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SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION








SOME ELEMENTS OF
RELIGION
Lent iLftvett
1870
BY
H. P. LIDDON, D.D.
CANON OF ST. PAUL'S
NEW YORK
SCRIBNER, WELFORD, & ARMSTRONG
i872




Perche, se tu alla virtui circonde
La tua misura, non alla parvenza
Delle sustanzie che t' appaion tonde,
Tu vederai mirabil convenenza,
Di maggio a piui, et di minore a meno,
In ciascun cielo, a sua intelligenza.
PAR. xxviii. 73-78.




TO.3abMtia liam Ogle, (t+zq aunt.
OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
WHOSE WORK AND CHARACTER SUGGEST
MANY PRECIOUS LESSONS
WHICH HE NEVER THINKS OF
TEACHING








ADVERTISEMENT.
THESE Lectures were delivered in  St. James'
Church, Piccadilly, during the Lent of 1870.
They were, at the time, through God's mercy,
of service at least to some minds,-anxious, if it
might be, to escape from perplexities which beset
an age of feverish scepticism.  It was accordingly
difficult to resist the practical reasons which were
urged in favour of publishing the Lectures; but
the announcement of their intended publication
was, perhaps, made, before the drawbacks which
must necessarily accompany the rhetorical treatment of such a subject as the present, in a permanent form, had been sufficiently considered. Moreover, a fulness and method of discussion which
satisfies the purposes of a Lecture, and which indeed is all that an audience will bear, must fall
altogether below the standard which may be reasonably looked for in a book, supposed to make




viii       /     A dvertisenzenZ.
any pretension whatever to claim the character of
a formal treatise upon a wide and serious subject.
Of this, upon further reflection, the writer became so strongly convinced as to have entertained the design of expanding these fragments
into a larger work. But, apart from the pressure
of other duties, he could not but feel that such
an  attempt would  destroy, together with the
identity of the Lectures, any moral or spiritual
associations that might cling to them; and, in
working for the  cause of Faith, as in other
matters,
"Un sou, quandcl i est assnre,
Vaut mllieux, que cinq en esperance."
The Lectures are therefore published as they
stand.  It will be borne in mind that they suggest only a few thoughts on each of the points of
which they treat; that they cannot but raise some
difficulties which they leave unanswered; and, in
a word, that their limits are not in any sense determined by those of the general subject, but only
by the number of Sundays in Lent.
WHITSUNTIDE, 1872.




CO N T E N TS
LECTURE I.
ffTiht Zunla~ in itent.
THE IDEA OF RELIGION.
Ps. cxliii. 8.
PAGE
Shew Thou mne the way that I should walk in, for I lift up my
soul unto Thee                                              1
LECTURE II.
cnab;urnTha~ in fitnt.
GOD, THE OBJECT OF RELIGION.
Ps. xlii. 2.
My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God: when shall
I come to ap7pear before the presence of God...   39
LECTURE III.
Efrb  uinba2 izn Lnt,
THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION-THE SOIJL.
Ps. viii. 4.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?...   81




x                         Contenzs.
LECTURE IV.
fouttj SWunbal in Lent.
THE OBSTACLE TO RELIGION-SIN.
S. JAMES i. 15.
PAGE
When desire hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when
it is finished, brinzyeth forth death.               128
LECTURE V.
fiftf  Sunba  in LLent.
PRAYER, THE CHARACTERISTIC ACTION OF
RELIGION.
S. MATT. vii. 7.
Ask and it shall be given you.....  166
LECTURE VI.
V aim 5unbar.
THE MEDIATOR, THE GUARANTEE OF RELIGIOUS
LIFE.
S. MATT. xxiii. 41.
Jesus asked them, saying, What think ye of Christ?..  204




LECTURE I.
Sirot Zuntlfap3 in tftnt.
TIHE IDEA OF RELIGION.
Ps. cxliii. 8.
Shew T7ou me the cway that I should walk in, for I lift uzp my soul unto T'lee.
xU2i age, it has been said, longs to be religious. If this
is too unguarded an assertion, it is at least true that
the instinct or sentiment of religion is treated among us
with more respect and sympathy than has been the case at
some past epochs of our national history.  Amid the debaucheries of the Restoration, and the shallow habits of
thought on the gravest subjects which marked portions of
the last century, Religion, in the broad sense of the term,
was largely discredited, even when it was not openly
scouted as a weakness or a superstition. Whereas in our
day religion is named, even by the irreligious, with the
forms if not with the sincerity of respect.  And some men
interest themselves'in religion as an abstract good, with
very great sincerity, who oppose by turns all that asserts
its power and presence in the world. Thus they declaim
B




2            _Re/ziov, hozw far welcozmed         [LECT.
against churches, while they explain that in doing this they
are befriending that true Religion which churches misrepresent.  Or, they would do away with priesthoods; but
then they are only anxious, while rescuing the fair jewel of
religion from clerical keeping, to make its sway more
imperial, by making  its mien  and  countenance more
human.  Or they make war upon theology-the theology
of Apostles, Fathers, Creeds; but theology, they declare,
again and again, is a pedantic product of the clerical understanding, and they for their part are passionately interested on behalf of the religion of the human heart. They
discredit " book revelations," and insist upon errors of fact
or errors of morals, which they hold to be discoverable
in the Bible; but they are all the more eager to profess
and feel a zeal for that unerring and sublime essence of
religion, which is not bound, as they phrase it, to the letter,
and which fires their enthusiasm in renouncing the letter.
And thus, however warmly the institutions, the ministers,
the beliefs, the sacred literature of religion, may be successively assailed, religion itself, we are assured, is respected;
or rather it is respect for and loyalty to religion-to religion
divested of accretions which have gathered round it and obscured its beauty during the lapse of time,-which is in fact
the animating motive of this most friendly and discriminating opposition.
That religion should be thus safeguarded as an idea,
when all that secures its practical power is by turns objected to; that the abstract, disembodied, intangible essence




I.]             ic tI/e- Malodernz   orldo.          3
should be so sedulously honoured, while its concrete forms,
its living and working embodiments, are opposed and denounced, is a fact which must engage attention.  How are
we to account for it? Is it that we live in a "period of
transition," when men have not yet faced the last consequences of the principles which they are are adopting, and hang
with a pardonable, althouglh illogical tenderness between
premiss and conclusion? Does the sacred name of religion
still command an awe which, while it is not strong enough
to protect many practical interests, can yet hedge around a
remote object with the forms of popular respect?  Is
it that, as of old, barbarian invaders, who will without
scruple devastate the precincts and sack the interior of
the temple, are pausing involuntarily, spell-bound, almost
terrified, upon the threshold of the sacred shrine?  Or
does the -esthetic feeling of our time, looking at human
life with the eye of an  artist rather than  with the
eye of a statesman  or philanthropist, prompt this interest on behalf of religion, as alone adequately representing and uphlolding the ideal side of human existence?
Does it anticipate, not without reason, the dull, barren,
uninteresting, prosaic level of existence to which we
should be reduced, if all that points upward in thought
and feeling could be utterly stripped from us, and
eliminated;  if human  life, could  be robbed  of the
most refining and stimulating influences that can be
brought to bear on it?  Or is this reserve of interest on
behalf of religion at bottom  a social, or political -if you




4             Why rYzei-/iolz is respeced.        [LECT.
like, a selfish-class instinct?  Is it order cowering before
approaching revolution, and endeavouring to support its
regiments and its policemen with forces summoned from
some higher world, whether of fact or fancy; with invisible
powers capable of making their way into the very heart of
the enemy's camp? Is it that we of this generation,who have
read in the annals of a neighbouring country the stern lessons
taught by eighty years of active or suppressed anarchy, are
more keenly alive than were our ancestors to the tremendous force of the volcanic passions latent in human nature?
Are we willing to grant that some religion at least is a
social necessity; a necessity iin the sense of Machiavelli, if
not in the sense of Jesus Christ? Are we satisfied that the
brute within us, if he is to be chained and imprisoned at
all, can only be taken captive by a superhuman mlaster,
and will never forfeit his destructive liberty, except at the
bidding of an unearthly creed?
Undoubtedly, it may be admitted that religion owes somethling, on the score of respect yielded to her as an abstract
idea, to each of these causes.  The awe which a reasoned
scepticism cannot always crush, the perception of what it is
that constitutes beauty in life, combine with the stern practical instincts of social safety, with the love of order, and the
anxiety to make property and life secure, to insist that man
must have something in the way of a religion.  Schemes of
independent morality, even if they were theoretically defensible, are not equal to resisting the impetuosities of passion,
or the exorbitant demands of a low self-interest.  " Take my




I.]       IV jluence of Mke szluecIzvJe syu21it.      5
word for it," said a great statesman, " it is not prudent as
a rule to trust yourself to any man who tells you that he
does not believe in a God or in a future after death."'
But a deeper reason for the fact we are considering, is to
be found in the wider conviction that religion is, if I may
so express it, an indispensable part of man's moral and
mental outfit.  Two causes have contributed to deepen this
conviction in modern times.
The first is the subjective spirit of the age, which
insists on looking at truth, not as it is in itself, in its
utter independence of the mind of man, but as it presents itself to man's mind, or rather as man's mind in very
varying moods apprehends it.  This spirit, while it has
weakened the public hold upon Creeds and Scriptures, has
directed attention, with an intensity unknown before our
day, to the needs of the human mind, and among them  to
its supreme need of a religion. It has indeed exaggerated
this into maintaining, as with Feuerbach, that all existinSc
religions are but the creations of human thought, which,
while it is really doomed to ain uninterrupted contact with the
world of sense, aspires to create, if it cannot discover, an ideal
world beyond; but this paradox only yields an additional
testimony to the need we have, as men, of some religion,
in order to do justice to our humanity.  Religion, says a
modern English writer, who certainly will not be suspected
of any desire to exaggerate its influence, is that " which
gives to man, in the midst of the rest of creation, his special
i Sir Robert Peel.




6          Ifzezence of zislor/ca sluclies.    [LECT.
elevation and dignity."l  And it was perhaps, upon the
whole, the most marked feature in the work of Schleiermacher, that when groping his way back from  the grim
intellectual desert into which many of his countrymen
had been led, under the guidance of the older Rationalism, he insisted with such emphasis and success upon the
necessity of religion in order to the completion of human
life.  Beyond any of his contemporaries, he saw  and
pointed out that by our capacity for religion; by our power
of looking beyond this deceptive and passing world of sense
to a higher world, invisible and eternal; by loyalty to
the obligations which that clearer sight imposes on us,
we men are best distinguished from the brutes around us.
Language itself, the physical dress in which we clothe
our thought, is not more distinctly royal among our outward human prerogatives, than that upturned countenance
which, as the heathen poet divined, is the symbol of our
intelligent capacity for a higher life.
The indispensableness of religion to human life has also
been forced on the mind of this generation by a deeper
study of history. The more we know of the annals of our
race, the more clearly is it seen how the greatest catastrophes,
and the most profound and far-reaching changes, have really
turned upon religious questions; and that the stronger and
more definite has been the religion, the more fundamental
and striking have been these results. Thus, for instance,
the modern history of Europe has been little else than a
i Froude': Hist. Engl. xii. 535.




1.]          XA mlore ermvazenz  carzse.              7
history of struggles fundamentally religious. A recent
historian of civilisation has indeed maintained that this is
true only of the past, 1 and that the present age has more and
more learned to restrict its enthusiasm to material objects.
But he forgets that religion does not cease to influence events
among those who reject its claims: it excites the strongest
human passions not merelyin its defenders,but in its enemies.
The claim to hold communion with an unseen world irritates
when it does not win and satisfy. Atheism has again and
again been a fanaticism; it has been a missionary and a persecutor by turns; it is lashed into passion by the very presence of the sublime passion to which it is opposed. WVe of
to-day know full well that no political subjects are discussed
so warmly as those which bear even remotely upon religion.
" The deepest subject," says Goethe, " in the history of the
world and of mankind, and that to which all others are subordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief." 2
While these causes make an interest in religion, of whatever kind, inevitable among thoughtful men in our day and
generation, they only reinforce, they do not obscure or
supersede, those permanent reasons for its influence, which
are part of our natural and human circumstances. Amnong
these it may suffice to mention one. It is a fact, certain to
each one of us, that we shall individually die. If science
could arrest the empire of death, as it has limited that of
disease; if thought, in its onward march throughout the centuries, could rob us utterly of the presentiment of an im1Buckle: Hist. Civ. i. 241-325.  2 Qu. by Luthardt.




8                  W/hal/ is rezg-izonz            [LECT.
mortality and of our aspirations towards a higher world, then
religion would retain, in the fixed circumstances of life, no
ally of anything like equal power. But there is the certainty,
present to each one of us in our thoughtful moments, never
entirely absent from  the thought of those who seriously
think at all, that an hour will come when we shall face the
problem of problems for ourselves and alone; when we shall
know by experience what really is beyond the veil, and how
it is related to that which we see and are here; and it is
impossible, with this prospect before us, to treat the voice
and claims of religion as wholly trivial or unimportant.'
But here the question arises as to what it is that man seeks
in seeking religion.  Or rather, what is religion?  We
know it when we meet it in life; we know it by its bearing,
by its fruits, by the atmosphere with which it surrounds
itself.  But what is it within the soul? what is its chief
element or substance? What is this power which does not
meet the eye, but which we trace in its results? what is the
true psychological account that must be given of it?
As we repeat the question, "What is religion," we find
ourselves, it may be, in the position of standing face to face
1 This is admitted, although, of course, in terms which the writer would
not adopt, by Mr. Buckle. Hist. Civ. i. 113.




I.]         Does zi consiszt  r Yrzg-tIfeefdizg-?              9
with a very old acquaintance, with whose countenance and
habits we have been familiar all our lives, but of whose
real self we cannot but feel we have a somewhat shadowy
perception.
1. Is religion, then, in the heart of man, to be looked
upon chiefly as the highest and purest form  of feeling?  Is
feeling the essential thing in true religion? So thought
no less a person than Schleiermacher.1   He makes religion
to consist in feeling —notably in our feeling of dependence
on a Higher Power; and his influence has won for this
representation  a wide  acceptance  in  modern  Protestant
Germany.2   Such in England is, or has been at times, the
practical instinct, if not the decision, of Wesleyanism  and
kindred  systems.3   Feeling, not knowledge; feeling, not
morality; feeling, not even conscience, is the test of acceptance-that is to say, of satisfactory religion. Acceptance
is warranted by the sense of acceptance; religious progress
is measured by the sense of enjoying more and more the
raptures of the religious life.
Nor, if we look either into the recesses of the human
heart, or into the historical expressions of religious earnest1 Schleiermacher, Christliche Glaube, i. pp. 6-14. He is expanding the
proposition that "Die Frdmmigkeit, welche die Basis aller kirchlichen
Gemeinschaften ausmacht, ist rein ftir sich betrachtet weder ein Wissen noch
ein Thun, sondern ein Bestimmtheit des Gefiihls oder des unniittelbaren
Selbstbewusstseins."  Compare p. 16. I)as gemeinsame aller derjenigen
Bestimmtheiten des Selbstbewusstseins, we!che iiberwiegend ein Irgendwohergetroffensein der Empfhnglichkeit aussagen, ist dass wir uns als
abhitngig fiihlen.
2 As with Nitzsch, Twesten, and others. Cf. Grinmm, Inst. Th. Dogm.
p. 19.
3 Compare the remarks in 2outbley's " Life of WVMesley,' p. 267.




To    "Fceli.zg" in I/ke Psaller and S. Pail.  [LECT.
ness, can the high place of feeling in the religious life be
rightly depreciated.  Feeling is the play of our consciousness coming into contact with its object: it varies in intensity according to the interest we take in that object: it
is a totally different thing in the case of a casual acquaintance and of a near relative. When, then, the soul is in
intimate contact with the Object of objects-with God,
-feeling, the purest and the most intense, is not merely
legitimate, but ordinarily inevitable.  How much of the
Psalter is feeling-the tenderest, the strongest, the most
loyal, the most affectionate! "Like as the hart desireth
the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, 0 God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God:
when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?"
"TWhom  have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none
upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee!"  "My
soul hangeth upon Thee: Thy right hand hath upholden
me."  " Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee, and am
not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee: yea, I hate
them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies!" 1
How profoundly is the religion of S. Paul, as we study it
in his Epistles, penetrated by feeling!  Always in felt
contact with an unseen Master; he is tender, he is vehement, he burns, he is melted: his dispositions towards his
fellow-llen are so various and keen, because in him feeling
has been educated in a higher Presence.-"The love of
Christ constraineth us:" "To nme to live is Christ:" "Who's. xlii. 1; lxxiii. 2.5; lxiii. 8; cxxxix. 21-22.




I.]     "'FeeAiino" uzlSi have a tZrle objectd.          I
shall separate us from the love of Christ?" " I live; yet not
I, but Christ liveth in me:" "Itf any man love not the
Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha."' 
But the question is not whether feeling be an element of
sincere religion; but whether it be the one most essential
element. And here two observations cannot fail to strike us.
In the long run, there can be, for well-ordered minds, no
strong play of feeling apart from a sense of the intellectual
truth of the object upon which feeling is bestowed.  To
lavish feeling, if it be possible to do so, upon a personage
who is even suspected of being mythical or half mythical,
is to prostitute feeling. Some idea, then, of the object of
feeling must precede the feeling, as well as a conviction
of the truth of the object so conceived of. We are told
that religious feeling is especially the sense of entire dependence upon a Higher Power: man's inmost soul hangs
confidingly upon the Power in which we live and move and
have our being.  But, then, what is this power?  That is a
question which must be answered before feeling can
determine its complexion. Is this power an impersonal
force? is it a blind fate or destiny? is it some vast
machine, having neither heart nor will, but moving onwards through endless cycles of destructions and recombinations, of life and death, unceasingly, resistlessly,
inexorably? If so, feeling at least cannot take the form of
absolute dependence: there is no such thing as surrendering yourself in trustful resignation to a piece of machinery,
2 Cor. v. 14; Phil. i. 21; IRom. viii. 25; Gal. ii. 20; 1 Cor xvi. 22.




12   "Feelz'iZg " inzCst lead lo r'Zlpracttice.  [LECT.
which may crush you to death at any moment in its
advance. Trustful dependence is only possible when that
on which we depend is seen to be a Person, and a moral
Person, that is to say, holy, truthful, compassionate, just.
But here we pass out of the region of feeling. It appears
that before feeling can trust itself, something is wanted
to guide and colour it. Knowledge is at least as essential
to religion as feeling; and knowledge of the Object of
religion, expressed in clear and precise terms, is after all
only another name for dogma.
But, moreover, feeling, even if intelligent, must accompany right moral effort, in order to be religious. Feeling,
even when directed to heavenly objects, may be, in its
substance, partly physical; and there is no necessary connection between feeling so originating and moral earnestness, or even a right morality.  Nay, it is very possible for
those who feel warmly to imagine, mistakenly enough, that
warm-^ feeling is the same thing as, or an adequate substitute for, acting rightly. He who said, " If ye love Me, keep
My commandments,"' implied that there are forms of religious passion, distinct no doubt from the true Christian
grace of love, which may co-exist with disobedience, and
may even appear to compensate for it. The Galatians had
not been the less willing to "pluck out their own eyes,"
out of devotion to S. Paul, at the time of their conversion,
because they afterwards looked on him as a personal enemy
for telling them  the truth about the Judaisers.2  The
I S. John xiv, 15..2 GAal. iv. 15, 16.




I.]         Is religion a kild of kizowledg-e'                 13
Apostle was not insincere who protestcd, " Though I should
die  with  Thee, yet will I not deny Thee;"l  albeit a
few hours later, at the crisis of danger, he could exclaim,
"I know not the Man." 2  Feeling is not necessarily moral
purpose; and its possible deficiencies on this side, as well
as on the side of knowledge, shew  that we cannot regard
it as alone forming the raw material of religious life.3
2. Is it then  more  nearly  true  to  say that the  one
essential thing in religion is knowledge knowledge of
God and of the things of God?  Somewhat of this kind
was the opinion of the Gnostics of the second century.
They regarded the Christian doctrines as simply an addition to the existing  stock of current human speculations,
and they ventilated what appear to us nothing less than
the wildest fancies under the protection of current Christian  phrases, which  served  to  decorate and  recommend
speculations that often had nothing to do with Christianity.
They thought that the Apostles had been unintellectual
persons, upon whose well-meant efforts they  had thenmselves improved.l   Since faith has in it a large moral element, their watchword was, not fcaith, but knowvledyge; and,
1 S. Matt. xxvi. 35.                   2 S. Matt. xxvi. 72, 74.
3 Hegel, Werke, xvii. 295 (qu. Grimm).  Grtindet sich die IReligion im
Menschen nur auf ein Gefiihl, so hat solches richtig keine weitere Bestimmung als das Geftihl seiner Abhtagigkeit zu seyn, und so wfire der Hund
der beste Christ, denn er trigt dieses am stirksten in sich, und lebt vornellmlich in diesem  Geftihile.  Auch erlosulngsgeftihle hat der Hund, wenn
seinem  Hunger duech einen Knochen Befriedigung wird."  This does
not exclude the truth that the affectionate loyalty of a dog for his master is
a rebuke to the coldheartedness of Christians; but it is rightly implied that
the religion of humanity mnust be based on something more than feeling.
4 S. Irenneus, Har. III. 12, 12.




14       "KInozA oedg'e" necessary  lo rezgzon,    [LECT.
in their own phrase, this knowledge was to be the salvation
of souls. 1
The history of the human mind repeats itself, and a
position which is at bottom akin to the foregoing, is
familiar to some of us in the philosophies of Schelling and
Hegel.  Here too faith is only the lower grade, the popular
form  of the religious  consciousness; its  most cherished
doctrines are only parables of the realities open to the eye
of  science  upon  which  the modern  thinker may  gaze.
His religion is thus mainly an effort of the intellect, which
is perpetually engaged in disentangling and distilling from
the rude forms of old-world creeds those abstract scientific
conceptions which are better suited to the palate of modern
philosophy. 2
It has already been implied that knowledge-true knowledge of truth-is of vital importance to religion.  No one
would question this, except in the interests of a morbid
fanaticism.   Religion is impossible without some knowledge of its object; and  our capacities for true religious
life must, to a certain extent, vary with our varying degrees
of religious knowledge.3   "This,"  says our Saviour, "is
1 Compare the account which S. Irenaeus gives of the Valentinians,
Hser. i. 6, 2.  Their contemptuous estimate of Catholic Christians is expressed in the phrase "oi 1i fpywv Kca 7rTo-reWs ptkLXs PE/3PatoCtecvo Kat lr T'77p
-reXefav 7yYvsev EXovTrs."
2 In the words of a more recent Hegelian writer, " Dass der Inhalt der
Religion und Philosophie derselbe sey, indem den Vorstellungen des religiiisen
Bewusstseyns ein ihner fern liegender Sinn untergelegt wird, den man
unverholen auszusprechen sich nicht getrauen darf. Daurver, Andeutung
eines Systemes speculativer Philosophie, p. 45, qu. by Grimm.
3 Rom. x. 2; Eph. i. 17; iv. 13; Phil. i. 9; Col.. 9, 10;ii. 2; 1
Tim. ii. 4; 2 Tim. iii. 7; Heb. x. 26; 2 Pet. i. 2, 3, 8; ii. 20.




I.]      bZlZ it nuZsl be accomjanied by love.       I5
life eternal; that they may know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, Whom  Thou hast sent."'   The
knowledge spoken of here, and elsewhere in the Bible, is
indeed not merely intellectual: it is knowledge in act;
it is the knowledge which is won by love and obedience,
as distinct from, although together with, intelligence.
Nevertheless, knowledge, in its ordinary sense of information apprehended by the undclerstanding, is indispensable
to religion.  Sight is not the power of walking or working;
but we cannot work or walk blindfolded without disaster.
Yet no mere action of the intelligence, however active,
upon the subject-matter of religion, is the true back-bone of
religion. Knowledge alone may only enhance responsibility.
If Christ had not come and spoken to the Jews, they had
not had sin: as it was, they had no cloke for their sin.2
S. Paul contrasts a merely intelligent apprehension of religious subjects with love. "Knowledge," he says, "puffeth
up, but charity edifieth."3   The whole  drift of S.
James' Epistle goes to shew the worthlessness, religiously
speaking, of unfruitful knowledge.   The hearer of the
Word who is not a doer, is compared with the man who
continueth in the perfect law of liberty besides looking into
it.  The first does but realize a fleeting and unproductive
impression; the second has undergone a change of life.4
The most intellectual of the Greeks, whose thoughts about
God and the soul might at times almost seem to anticipate
1S. John xvii. 3.        2 S. John xv. 22; ix. 41.
1 Cor. viii. 1.           8S. James i. 22-24.




1 6   Is relikzion azol/er zname for moral!ty P  [LECT.
Christianity, as they have been welcomed with the respect
of many a generation of Christians, has unwittingly warned
us of the religious impotence of mere culture, by staining his
pages, not once or twice, but habitually, with sympathetic references to crimues,tolerable enough to the public sentiment of
Athens, but the very names of which are defiling to Christian lips. The most intellectual Gnostics were sensualists;
sensualists upon a theory and with deliberation.l  And
modern history, if it were worth our while to consult it
here, yields many a warning that intellectual culture about
religious things is one thing, and genuine religion quite
another.  Henry VIII., who had been destined for the
English Primacy, was among the best read theologians of
his day; but whatever opinion may be entertained of his
place, as a far-sighted statesman, in English history, no
one would seriously speak of him as personally religious.
Intelligence indeed, however cultivated, is only a department of human life. Man is something greater than a cultivated intellect; even than an intellect cultivated by study
of the highest objects that can be presented to it,-by study
of the things of God.  More than this is needed to constitute religion; which, if it be not merely a sentiment or
passion, so certainly it is more than an intellectual effort,
however serious be its purpose or sublime its goal.
3. Are we then to say, with a large section of the nmodern
world, that the essential thing in religion is morality? This
1 S. Irenaeus, Hser. i. 6, 3.  6to 65 Kal Tr& aretp-y/Cvca 7rdvra di6eos oL
XEeNota-Tot 7rpdITovoltv, aWTwv,  wrepl Wv a ypa~4at raLfi6taroGLvTac, TobS aotoUVTas
aTa faoLhXetcav OeoO r) KX7pOPO/o'U7ELV. Cf. 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10.




I.]      Moralzty essenliael   o trzle relizgon.         I 7
was the teaching of Immanuel Kant. Religion, as he phrases
it, is a practical recognition of the Divine origin of the
moral law.1  And it is a doctrine which constantly meets
us in the society and the general literature of our own
country at the present day. Its popularity is easy of
explanation in an age when belief in the Unseen has been
seriously weakened among those classes of the people to
which the political necessity of strengthening virtues which
purify life and uphold society is pre-eminently obvious.
And certainly we must admit that religion has no more
appropriate work than the regulation of human life in
accordance with moral truth: it is in this province
especially that we look for evidences of its reality and
its power.  "By their fruits ye shall know  them," 2 said
its one great Master, of certain religious aspirants.  "Pure
religion," according to His Apostle, "and undefiled before
God and the Father, is this, to visit the fatherless and widows
in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the
world."3  In other words, it is abtive philanthropy and personal purity. The language used to describe it in the Bible,
implies that knowledge of religion and religious emotion are,
as we have seen, worse than incomplete, if they do not lead to
active goodness. 4 What a man knows or feels is of little import, until it is ascertained what he does, or rather what he is. 5
But it by no means follows that morality can be truly
described as the essence of religion.  It differs from religion
1 Quot. in Luthardt: Apologetische Vortriige, 1. 6. 2 S. Matt. vii. 16.
3 S. James i. 27.      4 S. Matt. vii. 22, 23; 2 S. Pet. ii. 20, 21.
5 Ps. xv. i. sqq.; xxiv. 3, 5; Rom. viii. 13, 14.
C




Is8      Morality, hozw related to relzgioz.   [LECT.
in this, that morality is conformity to a law of right, while
religion is essentially a relation towards a Person.  A
perfect, absolute morality will cover the same practical
ground as true religion. But if men endeavour to treat
morality as the only essential element in religion, and
accordingly attempt to plant it on some independent basis,
physical or otherwise, of its own —two things will happen.
Such a morality will be much narrower than a religious
morality; it will, in the judgment of religious men, present
an incomplete view of the real cycle of duty; notably, it
will fail to recognize that most important side of duty
which we owe exclusively to  God. But, besides this,
morality, divorced from religion, will tend more and more,
from the nature of the case, to approximate to a department of mere human law; to concern itself only with acts
and not with motives; to make the external product, and
not the internal governing principle, the supreme consideration. Morality, severed from religious motive, is like
a branch cut off from a tree: it may, here and there, from
accidental causes, retain its greenness for a while; but its
chance of vigorous life is a very slender one. Nor is it
possible to popularize a real morality, a morality that shall
deal withi motives as well as with acts, without unveiling
to the eye of the soul something more personal than an
abstract law.  It is when man has caught sight of the one
Perfect Being, and in the effort to escape from the weakness and degradations of his own earthly life, " lifts up his
soul" to this unseen, all-powerful, all-bountiful Friend,




I.]    Re,'oioni a bonzd betweezn mnz     azd God.            19
that he may hope to discover the true ideal of'his life, and
to realize it.  Religion is thus the constant spring and
best guarantee of morality; but morality is not the " essence
of religion."  Religion consists fundamentally in the practical recognition of a constraining bond between the inward
life of man and an unseen Person.1
The ancients were fond of discussing the derivation of
the word religion; and Cicero refers it to that anxious habit
of mind which cons over again and again all that bears on the
service of heaven.2 Lactantius may be wrong in his etymology, but he has certainly seized the broad popular sense of
the word, when he connects it with the idea of an obligation by which man is bound to an invisible Lord.3
With this the Biblical phraseology is in substantial harmony.  The expressions which describe the religion of the
earliest Patriarchs are in point; and, like much else in the
Pentateuch, they mould the later language of the Psalter.
Enoch  and Noah  are said to have "walked with Godl;"
Abraham was bidden " walk before the face of God, and be
perfect."'  Here God is represented as the bounden Companion of a man's life, as well as his all-surveying Judge
and Master; and this idea of religion as personal devotedness to God underlies all the representations of Scripture
1 Compare Eus. Preep. Ev. 1, 2.  X 7rp0S 7TO Eva Kac /4yvov ws arXrOes
o4o0Xo'yovule6Yv v 7e Kai 6vT'a Oedv adve'Evets Kati 7 KaTa TOVTOYv >X.
2 Nat. Deor. ii. 28. Qui omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, religiosi dicti sunt ex relegendo.
3 Inst. Div. iv. 28. Vinculo pietatis obstricti, Deo religati sumus, unde
ipsa religio nomen cepit. Compare the hostile phrase of Lucretius, " religionum se nodis solvere." Cf. St. Aug. Retract. 1. 13; de vera relig. xli. 55.
Gen. v. 24; vi. 9; xvii. 1.




20 Religionl a "covenant I" and "comm'union." [LECT.
on the subject.  Religion in the understanding, is the
knowledge of God,l —of His will and commandments; it is
the knowledge of His "mystery" or secret counsel revealed
in Christ.2  When the Jewish law had been given, religion
was practically a "walking in the law of the Lord;" 3 when
the Christian revelation has been made, it is an "acknowledgment of the truth which is after godliness." ~ But in this
truth, in that law, it seeks a Person; it is fundamentally
the maintenance of a real relation with the Personal God,
or with a Divine Person really incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Accordingly, religion, both Jewish and Christian, is described as a covenant; it is a bond or understanding
between the nation or the soul and God; or, still more,
from the point of view of a faith that worketh by love, it is
personal communion with God. "That which we have seen
and heard," says S. John, "declare we unto you, that ye
also may have communion with us, and truly our communion is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." 5
Thus religious life is more than feeling, since feeling may
be physical, misdirected, selfish.  It is more than knowledge,
which, even if it be complete and accurate, may fail to
govern the moral nature.  It is more than obedience to a
nmoral code, because such obedience, if sufficiently complete
to be religious, already implies relations to the Lawgiver.
And yet religion is feeling; it is mental illumination; it
is especially moral effort; because it is that which implies,
and comprehends, and combines them all. It is the sacred
1 Hos. iv. 1.   2 Eph. i. 17.
3Ps. cxix. 1; Cf. S. Luke i. 6.   4 Tit. i. 1.  r 1 S. John i. 3.




I.]       Characlerislics of a lrzie yrezgio-z.      2 I
bond, -freely accepted, generously, enthusiastically, persistently welcomed, whereby the soul engages to make a continuous expenditure of its highest powers in attaching itself
to the Personal Source and Object of its being. It is the
tie by which the soul binds itself to God, its true friend.  To
be thus bound to a person is to cherish strong, nay,
passionate feelings towards him; it is to seek to know all
that can be known about his wishes and character, and to
register this knowledge in exact terms; it is to obey
scrupulously all that is clearly ascertained to be his will.
" Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up
my soul unto Thee." This is the language of feeling, pure
and strong; it is the language of intelligence, ever desiring a higher knowledge of its Highest Object; it is the
language of obedience, the most absolute that man can
proffer. It is these, because it is the voice, the exceeding
great cry, of that unquenchable passion, of that irrepressible
aspiration, whereby'the soul of man shews forth its truest
dignity and highest virtue in seeking the better to know
and love and serve its Highest and Invisible Object; because, in a word, it is the language of religion.
II.
If the prayer of the human soul be granted, can we infer
from the needs of the suppliant any of the necessary




22  I. llysle.riozSZZess ofa tr'ze relibZious creed. [LECT.
characteristics of the great gift which is to relieve them?
To say that we can do so will not be " cldictating terms to
God," because He is not more the author of a religious
Revelation than of the moral and mental instincts which
demand it. To say that we can do so will not involve our
" paying court to the corrupt instincts of a fallen nature;"
because it certainly is not these instincts which seek a
close approach to a nearer vision of the Throne of Moral
Purity and Light. 3Nor will it compromise the True Faith
by drawing attention to some features which are, and must
be, more or less common to it with the false faiths whereby
man, again and again, during his long and weary history,
has sought to satisfy the noblest of his passions, even
when lie has only lighted up the dark canopy of heaven
from fires kindled by himself on earth. For in order to
exist at all, false beliefs must embody some, even considerable elements of truth; and conversely, the True
Faith, in order to be itself, must have something, both in
its form and in its substance, common to itself and to every
falsehood that opposes it.
1. First of all, then, an answer from God to the religious
needs of man will be, at least in some degree, a mysterious
answer: it will half unveil much which shades off into the
unknown and the incomprehensible. To profess to reveal
the Infinite, and yet to undertake to explain everything to
the perfect satisfaction of a finite understanding, is worse
than unreasonable. And a creed which should discover
nothing that lies beyond the province of our experience, can




I.]     Wky a  yure religion is mnyslerious.        23
have no pretensions to be a religious creed at all.  For
religion is not a relation to or communion with nature, or
with any natural force or law; it is communion with an
Invisible Person.  Certainly, we hear men speak of a
religion of art, of a religion of work, of a religion of civilisation. HIarmless metaphors these, if it be only meant
that all the occupations of life can and should be penetrated
and sanctified by the sense of God's Presence and Will;
but mischievous and misleading to the last degree, if it be
suggested that either art, or work, or civilisation is in
itself an end worthy of the highest energies of the human
spirit.  He only who made us for Hinmself-the Infinite
and Eternal God —can be the object of religion, and any
serious answer to the religious aspirations of humanity must
point to Himt. " Our preachers," said a German writer, referring to his university some thirty years ago, " having got rid
of the Christian doctrines by means of the higher criticism,
are now insisting with mnuch earnestness upon the importance
of taking regular exercise." 1 Regular exercise is no doubt
a matter of real importance in its way: but an advocacy of its
advantages, however impassioned, says nothing to that side
of our being which breathes the prayer, "Shew Thou me the
way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee."
That Christianity is mysterious,is no new objection against
it. Unquestionably it is mysterious.  In the year 1702,
Toland undertook to prove that " Christianity is not nmysterious:" but he only succeeded in leading a certain numI Dr. Tholuck to Dr. Pusey.




24        2. DefaziiZeness of OIrze rezigpiozz.    [LECT.
ber of minds to a belief that it is false.  That " the Gospel
contains nothing contrary to reason" is the conviction of
every Christian, who knows that right reason and revelation are alike gifts of God. That the Gospel "contains
nothing above reason," is an assertion so paradoxical, as to
be undeserving of a reply from  those who believe that the
historical and doctrinal statements of the New Testament
are integral elements of the Gospel. Toland, indeed, could
only make any approach to demonstrating his thesis, by
tampering with the ordinary and world-wide sense of the
term  " Mystery;" and since the days of Toland science herself has, by her discoveries, made men feel more keenly
than did our fathers the mysteriousness of Nature, and
through Nature, of Nature's GOD.
2. Next, God's answer to man's prayer must, at least
within limits, be definite. An answer made up altogether of
vague hopes, aspirations, surmisings, guesses, probabilities,
whatever its other merits, will not meet the specific needs of
man. What does man seek in seeking a religious creed?
He seeks intellectual satisfaction and moral support.  His
intellect asks for reliable information upon certain subjects
of the most momentous importance. How does he come to
be here? Whither is he going? What is the purpose and drift
of the various forms of existence around himnt? Above all,
what is the nature, what are the attributes and dispositions,
of that Being to Whom the highest yearnings of his inmost
self constantly point as the true object of his existence?
In asking that the answers to these questions shall be




I.]    Jioral and izlellec/zal reasons for ii.      25
definite, that what is certain shall be affirmed as certain,
what is doubtful as doubtful, what is false as false, he is
only asking that his religious information shall be presented in as clear and practical a shape as his information on
other subjects. In no department of human knowledge is
haziness deemed a merit: by nothing is an educated
mind more distinguished than by the resolute effort to
mark the exact frontiers of its knowledge and its ignorance;
to hesitate only when hesitation is necessary; to despair of
knowledge only when knowledge is ascertainably out of
reach. Surely on the highest and most momentous of all
subjects this same precision may be asked for with reverence and in reason; surely the human mind is not bound
to forget its noblest *instincts when it approaches the
throne and presence of its Maker.
Yet more necessary are definite statements of truth and
duty to the moral side of human life. To obey at all, we
must know what are the true limits of obedience, and what
the nature and authority of the lawgiver. A soldier under
fire has two things to do: first to attend to the word of his
commanding officer, and then to strengthen his will by all
the considerations which may enable him to do his duty.
Man, as a moral being, is engaged in a perpetual campaign
against the invading forces of temptation which assail him
from without, and the insurrectionary outbreaks of lawless
passions from within.  If he is to make a successful resistance, he must be penetrated by a conviction that it is of
vital importance to resist to the last extremity. This




26         T/eology izecessary lo reizglion.    [LECT.
conviction must itself be made up of and depend upon
other convictions, such as the sanctity of God, His power,
His omnipresence, the interest which He takes in our success, the strength with which He supplies us, the certainty
that He will come to judge us. A faltering, hazy representation may feed an aimless sentimentalism; it is useless for
the purposes of an earnest moral struggle.
An exact creed and code of conduct is therefore a need
of man's mental and moral nature, and all religious systems,
whatever their truth or falsehood,have attempted to satisfy it.
The answer to this need, with which we are familiar, is that
contained in the Christian theology; and we use that word
in its broad sense, as including the whole cycle of revealed
doctrine and morals. Theology, in its scientific exhibition,
results from the effort which the Christian mind makes
from age to age to reduce to a precise and working form
the deposit of truth committed at the first to the Christian Church.  It is the elaborate inventory which century
after century the Church has been taking of the priceless
treasures which were committed to her keeping in the
age of the Apostles. What doctrines may and may not be
catalogued in that inventory without serious inaccuracy, is
a point upon which, unhappily, there are wide divisions
in the Christian world; but in the fifty generations of
Christians from the first until the present age there has never
been any sort of question as to the duty of ascertaining,
as correctly as may be, what are the truths which Christ
and His Apostles have taught, what is the exact area and




I.2].Est hetic objeclions to defiCnieness.     27
import of these truths, what their moral and social significance, what our practical duties towards them.
Yes; but it is said, has not this inveterate instinct of the
Christian mind been fatal to the beauty of religious truth?
Is not religious truth better left in the vague, hazy distance
of popular thought? Is it not vulgarized by this nearer
probing, by this inquisitive anxiety to make out exactly
what it is? Is not the New Testament vague and undecided,
and are we likely to improve upon it? Are not the clergy,
too, under a temptation to confuse between their professional
instinct of making the most of their title-deeds, and the
real broad interests of Christendom? Has not Christendom,
in fact, suffered by over-definitions, by false definitions;
and this in former ages as certainly as in our own?
Certainly there are arguments which may be urged
against definitions; and first of all on aesthetic grounds.
A picture of Turner's is a more beautiful thing than a
working drawing; but if your object be to give the
measurements of a public edifice, Turner's picture would
not be the more useful guide of the two. It is easy
to advise a man to "study and admire the poetry of
Isaiah and S. John, without troubling himself with the
truth  of their theological dogmas, or even of their
historical statements."  No doubt the poetry of the Evangelist and of the Prophet is of consummate beauty, but it
is not their poetry which has impressed them on the thought
and heart of the Christian world. The really important question about both these writers is, what do they exactly teach




28     DefizzZeness of /te Newz  Teslamenil.  [LECT.
upon the gravest subjects that can interest thoughtful men?
And next, is their teaching true? The answer to this, to be
worth having, must be a sharply defined answer; and art,
if needs be, must make a sacrifice to the demands of truth.
That there have been unnecessary definitions, rash definitions, false definitions in Christendom, must be frankly
granted; that they are still possible cannot be denied,
in view  of contemporary events; that they have injured
the cause of Christ cannot be doubted.  But the question is as to the principle of definiteness, not as to
its abuse: false definitions, like false miracles, imply the
true, of which they are a counterfeit and caricature. As
to the New Testament, those who speak of its teaching
as indefinite, appear to confuse between its substance
and its form.  Made up as it is of four biographical
sketches, of one narrative of the lives and works of some
missionary teachers, of twenty-one letters, six of them
addressed to individuals, and of one description of a
heavenly vision, its form is, of necessity, unmethodical; it is,
if you will, anti-scholastic. But its form is distinct from its
substance; and from age to age the clear import of its substance is pressed upon the imagination and heart of the
world by the matchless beauties of its form. The teaching
of the New Testament indefinite! It is simple paradox.
What can be more definite than the account of Clhrist's Birth,
of His Miracles, of His Resurrection, of His Ascension
into heaven, in the first three Gospels? What more definite
than the awful representation of His Person in the fourth?




