BT 1101 .G56 1913 
 Glover, T. R. 1869-1943 
 The Christian tradition and 
 its verification 
 
y 
 
 • THE ANGUS LECTURESHIP 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND 
 ITS VERIFICATION 
 
 1912 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/christiantraditi00glov_0 
 
THE 
 
 CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 AND 
 
 ITS VERIFICATION . 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN ANCIENT HISTORY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1913 
 
PRELIMINARY NOTE 
 
 ' I ^HE Angus Lectureship has its origin in a 
 ^ Fund raised as a Testimonial to the Rev. 
 Joseph Angus, M.A., D.D., as an expression of 
 the sense entertained by the subscribers of his 
 character and services as President of the 
 Baptist Theological College, formerly situated 
 at Stepney, and now at Regent’s Park, 
 London. Dr. Angus having intimated his 
 desire that the Fund should be devoted to 
 the establishment of a permanent Lecture- 
 ship in connection with the College, a Trust 
 has been constituted for that purpose; its 
 income to be “ administered and applied by 
 the College Committee for the establishment 
 and maintenance of a Lectureship, to be 
 called ‘ The Angus Lectureship,’ in connection 
 with the said College, for the delivery of 
 periodic Lectures on great questions con- 
 nected with Systematic, Practical, or Pastoral 
 
VI 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 Theology, or the Evidences and Study of the 
 Bible, or Christian Missions, or Church 
 History, or Kindred Subjects.” 
 
 It is further provided that the College Com- 
 mittee, in conjunction Avith the Trustees, shall 
 once in two years, or oftener (should excep- 
 tional circumstances render it desirable), 
 ‘‘appoint and engage a Lecturer, who shall 
 ordinarily be a member of the Baptist denomi- 
 nation, but who may occasionally be a 
 member of any other body of Evangelical 
 Christians, to deliver a course of not more 
 than eight Lectures, on some subject of the 
 nature hereinbefore mentioned.” 
 
 In accordance with these provisions, the 
 Rev. Dr. Angus delivered, at Regent’s Park 
 College, in the year 1896, a Course of Six 
 Lectures on ‘‘ Regeneration,” afterwards 
 published. 
 
 The Eighth Course, delivered at Regent’s 
 Park College in the year 1912, is contained 
 in the present volume. 
 
 Note. — The sentences above marked as quotations are from 
 the Deed of Trust, executed March, 1896. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 T N the first book of The Faerie Queene, 
 -*■ Spenser’s heroine is Una, who is Truth. 
 Her beauty is spiritual, and we see it tame 
 the lion and soften the “ salvage-men ” — and 
 this at first sight. Yet it is not till the end of 
 the book that the Red Cross Knight realizes 
 her beauty. He forsakes her; he is entrapped 
 by Duessa, who is Falsehood ; he is imprisoned 
 in the Castle of Pride, and from this bondage 
 it is Una that rescues him. Despair would 
 have him kill himself ; and she again rescues 
 him, and leads him to the house of Caelia 
 and on to Charissa, who is Grace, and thence 
 to the hill of Contemplation. Then at last 
 he is fit to slay the Dragon. The tenderness 
 and healing power of Truth have rarely been 
 so well drawn. On through repentance and 
 forgiveness to the heavenly vision. Truth has 
 brought her knight. Yet it is not till after 
 
 vii 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 viii 
 
 the desperate three days of battle with the 
 Dragon that the Red Cross Knight sees Una 
 without her veil. 
 
 The blazing brightnesse of her beauties beame, 
 
 And glorious light of her sunshyny face, 
 
 To tell were as to strive against the streame : 
 
 My ragged rimes are all too rude and bace 
 Her heavenly lineaments for to enchace. 
 
 Ne wonder; for her own deare loved knight, 
 
 All were she daily with himselfe in place. 
 
 Did wonder much at her celestial sight. 
 
 Oft had he seen her faire, but never so fair dight. 
 
 “ Our sage and serious poet ” Spenser has 
 grasped the fact that, while Truth captures 
 us in the first instance by its beauty, we never 
 realize that beauty till we have learnt in ex- 
 perience how much Truth can do for us, and 
 how much we can do for Truth and can suffer 
 for Truth. And in the allegory Una is not 
 merely Truth, but the Christian Religion. 
 
 The old allegory stands ; and it is a pity 
 that men and women do not read the wonder- 
 ful poem more than they do. There are those 
 who can decide about Truth at first glance, 
 or even without a first glance on a priori 
 grounds, but Spenser knew better. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 The drift of this little book is briefly this. 
 In all modern study the emphasis falls on 
 verification — on insistent reference to fact that 
 can be tested and relied on. No other method 
 is going to show the significance and value 
 of the Christian religion — that greatest of all 
 our traditions. Experience alone will tell 
 us what it means. Here, I hope in a 
 scientific spirit, it is urged that we familiarize 
 ourselves with the mass of experience the 
 Church of Jesus Christ has had of Him; 
 and I believe that such a course will 
 lead us on to experiment, and that when 
 we, like the Red Cross Knight, have found 
 what life in Truth is, we too shall share his 
 wonder at the unsuspected beauty of the 
 fuller vision. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE I I 
 
 The Challenge to Verification. 
 
 Modern thought and its factors, p. 3. 
 
 1. Natural Science — p. 5. 
 
 (а) Its actual contributions to knowledge as 
 
 disturbances to Christian tradition, p. 6. 
 
 (б) Its effect upon our habits of thought — viz., 
 
 partial investigation, failure of imagina- 
 tion, and lack of philosophy; yet an 
 impetus given to verification, p. 12. 
 
 2. Social and Economic Science — The study of 
 
 environments, p. 16. 
 
 3. History — Race problems and world movements, 
 
 p. 19. 
 
 4. Comparative Study of Religion, p. 22 — 
 
 (a) Carlyle on Mohammad — Zoroaster, Buddha, 
 
 the Bab. 
 
 (b) Folklore, p. 25. 
 
 5. Study of the origins of Christianity, p. 26. 
 
 6. The other knowledge of the Poet, p. 27. 
 
 The twofold call to feeling and verification, p. 31. 
 
 LECTURE II 33 
 
 The Use of Tradition. 
 
 The challenge to verification is met by the question as to 
 the use of history, of tradition. 
 
 We have to study — 
 
 1. The value and place of Tradition in sound thinking. 
 
 2. How to discriminate between Traditions, p. 35. 
 Discussion as to Dogma and Tradition in relation to 
 
 Religion, p. 36 — with a caution as to the use of theory — 
 the contrast between use made of theory in scientific work 
 and in the Church, p. 39. 
 
 xi 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 xii 
 
 The strength of Tradition, p. 
 
 The combination of Inherited Experience and Individual 
 Experiment is the key, p. 45 — illustration from the boat- 
 builder, and its application to the sphere of Religion, p. 46. 
 
 The principles which may enable us to judge between 
 one set of Religious Traditions and another, p. 53. 
 
 The Christian Tradition to be considered with reference 
 to — 
 
 (а) The world outside Christ, p. 60. 
 
 (б) The Christian Society, p. 64. 
 
 (c) The historical Jesus and His person and ideas, 
 
 p. 66. 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 The Significance of the Christian 
 Church, 
 
 The problem of its growth, continuity and permanence, 
 p. 7 1 . The endeavour to discover the source of its strength, 
 p. 72 — its weakness an index to unsuspected greatness, p. 74. 
 
 1. The way in which the Church holds its main doctrines 
 — its intellectual right to do so, p. 78. The Sanity of the 
 Christian Church, p. 79— 
 
 (a) Resting on the value of experience, p. 79. 
 
 (b) Tested by the criticism of the World, p. 81. 
 
 (c) And by the Church's attempts at compromise, 
 
 p. 83. 
 
 (d) The fact before the explanation, p. 87. 
 
 2. The conviction of the Church resulting from its 
 experience, p. 88 — 
 
 (а) The serious view of evil, p. 88. 
 
 (б) The inexorable character of law, p. 91. 
 
 (c) The high value of the human soul, p. 93. 
 
 (d) The significance of Jesus Christ, p. 90. 
 
 3. The application to life, p. 97 — 
 
 (a) The Church is the one body incapable of 
 
 despair, p. 97. 
 
 (b) Its clear method, p. 97. The three great types 
 
 of religion, p. 98. 
 
 (c) Its reliance on the sufficiency of Jesus Christ, 
 
 p. 100. 
 
 4. Its justification in results, p. 101. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 xiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE IV 103 
 
 The Experience of the Early Church. 
 
 The early Christian literature and its demands upon the 
 student to understand it, p. 104. 
 
 1. The autobiographical element in early Christian 
 writings to be a guide for us to the experience behind 
 them, p. 105. Norden on St. Paul, p. 107 — 
 
 (a) St. Paul, p. 109. 
 
 (b) The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 
 p. 113. 
 
 (c) The author of the Fourth Gospel, p. 114. 
 
 (d) The first doxology of the Apocalypse, p. 116. 
 
 (e) The first “ Harrowing of Hell,” p. 122. 
 
 2. The experiences and convictions shared by all these 
 early Christian writers, p. 125 — 
 
 A. The New Life, p. 125. 
 
 (a) The contrast of the old life and the new, p. 125. 
 
 (b) “ Photisthentes ” — the enlightenment, p. 126. 
 
 Clement to the Corinthians, p. 129. 
 
 (c) The “arrhabon,” and the fruits of the Spirit, 
 
 p. 129. 
 
 B. The overcoming of national and social barriers, 
 
 p. 132 
 
 C. “ Before the foundation of the World,” p. 135. 
 
 LECTURE V 141 
 
 Jesus in the Christian Centuries. 
 
 The study of the Belief in Jesus as itself a historical 
 force — 
 
 (a) The power of the name, p. 143. Daemons, 
 
 p. 144. 
 
 (b) Pro quo Christus mortuus est, p, 155. 
 
 (c) The progressive training of conscience and the 
 
 new impulse, p. 162. 
 
 (^f) The Great White Throne, and Christian self- 
 criticism, p. 168. 
 
xiv THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Love of Jesus in History, p. 172 — 
 
 (a) The victory over disorder, p. 172 — the contri- 
 
 bution to sanity, p. 175 — the place of prayer, 
 p. 176. 
 
 (b) The new attitude to pain, p. 177. 
 
 (c) The life of joy, p. 179 — Richard Rolle, p. 181 — 
 
 Wordsworth on " The deep power of joy,” 
 p. 184 — personal centre, p. 185. 
 
 (d) The sure hope, p. 187. 
 
 Fact and word ; if the facts of the Church be sure, and 
 the speech erroneous, can we find the right language ? 
 
 But we must not, in so doing, lose any of the facts, p. 190. 
 
 LECTURE VI 193 
 
 The Criticism of Jesus Christ. 
 
 All turns in the study of Christianity upon the central 
 figure, p. 193. 
 
 Why some judgment upon Christ is inevitable, p. 195. 
 
 His historicity is certain, p. 196 — Contrast between Jesus 
 Christ and Zoroaster, Buddha, etc., p. 198. 
 
 What is the real value in it all ? The ethics or some- 
 thing else ? p. 200. 
 
 The contribution of Jewish criticism on this point, p. 201. 
 
 The necessity of some judgment upon Jesus Christ for 
 the serious student of history and society, p. 205. 
 
 The qualifications for such a judgment (with two pre- 
 liminary cautions as to the difficulty of criticism, and of 
 reconstructing a personality), p. 208. 
 
 1. Knowledge of the historical facts, p. 213. 
 
 2. The historical imagination, p. 217. 
 
 3. Sympathy with the fundamental ideas and feelings 
 of Jesus, p. 219— 
 
 (a) His passion for the redemption of men, p. 221. 
 
 (b) His attitude to God, p. 222. 
 
 4. The sense of insufficiency, p. 222. 
 
 The re-action of a profounder study upon the critic, 
 p. 227. 
 
Uorepov eX&ojv avros e^ijraKag tovto, y ttcus 
 0L(r6a ; 
 
 05(coC»', Kol irepi rovTtov, orav p.r)KtTt 
 
 eiKd^(op.€v, oA.\ ySy ei8!x)p.ev. Tore <rvp.^ov\- 
 -€v<rop.€v. 
 
 Socrates ap. Xen, Mem, iii., 6, ii. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 AND ITS VERIFICATION 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 The Challenge to Verification 
 
 I T is a very long time since it was first 
 pointed out that the Christian faith is 
 untenable. There it stands — belief cast 
 into the form of dogma, implying a unified 
 view of the world, of all time, and all exist- 
 ence, and setting before men statements of 
 the most amazing scope with reference to God 
 and man and their relations to all eternity. 
 But, in some particulars, it is not satis- 
 factory, we are told; it goes outside what 
 man can in any case know, and it rests 
 on the preconceptions of a day that had 
 neither criticism nor science; its terminology 
 bears the stamp of its origin and proclaims 
 how obsolete it all is. We are so conscious 
 of the value of our own additions to know- 
 ledge, that a faith which seems to jar with them 
 
2 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 is at once untenable. But this is not peculiar 
 to us at all. We have only to go back to the 
 eighteenth century — to what Gibbon in his 
 magnificent way called “the reason and 
 humanity of the present age” — to find the 
 same attitude to the Christian Church and its 
 creeds ; and yet what seemed then a sufficient 
 account of life to replace Christianity has by 
 to-day a starved look — it seems a hard and 
 low-pulsed sort of gospel or philosophy for 
 any really human being. 
 
 A critic of some humour has suggested that 
 the authentic words spoken by Adam to Eve, 
 as they stepped through the gate of the 
 Garden in Eden, were: “We live in times 
 of transition.” The habit has never been 
 lost; we still live in times of transition. We 
 have left the eighteenth century behind, and, 
 it is urged, the first century a great deal 
 further behind. The days are past when our 
 fathers and mothers, in their quiet, easy way, 
 could hold, unvexed by problems, the old 
 Christian faith. Of course, such talk is 
 frankly absurd. There never was a time 
 when the Christian faith was unchallenged. 
 By every sort of critic it has always been ques- 
 
TRANSITION 
 
 3 
 
 tioned, and there never was a day when it was 
 easy to believe the Christian gospel* or to live 
 the Christian life. The contribution of the 
 Church to mankind would have been less if its 
 venture into the unseen had been limited by 
 the views of its critics. 
 
 We are still confronted in earnest with the 
 Christian faith, whether we accept it or reject 
 it. There are many who would welcome its 
 final disappearance ; there are many more 
 who, while they think it may disappear, are 
 not eager to see it go till they know better 
 what is to take its place ; some believe there is 
 nothing to take its place at all, and deeply 
 dread its going. And again, there are those 
 who have not the least fear about the Church 
 remaining and becoming a still greater force 
 in human life. 
 
 But are we sure about the new factors 
 operative more and more to-day in human 
 thought? It is to these that I wish to give 
 my first lecture. In the next two we shall 
 discuss the place of tradition in sound think- 
 
 * My friend, Professor D. S. Cairns, quotes Principal Rainy’s 
 remark in his presence : “ God never meant it to be an easy thing 
 to believe .” — Life of Rainy , ii., 117. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 4 • 
 
 ing, and the general sanity of the Church 
 in its methods of reaching truth and in its 
 principles of verification. Then we shall turn 
 to the actual experience of the Church, in 
 the endeavour to learn what it really has 
 been, to see what happened or happens still, 
 and what has been the effect for mankind of 
 the great tenets of the Church — particularly 
 of its attitude to its Founder. The Founder 
 Himself will be in our thoughts throughout, 
 and in the last lecture an attempt will be made 
 to lay down the lines toward a sounder 
 realisation of His significance. 
 
 The Church never had a monopoly in 
 shaping the thoughts of men, however near 
 it may seem to have come to it in certain 
 ages. To-day it seems further from it than 
 ever. Into the great inherited body of thought 
 that makes the atmosphere in which we live 
 and move and think, and which conditions us 
 and our thoughts in ways past finding out, 
 new forces have come. There have been 
 changes of the most momentous kind in the 
 background of our thinking, in the nature of 
 our thoughts, and in the very minds with which 
 we think. The preconceptions with which we 
 
CHANGES IN THOUGHT 
 
 5 
 
 start have been changed, and in a number of 
 different ways. 
 
 First of all there is Natural Science, which 
 has imposed its methods and its conclusions 
 upon us, and has had as large a share in the 
 new movements of our times and our fathers’ 
 as anything else. There has been unsettle- 
 ment, uncertainty and fear. For there is a 
 type of scientific man — not so common now, 
 perhaps, as formerly, certainly not in the front 
 ranks — who has rather a loud way of speak- 
 ing, and speaks at times with insufficient 
 recognition of other branches of study; and 
 he has fairly done his part in emphasising, 
 not merely the difference between science 
 and religion, but his own strong opinion that 
 religion is obsolete. Long ago Plato spoke 
 of “a certain old quarrel between poetry and 
 philosophy,”* and this is another of the same 
 kind. The material to be studied is different, 
 and the methods are different, as is neces- 
 sarily the case when different aspects of 
 reality have to be investigated; and the con- 
 servative instinct in man is always impatient of 
 
 Republic, 607, B. 
 
6 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 foreign method. The same intolerance, which 
 is sometimes shown by students of science 
 toward religion, is also shown, in measure, 
 toward history, philosophy, and art, and it 
 means no more than unfamiliarity. But this 
 is not all; for, from time to time, great ac- 
 quisitions of knowledge have been made, and 
 securely made, which clash with particular 
 statements long maintained with great con- 
 fidence by the Church; and the question is 
 asked whether (to take a simile from the sea) 
 the Church’s doctrine is in watertight com- 
 partments, and, even if so, whether enough of 
 them have not been injured so badly as to 
 sink her. 
 
 The first great change is associated with the 
 name of Copernicus. It was understood that 
 the Church was committed to the dogma of 
 a flat earth and seven or more spheres. They 
 had stood for twenty centuries, and Coper- 
 nicus did away with them. Milton’s works 
 are, in English literature, a landmark of the 
 change. He speaks of his visit to Italy: 
 “ There it was that I found, and visited the 
 famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the 
 Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy other- 
 
THE STARS AND THE ROCKS 
 
 7 
 
 wise than the Franciscan and Dominican 
 licensers thought.” In Paradise Lost he re- 
 curs several times to the problem, leaning to 
 the Copernican system, and leaving the 
 Ptolemaic to Satan, who uses it naturally. It 
 is clear that the Roman Church felt that some- 
 thing was at stake in spherical astronomy. 
 With it the Neo-Platonists had connected their 
 theory of the soul and its descent from God 
 to earth; and with it was still bound up the 
 destiny of the soul in a local heaven to which 
 Christ had ascended. 
 
 After this came the geological trouble 
 and the question as to whether Moses and his 
 Genesis squared with the testimony of the 
 rocks; and strange attempts were made to 
 reconcile them. If such attempts are no 
 longer made, it is because Christian thinkers 
 have become content to do without the recon- 
 ciliation. 
 
 But, serious as Copernicus and the geolo- 
 gists had seemed to orthodox thinkers, worse 
 was to follow when Darwin and Huxley taught 
 men to think in terms of evolution. A great 
 epoch was made; but, as happens at such 
 times, the great gains were misapplied because 
 
8 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of recklessness in their use. Everybody 
 talked evolution who had a fancy for being 
 enlightened or abreast of the times. Every- 
 thing was referred to evolution, whether it 
 had any relation with the sphere of Darwin’s 
 investigations or not. Wherever a progress 
 could be observed, it was at once put down 
 to evolution. Great play was made with 
 heredity and environment and the rest of the 
 terminology. I have even heard a woman 
 explain that with modern girls tight-lacing 
 was practically involuntary, because it was 
 an inherited acquired instinct. What men of 
 scientific mind thought of all this reckless talk 
 we can guess. Nothing less scientific could be 
 imagined. Darwin, after long investigation 
 and thought, suggests a theory to explain 
 certain things in Biology ; and a horde of 
 people seize it and apply it, without anything 
 approaching Darwin’s care for truth, to the 
 most disparate matters in fields of study as 
 widely removed as could be from the 
 biological. Thought, morals, religion, were 
 all suddenly discovered to be products of an 
 evolution, apparently involuntary and in- 
 evitable. Developments could be observed in 
 
EVOLUTION 
 
 9 
 
 these spheres of life, and that was enough. 
 How those developments came is, however, 
 a matter of history, to be studied with refer- 
 ence to the evidence ; and the virtual abolition 
 of effort, and, incidentally, of personality, was 
 precipitate,* 
 
 When, after a number of years, a sugges- 
 tion of the Bavarian abb^ Gregor Mendel, 
 was revived, and deliberate experiments were 
 made in the careful breeding of plants, birds, 
 and animals, in order to ascertain, by de- 
 finite and recorded steps, what changes are 
 possible in the development of species, there 
 were some further examples of swift thinking. 
 Roughly speaking, the experiments have 
 shown that the results obtained in breeding 
 are not, if a wide enough range be taken, 
 irregular or freakish, but may be more or less 
 accurately reduced to mathematics — in short, 
 that what you put in, you get out, re-com- 
 bined variously, but symmetrically. You 
 
 * Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his Club of Queer Trades, p. 236, 
 wittily sums the matter up in the sweeping assertion that “the 
 Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except 
 that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they 
 now talk unscientifically about science.” 
 
lO 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 cannot, perhaps, predict the character of the 
 offspring of a particular pair of mice, for some 
 may die or other unnoticed factors may come 
 in, but the general law seems roughly estab- 
 lished. From this point one conspicuous 
 exponent of Mendelism stepped by an appar- 
 ently easy transition to a sweeping re-assertion 
 of Determinism. So difficult it is to keep the 
 scientific outlook steady, even when a man’s 
 work is so essentially a matter of close and 
 exact verification as that of the Mendelists. 
 
 Meanwhile, in Psychology a very brilliant 
 book caught the reading public, and we began 
 to learn a new language. “ Uprushes ” and 
 “the subliminal self’’ and “ auto-suggestion ’’ 
 became terms as familiar and as precise as 
 “ justification ’’ and “ sanctification ’’ had been 
 three centuries before. Religion was ex- 
 plained at once — it was a matter of auto- 
 suggestion. Certain questions, however, may 
 be asked here, such as : How much is de- 
 finitely known as to auto-suggestion ? or is it 
 really a splendid guess? Can there be auto- 
 suggestion without reference to external facts 
 with which the mind of the person concerned 
 is more or less acquainted — in other words, 
 
THE VALE OF BEAVOR ii 
 
 has the idea to be suggested to the autos, or 
 does the autos suggest it to itself — which way 
 does evidence point ? Why should auto- 
 suggestion, when it takes the form or direction 
 of the Christian religion, work so uniformly 
 toward sanity and morals ; is there anything 
 significant in the uniformity ? and, lastly. 
 What is autos — ^one of the oldest of philo- 
 sophical difficulties ? A solution of the pro- 
 blem of the nature of religion, which raises so 
 many other problems at the first breath, does 
 not take us very far. 
 
 All these new factors, however, are in the 
 air, and the combined effect of them is very 
 great. They make us feel once more and in 
 a new way the “great Cloud” that came over 
 George Fox in the Vale of Beavor, when “ it 
 was said; All things come by Nature ; And,” 
 he adds, “ the Elements and Stars came over 
 me.” Some of us have to “sit still under it and 
 let it alone ” a good deal longer than he had, 
 before “ a living Hope ” rises in us and “ a true 
 Voice,” to tell us ; “ There is a living God, who 
 made all things.” There are so many more 
 stars in three hundred years, and so many 
 more elements, and so much stranger ones; 
 
12 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 space is more vast to-day than ever Fox 
 dreamed; and we are challenged more seri- 
 ously than ever on the fundamental question 
 as to whether man “ comes by Nature,” and is 
 a mere product, or whether he has any 
 spiritual freedom at all. 
 
 But there is more to be said, for the chief 
 effect of the modern study of Natural Science 
 has not been so much to challenge us with 
 definite and established knowledge, or with 
 theories of high probability and great bril- 
 liance, as to affect our habits of mind and our 
 methods in thought. The scientific man is 
 occupied in an investigation which avowedly 
 affects only one small part of the area of 
 all knowledge ; his research is partial, he has a 
 special subject, and his affirmation on his own 
 subject is apt to be tentative and provisional; 
 indeed, as he grows to be a master in his own 
 department, it often happens that he is more 
 and more reluctant to hazard any statement of 
 scope or range concerning it without inter- 
 minable qualifications. This habit of mind has 
 passed over into other studies, and we have 
 in common the weaknesses that go with it. 
 The passion for accuracy is a noble one, but 
 
REACTION OF SPECIALIST STUDIES 13 
 
 if it be cramped in a very small sphere, a 
 partial investigation, it results, unless a man 
 is on his guard against it, in a certain 
 failure of the imagination. This is not un- 
 common among specialists. The mind loses 
 powers by perpetually dwelling on one subject 
 — “ that way madness lies,” as Lear said. 
 The atrophy of faculty does not make a man 
 more competent to speak in his own depart- 
 ment, still less of matters that lie outside it. 
 But we constantly find a type of specialist who 
 is contemptuous of studies and interests of 
 which he is ignorant. With the best men it is 
 very different. 
 
 Another weakness which we all share, as 
 knowledge grows from more to more, is a 
 lack of synthesis. One feature of Elizabethan 
 England, as of Periclean Athens, was what 
 has been called the ‘‘ integrity ” of the period. 
 The same man touched all knowledge and 
 all activity ; he could write a poem, sail a ship, 
 beat a Spaniard in fight or a Papist in argu- 
 ment — the world had a unity for him. For 
 us the world is hardly a unity, except by logic ; 
 it is a series of bits, the relations of which 
 we do not readily grasp. There is lack of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 14 
 
 knowledge and lack of intelligence ; in a word, 
 lack of philosophy. Now the philosopher, as 
 we know, is liable to err, and to err very 
 badly — 
 
 An innocent mind, but far astray — 
 he is liable to be very dogmatic, and to 
 domineer with a truculence little short of that 
 of the man of science at his worst. But to be 
 content to lack philosophy is surely to abdi- 
 cate manhood ; yet we do it. We do not frame 
 systems of thought for ourselves ; we avowedly 
 refrain from it; and yet, in a subtle and 
 insidious way, they frame themselves for us; 
 and such un-thought-out systems of thought 
 are very dangerous, especially if we are people 
 of books and laboratories, a little remote from 
 ordinary life. But religion implies a certain 
 amount of deliberate philosophy — it involves 
 an ordered world, or a world getting moved 
 in the direction of order, and a God at the 
 top of it or in the heart of it, interested effec- 
 tively in it, somehow; and it further implies 
 a relation between this God and the man. 
 Even to such a rudimentary philosophy a 
 certain class of scientist is contemptuous again, 
 and again for the same reason. It lies out- 
 
THE NEED OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 15 
 
 side him, and it implies an energy of thought 
 for which he has not braced himself. It runs 
 counter to the presuppositions, the un-thought- 
 out system, into which he has slidden. 
 
 This is the experience of very many of us 
 — we have lost the sense of the whole in the 
 fascination and interest of the part. Words- 
 worth, in his Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
 tality, gives a picture of some such auto- 
 biography : how the vision splendid fades into 
 the light of common day, as Earth, the homely 
 nurse, doth all she can to make her foster- 
 child forget the glories he hath known. And 
 then, in the great stanzas that follow, where 
 he speaks of “obstinate questionings of 
 sense and outward things,” the poet touches 
 those experiences which challenge the narrow 
 dogmatism of common sense and partial 
 knowledge — which we can almost abolish if 
 we give our minds to it, and the abolition of 
 which will ruin us. Yet plenty of men seem to 
 be imprisoned almost hopelessly in the zest of 
 interests that frankly cover the smallest arc of 
 the circle of life. The excuse is, of course, 
 the vast range and difficulty of scientific work 
 — di confession, in so many words, of failure. 
 
i6 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 On the other hand, there is a noble 
 contribution which the scientific mind is 
 making to the religious, a keen and quickened 
 sense of truth and a passion for verification. 
 And it is a curious situation when the man 
 of science says to the disciple of Jesus of 
 Nazareth: “Make sure; be sure that you 
 know; look to it for yourself; verify.” It is 
 the method of Jesus Himself, and it will give 
 us again “the deep and firm sense of reality,” 
 which, as Matthew Arnold pointed out,* 
 characterises the thinking of Jesus; for 
 “theory,” as Arnold elsewhere says, “Jesus 
 never touches, but bases Himself invariably 
 upon experience. ”t If we are to do anything 
 with religion, the first thing is to be done with 
 preconceptions (as far as that is possible for 
 man) and to learn what can be from what has 
 been and what does occur. To this we shall 
 have to return in the next lecture. 
 
 Let us pass on to another branch of study — 
 a study full of the enthusiasm of youth and 
 new methods — Social Science, as it is called, 
 
 Preface to God and the Bible. 
 t Literature and Dogma, ch. 7. 
 
SOCIAL SCIENCE 
 
 17 
 
 though the name is a large one, and perhaps 
 not yet quite vindicated. We have been 
 brought — and it is a good thing that we have 
 been so brought — face to face in a new way 
 with poverty. The poor we have always with 
 us, but we have not been earnest enough in 
 asking Why; and that we are now being told 
 with vehemence, not unwarranted when men 
 are so slow to listen. This is not the first 
 generation, if it may be said with modesty, 
 that has felt the problem of poverty ; but men 
 are probing more deeply into causes and 
 factors, with a new alertness for evidence. 
 The mind of the social student dwells on en- 
 vironment as the scientific man’s on heredity, 
 and the besetting sin of quick thinking, which 
 haunts science and theology, is not unknown 
 here. The problem of evil has taken on a new 
 form for the social researcher and the social 
 worker; and some of the evils they see are 
 so obvious, and yet so much ignored, that 
 their desperately quick remedies are intelli- 
 gible. Delay is at the cost of life and mind and 
 moral being ; and the suggestion of the Church 
 
 that, by the Soul 
 
 Only, the nations shall be great and free. 
 
 2 
 
i8 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 is scouted more fiercely than it deserves 
 to be. The moral evils of destitution are 
 familiar to the social worker; and, if 
 destitution were abolished, they would mostly 
 disappear, he believes. It means once more 
 that man is a product of heredity and 
 environment, the outcome of forces and 
 factors he cannot control; that the margin 
 of spiritual freedom is extraordinarily narrow. 
 That is very quick thinking. It is curious, 
 too, to find such an approximation between 
 the modern reformer and old Cephalos, in 
 Plato’s Republic, who was glad that he had 
 been rich, because riches save a man from so 
 much sin. The Church has always had a 
 deeper view of sin than this. 
 
 Once again, the impression left on the mind 
 is that of an immense range of knowledge to 
 be explored and known. How many factors 
 are there in the problem of poverty? how do 
 they work, and how are their workings inter- 
 woven, and how are they to be measured ? 
 If History teaches anything here, it is the 
 imperative need of the closest and most accu- 
 rate thinking on the basis of the fullest know- 
 ledge — that we must go slowly. Yes, say our 
 
HISTORY 
 
 19 
 
 friends, History is far slower than death and 
 disease. Still, here again we are challenged 
 to verification. Is it possible that the Chris- 
 tian Church or its critics can have overlooked 
 factors of moment ? 
 
 But we have invoked History, and History 
 also is touched with the scientific spirit — if it 
 is not, as some severe students of it urge, a 
 science itself. The origins of the human race 
 and the growth of nations are being investi- 
 gated with more reference to facts than in 
 the old days when, as the severe say. History 
 flourished with Literature at her one elbow 
 and Moral Philosophy at the other. What is 
 race? Is Nature, after all, “so careful of the 
 type ” ? In some quarters we are assailed with 
 large statements about tall fair men and little 
 dark men, dolichocephalous and brachy- 
 cephalous, breeds with great differences of 
 endowment ; and we are warned that, if 
 eugenics be not carefully studied, that balance 
 between the ethnic varieties may be lost which 
 makes England what it is. It is not, however, 
 historians who talk in this way. History is a 
 very long story for them; and they ask, quite 
 honestly, because they do not know, whether 
 
20 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 a race is a fixed type or a shifting type; 
 whether differences of climate and food over 
 long periods affect the cephalic index and the 
 varieties of endowment ; whether Anglo- 
 Saxons were really Anglo-Saxons for many 
 millennia before Julius Csesar studied the 
 Germans ? and other questions. If every- 
 thing is a matter of race — if temperament, 
 religion, morality, art, genius, and the rest, 
 all depend on race — then let us be sure 
 we know something about it ; for, at 
 present, unless brilliant guesses based on 
 evidence, that would be valuable if its relations 
 were understood, be knowledge, we know very 
 little about race.* It is another call to 
 verification. 
 
