BR 1703 .P76 1896 
 
 The prophets of the 
 christian faith 
 
THE PROPHETS OF THE 
 CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
•Thg^><y^o 
 
THE "^PROPHETS 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. LYMAN ABBOTT, REV. FRANCIS ^KOWN, REV. GEORGE 
 
 MATHESON, REV. MARCUS 'DODS, REV. A. C. McGIFFERT, 
 
 VERY' REV. W. H. "FREMANTLE, PROFESSOR ADOLF 
 
 *HARNACK, REV. A. M. FAIRBAIRN, REV. T. T. 
 
 MUN6ER, REV. A. V. G. ALLEN, AND 
 
 VERY" REV. F. W. FARRAR 
 
 Weil) gork 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1896 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1896, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 NoriDoolr 3Pwgg 
 
 J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
 Norwood Mass. U-S.A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. WHAT IS A PROPHET? . . . . 1 
 
 By the Rev. Lyman Arbott, D.D., Pastor of Plym- 
 outh Church, Brooklyn. 
 
 II. ISAIAH AS A PREACHER ... 17 
 
 By the Rev. Fran'cis Beown, D.D., Professor in 
 Union Theological Seminary, New York. 
 
 III. THE APOSTLE PAUL .... 33 
 
 By the Rev. George Matheson, D.D., Pastor of 
 St. Bernard's Church, Edinburgh, Scotland. 
 
 IV. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA ... 49 
 
 By the Rev. Mabccs Dods, D.D., Professor of New 
 Testament Exegesis in New College, Edinburgh, 
 Scotland. 
 
 V. ST. AUGUSTINE AS A PROPHET . . 65 
 
 By the Rev. Arthur C McGiffert, D.D., Professor 
 of Church History in Union Theological Seminary, 
 New York. 
 
 VI. JOHN WYCLIFFE 81 
 
 By the Very Rev. W. H. Fekmantle, D.D., Dean of 
 Ripon. 
 
 VII. MARTIN LUTHER, THE PROPHET OF 
 
 THE REFORMATION . . . .107 
 By Professor Adolf IIaknack. 
 V 
 
vi Contents 
 
 PAQE 
 
 VIII. JOHN WESLEY 123 
 
 By the Very Eev. F. W. Faerar, D.D., Dean of 
 Canterbury. 
 
 IX. JONATHAN EDWARDS . . . .145 
 
 By the Kev. A. M. Faikbairn, D.D., Principal of 
 Mansfield College, Oxford, England. 
 
 X. HORACE BUSHNELL . . . . . 167 
 
 By the Kev. T. T. Mungee, D.D. 
 
 XI. FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE . . 193 
 
 By the Eev. A. Y. G. Allen, D.D. 
 
 XII. CAN WE BE PROPHETS? . . .215 
 
 By the Very Rev. F. W. Farrab, D.D., Dean of 
 Canterbury. 
 
I 
 
 WHAT IS A PROPHET? 
 
PROPHETS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 FAITH 
 
 I 
 
 WHAT IS A PROPHET? 
 
 BT THE REV. LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. 
 
 "Just as a dumb or retired person," says 
 Ewald, " must have a speaker to speak for him 
 and declare his thoughts, so must God, who is 
 dumb with respect to the mass of men, have 
 his messenger or speaker; and hence the word 
 [prophet], in its sacred sense, denotes him 
 who speaks not of himself, but as commis- 
 sioned by his God." Accepting this general 
 definition, the prophet is an interpreter of 
 God to men; he is not so much a foreteller 
 as a forthteller. He receives his message 
 from the Eternal and gives it as the messen- 
 ger of the Eternal. The difference between 
 the prophet and the priest is far more radical 
 3 
 
4 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 than Carlyle has represented it to be in his 
 " Heroes and Hero- Worship. " The priest inter- 
 prets man to God. The office of priesthood 
 assumes that God is too holy for ordinary 
 mortals to approach; that some special per- 
 sons must be appointed to mediate between 
 man and God and approach God in lieu of, 
 or in behalf of, man. He who believes that 
 God is the All-Father, and that his ear is 
 open to the faintest cry of his feeblest child, 
 will have no place in his thoughts for any 
 such mediator between man and his God. 
 The office of the prophet is quite different. 
 The need of a prophet grows, not out of the 
 inaccessibility of God, but out of the imper- 
 fection of men. It is not — in this I venture 
 to differ with Ewald, at least in phraseology 
 — because God is dumb, but because man is 
 deaf. Man lives so in the sphere of the mate- 
 rial, he is so dependent upon the senses as a 
 medium of communication, that he cannot ap- 
 preciate, cannot understand, can hardly even 
 receive, a message which is not translated 
 into words. He is, indeed, the recipient of 
 certain vague impressions, but he cannot in- 
 terpret their meaning. He requires some one 
 to interpret them to him, to embody them in 
 
What is a Prophet? 5 
 
 language, to explain himself to himself, and 
 so to make God and God's message clear to 
 him. There is something like this in litera- 
 ture, art, and music. The poet, the artist, 
 the musician, are each a kind of prophet. In 
 all men there is some poetic nature, some dim 
 perception of truth and beauty felt rather than 
 perceived; sometimes it is not even felt, there 
 is only a potentiality of feeling. The poet, 
 by his expression, develops this potentiality, 
 brings forth this hidden and sub-conscious life 
 into consciousness, enables the soul to per- 
 ceive what it could not perceive without this 
 poetic interpreter. So the artist awakens the 
 dormant sense of beauty, by presenting beauty 
 to the sense-perception of men who were in- 
 capable of perceiving it by pure imagination; 
 and the musician evokes musical life in souls 
 incapable of responding to unheard music. 
 Similarly, in every soul there is a possibility 
 of divine life, a half-conscious recognition of 
 truth and duty, of purity and love, of good- 
 ness and God. The prophet utters what un- 
 prophetic souls only vaguely feel, and thus 
 vitalizes their feeling and converts it into 
 will, purpose, action. 
 
 Prophecy, then, assumes that God is ever 
 
6 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 brooding his children, awakening in them a 
 life higher than their own, leading them up 
 into life and light, as the sun leads up the 
 plant from the darkness of the soil into the 
 light of day. Some men are hardly conscious 
 of this divine life; others are conscious of it 
 only on rare occasions; some possess it as a 
 vague, uninterpreted feeling, an enigmatical, 
 restless desire for they know not what, a 
 dream from which they seem to themselves to 
 be continually awakening to the stern realities 
 of life, a half-seen vision which disappears 
 before it is really discerned; while to some it 
 is the dominant force of their lives, the direct- 
 ing purpose, the rudder-holding hand, the great 
 reality. Among these last, those who have the 
 power to phrase this divine life in words, to 
 interpret it so as to make its meaning clear to 
 their fellows, are the world's prophets. They 
 receive their message from God, and give it to 
 their fellow-men. 
 
 Thus the prophets interpret God to man. 
 But they also interpret man to himself. They 
 explain to him what was before enigmatical in 
 his own aspirations. They make legible the 
 before invisible writing in his own experience. 
 Every man is at times vaguely conscious of an 
 
What is a Prophet f 7 
 
 unknown tongue speaking within himself. The 
 prophets translate this unknown tongue. And 
 no less do they interpret the age to itself. 
 They see, not always, not generally, with infal- 
 lible accuracy, but more clearly than their less 
 spiritually-minded fellows, what is the mean- 
 ing of the age, what the providential purpose 
 which is in process of fulfilment, what its di- 
 vine trend, what its great issues are sure to be. 
 And because the object of their speech is to 
 prepare men for these issues by interpreting 
 to them this providential purpose, their forth- 
 telling is also a foretelling. The prophet is not 
 a mere historian ; he is a historian only for the 
 purpose of interpretation, and an interpreter 
 only for the purpose of leadership. For his 
 purpose is always to lead the people forth, to 
 enable them to understand God's will in order 
 that they may do God's work. 
 
 The prophet, therefore, is always a combi- 
 nation of piety and sympathy. A recluse is 
 never truly a prophet. The mere man of action 
 is never truly a prophet. He must be both a 
 man of his time and a man of eternity. He is 
 to interpret God to the men of his age; he 
 must, therefore, understand both God and the 
 men of his age. He is to translate the Ian- 
 
8 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 guage of heaven into the language of earth ; 
 he must, therefore, understand both languages. 
 He must, accordingly, first of all be what the 
 Bible calls him, a "man of God," that is, a 
 man whose life is born of God and comes forth 
 from God. He must walk with God, live with 
 God, commune with God, or he cannot under- 
 stand God's message. He must go up into 
 Mount Sinai with Moses, up into the Mount 
 of Transfiguration with Christ. He must be 
 at times absolutely alone with his God to re- 
 ceive God's message. But it is not enough 
 that he receive the message ; he must also be 
 able to impart it. Not every spiritually -minded 
 man is a prophet. He must also understand 
 men — the men of his own age, their lives, 
 their experiences, their needs. The prophets, 
 therefore, belong to no class or order. Rarely 
 has one been taken from any select circle, 
 whether ecclesiastical or social. Moses was a 
 herdsman, David a shepherd, Isaiah a peasant's 
 son. When one is found in the hierarchy, this 
 very fact limits his usefulness ; Ezekiel is not 
 so widely read nor so widely useful as the Great 
 Unknown. The school of the prophets pro- 
 duces no prophets. They cannot be created by 
 educational processes. Education may add to 
 
What is a Prophet? 9 
 
 their equipment, but it is not and cannot be the 
 secret of their power. That lies in the posses- 
 sion of this twofold faculty — the hearing ear 
 and the speaking mouth ; the ear to hear God, 
 the mouth to speak to man ; the understanding 
 of God's message, and the capacity to impart it 
 to men who have not understood it. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that the prophet is 
 always, or even generally, the bearer of a new 
 message to the world. This he may sometimes 
 be, but more generally he interprets to a wider 
 circle a truth before known only to a few ; or 
 makes vital in life a truth which before was 
 only a philosophical opinion ; or restores to 
 human consciousness a truth it had lost ; or 
 puts into new and better perspective a truth 
 which had been suffered to lie forgotten in 
 the background ; or carries on to its legiti- 
 mate and necessary conclusions truths whose 
 issue and meaning the world had not seen ; or 
 makes new applications of familiar truths. The 
 few philosophers of Egypt believed that there 
 was one God above all gods; Moses brought 
 this truth out of its hiding-place in the schools 
 and made it the foundation of a new State 
 and the inspiration of a new worship. This 
 prophet of the Law taught that God is one, 
 
10 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 that he is a righteous God, and that he requires 
 righteousness of his children. This is the bur- 
 den of the Book of the Covenant, which is 
 probably the oldest writing in the Bible, and 
 of Deuteronomy, which, whatever its date as a 
 manuscript, embodies the prophetic message of 
 Moses, the great Lawgiver. David brought 
 into the foreground the truth that God is mer- 
 ciful, sang of a Father who pities his children, 
 and handed down to future generations, as his 
 bequest to them, the revelation embodied in 
 the phrase "The sure mercies of David." 
 Elijah proclaimed nothing new ; he simply re- 
 told the story of the past — one God, just and 
 merciful ; he was the prophet of a restoration. 
 The Great Unknown — the second Isaiah — 
 himself taught by the years of captivity in 
 Babylon that the spirit of righteousness and 
 reverence is not confined within any geographi- 
 cal boundaries, saw clearly that if there is but 
 one God, ever righteous and merciful, then his 
 law extends over all nations and his mercy is 
 provided for all ; he was the prophet of a cath- 
 olic religion. 
 
 It is equally a mistake to suppose that proph- 
 ecy ceased and prophets were no more after 
 the coming of Christ. It is true that a chief 
 
What is a Prophet? 11 
 
 message of the Old Testament prophets, from 
 Moses to Malachi, is that a Messiah is yet to 
 come ; and, of course, after he had come, this 
 theme, as one of foretelling, ceased forever. 
 What had been prophecy became history. The 
 Incarnation, which had been a vision and a 
 hope, became a fact witnessed to by the senses : 
 a somewhat concerning which the Apostle 
 could write, "which we have seen with our 
 eyes, which we have looked upon, and our 
 hands have handled of the Word of life." 
 But in the larger sense of a forthtelling — a 
 spiritual perception, and an effective interpreta- 
 tion — prophecy has not ceased, and will not, 
 until every eye shall see Him face to face. A 
 wider range of prophecy, not its cessation, is 
 anticipated by Joel as the result of the Incarna- 
 tion. The secret of prophecy is imparted by 
 Christ to the Apostles when he breathes upon 
 them ; the promise of prophecy, when he prom- 
 ises the Holy Spirit to guide them into all 
 truth ; the commission to prophesy, in the com- 
 mand, " What ye hear in the ear, that proclaim 
 ye upon the housetops." Prophets are men- 
 tioned in the Book of Acts as recognized 
 teachers in the Apostolic Church, and are in- 
 cluded by Paul in his list of its ministers ; and 
 
12 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 the preacher's recipient faith is accounted by 
 him as at once the measure and the secret of 
 the prophet's forthtelling. To deny to the 
 Christian Church prophets, to assume that 
 prophecy ceased with the close of the New- 
 Testament canon, to draw a sharp line between 
 the prophets before and the prophets subse- 
 quent to the first century, appears to me to 
 foster two errors : one, that which imputes to 
 the Hebrew prophets an infallibility which they 
 never claimed for themselves ; the other, to 
 deny to the Church since Christ that presence 
 of a living, speaking, interpreted God, which 
 was characteristic of the Hebrew Church, and 
 which Christ distinctly and emphatically de- 
 clared should continue to be characteristic of 
 the Christian Church. 
 
 In a true sense, every real preacher is a 
 prophet. If he is not a prophet, if he does not 
 receive a message direct from God which he 
 can communicate to man, if he is not a forth- 
 teller, an interpreter, a divine messenger, he 
 is no true preacher. In one respect he has 
 an immeasurable advantage which the earlier 
 prophets did not possess. His message he can 
 always compare with the life and teachings of 
 his Master, and thus determine whether it is in 
 
What is a Prophet P 13 
 
 very truth a divine message or only a human 
 phantasy. His message will sometimes, per- 
 haps generally, be a simple re-enunciation of 
 that which other Christian prophets have given 
 or are giving ; but it will have no real pro- 
 phetic power unless it has come to him from his 
 Father, for he can prophesy only according to 
 the proportion of his faith, only as what he 
 has heard in the ear he is proclaiming from 
 the pulpit. But while thus every Christian 
 preacher may be and should be a prophet, an 
 interpreter of the mystic voice of God to the 
 men of his generation, there have been pre-emi- 
 nent prophets in the Christian Church as there 
 were in the Hebrew Church, men whose mes- 
 sage has had all the force of a new revelation, 
 men whose faith vitalized truths that were 
 before held as mere inert opinions, or revived 
 truths that had been forgotten, or revealed — 
 that is, unveiled — truths to the common peo- 
 ple which had been concealed in the closets of 
 the few, or made new applications of familiar 
 truths to new and unfamiliar conditions of life. 
 These men are as truly prophets, interpreters, 
 forthtellers, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. 
 Such was Clement of Alexandria, with his 
 message of the divine immanence ; Augustine, 
 
14 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 with his message of divine sovereignty from 
 the authority of which no man can escape ; 
 Luther, with his message of personal responsi- 
 bility to God and therefore personal freedom 
 from all who interpose themselves between the 
 soul and God ; John Wesley, with his message 
 that the Christian religion is the universal 
 religion, adapted to all sorts and conditions of 
 men ; Jonathan Edwards, with his revived 
 statement of the combined messages of Cle- 
 ment and Augustine, divine sovereignty and 
 divine indwelling ; Swedenborg, with his mes- 
 sage that religion is life, not ritual or dogma ; 
 Maurice, with his message of a living God as 
 the Father of whom the whole family in heaven 
 and on earth is named ; Bushnell, with his 
 message of the transcendent character of spirit- 
 ual experience and the inadequacy of all creeds, 
 traditions, and theologies to give expression to 
 it ; Channing, with his message that man is 
 God's son, however far he may have wandered 
 from his Father's house ; Finney, with his 
 message to a paralyzed Church bound in the 
 chains of a fatalistic philosophy, "All things 
 are possible to him that believeth " ; Henry 
 Ward Beecher, with his message summoning 
 the Puritan Church from bowing awe-stricken 
 
What is a Prophet f 15 
 
 at the foot of Mount Sinai to clasp love-stricken 
 the cross on Calvary ; Phillips Brooks, with 
 his message of the universal presence and 
 grace of God and the abundance of life in 
 and through his indwelling — these and many- 
 others have been true prophets of the Chris- 
 tian Church. Every such man seeing the need 
 of humanity, receiving his message from God 
 and giving it as God's interpreter to God's 
 children — a son of man, but no less a son of 
 God, sent by God to be a forthteller of God's 
 word, in whatever age or community he may 
 live, however large or small his audience, how- 
 ever fresh or familiar his message, is a prophet 
 of the living God. 
 
II 
 
 ISAIAH AS A PREACHER 
 
II 
 
 ISAIAH AS A PREACHER 
 
 BT THE REV. FRANCIS BROWN, D.D. 
 
 Much depends on our understanding the re- 
 lation of the prophets to their own times. It 
 is difficult for some good people to learn that 
 this is of primary consequence — only less funda- 
 mental than their close relation to God. The 
 importance they have for us rests very largely 
 on the more direct importance they had for their 
 own contemporaries. No intelligent person now 
 supposes that prediction is all of prophecy, but 
 many intelligent persons fail to perceive or to 
 appreciate the fact that, in God's ordering, pre- 
 dictive prophecy is conditioned by the circum- 
 stances that attended its birth, and is designed 
 to affect contemporary belief and life. The 
 same thing is true of the moral and religious 
 teachings of the prophets. The prophets were 
 not moral philosophers nor systematic theolo- 
 gians. Neither the speculative nor the scien- 
 19 
 
20 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tific spirit controlled them. They had visions, 
 but they were not visionaries; they taught great 
 truths, but they were not professors of dogmatics. 
 They were men of intense spiritual life, eager 
 to influence the national organism of which they 
 themselves formed a part — the men and women 
 among whom they moved, whose wants and sins 
 they clearly saw. They were not essayists nor 
 theorizers. They were preachers and interpret- 
 ers. From the stern announcements of Amos 
 and the passionate pleadings of Hosea, down 
 to the fierce joy of Nahum over Nineveh's fall, 
 the melancholy of Jeremiah at his people's ca- 
 lamity, and the encouragements and spiritual 
 exhortations of Haggai, Zechariah, and Mala- 
 chi, they are all men of their own people, with 
 throbbing, longing hearts. Even the apoca- 
 lyptic prophets, such as Ezekiel, Joel, and 
 Daniel, make present conditions their start- 
 ing-point. It is this which, humanly speak- 
 ing, gives to their messages their permanent 
 vitality. Conditions and circumstances change, 
 but the living God and the heart of man abide, 
 and those who have ever really interpreted the 
 one to the other are the preachers of all time. 
 
 As soon as we recognize the prophets as chil- 
 dren and servants of their own age, the study 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 21 
 
 of that age and its various periods and experi- 
 ences becomes imperative. We cannot under- 
 stand them without knowing the character and 
 needs of their people at the time when they 
 spoke. The better we know these — the more 
 minutely we learn the fitness of prophetic 
 utterances to the exact situations that called 
 them forth — the richer will these utterances 
 become for us, not only as memorials of a past 
 age, but also, and especially, as messages to 
 ourselves. 
 
 No prophet illustrates all this better than that 
 most gifted of the prophets, Isaiah. Isaiah was 
 a man of great natural endowments, intensified 
 and consecrated to the loftiest ends by his self- 
 surrender to God. He had the intellectual 
 grasp of a great statesman, and the fervid im- 
 agination of a great poet. He could make 
 combinations and foresee consequences, and 
 warn him who ventured upon devious ways ; 
 he could portray with sustained power, he could 
 overwhelm with the outpourings of righteous 
 indignation, he could pierce with irony, he 
 could cheapen with ridicule, he could mourn 
 over his self-destroying people, he could sym- 
 pathize with the downcast, he could rise to 
 heights of spiritual experience and anticipa- 
 
22 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tion. All his gifts were in the service of his 
 generation. He was absorbed in them, and 
 in God's dealings with them. The present 
 was awful to him because of its issues for 
 them; the future was gloomy because it held 
 punishment for their obstinacy, or bright be- 
 cause after the purification was to come their 
 glory and their peace. 
 
 Fortunately for us, in the case of no other 
 prophet have we a better opportunity to learn 
 the concrete character of his thought, or study 
 the influences which shaped its expression. ^ 
 While our information is only to a slight de- 
 gree of a personal character, and while our 
 knowledge of the contemporary history is not 
 equally full at all points, we find that there 
 were two crises in the national life around 
 which many of Isaiah's most telling sermons 
 group themselves — the Syro-Ephraimistic war 
 (B.C. 734 ff.), with the Assyrian campaign 
 under Tiglathpileser III., by which that war 
 
 1 Among recent writers in English on this subject may he 
 named Canon S. R. Driver, D.D., "Isaiah, His Life and 
 Times," 2d Ed., 1893 ; Professor George Adam Smith, D.D., 
 "The Book of Isaiah," Vol. I., 1889 ; Canon T. K. Cheyne, 
 D.D., "Introduction to the Book of Isaiah," 1895 ; Professor 
 Maximilian Lindsay Kellner, "The Prophecies of Isaiah: 
 An Outline Study," 1896. 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 23 
 
 was terminated, and the invasion of Sennache- 
 rib, B.C. 701. Lack of exact chronological 
 arrangement in our present Isaian collection 
 makes the assignment of the various addresses 
 and sermons more difficult than it otherwise 
 would be, but scholars are fairly well agreed 
 as to the illustrations here given. 
 
 As so frequently happens under autocratic 
 rule, the humiliation of Judah under Ahaz 
 followed speedily upon the military successes 
 of Uzziah and Jotham — Ahaz's grandfather 
 and father. The bold leader and strong ruler 
 passes away, a weakling succeeds him, and 
 there is no habit of self-control, self-reliance, 
 and responsible patriotism in the many, to take 
 the place of the one vigorous hand. Probably 
 the earliest words of Isaiah preserved to us are 
 those in which he characterized the moral con- 
 dition of Judah at the close of Jotham's reign 
 and the beginning of that of Ahaz, about the 
 year 735. Conquest had brought increase of 
 wealth, luxury, pride, idolatry, looseness of 
 life, weakening of moral fibre. The inevitable 
 consequences of this emasculation could not be 
 hidden from the keen eye of Isaiah, divinely 
 clarified, and sweeping the horizon, upon which 
 the might of Assyria was distinctly looming up. 
 
24 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Accusation and warning have seldom been ad- 
 dressed to a nation in nobler and more search- 
 ing language than that preserved to us — in 
 a somewhat fragmentary form, it is true — in 
 Isa. ii. 6-21. After the arraignment, vv. 6 ff., 
 comes the announcement of the judgment day 
 of Yahweh, vv. 12 ff. : 
 
 For a day hath Yahweh Sebaoth 
 Upon all that is exalted and high, 
 And upon all that is uplifted, — yea it shall be 
 laid low, — 
 
 And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, 
 
 And upon all the oaks of Bashan. 
 
 And upon all the high mountains, 
 
 And upon all the uplifted hills. 
 
 And upon every tower that is lofty, 
 
 And upon every fortified wall, 
 
 And upon all Tarshish ships. 
 
 And upon all the objects of delight. 
 
 And the haughtiness of man shall be abased, 
 
 And brought low the loftiness of men. 
 
 And Yahweh alone shall be exalted 
 
 In that day ! 
 
 The early part of the third chapter contains 
 the prophet's scourging attack on the political 
 condition of the people under the weak and 
 effeminate rule of Ahaz. 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 25 
 
 For behold ! the Lord, Yahweh Sebaoth, 
 Removeth from Jerusalem and from Judah sup- 
 port and stay, 
 
 Hero and man of war, judge and prophet, 
 And diviner and elder, captain of fifty and ex- 
 alted one, 
 
 And counsellor and skilful magician and shrewd 
 enchanter, 
 
 And I will set boys as their princes, and chil- 
 dren shall rule over them (vv. 1-4). 
 
 My people, its overseer is a wilful child. 
 And women, they have ruled over it ; 
 My people, those guiding thee are misleading, 
 And the way of thy paths they have swallowed 
 up (v. 12). 
 
 In the latter part of the same chapter comes 
 the intense and contemptuous ridicule of the 
 luxurious and worthless women of the court. 
 In chapter v. 8 ff., we find a group of 
 "Woes" pronounced upon oppression, intem- 
 perance, and reckless presumption, and at the 
 beginning of the same chapter a statement of 
 the whole case of Yahweh against Israel, in 
 which sternness is joined with profound and 
 tender sadness : 
 
 What was there more to do for my vineyard that 
 I did not in it ? 
 
26 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Why did I expect it to bear grape-clusters, and 
 it bore worthless things ? 
 
 Chapter vii., which begins in narrative form, 
 shows us the invasion of Pekah and Rezin 
 already in progress, and the prophet vainly 
 endeavouring to awaken faith in God in the 
 heart of the superficial and faint-hearted 
 Ahaz, who appears already to have formed 
 the plan of saving himself from the allied 
 enemies, Aram and northern Israel, by throw- 
 ing himself into the arms of Assyria, as re- 
 lated in 2 Kings xvi. All Isaiah's assurances 
 are of no avail, not even his declaration that 
 deliverance is so certain and will be so speedy 
 that a child soon to be born shall by right 
 receive the name " God-with-us," because the 
 hand of God shall by that time already be 
 manifest in the defeat of the foe. Ahaz is too 
 timid and too far involved with Tiglathpileser 
 to respond, and the prophet is compelled to 
 pass in vv. 17 ff. to an announcement of the 
 disaster that will follow upon the Assyrian 
 alliance. 
 
 To a time a little later, when Assyria was 
 already on the move, belongs the declaration of 
 judgment upon the Northern Kingdom, ix. 8-21, 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 27 
 
 winding up with the magnificent description 
 of the oncoming Assyrian host, v. 26-30, 
 which has become displaced: 
 
 And he hath lifted up a signal to the nations 
 afar, and hath hissed to him at the end of the 
 earth, 
 
 And behold, hastily, swiftly, he cometh ! 
 
 None weary, and none stimibling among them, — 
 he slumbereth not and he sleepeth not. 
 
 And the girdle of his loins hath not been loosed, 
 and the thong of his sandals not broken ! 
 
 Whose arrows are sharpened, and all his bows 
 bent; 
 
 The hoofs of his horses, like flint are they reck- 
 oned, and his wheels like the whirlwind ! 
 
 A roar he hath like the lion, he roareth like the 
 young lions. 
 
 And he growleth, and he seizeth prey, and he 
 carrieth it safe away, and there is none that de- 
 livereth. 
 
 And he growleth over them in that day, like the 
 growling of the sea, 
 
 And they look to earth, and lo, thick darkness, 
 and the light hath grown dark in its clouds ! 
 
 [For all this his wrath has not turned back, and 
 still is his hand stretched forth ! ] 
 
 About the second great crisis of Jerusalem 
 during Isaiah's ministry, that caused by the 
 
28 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 invasion of Sennacherib in 701, another set of 
 prophecies group themselves. In these, al- 
 though the people is not freed from blame 
 for the perils of the situation, especially in 
 respect to the false move of intrigue with 
 Egypt, the general tone is more cheerful, 
 and the expectancy of deliverance more abso- 
 lute. This time the King (Hezekiah) and the 
 prophet were in more substantial accord. The 
 words of Isaiah contained in 2 Kings xix. 6, 
 7, 20 ff. (= Isa. xxxvii. 6, 7, 21 ff.), indicate 
 the hopeful tenor of what he then felt moved 
 to say. From a somewhat earlier year are 
 chapters xxix., xxx., xxxi., xxxii.; more nearly 
 coincident in time are the verses xiv. 1-14. 
 For our purposes the prophecy concerning 
 Assyria, x. 5 £f., may be cited. The point of 
 view is different from that of ix. 7 ff., v. 
 26 ff. Here the presumption and the punish- 
 ment of Assyria is set in the foreground, and 
 assurance is given to Jerusalem of rescue from 
 this seemingly invincible foe. 
 
 Ho, Asshur ! rod of mine anger ! yea, a staff in 
 their hand is my wrath ! 
 
 Against a profane nation do I send him, and over 
 the people of my rage do I command him ! 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 29 
 
 To take spoil and seize booty, and to make them 
 a trampling, like mire in the streets. 
 
 But he, not so doth he devise, and his heart, not 
 so doth it reckon. 
 
 For to destroy (is) in his heart, and to cut off 
 nations, not a few. 
 
 For he saith. Are not my princes altogether 
 kings ? Is not Calno as Carchemish ? 
 
 Or is not Hamath as Arpad, or is not Samaria as 
 Damascus ? 
 
 As my hand hath lighted upon the kingdoms of 
 the no-gods, — and their images are more than in 
 Jerusalem, — 
 
 Shall I not, as I have done to Samaria and her 
 no-gods, so do to Jerusalem and her idols ? 
 
 But Yahweh shall punish him for his pre- 
 sumption. The passage ends with the imagi- 
 native picture of the approach of the Assyrian 
 army to Jerusalem from the north, and its 
 sudden overthrow (vv. 28-34): 
 
 He hath come upon Ayyath, hath passed by 
 Migron, at Michmash he storeth his baggage ; 
 
 They have crossed the pass, at Geba they have 
 taken night-quarters. 
 
 Kamah trembleth, Gibeah of Saul hath fled. 
 
 Cry aloud, daughter of Gallim, give ear, Layisha, 
 answer her, Anathoth ! 
 
80 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Madmenah hath, become a wanderer, the dwellers 
 in Gebim have hurried off (their treasures). 
 