I.]     Diefitzzeness of te iVezo  Teslamenmf.      29
Is the account of justification in the Epistle to the Romans
and the Galatians indefinite? Or that of the Eucharist and
the supernatural gifts of the Spirit in the First Epistle to the
Corinthians, or that of the incorporation of the Church
with the living and triumphant Christ in the letters to
the Colossians and Ephesians, or that of its organization
in the Pastoral Epistles?  Is it not rather true that the
New Testament is much too definite for modern unbelief,
and that the real crime of the Church is, not that she has
added the quality of definiteness to the writings of the
Apostles and the Evangelists, but that she has persistently
called attention to that quality which from the first, and
front the nature of the case, belonged to them?
How, indeed, could it be otherwise?  How  would
the cry of humanity for light and guidance have been
answered? how would it not rather have been mocked
and scorned, by a revelation of the indefinite; by a
revelation of mists whereof none could decide the frontiers, or unfold the meaning, or insist upon the worth?
Such a revelation would have in fact revealed nothing;
nothing that might not have  been  in  sonie degree
surmised by reason; nothing that could invigorate the
heart or control the will. And in Christianity God has not
disappointed us. He has not contrived to say much without asserting anything. If our Heavenly Father has not
answered the petition of His children for the solid bread of
truth with a stone, He as certainly has not met it with a
transcendental vapour.




30   3. Positive character of a trze religion. [LECT.
3. Thirdly, a real answer to the religious needs of man
must be positive. It must state what is truth, and not
merely what is not truth. The soul of man does not look
inward and upward only in the hope of detecting falsehoods:
its deepest desire is to know, not what is not, but what is.
Merely negative teachers are as the wind; they destroy but
they cannot build; at their best they do but sweep away the
unsubstantial fictions of human fancy or human fraud, but
they erect nothing solid in the place of the discarded fictions.
Positive truth alone can feed, sustain, invigorate the soul. It
is no support in the hour of despondency or in the hour of
temptation to reflect or to be told that such and such a
doctrine or system is false. Possibly enough it is false; but
what then? Does a sense of its falsehood nerve the will to do
and the heart to sustain when action and endurance are hard?
A sense of falsehood only supplies moral power so long and so
far as you are confronted with the falsehood. You hate the
lie, and your hatred imports force into your contradiction;
you loathe the idol, and a righteous scorn nerves your arm to
shatter it. But when the idol has been pulverized and the
lie is exploded, your force is gone. Your force was purely
relative to the objects of its animosity, and it perished with
them. Nay, more; even while they lasted, your force was
good for nothing beyond and beside the function of destroying them. Such force is like Jehu; it is trenchant energy
so long as vengeance has to be wreaked upon the house of
Ahab; but it is abject impotence when the time comes for
settling the polity of Israel, on a sure foundation, and of




I.]    Unfrziilfulzness of religiozs negationzs.    31
storing up a legacy of strength and safety for the coming
times. Positive doctrine, on the other hand is, or ought to
be, moral power. The whisper in the heart of the moral
fool, " there is no God," can never add to his stock of moral
strength. The faith of the Psalmist, " the Lord liveth," is at
once followed by the exclamation, "and blessed be my
strong Helper, and praised be the God of my salvation."1
The soul cannot rest upon the void which is the result of
that vast negation: it can and does draw comfort, strength,
support, determination, as it grasps and leans upon this
greatest of all assertions.
This is a point which requires insisting on, especially
in an age of criticism.  Here and there criticism  may
vindicate an affirmation; its more ordinary occupation is
to destroy.  It almost proceeds upon the assumption that
the soil of truth is encumbered on all sides with brushwood
and rubbish, and that it can scarcely do wrong in burning
and clearing away for ever. We may allow that there is
legitimate and useful work for it to do; but it is not the less
true that the temper of mind which it creates is prone to
entertain a most serious misapprehension on religious
matters.  It tends to beget the notion that religious truth
is simply negation-negation of false beliefs, negation of
superstitious practices, negation of the errors and mistakes
of other people; but scarcely anything that is really positive, with a body and substance of its own. Very many
people in this country, especially among the educated
Ps. xviii. 47.




32      A  Irue religion has negative aspec/s. [LECT.
classes, conceive of religion in this way, and to their own
unspeakable loss. What God is not, what Christ is not,
what the atonement and work of Christ are not, what
prayer is not, what sacraments are not;-these are the questions with which they concern themselves almost exclusively. Yet the only question that is lastingly practical is
what God, Christ, the atonement, prayer, the sacraments
are. The negative conclusion does nothing beyond removing one or more misconceptions, or being supposed to do
so; or rather it does something which were better undone.
It satisfies the vague sense that religion is too important a
concern to be entirely passed by: it furnishes a form of
interest in religion, of strictly intellectual interest, that may
be warranted to entail no practical consequences. And thus
the half-awakened conscience is again lulled to sleep, by encountering a religious idea which only presents itself to be
discarded; and the eyes of the spirit close, perhaps for ever.
Do I say that a true faith has no negative aspects?
Certainly not. The Jewish faith was a negation of Polytheism: Christianity is a negation of Polytheism, and of
much besides. The most characteristic writings of the great
Apostle are protests against false ideas of the work of Christ:
the most elaborate of the Catholic creeds contains a
repudiation of errors which deny the truth of the Divine
Nature, or the truth of the Person of Jesus. But in these
cases the negation does not stand alone; it is only the
inevitable corollary of a greater affirmation. Unlike the
dreary criticism  which makes a solitude in the human




I.]     4. Absoluieness of the true religion.         33
spirit, and then sardonically calls it peace, the negations
of the Creed do but remove obstructions to its positive
statements: they clear a space in thought for laying the
foundations and raising the walls of a solid edifice, within
which the Divine Architect has provided for the most
urgent wants of man.
4. Yet again, if man's deepest needs are to be satisfied,
he must believe that his creed is absolutely, and not merely
relatively, true.  Relative truth-truth which is true only
to certain persons or under certain circumstances-ceases
to be truth when those persons and circumstances pass.  It
is transient; and to say that truth is transient, is to qualify
the idea of truth by an attribute which destroys it.  Relative truth is not truth, in the plain sense of the term; it is
only opinion; it is opinion which in the event proves to be
unfounded.
We are often told that Christianity, like the other
positive religions of the world, is relatively true; and
hard words are used of Christians, who say that its truth is
absolute if it be true at all. Yet how can a creed profess to be
relatively true without admitting itself to be really false?
It was pardonable in Benhadad's Syrians to suggest that the
God of Israel was only a God of the hills; but no believing
Israelite could have granted this without denying the first
article of his creed.  And Philosophy has sometimes meant
to befriend Christianity, by asserting that it teaches a relative truth. She bids believers make the best of it, on the
ground that if not absolutely true, it is a phase of truth,
D




34    Worth of "realaive" lruZh in relizionz. [LECT.
true to the believer, true provisionally, although liable to be
superseded by a higher truth in days to come. But who
could make the most of a creed with such an estimate of its
worth as this? Would any sensible man die for a "relatively true" religion?  Could it teach him the duties of
prayer or self-sacrifice? Would he live for it? Would he be
even interested for long in a philosophy which he believed
to be only relatively true? While the Ptolemaic system
of the heavens lasted, it was supposed to be absolutely true:
Would the ancient world have listened quietly to the
Ptolemaic teachers had it suspected, however distantly, the
advent of a Copernicus? The ceremonial element in the
Jewish dispensation, as S. Paul has taught us, was only of
relative authority. But it was believed by the Jews to be
absolute. To see in it "a figure of the time then present," was already to have become a Christian.  Any creed,
whether true or false, must claim to be absolute, or it
must make no claim at all, since upon faith in its absolute
truth depends the necessity and reasonableness of all the
acts, habits, efforts, sacrifices, which constitute its practical
side —all the ventures, in short, which men make on
account of it.
To say that Christianity is only relatively true; that it
is but the prelude and introduction to some broader religion of humanity, which will in time supersede it, is, in fact,
to reject Christianity. For from the first Christianity has
claimed to be the Universal Religion. It was destined from
the first to embrace the whole world; it was to last through



I.]    Tuhe fniversal religizon muzsZ be absohtZe.    35
out the ages.  "Go ye," said its Founder, "and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them  in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;" and, "lo,
I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 1
In this claim of universality, whether in time or range of
empire, there lay the implied and further claim to be the
Absolute Religion-the one final unveiling of the Universal
Father's mind before the eyes of His children.2 This conviction underlies S. Paul's earnest apostolate of the Gentiles
in the face of active Jewish prejudice.  He "owed "3 the
absolute religion, as he could have owed no relative religion
whatever, to the Greeks and to the Barbarians alike, to the
philosophers and to the uneducated. To his eye all the
deepest divisions of country, race, and station vanished
entirely as men passed within the Church.  "There is," he
exclaimed, "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ
is all, and in all." 4 A religion conscious of being suitable
only to particular dates or localities could never have
originally aspired to bring within the range of its influence
all the varieties of race and thought that are found in the
human family.  It would feel its unsuitableness to some
races, to some civilizations, to some historical periods, if not
to all.  " To make all men see what is the fellowship of the
mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been
S. Matt. xxviii. 19, 20.
2 Baur: Vorlesungen fiber Neutestamentliche Theologie, p, 131.
3 Rom. i. 14.
4 Col. iii. 11; cf. Gal. iii. 28.




36      5. Provision for the heart and will. [LECT.
hid in God,"l was an ambition appropriate "to the faith
once for all delivered to the Saints." 2
5. Lastly, if man's religious wants are to be answered, his
creed must speak, not merely to his intelligence, but to his
heart and will. He cannot really rest upon the most unimnpeachable abstractions. Heneeds something warnmer than the
truest philosophy. He yearns to come in contact with a heart;
and no religion therefore can really satisfy him which does
not at least lead him to know and love a person. An unseen
Friend, who will purify, and teach, and check, and lead, and
sustain himr:-that is his great necessity. And this want,
this last but deepest want of man's religious life, Christianity has satisfied. As humanity, "sitting in darkness and
in the shadow of death," pleads with the Power Whom it
feels but cannot see-" Shew Thou me the way that I
should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee "-lo! the
heavens drop down from above, and the skies pour forth
righteousness. And One fairer than the children of men
presents Himself to all the centuries and countries of the
world with the gracious bidding, "Come unto Me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 3
In the Lectures which are to follow during the succeeding Sundays of Lent, an attempt will be made to insist
upon some of the truths which are most fundamentally
related to the soul's religious life, as they come into contact
with some forms of modern thought. Of so vast a subject
a few fragments are all that, from the nature of the case,
Eph. iii. 9.    2 S. Jude 3.    3 S. Matt. xi. 28.




I.]         Anticizpaions and caztziozs.            37
can possibly be offered. If we could say all that could be
said, such truths must still shade off into the unknown.
But we may at least endeavour to trace what we can see
of their real outline, to quicken our sense of their positive
contents, to deepen our convictions of their absolute and
unchanging significance, to enhance the influence which they
already exert over our moral natures. It is not well that such
topics should be approached with no higher purpose than that
of an intellectual enterprise. If we do not mean the cry,
"Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift
up my soul unto Thee," it were better not to enter on the
holy ground. Religion indeed must always command the
attention of practical men, because it is, at least, one of
the most powerful forces, because it shapes the strongest
passions, that can govern the conduct of large masses of
mankind. It also will ever be interesting to serious thinkers,
whether they accept its authority or not; for without
controversy it has a word to say upon the highest objects
of human thought. But for those who look at it, not only
from without but from within, not as a toy of the intellect,
but as a necessity of the soul, it must be something more
than this. If there be any truth in its teachings at all, if its
aspirations be anything more than a waste of heart and effort,
lavished through centuries upon what are after all only
weird or graceful phantoms of the brain, then nothing that
can occupy our thoughts can really compare with it in point
of absorbing and momentous import.  Beyond everything
else, it must have imperious claims upon the time and




38          A nliclaptions and cactions.   [LECT. I.
thought and working power of every human being who has
ever felt, in any serious degree, the unspeakable solemnity
of life and death. May God endow us with a sense of this
interest in that which binds us to Himself, or may He
deepen it; and then, in answer to the longings which in
every sincere soul it will assuredly foster, may He this Lent
be merciful to us, each and all, and bless us, and shew us
the light of His countenance, and be merciful unto us 1
1 Ps. lxvii. 1.




LECTURE II.
~cont ~unta~ ir ent.
GOD, THE OBJECT OF RELIGION.
Ps. xlii. 2.
My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God: when sh/all I come to
appear before the presence of God?
THERE is scarcely, even in the Psalter, a more touching
psalm than this. The Psalmist is probably an exile
of the early Assyrian period. In the land of his captivity,
he is surrounded by all the institutions of an established
idolatry, and, as he sadly reflects, he is far removed from the
Holy Home of the race of Israel; from the place which the
Lord had chosen to put His name there; from the worship
and fellowship of the sacred commonwealth. His thought
spans the intervening desert, and he dwells with a full and
aching heart on all that lies beyond it. He remembers
the festival services in Jerusalem in bygone years, when he
went with tbe "multitude keeping holyday," when he, too, had
his share in the "voice of joy and praise." As he calls up
in memory this cherished part, he pours out his soul in secret
grief; and while the cruel heathen around taunt him with the




40               The " livizg" God.            [LECT.
insulting question, Where is thy God? he can. only find
refuge in tears; his tears, as he tells us, flow by day and
by night. When will the long years of exile have an end?
When will he come to " appear before the presence of God"?
He is like the thirsty stag, panting after the distant waterbrooks; his inmost being is " athirst for God, yea even for
the living God."
" The living God!"  What a strange, yet what a pregnant phrase! Surely, the Author of Life Tmust live; yet
here is an expression which hints at the idea of deities who
are not alive. It was thus that the Hebrews distinguished
the true God Who had revealed Himself to their ancestors
from the false gods of the nations around them. " As for
all the gods of the heathen, they are but idols; but it is the
Lord that made the heavens."   The heathen deities were so
much carving, sculpture, and colouring; or they were so
much human imagination or human speculation; they had
no being independent of the toil, whether of the hands or of
the brains of men. They had no existence in themselves;
they did not live, whether men thought about them or not:
as we should say, they had no objective existence.  It was
true that evil spirits, by lurking beneath the idol forms, or
draping themselves in the debasing fancies of the heathen
world, might contrive to appropriate the homage which the
human heart in its darkness lavished upon its own creations; and thus the Canaanites are said, in their cruel
Moloch-worship, to have sacrificed their sons and their
1 Ps. xcvi. 5.




II.]       Elermenus of jrutl  iin  eafleinism.             41
daughters unto devils.'   But the broad contrast, latent in.the expression " the living God," is the contrast between
imagination and fact; between an Existing Being and a
collection of fancy personages; between a solemn truth
and a stupid and debasing unreality.
We are not here concerned to inquire what elements of
truth there may have been in the forms of heathen worship
with which the Jews came into contact.2   Some truth there
certainly was in the most degraded of them; since a religion
which is pure undiluted falsehood could not continue to
exist as a religion, and the false religions which do exist,
only exist by virtue of the elements of truth which in varying
proportions they severally contain.  The lowest fetichism
witnesses to the great truth, that man must go out of himself
in order to seek for an adequate object of his heart-felt
devotion-of his highest enthusiasms. And no instructed
Christian would deny that certain forms of heathenism
embrace incidentally the recognition of considerable districts of fundamental truth.   If, indeed, as S. Paul says,
God teaches all men up to a certain point through nature
and conscience,3 it could not be otherwise; and this intermixture of truth, which is thus latent in all heathenism,
1 Ps. cvi. 37.
2 On the "Dispensation of Paganism," see Newman's "Arians of the
Fourth Century," pp. 87-91; and the quotation from S. Clem. Alex. Strom.
vii. 2. " He (the Word) it is who gives to the Greeks their philosophy.. 
His revelations, both the former and the latter, are drawn forth from one
fount; those who were before the Law, not suffered to be without Law;
those who do not hear the Jewish philosophy, not surrendered to an unbridled
co'rse."
3 Rom. i. 19, 20.




42  feal/Tenizism, hozw estimaled iz  Sczrip hre. [LECT.
yields the best starting-point for convincing heathens of the
errors which they admit, and of the truths which they deny
beyond.' In this sense, undoubtedly, the science, which has
been of late named Comparative Theology, may be made
really serviceable to the interests of Christian truth.  It is
a widely different thing to start with an assumption that all
the positive religions in the world, the Jewish and Christian
revelations included, are alike conglomerate formations in
very varying degrees, partly true and partly false; and that
the religion of the future-an etherealized abstraction, to
be distilled by science from all the creeds and worships of
mankind-will be something beyond, and distinct from all
of them.  Certainly heathenism is not treated, either in the
Old Testament or in the New, with the tenderness which
would befit such an anticipation as this.  Practically speaking, and as contrasted with the revealed truth, whether
Jewish or Christian, heathenism is represented as a lie.  To
live within its territorial range is to live in the kingdom
of darkness; 2 to practise its rites is to be an enemy to God
by wicked works; 3 to go after false gods is to have the
earnest of great trouble,4 and to provoke the anger of the
real Lord of the Universe.  The Assyrian idols did not raise
in the exile's mind any question as to the stray elements of
truth whlich might be underlying so much tawdry and impure
error.  "My soul," 1he cried, "is athirst for God, yea even
1 So S. Clem. Alex. speaks of Greek philosophy as brro3dpOpav oiuav zrTs
raTao XapLto' 0LtXooo0laCs.-Strom. vi., qu. by Newman, ubi sup.
2 Is. lx. 2; 1 Pet. ii. 9.    3 Col. i. 21.
I Ps. lxxviii. 59, 60; cvi. 36-40.




II.]     God, the object of Ihe Soul's thirst.     43
for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the
presence of God?"
The language of this exile is in truth the language of the
human heart, under the stress of the purest and deepest
desire that man can know. In this life man is an exile; he
is parted from his true home and country; he is the victim
of an unconquerable restlessness. This restlessness of the
mnind —this "wasting fever of the heart" of man-this
unwillingness to be satisfied with any earthly goodattracted the attention of ancient thinkers. But they did
not understand its secret. They would fain have accounted
for it by pointing to some fatal warp or flaw in human
nature; or they would have silenced it by the tentative
guesses of successive philosophies, moving in cycles which
ended in proclaiming that nothing beyond the province of
sense is trustworthy; or they would have buried it beneath
the cares of business, or the cares of empire, or the grosser
attractions of sensual pleasure. But again and again the
human heart has protested against these endeavours to
crush the noblest of its aspirations; and history again and
again has echoed with the cry, "My soul is athirst,"
not for pleasures which may degrade, nor yet for philosophies which may disappoint, but for the Pure, the
Absolute, the Everlasting Being. "My soul is athirst for
God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of
God?"
Was this cry ever heard more distinctly by those who
have ears to hear the voices of the spiritual world than in




44          The Ihirsi of the Soul, hozw        [LECT.
our own generation? The passion, or, as the Psalmist phrases
it, the thirst for God-the strong desire of the soul mounting
towards Him with all the agonized earnestness of a clisappointed and tortured sense-speaks, not merely or chiefly in
churches and pulpits, but in magazines, in newspapers, in
social gatherings, in political assemblies, with a fervour and
decision which would have startled the age of George III.
The pulse of this desire is felt outside the Christian camp;
it quickens the very enthusiasms of error and paradox; often
enough, it mistakes friends for foes and foes for friends; but
it is generally sincere, vehement, intolerant of delay and
trifling. " AMy soul is athirst for God, yea even for the
living God," is the desire of desires; it really underlies and
explains all others that are not purely brutal in this Europe,
this England of the nineteenth century. Let us see how
it fares-this thirst for God —at the hands of some great
speculative systems which more particularly challenge
attention in the present day.
High in the world of thought, if we determine its place
by the intellectual forces which it can at present muster,
while we refuse to adopt any truer and worthier rule of
measurement, lies the camp of the Materialists.  Materialism is sometimes digested into a system; sometimes it is
little more than an intellectual tendency.  Occasionally it




II.]           satisyfed by Malerialism.                 45
displays the constructive enthusiasm together with the stiff,
and, perhaps, pedantic livery of Positivism: more frequently,
it is shy of committing itself to positive theories, while it is
consistently earnest in resenting all attempts to base knowledge upon anything besides the verdict of sense.  It bids us
believe what we can see and smell, and taste and touch; it
invites us to make such generalizations as we can out of the
report which our senses bring to us.  Thus, it assures us,
will the mighty universe in which we live reveal itself to
us; and we shall learn to perceive in it two, and only two,
elements in the last analysis,-a kingdom of matter, that
is apparently eternal, unceasingly, infinitely modified by
eternal force.  How this force and that matter came to be.
it knows not: it affirms, as it denies nothing. A philosophy
that is positive does not concern itself with the origin
of the universe, " if it ever had one," or with what happens to living beings after their death.l  Of this eternal
interfusion of force with matter, man himself is only a ripe
and very complex product. There is nothing in him for
which his chemistry cannot give an account: his intelligence is exactly proportioned to the mass of his brain: his
thought is " but the expression of molecular changes in the
physical matter of his life:" 2 his thought is impossible
without phosphorus; his consciousness is only a property
of matter: 3 his virtue is the result of a current of electri1 Paroles de Philosophie Positive, p. 31, qu. by Bp. Dupanloup.
2 Fortn. Rev., 1869.
3 Biichner, Kraft und Stoft, ~ 122.  Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke,
auch das Bewusstsein ist nichts als eine Eigenschaft des Stoffes.




46           The hkirst of the Sotl, how        [LECT.
city; his virtue and his vice are strictly due to his natural
organization, they are " products in the same sense as are
sugar and vitriol."  All that he can do, either with himself
or with the world around him, ils to search out and to register the several qualities of matter, and to number and
measure the ever-shifting forms of the force which governs
it.  There may be something beyond matter and force
-who knows?  But science, which deals only with positive realities, cannot concern herself with, as she does not
need, "such an hypothesis " as God.  Can God be verified
by the senses? Is He not a phantom that belongs properly
to the childhood of humanity? Is He not an anachronism
in a scientific age?1  What is He, then, whom men commonly name God?  God, says Fenerbach, whose Pantheism is really Mlaterialism, is only "the nature of man
regarded as absolute truth;" " that which is given to man's
God, is in truth given to man himself;" "what a man
declares concerning God, he in truth declares concerning
himself;" "the Divine activity is not distinct from the
human;" " in God man has only his own activity as an
object;" " the mystery of the inexhaustible fulness of the
Divine predicates is nothing else than the mystery of
human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely
modifiable, but consequently phenomenal being." 2 In
other words, God does not exist apart from the mind and
imagination of man; He is only its creation, and has no
1 See Conservation, R&volution, Positivisme, p. 70, qu. by Dupanloup,
l'Athdisme, p. 70.
2 Feuerbach, Geist des Christenthums, ~ 2.




II.]          satisfed by Maieriadism.              47
rightful place in the region of serious and scientific
thought.
This is not, I trust, a misrepresentation of the language
of contemporary Materialism: and whatever else may be
said of it, this at least is certain, that it does nothing
whatever towards satisfying that great desire or "thirst"
for communion with a Higher Being, of which, in his best
and highest moods, man is so profoundly conscious. It
denies, if not that any such being really exists, at least that
we can know Him to be really existing. They who have
no satisfaction to offer to a need naturally condemn the
demand for one: they who have no answer to give, would
rather not be questioned. And yet the religious side of man's
nature is a fact of which a philosophy of experience should
surely take account. Upon what is man's religious instinct
to spend itself in the Materialistic universe? Upon that.
phantom-god who, as we are told, is only a pale reflection
of human vanity? But the soul asks for reality, and cannot occupy itself with a confessed shadow. Upon that
eternal flux of self-existent matter? upon that ceaseless
activity of self-existing force? But is there anything in
mere force or matter, or in both combined, I will not say
to satisfy a passion which is purest and strongest in saintly
men, but even to have any contact with or relation towards
it whatever? How can that which is purely physical touch
the sense which appreciates a moral world? It is a merit
of Auguste Comte to have recognized the necessity of some
answer; and he tells us that it is our privilege and our




48              Tke Posilivist deity.           [LECT.
business to love, reverence, and worship " a Being, immense
and eternal —Hunanity."l1  Not, mark you, a sinless and
Divine representative of the race, such as we Christians
adore in the Incarnate Jesus, seated as He is at the right
hand of the Father. Not even an idealized abstraction,
which, in the pure realms of thought, might conceivably be
separated from  the weaknesses and degradations of the
sum-total of human flesh and blood. But this very collective human family itself, in all ages and of all conditions,
viewed as one organism; this human fanlily, not merely
illuminated by its struggles, its sufferings, its victories, but
also weighted with its crimes, its- brutalities, its deep and
hideous degradations.  It might be thought that "we men
know man too well to care to worship him." Yet, seriously,
this is the god who is to supersede the Most Holy Trinity,
when Positivism has won its way to empire in European
thought. Will he, think you, satisfy the mighty thirst of
the human soul? What does this thirst mean but man's
endeavour to escape from himself, to rise to an ideal, or
rather to a reality above himself, to lose himself in a Being
who is greater, wiser, better than himself? Yet here he
is bidden, in the name, if without the sanction of the
most recent science, to seek the object of his trust and
worship within himself, since nothing higher than himself is really cognizable by his understanding.  It is
clear that teachers who do not believe in a living
God must leave one side, and that the highest, of human
1 Cat. Pos. Int.




II.] Revolt of ihe hztma  mind cagainst A  Ztezsm. 49
nature altogether uncared for; since in truth they have
nothing to say to it. And history does not smile upon
materialistic attempts to bribe the religious yearnings of
the soul of man. Atheism could indeed, on one fatal day,
throne naked vice as the goddess Reason upon the high
altar of a Christian basilica, while an apostate archbishop
lent his presence to the hideous ceremony; but it was one
thing to obey the interested or sentimental fanaticism of
the Jacobin  Clubs, and  quite another permanently  to
control the heart and convictions even of the Voltairianized
multitudes of Paris.' The realities of religion might have
been hated; but this godless parody of worship could only
provoke a languid contempt.
II.
Against Materialism, in all its forms, the common sense
of man, not to speak of his religious instinct, will ever
protest.   The idea or presentiment of God, everywhere
rooted in the mind of man, is a fact sufficiently important
to be treated as something better than a superstition by
those who put forward any serious doctrine about human
1 Pressens4, L'Eglise et la Revolution Frangaise, p. 280. " II ne resta de
ce jour que le souvenir d'une stupide parodie qui vengeait h elle seule la
religion sainte que l'on avait voulu fouler aux pieds. C'est en vain que pour
ranimer la ferveur on remplaga h Paris et dans les d6partements les actrices
par les prostitutes. L'ennui et le ddgoft frappbrent le nouveau culte des
ses d6buts.
E




50        The zoorld-wide feeling after God.   [LECT.
nature. A mental fact is as worthy of attention as any
fact which can be appraised in a chemical laboratory or on
the roof of an observatory. Cicero's statement' that there
is no nation so barbarous and wild as not to have believed
in some divinity, is still, notwithstanding certain apparent
exceptions, true. A nation of pure Atheists is yet to be
discovered.2    Unworthy and degraded as are many of the
beliefs on the subject of a Higher Power that are to be
found in the heathen world, some groping after the Great
Unseen, some tentative intuition, some shadowy belief there
is to be found always and everywhere. Man thinks of a
HIigher Power as naturally  as he thinks of the world
1 Cic. de Legibus, i. 8. Itaque ex tot generibus nullumn est animal prneter
hominem quod habeat notitiam aliquam dei: ipsisque in hominibus nulla
gens est neque tam immansueta neque tam fera, quse non, etiam si ignorat
qualem habere deum deceat, tamen habendum sciat. Tuscul. Disput., i. 13.
Ut porro firmissimum hoc afferri videtur, cur deos esse credamus, quod nulla
gens tam fera, nemo omnium tam sit immanis, cujus mentemn non imbuerit
deorum opinio:-multi de diis prava sentiunt (id enim vitioso more effici
solet); omnes tamen esse vim et naturam  divinam arbitrantur: nec vero id
collocutio hominum aut consensus effecit; non institutis opinio est confirmata,
non legibus.  Omni autem in re consentio omnium gentium  lex naturae
putanda est.
2 Cf. Diderot, Philosophie des Canadiens. CEuvres, I. p. 433. AMlIax
Miiller, " Chips from a German Workshop."  " There is perhaps no race of
men so low and degraded as the Papuas. It has frequently been asserted
that they have no religion at all, and yet these same Papuas, if they want
to know whether what they are going to undertake is right or wrong, squat
before their karwar, clasp the hands over the forehead, and bow repeatedly,
at the same time stating their intentions. If they are seized with any
nervous feeling during this time, it is considered as a bad sign, and the project is abandoned for a time; if otherwise, the idol is supposed to approve.
Here we have but to translate what they in their helpless language call' nervous feeling' by our word'conscience,' and we shall not only understand what they really mean, but confess, perhaps, that it would be well for
us if, in our own hearts, the karwar occupied the same prominent place
which it occupies in the cottage of every Papua."




II.]  7hethIhoutghof God latentisz ti    e knman milnd.  5 I
around him, or of himself. Nay, he thinks of Truth;
and truth is no mere abstraction; it is a Real Being;
it is God.l   He thinks of the Infinite, says Fenelon, as he
thinks of the circle, of the line, of the distinction between
whole and part.2   The  spontaneous activity  of his consciousness brings with  it, contains in itself, the thought of
One who is greater, if not also stronger, wiser, better than
all else; and that man  should  thus think  of Him, is of
itself a presumption that He really exists.3 This instinctive perception and affirmation of God is indeed not merely
an act of the intellect; it is also, as will be insisted on presently, perhaps it is chiefly, an act of the moral sense, an
act of the conscience.  It is that upward  attraction of the'Plat. Repub. vii. 517.
2 De l'existence de Dieu, lere partie, p. 60. L'idee de l'infini est en moi
comme celle des nombres, des lignes, des cercles, d'un tout et d'une partie.
Changer nos idles ce serait andantir la raison meme.
3 The ontological " argument " for the existence of God is stated in varying degrees of completeness by S. Augustine, Boethius, S. Anselm, and
Descartes.  To cite the two last, S. Ans. Proslog. 2, convincitur etiam
insipiens (Ps. xiv. 1) esse vel in intellectu aliquid quo nihil majus cogitari
potest.  Et certe id quo majus cogitari nequit non potest esse in intellectu
solo. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re quod
majus est. Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non potest est in intellectu; id
ipsum, quo majus cogitari non potest est quo majus cogitari potest: sed
certb hoc esse non potest. Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo majus
cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re.  Descartes observes (Medit.
de Prim. Philos. 3, 4, sub fin.) "notiones nostras esse anut adventitias,
aut factitias, aut innatas.  Ideam  de Deo non esse adventitiam, Deum
enim  non experientif duce reperiri; neque factitiam, nam  non arbitrio
a nobis effictam  esse; ergo esse innatam, sive a Deo ipso nobis suppeditatam."  This is undoubtedly the weakest of the arguments for God's
existence; but its real value should not be mistaken on account of the
facility with which it lends itself to the Hegelian doctrine that " God is
only God in so far as He has knowledge of Himself; but His self-knowledge
is'sein selbst bewusstseyn in Menschen und das Wissen des Menschen von
Gott"' (Encycl. p. 576, qu. by Grimm).




52   Instinctive ay5Cyrehensio   pYrecedes  roof:  [LECT.
soul upon which Plato dilates;1 it is the universal hypothesis  which  Aristotle  registers;2 it is the world-wide
prejudice of Epicurus; it is the "anticipation" naturally
imbedded in the human mind, of Cicero.3   It precedes demonstration; it is out of the reach of criticism; it resists
hostile argument. It is, speaking philosophically, a fact
in psychological science, and a fact so fruitful and stimulating, that to it must be traced all in human life and
effort that looks really upward, —man's love of truth, his
clinging to a coming life, his aspirations to rise above the
level of animal existence.  It is, speaking religiously, in
its way, a revelation; it is a revelation of God within, as S.
Paul says, answering to the revelation of God from without;
it sets man's, thought in motion as he gazes upon the
natural world, and bids him  not to rest until he has wrung
from it a disclosure of the highest truth which it has to
teach him.
And thus, with this preparatory idea or intuition of a
Divinity, the human mind approaches what are called the
1 Cf. the whole passage in Plato, de Legibus, ix. x. 899, c. d. e., qu. by
Staudenmaier, Dogm. II. 22.
2 Arist. de Ccelo, 1-3.  rdv'res y&p avOpw'ro 7repi Oewv gXovutc vi7rdO'XrtLv,
KaCt rdres rbv Tavw-dT'w 7i Gielp rOrov aro&o6aoat. Referred to by Staudenmaier, ubi. sup.
3 Cic. de Nat. Deorum, i. 16. Solus enim vidit [Epicurus] primum esse
deos, quod in omnium animis eorum notionem impressisset ipsa natura.
Quse est enim gens, aut quod genus hominum, quod non habeat sine
doctring anticipationem quandam decorum? quam appellat 7rpdrXvqtv Epicurus, id est anteceptam animo rei quandam informationem, sine qua nec
intelligi quidquam, nec quneri, nec disputari potest.  Cujus rationis vim
atque utilitatem ex illo ccelesti Epicuri de regulM et judicio volumine accepimus.




II.]          The Cosmologicad Argument.                         53
proofs of God's existence. Looking out upon the universe
around it, the mind seeks for its productive cause. 1  Whatever efforts may have been made by recent writers to reduce
causation to mere antecedence, the law of causation is at
once a primary law  of human thought and of the world
without us.2  What cause, what force, preceded and brought
into existence this universe?  All the causes with which
we come in contact here, are, as we term  them, second
causes; but they point to a cause beyond themselves, to a
cause of causes, to a supreme all-producing Cause, Itself
uncaused, unoriginate. The heavenly bodies move on unceasingly in their orbits, obedient to the laws of gravitation, but no law  of gravitation could have assigned them
their place in space.3 The whole universe bids us look
beyond itself for the adequate explanation of its existence.
"So far is it from  being true," says Lord Bacon, "that the
1 The cosmological proof of God's existence is stated with great beauty
and variety of illustration by Fenelon, Trait, de l'existence et des Attributs
de Dieu, c. 1, 2. To the original form of the argument which, looking upon
the world as an effect, seeks for its cause, Leibnitz adds a second, based
upon the contingent nature of the world and its several parts, which obliges
us to seek in the -rpWTOv KtoOvv, or First Cause, the Unchanging and intrinsically Necessary Being. This Necessary Being is not, as Strauss says,
the "ewiges Grundwesen der Welt," or the permanent material of the
universe, as distinct from its ever-changing forms; because the necessity of
seeking a first cause obliges us to go beyond the universe, which, as a whole,
is an effect. On the other hand, the cosmological argument does not of
itself lead us to a moral God, such as would satisfy the instincts of pietythe "thirst " of the soul.
2 Cf. I'Cosh, s" Method of the Divine Government," Appendices III. and
IV.
3 Newton, Philos. Nat. Princip. L. III. schol. gen. Perseverabunt quidem
in orbibus suis per leges gravitatis, sed regularem orbium situm primitus
acquirire per has leges minimb potuerunt.




54 The frst cause the Hzg/hesi I~tellizence. [LECT.
explanation of phenomena by natural causes leads us away
from God and His Providence, that those philosophers who
have passed their lives in discovering such causes can
find nothing that affords a final explanation without having
recourse to God and His Providence."1   The father of the
inductive philosophy does but speak the common sense of
religion; but will it be maintained, except by writers who
are prepared to deny the existence of causation, that he
does not also utter the common sense of scientific thought?
Does the universe tell us anything as to the nature of
its First Cause? Surely we may at least presume that the
Author of the natural world must be higher and greater
than anything in the natural world.2   Water will not rise
above its source; and it is inconceivable that, if there be
an Author of nature at all, His Self-existent Life must not
be higher and nobler than any life which He has bestowed.
Who does not see the force of the Psalmist's argument,
"He that made the ear, shall He not hear? and He that
gave the eye, shall He not see?"3   Above the life of the
1De Augm. Scient., iii. 4. Adeo ut tantum  absit ut causne physicse
hominem' Deo et Providentig abducant, ut contra potis philosophi illi qui
in iisdem eruendis occupati fuerunt, nullum exitum rei reperiant, nisi postremb ad Deum et providentiamn confugiant.
2 That the one true God may be known from His works in Nature is
taught, as against Gentile idolatry, in Isaiah xliv.; xlv. 18, sqq.; Acts xiv.
15-17; xvii. 22, sqq.; Rom. i. 19-20. That the natural world witnesses to
the beauty of His Being and Attributes is implied in Psalms viii. 2-4; xix.
1, sqq.; civ., passim, &c.  Holy Scripture, of course, does not demonstrate
the existence of Him Whose true Nature it unveils; but it points to the
natural world as involving for all reasoning beings the privilege and the
responsibility of some knowledge of its Author's existence, and of His
character.
3 Ps. xciv. 9.




II.]           The Teleological Argzwevl.                    55
tree, there is that of the animal; above that of the animal,
there is the life of man.  Man, with all his ingenuity and
will, cannot produce a leaf or a shell-fish: and is it to be
supposed that the author of man's life is less endowed with
thought and volition than man?  We may paraphrase the
Psalmist: He That made the human intellect, shall He not
think?  And how came it to exist, if He did not make it?1
There are chasms in the natural world which no theories
substituting a fated self-development for the free action of
God will really bridge over. There is the chasm between
the inorganic and the organic; the  chasm  between the
lifeless and that which lives; the chasm between animal
instinct and the reflective consciousness.  At each of these
levels of creation we seem to feel more sensibly than elsewhere the fresh intervention  of a creating Intelligence;
and our conviction of His activity is strengthened when
we observe the interdependence and harmony of the universe as a whole, in which each part is necessary, in
which nothing is really out of place, and between the
several elements of which new relations are continually
coming to light, as if to justify His foresight and to enhance
our estimate  of His  inexhaustible resources.2   "Those
1 Bossuet, CEuv. i. 79. Si nous etions tous seuls intelligents dans le monde,
nous seuls nous vaudrions mieux avec notre intelligence imparfaite, que toute
la reste, qui serait tout-a-fait brute et stupide, et on ne pourrait comprehendre d'ou viendrait dans ce tout qui n'entend pas cette partie qui entend,
l'intelligence ne pouvant nfitre d'une chose brute et insens6e.
2 The teleological argument for the existence of God, which sees a purpose
in the forces and laws of the natural world, and in the events of human
history, has been chiefly discredited in modern times by the popular supposition that modern attacks upon the doctrine of final causes have been really




56        God, how  related to t/he Cosmos.               [LECT.
persons," says Montesquieu, "who maintain that a blind
fate has produced all the effects we see in the world, maintain that which is a great absurdity; for what absurdity
can be greater than  a blind  fate  producing  intelligent
beings?"1   How do you know, a Bedouin was asked, that
there is a God?  "In  the same way," he replied, "that I
know, on looking at the sand, when a man or a beast has
crossed tlhe desert-by His footprints in the world around
me,"))
III.
Thus does the common sense or reason of man lead him
up to recognizing One Supreme Intelligence as at least the
original cause of all that he is and sees around him. But
then the question arises, what is the relation that actually
subsists between this Highest Intelligence and the universe? To this question there are two leading answers.
successful. For a partial and popular consideration of some recent objections to Final Causes, urged by Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lewes, and others,
cf. M'Cosh, Christianity and Positivism, pp. 78-88.  Even if a doctrine of
evolution should in time be accepted as scientifically, and so as theologically
certain, such a doctrine would not be inconsistent either with that belief in
the original act of creation which is essential to Theism, or with " the recognition of plan and purpose in the number and variety of animated beings."
"Evolution," from a Theistic point of view, is merely our way of describing
what we can observe of God's continuous action upon the physical world;
and because the phrase seems tacitly or poetically to invest the universe
with a power of self-unfolding, it does not follow that the question of an
Intelligent Creator and Ruler is thereby decided in the negative by those
who employ it.
1 Esprit des Lois.  Cf. Ps. xiv. 1.




