POSITIVE PREACHING 
 AND MODERN MIND 
 
 BT 
 
 P. T. FORSYTH 
 
 M.A., D.D 
 
 THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON 
 PREACHING, YALE UNIVERSITY, 1907 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 
 ayaTTijcravri fie n.al TrapaSovrt eavrov 
 inrkp 
 
 2209273
 
 MAY I remind those who honour me by looking 
 into this book that it consists of lectures, and that 
 I have been somewhat careful not to change that 
 form in print. Also, as the audience consisted 
 chiefly of men preparing for the Ministry, it was 
 inevitable that I should speak chiefly ad clerum. 
 I trust this may help to excuse a shade of intimacy 
 that might not befit address to a wider public, 
 possibly something of a pulpit style at times, and 
 a few repetitions. I need hardly add that the 
 lectures were abbreviated in delivery. 
 
 I should also like to mention that as the lectures 
 were given to a post-graduate audience I have taken 
 more for granted in places than if I had been speaking 
 to a more general assembly. While I am grateful 
 for any who will listen to me, I confess I have kept 
 in view rather students than mere readers those 
 who do not resent an unfamiliar word, who are 
 attracted rather than impatient towards a dark say- 
 ing, who find the hard texts the mighty ones, and
 
 viii Preface 
 
 who do not grudge stopping the carriage to examine 
 a mysterious cave or to consider a great prospect. 
 
 It has cost the writer much to find his way so 
 far. And he has yet a long way to go. But he 
 believes he has found the true and magnetic North. 
 And a voice is in his ears, teal <rv TTOTC eVio-Tpe^rav 
 <TTijpi(rov TOW a8e\(j)ov<i <rov. This voice he would 
 obey humbly to it, respectfully to his brethren. 
 How grateful he is to the great university of Yale 
 for giving him such an opportunity of service, and 
 providing him with a world-pulpit in such an 
 apostolic succession as his predecessors make. 
 
 I have to thank my colleague, Rev. Prof. Bennett, 
 D.D., Litt. D., for valuable assistance with proofs, 
 and my pupil, Mr. Sydney Cave, M.A., B.D., for 
 the table of contents.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS CHARTER. . 
 
 The fundamental importance of preaching for Christianity 
 God's chief gift not the Church and the Sacraments but 
 the Word The Bible as the world's greatest sermon Its 
 unity that of the history of redemption To what extent is 
 the Bible a record of God's word ? The nature of its in- 
 spiration and infallibility Its final criticism not the higher 
 rationalism but the highest grace The Holy Spirit and the 
 historic Christ The need of contextual preaching The 
 true context of the Bible is the race's consciousness of sin 
 The difficulty due to the general disuse of the Bible The 
 Bible as the preacher's Enchiridion. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF THE PREACHER . 41 
 
 The urgent modem need of an Authority The authority 
 
 of the Pulpit due to the divine Person it proclaims 
 
 Our authority must be objective and inward This inward 
 
 authority not the natural conscience, whether crude or 
 
 ix
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGB 
 
 refined Our supreme need of redemption The final au- 
 thority in Christianity that of a Redeemer ; so the author- 
 ity of the pulpit is evangelical It is God in His supreme 
 saving act in Christ's Cross Christ so to be preached as to 
 be the Creator of faith, the absolute Redeemer. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS CHURCH; OR, 
 
 PREACHING AS WORSHIP ... 75 
 
 The modern neglect of the idea of the Church The 
 Church as the great preacher in history The preacher's 
 place in the Church not sacerdotal but sacramental A 
 sermon as an act involving the real presence of Christ A 
 preacher's first business is with the Church His work in- 
 terpretive, not creative, of Revelation The preacher as the 
 Church's means of self-expression, and as the mandatory of 
 the great Church for the individual Church and for the 
 world The corresponding responsibility of the preacher 
 and his need for sober knowledge Some consequences in 
 regard to (i) the preacher's private views, (2) questions of 
 Biblical Criticism, (3) the demand for short sermons. 
 
 IV 
 THE PREACHER AND THE AGE . . .113 
 
 The relation of the preacher's message to the mental 
 vernacular of his time Two observations thereon: (i) In 
 its greatest ages the Church marked by an attitude of de- 
 tachment to the world ; the example of Gnosticism ; (2) 
 our creed to be minimal and our faith maximal, belief to be 
 reduced and emphasis redistributed The need of forcing a 
 crisis of the will The old Theologies to be interpreted 
 completely and with sympathy Reduction not Repristi- 
 nation necessary The casuamess of the Public The value 
 of pessimism as a corrective Ibsen The danger of a false 
 humanism The severity of Christ.
 
 Contents 
 v 
 
 THE PREACHER AND RELIGIOUS REALITY 161 
 
 The Reformation not to be regretted nor renounced, but 
 reformed by its own principle of faith and its demand for 
 moral reality The need of facing as fairly as the Reformers 
 the moral, social and political situation, the supreme 
 demand to-day is for spiritual reality The three diseases 
 of the Church and their cures: (i) Triviality, demanding a 
 new note of greatness in our creed ; (2) uncertainty, de- 
 manding a new note of wrestling and reality in our prayer ; 
 (3) complacency, demanding a new note of judgment in our 
 salvation The root of moral reality, personal religion, and 
 social security only to be found in the consciousness of 
 guilt produced and transcended by the sense of vicarious 
 redemption. 
 
 VI 
 
 . 199 
 
 Authority the need of the hour The preacher's authority 
 being the objective personal content of faith, his first need a 
 positive theology The meaning of a " positive theology " 
 Its irrepressible adjustment in each age Its vital difference 
 from Liberalism in its emphasis on historic and experienced 
 grace and on the absoluteness of Christ Creational rather 
 than evolutionary Its norm the New Testament Gospel 
 and not the modern mind Its adequacy to the human 
 tragedy Its emphasis on personality and sin Its inter- 
 pretation of Christ by incarnation, not by immanent The 
 seriousness of the issue to-day. 
 
 247 
 
 The need of a modernized Theology : 
 
 I. Its positive doctrines (i) a gospel of Jesus the Eternal 
 Son of God ; (a) a Gospel of Jesus the Mediator; (3) a 
 Gospel of Christ's Resurrection.
 
 xii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 II. Its recognition of modern principles, (i) The 
 autonomy of the individual ; (2) The Social Idea ; (3) the 
 development of personality ; (4) the distinction between 
 practical and theoretical knowledge ; (5) the need of popu- 
 larisation ; (6) the principle of Evolution ; (7) the passion 
 for reality. 
 
 III. The issue not really critical but dogmatic This 
 illustrated in the case of the Bible and of Christ. 
 
 The vital need throughout of an experimental foundation 
 in grace A living, positive faith in a historic gospel. 
 
 VIII 
 THE PREACHER AND MODERN ETHIC . 293 
 
 The modern ethical note An ethicized Christianity means 
 a more positive doctrine of the Cross The moral paradox 
 of God's forgiveness The primacy of the moral The ethi- 
 cizing of religion by the idea of the holy The Cross as the 
 consummation of holiness Judgment as an essential factor 
 in God's Holy Love The analogy of Fatherhood and its 
 danger The Cross as the centre of the Kingdom So 
 Christianity, as supremely moral, appeals to a society intent 
 on moral righteousness But the preacher has his oppor- 
 tunity also in the moral weakness of society. 
 
 IX 
 THE MORAL POIGNANCY OF THE CROSS . 339 
 
 The inadequacy of the common view of God's benig- 
 nant Fatherhood Popularity not the test of the Gospel 
 The complexity of the soul's situation Sin as enmity to God 
 God's love brought home not by a spectacle but by a 
 finished universal act An ethicized Theology must em- 
 phasize holiness Christ as God forgiving The need of 
 moral mordancy, of iron in our blood The Cross not a 
 martyrdom but God's decisive and creative act Christ not 
 only redeemed, He atoned The element of judgment, 
 the wrath of God The Atonement to God This aspect 
 of propitiation essential to the final prospects of Christian- 
 ity Conclusion. 
 
 EPILOGUE .
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS 
 CHARTER
 
 I 
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 IT is, perhaps, an overbold beginning, but I will 
 venture to say that with its preaching Christianity 
 stands or falls. This is surely so, at least in those 
 sections of Christendom which rest less upon the 
 Church than upon the Bible. Wherever the Bible 
 has the primacy which is given it in Protestantism, 
 there preaching is the most distinctive feature of 
 worship. 
 
 But, preaching a feature of worship ! I will 
 ask leave to use that phrase provisionally, till, 
 at a later stage, I can justify the place of preach- 
 ing as a part of the cultus, and not a mere 
 appendix. 
 
 Preaching (I have said), is the most distinctive 
 institution in Christianity. It is quite different 
 from oratory. The pulpit is another place, and 
 another kind of place, from the platform. Many 
 succeed in the one, and yet are failures on the other. 
 The Christian preacher is not the successor of the 
 Greek orator, but of the Hebrew prophet. The 
 orator comes with but an inspiration, the prophet 
 comes with a revelation. In so far as the preacher
 
 4 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 and prophet had an analogue in Greece it was the 
 dramatist, with his urgent sense of life's guilty 
 tragedy, its inevitable ethic, its unseen moral 
 powers, and their atoning purifying note. More- 
 over, where you have the passion for oratory you 
 are not unlikely to have an impaired style and 
 standard of preaching. Where your object is 
 to secure your audience, rather than your Gospel, 
 preaching is sure to suffer. I will not speak of 
 the oratory which is but rhetoric, tickling the 
 audience. I will take both at their best. It is 
 one thing to have to rouse or persuade people to 
 do something, to put themselves into something ; 
 it is another to have to induce them to trust some- 
 body and renounce themselves for him. The one 
 is the political region of work, the other is the 
 religious region of faith. And wherever a people 
 is swallowed up in politics, the preacher is apt to 
 be neglected ; unless he imperil his preaching by 
 adjusting himself to political or social methods of 
 address. The orator, speaking generally, has for 
 his business to make real and urgent the present 
 world and its crises, the preacher a world unseen, 
 and the whole crisis of the two worlds. The 
 present world of the orator may be the world of 
 action, or of art. He may speak of affairs, of nature, 
 or of imagination. In the pulpit he may be what 
 is called a practical preacher, or a poet-preacher. 
 But the only business of the apostolic preacher 
 is to make men practically realize a world unseen 
 and spiritual; he has to rouse them not against
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 5 
 
 a common enemy but against their common selves ; 
 not against natural obstacles but against spiritual 
 foes ; and he has to call out not natural resources 
 but supernatural aids. Indeed, he has to tell 
 men that their natural resources are so inadequate 
 for the last purposes of life and its worst foes 
 that they need from the supernatural much more 
 than aid. They need deliverance, not a helper 
 merely but a Saviour. The note of the preacher 
 is the Gospel of a Saviour. The orator stirs men 
 to rally, the preacher invites them to be redeemed. 
 Demosthenes fires his audience to attack Philip 
 straightway ; Paul stirs them to die and rise with 
 Christ. The orator, at most, may urge men to 
 love their brother, the preacher beseeches them 
 first to be reconciled to their Father. With 
 preaching Christianity stands or falls because it 
 is the declaration of a GnspelZ Nav mnrp far 
 more it is the Gospel prolonging and declaring 
 itself. 
 
 
 
 I am going on the assumption that the gift to 
 men in Christianity is the Gospel deed of God's 
 grace in the shape of forgiveness, redemption, 
 regeneration. Im Anfang war die That. But I 
 should perhaps define terms. 
 
 By grace is not here meant either God's general 
 benignity, or His particular kindness to our failure 
 or pity for our pain. I mean His undeserved and 
 unbought pardon and redemption of us in the face
 
 6 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 of our sin, in the face of the world-sin, undei 
 such moral conditions as are prescribed by His 
 revelation of His holy love in Jesus Christ and 
 Him crucified. 
 
 And by the Gospel of this grace I would especially 
 urge that there is meant not a statement, nor a 
 doctrine, nor a scheme, on man's side ; nor an offer, 
 a promise, or a book, on God's side. It is an act 
 and a power : it is God's act of redemption before 
 it is man's message of it. It is an eternal, perennial 
 act of God in Christ, repeating itself within each 
 declaration of it. Only as a Gospel done by God is 
 it a Gospel spoken by man. It is a revelation only 
 because it was first of all a reconciliation. It was 
 a work that redeemed us into the power of under- 
 standing its own word. It is an objective power, 
 a historic act and perennial energy of the holy 
 love of God in Christ ; decisive for humanity in 
 time and eternity ; and altering for ever the 
 whole relation of the soul to God, as it may be 
 rejected or believed. The gift of God's grace was, 
 and is, His work of Gospel. And it is this act 
 that is prolonged in the word of the preacher, 
 and not merely proclaimed. The great, the 
 fundamental, sacrament is the Sacrament of the 
 Word. 
 
 What I say will not hold good if the chief gift 
 to the world is the Church and its sacraments, 
 instead of the work and its word. Wherever you 
 have the ritual sacraments to the front the 
 preacher is to the rear, if he is there at all.
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 7 
 
 In Catholicism worship is complete without a 
 sermon ; and the education of the minister suffers 
 accordingly. So, conversely, if the preacher is 
 belittled the priest is enhanced. If you put 
 back the pulpit, by the same act you put for- 
 ward the altar. The whole of Christian history 
 is a struggle between the apostle, i.e. the 
 preacher, and the priest. The first Apostles 
 were neither priests nor bishops. They were 
 preachers, missionaries, heralds of the Cross, and 
 agents of the Gospel. The apostolic succession is 
 the evangelical. It is with the preachers of the 
 Word, and not with the priestly operators of the 
 work, or with its episcopal organisers. Our churche 
 are stone pulpits rather than shrines. The sacra- 
 ment which gives value to all other sacraments 
 is the Sacrament of the living Word. 
 
 I note that the Catholic revival of last century 
 is coincident with complaints elsewhere of the 
 decay of preaching. And if this decay is not 
 in the preaching itself, there is no doubt of the 
 fact in regard to the pulpit's estimate and influence 
 with the public. Even if the churches are no less 
 full than before, the people who are there are much 
 less amenable to the preached Word, and more 
 fatally urgent for its brevity. 
 
 This coincides with the Catholic revival on 
 the one hand, as I say, and with something to 
 which I have not yet referred, on the other I 
 mean the decay among our churches of the personal 
 use of the Bible. Preaching can only flourish
 
 8 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 where there is more than a formal respect for the 
 Bible as distinct from the Church, namely, an active 
 respect, an assiduous personal use of it, especially 
 by the preacher. But to this point I shall have to 
 recur. 
 
 The Bible is still the preacher's starting-point, 
 even if it were not his living source. It is still the 
 usual custom for him to take a text. If he but 
 preach some happy thoughts, fancies, or philosophies 
 of his own, he takes a text for a motto. It was 
 not always so ; but since it became so it is a custom 
 that is fixed. And this from no mere conservatism. 
 The custom received ready, nay inevitable, con- 
 firmation from the Reformers. It corresponded 
 to the place they gave the Bible over the Church, 
 on the one hand, and the individual on the other. 
 It is the outward sign of the objectivity of our 
 religion, its positivity, its quality as something 
 given to our hand. Even when we need less 
 protection against the Church, we still need it 
 against the individual, and often against the 
 preacher. We need to be defended from his 
 subjectivity, his excursions, his monotony, his 
 limitations. We need, moreover, to protect him 
 from the peril of preaching himself, or his age. 
 We must all preach to our age, but woe to us if it is 
 our age we preach, and only hold up the mirror to 
 the time. 
 
 And not only so, not only do we adhere to texts, 
 but there is a growing desire for expository preaching 
 for a long text, and the elucidation of a passage.
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 9 
 
 The public soon grow weary of topical preaching 
 alone, or newspaper preaching, in which the week's 
 events supply the text and the Bible only an 
 opening quotation. And the new scholarship is 
 making the Bible a new book, a new pulpit for the 
 old Word, a new golden candlestick for the old light. 
 Preachers are inspired by the historic freshness of 
 it, as the public are interested by its new realism. 
 It is a great recent discovery that the New Testament 
 was written in the actual business and colloquial 
 Greek of the day. And less than ever is the textual 
 style of preaching like to die, or the Bible to cease 
 to be the capital of the pulpit. Preaching has a 
 connexion with the Bible which it has with no other 
 book. For the Bible is the book of that Christian 
 community whose organ the preacher is. Like 
 the preacher, it has a living connexion with the 
 community. Other books he uses, but on this he 
 lives his corporate life. It is what integrates him 
 into the Church of all ages. Preachers may, for 
 the sake of change, devote their expositions on 
 occasion to Tennyson, Browning, or Shakespeare. 
 They may extract Christianity from modern 
 art, or from social phenomena. They may do 
 so in order to lay themselves alongside the 
 modern mind. But they will be obliged to come 
 back to the Bible for their charter, if they 
 remain evangelical at all. If they cease to be 
 that, of course, they may be driven anywhere and 
 tossed.
 
 i o The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 
 
 But the great reason why the preacher must 
 return continuaUy to the Bible is that the Bible 
 is the greatest sermon in the world. Above every 
 other function of it the Bible is a sermon, a ^pv^a, 
 a preachment. It is the preacher's book because 
 it is the preaching book. It is still a book with an 
 organic unity of idea and purpose. I admit all the 
 truth intended when the Bible is called a library, 
 and part of it a national library. It was quite 
 needful that that fact should be strongly urged on us. 
 But when we have recognized the Bible as the litera- 
 ture of a nation, and subject to its literary and his- 
 torical conditions, we soon recognize that that nation 
 had a providential function. It was the people 
 of the Word. It arose at God's hands to be the 
 preacher among the nations with the preacher's 
 perishableness, but also the preacher's immortality, 
 with the fugitiveness of the preacher, but with the 
 perpetuity of his message. And this message is 
 one, definite, and positive. It runs through the 
 whole literature of that nation (with one or two 
 exceptions, like Esther or the Canticles, which do 
 not destroy the general fact). The library is a 
 unity in virtue of this historic message and pur- 
 pose. It is not nationalist. It is not a history 
 of Israel, but it is a history of redemption. It 
 is not the history of an idea, but of a long 
 divine act. Its unity is a dramatic unity of 
 action, rather than an aesthetic unity of struc-
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 1 1 
 
 ture. It is a living evolving unity, in a great 
 historic crescendo. It does not exist like a library 
 in detached departments. It has an organic 
 and waxing continuity. It is after all a book. It 
 is a library, but it is still more a canon. You may 
 regard it from some points as the crown of 
 literature, for it contains both the question and 
 the answer on which all great literature turns. 
 It is the book, as Christ is the person, where the 
 seeking God meets and saves the seeking man. 
 
 The crown of literature is thus a collection of 
 sermons. It is one vast sermon. It is so much more 
 than literature, because it is not merely powerful ; 
 it is power. It is action, history, it is not mere nar- 
 rative, comment, embellishment or dilution. It makes 
 history more than it is made by history. There 
 is no product of history which has done so much to 
 produce history as the Bible. Surely that which 
 had in it so much of the future had also in it more 
 than the mere past. It had the Creator. 
 
 It is akin to the press on one side, as to the 
 pulpit on the other. Its value is in its news more 
 than in its style. It is news to the world from 
 foreign parts but, remember, from foreign parts 
 unseen, which ought not to have been so foreign 
 to us as they are. And it is akin to the world of 
 action more than the world of sentiment. It 
 deals more with men's wills than with their taste, 
 with conscience more than with imagination. 
 It is the greater literature because it never aimed 
 at being literature, but at preaching something,
 
 1 2 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 doing something, or getting something done. It 
 is so precious for the preacher because it is so 
 practical. It is a " Thatpredigt." It is history 
 preaching. 
 
 
 
 How far is the Bible a record? It has been 
 common of late to speak of the Bible, not as 
 God's Word, but as the record of God's Word. The 
 Word, it is said, is the living Word, Christ. There 
 is much truth in this view also. It is another 
 symptom of the great historical movement which has 
 passed over religion, the great restoration of the 
 person of Christ to its place in Christianity. It is 
 one side of the movement which sends us back to 
 the historical study of the Bible, as the Reformers 
 went back to its grammar. But it is only a partial 
 truth after all. It is only in a modified sense that 
 we can speak of the books of the Bible as historical 
 records. They are not records in the strict histor- 
 ian's sense of archives. They are not documents 
 of the first value for scientific history. There is 
 hardly a book of the Bible that is a document in 
 that severe sense. And certainly the object of the 
 Bible was not scientific history, as we know that 
 science. Why is it that we find it hard, if not 
 impossible, to write a biography of Christ ? Because 
 the object of the New Testament writers was not 
 to provide biographical material but evangelical 
 testimony. The New Testament (the Gospels 
 even), is a direct transcript, not of Christ, but
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 13 
 
 of the preaching about Christ, of the effect 
 produced by Christ on the first generation, a 
 transcript of the faith that worshipped Him. It 
 is a direct record not of Christ's biography but 
 of Christ's Gospel, that is to say of Christ neither 
 as delineated, nor as reconstructed, nor as analysed, 
 but as preached. The inmost life of Christ we can 
 never reach. We cannot reconstruct the nights 
 of prayer. 
 
 Well, is this not to say that the first value of the 
 Bible is not to historical science but to evangelical 
 faith, not to the historian but to the gospeller ? 
 The Bible is, in the first instance, not a voucher 
 but a preacher. It is not a piece of evidence. 
 The Gospels are not like articles in the dictionary of 
 National Biography, whose first object is accuracy, 
 verified at every point. They are pamphlets, in 
 the service of the Church, and in the interest of the 
 Word. They are engrossed with Christ, not as a 
 fascinating character, but as the Sacrament, the 
 Gospel, to us of the active grace of God. The only 
 historical Christ they let us see is not a great figure 
 Boswellised, but a risen eternal Christ preached, a 
 human God declared by His worshippers. They 
 are homiletical biography, not psychological ; they 
 are compiled on evangelical rather than critical prin- 
 ciples. The stories told are but a trifling selection, 
 not chosen to cast light on the motives of a deep 
 and complex character, but selected entirely from 
 a single point of view that of the crucified, risen, 
 exalted, preached Saviour. (See p. 38.) There
 
 14 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 is not an idyllic feature in them that is not imbedded 
 in the great doom, and sobered by the supreme 
 tragedy whose conquest made the Church. It is the 
 Saviour born to die that is the burthen of the New 
 Testament ; it is the Redeemer, not the Messiah, 
 not the champion of humanity, not the spiritual 
 hero, not the greatest of the prophets, not the 
 exquisite saint. The history is history with a 
 purpose, history unto salvation, history unto 
 edification, history made preacher, history whose 
 object is to create not an opinion on our part but a 
 determination. The story is on a theme. It is 
 there for the Gospel. It is inferior as art, but it 
 is mighty as action. It is a crisis of spiritual 
 action. It is preaching, I repeat. The object 
 is not proof, but life. The appeal is not to 
 intelligence but to will. These things " are written 
 that ye might believe that Jesus is Messiah and 
 Son of God, and that believing ye might have life 
 in His name." They spoke from faith to faith. 
 They were not proofs to convince the world. Neither 
 the miracles nor the Gospels were advertisements. 
 They were not evidences. They were there to 
 feed rather than to fascinate, to edify more than 
 defend, and to confirm more than to convince. 
 They were material to build up the Church. They 
 spoke to believers. They appeal not to an estimate 
 of evidence but to a fault of will, to our need of a 
 Saviour and our experience of grace. They belong 
 to the literature of power, not of knowledge. The 
 news they bring is of an impressive creative act,
 
 The Preacher and his Charter i 5 
 
 and not a cold cause, or a still fact. Their inspir 
 ation is not in regard to mere truth, but to 
 the truth as it is in Jesus, to Jesus as the Truth, 
 to truth as a personality, and a personality 
 gathered up hi a universal redeeming act. 
 