 This very day he is to halt in Nob, brandishing 
 his hand against the mountain of the daughter of 
 Zion; 
 
 Behold, the Lord, Yahweh Sebaoth, loppeth off 
 the boughs with frightful crash, 
 
 And the high in stature are hewn down, and the 
 lofty, they shall be laid low ; 
 
 And he shall cut down the thickets of the forest 
 with iron, and Lebanon by a mighty one shall fall ! 
 
 There is space now for only a word about 
 the specific Messianic predictions ascribed to 
 Isaiah — those in which the expectation of a 
 great deliverance involves a future king to be 
 the great deliverer. These, too, are rooted, 
 more or less distinctly, in the present, and 
 their expression is framed for effect upon the 
 prophet's own contemporaries. Scholars gen- 
 erally hold that the most definite and stirring 
 of them all found its point of contact with the 
 national life in the devastation of northeast 
 Israel by Tiglathpileser III., in the invasion 
 of 734, which cost Pekah his throne and his 
 life. It was then that Isaiah, keenly feeling 
 the blow which had fallen upon the sister 
 kingdom, recognizing, indeed, the divine mis- 
 
Isaiah as a Preacher 31 
 
 sion of Assyria, but believing this to be only 
 temporary, and confident that the haughty 
 invader must be overthrown, despairing of any 
 leadership in that overthrow on the part of the 
 weak, timorous, and self-willed Ahaz, received 
 power to announce the birth of the child who 
 was to conquer all enemies, set his people free, 
 and secure them peace. All the world knows 
 the verses now, and gives them a comprehen- 
 sive and spiritual interpretation, but the polit- 
 ical conditions of Isaiah's time have left an 
 indelible mark upon them, and we can inter- 
 pret them largely because he compressed into 
 them so much intensity of patriotic feeling 
 and so much confidence of faith. I am speak- 
 ing of the great prediction of ix. 1-6, ending 
 with the stanza (vv. 4-6) : 
 
 Yea, every boot of the man that stampeth with 
 noise, and garment rolled in blood — 
 
 It shall be for burning, — fuel for fire. 
 
 For a child is born to us, a son is given to us, 
 and the dominion shall come upon his shoulder, 
 
 And his name shall be called Wonder of a Coun- 
 sellor, God-hero, Possessor of Spoil, Prince of 
 Peace ! 
 
 For the increase of the dominion and for peace 
 without end, upon the throne of David and over 
 his kingdom, 
 
32 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Establishing it and sustaining it, by justice and 
 by righteousness, from now, even forever ! 
 
 The zeal of Yahweh Sebaoth will perform this. 
 
 This portrayal of Isaiah's prophetic work 
 has been meagre enough. Into some regions 
 of his thought it has not been possible even 
 to enter. But the illustrations given are suf- 
 ficient to establish his greatness — greatness as 
 an artist and greatness as a preacher. His 
 sermons are poems, in vi^hich poetic fire and 
 skill are wholly genuine and wholly at the 
 service of his moral integrity and his spiritual 
 insight, so that through them God revealed his 
 will to the men of Isaiah's time, and has re- 
 vealed his will afresh to the successive genera- 
 tions since Isaiah died. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE APOSTLE PAUL 
 
Ill 
 
 THE APOSTLE PAUL 
 
 BY THE REV. GEORGE MATHESON, D.D. 
 
 The figures of the New Testament are rep- 
 resentative men; each stands for some phase 
 of the soul. Matthew is the type of conserva- 
 tism, "that it might be fulfilled." Mark is 
 the symbol of present action, "straightway 
 he commanded." Luke is the embodiment of 
 human sympathy. John is the love of the 
 ideal. Nathaniel is the child ; Nicodemus is 
 the student ; Peter is the youth ; Thomas is 
 the reflective and somewhat careworn man. 
 No portrait in this gallery is without its special 
 significance. 
 
 What is Paul ? It seems at first sight equiv- 
 alent to asking " What is Shakespeare ? " It 
 appears as if the only word which would de- 
 scribe him is myriad-mindedness. And yet, to 
 my mind, the remarkable feature about Paul 
 is not variety but unity — not the diversity of 
 35 
 
36 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 his experiences, but the one thread which con- 
 nects them. If I were asked to state in a 
 single phrase what Paul represents, I would 
 say, "The pilgrim's progress." I would say 
 that his life, as indicated in the historical order 
 of his epistles, describes the normal course 
 through which each Christian is to journey in 
 his passage from the scene of shadows into the 
 happy land of Beulah. 
 
 I say, "the normal course." But the point 
 I wish to emphasize is that to Paul himself it 
 was very abnormal. He was the initiator of 
 that which has since become chronic and habit- 
 ual. The course proposed for the Old Testa- 
 ment pilgrims was the very opposite of that 
 prescribed for Paul. Theirs was a march from 
 the desert into the promised land ; Paul's was 
 a progress from the promised land into the 
 desert. They began with the valley, passed 
 up to the plain, and ended on the height ; he 
 began with the height, passed down to the 
 plain, and ended with the valley. They pro- 
 ceeded from law to love ; he descended from 
 love to law. They set up their ladder on the 
 earth and tried to reach the heavens ; he fixed 
 his ladder in the heavens and tried to reach 
 the earth. 
 
The Apostle Paul 37 
 
 It was not only from the men of the Ohl 
 Testament that Paul was thus distinguished ; 
 his experience was equally marked out from 
 the original Apostles — the men of transition 
 between the old and the new. These pro- 
 ceeded from the human to the divine. They 
 gazed first on the Christ of the flesh. They 
 followed the steps of the Son of man from the 
 cradle to the cross ; when the croAvn came, 
 their pilgrimage was over. But Paul began 
 with the crown. His first sight of the Christ 
 was the Christ glorified. He knew the power 
 of His resurrection before he felt the fellow- 
 ship of His sufferings. His progress was a 
 progress backward. He had begun with the 
 light of immortality ; he had to retrace his 
 steps to take up the life of time. It was an 
 abnormal experience, though it was to become 
 universal. He was the first of the new regime, 
 and for a while the only one. He says he was 
 "born out of due time." I understand him to 
 mean, not that he was born too late, but that 
 he was born too soon. He claimed to have a 
 vision of the Christian life which was above 
 his age, before his day, in advance of his con- 
 temporaries. He claimed to be the follower 
 of One whose progress had been from heaven 
 
88 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 to earth, who had begun with the form of 
 God and ended with the form of a ser- 
 vant, who had emptied himself step by step 
 into sympathy with things beneath him, 
 and paused not, rested not, until he had 
 made the human divine. The progress of 
 St. Paul was like that of his Master — a prog- 
 ress downward. 
 
 He begins in the air — in the other world. 
 He has been caught up to meet his Lord, and 
 the earth disappears from his view. He sees 
 nothing but the second advent ; he hears noth- 
 ing but the last trump. All perspective has 
 vanished ; the end is at the door. Christ is 
 coming ; in a little while he will be here. 
 What is this world to any man ? Before his 
 descending shout of triumph its proudest 
 pomps shall melt away. Before the first gaze 
 of the man of Tarsus there floated the form of 
 only one Christ — the Christ of resurrection. 
 The light which smote him from heaven put 
 out all the candles of earth. Everything below 
 that sun became a thing of insignificance. The 
 kingdoms of the world and the glory of them 
 vanished like smoke. Their inhabitants be- 
 came as grasshoppers, their events as water- 
 drops. The only bells heard were the bells 
 
The Apostle Paul 39 
 
 of the New Jerusalem, and they summoned 
 all men to a cathedral above. 
 
 Then there came a cloud ; I know not when, 
 I know not how. I only know it was some- 
 where between the Thessalonians and the 
 Galatians. In his letter to Corinth he speaks 
 of it as a thorn ; in his letter to Rome he de- 
 scribes it as a warfare ; both are introduced 
 as retrospects of a dark, and to some extent 
 a surmounted, past. The cause of the cloud 
 I cannot tell ; probably it was something ex- 
 ternal. But the main point is that it was 
 something which made Paul feel himself less 
 ready for his change. The second advent 
 moves further off ; the world looms nearer. 
 He finds that the light which fell upon him 
 at Damascus was like the deluge ; it had only 
 covered the old world — not annihilated it. 
 There were two natures within him — Saul 
 and Paul. For the first time in his life he 
 felt thoroughly bad. What right had he to 
 struggle ? Had he not tasted of the heavenly 
 gift ; had he not seen the Lord ? Where was 
 the blessedness he had known in Arabia ? 
 Where was the joy with which he had written 
 to Thessalonica ? Where was the exultation 
 with which he had been taken up to the third 
 
40 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 heaven ? What was this that had come to him 
 — this flesh lusting against the spirit, this law 
 in his members warring against the law of his 
 mind? Was not this spiritual death? The 
 strong soul of yesterday beat upon his breast 
 and cried, " O wretched man that I am ! " 
 
 Then came a new gleam of glory, and it 
 came, not from the third heaven, but from the 
 very mist into which Paul had wandered. It 
 brought a great message to his soul. It said: 
 Your seeming fall is a rise. You are further 
 removed from death now than you were in your 
 hour of immediate vision. The true sign of 
 spiritual life is spiritual dissatisfaction. There 
 is nothing which justifies a man like his belief 
 in the existence of a beauty which he himself 
 cannot reach. 
 
 Paul has come a step down his ladder, which 
 means a step up his pilgrimage. He has come 
 nearer to the earth. He has passed from sight 
 to faith — from an ideal of perfect satisfaction 
 to an ideal which eludes him by its glory. But 
 already another step was preparing. What was 
 that glory in Christ which had hitherto eluded 
 him? It was love. The moment Paul said, 
 " I believe in love," he had put out his foot for 
 a further step downward. Hitherto, however 
 
The Apostle Paul 41 
 
 beautiful, his experience had been mainly per- 
 sonal. He had found rest to his own soul. 
 But that is not the half of the Christian life. 
 Paul's deepest Christianity was yet to come. 
 He had begun with sight ; his passage from the 
 Thessalonians to the Galatians had been a pas- 
 sage from sight to faith ; his passage from the 
 Galatians to the Corinthians is a passage from 
 faith to love. You say '-it was a very short 
 time in which to make such a transition." 
 Yes; but the transitions of God's Spirit are, 
 in their last result, almost momentary. I can 
 well-nigh hear the very hour strike in which he 
 passed over the line. The man who wrote the 
 magnificent hymn of the thirteenth chapter of 
 1st Corinthians has made a leap ; and when he 
 touches the ground it is no longer the old 
 ground, but a plane higher in God's sight, 
 because lower in the sight of man. 
 
 Can you fail to observe that from this time 
 onward the teaching of Paul takes another 
 channel? It becomes less personal, more hu- 
 manitarian. Even his view of predestination 
 is to my mind the result of his new breadth, 
 not of his old narrowness. He sees that a 
 mother's love is always predestinating love. 
 When a mother foreknows that her child is 
 
42 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 about to come into the world, even before its 
 birth, she conforms it to an image ; she figures 
 to herself what she would like it to be. That 
 is, in my opinion, the metaphor which glittered 
 before the eyes of the great Apostle when he 
 proclaimed that the All- Father had predestined 
 his children " to be conformed to the image of 
 his Son." Divine Love, foreknowing that its 
 children were about to be born, ere ever they 
 had a character, ere ever they had a being, 
 planned for them a destiny of glory, figured 
 them in the likeness of the most beautiful thing 
 it knew, and said within itself, " I baptize them 
 into the name of Jesus." Nay, was not bap- 
 tism into Christ's name itself simply the pre- 
 destination of love — the expression in the heart 
 of the Divine Parent of a great, an unquench- 
 able desire that the new convert should rise 
 to heights altogether unearthly, and attain to 
 nothing less than the image of the Son? 
 
 Paul has now reached what he himself calls 
 the glory of the cross. He had begun with 
 the crown — the sight of the Christ of resur- 
 rection. He had passed from sight to faith — 
 the vision of an ideal which was beyond him, 
 and after which he must strive. He has now 
 come from faith to love — the perception that 
 
The Apostle Paul 43 
 
 others have an ideal as well as he. Has Paul 
 now arrived at the terminus ? No. He has 
 reached the knowledge that the cross is the 
 glory of God ; but there is a step beyond even 
 that — he must '' rejoice in hope of the glory of 
 God." Faith in Christ was the parent of love, 
 because it was the belief in love ; but Paul 
 makes the further discovery that love is the 
 parent of hope. He says, in so many words, 
 that the reason why he is not ashamed to hope 
 is that the love of God is shed abroad in his 
 heart (Romans v. 5). He was of a spirit not 
 naturally sanguine ; I have heard him called a 
 pessimist. In his Epistle to the Thessalonians 
 his main hope for the world seems to have been 
 that a divine power is keeping things from 
 being worse ; and truly he was right. But 
 when the enthusiasm of the cross burst upon 
 him, hope had a deeper revelation to bring. 
 We again hear the clock strike as he passes the 
 line. He had spoken of justification by faith ; 
 he had called love " a more excellent way " ; 
 he was now to cry, "We are saved by hope."" 
 Love was the parent of hope. No doubt the 
 parent was greater than the child ; yet the child 
 was indispensable to the support of the parent. 
 And, with this latest birth in the soul of Paul, 
 
44 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 there comes a widening of his horizon. There 
 is nothing which tells such tales as a letter, 
 and often most in the things it does not say. 
 Already in the Epistle to the Romans we begin 
 to catch breezes — currents of air which apprise 
 us that there is an opening somewhere not far 
 away. As we advance beyond the boundaries 
 of that Epistle, the current freshens. He tells 
 the Philippians in express terms that the pur- 
 pose of God's heart was that every man in 
 every place should bend his knee in prayer. 
 A few miles more and we are out in the open, 
 with the gusts of the great sea around us. As 
 we pass from the coasts of Philippi we are in a 
 new element — an element of breadth, I had 
 almost said of secularism, an element which in- 
 creases in strength from the outpouring of the 
 letter to Ephesus, until those notes of pastoral 
 counsel which speak the last farewell. 
 
 What is this new element in Paul ? I have 
 called it secularism ; it would be more correct 
 to call it the extension of the sacred. Hith- 
 erto, Paul had seen in Christ merely the head 
 of a body of members. But now he began to 
 see more. Christ was the head of the Church, 
 but was he not also head of the State — of all 
 principalities and powers ? Was not this mag- 
 
The Apostle Paul 46 
 
 nificent Roman Empire, however unconsciously 
 to itself, already the kingdom of God? Was 
 not Csesar as much the servant of Christ as he 
 was, albeit he knew it not ? Was this world a 
 secular system at all ? Was the distinction be- 
 tween Church and State a real one ? would not 
 the fulness of time show that all things had 
 been " gathered together in Christ " ? As he 
 approached Rome, and as the spectacle of Roman 
 unity swam before his eyes, he asked himself if 
 Christ's kingdom would be less incorporative 
 than this kingdom of man. He asked himself if 
 this Roman unity was really the work of Csesar, 
 if it was not itself only a product of that divine 
 order which had arranged thrones and princi- 
 palities and powers. So asking, so thinking, 
 Paul stepped into the world again. He came 
 back to the haunts from which his conversion 
 had lifted him ; he claimed them for Christ. 
 He found the land of Beulah on the earthly 
 side. For the second time in his life he preached 
 the things which once had been alien to him. 
 Very beautiful to my mind is the passage, 
 Ephesians iii. 14 and 15, in which he declares 
 that the idea of family life is modelled after the 
 relationship of the Father in heaven. Beauti- 
 ful, because I think there was a time when Paul 
 
46 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 would not have said it — a time of storm and 
 stress below, of dazzling light above, when the 
 radiance of the heavenly vision had blinded 
 him to earthly ties. Beautiful, too, because it 
 is no accidental utterance. It is the keynote 
 of his latest song. If his morning carol is to 
 the Christ of the heavens, his evening lay is to 
 the Christ of the home ; if he begins with love 
 on the wing, he ends with love in the nest. 
 All his latest notes are of home. 
 
 I cannot better conclude than by placing side 
 by side Paul's earliest and latest ideals of Chris- 
 tian joy — the one from his first letter, the other 
 almost from his last. He says to the Thessa- 
 lonians, '' We shall be caught up together in the 
 clouds to meet the Lord in the air" ; he says to 
 Titus, " The grace that bringeth salvation hath 
 appeared unto all men, teaching to live soberly, 
 righteously, and godly in this present world." 
 Do I say that at the close of his pilgrimage he 
 has found his first experience to be untrue? 
 No ; rather for the first time has he discovered 
 its real value. He has found that the advan- 
 tage of going up is the new strength we get 
 for coming down. The bird that at dawn sings 
 in the uplands may be heard in the afternoon on 
 the ledge of an office wall ; but the song on the 
 
The Apostle Paul 47 
 
 office wall has been learned in the uplands. 
 Moses had the vision of Nebo before coming 
 down to the common lot of men ; but the vision 
 of Nebo helped him to come down. Paul's 
 first revelation was the sight of immortality, 
 but the sight of immortality gave value to the 
 earth ; and he who began with the vision of 
 the ascending Christ was bound sooner or later 
 to recognize the possibilities of "this present 
 world." 
 
IV 
 
 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 
 
IV 
 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 
 
 BY THE REV. MARCUS DODS, D.D. 
 
 Titus Flavius Clemens, commonly known 
 as Clement of Alexandria, may be accepted as 
 the representative of Greek Theology. In some 
 respects either Origen or Athanasius might 
 more suitably stand as its exponent, but Clem- 
 ent has the advantage of being earlier than 
 either of these great theologians, and of being 
 Origen's teacher and predecessor as head of 
 the catechetical school of Alexandria. " He 
 stands in the same relation to those that came 
 after him that Augustine sustained to the 
 Latin theology of the Middle Ages, or Luther 
 and Calvin to the later Protestantism." 
 
 Of his personal history little is known. He 
 wrote in the reign of Severus (193-211 A.D.), 
 and the probability is that he was born in 
 Athens about the middle of the second cen- 
 tury. In quest of truth he travelled in Italy, 
 51 
 
52 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Syria, and Asia Minor, until finally he " caught 
 the true Sicilian bee," Pantsenus in Alexandria. 
 In a year or two afterwards he was ordained 
 a presbyter of the Church, and succeeded Pan- 
 tsenus as Master of the Catechetical School. 
 His residence in Alexandria undoubtedly had 
 a great influence, not only on the form of his 
 writings, but on his thought, and especially on 
 his attitude towards philosophy. In this mag- 
 nificent, busy, and dissipated city, every vice 
 of heathenism and the most sumptuous and 
 seductive idolatrous worship were daily ob- 
 truded on the notice of Clement. Everything 
 that paganism had to attract, to delude, to 
 bind, was matter of familiar observation to 
 the man who was destined to become, not only 
 the most voluminous, but in many respects the 
 most sagacious and convincing, of Christian 
 apologists. 
 
 In Alexandria Clement had also opportunity 
 to acquire that learning which was essential to 
 qualify him to meet the mental condition of re- 
 ligious inquirers in the second century. It was 
 at least as important to gain to the new faith 
 the philosophers and scholars of the museum 
 as the mechanics of the docks and building- 
 yards, or the warehouse porters. His office 
 
Clement of Alexandria 53 
 
 as teacher of the Christian school exposed him 
 to the interrogation of all who had difficulties 
 about the new religion. The cavils which 
 were concocted by the wits of the museum, 
 the theories which were broached in the dining- 
 hall of the professors, would naturally find 
 their way to the ears of Clement. And so 
 he drew around the young plants which were 
 under his charge the hedge, as he calls it, of 
 a learning superior to that of the assailants. 
 Excepting Athenseus, probably no ancient writer 
 could be named who cites four hundred au- 
 thors, but a larger number than this must 
 measure the reading of Clement. This great 
 learning he used, not for display, but as a 
 missionary engine. His three great books, 
 the " Protreptikos," the " Paidagogos," and the 
 " Stromateis," written respectively for the hea- 
 then, the catechumen, and the Christian Gnos- 
 tic, all bear witness to his zeal no less than to 
 his knowledge. 
 
 In the apologetic of Clement we become 
 aware that his conciliatory attitude is the re- 
 sult not merely of geniality of disposition, but 
 of principle — the principle, to state it in his 
 own words, that " there is one river of truth, 
 but many streams fall into it on this side and 
 
54 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 on that." He believed that Philosophy had 
 been in its measure a "schoolmaster" to the 
 Greeks, as the Law had been to the Jews ; 
 and that even after the Advent it served as 
 a preparatory training which might lead men 
 to Christianity. By "philosophy," as he is 
 careful to explain, he did not mean the teach- 
 ing of any particular school, the Platonic, 
 Aristotelian, or Epicurean, but whatever had 
 been well said by any sect "which teaches 
 righteousness along with science." As Justin 
 had taught that the Logos had been the re- 
 vealer of truth to the heathen philosophers, 
 so Clement maintains that philosophy is God's 
 gift to men "for the sake of those who not 
 otherwise than by its means would abstain 
 from what is evil." 
 
 This catholic tendency which is so marked 
 a feature of the second century was no doubt 
 stimulated, if not wholly caused, by the uni- 
 versalism of the Empire. As Professor Allen 
 says, " The necessity of enforcing one com- 
 mon method of legal procedure upon a variety 
 of peoples, each with its own conception of 
 justice and of its practical administration, gave 
 rise to the comprehensive spirit of Roman law 
 and the endeavour to ground it in the nature of 
 
Clement of Alexandria 55 
 
 man. A similar necessity gave rise to similar 
 efforts in the sphere of religious thought." 
 The necessities of Clement's position also drove 
 him to adopt his liberal views and methods. 
 He expressly affirms that he felt himself im- 
 pelled to become a Greek to the Greeks, and 
 that in order to remove their difficulties he 
 must first feel them, must recognize the truth 
 they held before he could add to it, and must 
 see their error from their own point of view. 
 Never, on the other hand, does he allow it to 
 be supposed that he considers philosophy to be 
 a sufficient guide. Christ alone possesses the 
 whole truth. There is only One who can per- 
 fectly satisfy, only One who can heal, purify, 
 and restore to God. 
 
 In this teaching Clement is the type not only 
 of one of the most remarkable phases of early 
 Christianity, but he is the representative of a 
 tendency or mental attitude which reappears 
 in all ages of the history of Christendom. It 
 would appear from unmistakable signs, in our 
 own day, that the Church has not yet made 
 up its mind to adopt Clement's theory of the 
 relation of non-Christian religions and philoso- 
 phies to Christianity. The Bampton Lecturer 
 for 1894 (Mr. Illingworth), speaking of the 
 
56 Prophets of the Ohristiafi Faith 
 
 non- Christian sacred books of the world, says : 
 " With all their imperfection and manifest in- 
 feriority, there is that in them which we can 
 well believe to have been a vehicle of divine 
 teaching to the nations they addressed, and, if 
 so, to have been inspired, as their possessors 
 believed." And in confirmation of his state- 
 ment he quotes Clement, who speaks to the 
 same effect : " Perchance philosophy was given 
 to the Greeks, directly and primarily, till the 
 Lord should call the Greeks." And again, 
 '' The barbarian and Greek philosophy has 
 torn off a fragment, not from the mythology 
 of Dionysus, but from the theology of the 
 Eternal Word." Yet the man who has done 
 more for India and for Christianity in India 
 than any other during this generation has been 
 severely taken to task for pointing out that 
 Hinduism has in it elements of good and a 
 contribution to make to the Church and to 
 the world. 
 
 St. Paul's method of dealing with the heathen, 
 his addresses at Lystra and at Athens, should 
 have made it impossible to deny that God has 
 been training Gentile as well as Jew for Christ. 
 And probably the idea that heathenism and all 
 its works are wholly of the devil is pretty well 
 
Clement of Alexandria 57 
 
 obsolete. But there is still prevalent a lurking 
 fear tliat in recognizing the good that is out- 
 side Christianity the supremacy and essential 
 distinction of our religion may be lost. Instead 
 of levelling up, a process of levelling down may 
 be initiated. And even although this fear must 
 not be allowed to blind us to the education of 
 the world as a whole, and to the part played by 
 the various races in that education, yet there 
 are undoubtedly dangers to be avoided. For 
 example, we see that in Clement this approxi- 
 mation of Christianity to philosophy caused 
 him all but uniformly to present Christ as a 
 teacher. With him redemption is little more 
 than the reception of Christ's teaching, the soul 
 being purified and, in the Platonic sense, re- 
 deemed by the truth. Fate comes to be noth- 
 ing more than the mental acceptance of the 
 revelation of Christ. The saving power of 
 Christ consists in his manifestation of the 
 Father's love. The idea of a redemption by 
 expiation is quite in the background, and may 
 easily be overlooked. Christ saves by the 
 light he brings. Atonement is effected, not by 
 altering the relation of God to man, but by 
 disclosing the actual relation and attitude of 
 the Father towards his erring children. All 
 
58 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 who now hold that our redemption is accom- 
 plished by the knowledge of God which Christ 
 brings may claim Clement as their theological 
 ancestor. 
 
 The doctrines in which Clement's character- 
 istic thinking most conspicuously emerges are 
 his teaching about God, man, punishment, and 
 the higher or Gnostic life. In his doctrine of 
 God Clement followed the teaching of his phil- 
 osophical progenitors, Plato and Philo. And, 
 indeed, the whole trend of belief in the second 
 century was towards the transcendence of God. 
 The impossibility of his holding any direct 
 living relationship with the world was freely 
 taught by the Gnostics. And, in opposing 
 Gnosticism, Clement did not repudiate the idea 
 which lay at its root, although he evaded its 
 consequences. With him God is the Absolute, 
 the Monad. You cannot apply to Him the 
 terms genus, difference, species, atom, number, 
 accident, subject, whole, part, figure ; nor can 
 any name be properly or essentially given Him. 
 But while thus exhausting language to empha- 
 size the remoteness and incomprehensibility of 
 God, Clement yet believed in his immanence. 
 All things and persons are penetrated by the 
 Divine Logos, the Son who is the consciousness 
 
Clement of Alexandria 59 
 
 of the Father. Through the Logos God has 
 dwelt with men, has guided and educated the 
 race, has been, in all ages and races, anticipat- 
 ing the Incarnation. 
 
 The Gnostics believed in a God who was 
 good but not just. Accordingly Clement de- 
 votes a part of his "Paidagogos" to demonstrate 
 that goodness and justice are not incompatible. 
 " The justice of God is good, and his goodness 
 just." And, hence, instead of holding with the 
 Gnostics that punishment was the work of a 
 subordinate and evil God, Clement holds that 
 all punishment is remedial and for the sake of 
 the punished. In this also he followed Plato, 
 but, as Dr. Bigg has clearly shown, unad- 
 visedly; for, whereas Plato held that sin is the 
 result of ignorance and is therefore a disease, 
 Clement held that sin is the product of will. 
 If sin is a disease, punishment may be remedial. 
 But if sin is, as the Alexandrines held it to be, 
 rebellion against God and against Law, the 
 case is altered. *' Punishment is the safeguard 
 of Law, that is to say, of the unity, life, and 
 welfare of the whole, and of the individual in 
 and through the whole. It does not aim at 
 amendment, but at the maintenance of that 
 Law, which alone can amend." On Clement's 
 
60 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 theory of punishment, also, it is difficult to find 
 the full significance of the death of Christ, or 
 even to perceive its necessity. 
 
 In the characteristics of Clement's theology 
 now indicated many Christians of our own time 
 will find their prototype and legitimization, but 
 it will be less obvious where contemporary 
 analogies are to be found for the teaching 
 which was most peculiar to him, his inculcation 
 of a lower and higher grade of Christian life. 
 No doubt we everywhere find that practically 
 Christians are divided into those who take 
 their Christianity seriously and those who do 
 not, and we also find some popular forms of 
 teaching which might be construed into a belief 
 that there are lesser and greater mysteries into 
 which Christians can be initiated. But in 
 Clement we find the distinction between the 
 ordinary believer and the Gnostic or advanced 
 Christian elaborated and formulated. He be- 
 lieves the distinction to be justified by St. 
 Paul's distinction between the babes who re- 
 quire to be fed with milk and the adult or 
 spiritual who can use solid food. The Gnostic 
 is distinguished from the common believer by 
 many characteristics ; he acts from the prin- 
 ciple of love, the common believer from fear or 
 
Clement of Alexandria 61 
 
 hope. The perfection of the former consists in 
 doing good, of the latter in abstinence from 
 evil. The Gnostic prays only in thought ; his 
 excellence consists, not in controlling his de- 
 sires and wishes and passions, but in not having 
 them ; in him the struggle between inclination 
 and the sense of duty is past. The Gnostic is 
 a king ; nay, he becomes a god. His appella- 
 tion of "Gnostic" is justified by Clement's 
 theory that "knowledge is superior to faith," 
 that " through knowledge faith is perfected, as 
 through it alone the believer becomes perfect." 
 " Faith is a compendious knowledge of things 
 which are of urgent necessity; knowledge, a 
 firm and valid demonstration of things received 
 through faith." The final state of the Gnostic 
 is perpetual contemplation of God. "The 
 Gnostic soul, in the grandeur of contemplation, 
 embraces not the divine in a mirror or through 
 a glass, but feasts eternally upon the vision in 
 all its clearness — that vision with which the 
 soul, smitten with boundless love, can never be 
 satiated — and enjoys inexhaustible gladness 
 for endless ages, honoured by a permanent con- 
 tinuance in all excellence." 
 