II.]  God  anished from the Zorld by Deistm.   57
The Deist so far agrees with the Christian, as to admit
that God is related to the world as its Creator; and that He
must have made it out of nothing by the fiat of His Will.
But with this admission —momentous as it is-the old
Deism practically closes its account of God's free personal
action upon His work. Since the creation, God's action is
represented as being practically superseded by a system of
unchangeable routine; and this routine is conceived to be
so strictly invariable, as to bind the liberty of the presumed Agent. The Deistic theory of the universe might
remind us of the relations which, at least until some
very recent events, were understood to exist between the
Government of Egypt and the Sublime Porte. There was
occasionally a formal recognition of the sovereign power
on the part of the nominal dependency, but Egypt was
governed by a practically independent Viceroy; the Suzerain's name was mentioned rarely, or only in a formal
way; his active influence would have been at once
resented, the real power being lodged elsewhere. According to the old Deism, God created the world; but He
cannot be supposed ever to interfere with the ordinary laws
of its government. He cannot work miracles; He is, in no
tangible sense, a Providence. He is well out of the way
of active human interests: it is not to be supposed that He
can hear the prayer of a worm writhing on one of His
planets; that the happiness or misfortunes of a larger sort
of animalculse can give Him any real concern. So He is
throned by the Deistic writer in magnificent inactivity




58         Deislic apo/heosis of Nature.       [LECT.
at a very remote corner of the universe, while a new
power has practically taken His place.
In the last century, at the first great outburst of Deistic
thought, Nature practically superseded God. Men talked and
wrote persistently about the laws of Nature, the moods of
Nature, the religion of Nature: Nature was so vividly and
constantly personified in conversation and in literature,
that the European world might be supposed to have lighted
upon a new goddess, charged, in a very special sense, with
the interests of humanity. We live in a more positive
and realistic age; and where our fathers talked of Nature,
modern Deism names "laws."  What is lost in picturesqueness is gained in truth. There is no such person as
Nature; but there are observable modes of the Divine
activity, which may never vary within the experience of a
race. Order is, as Christians know, a characteristic of all
God's works; but He, the Almighty, is so little enslaved
by the rules which He freely observes, that moment by
moment He wills the very order that seems to bind His
liberty. Deism, however, really means by "laws "-forces
which have become somehow independent of God; fatal
forces, which defy His power to innovate upon their resistless play. But what can this impotent Deistic God, from
whose control his universe has so escaped as to constitute
itself a self-governing machine, —say or do to meet the
aspirations, or relieve the despondencies of the human
soul? If we cannot love and trust volcanic forces, or vital
forces, the laws of growth or the laws of decomposition;




II.]    nDeistic exferizmenls of Robes5ierre.                        59
can we love and trust a being who has left this universe to
itself; who surveys it, if he does survey it, in the cynicism
of an unbroken silence from a very distant throne; to
whom its vast oceans of hope and fear, and struggle and
disappointment, and triumph and failure —all the mysteries
of its moral life, are of no more concern than they are to the
rocks and seas around us?  No, the god of Deism  does not
quench the religious thirst of the soul. The soul of man
seeks the Living God, not a deity who is as remote from
human interests as was the Jupiter of expiring Paganism.
The French Revolution was fertile in religious or irreligious experiments; and  as it endeavoured  to  satisfy  the
human  soul with  Atheism, so it made yet more strenuous
effort to satisfy it with Deism. 1   Robespierre had publicly' So Alison.  Compare Pressens6, l'Eglise et la Revolution, p. 294. La
fete eut lieu le 20 prairial.  Lien n'avait 4te 6pargne pour la rendre grandiose
et cependant elle n'4vita pas les puerilites ridicules.  Robespierre, president
de la Convention, en bel habit bleu, avec un bouquet de fruits et d'4pis dans les
mains, prit place avec tous ses collegues sur l'amphith8etre 4lev6 au milieu
des Tuileries.  Aprbs un pompeux discours, il en descendit pour incendier
la statue de l'Atheisme, promptement remplac~e par celle de la Sagesse qui
parut malheureusement trbs enfumee.  Des Tuileries la Convention se rendit
au Champ de Mars, entouree et comme enlac6e d'un ruban tricolore, que
portaient des enfants ornes de violettes, des adolescents ceints de myrtes,
des hommes d'age miAr couronn6s de feuilles de chgnes et des vieillards par4s
de pampre et d'olivier.  Un char bucolique charge d'instruments aratoires
suivait la Convention, trainm  par les inevitables bceufs'a comes dordes et
suivi par les non moins inevitables jeunes filles en blanc. Au Champ de
Mars la Convention se plaqa sur une montagne artificielle, monument flatteur
pour les deput6s de la majorite.  Le president perora, les jeunes filles chanterent, les vieillards donnbrent leur b6nediction, les canons tonnurent et tout
se termina par le cri de vive cl Repjublique.  Ces pompes d'opera comique,
ces symboles ridicules et ces rites glaces apprenaient'a la France qu'il est
plus facile de dc'creter un changement de religion que de l'op6rer. Jamais
le deisme ne fondera un culte et tout ce qu'il essayera dans ce genre tombera




6o   The Soul's thirst unsatisJfed by Deism. [LECT.
declared that Chaumette deserved death for the abominations which accompanied the Feast of Reason in Notre
Dame, on November 7, 1793; and he took a leading part
in the Feast of the Supreme Being, which was celebrated
in the gardens of the Tuileries and in the Champ de Mars,
on June 9, 1794.  The Convention decreed that he should
discharge the duties of Supreme Pontiff on the occasion.
The Deism of Robespierre was sufficiently vivid to admit
of his believing that God does rule the affairs of men;
he maintained with particular earnestness that God hates
kings and priests. The undeniable eloquence of the president of the Convention, the art and industry of the painter
David, the music, the costumes, the political enthusiasm at
fever height, did all that could be done for the success of
the festival. But you cannot lash a multitude into devotion to a remote and hypothetical abstraction by any
elaborate display of ceremonial; and the real deity of the
occasion was Robespierre. As he marched along, overshadowed with his plumes, and adorned with his tricolor
scarf, while the air resounded with cries of "Vive Robespierre," his countenance, says the historian, was radiant
with joy. " See how they applaud him," said his colleagues.
"He would become a god: he is no longer the High Priest
of the Supreme Being." History does not ascribe to this
attempt any special efficacy in reviving among the French
sous la risee publique. La fete fut trouv6e bien longue, surtout pour ceux
qu'irritait le r61le pr6ponderant de Robespierre. On raconte qu'un repr6sentant moins patient que ses collbgues lui dit en termes d'une trivialit6
energique: " Tu commences h nous ennuyer avec ton Etre Supreme."




II.]    God  zuried in the world by Pantheism.   6 i
people a sense of their duties towards their forgotten
Maker.  The most tangible result of the day was the
decree proposed by Couthon, for increasing the powers of
the Revolutionary Tribunal.
To the question, What is the relation  between the
universe and the Supreme Intelligence? another and a very
different answer has been given. If Deism practically
banishes God from  the world, Pantheism, at least, sees
what it calls God everywhere, and in everything.l  The
Pantheistic god is the common principle which not only is
held to constitute the unity of, but which is, the universe.
According to Benedict Spinoza,2 God is the one eternal substance, which makes its appearance in the twofold realm
of thought and of matter. Out of it all individual forms
of existence are constantly emerging, and like waves upon
the ocean, they are as constantly sinking back into, and
being absorbed by it, as the common stream of universal
life. God alone is, says Fichte, and apart from Him is
nothing, 3 —a great truth in one sense, and a great falsehood
in another. Hegel teaches that the Absolute is the universal
reason; which, after having buried and lost itself in
nature, recovers itself in man, in the shape of self-conscious
thought. Man's thought of God, therefore, is the true God,
the only existing God. God exists only in human thought;
1 Wegscheider, Inst. p. 240. Pantheismus-ea sententia qua naturam
divinam  mundo supponant et Deum ac mundum unum idemque esse
statuunt.
2 Cf. Tractat. de Deo. c. 2. Suppl. ad. opp. Amst. 1862. For his Theory
of Substance, cf. Ethic, p. 1, Def. 5.
3 Fichte, Von Sel. Leben, ~ 143.




62     Secrel of /Zhe srezngthk of Pazzikeism.   [LECT.
human thought is the reason of nature arriving at selfconsciousness.  Man thinks of God, and, in man's thinking,
God exists; He has no independent or personal existence.'
The great attraction and strength of Pantheism lies in
the satisfaction which it professes to offer to one very deep
and legitimate aspiration; it endcleavours to assure man of
his real union with the source of his own and of the
universal life. It is this profound idea, this most fascinating allurement, that can alone explain the empire, which,
in various ages and under various forms, Pantheism  has
wielded in human history.  It inspires Eleatic and Indian
philosophies; it is the animating principle of such worship of the generative and life-sustaining powers in nature,
as was, for instance, that of the Phcenician Baalim.  Since
Lessing, Spinoza has almost reigned in certain districts of
cultivated Europe, and Germany is by no means the only
home of the thought of Schelling and of Hegel.  In its
later forms Pantheism is, speaking historically, a reaction
from and a protest against the older Rationalistic Deism.
It often represents a noble plea that God shall not be
banished by modern thought from  all real contact with
humanity: nay, it would fain essay to do in its way what
the Divine Incarnation has actually done; it would make
men partakers of the Divine Nature.  And this, its religious
aim, is beyond question a main secret of its power.
1 Hegel's fundamental error consists in his identification of the "abstract
thought" of man with the "Absolute Thought." Fichte (Zeitschrift ftir
Philosophie, Bd. 17, ~ 292) says that this is " nicht ntir hiichst willkurlich
und grundlos, sondern eine contradictio in adjecto." Qu. by iettinger; cf.
Hegel, Phil. der Rel. ~~ 207, 261, 263; Encycl. ~ 56.




II.]   Does il satisfy the thirst of Mte Soid?         63
Yet does the Pantheistic deity afford any real satisfaction to the needs of the soul of man? Can he be the object
of any serious religious effort whatever?  What is there in
him to which the life of religion can possibly attach itself?
He is not a person: for Pantheism  necessarily denies the
existence of personality.  He is not a cause: for Pantheism  cannot tolerate any doctrine of causation.  He is
not even, as the Absolute Substance, in anywise distinct
from phenomena; for, while it is loyal to its central position,
Pantheism  cannot afford to admit the correctness of such
a distinction. ~What is he then? He is only a fine name for
the universe.  He has no existence apart from it: he is the
universal life, of which you and I are transient manifestations or forms.  You may indeed encounter him  draped
and veiled in a phraseology so reverent and tender, that it
milght seem to have been borrowed froml the inmost shrines
of Christian mysticism; but when you force yourself to
look at the hard reality beneath, you find that it is practically identical with that presented by Materialism.n    If
God be in reality only the spirit or life of the universe,
how can He provoke the yearnings of the soul, or how
satisfy its aspirations? How can He be the object, whether
of religious homage, or of religious trust?  How  can we
yield love, obedience, worship to a mere torrent of existence
that flows onwards inexorably beneath our feet; we, the
ripples, who do but rise upon its surface to sink away
1 Strauss, G1. 1, ~ 517. Seine Existenz als wesen ist unser denken von
ihm; aber seine reale Existenz ist die Natur, zu welcher das ehi.zelne Denkende als Moment gehirt.




64   Pantheism, I/e sanction of joral evil. [LECT.
after our little moment of undulation?   Or how can a
sensible and modest man love, trust, worship, his own selfconsciousness, under the idea that in each reflecting mind
God has become conscious of HIimself? Nay, if religion
has anything to do with reverence for goodness and with
abhorrence of moral evil, if it is not a sentiment that has
been rendered by modern speculation wholly independent
of moral truth, how can we worship either an inner self
into which, as we must each of us know, evil penetrates so
constantly and so pervadingly; or an universal life of
which in its highest, that is its human, manifestation, evil
is, as a matter of fact, more frequently an accompaniment
than good? How, I say, can such an absolute principle be
the object of religion, if its activity be manifested not less
truly in murder and lust than in heroism and unselfishness; if the darkest forms of evil stand to it in a relation
just as necessary as do the highest forms of good; if by
it, in a word, all moral distinctions whatever are really
annihilated?
Between Pantheism and an earnest hatred of moral evil
there is accordingly a necessary opposition, and this reason
alone establishes a permanent divorce between it and any
true effort at communion with the All-Pure, such as all
that is best in us enjoins. But further, that which in a
Christian, as in any earnest Theist, makes Pantheism impossible, is the first article of his creed: " I believe in God
the Father Almighty, Mcaker of heaven and earth." As the
act of creation was not witnessed, so it cannot be demon



II.]   Relayse of Pantileism  inilo M/ateirialisr.    65
strated. " By faith we understand that the worlds were made
by the word of God."l   Creation interposes an immeasurable chasm between the Creator and the creature; between that Pure and Awful Life Which is indebted to none
else either for existence or support, and this life of dependence, weakness, corruption. And belief in creation is a
necessary  outwork  of any  true  theism   whatever: deny
I Heb. xi. 3. That God created the universe is the first truth which Scripture teaches us about Him, Gen. i. 1. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4-7; Ps. xxxiii. 6-9,
thus revealing His majestic beauty; Ps. xix. 1-7; xcvii. 1-6; cxix. 64. The
Jews knew that this creation involved not merely the bringing order and
life, e dai/dpqou Vilus, Wisd. xi. 17, but also originally the calling this formless material itself into being, Ed o0K OzvTwv, 2 Mac. vii. 28. In the New
Testament, creation is generally referred to as furnishing arguments for
moral truths or duties; as by our Lord, Matt. xix. 4-6, for its witness to the
indissolubility of the marriage tie; and by S. Paul, as yielding proof of God's
real relation to the world, Acts xvii. 24; or of His interest in the whole
human family, and of our duty of seeking Him, ib. 26; for the
refutation of a false dualistic asceticism, 1 Tim. iv. 3; cf. Eph. iv. 6.
That He has created all things and for Himself is His title to praise and
adoration, Rev. iv. 11. Although the New Testament does not in express
terms speak of creation out of nothing, it implies this truth. S. Paul's
arguments in Acts xvii. 24, and I Tim. iv. 3, would lose their force, if it
were true that God was not the maker of matter as well as the artist who
gave it form, while the doxology of Rev. iv. 11 could not be truthfully
addressed to a Being who had not created matter, or who had formed anything out of pre-existent material which he did not create. The aALopPos VXsr
of S. Justin Martyr (Apol. i. 10), and even the f"X  I Xpovos of Clement
(Phot. Bibl. cod. 1C9) is not necessarily eternal; the creation of matter out
of nothing, and of the world out of matter, were distinct events, separated
by intervals that distance all human thought. Tertullian pointed out that
Hermogenes, in teaching the eternity of matter, was really a Ditheist (Adv.
Herm. c. 4.) The general teaching of the ancient church is expressed by
S. Augustine (De fid. et symb. c. 2): Credimus omnia DIeum fecisse de
nihilo, quia, etiamsi de aliquA materi' factus est mundus, eadem ipsa muateria
de nihilo facta est, ut ordinatissimo Dei munere primo capacitas formarum
fieret, ac deinde formarentur qunecunque formata sunt. Hoc autem diximus,
ne quis existimet contrarias sibi esse Scripturarum sententias: quoniam et
omnia Deum fecisse de nihilo scriptum est, et mrundum esse factum de informi materiA.
F




66       Thze COrealor ipresenl in His Works.  [LECT.
creation and you deny God. If God in His unfettered
freedom did not summon into existence all that is, if the
universe escaped from  Him  against His will, He is not
alone the Omnipotent: if anything that we term matter or
spirit has from  the beginning co-existed side by side with
Him, He is not alone the Eternal.l The difficulty is not
met by phrases about the eternal Idea passing into reality;
since it will be asked how such a passage could have been
effected, or rather, why it should have taken place at all?
A- creative Will having no limits to its power, is at least
intelligible, but the mind refuses to dwell seriously on such
a process as a transmutation of thought into matter. In
its attempt to explain itself, Pantheism  practically sinks
back into Materialism; it has no expedients equal to the
task of saving its god from burial beneath the materialistic
chaos of matter and force.
Will it be said that to believe in a Creator-God is to
close the eye to the presence of God in creation?  But
who that believes in the Omnipresent can limit His presence? Is not the original act of creation a warrant for the
Creator's continued presence with and action  upon His
work? 2  The Apostle who taught the Athenians that God
made the world and all things therein, taught them also, and
in the same great sermon, that "He is not far from  every
1Cf. S. Aug. Conf. xii. 7. Fecisti ccelum et terram non de Te, nam
esset equale Unigenito Tuo, et aliud praeter Te non erat, unde faceres,
ideo de nihilo fecisti ccelum et terram. S. Iren. H-er. ii. 10, 4. Homines
quidem de nihilo non possunt aliquid facere, sed de materia subjacenti:
Deus autem materiam fabricationis sue, cum ante non esset, ipse adinvenit.'S. John v. 17.




II.]   S. Azguslzine ozi God and the Uznzverse.   67
one of us, for in IIlim  we live and move and have our
being." 1  To assert God's presence in His works is one thing;
to identify Him with them is another. His omnipresence
is a necessary attribute of His Deity; while if He could be
identified with nature He would cease to be. If the mystery
of life, which attests God's presence in the natural world,
was ever felt in all its awe and its beauty by any human
soul, it was felt by the great Augustine.  Witness the often
quoted passage of the Confessions in which he tells us why
nature was in his eyes so beautiful, by telling us how
nature had led him  up to God.  "I asked the earth, and
it said:'I am not He;' and all that is upon it made the
same confession.  I asked the sea and the depths, and
the  creeping things that have life, and they answered:' We are not thy God; look thou above us.' I asked the
breezes and the gales; and the whole air, with its inhabitants, said to me:'Anaximenes is in error, I am not God.'
I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars:' We too,'
said they,'are not the God Whom  thou seekest.'  And I
said to all the creatures that surround the doors of my
fleshly senses,'Ye have said to me of my God that ye
are not He; tell me somewhat of Him.' And with a great
voice, they exclaimied' He made us.' "'
1 Acts xvii. 27, 28.
2 S. Aug. Conf. x. 6. Interrogavi terram et dixit: non sum; et qumecumque in eAdem sunt idem confessa sunt. Interrogavi mare et abyssos et
reptilia animaruml vivarum, et responderunt: Non sumus Deus tuus, quzere
super nos. Interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis
suis: Fallitur Anaximenes, non sum Deus. Interrogavi ccelum, solem,
lunam, stellas: Neque nos sumus Dens quem quneris, inquiunt. Et dixi




68   God more Mianz tMe Highesl Intellizgece. [LECT.
IV.
So long as the human mind only conceives of God
as a Supreme Intelligence, it will oscillate hesitatingly
between these two errors; between a sterile Deism which
banishes God from the world, and a reactionary Pantheism
which buries Him  in it.  It is when we gain a height
beyond, and observe the third great form of argument with
which man clothes and fortifies his presentiment of God,
that we are saved from this liability. Here a view of God's
Nature opens out upon us, which is at once conservative
of His moral Purity and distinctness from created life, and
which also does justice to the intimacy of His contact with
the world and with humanity.
The philosopher of Konigsberg, who in his Critique of
Pure Reason has made the most of some well-known objections against those arguments for God's existence, which are
drawn from  the existence and structure of the universe,2
insists with great force upon the strength of the inference
by which the human conscience ascends to the recognition
of God.  If Kant is a sceptic in the domain of speculative
thought, his doubts vanish altogether when, entering that
of the practical reason, as he terms it, he listens to the
commands of moral truth. 1 This practical reason is wholly
independent of any discovery or decision external to itself:
omnibus iis que circumstant fores carnis mese: Dixistis mihi de Deo meo
quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid. Et exclamaverunt voce
magna: Ipse fecit nos.
1 Luthardt, Apologet. Vortr. L. iii. Scholten, Phil. in Rel., p. 100.
2 Iritik d. reinen Vernunft, Abt. ii. B. 2, kap. 3, ~~ 4, 5, 6.




II.]     zInfe:rence of tie practzlical reason.      69
it apprehends the good as such without waiting for the
judgment of experience. Its commands are issued without
limit or reserve; they have an objective certainty; they
"judge all things, while they themselves are judged of no
man."  They lead us to recognize as necessary truths, first,
the freedom of man's will; next, a future life; thirdly, the
existence of God. The voice of the practical reason, " Thou
oughtest," implies "Thou canst"; the categorical imperative is meaningless in the absence of moral freedom.  lMan
is free, and his conscience perpetually affirms that he must
do good at all costs, even although doing good should not
make him happy.  It affirms no less clearly that if he
is really virtuous he should be happy. Yet, in the experience
of life, the good man who does good is often unhappy,
while vice is not unfrequently salaried and crowned with
rewards that are denied to virtue.  The sight of this contradiction forces the conscience to infer a life to come, and
a Moral Being Who, in His justice, will re-establish those
relations between happiness and virtue which it persistently
recognizes as necessary. Thus the practical reason reaches
God, not by a demonstration of His existence, but as a
postulate of its own activity. Speculation may mislead,
but duty is a certainty; and duty is no arbitrary creation
either of our reason, or of our self-interest; it is not an
abstraction which rests on nothing beyond itself; it is out
of the reach of merely speculative criticism, yet it leads us
to the Master of the moral world. Those clear, precise,
categorical orders which are imposed in varying degrees




70    Cozscience not a product of eduzcalion. [LECT.
of urgency upon all human wills, point to a really living
Ruler of men, in Whom man cannot disbelieve without doing
violence to himself. Certainly Kant would have had little
patience with the theory that conscience itself is only a
collection of prejudices received from childhood, and incorporated with the moral life; that it is simply the result of
early training, and has no real basis in the soul.  For this
theory confuses the furniture of the conscience with the conscience itself; the acquisitions of a faculty with its existence.
It might be contended with equal justice that the human
mind does not exist because it is developed by exercise, and
enlarged by information.l Certainly conscience may be
enlightened or it may be misinformed by education. But the
original faculty which perceives the existence of some right
and of some wrong, whatever may be apprehended as such,
and which refers actions to such right and wrong; the
faculty which under all circumstances pronounces in favour
of truth, and justice, and self-sacrifice, and courage, and
purity, wherever these can be found, because it intuitively
perceives their necessary excellence;-this faculty demands
God.  Conscience is unsatisfied, according to Kant, unless
there exists some Being above the world, Who can hereafter reconcile the discrepancies which exist between virtue
and fortune in this present life, in His quality of an arbiter
of human conduct. Here Atheism, especially in its Positivist guise, pleads the disinterestedness of real virtue,
1 Kritik der Reinen Yernunft, pp. 462-491, ed. Rosenkranz. Siimmtt.
Werke, 2er Theil. These criticisms are discussed by Kleutgen, Theologie
der Vorzeit. BId. ii. p. 46, sqq. Philosophie der Vorzeit, ii. diss. 9, 1.




II.]      God a Jostzlale of the conscience.        71
which is good and does good for the sake of goodness,
seeking no reward, and daunted by no misfortune.1 But
when Kant maintains that there must be a moral God, he
does this not in the interests of a mercenary virtue, but
in those of an absolute and consummate justice, which proclaims in every human conscience the necessity of establishing an harmony or correspondence between the conditions
of human existence on the one hand, and man's demerits
or deserts on the other.
Thus it is that conscience demands God; and the atheistic
whisper in the fool's heart of which the Psalmist speaks,
belongs in truth to moral rather than to intellectual folly.
It is ultimately traceable to a failure to perceive and feel
the mighty and abiding contrast which exists between
moral good and moral evil, and the necessary bearing of
this contrast upon the ultimate destinies of the universe.
In a good man, belief in God results from belief in the
invincibility of good; the intensity or feebleness of a man's
belief in God is a spiritual thermometer, whereby the temperature of his moral being may be pretty accurately
measured. When the moral sensibilities are weakened or
blunted by culpable indulgence until known sin is tolerable
or even welcome, then the intellect is always open to
theories which represent good and evil as alike forms of the
Universal Life, or as equally fatal results of that " unreasoning and irresistible piece of machinery which we name
1 Cf. too Strauss Glaubensl. 1, 393, qu. by Luthardt, Lect. III., whom
I here follow.




72 Conscience, hozu far ajffecled by /Se Fall. [LECT.
the Universe."  But although the human conscience is an
earnest theistic apologist in exact proportion to its vitality,
its affirmation of God should not be dclivorced from the intellectual inferences which the universe suggests to us.
The evidential strength of Theism, like that of Christianity,
lies not in any single proof, but in the collective force of
the various evidences which are producible in its favour; and
of these, the cry of conscience, if the strongest practically,
is, after all, only one. Nor does it follow that because conscience is a true guide towards the throne of a Living and a
Moral God, it is therefore an infallible judge in reviewing
all that He may reveal to us about Himself or the laws of
His government. We may reasonably accept the witness
of the universal conscience of good men in favour of Theism,
without binding ourselves to accept all that has been
pleaded by individuals in the name of conscience against
portions of the Jewish history, for example, or the doctrine
of the Atonement. If it be urged from another side that
it is after all "the conscience of fallen man upon which
we rely for this great affirmation of God," the reply is, that
the Fall cannot have destroyed our powers of apprehending
truth, or it would have destroyed our responsibility, and
that it is not the weakness which the Fall has wrought in
human nature, but the strength which still survives it,
whereby man affirms the existence of a M[oral God and
seeks Him. So far as man is a fallen being, no doubt, at the
approach of the Lord God, he " hides himself amid the trees
of the garden," to the end of time. But those truth-seeking




II.] Feebleness of couscienzcewilkozdta Revelcdozon. 73
I.                                                 73
elements of his spiritual nature which, as the Christian
creed teaches, were in Paradise invigorated by a robe of
supernatural grace, afterwards forfeited by the sin of our
first parents, are throughout heathendom still kindled into
activity by the prevenient grace of the Holy Spirit, breathing as He wills across the deserts; and thus fallen man
seeks the Lord, if haply he might feel after Him  and find
Him, though He be not far from every one of us,l instinctively assured, as all good men must be, of His existence,
and hoping that He may be fully unveiled at last.
Yet the feebleness of conscience in fallen man is a fact
of significance.  Although conscience seeks in God, not
merely, as does intellect, a solution of the problem  of the
universe, but a Legislator Who has given and Who will
enforce the law of right and wrong written in the human
heart, conscience is nevertheless in the mass of men, if
left to itself, too enfeebled to keep a Moral God clearly in
view, even when it has caught sight of Him.  It requires
an aid external to itself, a token from its Object that it is
not mistaken about Him.  It requires a revelation.  Without a revelation, historical theism  is either the fruitless
speculation of a few isolated thinkers, or the underlying
idea of a popular superstition which obscures and degrades
it. In a certain true sense it is itself a revelation; but its
utterances require a countersign in the world without,
which may make it certain that the inner legislator is also
the Ruler of the Universe. Conscience itself, exactly in the
1Acts xvii. 27.




74  Ideun'iy of 1ze God of Conscience and /he [LECT.
ratio of the clearness with which it discerns the moral nature of God, discerns the implied necessity of a revelation.
It is sure that He Who is Himself just and merciful, cannot
leave men altogether to themselves: that the All-Good cannot
permanently disappoint the desires and powers which He
has Himself implanted. And thus the antecedent probability of a revelation is to a good man not less than overwlhelming; and Christianity assures us that his conviction
is warranted by the fact.
The substance of the Christian revelation of God consists not merely in the teaching of Jesus Christ, together
with the old Hebrew literature on which He sets His seal,
and the apostolical doctrine which He warrants by anticipation, but also in His life. His life was an unveiling
of God to the eye of man's sense, that the eye of man's
spirit might understand Him. Christ's life, not less than
His teaching, confirms the highest instincts of the human
conscience, and educates them up to a point which of
themselves they could never have reached. But how is
man enabled to identify the Author of this law within
him, perfectly reflected, as it is, in the Christ, with
the Author of the law  of the universe without him?
The answer is, by miracle. Miracle is an innovation upon
physical law,-or at least a suspension of some lower
physical law by the intervention of a higher one,-in the
interests of moral law.  The historical fact that Jesus
Christ rose from the dead identifies the Lord of physical
life and death with the Legislator of the Sermon on the




II.]  Cod of iNabc re cerfticacd by liracle.      75
Mount. Miracle is the certificate of identity between the
Lord of Nature and the Lord of Conscience,-the proof
that He is really a Moral Being Who subordinates plhysical
to moral interests. Miracle is the meeting-point between
intellect and the moral sense, because it announces the
answer to the efforts and yearnings alike of the moral sense
and the intellect; because it announces revelation.  It
may be asked whether miracle, in revealing God, is not
subversive of the idea of God, Whom  it reveals.  Does it
not postulate in Him  two contradictory wills, the one
whereby He enacts a permanent law, the other whereby
He suspends it? And is not this irreconcileable with the
highest views of His nature, as the Immutable, Who is
what He is unchangeably, because what He is, is absolutely the best? No. For this is to apply to the Divine
Mind a human standard of measurement.  Succession is a
law of human thoughts; because the mind of man is finite.
If I resolve to spend each day for the next six months in a
given way, and then, three months hence, determine that I
will spend one particular day very differently, I am without
doubt guilty of traversing my original and general intention by a second and particular intention which contradicts
it. But with God, no such self-contradiction is possible;
because in the Divine Mind there is no succession, whether
of ideas or resolves. The Eternal Being sees the end in
the beginning; He sees the exception together with the
rule so simultaneously, that it is untrue to say that He
anticipates it. It is a simple, indivisible act of will, where



76       Dignily of God nol compyromised   [LECT.
by He everlastingly wills the rule together with the exception-the exception with the rule.  With Him is "no
variableness, neither shadow of turning." 1  The idea that
God, in working a miracle, contradicts His own earlier
purpose in giving to the physical world unchangeable laws,
not merely betrays a conception of law as something
independent of the free activity of God, but introduces into
our conception of the Divine Mind the finite and human
idea of succession in thought and will. Whereas, in truth,
He, the Infinite, embraces, by one single act, present, past,
and future, the general and the particular, the individual
and the universal; reaching, as the Wise Man says, "from
one end to another, mightily, and smoothly and sweetly
ordering all things." 2
But does God compromise His dignity by working a
miracle, or by exerting a special Providence over His
works? It is pleaded, indeed, that He must do so. It is
said to be inconceivable that the Maker and Monarch of
all these suns can interest Himself in the concerns of one
of the smallest of His planets; in a particular race of
creatures on its surface, in individual members of that
race, in you and me. To imagine this, we are told, is
only to indulge human self-love, which interprets all
things, even the Deity Himself, by the promptings of
its own boundless self-complacency.
And yet, what kind of "dignity" is it which is thus
pleaded in order to depreciate the freedom, energy, and
1 S. James i. 17.         2 Wisd. viii. 1.




II.]   by miracles wzhic  altest His moralily.    77
ubiquity of God's Providential Rule? It is at best the
dignity of an oriental despot; he is too engrossed in
the cares of personal government, or in the pursuits of
personal indulgence, to listen to the voices and to study
the wants of the poor, who struggle and suffer around
the walls of his seraglio. The notion that a really great
intelligence will concern itself only and exclusively with
broad principles and general interests, to the neglect of
particulars and details, is, even when we are speaking of
human minds, a mistaken notion. This vulgar contempt
for details belongs to the pretentious incitation rather than
to the reality of mental power. A really great intelligence
combines the observation and study of details with the firm
grasp of comprehensive principles; and in this power of
combining things, which in lower minds are found apart,
lies the strength and secret of its greatness. Nor is this
less, rather it is much more the case, with the Eternal Mind.
God is not less Divine in literally numbering the sparrows
that fall to the ground, and the hairs of the human head,
than in formulating the highest laws which govern either
planetary systems or spiritual intelligences; while this
comprehensive and penetrating interest and action, spending
itself upon the whole outward and inward life of His
creatures, is the symptom  and expression of the moral
interest which the reasonable creation commands in the
heart of the Creator.
No; God's greatness is not enhanced by systems which
would banish Him from the world, or condemn Him to




78       God revealed lo the sozul in CGhrist.  [LECT.
impotence. The miracles of Christianity are so far from
compromising its Theism, that they illustrate and secure it.
The God of Christianity is no mere First Cause, or Supreme
Intelligence.  He is a Moral God. If He is Power and
Wisdom, He is also Sanctity, Justice, Providence, Mercy,
Love.  According to the Gospel, Love is His Essence;
and love is interest in, and self-sacrifice for that which is
its object. It is such a God as this alone Who can be
the adequate object of religion.
Traceable everywhere  in  human  history, traceable
especially in the history of one separated and chosen
race, the interest of the Perfect Moral Being in the moral
and thinking creatures of His hand culminates at Bethlehem and on Calvary. The Incarnation of the Eternal
Son, the manifestation of the Divine life of Love, and
Justice, and Compassion, and Purity, flashing through a
veil of flesh, and leading up to a death of agony and shame,
which alters the whole existing moral relation between
earth and heaven; this is the glorious creed which rivets
a Christian's conviction of the moral intensity of the life of
God. " God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son."  What could He do more in order to con-.
vince us that He is not merely a Force or an Intelligence,
but a Heart? At the feet of Him who could say, " He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," we understand,
and feed upon the certainty, that God is moral as well as
intellectual " light, and that in Him is no darkness at all."
W~hen a man's hold upon this creed is gone, his thought




II.]          Practical consideraZiozs.           79
falls back, at best, upon the more rudimentary and less
adequate ideas of the Godhead; the darker mysteries of
the world's history present themselves with more painful
force; and the mind tends inevitably, in the last resort,
either to Deism or to Pantheism; to a Deism which just
permits God to create, and then dismisses Him from His
creation; or to a Pantheism which identifies Him with all
the moral evil in the universe, and ends by propagating
the worship of new Baals and Ashteroths.
A few words in conclusion.
God being really alive, His existence is a fact'with which
no other fact that the human mind can come to recognize
will possibly compare. Nothing among created things that
can engage and stimulate thought, nothing that can warm
and expand affection, nothing that can invigorate will and
purpose, ought, in the judgment of any thinking human
being, to compete with the Eternal God. Our reasonable
duty towards God is " to believe in Him, to fear Him, and
to love Him, with all the heart, with all the mind, with all
the soul, and with all the strength."  And yet that unbegun,
unending, self-existent Life; that boundless Intelligence
administering a boundless Power; that long array of moral
Attributes which win our love while they must also move
our reverence and fear; what is I-e, our God, to us? Do we
thirst for God? As the days, and months, and years pass,
do we ever look out of and beyond ourselves upon that vast
ocean of Uncreated Life Which encircles us, Which penetrates our inmost selves? Do we ever think steadily, so as to




o80         Praclical considerations.       [LECT. II.
dwell with a real intellectual interest upon Him Who is the
first and highest of truths, to Whose free bounty we ourselves owe the gift of existence, and to Whom we must
one day account for our use of it? Do we ever sincerely
desire to love Him, and to live for Him? Or are we constantly hurrying along our solitary path from one vanishing shape towards another, while we neglect the Alone
Unchangeable? Be sure that, if we will, in God revealed
in Christ, the soul may slake the thirst of the ages; and
the dreariest, and darkest, and most restless existence may
find illumination and peace. "This God is our God for
ever and ever: He will be our guide unto death, and
beyond it." To each one of us, now, He is, if we will; if
we will, He will be, for ever, to each the Eternal Truth,
wherein thought can never find its limit; the Uncreated
Beauty, "most Ancient, yet always Fair," whereof affection can never tire; the Perfect Rule, existing eternally in
the Life of the Necessary Moral Being, whereunto each
created will may perpetually conform itself, yet never exhaust its task. Without this Awful and Blessed Being,
man has no adequate object, even during these days of his
brief earthly existence; his thought, his affection, his purpose spring up and are exercised only that they may
presently waste and die. With God, the human soul not
merely interprets the secret of the universe; it comprehends, and is at peace with, itself. For God is the satisfaction of its thirst;-He is the object of Religion.




LECTURE III.
Citrb <unbav in 1ent.
THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION-THE SOUL.
Ps. viii. 4.
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
"ELIGION, we have seen, is not a sentiment, or an idea,
or even a code of moral practice. It involves the
establishment and maintenance of a real bond between God
on the one hand and man on the other. To the perfectness
of this bond, feeling, thought, and moral earnestness on the
part of man, contribute elements which are indispensable
to it; so that religion in itself, although beyond each of
them, is dependent upon all. Its object, as we have also
seen, is the Personal and Moral God. In a mere first cause,
in a mighty force, in an all-surveying intelligence, religion
finds nothing to which it can attach itself; and systems
which, like Pantheism, deny the personality of God, or, as
did the old Deism, remove Himr from all interest in and
moral action upon the world, are thereby destructive of
religion. And we have so far anticipated the matter
G




82              Value of the inquiry,           [LECT.
before us, as to observe that, whatever else may be said for
or against it, Christianity satisfies those conditions of a real
religion, in which these theories severally fail; and that
in Christendom, the purity and spirituality of a Personal
God on the one hand, and His intimate contact with us
men on the other, by means of a Personal Incarnation,
are fully and equally recognized. But this brings us face
to face with a question of scarcely inferior importance,
at least from our human and practical point of view.
Religion being a real relation between man and God, it
is natural and inevitable to pass from considering one
of its terms to the consideration of the other.  If God
be the object, what is the subject of religion? What is
this created being who can thus enter into relations with
the high majesty of heaven? or, as the Psalmist puts it
at once more reverently and more truthfully, " What is
man, that Thou art mindful of him?"  What is it in man
which makes him capable of this exceptional relation to
God, as implied in his capacity for religion?
It would be a mistake to treat this inquiry on which we
are embarking as so entirely speculative that it can secure
or fortify no practical results. It is easy, but unwise, in
days like ours to ignore the great questions which open beneath our feet as well as above our heads, under the pretence
of being practical men who have neither time nor inclination
for theory. No doubt, it is better to be a good man than
to be a good psychologist; but an accurate notion of the
real nature of the soul may contribute very materially in




III.]     Why is man cacpable of reizgion.?       83
an age like ours to personal enthusiasm for practical goodness.  How are you to decide whether man is capable of
religion, or how far his capacity extends, until you know
what, in his inmost, deepest being, man really is? In other
words, this question of man's capacity for religion is substantially the question whether man be not merely a bodily
organism, but also and especially a spiritual personality.
Certainly IRevelation has familiarized Christians with the
angels, as supramundane beings, in a very high degree capable of religion. But religion, as it comes before us on the
surface of this planet, is a monopoly of man. Among the
lower creatures we find nothing like it; we can discover no
place for it. Man is the highest being of which these
creatures have cognizance. Often, indeed, may we discover
in their attachment to ourselves, in their fidelity, in their
tenderness, in the true delicacy of the attention which
they shew us, much that rebukes us when we reflect on the
poor service that we ourselves pay to a Higher Master.
But having no unseen world open to them, and being, as
they are, incapable of any properly reflective thought, they
are also incapable of religion, of any consciously personal
relationship to the Source of all Life. But man can look
above and beyond this world of sense; he can enter into
real communion with the Monarch of both worlds; and the
secret of his doing this lies in that which, by virtue of God's
bountiful gift and appointment, he himself is as distinct
from the creatures around him.




84           External aspects of man.           [LECT.
What is man? What, let us ask, is this or that given
man of our acquaintance, a near relation, one of ourselves?
In the distance, or at first sight, a single human being is
what the world chiefly associates with him; he is so much
property, so much professional skill, so much political
influence, so much social power, so much literary reputation,
so much practical capacity for public affairs. Upon these
things the public eye is wont to rest chiefly, if not exclusively; these things are labelled with this or that great
name when it is repeated in conversation or in the newspapers. But they are only the accidents of any human
life. They are external to it. They tell us nothing about
it, nothing at least that a true appreciation of human
greatness would most care to know. When do we see the
man himself? We stand face to face with him; we listen
to a voice; we note the peculiarities of a manner; we study
the ever-varying lines of a human countenance; but we
are still outside the real man. His voice, his manner, his
expression, may tell us something about him; it may be a
great deal; but they are not himself. We get nearer his
real self, when we can observe and compare and take to
pieces what he says and does; in his speech and his action,
he reveals at least some portion of his character. But that
which speaks and acts is beneath speech and action; it is
always and necessarily invisible. The knife of no anato



III.]          Alan himself a peerson.              85
mist, however delicately wielded, can detect it in the folds
of any human brain; no psychologist can draw it out into
the light by an exhaustive analysis of any human thought.
Underlying all the outward decorations of man's life;
underlying the human face, and form, and speech, and
action, although thrilling through them as if threatening
ever and anon to become visible; underlying all that is
most private and subtle even in secret thought, is that
around which all else is gathered, and without which all
else would be stripped of its significance, without which it
would never have been or would cease to be.
What is man?  He is, in the root and seat of his being,
a person.  He is that which each of us means when
he says, "I."  Let us turn to look at this question from
within, rather than from  without; for after all, it is
within ourselves that we can, each for himself, only
and really grapple with it.  What do we mean, each
of us, by " I." We mean, first of all, something distinct,
utterly, profoundly distinct, from all that is not " I"; something which is conscious, as nothing else is concious, of this
deep distinctness. I think, and I know that it is only I
who think; I think about myself, and I know that it is
myself only upon which I only am thinking; no other self
commingles with this consciousness, or I should not be
myself; I am thus conscious of my own identity, and of
my radical separateness from all besides. Nay, more, I
can trace and assert this identity of myself with myself,
this separateness of myself from all that is not myself, for
a long term of past years. When the outward circumrn



86             T7'he sense ofy5ersonality.             [LECT.
stances of my life were far other than they are now; when
my bodily mien was so different that none could recognize
in it the myself of to-day; when the inner companions of
my secret being were not as they have been since, so that
I had other thoughts, other feelings, other resolves than
now; yet still underlying these differences there was, deep
down at bottom, the same self, thinking, feeling, resolving
then, even as it resolves, and feels, and thinks now.  And of
no one fact am I more certain, or so certain, as of this;that this self of the present is the self of thirty or forty
years ago; that it was then as it is now, that it is now
as it was then, a thing distinct from  all else in  the
universe; and a thing of which, among creatures, I alone
have actual cognizance.  And as I am  certain that it is
separate from all besides, and that, as long as my memory
will serve me, it has never been otherwise; so I feel at this
moment, as I always have felt, that I possess it; that its
thoughts are nmy thoughts; that its will is my will; that this
thought and will are not powers which come in upon me
like a flood and possess me, but that they are strictly forms
of my own activity. If I think, I choose to think; if I will,
it is I, and no other being in the universe, who does will;
my will is the exercise of a freedom, unshared by any
partner of my life; and, if I choose, indestructible.'
1See Psychologie, by Ainedee Jacques, in the Manuel de Philosophie,
Hachette, 1867. In Is. xxvi. 9, the Ego Aft is clearly distinguished both
frozm the SA  and the en.':; in Prov. xxxiii. 15, and Eccles. vii. 25, it is
distinguished from the'1Z  of the Speaker. In Scripture 7rpdwwrov (2 Cor.
i. 11) refers to external manifestation of the person, and vroSraeLS (Heb. i.




III.]      The lower animzals do notl  ossess iP.              87
Such, or, at least, something of this kind, is the sense of
personality as we, each one of us, experience it. As long
as we can remember, it has been at the bottom  of all that
we have felt, thought, and done; it has penetrated every
movement of our minds and hearts; it has welded the
many elements of our lives, outward and inward, moral
and  intellectual, spiritual and even bodily, into  a consistent whole.  When it is felt, our inmost being is felt;
we can get no deeper than that reflective thought, than
that conscious will.  Here we touch, so far as we can
touch, personal spirit; and it is because man is a personal
spirit, or, as Scripture terms it, a being made in the image
of God, that he is master of the world around him. 1  The
mere animal is not thus conscious of, and capable of reflecting, on his own existence.  He lives and feels; he carries
instinct forward, it may be, to the very confines of reason.
But he does not comprehend his life; he does not reflect
that it is he who lives; he is not conscious of remembering a line of personal existence, unshared by any other
being, and threading a series of years and a long train of
divergent circumstances.  He does not anticipate a future.
3, xi. 1) to the substance that underlies the appearance. There is no word
in Scripture to express " person" in the sense of a self-conscious, self-determining being. Del. Bibl. Psychologie, vi. 1. Wiirter's art. Seele in Wetzer
and Wette; Dict. Encycl.
1 On the Likeness of God in man see Delitzsch, Biblische Psychologie, ii.,
~ 2. The Divine Image consists in man's self-consciousness and moral freedom, zd VOpiV KatC aevTetCeoOyov. Man's dominion over the earthly world is
" an effluence of the Divine likeness, and not the Divine likeness itself." By
means of the Resurrection even man's body attains 7T-7'v iK6a rUo 67roUpavlou
(1 Cor. xv. 49), in that it is transfigured into the image of the God-man.
See the whole of this interesting section.