 It is inspiration, therefore, which does not guar- 
 antee every statement or view, even of an apostle. 
 The inspiration is not infallible hi the sense that 
 every event is certain or every statement final. 
 You may agree with what I say without agreeing 
 with all I say. The Bible's inspiration, and its 
 infallibility, are such as pertain to redemption and 
 not theology, to salvation and not mere history. It 
 is as infallible as a Gospel requires, not as a system. 
 Remember that Christ did not come to bring a 
 Bible but to bring a Gospel. The Bible arose after- 
 wards from the Gospel to serve the Gospel. We do 
 not treat the Bible aright, we do not treat it with 
 the respect it asks for itself, when we treat it as a 
 theologian, but only when we treat it as an apostle, as 
 a preacher, as the preacher in the perpetual pulpit of 
 the Church. It is saturated with dogma, but its 
 writers were not dogmatists ; and it concerns a 
 Church, but they were not ecclesiastics. The Bible, 
 the preacher, and the Church are all made by the 
 same thing the Gospel. The Gospel was there 
 before the Bible, and it created the Bible, as 
 it creates the true preacher and the true sermon 
 everywhere. And it is for the sake and service 
 of the Gospel that both Bible and preacher exist. 
 We are bound to use both, at any cost to
 
 1 6 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 tradition, in the way that gives freest course to 
 the Gospel in which they arose. 
 
 The Bible, therefore, is there as the medium of 
 the Gospel. It was created by faith in the Gospel. 
 And in turn it creates faith among men. It is at 
 once the expression of faith and its source. It is a 
 nation's sermon to the race. It is the wonder-working 
 relic of a saint-nation which was the living organ 
 of living revelation. What made the inspiration of 
 the book ? It was the prior inspiration of the people 
 and of the men by the revelation. Revelation does 
 not consist of communications about God. It 
 never did. If it had it might have come by an 
 inspired book dictated to one in a dream. But 
 revelation is the self-bestowal of the living God, 
 his self limitation in the interest of grace. It is 
 the living God in the act of imparting Himself 
 to living souls. It is God Himself drawing ever 
 more near and arrived at last. And a living God 
 can only come to men by living men. Inspiration 
 is the state of a soul, not of a book of a book 
 only in so far as the book is a transcript of a soul 
 inspired. It was by men that God gave Himself to 
 men, till, in the fullness of time, He came, for good 
 and all, in the God-man Christ, the living Word; 
 in whom God was present, reconciling the world 
 unto Himself, not merely acting through Him 
 but present in Him, reconciling and not speaking 
 of reconciliation, or merely offering it to us. He 
 acted not only through Christ but in Christ. He 
 who came was God the Son, and not a sinless
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 17 
 
 saint dowered and guided by the Spirit. In Christ 
 we have God Himself, and no mere messenger 
 from God. That truth was the substantial victory 
 gained by Athanasian theology for the Church 
 once for ail. 
 
 
 
 Now if this be so, that the Bible exists for the 
 Gospel which created it, then this Gospel is the 
 standard of all that the Bible contains. If the 
 Bible is the great discourse, and may even be called 
 a preacher above all else, then it is to be interpreted 
 as a sermon is interpreted, and not as a dogmatic, 
 nor as a protocol. 
 
 We do not treat a preacher fairly when we judge 
 him by statements, logic, anecdotes, or phrases. 
 We must judge him by his positive and effective 
 message. The preacher claims to be thus under- 
 stood. He protests bitterly against the mindless 
 isolation of his obiter dicta, and the throwing up 
 into large type of chance phrases. He asks that we 
 will give much more attention to his message than 
 to his methods. And if his methods eclipse his 
 message he feels, or ought to feel, that he has 
 failed. He has preached himself. His idiosyncrasy 
 has stepped in front of his Gospel. 
 
 Well, what the preacher claims from the public in 
 this way the Bible claims from the preacher. 
 Measure it by its message, not its phrase, its style, 
 its incidents, episodes, views, or faults. 
 
 The Bible is the preacher for preachers. It speaks
 
 1 8 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 to them above all, and with a word and not a creed. It 
 makes believers into preachers or agents in proportion 
 as it lays hold of them. Its first congenial appeal is 
 not to the scientific theologian. It handles his ideas, 
 but it does not speak his methodic language. St. 
 Paul, for instance, was no dogmatician in the sense 
 of Aquinas or Melanchthon. He was comparatively 
 careless about the correct form of his belief, what 
 could now be called its orthodoxy (indeed he was 
 the great heretic of his day) ; and he was lost in the 
 experimental reality of it. He was the first of Chris- 
 tian theologians only because he was the greatest of 
 Christian experimentalists. To express a reality so 
 unspeakable he strained language and tortured 
 ideas, which he enlisted from any quarter where he 
 could lay hands on them. No, it is not to the 
 scientific theologian, far less to the correct theologian, 
 the orthodoxist, that the Bible first speaks. It is 
 a preacher to preachers. And as the preacher's first 
 concern is not dogma but Gospel, not creed but 
 grace, so it is with the Bible. Every part of it is 
 to be valued in the perspective of grace, in the 
 proportion of faith in grace. It is all to be measured 
 by its contribution to God's redeeming grace, by 
 its effect as an agent of grace. The final criticism of 
 the Bible is not the ' higher criticism ' but the highest, 
 the criticism whose principle is God's supreme object 
 in Bible, Church, or even Christ the object of 
 reconciling grace. The final criticism of it is neither 
 literary nor scientific but evangelical, as the preacher 
 must be. If the Bible is a preacher its first object
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 19 
 
 is not to carry home divine truth but divine mercy. 
 It is not formal but dynamic, not scientific but 
 sacramental. The theologian has charge of the 
 Gospel as truth, the preacher has it in his charge as 
 grace. The very iteration of the word grace in my 
 style only reflects the continuity, the dominance of 
 the thing in our faith. The Bible, like its preacher, 
 is not the organ of God to the scientific intel- 
 ligence, but the sacrament of God to the soul, of 
 the living God to living men, of the gracious God 
 to lost men. 
 
 If we ask what is a modern Christian theology, 
 it is the Gospel taking the age seriously, with a 
 real, sympathetic and informed effort to understand 
 it, in the interest of no confession, but always keep- 
 ing a historic and positive salvation in the front, 
 and refusing everything in any age that is incom- 
 patible with it. It takes its stand neither on the 
 spirit of the age, nor on the Christian consciousness, 
 nor on the Christian principle, but on the historic 
 and whole New Testament Christ. 
 
 
 
 May I illustrate what I mean when I say that the 
 final criticism of the Bible, as a preacher, is not the 
 higher rationalism but the highest grace. The 
 question of the Virgin Birth is one that already 
 exercises many and is shortly bound to exercise 
 many more. How is that question to be settled ? 
 It is generally admitted that if it were not for the 
 opening chapters of Matthew and Luke no other
 
 20 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 parts of the Bible would leave it tenable, by direct 
 evidence at least. Now the higher criticism claims 
 the right to dismiss these early chapters, and to say 
 whether they are integral with the rest of the 
 Gospels in which they are incorporated ; or, if so, 
 whether they represent the earliest truth, or a later 
 tradition used by the evangelist. But supposing 
 it came to be generally held that the story is integral 
 to the literary whole of the book in which it occurs, 
 that does not settle the question of fact. Such could 
 only be the case if we agree beforehand that every- 
 thing stated integrally in the Bible is historically 
 true. Nor would the question be settled if we held 
 that the story was believed by the Church at a stage 
 earlier than the Gospels. That would settle it only if 
 we agreed in advance that whatever was held by 
 the Church of the first decades was true including 
 the explanation of epilepsy by demons. Or if, on 
 the other hand, critics came to agree that the 
 narrative was quite detachable from the rest of 
 Matthew or Luke, that would not settle the question 
 against its historicity. It could do so only if we 
 agree in advance that nothing is historically true 
 but what proceeded from the pen of a particular 
 apostolic writer or writers. That is to say, the matter 
 is not really to be settled by any decision of the 
 literary critics, acting simply as critics. So also it 
 might be shown not to be at the mercy of his- 
 torical criticism either. The real settlement of 
 the question lies farther within theological terri- 
 tory. It is really a theological question and not a
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 2 1 
 
 critical, as I hope later to show. The Virgin birth 
 is not a necessity created by the integrity and 
 infallibility of the Bible ; it is a necessity created 
 (if at all) by the solidarity of the Gospel, and 
 by the requirements of grace. Was such a mode 
 of entry into the world indispensable for Christ's 
 work of redemption ? If it was otiose to that work 
 then we can leave it to the methods of the critics- 
 But if it was essential to that work we must refuse 
 them the last word. If it was essential to the perfect 
 holiness of Christ's redeeming obedience, what is 
 unhappily called His sinlessness, then it must stand, 
 whatever the critics say. I am not here called on to 
 decide that question. I only quote it as an illustra- 
 tion of method, to show what is meant by saying that 
 there is a dogmatic criticism of the Bible higher 
 than what is called the higher. And it consists 
 in judging the parts of the Bible by its whole message 
 and action, in bringing every detail to this test how 
 does it serve the one divine purpose which makes the 
 library a book and the book the Word the purpose 
 of preaching saving grace ? 
 
 This is actually Luther's test does this or that 
 passage " ply Christ, preach Christ ? " Is it in 
 solidary connexion, direct or indirect, with Him ? 
 But the way I have ventured to put it, by saying the 
 Gospel instead of Christ, makes the issue a little 
 more distinct, perhaps, and the test more pointed. 
 As I said, we cannot have a biography of Christ. 
 We cannot easily tell what is or is not congruous with 
 a character of whose psychology we know so little
 
 22 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 as the Gospels tell us. But we do know above all 
 other knowledge the scope, object, and act of Christ's 
 person. We do know the Christ of our faith better 
 than any Christ of our constructive imagination, for 
 all its precious results from modern methods. He was 
 gathered up for us, as for God, in the consummation 
 of the Cross. And the Cross is there as the agent 
 of God's grace in redemption. Christ was born to 
 die. To preach Christ really means to preach the 
 Cross where His person took effect as the incarnation 
 and the agent of the atoning grace of God. For this 
 therefore, I say that Christ Himself existed not to 
 present us with the supreme spiritual spectacle of 
 history, but to achieve the critical thing in history. 
 The Gospel is an act of God, gathered in a point but 
 thrilling through history, and it calls for an act, and 
 inspires it. Its preaching must therefore be an act, a 
 " function " of the great act. A true sermon is a 
 real deed. It puts the preacher's personality into 
 an act. That is his chief form of Christian life and 
 practice. And one of his great difficulties is that he 
 has to multiply words about what is essentially a 
 deed. If you remember what men of affairs think 
 about the people who make set speeches in committee 
 you will realize how the preacher loses power whose 
 sermons are felt to be productions, or lessons, or 
 speeches, rather than real acts of will, struggles with 
 other wills, and exercises of effective power. The 
 Gospel means something done and not simply 
 declared. For this work Christ existed on earth. 
 And to give this work effect Bible and Church alike
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 23 
 
 exist. We treat the Church as plastic to that work 
 and its fulfilment, do we not ? That is the true 
 Church, and the true form of Church, which gives 
 best effect to the Gospel. So also we must treat the 
 Bible with much flexibility. The test and the trial 
 of all is the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and in 
 Him as crucified. Everything is imperishable which 
 is inseparable from that. 
 
 
 
 The Bible, I have said, is the preacher to the 
 preacher. But I shall be met perhaps by the observa- 
 tion that the preacher to the preacher is the Holy 
 Spirit. It is an observation quite just. But it 
 does not impair the force of what I have said. What 
 is the principle of the Spirit's action on men ? The 
 Spirit is so much the spirit of Christ that we find in 
 Paul's mouth the expression, " the Lord the Spirit " 
 the Lord is the Spirit. I will not discuss the hard 
 question thus raised as to the relation between the 
 kingly Christ in Heaven and the Holy Spirit. For 
 my purpose I may speak of the Spirit's action as the 
 action of Christ in that heavenly kingship of His, 
 which is the completion of His work as prophet 
 and priest. The same Christ as on earth was both 
 prophet and priest is in Heaven king also, by His 
 finality and perfection in both. He does not sit on 
 a height apart, retired, and simply watch, with a 
 parental eye, the progress of the great kingdom He 
 set on its feet, the great concern He founded and left 
 to run. He still continues his prophetic and priestly 
 work in a supreme and kingly way. But how,
 
 24 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 precisely ? Is it merely by the emission of waves 
 of spiritual force, supplementary and propulsive 
 to the fundamental work of His earthly life ? It is 
 sometimes so viewed, as if the Spirit were a new 
 and even a superior dispensation. We find the 
 tendency both among the dogmatic pietists and 
 among the undogmatic Christians who renounce 
 theology in the interest of the Christian spirit or 
 temper. In the history of the Church men and 
 movements arise under a strong religious impulse 
 which is either vague or extravagant. It is vague 
 as being undefined by the positive principles of 
 faith ; or it is extravagant as being uncontrolled by 
 the authority of a historic revelation. Certain 
 mystic movements have their very vogue by their 
 independence of the Bible. They gratify our mo- 
 dernity, our subjectivity, our spurious spirituality, 
 our impressionism. Some Christianized forms of 
 natural piety manage to combine much human grace 
 and religious sympathy with little personal use of 
 Scripture. And other movements in the direction of 
 a superior sanctity seem, at least at times, to associate 
 sanctification much less directly with justification 
 than the Bible does. But the action of the glorified 
 Christ is always represented in the New Testament 
 not as making new departures, or issuing fresh 
 waves, but as giving fresh effect to His own historic 
 work, keeping it a personal act, and preventing it 
 from being a mere spiritual process. One of the 
 greatest actions of the Spirit in modern thought is 
 to preserve Christ's influence from being detached
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 25 
 
 from his act and turned into a moral process. His 
 spirit brings the act to remembrance ; or takes of 
 the work of Christ and shows it to the Church. 
 He leads the Church into all truth, but it is the truth 
 as it is in the whole Jesus. And nothing is more 
 shallow and pretentious than the attempt to reform 
 Church or creed by giving the Bible the go-by, or 
 pooh-poohing its theology in the interest of an 
 aesthetic or an idealist construction of religion. 
 
 This return to history is especially shown at the 
 great crises of the Church's career, whether you take 
 Luther, Wesley, or Schleiermacher. The Lord from 
 Heaven forces the soul of the Church into a closer con- 
 tact with His historic person and work, and gives a 
 deeper penetration of it. It is the only condition of real 
 revival. It is the inspiration of evangelical preach- 
 ing in the great sense of the word. It was particu- 
 larly the case with Paul, from whom these other great 
 names have their apostolic succession. He fastened 
 on the Cross, if I might venture so to say, and pressed 
 the whole divine life out of it for our healing. And 
 the history is our great protection now against 
 both an idealism and an extravagance which readily 
 run down into aloofness, feebleness, and futility. 
 It keeps faith from the sentimentalism which to-day 
 so easily besets it, by keeping it hi the closest contact 
 with the focus of the world's moral realism in the 
 Cross. Our aim must be an ever fresh immersion 
 in the Bible, an immersion both scholarly and experi- 
 mental. We see deeper into it than our deep 
 fathers did, though on other lines ; for the new age
 
 26 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 has new eyes. It has new needs, and need makes 
 wit. Through the ever-deepening need of man 
 Christ is pressing His one personal, fundamental, and 
 final work into our souls. He unfolds and freshens 
 its searching meaning and eternal power. New men 
 and new occasions do but elicit from Hun fresh 
 wealth of resource. But it all comes from the Bible 
 Christ, from the Christ of the Cross. The more He 
 changes the more He is the same. Stability is not 
 stiffness. Jesus, the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever, is not a dead identity, a monu- 
 ment that we leave behind, but a persistent per- 
 sonality that never ceases to open upon us. All 
 permanent work in the kingdom is His work, of 
 His initiative and not only in His succession. It 
 is because He acts on us from the other world that 
 that world is not a mist, a riddle, or a desert for us, 
 and we are not aliens there. But from there He 
 acts on us through what He was and did in history 
 once for all. Our real and destined eternity goes 
 round by Nazareth to reach us. What abides in 
 history is not the impression He made, nor a 
 Church's report. But it is His historic self, prophetic 
 and priestly still in the kingly way of eternity. He 
 is born again in each soul that is born anew. 
 And those who preach are the channels and agents 
 of the preaching, praying Christ, working from His 
 spiritual world, but working still through Jeru- 
 salem, through the Bible. If it is not so our 
 Protestant doctrine of Scripture, its constant use, 
 free function, and first necessity for every soul, is 
 a mistake and an unreality.
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 27 
 
 
 But if the Bible is the supreme preacher to the 
 preacher, if it is through the Bible and its gospel above 
 all that the Holy Ghost works upon him, how is the 
 preacher to preach the Bible ? Is his relation to it sug- 
 gestive or expository ? Is he to read in, or read out ? 
 Is he to preach whatever it may strike from his mind, 
 or what his faith truly finds in it ? Is he to treat it 
 as a jewelled mass of facets of trembling lights, or as 
 the living source of a positive revelation ? Is it a 
 huge brilliant, finely cut, afire with all kinds of rich 
 and mystic hues, or is it a sun which issues the 
 energy of the new world more even than its light ? 
 Is the preacher's work to lead the people into a 
 larger modern world of suggestion which the Bible, 
 without creating, has yet the power to stir, or shall 
 he lead them into the Bible's own great renew- 
 ing heart ? There is no doubt the modern man 
 inhabits a world larger in some ways than the Bible 
 view of the cosmos or of man, a world of conception 
 not due to the Bible but rather to art, science, 
 exploration, industry and the like. And the Bible 
 does possess on its part, in many words and 
 phrases, that feature of inspiration which we might 
 call glancing lights, as distinct from penetrative 
 power, the flash rather than the force of the Spirit's 
 sword. The book of Job, for instance, apart from its 
 place in the history of moral revelation, has an 
 extraordinary modernity both in theme and phrase. 
 It is full of angles of reflection of the modern mind.
 
 28 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 All that is true. But our whole view of the rela- 
 tion of the Bibh to the Gospel must be changed if 
 we hold that that suggestive power is the main 
 feature of the Bible, or its main function, that the 
 Bible is there like a work of art, nimium lubricus 
 adspici, offering, like a bird's neck, a play of fleeting 
 hues for every man to seize what he has affinity to 
 find. The Bible does not appeal to our affinities 
 so much as to our needs, nor to our ingenuity so 
 much as to our penetration, nor to our spiritual 
 fancy so much as to our faith. To treat the Bible 
 chiefly in that casual way is to return by another 
 route to the old textual, atomistic, individualist 
 fashion of dealing with it, the old, unhistoric, and 
 often fantastic Biblicism. Whereas one of the great 
 tasks of the preacher is to rescue the Bible from the 
 textual idea in the mind of the public, from the 
 Biblicist, atomist idea which reduces it to a religious 
 scrap book, and uses it only in verses or phrases. 
 There is a true place for such a use, but it has 
 monopolized the Bible with the general public ; 
 and that is not right. The Bible is much more 
 than a collection of spiritual apophthegms, or the 
 gnomic reliquiae of moral sages. And a great part of 
 the preacher's work is to rescue the Bible from this 
 treatment, which is largely due to textual preaching, 
 and is part of the price we pay for it. He must 
 cultivate more the free, large, and organic treatment 
 of the Bible, where each part is most valuable for 
 its contribution to a living, evangelical whole, and 
 where that whole is articulated into the great course
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 29 
 
 of human history. This is one of the benefits we 
 learn from the study of comparative religion, and 
 particularly from the work of the new religious- 
 historic school, when rightly used. But at first it 
 will be less popular than the more fanciful treatment 
 in which the public loves to roam and pick up the 
 stray gifts that belong to whoever can find. Their 
 right is not here denied if it be kept in its due place, 
 which is the second, not the first. Who can deny the 
 Bible's fragmentary and suggestive power ? Who 
 should refuse it in private meditation ? Who would 
 forbid textual preaching ? But for the public pur- 
 poses of Church and ministry there is another and 
 higher point of view. The Bible is primarily there 
 for a single and public purpose, for a historic, social, 
 and collective purpose, for a purpose of the race. 
 It is there not as a fountain of stray suggestion 
 but as a channel of positive revelation and a source 
 of spiritual authority. Bible preaching means lead- 
 ing people into the Bible and its powers. It is 
 not leading them out of the Bible into subjectivities, 
 fancies, quips, or queries. The Bible has a world 
 and a context of its own. It has an ethos, if not 
 a cosmos, of its own. It cannot simply be assigned 
 a leading place among the literatures of the world, 
 or given the hegemony of those fine forces of the 
 human spirit " bound to get to God." It has a 
 place far beyond what it takes hi the history of 
 religion, if we think of religion only as the Godward 
 projection of man. It has also a supreme, a 
 solitary, place of its own in the action of revelation,
 
 30 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 thinking of revelation "as the manward move- 
 ment of God." It not only stirs our opinion as 
 another religion might do : it demands our decision, 
 our selves. The ethos of the Bible is beyond our 
 cosmos, however largely you construe that cosmos, 
 though you extend it to all modern dimensions. 
 And not only so, but it represents the God of the 
 cosmos. If it is to be integrated with the cosmos 
 at all, it is as the final purpose always controls 
 the evolving process, and the drift the context. 
 
 When I speak of Biblical context I am not thinking 
 on the mere textual scale. I mean the context of the 
 whole spiritual order in which the Bible is imbedded. 
 It is necessary, of course, for any preacher who 
 would deal seriously with the verse of his text 
 to study and handle it in its context. But what is 
 true of a text from the Bible is truer still of the whole 
 Bible as a text. It can be truly and fruitfully 
 studied only in its moral context of history. And 
 by that again I do not merely mean either the con- 
 text of each passage in the history of Israel, or the 
 whole book's context in the history of religion, in its 
 relation to other religions, other contemporary or 
 previous systems amid which it arose. Great is the 
 light that comes from that source, and it entails some 
 change in divers of our interpretations. But there is 
 such a thing as the Bible's evangelical context, its 
 organic moral relevancy to the conscience of Human- 
 ity, and I mean that. I mean its function in the actual 
 moral condition of the total perennial human soul, 
 in the great tissue and issue of human destiny. I
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 3 i 
 
 mean the whole moral situation which Christianity 
 reveals in man as truly as it reveals the holy 
 grace of God. I speak of the moral context of 
 the Bible as a whole in the race's conscience the 
 human sin which the holy Saviour casts into the 
 deeper shade, the lostness revealed by the Gospel that 
 finds. In respect of the cosmos, whether of nature, 
 the soul or society, the Bible may be very suggestive ; 
 and it may give rise to many theologoumena, some 
 speculative, some merely fantastic, as most amateur 
 theologoumena are. The Bible is like the United 
 States (will you pardon this glancing light ?), the 
 richest ground in the world for every variety of 
 " crank." But in respect of the ethos, in relation 
 to the fundamental moral condition of the race, 
 the Bible is much more positive for conscience than 
 suggestive for fancy. It has a definite message and 
 a central task. It has something imperative, which 
 overrules all the suggestions of fantasy or ingenuity ; 
 and something crucial which transcends the mere 
 play of thought, or the mere practice of poetry. 
 It compels an attitude, a choice, a line to be taken. 
 Its reality appeals to our reality in will. It has at 
 its core something which demands to be met actively, 
 and crucially if need be, something that closes 
 with history in moral conflict. It has a Gospel, nay 
 the Gospel, for the worst condition of the whole 
 energetic race. It has mankind's inevitable word 
 and its eternal destiny. 
 
