THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES SELECTIONS FROM BRIERLEY SELECTIONS FROM BRIERLEY ("J. B." OF "THE CHRISTIAN WORLD") BOSTON: THE PILGRIM PRESS LONDON : JAMES CLARKE & CO 1914 CONTENTS VITAL QUESTIONS Our Doctrine of God— Incarnation— What is Man ? — Christianity the Eternal Rehgion— What is Sin ?— Salvation — Unworldliness — The Sacred and the Secular— What is Life?— What is Death?— What is Eternity? PP- 11—32 THE INNER LIFE Religious Experience — Prayer — The Progress of the Soul — Religious Temperaments — ^The Inner Disciphne — Beneath the Surface — Man's Relation to God — On Divine Leading— The Truest Rest— The Athletics of the Soul — The Upward Way — Special Providences — On the Sick Bed— The Atmosphere of the Soul- Vicarious Consecration — ^The Inner Secret— The Inner Factor pp. 35—66 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE True Liberty — The Reformation of Character — True Wealth — The True Society — The Church as a Social Force — The EngUsh Sunday — The Social Pressure— True Social Intercourse — The Problem of the City — ^The Church and the Criminal — Unworldly Men pp. 69—87 1 7;^22QA CONTENTS THOUGHTS ON LIFE Life's Appeal — Life's Products — Life as an Accumulator — Life as a Mixture — ^The Art of Letting-go — ^The Commonplace — Adjustments — Elect Spots — Events as Teachers — ^The Present and the Past — ^The Philo- sophy of Lowliness — Reaching the Goal — Possessing Ourselves — Negative Blessings — " Narrowness " and " Breadth " — ^The Art of Keeping Young — After Middle Age — Looking Backward — Life's Retrospect pp. 91 — 126 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS The Ultimate Standard — The Morally Undefined — Character and Reputation — A New Doctrine of Equality — Money and Rehgion — Conscience — Doctrine versus Life — A New Warfare — The Ethic of the Intellect — Progress by Self-repression — ^The Supre- macy of Personality — The Philosophy of the Incomplete — Good versus Good . pp. 129 — 150 THE GOSPEL OF HAPPINESS The World's Happiness — The Joy of Living — ^The Discipline of Joy — The Pleasures of Anticipation — Enjoyment as a Virtue — Religion and Humour — Religion and Amuse- ment — Sunshine in the Soul — Friendship — ^The Ethic of Fatigue — Holidays . . . pp. 153 — 173 LIFE'S MYSTERIES Religion and Mystery — The Tragic in Life — Religion and Catastrophe — Is God Indifferent ? — The Mystery of the Gospel — In Praise of Darkness — The Meaning of SoUtude — Society and Solitude — The World Invisible — The Doctrine of Pause — Personal Survivals — Illusion as a Training Force .... pp. 177 — 198 vi CONTENTS SPIRITUAL SIDELIGHTS What is it to be Spiritual ? — ^The Note of the Spiritual — The Spiritual Sense — Spiritual Amalgams — Can we repeat Pentecost? — ^The Christ of To-day — Spiritual Gain and Loss — A New Incarnation of Christ — Moral and Spiritual Spring Cleaning — Spiritual Emancipation — Moral Superiorities — Idle Piety — Faith as a Force — Religion : Pubhc and Private — Spiritual Under- currents — Lay Religion — Leading and Following pp. 201 — 230 RELIGION AND LIFE The Rehgion of Experience — The Supreme Human Achieve- ment — ^The Coming Unity — Religion and the Child — • Nature's Penalties — Self-Acceptance — Not Debt but Grace — ^The Surprise Faculty — Woman's Influence in ReUgion — Pulpit Silences — New Testament Religion — The Appeal to Fear . . ' PP- 233 — 254 SCIENCE, ART AND RELIGION Science and the Creeds — Science as Interpreter of Christ — Medicine and Rehgion — ^The Message of the Stars — Heredity and Character — Nature as Preacher — Our Inheritance in the Invisible — Religion and Art — Recognition of the Beautiful . . pp. 257 — 275 Vll VITAL QUESTIONS VITAL QUESTIONS OUR DOCTRINE OF GOD Were there no man there would be no God. The statement may seem startHng enough, but it is really, on this theme, the first thing we have to learn. Do not let it be misunderstood. The Ineffable Reality that is in and behind the Visible has been there from all eter- nity. But God, to us as human beings, is just as much as we know and can conceive of that Reality. Our manhood is our measure of Godhead. Man's incessant cry has been for Divine revelation. In ruder times he wanted it hot and hot, a vision in flaming heavens, or signs and wonders on the earth. Later, the aspiration, unanswered, apparently, has turned to a tormenting doubt. It has been his astonishment and despair that the heavens " make no disclosure And the earth keeps up her terrible composure." But in this despair man is forgetting one thing. It is that there is Divine revelation, actually and inces- santly going on, and that he is the organ of it. His own voice has in it the accent of eternity, and the more according to his height of soul. When we speak of God as Father — the great word of Jesus concerning Him — we come to the element of personality. It is indeed along all the sides of our II Selections from Brierley personality that we touch God and are made conscious of His presence. The intellect is our poorest proof of Him. It is when we love, suffer, labour, serve, forgive, that we are surest of God. When we say that without man there were, for us, no God, we are simply putting in another way the formula that God's revelation to us is in us. And the revelation is continuous. Calvin's great word, " Pie hoc potest did Demn esse Naturam " (" One may say with rever- ence that God is Nature "), has to be taken with a reservation which he himself held. For God is Nature, and more. Evolution, if it means anything, means a progression. Is not the greatest thing we are reach- ing to-day this, that out of evolution is emerging a doctrine of God which sees Him as the perfect worker behind a perfecting Universe, a Universe which, under His hand, is becoming the ever truer, the ever more adequate expression of Himself ? INCARNATION It is the wonder of Jesus that He is being perpetually reborn. Each generation incarnates Him anew, clothes Him in the flesh and blood of its own life and thought. As we glance back through the ages we see a procession of Christ-figures successively filling the scene, each different from the others, yet always with a mystic likeness that tells us it is He. When we find Christi- anity putting in its forefront a doctrine of Incarnation, and proclaiming the historical Jesus as Divine, we find ourselves in presence, not of a suddenly launched, isolated claim, but of a continuity, both of idea and of experience, which must command our attention. 12 Vital Questions What, then, is the Christian Incarnation ? It is, as the New Testament puts it, " God manifest in jflesh." And not the less so that the manifestation is under strictly human conditions. In Jesus, " our divinest symbol," humanity enlarged its boundaries to take in Divinity. The " new originations," of which modern science speaks, found here their sublimest example. We have only to read the Life depicted in the Gospels to realise how, entering into all the human conditions, it at every point transcended them ; how it lifted the experiences and possibilities of living up to a new scale ; how it compels us to say with Origen that " Jesus was united to God in the most essential manner " ; with Theodore of Mopsuestia, that " God in Him was not simply immanent, but that the spirit of Jesus so per- fectly appropriated the Divine as to become one with it " ; with Fichte, that " Jesus is in a wholly peculiar manner the only-begotten and first-born Son of God " ; and with Ritschl, that He represents to us " the religious ' value of God." We do not in the spiritual evolution know where man ends and God begins. But as we study Jesus in His life and death, and in the power of His Resurrection, what we do know is that here God and man are manifestly one. WHAT IS MAN ? The most conspicuous service of science has been to throw into an intenser relief the contrarieties of our existence. It has allied us, in a way our fathers never dreamed of, to the animal kingdom. Here indeed it offers nothing to boast of. On this, the material side, Nature puts us on a level with her flies and beetles. 13 Selections from Brierley On occasion she destroys us by the same methods and with the same indifference. In an earthquake our value, our consequence to the cosmos, appears to be that of an anthill. If life had no other side than this visible one our doctrine of man would be indeed a doctrine of despair ; our philosophy " to eat and drink, since to-morrow we die." But the facts of life which point to such a conclusion are met by another set, not less certain, far more august, which look in an opposite direction. These are the facts of the spirit and of the spiritual world. The central thing about man is not that he can be crushed by earth- quakes or smothered by volcanoes. It is that he is a spirit, a thinker. Resting, as to one side of his being, on natural laws that treat him with scant respect, he founds himself on another set whose opeiation and significance are very different. One of these, a law which seems to dominate all others, is the law of pro- gress. Against that man is mortal put this, that he is progressive. The individual dies, but the race moves forward. It is at this point that science and philosophy meet with a concordant message for theology. They remove the old limits from humanity — at both its ends. The scientific view of man as constantly evolving, as moving from lower to higher, has, on both its sides, vital consequence for theology. On the lower side it touches its doctrine of sin, on the upper its doctrine of Christ. As to the first, the doctrine of the Fall, which belongs to Christian teaching, is a doctrine of science and philosophy as well as of the Bible. The facts of evolution join with the Genesis story of the Old Testament and with the Pauhne argument of the 14 Vital Questions New in affirming a Fall, a breach of the earlier ethical unity, as coming at the beginning of our spiritual history. When we ask " What is man ? " we have to reaffirm with a new emphasis our philosophy/ of Becoming. Man is not simply what he is, but all he may yet be. And the prospect along these upper ranges of his nature opens plainly upon infinit3^ What will be the new departure ? After humanising comes Divinising. It is at this point that Christianity comes, with such impressive effect, into the story. Humanity, at its topmost level, opens itself to take in Christ. Schleier- macher, the noble-hearted thinker who combined in himself almost in its perfection the philosophic temper with the true Christian devotion, has put in unsur- passable language the truth we have been here striving to express : " Christ's work is a completion of the creation of human nature. In this sense of expressing the perfect consciousness of God, Jesus is Divine. He is not merety exemplary ; He is archetypal {urhildlich) . He is the manifestation in a definite Person of an eternal Act — the completion for which all that went before was preparation." Even a hasty glance will be enough to show how sure are the grounds for faith. The researches of science, the verdicts of criticism, properly considered, serve only to throw into greater clearness the inimitable expanse of man's spiritual inheritance, the deep foundations of his immortal hope. CHRISTIANITY THE ETERNAL RELIGION The Church, in its first age, conquered not so much by teaching as by giving. The Christian love offered itself everywhere without expectation of return. It 15 Selections from Brierley lent itself " hoping for nothing again." As that early Christian, the unknown writer of the Epistle to Diognetiis, puts it : " They love all men and are persecuted by all ; they are poor and make many rich ; they lack all things and abound in all." The trans- figuring power of this new spirit turned dungeons into palaces. Read the diary of that lovely soul, Perpetua, the young mother delivered at Carthage to the wild beasts for her faith. She writes : " The gaol became to me suddenly hke a palace, so that I liked to be there better than anywhere else." The disciples felt, as Justin Martyr has it, that nothing that happened to them could be an evil so long as their Lord was with them. And that is Christianity, the eternal religion. It is love thrilled by a felt contact with One whose life and soul were Love Incarnate, love that goes forth in constant joyful service. It is the Church's mission to preach, and still more to exhibit this as the whole secret of hving. When we contrast the programme with the course that has actually been taken, we realise at once the enormous amount of ground and of time that have been lost. The Church, century after century, has been trying to stuff the brain — and that with most inferior material — instead of to train the heart. The world, breaking here from the tutelage of the Church, has of late carried on its own intellectual affairs to its enormous mental advantage. But its heart is starved. What it craves now is precisely the thing Christianity has to give, if it will only open its treasure house. When the Church reaches once more that first temper ; when it offers to men what the first believers offered, its great moment will have come again. It i6 Vital Questions has centuries of lost time to make up. It has to retrace long leagues of wandering in order to get back to the track. We need not trouble about the revelation of truth. That is streaming in upon us from all quarters. What we want is to enter again into the Gospel's open secret. When the Church has caught afresh its first great rapture of love, and set it forth in the works that follow, there will be no infidels in sight. WHAT IS SIN? Christianity has a deeper note concerning sin than is found elsewhere. Its " conviction of sin " is pecuhar to itself. Its saints, in every generation, have begun with this. There is no Hterature outside which carries such an accent of contrition. When we ask why it is that Christianity carries this special note of the consciousness of sin we are immediately, for answer, thrown back upon some fundamental facts of the spiritual hfe. We stumble on that foundation paradox that the sense of sin is the gauge of progress. That man has this sense is the sign that he is rising ; the intensity of the sense denotes the height to which he may rise. In his pre-human, animal stage he did the things he now calls sinful, and many more. But he did not know them by that name. It was when the ideal of something higher dawned on him that the sense awoke of moral defect. It is precisely because the Christian ideal is the loftiest that has opened to the soul of man, that the contemplation of it has produced in him, age after age, this pecuhar depth and intensity of self-abasement and reproach. The question of questions to-day concerning sin is Selections from Brierley that of free will. Are men really responsible for their actions, or are they simply links in a chain of irresistibly working forces ? Is our notion of freedom an illusion, like that — to use Spinoza's illustration — of a stone flung into the air and imagining that it is flying ? If the latter, the doctrine of sin in the Christian sense falls, of course, to the ground, for if man cannot help being what he is, or doing what he does, there is no guilt in his deed. Atonement would be out of place, and punishment a monstrous cruelty. Human action, according to physicists of the type of Biichner and Haeckel, is a product of predetermining causes as natural and as inevitable as the production of a crystal or a salt. Your deed to-day is one of a chain of effects traceable backwards in unbroken succession to the attractions and repulsions of the primordial atom. This teaching has been presented, not only as a truth of science, but as a gospel of hberation. And a wonderful relief truly for rascality that it should henceforth have not to blame, but only to pity itself ! Between the Christian word which says, " Thou hast sinned : repent," and this other which annihilates sin, there is really all the difference between hope and despair. The Biblical treatment may seem stern and severe. It tells the delinquent what it thinks of him. But its very condemnation is a promise. It holds in it the suggestion of remedy. " You are wrong, because you can do better. And in repentance and grace and the new resolve you can find a way out." Compare this, in the matter of help and hope, with a doctrine which tells a man that his degradation, the vileness to which he has sunk, and for which he cannot help cursing himself, is just the thing he must be, one of the results 18 Vital Questions for which the whole world-process from the beginning has been working ! Solvitur amhulando. The will proves itself free by acting as free. No study of the outside machinery of brain or nerves, no calculations carried on in tlie region of matter and force, really touch the question. The will, m its movement up or down shows itself as belonging to that inner moral and spiritual realm in which man dwells, and where he finds his true being. And it is in the way that Christianity meets man here ; in the way it meets his sense of loss and failure, of guilt and disgrace, with its august economy of sacrifice and redemption ; by its offers to him in his extremity of a Divine and gracious forgiveness, that it establishes itself as the eternal answer to his eternal problem. SALVATION " Salvation," " being saved," and the alhed words and phrases form to-day, as they have formed in all the Christian ages, an integral and vital part in our Church vocabulary. The all-important question is. What do we now mean by them ? Salvation is a living word, expressive of a most real and living thing. There is no man of us but needs it, nor that will not fail without it. As the outside hfe — the battle with the elements, with circumstance, with the dead weight of things — demands our best effort, so here, in the inward life, victory comes only through struggle and pain, the putting forth of our utmost will, the reinforcement of other powers than our own. Augustine found two things in the universe, God and his own soul. Yes, God and the soul, and the problem 19 li j5 Selections from Brierley with us, as with him, is to adjust their relations. No man is at peace till he has found God, and is on right terms with Him. Through all the languages and all the religions of men we see this emerging as their chief and final business. New Birth means the conscious union of our poor self with a greater and better self, the finding of that Highest whose Witness has been ev^er in us, and to whom now, as our refuge and strength, we joyfully give our- selves over. Christianity, as lived, means that first and last. God and the soul. Salvation, working upward to the first, works downward next upon the second. The real saving is a saving into character ; from a lower to a higher spiritual state of ourselves. And, considered as the finding of God and the finding of character, salvation contains in it the idea of a Church as part of its method. Do we not, indeed, find here the true sense of that otherwise hard saying, " Outside the Church (that is, outside a brotherly fellowship) is no salvation." For we cannot complete our character without our brotJier's aid. All the virtues of it sup- pose him. We cannot love nor serve nor sacrifice ; we cannot cultivate humihty, nor patience, nor self- abnegation, except as members of a society. We cannot find our own soul except in the soul of our brother. There is no'^true joy that is not a sharing. Being saved, then, is^ a fellowship with God which unites us by love and service with every soul that He has made. UNWORLDLINESS What is it to be unworldly? Briefly it is, while rej oicing in the seen, to beheve with all our souls in an 20 Vital Questions Unseen ; while holding to the present as good, to hold still more firmly to the future as a better. The un- worldly man is one who takes the universe as spiritual, who finds the spiritual in himself, in his neighbour, in all things visible and invisible ; who trusts in that spiritual as an uplifting force which is to bring in a better world than is now here, and which calls upon us all to help in the task. This spiritual in him, linked to the spiritual outside him, compels him every day and every hour to seek a higher than he has yet attained, knowing that to rest in his moral endeavour is always to go down ; compels him equally to work for the betterment of his fellow, of the whole state of things in which he fives. This principle puts for him everything into its proper place, ranges things in their due proportion. His work, his amusements, his sense-enjoyments fall into fine, taking their place in due order as instruments and furtherers of his highest soul. He is double-sighted '; whatever his senses see, his soul sees, and sees so much more than comes upon his optic nerve. He is a speculator in life's highest values, and will touch no stock that does not yield these. He is a pofitician of the City of God. He is ever of that heroic company " Who, rowing hard against the stream. Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, And did not dream it was a dream." The unworldly man can to-day hardly be fashionable. Society, as it is at present constituted, is dead against him. The modern Press, the most venal perhaps the world has seen, the modern Press, whose circulation is apparently in inverse proportion to the size of its 21 Selections from Brierley conscience, to which truth is the smallest of considera- tions, which preaches daily the gospel of force and of hatred, which lives by the pandering to passion and the lowest instincts, has for our idealist a contempt which it expresses with all the wealth of its rich vocabulary. He would be sorry to have, from that source, any other tribute. He smiles as he reads it, for he knows that he ^vi\\ win. Yes, for the unworldly man is ever the creator of the newer, the better world. He is an optimist, sure of his cause. For that cause is the spiritual in man, the latest born of his faculties, but incomparably the mightiest. Existing at present as a thin streak at the top of his mind, it is there to stay and to grow until it has subdued him to its sway. This makes him a worker, a preacher of hope to the neediest and the worst. He shares here the audacity of Jesus, the audacity which chose pubhcans and sinners for disciples, knowing that in these, as in all souls, lay heaven's undeveloped Kingdom. THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR Amongst the problems besetting and bewildering our age, not the least puzzling is that which hes around the words " sacred " and " secular." In the history of civilisation it is invariably the sacred that comes first. What we know as the secular is always a later evolu- tion. If, for example, we take the subject of legislation, now regarded everywhere as a secular business, there is not one of the ancient systems that was not originally held to be of Divine origin. The Greek drama was originally a religious function ; and its arts of painting 22 Vital Questions and sculpture were immediately associated with worship. In Christendom the same law has obtained. The Church of the earlier ages took upon itself to organise the whole of human affairs. How came it, then, the developments of civihsation which began in the sphere of the " sacred " should find, as we see, their later resting-place in tlie " secular " ? The history of the process is the history of the Church's mistakes and shortcomings. The mistakes were of its intellect, the shortcomings of its heart. To understand what happened we need to begin with a diagnosis of religious exclusiveness. At the beginning of religious movements men taste a peculiar rapture. It is an intense emotion associated with a sense of intimate intercourse with the spiritual world. God is known and felt as a Person. The dwellers in this inner circle dis- cover that they are the recipients of unutterable things. Into the soul flow tides of energy that translate them- selves into the sense of pardon, of fellowship with the Highest, of victory over the world, of immortal hope beyond the grave. It is felt, and rightly felt, that in comparison with such experiences life has nothing else that is equal to offer. And most natural is it, further, to conclude that wliatever seems to interrupt the flow of such celestial intercourse is hannful, and should be placed under taboo. We are here at the secret of the whole business. It is precisely at this point that we discover how the highest individual aspirations may fail to adjust them- selves to the wholeness of things. Our religionist will at all cost keep up his fervour. Good ! But he has fed it solely upon one kind of food. And he has no notion of a possibly beneficial change of diet. When 23 Selections from Brierley for his inner development, in addition to the prayers, the exercises, the spiritual records which have appealed to him hitherto, there is offered a whole new range of ideas and activities, his instinct is to start back and refuse. The idea that there was no other food for the soul than that they had known, for one thing, narrowed immeasurably their outlook. Into a disastrous blunder did the Church fall when it identified its spiritual treasure and its rehgious feehng with a world- view which science was discovering to be inadequate and erroneous. What that blunder meant for civilisation Lecky has described for us. " Every mental dis- position which philosophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual vices were dehberately inculcated as virtues. The theologians, by destroying every book that could generate discussion, by diffusing to every field of knowledge a spirit of boundless creduhty . . . succeeded in almost arresting the action of the European mind." In the light of these hints we discover how our two separate territories came into being, with the boundary wall between them. On the one side was religion, enamoured of its high emotions, unwilHng to admit anything that served to hinder their flow, and in their supposed interests thrusting out or stamping down all that was new and strange. On the other cide a whole fresh world of sciences, arts and interests dev^eloping out of the religious consciousness, yet disowned by it ; sure of themselves and of their right to exist, 3/et ostracised by their parents ; growing away from their first home, andi'so, to a large extent, strange to the 24 Vital Questions inspirations which that home alone could suppl}'. It is ours to reverse the process and find the way from secular to sacred. The early shortcoming was really moral as much as intellectual. Religion must found itself on a wider synthesis. Only thus can it reconquer a world half of which it has allowed to sHp out of its grasp. To science, to art, to commerce, to the drama, to amusement, it must resume the relation which it had at the beginning, and which only its own folly has dislocated. No rehgion is complete without a relation to every department of hfe. No department of life is complete without a relation to religion. There is no science, no art, no true pleasure in which a properly-adjusted nature cannot immediately find and enjoy God. WHAT IS LIFE? Life means work. Our being's end, its true happiness, lies there. We has^e no perfection, because it is not perfection but the striving for it, the reaching after something yet beyond, that fits us best. To arrive at a point where we had to stop because there was nothing more to be done — imagine that as a destiny ! It is too horrible to think of. The nethermost hell, with a chance of working our way out of it, would be vastly better. This, to some ears, may sound strange, but let us think a httle. Suppose yourself placed in the most enchanting paradise the imagination can conceive ; a city whose streets are gold and whose gates are pearl, a country where eternal summer reigns, where every 25 Selections from Brierley want is met ; no poverty, no hunger, no death, no burden. And you are there with nothing to do ! You sit, because there is no end to be achieved by walking. You are still, because all the ends for activity have been accomplished. You are to sit there for eternity ! A good hour of that would bore most of us to extinction. No, that is not our happiness, in this or any world we can conceive. Our pleasures, our most passionate joys, are a movement ; to stay it at where we are were to spoil all. Our whole living is under this law. The action of a mineral poison is by stopping the change and decay of the tissues. To stay this activity, even this activity of decay, is death. That this is the one supreme law for ourselves is the more evident when we remember that it is the one law of all Nature. There is no such thing in Nature as absolute inertia. The most seemingly stable things are full of movement. The world's work is always going on. When we are resting, our nature is not resting. In our sleep the heart is pumping, the lungs are respiring, our brain-cells are busy repairing the wastes and losses of the day. Often when the conscious " we " is doing least, our unconscious " we " is doing most — tliat imconscious " we," our true guardian angel, which never sleeps, which never relaxes from its faithful toil. This has surely an important bearing upon our social outlooks and endeavours. We sec liere how the Gospel becomes scientific. The maxim, " It is better to give than to receive," and the statement that man, in his highest representative, " came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," cease to be mere saws of the pulpit ; they stand as representing the cosmic law, the 26 Vital Questions ultimate secret of living. For the secret of a man's living is just that of getting all of him to work, and in the right way — his body to work, his mind to work, and his soul to work. The signs are that, as the world progresses, the rougher kinds of manual toil will be superseded, giving place to the action of nature-forces under the guidance of the intellect. Man will work more and more with his upper part. Our sowing, our reaping , our threshing, our travelhng, are done by the machine. Work is such a different thing to different people. The old-time labourer thought the mere mentahst a loafer, with a too easy job. The present writer, once, in countiy lodgings, after a hard daj^ at his books, by way of relaxation busied himself with a spade in the garden. " Ah," said his farmer host, " I see that you are taking to a bit of work ! " He was astonished when I told him I called this rest. But there is an activity beyond that both of the body and the intellect. It is that of the soul. Men only half-live to-day because of the idleness of their best nature. With a bewildering rush at the circumference there is a fatal inertia at the centre. For after all itj.s by the snul's activity that we reach life's ultimate secret. And the proof of this is seen when we find people fnlFof bodily strength and of intellectual gifts often amongst ^~e most unhappy, while men and women wliose health has gone and whose mental powers are crippled, from their invalid couches are crying " Vic- tory ! " ItTs where the soul is bus}^ busy in the right direction, that we find triumphant living. It is the soul that puts values on life. One of its highest activities is that of appreciation. Your world is every 27 Selections from Brierley day of your making. If it is a good, a glorious world, it is because you bring to it the spiritual capacity " To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, To hold infinity in a palm of the hand And eternity in an hour." The world is a world for workers. We are here for that, and to find our liappincss in that. It is left imperfect in order that we may add to it our contribution. And because this is so, our social programme should be one which first and foremost aims at the liberation of the workers ; at the development of every human faculty, bodily, mental and spiritual, to their highest point, and to their truest harmony. Here is the secret of living and of possessing. For man's true possession is, after all, the possession of himself. WHAT IS DEATH? Death is at once the most famihar and the most unfamiliar of human facts. We are all agreed that we must die, but the world has been quarrelHng from the very beginning as to what dying really means. Num- bers of cultivated men in both hemispheres hold, in their secret mind, that this life is all, or at least that the odds are enormously against there being any other. The extent to which men have succumbed to this argu- ment is patent in the whole literature of modern Europe. This particular mood has, indeed, lain heavily upon Europe during more than a generation. But there are signs that it is passing away. And the curious tiling is that the cure is coming from the very quarter out of which came the disease. For it is the 28 Vital Questions science, the material observation, which appeared at first to rivet on man the chains of death, that is now forging the instruments of his dehverance. First of all, it has shown us the fallacy of appearances. The premises on which the old materialistic arguments were based are being shattered by more extended observation. Matter, the partner of spirit, is showing in such entirely new lights as to make us recast all our conceptions about it. Whatever death does to spirit, it does not destroy matter. It changes it, that is all. And if all death can do to one, and the inferior partner in the human com- pact, is to alter its form, what natural or logical ground, men are beginning to ask, is there for supposing that it can do more with its associate, the spirit ? The broad hint of science here is that, hke its mate the body, the spirit maybe transmuted, but will not be destroyed. It is at first starthng, but afterwards infinitely reassuring, to learn that in the scheme of evolution death is not a necessity, but simply one of Nature's devices for the furtherance of hfe. It was in the endeavour after a higher and more complicated structure that death entered. These studies show us life, instead of being lorded over by death, pressing it into its service to help build up its structures and com- plete its developments. Instead of being the dread tyrant before which all must bow, death is shown to be life's day labourer, whose entrance on the scene can be discerned, and whose departure, when his work is done, may be predicted. It may be said that what science here offers does not, after all, amount to much. It would not if it stood alone. But it comes as reinforcement to an im- mense and growing body of considerations arising 29 Selections from Brierley from another source. Man's strongest hope for immortahty rests, after all, upon his moral and spiritual intuitions, and upon his moral and spiritual history. He dwells in a visible universe which he can prove has come out of an unseen one, to which it will eventually return. He has already multiform relations with that Unseen, and is continually enlarging them. The highest thinkers everywhere recognise the spirit world as the most real and the most mighty. Spirit every- where pervades matter and everywhere rules it. And this permanent force, amid a world of change, man realises as abiding not only in the Universe on which he looks, but in his own deepest self. The Eternal \vithin him claims kinship with the Eternal without him. His desires here are facts in the making. His yearning for immortality is the unborn in him groping for the light to which it is destined ; it is the inland stream calling, as it runs, to the ocean whence it came and towards which it hastes. WHAT IS ETERNITY? The concept of eternity which pictures for us a changeless universe, an eternity of endless and aimless rearrangements of matter and force, is not only unscientific ; it is unmoral. Were it accepted the only morality could be one of convenience. To the extent it is believed in, human life becomes a jest or a pessimist tragedy. Religious thought on this theme has been continually stumbling upon two mistakes. One is the identification of eternity with the idea of cataclysm and catastrophe. Successive generations of Christian people have gone on dividing their world- 30 Vital Questions system into two parts — one the time in which they hved, which was about to come to an end, and the other, " eternity," which was to be ushered in by an overwhelming cosmic outburst. It is surely time that this view of eternity, as of a kind of approaching tidal wave that will by-and-by roll in and submerge every- thing that is, should be recognised by sensible men as provedly false and provedly immoral, and as such to be henceforth dropped and done with. And with this must go another idea that has prevailed even more \videly. It is that view which has regarded eternity as a kind of infinite Topsy-turvydom, in which all the principles of Divine government which we recognise in the present state are to be neutrahsed and reversed. It is time we reached that nobler concept of eternity which is at once the essence both of true religion and of true morals. The more we study it, both in the New Testament and in that other revelation given in the ever-growing human consciousness, the more we shall reahse the inadequacy and the falseness of the travesties we have been sketching. In this clearer light we shall recognise the Apocalyptic thunderings and trumpetings as poetic representations of a some- thing that in itself is entirely spiritual. The true eternity which Christ taught has, it is true, duration in it ; death also and the Beyond in it ; but tliese are the smallest part of the idea. For, essentially. His eternity is not only then, but now ; not only there, beyond the stars, but here, in the conscious soul. The eternal hfe He offers is not a mere uncountable sum of years. Its chief element is a conscious relation to, reception of, and fellowship with, that immutable 31 Selections from Brierley spiritual Order which exists behind the veil. It is the sharing of that Divine reahty of which the soul's most ardent aspirations are the faint adumbration ; to taste of which is to know at once hfe's meaning, and its inmost satisfaction. It is eternity under this aspect that gives moraUty its one vital and efficacious motive, and to human life its true value and perspective. It is a view which inspires the whole man. The man who gives clearest proof to his brethren that his habitual dweUing is in that region, who can bring to them largest spoil of this sacred Invisible, will be always recognised by them in the end as of all benefactors the highest. ?2 THE INNER LIFE THE INNER LIFE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Religion, whatever may be its after fortunes, has its rise always as a free movement of the soul. Its starting-point is an experience. All the religion at present in sight, that contained in Bible, in Church institutions, in theology, began here. The grittiest formularies are the petrifactions of what was once volatile and flowing ; they are visibles congealed from an invisible breath. Religion comes first to great souls as an obsession, an answering thrill to the call of the Infinite. Theology is the oft-repeated, manifold attempt to put this primitive thrill into words. The tides from the Infinite flow in first upon selected and prepared souls. These do their best to mediate to others of what they have received. But it is only a partial transmission. What has really passed in the minds of the spiritual leaders is always their own secret. They could not reveal it if they would, because there are no words available. What has determined them to their great choices has been rarely a process of argument. Madame Guyon says of her sojourn at Grenoble : "I felt myself on a sudden invested with the apostoHc state, and discerned the conditions of the souls of such persons as spoke to me." With some 35 C2 Selections from Brierley there is a sudden inrush of what is felt to be Divine. Jacob Bchmen thus describes his experience at Gorhtz : ** There came a blessed peace or Sabbath of the soul that lasted seven days, during which I was, as it were, inwardly surrounded by a Divine light. The triumph that was then in my soul I can neither tell nor describe." These first-hand experiences, borne in on the con- sciousness of elect souls, are for the world the origin of its rchgious hfe. Working on the first recipients with an extraordinary energy, they issue from them as winged words, as mysterious influences, as startling activities. And the best men of those ages never forgot that, in faithfully handing down what they had received, they were most effectively helping succeeding generations to a first-hand religious consciousness of their own. In the words of Christ and of His Apostles they recog- nised the spiritual laws, by obeying which the soul became sensitised for the reception of new light and power. It is while on the roads marked out by the ancient leaders that the modern pilgrim gets his vision. It is on this account that the Scriptures remain the eternal treasure-house of the soul. So often in studying them has the illumination come which, for the reader, for ever transformed his world. Men talk of the evils inflicted by a misguided religionism. But oh ! the happiness of the real thing ! No one has given us that story, for it cannot be put into words — the moment when men have seen clearly the Eternal Love shining upon them, and when what before was an outlook on poverty and failure and utter despair has been changed into tlie bhss of a Divine assurance ! There are humble 36 The Inner Life people to-day, weaving at the loom, working in pits, on death-beds, who, because they have that experience, are happier than kings. When preachers carry this experience to their pulpit the churches thrive. They cannot tell all they know, but the sight of them handhng this treasure, and calhng their brethren to share it, is in itself an irresistible appeal. PRAYER Prayer on the human side is man's declared aHiance with the Infinite. It is the sap in us, all the warm hfe- current in us, rising past every intermediate object of desire to our very topmost, and thence streaming out to meet that higher Beyond of which it knows itself a part. For we know ourselves not as a finished product, but as rather a process, a becoming, and in prayer we seek the element which is making us. It is in this conception we finally meet the objection, absurd in itself, of prayer being the dictation of weak- ness and ignorance to the all-governing wisdom. The objection ignores the whole system of things in this world. It supposes that man's prayer begins with man, whereas nothing in man begins with him. It began first in his universe, in his Maker. It is as the action of sun and rain. From out of the ocean the sun draws up the vapours, which later come back in showers upon the earth. Here is a circulation from deep to height, and from height again to deep. So, under the shining of the Sun behind the sun, out of the deeps of man's mind and heart are carried up the invisible currents of his aspiration and soul's desire, to descend afterwards in secret responses which he knows, nevertheless, to be Selections from Brierley real. Real, though the first form of his desire is often enough left unanswered. The response lies, indeed, often enough in the heightening and purification of his desire. In Gethsemane's agony he prays, maybe, for his cup to pass from him. He leaves the garden with no other wish than that God's will be done. What may be the precise relation of our nature to that unseen side of things to which in prayer it appeals, we may not accurately know. But this we are assured of, that the response from that other side is immense. Under certain inspirations the giants of faith have asked and received, because the asking and the receiv- ing were alike of God. It is in this region the heroes have found their strength. Gordon in his tent here won his battles beforehand. Here the common man conquers himself and the world. Fides impetrat qucs lex imperat. " Faith obtains what the law enjoins." THE PROGRESS OF THE SOUL The one progress we have to plan and work for is the progress of man, of his body, his brain, and, above all, of his soul. And how slow has been the movement here ; what lapses, what retrogressions ! Compare the modern Egyptian with his far-off ancestor, according to what we read of him in perhaps the oldest book in the world, " The Precepts of Pta-ho-Tep." This book, of the time of the fiftli dynasty, is full of the highest morality, where special stress is laid on the vital importance of training children, and of making a son a true gentleman ! And have we Christians got far ahead of those Essene communities whom Josephus and Philo describe for us ; who laboured in agriculture for their subsistence, who 38 The Inner Life practised the strictest temperance ; of whom we read : " Here everyone is master of his passions and a friend of peace. In all their work the brethren obey the direc- tions of their superiors ; only acts of kindness and mercy are left to their own discretion. Truthfulness in every word is strictly enjoined ; they bind themselves to honour God, to practise righteousness towards men, always to hate the unrighteous and to help the righteous to be faithful in his relations with all " ? The world has moved since then towards vaster things than Egyptian or Essene ever conceived. Nevertheless, our modern society, in contemplation of such habits of life, might well turn to the recovery of some of these lost ideals instead of boasting itself overmuch. For these people beheved in the soul, and it is the one thing to believe in. It is the one possession we have that is fortified against decay, whose development can be carried on to life's latest moment. The years take from us everything else ; our bodily vigour, our mental force, our friends, our place and position in the active world. But in this inmost centre of life we can go on still growing, making our losses, our very weakness, an occasion of its further disciphne, the incentive of its deeper energies, of its immortal hopes. " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made ; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home." Let us be of good cheer. We are in the order of progress. And our own stroke of work, if it be an honest stroke, will tell in it. Is it not better, after all, to be in an unfinished world, with ourselves as helpers towards its perfectness, than merely spectators of one 39 Selections from Brierley where everything is done and finished ? Herein is the greatness and joy of our calhng, to be not lookers-on, but co-workers. Let us see to it that in our work and hfe we follow, and help our brother to follow, the true roads of progress, and not the false ones. RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENTS Religion in its wholeness is something far other than a temperament. There are, nevertheless, departments of its expression for which certain temperaments seem specially fitted, and the possessors of these are almost certain to be chosen as guides and leaders. There are varieties here, widely differing, and an accurate analysis would have to take in a large gradation of subtle shadings. Speaking broadly, however, there are two well-marked forms of religious character, each wielding immense power, each capable of noble service, but open both of them to dangerous and even deadly defects — the aesthetic and the ascetic. The former, which in certain varieties might perhaps be even better described as the emotional, is singularly open to impression. Delicately strung, with an artist's soul for beauty, vibrating to life's subtlest overtones, with an intense sense of the awe and mystery of Hfe, it is made for the rehgion of feehng. Its faith at the fullest is a rapture, an ecstasy. It is an epicureanism of the higher sensations. It beholds visions, it listens inwardly to melodies which no mortal music ever made, and when it comes to expression, there are none can speak so pleadingly, so persuasively. Men listen as to angel voices. But all this is at a price. Humanity would have got on badly enough for its religion without 40 The Inner Life this temperament, but still worse had it been the only one. As if to teach the lesson of the human sohdarity, the lesson that the whole world of us, and no one individual or type, is the true man, we find this charac- ter full of weaknesses and leaning always heavily upon others. The other variety of the religious temperament — the ascetic — of which every age produces specimens, with its superb reaction against the slothful indulgence of the masses, develops often into a potent and magnificent spiritual leadership. Founding itself on a heroic mysticism that discerns from the beginning the essential emptiness of material and sensuous pleasures, it presses on behind the veil to find its joy in spiritual reahty. It is enamoured of renunciation, and finds a marvellous liberty in following that austere road which St. John of the Cross indicates in his motto : " Whatever you find pleasant to soul or body, abandon ; whatsoever is pain- ful, embrace it." It is tim.e we were done with the pseudo-Christianity whose leading characteristic is the exhalation of gloom. There is no grace in this November fog. Sourness is a crime of Use hmnanite. To what, O my bilious brother, do you propose to convert the world ? To your own grimness ? It were hardly an improvement. The world wants saving into soundness and hght, and it shows a