earnest of its achievement in the Church triumphant. Even now the forecast peace is only veiled from those who will not look below the surface, who will not watch for its signs in quiet and Christlike lives of unnoticed service and of silent faith. Let us try to think of lives so quickened and harmonized, or of that deep sympathy which could efface in the Apostolic Church the strong lines of severance between Jew and Gentile, between bond and free, while we look for the means by which Christianity invites us to enter into the Communion of Saints. I would not try to speak in this short space of that mysterious work whereby through the hidden efficacy of Sacraments and by the power of the Holy Ghost, we may be, for all our unworthiness, filled with the very Life of Him Who died for all, and caught up into the oneness of His Body Mystical. That work is true and real and actual : but it is not briefly to be spoken of : perhaps it will not always bear the restraint of human utterance. But there is one plain ground of fellowship which lies so near to the experience of our daily life, that it is easy for all to see and measure. For at the outset, Christianity, and Christianity alone, sets before us all One Lord. Alike in earth and Heaven we are to be brought into the true fellowship one with another 58 THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. by a service and devotion which is not mutual but common : by seeking first the same Lord and Saviour. The real secret of sympathy is to love in the first place, not one's friend, but that which he loves better than himself: and the fulfilment of the social instinct is found in the concentration of all hearts upon the One true God. And surely this, strange as it may at first appear, is the plain indorsement of our own experience. It is not in mutual admiration, in the private inter- change of regard and care, in loving those who first love us, that we attain the purest intensity of devotion and communion. It is in community of service, in fellowship of the same whole-hearted work, in eager striving towards the same unselfish hope. So is it in our homes : we unlearn all partiality, all selfish preference and self-willed affection, we enter within the veil, and read the mysteries of love, in pro- portion as our hearts are set upon one common aim. And so it is that sometimes sickness, with its quick con- centration of all interests in one room, upon one life and hope, can knit a home together with a sympathy unknown before, and teach to all who will the secret of all true communion. So is it also in the wider ranges of our life. It is surely true that men are really drawn together and taught to co-operate with generous trustfulness, not by THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. 59 a good-natured acquiescence in the ways and wishes of others, not by a diffusive zeal to gratify their fellows, but by the concentration of their lives upon one faith and hope, and by the service of the same enthusiasm. It is this which sets and holds their hearts in sympathy ; this which overcomes the sinful instinct of distrust, and washes away the barriers of self-regard : even as it is this which is deformed and wasted in the violence of party-feeling. But if thus we find the unlooked-for blessing of mutual trust growing we know not how out of our common allegiance to any earthly object, how can we measure the love which might spread from heart to heart if all were wholly set upon the selfsame Lord Who ever pours towards all the selfsame everlasting Love ] We shall better understand what the Communion of Saints may be, in proportion as we can give our hearts, our strength, our lives, to Him Who gave Himself for us — to Him Who, since He was lifted up from the earth, alone can draw all to Himself, and link them in the one sufficient sympathy of one unending Love. For " if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another" : even as " this command- ment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also." It was with such a hope that the great Christian artists painted the joys of the THE SOCIAL INSTINCT. united Church in Paradise : where all the Saints, as they wander among the glories of their home, are ever looking away from the dear companions of their peace and gazing only upon Him Who has redeemed them by His Blood : finding in that concentration of all their thoughts and all their love the perfect fulfilment of His promise and their hope, in the unhindered com- munion of their unnumbered hosts. IV. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. " The appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel."— 2 Tim. i. 10. The letter from which these words are taken is one which no thoughtful man can read without the deepest interest : for it was written under circumstances which might give authority and attraction to the words even of the least original and effective among us : and the writer certainly was not lacking in the very highest qualities of a teacher. St. Paul is a prisoner at Rome, charged with offences which involve the unfailing in- dictment of high treason : as a Christian he will prohably find his case complicated by the rumours which have issued from Nero's court as to the origin of the late ruinous fire : and he is daily expecting to be taken from his prison to his death. The time has come which must test the entire sincerity and self-knowledge with which he said some nine years ago 61 62 THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. by the sea-side at Miletus, "Bonds and afflictions abide me : but none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself": — and this letter makes it clear that those words owed none of their strength to the impulse of rhetoric or excitement. For St. Paul is neither frightened nor excited by the near approach of his painful death : he neither dreads nor denies the strain which suffering and loneliness can exert : he feels that for one younger than himself and less versed in the trials and triumphs of faith, such violence as has lately broken out upon the Church at Rome may be almost more than he can face with- out flinching. And so — since, like his Master, having loved his own which are in the world, he loves them unto the end — he writes from his prison to his own son in the faith, and he shares with Timothy the thoughts and hopes which he feels to be the secret of his quietude. They are told with the steady simplicity of one who feels that what he has to say is at once certain and sufficient : the letter is in utter contrast with that appearance of theatrical effect which in some later martyrdoms jarred on M. Aurelius' delicate taste in heroism : indeed, at times it descends to matters of personal convenience, and might seem to teach us little more than a lesson in common sense at critical times. For instance, the sentence may be deferred till after the THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 63 winter ; and, if so, St. Paul will want the cloke that he left at Troas : he is anxious to have some books, but especially some parchments, whether for his own use or for the instruction of those whom he can no longer teach by word of mouth : there are messages to be sent, and news to be told of common friends, of their loyalty or failure : and twice St. Paul recurs to his great longing to see his dear son once again : " Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me": to <: come before winter." But this may not be possible : and so the main tenor of the letter is to say good-bye. Its tone is touched with the sober graces of the evening and the autumn : it lingers round the thoughts and ways of life by which men put away the fear of dying : it strives to fix for ever in the young Bishop's mind those principles and views of public and private conduct which will not break clown or need to be modified even in the last days and the perilous times, even in perse- cution and the hour of death. It is natural that one who writes thus should lay some stress upon the doctrine of the Resurrection, and that he who had told the Corinthians, " If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain," should, as he looks to the supreme trial of faith, realize and declare the supreme and unique significance of this truth. And so, not only in the general tenor of the letter, but also 64 THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. expressly in several passages, St. Paul shows with how vivid and masterful a power the communion of the Risen Lord, and the promise of eternal life with Him, had entered and occupied His servant's soul. And I woidd try, by God's grace, first to show in what sense this power has been historically exercised by Christianity, and how life and immortality were really, as the text asserts, brought to light through the Gospel : and then to say something of the evidence which is rendered and reflected, as it were, to the Creed of the Church from the world which it has thus affected. Briefly, I would ask you to consider first whether Christianity has succeeded in satisfying man's in- stinctive lormiri" for a revelation of eternal life ? And if it has, whether this success is any argument for its truth ? It may at first be thought that in the words of the text St. Paul has overstated the originality of his Gospel in its doctrine of immortality. For, on the one hand, we find the tokens of firm belief in a life beyond the grave among the very lowest savages : it is shown in their legends, in their accounts of dreams, in their customs of burial : — and, on the other hand, we are familiar with the glorious forecasts by which, lone before our Saviour's Advent, both Greeks and Jews discerned what lay behind the unrent THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 65 veil of death, and declared by faith that they desired a better country, and the city which God had prepared for them. But St. Paul does not, could not, deny that the expectation of an eternal life and the suspicion of immortality were astir among men before Christ rose from the dead, the first-fruits of them that slept : what he does claim is that through the Gospel of the Resurrection God has brought the truth to light, and substituted for the shifting glimpses, the twilight hope, the unfinished prophecy of the past, a fact as stable as his prison walls, a fact which brings immortality itself into the broad light of day, aud sets it, for those who believe that Christ is risen, among the steadiest axioms of life. He is satisfied that his eyes have seen the Form, his ears have heard the Voice of One Who liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore : he believes that all his needs are known, all his thoughts read, all his labours watched, all his prayers heard, by One like himself, save only for his sins, One Who was in earth, and now looks down from Heaven: and by that belief the immortality of his own soul is carried beyond the approach of doubt : — " I know, 1 ' he says, " Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day." The expectation of a future life had indeed long been in the world : but it had been a very 66 THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. different thing from this. In the infantile mind of the savage it had been little more than the mere inability to imagine how he could cease to be ; it cost him less effort to think of the present as continuing than as stopping: he had not fancy or energy enough to conceive an end. 1 It was impossible that a state of mind so purely negative should long take rank as an expectation among civilized men : in their higher and more active souls it must either become positive or pass away. It does become positive to the Greek and to the Jew : but at the same time it loses something of that unfaltering certainty with which it swayed the savage. To the wisest of the Greeks it appears as a belief which he is disposed to accept, partly in con- sequence of his high opinion of the dignity of man, partly on the ground of practical expediency ; 2 and there is a striking contrast between the clear hope of the prisoner of Jesus Christ as he waits for martyrdom, and the equal courage with which Socrates, doomed to die by as unjust a sentence, quietly weighs the balance of probabilities, either that death may be such a change that the dead man is nothing, or that it may chance to be a migration of the soul into another place. 3 And 1 Cf. S. Baring-Gould, Origin and Development of Religious Belief, i. 70, 71. 2 Cf. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, chap, viii. ad fin. 3 Plato, Apologia Socratis, chap, xxxii. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 67 even for the Jew, though God had borne into his heart the hope of an everlasting salvation, and a long life, even for ever and ever : though Job knows that from his flesh he shall behold God, and Asaph cries that when flesh and heart fail God is the strength of his heart and his portion for ever : yet still the hope is growing towards the perfect day : still the great prophecy remains unverified : still, to borrow a vivid metaphor, the further pier of the bridge which spans the whole of life rests upon that unseen shore from which in all the generations of the past no traveller has returned, 1 no voice been heard ; and when the dark- ness of that strange land has seemed to gather round him, even David wonders " What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit ? " even Hezekiah cries to God, "The grave cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee : they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth." But for St. Paul all this is changed. He has seen and loved and communed with One Who beina: raised from the dead dieth no more : the dominion of death is ended for ever : and through the Gospel Jesus Christ has brought life and immortality to light. He feels that a new power is come into the world of thought : that the Resurrection of the Crucified has achieved, as 1 Cf. J. B. Mozley, University Srrmons, p. 50. 