88         Personalily not mervged iz  species.   [LECT.
Neither is he free or deliberate in his exercise of will: his
will is only impulsive desire or passion, unregulated by
intelligence; it is not his instrument; it is his master.
Being thus the slave of nature around him and of his own
nature, of his own instincts, and of the force of circumstance, he never can project himself beyond nature, and
so rise above it, and take the measure of it and of his own
relation towards it.  He is thus passive when face to face
with  his nature, he  is thus entirely under its control,
because he altogether belongs to it; because in him there is
nothing which comes from  a higher world, and is independent of the world of sense.1 Accordingly the single
animal is only a specimen of his kind, the individual exists
only in the species: but man, besides belonging on his
animal side to an animal species, yet knows himself to be,
in his individual capacity, a solitary essence, personal and
indivisible.   With  man, the  animal species, the  lower
nature which he shares with his kind, is subordinate to the
individual, because  in man  that which  constitutes the
individual, his inmost being, belongs to a separate and a
higher order of existence.2
1 Wiirter, art. Seele, ubi. sup.
2 It were to be wished, observes Delitzsch, that personality and individuality were less frequently confused in common language than they are.
Personality is common to all men as such: by it men are raised above plants
and beasts. Between the " thought," feeling, instinct of the brute, and the
inner life of man, who is conscious of himself, and can in thought project
himself beyond himself, there is an impassable gulf.  Individuality only
marks off the single specimen of the kind, whether it be man or beast; it
implies nothing as to his subjective life. Although this obvious distinction
is not formally expressed in Scripture, it is observable that in the narrative
of the creation  lp. is used only of plants and beasts, not of man-; as if




III.]       Doctrine of " inlernalfacls."             89
This consciousness of personal life is not to be referred
to anything in man's physical constitution.  Thought
after all is not merely phosphorus; and psychology is not
correctly described as a branch of physiology. The great
Scottish thinkers of half a century ago laid much stress
upon the doctrine of what they called " internal facts."
By an internal fact they did not mean a fact removed from
the cognizance of the five senses; because there are many
purely physiological facts which might be defined in this
way, —as, for example, valvular action in the circulation of
the blood.  They meant an act of which the personal
consciousness alone takes cognizance. If you lift a heavy
weight, so far as the visible muscular exertion of the arm
goes, that is an external fact; but the cause of this
external fact is an internal fact, a determination of your
will-that is, of yourself; and of this cause you alone are
conscious.  How your will acts upon your muscles, you
cannot say; but this at least you do know, that it is your
will which, by a voluntary self-determination, caused the
movement of the muscles of your arm: and this internal
fact is just as certain to you as the external one. Or
suppose that you feel annoyance at some action of a
neighbour, and reflect almost immediately that this feeling
is undeserved, and fall back upon this and that consideration in order to set it aside, and succeed in doing so.
Here you have three distinct internal facts; the original
to imply that man is more than an individual specimen of a kind,-that he
is a person.-Bibl. Psych. iv. 1.




90             Spirizualizy of I/ze sozd.          [LECT.
feeling, the bringing reason to bear upon that feeling, and
the altered state of feeling which succeeds.  All of these
are strictly internal, strictly peculiar to the consciousness;
yet as appreciable by observation, and as immediately
appreciable, as any fact of physiology.   There is no
necessity, exclaims  the eminent thinker who  suggests
this illustration, for losing ourselves "in metaphysical
hypotheses, in order to demonstrate the spirituality of
the soul, and Kant was right in throwing these oldfashioned arguments to the winds.  The spirituality of the
soul is a fact; it is a positive fact; it is a fact just as
notorious as the sunlight. MAen are still inquiring, and
will probably inquire while time shall last, what matter is.
But we do practically know what spirit is, for we have
each one of us a sample of it in ourselves, that is to say,
in the thinking, feeling, determining subject which we
name' self."' 1
It would be an impertinence to say that the spirituality
of the human soul " is taught in Scripture," because Holy
Scripture everywhere presupposes it, and is unintelligible
without it. But a question may be raised as to the form
in which it is taught there.  Scripture sometimes appears
to exhibit human nature as composed of two elements,
sometimes as of three. Moses represents man as originating from  " the combination of an immediate breathing of
God with an earthly body," 2 and Solomon distinguishes
1 Saisset, L'Ame et la Vie, pp. 16, 17, 18, 22.
2 Gen. ii. 7; cf. Del. Bibl. Psych. ii. ~ 4.




III.]    ScriPzztyrl anzaysis of man's nature.               9I
the dust which at death must "return to the earth as it,
was " from "the spirit" that " shall return unto God who
gave it."'   After a like manner our Lord distinguishes
the true life or soul of man2 from his animal life, and
the "spirit," which in His disciples was "willing," from
the "flesh'.' that was weak;3 and in dying He resigns His
Human Soul to the Father, with the words, "Into Thy
hands I commend My Spirit." 4   In the same manner S.
Paul bids Christians glorify God both in their body and
in their spirits, since both body and spirit belong to
Him; 5 and  S. James compares faith  without works to
that separation between the body and the spirit which
implies the death of the body.6 In these passages, man
is regarded as composed of a body and of a single supersensuous nature, which is sometimes called life or soul,7
and sometimes spirit; but elsewhere, this immaterial nature
itself is subdivided into  self-conscious, self-determining
spirit, and animal life-power or soul.  Thus S. Paul prays
that the spirit, and soul, and body of the Thessalonian
Christians, each part subsisting in its perfect integrity,
may be preserved blameless until our Lord's second
1 Eccles. xii. 7.   2 S. Matt. vi. 25, oljx  7'vXha wrXe7iv eicOL qrs rpoqlS.
3 S. Matt. xxvi. 41.        4 S. Luke xxiii. 46.
5 1 Cor. vi. 20, see text.  6 S. James ii. 26.
7 "According to the suse loquendi of all the books of the Bible, Wig pvX,',
frequently denotes the entire inward nature of man." This is true even
of S. Paul.  If rvX' in his writings means nothing more than " vis qu'
corpus viget et movetur," he is at issue with S. Luke, with the Epistle to
the Hebrews, and with Eph. vi. 6, Col. iii. 23, Phil. i. 27; in all of which
passages the seat of moral resolve is placed in the WtvX?. Cf. Delitzsch, Bibl.
Psych. iii. ~ 9.




92    Oneness of the vilalprinciple in man.   [LECT.
coming;1 and the word of God is described in the Epistle to
the Hebrews as having, from its moral power, an analytical
efficacy which separates as clearly between the spiritual and
psychical elements of man's immaterial nature, as between
the life of sensation and the life of motion in his corporeal
nature.  Still it cannot be concluded from these two passages that man consists of three essentially distinct elements.
If this language of S. Paul obliges us to see in soul and
spirit something more than two distinct relations of man's
inward nature, it does not imply more than two distinct
departments of that nature, the higher region of self-conscious spirit and self-determining will, which belongs to
man as man; and the lower region of appetite, perception,
imagination, memory, which in the main is common to
the undying soul of man and the perishable inmost being
of the brute. Man's soul is not a third nature, poised
between his spirit and his body; nor yet is it a sublimate
of his bodily organization, any more than his body is a
precipitate of his soul.  It is the outer clothing of the
spirit, one with it in essence, yet distinct in functions;
the centre of man's life, psychical and  animal, is his
spirit.3
But whatever Holy Scripture may explicitly say about
11 Thess. v. 23, O6XOKXpoV Vi/gv rO,rveO/&a, Kati X ifvXql, Kai rd Tena.
2 Heb. iv. 12, &'KvoV1,eCos %XPtL /epLLtWoO /vxis5 Te Ka 1 7rve5Laros, &ap/wv TE
Kai /vwEX&v.
s In our own day Anton Giinther revived the psychological dualism of
Occam, by making the distinction between the soul and spirit in man an
essential distinction; in other words, by representing each man as possessed
of two souls, one the seat of reason, the other of sensation and growth.




III.]   Ouzr Lord's estimate of zhta  mazn  is.          93
the spiritual personality of man as a formal doctrine, it
implies much more by its constant appeal to man's
higher nature. From first to last it treats man as a being
who, although clothed in an animal form, is essentially and
in himself a spirit. It surrounds him with precepts which
a self-determining spirit only can obey; with examples, of
which only a reflecting spirit can enter into the force and
drift; with prayers, aspirations, modes of thought and feeling, that have no meaning for a being who is not experimentally conscious of his spiritual subsistence. Especially
is this observable in those Divine pages which form the
inmost sanctuary of Holy Scripture; in the Life and Words
of our Lord Jesus Christ. As human forms pass before
Him, in the Gospel, although He is constantly relieving
human want and pain, it is plain that the outward man
means for Him, relatively, almost nothing, and that His
eye rests persistently, exclusively, upon the man within.
As we accompany Him in that brief but exhaustive study
of humanity, we feel before the centurion or Pilate little or
nothing of the majesty of the Roman name. Although Christ
appeared when the Empire of the Cesars was in its splendour,
He speaks of the "kings of the Gentiles," in a phrase of
studied vagueness; as if to suggest the utter insignificance
of the highest political interests which only touch man's
outward life, when they are contrasted with those higher inThat this theory has no biblical warrant appears to have been satisfactorily
shewn by Delitzsch: its experimental difficulties are obvious.  The Ego
which thinks, reasons, wills, is, we all of us know, identical with the Ego
which experiences the sensations of sight, smell, hearing, touch.




94  A personal spirit only cpalble of rezigion. [LECT.
terests of the human spirit which He had come to promote.
Even the greatness and authority of the successors of Aaron
disappears, or recedes into the background, in the atmosphere of this exacting estimate, which knows no respect of
persons; while on the other hand, at His bidding, a few
obscure and illiterate Galilean peasants become respectively
a S. Peter, a S. John, a S. Mary Magdalen-names which
of themselves recall neither political weight nor intellectual
prestige, but types of spiritual character, beautiful and
majestic, upon which already eighteen centuries of progressive civilization have been forward to lavish all but
the best of their reverence and their love.
It is indeed as personal spirits, tabernacling in bodily
forms, that we men are capable of religion. Resolve man's
higher nature into physiological sensation with Materialism,
and religion becomes an absurdity.  As spirits, we are
linked and bound to the Father of Spirits; as spirits, we
believe, we hope, we love; as spirits, we enter into the complex mystery and activities of prayer; as spirits, we take
in each other that deep and penetrating interest which
-pierces beneath the outline of the human animal, and holds
true converse with the supersensuous being within. All
that weakens or lowers our consciousness of being spirits,
weakens in that proportion our capacity for religion: all
that enhances that consciousness, as surely enlarges it.




III.]     Theory of the soul's pre-exislence.         95
II.
Man, then, if we track him  to the centre of his being,
is a spirit, whatever be the dignity and organic indispensableness of his outward form. What do we know about
the origin of man's spirit, of his deepest self? We know
when and under what conditions a human body comes
into existence.  What do we know about the origin of a
human soul?
If we take account of the ancient and of the Eastern
world, one of the most popular answers to this question
will be found in the theory that the soul exists before the
body.  Sometimes this is stated without an attempt at closer
definition; more frequently it takes the form of a doctrine
of Metempsychosis. According to this doctrine the spiritual
part of each man's being is as a forced emigrant, who has
previously occupied other frames, and who may have others
to inhabit hereafter; although man's inextinguishable hope
suggests that an escape from this fatal cycle may be achieved
by pre-eminent virtue, which will at length secure an incorporeal immortality for the weary wanderer.l
The Western and less systematized form of the doctrine
is due to Plato. Plato, who did so much in the way of
training the ancient world to realize the greatness and
uniqueness of the soul, accounted for the soul's present
1 For a recent European theory of a curiously Gnostic complexion, see
" Le Lendemain de la Mort, ou la vie future selon la Science," par Louis
Figuier. Paris, 1871.




96          Pla1onic formz of /le theory.       [LECT.
and, as he deemed it, humiliating relation to the body, by
saying that the soul had existed previously in another
state of being, and was condemned to tenant a human
frame as a kind of punishment. Plato was probably less
anxious to give a complete account of the origin of the
soul, than to explain the source of certain ideas which he
encountered in the human mind.  They occupied much
of his attention, and he desired to invest them  with
an authority that might place them beyond the reach of
popular discussion.  To Plato it seemed that these ideas
were relics of a higher knowledge enjoyed by the soul in
some earlier stage of its existence; he could account for
them no otherwise, because they so transcended the poor
realities of man's present experience.  Thoughts which
appeared to result from scientific speculation were in truth
only a form of memory-memory of some bygone existence,
passed in an ideal world from which the soul had fallen down
into the sphere of sense and under conditions of time.'
Plato's speculation about the soul was of deeper and
more permanent interest to humanity at large, than the
particular theory which led him to adopt it. It naturally
found its way, in company with his other guesses, to Alexandria.  It was adopted by Neo-Platonist thinkers, and
even in the Jewish schools; it was taught by Philo, as
well as by Plotinus; it was filtered through Essenism into
the religious philosophy of the Talmud and the Cabbala; 2
1 71'?,V 71 /0Co'rOLS O1K'XXo zTL X Cdy4d7oS T7UYXCa'E okra. Cf. Plat. Phaed.,
E. 73-77, 246.
2 Delitzsch quotes Joel, Religions philosophie der Sohar, pp. 107-109.




III.]   Pre-exislence of the soul not Scrz ltural.    97
it entered into more than one type of Gnosticism; it appears
among the other eccentricities of the eccentric Origen;
it  forms   a  link   between   the   philosophical  bishop
of  Cyrene,  Synesius,  and  the   outer  world  of  Pagan
thought.    But it was stoutly  opposed  by  the  immense
majority of Christian teachers,  and was finally condemned
by the collective Church, as an untenable error.2 For it
never had any basis in Holy Scripture; not even  in  those
writings which are historically connected with Alexandrian
thought, or which have been supposed, on strictly internal
grounds, to have an Alexandrian  colouring.3   To suppose
that it underlies the doctrine of an original or birth-sin, as
taught in the New  Testament, is to  forget that the  great
teacher of that doctrine  expressly  states that the  consequences  of the  first sin  devolve  upon  those  who  have
not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression.4
1 Even by Clement of Alexandria, 6 Oeos l/uacs wero.'o'ev o0 7rpdovras' eXPnV
y~&p Kcal ee66,aL /,tus ivrov 4tecv ei 7rpo if.ev.  Qu. by Klee, Dogmatik. p.
433, from Strom. viii.; Maii, tom. vii. p. 88.  S. Peter of Alexandria
characterises it as a shred of heathenism: TO yap [taO'qyca ToOTO T7js CeXX9kW'S
coarL OtXoeo-oeas KEC17s  Kal aXXo-Tptas Ofko'z7s TW(DV ev X9pLtT'~  eSVjePs OEX6ovTWV
jPzv. De Anim. frag., ib.
2 In the Second Council of Constantinople; Hefele, Conciliengesch. ii. 772.
3 E.g., not in Wisd. viii. 19, 20, which refers to an altogether exceptional attribute or Personality. The Cabbalist reference to Eccles. xii. 7,
and ()rigen's to Rom. ix. 11-13, Luke i. 47, Jerem. i. 5, are set aside on examining the passages.  Nor are such arguments as Heb. vii. 9 to the point.
The pre-existence of our Lord's Divine Person, as taught in S. John and
S. Paul, would be relevant, if those Apostles had taught the pre-existence
of any one else, and if, in His case, this pre-existence did not clearly attach
to a representation of His Personal Dignity as superhuman.  His Human
Soul was, like His Body, created in time, and then hypostatically united
to His P're-existent Godhead.
4 Rom. v. 14, e7rl rob3s ut' aU/apr7cravrS iw7rt riT   ot/oldacrt Tr9s 7rapacidoews'a




98 A pre-existent so/l destroys the idea of man. [LECT.
The conception of a pre-existing soul is, moreover, broadly
at issue with the Scriptural account of man's creation.
Holy Scripture knows of no creation of souls prior to
the creation of bodies; the creation of the first man
comprises the simultaneous creation of his body and his
soul. Scripture carries us up to no moral act of any
soul living and working before the creation of Adam's
body; it traces no moral circumstance of man's present
condition higher than to the sin of Adam in Paradise.
It represents marriage as honourable, and the offspring
of marriage as a blessing from  the Lord; but these
representations would ill consist with the theory which
would treat the human body, the product of marriage,
as only a strange house of detention, wherein the unwilling soul is bound during a lifetime, far from its true
end and home. In short, the theory of the soul's preexistence is broadly at issue with the biblical and Christian
doctrine of man, which makes man the synthesis of body
and spirit; since, according to that theory, man existed in
his completeness, as spirit, before he was sent to inhabit a
human frame. And in this way such a theory cuts up by
the roots that profound argument for the future resurrection of the body, which is suggested by the fact that the
body is, under the terms of man's natural constitution, the
soul's one adequate organ and instrument; it reduces the
body to the rank of a temporarily indwelt shell, which
might be escaped from with advantage. Nor is the verdict of our experience at issue with that of Christian




III.] Theory of the soul's descenI from Jarenlts.   99
doctrine in this particular.  If we have all of us existed in
some previous state of being,'l how is it that no living
memory records any one distinct event in this presumed
phase of past existence? If all traces of this supposed
pre-existent life should have been blotted out from  one
memory, or from the majority of memories, how are we
to explain their entire disappearance from all? Such
universal oblivion of a great past is in fact inexplicable,
except upon the extreme and violent hypothesis of a
miraculous annihilation of memory in all spirits that
have been heretofore united to human forms. The failure
of any one memory to recall the supposed life of human
souls in another sphere of being, is as unfavourable to the
supposition at the bar of reason, as its other demerits must
be held to be condemnatory of it in the judgment of faith. 
But if man's soul cannot be supposed to exist, as an
independent being, before the formation of his body, is
it a part, the highest part, of that transmitted inheritance
of life, which we receive, each one of us, from our earthly
parents? Among the ancients this position was maintained  most earnestly by Tertullian.2  He had already
broken away from  the Church, and he wanted a strong
psychological tenet capable of bearing him well out in the
1 For some considerations to the contrary, see Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. i.
1, who, however, insists that the theory in question has no Scriptural
foundation.
2 Cf. Tertull. de Animif, c. 19. He speaks of the human soul " velut
sarculus quidam ex matrice Adam in propaginem deducta; " and argues that
in the process of natural conception, " cum omni suf paraturA pullulabit,
tam intellectu quam sensu." Cf. passim, 19-21, 25-27, 37.




oo        MlaeriaZlis  elemzen! in Tradtcijanism.  [LECT.
vigorous resista.nce which, in his Montanist isolation, he
offered to the Marcionite notion of a pre-existing soul.  Of
course, if the soul was generated simultaneously with the
body, there was no room left for saying that it had ever
existed independently; and Tertullian accordingly pressed
the theory of Traducianism, as it is termed, with this object,
just as in a later age S. Augustine was attracted towards
it, for another reason equally independent of its intrinsic
merits. 1  If the soul was transmitted from  sire to son, then
it was easy to answer the Pelagian question, how original
sin could be passed on together with it from  Adam  to his
descendants.  But, notwithstanding this powerful motive
for accepting it, Augustine saw in the Traducianist doctrine
an element of Materialism.2   The ordinary comparison of
lighting one lamp from  the flame of another, was too gross
an image accurately to adumbrate the act of giving being
to an immaterial consciousness.   The idea  of the  soul
which Traducianism  suggests, is really derived from  animal
analogies, and is inapplicable to the conception of a purely
spiritual and indivisible essence.  The difficulty was not
removed by saying that the body was not, as in the theory
1 Beausobre (Hist. Crit. de lManich6e, Amst., 1734) goes so far as to
attribute a strictly Traducianist doctrine respecting the origin of the soul
to S. Augustine. How keenly Augustine felt the daingers of Materialism
latent in this theory appears from such passages as De Gen. ad Litt. lib. x.
cap. i. 24-25. His general language is studiously undecided: cf. De Anima
et ejus orig. i. 2; iv. 2. De Lib. Arbitr. iii. c. 21, n. 59. His hesitation is
the more remarkable, as Pelagius made great use of Creatianism in opposing
the Catholic doctrine of original sin. See his Letter to S. Jerome; Ep. 166,
Ep.                  iv.. 13, 14, 19.
iEp. 190, ad Opt. c. iv. u. 13, 14, 15. qu. by Wiorter.




III.]          Djf zt/icuzdies of Trzdzuzciaznlsl,.              IOI
of Tertullian, the real generating agent, but only one intermediate link in the process by which a soul is engendered
by parent souls.  When Lactantius asked whether, on the
Traducianist hypothesis, the  soul of an  infant was to be
supposed to be derived from  the father, or front the mother,
or from  both parents at once, he asked a question which
was, in fact, fatal to the theory.l It was inconceivable
that a spirit, personal and indivisible, or that two spirits,
should engender another spirit; because to conceive this
was to attribute a purely animal process of propagation
to  denizens  of the supersensuous world.2    It has been
observed that children generally resemble their parents in
those qualities which we describe collectively as tempera1 De opificio Dei, c. 19.  lluld quoque venire in questionemn  potest:
utrumne anima ex patre, an potibs ex matre, an verb ex utroque generetur.
Sed ego id meo jure ab ancipiti vindico. Nihil enimn ex his tribus verum
est, quia neque ex utroque neque ex alterutro seruntur animae corporibus.
Corpus enim ex corporibus nasci potest, qu..niam confertur aliquid ex
utroque; de animis anima non potest, quia ex re te.zui et incomprehensibili
ilhil potest decedere.
2 Delitzsch's attack upon the position that " the assumed ability of spirit
to propagate itself is contrary to the dualism of nature and spirit," does
not appear to be convincing.  The Divine Nature being the Parent of
the material as well as of the Spiritual Universe, those Eternal Truths
internal to It, which are shadowed out by the Names of Father, and Son,
may well be the archetypes of material rather than of spiritual facts in the
universe. The Eternal Spirit Himself is "anot begotten but proceeding."
The.I9Pf  of Prov. viii. 24, is to be referred to the Son, who is identical
with the Wisdom  of the Proverbs.  The applicatioi of the metaphor of
generation and birth to God's natural (Job xxxviii. 28; Ps. xc. 2; Deut.
xxxii. 18) and supernatural (1 Pet. i. 3; James i. 18; 1 S. John iii. 9)
creations does not warrant any inference as to a possible parental relationship between one created spirit and another. The angelic reference in Gen.
vi. 1-4 is, to say the least, far too doubtful to be made the basis of an argument. But cf. Bibl. Psych. ii. ~ 7, sub fin.




102              Theory of Crealianzism.                [LECT.
ment, as belonging to the region of animal life-power; but
that no such resemblance can be calculated on, or, where
it does occur, regarded as other than purely accidental, in
respect of strictly personal qualities, such as genius, or
will. 1 Traducianism can undoubtedly point to great names
who favour it in ancient and modern times; 2 and it rests
on too large an area of possibilities to be rejected with
anything like peremptoriness. But the general sense of
the Church is now, as it has been in past times, against
it; it does not seem to harmonize, at least naturally and
easily, with the fixed outlines of a consistently spiritualist
philosophy, or, notwithstanding the easy explanation
which it affords of a doctrine of transmitted sin, to make
itself really at home  with  such  an  estimate  of man's
spiritual nature as is implied by the great doctrines of
the Christian creed.
The other and more generally received doctrine, is known
as Creatianism. Each soul is an immediate work of the
Creator: He is perpetually creating souls out of nothing,
and infusing them  into bodies.3   He creates each soul at
the moment when the body which is destined for it enters
1 As by WVdrter, ubi supra.
2 S. Jerome, indeed, himself an earnest Creatianist, attributes Traducianism to the majority of Western teachers in his day: maxima pars occidentalium, Ep. 78, ad Marcell; but in antiquity Tertullian stands out almost
alone in his unfaltering decision. Augustine hesitates. Of modern Traducianists, Delitzsch among Lutheran, and K(lee among Roman Catholic writers,
are perhaps the greatest.
s Quotidib Deus operatur animas et in corpora mittit nasceitium.  S.
Jerome; adv. nuf. Apol. xvi. 1, 3. Traducianism he thinks absurd: Satis
ridendi qui putant animas cum corporibus seri et non a Deo, sed a corporum
parentibus generari. Qu. by Klee, Dogm.




III.]  On whatgrounds   s   excepted against.   103
really and properly on its inheritance of life. I  Creatianism
recognizes that sense of the immateriality of the human
spirit which expressed itself falsely in the doctrine of a
pre-existence, and which is so seriously compromised by
Traducianism.   Personal spirit, it is asserted  by  the
Creatianist, cannot be transmitted from one created life to
another, like animal vitality. Yet Creatianism recognizes
the truth for which the Traducianists contended against
the advocates of the soul's pre-existence, when it maintains
that the soul and body are strictly contemporaneous in
their origin, and that they have profound and ineffaceable
relations to each other.
When it is pleaded against this theory of the origin of
the soul that it is at issue with the Scriptural representation of a Sabbath rest, which brought God's creative activity
to a close,2 it is sufficient to reply that such an interpretation of the Mosaic narrative would oblige us to close our eyes
to the proved fact of a later origin of new species of animals,
besides being inconsistent with any adequate idea of God's
providential relation to the world.3   When it is said that
Creatianism, if true, would enslave God, by bidding Him
give existence to an immortal spirit at the will of the
adulterer, and in defiance of His own law, this objection4
does indeed reveal the peculiar malignity of sins against
1 This is apparently the drift of Peter Lombard's often-quoted maxim:
Creando infundit animas Deus et infundendo creat.
2 As by Klee, Dogmatik, p. 431.        ~ S. John v. 17.
4 S. Augustine admits to S. Jerome that, before hearing his answer to
this difficulty, he had himself solved it by dwelling on God's power and will




o104  Crealianisa;zs   aoze2 tlamps in H. Scriytlure. [LECT.
marriage; but it is merely an extreme illustration of the
general truth, that man can only sin with God's assistance;
that all sin consists in the employment of God's bounty
against Himself. When, lastly, it is urged that the transmission of original sin is on this hypothesis unintelligible, it may be sufficient to say that original sin, being'
rather of the nature of a defect than of a positive taint,
there is no difficulty in understanding how  created souls
did not receive a gift which had been withdrawn from the
race to which at birth they became united.   Upon the
whole, the Creatianist theory seems better to fall in with
the scattered hints and with the general language of
Scripture. It is apparently more in harmony with the
account of the creation  of man, and with  the  general
representations of God's creative relationship to the spirit
of man, which we find in the Old Testament.l  Especially
does it seem to be borne out by the distinction which is
drawn in the Epistle to the Hebrews between the " fathers
of our flesh " and the " Father of spirits."2   These expressions discriminate  with  an  accuracy from  which  there
would seem to be no escape between the contribution
made  to the composite being  of man by  our heavenly
to draw good out of evil in all His earthly providences. The giving being to
a soul, capable of knowing and loving its Creator, is of itself a good, however it may be occasioned. Ep. ad Hieron. 166, c. 5.
1 Gen. ii. 7; Job xxxiii. 4; Ps. cxix. 73; Zech. xii. 1.
2 Ieb. xii. 9. The contrast, Delitzsch admits, between ris rapcpbis 1/,uv
wraTe'pes, and the Divine 7rawrcTp T,' -wv/Tu 7rveUaV, is physical and not ethical.
" There can hardly," he remarks, " be a more classical proof-text for Creatianism."  The passages which imply the organic oneness and responsibility
of the race of Israel do not set this aside (vii. 5, 10.) Cf. Num. xvi. 22.




III.]   Bearing of tkese theories on Religion.   Io5
Parent immediately, and that which He bestows through
created channels of the gift of life. 1
This question of the soul's origin has carried us into a
region where we have at best to deal with high probabilities; where revelation has rather hinted at the truth
than unveiled it, and where reason certainly cannot pretend to dogmatize.  But it is not altogether unfruitful
to look at this side of our subject, even where certainty is
unattainable.  To do so makes us all the -more thankful for
certainty, when we know that it is within our reach. After
all, the difference between the Creatianists and Traducianists does not raise the question whether the human soul
is made by God, but only the question whether it is
immediately created by Him.  All that we are and have,
except the evil which we have wrought, and which clings
to us, comes from the One Source of Life; but if religion
finds its strength in this general conviction, it is especially
stimulated by the belief that the soul is God's immediate
handiwork.   The belief that the inmost being of each one
of us is created as immediately by God as was that of our
first parent Adam, brings each of us into a felt relationship
with God, and reminds us of our obligations towards Him,
more effectively than would be the case if we supposed
ourselves to receive spiritual as well as corporeal life
through a long series of ancestors.  It is this persuasion
which underlies Bishop Andrewes' favourite ejaculatory
Cf. ]Delitzsch's Discussion of Heb. xii. 9 against Elvard's theory that
r-dpt means here the natural life in opposition to the regenerate life~
Hebraerbr, in loe.




o6             Destiny of the soul.           [LECT.
prayer from the Psalter, " Despise not Thou the work of
Thine own Hands." It is not in the anatomy and faculties
of the body, it is in the analysis and study of the soul,
that the greatness of human life is best realized, and our
indebtedness towards its Giver most deeply felt.  This reflective reason; this heart, capable of a boundless expansion; this will, which may be trained to a freedom and an
intensity of extraordinary power;- of what are these
faculties so suggestive as of the knowledge, love, and
service due to that Being of Beings Who is the End, as
He is the Author, of this centre of complex and selfcontrolling life?
III.
Man, then, is a spirit; and, as it would seemn, he is, as
such, immediately created by God. The gravest question
yet remains: What is his destiny? Whatever may be
said of the importance of questions bearing on the soul's
origin, no reflecting man will deny the interest of all that
bears upon its future.  It is true that even this question
is ostentatiously set aside on the ground of its being unpractical to discuss it. "The dead," it is argued, "do not
return to tell us their experience.  What then can be
known certainly of that which befalls them?  We may
hope, or we may conjecture; we may desire, or despair; we




III.]          Iuzevz'lableness of deatl.          107
may dogmatize in the air, and make creeds of our aspirations; but would it not be better to confine ourselves to
subjects that are well within the range of our experience,
and where sure results are attainable, than to waste time
and sympathy upon that which belongs really and only to
the realm of fancy?"
This way of treating the subject is possible and not uncommon among young men and women in good health,
who have never known a heartache; and in the pages of
clever serials, where readers are carried forward almost
unresistingly, by clear type and well-turned sentences, over
the dreary wastes of sceptical thought. But the question of
the eternal future is too pressing to be thus left at a distance, permanently. If religion has many enemies in the
predominant tendencies of the modern world, she certainly
has steady and inalienable allies in the permanent circumstances of human nature. To the most refined and cultured
of ourselves, death is just as certain a contingency as it was
to our rudest forefathers, and its dread solemnities enter
just as penetratingly into the homes of rank and science,
as into the humblest cottages in the land. Sooner or later
it comes close to all of us, and the mists which hide its
stern realities from our eyes roll away, and leave us face
to face with them.
"They think that their houses shall continue for ever:
and that their dwelling-places shall endure from one
generation to another; and call the lands after their own
names.




o8           Ineviltaleness of death.        [LECT.
"Nevertheless man will not abide in honour: seeing
that he may be compared unto the beasts that perish; this
is the way of them.
"They lie in the hell like sheep, death gnaweth upon
them, and the righteous shall have domination over them
in the morning: their beauty shall consume in the
sepulchre out of their dwelling.
" Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich: or if the
glory of his house be increased;
"' For he shall carry nothing away with him when he
dieth: neither shall his pomp follow him.
" For while he lived he counted himself an happy man:
and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak
good of thee.
"lHe shall follow the generation of his fathers: and
shall never see light.
"Man being in honour hath no understanding: but is
compared unto the beasts that perish." l
This is the solemn irony of life, and from year to year
we find ourselves face to face with it.  Death does not
move us much, when it visits those whom we do not
know, or whom we know only slightly; when it only meets
us as it wends its way gloomily through the crowded
thoroughfare towards the distant cemetery, or as it catches
our eye in the supplement of our daily newspaper.  it
1 Psahln lix,, 12, 14, 16-20,




1IT.]   Qzteslions raised al thze sightl of dealz.   I09
does not touch us as being what it is, so long as it only
produces social changes which excite our interest, while it
keeps sufficiently at a distance not to wound our hearts.
We drape it in phrases which treat it as a solemn abstraction. No doubt it is solemn; but so is the war lately
raging in Paraguay, or a Russian campaign in Central
Asia. We should speak very differently of a revolutionary
struggle in the streets of London, upon the issue of which
it was clearly understood that our own life and property
might immediately depend. But we find that at last death
comes home to us, even to us, in all the closeness of its
dreadful embrace. Not, it may be, this time to ourselves:
that were perhaps more bearable. The one human being
whom we have loved best on earth-the parent, the husband,
the wife, the child-lies before us. We see what is coming.
It is very gradual, perhaps, and there are many rallies in
which vital power struggles with disease, in which hope
flickers up in its contest with the presentiments of reason,
only to die back into a deeper despair. It is very gradual
-a slow processional movement to the grave: but the end
comes at last. At last a day comes to which the preceding
days are as if they had not been; a day comes which lives
in memory. We can no longer reckon on hours; we dare
not be away even for a few minutes, lest we should be too
late. A change has taken place, which they know well
who are familiar with death, and of which none can mistake
the import. We feel, all feel, that the time is short, and
a few words are said into which is compressed a life —




I  o   Questions raised at the sigkh  of deatl. [LECT.
its most sincere thought and love-a few assurances,
messages, entreaties; no more is possible. Already, one by
one, the vital powers take their leave: first speech, then
movement, then hearing, then even eyesight. Still there
is breathing, now rapid and deep, now weaker and intermittent; and then there comes a last breath; and we wait;
and there is none after it.
It lies before us, that loved form: only an hour ago it
spoke: we speak to it now, but in vain. We bend over
it in our agony, as if it was still what it had been; but we
know-what would we not give to escape from our conviction?-that neither thought nor feeling tenants it now.
And the question must rise then, if it never rose before, with
an urgency proportioned to the grief which asks it; —Is all
really over? Has the real being, which one short hour ago
thought and felt so keenly, actually and for ever ceased
to be?
Do you say that in presence of that passionate agony
it is folly to ask for a decision which should only be
dictated by the coolest, the calmest, the most unimpassioned, the most disinterested science?  I answer that
that agony, if it be not itself an argument, is well fitted
to win a hearing for arguments to which, under ordinary
circumstances, our materialistic science is deaf. Such
a condition of feeling may be impatient on the one
hand of a physiology which seeks for the immaterial spirit
in the brain; as it cannot, on the other, enter into a metaphysical discussion of the alleged indestructibility of




III.]      7uslice demands aJ ftzrue stale.        I I I
uncompounded essences.  But being itself pain, mental
pain, one of the great chastening, illuminating powers of the
moral world, it is at least in a mood to understand a moral
argument. And the moral argument for our immortality is,
after all, the strongest of those upon which reason can fall
back.  It is no fancy which insists that Eternal Justice
cannot close His account with any human conscience at the
moment of death; that there must be an after-world in
which the too unequal balance of suffering and happiness,
of good and evil doing during life, will be surely rectified.
We must do stern violence to the best and deepest instincts
of our better nature before the voice of this argument can
be silenced. It is a moral conviction which protests against
the Mlaterialistic theory that the soul is but an animated
vapour which becomes extinct with the life of the bodily
frame. It equally rejects the Pantheistic dream, that what
looks like a separate personality ceases when we cease to
breathe, while the soul sinks back into the vast undercurrent of boundless life, which is the fabled vital force of
the Pantheistic universe. If morality has any serious basis
in the nature of things, if it be not a dream or a conventionalisnl, there must be a future wherein each personal
spirit will subsist under conditions which will have direct
reference to its moral and spiritual attainments here.
For if one thing is evident to a man who takes notes of
what passes within him with the lapse of time, it is that
the inward being which he contemplates as " self," is continually developing. As the years pass, whether for good




I I 2 IiiZnorlality, how lazg/l in H. Scripttlre. [LECT.
or evil, this immaterial, thinking, resolving being acquires
accumulating  strength  and  intensity.   Long  after the
animal life of man has reached its highest point, and is
fairly on the decline, the spirit feels itself sensibly growing;
growing in the range of its intellectual grasp, growing in
its power of will, growing in its sense of being a centre of
life, unlike any of the forms of animal or vegetable life
around it.  Is it possible that death will abruptly put an
end  to  this hitherto  uninterrupted   development?   Is it
possible that we thus continuously expand in all that
constitutes our real human selves, only to find at the gate
of death that we were nothing but brutes after all, although
endowed  with  sensibilities  and  imaginations just keen
enough to make us the victims of an immense  and  exceptional delusion?
It is often remarked that the Bible nowhere deals with
the natural immortality of the human soul as a thesis to
be proved.l As in the case of the soul's spirituality, the
Bible scarcely asserts, but it everywhere takes the truth
1 It is not meant that the soul of man is immortal through any internal
necessity, such as might be held to belong to an uncompounded essence.
In this sense God is 6 dsevos cXwcv dOavaitav (1 Tim. vi. 16). In all creatures,
indestructibility is a gift.  It is a gift to the spirit, as di:tinct from
the animal life-power of man.  The ancients, Tatian and Justin Martyr,
who protested against the Greek idea of a necessary immortality inherent
iln the soul, did not deny the gift of immortality, which as a matter of
fact the Creator had bestowed. Just as man conceives of God, so he conceives of eternity, and longs for it.   His longing shows that he is
designed from eternity; it is otherwise inexplicable.  "God has placed
eternity, 3np  in the heart of man" (Eccles. iii. 21). It is a matter of
experience; and the argumentum ab appetitu seternitatis to the reality of
an eternal future is an adaptation of the Cartesian inference from the idea
to the being of a God. Cf. IDelitzsch, Bibl. Psych. vi. ~ 2.




III.]            The doctrine of Schieol.                I 13
for granted. When patriarchs and kings are said in the
language of the Old Testament to be gathered to their
fathers, it is not merely meant that their bones were laid
in the common family resting-place. The natural scenery
of Palestine probably suggested the word which described
the revealed invisible home of the spirits of the dead.1  It
was "a land of darkness, as darkness itself;"  the common
receptacle of the " small and great," of the " servant and his
master," of kings and counsellors of the earth, of prisoners
and of oppressors.3   All were gathered there, under new
conditions of life, incompatible with those earthly forms
of activity4 which  cease at death.  Not that the dead
are passive or unconscious.   Isaiah's description of the
movement of spirits in the unseen world at the descent
of the spirit of the King of Babylon can hardly be
resolved into poetical license; and it is observable that
the heathen monarch is there together with the rulers
of Israel.5 This doctrine of Scheol is perfectly consistent
with the general truth that at death the human spirit
returns to God,6 and that the souls of the righteous are in
" His hands," in the sense of being exempted from torment. 7
Nor is it in any way at issue with the doctrine of a bodily
resurrection, which, while its early and distinct appearance
in the Psalter8 is utterly inconsistent with the theory of
1     %j[~ is properly what is sunk deep, bent in; hence a ravine, abyss,
depth. Cf. Fuerst, Lex. in voc.
2 Job x. 21.   3 Job iii. 13-19.    4 Eccles. 9, 10.    Is. xiv. 9, sqq.
6 Eccles. xii. 7.      Wisd. iii. 1.
8 s. xvi. 10, 11; Acts ii. 25-31. Cf. also Ps. xlix. 16; lxxiii. 23, sqq.




I 14   IzuN2orltlity izt thie New  Testcl enl.  [LECT.
its being dclue to Eastern influences1 upon the Jewish
Revelation at the period of the Captivity, does undoubtedly,
in the later books, come very prominently into view. Apart
from a popular belief in this doctrine, the imagery of Isaiah 2
and Ezekiel3 would have been unintelligible to their contemporaries; and both in the dark days of the Captivity in
Babylon,4 and in the later struggle of the Maccabees against
Antiochus Epiphanes, this faith in a Resurrection sustained
the oppressed against the persecutors, even the martyrs in
their agony.5  So far as Alexandria influenced Judaism,
it discouraged faith in a corporeal Resurrection.  Philo,
like a genuine Platonist, sees in death the emancipation of
the soul from  its bodily prison-house.  But the ruling
religious minds in Palestine at the time of Christ's appearance believed in the resurrection of our actual bodies.6
Such a doctrine of course implies the immortality of the
soul; but the only demonstration of the truth of the soul's
immortality is given in our Lord's reply to the Sadducees
on the subject of the Resurrection.  He argues from  the
title, " the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God
of Jacob," which God was pleased to claim  in centuries
long after the death of the patriarchs, that the patriarchs
must still be living, because God is the God, not of the
dead, but of the living.7 By this general statement our
As suggested by Jul. Miiller, Studd. und Kritt, 1835.
2 Is. xxvi. 14-19. 3 Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14. Cf. los. vi. 2; xiii. 14.
4 Dan. xii. 1-3, 13. 6 2 Macc. vii. 9, 11, 14, 23; xii. 42-45; xiv. 16.
6 S. Matt. xxii. 24, sqq.; Acts xxiii. 8, xxiv. 15. Joseph. Ant. xviii. 1-3.
Bell, Jud. ii. 8-14. Qu. by Grimm.
7 S. Matt. xxii. 32; S. Mark xii. 27; S. Luke xx. 38.