healthy discrimination in refusing the overtures of morbidity and darkness. When the Church thoroughly understands this it will mend some of its ways. In teaching the higher life of the invisible, it will show always its appreciation of that fair world of the seen which is the other's vestibule. It will teach that man belongs to the two, and may be a proficient 41 Selections from Brierley in both. The man who enjoys helps others to enjoy. He cannot keep his sunshine to himself. It is here that, turning from the imperfections of its followers, we see the Divine wholeness of the Master-life. A Prophet of the invisible, Christ knew and loved the seen. The world of birds and flowers, of happy sunshine and human fellowships, was also His world. A Messenger from the Centre, He dwelt with gladness in the outer court, knowing it also was a part of the Father's house. THE INNER DISCIPLINE That is an admirable definition of fasting which Clement of Alexandria gives us in the " Stromata " : " liow fastings signify abstinence from all e^•ils whatso- ever, both in action and in word, and in thought itself." " In thought itself " ! Our religion has done nothing for us umcbs it has given us an easy control here. It is in this realm, indeed, that its whole triumph hes. Its grandest product is the entire and joyful acquiescence in whatsoever befalls us. The notion of religion as an assurance against calamities is too naive. It is rather a preparation for them and a state of soul for meeting them. Circum- stance may play its worst trick upon us ; it may reduce us in a moment from wealth to poverty, from strength and activity to the extremity of weakness. The soul, disciphned by faith, will meet that extremity and not be cowed by it. It will rcahse with Vauvenargues that " despair is the worst of our errors." Its whole development will have taught it to accept life, in whatsoever strange and repelling form it for the moment offers itself, as a present good and the promise 42 The Inner Life of an infinite better. It is a great thing to be taught our utter nothingness. After we have tasted that sensation we are ready for what generally comes next, the sense of the Divine sufficiency. We rest in a system of things which is too vast for our comprehen- sion, but which we feel to be good. We know ourselves as in an orderly universe with Infinite Perfection at its centre. It is by such inner discipline, and by no other process, that we arrive at the perception of the higher truths. Good comes first, truth afterwards. Les grandes pensees viennent du cceur. The heart knows truths which the reason cannot formulate. We require a certain inner height to discern life's greatest secret. It is given alone to the pure in heart to see God. BENEATH THE SURFACE In the tumult of our modern life, amid the confused din of its many-tongued utterance, we need continually to look to what is beneath, to what is unexpressed. One might think, to hsten to the voices which shriek in our modern Press, that the world were more securely than ever in the grip of the devil. We are called to imperiahsm, to patriotism, to mihtarism, as the highest of our privileges, the foremost of our duties. Beneath this clamour, if we look steadily, we discern a hidden thing ; it is the panic of the brute instinct in us, specially dominant in certain classes — the most vocal classes — against the formation of another sentiment which is destined to destroy " these dragons of the prime." This sentiment is beginning already to find its voice and to ask questions. " What do you mean 43 Selections from Brierley by your imperialism ? If it stands, as it seems, for an empire of which we hav'e to brag and boast, which is to use its power to beat down competitors, to inflame its members with tlie intoxication of a false glory, we will have none of it. Man's function, in or out of the ' empires,' is plainly not that. He is here not to dragoon but to help, not to boast himself but to serve. Your mihtarism is out of date ; sufficient for the past that nations should exist without conscience ; that they should take pride as masses in what they detest as individuals ; that they should conceive thieving and murdering, when we call it war, as anything other than thieving and murdering at our own doorstep ; that assassination in masses is any less detestable than the assassination of individuals ; that to settle a national quarrel by stabbing and shooting is any less barbarous than in this way to settle a private one." Against all this devilry there is a spirit arising, only half articulate as yet, but which in time will find its hand and its tongue. Already it has eyes in its head, and can see the real shape of these monsters, hitherto so cunningly disguised. When it fully finds its voice it will call them by their true names. Its unexpressed will by and by come into form, in deeds and charters of the human solidarity. It will erase some words from its vocabulary and put new ones in their place. It will cease to speak of the foreigner, the ahen, tho foe. It will know humanity as one, a common brotherhood, with equal claim upon our service and our love. Good and marvellous is the expressed, but the unexpressed is better. Behind all we see looms up that which is yet to be seen. The world's great 44 The Inner Life wonders are yet to come. We see now all we are equal to seeing. But we are linked to a spiritual realm which is ceaselessly at work upon our soul and its faculties. With their growth our universe will grow. That is, it will reveal itself, opening up its mysteries, showing the wonders of its hidden beauty, exhibiting itself ever more clearly as the visible garment of God. MAN'S RELATION TO GOD There is only one relation high enough and broad enough to reach all the necessities of the soul's Hfe. It is our conscious relation to a holy God. When, from a personal experience, we have learned what this means for our daily conduct of affairs, for our attitude towards living and dying, towards the buffets of circumstance, towards the uncertainties of the future, towards our intercourse with our fellows, towards our inner conquests and defeats, the wonder grows in us that any mortal of us should attempt to get on without it. It is so constant and effective a solution of our difficulties. " Stand in your relation to God," and instantly your duty appears to you ; instantly you can size up your personal worth, knowing, as St. Francis put it, that " we are just as great as we are in God's sight." From this standpoint we see ranged in line, and in their due proportion, the world's values, material and spiritual. Here, in a realm of change, we find our welcome, our immovable rest. Here is perpetual companionship, the heart's sweetest intercourse. Standing here we know ourselves at the meeting- 45 Selections from Brierley point of all noblest influences. We touch new realms of being ; have companionship with " The great intelligences fair That range above our mortal state." We are where the great, the heroic things are done ; in touch with the " one great society alone on earth, the noble Hving and the noble dead." There are we in the soul's home, its sure abiding place, from which not time nor death will separate it. In contemplation of this supreme relationship we find ourselves saying with Augustine : "I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing else ? Nothing at all." ON DIVINE LEADING The religion of the Sermon on the Mount is above all things a democratic religion. " The hairs of your head are all numbered " applied not only to patrician locks but to the unkempt polls of the fishers who heard first the Divine words. It was, indeed, the eager acceptance and handing-on of the doctrine by the " dim common populations " that so excited the wrath of its " superior" opponents. Yet this doctrine of the highest guidance for every mother's son of us is really the only one this side atheism. The doctrine is so logical. Any one who, under good scientific guidance, has examined the struc- ture of a human hair, has to say whether this marvel is a product of bhnd chance or of a high intelligence. If it is intelligence which made it and is still looking after it, then, a fortiori, intelligence is looking also after its wearer. It is amazing we do not more definitely settle 46 The Inner Life this matter with ourselves. It would resolve so many questions. We should go on working, but leave off worrying. As it is, we imagine the world is on our shoulders. We groan over the condition of the Church and the back ebb in which religion finds itself. If we believe in the sermon our own hair teaches us as we brush it of mornings we shall stop this lamentation. As if rehgion began when we took up its business and will end when we retire ! Of the amazing tricks men resort to, in the notion that thereby they are keeping rehgion going, there will also be a final end. It is in the bearing of this doctrine on our personal life that it gains its weightiest import. If a man can only get some reasonable assurance that in this welter of a world he is not left to fight his own battle, or to muddle his way through as best he can, unhelped or unguided ! What for the twentieth century is the assurance on this point ? Apart from the consideration just urged the evidence is of two sorts, an external and an internal. In that first, outward sphere, there is to be noted what strikes us as a feature most significant and affecting. It is that the evidence is usually reserved to the period when it is most needed. The evidence we go upon is often such as we cannot talk about, and which would appear by itself quite in- adequate in a law court. It was not meant for the law court, but for ourselves. It is its mysterious inner appeal to us that counts. The conviction of a guidance of our outward life will grow in proportion as we reafise a guidance of the inward life. Precisely as a man who devotes himself to the culture of his intellect will rise to a plane superior to that of the mass and bring to the decision of questions a faculty of which they are scarcely 47 Selections from Brierley conscious, so in the most central sphere a similar devo- tion will yield a like result, only a higher. To those who lodge in the soul's uppermost chambers there opens a prospect unseen by those below, unbelieved in by these latter, may be, but none the less real. Our own soul, in its solitary journey, if faithful to the highest in it, becomes ever more conscious of a Divine leading. Its transitions are progresses, successive dis- closures of the revelation that goes on within. The outer universe, opening to us at every turn its new exhaustless energies, reveals itself as symbol and faint expression of a Diviner universe behind. More sure do we become, as the years pass, that our intellect is fed from a higher intellect, that our heart draws its inspira- tion from a greater heart. As surely as our bodily eye opens to us a visible world of matter and force, so surely does the soul's eye reveal one whose powers are higher. As surely as holiness is greater than gravitation, so surely is the kingdom of holiness the real and enduring kingdom. Our greatest knowledge is our knowledge of values. The highest in us points to the highest without us. Science knows that God is Power ; the soul knows that God is Love. THE TRUEST REST Through the whole universe of matter there is no moment's cessation of activity ; nor is there any in our physical organisation. Plainly, if we are to discover some semblance of reality in our idea of rest, we must seek it elsewhere. Where ? The answer is in the inner realm of the mind. But here our first discovery is that within, as well as outside, there is no such thing as an 48 The Inner Life inactive rest. Let anyone " descend into himself " and he will find that it is not in movement, in action, but in the opposite of it, that his soul is farthest from peace. The trying moment for the regiment is not in the charge, but before, when lying down and waiting the order to advance. Many great public speakers mix Gethsemane with every speech. But that comes not in delivery, but the time that preceded. When actually on their feet, with mind and body in highest activity, the soul is entirely at rest. It is not the employed, but the unem- ployed, in whom we find the completest mental chaos, the furthest remove from tranquillity. Rest consists nowhere, either in nature or in the mind of man, in a mere motionless inactivity. In both it must be, if it exists at all, a concomitant of action. As Nature climbs higher in her achievements, the more deUcate is the balancing by which her rest states are obtained. It is a magnificent result, surely, of her engineering which secures that a planet like our own, the centre of such stupendous forces, should have every- thing within and without so exquisitely adjusted that while careering in space at Hghtning speed over half a dozen courses at once, it should appear to its inhabitants as absolutely still. All this is reproduced and surpassed in the soul. It is absurd to talk of peace as though it were a single pro- duct. There are as many forms of peace as there are of men, and you may judge a man by the kind of peace he achieves. There need, for instance, no great forces to produce the " rest " of Clough's jesting fines : " Let me, contented and mute, with the beasts of the field, my brothers, Tranquilly, happily lie — and eat grass like Nebuchad- nezzar^! " 49 ^ Selections from Brierley Above this lies the rest of philosophic indifference. It has some famous watchwords. There is Plato's dictum that " nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety " ; and Ovid's " non est tanti " — " it is not worth so much trouble " ; and Lord Melbourne's " Why can't you let it alone ? " All this brings undoubtedly a peace of a sort. But it is a wintry peace, with snow on the ground and the streams frozen. What then is the highest peace ? We have worked along this long line of illustration in order to reach a point from wliich at last we may view it. The greatest achievement ol Hfe, so far as we know it, is the produc- tion in souls of what the world's greatest book calls " the peace of God which passeth all understanding." Greatest, because it is the higheet product of the highest forces, acting at their highest level. There is nothing in the world or in history to compare with this. We talk of the Peace of Utrecht or of the Treaty of Paris. They are trivialities compared with the peace God creates in consecrated souls. Nature's whole scheme is a parable of this highest result. The world spinning in vacuo, its enormous burden upheld by a power invisible, is her visible sign of this crowning wonder. Peace in the battle, rest in the whirlwind — this is the miracle of the ages, the miracle wrought by Christ's Gospel in the hearts of men. THE ATHLETICS OF THE SOUL To-day the masses and the classes alike sacrifice to the great god Comfort. We want a hfe with all the corners rubbed off, and find a deadly dulness as the result. When our ease is broken we howl, or perhaps 50 The Inner Life blaspheme. Marcus Aurelius from his pagan philosophy could teach us so much better than that. And our natural instinct revolts in its innermost self against the hog paradise. " Nor for thy neighbours, nor for thee, Be sure was Ufe designed to be A draught of dull complacency." How magnificent, in comparison, have been the per- formances here of God's athletes ! It should surely be good news for us, in this stormy world, to know of a discipline that can make men buffet-proof, a secret wliich, when learned, sends them unhurt and exultant through the worst that comes ! That it is so is plain history. When John Woolman went to preach the Gospel to a tribe of hostile Indians, he tells us that one night, far from tent or habitation, unable to kindle a fire because of the heavy rain that was falling, he sat under a bush during the long hours, and " found his soul filled with comfort as he meditated upon God." The power of the religious teacher, whatever his Church or his position in it, will be strictly in accordance with his proficiency in the soul's athletics. Men talk of originahty in the pulpit — make often grotesque and frantic efforts to acquire it. The only originality worth the name is that of a growing soul. There is no preacher worth his salt whose greatest daily work is not here. It is the training of his own spirit that con- stantly freshens and enlarges him. The hearer is thrilled by something undefinable. It is the new power evolved from a soul's ascent. Unless this process is going on, a man were better dumb. Think of Christ's couple of years or so of ministry, and thirty previous years of silent inwardness ! In their Hbraries men 51 D2 Selections from Brierley may find new facts and new arguments ; but these will be useless unless in the deeps of their own spirit they seek for new powers. Anyone, layman or cleric, who sets forth on this quest, will come speedily to a point where we may here leave him. He will find that his own solitary strength is nothing. For in the spiritual world, as in the natural, a man becomes strong only as he links himself to the great outside powers. Science malces him mighty by harnessing his personality to the cosmic forces. Faith makes him mightier yet by linking his feebleness to Divine Omnipotence. THE UPWARD WAY As we survey history and literature, and note the way of thinking and feeling of our fellows ages ago, we dis- cern at once a difference so great that it points to the emergence in the mind of at least the germs of new faculties. The mind of man, we perceive, is steadily being remade. There has come to the modern con- sciousness a faculty we fail to discern earlier, in the shape of what is frequently called " the historical sense." By that we mean the power of realising the past exactly as it was, of placing bygone ages in the dry light of actuality, of cutting clean through the enormous and fantastic structures which the human imagination has constructed round certain events, and reaching the bare, simple fact. It is to the appearance and steady growth of this new faculty that we may look for changes of the vastest consequence in the domain of man's relations with the past, in the domain, that is to say, of history and 52 The Inner Life religion. The earlier mind could not see clearly if it would. The medium in which it worked was so charged with preconceptions, with unscientific views of the universe, that it had no means of reaching the actual fact. It is a new mental development which compels the modern mind, in contrast with all this, to judge of the occur- rences of the first century by the occurrences of our own ; and to be perfectly sure that nothing happened in Judsea at that or any other time that might not happen in London or New York in our own. We are only beginning dimly to recognise the changes in our thought- world that the rise and operation of this faculty will accomplish. We see enough, however, to be aware that it will make all things new. We develop by effort, by struggle. It is under strain and pressure that the organism evolves. Anyone who realises that simple fact should see in it an all-sufficient reason for the arduous, the strenuous life. And that to its very close. The law which bids us " scorn delights and five laborious days," which assures us that " Mortals miss Fair prospects by a level bliss," is the very central law of life. To preserve our facul- ties at their topmost level by constant work ; to abhor and keep from the ruts of luxurious ease ; to welcome the opportunity of sacrifice, the doing of things that crucify the flesh ; to maintain in every department the strict subordination of lower to higher, of animal to spiritual — this we are coming now to recognise is not only the teaching of the New Testament Gospel ; it is seen by science to be the one and only way upward. 53 Selections from Brierley SPECIAL PROVIDENCES " Unless the hairs of your head are all numbered there is no God." The words are George MacDonald's, and they put the challenge to faith in its clearest and boldest form. We all want to believe that our hairs are numbered ; that we are the objects of a special loving care. In Christendom for long ages the idea of a special Providence was sustained by accounts of miracu- lous occurrences. The sign of God's care over human lives was in His surpassing or contradicting the known laws of nature. A successful battle, no matter in what infamous cause it has been won, has invariably been followed by ecclesiastical Te Deums. The faith in Providence as a sort of special relief agent, to be called on at all hours of day and night, was perhaps never more naively expressed than in the story of an old negro, who during an earthquake at Charleston prayed as follows : " Good Lord, come and help us ; oh, come now. And come Yo'self, Lord ; 'taint no time for boys ! " Our suppHant behcved in help at first hand. He had a healthy distrust of intermediaries. Views of this kind still hold their ground over a very wide area, but to most intelligent people they are no longer satisfactory ones. The faith in a special Provi- dence which is possible to our time, and to all times, is then a faith which resides in the spiritual realm, which springs out of our spiritual instincts and afhnities ; which works in a sphere that transcends Nature, which accepts her laws, even in their hardest expressions, as ministering to its development. We say this in face of all the objections. Why, with a good and omnipotent God, is not our world more perfect ; why weakness and 54 The Inner Life disease, when with such powers abroad in the universe there might have been strength and health ? Why has a state of society been permitted in which the rich rob the poor ; in which the hardest work is done for the worst pittance ; in which we have homes of one room ? That is to say, supposing God had done everything for us ! Would that have been a better condition than the one in which we find ourselves ; one in which we are invited to find out things, and to do things for ourselves ? A paradise with nothing to do might be a paradise for somebody else to admire ; it would be no place for an eager soul to find itself in. The whole scheme, indeed, is one whose primal object — for which all else is risked and even sacrificed — is a scheme for the development of human spirits, and that by leaving man to do all that he can do. He is not to be coddled — to be furnished with crutches when he can use his own muscles and limbs. The school-boy who finds a companion to do all his sums for him may regard his helper as a special providence. But he is not a good providence. Why should man be cured by miracle of his diseases ? Let him learn to cure himself. That will give him not only health but the laws of health — so much larger a possession. His difficulties, his miseries — what are they but a perpetual challenge to try again ? The human freedom, with all the risk of using it wrongly, is better than no freedom. The soul can grow under no other conditions. Man must put out to sea, even with the chance of wreckage, for he will never become a sailor by remaining in port. And our faith goes so far as to beheve that in this human voyage even his wreckage will not ruin him. For man's worst has 55 Selections from Brierley its limitations and contains in itself some subtle seed of recovety. Yes, the hairs of our head are all numbered. When- ever we pray we affirm that. And we can match this affirmation, in our being's highest act, against all the materialisms and all the devil's advocacies, from what- ever quarter they come. For the soul here is sure of itself. It moves here in a sphere the world cannot enter, still less conquer. Quis separahit ? In face of life's sternest tragedies, of its utmost extremities, it joins in the Apostle's triumphant hymn of faith, knowing with him that neither life nor death, things present nor things to come, can shut it off from the Infinite Love. ON THE SICK-BED In a severe illness, when the hfe-force ebbs to a low point, Nature rehearses the fmal scene for us, and shows us how easy a thing it \\dll be to die. A healthy nature, that enjoys living, will, when the time comes, enjoy dying. We recognise it as part of the general scheme ; a kindly scheme, which does not cease to be kind in this final incident. We see with Browne in his " Religio Medici " that " we are happier with death than we should have been without it." Death is, in fact, a trump card which Nature holds for us, and which she will play in our interest at the right moment. And this convic- tion comes upon us without any complications from theology. Illness is non-theological. The sick man knows, if no one else does, that the most heated dis- putes in this sphere have little or no contact with reality ; that they are a logomachy with which he need not trouble himself. Nature is not much of an eccle- 56 The Inner Life siastic. She brought us into the world in her own homely fashion, without formulae, and will take us out of it under similar conditions. All the same, she is not mocker, nor atheist. The space she clears for us from the Church controversies leaves the more room for rehgion. In these hours of seclusion, shut off from the roaring world, we find our- selves in communion with the ultimate reahties. We are in love with the heights. We find our kinship with all who have loved, who have aspired, who have suffered. Familiar words from the great souls who have known God come back to us with an altogether ravishing sweetness. Our soul dwells in Holy Land. We walk in Gahlee and hear the Beatitudes ; we are admitted to Gethsemane ; we learn the secret of Calvary. We know all this not simply as history written in a book, but as the human history that is written in our own spirit. Here is the road that souls have travelled from the beginning of the world, and where they have found victory. It is for most of us a happy experience to come back again from that weird by-path where we have spent the painful weeks, and to find ourselves once more amid the joyous bustle of the main route. Whence, by what mysterious processes does it come to us, this returning strength ? From rest and from movement, from the spring breath, from wind and sun, it streams in upon us. Day by day the perspective changes. The old interests, the old preoccupations revive and resume their sway. We are becoming once more pohticians, controversiaHsts, shareholders, sportsmen, and the hundred other things that made up the old life. The world which has shown how easily it can 57 Selections from Brierley do without us gives us, nevertheless, a good-humoured welcome back. Best of all, it shows us the niche where we can still do some of its work. Well will it be for us if, as we tread the old route, we con diligently and lodge safe in our memories the signs written in the earth and sky of that other bit of country we have been passing through. A sorry thing if, after that experience, we remain still without a sense of the true proportion of things ; if we have not learned to estimate all the world offers at its proper value ; if we have not with Chalmers, after the illness which changed his life, been made to perceive the " Httleness of time and the greatness of eternity." THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE SOUL In these later ages the world has developed a new- sense, that of climate. We have become mightily fastidious in breathing. We pay any price for an atmosphere. In the sights it flashes on the retina, in the fragrances with which it intoxicates, in the secret vigours it conveys, we find some of life's choicest gifts. And as certainly as does our physical organism so certainly does our spiritual self live by the air it breathes. But the analysis of the one atmosphere is not nearly so easy as that of the other. When we talk of oxygen and hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, of the atomic theory and of the law of combining proportions, we are in the sphere of weights and measures, of the accurately calculable. It is a more dimly-lighted region we enter when we reach this other side, and our measuring instruments are all to seek. We are 58 The Inner Life stumbling up against dim perceptions, adumbrations of truths which, while they impress with their grandeur, leave us only a vague sense of their outline and content. As our planet is immersed in a deep, dense sea of air, that plays incessantly through our organism and carries in itself mysterious potencies which we are just beginning to discern, so is our thought-world to-day surrounded by its ether, not less pervasive and potent. We cannot tell its whole content, or the whole method of its operation. It consists, partly at least, of ideas and of influences that have for ages been accumulating. And this inner atmosphere, accessible from all worlds, has also its sun. The soul's system has its centre as surely as the planetary. The history of reHgion is the history of the soul's gravitation to the centre, its aspiration for its birthplace. The saints have put this aspiration into every language. Jacob Behmen's words on the new birth stand as a type of the whole human movement here. His account of the soul as a light originating in the Father's essence, lumen de Inmine, imprisoned in darkness, feeling " a fire of anguish," until its longing for the Hght is satisfied by God's witness in it, when there arises within " a sweetness of rest and peace," is the common story from Plato and St. John to George Fox and to William Law. The question of the soul's atmosphere has, however, another side. We do not merely draw from it. We also contribute to it, and it is here that perhaps the chief significance of our life exhibits itself. We are pouring out powers that create or destroy. If waves of force, flowing from physical centres, flash, as we know they do, through atmospheres, and penetrate every form of matter, who shall estimate the effect 59 Selections from Brierley of the forces emanating from our spirit centres, that beat upon our brother's thought and will ? It is from this point of view that we best study the significance of prayer. When a mother wrestles in spirit for her child, or a friend for his friend, we have at work the highest and the purest force the world knows. And the results ? We may not see them. But unless all the discoveries both of the physical and the spiritual universe are in a conspiracy to deceive us, nothing is more certain than the certaint}^ of these results. The forces here unlocked may have a circuit as wide as that of a comet, but they will not waste themselves nor fail of their goal. From this standpoint, too, we could best discuss the whole life of the Church. Its business is to create an atmosphere. More than its assertion of dogma, more than the perfecting of its ritual, is its function of filhng the area of its influence with an air which the poor, poisoned soul of humanity, as it inhales the oxygen and warms to the sunshine, sliall reahse as the Divine it has panted for, the very breath of God. VICARIOUS CONSECRATION One of the most significant, as well as one of the most pathetic, things in history has been men's ceaseless quest after the good. So eager has been their search for saints and sainthood that where they could not find what they sought they have invented it. The hagiologies, the Lives of the Saints, with their super- natural embellishments, their impossible idealisings — what are they but the expression of the world's impatient expectation of a Diviner light that is to 60 The Inner Life break upon it out of human character ? When men find such a gleam, how eagerly they follow it ! How the common human heart vibrates to that saying of the Italian peasant to Francis of Assisi, " Art thou brother Francis of Assisi ? " " Yes ! " " Try, then, to be as good as all think thee to be, because many have great faith in thee, and therefore I admonish thee to be nothing less than people hope of thee." Such a person is, in fact, felt to be the possessor and free distributor of immeasurable wealth. He is the discoverer of a new paradise, and men flock to breathe its celestial air. As our inward development goes on we find ourselves laid hold of by a secret imperious demand to this higher helpfulness. " For their sakes " we, too, are " to sanctify ourselves." Humanity has a claim upon us to be and do our very best, that we also may add to the sum of the invisible Good. By our value we increase the value of all mankind. The noble motto, " Non inferior a secuius " is not fully realised till we have learned not only to follow the higher things, but to follow them from more than a personal motive. Vicarious consecration should be a watchword for us all. Fathers and mothers are the moral trustees of the family. Failure of character defrauds their children of the best part of their heritage. The pastor and rehgious teacher is a trustee on a yet larger scale. For such a man to fail of the highest is a public mis- fortune, while an actual fall is worse than if the bank had broken. The malversation of funds is greater, and in a specie that cannot be replaced. We do not, indeed, know the full hmits of our trusteeship. We trace some of its outlines in our earthly relations, 6i Selections from Brierley but these are not the only ones. A wider reach is suggested in those awesome Hnes of Tennyson : " Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side ? Is there no baseness we would hide, No inner vilencss that we dread ? " Whether we look up or down, it is plain there is no room for us anywhere except in goodness. THE INNER SECRET Our innermost yields itself only to kindred spirits and to the soHcitations of love. A man going into St. Mark's, Venice, shall find it discoursing to him according to his degree of initiation. If he be entirely uneducated it may impress him simply as a glowing mass of form and colour. Certainly it says that to all who come. To the artist it has far more to com- municate. He reads miles deeper into its thought. But even he may miss its central intention. It is to the sympathetic believer, and to him alone, that it tells its whole secret. It is he who finds in these " Stones of Venice," as their uttermost meaning, the Christian Gospel. In like manner it is with that vaster fane whose dome is the starry firmament, and whose measurements are infinity and eternity. There are those, the careless and unthinking, to whom the universe discloses only its commoner and surface meanings. And there are, if we may so say, God's intimates, to whom He whispers His finer thoughts. It is in man, the microcosm, in whom all the universe meets, that the Divine ideas chiefly unfold themselves, and that in proportion as 62 The Inner Life his receiving surface is purified and expanded. Emerson has put this in his own way in the statement that " the foundation of culture as of character is at last the moral sentiment. If we live truly we shall see truly." An old Enghsh mystic has expressed it quaintly, yet more nearl}^ : " As long as we be meddhng with any part of sin we shall never see clearly the blissful cheer of our Lord." It is here, indeed, that we have the secret of the moral authority of Jesus. His absolute purity was the light in which He read the heart of God. He saw it as an open book. He spoke with the certitude of conscious oneness with the Divine. And His way is for all the ages and all the worlds the only way of intimately knowing God. By mathematics and chemistry and art we may scrape some acquaintance. It is only through love and purity and humihty and sacrifice that we learn the inner secret. THE INNER FACTOR In our religious behef and life the determining factor is always the inner factor. You repeat the same creed to a thousand people. "They all say " Amen " to it ]' but is it the same to them ? They have assented to a thousand different creeds ; different with all the varieties of their separate upbringing, of their knowledge of the words used, of the mental and moral predispositions they bring to them. The out- side creed, the outside ceremon}', remain the same, but the inner growth of the soul alters perpetually our relation. To the same Bible come a Wesley and a Marat. They are both constant readers of the Bible. But the Enghsh divine brings to it a heart yearning 63 Selections from Brierl ey with compassion for his fellows, and takes from it a message of salvation to every creature ; of the French revolutionist we read : " There was Marat, with the Bible always before him, picking out texts which justified his murders." And we shall never get on in our interpretation of doctrine, in our prognostic of the future of reUgion, till we recognise that this inner movement is a Divine movement, the personal, the eternal revelation. It is this Divine consciousness in us, ev^er developing, ever coming to clearer affirmations, which is steadily ridding us of earlier barbaric conceptions of God and man. The Divine in us, whicli is teaching us the omnipotence of goodness, the limitlessness of love, which puts us alongside, inside, of our fellow-man, one with his innermost feeling and need, makes it impossible for us to conceive of God as other, as less than that. And so away go all doctrines which are contrary to this ; all doctrines which imply that God can inflict torture for the sake of torture ; can please Himself with another's sufferings. If God is in man, eternal punish- ment would be the eternal punishment of Himself ; He would be Himself the eternal sufferer in His own hell ! While the soul, in its inner growth, arrives, in these directions, at what seems denial, the chief result is in great affirmations. We hear to-day of Christianity being " at the cross-roads." The New Testament is being torn in pieces at the hands of a remorseless criticism. The four Gospels are under the microscope. Upon every sentence, every word, is being brought to bear the fiercest light that ever played on human handiwork. In this hght we are asked to consider, 64 The Inner Life not only the limitations of the Gospel writers, but the limitations of Him whose words and deeds they record. Taken by itself it is a disturbing study. But is that all we really have .-* The heart knows better. Jesus, whatever the critics make of Him, remains for ever the Creator of the Christian conscious- ness. He remains the Creator of the soul of to-day. From the Cross, however interpreted, has streamed out a force of love, of spiritual power, which has been the life of the later world. No criticism can ever touch the inner experiences of Paul, of Peter, of Augustine, of Bernard, of Wesley, of Livingstone ; of the myriad unknown ones who in all the ages have by faith overcome the world, have tasted the rapture of the spiritual life. With Jesus came a creation of inner values which no destructive dynamite can blow away. Love, joy, peace, gentleness, meekness, faith — here is an ahment on which souls have thriven as never before. Here are riches lodged in the world's heart, safe from assault, where no moth or rust can corrupt, where no thieves can break through and steal. Our whole success or failure in life is an affair of what is going on within us. The outside event is, after all, so little of it outside. It takes its shape, colour, quahty, its power of blessing or cursing, from the shape, colour and quality of the soul in us that meets it. What it is, first and last, is a question of what you are. Present a /i,ooo banknote to your dog, and it would perhaps swallow it and cough its disgust. The Bodleian library is to a scholar the Bodleian. What would it be to an Esquimaux ? The cross of the blaspheming thief was, we suppose, of the same wood as that on which Christ hung. The nails 65 E Selections from Brierley were of the same penetrating sharpness. But what a different story they told ! It was the difference — • incalculable — between this soul and its neighbour. What inwardness are you to-day offering to the assault of the world's outwardness ? To this scene which surrounds you how much faith, how much prayer, how much love and courage are you bringing ? Here, in your inner training, in your central thought, is the secret of victory. We come back to the words of the Imitatio : " He to whom all things are one, and who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, can be steadfast in heart and remain peaceable in God." 66 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE E 2 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE TRUE LIBERTY What is man's proper liberty, as an individual and as a member of society ? The question puzzles us sorely. Civilisation has burst all its old bonds. Within the last century vast new movements have come, revolutions of the social order, which have upset our old notions, and are compelling a rearrangement of ideas. Perhaps the greatest teacher of the modern world, for good or ill, is the Press, and it is worth while to consider the present position and immediate future of the Press. The newspaper is the pulpit of to-day. But a new condition is emerging, full of menace to its best work. Its liberty is threatened by capital and monopoly. Up to a few years ago the Press stood as an honest record of opinion. The opinion was of various kinds, representing all shades of pohtical and social thinking. The great newspapers fought for their cause, whatever it was. But to-day capitalism is swallowing the independent newspaper. The milHonaire or the syndicate buys up the old local organs and turns them into a multiple megaphone, which drowns all other voices in its deafening preach- ment of selfish interests. It is a wondrous spectacle — with an irresistibly comic side — this, of your humble 69 Selections from Brierley wage-earner, your London clerk, devouring morning by morning the gospel proclaimed to him by his guide, the multi-milhonaire. One wonders what will be the outcome. Will the scholar, the original thinker, the man of conscience and conviction, continue in the ranks, or be drawn to them, as the servants of such a system, or will journalism be reduced to a mob of hirelings, ready to suppress truth, to propagate Hes, to damn their own souls at the bidding of these masters ? The symptoms are threatening, but we doubt if this will be their outcome. The nature of things is, as the Americans say, up against it. Truth, however it may be handicapped, has a way of conquer- ing falsehood, of inflicting upon it final and annihilating defeats. Thus much of liberty in the pulpit outside the Church. What of the pulpit inside it ? On this theme Jeremy Taylor's " Liberty of Prophesying " might, in our day, be read with much profit by both preachers and hearers. And side by side with it might be taken that saying of one of the noblest of Christian thinkers, Pascal, that the greatest of Christian truths is that truth be loved above all. We have hardly attained that virtue yet. Jowett of BaUiol, when speaking of his o\\ti communion, utters what seems too sweeping a condemnation when he says : "I feel con- vinced that, sooner or later, the Church of England will find it impossible to subsist on a fabric of falsehood and fiction." But there has been, there and elsewhere, too much of ecclesiastical subterfuge. Why do we talk so unctuously of " Christian truth " ? Do we need the adjective ? If a thing is true, is not that enough ? If it is not true, no adjective will save it. 70 The Social Conscience The pulpit will only hold men as it is itself held by the truth. In our separate lives the true Hberty for you and me is the hberty to grow and to serve. As Cicero puts it, " We are servants of all the laws in order that we may be free." We have to learn, as Frankhn tells us he learned from his early excesses, that things are wrong not because they are prohibited, but prohibited because they are wrong. As the pianist gets his freedom of execution by obeying all the rules, so we reach the liberty of our universe by meeting all its requirements. There is no other way of it ; thus and thus only do we reach that sphere of the infinite life which an apostle has described for us as " the glorious liberty of the children of God." THE REFORMATION OF CHARACTER Wherever the primitive Gospel has been proclaimed by men possessed of its spirit, however crude the mental envelope in which it has been wrapped, it has exercised this extraordinary power — the power of changing men, of turning them upside down and inside out. It has accomphshed the fact which Schopenhauer declares impossible — of making bad men good. Amid all the clashings of modern behef and non- behef ; amid all the assaults which are made to-day on the citadel of religious orthodoxy, there is one thesis about which, we imagine, all fair-minded men would be found to agree. It is that some such force as this, wherever it is to be found, is the one thing 71 Selections from Brierley we need for the reorganisation of society, for the attainment of human well-being. Amid all our sciences the one needed science is that of making men good. It is an age of machinery, but none is being invented for turning brutal, drunken, wife-beating men into sober citizens, into kind-hearted builders of homes. Any Socialist who can see farther than his nose-end must recognise that his State scheme, however cleverly organised, can come to nothing so long as his material is bad. Is there in the whole SociaHst machinery, even if it work overtime, a means of producing " love, joy, peace, gentleness, meekness, temperance, faith " ? Until it can, it must cease boasting of being, in itself, a new highway into the human paradise. Wrapped up often enough in crudest forms, Christianity has nevertheless vindicated itself as the agent of that greatest of miracles, the reformation of character. It has accomplished the one thing which neither law, nor pohce, nor science, nor material conditions has been able to achieve ; it has given men in all circumstances, even the worst, the sense of inward peace and blessedness. Its beginning marked the inflow from the unseen of a great, unique spiritual power. It was the impartation to man of a new deposit of that " treasure in heaven " which man was created to receive, and which waits to discover itself yet more fully. In saying this, are we not describing what is manifestly the Church's supreme function ? Its one business is to receive, to fill itself with this Divine hfe, that it may impart it to men. It is to be a reservoir of faith, of 3037 and strength, that may flow into and heal the world's broken heart. No assault of scepticism 72 The Social Conscience can touch Christianity so long as it remains a healer of souls. TRUE WEALTH One of the results of the new idea of religion, as the whole science of right living, is the necessity it imposes on Christian teachers of broadening their studies. In this view all great Hterature, all true science, are a part of theology and belong to its curriculum. And quite indispensable as a branch of that learning, lying as it does at the root of our vast social question, and forming thus an integral feature of the eternal religion, is the study of Political Economy. Such a study will give us some sure results, and should dissipate a good many mischievous notions. It will, for instance, in no degree diminish our sense of the value of wealth. It will, instead, clarify our view of its position and function. We shall realise, in the words of a modern writer, that " money is com- pressed force," and force, especially " compressed force," is, we know, not a matter to be trifled with. And there is a legitimate enjoyment in wealth. Theology here must come to the same conclusion as economics. For if God be at once the supremely Holy, and at the same time the Possessor of all things, there can be no intrinsic evil in wealth. We are, indeed, in a very rich universe, with invitations scattered over every yard of its surface to enter boldly and partake. The real question here is, " On what terms and for what end ? " And here we come straight upon Ruskin's great governing proposition, that " there is no wealth but hfe." A career, whether it be of twenty or of ninety 73 Selections from Brierley years, is in the final analysis the sum of its thoughts, its feehngs, its deeds. To get the best in these kinds is to have truly lived. To secure these things in the largest degree for the community, is the one worthy aim of the teacher and leader of men. It is only as property — material having of whatsoever kind — ministers to this result that it is of value. Where it hinders this result its influence has to be regarded as mischievous. In the long run the problems of wealth and hfe will adjust themselves, and we are beginning to see how. The clue to the solution will be in accepting life- development as always the highest end. The soul must first of all be free in order that it may grow. The gold tyranny that seeks to fetter it must at all costs be broken. And that can only be by the uprising of men whose minds are not to be bought ; who will speak naught but the truth, though they starve in the process. And these men must to-day speak the truth about wealth. They must show that in the method of its procuring, of its distribution, and of its enjoyment, no law shall be broken that concerns the furtherance of Hfe. To this end the wealth must be equitably distributed. The beauty it creates, the energies it sets in motion, the art, the literature, the enjoyment it promotes, must be held as not the appanage of a few, but, in as far as the ultimate con- ditions permit, the inheritance of all. The end is that not a cHque or a caste, but man himself is to be wealthy ; a being, that is, dowered with all the capacity of being, doing and possessing that is commensurate with the magnificent place assigned to him in the scheme of the world. 