 
 It is that word that the preacher must bring to the
 
 32 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 people. It is in that word he must himself live ; 
 especially with historic study, avoiding the artificial 
 paradigms and surface " railways " that disfigure its 
 meaning to the untaught. The Dutch gardeners do 
 the Bible as much harm as the people who but 
 pick the flowers. Let the preacher's suggestion teem 
 by all means, as it will teem, in the quickened vitality 
 given to his personal resources by the Word of Life. 
 Let the gift of his fancy be stirred up, as well as all 
 his other gifts, by this life beyond all gifts. But let 
 every suggestion keep its true place in the economy 
 and proportion of faith. Let it wear the clear livery 
 of the Gospel, and conspire to lighten and magnify 
 that. For instance if, as the preacher reads the words 
 '' He shall show you an upper room furnished," it 
 strikes him with a flash that Christ's Gospel not only 
 lights up the ideal world over him but stocks it with 
 a content of positive truth for our spiritual dwelling 
 and use, by all means let him preach a sermon to that 
 effect from the text. But let it be clear that he is 
 using some sacred fancy in so doing. And let him 
 realize that such a treatment of the Bible is on a 
 very different footing from that which he employs 
 if he preach on central words like these : " Being 
 justified by faith we have peace with God through 
 our Lord Jesus Christ." It is into the Bible world 
 of the eternal redemption, that the preacher must 
 bring his people. This eternal world from which 
 Christ came is contemporary with every age. To 
 every age it is equally near, and it is equally authorita- 
 tive for every age, however modem. It is never
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 33 
 
 antiquated in its final principles and powers. The 
 only preaching which is up to date for every time is 
 the preaching of this eternity, which is opened to us in 
 the Bible alone the eternal of holy love, grace and 
 redemption, the eternal and immutable morality ol 
 saving grace for our indelible sin. 
 
 It is not the preacher's prime duty then to find 
 happy texts for the exposition of modern thought. 
 Nor must he sink the Gospel to a revelation which 
 puts people in a good humour with themselves by 
 declaring to them that the great divine message 
 is the irrepressible spirituality of human nature. It 
 is an inversion of his work if he begin with Christ and 
 enlarge into Goethe. Let him begin with Goethe, 
 if he will, so that he go on to enlarge into Christ. 
 Let him learn from the first part of Faust ; he has 
 nothing to learn from the second. Let him state the 
 problem as powerfully as Shakespeare left it, but let 
 him answer it with the final answer Christ left. No 
 genius has or can have it but from Christ. For 
 He is the answer that they but crave. And they but 
 state, as only genius can, the human tragedy which it 
 is Christ's to retrieve. 
 
 
 
 But the preacher who tries to follow this advice 
 will find himself in one great difficulty. The Bible 
 may be his text book, but it has ceased to be the 
 text book of his audience. The Bible is not read 
 by the Christian, or even by the churchgoing, public 
 as a means of grace greater even than church-
 
 34 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 going. Our people, as a rule, do not read the Bible, 
 in any sense which makes its language more familiar 
 and dear to them than the language of the novel or 
 the press. And I will go so far as to confess that 
 one of the chief miscalculations I have made in 
 the course of my own ministerial career has been 
 to speak to congregations as if they did know and 
 use the Bible. I was bred where it was well known 
 and loved, and I have spent my ministerial life 
 where it is less so. And it has taken me so long 
 to realize the fact that I still find it difficult to 
 adjust myself to it. I am long accustomed to 
 being called obscure by many whose mental habits 
 and interests are only literary, who have felt but 
 a languid interest in the final questions of the soul 
 as the New Testament stirs them, who treat sin 
 as but lapse, God's Grace as if it were but love, and 
 His love as if it were but paternal kindness. 
 At first I believed I was obscure, and I took 
 pains to be short in the sentence and unadorned 
 in style. But I found my critics still puzzled. 
 And I have come to think the obscurity is at 
 least in some degree due to the fact that while I 
 am attracted by such matters beyond all else, I 
 am often dealing with people to whom they are 
 not only strange but irritating. They have applied 
 to religion what William Morris applied to life, 
 " Love is enough." They have given a Christian 
 varnish to what in him was mainly pagan, but they 
 have not really stepped out of his natural world. 
 They have risen to locate the affections in God ;
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 35 
 
 but they have not realized faith as the inroad, the 
 uprise in us of a totally new world, Christianity as a 
 new creation, and the new life as a new birth. Grace 
 for them is only love exercised on the divine scale 
 not in the divine style, not under the conditions 
 of holiness and sin. They read in the heart more 
 than in the Bible. 
 
 The old Protestant principle, therefore, no longer 
 rules the relation of preacher and people. They are 
 not spoken to from their Bible as they are from 
 their preacher. Consequently they do not easily 
 find the thing they like in the preacher who lives 
 in his Bible. And, on the other hand, they are 
 unable to exercise on the preacher the check of 
 personal experience of the Bible and first-hand 
 knowledge of it, as they did in the days of the 
 great classic preachers. But that is the habit in 
 the people which makes great preachers in the 
 pulpit. And it is that principle that is the basis 
 of the people's place, the place of the laity in 
 a Protestant Church. Anything else is in principle 
 Catholic. It is a Catholic treatment of the Bible 
 to leave it in the hands of the minister alone. 
 And, unless there be a change, it is to that that 
 Protestantism is coming. Outside an evangelical 
 Protestantism, amply construed, there is nothing 
 for us but Catholicism. For general Atheism is 
 permanently impossible. I trust you will not here 
 think me extravagant. The final action of a 
 principle, to those disaccustomed to principles, is 
 sure to seem fanciful. And I am only stating the
 
 36 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 action of one of those deeper principles which in 
 the end form the logic of history, and override all 
 the tactics of the hour. And the principle is that 
 where Protestantism falls into the Catholic treat- 
 ment of the Bible, namely its disuse by the laity, 
 we are rapidly getting ready for the Catholic idea 
 of the Church, and the Catholic construction of 
 the priest. To restore to the people an intelligent 
 and affectionate use of the Bible is a service to 
 Protestantism far more needed than those violent 
 and ill-informed denunciations of the priest which 
 are so easy and so cheap. 
 
 
 
 Bible preaching then means that we adjust our 
 preaching to the people's disuse of the Bible. We 
 have to regain their interest in it. It is, therefore, not 
 the preaching of doctrine with proof passages. It is 
 not preaching which does the Bible the lip homage 
 of taking a text. Nor is it simply preaching historic 
 facts on the one hand, or personal experience on the 
 other. But it is the preaching of those facts and 
 gifts of grace which are experimentally verifiable 
 and creative of experience. It is only on points so 
 verifiable that the Bible can be doctrinally used by 
 the laity. A fact like the Virgin Birth is not at 
 all on the same footing as the Resurrection of 
 Christ, who is met as the risen Lord by His dis- 
 ciples to this day. Christianity is not the religion 
 of a book, though it is a book religion. Nor is it 
 the religion of a Church, though it is a Church
 
 The Preacher and his Charter 37 
 
 religion. But it is the religion of a Gospel and a 
 grace. These are the facts that make the Church. 
 Doctrine as doctrine is a precious and indispens- 
 able possession of the Church, but it was not such 
 doctrine that made the Church. Neither ideas nor 
 truths could do that, but only persons and powers. 
 Nor does such doctrine make the great changes of 
 the Church. The Reformation was not a reformation 
 of theology, but of faith. It is remarkable how 
 little of the theology it changed in its first stage. 
 It was the renewed action, not of truth, but of 
 grace. It was the greatest of evangelical revivals. 
 That is why it re-discovered the Bible. It was not 
 the Bible that lighted up grace for Luther, but Grace 
 to his needy soul lighted up the Bible. Biblical 
 preaching preaches the Gospel and uses the Bible, it 
 does not preach the Bible and use the Gospel. 
 
 For the Gospel the Bible must be used. The 
 minister must so live in it that he wears it easily. 
 One reason why people are repelled from it is that 
 the preachers cannot carry it with easy mastery. 
 They are in Goliath's armour. Now the ideal 
 ministry must be a Bibliocracy. It must know 
 its Bible better than any other book. Most 
 Christians hardly know their Bible at first hand 
 at all. They treat it with respect, no doubt. 
 They keep a great Bible in the house ; but it is on 
 a little table, not very steady, in the parlour window, 
 and it has stiff clasps. It is in the room least used ; 
 it carries a vase of once pretty flowers ; and it gets 
 in the way of the rich lace curtains. Which is all
 
 38 The Preacher and his Charter 
 
 an allegory. Some preachers know it only in the 
 way of business, as a sermon quarry. But the true 
 ministry must live on it. We must speak to the 
 Church not from experience alone, but still more 
 from the Word. We must speak from within the 
 silent sanctuary of Scripture. We do not realize 
 always how eager people are to hear preaching 
 which makes the Bible wonderful by speaking from 
 its very interior, as men do who live in it and wonder 
 themselves. I do not believe in verbal inspiration. 
 I am with the critics, in principle. But the true 
 minister ought to find the words and phrases of 
 the Bible so full of spiritual food and felicity that 
 he has some difficulty in not believing in verbal 
 inspiration. The Bible is the one Enchiridion of the 
 preacher still, the one manual of eternal life, the 
 one page that glows as all life grows dark, and the 
 one book whose wealth rebukes us more the older 
 we grow because we knew and loved it so late. 
 
 Note to p. 1 3. 
 
 " Th first Church troubled about ' the real Jesus ' only in 
 so fax as suited the Jesus living for their faith. . . . Had 
 Mark attempted or achieved such a model biography of 
 Jesus as historical science demands his work would have 
 been useless for religion." Julicher, Neite Linien, p. 71.
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF THE 
 PREACHER
 
 II 
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 I VENTURE here to state at once what I will go on 
 to explain, that the preacher is the organ of the only 
 real and final authority for mankind. He is its 
 organ, and even its steward ; but he is not its vicar, 
 except at Rome. 
 
 The question of the ultimate authority for man- 
 kind is the greatest of all the questions which meet 
 the West, since the Catholic Church lost its place 
 in the sixteenth century, and since criticism no 
 longer allows the Bible to occupy that place. Yet 
 the gospel of the future must come with the note 
 of authority. Every challenge of authority but 
 develops the need of it. And that note must sound 
 in whatever is the supreme utterance of the church, 
 in polity, pulpit, or creed. It seems clear, indeed, 
 unless the whole modern movement is to be simply 
 undone, that the Church must draw in the range of 
 its authority, and even Catholicism must be modified 
 if it is to survive. But the Church can never part 
 with the tone of authority, nor with the claim that, 
 however it may be defined, the authority of its 
 
 41
 
 42 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 message is supreme. That is the very genius of an 
 evangelical religion ; for it declares that that which 
 saves the world shall also judge the world, and it 
 preaches the absolute right over us of the Christ 
 who bought us the active supremacy in conscience 
 of our moral redemption. It is the absence of the 
 note of authority that is the central weakness of so 
 many of the churches ; and it is the source of their 
 failure to impress Society with their message for the 
 practical ends of the Kingdom of God. It is useless 
 to preach the Kingdom when we do not cany into 
 the centre of life the control of a King. The first 
 duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but 
 its Master. And the first charge of every Church 
 is to offer, nay to mediate, Him. 
 
 
 
 The authority of the preacher was once supreme. 
 He bearded kings, and bent senates to his word. 
 He determined policies, ruled fashions, and pre- 
 scribed thought. And yet he has proved unable to 
 maintain the position he was so able to take. He 
 could not insure against the reaction which has 
 now set in as severely as his authority once did. 
 That reaction has long been in force ; and to-day, 
 however great may be his vogue as a personality, 
 his opinion has so little authority that it is not only 
 ignored but ridiculed. In that respect the pulpit 
 resembles the press, whose circulation may be 
 enormous, while elections, and such like events, 
 show that the influence of its opinions is almost nil.
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 43 
 
 But between the press and the pulpit there is this 
 mighty difference. The pulpit has a Word, the press 
 has none. The pulpit has a common message and, 
 on the strength of it, a claim, while the press has no 
 claim to anything but external freedom of opinion 
 and expression. The one has a Gospel which is the 
 source of its liberty, the other has no Gospel but 
 liberty, which in itself is no Gospel at all. Liberty 
 is only opportunity for a Gospel. The true Gospels 
 not only claim it, they create it. But, in itself, it 
 is either the product of a Gospel, or a means thereto ; 
 it is not an end. It is no more an end than evolu- 
 tion is, which is only the process of working out an 
 end that the mere process itself does not give, 
 Liberty in itself is not an end ; and it has only the 
 worth of its end. The chief object of the liberty 
 of the press is facts. It must be free to publish 
 facts. But the pulpit has not merely a fact 
 but a Word. The press is there for information, 
 or for suggestion at most, it is not there for 
 authority ; but the pulpit is there with authority ; 
 and the news it brings is brought for the sake of the 
 authority. The press may offer an opinion as to how 
 the public should act, but the pulpit is there with a 
 message as to whom the acting public must obey 
 and trust. The press is an adviser, but the pulpit 
 is a prophet ; the press may have a thought, the 
 pulpit must have a Gospel, nay a command. If I 
 may use press language, the pulpit's news is there 
 for the sake of the leader, the leader is not a mere 
 opinion about the news. The Gospels are there
 
 44 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 for the sake of the Epistles, for the sake of the 
 Gospel. 
 
 Therefore, the pulpit has an authority. If it 
 have not, it is but a chair and not a pulpit. It may 
 discourse, but it does not preach. But preach it 
 must. It speaks with authority. Yet the autho- 
 rity is not that of the preacher's person ; it is not 
 mere authoritativeness. For us that goes without 
 saying. What does not go unsaid, what needs 
 saying is, that the preacher's authority is not the 
 authority even of his truth. In the region of mere 
 truth there is no authority. Mere truth is intel- 
 lectual, and authority is a moral idea bearing not 
 upon belief but upon will and faith, decision and com- 
 mittal. (See Lect. VIII.) It is not statements that 
 the preacher calls on us to believe. It is no scheme 
 of statements. It is not views. It is not a creed 
 or a theology. It is a religion, it is a Gospel, it is 
 an urgent God. In the region of mere Theology we 
 may be bold to say there is no authority ; the 
 authority is all in the region of religion. The creed 
 of the Church Catholic should have great prestige, 
 but not authority in the proper sense. Belief, in 
 the region of theology, is a matter of truth or 
 truths ; it is science, simple or complex. And 
 science knows no authority. But in the region of 
 religion belief is faith. It is a personal relation. It 
 is belief in a person by a person. It is self committal 
 to him. With the heart man believeth unto salva- 
 tion. It is a personal act towards a person. It 
 is trust in that person, and response to the power of
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 45 
 
 his act. It is soul answering soul, and act act, 
 and choice choice. In science, knowledge is the 
 relation of a person to a fact or law to some- 
 thing inferior to a person, and therefore not his 
 authority. But in faith knowledge (I shall show 
 later that faith is an organ of knowledge) is the 
 relation of a person to a person who is like us yet 
 over us. It is a moral relation of obedience and 
 authority. 
 
 The authority of the pulpit is thus a personal au- 
 thority. Yet it is not the authority of the preacher's 
 person, or even of his office. His office may demand 
 much more respect than the fanatics of freedom allow, 
 but it cannot claim authority in the strict sense. 
 The personal authority of the pulpit is the authority 
 of the divine person who is its burthen. It is an 
 external authority, but it is the authority of an 
 inward objective, living, saving God, before whose 
 visitation the prophet fades like an ebbing voice, 
 and the soul of the martyr cries invisible from under 
 the altar of the Cross. 
 
 
 
 I know well the feelings which arise in many at 
 the very mention of words like " authority " and 
 " external." They are feelings of recalcitrance 
 and resentment often very blind. We are put 
 upon the defence of our independence. It seems 
 forgotten that the supreme thing in life must be 
 uppermost, not merely in place but in dignity, not 
 merely in position but in right, not as a stratum
 
 46 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 might be, but as a throne. It is not the soul's top 
 storey but the soul's suzerain power. For the soul, 
 and conscience, the words higher or lower mean 
 authority or they mean nothing. Even in the 
 celestial time when the Soul shall be in complete 
 harmony with God the relation must always be 
 worship, and therefore authority and obedience. The 
 supreme thing is not a weight that lies on us but a 
 crown that governs us and lifts us up for ever. Unless 
 we frankly adopt the positivist position, where 
 humanity is to itself not only a law but an object 
 of worship, there must be an authority both for 
 man and men. And as for the externality of it 
 surely if there be an authority it must be external. 
 It must come to us, and not rise out of us. It 
 must come down on man and not proceed from 
 him. It is a word to our race, not from it. The 
 content of our conscience descends on us, it is no 
 projection of ours. It were less than conscience 
 if it were ; for the law that we made we could 
 unmake and the order we issued we could recall. 
 Treat the autonomy of conscience as you will, 
 but do not remove the accent from the nomos to 
 the autos. If it be a nomos it is a product of more 
 than ourselves, more than man it is of God. Other- 
 wise it would be but a self-imposed condition, from 
 which at any time we might be self-released. And 
 it could bind none, even while it remained binding, 
 but him who had imposed it on himself. And then 
 it would not be conscience but earnest whim. 
 But then, it is asked, is it not one of the greatest
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 47 
 
 and surest results of modern progress that, if there 
 be an authority, it must be inward, it must be in 
 the soul, it must be by consent ? Yes, indeed, that 
 is one of the greatest and best blessings of the modern 
 time. But do you realize what that means ? 
 Surely the more inward it is the more is it external. 
 The more we retire to our inner castle the more 
 we feel the pressure of the not-ourselves, and the 
 presence of our Overlord. The more spiritual we 
 are the more we are under law to another. To 
 internalize the authority is to subtilize it, and there- 
 fore to emphasize it ; for it is the subtler realities 
 that bear upon us with the most persistent, ubiqui- 
 tous, and effective pressure. The more inward we 
 go the more external the authority becomes, just 
 because it becomes more of an authority, and more 
 unmistakably, irresistibly so. 
 
 If we were not so Philistine that the most accurate 
 words seem pedantic, the proper word would be 
 not external but objective. Because external has 
 come, for the man in the street, to mean outside 
 his own body, or his own family, or his own self- 
 will, his own individuality ; while what we are really 
 concerned with is outside our own soul, our own 
 personality. What we are suffering from is not 
 mere externality but unconquered inwardness, sub- 
 jectivism, individualism, ending in egotism. It is 
 our subjectivism which gives externals their enslav- 
 ing power over us. If within us we find nothing 
 over us we succumb to what is around us. It is 
 a cure for our subjectivism that we need, a cure
 
 48 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 for our egotism. And that is to be found in nothing 
 physically external, nothing institutionally so, but 
 only in an objective, moral and spiritual, congenial 
 yet antithetic, in an objective to the ego, yea to 
 the race, which objective alone gives morality 
 any meaning. Our suzerain must indeed sit in 
 the court of the Soul, but he must be objective 
 there. What he is he must indeed be for the soul 
 the soul's vis-d-vis, which must be also soul. 
 Soul is relative only to soul, will to will. But, 
 while he is not anything else than soul, he is other 
 than my soul. He is not an other, but he is my 
 other. He is my objective. But objective he must 
 be, no less than he must be mine. He is my 
 authority, but it is not a heteronomy, it is no 
 foreign rule. Any autonomy of mine is due to his 
 congenial power, to the homonomy of his authority, 
 to its kinship with my soul. 
 
 By all means then the divine authority must be 
 inward if we are sure what we mean, if we do not 
 come to mean that we are our own authority which 
 I am afraid is the popular version with which the 
 preacher has to contend. The authority must be 
 inward, it is true. The modern preacher must accept 
 that principle, and correct all its risks of perversion 
 and debasement. His message must be more and 
 more inward. But it must be searchingly inward. 
 That is to say, it must be inward with the right of 
 search, as an authority ; and not simply as a ser- 
 vant, a suppliant, an influence, an impression, a sensi- 
 bility. It must be above all else a moral authority,
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 49 
 
 having right and not mere influence or prestige, 
 demanding action, obedience and sacrifice, and not 
 merely echo, appreciation, stirrings, and thrills. 1 
 
 Thus when we move the authority from an exter- 
 nal church or book to the forum of the conscience, 
 when in the face of humanity or society we claim to 
 call our soul our own, we have not ended the strife ; 
 we have but begun one more serious on another 
 plane. And, in many cases, we have but opened 
 the gates of confusion, and let loose the floods of 
 inner tumult. The recognition of the inwardness, 
 
 1 It must be a moral authority. The grand etre, the 
 oversoul, the totality of supreme being, call it what you 
 will, which teaches us our place and conducts us to it, 
 and so to our blessedness, must be moral in its nature. 
 The law of being is a moral law. The nature of reality 
 is not only experience, as the modern drift of thought 
 teaches, but it is moral experience. It is a will's action. 
 It is decision. Now religion is no exception to the universe 
 of reality. That is not what is meant by its autonomy. 
 Rather is it the key to that universe. It opens reality. 
 It contains it. Religion is part of our consciousness. And 
 consciousness is primary ; it is not deduced from any prior 
 reality of another nature. It is part of reality. Reality has 
 therefore the nature of consciousness. And consciousness 
 is moral. For it is of the will in its nature. We are con- 
 scious of ourselves as will-powers. The great reality is 
 thus a supreme will. And our recognition of it is an act of 
 moral submission. That is, it is a relation of authority 
 and obedience. And the preacher's word of grace to faith 
 is thus all of a piece with the word of the universe to 
 the Soul, with 
 
 Der ewige Gesang, 
 
 Der unser ganzes Lebenlang 
 
 Uns heiser jede Stunde klingt.
 
 50 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 in many cases, seems to destroy the authority. 
 Perhaps it does so in most cases at first. We are 
 too full of ourselves to desire another to rule over 
 us. And even when we desire it there are few who 
 are so familiar with their inner selves as to be able 
 to distinguish with any certainty the shepherd's 
 voice, amid the gusts or sighings of their own fitful 
 selves. 
 
 
 
 The questions that arise are such as these : 
 i. What is the inward authority, to which the 
 claims of a Gospel, or its preacher, must be brought ? 
 Is it the natural conscience, uneducated, and there- 
 fore (it is said) unsophisticated ? Is it the stalwart 
 Natur-kind from the far West, whose pockets bulge 
 with Walt Whitman ? Is it the amateur private judg- 
 ment, so dear to the sturdy moralist of the street ? 
 Is it a moral mother-wit, sitting with a hair-trigger at 
 the centre of an individualism whose self-confidence 
 is impregnable, and passing its prompt verdict 
 upon everything done or devised ? There is no 
 doubt about the popularity of this order of ration- 
 alism, especially among the more independent races, 
 and their more unschooled strata. It is a claim, 
 too, which a democratic Christianity does much to 
 encourage. The pushing tradesman of a small town 
 enters a theological discussion to say that he always 
 wants a straight answer to a straight question ; and 
 he is not going to be cowed by the people who under- 
 stand it, or bent to a theological popery. But that the
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 5 1 
 
 supernatural eternal Gospel should be staked on an 
 appeal to the healthy and untutored natural con- 
 science is a view so far outgrown that perhaps it 
 need not occupy us longer. Sociology teaches us 
 that even the most self-sufficient man is not a self- 
 made man, but he is made by centuries of heredity 
 and ages of solidarity. And if Christianity meant 
 healthy-mindedness, that itself would surely mean 
 something more than the light of nature or the 
 verdict of the decent pagan man. We may, more- 
 over, take it that the authority of a holy Gospel 
 cannot be proved to the natural man. The offence 
 of the Cross has not ceased. It must first capture 
 him and make him a supernatural man. 
 