III.] Imzmor/ality andour Lord's Res-urrecZioi.  I I5
Lord apparently implies that God does not create spiritual
beings only that they may sink back into nothing.  The
distinctive teaching of the New Testament about the future
world everywhere presupposes the soul's immortality.  If
death were annihilation for all of us, or for all but the just,
the descriptions of the end of the world, of the last judgment,l  of the general resurrection,2 and of the future state,3
would have no interest for any but a minority of mankind.
It is the steady conviction that, in some way, we shall each
and all personally subsist after death, which secures to
these pages of our Bibles such universal interest.
This- conviction of our immortality rests on what is for
Christians an unquestioned certainty.  In Christian eyes,
the central fact of the world's annals is the Resurrection of
our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.  It occurred in the full
daylight of history: it was attested by hundreds of witnesses.4
WVe can only deny its truth upon cM rriori principles, which
are not merely destructive of serious belief that God is a
Moral and even a Living Being, but which are also fatal to
confidence in human history. The Resurrection of Christ
is the guarantee of our own. The clouds which hung
around the gate of death in earlier ages have rolled away
1S. Mi\att. xxv. 31-46; Acts xvii. 31; Rom. xiv. 10; 2 Cor. v. 10;
2 Tim. iv. 1; 1 S. Pet. iv. 5.
2 8. John v. 28, sqq.; Acts xxiv. 15.
3 Rom. ii. 10, viii. 18; 1 Cor. xiii. 12; 1 S. John iii. 2; Heb. x. 26, 27;
Rev. xiv. 13; S. Matt. viii. 12; S. Mark ix. 43, sqq.; S. John xii. 26,
xiv. 2, sqq.; xvii. 24; Rev. xxi. 7, 8.
41 Cor. xv. 6, i06 Jzrrdcivw 7reVTraKocJloLs &ceXvoYs Jq9c5araw, et cv ol rrXetovs,uvYOvOFv EWS 6p-r, TrveS 6e Kal eKoLOu?7Ox2av.




I i 6 Can thie body be dispeuised witz for ever? [LECT.
since the day of our Saviour's triumph over death; the
presumptive speculations which were previously rife as to
the future state have been exchanged for strong certainties.
" Life and immortality have been brought to light by the
Gospel:" " God has begotten us again to a lively hope, by
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead:" Christians
are "not to sorrow as those that have no hope:"  Death
has lost its sting, and the grave its victory.l
HIere, too, let it be noted, that although the soul is the
seat of man's personal life, it is not, as has been already
hinted, man in his completeness.  Mlan is a body as well
as a soul.  Materialism itself has here done valuable service
in correcting the exaggerations of a one-sided spiritualism.
It is common, but erroneous, to speak of man's body as
being related  to his spirit only as is the casket to the
jewel which it contains, or only as a prisoner to the walls
of his dungeon.2  But as a matter of fact, the personal
spirit of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompassing frame of sense, with which, from the first moment
of its existence, it has been so intimately associated: in a
thousand ways, and most powerfully, the body acts on the
soul, and the soul on the body. They are only parted at
12 Tim. i. 10; 1 S. Pet. i. 3; 1 Thess. iv. 13; 1 Cor. xv. 55.
2 The false spiritualism which is implied in these metaphors is, in modern
times at least, chiefly due to the Cartesian philosophy. Descartes held that
the human soul was made only for the purposes of thouyfht (Disc. sur la
Meth. pt. 5.); the animal-life of man was, as a consequence, in his judgment,
merely that of an independent machine. Madame de S&vignde rallies this
once popular theory " des machines qui aiment, des machines qui ont une
election pour quelqu'un, des machines qui sent jalouses, des machines qui
craignent."  (Euvr. t. iii. lett. 170.




III.] The body esseziaul lo maz's fill idenlily.  I I 7
death by a violent wrench. The spirit can indeed exist
independently of the body, but this independclent existence
is not its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and
sense; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce from the
companion whose presence is needed to complete its life.
Would the soul, permanently severed from the body, still
be, properly speaking, man?  Would it not really be some
other being?  Our inmost consciousness here echoes the
answer of science. The body which has been so long the
associate and partner of the soul's life, the instrument of
its will, the minister of its passions, mingling lower physical
sensations with that higher life of thought and feeling which
belongs to it, could not be altogether cast away without
impairing the completeness of our being, without imperilling
the continuous identity of our changeful existence.
This, then, is the true ground of the general resurrection,
which is no eccentric or gratuitous miracle, but the restoration to man of that completeness of identity which is impaired by death. If the body did not rise, man would, by
dying, not simply enter upon a new stage of being; he
would exist as a different order or species of creature. His
moral history would have changed its conditions and
character.  The disembodied spirit might repudiate the
weaknesses or excesses of the companion with which it
had finally parted company. As a matter of fact, all men
are to rise again with their bodies, and to give account of
their own works: the complex being which acted here, is to
be judged hereafter.




i i 8 BeariZg of rezigion on odwvard h/zinzgs. [LECT.
The body and soul together share here in one composite
existence; each acts upon the other as well as with it.
The corruptible body presseth down the soul. The passions
which have their seat in the soul depict themselves upon
the surface of the body.  On the one hand, an Apostle
reminds us that fleshly lusts war not merely against the
bodily health, but against the soul.1  On the other hand,
a beautiful soul illuminates the face of a S. Stephen
with angelic light; 2 and hereafter the bodies of the
blessed will be "glorious," that is to say, translucent
with the splendours of the glorified spirit.s
IV.
Ieligion, in order to meet the wants of human nature,
will take account of man's composite being: she will have
lower relations to the bodies as well as higher relations to
the souls of men. As man has, besides his unseen person,
an outward and visible shape, so will religion herself provide sensible forms as well as supersensuous realities.
She will exact outward as well as inward reverence, because
in a composite being like man, the one is really the condition of the other.  There are bodily postures which
absolutely forbid heavenly exercises to the soul: to lounge
in an arm-chair is inconsistent with the tension of thought
1 1 S. Pet. ii.1..    2 Acts vi. 15.    3 1 Cor. xv. 43.




III.]  Religion  based on sense of immnortalily.  I I9
and will which belongs to adoration of the Most Holy.
Religion, like man himself, is a beautiful spirit tabernacling
in a body of sense; her divine and immutable truths are
shrouded beneath the'-unrivalled poetry of Bible language;
her treasures of grace beneath tle outward and visible
signs which meet us in sacraments. She proclaims the
invisible by that which meets the eye; she heralds the
eternal harmonies by a music that falls upon the ear. She
certainly is not all form, for man is not a brute; but also
she is not all spirit, for man is not an angel. She deals
with man as being precisely what he is, and she enlists
the lower faculties of his being in aid of the higher. Yet
if she is true to man and to herself, she never allows him
to forget the unseen in the seen, the inward in the outward,
the soul in the body.  For religious purposes, the soul
must always be incomparably of the highest importance,
as being the very man himself, the man in the secret
recesses of his being, the man at the imperishable centre
of his life, the man as he lives beneath the Eye, and enters
into relations with the Heart of his infinite Creator.
Certainly if belief in our being personal spirits is essential
to religion, and belief in the immediate creation of the soul
by God is stimulating to it, belief in the soul's immortality
is of yet higher religious importance.  The relation between
God and the soul, in which religion consists, would be little
more to us than a sentiment or a literary taste, if we were
persuaded that we should have taken leave of it, as we
shall have taken leave of our clothes and of our books,




120  ReligionZ imyossible, ifall eids at death.. [LECT.
when we are laid in our coffins. Would religion be worth
our attention as serious men, would it be anything more
than a plaything, if all really ended at death? That the
soul is immortal, standing in its ifmmortality, for weal or
woe, face to face with the Everlasting God; —this truth,
dimly grasped by natural religion, has been wrought into
the very heart and fibre of Christendom.  It is taken for
granted by Christian faith just as naturally as is the fact
of life itself. It underlies that sense of an eternal life which
good men already enjoy here, and which implies not simply
a consciousness that admlits of no idea of succession or
time, but an inmmortal soul in fixed communion with an
Eternal Object. It teaches man to look upon all the acts
and habits which really feed and strengthen religion as a
part of his preparation and outfit for eternity, to be in some
sense carried with him as he crosses the heights which form
his present horizon, and which shut out from  his view
the eternal world. And thus it has elevated and enriched
human nature in a thousand ways, which we only do not
sufficiently appreciate because we are so entirely accustomed
to them.
Let me illustrate this by an example. Putting religion
for the moment out of the question altogether, there is no
doubt as to the view which a philanthropist must take of
suicide, supposing it to become general, and regarding it in
its influence upon society. When a popular Cyrenaic
teacher, I-egesias, advocated suicide, at Alexandria, as
being the course upon which a really wise man would




III.]         Chrislianz estimate of suzcide.             12 1
resolve after comparing the sum  of the pleasures of life
with the sum of its misfortunes, Ptolemy felt it necessary,
in the interests of good government and of society, to
oblige him to close his lecture-room.  But the sentiment
with which suicide is practically regarded among us is not
based on any mere estimate of its social bearings, still less
is it looked upon only as a mode of passing out of life.
The announcement that this or that well-known man had
destroyed himself would create in any modern society a
sensation distinct in kind from that which would be caused
by the simple announcement of his death.l  Why is this?
It is because Christianity, revealing to man as a certainty
the fact of his immortality, has given a new meaning, value,
solemnity to life.  To live is to be on our trial, with a
tremendous future immediately before us; and to shorten
this trial by a voluntary act, is, apart from other and even
graver aspects of such an act, felt to be altogether irreconcileable with this, the Christian estimate of life.2
Considering the strength of the instinct of self-preservation which is naturally implanted in us, suicide shocks us
as being a violent contradiction of that instinct.  Yet
while cases of suicide are to be found here and there, in
all times and districts of history, there have been periods
and places when suicide has been nothing less than a passion
1 Since this observation was made, it has been painfully illustrated in the
case of the lamented M. Pr6vost-Paradol.
2 Lecky, " History of European Morals," ii. 52.  "Direct and deliberate
suicide, which occupies so prominent a place in the moral history of antiquity,
almost absolutely disappeared within the Church."  Cf. pp. 40-63 of this
interesting chapter.




122         Pagacn thheories of suicide.       [LECT.
-a moral epidemic swaying the imaginations and wills of
whole classes even of educated men. In India suicide has
been for at least two thousand years the result of energetic
conviction; it is still what it was at the date of Alexander's
conquest. It is at this day the effort by which the individual would plunge into the infinite, in which it is his presumed happiness to forfeit his individuality; whether that
infinite be the supreme soul of the Brahmins, or the
Nirvana of the Buddhists.  In Greece and Rome, suicide
was a precept not of religion but of philosophy. It was
recommended by philosophies the most opposed to each
other. In Greece the great representatives of the Cynic
school, Zeno, Diogenes, and in Christian times, Peregrinus,
died by their own hands.  The Cyrenaics formulated the
doctrine of suicide, as an escape from the preponderating
miseries of life.  At Rome, Lucretius, the Epicurean
poet, as well as Cato and Brutus, under Stoic influences,
destroyed themselves.  The Epicurean feeling, that when
life had been made the most of for the purposes of
enjoyment it was time to end it, coincided as to its
practical result with the Stoic doctrine that the stern
effort by which man could in extremity make good his selfmastery is a voluntary death. Of this doctrine Seneca is
the great master. Suicide is, he contends, the act by which
man asserts his rights over himself, when face to face with
the menaces and oppressions of tyranny: suicide is the door
though which liberty may retire from a world of slaves.
This doctrine especially it was which dictated suicide




III.]      Sziczide unzder the Renaissancie.      I 23
on a considerable scale in the first of the three periods
when like a moral plague it has darkened the life of
Europe.  During the later days of the Roman Republic,
and under the stern Cxsarism of the Empire, suicide was
recommended and practised as an escape from the political
and social evils of the time. The spirit of suicide only
fell back before the advance of the Church; and more
than three centuries after Seneca, we find S. Augustine
combating his arguments one by one in the closing books
of the treatise on the City of God.  The second period
was that of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century.
Suicide had nearly disappeared during the Middle Ages;
but when educated Italy, with Leo X. at its head, had
saturated itself afresh with Paganism, it was natural that
some of the moral ideas of antiquity should reappear in
the train of so engrossing a study of its mind and style.
Philippo Strozzi, the prisoner of the Grand Duke Cosmo I.,
destroys himself, praying God-it is an odd mixture of
Christian and Pagan creeds-that his soul may be placed
along with the soul of Cato of Utica, and of others who
have died after the same fashion. Montaigne in his essays
defends suicide elaborately; and in time it had its devotees in England, no less than in France and Italy. The
more positive and earnest Christianity of the seventeenth
century brought with it a more worthy appreciation of
the real seriousness of life: but in the succeeding age the
taste for suicide was renewed, not as a part of the complete Pagan ideal of conduct, but as the fruit of a melan



1 24   Suiczde at /ie end of tle last century.  [LECT.
clholy estimate of our condition in this world, joined to
impaired or decomposing religious convictions.  The felt
disappointments of life as a whole, the absence of fixed
aims, the culture of imagination and passion without any
regulating faith, the feverish indecision, the languid yet
ever - growing self-idolatry, the moral atmosphere of
impatience, irritation, curiosity, the mingled rapture and
pain of vagrant imagination, the utter caprice and prostration of will, —these were the characteristics of a period
which was impersonated by, and which recognized itself
at length in Goethe. In the earnestness as well as in the
levity of an irreligious age, the ordinary motives to selfdestruction acquired a new and fatal force; and the growing evil was only checked by the Christian reaction which
followed on the French Revolution throughout Europe;
and which again restored belief in the solemnity of life by
forcing men to look steadily at the eternity which succeeds
it. Certainly, we have only to refer to yesterday's paper 1
to read the account of a suicide from  London Bridge.
Domestic misfortunes, temporary derangement, moral
despair, still count their too numerous tale of victims.
But it is a simple matter of fact that belief in a future
state, as taught by Christ and His Apostles, is the one
adequate antidote to this weird contempt for the gift of
existence-a contempt which cannot really extinguish the
gift which it yet can so irretrievably curse.2
1 Standardc, March 19, 1870.
" On this subject the opening Essay in M. Caro's Nouvelles ]Etudes Morales
is full of interest; and I am indebted to it in the foregoing paragraphs.




III.]  Chkrislianily and the vtalue of /he soud.   125
It would be easy to shew in like manner how-sometimes
directly, sometimes indirectly-Christianity has bettered the
condition of the masses of mankind by making Christians
feel the value of each separate life. Our Lord has done this,
as no other has done it: nowhere is human life thought so
highly of as where the Christian creed is sincerely believed
to be absolute truth. The history of infanticide is one
among other illustrations of this result of a hearty belief in
immortality. The great Christian doctrines centre in, they
are unintelligible apart from, faith in the value of the individual soul. The soul's value is measured in a Christian's
judgment by the stupendous truth of the Incarnation and
Death of the Everlasting Son; by the gift and energies of
the Divine Spirit; by the perpetual intercession of Christ
in heaven; by the grace and power of the Sacraments; by
the prospects which open to faith's eye beyond the grave —
upwards into an illimitable heaven, downwards into a
fathomless hell.  Confronted with each of these truths, the
soul confidently, yet tremblingly, feels its dignity-its priceless dignity-in the eye of its Maker. The soul feels as if,
when it turns awhile from the daily round of duty to gather
itself up into itself, to sink a shaft into the depths of its
consciousness, there were two, and only two, beings ia existence-itself and its God. To know more of Him, to love
Him more, to serve Him better-this is its constant effort;
and its hope and prayer is to receive day by day, in larger
measures, more abundant communications of His mind and
of His life. In a word, when dwelling on the soul's nature




I26      Our bUsiZess is to save ozt souzls.    [LEcT.
and destiny, man understands that religion is his highest
and most reasonable field of thought and work.
It has indeed been said that the old phrase of "saving
one's soul" has ceased to have much meaning for the religion
of educated people in the present day. If this be indeed
true, we can only rejoin, in all truth and sorrow, " so much
the worse for the educated people."  Whatever be a man's
place in society or in letters, whatever his circumstances in
this earthly scene, it remains true that, to close with the
offers which Christ makes to sinners, to " work out his salvation with fear and trembling," is his one most important
business here. The eternal realities do not change with
our intellectual fashions; and like the laws which govern
our physical frames, the spiritual rules under which men
live or die are the same for all of us. The clay will come
when the God-fearing peasants of Devonshire or of Yorkshire will rise in judgment against the cultured irreligion
of the centres of our modern civilisation: not because it is
cultured, but because it is irreligion; because in the glare
of its enthusiasms for the additions which it has made to
the knowledge of our material home and structure, it has
forgotten almost or altogether the Eternal Home beyond.
The salvation of the soul can only be treated as an oldworld anachronism, when it is clear either that man has no
real soul, or that it does not survive death, or that if it does
survive, its condition hereafter has no reference whatever
to its state and actions here. If this be really meant, it is
better to say so; only, in that case, it is difficult to see what




1II.]    AzAwfilnzess and blessedness of zifje.    127
sphere is left for religion at all. If it be not meant, then,
undoubtedly, a variety of the gravest questions at once
open before us, both as to what we have to be saved from,
and as to the means and conditions of our salvation. Upon
the first of these questions, we shall encounter in the next
lecture some of the more serious differences which divide
the modern world: to-day it must suffice to have insisted
upon the mingled blessedness and awfulness of life. What
it is to live here at all as a human being; what it is to
possess or rather to be a centre of self-reflecting thought,
of self-determining will, a centre of life which under some
conditions will be perpetuated indefinitely; —this, when we
think of it steadily and in good earnest, is, next to the
spiritual sight of God Himself, the most solemn, the most
chastening, the most stimulating consideration that can
open upon us. Let us make much of it, in the interests
both of the present and of the future, for the sake of God
and truth, as well as of our own lasting happiness. Let us
determine to ask ourselves again and again during the
coming week, what in our inmost selves we really are, and,
next, whither we are going. Let us listen to a voice which
will at times find some echo in every conscience, and which
bids us, in God's name, reflect that "the things which are
seen are temporal, while the things which are not seen
are eternal."




LECTURE IV.
jrouIQt EunbaUnb in Rent.
THE OBSTACLE TO RELIGION- SIN.
S. JAMES i. 15.
When desire hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is,finished, bringeth forth death.
HE ground which we have hitherto traversed is, in the
main, common ground to those who accept the idea
of religion in any serious sense at all.  Religion is impossible, except as a bond between a real, that is to say, a
moral and governing God, and a real, that is to say, a
conscious, self-determining, immortal soul.  Deny either
term of the statement, and religion dissolves into an
unpractical sentiment, which either has no adequate object,
or else no adequate subject and field for its existence.
Hitherto, therefore, at least generally, we have occupied
positions which may be taken up even by theories which
are very earnestly opposed to some of the most distinctive
features of the Christian creed.  But to-day we advance a
step further; and this advance, it is well to say at the
outset, must forfeit the sympathy of many who have thus




LECT. IV.] SinZ, not alz i1zvezz'ion of Czrisliatniy. I 29
far been able to accompany us.  We have reached a point
at which we encounter a fact of such widespread and
deep significance, that it munst perforce colour and impress
any real religion, from first to last; so that its pressure
and importance are felt both in the drift and substance of
religious belief, and in the characteristic temper and dispositions of a religious mind.  The fact in question is
moral evil. Moral evil, or sin, is the disturbing and disorganizing force which breaks up the original relationship
of love and confidence between God and man.  In view of
moral evil, revelation must be not merely illuminative, but
remedial; and religion, in order to be true to the facts of
human nature, must consist predominantly of penitence
and contrition.  And Christianity is broadly at issue with
not a few of the religious proposals which aspire to take
its place in the present day on this very ground. It does,
and they do not, practically recognize this universal and
fundamental fact: they do, and it will not, consent to gloss
it over, or to explain it away, or to assume that man's
religious wants can be really satisfied without looking it
boldly in the face, and providing against it a cure and an
antidote.
It would be a very great error to suppose that Christianity has invented the idea of sin only for the purpose
of remedying it.  If sin were not a fact independent of
Christianity; if it were not an integral feature of human
life, Christianity would long ago have perished.  In the
spiritual world, too, there is such a thing as supply and
K




I 30 Szfz recogzizzenrdi7z crsn &'?IHea/ejza'rom. [LECT.
demand; and if a religion pre-supposes wants which do
not exist, and brings remedies for diseases of which nobody
is conscious, it has already signed its death-warrant.  It is
true that Christianity, as a revelation of the highest moral
truth, has, beyond any other religion, educated man's sense
of sin; but this sense of sin was not itself a result of
Christianity.  Long before Christ came, the moral sin and
sickness of the world was felt, rather than explicitly
recognized. It was of course recognized by the educated
conscience of Israel, with its moral law, creating a knowledge of sin, and its sacrificial system, deepening the sense
of the guilt of sin, and its prophetic ministry, bringing
these general truths home with an unflinching courage and
precision to the sinful kings and populations of the later
centuries of its history.  But this heart-sickness of the
world was also a fact very vividly present to the comparatively uneducated conscience of Greece.  What makes
a great heathen say that even if death does involve endless
unconsciousness, it ought, nevertheless, to be looked upon
as substantial gain; a deep sleep throughout a lifetime, a
sleep unbroken by dreams, being, in his opinion, preferable
to the active life of the most fortunate of mankind?
Probably he could not have told us the real reason; this
was an instinct of his rather than a reasoned judgment.
He instinctively perceived that in human life, as he saw it,
even under its brightest aspects, there was on the whole
more evil than good.  More evil than good,-but not
merely or chiefly more physical evil. The natural courage




IV.]      The sense of sin ivn lealhenclom.        I3 I
of a great soul would never have regarded a preponderance
of misfortune or of pain in a human life as a reason for
wishing to be practically non-existent.  The evil which
decided the balance of judgment against the expediency of
life, was more penetrating, more oppressive, more fatal to
the sense of having a right to live than any pain of body,
or loss of friends or of goods could possibly be. It was, in
a word, moral evil. The heathen knew of the existence of
moral evil, but they had very imperfect ideas of its extent
and nature. They knew that there was a right and a
wrong, to which man is bound to conform himself; but
what is right and what is wrong, and why right is right,
and wrong is wrong, these were subjects upon which their
knowledge was exceeding imperfect. But the general fact
of man's disloyalty to such moral truth, as he knew, is
often admitted by the leading minds of antiquity.  They
acknowledge man's secret misery; his proneness to yield to
temptations which his conscience condemns; his forfeiture
of the light which he actually enjoys by disobedience to
its requirements.  "I see and approve of the better
course," says Horace, " I follow the worse."  " Nature has
given us small sparks of knowledge," says Cicero, " we
corrupt and extinguish them by our immoralities."  " Wre
are all wicked," says Seneca, " what one of us blames in
another, each will find in his own bosom." 1
The Epistle to the Romans itself, which sets out by
shewing that both the Jewish and Gentile worlds, by
Quoted by Luthardt.




132          Thze melanczioly of Wert/er.        [LECT.
reason of the sin which had overmastered them, stood in
need of the justifying righteousness of Christ, is scarcely
more explicit in its assertions than are these great heathen.
For to observe human life at all, and to reflect on the
observation, is to be conscious of its moral anomalies.
This consciousness often takes ithe disguised form  of a
bitter complaint against the external conditions, nay, the
very fact of life itself.  So it was at the end of the last
century. WTerther translated Hamlet into the language
of modern life, and Goethe made Werther European.
Werther embodied the philosophy of melancholy; of dissatisfaction with life, grounded on a sense of hopeless
irretrievable failure.  In days nearer to our own, this
Pessimism  has found a prophet in  Schopenhauer, the
philosopher of Frankfort. " The history of every life," he
says, " is but a history of suffering; the course of life is
generally but a series of greater or of less misfortunes.
The true sense of the monologue in Hamlet may be thus
summned up.  Our condition is so wretched that utter
annihilation would be decidedly preferable."... "The
oft-lamnented shortness of life may perhaps be its best
attribute."...  "Life," he pursues, "may be represented as a constant deceiver in things both great and
small.  If it makes promises, it never keeps them, except
to shew how undesirable is that which was desired.  First
the hope, then the thing hoped for, disappoints us.  Life
gives only to take away.  The charm of distance shews us a
paradise, which vanishes like an optical delusion, if we




IV.]      The Pessimism of Schzoben/hazier.        I33
allow ourselves to appioach it. Hence our happiness ever
lies in the future or in the past; the present may be compared to a dark cloud which the wind drives before it over
the sunny plain; behind it there is the sunshine, beneath
it a constant shadow. Life is consequently ever unsatisfying; the future being uncertain, the past irrecoverable.
Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly, little, great,
and greater discomforts; with its disappointllents, its
misfortunes, baffling all calculation; bears so plainly the
impress of something which is to be spoilt to us, that it is
difficult to imagine how this could ever have beefi mistaken,
and how any one could have conceived that life was given
to be thankfully enjoyed, or man made to be happy.  The
general structure of life would rather produce the conviction that nothing is worth our efforts, our energies, and
our struggles; that all possessions are vanity, the world
a bankrupt in all quarters, and life a business which does
not pay its expenses.  Satisfaction  and prosperity are
merely negative —merely the absence of suffering; only
sorrow and want can be positively felt."..   "We
do not perceive that certain days of our lives have been
happy till they have given place to unhappy ones.  If, then,
there were a hundred times less sorrow in the world than
there is, its mere existence would be enough to confirm a
truth expressed in various ways, though always with some
indirectness-namely, that the existence of the world is a
matter not of rejoicing but of grief; that its annihilation
would be preferable to its existence; that it is fundamen



I34      S. Paul on t1,e groanzs of creazionz.  [LECT.
tally something which ought not to exist.  Human life,
far from wearing the aspect of a gift, has every appearance
of an incurred debt, the payment of which is exacted in
the form of the urgent necessities, the tormenting desires,
the unceasing want which life involves.  The whole period
of life is generally consumed in the liquidation of this debt,
and yet it is only the interest which can be thus paid off.
The payment of the capital is effected by death."1
Such is Schopenhaner's reply to the sunny Optimism
of Leibnitz, who deems this "the best of possible worlds";
and in this philosophy of despair we listen to the same
chord as that already struck by the Platonic Socrates, only
the despair is deeper and sadder than was possible for a
heathen, who had never heard of a Christian's hope.  For
Schopenhauer might also seem  at times to be expanding
and paraphrasing S. Paul's picture of the whole creation
groaning and travailing in pain together until now; only
S. Paul saw light upon the distant horizon, and he knew
the secret of the present distress. It was moral evil which
had introduced this unrest and disorder, or which, if it had
not introduced all physical suffering into the universe, at
least had made it so intolerable.  The aggravated, unappeasable restlessness which results from a conscious
forfeiture of the harmony of our being with the moral law
of the universe;-this it is which quickens the agony of
that piteous wail to which we have just been listening:
1 Schopenhauer, IDie Welt als WVille und Vorstellung, ~ 67, 59, ii. 46,
qu. by Luthardt, Apolog. Vortr. Vorles, 2, Notes.




IV.]             Origin of morcl evil.           I35
this it is which lights up in the human consciousness the
sense of an almost infinite capacity for pain.
The presence and power of moral evil in the world has
ever afforded matter for the persevering, anxious, weary
exercise of human thought. The difficulties of the problem
have not silenced inquiry; the failure of one generation of
thinkers has not discouraged another. Like the movements
of the heavenly bodies, or the laws of health, the existence
of moral evil is too patent, too importunate a subject, to be
permanently set aside by human beings: it exerts over all
who seriously consider the meaning and facts of life too
irresistible a fascination not to demand from each generation
some attempt at accounting for it, however others may
have failed to do so. And in dealing with this problem
let us observe that there are two fatal tendencies, which
beset, on this side and on that, the necessary path of
inquiry with the importunity of a resistless fascination.
Like Scylla and Charybdis, they divide between them the
great majority of those who would attempt a passage; to
escape from the one is generally to fall a victim to the
attractions or violence of the other. Our path then lies
between the temptation to extenuate the idea of evil, and
the temptation to tamper with the idea of God.




136        Spz'zoza's tizeory of moral evil.   [LECT.
1. Of these, the more welcome to the spirit of our time
is the former.  It is impossible to deny that moral evil
exists; but is it impossible to soften that stern idea of evil
which haunts the human conscience, and which is sanctioned
by Revelation?  May not moral evil be represented as a
necessary product of man's nature and constitution, as the
mere expression and symptom of his place among created
beings, nay, even as an indispensable condition of his
turning his opportunities to the best account and of
fulfilling his destiny? Yes, it has been said, sin in man
is only the measure of his failure to achieve ideal or
metaphysical perfection.  Man is confessedly a finite
being; and the evil which clings to him, or which he does,
is but an appropriate feature of his original circumstances.
"The good is that which is, or the real: evil begins with
that which is not, or with the unreal."  Therefore the
Unbounded, All-powerful Being is alone the good, because of His Infinity and Almightiness. Creatures are
partly good and partly evil; they are good so far as they
exist; their evil begins with their finitude; it begins at
the point where their little life shades oft through weakness into non-existence. In this sense too, "whatever is,
is right:" whatever tries to be, and cannot be, is wrong.
Sin and weakness, strength and virtue, are interchangeable
terms.  Man as a moral agent suffers in two ways for this
metaphysical imperfection of his life. His knowledge of
duty is very limited, so that, while he really aims at what
is good he constantly does something less than good, only




IV.]   Sizn  olt dome lo ozur  Zimiled knowledage.   137
from want of that enlarged information which is denied
him by the limited conditions of his being. And he is
also tied down to a gross material body, filled with sensual
impulses and instincts, which control and overmaster his
loftier aspirations. His sensuous nature necessarily and
perpetually depresses the level of his thought and action;
and in this depression, thus physically necessitated, from
the line of his ideal attainments to that of his actual
attainments, consists his sin.
Now, so far is sin from  being the product of imnperfect knowledge, that the imperfection of man's knowledge is the measure of his innocence. Knowledge is
essential to responsibility; the latter can only exist in
the ratio of the former.  The lower creatures cannot
sin against the knowledge which we have, but which
they do not possess: we cannot sin against a higher
knowledge than that which has been vouchsafed to us.
But we know enough to have enormous opportunities for
sin open to us; and when we do sin, our consciences do
not whisper that had we known more we might have been
innocent still. Omniscience is not a condition of virtue;
philosophers are not always saints, nor little children
always criminals. Nor is sin accurately attributed to the
necessary action of our sensuous nature. It is not, by any
means, universally or even generally the product of insurgent senses. Ruinous as are the sins for which perverted sensual instincts furnish the miaterial, there are
many sins of the darkest type which have nothing to do




138 Our sezsTious zaltzre nol the source of si. [LECT.
with sense.  We should be just as capable of envy and
hatred, of ambition and pride, of runtruthfulness, or the
desire to destroy a fellow-creature, if we had no bodies
at all.  Sin then, as such, is not the irrepressible product
of a sensuous body; nor is it the imperfection of moral or
spiritual effort which alliance to such a body is thought
of necessity to imply. In order to practise virtue, it is
indeed often necessary, with the Apostle, to keep under
our body and bring it into subjection; 1 but the body does
not exert any irresistible power of depression over the
higher instincts of the soul, or it would be useless to
struggle against it.  The seat of sin is in the will, whether
sin be chiefly spiritual or sensual; the body merely
furnishes one of the spheres wherein temptation may be
found and sin is possible; and sin is a much graver thing
than any failure to attain ideal goodness which arises from
our being weighted with a body of sense.  If sin were only
inevitable weakness; if it were nothing more serious than
a lowly condition in the scale of being resulting from
man's physical circumstances; the conscience of man would
no more torture him on account of it than the conscience
of the cripple or the blind accuses him of his misfortune.
Sin differs from  virtue not as a flower which has been
frostbitten differs from  a flower which has escaped the
frost, but as a self-made devil differs from an angel; and
the body can no more fetter the will of the saint than the
triumph of its rebellious senses can be held to measure or
diminish the responsibility of the sinner.
1 1 Cor. ix. 27.




IV.]    Sii 7z01  szmz5ly a fJiazure lo 6e good.    I39
So faint an estimate of evil may help us to create a
morality that shall accommodate itself to human life as it
actually is. It will not furnish us for long with a standard
of moral truth which will remind us of what our life actually
is not.  It may recommend itself at once, and very persuasively, to our self-love.  It were pleasant to think, if
we could think, that we have never been in the terrible
predicament of opposing and refusing a known standard
of goodness; that, at the worst, we are only pardonable
and even interesting instances of failure to be all that we
conceivably might have been.  To see in evil nothing
beyond the result of man's finite nature; to see in it a
privation only and not a contradiction of good, is undoubtedly calculated to put us all on very good terms with ourselves.  But is any theory of the kind consistent with the
most rudimentary idea of evil? Surely our consciences
tell us that evil is a great deal more than a maimed effort
at goodness, more than a privation of goodness which
might be but is not. Evil and good are not, so to put it,
upon the same line of advance, with only this difference,
that while goodness is success, evil is failure.  If, for
instance, I tell a very deliberate lie, with a view to getting
possession of a sum of money by doing so, I surely do
something more than fail to reach an ideal of perfect
truthfulness. I move very deliberately in an opposite
direction to that of truth; I do not come short of it; I
contradict and trample it under foot.  If nobody ever told
a lie without wishing to tell the truth, while yet he failed,




140      The idea of sin in Holy Scriy5zuze.  [LECT.
from defective knowledge, to do so perfectly, this theory
of evil as the symptom of man's finite nature might at least
claim a hearing. As it is, the real facts of every human
conscience are against it.
And accordingly Holy Scripture speaks of sin in terms
which are utterly at variance with any such estimate of
moral evil as this.  It speaks of " sin having dominion over
us,"  and of the justified being " dead unto sin;"2 but we
are not ruled by imperfect forms of goodness, nor do we
"die " to moral efforts which were only less successful than
our present ones.  It speaks of sin as a service, the wages
of which is death;3 as a defilement from which we must be
cleansed and washed;4 as a bondage from which Christ
makes us free.5  There is, it appears, a law of sin in our
members, to which we may be brought into captivity;6 and
sin it is which constitutes the sting of death,7 and which
in its deliberate and emphatic form is the death of the soul.s
How  is all this language, which presupposes an energetic
contradiction  to  exist between sin and  holiness, to be
reconciled with any representation of sin as being merely
imperfection, whether of knowledge or of moral force? As
if there were no sins except those of negligence and omission, no sins of set purpose to do evil; as if there were no
such thing as knowing evil to be evil, and deliberately
embracing it!9
R1 om. vi. 14.    2 Rom. vi. 2.   Rom. vi. 23; cf. I S. John iii. 8.
* Ps. ii. 2-7; Isa. i. 16; Jerem. iv. 14; Acts xxii. 16; 1 Cor. vi. 11; Rev.
i. 5; Rev. vii. 14.
R om. vi. 16-22.      O Rom. vii. 23.       7 1 Cor. xv. 56.
8 1 S. John v. 16.       ROm. i. 32.




IV.]      Is sins a ncecessary foil to virvze       14I
Indeed, to represent sin as something due to the original
imperfection of human nature is to contradict the sanctity
and justice of God.  God is the Maker of His creatures;
and if creatures are imperfect, as compared with the Creator,
it is from the necessity of the case, because the creature is
not the Creator. But this inherent or metaphysical imperfection does not necessarily imply moral imperfection: had
it been so, God could not have created at all without
violating His own attributes.  And certainly, if man only
sins because his views of absolute good are limited, and his
higher aspirations weighed down by the body of sense
which encompasses him, the author of that intellectual
finiteness and of that sensual frame is the author of man's
sin; and God, in creating, forfeits His sanctity, and in forfeiting His sanctity ceases to be the object of religion.
This conclusion, indeed, is not declined by the Pantheistic
philosophy, and by that large body of thought in our day,
which is profoundly, because for the most part unconsciously,
moulded by it.  Sin, we are told, like everything else, is
really due to the Divine activity; but, then, sin is not without its uses-I had almost said, its merits.  It is, forsooth,
the stimulant and condition of goodness.  As in the world
of Hegelian thought, truth, we are told, is not to be looked
for in any single and direct affirmations, but only as the
term of a series of contradictions, which not only may be
true together, but are together necessary to express the full
truth; so it has been asserted, that in the moral sphere there
is a somewhat similar law of contradictories; that it is as




142 Evil oIot /zereforegood, because overruled. [LECT.
unphilosophical to find fault with what is vulgarly described
as sin, as it is to keep no terms with what is coarsely described
as falsehood. Sin is the necessary foil to goodness: without
sin goodness would never be roused into active life. Contradiction is a condition of moral life: goodness is not
tranquil conformity to law, but energetic struggle against
that which contradicts it, and which by contradicting it
makes it what it is.  "Just as nature is made up of contrasts, and in it we see light opposed to darkness, and heat
to cold, and expansion to concentration, and pleasure to
pain, and health to sickness, —even so does the true life of
the human soul emerge from deep contrasts; it is only
developed by the encounter between truth and falsehood,
between good and evil."... "Evil is thus a condition,
almost an ingredient of good.  Goodness would slumber in
itself, it would be without the necessary impulse to exertion,
unless it were constantly kept on the alert by the antagonistic energies and excesses of evil." 
This singular travestie of the account which the revelation has given of the permission of moral evil in the world,
involves a fallacy of- confusion.  It confounds the good
ends which evil, against its nature, may subserve in the
purposes of an overruling Providence, with the inherent
qualities of evil itself. Certainly it is better for the
health of the body that latent disease should shew itself
in pronounced illness; and when such illness is over,
a patient may be all the stronger and better for having
1 Cf. quot. by Klotz, in his art. Siiade.




IV.]        Gooduess indejpendent of evil.        143
been ill.  But for all that, disease. is disease, and not a
variegated form of health; and a man in whom disease
had never been latent, and whose constitution had been
even monotonously free from its assaults, will be, at least,
as well as another who may have happily survived a scarlet
fever. What God in His loving Omnipotence may nmake
evil do in spite of its nature is one thing; what it is in itself
is another. Vice is not a necessary aliment, it is not even
a necessary foil to virtue. The devil is not necessary to
the existence of God; and goodness does not depend either
for its beauty or its strength upon the antagonistic efforts
of sin. If it were so, we should at once reach the practical
conclusion of the Materialistic philosophy, which denies the
existence of any free will in man whatever, and sees in all
moral actions, whatever their colouring, the inevitable
result of antecedents which create them, by as necessary a
law as any which'rules the world of matter. Upon Materialistic principles, the murderer Traupmann ought never
to have been executed: he was no more responsible for his
atrocities than a flash of lightning or a wave would be for
the destruction of a human life. But upon the principles
of the aesthetic Pantheism, it might even have been questioned whether French society did not on the whole gain
by his horrible activity: and whether one who had done
so much to exhibit the virtue of respect for humilan life in
high relief, by so emphatically contradicting it, was not, in
consideration of his services, entitled to receive some higher
and more substantial reward than a reprieve of the penalty
which he actually suffered.




I44   E'vi, if necessary, zoiutsl be condoned.  [LECT.
Indeed, it is here that we see how irreconcileable any such
theory is with the plainest instincts of a healthy conscience.
If evil is necessary to the existence of good, why should
conscience condemn evil?  How can conscience condemn
that which is necessary to the good which it approves?
How, if we are to pursue this line of thought, can we ultimately avoid acquiescing in a theory which, denying all
distinctions of right and wrong as of the nature of baseless
prejudice, sees in evil, as in good, only an energetic manifestation of life apart from any moral colouring whatever?
A last protest may indeed be made to the effect that man's
business is to contradict the metaphysical necessity for evil
by the moral demand that it should be resisted. But this
very demand, if it is to be enforced, must proceed upon the
serious conviction that moral evil is evil; that it is a something which need not be; and that if we will, we are individually and perfectly free to accept or tb reject it.
Theories such as these are in truth expedients for representing sin as being less serious than it is; for softening
the repulsive contrasts which it presents to holiness; for
securing to it a right to feel at home in human conduct
and in the human soul. Every such theory attempts to
put forth a more or less disguised justification and apology
on behalf of sin, at the bar of intellect, that sin may, if
possible, be received without dishonour, if it be not welcomed at the court of conscience.  But conscience, when she
is not benumbed or asleep, must protest implacably against
these attempts to make sin respectable.  She can see in




IV.]       Doctrize of Two Prinzcilces.          I45
them only so many invitations addressed to the single soul,
bidding it look tolerantly or fondly on the sure instrument
of its degradation and ruin; so many invitations addressed
to human society, bidding it recognize or welcome the foe
who is sworn to impede and to destroy the indispensable
conditions of its coherence and progress.
2. It has indeed been the dread of softening down the
idea of evil which has led the human conscience in very
early ages to tamper with the idea of God. The instinctive
recoil from the one error has plunged it into the other.
The physical evil of pain, of disease, of death, inflicts
itself upon the senses; and conscience accounts for physical
evil by tracing it to moral evil. Conscience cannot deny
the malignity of moral evil without dethroning herself.
But why should moral evil exist? The All-Holy could not
have created it: to have done so would have been to cease
to be Himself. But why did He permit it? And who gave
it being, that He should permit it?
In ages and civilizations when the idea of God was imperfect or impoverished, men accounted for the existence
of evil by ascribing it to a being or principle, coeval with
God, independent of Him, and of course opposed to Him.
Whether this evil was supposed to be matter out of which
the Good God had fashioned the world, or whether it was
conceived of as something more spiritual, the object and
origin of the system was identical. It was an effort to
account for the great perplexing mystery-the existence
of evil. It is impossible, argued these ancient thinkers,
L




I46           Ormyuzd and AYrimzan.            [LECT.
that moral life and death, that good and evil, can flow from
a single source. It is impossible that a Holy God can have
been the author of evil. Evil, then, must be referred to
some other origin: it must have had an author of its own.
So far we cannot but follow; but then the argument appeals,
in order to sustain its own false inference, to the gigantic
proportions which evil has actually assumed.  Considering
how world-wide and imperial is the sway of evil, must not
evil, it asks, be referred to some person, principle, force, or
tendency, higher and older than created things; to some
almighty source, existing side by side with the Author and
Source of goodness, in eternal contradiction to His mind
and work?
If we take the ancient Parsee doctrine as a sample, we
find, in the lines of the Bucndehesch, the good and evil
principles-Ormnuzd and Ahrimlan-contrasted as follows:"Ormuzd is the light;
This light is without beginning;
Ormuzd is on high,
Ormuzd is Holy,
Ormuzd hath all knowledge."
On the other hand"Ahriman is in darkness;
This darkness is without beginning;
Ahriman is in the depths;
Ahriman delighteth in strife;
Ahriman hath only a derived knowledge."'
Here, while Ahriman is in respect of knowledge the
inferior of Ormuzd, they are represented as coeval; al1 Ahardanesch, qu. by Hanneberg from Jos. Miiller, art. Parsismus.