74 The Social Conscience THE TRUE SOCIETY A true society will come, not from sudden political or economical readjustments, but from a heightening of the type of the individual man. To effect that heightening is what rehgion is here for. And it is pre- cisely here, in rehgion property conceived, that we get the common life at once in its purest and its pro- foundest form. Religion really rests on this, the recog- nition of the innermost Highest Being in each soul of us. So is it that Christ is the true eternal Prophet of the common hfe. He appeals to the universal soul. True Christianity recognises that all rehgions are the dialects of one common speech. It holds its place as the crown and summit of the human consciousness, at the top of all the faiths, yet vitally and originally related to all. It sees its own beginnings in the dim aspirations of far-off times, and of what we once thought were ahen cults. It was eminently natural that a rehgion which, in its pure form, proclaimed as its vital principle the essential unity and brotherhood of humanity should, from the beginning, have striven to express this unity in a con- crete way. That was the meaning of the community of goods in the apostohc age, of the monastic institu- tions, v/hose ideal, though fallen away from so grievously in later days, was originally so noble. THE CHURCH AS A SOCIAL FORCE. The Church is a social power or nothing. Its theology, its opinions, have been a mere incident as compared 75 Selections from Brierley with its grasp upon, its inspiration of, the common life. Its whole business has been to grip and combine men in the pursuit of lofty ideals, to help them govern them- selves through the best that is in them. The primitive Church was founded on this basis. We read the New Testament for its directions for living. The Roman Government persecuted the Church, not for its ideas, but because it regarded it as a secret society. As we study the after-histor}', the same thing everywhere meets us. Where the Church helped and inspired, it was not by iis statements on abstract questions, which varied continually from age to age, but from its example of Hfe. What made Bernard in his Clairvaux wilder- ness, and Francis, the " Poverello," at Assisi, so mighty for good in mediaeval Europe was not their opinions on transubstantiation, but the standard of living they set up. And later the EngHsh Methodism gained its force, not from Wesley's views on the quin- quarticular controversy, fiercely as it raged, but from the example which these banded societies offered, of a people ordering their conversation and their whole career on the basis of their relation to God and to eternity. That is the note we have to recover for England and the Enghsh-speaking world. We cannot afford that our Anglo-Saxondom should sink out of view of its sky. A society that is organised on a basis of football or Sunday sing-songs cannot come to much. Heroes will not be born to it ; it will do no great things. It would produce in time a race incapable of understanding the history of the past — that history so full of sacrifice and noble deeds. To stop this rush to Gehenna is plainly the Church's present business. From its bosom, if 76 The Social Conscience from anywhere, must come the movement to rally our disorganised human host, and set it again on the upward track. It will be by a big fight over the whole field of operation, but chiefly by a courageous and statesman- like handling of the problems of childhood and youth, that the Church will again take its true place, and society throb once more under Divine inspirations. THE ENGLISH SUNDAY The winds of criticism are beating upon all our institutions to-day, and among other things we are asked to revalue that ancient asset the Enghsh Sunday. The Church by various signs shows it is not entirely satisfied with it, and the world is in a not less critical mood. A large and, as it seems, increasing section of the population has frankly given the religious tradition of it the go by. Few questions touch weightier issues, or come closer home to us all, than this : What has our Sunday to say for itself, in view of the national consciousness of the time ? Sunday is one of the oldest things that man brings with him. We do not know how old it is. It goes back a long way. More than a thousand years before Abraham's time there was -/ Sabbatical observance in the Babylonian plains, and in connection with religious services of a peculiarly elevated character. Humanity has, in fact, been brought up on the idea of devoting a day, at regular and shortly-recurring intervals, for the cessation of labour, for the recovery by each individual of his personal freedom, and for the consideration of his relation with the unseen, Christianity, on its appearance, took over Selections from Brierley this great religious asset. It changed the date of Sun- day in the week, and gave to its observances a flavour of its own. It is, indeed, precisely in connection with these observances that the whole modern question of Sunday comes up. The spiritual aspect of Sunday is a treasure which, equally with the Puritan, we are bound to safeguard. The greatest thing in humanity to-day, and the pledge of the greatest things to come, is the spiritual conscious- ness which the Church possesses, and which, when its worship is real, comes then to its greatest height. Evolution, in its age-long working, has produced nothing else comparable to this. To bring men universally into the possession of it is to confer the greatest boon that life offers. It is the business of the religious teacher and worker to master the conditions of the time, and to plan his campaign accordingly. And he may do it with good heart. For when all is said and done in other depart- ments, there is nowhere else such a power of appeal and fascination as the Gospel offers. Sunday must, first of all, be a democratic Sunda}^ a people's day. Its institutions and services must be an appeal to every healthy human instinct. It should offer art and music for eye and ear, and the joys of fellowship for the social nature ; it should let loose amongst the poor and disinherited all its play of kindness and brotherly love. It has to popularise the Christian Sunday by flooding it with sunshine. May we not, bringing fresh aids and knowledge to the task, seek again to realise the ideal of holy George Herbert, and make Sunday a time of which we can say : 78 The Social Conscience Thou art a day of mirth ! And where the week-days travel on ground, Thy flight is higher as thy birth ! O let me take thee at the bound [ Leaping with thee from seven to seven. Till that we both (being tossed from earth) Fly, hand in hand, to heaven ! " THE SOCIAL PRESSURE The problem of the social pressure is a tremendous one, full of everj^ imaginable complication, yet we are beginning to see our way in it. What has to be done, we recognise, is to untangle the several threads of it and follow them up. Some of the apparently most hopeless features look far less hopeless to-day than they did not long ago. John Stuart Mill's pessimistic conclusion, for instance, that, whatever our methods of relief, the population would go on increasing always to starvation point, is no longer held. There are, instead, nations already crying out that their population is decreasing. But keeping now to the people who are here, what do we find ? At our bottom stage we hav^e three ragged regiments — the badly employed, the un- employed, the unemployable. But there is one classification that includes them all, and which has to be remembered in any scheme of reform. These people almost without exception are the imskilled. The honest among them are sweated because they know no craft that wall bring them a better wage. The State must interpose itself between the sweater and his victim, as it interposed itself eighty years ago between the manufacturer and the workhouse boy and girl slaves he employed. 79 Selections from Brierley England is, it is evident, awaking to the facts of the present position. Its conscience is stirred. It is aware there is something wrong. But it is not fully awake. It is not so aware as it should be of its immediate responsibility. Shall we palter with our miserable conventions, be tied for ever by our feudal traditions, when, if we will only put forth the strength that is in our hand, guided by the knowledge that is in our brain, we can straightway drain dry the Serbonian bog in which our poor are weltering, and plant them out on wholesome ground, in full view of the sun ? TRUE SOCIAL INTERCOURSE What a man says to his wife or his child at the dinner-table reveals him more surely than his finest eloquence from pulpit or rostrum. It reveals, because it shows us at unawares : shows, not what we wish to be, not what we want the world to think of us, but what at the moment we are. Not that the revelation will necessarily be a discreditable one. If it discloses sometimes our worst, it often shows our best. It was the fortune of the writer to form one of a quartette who spent many days together in Norway. The other members were an Anglican canon, a Roman CathoUc priest, and a Unitarian layman. We formed the happiest society, in which we discovered to our continual wonderment what a vast area of common ground our souls occupied. " If we go on hke this," it was remarked, " what is to become of all our political, our theological, and our ecclesiastical animosities ? " What, indeed ! The secret of the coming world unity 80 The Social Conscience will lie in getting men together and in letting them talk at large. Conversation, in our day, seems to have ceased to be a fine art. Perhaps we talk less because we do more. Some of the greatest passages in history were talk, or what arose out of it. We may well beheve that some of the Divinest things in the Fourth Gospel were spoken over the supper-table in the upper chamber at Jerusalem. One would have liked to hear what Milton said to Gahleo when he visited him in Italy. " There it was that I found and visited Gahleo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." Religion, which begins first in the thought and feehng of some heaven-inspired soul, has found in every age its most effectual form of propagation in free, un- fettered talk. Christianity was spread in this way before anything was written. The Puritans were not afraid of religious conversation. Calamy said of Baxter that " he talked about another world hke one that had been there, and was come as a sort of express from thence to make a report concerning it." We remember that a similar remark is made by Erasmus concerning Sir Thomas More. It was in the free intercourse of the Common Room at Lincoln College that Methodism was started. And later, in the Oriel Common Room, Newman's movement began. It is here, in this frank encounter of man with man, more than in set speech, that your spiritual genius shows himself. We do not get much of that type of conversation now. It is as if the things discussed no longer existed. And yet they do exist, and they are worth talking 8i F Selections from Brierley about. On the whole, one must admit that while the world has progressed in many ways, it shows little improvement in the matter of social intercourse. In some aspects of it it has gone backward. The remedy for all this is hardly to banish ourselves from societ}^ ; is it not rather to lay in some stock of principles for our conduct in it ? And one of these is an edict of banishment against scandal, so far as our personal talk is concerned. Scandal is simply the con- versational resource of empty minds — and the remedy is to fill our mind with other themes and interests. The world's true social intercourse is yet to seek. It is an affair of so many more things than speech. To reach it we shall need a new social system : a system in which every man will realise his relation to his fellow, and find his joy in contributing to that fellow's welfare. Tliat means a vast breaking down of barriers, a vast opening up of new sympathies. Our present condition is one of irrehgious barbarism. If Christ came again among us, do we think He would travel in a first-class carriage, or in the saloon of the Mauretania ? You would find Him in the third-class, and in the steerage of the hner. He would go there to seek the true human- ness of humanity. If He came to London, think you He would be satisfied with a West-end where souls are crushed out by enormous luxuries, and an East-end where in numberless homes people eat and drink, sleep, get ill and die in one room ? While these things exist, let us not call ourselves Christian, or even civilised. Plainly we are only at the beginning of our task as human beings. We shall never be right with God, or with His universe, till we have set about in earnest to be right with our neighbour. 82 The Social Conscience THE PROBLEM OF THE CITY The city is at once the glory and the disgrace of our civihsation. It has been the centre and home of intelli- gence, and yet it has grown without inteUigence, It has come about no one knows or cares how. Now that we are beginning to ask questions about it, we begin to perceive that its problem is too big for us. We have allowed a monster to develop which threatens to devour us. Nothing grows in a city. It is in itself an attack upon nature. As it advances, all the beautiful things wither and die. We watch the process in a suburb. The clump of old oaks we used to pass in our mornmg walk has gone ; the green meadow has become a brick- yard ; the thrushes, the blackbirds we used to hear have disappeared ; the brook is covered in ; the greenery over which the eye ranged is replaced by lines of brick and mortar. There is a different taste in the air. The country has been annexed by the city, and has died in the process. The city, we say, is the place where nothing grows. The things by which man lives — his cattle, his corn, his wine, his oil — have here no place to produce themselves. The really strong men of the city are the well-to-do, who were most likely born in the country, who have their homes in it, to which they rush when work is over, and who have long holidays by mountain and by sea. The dweller who cannot secure these escapes dwindles, as do his children after him. These are physical results. Note now some moral ones. The ruthlessness of the city is perhaps nowhere more shown than in the shrinkage it produces in human values. We esteem each other so much less there than 83 F 2 Selections from Brierley anywhere else. In the small town, in the village, every individual counts for something, for all he is worth. You greet the village policeman, the roadside worker, and discover how interesting they are. Who thinks of greeting a pohceman or his fellow-passenger in Fleet Street ? You meet a man on your travels in Switzer- land or in Norway. You spend three weeks in his company and realise how many ties there are between you. If he came afterward to your neighbourhood in the country you would be friends for hfe. He Hves in London, within a mile of you, and therefore you are no more to each other. The village shoemaker dies and the whole community is moved. Everybody knew him. A thousand shoemakers may drop out in London, and London does not turn a hair. There is another side to the problem of the city, the most difficult of all, and where we seem farthest from a solution. It is the problem of poverty, of destitution. The production of our worst, our hopeless classes, our thieves, prostitutes, drunkards, incapables, is, more than anything else, the result of our aggregation in huge cities, and till we have remedied that we have remedied nothing. But how to remedy things ? We shall not remedy them assuredly till the common-sense, and still more the conscience, of the community has been awakened and made to study the facts as they are. We have to unlearn our city pride. We have to learn instead that the city is a monster that has to be tamed and brought under. We have to learn that a community, to be really human, must be kept to human conditions ; and one of these is a manageable size. Meanwhile the city, as itis, will have to be reorganised. 84 The Social Conscience We look for a social machinery in it so efficient, so wide- spread, so minutely ramified, as shall take into its care every member of the vast family therein gathered. May we not entertain here a new conception of the Church ? Of a Church which, instead of occupying itself with theologic squabbles, with the routine of sermon-making, with the splitting up into endless divisions, should resolve itself into the one supreme agency for bringing these vast, shepherdless hordes into a true mutual relationship ? These things are far from us as yet. But they are the questions of the day, and they will allow us no peace till we have found some means of getting them answered. THE CHURCH AND THE CRIMINAL Society hitherto has been busy indicting the criminal. It has called him all the bad names of its vocabulary. It has caught him, judged him, prisoned him ; and our Chelsea philosopher winds up by recommending a wholesale shooting and hanging of him. We are now, however, beginning dimly to perceive another side to all this, and are asking uneasily whether Society, of which we are a part, is not on the whole the greater criminal ; and whether, if any shooting or hanging is to be done, it were not better to begin nearer home ? Where has the criminal come from ? How did he come to be what he is ? What of the system which has allowed a fellow mortal to sink to this depth ? But we are the makers and supporters of the system. Do not the words of MaeterHnck here burn the skin of every one of us ? " For it is enough that we should feel the cold a httle less than the labourer who passes by, that 85 Selections from Brierley we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have unconsciously returned, through a thousand by-ways, to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling his weaker brother." Here speaks that social con- science outside the Church which, in these matters, is nearer the Christianity of Christ than the modern Church itself. The earher Church was bolder. In teaching that the goods of the world are not properly partitioned, that poverty and crime are an indictment not so much of the poor and the criminal as of the rich, the Socialist of to-day is only saying what Chrysostom and Basil and Jerome and Tertullian said ages ago. Crime is a disease, and one that is everywhere curable. The existence of a criminal class is an indictment, not of that class specially, but of Society at large, whose greed and neglect have produced it. Every time a man enters the dock Society enters with him as particeps criminis. And the only way of curing our criminal is not by the infliction of pain, but by Qn-ist's way of Divine sympathy, by standing in with him as a brother, by using our skill to fight his inner ailment, by changing his environment, by bringing in our goodwill to assist his diseased will ; in a word, by giving his better self a chance. UNWORLDLY MEN Modern society in all departments of its hfe can only be saved by its unworldly men. We want pohticians and statesmen of this breed. Plato's cry for philosophers as State rulers meant that the only men for such posts were such as were rooted 86 The Social Conscience in the Eternal. Happily there were and are such. Creighton's remark about Hildebrand's monk-popes, who ruled the world while renouncing it, suggests the high road here. A man may be in the foremost place and keep the heart of a child. He will keep it by abiding in God, ready to rule or to serve, to be at top or bottom if onty it be His will. At present politics are an ugly scramble, and Church life is little better. When Lord Grey resigned in 1834 he told Creevey that he had 300 apphcations for peerages and a perfectly endless number for baronetcies. In the Church, of all denominations, the rush for front places is just as fierce and as ruthless. Men will talk angelically on a pubHc platform about humihty and self-renunciation, their chief thought being meanwhile to get their name advertised and their address published. The spiritual education, both of the world and of the Church, is as yet clearly only at its beginning. We see our nobler, inner world but dimly, " as through a glass darkly." We need all of us to get our vision purged. The reform of the soul is a more urgent need than the reform of Parliament. When we are at last fairly in love with that highest world — the world opened to us in the New Testament, which Jesus Uved in, and where all the noblest aspirations have their springs — we shall be fit for whatever post or work is assigned us, and carry a clean soul through it all. S? THOUGHTS ON LIFE THOUGHTS ON LIFE LIFE'S APPEAL Life's appeal, as it comes to us from the outside, is a plea for the beautiful. An insistent plea, which man will be compelled to answer until his cities, his land- scapes, his tools and implements, the whole furniture and surroundings of his existence come under its glorious law. But that is only a beginning. The voices that ring in his soul insist on another beauty. Consider here the soul's quality. There is no revelation so sure as that in the qualities of things. To fire, or water, or sunlight you may give any name you please. No name or lack of name will prevent them from working out into the world all that is hid in their nature. And as with fire or sunlight so with the soul. It works out of its quahty, out of that mystery of its essence which is irresistible and indestructible. And its quality, ascertainable whenever it shows itself, is to aspire and to work ever towards the perfect — the perfect, not only of outward form, but of that inner and spiritual beauty which we call holiness. This is only a part of that life-appeal which speaks in the modern consciousness. There is far more, but this in itself surely is much. It is a revelation as rich as it is authentic and authoritative. It is a revelation 91 Selections from Brierley without books, without Church, without catechism or tradition. And yet its mandate is as clear as though it pealed from Sinai, or wrote itself on tables of stone. And the burden of it ? Surely it is to be of good cheer ; to enjoy what life offers ; to traverse without faltering its road of experience ; to take its illusions and disappointments as openings to deeper things ; to realise ever behind it that Power which shares in our laughter and in our tears ; which plays with us, but will not let us stop at play ; which will have us rest at nothing short of the higliest. When from this study of hfe we open the New Testament we find a name for that Power. Life's unvoiced appeal and this message from GaHlee — the message which bids us trust in a Father whose name is Love — seem marvellously in accord. LIFE'S PRODUCTS Life is a perpetual weaving of all sorts of raw material into all kinds of manufactured articles. We must always correct our judgment of the material by a study of the product. The study should relieve us from a host of superfluous fears. Why trouble about hardships, about difficulties, about renounce- ments, about " doing without " for ourselves and our children, when we see how these things turn out ? They are the very stuff that a healthy human nature is calhng for, the material of its highest quahty of manufacture. Life's products, if we will only give them a chance, are so wonderful. We receive the raw material at 92 Thoughts on Life the beginning of the process. But the result is of a fineness often beyond our tracing. What chemistry, what analysis can fix for us the elements of a truly spiritual character ? What is the machinery that has wrought it to its exquisite beauty ? Has this finest of all results been consummated only to disappear ? Is this love, this faith, this glow of devotion no longer anything ? Who that beUeves in the sanity of the universe can beheve that ? The early Fathers — you find it in Ignatius, in Irenseus — taught that the bread of the Sacrament went to the making of a spiritual, immortal body. That is an idea too coarsely materiahstic for many of us. But character, the extract of the will's noble striving with the world, the subtle essences that have flowed out of loving deeds, out of soitows bravely borne, the wisdom born of experience, the vision given to faith — here have you a product, an entity formed of elements which the body did not generate, and in whose fortune it does not share. The ulti- mate result of this high manufacture is too fine for mortal perception. It passes beyond our vision, to take its place and service in those higher spheres to which it is akin, and where it will find itself at home. LIFE AS AN ACCUMULATOR Life as an accumulator works in mysterious, baffling ways. Often it will store up for long antecedent periods the materials that are finally to exhibit them- selves on the great scale in one commanding personaUty. It took generations of obscure musicians to produce 93 Selections from Brierley finally a Bach, a Rossini, a Beethoven. The current runs underground for far distances until finally its hidden forces burst up in some mighty geyser-fountain, towering heaven high. There were generations of Wesleys, all full of character, but when we speak of " Wesley " we know the one we mean. Patrick Bronte, in his gloomy moorland parish, cherished a world of thought and passion in his stern, silent nature. It was his daughters who gave it vent in "Jane Eyre" and " Wuthering Heights." Our separate personahty is, indeed, the greatest puzzle in the world. We can never apportion its boundaries ; so little of it is ours, so much a borrowing from the man before us. " Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead have so\vn — The dead, forgotten and unknown." A scientific ordering of life will be largely a science of accumulations. We shall settle with ourselves what things are to be sought and retained, and what treated as negligible. The strange thing is to see the eagerness for lumber. Cicero asks if anything can be more absurd than, in proportion as less of our journey remains, to seek a greater supply .of provisions. And pagan Porphyry, a far better Christian, surely, than many in the Church, gives us the true sense of the matter in that letter to his wife where he bids her lay up the things that can be carried into the world beyond, instead of being solicitous about what will have to be left behind. How striking is the Persian motto, " The bricks are made on earth with which to build our heavenly palace " ; and that saying in the 94 Thoughts on Life Laws of Manu, " For after death neither father, nor mother, nor son, nor wife, nor relatives are his com- panions : his virtue alone remains with him." These souls of the early world, seekers after God, whose earnestness shames our indifference, knew well the lesson of our theme. They saw hfe as continuous, death as a liberation, and the realm beyond as a sphere where the spiritual accumulations of the present would be built into the structure of eternity. LIFE AS A MIXTURE The whole wisdom of hfe — a wisdom in which our age has yet to take some important lessons — consists in our proper apprehension of hfe as a mixture ; a clear perception of the fact, and a right deahng with it. The vast experience which the world has already had should have taught us something here ; and yet, as we will try in what follows to show, the point has too often been missed. In pohtics, in rehgion, in our personal attitude to life, we are constant^ missing it. And what is the point ? The ages have shown us nothing if not this : that in the mixture the good is the topmost, the victorious element ; that the existing evil has a soul of good in it ; that our wisdom is in beheving in the good and working for it, while keeping the eye of eternal vigilance on that other sinister element in the compound. The inevitable logic of facts is proving to us that the human mixture is, on the whole, good, and, by the inevi- table law of its own nature, is working towards a higher good. In the sphere of religion, also, the rule obtains, the 95 Selections from Brierley rule of things mixed. The Christian rehgion, to which we here confine ourselves, has for its text-book the Bible — the book on which we have been brought up ; which contains the highest truth and the highest life we know ; which, as Seeley says, towers over the greatest single work of human production as the Peak of Tenerif^e towers over our tallest buildings. But its truth and hfe, how do they come to us ? In such a mixture as no other book we read to-day presents. In it eternal truths lie so often wrapped in worn-out time-vestures. We have no business to offer the book to the non-Christian peoples as anything but what we ourselves have discovered it to be — a mixture. To send the book without that knowledge of it would be a gross fraud and a grievous wrong. Are we to permit these peoples, without word spoken or help given, to go through the agonising process by which our own standpoint of faith has been reached ? Let us go on giving the world the Bible — it is the best gift we can offer it — but give it under no false pretences. " Here," let us say to these outside races, " is a God's gift to you, which comes as every other God-gift, as His rain and sunshine. His crops and seasons come, not as something absolute or ideally perfect, but as a mixture of things higher and lower, best and not best, but a mixture where the best is predominant, so predominant that, properly used, it will lift you higher than ever you were before." Our personal life is a mixture. No philosophy and no theology can solve the problem as to why it comes to us as it does. But we can live here by a faith which is founded on facts. That the mixture has so much good in it, and works so persistently towards 96 Thoughts on Life a good that is beyond, is siiflficient reason for us to believe that the ultimate nature of things is neither adverse nor indifferent towards us. The defeats, the failures, the pains, the sorrows, are life's unknown quantity. That they exist side by side with so much that we know as good is proof enough, in courageous souls, for the faith that these also are part of a scheme whose final issue is not yet, but which will reveal itself in its time as wholly benevolent. THE ART OF LETTING-GO The process of letting-go is sometimes a hazardous one, calling for all the nerve and judgment there may be on hand. To commit oneself to a glissade in the High Alps without being quite sure what is at the farther end, or to drop from the end of a rope slung over a vessel's side to a boat riding below on a high-running sea, with the consciousness that if you miss the elect moment the said boat will be yards away, and you amongst the fishes, are experiences in this line which, when gone through for the first time, leave a mark in the memory. People who have lived, in any wide sense of the word, are sure sooner or later to come upon dead drops of faith of this kind. Moments arrive when we have to leave tlie known for the unknown, to com- mit ourselves to an untried principle, to make our fate depend upon the action of a law which we have hitherto taken on hearsay. Letting-go is a business both of the exterior and the interior of hfe, and in both forms an essential feature of human progress. History is made by the men who 97 G Selections from Brierley accomplish it successfully. When the world is ready for a fresh departure its struggling consciousness becomes incarnate in some one individual, who drops away from the old moorings, canying its fortunes in his hands. The act, whenever and on whatever scale accomplished, offers a psychological moment which one would like to know more about. It is a pity the men who perform it have been, many of them, so reticent. To let-go successfully requires some conditions. The time must be ripe, and the principle to which we com- mit ourselves trustworthy. In the region of social and spiritual, as well as of material experiments, the way is marked by lettings-go which were catastrophes, as well as by those which were successes. It is in the sphere of the inner and spiritual Hfe that the principle of letting-go receives some of its most momentous applications. As in other departments, so here we find the human story one first of crawling on all fours, then of endeavours after the upright position, assisted by clutches at whatever offers itself as a support, until at last the pupil stands and walks alone. In no other direction, however, is there such a tendency to reversion. Christ found the Jewish nation in His day still going on crutches, and the habit, spite of His own life and teaching, in the religious world yet remains the fashion. A Paul may, with his doctrine of faith, knock away the loved implements from under Galatian armpits, but as soon as his back is turned the old hobbling recommences. To-day, over tliree-fourths of Christendom, the religion which saves is held to consist primarily in sub- mission to Church authority and the acceptance of old- world creeds. The crutch ecclesiastical is still de 98 Thoughts on Life rigiteur. To walk without it is considered as socially indecent. The nullius addidus jurare in verba magistri habit is shocking impertinence. Spite, however, of clerical reactions and all other appearances to the contrary, men will in the end get to their feet in these matters, and the crutch be finally relegated to the museum of antiquities. The religion which consists simply in heart-whole loyalty to truth and to the highest standard of living is already in sight. The time will come when it will be in full possession. THE COMMONPLACE One of the greatest of human burdens is the sense of being imprisoned by the commonplace. A man spends his working day in making the eighth part of a pin, or in totting up columns of figures, or in selhng calico. His wife, meanwliile, is occupied with an incessant cooking, cleaning and arranging, which has all to be begun over again to-morrow. " If only there were a respite, and a chance of travel and change ! " They take it for granted, and are here voicing the almost universal feeling, that the escape from commonplace is simply an affair of change of circumstances. Yet Nature does not seem to have organised man's Hfe here with a view to its being a purely humdrum affair. That she placed him in such an astonisliing universe, and with a relation to it so marvellous, is in itself the answer to such a supposition. The knowledge of good and evil that she rubs into us ; our encounters with pain and trouble, the fact that we can never get through a day without some rebuff, some tangle of 99 G 2 Selections from Brierley circumstance ; and, most striking of all, that in full view there is placed before every mother's son of us, for wind up of our present career, the tremendous adven- ture of death, are all Nature's stern refusal to man to permit himself to be trivial. Imprisoned as we most are in our narrowing labours and positions, we may yet individually escape the commonplace. There is but one way, and it is an inward way. The only change as to our circumstances that is really effective is the change of our mental and moral attitude towards them. Precisely in proportion as we become in ourselves deeper, purer, more refined, more open-eyed, does our environment become more wonder- ful, more wholly removed from tedium or vulgarity. There is no need to travel a thousand miles in search of the subHme. A stairy night is vastly more sublime than Niagara. The moment we take ourselves in hand and reahse that the whole question of change, whether it be of scenery or circumstance, is from beginning to end a question of our own interior, and of what goes on there, our deliverance has begun. Rehgion,in the sense of an abiding consciousness of God, is the supreme deliverer from the common-place. It is, as Joubert has put it, " the poetry of the heart " ; it is for every man the open door into the infinite. There seems a corollary to this, a special instruction to the religious teacher of whatsoever name. What his fellow man requires of him, what, indeed, constitutes his chief raison d'etre in the world, is that for himself and for his fellows he escape the commonplace. And he is to do it, not so much by genius or by learning, as by enlargement and cleansing of his interior life, by the infiltration into it of the hfe of God. 100 Thoughts on Life ADJUSTMENTS The position which now overshadows all others for thoughtful men is the profound change which is working in the region of our most momentous beliefs. On the question of man's origin and destiny, of revelation, of the interpretation of the Christian facts, we are in sight of nothing less than a revolution. The best minds are already fully occupied with the movement ; and what fills the best minds is, by an inevitable law, certain within a given time to permeate the entire community. The beams that at first gild the topmost peaks will, later on, give daylight to the valleys. Cautious and timid souls are aghast at the signs. They imagine that if a given view is taken from them the privation will work death to the soul. It is con- soling here, however, to note Nature's way of working in these matters, to note what actually happens. i The process man is now going through is no new one. All through the ages he has been passing from one phase of belief to another. And always when he is summoned to advance, he finds the way prepared for him. Steps have been cut for him in the snow ; the precipices have been barricaded. It is the sub- conscious within him, rather than his own noisy argumentation, that has prepared his solutions. The great controversies, indeed, seem never to be settled by argument. We do not so much refute error as grow out of it. What to us now are the mediaeval theories of the Atonement, the contests of NominaHsts and Realists, the five points of the Calvinist-Arminian controversy ? These battles are over not because this or that side was declared victor, but because the great lOI Selections from Brierley human interests have shifted their ground. Nature, in conducting her child, keeps open his communications not only with the past, but also with the future. Man's present views are provisions on the way. And the supply has perpetually to be renewed. It is a wilder- ness-manna which v,i\\ not keep sweet in perpetuity. When science and philosophy have said their last word, the mind's final adjustment will be a rehgious adjustment. Here, and nowhere else, does it find refuge against the infinite mutations of time and the world. It is an open secret known to all pure souls. The author of the " Imitation " has put it for us with his own simple beauty : " When a man cometh to that estate that he seeketh not his comfort from any creature, then first doth God begin to be altogether sweet to him. Then shall he be contented with whatever doth befall him in this world, then shall he neither rejoice in great matters, nor be sorrowful in small, but entirely and confidently he committeth himself to God, who is unto him all in all." ELECT SPOTS When a spot has become sacred to men it is always in the first place because a great spirit has dwelt there. But another arresting feature is the way in wliich, in the making of a " holy place," the outside matter, the physical surrounding, has acted as a kind of reflex of this soul, one might say an absorbent of it ; such that, by dwelling in the place, the saint or hero has saturated it with his personahty, as though emanations from his central self had poured into this house he dwelt in, into these fields and hills his eye looked upon. 102 Thoughts on Life It is this speciality of the rehgious sense, this struggle which it wages for a pure, unadulterated manifestation, that has given rise to Puritanism, to those bare simphcities of worship so offensive to art, but so mighty for life. It is tlie cry for immediacy of access of spirit to spirit which would have no distraction of the out- ward in its high intercourse. Jacob's rude block at Bethel was better as a Divine remembrancer tlian a garish temple. Here is why simple souls have found their bare meeting-house more sacred than cathedral altar. They know it as the place where the heart has reached its deepest and highest, where the soul has found its utmost wealth of inner experience. The uncushioned pew, the rude bench, have been to them the Damascus road where the vision came, their Milan garden where, like Augustine, they heard the inner voice that shaped their destiny. By the Spirit's thrill, most august of consecrations, the lowly place has become holy ground. Every thinking man, in his progress through life, has his elect spots, unnoted of others, which are shrines to him. Poor indeed is our home if there be not some quiet chamber in it, whose windows open toward Jerusalem. There is a corner, a chair, a bedside, whence the soul has found passage-way upward, and where secret strengths have flowed in on it, as from uttermost heights. Often these places are the unlikeliest of all. Prison floors, the bottom- most abyss of outward affliction, are by the soul's magic turned into altars. A victim of the earthquake at Valparaiso describes how, thrust by the disaster with his family from a comfortable home upon the bare hillside, with no shelter from the bitter cold, he 103 Selections from Brierley found, in the four nights thus spent, a sense which he would never after forget of the Divine presence and love. To sincere hearts, each year makes the world richer in these sanctities. One becomes almost superstitious about them. There is a certain spot in one of the most crowded streets of London, where the present writer has, in passing, had time after time such sudden rush of happy thought as to make him wonder whether hidden behind the brickwork there be not some ministering sprite, some mystic fount of inspiration. EVENTS AS TEACHERS It is a great step in the interpretation of Hfe when we have discovered that all events are ultimately spiritual. Their outside may seem at the furthest remove from any such character, but we have only to go deep enough to find that this is the simple truth about them. The fall of Jerusalem was to Jeremiah and his contemporaries just a bloody and horrible catastrophe. Within it was contained the movement which led up to the revelation of God as henceforth not the tribal deity of Judah, but the one God and Creator of all nations of the earth. The spHt in the Papacy, which gave fourteenth century Christendom two rival and mutually anathematising Popes, was, to innumerable devout Cathohcs, only a distressing quarrel and a grievous religious scandal. At its centre the spectacle held the germ of that appeal of the Christian consciousness from fallible and rival ecclesiastics to Christ Himself, which issued in the Reformation. When shall we ever reach the central inwardness of the event we call the Crucifixion ? In 104 Thoughts on Life itself, on the outside, it was a sheer, grim fact, a hideous kiUing. It was not speech, nor music, nor poetry, nor art, nor philosophy, nor saving power. It was the doing to death of a victim in the cruel Roman fashion. And yet, as we press toward the inner recesses of this fact, how much do we meet of art and philosophy and devotion and saving power, and all Divine things that have already come out of it, and how much more, unreached as yet, remains behind ? There is this advantage about events considered as teachers, that they are so entirely honest and trust- worthy. Unhke so many of our rehgious instructors, they carry no top hamper of tradition, and they never worry us with preconceived theories. They neither He nor flatter, but bring us a lesson crammed with reahty, and bid us make what we can of it. The greatest evidence, perhaps, of the grandeur and infinite reach of human destinies lies in this conscious exposure of the soul to the momentous events that await it. And especially those darker events which cast so chill a shadow before them. It may be that, as Livy says, " Segnius homines bona quam mala seniinnt " (men have a keener sense of ill than of good). But what they feel so keenty as ill bears in itself a message that it is not the end. That deep word of Mrs. Browning, " But pain is not the fruit of pain," verifies itself. No, not pain, but something far other shall be the fruit of what we here suffer. Shall we not say indeed, with a German writer, " Everything inferior is a higher in the making ; everything hateful a coming beautiful, every- thing evil a coming good " ? An inspired apostle has given us the true inwardness of events, in the declara- tion that the present pain shall be swallowed up in the 105 Selections from Brierley coming glory, and that no one of all the conceivable happenings in heaven or on earth can separate the people of God from the love of God. THE PRESENT AND THE PAST Tlie present is master of the past, and not its slave. The prophetic minds have ever gone on this assumption. It was the attitude of Jesus. He was crucified for being a revolutionary, for beheving that there was a greater inspiration living then in His soul than was to be found in any old-world writings. It is precisely as men have followed Him here, precisely as they have caught the new note for their time, and fearlessly uttered it, that they have become of use to their generation. It is on this view of the right relations of past and present that our whole religious thought in the future must proceed. When Pascal declared that the human race was, in its totaUty, as an individual, ever growing and ever learning, he uttered a truth whose imphcations went further probably than even he himself perceived. For it proclaims the newest mind as ever the oldest and the most experienced mind. The race is older with each generation, and knows more. And its new know- ledge is always a fresh chapter of the human Scripture. When men generally have perceived this there will be surcease for ever of the pitiful spectacle of rehgious minds tormenting themselves and others with notions of God, man and the future derived from the childhood of the world. It will be seen that we are on an ascend- ing scale of height and vision, and that the view open to us is more trustworthy than that of men for their time truly inspired, but who historically and evolu- io6 Thoughts on Life tionarily were lower down on the road. The past is ours not for our enslavement, but for our use, for our learning, for means of conquering a vaster future. No less than this is involved in our behef in God the Living Spirit. With Vinet we hold that " the Reformation is ever permanent in the Church even as Christianity. It is Christianity restoring itself by its own inherent strength." THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOWLINESS In the exhibition of the transcendent wonders of the atom which is our latest revelation, we have a new sanction for the Gospel virtue of lowhness and for its grace of contentment. The investigation which has discovered the infinite potencies of the tiniest visible speck suggests the infinite potencies in our own least and lowest. We see here how our insignificancies, our Umitations, are, not less than their opposites, parts of the Divine order. The infinite is not only in the heaven of heavens ; it is also in yonder molecule. And we shall have achieved one of the greatest of all the inner victories when it has become to us an article of faith, a fact of hfe to be embraced and held fast day by day, that our least and poorest, the side where we do not count, the failure, the weakness that keeps us back from honour, the obstacle that mars our pleasure — that all this, not less than our shining gift, our sense of power, has in it and behind it all the majesty of the eternal purpose. The infinitely great hves with and by the infinitely Httle. Our weakness, not less than our strength, is a part of God. It is a side of His purpose, an aspect of His life. 107 Selections from Brierley And this blessed discovery puts us in love, not only with a part, but with the whole of our life. We look beyond the sordid surface to the eternal beauty that gleams through. We reaHse that existence itself is victory. We do not quarrel with its knobs, excres- cences, and rough surfaces. We know that weeds, so called, are " plants whose virtues have not yet been discovered." The doctrine holds of the inner garden as well as of our plot outside. We examine our hmi- tations with a new hopefulness. They are the atomic side of us. It is, we perceive, only our ignorance which hides from us their mysterious, beneficent working, their stupendous Divine relationships. The man who has mastered the philosophy of lowli- ness will be free of many things. He will not be dis- appointed at his limitations or his weakness ; and that not because he is in love with limitations or little- ness, but because he discerns behind all this an infinite greatness looming. It is here also he will find his strength to be honest and fearless as a truth-seeker and a truth-utterer. Your true independents are the men who are at their ease in lowhness. One of the greatest weaknesses of public life to-day, in pohtics as in religion, is the slavery of men to outward position and to popular applause. We shall not get a revival of moral and spiritual force till leaders and public teachers, renewing themselves at the sources of highest Hfe, have won their emancipation from the false high in its every form, and speak and act in absolute loyalty to the true high, though it be linked with a manger or a cross. Here find we, indeed, our emancipation from all that is called evil. When we have reached this deeper view — have realised for ourselves that what, in io8 Thoughts on Life its inner aspect, is a limit, opens on its other side to infinite freedom ; that experiences which, in our pre- sent appeal to our consciousness, are gloomy and painful, have behind them immeasurable other aspects, vastest transformations ; that death itself is an appearance with a quite other reahty behind — the day of our freedom will have dawned. We shall accept life in its totahty as a Divine gift. In its highest and lowest we shall alike touch God. REACHING THE GOAL There are disquieting reports concerning the young man of to-day. It is rumoured that his interests are somewhat astray. The post at present assigned to him in the world's work is a post vacant of his mind and heart. To do not his best but his least in it, and to get away from it at the earliest possible to idle and expensive pleasures, are said to be his ruling ideas. Or the work, he thinks, is not good enough for him, and he scamps it while dreaming of the loftier objects of his ambition. The man with stuff in him does not argue in this way. What if his present occupation is not the final or highest he is to reach ! That will not prevent him from putting his back into this which is before him. Actually where we are is the battleground where we are to play the man. To be there and all there, to put our utmost soul into the job in hand, is the way of success. A fig for the student who has perpetually to be chasing his thoughts back to his theme ! You will do no good till you know how to be absorbed. 