THE 
 
 WITNESS OF 
 
 RELIGIOUS 
 
 EXPEEIEIGi 
 
 THE RT. REV. 
 
 fl.ouro 
 
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THE WITNESS OF 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
THE WITNESS OF 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 THE DONNELLAN LECTURES DELIVERED 
 BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN, 1914, 
 AND IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, LENT, 1916 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT REV. W. BOYD CARPENTER 
 
 K.C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L., D.Litt. 
 
 Sub-Dean and Canon of Westminster and Clerk of the Closet to 
 H,M. the King, formerly Bishop of Ripon 
 
 LONDON 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
 J4 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C, 
 
 1916 
 

These Lectures contain the substance of four 
 lectures given on the Donnellan Foundation at 
 Trinity College, Dublin. They are, however, 
 printed here as though five lectures were given, 
 for such grouping of the subject became desirable 
 when the Lectures were delivered in Westminster 
 Abbey. 
 
 346833 
 
LECTURE I . 
 LECTURE II . 
 LECTURE III . 
 LECTURE IV . 
 LECTURE V . 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGK 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 I HAVE given as the title of these 
 lectures "The Witness of Religious Ex- 
 perience." If I had to choose a text I 
 should probably refer to i John v. 10, " He 
 that believeth on the Son of God hath the 
 witness in himself," or else to that word 
 of Christ, "The kingdom of God is within 
 you." It is of this inner kingdom or inner 
 witness that I wish to speak ; for here for 
 all of us is the heart of religion : here is 
 that secret which God whispers to the soul 
 and fills it with exceeding joy. 
 
 And now for a few minutes the world 
 is shut out. The busy and strident noises 
 of battlefield and market-place are far away. 
 In the quiet of the House of God we can 
 find peace. We retire from the strife and 
 
 2 i 
 
2 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 turmoil of earth, from the clamour of her 
 cares and her anxieties. There are greater 
 things than the things of earth. The 
 bodily needs require thought and planning : 
 the needs of the soul require peace, and in 
 the peaceful hour of inner converse with 
 higher things the light of heaven may dawn 
 upon us. 
 
 " I retire," said the saint, " I retire from 
 the things without to the things within : I 
 rise from the things within to the things 
 above/' This, too, might be my text. 
 Can we by shutting out the noise of the 
 world, and laying aside the demands of 
 things without find that there is a ladder 
 within which reaches up to heaven ? I be- 
 lieve that we can. " The secret of the Lord 
 is with them fthat fear Him." " The anointing 
 which ye have received . . . teacheth you 
 all things." The ladder is within. I ask 
 you to join with me in these lectures in 
 seeking it out, and perhaps in climbing a 
 little nearer to heaven. 
 
 No erudition of any special character is 
 needed : the things of God may be revealed 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 3 
 
 to babes, and may be the reinvigoration of 
 strong men. All that is needed is single- 
 ness of heart a quiet mind, the laying aside 
 of preconceptions, the hunger for righteous- 
 ness. For these let us pray. Every one 
 that asketh receiveth. 
 
 I have said that a dispassionate judgment is 
 needed. What is it that we are called upon to 
 judge ? Briefly, we are called upon to judge 
 a great claim which is put forth by Christian 
 people indeed, I might say by religious people 
 in all ages and in all countries. It is the claim 
 that a man may know God, and that this 
 knowledge is real and personal that God 
 may be known as truly and as unquestionably 
 as we know the beating of our own hearts 
 and the stirring of our own enthusiasms. 
 
 This claim of the knowledge of God as 
 a personal experience is put forth in various 
 forms : the forms are of little moment : the 
 fact is the important matter ; and in their 
 witness to the fact the witnesses are at one. 
 Shall we hear some of the witnesses ? 
 
 St. Paul is a witness. He says, " I know 
 whom I have believed/' Lest any one 
 
4 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 should say that this may refer to historical 
 knowledge, I cite this other statement of 
 St. Paul, " I live, but not I : Christ liveth 
 
 in me." 
 
 St. John is another witness. " Truly our 
 fellowship is with the Father and with His 
 Son Jesus Christ," and lest this again should 
 be taken to mean that he belonged to the 
 Christian society, I add this other word of 
 his: " Hereby know we that we dwell in 
 Him, and He in us, because He hath given 
 us of His spirit" (i John iv. 13). 
 
 But it may be said : these passages belong 
 to the Bible : they date from the Apostolic 
 age, which was an age of great spiritual 
 exaltation. If by exaltation be meant some- 
 thing akin to hallucination, I can only ask 
 you to read the New Testament writers, and 
 you will soon realize that there is no tinge 
 of weak excitement in their spirit. There 
 is a quiet reticence : their words are those 
 of truth and soberness, but they are warm 
 and living words : the writers feel as with 
 a vivid reality that their knowledge of God 
 is a deep, personal knowledge : their life is 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 5 
 
 spent in a divine companionship. With "a 
 consciousness of God they endured grief, 
 suffering wrongfully " (i Peter ii. 19). " They 
 had come to Christ and found in Him no 
 mere abstraction nor mere historical figure, 
 but the shepherd of their souls" (i Peter ii. 
 25). "They knew the support of a divine 
 presence : for though deserted by men, the 
 Lord stood with them and strengthened 
 them" (2 Tim. iv. 17). 
 
 But this witness is not local or temporary : 
 it is not a witness found only in the early or 
 in the Apostolic ages : it is a witness which 
 meets us in every age and in every land. 
 Time would fail me to summon and cite 
 the great cloud of witnesses to the joy and 
 reality of this personal knowledge of God. 
 
 " There are unfathomable powers in the 
 depths of the human soul, because in the 
 depths there is God Himself," l is the lan- 
 guage in which the biographer of St. 
 Francis explains the spiritural comradeship 
 of the saint with God. What can express 
 this comradeship of the soul more vividly 
 
 1 P. Sabatier, "Vie de S. Francois d'Assise," p. 214. 
 
6 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 than these words of Pascal. " Unite me to 
 Thyself : replenish me with Thyself ... so 
 that being inspired and acted on by Thee, 
 it may be no longer I who live and suffer, 
 but Thou, O my Saviour, who livest and 
 sufferest in me." 1 
 
 If we go from the Old World to the New, 
 we find the same joy in this inner divine 
 friendship. Jonathan Edwards realized so 
 intensely the divine presence that he seemed 
 to be in a " wilderness, far from all mankind, 
 sweetly conversing with Christ, and swal- 
 lowed up in God." 2 
 
 I need not multiply examples : your own 
 memory will supply many more ; for the 
 realization of God as the inner friend of 
 the soul finds expression in the hymns of 
 the Church. God is " the spring of all my 
 joys, the life of my delights," is the witness 
 of one. Cowper recalls the peaceful hours 
 he once enjoyed when he sighed "for a 
 closer walk with God." C. Wesley cried 
 out for the refuge of the divine love, 
 
 1 "Thoughts on Religion," p. 320. 
 
 8 Dr. A. Phelps, "The Still Hour," p. u. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 7 
 
 Jesu ! Lover of my soul, 
 Let me to Thy Bosom fly. 
 
 And Toplady, though in an opposite theo- 
 logical camp, knew the security of the same 
 refuge. 
 
 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in Thee. 
 
 Thus the claim that God may be known 
 known to the soul of man as a refuge, 
 a comrade, a joy is heard throughout the 
 Christian centuries, and is as strong and 
 clear to-day as it was in the early days of 
 the Christian Church. This claim is to a 
 knowledge possible, real, and personal : it 
 is to a knowledge so pervasive and powerful 
 that it can kindle gladness, calm apprehen- 
 sion, and awaken activity. 
 
 It is the claim that God can be known as 
 a great reality. Is it a legitimate claim? 
 Can we, the children of a scientific age, 
 trained to a wholesome, and perhaps exag- 
 gerated scepticism accept the claim ? Does 
 it represent something real, tangible, verifi- 
 
8 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 able ? Or are these claims due to purely 
 subjective impressions, carrying no evidence 
 or any corresponding objective reality ? Are 
 they fictions or are they expressions of fact? 
 Here we reach the important point? Can we 
 bring these claims to the test of reality ? Can 
 they be classed among facts or not ? This 
 is, I repeat, the important matter ; for the 
 demand of scientific thought to-day is that 
 truths or so-called laws must be based on 
 fact. Are we prepared to stand or fall by 
 this test? 
 
 We cannot, I think, refuse to accept the 
 principle that truths must be supported by 
 facts : in other words, that without facts we 
 cannot urge the acceptance of any theory. 
 
 Now let us understand this principle ; for 
 it is easy to juggle with words, and scientific 
 men as well as theologians have confused 
 the issue by a profuse employment of am- 
 biguous language. The principle which we 
 are asked to accept is this : law or truth 
 must be founded on facts. A mode of 
 reasoning which was common in pre-scientific 
 days was this : a theory was advanced, and 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 9 
 
 then facts were collected to support the 
 theory. The objection to this method was 
 clear enough. Facts may be collected to 
 support almost any theory : it is easy enough 
 to select the facts in favour and to ignore 
 the facts against the theory. Clearly the 
 right course is to collect all the facts which 
 bear upon the subject : interrogate them : 
 analyse them : classify them, and then from 
 the facts so observed and sifted, deduce the 
 law or truth. First the facts : then the law 
 or truth. This is the true scientific order. 
 
 Here we need to ask a fundamental 
 question ? What is meant by a fact ? One 
 of the confusions of thought, which often 
 meets us, is due to the misunderstanding of 
 the meaning of fact. Too often an object 
 is supposed to be a fact. What can be more 
 clear or simple facts than stones, or brick, 
 or mortar, or gold or silver ? But these are 
 objects and not facts : they are objects about 
 which we desire to ascertain facts. When 
 I have discovered that the stone is marble 
 or granite I have ascertained a fact about 
 this object stone. A fact is the truth of a 
 
10 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 statement. The dictionary definition of a 
 fact is that it is a real state of things. In 
 its first meaning a fact is something done 
 a deed : it then comes to mean a true con- 
 dition, of which we can say " this is true 
 indeed " : it is the correspondence between 
 statement and reality : it is different from 
 opinion, for opinion may not correspond with 
 the real state of things. Fact expresses an 
 actual harmony between statement and reality : 
 a true statement of the condition of things ; 
 as, for instance, if I say that gold is yellow, 
 I make a statement which truly expresses 
 the state of the case. 
 
 Mill in his logic writes : " In order to 
 believe that gold is yellow I must have the 
 idea of gold and the idea of yellow, and 
 something having reference to these ideas must 
 take place in my mind. But my belief has 
 not reference to the ideas, it has reference 
 to the things. What I believe is a fact 
 relating to the outward thing gold, and the 
 impression made by that outward thing upon 
 the human organ, i.e. the impression made 
 by gold upon the eye." 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 11 
 
 Here we may notice that the fact turns 
 upon the constancy of the impression which 
 gold has made upon the eyes of many : I see 
 that gold is yellow, but many more before 
 me have seen gold and have seen it to be 
 yellow. There is a true and continuous 
 harmony between the condition of gold and 
 the statement that it is yellow. Gold is the 
 object : the statement that it is yellow is the 
 fact. 
 
 Similarly when Newton saw the apple 
 fall : the apple was the object ; the fact was 
 that the apple fell. 
 
 We may now apply this to the religious 
 consciousness or experience. Man is the 
 object : man possessed of a religious conscious- 
 ness or a power of religious experience is 
 the fact. Or to put the same in a simpler 
 form we may say : the fact is that man is a 
 religious animal. 
 
 Is this a fact? i.e. does the statement 
 correspond with the reality of the case ? 
 
 Let us avoid all irrelevant matters. I am 
 not now asking the meaning of this religious 
 consciousness in man : I am not inquiring 
 
12 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 about its origin. The questions about its 
 source or its significance can come later. 
 Now we are only asking, Is it a fact that 
 man is a religious animal ? We need spend 
 but little time here. Everywhere and in 
 every race traces of religion or religious 
 consciousness are to be found. Researches 
 were undertaken with the object I might 
 even say with the hope of discovering some- 
 where a race or tribe without religious rite 
 or feeling ; but the researches ended in 
 establishing the fact that everywhere the 
 religious instinct could be found. Here is 
 the witness of Quatrefages no mean authority 
 on the subject. He said : " Obliged, in my 
 course of instruction, to review all human 
 races. I have sought Atheism in the lowest 
 as well as in the highest. I have nowhere 
 met with it, except in individuals, or in more 
 or less limited schools, such as those which 
 existed in Europe in the last century, or 
 which may still be seen in the present day. 
 ... In every place and at all times the mass 
 of populations has escaped it : we nowhere 
 find either a great human race, or even a 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 13 
 
 division however unimportant of that race, 
 professing Atheism." l There is no race, we 
 may conclude, without some idea of God, 
 and some consciousness of a link or bond 
 binding them to Him. No doubt the ways 
 in which religion expresses itself are very 
 various ; but we are not now dealing with 
 these varieties, we are only seeking an answer 
 to the question whether man is or is not a 
 religious being. The answer is clearly and 
 overwhelmingly that he is religious. In other 
 words, it is a fact that man is a religious being. 
 When we say that man possesses a conscious- 
 ness of religion, we are not stating a mere 
 opinion or belief: we are saying what is in 
 harmony with the real state of the case : we 
 are stating a fact. 
 
 Hence the religious consciousness of man 
 belongs to the region of fact. This is the 
 fact or set of facts we have to deal with ; we 
 are not dealing with something which is a 
 mere imagination, a wild speculation, but a 
 real and undeniable fact. 
 