 Here, it will be obvious, we have a strange 
 combination of Paulinism, Gnosticism, Mysti- 
 
62 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 cism, and Stoicism. The relief and quickening 
 which Stoicism brought to many of the truest 
 souls in the Roman world proves that it does, 
 in a large if not in a perfect measure, satisfy 
 human instincts and cravings. Mysticism bap- 
 tizes it without enforcing that element in Chris- 
 tianity which sanctifies work and commonplace 
 people. That a state of absolute superiority 
 to pleasure and pain can be reached, that this 
 condition of ''apathy" can be attained by the 
 contemplation of God, and that this is the 
 perfect bliss and eternal state of the soul — 
 these are the main contentions of Mysticism. 
 The superiority of the Gnostic to the common 
 believer is the very point which Bossuet saw to 
 be the foundation of all Madame Guyon's error. 
 " The doctrines which you advance, Madame, 
 involve the fact of an inward experience above 
 the common experience of Christians." But 
 anything which even seems to throw a slight 
 on the Christianity of the uneducated and toil- 
 ing millions, or of the men who spend them- 
 selves in active efforts for the promotion of 
 Christ's kingdom, is earnestly to be depre- 
 cated. Indeed, we have a personal interest in 
 maintaining the sufficiency of the lower Chris- 
 tian life ; for, as Dr. Bigg appositely remarks : 
 
Clement of Alexandria 63 
 
 " To most of us probably Miss Rossetti's words 
 go home : 
 
 " We are of those who tremble at Thy Word, 
 
 Who faltering walk in darkness towards our | 
 
 close ! 
 
 Of mortal life, by terrors curbed and spurred — ! 
 
 We are of those. I 
 
 1 
 
 "Not ours the heart Thy loftiest love hath stirred, j 
 
 Not such as we Thy lily and Thy rose, 
 
 Yet, Hope of those who hope with hope deferred — i 
 
 We are of those." ! 
 
V 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE AS A PROPHET 
 
V 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE AS A PROPHET 
 
 BY THE REV. ARTHUR C. MCGIFFERT, D.D., 
 Profensor of Church History in Union Theological Seminary. 
 
 Every true prophet looks both forward and 
 backward — is at once parent of the future and 
 child of the past. Only as his life draws its 
 nourishment from the world in which he lives, 
 with all its heritage of bygone ages, can he 
 stamp himself upon his own generation and 
 mould the life of generations yet to come. Not 
 one in the world's long line of " speakers for 
 God " whose divine message has not borne the 
 imprint of earthly traditions and conditions — 
 often of the organs at whose reformation or 
 eradication that message was aimed! Indeed, 
 the influence of every such prophet has been 
 measured always, not alone by the divine truth 
 which he has lived and spoken, but also by the 
 degree to which the thought and feeling of his 
 fellows have found utterance in him. He has 
 67 
 
68 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 spoken, not simply to his age, but for it, if he 
 has spoken with power and effect. It should, 
 therefore, not cause surprise if in the thinking 
 and teaching of Augustine, who for fourteen 
 centuries has influenced where he has not dom- 
 inated the thought of Western Christendom, 
 there should voice themselves along with his 
 own peculiar message the prevailing tendencies 
 of his time. It is hardly just to hold him 
 responsible for all that he received from his 
 age as well as for all that he gave it, and it 
 is curiously unhistoric to overlook, as is often 
 done, that which was truly his own, and to 
 stamp with his name that alone which was the 
 common property of his day and generation. 
 
 Augustine was born and bred in the midst 
 of an environment distinctly Roman in its 
 character, and he knew Christianity before his 
 conversion chiefly, if not solely, in that pecu- 
 liarly Latin form which it had acquired already 
 more than a century before, and which is no- 
 where more clearly portrayed than in the 
 writings of his own countrymen, the lawyer 
 Tertullian and the ecclesiastic Cyprian. In that 
 Christianity the most characteristic feature was 
 the dominance of legalism. The Gospel was 
 regarded as a law or a collection of laws, by 
 
St. Augustine as a Prophet 69 
 
 the observance of which a man could gain 
 eternal life, but the disregard of which entailed 
 eternal condemnation. God was conceived 
 commonly under the aspect of Lawgiver and 
 Judge, whose chief function was to reward men 
 for obeying and to punish them for disobeying 
 his commands. Faith still had a place as the 
 initial act of the Christian life, and God's grace 
 was still exercised through the "sacrament of 
 regeneration " for the remission of sins com- 
 mitted before baptism ; but for the Christian 
 who sinned after receiving the cleansing rite 
 there was nothing to depend upon but his own 
 endeavours, divided between the attempt to 
 obey and the effort to atone by works of pen- 
 ance for his daily acts of disobedience. The 
 Christian life had thus become largely a mere 
 matter of calculation. Not the overflow of the 
 heart in love and gratitude to God ; not the 
 instinctive striving of the soul after higher and 
 better things for their own sake ; but the pay- 
 ment of enough, and no more than enough, to 
 insure escape from death and the enjoyment of 
 the promised reward. 
 
 Naturally associated with such a conception of 
 the Christian life was the tendency to push God 
 ever further and further away — to lose all sense 
 
70 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 of communion with him — to regard him as a 
 tyrant to be feared and appeased rather than as 
 a Father to be loved. It would carry us too far 
 afield to trace the rise and development of this 
 conception of God in Christian thought, but the 
 resemblance between it and the God idea in 
 Latin paganism is striking, and the predilec- 
 tion for it of the native Roman mind is unmis- 
 takable. 
 
 The same legalistic tendency which operated 
 thus to degrade the Christian life and the 
 Christian's God resulted also in the transfor- 
 mation of the primitive Christian brotherhood 
 into the Holy Catholic Church of the third and 
 following centuries. That which had been 
 originally a mere communion of saints, bound 
 together by a common faith and a common 
 hope, had become already at an early day a 
 great and thoroughly organized institution with 
 its apostolic episcopate and its clerical sacerdo- 
 talism — an institution claiming to be the sole 
 representative of divine authority, rebellion 
 against which meant rebellion against God 
 himself, and claiming to be the sole channel of 
 divine grace, outside whose pale salvation was 
 impossible. It was to such a Christianity, em- 
 bodied in such a Church, that Augustine was 
 
St. Augustine as a Prophet 72 
 
 converted, under the preaching of the great 
 Bishop Ambrose of Milan, and it is in the light 
 of this environment that his Christian life and 
 teaching must be studied. That he was af- 
 fected by it and that much of his thinking 
 bears its impress, that he showed himself, in- 
 deed, in his controversies with heretics and 
 schismatics, a devout believer not only in the 
 authority of the Church and in its right to 
 demand implicit obedience both in thought and 
 deed, but also in its exclusive privilege to dis- 
 pense the saving grace of God, cannot be 
 denied ; and that he helped thereby to fasten 
 upon the neck of Western Christendom the 
 yoke of ecclesiasticism and sacramentarianism 
 is doubtless true, but it is not this side of his 
 teaching that is truly characteristic of him. It 
 is not in what he received from his age, but in 
 what he gave it, that his real significance lies. 
 He had been no prophet had he simply voiced 
 the thinking of his day. It was because he 
 had another message to utter — a message 
 received direct from God — that his name still 
 lives beside the names of Paul and Luther. 
 
 " Thou mo vest us to delight in praising 
 Thee ; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, 
 and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee." 
 
72 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 "I could not exist at all, O my God, unless 
 Thou wert in me. Or should I not rather say 
 that I could not exist unless I were in Thee, 
 from whom are all things, by whom are all 
 things, in whom are all things ? " " O Thou 
 strength of my soul, enter into it and prepare 
 it for Thyself, that Thou mayst have and hold 
 it without spot or wrinkle." "I call Thee into 
 my soul, which, by the desire that Thou inspir- 
 est in it. Thou preparest for Thy reception." 
 "Thou, Lord, hast blotted out all my evil 
 deserts that Thou mightst not repay into my 
 hands wherewith I have fallen from Thee, 
 and Thou hast anticipated all my good de- 
 serts that Thou mightst repay into Thy hands 
 wherewith Thou madest me." "I can do all 
 things through Him which strengtheneth me. 
 Strengthen Thou me that I may be able. Give 
 what Thou commandest, and command what 
 Thou wilt." " Another have I heard entreat- 
 ing that he might receive ... by which it 
 appeareth, O my holy God, that Thou givest 
 when that Thou commandest to be done is 
 done." 
 
 It is in such utterances as these, selected 
 almost at random from his " Confessions," that 
 the true Augustine speaks. His response to 
 
St. Augustine as a Prophet 73 
 
 his contemporaries' low and unchristian con- 
 ception of God is the abiding love of God, 
 which leads Him to give all to man, who de- 
 serves nothing ; the constant nearness of God, 
 which makes intimate communion with Him 
 always a possibility ; the fatherhood of God, 
 which makes an unbroken fellowship with Him 
 the supreme delight of the soul. His response 
 to his contemporaries' commercial notions of 
 the Christian life is the allness of God and the 
 nothingness of man ; the assertion that all that 
 is good comes from God, and God alone ; that 
 man is good only in so far as he depends upon 
 God and cleaves to Him ; that no man can put 
 God in his debt or establish a claim of merit 
 over against Him, for there is no merit except 
 God's merit, and to be independent of God is 
 to be only evil. For an explanation of Augus- 
 tine's thought of God and of man's relation to 
 Him we may look in the Psalms and in the 
 Epistles of Paul, which were his very meat and 
 drink, and which he understood and appreciated 
 as no one else in the ancient Church ; or we 
 may look in Neo-Platonism, which profoundly 
 influenced him at a critical period in his career, 
 and which constituted for him a bridge from 
 scepticism to the Catholic faith. With its con- 
 
74 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 ceptioii of Deity as the only true existence, and 
 of absorption in the divine as the only true 
 good, it doubtless did much to mould his 
 thought. But though we may acknowledge 
 Augustine's indebtedness to these and other 
 influences, we must recognize the fact that his 
 theology, like his piety, finds his ultimate 
 ground only in his profound religious nature 
 and in his vivid experience. His was a nature 
 to which the divine was as necessary as the air 
 he breathed, a nature open on its upward side 
 towards the infinities, and finding no satisfac- 
 tion in aught that failed to breathe their inspir- 
 ation. Even had he never known Christianity 
 he must have sought and remained unsatisfied 
 until he found Deity, for he was impelled God- 
 ward by the deepest craving of his soul. 
 '' Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart 
 is restless till it rests in Thee," is the cry, not 
 alone of Augustine the Christian, but of Au- 
 gustine the man, and Christianity was what it 
 was to him, not, as to so many others, because 
 it promised him escape from punishment or the 
 enjoyment of reward, but because it opened 
 to him a vision of the God he had been seek- 
 ing, because speaking in and through it he 
 heard and recognized God's voice. He was the 
 
St. Augustine as a Prophet 75 
 
 prophet, not of a distant God, but of a God 
 within man ; not of a God who has withdrawn 
 and hidden himself from his creatures, but of a 
 God who still reveals himself to those who will 
 but open their eyes and look upon him. He 
 was the prophet of such a God, and he prophe- 
 sied whereof he knew. He spoke to his fellows 
 out of the fulness of a God-knowledge gained 
 by direct and intimate communion with Him. 
 He bore witness to what he had himself seen in 
 his immediate visions of the Father's face. 
 The secret of his marvellous influence over his 
 own and subsequent generations lies largely in 
 this very fact, that he prophesied, not of what 
 he had heard or thought, but of what he had 
 experienced — that he uttered not merely his 
 ideas, but himself. Divine truth was incor- 
 porated into his life before it found its way 
 to his lips ; he lived his theology before he 
 taught it. 
 
 The dogma of original sin, for instance, 
 which Augustine asserted so strenuously in 
 his controversy with the Pelagians, and wdiich 
 has brought such widespread disrepute upon 
 him, was no scholastic or artificial thing ; it 
 was in the truest sense the fruit of his own 
 experience ; nor was it out of line with his 
 
76 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 highest thought of God and man. The more 
 vividly conscious he was of the presence of 
 the divine, the more certain did he become of 
 the essential kinship between God and man — 
 a kinship which made necessary some thorough- 
 going explanation of humanity's all-too-patent 
 lack of present oneness with Deity, in disposi- 
 tion and in sympathy. His insistence upon 
 the dogma bears witness to the strength of 
 his conviction that man Avas made for God 
 and finds his true life only in Him, and to 
 the keenness of his experience of the empty 
 and unsatisfying character of man's ordinary 
 life, compared with the possibilities of a life 
 of unbroken converse with the divine. And 
 so the doctrine of unconditional predestination, 
 upon which he also laid such earnest stress, 
 rooted itself, not in any artificial conception 
 of God and of man's relation to him, but in 
 the experimental knowledge that God alone is 
 good and the source of good, and that there 
 is no such thing as independent, self-originated 
 human merit. However harshly this truth 
 may have found expression in the controver- 
 sies in which Augustine was engaged — how- 
 ever narrowly and artificially it may have been 
 interpreted at times by Augustine himself — 
 
St. Augustine as a Prophet 77 
 
 however unwarrantably it may have been made 
 to justify extreme and erroneous conceptions of 
 man and of God's dealings with him, the utter- 
 ance of such a truth must have stamped Augus- 
 tine as a true prophet of God in whatever age 
 and under whatever circumstances he had 
 spoken. The utterance of it in an age per- 
 meated with the belief that man and God 
 have nothing in common, and that God blesses 
 only the man whose independent, self-origi- 
 nated merit makes him rightfully God's cred- 
 itor, stamps him as one of the very greatest of 
 all God's prophets. His was indeed the voice 
 of one crying in the wilderness — proclaiming 
 to his fellows the message which Christ him- 
 self had uttered when he revealed God in 
 human form, and thus disclosed the true 
 source of all that is truly good in man. 
 
 Augustine has often been accused of giving 
 currency, especially through liis " Confessions," 
 to an unhealthful mysticism which inevitably 
 leads to quietism and saps the energy of the 
 Christian life. There was undoubtedly an 
 element of mysticism in Augustine's piety — 
 as in that of all the world's great religious 
 geniuses — but his mysticism was not that 
 of the East, and the pantheistic mysticism 
 
78 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 which was so widespread in the West during 
 the later Middle Ages had its progenitor not 
 in Augustine but in the Neo-Platonism of 
 Pseudo-Dionysius. Genuine Latin that he 
 was, Augustine dealt in terms of personality 
 rather than in terms of nature, and it was 
 not of a physical union between Deity and 
 humanity that he thought, but of a personal 
 union between God and man. It is a fact of 
 great significance that it was not through his 
 study of the universe, but through his study 
 of himself, that his eyes were at length opened 
 to the God he had so long been seeking. " God 
 and the soul — that is what I desire to know," 
 he says in his Soliloquies. " Nothing more ? 
 nothing whatever." 
 
 He was a psychologist before he was a theo- 
 logian, and his apprehension of his own indi- 
 viduality was far too vivid to permit him to 
 content himself in genuine mystic fashion with 
 the idea of a mere absorption in Deity as the 
 end of existence, while his acquaintance with 
 the inmost workings of his own soul was 
 too thoroughgoing for him to conceive of any 
 union between God and man which was not 
 conditioned primarily upon a conscious unity 
 of will and purpose. And so he found, not 
 
St. Aui/ustine as a Prophet 79 
 
 in mere contact of nature with nature, whether 
 through mystic contemplation or through par- 
 ticipation in the sacrament of the body and 
 blood of incarnate Deity, but in the love of 
 the human heart for God, the true secret of 
 oneness with Him. This was the Christianity 
 which he preached : the heart of man respond- 
 ing to the heart of God — love answering love 
 — self lost, not in the contemplation of Deity, 
 but in devotion to Him. Truly, motive power 
 enough in such teaching to transform the life 
 of Christendom! 
 
 Augustine did not live in vain. It is true 
 that many of the traditional misconceptions 
 which his higher views should have led him 
 to repudiate find expression in his writings, 
 and that much that is artificial and unhealth- 
 ful in Christianity has in his teaching a war- 
 rant for its existence ; but, in spite of the fact 
 that he was a child of his age and was unable 
 to free himself completely from its bondage, he 
 gave to those who came after him a conviction 
 of the abiding grace of God and of man's con- 
 stant dependence upon him which had in it the 
 seeds of better things to come. This very con- 
 viction might, as it did in subsequent genera- 
 tions, bind the yoke of ecclesiasticism even 
 
80 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 more tightly upon the neck of Christendom by 
 magnifying the need of that grace which the 
 Church alone could dispense ; but, in spite of 
 the evil consequences which flowed from such a 
 tendency, Augustine's conception of God was 
 and remained a blessing. God a Father in- 
 stead of a mere Avenger, even if the Father 
 only of those within the Catholic Church ; 
 God near instead of far, even if near only in 
 the sacraments : this was no small gain ; and 
 there came a time when the great truth uttered 
 by Augustine found a clearer-eyed and surer- 
 voiced champion in Augustine's greater disciple, 
 Luther. Their Gospel was one, but eleven cen- 
 turies of ecclesiasticism and sacramentarianism 
 had taught the later prophet what the earlier 
 had not learned. The evangelicism of the 
 great Reformation of the sixteenth century 
 was Augustine's, its Protestantism was Lu- 
 ther's own. 
 
VI 
 
 JOHN WYCLIFFE 
 
 •\ 
 
VI 
 
 JOHN WYCLIFFE 
 
 BY THE VERY REV. W. H. FREMANTLE, D.D. 
 
 Wycliffe was a prophet. We must not 
 limit the spirit of prophecy to the Old Testa- 
 ment. Not only do we read of prophets in 
 New Testament times at Antioch (Acts xiii. 
 1) and Corinth (1 Cor. xii. 28), but also in 
 the ancient writing called the " Didache " and 
 in the hymn "Te Deum." Why should we 
 confine prophecy to those first Christian ages ? 
 On the tomb of Luther the inscription rightly 
 stands, " Propheta Germanise." 
 
 The special character of the prophet is that 
 of one who speaks for God ; and of one who 
 does this, not as a scribe who reads from a 
 book, nor as an ordinary pastor who makes use 
 of all the means at hand to influence men, but 
 as one in direct communion with the Unseen. 
 And, further, the prophet's message is always 
 one of Righteousness. He disentangles God's 
 righteousness from the wrappings of system, 
 83 
 
84 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 and makes it stand out bright and burning 
 before the eyes of men. 
 
 But there are differences in the form which 
 the message takes, and the medium through 
 which it operates. Carlyle presents to us the 
 Hero in different guises — as Priest, as States- 
 man, as Man of Letters. We may do the same 
 with the Prophets. In Wycliffe we may see 
 the Prophet as Schoolman. The Schoolmen, 
 too, had their different titles. Aquinas was 
 the Angelic, Bonaventura the Seraphic, Ock- 
 ham the Invincible or the Singular. Wycliffe 
 was the Evangelical Doctor. The Evangelical 
 Righteousness which filled his soul is the key 
 to all his thought and teaching. It led him, 
 first, to maintain the Scriptures as supreme 
 above traditions, Fathers, councils. Papal de- 
 crees ; secondly, to uphold the rights of the 
 nation, as the organ of public righteousness, 
 against the Pope and the clergy ; thirdly, 
 to insist on the paramount importance of the 
 pastoral office over the work of the monastic 
 orders ; and, lastly, to rehandle the doctrine 
 of the Church in the light of Scripture and of 
 sound reason. All this makes him to be justly 
 esteemed as the pioneer, or Morning Star, of 
 the Reformation. 
 
John Wycliffe 85 
 
 Wycliffe was born about 1320, at Spresswell, 
 near Old Richmond on the Tees, in the north 
 of Yorkshire, close to the village of Wycliffe, 
 from which his family took its name. But, 
 like other prophets, he was without honour in 
 his o^vn house ; his family were, and remained, 
 strong Papists. Of his early training we know 
 nothing ; he probably went to Oxford about 
 the age of fifteen, and became a scholar and 
 afterwards a Fellow of Balliol College. This 
 College, which had been founded by John of 
 Balliol in 1262 and consolidated by his widow 
 Dervorquilla in 1282, was connected with 
 Wycliffe's country through the endowments 
 which they had given it (and which it still 
 possesses) at Bernard Castle on the Tees, and 
 was the rallying-place for the " Boreales " or 
 Northern men, as Merton College was for the 
 Southerners. 
 
 The colleges at Oxford were at first little 
 more than lodging-houses where poor scholars 
 were provided for while they were reading for 
 the higher degrees. When Wycliffe joined 
 the University, there were, in the College 
 which has attained in our day a leading 
 academical and social position, twenty-two 
 Fellows, with a weekly allowance of eight 
 
86 Prophets of the Ohristiafi Faith 
 
 farthings apiece for maintenance ; they were 
 bound to resign when they took the degree of 
 Master of Arts, and their Master was elected 
 from among themselves. Their position was 
 improved in 1341 by the benefactions of Sir 
 William Felton and Sir Philip Somerville, 
 through which their allowance was increased 
 to twelve farthings a week (equal to about 
 five shillings now), with clothing ; six Theo- 
 logical Fellowships were instituted ; and the 
 Fellows were allowed to remain till they 
 should attain a sufficient living from the 
 Church. Since the rule still remained that 
 the Master must be elected from among the 
 Fellows, it is all but certain that Wy cliff e 
 held one of these Fellowships till he was made 
 Master, about the year 1358. 
 
 In 1361 Wycliffe was appointed Rector of 
 Fillingham, in Norfolk ; in 1369 he changed 
 this benefice for that of Ludgershall, in Bucks, 
 some ten miles from Oxford ; and in 1374 he 
 was appointed by the Crown to be Rector of 
 Lutterworth, which position he held till his 
 death in 1384. At the first of these parishes 
 he seems to have seldom resided ; the leave of 
 absence which he craved in 1368 from the 
 Bishop of Norwich in a still extant petition, 
 
John Wycliffe 87 
 
 in order that he might devote himself to study 
 at Oxford, probably denotes his usual practice, 
 a practice common in that and many other 
 times ; at Ludgershall, as being nearer to 
 Oxford, he was probably more constantly 
 resident, and at Lutterworth he fully dis- 
 charged the pastoral duties. His increased 
 sense of responsibility and of the importance 
 of the pastoral office no doubt made him 
 unwilling to hold the cure of souls as a mere 
 benefice. Yet he was often in Oxford, even 
 till his last years ; he appears to have had 
 some connection with Queen's College, where 
 his name occurs as occupying a room. 
 
 His studies began with what was called the 
 Trivium — Grammar, Dialectics, and Rhetoric ; 
 and the Quadrivium — Arithmetic, Geometry, 
 Astronomy, and Music. But there is evi- 
 dence that he studied with enthusiasm Natural 
 Science and Natural History ; and he became 
 thoroughly versed in legal studies, not only in 
 the Canon and Civil Law, to which he would 
 necessarily be led by theology and Church 
 history, but also the laws of England. Oxford 
 was at that time the most celebrated university 
 in Europe. It had produced within one hun- 
 dred years Roger Bacon, the physicist (the 
 
88 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Doctor Mirabilis, d. 1292) ; Grostete, the just 
 and patriotic Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253) ; 
 Duns Scotus, the Realist (d. 1308) ; William 
 of Ockham, the Nominalist (d. 1347) ; Rich- 
 ard Fitzralph, the opponent of the Mendicant 
 Orders (Archbishop of Armagh, 1347) ; and 
 Thomas Bradwardine, the Doctor Profundus, 
 the Predestinarian (d. as Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury, 1349). Of each of these we may- 
 trace the influence in Wycliffe's writings. 
 Yet he stands forth as entirely original. In 
 answer to one who accuses him of taking his 
 opinions from Ockham, he says : " My convic- 
 tions owe their origin neither to him nor to me, 
 but are irrefragably established by Holy Script- 
 ure." He was recognized by all his contem- 
 poraries at Oxford as the first man among them 
 in knowledge and in dialectical skill. His 
 diligence, his resource in argument, his biting 
 wit, his wealth of illustration, all contributed 
 to this ; but, far more than all, his force of 
 character and deep conviction, his genuine and 
 humble piety, and his entire reliance on the 
 Scriptures. He is never the mere apologist or 
 argumentative fencer, but a preacher of right- 
 eousness. In his last complaint to the Parlia- 
 ment (1382) he does not take up a position of 
 
John Wycliffe 89 
 
 self-defence, but boldly demands that, in spite 
 of Pope and bishops, free course should be 
 allowed to the preaching of the true doctrine 
 of the Sacraments. 
 
 The time was one of great unsettlement, 
 such as needs a strong man. The English 
 nation was all on fire with the long war with 
 France, at one moment drunk with prosperity, 
 at another dejected by the loss of all its great- 
 ness ; the Black Death (1348) stalked across 
 Europe and mowed down half the inhabitants 
 of England, producing the usual results of 
 pestilence — panic, recklessness, a dislocation 
 of human relations, and begetting wild hopes 
 by the sudden rise of wages and of prices 
 through the paucity of labourers. The system 
 of the Middle Ages was coming to an end ; 
 the Popes had left Rome for Avignon (1305), 
 and their return to Rome in 1376 produced the 
 great schism which shook men's allegiance. 
 Intellectually, also, the world was changing. 
 Scholasticism was waning, the Renaissance 
 was dawning with Petrarch and Boccaccio. 
 And there was an uprising of the common 
 people, not merely to get rid of serfdom, as 
 under Wat Tyler and John Ball in 1381, but 
 to gain knowledge, as is witnessed by the poem 
 
90 Prophets of tlie Christian Faith 
 
 of "Piers Plowman," in which Truth reveals 
 herself, not to the lord or the ecclesiastic, but 
 to the peasant. Till this time Latin had been 
 the language of the scholar, the divine, and the 
 lawyer, as French had been that of the court ; 
 but now Wycliffe in his Bible and his later 
 works, Langland in his popular poem, and the 
 courtly Chaucer in his Tales, laid the founda- 
 tions of English literature. This in Wycliffe's 
 case was not so much a literary change as an 
 appeal to the popular heart, grounded on the 
 noble belief that simple men are capable of 
 developing the highest powers : " One simple 
 man," he says, "if the grace of Christ be in 
 him, is more profitable to the Church than 
 many graduates, since he sows Christ's law 
 humbly and abundantly by work as well as 
 by word." 
 
 The change just noticed, the appeal of the 
 scholastic divine to the people, is a genuine 
 product of Christian thought. The Schoolmen 
 had many authorities to which they appealed 
 with equal confidence — the Scriptures, the 
 Fathers, Aristotle, the decrees of Popes and 
 Councils. Gradually but surely Wycliffe raises 
 the Scriptures above the rest, and places them 
 on a pedestal where their unique value is per- 
 
John WycUffe 91 
 
 ceived. And, as time goes on, and he is met 
 by obduracy on the part of those in high place, 
 he is convinced that it is not learning but 
 spiritual enlightenment which enables men to 
 apprehend truth, and he turns to the people ; 
 the Scriptures must be given to them in their 
 own tongue, and must be set forth by plain men 
 in plain words. *' If you mix too many flowers 
 with the seed," he says, " it will not take root.'' 
 This led first to the formation of his own philo- 
 sophical views on a directly Scriptural basis, 
 and valuing the simple teaching of Christ and 
 the Apostles above all the subtleties of the 
 schools ; then to the translation of the Bible 
 into English, then to the writing of English 
 sermons and tracts, and to the training of a 
 body of Poor Priests, who, like the Franciscans 
 in a former and the Wesleyans in a later cen- 
 tury, went to and fro among the people, bring- 
 ing the simple elements of divine truth into 
 their hearts and their homes. 
 
 The righteousness of which Wycliffe was the 
 prophet had to be carried into public life ; he 
 became a legist and a statesman. It is prob- 
 able that he sat in Parliament, not only in the 
 ''Good Parliament" of 1376, when the Black 
 Prince rose from his death-bed to aid the cause 
 
92 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 of moral reform in court and council, but also 
 in 1366, when the question of tribute paid to 
 the Pope was discussed with great vehemence. 
 It is known that six Masters of Arts were sum- 
 moned by the King to that Parliament, and 
 that Wycliffe speaks of himself as " the King's 
 own clerk " ; that he gives a long account of 
 the speeches of seven Lords in the debate ; and 
 that he reports certain words of the Bishop of 
 Rochester as addressed to him " in the public 
 sitting of Parliament." The tribute of 1000 
 marks a year had been imposed on King John 
 by Innocent III. as the price of the restoration 
 of the kingdom and the acknowledgment that 
 the Pope was overlord of England. It had 
 never been paid willingly, and for thirty-three 
 years had not been paid at all; the Pope de- 
 manded payment with arrears. And this claim 
 was connected with the numerous exactions of 
 the Papacy, such as that of the first year's in- 
 come of all benefices. Arnald, the Pope's 
 treasurer, had an office in London, at which 
 these dues or exactions were paid. In the pro- 
 cess of the dispute, which lasted many years, 
 it was shown that the Pope (and a French 
 Pope living at Avignon) habitually appointed 
 to English church offices favourites of his own 
 
John Wycliffe 93 
 
 who never set foot in the realm, and that the 
 revenues going out of England to the Pope 
 were four times as large as those paid to the 
 King. AVycliffe wrote a tract on the oath of 
 Arnald, taken on his appointment, in which he 
 swore that he would do nothing contrary to 
 the interests of the realm, that he would give 
 good advice to the King, and that he would 
 conform to the laws of England. In every 
 particular, as Wycliffe shows, this oath had 
 been violated; the pecuniary interests of the 
 Pope had been made to override all law and 
 justice. The clergy stood by the Pope ; but 
 the laity were grateful to a theologian who 
 could vindicate the cause of England against 
 the rapacity of foreigners which was cloaked 
 with holy sanctions. The court and the people 
 stood by him, with hardly an exception, to the 
 end. 
 
 It was not as a partisan that Wycliffe took 
 this course, but from a profound sense of jus- 
 tice. Righteousness was more to him than 
 clerical interests. And this led him further. 
 He was sent on an embassy to Bruges in 1374 
 to treat with the envoys of the Pope on the 
 questions just mentioned ; and at the same 
 time an embassy under John of Gaunt, Duke 
 
94 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 of Lancaster, was sent to Bruges to make peace 
 with France. Both embassies proved futile ; 
 but the occasion had three important conse- 
 quences for Wycliffe. First, it made him more 
 fully acquainted with the duplicity of the Pope 
 and of the English clergy who were under 
 his influence ; secondly, it commended him to 
 Lancaster, who ever afterwards stood by him ; 
 and, thirdly, it placed him on an eminence 
 as a patriot when the refusal of the Pope 
 to do justice was debated next year in Par- 
 liament. 
 