 
 
 2. Then, is the adjudicating faculty which 
 chooses our authority the natural conscience 
 educated, when it has in some serious fashion gone to 
 school ? Is it the natural conscience refined ? Is 
 it the natural conscience stimulated by contact with 
 historic and imaginative ideals, and thus developed 
 to a nicer tact of judging the higher claims ? Well, 
 no doubt, a moral teacher and hero like Socrates 
 has a rich and rare power of rousing the conscience, 
 and educating it to approve ideas it once ignored or 
 condemned. He wins our admiration and trust. 
 He elicits our personality. He stirs in us a mind as 
 constant as his own. He quickens also our moral 
 intelligence, and trains our moral discernment. 
 And he does so by sympathy and not antagonism,
 
 52 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 by an imperative which is congenial and not merely 
 imperious, dialectic and not only dogmatic. He 
 may rouse bitter hostility but he also rouses heroic 
 friendship, insight, imitation, or obedience. Or, if 
 he do not actually raise our self to his own height, 
 at least he stirs in us the sense that we ought so to 
 rise, and to become such a soul in our place and way. 
 A moral nature is born, or he leaves us morally more 
 than he found us. 
 
 It is here recognized, you note, that the appraising 
 self must be educated in some due school ; it is not 
 ready to our hand. The preacher would be then 
 principally a formative pastor, tutor, teacher. He 
 is educative rather than evangelical. His method is 
 dialectic and maieutic rather than regenerative. He 
 analyses our truth, and brings our best self to light, 
 rather than creates a new man. But is his result, in 
 this conception of him, always a success ? Does he 
 lay more problems than he stirs ? Does he give us 
 power to deal with final questions and command final 
 answers ? Does he plant us on the rock of finality, 
 where the problems range about a base which they can- 
 not eat away ? Does he not rather stir new questions 
 more urgent than the old ? Thus : "I ought to 
 rise to that height. But how shall I ? I know I 
 should, I do not know how I can. In this region 
 I feel an impotence I feel nowhere else. I can 
 master problems, but how am I to rise to tasks, and 
 keep at their level ? I am a sinful man. My new 
 ideal does as much to oppress me as to exalt me, and 
 often much more. The more it teaches me to see,
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 53 
 
 the less I am able to do. The more it smiles on me 
 as my ideal, the less it seems as if it could ever 
 become mine. ' It is lovely, but it has no arms.' 
 It does not grasp, it does not save. O, wretched 
 man ! How shall my ideal become my destiny, 
 and my vision my goal ? How can my sinful 
 self become my true free moral self? I want a 
 power to give me not vision, nor truth, nor convic- 
 tion alone, but myself. Yea, I want relief from 
 myself. I must be redeemed from myself into the 
 moral freedom I have now learned to crave. 
 
 " ' O for a man to arise in me 
 
 That the man I am may cease to be.' " 
 
 
 
 It is not with our moral freedom, you may mark, 
 as it is with our ordinary mental vision. Intellec- 
 tual progress takes what it finds already to hand, and 
 builds on it. Thus each generation adds to the great 
 reef which is growing under the waves of time to a 
 new mental world. We take up science, discovery, 
 or invention, where our fathers left them. But it is 
 otherwise with our moral selves, and especially with 
 our spiritual selves. We have to start from the be- 
 ginning, or very much nearer it than the intellect 
 does. There is little historic progress in the region 
 of the elemental humanities. Love, hate, jealousy, 
 valour, loyalty, awe, pity, or beauty, are substanti- 
 ally the same for us as they were for Homer and his 
 age. Man is very permanent in what most makes 
 him man. In the case of our central moral man,
 
 54 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 for all the latent furniture of heredity, and all the 
 long bias of evil, we can say of each soul 
 
 "He is the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 
 
 What we have with each soul is rather a fresh case 
 than a new development. And so when God comes 
 to us He brings more than a mere extension of our 
 previous horizon, a supplement to nature, or a 
 development of it. It is not a mere enrichment of 
 our previous mentality. His is not the touch which 
 unfolds the latent germ. It is not merely a case of 
 slitting our husk, or of eliciting the vitality. It is 
 not education. It is revelation. It is not giving 
 effect to our native power, and enlarging us to the 
 destined fulness of our hidden resource. It is not 
 the opulent expansion of our individuality. That 
 is all too romantic. It is a fresh spontaneity of 
 His, a new creation, a free gift. It is a pure gift to our 
 weakness, our need, our helplessness. It is an 
 absolute salvation, not an aid to our self-salvation. 
 Our receptivity is room rather than faculty. We 
 receive a new life rather than gain a new facility. 
 There is not an evolution so much as a new creation. 
 Between man and man it is otherwise. What 
 man does for man is on a basis of parity. He tries 
 to elicit what is latent in a common humanity. 
 It is give and take on both sides. The teacher may 
 even gain more than the taught from acting upon him. 
 But it is not so when one of the parties is God. It is 
 then a relation of disparity. The Christian God at 
 least is man's God in being his Saviour, i.e., in virtue
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 55 
 
 of His difference from man rather than His identity. 
 Christ always stood with God over against man. 
 The object of God with man is not to elicit slumbering 
 divinity, and kiss the sleeping beauty into life. 
 Nor does He gain from us as the teacher does from 
 the taught. God needs none of us as we all need 
 Him. It is not give and take ; it is all giving on 
 His part. In receiving anything from man He 
 receives but what He gives, and in His life we live. 
 Our synergist pride is quelled as we realize that. 
 Our self-satisfaction has its saving rebuff. We are 
 no partners with God, fellow-workers as we may be. 
 Our best faith with all its works is purely the gift of 
 God, because it is roused by His one gift, Christ. 
 He receives man in no such sense as man receives 
 Him. His work with us is much more than educa- 
 tive, more than maieutic. It is paternal, creative. 
 The conscience before Him is in a state where 
 education will not serve it. Merely develop sinful 
 man, and in spite of all the good in him, you only 
 have a greater sinner. The disparity of God and 
 man is not gradual, it is not a matter of degree. 
 And what God has to deal with is not our relative 
 imperfection. He does not simply stoop to us 
 as we keep doing our poor best to reach Him. He 
 does not simply wait for us, and cheer us on with a 
 tender remembrance of the time when He was at 
 our stage and felt the need of a sympathetic father 
 or even brother. The gulf between us is much more, 
 even than the gulf between the creature and the Crea- 
 tor. Great as that distance might be it does not ex-
 
 56 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 elude communion. What ails us is not limitation but 
 transgression, not poverty but alienation. It is the 
 breach of communion that is the trouble the separa- 
 tion, the hostility. We are not His counterparts 
 but His antagonists. There is not only the distance, 
 between Creator and creature, father and child in the 
 natural sense ; but there is a vast and serious dis- 
 turbance of even that relation. There is a huge 
 dislocation. There is that in us and in our sin which 
 is in its very essence intractable to all the processes 
 of a reconciling idea ; something which, to the end, 
 by its very nature, refuses to be taken up as a 
 factor into the largest and most comprehensive pro- 
 cession of divine action ; something which can 
 never be utilized, but can only be destroyed in a 
 mortal moral war ; something which, if God cannot 
 kill it, must be the death of God. And as a race 
 we are not even stray sheep, or wandering pro- 
 digals merely ; we are rebels taken with weapons 
 in our hands. 
 
 Our supreme need from God, therefore, is not the 
 education of our conscience, nor the absorption of 
 our sin, nor even our reconcilement alone, but our 
 redemption. It is not cheer that we need but salva- 
 tion, not help but rescue, not a stimulus but a 
 change, not tonics but life. Our one need of God 
 is a moral need in the strictest holiest sense. The 
 best of nature can never meet it. It involves a new 
 nature, a new world, a new creation. It is the moral 
 need, not to be transfigured but to be saved. And 
 the inner authority is the power which does that.
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 57 
 
 It not merely aids us, nor enlightens us, nor 
 kindles us, nor presents us with an ideal, or a con- 
 tagion, or a sympathy ; but it redeems us by the 
 destruction of our guilt, the neutralizing of the evil 
 we have done, and the hallowing against us of His 
 own holy name. It is the authority of a Redeemer, 
 of one who is the organ to us of a new world. It 
 is a new world in total contrast with the old, yet 
 interpenetrating it ; underlying it, yet not imbedded 
 in it like a germ, but haunting it and urgent at 
 every point, and at one point leaping to light and 
 final effect. 
 
 
 
 3. This authority of the Redeemer is the final 
 authority in Christianity. And, observe, I do not 
 say the authority of Christ, but the authority of 
 Christ as Redeemer, as our new Creator, the authority 
 of Christ's person as wholly gathered up and com- 
 pletely expressed in the Cross, its work, and its 
 Gospel. He is our peace not in His person alone, 
 for that were too quiescent, exemplary, and aesthetic 
 but in the mediation which is the energy, act, and 
 effect of His person for ever. I certainly do not mean 
 the authority of Christ's teaching, supreme as that is 
 over all other teaching on spiritual things. Nor do 
 I mean the authority connected with the magnetism, 
 the impressiveness of His personality the authorita- 
 tiveness of it. Still less do I mean the authority of 
 such of His beliefs as were solid with the naive 
 religious consciousness of His land and age as for
 
 58 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 instance, His references to the Davidic authorship of 
 a Psalm. I mean His authority in the true region 
 where the word authority has its ultimate meaning, 
 in the region of personal interaction, in the moral, 
 the religious region alone, the region where grace 
 acts and faith answers, the evangelical region and not 
 the theological. In the theological region I have said 
 there is, properly speaking, no authorit}* author- 
 ity being predicable not of a truth in theology, but of 
 a theological person whose action on my person 
 makes my religion. This is the authority realized 
 by the most classic types of the Christian experience 
 the authority, not of the conscience however en- 
 lightened, but of Christ in the conscience ; and in 
 the conscience, not as its oracle simply, or its needle, 
 but as its redeemer, regenerator, and new creator. 
 The seat of authority is not the enlightened conscience 
 but the redeemed and regenerate. 
 
 Thus alone do we do justice to moral realism. 
 It is a moral authority that concerns us, I have 
 said. That means, it is the authority for men not in 
 some abstract and conceivable position, nor in some 
 primeval perfection which never was real, but for 
 historic man in his actual moral state ; which is a state 
 not of imperfection only but of impotence for holi- 
 ness, and not of impotence alone but of collective guilt. 
 The more we realize the solidarity of man the more 
 his moral condition becomes a collectivism of guilt. 
 That is to say, the moral authority must be in 
 relation to guilt, and to the guilt of the race ; it 
 must be more than ethical, it must be a religious
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 59 
 
 authority, a saving one, an evangelical one. It is 
 an authority acting not merely on our moral per- 
 ception but on our moral perdition at least on our 
 moral crisis and acting by way of redemption, 
 and not merely by way of injunction, nor by way 
 of impression, nor by way of prestige. And the 
 redemption thus demanded by our actual case is not 
 merely eschatological, at the far consummate end of 
 things. Nor is it merely ethical, in the way of promot- 
 ting our moral development and improvement. The 
 chief criterion of Christianity is not its ethical results 
 and amendments. These are but the consequences 
 of it, the fruits of its reconciliation. It is evan- 
 gelical in this way that it begins with reconciliation. 
 It is the destruction by God in Christ of sin's guilt 
 and sin's distrust, and sin's blocking of the sky. 
 Such is our central case and need. Whatever, there- 
 fore, meets that is the final and sole authority of 
 our race, from which all that claims authority must 
 deduce. Set that right in every man by what sets 
 right also the race, and right views and right 
 relations will follow as the night the day. The 
 great creed and the great millennium must be alike 
 confessions of the living faith which is our contact 
 with Him who sits on the throne and makes all 
 things new and true. 
 
 
 
 But this is to say that the final authority in 
 human affairs is, after all, the preacher' s authority. 
 It is on this authority alone that the preacher must
 
 60 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 rely; and the preacher's is the only function that 
 must rely on this authority alone. He, of all men, 
 is most dependent on his message. He is depen- 
 dent on his personality only as his Gospel makes 
 it, and as it shows forth the Gospel. You hear 
 it said, with a great air of religious common sense, 
 that it is the man that the modern age demands 
 in the pulpit, and not his doctrine. It is the man 
 that counts, and not his creed. But this is one of 
 those shallow and plausible half-truths which have 
 the success that always follows when the easy, 
 obvious underpart is blandly offered for the 
 arduous whole. No man has any right in the 
 pulpit in virtue of his personality or manhood in 
 itself, but only in virtue of the sacramental value of 
 his personality for his message. We have no business 
 to worship the elements, which means, in this case, to 
 idolise the preacher. (Fitly enough in Rome the 
 deification l of the priest continues the transubstan- 
 tiation of the elements.) To be ready to accept any 
 kind of message from a magnetic man is to lose the 
 Gospel in mere impressionism. It is to sacrifice the 
 moral in religion to the aesthetic. And it is fatal to 
 the authority either of the pulpit or the Gospel. The 
 Church does not live by its preachers, but by its 
 Word. 
 
 
 The last authority, then, is the evangelical. 
 
 1 "Eritis sicut dii." Cp. Gen. iii. 5 with the Catechism 0} 
 Trent, II. 7. 2 : " Sacerdotes non solum angeli sed dii appel- 
 lantur."
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 61 
 
 For what is our authority but that to which we are 
 not our own ? And that is what we find absolutely 
 in our evangelical faith. Its appeal is not to the 
 natural conscience, individual, amateur, and self- 
 sufficient. Nor is it to the enlightened conscience 
 of civilization, cultivated by all the moral thought 
 and discipline of history, society, or imagination. 
 But it is to the actual conscience of the race, to the 
 conscience taken as we find it, to the conscience as 
 sinful and redeemed, the conscience struck into 
 self-despair, horrified with the world's moral tragedy, 
 and plucked into salvation by God's and man's last 
 moral crisis in the Cross, where the greatest tragedy 
 turns the greatest triumph of all. The appeal is to a 
 conscience in such a state that it must be saved, and 
 re-empowered ; and saved by no mere contact with 
 God, but only by a moral act of God at least as ener- 
 getic as the universe, as real, historic, and tragic as the 
 sin, i.e. by God's holy reaction of grace, of invading, 
 mastering, regenerating grace. The inmost authority 
 being moral is the most objective thing we know ; 
 speaking to and through the conscience, and to a 
 conscience made capable by grace of appraising and 
 appropriating in a way impossible to the natural self. 
 It emerges and wells up under psychological condi- 
 tions, but it is not a psychological product. It 
 may be subliminal rather than supernal, but it is not 
 ourselves, it is objective. And nothing is so objec- 
 tive, so authoritative as that which at our inmost 
 moral centre saves us from ourselves. The thing most 
 immanent in us is a transcendent thing, nay, a des-
 
 62 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 cendant thing. The more immanent the forum, the 
 more objective and invasive do we feel the redemption. 
 But we must be redeemed, ere we realize this. To the 
 natural man it is foolishness. He finds all salvation to 
 be but the great recuperative effort of man's inalien- 
 able divinity, his indefectible essential identity with 
 God, which is the only true eternal life. And the 
 act of saving grace is nothing but our own act of 
 faith in our profound and innate selves. Against 
 all which I would say, in a word, we have to be 
 redeemed into the power of appreciating redemption, 
 and appropriating the greatest moral act man knows 
 the Cross. 
 
 Thus we can never settle the question of a final 
 moral authority (which is the last authority of all) 
 except in the region where will meets will and 
 faith takes home God's act of grace. It is quite 
 insoluble in the region where cosmic process takes 
 the place of moral action, or in the region where con- 
 science responds but to an ideal, or reason accepts 
 truth. It is not with truth we have to do but reality. 
 And reality is a moral thing, a matter of a person, 
 and his will, and his act. Life in its reality is a great 
 act and choice, and not a long process. And there- 
 fore, the authority is not a standard, as a truth, or 
 an architecture of truths, might be. It is a living 
 law. And a living law, not in the sense of a historic 
 institution, acting as the custodian of truth, and the 
 trustee of its development. It is a living, holy, 
 historic God and Saviour witnessed, preached, and 
 truly conveyed, by the whole Church, but dispensed
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 63 
 
 by none. It is a living and holy God in much 
 more than presence (which were mere mysticism). 
 It is God in power, in moral power, in historic 
 and sempiternal action. It is a God real in a 
 historic act, which is perpetual in its energy, 
 achieved at one point but throbbing at every other, 
 a timeless act, parallel with every human action, 
 and mutually involuted with it (if one may so say), 
 but involved in the way of struggle and conquest 
 rather than mere permeation an Eternal Cross 
 rather than a universal Spirit. It is this act 
 that is prolonged as the arduous emergence through 
 history of that Kingdom of God, which, for all its 
 immanence, is much more a gift to history than 
 its product. The last authority is God in His 
 supreme, saving act of grace to mankind in Christ's 
 Cross, which is the power of God addressed to what 
 is at once the power and the weakness in us, our will, 
 conscience, and total moral self. Our last authority 
 is something we can only obey by subjugation, 
 reconciliation, and worship, and not by mere assent. 
 It is that saving act of God which makes all our best 
 moral action possible. It is an invasion of us, how- 
 ever inward, it is not an emergence from us ; nor is 
 it merely the stroke upon our hard shell which 
 releases our innate divinity. It is an invasion, 
 creative more than tonic, redeeming rather than 
 releasing, putting into the Soul a new mainspring 
 and not disentangling the old which had caught. 
 
 But, invasion as it is, it is yet no assault on the 
 sanctuary of our personal freedom. We are mastered
 
 64 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 but not concussed. For it is the one influence, the 
 one authority, that gives us to ourselves, and puts 
 us in possession of our moral freedom. The true 
 freedom of man springs from the holy sovereignty 
 of God, which we only know in Christ, in redeeming 
 action. There our freedom has its charter and not 
 its doom. Even if we started psychologically free, 
 the result of the choice of evil is to impair freedom ; 
 and an impaired freedom goes on to a destroyed free- 
 dom. Who doeth sin is the slave of ski. But God's 
 sovereignty is redemption. He is never so sovereign 
 as there. He is never so absolute as in making free- 
 dom. Redemption is not a second best sovereignty, 
 in the room of a best of all forever lost. It is a deliver- 
 ance which makes us choose Supreme good. And 
 to choose good is to be free ; while to be good without 
 choice is neither goodness nor freedom. To choose 
 good is not Like choosing evil. It is not immaterial 
 to our freedom what we choose so long as we are 
 choosers. If we choose evil, our very choice enslaves 
 us. But if it be good we choose we acquire our- 
 selves and our freedom. And if we choose good it 
 can only mean that we choose it, not as our ally, but 
 as our sovereign. That is to say, it is choosing God 
 and God's choice. And God's authoritative choice 
 of us is a choice into life and therefore liberty. His 
 sovereign choice of us is choosing us to choose good and 
 enlarge our freedom. The authority of our Redeemer 
 then does not concuss our personality as an author- 
 ity would do which was institutional, impersonal, 
 external in that sense, like a church, or even a book.
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 65 
 
 For the authority of our Redeemer over our person 
 is a personal authority. And the redemption itself 
 is the greatest moral act of existence ; and therefore 
 it is the freest act. Therefore also it is the act 
 most creative of freedom, and therefore most authori- 
 tative for it. Our inchoate personality bows herein 
 to something more personal than itself, and not less, 
 something not less spiritual but more, something in 
 which it comes to itself. The authority as redemp- 
 tive is a living power, person, and act, revealing, 
 making, giving freedom. It is the holy and com- 
 plete person, creating personality. It is not a truth, 
 nor an ideal, nor an institution, with their external and 
 aesthetic effect, but it is a personal act, the eternal 
 act of an eternal person, with all the moral effect due 
 to that. As a redeeming authority it says, " Be free 
 and obey." It does not say, " Obey and be free." 
 
 Thus, if the classic religion is Christianity, the 
 classic type of Christianity is the experience of 
 moral redemption and not merely ethical reform. 
 Or rather it is the experience of a redeemer. Because 
 it is not the sense of the experience that is the main 
 matter, but the source of the experience, and its 
 content. It is not our experience we are conscious 
 of that would be self-conscious piety but it is 
 Christ. It is not our experience we preach, but 
 the Christ who comes in our experience. We 
 preach not ourselves, but Christ.
 
 66 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 
 
 4. Christ, I have said, is the source of our experi- 
 ence. Let me, in addressing preachers, dwell on that . 
 The age in which we live shows a singular con- 
 junction in its return to the historic Christ, on 
 the one hand, and its devotion to a subjective 
 type of religion, on the other. Its allegiance is 
 distracted between the historic Christ and the 
 Christian spirit meaning thereby the Christian 
 style, manner, ethic, or temper between Christ's 
 person and the Christian principle. At one 
 moment it pursues its quest for a biography of 
 Christ ; at another it says that this were but 
 the Christ according to perishable, passing flesh ; and 
 it devotes itself therefore to the worship and culture 
 of a perennial principle of which Christ was but 
 the supreme expression. And faith then becomes a 
 devout and altruistic frame of mind, a subjectivism, 
 instead of an act diffused through life, a life-act 
 of self-committal into Christ's hands and Christ's 
 Act of Grace. Attention is withdrawn from the 
 contents of faith to the mood of faith. If we press 
 for attention to the content of faith we are ruined 
 by the charge of theology. For the mere temper 
 of faith is comparatively indifferent to its theologi- 
 cal veritable content. Let us have sweetness and 
 charity at any cost to reality. And its machinery 
 works whether you drop into the slot the legitimate 
 metal or an iron disc. 
 