 Our next duty is to examine the nature of 
 1 "The Human Species," p. 482. 
 
14 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 this fact to observe its features, and endeav- 
 our to find its place among other facts of 
 experience. 
 
 Now, the first thing we may notice about 
 this fact is that this religious consciousness 
 is not a dead or inert thing : it has energy 
 and power : it is a force as well as a fact. 
 It has made itself felt in history : it has built 
 temples and cathedrals. Every place of wor- 
 ship whether the Taj in India, the Parthenon 
 at Athens, St. Peter's at Rome, or our own 
 Abbey witnesses the energy or driving power 
 of this force. Men have tried to explain its 
 origin : they have found it in animism or in 
 ghosts ; but these leave religion unexplained. 
 "In all religious movements of a large char- 
 acter there are influences at work which cannot 
 be wholly accounted for by historical investiga- 
 tion," says Professor J astro w. 1 
 
 Religion thus is a force full of activity, and 
 exercising enormous influence over human 
 history : it is perhaps an unexplained force ; 
 but it is not therefore insignificant. 
 
 There are forces which enter into our daily 
 1 " The Study of Religion," p. 179. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 15 
 
 life which have not yet been explained, but 
 because they are mysterious, they are not 
 therefore insignificant. Take as an example 
 imagnetism. It is a force, but it is a force not 
 jyet understood. This is what the Director of 
 [the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the 
 Carnegie Institution in Washington, U.S.A., 
 (tells us: "As regards the actual motions of 
 (the earth's magnetic poles and the precise 
 cause or causes, we may say with Halley 
 that these are 'Secrets as yet utterly unknown 
 to mankind and are reserved for the industry 
 of future ages.' ... In spite of the accumu- 
 lated facts of over three centuries, we are still 
 unable to say definitely to what the earth's 
 magnetic field is really due." 1 
 
 Magnetism, in fact, defies definition. When 
 experts were occupied in preparing a dic- 
 tionary definitions were required for magnet 
 and magnetism. And this is what was given. 
 A magnet is " something acted upon by mag- 
 netism": magnetism was "something acting 
 upon a magnet " : it was announced that these 
 definitions were " condensed from the works of 
 
 1 Dr. Bauer, Fourth Halley Lecture in Oxford, 1913. 
 
16 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 a thousand " scientists, who had " illuminated 
 the subject with a great white light, to the 
 inexpressible advancement of human know- 
 ledge." 
 
 Magnetism is a force, and an unexplained 
 force; but not therefore a negligible or un- 
 interesting force : rather its mystery challenges 
 our curiosity. In the same way, if we regard 
 religion as an unexplained force, it is not 
 therefore valueless or unattractive ; it rather, 
 on this account, appeals to us as demanding 
 more of our thought and attention. In the 
 religious consciousness we are aware of a 
 power, not our own, which makes demands 
 upon us, and has exercised over man a 
 strange constraining influence. 
 
 The Eastern no less than the Western, the 
 Hindu as well as the Christian, is awake to the 
 magic of its power. 
 
 Rabindranath Tagore pictures himself as a 
 little pipe through which there speaks a power 
 greater than himself. As of old the Baptist 
 said : "I am the voice only the voice " ; so 
 the Indian poet says: " This little flute of a 
 reed Thou hast carried over hills and dales, 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 17 
 
 and hast breathed through it melodies eternally 
 new." 
 
 The Western no less than the Eastern felt 
 this truth. Robert Barclay, in his " Apology 
 for the Quakers," claimed this inward illumi- 
 nation, "evident and clear of itself, forcing 
 by its own evidence and clearness the well- 
 disposed understanding to assent, irresistibly 
 moving the same thereunto." x 
 
 We reach, therefore, two conclusions to-day. 
 The religious consciousness or experience is 
 a fact: it is as real a fact as magnetism or 
 gravity. It is more : it is a force, and a force 
 of such magnitude and influence that it cannot 
 be ignored. It is, if you will, from a human 
 point of view, an unexplained force : it stands 
 outside definition. " We cannot tell whence it 
 cometh or whither it goeth." It is, like mag- 
 netism, a real force, but its source and its law 
 of movement lie among the secrets of the 
 universe. 
 
 But though from this point of view inexplic- 
 able, it is very real : it enters into actual life : 
 it changes a man's outlook : it influences his 
 1 "Apology," p. 4, 6th ed,, 1736. 
 3 
 
18 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 career : it elevates his thought : it brings a 
 deeper consciousness of personality. The man 
 who is the subject of its influence may tell us 
 of his experience, but he cannot explain. He 
 can only say, "I do not understand : but a 
 change came, and things were different, and 
 I was different : my whole outlook upon life 
 was altered by a force other than my own." 
 
 We are thus in the presence of a force 
 which has been marvellously influential in 
 human history. 
 
 Our next step must be to inquire into the 
 nature of this force as it is seen at work among 
 men. 
 
 This I must reserve for the next lecture. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 WE have seen that religious consciousness 
 in man is a fact, and a force. It is a 
 fact both in its universality and its con- 
 tinuousness. It is a force seen in its activity, 
 and we may place it among unexplained 
 forces. The efforts which have been made 
 to explain its origin in terms of things 
 earthly have not been successful. Professor 
 Jastrow's judgment on this appears to be 
 correct. "It is urged," he says, "from a 
 scientific point of view that the peculiar 
 direction taken by religion among certain 
 peoples cannot be accounted for by a process 
 of purely historical development. This position 
 is indeed justified. After due allowance is 
 made for the natural causes, which led to 
 such a remarkable movement as is represented 
 
 19 
 
20 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 by the ethical monotheism of the prophets or 
 by the appearance of Jesus Christ, or by the 
 rise of Islamism, there remains an element 
 which cannot be explained by historical 
 research. ... In all religious movements 
 of a la^ge character there are influences at 
 work which cannot be wholly accounted for 
 by historical investigation." 1 
 
 We are then in the presence of a force 
 which while it operates through natural means, 
 yet remains in a large degree mysterious. It 
 is like magnetism : we feel its power : we have 
 evidence of its activity and capacity ; but we 
 cannot explain. It is mysterious like the 
 wind : it bloweth where it listeth : we hear 
 the sound : we see the effects : but we "cannot 
 tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." 
 St. Paul described it (Rom. i. 16) as a power, 
 but he " conceives of it as essentially a mode 
 of personal activity." 2 
 
 Yet one thing we do know about it. It 
 differs in a sense from other forces in this 
 that it works in man. Its origin may be 
 
 1 Jastrow, "The Study of Religion," pp. 178-9. 
 * See Sanday and Headiam on Romans, p. 23. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 21 
 
 outside of us : its force is felt in man. If 
 we want to observe it, we must note its 
 effects in the mind, emotions, and will of 
 man. 
 
 As I note its effects, it seems to me to be 
 a force which tends to educate or help forward 
 the development of man : it lays hold upon 
 some great instincts of man and gives them 
 a new and noble direction : it seems to claim 
 man in the completeness of his nature. 
 
 John Fiske told us that evolution in its later 
 manifestation worked no longer for the de- 
 velopment of things physical, but wrought 
 in human history for the education in man of 
 those social qualities on which the life and 
 happiness of the race depended. Social quali- 
 ties and family affections were called into play 
 by the lengthening period of childhood. In 
 other words, nature was now at work develop- 
 ing not now the physical but the psychical 
 powers of man. When I view the story 
 of religion I seem to see at work a power 
 which even if unexplained in origin is clear 
 in its tendency to develop man's whole per- 
 sonality. 
 
22 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Religion or religious consciousness in man 
 does this. 
 
 By claiming the whole man. 
 
 Too often we have been inclined to take the 
 part for the whole. Man has been looked 
 upon as not merely having, but being mind. 
 His intellect has been regarded as equivalent 
 to the whole man. At other times the emotions 
 are given prominence, and sentiment has been 
 taken as a sort of sum total of man. Or again, 
 there have been times when the demands of 
 man's physical nature have been given such 
 exaggerated importance that it might be sup- 
 posed that man was just body and nothing 
 more. 
 
 Absurd as is this partial way of looking at 
 man, the affairs of life have in one way or 
 another fostered this onesidedness of view. 
 We must live, it has been said, and moral 
 considerations have been put aside for the 
 sake of bodily needs. Or again, Art and 
 Science have emphasized the value of intellect 
 and imagination, and conscience has been 
 silenced in the court of final appeal. Philo- 
 sophy has exaggerated thought : science has 
 
WITNESS OP RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 23 
 
 deified knowledge : ethics have laid stress 
 upon right conduct. It has remained for 
 religion to claim the whole man his mind, 
 his affections, his will ; and to refuse to be 
 satisfied with any partial offering. 
 
 Here I may be challenged, and told that 
 there are religions which obviously do not 
 claim man's whole nature. It is true. Religions 
 differ in the extent of their claim upon man : 
 in some cases they only ask, as in the religion 
 of Latium, a certain ceremonial exactness in 
 the performance of religious rites. Religions, 
 moreover, differ and differ very much in their 
 relation to ethics : some insist upon moral 
 conduct : others have little or no relation with 
 ethics. I admit fully that in their demands 
 upon man's nature, religions differ widely from 
 one another. 
 
 But while this is true of different religions, 
 Religion, which shows itself in human history 
 not in one religion, but in many, Religion, 
 if we follow her history, refusing to identify 
 her with any one form of religion, Religion 
 in the long run claims the whole man. 
 
 There is a religion which prescribes a rite 
 
24 WITNESS OP RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 or ceremony and seems content with its exact 
 performance, but Religion soon appears in 
 another form and makes demand upon the 
 moral nature of man. It is interesting in this 
 matter to notice how words which at first had 
 only a ceremonial meaning at length came to 
 have a spiritual and ethical meaning. For 
 example, and here I quote from the com- 
 mentary on the Romans by Professor Sanday 
 and Dr. Headlam, the word dyios (holy) is 
 said to have developed its meaning " by a 
 process of deepening from without inward." 
 The word grew in its significance : it first 
 meant something separated or dedicated to 
 God's service ; but as what was so set apart 
 ought to be unblemished, so it came to mean 
 without spot or stain or defect. From this its 
 meaning readily passed over into the moral 
 sphere ; and as God Himself was without 
 blemish or stain, it rose in significance to 
 mean that which resembled God in its ethical 
 or spiritual purity. The history of a word 
 may thus show Religion at work gradually 
 extending her claim over the whole realm of 
 man asking first man's goods : then his acts : 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 25 
 
 then his thoughts and motives, and reaching 
 at last that supreme demand " as He which 
 has called you is Holy; so be ye holy in all 
 conversation and godliness." 
 
 Whatever may have been the defects of cer- 
 tain religions, Religion as a whole has grown 
 in her claims upon man, and does not rest 
 content till the whole man has surrendered 
 to her influence. 
 
 I know that in saying this I am putting 
 myself in opposition to the views of some 
 learned writers on the subject. Some have 
 defined Religion as being sentiment and senti- 
 ment only : others, laying stress upon doctrine, 
 have treated it as a system of dogmas : others 
 again have seen in it only a philosophy, or only 
 a ceremonial ; but the truth is that while Religion 
 enlists sentiment and requires dogmatic force 
 and rite in which to express itself, religion is 
 more than these : these are only forms of ex- 
 pression : they may belong to her, but she is 
 more than they. 
 
 Professor Tiele seems to me to be right when 
 he says : " Religion differs from other manifes- 
 tations of the human mind in this that whereas 
 
26 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 in the domain of Art, the feelings and the im- 
 agination predominate, in that of Philosophy 
 abstract thought is paramount, and the main 
 object of Science is to know accurately, whilst 
 Ethics are concerned chiefly with the emotions 
 and the fruit they yield, in Religion all these 
 factors operate alike, and if their equilibrium 
 is disturbed a morbid religious condition is 
 the result." 
 
 Religion asks the whole man : it is not con- 
 tent to accept a part for the whole. In doing 
 this it is in harmony with correct psychology, 
 which refuses to treat man as though he were an 
 assemblage of faculties without personality, and 
 which tells us that in every act man calls into 
 exercise thought, feeling, and will. The degree 
 in which these are present in any act will vary 
 with the act ; in some thought preponderates, in 
 others feeling ; and in certain others, will ; but 
 in every act these powers combine in varying 
 proportions. Similarly, Religion asks the whole 
 man, and forces upon us the truth that man is 
 not an assemblage of mechanical forces, but a 
 living, thinking, feeling, and willing entity in 
 short, that he is what we call for convenience' 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 27 
 
 sake a personality. The unit of life for man is 
 not his intellect, or his emotion, or his will, but 
 his personality. This unit the personal man, a 
 complete self-directing organism is the highest 
 and noblest thing we know in nature, and this 
 noble thing Religion claims unmaimed and un- 
 blemished ; and in doing so she contributes to 
 man's knowledge of himself. She enlists senti- 
 ment, evoking the poetry of our nature, and 
 under her influence temples are built and voices 
 of prayer and praise are heard, striving heaven- 
 ward. She claims intellect ; and though at 
 times she may have seemed hostile to thought, 
 it was, remember, her claim upon human 
 thought which gave rise to dogmas ; for dogmas 
 are the attempt to harmonize religious ex- 
 perience with the facts of life. But Religion 
 asks more : she asks the will. She claims the 
 spring-head of human action and conduct. And 
 in this broad claim she is affirming her right to 
 treat man as an entity : she will deal with him as 
 a personality, and in the growth of her claims 
 upon man she compels him to recognize his 
 possession of this great and unique gift among 
 the creatures of God viz. his personality. 
 