 Of course, in dealing with race, the historian 
 is defending himself against the popular 
 biologist, but he sometimes needs defence 
 against himself. There are the great world- 
 movements in historic times — whole ages 
 dominated by certain types of thought, in 
 which, if a man appear who reaches too far 
 into the future, he is useless, however truly he 
 
 * A distinguished anthropologist tells me I should have said 
 that ‘‘ nothing ” is known about race, 
 
HISTORY 
 
 21 
 
 may anticipate the actual developments of 
 thought and life in generations after his own. 
 At least, so it is said, and we do find men who 
 were, as we say, before their time, though 
 often, on closer investigation, it looks as if 
 their anticipations were made rather by long 
 jumps, and lacked the intermediate steps 
 which make for real progress. Why is it that 
 man moves so slowly, and is so desperately 
 in bondage to his own day ? One answer is that 
 he is not in fact nearly as much in bondage 
 to his day as he seems in retrospect. Yet 
 the historian observes a relation between 
 political and social conditions and thought — 
 e.g., under the successors of Alexander the 
 Great and under the early Roman Empire, 
 under Turkish sultans and Indian rajahs, 
 philosophy leans to fatalism, as if the experi- 
 ence of arbitrary and incalculable government 
 took the initiative out of men’s minds and 
 turned them toward submission without 
 action. We find something of the kind in 
 history, but we must be careful once more 
 about sweeping statements. Men and peoples 
 are under the influence of the old and middle- 
 aged more than we suppose, and move slowly. 
 
22 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 but most of the talk about the unchanging 
 East (for example) is fortified by wide ignor- 
 ance of Eastern history. The East does 
 change, and man is no more the victim of 
 place than of race, much as both influence 
 him. The historian insists, like other serious 
 thinkers, on much more earnest standards of 
 verification than the journalist or the amateur. 
 
 A new factor in these generations is the 
 comparative study of religion. It offers a 
 most fascinating field of work. The great 
 religious systems of the world have been 
 studied with new sympathy and new know- 
 ledge, as their sacred books have become 
 known in the West. Carlyle’s treatment of 
 Mahomet is a familiar landmark here — “ a 
 silent great soul; he was one of those who 
 cannot but be in earnest; whom Nature her- 
 self has appointed to be sincere. While 
 others walk in formulas and hearsays, con- 
 tented enough to dwell there, this man could 
 not screen himself in formulas ; he was alone 
 with his own soul and the reality of things. 
 The great Mystery of Existence glared in 
 upon him, with its terrors, with its splendours.” 
 Zoroaster and Buddha have become more 
 
STUDY OF RELIGIONS 
 
 23 
 
 familiar and intelligible figures ; we see what 
 they meant and how they came to mean it. 
 There is Hinduism, too, more intelligible in 
 its turn when we know something of its 
 history — not unlike Neo-Platonism. We are 
 taught to realise the great elements in all 
 these systems. And among the great religious 
 teachers is Jesus of Nazareth— but here one is 
 half tempted to quote Tertullian’s sharp word : 
 “ Here human curiosity ceases to be inquisi- 
 tive.” It would not be strictly true, and yet 
 how many popular critics of religion have 
 troubled to give Him the full study that is 
 needed to understand Him ? 
 
 The problems raised by this comparative 
 study of religions are many. Thus and thus, 
 again and again, the minds of men have 
 moved ; monotheism and polytheism have 
 battled together; great teachers have risen 
 like Carlyle’s Mahomet, and have been fol- 
 lowed by disciples, and after a period of 
 advance comes a decline. In one teacher and 
 another we find great resemblances ; the high 
 faith, the ardent spirit, the tender and sym- 
 pathetic heart; and there is a great likeness 
 about their teaching in the sphere of conduct. 
 
24 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 at least at first sight. We ask ourselves what 
 these resemblances mean ? Would it be 
 possible for us to find truth by taking what 
 the Stoics called the consensus of mankind, 
 'the “greatest common measure” (if that old 
 arithmetical term survives) of all the religions ? 
 Will it serve us best to take what is common 
 to all the great religious teachers, and to 
 eliminate the rest, and to ask whether there is 
 any difference between Buddha and Jesus 
 Christ and the Bab ? and, if there is, whether 
 it matters ? This sort of question is being 
 asked, and a quick answer given. Yet, it is 
 possible to ask, also, whether it is not the 
 difference that chiefly signifies. Is Chris- 
 tianity made by what it shares with Buddhism, 
 however much that is ? As we get better 
 acquaintance with the two systems the 
 common element seems trifling in comparison 
 with the gulf between the two outlooks on 
 life and the world. Is what men have counted 
 the very gist and essence of Christianity a 
 mistake — the faith for which men have fought 
 and died and been martyred? 
 
 We have here a fresh call to verification. 
 We need to know vastly more about 
 
STUDY OF RELIGIONS 
 
 25 
 
 Buddhism, and above all about the influence 
 of Buddhism on life, about the actual teach- 
 ing of Buddha in relation to current 
 Buddhism, about the type of character that 
 Buddhism produces, not merely among its 
 ascetics, but among the people whom they 
 influence or do not influence, and a great 
 many more such matters.* Similarly, we must 
 give ourselves to a fuller historical study of 
 Christianity, not so much with controversy as 
 our object as intelligence. 
 
 Of later years, the study of religion has 
 reached another phase. We have been taken 
 back in the most fascinating way to origins, 
 and move with delight and interest among 
 golden boughs, and totems, and thunder-birds, 
 and divine kings, and heavenly twins. Many 
 familiar conceptions have had their pedigrees 
 traced back to very lowly spheres, and we 
 are told — rather quickly — that most of our 
 religious belief comes from magic and the like. 
 It is not altogether proven that it is so, nor 
 
 * I should like to recommend here the book of Ekai Kawa- 
 guchi, a Japanese Buddhist monk, entitled Three Years in Tibet. 
 There is an English translation, and it is a most interesting and 
 illuminating work. 
 
26 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 is it shown that, if a religious usage originated 
 in a magical practice, or if a religious belief 
 was at first no more than a superstition of the 
 grossest kind, no development is possible, but 
 that religion remains as it began, essentially 
 magical. We have to remember the innate 
 conservatism of our race, and how we love 
 to associate the new with the old as if they 
 were one. If the trellis is clearly magic, must 
 the vine be magic ? In ancient Italy the vine 
 grew up a living elm: is this our analogy 
 of religion and magic ? Or is it safe to play 
 with analogies? Is it certain that the ram’s- 
 horn of Folklore (to borrow a simile from the 
 preface of a great work) will bring down the 
 picturesque and ivy-clad walls of the Jericho 
 we call religion? Is it not just possible that 
 something escapes the student of Folklore, and 
 that things are not so easy as the man of one 
 subject comes to think? Once again, a 
 challenge to verification. 
 
 But if we are to study origins, we shall have 
 to look again at Christian origins. It is 
 notorious that, for people who are in a hurry 
 about their thinking, the Higher Criticism, 
 as applied to the Old Testament, has shaken 
 
RELIGIOUS ORIGINS 
 
 27 
 
 the Christian faith, whether they are pleased 
 with the result or unhappy about it. It will 
 be more serious when they learn what it is 
 doing with the New Testament. Yet the 
 general principles of the Higher Criticism 
 are sound and scientific, though this does not 
 imply that every result produced by those 
 who apply these principles to Old or New 
 Testament, is finally true, even if many critics 
 agree in affirming it. It is clear that wrong 
 results from sound principles will not survive 
 sound application of those principles. Here, 
 as elsewhere, the remedy for wrong thinking 
 is strong thinking, deeper thinking, and plenty 
 of it, with constant reference to fact. 
 
 So far we have been dealing with the 
 criticism of the Christian religion from the 
 scientific side. The whole of it is open to 
 the suggestion that there is too much of the 
 laboratory and the study about it — it is too 
 like Morphology as opposed to Biology; it 
 does not come near enough to life and the 
 living thing. Side by side with the man of 
 science lives another type of man altogether, 
 who does not understand him, and does 
 not very much wish to understand him. 
 
28 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 He is not interested in Chemistry or 
 Geology — 
 
 Enough of Science and of Art; 
 
 Close up these barren leaves; 
 
 Come forth, and bring with you a heart 
 
 That watches and receives. 
 
 He knows the world in another way 
 altogether, and he cannot believe that anyone 
 knows it as well as he does, for no one enjoys 
 it so much. 
 
 The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood. 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite: a feeling and a love. 
 
 That had no need of a remoter charm. 
 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 
 
 He lives in the beauty of the world, and, when 
 you walk beside him and talk to him about 
 your system, economic or philosophic, he 
 listens in a way with the ear next you, 
 but he sees something quite different. The 
 grey willow against the copper beech — he sees 
 these, and they both speak to him in voices too 
 strong, too clear, and too truthful to let him 
 care about anything else — not even if it is 
 
THE POET 
 
 29 
 
 a system of the universe that explains them. 
 He feels, and he cannot help feeling, the 
 beauty and the magic of a world of colour, 
 the movement and the life of it; and these 
 things come into his own life with a power 
 and an intensity of which you do not dream, 
 and yet you think you have them in your 
 system. He cannot reply to your questions; 
 he cannot give you a reasonable answer, or 
 argue with your tools : his major premiss is 
 something irreducible to formal logic, and his 
 conclusion reaches to infinity and leaves out 
 everything that you think should be in. As 
 for your system, of what service is a system 
 when a man only knows a dozen or two things 
 in the world, and they baffle him because, 
 however well he knows them, every now and 
 then they break out into new doxologies ; 
 there is no end to their inexhaustible fertility 
 of meaning and joy. Which of you knows 
 the world? You with the system and the 
 pedestrian mind, or he in rapture ? He knows 
 it in all its joy — 
 
 The beauty and the wonder and the power, 
 
 The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, 
 
 Changes, surprises, — and God niade it all ! 
 
30 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 Your system is a Christian scheme of things, 
 perhaps, and he does not care about it; you 
 do not see into the heart and life of things, 
 he says; they move dimly for you, in a mist; 
 they burn for him, and blaze and are bright 
 — yes, painful sometimes, but it is worth it. 
 You talk about shadows; and he handles 
 realities. 
 
 He too turns critic, and, like a splendid 
 pagan, is magnificent in denunciation of a 
 drab and lack-lustre Christianity, a Christian 
 Church that cramps and confines the spirit, 
 that deadens everything it touches, that is 
 afraid of this and of that, that dares not try 
 life, does not realise, and does not know. He 
 has reached the same point as the scientific 
 man, and makes the same reproach. Our 
 standards of truth and knowledge are too low 
 and too dull, they both tell us. “You must 
 go back to life,” he cries, “ until you know 
 it from within, till it lives and moves again 
 for you, if anything you say is ever to be 
 worth listening to.” He has put the same 
 problem of verification before us in another 
 way, the vast, wide range of reality, the awful 
 and wonderful complex of things which we 
 
VERIFICATION 
 
 31 
 
 must discover by feeling them, by living in 
 them. Verification in earnest. 
 
 Attacked on two sides, by those who tell 
 him that he does not know and by those who 
 tell him that he does not feel, the Christian 
 turns ruefully to his Master to see what has 
 become of Him in all this. “We have be- 
 lieved what you told us; we have quoted it; 
 and they sweep it aside and tell us we neither 
 know nor feel ! ” And I think that if we could 
 see His face, there would be something of a 
 smile upon it — a suggestion of some kindly 
 amusement at such anxiety. “ Did I not tell 
 you the same?” He asks, “That you must 
 search and know, and feel, and judge for 
 yourselves ? ” For Jesus Christ is not a 
 teacher to be quoted, I think. If we quote 
 Him, we use Him amiss. His words are 
 nothing till they come somehow out of our 
 own hearts again, as they did from Peter’s 
 long ago; they are not dead; they live. Our 
 critics are bringing us back by their challenges 
 to know Him Whom we have believed. They 
 are bidding us test and examine and know 
 ourselves and Him, and get our lessons from 
 life and fact. It is His own method after all. 
 
32 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 In the lectures that follow, that is to be our 
 task. Brokenly and strugglingly, we are to 
 try all the same to get some glimpse, some 
 idea, of what things are. Not results or 
 conclusions are to be our immediate aim, but 
 a method, an approach that will bring us into 
 the real and to the Master of it. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 The Use of Tradition 
 
 I N the previous lecture we tried to face the 
 great challenge made to the Christian 
 community by modem thought and 
 modern learning. We saw that our religion is 
 challenged along many lines. The man of 
 science, the economist, the historian, the critic 
 of the Bible, the poet — ^all bring against us 
 an accusation that we do not take pains 
 enough to verify what we tell them so easily 
 we believe. “ How much of what you assert 
 do you know?” asks one school of critics. 
 “How much of it do you feel?” asks the 
 other. We are driven back upon a fresh 
 study of the facts. 
 
 What are the facts, then, upon which we 
 rest? What are the facts in religious ex- 
 perience ? 
 
 Whether there be truth in the Christian 
 religion or not, our first fact is a world-wide 
 society, with a history of nineteen centuries. 
 It touches every part of life, conditions and 
 
 o 33 
 
34 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 suggests our thoughts, shapes us, and makes 
 a background for us — ^and all this in ways 
 that are beyond our reckoning or our under- 
 standing — so that we can hardly think of 
 ourselves apart from the fact of the Christian 
 Church and its influence. As we look at it, 
 we are challenged again with a series of 
 questions. Are we to dismiss all this ? Is 
 there nothing for us in the long story of the 
 Christian community ? Is it possible that nine- 
 teen centuries of human experience have 
 nothing to say to the heir of all the ages ? 
 
 The souls of now two thousand years 
 Have laid up here their toils and fears, 
 
 And all the earnings of their pain, — 
 
 Ah, yet consider it again! 
 
 There the great fact of the Christian Church 
 stands, and we have to ask ourselves if we 
 know what it means. We shall not know 
 what it means till we have grasped how it 
 came into being, and what is the inmost sig- 
 nificance of its doctrines and its faith; till 
 we understand the mind of its great sons and 
 daughters, till we realise something of their 
 individuality, who they are that have held 
 the Christian faith, and how they have held 
 
THE FACT OF THE CHURCH 
 
 35 
 
 it. We have to think out our attitude to the 
 Christian past, remembering that, if we decide 
 that it means nothing, the decision carries 
 with it extraordinary consequences. For it 
 will be hard to say what can mean anything 
 to us if nineteen centuries of the intensest 
 life of the most living part of the world are 
 to go for nothing. We have to study the 
 Church till we discover how the Christian 
 community has historically reached its present 
 position, and not only that, but how it still 
 can hold it as it does. Have Christian, 
 thinkers after all never felt the improbability 
 — the incredibility — ^of what they say ? What 
 is it that has brought men to this, and still 
 brings them ? Why do men lean so to the 
 Gospel ? Why do> they love it as they do ? 
 
 This means that we have to begin by 
 turning to the past and studying its contribu- 
 tion — the inherited element in religious 
 thought. There are other religions beside 
 Christianity; and, if we are to be sure of our 
 results, we shall have to go further and con- 
 sider what canons we have for judging be- 
 tween one religion, or one body of religious 
 belief, and another. 
 
36 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 The term “religion” is used with some 
 ambiguity of meaning. It may connote chiefly 
 ritual or cult ; but with these we are not 
 primarily concerned for our present purpose. 
 It may, again, suggest a more or less ordered 
 body of belief ; or it may mean only and solely 
 the experience that men actually have of God 
 — their contact with Him, direct or indirect, 
 and their consciousness of Him as a factor 
 in life. These two latter senses of the word 
 touch one another very closely. The Chris- 
 tian Church rests, deliberately and consciously, 
 upon its own experience of God in Christ, and 
 it has embodied this, so far as it could, in 
 its creeds and dogmas. And these, vathout 
 refinements in the ecclesiastical way, we may 
 group, at least for the present, as the Christian 
 tradition. The term, then, will be used in 
 this general and larger sense of the whole 
 body of essential Christian belief, as com- 
 monly held by all sections of the Christian 
 community, and pointing to the full volume 
 of Christian experience. 
 
 It is, of course, obvious that, here as else- 
 where, experience and the formulation, ex- 
 pression or explanation that it receives, are 
 
EXPERIENCE AND THEORY 
 
 37 
 
 distinct things — that is, however closely they 
 go together, we can think of them apart, and 
 it is also clear that one of them is more im- 
 portant than the other. The one is concerned 
 with action primarily — with what a man does 
 in daily life, with the spirit in which he lives 
 and in which he prays, in which he manages 
 his dealings with man and God. The other is 
 more closely connected with speculation. Of 
 course, it is here as in other spheres; practice 
 and theory act and react on each other; 
 dogma and religion affect each other. What 
 a man believes conditions what he does ; what 
 he does conditions what he believes. Action 
 is impossible without some working theory, 
 and this very fact drives earnest men into 
 speculation. Even the man of science is 
 never without some kind of tentative working 
 hypothesis, even when, in the most dis- 
 interested and objective way, he is in- 
 vestigating fact; he is looking for something, 
 and that directs his search. We cannot take 
 the tradition of the Christian Church — its 
 body of belief and dogma — apart from its 
 experience, however distinct the two things 
 may be. 
 
38 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 At the same time we have to remember that 
 the spheres of action and speculation are still 
 different. Very often in all the affairs of life 
 we find that the man who is master in the one 
 sphere is helpless in the other; and so it is 
 with religious life and thought. Many a man 
 has the power and has the life, who can give 
 no account of it, or who can only account 
 for it in borrowed terms, crammed with 
 metaphor — terms more or less intelligible to 
 those who understand the metaphors, and 
 hopelessly dark for others. Similarly, men may 
 be adepts in the speculative treatment of 
 religion, and have little enough of the real 
 thing in the way of power or life. One part 
 of our task, then, will be to make sure of the 
 relation between the tradition and the ex- 
 perience behind it, for it may be that the 
 Church has not quite managed a perfect 
 account and explanation of its own life. 
 
 The Christian Church, in its history as in 
 all its daily transactions, is conscious of a 
 life related in a peculiar way to the historical 
 facts given in the Gospels. Of this life it has 
 to find some account; and this account must 
 be given 'with reference to its whole knowledge 
 
DOGMA 
 
 39 
 
 of the world. Otherwise it remains more or 
 less unknown and unintelligible. This is the 
 common instinct of men. Speculation is 
 native to us — “the un-examined life,” Plato 
 said, “ is un-live-able for a human being.”* We 
 are always seeking to bring the whole of our 
 experience into relation with itself, that we 
 may grasp the whole of life and the universe, 
 so far as they touch us, with some unity and 
 inward coherence ; and it is never a merely 
 academic task, the impulse of an idle curiosity. 
 It is intensely practical. The Church in its 
 dogma endeavours to formulate its experience 
 in the religious sphere in connection with its 
 general experience of life and the universe, 
 and of the laws of life and the universe, taken 
 as a whole, and it does this with the practical 
 aim of proceeding thereby to some larger 
 working theory of the divine order, on which 
 to base action. 
 
 In common life, however, there is a curious 
 tendency to be remarked here, in striking 
 contrast with the ways of the scientific world. 
 The man of science frames hypotheses to 
 
 Apology, 38 A. 
 
40 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 account for the facts he has observed, and 
 to enable him to proceed further; but he is 
 wedded to no hypothesis. When new facts 
 — or old ones better known — falsify his 
 hypothesis, he abandons it for a new one, 
 which in turn will condition his work, give a 
 new direction to it, and call his attention 
 steadily to some group or type of facts. But 
 whatever theory he forms must be more or 
 less immediately verifiable by experiment. 
 Now, though the description may seem fanci- 
 ful, experiment, one might say, is essentially 
 listening to the voice of Nature — sometimes 
 by long, still, and silent observation, by simple 
 watching, as the modem student of birds 
 watches them alive and at liberty ; while some- 
 times the experiment takes the form of putting 
 questions to Nature and then carefully catch- 
 ing the answer. It is a helpful thing here that 
 one may put the same question to Nature as 
 often as one pleases; and, if it is the same 
 question, she will give the same answer. She 
 will not tire of giving the answer, as some- 
 times happens when you put the same question 
 to the same person an infinite number of 
 times. Thus it is possible to be sure of her 
 
THE USE OF THEORY 
 
 41 
 
 answer; and, when a great many people put 
 to her the same question, it is possible to verify 
 it. Thus by repeated and intelligent listening 
 Science comes into possession of a body of 
 established facts. 
 
 The results of scientific experiment are 
 patent to sense. Of course, the values of 
 these results are not so patent. They require 
 sometimes a vastly higher power of intellect 
 to grasp them in their relation to one another, 
 and to the whole body of established fact, than 
 is required to make the experiments from 
 which they are gained. But in the main the 
 results of scientific experiment are patent and 
 clear, and they lead to the establishment of 
 facts which any competent person can verify. 
 In this field theories are theories admittedly — 
 working hypotheses to use or discard as serves 
 best. A clear distinction is drawn between 
 facts established by experiment and what are 
 avowedly theories; and that distinction per- 
 mits a considerable freedom in the use of 
 hard facts, and makes the progress of Science 
 possible in virtue of clear thinking. 
 
 But now let us turn to the other side and 
 look at religion. Here we step into a region 
 
42 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of great difficulty, for we have to do with the 
 innermost secrets of human nature. We 
 really know very little yet even of the familiar 
 five senses ; still less can we claim any 
 satisfactory knowledge of the secrets of 
 psychology — will, feeling, emotion, impulse, 
 perception, attention; and there are elements 
 in human nature still more perplexing and 
 still less explored. Of the great spiritual ex- 
 periences, such as love or sorrow, it is hard to 
 give even an approximately true account, 
 except perhaps in poetry. Somewhere, deep 
 among the innermost things of our being, is the 
 home of what we call religion — in a region 
 where experiments seem hardly possible, and, 
 even when they are possible, the results are 
 peculiarly difficult to understand and to 
 relate to one another. Some measure of 
 experiment is, of course, possible here; but 
 here more than elsewhere we require the 
 intelligent working of independent witnesses, 
 independent investigators, correcting them- 
 selves and correcting one another, by inde- 
 pendent results taken over long periods and 
 wide areas, if we are to eliminate accident and 
 error. Yet precisely in this sphere we find 
 
THE USE OF THEORY 
 
 43 
 
 sometimes the most careless use of theory and 
 fact as if they stood on the same footing. 
 There are those who freely use their own 
 theories in this way ; and there are those who 
 lay an emphasis on the authority of the 
 Church, which seems as alien to scientific 
 thinking. To the former class we scarcely 
 need to attend, but we have to consider the 
 stress laid on Authority and to ask how far 
 it is legitimate. 
 
 One reason lies ready to hand. It is partly 
 because of the great difficulty of the problem 
 that lies before the individual — because of 
 the vast issues bound up with it and the short 
 space within which it has to be solved — 
 because he feels so acutely his limitations. 
 He stands in a world of many minds, none 
 of them quite rigid, however rigid they may 
 seem — all of them in reality played upon by 
 shifting currents of thought and feeling, and 
 conditioned by sterner variations in ex- 
 perience. Nothing that he can see stands 
 immovable and immutable, and he asks for 
 something that is permanent. For he realises 
 that he is face to face with a practical problem. 
 He has a life to live which is hurrying past 
 
44 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 him faster and faster — a. life which he would 
 like to call his own, but, as he thinks of it, he 
 seems to himself more and more to be a mere 
 spectator, so quickly life goes, and so little 
 does it leave. He is hindered from developing 
 his opportunities by failure within himself. 
 Evil round about him is challenging his 
 energies, but they are thwarted and deadened 
 by evil within; and meantime he is swept 
 down-stream, more and more conscious of 
 failure — yes, and of ignorance of himself and 
 his own nature. How is he tO' use life, to 
 overcome the inner weakness that makes the 
 outward inefficiency^ — in short, to be what he 
 feels dimly he should be, and might be, 
 somehow, if he only knew how? 
 
 The difficulty of life lies, after all, not so 
 much in the region of speculation as of action 
 — that is, unless a man is content to drift 
 through his days and nights, eating, sleeping, 
 and thoughtlessly putting his hand to what 
 occurs, without purpose or outlook. There 
 may be perhaps an art or science of war — 
 or perhaps Socrates would call it, like rhetoric 
 and cookery, a mere knack. In the last resort 
 many arts and sciences have a larger element 
 
RECOURSE TO EXPERIENCE 
 
 45 
 
 of knack in them than human pride would 
 wish to recognise. However, if there is an art 
 or science of war, it is not to that that we 
 should liken life, but rather to the conduct 
 of a siege — ^an affair of sore straits and 
 cramped means, spiritual, intellectual, and 
 moral, and the enemy always at the gates. 
 
 In all such cases a man has a tendency to 
 fall back on the experience of other men. 
 The instinct is a sound one. Whether one 
 consider the history of inventions, of art, of 
 literature, or of politics and freedom, the 
 inheritance at times seems everything. On 
 what background does a man work ? What 
 depth of leaf mould is there in which literature 
 may root itself and flower ? The answer often 
 determines the value in each case. In litera- 
 ture, for instance, Goethe said that “ to make 
 an epoch in the world, two conditions are 
 notoriously essential — a good head and a 
 good inheritance.”* The man who will 
 emphasise himself and swing clear of the con- 
 ventions of the race is not so often the real 
 genius as the crank or the pretender. The 
 
 • Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 2 May, 1824. 
 
46 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 inherited experience of mankind, scarcely 
 formulated, and reduced to no very valid rules, 
 is invaluable to the real artist, who absorbs 
 it he cannot tell how or when. It saves him 
 from gratuitous mistakes, from waste of mind, 
 from eccentricity, from disastrous side-tracks, 
 and by its gentle pressure turns him in that 
 direction where, if he follow his genius, he 
 will instinctively know when to overstep con- 
 vention and so to extend the experience he 
 inherits, and to enlarge in a permanent and 
 true way the faculties of the race. In fact, 
 much as the individual is — and at times he 
 in his turn seems to be everything — he is 
 most when he realises and uses the solidarity 
 of human experience in that sphere in which 
 he has to work. 
 
 The experience of the race and the freedom 
 of the individual — these, then, are the two 
 great things for the man who takes life 
 seriously in any sphere — neither without the 
 other, but the combination of individual 
 experiment with inherited experience. 
 
 Let us take an easy illustration. Man’s 
 struggle with Nature began far earlier than 
 any date to which historians can take us back; 
 
THE BOAT-BUILDER 
 
 47 
 
 and long after it began, and yet long before 
 we have anything we can call History, the 
 first boat was made. We have to use con- 
 jecture here, but we have some evidence. The 
 man who made it was one who watched 
 Nature. The tree trunk floated, he saw, while 
 the stone sank; and he took in these facts 
 and thought he might use them. But the 
 trunk had to be cleared of its branches, and 
 after a while it occurred to him that if it were 
 hollow he might convey himself and his 
 belongings — human and other — with more 
 safety and at least drier. So he thought out a 
 new application of fire — that treasured dis- 
 covery of his race, so hard to get, so 
 important to keep; and then, after a long 
 series of failures perhaps, with fire and stone 
 he made his dug-out, and launched it with the 
 aid of his friends. And then, to their great 
 amusement, the tree trunk, afloat and free, 
 turned over and resolutely floated upside 
 down. But the man would not be beaten. He 
 hauled the wretched trunk out of the water, 
 and at last, by a heart-breaking course of 
 thought and experiment and disappointment, 
 achieved a new and a great thing — a tree 
 
48 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 trunk hollowed within and shaped without to 
 just those curves and just that build (to use a 
 later word) that would enable it to stay right 
 side up and hinder its own progress least. 
 Human life might depend upon both these 
 qualifications. So rose the most wonderful 
 and fascinating of human trades, to which 
 man was to owe some of his most amazing 
 victories over the world. The man who made 
 the first boat in any tribe was of the type 
 to which mankind owes most — the listener to 
 the voice of God in fact and Nature. He was 
 done with anticipating; he would have the 
 fact, and he put himself to the pains of letting 
 the fact assert itself — patient enough to ask 
 again and again till he understood what 
 Nature meant, and then using it gloriously. 
 Back to him and his boat we can trace the 
 story of shipbuilding, and from him again 
 downwards to onr Mauretania s and Olympics ; 
 and at no stage has the past with its triumphs 
 been irrelevant — nothing once gained was 
 lost, and it is only as men build their ships 
 true to the discoveries made all the way along 
 from the first dug-out that they build aright. 
 The past is superseded indeed ; the Mauretania 
 
THE BOAT-BUILDER 
 
 49 
 
 is worth many dug-outs, but in her the dug- 
 out lives still in a more glorious life. It is 
 the combination of experience and experi- 
 ment. 
 
 So, too, when, at a later day, seas were to 
 be navigated, the sailor did the same thing. 
 The quiet man who would watch and listen 
 learned how to shape his course. Without 
 chart or compass, without even an anchor, 
 how was he to know where he was, to find 
 his way, to save his ship? He looked and he 
 listened. The stars spoke to him, and he 
 went to his journey’s end and came back 
 again because he had the genius to listen to 
 them — ^and to sea and winds and coastlines 
 and currents. The moods of the sea and the 
 face of the sky were never idle for him; and 
 what he learned, he taught, and navigation 
 developed. “A new boat and old rocks,” 
 says the grim Highland proverb. The old 
 perils remain, but the sting is drawn from 
 them if you will use what your father told 
 you. Once more it is the experience of the 
 race and the experiment of the individual. 
 
 When we turn to the sphere of religion, it 
 is natural to expect that the same method will 
 4 
 
5 ° 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 still serve us best, for there is a certain unity 
 in our acquaintance with the universe. Life 
 is one, however many its aspects and faculties. 
 Nature will speak to us here also, if we will 
 listen. But we must be careful not to be 
 in a hurry. It is here that hurry seems most 
 natural to the human mind and most disas- 
 trous. How intricate are the relations of 
 experience and the formulation given to it, 
 we have seen. With the most earnest passion 
 for truth, men may misconceive it and mis- 
 represent it ; and in religion we may be misled 
 by the very highest tradition available to us. 
 V erification here is slow work and very hard ; 
 yet it is possible, if we are willing to avail 
 ourselves of the accumulated evidence of man- 
 kind, with all the care and sympathy needed 
 to understand it aright. 
 
 So far as we can trace the history of man’s 
 conception of God, it has grown very slowly, 
 and in a very .simple way. It would be a 
 wonderful thing to re-capture, if we could, 
 the very thoughts of those remote ancestors 
 of ours who first formulated their experience 
 of Something-Not-Themselves, and to trace 
 how, age by age, men re-shaped their ideas 
 
THE GROWTH OF RELIGION 
 
 51 
 
 of the great Environing, as they watched how 
 thought re acted on life, and life on thought. 
 The real progress has been made by attention 
 to fact. This and that, men said, their fathers 
 had told them, but quite other was the voice 
 of life; God was not what was said, but what 
 He showed Himself to be, what He revealed 
 in the growth of moral and social ideas and 
 ideals. Thus in Homer the traditional gods 
 are clearly on a lower moral plane than the 
 heroes men made from their experience of 
 their fellow-men. It is plain to us in looking 
 back that Homer’s gods were outgrown and 
 must yield their place sooner or later. The 
 attack made by Xenophanes, Euripides, and 
 Plato on traditional religion in the light of 
 new experience of righteousness is the great 
 instance in Classical literature and history of 
 the progress made by those who inherit and 
 examine and reflect. God was re-interpreted 
 in the light of life. Strange that what men 
 are is so often a better guide to the nature 
 of God than what they say about Him ! 
 
 Progress in the spiritual region depends on 
 the result reached by the individual, when he 
 is not merely an individual but a joint-heir 
 
52 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of the race, and will use his inheritance with- 
 out losing his personality. Robinson Crusoe 
 on his island is hardly a type of the human 
 soul. We are too individualistic — too apt to 
 forget that Robinson Crusoe had an axe and 
 a number of other fascinating things brought 
 from England, all of which implied humanity, 
 and the long history of civilisation. He had 
 also a Bible in English, we may remember, 
 which again implied a long history of 
 religion. The individual inherits all this — 
 he is made by it; it is in him; and sound 
 thinking requires the recognition of this fact 
 also, as well as all other relevant facts, in the 
 fulness of its meaning. Without the religious 
 history of the race behind us, not one of us 
 is likely to achieve anything, either in his own 
 religious life or in his thinking. If he starts 
 afresh, he is most like an artist who begins 
 without perspective, and ignores all that has 
 been learned and felt of colour. Not even 
 genius could thrive on such a plan; and it 
 is perhaps worth while remarking that one 
 of the most significant factors in genius, and 
 one of those least recognised, is its infinite 
 capacity for learning in patience and humility. 
 