 But Wycliffe was led much further. He 
 saw that the clergy must be brought under the 
 national law. He maintained that the nation 
 had the right, not merely of taxing them (for 
 hitherto they had been exempt), but of depriv- 
 ing them of their estates if this were expedient 
 for the good of the country and of religion. 
 And he came more and more to the conviction 
 that the possession of land, with the feudal posi- 
 tion which it implied, was prejudicial to both 
 Church and realm. He even wrote to the Pope 
 exhorting him to disembarrass himself of his 
 temporal sovereignty as an example to the 
 clergy throughout Christendom. The require- 
 ments and laws of the country, not the hierar- 
 
John WycUffe 95 
 
 chical position of the clergy, must regulate 
 public policy if righteousness was to prevail. 
 To these victories he gave systematic expres- 
 sion in his great work " De Dominio." God is 
 the righteous ruler to whom all sovereignty 
 belongs, but he has given parts of it, as a stew- 
 ardship, to those who rule under Him, to the 
 Pope and clergy, to the king and magistrates, 
 and to each believer according to his position. 
 Each of these, as holding under Him (for the 
 feudal idea is still dominant), so far as he is 
 faithful to the great Overlord, is supreme in 
 his own sphere. Thus, in contradistinction 
 to the Papal theory (constantly set forth by 
 the image of the plurality of the keys or the 
 two swords in Peter's hands) that the Pope is 
 supreme over all departments of life, Wycliffe 
 asserts the sacredness of the human conscience 
 and human relations in themselves, and their 
 immunity from Papal interference. His more 
 popular tract '' On the Six Yokes " — that is, the 
 social relations which are binding on us all — 
 is an anticipation of William Tyndale's " Obedi- 
 ence of a Christian Man." The clergy are to 
 minister faithfully and in subordination to the 
 Scriptures, their faithfulness being judged of 
 by the nation to which they minister ; that is 
 
96 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 their sphere; but in all other spheres the ruler, 
 be he king or father or master, or simple indi- 
 vidual, is responsible to God alone. The natu- 
 ral law of human society is the law of God's 
 righteousness. 
 
 This sense of the need of righteousness in all 
 departments of life led Wycliffe, in the next 
 place, to recognize the paramount value of the 
 pastoral office above all parts of the Church 
 system. It led him in his old age to leave the 
 University, its philosophy and its disputations, 
 the scenes of his intellectual triumphs, for a 
 country parish; to esteem the effort to raise 
 the common life by pastoral intercourse of more 
 importance than the solitary and unearthly 
 piety aimed at in monasteries and colleges, and 
 to bend all his energies to the translation of the 
 Bible, the issuing of plain English tracts and 
 sermons, and the training of his Poor Priests. 
 
 We may best view the country parson of 
 those days through the description of him given 
 by Chaucer, who is supposed to have had 
 Wycliffe as the model for his picture : " He 
 was a learned man, a clerk, . . . preaching 
 Christ's Gospel truely, wondrous diligent, 
 patient in times of adversity, willing to give 
 rather than exact from his flock." 
 
John Wi/cliffe 97 
 
 Wide was his parish, and houses far asunder, 
 
 But he ne left nought ne for rain nor thunder, 
 
 In sickness and in mischief, to visit 
 
 The farthest in his parish, much and lit, 
 
 Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff. 
 
 This noble example to his sheep he yaf [gave], 
 
 That he first wrought, and afterwards he taught. 
 
 This description certainly appears to fall in 
 with the views of the pastoral office which 
 Wy cliff e entertained. The parochial life dif- 
 fers from the monastic in that it brings the 
 pastor in contact with the common experience 
 of men and all its varied discipline. It differs 
 also from the life of the evangelist or revival 
 preacher in that it does not touch men merely 
 at one point, but enters into their homes and their 
 business ; and it Avould seem that Wycliff e, like 
 Fitzralph of Armagh, contrasted the life of the 
 parson or "secular" priest with that of the 
 friars on this ground as well as on the ground 
 of their having become corrupt and self-seek- 
 ing, and of their being the special emissaries 
 of the Pope. It is certain that in his later 
 life he regarded them as a power which did 
 not make for righteousness ; so much so that 
 on one occasion, when he was ill, he suddenly 
 roused himself, exclaiming, " I shall not die. 
 
98 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 but live and declare the works of the Friars." 
 He would have wished the parochial clergy to 
 be married, so that they might be more closely 
 in contact with the life of the people. And we 
 may connect this zeal for parochial well-being 
 with his public spirit and desire for righteous- 
 ness in the nation ; for the parish is a fraction 
 of the nation. 
 
 The great instrument for his parochial work 
 and teaching was the English Bible, at which 
 he laboured on, revising and correcting, to the 
 end of his life. The translation was made 
 from the Latin Vulgate, for both Greek and 
 Hebrew were then inaccessible. Wy cliff e was 
 assisted by his friends Nicholas Hereford and 
 John Purvey, the latter of whom revised the 
 whole after the Master's death. To this were 
 added many simple tracts and short sermons 
 in English (almost all the English works be- 
 long to this time of his life) which served as 
 guides to his itinerant preachers. 
 
 It would appear that Wycliffe had during 
 his Oxford days gathered round him a few 
 scholars whom he trained as preachers. Their 
 numbers were now largely added to. They 
 were mostly very simple men, like the first 
 Franciscans or the first Methodists. Wycliffe 
 
John Wycliffe 99 
 
 applies to them the word " Idiotes,'' which was 
 given to the Apostles by the Sanhedrin. They 
 went about clad in a long russet gown, preach- 
 ing and singing in a way which earned them 
 the name of Lollards (babblers or chaunters), 
 appealing as men of the people to their own 
 order, and endeavouring in their rude way 
 to free religion, especially the sacrament, from 
 its superstitious elements, and to waken men 
 up to righteousness and " the law of Christ," 
 as Wycliffe constantly called the simple Chris- 
 tianity which he delighted to teach. 
 
 But little or nothing would have been done 
 had Wycliffe's reform not touched the errors of 
 doctrine which were stifling the Gospel. His 
 glory is that he attempted to shake the whole 
 fabric of Papal error. He judged the whole 
 by its bearing on righteousness. The Pope, so 
 Wycliffe taught, is to be resisted when acting 
 unrighteously; the support and allegiance of 
 the faithful is to be withdrawn from the 
 clergy when they are untrue to their calling. 
 The Church is not a body of persons conform- 
 ing to certain ordinances of which the clergy 
 hold the key, but the entire body of the elect. 
 The moral and independent standing which 
 election implies is all in all. The sacrament 
 
100 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 is the receiving of Christ by means of the 
 sign or emblem ; and the change wrought in 
 the elements is that they become capable of 
 bringing home the person or presence of Christ 
 to the believing heart. This, at least, seems to 
 be the meaning of Wycliffe's expressions, which 
 are couched in scholastic forms. Transubstan- 
 tiation, on the other hand, he utterly rejects. 
 How can the " accidents " of taste or touch re- 
 main if the substance is changed? A shrew- 
 mouse would detect the fallacy. In the great 
 matter of justification Wycliffe does not take 
 the same ground as Luther ; not that he dif- 
 fers from him, but that the aspect of the Gospel 
 which he chiefly realizes is not that of confer- 
 ring the pardon of sin, but that of leading men 
 into living participation in the divine righteous- 
 ness. He views the whole process of redemp- 
 tion through the medium of God's sovereignty, 
 and dwells on the election of men to right- 
 eousness, though not overriding free will and 
 not admitting the idea of reprobation. 
 
 We may see now the way in which Wycliffe 
 was a precursor of the Reformation. He was 
 a prophet nourishing his soul directly from the 
 source of eternal life, not through the media 
 of human inventions, and speaking directly 
 
John WycUffe 101 
 
 for God and for righteousness. This is in- 
 deed the essence of the Reformation doctrine, 
 that we are righteous through faith alone ; 
 for what is meant by faith is not some formal 
 belief, or acceptance of some special truth, but 
 the spiritual enlightenment, the expression of 
 the divine life in the soul, that which " makes 
 evident the things not seen," and '* endures 
 as seeing Him who is invisible." This faith 
 Wycliffe possessed in the highest degree. It 
 was this which made him realize the suprem- 
 acy of Scripture above all writings, and of 
 Christ above all human things, " our only 
 Emperor, Lord, Bishop, and Abbot." It was 
 this which made him assert the divine sover- 
 eignty, with which no human will or inven- 
 tion can conflict. It was this which made 
 him take an independent attitude towards 
 church ordinances, and use them only as con- 
 ducive to righteousness, but which also gave 
 so high a value in his eyes to plain preaching 
 and the manifestation of truth to the con- 
 science. It was this, finally, which made him 
 assert the independent validity of the gifts or 
 ministries assigned to each believer, and, as a 
 corollary from this, the divine functions of 
 human government — an assertion which was 
 
102 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 renewed by the reformers of the sixteenth 
 century only to be buried again beneath a 
 heap of scholastic disputations ; an assertion, 
 nevertheless, which needs as much now as in 
 his day to be renewed and made practical if 
 Christianity is ever to master the world. 
 
 The meed accorded to Wycliffe was that 
 which the world has usually accorded to the 
 prophets. He was arraigned as a heretic by 
 Courtenay, first as Bishop of London, in 1377, 
 before the Convocation at St. Paul's, when 
 he was saved by the appearance at his side of 
 John of Gaunt, who quarrelled violently with 
 the Bishop and prevented any action being 
 taken ; and again by the same prelate as Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth, in 1382, 
 when he was saved by the intervention of 
 the Queen Mother, the widow of the Black 
 Prince, and by the threatening attitude of the 
 citizens of London, who honoured him. His 
 University was forced by the Pope and the 
 Archbishop to condemn various propositions 
 from his writings, but he, being present, man- 
 fully defended himself ; and no one dared 
 either to touch his person or to subject him 
 to excommunication. His advice was sought 
 by the King on his relations with the Pope 
 
John Wycliffe 103 
 
 at the very time when the ecclesiastical power 
 was trying to destroy him ; and he continued 
 his work at Lutterworth unimpeded, and, 
 though touched with paralysis in 1383, dis- 
 played an astonishing activity in pastoral and 
 literary labours to the end. At length, on the 
 last day of 1384, he was struck down by a 
 second paralytic seizure, during the sacrament, 
 and died with his friends around him. 
 
 His body was exhumed in 1428 in pursuance 
 of a decree of the Council of Constance, and 
 his ashes thrown into the Swift. But mean- 
 while his works had been carried far and wide. 
 In Bohemia, which they reached through those 
 about Anne of Bohemia, wife of Richard II., 
 they inspired new prophets, Hus and Jerome 
 of Prague, who were treacherously put to 
 death for propagating his opinions by the 
 Council of Constance, and gave rise to a 
 national movement which, though quenched in 
 bloodshed, leavened the life of the whole peo- 
 ple. In England it was said at the beginning 
 of the fifteenth century that every third man 
 was a Lollard ; and the first Parliament of 
 Henry V. was so swayed by Wycliffe's anti- 
 clerical principles that the ecclesiastics trem- 
 bled for their estates. But the renewal of the 
 
104 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 French wars drew the whole mind of the 
 country in another direction ; and the move- 
 ment of Wycliffe, already compromised during 
 his lifetime by its supposed connection with 
 Wat Tyler's agrarian revolt, was finally dis- 
 credited when its leader, Sir John Oldcastle, 
 was provoked in 1417 to take arms against 
 his King. But though Lollardry was crushed, 
 the influence of Wycliffe was never extin- 
 guished. As many as a hundred and fifty 
 copies of Wycliffe's Bible still remain ; and 
 there is no doubt that it was widely read by 
 the common people, for whom it was written, 
 throughout the fifteenth century. When, in 
 1510, a raid against heretics was made by 
 Fitzjames, Bishop of London, so violent that 
 Colet wrote to Erasmus that all the prisons 
 were full of them, the articles in almost all 
 cases stated that the accused possessed copies 
 of Wycliffe's Bible or of some of his works ; 
 and Erasmus, in his account of his pilgrimage 
 to the shrine of Becket, at Canterbury, when 
 he tells how his companion (Colet) questioned 
 the advantage of such an exhibition of relics, 
 represents his interlocutor as saying : " Who 
 was your friend? Some Wycliffite, I sup- 
 pose." Thus the reformer of the fourteenth 
 
Johi Wycliffe 105 
 
 century joins hands with the reformer of the 
 sixteenth. 
 
 x\nd thus it is ever with the prophet. " In 
 the sight of the unwise he seems to die," but 
 " his hope is full of immortality " ; his spirit 
 lives on and prepares men for the better day. 
 
VII 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER, THE PROPHET 
 OF THE REFORMATION 
 
VII 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER, THE PROPHET OF 
 THE REFORMATION 
 
 BT PROFESSOR ADOLF HARNACK 
 
 He came in the fulness of time — when the 
 rule of the Roman Church, which had hitherto 
 educated the peoples, had become a tyranny, 
 when States and nations were beginning to 
 throw off an ecclesiastical yoke and independ- 
 ently to organize themselves in accordance with 
 their own laws. 
 
 He came in the fulness of time — when the 
 economic conditions of Europe, both through 
 inner developments and through the discovery 
 of distant lands, had become completely 
 changed, and the method of administration of 
 their estates by the Roman priests and monks 
 was no longer tenable. 
 
 He came in the fulness of time — when me- 
 diaeval churchly science had outlived its use- 
 fulness and when the tree of knowledge was 
 producing young, fresh shoots. 
 109 
 
110 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 He came in the fulness of time — when the 
 classes and castes of the Middle Ages were 
 disintegrating, and when everywhere the indi- 
 vidual, supported by the new culture of the 
 Renaissance, was striving to struggle up to in- 
 dependence. He came when the monastic idea 
 of life had run through all phases of its de- 
 velopment, and when man was beginning to 
 esteem an active not less than an ascetic life. 
 
 He came in the fulness of time — when lay- 
 men were no longer satisfied with priest and 
 sacrament, but were seeking God himself, and 
 were feeling the personal responsibility of their 
 own souls. He came as man was recognizing 
 the precepts of the Church to be but arbitrary 
 laws, and her traditions as only innovations 
 and forgeries. 
 
 He was no universal genius, no Plato, no 
 Leibnitz. He did not grasp all the conditions 
 of his time ; nay, he did not even know them 
 all. His education was mediocre. He was no 
 sharp and refined thinker, he was no humanist, 
 he was no critic ; his vocation was not to rec- 
 tify theoretical errors just because they were 
 errors. The sphere of science was not his 
 sphere ; indeed, he had an instinctive and 
 never entirely conquered suspicion of " reason." 
 
Martin Luther 111 
 
 He was no saint, no Francis, who, through 
 the glow of feeling, through the sweetness of 
 his spirit or the power of his sacrifice, swept 
 every one along with him. He was also no 
 agitator, no orator, who, like Savonarola, could 
 move and inflame the masses. 
 
 Luther was no cosmopolitan, but a German 
 with the marked characteristics of his nation, a 
 German as monk, as professor, and as reformer. 
 His personality has never been understood by 
 the Romanic races ; it has never impressed 
 them ; his thoughts alone have been able to 
 take root among them. 
 
 How was this man, then, able to become the 
 reformer of the Western Church ? How was 
 it that this professor in a little German univer- 
 sity, in the midst of an uncultivated environ- 
 ment, could unfetter the great movement by 
 which the new epoch in the history of the 
 world began ? How did it happen that, 
 through him, " the time was fulfilled " ? He 
 was in only one thing great and mighty, over- 
 whelmingly and irresistibly the master of his 
 time, victoriously overcoming the history of a 
 thousand years in order to force his age into 
 new channels. He teas great only in the redis- 
 covered knowledge of God in the QospeU. What 
 
112 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 it means to have a God, what this God is, how 
 he grasps us, and how we can apprehend and 
 hold him — all that he experienced and that he 
 proclaimed. In the midst of the night of his 
 conventual life, as he strove to work out his 
 salvation in fear and trembling, it dawned 
 upon him like the sun : " The just shall live hi/ 
 faith.'''' In the midst of the complex system of 
 what was called " religion," in the midst of un- 
 satisfying consolations and of incomplete pen- 
 ances, he lived religion itself and he led it out 
 into freedom. The living God — not a philo- 
 sophical or mystic abstraction — the manifest 
 and gracious God, was a God to be reached by 
 every Christian. Unchangeable reliance of the 
 heart upon God, personal confidence of belief 
 in Him who said, "I am thy salvation," that 
 was to Luther the whole sum of religion. Be- 
 yond all care and trouble, beyond all arts of 
 the ascetic, beyond all theological precepts, he 
 dared to grasp God himself, and in this deed of 
 faith his whole life won its independent sturdi- 
 ness. " Mit unser Macht ist Nichts gethan" 
 ("With our might is nothing done"). He 
 knew the might which gives to our lives 
 both firmness and freedom ; he knew that 
 might, and he called it by its name. Belief. 
 
Martin Luther 113 
 
 To him that meant no longer an obedient ac- 
 ceptance of ecclesiastical dogmas, it meant no 
 knowledge, no deed, but simply the personal 
 and continual giving of the heart to God, a 
 daily regeneration of man. ' That was his con- 
 fession of faith, a living, busy, active thing, a 
 sure trust, making one joyful and eager in the 
 sight of God and man, something which makes 
 us always ready to serve or to suffer. Despite 
 all evil, yes, despite our sin and guilt, our life 
 is hid in God, when w^e trust him as children 
 trust their father. That was the vital thought 
 and the vital power of Luther's life. 
 
 With equal certainty he perceived and ex- 
 perienced the other idea, the idea of " the free- 
 dom of a Christian." This freedom was to him 
 no empty emancipation or the license for every 
 whim. Freedom meant to Luther the libera- 
 tion from every external or human authority 
 in matters of belief and conscience. Christian 
 freedom was to him the feeling of surety that, 
 united with God, he was raised above the 
 world, sin, death, and the devil. "If God 
 be for us, who can be against us ? " Every 
 soul that has found God, and in him has rec- 
 ognized its refuge, is free — so proclaimed 
 Luther. 
 
114 Prophets of the Chi^istian Faith 
 
 Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, 
 Ein' gute Wehr und waffen. 
 
 (A mighty fortress is our God, 
 A bulwark never failing.) 
 
 Let it be here remarked that, in the same 
 hymn, Luther asks : 
 
 Eragst du, wer er ist ? 
 Er heisset Jesus Christ, 
 Der Herr Zebaoth, 
 Und ist kein and'rer Gott. 
 
 (Dost ask who that may be ? 
 Christ Jesus, it is he, 
 His name, Lord Sabaoth ; 
 Nor is there other God.) 
 
 In Jesus Christ alone Luther recognized 
 God. Outside of Christ he saw only a dark, 
 frightful, and enigmatical Force. In Christ 
 alone he saw the gracious God. Luther was 
 no philosopher who would recognize God in 
 the construction of the world ; he was no mys- 
 tic, who could raise God out of his own soul's 
 secret depths. He was a faithful son of the 
 Christian Church, convinced that she was in 
 the right with her commission from Jesus 
 
Martin Luther 115 
 
 Christ. He was a faithful disciple of Paul, 
 and had learned from him that all knowledge 
 of God lies locked up in the sentence, " God is 
 the father of our Lord Jesus Christ." He was 
 a faithful disciple of Christ himself, who said, 
 "No man knoweth the Father save only the 
 Son, and him to whom the Son will reveal 
 Him." 
 
 Not only did Luther win God-knowledge in 
 Jesus Christ, "the mirror of God's paternal 
 heart," but also the fact that Jesus is the 
 Redeemer, who through death has freed us 
 from sin and blame. Paul's Gospel is also 
 Luther's. Before the latter, no one in the 
 Church really understood the Epistles to the 
 Romans and to the Galatians. Just because 
 he was convinced that he was putting the old, 
 dimmed Gospel again in the light, he was far 
 from the thought of adding anything to it. 
 Never had he another plan than that of restor- 
 ing the old belief; never did he think to fight 
 against the Church, but always for the Church 
 against a false and soul-dangerous practice ; 
 never did he dream that the Gospel had been 
 really lost — no, but it was to be freed from a 
 captivity into which the Pope, the priests, and 
 the theologians had led it. 
 
116 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Great, lasting reformations are made only by 
 conservative men ; not those who " destroy," 
 but those who " fulfil," bring about a new era. 
 Luther — at the bottom of his heart the most 
 conservative of men — has broken the mediae- 
 val Catholic system in pieces for millions of 
 souls, and thus freed the history of progressive 
 humanity from the shackles of that system. 
 In that he vindicated the new and yet old 
 Gospel, in that he freed the conscience of the 
 individual from priest and statute, he struck 
 deadly blows against the Church of the Middle 
 Ages. For, (1) he overturned her teaching as 
 to salvation — salvation not being a thing 
 brought about by donations and merits, but 
 the free grace of God, which gives us the con- 
 viction that we are his children. (2) He over- 
 turned the teaching as to Christian perfection 
 — true Christian life does not consist in mo- 
 nasticism, but in an active life of fidelity to a 
 calling, in humility, patience, and the service 
 of love to our neighbour. (3) He overturned 
 the teachings as regards the sacrament — God 
 does not give us individual and different frag- 
 ments of grace, but he gives us the forgiveness 
 of sins and with it all grace, yes, he gives us 
 himself as the Bread of our lives. (4) He 
 
Martin Luther 117 
 
 overturned the priestly Church-system — God 
 wills that all his children shall be priests, and 
 he has instituted but one office, the office of 
 proclaiming the Gospel and of distributing for- 
 giveness. (5) Luther overturned the mediaeval 
 church services — God will not be honoured 
 by means of ceremonies, masses, oblations, etc., 
 but only through praise and thanksgiving, 
 pleading and prayer. Every church service 
 must be spiritual, and at the same time innately 
 bound with service to one's neighbour. (6) He 
 overturned the false authorities of Roman Ca- 
 tholicism. Not the Pope, nor the Councils, 
 not even the letter of the Bible (yet here, in 
 regard to the Bible, Luther was himself not 
 completely clear), has unerring authority, but 
 only the Gospel, the power and truth of which 
 the soul inwardly knows. 
 
 All these points have to do with religion 
 alone. Luther determined to purify religion 
 and to free it from every strange thing which 
 does not belong to it. Besides this he never 
 had another independent interest; he did not 
 care about bettering the world, or the State, or 
 science, for themselves alone. Yet right here 
 is revealed the truth of the saying : " Seek ye 
 first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, 
 
118 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 and all these things shall be added unto you." 
 In that Luther thought out the Gospel in all 
 its parts, proclaimed and applied it, all else fell 
 into his lap ; in that he liberated religion from 
 mixture with that which is foreign to it, he 
 also liberated the natural life and the natural 
 order of things. He put everything in its right 
 place, and gave everything freedom and room 
 for development. Everywhere he broke apart 
 unnatural ties, he loosed old chains, he gave air 
 and light. 
 
 Theology through him is henceforth to be 
 nothing else than the exposition of the Gospel, 
 of how it has founded the Christian community 
 and still keeps it together. The proof of the- 
 ology is no longer derived from external au- 
 thority or strange philosophical speculations, 
 but by the simple fact of Christ's appearance, 
 and by our inward experience. 
 
 Philosophy is no longer a feared servant or 
 a seductive mistress of theology, but her in- 
 dependent sister. Languages and history 
 are studied conscientiously and faithfully, in 
 order to ascertain the right meaning of every 
 word. 
 
 The State is no longer regarded as a half- 
 sinful product of compulsion and need, and the 
 
Martin Luther 119 
 
 creature of the Churcli, but as the God-willed, 
 Id dependent order of public social life. 
 
 Law does not longer pass as a dangerous 
 middle course, something between the might of 
 the stronger and the virtue of the Christian, 
 but as the independent, God-given rule of in- 
 tercourse, always maintained by the '' powers 
 that be." 
 
 Marriage is no longer thought of as a divine 
 concession towards the weak, but as a free bond 
 between the sexes, a bond instituted by God, 
 and free from tutelage on the part of the 
 Church, and as the school of the highest 
 morality. 
 
 General benefactions, such as the care of the 
 poor, are not now so much pursued because of 
 any desire to assure one's own salvation ; they 
 have become a free service to one's neighbour, 
 the final scope and only reward of which is 
 effective relief. 
 
 Above all things, however, in civil (as op- 
 posed to ecclesiastical) callings, activity in 
 house and farm, in trade and official position, 
 is no longer looked upon suspiciously as if it 
 led away from our spiritual vocation. Men 
 now know that the one who guides a household 
 well, educates children patiently and faithfully, 
 
120 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 fulfils the duties of a calling — even though 
 that one be but a poor boy or a lowly maid — 
 stands in the rightful spiritual place and is 
 higher than all monks and nuns. 
 
 Over the great period which we call the 
 Middle Ages, over the chaos of non-indepen- 
 dent and intricate forms, there soared the spirit 
 of belief, which had recognized its own nature 
 and therefore had also recognized its limits. 
 Under its sway, all things that had a right to 
 free existence now strove towards independent 
 development. Before Luther, no one had ever 
 separated so clearly and distinguishingly the 
 great departments of life, and given to each 
 its own right. Wonderful! this man would 
 not teach the world other than what the being, 
 the power, and the comfort of the Christian 
 religion is ; but in that he recognized this most 
 important department in its own individual- 
 ity, all other departments came to their own. 
 Luther preached that the just man lives by 
 faith, and that a child of God is a free master 
 over all things. In that he so taught he indeed 
 freed men and things, and thus showed that 
 " the time was fulfilled," for he was called that 
 the time should be fulfilled. 
 
 He became the reformer. Beside him Zwingli 
 
Martin Luther 121 
 
 and Calvin can claim but second places ; tliey 
 are dependent on him. Yes, Ave can even say: 
 He was the Reformation. He had experienced 
 the Reformation in his own soul, when he strug- 
 gled in the cloister with the creed of his Church. 
 Everything which he afterwards said, wrote, 
 and did, in Wittenberg, in Worms, and in 
 Coburg, was only the natural consequence of 
 that experience. Out of his breast, from the 
 bottom of his heart, the Reformation streamed 
 as a brook out of hidden springs in the rock. 
 In one sense he did not give power and endur- 
 ance to the Reformation : he did not set its 
 bounds and aim, but the Reformation gushed 
 from his spirit like a fruitful stream. " Here 
 I stand ; I can do no other," said he, before 
 Emperor and Empire. When the lonely man 
 thus spoke, it was decided that he, through his 
 faith, like Abraham, should become the father 
 of many thousands ; it was decided that a great 
 epoch in the history of mankind had finished 
 its course, and a new was advancing. 
 
 But we must not forget that it was four hun- 
 dred years ago that Luther taught. The con- 
 venient belief that he thought out everything 
 for us, and that we can rest on his teaching, is 
 a foolish one. The greatest hero is always only 
 
122 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 a finisher for the past ; as regards the future he 
 is but a beginner. He who does not under- 
 stand Luther so that he learns from him the 
 spirit with which to solve new problems and 
 lessons, and so that he endeavours to continue 
 the Reformer's work, understands him falsely. 
 The prophets have been given to us, not that 
 we should build their graves, but that we 
 should inflame our hearts through their faith 
 and their courage. 
 
VIII 
 JOHN WESLEY 
 
VIII 
 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 BT THE VERY RET. F. W. FARRAR, D.D. 
 
 It has often happened that the most memor- 
 able revolutions or reawakenments in the moral 
 and spiritual world have been achieved by men 
 who were not remarkable either for learning or 
 for genius. St. Francis of Assisi awoke the 
 Church of the thirteenth century from its gor- 
 geous dreams of dominion and luxury, and has 
 eternized his name on the bright lists of saint- 
 hood ; but the humble brown figure of the 
 poor illiterate wanderer looks absolutely in- 
 significant beside the purpureal stateliness of 
 Pope Innocent III. There was something 
 almost bourgeois in the plain homeliness of 
 St. Vincent de Paul, yet in founding his sis- 
 terhoods of mercy he inaugurated the chief 
 movements of social philanthropy. Thomas 
 Clarkson and John Howard were simple coun- 
 try squires, with no remarkable endowments 
 125 
 
126 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 of any kind except the genius of goodness and 
 the sensibility of compassion, yet the one ended 
 the slave trade and emancipated the slave, 
 and the other — traversing Europe, as Edmund 
 Burke said, "to dive into the depths of dun- 
 geons, to plunge into the infection of hospitals, 
 to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, de- 
 pression, and contempt " — purified the prisons 
 of the Christian world from their enormous 
 abuses and dehumanized loathliness. There 
 were many noblemen of the last generation 
 who towered over the late Earl of Shaftes- 
 bury in the splendour of their attainments and 
 their oratory, yet none of them, not one of 
 the Archbishops, Bishops, and great ecclesias- 
 tics of his day, effected one tithe of his mighty 
 work of beneficence for the poor women of the 
 mines and collieries, for the factory children, 
 for the little ''climbing boys," for the waifs 
 and strays and gutter-children of London, for 
 the costermongers, for maltreated lunatics, and 
 for hosts of the oppressed. To this order of 
 men, though he was superior to them in learn- 
 ing, belonged John Wesley. He found a Church 
 forgetful and neglectful of its duties, somnolent 
 in the plethora of riches, and either unmindful 
 or unwisely mindful of the poor. He found 
 
John Wesley 127 
 
 churches empty, dirty, neglected, crumbling 
 into hideous disrepair ; he found the work of 
 the ministry performed in a manner scandal- 
 ously perfunctory ; he found in the ranks of 
 the priesthood more than enow 
 
 of such as, for their bellies' sake, 
 Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold. 
 