28 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 In making this claim, Religion works upon 
 and develops the power of man's natural 
 instincts. It is no part of religion to destroy 
 or mutilate nature : it rather acts upon man as 
 a force which fosters and fulfils man's best 
 instincts. 
 
 Let me speak of one great instinct or ten- 
 dency of human nature the instinct for self- 
 expression. So strong is this in man that I 
 am tempted to call it a necessity of our nature. 
 Life, vigorous and various, teems with energy 
 around us, and all things seem bound by the 
 necessity of self-expression. " To every seed," 
 said the Apostle, " is given its own body." 
 The seed once planted seeks to express itself, 
 to develop that body or form which is natural 
 to it. The harvest and the flower tell the tale 
 of plants which reach their perfection in self- 
 expression. 
 
 This urgent necessity shows itself early. The 
 little gestures and grimaces of the child are no 
 doubt learned by the imitation of others, but 
 soon we feel that they are due to an effort of 
 personal self-expression. Every child is in 
 some fashion or another a born " actor," as we 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 29 
 
 often say ; but this is, in truth, the attempt to 
 express self in some way. 
 
 The higher evidence of this necessity for 
 self-expression is found in Art. Art is the 
 resource of this necessity in imaginative minds. 
 Painting and sculpture and poetry attest the 
 urgency of that spirit in man which seeks for 
 self-expression. The joy and peace of the 
 home may be said to be rooted in the same 
 necessity. Children are the realization of self- 
 expression, and the contentment of home life 
 results from the happiness of a mode of self- 
 expression which lives and is the earnest of 
 a sort of continuous self-expression. It thus 
 happens that life becomes abundant and joyous 
 in a multitude of new forms, all the channels 
 open to self-expression are filled, and the world 
 teems with life and beauty and song, because 
 man has been created with this ardour, which 
 delights in expressing itself in richly varying 
 forms. 
 
 In life we first gain consciousness of self, and 
 out of this rises, when once realized, the desire 
 of self-expression. The earlier stages of life 
 train us in consciousness of self. Pain makes us 
 
30 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 conscious of self through bodily sensation : the 
 angry resentment which so often accompanies 
 pain makes us conscious of self through emo- 
 tion, which is more than a mere bodily 
 sensation : through pain we are conscious of 
 our bodily self : through emotion we are con- 
 scious of our psychical self. Through kinship 
 we become aware of our relationship with 
 others ; and in their activities the desire for 
 self-expression is through the imitative faculty 
 called into conscious power. 
 
 The spheres of self-expression, however, 
 are limited, i.e. they do not yield to 
 the spirit adequate opportunity for self- 
 expression. Whatever a man may achieve 
 in art or song, there is always a check 
 upon his ardour in the medium he em- 
 ploys. Words are not adequate to feeling 
 or aspiration. Stone and colours are not equal 
 to the rendering of the soul's great imaginings. 
 As Dante said, " La materia e sorda." The 
 medium is deaf to the artist's demands. There 
 is the picture which never will be painted : the 
 song which will never be sung because the 
 soul outstrips the earthly material, which, how- 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 31 
 
 ever skilfully used, fails to embody what the 
 spirit of the artist has seen. Here we touch 
 one of the notes of man's supreme sadness. 
 He must die before he can achieve that high 
 and great thing which he saw on the heights. 
 He cannot make anything after the pattern 
 showed him on the mount. 
 
 Religion meets us here. Religion, from one 
 point of view, is man's last and greatest effort 
 at self-expression. It is his excursion into 
 regions greater than earth : it is his yearning 
 to find means of self-expression better and 
 more enduring than words or stones. He 
 builds his temple, and decorates it with crude 
 and grotesque ornaments and adorns it with 
 garish colours and tawdry splendour ; but the 
 grotesque is symbolical. In all the materials 
 he uses he seeks to express that which is 
 above everything physical : his soul's visions 
 and dreams find expression in strange and 
 unnatural forms. He is in his religion a 
 creature still yearning for self-expression. 
 What earth cannot furnish the regions above 
 earth may yield. The self-expression which 
 he cannot find fully satisfied in art he may 
 find in religion. 
 
32 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 But though the instinct for self-expression 
 is the same whether in art or religion, there 
 is yet this difference, viz. that in art man is 
 seeking the expression of thoughts, ideas, 
 imaginings : in religion he is seeking the 
 expression of himself. He is seeking that 
 expression of self which is the greatest of all : 
 he is seeking self-realization. Life, earth, 
 time, the beauty of flowers, sea or sky, the 
 music of bird or thunder or ocean they cannot 
 yield scope enough for a being who is greater 
 than all these : he may find opportunity for partial 
 self-expression in these : for full realization of 
 self he needs more : and religion, as measured 
 from within man, is the striving for this full 
 realization of self for which earth with her 
 many voices is unequal. " The sense of the 
 infinite lies at the root of man's whole spiritual 
 life," wrote Tiele ; and we may add : The 
 desire to express himself in terms which 
 belong to the infinite explains a large num- 
 ber of the strange and bewildering things 
 which meet us in the history of religion. 
 
 We can hear this unsatisfied yearning in 
 nearly all forms of religion. " We can hear," 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 33 
 
 wrote Professor Max Miiller, " a groaning of 
 the spirit, a struggle to conceive the incon- 
 ceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing 
 for the infinite, a love of God." 1 
 
 This is that longing which we read of in 
 so many writings. It is a longing of man's 
 whole nature : it brings into its service the 
 mind, the will, the affection, and uses them 
 all. Where it employs the mind, it becomes 
 theology ; where it uses the affection, it 
 becomes psalm and hymn ; where it uses the 
 will, it becomes sacrifice and ceremony. It 
 cries out like the Psalmist athirst for the 
 living God : it refuses earth, and scorns, like 
 Lacordaire, to leave the soul in a heap of 
 dirt : it exclaims with Augustine, " Thou hast 
 made us for Thyself, and we cannot rest till 
 we rest in Thee." 
 
 It is the yearning of the whole personality 
 of man for that medium in which it can realize 
 itself in all the completeness of its nature. 
 
 Now the result of these thoughts is to show 
 us that religion works through the human 
 instinct of self-expression ; and the instinct so 
 1 Hibbert Lectures. 
 
34 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 worked upon appears to be a developing instinct. 
 From one point of view then religion might 
 be regarded as a developing instinct of human 
 nature. It is the innate and unappeasable 
 desire for self-expression moving forward and 
 seeking to realize itself in the region of the 
 spirit. It can command a measure of success 
 in the physical world, but inasmuch as man 
 is spirit as well as body, no mere material 
 medium of expression can satisfy him. The 
 same instinct which seeks self-expression in 
 things earthly, seeks it in the spiritual sphere. 
 When we think of this instinct of man seek- 
 ing to make itself felt in the spiritual world, 
 we realize that Religion may historically be 
 regarded as the story of man's effort to realize 
 himself in the realm with which his higher 
 nature has kinship. 
 
 It has been said that life transforms indi- 
 viduality into personality. We are individuals, 
 i.e. possessed of individual souls, from an early 
 period of our life, but only as we develop the 
 full consciousness of our self-hood can we be 
 said to possess personality. In the legal sense 
 man becomes a " persona" when he can 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 35 
 
 exercise the rights of citizenship, i.e. enter 
 into real and useful relationship with his fellow- 
 men. It is a sort of capacity for comradeship 
 which makes him a person. We may apply 
 the same class of ideas to the religious de- 
 velopment : it, too, leads man onwards, call- 
 ing out all his powers of thought and will 
 and affection, developing his whole nature 
 and endowing him with the sense of his own 
 personality, and so preparing him for comrade- 
 ship with the divine for that intercourse 
 between the soul and God which we call 
 personal. 
 
 I am willing to admit all the difficulties 
 which surround us when we speak of God 
 as possessed of personality. If I were speak- 
 ing the language of metaphysics or philo- 
 sophy I might hesitate to use the word ; but 
 if we take personality to mean the capacity 
 for comradeship, the right of citizenship, then 
 we may claim the right to describe the re- 
 lationship between God and the soul as one 
 subsisting between those who possess per- 
 sonality and who can enter into personal 
 relationship with one another. 
 
36 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Thus whether I look at Religion as a Force, 
 educating or training man, or ask what re- 
 lation it bears to man's instinctive desire for 
 self-expression, I am led to the same result, 
 viz. the realization of Personality. This, 
 which in one sense is the final stage in an 
 evolutionary process, is nevertheless an initial 
 stage in true religious experience for in all 
 religious experience the personality of man 
 is taken for granted. It is I as a person 
 who experienced this or that : it was my 
 emotion which was stirred, my thoughts which 
 were awakened, my will which was deter- 
 mined. It is this personality for which religion 
 has been seeking through the ages ; it is the 
 evoking of this personality into self-realization 
 which Religion through its various forms 
 crude, fantastic, erudite, philosophical, or 
 emotional has been desiring. 
 
 It is by this personality alone that I can 
 know God. 
 
 For let us consider what this Personality 
 implies : it means the possession in one or- 
 ganism of powers which are nobler than any 
 which eye or ear can discover in the universe. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 37 
 
 The Frenchman mockingly said, " I have 
 sought God in the heavens, but the sweep 
 of my telescope never discovered Him." 
 Religious feeling was offended. Had not the 
 Psalmist said, "The heavens declare the glory 
 of God " ? Yes, the heavens declare God's 
 glory, but God Himself is not known through 
 the physical universe. His glory is read in 
 the heavens by those who know Him within 
 themselves. When the poet declared that 
 the sweeping tempest, the glittering snowy 
 heights, and the loud-voiced avalanche all 
 spoke of God, he only meant that, because 
 God was within, God's footsteps could be seen 
 without. 
 
 And where after all could God reveal Him- 
 self to man except in the highest power which 
 man possesses, and that is man's personality? 
 If I mistake not, Professor Bradley allows that 
 man's personality is the only vehicle it is 
 my own word through which the knowledge 
 of God can come ; for after saying that it 
 would be, in his view, absurd to suppose that 
 religion would be ruined without the idea of 
 Personality in God, he adds that one may 
 
38 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 " maintain, in another sense, that the personality 
 of God is a necessary truth. If without that 
 belief religion remains imperfect, and if, on the 
 other hand, religion's claim must be perfectly 
 satisfied, it will follow that the above belief 
 is true, and in a sense is necessary to re- 
 ligion." We may see what value he attaches 
 to the claim of religion by recalling another 
 passage in which he says : " The main interest 
 and the genuine claim of the religious con- 
 sciousness is, to my mind, the ground on which 
 everything must be based. Whatever ideas 
 are required to satisfy the above interest and 
 claim must, I think, be true true, that is 
 really, though not absolutely. Hence it is 
 solely by an appeal to the religious conscious- 
 ness that, in my judgment, the question as to 
 God's personality must be answered." I 
 
 Thus, though in Mr. Bradley's view a 
 Person must be finite, yet for the purposes 
 and practical claims of the religious conscious- 
 ness we must accept the idea of personality 
 in God as something which brings us who 
 are personalities into living or real touch with 
 1 " Truth and Reality," p. 449. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 39 
 
 Him. It is a needful assumption that there 
 must be in God something corresponding to 
 that Personality which is the highest thing 
 we know. And if we clear our minds of the 
 philosophical environment of the word, and 
 treat it is as a word expressing the capacity 
 for citizenship or comradeship, then we may 
 use it without fear of metaphysical confusion. 
 In any case, if God is to be known at all, 
 He will be known, not in that which is lowest 
 in us, but in that which is highest, and the 
 highest we know is our personality. In that, 
 if anywhere, we may find personal comrade- 
 ship with Him. 
 
 This conclusion, which as a possibility Pro- 
 fessor Bradley accepts, is the conclusion which 
 thoughtful men of various schools have reached. 
 " His dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, 
 but in the heart of man. . . ." l " There is the 
 belief of the head and the belief of the heart. 
 And these two blend in one. As the heart 
 believes, the objects of belief gradually clear 
 and become definite to us. We no longer 
 use words merely : we feel within us that 
 1 Jowett, " Plato's ' Republic,' " iii. xxxi. 
 
40 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 they have a meaning ; but our inward ex- 
 perience becomes the rock on which we 
 stand : it is like the consciousness of our own 
 existence." I 
 
 In that which is highest in us, in that 
 the existence of which is the surest thing we 
 know, we meet with Him who is greater than 
 our hearts and knoweth all things. Some- 
 thing we meet which corresponds to our 
 Personality. We have been seeking self- 
 expression, and we realize at last that only 
 in Him can we find the fullest scope for 
 such expression. We with the great gift and 
 consciousness of our Personality cannot find 
 adequate expression of ourselves in materials 
 and media which are lower than ourselves : 
 only in Him who made us in His image, 
 only in Him who has been training us 
 through religious consciousness to the know- 
 ledge of ourselves and the satisfaction of 
 self-expression, can we really find ourselves, 
 and in finding ourself we find ourselves in 
 Him. This religious consciousness, this un- 
 explained force, is after all due to the fact 
 1 Jowett, " College Sermons," p. 21, 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 41 
 
 that He was in us, and it has led us on to 
 the discovery that we are in Him who is 
 true. In finding ourselves we find God, and 
 in finding God we find ourselves. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 WE have seen that the religious con- 
 sciousness in its development leads to 
 self-realization, i.e. to the conviction of our 
 own personality. In realizing ourselves, we 
 realize that within us there is a meeting 
 ground between us and God. In other words, 
 the development of the religious conscious- 
 ness leads to the verification of those words 
 of Christ " The Kingdom of God is within 
 you." Here is the home of religious experi- 
 ence : it is possible to meet with God in the 
 soul, though we may seek Him vainly in 
 earth or in the sky. We may find Him 
 within, and finding Him within we may 
 realize that it is only in Him that we shall 
 find full expression of ourselves. 
 