 Well, you can have no adequate Christ without
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 67 
 
 theology when you turn seriously to realize or explain 
 Him. But Christ is not there simply as the theological 
 content of faith. That would not give Him His 
 authority. He is not there simply as the substance 
 of our belief, nor simply as the object of faith. He 
 is there, above all, as the standing source, nay, the 
 creator of our faith. This is where our sense of 
 communion with Christ differs by a world from any 
 alleged converse with Virgin or Saint. They are at 
 most but the helpers, and not the fountain, of our 
 faith. If our Christian experience tell us anything, 
 it is not about ourselves in the first place, nor about 
 our creed, but about Christ. And it tells us of Him 
 as the Giver of faith, the source, the creator of the 
 experience. That is what is meant by saying that 
 our very faith is the gift of God. It cannot be 
 worked up by us, nor by any one working at us. 
 It is evoked by contact with Christ, who is the gift 
 of God. That is why we must preach Christ, and not 
 about Christ, why we must set the actual constrain- 
 ing Christ before people, and not coax or bully people 
 into decision. If we put the veritable Christ before 
 them He will rouse the faith before they know 
 where they are. Our faith says, then, that He is the 
 Creator of our faith. He is not simply its datum. 
 You do not simply explain your faith by a historic, or 
 a psychological reference to Christ as postulate. 
 You do not use Christ to account for your faith, in 
 a reflective, dialectic, hypothetic way. Your faith is 
 faith hi Him as acting, rousing your faith, creating 
 it, and not merely receiving it. In your faith you
 
 68 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 are more conscious and sure of Him than you are ol 
 your faith. For your faith, you well know, may 
 fail Him, but you know still better that He will 
 not fail your faith. And you are more conscious 
 and sure of Him, as the source and cause of your 
 experience, than you are of the experience itself, 
 which you forget to think of. The very apostles 
 never asked us to believe their experience, nor to 
 believe on the ground of it, but to believe with 
 them in Christ. What your experience tells you is 
 that both the frame of mind and its stateable contents 
 were produced, and are produced, by Him and His 
 act. He, as the creator of your faith, is more real to 
 you than the fabric of your faith, or the sense of it. 
 He is not behind your faith in the sense of being a 
 datum which you must assume for it, and which 
 one day you will verify. But he is realized in your 
 faith as its effective cause and permanent reality 
 That is in the very definition of faith. He is not only 
 objective there, He is initiative. He is known not 
 simply in the experience, but as the creator of the 
 experience. He is not simply reached by faith, 
 He brings it to pass. It is the very life and move- 
 ment of the faith to worship Hun as its creator. 
 That is faith, it does not flow from faith. Faith 
 does not imply Him, it answers Him. Faith is 
 nothing else than myself believing. And it is Him- 
 self I meet. And it is me He saves and re-creates. I 
 do not infer Him, therefore, from my faith. My faith 
 is myself, my moral self, finding Him, and finding 
 that He first found me. It does not simply bear
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 69 
 
 upon Him, it flows from Him. And our Christian 
 experience is not merely an appreciation, or even 
 an appropriation, of Christ, but the life action of 
 Christ in us, and His action as Redeemer appropriating 
 us. We are " potential Christs " only in this sense 
 not that we grow into Christs, but that by faith 
 Christ is formed and grows in us, and we live not, 
 but Christ lives in us. And in this capacity He is 
 our one authority, to whom we are not our own. 
 And the preaching of our faith is what I venture 
 to call the prolongation of His action and His Gospel. 
 Our experience of Christ is thus quite different 
 from our experience of an objective world. Our 
 moral sense of an agent, and that agent a Redeemer, 
 is a different thing from the inference or postulate 
 of an objective world behind sense to account for our 
 impressions. That may be a cause but this is a 
 Creator. When the objective announces itself as a 
 heart and will, which not only chooses, or influences, 
 me, but saves me, then the response of my active 
 will, of myself as a person, is a different thing from 
 the commonsense that instinctively places an object 
 behind passive sensation. The relation of a cause 
 to a sensation is not analogous to the relation of a 
 person to a person. And our relation to Christ is 
 no less different from our attitude to an auxiliary 
 presence, like Saint or Virgin, which aids but does 
 not redeem, and which is not my master because 
 I owe it something much less than my eternal 
 self
 
 jo The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 These are not metaphysical considerations, how 
 ever trying they may be to our loose religiosity, 
 but they are positive, practical and experienced 
 religion taking itself in earnest, bringing itself to 
 book, taking a census of itself. I but make explicit 
 in the statement what is implicit in the experienced 
 fact, and present there though all unknown. And 
 its testimony is that Christ does not stand as the 
 crowning, stimulating, releasing instance of the 
 best that is immanent in man. He is not the divine 
 virtuoso, who thoroughly understands his human 
 orchestra, and can bring out of it what none else can. 
 He is not the sublime divine comrade, full of endless 
 cheer, because he has been through it all before 
 us, and has come out on the other side. He is not 
 the herald of God's forgiveness for sins that but 
 hamper our development or soil the surface without 
 tainting our core. But, for ah* the classic Christian 
 experience, from the New Testament down, He 
 is the Redeemer of our total personality from its 
 radical recalcitrance to God's will, and from its 
 impotence to obey it, even when it has moved to 
 desire it. The natural man is a nisus against God, 
 against a God he cannot but feel. And the world's 
 treatment of Christ shows that the higher and better 
 God's will for us is, the more man repudiates, rebels, 
 and fights against it. The authority which is really 
 in question is the will of God. It is personal. And 
 that is why our personality resents it. We yield
 
 The Authority of the Preacher 71 
 
 far more readily to a process or an idea, because it 
 makes no such demand on our self-will as the will 
 of a personal God does. There are many attractions 
 for self-love, vanity, or ambition, in Monism with 
 its vague lack of moral realism and severe impera- 
 tive. Everything leaves us with a subtle sense of 
 superiority and self-satisfaction but the Will of 
 God, which breaks us to our true peace. And the 
 only means of reducing us to acknowledge the place 
 and practicability of that will is by Redemption. 
 To assert it was useless ; to magnify it failed. It 
 had itself to redeem us in Christ, and to bring such 
 a remission of past guilt as should change our total 
 attitude towards self and God, give us a confidence 
 in self despair, bring us into loving communion for 
 life, and confer on us the Gift of Life Eternal. 
 
 There is but one Authority therefore for human 
 life that life being what it is. It is its historic 
 Redeemer, in the one critical and creative moral act 
 of its history. All the amateur philosophandering 
 of the hour is fumbling to escape from a historic, 
 positive, evangelical Christianity, and to preserve 
 before God a remnant of self-respect, self-possession, 
 and selfwill. But the prime content both of Chris- 
 tian and human experience is the Saviour, trium- 
 phant, not merely after the Cross, but upon it. This 
 cross is the message that makes the preacher. And 
 I have tried to make good what I said at the outset 
 of this lecture, that the preacher is the organ of the 
 only real and final authority for mankind. As to 
 creed in its form and detail, if all men accepted
 
 72 The Authority of the Preacher 
 
 that practical and absolute authority for their 
 moral selves there would be no lack of either an 
 inspiration or a standard for their belief, thought, 
 action, or affection, throughout. An authority abso- 
 lute in our experienced religion will marshal to its place 
 by an inevitable moral psychology, our theology, 
 philosophy, and politics alike. The King alone 
 can make the Kingdom. The Christ of our faith 
 will organize our life. The power that makes the 
 soul will make the Church. What makes the faith 
 will make and remake the creed. And the Gospel 
 that made the book will bless the book, and give us 
 the freedom in it that it gave us through it. If the 
 son make us free we shall be free throughout, and 
 free indeed. To be the slave of Christ is to be the 
 master of every fate. And this is as true for 
 Humanity as it is for every soul.
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS 
 CHURCH, OR PREACHING AS 
 WORSHIP
 
 Ill 
 
 The Preacher and His Church, 01 
 Preaching as Worship 
 
 I HAVE been complaining (in the close of my 
 first lecture) that Christians do not know their 
 Bible. But even if they did, the preacher would 
 still be at a loss in another way. He has to face the 
 modern man's neglect of the Church no less than of 
 the Bible. He meets impatient reformers who take 
 a tone of superior realism, and coarsely speak of 
 Church life and the edification of believers as a 
 mere " coddling of the Saints." He lives in an age 
 when the Kingdom of God engrosses more Christian 
 interest than the Church of Christ, and Christian 
 people are more devoted to the busy effort of getting 
 God's will done on earth than to the deep repose 
 of communion with God's finished will in Christ. 
 It is characteristic of much of the Christian activity 
 of the last half-century that it aims not so much 
 at a Christocracy, where Christ has a household and 
 is master of it, as at a Christolatry a mere \arpeia 
 of Christ, where he is worshipped mainly through 
 the service of the public. It is needless to point 
 out to the student of the New Testament how 
 flatly this contradicts its genius. And it is useless 
 
 75
 
 76 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 to urge the point with those who treat the New 
 Testament as archaeology. 
 
 Some of us who are greatly in sympathy with 
 these churchless efforts, like the Salvation Army, 
 may yet believe that if they became the ruling type 
 their end would be lost. We may believe that, by the 
 will of Christ, it is only through a real Church, truly 
 Christianized, that Humanity can be served and saved 
 for the Kingdom. We may feel that the love of 
 Humanity could not survive apart from not only 
 our love of Christ, but also from the personal com- 
 munion with Christ in a Church which feeds that 
 love. The <f>t\av6pc07ria is only possible through the 
 <f)i\aSe\(f>ia. Do good to all men, but especially to 
 those that are of the household of faith. Our fellow 
 Christians have claims on us that may precede those 
 of our fellow men. The Communion of saints is 
 more to God than the enthusiasm of Humanity. 
 The neighbour, in the New Testament, is not the 
 same as the brother. 1 The brotherhood of the New 
 Testament is indeed meant to cover the race at last, 
 but it is the brotherhood of Christian faith and love, 
 not of mankind. The victory which overcomes 
 the world is not humane love but Christian faith. 
 It is won not by the natural heart but by the re- 
 creating Cross. The goats in the parable were 
 condemned not for being of the world ; for they were 
 a part of the Church ; they were not wolves or 
 dogs. But they were false to the love which makes 
 
 1 This point would richly repay working out in the 
 interests of a true Social Christianity.
 
 or Preaching as Worship 77 
 
 the Church, the love which crowns true faith in 
 Christ with kindness to the needy ones of the 
 sacred flock. The tragedy of the race is too awful 
 and sordid for any salvation that is not con- 
 stantly fed by the Saviour ever rising through 
 His community from His Cross and grave. Devoted 
 men and women, who go on now by the impulse 
 from centuries of the cross, would break down under 
 the horrible conditions of life where it most needs 
 saving, if the habit of a faith and fraternity bred in 
 the Church alone were to die out. 
 
 Many of us realize that. But great numbers of 
 people, even Christian people, do not realize it. 
 They call roughly upon the preacher to spend less 
 time and concern upon maturing the converted, 
 or edifying comfortable believers ; and they urge 
 him to go straight to the world to Society or to the 
 masses, to the natural man, cultured or coarse. It 
 is a large question that opens here. I cannot do 
 much more here than place myself on the side of 
 the sound principle that it is the Church that is the 
 great missionary to Humanity, and not apostles, 
 prophets, and agents here and there. If a preacher 
 is to act on the world he must, as a rule, do it through 
 his Church. And his Church, if it be not built up 
 in its faith, will in due course cease to exist. Many 
 Christians are like Peter. They need several con- 
 versions (Luke xxii. 32). And a neglected Church 
 will lose that collective wisdom which alone forms 
 a sound judgment on the difficult moral issues of 
 Society. Practical wisdom speaks only amid the
 
 78 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 / 
 
 full-grown ; and our souls mature only in a living 
 Christian community. Of course, if the preacher 
 so preaches that his Church cultivates the snugness 
 of pious comfort instead of the humble confidence 
 of evangelical faith, then also the Church is in 
 decay, and it will in due time become but a reli- 
 gious circle. But for all that the minister's first duty 
 is to his Church. He must make it a Church that 
 acts on the world through him indeed, but also other- 
 wise. He is to act at its head, and not in its stead. 
 In this matter the preacher must refuse to have his 
 duty dictated by those without, who have little or no 
 Church sympathy or responsibility. I have observed 
 that the demand on the preacher to ignore his people 
 and go straight to the world, is largely made by the 
 world, by influences, at least, which voice the 
 verdict of the world rather than the insight of the 
 Church, by religious parliamentarians, eager social- 
 ists, or by people who are willing to utilize the 
 Church but quite evade its responsibilities. Some 
 are, like many sections of the press or of literature, 
 voices that stand aloof from the Christian burden 
 and speak often in severe criticism. Or they are 
 that end of the Church which is more moulded by 
 these influences than by Bible or Faith. They 
 speak as if Christ's first obedience had been to 
 human needs and not to God's will. And they are 
 not much entitled to an opinion as to what the 
 proper method of the Gospel is, or the consequent 
 duty of the Church. The genius of the Gospel is 
 after all best understood by the personal believers
 
 or Preaching as Worship 79 
 
 in the Gospel. And that genius certainly is to 
 go to the world ; but it is to go there through the 
 Church, and the Church's Word. It goes through 
 the common action of believing men, who are mature 
 enough in their educated faith to have measured both 
 the world and the Gospel, and to be sure, beyond 
 cavil, that their Gospel is the tragic, desperate world's 
 one hope. They are men who have been evangelized 
 to good ripe purpose. The Gospel of a moral 
 salvation will never seize the world through men 
 who are but thinly sure, or personally neutral, 
 and have only an admiration for Christian ethic. 
 The act of Grace can never be conveyed by men 
 on whom it does not act. As little will it capture 
 the world through men who are converted and no 
 more, who are not built up by the spiritual educa- 
 tion and insight of a living Church. 
 
 
 
 The one great preacher in history, I would con- 
 tend, is the Church. And the first business of the 
 individual preacher is to enable the Church to 
 preach. Yet so that he is not its echo but its living 
 voice, not the echo of its consciousness but the organ 
 of its Gospel. Either he gives the Church utter- 
 ance, or he gives it insight into the Gospel it utters. 
 He is to preach to the Church from the Gospel so 
 that with the Church he may preach the Gospel 
 to the world. He is so to preach to the Church 
 that he shall also preach from the Church. That 
 is to say, he must be a sacrament to +^fi Church.
 
 8o The Preacher and his Church 
 
 that with the Church he may become a missionary 
 to the world. 
 
 You perceive what high ground I take. The 
 preacher's place hi the Church is sacramental. It 
 is not sacerdotal, but it is sacramental. He 
 mediates the word to the Church from faith to 
 faith, from his faith to theirs, from one stage of 
 their common faith to another. He does not there 
 speak to un-faith. He is a living element in 
 Christ's hands (broken, if need be) for the distri- 
 bution and increment of Grace. He is laid on the 
 altar of the Cross. He is not a mere reporter, nor 
 a mere lecturer, on sacred things. He is not merely 
 illuminative, he is augmentive. His work is not 
 to enlighten simply, but to empower and enhance. 
 Men as they leave him should be not only clearer but 
 greater, not only surer but stronger, not only inter- 
 ested, nor only instructed, nor only affected, but fed 
 and increased. He has not merely to show certain 
 things but to get them home, and so home that they 
 change life, either in direction or in scale. It is 
 only an age like the present age of mere knowledge 
 that tends to make preaching the statement of sound 
 and simple truth, interesting but powerless. It 
 is only an age which starves the idea of revelation, 
 by its neglect of the sacramental idea, that 
 reduces preaching to evangelizing alone. It is 
 only an age engrossed with impressions and careless 
 about realities that could regard the preacher's 
 prime work as that of converting the world, to the 
 neglect of transforming the Church. It is only
 
 or Preaching as Worship 8 i 
 
 such an age that could think of preaching as some- 
 thing said with more or less force, instead of some- 
 thing done with more or less power. We spend 
 our polemic upon the Mass, and fitly enough in 
 proper place. But the Catholic form of worship 
 will always have a vast advantage over ours so 
 long as people come away from its central act 
 with the sense of something done in the spirit- 
 world, while they leave ours with the sense only 
 of something said to this present world. In true 
 preaching, as in a true sacrament, more is done than 
 said. And much is well done which is poorly said. 
 Let the preacher but have real doings with God 
 and even with a stammering tongue and a loose 
 syntax he will do much for life which has never 
 yet been done by a finished style. The preacher 
 may go "lame but lovely ", to use Charles Lamb's 
 fine phrase. His word may lack finish if it have 
 hands and feet. He is a man of action. He is 
 among the men who do things. That is why 
 I call him a sacramental man, not merely an 
 expository, declaratory man. In a sacrament is 
 there not something done, not merely shown, not 
 merely recalled ? It is no mere memorial. How 
 can you have a mere memorial of one who is 
 always living, always present, always more potent 
 than our act of recall is, always the mover of it ? 
 What he once put there might be a memorial, but 
 what he is always putting there is much more than 
 that. It is at least his organ. It is, indeed, his act. It 
 
 is something practical and not spectacular. A reve- 
 p.p. &
 
 82 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 lation may be but something exhibited, but in a sacra- 
 ment there is something effected. And the one revela- 
 tion in the strict sense is the sacrament of the cross, 
 the cross as an effective act of redemption. A 
 revelation of redemption is a revelation of something 
 done ; and it is only a deed that can reveal a deed. If 
 the preacher reveal redemption he does it by a deed, 
 by a deed in which the Redeemer is the chief actor, 
 by some self -reproduction by Christ, some function 
 of the work of the Cross. He has to reproduce the 
 word of the beginning, the word of the Cross which 
 is really the Cross's own energy, the Cross in action. 
 No true preaching of the Cross can be other than 
 part of the action of the Cross. If a man preach 
 let him preach as the Oracle of God, let him preach 
 as Christ did, whose true pulpit was His Cross, 
 whose Cross made disciples apostles, in whose Cross 
 God first preached to the world, whose preaching 
 from the Cross has done for the world what all His 
 discourses even His discourses failed to do. 
 
 The preacher, in reproducing this Gospel word of 
 God, prolongs Christ's sacramental work. The 
 real presence of Christ crucified is what makes 
 preaching. It is what makes of a speech a sermon, 
 and of a sermon Gospel. This is the work of God, 
 this continues His work in Christ, that ye should 
 believe in Him whom He hath sent. We do not 
 repeat or imitate that Cross, on the one hand ; and we 
 do not merely state it, on the other. It re-enacts 
 itself in us. God's living word reproduces itself as a 
 living act. It is not inert truth, but quick power.
 
 or Preaching as Worship 83 
 
 All teaching about the truth as it is in Jesus culmi- 
 nates in the preaching of the truth which is Jesus, 
 the self-reproduction of the word of reconciliation in 
 the Cross. Every true sermon, therefore, is a sacra- 
 mental time and act. It is God's Gospel act reassert- 
 ing itself in detail. The preacher's word, when he 
 preaches the gospel and not only delivers a sermon, 
 is an effective deed, charged with blessing or with 
 judgment. We eat and drink judgment to ourselves 
 as we hear. It is not an utterance, and not a feat, 
 and not a treat. It is a sacramental act, done 
 together with the community in the name and 
 power of Christ's redeeming act and our common 
 faith. It has the real presence of the active Word 
 whose creation it is. If Christ set up the sacra- 
 ment, His Gospel set up the sermon. And if He 
 is real in our sacramental act still, no less is His 
 deed real in our preached word which prolongs 
 that deed. And it is known to be real by the 
 insight of faith, however many counterfeits there 
 are, with no insight but only zeal, and sometimes 
 with nothing but stir. 
 
 Our Catholic opponents charge us with having 
 cut ourselves off from the true Church by having 
 lost the sacramental note. And I will confess to some 
 fear that it may be true, though in another sense 
 than theirs. For them the centre of gravity in the 
 sacrament is in the elements in the change effected 
 on them, and, through them, on us. But for us the 
 centre of gravity in any sacrament lies not in the 
 material element but in the communal act . That is the
 
 84 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 site of Christ's real presence. It is not metaphysical 
 but moral 'and personal. It is not corporeal but 
 collective. We do not partake of Christ's body in 
 the form of any substance, however refined and 
 ethereal. For us the body of Christ means the 
 person of Christ, 1 and the whole person of Christ 
 is gathered into His saving, atoning act. And what 
 we perform is an act of communal reunion with 
 His person in its crucial and complete act. His 
 great act of Redemption renews itself in His Church. 
 We re-enter by act the communion not of Christ's 
 substance but, as the apostle says, of His death that 
 is, of His saving act. It is in the Church's act that 
 the real presence behind it takes effect, the real 
 presence of Him who was above all things the will 
 and deed of God, God's eternal will and new testa- 
 ment. It is the Great Act of Christ finding itself 
 anew in the act of the Church. 
 
 Now this is really what occurs in another aspect 
 in the Sacrament of the Word, in the Church's 
 preaching of the Gospel. To be effective our 
 preaching must be sacramental. It must be an 
 act prolonging the Great Act, mediating it, and 
 conveying it. Its energy and authority is that of 
 the Great Act. The Gospel spoken by man is the 
 energizing of the Gospel achieved by God. Its 
 authority is not that of the preacher's personality , nor 
 even of his faith, nay, not even of his message alone, 
 but that of the divine action behind him, whereof 
 
 1 "All flesh " = all persons. "One flesh " = one dual 
 personality.
 
 or Preaching as Worship 85 
 
 he himself is but as it were the sacramental element, 
 and not the sacramental Grace. If our preaching 
 is not more sacramental than the Catholic altar 
 I do not say more eloquent or more able, but more 
 sacramental then it is the altar that must pre- 
 vail over all our No-Popery. For religion is sacra- 
 mental. Where it is not it becomes bald. And 
 the only question is, where the sacrament lies. We 
 place it in the Word of Gospel. Accedit verbum etfit 
 sacramentum. Nothing but the Word made Sacra- 
 ment can make a Sacrament out of elements, and 
 keep it in its proper place. But what a task for 
 our preachers to fulfil ! 
 
 It is this sacramental note that I fear our preach- 
 ing often loses. It is this objective power, over- 
 ruling both the temperament of the preacher and 
 the temper of his time. We speak freely and 
 finely about the Gospel, but does the Gospel come to 
 its own in it all ? Does it preach itself through us 
 with power ? Are our sermons deeds, ' action-sermons '? 
 They cost much labour, and what do we take by it ? 
 They are not without some effect, but are they real 
 causes in the religious life ? If they are not, is it 
 because they lack will-power, because they are 
 exercises more than acts, productions more than 
 powers, which aim at impression more than at 
 change ? Is it because they lack behind them the 
 volume of a Church's conviction, a Church's faith, 
 the impact of a whole Church's will ? Is it because 
 we are more eager to have in our pulpits the manly 
 man than the new man ?
 
 86 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 True preaching presupposes a Church, and not 
 merely a public. And wherever the Church 
 idea fades into that of a mere religious club or 
 association you have a decay in preaching. Wher- 
 ever the people are but a religious lecture society 
 the pulpit sinks. When it is idolized it always sinks. 
 It does not lose in interest, or in the sympathetic 
 note, but it loses in power, which is the first thing 
 in a Gospel. If the preacher but hold the mirror 
 up to our finer nature the people soon forget what 
 manner of men they are. 
 
 But you point out to me that the preaching of 
 the Apostles was addressed to the public, that it 
 was very largely of the gathering, of the missionary, 
 kind. Yes, but even that began and worked from 
 the faith it found. It began with the susceptible 
 among the Jews. At first it was not so much con- 
 verting for Gentiles as stirring for Jews. It was always 
 with the local synagogue that Paul began when he 
 could, with the votaries of the Old Testament Word ; 
 and while he could he worked through them or their 
 proselytes. Jesus Himself began so. His relations 
 beyond Israel grew out of His relations with Israel. 
 It was His earnest dealings with Israel that provoked 
 the Cross, which alone universalized the Gospel. So 
 the preacher has his starting point in the stated and 
 solemn assemblies of the Church, though he does 
 not end there. Through these, he works also 
 on his public who are present, though not of the 
 Church. Then in the end he goes to the world
 
 or Preaching as Worship 87 
 
 without. But his first duty, if he is a settled pastor, 
 and not a preaching friar, is to his Church. Nothing 
 could be more misplaced, when a young preacher 
 enters on a Church, than a neglect or contempt 
 of its corporate life and creed, or a sudden inversion 
 of these in order that he may get at the world. He 
 has no right to stop the building that he may start 
 elsewhere. He has no right to use his Church 
 merely to provide himself with an outside pulpit. It 
 is together that they must go to the world, he and 
 his Church. What Christ founded was not an 
 order of preachers, nor the institution of preaching, 
 but a community, a Church, whose first charge 
 His preaching should be. It is Church and preacher 
 together that reach the world. 
 