 And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
 Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; 
 The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
 But, swoln with wind and the rank mist they 
 
 draw, 
 Eot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 
 Besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw, 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said. 
 
 Doubtless in his day, as in Milton's, it might 
 have been said, 
 
 But that two-handed engine at the door 
 Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. 
 
 But John Wesley, becoming magnetic with 
 moral sincerity, flashed into myriads of hearts 
 fat as brawn, cold as ice, hard as the nether 
 millstone, the burning spark of his own intense 
 convictions, and thus he saved the Church, 
 
128 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 which at first had nothing for him but sneers, 
 . hatred, and persecution. Wesley never was an 
 enemy to the Church of England. He loved 
 the Church which hated him. He included her 
 name in his daily "grace before meat." He 
 died in her full communion. He would have 
 said, as sincerely as Edmund Burke, " I wish to 
 see the Church of England great and powerful ; 
 I wish to see her foundation laid low and deep ,• 
 I would have her open wide her hospitable 
 gates by a liberal comprehension ; I would 
 have her a common blessing to the world, an 
 example, if not an instructor, to those who 
 have not the happiness to belong to her ; I 
 would have her give a lesson of peace to man- 
 kind, that a vexed and wandering generation 
 may be taught to seek refuge and toleration in 
 the bosom of her maternal charity." And he 
 distinctly saved the Church of England from 
 the Nemesis of just retribution, which but for 
 him would sooner or later have overwhelmed 
 her in indiscriminate collapse, and might not 
 improbably have buried under her heaps of 
 ruin all that was best in the great heritage of 
 English religion. He set her the example 
 of indefatigable activity, of immense and un- 
 grudging self-sacrifice, of that true beauty of 
 
John Wesley 129 
 
 holiness which shines in the life of every Chris- 
 tian who "makes his moral being his prime 
 care," and gives the actual, not the merely 
 nominal, sovereignty to the beliefs which he 
 professes to regard as supreme. He saved the 
 Church of England, though at first she so an- 
 grily and contemptuously rejected him, and, 
 just as from the mouth of Socrates issued forth 
 
 Mellifluous streams which watered all the schools 
 Of Academics old and new, with those 
 Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect 
 Epicurean, and the Stoic severe, 
 
 so, from the impulse which Wesley gave, orig- 
 inated almost every form of special religious 
 enthusiasm since his day. Thus he became one 
 of the most disinterested of those benefactors 
 of mankind who " have raised strong arms to 
 bring heaven a little nearer to our earth." 
 
 One great virtue in his character was that 
 sovereign religious tolerance which is so in- 
 finitely rare amid the divergences of religious 
 shibboleths. In the first century the heathen 
 said, " See how these Christians love one an- 
 other " ; but, long before the third century, the 
 odium theologicum had culminated in those exe- 
 crable forms of religious virulence which, if 
 
130 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 " love " be indeed the fulfilling of the law, are 
 the very antithesis of the Christlike spirit, at 
 which all profess to aim who take Christ for an 
 ensample that they should walk in his steps. 
 It is a splendid testimony to Wesley's moral 
 insight and spiritual greatness that "no re- 
 former the world has ever seen so united faith- 
 fulness to the essential doctrines of Revelation 
 with charity towards men of every Church and 
 creed." This spirit of John Wesley has been 
 found, theoretically at least, only in the best 
 and greatest Christians. 
 
 Bishop Sanderson pointed out to some of the 
 narrowest of the post-Reformation sectaries that 
 " the Church was not to be confined to the nar- 
 row pingle of a room in Amsterdam." William 
 Penn uttered the great sentiment, so dear to 
 the heart of Abraham Lincoln, that the meek, 
 the just, the pious, the devout, are everywhere 
 of one religion, and that when death hath taken 
 off these masks they will know and love one an- 
 other. The devout Dominican Henri Feyrrane 
 saw, as Lacordaire also saw, that the worst pos- 
 sible policy is " to make the gate of the Church 
 bristle with anathemas, as with razors and 
 pitchforks." But too many nominal Chris- 
 tians have forgotten that all these words and 
 
John Wesley 131 
 
 actions tend to reduce the Church to the same 
 deplorable chaos of mutual hatreds and fierce 
 disdain which Christ found among the Phari- 
 sees and Sadducees of Jerusalem, when he 
 chose the hated and heretical Samaritan as 
 his exemplary type of the goodness which loved 
 its neighbour. 
 
 I dwell on this high virtue of Wesley because 
 it is so exceptional, and because it was never 
 more needed than in these days. Writing 
 in advanced age to the Bishop of Lincoln, he 
 said : " Alas ! my Lord, is this a time to per- 
 secute any man for conscience' sake? I be- 
 seech you do as you would be done to. You 
 are a man of sense ; you are a man of learning ; 
 nay, I verily believe (what is of infinitely more 
 value) you are a man of piety. Then think 
 and let think." Again, how wise are the re- 
 marks in the preface to his Sermons i " Some 
 may say I have mistaken the way myself, though 
 I have undertaken to teach others. It is very 
 possible that I have. But I trust, whereinso- 
 ever I have been mistaken, my mind is open to 
 conviction. I sincerely desire to be better in- 
 formed. What I know not, teach thou me. 
 ''Da mihi scire^^ as says St. Augustine, ' quod 
 sciendum est.'' If I linger in the path I have 
 
132 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 been accustomed to tread, . . . take me by the 
 hand and lead me. . . . But be not discour- 
 aged if I ask you not to beat me down in order 
 to quicken my pace. May I request you fur- 
 ther not to give me hard names in order to 
 bring me into the right way ? . . . For God's 
 sake, if it be possible, let us not provoke one 
 another to wrath. Let us not kindle in each 
 other this fire of hell. If we could discern 
 truth by that dreadful light, would it not be 
 loss rather than gain? For how far is love, 
 even with many wrong opinions, to be preferred 
 before truth itself without love ! We may die 
 without the knowledge of many truths, and yet 
 be carried into Abraham's bosom. But if we 
 die without love, what will knowledge avail? 
 Just as much as it avails the devil and his 
 angels ! " 
 
 The ground for this wise and noble tolerance, 
 which is one of Wesley's special lessons to this 
 religiously distracted age, was his clear realiza- 
 tion of the truth — demonstrated by all history 
 — that while unity of spirit is attainable, uni- 
 formity of organization is not ; that while there 
 can be but one flock of the Good Shepherd, 
 there always have been and to the end of time 
 there will be many folds. Dean Stanley de- 
 
John Wesley 133 
 
 lighted in a story — I know not its source and 
 will not vouch for its authenticity — which he 
 called " Wesley's Dream." It told how Wesley 
 dreamt that, wandering to the gate of Gehenna, -^ 
 he asked whether there were any Romanists, 
 any Anglicans, any Baptists, any Calvinists, 
 any Independents there, and was told in each 
 case, " Yes, a great many," and w^as yet more 
 deeply pained when, asking, " And are there 
 any Wesleyans here?" it was still answered, 
 "Yes, a great many." Then, returning to the 
 gate of Heaven, he asked, " Are there any 
 Romanists here ? " "None whatever." "Any 
 Anglicans?" " None whatever." "Any Bap- 
 tists?" "None whatever." "Any Calvin- 
 ists ? " " None whatever. " " Any Wesleyans ? " 
 Still none whatever. " Whom then have you 
 here?" he asked in amazement. "We have 
 none but Christians here," was the answer; 
 "we know no other name." Whether the 
 story was a pleasing allegory of the Dean's 
 or not, I cannot tell ; but this I know, that 
 Wesley's sermon on the Catholic Spirit would 
 have the honour of being thought shockingly 
 lax by bigots of every denomination, yet all 
 true Christians might well say with him, " I 
 desire to have a league, offensive and defensive, 
 
134 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 with every soldier of Christ. We have all not 
 only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, but we 
 are all also engaged in one warfare." 
 
 As another of Wesley's exemplary qualities 
 I would single out his sovereign common sense, 
 which is also an endowment much liable to 
 overthrow by the violences of egotistical dog- 
 matism. Though many have identified his 
 teaching mainly with certain formulae, Wesley 
 had no faith in the bare reiteration of shib- 
 boleths. His idea of a '' Gospel sermon " was 
 not the narrowly ignorant one which supposes 
 it to consist in the incessant repetition of 
 phrases — phrases often originally meaningless 
 to many of those who used them, or which 
 have become stereotyped into mere inanity 
 and fetichism. In his diary for November 
 20, 1785, he writes: "I preached in Bethnal 
 Green, and spoke as plainly as I possibly could, 
 on having a form of godliness but denying the 
 power thereof. And this I judged far more 
 suitable to such a congregation than talking 
 about justification by faith." How free, again, 
 from all hysteric excitability was the entire 
 attitude of his religion ! Some one had been 
 talking in an exaggerated and fantastic way 
 about death, and asking what he would do 
 
John Wesley 135 
 
 if he knew that he would die the next day. 
 "What should I do?" he said. "Exactly 
 what I shall do now. I should call and talk 
 to Mr. So-and-so, and Mrs. So-and-so ; and 
 dine at such an hour, and preach in the even- 
 ing, and have supper, and then I should go 
 to bed and sleep as soundly as ever I did in 
 my life." His feeling about death was that, 
 so far from being terrible, it was man's great 
 birthright ; and he would say, with the poet: 
 
 To you the thought of death is terrible, 
 
 Having such hold on life ; to me it is not ; 
 
 No more than is the lifting of a latch, 
 
 Or as a step into the open air 
 
 Out of a tent already luminous 
 
 With light that shines through its transparent folds. 
 
 Again, it was no small matter that, in an 
 age so corrupt and decadent as his, in which 
 the dregs of sensuality and worldliness poured 
 over the glorious England of Puritanism by 
 the despicable epoch of the Restoration had 
 reduced religion to a Dead Sea of torpid un- 
 reality, Wesley, like the great Hebrew prophets 
 of old, should have stood forth as a preacher 
 of righteousness. No preacher or reformer 
 can effect great results unless he insists upon 
 
136 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Christ's plain teaching that, if we would ever 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven, we must 
 keep the commandments. Late in his career 
 he said : " Near fifty years ago a great and 
 good man, Dr. Potter, then Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, gave me an advice for which I 
 have ever since had occasion to bless God. 
 'If you desire to be extensively useful, do 
 not spend your time and strength in contend- 
 ing for or against such things as are of a 
 disputable nature, but in testifying against 
 open and notorious vice and in prompting 
 real spiritual holiness.' Let us keep to this, 
 leaving a thousand disputable points to those 
 that have no better business than to toss the 
 ball of controversy to and fro, and let us bear 
 a faithful testimony in our several stations 
 against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, 
 and with all our might recommend that inward 
 and outward holiness without which no man 
 shall see the Lord." 
 
 It may be, as I have said, that in talent, in 
 imagination, in learning, in the pure and un- 
 definable quality of genius, Wesley was not 
 the equal of many of his contemporaries ; but 
 which among them all equalled him in versa- 
 tility of beneficence, in zeal of self-sacrifice, 
 
John Wesley 137 
 
 in the munificence of his generosity, or in the 
 lustre of the example which he has left to all 
 the world ? Consider his supreme disinterest- 
 edness, his unparalleled courage, his indefati- 
 gable toils. How many have there been in 
 all the centuries who made such an absolute 
 offering of his money to God, and, living on 
 less than many a curate's salary, gave away 
 £40,000? Consider, again, his unparalleled 
 courage. How many have shown equal un- 
 dauntedness ? Men admire the courage of the 
 soldier who heads the forlorn hope through 
 the cross-fire of the batteries, of the sailor or 
 of the fireman who, at personal risk, plucks 
 from destruction an imperilled life ; but such 
 physical courage is a million times cheaper 
 and more common than that of the scholar, 
 the gentleman, the clergyman, who, in that 
 age, day after day, month after month, year 
 after year, in England, in America, in Scot- 
 land, in Wales, in Ireland, even in the Isle of 
 Man, could, voluntarily and out of the pure 
 love of souls, face raging mobs and descend to 
 what was then regarded as the vulgar humilia- 
 tion of preaching in the open air. And higher 
 even than this was the moral and spiritual 
 courage which, in the calm of blameless inno- 
 
138 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 cence, could treat the most atrocious and the 
 most persistent calumnies with the disdainful 
 indifference of unblemished rectitude. When 
 even Charles Wesley was thrown into a fever 
 of agonized excitement by the scandal against 
 his brother caused by his wife's publication 
 of stolen, forged, or interpolated letters, and 
 wanted him to stay in London and expose the 
 slander, John Wesley remained perfectly calm, 
 knowing that no real harm can befall 
 
 The virtuous mind that ever walks attended 
 By a strong-siding champion, Conscience. 
 
 "Brother," he said, "when I devoted to God 
 my ease, my time, my life, did I exempt my 
 reputation?" Then consider his indefatigable 
 toils — those sixty-eight years of service ; the 
 4400 miles which he travelled yearly on the 
 execrable roads of those days ; the 225,000 
 miles which he traversed in his lifetime ; the 
 42,400 sermons — sometimes as many as fifteen 
 a week — which he preached even after his re- 
 turn from Georgia — preached mostly in the 
 open air, and sometimes to as many as 20,000 
 souls; those endless meetings, those burden- 
 some anxieties, those numerous publications, 
 that love of so many communities, continued 
 
John Wesley 139 
 
 amid incessant attacks of the mob, the pulpit, 
 and the press, and scarcely ever relaxed till 
 the patriarchal age of eighty-eight. Could a 
 clergyman of any denomination, amid the work 
 which, in comparison to his toils, is but ease 
 and supineness, think it anything but an 
 honour to profess reverence for the memory 
 of one who so heroically lived and so nobly 
 died? Although the world and the Church 
 have learned to be comparatively generous to 
 Wesley now that a hundred years have sped 
 away, and though the roar of contemporary 
 scandal has long since ceased, I doubt whether 
 even now he is at all adequately appreciated. 
 I doubt whether many are aware of the extent 
 to which to this day the impulse to every great 
 work of philanthropy and social reformation 
 has been due to his energy and insight. The 
 British and Foreign Bible Society, the Relig- 
 ious Tract Society, the London Missionary 
 Society, even the Church Missionary Society, 
 owe not a little to his initiative. The vast 
 spread of religious instruction by weekly peri- 
 odicals, and the cheap press with all its stu- 
 pendous consequences, were inaugurated by 
 him. He gave a great extension to Sunday- 
 schools and the work of Robert Raikes. He 
 
140 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 gave a great impulse both to national educa- 
 tion and to technical education, and in starting 
 the work of Silas Told, the Foundry Teacher, 
 he anticipated the humble and holy work of 
 John Pounds, the Portsmouth cobbler. He 
 started in his own person the funeral reform, 
 which is only now beginning to attract public 
 attention, when in his will he directed that 
 at his obsequies there should be no hearse, no 
 escutcheon, no coach, no pomp. He visited 
 prisons and ameliorated the lot of prisoners 
 before John Howard ; and his very last letter 
 was written to stimulate William Wilberforce 
 in his Parliamentary labours for the emancipa- 
 tion of the slave. When we add to this the 
 revival of fervent worship and devout hymnol- 
 ogy among Christian congregations, and their 
 deliverance from the drawling doggerel of 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, and the frigid nullities 
 of Tate and Brady, we have indeed shown how 
 splendid was the list of his achievements, and 
 that, as Isaac Taylor says, he furnished ''the 
 starting-point for our modern religious history 
 in all that is characteristic of the present time." 
 And yet, even in this long and splendid cata- 
 logue, we have not mentioned his greatest and 
 most distinctive work, which was that through 
 
John Wesley 141 
 
 him to the poor the Gospel was preached. Let 
 Whitefield have the credit of having been the 
 first to make the green grass his pulpit and the 
 heaven his sounding-board ; but Wesley in- 
 stantly followed, at all costs, the then daring 
 example, and, through all evil report and all 
 furious opposition, he continued it until at 
 last, at Kingswood, at the age of eighty-one, 
 he preached in the open air, under the shade 
 of trees which he himself had planted, and sur- 
 rounded by the children and children's children 
 of his old disciples, who had long since passed 
 away. Overwhelming evidence exists to show 
 what preaching was before and in his day ; 
 overwhelming evidence exists to show what 
 the Church and people of England were be- 
 fore and in his day — how dull, how vapid, 
 how soulless, how Christless was the preach- 
 ing ; how torpid, how Laodicean was the 
 Church, how godless, how steeped in immo- 
 rality was the land. To Wesley was mainly 
 granted the task, for which he was set apart 
 by the hands of invisible consecration, the task 
 which even an archangel might have envied him, 
 of awakening a mighty revival of religious 
 life in those dead pulpits, in that slumbering 
 Church, in that corrupt society. His was the 
 
142 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 religious sincerity which not only founded the 
 Wesleyan community, but, working through 
 the heart of the very Church which had de- 
 spised him, flashed fire into her whitening em- 
 bers. Changing its outward forms, the work 
 of John Wesley caused first the Evangelical 
 movement, then the High Church movement ; 
 and, in its enthusiasm of humanity, has even 
 reappeared in all that is best in the humble 
 Salvationists, who learned from the example 
 of Wesley what Bishop Lightf oot called " that 
 lost secret of Christianity, the compulsion of 
 human souls." Recognizing no utterance of 
 authority as equally supreme with that which 
 came to him from the Sinai of conscience, Wes- 
 ley did the thing and scorned the consequence. 
 His was the voice which offered hope to the 
 despairing and welcome to the outcast. His 
 was the voice which, sounding forth over the 
 Valley of Dry Bones, cried, " Come from the 
 four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these 
 slain that they may live." The poet says : 
 
 Of those three hundred grant but three 
 To make a new Thermopylse. 
 
 And when I think of John Wesley, the organ- 
 izer, of Charles Wesley, the poet, of George 
 
John Wesley 143 
 
 Whitefield, the orator of this mighty movement, 
 I feel inclined to say of those three self-sacrific- 
 ing and holy men, Grant but even one to help 
 in the mighty work which yet remains to be 
 accomplished ! Had we but three such now, 
 
 Hoary-headed selfishness would feel 
 His death-blow, and would totter to his grave ; 
 A brighter light attend the human day, 
 When every transfer of earth's natural gift 
 Should be a commerce of good words and works. 
 
 We have, it is true, hundreds of faithful work- 
 ers in the Church of England and in other re- 
 ligious communities. But for the slaying of 
 dragons, the rekindlement of irresistible enthu- 
 siasm, the redress of intolerable wrongs, a 
 Church needs many Pentecosts and many Res- 
 urrections. And these, in the providence of 
 God, are brought about, not by committees 
 and conferences and common workers, but by 
 men who escape the average ; by men who 
 come forth from the multitude ; by men who, 
 not content to trudge on in the beaten paths 
 of commonplace and the cart-ruts of routine, 
 go forth, according to their Lord's command, 
 into the highways and hedges ; by men in 
 whom the love of God burns like a consum- 
 
144 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 ing flame upon the altar of the heart ; by men 
 who have become electric to make myriads of 
 other souls thrill with their own holy zeal. 
 Such men are necessarily rare, but God's rich- 
 est boon to any nation, to any society, to any 
 church, is the presence and work of such a 
 man — and such a man was John Wesley. 
 
 The bust placed in Westminster Abbey to 
 the memory of John Wesley, more than twenty 
 years ago, was a very tardy recognition of the 
 vast debt of gratitude which England owes to 
 him. It stands hard by the cenotaph of that 
 other illustrious Nonconformist, Isaac Watts, 
 and gives the beautiful presentment of the aged 
 face of the evangelist and the fine features of 
 Charles, his poet-brother. In the solemn aisle 
 thousands of visitors to our great Temple of 
 Silence and Reconciliation may read three of 
 his great sayings — one, so full of holy energy, 
 " I look on all the w^orld as my parish " ; an- 
 other, so full of bright and holy confidence, 
 " God buries his workmen, but continues his 
 work " ; the third, when, on his death-bed, 
 uplifting victoriously his feeble and emaciated 
 arm, he said : "The best of all is, God is with us." 
 "Yes ! " he exclaimed again, in a tone of victori- 
 ous rapture, "the best of all is, God is with us." 
 
IX 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 
 
IX 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 
 
 BY THE REV. A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D.D. 
 
 Jonathan Edwards is a thinker difficult 
 to appreciate and very easy to misunderstand. 
 His faults lie on the surface, while his merits 
 are to be discovered only by sympathetic 
 study. He is not only the greatest of all the 
 thinkers that America has produced, but also 
 the highest speculative genius of the eighteenth 
 century. What in him was occasional most 
 impressed his own generation and most easily 
 arrests the eye of ours. What in him was per- 
 manent retreats from the hands that hastily 
 glean in the field of literature and religion. 
 What most impresses a cocksure and sceptical 
 critic like Mr. Leslie Stephen is the awfulness 
 of Edwards's descriptions of sin and its punish- 
 ment ; and he marvels that any writer could 
 say anything concerning him without dwelling 
 on his doctrine of hell. But the grim and ter- 
 147 
 
148 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 rible sermons which Stephen quotes as if they 
 were the essence of Edwards's mind were not 
 the creations of his reason, which was Ed- 
 wards's master faculty, but the work of his 
 imagination in a peculiar mood — as it were 
 epic pictures thrown out while it was intoxi- 
 cated with a spiritual passion or drenched by 
 the wave of religious enthusiasm then rolling 
 over New England. In truth, the distinctive 
 theology of Edwards was of quite another 
 order, the creation of a reason all alive with 
 speculative passion, and moved as if by an in- 
 finite hunger for the divine. In him religious 
 affection was exalted and transfigured by an 
 illuminative yet inexorable reason, a thought 
 that, urged by the necessity of its own being, 
 could know no rest till it had^ not simply 
 grasped the skirts, but, as it were, penetrated 
 to the very heart of deity. In a far higher 
 degree than Spinoza he was a " God-intoxicated 
 man," and his religious affection more than 
 Spinoza's intellectual love made man one in 
 will through being one in heart with God. 
 The development from Edwards emphasized 
 too much what was occasional, while it empha- 
 sized too little what was permanent ; and so 
 the New England becomes more a scholastic 
 
Jonathan Edivards 149 
 
 than a speculative theology, while, if it had 
 been true to the genius and soul of Edwards, 
 it would have been more speculative and less 
 scholastic. 
 
 In the attempt to understand him we have 
 first to realize the comparative isolation in 
 which he lived, and therefore the independence 
 with which he worked. If we put him back 
 into his time without recollection of his place, 
 no man could seem less the son of his century. 
 He was born in 1703, a year before Locke died. 
 In England deism had commenced its belliger- 
 ent and barren career. Berkeley had entered 
 Trinity College, and was jotting down in his 
 commonplace book the speculations that were 
 later to become a new " Theory of Vision," and 
 furnish the " Principles of Human Know- 
 ledge." Toland was busy proving Christianity 
 not mysterious, and arguing for a new theism 
 which should make God all in all. Of those 
 who may be regarded as more strictly his con- 
 temporaries, Joseph Butler entered Oriel Col- 
 lege, Oxford, just about the time Edwards 
 entered Yale. David Hume, eight years his 
 junior, became, like Edwards, a student of 
 Locke, but, unlike him, so interpreted Locke 
 as to deduce from him a system of universal 
 
150 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 doubt, which did not, like that of Descartes, 
 spare thought and find through the ego a way 
 into reasoned belief. In France, in the very 
 year of Edwards's birth, Voltaire entered, a boy 
 of nine, the great Jesuit School, the College 
 Louis le Grand, and began to prepare himself 
 to conduct his crusade — in its essence more 
 Christian than those of the Middle Ages — 
 against the tyranny of the unreal and make- 
 believe in religion. While Edwards was pas- 
 tor in Northampton Rousseau was indulging 
 himself in all the luxury of sentiment, and 
 feeling his way towards the limitation of the 
 individual and the construction of society 
 through the "Social Contract." As Edwards, 
 diffident in secular things while greatly daring 
 in intellectual, was describing to the corpora- 
 tion of Princeton his " peculiarly unhappy con- 
 stitution, attended with flaccid solids, vapid, 
 siezy, and scarce fluids, and a low tide of 
 spirits ; often occasioning a kind of childish 
 weakness and contemptibleness of speech, pres- 
 ence, and demeanour, with a disagreeable dul- 
 ness and stiffness, much unfitting me for 
 conversation, but more especially for the gov- 
 ernment of a college," and hesitating to accept 
 the position offered to him — a younger con- 
 
Jonathan Edivards 151 
 
 temporary in Germany, Lessing, was turning 
 his thoughts to the reform of the theatre, and 
 to a more scientific interpretation of religion 
 and its history. 
 
 But Edwards in his New England home 
 lived apart from all these European movements 
 and influences. They could, indeed, hardly be 
 said to have touched him. As a student he 
 had studied the '' Essay on the Human Under- 
 standing," and through it discovered at once 
 his faculty and problem. In Dr. Samuel John- 
 son of Stratford, and in Cutler, his tutor, he 
 had met men who knew something of Berkeley; 
 the former, in particular, being a convinced 
 idealist. And, indeed, while he was beginning 
 his career as a pastor, Berkeley was attempting 
 to make a home for himself in Rhode Island. 
 But while there are points where he coincides 
 with Berkeley, Edwards's development was 
 independent ; they agree rather by logical 
 coincidence than by literary or speculative imi- 
 tation. And this is the more significant as the 
 agreements are mainly on points which Berke- 
 ley later developed, and where he agreed with 
 Malebranche. Edwards, indeed, largely worked 
 out his problems, not only in independence, but 
 in an intellectual isolation which no man in the 
 
152 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Old World could know ; least of all was it 
 known to the men with whom he has most 
 affinity — Spinoza, Malebranche, and Berkeley. 
 The shape which both the problems and their 
 solution assumed at his subtle hands proceeded 
 as much from his simple and pure nature as 
 from the simplicity of the life he lived. The 
 faith of his people possessed him. Time was 
 to him eternal ; every year, every day, and 
 every hour were the dwelling-place of God. 
 The God he believed in moved all things, filled 
 all time and every place. Yet his individual 
 existence was not a mere moment in the being 
 of the Eternal, but a means by which God real- 
 ized his purposes in time and fulfilled his ends 
 for eternity. We have to remember, then, at 
 the outset, these two things : (1) the simplic- 
 ity and purity, yet intense rationality, of Ed- 
 wards's nature ; and (2) the traditional faith, 
 which made all nature supernatural, that pos- 
 sessed and inspired him. From this point of 
 view the things that are most significant of 
 Edwards are not his deliberate and elaborate, 
 but his most spontaneous, thoughts — those 
 that came to him, as it were, by the way of 
 intuition or meditation rather than by the 
 method of logic and evidence. As indicating 
 
Jonathan Edwards 153 
 
 the quality of liis nature, which is in a measure 
 the hidden laAv of his mind, we may cite two 
 things : 
 
 (1) Some of the resolutions he wrote before 
 his nineteenth year : 
 
 " Resolved, Never to do any manner of thing, 
 whether in soul or body, less or more, but what 
 tends to the glory of God, nor be nor suffer it, 
 if I can possibly avoid it. 
 
 " Resolved, to live with all my might, while 
 I do live. 
 
 '' Resolved, Never to do anything which I 
 should be afraid to do if it were the last hour 
 of my life. 
 
 " Resolved, Never to count that a prayer nor 
 to let that pass as a prayer, nor that as a peti- 
 tion of a prayer, which is so made that I can- 
 not hope that God will answer it." 
 
 The fine love of reality in the last resolution 
 is specially noteworthy. 
 
 (2) This extract from his diary will show 
 his innate mysticism, the degree in which he 
 was possessed of the passion for the divine : 
 " Once, as I rode out into the woods for my 
 health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse 
 in a retired place, as my manner commonly has 
 been, to walk for divine contemplation and 
 
154 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 prayer, I had a view, that for me was extraor- 
 dinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as 
 Mediator between God and man, and his won- 
 derful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace and 
 love, and meek and gentle condescension. This 
 grace that appeared so calm and sweet appeared 
 also great above the heavens. The Person of 
 Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an 
 excellency great enough to swallow up all 
 thought and conception — which continued, as 
 near as I can judge, about an hour; which 
 kept me the greater part of the time in a flood 
 of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency 
 of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how 
 to express, emptied and annihilated ; to lie in 
 the dust, and to be full of Christ alone ; to 
 love him with a holy and pure love ; to trust 
 in him ; to live upon him ; to serve and follow 
 him ; and to be perfectly sanctified and made 
 pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I 
 have several other times had views very much 
 of the same nature, and which have had the 
 same effects." 
 
 Let us now see how a man with so intense and 
 spiritual a nature as Edwards', and yet so specu- 
 lative and rational a mind, possessed also of a 
 faith so intense and elevated, and so completely 
 
Jonathan Edwards 156 
 
 isolated from the great intellectual currents of 
 the time — wrestled in thought with its largest 
 problems. We begin with some of the positions 
 that he lays down while quite a young student 
 as the result of his study of Locke. Locke's 
 analysis of the process of knowledge led him to 
 this — that the ultimate source of ideas was 
 sensation ; that sensation was due to the opera- 
 tion of external bodies, and the quality which 
 remained to the external body in the ultimate 
 analysis was Resistance, which is only another 
 form of Descartes's Extension. But Edwards 
 translates Locke's resistance into a mode of 
 divine energy or will, thus : " There is nothing 
 out of the mind but Resistance, and as Resist- 
 ance is nothing else than the actual exertion of 
 God's power, so the power can be nothing else 
 than the constant Law or Method of that actual 
 exertion." Matter and energy are thus trans- 
 formed into the being and will of God ; and so 
 he again says : " Nor will it be found that the 
 principles we lay down at all make void natural 
 philosophy, or the science of the Causes or 
 Reasons of corporeal changes ; for to find out 
 the reasons of things, in natural philosophy, is 
 only to find out the proportion of God's acting." 
 He further thinks that all the natural changes 
 
156 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 in the universe which follow in a continued 
 series " do not perhaps exist anywhere perfectly 
 but in the Divine Mind." "But, then, if it be 
 inquired, what exists in the Divine Mind ; and 
 how these things exist there ? I answer, There 
 is his determination, his care, and his design, 
 that ideas shall be united for ever, just so, and 
 in such a manner, as is agreeable to such a 
 series. For instance, all the ideas that ever 
 were, or ever shall be to all eternity, in any 
 created mind, are answerable to the existence 
 of such a peculiar Atom in the beginning of 
 the Creation, of such a determinate figure and 
 size, and to have such a motion given to it : 
 That is, they are all such as Infinite Wisdom 
 sees would follow according to the series of 
 nature, from such an Atom, so moved." 
 