 Now is there in this inward experience any 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 43 
 
 order or law of progress ? or is the inward 
 experience merely vague and chaotic an 
 experience like that of the clouds which take 
 on ever-changing forms as wind and atmo- 
 sphere play upon them ? Can we as those 
 who may be the subjects of religious experi- 
 ence detect any general principles according 
 to which these experiences act? 
 
 We are dealing, remember, not with dead 
 material, but with souls alive, palpitating 
 with energy, possessed of individuality, and 
 living under the order of a continuous growth. 
 Is all therefore uncertain, or can we find any 
 type or pattern of the development of religious 
 progress ? 
 
 We are in the realm of personality. The 
 laws, as we call them when we speak of 
 dead material things, are not the same in 
 the realm of free personalities ; but we are 
 not in the realm of haphazard. Ideas now 
 become blended with will and choice, impulse 
 and judgment. Ideas develop into drama. 
 Can we find some outline of the drama of 
 the soul ? Has it any recurring features ? 
 
 We may indeed we must confine our- 
 
44 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 selves to Christian religious experience 
 here. 
 
 The religious consciousness which is being 
 educated by experience has shown interesting 
 features all along the line of human history ; 
 but with the advent of Christianity, religious 
 experience has developed and given to us 
 the clearest and best specimens of such 
 religious experience. At any rate, we are 
 selecting that specimen of religious experience 
 which shows the clearest marks and can be 
 investigated from the richest resources. 
 
 And here we are not without the help of 
 experienced teachers. The subject of Chris- 
 tian experience has been investigated, as we 
 all know, in the late Professor James's famous 
 book. Professor Granger, in his book en- 
 titled "The Soul of the Christian," has dealt 
 with the subject with scholarly impartiality 
 and remarkable insight, while from a more 
 external point of view the question has been 
 investigated by Professor Starbuck, who has 
 endeavoured to apply strictly scientific tests 
 to the examination of Christian experiences. 
 We cannot deem ourselves in a region of 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 45 
 
 unreality when a matter of this kind is thus 
 deliberately investigated by men of admitted 
 thought and scientific habit of mind. What, 
 then, are the results of this examination of 
 religious experience at the hands of these 
 eminent men ? As might be expected, the 
 religious experiences investigated show great 
 varieties, and I suppose it would not be untrue 
 to say that religious experiences must naturally 
 vary according to the temperaments, charac- 
 ters, and circumstances of the people con- 
 cerned. But just as the statistician who deals 
 with varieties of population is yet able to 
 indicate a certain order or law of fluctuation 
 in the story of communities, so also, amid 
 the great varieties of characters who have 
 been the subject of religious experiences, 
 there has been traced one strong and leading 
 type which attracts irresistibly the attention 
 of the investigator. It is the type which for 
 distinction's sake we may call the Pauline type. 
 It challenges our attention because St. Paul 
 stands out among early Christian teachers not 
 only as the most vigorous and remarkable 
 exponent of Christian thought, but as one 
 
46 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 whose personal experience showed in such a 
 striking manner the spiritual power which was 
 at work in the early days of the Church. 
 Indeed, it may be said that St. Paul's theo- 
 logical conceptions grew out of his spiritual 
 experiences. Beneath all his arguments there 
 is the strong undercurrent of a personal con- 
 viction which counts for a great deal more 
 than his method or system of presenting his 
 views. So strong was the influence of St. 
 Paul that it has been affirmed that the Chris- 
 tian faith as generally received was a creation 
 of St. Paul rather than an offspring of the 
 work of Christ. I do not share this view, 
 and later on I hope to deal with the sup- 
 posed discrepancy between the religious 
 experience of St. Paul and the religious 
 consciousness of our Lord. But this must 
 wait. Meanwhile the type of experience 
 which is presented to us by St. Paul is one 
 which is so common, i.e. possesses so many 
 parallels in Christian history, that it need not 
 surprise us that it has been deemed by some 
 the only type of religious experience among 
 Christian people. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 47 
 
 What, then, is the nature of this Pauline 
 type of experience ? Let us trace it in the 
 story of the Apostle. 
 
 He first appears on the scene as a man 
 who is living a self-satisfied life. He has no 
 misgivings : his conscience does not upbraid 
 him : he pursues his persecution of the Church 
 of God without any feeling of self-reproach or 
 moral doubt. He tells us, " I thought I ought 
 to do many things against the name of Jesus 
 of Nazareth." Then there came the great 
 central experience of his life with its sudden 
 sense of self-condemnation, followed by the 
 solitary struggle in those days of contempla- 
 tion in the desert of Arabia. Lastly came the 
 life of joyous consecrated service undisturbed 
 by any misgiving save the regret for those 
 years of his life before this unique experience 
 became his. Now St. Paul has explained to 
 us the nature of this experience. He tells us 
 that he lived a life of self-satisfaction. " I was 
 alive without the law once.'* He tells us that 
 this was followed by an experience of deep 
 dissatisfaction arising from the consciousness 
 that he could not fulfil the ideals of the law 
 
48 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which had left him so long undisturbed. 
 "When I would do good," he says, "evil 
 is present with me." And, lastly, he tells us 
 of the deep joy which is his as he fixes his 
 faith upon Another : " I thank God through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord." "There is no con- 
 demnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." 
 Further, he has given us in a succinct and 
 epigrammatic form his own rationale of this 
 change : "I through the law died unto the 
 law that I might live unto God. I have 
 been crucified with Christ yet I live, and yet 
 no longer I but Christ liveth in me, and that 
 life which I now live in the flesh I live in the 
 faith, the faith which is in the Son of God 
 who loved me and gave Himself up for me." 
 The case of St. Paul is the specimen case of 
 that class of experience which I have called 
 by his name, but the features of this experi- 
 ence have been repeated times without 
 number. The features are the sense of satis- 
 faction exchanged for one of dissatisfaction, 
 and this dissatisfaction exchanged for one of 
 the highest satisfaction of a changed soul. 
 These three stages turn upon a central ex- 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 49 
 
 perience ; the satisfaction of the early stage 
 is exchanged for the higher satisfaction of the 
 later stage, but is only reached through an 
 experience of deep and bitter self-dissatisfac- 
 tion. These experiences we find repeated in 
 the case of St. Augustine. His life was one 
 of worldly pleasure ; then came the period of 
 anxiety, of long search for truth, and often of 
 agony of mind, and at length he reached the 
 haven of spiritual rest. Once his cry was full 
 of pain, as of the pain of death. ". . . I 
 became more wretched, and Thou nearer," 
 were his words ; he sought to explore his 
 heart. " I entered even unto my inward self, 
 Thou being my Guide ; and able I was, for 
 Thou wert become my helper. I entered and 
 beheld with the eye of my soul . . . the Light 
 unchangeable." l But the shining of this light 
 only made clearer to him his own shortcomings 
 and the power of sin. " But when a deep 
 consideration had from the secret bottom of 
 my soul drawn together and heaped up all my 
 misery in the sight of my heart, there arose 
 a mighty storm, bringing a mighty shower of 
 
 1 "Confessions," Book vii. (x.), 16. 
 5 
 
50 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 tears. . . . To this purpose spake I much 
 unto thee. . . . Remember not our former 
 iniquities, for I felt I was held by them." r 
 Then he took up St. Paul's writings and 
 read: " Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 make not provision for the flesh. No further 
 would I read, nor needed I ; for instantly at 
 the end of this sentence, by a light as it were 
 of serenity infused into my heart, all the 
 darkness of doubt vanished." 2 
 
 These cases are witnesses of the way in 
 which what has been called the dark night of 
 the soul gives place at last to the morning. 
 The words of Molinos are true : " The soul 
 is not to be disquieted, that it sees itself 
 encompassed with darkness, because that is 
 an instrument of its greater felicity." 3 One 
 is tempted to quote the parallel thought from 
 that sad singer who perished all too young : 
 
 " The gloomy mantle of the night, 
 
 Which o'er my sinking spirit steals, 
 Will vanish with the morning light, 
 
 Which God, my East, my Sun, reveals." 
 
 1 Book viii. (xii.), 28. 2 Ibid, (xii.), 29. pp. 170, 171. 
 3 Molinos, " Golden Thoughts/' p. 48. -Bryce & Son, 
 Glasgow, 1883. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 51 
 
 Professor James and Dr. Starbuck agree 
 that the facts and phenomena seem to 
 indicate a general harmony in the experi- 
 ences. Thus Professor James summarizes 
 the experiences as generally exhibiting the 
 following cycle. He affirms that under all 
 discrepancies of creed there is a common 
 nucleus to which these experiences bear testi- 
 mony. This common nucleus consists of two 
 parts ; first, an uneasiness, followed by its 
 solution. According to Professor Starbuck 
 there are two types of the experience 
 of spiritual awakening, one arising from a 
 sense of incompleteness, the other which he 
 calls an eruptive type characterized by the 
 breaking up of evil habits. But both types 
 have much in common, both go through three 
 stages of experience, namely conviction, crisis, 
 new life. This agrees practically with Pro- 
 fessor James's two-fold division : the uneasi- 
 ness, of which Professor James speaks, corre- 
 sponds with conviction, and the word "solution" 
 employed by Professor James covers what 
 Professor Starbuck calls crisis and new life. 
 The new life, he says, is the real self. 
 
52 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Throughout the experience it is the real self 
 which is being sought. After the awakening, 
 contentment which had existed before, content- 
 ment with the lower life, is impossible, and 
 no rest is reached till the higher life is 
 accepted as the true life in which the true 
 self is found. Thus Professor Starbuck writes : 
 " The feeling of oneness (with God or Christ) 
 is the experience in which the most prominent 
 thing which presents itself at the time is the 
 sense of freedom and harmony that follows 
 the change and the consciousness that the 
 life is now the completer embodiment of the 
 larger spiritual world." 
 
 Lastly, we may notice the coincidences which 
 this law suggests with the demands which 
 the religious consciousness makes upon the 
 religions which have been presented to it. 
 Every religion seeks to satisfy man's sense 
 of dependence by the setting forth of some 
 god upon whose power or partiality or love 
 man may rely. But the demand of the 
 religious consciousness goes further, for most 
 religions recognize that man wishes to enter 
 into harmony or fellowship with the Deity. 
 
WITNESS OF BELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 53 
 
 Men even in moments of self-satisfaction feel 
 their dependence upon some Higher Power, 
 but a great change is initiated when the soul 
 which is dependent begins to long for com- 
 munion or fellowship with the Unseen Power. 
 This is the moment when, in all ethical reli- 
 gions, the sense of the discord between the 
 soul and its own ideals begins to make itself 
 felt. The idea of goodness or holiness in 
 God takes its place in experience ; and the 
 very desire for fellowship produces the sense 
 of discord and dissatisfaction. But when this 
 is overcome and the happy sense of fellow- 
 ship with the Unseen is reached then the 
 future brightens because the soul, in co-opera- 
 tion with the Higher and Unseen Power, 
 now sees its way to a life of progressive 
 power. Thus the third demand of the reli- 
 gious consciousness, viz. that for progress, is 
 met. Compare with these three the theo- 
 logical words "condemnation," "justification," 
 " sanctification." The dissatisfaction with self 
 when measured by some standard of holiness 
 the longing for fellowship and harmony 
 finds satisfaction in justification : the yearning 
 
54 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 for progress is met by the prospect of sancti- 
 fication. And again, are not these three 
 demands for dependence, fellowship, and pro- 
 gress met and satisfied in the conception of 
 the Divine Being which has been accepted 
 by Christendom ? Dependence, or the need 
 of dependence, every one feels, and that de- 
 pendence is a happy feeling when we are 
 assured that God is our Father ; but with the 
 revelation of Christ there comes the desire 
 for fellowship with God together with a deep 
 sense of how far removed we are from that 
 fellowship, for Christ is the revelation of our 
 failure as well as of our hope. But when the 
 oneness of Christ with us and ourselves with 
 Christ is realized, the way of life becomes one 
 of happy progress from glory to glory with 
 the full assurance that the Spirit of God is 
 now freely working with our spirit for 
 the fulfilment of the great Divine purpose. 
 Thus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appear 
 operating in these three stages of religious 
 experience. 
 
 It will thus be seen that Christian experi- 
 ences follow a generally harmonious order. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 55 
 
 That order is recognized by expert writers, and 
 may perhaps best be described as the stages 
 by which a happy sense of fellowship with the 
 Unseen is reached through an experience of 
 the valuelessness of any earthly satisfaction. 
 Or, to put it into Pauline form, the period 
 of satisfaction has given way to the period in 
 which the self is felt to be the foe of life, 
 and this in its turn is followed by the reali- 
 zation that life is found only outside of self. 
 We may put it in this form : selfish- 
 ness first, the discovery of the isolation in 
 which selfishness places the soul, and, lastly, 
 the discovery of the joy of the selfless life. 
 These three stages seem to mark the order 
 of the Christian experience as far as this 
 Pauline type is concerned. 
 