68 7 HE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. it were, not only the dethronement of death, but also the coronation of a hope, of whose dominion there shall be no end : that the speculations of philosophy and the religious aspirations of Judaism have given place to a revelation which will have power to ennoble and control the lives of rich and poor, of learned and unlearned, with the assurance of an eternal issue. And, beyond dispute, brethren, his forecast has in history proved true. "Whatever Christianity has done, or failed to do, this at least we need not fear to claim for it : that it has availed to plant the belief of our immortality among the deepest and most general convictions of our race : that it has borne even into the least imaginative hearts the unfailing hope of a pure and glorious life beyond the death of the body : that it has shot through our language, our literature, our customs, and our moral ideas the searching light of a judgment to come and the quickening glory of a promised Heaven ; that it has sustained and intensified this hope through countless changes of thought and feeling in centuries of quickest intellectual development : and that it is now impossible to conceive the force which could dislodge from so many million hearts the axiom which they have learned from the Gospel of the Resurrection. But is there in this achievement any evidence that that Gospel is true ? Let us seek some answer to this question. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 69 And first, may not this be said with truth : that there are some conceptions of our life, of ourselves, and of this present world, which, as moral beings, we have no right to entertain ? They may seem merely abstract theories ; and sophists may find much to say for them : but every healthy taste detects their quality with an instinct of repugnance, and knows that their rejection is at once a natural impulse and a moral duty. We have no right, for instance, to entertain, still less to impart, the theory that there is any sin which men cannot avoid, any vice which they had better practise : we have no right to say to ourselves or others that our humanity is naturally vile or brutal. For views such as these are, by the clear sentence of our own hearts, insulting, degrading, paralysing to the nature and the life we share : they drag us down from the rank in which we were born : and we have no more right to hold them than we have to renounce the exercise and responsibility of any social influence, any intellectual power, any delicacy of feeling with which we find ourselves endowed. Conscience can condemn a thought as distinctly and authoritatively as it can an act : and there are abstract views of ourselves and our life which can only be accepted by doing ruinous violence to the moral sense. Such, and so criminal, is or would be the belief that 70 THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. this present life is all unreal and meaningless, a thing to be mocked at or despised as silly and abortive : as though all its interests and issues, even when they seem most free and hopeful, were really in the relentless grip of a blind or cruel force, and its government or anarchy, with all that we call law and right and reason, a mere amusement for some scornful spectator of our manifold delusion. We have no right, even in thought, so to jeer at ourselves : no man, being rational and moral, may think so meanly of his manhood. The strength and truth of our recoil from such a thought is seen in our deep instinct of poetic justice : it is, as Aristotle said, repulsive, disgusting to us, that by the final issue of the plot the faultless hero should be left in misery, the vilest characters rewarded : ] the drama is to us a little world, a little summary of all time : and we, in the name of morality and reason, demand that it shall either present, or point towards, a righteous end. And practically no sane man can steadily thus scorn the world or his own life. Beneath all earnest thought and work there lies the profound conviction that the main lines of human life are reasonable and righteous : that there is in it a power, a tendency, with which good men can co-operate, allying with it, entrusting to it, the hope and effort of their lives : that diligence and ' Cf. Arist. Poet., ch. xiii. 2. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 71 patience and self-discipline are not a mere waste of time, which might be spent in obvious pleasures, but are rather in harmony with a principle or a will, which through all the apparent confusion of the world is steadily moving towards an assured fulfilment, and a victory which will somehow justify and crown the trust and toil of those who have striven to live rightly. And we, brethren, know that this voice of the people- is also a Voice of God : we recognize it as our nature's evidence that God is good, and God is King : we welcome and rest on it as the revelation of His Will in Whom we live and move and have our being. We live then, we go on working, upon the belief that the main and dominant element in life is reasonable and righteous : it is a belief which morality inculcates as a duty ; without which effort and progress are words drained of all meaning. But does this world, indeed, display the character which we are thus forced to impute to it, if all the issues of a human life are finished, all its drama played, its accounts all balanced, and its story closed, when the frail body dies ; if life and immor- tality indeed have not been brought to light? With- out staying at present to lay stress on those parts and relations in every man's life, which would be stultified and degraded into insignificance or absurdity by such a supposition, let us only think for a minute how many 72 THE REASONABLENESS OE LIFE. souls there are within, say, half a mile of this place for whom, if all the issues of their life lay on this side of the grave, this world would seem neither reasonable nor righteous, but rather a house of cruel and thankless bondage, whither they have been sent for a few dull or bitter years, to be mocked with fading hopes, and to look at pleasures while they lived in pains. We may lay but a light hold on the promise of eternal life if this world seems to us a pleasant place of interest and congenial work and tasteful leisure : if we are fond of books, and have time to read them : and if our moral nature can turn from time to time to try the relief and luxury of doing good. But there are unnumbered souls for whom only the hope which Christianity has given them can justify the patient continuance of life, or arrest the quick growth of disappointment towards despair and madness. It was suggested not long ago by a thoughtful writer in the Spectator that even in Agnosticism there might be the impulse of persecution : and that possibly those who had themselves dismissed religion from their lives might forbid or oppose its practice by others, as pre- judicial to dispassionate study, and on the ground that " that way madness lies." Surely mankind at large, or certainly the poor and suffering, know better than the Agnostic where lies the true safeguard of their sanity. THE REASONABLENESS OF LIFE. 73 There is a stubborn argument in favour of His truth Who has brought life and immortality to light, which we may take in the words of the poor dying factory-girl in the tale : " I think if this should be the end of all ; and if all I have been born for is just to work my heart and life away in this dree place, with those mill-stones in my ears for ever, until I could scream out for them to stop and let me have a little quiet : with my mother gone, and I never able to tell her again how I loved her, and of all my troubles, — I think, if this life is the end, and that there is no God to wipe away all tears from all eyes, I could go mad." 1 1 North and South, by Mrs. Gaskell. Quoted by Dr. Newman in the Grammar of Assent, p. 312. V. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : (i) IN NATURE} " And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." — Genesis i. 31. In these most simple and mysterious words we are plainly told that in the beginning the Creator of this world delighted in the beauty of its outward form. He approved it not only as fit for the material develop- ment which He had designed for it, fit for the ages of change, the course of history which should be enacted on it : but also as outwardly delightful. He saw His work, and, behold, to sight it was very good. It was good, not only as satisfying the purpose of His mercy for those whom He would place there, not only as apt 1 The thought from which this sermon starts will be familiar to those who know Dr. Mozley's sermon upon " Nature " in his volume of University Sermons. It has been followed out with great power in a book referred to below, The Natural Theology of Natural Beauty, by R. St. John Tyrwhitt. 74 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: IN NATURE. 75 to minister to their life and growth : but also as a visible expression of the eternal beauty, and therefore pleasing even to the Eye of God. Apart from all the uses it would serve, its outward aspect was in harmony with a certain Divine law : and for this Almighty God judged that it was very good. If men would only look frankly at the tirst chapter of Genesis, without either timidity or injustice, it would surely seem very strange to find this simple and complete anticipation of a thought which, though it has been astir in the world for many centuries, has only in the last few years received its due emphasis and its logical force. I mean the thought that our delight in the visible beauty of this world can only be explained by the belief that the world has in some way been made to give us this delight by a Being Who Himself knows what beauty is : and that the beauty of Nature is a real communication made to us concerning the Mind and Will that is behind Nature. The argu- ment has quite lately been stated with great skill and grace in a book entitled The Natural Theology of Natural Beauty, the author, Mr. Tyrwhitt, following in the main the lines marked out by Professor Euskin in his Modern Painters, and by Dr. Mozley in his end- lessly suggestive sermon upon Nature. And it is an argument which, so far as it goes, will bear any weight 76 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: we like to put upon it. For all the real business of the universe, all the changes and energies which sus- tain and advance our life upon the earth, might plainly have gone on quite well without making any appeal to our emotions. The sun might have risen and set, the succession of seasons might have been ensured, and the requisite food brought out of the fields, without any suggestion to us of wonder or delight or praise. All the mechanism of provision for our physical life might have worked smoothly and successfully, with no more thought or hint of beauty than we may find in a factory or a ploughing- machine. But, as we know, the case is wholly otherwise : — Nature does much more for us than merely to give us board and lodging. Over and above the daily sustenance of our life we receive from her a constant series of delightful and ennobling thoughts and feelings : the great and costly labours which enable us to live, present us also with a magni- ficent and thrilling spectacle : and Nature — as has been said in very memorable words, — in the very act of labouring as a machine, is also sleeping as a picture. 