EXPERIENCE AND PROGRESS 53 
 
 however high it may soar afterwards — its 
 power of combining docility with indepen- 
 dence. Independence without that docility is 
 the mark of the fool, though he does not 
 always recognise it. First-hand experience 
 of life, of course, we ask of poet and painter, 
 and of the man of religion, but in the first 
 instance within the limits of the inheritance. 
 
 When we speak of our religious and 
 spiritual inheritance, we must think not merely 
 of those whO' say they have the Voice of God, 
 but of some who make no such claim — not 
 merely of one Church, but of many, and of 
 many that no Church at all will recognise. 
 The whole spiritual history of man is the 
 background on which we have to work. 
 There are the great historic religions of the 
 world, and within Christendom the great 
 Churches and societies and movements — ^and 
 none of all these is irrelevant. For, after all, 
 “the Church” is essentially the tradition, and 
 the tradition has tO' be transcended; while 
 to the man who is in earnest, every tradition 
 is of value, and none is finally binding. 
 Church or no Church, it is to the highest 
 experience in the sphere with which we are 
 
54 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 concerned that we have to look, and it is 
 not till we have found that, that we may 
 dismiss anything as irrelevant, and even then 
 we must not dismiss it too abruptly. For 
 most of us to-day there is little question that it 
 is in the area of Christian thinking that the 
 highest results in thought and character are 
 to be observed; and, when we find these, 
 we are right — indeed, we are bound — to ask 
 how they have been developed. It is, of 
 course, true that this conclusion is questioned. 
 Other standards of morality, by which to 
 test character, are proposed, but they are 
 rarely as new as those who advocate them 
 imagine ; often they are obsolete — blind 
 alleys long since labelled and known to lead 
 nowhere. 
 
 To recapitulate the three points we have 
 reached, we have remarked, first, the soli- 
 darity of the race, and the dependence of the 
 present, and with it of the future, upon the 
 past and its experience. In the next place, we 
 have seen that progress depends upon the 
 right and wise use of the inherited experience 
 by the individual, conscious of his respon- 
 sibility at once to maintain and to advance 
 
RECAPITULATION 
 
 55 
 
 what he has inherited ;* and, at the same time, 
 that in every sphere of human activity it is 
 the highest achievement that counts, and must 
 be our starting-place for further progress; 
 that, if to ignore experience is always folly, 
 it is still more folly to ignore the highest 
 experience available. In the third place, 
 embodied in the tradition of the Christian 
 Church or Churches, and in the teaching and 
 dogma of the non-Christian religions, we have 
 a mass of religious experience which may be 
 of the highest value to us, if we take the 
 pains to understand it; for here we touch 
 the life of the human race at its very highest 
 and most intense. The great religions express 
 the most earnest minds among those races 
 of man which are most endowed with 
 insight and most trained in variety of life. 
 They come not from the backward peoples, 
 but from the races with long histories, embody- 
 ing every interest that race or nation can 
 
 * The Church, wrote Principal Rainy in 1867, “ is compelled to 
 submit afresh to the cross-questioning of the ever-changing, ever- 
 moving, Providence of God. She is obliged to let drop the mere 
 habits of her history, which suffice no longer. . . . The Church 
 of Christ has no liberty to become the slave even of its own his- 
 tory.” {Life, i., pp. 176, 177.) 
 
56 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 know, and in every one of the great religions 
 the signs are manifest which tell of roots deep 
 in the past. In each case the highest thought 
 of a gifted race has been turned upon what 
 supremely matters to every man. For those 
 who know it best — who know it from within — 
 the Christian faith stands apart from all other 
 religions in a place of its own, with a future 
 — ^and a future which, we believe, will not 
 be a mere repetition of the past. The rest 
 of this lecture will be devoted to a short dis- 
 cussion of principles which may enable us 
 to judge between one set of religious traditions 
 and another, and (I hope) to see some ground 
 for the preference given to the Christian faith. 
 
 There are three questions which we may 
 ask about any religion — quite simple ques- 
 tions. What will it do for you? What will 
 it do to protect other people against you? 
 How far does it hold open the door for the 
 future ? 
 
 In answering such questions two ways may 
 be taken. We may go to sacred books, and 
 compare the precepts of the great religious 
 teachers and the proverbs bearing on moral 
 matters that are current among the various 
 
THE STUDY OF RELIGIONS 
 
 57 
 
 peoples. Or we may go to the people them- 
 selves and study their lives and see how far 
 the religion is practically operative there — 
 what it gives them, what it does to protect 
 the weak from them, what it does to safeguard 
 the future — ^and with what force and power 
 it does these things. We shall find sometimes 
 that the popular proverb has more vitality 
 than the religious aphorism or principle, and 
 yet that even so a proverb has often enough 
 to do to maintain its own life, without dynamic 
 to spare to guide and quicken the lives of 
 men and women. We must keep always in 
 close contact with actual life, and work out 
 our problem with progressively intense study 
 of individual character, without neglecting, 
 on the other hand, the notes of the larger 
 or more organised society. We must make 
 it our concern to go slowly about our work — 
 especially when we reach the stage of making 
 statements — till we have grasped the fulness 
 of the fact. In religion a fact is extremely 
 hard to convey in its fulness by any words 
 available; and then we have to realise that 
 other people use the same words and mean 
 something very different. The content of the 
 
58 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 word varies immensely. Even when we take 
 so simple and obvious a word as (let us say) 
 “blue,” no one can tell what its exact value 
 is — it makes all the difference whether it is 
 applied to a blue-bottle fly, the summer sky, 
 or a preparation for the laundry. The word 
 “Father” is applied to Godin many religions, 
 and its compass varies as widely as “blue” 
 in the three instances I have suggested. It 
 is clear that we have to go beyond what people 
 say, and study what they mean, and how much 
 they mean it. 
 
 Some little time ago. Professor Gilbert 
 Murray, of Oxford, said that the great danger 
 in literature was reading “with a slack imagi- 
 nation.” This is always the danger, whether 
 one is criticising a book or dealing with 
 human character in any form or race. Know- 
 ledge, to be anything at all beyond conceit and 
 delusion, must be a thing of passion and 
 intensity. It is not easy to understand any 
 man in his fulness — character is so com- 
 plicated to begin with, and in the next place 
 it is never finally fixed. If we are to study an 
 author, there is only one way, and this Carlyle 
 summed up in writing of Novalis for an 
 
THE TRUE WAY IN CRITICISM 59 
 
 English public very doubtful about such 
 foreigners : 
 
 “ The most profitable employment any book 
 can give them is to study honestly some 
 earnest, deep-minded, truth-loving Man, to 
 work their way into his manner of thought, 
 till they see the world with his eyes, feel as he 
 felt and judge as he judged, neither believing 
 nor denying, till they can in some measure 
 so feel and judge.”* 
 
 When we have taken such a course with 
 any religious teacher, our acceptance or re- 
 jection, our belief or denial, will at least be 
 defensible. Is it too much to suggest that 
 such measure is only seldom given to that 
 wonderful series of “ earnest, deep-minded, 
 truth-loving Men ” who have made the 
 Christian Church, and handed down to us its 
 tradition — the embodiment of the religious 
 experience of the peoples and of the men in 
 nineteen centuries who were best qualified 
 
 * Dr. Edward Caird, in a lecture on Carlyle, said much the 
 same thing- ; We must “ let his way of thinking [a great author’s] 
 permeate into our minds, until it becomes part of their very sub- 
 stance ” ; till then, our criticism “will be wanting in sympathy, 
 and it will rather tend to defend us against his spirit than enable 
 us to appreciate it.” 
 
6o 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 for such experience, even if most conscious of 
 their own disqualifications? 
 
 Our task is the open-hearted study of the 
 Christian religion, with our three questions 
 in mind; and this lecture shall end with the 
 suggestion of some lines along which our 
 study may be carried out. 
 
 First of all, I would suggest the con- 
 sideration of the Christian tradition by refer- 
 ence to the world outside Christ — ^and that is 
 not easy. Most of us have no idea at all what 
 the world is without Christ; He is so deeply 
 involved in every aspect of the world we know, 
 so interwoven with every fibre of its being. 
 Yet there are two regions where we can see 
 the world without Christ. There is the ancient 
 world, with the fascinating story of the Greek 
 and Roman civilisations in which our own 
 is rooted. And again there is the modem 
 world of Africa and Asia — the pagan world 
 of to-day. To know either is the task of a 
 lifetime, it may sometimes seem to the weary 
 student, and yet certain things are plain 
 enough. 
 
 For example, deplorable as things are in 
 European and American society, they are bad. 
 
SOCIETY WITHOUT CHRIST 
 
 6i 
 
 nevertheless, with the continual correction of 
 a Christian background. There are men and 
 women leavening these societies in whom 
 bums a passionate devotion to the person of 
 Jesus Christ and His ideals for mankind and 
 for the individual. There is the public recog- 
 nition (whatever it is worth) of religion, and 
 there is in all educated persons some slight 
 knowledge — very vague and inaccurate as it 
 may be — of the principles of that religion 
 which touches their lives, if nowhere else, 
 in most of their weddings and funerals. But 
 imagine the background removed, and in- 
 dustrial enormities, flagrant cruelty, and open 
 uncleanness, continuing unchecked, and gain- 
 ing rather than losing in volume, as they 
 would. Even with the assistance of Leopold 
 II. and his Belgians, it will be hard for any- 
 one without special knowledge to imagine 
 what things were tolerated in ancient society 
 — or are tolerated in India — in civilised com- 
 munities, that is — and in neither case with 
 much disapproval. Some things are ignored, 
 and others are defended; and that makes 
 an unspeakable difference. Good natures and 
 kind hearts there were in the ancient world, 
 
62 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 but it is remarkable how little influence they 
 had.* Classical scholars and modern mission- 
 aries rarely tell all they know about pagan 
 society. Few ask about the condition of 
 slaves, for instance, in the mines of Attica 
 while Pericles was the chief man of the State; 
 and the terrible want of mercy that caste 
 involves is not understood. If you know the 
 questions to ask of returned missionaries, they 
 will tell you. Sometimes they tell you things 
 without noticing that they are doing so, and 
 such evidence is always significant. 
 
 Then we must think about religion without 
 Christ. Here, of course, we meet people who 
 go at once to the Diary of Marcus Aurelius or 
 Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia — documents 
 of very different value. But there are sounder 
 works on Buddha, with less glamour, while 
 Marcus Aurelius was in any case an ex- 
 ceptional man. Plutarch’s book On Isis and 
 Osiris is a much better guide to the real ideas 
 of ancient religion. Two features stand out 
 in most non-Christian religions — the world’s 
 quarrel with God, and the awful touch of 
 
 * Think of the gladiatorial shows and the kind and humane 
 gien who gave them, 
 
RELIGION WITHOUT CHRIST 63 
 
 superstition. Buddha and the Stoic both 
 knew the world was made amiss, and, recon- 
 ciliation being practically impossible, they 
 urged renouncing the world. The Stoic, of 
 course, with his love of paradox, simul- 
 taneously maintained the beauty and rightness 
 of the world, but, none the less, did his utmost 
 to nerve himself to endure it. Buddha, it 
 might be said, beyond all religious teachers, 
 takes the worth out of life. If it is urged that 
 the mediaeval monk also said that “ the world 
 is very evil,”* none the less, the hymn, in 
 which the phrase comes, ends with ‘‘ Jerusalem 
 the Golden,” while the Stoic ended with reso- 
 lution into elements and Buddha at best with 
 Nirvana. The plain fact is that, in the long 
 run, despair is at the heart of every religion 
 without Christ; and if man or woman is to 
 get through the world at all, it must be by 
 the hardening or deadening of the more 
 sensitive parts of human nature. Marcus 
 Aurelius’ Diary is a sort of breviary of despair. 
 
 Epicurus and Nietzsche have a different 
 story to tell, but their messages have the same 
 
 * To be fair to Bernard of Morlaix, he did not say this. Hora 
 tiovissima tempora pessima is rather different, 
 
64 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 defects. They are not for people who outlive 
 youth, or who have it in them to love in any 
 passionate way; and as old age and love are 
 obvious elements in human life, it is a damag- 
 ing criticism upon a philosophy to say that 
 it does not cover them. Besides, Plato dealt 
 with Nietzsche long ago in the Gorgias, and 
 Epicurus really asks more self-discipline than 
 youth or voluptuary would wish to practise. 
 
 In the fifth lecture I shall have to deal with 
 another aspect of religion outside Christ — with 
 polytheism in faith and cult and daily life — 
 and to call your attention to its effects upon 
 human nature. 
 
 In the next place we have to study Christian 
 society to see what has been done for men by 
 Jesus Christ, and what is being done. We 
 will not blink the weakness and distractedness 
 of Christian society, but as weakness and dis- 
 tractedness are not features peculiar to it, 
 we will look elsewhere for the factors that 
 differentiate. Two lectures in this course will 
 be given to this. 
 
 Several things will be necessary. We shall 
 need to give a closer attention to Christian 
 phrase, neither surrendering to its appeal of 
 
CHRISTIAN PHRASE 
 
 6S 
 
 old association, nor .rejecting it as merely 
 conventional. Here again we have to guard 
 against the slack imagination, and to wrestle 
 with the word, and with the man who uses it, 
 till we grasp what it is intended to express. 
 Over and over again we shall find that the 
 difficulty is that it was an endeavour to put 
 a wholly new experience into old phrase. Old 
 categories and old conceptions have received 
 a new content, far too great for them. The 
 Church has treated its words like Humpty- 
 Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking-Glass ; 
 the word has had its own associations and 
 preferences, and the Church forces it, in spite 
 of all these, to convey an idea it never meant 
 to suggest — sometimes an idea of glowing joy. 
 And then, when the word has learned its new 
 work, dull folk use it till an impatient age 
 supposes it never meant anything but 
 flabby make-believe.* Really, if the words 
 are to be understood, our best plan is to 
 repeat the experience which called them forth. 
 
 We shall have to study the involuntary 
 convert — Si person to be found in many 
 
 * Perhaps one might instance such words as faith, love, sub. 
 stitution, holy. 
 
 5 
 
66 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 societies to-day, a man well worth our atten- 
 tion. He is of the type that does not mean 
 to be converted — too candid to take things 
 without examination, too true to move quickly 
 — and then, like the Pearl Merchant in the 
 parable, after all his experience of the beauti- 
 ful and true, he finds something that goes 
 beyond all — he gets outside his own old 
 range, finds a new joy; and life, without his 
 intending it or expecting it, is a new thing. 
 But if we are to understand him, it will not 
 be with the slack imagination. 
 
 Above all, we shall have to consecrate our- 
 selves to a new and special study of Jesus 
 Christ — His ideas and principles, and, what 
 is vastly more. Himself and His personality. 
 
 Is His a religion that closes the door to 
 the future? Or does it not rather hold the 
 door open? In a great passage, St. Paul 
 speaks of Christ as being God’s “Yes” — 
 “however many,” he says, “the promises of 
 God are, in Him is the Yes.” The Christian 
 religion is a religion of Yes, and all other 
 religions, in last resort, are religions of No. 
 Paul sees in Him the fulfilment of all God’s 
 promises — promises written in the books of 
 
“IN HIM WAS YES” 
 
 67 
 
 the prophets of Israel, no doubt, but promises 
 written before their day in the very nature of 
 the human heart, in its craving for some- 
 thing more, its hunger for love, its un- 
 developed capacities, and its growing demand 
 upon the universe. The Yes for all these 
 Paul sees in Christ. 
 
 We have to study Christ’s effect in pro- 
 ducing and broadening sympathy, in enlarg- 
 ing outlook and developing faculty, in making 
 men more really men than they ever were 
 before — larger, more humane, more gentle 
 and tender, more open to the world, and 
 stionger and more fit for new kinds of service 
 — spiritual, social, and intellectual — in short, 
 in a larger and fuller sense, more human. We 
 have to see how He has laid more emphasis 
 than any other religious teacher on the worth 
 of human life, the beauty of human relations, 
 the charm of the world about us — sometimes 
 by direct teaching, sometimes by implication, 
 and most of all by His influence exercised on 
 those who love Him even when they are not 
 very conscious of being influenced by Him at 
 all. We have to realise that this has been the 
 continuous experience of the Church, and in 
 
68 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 ever a larger and deeper measure. The nine- 
 teenth century, it was said, was nearer Christ 
 than the second was. Let us pray that the 
 twentieth come nearer still. “ Where the 
 spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” wrote 
 Paul ; and there is indeed liberty there — to go 
 about the Father’s house and to see everything 
 belonging to the Father. The locked doors 
 are few — ^and in some the keys stand waiting 
 till we learn to turn them, while, as to others — 
 ‘‘ Knock, and it shall be opened to you.” But, 
 in general, it is : “ Behold, I have set before 
 you an opened door.” 
 
 It is curious, too, to remark how, when a 
 man is really under the influence of Jesus 
 Christ, such influence does not, as between 
 man and man, narrow or limit, but broaden 
 him. The Holy Spirit, it is promised, is to 
 guide us into all truth. We And, wherever 
 Jesus Christ has been in reality, men have 
 conceived of everything in a progressively 
 larger and nobler way — have framed greater 
 ideals of personal, social, and national 
 righteousness, and achieved a new intellectual 
 freedom. 
 
 But eventually our subject of study is Christ 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRIST 
 
 69 
 
 Himself. We must go back to the historical 
 Jesus — to the great Teacher who bade men 
 go to the facts — “Tell John the things you hear 
 and see ” — ^and Himself the great fact for us, 
 Who saves us at once from the hardening of 
 tradition, and from the danger of being lost 
 altogether in a world of theory and spindrift 
 fancy. As long as He stands, we build on the 
 Rock, we touch the actual and live in the real. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 The Significance of the Church as Witness 
 
 O UR subject in this lecture is the Chris- 
 tian Church; and what other has so 
 many claims upon our interest and 
 our study? Think of its long history, its per- 
 manence, its recuperative power, its force, its 
 solidarity, its place and part in all human 
 affairs; and, again, of the great succession 
 of significant men that have made it. 
 Whatever its origin and nature may be, the 
 part it has played and still plays in the story 
 of the race entitles it to a closer study than 
 most people give it. We do not realise what 
 it means; we take it for granted, in our idle 
 way, and hardly even wonder that it should 
 have lasted so long, or how it can have done 
 so, or how it began. 
 
 The problem of the rise of the Christian 
 Church in the Roman Empire in the face of 
 a great religious system, hallowed by every 
 emotion that the associations of family life 
 
 71 
 
72 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and national life, of literature and history, can 
 give* — ^of a great imperial system hostile to 
 it from Nero’s reign onward — is one that may 
 call for every faculty of intelligence, sympathy, 
 and historical imagination and historical sense 
 that we possess . Gibbon dealt with it in his two 
 most famous chapters — the least satisfactory 
 chapters of his masterpiece. We must be 
 more friendly than he was to the Christian 
 Church if we are to understand it — friendly 
 as every historical student must be to the 
 subject of his researches. Sine ira et studio 
 is the phrase of Tacitus — yes, without anger 
 and partisanship, but not without sympathy. 
 We must go quietly and slowly about our 
 work; hurry is fatal in historical study. 
 
 Then we have to ask what has kept the 
 Church together so long, and kept it one, in 
 spite of the gulfs of controversy that separate 
 Protestant and Catholic. We know quite well 
 that in the last resort we stand together and 
 
 * The volume of emotion and the variety of association 
 that made the strength of the old religion are to be seen 
 in Plutarch. Men, he says, were “ in anguish and in fear 
 lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years,” 
 and it had not lost it. 
 
THE VITALITY OF THE CHURCH 73 
 
 believe in one another. When one thinks 
 of the great philosophic schools of the past — 
 how small their numbers have been in spite 
 of their great influence — how they dis- 
 integrated and disappeared, as the Stoics, for 
 instance, did after the reign of Marcus 
 Aurelius — one realises the contrast in the 
 Church. Its numbers have been vast — they 
 are greater to-day than ever; its divisions 
 have been more acute and more cruel than 
 those of any philosophic school; and yet it 
 lives. We shall have to ask in virtue of what 
 it lives, and to see that we reach an adequate 
 answer. What is it that revives the Church 
 again and again? What is the meaning of 
 the great movements associated with such 
 names as Luther, Tyndale, and Wesley — ^all 
 these, men of the academic habit, who studied 
 in Universities and read Greek — not at all 
 our common idea of leaders of mass-move- 
 ments ? There is no secret at all about these 
 men — they were fallible like ourselves, liable 
 to the charges of anger and narrowness of 
 view and mistaken judgment, what you will — 
 but they have this also in common, that they 
 all lived in the power of a renewed realisation 
 
74 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of Jesus Christ. That is plain enough. We 
 have to ask ourselves why should this be 
 responsible for new eras in Christian life and 
 thought — and again we have to look to it 
 carefully that we really answer our question. 
 
 To some critics the most conspicuous thing 
 about the Church is its weakness; and in a 
 certain sense they are right. The Christian 
 Church has many weaknesses — some which 
 its critics see better than it does itself, and 
 some which it knows and they do not know. 
 Its record is disfigured with terrible errors 
 and follies ; and at times it has been guilty — 
 sections of it, at least, have been guilty — of 
 what must be called crimes — crimes against 
 its Founder, against the love of God, against 
 ordinary humanity. We need not play the 
 apologist, or seek to palliate such things, or 
 to explain that wrongdoing was right when 
 viewed from some peculiar standpoint or 
 other. We may take the thing on the showing 
 of the most hostile and the unfairest critic we 
 can find; and then we must still more reso- 
 lutely ask how it is that a body capable of 
 such weakness, of such error, of such betrayals 
 of its own ideals, can yet win and keep the 
 
THE STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH 75 
 
 love and the loyalty of men and women, in 
 earnest with themselves and with truth, and 
 can affect through them the whole course of 
 human history — we believe, for good; but, 
 if our critics will not let us say so at once, 
 we will ask only. To what does a body so 
 conspicuously worthless owe its influence ? 
 
 Let us take an illustration from ordinary 
 history — Julius Caesar. We will read the 
 worst that is to be said about him; we will 
 draw him as Shakespeare drew him, from 
 North’s Plutarch — a. man of conspicuous 
 errors and defects — epileptic, deaf, ambitious, 
 vacillating, arrogant — falling far short in some 
 matters of ordinary standards of conduct. Or 
 we will take Martin Luther, and, for the 
 moment, try to believe every foul calumny 
 that the meaner partisans of the Papacy and 
 of modern culture have heaped on him. And 
 then we have a problem indeed. We have 
 now to explain how such a Caesar and such 
 a Luther were capable of such great things 
 as they actually achieved. They changed the 
 course of human history. We will allow all 
 that sense will tolerate to tendencies of the 
 times, as people tell us to do to-day — people. 
 
76 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 it seems to me, who do not always penetrate 
 quite into the depths of things. We will make 
 every deduction that is historically possible; 
 and then, weighing the real effect of these 
 men, on a just survey of everything to be 
 considered, we will wrestle with the problem 
 before us. If they had been (as so many 
 suppose) great men and true men, the explana- 
 tion would have been easier ; but the traducer 
 has only effected this — we realise now, when 
 we know at last the frightful deductions that 
 have to be made, how great the men were in 
 fact. The more weakness and vice we load 
 upon them, the more we magnify the great- 
 ness that enabled them to do what they 
 actually did, in spite of everything. 
 
 Similarly, the greater the errors of the 
 Christian Church, the worse its failures in con- 
 duct, insight, and sympathy, in grasp of truth 
 or sense of right and wrong — the more we 
 have to explain. If the minus is so great, 
 how great is the plus? What is it that gives 
 the Church its power ? That it has power and 
 charm and influence, we can see at a glance, 
 in the love men have for the Church, and in 
 their hatred for it. Hate and love of such 
 
THE STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH 77 
 
 force — that carry men so far — are never 
 waked by anything weak and trivial ; and 
 there is no hatred and no love in human 
 history equal to those which the Church has 
 waked. Why? We have seen the weakness; 
 we have to see the strength. 
 
 It is a commonplace in criticism — ^or it 
 should be so by now — that the beginner is 
 quicker to see what is wrong than what is 
 right. The critics, as Disraeli said in a famous 
 passage, are the men who have failed; and 
 he is right — the best of them are men who 
 would have created if they could — would have 
 made the poem or painted the picture, but 
 they did not. The man who does, criticises in 
 another way — with an incisiveness far beyond 
 theirs, and a tenderness and sensitiveness they 
 cannot reach. But, in the main, the task 
 of criticism for most of us — at least, when we 
 are measuring ourselves against great things 
 in art, or literature, or history, and it is wiser 
 and kinder to leave the rest alone — is to find 
 out what is right, how and why the thing 
 is right, and what makes it right — what gives 
 it its appeal — where its power lies. The critic 
 will be better trained in the National Gallery 
 
78 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 than in the Royal Academy. So if we are 
 to criticise the Christian Church, to form a 
 real judgment upon it, to be sound critics, not 
 mere pickers of holes and triflers, we have 
 to find out first where its strength lies. That 
 is the vital question for Delilah and her Philis- 
 tines when they are dealing with Samson; 
 it is the vital question for the enemies of 
 the Church, and they can do nothing till they 
 solve it. And what it means for us who are 
 committed to the Church of Christ, I need not 
 tell you. 
 
 In this lecture I wish to concentrate atten- 
 tion upon three main points, from the con- 
 sideration of which we may be better able 
 to take some measure of the strength of the 
 Christian Church, and to see what it means 
 and what lies behind. First of all, I suggest 
 that we should study more closely the way 
 in which the Church holds its main doctrines, 
 how it has come to do so, and what is its 
 intellectual right to hold them; and incident- 
 ally we shall have to remark its inability not 
 to hold them, in view of its invariable decline 
 when it has loosened its grip upon them. In 
 the second place, we must examine what these 
 
THE SANITY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 79 
 
 main tenets are; and, lastly, their place in the 
 actual life of the Church, their effect upon 
 the conduct and method of the Christian com- 
 munity, and the general character of the 
 results that have followed from their use and 
 application. 
 
 I begin, then, with what I may perhaps call 
 the Sanity of the Christian Church. 
 
 On this point, the first thing to be said 
 is that the Christian community has always 
 rested on the validity of human experience. 
 There are people, of course, who have main- 
 tained the doctrine that this is not a sound 
 basis, that there is, in fact, no sound basis at 
 all for knowledge, but that knowledge is im- 
 possible. How they can know this is not 
 explained. However, the Church has always 
 based itself on the belief that through ex- 
 perience you can learn, and that you can 
 definitely and quietly conclude that certain 
 things are true. There is reality in the ex- 
 perience of men, and knowledge is possible. 
 From the way in which things can be done, 
 and also from the ways in which they cannot 
 be done, the Christian Church believes that 
 it may learn something essential and vital. 
 
8o 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 The story of mankind is not for it an idle 
 thing, 
 
 a Shadow-Show 
 
 Played in a box whose candle is the Sun — 
 
 as empty and meaningless a sequence as a 
 series of smoke-rings blown by an idle man, 
 one after the other going away, and none 
 contributing to any before it or after it 
 — a. mere arbitrary succession of purpose- 
 less monotony.* On the contrary, Christian 
 thinkers have always held that there is some- 
 thing that the mind can grip and use in the 
 history of mankind — something valid and real; 
 and the more vital and real, the more a man 
 braces his mind to grapple with it and to 
 understand it in its fulness. The Christian 
 Church does not rest on what I have heard 
 called Perhapsology. Hence, when a certain 
 type of experience recurs again and again, it 
 is taken to be significant, and not accidental; 
 and, as a result, the Church calculates, in all 
 its dealings with men, upon the recurrence of 
 certain things. The human mind, with all 
 
 * This is unjust to the smoke-rings, every one of which, 
 as well as the whole series, will point to natural laws which 
 are not trifles. 
 
SOME THINGS KNOWN 
 
 8i 
 
 its triumphs over the material world, and all 
 its acquisitions of new knowledge, will con- 
 tinue to act in much the same way.* There 
 will be the same obstinate questionings age by 
 age — now turned upon this aspect of life, now 
 upon the other phase of it; the same hesita- 
 tions between theories of good and evil, the 
 same wavering between the appeals of good 
 and evil, the same weakness, and the same 
 needs and cravings. And to meet these 
 needs and cravings the Church offers the 
 same Christ — in the certainty that, though 
 the storms of criticism continue with greater 
 or less violence to beat upon this or that 
 element of the Christian faith, there still work 
 for it the same forces, the same movements 
 of the mind, that in ages past have taken and 
 still take men, often sorely against the lines 
 of their preference, into the same acceptance 
 of God in Christ. I have forestalled here one 
 of the great conclusions the Church draws, 
 but the immediate point is rather the way 
 in which it comes to draw it. 
 
 In the next place, I would urge you to 
 
 * “ Mankind advances, but man remains the same,” Goetite 
 said. 
 
 § 
 
82 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 consider that the conclusions of the Church 
 have not gone unchallenged. The Christian 
 community has not gone, like Odysseus’ men, 
 with wax in their ears, unable to hear the 
 Sirens. It has lived in the world and heard all 
 that the world has to say — whether it wished 
 or not — the world took care it should hear. 
 For it is rather curious to see how from the 
 very first the world has devoted itself to clear 
 the Christian mind of error. The Christian 
 faith has been demonstrated again and again 
 to be ridiculous by every argument that the 
 cleverest and wittiest of its opponents could 
 devise, from Celsus down to present-day 
 Members of Parliament. Just think of the 
 vast amount of wit that has been expended 
 upon Christian people in nineteen centuries, 
 from Lucian to Voltaire and onward — and 
 the Christian faith has survived it. Or, again, 
 think of the serious argument that age by 
 age has been based upon the best learning and 
 science of each generation, to convince the 
 Christian that if, as he must grant, philosophy 
 was in possession of sound canons of reason, 
 his faith was hopelessly absurd, or, at least, 
 hopelessly misconceived by himself ; not that 
 
THE CHALLENGE 
 
 83 
 
 it was quite without elements of sense and 
 truth, but that these were entangled in a fabric 
 of myth and nonsense, from which it was 
 urgent that they should be cut away and set 
 free. And again, think of the pressure other 
 than intellectual that has been brought to 
 bear upon the Christian communities from 
 time tO' time in one land and another — ^and 
 upon individuals — every kind of persuasion, 
 from the crown of Henri IV. to the Vivicom- 
 burium which threatened Tertullian. Love 
 and hate have used all the arts of enticement 
 and terror to bring the Christian away from 
 his relations with Christ — ^and Christ has per- 
 sistently been too strong for them all. If a 
 faith can be tested by what it has survived, 
 Christianity has been well tested. 
 
 But the Christian faith has been tested in 
 another and a rather subtler way. The 
 Church has always been sensitive tO' philo- 
 sophic criticism, as we are ourselves to-day. 
 In every generation the sons of Christians 
 have received the best available education of 
 their day — in those studies which, as St. 
 Augustine put it, “ they call liberal and we 
 c^ll secular” — they have been steeped ip 
 
84 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 philosophy, and have turned eyes, enlightened 
 by their training, upon the faith of their 
 fathers. Again, the early Church, and not 
 it alone, has won men of the philosophic 
 temper, for whom it was essential to review 
 their Christian faith and their philosophic 
 principles side by side. Philosophy, however, 
 is one thing, and philosophic systems another. 
 Philosophy is a natural instinct of the human 
 mind, a passion for a co-ordinated view of 
 things, an inherent compulsion to speculation 
 in order to reach truth. But an instinct is a 
 very different thing from the habits or prin- 
 ciples of thought to which in a given case it 
 may lead. Yet men have always been apt to 
 identify the instinct with the system of 
 thought. It is essential for a complete man 
 to reflect as to the bearings of his Christian 
 faith upon the whole world of his experience 
 — there must be Christian philosophy. But 
 men personify Philosophy as they do History 
 or Science, and will allege that Philosophy 
 teaches this or that principle. I do not think 
 that this is defensible, for I observe that age 
 by age there has been change in the principles 
 of philosophers. Many of the most f^r- 
 
THE TEST OF COMPROMISE 
 
 85 
 
 reaching postulates or preconceptions of the 
 age of St. Paul have by now long been mere 
 curiosities of the text-books. Yet their sway 
 was once enormous, and an educated man 
 dared not dispute them if he valued his repu- 
 tation for thought and culture. 
 