 Now it is perhaps not irrelevant to notice 
 that this three-fold law holds its place in other 
 departments of life than that of religion. An 
 interesting writer some years ago pointed out 
 that literature, or rather the development of 
 literary power, passed through stages analogous 
 to those which found expression in works of 
 religious experience. Though we have con- 
 
56 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 fined our attention to Christian experiences, 
 it is useful to note parallels to the cycle 
 we have described. The spiritual laws had 
 their counterpart in literature. Here, too 
 there must be self-disownment or self- 
 surrender : a justification by faith, a saving 
 doctrine of self-abandonment before true self- 
 expression could be reached. The poet, for 
 example, learns in suffering what he teaches in 
 song. Similarly, the insight of Persian thought 
 seems to have grasped the same great law 
 of life. Consecration by sacrifice created an 
 immunity from defilement. " Can the Haoma 
 that has been touched by the corpse of a 
 dead dog or the corpse of a dead man be 
 made clean again ? " Ahura Magda answered : 
 " It can, O Holy Zarathustra, if it has been 
 strained for the sacrifice : no corpse that has 
 been brought unto it makes corruption or 
 death enter into it." 1 
 
 Thus in these experiences the soul oscillates 
 between pain and peace : in it we find two 
 streams of emotion. Sometimes the stream is 
 
 1 "Zendavesta" Sacred Books of the East, Fargard, 
 vol. vi. p. 72. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 57 
 
 turbid and angry, and resembles the unquiet 
 torrent that is dashing through some rocky 
 gorge : the soul is in conflict with itself, uneasy, 
 unrestful. Thus Father John says, " I often 
 oppose God and His holy laws ; I am often 
 unbelieving, selfish, proud. I often despise 
 others; I often envy others; I am often avari- 
 cious, covetous, sensual, ambitious, impatient, 
 irritable, slothful. I do not pity those who 
 suffer. This and much more like it is my 
 daily experience." But alongside this experi- 
 ence of unrest we may meet with an experience 
 which resembles the quiet river that flows 
 with a happy murmur of contentment gently 
 between its meadow banks. " Then, }> says 
 Father John, " I am filled with Divine light 
 and joy and blessedness." Thus these two 
 experiences of great peace and great conflict 
 are characteristic of experience, or, as Father 
 John would say, " This also is experience." 
 The oscillations from the state of conflict to 
 the state of rest are found continually in the 
 story of the Saints. It is a story of a har- 
 mony sought between the soul and God ; it is 
 a harmony between two personalities ; not 
 
58 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 merely a harmony of thought nor a harmony 
 of feeling alone, but a conviction of peace 
 and concord between the personality of the 
 Christian and the Divine personality which is 
 sought. 
 
 When we analyse it we find that it is 
 only reached when the soul can get, as it 
 is expressed, out of itself: "If thou wouldst 
 enter into this heaven on earth forget every 
 care and every thought, get out of thyself 
 that the love of God may dwell in thy soul"; 1 
 so writes Molinos. And again, " By the way 
 of nothing thou must come to leave thyself 
 in God which is the last degree of perfection, 
 and happy wilt thou be if thou canst so use 
 thyself, then thou wilt get thyself gained and 
 find thyself most certainly." 2 The accom- 
 panying conception of these thoughts is 
 that all else save God is nothing ; and if 
 all else is nothing it is to be nothing to us, 
 and hence the paradox of the happiness 
 of fixing the soul's habitation in nothing : 
 " If thou settest but into the centre of 
 
 1 Molinos, "Golden Thoughts," p. 117. 
 a Page 131. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 59 
 
 nothing thou wilt never concern thyself with 
 anything without, . . . nothing will vex thee or 
 break thy peace." And all this is a spiritual 
 experience. It is within : for such souls the 
 Kingdom of God is within, and where this 
 experience is felt it is felt to be an experience 
 not of self but a Divine experience : " For 
 this Divine revelation and inward illumination 
 is that which is evident and clear of itself, 
 forcing by its own evidence and clearness 
 the well-disposed understanding to ascend 
 irresistibly, moving the same thereunto even 
 as the common principles of natural truths 
 move and incline the mind to a natural assent, 
 as that the whole is greater than its part, or 
 that two contradictory sayings cannot be 
 both true nor both false." I These experi- 
 ences, then, it is affirmed, carry their own 
 evidence. As surely as an axiom of Euclid, 
 so surely does the inward witness bring con- 
 viction to the soul. They are self-evidencing 
 experiences. 
 
 This idea of the certainty of an inward 
 witness is of course open to challenge. 
 1 Barclay, p. 4. 
 
60 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is easy to exaggerate and to mis- 
 understand it. What is the truth in this 
 matter? It is a mistake to take the witness 
 within as though it were a witness which 
 stood alone. If it is meant that a mere 
 subjective impression can carry adequate 
 authority, I doubt it. No single proposition 
 and no single authority can create certainty. 
 As a conclusion requires two premises, so a 
 conviction requires a double authority. The 
 conviction is in the soul, but the authority 
 of conviction is more than the soul. The 
 harmony sought by the soul is the harmony 
 between an earthly and a heavenly person- 
 ality ; it is in the juxtaposition of the two 
 that the soul finds the certainty. When we 
 analyse Christian experiences they will be 
 found to be not merely the presence of an 
 inward light, but the harmony between the 
 light which is within and the light which 
 is without the soul. Even such an ardent 
 quietist as Robert Barclay presupposes the 
 existence of a Divine personality coming into 
 harmony with the human personality. But 
 St. Paul's experience is the type from which 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 61 
 
 we can best learn the nature of the harmony ; 
 he described it as the harmonious and intimate 
 relation between his soul and Christ. The 
 historical Christ, the Christ who had a real 
 personal existence, had been realized by the 
 Apostle, and recognized as the One for whom 
 the seeking soul has long been waiting. The 
 Christ without became a Christ within, be- 
 cause the soul saw in the outward historical 
 Christ the spiritual counterpart of that for 
 which the soul had yearned. No satisfactory 
 harmony rests on the soul alone, nor on any 
 outward personality alone, but on the coming 
 together in the region of spiritual experi- 
 ence of the Christ without and the Christ 
 within. 
 
 There had been no spiritual Christ for 
 St. Paul unless there had been a historical 
 Christ, and there would have been no recogni- 
 tion of the historical Christ unless there had 
 been a Christ ideal within. This principle of 
 a spiritual harmony between what has an 
 external existence and that which has been 
 felt within is often stated in the New 
 Testament. St. Paul's phrase " Christ in 
 
62 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 you " I take to mean that the Christ ideal is 
 to be found in every man. His other phrase : 
 "You in Christ," describes those who have 
 recognized in the historical Christ the Christ 
 wTiom they have felt to be within them. 
 The " Christ in us " stands for great spiritual 
 aspirations, yearnings, longings, towards an 
 ideal which is recognized in the historical 
 Christ, and we are in Christ when we can 
 look at the world through the eyes of Christ. 
 When we see the world and life as Christ saw 
 it, as the field of opportunity and service, then 
 we are in Christ. We look at all things in 
 a new light : we see them in Him. The same 
 thought appears to me to be expressed in 
 those words of Christ : "He that entereth 
 in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep, 
 and the sheep hear his voice, but a stranger 
 will they not hear." The illustration seems 
 to suggest that the soul does not respond 
 to those who approach it through unnatural 
 avenues, that there is in every soul a natural 
 way of approach through the ideals which 
 are deep down in the soul of every man, 
 and this is the door through which the 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 63 
 
 Shepherd enters. Only when an appeal is 
 made to the true ideal that is, to the Christ 
 in every man does the soul respond ; but 
 when the true Christ enters appealing to that 
 ideal the soul recognizes His advent at once : 
 the sheep hear His voice. 
 
 I think we need a truer harmony between 
 our theological conceptions and the demands 
 of the religious consciousness. The mistake 
 of theologians has too often been that 
 they are satisfied to be speculative and 
 argumentative ; their theology has been out- 
 side of man's religious consciousness. We 
 do not find this in Christ. Christ always 
 appeals to the religious consciousness. He 
 seems in His Spirit to be absolutely one 
 with our consciousness, and while we often 
 find ourselves challenging the statements of 
 theological teachers, even of St. Paul himself, 
 we never find ourselves challenging the teach- 
 ing of Christ, for the reason that these teachers 
 are often theorizing outside the range of our 
 capacity for spiritual verification ; that is, they 
 are outside of our spiritual experience, while 
 Christ is always within it. " The Son of 
 
64- WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Man goes straight, as none other, to the heart 
 of our common humanity." I 
 
 The religious consciousness becomes a 
 faculty of spiritual verification. It is a 
 faculty by which we test the appeals of 
 different religions. It is not an authority within, 
 as some have thought, but it is a capacity 
 for testing and recognizing authority with- 
 out. It was the faculty to which Christ 
 appealed when He said : " Neither tell I you 
 by what authority I do these things" : or when 
 He asked the question : " Why even of your- 
 selves judge ye what is right?" Now when 
 we recognize this capacity, moral judgment 
 may be regarded as the resultant of efforts 
 to claim true self-expression, or it may from 
 the other point of view be described as an 
 unexplained force working in human history. 
 Regarding it as an unexplained force, may 
 it not be that this force is none other than 
 that of which Christian teachers have spoken 
 so often ? May we not see here the working 
 of the Spirit of God in the lives of men, 
 
 C*. 1 Sanday and Headlam, Epistle to Romans, "Inter- 
 national Critical Com.," p. 37. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 65 
 
 the witness of that power which is striving 
 to bring all things and all souls into harmony 
 with the Divine Will ? 
 
 The appeal of a voice from without is ever 
 to a capacity within. The outward force 
 of religion, which shows itself in precept, 
 prophecy, Psalm, or in some great personality, 
 is ever asking for the inward co-opera- 
 tion of the religious consciousness in man. 
 It says, Let the voice within answer the voice 
 without and all may be well. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE question has been asked whether 
 the religious experience, as expressed 
 by St. Paul, is in real harmony with the 
 thought and character of Christ. In other 
 words, can this experience justly be described 
 as Christian ? There can be no doubt that 
 the religious experience of the Pauline char- 
 acter is one which has been widely repre- 
 sented in the experiences of members of the 
 Christian Church, and unquestionably the 
 realization of Christ Himself has held the 
 highest place in these experiences. It seems, 
 therefore, almost a contradiction to suggest 
 that these experiences are not to be charac- 
 terized as Christian. And yet it has been 
 held that when we examine the religious 
 consciousness of Christ it is found to belong 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 67 
 
 to a different order from that of St. Paul. 
 The religious consciousness of St. Paul, it 
 has been said, is not that of Jesus Christ. 
 Thus Wrede writes, " Unless these two 
 figures are to be deprived of all historical 
 reality, it is obvious that the title * Jesus' 
 Disciple ' is hardly applicable to Paul if it 
 is intended to express his historical relation- 
 ship to Jesus. He is essentially in compari- 
 son with Jesus a new phenomenon, as new 
 as is possible in view of the wide standpoint 
 common to them both. He is far more 
 widely removed from Jesus than Jesus Him- 
 self is removed from the noblest forms of 
 Jewish piety. , . . We need not further 
 labour the point that the picture of Jesus' 
 life and work did not determine the character 
 of the Pauline theology." And again, " The 
 teaching of Jesus is directed entirely to the 
 individual personality. Man is to submit his 
 soul to God and to God's Will wholly and 
 without reserve. His preaching is for the 
 most part imperative in character if not in 
 form. The central point for Paul is a 
 Divine supernatural action manifested as a 
 
68 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 historical fact, or a complex of Divine actions 
 which open to mankind a salvation prepared 
 for man. He who believes these Divine acts 
 the incarnation, death, and resurrection of 
 a Divine Being can obtain salvation. This 
 view is the essential point of Paul's religion 
 and is the solid framework without which his 
 belief would collapse incontinently. Was it 
 a continuation or a further development of 
 Jesus' gospel ? Where in this theory can 
 we find the * gospel ' which Paul is said to 
 have 'understood ' ? The point which was 
 everything to Paul was nothing to Jesus." 
 
 Now I am not concerned here with the 
 question whether St. Paul had any personal 
 knowledge of Jesus Christ. This point has 
 been sufficiently dealt with by Weiss, and I 
 am disposed to believe that St. Paul intended 
 his hearers to understand that he had been 
 acquainted with our Lord in the days of 
 His flesh. This, however, is not our special 
 point. Our special point is to discover 
 whether there is such a difference in the 
 Christian theory of St. Paul and the teaching 
 of Christ as to constitute a totally new 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 69 
 
 departure on the part of St. Paul. In other 
 words, is the religious consciousness as mani- 
 fested in Christ wholly different in character 
 from that manifested in St. Paul ? 
 