 The preaching even to the Church, being in the 
 presence of the public, has of course due regard 
 to their presence. The sermon is not a mere 
 homily to an inner circle. It is gospelling. 
 The Church is addressed in the presence of 
 people who are not of the Church. The preacher 
 indeed renews for believers the reality of the 
 Gospel ; but he does it in a large way that con- 
 cerns also those who have not confessed their 
 faith explicitly. He dwells for the most part on 
 the large and broad features of the Gospel rather 
 than on individual and casuistic situations. He 
 declares the whole counsel of God ; that is, the counse 
 of God as a whole. If he handle individual cases, 
 it is as illustrations of wider truth. He leaves cases 
 of conscience to private intercourse. He is not
 
 8 8 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 in the pulpit a director of conscience so much as a 
 shepherd or a seeker of souls . And he may give expres- 
 sion to his own private experiences only in so far as 
 is seemly and useful for the more public aspects of 
 his Gospel. If he is ever beside himself, it must be 
 privately to God ; for the people's sake he is sober 
 and sane. Preaching is not simply pastoral visita- 
 tion on a large scale. Teaching from house to house 
 meant for the apostles not visitation, but minister- 
 ing to the Church gathered in private houses, as 
 it had then to be. 
 
 The first vis-d-vis of the preacher, then, is not 
 the world, but the Gospel community. The word 
 is living only in a living community. Its spirit 
 can act outwards only as it grows inwardly and 
 animates a body duly fed and cared for. The 
 preacher has to do this tending. He has to declare 
 the Church's word, and to utter the Church's faith, 
 to itself, in order that he and the Church together 
 may declare them to the world. The Church may 
 use, but cannot rely upon, evangelists who are 
 evangelists and nothing else. When the preacher 
 speaks to believers it is to build them up as a Chris- 
 tian community ; when he speaks to the world 
 it is to build them into a Christian community. 
 And the Church is built up by taking sanctuary, by 
 stopping to realize its own faith, by the repetition 
 of its own old Gospel, by turning aside to see 
 its great sight, by standing still to see the salvation 
 of the Lord. 
 
 
 Its own old Gospel ! It is not needful that the
 
 or Preaching as Worship 89 
 
 preacher should be original as a genius is, but only 
 as a true believer is. What he brings to the Church 
 is not something unheard of, and imported from out- 
 side/to revolutionize it. He has to offer the Church, 
 in outer form, the word which is always within it, 
 in order that the Church, by that presentation, 
 may become anew what by God's grace it already 
 is. He must be original in the sense that his truth 
 is his own, but not in the sense that it has been 
 no one else's. You must distinguish between novelty 
 and freshness. The preacher is not to be original in 
 the sense of being absolutely new, but in the sense 
 of being fresh, of appropriating for his own person- 
 ality, or his own age, what is the standing posses- 
 sion of the Church, and its perennial trust from 
 Christ. He makes discovery in the Gospel, not of 
 the Gospel. Some preachers spoil their work by 
 an incessant strain after novelty, and a morbid 
 dread of the commonplace. But it was one no less 
 original than Goethe, who said, the great artist 
 is not afraid of the commonplace. To be unable 
 to freshen the commonplace is to be either dull 
 or bizarre. Yet to be nothing but new is like a 
 raw and treeless house shouting its plaster novelty 
 on a beautiful old brown moor. The artist may 
 treat revelation as discovery. He may create 
 what he finds but as chaos. He finds but power, 
 and he issues it in grace. But it is otherwise with 
 the preacher. It is the converse. He finds revela- 
 tion in all discovery. He finds to his hand the 
 grace which he has to issue with power. His
 
 90 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 word is to send home a Word which was articulate 
 from the beginning, " What we have seen and heard 
 of the Word of life declare we to you." The 
 artist's grace is not the preacher's. Nor is it true 
 without modification that " all grace is the grace 
 of God." The preacher has often been compared 
 with the actor, and often he has succumbed to 
 the actor's temperament, or to his arts. But there 
 is a point of real analogy. The actor creates a 
 part, as the phrase is ; but it is only by appropri- 
 ating a personality which the dramatist really 
 created and put into his hands. And that is what 
 the preacher has to do. He has to work less with 
 his own personality than with the personality 
 provided him in Christ, through Christ's work in 
 him. He has to interpret Christ. Moreover, the 
 actor's is a voice which is forgotten, while the 
 poet's is a voice that remains. So also the preacher's 
 originality is limited. By the very Spirit that 
 moves him he speaks not of himself. He must not 
 expect the actor's vogue. Self-assertion or jealousy 
 are more offensive in him than in the artist. It is 
 enough if he be a living voice ; he is not a creative 
 word. He is not the light ; he but bears witness to it. 
 ' Je ne suis pas la rose mats j'ai vecu pres d'elle." 
 There is even less room for originality of idea 
 in the pulpit than elsewhere. WTiat is needed is 
 rather spontaneity of power. This is quite in 
 keeping with the conservatism that must always 
 play a part so much greater in the Church than 
 in the State. The preacher not only appeals to the
 
 or Preaching as Worship 91 
 
 permanent in human nature ; he is also the hiero- 
 phant of a foregone revelation ; he is not the organ 
 of a new one. His foundation is laid for him once 
 for all in Christ. His power lies not in initiation, 
 but in appropriation. And his work is largely to 
 assist the Church to a fresh appropriation of its 
 own Gospel. It is not to dazzle us with brand-new 
 aspects even of the Gospel. God forbid that I 
 should say a word to seem to justify the dulness 
 that infects the pulpit. Alas ! if our sin crucify 
 Christ afresh, our stupidity buries Him again. But 
 the cure for pulpit dulness is not brilliancy, as in 
 literature. It is reality. It is directness and 
 spontaneity of the common life. The preacher 
 is not there to astonish people with the unheard 
 of ; he is there to revive in them what they have 
 long heard. He discovers a mine on the estate. 
 The Church, by the preacher's aid, has to realize 
 its own faith, and take home anew its own Gospel. 
 That which was from the beginning declare we 
 unto you that fresh old human nature and that 
 fresh old grace of God. 
 
 What a strength we all receive from self-expres- 
 sion ! How we pine if it is denied ! How we die 
 if it is suppressed ! It is life to a genius to get 
 out what is in him ; it is death to be stifled or 
 neglected. If we can but express what is in us to 
 ourselves it is often sufficient. If we can put 
 pen to paper, paint to canvas, or the hand to 
 clay, it may save us, even if we do not get a market 
 or a vogue. Otherwise it is solitary confinement,
 
 92 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 or death. The flame dies for want of air. In like 
 manner also our private prayer receives for ourselves 
 a new value when in our solitude we utter it aloud. 
 The aspiration gains mightily from the spoken 
 word. The very effort to shape it in words adds 
 to its depth, precision, confidence, and effect. It is 
 well to sigh our prayers, but it is better to utter them. 
 With the heart man believeth unto righteousness, 
 but with the mouth we confess unto salvation. 
 Righteousness is well, but it must be established 
 and confirmed as salvation. Just so the preacher's 
 address to the Church is really the Church preaching 
 to the Church. It is the Church expressing itself 
 to itself. The Church is feeling its own strength, 
 and by the feeling it is growing in godly self- 
 confidence, and in power to say to the world what 
 the whole world resists. 
 
 The Christian preacher is no prophet sent to the 
 public till he is a voice of the Church to the Church. 
 He is but a part of the Church, yet he speaks to 
 the whole. We tend our body with the hand, 
 which is but an organ of the body. So the preacher 
 tends the Church as a part of it, moved in his act, 
 not by the part's life, but by its share in the life 
 of the whole. He is over against the Church only 
 as the organ is over against the organism. It is 
 the body that turns the hand upon itself. The 
 Church in the preacher becomes explicitly conscious 
 of itself. Its latent faith becomes patent. It 
 knows how much greater it is than it thought. 
 It is amazed with itself. It realizes what a mighty
 
 or Preaching as Worship 93 
 
 matter its faith is. The flush rises to the face of 
 its love. The gleam shines in its eye of its hope. 
 And it must reach this self-expression. It is not 
 merely the better for it. The expression is part of 
 the reality. The form is part of the life. It is 
 part of the joint action of the Word which is the 
 Church's life, and of the faith that meets that 
 Word. The sermon is an essential part of the 
 worship. 
 
 
 
 The preacher, therefore, starts with a Church 
 of brethren that agree with him and that believe 
 with him ; and in its power he goes to a world 
 that does neither. What he has to do is not to 
 exhibit himself to the Church, nor to force himself 
 on it. He offers himself to it in the like faith, as 
 a part of their common offering by the Eternal 
 Spirit to God. And the stronger the Church is, 
 so much the more it needs preaching, and the more 
 it desires preaching, preaching not only through 
 it but to it ; just as genius demands self-expression 
 in passionate proportion to its power. Only 
 note that while the genius demands expression 
 for itself the Church demands it for its Gospel. 
 It demands expression for its positive, objective 
 faith and not its consciousness ; its message and 
 not merely its experience. The Eternal Word 
 that always makes the Church, has to speak to a 
 Church whose experience is largely below the level 
 of the faith of that Word. What makes the Church
 
 94 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 is not Christ as its founder but Christ as its tenant 
 as its life, as its power, the Christ living in the 
 faith of its members in general, and of its 
 ministers in particular. But it is a Christ that 
 only partially comes to His own in the Church's 
 actual experience. The faith within the Church 
 has to speak to its half-faith, its bewildered faith, 
 its struggling, or even its decaying faith. 
 
 What is done in preaching to the Church, there- 
 fore, is not to set out its own consciousness. At 
 any rate, it is not the consciousness of the Church 
 at any one stage even the present. It is the 
 Spirit speaking to the Churches. It is the past 
 Church speaking to the present, the whole Church 
 to the single Church, the ripe Church to the unripe, 
 the faithful Church to the faltering Church, the 
 ideal Church to the actual, the unseen to the seen. 
 It is the great, common, universal faith addressing 
 the faith of the local community. And, in so far 
 as the preacher is the voice of the Church, he is 
 the voice, not of his own Church, but of the Great 
 Church that envelopes his own. The preacher 
 reflects the faith of the great true Church, but 
 neither the faith nor the views of those around him. 
 He is not giving expression to the average opinion 
 of his congregation, or his denomination. The 
 preacher is the mandatory of the great Church, which 
 any congregation or sect but represents here and 
 now. And what he has to do is to nourish that 
 single and accidental community with the essence 
 of the Church universal ; that the members of
 
 or Preaching as Worship 95 
 
 the Church may rise to the level of the Church, 
 to its true nature, its ideal holiness as the called 
 of God. When he addresses the Church it is the 
 ideal Church addressing the actual, the upper 
 Church the lower, the Church of the ages appealing 
 to the Church of the hour, the Church universal 
 to the Church on the spot. The inner Church 
 addresses the outer, that the outer may realize 
 itself anew, and apprehend that for which Christ 
 apprehended it. Nothing in the service goes to 
 the root of the Gospel (and, therefore, of the Church) 
 like preaching. And this makes preaching the 
 chief part of our evangelical ritual, the part which 
 gives the law to all worship, since the message is 
 what stirs worship and makes it possible. Our 
 chief praise is thanksgiving for the Gospel. And our 
 prayer is Christian only in the name of the Gospel. 
 Preaching is " the organized Hallelujah of an 
 ordered community." 
 
 But when the preacher turns from the Church 
 of which he is pastor to the world to which he is 
 missionary he must speak in the name of the whole 
 Church as a unity. Hence the slowness of missions 
 while the parts of the Church fight and devour 
 each other. Hence, too, the unifying reaction of 
 missions on the Church. Hence, also, the mis- 
 sionary must preach in chief those great things 
 which are the objective powers of the Church, and 
 not a subjective or merely experimental piety. 
 Let him preach the Gospel, and leave it to make 
 its own experience in the new races, by its own
 
 96 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 creative power. Their form of experience may 
 be very different from what has grown up in the 
 train of our civilization, with the mentality of the 
 West. No preacher (I have said) is only the 
 representative of the Church's consciousness ; and 
 the missionary preacher is so least of all. He is 
 the organ of the Gospel that created the Church's 
 consciousness at the first, and has developed it 
 all along. 
 
 Therefore, it is not the Church that he or 
 any evangelist preaches. Wherever the Church 
 is preached, the Gospel comes short. We have 
 then Catholicism, and we cease in due course to 
 have the Gospel at all. The preacher has not 
 even his commission from the Church, but only a 
 licence at most, only his opportunity. The Church 
 supplies not his authority but his pulpit. He has 
 his commission from God, from the Church only his 
 permission. He is an officer, not of the Church, 
 but of the Word that the Church has in steward- 
 ship. And all the Church has to do is to dis- 
 cover if he has the commission, by the wisest, 
 and even severest, tests, by a prolonged training, 
 perhaps, which is also a probation. But it is 
 a commission the Church cannot bestow. It can 
 only discern. It cannot convey the apostolic 
 spirit, it can but wait upon it. The Church has 
 no rights in the matter of ordination, and can confer 
 none. It has but a duty to recognize the spirit's 
 movement and the purity of the Word, and to 
 facilitate the Gospel in the most effectual way.
 
 or Preaching as Worship 97 
 
 
 
 Preaching, then, is part of the cultus. That 
 is the Protestant idea. To treat it as a gratuitous 
 adjunct to the service is Catholic. To regard it 
 as the mere exposition of a minister's views is 
 neither Protestant nor Catholic. It is not even 
 Christian. It is a rationalistic way of regarding 
 the matter, and it causes the sermon to differ by 
 no whit from a lecture more or less popular, or from a 
 manifesto, more or less interesting, of the preacher's 
 personality. The sermon has always been regarded 
 as an integral part of the service by a Protestantism 
 which knew what it was about. It is the Word of 
 the Gospel returning in confession to God who 
 gave it. It is addressed to men indeed, but in 
 truth it is offered to God. Addressed to men but 
 offered to God that is the true genius of preaching. 
 Christ sees in it joyfully the travail and the trophy 
 of His soul. Like all the rest of the worship, it 
 is the fruit of the Gospel. May I call it again 
 " the organized Hallelujah " of intelligent faith. 
 
 In so viewing preaching, Protestantism has 
 reverted to the New Testament idea, and to the 
 first Church. There more attention (to say the 
 least) is given to the proclamation of the Word, 
 than to the worship. And quite as much as is 
 given to the Sacraments which were sometimes 
 outside the personal concern of an apostle like 
 Paul. He thanks God he had baptised but two in 
 one Church. Our Lord, we are told, baptised not. 
 
 7
 
 98 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 On the other hand, the apostles could not but 
 preach. It was an essential part of their grateful, 
 worshipful response to the Word of Grace which 
 had found them. It was a creation of that Word. 
 " It pleased God to reveal His Son in me that I 
 might preach Him among the Gentiles." That 
 is to say, the preacher's commission was given in 
 the very nature of the revelation which made 
 him a Christian. The revelation by its very meaning 
 left him no choice. The self-same act of the cross 
 which made him worship Christ, made him preach 
 Christ as part of the worship. And by a consequence 
 that hearing the preaching was also part of their 
 worship to whom he spoke. Real preaching then was 
 bound up with the worship of Christ, with a faith 
 that could not but worship. The testimony to men 
 was as truly an acknowledgement to God of His 
 gracious Gospel as was any express act of confession 
 or praise. And the men who heard had a part 
 and a responsibility as great as the preacher's. 
 The confession of sin, which all call a part of worship, 
 did not mean so much as the confession of holiness 
 in a Saviour which is the preaching of the Church. 
 Further, if preaching is a main part of the Church's 
 worship, it is a part especially of the minister's 
 own personal worship. It is for him an act of worship, 
 in a far more intimate and real sense than anything 
 he may do in the serving of tables, the organizing 
 of work, or the carrying of help. Nothing tends 
 more to lower the quality of preaching than a 
 loss of this sense on the preacher's part. Nothing
 
 or Preaching as Worship 99 
 
 will destroy public respect for it so fast as the 
 preacher's own loss of respect for it. And that 
 respect is lost when, for the preacher himself, the 
 preaching is more speech than action, when he 
 feels its practical value to be more in what it leads 
 to, than in what it is. If great art is praise, true 
 preaching is so no less. Much preaching that is 
 not popular is still true worship. 
 
 Preaching is thus the creation of the Gospel, 
 and not our mere tribute to the Gospel ; therefore, it 
 has one great note which should appeal to the modern 
 mind the note of inevitability. It was the inevit- 
 able word, so prized now by the connoisseurs of 
 style the authentic Word. It was the triumph 
 of the Gospel genius, the royalty of the Gospel way. 
 It came 'forth with the ease, aptness 'and weight 
 wielded by full and conscious power. However 
 verbose preachers may be, preaching is not the 
 verbosity of a Word whose truer nature would 
 have been reticent like a ritual sacrament. The 
 preacher may be illogical, but preaching is there 
 by a spiritual logic, and a psychological necessity, 
 in the Gospel itself. It was the Church's great 
 spontaneous confession of its faith both to itself 
 and the world. There was something almost lyric 
 about it as the great creeds were at first hymns. 
 They expressed not merely belief, but triumphant 
 irrepressible belief. Nay, it was more. It was the 
 belief of men more than conquerors, more than 
 triumphant. They were the harbingers and hiero- 
 phants of the world's foregone but final conquest.
 
 ioo The Preacher and his Church 
 
 They were more than victorious, they were redeemed 
 They were victorious only because redeemed. 
 They could not be parted from Christ's love by 
 any tribulation, anguish, peril, or sword (Rom. viii. 
 35-9) not because they had overcome these things, 
 even in His name, but because He had, already and 
 in advance, put them under His feet for good and 
 all, for Himself and His people. They were 
 trophies of Christ's conquest more than victors in 
 their own. And it was more joy to be a trophy 
 and captive in the triumphal procession of Christ 
 than to sit with Caesar in his car. What made them 
 preach was a victory gained, not by them, but in 
 them and over them. And they sang their joy 
 in preachings that captured the world for which 
 they were themselves also captured in Christ. 
 
 Preaching then is the Church confessing its faith. 
 And it is as surely a part of the service as the reciting 
 of a creed could be. It is another aspect of the same 
 response to the Word given. It is less organized, 
 but no less collective than the great creeds. And in 
 the Churches where there are no formal creeds it 
 takes their place. The place of the sermon in the 
 more democratic and non-Catholic Churches is due, 
 in part, to the absence in their ritual of a recited 
 creed. It is all that some of them, like the Con- 
 gregationalists, have for a creed. 
 
 
 
 This fact, of course, lays a corresponding responsi- 
 bility on the preacher ; though it is a responsibility
 
 or Preaching as Worship 101 
 
 that is sometimes ignored or resented by preachers, 
 who claim for themselves a freedom that properly 
 belongs only to the Church. For the minister of a 
 Church in its pulpit is not a free lance (I say in its 
 pulpit, not in his). He is not a mere preaching 
 friar, a vagrant Evangelist, gathering his audience 
 in streets and lanes, hedges and highways, as he can 
 find them. He enters on a position of trust which 
 he did not create. He is licensed to it when he is 
 called by its custodian, the Church. Any call to a 
 minister is, in substance, a licence conferred on him, 
 however much in form it may be a petition addressed 
 to him. He stands on a platform, an institution, 
 which is provided for him, and he owes practical 
 regard to the Church that provides it. He bespeaks 
 men's attention, not in virtue of his personal quality 
 merely, but in virtue of a charge and Gospel, given 
 both to minister and Church, which both must serve. 
 He is not free to vend in his pulpit the extravagances 
 of an eccentric individualism, nor the thin heresies 
 of the amateur. He is not entitled to ask men to hear 
 with respectful silence the freaks of mere mother- 
 wit, or the guesses of an untutored intelligence. 
 When a man is entrusted with the pastoral care of a 
 Church from its pulpit he accepts, along with the 
 normality of Scripture, the obligations, limita- 
 tions and reserves of the pastoral commission. He 
 that sweareth by the altar sweareth also by that 
 which is upon the altar : and he abuses his position 
 if he simply unload upon his charge certain startling 
 views byway of relief to his own egoist conscience.
 
 IO2 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 To the older members of the flock that can be 
 upon occasion the heartlessness of intellectualism, 
 or the cruelty of youth. A man speaking his 
 genuine experience in the experimental region of 
 religion is always worth listening to. But if a 
 man takes leave to assault the great doctrines, or 
 to raise the great questions as if they had occurred 
 to him first, if he knows nothing of what has been 
 done in them by experts, or where thinkers have 
 left the question, he is out of place. No man is 
 entitled to discuss theology in public who has not 
 studied theology. It is like any other weighty 
 subject. Still more is this requisite if he set to 
 challenge and reform theology. He ought to be a 
 trained theologian. He need not have been at 
 college, if he show sufficient evidence of real study. 
 To read theology is not enough. Reading may be 
 no more than the browsing of a mental epicure at 
 will. The subject must be studied, and studied 
 at fountain heads. No man should ask for a 
 public hearing on a theological question unless 
 he has mastered his New Testament at first hand, 
 together with one or more of the great classics 
 which are landmarks and points of new departure for 
 theological thought. If we had more honest work 
 behind our theological talk we should not, for in- 
 stance, have popular clap-trap like the statement that 
 the Athanasian Creed is a jumble of Greek meta- 
 physics, when its whole substance registers the vital 
 effort of the Church to overcome metaphysic in the 
 interest of a historic redemption ; as it were to be
 
 or Preaching as Worship 103 
 
 wished the victims of metaphysic would do who 
 essay to reform our creed to-day. But it takes a 
 mastery of metaphysic to escape from metaphysic. 
 And it takes a real knowledge of theology to lead 
 theology on its broadening way, and at the same 
 time preserve the depth and intimacy of its Gospel. 
 
 A man is not invited into a pulpit just to say how 
 things strike him at his angle, any more than he is 
 expected to lay bare to the public the private recesses 
 of his soul. Nor is it the preacher's first duty to be 
 up-to-date, to be in the van of tentative thought. 
 He can do his work well without the very newest 
 machinery. The professor should know the last 
 thing written, but the preacher need not. If he is 
 young, and has not been well trained in his subject, 
 perhaps better not. He is there to declare the eternal, 
 which is always in the van, equally present, equally 
 real for every soul, everlasting, final, insuperable for 
 every age. He is not in the pulpit, primarily, as the 
 place where he can get most scope for his own 
 individuality, and most freedom for his own 
 idiosyncrasy. He is there, as the servant both of the 
 Word and the Church, to do a certain work, to de- 
 clare a certain message, to discharge a certain trust. 
 He is not in the pulpit as the roomiest place he has 
 found to enable him to be himself, and develop 
 his genius. Some young preachers are more con- 
 cerned about their own freedom than their people's 
 service. They are prone to think they must get 
 freedom to develop their individuality before they 
 have any positive idea what they are to do. But you
 
 104 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 cannot develop your individuality except obliviously, 
 in the doing of some definite objective thing. With- 
 out that you are taking yourself too seriously. 
 You are but " pottering at the pyramid of your 
 own existence," or modelling yourself in clay. 
 No, you " are taken into Heaven backwards." You 
 must grow in the doing of some definite thing, to 
 learn which thing and the handling of it your indi- 
 viduality ought to go to a very severe school. Your 
 duty is not to be yourself. " To thyself be true " is 
 not a Christian precept. It is automatic for the Chris- 
 tian man, whose one concern is to be true to Christ. 
 The first thing due even to yourself is to go to 
 school. Learn. Find a master. Let the past and its 
 trust make you yourself ! The first duty of a man is 
 not to assert a freedom, nor to use a private judgment, 
 but to find an absolute master. There is put into 
 the preacher's hands a trust, a message, which is not 
 merely like the artist's, the subjective trust of genius 
 with a responsibility as to how it shall be used ; but it 
 is the objective trust of the Gospel, of a positive 
 word which he must deliver however it may affect 
 his self-culture. Any genius that he has can but 
 enrich his Gospel. He is given the word of a foregone 
 and final revelation not its idea but its word, not 
 its surmise but its arrival, not its conception but its 
 visitation, not its intuition but its revelation, some- 
 thing which is his because of its insight into him rather 
 than his insight into it, something wherein he is 
 known rather than knows, something finally done 
 which is the root of all our best doing. The King-
 
 or Preaching as Worship 105 
 
 dom of God is among us, and has long been 
 among us. Such is the standing message of the 
 Church, and it is at once the source and the limit 
 of her theological liberty. It is the Gospel of the 
 achieved more than the call to achieve. It bids 
 us not to make, so much as to rest in something 
 we find made. It teaches us that all good we do 
 is but the energy in us of the best already done. 
 It is an opus operatum. That is the standing word of 
 Gospel. And the business of each preacher in 
 charge of a flock is to translate to his small Church 
 this message and content of the great Church, that 
 he may integrate the small Church into the great, and 
 that he and it together may swell the transmission 
 of the Word to the world. That is the true Catholicism, 
 the universalizing of the universal Word. That is 
 the principle which makes a Church out of a sect or 
 conventicle, and puts a preacher in the true apostolic 
 succession. The true succession is the true inheri- 
 tance of the eternal Word, and not the due concatena- 
 tion of its agents. The great apostolate is one, not 
 in the heredity of a historic line but in the solidarity 
 of a historic Gospel, not in a continuous stream but 
 hi an organic Word. 
 