1 We have then a right to say that the quality or character which can thus speak and appeal to our spirit must have been engendered in this visible world by a spiritual Being able and willing to enter into 1 Muzley's University Sermon*, p. 123. IN NA TUNE. 77 communion with us, and knowing what would affect and raise our thoughts. When we receive and read a letter, we are sure that it has come from some one who knew our language and could write it. When we listen to a beautiful piece of music we are sure that the composer had either a theoretic or at least a practical acquaintance with the laws and the effects of harmony. And when at the sight of a great landscape, rich and quiet in the chaste glory of the autumn, or glad with the bright promise, the fearless freedom of the spring, our whole heart is filled with happiness, and every sense seems touched with something of a pleasure that was meant for it, and all words are utterly too poor to praise the sight : — then surely, by as good an argument, we must say that, through whatever ways and means, the world received its outward aspect by the Will of some Being Who knew the law and truth of beauty. It does not matter, so far as this inference is concerned, how the result has been attained, or how many ages and thousands of secondary causes are traced between the beginning of the work and its present aspect : it is beautiful now : it now speaks to us in a language which our spirits understand : and, however long ago, and in whatever way, only a spiritual Being could have taught it so to speak. Whatever Creation means, the world was created by One Who could delight 78 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : ill beauty : — whenever its Author looked out upon His work He must have seen that it was very good. There is, I think, no refuge from this argument save in the denial that there is any such thing as natural beauty : and it is really too late in the history of human thought for this denial to claim much attention from practical men. The philosopher who says that my enjoyment of a great sunset is only a diffused stimula- tion of the nervous system, largely due to the hunting propensities with which our savage ancestors sought their prey towards nightfall in the woods and streams, may know, perhaps, what he himself is talking about : but it certainlv is not in anv sense the same thin" that •J J O I feel. We need not stay to prove the reality of beauty, or to be sure of its power to move our hearts and raise our thoughts. It may perhaps be more worth while to ask why it is that natural beauty fails so often to lead men nearer to the God of Xature and the Uncreated Beauty : or what is the pre-requisite temper for those who are to hear and understand the spiritual appeal of the great sights which are about them. In some degree, it would seem, the witness of visible beauty to the things of Faith is weakened or imperilled for those who live in great cities. Not indeed that there is any real force in the shallow and irreverent saving that God made the country and man made the IN NA TURE. 79 town. Almighty God, the Guide and Goal of all humanity, leaves not Himself without witness in any phase through which He leads our history, or in any conditions among which He bids us serve Him: the splendid courage, the wakeful energy, the network of mutual dependence and quick co-operation, the infinite inventiveness, the dominion over all physical forces which belong to the life of such a city as this, have at least as great a place in natural theology, and bear as true a witness to Him Who is upholding all things by the word of His power, as the quiet charm of an English village or the magnificence of an Alpine range. There is in the Bible no word of disparagement for the life of cities : a Holy City is the centre of its chosen scenery ; its highest hopes are set upon a City which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God : and, let us remember, it is not Sion, the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth, that suffers by com- parison with the lilies of the field, but only Solomon, in all his glory, the selfish glory of a vain and sinful court. Yes, it is in the luxury, the vanity, the un- reality of our high civilization, rather than in the real life and work of London, that we may grow deaf to the appeal of natural beauty and blind to the revelation of the mystic heaven and earth. It is our own little and unworthy thoughts, our pre-occupation with the details 8o THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: of fashion and society, our intense interest in ourselves, rather than any uncomeliness of streets and houses, that makes us careless about the moving splendour and the spiritual aspect of the world we live in : we are straitened in ourselves rather than in our surroundings. True, we may miss many of the glories that are day by day revealed about a country home ; we may spend most of our hours in the dingy atmosphere of narrow streets : but we may, if we will, attain a degree of alert- ness and appreciation which is very rare in rustic minds : and one sight there is, perhaps the greatest pageant Nature ever shows, which comes as gloriously about our life as in the wildest scenery. Over all places alike, it has been well said, the great sun begins his state and ends it in formless, inaccessible glory. That wonderful sight appeals to us quite as forcibly in the desolations of civilization as in those of Nature. Here in London, " once or twice in the twenty-four grey hours of darkness visible and night without peace, there comes forty minutes or so of strange, incongruous glory ; and all may see it. The exterior of life has been penal and hideous all day, but suddenly, and for a time, it is proclaimed that there is glory and there is rest." Surely we need not miss the evidence of natural beauty even in the greatest city of the world : we may 1 R. St. John Tyrwhitt, Natural Theology, etc., p. 1.3G. IN NA TURE. 81 go forth to our work and to our labour until the evening : hut at eventide there may be light : and here too we may see the work which God has made, and enter into communion with Him as we confess that it is very good. But, at the worst, the engrossing activity, the dis- tracting interests of a great city will but interrupt or delay our recognition of the beauty of nature and our attention to her message. There is another tendency of our age which threatens to lead the very faculty of delight in beauty far away from all that Nature offers for its exercise, and to gratify it with strange and curious pleasures, quite apart from all that God lias given it. Whatever praise may be justly claimed for the school of taste, which is popularly called testhetic, it cannot be denied that the beauty which it cultivates and enjoys is very often entirely distinct from the natural beauty of the visible world. It may surround us with delicate shades of colour and restful effects of harmony: but the glow and grace of the work is essentially artificial : we must go apart from the out- side world to surrender ourselves to its glamom\ Its highest achievement is a palace of art, where nothing- should jar on the quiet colours, chastened almost to sadness, and all should contribute to express some elaborate conception of recondite taste. Its favourite F S2 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: praise implies that this is so : for subtlety is the very contrary of the frankness, the universal appeal, the un- studied charm of natural beauty : and in contrast with the subtle tones of this new renaissance, the simplicity of the outer world seems glaring and noisy. As one turns away, for instance, from the last two rooms of the present Exhibition at Burlington House, 1 whether one leaves them with a sense of regret or of relief, the change is like coming out of a dream into the hard but healthy reality of actual life, or like emerging from a hothouse, fragrant with the heavy scent of exotic flowers, into the bracing freshness of the common air. The work which we have left may be attractive, skilful, imaginative, difficult in the very highest degree: but all its beauty lies apart from Kature, and apart from all that she offers for the brightness and gladness of men's lives : it is esoteric, exquisite, a subtle pleasure for the few. — But surely there is a real danger in thus leading our taste away from all which is its natural delight, and training it to a constant gratification with artificial charms. The beauty which is achieved may indeed be rare and delicate : but it calls the soul away from the great world, away from the "joy in widest commonalty spread," away from that beauty which God called very Qood. The mind with which we thus are brought in 1 In which were gathered at this time (1883) a collection of Mr. Iiossetti's pictures. IN NA TURE. 83 contact may be ingenious and very powerful, but its works have a note that sounds far away from the Mind which made the sunrise and sunset to be the world- wide tokens of its glory, and set the bow in the clouds as the pledge of world-wide love. We may gain much that is charming, and thoughtful, and splendid, from the study of this modern art : but all the while we are moving further from the revelation which has held and surpassed the praise of psalmists and prophets, the revelation which brought Job out of his great trial to penitence and blessing : that vast and ceaseless revela- tion of the one true beauty — " Which can intertwine for us The passions that build up our human soul, Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and nature ; purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear, — until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." 1 Lastly, but above all, if we are to receive from the visible beauty of the world all that it can reveal to us concerning Him Who made and praised it, we must draw near to it with watchful obedience to His own condition for so great a blessing : " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." It was nobly said by the founder of inductive science, that for entrance 1 Wordsworth, " Influence of Natural Objects." S4 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: into the kingdom of knowledge as for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, men must become as little children. They must draw near with free and humble hearts if they are to enter into the mysteries of natural science : they must not dictate to Xature, or assert themselves in her presence : they must come to her with affec- tionate attention to wait upon her self-revealing. And this, the true temper of the student of her inner laws, is also the only temper for the true lover of her outward aspect : the beauty, as well as the truth of nature, is often hidden from the wise and prudent that it may be revealed to babes. Xature will not be inquired of at all by those who set up their idols in their hearts, and put the stumbling-block of their iniquity before their face : or if they get from her any answer, it has too often been an answer according to the multitude of their idols. Men may turn to her in the mere indolence of luxury, leaving all the serious duties and responsi- bilities of their proper place, to loiter through unclouded days among her richest wealth of beauty ; and in the delight and softness of a southern coast, they have their reward : — but they are conscious of no spiritual appeal in all those glorious sights. Others may seek in the ever- changing charm of Xature a heightened and intenser life, a more vivid consciousness of self, a fresh flush of excitement or passion ; and they have their reward : but it is not the blessing with which God has charged the IN NA TURE. 85 beauty of this world. And some have even turned to Nature in rebellion against God : setting themselves, by the help of the creature, to strengthen their hearts against the Creator : trying to fill with the enjoyment of visible beauty the heart which He made for Himself, and from which they have dethroned Him : and it is only a miracle of His patient mercy that may find them even where they hide from Him, and recall them even in the house of their idol. — But day by day the pure in heart shall see Him, following on to know the Lord in the beauty and glory of His works. As they look out upon the world, with contrite sorrow for the sins that break its harmony and peace, with humble recognition that they are not worthy of the least of all God's mercies, only longing that no earth-born cloud may utterly hide Him from them, and thankful for each dim revealing of His goodness and His beauty, the simplest scenes about them seem to find a voice for them, and Nature more and more receives them to her confidence : more and more the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made ; until the things that are seen seem as a robe which half expresses and half hides the eternal and invisible glory, and the uncreated beauty almost smiles through the created veil, and God sends forth His light and His truth to be their guides unto His Holy Hill and to His dwelling. VI. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : (2) IN ART. " How great is His goodness, and how great is His beauty." Zechariah ix. 17. " He hath no form nor comeliness ; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him." Isaiah lui. 2. There can be little doubt that the eyes of those who wrote these words were turned towards the same horizon, and striving to descry the self-same object. In spite of the two centuries which sever them, in spite of the transforming discipline of the captivity which in that interval had seized upon the soul of Israel, and wrenched the course of its history as the desolating violence of sorrow sometimes stays and saves a life, still Zechariah is looking where Isaiah looked, and his hand is pointing to the same mysterious light. The two prophets are as men who from two distant hills are watching across foregrounds widely different, and through different veils of shifting mist, the growing glory of the same approaching dawn. Isaiah may have started in these chapters of his prophecy from a general and typical conception of the 86 THE LOVE OE BEAUTY: LN ART. 87 people of Israel, as the servant of Jehovah, sent into the world to do His Will, and bear witness to His Name, and to rise out of desolation and hatred to an eternal excellency as a joy of many generations : but soon that broken and uncertain outline has changed into a form so distinct and individual, designated by features and experience so essentially personal, that no criticism can resolve it into a figurative and collective idealization: 1 and the Ethiopian Eunuch, as he read this chapter with the simple insight of a good and able mind, felt the only doubt which can justly be enter- tained with regard to its subject, when he asked : " I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this, of him- self or of some other man?" Somewhat similarly, in the latter half of this ninth chapter, Zechariah passes from the promise that God will protect His people and His house, when Tyre and Ashkelon and Gaza shall fall before the armies of Macedon, and rises to a height from which this nearer future seems dim and miniature, like the villages which glisten in the middle distance of an Alpine view ; and on the firm lines of the farthest range he sees One coming with His Feet upon the untrodden snow, and His Form distinct against the depths of Heaven : it is the King Whose royalty has been but faintly forecast in the past history of 1 Cf. Delitzsoh on Isaiah xlii. 1. 