 The difference in character which is so 
 positively asserted by Wrede was hinted at 
 by Matthew Arnold in an article entitled "A 
 Friend of God " which appeared in the Nine- 
 teenth Century of April 1887. Matthew 
 Arnold pointed out that the religious ex- 
 perience described in the "De Imitatione" was 
 different in character from that represented 
 in Tauler's work, " The Following of Christ. " 
 He seemed to see in the former what he 
 called the element of mythology. There was 
 no way to life and peace but the way of 
 the Cross. That was the sum of the teaching 
 of the Imitation. As far as I can understand 
 the contention of Matthew Arnold, he re- 
 garded the "De Imitatione" as having a 
 certain mythological background from which 
 " The Following of Christ " was free : Tauler's 
 work, in fact, represented the religious con- 
 sciousness of Christ, whereas the " De 
 Imitatione" represented a Pauline religious 
 
70 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 consciousness. The facts of Christ's life, as 
 we are wont to describe them His In- 
 carnation, His Death, and His Resurrection 
 were essential elements in the religious ex- 
 perience of St. Paul. They represented the 
 triumph of the supernatural over the natural. 
 These, I suppose, are what Matthew Arnold 
 meant when he spoke of mythological 
 elements. But the character of the Christ- 
 like or non - Pauline religious experience 
 assumes that religion and virtue are natural 
 and that the religious conflict is the conflict 
 for the supremacy of what is natural over 
 that which is unnatural. Our subject, there- 
 fore, is the relationship between the religious 
 consciousness of St. Paul and that of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 First, however, it will be well to comment 
 on the use of the words "natural," "unnatural," 
 and "supernatural"; for here, as so often 
 happens, confusion arises from want of some 
 clear definition of the meaning of the terms 
 used. From one point of view virtue, good- 
 ness, truth, love all the best and highest 
 things of life must be regarded as natural. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 71 
 
 They are of God, and they express what is 
 in harmony with God's creative purpose, and 
 therefore they may be described as natural. 
 On the other hand, the works of the flesh, 
 the lower side of life, constantly developing 
 into vice, may be described as natural because 
 unfortunately they appear so often as what 
 may be described as the natural tendencies 
 of men. If I say that selfishness is natural 
 to men, I mean that a great many men are 
 selfish. If I say that selfishness is unnatural, 
 I mean that it is out of harmony with the 
 true order of nature. I do not think that 
 those who held strongly the doctrine of 
 Original Sin and regarded sin as natural to 
 men intended for one moment to limit the 
 use of the word " natural " only to what was 
 vicious and bad, but merely to emphasize the 
 fact that there were strong tendencies in 
 human nature as we know it towards evil. 
 Hence we must be on our guard in reading 
 religious works against the ambiguity which 
 meets us in the word " natural." The same 
 or a similar difficulty exists in the word 
 " supernatural." From the standpoint of human 
 
72 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 experience we call that supernatural which 
 we cannot account for by known laws, but 
 from the standpoint of an ideal conception 
 of nature, as the true order of God, we can 
 regard everything, whether capable of expla- 
 nation or not, as natural, for we must presume 
 that it is in harmony with the order of 
 God. Here again in works of an apologetic 
 character we have to steer our way between 
 words often used in ambiguous senses. Per- 
 sonally, I should like to claim the word 
 "natural" for all that is highest and best 
 inasmuch as to me the order of nature and 
 the order of God are one. But I confess 
 that it is difficult to avoid ambiguity in the 
 use of the word "natural," for when we read 
 in St. Paul's teaching about the Resurrection, 
 first the natural body and then the spiritual 
 body, we feel that our translators are trying 
 to maintain a distinction between the natural 
 and the spiritual ; but if we accept the view 
 that nature expresses the order of God, then 
 the spiritual is also natural. It would help 
 us if we could employ terms which avoided 
 these ambiguities, and although I cannot 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 73 
 
 promise to avoid such, yet as far as I can 
 in what follows I shall avoid the use of 
 " natural" altogether. Certainly when I think 
 of the religious consciousness of Jesus Christ 
 as putting before us what the religious con- 
 sciousness of man in his ideal state ought to 
 be, I feel more inclined to describe it as 
 the true natural and to regard the experience 
 of St. Paul as abnormal that is to say, as 
 an experience which is a resultant of some 
 deflection from what is truly natural. But I 
 wish to avoid any words which are likely 
 to cause confusion of thought. The real 
 question before us is to determine whether 
 the religious consciousness of Christ is wholly 
 unlike the religious consciousness of St. Paul. 
 Now we may admit at the outset that 
 there are great differences between the 
 religious consciousness as we know it in the 
 story of Jesus Christ and that which is 
 expressed by St. Paul. Let us for a moment 
 picture to ourselves, as far as we can do so 
 from the scant story of the Gospels, the 
 character of Jesus Christ and the religious 
 experiences manifested in His career. If we 
 
74 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 are to find anywhere the picture of religious 
 consciousness as a power in human hearts 
 we should expect to find it in His life who 
 is admittedly the greatest religious character 
 which the world has seen. 
 
 What are the features, then, which the 
 religious consciousness of Christ discloses ? 
 First, there is an impressiveness of power 
 about Him : the power in Him is felt rather 
 than seen. Just as it is the weight of the 
 hammer-head which drives the nail home, 
 but which itself is unseen, so is there in 
 every human being a felt but unseen weight 
 of power behind their words and deeds. In 
 many this is felt to be feeble. The hammer- 
 head, in fact, is too light and much effort of 
 hand is needed to drive a nail home. Such 
 men enforce their arguments by noise or 
 volubility. In others this unseen power is 
 great ; the hammer-head is weighty and a 
 very small touch is sufficient to drive the 
 nail home. Now our first impression of 
 Christ is the weight of unseen power which 
 was His. " His word," we read, "was with 
 power. He spake with authority and not as 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 75 
 
 the Scribes." This sense of power continues. 
 He is quiet, but He can act with decisive- 
 ness and vigour ; without hurry or fluster, 
 but with unhesitating force, He cleansed the 
 Temple. There was power but no brutality. 
 This quiet force is always present, and I 
 think we may say that it was the conscious- 
 ness of this quiet strength which appealed 
 to womanhood. Mere brute force or bullying 
 strength could never have gathered around 
 it the trustfulness of the women whose lives 
 Christ influenced. But Christ was trusted by 
 women. 
 
 But again we feel that this quiet strength 
 has a moral foundation. It is rooted in 
 an invincible conviction that right rules the 
 universe. Let us for a moment recall the 
 Temptation incident. It reminds us of 
 several principles. At the outset of His 
 ministerial career Christ says once for all 
 that right and not might is the foundation 
 of power. " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord 
 thy God " : and again, " Thou shalt worship 
 the Lord thy God": are the answers, and 
 they mean that no temptation either of pride 
 
76 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 or power or benevolence must be allowed to 
 strain in the slightest degree the righteous 
 order under which we live. 
 
 Hence, all through Christ's life, absolute 
 faith in right lay behind His actions, and this, 
 I think, gave the sense of that reserve of 
 power which all felt. This, if we may so 
 speak, was the weight behind the hammer- 
 head, it was the force which compelled 
 obedience when He said with quiet con- 
 fidence and sweet graciousness to one or to 
 another, " Follow Me/' In such a character 
 there was nothing hysterical. It is quiet, 
 sane, and sanely forceful. He does not 
 strive nor cry nor cause His voice to be 
 heard in the streets. Confidence in right, 
 confidence in goodness mark His words and 
 His deeds. We can feel how fitly the words 
 of a happy philosopher suited His method 
 of life : " We wished to do good, we did not 
 wish to make a noise, because good makes 
 no noise, and noise does no good." He is 
 aloof from the agitations of the big world, 
 He has no affinity with impatient ignorance, 
 empty heads, and brazen throats, " expecting 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 77 
 
 all things in an hour." He has the strength 
 of patience because He has the strength of 
 faith ; He can leave all things to God. The 
 critical hours are within His Father's hands. 
 " Of that day and that hour knoweth no 
 man, not the angels nor the Son, but the 
 Father." He is thus the pattern of quiet and 
 patient strength, He can enjoy the sunny 
 hours of life, and He can encounter its dark 
 days. He is not carried away by success 
 nor dismayed by failure. The French 
 proverb tells us, "" If adversity finds you 
 always on your feet, prosperity will not 
 make you walk faster." The proverb de- 
 scribes the quiet dignity of self-possessed 
 human nature. Christ is never hurried out 
 of self-possession. Faith in right and in 
 goodness are always real powers in life ; and 
 faith in the righteousness and goodness of His 
 Father's rule marks His character and His 
 actions. These belong to His religious con- 
 sciousness, and these have been recognized 
 by those who from various points of view 
 have studied Christ's life and character. 
 The experimental side of Christ's religious 
 
78 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 consciousness has seldom been considered, 
 yet for our purpose this aspect of Christ's 
 character needs attention. We have heard 
 of the inner working of the spiritual experiences 
 of St. Paul, St. Augustine, John Bunyan, and 
 others. Can we find any light thrown by 
 the experience on the spiritual experiences 
 of our Lord ? 
 
 Now first we may recall that with Him 
 communion with His Father was of His very 
 life. To gain the opportunity for such 
 communion He sacrificed His hours of rest. 
 He rose up before the dawn, He sought 
 the solitary place, and there He prayed. 
 Thus the first and elementary phase of 
 religious experience, the seeking of communion 
 with God, holds a clear, definite, and constant 
 place in His life. If we may say so, the active 
 life of His benevolence was sustained by the 
 contemplative life of His constant hours of 
 spiritual communion. No adequate view of 
 His religious consciousness can be reached 
 if this habit of communion with God is 
 overlooked. More than this, we must all 
 of us have been struck by the way in which 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 79 
 
 the consciousness of this fellowship or 
 communion with God finds effortless ex- 
 pression in His life. The Christ who sought 
 His Father in prayer on the mountain-top 
 or in the desert place lived in the consciousness 
 of His Father's nearness. At unexpected 
 moments He speaks to His Father : " Father, 
 glorify Thy Name." He has only to ask 
 and He will receive. " Thinkest thou not 
 that I cannot pray to My Father and He will 
 give Me more than twelve legions of angels ? " 
 Trust in His Father is so habitual that He has 
 no will against His Father's will: "Never- 
 theless not what I will but what Thou wilt/' 
 The Gospel records are few, but is there not 
 enough in these glimpses of His habits and 
 moods to show us that His religious conscious- 
 ness led to spiritual experiences, to high faith, 
 patience, devotion, marked by quiet deliber- 
 ateness and by conspicuous unselfishness? 
 Here we have the shadowing forth of the 
 activity of Christ's religious consciousness. 
 
 It might have been thought that if anywhere 
 in the life of Christ there would have been 
 found the best, purest, and fittest pattern of 
 
80 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 spiritual experiences ; but singularly enough 
 from such a study almost all writers on religious 
 experience have shrunk. Professor James, in 
 his now standard book on the varieties of 
 religious experience, attempts no study of the 
 religious experiences of Christ. He accepted 
 the division of experiences between the once- 
 born, as he called it, and the twice-born. The 
 twice-born are those who have experiences of 
 the great spiritual cataclysm with which the 
 Epistles of St. Paul and the " Confessions of 
 St. Augustine " have made us familiar. The 
 once-born are those who, without having their 
 life cleft asunder by some great spiritual 
 upheaval, have their days bound each to each 
 by natural piety. Now this latter experience 
 Professor James would call the religion of 
 healthy-mindedness, and we may suppose that 
 if Professor James placed the religious con- 
 sciousness of Christ in any category he would 
 have classed it in that of the once- born or 
 healthy minded. This, perhaps, is what under- 
 lies Matthew Arnold's position of which we 
 have spoken. Some writers, like the author of 
 the " De Imitatione," treated religion as a 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 81 
 
 power which set aside nature. The Cross of 
 Christ, which was the way to peace, stood for 
 the victory of the soul over nature, while in 
 the case of other mystics such as Tauler, of 
 whom we have spoken, religion was the fulfil- 
 ment of nature, and there was no need of a 
 violent overthrow of nature. In such contrasts 
 we see examples of the two types of the once- 
 born and the twice-born respectively. The 
 qualities of the once-born were set forth by 
 Professor F. W. Newman, who was the original 
 author of these phrases. Thus he writes of 
 the once-born : " They have no metaphysical 
 tendencies, they do not look back into them- 
 selves, hence they are not distressed by their 
 own imperfections. Yet it would be absurd to 
 call them self-righteous, for they hardly think of 
 themselves at all. This childlike quality of 
 their nature makes the opening of religion very 
 happy to them, for they no more shrink from 
 God than a child from an empeior beicre 
 whom the parent trembles. He is to hem 
 the impersonation of kindness and bcuuty ; 
 |they read His character not in the disordered 
 ; world of man but in romantic and harmonious 
 
 7 
 
82 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 nature. Of human sin they know, perhaps, 
 little in their own hearts and not very much 
 in the world, and human suffering does 
 but melt them to tenderness. Thus when 
 they approach God no inward disturbance 
 ensues. " 
 
 Now this picture agrees more with the 
 portrait we should draw of our Lord than 
 with the portrait of St. Paul. There is the 
 quiet acquiescence in life, the absence of 
 violent inward convulsion, the joyous trust- 
 fulness, the tender sympathy with suffering 
 which we meet in the Gospels. 
 
 There is primd facie no difficulty in accept- 
 ing more than one type of experience among 
 the children of God. Differences of inherited 
 temperament, of early training, of contem- 
 porary habits of thought may very well result 
 in different characteristics of religious experi- 
 ence : and ultimately it may be found that 
 varieties of experience are to be accounted 
 for by varieties which correspond to differ- 
 ences of soil and climate and methods of 
 husbandry. But the question assumes a 
 different character when it is affirmed that 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 83 
 
 the picture of Jesus' life and work did not 
 determine the character of Pauline theology, 
 and that St. Paul is essentially, in comparison 
 with Jesus, a new phenomenon far more widely 
 "removed from Jesus than Jesus Himself 
 is removed from the noblest forms of Jewish 
 piety." To affirm such a difference as this 
 is to remove St. Paul out of the family of 
 those who share the character of Christ. It is 
 not a question of different types of the same 
 plant; it is a question of a wholly different 
 plant. We recognize in Christ a religious 
 consciousness which is beautiful and attractive 
 in its calmness. It hardly knows storm, it 
 accepts and lives in living fellowship with 
 God. It has no revolutionary experience 
 like that of St. Paul. Is there then no 
 family likeness between the experience of 
 our Lord and that of the Apostle ? 
 