 In every age the Church has shown a 
 tendency to express the Christian faith in the 
 philosophic terms of that age — a tendency 
 laudable but dangerous ; for the proper desire 
 to be intelligible, the natural instinct for 
 making a unity of one’s thought, have de- 
 clined into compromise. Over and over again 
 Christians have been carried by a desire for 
 re-statement and accommodation to a point 
 at which it became evident to quieter people 
 that they had left the historic reality or the 
 eternal significance — or both — of Christ Him- 
 self far behind. In the early second century, 
 in deference to a philosophic dogma that God 
 and a Godlike man were immune from pain, 
 a school arose who taught that the death 
 of Jesus on the Cross was not real — a phantom 
 was crucified, or, at best, a man’s body — not 
 Christ. Such a compromise, it was quickly 
 seen, emptied the Christian faith of all reality 
 
86 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and all value ; it palpably gave away the whole 
 essence of the faith. Who could turn for real 
 help to a Christ impassive of pain — or die for a 
 Christ who vanished at the sight of the Cross ? 
 Again, the whole Arian controversy arose 
 from the desire to accommodate the Incarna- 
 tion to that method of conceiving God which 
 underlies Neo-Platonism, and has been called 
 the “deification of the word Not.” Once 
 again the compromise was one that gave 
 everything away. 
 
 One thing has always stood out clearly 
 sooner or later. Whenever the Church at 
 large, or any Church in particular, has com- 
 mitted itself to any scheme of thought that 
 has lessened the significance of Jesus Christ, 
 it has declined. Error always tells; and the 
 error of over-estimating Jesus Christ ought 
 to have told by now, but the experience of the 
 Church so far suggests that it has no real 
 reason to dread any danger from over- 
 estimating Him, but rather that the danger 
 has always come from obscuring or abating 
 His significance. It is, I think, worth while 
 to reflect upon what this involves. The faith 
 has been tested in every compromise that 
 
THE FACT GAINED 87 
 
 Christians have attempted, and if it is still 
 held, it is with some warrant. 
 
 A Christian philosophy there must be, but 
 it will not be reached by abandoning the 
 one fixed point we have attained. In the 
 meantime the Christian has had sometimes 
 to stand like St. Sebastian in the pictures 
 — stripped of every rag of philosophic and in- 
 tellectual dignity, and exposed to the shafts of 
 every so-called philosopher who cared to shoot 
 — ^^and quite glad so to stand, conscious that 
 he had something for which it was worth 
 while to be stripped and shot at, and to go 
 through every kind of shame. 
 
 For, in the last place, the Church, with 
 Aristotle, sets the fact before the explanation. 
 The thing is not irrational, if it is true, even 
 if we cannot explain it yet. 
 
 So far we have tried to consider some of the 
 grounds on which the Christian community 
 claims to be entitled to hold certain views of 
 its own. These are some of the factors which 
 have worked for verification — forces that have 
 acted together to keep the Church heading 
 for truth all the time. 
 
 We come now to some of the main 
 
88 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 convictions -which have been tested in this 
 ■way. 
 
 First of all, we may set here the serious 
 view that the Christian Church has always 
 taken of moral evil. There are those who 
 minimise evil, who see in it “good in the 
 making,” and play with the idea that all the 
 evil that men do is, in a certain sense, the 
 outcome of some divinely-given instinct within 
 them. This is rather confused thinking. The 
 instinct and the use made of it are not the 
 same thing. It is nearer the fact to say, with 
 Principal Henderson, that “ the horrible thing 
 about sin is that it is using God against God ” 
 — turning the gift in which He has given Him- 
 self against the giver, the gift which is equally 
 susceptible of another use. “ It was,” as 
 Milton says, “ from out the rind of one apple 
 tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, 
 as two twins cleaving together, leap’d forth, 
 into the World. And perhaps this is that 
 doom which Adam fell into of knowing good 
 and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by 
 e-vil.” But on the previous page he says; 
 “ the Knowledge cannot defile ... if the Will 
 and Conscience be not defil’d.” The critic 
 
MORAL EVIL 
 
 89 
 
 must look more closely into his psychology. 
 The Church, face to face with the ugly facts 
 of human life, such as depraved instincts and 
 conduct openly and flagrantly anti-social, has 
 advanced sound thinking by calling some 
 things categorically evil. Whatever the origin 
 of evil — ^and Christian thinkers have turned 
 that over pretty often — the Church knows by 
 now what evil is like and what its effects are, 
 and has set itself to combat evil — ^and it is 
 hard to imagine a better way to the discovery 
 of what it really is. 
 
 I take two forms of evil to illustrate the 
 point. What does cruelty mean? It is a 
 subtle thing. Human nature, as those who 
 have read it best have seen most clearly, is 
 capable of more cruelty than we like to think. 
 Shylock and Lady Macbeth, as Shakespeare 
 saw, are not far from any one of us. But, 
 above all, we must weigh the Christian recog- 
 nition of the weakness of the human will. 
 Socrates held that, if a man really knew what 
 was good, he would do it; a view that may 
 be defended on the ground of some ambiguity 
 in the word know, but otherwise past defence. 
 The Stoics, the noblest teachers of mankind 
 
90 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 apart from Christ, staked all on the human 
 will, and lost. What chance in most of us 
 has the will against the imagination ? “It 
 is so easy to make up one’s mind,’’ the girl 
 says in Mr. Barrie’s book; and the answer 
 her playmate gives is a true one: “ It’s easy 
 to you that has just one mind.’’ St. Augus- 
 tine* and St. Paul knew how intricately the 
 mind can be divided against itself — knew it 
 in virtue of struggles made by resolve, by 
 self-discipline, by self-government, to bring 
 the mind into unity with itself under a law 
 of righteousness. Men of this type, who have 
 done all to subdue themselves to right, for 
 whom the standards and ideals of thought 
 and conduct are progressively higher — these 
 are the people who recognise most clearly 
 and most sadly how hopeless it is to try 
 to do anything with their own wills and 
 characters. Flabbiness and stubbornness 
 seem incompatible vices, and the human heart 
 
 * Confessions, v\\\., g, 21. Imperat animus, ut velit animus, 
 nec alter est nec facit tamen . . . sed non ex toto vult, non 
 
 ergo ex toto imperat . . . non igitur monstrum partim velle, 
 partim nolle, sed aegritudo animi est . . . et tdeo sunt duat 
 voluntates quia una earum tota non est. . . . 
 
LAW 
 
 91 
 
 knows them for twins. It is worth noting as 
 we pass that in the experience of both St. 
 Paul and St. Augustine the recognition of 
 evil was the first step to the solution of their 
 intellectual problems. The moral problem, 
 they found, came first; and when they set 
 to work in earnest at that, and were willing 
 to avail themselves of the best means to solve 
 it, they found themselves nearer to a real 
 understanding of God and His nature. 
 
 In the second place, we may consider the 
 Christian conviction as to the inexorable char- 
 acter of law.* There the Stoic was before 
 the Christian, so that it is not exactly novel 
 when Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that there 
 is no forgiveness. Certain sections of the 
 Church may have provoked him, for there 
 is a type of Christian teaching which suggests 
 that God is, after all, the arch-sentimentalist 
 of the universe. Who will let His laws work 
 off and on, like electric light in its early days, 
 and is willing to be the consenting victim of 
 certain conspicuous dodges. That teaching 
 is not in the New Testament, and it is as 
 
 * This point will recur in the fifth lecture. 
 
92 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 well for us to recognise as soon as possible 
 the hard element in the Gospel.* 
 
 The Church, like its Master, has based itself 
 on fact and lived among facts, and it is by 
 now fairly well possessed of some truths ; and 
 the eternal connection of action and conse- 
 quence is one of them. The popular mind 
 finds this in the New Testament in the visions 
 of Judgment and the Great White Throne; 
 but behind these lay a profound experience 
 of life. In a series of vivid metaphors the 
 actual, obvious, and present effects of sin 
 are sketched by St. Paul and others. Men 
 become alienated from the life of God; God 
 gives them up to a reprobate mind — a mind 
 that cannot discharge its proper functions, 
 a conscience cauterised or darkened — untrue, 
 that is, in its estimates of life, unreliable; a 
 conscience stained. Here there is a parallel in 
 
 * Paul Wernle, The Beginning of Christianity (tr.), vol. i. 
 p. 286: “For clear-thinking, ethical natures, such as those 
 of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright necessity to separate 
 heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically 
 worthless speculations that have always tried to minimise 
 this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our own times of 
 how men, even to-day, once more enthusiastically welcome 
 the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good 
 and bad becomes all-important to them.” 
 
LAW 
 
 93 
 
 the teaching of Marcus Aurelius — “ Of what- 
 ever colour are the thoughts you think often, 
 to that colour does your mind grow; for the 
 soul is dyed by its thoughts.”* The idea 
 is of a conscience through which, as through 
 coloured glass, a man sees all life the colour 
 of his sin. The law is inexorable here ; and 
 the Church knows it better than some of its 
 critics. 
 
 In the third place, we may set the high 
 value which the Christian community has 
 always placed on the soul. Plato said much 
 in this direction, and the Church says more. 
 No school of thought has ever treated the soul 
 so seriously. Bear in mind the utmost that 
 the Church has had to say about Christ — 
 waiving for the moment any discussion of 
 the rightness or wrongness of that — ^and then 
 realise that it has taught that this Christ, 
 of Whom it has believed the most incredible 
 things, died for the meanest of mean and 
 vile men. The Stoic had to let some men 
 go. But whether we accept or reject the 
 Christian teaching as to the soul, it is clear 
 
 * Marcus Aurelius, V„ i6. 
 
94 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 that higher value is not to be set on the soul, 
 its grandeur, its worth, and its dignity than 
 the Church set on it — pro quo Christas 
 mortuus est — ^and this without slurring in any 
 way the evil it saw in the soul. 
 
 The Christian Church has always recognised 
 the infinite element in the soul of man. This 
 is partly expressed in the doctrine of its im- 
 mortality. The soul is built for immortality 
 and for God; it reaches into infinity, in the 
 conviction that it must have God in all His 
 fulness — the heart crying out for the living 
 God, crying out against its own evil, dis- 
 satisfied till it has God, and rests in Him. Ta 
 nos fecisti ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum 
 donee requiescat in te* And here again the 
 Church rests on experience. 
 
 On one of the great trunk roads of India 
 a missionary saw a woman measuring herself 
 in prostrations along the ground — a familiar 
 form of pilgrimage. Through dust and dirt 
 and heat she moved onward, lying down, 
 marking the farthest point her hand could 
 reach, and rising and starting again from that 
 
 Augustine, Confessions, i., j. 
 
THE SOUL’S VALUE 
 
 95 
 
 point to prostrate herself and reach forward 
 again. She must have made seven or eight 
 hundred prostrations to cover a mile. He 
 asked where she was going, and she named 
 a shrine in the Himalayas, where from some 
 cleft in a valley a burst of natural gas 
 would from time to time leap and take fire 
 in the air and vanish — a. fleeting manif estation 
 of God. It meant for her a journey of a 
 thousand miles. Why was she going ? “ Uski 
 darshan," she said — two words and no more : 
 “Vision of him.’’* 
 
 “ Vision of Him ! ’’ The Church knows that 
 that is the cry of the human heart, and it 
 knows, too, what that cry involves at last — 
 the acceptance of God on His own terms of 
 love and righteousness. That sense for God 
 can be deadened in a man, if he is shallow 
 enough; but for anyone for whom life is 
 real, shallow views are impossible, as men 
 find out in the misery of life without God. 
 The intellect, working in the abstract, may 
 persuade itself that there is no God — none that 
 can be reached; and you have the strange 
 tearing of the nature in two, the heart crying 
 
 * This story was told me by Mr. C. F. Andrews, of Delhj, 
 
96 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 out, and the intellect arguing it down, and 
 pretending not to hear. The heart is right; 
 for peace is never reached till the intellect 
 accepts what the heart has known all along. 
 Instinct and intuition may take us very far 
 astray — so, too, may intellect. It is interesting 
 in this connection to remark how, as men 
 grow older, and grow into the meaning of 
 human relations, and the deepest feelings 
 bound up with them, they turn away, like the 
 poet Virgil, from even the most splendid 
 rationalism. 
 
 Lastly, for the present — for we must return 
 to this in the lectures that follow — we may 
 remind ourselves that while others have recog- 
 nised the reality of evil and the inexorable 
 character of law, the grandeur of the human 
 soul (to some extent) and its cry for God, 
 for the Church all these things point to Jesus 
 Christ. The central conviction — the crowning 
 offence and error of the Church in the eyes 
 of all its critics from the beginning till now — 
 is the belief that “ God was in Christ recon- 
 ciling the world unto Himself” — that Jesus 
 Christ is the same, yesterday, and to-day, and 
 forever, 
 
NO DESPAIR IN THE CHURCH 97 
 
 To conclude, I come to the conduct and 
 method of the Church in view of its con- 
 victions. 
 
 First of all, then, the Christian Church is 
 the one body in all the world incapable of 
 despair. The Stoic did despair : “When a man 
 is hardened to stone, how shall we be able 
 to deal with him by argument?” There is 
 not, after all, very much to be done with some 
 people by argument — on that we can agree. 
 But the Christian Church, conscious of its 
 own story^ — the company of Christian men, 
 each conscious of a new life in One “ Who 
 loved me and gave Himself for me” — knows 
 quite well what to do. The envoy of Christ, 
 remembering Who sent him, never hesitates. 
 He will not compromise, nor blink facts, nor 
 abate (like the Unjust Steward) the figure 
 upon the bill; he will ask the highest from 
 the man dead as stone, for anything less 
 would be an abatement of the man’s worth. 
 He will not play with cheap systems of sal- 
 vation, as men did in the Graeco-Roman 
 world in the early days of the Church, and 
 do still; but he will go with a simple and 
 clear-cut message, the outcome of his own 
 7 
 
98 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 experience — no mechanism, no dodge, be- 
 neath the dignity of the soul, but an offer of 
 forgiveness and power and new life in Christ. 
 
 The religious systems of the world may 
 be grouped under three classes — not quite ex- 
 clusively, for some of them overlap two of the 
 classes, or even all three. There are the 
 religions of magic, found all over the heathen 
 world, and not there alone, perhaps — schemes 
 of initiation, incantation, mystery, and, as the 
 Greek put it, “ things done ” — 8pciyu,eva and 
 opyia — for which in the early centuries of 
 our era a great apology was made in the name 
 of Philosophy by Plutarch and Apuleius and 
 the Neo-Platonists. To this we shall have 
 to return in another lecture. But a great step 
 forward had long before been made by Plato 
 himself, when, in his Republic, he made a clean 
 sweep of quacks and prophets and “ sacrifices 
 and jollifications,”* and preached the religion 
 of Morals. In the Gorgias he proclaims that 
 there is no fear in the next world for the 
 man who spends his life “with his eye upon 
 truth ’ (ry^v aki^Oeiav (TKo:raiv) ‘for you will suffer 
 
 * Republic, ii., 364 A — 365 A. 
 
MAGIC AND MERIT 
 
 99 
 
 nothing terrible, if you will really be 
 honourable and good, and practise virtue.”* 
 That is a great religion, if it is followed in a 
 great and profound way, because, if a man 
 take it seriously, it will bring him into touch 
 with realities. But there he will learn its 
 limitations, for he will find, with St. Paul, how 
 desperately impossible are its conditions. If 
 he does not reach this point, there is a worse 
 peril, for, as our Lord taught about the 
 Pharisees, he will be liable to lose all sense 
 of reality altogether, and the religion will 
 decline into the pursuit of merit — and ‘‘ the 
 damnation of hell,” as Jesus said. Yet this 
 old religion finds its advocates still, pleading 
 for self-culture and self-discipline — which is 
 a higher thing than self-culture — and the 
 service of men, too, (like the Stoics), even on 
 the basis of an unsatisfied heart. 
 
 But the Christian religion is quite other — 
 it is the religion of Grace, the only one. Its 
 faith is in the willingness of God to give all 
 that man needs — in Christ, salvation from sin, 
 new and newer ideals of righteousness, a re- 
 
 Gorgias, 527 D. 
 
100 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 emancipated will, inward peace, and perpetual 
 joy. “ Give what Thou biddest,” prayed St. 
 Augustine, “ and bid what Thou wilt.”* 
 Whatever men may have to say about it, to 
 this the Church is committed. How impos- 
 sible the tasks are which lie before it, the 
 Christian community, after long experience, 
 knows better than anyone ; and, as a result 
 of that long experience, there stands the faith 
 that God gives all and does all in Christ. 
 
 And here is our last point on this head. 
 Just as, when we dealt with the convictions 
 that make up the Christian faith, we found 
 all summed up in the sufficiency of Jesus 
 Christ, so here again, in the sphere of action, 
 we find Luther’s words stand for the 
 experience of every Christian — Nos nihil 
 sunius ; Christas solus est omnia. In the 
 centre of all, in life and work, the Church sets 
 the unexplored Jesus Christ, that historical 
 person who was nailed to the Cross, and who 
 still, in the faith of the Church, lives and 
 works and does all. We cannot tell you 
 all we want to know about Him; the Church 
 
 • Confessions, x., 29, 40, da quod iubes et tube quod vis. 
 
CHRISTUS SOLUS EST OMNIA 
 
 lOI 
 
 looks to eternity for some of that; there are 
 many things we cannot explain ; but by 
 experience in life and work and faith, we have 
 found that all turns upon Him. 
 
 My last word for to-day is this. If we can 
 learn anything from history, if it has anything 
 certain to tell us, it is that, if any group of 
 beliefs, any body of doctrine, any faith, has 
 ever justified itself in human experience, it is 
 the Christian faith; or, if that seem too 
 sweeping a statement (I do not think it is), let 
 us say this — that the results of the Church’s 
 belief, and of its action upon those beliefs, are 
 such as to claim the very closest attention from 
 people who are in earnest with life. These 
 results are not to be lightly treated, but with a 
 full sense of the difficulties to be overcome 
 before they can be achieved, and of their sig- 
 nificance in the life of the man who knows 
 them. What, then, does the re-emancipation of 
 the will mean — with its escape from the clutch 
 of habit, its triumph over the disastrous effects 
 of the stained conscience, and the hopeless- 
 ness and paralysis of sin ? Again, what is the 
 significance of the joy that has from the begin- 
 ning filled the Christian life, overflowing all 
 
102 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 the obstacles, real enough, that militate 
 against peace ? What is to be said of Christian 
 joy as an index to the ultimate truth of 
 things ?* And, lastly, what are we to say 
 of the power that goes with the Christian 
 life ? Criticism from without and self Criticism 
 from within, the consciousness of failure at 
 every turn, as the splendid ideals of Jesus 
 Christ shine more and more into the soul — not- 
 withstanding all, the Christian Church has 
 been effective; it has been doing through 
 nineteen centuries what Jesus Christ pledged 
 Himself that it should do. I ask you, as 
 students of human nature and of history. Do 
 you realise at all in its fulness what that 
 means ? It is worth study. 
 
 *To this we shall have to return in the fifth lecture. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 The Experience of the Early Church 
 
 T O-DAY we have to consider the ex- 
 perience of the early Church — to re- 
 capture, if we can, something of the 
 impulse and the happiness that made it the 
 joyous and powerful thing it was. But let 
 us first try to sum up the results we have so 
 far reached. 
 
 We have seen that our business in dealing 
 with the Christian tradition is verification — 
 to get back to the facts and to know them in 
 their fulness, to win from them all their value 
 and significance. 
 
 In the second place, we have seen that we 
 
 must give a closer attention to experience as 
 
 embodied in the tradition of the Christian 
 
 community, and lay more stress upon the 
 
 probability of real truth being embodied in 
 
 some way in the main doctrines of the Church. 
 
 We may not accept, word for word, exactly, 
 
 what the Church has said as the final ex- 
 
 103 
 
104 the CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 pression of truth, but we shall feel in it and 
 through it — operative somehow in spite of 
 errors of statement — some element of truth 
 that is real and vital. 
 
 Thirdly, we looked at the Church itself, and 
 recognised how it had been tested by the 
 criticism of the world, by self-criticism, by the 
 desire to compromise, and had so far estab- 
 lished its right to be heard as at least a serious 
 witness — a. witness, that is, who, however con- 
 fused in utterance, had truth to tell, and was 
 trying in all earnestness to tell it. 
 
 To-day we have to try, through the words 
 and literature of the early Church, to reach 
 what lies behind. The phrase of that day is 
 not ours, nor are the preconceptions; we 
 approach everything in a different way; but 
 we have to remember that none the less we 
 are dealing with human material, with a real 
 experience, and we must cultivate the imagina- 
 tion to penetrate an unfamiliar dialect if we 
 are to make anything at all of history. 
 
 There is a considerable body of early Chris- 
 tian literature, and perhaps no other literature 
 has ever had so strange a fate. One part of 
 it is familiar to every race of mankind, civilised 
 
EARLY CHRISTIAN BOOKS 105 
 
 or uncivilised, beyond any books the world 
 has seen; and the rest of it in the Apostolic 
 Fathers, the Odes of Solomon, and the Apolo- 
 gists of the second century, is left to specialists 
 and ignored in general even by classical 
 scholars who study the Roman Empire. Yet 
 it cannot be denied that the instinct, or what- 
 ever it was, that made the New Testament 
 canon, was generally right both in choice and 
 in rejection. If we are really aiming at the 
 fact and truth of Christian experience, this 
 literature must be studied with the same 
 earnest enthusiasm as any other. 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wood has made a very telling 
 criticism upon one exponent of early Church 
 history, who has of late years taken pains to 
 be heard. “ He has no theory of any early 
 Christian document; he does not explain how 
 it came to be written, by whom, or under 
 what impulse, or for what purpose. He never 
 explains a Pauline epistle as a document.” 
 
 That is a most damaging criticism. What 
 sort of history can be written from un- 
 examined sources ? What is history without 
 what the Germans call Qaellenkritik — 
 criticism of sources? Has a historian, of all 
 
io6 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 people, any right to use a book as an illiterate 
 person would ? A book is — a book. But wha^ 
 is a book ? That is a question worth thinking 
 about ; and classical study in this country has 
 declined for want of such reflection. How 
 does a book come into being ? What is 
 its genesis ? There is a fine passage in 
 Emerson’s poem, The Problem, which answers 
 these questions : 
 
 Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old; 
 
 The litanies of nations came, 
 
 Like the volcano’s tongue of flame, 
 
 Up from the burning core below, — 
 
 The canticles of love and woe. 
 
 Or, again, there are Carlyle’s words, as he 
 gave the finished MS. of The French Revolu- 
 tion to his wife:* “I know not whether this 
 book is worth anything, nor what the world 
 will do with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to 
 do, as is likeliest; but this I could tell the 
 world : You have not had for a hundred years 
 any book that comes more direct and 
 flamingly from the heart of a living man.” 
 And again there are Goethe’s lines : 
 
 * Carlyle's Life in London, i., p. 89. 
 
LITERATURE AND LIFE 
 
 107 
 
 Denn es muss von Herzen gehen 
 Was auf Herzen wirken soli. 
 
 Literature is no mechanical product ; it is, 
 when it is any good at all, the offspring of 
 passion — “ simple, sensuous, and passionate,” 
 are Milton’s words to describe what a poem 
 should be; and prose is of the same family. 
 When a book reaches the heart of — we will 
 not say a generation, for very often one 
 generation is not the best judge — but of 
 several generations, and holds a place in the 
 thought and feeling of man for centuries 
 together, you must look well to it if you think 
 it did not come from a great human heart, but 
 was the mechanical product of ingenuity or 
 artifice. The ancient critic, Longinus, is right, 
 here as often, when he says that “ sublimity 
 is the echo of a great soul.”* 
 
 The German scholar Norden, in his book 
 entitled Kunstprosa, comes in due course to 
 the writings of Paul of Tarsus. “ 1 find Paul 
 hard to understand,” he says very honestly, 
 but he finds something in him that he 
 recognises. ‘‘ So the language of the heart 
 
 * Longinus 9, 2, ui^os yu.eyaXo<^po(Tw?/s d-Triy^^T^/xa. 
 
io8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 was born again,” says this critic; ‘‘since the 
 hymn of Cleanthes, nothing had been written 
 in the Greek language so full of feeling and at 
 the same time so splendid {nichts so Inniges 
 and zugleich so Grandioses) as the hymn of 
 Paul on love.” Later on in his work he recurs 
 to this; ‘‘Both these hymns on love to God 
 and love to men (Romans 8, 31 ; i Cor. 13) 
 have given back to the Greek language, what 
 had been lost for centuries — the feeling 
 {Innigkeit) and the enthusiasm of the Epopt 
 (the initiated) quickened by his union with 
 God. . . . How this speech of the heart must 
 have struck home into the souls of men accus- 
 tomed to listen to the silly verbosity of the 
 sophists! In these passages the diction of the 
 Apostle rises to the height of Plato’s in the 
 Phaedrus.'"* 
 
 One thing at least is clear to those who even 
 in a slight degree share Noiden’s knowledge 
 of the period — that Paul thought infinitely less 
 about style than did the sophists, who thought 
 of nothing else, and at the same time he 
 achieved what they never reached. How did 
 
 * Norden, Kunstprosa II., pp. 499, 459, 509. 
 
“ OTHERWISE THAN DISTRACTEDLY ” 109 
 
 he manage it ? The first thing in style is, 
 as Longinus put it, a great soul, and then 
 real thoughts and deep feeling. If a man will 
 be true to the depths of him, he will speak 
 well. Conversely, when we find life and 
 sunshine in the words of a poet or a religious 
 teacher — when his style is strong and pure 
 with the simplicity and power of great music — 
 when it takes us back into the very sanctuary 
 of a man’s spirit, we shall expect to find there 
 things of eternal significance; and truth will 
 be one of them. 
 
 The rest of this lecture will be given to 
 the attempt to get behind the ink and paper 
 of the books of the early Church, to ask 
 not only what the writers say, but what they 
 mean and what they are, and how they came 
 to mean what they did mean, and to be what 
 they were. “Get first,’’ wrote Carlyle, “into 
 the sphere of thought by which it is so much 
 as possible to judge of Luther, or of any 
 man like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; 
 we may then begin arguing with you.’’ 
 
 First, then, let us study St. Paul for a little. 
 
 Autobiography is not the most cheerful of 
 words — so many books with this label have 
 
I lO 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 had neither Autos nor Bios in them; the 
 authors so often have not lived very much 
 nor been very much. But every real book is 
 in some sense autobiography. Dull as books 
 and lectures may be, they are apt to be 
 duller when they lack some autobiographic 
 element, tacit or explicit. However artfully 
 the writer of either may cloak the personal 
 element, Et quorum pars magna fui is in every 
 story. 
 
 Carlyle indicated as much when he wrote, 
 as we saw in a former lecture, of Novalis and 
 his books.* Paul, it might be said, never 
 wrote an autobiography, and yet never wrote 
 anything else. Imagine a formal auto- 
 biography by Paul: “I was born at Tarsus, 
 a city of Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city,” — 
 and what early influences played upon him, 
 and how he went to Jerusalem, and his first 
 impressions of it, and how he sat at the feet 
 of Gamaliel, till Gamaliel gave such an un- 
 certain note about the Christian movement 
 that the pupil saw it was time to take action 
 of his own — ^and so on. No, if he had done it, 
 
 See p. 5Q. 
 
ST. PAUL 
 
 III 
 
 there would have been all the usual trouble 
 about such works — the delimitation of the 
 provinces of Dichtung and Wahrheit ; and, 
 besides, a formal work of such a kind by Paul 
 would have been essentially false and non- 
 Pauline — how could the real Paul ever have 
 spared the time, even in prison, for such in- 
 trospection? Erasmus called Paul’s style 
 “pure flame,” and there could hardly be an 
 autobiography that came half so flaming from 
 the heart of a man as that which Paul did 
 not write at all, but which escaped him when 
 he was dealing with other matters. 
 
 “O wretched man that I am! Who shall 
 deliver me from the body of this death? . . . 
 There is therefore now no condemnation to 
 them that are in Christ Jesus; for the law of 
 the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me 
 free from the law of sin and death.” A 
 passage like that is inexhaustibly full of the 
 man — how are we to judge it, till we tingle 
 with the man’s own passion for righteousness, 
 with his shame of failure, and the unspeak- 
 able joy he knows in the given life in Jesus 
 Christ? There is the story of his life in the 
 phrase at the head of several epistles, “the 
 
II2 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 slave of Jesus Christ ” — in the clause, “ Who 
 loved me and gave Himself for me ” — in the 
 simple utterance, “ The Lord stood by me 
 and put strength into me ” — in the after- 
 thought added, almost without intending it, 
 to the Galatian letter when it was finished : 
 “ God forbid that I should glory save in the 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the 
 world is crucified to me, and I to the world.”* 
 Celsus, in his True Word, the first great 
 literary attack on the Church,fsays that every 
 Christian, of whatever sect, quotes that 
 sentence. There may be many things in Paul 
 which, like Norden, we do not understand, 
 or to which, with Luther, we may say : 
 ” Brother Paul, this argument does not stick,” 
 but our business is not with the word nor the 
 argument, but with the man. Can we explain 
 
 * An interesting and sympathetic account of Paul, as the 
 real interpreter of Jesus, is given by the Jewish scholar, 
 Moriz Friedlander, in the last chapter of his Religiose 
 Beviegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu. 
 One of his phrases must serve here : “ Paulus, der 
 
 geschworene Feind jeder Halbheit ” is an excellent charac- 
 terisation. 
 
 t Written about 178 a.d. 
 
HEBREWS 
 
 113 
 
 him, if we have never troubled to share or 
 to know his experience ? 
 
 Take another New Testament writer — the 
 anonymous author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, “ the most cultured Greek of them 
 all,” as his critics from Origen* to Norden and 
 Dr. J. H. Moulton agree, with his ‘‘masterly 
 handling ” of ‘‘ all the delicate shades of mean- 
 ing ” of which the Greek literary language 
 of his time was capable — a man who has given 
 to the whole Christian Church some of its 
 most moving language in relation to Jesus 
 Christ. There are, indeed, some who find little 
 in this epistle but old and obsolete metaphor, 
 awkward enough by now — priest and altar, 
 sacrifice and temple — to say nothing of Mel- 
 chizedek, and a touch of rhetoric which some 
 critics say they feel in it. But when one tries 
 to get an effective grip of the man and his 
 problem, his book or epistle comes home in 
 a new way. This is what he had to wrestle 
 through — how can a man have a real religion, 
 capable of managing a genuine reconciliation 
 of the universe and experience, capable of 
 
 Quoted by Eusebius, Eccl. Hist, vi., 25. 
 8 
 
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 114 
 
 keeping him from temptation and carrying 
 him through martyrdom, if he cut himself 
 adrift from every means of grace of which Jew 
 or pagan had ever conceived, priest, sacrifice, 
 victim, blood, and the camp of Israel ? When 
 a man has fought his way to peace through 
 perplexities like these — perplexities which we 
 can never understand till in some measure 
 we share them — we may well be interested 
 in his conclusion; it will have the marks of 
 battle on it. When such a man speaks to us, 
 let us watch his style — ^his words and their 
 order; he gives us a sentence, full and com- 
 plete, and then with a sudden leap of feeling 
 comes an after-thought, that tells us as much 
 again. “ Jesus Christ yesterday and to-day 
 the same — ^and for ever,” he adds. Before 
 we criticise him, let us understand him. 
 
 The Fourth Gospel is in many ways one 
 of the most perplexing books in Christian 
 literature. If we study it on a level with the 
 other three, in order to an objective history 
 of Jesus, we are involved in the greatest diffi- 
 culties. For it is not so much a history of 
 Jesus as men knew Him in Galilee, as a record 
 pf what Jesus had been, and had become. 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 
 
 to a man in the course of a long life. Our 
 problem here is tO' explore the experience and 
 the impulse from which the man writes. How 
 does a man come to write such sentences as ; 
 “ Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away 
 the sin of the world.” Such a statement is 
 either rhetoric or autobiography. What is 
 the life so written ? Have we touched it ? Or 
 again: “God so loved the world that He 
 gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever 
 believeth on Him should not perish, but have 
 everlasting life ” — the words are too familiar, 
 and have been quoted too often, we feel. 
 
 Upon the topmost froth of thought; 
 but they were not so written. What has taken 
 the writer so triumphantly outside all national 
 barriers, Jew as he seems to have been ? What 
 has given him his conception of the love of 
 God taking shape in a story so shocking to 
 Jew and Gentile alike — contact with the world, 
 with pain, with the damned? Or, again, what 
 does he mean by “everlasting life”? What 
 content beyond mere duration has the word 
 for him? What had he in mind in the way 
 of past experience when he wrote of the 
 promise of the Paraclete? If science bids 
 
Ii6 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 us study the “life history” of plant and 
 animal, and make biology and not morphology 
 our aim, what of ideas ? Too often we study 
 them in the herbarium, as it were, or the 
 dissecting-room, and forget the soil and the 
 sky that made them and the life that was in 
 them. Is there an author who has suffered 
 more from this intellectual slackness on the 
 part of his readers than the writer of the 
 Fourth Gospel? 
 