109 Selections from Brierley We love that story of the mathematician who began to chalk some formulae on the back of a carriage in the street, and was then astonished to find his black- board moving away from him ! His concentration was here undoubtedly a httle overdone, but it was this that had made him a mathematician. Here and now ! For heaven's sake do not sacrifice your present for any possible future. Let this be the best there is for you, whatever may come after. " Be perfect in regard to what is here and now." Remember always, as Jean Paul has it, that " this future is nothing but a coming present, and the present which thou despisest was once a future which thou desiredst." Is yours a rough and uncouth present ? Yet Confucius could say : " With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow, I still have joy in the midst of these things." Most people, especially the young, are intent on some sort of " getting there." On every hand heights rise above us kindling desire to cHmb them. And the ambition is no bad thing in its way ; properly handed, one of the best things. It is one of our highest titles that we arc climbers. The question is as to the kind of summits we are after, and what we expect when we reach them. One matter to be settled with ourselves at the start is that whatever outside elevation we attain, whatever accumulations we make, will have no effect whatever in satisfying us. At the topmost peak you are at the work of wishing just as much as when you were at the bottom. And to gain the thing wanted is often enough to lose it. Is life, then, a cheat ? Only a cynic would say so. Its business is to train us to the right direction in our no Thoughts on Life climbing, to show us the proper " there " to be reached. And here comes in the supreme office of religion. It reveals to us a spiritual world whose " here " and " there " have no connection with space, yet are the surest and most abiding of realities. The progress towards these altitudes is not measured in miles, nor can it be promoted by the most ingenious of mechanical engineering. There are no tickets to be purchased on this line ; no saloon carriages ; it is all plain tramping. In this progress the milHonaire is no better off than the artisan. He is, in fact, handicapped by the weight he carries. The travellers, unlike those others, have no misgivings as to the kind of region they are entering, or as to the satisfactions it offers. As the steps mount the air becomes ever purer, the view more majestic, the sense of innermost wellness the more pronounced. Getting there — to this " there " — is plainly worth the trouble. There is absolutely no doubt as to the existence of the region, and none either as to its accessi- bility. You may deny a future life, or an3'^thing else you choose. But when it comes to the soul's Promised Land, high up, invisible, you may spare the breath of negation, for there are people who are Hving in it. And being there they have a shrewd suspicion, born not of the mind's logic, but of an experience so much deeper, that this region is an eternal one, and their relation to it eternal. POSSESSING OURSELVES Possessing ourselves, truly conceived, can never be a narrowness, a selfish isolation. It is rooted in III Selections from Brierley obedience, in loyalty to the highest. It begins not by shutting its doors, but by opening them to a uni- verse, to a hospitahty which claims God as its guest. And this receptiveness will be no mere passivity. When in this way we possess ourselves, we shall want to make the property worth possessing. We inhabit this interior, and our first business is to furnish it. Here am I, established on this bit of infinite space, on this moment out of eternity, with the task in my hands — to create myself. Here to me is offered the mystery of the power, the mystery of to-day, to do what I will with them. There are a hundred ways of frittering them, a hundred forms of meanness, of in- consequence, of moral ughness, into which I may turn them. Shall I be content with these, with anything less than the highest possible ? If we decide for that highest, it will put us at issue on a good many points with the world as it is. You want, for instance, to fill your mind with the truth of things. That will put you at issue with numbers of people who instead want to fill you with themselves. You will have to wave away the whole race of mental despots, who, filled with the lust of power, are nothing less than spiritual beasts of prey. They urge upon you some old-world conception of God and man which they use as an instrument for dominating your mind. The priest or preacher, of whatever name, whose manifest desire is to help and inspire you, to stimulate your nobler part, is to be welcomed as a friend. But beware the man who comes to you with threats ; who interposes his Churcli, his creed, between yourself and that ultimate truth which is your heritage. If he is to do all your seeing, your own eye will shrivel 112 Thoughts on Life into blindness. His threat of damnation is an appeal to your courage. If we would possess ourselves, we need beware of all sorts of invaders. When we consider what, in this brief life of ours, there is to learn and do, the common waste of time is appalHng. What is the value we are putting on hfe when we give our hours and days to vapid amusements, to frivolous reading, to talk in which there is neither sense nor soul, to melancholic musings of doubt and despair ? We should seek our own company oftener if we had made our company a little more valuable. For the full soul, at one with the universe, finds in itself the best society. It is never less alone than when alone. It is in company with the eternal. All things speak to it ; a tree, a bird, the moving cloud, the face of a child, kindle it to inner raptures. Its solitude is a communion, a prayer, a hymn of thanksgiving. A great, an infinitely complex operation truly is this business of gaining, of possessing ourselves. It is God's work and our own. A thousand foes menace the possession ; we guard it at the price of an incessant vigilance. And for what end do we strive and watch ? Is it to keep this treasure as a miser his hoard ? Are we preaching here a colossal egotism ; a doctrine of what George Ehot calls " the miserable aims that end in self " ? It is the opposite of that, for the great possessing is always for the greater giving. We want to make ourselves worthy for the one end that what we offer to the service of God and of our fellow may be an offering of price. " Our wills are ours, we know not how ; Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 113 H Selections from Brierley NEGATIVE BLESSINGS It is astonishing how coolly we take our negative mercies. If we had a week of blindness we should begin to understand what non-bhndness means, what it is to wake up of a morning with unimpaired eyesight. The man who is crippled with rheumatism could give lessons on the privilege of being able to swing one's limbs without pain or ache. It would be a wholesome experience for the bored dwellers in Park Lane to exchange their palaces for a twelvemonth with the residents in Bethnal Green. The modern Free Churchman who so eloquently proclaims his grievances might, for a mental change, go back in thought for a few centuries — to the time when his present privileges did not exist ; when his ancestors had their religious meetings broken up by pistol shots ; when for uttering opinions such as he now fearlessly maintains he would have been prisoned and racked. How easy we all are now in our languid convictions ! We can be Arians or Socinians or even atheists and nobody interferes. We should have needed more courage in our heresies had we lived in the seventeenth century, when an English Parliament made the above-named opinions punishable with death. Milton in that age declared the liberty to think and to speak one's thought the greatest of all liberties. We have it, and we forget to praise God for it. We should understand it better if it were taken from us. We shall never get on either as souls or as citizens by negatives alone. If you find life empty it is because you are empty. A full soul finds always a full world. " No," of itself, is no man's food. If you stay in it you 114 Thoughts on Life will be starved. Its one service is as a step towards a " yes." The ennui, the misery of modern society, lies in its want of spiritual conviction, in its failure to grasp a religious reality. And nothing that rank, or fortune, or circumstance can offer will find that void. The inner hunger here can be satisfied from only one source. For man is made for God. His emptiness in himself is the negative that requires this Positive to make him a man. That vacant spot is the place where God would incar- nate Himself in us. " Though Christ in Joseph's tovm A thousand times were bom, Till He is bom in thee Thy soul is still foriom. The Cross on Golgotha Can never save thy soul ; The Cross in thine own heart Alone can make thee whole." ••NARROWNESS" AND •'BREADTH" An urgent need of the hour is of some fresh definitions which shall include all the new knowledge, and correctly relate it to the business of Uving. And in no direction is such a reconstruction needed more than in the con- ceptions of " broad " and " narrow," in rehgion and life. People are making the greatest mistakes, both about breadth and narrowness. They praise or blame the one and the other without any proper reason. It is time we saw the real significance of these terms, and the part they fill in the economy of Hfe. Let us be sure of our ground when we condemn, as we are apt to do, the " narrowness " of our neighbour. We talk continually of " narrow " views in religion or in conduct. There are such, undoubtedly, of which we 115 H 2 Selections from Brierley may speak presently ; but what we have first to learn on this question is that narrowness is not in itself necessarily an evil. If it were, be sure we should not find it so continually and so deeply wrought into the innermost processes of living. Nature, we find, is narrow as well as broad, and her narrowness is as needful as her breadth. In order to get her results she is perpetually limiting things, shutting them behind her barriers. She wraps her seed up close till its time comes to unfold. She is continually purchasing intensity at the cost of expansion. Yet Nature, using thus her tools of narrowness, works incessantly towards breadth as a result. Beginning at simple combinations, her ten- dency is always to a greater complexity. When we come to the problems of morals and rehgion we find a similarity of phenomena which shows us, on a higher plane, the working of the self-same process, under the self-same guidance. Rehgion, to secure its results, has used, and effectively used, the narrowing instincts, and has therein followed strictly the order of Nature. Christianity, for instance, would not, humanly speaking, have won its victories and gained its position in the world, apart from the employ- ment at certain periods, of Nature's method of narrow- ness. The early Christians concentrated on one side of life. They lost view of some others, but what they gained thereby, for themselves and the future, was worth the sacrifice. A certain insulation was required in the making of a martyr. And the faith of the Church as a whole was for a long while of too naive a kind to bear sudden expansions. It followed a true instinct in looking askance at new elements. It was by slow degrees, amid much misgiving, and after hard fighting, ii6 Thoughts on Life that art and literature, and science last of all, found a place in it. But Nature, so slow, so careful, so conservative in her operations, yet never stands still. The May-time comes, and then her blooms, hitherto so carefully shut up from the wintry blast, must unclose and dare the open. In humanity as a whole, and in the development of the individual mind in particular, a point is at length reached when the simpler form has to blend with the new elements. It is when we have reached this point of growth that we are faced with a question which may be said to constitute the pecuhar problem of our day. It is that of combining the wider interest with the older fervour. The dilemma is a serious one to many earnest souls. But if we have correctly stated the doctrine of this question there should be no difficulty about its solution. It is all a matter of the stage of development. If individuals or if Churches are at the level where the new complexity is proved harmful, they are better without it, and are right in rejecting it. The flowers must not appear in March that are meant for May. Let each man, each communit}^ judge of their own condition, of what is safe for their highest interests, and act accordingly. Till a thing can be safely done it were better not done. Not the less certain is it, however, that in the spiritual development of humanity the point will be reached when these diverse elements will be included. They will be included in the consciousness of the spiritual man because they are included in the consciousness of God. And that stage has already been reached by many souls. They have learned the spiritual Hfe as at once an unfathomed depth, and as an 117 Selections from Brierley illimitable breadth. They pass from one phase to another without loss, but with a conscious enrichment, and the point they have attained will be attained in the end by all. To the common humanity will come at last the experience and the conviction which Browning has expressed for us : " You've seen the world, The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, hghts and shades, Changes, surprises — and God made it all ! " THE ART OF KEEPING YOUNG Age is coming to be regarded by the moderns as the shadow upon hfe. Men exclaim that Nature here drives too hard a bargain with them. What a wail is that which Beranger raises when fifty ! " En maux cuisants la vieillesse abonde ; C'est la goutte qui nous meurtrit, Le c6cit6, prison profonde, La surdity, dont chacun rit." And so on to the gloomy end. But even his picture is not so dismal as that of Amiel, who, at forty-seven, finds this as his outlook : " All the swarm of my juvenile hopes fled. I cannot conceal my outlook as one of increasing isolation, interior mortification, long regrets, inconsolable sadness, lugubrious old age, slow agony, death in the desert." Yet in the way, at least, in which Amiel and other moderns picture the business, there is absolutely no need to grow old. Life may be, and was meant to be, an immortal youth. Of course there is here a qualification. We cannot put back the clock, and no philosophy can obhterate the difference between seventy and twenty-one. Of ii8 Thoughts on Life each one of us, if we live long enough, the poet's words will be true : "He heard the voice that tells men they are old." The march of the physical processes is unceasing, and goes on without our consent being asked. But while the inevitable years produce their results, the inner spiritual conditions are at every point profoundly modifying them. In the process of getting old it seems often as though the body and the years had least to do with it. There are men who are young at eighty, and others who are old at thirty. To keep young is a secret of the soul. This great achievement — the greatest shall we say that the earthly career presents — demands in the first place some renunciations. We have, for one thing, to weed our pleasure garden of ignoble satisfactions. We are to be resolutely human and not animal. In the words of Maeterhnck, "sterile pleasures of the body must be sacrificed — all that is not in absolute harmony with a larger, more durable energy of thought." The one and only prescription for perpetual youtli is the life of faith. Justification by faith has to be restated in our age, and it is time it were done, for society is going to pieces for want of it. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a youth at eighty, puts the matter in a nutshell : " It is faith in something, an enthusiasm for something, that makes life worth living." The faith may take on manifold forms, may attach itself to various creeds, but in essence it is always the same — the soul's grasp of what is higher than itself, a conviction of a spiritual order, pure and holy, regnant in the universe, which though at present invisible, will in the end make its triumph known. This juvenescence does not necessarily carry with 119 Selections from Brierley it animal health, strength, or length of days. But it means throughout life a feeling of youth, a glorious exultancy, a growing and aspiring soul. This is the art of living carried to its highest point. By-and-by men will discover that the only wealth is hfe ; that the only way to make the best of this world is to make the best of the other. For the two are one. The highest gleams ever through this lower. The pilgrim to the better country is the man who, living or dying, knows the bliss of a perpetual youth. AFTER MIDDLE-AGE The region lying westward of fifty is one which we shall all traverse if we live long enough, and it is a doctrine against which no sceptic voice can be raised that our experiences there will be largely a reaping of what, in the earlier period, we have sown. That a successful sowing is not too easy is evident from the failures that are everywhere apparent. There have been philosophers who have glorified age as Ufe's happiest time, but the general verdict has seemed otherwise. The early world as a whole regarded the post-youth period almost with a shudder. Even Wordsworth, with his immense spiritual insight, seems afraid of life's second half. There is perhaps nowhere in hterature a more vivid picture of desolation than that of his " Small Celandine " as an image of hfe's helpless last stage, with these mournful hues for an ending : " O man ! that from thy fair and shining youth, Age might but take the tilings youth needeth not." And there is undoubtedly a great deal, and that not merely on the surface, that appears to back up this 120 Thoughts on Life indictment. Age is in a sense a decline, a failure, a disease, which no medicine can cure. On one great side of our Hf e, whatever our earher precautions and prepara- tions, we are, after fifty, certainly on the down grade. But that is not the worst. It is brought as one of the fatal accusations against the post-fifty period that it lacks interest. A man has by that time, maybe, gained a fortune to discover that the pleasures he hoped to purchase with it have ceased to be pleasures. A deadly monotony has set in. We have got to the bottom of things, have seen the whole show and begin to find it wearisome. We come back, then, to the view of life as a probation, in the sense that the after part reaps what the earlier part has sown. The failure, where failure there is, Hes not in the game, but in our way of playing it. Properly understood and followed, the human career, if we interpret it rightly, should to its very end be full of freshness and benediction. The whole business resolves itself into the question whether life's after part is to be considered by us as a dechne or as part of a growth. It is well to persuade ourselves, and the sooner in life the better, that there is no possible way of making our " after middle age " a success except this one of accepting ourselves as in this world mainly and ultimately for spiritual growth. It is this only which will save that after period from monotony. We do not see the same show over again. As our inner nature opens our world becomes ever more beautiful, more mystically inspired. If each new spring does not bring us a deeper message it is because we have been neglecting our inner hfe. To the growing soul the world is ever miraculously renewing itself. Our 121 Selections from Brierley fellow-men grow always dearer to us, always more interesting. And how much more interesting does God become ! LOOKING BACKWARD " Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth to those things which are before " has been the text of innumerable sermons. An inspiring text it is, the clarion note of progress. A much -needed note in our own day, when such nuiltitudes of people, in politics, in theology, in social matters, are bent on reversing the Apostohc monition, being occupied in forgetting the things before and reaching forth to those which are behind. There are numbers of men — and very noble souls among them — who are by tempera- ment and mental habit invincible conservatives. The men who have done the greatest things are often the worst judges of them. When their own day of strength is over and the}^ see the new time being shaped by other hands than theirs, they think the world has sHpped from their grasp to be on the down grade. They are under the temptation to which the strongest succumb, to consider their own work to be God's work, while their neighbour's is that of the devil. Against all this the Apostle's word is a magnificent vindication of the Divine order, and a call to us to believe in it. What is to come is, despite all contrary appearance, a furthering, and not a reversal, of what has gone, a harvesting of all its sowing, a developing of all its good. But this great teaching is not to be misunderstood by us. The things behind, though not to be rested in, have yet a significance which is worthy of all our study. 122 Thoughts on Life We shall never do much in the future if we neglect the past. It is our past that has made us what we are. When a man of repute goes down in some moral catastrophe the downfall seems sudden to the pubHc, but it is not sudden to the fact. Underneath there has been going on a long process of sapping and mining, until the will has lost all power of resistance, and so against the new temptation has no defence to offer. To give way to-day is to leave an enemy in our rear, the worst fault, as every strategist knows, that a general can commit. The things behind us are for the sake of the things in front. Do we not see something prophetic in this infinity of preparation ? What human imagination would have dared to predict that out of the original chaos could come such a world as we see ; that the first germ of animate life would develop into the intellect and heart inside us ? And if all that is behind, what is there before ? Are we not to hope something out of such a record ? To the Apostle the past, with all its wonder, was as nothing to the future. Let us share that certitude. It is well founded. " Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." Now we have the sense and feeling of God deep in our hearts. It is a germ, but one, be sure, that will have full fruition. All science, all history, all rehgion bid us stretch on to the things that are before. " Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be. The last of life for which the first was made ; Our times are in His hand Who saith, A whole I planned, Youth knows but half ; trust God ; see all, Nor be afraid." 123 Selections from Brierley LIFE'S RETROSPECT Life is to be judged, not from its emptiness, but from its fulness. Of all visible things on this planet, we possess it in its highest quality. One is awestricken in contemplating the immensity of the inheritance of which we are put in possession. That we can think eternity makes us, in a very real sense, eternal. Immensity and eternity meet in us, for we are the living embodiments of their idea. Our actual existence here is a mere flash, but it has these things behind it and interpenetrating it. Deprive man, if you will, of his God, of his religious hopes, you can never deprive him of these infinite relations. They are of the structure of his soul. Wherever that came from, it brought these things with it, and in it. Man stands on time, but always to look beyond it. When a man is fifty he ought to know himself fairly well. We must have more vitaHty than our ancestors, for so many of them write of themselves as practically done with by that time. Montaigne considered himself old at fifty. Erasmus has the same view. He says : " I am now fifty, a term of hfe which many do not reach, and I cannot complain that I have not Hved long enough." B(§ranger, in his dismal lines, speaks of what awaits him — gout, blindness, deafness, imbecility — all in view of the fact that, as he puts is, " J'ai cinquante ans." Some of us have gone a long way beyond that, and yet feel no inclination to sing dirges. We have not much future before us, so far as this world is concerned. In compensation there is a rich past behind us, of which we are competent to form some judgments. The retro- 124 Thoughts on Life spect has some delights of its own. Not the least is the consciousness that the thing, such as it is, has been fairly and safely got through. One of the chief lessons of the retrospect, indeed, is to teach us not to be afraid. Think of all the fears that in succession have haunted us during that fifty years, if we have Hved so long ! What has become of them ? " I have had a great deal of trouble in my hfe," said a dying man to his children, " and most of it has never happened." People torment themselves with all manner of illusions. Pessimists take it as a certain proof of the worthlessness of life that people do not want to Hve their Hves over again. Many do not, or say they do not. It is recorded of Dr. Parker, that preaching on his seventy-first birthday, he told his con- gregation that he had been asked whether he would like to have those years all over again, to which he had rephed, " Not for ten milHon worlds." The backward look on Hfe gives a good opportunity for judging of what Loisy finely calls " the moral worth of the universe." If anything, in such a review, stands out with sunbright clearness, it is the essentially spiritual system under which we live. We have in succession all sorts of pleasures offered us. The right moment for appraising them is not when we are sipping the foaming draught. It is the moment after, or, still better, that farther moment when we contemplate them from the distance of years. We get then the true flavour of actions. It is the aftertaste that counts. And what are these verdicts ? We find that while mere animal gratification leaves nothing, or next to nothing, for the soul, the things we have done out of our faith, our love, our spirit of sacrifice, create in us an after- 125 Selections from Brierley wards of purest joy. That, we find, is how we are made. This law, of the after-results of things, is as sure, as inexorable as gravitation. Its operation shows us the kind of universe we are in. If things are like that, then the Power behind them is hke that. " By all that He requires of me I know what He Himself must be." In a review of our past the one thing that gives it coherence, meaning, purpose, is when we regard it as the development in us of a personahty, the growth of a soul. One pities the people who forget this : one wonders what their final thoughts will be. Whether we be men or women, let us be sure of this, that there is nothing else worth having or worth developing. And our age, with all its defects and difficulties, is, if we give it and ourselves a chance, a splendid one for the soul. There has been no better for the growth of faith. We have revolutionised all the grounds of faith, upset our old theologies, turned our Bibles inside out, and all this to find our faith, as the inspiration of our living, more deeply rooted than ever before. And it is hfe which has taught us this ; hfe, whose vicissitudes have revealed to us the Divine guidance ; whose experiences have shown us where the real values, the hidden treasures, he ; hfe, whose hard fight has thrown us back upon God as our only refuge and strength ; Hfe, whose divine character and glorious possibilities have been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the name wliich is and will ever remain, humanity's dearest possession, the soul of its soul. 126 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS THE ULTIMATE STANDARD What is the ultimate standard of truth and conduct, and what is the relation to it of public opinion ? The standard is an Eternal Truth and an Eternal Righteous- ness existent and inherent in the universe, towards which the evolution of the human mind and human character is a constant approximation. In other terms, man is in the presence of a slow but continuous process of unveiling or revelation of this truth and right. That he has continually blundered both in his mental and moral appreciations means that he nearly always begins by misconstruing the lesson set before him. But he ends by mastering it, and by knowing he has done so. The current opinion of an age, both in science, ethics, and reHgion, represents, then, not the standard itself, but the degree to which the ultimate truth, as it lies in the Divine mind, has been apprehended and acquiesced in by it. And here lies the explanation of the anomaly of the ranks of those condemned by existent pubhc opinion, numbering in them representa- tives at once of the worst and of the best of mankind. The man who defies pubhc opinion may do so be- cause he is a rogue or because he is a prophet. The three crosses at Jerusalem, on which hung two thieves, and in their midst a Christ, is of this antithesis the 129 I Selections from Brierley eternal illustration. The malefactors were punished because tliey were behind the ethical level of the pubhc consciousness, the Christ because He was beyond it. We get here our answer to the question as to the true relation of the individual to the public opinion of his day. It is well for him to keep up with it, for it is, on a multitude of points, the product of successive revelations of unspeakable value. The average man •will not get beyond it — will, in fact, need its esprit de corps to maintain himself at the height it has readied. But the deeper spirits whom God has chosen as prophets and leaders must ever hold themselves open to the further unfolding of His unceasing revelation, and in obedience thereto to break rank and move on, as fore- runners of the new and higher order. THE MORALLY UNDEFINED The soul of man to-day finds itself embarrassed by its growth. Its height enables it to look over walls which shut in the prospect for our fathers ; and that prospect for the present is somewhat bewildering. The modern man — where he is in possession of his own conscience — is like a traveller in an unexplored country. He has to find his way. He looks up from his Bible, his books of religious direction, to find himself confronted with questions about which they are silent. The undefined morahties are at once public and private. They belong to our action as fellow- citizens in the commonwealth, and also to the daily, intimate habitudes of our separate Hfe. It is actually only within our own lifetime that international ethics 130 Some Ethical Considerations have come up as a matter for the general conscience. It is only now that we are waking up to the singular conditions that prevail there ; that we are conscious of the extraordinary anomaly of statesmen following one scale of morality for their private life and an entirely different one for the conduct of " foreign affairs." It is only now that men begin to ask why faith, generosity, and the Christian law of loving- kindness should be recognised in our family and social deahngs, while mistrust, cunning, and undisguised self-interest should be the recognised motives in the intercom'se of States. When we come to hfe's more private and intimate side we discover how here also we are constantly moving in the region of the morally undefined. In the most important concerns we have no published code or scale of values. We act by that secret instinct whose working reveals the height and complexion of our spirit. And here what curious varieties we find ! Where, for instance, in our standard ethics have we a proper appraisement of cheerfulness ? There are multitudes of excellent people, with consciences that quiver to the slightest monitions of law and religion, but who lower the value of life to all around them by their incessant gloom. Ought it not to be an indictable offence to lower the common joy of living by inflicting our dismal moods upon the world ? Is there, indeed, a more frontal virtue than this of good cheer ? And yet so ethically confused are we that tender con- sciences by the score around us, the highest product of church and chapel, are not aware apparently that it is a virtue ! May we share in Schiller's aspiration to hve " in the 131 12 Selections from Brierley full enjoyment of my spirit," or forget all that in soul-engrossing activities ? Have we balanced the claims of giving vcrstts saving, of generosity versus prudence ? To what extent shall a public teacher say out what he thinks and knows ? What economies of utterance shall he practise, out of regard for weak brethren and wavering faith ? Woman, too ; how shall she carry herself in the new world that is here ? Shall she cultivate tlie modesties and repressions of the Victorian ideal, or strike in with the assertiveness, independence, and free expressions of this later time ? The problems are plainly endless, and they beset us every day. And the higher we rise the more they press. The old text-books no longer suffice. We are being taken out of them to something higher and surer, to that constant revelation which is being communicated to earnest and receptive souls. The problems are an education, and as we face them we are conscious of a Teacher. God has not finished His Bible. He writes its new chapters daily upon our hearts. With " Nil sine Deo " as our motto we move surelv and serenely on the untrod way. Its turns are baffling ; the cloud is often on the landscape ; but the road leads ever upwards, CHARACTER AND REPUTATION In modern civilisation we have the curious spectacle of a subsidiary morality, the morality not 30 much of character as of reputation. It is practised by people who, without the instinct of goodness, have fully developed the instinct of self-preservation. They have no love for the abyss though they are closely 132 Some Ethical Considerations akin to the unfortunates who have got there. They claim the awards of respectabihty wliile secretly violating its laws. They live the " double Hfe." A large part of their daily business is the business of conceal- ment, of evasion. Not that concealment is, in itself, necessarily discreditable. Every man conceals a large part of his life. There are functions of it which are not for his neighbour's eye. There is an innocent dissimulation also which we borrow from mother Nature — herself the most arrant of dissimulators. The honest man's face, as well as the rascal's, is at times a mask. He needs on occasion to cover up his soul, and is glad of the screen that has been furnished him. But the difference between him and this other is that, were his veil torn aside, the result would be at worst to hurt his feehngs, while in the other the result is ruin. There are more people in this latter case to-day than one likes to think of. Their problem is not how to avoid wrong, but how to avoid being found out. The men who are " doing time " at this moment at Dartmoor or Portland have outside a great host of counterparts, who are at large simpl}^ because they have been luckier or cleverer in their concealments than their brother criminals under lock and key. Can we create character, or hold it in any way under our own control ? It is the m^aster dilemma, in which life and logic seem eternally at war. If the neces- sarians are right all our moral vocabulary is a delusion. Why blame a man for what he cannot help ? But the vocabulary is there, with all it means. And all the fatalist theorisings of a thousand years have not shifted it by a hair's breadth. The logic of hfe here is, in fact, deeper than our own. Its 133 Selections from Brierley freedom and its necessity work at a depth beyond our ken. Assuredly the best freedom we know is that Divine necessity inherent in the quaUty of a pure soul which forbids it to go wrong. The work- ing of that inner power is the secret of religion. The doctrine of it, permanent amid all outward change, is that a man wins his light by linking himself to a Something, a Someone higher, in whom his being completes itself. As Carljde put it of the Puritans : " It is a fruitful kind of study, that of men who do in very deed understand and feel at all moments that they are in contact with God, that the right and wrong of their inner life has extended itself into Eternity and Infinity. It is, at bottom, my religion too." To men of this quality the relation of character to reputation becomes quite simple. Tliey think everything of the first and next to notliing of the second. Their vision of reahty is so clear that they have little enough care for illusions. Popularity, the opinion of the moment, the assent of the current orthodoxy, what are these ? To get one's piece of work done in this world, to find the truth and say it, though the utterance lead to Gethscmanc and the Cross — this is the concern of the world's great souls. And when they have passed, and men catch at last the actual meaning of their life, they bow themselves over the print of what tlicy now discern to be Divine footsteps. They know that once more " God hath visited His people." A NEW DOCTRINE OF EQUALITY The strange, the revolutionar}^ fact of our time is that Jesus Christ is actually, here and there, beginning 134 Some Ethical Considerations to be taken seriously. Locked up for long in the metaphysics with which theology had swathed Him, kept in the skies to be hymned and chanted at, He is now by growing multitudes being accepted as having something really to say about the social order, about the true way of living. In His light these people are coming to see that there is no greatness at all but that of the soul ; that, as Francis in the thirteenth century said, " A man is as great as he is in the sight of God and no otherwise." They see, too, that the business of man is to find his greatness, not in ambition, but in service ; not in increasing the distance between himself and his humbler brother, but in lessening it ; not in cHmbing to fashion's gaudy pinnacles, but in reaching downwards to where the needy are and helping them along. Upon these people has dawned the amazing fact — hid for centuries in a theological tenet, but now seen as incarnating the one and only social law — that humanity's greatest soul humbled Himself, took dehberately His place among the labourers, accepting their lot, pouring His soul into theirs, living and dying for their happiness. That truth has at last come, and we shall never again let it go. It is to remake the future, and the process is beginning. It is to be our politics, our social code, and that because it is at last to be our religion. One of its first effects will be in a new doctrine of equality. That doctrine will take account of all the natural inequahties. Society will still have its eminences. Man will not be defrauded of his upward look. But the eminences will be true ones. Intellect, gifts, moral worth, achievement — all will get their due. There will be room for them, made more ample 135 Selections from Brierley by the carting away of pasteboard dignities. But what, in this arrangement, will be the equaUty to be sought for ? It will be the equality in the means of happiness, in the means of human well-being. For we are discovering our essential kinship — discovering that we cannot be well, be happy, unless the whole of us is happy and well. This does not mean, let us once more repeat, that everybody is to be as everybody else. Well-being does not demand that ; it demands the contrary. What it does mean is such an arrangement of conditions, such a management of the national resources as shall secure to every man, woman and child of the community a full, a wholesome and a joyous life. That is within the reach of this nation ; and the only pohtics worth following are the politics that work towards it. MONEY AND RELIGION There is a book waiting to be written by somebody on Money and Rehgion. They have had a curious history ; one of the strangest relations ; of alliances and antagonisms, of attractions and repulsions. Money never did, and nexev could, create religion. Your capitahst may endow rehgious institutions. To see the way he is run after by religious societies, to observe the part which finance plays in the Church organisations, one might easily imagine that here the gold bag is omnipotent. But come to realities and we find where we are. You cannot, by an}' alchemy, extract prayer from a dollar bill or a banknote. All the gold in the world could never produce a genuine religious aspiration. The noblest emotions were never born in 136 Some Ethical Considerations that atmosphere, and where it prevails they do not thrive. It was not money that started Christianity, or gave us the New Testament. They are not Stock Exchange values. It is only when the great ecstasies are over, when the lofty ideals have ceased their heavenward flight, that money has come in as a determining factor in the Church's Hfe. The betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver was more than an isolated event. It stands as a symbol of the part money has played in rehgion's story ; a symbol, mark you, not simply of rehgion's weakness, but of its enduring strength. The man fell, but the Christ triumphed : " Still, as of old, Man by himself is priced. For tliirty pieces Judas sold Himself, not Christ." Where money is master, rehgion is always at its lowest ebb. When the Church could say " Silver and gold have I none," it made men stand up and walk. Later, its treasury overflowed, but it had lost its power of heahng. The great religious founders Iiave always kept money in its place. St. Bernard ruled the mind of Europe from his hut at Clairvaux ; Luther and Calvin, Wichf and Knox, were unknown to high finance. John Wesley left nothing but his books and some silver spoons. These men conformed to that saying of Gratry : " Take poverty for your weapon. There is nothing to be done with men who have not conquered gold and silver." The same is true of all the men who have done the high tilings. Whoever thinks of Galileo or Copernicus or Newton from the money standpoint ? 137 Selections from Brierley We never inquire about their pounds and shillings. Yet they were worth something to the world ! Words- worth on his hills, Burns at his plough, showered gifts on their fellows, but they were not in specie nor reahsable that way. Milton wrote " Paradise Lost " and received live pounds for the manuscript. You can see to-day the httle cottage at Chalfont St. Giles which he found good enough for him. He whose thought ranged through infinity and eternity had not room in his mind for the material on which Wall-street fattens. These voices from the past are almost lost in the roar of our present-day money-making. But they will survive and be heard when our money-makers, so big in their own estimation, have gone silent and forgotten. Wealth can get to the outskirts of hfe ; it can never reach its centres. It can feed the lower nature and the middle nature, but never the highest. The startling denunciation of riches which we find in the Fathers, in Basil, in Jerome, in Chrysostom, proceeded from the sense, not only of the injustice which so often accompanied their acquirement and use, but of the obstacle their pursuit offered to the highest bliss of the soul. Laurence OUphant declares tliat " moral truth cannot be discovered by a bad man." We may add, " Nor can it be discovered by the mere wealth-hunter." That road misses all the finest prospects. The soul must be on another track to catch siglit of these. Manunon can feed only a bit of a man ; can play upon but one string of his vast instrument, a string which soon wears out and loses tone. There are men who think they can buy heaven with theii money, and so they endow churches and make 138 Some Ethical Considerations huge testamentary donations to missions ! It is our queer modern way. It will be almost worth dying to see the kind of inheritance these capitalists have by such means secured for themselves in the next world. There are certain currencies — such as Turkish paper mone}' — which shrink a good deal in the process of exchange. But this shrinkage will be nothing in com- parison with the drop in value which awaits some pro- perties at the exchange bureau of death. Some of us, for our discipline and eternal good, will discover then how woefully we have misunderstood the celes- tial currency. We shall have to begin all over again. At present there is no proper ethic of money ; but there is one coming. The new ethic will accept wealth at its true value, neither more nor less. It will give man leave to develop to their utmost all the treasures that this world holds. That plainly is part of his inheritance. But it will have new principles of acquire- ment and distribution. It mil use the treasure not in the interests of badness but of goodness ; not for the growing of selfishness, of pride, of debasing pleasures, of caste distinctions, but for the heightening of human Hfe. It will direct its flow to the relief of those who starve for the want of what it can procure ; to the feeding of ill-nourished bodies ; to securing leisure to the over-worked ; to the winning for every child of Adam the means of a full and joyous life. And it will teach, with an authority born of age-long experience, and which none will gainsay, that man's true kingdom is one not of possession, but of being ; not of meat and drink, but of God's righteousness and peace and joy. 139 Selections from Brierley CONSCIENCE What is conscience ? Have we misnamed it when we call it a Divine inward monitor and judge ? Is there then, after all, no infallible guide for our life ? The modern answer on these points represents a broader outlook than the older one ; yet, properly considered, it is not one whit less spiritual or rehgious. Conscience in this view is the correspondence of our individual feehng with a common outside standard. But this standard is continually rising and its upward progress is nothing less than the growing revelation of God in and to our race. 71ie Divine inspiration was assuredly in the patriarchs, though their manner of life if prac- tised here would have consigned them to a gaol within a week. The explanation is that while the force work- ing in them was from above, its uplift could, in the nature of things, carry them only as far as it was in their generation to go. There is an immutable standard of right and wrong, but it was not plumped into the world all at once. It is dawning upon us bit by bit in the ceaseless development of the human spirit. Con- science is the Divine in us, but like another incarnation, it was born a babe and comes to itself by degrees, " increasing in wisdom and stature." The by-play of conscience, its non-moral activity, is shown in our state ol mind towards people we have wronged. If the inner tumult occasioned by the act does not issue in a determination to repair the evil, it produces the curious opposite result of a settled dishke of our victim. He has somehow put us in the wrong, and we bear a grudge against him for it. Conscience requires not only to be listened to, but to be trained. 