 Let us be careful to understand what we 
 mean by a family likeness in this case. The 
 religious life, so far as experience goes, consists 
 in bringing the human will into harmony with 
 the Divine. Whatever mysteries may surround 
 the questions of free-will, fate, and foreknow- 
 
84 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ledge, there is none in the need of this final 
 harmony between the Will of God and the 
 will of man. 
 
 Our wills are ours we know not how : 
 Our wills are ours to make them Thine. 
 
 Now this bringing of the will into harmony 
 with God is of the very essence of our Lord's 
 teaching. The disciple whose character will 
 prove itself unshaken by storms is the 
 character formed by the man who does the 
 will of the Father who is in heaven. Simi- 
 larly, the spirit of such a man's prayer will 
 always be that the Will of God may be 
 paramount and victorious even over his 
 own will. " Thy Will be done on earth, 
 as it is in heaven." More than this, 
 according to the Fourth Gospel, Christ 
 taught that this readiness to bring the will 
 into harmony with God's Will was the secret 
 of the illumination of the soul by larger 
 truth. " He that willeth to do the Will of 
 God shall know of the doctrine whether it 
 be of God." Further, and this brings us 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 85 
 
 nearer to our point, it is the doing of the 
 Father's Will which constitutes the family 
 bond of the Divine family on earth. " He 
 that doeth the Will of My Father the same 
 is My brother and sister and mother." It 
 is thus the surrender of the free human will 
 to the law and purpose of God which marks 
 the step which translates the child of earth 
 into the family of God. 
 
 Now there is a great difference, as we may 
 admit, between a life of quiet growth in 
 piety and a life which has known a great 
 spiritual upheaval. But whatever be the 
 incidental differences, every spiritual life must 
 be alike in this, that it is the life of sur- 
 rendered will. So Christ taught, and so every 
 Christian saint would acknowledge : and 
 did not Jesus Christ also live the life of 
 surrendered will ? He was no teacher who 
 did not also live the life He pressed upon 
 others. He lived according to God's Will. 
 He witnesses to this by His deeds as clearly 
 as He teaches it by His words. He found 
 it, He tells us, to be the very invigoration 
 of His soul that He could do God's Will. 
 
86 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 " My meat and drink is to do the Will of 
 
 Him that sent Me. I seek not Mine own 
 
 will but the will of Him that sent Me." 
 
 And in the last hour of the power of darkness, 
 
 when the cup was put to His lips, " Let 
 
 this cup pass from Me. Nevertheless not as 
 
 I will but as Thou wilt." Christ lived the 
 
 life of the surrendered will. He grew as 
 
 man from stage to stage : slowly in His 
 
 case as in ours the consciousness of growing 
 
 power was His. As life moved it disclosed 
 
 gradually the forces which are placed at 
 
 men's disposal thought, memory, affection, 
 
 will. And the will was to Christ the pivot 
 
 of the life. The will was the sacred gift to 
 
 man ; the one thing which determined life 
 
 and character ; the sacred thing which God 
 
 Himself does not coerce ; the sacred thing 
 
 which, because it is free, becomes the one 
 
 thing whose offering is sweet to God. And 
 
 when Christ came to man's estate He made 
 
 that great and sacred offering of His Will 
 
 to God. 
 
 A veil hangs over the story, for there are 
 precincts into which we are not admitted. 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 87 
 
 Every man's soul is a holy of holies into 
 which one alone can enter. But without 
 wishing to lift the veil which hangs over this 
 part of Christ's life, may we not must we 
 not infer from what is recorded that this 
 surrender of self on the part of Christ to 
 His Father was a surrender made intelli- 
 gently, deliberately, heartily? Is not the 
 story of the Temptation the parable of this 
 willing and conscious surrender? It was no 
 otiose offering which our Lord made to His 
 Father : it was the offering of the will, and 
 it was the will in the offering which made it 
 sweet and acceptable to God. So the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews wishes us to 
 believe. He seeks to draw our thoughts away 
 from the material or physical conditions of 
 sacrifice. He fixes our minds upon what 
 was spiritual : " Sacrifice and offering Thou 
 wouldest not. Then said I, * Lo, I come to do 
 Thy Will, O God,' by the which Will we 
 are sanctified through the offering of the 
 Body of Jesus Christ once for all." 
 
 We can mark the crisis in the life of our 
 Lord when this great resolve took final shape. 
 
$8 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 It came at the time of the Temptation, when 
 there spread before Him temptations to win 
 in life by means outside His Father's way 
 and will. The Temptation story, however 
 figurative we may regard it to be, does imply 
 the temptation to act outside the general order 
 of the Father's rule. Briefly, the three tempta- 
 tions are the affirmations of the three great 
 principles of human life the spirituality of 
 man, the sanctity of nature, and the supremacy 
 of moral order. The spirituality of man is 
 expressed in the words, " Man doth not live 
 by bread alone." The sanctity of nature is 
 expressed in the reply : " Thou shalt not tempt 
 the Lord thy God " ; that is, to act as though 
 the laws of nature were to be set aside was 
 to act as one who tempted and disregarded 
 the Divine Will as expressed in natural laws. 
 " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God," ex- 
 pressed the supremacy of the moral order : 
 even to win what His benevolence desired, 
 the power to rule the world in goodness and 
 truth, the moral order must not be strained ; 
 evil must never be done that good may come. 
 " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 89 
 
 Him only shalt thou serve," is the affirmation 
 of the supremacy of the moral order. And 
 these three pictures of temptation all imply 
 the surrender of the will to the Father. He 
 must follow the Father's Will at the cost of 
 bodily suffering, at the cost of quiet obedi- 
 ence to natural law, at the cost of postponing 
 the realization of noble desires. The Tempta- 
 tion, as it seems to me, expresses in vivid and 
 pictorial form that conflict of self-surrender in 
 which the Divine Will is accepted as victorious 
 and for ever the guidance of the human will. 
 We may paint the life of Christ in soft, low 
 tints if we will, but we may take the mascu- 
 linity out of it by doing so. His life was 
 made of days which blended harmoniously 
 together, but if He shared, as we have been 
 taught that He did, our manhood He knew 
 something of those inner resolves in which 
 the devil seems to claim that which belongs 
 to God. If there was no cataclysm in His 
 life there was the temptation hour, the crisis 
 moment when His great mission claimed the 
 surrender of His will and when His great 
 resolve took on its last and its glorious form. 
 
90 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Thus the one indispensable experience of the 
 religious consciousness the surrender of will 
 which leads to harmony belonged to the life 
 of Christ. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 WE have seen that the fundamental 
 principle the surrender of will finds 
 its place in our Lord's experience ; but even 
 when we realize this we feel that there is a 
 difference between the Pauline experience and 
 that of our Lord. It now becomes our duty 
 to ask what are the features which constitute 
 this difference. We should, perhaps, best 
 answer this question by first asking another. 
 What is it that the man of Pauline type seeks 
 through the cataclysmic experiences we have 
 spoken of? It is emancipation from the 
 thraldom of self. Primarily it is harmony 
 with the Divine order which is sought, but 
 to achieve this he must be set free from the 
 thraldom of self. The cataclysm, as we have 
 called it, is a process of unselfing ; but what 
 
 01 
 
92 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 constitutes the difficulty in this process? It 
 is the sense of the domination of self in some 
 form or another. From the ideal or Divine 
 standpoint this thraldom of self by self is 
 contrary to the true order of life. The true 
 order of life is service, unselfish service. 
 " None of us liveth to himself." " I am among 
 you as one that doth serve," said Christ. 
 Sin is energy thrown outside the true orbit 
 of life. Sin is the symptom that the life is 
 self-centred, not God-centred. Whatever the 
 specific act of sin may be, its essence is 
 the spirit of self-centredness. St. Paul felt 
 the pressure and pain of this spirit : " I 
 find that when I would do good evil is 
 present with me.'* The act might be 
 good and praiseworthy, but a subtle selfish- 
 ness of aim or purpose might vitiate its 
 spiritual validity. The heart of the action 
 was not rio'ht. There was no flawless act 
 
 o 
 
 except an act that proceeded from pure and 
 unfeigned love, for love worketh no ill to his 
 neighbour. The consciousness of sin is not 
 so much the remembrance of sinful acts but 
 the consciousness of the unworthy spirit which 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 93 
 
 those acts display the consciousness of the 
 thoughtless and cruel selfishness of which the 
 act was the evidence. 
 
 The surrender of self is the indispensable 
 factor in the spiritual life. Without it there 
 is no happy harmony for the soul. But this 
 surrender may be the high, loyal, and flaw- 
 less offering of the soul, or it may be a sur- 
 render only slowly and painfully accomplished 
 after many ineffectual efforts. It may be a 
 glorious act, the memory of which is a per- 
 petual joy, or it may be a prolonged struggle 
 in which the reluctant soul finds that self has 
 often played the traitor. It may be the clean 
 and clear offering of the unblemished heart 
 and the undamaged will, or it may be the 
 offering of that which is torn and maimed, 
 the extorted offering of the slavish soul, the 
 offering of fear, not of love, not the offering 
 of a free heart. But till the offering is a 
 free-will offering there is no complete and 
 acceptable surrender; something, and that 
 the most precious thing of all, is kept back ; 
 it is not whole-hearted. To translate this 
 into the language of Christian experience, sin 
 
94 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 hangs round all these efforts : the conscious- 
 ness of an uncleanness of soul is felt and 
 keenly felt because there is uncleanness of 
 soul wherever the offering is not that of the 
 loyal, loving free-will. This gives the poig- 
 nancy to the cry of the struggling heart : it 
 is the sense of spiritual impotence : " I cannot 
 do the thing that I would." 
 
 The struggle to accomplish the great sur- 
 render is accompanied in such cases by a 
 self-revelation which often points the way to 
 despair. Now there is no trace of this kind 
 of experience in the case of Christ. His great 
 surrender is unsullied by any such Marsyan 
 robe of selfishness. His is the offering of a 
 sinless and ready will. There is nowhere in 
 the story of Christ the expression of the con- 
 sciousness of sin. His pure, unblemished spirit 
 offers itself freely to His Father ; He moves 
 forward as He grows into the higher planes 
 of experience, without misgiving or remorse ; 
 He encounters the crisis of life and takes 
 possession of His completed powers by an 
 act of consecration, for such, we take it, was 
 the Temptation. No ghosts of lost oppor- 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 95 
 
 tunities or of hideous mistakes or of crude 
 selfishness enter into His experiences ; no 
 reluctance, no reserves spoil the beauty and 
 completeness of His surrender. His is the 
 offering as of a lamb without blemish and 
 without spot. In the surrender of the will 
 lies the common ground between the ex- 
 perience of Christ and that of St. Paul, 
 indeed of all Christian men. In the dis- 
 closure of the hold which the self has upon 
 the soul is to be found that which differen- 
 tiates the experience of St. Paul from that 
 of his Master. The experiences belong to the 
 same family, but the experience of the one is 
 the experience of the unspoilt and loyal son : 
 the experience of the other is that of the 
 prodigal who has been into the far country 
 and wasted his substance. It is the experi- 
 ence of the soul which finds at the moment 
 when it would fain bring to God the offering 
 of a clean, pure, and loving spirit that all it 
 has to offer is a stained, half-hearted, sin- 
 laden, and sin-loving spirit. For such there 
 remains only one offering. The free heart 
 is impossible : it can but hope that a broken 
 
96 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 and contrite spirit will not be despised. What 
 Christ attained naturally and by a stainless 
 consecration, St. Paul could only reach by 
 conflict and humiliating experience. 
 
 The characteristic of the religious conscious- 
 ness of Christ is this : it was a consciousness 
 of the nearness and certainty of God's pres- 
 ence. He lived in the presence of God, not 
 as those saints who seem to reach the vision 
 of God in moments of ecstasy, not as Dante 
 seeing a glimpse of the Divine but turning 
 faint through excess of lioht, but as one to 
 
 O O ' 
 
 whom the presence of God was as natural as 
 the air he breathed so natural, indeed, that 
 His wonder ever was at man's unbelief. He 
 was as one who saw clearly among men who 
 were blind or who at best only saw men as 
 trees walking. 
 
 There is a difference deep and clear between 
 the religious consciousness of St. Paul and 
 that of Jesus Christ, but it is a difference 
 not in the principle of operation but in the 
 subjects of its operation. The principle to 
 which religious consciousness bears witness, 
 and which it insists upon in settling any 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 97 
 
 operation, is harmony with the Divine through 
 self-surrender. This is seen as clearly in 
 the case of our Lord as in that of His 
 Apostle. 
 