 I turn now to the Apocalypse, and, as here 
 we reach more ordinary people, I propose to 
 linger rather longer over a crucial and most 
 informing passage. In doxology we come 
 nearer to fact than in dogma, for it is out of 
 doxology that historically dogma has grown. 
 The primitive Christian first went through 
 an experience; then he broke out in thanks- 
 giving and doxology for it ; and finally he, 
 and other people, began to speculate on the 
 relation of the experience so stated to the 
 general sum of human experience and know- 
 ledge; and the result of this speculation was 
 called, in the language of the day, dogma. 
 For our present purpose we have to con- 
 centrate attention on the experience as the 
 
THE APOCALYPSE 117 
 
 primary thing. The doxology then will bring 
 us nearer to this than the dogma. 
 
 The writer of the Apocalypse, whoever he 
 was, remains one of the most interesting 
 figures of the New Testament. He wrote 
 at a time when the Christian movement was 
 recognised for what it was by the Roman 
 Government and was treated accordingly ; the 
 sect was in a fair way to be stamped out 
 in blood. Yet his book is full of scenes and 
 songs of triumph — “ I heard the voice of 
 harpers harping with their harps : and they 
 sung as it were a new song.”* He represents 
 a miserable handful of slaves and abjects; 
 he counts them by “thousands of thousands,” 
 and sees them glorified — “ these are they that 
 came out of the great tribulation. ”f Behind 
 such vision lies experience. Like all prophets, 
 spiritual, political, or commercial, he reads the 
 future out of the present, and, from his picture 
 
 *As Wernle suggests, when one realises the clear call 
 the writer gives, and his note of triumph in Jesus, there is 
 little wonder that the martyrs “ for the testimony of Jesus ” 
 valued the book; and perhaps they did not like it less for 
 its borrowed imagery — that too had associations. 
 
 t The omission of the definite article in the Authorised 
 Version obscures the situation. 
 
ii8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of the future, with care we can reconstruct his 
 experience in the present. And, in case we 
 cannot, he sums it up several times in his 
 doxologies. 
 
 The first of these will serve as a starting- 
 point. Like a Hebrew psalmist, he sets at 
 the beginning the keynote of the music he 
 has beaten out. “ To Him that loved us and 
 washed us from our sins in His blood, and 
 made us kings and priests to God and His 
 Father, to Him be the glory and the power 
 for ever; Amen.” 
 
 It has long been observed that the 
 Apocalypse depends more directly on books 
 than any other New Testament document, 
 and sometimes in a rather curious way. Here 
 the writer borrows a phrase from Exodus 
 (xix. 6): ‘‘Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of 
 priests and an holy nation.” He knew well 
 enough that this ideal for Israel had not been 
 reached ; Israel had set up a single man as 
 king and a separate tribe as priests, and had 
 abandoned the greater conception of a nation 
 in which every man was king and priest. The 
 race had abdicated. The Christian writers 
 claim the promise as their own — it was 
 
THE DOXOLOGY 
 
 119 
 
 certainly derelict. They maintain that the 
 followers of Jesus are in effect kings and 
 priests, set free from sin and standing in a 
 personal relation to God. The term employed 
 for “king” served also for the Roman 
 Emperor. But “king” and “priest” had 
 in antiquity a peculiar identity of suggestion. 
 King and priest, each belonged to some 
 guardian god, and shared his divine nature, 
 while each stood among men as a man set 
 apart and sacred — each was tabu in short — 
 the god’s own, and guarded from common 
 touch by a divine sanctity — ^and each again 
 had the mystical function of standing between 
 god and man, of mediating and bringing 
 them into effective relations. So much for 
 the new names given to the Christian by our 
 writer. 
 
 It is worth while to see to whom these 
 names are given. It was commonly remarked 
 for centuries that the Christians came from 
 the lowest classes. They were of the common 
 people — “the most unlettered sort,” as the 
 educated observed, and the hopelessly de- 
 praved, as more decent critics noticed with a 
 shudder. “ Other cults call for those who are 
 
120 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 holy, who are pure from all stain, and clean 
 of hands,” said Celsus; but the Christian con- 
 stituency consisted of ‘‘ sinners,” precisely as 
 they said : ‘‘You mean the unjust, the thief, the 
 burglar, the prisoner, the robber of temple 
 and tomb ; whom else would a brigand invite 
 to join him?”* None of this criticism was 
 too strong. Roman slavery produced a class 
 of person unknown to us. ‘‘ Far-seeing Zeus,” 
 said Homer, long before, ‘‘takes away half 
 a man’s worth, when he brings the day of 
 slavery upon him.”f Often in Roman days 
 slavery took the whole away — ^everything that 
 made the man’s arete, the essential group of 
 qualities and faculties that in combination 
 make him human. With the woman it 
 was perhaps worse. The ‘‘ hired animalism ” 
 of Tennyson’s poem stood higher, for she 
 had a wage for her shame, and the slave- 
 woman had not. The female animal almost 
 stood higher, for while the slave had the same 
 sex she had not the beast’s privilege of 
 bearing young. Man and woman, the slaves 
 acknowledged and accepted their degradation 
 
 * Quoted by Origen, Contra Celsum, iii., 59. 
 t Odyssey, xvii., 322. 
 
THE SLAVE 
 
 I2I 
 
 — and the lowest stage is reached when that 
 is done. Living on the basis of their own 
 worthlessness, what wonder if they justified 
 the free man’s contempt for the slave ? No 
 one had hope or help for them. “ I thank 
 Thee,” prayed the Jew, ‘‘that I am a Jew and 
 not a Gentile, a man and not a woman, a 
 freeman and not a slave.” The Stoic had 
 a gospel of self-help for men and women who 
 retained their will-power. There were, indeed, 
 slaves, as there were free men, equal to this 
 stern gospel — there was Epictetus, at least — 
 but such men were very fev^ This was one 
 of the things that wrecked the Roman Empire 
 — the class acknowledged by themselves, as by 
 others, to be below redemption. 
 
 The first thing to be done was to bring 
 these hopeless people to another opinion about 
 themselves. The Christian went to the slave 
 and told him that the Son of God loved him, 
 and had died for him — £l ransom.* To a mind 
 philosophically trained the phrase was in those 
 
 * Cf. Matthew xx., 28. The many phrases and analogies 
 connected with “ ransom ” and “ redemption ” gain new 
 meaning for us when we think what a note they sounded for 
 the slave. 
 
122 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 days as silly as it was repulsive. But the 
 Christian believed it, and in no ordinary way 
 — he believed it with such effect that the slave 
 came to believe it too, and became a man 
 again. It was one of the features of the days 
 of persecution that slaves, men, women, and 
 girls, had found a new stamina, a new dignity. 
 They would face fire and torture and beast 
 without fear or flinching. In common life 
 they began to shed the servile vices; they 
 became honest and pure; they “received the 
 Holy Spirit,” as Christians put it, and showed 
 an extraordinary gift for winning men by 
 sheer force and beauty of character. The 
 doxology in the Apocalypse answers word for 
 word to the facts. To find the ultimate 
 philosophic expression and account of what 
 happened, and of what made it happen, is a 
 secondary matter; the first thing is to realise 
 the fact in its wonder. 
 
 In the third century, a short but very re- 
 markable little book was written, by whom 
 we do not know. Later on it was appended 
 to a tedious production known as the Gospel 
 of Nicodemus, and there it is still to be read, 
 perhaps intact, wonderful in its contrast with 
 
THE HARROWING OF HELL 
 
 123 
 
 its setting.* It is the oldest story of the 
 Harrowing of Hell. It tells how Christ, as 
 it is said in the Creed, “ descended into hell,” 
 and set free its captives, and ascended with 
 them. One of these captives tells it in the 
 first person. It has the naive sincerity of a 
 true poet, and the large and honest imagina- 
 tion. The story begins in hell, and we over- 
 hear Satan and Hades talking with some 
 anxiety as to what may follow yet from the 
 Crucifixion of Jesus; for now “into the dark- 
 ness there dawned as it were the light of the 
 sun, and it shone, and we saw one another.” 
 This sudden gleam of light, and especially 
 the imaginative use of it by the writer in the 
 last sentence, bring out for us the age-long 
 darkness of the grave with strange feeling. 
 A great voice like thunder is bear'd calling on 
 the everlasting gates to open that the King of 
 Glory may come in. Hades bids make fast 
 the gates of brass and defend them; but the 
 forefathers who had been with him from the 
 beginning mock him. Again the voice 
 
 * I think the English reader will find it most accessible 
 in Hone’s Apocryphal New Testament. 
 
124 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 sounds, and Hades asks : “ Who is this King of 
 Glory ? ” The answer comes : “A Lord strong 
 and mighty, a Lord mighty in war,” and at 
 the word the gate of brass and its bars of 
 iron are shattered, the dead are loosed from 
 their bonds, “and we with them,” as Jesus 
 of Nazareth enters. The King of Glory 
 stretches forth his right hand and raises up 
 Adam, and “ blesses him on the brow with 
 the sign of the cross”; and then, with 
 patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs. He “ leaps 
 forth” from Hades. Still holding Adam by 
 the hand. He brings them all to Paradise, 
 where Enoch and Elijah meet them, and then 
 a more interesting figure. To him the fathers 
 said: “Who art thou that hast the look of 
 a robber, and what is the cross thou bearest 
 on thy shoulders?” And the penitent thief 
 tells them his story, and how, when he came 
 to the gate of Eden, “ when the fiery sword 
 saw the sign of the cross, it opened to me 
 and I came in.” And then the story ends, 
 simply enough : “ All this we two brothers 
 saw and heard.” 
 
 To choose a sentence or two from such a 
 piece is to do it some injustice, but a 
 
THE NEW LIFE 
 
 125 
 
 sympathetic reader will feel that here we have 
 a great piece of imaginative literature, and 
 he will ask himself from what impulse it 
 came.* Surely some new and first - hand 
 experience of the real and eternal lies behind 
 every such creation, and we have again to 
 be sure, before we criticise, that we under- 
 stand whence came the impulse that stirred 
 the poet to such power and beauty. It is 
 no idle enquiry, for experience of our own 
 is involved in it. 
 
 We have now to go a step further and 
 touch upon some of the experiences and con- 
 victions that underlie all early Christian 
 literature, and I begin with the new life. 
 
 St. Paul writes to his friends and converts 
 with great frankness about the old life and 
 the new; he is as explicit as Celsus himself. 
 In his letter to the Corinthian church 
 (i Cor. vi. ii) he runs over a series of horrible 
 and mean vices, and then says quite bluntly: 
 “And such were some of you; but ye are 
 
 * That it went to the heart of the Church is shown by the 
 frequency with which it was treated in poetry ; e.g., by 
 Prudentius, Synesius, and Ephrem the Syrian. The hymn of 
 Synesius upon it is translated by Mrs. Browning. 
 
126 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are 
 justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and 
 by the Spirit of our God.” He knew what 
 the streets of a great Hellenistic city and sea- 
 port were like — “ the great sinful streets of 
 Naples ” — and he and his converts knew 
 how bad the old life had been, ‘‘ alienated 
 from God and without hope in the world.” 
 Greek culture, as we know it in literature and 
 art, at its highest and most glorious, was not 
 the fruit of Hellenistic life in the Roman 
 Empire, nor is it representative of it. But 
 let us look rather at the new life. 
 
 One of the telling words used in the New 
 Testament to describe the change is “En- 
 lightened.” The word to-day has lost its 
 charm and wonder. The great eighteenth- 
 century movement of Aufkldrung, or Illumina- 
 tion, had once, perhaps, hope in its very name ; 
 but that has died away into a very common 
 and dull day. The Christian, I think, took 
 the word from the Mysteries — ^a symbol-word 
 of gladness. With eyes shut men went into 
 the holy place; there was a priest, the light- 
 bringer ; and in trance, perhaps, or in vision a 
 great light shone upon them as they drew 
 
THE NEW LIFE 
 
 127 
 
 near to their god.* The Christian took the 
 word ; for him it was truer than for the Greek 
 and the Egyptian. He had lived in darkness 
 — with the understanding darkened, and he 
 meant now that Christ, Himself the true 
 Phdtagdgos,-\ had shone upon him and 
 brought him near to God; and now he lives 
 and moves in a new hope and joy, a hallowed 
 being. The New Testament word “ Saint ” 
 touches the same order of ideas ; it represents 
 a person set apart for a God — aytos, sacer, 
 tabu — the God’s own, and immune from 
 unhallowed touch. It is good to linger over 
 the phrases, unstudied and spontaneous, in 
 which the Christian writers tell of the new 
 life — “ joy unspeakable and full of glory.” 
 Familiarity tends to rob us of them, but at 
 a touch of the old experience they are alive 
 again. 
 
 In the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians 
 comes a description of Christian life even in 
 Corinth. ” A profound and rich peace was 
 given to all, and an insatiable passion for 
 
 * The description depends on a passage at the end of 
 Apuleius’ Golden ^.? 5 . 
 
 t Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 120, i. 
 
128 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 doing good; an abundant outpouring of the 
 Holy Spirit also fell upon all.” Philanthropy, 
 I am afraid, is a dull word, like most long 
 words borrowed from the Greek and the Latin, 
 to describe in more dignified terms the 
 ordinary Christian virtues; and people who 
 value themselves to-day will have nothing to 
 do with “philanthropy” and “doing good.” 
 They are almost technical terms, dulled by 
 use by uninspired people, like “oxide” and 
 “ the subliminal self.” But we must look at 
 words as they come first from the poet-souls 
 who make them, trailing clouds of glory, and 
 making the heart beat and the eye brighten. 
 One of the historian’s tasks is to re-create the 
 past by means of worn-down watchwords, as 
 the numismatist will tell you the history of 
 a dynasty and a civilisation from a series of 
 battered coins. They are dull enough now; 
 but back to the beginning! There cannot 
 have been many people with “an insatiable 
 passion for doing good ” in any Grasco-Roman 
 city; and what a Godsend even a Corinthian 
 Christian must have been with such a passion 
 for the wrecks and waste-products of a com- 
 mercial and pleasure-loving city that organised 
 
THE NEW LIFE 
 
 129 
 
 its gains and its pleasures on the basis of 
 slavery ! Think of the change in such a man 
 — the new dreams that haunt him of a char- 
 acter like Christ’s, the new passion for service 
 of his Master, the new standards ! “ Which is 
 ampler?” asks Tertullian,* ‘‘to say, Thou 
 shalt not kill ; or to teach. Be not even angry ? 
 Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or 
 to bid refrain from a single lustful look?” 
 Think of the phrase in 2 Peter (ii. 14) describ- 
 ing a certain type of person ‘‘ having eyes full 
 of adultery” — ^and later Greek literature illus- 
 trates what numbers pf such persons there 
 were in a Greek town. ‘‘ But ye are washed,” 
 says St. Paul. ' 
 
 It is not merely that a change has been 
 effected, and a great one, but that it is to 
 continue; it is to be a progressive develop- 
 ment. Paul uses a number of commercial 
 terms when he writes to Corinth, and by 
 means of one of them illustrates his conception 
 of the Holy Spirit. It is the arrhabon,^ or 
 
 * Apology, 45. 
 
 f2 Cor. i. 22; v. 5. The reference to sealing in the 
 first passage has suggestions worth study. The seal was 
 the one way of protecting property in a household of slaves 
 
 9 
 
130 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 earnest, that God gives a man as a guarantee 
 that He will fulfil His promises to him. God 
 is going to do for the Christian something (as 
 Paul puts it) “exceeding abundant, above all 
 that we can ask or think,” and meanwhile 
 gives him a token or pledge which binds God 
 — ^and that is the Holy Spirit. So much has 
 been said amiss about the Holy Spirit, and 
 such difficult psychological problems are 
 connected with the whole matter, that state- 
 ments of this kind are received with hesitation. 
 But Paul is not talking theories, he is 
 speaking from experience ; and that experience 
 we have to re-capture before we are entitled 
 to dispute his phrase. In another passage 
 (Gal. V. 22, 23) he speaks of the fruits of the 
 Spirit as “ love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
 kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self- 
 mastery,” and he adds that they that are 
 Christ’s have “ crucified the flesh with the 
 passions and the lusts.” The line of a second 
 century poet comes back to one’s mind as 
 
 (c/. Clem. Alex., Paed., iii., 59), and it is a metaphor, I 
 think, already used in the Mysteries (c/. Clem. Alex. Protr., 
 120). 
 
THE NEW LIFE 
 
 131 
 
 one thinks of this glad new life which Paul 
 describes — 
 
 V er novum, ver jam canorum, ver renalus orbis est. 
 
 “ New spring, singing spring, spring the world 
 re-bom ” — that is the story of the Church. 
 Paul’s list of fruits is very interesting. The 
 last, self-mastery, was a Stoic virtue; but the 
 rest did not ripen easily in the Hellenistic 
 world, and the rocky soil and Northern slope 
 of the Stoic garden were too hard for them. 
 But most people would have said they were 
 not virtues for men at all — rather for women 
 and slaves, as Nietzsche and his followers 
 would say to-day. Yet how much would be 
 lost to life if these fruits of the Spirit were 
 taken away or ripened no more ! 
 
 It is to be noted that, in so surntning up 
 the fruits of the Spirit, Paul holds the same 
 outlook as Jesus. It was He who brought 
 these virtues into their new place and sig- 
 nificance, and it is to be remembered that 
 He is the centre of all this Christian move- 
 ment. Men in the second century were 
 reading the four Gospels day by day as a 
 part of Christian life and practice;* their life 
 
 * Justin, Apology, i., 66, 67; Clem. Alex., Strom., vii., 49. 
 
132 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and their thought are Christooentric. Men 
 may theorise as they please about the necessity 
 of a historical base or a historical element 
 in religion ; so far as we have got, experience 
 shows how much it does signify. It has been 
 said that in every age the condition of 
 religious progress is the return to the historical 
 Jesus. In every age we are apt to re-conceive 
 Him in the terms of our own day and our own 
 thought; but the next generation has other 
 thoughts and other ideals, and revolts against 
 those of its parents. So long as the Church 
 turns to the historical Jesus — the real Jesus 
 of history — it can face these changes. But a 
 Jesus with the date-mark of a particular school 
 of interpreters — an eighteenth-century Jesus 
 or a mid-Victorian Jesus — is not to be thought 
 of for a moment. The Gospel message is 
 “ Come unto Me,” and the function of the 
 Church is to bring men to Christ and to 
 leave them with Him to learn of Him for 
 themselves. 
 
 We may notice in the next place, among 
 the experiences of the early Church, that it 
 has triumphed over nationalist barriers. 
 “ Thou wast slain/’ run the words of the New 
 
“EVERY KINDRED AND TONGUE” 133 
 
 Song, “ and hast redeemed us to God by Thy 
 blood out of every kindred and tongue and 
 people and nation.” Paul urges the same 
 thing in the Epistle to the Colossians when 
 he emphasises that it is Jesus Who has “ made 
 peace” — He is the great reconciler. It may 
 be the case that, as some critics say, Jesus 
 never spoke the words at the end of the First 
 Gospel, “Go ye into all the world”; but, 
 as Ignatius says : “ He that truly has the 
 word of Jesus can hear His silence also,”* 
 and the Christians had heard it and had gone 
 into all the world before Matthew wrote. A 
 contemporary Greek writer remarks of the 
 philosophers that “ some of them do not go 
 to the people, despairing, perhaps, of their 
 ability to make the many better.”f Socrates 
 
 * Ignatius, ad Eph. 1 5- It is worth remembering that 
 Ignatius was already on his way to martyrdom when he wrote 
 — early in the second century. 
 
 t Dio Chrysostom, Or., xxxii., 9 (to the Alexandrines) : 
 Some, aTreyvojKOTes itrws to /Sekriov^ av iroi^crai rows ttoAXovs; 
 some, like the Cynics, degrade philosophy ; and it is rare to 
 get a man ready to face ridicule from goodwill and care 
 for others. Even if Dio is gently suggesting his own 
 virtues here, it is fair to say that he did frankly preach 
 morality to his audiences. On the unfriendly attitude of 
 Pharisaism to the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism, see 
 
134 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 used to say that he was a “ citizen of the 
 world,” and the philosophic schools were 
 recruited from all races. Greek culture and 
 Roman rule were tending to weld the races — 
 ” preparing the way for Christ,” as the poet 
 Prudentius wrote about 409 a.d. But the 
 union of men in the Church was a deeper 
 one, for in the Church there was a place for 
 the slave, as we have seen, but he left the 
 name of shame outside. It is said that the 
 word “ slave ” is not found among the in- 
 scriptions of the Catacombs. It was the 
 Christian doctrine that master and slave were 
 redeemed in the same way by the same 
 Saviour ; and it is a historical and still visible 
 fact that if you begin to care for the crucified 
 Jesus, everybody else who cares for Him 
 stands in a new relation to you. There is no 
 bond like it. Master and slave met at the 
 Eucharist in the early .Church, to com- 
 memorate the dying of their common Master, 
 Who “ took upon Him the form of a slave,” and 
 
 Moriz Friedlander, Die Religibsen Bewegungen des Judentums 
 im Zeitalter Jesu, p. 31. Contrast St. Paul — a friend of 
 mine has pointed out that Paul’s emotion is very liable to 
 break up his grammar, when he thinks of his mission to 
 the Gentiles or of Jesus Christ. 
 
SLAVE AND CASTE 
 
 135 
 
 died a slave’s death; and a new force bound 
 them together in a new spirit. And when it 
 came to martyrdom, a story like that of 
 Felicitas and Perpetua shows how distinctions 
 of lady and slave fell away in shame and 
 suffering shared for the One name. There 
 have been many reformations of Hinduism, 
 but none strong enough to prevail in the long 
 run over caste. The love of Jesus did this 
 for the Church from the beginning, and does 
 it for India tO“day. The ultimate God of the 
 Graeco-Roman world was the abstraction 
 summed up, as we have seen, as “ the deifica- 
 tion of the word Not ” — beyond and above 
 being itself, and far from the contact of any 
 emotion — a. God without love. What a con- 
 trast to the Christian’s Friend who chose the 
 Cross! What could such a negation do to 
 touch or help the world, even if philosophy 
 had allowed such a thought ? 
 
 We have to study this early Church till we 
 understand it. My last instance for to-day 
 shall be a phrase which of itself proclaims the 
 difference of outlook that the centuries have 
 made. In some ten passages of the New 
 Testament we find “the foundation of the 
 
136 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 world,” in connection with things and events 
 dated before it, or contemporaneously with 
 it, by the writers or speakers. We are not 
 used to-day to vision of such range; and we 
 have in consequence to shed a whole vocabu- 
 lary, and perhaps ‘‘ Providence ” itself would 
 go with them if we fortunately were not apt 
 to be a little illogical. 
 
 But the difference of outlook is still more 
 marked when we notice what kind of things 
 the early Christian conceived as reaching 
 through all history from ‘‘ before the founda- 
 tion of the Cosmos ” — ^for he uses a technical 
 term of Greek philosophy. He speaks of 
 ‘‘names written in the book of the Lamb 
 slain, from the foundation of the world” — 
 this comes twice in the Apocalypse, while in 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians the writer speaks 
 of himself and his friends as ‘‘ chosen in Christ 
 before the foundation of the world.” Finally 
 the writer of the Fourth Gospel represents 
 Christ as speaking of the glory which God had 
 given Him, ‘‘for Thou lovedst Me before the 
 foundation of the world.” 
 
 Frankly, there is not a phrase among all 
 these but comes with a shock, almost painful, 
 
“ THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD ” 137 
 
 to a man bred in the thoughts of our day. 
 They are repugnant to “ the reason of the 
 present age,” nor to the reason of this age 
 alone, as St. Paul very well saw. He was 
 left in no manner of doubt as to the judgment 
 of rational and educated people upon what 
 he had to say^ — he, a poor Jewish spermologos, 
 a journalist, as we might say to-day. It is per- 
 haps remarkable how rarely the theologians of 
 to-day deal with the conceptions we have 
 picked out from' these first-century documents, 
 when one reflects that the Christians of most 
 ages would not have recognised their faith, if 
 stripped of them, for the same thing at all. 
 
 The early Christian conceived that to God 
 Jesus Christ was not accidental, nor yet the 
 unforeseen product of an evolution that might 
 have miscarried. He held that there is a 
 thread running through all history; that 
 nothing walks with aimless feet; that a long 
 progress intelligible to reason is also guided 
 by reason, and that to no random goal. He 
 held this because it was clear to him from what 
 he saw, and from what he experienced, that 
 Jesus Christ was lifting men to a new plane 
 of life and thought, with the prospect of a 
 
138 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 boundless vista of future developments up- 
 ward. A religion is to be judged, not only by 
 what it achieves in the present, but by the 
 germinating forces it perpetually renews in the 
 human heart — by its promise of power in the 
 progressive disruption of every exhausted con- 
 ception in favour of a higher. In Jesus the 
 early Christian found such a hope, and he 
 refused to believe Him to be accidental or 
 anything short of God’s highest revelation of 
 Himself. And, in the clearest and most 
 definite terms he could find, he said so — he 
 said that, before the world was, God saw the 
 end for which He worked, without accidents 
 and without after-thoughts. 
 
 He went further; for, grasping that the 
 essence of Christianity is the realisation by 
 each individual soul that it is the object of 
 God’s individual love, he boldly carried this 
 to the furthest point of possible emphasis — 
 God knew His own before He ever set hand 
 to creation — He fixed beforehand the day and 
 hour, and worked ahead for those He loved, 
 as a father (in the parable) starts working 
 to win the bread before the child is hungry, 
 and even before the child is bom. God knew. 
 
THE PURPOSEFUL LOVE OF GOD 139 
 
 he said, and God arranged, at once for the 
 great Cosmos and for the last and least of 
 those who were to find in the Good Shepherd a 
 new access to the heart of God. With one 
 metaphor and another — a name written in a 
 book, the paschal Lamb, the laying-down of 
 the Cosmos — with endless variety of phrase, 
 he tried to drive home to every man the 
 supreme fact of God’s love of each man. His 
 long prevision of each and His long provi- 
 dence for each. He knew very well he was 
 using metaphor. “ For want of His name,” 
 said Clement, ‘‘we use beautiful names, that 
 the mind may not wander at large, but may 
 rest on these.”* At all hazards he would 
 make clear the great fact of God’s love as 
 antecedent to all things — of Christ as the em- 
 bodiment of purposeful love — of the universe 
 itself in all its range as a Cosmos indeed, 
 inspired and achieved by love, and subservient 
 in its last detail to love. And he aimed at 
 doing this by use of the best language avail- 
 able to him, and very telling language it was. 
 
 Such thoughts may not commend them- 
 selves to us; we may be afraid of them, as 
 
 Clem. Alex., Strom, ii., 74, 75. 
 
140 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 too large, too sweeping, too bold. But two 
 things may be said. These beliefs have a 
 great history, as worthy to be studied as any 
 other history — for we are bound to study the 
 past till we understand it, and absorb it, if 
 we are to make steady progress in the 
 present. And, further, a faith congenial to 
 “ the reason and the humanity of the present 
 age ” (as history can show in many a surprising 
 instance) is not always very sure of the respect 
 of the next age. “ A man’s reach should 
 exceed his grasp,” as Browning said. We 
 need a faith larger than we can be quite easy 
 about, if it is to be of much real use to us. 
 
 I end with what I began with — this : we 
 have to reckon, as serious people, with this 
 story of the Church; to criticise it, not from 
 without but from within; to understand how 
 men came to speak as they spoke, and to feel 
 as they felt. Criticism, to be just, must be 
 identification. That is the duty before us. 
 Before we decide as to the final truth of what 
 they said, we must know to the full, and from 
 within, the evidence from which they spoke, 
 and the experience which gave them their 
 premisses. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 Jesus in the Christian Centuries 
 
 O UR subject in this lecture is Jesus Christ 
 in the Christian centuries. We shall 
 not for the moment deal with the truth 
 of the Christian religion, for our aim through- 
 out is to enlarge our basis of facts before we 
 embark upon opinion. We shall try to look 
 into what the .religion, true or false, has 
 actually effected; and we shall take the belief 
 in Jesus as itself a historical factor, in order, 
 first of all, by measuring it against the forces 
 with which it has had to contend, to reach 
 some approximate measure of its real power. 
 In doing this we ought to include some 
 inquiry as to the sort of men and women 
 affected — people like ourselves, with every 
 variety of temperament and temptation. 
 For there is nothing externally that marks 
 the Church as a peculiar body of persons, 
 unless, indeed, we recognise, as we may, that 
 there is something unique in the range of 
 
142 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 character and disposition to which it appeals, 
 in the variety of natures which it wins and 
 uses.* In the next place, we ought to ask 
 whether a factor that works so uniformly for 
 the good of mankind, and, with all deductions 
 made that should be made for mistakes and 
 wrong tempers incidental to all human nature, 
 has forwarded the growth and development 
 of the human race, is, after all, a mistake; 
 whether, as some burning spirits suggest, it 
 ought to be the main business of all illuminated 
 people to rid the world of the Christian' 
 religion. We might go on to ask ourselves 
 whether it could be dispensed with, and, if 
 so, by what it could be replaced — by 
 philosophy or economic changes, or both — 
 or something else. And then we ought to 
 ask whether there is not some test of truth 
 in the correspondence between the needs of 
 the human soul and the Christian Gospel. 
 It is very often better for a lecturer to ask 
 questions than to answer them; so, while my 
 own way of dealing with them may not 
 
 * A closer study of the great Christian biographies would 
 be a great reinforcement to the Churches to-day. 
 
THE POWER OF THE NAME 
 
 143 
 
 escape notice, I will not attempt categoric 
 answers to these questions. What I urge, 
 however, is that everything turns on how 
 deeply we care to go into realities; and a 
 large part of the lecture will be a repeated 
 reminder that we need to go very deep 
 indeed, if we wish to understand a human soul. 
 
 Let us begin by examining a contribution 
 which the belief in Jesus has made to human 
 life, which is apt to be overlooked. It is what 
 we may call, in language not very readily in- 
 telligible to Anglo-Saxons of our day, but 
 instantly significant to men of other races and 
 other ages, the “ Power of the Name.” And 
 here we shall have to mjake a short excursion 
 into Folklore. 
 
 Herodotus, in a well-known passage, tells 
 us that the women of Miletus would never 
 call their husbands by name.* All over the 
 world we come on the same reluctance to 
 reveal names. We meet it in the story of 
 Lohengrin, in the English fairy-tale, most 
 readily identified by the refrain that is its gist : 
 Ninny, ninny, not. 
 
 Your name’s Tot Tit Tot! — 
 
 * Herodotus, i., 146. 
 
144 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and in the strange fact, which Macrobius tells 
 us, that the priests of ancient Rome had a 
 secret name for their city.* For man, in the 
 primitive stage, name and thing tend to be 
 one in essence. The name is not a mere 
 convention; in some deep, mysterious bond 
 of nature it is the thing ; and if anyone knows 
 the name, he is master in some measure of the 
 thing. Thus, if he learns the name of his enemy 
 and has some familiar spirit (for instance) 
 whose name he also knows, he can link these 
 names in magic to his enemy’s undoing. 
 
 In the early days of the Christian Church, 
 in the Mediterranean world, as to-day among 
 the animistic peoples, we find the minds of 
 men infested with a belief, which to us is 
 almost incomprehensible, in a whole world of 
 spiritual beings or daemons, as the Greeks 
 called them. Elaborate accounts of the 
 demons and their nature are given by 
 Plutarch and Apuleius. They lived in the 
 air; they were of mixed nature — something 
 
 * Saturnalia, Vu., g, S- Ipsius vero urbis nomen etiam doc- 
 tissimis ignoratum est, caventibus Romanis ne quod saepe 
 adversus urbes hostium fecisse se noverant ipsi quoque hostili 
 evocatione paterentur si tutelae suae nomen divulgaretur. 
 