88 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: Israel : it is the Saviour of Whose deliverance the exodus from Egypt or from Babylon has been but a pale and transient glimpse : it is He Who shall speak peace unto the heathen, and Whose dominion shall be from the Mediterranean to the unvisited Ocean of the East, from the Euphrates to the mysterious ends of the West : and it is with the vision of this advent that the prophet cries — " Eejoice greatly, 0 daughter of Sion ; shout, 0 daughter of Jerusalem : behold, thy King cometh unto thee:" and — " how great is His goodness, and how great is His beauty !" — Thus both prophets urge the faith of their contemporaries far beyond the narrow range of imminent peril and deliverance, and would bear into their hearts the certain and definite expectation of One Whose Person and work should at once explain the life and realize the hopes of His people, even where these seemed most strangely incon- sistent. For though in the servant of the Lord, Isaiah foretells no beauty that we should desire Him, while the King whom Zechariah sees is fairer than the children of men, yet this is but one instance of that strange and sudden contrast which was embraced within the Messianic hope of Israel. It might seem to us almost incredible — though it is indeed indisputable — that the same men did passion- ately cherish expectations thus contradictory concerning IN ART. 89 the same object of their stedfast hope ; we might be positive that no ideal could include and blend these opposite traits of humiliation and magnificence, of con- tempt and adoration, of death and conquest : were it not that history has set before us from our childhood the actual fulfilment of both lines of prophecy, and the solution of their contrast in the Life and Death and Eesurrection of our Lord and Saviour. We may be indeed so familiar with the solution that we have almost ceased to be conscious of the contrast : we may read the ninth chapter of Isaiah upon Christmas Day, and the fifty-third upon Good Friday, and hardly pay the tribute of wonder to the astounding courage of the heart, which could hold, and love, and live by them both, until the fulness of time should make both one in the Person of Jesus Christ : until the Mighty God, the Prince of Peace, the King in His Beauty should come, as Zechariah had foretold, lowly, and riding upon an ass : should come to be despised and rejected of men, wounded, bruised, oppressed, afflicted, dumb : brought as a lamb to the slaughter and cut off out of the land of the living: to have His grave assigned with the wicked, and after His Death with the rich man : that thus He might see of the travail of His soul and divide the spoil with the strong : and that all the ends of the earth might see the salvation of our God. go THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: Let us fix our thoughts on one example of that con- trast which inspired prophecy and the life of Christ have thus agreed to reconcile. It is decisively expressed in the contradictory words of Zechariah and Isaiah: the former heralding the King of Sion as One Whose beauty should surpass the utmost praise of human words or thoughts : the latter declaring that those who should see that self-same Christ, should find in Him no beauty that they should desire Him. I would try to suggest something, however faintly and poorly, in regard to the actual fulfilment of both prophecies in the claims addressed to our sense of beauty, by the revelation of Christianity ; believing that there is a deep meaning in that strange and blended force of stern restraint and irresistible charm which this sense has so often owned in the Presence of the Crucified ; and hoping to show that this too is an instinct of our human nature, which, if we suffer it to act in sincerity and truth, will find its rest for ever in the Person of its Redeemer. Let us, then, notice first that the prophecy of Isaiah is, if we take it alone and superficially, in accord with much that has been lately written or implied about the influence of Christianity upon the genius of Art. For we are sometimes told, and more often made to feel, that there is something irksome and hindering to the IN ART. qi free appreciation arid enjoyment of beauty, in those dogmas about the conditions and issues of human life, which are inseparable from the work of our Lord. We are familiar with graceful expressions of regret for that simple and happy and trustful communion with Nature, which is said to have been the privilege of Paganism : the indestructible health of the old world has been displaced, we are told, by our severance between flesh and spirit, our unnatural suspicion of natural pleasures : by some the traditions of Judaism, by others the monastic and ascetic perverseness of the middle ages, by others the gloom of Calvinism is said to have come between mankind and their due delight in the grace and passion of this world. In various ways it is suggested or proclaimed that Christianity has unduly and too long presumed to thrust its doctrines between the human soul and the beauty which is about it, and disturbed that free entrance into the pleasures of sight and sound, through which every energy might go out to find its satisfaction and its rapture. And so some have already returned to feed and foster their sense of beauty by the works and thoughts of those who lived before this tyrannous restraint was preached : others are looking forward to a time when Art may avail itself of the triumph of scepticism, and renounce all hindering allegiance and 92 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: regard to the discredited formulae of religion : while many more are conscious of a vague expectation that the life of passion henceforward will and should be freer and fuller than it has been : that hitherto we have been unnecessarily cautious and sober in our pleasures, and timidly patient of undue restrictions : but that now all is going to be much more passionate and unfettered and absorbing, and that, by the pursuit of Art for Art's sake, we enter into an earthly paradise, which has at length been relieved from certain gloomy and old-fashioned regulations, and in which it may now be hoped that our sense of beauty will be a law unto itself. And in this temper very many who little know the consistent significance of their choice are falling in with a course of life and thought which has, as a whole, turned away from the Cross of Jesus Christ, and shaken off the light yoke and easy burden of our Lord and Master : turned away from the lesson of His Sacrifice, and His wounds and bruises, and the Visage marred more than any man : turned away to seek elsewhere the full desire of their eyes, because He hath, as He dies for us, no form nor comeliness, and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. For in truth there is a challenge and a law with which Christianity must ever meet the lover of beauty as he goes out to seek by whatever way the gratifica- IN ART. 93 tion of this sense. The Church of Christ cannot, while she remembers her Master, her message, and her trust, cousent to be dismissed from the sphere of taste, or let it be thought that she has no counsel for her sons, as they turn to those high and thrilling pleasures, no means or right of judging the tone and the ideals of contemporary Art. And if at first there seems to be a shadow of discouragement and severity in her bearing, if her words fall with an unwelcome hint of unsuspected dangers, if some are inclined to go back and walk no more with her ; still she knows that this is no new thing ; that the offence of the Cross is not likely to disappear in this world; and that her King in His beauty has often seemed to have no form nor come- liness. There was shown in London lately, a picture, 1 which, if we can remember or imagine it, may help our conception of the bearing of Christianity upon the artistic temper. In the rich and delicate glory of the mediaeval life of Italy, a company of wedding-guests are coming down the sti'eet, glad and graceful with the quick, laughing, generous sense of health and youth and happiness. They move with that instinctive charm of un questioning enjoyment which seems caught from Nature's brightest and most helpful moods, in the 1 By Mr. Frank Dicksee. 94 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: sweetness and light of a southern city. But just as the bride and bridegroom, happy in themselves, in each other, and in all the kindly circumstance of life, step lightly out from under an archway into the welcome of the sunshine, an old man, cowering by the side of the street, poor, and feeble, and uncomely, stretches out his hand to offer them for sale — a Crucifix. There is no necessary implication of rebuke in the contrast, no. reason shown why the bridal company should stay, or go less gladly to the feast : He Who hangs upon the Cross wrought His lirst miracle to keep up the joy of such a day : still there the contrast is — on the one hand, the free and exuberant happiness of youth and wealth and love and beauty : on the other — the old man, dull, squalid, jojless, friendless, near to death : already doomed, it may be, never to feel another pleasure coming through the avenues of sense : and hi his feeble hand the image of the Son of Man, the Sinless, the Incarnate Love, desolate and dying in shame and agony that He may save His people from their sins. The first appeal and influence of such a contrast upon the hearts of most men, and, by God's grace, of almost all women, has perhaps no proper force in logic : it can be met and driven back by general considerations and consistent arguments : but it is not altogether IN ART. 95 without sanction or moral value. Its seems analogous to that suggestion of our Blessed Lord which sent the Scribes and Pharisees in silence from the Temple, and saved the woman taken in adultery : it comes closer still to the outward form of Abraham's unanswered answer across the great and impassable gulf : " Sou, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things." There is an illogical force in such sights and words which we may sometimes, in particular cases, do well to resist, but to which very few men, if any, can with- out deep loss and risk become habitually insensible. For we all know that the greater part of our growth and education in all the higher ways of life depends upon our faithful attention to feelings which we cannot define, to signs which are not certain, and arguments which are not irresistible. And probably many of us would live nobler lives if, in matters where only our own pleasure or profit is concerned, we were more sensitive and obedient to some of our less logical instincts and suspicions. But underneath this first vague effect of the contrast between the general aspect of our Saviour's Life on earth, and the unhindered gratification of the sense of beauty, there is a truth which may stand the test of a colder examination. For the real force of such a contrast lies in this : that 96 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: it challenges our theory of life and action with a fresh presentation of some omitted or forgotten facts. It drives us back to the truths from which we should have started, to the one point of departure from which a man can move steadily and consistently through life and death. It meets us first with the old command in its ever new significance — " Know thyself." We were going to throw ourselves without reserve into this or that enthusiasm of beauty, to steep our souls in the excitement of music, or poetry, or art, to forget all else in the engrossing delight of their eager sympathy, to lay aside every hindering thought, to trust the strong- desire of our heart, and measure our interests by their intensity : and Christianity recalls us to ourselves. It sets before us, in the compass of a single life, the full expression of that deep and marring discord which has broken up the harmony of this world, and it urges us to seek within ourselves for the secret of the disturb- ance and misery. It shows us the Perfect Love re- jected, Perfect Purity reviled, Perfect Holiness blas- phemed, Perfect Mercy scorned ; God coming to His own and His own receiving Him not ; the righteous Judge condemned; the Lord of Life obedient unto death ; and it says that the cause of this anomaly, the condition which made this the eartbly Life of the Incarnate Son of God, is to be found within our own IN ART. 97 souls : and we know that there is something there which seems at times as though it would crucify the Son of God afresh : something which would distort our choice from the high and spiritual to the bestial and mean : something which has often made us cruel and unjust to other men, and contemptible to ourselves. And as before the Cross which mankind awarded to its Eedeemer we feel the havoc and tumult which sin has brought upon the order and truthfulness of our inner life, we must surely hesitate before we say that no restraint shall