 We feel as if we were reading the first and 
 second books of Spinoza's " Ethics " through the 
 psychology of Locke as modified by Berkeley. 
 Edwards we may here term a monotheistic 
 idealist, with the emphasis on the mono. The 
 order of things we term nature is the order of 
 ideas in the mind of God, and this becomes our 
 order of ideas by the direct operation of the 
 creative mind. And so it follows that mind is 
 primary ; indeed, in a sense there is nothing 
 
Jonathan Edwards 167 
 
 but mind and its ideas, those of man being 
 effects from those of God. In words that sug- 
 gest Kant he says : ''''Place itself is mental, and 
 Withi7i and Without are mere mental concep- 
 tions. . . . When I say the Material Universe 
 exists only in the mind, I mean that it is abso- 
 lutely dependent on the conception of the mind 
 for its existence, and does not exist as Spirits 
 do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in 
 dependence on, the conception of other minds. 
 . . . Things, as to God, exist from all Eternity, 
 alike ; that is, the idea is always the same, and 
 after the same mode. The existence of things, 
 therefore, that are not actually in created 
 minds, consist only in Power, or in the Deter- 
 mination of God, that such and such ideas shall 
 be raised in creative minds, upon such condi- 
 tions." He sums up his philosophical position 
 in these remarkable words (the italics are his 
 own) : " That which truly is the Substance of 
 all Bodies, is the infinitely exacts and precise^ 
 and perfectly stable Idea, in Grod's mind, together 
 with his stable Will, that the same shall gradually 
 be communicated to us, and to other minds, ac- 
 cording to certain fixed and exact established 
 Methods and Laws; or, in somewhat different 
 language, the infinitely exact and precise Divine 
 
168 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Idea^ together with an answerable^ perfectly ex- 
 act^ precise^ and stable Will-, with respect to cor- 
 respondent communications to Created Minds, 
 and effects on their minds. ^^ ^ Nature thus be- 
 comes the continuous creation of God ; all our 
 knowlege is the result of his action, and in the 
 interpretation of what is without we are only 
 really discovering the secret of what is within 
 by thinking the thoughts of God after him. 
 
 Let us see now how he works this funda- 
 mental idea out into a theology. And first as 
 to his conception of Deity, which also involves 
 that of the relation which He sustains to the 
 universe. Edwards, then, formulates the prin- 
 ciple that " God and real existence are the 
 same ; God is, and there is none else." This 
 is logically involved in his theory both of being 
 and of knowing. For as real existence is ideal, 
 the divine as the f ontal or creative mind is the 
 source of all ideas, and is therefore the reality 
 
 1 Compare with the quotations in the text the following 
 propositions from Spinoza's "Ethics " : " Prseter deum nulla 
 dari neque concipi potest substantia," " quicquid est in Deo 
 est, et nihil sine Deo esse neque concipi potest." "Deus non 
 tantum est causa efficiens rerum existentia, sed etiam 
 essentise." "Voluntas non potest vocari causa libera, sed 
 tantum necessaria." "Ordo et connexio idearum idem est, 
 ac ordo et connexio rerum." 
 
Jonathan Edwards 159 
 
 of all existence. And so he later expresses Ids 
 notion thus : " The eternal and infinite Being 
 is, in effect, being in general, and comprehends 
 universal existence." And, again, he says : 
 God is " the foundation and fountain of all 
 being and all perfection, from whom all is per- 
 fectly derived, and on whom all is most abso- 
 lutely and perfectly dependent ; whose being 
 and beauty is, as it were, the sum and com- 
 prehension of all existence and excellence much 
 more than the sun is the fountain and summary 
 comprehension of all the light and brightness 
 of the day." But as God is, such must the 
 creation be, for as is the fountain such is the 
 stream, as is the beginning such is the end. 
 And so he describes the end of the creation as 
 really contained within the divine nature. " It 
 appears reasonable to suppose," he says, "that 
 it was God's last end that there might be a 
 glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite 
 fulness of good ad extra^ or without himself ; and 
 that the disposition to communicate himself, or 
 diffuse his own Fulness^ was Avhat moved him 
 to create the world." As the end for which 
 the world was created is thus contained in 
 God, and as creation is " an emanation of his 
 own infinite fulness," it follows that as He is, 
 
160 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 its end must be ; and this end he describes in 
 twofold terms — as his own glory or as the 
 creature's good, but these as coincident and 
 identical, not as different, still less as opposed. 
 Thus he says : " God's respect to the creature's 
 good and his respect to himself is not a divided 
 respect ; but both are united in one, as the 
 happiness of the creature aimed at is happiness 
 in union with himself." And again : " Thus it 
 is easy to conceive how God should seek the 
 good of the creature, consisting in the creat- 
 ure's knowledge of holiness, and even his happi- 
 ness, from a supreme regard to himself; as his 
 happiness arises from that which is an image 
 and participation of God's own beauty ; and 
 consists in the creature's exercising a supreme 
 regard to God, and complacence in him." 
 
 So far we have been concerned with his con- 
 ception of God, and God's relation to the course 
 and end of being ; we have now to see how he 
 translated his theology into religion. Religion 
 was to him essentially imitation of God, the 
 godly being the godlike man. As, then, God 
 was, such ought the virtuous man to be. The 
 methods and ends of the good were those of 
 God. As to God, "he delights in his own 
 goodness, and in the exercise of his goodness, 
 
Jonathan Edwards 161 
 
 and therefore he delights to make the creatui-e 
 happy, and delights to see him made happy." 
 He says : " In God, the love of himself and the 
 love of the public are not to be distinguished 
 as in man, because God's being, as it were, 
 comprehends all." He means, then, that as 
 man's obedience expresses God's perfection, the 
 divine glory is manifested in the character and 
 the conduct of the saints ; for "they are all 
 but the emanations of God's glory, or the ex- 
 cellent brightness and fulness of the Divinity 
 diffused, overflowing, and, as it were, enlarged ; 
 or, in one word, existing ad extra.'' Since 
 religion is imitation of such a Deity, he con- 
 ceives virtue " as love to the greatest happiness, 
 or love to the happiness of universal being''; 
 I.e., the virtuous man is the man whose conduct 
 is governed by the very end for which God 
 made the world. For it is not merely personal 
 happiness or love to our own personal pleasure 
 which constitutes an action virtuous ; on the 
 contrary, he thus admirably distinguishes : 
 " That which is often called Self-love is exceed- 
 ingly improperly called Love., for they do not 
 only say that one loves himself, when he sees 
 something amiable in himself, the view of 
 which begets delight. But merely an inclina- 
 
162 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tion to pleasure, and averseness to pain, they 
 call Self-love ; so that the devils and other 
 damned spirits love themselves, not because 
 they see anything in themselves which they 
 imagine to be lovely, but merely because they 
 do not incline to pain, but to pleasure." True 
 virtue, therefore, " consists in love for God, the 
 being of beings infinitely the greatest and 
 best." It is not the love of pleasure but the 
 happiness that is holiness — a certain kind of 
 beautiful nature which appears in itself beauti- 
 ful or comely because it so makes comeliness — 
 is godlike because it tends to make the world 
 like God. 
 
 While these are Edwards's fundamental and 
 characteristic ideas, the heart as it were of his 
 philosophy, they are modified in the working 
 out by the formal logic and the imperfect psy- 
 chology which he owed to Locke. When he 
 turned from speculation to experience, he looked 
 at it through the traditional beliefs of his peo- 
 ple. These were, of course, imbedded in the 
 very speech of his community, the local condi- 
 tions from which he could not extricate himself, 
 as it were the vernacular into which he had 
 been born. From this point of view we may 
 regard the "Treatise on the Will" as not so 
 
Jonathan Edivards 163 
 
 much a creation of his philosophy as a theologi- 
 cal inheritance ; but its justification was alto- 
 gether in his own manner. It is remarkable 
 that while in his ultimate thinking he had so 
 completely emancipated himself from empiri- 
 cism, in this field of thought he identified 
 himself with the school to which he was most 
 radically opposed. For just as Collins had so 
 developed Locke as to deny liberty and affirm 
 necessity, and as Hume had resolved causation 
 into mere antecedence and sequence, and as 
 Henry Home had applied the same principles 
 to the naturalistic explanation of morality and 
 religion, so Edwards, in his '' Treatise on the 
 Will," turned his back upon his own philosophy 
 and advocated one alien not only to Christian- 
 ity but even to theism. This may require a 
 word of explanation. His fundamental notion 
 that God is the only real cause may be made 
 the basis of a theory of necessity, but then the 
 necessity that it expresses will be one of uni- 
 versal benevolence. It may be quite victori- 
 ously argued that where God is the essence 
 and energy of all that is, man cannot be free ; 
 but if God be conceived as so good as to will 
 universal happiness, the ultimate end must be 
 even as his will. It is remarkable that the 
 
164 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 thinker who had, on the most transcendental 
 of all subjects, so broken with empiricism, 
 should, at this point of transcendent practical 
 importance, have fallen such a potent and will- 
 ing victim to its exhausted charms. But we 
 can see how it happened. The psychological 
 basis of the Treatise Locke supplied. The 
 will was identified with desire, choice with 
 inclination. As desire always must be for the 
 agreeable and towards the pleasant, so the will 
 is always as the strongest motive is. Choice, 
 in other words, was superseded by inclination, 
 and where inclination or desire is the only form 
 of choice the man is but the victim of circum- 
 stances, made according to what happens to him 
 rather than according to what he is. The 
 " Treatise on the Will " was Edwards's most 
 elaborate work; it was also his most imme- 
 diately influential. It was received in Scot- 
 land, to the dismay of his evangelical friends, 
 with warm approval by their freethinking con- 
 temporaries. Henry Home and David Hume 
 found their own ideas here expanded and en- 
 forced by the champion of the orthodox, and 
 the latter, in dismay, turned to him for ex- 
 planations of difficulties, which indeed he 
 attempted to give even while he failed to per- 
 
Jonathan Edwards 165 
 
 ceive their real source and significance. We 
 may leave the Treatise to its empirical admir- 
 ers, while holding to the theology which is its 
 corrective and negation. 
 
 Edwards was in many ways a man who ex- 
 emplified the most characteristic qualities of 
 New England. Occasionally, through his all 
 too sombre speech, a kindly gleam of humour 
 breaks. Thus he quaintly says, "Although 
 the devil be exceedingly crafty and subtle, yet 
 he is one of the greatest fools and blockheads 
 in the world, as the subtlest of wicked men are. 
 Sin is of such a nature that it strangely infatu- 
 ates and stultifies the mind." Take him all in 
 all, in the beauty of his character, in the eleva- 
 tion of his thought, his claim to stand amid the 
 great thinkers of the world is indisputable. In 
 England here we have just been making wel- 
 come the new edition of Bishop Butler's works 
 — edited by the statesman who in his retire- 
 ment shows his undiminished vigour and reveals 
 his lifelong interest in theology — and I have 
 been comparing Butler's answer to Tindal with 
 Edwards's, with the result that I am forced to 
 confess that while the rigour and vigour of inex- 
 orable logic and the strength which comes from 
 a concentration due to the careful exclusion of 
 
166 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 all irrelevant matter are with Butler, the eleva- 
 tion, the insight, the oversight, the feeling of 
 the magnitude of the problem, and the forecast 
 of the lines along which the ultimate answer 
 must move are all with Edwards. Still, he 
 speaks to us in a strange tongue. It is, indeed, 
 our mother speech, yet, as it were, in a dialect 
 so remote from the culture of Europe, from the 
 elegance of literature, and the discipline of the 
 classics, that we hardly know it as our own ; 
 but when we have penetrated under the speech 
 to the matter, and behind the form to the man, 
 we are fain to confess that in this lone New 
 Englander, preaching now in Northampton, 
 whether amid the excitement of the Great 
 Revival or in the face of the coldness of an 
 estranged people, and now labouring in the 
 backwoods at Stockbridge, amid Indians and 
 amid countrymen ruder than the Indians, we 
 yet have one who holds his place amid the 
 most honourable of the doctors of the Church, 
 of the philosophers of his century, and of the 
 saints of God. 
 
X 
 
 HORACE BUSHNELL 
 
X 
 
 HORACE BUSHNELL 
 
 BY THE REV. T. T. MONGER, D.D. 
 
 Horace Bushnell appeared at a time when 
 a theologian was greatly needed in New Eng- 
 land. The force of Edwards's influence had 
 spent itself, or, rather, its soul had gone to 
 feed an intellectual idealism, and its body had 
 degenerated into a hard formalism. His over- 
 whelming sense and assertion of God — a thing 
 not easily brought within the limits of theology 
 or philosophy as they are usually regarded — 
 had lost its inspiring power. 
 
 When Dr. Bushnell began his ministry in 
 Hartford in 1833, the churches may be said to 
 have been living under a system rather than 
 under truths. I will not use my limited space 
 to enforce the distinction, though it is one of 
 real importance. The good qualities that we 
 ascribe to the churches of that day grew out 
 of the truths involved in their theological sys- 
 169 
 
170 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tern ; their faults sprang out of their insistence 
 that those truths must be so defined and shaped 
 as to form a coherent system. It was a marvel 
 of exactness — definitions and proof -texts be- 
 ing accepted — but it never satisfied the think- 
 ers, and was constantly being "improved." In 
 its last form it reposes in unpublished manu- 
 scripts or unread volumes. But, though under- 
 going constant modification, it was imposed on 
 the churches with relentless rigour as the sub- 
 stance of their faith. Its conceptions of God 
 and man were alike defective, its exegesis was 
 poor and arbitrary, its logic formal and pedan- 
 tic, and its conclusions were often inhuman. 
 While involving great nourishing truths, it 
 so combined them that they almost ceased to 
 wear the Christian cast. It is too well known 
 to require statement — a fall in Adam, who in 
 some sense contained or represented the race ; 
 a consequent universal condemnation to eternal 
 punishment ; an atonement that either endured 
 the punishment or made some corresponding 
 expression of it ; imputed sin and imputed 
 righteousness; electing grace and reprobation, 
 each irrespective of character except as it may 
 have been anticipated in the counsels of eter- 
 nity. Such, in substance, was the theology that 
 
Horace Bushnell 171 
 
 prevailed in the early part of the century. As 
 we now see things, it interpreted hardly a fact 
 pertaining to God or man or Scripture or nat- 
 ure with correctness, and yet it asserted dog- 
 mas that presumed an exhaustive knowledge 
 of them. Great Biblical words like faith and 
 sacrifice and life were emptied of their real 
 meaning and made to carry a sense not in- 
 tended. Texts were taken out of their setting 
 and used in support of doctrines to which they 
 do not refer ; and thus the whole Bible was sub- 
 ordinated to a system which only by a fiction 
 could be said to have its origin in it. It was 
 mainly designed to set forth the sovereignty 
 and the glory of God — in redemption indeed, 
 but the two terms were put in such a relation 
 that redemption was belittled by sovereignty 
 and actually failed in reflecting glory — a mis- 
 take in the construction of the system that has 
 reacted fatally upon it. The mistake was a 
 natural one ; the idea of humanity and of the 
 scope of redemption had not yet fully come. 
 Our reverence for the fathers leads us to 
 speak of the vanishing away of this system as 
 a change in habit of thought, but it is more 
 than that ; it is disappearing because it is no 
 longer regarded as true. 
 
172 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Important but not fundamental changes in it 
 were going on while Bashnell was a student in 
 Yale College. The New Haven divines were 
 urging a view of the freedom of the will and 
 of the moral government of God which de- 
 veloped a deeper sense of human responsibility 
 and induced a revival of Christian activity the 
 effects of which were felt in the birth of great 
 religious enterprises that are still full of power 
 — an indication of emergence from the prevail- 
 ing theology. But it was a period of fierce 
 controversy. Dr. Taylor and Dr. Tyler were 
 dividing the churches over a metaphysical no 
 tion of the will, the difference between them 
 being that one claimed that it was a little freer 
 than the other ; and the degree of difference 
 was thought to involve results derogatory to 
 God and harmful to souls The condition, in- 
 tellectually and morally, was cluttered with 
 metaphysical distinctions, emanating from the 
 studies of men imperfectly educated, but keen 
 enough to see the lack of adjustment in a sys- 
 tem which showed such lack because it was 
 made up of truths which could not be dove- 
 tailed into each other. The pulpit was nar- 
 row and timid for fear of getting beyond the 
 imposed conditions, or it was tyrannical in its 
 
Horace Bushnell 173 
 
 insistence on them. The distinctions and dif- 
 ferences had been growing since Edwards, and 
 had reached a stage which Bushnell described 
 in his preface to "Christ in Theology" as 
 *'the sedimentary subsidence of theology itself, 
 precipitated in the confused mixture of its 
 elements." Meanwhile in Massachusetts the 
 Unitarian schism had paralyzed Orthodoxy 
 with fear, and no one dared to speak above 
 one's breath. Professor Park had not yet 
 come to Andover with his great word — one 
 of the most effective ever spoken in the Ameri- 
 can pulpit — on "The Theology of the Intellect 
 and the Feelings" — effective because it showed 
 a way out of an over-rigid theology ; a kind 
 Providence provides such vents for intolerable 
 beliefs. 
 
 What made this condition so deplorable, and 
 so exasperating to Dr. Bushnell when he be- 
 came a pastor, was that this system was carried 
 into and imposed on religious experience. The 
 Thirty-nine Articles are Calvinistic, but they 
 are not intruded on the life of the Episcopal 
 laity: wise but illogical. The clergy of New 
 England could not endure such inconsistency. 
 Indeed, they had nothing to fall back on if 
 their dogmas were set aside ; they had no 
 
174 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 function but to turn them into experience ; 
 the cardinal duty of the pulpit was to preach 
 them. And well was it carried out — an hon- 
 est but doubtful business. Religious experi- 
 ence was made to tally with the system and 
 run the round of its several members in a 
 fixed order. Human life in all its complexity 
 and variety was forced to act under a sharply 
 defined conception of lost condition by nature, 
 heavy conviction of sin, struggle, surrender, 
 illumination by the Spirit, to be followed by 
 an experience of constant heart-searching with 
 possible doubts of election and never any cer- 
 tainty of it, fear lest the sin against the Holy 
 Ghost had been committed, alternations of 
 peace and assurance with occasional ecstasies 
 of trust and hope ; but as a whole the experi- 
 ence was overshadowed by morbid misgiving 
 and painful foreboding — a Puritan search for 
 the Holy Grail. 
 
 The experience was adjusted to a system 
 every feature of which must be reproduced by 
 every person ; but while all were thus held 
 to the system with but small room for the 
 play of personal qualities, the experience was 
 absolutely individual : each soul was isolated 
 from every other, and almost from God, and 
 
Horace Bushnell 175 
 
 left to wrestle alone for salvation. This em- 
 phasis upon system lay at the root of the New 
 England zeal for orthodoxy, and of its intoler- 
 ance of the slightest departure from it. If one 
 doubted any part, one doubted the whole. If 
 he doubted the eternity of punishment, he en- 
 dangered the moral government of God ; if he 
 doubted decrees, all theology was involved in 
 confusion : both doubts were an impeachment 
 of the sovereignty of God. 
 
 Such was the condition of things when Dr. 
 Bushnell came upon the stage. Its main feat- 
 ure was its unnaturalness. Each member of the 
 system represented or hinted at a truth, but the 
 truths were so defined and manipulated that 
 their real meaning evaporated and left only a 
 travesty of the Gospel. The system bore little 
 relation to human nature, took no account of 
 its variety or need, or method of action, but 
 loaded it with burdens which did not beloncr 
 to it, and then required it to throw them off 
 by processes that were arbitrary and unnatural. 
 
 Dr. Bushnell was reared and educated under 
 this system, though some exceptional influences 
 in childhood separated him somewhat from its 
 more rigid features. He never broke away 
 from it externally, but from the first he pro- 
 
176 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tested against it. He refused to think under 
 it or along its lines, and the point of his stout- 
 est protest was its unnaturalness. He took 
 the path by which superior minds have always 
 found their way into new realms of truth. 
 They do not pass from one school to another, 
 but instead rise into some new or some larger 
 conception of nature and start afresh. All 
 gains in philosophy and religion and civiliza- 
 tion have been made by farther inroads into 
 nature, and never in any other way. Dr. 
 Bushnell, with the unerring instinct of a dis- 
 coverer, struck this path and kept it to the end. 
 At the bottom of all his work lies a profound 
 sense of nature, of its meaning and force in the 
 realm of the spirit. He did not deny a certain 
 antithesis between nature and the supernatural, 
 but he so defined the latter that the two could 
 be embraced in the one category of nature when 
 viewed as the ascertained order of God in crea- 
 tion. The supernatural is simply the realm of 
 freedom, and it is as natural as the physical 
 realm of necessity. Thus he not only got rid 
 of the traditional antinomy between them, but 
 led the way into that conception of the relation 
 of God to his world which more and more is 
 taking possession of modern thought. In his 
 
Horace Bushiell 177 
 
 essay on Language he says (and the thought is 
 always with him as a governing principle) : 
 "The whole universe of nature is a perfect 
 analogon of the whole universe of thought or 
 spirit. Therefore, as nature becomes truly a 
 universe only through science revealing its 
 universal laws, the true universe of thought 
 and spirit cannot sooner be conceived." Thus 
 he actually makes the revelation of spiritual 
 truth wait on the unfolding of the facts and 
 laws of the world of nature. There is some- 
 thing pathetic in the attitude of this great 
 thinker sitting in the dark, waiting for dis- 
 closures in nature that would substantiate 
 what he felt was true in the realm of the 
 spirit. A generation later he would have 
 seen the light for which he longed — a light 
 that justifies the central point of all his main 
 contentions. 
 
 He seems to have taken to heart the fact 
 that God made the heavens and earth and all 
 that in them is. This sense of nature was 
 largely an endowment. No theologian was 
 ever more fully dowered with the seeing eye 
 and the interpreting mind. He was a poet 
 before he was a theologian, and his chief 
 excellence as the latter is due to his greatness 
 
178 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 as the former. This divine gift was stimu- 
 lated and directed by Coleridge, whose "Aids 
 to Reflection" kindled within him a passion 
 for thought and feeling early in his career. 
 Thus, without being fully aware of it, he was 
 in close accord with that modern habit of 
 theological thought which came in through 
 Coleridge and has since pervaded the theo- 
 logical world. Its key is nature ; its secret 
 is reason. It sees first and speculates after- 
 ward. Dr. Bushnell's entire work may be 
 characterized as a plea for naturalness. His 
 eye is always fixed on the nature of things. 
 His first book — " Christian Nurture " — is a 
 plea for Christian education according to 
 nature, as seen in the divine constitution of 
 the family. " God in Christ " and " Christ in 
 Theology " are attempts to bring the Trinity 
 within conceptions that do not violate nature. 
 His Sabellianism grew out of his desire to 
 bring the Trinity under the great principle 
 of the Logos, and so get God out of his 
 incomprehensibility down into a region Avhere 
 things are a revelation of God ; the Logos is 
 the meeting-ground of God and nature, the 
 visible side of the invisible God. In Christ 
 God manifests himself as human, and feels 
 
Horace Bushnell 179 
 
 and acts and suffers in human ways, but it 
 is all divine and yet natural as these processes 
 in man are natural. 
 
 "Nature and the Supernatural" had for its 
 purpose to include the two contrasted domains 
 within one category. The will itself, he 
 claimed, was a supernatural agent. "The 
 Vicarious Sacrifice " was an effort to state 
 the Atonement in terms that are justified in 
 human experience. His essays are careful 
 explorations into the nature and relations of 
 the thing under discussion ; often they ran 
 wild with imagination, but in the farthest 
 flights he never let go of the guiding clue of 
 nature. 
 
 The times had much to do with the develop- 
 ment and shaping of his powers. He began 
 his ministry just as that crisis was maturing 
 which ended the reign of superstition and 
 tradition, and ushered in the scientific habit 
 of thought. It was a time well described in 
 Matthew Arnold's lines : 
 
 Wandering between two worlds ; 
 
 One dead, the other powerless to be born. 
 
 Bushnell felt the deadness of one world, but 
 not the inability of the other to be born. 
 
180 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 Born he at least would be, and his whole life 
 was one steady effort to find his way into this 
 new world where highest truths could be 
 joined to highest reason by the connecting 
 bond of nature. Nearly everything that he 
 wrote was grounded " in principles interpreted 
 by human analogies." The power and great- 
 ness of the man lay in the fact that he was 
 broad enough to cover the world in which he 
 first found himself, and also that into which 
 he made his way. He did not abjure his past ; 
 he made no violent break with the existing 
 order ; the weakness of schism was not in 
 him ; he might be turned out, but he would 
 not himself go out. His historic sense was 
 strong, as it is with all great men, and he 
 shrank from violating it by external change. 
 The past contained great realities of faith and 
 practice, and he held fast to them. He had 
 no liking for raw and violent denials and fresh- 
 made doctrines. But while he held to the 
 past, he played the part of critic with vigour, 
 cleared it of its hardness and narrowness and 
 superstition, searched out "the soul of good- 
 ness " in it, and so paved the way into a world 
 as new as that of which Arnold sadly dreamed. 
 I do not mean that Dr. Bushnell wholly parted 
 
Horace Bushnell 181 
 
 with what now seem to us imperfect and pro- 
 vincial opinions in theology, nor that his 
 thought was always what would now be re- 
 garded as scientific ; no man ever wholly frees 
 himself from the defects of his age ; but he 
 found his way into the world of the spirit. 
 Instead of leaving one field and going over 
 into another, he rose into a higher region that 
 spanned both. The characteristic of the man 
 was spirituality ; his ruling passion was for 
 freedom and order. He found his way into 
 freedom along two paths — one by which he 
 '^passed into the vein of comprehensiveness, 
 questioning whether all parties were not in 
 reality standing for some one side or article 
 of the truth " ; the other was a theory of lan- 
 guage which he regarded as his own peculiar 
 work. Whether it was a true theory or not, 
 it served his purpose ; if it was a hobby, it 
 carried him whither he was moved to go. His 
 biographer regards it as "the key to Horace 
 Bushnell," and, undoubtedly, he is to be read 
 under his own theory of language. Its root 
 is to be found in the ancient doctrine of the 
 Logos. As used by himself, words became 
 the reflection of his thought rather than 
 "exact representatives" of it. This theory 
 
182 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 seemed necessary to enable him to speak 
 according to his thought on such themes as 
 the Trinity, atonement, miracle, and regen- 
 eration — subjects that chiefly engaged his 
 attention. He found these great doctrines 
 tied up and smothered under hard and narrow 
 definitions. His first step was rejection of the 
 definitions ; thus he escaped into the world of 
 the spirit, where language does not define but 
 only indicates or shadows forth. The chief 
 value of this theory of language lies in its 
 assertion that spiritual facts and processes 
 cannot be brought within strict definition. 
 We are getting to know this well enough 
 without a special theory. Possibly, however, 
 the day is not yet past when categorical 
 answers to sharply defined questions concern- 
 ing infinite and eternal things are required 
 of suspected teachers. In such a case a theory 
 of language that eludes the dictum of "the 
 evident meaning of the words" is not only 
 convenient but justifiable, and is a proper 
 defence when official bigotry worries such 
 teachers. Even theology has its humorous 
 side, and Samson may jest while the Philistines 
 
 torture him. Dr. A , his chief accuser, 
 
 spends two days with Dr. Bushnell and is 
 
Horace Buslinell 183 
 
 led to believe that there is no heresy in him ; 
 he could not understand his host's use of 
 language. 
 
 I can but hint at the works which came from 
 his prolific pen — a dozen volumes at least, 
 five of them solid treatises on theology and 
 the rest sermons or essays. There is a logical 
 order in the treatises which indicates that one 
 sprang out of or was rendered necessary by 
 another. He began where theology has so 
 often broken down and started afresh — as 
 Dr. Prentice, of Union Seminary, long ago 
 pointed out — with children, in a treatise on 
 "Christian Nurture." It won all Christian 
 motherhood and well-nigh the fathers, but it 
 was discovered to be heretical, and charges 
 to that effect were brought, which never 
 relaxed but never accomplished anything 
 except to forward the doctrine it attacked. 
 The aim of the book was to establish the 
 proposition : " That the child is to grow up 
 a Christian and never know himself as being 
 otherwise " ; a very simple statement, but it 
 shook New England theology to its founda- 
 tions. It attacked the extreme individualism 
 into which theology had fallen, and recalled 
 it to those organic relations between parents 
 
184 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 and children which are recognized in all the 
 historic Churches, and are steadily gaining 
 significance under modern thought. Christian 
 experience had become too supernatural ; Dr. 
 Bushnell brought it within the range of human 
 nature. The effect of the treatise has been 
 to make Christian character not less a prod- 
 uct of divine grace, and to reinforce it by the 
 natural relations of the family. Its main 
 idea is as old as the oldest religion ; for no 
 men were ever so dull as to conceive or 
 develop a religion on a basis of pure individ- 
 ualism ; but Dr. Bushnell treated the subject 
 in a full and thorough way, and prepared 
 it for the modern conceptions and applications 
 of heredity. 
 