DEMONS 
 
 145 
 
 between gods and men, between whom they 
 might serve as intermediaries. But they had 
 many activities of their own — good and bad; 
 and they were generally recognised as the 
 chief dangers of human life. Some of them 
 were beneficent — guardian powers ; and, from 
 one point of view, even the human soul itself 
 might perhaps be a daemon. The Egyptians 
 assigned the human body, area by area, to 
 thirty-six demons, whose aid would be in- 
 voked according to the part of the body 
 affected by disease. Perhaps every passion 
 was induced by some daemon. Mischief of 
 every kind was due to them — ^every ill legend 
 of the gods was their work ; every ugly, cruel, 
 or obscene type of worship or sacrifice was 
 inspired by them; and they were constantly 
 the authors of disease and insanity. Such 
 words as daemoniac, nympholept, enthusiasm, 
 obsessed, possessed, hag-ridden or bewitched 
 — along with incantation, enchantment, and 
 charm — tell, for those who can understand 
 them, a long story of human trouble.* 
 
 * It may be permissible to refer to an article of my own 
 in the Hibbert Journal, vol. xi., no. i (Oct. 1912), on " The 
 Daemon Environment of the Primitive Christians.” 
 
 10 
 
146 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 If a man, then, knew the names and 
 affinities of these daemon powers, he could 
 use them, for the Neo-Platonist philosopher 
 argued that the universe is a unity, all things 
 linked to all, but some things more subtly 
 connected; and therefore if, as a modern 
 chemist uses are-agent to act on some element 
 or compound, a man will take in his hand 
 a certain stone, and, pronouncing a certain 
 name, will add a set form of prescribed 
 words, he is also automatically bound to 
 control some dcemon-power.* This, of course, 
 he can set to harry anyone whose name he 
 knows. This is the essence of all magic. 
 
 So far I have used the statements of 
 Classical and non-Christian writers. This is 
 supplemented by modern evidence. Under 
 the dominion of spirits, the animistic 
 heathen is “ bound by three fetters — fear, 
 demon-worship, and fate. . . . Even his own 
 soul is a hostile power against which he must 
 
 * Cf. Clem. Alex., Protr., 58. The Indian name for the 
 form of words is mantra. See C. F. Andrews’ Renaissance in 
 India, Appendix V., for Mrs. Besant’s catechism. “ Q. Does 
 the order of the words matter? A. Yes. Q. Can a mantra 
 be translated? A. If it be translated it loses its use." 
 
DEMONS 
 
 147 
 
 ever be on his guard. It is fond of leaving 
 him; it allows itself to be enticed away from 
 him ; it refuses to accept benefits from him. 
 . . . Animism seems devised for purpose of 
 tormenting men and hindering them from 
 enjoying life. To that must be added fear of 
 the dead, of demons, of the thousand spirits 
 of earth, air, water, mountains, and trees.”* 
 Hinduism has incorporated much from such 
 old beliefs, and has thirty crore of gods 
 of one kind and another — three hundred 
 millions. 
 
 Muhammadanism and Buddhism alike have 
 failed to break the power of these spirits; 
 Mrs. Besant and the Theosophists in India 
 invoke modern science to defend the use of 
 
 * Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel (tr.), pp. 108, 109. 
 See also the most interesting book of my friend, Mr. J. C. 
 Lawson: Ancient Greek Religion and Modern Greek Folk- 
 lore, on the survival into modern Greece of the belief in 
 nymphs and worse things. Mr. Lawson tells us (pp. 48, 13 1) 
 how he once saw a Nereid — or at least something which his 
 guide knew to be one, and would not wait to allow Mr. 
 Lawson a closer investigation. Mr. Lawson says (p. 281) 
 that people born on Saturday are credited with the power to 
 see their guardian spirits, as well as second sight. His 
 remarks on the survival of paganism in the Greek Church 
 (p. 47) deserve study — it is the outcome of compromise 
 centuries ago. 
 
148 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 charms, spells, incantations, idolatry, and 
 caste; they are covered by the vague term 
 “'magnetism.” “The water of the Ganges 
 was sacred because it was magnetised by the 
 great rishis. Hindus bathed at the time of 
 the eclipse to wash off the bad magnetism. 
 Idols were to be worshipped because they 
 were ‘ centres of magnetism ’ which is put 
 into them by highly spiritual persons. The 
 religious marks were worn on the forehead, 
 because the ‘ materials used have magnetic 
 properties.’ ”* 
 
 Evidence for all this belief in daemons was 
 found — ^and is found — in abundance in all 
 illnesses,t especially sudden ones and those 
 that affect the mind, in every unfamiliar occur- 
 rence, and in the oracles; and plenty was 
 no doubt supplied by men who had any 
 natural gifts for hypnotism and legerdemain. 
 But the main point is that, evidence or no 
 
 * Andrews’ Renaissance in India, p. 149. 
 f Mr. John Howell, of the Baptist Missionary Society, tells 
 me that, on the Congo, natives stricken with sleeping-sickness 
 will change their names (with proper ceremony) to hide their 
 identity and so escape the spirits which have sent the 
 disease. To be called, even accidentally, by their former 
 names troubles them greatly. 
 
DEMONS 
 
 149 
 
 evidence, the human mind was, and is, in 
 such systems utterly depressed and paralysed. 
 
 Traces of the daemon-belief, common to 
 Jews as well as Gentiles, abound in the New 
 Testament. The “prince of the power of the 
 air that now worketh in the sons of 
 disobedience ” (Eph. ii. 2), the familiar “ prin- 
 cipalities and powers,’’ can be supplemented 
 freely, but two crucial passages will suffice. 
 This, says Paul, “none of the rulers of this 
 world knew; for, if they had known, they 
 would not have crucified the Lord of glory ’’ 
 (i Cor. ii. 8). And, again, “ we wrestle, not 
 against flesh and blood, but against princi- 
 palities, against powers,* against the world- 
 lords of this darkness, against spiritual beings 
 of evil in the sky above us ; so take to 
 yourselves the panoply of God’’ (Eph. vi. 12). 
 
 When, then, from all this we turn to “ the 
 name that is above every name,’’ and read 
 that at it the knees shall bow of things in 
 the sky (Phil. ii. 10), the old phrase takes on a 
 
 * Cf. also Romans viii. 38, 39: “I am persuaded that 
 . . . neither principalities nor powers . . . shall be able to 
 separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
 our Lord.” 
 
150 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 new meaning.* * * § The magician lets loose upon 
 us all his allies — or they may come against us 
 on their own account — evil daemons, deceiving 
 spirits, powers of darkness, disease,-and terror 
 — but we have a Name that is above every 
 name. “ Even the very name of Jesus is 
 terrible to the daemons,” wrote Justin Martyr, 
 tenderest and most beautiful of philosophers. f 
 ‘‘ This,” wrote Tatian, speaking of the Gospel, 
 “ ends our slavery in the world and rescues 
 us from rulers manifold and ten thousand 
 tyrants. “ I was now taught,” writes a 
 modern Japanese Christian, Utschimura by 
 name, “ that there was only one God, and 
 not many — over eight millions — as I had 
 formerly believed. Christian monotheism 
 laid its axe at the root of my superstition. 
 . . . One God, not many^ — that was a glad 
 message to my soul.”§ “There used to be 
 fairies here,” said an old woman in the High- 
 
 * I do not suggest that this is its only meaning. 
 
 t Justin, Dialogue ■with Trypho, 30. Justin and Tatian 
 belong to the middle second century. 
 
 X Tatian, 29. 
 
 § Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel, p. 21 1. 
 
DEMONS 
 
 iSi 
 
 lands to a friend of mine, “ but the Gospel 
 came and drove them away.” 
 
 One of the worst effects of this subjuga- 
 tion to daemons is the hopeless fatalism it 
 induces. Every impulse is the work of a 
 daemon; no effort is of any use; a man is 
 a plaything of devil-powers, and his life is 
 governed by stars above him. ‘‘ It kills man’s 
 nobler nature, and degrades him to a piece 
 of mechanism. . . . The very will for freedom 
 is bound. . . . Exceptions to the average are 
 more rare than among civilised nations.”* 
 “We,” writes Tatian, on the other hand, “are 
 above Fate, and, instead of daemons that 
 deceive, we have learnt one Master that 
 deceiveth not,” and he specially mentions 
 Astrology as one of the evils from which he 
 has been delivered.t It is a curious reflection 
 that Astrology was the earliest form of 
 scientific determinism. 
 
 Now let us sum up the matter. We shall 
 not be in a hurry to commit ourselves to the 
 
 * Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel, p. 121. 
 t Tatian, 7, 8, 9. Compare a very interesting discussion 
 by Tacitus, Annals, vi., 56. See Franz Cumont, Astrology and 
 Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912). 
 
152 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 belief that there are such powers of evil about 
 us, though men who know Paganism at first 
 hand sometimes lean to the idea, and modern 
 science has no evidence that they do not exist, 
 and is indeed invoked (not very skilfully) to 
 explain them. But we shall note that, what- 
 ever the truth about daemons, where Jesus 
 Christ comes in any real way into the hearts 
 of men. He liberates them from all fears of 
 supernatural enemies. He takes the terror 
 out of life by making it possible — indeed, 
 inevitable — that men live in the sunshine and 
 warmth of God’s love, “ children of love,” as 
 an early Christian writer puts it;* and there 
 is no other religion with anything like the 
 bright atmosphere of love that the Incarnation 
 makes. The terrors go like the night-fears of 
 children when the room is flooded with light, 
 and one they love stands by them. The mind 
 is relieved of an intolerable incubus, that has 
 militated more and more against its powers; 
 and morality is made possible. Where 
 animistic beliefs rule, all things are allowed 
 to the mighty man with a strong soul; other 
 
 * Barnabas, 9, 8. 
 
DEMONS 
 
 153 
 
 men are bound by custom; he is free to do 
 what will secure his strength — a. curious co- 
 incidence between the crudest heathenism and 
 the philosophy of Nietzsche. Where Christ 
 comes, morality is changed from custom into 
 the spontaneous overflow of love to Him. 
 Whatever our judgment upon Christ — 
 whether we count Christianity pure delusion 
 or half delusion — it does not alter the fact that 
 by the belief in Him men are set free to 
 think in peace of mind, and are lifted out of 
 the slough of selfishness which superstition 
 always makes. It becomes possible to appeal 
 to conscience, and still more to a new love 
 for Jesus Christ, that carries men far in all 
 that makes for good. The savage eats his 
 enemy to make his own heart braver; the 
 Christian, if he takes Jesus seriously, identifies 
 himself with his enemy in quite another way. 
 The Cross teaches us a new spirit in which 
 to approach those who hate us. 
 
 One thing more has to be added on this 
 point. The religion of the Graeco-Roman 
 civilisation, in which St. Paul moved, like the 
 religion of civilised India to-day, had many 
 rites and ceremonies and sacred legends, full 
 
154 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 of cruelty and obscenity. The purer spirits, like 
 Plutarch, regretted this, and tried to explain 
 that such things must be the work of evil 
 daemons — gods could not wish them; and yet 
 it was possible, Plutarch clearly felt, that even 
 the obscene thing was a symbol of something 
 great and true. In fact, he could not break 
 with tradition. Perhaps human sacrifices no 
 longer continued in his day ; the point is 
 doubtful; but the shrines of Aphrodite still 
 kept harlots, hierodules, whose service and 
 whose earnings supported the temple, and 
 whose life was therefore hardly sinful.* The 
 same thing still prevails in modern Hinduism. 
 The dedication of little children to such 
 temples for such purposes is revolting to the 
 
 * The temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, Strabo says (c. 
 378), had at one time more than a thousand hierodules, 
 “ whom both men and women dedicated to the goddess ” ; 
 the temple at Comana, in his own day, had six thousand 
 (Strabo, c. 535, cf. J. G. Frazer, Adonis, p. 23); in Judaism 
 they were prohibited (Deut. xxiii. 18), though the regular 
 Hebrew word for a harlot means “ consecrated woman ” 
 (q'deshah). For modern India, cf. Meredith Townsend, 
 Asia and Europe, pp. 17, loi : “When, in Lord Dalhousie’s 
 time, a Bill was drawn for the prevention of overt obscenity, 
 it was necessary to insert a clause that the Act should not 
 apply to any temple or religious emblem.” 
 
CLEAN RELIGION 
 
 155 
 
 better minds of India, but it is still religion. 
 We need not dwell on such things. Jesus 
 Christ finally lifted religion out of any region 
 in which cruelty or uncleanness can be 
 associated with it, and made the very word 
 inaccessible to such taints, associating it with 
 truth and peace and quietness, the service 
 of men and a spiritual love of God. 
 
 In all this, whatever our final decision as 
 to Christ, it is fairly clear for those who care 
 for verifiable fact that the belief in Jesus has 
 worked for the good of men, and especially 
 of women. The significance of this comes 
 out when we study modem Indian move- 
 ments, and realise how for the Vedantist, as 
 for Plutarch and the Neo-Platonist, there is 
 a refined esoteric teaching for the initiate, 
 while the crowd may go on as before with 
 the old wickedness, miscalled religion. The 
 Christian Gospel has the same implications 
 for all men, educated or uneducated, in every 
 relation of life, the same ideal of conduct and 
 of truth. “One is your Master.” 
 
 As our next instance of the working of the 
 belief in Jesus, we may take the conviction 
 that each individual man, however insignifi- 
 
156 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 cant, is one “for whom Christ died.” The 
 phrase is Paul’s. I will give three cases where 
 it has been quoted or paraphrased, to show 
 how it works. 
 
 About the year 412 a.d. a new governor 
 came from Constantinople to Tripoli, and 
 began to misuse the people he had to govern. 
 Synesius, the most charming figure of the 
 century, hunter and scholar and philosopher, 
 a lover of books and dogs, and now bishop 
 of the place all against his own inclination 
 and sense of fitness, wrote boldly to the 
 governor, and told him he was using men as 
 if they were cheap; but “precious among 
 creatures is man, precious in that for him 
 Christ was crucified.”* Synesius had not been 
 quite sure in his own mind that he was 
 properly and fully Christian, but need brought 
 him to realise this aspect of the death of 
 Jesus. 
 
 When Kett led his rebellion in Norfolk, 
 some envoy of the Court came down to 
 negotiate with him, and spoke of Kett’s 
 followers as “ villeins.” Kett’s answer is worth 
 
 * Synesius, Epist. 57, 1388c. 
 
“FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED’’ 
 
 157 
 
 remembering : “ Call no man villein who was 
 redeemed by the precious blood-shedding of 
 Jesus Christ.’’ 
 
 The third instance is one, the source of 
 which I have lost. It comes from the 
 eighteenth century, I think. A man, injured 
 in some accident, was brought into a hospital, 
 very near death, it seemed. One of the 
 surgeons proposed some drastic treatment, 
 adding, fiat experimentum in corpora vili — 
 the easy quotation we all know. From the 
 table, on which the injured man lay silent, 
 came a Latin answer : Non ita vile pro quo 
 Christas mortaus est. 
 
 In an earlier lecture I suggested that one 
 of the tests we may apply to a religion is its 
 power to protect men against us. Here, in 
 this old belief, which embodies the very 
 central proposition of the Gospel, that Christ 
 died for every man, is, I think, the most 
 powerful safeguard that the poor, the 
 oppressed, the black man, and “ ordinary 
 people” have ever had against the great, 
 whether kings or civil servants, experts 
 and specialists, parliaments or plutocrats. 
 Nothing so far in India has really shattered 
 
158 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 caste except Christ. If Christ died for the 
 pariah, it cannot defile the rest of us to touch 
 one whom Christ loved. 
 
 A missionary has told me a tale from 
 Bengal, which illustrates the matter. Village 
 people, returning to their village, found a dead 
 woman at the road-side, a little child beside 
 her, alive and trying to wake her. No' one 
 would touch the woman or the child; they 
 were wanderers, of unknown caste: and 
 
 religion forbade, till some Christian converts 
 came along, whose religion knew no caste. 
 
 Even so sympathetic a student of Jesus 
 Christ as Wilhelm Bousset counts it some- 
 thing of a defect in orthodox Christianity 
 that its system has not room for Bismarck — 
 “ If we accept in its entirety this conception, 
 if, that is, we take from modern life its very 
 essence, and force it to self-renunciation, we 
 shall have absolutely to cast on one side such 
 complete and great figures as those of Goethe 
 and Bismarck.” That may be so. The ideals 
 of Bismarck are not those associated with 
 the Cross ; but which mean more for human 
 good and happiness, or for progress ? We 
 have to realise that where Christ has touched 
 
TYNDALE 
 
 159 
 
 human character in earnest, the Bismarck 
 ideals have been challenged at once, and all 
 the school of Bistnarck has always realised the 
 danger of a free Gospel. A tame-cat clergy, 
 with a gospel of a mailed fist, may be 
 tolerable; but men, in whom Christ lives, 
 and men prepared to champion their fellow- 
 men in Christ’s spirit — these are intolerable 
 in any community ruled by the ideals of 
 Bismarck, English, German, Russian, or 
 Roman. 
 
 Let us take an illustration. William 
 Tyndale, “ further ripened in the knowledge of 
 God’s Word ” at Cambridge, went to be chap- 
 lain in the house of Sir John Walsh at Little 
 Sodbury; and there, in controversy with a 
 learned man at his employer’s table, he broke 
 out with the words : “If God spare my life, 
 ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth 
 the plough shall know more of the Scripture 
 than thou doest.’’ His life was spared, and 
 he printed that English Testament, which, 
 with corrections and revisions far less sig- 
 nificant than we think, we still use.* He was 
 
 * Cf. Demaus, William Tyndale (ed. 2), p. 234, on the reason 
 for this. 
 
i6o 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 carried further, and wrote Of the Obedience 
 of a Christian Man, and other works, which 
 did not commend themselves to those in 
 authority.* Here is his conclusion: “The 
 Gospel hath another freedom with her than 
 the temporal regiment [i.e, government]. 
 Though every man’s body and goods be under 
 the king, do he right or wrong, yet is God’s 
 word free and .above the king; so that the 
 worst in the realm may tell the king, if he 
 do him wrong, that he doth naught, and other- 
 wise than God hath commanded him; and so 
 warn him to avoid the wrath of God.’’ The 
 seventeenth century shows what direct 
 association with the Bible in English meant 
 — in the planting of New England and the 
 Civil War.f “ The worst in the realm may 
 tell the king,’’ and they did, to some 
 effect; and the results of seventeenth-century 
 Puritanism in the history of the emancipa- 
 
 * The significance of Tyndale’s work may be divined from 
 the extraordinary and violent attack made upon him by 
 Sir Thomas More, who devoted more than a thousand folio 
 pages to him. 
 
 t On Bible-reading, see G. M. Trevelyan, England under 
 the Stuarts, p. 6o. 
 
CHRISTIAN FREEDOM 
 
 i6i 
 
 tion of mankind are still to receive additions. 
 Does not Germany itself owe to Luther, and 
 his resolve to make the Bible a people’s book,* 
 more than to the Bismarck school? If there 
 are those who do not see the relation between 
 the belief in Christ and human liberty, at 
 all events the dread felt by governments in 
 the last four hundred years for people who 
 take the Bible seriously should be evidence 
 enough — whether these governments be 
 Spanish Courts or American Presidents and 
 Cabinets fearful of slave-holders. It is not only 
 that men possessed of the faith in Christ will 
 assert the manhood and the rights of others, 
 but their own, modestly it may be, but 
 doggedly. But we need not turn to former 
 centuries. What is the meaning of the dislike 
 felt, and put into word and action, by govern- 
 ment officials, traders, exploiters of native 
 races, and rubber-dealers — reputable as well 
 as indefensible — to the missionary, but simply 
 this ? That here is a man who, in his faith 
 that Christ died for the black man, is pre- 
 
 * “ This book is to be written in the simplest language 
 that all may understand it ” — Luther, letter of 30 March, 
 1522. 
 
 II 
 
i 62 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 pared to insist that the white man shall not 
 abuse him, whether his motive be private gain 
 or good government. Christ’s servant will 
 be the friend of the people for whom Christ 
 died ; he may be misguided, and he will often 
 be very inconvenient; but it means that, 
 wherever the missionary is, there will be a 
 reference of everything — trade, government, 
 and personal conduct — to eternal standards 
 rather than to a local magistrate’s sense of 
 expediency. 
 
 But we can go a good deal further, if we 
 will look a little more into men. For we have 
 to recognise that the belief in Jesus Christ 
 has not merely been a restraining influence 
 which has kept men from abusing their 
 powers, but a deeper stimulus, which has 
 worked in a progressive training of conscience 
 and a new attitude toward those who need 
 help and care. For instance, the late Dr. 
 Verrall said that the radical disease, of which, 
 more than of anything else, ancient civilisation 
 perished, was an imperfect ideal of woman.* 
 No one who is familiar with ancient literature 
 
 EiUripides the Rationalist, p. ill, note, 
 
CHRIST AND WOMAN 
 
 163 
 
 can deny this low estimate, which comes out 
 most clearly when speakers and writers deal 
 without emphasis with the ordinary ways of 
 life. It is the same in India: “Day and 
 night,” say the Laws of Manu, “must women 
 be kept in dependence by the male members 
 of the family; they are never fit for inde- 
 pendence; they are as impure as falsehood 
 itself ; this is a fixed rule.” It seems clear 
 that in the earliest Indian as in the earliest 
 Greek literature woman is given a higher 
 place than she had later. This is significant. 
 Why, as civilisation advanced, should the 
 belief in woman decline? In the story of 
 the Church it is the other way. From the 
 first Christians have tended to take their 
 Master’s view of woman, and have held “ there 
 is neither male nor female.” Their methods 
 of carrying out His principles, consistently 
 with the standards of decency that have from 
 time to time prevailed around them, show 
 curious deflections, but it remains that the 
 Church has steadily recognised the dignity of 
 woman. 
 
 Nowhere in Classical literature — -perhaps 
 nowhere in non-Christian literature — is there 
 
164 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 a teacher of men who is recorded to have 
 taken the interest in children that Jesus did. 
 The exposure of , new-born children was 
 common in Greece, and Plato and Aristotle 
 tolerated it in their ideal Commonwealths. 
 The plots of plays and romances turn upon it 
 with wearisome iteration. So that it was not 
 idly that the early Christian apologists 
 emphasised the fact that Christians do not 
 abandon their own offspring to death or the 
 brothel, and keep parrots.* “ The childless 
 man falls short of the perfection of nature,” 
 says Clement of Alexandria. f “ Who are the 
 two or three gathering in the name of Christ, 
 among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does 
 He not mean man, wife, and child by the three, 
 seeing woman is made to match man by 
 God?”$ We are apt to attribute a certain 
 monopoly in some vices to Southern 
 Europeans, and it is startling to find in the 
 Icelandic Saga of the Burnt Njal such a 
 passage as this : “ This is the beginning of our 
 
 * Clem. Alex., Paed., iii., 30. 
 t Clem. Alex., Strovi., ii., 139, 5. 
 tCIem. Alex., Strom., iii., 68, i, 
 
EXPOSURE OF CHILDREN 165 
 
 laws ” (the Christian law-giver speaks), “ that 
 all men shall be Christians here in the land 
 and believe in God, the Father, the Son, and 
 the Holy Ghost, but leave off all idol-worship, 
 not expose children to perish, and not eat 
 horseflesh.”* 
 
 Again, there is slavery, deeply rooted in 
 ancient life, the gangrene at once of morality 
 and industry, and it lasted on into the nine- 
 teenth century. Here it is curious to note 
 how men, who theoretically believed in the 
 complete inspiration of the whole Bible, 
 brought a higher criticism to bear, and saw 
 at a glance that the ‘‘ mysterious destiny ” 
 assigned to Ham’s descendants in virtue of 
 drunken Noah’s foolish curse was not of equal 
 significance with Christ’s death for the negro 
 slave.f 
 
 The belief in Jesus has given men a keener 
 insight and a warmer and quicker sympathy; 
 
 * The Burnt Njal, § loi (Dasent's translation), 
 t Is it worth while noting that they were not content 
 with “ soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of 
 immense and inexpensive happiness in another world when 
 the process of working them to premature death in the 
 service of the rich is complete in this,” as Mr. Bernard Shaw 
 suggests ? 
 
i66 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 it has waked the dedicated spirit and taught 
 new ways of service. Believing heart and 
 soul in Jesus’ death for men, Christians have 
 given their lives to help their neighbours in 
 the obvious duties of neighbourliness (which 
 as Jesus said, the publicans also do), to re- 
 lieve poverty and to study its prevention, and, 
 above all, to train the moral standards of 
 their fellow-men, and to bring into their lives 
 that experience of Christ to which they owe 
 all themselves. This sense of being able to 
 lead men to a living Christ who will do every- 
 thing for them — the very keynote of all 
 Christian service — stands or falls with the 
 belief in Christ. What other religion has such 
 a message of joy? Where are people, who 
 can keep it right into old age, poverty and 
 pain, apart from Christ? What other Gospel 
 is there than His? Ethics are splendid 
 subjects for discussion and for declamation; 
 Christian principles have won much admira- 
 tion; but where, apart from belief in Christ, 
 is the force that can make anything of them ? 
 Think how that has stimulated men to lives 
 like their Master’s. “ Christ,” wrote Wycliffe, 
 “ saith within us every day: This I suffered 
 
THE IMPULSE TO SERVICE 167 
 
 for thee, what dost thou suffer for me?”* 
 Men, as we can see all over the world, are 
 sporadically capable of wonderful lives of 
 service and beauty; but when it comes to 
 the use of poor material, who will make saints 
 of that? Yet the belief in Christ has done 
 it and does it still, affording the motive that 
 makes the consecrated life a thing of increas- 
 ing power. Let us ask ourselves what is the 
 significance of the amount and quality of 
 impulse that makes men missionaries and 
 keeps them ? Life among a primitive race is 
 apt to be hateful, stripped of all the amenities 
 we most prize, and exposed to everything that 
 jars the nerves, from incessant vermin to inter- 
 mittent murder ;t what is it that takes men 
 
 * Christus dicit in nobis cotidie : Hoc passus sum pro te, quid 
 pateris pro me ? See Lechler, John Wycliffe and his English 
 Precursors (2nd edition, Engl, tr.), p. 273, n. 
 
 t Cf. Livingstone, Travels in South Africa, chapter xii. 
 (end) : “ During a nine weeks’ tour I had been in closer 
 contact with heathens than I had ever been before; and 
 though all were as kind and attentive to me as possible, 
 yet to endure the dancing, roaring, and singing, the jesting, 
 grumbling, quarrelling, and murderings of these children of 
 nature, was the severest penance I had yet undergone in the 
 course of my missionary duties. I thence derived a more in- 
 tense disgust of paganism than I had hitherto felt, and 
 
i68 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and women into it and keeps them there glad 
 and eager — without books or friends, and 
 their children thousands of miles away ? This is 
 one of the effects of the Belief in Jesus Christ. 
 
 Plato, long before Jesus was bom, spoke to 
 men of a last judgment, at which Minos, 
 naked, should with very soul contemplate the 
 very soul of each in turn immediately after 
 death, “ alone, without a kinsman beside him, 
 all the trappings of his life left behind on 
 earth.”* * Other men wove apocalypses round 
 myths after Plato ; and no doubt it contributed 
 something to morality. But think of the con- 
 trast of these payths with the Christian 
 conviction of the Great White Throne — no 
 myth, but a certainty. 
 
 Tuba mirum spar gens sonum 
 Per sepulcra regionum 
 Cogit omnes ante thronum. 
 
 Mors stupebit et natura, 
 
 Cum resurget creatura 
 Judicanti responsura. 
 
 formed a greatly elevated opinion of the effects of missions 
 in the south, among tribes which are reported to have been 
 as savage as the Makololo.” 
 
 * Gtrgias, 523 E. 
 
THE GREAT WHITE THRONE 169 
 
 Look at these lines — their strange simplicity 
 of language, so closely in touch with the awful 
 simplicity of the thought, their freedom from 
 artifice, their austere beauty — no random 
 products of happy accident, nor the ingenious 
 work of artifice. The whole scene lives and 
 moves before the poet’s eyes — he does not 
 frame it, he can hardly be said even to imagine 
 it — there it is; and in nine words he draws 
 it, with no syllable of comment or reflection. 
 Is there anywhere in human speech so much 
 in nine words ? And then a new thought 
 burns with pain in the poet’s heart — for he 
 grasps that he is no mere spectator — he stands 
 alone before the Throne; so far as he is 
 concerned, heaven and earth have fled away, 
 as in the great description in the Apocalypse; 
 and he cries aloud: 
 
 Quid sum miser tunc dicturus. 
 
 Quern patronum rogaturus, 
 
 Cum vix justus sit securust 
 
 What has this belief carried with it — this 
 recognition that the world and the individual 
 are judged in the last resort by Jesus Christ, 
 that His standards prevail, that the last word 
 
170 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 is the measure of the stature of the fulness 
 of Christ ? That from the scene every 
 vindictive element is eliminated, makes all 
 more serious. Through the steady facing of 
 this ultimate judgment of all life by God, in 
 accordance with the standards set in the 
 holiness and tenderness of Jesus Christ, the 
 Christian community has achieved and kept 
 a new recognition of the responsibility of the 
 individual, with the result of added concentra- 
 tion on the training of the soul. Goethe 
 speaks of “ what an inaccessible stronghold 
 that man possesses who is always in earnest 
 with himself and with the things around him.” 
 How could a man be more in earnest with 
 himself and with the things around him than 
 by living as Christians have constantly done 
 in full view of the Great White Throne? 
 Think of the self-criticism induced — of the 
 steady reference of everything to Christ’s 
 standards from beginning to end — of the 
 spiritual force there is for the individual 
 Christian in the consciousness of his nexus 
 with Christ, past, present, and eternal. It 
 is possible to measure something of what it 
 all means by remarking what happens when 
 
THE GREAT WHITE THRONE 
 
 171 
 
 the belief disappears — a. lowering of tone and 
 a certain hardening. If Christian teaching 
 here be set against Stoic or Buddhist, the 
 contrast is illuminating. Which has laid most 
 stress on the seriousness of life, and on the 
 importance of the individual man, and done 
 it most effectively ? And human progress 
 depends at once on the value set by all upon 
 the individual and the earnestness with which 
 he lives his life. In these matters there are 
 few things in history to match for significance 
 and worth the plain Gospel of the Christian 
 Church, that Christ died for the man, and 
 Christ will judge him. 
 
 But beside the historical effect of this 
 doctrine, we have to study its origin. How 
 came the Christian community, within one 
 generation of Calvary, to the conviction that 
 the historical Jesus, whom they had known, 
 with whom they had talked and travelled — 
 a crucified provincial, and one of many such — 
 was to sit upon the judgment-seat of the 
 universe ? The cross and the throne were 
 surely incompatible ideas; and yet they are 
 linked deliberately — and for the sake of a 
 man whom they had passed on the street. 
 
172 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 What was the experience that led the fol- 
 lowers of Jesus to a faith like this ? 
 
 “ The love of Christ constrains us,” said 
 Paul. After all, if we wish to understand 
 Christianity, we must come closer in to it, 
 and consider, not merely what it has done to 
 safeguard and to develope society, but what 
 it is for those to whom it yields most of its 
 meaning. What has come from the sense 
 that the Christian has always had, clearly or 
 dimly — of being the object of the love of 
 Christ, of having been sought by Him, and 
 found, and redeemed by Him, of being to 
 Christ not a mere item of humanity, but a 
 person and dear to Him ? What has been 
 the effect of the peace and joy of belonging to 
 Him, of being His? Here it may be objected 
 that this is just Christian folklore — not a very 
 impressive criticism; but once more we will 
 look into the thing, and try to be sure that we 
 understand it, before we pronounce upon it. 
 
 Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in one of his essays, 
 suggests that to “most of the best men” the 
 whole conception of miserable sinners re- 
 deemed by Jesus Christ is “simply without 
 any meaning at all.” So, too, it appears to 
 
FORGIVENESS 
 
 173 
 
 animistic savages, who are mostly not very 
 conscious of any sinfulness or of much respon- 
 sibility. But with men who grapple with life 
 in earnest, and find how, when it is taken 
 seriously, it teems with problems of action 
 and responsibility, a more severe sense is 
 found of what is asked of them. “ The contest 
 with Evil, we feel, is the essence of our moral 
 life. But then, on the other hand, the contest, 
 our faith must suggest, is relevant to world- 
 issues, somehow essential to the whole. In 
 fighting for Good we are assisting something 
 real that is divine.” These, again, are Mr. 
 Lowes Dickinson’s words in the same essay; 
 they represent, apparently, his own view ; they 
 are certainly very like what a Christian would 
 have said. But a Christian would add : 
 Supposing that, in this contest relevant to 
 world-issues, where, in fighting for Good, I 
 ought to be assisting something real that is 
 divine, I have in point of fact failed — ^fallen, 
 that is, below what, I see, was the ideal 
 conduct and was perhaps possible? Seneca, 
 the Stoic, felt , something of this, and used 
 to survey every night his day’s failures and 
 guccesses: ‘‘I hide nothing from myelf; I 
 
174 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 pass over nothing. For why should I be 
 afraid of any of my errors, when I can say ; 
 ‘ See that you do it no more, now I forgive 
 you.’ ”* Seneca was a lovable man, but even 
 his friends have to own that other people, 
 rightly or wrongly, did not forgive him quite 
 so easily. At all events, there are many, and 
 these among the best of men, who cannot 
 forgive themselves and have not done it — 
 men who feel in sober earnest that if they 
 are not to be burdened for ever with past 
 failure, if they are to be clear of old taints, 
 if they are to be relieved of the obstacles that, 
 as a result of the characters they have 
 developed, block their access to other men, 
 it must be by another, and that this other 
 is in plain fact Christ Himself. That is the 
 common Christian belief, shared by all the 
 Christian communities; and, if Mr. Lowes 
 Dickinson is right, “most of the best men’’ 
 must, ex hypothesi, be outside those com- 
 munities. Each man must decide this for 
 himself; but our present concern is to see 
 what the love of Jesus is for those who find 
 
 * Seneca, de ira, iii., 36, 3. 
 