140 Some Ethical Considerations It needs a teacher and an ally. We are here only on safe ground when we realise, as Quaker Barclay puts it in his Apology, " that Christians are to be led inwardly and immediately by the Spirit of God, even in the same manner, though it befall not many to be led in the same measure, as the saints were of old." DOCTRINE VERSUS LIFE Between doctrine and Hfe there will be ever that sort of antagonism which subsists between greater and less. It is like the battle of sea and shore. We fence in our plot of the idea ; we wall it off from the outside savage and untamed material universe, as men build embank- ments against the Atlantic. Again and again man has awaked to find this outer ocean, mute, vast and terrible, invading his defences and sweeping away his structures of granite. For a moment he despairs ; the world is too great, too subtle, too savage as it seems for his soul. But the miracle here is that the Power which deals thus with him will not permit his despair. It tells him that land and sea together are his. Let him build on the one and embark on the other. Each has its treasure for him ; each .shall help him to his final kingdom. The body of rehgion may change and decay, but its soul ever lives, and immortally renews itself. Men formulate their theory of Calvary, of Atonement ; they form and re-form it. Meanwhile, amid all the varying presentments of it, the Cross draws men ; until at last it is dawning upon us that it is not the theories at all that have been the attraction, but the treasure that is hid deep in the wood of Calvary's tree, even the love of God which passeth knowledge. 141 Selections from Brierley The soul has been in every age the organ of Divine revelation, and it is still performing its function. The spiritual universe enlarges continually to our eye with the growth of our power of vision. And as in the physical cosmos, so in the spiritual, the change of view produced by our wider knowledge is a change not from greater to less, but ever from more to more. A NEW WARFARE The next stage in the human evolution, it may be predicted, will be the search for, and the finding of, efficient substitutes lor all that mihtarism has accom- plished in the training of man. The advocates of conscription point out what it does for a nation's youth. It has its eye on every citizen, and allows no hfe to go to waste unnoted. It tells every man he is somebody, who must do his best for the State. It teaches him to stand, to march, to handle arms, to obey orders, to endure fatigue, to act in unison with others ; in short, it procures for the State a trained and disciplined people. And there is some- thing in that — a great deal, in fact. We want a trained and disciplined people ; a muscular, full-blooded and courageous people ; a people that can use its weapons and aim straiglit. But — and here the whole question comes — are the only weapons guns and bayonets ? When we are taught to aim straight, shall the only target be the bodies of our fellow-men ! Are not the mattock and plough as good for human handling as sword and gun ? Aim skilfully with them at Mother Earth, 142 Some Ethical Considerations and the results, in turning wildernesses into fruitful fields, are surely as good as the maiming of limbs and the beating out of brains ! Does not Nature offer us a field for all our courage and all our skill ? To tunnel her mountains, drain her swamps, combat her diseases, explore her unknown territories ; to become masters of her sea and land, of her heights above and depths beneath ; to wring from her those jealously guarded secrets which, once disclosed, will make man into superman — is there not enough in this war- fare to call out all of strength and daring there is in us ? Instead of the conscripts of slaughter we are to have the conscripts of industry, the conscripts of human development. The militarists are right in demanding national organisation, a training system which lets no individual escape. But let us have the right training and for the right objects. In previous ages man has been marvellously industrious and marvellously brave in the business of making his brother man miserable. We want now all that industry and all that courage in making him happy. After his ages of madness let him begin his period of sanity. After placing his valour, his civiHsation, his rehgion so long at the devil's service, let him, for a change, place them at his own service. For countless centuries, having so badly missed his way, he has wandered in the wilderness. But now Canaan is in full view. THE ETHIC OF THE INTELLECT Human morahty is a plant of strangely irregular growth. Man has morahsed himself in patches. 143 Selections from Brierley Nothing is more curious than to observe the dihgence with which one part of us has been ethicaUy tended as compared with the neglect visible in other directions. Society has great institutions for keeping us straight, but their jurisdiction is a limited one. The law courts, for instance, deal with ethics of the will and of action. The Church so far has had to do mainly witli ethics of act and feeling. It probes deeper than the law court, judging not only men's evil acts, but the envy, lust, avarice, wrath, hatred, out of which the acts have come. But there remains another region of human Hfe for the regulation of which no institution at present exists, and the laws of which are still very much to seek. It is the region of the pure intellect. Throughout long past ages, and with multitudes of earnest people in our time, there has been no such thing as an ethic of the intellect at all. When that ethic does arrive, when everybody realises that mental morahty is essential to every other morality, we shall get some very different thinking, leading to some very different acting in our world, and not least amongst those who are counted specially rehgious. Rehgious men still proclaim their passionate devotion to " the truth," " the precious truths," " the great fundamental truths," without daring to inquire whether what they proclaim is true at all. Religion will never set itself right with the present age, and still less with the time that is coming, until it has purged itself of, and done penance for, this age-long and deadly infraction of the ethic of the intellect. The ethic of the intellect needs to be cultivated above all things at the domestic hearth. Nowhere so much as here should the mind's action be so carefully 144 Some Ethical Considerations watched. Nowhere so much as here do we need the right atmosphere of feehng in which the intellect may do its work of thinking. For the people around us will be to us precisely according to that atmosphere and that thought. They will vary as these vary. A French writer says we are never just except to those we love. He is right. There is no justice outside of love. A wife, a husband, a brother, depend for their justice, for their happiness, on the way we set our minds towards them. They cry to us to look for the good in them ; most of all for that hidden good, which awaits our loving culture to nurse it into life. In sum, the ethic of the intellect unites in the demand for truth, for Hfe, for love. But the greatest of these is love. PROGRESS BY SELF-REPRESSION All progress of every kind has come by self-repression. A sure instinct tells us what within us is lower and what higher ; the one to be held back that the other may be furthered. Whether it be a branch of learning or a physical ex:cellence that we are striving for, we put for the time being nine-tenths of us under hatches to let this one thing get its chance. And in the sphere of morals, let the sensuous philosophy rave as it may, the common-sense of mankind recognises instinctively that the winning of all that makes life dignified and beautiful, the prizes of love, reverence, faith, of inner harmony and loftiest self-reaHsation, are by repressi3n of what is felt to be lower and the assertion and free play of the higher. Caring ever less about himself, the true leader 145 K Selections from Brierley becomes absorbed more and more in the cause he holds sacred. He can take with a laughing humour the acci- dents that happen to his personality. But in defence of his principle he is the most assertive of men. One of the most noteworthy features of Mr. Gladstone, than whom in his private capacity was none more courteous, was the almost Titanic wrath that flamed in him when attack was made on the rights of which he conceived himself the guardian. To be yoked to great principles keeps one eternally young. The egotist ages quickly. When Napoleon was twenty-nine he declared " Glory itself is insipid. I have exhausted everything." It was the Nemesis of self. It is, on the contrary, the bliss of being enhsted in the service of the Highest, that at the end of life we have exhausted nothing. We feel we are just beginning. Having linked our fortunes with the best and made it a part of ourselves, our self-assertion is simply the expression of a Divine in us that can never perish. THE SUPREMACY OF PERSONALITY Greater than all his past work, as it stands there in sciences, theologies, churches, is the worker himself. You talk of revelation ! Here, man, did you but know it, in your own h\nng soul, is the very tissue of revela- tion, the treasure-house out of which it all has come ! And yet it is not you, but the Something within and behind, that is greatest of all. For you are ever the eternal coming into time, and by your growing spirit making Himself visible and giving Himself speech. This is above all things the lesson of Christianity. It 146 Some Ethical Considerations is, throughout, the story of victorious personality. Jesus conquered the world, not so much by what He said, Divine as that is, but by what He was. The Greek and Eastern philosophers had uttered beforehand almost all His teachings, but He exhibited to men a soul greater than all teachings, a soul whose Divine sweetness and power have been the main human uplift through all these later ages. If such be the place and work of the human spirit, what kind of life should we, its possessors, be living in this world ? Our business, it seems, is that God may more and more utter Himself through us. The deeper we descend into ourselves the surer do we become of this ; the clearer the signs of a Divinity that is within, beneath, behind us. The days and the years are for the weaving of that Divine into speech and act. We are here to help on the ever-growing kingdom, nothing less or other. In the words of Professor Royce, who in his deep, philosophic way sums up thus the aim of our human striving : " When I seek my own goal I am seeking for the whole of myself. In so far as my aim is the absolute completion of my selfhood, my goal is identical with the whole hfe of God." THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE INCOMPLETE It is through the philosophy of the incomplete that we get the clearest of our modern hghts on the mystery of evil. The theology of the conscience, studied from this side, is a theology of successive completes and incompletes. St. Paul's pregnant sentence, " I had not kno\vn sin except through the law," contains the whole 147 K 2 Selections from Brierley history of moral evolution. There was a stage in the preliistoric story when the human soul — an infant soul — knew a moral completeness that later it found itself to have lost. It was like the lost equihbrium of a good walker who is now learning to ride. From grace and perfectness he has come to awkwardness and physical misery. But the awkwardness and uneasiness that have succeeded the earlier ease and finish are really a progress. The incomplete that has been reached is higher than the complete that was left. So in the moral world the sinner, groaning over his imperfection, is further on than that progenitor of his who knew no sin. What has made our man a sinner } Not the performance of fresh evil. He did all this before. It is the rise in him of a new ideal of good, in the light of which the old life is seen as inferior and tlierefore bad. From a low grade " complete " he has risen to a higher " incomplete." His consciousness of sin is really a great step upward. The seventh of Romans, that agonised wail of a stricken soul, is also the history of a soul's ascent. The imperfections of our life, its ragged ends, its unexplained mysteries, arc, truly seen, reasons not for gloom but the contrary. All these tilings are processes of development, are hints of wonders yet to come. That you are here is the thing, immeasurably greater, if you can see it, than that you are this or that. The actual milestone you have readied is not the point. Is it not something to be on tlie infinite road ? Another thing follows, a supreme thing. The incomplete in us is, above all else, the soul's preparation for God. Also is it the abiding and all-sufficient proof of Him. If adaptation is evidence of anything, if the eye suggests 148 Some Ethical Considerations light somewhere, and the ear's structure the existence of sound waves, then what is in you and me, the " Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn " shape one Name as key to their mystery. God is the only possible answer to the human soul. In the Apostolic word, " Ye are complete in Him," all philosophy is summed. " Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure ; What entered into thee That was, is, and shall be ; Time's wheel runs back or stops ; Potter and clay endure." GOOD VERSUS GOOD Nearly all the difficulties, both of yesterday and to-day, have come from the inability of one good to recognise another. It has been so much easier to call names. The opposite side has stood for wickedness, or foolery, or both ; whereas the men on each side have been following the best they knew. When Diderot and his fellow Encyclopaedists denounced Christianity as full of superstitions and impossible doctrines, their writings were tabooed by all good Catholics as of the devil. What we now see is that each side stood for a right whose victory is to-day one of civiHsation's most valuable assets. The libres fenseurs of the eighteenth century strove for the freedom of investigation. The system they fought was greatly in need of being fought. It was, indeed, stuffed with superstitions and impossible behefs. The real Christianity behind that system is a good that these attacks never touched. In the end the heart's devotion and the mind's freedom will know each other as of the same stock and qualit3^ Selections from Brierley The only rational position of the Church to these sides of life is that of a good relating itself properly to another good. Between goods there must be not opposition, but co-operation. But the higher here must teach and lead the lower. The brightness, the movement, the colour, the humour, the human interest represented alike in the theatre and in the pubhc-house are to be taken into the Church's scheme for the highest furtherance of hfe. For these are all of the assets of humanity, elements in its social evolution. The problems connected with them are so to be dealt with as to ehminate the baser elements ; the remains of a time when the sensual and the animal were man's higliest good. The theme in its entirety offers a new and fascinating outlook upon the future. For it shows us how the very problems of evil are really the marks of an eternal progress ; how man's very consciousness as a sinner is the evidence of a movement towards an infinitely glorious ideal yet to be reaUsed in him. 150 THE GOSPEL OF HAPPINESS THE GOSPEL OF HAPPINESS THE WORLD'S HAPPINESS The dominant spiritual quality of life is never more present to us than when we look into a theme Hke this, of the world's happiness. Here is something which all men believe in, for which all are thirsting. Happiness is a rehgion on which no one turns his back. And yet on this theme, so vitally and universally interesting, what do we know ? How much happiness is there } Is the output increasing ? Happiness is outside commerciahsm. Yesterday's sunshine and spring beauty filled us all with dehght, and not one of us paid a penny for it. The milhonaire's entertainment, on the other hand, on which he had lavished thousands, produced all manner of results, duly chronicled, but not this. That is the odd part of it. We make elaborate preparations to capture what is as common as the air, and miss it ! For the reason why we are not happy is certainly not because of any lack in the original supply. The sense of the infinite resources here available grows on us as we study the world's history. Happi- ness is not a deposit hke a coal bed, which, after being drawn upon for years, shows signs of giving out. The experience is rather of an immeasurable supply which only awaits a growing capacity to use it. 153 Selections from Brierley This joy world, as it emerges into its higher fomis, shows itself as something entirely spiritual. How remote it is from that of commercial calculation is seen when we examine the way in which happiness comes, grows, and distributes itself. Happiness is the outflow of life, the communication of it from one soul to another. It is the rhythmic movement of a spirit's peace and joy which, by a beautiful law, propa- gates itself and impinges upon other spirits. And the movement here partakes of infinity in its exhaust- less energy. Happiness is a secret of Hving, and so the world's immeasurably greatest benefactors have been those who have caught that secret and imparted it to others. The Church's communion at its purest has ever been the gathering together of souls who have 'a secret to impart. There is no joy comparable to that which thrills upon us from contact with some highest soul. That was why men gave up all and followed Jesus. The State can do much to organise happiness. We are on the eve of vast developments in this direction, developments in which the poor, the ignorant, the unprotected, will find themselves backed by the highest intelligence, the highest conscience, and the best resources of the community to which they belong. In a railway train every passenger, the stupidest as well as the wisest, shares in the skill of the engineer, the skill that built the road and tliat carries him along it. What we are now endeavouring for is that, in hke manner, every man, woman and child of the com- munity shall have, for the favourable issue of their hfe-battle, not only what capacity lies in their own poor body and mind, but the reinforcement of the 154 The Gospel of Happiness nation's highest brain and heart, to shield, to encourage and to inspire. In the highest spheres it is the personal that gives us our joy, and all along the hne it is in this same personal that we find it. The best gift we can offer our friends is the best in ourselves. Is it not worth thinking of, the extent to which by our simple being and doing we can increase the world's happiness ? We can add definitely to this treasure every day. Scientists speak of matter and force in the universe as being a constant, the amount being never added to nor diminished. But herein the spiritual transcends the material. Here is a value that can incessantly grow. Whatever our station may be, our gifts or lack of them, we can, by willing it, add continuously to the sum of human joy. And this, after all, is the world's best possession. THE JOY OF LIVING It is something, as a start in the world, to be con- vinced on good grounds that the Ordainer of our hfe on tliis planet intended joy as one of its chief products. That it means other things — service, sacrifice, education, development, probation, as well as a thousand aims beyond our ken — we may well beHeve. But one of its governing designs is the joy of Hving. If there is proof of anything there is proof of that. It peeps out of every detail of the scheme. Human dehght, and not human only, but that of all living creatures, is one at least of the world's ultimate ends. The happiness idea, while so deeply interfused into the constitution of Nature, is seated even more deeply 155 Selections jfrom Bricrley in the heart of man. But the happiness material requires extracting, and for this there are some rules. The soul must in some positive directions be trained to enjoy. It must, for one thing, learn to be simple. The art of being happy is the art of discovering the depths that lie in the daily common things. Dehght in the simple is the finest result of culture. The man of simple mind, of purged eye and pure heart, walks daily wrapt in the consciousness of being in the midst of a universe Divinely beautiful, and which is all his. The secret of the joy of living is the proper appre- ciation of what we actually possess. That kingdom of the unpossessed for which we so foohshly thirst is not half so good as this of what we have. When we have fairly understood the worth of our personal gifts ; what it means to be able to swing along in careless freedom of limb, to open clear eyes upon the world's beauty, to eat with appetite, to reason, to remember, to imagine, instead of being reduced to the privation of these tilings, we find we are rich where we thought ourselves poor. The worst is where we lightly value our wealth in love. Multitudes of us are fuming in a false sense of poverty when close at home are faithful hearts that, if taken from us, as they might be next week, would leave a void that not the wealth of Indies would fill. We are only poor by thinking ourselves so. It is, in fact, our perverse thinking that every day makes fools of us. The Gospel account of Jesus stands out here as the typical, highest example. In the beginning was the exquisite joy of a pure heart in the presence of Nature, when the flowers and the birds proclaimed the goodness of the Father. At the end this soul, ever learning and 156 The Gospel of Happiness growing, had reached a capacity such that the Cross, striking full upon it, evoked only a deeper harmony. The joy which, at the Supper, Jesus offered His disciples, was richer than that of the Sermon on the Mount. And this marvel has continued. Men have learned from Christ how to find joy in pain ; how to be happy when suffering and dying. To the soul that learns, hfe at what seems its darkest and its worst is realised as infinitely worth hving. Courage, then, in the gloomy day. " If winter comes, can spring be far behind ? " " Be our joy three parts pain, Strive and hold cheap the strain. Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe ! " THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY The human story so far has been largely that of a discipline of pain. On this point science and religion are for once in agreement. Man has won his present position at the sword's point, and with sweat of blood. Nature has been a rigid discipHnarian, a stern task- mistress. But the pain element in human education has been exaggerated, and the wrong inferences been drawn. From the very beginning, notwithstanding its hardships, life has been sweet to the race. Our ancestor was happy in his own way. Despite the cost, it was a good thing for him to be alive. A false perspective here has been the creator, amongst both heathen and Christian, of much bad theology. The sorrow element in man, exaggerated by his imagination, has cast its shadow upon the heavens, and created the 157 Selections from Brierley religion of fear. Paganism trembled as it snatched its joy. It hardly dared to be prosperous, lest some god, or malignant power, should be pro\'oked to jealousy. Unfortunately for Christian theology, the noble and clear-sighted \'iews of the early Greek Fathers were superseded by a darker system, which once more shadowed the heavens and made religion a thing of fear. Asceticism founded itself on the notion that human suffering and privation were in themselves pleasing to God. But asceticism, the cult of many a noble soul, carried in it no finality. It was a phase, and not a whole. It was no key to the world-system, no ultimate revelation of God, no ultimate goal of human development. Can man, then, afford to enjoy himself more than he has done ? Is gladness, as well as sorrow, to be trusted as a spiritual educator ? The average Christian is, on this matter, in a curious jumble of thinking. Logically he should be all on the side of joy as supreme moraliser, for is not his heaven at once the place of vastest delight, and j-et of highest perfection ? But with the other side of his head he distrusts this doctrine. In a normal, healthy condition, enjoyment is con- nected with our every movement, our every phase of living. And ever as we get deeper into life the springs become more numerous and more copious in their flow. As this education, this discipline of joy reaches its higher stages, the mind chooses its delights as by instinct, and with a certain infallibility. And in these upper ranges what exquisite distillations and essences of noblest consciousness await the developed soul ! Irenaeus has expressed for us in unsurpassable words the consummation of this " discipUne of joy " : " For our 158 The Gospel of Happiness face shall see the face of the Lord, and shall rejoice with joy unspeakable, that is to say when it shall behold its own Delight." THE PLEASURES OF ANTICIPATION What is pleasure, and wherein does it consist ? We study half-a-dozen persons seeking it in different ways. One is reading a novel, a second is journeying through noble scener\^ a third is engaged on a problem in chess or mathematics, a fourth is eating or drinking, or satisfying some other animal appetite. If we examine the consciousness of the actual moment in the case of any one of these, we shall find that in each case the mind is not resting in that moment, as though satisfied in it, but pressing out of it towards something beyond. What is more, the something beyond is never reached. The novel-reader hurries on from page to page, as though expecting, when the plot is fully unravelled and the story told, that some desirable end will have been gained. But the end gained is vacuity ■ — a sense of being flung back by the last sentence upon one's own empty self. In like manner men rush through the differing phases of a form of animal sensation as though the consummation could furnish the prize. What they find there is, again, a dead wall, against which the baffled consciousness helplessly dashes itself ; and so through ev^ery other pursuit. In this view of it, life, even at its highest moments, seems one vast and perpetual anticipation. It may be none the worse for that. May we not take this wonder- ful law as the surest and most plainly written of the prophecies concerning man's relation to a future and 159 Selections from Brierley higher state of being ? It is when contemplating this side of things that we feel the weight of Plato's argu- ment — that what the human soul, shut up in its mortal prison-house, deals with in the present life is only the outward show of the actual, and that for the Reality which will satisfy it we must wait. In that pathetic struggle of Greek philosophy with the problem of life and its result we may surely recognise a preparatio evangelica — a Divinely-ordered introduction to the kingdom and teaching of Jesus. ENJOYMENT AS A VIRTUE Ought we to enjoy ourselves ? The question is worth asking, because there is a good deal of religion and of theology that suggests or implies the contrary. The praise of melancholy, as our only proper attitude, has also appeared, especially in these later days, in some of our philosophy and literature. With numbers of pious persons laughter is at a discount. How dare a man joke while the Judge is at the door ? High spirits are a peril to the soul. M'Cheyne of Dundee confessed that the ministerial function which he liked least was to celebrate a wedding. The idea to-day is very widely spread, both amongst the religious and the non-religious, that the music to which the Church moves is a funeral march. The idea of taking this world as a really good place ; of accepting the present moment, the fact of existence, as a thing to be happy in, is held by philosophy to be an illusion, by many Christians as a sort of impiety. Whatever the case for philosoph3^ this attitude in religion is, to say the least, a singular one. It is so i6o The Gospel of Happiness self-contradictory. Nobody thinks of gloom and long faces in the celestial spheres. Everything there, if we take the accepted notion, is arrayed on a basis of the utmost wealth of living. If enjoyment is good in heaven, it should be good on earth. All the churches, all the theologies agree that it is a Christian duty to labour for the welfare, the happiness, of others. But if happiness is good for these others — else why are we to labour for it ? — then it must be good for ourselves. If it be not, then are we not doing our neighbour a wrong in trying to secure him so dangerous a com- modity ? The world is still full of self-torturers. Scourges are still on sale. People go into convents, into monasteries, shave their heads, wear ugly dresses, shut their eyes to the world's splendours, in the belief that the celestial powers are pleased with all this. And multitudes of earnest Protestants, who exclaim against monkery, build themselves an interior cell, gloomy as any anchorite's, where their soul Hves a tormented and sunless hfe. They cannot get rid of the belief that sanctity has some sacred affinity with sourness ; that to reach heaven they must journey with flints in their shoes. Yet the saints, and the Master they followed, never renounced the good of the world ; no, nor the joy of living. Jesus was the happiest being in the world of the first century, and Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth. They accepted the joy of the senses, only in a simpler and a larger way. They had nothing that they might possess all. Was there a soul elsewhere who felt as deeply as they the glory of the sunrise, the song of birds, the fellowship with all creatures, the thrill of human society, the happiness of loving, the joy of uttermost giving ? j6i L Selections from Brierley They showed men the lesson our stilted, laboured civilisation is to-day most in need of — that not the rich and the luxurious only, but all men, those most naked of everything that wealth commands, have a glorious world to live in, if only they will use it well. We are missing the lesson of hfe, the plain duty it enjoins upon us, if we do not enjoy it. We talk of service to our fellow, but there is no better service we can render than to show him a smiling face. That is our personal advertisement of the fact that God's world is a good one, and that he may take heart in believing it. Enjoyment is to be cultivated as a virtue ; to be cultivated because it is largely an art. It is from our stupidity that we so often miss it. " God's in His heaven," sings the poet ; yes, and in His earth, too, and that is why it is good to be alive. RELIGION AND HUMOUR It is by the faculties with which God has endued men and races that He makes Himself known. He pours His thought through human brains. The Greek has taught us one set of truths, the Roman another, the Jew a third. All the sciences are branches of theology, for they show us the separate roads along which the Divine thought has travelled. And amongst these heaven-revealing gifts assuredly we cannot leave out humour. The faculty of laughter is too intrinsically human not to carry its message. It is not here by chance, nor by manufacture. It is a side of God's nature, and its revelation is immense. It is the assurance, for one thing, that we are in a good and wholesome world. Nature hkes to play with 162 The Gospel of Happiness us. We are now entering into her humour. We do not take it amiss that she deluded our fathers so dehciously for thousands of years, making them beheve the sun went round the earth, that there were four elements, that the world was fiat, and a thousand other drolleries. She was dealing with them, we now per- ceive, exactly as we deal with our own children, telling them as much as they are ready to know, and laughing, as we do, in her sleeve at httle mystifications which must serve the young world till it was of age to know better. It is in the Anglo-Saxon and kindred races that the faculty of humour, developed to a degree unknown elsewhere, has blended most perfectly with the rehgious spirit. Its spiritual men have been humorists. They have found humour in themselves, humour in the universe, humour in God. The characteristic is noteworthy of our English divines of all persuasions. Your cleric, whether he be Episcopahan, or Presbyterian, or Methodist, has always his fund of good stories. Is his mirth a reaction from the gravity of his professional pursuits ; or from the fact that, having been looking habitually at the inmost centre of life, he has found it a centre of brightness and good cheer ? Both suppositions have their truth. Altogether 'tis a pleasant feature. It has made the pulpit a homeher, a more human place. What could be more delightful than the way in which Father Taylor, of Boston, beloved of the sailors, most devoted of evangelists, extricated himself from an impossible sentence ? " Brethren, I have got into this sentence, and for the life of me I cannot see how I am going to get out of it ; but one thing I know — I am on the way 163 L2 Selections from Brierley to Zion. Hallelujah ! " What a humorist was Spurgeon ! We have heard him keep an audience of ministers in roars of laughter for an hour together. Yet who more fervent in devotion, more mighty in faith, more penetrated with the deepest reahties ! Great natures can afford to laugh. It does them good, and the world, too. Their mirth carries its own brand with it. We never mistake it for the cackle of fools or the cynicism of soulless worldlings. It carries with it all their faith, all their sunshine. Humour in such is often sublime. It is the triumph over fear. Humour is the delight of wise men and the pitfall of fools. None of our gifts need more of grace in its use. We need to capture and train its strength for the higher service of man ; its flashing beam for the discovery of folly ; • it lambent play for the cheer of weaiy hearts. True humour is full of religion. It is in itself a revelation. That we can laugh is a proof that the world is sound and that God is good. It is safe to cultivate it, for unless all the omens deceive, there will be more of it in the next world than in this. RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT Rehgion and amusement ; the two things are here together on this God's earth of ours ; have been here from the beginning ; and we have not found yet the formula which unites them. Piety still looks askance at comedy, and knows not what terms it should make with it. It is singular that in a world which has never been without philosophers, there should have been all along, on a theme so vital, a confusion so utter. Cicero introduces the question of the significance of 164 The Gospel of Happiness laughter only to dismiss it as insoluble. Christian thinlcers handle amusement from all manner of stand- points, but end generally by leaving their theme in the air. But the pessimistic point of view, both Christian and non-Christian, despite the support it receives from the miserable misuse of amusement, does not satisfy us. Nor does another religious view, still in vogue in some quarters, which regards gaiety and laughter as not countenanced by the example of Christ or by the teaching of the Gospel. The mediaeval Church, with all its faults, understood this side of human nature better. In its miracle plays, out of which, let us remember, the modern theatre arose, the full swing of broadest humour in immediate contact with all that was sacred, while giving rude shocks to our modern susceptibihties, contained, nevertheless, the hint of a truth which the Puritan could not see. The mistake about amusement is that men invert its position. They go to amusement to get from it a satisfaction in hfe, whereas it is not till men have obtained life's satisfaction that they are in a condition to be amused. The soul can never be satisfied with anything lower than itself. Until its deepest want has been met its harp is on the willows. It cannot sing in exile. The Christian Church needs in the present day to know its mind on the subject of amusements. It cannot ignore or taboo them, for its own teaching, properly interpreted, shows them to enter deeply into the Divine scheme of life. On the other hand, it must never forget that the prime function of religion is to supply the inner reconciliation without which 165 Selections from Brierley there is no true amusement possible. The soul cannot laugli its own laugh till God has filled it. The Church has also to teach the world the ethics of amusement. The " gaiety of nations " can only increase as men imbibe Christ's unselfishness. It will come never, let us be sure, out of greed, or pride, or egotism. When, in society, we are passing a pleasant evening, be sure that at the bottom of it lie somebody's loving thought and self-sacrificing labour. The Church, for ages, with more or less success, has been teaching men to pray. It has also, it now reahses, to teach them to play. It must widen its programme until it takes in the whole man. It must renounce for ever the view which made seriousness take offence at mirth, knowing that each is from the same source, and works to the same end. Its attitude to humanity must be less of a menace and more of an encouragement. For ages has it busied itself with the religious meaning of tears. Let it now investigate a httle more the religious meaning of laughter. Men, we learn on the highest authority, are to become cliil- dren to understand the kingdom of heaven. The cliildren's play is God's pledge. The child-heart delivers to us the open secret. In the midst of this tremendous universe, with all its mystery and all its tragedy, these little ones, nearest to the centre, are light of heart. The Church can build its doctrine on that fact. In it is contained the whole Gospel. SUNSHINE IN THE SOUL Important as is the sunshine in things, vastly more so is the sunshine in ourselves, in the soul. We get i66 The Gospel of Happiness the solar beam out of our coal and wood by mechanical processes. But lying over these is the moral process by which the spirit extracts from things another sunshine, a light and warmth that come from a sun behind the sun. Personal happiness and, we may say, usefulness, are just the art of extracting this sunshine. It is a secret of faith ; a certainty, inwardly grounded, that the sunshine is there ; in the most unlikely things ; that circumstances as black as coal will yield it, just as the coal yields sunshine when handled the right way. This, surely, is what Carlyle means when he asks : " Is not serene or complete rehgion the highest aspect of h\unan nature ? " The rehgion here is one which makes us at home in our universe as essentially a good universe, ready to bless us as far as we will let it. An inner indomitable cheerfulness is the soul's response to the Divine goodness. In a gracious nature it burns there with a steady flame, like the household fire on a winter's night. Our first duty to our fellows is to kindle this fire for them, to show them a shining face. Is there a worse sin against them than a dour despondency ? Immeasurably higher than our clever- ness, our deftness here and there, as a service to our fellows, is that we carry amongst them a spirit of good cheer. Away with what is contrary to that ; with your bihous theologies, your pessimistic philosophies. Men with no good message to the world should be silenced. Their hypochondriasms, whether in rehgion or elsewhere, are poisons whose sale should be stopped. Till I have found a word with sunshine in it I have no right to speak. Through immeasurable ages the sun tas been making 167 Selections from Brierlev our world ; storing its crust with mineral treasures, filling its atmosphere with mystic forces ; drying it, warming it, making it habitable for the humanity that was to live there. And man, finding himself here, discerns that all he looks upon, that all the physical forces which play round him, are symbols of something higher still ; that behind the visible sun is another ; that behind the physical universe is a spiritual universe also, warmed and hghted, alive with glorious forces ; that here, too, is endless progress — a progress in which he participates. The sun in this heaven is the hving God, from whose eternal Being are being poured forth upon us treasures of revealing and of life that through the ages past have been making man into what he is, and that through the ages to come will be building him into something greater than he knows. FRIENDSHIP The best friendships, as a rule, are those that begin young. Life's iron is then fire-hot, and we weld easily. And the special happiness here is that, properly managed, these unions are often for all the years. In the college common room we stumble upon a brother soul which vibrates responsive to our own, and now after three or four decades, and when we are almost at the end of the journey, the music is still going on. Our careers have been wade apart, our fortunes different, our meetings perhaps infrequent ; and yet the mere sense that our friend is yonder, thinking his thoughts and doing his work, is a strength and a companionship to us. How much so, we shall know when he has gone. i68 The Gospel of Happiness A soulful intimacy of this kind acquires an ever better flavour with the years. And here it is that a mere self-seeking ambition defeats itself in the search for the prizes of Hfe. In the rush for worldly advance- ment, our pusher, eager for more brilliant alliances, drops his old friends, or, what is worse, adopts towards them an attitude of condescension. What he has gained in this process we will not inquire. We know what he has lost. Such a man has no friends. To apply this title to his new entourage would be too cynical. And the friendless man, whatever height he has cHmbed to, is surely a being to be pitied. The ideal friendships come from the knitting in each other of our nobler parts. Fellowship in great enterprises, a common aspiration concerning Hfe's deepest things, are their truest foundation. This it is which makes a genuine rehgious communion so uniquely beautiful a thing. When men can find a real spiritual leader, the union of soul between him and them is heaven's own marriage. There is nothing in the sphere of feehng so exquisite. Our inner progress could be accurately measured by the range and quahty of our friendship. As tlie quahty heightens the range extends. " Qui Deum amat, amat onines," as Leibnitz says. We sympathise with that saying of St. Teresa about the demons : " How unhappy — they do not love ! " And in loving men we learn, as Fenelon said to Destouches, " to expect httle from them." Why, indeed, should you look for this and the other in return ? Is not the pure joy of loving and serving reward enough in itself ? As you travel along this hne it becomes more and more difficult to hate. We hardly need Augustine's 169 Selections from Brierley reminder : " Most often when you think you are hating an enemy, you are hating your brother without knowing it." Friendship of this order, fed and inspired from the highest sources, beginning its action in the private circle of those nearest us, spreads and spreads till it encompasses the world. And it will be the growth of this power, more than the achievements of science or the harnessing of the world's physical forces, that will ultimately bring to our race its age of gold. THE ETHIC OF FATIGUE Fatigue, we are beginning to discover, is one of the first-class themes in modern hfe. It is an affair not simply of medicine and hygiene, but of morals, of philosophy, of religion — in fact, of the entire human welfare. There is an ethic of fatigue, almost a religion of it. In that reconstruction of the ethical and religious idea which is arising out of a clearer knowledge of the contents of consciousness, this subject will occupy a foremost place. What is fatigue ? It is curious how hazy the average notion is. We know it as a phase of feeling associated with certain physical states. When by walking, singing, hammering, or other exercises, the muscles and nerves employed have given off a certain amount of energy, the fact is registered on our consciousness, and we say wc are tired. The whole of the body is working, perpetually giving off energy. But it is only a portion of the body that produces fatigue as a sensation. The blood circulates, the heart performs its rhythmic motion, the hver secretes, the cells in their myriads form and reform, and all this without sense of 170 The Gospel of Happiness weariness. Fatigue, as felt, belongs purely to the voluntary nerves and muscles. Fatigue is an affair of life, of sentient beings. There is no tiredness in the universe. Its sum of infinite energy continues from age to age its stupendous, complicated movement, without trace of exhaustion. The cosmos as a whole amid eternal change retains eternal freshness. But there is discernible in history such a thing as a fatigue of races. A population over- driven by labour, or exhausted by its passions, will become old and decrepit before its time. To keep a nation young is the highest task of social economy, and that can only be achieved by knowledge of the whole complex law of hving. It is plain, then, that as individuals and as a people we need a philosophy and a rehgion of fatigue and of rest. When our activities go beyond their Hmit ; when we work not from our overflow, but from the dregs of our vitality ; when we keep going, not by sleep and rest, but by the stimulant and the spur, we are sinning against the whole Decalogue of Hfe. If we would see our highest, we must Hmit the output. We must never let work choke our top springs. For joy is not only our heritage ; it is our duty. " La joie de I'esprit," said Ninon, " en marque la force." We want gladness enough, not only to flood our own hfe, but to flow over perpetually upon our neighbour. And there is no gladness in exhaustion. The highest philosophy of living is to work as the universe works, and to rest as it rests. We want to catch for ourselves the secret of that mighty cosmic rhythm ;• to catch the secret of its storing and of its giving forth of energy ; of its repose and its multitudinous motion. The universe 171 Selections from Brierley finds its rest in the interplay of a myriad of interests. That is how we shall find ours. The wider the key- board the less strain on this note and that. The vaster the music we make the longer will the instrument last. HOLIDAYS The annual summer holiday may be said to have definitely estabhshed itself as an integral part of modern life. To leave one's ordinary pursuits and one's ordinary haunts for a certain number of weeks in August or September has, with a vast mass of the toihng community, become a fixed habit. The annual break from the harness finds us quite ready for it when it comes, and the year's total output of activity is, in the vast majority of cases, the better, in respect both of quantity and quality, for that brief release. But holidays may very easily be overrated in their relation either to the enjoyment or the general further- ance of life. It would indeed be a pessimistic view which should regard the main body of the year's experiences as a dull, unrelieved mass, through which the thin streak of vacation time shone as the only Hne of light. Nature, happily, has taken care that we shall not fall into that mistake. In her constitution, both of the human mind and of external circumstance, she has provided a holiday system of her own, which, while it takes the conventional one into account, is by no means dependent on it. The .soul has its holidays, and the times of tliem have no necessary relation to August or September. It is an exhilarating study to note the gloriously free way in wliich the soul takes its holidays. It 172 The Gospel of Happiness scorns conventions and attires itself for highest festivities under circumstances which set the calcula- tions of Humdrum at defiance. One of the last places in the world to be regarded as a holiday resort was surely the noisome den at Bedford in which Bunyan was confined. But there was rarest holiday-making within. To stand on the Delectable Mountains was better than to chmb the Jungfrau. Greatheart, Christian and Faithful formed finer society than the wits of the coffee-houses. To have looked through the gates of the New Jerusalem made cheap the splendours of Paris or Rome. It would be easy to multiply examples of the way in which Nature gives holiday times to the soul under the strangest outward conditions. Thackeray is exactly true to Hfe when, in " Esmond," he sketches a poor merchant trembHng on the edge of bankruptcy who has sleepless nights, in which he thinks of suicide, but who, when the crash has come and he has lost all, finds he can now sleep comfortably. After desperate strivings to keep his foothold, he has finally shpped and rolled to the bottom, to find that it is not such a bad place after all. The experience is typical and should be encouraging. When we come back from vacation time to resume the famiHar task awaiting us, it is refreshing to think that in the midst of the most pressing urgencies and of circumstances the least promising to which it may introduce us, there are reserved for us there holiday seasons which the soul will