 
 
 We have thus some guide to answering the question 
 whether a minister's first duty is to his Church or 
 to the world. If we must choose, in what is perhaps 
 a false dilemma, it is to his Church. The duty to the 
 world is a joint duty of preacher and Church. 
 Churches are always forgetting this, and reducing
 
 106 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 preachers to priests in spite of themselves by 
 making everything turn on the preacher. It is 
 part of the price that we pay for popular preachers 
 that we fall into a way of thinking as if, when a 
 gifted speaker appears, the main duty of the Church 
 is to give him his platform, or even his pedestal, and 
 then stand out of his way. Hence manifold mischief 
 to preacher, Church, and Gospel ; the cossetting 
 of the preacher's selfwill, the elimination of the 
 communal will, the deflection of the will of God. 
 The task of the great preacher is at bottom the task 
 of the smaller preacher who can but be faithful. 
 It is to act upon the world through his Church and 
 not merely from his Church. His Church is not the 
 arena for his individualism (far less the pedestal of his 
 vanity) but its school. A man who is truly, through 
 the Word, the agent of the great Church will never 
 become the mere exploiter of his own Church. The 
 captive of the Gospel will never lord it in the Lord's 
 house, nor simply use the flock he is there to feed. 
 
 
 
 There are some consequences that follow, if we 
 grasp the great principle that the sermon is an 
 essential part of the worship. 
 
 i. The minister (as I have said) may not use the 
 pulpit merely for the exposition of his own views. 
 Any views of his must be given as such, and be used, 
 directly or indirectly, for the ruling purpose of the 
 message from God. In proportion as he puts in 
 the front views and opinions of his he may expect
 
 or Preaching as Worship 107 
 
 public abstension, or contradiction, from those who 
 have differing views. Farther, the minister may 
 not sacrifice the pulpit to mere instruction, mere 
 lectures, or intellectual or aesthetic treats. Let 
 the lecture room or the Bible Class be used for that. 
 Of course I speak of such habitual use of the pulpit, 
 not of exceptional occasions. 
 
 2. As a corollary of this it is the preacher's duty, 
 in most cases, to touch questions of Bible criticism 
 only in so far as they clear the ground for a real 
 and positive Gospel. The structure of the Bible 
 may be discussed in the pulpit only in so far as it 
 affects the history of revelation, and not merely 
 of religion. The popular religion of Israel is one 
 thing, and the divine revelation that gradually 
 emerged through it and subdued it is another. 
 And though it is no part of the preacher's work to 
 treat of the religion of Israel for its own sake, yet 
 it is his to disentangle those parts of the Old Testa- 
 ment where the revelation of God is forcing its way 
 through the popular religion, in ways which even the 
 writers themselves but dimly understood. Still the 
 preacher is not an academic ; he is an evangelist. 
 The minister's conscience is not scientific but 
 pastoral. For this purpose he must often exercise 
 a discreet reserve as to scientific truth in the interest 
 of higher truth, or truth on the whole. 
 
 Although we hold the doctrine sound 
 For life outliving hearts of youth, 
 Yet who would preach it as a truth 
 
 To those that eddy round and round ?
 
 io8 The Preacher and his Church 
 
 The thinker and the scholar have a freedom, and 
 even a duty, which do not belong to the pastor who 
 has a cure of souls. The savant may owe to the 
 public, or the lecturer to his class, what the preacher 
 does not owe to his charge. To rend a Church on a 
 point of speculative theology mostly argues some 
 tactlessness on the preacher's part, or a misconcep- 
 tion of his office, or an egoistic sense of duty. There 
 may be many points on which he should keep silence, 
 partly because he or his people are not ready, partly 
 because these are points which do not directly 
 concern his Gospel. He should not allow his hand 
 to be forced, especially by outsiders. No outsider 
 has his responsibility, nor, indeed, any insider 
 either. He should be the best judge about his own 
 reserves as pastor. And he should not force the 
 convictions of his people. Of course if the first 
 charge on him were the integrity of pure doctrine 
 (as was once thought), if he were one of the theo- 
 logians he derides, then perhaps he ought to 
 treat his Church as a class and at once indicate his 
 departure from tradition. But his charge is to 
 educate those people not in a correct theology, old 
 or new, but in a mighty Gospel. He is a minister 
 of the Gospel, not a professor of scientific theology. 
 " There are truths we must say to all, and truths we 
 should say to some ; and there are truths we can 
 only tell to those who ask." It is not the preacher's 
 duty to tell everything he knows about the Bible ; 
 but it is his duty to tell everything he knows about 
 the Gospel, and, in this reduced yet enlarged sense.
 
 or Preaching as Worship 109 
 
 in this plenary but not exhaustive sense, to declare 
 the whole counsel of God. He has to give the 
 Gospel its divine place in knowledge, and not know- 
 ledge a supreme place in the Gospel. The whole 
 counsel of God, not the whole results of scholarship, 
 is the preacher's burthen these last only when they 
 remove obstacles from the Gospel, or enrich its 
 message. It is no business of the preacher, at the 
 stated occasions of worship, to enlarge on the strati- 
 fication of the Pentateuch, or the postexilian origin 
 of the Psalms ; unless he is engaged in opening larger 
 sweeps of God's method of revelation, or expounding 
 Christ's true relation to the Old Testament, as its 
 fulfilment, and not its professor. 
 
 3. We discourage the position of those who are 
 impatient of the sermon, who walk out when it 
 comes on, or who paralyse preachers by a demand 
 for brevity before everything else. I speak of those 
 who do so on the ground that they go to Church to 
 worship God. I should like to say here that in my 
 humble judgment the demand for short sermons on 
 the part of Christian people is one of the most fatal 
 influences at work to destroy preaching in the true 
 sense of the word. How can a man preach if he feel 
 throughout that the people set a watch upon his lips. 
 Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the preacher is 
 not a wit. And those who say they want little 
 sermon because they are there to worship God and 
 not hear man, have not grasped the rudiments of the 
 first idea of Christian worship. They but represent 
 the indifference of the natural man, his Catholicism.
 
 no The Preacher and his Church 
 
 They but swell that Protestant Catholicism which 
 is preparing so rich a harvest in due course for 
 Rome. For remember that Catholicism is the 
 Christianity of the natural man. It is easy with 
 human nature. You cannot quench the preacher 
 without kindling the priest. If the preachers are not 
 satisfactory, let the Church take steps to make them 
 so. If they bore the people, let the people not be 
 too patient. But let us not go wrong as to what 
 preaching is for the Gospel, or for any Church that 
 is in earnest with the Gospel. A Christianity of 
 short sermons is a Christianity of short fibre.
 
 THE PREACHER AND THE AGE
 
 IV 
 
 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 THE question raised in the last lecture as to the 
 preacher's attitude to the world is worth closer defini- 
 tion. Is his mental attitude to the world, to all that 
 passes as civilization, or culture, to be one of isolation 
 or accommodation ? I am not asking now whether 
 he should know the results of contemporary culture, 
 nor how far, if he knows them, he ought to press 
 them on his own people. I am asking whether he 
 should do much or little in construing his own 
 conception of his message in the mental vernacular 
 of his tune ? It is not here a question of pedagogy 
 with his charge, but of his theology and his truth. 
 It is a larger question than concerns his procedure 
 or style with the public. It concerns his Gospel 
 and its intellectual content. Shall he become here 
 all things to all men ; shall he use here the oppor- 
 tunism that he may freely use in practical affairs, 
 where he has to work with other men rather than 
 upon them ? Or shall he, at the other extreme, 
 deliver a message manifestly, and almost aggres- 
 sively, independent of the fashions of thought, with 
 small concern whether men hear or forbear ? 
 
 P.P. 113 8
 
 ii4 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 Shall he use the old categories and terms of the 
 Gospel like redemption (always, of course, in a 
 living way, and not as a dead orthodoxy) ? Or 
 shall he be eager to discard such terms as being 
 '' the language of Canaan " ; and shall he seize on 
 the latest thing in thought or action, and force his 
 message into wholly modern terms ? Shall he 
 discard redemption and take up with evolution ? 
 Shall he reject atonement and speak only of sacrifice ? 
 Shall he cease to think evangelically if only he 
 think ethically ? Shall he give up speaking of faith, 
 and talk of spirituality ? Shall he forswear reve- 
 lation for the God-consciousness, and drop from his 
 vocabulary a word like incarnation to make room 
 for immanence ? Shall he be silent about the 
 Church in order to speak of the Kingdom of God, 
 or say little even about that, that he may not repel 
 those who will only hear about the brotherhood of 
 man ? Should he give up alluding to the bond of 
 the Spirit, and dilate upon sympathies and affi- 
 nities ? That is to say, are the intelligible terms of 
 his message to be given it chiefly by current 
 thought ? Is its substance so poor, its matter so 
 impotent, that it has been unable to frame a per- 
 manent terminology for its own spiritual experi- 
 ences, and is forced to borrow and adapt the 
 current language of the cultured natural man ? 
 Is the preacher's terminology to have regard only 
 to men's business and their bosoms, to the voca- 
 bulary of commerce and affection ? And must 
 he cast off the specific language created and con-
 
 The Preacher and the Age 115 
 
 secrated by classic Christian experience because it 
 is theological and non-natural ? If he keep any 
 theology, is it to be adjusted entirely to modern 
 thought without any call made on modern thought 
 to adjust itself to a theology given in the Gospel and 
 peculiar or inevitable to it ? Is his mind, for all its 
 heavenly birth and lineage, to be entirely naturalized 
 in the better quarters of the world ? Or is he to be 
 palpably less at home in the world's ways of thinking 
 and writing, a stranger and a sojourner as all his 
 fathers were ? 
 
 An acute form of the difficulty occurs when a 
 preacher is faced by the question, Shall I preach to 
 the modern age, whether by my theology or my 
 methods, at the cost of rending my Church ? Well, 
 with a man of real culture, sympathy, and good 
 sense, (I have said) probably the dilemma need not 
 occur. In very many cases where such crises arise 
 they arise from the preacher's lack of sympathy and 
 judgment. Either that, or he lacks a sense of responsi- 
 bility for anything but what I have called the unload- 
 ing of his own egoistic conscience. But if the crisis do 
 come, if a headlong policy of vigour and rigour call for 
 a decisive answer, it would be this, in my humble 
 judgment. A man whose action on public affairs 
 promises to rend his Church should resign his Church, 
 and seek one that will go solidly with him. I know 
 it is a very difficult question. But the Church is 
 not there with political or social reform for its 
 prime object. And when a Free Church minister 
 has to fight his people for his position it is
 
 1 1 6 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 time to leave it. Victory is mostly sterile for 
 him ; and defeat may be heartbreaking, without 
 the dignity of the Cross. His Church is not there, 
 as I have said, to be his platform merely, but 
 the body of which he is the head ; he must animate 
 it with his principles and not dissolve it. The brain 
 must not quarrel with the nerves. He is the Church's 
 organ rather than the Church his. His first duty 
 is to the Church. His whole manhood goes primarily 
 to the Church. If his duty to the public threatens 
 to destroy his Church, then he should release himself 
 and his Church likewise. The order of obligation for 
 a preacher is first to the Gospel (in its nature, not its 
 particular applications), second to his Church, third 
 to the great Church, and then to the public. He 
 s not first a prophet of social righteousness but an 
 ipostle of the Gospel. He is not merely an agent of 
 the ethical kingdom. Every Christian is that. But 
 when he adopts the ministry as a life work, he adopts 
 what is an office of the Church. He becomes some- 
 thing else than a prophet, and something more. 
 He represents the Spirit which abides like a dove and 
 does not swoop like an eagle. He accepts the con- 
 ditions of a stable society, its position, its aid, and, 
 along with these, responsibility to it. His place is 
 not a prerogative of his own. It is not a right that 
 belongs to him by his mere subjective sense of a 
 Charisma. He is not a wandering seer. 
 
 
 In all such cases the line a man may take will be
 
 The Preacher and the Age 117 
 
 much affected by his idiosyncrasy. And I do not 
 say that it ought not, so long as we understand that 
 idiosyncrasy is not the decisive thing. It is a 
 question here of the principles that prescribe the 
 general attitude of the Church to the world, not of a 
 man to his circle. For these large principles prescribe 
 the preacher's attitude, in so far as he is more than 
 the victim of his temperament and becomes the 
 servant of the Gospel in a Church. And from this 
 point of view there are two things to be said in 
 answer to the question with which I set out. 
 
 i. First, in the great and crucial ages of the 
 Church she saved herself and her word by taking 
 the attitude of detachment not to say intolerance 
 rather than accommodation. She faced the world 
 with a boon but also a demand. Is there no intoler- 
 ance in the Johannine writings ? She served a world 
 she would not obey, in the name of a mastery it 
 could neither confer nor withstand. She did not 
 lead the world, nor echo it ; she confronted it. If 
 she borrowed the thought, the organization, the 
 methods of the world, she did so voluntarily. And 
 she only used them as a calculus. She was but 
 requisitioning the ladders by which she escaped from 
 the world, and rose to its command. She used the 
 alloy not to debase the metal, but to make it work- 
 able, to make it a currency. 
 
 The mention of the Johannine writings reminds us 
 that the first and greatest of these crises was the 
 conflict with paganism, and especially with gnosticism 
 in the early centuries. And what was it that then
 
 1 1 8 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 saved the Church for the future and for the Gospel ? 
 It was not the apologists nor the line they took in 
 presenting Christianity as the noblest of all the 
 cultures, the most comprehensive of all the philo- 
 sophies, the most efficient of all the ethics, the con- 
 summation of prophecies immanent in pagan 
 humanity, and the apotheosis of all its latent powers. 
 That was a line that developed the gnostic tendency, 
 as it is the leading line in the gnosticism of to-day. 
 But the situation was saved by the other line, 
 by Athanasius, who developed everything that dis- 
 tinguished his position out of the principle of the 
 experienced redemption of a ruined world. To ex- 
 press this unutterable reality he had to do as Paul 
 did, to capture and transform the speculation of the 
 day ; and he had even to coin a new metaphysic. 
 He converted the past more than he developed it. 
 He descended on the world, like the true preacher he 
 was, rather than arose from it. He defied it rather 
 than deified it (if the quip may pass) . He made the 
 Church victorious by making it unpopular. He 
 compelled the world to accommodate itself to him 
 by preserving an evangelical isolation from it. He 
 overcame the religious liberalism of his day by 
 thought too profound to be welcome to the lazy 
 public, and too positive to be welcome to the 
 amateur discursive schools. 
 
 And perhaps the Church has never, since that time, 
 been in a position with the world so crucial as it is 
 at the present day. The old gnosis has never since 
 risen in such critical and yet plausible antagonism
 
 The Preacher and the Age 119 
 
 to the Gospel till its recrudescence in our own time. 
 The paganism of the Renaissance and its humanism 
 was threatening enough ; but it rested more on the 
 classic scholarship and taste of a few than on the 
 vague and romantic intuitions which, in the religious 
 experiments of to-day, appeal to the general public, 
 borrow the mantle of Christianity, and simulate the 
 voice of the authentic Word. So that even apostles 
 of that Word are found speaking rather as adven- 
 turers of the soul. They are more drawn to the 
 gnosis of speculation, the occultism of science, the 
 romance of the heart, the mysticism of imagination, 
 than to the historic and ethical spirituality of the 
 evangelical Christ the crucified. Now there will be 
 no doubt of your popularity if you take that 
 gnostic course with due eloquence, taste, and con- 
 fidence. For it expresses the formless longings 
 and dim cravings of the subjectivity of the day. 
 But it has not the future, because it misses the 
 genuine note of the Gospel, and the objective Word 
 and deed in the true moral crisis of the Soul. 
 You will add religion to the vivid interests of the 
 public ; but you will not come with that authority 
 which men at once resent and crave. 
 
 The capture of the Western Church by classical 
 philosophy in the shape of medieval scholasticism 
 was very complete ; but it was not comparable to 
 what would have happened had gnosticism got the 
 upper hand in the first crisis. For Aristotle did 
 not represent the religious element in paganism which 
 gnosticism exploited, the spiritual, imaginative, kind-
 
 120 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 ling, popular element. Gnosticism was romantic, it 
 was classicism turned romantic. Its roots are dim 
 because they are outside the literature by which 
 classicism has become known to us for the most 
 part. It represented that element in paganism 
 which was not contributed by cultured Greece so 
 much as held by Hellenism in common with other 
 paganisms, held by it outside the literary class, 
 and chiefly developed in the dreamy East. It 
 stood for the deep human passion to be redeemed ; 
 though it did not realize, as historic Christianity 
 alone did, the moral depth of the need, or the holy 
 passion in God to redeem. The redemption which 
 was the passion of Asia was a much more intense 
 though a much less positive and effectual thing than 
 that demanded by the more free and ethical West. 
 It moved among spiritual processes rather than 
 moral and historic acts. And it steamed up, like 
 slow and spectral vapours, from the cauldron of 
 the prisoned, seething world, rather than issued in 
 the effectual shape of a hero and a deed. 
 
 Now, had this early gnosticism had its way it 
 would have stifled the young Church in its cradle ; 
 whereas medieval Aristotelianism only infected a 
 Church whose evangelical constitution was shown 
 by the Reformation to be now too mature to suc- 
 cumb. In the early period the very affinities of 
 gnosticism with the redemptive idea in Christianity 
 increased the danger by their plausible advances to the 
 burdened soul's demand ; and they gave the gnostics 
 a huge advantage over the whiggish apologists and
 
 The Preacher and the Age 121 
 
 their liberal Christianity, which ignored that idea. 
 But the Gospel triumphed, and, thanks to Athana- 
 sius, by the middle ages the evangelical idea had 
 become so imbedded in the constitution of the Church 
 that Aristotle could not smother it, and it leaped to 
 life in the Reformation. Doubtless the Reformation 
 issue was one of life and death. But not so pro- 
 foundly as in the gnostic strife. It was between 
 two sections of the Church ; it was not between 
 the Church and the world, the Church and 
 civilization, the Church and humanity, God and 
 man. Everybody in civilization then belonged to 
 the Church. And even after the Reformation it was 
 only a question of which Church a man belonged 
 to ; it was not whether he belonged to Church or 
 world, whether he was Christian or pagan. 
 
 But to-day it is the latter question that we ask. 
 The bulk of the civilized public of Europe, practically, 
 either belong to no Church, or they are indifferent to 
 which Church they belong. And most culture is rather 
 with the world than with the Gospel. We are thus 
 in the most critical time since the first centuries. 
 And, if history teach us rightly, does it not teach us 
 that the main policy of the Church must be the same 
 now as then ? It must be self-sufficient, autonomous, 
 independent. I say the main policy, for the accom- 
 modations to modern knowledge and modern criti- 
 cism must be many. But amid all these adjustments 
 to the world of natural and rational culture, the 
 Church must in principle be -detached. With all 
 her liberalism she must be positive. She must
 
 122 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 insist on the autonomy of faith in the matter of 
 knowledge and certainty. She must descend on the 
 world out of heaven from God. Her note is the 
 supernatural note which distinguishes incarnation 
 from immanence, redemption from evolution, the 
 Kingdom of God from mere spiritual progress, and 
 the Holy Spirit from mere spiritual process. She 
 must never be opportunist at the cost of being 
 evangelical, liberal at the cost of being positive, 
 too broad for the Cross's narrow way. And she must 
 produce that impression on the whole, that impression 
 of detachment from the world and of descent on 
 it. The minister may be licensed by the Church, 
 but the Church, as Christ's great minister for the 
 kingdom on earth, depends on no licence either from 
 the schools, the world, or the state. The Saviour of 
 the world was not made or moulded by the world ; 
 and the world knew, and still knows in Him a presence 
 that must be either obeyed or destroyed. He always 
 looked down on the world He had to save. He 
 always viewed it from God's side, and in God's in- 
 terest. He always stood for God against the men 
 he would save. It was indeed with divine pity he 
 looked down, and not contempt ; but it was with 
 pity, it was not with co-equal love. It was not the 
 love of give and take, but the mercy which gives all 
 and claims all. 
 
 And this must be the note of the pulpit. It must 
 of course be liberal. That is to say, it must not be 
 obscurantist. It must give knowledge its place 
 and modify accordingly. It must leave to the region
 
 The Preacher and the Age 123 
 
 of knowledge much that used to be held prt of saving 
 faith. If you are not humane, as civilization under- 
 stands it, you do not speak the language of the time. 
 You must wear the intelligible forms of living faith, 
 the fair humanities of kind religion. But still more 
 must you be divine and positive, else you do not 
 declare the Word of God which is Humanity's 
 one hope. We do not approach men hi order to 
 interpret them to themselves, as a genius might 
 do, but to interpret to them God in Christ. Christ 
 is ours not because He represents our best but 
 because He redeems our worst, not because He set 
 a seal to our manhood but because He saves it, not 
 because He elicits it but because He gives it. You 
 must not tell men that the way to understand God 
 is to understand the human heart, nor that the way 
 to be true to men is to be true to their own selves. 
 We are not true to men till we are in Christian rela- 
 tion to them; and that comes from being true to 
 Christ and to the Word of His grace. As angels of 
 the Churches you must descend on men. That must 
 always be the ruling note of your word and work. 
 If you wash His disciples' feet it must be not merely 
 as a poor serving brother but with the kind dignity 
 of the agent and apostle of Christ. And you must 
 always so speak as the oracles of God, as the am- 
 bassadors of Christ, and king's messengers. You 
 must always tell men that they can never be right 
 with each other except as they are right with God 
 in Christ and in the atoning Cross of Christ.
 
 124 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 
 
 2. So the second thing to be said is this. If we 
 accommodate ourselves to the world in one way we 
 must be exigent in another. Our demands must 
 never be submerged by our sympathies. The more 
 kind we are, the more lofty we must be with our 
 kindness. The goodness of God must never minish 
 the severity of God. His gifts of love must never 
 obscure the prior claim of holiness. His grace must 
 never abolish His judgment. Fatherhood is not the 
 fatherhood of Christ's God if it erase from our 
 faith the necessity of an Atonement offered not to 
 man alone but to God. The love by which God's 
 offspring are called sons of God is not His kindness 
 to His creatures, but it is a special manner of love 
 bestowed upon us with the gift of Christ and not 
 with the gift of existence, by a Redeemer and not 
 a Creator (i John i. 3). 
 
 But the particular bearing of the principle in my 
 mind at the moment is this. If we so accommodate 
 ourselves to the world as to reduce the bulk of our 
 creed we must insist on more serious attention, more 
 concentration, by the world upon the quality of our 
 faith. Reduction of belief on our part must be 
 balanced by concentration of faith on the part of 
 the public. 
 