VICTORY IN CHRIST 
 
 175 
 
 most in Him, and one point, on which they 
 are all agreed, is this belief that in Him the 
 sin of the past is taken away. They certainly 
 live on the basis of being able, by His strength 
 daily given, to overcome the repeated impulse 
 of evil from without or from within, and of 
 being, in the New Testament phrase, “kept 
 by the power of God.” “We are more than 
 conquerors through Him that loved us.” 
 That is the Christian language, right or 
 wrong. 
 
 With this aspect of Christ as the giver of 
 the victory over disorder, as the one power 
 that can “ keep our hearts and thoughts,”* 
 we may associate the contribution of the 
 historical Jesus and the permanent Christ to 
 sanity in the common business of life, to the 
 quiet mind, to sense in religion. Here is a 
 religion that is not trance or ecstasy, nor 
 ritual and ceremony, neither delirium nor 
 Spw/xeva, “ but righteousness and peace and 
 joy in the Holy Spirit”; and this works out 
 in the most ordinary affairs of human inter- 
 
 * Perhaps it is worth while to note that, Phil. iv. 7, St. 
 Paul wrote “ thoughts,” and a little study of his experience 
 pf thoughts and their movements may explain what he meant. 
 
176 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 course. Neither George Fox nor John Wesley 
 started with any idea of an immense develop- 
 ment of English industry and commerce, as 
 the result of his work — very far from it. They 
 thought of eternal life. How, then, have the 
 societies they founded done so much in 
 English trade? When one reflects upon the 
 material on which Wesley, at any rate, had 
 to work, the wonder grows. It is evident 
 that conversion meant in hundreds of cases 
 what it means still — a clearing of brain, and 
 a disentangling of faculty, which, quite apart 
 from spiritual things (if one may use so 
 careless a phrase), involve an extraordinarily 
 heightened effectiveness in the mundane 
 affairs of buying and selling, making and 
 planting, guiding and directing. 
 
 Have we studied enough the place of 
 prayer in the ordering of life and in the 
 development of character? What does its 
 perpetual reference of everything to the will 
 of Christ mean in self-criticism and self- 
 correction? Do we realise enough what 
 Christian people have gained in every way 
 from this constant reminder of the love of 
 Jesus, of His life and death, and the associa- 
 
PRAYER AND PAIN 
 
 177 
 
 tion of the soul with its Saviour? There are 
 those who call all this delusion, auto- 
 suggestion, and the like. We may ask if 
 any other delusion, any other variety of auto- 
 suggestion, has done so much in making solid 
 character, sane, healthy, normal, and effec- 
 tive? Can we persuade ourselves that in a 
 rational universe delusion does better than 
 truth? Prayer, we must remember, for the 
 Christian is nothing without Jesus Christ. It 
 is worth while to weigh the effect of the love 
 of Jesus in this direction also. 
 
 With this we may connect the new attitude 
 to pain. Jesus Himself, we read, deliberately 
 associated Himself, His claims, and His 
 nature, with suffering. That fact the Church 
 could not forget, nor would its critics allow 
 it to forget it. He was “ crucified in weak- 
 ness,” and it was remarked that He refused 
 the anesthetic draught. And a part of the 
 Christian life, for Paul, at least, was identifica- 
 tion with Christ on this side of His ex- 
 perience — ‘‘ the fellowship of His sufferings.” 
 ‘‘ With Stupidity and sound Digestion man 
 may front much,” wrote Carlyle in Sartor, 
 but these are not the endowments with which 
 
 I? 
 
178 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 the Christian faces pain — he is sensitive to 
 it, and must be, if he is to do his work in 
 the world. How else can he have sympathy 
 with people whose first need it is? What, 
 then, has it meant to men to realise the 
 first-hand knowledge of pain that Jesus Christ 
 had, pain of body and mind and heart — ^to 
 know that He understands what He is to 
 heal ? 
 
 I have been told by a missionary from 
 India that once, ill with fever, she lay groan- 
 ing, and, I suppose, scarcely knowing what 
 she said or why, she kept repeating “Ah I 
 me! ah! me!” Her ayah overheard her 
 and, mistaking the syllables, said: “Yes, 
 Memsahib, that is it ; Amen ! Amen ! ” and 
 the white woman learned anew the lesson she 
 had come to teach. This is the effect of the 
 love of Jesus in making men and women 
 willing to bear pain as long as He chooses 
 they shall, in the faith that what His love 
 assigns or tolerates is not very much amiss. 
 It, too, must have contributed more to man- 
 kind than we remember. Think of Bunyan’s 
 contentment to be in prison, “ God . . . 
 satisfying of me that it was His will and mind 
 
THE LIFE OF JOY 
 
 179 
 
 that I should be there,” and his resolve after 
 twelve years of it to continue there on the 
 same terms “ till the moss shall grow on 
 mine eyebrows.” 
 
 On this follows naturally the new life of 
 joy that we find in the Christian Church — the 
 new song, as it is called in the Apocalypse. 
 ” A musical thought,” says Carlyle,* “ is one 
 spoken by a mind that has penetrated into 
 the inmost heart of the thing; detected the 
 inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that 
 lies hidden in it ; the inward harmony of 
 coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, 
 and has a right to be, here in this world. All 
 inmost things, we may say, are melodious; 
 naturally utter themselves in Song. . . . All 
 deep things are Song. It seems somehow the 
 very central essence of us. Song; . . . See 
 deep enough, and you see musically; the 
 heart of Nature being everywhere music, if 
 you can only reach it.” 
 
 The early Christian did reach it. The Holy 
 Spirit, said Hennas, is a glad spirit.f Synesius 
 
 • Heroes and Hero Worship, Lecture III. 
 t Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates, 10, gi- 
 
i8o 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 was told the same by old men when he was 
 depressed at becoming a bishop, and they also 
 told him that the Holy Spirit gladdens His 
 partakers.* Augustine found the Church 
 glad; and so it goes on through the ages.f 
 The hymn-book is a volume of Christian 
 evidences — the product of generations of 
 thinking and living. Thought and feeling, 
 inherited experience and individual experi- 
 ment, all go to the making of a great hymn. 
 We do not give enough attention to what 
 lies behind, and lies in, our hymn-books. 
 How much man — so to speak — must there be 
 in a hymn, or any poem, if it is to last 
 a generation, and many generations, and still 
 express the deepest thought and experience of 
 God that men know? How much of life is 
 there in Jesu dulcis memoria? It has to be 
 remembered, too, that the hymn-book is in 
 the main a Christian product. Cleanthes 
 wrote a sort of hymn to Zeus or Fate; but 
 nobody sang it. The Christian hymn implies 
 the congregation — ^an entire community shar- 
 
 * Synesius, Ep. 57, p. 1389, Mig-ne. 
 
 t Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Paed., i., 22 ; The Church 
 fhe one body that remains rejoicing always and for ever. 
 
THE HYMN 
 
 i8i 
 
 ing the same happiness; and Jesus Christ is 
 the “inmost thing” whence it all comes. 
 
 Thus, the biographer of Francis of Assisi 
 writes : “ Drunken with the love and com- 
 passion of Christ, the blessed Francis did 
 at times make such songs, for the passing 
 sweet melody of the spirit within him, seething 
 over outwardly did oftentimes find utterance 
 in the French tongue, and the strain of 
 the divine whisper that his ear had caught 
 would break forth into a French song of 
 joyous exulting. At times he would pick up 
 a stick from the ground, and setting it upon 
 his left shoulder, would draw another stick 
 after the manner of a bow with his right hand 
 athwart the same, as athwart a viol or other 
 instrument, and, making befitting gestures, 
 would sing in French to the Lord Jesus 
 Christ.”* Poetry, as Wordsworth put it, is 
 “ the spontaneous overflow of powerful feel- 
 ings. ”f 
 
 I take one illustration only — a hymn made 
 by the first English hymn-writer, the mystic 
 
 * speculum Perfectionis, cap. xciii. The Mirror of Perfection, 
 tr. Sebastian Evans, p. 165. 
 
 t Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800. 
 
i 82 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 Richard Rolle of Hampole (? 1290-1349), 
 a precursor in some ways of the Reformation, 
 e.g., in his emphasis on the love of Christ. 
 He marks three stages in his course, which 
 he calls calor, canor, and dale or ; and the 
 singing came to him by surprise, and after 
 that his experience is what he says quite 
 simply : T otiens glorior, quotiens nominis tui, 
 Jesu, recordor. His theory of the religious 
 life is in amore Dei cane re et jubilare quasi 
 raptus super terrena, in se deficere et in Deum 
 pergere. Here are a few of his verses :* 
 
 I sytt & syng of lufe-Iangyng fat in my hert es bred : 
 Ihesu my keyng & my joyng, whyne* war I to fe led ? 
 Ful wele 1 wate in al my state, in joy I sulde be fed : 
 Ihesu me bryng til fy wonyng,* for blode fat fou base 
 sched. 
 
 Demed he was to hyng,’ fe faire aungels fode : 
 
 Ful sare fai gan hym swyng,'* when fat he bunden^ 
 stode, 
 
 His bak was in betyng, & spylt hys blissed blode, 
 pe thorn corond fe keyng, fat nayled was on fe rode.* 
 
 * The Latin sentences will be found in Horstman’s edition 
 of Rolle, vol. ii., Introduction, p. xiv. The verses are in 
 vol. i., p. 76. 
 
 ' Why not ? * Dwelling. ^ Hang. * Beat. ‘ Bound. * Cross. 
 
RICHARD ROLLE 
 
 183 
 
 Whyte was his naked breste, & rede his blody syde, 
 Wan was his faire face, his woundes depe & wyde; 
 pe iew})is' wald not wande to pyne® hym in }>at tyde : 
 Als streme dose of pe strande, his blode gan downe 
 glyde. 
 
 Blynded was his faire ene, his flesch blody for-bette; 
 His lufsum iyf was layde ful low & saryful vmbesette. 
 Dede® & lyf began to stryf wheper myght maystre 
 mare, 
 
 When aungels brede was dampned to dede® to safe 
 oure sauls sare. 
 
 Lyf was slayne & rase agayne, in faire-hede'* may we 
 fare ; 
 
 And dede* es broght til litel or noght, & hasten in 
 endless kare. 
 
 On hym pat pe boght hafe al pi thoght, & lede pe in 
 his lare“ ; 
 
 Gyf al pi hert til Crist pi qwert,'“ & lufe hym ever-mare. 
 
 If Art is the offspring of Joy, we have 
 also to remember Charles Lamb’s emphasis 
 on the sanity of true genius. When, then, we 
 find in the Christian life the combination of 
 the deepest and intensest joy with sanity and 
 self-discipline, we have surely favourable con- 
 ditions for great Art. While Christ’s teaching 
 
 ^Jews. “Torment. ® Death. ‘“Beauty. “Learning. **Joy. 
 
184 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 seemed to some to suggest that all things 
 temporal are vain, to others it was as clear 
 that the historical Jesus did not live in 
 a vain show — rather in a beautiful world, 
 the work of His Father. Historically, in 
 Christ Art found itself again, and pro- 
 duced great works of deeper significance. 
 The new value of life and of man was 
 bound to tell. This is one way in 
 which the joy associated with the belief in 
 Jesus Christ has affected mankind. It is a 
 large subject, and it would take us too far 
 and too wide in historical research to pursue 
 it; for the moment all we can do is to note 
 that the debt of Art to the Gospel is far 
 larger than people of the artistic temperament 
 sometimes recognise. Their quarrel is with 
 its control — and control is yet the one thing 
 needful for such temperaments, if they are to 
 achieve Art. ; 
 
 Two points only I wish to suggest while 
 we are dealing with Joy. Most of us miss 
 a good deal of its value, because we contuse 
 it with more fugitive emotions, and come to 
 look on it as a mere idle flash, like summer 
 lightning that illumines nothing. That is 
 
“ THE DEEP POWER OF JOY ” 185 
 
 superficial criticism, as Wordsworth would tell 
 us : 
 
 With an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy. 
 
 We see into the life of things. 
 
 A great poet is apt tO' be more of a 
 psychologist than we suppose, and a saying 
 like this, taken with Wordsworth’s descrip- 
 tion of the poet as one “who looks at the 
 world in the spirit of love,’’* should lead us 
 to a truer estimate of Joy and its significance. 
 With this in our minds we shall be less 
 disposed to undervalue Joy as an index to 
 fundamental Truth; and when we realise the 
 perennial joy that keeps breaking out in the 
 Christian community, with its “deep power’’ 
 of insight, work, and endurance, we shall be 
 better able to measure the meaning of the 
 love of Jesus. 
 
 For, in the next place, the joy that springs 
 from love, like love itself, points to a personal 
 centre. If Wordsworth’s love of Nature and 
 joy in Nature ,seem to suggest that this is 
 wrong, the reply is that for Wordsworth 
 
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800. 
 
i86 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 neither was Nature impersonal, nor were 
 animals, or even flowers and plants, incapable 
 of personal feelings.* It is the abstract noun 
 that is the most hopeless of all things, barren 
 of comfort and barren of power. That sort 
 of mistake the Christian Church has gener- 
 ally managed to avoid, and the reason lies 
 in the fact that the very source of everything 
 was for the Church a historic personality. 
 There have always been people for whom an 
 abstract proposition is invariably more con- 
 vincing than a fact; but most of us walk 
 better with at least one foot at a time on 
 earth. It has been the salvation of the Church 
 that Jesus was a person, and not a doctrine. No 
 one, as Dr. Rendel Harris once put it, can sing 
 How sweet the name of Logos sounds I 
 On the contrary, Giacopone dei Todi, the 
 friend of St. Francis, comes far nearer the 
 real thing in his hymn on the Nativity :f 
 Fac me vere congaudere 
 Jesulino cohaerere 
 Donee ego vixero. 
 
 Our last point in this long lecture shall 
 
 * See Lines written in Early Spring, 1798. 
 t Cf, Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. 286. 
 
CHRISTIAN HOPE 187 
 
 be to remind ourselves of the place of Hope 
 in Christian experience: 
 
 Hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays, 
 
 For its own honour, on man’s suffering heart. 
 
 Hope is not an easy virtue. There is death 
 to grapple with — and all men’s theories of 
 death' — 'extinction and the transmigration of 
 souls, “ eternal re-dying ” as it has been called. 
 Life, when one is young and forgets age and 
 death, is a gay thing for the pagan ; but every 
 pagan litany ends in a shriek of terror, or 
 the grim, set teeth and hard mouth of despair. 
 From the first, however, it has been noticed 
 that the inscriptions on Christian graves in the 
 catacombs and elsewhere have a different note 
 from those the pagan carved.* The belief 
 
 * Cf. Marucchi, Christian Epigraphy (Eng. tr.), No. 34 : 
 
 IN NOMINE 
 QVIESCIT 
 
 and No. 84, a curious combination of Greek and Latin ; 
 
 an 
 
 anchor 
 
 AHMHTPIC ET AEONTIA 
 CEIPIKE • 4 >EIAIE • BENEMEREN 
 TI • MNHCQHC • IHCOTC 
 O • KYPIOC • TEKNON . . . 
 
 a 
 
 dove 
 
i88 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 in immortality rested on Jesus Christ, and 
 there it still rests — a faith that finds help in 
 several suggestions of value, but in the long 
 run rests on Him.* Men who believe in 
 Him will take the risk of there being no 
 eternal life ; in any case they do not care much 
 about it apart from Him. 
 
 The Christian martyr deserves mbre 
 sympathetic study than he has had. There 
 were foolish and noisy martyrs, but their talk 
 need not obscure for us their action. Still, 
 in the main, the martyrs were quiet and com- 
 posed. “ Miserablest mortals,” writes Carlyle 
 when he reaches Louis XVI. on the scaffold, 
 ” doomed for picking pockets, have a whole 
 five-act Tragedy in them, in that dumb pain, 
 as they go to the gallows, unregarded; they 
 consume the cup of trembling down to the 
 lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the 
 justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard 
 thing to die.” Yet, with a full sense of pain 
 and shame and popular execration, utterly 
 unhelped by human sympathy, men and 
 
 * C/. Herrmann, Communion with God, p. 290 (Eng. tr.) : 
 “ We cannot think of the personal life of Jesus as some- 
 thing that could ever be given over to annihilation.” 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MARTYR 
 
 189 
 
 women faced death, quite gladly, and quietly.* 
 It is easy to say; “Yes, they looked beyond, 
 and did it for eternal rewards.” Eternal 
 rewards look poor on the other side of the 
 vivicomburium, the stake and the faggots. 
 The motive, however, was not the thought 
 of what Jesus Christ would do for them, but 
 a great consciousness of what He had done, 
 of what He was — sheer gratitude and love.f 
 The same sure hope shows itself in work 
 and service. Marcus Aurelius’ famous Diary 
 is surely the most desperately hopeless book 
 ever written. Omar and Ecclesiastes have a 
 clear enjoyment of their literary work; 
 Marcus had as little joy or hope as ever man 
 had who got through a life of work without 
 hanging himself. But the Christian did not 
 work without hope. “ Christ lives,” wrote 
 
 ♦Clement of Alexandria (Strom., ii., 125) quotes Zeno’s 
 saying, that the sight of one Hindu enduring the flame was 
 better than all the declamations about pain, and he points, 
 not unjustly, to “ the boundless fountains of martyrs daily 
 before our eyes, being burnt, impaled, and beheaded.” On 
 martyrdom, perhaps the best things to read are Tertullian’s 
 Scorpiace and On Flight in Persecution. 
 
 t See on this Clement of Alexandria, Strom., iv., 14, on 
 love to the Lord as the motive in martyrdom, 
 
190 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 Luther, “and does not sit at the Emperor’s 
 but at God’s right hand, else we should have 
 been lost long ago.’’* The vision of the 
 triumphant Christ may seem to some a fancy; 
 yet what it has meant in constraining power 
 and in resultant victory it is not easy to com- 
 pute. It is the men who have believed in 
 the eventual supremacy of Christ who have 
 won Him what supremacy He yet has, though 
 they themselves — justly enough' — would say 
 that it was He who did it through them. The 
 great note of Christian song is given in the 
 Apocalypse : “ Thou wast slain and Thou hast 
 redeemed us. ... To the Lamb be blessing 
 and honour and glory and power for ever 
 and ever.’’ 
 
 Throughout this lecture I have tried to set 
 out side by side what has been actually 
 achieved by the Christian Church and in the 
 Christian man, and what the Church — the 
 community at large and the individual in 
 particular — has said to explain how such 
 things were achieved. My task has been 
 history rather than philosophy; and if the 
 
 * Letter of 9 July, 1530, to Justus Jonas, 
 
THE FACT AND ITS MEANING 19 1 
 
 Church’s language has been dreadfully un- 
 philosophic in the judgment of some people, 
 still, it is the historian’s business to remember 
 Othello’s bidding: 
 
 Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, 
 
 Nor set down aught in malice. 
 
 We shall not understand Church or saint, 
 republic or trust company, poet or warrior, 
 on the basis of a revised version toned down 
 to suit a priori judgments. We must have the 
 actual — word and deed, however foolish ; and 
 we must remember — ^especially the historian 
 must remember — that word and deed are 
 nothing till they glow with the light of the 
 whole personality behind them. This and 
 that the Church has done; this and that, 
 one Christian saint or another; and we know 
 it. Nothing in this lecture is unfamiliar 01 
 out of the way. It is all as common as can 
 be ; not a street-corner crowd with a Salva- 
 tionist officer in its centre, but the story of 
 the Church in the centuries is there. My 
 task is to remind you of what you know, and 
 to ask if we understand it in all its wonder and 
 significance. Not till then can our opinion 
 
192 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 be final. It is a story of power. The language 
 of the Church and its explanations may be 
 all wrong; but it represents a real force. If 
 there is better language to express that force, 
 let us have it by all means ;* but if the better 
 language leaves out, as sometimes happens 
 when tales are improved, the gist of the whole 
 Story — then the old language will be nearer 
 the fact. The Christian Church has tried 
 again and again to express what most it means 
 in other language, but it has not succeeded; 
 it can find no other account of love and power 
 than that they are bound up with Jesus Christ. 
 
 * Supposing the better language found, the first experi- 
 ment might be to substitute it for the familiar expressions of 
 the New Testament, and to see how the book read when 
 Jesus had been eliminated in favour of the more accurate 
 expressiop, 
 
LECTURE VI 
 The Criticism of Jesus 
 
 S O far in the course, of which this is the 
 last lecture, our aim has been to dis- 
 cover along what lines we may reach 
 the actual experience of the Christian Church 
 — setting fact, in the first place, before theory, 
 in the endeavour to understand what the 
 Church means before we pronounce upon it. 
 From the start we have realised that 
 experience is hard to grasp in its fulness in 
 any case, and is only to be known by such 
 an identification as will let the original 
 factors act upon the mind again, and, as far 
 as possible, in the original way. Point by 
 point, in our study of the Church and its 
 experience, we have been brought back to 
 Jesus Christ, for at each step we found 
 the Christian community at one in the con- 
 viction that everything depends upon Christ. 
 In every phase of its life the one thing that 
 decisively differentiates its experience from 
 
194 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 that of the world around is its relation to Him. 
 He is the historical source of the whole move- 
 ment; He is the moving factor still; — such, 
 rightly or wrongly, is the fixed belief of the 
 Christian Church, after a great deal of experi- 
 ment, both in trying to minimise the place 
 He must hold, and in trying to avail itself of 
 what it calls “ the unsearchable riches of 
 Christ.” Throughout, a tacit challenge is 
 offered to the critic : “ Do you understand 
 Him? Do you see what it is that drives 
 the Church back on to Him in every age and 
 in every situation ? ” Great as the part has 
 been which the Christian communities have 
 played in human history, the whole, according 
 to the Christian, is, after all, a mere phase of 
 the activity of Jesus Christ. The statement 
 may sound preposterous or paradoxical, but 
 for the moment it does not concern us to 
 pronounce judgment upon it. Our business 
 — ^as we have agreed so often — is to realise 
 before we judge; and, however odd the funda- 
 mental conviction of others may sound to us, 
 we have to see for ourselves what they really 
 mean, and what they are trying to express — 
 not least when this conviction is strongly held 
 
THE JUDGMENT UPON CHRIST 195 
 
 by a community the thoughts and lives of 
 whose members have so profoundly affected 
 human history. 
 
 This lecture will be devoted to the con- 
 sideration of some methods of approach to 
 the pivotal question in every study of the 
 Christian movement — viz., the personality 
 which is its centre. N o man, however possessed 
 of truth himself, can make up the mind of 
 another; Jesus Himself never attempted to 
 do that for anyone; but it is possible to put 
 evidence before men, or, better still, to suggest 
 ways in which they may apprehend it for 
 themselves by personal adventure. 
 
 Why must we undertake to form any 
 judgment upon Jesus Christ? Why is it im- 
 possible to let Him alone ? In the first place, 
 because we are confronted by the historical 
 Christian Church, and cannot get away from 
 it, however much some of us may wish to be 
 rid of it. The Christian Church is there; 
 the whole of Christian history is there, with 
 all the endless ramifications of influence it 
 has exerted upon mankind. To refuse to 
 consider such matters is to cut ourselves off 
 from humanity and its experience, to count 
 
196 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 too much of it alien to us. It is only 
 possible to be human as one is open in heart 
 and mind to the life of all men; and to be 
 closed to what has meant so much is to be 
 half-men at best, to lack that sympathy and 
 intelligence for others which makes us men, 
 and by which alone we can hope to grow. 
 We cannot by our own choice cut ourselves 
 off from the deepest force mankind has 
 known — a factor as powerful in the present 
 as in the past — and keep our manhood 
 undiminished. 
 
 There the Christian Church stands, and in 
 the centre of all things for it is Jesus of 
 Nazareth. There are those who make des- 
 perate efforts to disprove His historicity, to 
 convince themselves that He never existed. 
 Such endeavours are quite intelligible ; if the 
 Christian Church has to be got rid of, Jesus, 
 the historical Jesus, must go first ; and every 
 attempt made to torture historical evidence 
 to suggest that He never taught and never was 
 crucified at all, is a recognition that for the 
 Church all depends on Him. 
 
 A religion, it is sometimes urged, is the 
 weaker for having an historical figure as its 
 
THE HISTORICAL BASIS 
 
 197 
 
 centre and resting on an historical basis ; and 
 Christianity, accordingly, is doomed to share 
 the fortunes of the historical Jesus. Thus 
 the Swami Vivekananda, the great leader of 
 the Vedantic movement in modern India,* 
 urges that Hinduism alone can be the 
 universal religion for mankind, for “all the 
 other religions have been built round the life 
 of what they think an historical man, and 
 what they think their strength is really their 
 weakness, for smash the historicality of the 
 man and the whole building tumbles to the 
 ground. Half the lives,” he continues, “of 
 these great centres of religion have been 
 broken into pieces, and the other half are 
 doubted very seriously. As such, every truth 
 that has its sanction only in their words 
 vanishes into air again.” We need not discuss 
 the Swami’s principles, which bear the usual 
 marks of quick thinking, but we may accept 
 one of his sentences and apply it to Jesus 
 Christ, for whom he no doubt designed it : 
 “ Smash the historicality of the man and the 
 whole building tumbles to the ground.” 
 
 * See C. F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India, pp. 128-132, 
 158-159 ; Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 252-260. 
 
198 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 Whether a religion needs a historical basis, 
 or is better without one, is another issue, and 
 is at best a rather abstract question. The 
 main issue here for us is the historicity of 
 Jesus. If the ordinary canons of history, used 
 in every other case, hold good in this case, 
 Jesus is undoubtedly an historical person. If 
 He is not an historical person, the only 
 alternative is that there is no such thing as 
 history at all — it is delirium, nothing else; 
 and a rational being would be better em- 
 ployed in the collection of snuff-boxes. And if 
 history is impossible, so is all other knowledge. 
 
 Another line, however, is suggested, which 
 has the merit of sense, and has, moreover, 
 such support as some supposed historical 
 parallels will give. Jesus, it is conceded, is, 
 of course, historical, as Zoroaster, Buddha, 
 Socrates, and Muhammad are historical. 
 Each of these four gave mankind a great 
 impulse, and so did Jesus; and neither in 
 their case nor in His does the value of the 
 religion rest on the person of the teacher. 
 The suggestion is attractive, but one or two 
 things diminish its importance. In neither 
 of the four parallel cases can it be said, as 
 
THE FOUNDERS OF RELIGION 199 
 
 in the case of Jesus, that the influence of the 
 teacher as a personality has not declined as 
 the generations have separated men from him. 
 The schools of Socrates and of Zoroaster are 
 practically 'extinct — apart from two interest- 
 ing but small communities of Zoroastrians 
 in Yazd and Bombay.* Buddha’s religion 
 or philosophy is not, in the form in which he 
 taught it, a faith that greatly moves the masses 
 of mankind. The religion of Islam bears on 
 it, indeed, the impress of Muhammad’s per- 
 sonality — a fatal inheritance, which keeps men 
 in a backwater wherever the religion of the 
 Quran really prevails. On the other hand, 
 no one can say that since the Reformation the 
 Christian nations have been retarding the 
 world’s progress. We may lament that they 
 have had so many wars and been guilty of 
 so much wrong dohe against primitive 
 peoples, but we must recognise that these 
 defects they share with all mankind, while the 
 progress is their own. There is something 
 about Christianity, candid students of human 
 affairs will admit, that is of value. What is it ? 
 
 * On the Zoroastrians of Yazd, see E. G. Browne’s delight- 
 ful Year among the Persians, chapters xiii. and xiv. 
 
200 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 What is the real value of Christianity? 
 There are those who say at once: “Not its 
 theology.” That, they urge, stands very much 
 on a level with similar constructions, as 
 fanciful and as unproven, which other re- 
 ligions can show; there is little choice in 
 Folklore, they tell us. But the ethics of 
 Christianity are sounder. Christians may not 
 actually manage to “ love their neighbours 
 as themselves,” — indeed, some clever people 
 say it is better they should not quite succeed 
 at it — but their average decent grasp of the 
 ideas of altruism and social service is a good 
 thing for society, and it would be a pity if it 
 were lost. On the other hand, it is sometimes 
 urged against the Gospel that it is essentially 
 in its ethics that it fails; that it teaches men 
 submission and contentment, to turn the other 
 cheek and to bear with oppression, confiscated 
 cloaks and commandeered miles; that it is, 
 in reality, by pow, essentially an engine of 
 middle-class industrial tyranny.* 
 
 * Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, says : “ Christianity, in 
 making a merit of such submission, has marked only that 
 depth in the abyss at which the very sense of shame is lost ” 
 — and so on. History is against him, if that counts. 
 
THE REAL VALUE 
 
 201 
 
 Whatever has to be said of Jesus, no one 
 can read the Gospels with any intelligence 
 and suggest that He was the emissary of any 
 government or middle class, inculcating ideas 
 to secure their predominance. However much 
 may be uncertain, it is certain that He was 
 an original man — earnest, quick, clear- 
 sighted, and fearless, no man’s agent. If 
 oligarchies and despotisms have used the 
 Church that bears His name, and applied 
 parts of His teaching to their own ends, they 
 have had as often reason to regret it when 
 men caught His mind and studied His 
 thoughts un-garbled. His teaching. He would 
 have said, was never meant for second-hand 
 use. He, at all events, never aimed at being 
 a captain of echoes. It is not real criticism to 
 judge Him by echoes, nor by organisations 
 that have lived on echoes. 
 
 We turn, then, to His teaching — to that 
 “ sublime ethic ” in which we are told to look 
 for the real value — ^and here we find un- 
 expected allies. Modern Jewish students of 
 ancient Judaism tell us that there is very little 
 that is original in the teaching of Jesus, as 
 Christian scholars would see if they would 
 
202 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 take the trouble to go to the original 
 documents instead of lazily depending on St. 
 Paul or the warped narratives of the Gospels.* 
 Even the so-called Golden Rule is found in a 
 negative form in one of the Jewish fathers.f 
 Jewish morality, it is said, has been steadily 
 written down; it has always been as good as 
 Christian, and the great Jewish moralists have 
 
 * For a thorough going defence of Jew and Pharisee, see 
 Gerald Friedlander, The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on 
 the Mount (London, 1911). His view is that “the career of 
 Jesus as prophet and Messiah was an entire failure” (p. 6); 
 “ the Lord’s prayer is merely an adaptation of nine verses 
 of Ezekiel” (p. 165); “we have not seen any good reason 
 to prefer the teaching of Jesus to that of the Old Testament, 
 and of the Scribes and Pharisees” (p. 45). Mr. Friedlander’s 
 polemic against Mr. Claude Montefiore is significant. A very 
 different view of Pharisaism is taken by another Jewish 
 scholar of the same name — Moriz Friedlander — “brought 
 up,” as with real feeling he says in self-defence, “ in 
 Pharisaism, which I learnt to know from its noblest and 
 deepest side, which I lived up to manhood.” 
 
 t It is interesting to find the same kind of comment in Mr. 
 Yoshio Markino’s book. When I was a Child (p. 93). “ The 
 
 latter [the New Testament] was a great disappointment for 
 me. Of course, the Sermon on the Mountain is very high 
 ethic, but these were not new lessons to me. Many Oriental 
 philosophers have talked about the ethics equal to that 
 sermon long, long ages before.” The book is full of in- 
 terest for anyone concerned in any way with the spreading 
 of Christianity in the non-Christian world. 
 