register as the best of all. 173 LIFE'S MYSTERIES LIFE'S MYSTERIES RELIGION AND MYSTERY Mystery haunts us at every step of life's journey. It is at once our torment and our joy. How much of life's fascination comes from the puzzles that are wrought into its texture ? It begins with the children, who love and dread it. How greedily do they swallow the ghost story which is to keep them shuddering hours after in the dark ! In the glare of later life the sense of it is apt to become blunted. But we have only to think ourselves away a moment from the provincialism of our accustomed surroundings, to find again all our wonder-faculty alert. It was out of the world's mystery that the rehgions grew. Each was an attempt, in its own way, to explain the riddle of the universe. But the riddle remained always the master. And so the religions, which were to explain the mystery, became themselves a mystery. Amongst the rehgions the relation of Christianity to mystery is noteworthy. It takes full account of it, and, indeed, plants itself broadly in this realm. So far from attempting to explain away life's riddles it boldly adds to them, itself being the greatest riddle of all. The New Testament is par excellence the mystery book. It baffles us at every turn. That it contains so much, and yet so httle ; that it raises such enormous 177 M Selections from Brierley questions, which it never attempts to answer ; that it offers us so transcendent a central Figure, who Himself nevertheless writes us no single word, and whose coming and going are alike unknown ; that it gives us the loftiest teaching set in a framework whose crudity confounds the modern mind ; that it puts in operation enormous spiritual forces of which it vouchsafes no scientific account ; that this epoch-making book itself, of such priceless value to humanity, should have been exposed to all the hazards of literary fortune, flung on the world in scattered pieces, the gathering and preservation of which is left to a mere instinct — all this and a thousand other things meet and confound us in our attempted solutions. There was no need for the Church to elaborate any " mystery " of its own, as in later ages it was so fond of doing. The bare facts of the recital offer us, in this line, more than on this side the veil we shall ever be able to digest. The modern materiahst invites us to take the sense- verdict of a consciousness that has only begun to be developed — a mere glance upon the surface of things — as the ultimate thing to be said. Man will never be satisfied with such an answer. His rehgion may be limited in its expression, but it has reached a deeper grasp of reahty than this. Its doctrine of miracle, of the supernatural, may be, as to its form, somewhat wide of the mark. But in so far as it is a recognition of the wonder of the universe, especially of the wonder of its moral and spiritual hfe, it touches the centre. Its hfe of faith is, when all is said, the only true attitude in face of the mingled hght and shadow upon the world. Against the scoff of Haeckel we can put the word of a greater scientist than himself. " My supreme desire," 178 Life's Mysteries said Kepler, " is to find the God in myself whom I find everywhere outside." THE TRAGIC IN LIFE When we compare hfe's quiet days with its days of uprooting, its myriad joys with its pains, our year will be found, after all, to have had a spring, summer and autumn as against one winter — and that winter also had its attractions. But the question recurs. Why is there the winter ? why this residuum of the tragic ? Why should such terrors have been let loose to prowl in the close neigh- bourhood of spirits that are so timid ? There seems but one answer. Human nature has been deliberately exposed to them because it has been planned and framed for the heroic. The school to which we have been intro- duced, the instructors that wait on us there, argue an education such as befits only the highest destinies. It is the tragic in their life that stamps every common man and woman, the unnoted dwellers in mean streets as well as the occupants of palaces, with the hall- mark of an eternal distinction. A discipline so tre- mendous argues an output that corresponds. Were we here only to amuse ourselves the arrangements had been different. As it is, the awful universe over which his gaze wanders, the losses and disappoint- ments that smite him, the pains that rack him and the death and eternity that await him, all salute our pallid mortal and proclaim his greatness. A being on whom such forces are employed can never be ignoble, can never be less than royal. This is the Christian view, and it is the view that 179 M 2 Selections from Brierley alone seems to reach the level of the facts. "Our people die well," said Wesley. They have faced, as did Ignatius and many a one after him, the most hideous tortures, and yet were happy. That the tragic, as all else in hfe, is indeed a concealed Beneficence, working on us for the highest ends, comes out in that individual con\'iction which, as Ritschl finely puts it, " founds its behef in Providence not so much from the study of the fortunes of others as from the study of our own." To Ritschl on this point echoes R. L. Stevenson : " If I from my spy-hole looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of the Universe, yet perceive in my own life's destiny some broken evidence of a plan, and some signals of an overruling goodness, shall I then be so mad as to complain that all cannot be deciphered ? " RELIGION AND CATASTROPHE The shock to our consciousness occasioned by physical catastrophe, the sense it creates of an utter indifference in Nature, as though the shaking down of our cities were to it as the disturbance of an anthill, may be susceptible of an interpretation quite the opposite of the ordinary one. That man can lose so much shows how rich he is. But that is not all. His revolt against the physical universe here, liis sense of injury under its blows, is in itself the most significant feature of the situation. His attitude is inexplicable on the supposition that he is a mere part of this physical nature. That he can lose so much, that he has a range of consciousness capable of being struck at in this 1 80 Life's Mysteries tremendous way, is the opposite of an argument against the vanity of hfe. It is, on the contrary, man's disasters, his catastrophes, that give the cachet to his rank and his destiny. The common interpretation of these calamities — that they are entirely indiscriminate in their dealing with men, striking down with the same indifference innocent and guilty, saint and sinner — is equally wide of the mark. Here again we see how the surface view, the appeal to the physical consciousness. Winds us to the ultimate fact. The most striking feature of these events is the entire and dehcate discrimination with which they distribute their effects. Nature, even in her earthquake moods, grades her deahngs with the nicest exactness. The one event may smite us all, but each will take it in a different way. And our separate way will be in strict accord with our entire inner state and training. How different the same pain to the weakhng who howls under it, and to a Posi- donius, who in his torture says to Pompe}', " Pain, do what thou wilt, I shall never be drawn to say thou art an evil ! " Man has lived with catastrophes through all his historj^ and his faith has survived them. No number of them in the future will persuade him that the scheme of things under which he finds himself is a farrago of nonsense. He will persist rather in believing with Bourget that " this obscure universe has a mysterious and kindly signification." Christianity is, in the best sense, a religion of calamity. Goethe called it the religion of sorrow. Assuredly, as none other, it has sounded the depths of sorrow and exhibited to us their meaning. One who has sounded those deeps as few have asks, " Is not He who made i8i Selections from Brierley misery wiser than thou art ? " Deepest of all inter- pretations of calamity is the interpretation of Christ. In His Cross we have a religion built on catastrophe. It is a defiance of it and a victory over it. In Jesus, who, while enduring there the worst that Nature and the world could inflict, breathes the name of " Father," we have the clearest, Divinest ray of hght that, from the darkened heavens, has ever shot athwart the deep mystery of life. IS GOD INDIFFERENT? There are times in history when a mortal chill seems to fall upon the human soul. A deadly suspicion spreads abroad that man is, after all, in a universe that is deaf and dumb to his prayer. The impression gains that morality and spirituality, faith, hope, love — all the things that make life precious and holy — are phenomena simply of our own consciousness, and tliat there is no evidence of there being anything corresponding to them outside. Nature appears to know nothing of our morality. She slays wholesale, and in her slaying takes no heed of ethical distinction. When the ship goes down, or the earthquake engulfs the city, the pious and prayerful ore swept away just as remorselessly as the nuirderer and the thief. People living sheltered lives may dream of love as at the lieart of things ; but the man on a raft in the pitiless Atlantic, or staggering, lost and hopeless, to his deatli in the Australian bush, finds no suggestion of this friendhncss. There are times, we say, when such considerations come upon men with crushing force. The earth- 182 Life's Mysteries quake at Lisbon, it is said, made multitudes of people atheists. In events of this kind Nature seems to outrage our best instincts. At such times men echo Carlyle's outburst, " God sits in heaven and does nothing ! " These things happen, and there seems no outside response, no faintest sign that any moral sensitiveness beyond our own has thereby been touched. Brooding of this kind is very rife to-day, and it has produced the singular result of a reHgious scepticism that has moraHty for its chief support. Man has become conscientious, but cannot find a conscience in the uni- verse. He thinks himself better than his world, and is ready to propose an evangelistic mission amongst the unseen powers. And yet in all this the chief puzzle to us lies not in the world-problems that are presented, but in the fact that men in such numbers, and often of such con- spicuous ability, should so misconceive the whole question. For, when everything is said, what does this supposed evidence about the Divine indifference amount to ? Looked at narrowly it resolves itself into a series of surface appearances of really no weight as against the other side. The unvarying action of the laws of Nature may drown a man here and there, or break him in pieces at the bottom of a cliff, but what kind of a world should we have if this uniformity ceased, and gravitation pulled up or down at any man's whim or need ? Our navigation, our building, our engineering, the whole of our mechanical arts, the whole progress of the sciences ; more than that, the whole education of the mind, its forethought, its calculation, its coolness, its courage, depend upon the faith we have in Nature's guarantee that she will 183 Selections from Brierley keep to her course, and not deviate at random from her estabhshed hne of things. But what of those who get the rough side of this uniformity, whom it buffets or crushes ? Why is Nature in places so horribly fierce, so utterly cruel ? As a rule the men who know most of that fierceness, the mariners buffeted in Bay of Biscay gales, the ex- plorers of Antarctic wastes, are just the people who do not complain. Roughness is one thing to a nincom- poop, another thing to a man. But to the modern conscience perhaps the greatest stumbling-block of all lies in what seems the Divine indifference to man's moral and religious aspirations. Earnest men watch with dismay the immoralities around them, the orgies of lust and crime, the prosperity of villains, the grinding of the poor, and in their struggle against it they seem to get no help. Here again we are out of our reckoning simply because our observations are faulty. There is nothing wrong with the heavens ; it is our sextant and compass that need adjustment. If we will only look deep enough we may see that God, conceived as moral and spiritual, is acting pre- cisely in the wa}- we should expect. So far from being indifferent, He offers an ever-growing revelation of His moral care. His universe is not silent on this point. The mistake men make is in looking for speech in the wrong direction. The Divine indifference is apparent and not real. The universe, despite surface appearances to the con- trary, discloses a Divine moral order and a Divine moral passion, the revelation of which is in the human consciousness. God can only make Himself known morally in the sphere of the soul, and there He does 184 Life's Mysteries make Himself known. Any man to-day, if he chooses, can have the consciousness of God in his own spirit. In view of this it is well for us " to bear without resent- ment the Divine reserve." Those who penetrate to the centre find there clear sky and angels' food. To him that overcometh is given to eat of the hidden manna. THE MYSTERY OF THE GOSPEL The Gospel itself has its mystery. When we open the New Testament we find ourselves in a region different from anything that modern literature offers us. We call the Gospels history, but they are not histor}' in any sense similar to what we now call history. Of the far greater part of Christ's hfe they contain nothing, and very little really of that brief period of it contained in His pubHc ministry. What then is the plain man to do, the plain man who has his soul to save ; who wishes to make the best he can, morally and spiritually, with the Hfe that has been given him ? Well, there are some things here to be taken note of. To begin with, this Gospel mystery, does it not occur to us that it may have been intended to be a mystery ? Christ is left to us in the Gospels as a mystery. But He is not less certainly a fact. He is not so much in the New Testament as behind it, the power behind it. He never wrote a Hne of it, but in every hne of it we feel Him. There had been none written had He not been there, behind the scenes. Through the luminous haze which hangs over those marvellous years, we see the outlines of a Figure that is human 185 Selections from Brierley and yet more than human ; a spiritual Power that, working on men, lifts them far above their natural stature, and makes them heroes and martyrs. The figure shines there as a sun which hides behind its own brightness ; a sun whose central heat comes pulsing through generation after generation, warming dead races into life, and, with all this prodigality of power, showing no sign of wasting or decay. When rationalism has put our Gospels through the mill, and by its pressure wrung out of them the last ounce of the improbable and the impossible, there still remains the mystery that created them, and the mystery of what they have wrought. That mystery is too much for any naturalistic interpretation. It points at least to this : to the penetration of our scheme by a vaster scheme, a scheme which shows the realm of science to be the threshold of a realm far higher, a realm of the spirit, to which we belong, and where alone our hfe must seek its explanation. The real mystery of religion is the mystery of a Love, a Redemptive Purpose that has been working in humanity from the beginning, that has already shown itself in ways passing our understanding, and that is preparing manifestations in the future beyond our highest thought. IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS We are all enthusiasts of the light, but let us have also our praise of darkness. We are not sufficiently mindful of what we owe to it. All the great vital processes go on in the dark. If you want your seed to sprout, you must bury it. Dayhght and sunshine i86 Life's Mysteries will help to make your corn, but for the real start of its hfe it must go underground. Nature covers your body with a skin, more or less exposed to the air and the general gaze. Here on the surface is all your bravely of feature — your complexion, your beaut}-, your plainness — for the world to look at. But the real business of keeping you alive is within, deep down, remote from the view. Those biUions of cells which form your tissues — each one a separate Hfe — do their work unseen. Your heart, your lungs, your vital organs, toil all of them in the dark. The real factors of you shun pubHcity. Physically, you are a creature of the night. Your thoughts, too, are born in the dark. The conscious self which you know is the product of a self beneath it, which you do not know. Whence our ideas come, how they are created, what are the factors which produce them — all this is as hidden from us as is the centre of the sun. Who is the genius who works inside a genius ? The genius himself is the last person who can tell you that. We remember Stevenson's talk of the " brownies " who did his creative business for him. Call them brownies or blackies, or whatever name you choose ; the fact remains that the clear image which is formed in the brain is the result of operations carried on by unseen agents in a world unknown. The deeper we penetrate into this theme the more significant are its results. The spiritual hfe, Hke all other hfe, requires darkness and the deep for its starting-point ! A man must dive into his inmost recesses in order that he may find himself. The nearer lights must be put out that tlie far view may get its 187 Selections from Brierley chance. Why is it that so many of us have begun by rejecting a creed ? It is not necessary to say it is the fault of the creed. The reason, the main reason at least, hes in ourselves. The creed, as it stands there, cannot feed us. It is a creation of the hard, dry hght. The men who made it had in their day their own inner process, but the creed they offer us, though a product of it, is not that process, or anything like it. Here you have to work out your own salvation. You are in want of life, your own life, and that must begin deeper down. The doubts, the fears, the rejections, the despairs, are nothing else or less than the clods thrown upon the soul, under the shadow of which the life miracle is wrought. All life, from the lowest to the highest, is alike ; it follows one law of birth and growth. The soul's night of an Augustine, of a Bunyan, your night and mine, are akin ; akin not only to each other but to the growth of the corn, to the bloom of a flower. Night and darkness, with their uses and abuses, are, after all, of limited area. The sunlight is so much more than they. This ebon blackness, so seeming all-enveloping, is merely a result of your position on a sloping planet. The night's dimension is a trifle compared with the light that is abroad. All around you, though 3'ou cannot see it, the pulsing beam is raying out from the centre, spreading through the immensity of the outer spaces. It is yoit who are in the night, not the solar system. It is not for lack of sunshine that you see nothing. That is an affair of your present position, your present need. And when the need is gone, the night will go. Your destiny is not the night, but the day. Your darkest hour is only its 188 Life's Mysteries prelude. We see already the boundary of the night, for " On the glimmering limit far withdrawn God makes Himself an awful rose of dawn." THE MEANING OF SOLITUDE In the human race as a whole, in its separate stages of Ufe, in the experiences of elect and suffering souls, and, as if sympathising with all this, in the very con- figuration of our globe itself, we are met at every point with the mystery of sohtude as an essential part of Hfe. What is its meaning ? Is it by chance that it happens so, or is there a purpose here ? Are we really alone when we seem so ? These are the questions. And it is precisely when we study the action of soli- tude upon the individual soul that we obtain there a ghmpse into what man's solitude in the universe really means. He is left to himself that he may grow. It is precisely in this condition that he does grow. Gregory of Nazianzen reahsed that, when he " retired into him- self, deeming quiet the only safety of the soul." Wordsworth reahsed it, '' retired in the sanctuary of his owTi heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own thoughts. " It is thus indeed that all his great thoughts, all his revelations, have come to man. And so his very isolation is evidence that he is guided. His guide keeps out of sight, remains a Dciis ahsconditus, but not the less surely does He open up and indicate the road. We have, then, to comprehend and to accustom ourselves to the Cosmic habit. It is not enough for us " to bear Without resentment the Divine reserve." 189 Selections from Brierley We have to understand it and to achieve in ourselves all that it designs for us. It is studies such as these, of the mere facts of life, that show us faith, in the New Testament sense of it, as the only rational solution of our riddle. Our isolation is an insulation. We are shut off from visible signs that there may develop in us the sense and certitude of the invisible Reahty. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE We are the product of both society and solitude, and it would be difficult to say which has had most to do with the making of us. At first, and for a good way on in life, we are of the general lump, and barely distinguishable from it. A thousand things hnk us to the mass. There is already among us, apart from theory, an enormous Communism. We are talkers, and even thinkers, by virtue of a language which is equally the property of my neiglibour and myself. It is the feeder of our most secret hfe, and yet derives all its use and power from the fact that it dwells, on the same terms, in a million minds beside our own. Yet, when all this is said, man remains the great solitary. He is so both collectively and individually. Humanity, as a whole, is surely the most lonely of created things. Whether we look up or look down, we seem alone. An immeasurable gulf separates us from the animal forms that share the planet with us ; but this is nothing to the void that opens above. It is along this desert path, so hard and terrible, so bewil- dering in its silence, that man comes to the possession of himself. For we have two solitudes. We are part of a lonely humanity, but we are also ourselves alone. 190 Life's Mysteries Society presses us on every side, but it is a surface pressure, and beneath there are unfathomed depths. Language often conceals our thought, it never fully expresses it. Surrounded by our nearest and our dearest, we Hve alone, think alone, feel alone, and shall die alone. This is the mystery of man the solitary, and there should surely be some solution of it. In every age exultant souls have discovered that the isolation is an insulation, and that for the transmission of a message. We are shut off from everything else that we may hear it. The message is the whisper of a hidden way. When a man understands the meaning of faith, of love, of sacrifice, of prayer, he ceases to feel lonely. The upper spaces become populated. He has dis- covered his kindred. It is assuredly one of the great secrets of hving to know how to be alone. On the man who has learned it the crowd, once so imperious and dominating, has ceased to impose. Its voices, whether of threaten- ing or applause, interest and perhaps amuse, but never coerce him. He does his duty by his fellow, and feels all the weight of obligation which binds him to society. But his actions are no longer regulated by this cry or that. For the great moments, for the critical decisions he retires from the throng, that in silence he may hear the verdict of his inmost soul. He listens with awe and submission, for he has learned to recognise beneath that whisper a note august and cen- tral, which seems to him Divine. THE WORLD INVISIBLE The sense of the visible as only the shadow of a greater reaUty behind comes with more difficulty to some races 191 Selections from Brierley than to others. The Western peoples are not specially gifted on this side. Theirs has been largely a material mission. To root themselves solidly on the planet, to learn its surface laws, to enrich themselves by the clever manipulation of its forces, this has been the Western function. The East gained an earher sense of what lay beneath. The world's great religions are Oriental. Egypt lived thousands of years before Christ in the acutest perception of an invisible world. In'its Vedanta philosophy India also, in a far antiquity, beheld the world as phenomenal, resting on a Divine which alone was real, declaring man's hold on immor- tality to be in the surrender of what in him was earthly and transitory. But no race of- men, whether in East or West, is permitted to escape this discipHne. Sooner or later, after our first intoxicating experience of the visible, does it dawn upon us that all this is only a screen. The very senses that linked us at first so firmly to earth turn traitor to it later, and cry " illusion ! " The world is in this respect a Church, whose teaching and ritual none may evade. As friend after friend departs, and our own years tell their story, hfe becomes more and more a vast expecta- tion, a wait till the curtain shall be raised. That humanity, spite of itself, is drilled always into this attitude is, for those who see any purpose or coherence in life, a sufficient hint of what is yet to come. Evolution, for instance, gives us life as a perpetual ascent. Eacfi grade of being takes in all that is beneath it, with something of its own added. Man, as we know him, sums up in himself the laws and forces of inorganic matter, the vital principles of vegetable and 192 Life's Mysteries animal life, together with a whole higher world of his own. And when to all this we add the consideration opened by the later evolutionary researches, showing as they do that the lower organisms are practically immortal ; that death has come in as part of the struggle towards a higher structure — come in, that is, not as the lord and tyrant of life, but as a fellow-labourer working towards its furtherance — we realise how the evidence accumulates which bids us look for higher fruitions, as well as for the solution of our enigmas, behind the veil. Life's silences and separations are a purposed disci- phne. The pains here are the spirit's " growing pains." The heavens are mute, not because there is nothing to say, but because the time is not yet. Meantime our business is to develop more and more that spiritual sense which gives us, here and now, the vision of life in its wholeness, " Heard you not that sweet melo- dious music ? " said Jacob Behmen to his son, when dying at GorHtz. There is more than mortal music already audible to attuned ears. The elect souls are already free of the world behind the veil. They are on pilgrimage towards that fatherland. " For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. . . . But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly." THE DOCTRINE OF PAl^SE Have we ever considered — in music and other things — the significance of the pause ? In an orchestral performance there is a moment when the sound 193 N Selections from Brierley ceases. The musicians are bending over their instru- ments ; the conductor is beating time with his baton, but no note emerges. What is this silence ? It is not an interruption. It is a part of the music. It is as eloquent, as necessary, as any preceding or following crash of harmony. You note the same thing in public oratory. There was a preacher of a generation ago who was famous for his pauses. They stirred all the expectancy of his auditors, who knew that something good was coming. He had his imitators — often, alas ! with disastrous results. They forgot that the value of their pause lay entirely in what preceded and what was to come after it ! The pause is an element in all Hfe. It is a feature of our physical being. Our body conforms to it in our nightly sleep. The heart, in its constant systole- diastole, has its moment of rest. The world at large is full of the doctrine of pause. Nature depends upon if for some of her greatest effects. One might speak here of her dramatic instinct. How incomparable is her mise en sctne of a thunderstorm ! And amid all the array of impressive effects there the greatest surely is the pause which precedes it. And this, which is true of the world at large, is true of ourselves. Here also, in our personal life, it is well to hold the doctrine of the pause. The hours when your work appears at standstill, and your hope with it, are just those when something beyond you is working for you. How much even of our mental operation is carried on without us ! The wearied brain, beaten by its problem, gives up the task. Later on we face the puzzle, to find the thing is done. How, we know not ; something beneath our conscious- 194 Life's Mysteries ness has been at work for us. We take the result with rejoicing, not knowing what or whom to thank. It is the same in the deeper experiences of the soul. W. J. Locke, in one of his novels, makes his hero say : " I was going about in a state of suspended spiritual animation." Those of us who have passed many years in the world are famiHar with that experience. There are times when the machinery of our faith seems to have broken down. Its foundations sink beneath us. It may have been the reading of destructive criticism ; or a mounting sea of troubles ; or the failure of health. Whatever the cause, paradise seems barred and bolted against us. We are in the desert, under a pitiless sky. We trudge on " With close-lipped patience for our only friend. Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair." Later, as we look back on those times, we find in them one of the best arguments for our present faith. We see in them the pause which was part of the music. They were the times when some of the soul's best work was going on underneath, work of which at the time we were ignorant. Our sad journey was on the road to an assurance better founded, to a realm of vaster horizons, where the doubts which had confounded us had become the instruments of a wider vision. Our sorrow had wrought in us new elements of strength. It is thus that we are remade, not once, but many times over ; for the apostoHc saying, " Old things are passed away, behold all things have become new," is not a soHtary experience, but one that, in our pilgrim's progress, is many times repeated. 195 N 2 Selections from Brierley PERSONAL SURVIVALS The most obvious of personal survivals is the one contained in memory — the marvellous faculty which makes our past a present, and permits us to repeat our life to ourselves a thousand times over. Nothing perhaps so vividly exhibits our earthly career as a progress from the natural to the spiritual as the operation of memory. For in its processes we see the raw material of experience, the rough products of the consciousness in its contact with the world, sub- tilised, ethereahsed, made into possessions of pure spirit which are held by it for ever. Another of the great personal survivals is that which belongs to the region of feeling, and which is illustrated specially in religion and love. In religion, that which counts is not so much what we start with as what survives. A man of fifty who has thought his way through the problems of an age like our own lives in a mental region startlingly different from that of his youth. A whole world of ideas has dropped away. He looks over a new heaven and a new earth. Yet, if his life has been pure and his intent honest, his religious feeling will have come out of the hurly- burly no whit damaged and in its essence scarcely changed. If difference there be, it is that his faith is more essentially childlike. All the motives to trust, to sacrifice, to service and to love have strengthened with the wider horizon and the deepened experience. From what he has learned of fatherhood he under- stands, as he never could in the earUer years, what it is to be a child. The same principle holds in love. The test of it 196 Life's Mysteries is its survivals. The earlier period, with its passional attraction and its tumult of the senses, offers a judgment more or less confused. It is when, with husband and wife, this phase of relationship has been passed through and discounted, that one can discern whether or no the root of the matter is in them. For a true union is another illustration of the Divinely ordered progress of life from the natural to the spiritual. And it is in its later stages that we discern whether the flower has produced the fruit. In man's physical frame, in his rehgious faiths, in his social relationships, in his innermost feeHngs we discover marks of lowliest origin, but of an ever upward movement. And the depth of the beginning is in starthng contrast to the height of the consum- mation. The progress of humanity is from nothing to the infinite. Out of the material it fabricates the spiritual. And the permanence of this last is of all life's survivals the greatest. Said his friends to Socrates before he drank the hemlock, " How shall we bury you ? " "As you please," was the reply, " but first be sure that you have me." To the old Greek thinker was it clear, as on higher evidence it has become yet more clear to us, that the inner wealth of the soul, the spoil of its struggle in this world of sense, will be life's great survival after its last grim fight with death. ILLUSION AS A TRAINING FORGE Illusion is the charm and poetry of the soul, as well as one of its most effective inspirations. Children live in its enchanted realm, and if we are wise, we who are older will often take up our abode there too. It is a trick of the present writer, when at a concert where 197 Selections from Brierley the highest music is provided, to enhance the enjoy- ment by the simple process of shutting his eyes and imagining himself in his own room, and this glorious feast to be an impromptu serenade under his windows. By getting rid in this way of the claims of expectation, and allowing everything to come as a surprise one has doubled the delight. It is by illusion also that Nature gets her biggest things out of us. Young men set off on hardy adventures of campaign or of travel with an idea of accompanying pleasure or profit which in nine cases out of ten will not be reahsed. But they will have done something for their own and the world's furtherance, which otherwise would not have been done. A lad's notion of his own powers, and of his future, is half illusion. But what power he does exercise, and what future he will secure, are owing largely to that illusion. Under this rainbow arch men and women walk together to marriage and the founding of homes. Nature smiles at their ideas while securing, at their expense, the harvest of her own. Yet is her smile, while carrying in it a trace of irony, ever benevolent. From passion's illusion, by which hearts seem often so cruelly beguiled, come results better than the dream, though so different from it. The family life, consisting often of hard enough realities, will leave higher effects upon character than the senti- mental raptures which preceded it. And its dis- appointments and sorrows show illusion as one of the great training forces of the human spirit. It is by the contrast here forced on us between earth's pro- mises and their fulfilment that it urges on the soul, as by an inner necessity, to seek finally its peace in those imperishables which do not betray. 198 SPIRITUAL SIDELIGHTS SPIRITUAL SIDELIGHTS WHAT IS IT TO BE SPIRITUAL ? St. Paul's ringing word, " to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace," is one of those sentences that, once uttered, can never be forgotten. But what is it to be spiritual ? The Pauhne sentence has, in the intervening centuries, produced innumerable interpretations. To get to the meaning of this word for our age we have, moreover, to work through and to set aside the strange miscon- ceptions that have gathered round it. Men have persuaded themselves that they were spiritual on the strength of a certain persuasion, especially when accompanied by a capacity for ecstatic feehng. And this when permitting themselves the most extraordinary licence of action. To be spiritual has been interpreted by others as involving a refusal of, and seclusion from, certain large sides of human life. Under this persuasion the early anchorites fled to the desert ; celibacy was regarded as the only way to perfectness ; the arts and sciences were tabooed as godless secularities, and psalm-singing, suppHcation, and rehgious reading and meditation as the only saintly employments. How stood Puritanism in its interpretation of the spiritual ? Undoubtedly there was, in the intensity of its apprehension, a tendency to separatism and 201 Selections from Brierley exclusiveness. Yet not so much among its highest representatives. Milton grasped the whole world of learning, and none of his age had a more exquisite perception of the beautiful. The Puritan tendency in the seventeenth century was to see God only in one phase of things and only one side of life. What, then, is it to be spiritual ? In brief, spirituality is two things — a perception and a performance. It is for one thing to reahse God as everywhere in His world ; to accept with reverent gladness every variety of its phenomena and every phase of its experience as a new manifestation of Himself. The spiritual man is he who in a sunset on the Alps, or in a sonata of Beethoven, or a problem of mathematics ; in the age-long drama of history, in the laughter of little children, in the events of his life, in the questions and answers of his experience, in his highest aspirations, sees everywhere, now the hiding and now the mani- festation of that ultimate Reality which his soul's voice tells him is HoHness and Love, and to be united with which is the one final craving and cry of his heart. And with this perception comes a performance. Knowing the universe as spiritual, its law as holy, the spiritual man seeks as his dearest aim to conform his action and character to that law. The law is exceeding broad. All knowledge, all science, all skill are included in it. A Mozart's perfection in music is of affinity with the perfection that is spiritual. All hold of the one principle. And so the spiritual man is the broadest and not the narrowest of his fellows. He seeks the best in everything, for the best is God. 202 spiritual Sidelights THE NOTE OF THE SPIRITUAL Looking over the immense and wonderfully varied fields of human activity we discern in them all a teaching, and the question now is as to the relative value of this teaching. In all these departments, however seemingly remote from one another, the quaUty of the work depends on the presence or absence of one element. In painter or poHtician, in architect or business man, in parent, schoolmaster or preacher, the note which Nature demands, and which will decide their real worth, is the note of the spiritual. By the note of the spiritual we mean the recognition, back of every form of living and working, of an Unseen Holy, of a Divine and Infinite Purity, Beauty and Love, by which these several activities are to be inspired, and to which they are always to look for final appraise- ment. This view of things is one against which, in different quarters, very vigorous revolts have been made, but the issue of those revolts confirms the fact that the universe will tolerate no other. As we become surer of God and more acclimatised in His truth, hohness and love, we can look upon the bewilderments of dogmatic utterance from a very safe standpoint. Not that we are going to be infallible. We may make abundance of mistakes ; only, as Joubert says, " there are some minds which arrive at error by all truths ; and others which arrive at great truths by all errors." The true soul will be wrong often enough in its arguments, but right in its conclusions. A teacher, for instance, may state the Christian doctrine of the Atonement in a way which, from the philosophic or 203 Selections from Brierl ey the forensic standpoints, may be riddled with objections. But if he has stated it so that men have gone away with a new hatred of sin and passion for hohness ; with a deeper insight into the love of God, and His law of sacrifice ; and with a fresh great hope for the utter redemption of this sorrowful world ; we say that, whatever the faults and ragged edges of his theory, as a religious teacher he has not gone far wrong. If we are in right relation with Eternal Love, Truth and Righteousness, we shall steer our way through doctrines without fear of shipwreck. Our work and life form a teaching the value of which depend on our relation to the spiritual world. Unless we and our work are rooted there, we and it are as a bubble that breaks on the passing wave. In rehgion we can teach nothing effectively that we have not first lived. Our measure as teachers will be in the measure of our experiences. We can give only of what we have received, and we are receptive only as we practise inner obedience. The men who are mighty in this field are those whose height of attainment gives a quality of its own to the words they use, who use speech as a channel along which flow influences that no words can translate. \ THE SPIRITUAL SENSE ^ Perhaps the loosest and most badly defined word in our language is the word Faith. On the lips, not only of the people but also of scholars and divines, it has been made to connote all manner of dissimilar and incongruous elements. But in its primitive and Biblical signification it means neither more nor less 204 Spiritual Sidelights than the spiritual sense, the faculty of response in man to the spiritual world around him. It is the soul's retina, on which alone the light that streams thence can register its pictures. Like the musical faculty, it has been slow in its emergence. For long ages of his history man seems to have felt no stir of it within him. The palaeolithic times offer not a trace of a religious sense. Even now it is most irregularly distributed. In multitudes it seems entirely dormant, if at all existent ; in a few it has from time to time exhibited itself in commanding and overpowering potency. What is the function of this spiritual sense, and how does it affirm its authority ? We have only to look carefully at its operation in ourselves to discover at once how absolutely different it is from the processes of mere reasoning. One might describe it as the soul's thrill at the approach of the Divine. The spiritual sense immediately recognises itself in other souls and rejoices in the contact. Religious fellowships arise from the play of its law of affinity. It knows instinc- tively where its nutriment Ues, and has processes of its own for extracting and assimilating it. But the history of this spiritual sense, however disappointing to our impatience as the record of a rehgious triumph, is almost perfect as a piece of rehgious evidence. We need scarce any other. The spiritual sense as we now have it contains the essence of these things in itself, and would reproduce them, with new elements added of the eternal revelation. It is the business of the Church, and specially of the religious teacher, to develop the spiritual sense. The real end of worship and of exhortation is not to 205 Selections from Brierley root men in tradition or to drill them in logic, or to cram them with facts. It is to find the mystic chord which vibrates to the breath of the Unseen. It answers always to the true note. Often the thrill comes apart from any words. When a man has felt God his neigh- bour knows it. That is where the true preacher's power hes. Beyond all eloquence, all learning, its secret is in the fulness and fineness of his spiritual sense. And that grows in him by careful cultivation. He above all others needs to ponder the old Greek saying ; " The gods sell us all the goods they give us." We cannot, that is, get the best without paying for it. Inferior substitutes for the true power can be had at specified rates, but for this there is no haggling and no cheapening. Those who, in pulpits or elsewhere, desire to be irrefutable evidences of the heavenly kingdom must offer their whole selves as the price. SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS In every successive age the Divine principle has been humbhng itself to, and making what it could of, the human tenement prepared for it. And always, we may observe, the movement is towards the better body, towards a more adequate expression of itself. When one form has worn itself out, it is cast off or remodelled. The sixteenth century saw the process on a great scale, but the Protestantism then created was far from a finahty. The Bibliolatry on which, in its struggle with Roman Church authority, it fell back, and which in the seventeenth century culminated in the monstrous doctrine of Quenstedt that every line, word, and syllable of the Scriptures was directly dictated by the Spirit, 206 spiritual Sidelights the writers being passive instruments, a doctrine which it has been wittily said, makes Balaam's ass the fittest of all the chosen media of revelation, was a bodily form which the ever-growing spirit has already burst through and laid aside. Essential Christianity, which may be defined as the revelation of the true relation between man and God and man and man, with the power to create it, is again seeking new garments of thought, speech, and action. It is combining to-day with poUtical economy and social science. Are we told that these are foreign to the Gospel ? They are assuredly not m.ore foreign than the philosophies which an Athanasius and an Augustine brought into the Church. And the amalgam they will produce will, we predict, be a good deal more Christian than the Athanasian Creed. But this is only one side of the topic. The spiritual amalgams which take place in our own nature are as interesting as those seen on the broader scale of history. The first result of these processes is that there are as many Christianities as there are Christians. For with each man the seed drops into the special soil of his education, his temperament, capacity, and primitive instincts, and the result is always something unique and separate. There is in everyone a twofold reaction — of Christianity upon his original character, and of his original character upon Christianity. But there is another and beautiful side of the topic. The action of the Christian spirit upon a nature that honestly receives it will work out in the endeavour, on its side, to fink every function of the lower fife with the higher and heavenly. The animal part of him will, under this influence, never be left to act alone. In a 207 Selections from Brierley word, a man keeps to the height of his true self only by virtue of that spiritual amalgam which we term the soul's union with God. CAN WE REPEAT PENTECOST? There is nothing more doleful than attempts at spiritual repetitions. The soul knows its hour and will not be coerced. Moreover, to propose to repeat a thing is to deny the law of progress. To-day is greater than yesterday. It has its own work and its own revelation. What we learn from Pentecost is not to hark back to the old, but to push on courageously to the new. For amongst other things this Jerusalem event was an immense break with the past. It inaugurated a revolution. At bottom it meant the substitution of the rehgion of the spirit for a religion of form. We are only at the beginning as yet of all that this meant. For to-day we are carrying this evolution into a vaster sphere. Precisely as Pentecost meant a religion which transcended Judaism, so the movement now going on means a religion which transcends medise- vahsm. The Cliristianity we have inherited was set in a framework which is visibly falling to pieces. Our task is to build its vital elements into a new and larger synthesis. The Jerusalem Christians in their Pente- cost message were the supreme heretics of their time. All the same they were God's appointed workers. The Power which moved them is the Power which in our time is carrying Church and world into another and yet higher phase of thought and hfe. The Jerusalem Pentecost drove the early Church 208 Spiritual Sidelights into a great propaganda. Our Pentecost will in like manner have its propaganda. It will carry with it all the spiritual elements, the love, the sympathy, the human brotherhness which belonged to that first phase. But it will take with it something more. The Church's missionary effort is, before our eyes, developing an entirely new element. We cannot better describe it, or complete what we have here had to say, than by quoting Professor Seeley on this point in his " Natural Rehgion." " The children of modern civilisation are called to follow in the footsteps of Paul, of Gregory, of Boniface, of Xavier, EHot and Livingstone. But they must carry not merely Chris- tianity in its narrow clerical sense, but their whole mass of spiritual treasures to those who want them. Let us carry the true view of the universe, the true astronomy, the true chemistry and the true physiology to polytheists still wrapped in mythological dreams ; let us carry progress and freewill to fatalist nations and to nations cramped by the fetters of primitive custom ; let us carry the doctrine of a rational Hberty to the heart of Oriental despotisms. In doing all this ... we shall admit the outlying world into the great civihsed community, into the modern city of God." THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY The Christ of to-day is something more — in a sense, we may say, something much greater even — than the Christ of the New Testament. There we behold Him in the restrictions of bodily Hfe. But now we see Him, as a sheer spiritual Power, traversing and transforming the ages. It is the simple fact to say that to all ages 209 o Selections from Brierley and conditions Christ has been the Hfe of the soul. In this view the Christ of to-day is an invisible world power, whose operations are in the interior of human hearts. Our Christ of to-day is a human histor\', a personality, and a power behind. A cloud in the heavens, shall we say, and the infinite blue beyond, from out of which the cloud has drawn itself ? And the cloud and the blue are one. The mystery is beyond words, and yet this is finally how it shapes itself : The Infinite to be the Infinite must contain the element of personality. It contains more than force ; it contains also, truth, love, purity, holiness. But these to have their true effect in the human sphere must personalise. The Infinite here must take shape. The limitless blue must 3'ield its cloud. And it has done so. When in the secret place of our soul we build our God, we form Him not out of cosmic forces, not out of gravitation and chemical attraction, but out of hofiness and love. And, lo ! as we look, the form is as of the Son of Man ! The Absolute as Absolute is not enough for the religious life. Man must have some fixed, visible point, some crystalhsation, as it were, of the All on which his love and reverence may rest. That is where the New Testa- ment story meets him. Here he finds the humanising and personahsing of the Infinite Goodness. In the study of this Life he tastes eternity. And as he believes, the power to be good flows into him. Therefore knows he to-day the Christ, not only as human, but also as Divine ; not only as a figure in history, but as the eternal Now. " God may have other words for other worlds. But for this world the Word of God is Christ." 