 The next book in point of influence is " The 
 Vicarious Sacrifice." I refer only to the first 
 volume, and not to the second, which was orig- 
 inally published under the title "Forgiveness 
 and Law," and afterward incorporated with the 
 first as a part of the same treatise. Its main 
 purpose is to show that the object and issue of 
 the atonement is the moral recovery of man. 
 Christ did not die " to even up a score of pen- 
 alty," but to make the cross a salvation by its 
 power on life and character. The key to his 
 
Horace Bushnell 185 
 
 view is found on the title-page: ''The Vicari- 
 ous Sacrifice, grounded in Principles of Uni- 
 versal Obligation." He regards "the sacrifice 
 and cross of Christ his simple duty, and not 
 any superlative, optional kind of good, outside 
 of all the common principles of virtue. It is 
 not goodness over good, and yielding a surplus 
 of merit in that manner for us, but it is only 
 just as good as it ought to be, or the highest 
 law of right required it to be." Here again we 
 detect the note of nature which is heard in all 
 his writings. He will not admit that there is 
 any principle or law in the atonement which is 
 not of "universal obligation." The sacrifice 
 of Christ meant and called for an exactly cor- 
 responding sacrifice on the part of all men ; it 
 impressed them for that end, and so saved them. 
 It is not penal, nor expiatory except as it works 
 morally to overcome evil, nor is it an expedient 
 to uphold a moral government. These extra- 
 human renderings of a simple and universal 
 moral law are set aside to make room for one 
 that the twentieth century will hardly call in 
 question. No efforts to link this view with 
 those found in the old theologies — doubtless 
 it can be found in them — lessen its novelty as 
 it was propounded to the churches of New 
 
186 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 England. As things were in 1866 it was un- 
 doubtedly heretical, as many a sympathizing 
 young pastor found to his cost. The volume 
 strengthened the suspicion awakened by " Chris- 
 tian Nurture," and henceforth the heresy con- 
 nected with him was that of the "moral view." 
 Efforts were made to bring him to trial, but 
 the Congregational system does not readily 
 lend itself to such work, and he suffered only 
 such small penalties as the religious newspapers 
 inflicted, one of which went into a decline under 
 his stinging characterization of it as " not only 
 behind the age, but behind all ages." But he 
 was not much given to controversy or self- 
 defence. Only once or twice did he turn on 
 his accusers, and then it was as with that "two- 
 handed engine that smites once and smites no 
 more." He was too profound a lover of truth 
 to make it matter of debate ; he did not so 
 reach his conclusions, nor would he so defend 
 them. He belonged rather to the order of 
 seers, and simply declared what it had been 
 given him to see, and so left it. 
 
 Whatever may be said of "The Vicarious 
 Sacrifice" in the way of criticism, the fact 
 remains that it introduced into New England 
 theology the moral view of the atonement, and 
 
Horace Bushnell 187 
 
 largely supplanted the existing view. The 
 doctrine now preached in New England, with 
 modifications indeed, and much of independent 
 interpretation, is that which runs through this 
 treatise — a fact recognized in a recent sermon 
 by Professor George Harris, of Andover, in 
 which he said that " his (Dr. Bushnell's) theory 
 is now more generally accepted than any other." 
 This theory runs through all his books. It 
 was infolded in his first work — " Christian 
 Nurture " — which, indeed, contained the germ 
 of all his writings. This was inevitable. When 
 he struck out the great truth that the Christian 
 training of a child must be in the ways of 
 nature, nature being regarded as God's order, 
 it was inevitable that every doctrine and phase 
 of Christian truth should be treated in like 
 manner. Dr. Bushnell early, and by the very 
 quality of his nature, fell into the scientific 
 habit of thought, and he kept to it throughout. 
 He was often mystical, sometimes inconsistent, 
 but at bottom, in all his conceptions and in 
 almost every sentence, he was scientific ; that 
 is, he kept his eye on facts, on the things that 
 are made, on the divine order wrought into the 
 nature of man, and reasoned from them. There- 
 fore, when he came to treat of miracles — an 
 
188 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 inevitable theme for him — he searched and 
 enlarged the realm of nature to find a place 
 for them. Here again his thought may be at 
 times inaccurate, and without the severity that 
 would now be insisted on, but none the less did 
 he redeem the subject from definitions and 
 interpretations that defied reason and provoked 
 unbelief. He did more ; he directed attention 
 to the field where they must be located, and 
 stated the general principles under which they 
 must be regarded ; he broke down the artificial 
 barrier between two worlds which are not two 
 but one, and made us see that unity in the 
 works of God which destroys the antithesis 
 between nature and miracle, and brings all into 
 one spiritual category. The purpose of the 
 book is indicated in its title : " Nature and the 
 Supernatural as together Constituting the One 
 System of God." The treatise is still of great 
 value, and is perhaps the best on the subject. 
 The tenth chapter has become a Christian 
 classic. The writer did not have the advan- 
 tages afforded by recent science. Evolution, 
 which simplifies the treatment of all subjects, 
 was nothing more than a disputed hypothesis ; 
 biology was a new science ; the new psychology 
 was in its infancy, and exegesis was still en- 
 
Horace Bushnell 189 
 
 thralled under a hard and narrow doctrine of 
 inspiration. The limitations of the treatise are 
 due to these conditions, but all the more does 
 it reveal the bravery and insight of the author ; 
 he anticipated discoveries and wrought the 
 spirit of them into his pages. He hewed out 
 a path through a very tangled wilderness, 
 guided only by his insight into the things of 
 God and by a deep sense of the need of finding 
 a way through. The condition in which the 
 subject lay when Dr. Bushnell began to write 
 was lamentable ; it was exactly that reprobated 
 by Christ when the Jews clamoured for a sign. 
 Thus preached, it played fatally into the hands 
 of infidelity, and added to the perplexity of a 
 faith that was already heavily burdened. As 
 on other subjects, he opened a way out, stem- 
 ming the tide of schismatic denial and rejection 
 by leading men into a region where they could 
 at least think with some show of reason, and 
 look about them with their feet planted on the 
 nature of things. Dr. Bushnell was accounted 
 a heretic, but he saved orthodoxy, at least what 
 of it was worth saving. The churches of New 
 England were fast drifting into a condition 
 where schism or dry-rot would have soon made 
 an end of them. He arrested this process, and 
 
190 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 rediscovered for them the world of the spirit ; 
 he directed their attention to the nature of 
 things, and made them a logos of divine truths ; 
 he created a soil for an ethical and reasonable 
 faith, and sowed seed in it that is still yielding 
 ever-increasing harvests. 
 
 The recognition of his service was tardy and 
 scant except among the younger clergy. There 
 was, however, a quasi-recognition in the dis- 
 tinction that was made between his sermons 
 and his treatises ; the latter were generally set 
 down as dangerous, but the former were ac- 
 knowledged to be full of spiritual power and 
 comfort. The distinction but showed the piti- 
 ful state of criticism at the time ; it was kind 
 but weak. The sermons and the treatises grew 
 out of each other, and were but forms of the 
 same thing. But lack of recognition is a tri- 
 fling matter ; the true prophet is aware that it 
 must be so. It was not a specially sore thing 
 to Dr. Bushnell. He was immensely stored 
 with inner resources. He delighted in his own 
 thoughts, and he found his way into that hid- 
 den world where he " fed on God " (his own 
 phrase), and so had strength and health of soul. 
 Late in life he said to a friend, "I have been 
 greatly blessed in my doubtings." In New 
 
Horace Bushnell 191 
 
 England, and not less in Great Britain, a more 
 Christlike Gospel is preached, and Christian 
 believers the world over are living in the ex- 
 ercise and comfort of a more rational faith, 
 because of the work he did. 
 
 He was a solitary thinker. His writings 
 lack the signs of full contact with the scho- 
 lastic world ; and perhaps they are all the 
 better for it. They suggest by their style and 
 form that he thought as he wrote, and that he 
 worked his way along to his conclusions in- 
 stead of starting with a full plan. Hence he 
 often found it necessary to qualify and correct 
 what he had said, and so his writings have a 
 prolixity that might have been avoided. 
 
 The real greatness of Bushnell does not con- 
 sist in his strictly theological work, but in 
 those separate and yet connected spiritual reve- 
 lations in which his life abounded. Read his 
 books — treatise or essay or sermon — and it is 
 not the truth of thought that most impresses 
 you, but the truth of experience. He was pre- 
 eminently a thinker, but he was still more a 
 practical man in the realm of the spirit. A 
 man of affairs, of keen worldly insight and 
 wisdom, he carried this quality into the things 
 of the spirit. He had no "unrelated facts," 
 
192 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 as every title-page and every chapter shows. 
 His apprehension of God in his personal ex- 
 perience, the play of his own spirit back and 
 forth in God, his moral interpretation of life 
 and of history, his ready perception of the di- 
 vinest truths in his daily walks, his easy and 
 natural lifting of the earthly into the heavenly, 
 and bringing the powers of eternity down into 
 the commonest events of life — these things 
 constitute the greatness and power of the man. 
 In his life as well as in his writings he over- 
 came the hard dualism he found in the prevail- 
 ing theology, and became himself a revelation 
 of the oneness of God in the world of the spirit 
 and in nature. 
 
 The limits of this article permit no mention 
 of Dr. Bushnell as a preacher, nor of the varied 
 work which he performed in other fields than 
 theology, nor of the incidents of his life. I 
 cannot spread out in detail his character, in 
 which virility, mental vigour, saintliness, com- 
 mon sense, imagination, and spiritual insight 
 waged no war with one another, but instead 
 conspired to produce a man who stands on the 
 same plane with Edwards and Channing and 
 Emerson — the other great teachers of the life 
 of the spirit whom New England has produced. 
 
XI 
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
XI 
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 
 
 BY THE REV. A. V. G. ALLEN, D.D. 
 
 There are some voices which are impersonal, 
 speaking, as it were, out of the darkness, giv- 
 ing no hint of time or place, and gaining noth- 
 ing in power or directness by a study of their 
 environment. Such was Thomas a Kempis, 
 whose message comes with equal force to every 
 age. Something of this quality was in Mau- 
 rice, imparting to his thought a certain endur- 
 ing appeal, as if he belonged to no particular 
 time or country, or had received no special in- 
 fluence from his surroundings. And yet no 
 man ever lived more deeply in the heart of his 
 generation, and his teaching contains a pro- 
 found response to the immediate needs of the 
 hour. 
 
 The world into which he entered seemed 
 to be losing its hold on God. Among his 
 more eminent contemporaries, Carlyle com- 
 195 
 
196 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 plained that God was doing nothing ; Mill 
 regarded the divine existence as an open ques- 
 tion, and Darwin appeared to have lost his 
 religious faculty. It was a world interested 
 in reform, whose watchwords were liberalism 
 and progress, whose programme called for the 
 removal of ancient abuses, under which were 
 included religion and the Church. In the 
 place of these relics of a bygone age, science 
 was offered and the religion of humanity, as if 
 adequate substitutes. Agitations were rife for 
 the improvement of social conditions ; but the 
 leaders, for the most part, had ceased to look 
 to God for aid or inspiration — it was time at 
 last that men should help themselves. The 
 labouring men, with their grievances, turned 
 away from the Church and the means of grace 
 as if they were empty mockeries. The higher 
 walks of thought and culture were invaded 
 with religious doubt, a mood in which men 
 would fain believe but could not. The nega- 
 tion had gone deeper than in the eighteenth 
 century, when men professed, at least, to be- 
 lieve in natural religion, and when on this 
 ground Bishop Butler had met them with his 
 Analogy. Now natural religion was called in 
 question ; it had become the issue whether God 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 197 
 
 existed or the soul of man was immortal. Ef- 
 forts were not wanting to meet the situation — 
 proposed reconstructions of the Church after 
 antique models which had once been useful, or 
 the presentation of the claims of the Roman 
 Church as somehow strangely adapted to the 
 requirements of the hour. 
 
 These were the problems of the age to which 
 Maurice appealed with the conviction that " no 
 man," as he had said of Coleridge, ''will ever 
 be of much use to his generation who does not 
 apply himself mainly to the questions which 
 are agitating those who belong to it." It was 
 the burden of his message that God was mani- 
 festing himself in the contemporary world of 
 human thought and activity. " The know- 
 ledge of God," he wrote, " I regarded as the 
 key to all other knowledge, as that which con- 
 nected knowledge with life." And again, "The 
 only way to consider philosophy is in connec- 
 tion with the life of the world, and not as a 
 set of merely intellectual speculations and sys- 
 tems." The light of the world was first re- 
 vealed in life, and life was the light of men. 
 
 The preparation of Maurice for his mission 
 as a theologian began in his early years, as a 
 child in the household. His father was a Uni- 
 
198 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tarian minister, with a simple, genial creed 
 whose principal tenet was the fatherhood of 
 God ; his mother was a Calvinist, thinking of 
 God as absolute sovereign will without whose 
 decree of election salvation was impossible, and 
 for herself doubting if her name were enrolled 
 among the elect. Maurice was forced by his 
 filial love and respect, no less than by his sym- 
 pathetic nature, but also by his spiritual in- 
 sight, to live in the creed of both his parents, 
 and was thus early called to mediate between 
 religious attitudes that seemed to neutralize 
 each other. 
 
 His method of solving the difficulty was a 
 simple one. He insisted that both creeds 
 should be understood as expressing realities or 
 existing relationships, not merely analogies of 
 human reasoning or notions of the mind which 
 it was pleased to entertain. When thus inter- 
 preted, the reconciliation followed — the abso- 
 lute Sovereign of the universe, whose will was 
 inflexible, was at the same time the Infinite 
 Father whose love was the inmost essence of 
 his being. If no one could escape from the 
 control of absolute and sovereign Will, so also 
 no one could be excluded from the love of the 
 Eternal Father. The range of fatherhood was 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 199 
 
 co-extensive with the energy of the divine will. 
 It expanded before the vision till it included 
 not only the Church but the whole secular 
 world as well. Maurice admitted no distinc- 
 tion between a special and a common grace, for 
 such a distinction was incompatible with the 
 idea of fatherhood. Preterition or reprobation 
 as defined in the language of the schools were 
 not fit expressions for describing the economy 
 of the divine will, which was also a father's 
 love. Everywhere it was the same God, call 
 him the Infinite Father or the sovereign Will, 
 who condemned the evil and inspired the good. 
 The loving providence or the infinite purpose 
 of existence must therefore be revealed in every 
 sphere of human life, in the Church and in re- 
 ligion, but also in philosophy and literature, in 
 art and science, in politics and in the social 
 order. 
 
 But, further, the relationship of God to the 
 world, since it was an actual or real relation- 
 ship and not a notion begotten by the mind, 
 must still exist apart from and despite its la- 
 tency to the consciousness. The energizing of 
 the divine will was not dependent upon human 
 acknowledgment nor limited in its activity by 
 human recognition. The fatherhood of God, 
 
200 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 embracing in its scope every child of man, was 
 the latent reality which gave significance to 
 baptism or invested with a deeper meaning the 
 process of conversion. If there were danger 
 that the doctrine of the divine fatherhood 
 might be misinterpreted to sanction laxity or 
 indulgence, yet, when conjoined in organic 
 unity with sovereign will, the love of God 
 became the supreme principle of moral law ; 
 righteousness was seen as the inmost essence 
 of the loving purpose which has gone forth 
 into creation ; the fatherhood which demanded 
 righteousness in the children could grant no 
 relaxation, but must seek and surely find its 
 accomplishment through manifold agencies in 
 life, through chastisement or the bitter agony 
 of experience whether in this world or in an- 
 other. If the moral purpose of God does not 
 always appear in direct manifestation, yet in- 
 directly it never fails to be revealed in the 
 confusion and misery which await the infringe- 
 ment of the moral law. The existence of evil 
 was the one subject upon which Maurice re- 
 fused to speculate. But while he did not in- 
 quire why sin should have entered the world, 
 he dwelt upon the experience that condemned 
 it — how the Bible, the Church, society, and 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 201 
 
 each individual conscience bore witness to its 
 ravages. He recognized also that the normal 
 order of the world and the constitution of man 
 were visibly at war with evil, and since the di- 
 vine love was revealed in the constitution of 
 things and was also identical with sovereign 
 will, evil must at last be overcome and ban- 
 ished from the universe. 
 
 It fell to the lot of Maurice to come into 
 close personal contact with almost every vari- 
 ety of religious thought in England ; and, by 
 virtue of that mysterious element in his per- 
 sonality which made him from his childhood a 
 mediator in religious differences, he learned to 
 live, as it were, in the divergent forms of the 
 common household of faith, to feed upon the 
 truth they held, so that he could interpret their 
 mission from within their fold. In this way 
 he accepted the doctrine of the " inner light " 
 as held by the Quakers, while clinging also to 
 the necessity of sacraments and outward form 
 as revealed in the spiritual life of organic his- 
 toric Christendom. He was thrown among the 
 Irvingites and listened to their urgent cry for 
 the living Spirit who once wrought by signs 
 and wonders in the Apostolic age. But he 
 could not believe that the Spirit's action was 
 
202 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 shut up to any one form of manifestation or 
 that it had ever been withdrawn from the 
 Church. The Holy Spirit appeared to him as 
 the actually existing bond of every unity, 
 whether domestic or social or ecclesiastical, a 
 spirit which united men by bringing them into 
 the fellowship of the Father and the Son ; which 
 spake by the prophets, but also in the conscience 
 and higher reason of every man ; who inspired 
 the writers of the sacred books, but a Spirit 
 also without whose constant presence and in- 
 spiration no man could think or perform those 
 things that are good. Through his connection 
 with the evangelical churches Maurice learned 
 to identify the gospel of Christ with the proc- 
 lamation of a message of deliverance from sin 
 and guilt. He remained at heart an Evan- 
 gelical all his days, but he also widened the 
 range of Christ's redemptive work, till it in- 
 cluded all other deliverances, from every form 
 of oppression and tyranny, whether ecclesias- 
 tical, political, or social. In all this Maurice 
 may appear as the pioneer in some method 
 unknown before. But one is also impressed 
 with that unbroken chain of spiritual influ- 
 ence by which the generations are bound to- 
 gether, handing on to those who follow the 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 203 
 
 truth which has been received, waiting only 
 till God shall provide the medium, the fitting 
 soil in which the living seed at last shall germi- 
 nate, take root, and spring upward and bring 
 forth fruit an hundred fold. 
 
 In his intellectual development Maurice had 
 the unusual advantage of taking the full course 
 of study at Oxford first, and then at Cam- 
 bridge. He caught the spirit, the subtle 
 quality of each of the great universities which 
 have stood throughout their history for differ- 
 ing ideals and tendencies in English thought. 
 Cambridge has been the congenial home of 
 spiritual largeness and freedom. There Puritan- 
 ism found its stronghold in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, to be followed by the liberal school in 
 the English Church of Cudworth, More, and 
 Whichcote. It was at Cambridge that the 
 Evangelical School was nourished, and to Cam- 
 bridge belongs the honour of ranking Coleridge 
 among its pupils. Oxford, on the other hand, 
 which in the Middle Ages was more closely 
 identified with the scholastic philosophy, has 
 given birth to two great conservative move- 
 ments, the Anglican revival under Laud in the 
 seventeenth century, and again under Newman 
 and Pusey, of which the tendency in both cases 
 
204 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 was to idealize or deify the existing institution 
 as against the disintegrating forces of change or 
 revolution. Maurice felt the historical appeal, 
 the sense of historical continuity which Oxford 
 cherishes, but the influence of Cambridge was 
 the stronger. He imbibed there what may be 
 called the spirit of Platonic realism, according 
 to which the eternal idea or pattern of human 
 things is always larger than its embodiment in 
 any human institution and forever calls men to 
 rise to its fuller appreciation. However vision- 
 ary or impracticable the idea may seem, its 
 deepest ground is invoked in the eternal will. 
 Thus Maurice was led to insist upon the ideal 
 constitution of the Church in Christ its head, 
 as the actual reality, and not a mere spiritual 
 aspiration which could rest in the background 
 of thought. His conception of the Church, 
 which brought him into conflict with what may 
 be called an Aristotelian realism, divinizing the 
 existing order as if change or improvement 
 were but sacrilege, was throughout his life one 
 of the ruling ideas of Maurice's theology. He 
 preached it to the workingmen, he traced its 
 presence in history, he urged it as the basis of 
 Christian unity, he would have it carried to the 
 heathen world as the solvent of its dark con- 
 
Frederick Benison Maurice 205 
 
 fusion — the brotherhood of human souls, a 
 divine-human fellowship of which Christ was 
 the head and leader, the Holy Spirit the bond 
 of inward unity, the fatherhood of God its 
 eternal ground in the infinite and sovereign 
 will. 
 
 The man who wrought most powerfully upon 
 Maurice after leaving the university was Cole- 
 ridge, "the Master," as he has been called, 
 "of those who know." Maurice did not come 
 into personal contact with him, but the study 
 of his life and his writings reconciled him to 
 the Church of England, of which he became a 
 minister, and, above all, taught him the signifi- 
 cance of the doctrine of the Trinity. It was no 
 longer an arithmetical puzzle as it had seemed 
 to the typical mind of the last century, but the 
 comprehensive formula of the Christian faith, 
 which contained the reconciliation of the con- 
 tradictions of speculative thought about the 
 divine existence as well as the satisfaction of 
 the deeper needs of the spiritual life. In the 
 light of God as one and yet triune, the fellow- 
 ships and relationships of earth were disclosed as 
 having their ground and justification in the eter- 
 nal fellowship which existed in the bosom of God. 
 In this conviction the Christian Church had re- 
 
206 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 sisted the pressure of the imperial will in the 
 ancient days of its alliance with the Roman 
 Empire — that the Son of God who had as- 
 sumed humanity in the body of this flesh was 
 one and co-equal with the Father. And again 
 in the strength of this conviction, the barbar- 
 ism which overcame the Empire had in turn 
 been overcome. It had also been the watch- 
 word of Christianity in the struggle with Islam 
 when the seemingly difficult and complex idea 
 of God had triumphed over a seeming simplic- 
 ity, which was, after all, but an empty abstrac- 
 tion. But its historical interest and significance 
 paled before its spiritual and moral appeal to 
 the individual soul, or to social reformers re- 
 jecting the Church and disowning God. For 
 the deep-seated and widespread scepticism of 
 the age was assuming that God existed apart 
 from human life, indifferent to human suffer- 
 ing, enforcing obligations and calling for sacri- 
 fices with which in Deity there could be no 
 sympathy, for they were alien to the divine 
 nature. But, in the name of God as Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost, human relationships and 
 duties and obligations of self-sacrifice were 
 taken up, as it were, into God, and glorified 
 by his inmost essential life. The divine be- 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 207 
 
 came the prototype of the human ; eternal 
 fatherhood and sonship were the pattern from 
 which the human relationship was derived, and 
 not an analogy inferred from the human family. 
 Sacrifice and suffering entered as an integral fac- 
 tor into the divine life, before it proceeded forth 
 from God as the moral law of the universe. In 
 the incarnation of God in Christ and in the aton- 
 ing sacrifice on the cross was illustrated the 
 identification of divine with human interests. 
 So great was the importance which Maurice 
 attached to the doctrine of the triune name 
 that in his book on '' The Religions of the 
 World" he applied it as the test by which 
 they were to be measured and judged. Con- 
 fucianism and Mohammedanism could not rise 
 to the truth of the fatherhood of God because 
 they lacked the knowledge of the Son, through 
 whom alone fatherhood could be fully revealed. 
 Brahminism abounded in incarnations of the 
 divine, but they ended in themselves because 
 the knowledge was wanting of the Eternal 
 Father. Buddhism dreamed of an infinite 
 Spirit in which all men shared, but because 
 it did not know the Father and the Son its 
 doctrine of the Spirit was void, as its highest 
 goal was also reduced to Nirvana. 
 
208 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 The ample learning which Maurice needed in 
 order to illustrate and enforce the truth which 
 he discerned, he had the opportunity to gain 
 during the years from 1840 to 1853, when he 
 held the professorship of history and literature 
 in King's College in London. His books bear 
 witness, and more particularly his " History of 
 Philosophy " and his " Social Morality," to the 
 thoroughness and depth of his acquaintance 
 with systems of thought, or his insight into 
 men and motives, or his power of interpreting 
 literature and life. In these works we may 
 read his appeal to the educated mind of his 
 age. He does not offer new arguments for 
 the divine existence, or endeavour to overcome 
 scepticism by dialectics, but rather makes mani- 
 fest how God is revealed in all the higher forms 
 of human thought and expression. All history 
 resolved itself before his eyes into a spiritual 
 drama. The world everywhere appeared to 
 him as bearing witness to God, as if it were 
 fed with the life of God and shone with the 
 light of God. But Maurice does not appear 
 in his books or elsewhere in his work as if en- 
 gaged or preoccupied with the anxious search 
 for God. If he seems burdened, it is as if the 
 weight of the divine revelation might over- 
 
Frederick Denison Maarlce 209 
 
 power him. His attitude is that of receptivity 
 for truth, or as if passivity were the condition 
 for seeing and receiving. His experience con- 
 firms what WordsAvorth had taught: 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 Think you 'mid all this mighty sum 
 
 Of things forever speaking, 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 
 But we must still be seeking ? 
 
 In addition to his other work, Maurice gave 
 much of his time and thought to the improve- 
 ment of the working classes. So identified was 
 he with the cause of social reform that he be- 
 came known as the father of Christian Social- 
 ism. He was the founder of a college for 
 workingmen whose success was mainly owing 
 to his disinterested labours. He had a lofty 
 conception of the capacity of men engaged in 
 physical toil and without education to receive 
 the higher forms of truth and the results of 
 learning. He aimed to overcome their pecul- 
 iar scepticism as to whether God were doing 
 anything for the emancipation of society from 
 
210 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 its oppression. It was the spirit of his teach- 
 ing that it was God who was raising up the 
 very reformers who disowned Him, that it was 
 a divine spirit which stirred up social discon- 
 tent as the condition of social progress. 
 
 While the thought of Maurice does not lend 
 itself easily to brief summaries, yet it is not 
 difficult to trace in all his writings one com- 
 mon element which binds them together in a 
 consistent whole. That "religious realism" 
 which enabled him to grasp the fatherhood of 
 God as an actual relationship which could not 
 be broken may be discerned in every attitude 
 of his mind. He looked upon religious institu- 
 tions, not as identical with their divine idea, 
 but as witnesses to a higher reality. Because 
 the reality existed independently of its acknow- 
 ledgment, he could be charitable while holding 
 the strongest convictions, dogmatic while re- 
 joicing in the largest freedom of thought. 
 What to the popular mind seemed like divine 
 indifference to human affairs was to his mind 
 the visible token of His presence. The relig- 
 ious doubt from which others fled in alarm, 
 he welcomed as an aid to the deeper know- 
 ledge of God. Where others spoke of a lost 
 and ruined world, he spoke of a world which 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 211 
 
 had been redeemed by Christ. Some said that 
 only those who had been baptized were the 
 children of God ; others, that to become a 
 child of God one must have been converted 
 and have the witness of an inward experience ; 
 he said that all men were children of God in 
 virtue of their creation by the Eternal Father. 
 Against those who maintained that religion 
 was repugnant to the natural man, he affirmed 
 religion to be that which the heart needed 
 and for which it craved. In contrast with the 
 method of those who laboured to overcome the 
 natural depravity of the heart as the first step 
 in religious experience, he preached the " God 
 within," even to reprobates, as a divine appeal 
 in order that they might claim the heritage of 
 sonship. In the common thought the Church 
 of God was identified with some existing insti- 
 tution ; he regarded the institution as witness- 
 ing to the existence of the Church. The true 
 Church did not require to be founded or car- 
 ried, but to be proclaimed as having already 
 an actual existence, the brotherhood of men in 
 Christ. It was customary in speaking of the 
 forms of human government to classify theoc- 
 racy by itself, as if it had once existed among 
 the Jewish people or been attempted as an 
 
212 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 experiment at various moments in history ; but 
 he maintained that theocracy, God's govern- 
 ment, underlay all forms of human government 
 as their pattern, the test by which they would 
 be vindicated or condemned. 
 
 This reversal of ordinary judgments, to 
 which men have become accustomed by long 
 habit of training, constitutes a difficulty in 
 reading Maurice which is not easily overcome 
 — a difficulty akin to that which followed the 
 Copernican discovery, when reality was placed 
 in such strange contradiction to the testimony 
 of the senses that it still requires an effort 
 of the mind to adjust the seeming appearance 
 with the actual fact. There was one inference 
 which Maurice urged with great strenuous- 
 ness — that in the spiritual world relationships 
 were timeless, or could not be expressed in 
 terms of quantity; that eternal life and eter- 
 nal death were phrases charged with spiritual 
 potency without reference to their duration. 
 This contention regarding the use of the word 
 "eternal" goes to the heart of the Maurician 
 theology, affording a glimpse into a higher 
 order, where things are not what they seem ; 
 where, instead of the divine revolving around 
 the human, God becomes the central sun of an 
 
Frederick Denison Maurice 21 o 
 
 infinite spiritual universe in wliom men live 
 and move and have tlieir being. The relation- 
 ship of fatherhood and sonship constitutes the 
 law of spiritual gravitation from which there 
 is no escape, in whose glad recognition and 
 obedience consists eternal salvation. 
 
 But, apart from his theological teaching, it 
 is the supreme tribute to be paid to Maurice 
 that he stood throughout his life as a con- 
 fessor to his age, listening to the story of 
 human doubt in deep sympathy, and never 
 turning his ear away from any man who found 
 difficulty in believing. Tennyson, who was his 
 friend, has described him in what he did for 
 himself and for others : 
 
 The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell 
 On doubts that drive the coward back, 
 And keen through wordy snares to track 
 
 Suggestion to her inmost cell. 
 
 He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
 He would not make his judgments blind, 
 He faced the spectres of his mind 
 
 And laid them ; thus he came at length 
 
 To find a stronger faith his own ; 
 
 And power was with him in the night, 
 Which makes the darkness and the light, 
 
 And dwells not in the light alone. 
 