rest upon our sense of beauty, that there is no need, whatever adversaries may be moving about us, to be sober and vigilant in the world of Art. But for those who humbly take the yoke upon them, who, as they turn to the manifold wealth of beauty, do not thrust away the knowledge of their own hearts and the thought of Him Whose Death alone has saved them, and Whose strong grace alone sustains and shelters them, — for those the best delights of Art and Nature appear in a new radiance of light and hope, and speak of such things as pass man's understanding. The moments of quickened and exalted life which music and painting stir within them, the controlling splendour of the sunset, the tender glory of the distant hills, the wonder of a pure and noble face, — these no longer come as passing pleasures, flashing out of a dark background, G 98 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: which is only the gloomier when they are gone, half realized and little understood : for now all are linked and held together as consistent tokens of the same Redeeming, Sanctifying Love ; they see the Hand, the pierced Hand, which holds the gift ; they know the Love which fashioned and adorned it ; they have read else- where the thought which is embodied in the outward beauty ; for it is He Who spared not His Own Son Who with Him freely gives them all things. And all that He gives them prophesies of Him ; and every delicate form, and every pure and burning colour, as it sinks from present sight, foretells the coming of a steadier brightness ; till those whose hearts have clung to Him Who had no form nor comeliness, may seem to hear all the majesty and loveliness of Art and Nature bearing their witness with the promise of that other stream of prophecy, " How great is His goodness and how great is His beauty ! " " Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty " : for Thou, 0 Lord, " art fairer than the children of men ; full of grace are Thy lips." And lastly, when there falls upon this life that inevitable shadow, under whose cold contact every pleasure which has not spoken to us of another world will grow pale, and faint, and death-like — when the keenest thrill of earthly beauty will be powerless by itself to waken one pulse of gladness in the sinking, IN ART. 99 struggling heart, — then surely it would be like a ghastly, awful dream if the soul should be wedded beyond the power of severance with thoughts which will not speak to it of anything save the beauty of the world which now it must for ever leave, thoughts which have never been touched with the shadow of the Cross, or waited for the kindling of the love of God : and now engross the desire which they certainly will never again pretend to satisfy, — the desire which should have been kept pure and patient till it might attain to the vision of Him Who in His uncreated beauty created it to rest in Him alone. VII. THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : (3) IN CHARACTER " I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." — Matt. v. 20. In these words our Lord prepares the minds and hearts of His disciples for that great act whose record we read in the remainder of this chapter — the announcement of a new standard of righteousness, a new rule and goal of human effort. He goes on to mark, in regard to five points, the contrast between the new standard and the old : five times He repeats, in that tone of supreme and indisputable authority which belongs to God alone, "Ye have heard that it was said; . . . " but / say unto you." He taketh away the first that He may establish the second. He would bear into His servants' souls a new conception of good- 1 A very striking presentation of the evidential significance of our Blessed Lord's consciousness of sinlessness, as " an anomalous insulation in the self-convicting conscience of humanity," is given in Dr. Mozley's essay on " Christ Alone without Sin," cf. Lectures and other Theological Pajwrs, p. 116 seq. 100 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: IN CHARACTER. 101 ness, a new canon of rectitude in thought, word, and deed : He would remove from them the possibility of self-satisfaction in the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, and make them sensitive to a light and hope which hitherto had been beyond their ken. And at the end of this chapter we read His revelation of the very essence of the new Law. Heretofore there had fallen upon earth only the example and shadow of heavenly things : but henceforward men should have boldness to enter into the holiest, and to move among the heavenly things themselves : for the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand : and those who would enter thereinto must judge of right and wrong by reference to no lower rule than this : " Be ye perfect, even as your Father Which is in Heaven is perfect." Let us look for a while at a thought which seems to be implied in the words of the text, and in that aspect of our Lord's work on earth which bears upon the moral sense of men. We commonly include in one conception, and often express by one name, two very different acts or powers of our inner life : the one that which defines the moral quality of any thought, word, or deed ; the other, that which then orders that this thought, word, or deed should be either pursued or shunned : the former being the act of our moral sense, the latter the proper act of 102 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : conscience : the former analogous to the decision of a judge, the latter to the command of a king. It might be said, again, that the moral sense is employed as the augur whom a Koman magistrate might send to watch the heavens for a sign of good or evil omen at the outset of an enterprise : the conscience waits for its report, and according as the augury is of good or evil, lays its charge upon the executive will. The moral sense can only examine, compare, and designate : it is the office of the conscience to command, to prohibit, to enforce. In the ordinary way of thinking and speaking, we lay chief stress upon the voice of conscience : there is a ring of technical phraseology in talking of the moral sense : and while " conscientious " is a common term of praise, there seems a hint of subtlety, a suggestion of something unusual, unnecessary, and possibly inconvenient, when we speak of a man as morally sensitive. — And doubtless for the soul of each man this is the one supremely important question, whether he is living in habitual obedience or disobedi- ence to the commands which his conscience lays on him : for it is the answer to this question which even now is filling those books which shall at the last day be opened before Almighty God : since not the hearers of a law are righteous before Him, but the doers of a law shall be accounted righteous. The voice of conscience IN CHARACTER. 103 is indeed in each one of us the very earnest of that judgment to come : and the infinite significance of its authority over our life may well withdraw our attention from the other faculties which are astir about its throne. It is, perhaps, from the standpoint of the historian and in the lives of others that we can see more plainly the vast power, and the deep, prophetic meaning of the moral sense, and so more nearly grasp the import of that strange appearance which still is set before us in such words as those of the text, in the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, and in all the glory of our Saviour's Life on earth. Let us notice, then, that, in the life alike of nations and of individuals, the moral sense appears as a faculty widely variable in range and delicacy. Its canons and verdicts in different centuries and in different places have been almost as diverse and inconsistent as the tastes of men in choosing their pleasures or their dress. It has had in the past its dark ages, and its moments of renaissance : it has risen and fallen in entire sever- ance from many other elements in a nation's life with which we might be tempted to associate it : and genera- tions which have been rich in works of intellect and art have yet found nothing wrong in vices which simpler ages would have loathed. And it may be marked that in this power of development and relapse the moral IQ4 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY : sense is again distinguished from the simply imperative conscience. Conscience has indeed a widely varying force in different souls : in some men it seems to be enthroned for a secure and immediate supremacy ; in others it is discouraged and despised until its voice may almost die away, like the music of a retreating army : but it is by no means to be thought that its strength is least when the moral sense is lowest. The mere savage, as he sits before his idol and dares not act until he is sure that the mysterious feeling of uneasiness will not visit him, is as truly obedient to conscience as was the wisest of philosophers when he held aloof from the public life of Athens at the bidding of a certain voice which came to him •} St. Paul could say that from Ins fore- fathers he had served God with a pure conscience, though Saul of Tarsus had thought with himself that he ought to do many things contrary to the Name of Jesus of Nazareth. No inquiry has yet shaken the truth that the Maker of Heaven and earth, even when He suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, still left not Himself without witness : no age or race has yet been found in which the ultimate command of con- science has been other or less certain than it is to-day — that men must refuse the evil, and choose the good. But in regard to the action of the moral sense, in regard 1 Cf. Plat. Apologia Socratis, cap. xix. IN CHARACTER. 105 to the canons and definition of the evil and the good, we look back over a course of changes and stages as weird and uncouth to our minds as the monsters of the prehistoric world or the grossness of cannibals. And if in this respect we dare to call ourselves the children of the prophets, if we see the moral light which only very few foretold, if the pages of modern history record on the whole a clear growth of this sense in purity and truth, still we must thankfully expect that to the better minds of those who will come after us much that we now tolerate will seem as strange and rude and cruel as we may judge the customs of the middle ages with the torture-chamber and the trial by fire. We find our- selves living at one moment in a line of development whose end no natural reason, apart from the express teaching of the Bible, can foretell. For who can, by scientific forecast, anticipate the morality of the future, or mark where the progress of the moral sense will end ? It would be far easier to set a limit to the uses of electricity, the subtleties of civilisation, or the means of gaining and diffusing knowledge. But secondly, in regard to the life and health of separate souls, we can as plainly trace this continual and boundless variation of the moral sense There may indeed be some in whose hearts the grace of God has all along fashioned and displayed for every period of 106 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: their growth in strength and liberty the appropriate ideal of goodness : who in childhood, boyhood, youth, maturity, have always by His help been pure and happy enough to see and own His perfect Will. But it is surely true that in many, if not in most men the discernment of goodness, the education of the moral sense, is pursued through many stages, by the successive discovery and apprehension of types and patterns more and more nearly good. Let us try to remember, or else to imagine as truthfully as we can, what is the moral life and progress of one who, by God's grace, desires always to do what is right, but to whom, for whatever reason, in himself or in others, the Bible has not yet become the master- bight of life and the shrine of all ideals. — The first acts of his conscience in early child- hood were guided by a moral sense which simply ac- cepted a few positive rules without question or explana- tion. There were certain things which he was told to do or not to do : when he did according to this bidding he was good and self-appro vi ng : when he disobeyed it he was uneasy, and fearful that he had done wrong. And perhaps there is no more solemn trust in Life than that which is thus given to a parent : that he may be for a while as the moral sense to his children's con- science : that he may even stand to them as the repre- sentative of the Divine Fatherhood and Authority : that IN CHARACTER. 