JEWISH PARALLELS 203 
 
 a parallel for everything of worth in Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 To this reasoning two replies have recently 
 been made. The Jewish scholar, Moriz Fried- 
 lander, frankly takes the line that Jesus 
 offered the Pharisees something higher than 
 they knew, and that they made a fatal mistake 
 in refusing it.* Wellhausen’s famous reply 
 takes the Jewish attack more simply — “Yes, 
 it is all in the Talmud — and how much else ! ” 
 We may, however, ask a further question. 
 Is it only because there is inferior matter in 
 the Talmud that Christ prevailed? Is the 
 world really so apt to be moved by moral 
 maxims ? By catchwords, yes — men in groups 
 
 * Moriz Friedlander, Die Religiose Bewegungen innerhalb 
 des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu (Berlin, 1905); Synagoge 
 und Kirche in ihren Anfange (Berlin, 1908). He speaks 
 of Jesus “ being like a meteor streaming in light across the 
 world, whose kindling and enlightening rays could never 
 again be extinguished “ and if that light was wei\ed{yerhullt) 
 by short-sighted and dark Pharisees and worldly priests, it 
 broke out and still breaks out ” {S. u. K., p. 151). “ Jesus 
 
 died a heroic champion for the truth and for the people’s 
 redemption. He died because he tore the veil from the face 
 of the hypocritical Pharisees — the ‘ coloured,’ as the Talmud 
 calls them — and showed the great masses their true nature ” 
 (S. u. K., p. 155). “ For this work of man’s redemption, 
 
 Jesus lived and offered himself up ” (f?. B., p. 339). 
 
204 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 and communities are from time to time the prey 
 of catchwords, but not for long, as Abraham 
 Lincoln’s well-quoted saying suggests. But 
 the world moved by maxims ? 
 
 Alas 1 the great world goes its way I 
 It never did and it never would consider the 
 Rabbis or their maxims — 
 
 Far less consider them again! 
 
 Let them show how they anticipated Jesus 
 in every moral precept He gave — what does it 
 matter? Who cares? It was Jesus, not Hillel, 
 that conquered the ancient world, en toytoi 
 NIKA was never thought or said of any Jewish 
 symbol. If Christianity were no more than 
 a heap of precepts, it might interest men 
 to-day as little as the Talmud. We need not 
 invoke the evidence of Paul, who had at least 
 as good a knowledge of first-century Judaism 
 as most of us have. Our Jewish critics have 
 cleared the air for us, and helped us most 
 materially. If the sublime ethic, the altruism, 
 and so forth, are all in Judaism, then the real 
 value is somewhere else. As Mr. J. M. 
 Robertson says : “ The fundamental source of 
 error in this connection is the assumption that 
 mere moral doctrine can possibly regenerate 
 
THE DIFFERENTIA 
 
 205 
 
 any society independently of a vital change 
 in social and intellectual conditions.” We 
 may differ as to how this vital change is 
 to be produced, but the sentence as it stands 
 is sound. It is a vital change that is needed, 
 and the Christian Church has always known 
 it and said so. The differentia between the 
 Christian faith and all other religions is the 
 personality of Jesus Himself. “When one 
 loses Christ,” said Luther, “all faiths (of the 
 Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common 
 rabble) become one faith.”* 
 
 We haveicome back to our problem again 
 — the formation of some serious judgment 
 upon Jesus Christ Himself. Here is the force 
 that historically has transformed the thoughts 
 of men, their standards, and their life. The 
 old world to which He came has become 
 new; the Lamb of God has taken away 
 already much of the sin of the world. We 
 have to study how He has done it. He begins 
 with a group of a dozen or so men, living in 
 great intimacy with Him; and I am not clear 
 that there is anything in all Christian history 
 so full of wonder as the transformation of 
 
 • Quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma, vii. 199. 
 
2o6 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 these men.* Again and again it has come 
 to me with surprise, even with embarrassment 
 — how came the change in them ? What made 
 it ? Through them again He has forced Himself 
 upon the world — quite quietly. The tide itself 
 could not come up so noiselessly. The world, 
 itself, in an oblique way, has accepted His 
 canons — for the criticism of other people. It 
 has recognised Him, too, as its chief difficulty^ 
 the very ground and foundation of the Church 
 of which it is so weary. He stands the 
 permanent life of that Church, which has 
 sacrificed so much and done it so gladly for 
 Him, and which only lives, it assures us, in 
 virtue of His perpetual presence. 
 
 Here we touch a theological problem, which 
 I am wishful to avoid at present. We have to 
 think at once of the historical Jesus and of 
 the permanent Christ, and if we plunge im- 
 mediately into the vexed question of their 
 relations, it will take us into an area where 
 it may not as yet be profitable to spend our 
 time. For this is, above all, a matter that is 
 not to be settled on a priori grounds, on the 
 basis of our preconceptions. It was precisely 
 
 * See p. 171. 
 
DECISION AS TO CHRIST 
 
 207 
 
 to avoid this that throughout this course we 
 have gone to history first, to enlarge our range 
 of actual facts and to deepen our under- 
 standing of the facts we already have. For 
 the facts with which we have to deal are 
 not objective dead things — like empty shells 
 among pebbles on a beach — but living things, 
 like Luther’s “truths with hands and feet’’; 
 not always intelligible at the first glance, but 
 always relevant. 
 
 Bearing in mind how much we have to 
 learn and to assimilate before we are ripe 
 for a judgment upon Jesus Christ, we have to 
 realise that such a judgment has to be made. 
 All day long, as Jesus hung on the cross, the 
 crowds passed Him ; and each man’s life was 
 affected by the judgment he made or did not 
 make. The priest or the Pharisee who 
 mocked — the soldier who sat at the foot of 
 the Cross and diced — the women who wept — 
 the pious people who turned away their faces — 
 Simon who carried the cross — ^each man’s life 
 was conditioned for ever by his attitude that 
 day, whether he thought so or not. So, 
 through the centuries, the procession of man- 
 kind has moved past the Cross, judging, and 
 
2o8 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 made or unmade by their judgments 
 upon it. You and I are face to face 
 with it now; some judgment upon it is 
 inevitable — we cannot escape it. He is the 
 central figure in all human history, and on 
 our attitude to the centre all depends for us. 
 On our judgment rests in great measure our 
 use and place in society — ^as we ignore or 
 admire, turn away or follow, hate or love. 
 Him who has meant and means most for all 
 mankind. How are we to judge Him? 
 
 In the rest of this lecture I want to offer, 
 not a judgment, but a method — a caution and 
 a reminder of some qualifications that we must 
 have, if we are not to judge in a shallow way.* 
 
 First of all, let us recapitulate a few points. 
 We have to remind ourselves again and again 
 that we have to touch the fact independently 
 of preconception, to know it from within, and 
 to know it in its full significance and its true 
 perspective. A hundred years or so ago, 
 Tieck, writing of Novalis, said : “ A spirit of 
 
 * Beng-el's sentence at the beginning: of his Gnomon (Pref. 
 i vi.) supplies a useful caution : Quisquis in Scriptura inter- 
 pretanda aliquid navare vult, se ipse explorare debet quo jure 
 id facial. 
 
THE DIFFICULTY OF CRITICISM 209 
 
 such originality must first be comprehended, 
 his will understood, and his loving intention 
 felt and replied to; so that not till his ideas 
 have taken root in other minds, and brought 
 forth new ideas, shall we see rightly, from the 
 historical sequence, what place he himself 
 occupied.”* The words may surely be applied 
 to the more difficult task we have in hand, and 
 yet how often it is true that, as Bishop 
 Creighton wrote: “We are clear by missing 
 out half the elements involved.” 
 
 We have further to remember that it is the 
 task of criticism to distinguish the highest 
 values, for these are the true ones. Anybody, 
 it is said, could write a set of verses as good 
 as such and such a poem of Wordsworth; but 
 the question is. Who could equal him at 
 his best? “A line of Wordsworth’s,” wrote 
 Lamb, “ is a lever to lift the immortal spirit.”! 
 And the illustration may suggest to us another 
 thing. Do we remember how, in every other 
 sphere, the critic has to be trained and is only 
 trained by association with the masterpiece? 
 that Wordsworth had to grow his own public, 
 
 * Quoted by Carlyle in his essay on Novalis. 
 
 t Letter to Barton, 15 May, 1824 (Lucas, No. 328), 
 
 14 
 
210 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 because reading England knew only too well 
 that his poetry “would not do,” for the simple 
 reason that they had never seen any poetry 
 like it before ? Who will say he is ripe enough 
 to judge Jesus Christ? How many of us have 
 judged Him from the Stoic or the Epicurean 
 standpoint after all? We live in the twentieth 
 century, so far as journalism and electric 
 transit are concerned; and our minds have 
 learned from nineteen centuries not enough 
 to differentiate us from the Stoics and 
 Epicureans who laughed at Paul on the 
 Areopagus. Remember what Lamb said 
 about the men who talked literature at him in 
 the East India Company’s office;* and let 
 us ask how far we are trained enough for the 
 judgment we have in hand. The acutest 
 minds can be singularly unintelligent. Jeffrey, 
 when he penned the opening sentences of his 
 famous review on Wordsworth, little thought 
 that, with all his brilliance and taste, he was 
 making his name a byword for ever for bad 
 criticism. 
 
 There is another caution of which we need 
 often to remind ourselves. We are to apply 
 
 * Letter of i8 February, i8i8 (Lucas, No. 229J 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 21 I 
 
 ourselves to the task of judging Jesus Christ, 
 and to do it we have (as it is called) to re- 
 construct His personality. To those who 
 know anything about Him the very words will 
 be alarming enough. Anyone who has tried 
 to reconstruct a personality, however simple, 
 knows quite well — knows acutely in proportion 
 to the pains he has given to the task — how 
 difficult it is. Wordsworth tells us how to him 
 
 the lonely roads 
 
 Were open schools in which I daily read 
 With most delight the passions of mankind, 
 Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed ; 
 There saw into the depth of human souls. 
 
 Souls that appear to have no depth at all 
 To careless eyes. 
 
 It is the careless eye that does the mischief. The 
 mimic and the caricaturist represent a higher 
 stage — a. little higher. It is the essence of 
 their work — the virtue and the defect of it — 
 that they always give their subject from one 
 angle. Their representations convey character, 
 we say, but never completely. The sharp nose 
 or the squint in the cartoon suggests the man 
 at once, if it is only half-a-dozen strokes of 
 the pencil. But a personality is a more corn- 
 
212 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 plicated thing. Character is many-faceted. It 
 would be better, indeed, to drop such a 
 metaphor from a polished stone, and to try 
 another more living. Light and shade pass 
 over the long grass as the wind sways it this 
 way and that, now in and now out of the 
 shadow of the tree, tree and grass both 
 moving in the breeze, and the play of the 
 gleams upon the blades is infinite. There are 
 characters as various. Coleridge applied to 
 Shakespeare the Greek epithet “myriad- 
 minded,” which he remembered or invented. 
 Let us think over the character and the per- 
 sonality, with which we have to deal in Jesus 
 Christ, rather more carefully. The general 
 teaching of the Gospel is intelligible and 
 simple; and it is amazing how, if you let 
 people alone with the Gospels, they will under- 
 stand Jesus Christ, if they are simple enough 
 and true enough. But we have for our 
 purpose to gain what Paul called “ the measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” 
 
 There are four qualifications, if I may so 
 call them, that I would suggest for anyone 
 who proposes to make some judgment upon 
 Jesus Christ; and every one of them is so 
 
KNOWLEDGE OF THE FACTS 213 
 
 very obvious that I feel reluctance in putting 
 them forward. But the carelessness of men and 
 women in forming and expressing opinions 
 is one of the astounding things in life ; it is so 
 general and it implies so much profound in- 
 difference to truth. It is of itself a negation of 
 God. It is no new thing. In the Gospels 
 we find our Lord remarking upon the in- 
 sensitiveness of men to fact, and challenging 
 them to face fact for themselves. 
 
 First of all, then, I set — ^^and I do it quite 
 simply and without irony — the knowledge of 
 the plain facts of our Lord’s life as recorded 
 in the Gospels, and of the facts of the 
 Church’s history. This seems so obvious as 
 not to need mention, but the Gospels do not 
 receive that study to which they are entitled. 
 People have a general impression of them at 
 best, and learn with surprise (to quote an 
 instance) that in the narrative of the Nativity 
 the Magi are in one Gospel and the Shepherds 
 in another. When I read Professor Lake’s 
 book on the Resurrection, I realised with 
 some shame that I had never followed out 
 any single Gospel in its story of what 
 happened, but had in my mind a careless 
 
214 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 conflate version, , which had come to me I 
 did not know how. How many of us have any 
 clear idea of the characteristics of the four 
 writers of the Gospels — to say nothing of Q 
 or the Logia ? How many of us have studied 
 the methods of Matthew and Luke in using 
 Mark and their other material? 1 will go 
 further, and, waiving all this detailed work 
 on our authorities — ^elementary enough — I 
 would ask if we know the events of our Lord’s 
 life and His words ? One has not far to go 
 to meet extraordinary ignorance of these, and 
 it does not seem to stand in the way of sweep- 
 ing judgments upon Jesus Christ.* 
 
 I have spoken in a previous lecture of the 
 permanent value to us of the historical Jesus 
 as a safeguard against the complete evapora- 
 tion of the Gospel into theory — no imaginary 
 danger, as the history of the Church can show. 
 I need say nothing at this point of the intense 
 relief it is at times to take refuge in the plain 
 tale of the life and teaching of the actual 
 Jesus — and the whole of it, when we are 
 
 * Quam sapiens argumentatrix sibi videtur ignorantia 
 humana, is the caustic remark of Tertullian {De Sped. 2). 
 
ON READING THE GOSPELS 
 
 2^5 
 
 bombarded with ingenuities and eschato- 
 logies. The beauty, and the sanity and the 
 power of these plain books without adjectives 
 come full of healing to the soul; and one 
 recalls with sympathy how eighteen centuries 
 ago the plain style of the Christian’s books 
 was one of the things that attracted Tatian to 
 Christianity.* 
 
 What happens when people yield to this 
 attraction ? Here are a few words, not my own, 
 but those of one who was brought up quite 
 without religious training, but found under 
 some stress that life needs a base in God : 
 “ And then I began to read the Bible. I was 
 always coming on bits of the New Testament 
 in books; and I tried to believe the appeal 
 lay in the style. But then I took my courage 
 
 * Tatian meant more particularly the prophets. In passing 
 it does seem worth while to ask how the writers of the 
 Gospel came to write as they did — plain fact, no comment, 
 no word of admiration for Jesus or of condemnation for His 
 enemies. The same sort of reserve has won for Thucydides 
 a name, among modern scholars, for intellectual coldness and 
 aloofness — as if it were impossible to convey real feeling 
 without saying so. Ancient critics, however, saw and felt the 
 power and pathos of Thucydides through the reserve; and 
 the quietness of the evangelists surely adds incalculably to 
 their story. 
 
2i6 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 in both hands and read the New Testament 
 right through — ^and saw there was nO' contact 
 (with God) except in Christ.” 
 
 We may ask the man who criticises Jesus 
 Christ if he has honestly read that history — 
 with the decent modicum of attention that 
 is due to a book which means so much to 
 men and women. With a great work, a single 
 reading is of little use ; it is only intimacy that 
 counts. One might ask, further, whether the 
 book has been read with any sense of that 
 aftergrowth of human association, which, in 
 the case of master-works, adds so much to 
 the value of what the writer had consciously 
 in mind, or, more truly, developes what he 
 felt from what he expressed. Such books 
 never yield their meaning to the hurried 
 reader, as much of the criticism of Euripides 
 (for example) will prove. It is something to 
 read a masterpiece in the copy some friend 
 has used and pencilled, and to follow that 
 friend along with the author, ‘‘ reading where 
 the quiet hand points.” The New Testament, 
 if one took the trouble to read it so, is full 
 of such marks. Think of that chapter which 
 Knox on his death-bed asked for, as the one 
 
HISTORICAL IMAGINATION 
 
 217 
 
 “ in which he had first cast anchor.” * The 
 New Testament is not to be understood fully 
 without the community behind it, for which 
 it was written and which has lived with it 
 all the centuries, till (in more senses than 
 one) it knows it by heart. 
 
 All this brings me to what I may call the 
 second qualification — the historical imagina- 
 tion. Once again let us recall Carlyle’s words 
 on Novalis — of the value of a book in introduc- 
 ing us to ” some earnest, deep-minded, truth- 
 loving man ” till we can follow the movement 
 of this thought.! Can we read the Gospels till 
 we penetrate the phrase and see the man — on 
 the hillside among his friends, and catch the 
 gleam of his eye, and mark what he does 
 with his hands;}; — how the casual word touches 
 some hidden spring, as it were, and from 
 the treasure of the heart comes the speech — 
 and such speech! Or have we a higher and 
 keener attention for Novalis? Is it fair, it 
 may be asked, to expect so much of ordinary 
 people? That is to beg the question. The 
 
 * John xvii. ; Hume Brown, Life of Knox, ii., p. 287. 
 
 t See p. 59. 
 
 t Cf. Mark x. 21 ; i. 41 j and Acts xiii. 16 ; xxi. 40 ; xxvi. i (all 
 three of Paul speaking). 
 
2i8 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 critic is not an ordinary person, if there are 
 any ordinary persons at all. We are all 
 capable of much more mental energy than 
 we care to exert; and when a man begins to 
 talk of ordinary people, it is generally a sign 
 of shuffling of some sort. In any case, those 
 of us who are in earnest about Jesus Christ, 
 who wish really to understand Him, may be 
 expected to have higher standards of know- 
 ledge and sympathy. 
 
 But these, after all, depend less on 
 intellectual than on moral character. It is 
 remarkable how Carlyle, in describing one 
 and another of the great men in his Essays, 
 says sooner or later the same thing about 
 each of them, even when they are so different 
 as Boswell and Burns and Voltaire — that the 
 man had a great loving heart, and that was 
 how he could interpret men and speak to 
 men and win them. What degree of loving 
 insight have you ? is Carlyle’s question,* and 
 
 * Cf. the passage in the essay on Mirabeau : “ The real 
 quantity of our insight, — how justly and thoroughly we shall 
 comprehend the nature of a thing, especially of a human 
 thing, — depends on our patience, our fairness, lovingness, 
 what strength soever we have : intellect comes from the whole 
 man, as it is the light that enlightens the whole man.” 
 
“ON HIS KNEES’’ 
 
 219 
 
 we may ask it of the student of the Gospels. 
 For anyone who loves the Gospels can under- 
 stand them and live himself into the scenes 
 they describe till he knows the company there 
 to some purpose. Sympathy is the highest 
 mode of intelligence. The word has suffered 
 from being used by dull people to cover their 
 coldness, and it is safer tO' counsel reading 
 with admiration. Goethe said that Schlegel, 
 if he was to criticise Euripides, ought to do 
 it “on his knees.” If we tiy this plan with 
 a new author, we find often enough that after 
 a few pages we have unconsciously risen from 
 our knees; the man is not great enough or 
 true enough to keep us there. But, be it 
 sympathy or admiration, some such plan is 
 necessary if we are to get the full significance 
 of any great work or atiy great man, and be 
 liberated frotn the small attitude of the merely 
 clever person. 
 
 The third qualification is some natural or 
 cultivated sympathy with the fundamental 
 ideas and feelings of Jesus Christ, and it 
 follows from what we have just been consider- 
 ing. Does the critic stand near enough to 
 the man whom he criticises, in interests, in 
 
220 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 tastes, in training? Once more the emphasis 
 falls on the necessity of the critic being 
 trained. The criticism of the outsider is 
 everywhere recognised as worthless. Is a 
 critic of Jesus to be trusted who has no 
 essential sympathy with religion; who does 
 not see how native it is to man, like art and 
 music ;* whose instincts for religion have 
 become atrophied? Is he not, rather, like a 
 colour-blind person, who has not studied 
 pictures, let loose in a picture-gallery ? What 
 can he say without giving himself away ? 
 Jesus is, after all, the highest term in religion; 
 and just as a child prefers a coloured picture- 
 postcard of some intelligible kitten or horse 
 to any Raphael or Botticelli, the man, for 
 whom religion is not a passion, who is not 
 intensely conscious of those needs which 
 religion alone can satisfy, cannot be expected 
 to care about Jesus. The savage often does 
 not; why should the Epicurean, or anybody 
 
 * Cf. John Watson, The Philosophical Basis of Religion, 
 p. 187; “Religion is not something accidental to man, but 
 something inseparable from his rational life. It is that un- 
 dying and inextinguishable faith in the divine, the denial 
 of which is ultimately the destruction of all other beliefs.” 
 
THE TRAINING OF THE CRITIC 221 
 
 else to whom, by his own choice in life or 
 by accident, Jesus is as yet unintelligible 
 in His greatness? 
 
 Let us take two aspects of what religion 
 meant to Jesus, and ask ourselves, first, how 
 far we understand His passion for the 
 redemption of men? That is quite a simple 
 and obvious thing to ask. “ The Son of Man 
 came to seek and to save that which was lost.” 
 Do we realise how much He implied by “ lost,” 
 or to what point of salvation He meant to 
 bring those He found? We are all touched 
 to-day, more or less, by the social needs of 
 millions of our fellow-countrymen; but how 
 far are we prepared to go to save them, and 
 how high do we think of raising them ? Is our 
 maximum the spiritual heights of the middle 
 classes ? Let us try to realise the intensity 
 and the passion with which Jesus gave Him- 
 self “a ransom for many ” — ^^and ask ourselves 
 how much we are prepared to face for the sake 
 of the vulgar and the depraved ? If we share 
 His mind at all on this point, we shall be 
 able to understand Him growingly; and as 
 we do so, we shall realise more and more 
 the amount of redeeming which He saw men 
 
222 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 need. Indeed, as men come into the mind 
 of Jesus, the more conscious they grow how 
 much they need Him. 
 
 Do we realise, again, in any vivid or true 
 way the extent and nature of Jesus’ sense 
 of God? how He sees and apprehends God 
 in all things, not merely as a great item in 
 every situation, but as the one factor? how 
 alive He is for the fact of God? how full 
 all life is of God for Him? Have we any 
 sympathy with, or intelligence of, one whose 
 life is so filled with the power and the joy 
 of the real presence of God? All this is 
 obvious in the Gospels, if we are trained 
 enough in our business of observation to see 
 the flame in the burning bush. To put it 
 more directly. Have we any sense of needing 
 God, or do we crave at all for contact with 
 God ? If we do not, we shall not be interested 
 in Jesus. 
 
 The fourth qualification shall be the sense 
 of insufficiency. Plato spoke of philosophy 
 being the offspring of wonder;* and it was 
 
 * Theaetetus, 154E. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica, i., 2, who 
 adds that the cessation of wonder is the end of all philosophy. 
 
THE SENSE OF INSUFFICIENCY 223 
 
 a beautiful and illuminating thought. It is 
 wonder that makes the poet and the painter; 
 and it is only as they embody it in their 
 work that it appeals to men ;* it is only as we 
 accept it that we can learn the meaning and 
 value of their art. When this faculty of 
 wonder dies out in us, we lose the world 
 and all it means of beauty and truth. There 
 is human nature, there is that morality which 
 is deeply implanted in man and without which 
 he can achieve nothing and cannot realise 
 himself — who, as the old phrase goes, is 
 sufficient for these things ? There are men 
 always in every sphere who are masters of 
 everything that is to be known there, and 
 can inform us completely — ^^and we turn away 
 from them ; they are weary, stale, flat, and 
 unprofitable. In religion it is the same; it 
 is only as we grasp its wonder that we can 
 begin to understand. In all these things, in 
 Nature, in art, in morality, in religion, the 
 infinite element is what appeals to the human 
 mind and soul. It is the experience of the 
 Church that in Jesus Christ is this same 
 
 * “ If a poem is not wonderful,” says a critic of our owp 
 day, “ it is nothing." 
 
224 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 quality, and that for His interpreter the same 
 aptitude for the infinite is essential. As men 
 study Him in earnest, they grow less satisfied 
 with their knowledge and their understanding 
 of Him; He goes beyond them, and they 
 follow here with the same sort of experience 
 that men have who take seriously any other 
 permanent aspect of God’s manifestation of 
 Himself* — the path is daily lit up with new 
 wonder, fresh surprises and new marvels 
 quicken the follower, as the exploration 
 extends. 
 
 The German Jew, Borne, said that Chris- 
 tianity is “ the religion of all poor devils. ”f 
 Jesus, in another vernacular, said much the 
 same thing. It is for the people who are 
 not satisfied, who know their need and feel 
 it progressively — the tempted, the beaten, the 
 miserable. Christ is most theirs who need 
 Him most and know it; and He is best 
 learned through the sense of our own limita- 
 tions. It is the old story of the Church — He 
 is known by acceptance. With Him, as in 
 
 * Cf. 3 . Striking sentence in Mark x. 32. 
 
 t Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, 
 vol. vi., p. 97. 
 
“TO KNOW CHRIST” 
 
 225 
 
 the case of every real interest, the secret of 
 knowledge is identification. “ To know 
 Christ,” said Melanchthon, “is to know His 
 benefits — not to contemplate His natures or 
 the modes of His incarnation.”* Luther said 
 the same : 
 
 “ The Sophists have described Christ — -how 
 He should be Man and God — they count His 
 legs and arms, and combine His two natures 
 together wonderfully ; and that is only a 
 sophistic knowledge of the Lord Christ. For 
 Christ is not called Christ for having two 
 natures. How does that touch me? But He 
 bears this lordly and comfortable name from 
 the office and work that He has taken upon 
 Him; that gives Him the name. That by 
 nature He is man and God, is His affair; 
 but that He uses His office and pours forth 
 His love and becomes my Saviour and 
 Redeemer, that is all to my comfort and 
 good.”t 
 
 * Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia ejus cognoscere, non 
 ejus naturas, modos incarnationis ejus contucri ; Intr. to his 
 Loci, 1st edition, 1521 ; quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma 
 (tr.', vii., p. 198, n. 
 
 -t- Quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma (tr.), vii., p. 2. 
 
 15 
 
226 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION 
 
 As we saw before, it is in action that truth 
 is discovered and tested,* by the application 
 of individual experiment to inherited ex- 
 perience. Jesus Christ is best understood in 
 the strenuous life of love and service of men 
 — in “ battles with dulness and darkness,” as 
 Carlyle called them — in the failure of our 
 strength, when His power comes into play — 
 in the endeavour to meet the need of other 
 men, when our own springs of help are dry 
 and we turn to Him- — in the wrestle with God 
 in the darkness, when He alone lets in the 
 light upon God for which we crave. ” Doubt 
 of any sort cannot be removed except by 
 Action. ”t It is in work of this sort alone 
 that the character can be trained, on which 
 depends the ‘‘loving insight” we need, and, 
 indeed, the mind with all its powers. ‘‘ How 
 can we,” asked Henry David Thoreau, ‘‘ex- 
 pect a harvest of thought who have not 
 
 * Falsehood, says Clement of Alexandria (Protr. 77), is not 
 got rid of by merely putting the true alongside of it, but 
 by using the truth. 
 
 t Christiani hominis est non de dogmatis magnifice loqui sed 
 cum deo ardua semper et magna facere. Zwingli, quoted by 
 Harnack, History of Dogma (tr.), vii. (end). 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 227 
 
 had a seed-time of character? ” How can we, 
 we in turn may ask, expect to understand such 
 a character, such a personality, as that of 
 Jesus Christ, if we have never grappled in 
 earnest with the powers of sin and misery, 
 over which He won the victory, “ not without 
 dust and heat ” ? 
 
 The last word for to-day is this. When a 
 man sets about judging some masterpiece in 
 art or literature, as long as he knows little 
 about it, he is pleased with his power of 
 judgment. But if he consort in earnest with 
 the masterpiece, till he knows it, the positions 
 are reversed, and he finds that the master- 
 piece becomes his judge at last — ^educates him 
 and tests him and shows him himself. Some 
 of us begin by judging Jesus Christ, and 
 find, as we come to know Him, that His 
 standards replace ours, that the very nature 
 of the case requires us, in the old phrase, to 
 learn of Him, and that where we started as 
 critics, we end as disciples — ^and are glad 
 of it. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Readers are reminded that the chief topics will be found in 
 the Table of Contents. They are, therefore, generally 
 omitted here. 
 
 Animistic peoples, 144, 147, 
 
 173 
 
 Apocalypse, 1 1 6 — 1 22 
 Aristotle, 87, 222 
 Arnold, Matthew, 16 
 Arrhabdn, 1 29 
 Astrology, 151 
 Astronomy, 6 
 
 Augustine, 83, 90, 94, too, 
 180 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 62, 93, 189 
 Auto-suggestion, 10 
 Authority, 43 
 
 Bdb, 24 
 Bengel, 208 
 
 Bernard of Morlaix, 63 
 Bernard, St., 180 
 Besant, Mrs., 146, 147 
 Bismarck, 158, 159 
 Boat-builder, 47 — 49 
 Borne, 224 
 Bousset, W., 158 
 
 Burnt Njal, 164 
 Buddhism, 22, 24, 25, 63, 
 171, 199 
 Bunyan, 178 
 
 Caesar, 75 
 Caste, 157, 158 
 Caird, E., 59 
 
 Carlyle, T., 22, 58, 59, 92, 
 106, 109, no, 177, 179, 
 188, 218, 226 
 
 328 
 
 Celsus, 1 12, 120, 125 
 Clement of Alexandria, 130, 
 139, 164, 226 
 Clement of Rome, 127 
 Clough, 34 
 Copernicus, 6 
 
 Daemons, 144 — 147 
 Darwin, 7, 8 
 
 Dei Todi, Giacopone, 186 
 Dickinson, G. L., 172, 173, 
 
 174 
 
 Dio Chrysotom, 133 
 Dogma, 39 
 Doxology, 1 16 
 
 Emerson, 106 
 
 Fatalism, 21 
 Fox, George, ii, 176 
 Francis of Assisi, 181 
 Friedlander, G., 202 
 Friedlander, M., 112, 134, 
 
 202, 203 
 
 Galileo, 6 
 
 Geology, 7 
 
 Gibbon, 2, 72 
 
 Goethe, 45, 81, 106, 219 
 
 Harris, Rendel, 186 
 Hebrews, Epistle to, 113, 
 114 
 
 Hermas, 179 
 
229 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Herodotus, 143 
 Hierodules, 154 
 Hinduism, 23, 135, 147, 148 
 History, 18, 19 
 
 Ignatius, 133 
 
 John, Gospel of, 114 — 116 
 
 Kawaguchi, 25 
 Kett, 156 
 Knox, 216, 217 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 183, 209, 
 
 210 
 
 Lawson, J. C., 147 
 Livingstone, 167 
 Longinus, 107 
 Luther, 73, 75, 100, 109, 161, 
 189, 203, 207, 225 
 
 Macrobius, 144 
 Markino, 202 
 Melanchthon, 225 
 Mendel, 9, 10 
 Milton, 6, 7, 88, 107 
 Muhammad, 22, 199 
 Mysteries, 126, 127 
 
 Name, power of the, 143 
 Neo-Platonism, 23, 86, 98, 
 I5S 
 
 Nereids, 147 
 
 Nicodemus, Gospel of, 122 
 Nietzsche, 63, 64, 131, 153 
 Norden, 107, 108 
 Novalis, 58, 208 
 
 Pagan world, 60 — 64 
 Paul, St., 66, 67, 68, 90, 
 98, 107, 1 13, 125, 130, 
 
 « 3 i, 134, 137 
 
 “ Perhapsology,” 80 
 Philanthropy, 128 
 Philosophy, 14, 84 — 86 
 Pilgrim in India, 94, 95 
 Plato, s, 18, 39, 51, 64, 93, 
 98, 168, 222 
 
 Plutarch, 62, 72, 98, 155 
 Poet, 27 — 30 
 
 Race, 19, 20 
 Rainy, R., 3, 55 
 Ransom, 121 
 Robinson Crusoe, 52 
 Rolle, Richard, 181 — 183 
 
 Seneca, 173 
 Shakespeare, 75, 89 
 Shaw, G. B., 91, 165, 200 
 Slavery, 120, 129, 134, 165 
 Stoics, 63, 73, 89, 93, 97, 
 
 Synesius, 156, 179 
 
 Talmud, 203 
 Tatian, 150, 151, 215 
 Tertullian, 23, 83, 129, 189, 
 214 
 
 Theory, 39 — 42 
 Thomas of Celano, 168, 
 169 
 
 Thoreau, H. D., 226 
 Tyndale, W., 73, 159, 160 
 
 Watson, J., 220 
 Wernle, P., 92, 117 
 Wesley, J., 73, 176 
 Woman, 162, 163 
 Wordsworth, W., 15, 17, 28, 
 181, 185, 209, 21 1 
 Wycliffe, 166 
 
 Zoroaster, 199 
 
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