214 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 It was the testimony of Archdeacon Hare, 
 while Maurice was still alive, that no one had 
 done so much in reconciling the reason and 
 the conscience of the thoughtful men of the 
 age to the faith of the Church : " It is in great 
 measure owing to him that the intellect of the 
 rising generation is with us rather than against 
 us." In the words of another eminent contem- 
 porary, Dr. Montagu Butler: "Wherever rich 
 and poor are brought closer together, wherever 
 men learn to think more worthily of God in 
 Christ, the great work that he has laboured 
 at for nearly fifty years shall be spoken of as 
 a memorial of him." He held no high prefer- 
 ment in the Church of England, but the world 
 recognized him for what he was and for what 
 he had done. At his death in 1872 there was 
 a demonstration of public feeling which for 
 spontaneity and universality had not been wit- 
 nessed since the funeral of the Duke of Wel- 
 lington. Beneath his bust in Westminster 
 Abbey is recorded the only estimate we need : 
 " He was not that light ; but was sent to bear 
 witness of that light." 
 
XII 
 
 CAN WE BE PROPHETS? 
 
XII 
 
 CAN WE BE PROPHETS? 
 
 BY THE VERY REV. F, W. FARRAR, D.D. 
 
 1. Can we be prophets? Most assuredly, 
 yes. It is not the possibility which is wanting, 
 but the will. We are called to be, every one 
 of us in our degree and measure, prophets of 
 the Lord ; interpreters, that is, of his will to 
 men, both on our lips and in our lives. It 
 is, then, most important to us to meditate and 
 understand what a prophet is, what he has to 
 do, what he has to expect, what he may hope 
 to achieve. What the prophet has to do is 
 to sweeten the moral air which the world 
 breathes ; to raise the tone of society ; to ex- 
 pose the hoUowness of the compromises which 
 the heart is constantly making with the powers 
 of evil ; to set forth an example of something 
 higher and more heroical in religion than his 
 age affects ; to turn men's eyes from the danc- 
 ing bubbles of avarice and ambition to the dis- 
 217 
 
218 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 tant, the future, and the unseen ; to live as one 
 to whom it has been granted to see the things 
 that are invisible. This inscription was found 
 carved over a temple door in a southern island : 
 " The world was given us for our own upbuild- 
 ing, not for the purpose of raising sumptuous 
 houses ; life, for the discharge of moral and 
 religious duties, not for pleasurable indul- 
 gence ; wealth, to be liberally bestowed, not 
 avariciously hoarded ; learning, to produce 
 good actions, not empty disputes." In other 
 words, life is a serious and noble thing, and we 
 are in daily danger — a danger to which most 
 of us succumb — of making it a paltry, a petty, 
 a frivolous, a dishonest, and a corrupted thing. 
 And if God sends us prophets, it is that they 
 may raise us up, that their words and deeds 
 may breathe like a fresh wind through the 
 perfumed and polluted atmosphere of society ; 
 that they may become electric to flash through 
 all the world the wholesome lightnings of truth 
 and faith, startling the strongholds of immoral 
 selfishness and shattering the refuges of ac- 
 cepted lies. And yet all this the prophet has 
 to do, often alone ; often in deep obscurity and 
 isolation ; often in the midst of poverty and 
 persecution ; and he must do it with a deep 
 
Can we he Prophets? 219 
 
 and crushing sense of his own feebleness and 
 imperfections, but making a loyal sacrifice of 
 his earthly life and his earthly hopes. How, 
 then, can we be prophets — we, the worldly ; 
 we, the sensual ; we, the idle and sluggish ; we, 
 the vulgar and conventional ; we, who worship 
 Mammon, and love pleasure, and delight so 
 much in scandal and hatred and lies? As 
 we are, we cannot be prophets ; but are the 
 wings of six-winged seraphim — the twain with 
 which they did fly — folded forever ? Is there 
 no temple more ? Is heaven closed forever ? 
 Burns there no fire on the altar? Has the 
 chariot of heaven ceased to descend to earth ? 
 Are there no hot coals of fire to touch and 
 purify the unclean lips ? Does the Lord say 
 no longer from his throne above the cherubim, 
 "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? " 
 He who made the stammerer Moses his law- 
 giver, when he was in the wilderness but a 
 shepherd of alien sheep ; He who made the 
 peasant Amos a prophet, as he earned his few 
 daily pence by gathering the coarse fruit of the 
 sycamore ; He who made a prophet of Jere- 
 miah when he was yet but a timid child ; He 
 who slung a sword round the neck of the least 
 of the children of Manasseh, and sent him forth 
 
220 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 to smite the innumerable foe — cannot He make 
 sons of God and heroes of us, even of us? If 
 the world summoned us to her splendours and 
 her feasts, if some one offered us a life of ease 
 and wealthy self-indulgence, what a rush there 
 would be to claim it ! 
 
 Hark ! rising to the ignoble call, 
 How answers each bold Bacchanal ! 
 
 But when God calls us and offers Heaven as 
 the issue, will we all slink back in silence ? 
 Shall He alone find none to brave sorrow and 
 loss for Him, among the many whom He has 
 made ? Well, He calls us now ! 
 
 2. But God never deceives us. His prophets 
 must be made of stern stuff, men of nerve and 
 insight. He does not promise us any primrose 
 path of dalliance. He says, '' If ye would be 
 my soldiers, ye must endure hardness. If ye 
 would run in my race, ye must train. If ye 
 would be my athletes, ye must deny yourselves. 
 If ye are to be my prophets, then, like all my 
 best and greatest prophets, in the world ye 
 shall have tribulation." Why must this be so ? 
 It is, in one word, because the prophet must 
 escape the average. The mass of mankind live 
 the average life. They are easy-going, con- 
 
Can ive he Prophets ? 221 
 
 A^entional, traditional, commonplace. They do 
 what others do ; say what others say ; they do 
 not either think or act for themselves ; any 
 shibboleth does for them, so that it is current ; 
 any sophism suffices them, so it be accepted ; 
 they are but echoes ; they pair off, as one has 
 said, in insane parties, and because they ignore 
 the deep realities of morals and religion, they 
 detest to have their sand-built houses shaken, 
 or their sluggish ease disturbed. It is almost 
 incredible how hostile mankind has been to its 
 greatest men. Scarcely ever has there been a 
 great soul uttering truth but there has been 
 the shadow of Calvary. It is because the ma- 
 jority do not like trouble, and to face new 
 truth is a trouble. However much they may 
 be told that there is no such word as mumpi- 
 mus, still, like the old Catholic priest, they will 
 refuse to change it for the right but unfamiliar 
 sumpsimus. And that is why the world poisons 
 Socrates, who bids it think out its own philos- 
 ophy, and burns those who bid it amend its 
 false religion. Majorities are constantly in the 
 wrong. When Phocion heard the multitude 
 applaud his speech, he turned round in sur- 
 prise and asked, " Have I said anything wrong, 
 then?" "Always," as Goethe said, "it is the 
 
222 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 individual who works for progress, not the age. 
 The ages have always been the same." It is 
 this fact which robs of any cynical bitterness 
 the saying of a great writer, that the world is 
 composed of some thousand million human be- 
 ings — mostly fools. Well, but the prophet 
 must escape the average ; he must not be a 
 fool. Least of all must he be so in spiritual 
 intuition and moral views. 
 
 3. Now, we cannot get to practical applica- 
 tions till we have grasped fundamental facts ; 
 we cannot do even small duties without the 
 strength inspired by great principles. It re- 
 quires a converted character to make even a 
 thoroughly honest and satisfactory housemaid. 
 It is not so easy as men seem to assume to be a 
 Christian. To be a party religionist — to be an 
 Evangelical, or a Broad Churchman, or a High 
 Churchman — is very easy. But it is not easy 
 to be a brave, true, honest man. Let me, then, 
 try to illustrate what I have been saying. Let 
 me try to show that no man can be truly good 
 unless he escapes the average ; to show that to 
 escape the average costs something ; and so, 
 gradually, from great examples, to learn what 
 to us is so inestimably precious and indispen- 
 sable to learn ; namely, how, with some courage 
 
Can we he Prophets? 223 
 
 and some insight, to do our duty. Would God 
 all the Lord's people were prophets ; but we 
 cannot be so by echoing common falsehoods 
 and by running in conventional grooves. Let 
 me show, by an instance, what the prophet 
 must do and bear. 
 
 4. In the third century after Christ a boy 
 was born at Alexandria, of Christian parents, 
 in days of persecution. His parents trained 
 him carefully, and he showed, even as a child, 
 so bright a wisdom that, as he slept, the father 
 would sometimes kiss reverently the breast of 
 his sleeping son, whom he regarded as a temple 
 of the Holy Ghost. Fierce persecution arose, 
 and the father was seized and imprisoned. The 
 boy, then but sixteen years old, showed such 
 ardent longing for the crown of martyrdom 
 that his mother had to conceal his clothes, and 
 so prevent him from going forth into peril ; 
 yet, even then, he wrote to his father to be 
 brave and not to shrink. The father was mar- 
 tyred. The boy, left with a mother and five 
 brothers and sisters entirely destitute, toiled 
 for their support. Being a prodigy of learn- 
 ing, he supported himself by teaching pupils, 
 and then sold all his books of classic literature 
 for an annuity of a few pence a day, on which, 
 
224 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 throughout life, he lived. Taking the Gospel 
 literally, he would have no shoes, and but one 
 coat, and would touch no strong drink, and 
 lived from boyhood in severe and noble sim- 
 plicity. Almost before he was a man he be- 
 came the head of the great catechetical school 
 of Alexandria. Amid constant perils he lived 
 a life which was, from first to last, one long 
 prayer, one long struggle for closer union with 
 the Eternal and the Unseen. He exercised on 
 the Church of his own day, and of all succeed- 
 ing ages, an almost incredible influence. He 
 had saints and martyrs and holy hermits and 
 wise bishops among his converts and pupils. 
 He won over to the faith alike Christian here- 
 tics and heathen philosophers. He wrote hun- 
 dreds of books and pamphlets which others, 
 without acknowledgment, appropriated. He 
 was, even by the confession of his enemies, the 
 greatest man who had risen in the Church since 
 the days of the Apostles, and perhaps also the 
 holiest. His homilies have been the type of all 
 homilies since. He laid the very foundation of 
 the science of textual criticism. He was the 
 first who attempted a philosophy of Christian- 
 ity. After years of incredible labour and self- 
 denial, in which he rendered to the Church 
 
Can we he Prophets? 225 
 
 such services as no man has ever rendered 
 since, he died a martyr's death in the Deciie 
 persecution. That man was the great Chris- 
 tian Father, Origen the Adamantine. And 
 what was his reward? In his lifetime, bitter 
 envy, malignant persecution ; after his death, 
 the damnamus of Augsburg and the anathema 
 of Rome. The splendour of his attainments 
 raised him a host of enemies ; the depth of his 
 thoughts frightened the conventional ignorance 
 which took itself for ortliodox belief. This 
 greatest and holiest of men was branded as a 
 heretic nearly tliree centuries after his death 
 by the combined intrigues of a cunning and 
 worthless bishop and a cruel emperor. For 
 centuries it continued to be debated whether 
 he was not suffering infernal torments ; and 
 though, in the fifteenth century, when learning 
 revived once more, and a ray of light out of 
 God's eternity woke the Middle Ages from 
 their dark and ghastly dream, when ancient 
 Greece once more "started into life, but with 
 the New Testament in her hand " — though, I 
 say, since then the best and greatest have ever 
 honoured the name of Origen, yet this is the 
 man at whom, to this day, every raw sciolist 
 and every full-fed Pharisee still thinks that he 
 
226 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 may cast a stone. Why ? Because Origen was 
 a prophet ; he escaped the average ; he is, even 
 still, too great for their comprehension, too 
 wide and deep and brave a thinker for the 
 average mediocrity of common and cringing 
 thought. 
 
 5. So fares the prophet on earth in matters 
 of religion. It is the same in matters of sci- 
 ence. At the beginning of the twelfth century 
 after Christ a boy was born of a good family in 
 Somersetshire, who grew up to be one of the 
 greatest men whom the world has ever seen. 
 Only about once in a century does God kindle 
 the glory of an exceptional intellect ; and, 
 alas ! whenever such a light is kindled, the 
 world, which loves darkness, generally does its 
 best to quench it ; even as, in some dim cave, 
 the birds which love the twilight will flap out 
 an uplifted torch with their obscure wings ; 
 or as by night, in African wilds, the moths and 
 beetles will quench with their dark carcasses 
 the traveller's lamp. This boy, born in 1214, 
 was the founder of experimental philosophy. 
 To him is due the very dawn of that science 
 which is now the glory and blessing of the 
 world. Even in that age, besides science, he 
 mastered Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. 
 
Can we he Prophets? 227 
 
 He was the earliest writer on chemistry in 
 Europe. In his works he anticipated by three 
 centuries the invention of the telescope, by four 
 centuries the discovery of the laws of optics, 
 by more than five centuries the invention of 
 steam, suspension bridges, the diving-bell, and 
 the balloon. At that time what is called the 
 scholastic system was triumphant. It was 
 thought that there was no knowledge to be had 
 outside the pages of Aristotle. For a Christian 
 teacher to run counter to this heathen philoso- 
 pher was to be a heretic. The student I speak 
 of went to Oxford, and in order to devote his 
 life to knowledge he became a Franciscan 
 monk. He soon discovered that the Oxford of 
 his day was languidly feeding on the thistles of 
 a mere verbal knowledge ; and that there was 
 less to learn from all Aristotle, and all his com- 
 mentators, than was to be learned from one 
 line on the broad page of the works of God. 
 He wrote a book which he called his " greater 
 work " to shoAv what were the chief causes of 
 human ignorance. They were, he said, these 
 four : (1) Servile deference to authority ; (2) 
 traditionary habit ; (3) the neglect to train 
 the senses to observe ; and (4) the disposition 
 to conceal our ignorance, and make a show of 
 
228 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 our supposed knowledge. Truer words were 
 never uttered, and they are as applicable to relig- 
 ion as to science, and now as they were then. 
 Now, what happened to this splendid benefactor 
 of humanity among the hidebound slaves of 
 pseudo-orthodox tradition ? Ignorance, malig- 
 nity, folly, and that sort of animal stupidity 
 shown by men of decided opinions which are 
 based on nothing — against which even the 
 gods fight in vain — led the dull monks and 
 stupid religionists of his day to accuse him of 
 magic and sorcery. He spent many years of 
 his life in prison. He was insulted, scorned, 
 and, it is believed, even tortured. That man 
 was Roger Bacon, a far greater man than Fran- 
 cis Bacon, Earl of Verulam, by whom his fame 
 has been eclipsed. It was not till the age of 
 seventy that, broken in heart and broken by 
 suffering, he was liberated from prison. In 
 the last eight years of his life he was able to 
 do nothing. He was driven to the bitter 
 thought that men, as he knew them, were so 
 base, so little, and so ignorant that they were 
 not worth the pain and toil which he had 
 endured on their behalf. God had inbreathed 
 an intellect into one of his children which 
 would have anticipated by three centuries the 
 
Can we he Prophets? 229 
 
 richest blessings wliicli science has bestowed 
 upon mankind. God kindled it ; man quenched 
 it. Truly, "however we brazen it out, we men 
 are a little tried." Had there been no perse- 
 cuted prophets to be loftier than the common 
 run of us, we should have been low indeed. 
 
 6. I give these two instances to show that a 
 man may be a prophet in many directions, but 
 that if we hope, if we try, in any direction to 
 escape the average, it will cost us something. 
 It may cost us nothing less than the success 
 and happiness of our lives. So that I hope 
 that not one will say, "What is all this to 
 me ? I cannot be a great religious thinker like 
 Origen, or a great scientific discoverer like 
 Roger Bacon. I cannot lift mankind from the 
 slough of intellectual sloth and moral compro- 
 mise in which they love to lie." Pardon me ; 
 that is not quite true. We cannot be profound 
 and learned like Origen, or men of superb 
 genius like Roger Bacon, but every one of us 
 can be humble like Origen, and brave like 
 Origen, and unresentful like Origen ; and can- 
 did, and thoughtful, and lovers of truth like 
 Roger Bacon ; and we, like them both — in 
 great things or in little, as God shall grant 
 to us — may help to improve the moral judg- 
 
230 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 ments and to raise the moral standard of the 
 world. To do this requires no mental great- 
 ness, no grand position. It has been done 
 by youths and timid girls, by poor women 
 and penniless, persecuted men. Many a poor 
 woman or boy may think that what I have said 
 was not for them, because they never heard so 
 much as the names of these great men ; well, 
 but their names, and the age in which they 
 lived, are of no consequence ; what is of conse- 
 quence is that they were just human beings, 
 who breathed common air of life, who had once 
 been little babes in the cradle as you and I 
 were. In our own way, to our own degree, we 
 can walk in their steps, as they walked in the 
 steps of their Saviour Christ. 
 
 7. For, mark, it does not want genius or 
 power or learning to benefit men by braving 
 their false judgments, by scorning their hypo- 
 critical alliances with sin, by opening their eyes 
 to the infamy of accepted customs. It only 
 wants — if I may use a vulgar word — it only 
 wants pluck ; fidelity ; moral manliness. It 
 wants no knowledge beyond that of the Lord's 
 Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the 
 vulgar tongue. It only wants the eyes open 
 to see God's law. Yet how marvellously rare 
 
Can we be Prophets P 231 
 
 is this moral courage ! Brute courage ; in- 
 stinctive courage ; the courage of the tiger 
 " which bounds with bare breast and unarmed 
 claws upon the hunter's spear"; the flashy 
 courage of the bully in the ring, or of the felon 
 who, in his own brutal language, "wants to 
 'die game' upon the scaffold" — that is com- 
 mon enough ; but the courage which dares to 
 confront an angry king, or, standing up before 
 a raging mob, dares to say, " You are wrong "; 
 the courage which says, " I will not follow the 
 multitude to be lost"; the courage which sees 
 nothing but feebleness in the plea, " every one 
 else does it, so I must do it too"; the courage 
 of the man who, when standing up against 
 brute force for law and right, says, " No bullets 
 and no threats shall cow me in the clear direc- 
 tion of my duty "; still more the courage which 
 can face and shame down a wrong custom amid 
 the execrations of its votaries — that courage re- 
 quires no genius except a moral genius which 
 the most ignorant man or woman alive can show ; 
 and that moral genius of fearless rectitude is 
 most astonishingly rare. We all know one mem- 
 orable instance, to which I shall therefore but 
 passingly allude. We know how, in ancient 
 days, existed the horrible cruelty of public 
 
232 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 games in which criminals and gladiators — often 
 barbarians — fought each other and stabbed each 
 other to death before the yelling and gaping 
 multitude. Who would have thought that 
 such a custom would have survived no less 
 than four centuries of Christianity? Yet it 
 did ; and we need not be so much surprised 
 when we remember that our fathers looked on 
 unmoved at the English brutalities of bear- 
 baiting and cock-fighting ; that dog -fighting 
 still secretly survives, that there may be men 
 even among my readers who have looked on at 
 the foul and filthy spectacle of a prize-fight. 
 But who stopped gladiatorial shows ? Who 
 wiped that infamy from the manners and 
 morals of a nominally Christian Empire ? Not 
 emperors, or consuls, or lawyers, or writers of 
 genius, or eloquent preachers, or learned di- 
 vines, but just a rude, illiterate, unknown 
 Asiatic monk, who had the courage to say, 
 " This is wrong," and the courage to say, " So 
 far as I am concerned, it shall not be." The 
 show was going on ; the myriads were assem- 
 bled in the Coliseum ; the gladiators were 
 matched ; the Emperor was in the chair ; 
 there was a clash of swords and a stream of 
 blood, and the horrible spectacle had fairly 
 
Can we he Prophets? 233 
 
 begun. Then, in his monk's rude dress, down 
 into the arena leaped the intrepid man, and, 
 unarmed as he was, thrust himself between tlie 
 weapons of that murderous struggle. It was 
 the poor blind monk Telemachus. '' Who is 
 he ? What presumptuous insolence ! Down 
 with him ! " The mob hooted, yelled, raged, 
 leaped over the barriers, hurled stones at him, 
 would have rent him limb from limb. The very 
 gladiators, whom he would have saved, turned 
 their swords against him. He fell a mangled 
 mass, beaten to death by innumerable blows. 
 It is the only day of all his life of which a 
 single fact is known. But what a day ! it was 
 a day in which his plain sense of right and 
 wrong, his plain courage in acting up to it, had 
 done nothing less than liberate the world ! 
 
 Sound, sound the trumpet ; shrill the fife ! 
 
 To all the sensual world proclaim, 
 One crowded hour of glorious life 
 
 Is worth a world without a name ! 
 
 8. Let me give another instance. It requires 
 no small courage to resist the power and decrees 
 of kings. It is never right to do so except when 
 righteousness and truth demand, and one is 
 sorry to see those high dear issues confused for 
 
234 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 the sake of mere fantastic puerilities. When 
 they do, when there is a clear collision between 
 conscience and the civil power, no good man, 
 no true man, no brave man, ought to flinch. 
 Isaiah, we saw, did not flinch before Ahaz and 
 Manasseh ; nor Elijah before Jezebel ; nor St. 
 Ambrose before Theodosius ; nor St. Chrysos- 
 tom before Eudosia. Yet even Luther and 
 Melancthon did before Philip of Hesse. John 
 had said to Herod, with noble and blunt 
 forthrightness, "It is not lawful for thee to 
 have her " ; yet Luther and Melancthon — 
 though the shame of it afterwards almost broke 
 Melancthon's heart — practically allowed Philip 
 of Hesse to contract a bigamous marriage. 
 Now we, thank God, are never likely, in any 
 worthy or sensible cause, to come into collision 
 with the civil power ; but there is not one of us 
 who may not have to confront some superior — 
 our employer in an office, our master in a shop, 
 if they bid us do wrong. And this may cost 
 us much ; and there is a tremendous temptation 
 not to do it. Yet how invaluable to others one 
 brave word, one brave act, may be! In the 
 reign of James II., in 1683, the clergy were 
 ordered to read a declaration which they held 
 to be illegal. Even eminent laymen advised 
 
Can we he Prophets? 235 
 
 submission ; and to refuse it was to brave a 
 tyrant as unscrupulous and as cruel as he was 
 narrow and bigoted. Bishop Sprat had the 
 baseness to comply, and with pale face and 
 shaking hands he read it in the Abbey amid 
 the noise of the congregation as they indignantly 
 crowded out. But fifteen London clergymen 
 met to consider whether they should do it. 
 They were inclined to yield, when Dr. Edward 
 Fowler got up and said, "I must be plain. 
 The question is quite simple. Let each man 
 say yes or no. But I cannot be bound by the 
 vote even of the majority. This declaration I 
 cannot in conscience read." His courage fired 
 the rest, carried the day, and saved England 
 from a Popish tyranny. In four churches, only, 
 of London was the order read. The father of 
 John Wesley, then a curate in London, chose for 
 his text that day the words, '^ Be it known unto 
 thee, O King, that we will not serve thy gods, 
 nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
 setup." 
 
 9. This is to act in the spirit of a prophet. 
 It is to see the truth plainly, and to act up 
 to it boldly ; to see the truth unblinded by 
 the mists of self-interest or the cobwebs of 
 casuistry ; to act up to it though rulers may 
 threaten and mobs may yell. 
 
236 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 I will give another illustration in our own 
 day. In the youth of many of us duels were 
 still common. The statesmen of that time, the 
 literary men of that time, had — many of them 
 — been engaged in duels, as some living men 
 of eminence have been. The custom was bad, 
 as un-Christian, as anti- Christian as anything 
 could be ; it was "a mixture of fashion and 
 revengefulness, of murder and suicide." And 
 yet society, so far from condemning it, consid- 
 ered it a necessary institution ; and every 
 hot-blooded young fool who misunderstood a 
 neighbour's remark thought himself entitled to 
 demand what he called "satisfaction." Now, 
 though this spirit of murderous resentment and 
 this reckless disregard of human life stood 
 utterly condemned before the bar of every 
 moral law, it required a very brave man indeed 
 to resist it. A story is told of one such brave 
 man. An insulting adversary spat in his face. 
 "Young man," he said, "if I could wipe your 
 blood off my conscience as easily as I can wipe 
 your insult off my face, I would strike you 
 dead this moment." But the person who did 
 more than any one to give the death-blow to 
 this wicked and senseless custom in our day 
 was a peer — the Earl of Shaftesbury — who 
 
Can we be Prophets f 237 
 
 stands foremost for his services to mankind. 
 Years ago he received a challenge from some 
 blustering opponent. Instead of accepting it, 
 he wrote back a quietly contemptuous refusal, 
 and sent the letters to the police court and the 
 newspapers. After that the proposal to set- 
 tle a quarrel by being shot at and shooting 
 at some else — a mode of settlement which, 
 though it did not stand above the level of the 
 morality of the O jib ways, yet, simply because 
 it was the custom of society, did not strike 
 our grandfathers as grotesque or wrong — fell 
 before the force of courage and insight into 
 moral contempt and merited disgrace. 
 
 I have dwelt on these instances solely be- 
 cause the concrete is more likely to explain 
 itself, more likely to act as a motive, than the 
 abstract. And, not to talk only of distant and 
 heroic things and persons of which history tells, 
 I will give a very modern and every-day in- 
 stance. The story has got into books ; it has 
 been told of various schools and other com- 
 munities, but, as I tell it you, it was told me 
 by one who knew, and was himself an actor 
 in the scene. More than forty years ago, at a 
 great English school (and in those days that 
 state of things was common), no boy in the 
 
238 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 large dormitories ever dared to say his pray- 
 ers. A young new boy — neither strong, nor 
 distinguished, nor brilliant, nor influential, nor 
 of high rank — came to the school. The first 
 night that he slept in his dormitory not one 
 boy knelt to say his prayers. But the new 
 boy knelt down, as he had always done. He 
 was jeered at, insulted, pelted, kicked for it; 
 and so he was the next night, and the next. 
 But, after a night or two, not only did the 
 persecution cease, but another boy knelt down 
 as well as himself, and then another, until it 
 became the custom for every boy to kneel 
 nightly at the altar of his own bedside. From 
 that dormitory, in which my informant was, 
 the custom spread to other dormitories, one 
 by one. When that young new boy came to 
 the school, no boy said his prayers ; when he 
 left it, without one act or word on his part be- 
 yond the silent influence of a quiet and brave 
 example, all the boys said their prayers. The 
 right act had prevailed against the bad cus- 
 tom and the blinded cowardice of that little 
 world. That boy still lives; and if he had 
 never done one good deed besides that deed, 
 be sure it stands written for him in golden 
 letters on the Recording Angel's book. Now, 
 
Can we he Prophets? 239 
 
 is not that kind of act an act which any one 
 of us, from the richest statesman down to the 
 youngest boy, might imitate? Are there no bad 
 customs, no immoral conventions, no base ac- 
 quiescences, no tolerated evils, in society ? And 
 if so, have you no share in them? Have you 
 made no attempt to make a compromise be- 
 tween Christ and Belial? Are there no Tem- 
 ples of Rimmon in England ? And, if so, have 
 we never bowed in them ? Well, whenever we 
 see a wrong deed and have the courage to 
 say, " It is wrong, and I, for one, will have 
 nothing to do with it" ; whenever we come 
 in contact with a low and un-Cliristian stand- 
 ard, or a bad, unworthy habit, and are man 
 enough first to refuse for our own part to 
 succumb to it, and then to do our best to 
 overthrow it — we are prophets. Indeed, those 
 who live in poor streets have even more oppor- 
 tunities of taking this line and of making this 
 stand than others have. If the Gospel means 
 the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, remem- 
 ber that this is the Gospel and nothing but the 
 Gospel, though it be not expressed in the shib- 
 boleths which Pharisees are most fond of writ- 
 ing on their broad phylacteries. For this — to 
 see sin, which tried to pass itself off for virtue ; 
 
240 Prophets of the Christian Faith 
 
 to expose hypocrisy, which wore the garb of 
 religion ; to save society, which was perishing 
 of its own hidden corruption ; to teach truth, 
 though men hated it; to scatter darkness, 
 though men loved it; to reveal the God of 
 Love, though men had represented him as a 
 Moloch of hatred; to teach men that their 
 work in life was to love and to help their 
 fellow-men, and so (and not by mere exclusive 
 formulae and malignant orthodoxies) to save 
 their own souls — this, this emphatically, was 
 the work of Christ. His work and therefore 
 our work, for which he will inspire the cour- 
 age. Be brave, be just, be truthful and honest 
 to the heart's core, and so serve your brother 
 man, and so serve best your Father God, and 
 your Saviour the Lord Christ. If those be not 
 lessons of the Gospel of the Pharisees, they are, 
 ten thousand fold more than a gloomy Calvin- 
 ism or a sectarian shibboleth, the lessons of the 
 Gospel of Christ. " There are," a great states- 
 man said, "there are steeps of Alma on the 
 field of duty no less than on the field of blood." 
 The question is, will we be one of the vulgar 
 throng that will not face them, or will we be 
 individual soldiers, however humble, in the 
 " thin red line " that carries them against the 
 
Can we he Prophets? 241 
 
 foe ? If of the latter, then God will make us, 
 too, his prophets, and will say to us, as to 
 Ezekiel : 
 
 "And thou, son of man, be not afraid of 
 them. Be not afraid of their faces ; be not 
 afraid of their words, though briers and thorns 
 be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scor- 
 pions." 
 
 THE END 
 
OUTLINES OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY. 
 
 By WILLIAn DE WITT HYDE, D.D. 
 
 President of Bowdoin College. 
 
 i2mo. Cloth. Price $1.50. 
 
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 SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 
 
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 By ROBERT F. HORTON. M.A. 
 
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