 The differences are to be found in dif- 
 ferences of personal character : the law, so 
 to speak, is the same in both cases. The 
 materials upon which the law works are 
 different and, in consequence, different con- 
 ditions are set up, but these different con- 
 ditions do not invalidate the law which is 
 operative in both cases. A steamer which 
 can attain a certain speed in deep water 
 finds that it cannot reach the same speed 
 when its course is in shallow water. The 
 soldier must give a greater elevation to his 
 rifle when the weather is cold than when it 
 is ho and when the barometer falls one 
 inch he must deduct one and a half per cent, 
 off his range. There is in these variations 
 no change in the law of dynamics. These 
 only represent what is due to variation of con- 
 ditions. The vibrations which an earthquake 
 generates travel much more rapidly through 
 the solid, steel-like centre of the earth than 
 
 8 
 
98 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 they do around its comparatively loose and 
 broken surface. Where the medium is close, 
 compact, and coherent the transmission is 
 rapid. The earthquake is the same, the 
 force at work is the same, but the con- 
 ditions of transmission in the one case are 
 favourable, in the other unfavourable. In 
 the one case the message is prompt, in the 
 other it is dilatory. If the subject of the 
 religious consciousness be a compact, coherent 
 being, the response will be rapid, clear, and 
 unhesitating ; if the subject be deficient in 
 self-unity, at war with itself, then in pro- 
 portion to its incoherency will be difficulty 
 and delay in response. 
 
 It is, perhaps, the final truth on this matter 
 to say that the way in which the religious 
 consciousness expresses itself must vary with 
 the temperaments and characters of those who 
 are its subjects. In some the expression will 
 be stormy and prolonged, in others gentle and 
 quiet. Some reach the sense of harmony after 
 the clash of self-conflict, others reach it with 
 the same insensible stages with which the 
 seasons succeed one another. But there are 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 99 
 
 none in which the self-surrender is not the 
 end towards which the religious consciousness 
 tends. In the case of Christ the self-surrender 
 was never a strange or a hard thing, to Him 
 it was the inevitable meaning of life : but in 
 cases where life has been in any way self- 
 centred the change to a love-centred life must 
 be a revolution whether that change comes 
 swiftly or slowly, with noise or insensibly as 
 the lengthening days of summer. In the case 
 of Christ there was resolution but no revolu- 
 tion, the resolve of self-surrender for His 
 mission, but no revolution, for His life never 
 had but one surrender, it was love-centred 
 from the beginning. Herein lies, as I think, 
 the difference between His religious conscious- 
 ness and that of St. Paul and others of his 
 type. It is not a difference in the fundamental 
 principle of spiritual harmony, though it is an 
 evidence of the uniqueness of Christ's character. 
 He stands so near to God that He is outside 
 the region of those storm-centres which sin, 
 self-reproach, remorse, and rooted selfishness 
 occasion in others. In other words, He is 
 an example, an ideal, of glorious self-surrender, 
 
100 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 a pattern after which all may strive, but He 
 is not a type whose counterpart can be found 
 in any human being. That He did not 
 experience the dark hours of spiritual remorse 
 was due to the fact that His loyalty of heart 
 left no room for regret or repentance. His 
 religious consciousness was the consciousness 
 of a single purpose always in harmony with 
 the Divine Will. He delighted to do God's 
 Will, His law was written in His heart. Pre- 
 cisely because such a harmony of heart and 
 life was the desire but unattainable goal of 
 St. Paul he experienced pain of soul like that 
 of a bird baffled by the weakness of a wounded 
 wing. 
 
 So far, then, as divergence of spiritual 
 experiences go, the religious consciousness of 
 Christ gives us the normal experience of the 
 unspoilt soul and is based on the essential 
 principle of self-surrender, the only principle 
 by which the higher harmony of life is reached. 
 But the experiences of St. Paul are the sadder 
 and darker experiences of a soul which, having 
 fallen below the ideal, meets the inevitable 
 difficulties which wait upon those who have 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS. EXPERIENCE 101 
 
 to retrace their steps with bitter tears upon 
 the road of life. 
 
 But we have not exhausted the significance 
 of the relationship between the experiences 
 of Christ and those of His Apostle when we 
 have noted their identity in principle and 
 their difference in form. According to the 
 view of St. Paul, Christ gives us the norm of 
 human character and action. He is the ideal 
 for humanity, but He is more. His life is a 
 spiritual symbol to the awakened spirit, the 
 facts of Christ's life convey a meaning deeper 
 than the surface : they indicate the great 
 spiritual law of life. Our Lord always pressed 
 upon men's thoughts the inward aspect of 
 things ; outward signs He repudiated. The 
 only valid condition of true human life was to 
 be found within. The Kingdom of God was 
 within ; the heart was the measure of life, 
 genuineness of nature, a single eye, was the 
 condition of vision ; and as He insisted on 
 this inwardness so also were the facts of His 
 life taken as having a message for the inner 
 life of man. That life of Christ, with its 
 unwearied kindliness, its loneliness, its suffer- 
 
102 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ing, the death upon the Cross, followed by 
 the rising again into life, became not merely 
 pathetic historical facts but great spiritual 
 symbols : they furnished the silver thread to 
 guide men through the labyrinth of life. 
 The Christ who had lived and died was a 
 Christ who must be realized in the life of 
 discipleship ; the claim of St. Paul and it is 
 a claim reiterated in the experience of thou- 
 sands is that He who was seen in flesh long 
 ago is a living Christ, a Christ alive in the 
 souls of men. 
 
 What the struggling soul seeks is, as we 
 have seen, harmony. The Christ of history 
 set before men the highest reality of life, 
 the perfect manifestation of harmony with 
 the Divine ; the soul of the disciple craves 
 for that harmony so that it too may reach 
 the highest reality and truest expression of 
 life. The Christ of history is a glorious in- 
 heritance to the sons of men, but it is not 
 enough for the soul. The ideal once real- 
 ized must be always realized. Christ must 
 not only be real in history, He must be real 
 in experience. To put this in another form, 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 103 
 
 beside the Christ outside us, the historic 
 Christ, there is a hidden Christ, a Christ 
 who is a fact of personal spiritual conscious- 
 ness. He who was real in history has 
 become real in the inner experience. ' St. 
 Paul not only spoke of the outline of his- 
 torical facts namely, that Christ died for our 
 sins, that He was buried, and that He had 
 been raised again, that He appeared to 
 Kephas and to others, but he also spoke of 
 a Christ to be formed in the soul, of a soul 
 who was our life, of a Christ in us and a 
 Christ who lived in us. The peace of the soul 
 that is, the sense of harmony depended 
 on the realization of the inward Christ on 
 the part of those who doubtless had first 
 been attracted by the outward Christ. This 
 seems to me to be the method of the verification 
 of faith to the soul of the Apostle. The outward 
 or historic Christ was a concrete fact, but it 
 remained a barren fact till it became related to 
 a spiritual law or principle. The realization of 
 this principle comes with the consciousness of 
 the inward Christ : " Christ in you the hope 
 of glory." Thus there come together two con- 
 
104 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 verging lines, one from the realm of fact, the 
 other from that of experience. These uniting 
 make the syllogism of the soul. Another 
 Apostle speaks in the same fashion. The 
 historic Christ of flesh and blood was the 
 concrete fact, "that which we have seen with 
 our eyes and our hands have handled " ; but 
 there was the inner witness also, "the Spirit 
 which beareth witness with our spirit." It is 
 a duality of proof, outward and inward, which 
 brings conviction and secures verification. The 
 historic Christ and the indwelling Christ make 
 the verifying Christ to the soul. This has 
 been the continuous view of the Church of 
 Christ. The incidents of His life demand a 
 spiritual counterpart in the disciple's life. Is 
 Christ born? we must be regenerated and 
 renewed of the Holy Spirit. Does He die ? 
 we must die to sin. Does He rise ? we must 
 rise in newness of life. Does He ascend ? we 
 must in heart and mind to heaven ascend and 
 with Him continually dwell. Thus the historic 
 facts are not left as barren incidents, they are 
 living powers, they express eternal principles 
 of spiritual growth. It has been said that 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 105 
 
 certain mythological notions were introduced 
 into Christianity by St. Paul. I am not careful 
 to claim for St. Paul immunity from the 
 influence of crude ideas, provincial notions, 
 contemporaneous methods of argument. But 
 making allowance for all these, the broad fact 
 remains that he treated the incidents of Christ's 
 life as the witness to great eternal principles 
 of continuous application. He set out his 
 reasoning often on forensic lines. His line of 
 argument was sometimes that of a lawyer, but 
 when he spoke out of the fullness of his heart 
 he told us of the transfigured life which he 
 knew, of the Christ who loved him and lived in 
 him ; and the central thought of his heart was 
 this, that no man lived truly till he had died to 
 himself. He taught the truth of which Goethe 
 sang 
 
 Till this truth thou knowest, die to live again, 
 Stranger-like thou goest in a world of pain. 
 
 And in this he was at one with Him who said, 
 " He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he 
 that loseth his life shall find it." 
 
 Lastly, we are met by a difficulty which is 
 
106 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 a philosophical one. It has been said that 
 historical foundations are inadequate to estab- 
 lish eternal principles. Historical incidents 
 come and go : there is no necessary eternity 
 about them. We may admit it, and yet surely 
 we may plead that a historic incident may 
 have a lasting representative character. The 
 fall of Newton's apple was only incidental, 
 but to the man that had eyes to see it repre- 
 sented an eternal law. One fact may have 
 an eternal significance, and if that one fact 
 is seen to be repeated in typical or represen- 
 tative form, then the very continuousness thus 
 seen becomes a witness of the lasting signi- 
 ficance of the original incident. And thus 
 it is that, as we have seen, the historical facts 
 of Christ's life have been viewed by the 
 Church as significant of eternal truths. But 
 this if it had only been a theological theory 
 would still have had little validity, unless 
 it had been verified in continuous spiritual 
 experience. And this surely has been the 
 case. Time would fail us to bring evidence 
 of this, but we have only to read in the most 
 superficial way the Hymns of Christendom, 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 107 
 
 the confessions of Saints, the records of 
 spiritual struggle, to know that the simple 
 historic facts of Christ's life have become 
 incorporated into Christian experience and 
 afford the best description of the nature of 
 those experiences. There may not be in 
 these facts evidence or proof as understood 
 by science, but there is unquestionably an 
 evidence which carries weight to the en- 
 lightened and illuminated soul. The historic 
 Christ coming as the spiritual Christ brings 
 His own authentication to the souls of men. 
 I am ready to admit that in the history of 
 Christendom there has been a tendency to 
 externalize these principles and to speak 
 as though salvation came to the man who 
 rests only on the belief in certain historic 
 facts or theological propositions ; but this is 
 foreign to the primitive Christian spiritual 
 realization. But wherever there has been 
 spiritual life in the Church there the great 
 teachers have sought, if I may use Professor 
 Green's words, " to bring their people to 
 enact in their own hearts and lives the 
 work which the creeds rehearse, so to affect 
 
108 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 them as that they shall die and rise again 
 with Christ." Where such an experience 
 exists there is no need to trouble oneself 
 about the minutiae of evidences or to be over 
 anxious to lift the cloud which hangs over 
 historical sources : the light which comes to 
 the soul floods the whole being and flings 
 a thousand petty controversies into insigni- 
 ficance. The Divine voice has spoken to 
 the soul : the Divine presence is seen : 
 
 Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit with 
 
 spirit can meet; 
 Closer is He than breath, and nearer than the handi 
 
 and feet. 
 
 They need not that any should witness, for 
 they have the witness within. 
 
 Here we return to the great principle with 
 which we started, the witness within, the 
 fact of the witness of experience. 
 
 And so we close with that which has been 
 for religious minds the last and culminating 
 appeal the appeal not to the outward, 
 neither to heaven nor to earth, but the 
 appeal to the living sensibilities of the soul; 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 109 
 
 and the answer, I think, will always be 
 Only in the Cross can the highest life be 
 found : only in the Cross do you truly live : 
 only in Him do you find your fullest self- 
 expression ; the self which you surrendered 
 is restored to you in Him. 
 
 One other aspect of the significance of 
 this religious experience should be noted, 
 for it gives a completeness to the drama of 
 the soul. 
 
 The entering into this harmony is through 
 conflict, but this conflict is the overcoming 
 of the self. If we inquire, for instance, of 
 Dr. Star buck, who made what we may 
 describe as a scientific examination of religious 
 experiences, he tells us that this religious 
 experience is "a process of unselfing"; he 
 quotes examples from the records which he 
 possesses which indicate that this unselfing 
 process is practical. " I began," says one, 
 " to work for others." Another writes, " I 
 had more tender feeling towards my family 
 and friends." Or again, " I felt everybody 
 to be my friend." " It is clear," says the 
 Professor, "that in a large per cent, of 
 
110 WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 cases the immediate result of conversion 
 is to call the person out from himself into 
 active sympathy with the world outside." 
 Again he describes it in these words: "The 
 central fact underlying both is the formation 
 of a new ego." Does not this exactly corre- 
 spond with the Apostle's declaration: "I 
 live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me " ? The 
 Apostle realizes the fact of this new ego ; 
 the conflict therefore ends in the unselfing 
 process ; the old self, or the old Adam, as 
 St. Paul would call it, has passed away ; the 
 soul has learnt what it is to become a new 
 creature. But this experience, which is the 
 suppression of self, is, from another point of 
 view, the realization of self. If man was 
 made in the image of God, if the self-centred 
 life is utterly out of harmony with the God- 
 like life, then the man who steps from the 
 self-centred life into the love-centred life 
 steps into his true life. The unselfing is 
 not the annihilation of self, but the realization 
 of the true self. We can understand in the 
 light of this fact the reverence and affection 
 for the Cross of Christ which is so universal 
 
WITNESS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 111 
 
 in Christendom. It is not the Cross asso- 
 ciated with tragic remembrances, but it is 
 the Cross illuminated by the sense of the 
 victorious regaining of the true humanity, 
 the restoration of the love-centre to the 
 universe, the symbol of the restoration of 
 the love-centre to every human being in 
 God's world. 
 
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