210 spiritual Sidelights SPIRITUAL GAIN AND LOSS Those higher manifestations, which, for want of a better term, we define as " the spiritual hfe," are being more and more recognised as humanity's most precious asset, its pearl of great price. To lose them, or to stop their free development, is, by the best minds, seen to be a loss greater infinitely than the failure of the crops or the breakdown of the national credit. To the degree in which a country is backward here it is under a disabihty not to be reckoned in figures. It is hke want of eyesight. We do not stay now to define the contents of the spiritual consciousness. St. Paul has done it excellently for us in his description of the " fruits of the Spirit." What we want specially to dwell on is the possibihty of losing it. That the loss, in more or less degree, is quite possible, history abundantly shows. What history, however, has made quite as abundantly manifest is the curious blunders men have made in guarding against the loss. The wider our observation, the more careful shall we become in declaring what is actually a spiritual loss. So often do we mistake the apparent for the real, so often do we find that what needed to be corrected was not the thing outside us so much as our own stan- dard of judgment. What we imagine has gone has simply become latent. What really constitutes spiritual gain and loss ? Anything that hinders the freest circulation of the spiritual forces is a loss. The pursuit of research, the clash of opinion, where full Hberty is, can only end in spiritual furtherance, for the laws of the human mind, where they are free to act, tend inevitably towards 211 O 2 Selections from Brierley the truth. To underprop religion by the old arti- ficial methods is like underpropping the planet. The spiritual kingdom, like the planet, requires no under- propping, because it, too, is sustained by forces that are invisible. Nothing in the whole range of a man's possessions is so well worth safeguarding as his spiritual estate. And he is himself a fair judge of how matters are going there. As we advance from youth to age a great many things change in us. There may be decay of bodily strength and of some forms of mental faculty. But it is a glorious fact that in all that makes the soul of a man the move- ment may be one always of less to more. If there is in us a perceptible lessening of the sense of justice, of the passion for purity, of human sympathy, of sensitive- ness to the spiritual world and all of beauty and promise that it holds, the fault is not with the years but with ourselves. After all, the one great touchstone of spiritual loss or gain, as the apostle has told us in immortal words, is love. A NEW INCARNATION OF CHRIST In Church life to-day are visible on all hands the signs of decay. A vast quantity of our rehgious apparatus is obsolete. A mass of the traditional rehgious statement and ceremonial fails to touch the modern mind. Men in consequence are writing about " the coming irrehgion " and the approaching extinction of Christianity. What is really taking place around us is a series of vast preparations for yet a new incarna- tion of the Christ. Marvellous and awe-inspiring, to one whose eyes are open, are the stages of the august 212 Spiritual Sidelights process. The very dissatisfaction with the existing forms is a part of it. Carlyle has put into unforgettable words the spirit of the time : " The rehgious principle, driven out of most churches, either lies unseen in the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently working towards some new realisation ; or else wanders homeless over the world, hke the disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organism." That new organism is already looming into sight. The fresh incarnation is visibly preparing. In the twentieth century also shall the Christ find His body. And it will be a higher, nobler structure than any that has preceded it. A thousand things that belonged to earher forms will be missing in this. The old prescrip- tions, the old narrowness, the suspicions against know- ledge and reason, the claims of priesthoods, of bUnd authority, will be missing here. This body will have a brain stored with all the world has of knowable, but its soul will be the soul of Christ. In this incarnation we shall see Christianity in its essence as the Spirit of Heavenly Love, binding human society together in a brotherhood of service, in a holy, happy fellowship of the spirit. Nothing can prevent that coming. All history points this way. Here shall be fulfilled the aspiration, echoed by a myriad loyal hearts, which our great Puritan poet has put into imperishable words : " Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the Kings of the earth ! Put on the visible robes of Thy imperial majesty, take up that unhmited sceptre which Thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed Thee ; for now the voice of Thy bride calls Thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed." 213 Selections from Brierley MORAL AND SPIRITUAL SPRING CLEANING Our modern civilisation has produced some interest- ing results. Amongst other things it has made fashionable, and even necessary, a new type of spring cleaning : that, namely, of the body. Thousands of people, with apparently nothing better to do, habitually over-eat and over-drink themselves. Under this treatment the overloaded physique become clogged to the breaking-down point, and our fashionable rushes off to Vichy, to Carlsbad, to Wiesbaden, for what he calls his " cure." His hfe is spent in eating himself into disease, and then drenching and dieting himself out of it. Do we not want here a spring cleaning such as Wiesbaden and its rivals are unable to supply ; one, namely, that shall sweep out, as with a torrent's rush, the whole theory of hfe on which these habits are founded, and clear the way for one which makes our eating and drinking, instead of an animalism more or less refined, into an instrument of health and of noble living ? Amongst the fashionable circles who make the for- tune of the Continental " cures " there is a curiously analogous spring cleaning process m their spiritual affairs. In Catholic society you hear of worldhngs who occasionally " go into retreat," in order, as the phrase is, " to make their soul." Lent is a kind of spiritual Carlsbad. Its devotions are a sort of medi- cinal waters, wherewith to wash off from overloaded consciences accumulations which have become burden- some, and to restore to the jaded appetite its vanished 214 Spiritual Sidelights freshness. Wlien Lent is over, everybody will be gayer than ever. A mad world, truly, my masters. There are spring cleanings in Nature's great house- hold, and she manages them in her own way. During the closing scenes of the Russo-Turkish war, a singular fortune brought the present writer into the little town of Bourgaz, at the foot of the Balkans, then occupied by Russian troops. The streets were a foot deep in mud. Remarking on this to the British Consul, the latter said : " Ah, they never clean them. They wait lor the snow melting in the spring. Then there is a flood, which sweeps it all away." Nature here took a hand in the spring cleaning by a method rough but efficacious. In the poHtical sphere something Hke this happened in England in the seventeenth century, and in France in the eighteenth. In the present day, we are apt to regard these old-time methods as a little too drastic. We dislike floods, and for our street cleansings have provided instead a whole apparatus of brooms and watercarts. But does not our poUtical region need a spring cleaning ? We are supposed to be under democratic Government. What a pathetic delusion ! Go five miles out of any English town and you have stepped from democracy into feudalism, from the twentieth to the fourteenth century. Or go from the country to the city, to your central Govern- ment. On your Treasury bench you have men pledged to progress. But behind that bench you see permanent departments — where the actual governing is done — stuffed with reactionaries, wedded fast to the feudal ideas. Some day — there are signs of spring already — there will be a snow-melting on the hills, when it will be time for functionaries of this order, and for the whole 215 Selections from Brierley system they represent, to save themselves from the rush of the torrent. We are suffering to day from a grievous clogging of our interior life. The soul's arteries are blocked with material accumulations, and its pulse throbs feebly. In some respects our civilisation resembles that of the old world, to which Christianity, in its glorious freshness, came as a great spring cleaning. Upon a faint and thirsty world that current of noblest leehng came as an infinite refreshment, cool, sparkUng, fresh from the very river of God. That stream still flows. What is needed is that we get back to it. Some of us are badly in need of an inner spring cleaning. And that not on the Carlsbad principle — as a mere change of dissipations — but as the purifying and renewing of our life. Back from our vapid pleasurings, from our mad hunt for things not worth the chase, back to the hills where the fountains rise, where the view opens on infinity, and we see things sub specie ceternitatis ; to the heights where life is felt as holy, where God is known as our one, our all-sufficing and everlasting possession. SPIRITUAL EMANCIPATION There are multitudes of rehgious people who are by no means emancipated. They have not yet learned the full art of hving. The education for hfe has, indeed, a good many branches, and excellent people, on all sides of us, are to-day groaning in bondage because of non-proficiency in one or other of them. In some branches we seem to have gone back rather than forward. Wiio can doubt that tlie Spartan and Stoic cult of physical hardihood was, for instance, a step 2l6 Spiritual Sidelights towards inner freedom ! Was not that a splendid lesson which Marcus Aurelius learned from his tutor ? " I learned, says he, " endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands." Not all his imperial legions could win him such conquests as these. Mme. de GenHs must surely have planned her scheme of education on this model when she taught Louis Phihppe as a youth " to wait on himself, to despise all softness, to sleep regularly on a hard bed, to brave sun, rain and cold, and to endure the greatest fatigues." Whether we be prince or peasant, Christian or pagan, these are teachings with the marrow of reality in them. We are becoming enslaved to soft- ness in our time. The Christian professor and the pronounced agnostic are alike in being uncomfortable unless their luxuries are to hand. But all that is treason to the inner hberty. What we should incesr santly cultivate is a limber soul that sits easily to cir- cumstance. We are bunglers in Hfe's first principles unless we can sing the heart's song with bread and water for our meal and a board for our couch. So long as our happiness holds of a given round of physical comforts we may call ourselves by what name we choose, but we are slaves and not free men. Mental freedom is only one of the ways to the soul's emancipation. It is not here that the greatest victory is gained. That is a moral one. We have not tasted real liberty till we have got the true measure of what the world calls success, till we have learned to be satisfied from within and not from without. Our emancipation is accomphshed when the soul, free from fears because sure of its place in the Divdne order, accepts each day as a new gift from God, looks 217 Selections from Brierley back on its past with gratitude, and forward with the joy of perfect trust. MORAL SUPERIORITIES No true man girds at rank. He knows that it represents sometliing worthy, it not in its actual possessor, yet assuredly in the force that created it. It is there, the evidence of a primal hfe-power that once lifted itself amongst men and made itself respected. The Gahlean peasant whom Pilate condemned did not dispute for a moment the higher social rank of the judge. But to-day the judges and great ones of the earth name the Gahlean's name with religious devotion, and have no words which adequately express their sense of His rank in the world. Throughout history, in fact, the moral and spiritual superiorities seem by a kind of law to have been wedded with lowliness of outward position. Libanius made fun of the early Christians as a set of tinkers and cobblers who had left their mallets and awls to preach the kingdom of heaven. Spinoza ground lenses for a Hvelihood. George Fox and Jacob Behmen got theirs by cutting leather. Literature tells the same story. From Homer downwards the kings of ideas have been, as often as not, bankrupt of pocket. This study of the superiority that lurks in andbeneath the life of the common man is the one thing needful and grievously lacking among the present-day accredited purveyors of our moral ideas. It would do some of our armchair theologians, who judge mankind by their prim lists of ecclesiastical " virtues and their contrary vices," a world of good if they could spend some months amongst, say, the common sailors on board an ocean 218 Spiritual Sidelights tramp. On Sundays, while the tramp's owners and the pious British public generally are at church, they would find these men at some foreign port loading grain or coal. Their language will not be ecclesiastical, and when they get a day ashore their procedures are not such as are provided for in the Assembly's Cate- chism. This, without doubt, is very shocking. But by-and-by it will dawn upon the theologian, if he have grace, that the moral and spiritual lack of these men is the sacrifice they are offering to the interests of the religious British public ; that their Sunday and week-day labour, their exposure to the tempests of ocean, and to the thieves and harlots of the foreign port, are the price at which this stay-at-home public gets its corn and wine, its comforts and luxuries, three-parts, in fact, of all it eats, drinks and wears. It dawns upon him that if vicarious sacrifice is the highest height and deepest heart of morals, then these men, who have sacrificed the interests of their bodies and their souls for the rest of us, are in their unchurched paganism actually a great deal higher up than we. When besides he has touched hands with these men, and known their childlike simplicity, their quick response to what is higher when it is offered, their splendid courage, their noble devotion, he will be more than ever inclined when he comes back to revise his theology. He will search for some new definitions as to who is high and who is low in the kingdom of heaven. IDLE PIETY It was a saying of Dean Church, which all schools of us may well note, that " the call to be religious is 219 Selections from Brierley not stronger than the call to see of what sort our religion is." All the Churches have bred great souls, and all of them, though some more than others, have seen interpretations of rehgion that have been a hindrance rather than a help to true living. Moreover, we find clinging to all the Churches, in greater or less degree, expressions of religion that arose out of an inferior development, out of a more limited outlook than our own. It is time now that we recognised these for what they are worth. They may have been designated as a species of " idle piety." For centuries the Church's ideal of piety was the monastery. Every- thing outside that was a compromise, a " second best." Now it will not do to pass an undiscriminating judgment on the monastic life. There have been times when it stood for the best there was in our world. Its note has been often the reverse of an idle piety. But the fine gold so soon became dim. Of all the rehgious orders it may be said that, aiming in the beginning at the highest, they sank ultimately to the lowest. Seeking perfection in a segregation from the common humanity, they ended in losing their manhood. A great awakening is preparing against this whole view of things. The Catholic ceremonial has often its match in the futihty in Protestant emotionalism. We are in an age of Conventions, in which the higher Hfe is sought in a round of high excitements, as though spiritual power and the inner victory are won by an incessant play upon the feelings. Are we so sure that these are the right methods ? Or may it not be that in surfeiting the feehngs we are emasculating the will ? Spiritual power comes not by external excite- ments, but by the inward discipHne of the soul. It is 220 « \ spiritual Sidelights by obedience to the laws of the spiritual life, to the laws written in letters of fire upon the Cross of Christ, that a man rises to the highest levels. A deeper study at once of the nature of God, of the laws of the soul, and of the needs of the modern world, are, we say, bringing a vast modification of our ideas upon the whole subject of the pious Hfe. Under the influence of it our truest worship will become more and more a work. Our service of God will express itself in a service of man. Our prayer will be more and more a quiet, yet hard, leaning upon God, as we haste in His name to help our brother. The best thought of our time is moving in these directions. The Church is becoming tired of idle piety. Its leaders are eager with their programme of social reform. When this evolution has been completed, when we have carried our creed into our work, and our work into our creed, our worship will regain that accent of reahty which it has lost. At present soul and body are seeking each other. In the end they will find their point of contact, and Christ will again come to His own. FAITH AS A FORGE From history's earliest dawn man knows himself as spiritual and related to an eternal moral order. The Egyptians, millenniums before Christ, had the clearest perception of a future hfe. In India, Vedic hymns that are three thousand five hundred years old declare a belief in a psychic body inside the fleshly one, by which the dead rose to the upper spheres. What our later researches are making increasingly plain is, that these 221 Selections from Brierley long-forgotten races, whom in our narrower concep- tion we had thought of as rehgiously outcast and uncovenanted, had really a knowledge of spiritual law which in some respects was more profound than our own, and were enjoying a very rich rehgious inheritance. Much of that higher living which we have regarded as our specialty had been for thousands of ye^Ts reahsed in humanity, the possession, in its full fruition, of the choicer spirits, yet dimly discerned and unconsciously working among the less enlightened. It will be upon this vaster view that the religion of the future will be framed. We are in sight of a scien- tific demonstration of its essential principle, which will establish it beyond the reach of doubt, and confound alike the narrow sectarianism that finds salvation in some sectional shibboleth, and the more miserable nihilism which denies man a soul and a future. It is wonderful in this connection to note how, in each age, the faith element receives the ahment appropriate to itself. To-day experimental science is the greatest master of belief, and it is this science which is beginning to furnish us with evidence, procured in its own way, for the great religious affirmations. The finest piece of artistry in the world is the spec- tacle of faith working upon a personality and producing its results. These phenomena of the moral sensi- bilities, of prayer, love, sacrifice, ol mighty hopes, of sustained enthusiasms, all energising in a human interior, are, we say, the greatest sight the world has to show. Amid the shaking of the creeds these things remain. The breaking down of dogmatic limitations is only a widening of faith's prospect. The decay of older evidence simply makes room for more trust- 222 spiritual Sidelights worthy affirmations. We are on the eve of a mighty revival of faith. It will emerge purified from a thou- sand gross accretions, estabhshed upon immutable bases, showing itself as the synthesis of all life, as the explanation of all history, as the motiv^e of all noble striving. With its dawn the great age of humanity will begin. RELIGION-PUBLIC AND PRIVATE In the teaching and example of Jesus pubHc religion is almost nothing, private religion is almost everything. Throughout the Gospels no emphasis whatever is laid on pubhc services or ceremonies. In that summary of our relations with God and man contained in the Sermon on the Mount there is no mention of churches or congregations. It speaks of prayers to be offered in secret, of alms about which there is to be no adver- tisement. We hear nothing of processions or of vestments, of organings and Te Deimis, as means of pleasing heaven. Christ asks, as the test of religion, " Are you, men and women of the common life, lowly in spirit, meek, merciful, pure, peaceful, hungering for righteousness, ready to suffer for its sake ; are you forgiving, truthful, temperate, happy in childhke trust, beheving in the eternal Hfe here and the eternal Hfe hereafter ? " To be this, says Jesus, is to be religious. From beginning to end it is an affair of invisibles. We are still in the toils of ecclesiasticism, and have not yet found the courage to follow Christ. But the day draws nearer when religion will be put entirely on His basis. His kingdom will be known as always within. This is not to say that public religion will decHne, far less die out. 223 Selections from Brierley The common worship has indeed an immense future. Men will bring new elements into it and will make it express the vaster aspiration, the wider view, the heightened joy of Hving, the fuller reahsation of the soul's utmost powers which to-day are opening to the human gaze. The message proclaimed there will continue as of old to search men's lives, to heal wounded spirits, to arrest the young at the parting of the roads and set their feet on the way everlasting. Hence- forth, we shall make no mistakes as to where the emphasis of Christ's religion lies. It is not in congre- gations, nor in the figures of a church census. If I see my neighbour this Sunday morning in the next pew, well. If instead he is worshipping God on the hill-side 1 have no word from Christ to throw at him. You and I are Christians according to the precise height in us of love and faith, of purity, generosity, and helpfulness. Indeed, when the best of human living has been reached it will be in a city without a church. The Bible depicts that condition in one of its sublimest and final words : " And I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it." SPIRITUAL UNDERCURRENTS The significance of the history of Jesus for us is, partly at least, the revelation it offers of the possi- bilities of humanity when in fullest union with its spiritual environment. Verily, here is He the first- born of a new creation, the forerunner in a new and higher stage of development. That perfect hfe, with its Divine self-consciousness, its utter purity, its love, 224 Spiritual Sidelights its Calvary-consummated sacrifice, opened, as it were, the sluices through which the pent-up spiritual cur- rents, hitherto hidden, could roll in upon a thirsty humanity, bringing Paradise in their flow. Precious beyond words is that draught of the undercurrent, and beyond words precious is He to whom we owe it. Mankind, said Goethe, is continually progressing, but the individual man is ever the same. The same, that is, in his central need, a need which no progress in civilisation can ever supply, but which is met and satis- fied through Christ. As men understand these things more, the more will they enter into that sheer, adoring love of Christ which perfumes the New Testament. The language of Christina Rossetti become our own : " How beautiful are the arms which have embraced Christ, the hands which have touched Christ, the eyes which have gazed upon Christ, the lips which have spoken with Christ, the feet which have followed Christ ; how beautiful are the hands which have worked the works of Christ, the feet which, treading in His foot- steps, have gone about doing good, the Hps that have spread abroad His name, the lives which have been counted loss for Him ! " The relation of Christ's personaUty to the spiritual undercurrents is, in a lower degree, that of all His followers. The spiritual currents concentrate in us, form in us reservoirs of power, use us as media of their mighty movement. It is precisely to the extent in which we are in touch with them that, as Churches or as individuals, we are of any rehgious use to the world. What a spectacle that of a Church with all its organism complete for work, but with the stream that should furnish its driving'power cutting for itself a channel in 225 P Selections from Brierlcy a new direction, and leaving all this ecclesiastical plant high and dry on the deserted shore ! Just as, in the electrical sphere, no teacher of the science is possible who is ignorant of, or careless about, the laws which operate in it, so in this spiritual sphere no Church authority will be recognised which is not founded on knowledge of, and obedience to, the inner laws. The idea of a Church subsisting on, or working by, any other power than that which rises in the spiritual world, will be felt to be as absurd as Laputa's project for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. The Church's speech, its prayers, even its silences, will be channels of the Spirit's mighty undercurrent. No preacher will venture the impertinence of utterance which, either in substance or in delivery, is divorced from the operation of the kingdom's law. If his work is worth anything at all he will know that its worth consists pre- cisely in this, that it originates in a sphere beyond himself. LAY RELIGION Will the eternal religion be a layman's religion or the religion of the priest ? The clerical testimony to religion is, inevitably, taken with a certain discount. The ecclesiastic, it is felt, is committed to a certain position and cannot help himself. Amongst the work- ing classes this view of things is especially widespread, and accounts largely for their present coolness towards Christianity and the Churches. There is no doubt as to the fact, but many of us, both inside and outside the Church, have not yet taken the trouble to understand what the fact means, nor the conclusions to which it 226 Spiritual Sidelights points. It is not too much to say, however, that the whole fortune of the Churches and of Christianity depends on the way in which, in the future, the fact is comprehended and acted upon. It is by an instinct which is essentially sound that the clergy, as such, are at a discount as a religious witness. The reason is that in so far as they, as a class, are separated from the laity, they are in a false position. Their position is false at once historically and by the nature of things. For primitive Christianity was essentially a layman's religion. Jesus had no connec- tion with the clerical order, nor had His followers. Not one of His first disciples was in any sense a " reverend gentleman." The teaching of Jesus is a rehgion of the common Hfe. But the primitive Christianity did not last. The new was conquered by the old. The two forces in their contact each gave something to the other. What Christianity gave was vital and could never be destroyed. But in taking it the systems of the immemorial past exacted their rights, and the toll was a heavy one. As a result of the compromise we have in the following centuries a Christianity which is an amalgam of the teaching and life of Jesus with the priestism and cleri- cahsm with which Judaism and heathendom had combined to endow it. Christianity had ceased hence- forth to be a layman's religion. The Reformation was, for one thing, an endea- vour to make Christianity again a layman's religion. The vital religious movements ever since have been essentially laymen's movements. Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian community, was a layman. John Wesley obtained his most vivifying spiritual 227 p 2 Selections from Brierley experience from his contact with Peter Bohler, the Moravian, also a layman. And Wesley's first preachers, witli whom he woke up England, were a band of laymen. To-day the vast evangelising work founded by William Booth is conducted by lay people. D. L. Moody, the greatest missioner of our generation, was a layman. Are we, then, to conclude that Christianity is better without any separated order ; that in view of the evils of clericalism, we are to do away with a clergy ? That by no means follows. Abusus non tollit iisum. This would not be primitive Christianity, which certainly had its separated ministries. It stands to commonest sense that a religion which rests on teaching must have teachers, and that teaching, to be continuous and effective, must have its specialists. But what primitive Christianity and all the later history do teach is plain enough. Clericalism as an evil can only be avoided by putting the teaching order on the primitive basis. It is to be ever of the people, and with the people and for the people. The true teacher and spiritual leader has ever his vocation from on high. It begins there between his soul and God, most august of commissions and of consecrations. But thus commissioned he stands there amongst his brethren, of and with them always, his note union, and never separatism. Let Christianity, with its organisation and its teaching faculty, resume its place as a layman's religion ; let the great Layman, its first Teacher, be permitted once more to exhibit, without veil or intermediary. His Divine Hfe and doctrine, and again, as of old, the common people will hear Him gladly. 228 Spiritual Sidelights LEADING AND FOLLOWING In the ideal spiritual community each member will combine in himself the functions of master and of disciple. He will be a master, for if he has developed the inner possibihties of his nature as God meant him, he will have won from life and have garnered into his personality a something of Infinite made visible in his finite, which all who behold may study, and dehght in, and learn from. And for this something which every true disciple gains, the greatest will sit at the feet of the humblest, and each will learn from every other. It is here we find humanity's true and only priesthood. In that one tiny sphere which each true learner has made his own by possession and experience, he is a priest to his fellow ; from it he communicates to him of mysteries whereof God has made him special custodian. Whatever our ecclesiastical position or pretensions, it is only as we stand in this one spot of spiritual territory where God has specially met and dealt with us that we can exercise any effective priesthood. To lead is often the saint's duty, but his truest joy is in following. It will be his attitude for ever. Always in his upward progress will there be a sense of something yet to be developed, of a good that still waits to be disclosed. It is his happiness to reaUse that however far he gets there is always something above him. As Goethe said to Eckermann : " We are not freed by refusing to recognise anything higher than ourselves, but rather by reverencing something that is above us. For in reverencing it we bring to light the conscious- ness that we ourselves bear the possibility of this Higher in us." It was this Higher made visible to 229 Selections from Brierley men in the life of Jesus that gave the world the grandest exhibition of disciplcship it has yet seen. Nothing in history, so far, has been comparable to that Divine compulsion of love which has glowed generation after generation in human hearts, and which finds fitting expression in the words of the Church's first historian : " We who are converted to Him know Him not only with the voice and sound of words, but with all the affections of the mind ; so that we prefer giving a testimony to Him even to the preservation of our own lives." 230 RELIGION AND LIFE RELIGION AND LIFE THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE It has been the misfortune of theology that age after age it has been so eagerly engaged in mapping out the Umits and boundaries of the Divine element in Jesus. In the process theology has injured its eyesight, Hke observers who gaze too fixedly on the sun. The usefulness of the sun is disclosed to us not by looking at it but by working in its Hght. The original Christianity, that which lived in the bosom of Jesus, which consisted of His own direct experience of God, hfe and the world, is like the solar centre, hidden from us. We know it only by the burning heat which has radiated from it. Men will easily accept the Incarnation if only we will refrain from definitions of it. When Beyschlag declares for the purely human consciousness of Jesus ; when Ritschl finds here " the religious value of God," God, that is, revealed along the hnes of spirit, will and love ; when Theodore of Mopsuestia, one of the sanest minds in the whole catalogue of the Fathers, sees " the human spirit of Jesus so perfectly appropriating the Divine as to become entirely one with it " ; we recognise the honesty and, in a certain degree, the value of these appraisements. Not the less do they make us reahse that the rehgion of experience gains little from these definitions. We 233 Selections from Brierley know Christ's nature best by the response it has created in others. Our knowledge of Christ as a knowledge mediated through human hearts does not end in the New Testament records. It emerges from them into the vaster sphere of the world and of the ages. And this region we find to be one not only so much wider than the first but where we find ourselves on so much surer ground. It is not here a question of historical detail, where it is so easy to be mistaken, but of those psychological facts, those contents of the human consciousness which come nearest of all to our concep- tion of reahty. We deal here not with the accidents of time and place, but with the working of the inner laws, with the impact of spiritual forces on the soul. Christianity is the religion of a human life and death, with the sequel of the invisible action of a vast post-mortem power. This power was in its operation moral and spiritual. But morahty and spirituaHty are quahties of persons. They suppose personahty and are inconceivable without it. It is time we gave up being afraid of this term in a cosmic connection, as though it were unscientific. The cry of " anthropomorphism " as apphed to an unseen personality is surely by this time out of date. When we are told that this is a mere projection of ourselves into the sphere of causes, we reply that there is no theory of the universe possible to us which does not he open to the same criticism. If we adopt the barest materiaHsm and speak only of matter and force, we are still entirely anthropomorphic. For the idea of force, as much as the idea of will or of intehigence, is derived entirely from our own consciousness. Wlty, we repeat, should we be afraid of personality in our con- 234 Religion and Life ception of the world-process ? So far as we can see, personality is the beginning and the end of things. It is the one thing towards which Nature incessantly strives. It is the one interesting thing. As Bradley, in his " Appearance and ReaHty," puts it : " Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reaHty ; and the more anything is spiritual so much the more is it veritably real." There could be no use in a universe which did not know itself. The seas, the mountains, the cosmic forces, time, eternity, are significant only to an eye that sees, to an intelligence that understands. THE SUPREME HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT No combination of all the natural forces in the planet can vie for one moment with the potentialities of the human voHtion. In its secret chamber we can force destinies. The combination of freedom and necessity that goes on there is a mystery we shall probably never explain. The nearest approach to it, perhaps, is in the formula of Hegel : "It is only as we are in ourselves that we can develop ourselves, yet is it we ourselves that develop ourselves." Despite the dense sophistical webs that have been woven round this subject man has always beheved in his freedom. Plutarch well represents this age-long faith when, speaking of Homer, he says, " The poet never intro- duces the Deity as depriving man of the freedom of the will, but as moving the will. He does not repre- sent the heavenly power as producing the resolution, but the ideas that lead to the resolution." But this Hfe-determining power to be of any service to us has to be trained and to be reinforced. The 235 Selections from Brierley supreme human achievement is to make resolutions and to keep them. If a man cannot resolve for a hfe-time, let him resolve for one day. His will-power for the morrow will be perceptibly stronger for the effort. The world's emancipation, its advent to an earthly paradise, depends not on the accumulation of capital, but on the rescue of its will-power and the concen- tration of it on noble living. Imagine the lift toward human felicity if this magnificent sentence in Ter- tullian were made into a fixed resolve : " To wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill or to think ill of any one we are equally forbidden without exxeption." Here is a contribution to life, the noblest conceivable, which we can every one make. It may not be ours to add to the world's wealth by great inventions or works of genius. We may be prevented from doing the thing we had most set our hearts on. But in one direction lies a sphere of glorious freedom. It is that of helping the world to its new, its Christian temper. When as a daily disciphne we resolutely crush within us the first beginnings of unloving tliought towards our fellow, when we help him by bathing the facts of each day's hfe in the radiant atmosphere of our own faith, when by God's grace and our inner struggle we have produced that noblest and most dehghtful of products, a richly developed inner hfe, we shall have taken the best possible means of paying back our debt. The world's greatest asset is the souls it is producing. Let us see to it that our own becomes a worthy addition. THE COMING UNITY A new cosmic conception has dawned upon the human mind, which throws everything. Church and theology 236 Religion and Life included, into a fresh perspective. We discover that there is a biology of the sects as well as an ecclesiology, and that the former is hkely to chase the latter out of the field. In this view the differences which have exasperated theology and ht its persecuting fires are seen to be nature's effort after variety and individuahty. She flatly refused, at Church or other bidding, to be shut up to one type or species of religious man. She went out of her way to produce fresh specimens and to secure their perpetuation. We are beginning now to see the futihty of crossing her great design. We no longer propose to stay the ocean with the mop of Mrs. Partington. The rehgious union of the future — it all comes to this — will have to recognise to the full the rights of individual hberty and development, including the right of difference. Spiritual association will be a fellowship of faith, love and service. But the faith will be an instinct rather than a definition. Its inquisition will be a judgment faculty in the interior of each man's soul, not an institution for the ex- communication of his brother man. Its union will be for help and cheer, not for coercion and bondage. It will include all who seek truth and yearn for goodness. Its forces will be precisely those which filled the first disciples — the forces of a great love and an immortal hope. This union, in its largeness and freedom, will not impoverish theology. It will enrich it. Precisely as our instruments of observation and of measurement become more penetrating and more accurate, will be the range of the spiritual realm they discover, and the quantity and value of the products they draw from it. 237 Selections from Brierley With the higher hfe of this society will come forms which best express it. Its level will be the high-water mark of humanity, its growth the highest human progress. And the relation of each to all in it will be that of the noble apostolic word : " Not as having dominion over your faith, but as helpers of your joy." RELIGION AND THE CHILD In the art galleries of Europe what perhaps oftenest strikes the eye is the subject, incessantly repeated, and by the world's greatest artists, of a Mother and a Child. Genius, with its fine intuition, offers us here the highest rehgion as centred in birth. It is strange that, with such an object-lesson before it, the world, and especially the rehgious world, should have failed so signally in recognising the spiritual significance of childhood. Men to-day, concerned for the prospects of religion, take anxious note of its visible resources. They count up churches, revenues, adherents. They take note of prevailing mental tendencies, and also of those spiritual reinforcements which their doctrinal systems admit. WJiat really, when properly under- stood, will be found to bulk greatest in any such calcu- ' lation, is the least thought of. It is that of the birth into the world of children, the perpetual renewal in humanity of tlie child-nature. Has it occurred to us yet that the greatest religious force in the world is not the pulpit, but the cradle ? It was through the cliild that altruism first came into the world. It was in the care of their helpless offspring that our primitive ancestors got their first dim appre- hensions of unselfish regard for others ; it was here 238 Religion and Life that motherhood and fatherhood, in the high senses which now attach to the words, were born ; here were wrought out the ideas that made possible the rehgious teaching about a Father in Heaven ; here also was it that man, as he nursed his offspring, nursed also the first glimmerings of that conception of self-sacrifice which was to form its culmination in the Cross. The child is the guarantee of religion in the world. The child thus signified is not simply the new-born infant, but also that element of our grown-up manhood which, despite all our years and experiences, remains as the survival of our childhood. It is this part of a man, not the disputer in him, not the logician, but the child, the wonderer, the mystic, the bit of him that from the beginning has felt secret ineffable yearnings for something his eye hath not seen but his soul hath wotted of ; it is at this side of him the preacher and religious teacher should chiefly aim. When Guthrie, as he lay a-dying, asked the watchers to " sing a bairn's hymn," he was reveahng the whole secret. The child in us is our doorway to the Infinite. It is so with the good, and just as much so with the bad. In presence of his child the worst man has a moral longing. He conceals his vices from him. That his boy should imitate him there is a thought he cannot endure. If the Church knew only how to touch this instinct ! Had it eyes it would see that its vital question hes in adequately meeting that child yearning of each human soul which, mightier in it than logic, mightier in it than science, is the evidence of the Paradise Lost which it seeks to regain. Religion is the basis of child-life, and when it is not also the basis of parent Hfe Nature in her holiest part has been out- 239 Selections from Brierley raged. The best dowry for a child, more in value than all the world can offer, is the memory of a mother who prays. To be chosen by our child as its ideal is, perhaps, the highest honour that we could receive. But even that is not enough. We have failed unless, in embracing us as his ideal, our child is thereby set on the direct route to the Highest. NATURE'S PENALTIES What is now pressing the conscience of thoughtful men is the enormous luxury of the rich compared with the appalhng poverty of the poor. The luxury has its defenders. It is argued that a lavisli expenditure puts money in circulation, and helps numbers of people to employment. You give a " freak dinner " or a fancy ball ; you sail about in a 3,000-ton yacht, or shoot pheasants over well-stocked preserves ; or you drop your money over the gambhng tables of Monte Carlo. What matters ? The money moves, keeps numbers of people going ; gets into a healthy variety of pockets. Our spendthrift is exalted into a public benefactor. It is time people were taught to think on these sub- jects. Is the man who spends in this way getting any proper return for himself, in the development of his own inner nature ; or in the characters of the syco- phants who surround him, of the pampered menials who minister to him, in the gamblers who pocket his losses ? Consider what would be the difference not only to the man himself and his immediate surroundings, but to the whole social condition, if instead of consuming his capital on mere waste he invested it in productive 240 Religion and Life work ; in the building of houses, in tlie settlement of people on the land, in enterprises whose returns are in the health, well-being and happiness of his fellows ! To selfish expenditures, to reckless animal indulgence. Nature, which renders so lavishly on wise investments, has her own rejoinder. She closes her fist more tightly than the hardest usurer of Jewry. She proceeds now by what economists call " the law of diminishing returns." The mere pleasure-lover finds his sources closing with every succeeding year. His vices turn and rend him. He finds, as Mary Chohnondeley puts it, " the red-hot iron of our selfishness with which we brand others becomes in time hot at both ends." Nature, outraged by the defiance of her spiritual law, instead of yielding her compound interest, turns the scale the other way and exacts a compound interest ; duns and prisons her debtors for it till they have paid the uttermost farthing. She pays now in penalties. As Anne of Austria said to RicheHeu, " God does not pay at the end of every week, but in the end He pays." SELF-ACCEPTANCE There is, so far as we know, only one thing that can reconcile ourselves to ourselves. This is the primitive faith that our lot is an ordained lot, given us to make the best of. Say, if we will, after the modern fashion, that our life inheritance — in its elements of body, mind, and circumstance — ^is just what our ancestors have made it ; that its limitations, its thin- ness of soil, its heavy encumbrances are due to their mismanagement. If we are healthy-minded we shall 241 Q Selections from Brierley see in all this simply a reason for more careful farming on our own part. If we can thereby pay off some of the liabihtics and hand down the estate to our suc- cessors in better condition than we found it, that will be something. But there is more than this. The faith that accepts our lot, whatever it be, as ordained, will also see in it the battle-ground on which is to be fought out the great fight for our own personality, for our enduring spiritual self. On this point we could not do better for modern Pessimism, be it scientific, philosophic, or rehgious, than to recommend to it the steady reading of a thinker too little known in England, the German Rothe. To get well into the mind his conception of the universe, as having for its one end the develop- ment of spiritual personahty by the conflict in all worlds of free will with circumstance, a view in which difficulties, sorrows, pains are regarded as factors in the process, and heaven and the angelic hierarchy as some of its achieved results, is to sweep as with a keen north wind the fogs out of our brain, and to set us cheerfully to work. It is, too, a faith of this kind which enables us, not only to accept ourselves, but also the man who has beaten us in the race. We learn to rejoice in his greater gifts and success as enriching that common life of which we are privileged to partake. We are to accept ourselves as being, after all, something which God meant, a possibihty or a bundle of possibiUties out of which, with His help, we may create a result which will enrich the sum total of existence. Into the process our weakness and pain as well as our strength and joy, our disappointment and defeat as 242 Religion and Life well as our rapture and victory, come as needful elements. But the self which we thus accept will never be a finahty. It will be always a " becoming." While planting our ideal in the region of the possible we shall continually see " Amplius " written across the attempts we make to realise it. We may not reach the goal we seek, but it will at least have drawn us a long way upward, besides giving us a habit of climbing which will very likely serve in the next world as well as this. " That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it ; This high man, with a great thing to pursue. Dies ere he knows it. That has the world here ; should he need the next ? Let the world mind him. This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed. Seeking, shall find Him." NOT DEBT BUT GRACE Nature keeps tally and demands payment for every- thing she offers us. But is that the final word on the subject ? No. When we get to the matter's deepest heart we find the word there is not debt but grace. Nature's business habits, her exactions, her demand always of a something for something, are only a modus operandi which veils a deep mystery of Good that lies behind. The payment got out of us is really a gift to us, and one of the most precious. Listen here to the confession of a modern spirit, one of our most gifted and representative. Robert Louis Stevenson has laid bare the innermost of the thing in this marvellous utterance of his own experience : " But indeed with the passing of the years, the decay of strength, the loss 243 Q2 Selections from Brierley of all my old, active and personal habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of the scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensa- tion." Nature's hard bargaining with her suffering son had let him, the one-time sceptic, into the secret of a boundless Love ! And must we not include death itself, that ultima linea rerum of the ancients, as only a part of Hfe's exchange system ? Science joins rehgion in ignoring the old " ultimate boundaries." Seeming destructions are in its view only new beginnings. It was both science and Christianity which mingled in the sentiment of Wordsworth when, as Aubrey de Vere records, he " frequently spoke of death as if it were the taking of a degree in the university of life." We shall have come well out of our life commerce if, as the account draws near its close, the give and take, the gain and loss, have left for final result the full assurance of this great Christian hope ; if we are in the company of those to whom apply the noble words of our Edmund Waller : " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. Lets in new light through chinks that time has made ; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home." THE SURPRISE FACULTY Men think a good deal to-day of their surprise faculty, and pay large sums to feed it withal. The Roman Emperor who offered a fortune to the man who could procure him a new sensation would find sympathisers to-day. People travel round the globe in search of 244 Religion and Life its big things, the views that will startle and astonish. But this is, after all, a worn-out way of seeking the wonderful. The true way of travel here is not the lateral but the vertical. The secret is not so much that of roaming as of mounting. A man who has seen the prospect every day of his life from his native village would scarce know it as seen from a balloon. If as individuals we would seek the world's surprises it must be by the inner way. When we change a habit, when we start a fresh study, when we take on a new service, when we open a hitherto untouched side of our nature to the free play of God's Spirit, we shall find ourselves in a new world. Life, as Madame Swetchine says, consists mainly of what we put into it. Natures that by constant endeavour and aspiration preserve their freshness, find an intoxication in every fresh dawn. To them, happy souls, is it given " To see a world in a grain of sand. And a heaven in a wild flower ; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. And eternity in an hour." They have learned Emerson's lesson, that every day is the best day in the year. That is a poor life which, in the retrospect, does not abound in reverent wonder at the Divine goodness in the whole ordering of it. It is a fine observation of Ritschl that each man's belief in a personal Providence arises out of his own experience of God's leading. Stevenson found it hard to forgive God for the sufferings of others, but melted at the thought of His fatherly dealing with himself. And yet what a sufferer was he ! It is the marvellous history of that hidden Love toward us in the past that heartens us for the future. 