IV.]           A  i-dzdlzalisz of Isaihk.             I47
though the modern Parsees, especially when in conflict
with Christianity, have tended, by exaltintg Ormuzcl alone,
to approach more and more closely to a practical Monotheism.   But there is no real question as to the practical
Dualism of the earlier doctrine, which prevailed in Persia
at least from  the date of Darius Hystaspes to that of
Alexander the Great, and  again after the fall of the
Parthian dynasty, —the doctrine which is confronted in the
pages of the Hebrew  Scriptures.  In Isaiah, the God of
Israel proclaims"I am the Lord,
And there is none else:
There is no God beside Me.......
I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace and create evil;
I the Lord do all these things."2
Here we have a revelation probably designed to protect
the faith of Israel against the Dualistic influences to which
it would be exposed during the later period of the Captivity.
The Eternal Lord of Heaven was much more ancient than
this antagonism of good and evil which meets men's eyes
in the world, and which suggested the faith froml  which
was evolved the Zendavesta.   The evil principle itself
was in this sense only created by Him, that He had formed
the wills which, in their perverted freedom, gave it birth.
"I am the Lord, and there is none else."
1 Cf. Hanneberg, who quotes Wilson, "The Parsee Religion," Bombay,
1843, p. 107. It would seem that the superiority of Ormuzd was never
supposed to imply his power of preventing the birth of Ahriman or of
annihilating him.
2 Isa. xlv. 5, 6, 7.




148        Dztalism is, i zfacd, A  keismz.    [LECT.
In Christian times we find S. Paul insisting upon the
truism, as it appears to us, that " every creature of God is
good, and nothing to be despised," 1 as a reason for rejecting certain distinctions of food which were insisted on by
some ancient ascetics at Ephesus.  But here he is really
combating another form of the doctrine of Two Principles;
which held matter to be the seat and source of evil, and
certain kinds of food to be peculiarly representative of the
grossness of matter. When Augustine, in a later age, as a
still unconverted young man, giving the freest license both
to sensual passions and to intellectual enterprise, was
casting about for a theory which would at once countenance
his excesses, and furnish him with a working philosophical
explanation of the universe, he found it in Manicheeism.
Manicheeism  was the Dualism  which had acquired a
Christian flavour by coming into contact with Christianity;
and we may form some idea of the strength and fascination of the theory, by observing how tenacious was its hold
upon the strong and beautiful mind of the greatest of the
Fathers, even when the full light of Catholic truth was
already breaking upon him.
Isaiah's words will have already suggested that seriously
to believe in two eternal principles is fatal to serious belief
in the existence of God.  God is the one Self-existent
Being; the Maker of all things, visible and invisible. To
assert that another-whether essence, person, or even
matter-existed eternally side by side with God, is to deny
11 Tinm. iv. 4.




IV.]   The idea of evi izypaired jy Dualismw.   I49
God's first and necessary prerogative, as the Alone Eternal,
and Self-existent.  If God is to be screened in human
thought from  the blasphemy which would credit Him
with the origination of evil, it must be by some doctrine
which, unlike Dualism, does not virtually annihilate Him
in order to do so.
But the doctrine of Two Principles does not succeed even
in its main object, namely, the protection and affirmation
of the unimpaired idea of evil itself. Evil is, in its quaintly
perverted estimate, rather a growth of nature than the free
product of a created will: evil has a positive substance of
its own. Evil must therefore be conquered by a physical
rather than a spiritual or moral treatment. This would
seem to have been the idea of these mistaken ascetics
at Colosse, 1 whom S. Paul observed and reproved. And the
error leads to consequences beyond itself.  If evil is
physical, there is no more reason for distress at a habit
of lying, than at tuberculation of the lungs. If sin is
physical, remedies may or may not succeed; and a moral
struggle is on the whole less reasonable than a torpid
resignation.
At any rate, it may be said, we of this generation are
not Dualists: and what good is to be done by disinterring
and gibbeting the corpses of ancient errors? But let us
recollect that when error is buried as a formal theory, it
often leaves behind it a miasma which infects the world
of thought for many a succeeding generation. We practi1Col. ii. 22, 23.




150          DzLa/Zisz  inz everyday life.     [LECT.
cally affirm a second evil principle in the universe when
we acquiesce in the notion that evil in ourselves or in
others, in individuals or in societies, is invincible. We do
not talk of a second principle; we assume one.  We
assuime not merely a powerful but an unconquerable devil,
when we despair of expelling, by God's grace, that which
is evil in ourselves or in others. We bow, as we say, to
the inevitable; we recognize such and such tendencies of
the times.  They.are perhaps at issue with what we know
to be right. But there they are; the current flows all one
way and with increasing strength, and we say that it is
useless to attempt to make head against it. Instead of overcoming evil with good, like the Apostle, we philosophically
resign ourselves to being overcome with evil.  But our
notion of the invincibility of sin and error is at issue with
our still professed faith in the one All-Powerful and Holy
God. Our faint-heartedness, our despair, our abject fatalism
in presence of evil, within and around us, is properly a
relic of the old Dualistic leaven, which sees in evil the
resistless play, the unconquerable energy of an eternal
principle; which refers it to a power that, could it have
existed, would have made God impossible.
No.  There must be no tampering with the idea and
character of God; with His Unity, with His Omnipotence,
with His Sanctity. To deny these is to destroy, in humnan
thought, the ascertained object of religion. If there is one
God, All-powerful and moral, and if moral evil is a fact in
the universe, the existence and nature of moral evil must




IV.]       Desire l/,e r'aw  material of sin.        15 I
be in some way accounted for by serious Theists, if it can
be accounted for at all, without impugning the morality
and the Omnipotence of God.
II.
What, then, is sin in itself?  What representation of
it will neither obliterate the lines of moral truth, nor do
injustice to the Sanctity or the Omnipotence of God?
S. James, in the passage which is before us, furnishes
us with materials for answering this question.  He says
that desire when it bath conceived bringeth forth sin.  He
thus places the origin of moral evil in the created will, of
which desire is the moral ingredient. Desire is, indeed,
the raw material of moral life. It is the plastic force
which may become, under different circumstances, either
sanctity  or sin: and  thus S. Augustine has defined
virtue as "love or desire ruled by true order."  Desire is
part of the original outfit of every human being; a
sympathetic force by which the various instincts and
faculties of our nature are drawn towards a something
external to itself.  What is that sonmething?  In man's
unfallen state of old, and in his state of perfectly restored
sanctity hereafter, God is the true object of all human
desires: man desires God for His own sake, and all created
objects only for the sake of God.  In the origincal design




152         Sefi/shness alt he root of siZ.      [LECT.
of God, desire in the moral world corresponds to the law of
attraction in the physical; and the perfected saint, in all
the activity of his moral and intellectual life, moves
around the great Centre of his adoration with an undeviating regularity, such as is that of the planet circling in
its orbit around its parent sun.  But the planet cannot
modify or weaken the attraction which governs it.  It
cannot plunge anarchically through space, seeking a place
in some other system  where it may move around some
other sun, or itself become the centre of other satellites;
whereas desire, being moral, does not bind free agents to
loyal revolutions around their true Centre by any such
necessity.  Man may at his option cease to desire God: he
may, in the stead of God, desire one of God's creatures for
its own sake, and with the vehemence of an absorbing
passion.1 And since no other creature can really take
God's place, man thus comes to make himself his own
centre; to view all persons and events relatively to himself; to think of God, if at all, as only one of the points
on the circumference of his own petty and fictitious
universe.  When desire is thus perverted, by being wedded
to the things of time and sense, as if they could really
satisfy the yearnings of the soul, it " bringeth forth sin."
Like an atmosphere charged with infection, desire spent
upon created things is pregnant with sin: it implies
that idolatrous surrender of self to creatures, that passionate
claim upon creatures on behalf of self, which in the end
1 S. John ii. 17, Eiwttv/ca TOO Kdo'/lov. Tit. ii. 12; Rom. vii. 7, 8.




IV.]          Okher aspecs of ai act of siz.               I 53
breaks the bond between God and the soul.'  And hence
an act, or series of acts, whether of thought, or word, or
deed, to which in its freedom the will consents, and which
contradict the moral order of the universe.
And this is sin.  Sin, to be complete, need not become
speech or action: a formed desire, deliberately assented to
by the will, constitutes sin. " He that looketh on a
woman," says our Lord, " to desire her, hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart."2  Indeed, it is
the internal act, and not the material product of the act,
which is chiefly of moral importance.  What is the precise
form  or turn of the inward act?  Here the beautiful and
suggestive  words, which  are used  to  express the  idea
of sin in the sacred language, but which are untranslateable into our clumsier Western tongue, will help us.  In
the  fifty-first Psalm,  for instance, besides the  generic
expression for evil,3 there are three words which describe
different aspects of the idea of sin.  Of these, one implies
that God's will being the aim which man rightly pursues,
sin is a missing his true goal in life.4   A  second regards
1 This aspect of sin has been well re-stated in Jul. Miiller's Lehr. v. d.
Sfinde, i. i. c. 3.
2 S. Matt. v. 28.
3   v, v. 6, broadly opposed to:lj —Gen. xxiv. 50; Levit. xxvii. 10. In
a more emphatic moral sense, Prov. viii. 13; Ps. vii. 10.  ptW+ means
originally to be noisy, tempestuous; the transition to the idea of moral
disorder appears in.~, which is primarily used of breaking in pieces with
a crash, Job xxxiv. 24, Ps. ii. 9; then of evil generally, and finally, in the
Hiphil especially, of evil action.-J. Miiller, Lehr. v. d. Siinde, i. i. c. 2.
4 n, v. 5. The primary idea seems to be that of stumbling on the way
T T
to a goal-Proe. xix. 2; in which is implied the missing of the object of




I54         Siuz contradicls E/ernal  Law,              [LECT.
sin as a twisting or perversion of the will from  the right
way.l   A  third brands it as rebellious transgression of
Divine law,2 of a covenant with God, of the law  which
man is bound to obey. The New Testament expressions
substantially correspond; and they have this in comlmon.
Sin is an offence against moral truth; known, and contradicted although known.   " Sin," says  S. Augustine, " is
something said or done or desired in contradiction to the
Eternal Law."
Why the "Eternal" Law?  This question can only be
answered when we reflect on the nature of moral truth.
Moral truth is not like the laws and facts of the physical
world; it is not something which might have been otherwise than as it is, had God so willed.  God was under no
necessity to make either one or a million suns or planets,
or to  furnish  them  with  a particular temperature and
particular inhabitants.  Why  not?  Because  there  was
nothing in His necessary nature which constrained Him to
do so.  He created in His freedom:  He created as He
created in His freedom: He might have created otherwise:
He was free not to have created at all.  But could God
ever have sanctioned you or me in saying that that which
search-Prov. viii. 36.  Not that Nnd  is used only or chiefly of sins of
infirmity, whether of thought or will: it is often applied to the gravest sins,
and implies that which is characteristic of all sin, namely, that sin is a moral
action, in which man misses the aim for which he was created by God.
1 Bl, v. 4, from,ap, to be bent or distorted, implies evil considered as
departure from man's appointed path.-Job. xiii. 26; Gen. iv. 13.
2 yg, v. 5. Vjin primarily implies faithless rebellion against a covenant,
as in Isa. i. 2, xliii. 27; Jerem. iii. 13; Amos iv. 4; 1 Kings xii. 19, &c.




IV.] and lzerefore lie seif-exiseez szialitre ofGod. I 5 5
we know to be false is true?  Why not?  Because, in
sanctioning us, God would be contradicting, not a law
which He might have made other than as He has made it,
but a necessary truth of His own eternal nature. A moral
truth is like a mathematical axiom; we see it intuitively,
and we do this because it is necessarily true, and as being
necessarily true, is also a truth of God's eternal nature.
Can any reasonable man, for instance, without destroying
and uprooting tlhe very constitution of the mind which
God has given him, conceive that under any possible
circumstances it could ever have been true that things which
are equal to the same are not equal to one another?  If
not; then, here we have an Eternal Truth.  And if this
be an Eternal Truth, it is, as such, a real part of God's
Eternal Nature; since if this be denied, we must admit that
there are eternal truths independent of God, and existing
eternally apart from Hint. Would not this in effect be a
denial of His solitary self-existence? Either God does not
exist, or all that is eternal is God. But if pure mathematical truth, as being eternally true, be thus Divine, moral
truth is not less so. If we cannot believe that a lie was
ever right, this is because veracity is an eternal law of
the Divine nature; and this applies to the whole moral
law, which is, in reality, the Divine nature formulated
into rules which suit the conditions of creaturely existence.
Thus, given the parental relationship, it never could have
been right to dishonour a father or a mother: given human
life, murder could never have been other than criminal:




156          Permission of evil by God.       [LECT.
given the responsibility of transmitting the gift of life, and
adultery, which trifles with that responsibility, could never
have been condoned: given the idea of personal rights, of
property, and stealing is necessarily condemned.  And
thus it is that sin does not contradict a rule which God
has made of one kind, but which He might have made of
another; it contradicts a rule which, in its principle, is
necessary and eternal; a rule which does not depend even
upon the will of God Himself, since it embodies and
expresses His Divine and unchanging Nature; a rule which
accordingly it is impossible to contradict, without running
counter to, and, so far as we can, setting at naught and
destroying the very being and nature of God Himself.
" Against Thee only have I sinned," is the voice of the
sinner's deepest knowledge of himself. And it was this
which led ancient divines to say, that if, per imnptossibile,
moral evil could be pushed to a point of sufficient exaggeration, it would annihilate God. By this saying, they expressed the vital and fundamental antagonism  which
exists between sin and the Divine nature.
Now, such an account of moral evil cannot be said to
attenuate its malignity; but is it equally careful of the
character of God? If evil be thus antagonistic to God,
how can God, at once Almighty and All-holy, have allowed
it to exist? As All-holy, He must abhor it; as Almighty,
He surely might have proscribed what He abhors?
The answer is, that, notwithstanding the inherent quality
of evil, the possibility of its existence is, so far as we can




IV.]      Sin an abuse of God's generosity.        157
see, a needful condition of true moral freedom.  God might
have created a universe ruled from first to last by physical
law, and so incapable of deviation from the true rule of its
action.  In such an universe, moral evil would have found
no place, only because there would have been no creatures
properly capable of moral good. Our experience tells us
that God has not chosen to stint down His creative activity
to these proportions: that we are free agents, is not more
a matter of faith, than of experience. We know that God has
created beings whose high privilege it is to be able freely
to choose Him as their king, as the accepted Master of their
whole inward life; but if this privilege is to be real, it also
carries with it the implied power of rejecting Him. The
alternative risk is the inevitable condition of the consummate honour: it is actually a substantial part of the
honour. A moral being must at least have a capacity for
disobedience if he is to be able freely to obey.
If, then, God has permitted evil, it is not because He has
ceased to be Himself, but because His generosity has been
abused. The source and root of moral evil is to be found,
not in the Good God, but in the abused freedom of the
creature, whether it be man or angel. It were hard indeed
to blaspheme God for His generosity; to complain that He
has made us men and not brutes or stones, because, forsooth, as a race, as well as in our individual lives, we have
turned His bounty against Himself, and made the greatness of His gift the measure of our degradation.
It will be urged that God must have "foreseen" the




I 5 8 S. PauulandS.A  gzgsiineonpermimtedsinu. [LECT.
abuse that would follow upon His gift of freedom.  Certainly.  But those who believe in His wisdom  and His
love at all, must surely believe that He foresaw much else.
They will believe witl S. Paul that if, in the event, sin
has abounded, grace has much more abounded.'  They
will believe with S. Augustine that " God knew it to be
more agreeable to His almighty goodness even to bring
good out of evil, than not to permit evil to exist."2  He
might be trusted to strike the balance of advantages between
a universe ruled only by physical law and a universe so
open to the possible invasion of evil as to be darkened
by its actual presence and apparent victory, but withal
illumninated by the remedy, which, in the long run, was
to be much more than equal to grappling with the disease.
Sin might be tolerated, if the Eternal Son was to-redeem
the world.  We know  at any rate how the world's Ruler
has decided, and it is scarcely reasonable to complain that
He has not admitted us to share all the reasons which
governed His decision.
III.
Here, then, I repeat the statement with which I began,
that if a religion is to be real life-controlling power, it
1 Rom. v. 18, 19, 20, oi &e erXedvaoev 4'  a/tapTra, vrreperepiceuTaev 4 Xcapis.
2 De Cor. et Gr. c.' 10. Qui creavit omnia bona valde et inala ex bonis
exoritura esse proescivit; scivit magis ad omnipotentissimam suam bonitatem
pertinere etiam de malis benefacere quam mala esse non sinere.




IV.]      Religion mustgra5pple  wzit  sil.         159
must practically recognize the fact of sin. For, since sin
provokes God's necessary displeasure on the one hand, and
destroys man's power and even his wish to seek God on
the other, its direct effect is to break uLp that bond between
God and man in which religion essentially consists. Religion, therefore, must deal with sin, not as if it were making a
supererogatory exertion, but as a condition of its own existence. It must remove this fatal obstacle to its proper activity,
if it is to exist at all. Not less necessary is this practical
recognition of sin by religion, if religion is to be of any
real benefit to society.  Go out into the streets of this
great capital, or read the daily journals which register the
thought and incidents of our national life, and what are
the two spectres which meet you most constantly? Are
they not suffering and crime?  And what is suffering, at
least in the main, but the effect and shadow of sin; if not
of the sufferer's own sin, yet at least of some physical or
social legacy from a parent's error? What is crime in its
most venial form, but sin, prompted by suffering and
organized and solidified, until in its brutal exuberance it
threatens even the existence of society?  Has religion
nothing to say to the moral mischief which is the parent
of these dark phantomls? Is she dreaming? Is she powerless? Is she abandoning her high hope and mission of
saving humanity from its worst enemies?
It is here that true religion parts company altogether
with certain phases of so-termed religious thought, which
are not without an ambition to be considered at least the




60o "Religiouts" 5ilfosophies wzich zgizore siu. [LECT.
rudiments of some future religion of civilization. Doubtless they embody much which recommends them, at any
rate, to the interest of educated people. They are philosophical; they are enterprising; they are in good taste; they
occupy a large amount of attention in our journals and
periodicals. Nor are they insensible to the evil of crime,
considered as a cause of social disturbance and danger.
They would sometimes deal more hardly with it than
would be morally possible for men who had a deeper insight
into the relative responsibilityof criminals. But ignoring the
awful yet blessed doctrines of Rledeniption and Grace, they
have no remedy for sin; no remedy, that is, of any practical
value; and after all, sin is the great fact with which they
ought to deal. Animated speculation on religious topics,
careful reproduction of the external drapery of scenes in
early sacred history, quick capacity for analyzing and delineating sentiment, is very welcome in its place.  It has indisputably a literary value; but it does not help us to confront
the stern realities of this human world. The religion which
has no fixed doctrines, or scarcely any; no code of absolute
truth, to be taught and suffered for at all costs; no word of
heart-searching warning, and yet of tenderest consolation
for sinners,-is not really a religion at all. It is at best
a very one-sided philosophy.  Its endeavours to deal with
the great heart-sores of humanity remind us of some great
physician who, at the bedside of a patient, writhing in protracted agony, should airily discuss his own last excursion
in the Alps, or the last debate in Parliament, or at best the




IV.]       yesus leaches lhe naizre of sil.          16 
most recent resolution arrived at by the Metropolitan Board
of Health.
The religion of Jesus Christ, as taught by His Apostles,
does not thus trifle with the seriousness of sin. It begins by
deepening the sense of sin, the perception of its real area
and power in human life. It adds poignancy to the feeling of
shame and guilt which follows upon deliberate sinful action
in a healthy conscience.  By the Mosaic law there was a
knowledge of sin.'  By the teaching and example of Jesus
Christ there is a much truer and deeper knowledge of it. 2
That faultless and unapproached Life which we study in the
pages of the Gospels, brought home to the heart as well as
to the understanding by the secret teaching of the Eternal
Spirit, endows the Christian with an ideal of sanctity altogether his own.3  Around the Sermon on the Mount, or the
last discourse in the supper-roolm, there is an unearthly
atmosphere of purity and holiness, which lights up in the
soul, with microscopic distinctness, the consciousness of
secret evil, more perfectly than could any code of precepts.
One only appearing among us in human form has been
able to ask the tremendous question, "Which of you convinceth Me of sin?"*   And as we gaze on Him, holy,
harmless, undefiled, separate from  sinners, in His purity,
His courage, His humility, His tenderness, His majestic
moral strength, His fearless loyalty to truth, His vast
charity, we see that which reveals us to ourselves. At the
feet of the Lamb without blemish and immaculate, we feel,
1 Rom. iii. 20. 2 S. Matt. v. 21-48. 3 S. John viii. 12. 4 S. John viii. 46.
Mvi




162    7esuLs leaches t/e cozsezeinczes of sin.  [LECT.
with Job, that the report of God's sanctity has been at
length exchanged for sight;1 we exclaim with the Apostle,
"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 0 Lord."2
Nor does Jesus Christ stop here.  He reveals, as does no
other, not merely the fact and malignity of sin, but its
consequences.  The sternest things that have ever been
said, as regards sin's prospects in another world, first
passed the tenderest lips that ever proclaimed God's love to
man.3  Our Lord would not leave the revelation of the
penal future to His Apostles: He took the unpopularity of
making such a revelation upon Himself.  No unbelieving
criticism can really touch the plain meaning of the tremuendous words in which the All-Merciful One has depicted
the case of a moral being, stiffened by final impenitence
into a permanent self-torturing rebellion against Eternal
Justice and Eternal Love.  But for that awful measure of
sin, the saying concerning Judas had been a paradox; " It
were good for that man if he had never been born." 1
Yet if Jesus Christ had only taught us the penalties of
sin, He would but have enhanced the terrors of the ancient
law.  Whereas, in reality, He has made it possible for us
to look at moral evil as it is. We Christians can dare to
face it, for Ie has brought us both a pardon and an antidote.
His cross and passion are a revelation as well as a cure.
When dying, He shews us what sin is. At least to those
who take Him  at His word, and see in Him One Higher
1 Job xlii. 5.          2 S. Luke v. 8.
3 S. Mark ix. 43-48; S. Matt. xxv. 46; S. John v. 29.
4 S. Matt. xxvi. 24; S. Mark xiv. 21.




1V.]    _yess is /te A /ozlelenf/ifor SiZl.       163
than the sons of men, the Cross will surely have this meaning.  Why could not the Holy One, manifested to HIis
reasonable creatures in a form of sense, have ended a life of
beneficence and glory by such a visible ascent to heaven as
was that of the Tishbite? Why those years of privation
and sorrow, those sufferings and insults, that shame and
scorn? Why the prostration in the garden, and the WTounds
and the Blood, and the agony lengthened out by ingenious
cruelty, and the ostentatious exultation and triumph of the
hosts of evil, and the darkness and gloom of the closing
scene? Would not this mean failure, if it had not been
proved by the event to mean a victory, wherein the Divine
Suffeirer was triumlphing, as His Apostle notes, over the
associated powers of darkness?l  That unfathomled pain is
the true measure of sin for Christians.  In that keen sensitiveness, in that strength of a self-sacrificing Will, in that
exhaustive anticipation of and intellectual familiarity with
the coming Agony, followed by so entire an acceptance of
it, we Christians discern the real character of the adversary
which the Perfect Moral Being conquered by His voluntary
death. From that fountain of pardon and strength which
HIe opened upon Calvary, all2 the resources which His
Church can wield in her struggle with His great enemy,
and in her continuation of His work of reconciliation and
peace, are consistently derived. No virtue exists in theworld
which is not His; no cleansing which His Blood has not
made good.  Standing beneath the Cross, we can never
1 Col. ii. 15.      2 Acts iv. 12.




I64   The sense of sin in afailthfu    Chrislian. [LECT.
deem moral evil less or other than the greatest, if it be not
rather the only evil. Kneeling before the Crucified, be our
sense of guilt what it may, we can never despair; since
the complete revelation of the malignity of sin is also
and simultaneously a revelation of the Love that knows
no bounds. 1
It is these concrete truths, and no abstract considerations, which really keep alive in the Christian heart an
abhorrence and dread of moral evil.  With that evil, even
when all has been pardoned, every Christian life is, froml
first to last, in varying degrees, a struggle. There are great
conflicts, and there are periods of comparative repose;
there are days of failure as well as days of victory; there
are qcuickenings of buoyant thankful hope, and there are
hours of a discouragement which is only not despair.  But
two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes
light of any known sin,2 and he never admits it to be
invincible.  While he constantly  endeavours, by the
sanctification of his desires, by entwining his affections more
and more around the Source of goodness, to destroy sin in
the bud, or rather in its root and principle, lie is never off
his guard; never surprised at new proofs of his natural
weakness; never disposed to underrate either his dangers
or his strength.  He knows that now, as eighteen centuries
ago, he wrestles not against flesh and blood,* but against
principalities and powers that bear him no good will: he
1 2 Cor. v. 14; Rom. v. 15.       2 1 S. John iii. 9; v. 18.
1 Cor. x. 12.                    4 Eph. vi. 12.




IV.]             The victory over sinz.              I65
knows, that as at the first so now, " if any man sin, we have
an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,
and He is the propitiation for our sins." 1  And thus, in his
inmost life, he is at once anxious and hopeful; confident
yet without presumption; alive to all that is at stake day
by day, hour by hour; yet stayed upon the thought, nay,
upon the felt presence of a Love Which has not really left
him to himself. And at last, when it seems best to that
Eternal Love, the day of struggle draws to its close,2 and
the towers of the Everlasting City come into view; the city
within whose precincts intellectual error cannot penetrate,
and moral failure is unknown.  "Thanks be to God Who
giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 3
Your alms are asked to-day on behalf of the additional
clergy needed by this great parish with its twenty thousand
poor.4  You will feel that this is an opportunity of testing
the earnestness of your desire to struggle against our common enemy, whether in the world or in your own hearts,
by freely placing your means at His disposal, Who is its
only real Conqueror.
1 1 S. John ii. 1.   2 2 Tim. iv. 6.    3 1 Cor. xv. 57.
4 St. James's, Piccadilly, Additional Curates' Fund.




LECTURE V.
Sift  Stuntba  in fi0nt.
PRAYEPR, THE CHARACTERISTIC ACTION OF
RELIGION.
S. MATT. Vii. 7.
Ask and it shall be givcen your.
DELIGION is the bond between the soul and God, which
sin, by virtue of its very nature, breaks up and
destroys.  It is of importance to inquire whether man can
strengthen and. intensify that which he can, it seems, so
easily ruin if he will. Does his power lie only in the
direction of destruction? Has he no means of invigorating
and repairing a tie, in itself so precious, yet in some
respects so frail? The answer lies in our Lord's promise.
Prayer is the act by which man, conscious at once of his
weakness and of his immortality, puts himself into real
and effective commnunication with the Almighty, the Eternal,
the Self-Existent God. I say, effective communication.
For prayer, as our Lord teaches in the text and elsewhere,
is not without results.  God answers prayer il many ways.
His answers to the soul's petition for health and strength




LECT. V.] Prayer IZ'   e lanutzgage of al re/igzons.  167
are collectively described as grace; -grace being the invisible
influence whereby He on His part strengthens and quickens
the tie which binds the petitioner to Himself. " Ask and it
shall be given you."  Prayer then braces the bond of religion
from the side of man; and grace, God's highest answer to
prayer, braces it in a different and far more powerful
sense on the part of God.
It is not too much to say that the practice of prayer is
co-extensive with the idea of religion. Wherever man has
believed a higher power to exist, he has not merely discussed the possibility of entering into converse with such
a power; he has assumed, as a matter of course, that he can
do so. Upon desert plains and wild promontories, not less
than in crowded thorouglfares and gorgeous temples, priesthoods, and kings, and multitudes have taken prayer for
granted, as being the most practical as well as the most
interesting and solemn concern of life. The surface of the
earth, of parts of our own island, is still covered with the
relics of some among these ancient worships. And if the
implied conceptions of deity were degraded, and the rites
cruel, or inhuman, or impure, and the minds of the
worshippers not seldom imbruted by the very acts which
should have raised them heavenward; still the idea of
worship as the natural correlative of belief in the superhuman was always there.  To know that a higher Being
existed, and interested Himself, in whatever way, in the
destinies of man, was to feel that it was at once a right
and a duty to approach Him.




I68          Prayer aiz Holy Scriytzzre.            [LECT.
And as we pass the historical lines within which, as
Christians believe, mankind has enjoyed a knowledge of
God's successive revelations of His true self and His true
will, we find that prayer is the prominent feature, the
characteristic exercise of man's highest life.   Sacrifice
begins at the very gates of Eden.l  The life of early
Patriarchs is described as a "walking with God," a continuous reference of thought and aspiration to the Father
above, Who yet was so near them.2  And after the Mosaic
Law was given, when the idea and range of sin had been
deepened and extended in the mind of Israel, we find
prayer organized in a system of sacrifices, suited to various
wants and moods of the human soul, consciously dealing
with its God as the King, both of the sacred nation and of
the individual conscience.  Penitence, thanksgiving, intercession, adoration, each found an appropriate expression.s
Later still, in the Psalter, prayer-the purest, the loftiest,
the most passionate-took shape in imperishable forms.
And when at length a new revelation was made in Jesus
Christ, there was little to add to what was already believed
as to the power and obligation of prayer, beyond revealing
the secret of its acceptance.  Our Lord's precepts4 and
example5 are sufficiently  emphatic; and His Apostles
appear to represent prayer not so much as a practice of
1 Gen. iv. 4.    2 Gen. v. 24; vi. 9.   3 Levit. i.-vii.
4 S. Matt. vi. 9; S. Luke xi. 2; S. ]Matt. xxvi. 41; S. Mark xi. 24;
S. Luke xviii. 1, &c.
5 S. Matt. xiv. 23; S. Mark vi. 46; S. Luke vi. 12, ix. 28; S. John
xvii. 1.




V.]     Relizgion as such has its specziic work.    I69
the Christian life, as its very breath and instinctive movement.  The Christian must be "continuing instant in
prayer;" he must "pray without ceasing."'
Each faculty, or endowment, or form  of activity that
belongs to man has, over and above a number of more
indirect effects, its appropriate and characteristic action, in
which its whole strength is embarked, and in which it has,
so to speak, its full play.  To this law religion is no exception.  While its influence upon human life is strong and
various in proportion to its high aim and object; while it
is felt, when it wields real empire, in every department of
human activity and interest, as an invigorating, purifying,
chastening, restraining, guiding influence, it too has a work
peculiarly its own.  In this work it is wont, if we may
so speak, to embark its collective forces, and to become
peculiarly conscious of its direction and intensity. This
work is prayer. Prayer is emphatically religion in action.
It is the soul of man engaging in that particular form of
activity which presupposes the existence of a great bond
between itself and God. Prayer is, therefore, nothing else
or less than the noblest kind of human exertion.   It'1 Rom. xii. 12; 1 Thess. v. 17.




I o70 Objectzon loprayer as zerely "sezlzinenoalE. " LLECT.
is the one department of action in which man realizes the
highest privilege and capacity of his being. And, in doing
this, he is himself enriched and ennobled almost indefinitely: now, as of old, when he comes down from the
mountain, his face bears tokens of an irradiation which is
not of this world.
That this estimate of the value of prayer is not universal
among educated people in our day, is only too notorious.
If many a man were to put into words with perfect honesty
and explicitness what he thinks, he would say that prayer
is an excellent thing for a clergyman, or for a recluse, or
for a sentimentalist, or for women and children generally;
that it has its uses as a form  of desultory occupation, an
outlet for feeling, a means of discipline.  For himself, he
cannot really think that much prayer would help him much.
It implies a life of feeling-perlhhaps, he would say, of morbid
feeling; and he prides himself upon being guided only
by reflection.  It is sustained, he thinks, by imagination,
rather than by reason; and he deems imagination puerile
and feminine.  -Iis religion, whatever it is, has nothing to
do with imagination, and is hard reason from first to last;
and accordingly prayer seems to him to be altogether less
worthy of the energies of a thinking man than hard work,
whether it be work of the hands or of the brains, whether
it be study or business.  The dignity of real labour is proverbial, but where, he asks, is the dignity of so sentimental
an occupation as prayer?  "For his own part, he thinks,"
(I am quoting words which have actually been used) " that




V.]   Seriospprayer is a form of/ zard work.   I 7 I
religion is not worship, but only another name for doing
good to our fellow-creatures."
Now, without saying one word to disparage the intimate
connection between religion and philanthropy, let us examine the idea of prayer, which is taken for granted in such
language as the foregoing.  Is it true that prayer is, as is
assumed, little else than the half passive play of sentiment
which flows languidly on through the minutes or hours of
easy reverie?  Let those who have really prayed give the
answer. They sometimes describe prayer with the patriarch
Jacob as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power, which
may last, not unfrequently in an earnest life, late into the
night hours, or even to the break of day.'  Sometimes they
refer to common intercession with S. Paul as a concerted
struggle.2  They have, when praying, their eyes fixedl upon
the Great Intercessor in Gethsemane, upon the drops of
blood which fall to the ground in that Agony of Resignation
and Sacrifice.3 Importunity is of the essence of successful
prayer.  Our Lord's references to the subject especially
imply this. The Friend who is at rest with his family,
will rise at last to give a loaf to the hungry applicant.'
The Unjust Judge yields in the end to the resistless eagerness of the widow's cry.-  Our Lord's blessing on the SyroPhcenician woman is the consecration of importunity with
God.6  And importunity means, not dreaminess, but sustained work. It is through prayer especially that "the
1 en. xxxii. 24.  2 Rem. xv. 30.  3 S. Luke xxii. 44.  4 S. Luke xi. 8.
S. Luke xviii. 5.  6 S. iMatt. xv. 27-28; S. Mark vii. 28-29.




1 72    Prayer exercises Die znderstlandiig,  [LECT.
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take
it by force."1  It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton
of Salisbury, that " no man was likely to do much good in
prayer who did not begin by looking upon it in the light
of a work, to be prepared for and persevered in with all
the earnestness which we bring to bear upon subjects which
are, in our opinion, at once most interesting and most
necessary."
This indeed will appear, if, looking to an act of real
prayer, we take it to pieces. Of what does it consist? It
consists always of three separate forms of activity which,
in the case of different persons, co-exist in very varying
degrees of intensity, but which are found, in some degree,
in all who pray, whenever they pray.
To pray, is first of all to put the understanding in motion,
and to direct it upon the Highest Object to Which it can
possibly address itself, the Infinite God. In our private
prayers, as in our public liturgies, we generally preface the
petition itself by naming one or more of His attributes.
Almighty and Everlasting God! If the understanding is
really at work at all, how overwhelming are the ideas, the
truths, which pass thus before it; a boundless Power, an
Existence which knows neither beginning nor end. Then
the substance of the petition, the motives which are alleged
for urging it, the issues which depend upon its being granted
or being refused, present themselves to the eye of the
understanding.  And if our Lord Jesus Christ is not Him1 S. Matt. xi. 12.




V.]           Mie affections, and the will.             173
self, as being both God and Man, the object of prayer,
yet His perpetual and prevailing intercession opens upon
Christian thought the inmost mysteries before the Eternal
Throne. And thus any common act of real prayer keeps,
not the imagination, but the understanding, occupied
earnestly, absorbingly, under the guidance of faith, from
first to last. 
Next, to pray is to put the affections in motion: it is to
open the heart. The object of prayer is the Uncreated Love,
the Eternal Beauty; He of Whose beauty all that moves love
and admiration here is at best a pale reflection.  To be in
His presence in prayer, is to be conscious of an expansion
of the heart, and of the pleasure which accompanies it,
which we feel, in another sense, when speaking with an
intimate and loved friend or relative.  And this movement
of the affections is sustained throughout the act of prayer.
It is invigorated by the spiritual sight of God, but it is also
the original impulse which leads us to draw near to Him.2
In true prayer as in teaching, "out of the abundance of the
heart the mouth speaketh."3
Once more, to pray, is to put the will in motion, just
as decidedly as we do when we sit down to read hard,
or to walk up a steep hill against time.4   That sovereign power in the soul, which we name the will, does not
1 Eph. vi. 18; S. John iv. 22-29; Rom. x. 14; Heb. xi. 6.
2 S. Matt. xv. 8; 1 S. John iii. 21-22.
3 S. Matt. xii. 34; S. Luke vi. 45.
4 S. John ix. 31; S. Matt. vii. 21; S. James iv. 7-8. These passages all
imply that prayer in which the will is not engaged is worthless.




I74  Prayer more exaczing'akai olierv wor/k.  LLECT.
merely, ill prayer, impel us to make the first necessary
mental effort, but enters most penetratingly and vitally
into the very action of the prayer itself. It is the will
which presses the petition; it is the will which struggles
with the reluctance of sloth or with the oppositions of
passion; it is the will which perseveres; it is the will
which exclaims, " I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless
mec."'  The amount of will which we severally carry into
the act of prayer is the ratio of its sincerity; and where
prayer is at once real and prolonged, the demands which
it makes upon our power of concentrating determination
into a specific and continuous act are very considerable
indeed.
Now, these three ingredients of prayer are also ingredients in all real work, whether of the brains or of the hands.
The sustained effort of the intelligence and of the will must
be seconded in work no less than in prayer by a movement
of the affections, if work is to be really successful.  A man
must love his work to do it well.  The difference between
prayer and ordinary work is that in prayer the three
ingredients are more equally balanced. Study may in time
become intellectual habit, which scarcely demands any
effort of will: handiwork may in time become so mechanical as to require little or no guidance from  thought: each
may exist in a considerable, although not in the highest
degree of excellence, without any co-operation of the affections. Not so prayer. It is always the joint act of the will
1 Gen. xxxii. 26.




V.] Prayerdeepezs /,eselzse offersonald/exsteuce. I 7 5
and the understanding, impelled by the affections; and when
either will or intelligence is wanting, prayer at once ceases
to be itself, by degenerating into a barren intellectual exercise, or into a mechanical and unspiritual routine.
The dignity of prayer as being real work becomes clear
to us if we consider the faculties which it employs. This
will be made clearer still if we consider the effect of all
sincere prayer upon the habitual atmosphere of the soul.
Prayer places the soul face to face with facts of the first
order of solemnity and importance; with its real self, and
with its God. And just as art, or study, or labour in any
department is elevating, when it takes us out of and beyond
the petty range of daily and perhaps material interests,
while yet it quickens interest in them by kindling higher
enthusiasms into life; so in a peculiar and transcendent
sense it is with prayer. Prayer is man's inmost movemeat
towards a Higher Power; but what is the intellectual view
or apprehension of himself that originally impels him to
move?  Under what aspect does man appear to himself in
prayer?  In a former lecture we have encountered the
mystery which lies enclosed within each one of us,-the
mystery which is yet a fact,-of an undying personality.
It is that which each human speaker describes as " I."  It
is that of which each of us is conscious as no one else can
be conscious.  Its existence is not proved to us by a
demonstration, since we apprehend it as immediately
obvious. Its certainty can be shaken by no sophistical or
destructive argument, since our conviction of its reality is




I76     Prayer an escape from serf to God.  [LECT.
based upon a continuous act of primary perception.  No
sooner do we withdraw ourselves from the importunities of
sense, from the wanderings of imagination, from  the misleading phrases which confuse the mental sight, than we
find ourselves face to face with this fact, represented by " I."
For it is neither the body which the real self may ignore, nor
a passionate impulse which the real self may conquer, nor
even that understanding which, close as it is to the real self,
is yet distinct from it. The body may be in its decrepitude;
the flames of passion may have died away; the understanding may be almost in its dotage; yet the inward, self-possessed, self-governing being may remain untouched, realizing
itself in struggling against the instincts of bodily weakness,
and in crushing out the embers which survive the fires of
extinct passions.  Now it is this self, conscious of its greatness, conscious of its weakness, which is the real agent in
prayer. In its oppressive sense of solitude, even in the
midst of multitudes, this self longs to go forth, and to commune with the Father of spirits Who gave it life. This
real self it is which apprehends God with the understanding, which embraces iim with the affections, which resolves through the will to obey Him; and thus does it
underlie and unite the complex elements of prayer, so that
in true heartfelt prayer we become so conscious of its
vitality and power. It is in prayer especially that we cease
to live, as it were, in a single faculty, or on the surface of
our being: it is in prayer that we cease to regard ourselves
as animal forms, or as social powers, or as family characters




V.]      Greatness of communzion wilz  God.          I 77
and look hard, for the time being, at ourselves, as being
what we really are; that is to say, as immortal spirits,
outwardly draped in social forms and proprieties, and linked
to a body of flesh and blood, but in our felt spiritual solitude loolkin  steadily upwards at the face of God, and
straining our eyes onwards towards the great eternity which
lies before us.1
Prayer is then so noble, because it is the work of man
as man; of man realizing his being and destiny with a
vividness which is necessary to him in no other occupation.
But what shall we say of it, when we reflect further that
in prayer man holds converse with God: that the Being of
Beings, with all His mnajestic attributes, filling and transcending the created universe, traversing human history,
traversing each man's own individual history, is before
him: that although man is dust and ashes, he is, by prayer,
already welcomed in the very courts of heaven?  It is not
necessary to dwell on this topic.  Whatever be the daily
occupations of any in this Church, be he a worker with the
hands or a worker with the brain, be he gentle or simple,
be he unlettered or educated, be he high in the state or
among the millions at its base, is it not certain that the
nobleness of his highest forms of labour must fall infinitely
below that of any single humnan spirit entering consciously
into converse with the Infinite and Eternal God?
s. Luke xviii. 13, 14.
N




178          NatUzral effects ofprayer.         [LECT.
II.
But granted, men say, the dignity of prayer-granted
even its dignity as labour: what if this labour be misapplied?   There are many functions in many states,
very dignified and not a little onerous, yet in a social and
human sense not very productive.  Is prayer, in its sphere,
of this description? Has it no tangible results? Does it
end with itself? Can the labourer in this field point to
anything definite that is achieved by his exertions?
The question is sufficiently serious at all times, but
especially in our own positive and practical day.  And
it is necessary to make two observations, that we may see
more clearly what issue is precisely before us.
In the first place, there is here no question as to the
subjective effect of prayer; the effect which it confessedly
has upon the mind and character of the person who prays.
Such effects have been admitted on the part of those who
unhappily do not pray themselves; just as the Jews, at the
time of the Betrayal, were so alive to tokens in the disciples
of companionship with Jesus.  That all the effects of
Ch]ristian prayer upon the soul, or most of them, are
natural, a Christian cannot admit: he believes them to be
chiefly due to the transforming power of the grace of God,
given, as at other times, so especially in answer to prayer.
But that some effects of prayer upon the soul are natural
consequences of directing the mind and the affections




V.]       Iz1zellecztual, mzora1, socuad effects.    I 79
towards a superhuman object, whether real or ideal, may
be fully granted.  Thus it has been observed that persons without natural ability have, through the earnestness of their devotional habits, acquired in time powers of
sustained thought, and an accuracy and delicacy of intellectual touch, which would not else have belonged to
them.  The intellect being the instrument by which the
soul handles religious truth, a real interest in religious
truth will of itself often furnish an educational discipline;
it alone educates an intellect which would otherwise be
uneducated.'  The moral effects of devotion are naturally
more striking and abundant.  Habitual prayer constantly
confers decision on the wavering, and energy on the
listless, and calmness on the excitable, and disinterestedness on the selfish.  It braces the moral nature by
transporting it into a clear, invigorating unearthly
atmosphere: it builds up the moral life, insensibly but
surely remedying its deficiencies, and strengthening its
weak points, till there emerges a comparatively symmetrical
and consistent whole, the excellence of which all must
admit, though its secret is known only to those who know
it by experience.2  Akin to the moral are the social effects
of prayer.  Prayer makes men as members of society
different in their whole bearing from those who do not
pray.  It gilds social intercourse and conduct with a
tenderness, an unobtrusiveness, a sincerity, a frankness, an
evenness of temper, a cheerfulness, a collectedness, a con1 Ps. Cxix. 100.     2 Ps. xxvii. 4, 5, 6.