107 he is charged with that presentation and rendering of the Will of God which Moses bore when the Almighty said to him, " See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh." But this mere acquiescence in the little code of child- hood, this happy possibility of blameless self-approval, is presently disturbed by the discovery of regions of choice, of needs for self-determination, and of qualities in other souls, which lie outside the narrow range of single rules. Gradually or suddenly the boy discovers the inadequacy of the child's obedience : he learns, however dimly and unconsciously, that the tests of good and evil must be not merely accepted on another's witness, but drawn from some example or ideal which his own soul can recognize and desire. And in such a case as we are imagining he will most often seek such guidance from the ways and character of some one who seems to him pre-eminently strong, or brilliant, or noble : he will for a while submit his moral sense to the imitation of an elder brother, a school-fellow, or any friend whose life seems near enough to be imitable in his own. And so it may be he acquires a certain conception of right and wrong, a certain set of opinions with regard to his proper interests and aims, a certain sense of what is worthy and unworthy of a man, what is mean and what is admirable, which his conscience may receive as true and adequate for many years of early life. But pre- 108 THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: sently the higher light breaks in on him again with a merciful and ennobling sense of shame : either the experience of his life may bring him to the overpower- ing knowledge of that bewildering tumult of lifelong misery which hangs behind our civilisation like the shadow of death : or some anguish of indignity, or dread, or suffering may be fastened upon his own soul, to challenge hour by hour the truth and reality of its thoughts, and to force it further into the deep meaning of great words : or it may be that God brings him into contact again and yet again with some one whose words and ways, whose very look, disturbs him with the im- plication of a higher standard, of conceptions about life and duty, in contrast with which his own opinions would seem sordid and grotesque : he meets with one to whom he only dares to show his highest thoughts, and fears that even these may jar as discords on a sense of harmony beyond his hearing. Through whatever open- ing of the heavens, he sees and loves a life above his own : and so he mounts into the purer light and air ; he puts away childish things, and goes from strength to strength, while his love abounds yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment, as he approves more nearly the things that are excellent in the sight of God. For in truth, as conscience is the steadfast earnest of God's final sentence, so is the moral sense in its growth IN CHARACTER. 109 and illumination the progressive revelation of His attributes : as conscience steadily declares that here- after some shall stand upon the right hand of His throne and some upon the left : so by the moral sense we enter into the knowledge of His being, Whose very love is as the touchstone of that severance between the loving and the loveless. And thus, as Lacordaire has said, each discovery in God threatens us with a virtue : and beyond every steep, whither He gives us grace and strength to climb, there rises yet another height, clad in purer whiteness of unsullied snow, and bright with steadier and more perfect light : till at last, it may be from some great and high mountain, we may look even to that great City which hath the glory of God, and her light like unto a stone most precious : and see that it is in that light that the nations of them that are saved shall hereafter walk. And then we know, as we have never known before, not only the poverty of the ideals and canons which hitherto have cramped and detained our moral sense, but also the deep defect, the necessary transience of every form of goodness which man can ever shape and grasp on earth : for the moral restlessness, the urgent displeasure with ourselves which all along has been the impulse of our upward effort, is at length explained and sanctioned and ennobled and sustained by the revelation of its prophetic truth : as no THE LOVE OF BEAUTY: we learn that in reality none is good save One : and that our souls have been athirst for God, yea, even for the living God. Perhaps in contrast with some such aspects of the moral sense, as it has grown and manifested itself in history and in our own lives, we may more nearly appreciate the evidence with which Christianity appeals to it and claims its witness. I have tried to show, though most imperfectly, how in history it has appeared as variable, and slowly moving forward in a line of development whose future course and goal are un- certain and distant : and how in the separate souls of men it is continually urged onward to a higher standard by successive and ever clearer recognitions of its own defect and childishness. But we have in our hands the record of one Life, one Character, one Form of goodness, which distinctly stands outside this conception of moral progress : which cannot be relegated to any bygone stage in the historical development, and which posi- tively rejects any suspicion of inadequacy or transience. At a certain moment in the past, in the eighth century from the founding of Eome, during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, One lived Whose deeds and words were recorded by four of His adherents : He set forth by His teaching and example, in life and death, a certain rule and ideal for the moral sense : He expressly declared that His words should never pass away, and IN CHARACTER. 1 1 1 that no one could convince Him of sin. In the whole course of His public life He never once changed in the least degree the ground or tenor of His teaching : He retracted nothing, amended nothing, qualified nothing : the simplest people felt that He taught with a strange authority : His enemies owned that no man had ever spoken as He spoke : His friends said that He had the words of eternal life : steadily and royally, without one sign of uncertainty or hesitation or deference or reserve, He declared what should be henceforward the perfect and everlasting canon of goodness : and for the visible rendering of that perfection He pointed men to His own person and example, saying, " I am the light of the world " : "I am the way, the truth, and the life " : — and then when He was a little past thirty He was crucified as a malefactor. — Eighteen centuries have gone by since then : some of them centuries of swift and brilliant change, some of fearless and outspoken criticism : countless generations have told their newest and boldest thoughts and hopes, and then seen them turned to truisms before they passed away: every custom and conventionality which was prevalent in the Roman empire is buried now under the dust of successive fashions deeper than the material ruins of that vanished glory: — yet still the life of Jesus of Nazareth stands untouched by criticism or by imita- tion : still He is the unassailed example of all that 1 1 2 THE LOVE OF BE A UT Y : IN CHA RACTER. pure and noble souls can yearn to be : still the moral sense of every earnest man returns to find in His abiding words the whitest light that ever falls on earth. In those thirty years there came through the shifting- clouds and broken gleams of human life a new and steady light, a light which has never faded or faltered or feared eclipse : a light as far above the brightness of this day as it outshone the righteousness of Scribes and Pharisees or the morality of Cicero or Tacitus. What- ever gain of delicacy or of truth, the conscience has received since Jesus lived on earth has been within the compass of His teaching and example : whitherso- ever any human soul has climbed, still it has only the more humbly fallen clown before even the distant vision of His perfect purity. What shall we say, brethren, of Him Who could thus anticipate and tran- scend the advancing insight and power of nearly a hundred generations ? — of Him Whose Image still is enthroned above the breath of all but love and worship ? Surely any one who in the story of that Life has simply seen what goodness really is, who has felt the con- trolling and uplifting power of the Sinless Man and the Love that is stronger than death, may not unreasonably plead with some who wonder that he still believes in the Godhead of His Master: " why, herein is a marvel- lous thing, that ye know not from whence He is : and yet He hath opened mine eyes." VIII. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 1 "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me." St. Matt. xi. 29. There may seem at first sight to be a great con- trast between, on the one hand, the bearing of our Lord and His Apostles towards the human intellect, and, on the other, the place which the intellect has held in the history of the Church. The Son of God at His Incarnation chose for Himself a lot among men utterly removed from the chief intellectual activity of that day : He willed to be born and to live as one of whom men would say that He had had no advantages. For the recipients and channels of His teaching He selected men of very humble rank, with little education and busy lives ; men utterly unlikely to attain to high mental power, or make a mark in cultivated society. And just before He spoke the words of the text He had declared His joy and thankfulness that intellectual 1 Preached in St. Mary's Church at a Service commemorating the foundation of the Pusey House. H ii 4 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. eminence had nothing to do with the entrance into His school : that the mysteries of His teaching were hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed to babes. His Apostles maintain the same attitude : and especially St. Paul, himself probably by far the most educated member of the Apostolic body. He seems to exult in the indifference — if we may reverently so speak — of Almighty God to the intellectual qualifica- tions of men : " Ye see your calling, brethren " — he says, almost defiantly, to his converts in the brilliant and critical society of Corinth — " that not many of you are wise, according to the flesh." " Where is the wise ? " he asks ; " hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world ? " " He hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise." — Such was the bear- ing and language of the Church as it first confronted the world. It might have seemed as though the triumph of Christianity must necessarily involve, as it has frequently been said to involve, the depreciation of mental power, the discouragement of education, the decay of learning. But in widest contrast with such a thought has been, as you well know, the actual course of the Church's history. " Christianity," it has been said with indisputable truth, " has always been a learned religion " : and, to take but one instance of this truth, it is of course to the care of the Church and the THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 115 diligence of monasteries that we owe the preservation of all classical learning through the troubles and dark- ness of many generations. But long before those times the faith of Christ had enlisted, occupied, ennobled, and transcended some of the highest and most splendid intellects that have ever commanded the attention and admiration of any age. The magnificent grasp, the unfaltering insight, the rich and just imagination of St. Athanasius : the pure and burning eloquence of St. Chrysostom : the philosophic depth, the glorious passion, the logical acuteness of St. Augustine : the unrivalled intensity, the pure and classical and clear- cut accuracy of St. Leo : these are but some of the gifts which the Church of the Galilean Carpenter wel- comed and ennobled in His servants. And surely we have seen in our own day a fresh and most instruc- tive evidence of the instantaneous readiness with which a revival of the Catholic faith and life at once commands the service and enhances the dignity of minds of the very highest order. Even those who are insensible or indifferent to the real work of the Tractarian movement, those who regard and dislike it as a mere bit of clerical reaction, transient and deplorable: even they must own that its leaders are not likely to be soon forgotten in the intellectual and literary history of this century. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, n6 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. Dr. Newman, Dr. Mozley ; it would be hard to find outside the Church of Christ, or enlisted in any other cause than His, minds more notable for learning and power and insight than those which they devoted wholly to the faith of the childlike and untaught: — finding there the worthiest exercise and the most sur- prising development of their extraordinary gifts. And even when we pass into the widest fields of intellectual venture, it seems neither insignificant nor easy of explanation that again and again a great moment of advance in the course of human knowledge has been associated with a revival or increase of purity and intensity in the life of the Church. It would seem as though between the strength of the Church and the growth of the human intellect there were some hidden link, some bond of sympathy, of which neither was fully conscious, and which both at times were tempted to deny, even while it was turning the victories of either to the welfare of both. Certain it is that in the confession of that Faith which from the first has refused to stand in the wisdom of men, and has declared that its highest mysteries are open to the simple and the childlike — in the confession, and often for the cause of that Faith, the mind of man has risen to its noblest strength and beauty, and achieved some of its most memorable conquests, its most steadfast works. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 117 It is on the surface a remarkable contrast between the first preaching of the Gospel and the subsequent splendour of Christian intellect. But below the super- ficial contrast is a principle of everlasting force — the great principle, I would venture to say, of all that is best in learning and education. Let me try, brethren, however unworthily, to link it with to-day's thanks giving and commemoration. I. At the entrance into the Kingdom of God the human intellect is received now exactly as it was in the time of St. Paul. It is greeted with sincere respect and with a lofty and reverent hope ; for it is an endow- ment of a very high order, a great and solemn trust committed by Almighty God to the use of man. Nay, it is even connected by its titles, by its intended place in our nature, by its possible exaltation, with the glory of the Second Person in the Ever-blessed Trinity. But in and by itself, apart from the consideration of its use, it constitutes no claim to enter into the Kingdom : it has no special privileges, no exemptions, no promise of a good place there. If it is to come in, if it is to see the brightness, and to know the joy and peace of those who walk with God, it must come by the one common door, and accept the invariable con- ditions. It must take upon it the burden of the Cross : it must stoop to the lowliness of the Crucified : it must n8 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. count itself but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus its Lord. As Christianity is no respecter of persons in regard to their rank in society, and offers no especial advantages to success in business, so must it refuse to recognise a high position in a class list, or a brilliant reputation in current literature, as of any import at all in the Kingdom of Heaven — unless, indeed, those successes simply mean that the man has humbly and unselfishly tried to do his duty. To cleverness or mental power, for its own sake, Christianity can give no more advantage, no more consideration, than it does to riches, or bodily strength, or social eminence. The intellect, under a false im- pression that it is slighted or disliked, may retaliate with a taunt of obscurantism, or of reactionary timidity : but the Church has in trust a charge too solemn to be surrendered under any such pressure of misunder- standing or contempt; by her ministry God hath of His goodness prepared for the poor : for their sakes, for the love of the ignorant, the weary and heavy-laden, the over-driven and the neglected, she can admit no aristocracy and no pre-eminence, save that of holiness : for her Gospel is to be preached unto the poor : and theirs is the Kingdom of which it tells. And so the great, the strong, the rich, and the intellectual, all alike must sue <: in forma pauperis " to God : all must TflE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 119 throw themselves absolutely upon His unearned Love : all must own that of themselves they have nothing which can claim His favour : nothing which can stand in His sight : nothing which does not need His patient forbearance and His merciful forgiveness. Yes, there is the first, the inevitable demand, at which the intellect hesitates and hangs back at the entrance into the Kingdom of God. For Christianity plainly requires that we should not allow our intellect to shirk or evade the pressure of the Cross : to slip out of our acts of penitence before the all-seeing Judge : to behave as though it were sinless or unfallen, as though it had no need of chastening and watchful self-restraint. No : it too must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ : it must follow the example of His great humility : it must take His yoke upon it. And then — beyond all hope, beyond all thought, beyond all that is natural — it shall learn of Him. Ay, even as by consecration to His service the wealth of this world may be exchanged for treasure in the Heavens, and the princes of this world receive a crown of life ; so may the intellect that follows in His steps find that it is indeed steadfastly walking in the way that leads to the fulness of light. " Qui sequitur me, non ambulat in tenebris, dicit Dominus." 1 He who demands this Imitatio Chrinti, I. 1. 120 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. submission of the intellect will confer upon it even in this life its highest, freest exaltation. It was by no chance in the course of history, no meaningless coincidence, that the Church of the poor, the childlike, the simple-minded, became the great school of learning and philosophy. No : for indeed the Christian char- acter has in it the true secret of intellectual growth. " Christianity seems to have been the first to give to the world the pattern of the true spirit of philosophical investigation " : this high claim was the theme of a sermon 1 preached from this pulpit nearly fifty years ago by one of Oxford's very greatest and most brilliant sons : and, brave as the words may sound, they will bear and reward all the investigation that can be given to them. The Cross of Christ, once sincerely accepted by the intellect, will assuredly train it to the greatest strength, the fullest, happiest exercise of which it is capable. Forgive me for recalling a well-known scene, which may be taken as a parable of this great truth. At the time when the Emperor Constantine was hesitating in his profession of Christianity, upon the verge of a critical battle, he was engaged in prayer to God. He prayed that the Almighty would reveal Himself to him : and that He would stretch forth His 1 Dr. Newman ou "The Philosophical Temper first enjoined by the Gospel," in Oxford University Sermons. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLEC7\ 121 right hand to help him against his cruel and idolatrous enemy. And as the sun was declining from the height of noon, a vision was vouchsafed to him. He saw the sign of the Cross in the heavens, standing above the setting sun, arrayed in light : and close to the Cross he read two words — tovtu) vlkci The next day, it is said, he called together the workers in gold and precious stones, and bade them fashion upon his standard the token of the death of Christ : and with the Cross of shame he led his troops in triumph through the gate of Rome. — So is it, brethren, with the intellect that has taken up that Cross to follow Him "Who died thereon : He will lead it in an unfailing path of victory to unending fields of conquest : yes, in all things it shall be more than conqueror through Him : and before its patient and lowly power the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. — And as the intellect turns away from the lower attractions of brilliant ventures and irresponsible speculations and popular display, it may hear a welcome which will thrill it through and through with a new hope and love : " Hearken, 0 daughter, and consider ; incline thine ear : forget also thine own people, and thy father's house : so shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty : for He is thy Lord God, and worship thou Him." II. "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me." 122 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. It would be easy, I think, to discover several ways in which the Christian character, the character imparted and developed by the grace of God, gives men the true temper of learning, and fosters strength and purity of mind. But I would briefly point to three elements in that character, which Dr. Newman has noticed in this regard, and which are, I think, likely to come home to us amidst the associations and memories of this day. Tor they are traits which were, I believe, among the very highest beauties in that life and work which the Pusey House is designed to commemorate : they are graces which were most potent in that wonderful per- sonal influence which the Pusey House will, so far as possible, sustain; and they had, I venture to think, a great- deal to do with the acquisition and exercise of Dr. Pusey's extraordinary and commanding intellectual power. First of all, then, the Faith of Jesus Christ our Lord presses upon us the resolute cultivation of humility. And about the place and virtue of humility in the philosophic temper the greatest masters of many ages have spoken with one voice. I need not remind you of the recurring profession, the pervading observance of humility in the Novum Organum ; how he who had " taken all knowledge to be his province " declares and remembers that for entrance into the kingdom of nature, as for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, we must THE rLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 123 become as little children. " The education which I advocate," said Professor Faraday, " has for its first and last step — humility." 1 And surely there is nothing which strikes one more when one is brought into contact with a mind of real greatness and of solid strength than the simple humility of speech and bearing which accompany such gifts. I well remember hearing Mr. Darwin say about a writer who was much talked of, and who is apt to be at once very positive and wide-reaching in assertion : " Ah ! I never read a page of him without thinking — There's five or six years' work for any one to see whether that 's true." Humility and patience : these are the unfailing and characteristic elements in the temper of those who have really most advanced the empire of human know- ledge. Surely, then, a man might do worse for what- ever intellect he may have than by resolving to train it after His likeness Who took upon Him our flesh, and suffered death upon the Cross, that all mankind should follow the example of His great humility and patience. And secondly, Christianity bears a great part in the life and growth of the intellect, by making it serious : by forcing it to be in earnest, and laying upon it the ever-present sense of a most solemn responsibility. " Religion," says Dr. Mozley, " gives the power of 1 Lectures on Education given at the Royal Institution, London. 124 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. receiving education : it provides that seriousness and weight in the mind which knows how to lay hold of the resources to the enjoyment of which it is admitted." 1 To realize that our search for truth, our inquiry into any subject-matter, is conducted in the sight of God, with faculties which He created and redeemed at an infinite cost, and that our intellectual life will hereafter be brought into judgment before Him: this should lift us at once above the temptation to be light-hearted, or ostentatious, or mercenary, in the use and exercise of the intellect. The pursuit of knowledge will never become desultory or easily satisfied if we understand that the light we seek and the powers we wield come to us from God alone, Who is the Father of lights : and hazy speculations, and ventures of hypothesis, and striking novelties of irresponsible suggestion, will be almost impossible to the mind which seriously and sincerely believes that it is working under the gaze and in the service of the Eternal and Almighty Truth. And then thirdly, the intellectual life will surely gain in purity and strength if the heart that animates it is unselfish : if its efforts are prompted and ruled by a generous and absorbing and self-sacrificing devotion. We are told that the besetting troubles of education and of learning in our day are " hurry, worry, and 1 University Sermons, p. 301. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 125 money": that often the freedom of the intellect is cramped, its peculiar endowments ignored and re- pressed, its natural growth distorted, and its dignity and happiness destroyed, by the relentless force of ceaseless and exacting competition. The complaint is, I believe, very true, and of wide application : but if so, what a career is open for minds tbat are raised by the obedience of Christ and the example of His Cross high above this wasteful strife of tongues : minds that can work in that calmness and sincerity which only come when self has been dethroned, and God, Almighty and All-loving, welcomed to a steadfast sovereignty over a man's life and work. There are especial treasures of knowledge reserved and held back to be the prize of the unselfish and the pure in heart : and as the sancti- fied intellect, the intellect that has been crucified to the world, that it may escape all the corruption that is in the world through lust: as such an intellect, wearing the likeness, it may be, of its Master's shame, approaches the inner shrine of learning — it may come with a fearless hope and say, " Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in:" "Thou, 0 God, wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee." III. To be humble, to be in earnest, to be unselfish : — these are the chief obligations which Christianity 126 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. imposes on the intellect : these are the conditions of its entrance into the service, the Kingdom of Almighty God : — " quern nosse vivere, cui servire regnare est." And if we want to represent to ourselves a character in which these graces adorn, and illuminate, and sanctify an intellect of the highest order and most massive power, surely our imagination may well remit the task to our memory and affection, and bid us simply think of him whom we commemorate to-day : of Edward Bouverie Pusey. Brethren, throughout this Sermon I have been sincerely condoling with your loss in his enforced absence who was first chosen to speak to you •} sincerely wishing that he had been suffered to fulfil his promise and your expectation. He was, through God's grace, united with Dr. Pusey by the most intense and intimate sympathy, the most absorbing and tender friendship, the most loving and appreciative reverence. And therefore, while all along I have, perhaps even as heartily as any one here, deplored his absence from this pulpit, I have never felt it so sadly as now, when I attempt to speak of Dr. Pusey's mind and heart. I can only speak as one admitted by him, with that untired generosity of his, in the last decade of his labours among us, to a friendship which I shall 1 The Rev. H. P. Liddon, who was hindered by illness from preaching on the occasion of this Sermon. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 127 always treasure with the most sacred memories of my life. But there were characteristic evidences of the inner life which it was impossible to miss, even in the slightest acquaintance with Dr. Pusey. And surely I am right in saying that no graces of his character and work were more immediately remarkable, more irresist- ibly winning, than his humility, his earnestness, his unselfishness. A humility so habitual that it had indeed become a second nature : so simple and entire that when he had been for some years Professor of Hebrew in this University, where Dr. Newman had long " felt for him an enthusiastic admiration," and used already to call him " 6 ^eya?," 1 a distinguished visitor from Scotland left him, after a long interview, with the approving verdict that he was " a modest lad": a humility to which the subtlest forms of human praise would have been, if he could have understood them, simply nauseous and annoying : this, by the grace of God, was in him. And who can ever forget his earnestness ? To it a great and most discerning critic long ago ascribed the unique power of his preach- ing in this place : for his was " a voice which, without art or manner, or any of the advantages of oratorical discipline or nature, is powerful by intensity, and impressive by the single-minded force of love, and a 1 Cf. History of My Reliyious Opinions, p. 6 1 . 128 THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. penetrating purity of will : — a voice which always speaks amid the perfect silence of arrested and subdued thoughts : and which imparts to its hearers, for the time, somewhat of that serenity, awe, and singleness, out of which itself issues." 1 And surely if ever any one, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, was led utterly outside the shadow of himself — if ever any one had learned to refer every action, every desire, simply and immediately to the Divine Will, and to live wholly and purely for one service, Dr. Pusey had been so led, so taught of God. It is the privilege of genius to give a fresh meaning to familiar truths : it is the privilege of saintliness to surprise us with a fresh illustration of primary graces : and Dr. Pusey has certainly enriched the life of Oxford and of England, and brightened the history of scholarship, with a rare and honourable example of unselfishness, and earnestness, and humility. IV. "When the highest gifts of intellect are con- secrated by union with these graces, the result is a power of personal influence which it would be difficult to limit. Wherever a man meets with that combina- tion of gentleness and strength which is, indeed, the reflection in human character of the Fatherhood of God, there he is ready at once to place his trust, and to open his heart. And in a place and time where 1 Dr. Mozley's Essay on Dr. Pusey's Sermon, in 1846. THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 129 hearts are restless and minds perplexed, there is an incalculable work of consolation, and of guidance, and of encouragement, which calls, with piteous necessity, for gifts and graces such as were vouchsafed in a pre- eminent degree to Dr. Pusey. For more than fifty years he was God's messenger of peace and light to unnumbered souls: it can never be known in this world how many were rescued from distress and doubt, defended from despair, stayed on the verge of reckless unbelief and soul-destroying sin by his unwearied, ever-gentle, ever-prayerful work of love and wisdom. Amidst the prevalent discouragement of faith, amidst the spiritual sterility of much that passes for religious teaching, amidst the subtle encroachment of dangerous forms of art, it is not likely that the need for such help as was ever found with him will grow less in Oxford than it was while he was with us. And the House which bears the honour of his name may do a work of widest and highest beneficence for England if, in the mental bewilderment and the moral perils of Oxford, her sons shall find there in years to come — as indeed, by God's mercy, they are already finding — the continuance of that unfailing, steadfast, calm, and fearless help which ever rests in the ministry of grace and in the fulness of the Catholic Faith. But we have yet n further hope enshrined in the 1 130 THE PLACE OF THE IXTELLECT. Posey House : a hope for whose rich earnest, wonder- fully vouchsafed to us already, we would praise and thank Almighty God to-day. The establishment and constitution of the House are, I think, a venture of faith in the power and prerogative of the sanctified intellect. "We believe that intellectual powers, trained in the daily imitation of their Crucified Eedeemer, held in resolute allegiance to His honour, illumined by His worship, guided by His revelation, and enabled and informed by the grace of His Sacraments, will achieve, in the work of literature and learning, results of abid- ing value and of commanding importance. We can point, for the support of this belief, to its frequent illustration in the history of the Church : but its truth comes nearest home to us to-day in the European reputation of Dr. Pusey's theology and scholarship. With humble, yet most eager and aspiring hope, we lift our thanks to God that the first Librarians of the Pusey House have already begun to justify this venture of faith, and to show how, under the yoke of Christ, the intellect may move with a better grace and surer strength than it is apt to show in its less disciplined exercises. Yes, we are not afraid to hope and to pray that the work which we now commemorate may be, in God's providence, the beginning of a new growth, a new power in the English Church : — that it may be at THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT. 131 least one step towards the restoration of our Theology to its rightful throne : and that the inexhaustible Truth of God may disclose yet new vigour and energy, new depths of light, new heights of glory, and new wealth of love for those who seek it, " not as the function of their own activities, the triumph of their own penetra- tion, or the offspring of their own mind": 1 but as the ever-living Majesty of the Uncreated Son of God : even as His own Bein" Who created and redeemed us, Who sustains us by His providence, and sanctifies us by His presence : "Who being in the beginning was in time made man : Who, " remaining in Himself, maketh all things new : and in all ages entereth into holy souls and maketh them friends of God." 1 Dr. Mozley's Essay on Blanco White. IX. THE DIGNITY OF MAN. " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? . . . "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands ; and Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet." Psalm tie 4-6. Of the many ways in which the Bible may be studied, the most difficult, and perhaps among educated people not the most common, is that in which un- doubtedly it has most to teach us. For the great pur- pose of the Bible, its supreme task in our lives is the illumination of conscience and the development and education of the spiritual life. And there is surely a striking contrast between the amount and quality of thought devoted, with the utmost keenness and inten- sity, to the subordinate aspects, the accessory details of its various parts, and the forgetfulness or transient regard with which this, its one great purpose, its inmost character, supreme and central, seems to be very often slighted. The Bible claims to be God's answer to that instinctive cry of every thoughtful heart in the per- 132 THE DIGNITY OF MAN. 133 plexity and uncertainty of this fragmentary life — " 0 send out Thy light and Thy truth, that they may lead me " : — it is offered to us, and commended by centuries of experience, as that Word of God, spoken of with dim hope in the Phaedo, which will carry a man through life more safely and surely than the best of human opinions. It comes to tis as a distinct and certain voice amidst " Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings ; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized " : it would speak with us heart to heart : it would teach us to know ourselves, and the real meaning of our lives : it would set our feet upon the Rock of the Eternal and Unchanging Truth : it would order our goings in the way of peace. And we — is it not an experi- ence of the inner life as well as a characteristic note of current literature ? — we are constantly losing sight of this, the dominant and essential aspect of the Bible : our minds falter away from direct and steadfast con- centration upon the fount of moral light, the shrine of that voice which would speak to us with such pierc- ing knowledge of our hearts : the effort of attention Hags, and we stray off with childlike weariness to the side issues, the adjacent fields of interest, where both 134 THE DIGNITY OF MAN. investigation and its results will make less demand upon us. It is so much easier, it has been truly said, to read a Commentary than to read the Bible : yes — just as it is much easier to know about God than to know God Himself. And so we are always swerving from the direct appeal of Scripture, wandering from the one real point : we change the conversation, as it were, when it begins to be too exacting : and we go off into all sorts of collateral questions about scholarship, or geology, or antiquarian research : studies in themselves of course most honourable and important, most worthy in the sight of God : only not reaching to that inner depth where His saints in every age have found the secret strength of the Bible : where alone the final, clenching proof of its divineness can be recognized and felt. It is often a pathetic failure that results : it is as though Wisdom were crying upon the high places of the city, " Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled " : and those whom she addressed were persistently engaged in examining the architecture of her house, or discussing the language of her invitation. It is the old contrast : " God's "Word is tried to the uttermost " : tried by every standard, in every field of criticism: but His " servant loveth it": His servant, who simply seeks and finds in it the light he needs in this puzzling, transient world, the hope he craves in the THE DIGNITY OF MAN. 135 eternal world to come : and who believes that by the standard of that Word he shall be judged in the Last Day. But if this disproportionate division of interest is seen in regard to any part of the Bible, surely it is pre- eminently seen in regard to its first chapter. 1 We read the Creation-Proem of Genesis, as it has been lately called, with our minds full of the ideas, the conceptions which belong to our own day : we expect it to impart to us knowledge on the same plane with that which we gather from the last book that we have read : and while, of course, we do not gain this, we also miss those ever-new and everlasting truths which were indeed among the first gifts of God for the direction of human life. Many men now turn away — let us frankly own it — with a sense of weariness Avhich has become almost proverbial from the unwearied efforts to establish a scientific harmony between Genesis and Geology. However the debate may end, it is felt that it is diverting attention from the centre to the circumference, from the dominant motive to the details, from the real test of a Divine revelation to that which men might safely be content to leave for a while un- settled. And it would be well indeed if, as we lay down our Review, with the thought, perhaps, that no- 1 Appointed as the First Lesson in the Morning Service of the day on which this Sermon was preached. 136 THE DIGNITY OF MAN. thing better can easily be done on those lines, and that it has added the most brilliant chapter to a somewhat unprogressive story, we would resolutely fasten upon those points in the Divine teaching which have least to do with geology and most to do with life : those points for the sake of which, if it may be reverently said, the whole mysterious scene might seem to have been urged by the Will of God upon the conscience and the heart of man. For if we could even imagine an authori- tative and distinct revelation of a complete scientific system, surely it might seem that it would have brought to human life more loss than gain ; for men have had far more happiness and benefit in patiently discovering the truths of nature for themselves than they could have had in receiving them all ready and precise with- out effort or inquiry. But there are truths in this great vision of the beginning which humanity could not afford to wait for or dispense with : truths which are a necessary part of man's outfit for his life, though he might never have discovered them for himself : truths which bear directly on the use, the duties, the tempta- tions of every day we live : truths to which the most ingenious achievements of our minds are but as the moss and heather — or, it may be, only as the shadows of the floating clouds — upon the slopes of the everlasting hills. Valuable and admirable as all true knowledge is — ovx THE DIGNITY OF MAN. 137