245 Selections from Brierley When we steer towards some menacing fate that fronts us we may meet it without fear. Its utmost shock will be a surprise of grace. That is what will happen to us in death. Dying will not hurt us. Sir James Paget said that he had scarce known a patient who, when the end came, regarded it with fear, or with aversion. He believed, indeed, that it had its own pleasure, as has every other physical function. It was said of Bushnell that, " Even his dying was play to him." And why not ? We agree with Erasmus that " no man can die badly who has lived well." And all that we have experienced in this world, the wonder of it, its deliverances, its trainings, its thousand gracious interpositions, lead us in our turn to the saint's trust of every age, that our passing hence will be to encounter the grandest and most blessed surprise of all. WOMAN'S INFLUENCE IN RELIGION As we trace the feminine influence in religion through the past and observe its fuller expansion in our own times, we realise more clearly the dimensions of the blunder which for long ages sought so persistently to repress it. For, as we now begin to perceive, it is the woman nature that, more intimately than the man's, expresses the innermost soul of religion. It is dawning upon us that those spheres of reason and of logic where man is strongest, and where he loved of old to elaborate his theo logic systems, are not, after all, the place where we shall find the thing we are seeking. Faith's true seat is elsewhere in the soul. The state- ment of a modern investigator that " science arises 246 Religion and Life from man's conscious, and religionfrom his subconscious states," may perhaps be too sweeping a generalisation, but it points undoubtedly in the right direction. We are understanding better now Pascal's profound remark, in its application to religion, that " what is founded only in reason is very badly founded." It is in the region beyond reason, in the sphere of intuition, of feeling, of aspiration, of that Formless which Goethe declared to be the highest thing in man, that religion finds at once its perennial spring and its impregnable refuge. And it is precisely because in these regions woman's nature is at its richest that we are beginning to discover how primary and how essential is the contribution which she makes to it. It is because along that side of its nature humanity most quickly and most surely feels the quiver of the Infinite that woman must inevitably in the future be recognised as arch- priestess of religion. In proportion as this element of the supra-rational — existing both in man and woman, but in man so frequently deficient — assumes without cavil its true place in religion, we shall see going on in it a steady readjustment of values. The bastard religion of dogma, forged in a place which has no proper apparatus for producing it, will yield precedence to the true religion of faith, hope and love. The Church will cease to frame definitions of everything in the universe, with anathemas attached against all who fail to accept them, and will instead give itself to its proper work of loving, praying and serving. It will labour with all its might to understand, but it will not again commit the offence of offering the world a syllogistic salvation. It wiU know God as every mother's soul has always known 247 Selections from Brierley Him, and as logic has never known Him. It will bear sinners on its heart as mothers do their prodigal sons. And by this means will it arrive at and abide in the true orthodoxy, the proper knowledge of God. For it is because God's heart has in its centre this mother love that He is our God. It is because Christ's life was the expression of that heart that he is the Saviour of the world. PULPIT SILENCES One of the clamant needs of the Church to-day is an adequate theory and practice of pulpit silences. Says R. L, Stevenson in one of his letters : " Oh, if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper." The preacher is, perhaps, more badly in want of this art than even the litterateur or the journalist. The need has been recognised. In all religions, down to the cult of the most savage tribes, we find an external, pubhc utterance carefully guarded by silences. Behind the exoteric teaching lay an inner core of " mysteries " to which only the initiate were introduced. Early Christianity proceeded on lines not entirely dissimilar. Christ spoke to outsiders in parables, the inner meaning of which He disclosed only to His disciples. We find in the early centuries a general pulpit instruction for the multitude, a further Christian indoctrination for tlie catechumens, and a still more developed disciplina arcani for the baptised. It is a singular revolution of method which has brought us to the pulpit instruction of to-day. At the period of which we have just spoken the system of 248 Religion and Life reserve was applied to what were considered the special doctrines of Christianity, such as those of the Trinity, the Atonement, the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. These were for the baptised communicants. At the present time, on the contrary, it is the fullest proclamation of these doctrines from the pulpit to all and sundiy that in orthodox circles is regarded as the pulpit's primal duty. What, then, in such teaching, should be found and what omitted ? Note the example of Christ. There are remarkable silences in His preaching, some of which have been made the subject of bitter complaint. Christ's message was to the permanent in man. It recognised that while men everywhere differ, man is always the same. And his highest ultimate need is, in all circumstances, the same need. It is precisely because the message is outside of time developments that it becomes a universal message. This consideration should help us greatly in the solution of some other urgent pulpit problems of to-day. How far should there be speech and how far silence on matters of immediate national interest ? To what extent is the Christianity preached to be an applied Christianity ? In what way and to what extent are the social, the economical and the political questions of the hour to be dealt with by the preacher ? Apos- tolic Christianity offers an answer which it were well if our own day would carefully re-study. We find in the primitive Church a complete absence of what may be called the ordinary social, economical and pohtical propaganda. Why was this ? Tlie reason why primi- tive Christianitji' had no specific anti-slavery, anti- poverty, anti-despotism propaganda lay in no sense in 249 Selections from Brierley the fact that it acquiesced in slavery, or poverty, or despotism. Actually it was the enemy of them all, and in the end will be fatal to them all. The primitive " silence " on these matters lay in the fact that the new thing Christianity had brought in was of infinitely more value to Hfe than all these, and its propagation accordingly of far more importance. If only the pulpit would believe it ! When the preacher has become merely political it is because he has lost grip of religion. As long as this last is vital in him he cannot help seeing that is is of infinitely more political and social and economical value than any poHtics, or sociahsms, or economics. To Paul it was so much more worth while to make a slave a Christian than to agitate for his freedom ! There will always be enough and to spare of pohticians ; what the world really wants is men who have news from the land of the ideal, who have God's life within them, who open afresh the springs of living water that quench the thirst of the soul. When the Church is alive it makes rehgion the most interesting thing in the land, whatever else is happening. That the Church is the representative of the eternal in the midst of time does not, however, absolve it from a heavy responsibility in relation to the things of time. Its message will have these continually within its scope, but ever to bring them under its own light, to view them sub specie cBtcrnitaiis. The pulpit cannot be silent on sins, whether national or individual, that are destroying spiritual hfe ; but when men speak on these themes they must have a call. The true prophet knows that his message has been given to him and that it must be spoken at all hazards. 250 Religion and Life NEW TESTAMENT RELIGION The New Testament religion, as offered the world, is not, nor was intended to be, in itself an absolute. It is a relative, avowing in its very terms a dependence for its results on the cultures which had preceded it. But to leave the matter here would be to leave it in halves ; we should have, in fact, precisely one of those half truths which make a whole falsehood. To get the entire truth we need now to look at the other half of our echo. We have seen some of the things included in the reflecting surface. What now of the producing voice ? There are laws on this side as well as on the other. When, in the same surroundings, coming back from the same mountain side or cliff formation, we have at different times a different echo, we know the difference here must be in the originating sound. Variation of tone, of quality, of intensity, will be according to what is found in that. It is when we apply to the Gospel this other side of an echo-doctrine that we can re-make the Christian affirmations that our earlier study seemed to question. Innumerable other voices have, before and since Christ, thrown themselves against this mountain mass of humanity. The mass was the same, but what of the response ? It is here that the consideration comes in with such effect that Harnack has urged in " What is Chris- tianity ? " We cannot, as he says, judge a great persona- lity simply by himself ; we cannot measure him merely by his own words, his own deeds. To approximate to his full size we must study the effect he has produced on others. And where we cannot hear the voice itself, we can measure it by its echo. When we carry this 251 Selections from Brierley method to our estimate of Christ there is no doubt about the result. The most merciless critic of the New Testament must recognise that it represents what the first generation of believers thought and felt about Jesus. This is the echo of His personahty in human hearts. Read the account of early Christian living and character in the Apology of Aristides, and ask what force must have been operating to produce such effects upon the dissolute and degraded humanity of the Roman Empire. The Divine life in man as here depicted, be sure, had Divinity for its origin. THE APPEAL TO FEAR The point is often discussed whether the com- parative absence from the modern pulpit of those appeals to fear characteristic of the earlier evangelism has not militated against its power. Under the re- action caused by the crudities and falsities connected with earlier presentations of judgment and punish- ment there has been a disposition to give the whole subject a wide berth. But this can never be a perma- nent attitude. The preacher of to-day, awake to the spiritual revelation that is going on around him, should have no difficulty and no hesitancy about the place he assigns to fear as one of the religious working forces. For long centuries the prevailing conception of the spiritual powers was demonic. God was demonic as well as Satan. He was taught as capable of inflicting endless physical tortures on little children, on beings powerless to resist, and of using the devil and his 252 Religion and Life angels as willing henchmen in the business. The lesson of history shows that appeals to fear of this type, whether under a pagan or a Christian name, lead only to cynicism and unbelief. The supreme Gospel offered there to man is that God is Love. But if God is Love anywhere He is Love everywhere, as much in the place called hell as in the place called heaven, as much the moment after a man's death as the moment before it. But what of the New Testament appeal to fear ? Is not the book full of warnings ; is not hell in its list of contents ; and have not those preachers and those Churches been most successful who have most insisted on this side of its teaching ? If we answer these ques- tions in the affirmative, as we find ourselves compelled to do, where is the reconciliation between such a posi- tion and those others we have just been urging ? The solution is not far to seek. The Christian appeal to fear finds its explanation, not in the vindictive character of God, but in the stupendous possibilities, up or down, of the human soul. The insistent warning note of the gospel is that man is making or marring himself ; that it is an immense and wondrous self he is making or marring ; and that the process is going on now. Heaven and hell are truly in this business, for, as said the old Persian poet : "Behold, myself am heaven and hell." Mingled with this element of the Christian fear is the dread of offending God. We cannot bear the thought of that Heart being smitten with our ingratitude, of that Face turned away in grief from our shortcoming. 253 Selections from Brierley Jean Ingelow has put with unsurpassable force this side of the Christian fear : '' Come, lest this heart should, cold and cast away. Die ere the Guest adored she entertain ; Lest eyes that never saw Tliine earthly day Should miss Thy heavenly reign." Thus fear, which, as we have seen, entered as first and lowest element into the religious concept, comes out, transmuted by love, as its last and highest. 254 SCIENCE. ART AND RELIGION SCIENCE, ART AND RELIGION SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS Our Church, creeds are Alpine ranges, flung up out of the molten mass of human thought and experience. In this age of sceptical criticism it is common to regard them with a certain discredit, as though they were cloud images, mere mirages, instead of solid rock. But that, we venture to say, will be proved to be not the right view. The difference is not one of material, so much as a difference in our viewpoint. The change is not so much in them as in us. The facts they repre- sent are still there, but they are no longer seen by us as a whole, but as parts of a greater whole. We have gained new positions for observing them. Our know- ledge of science, of the history of our race, of the uni- verse, and of the evolution of life in it, has carried us to a height which has changed our landscape for us. The creeds become now part of a vaster view of life, a view which comprehends them, and at the same times stretches beyond them ; a view which recognises their fullest value, but interprets them in a new way and on its own terms. The doctrines for which the Reformers contended, and which form the basis of the Evangelic faith of to-day, are, if under new names, as to the gist of them being practically reaffirmed by science ; set forth as part of its system of life. We may say that 257 R Selections from Brierley science, working from its materials, and in its own way, is re-preaching to us a doctrine of predestination, of human corruption and inabihty, of election, of regenera- tion, of Divine grace. To begin with, Evangelical doctrine declares that man, to reach his true self, must be reborn, born from above. To this science says yes ; and adds to it that man has already been born several times over. Religion says the elect are predestinated to become saints. Science says that man was first of all predestinated to become man. Has it occurred to us that to be human at all, even in the worst specimens of us, is the effect of an election which has been working on our race through measureless ages ? When we watch our poor relations at the Zoological Gardens — chimpanzees, baboons and the like — have we asked " Why are we not they ? " There is only one answer. It was because a Power not ourselves chose us in the beginning, guided our way up, repressed others, in a hundred subtle ways made our calling and election sure. The Evangelic faith reaffirms our helplessness, as of ourselves, to become good. We are experts at falling. Adam fell in his garden ; we fall in ours. That is not a legend ; it is a universal experience. If we are to get up and go on it will be by aid of a Power not ourselves. The force that made us man, out of something lower than man, must still work on us if there is to be a better man. All the religions affirm it, and that because all experience affirms it. You can never set a man on his feet without some higher help. Take a slum district. Imagine it as composed entirely of degraded people. Segregate that district. Shut it off from all contact with higher types, with all 258 Science, Art and Religion the higher influences. What would be its history, its chances ? So sure are we on that point, that our first thought for its improvement would be the impor- tation of remedial forces, the working there of good people, the changing of its conditions, the pouring in of spiritual influence. The low must be lifted from above. The old dogmas were the attempts of the men of that time to account for the facts on the data they possessed. Their account of predestination, of election, of man as being saved, not by works, but by grace, of being nothing in himself, and everything by means of what is higher than himself, was a badly-phrased and a badly-limited account. But the facts are there — made luminous in the light of science. Its retro- spect and its forecast show us man as from the beginning the subject of an eternal purpose, held in the grip of a Love that will not let him go. It shows us him as being perpetually made and remade by a spiritual power incessantly at work ; a Power showing itself in the field of history, now in the form of great Divinely- endowed personalities, again in streams of influence that flood the world with new aspirations, new enthu- siasms ; a Power whose work in the past is the promise and the presage, for the soul of man and for the world he lives in, of ever Diviner manifestations. SCIENCE AS INTERPRETER OF CHRIST Christianity neither gives us nor was intended to give us a certainty that can be proved at all points to the intellect. The cosmic scheme under which we live does not contemplate at any point an intellectual 259 R2 Selections from Brierley salvation. For ages men lived by the sun's light and heat without any proper conception of what the sun was. To-day, indeed, we are still at guesswork in the matter. But the sun shines, and man lives thereby. And in like manner, imperfectly translated to the reason, given to us througli a thousand distorted images, shining into all manner of varying mental atmospheres, His word twisted continually by variations of languages, by the presuppositions fixed in human brains, the Christ has through all gone on shining upon our race, and ever, where men have failed mentally to grasp the mystery, they have nevertiieless felt the warmth and the light. It is by the heart more than by the head that men have known Jesus. The greatest interpreter of Him is human life itself. The deed we perform, the event that meets us on life's way, the sorrow we endure, the inner struggle of the mind — these are the things that open to us one by one the doorways to this Treasure-House of the soul. And still the interpretation of Christ goes on. The mountain has, as yet, only begun to be explored. Theology has tried its best and succeeded only in- different well. As the human capacity widens new measuring Hues will be brought and greater results obtained. The scientist is to-day, in this matter, in a negative mood, but man never did and never can live by negations, and science will come by-and-by to a new temper. Some of the greatest spiritual testimonies are already from this side. What, in the humility of devotion, can surpass the inscription on the grave of Copernicus ! " Not that grace which Paul received crave I, not that favour with which Thou didst pardon Peter ; that which Thou 260 Science, Art and Religion didst grant the malefactor, that alone crave I." And where have we a more heart-felt breathing of disciple- ship than in the hymn of Leibnitz : " Jesu, dessen Tod und Leiden Uns're Freud' und Leben ist ! " The science of to-morrow, with a deeper apprehen- sion of the soul's mystery and need than it now pos- sesses, will regain that note, with something added of its own. With a mightier sweep of vision, it will be the great interpreter of Christ. MEDICINE AND RELIGION In modern civilisation the clergyman and the doctor stand at such a distance apart that it is almost difficult for us to realise that originally they were one and the same person. Yet there was a time when medicine — the whole business of healing — was a purely ecclesias- tical function. It has been by a very long process, in accordance with that law of specialisation of function the working of which Mr. Herbert Spencer has so laboriously deHneated, that the medicinal art has, amongst civiHsed peoples, gained the distinctive place of which we find it in possession to-day. Resting on a broad basis of accurate knowledge, master of a thousand secrets, its history crowded with glorious victories in the campaign against disease and pain, and with foremost names, witli intellect and worth everywhere devoted to its interests, the medical profession has reached a kind of apotheosis in modern life. To-day the personnel, the standing and the achievements of the medical profession represent one of the most valuable assets of civilisation. 261 Selections from Brierley It is precisely on this account that the question becomes so interesting as to the precise present-day relations between medicine and religion. One of our reasons for writing on the subject is the feeling that, in more than one direction, they might be improved. There is, for one thing, an impression abroad that the bent of the physiological mind is toward materiahsm. The old saying, "tres medici duo athei," is still quoted. Some of the strongest attacks against religious ortho- doxy have come from the medical and physiological side. It is also, in this connection, a curious coinci- dence that the starter of the modern denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch should have been a physician — the Frenchman, Jean Astruc. The question here is not that of their personal attitude towards this or that theological dogma ; it is whether the comparatively small attention paid by some members of the faculty to the spiritual side of human hfc does not, in some most important particulars, hinder and mar their professional work ? The healings wrought by Christ and the Apostles, the cures to which Irenaeus bears testimony in the second century, the marvellous physical results of the preaching of Bernard, the raising of Melancthon from what seemed immediate death at the prayer of Luther, are parts of an immense tradition which testifies to the existence of secret spiritual energies, potent against disease and for the furtherance of life, which under certain conditions are at the disposition of humanity, and which it behoves the men responsible in these departments most carefully to study. The best men of the profession recognise growingly, we believe, the immense moral responsibilities attach- 262 Science, Art and Religion ing to it, and the grave questions which hang thereon. Their position brings them continually into contact with life's ultimate problems. They stand between the young man and his vices. They see humanity in its defeats, its exhaustions, its despairs. And their entree is to every class. They are called in where the clergy are excluded. In their parish there are practi- cally no dissenters. To a man of the nobler instincts the appeal of this helplessness and despair should be irresistible. But what has he to meet it with ? In nine cases out of ten physical alleviation is the smallest part of what a sufferer needs. The thing he wants above all is hope and courage. But where is our practitioner to find this ; where is he to gain power to stiffen the moral backbone of tempted youth ; or to cheer the lonely invalid to whom the days are a weariness and the nights a horror ; to help men gain the supreme moral victory over suffering and over death ? One must put it bluntly ; he cannot be a good doctor who is not fundamentally a good man. Emphatically is it true for his work that " one man with a belief is worth ten men with only interests." What we are here saying has nothing to do with sectarianism ; still less with that professional religionism which is the most detestable of all poses. It is simply the assertion of certain fundamental truths that have been lacking in some medical curriculums, and of which, in conclusion, we may give this as the sum : IMedical science is ultimately a branch of spiritual science ; bodily healing requires a knowledge of psychic as weU as of physical conditions ; and finally, the medical ministry to a diseased and broken humanity can never 263 Selections from Brierley be adequate unless carried on as a mediation of the Eternal Goodness and Love. THE MESSAGE OF THE STARS There is immense spiritual inspiration in the message of the telescope, that life altogether is larger than our fathers imagined. For the idea grows upon us that if the material realm of which we form a part is so much vaster than we deemed, so in like manner must be that spiritual realm to which we also belong. That our poets and philosophers should sing and write as though creation's greatness spells man's littleness is, when one thinks of it, the oddest perversion. It supposes that we are dwarfed by the immensity of the whole, whereas it is this very vastness, properly considered, that enliances the worth of our own life. For we are not only in the universe, but the universe is in us. It plays through us, finding in the soul the organ of its consciousness. The greater the whole, the mightier the throb of its pulsation through us who are its parts. More than that . The greater the universe the greater its Maker. The dimensions of the one helps us to conceive the proportions of the other. But in a great nature it is ever the moral quality that counts most. If God in these later ages has astonished us by the revelations of His material side, what surprises may He not have in store on the side that is spiritual ? But the most important message of the stars is that of the absolute spirituality of true religion. The widening of the outer heavens is the cosmic emphasis 264 Science, Art and Religion upon the word of Jesus : " Neither shall ye say, Lo here ! or, lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Astronomy puts the veto on external pilgrimings, as aids to religion. We might journey from here to Arcturus and be no whit nearer God. The movement needed is of another kind, in another sphere. Religion's " above " and " beneath " have nothing to do with location. They are states of the heart. To get on here we need not to change our place but our ways. We reach heaven not through the clouds but through our own souls. It comes into us, and we come into it, in proportion to the stages we make in faith, in love, in humility of spirit. As we move along this line of things what we are chiefly conscious of is not so much the roomier realm of the stars, majestic though that be, as the roomier realm of the soul. How the two are exactly related does not yet appear. Enough if we realise that the incon- ceivable vastness of the one stands over against the inconceivable vastness of the other. Citizens of a boundless physical universe, let us rejoice most in our fellowship in that spiritual kingdom whose treasures an inspired voice has thus described : " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him." HEREDITY AND CHARACTER The extent to which the religious thinking of the day is being influenced by science is shown, amongst other things, by the attention bestowed by religious as well as by scientific teachers on the subject of heredity as 265 Selections from Brierley related to character. The age-long controversies between fatalism and free-will have in our day reap- peared under new aspects. The predestination of an Augustine and an Edwards, founded upon meta- physical and theological grounds, has been transformed into the doctrine of a Galton, a Lombroso, and a Weis- mann, which fixes the destiny of the human subject by the inherited character of the germ-cell from which he has sprung. It is true that on crucial points of the problem the experts are still at open war. But in spite of differences it is undeniable that the trend of a large volume of modern scientific thought has been in the direction of determinism. A man's character, it is held, is inevitably the outcome of his past ancestry. What has religion to say on these subjects ? To begin with, it is to be noted that the Bible is full of the doctrine of here(hty. Whatever view we may take of the Fall, it holds as a declaration of the unbroken sequence in cause and effect between the latest genera- tions and the earliest. The Old Testament doctrine, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, is to the same effect. But the Bible, while admitting and affirming the soli- darity of the race and the large extent to which a man's destiny is shaped for him before his birth, is at direct issue with the materialistic fatahsm which would rid the individual of moral responsibility. What religion, in fact, contends for is that the human ego, within a certain limited area — an area conditioned by the facts of heredity and the existing environment — is a fount of creative power. Surrounded by competing and often opposing currents of influence, which beat upon it from both the material and the spiritual 266 Science, Art and Religion world, it has the faculty ot choosing which of these it shall yield itself to. The immense changes that come over men as the result of the differing influences under which from time to time they place themselves, show that our characters are not ready-made and irre- versible, but are every day in the making. The view of life, in fact, which accords most closely with Scrip- ture, with the facts of experience, and with our deepest moral intuitions, is that which regards it as an inheri- tance which we are to deal with as we will. We have not made the inheritance. It comes down to us from the far past, carrying with it all manner of burdens, limitations, mortgages and what not, the result of the good or bad stewardship of those who held it before us. For these limitations we are not answer- able. What we are responsible for is, when once in possession, to do the best with what there is. That the estate may have been impoverished by a spendthrift ancestor does not absolve us from the obligation of personal thrift. The more does that lie upon us, in order to improve what is left and hand it on in improved conditions to the next heir. And the man who seeks to do this will find in Christ's Gospel a store of vital energy which will make him master of his fate. NATURE AS PREACHER There are preachers who spring into prominence at a bound ; others take long in maturing. We propose here to speak of a preacher of this latter order ; one who has been long in the world, but who nevertheless may be said to have only lately " arrived." The preacher is Nature. Only lately arrived, we say, for 267 Selections from Brierley it is within the last generation or two that people have begun to wake to the proper sense and feehng of the message. For long centuries men have been clamouring in the name of their various dogmatisms, and thereby drowning effectually the utterance of this finer voice. Is it not a remarkable thing that in the whole of the New Testament there is only one voice that seems to recognise the world's beauty ? St. Paul travels through the most magnificent scenery. He crosses the ^Egean, he traverses the Taurus mountains, he looks upon " the isles of Greece," but there is no hint in his letters that he had even noticed them. It was left to his Master to read Nature. To Him her voice was Divine. The sun, the flower, the bird of the air, were symbolic, sacramental. He delighted in her beauty as one who read her secret. Theology has in this matter followed more in the footsteps of Paul than of Jesus. Ecclesiasticism as a rule has turned a bhnd eye and a deaf ear to our preacher, and tauglit the world to do the same. This indifference of the past to what is our greatest inspira- tion is indeed difficult to understand. But to-day we have reached, to a degree not dreamed of by our ancestors, what may be called the cosmic consciousness. Nature has become, as never before, a preacher to us, the most formidable rival to all other preachers. These last, indeed, need, above all things, to get instruction in her school. Her " Lessons on Preaching " are the best extant. This orator has something for every capacity ; her word for the little child, her problem for the deepest mind. She clothes her truth in beauty, she adorns it with infinite illus- tration. Robert Hall used to read everything in 268 Science, Art and Religion order that, on the topics handled, he might always be ahead of his hearers. Nature is always ahead of her hearers. Behind her baldest commonplaces are depths of meaning which no plummet can sound. This is the teacher that never tires her audience. Every day she has something fresh. What holds us to her is her infinite suggestiveness. For one thing she has taught us that life is funda- mentally, divinely simple, and yet the most complicated business in the world. Simple, so that little children and ignorant races that have never read books have, generation after generation, drunk her draught and found no hurt. And yet the infinite complexity ! For as our mind opens we find life to have in it a million things, each one related to ourselves, each one with its own laws, laws which we must learn and obey if we would get life's blessing, and not its curse. Life, we find, is, from beginning to end, cause and effect, seed-sowing and harvest, the harvest being according to the seed. No pulpit thunder has ever declaimed this truth with an impressiveness equal to that of Nature as interpreted by science. But Nature has a doctrine not only of law but also of grace. Her punishments, her retributions, are severe, but they are never final, never hopeless for the criminal. Here her doctrine runs counter to some of our earlier theology. We know now that there is, in Nature at least, no irremediable ruin. For there is no ending that is more than a new beginning. The uttermost clash of worlds were only a fresh start of her combinations and her energies. She is exhaust- less in her patience as healer ; and her very ruins are consolations. Has this no bearing on the ultimate 269 Selections from Brierley human fate ? We pity the man who can study this aspect of things without seeing the meaning of the parable. OUR INHERITANCE IN THE INVISIBLE Science and philosophy run after Monism to-day, but the signs are that when all is done they will end in Dualism. The signs are. that is, of an external universe which is not perfected, but on the way to perfection. Which in its turn means a Perfect of Being and Reality that is behind and beyond the visible universe, greater than it, and which, in its constant self-disclosures, brings ever the cosmos closer to its own height and beauty. Why should we think of the universe other than as we think of ourselves ? Why should we not say that, just as the soul in us is in a way a mirror of the Deity, but an imperfect one ; and that in proportion as the soul grows, in that degree the Divinity is more clearly revealed ; so this external frame of things is just a vehicle for the self-disclosure of God, and will, in its infinite progression, open to us ever more of the inexhaustible riches of His perfection ? It is to some such point as this that the higher science and the higher philosophy of to-day are steadily moving. And the lesson from it is that which religion has taught from the beginning, the lesson, namely, of our inheritance in the Invisible, of our permanent home and treasure there. What is seen has all come out of the unseen, is a sort of deposit from it, and there is an infinity more to follow. But our share is in the fountain as well as in the stream. We are not of the visible only ; our inmost 270 Science, Art and Religion texture is of the invisible, and we partake of its eternity. " Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen. Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien." " No being can to nothing fall, in everything the Eternal moves." So sings the German prophet. But we can go further. Science and philosophy take us to the threshold ; the Christian Gospel introduces us to the presence chamber. These suggest a power, a wisdom, greater than all we see ; this tells us of a love that passeth knowledge. Spinoza offers us the amor intellectualis Dei : Jesus shows us the heart of the Father, and that, and that alone, suffices us. RELIGION AND ART A feature eternally associated with the eternal religion is its expression in art. The artist, qua artist, is religious. He may do nothing but genre pictures, landscapes, flower and fruit pieces, portraits, with never a suggestion of so-called sacred history or symbolism. But in so far as he is a genuine painter, his work is, we say, religious, for its success from first to last lies in its conformity to a law which is Divine. How comes it, then, that in the times and among the peoples where the religious sentiment has been at its highest, the feeling and the production of art have been at the lowest ; and that, contrariwise, the periods of the greatest artistic splendour have been marked so often by the utmost depravation of morals and religion ? The first Christian generation had its apostles, its prophets, its teachers, its martyrs, but not its artists. So barren was it in this direction that we have no 271 Selections from Brierley authentic portrait of Christ. Puritanism and early Methodism seem only to have repeated this story. The Scotch Presbyterians and the Cromwellian Iron- sides would have none of an artistic religion. The early Methodists, " filled with the Spirit," saw no connection between their vocation as saints and that of the painter and sculptor. They turned from an ornamental worship to the barest simplicity. And on the opposite side there is this other puzzle : that the periods of highest art have been again and again those of moral and religious decadence. The standing illustration here is, of course, the Renaissance. What, then, is the true relation between art and religion ? Does high religion banish art, or high art banish religion ? Or is the history a mere jumble of opposites with no uniting principle beneath it ? We believe in neither of these propositions. Religion and beauty are twin sisters, but they seem to have been put out to different nurses, and in their after career to have travelled so far afield as hardly at first sight to be able to recognise each other. Christianity came to us through the Hebrew race, and artistic culture was not in its department. The Greek here had a mission denied to the Jew, Each had something from God without which the other, and humanity at large, would not be complete. The history, rightly read, shows really no contra- diction. Art, instead of being opposed to religion, is one of its inevitable products. Its full development is only a question of time. The early Christian, the Puritan, the Methodist, had the whole thing within them for which the highest art strives. It was only that they had not the means, nor the development 272 Science, Art and Religion required, to put it all into form. That external beauty which they eschewed, as inferior to this inner loveHness, and as allied so often with moral rottenness, they yet believed in. It is the business of the present day to bring these great Hfe factors into a yet more visible harmony. Art and religion will reach their true unity when man, radiant in his spiritual perfection, shall look out upon a Paradise world which reflects that inner splendour. RECOGNITION OF THE BEAUTIFUL The recognition of beauty by the mind can be explained satisfactorily in only one way. The term we have just used is in itself the key. Our feeling here is a re?-cognition, that is a re-knowing, a reminder of what the soul already knows, of what is native to its realm. Schelling is on the track of all this when he treats of the external world as another expression of the same eternal Life that finds itself in our consciousness. The beauty of Nature is the work of a supreme Artist whose funda- mental ideas are reproduced, however faintly, in our own. Without such a relationship to begin with there could be no possible recognition of beauty on our part. A painter who exhibited his picture would be astonished to learn that the pubHc were admiring it on the strength of ideas entirely foreign to any he had himself put into it. The very basis of our compre- hension, not to say appreciation, of a picture's merit lies in the fellowship of our feehng with that of the artist. And the law which obtains in the Academy rules, so far as we can see, through all the worlds. 273 S Selections from Brierley Another, and by no means simple, problem comes up when wc touch the relation of beauty to morality. Observation appears to add positive reasons against any such alliance. The sense for external loveUness has had apparently no connection with high moral character. The ages in which it has been most con- spicuous, as that of the Greeks under Pericles, and of the Renaissance in Italy, were conspicuous, we are told, for their dissoluteness. The artist world has been generally a Bohemian world. But statements of this kind need to be taken with a certain reservation. As to the Itahan Renaissance, let us remember it produced a remarkable literature devoted to the idealisation of love and the redemption of it from the grosser elements. Nor were all its artists hbertines. It produced a Michael Angelo as well as a Benvenuto CeUini. No man in these later ages has had a mind more teeming with images of immortal beauty than our own Milton, but " his soul was hke a star and dwelt apart." Our own times have seen a Wordsworth, a Ruskin, a Tennyson, natures all of them in which the sense of beauty both in Nature and in art reached its highest expression, and all of whom found in it an immediate ally of spiritual perfection. That a given musician is a rake is no evidence that the laws of music which he obeys are not Divine. He has eyes only for a piece of Heaven's law, not its wholeness. The whole argument here, in fact, seems sunmied in the nature of Christ. If the Gospels speak truly there was never a nature that thrilled more exquisitely to the world's beauty. Yet never nature set forth so surely God's holiness. The belief in beauty is part of our belief in God. 274 Science, Art and Religion The Universe strives after it as the reahsation of His idea. Ugliness is to be striven against as a frustra- tion of Heaven's plan. Beauty of character and beauty of form are essentially allied, and should be striven for as elements in the wholeness of Hfe. Our com- munal life should be an intimate, harmonious blend of the spiritual and the material, each recognised as a portion of God's hohness. Their true union will produce a social structure whose enduring splendour shall be a reflex of the holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem, which John saw descending out of heaven from God. BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TOiNBRIDCE. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 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