I 80 Pr'.yer, asnzicuzilga Comol7 lu'ion wi/h God. [LECT.
stant consideration for others, united to a simple loyalty
to truth and duty, which leavens and strengthens society.
Nay, it is not too much to say that prayer has even physical
results.  The countenance of a Fra Angelico reflects his
spirit no less than does his art: the bright eye, the pure
elevated expression, speak for themselves.  It was said
of one who has died within the present generation,' that
in his later years his face was like that of an illuminated
clock; the colour and gilding had long faded away from
the hands and figures, but the ravages of time were more
than compensated for by the light which shone from
within.  This was what might have been expected in an
aged man of great piety; to have lived in spirit on Mount
Tabor during the years of a long life is to have caught
in its closing  hours some  rays of the  glory of the
Transfiguration.
Secondly, prayer is not only-perhaps in some of the
holiest souls it is not even chiefly-a petition for something that we want and do not possess.  In the larger
sense of the word, as the spiritual language of the soul,
prayer is intercourse with God, often seeking no end
beyond the pleasure of such intercourse.  It is praise; it
is congratulation; it is adoration of the Infinite Majesty;
it is a colloquy in iwhich the soul engages with the Allwise and the All-holy; it is a basking in the sunshine,
varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun of
Righteousness for His light and His warmth.  In this
1 Rev. J. Keble.




V.] Prayer nol'0 al/ays i.zzended log-el som/ethizng. I 8 I
larger sense, the earlier part of the Te Deumn is prayer as
much as the latter part; the earliest and latest clauses of
the Gloria in Excelsis as truly as the central ones; the
Sanctus or the Jubilate no less than the Litany; the
3Magnificat as certainly as the fifty-first Psalm.  When we
seek the company of our friends, we do not seek it simply
with the view of getting something from  them: it is a
pleasure to be with them, to be talking to them  at all,
or about anything; to be in possession of their sympathies
and to be shewing our delight at it; to be assuring
them of their place in our hearts and thouglhts. So it is
with the soul, when dealing with the Friend of friendswith God.  Prayer is not, as it has been scornfully
described, " only a machine warranted by theologians to
make God do what His clients want:" it is a great deal
more than petition, which is only one department of it:
it is nothing less than the whole spiritual action of the
soul turned towards God as its true and adequate object.
And if used in this comprehensive sense, it is clear that,
as to much prayer, in the sense of spiritual intercourse
with God, the question whether it is answered can never
arise, for the simple reason that no answer is asked for.
But whether prayer means only, as in popular language
it does generally mean, petition for a specific object, or
the whole cycle of possible communion between the soul
andti God, the question whether it is heard is a very
practical one.  We do not address inanimate objects,
however beautiful they may be, except in the way of




182        Prayer ilzvolves waste of lime,       [LECT.
poetical apostrophe.  We do not enter into  spiritual
colloquy with the mountains, or the rivers, or the skies,
with a view  to discharging a duty to them, or really
improving ourselves.- If there is really no being above
who does hear us, what can be the use of continuing a
practice that is based upon an altogether false presunlption?  The subjective benefits of prayer depend upon our
belief in its real power.  But even if they did not, who would
go through a confessedly fictitious exercise at regular intervals with a view to securing them? Who would continue
to pray regularly, if he were once well persuaded that the
effect of prayer is after all only like the effect of the higher
philosophy or poetry; an educLation and a stimulus to the
soul of man, but not an influence that can really touch the
mind or will of that Being to Whom  it is addressed?
Nobody denies the moral and mental stimulus which is to
be gained from the study of the great poets.  But do we
read Homer, or Shakespeare, or Goetlhe each morning and
evening, and perhaps at the middle of the day?  Or if
such were the practice of any of us, should we have any
approach to a feeling of being guilty of a criminal
omission, if now and then we oinitted to read them? No:
if prayer is to be persevered in, it must be on the strength
of a conviction that it is actually heard by a Living
Person.  We cannot practise any intricate trickery upon
ourselves with a view to our imoral edification.  We cannot
The apostrophes of the Psalms and the Benedicite are really act's of
p.raise to God, of which His creatures furnish the occasion.




V.]          unless God is really alive.           I83
pray, if we believe in our hearts that in prayer we are only
holding communion with an ideal world of our own
creation; that we are like  children, with  overheated
imaginations, vainly endeavouring to pass the barriers
which really confine us to our dark earthly prison-house;
while, in our failure, we half consciously, half unconsciously, cheat ourselves with the consolation of talking
to shapes of power or benevolence traced by our fathers
or by ourselves upon its inexorable walls. We cannot fall
into the ranks of the Christian Church, lifting up the holy
hands of sacrifice and intercession on all the mountains of
the world, if in our hearts we see in her only a new
company of Baal-worshippers gathering upon the slopes of
some modern Carrmel, and vainly endeavouring to rouse
her idol into an impossible animation; while the Elijahs
of materialistic science stand by to mock her fruitless
efforts with the playful scorn of that tranquil irony to
which their higher knowledge presumably entitles them.
The question whether God hears prayer, is at bottom
the question whether lHe is really alive; whether in any
true sense of the term He exists at all. No word is used
more equivocally than the word " God" in the present day.
If by " God" we mean only a product of the thought or
consciousness of man, to which it cannot be certainly presumed that any being actually corresponds; the highest
thought of man —yet only man's highest thought; then there
is of course no one who can hear us. It has been said that
if a man talks out loud to himself, apostroplhizing what are in




I 84            If God is really alive,          [LECT.
truth only his own conceptions, it is difficult not to credit
him with a certain tinge of madness; and it would be just
as practical to address our prayer to the carved and gilded
idols of Babylon, whose manufacture roused the sternest
satire of the Evangelical Prophet, as to the unreal abstractions, which, labelled with the Most Holy Name, are sent
us from the intellectual workshops, ancient and modern, of
Alexandria or of Berlin.  And if by " God" is meant only
the unseen force of the universe, or its collective forces; if
He is the principle of growth in the plant, the life-principle
in the animal or in man; we need not read Spinoza in order
to convince ourselves of the fruitlessness of prayer. A
self-existing force or cause, if such can be conceived, without intelligence, without personality, of course without any
moral attributes, may be a thing to wonder at, but it certainly is not a being to speak to.  We may of course
ejaculate to such a thing if we like; but we might just as
well say litanies to the winds or to the ocean.  The question may be safely left to our utilitarian instincts.  Time
and strength, after all, are limited, and we shall not in the
long run spend " our money," at least in this direction, " for
that wbich is not bread, or our labour for that which
satisfieth not."'
If, on the other hand, God exists, whether we think about
Him or not; if He be not merely the mighltiest force, the
first of causes, but something more; if He be a personal
Being, thinking with no limits to His thought, and willing
1 Isaiah Iv. 2.




V.]             He mustl hear prayer.                I85
with no fetters aroundcl His liberty; then surely we may
reach Him, if we will.  What is to prevent it?  Cannot we
men, at our pleasure, embody our thought, our feeling, our
desires, or purposes in language, and so make them pass
into and be apprehended by the created finite personalities
around us? Where is the barrier that shall arrest thought,
longings, desires, entreaties, not as yet clothed (why need
they be clothed?) in speech, as they mount up from the
soul towards the all-embracing Intelligence of Godcl? And
if God be not merely an infinite Intelligence, but a moral
Being, a mighty!Heart, so that justice, and mercy, and
tenderness are attributes of His character, then to appeal
to Him in virtue of these attributes is assuredly to appeal
to Him to some purpose.  If an Omnipresent Intelligence
is a sufficient guara ntee of His being able to hear us; an
interest such as Justice and Mercy imply on His part
towards creatures who depend upon Him for the original
gift, and for the continued  maintenance of life, is a
guarantee of His willingness to do so.
It is on this ground that God is said to hear prayer in
Holy Scripture. That He should do so follows from the
reality of His nature as God.  Elijah's irony implies that
He is unlike the Phcenician Baal in being really alive.1
A later Psalmist contrasts Him  in like manner withl the
Assyrian idols, in that " they have eyes but see mot, they
have ears but hear not." "  They do but fill their temples
with gorgeous impotence.  But Israel's God is the author
1 Kiigs xviii. 27.     o Ps. cxr. 5,




I86 8~cr45/tiral irferencesfirom Die life of God. [LECT.
of the very senses whereby we are conscious of each
other's presence and wishes, and can enter into a companionship of thought and purpose.  Is He debarred from
the use of the gifts which He Himself bestows with so
bountiful a hand? " He that planted the ear shall He not
hear, or He that formed the eye shall He not see?" 1 Is
it not, on the contrary, reasonable to believe that these
powers must exist in a much higher and more perfect form
in the one Being who gives them than in the myriads
upon whom they are bestowed, and by whom they are only
held in trust?  And if it is improbable that, amid the
innumerable beings who are alive to the sights and
sounds of His creation, the Creator alone should be blind
and deaf; is it more probable that He who has implanted
in our breasts feelings of interest anld pity for one another
should be Himself insensible to our pain and need? Our
hearts must anticipate and echo the statement of the
Psalmist, that God does hear the desire of the poor; that
the innocent, the oppressed, the suffering, have especial
claims upon Him. And, to omit other illustrations, our
Lord reveals Him as a Father, the common parent of men,
of whose boundless love all earthly fatherhood is a shadow
and a delegation.  If the earthly parent, being evil, does
not yet give a stone when his child cries for bread; the
heavenly Father will not fall short of the teachings of an
instinct which He has Himself implanted, by failing to
give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.2
1 Ps. xciv, 9.   2 S, Luke xi. 11-13,




V.]     Barriers supiposed to  rrest prayer.       187
III.
If a man is a good Theist-we need not say, a good
Christian —he must believe that the Father of Spirits is
not deaf to the voice of the human soul; that the thanksgiving and praise, the intercessions and supplications, the
penitence and the self-surrender of beings to whom He has
given moral and intellectual life, is not utterly lost upon the
Giver. But will He indeed answer prayer, when prayer takes
the form of a petition for some specific blessing which must
be either granted or refused?  There is no doubt as to the
reply which the Bible and the Church have given to this
question. But what do some modern thinkers say about
it? Do they not deny the power of prayer, by surrounding
the Throne of God with barriers, which, as they would
have it, oblige Him, while "the sorrowful sighings of the
prisoners" of this vale of tears incessantly "comle before
Him," to make as though He heard not, and to shorten
His hand as if it could not save?"
The first presumned barrier against the efficacy of prayer
to which men point is the scientific idea of law, reigning
throughout the spiritual as well as the material universe.
This idea, as we are constantly reminded, is one of the most
remarkable conquests of modern thought; and no man, so
it is said, can enter into it with an intelligent sympathy
without abandoning the fond conceit that God will grant
a particular favour to one of His creatures upon being asked




188           I. The barrzer of law.          [LECT.
to do so. It may have been pardonable to pray for rain,
for health, for freedom from pestilence and famine, when
these things were supposed to depend upon the caprice of
an omnnipotent will. But the scientific idea of law renders
these prayers absurd. We know that a shower is the product of atmospheric laws, which make a shower, under
certain circumstances, inevitable; that the death of an
individual is the result of physiological laws which absolutely determine it. The idea that a shower or the death
of a man are contingent upon the good pleasure of a
Being Who can avert or precipitate them at pleasure is
unscientific; it belongs to days when the idea of law had
not yet dawned upon the intellect of civilization, or when,
at ally rate, large margins of the physical world, and the
whole of the spiritual world, were supposed to be beyond
its frontiers, as being abandoned to the government of a
capricious omnipotence.  Surely, it is added, we have really
attained to a nobler idea of the universe, than was this old
theological conception of the Bible and the Church: the
superiority is to be measured by those fundamental instincts
of fitness within us, which assign to law and order a higher
place in our minds than can belong to a personal will.
Does not the very word law, by reason of its majestic
and imposing associations, here involve us in some indistinctness of thoulght? What do we mean by law? When
we speak of a law of nature are we thinking of some selfsustained flvisible force, of which we can give no account
except that here it is, a matter of experience?  Or do we




V.]            FV/zt  is meauzz 1y law?            189
mean by a law of nature only a principle whllich, as our
observation shews us, appears to govern particular actions
of the Alnighty Agent Who made and Who upholds the
universe?  If the former, let us frankly admit that we
have not merely fettered God's freedom; we have, alas!
ceased to believe in 1lim. For such self-sustained force is
either self-originating, in which case there is no Being in
existence who has made all that constitutes this universe.
Or otherwise, having derived its first impact fronl the
creative Will of God, this force has subsequently escaped
altogether from His control, so that it now fetters His
liberty; and, in this case, there is no Being in existence
who is Almighty, in the sense of being really  laster of
this universe.  If, however, we mean by law tihe observed,
regularity with which G-od works in nature as in grace;
then, in our contact with law, we are dealing, not with
a brutal, unintelligent, unconquerable force, but with
the free will of an intelligent and moral Artist, Who
works, in His perfect freedom, with sustained and beautiful symmnetry.  Where is the absurdity of asking Him
to hold His hand, or to hasten His work?  He to Whom
we pray may be trusted to grant or to refuse a prayer,
as umay seem best to the highest wisdom and the truest
love. And if He grant it, He is not without resources;
even although we should have asked Him  to suspend
what we call a natural law.  Can He not then provide for the freedomn of His action without violating its
order?   Can He not supersede a lower rule of working




190 2. The larrier of a Divinepreeeslilzalion. [LECT.
by the intervention of a higher?  If He really works at
all; if solnething that is neither moral nor intelligent has
not usurped His throne,-it is certain that " the thing that
is done upon earth He doeth it Himself;" and that it is
therefore as consistent with reason as with reverence to
treat Him  as being a free Agent, Who is not really tied
and bound by the intellectual abstractions with which finite
intellects would fain annihilate the freedom of His action.
No o; to pray for rain or sunshine, for health or food, is
just as reasonable as to pray for gifts which the soul only
can receive —increased love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith. All such prayers presuppose
the truth that God is not the slave of His own rules of
action; that He can innovate upon His work without
forfeiting His perfection; that law  is only our way of
conceiving of His regularized working, and not an external
force which governs and moulds what we recognize as His
work.  It dissolves into thin air, as we look hard at it,
this fancied barrier of inexorable law; and as the mist
clears off, beyond there is the throne of the Moral King
of the universe, in Whose eyes material symmetry is as
nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of
His moral creatures.
A second barrier to the efficacy of prayer is sometimes
discovered in the truth that all which comes to pass is foredetermined in the predestination of God.  How is the efficacy of prayer to be reconciled, asks the fatalistic predestinarian, with the boundless power and knowledge of God?




V.]   Prayer a defarrme;t ofiimaiinfreedonz.   191
Is not everything that happens to us the decision of an
Almighty, Wise, Beneficent Will; a Will which, in human
phrase, has ordained it from all eternity? Could this Will
have been, could It be, other than It is? Has time any
meaning for It? Is It not in Its Omniscience and Omnipotence eternally what It is? Where, then, is there ally room
for the effect of prayer?  Can it be conceived that the
erring understanding and finite will of the creature will be
allowed to impose its decisions on the infallible Mind and
resistless determinations of God? Surely if we are to go
on praying, after recognizing the Sovereignty of God, we
must give up the notion of exerting a real influence upon
the Divine Will: we must content ourselves with resignation, with bringing our minds into conformity with that
which, as a matter of fact, is quite beyond the range of our
influence.
This language does but carry us into one department of
the old controversy between the defenders of the sovereignty
of God on the one side, and the advocates of the free will
of man on the other.  The very idea of God, as it occurs to
the human mind, and the distinct statements of revelation,
alike represent the Divine Will as exerting sovereign and
resistless sway. If it were otherwise, God would not be
Almighty, that is, He would not be God. On the other
hand, our daily experience and the language of Scripture
both assure us that man is literally a free agent: his freedom
is the very ground of his moral and religious responsibility.
Are these two truths hopelessly incompatible with each




92    Prac/er is ilselfjpredesl'tzed, yelt jee.  LLECT.
other?  So it may seeml at first sight; and if we escape
the danger of denying the one in the supposed interests of
the other, if we shrink from sacrificing God's sovereignty
to man's free will with Arminius, and froml sacrificing nlal's
freedom  to God's sovereignty with Calvin, we can only
express a wise ignorance by saying, that to us they seem
like parallel lines which mnust meet at a point in eternity,
far beyond our present range of view.  We do know,
however, that being both true, they cannot really contradict
each other; and that in some manner, which we cannot
formulate, the Diivine Sovereignty must not merely be compatible with, but must even imply the perfect freedom of
created wills.  So it is with prayer and the Divine predestination.  God orders all that happen to us, and, in virtue
of His infinite knowledge, by eternal decrees.  But He also
says to us, in the plainest language, that He does answer
prayer, and that practically His dealings with us are
governed in matters of the greatest importance as well as
of the least by the petitions which we address to Him.
What if prayers and actions, to us at the moment perfectly
spontaneous, are eternally foreseen and included within the
all-embracing Predestination of God, as factors and c auses,
working out that final result which, beyond all dispute, is'the product of His good pleasure? Whether I open my
mouth or lift my hand, is, before my doing it, strictly
within the jurisdiction and power of my personal will; but
however I may decide, my decision, so absolutely free to
me, will have been already incorporated by the All-seeing,




V.]3.An h/ropomnorp/ziccozcefloi  ojfGodsdig6ziiy. 193
All-controlling Being as an integral part, however insignificant, of His one all-embracing purpose, leading on to effects
and causes beyond itself. Prayer too is only a foreseen
action of man which, together with its results, is embraced
in the eternal predestination of God. To us this or that
blessing may be strictly contingent on our praying for it;
but our prayer is nevertheless so far from  necessarily
introducing change into the purpose of the Unchangeable,
that it has been all along taken, so to speak, into account by
Him.  If then, with " the Father of Lights " there is in this
sense " no variableness, neither shadow of turning," it is not
therefore irrational to pray for specific blessings, as we do
in the Litany, because God works out His plans not merely
in us but by us; and we mllay dare to say that that which
is to us a free self-determination, may be not other than a
foreseen element of His work.
A third barrier supposed to interfere with the efficacy of
prayer is the false idea of the Divine dignity which is
borrowed from our notions of human royalties. It is assumedc
that a supreme governor cannot be expected to take account
of trifling circumstances, or to decide between petty and conflicting claims.'He legislates for the universe; but it is not
to be supposed that He will also discharge all the minute and
harassing duties of a local executive. The power of prayer
implies a special providence, and a special providence, we
are told, is beneath the dignity of God. We have already
encountered this line of thought, not in its practical bearings upon prayer, but as it affects our belief as to to the Divine
0




194   Ma/lerz'a bulk notl the test of grealness. [LECT.
Nature. " Do you imagine, men ask, when you reflect upon
the vast universe in which we live — upon that immeasurable space-upon those innumerable worlds-upon those
systems beyond systems of suns which are discovering
themselves slowly but surely to our telescopes-that He
who made this mighty whole has nothing to do but to listen
to the little story of your wants and hopes and fears? He
has instituted some good and universal rules of government under which you live: if they sometimes bear hardly
upon you, your case is only that of others, and you
must take your chance. To expect Him to suspend or to
revoke His legislation on your particular account, is to
sacrifice common sense to outrageous egotism; the egotism
which can suppose that a petty individual life, a worm
crawling on the surface of one of His smallest planets, can
be an object of this particular consideration and interest to
the Almighty Creator."
Even at the risk of representing human egotism, it must
be here and again asserted that man's place in the creation
is not determined by the considerations which this objection
supposes.  In the eyes of an intellectual and spiritual
being, material bulk is not the only or the highest test of
greatness.  If God is not to be supposed to be mainly
interested in vast accumulations of senseless matter; if
there be in the estimate of a Moral Being other and
worthier measures of greatness; if the organic be higher
than the inorganic; and that which feels than that which
has no feeling; if that which thinks be higher than that




V.] 4. The barrier ofof posing kzma izzleresls. I95
which only feels; and that which freely conforms to moral
will higher than that which only thinks; if a fly be really
a nobler thing than a granite mountain, and a little child
than a rhinoceros or a mammoth,-thenwe need not acquiesce
in this depreciatory estimate of man's place in creation,
or of his claims upon the ear of God. On his bodily side
man is insignificant enough. As a spirit conscious of his
own existence, and determining his action in the freedom
of his will, he does not deceive himself in believing that
God has crowned him with an especial glory and honour
among the visible creatures.1  But even if man were not
thus honoured, it is, as we have seen, no part of the Divine
dignity to be inattentive even to the lowest creatures of His
hand. The Throne of heaven is not modelled upon the
type of an Oriental despotism, and God's Greatness is not
compromised by the duties of administration any more
than it is heightened by the enactment of law. The Infinite
MSind is not less capable of formulating the most universal
principles because He enters with perfect sympathy and
intelligence into each of our separate wants and efforts, the
wants and efforts of creatures who are really greater, because
infinitely more like their Creator, than are the largest stars
and suns.
A fourth barrier to the efficacy of prayer is supposed to
be discoverable in an inadequate conception of the interests
of human beings as a whole. To suppose that God can
answer individual prayers for specific blessings is incon1 Ps. viii. 5.




I96   No manz izjyzzed y arzol/er's ealfg-ood. [LECT.
sistent, we are told, with any serious appreciation of human
interests.  One man or nation asks for that which may be
an injury to another. The Spaniards prayed for the success
of their Armada: the English prayed against it. Both could
not be listened to. The weather cannot consult the convenience of everybody at once: and therefore the specific
prayers of well-meaning villagers, if they could be attended
to, could only be attended to by a God who, instead of being
the Father of all His creatures, reserved special indulgences
for His favourites.
Here it is natural to remark that if God should think
fit to grant a large proportion of the particular requests
vwhich would be found among the daily prayers of an
earnest Christian, He would not, to say the least, thereby
do any injury to others, whether they were Christians or
not. Prayer for the highlest well-being of any human
being may be granted without damaging other human
beings. If God should condescend in answer to prayer to
teach one of His servants more humility, purity, or love,
this would not oblige Him  to withdraw spiritual graces
from any others in order to do it. Nor are other persons
the worse for coming into contact with one whom  God
has made loving, or pure, or humble, in answer to prayer.
Is it not nearer the truth to say that they are likely to be
much better, and therefore that a large number of answers
to prayer for personal blessings necessarily extend in their
effects beyond those who are immediately blessed?
But observe further that every prayer for specific bless



V.]       AX iyryer lacilfy cozTdiiztoned.         I97
ings in a Christian soul is tacitly, if not expressly, conditioned.  The three conditions which are always understood are given at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer" Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be
done."  In effect these three conditions are only one. If
a change of weather, or a restoration to health or any
blessing be prayed for, a Christian petitioner deliberately
wills that his prayer should be refused, supposing that to
grant it should in any way obscure God's glory in other
minds, or hinder the advance of His kingdom, and so contravene what must be His will. Every Christian tacitly
adds to every prayer, " Nevertheless not my will but
Thine be done." All Christian prayer takes it for granted,
first, that the material world exists for the sake of, and is
entirely subordinate to, the interests of the moral; and,
secondly, that God is the best judge of what the true
interests of the moral world really are. Therefore, if his
specific petition is not granted, a Christian will not conclude that his real prayer is unanswered. His real prayer
was from the first that God's Name might be hallowed
among men by the advance of His kingdom and the doing
of His Will, through God's granting a particular request
which he urges. He knows that his own highest object may
be best secured by the refusal of the very blessing for
which he pleads; and he puts his finite knowledge and
his narrow sympathies into the hands of Infinite Wisdom
and Infinite Love, with perfect confidence that the final
decision will be the best answer to his real and deepest




I 98   5. The barrier of himan seif-reliazce. [LECT.
prayer.  It is thus that he realizes the promise, "Every one
that asketh receiveth." He too receives that which he really
wants, though his specific petition should be refused.
A last barrier to faith in the efficacy of prayer is really
to be discovered in man's idea of his own self-sufficiency.
It can scarcely be doubted that one of the excellences of
our character as a nation is constantly a source of danger
to our faith in the power of prayer. Pelagius was himself a native of Britain; and the old heresy of substituting
human self-sufficiency for dependence on the grace and
help of God is very congenial to the temper which we
English cultivate, with such success, in individual action
and in political life. After all, we say, do we not depend
on our own efforts for being what we are, and for doing
what we do? Whatever God may see fit to do for us,
our best form  of prayer is work; it is the determination
to secure what we want by personal efforts to get it.
The indolent or the imaginative may be left to lengthen
out their litanies; but practical men will fall back upon
the wise proverb, that " God helps those who help themselves."
Here, however, it must be insisted on by the one side,
and admitted on the other, that many objects of prayer are
altogether out of the reach of human effort, and that if they
are to be secured at all, they must be given freely by God.
But the fact of our moral freedom, as felt in the capacity
for work, to which Pelagianism appeals, is not more clear
than the fact of our dependence. Do what we will, we




V.]       Work anzdprayer, how related.            I99
depend on others. We are linked to them by a thousand
ties; we are, all of us, acted upon most powerfully by the
circumstances which surround us; the governing moods of
thought and feeling within ourselves are often determined
by these circumstances.  This is true of "self-made men,"
as we call them, not less than of others. How much did
not Faraday owe to Sir Humphrey Davy! And this
dependence upon circumstances is in fact dependence upon
things which God controls. Facts are not less facts because they seem to be incompatible; because the effort
to reconcile them teaches our reason that its limits are
narrower than we wish. It is easier to say that man is
entirely free, that he depends on nothing; or to say that
man is simply the creature of circumstances, that he is
never really free; than to say, what is the real truth, that
man is, in his entire freedom, absolutely dependent, that
he is, in his entire dependence, absolutely free. Yet this
apparent paradox is the literal truth, which refuses to
ignore facts in order to make the task of reason easier,
and to enable it the better to round off its trenchant but
inconclusive theories about human action. And because
life is so subtle an intermixture of dependence and action,
prayer is the most practical of all forms of work; it is at
once the activity of man's freedom, and the expression
of his dependence; and the answer which it wins is not
less, in one sense, the result of human effort, than in
another it is the work of God.
And thus it is in and by prayer that the two governing




200 SpeczClaiZ'O azad aclions mee in prayer. [LECT.
elements of religious life, thought and work, alike find their
strongest impulse and their point of unity.  Such is our
weakness, that we constantly tend to a one-sided use of
God's gifts. W~e are either absorbingly speculative and contemplative on the one hand, or we are absorbingly practical
and men of action on the other. Either exaggeration is
fatal to the true life of religion, which binds the soul
to God by faith as well as by love; by love not less than
by faith; by a life of energetic service not less truly than
by a life of communion with light and truth.  It is in
prayer that each element is at once cuickened in itself,
and balanced by the presence of the other.  The great
masters and teachers of Christian doctrine have always
found in prayer their highest source of illumination. NTot
to go beyond the limits of the English Church, it is
recorded of Bishop Andrewes that he spent five hours daily
on his knees.  The greatest practical resolves that have
enriched and beautified lhuman life in Christian times
have been arrived at in prayer; ever since the day when,
at the most solemn service of the Apostolical Church, the
Holy Ghost said, "Separate M2e Barnabas and Saul for
the work whereunto I have called them."l  It is prayer
which prevents religion from  degenerating into mere
religious thought on the one side, or into mere philanthropy
on the other.  In prayer the man of action will never
become so absorbed in his work as to be indifferent to the
truth, whicl is its original motive.  In prayer the man of'Acts xiii. 2.




V.] A zswers to prayer a malter of e5rceriezce. 20I
study and contemplation will never forget that truth is
given, not so much that it may interest and stimulate our
understandings, as that it may govern and regenerate our life.
And thus it is that prayer is of such vital importance to
the well-being of the soul. Study may be dispensed with
by those who work with their hands for God: handiwork
may be dispensed with by those who seek Him in books
and in thought.  But prayer is indispensable; alike for
workers and students, alike for scholar and peasant, alike:
for the educated and the unlettered. For we all have to
seek God's Face above; we all have souls to be sanctified;
and saved; we all have sins and passions to beat back and;
to conquer. And these things are achieved pre-eminently/
by prayer, which is properly and representatively thet
action of religion. It is the action whereby we men, in all
our frailty and defilement, associate ourselves with our
Divine Advocate on high, and realize the sublime bond
which in Him, the One Mediator between God and man,
unites us in our utter unworthiness to the Strong and
All-holy God.
That prayer, sooner or later, is answered, to all who have
prayed earnestly and constantly, is, in different degrees,
a matter of personal experience. David, Elijah, Hezekiah,
Daniel, the Apostles of Christ, were not the victims of an
illusion, in virtue of which they connected particular events
Which would have happened in any case with prayers that
preceded it. They who never pray, or who never pray with
the humility, confidence, and importunity that wins its way




202     The claims of prayer upozn oour time. [LECT.
to the Heart of God, cannot speak from experience as to
the effects of prayer; nor are they in a position to give
credit, with generous simplicity, to those who can. But,
at least, on such a subject as this, the voice of the whole
company of God's servants may be held to counterbalance
a few ai priori surmises or doctrines; and it is the very
heart of humanity itself which from  age to age mounts
up with the Psalmist to the Eternal Throne-" 0 Thou
That hearest prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come."' And
Christians can penetrate within the veil. They know that
there is a majestic pleading, which for eighteen centuries
has never ceased, and which is itself omnipotent-the
pleading of One who makes their cause His own: they
rest upon the Divine words, "Whatsoever ye shall ask the
Father in My Name, He will give it you."2
A time will probably come to most of us, if it has not
come to some already, when we shall wish that the hours
at our command, during the short day of life, had not been
disposed of as they have. After all, this world is a poor
thing to live for, when the next is in view. Whatever be
their claims, created beings have no business to be sitting
on that highest throne within the soul that belongs to the
Creator.  Yet, for all that, too often they do sit there.
And time is passing. Of that priceless gift of time, how
much will one day be seen to have been lost; how ruinous
shall we deem our investment of this our most precious
stock! IHow many interests, occupations, engagements,
1 Ps. lxv. 2.     2 S. John xvi. 23.




V.] Th7e viezu of lime from  the Elerinal World. 203
friendships-I speak not of the avowed ways of " killing
time," as it is termed with piteous accuracy-will be then
regarded only as so many precautions for building our
house upon the sand: as only so many expedients for
assuring our failure to compass the true end of our existence! It may not now seem possible that we should ever
think thus. Life is like the summer's day; and in the first
fresh morning we do not realize the noon-day heat, and at
noon we do not think of the shadows lengthening across
the plain, and of the setting sun, and of the advancing
night. Yet, to each and all, the sunset comes at last; and
those who have made most of the day are not unlikely
to reflect most bitterly how little they have made of it.
Whatever else they may look back upon with thankfulness or with sorrow, it is certain that they will regret no
omissions of duty more keenly than neglect of prayer; that
they will prize no hours more than those which have
been passed, whether in private or in public, before that
Throne of Justice and of Grace upon which they hope to
gaze throughout eternity.




LECTURE VI.
THE MEDIATOR, THE GUARANTEE OF
RELIGIOUS LIFE.
S. MATT. xxiii. 41.
Jesus asked them saying, TlWhat think ye of Chlrist?
AT length, we reach the limits which the season assigns
to our scanty treatment of a subject that is in itself
inexhlaustible. The relationship or bond between God and
the soul of man, which we term religion, is obscured and
interrupted on man's side by sin; it is reasserted and
strengthened by prayer. But no human efforts can of themselves avail to establish or to restore it. If God answers
the prayers of individuals, has He answered the prayer of
prayers; the great prayer of humanity in all the ages?
Has He deigned to grant the prayer that He, too, would
on His side give some sign or pledge of real communion
with us; that He would not leave us to ourselves, walking
after our own ways, feeling after Him if haply we might
find Him, but only feeling on, century after century, in the
twilight of reason; that He would, in prophetic language,




LECT. VI.]   ooralprobabz.ity ofa revela/ioz' z.  205
rend the heavens alnd come down, and bid the skies
pour down righteousness? Is religion only a human instinct or effort upon which no encouragement, no sanction,
no corresponding and invigorating acknowledgment has been
bestowed from on high? Or has God spoken? Has He
lunveiled Himself?  Have the clouds and darkness that
are round about Him rolled away, so that the righteousness
and judgment which are the habitation of His seat might
become clearly manifest to us?
If we really believe God to be a Moral Being, we shall be
prepared to find that He has spoken to us. The strength of
the confidence with which we anticipate a revelation will
vary exactly with our faith in the morality of God. If He
were only an intelligence, or a force, there would be no
reason or apology for listening to hear whether any voice
breaks the silence of the spheres. But if He has, or rather
is, a Heart; if the moral qualities which are discoverable
in ourselves have any transcendent and majestic counterpart in Him; then, supposing the question whether Ie has
given a revelation to be for us still unanswered, or even
unexamined, we do well to traverse all the corridors of
history, to take counsel with the current wisdom and experience of the living, and to cross-question the recorded
convictions of the dead, until we see reason to hope that a
solution is at least at hand; until " the day dawn and the
day-star arise in our hearts."
Already, indeed, and almost at each stage of our progress,
we have ever and anon halted our steps, and hushed other




206   7esus Christ as Teacher of Jreliion.  [LECT.
disputants around us, that we might listen to One Whose
place among men, at least as a Master and Teacher of
religion, does not really enter into controversy. It is He
Who has set forth in its fulness the parental character of
God. It is He who has fully unveiled to the eye of the
human soul the secret of its boundless capacities, and of its
disheartening impotence.  It is He Who by His life of
unassailable purity, and by His death of voluntary sacrifice,
has lighted up the dark realities of moral evil. It is His
example, His precepts, it is widespread faith in His assistance and intercession, which have popularized prayer, without degrading its idea. It is through Him that prayer has
come to be the most serious and welcome occupation of the
noblest and purest in the human family; the continuous
expression of a desire to assert and strengthen the link
which binds man to the Source and End of his existence.
And thus, besides placing before us the idea of religion, He
has, as no other, taught us to know Him between Whom
and ourselves religion is a bond; and what it is, call we it
disease or antagonist, that breaks religion up; and what the
spiritual action in which it is especially embodied and reasserted. Has He done more for religion than this? Is
His relation towards it only an external one, such as was
that of a Raphael or a Michael Angelo towards their
majestic creations, such as was that of a Newton or a Cuvier
towards the great subjects of their lifelong study? Or is
He, besides being a Master and Teacher of religion, something more, and altogether distinct from this? Is He the




VI.]  Is I eszs Hizselff te objeet of relgzion?  207
masterpiece of His own art? Is He the subject of His
own teaching? Does He enter into the object-matter of
religion as an integral part of it? Is He not merely the
greatest of religious teachers, but also the first and greatest
of religious lessons which God has given to man? Is He,
in short, God's answer in history to man's constant aspiration heavenward; the impersonated bond between God and
man; a " Mediator," as Scripture terms it, Who bridges
over the chasm which sin had opened between earth and
heaven?
In pausing to consider this question, it is natural to every
Christian heart to express the joy of finding ourselves at
His blessed feet, Whose name is above every Name that is
pronounced, whether in His temples or elsewhere. On the
last five Sundays in which you have accompanied me with
your generous sympathy, it has often happened to us to
stray for a while into schools of thought, where He, our
Lord, is either unknown, or denied His due. We have
occasionally been listening to teachers and glancing at
systems which profess, in whatever sense, to be able to dispense with Him. No men love home as do those whose
duty has for awhile obliged them to reside abroad; and the
atmosphere of the New Testament and of the Church is not
the less welcome, because it is a change from that of human
literatures and of earthly philosophies.  To-day we cease,
at least in the main, to measure the forms and density of
the clouds which veil the face of heaven from  sad but
eager multitudes.  We pass into the light and warmth




208    INisoYrical imlorlanfzce of /Se Life   [LECT.
of the Sun of Righteousness, to occupy ourselves from
first to last with His glory and His beauty; we advance
to recognize, as I trust, in Him the living bond of unity
between the great empire of souls on the one hand, and the
King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible on the other.
Jesus Christ is a Name around which a vast accumulation of histories, ideas, beliefs, have gathered.  Christianity
has many aspects; literary, philosophical, moral, historical,
political, theological, spiritual, practical. What is the religious aspect of Christianity and of Christ?  What is the
aspect which exhibits our Lord's relation to religion, considered as the bond between God and the human soul?
" What think ye of Christ?"  Is He a subject of the
highest historical interest? No educated man, at least,
whatever be his faith or his life, can deny the reality or the
greatness of Christ's place in human history. Nothing is
more certain in the annals of mankind than this, that Jesus
Christ lived in Palestine, and was put to death eighteen
centuries and a half ago.  This fact belongs to general
human knowledge, just as much as does the life of Julius
Cxesar, or of Alexander the Great, or of Socrates, or of
Mahomet.  Nobody, indeed, does deny the general fact.




VI.]        of yesus CGhriss, ma2denziable.        209
Strauss, for instance, though he endeavours to distinguish
between the residuary historical element in the Gospels,
and the incrustation of legend, which, in his opinion, has
somehow become associated with it, yet fully admits that
there is history in the Gospels; he admits that Jesus Christ
lived and died in the age of Tiberius. And if even this be
admitted, the life and death of Jesus Christ must possess
for any intelligent man the highest possible degree of
interest. He must feel thlat, in point of social and historical
importance, it stands alone. No doubt, at the time, the
Coesar Tiberius was everywhere on the lips and in the
minds of men; while the retired religious Teacher, as He
seemed to be, in Palestine, was by His teaching, His acts,
and the opposition which they aroused, only furnishing a
little conversation and excitement to the peasantry and to
the officials of a remote province. But if the importance
of a life is to be measured by its results in history and to
civilization, even although we should put all religious and
even moral considerations aside, who would think most of
the Emperor?  What is the lasting and living influence
which Tiberius now exerts upon the world, except it be to
furnish a thesis now and then to clever essay writers, who
wish indirectly to attack or to defend modern imperialism?
But who can deny that at this moment, explain it how we
will, Jesus Christ, His life, His work, His Person, lives in
the hearts of multitudes as the object of most cherished and
devoted homage; that He governs the ideas, the aspirations,
the social and political action of millions of mankind; that
P




2IO      Dislinzclion belween ai izzteZectlua   [LECT.
the most active and enterprising section of the human
family, still, in various senses, places itself under the shadow
of His Name and patronage; and that if He has many
opponents, there is no serious probability of His being
spiritually or intellectually dethroned? All this is a matter
of simple observation. The truth of it is most obvious to
those who know most about human affairs and human history. And it at once invests the earthly Life of Christ, and
all that illustrates and belongs to it, with the highest
practical and speculative interest; with the interest which
belongs to the great problems of past history, and with the
interest which belongs to those great living forces that
make themselves felt day by day around us, and contribute
powerfully towards determining the current of events.
Not to be interested in the life of Jesus Christ, then, is
to be, I do not say irreligious, but unintelligent. It is to
be insensible to the nature and claims of the most powerful
force that has ever moulded the thought and swayed the
destinies of civilized man. But to feel this interest, it is
almost unnecessary to add, a man need not even profess to
be a Christian.  He may indeed be earnestly opposed to
Christianity: and his opposition can scarcely in any case
be formidable, unless he has given his mind to the careful
study of that which he opposes. To such men as Celsus,
or Lucian, or Porphyry, or the apostate Emperor Julian,
or the philosopher of Ferney, Christianity was a matter
of the deepest intellectual interest.  Men do not write
like Celsus, or act like Julian, or epigrammatize with the




VI.]     aud a religiozus interest in yesus.     2 I I
bitterness of Voltaire, about a doctrine in which they feel
little concerned. Nay, in order to have such an interest, a
man need not be an active opponent of Christianity. Looking
upon it with the eye, and only with the eye, of a philosopher; jealously excluding from his estimate every trace of
passion, whether it be the passion of hatred or the passion
of affection; he may yet understand that it is too great,
too powerful, in a word, too original a phenomenon, to be
ignored, or rather not to be investigated with patient perseverance. Such might seem to have been the case with
that most accomplished of modern critics, the late M. SaintBeuve. His History of Port-Royal betrays an intimate
acquaintance with the most delicate and beautiful forms of
Christian faith and Christian love. None knew better than
he the claims of Jesus Christ-of His life in itself, and of
His place in history-upon the attention of all earnest
students of nature and of man. No pages are more marked
than his by a sustained and rigid justice which is incapable
of condescending to a phrase that is dictated by any but
that which the writer intends and believes to be a severely
critical judgment. This lofty impartiality could not but
make him write at times like a devoted Christian in
virtue of his moral and literary sympathies; and many men
have read him without suspecting his real place in the
world of thought. Yet, at his last hours, we are told, he
purposely declined the ordinary consolations of a Christian
deathbed: his interest in Christianity did not imply a bond
to any living person with Whom, in the most solemn and




212 Im2ynression made by oztrL ord's "character. " [LECT.
critical moments of existence, there are histories to be
reviewed, and accounts to be settled.
That a literary and historical interest in Christianity
and Christ has its value, who would deny? It may, in
union with faith and love, achieve services of no common
order for the kingdom of the truth.  It may, under any
circumstances, enable Christians to realize the historical
settings of their faith, more truly and vividly than would
otherwise be possible. Thus, in a very creditable sense, it
may hew wood and draw water for the sacred camp, and
we must thank it with all our hearts for its services.  But
it is not of itself a religious interest.  It is only an
intellectual and scholarly taste dealing with a religious
subject-matter.  It is one thing to cleanse the glasses
of a powerful telescope; it is another to use them  as
they should be used by an observer and student of the
heavens.
II.
But the question must occur, WVhat was it in Jesus
Christ which gave Him, in spite of social and political
insignificance, so commanding, so unrivalled a position in
history? The least answer that can be given-I am far
from implying that it is an adequate answer-is, that His
character made a profound, an ineffaceable impression upon




VI.]  ChGaracter alppjrecialed by the moral seMzse.  213
His contemporaries; an impression so deep and abiding,
that it moved them, peasants and paupers as they were, to
achieve the moral revolution of the civilized world. And
we are told that admiration for Christ's human character
is still the sustaining element in Christianity; that it
explains its perpetuation as it explains its original victories;
that it furnishes, in fact, the true answer to the question,
" What think ye of Christ?" Undoubtedly the appreciation
of moral character is a higher and more religious thing
than the appreciation of any external historical fact, however imposing. In order to enter into the political consequences of a decisive campaign, a man requires only a
well-stored and cultivated intellect; in order to do justice
to a saintly character the observer must have that which
is infinitely higher in itself, though of less account among
men-a sensitive moral instinct, a tender and penetrating
heart.  And yet, happily, the higher gift is the more
common. The questions which may be raised about our
Lord's genealogies in the first and third Evangelists can
only be answered by a few well-trained scholars. But
every child can feel the pathos of the relief suddenly
given to the hungry multitudes; of the visit to the
house of mourning at Bethany; of the successive incidents of the stern conflict with the Jews of Jerusalem;
of the Last Supper; of the Agony; of the Betrayal;
of the Cross. A great character, even more than a great
picture, or a great poem, or a magnificent mountain, speaks
for itself. It commends itself to average men, even though




2 14 Our Lord's "characler " not tSe product [LErCT.
they cannot take their sympathies to pieces, and say precisely what is the feature in it that fascinates them.
There is that in their humanity which responds, however
imperfectly, to the form of moral beauty before them, and
they surrender themselves to an instinct which they do
not explain, but which they can implicitly trust.
Thus it is that our Lord's simplicity, His self-sacrifice,
His love of the humble and of the poor, joined to His
resistless moral ascendancy, His fearless courage, His
strength which is so entirely compatible with the utmost
tenderness, touches us all. Nothing perhaps shews Jesus
Christ more clearly to us than the circumstances under
which He delivered the Sermon on the Mount. For here
we are convinced that His character was so far from being
a product whether of His nation or of His age, as to be
in marked opposition to some of their ruling tendencies. In
the Jew of the age of Tiberius, the national feeling, intensified by the Roman conquest, had almost killed out
the human. The children of the men who under David
and Solomon had ruled Western Asia, beheld on every
side the symbols of their political slavery. The Roman
legionaries were keeping guard near the temple; the Roman
tax-gatherer was making his presence felt in every home.
And so the Jew wrapped himself more and more closely
and sullenly in devotion to the ideas and institutions of
his ancestors, and looked forward to a time when the
prophecies would be fulfilled in the rigid political sense
in which he read them; when the Roman invader would




VI.]       of His ag~e and cirvcms/ances.        2 15
be driven by an indignant people, headed by their King
Messiah, from the sacred soil. There were adventurers in
that age who really endeavoured to meet this predomlinating national temper, and the effort led to some wellknown catastrophes. And doubtless it was such a political
expectation as this which was kindled in the breast of
multitudes by the announcement throughout Galilee that
the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. The phrase fired
their imaginations. They followed the Teacher Who uttered
it out of their towns and villages to a distant hill-side, that
they might listen, as they trusted, to His plan for an
approaching insurrection or for a decisive campaign. And
what was His manifesto?   I-Ie uttered the Beatitudes;
He compared the Pharisaic with the true morality; He
proclaimed the law and unfolded the prospects of a spiritual
empire, of the kingdom of the truth.
It is not in the unrivalled exhibition of any one form of
human excellence, whether purity or humility, or charity,
or courage, or veracity, or self-denial, or justice, or consideration for others, that we best appreciate the significance of our Lord's human character. It is in the equal
balance of all excellence, in the absence of any warping,
disturbing, exaggerating influence, that modern writers
have been forward to recognize a moral sublimity, which
they can discover nowhere else in history. The subject
has been handled by a distinguished living layman, who
certainly cannot be supposed to have approached it with
any strong ecclesiastical bias. He observes that "there




216   Our Lord's "character" most vivid,yet [LECT.
are many peculiarities arising out of personal and historical
circumstances, which are incident to the best human
characters, and which would prevent any one of them from
being universal or final as a type.  But the type set up
in the Gospels as the Christian type seems to have escaped
all these peculiarities, and to stand out in unapproached
purity, as well as in unapproached perfection of moral
excellence."    Accordingly he argues that it can be said
to belong exclusively to neither of the " two hemispheres
in the actual world of moral excellence-the noble and
the amiable, or, in the language of moral taste, the grand
and the beautiful."  It belongs to both of them, "perfectly
and undistinguishably, the fusion of the two classes of
qualities being complete, so that the mental eye, though it
be strained to aching, cannot discern whether that on which
it gazes be more the object of reverence or of love." 2 This
type is equally free from sexual peculiarities; it combines
the strength of manhood with feminine tenderness so completely as to leave no room for a supplementary female
type that should complete the ideal of Christian humanity.3
It sets before us an image of pure beneficence, disengaged
from  all peculiar social circumstances which would disqualify a character from being universal and the ideal, yet
adapted to all. " If that type of character was constructed
by human intellect, we must at least bear in mind that
"it was constructed at the confluence of three races, the
1 On some supposed Consequences of the Doctrine of Historical Progress:
A Lecture.'By Goldwin Smith, M.A. 1861.-P. 15.
2 Ibid. p. 16.        3 Ibid. p. 17.        4 Ibid.




VI.]   wzlhout aniy znarrowing  eczdiarilies.    21 7
Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman, each of which had
strong national peculiarities of its own. A single touch, a
single taint of any one of those peculiarities, and the character would have been national, not universal; transient,
not eternal.  It might have been the highest character in
history, but it would have been disqualified for being the
ideal."  Supposing it to have been " human, whether it
were the effort of a real man to attain moral excellence, or
a moral imagination of the writers of the Gospels, the
chances, surely," he  urges, " were infinite  against its
escaping any tincture of the fanaticism, formalism, and
exclusiveness of the Jew-of the political pride of the
Roman-of the intellectual pride of the Greek. Yet it
escaped them all." 1
In like manner, the character before us in the Gospels
cannot possibly be regarded as a reaction from something
else: it is not an antinominian protest against Pharisaism;
it is not a fanatical patriotism protesting against servility
to the Roman rule; it is not an exaggerated cosmopolitanism in revolt against the narrow patriotism of the Jew: it
is the highest self-denial, without having the character of
a formalized asceticism; it is, in short, " the essence of
man's moral nature, clothed with a personality so vivid and
intense as to excite, through all ages, the most intense
affection; yet divested of all those peculiar characteristics,
the accidents of place and time, by which human personalities are marked,"   "What other notion than this," asks
1 Ibid. p. 18.




2  8  As slonishing seif-proclamction of _yesus. [LECT.
the writer, " can philosophy form of Divinity manifest on
earth?" 1
These eloquent and sincere words of Professor Goldwin
Smith will need no recommendation or comment. And
yet they suggest a question, which is in the path of our
subject, and which, under any circumstances, cannot be
overlooked. This ideal Character of the Gospels is, on one
side, at issue with what we should abstractedly conceive to
be a perfect human ideal. For He who presents it to us
proclaims Himself, in terms and to an extent which are altogether inconsistent with any true ideal of a purely creaturely
perfection.  In the words of another writer of our day,
" The unbounded personal pretensions which  Christ
advances, remain throughout a subject of ever-recurring
astonishment.  It is common, in human history, to meet
with those who claim some superiority over their fellows.
IMen assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or
fellow-countrymen, and become rulers of those who were
at first their equals; but they dream of nothing greater
than of some partial control over the actions of others for
the short space of a lifetime. Few, indeed, are there to
whom it is given to influence future ages. Yet some men
have appeared who have been as levers to uplift the earth
and roll it in another course. Homer, by creating literature; Socrates, by creating science; Caesar, by carrying
civilization inward from the shores of the Mediterranean;
Newton, by starting science upon a career of steady progress,-may be said to have attained this eminence. But
Ibid. p. 22.




VI.]      " Christ's discovery is Himseif."        219
these men gave a single impact, like that which is conceived to have first set the planets in motion: Christ
claims to be a perpetual attractive power, like the sun,
which determines their orbit.  They contrlibuted to men
some discovery, and passed away: Christ's discovery is
Himself. To humanity, struggling with its passions and
its destiny, He says-' Cling to Me: cling ever closer to
Me.'... He represented himself as the Light of the
world, as the Shepherd. of the souls of men, as the Way to
immortality, as the Vine or Life-Tree of humanity.
He commanded men to leave everything and attach themselves to Him;...  He declared Himself King,
Master, and Judge of men;... He promised to
give rest to all the weary and heavy-laden;... He
instructed His followers to hope for life from feeding on
His body and His blood." 1
If this statement only suggests the complete truth, it is
true as far as it goes. It might be sustained by a hundred
texts. That which is so striking, so overpowering in the
Gospels, is perhaps less the precise language which our
Lord uses about Himself, than the consistent bearing which
He assumes towards His disciples and mankind.  His
attitude is that of One Who takes His claims for granted;
Who has no errors to confess, no demands to explain, or
to apologize for; no restraining instinct of self-distrust
to keep Him in the background; no shrinking from high
command, based upon a sense of the possible superiority
1 "Ecce Homo," pp. 176-177.




220            Languazge of _ eszs Chist               [LECT.
of those around  Him. It is the bearing of One Who claims
to be the First of all, the Centre of all, with entire simplicity indeed, but also with unhesitating decision.
Let us dwell more in detail upon some of the language
which Jesus Christ really uses about Himself.   He  is
greater than the most venerable names in Jewish antiquity;
greater than the men whose greatness had been felt most
widely and deeply beyond the boundaries of Israel.  He
is greater than Jonah, whose preaching brought Nineveh
to penitence;1 greater than Solomon, in whom not
Israel only, but the whole East, recognized the wisest
of men.2  Not merely is He David's  descendant; He
is David's Lord.3   When Abraham  was yet unborn, He
was  already  in  existence.4    Thus  He could  refer to
" the glory which He had with the Father before the
world was,"5  and to the fall of the rebel-spirit, which he
had witnessed.6   God is, in an entirely unique sense, His
Father;7 the Jews feel that He uses the word in a manner
which implies a tremendous claim.9    For, indeed, He
is conscious of being "from  above,"  of having  "come
down from  heaven,"l  of having come forth from  being
1 S. Matt. xii. 41.       2 S. Matt. xii. 42.
3 S. Matt. xxii. 41-46: Ps. cx. 1.
4 S. John viii. 56, 57, 58; cf. i. 15, 27, 30.
5 S. John xvii. 5; cf. verse 24.    6 S. Luke x. 18.
7S. Matt. x. 32; xv. 13; xvi. 17; xviii. 19; xxvi. 39, 42; S. Luke
xxiii. 46; xxiv. 49; S. John v. 30; x. 29; xiv. 2, 6.
S S. John v. 17-18, raTe'pa Ctov tV EXeye b Oebv,'oov 4Cavrb\v rwoLv Tvr Oee7.
9 S. John viii. 23, y?( dEK Trv oPv e/ wd.
O Ibid. vi. 38, KTara'3PKa eK  oo o'pacioV; v. 51. 6 EK ToO opcpawov
Kcaraacis.




Vl.]          abozt   iNimse/f and  His claims.                  22 I
with the Father,' of having  come forth out of God.2   He
knows, not merely that He lives; but that He has in Himself, that He is, the Life; Life in the deepest sense of the
term,-perfect, blessed, absolute existence; eternally received from  the  Father, yet shared  with  Him  thus from
everlasting to everlasting.3   Although, then, He is visibly
upon  the  earth, He  is still really  in  Heaven.4   He  is
united  to  the Father not merely by  a moral, but by a
natural union,5  and  so  intimately, that "to  have  seen
Him  is to  have seen the  Father,6  to have known Himn
is to have known the  Father."7   He is in the Father, and
the Father is in  Him, by  a perfect reciprocity.s   Of the
Father He  only has adequate knowledge:  He Himself is
known  only by the Father.9  As a consequence, He has
all things in common with the Father.' o   ]Men, whom  He
wills to redeem, are already His own.l I               The Kingdom  of
God is His Kingdom. 1 2  The Angels are His Angels. 13  The
" Church of the Living God" 14 is His Church. 1 5   Power is
1 Ibid. xvi. 28, i'XOov 7rapa 7rov  ra-rpos, Kai idXqXvOa eis -'bV KiO-zULo.
2 Ibid. viii. 42, eK To) Oeov d'9X0ov KCaL?KW. Cf. S. John xvii. 8; xvi.
30; Ps. ii. 7; Micah v. 2.
3 S. John v. 26; xi. 25; xiv. 6; cf. S. John i. 4; 1 S. John i. 1, 2; v. 20.
4 S. John iii. 13,6 vtbs  o0 dvOpcbrov 6 Svy i& TL3 opCav$C.
5 S. John x. 28-30, ey)w Kal o6 7raT'p E'v iCCev.
6 Ibid. xiv. 9.                      [ Ibid. viii. 19.
s S. John xiv. 10; xvii. 21, 22.
9 S. Matt. xi. 27. Cf. S. John vi. 46, o b6v 7rap& 7'oO Ocod, o3To0 E&paKC
Tro wraiepa. Ibid. x. 14, 15.
10 S. John xvi. 15; xvii. 10; cf. S. Matt. xi. 27; Heb. i. 3; S. Matt. xxi.
38; Acts x. 36.; S. John i. 11.
x1 S. John x. 14, 15, 27, 28; xvii. 10-12.
12 S. Matt. xiii. 41; S. John xviii. 36. Cf. S. Luke i. 33; Rev. xi. 15.
s S. Matt. xiii. 41; xvi. 27; xxiv. 31.     14 I Tim. iii. 15.
1 5 S. Matt. xvi. 18; cf. Rom. xvi. 16.




222       Would our Lord's language about              [LECT.
given Him not merely over the human race, but also without any assigned limits in heaven and in earth; 2 and the
glory with which He will appear at the last day is not
other than His Father's.3   His working in the sphere of
sense and time corresponds to the ceaseless activity of
the Father.4   He too quickens and will raise the dead.5
He too forgives sins, as to the Paralytic;6 He too will
save the worldC;7 He will seek and save the lost;s He
will give eternal life. 9 To Him all judgment is committed,
and all nations shall one day  be gathered  before His
Throne.'0  Even now all men are to honour Him, even as
they honour the Father. I 
His words are familiar to our ears; but do we dwell
upon their real and awful meaning?   What should we
think of a religious teacher now  who could permit himself to say that Eternal Life consisted in the knowledge
of himself as well as in knowledge of the Father;l2  that
dislike of himself implied dislike of the Father;l3 that
belief in himself secured eternal life;l4 that disbelief in
himself involved present condemnation l? 5  What, if he
should tell us that without him  we could do nothing;'o
that united with him, we should bring forth much fruit; 7
1 S. John xvii. 2.    2 S. Matt. xxviii. 18.    3 S. Matt. xvi. 27.
4 S. John v. 17, 19, 20.   6 Ibid. verses 21, 28, 29; xi. 25, 40.
( S. Matt. ix. 2-7; S. Luke vii. 36-50.  7 S. John iii. 17.
s S. Luke xix. 10; ix. 56.  9 S. John xvii. 2.
oS. John v. 22, 27; S. Matt. xxv. 31-39. Cf. Is. xi. 3.
11 S. John v. 20-23.    12 S. John xvii. 3; xii. 44.
13 S. John xv. 23; S. Luke x. 16.'1 S. John iii. 16; v. 40; vi. 47.
15 S. John iii. 18; viii. 24.  16 S. John xv. 5; xiv. 6.
17 S. John xv. 4.




VI.]    HinseLf be tolerable iv atzy ot/1er?         223
that, although leaving this world before us, he was going
to prepare places for us in the Eternal Home;1 that his
name would have resistless power with the Father;2 that
in his name his pupils would cast out devils;3 that he would
send the Divine Spirit from  the Father 4 Who, when He
came, would glorify the sender?5  lWhat should we say of
the promise of a perpetual presence,6 of the pretension to
found an imperishable society,7 of the delegation of power
to forgive sins,s of the claim to be so faultless that in him
the Prince of evil had no part whatever?9
Much else to the same purpose might be quoted from
the three earlier Gospels, as well as from the last; and
the question arises, how we are to account for this earnest
self-assertion on the part of Jesus Christ, to explain such
language? How are we to adjust it, on the one hand, with
the sobriety and truthfulness of a perfect human character;
on the other, with a due recognition of the rights of God?
There are men who decline to entertain this inquiry.
They are not by any means forgetful of God.  He weighs
upon their conscience, upon their imagination, upon their
life of daily thought and action, as the greatest and most
solemn of all facts.  They are not insensible to the moral
beauties of the earthly life of Jesus Christ; on the contrary, they profess to be so enamoured of these beauties, or of
1 S. John xiv. 2, 3.  2 Ibid. xvi. 23; xiv. 13, 14.
3 S. Mark xvi. 17, 18; cf. 20.   4 S. John xvi. 7.
S. John xvi. 14.   6 S. Matt. xxviii. 20.  7 S. Matt. xvi. 18.
8 S. John xx. 21-23; S. Matt. xvi. 19; xviii. 18.
S. John xiv. 30.




224        Our Lord's secf-proclazatlion       [LECT.
some of them, as to be impatient of all other aspects of our
Lord's Work and Teaching, But they do not allow themselves to reflect steadily upon the question whether their
loyalty to the supreme rights of God, and their love for
Jesus Christ, do not alike oblige them to "consider the relation which exists between Christ and God."  Christian
theology appears to them in the light of a wanton importation of worthless metaphysics into the heart of a moral
history of simple and faultless beauty; but they do not
reflect that their moral ideal itself must fall to pieces, unless
they are prepared in some way to attempt the chief problem
with which Christian theology deals.
Is our Lord's language imposture? The suggestion can
only be mentioned to be condemned by the entire drift and
atmosphere of His Life. Is it the hallucination of an enthusiast, so entranced in his idea as to be insensible to the
world of facts around him? But even Channing has pointed
out that the enthusiasm takes a turn which would be inconceivable, for a deranged enthusiasm, under the circumstances of Jesus Christ: " I can conceive," he says, " of His
seating Himself, in fancy, on the throne of David, andsecretly
pondering the means of His appointed triumphs; but that
a Jew should fancy himself the Messiah, and at the same
time should strip that character of all the attributes that
fired his youthful imagination and heart; that he should
start aside from all the feelings and hopes of His age, and
should acquire a consciousness of being destined to a
wholly new career, and one as unbounded as it was new



VI.]  wzlike any/Zig inz tze Hebrew ProphelZs. 2 25
this is exceedingly improbable." 1 Was it, then, only the
natural manner of an oriental mind; the habit of seizing
truth intuitively and enunciating it authoritatively, in
contrast with  our western methods of demonstration
and argument?  But this explanation, even if on other
accounts it could be admitted, does not cover the ground
required.  It does not justify the actual substance and
contents of our Lord's language about Himself. It does
not explain the fact that His language about Himself is
unlike anything which we find in the Hebrew prophets.
The prophets, if you will, announce truth in the intuitive
manner; but they do not make themselves the subjects and
centres of the truth which they announce. They draw the
deepest distinctions between themselves and their Master:
they are sinners, and He is the All-holy; they are foolish
and incapable, He is All-powerful and All-wise. The relation in which Christ claims to stand, both towards the
Father and towards mankind, is utterly unanticipated by
anything that can be traced in the prophetic literature of
Israel; it reveals a Personality distinct in kind from any
that had previously appeared in Hebrew history.
And at this point we cannot but observe that our Lord's
language about Himself is entirely in harmony with the
character of certain of the miracles ascribed to Him in the
Gospels. The miraculous element cannot be weeded out
of the Gospel narratives, without altogether impugning the
historical value of those documents; and to do this mainly
1 Chanlling: Works, ii. 56.
Q




2 2 6 Or Lord's miracles illustrale His words. LLECT.
because one department or one age of human experience
does not positively correspond with what we know as yet
about another, is not reasonable. Now, the Gospel miracles
fall, speaking roughly, into two classes; they are acts of
mercy, or acts of power. In one sense, they are all acts of
power; but the motive of compassion towards human suffering apparently predominates in the one class; while, in the
other, the reason for working them must be chiefly looked
for in the need of demonstrating the personal power of the
Agent. Thus, among the miracles of mercy, there are seventeen cases on record of His healing bodily disease; there are
six cases of the cure of demoniacal possession, each of which
is described in detail; there are three cases of restoration to
life.  On the other hand, the miracles at Cana in Galilee,
and of feeding the four and the five thousand, suggest, first
of all, the creative power of the Worker, although it was
wielded with a philanthropic object. The element of power
is more distinctly and exclusively apparent in His stilling
the tempest, and walking on the sea; in His rendering Himself invisible to a hostile multitude; in His awing by a
glance the traders in the temple, and the multitude that
came to take Him; in His cursing the barren fig-tree.  Some
of this class of miracles are, in fact, objected to by a recent
writer,i on the specific ground that they only befit a
superhuman personality. We therefore do not strain the
import of such miracles in saying that they are, at least, in
harmony with Christ's language about His claims and His
superhuman Person.
1 Scc-;hekl: Characterbild Jesu. Absch. iv., Kap. 11, p. 123.




VI.]       Szro/zcaiavzce of frs sinlessizess.     227
But our Lord's references to Himself are also in keeping
with another phenomenon.  He was sinless.  Upon the
positive side of Christ's character we have already dwelt;
upon the balanced perfection, the ideal universality of the
type. It was a life such as Paganism had not conceived;
it was higher than, and distinct from, the unimpeachable
justice, the calm superiority to misfortune, the proud selfrespect, which constituted, in various proportions, the
Pagan ideal. It was a life of love and humility, of the
highest forms of holiness, expressed by example as well as
recommended by precept.  But the most startling moral
feature in this life is that we can trace nowhere in it
any-the faintest-consciousness of guilt.  The best men
ordinarily feel the taint of moral evil most constantly and
acutely: their language about their sins and shortcomings
seems even exaggerated to those who live at a greater
distance from the Source of sanctity than they themselves.
But Jesus challenges His enemies to convince Him of sin,
if they can. He never hints that He has done or said
any one thing which needs forgiveness. H-e teaches His
disciples to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses:" He never
prays for pardon Himself.  Sorrow makes all of us think
of that in our past lives, which, as conscience whispers,
has but too well deserved it: Jesus, in His sorrow, thinks
only of the sins of others.  Certainly He is tempted; but
there is nothing within Him  that can respond to the
temptation: He is "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate
fron sinners."  And no attempts to fasten sin upon Him




228          Chzrist only szinless, if Lie         [LECT.
have had a trace of success, except so far as they have
gone hand in hand with a denial of His personal claims.
Strauss, for example, thinks it not merely fanaticism, but
"unjustifiable self-exaltation, for a man to imagine himself
so separated from other men, as to cet himself before them
as their future judge."'  Strauss, we must admit, is perfectly right, if the claim  of Christ to judge the world is
not strictly based upon fact.  It is strictly impossible to
maintain our faith in the faultlessness of His character
if we deny that a fundamental necessity of His Being
forced Him to draw attention so persistently, so imperiously,
to Himself. But, on the other hand, if Hiis words about
Himself are sober truth, they only afford another illustration of His compassionate love for those whom  He canme
to enlighten and to save.
Doubtless it has been a favourite object with a modern
school, as men have said, "to  bring down Jesus from
the clouds, and to restore Him, by criticism, to the domain
of history."  This enterprise assumes that " the theological
and metaphysical Christ of the creeds," is a very different
person from " the living Christ of the Gospels."  But when
such criticism enters upon its task, what happens? If, instead of declaiming vaguely against dogma, men really
wish to get to the bottoml of this problem, they will find
that, of two things, one becomes absolutely necessary. Either
they must consent to forfeit the moral ideal which they
admire in the Gospels, and which, to do them justice, they
1 Leben Jesu fiir das Deutsche Volk, p. 242.




VI.]              is indeed Divine.                229
are sincerely anxious to preserve; or they must fall back
upon those very statements of the creeds which, by affirming Christ's personal Divinity, really and only justify His
constant references to Himself, and His unbounded claims
upon mankind. His precepts abouthumnility are contradicted
by His example, unless His statements about Himself are
dictated by that true humility which would rather incur
the suspicion of pride than conceal the simple fact. His
enforcement of sincerity ceases to awe us, if, in His language
about Himself, He was indeed guilty of consistent and
almost boundless exaggeration.  His very charity loses its
lustre, and becomes suspected, if we are forced to feel that
iHe is ever capable of putting Himself unduly forward; its
highest forms cease to represent in our eyes the Universal
Love; they remind us rather of the efforts of this or that
tribune of the people, who clothes a personal ambition
beneath the activities of an ostentatious disinterestedness,
and whose efforts are at last crowned by a catastrophe
which they have really deserved.
If, on the other hand, we bow before the general impression
produced by Christ's character, and He be taken at His
word, He must be believed to be, in the absolute sense,
Divine.  There is no room for an intermediate being, such
as Arianism imagined, who is neither God nor an angel, in
a serious theistic creed. And our Lord's words are strictly
inconsistent with what would be sober and true in any
creature, however exalted. They are not surpassed; they
are only unfolded by the later teaching of apostles and of




230          IHiarmozy of revacrled Irut Jr.     [LECT.
creeds.  The Christ of S. Paul's Epistles is really the
Christ of the earliest Evangelist; the Christ of S. John
is the  Christ of S. Paul; the Christ of the Creeds
and the great Councils is the Christ of S. John.  He
Who alone knows the Father, and Whom none but the
Father knows,1 is the Imnage of the Father,2 is in the Form
of God,3 is the Effulgence of God's glory and the exact
Impress of His Being,4 is over all God blessed for ever.5 He,
the only Begotten Son, or God, Which is in the bosom of the
Father,6 is of one substance with the Father,7 as being " God
of the substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds."s
The later statements may be more elaborate; but they are
implied, in all their completeness, by the earlier.  Just as
an anatomist, from his knowledge of the animal frame, can,
pronounce upon the ag'e and size of a skeleton of which he
only possesses the fragment of a single bone; so with our
eye upon S. John, and the Nicene confession, we can see
statements in S. Mark which can only be maintained when
men acknowledge the consubstantiality of the Son with the
Father.  There are deep harmonies in truth which, from
first to last, bind it in its integrity rigidly together.
They cannot be set aside or trifled with; for truths which
we in our narrowness deem  obscure or unimportant, are
oftenf  vitally necessary  to the maintenance of others
which  we  are  better capable  of appreciating.   Our
Blessed Lord's Divinity, instead of obscuring His true
1 S. Matt. xi. 29.    2 Col. i. 15.  3 Phil. ii. 6.   4 Heb. i. 3.
Rtom. ix. 5.    6 S. John i. 18.   N lic. Creed.  SAthan. Creed.




VI.]    Whalt is " the religzon of CGrist?"       231
Manhood, is the safeguard and justificationi of its moral
perfectness: and we do the most beautiful of moral histories
a fatal injustice, if we forget that, in the words of the
Creed, its subject "is perfect God and perfect Man, of a
reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the
Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father
as touching His manhood.; Who, although He be God and
Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ."l
This is the full and solemn truth; that Jesus Christ
is not merely the Teacher but the substance of Christianity;
not merely the author of the faith which Christians
profess, but its central object. For Christians the popular
phrase, " the religion of Christ," does not mean, as
Lessing suggested, only or chiefly the piety which in
the days of His flesh He exhibited towards the Father.
It means the piety, the submission of thought and heart,
the sense of obligation, the voluntary enthusiastic service,
of which He, together and equally with the Father, is
the rightful and everlasting Object; which, when He was
on earth, He claimed as His due; and which has been
rendered to Him  now for more than eighteen hundred
years by the best and noblest of the human race.
1 Athanasian Creed.




232            yesets t/e lizving Bond        [LECT.
III.
In Jesus Christ, then, we have the guarantee or bond of
religion; He is the means of an actual communication
between the soul of man and the Eternal God. "There is
one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus." 1 He is the Mediation in virtue of the very terms
of His Being: His office of Mediation is based upon the
two Natures which are united in His Single Person. On
the one hand, as the Eternal Son, He is One with the
All-Holy and Infinite God; on the other, as the child of
Mary, He shares all the finiteness and weakness of our
manhood; He shares everything with it except its sin.
Thus He impersonates and maintains, by the very fact
of being what He is, a true vital bond between earth and
heaven. To us men, He is the last and most complete
unveiling of the interest which God takles in the wellbeing of His moral and reasonable creatures; the Highest
Organ of the Diville Mind and Will; the only and certain
channel of those " unsearchable riches " 2 which flow down
from the Fountain of all goodness upon the beings whom
He has made. Before the Majesty of God He is the
unique and ideal Representative of our race: He represents
us, not as being what we are, but as being what we were
meant to be by the Great Author of our existence. And
yet, although we are only weak and sinful, we may unite
ourselves to Him by faith, and love, and contrition for the
1 1 Tim. ii. 5.     2 Eph. iii. 8.




VI.]          belweenz  God and t/he Soul.           233
past, and be "accepted in the Beloved." 1  His obedience
as Man, reaching its climax in the self-sacrifice of the
Cross, becomes ours through His free grace and mercy.
His invigorating life, which restores our race to its
original strength and beauty, is still communicated to us
by His Spirit and His Sacraments; so that all who will,
may "put off the old man, which is corrupt according to
the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of their
minds; and put on the new  man, which after God is
created in righteousness and true holiness." 2  This cannot
be done by fallen man for himself, and out of the resources
of his warped and impoverished nature.  But "what the
law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,
God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,
and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
the flesh, but after the Spirit." 3  Being as He is, Divine
as well as Human, Jesus is " made unto us Wisdom, and
Ritghteouslness, and Sanctification, and Redemption."4  Thus
in union with  Him, those religious aspirations, which
are part of our natural outfit, find their true exercise, their
full satisfaction. As the Light of the world, He is the
satisfaction of the intellect.  As " Fairer than the children
of men," He is the delight of the heart.  As " Holy, harnmless, undefiled, separate from  sinners," He challenges the
submission of the will.  Intellect, feeling, moral effort,
each have their part in Him.  He recognizes, He con1 Eph. i. 6.   2 Eph. iv. 22-24.   3 Rom. viii. 3, 4.   4 1 Cor. i. 30.




234           Di/ficuzlies of revelation       [LECT.
secrates them.  He leads them upwards, in and through
His own Holy Humanity to the All-wise and All-beautiful.
The soul finds that in Hiun " is the well of Life, and that
in His Light it will see light."
IDoes it seem inconceivable that the Eternal Son of God
should have, indeed, thus come among us men, to teach
and to save us; to make reconciliation between us and the
Almighty Father; to bestow on us the priceless gift of a
new Nature; and to lead us back, first one and then another,
to our true home and peace? Certainly, it may well move
our wonder to think of such grace and mercy. The Christian creed, when once it becomes precious to us, takes us
altogether out of the daily range of earthly thoughts and
interests, lifting us into a better, and brighter, but not
more mysterious, or less real, world than this. The Incarnation and Death of the Everlasting Son seem impossible,
only because we do not steadily reflect upon the simple
but momentous truths which lie at the root of all religion,
and which all who are not Materialists or Pantheists
generally admit. Is the Incarnation so improbable, think
you, if God is indeed a moral Being, if man has an immortal
soul, if moral evil is inherently deadly in itself and in its
effects? Do we not name " God," " immortality," "sin,"
without thinking what we mean; as if these tremendous
words were the symbols of trivial commonplaces, which
implied nothing beyond themselves?  And is not this
careless treatment of these solemn truths which we profess
to own, the reason why many of us do not understand the




VI.] not greaer /zan t/zose of natural relzgzonz. 235
truths beyond them? If the awfulness and magnificence of
God, the reality of eternity, the power and sting of moral evil,
were more often subjects of our thought, would our imaginations be so startled, as they often are, by those doctrines of
grace which adjust and harmonize what else is so full of
perplexity; by the Incarnation of the'Blessed Son of God;
by His plenary Atonement on the Cross for the sins of
men; by His unceasing Intercession for us before the
Father; by the sanctifying energy of His Holy Spirit; by
the power of His Sacraments, to renew and sustain our
life? Surely the earlier truths are just as full of difficulties for the imagination and the reason as the latter.  We
put them out of sight as being less importunate; but there
they are.  That the All-foreseeing and Holy God should
have created us at all, is at least as startling as that, having created, He should have redeemed us.  Or rather,
when we reflect upon His morality, upon His justice, upon
His love, we must think that His Redemnption of the fallen
is really less wonderful than His Creation of a race
capable of such signal failure; and we must find in our
daily experience of life, of the crimes and sufferings, which
so largely compose it, more embarrassment and distress for
reverent reason than can be furnished by critical speculations upon the explanatory and consoling truth, that " God
so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but
have everlasting life."l
S1. John iii. 16.




236      WIhVy /Se evzieirces of CG/lzslianzizy    [LECT.
"Whosoever believeth in Him."  It is not then, you say,
a matter of strict mathematical demonstration.  No; it is
not a matter of strict mathematical demonstration.  If it
were, there would be no more room for faith than there is
in the process of learning a proposition of Euclid.  Not to
acquiesce in the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid, is
to be intellectually deficient; but to refuse assent to the
Christian creed does not necessarily imply intellectual
deficiency.  VWhy not?  Because for such assent moral
dispositions are necessary as well as intellectual capacity.  The evidence for Christianity, intellectually viewed,
is something short of mathematical; and intentionally so.
Christian truth makes a demand upon the will as well as
upon the intellect; and the will, to avoid the foreseen consequences of assent, will often prevent the intellect from
doing its work, honestly and thoroughly, in investigating
the claims of Christ.   This is a reason why so much
store is set upon faith in St. Paul's Epistles.  Faith is a
test of the moral drift of our whole being, and not merely
of the soundness or acuteness of our understandings.  If an
act of faith in Jesus Christ implied no more than an act
of assent to the conclusion of a demonstrated proposition;
if faith were nothing higher and nobler than the forced
result of a victorious assault upon the human undlerstanding, conducted by columns and batteries of' mathematical
evidence; then all that is said about its moral and spiritual
worth,, about its purifying and elevating power, would be
simply unintelligible.  The most accomplished mathema



VI.]            are no0 mzal/zemalzcal.              237
tician is not necessarily moral; and tile most fervent believers, ancient or modern, have not been always Pascals
and Newtons.
Our Lord did, indeed, by His miracles, and notably by
His resurrection, address Himself to the experience of His
contemporaries in enforcing His claimlls; and by certain
portions of His teaching, He appealed no less truly to the
operations of their natural reason. But, in order to accept
Him as He is, reason and observation must be seconded by
the heart and the conscience.  There must be a true desire
to know all that can be known of the Author of the law of
right and wrong within us.  There mnst be a real anxiety
to escape from  the imoral anomalies of life; a recognition,
and sense of human goodness; a strong  anticipation that He
Who is its Source cannot have left us in weakness and
darkness to struggle alone.  Why this temper is found in
one man and not in another, is a question which carries us
back into the deepest secrets of our several moral natures;
into the varying histories of our loyalty or disloyalty to
God's original gift of natural light.  But upon the existence or non-existence of such moral dispositions depends
our way of looking at the evidence which Jesus Christ has
thought good to set before us on behalf of His claims.  In
one case that evidence will appear sufficient; insufficient
in another.  It will be held insufficient by the mail
who  thinks  to  become  a believing  Christian, as he
would become a mathematician, without any reference to
the temper of his heart, or even in spite of its decided




238  Faif  in our Lord's Divinily /ze bacsis LLECT.
bent against the moral teaching of the Gospel.  It will
be deemed sufficient —nay, more than sufficient —for those
who amid perplexities are "waiting for the consolation
of Israel." 1 They understand that religious truth, to be
embraced  at all to any purpose, must be embraced,
not simply by a dry assent of the logical understanding, but by a vital act of the whole inward man; by
moral sympathies even more earnestly than by an intellectual grasp. Christ, our Lord, in various ways, teaches
us as much as this; and Christian apologists can only
make that portion of the act of faith which belongs to
the understanding easier to it, by removing obstacles to
the reception of truth or by exhibiting its inward harmonies.  They cannot, if they would, do the work of the
Divine Spirit, and control the fevers, the prejudices, the
cowardice, the rashness of the heart.  He only Who made
the heart can soften, or subdue, or clhange it. He only
Who made the light to shine out of darkness can so shine
in the hearts of meni, as to "give the light of the knowledge. of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2
And they to whomHe has taught this greatlessonwill know
and feel, that believing in the Divinity of our Incarnate Lord,
we stand, as it were, upon the heights of Pisgah; and that
a new and vast prospect, grateful to eyes that are wearied
with the long glare of the desert, is opening before us.
Before us is a land of vineyards and oliveyards; a land
flowing' with milk and honey.  It is a region of repose
1 S. Lule ii. 25.                 2 2 Cor. iv. 6;




VI.]            of  racticda religiomz.            239
for faith and love; it is an atmosphere where communion
with God is easy and natural. It is the proper home of
spirituality and benevolence, of that internal and external
practice of religion, day by day, which is so altogether
higher and better a thing than the profoundest study of
its theory. For the Divinity of the Son of God is the
adequate warrant of all His promises; of the power of His
death; of the gift of His Spirit; of the efficacy of His
sacraments; of the converting and hallowing power of His
written word; of the Divine character of that society of
souls which, by His Spirit, He has organized into His
Church since the Day of Pentecost.  How vast in their
range, how interesting in their idea and scope, how energetically practical in their bearings on all earnest life,
are these great Christian doctrines which tbrm the hills
and vales of our Gospel Land of Promise! We strain our
eyes; we would fain go forward to study their beauties,
to try, if it might be, to understand and to surmount their
difficulties. But it cannot be; —at least now. If only we
sincerely cling by faith and love to our Divine and Human
Lord, all else will follow.  For the present, like the
Magdalen, we can but hold Him by the feet, and entreat
Him  to teach us that personal devotedness to Himself,
which is the secret and soul of genuine religion; since
without it the love of God soon dies away inlto aln attenuated mysticism, while the love of man is eventually hollowed out into a mechanical philanthropy.  Thinking of
Him, praying to Him, working for Him day by day, as




240                 Conclusionz.              LLEeT.
our living, tender, mighty, and wise Friend, we strengthen
our hold upon the one certain bond between earth and
heaven; upon Him through WVhom, in all our feebleness and
sin, we have real access in one Spirit unto the Father.l
Personal devotion to Jesus Christ is the exercise of
thought, and of affection, steadily directed upon His adorable Person. But it is also the exercise of will: it is preeminently practical. There is much to be abstained from
for His sake; there is much to be done and to be endured;
there is some danger, perhaps, of our doing nothing very
definite, where the opportunities of action are so various
and so complex. And, therefore, that you may do something for Jesus Christ now and here, you are asked to
support with your alms the St. James' Penitentiary.  Its
object is to carry out our Lord's work in the world as the
Healer of souls, whom sin has separated from  God, by
bringing them back to purity and peace through a recovered union with Himself. It has been said that Penitentiaries are too costly a method of restoration from sin.
They who speak thus can have thought little to any purpose about either the malignity of moral evil, or the meaning of the Self-sacrifice of the Son of God. The institution which I have named has done and is doing good, anmd,
as we trust, lasting work among our unhappy sisters, who
may well be so much less guilty in the eyes of the
1 Eph. ii. 18.




VI.]                CouzclZIszoz.                241
Eternal Justice than are many upon whom, in this present
world, and often to their own endless loss, the breath of
censure never falls. Be our case what it m'ay, we surely
do well to support an undertaking which honours our
Lord, by its disinterested work of unwearied compassion;
and which, while labouring for the social recovery of our
poor countrywomen, aims much more directly at promoting
the eternal well-being of their souls,-as capable as our
own of enjoying, through the Divine Mediator, the present and future blessings of religion.








BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Divinily  of our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ: Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford,
in the Year I866, on the Foundation of the late Rev. JOHN BAMPTON,
M.A., Canon of Salisbury. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo, 5s.
II.
Sermons Preached before the University of
Oxford. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo, 5s.
III.
A4 Manual for the Sick; with other Devotions.
By Lancelot Andrewes, D.D., sometime Lord Bishop of Winchester.
Edited, with a Preface, by H. P. Liddon, M.A. Second Edition.
Large Type, with Portrait. 24mo, 2s. 6d.
IV.
WValler Kerr Hamilton, Bishop of Salisbury.
A Sketch, reprinted from " The Guardian," with Additions and Corrections.  Second Edition.  8vo., limp cloth, 2s. 6d.; or, with the
Sermon "LIFE IN DEATH," 3s. 6d.
RIVI NGTON S
Ion~bn, Oxfotb, anb  Camrivibge








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THE HAPPINESS OF THE BLESSED.
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YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER,
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CLERGY DISCIPLINE: A Letter to His Grace
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