 Reduce the burden of belief we must. The old 
 orthodoxy laid on men's believing power more than 
 it could carry. That orthodoxy, that Protestant 
 scholasticism, was in its way thorough. It went
 
 The Preacher and the Age 125 
 
 in its way as Ibsen's Brand did in his it was all or 
 nothing. It moved altogether if it moved at all. It 
 attracted the all-or-nothing spirits, whose tendency 
 was to move like a prairie fire, covering the whole area 
 but spreading only in one plane. It was compre- 
 hensive and acute rather than profound and subtle. 
 It threatened to organize the faith clean out of belief. 
 It seemed to sacrifice colour to drawing, and life to 
 form. It had no atmosphere, no flexibility. And, 
 great as it could be, it came at last to be more vast 
 than great. It brought to men more to carry 
 than power to carry it. And like its predecessor, the 
 medieval scholasticism, it was disintegrated by its 
 own subtlety ; it crumbled through its own acute- 
 ness ; it died of its own insatiable dialectic ; and 
 fell of its own thin and ambitious imperialism. 
 
 This appeared conspicuously in regard to the 
 claims made for the Bible as replacing the Church. 
 ' The whole Bible or none,' it was said. ' Take but 
 a stone away and the edifice subsides.' This came 
 of the Bible having been reduced to a fabric instead 
 of an organism. And how many sceptics that course 
 has made ! How many Pharisees ! How many 
 spiritual tragedies ! If I were a Secularist I would 
 not touch by assault the doctrine of plenary verbal 
 inspiration and inerrancy. I should let it work freely 
 as one of my best adjutants. But this all-or-nothing- 
 ness applied also to the whole system of Protestant 
 scholasticism. Dislodge but a pillar of the porch 
 and the house fell in. Lop a bough and the tree 
 died. Train a branch another way and it pined.
 
 126 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 The habit of mind, I say, was in its way thorough. 
 And, indeed, I often wish we had the like thoroughness 
 of design and excellence of building on the founda- 
 tions of the present. But we now build with a 
 sense that systems do not last, and so we do not build 
 well. We build but to house a generation or a 
 couple. The systems we frame are all revisable, 
 all on lease ; and the framers naturally leave much 
 to the tenants and inspectors of the future. It was 
 otherwise with our fathers. In aeternum Pinxerunt. 
 The systems they built aimed at finality. Every part 
 was of the same steel. The nuts and screws were 
 of the eternal. Nuance, evolution was an unheard-of 
 thing. So that when the end came it came for many 
 as it has been immortally symbolized for us by the 
 American spirit of comedy in Lowell's The One Hoss 
 Shay. That must be the end of every system which 
 amis at being universal and final. 
 
 But hi such systems we have ceased to believe. 
 Finality is but hi God and His act. With a final 
 system we should have no God. The finality 
 would then not be a living soul but a scheme. We 
 believe, on the one hand, that scientific theology 
 lives the growing life of every other science, in re- 
 spect of its element of knowledge or statement. And 
 we believe, on the other hand, that salvation is not a 
 matter of scientific theology, but of personal relation 
 to the Gospel. And the truth of the Gospel is port- 
 able in proportion to its power. " Few things are 
 needful or one." The one principle of holy grace 
 carries in it all Christ and Christianity. A few
 
 The Preacher and the Age 127 
 
 mighty cohesive truths which capture, fire, and mould 
 the whole soul are worth much more than a correct 
 conspectus of the total area of divine knowledge 
 and especially for the preacher. A minimal creed, 
 an ample science, a maximal faith that is our aim. 
 
 
 
 There is one misunderstanding I should like to 
 avert. When I speak of a reduction of belief I do 
 not mean an attenuation of belief. I do not mean to 
 discredit an ample theology. I do not think of 
 consigning the greater part of faith's area to the 
 region of Agnosticism, and compelling the mind to be 
 satisfied with a few general principles. By the 
 reduction of belief I mean reducing the amount of our 
 claim upon the belief of the public, shortening the 
 articles of association, so to say. I do not mean that 
 every truth of theology should be capable of veri- 
 fication by experience the pre-existence of Christ is 
 not. Theological truth is far wider than experience. 
 But I do mean that we should not base the Church's 
 appeal to the public upon truths which are outside 
 experience meaning Christian experience. In ask- 
 ing people to concentrate more upon what we offer 
 we cease asking them to attend to what they have 
 not means of understanding. We ask them to go in 
 upon their moral experience with more earnestness 
 and resolution. We would remove their interest 
 from things they are incompetent to solve, and 
 kindle it on matters that appeal to their own soul, 
 conscience, and destiny. So that what we offer is not
 
 128 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 so much a new system of theology as a new pronun- 
 ciation of theology. It is theology uttered with a 
 change of accent. The stress is differently distribu- 
 ted. The emphasis falls on other parts of the 
 great Word. We certainly would escape from the 
 monotone of a whole system of equal value and obli- 
 gation in all parts. And we would dwell with but 
 minor force upon some truths which are not so much 
 saving truths as their corollaries. If I took an ex- 
 ample of what I mean, I would say that we ought to 
 restore to Christ's Atoning Cross much of the popular 
 interest so easily arrested by His birth and its manner. 
 We should lean but lightly on the Virgin Birth, which 
 does not make a moral appeal to us, but too often 
 appeals to a ready interest either in a baby or a miracle ; 
 and we should bear far more heavily on the centre 
 of all moral action and regeneration in the Cross, 
 which the popular mind so readily shuns because 
 there the world is crucified into us and we unto the 
 world. And a like transfer of emphasis should take 
 place from the truth of Christ's pre-existence, which 
 is outside the range of our experience, to that of His 
 risen and royal life, wherein we ourselves are made 
 partakers of His resurrection and vouchers of His 
 real presence. So that in the order of importance 
 we should go to the world first of all with the Atoning 
 Cross which is the Alpha and Omega of grace; 
 second, with the resurrection of Christ which is the 
 emergence into experience of the new life won for us 
 on the Cross ; third with the life, character, teach- 
 ing, and miracles of Christ ; fourth with the pre-
 
 The Preacher and the Age 129 
 
 existence of Christ, which is a corollary of His Eternal 
 Life, and only after such things with the Virgin 
 Birth, which may or may not be demanded by 
 the rest. It is not a case of denying any of these 
 points or even challenging them. They may all be 
 accepted, but let it be in their true perspective, the 
 perspective of faith. And they are offered to the 
 public, and belief is claimed, in the degree of their 
 relevancy to a vital Christian experience of the one 
 Christian doctrine of grace. For when we carry 
 reduction to its length we condense upon that one 
 principle and power of grace which has in it the 
 promise of the potency of all the soul's life and all 
 Christian truth. 
 
 I 
 
 We must therefore practise a reduction of belief 
 and with it a redistribution of emphasis. We 
 must call in our main army from lining the 
 long ramparts. We must rally at the great strate- 
 gic forts ; and from them command with our new 
 weapons, firing quick and carrying far, the whole 
 region we have to defend. To do this will give us 
 fresh impetus. The change from walls to guns means 
 the change from defence to attack, from form to 
 life, from system to power. It is a change which 
 brings immense gain. How much moral force we 
 have squandered ! We have to admit frankly, if 
 sadly, that a great deal of what lives were once lost 
 for, and hearts broken, and torture endured, is not 
 worth the while. What an awful course history has 
 
 p.p.
 
 130 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 had to take, to teach us things that seem so simple 
 now. What an irony it all is ! Does He that sits 
 in Heaven laugh ? At least we cannot be surprised 
 that some should think He does. Heine spoke of 
 the great Aristophanes of heaven. Arnold asks, 
 Was Heine one of those enigmatic similes ? Is the 
 irony of Christ in the Gospels still in the face and 
 grace of God over human history ? Truly, our great 
 simplicities are most costly and elaborate things. 
 The reason why they seem so simple now is because 
 they were so hard and bitter then. We do now 
 almost automatically what meant once labour and 
 sorrow. We enter into the labours and deaths of 
 others ; and we see clearly only from the shoulders 
 of greater men than ourselves, who had to keep their 
 eyes on the paths for our sakes. and did not see the 
 land. 
 
 
 
 But now if we do thus narrow the demand on 
 the world for belief, are we not entitled to require 
 that this retraction of claim on our part shall 
 be met by a corresponding concentration on the 
 part of the public ? If we bring intellectual 
 relief we must plead for moral attention, the 
 narrowness of intensity. What marks the modern 
 man is the mobility and dispersion of his interest. 
 And what does that mean but weakness of will, the 
 lack of power to attend, to decide, to choose ? Such 
 irresolution is the chief of all reasons for the lack of 
 response to Christ, or even to Christianity. That is 
 why such large sections of culture have no part or
 
 The Preacher and the Age 131 
 
 lot in Christ ; why they have no more than an 
 interest about Him. For culture in many cases not 
 only does not exercise the will, it dissipates it, it nar- 
 cotises it. Men are stupefied morally by all the thou- 
 sand impressions of the hour. They are quick to feel, 
 and keen to know ; but they are not only slow, they 
 are averse, to decide. Yet it is for decision that 
 Christianity calls, nay, it is for decision that the 
 energetic universe calls, far more than for a mere 
 impression in response. We are not set in such a 
 world as this simply to return its note as artists or 
 esthetes, but to act. And Christ asked for faith, 
 which is an energy of the will, far oftener than 
 for love, which is a movement of the heart. 
 
 And in this respect Christianity can endure, not 
 by surrendering itself to the modern mind and 
 modern culture, but rather by a break with it : the 
 condition of a long future both for culture and the 
 soul is the Christianity which antagonizes culture 
 without denying its place. Culture asks but a half 
 Gospel ; and a half Gospel is no Gospel. We must, 
 of course, go some way to meet the world, but 
 when we do meet we must do more than greet. A 
 crisis has from time to time to be forced, a crisis 
 of the will. And the world, which is not unready to 
 profess itself enchanted with Christ, must be con- 
 verted to Him, and subdued, and made not merely 
 a better world, but another world reconciled and 
 redeemed. A new departure is not enough ; there 
 must be a new creation. Refinement is not re- 
 form ; and amelioration is not regeneration
 
 132 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 We are not being fairly met if the public bestows 
 upon the few things we now hold crucial no more 
 attention or effort than if they were merely a sample 
 handful scooped at random from a mass of loose or 
 languid truths. 
 
 It is very singular that on the most grave concern 
 of life a serious man so often makes up his mind hi 
 an offhand way. His religious views are of the most 
 casual kind. He seldom really takes pains with the 
 matter. He does not attend to it. His opinions are 
 a sort of spontaneous deposit on the surface of his 
 mind. If it were a business matter he would go into 
 it. If it were a scientific question he would train his 
 mind, and then examine. He takes business and 
 science seriously. But his religion he does not. 
 Scientific people who begin to desire some acquaint- 
 ance with theology will betake themselves, not to 
 the masters of that discipline as they would with any 
 other science, but to popular sciolists who happen to 
 have a vogue. It is not a matter worth study, as his- 
 tory, literature, philosophy, economy, or the markets 
 are. I do not say a man's religion must be the 
 result of professional or technical study, like these 
 subjects. But it should receive no less earnest 
 attention, and engage him no less seriously and per- 
 sonally, and not be taken at haphazard. That 
 casualness is the source of most of the confusion of 
 the time. Every important topic of human dis- 
 cussion seems a pathless thicket to the person who 
 gives it no attention. It is only after you have taken 
 it seriously for a year or two that it opens into clear-
 
 The Preacher and the Age 133 
 
 ness and order. Religion is confused and pathless 
 chiefly to those who treat the greatest concerns with 
 most levity. And it is clear and great not from 
 without the Church, but from within. To look at 
 a building like the Albert Hall, or even St. Paul's, 
 from the outside, you would have no such impres- 
 sion of its vastness or grandeur as you receive 
 from its interior. And so with Christian truth. It 
 is really and mightily true only from within. 
 
 Now in reducing the bulk of belief we do far more 
 than scoop up a chance handful from a heap. 
 That is not how we arrive at the few mighty beliefs 
 we select. That is not the proper principle, or the 
 proper method, of treating the ponderous systems. 
 We must proceed by a serious and laborious process. 
 A coherent system which has grown obese cannot 
 be reduced, like a statue, by chipping, or paring, 
 as the ignorant critic of vigour and rigour thinks. 
 A criticism which is mere surgery is out of place when 
 we are dealing with great organic systems of belief. 
 The methods must be more medical, more psychical, 
 more sympathetic, more in the nature of moral 
 regimen, and less in the way of amputation. We 
 must not cut down, but work down. This reduc- 
 tion exercised on the old creeds is a moral act or 
 process. It is not merely eclectic. Reduction is 
 the right word. It is working the huge tissue of 
 orthodoxy down to its normal bulk and place. It 
 means acting on it naturally through its organic 
 centres. To throw beliefs overboard, like super- 
 fluous cargo, is only too easy. Any ship's boy can
 
 134 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 jettison the past like that, or as much of it as he 
 can lift. Thousands of thin rebels against orthodoxy 
 stand to prove how cheap that is, and how sterile. 
 Your pert witling, destitute of historic reverence or 
 scientific competency, can entertain a whole company 
 by stripping belief to the nude, and whipping it 
 through the town hi the wake of his lean team. But 
 you cannot dismember at will systems whose parts 
 are neither packed together, nor nailed together, but 
 developed from a centre with some concinnity of 
 thought. And such these orthodoxies were both 
 the medieval scholasticism and the Protestant. The 
 development may have proceeded under a mistaken 
 idea, but it was done with great intellectual power, 
 with rare acumen, and wonderful sequence. And 
 it cannot be undone simply by smashing the machine 
 and throwing it on the scrap heap. The idea of a 
 total collapse of the old systems is all very well for 
 poetic effect, humorous point, or popular purposes. 
 Rather, however, if we speak mechancially let us 
 speak (with a friend of my own) of reversing gear. 
 But it is still better not to speak of an organic system 
 which proceeded from a living Church as a machine. 
 Let us treat it at once more sympathetically, and 
 more scientifically. Let us treat it as an organism 
 as an overgrown organism, if you will, and too 
 inert, but as being earnest in its intention and 
 serious in its answer to problems which are real. If 
 we cease to feel these problems we lose far more 
 than we do by cherishing an inadequate answer. 
 So long as the problems are real an inadequate
 
 The Preacher and the Age 135 
 
 answer such as the systems gave is better than 
 the agnosticism of none. It took much grave 
 and able toil of spiritual men to rear those fabrics 
 we so lightly crush. They did not do it to amuse 
 their leisure, or to occupy an idle life. Had they been 
 less serious there would have been less temper about 
 it ; and, after all, the odium theologicum is better than 
 the spiritual insouciance of many who cultivate the 
 modern mind and a sentimental charity more than 
 they pursue reality and truth. These systems grew in 
 the hands of the mental elite of their day. In labour 
 they were born, and they should not die in contempt. 
 If they were worked up they must be worked down. 
 At least, they should be worked at. They should 
 not be the target of the man in the street, as if they 
 were in the public pillory. In their decay they are 
 decayed gentlefolk, somewhat heartless, perhaps, 
 like the French aristocrats of the Revolution, but 
 not ignoble, and too distinguished for the missiles 
 of the mob. They should not be disintegrated in 
 their hour of eclipse by tearing their seamless robe 
 and gambling their vesture away. If their form 
 must be reduced, I repeat, it must be worked, down. 
 It was competent moral effort that put them there, 
 and it must be moral and competent effort that re- 
 moves them. It was the science of the day that reared 
 them ; and it is competent science in their own kind 
 that should deal with them. They should be tried 
 by their peers. They should not be broken down but 
 trained down if I may use the phrase. If it was 
 development as they rose, it must be by development
 
 136 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 that they subside. They should be shed and not 
 shot. In evolution a living thing sheds its superfluous 
 parts ; it is only disease that demands amputation. 
 And it is only the raw procacity of the hour that 
 speaks of theological science as a disease of the 
 Church. But quackery is the worst heresy. 
 
 
 
 The word I should prefer to use for the process 
 would be distillation. As the revelation is distilled 
 from the Bible rather than dissected, so we should 
 treat the theologies of the past, and so we should reduce 
 their aged bulk. The creed is to be distilled from 
 the confessions. The treatment must be honestly 
 applied, and with insight. We must divine the 
 creed within the creeds. It is not simply imbedded 
 in them, as if the debris could be dug away by any 
 youth with a pickaxe, or yokel with a spade. It 
 rather pervades them as an organic principle. We 
 must unsphere the spirit of Calvin and Edwards 
 rather than disentomb their remains. We must 
 first know them, then " appreciate " them. A 
 modern theology must be an appreciation of the old, 
 done lovingly and sympathetically, and with scienti- 
 fic continuity. If we need positivity in the present 
 we need also to reach it by the interpretation of the 
 past. And to interpret we must know both languages 
 equally well. We must interpret with an informed 
 sympathy. The great authors of these systems 
 loved and trusted God at least as deeply as we do 
 who never have the word love off our lips at least
 
 The Preacher and the Age 137 
 
 as deeply, and, on the whole, perhaps, more deeply. 
 They had among them some of the spiritual giants 
 of the race. They thought in an atmosphere of 
 Christian experience. Their theology was like the 
 wounds of Christ, graven on their heart and on 
 the palms of their hands. To denounce and ridi- 
 cule here is sheer heartlessness. The call is for 
 interpretation. The need of the hour in respect of 
 past theologians (if we would escape vulgarity) is 
 informed and sympathetic re-interpretation. We 
 must ask what their profound and solemn minds 
 aimed at, and what they strove by their system 
 to guarantee ; though we may modify their way 
 of securing it. 
 
 
 
 Let me take an illustration. You would not 
 venture to preach at this time of day a sermon on 
 predestination. You say the idea is either ex- 
 ploded or it is left behind. Where it is not entirely 
 discarded it is so out of date as to be too far in the 
 rear of the religious mind for your purpose. 
 
 Well, but it may be your duty on occasion to 
 rescue some great beliefs from their oblivion by an 
 age which freely casts God, heaven, and hell into 
 the rear of its concern. You are there not simply 
 to speak what people care to hear but also to make 
 them care for what you must speak. And as to 
 this matter of predestination, is there no way of 
 preaching it so that even to-day some will listen, 
 some will listen gladly, and some few even with a 
 rising soul and a swelling heart ?
 
 138 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 Men will still hear of the soul if it be a true soul 
 that speaks no smatterer, and no self-seeker. 
 They will still hear of the great value of the soul. 
 They will even hear of its absolute value, its pearl 
 of price for whose sake all other pearls are but a 
 currency, and all other ends but means. Tell them 
 that this is the Christian, the New Testament faith. 
 Say, also, that in New Testament times, when it was 
 desired to emphasize the absolute value of anything, 
 they spoke of its pre-existence. The Jews with 
 their beliefs spoke thus of their Law, and of their 
 Temple even. If your audience follow you so 
 far, one at least will want to interject that to speak 
 thus of the absolute value of the soul would lead to 
 speech about its pre-existence. To which you would 
 reply that it did so lead. Even Plato, and many 
 since, took and followed that lead. But that was 
 because, instead of thinking of the soul as a mora. 
 subject, they thought of it as a finely vitalized 
 substance, finished in its kind, with an immortal 
 existence innate in itself. The Hebrew idea was 
 different. The Jews thought of the soul as im- 
 mortal not in itself but in a destiny conferred on it. 
 They thought of its immortality and perfection as 
 given by God. Its destiny was there as the result 
 of the will and choice of God. That destiny was 
 due to the divine purpose, and it existed there, not in 
 the soul's fibre, so to say. It was written not in the 
 soul's creation but in its Creator, not in its germ but 
 in its Maker. 1 Accordingly what was said to pre- 
 1 You see how near this comes to our modern idea
 
 The Preacher and the Age 139 
 
 exist was not the soul in its independent nature, 
 as a sort of fiery particle forming an exception 
 from the great universe of inert existence, but the 
 will of God for the soul, its destiny as a purpose and 
 choice of God. And as the purpose is that of God, 
 to whom all things future are present, therefore in 
 Him our destiny is an ever-present and ever-living 
 reality. Thus the soul's absolute and final value was 
 found in Christ, in the pre-existent Christ, eternally 
 chosen, God's personal purpose, eternal and unbe- 
 gotten, in whom we were and are created. 
 
 You will not of course preach in exactly those 
 terms, but by such thoughts you may satisfy and 
 clear and stablish your own minds, so that you can 
 put the matter freely in a more popular way. 
 People will listen to that often indeed too readily, 
 deeming sometimes of the Humanity eternal in God 
 almost as if it were an independent entity in God 
 which God existed to serve and magnify ; so that 
 they speak and think as if God loved Christ for the 
 sake of the humanity He embodied so perfectly, 
 instead of loving humanity for the sake of Christ, 
 who redeemed it so perfectly in God's saving pui- 
 pose. 
 
 about moral personality being the nature and meaning of 
 Soul, and about personality arriving as a growth out of ex- 
 perience and providence by the moral discipline of our faith. 
 I have already pointed out how sonship is not a natural 
 feature of the Soul but is conferred on it, though frcin its 
 beginning, as a destiny, a gift from God's hand, an adop- 
 tion from before the foundation of the world by God' , calling 
 and purpose.
 
 140 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 I am not going further into that. I only want to 
 point out that the pre-existence of the soul in 
 Plato became, for a Christian thought based on 
 positive revelation, the pre-existence of Christ, who 
 was the personal embodiment of God's personal 
 purpose and choice with persons, the Captain of the 
 elect, the eternal object of God's choice, and God's 
 own perfect and perpetual answer to His own will. 
 I only want to say that, if you put it to people in 
 the appropriate way, and not exactly as I put it to 
 you who are trained men, they will listen with at 
 least an imaginative interest. For these realities 
 are great poetry, and when well handled they 
 satisfy and pacify. And people who rise above a 
 material, selfish, impatient and over-practical Chris- 
 tianity will listen to preaching about the soul's 
 destiny, about its being so absolute and precious 
 that it was predestiny, bound up with God's 
 timeless thought, will, and purpose a purpose 
 pre-intelligent and pre-active and pre-redeeming 
 (Rom. viii. 28 ff.) a purpose in which God fore- 
 knew what He was about, fore-ordained the soul, 
 the race, unto salvation, and fore-saved and justi- 
 fied it before our day, and indeed before the day of 
 Time. People can be made to rise above the vulgar 
 contempt for such interests. They can be made to 
 respond to efforts of this kind to translate a material 
 and temporal valuation of life into a spiritual and 
 eternal, to deliver them from polemical dogmas 
 about the number and specification of the elect 
 to the presence and sober joy of thoughts beyond
 
 The Preacher and the Age 141 
 
 time concerning the fundamental gift and absolute 
 reality of a redeeming salvation. It is in our forgive- 
 ness that we find our soul and its destiny. Faith in an 
 eternally slain Christ is the foundation for the Church 
 of all certainty of salvation, all divine destiny for the 
 soul. From the beginning, from the heart of God, 
 from Christ, we were destined for God's will and re- 
 demption. We were forever in His purpose in Christ 
 our Saviour. We were from the first where Christ, 
 by God's eternal will, ever is. And so we arrive at 
 the great world-conquering and world-reconciling 
 conviction which lifts the soul to a heavenly rock 
 above the flux and storm of Time. It is the con- 
 viction that Christ in us is the hope of glory, that 
 any hope we have of a glorious and transcendent 
 future rests upon the finished reality of a glorious 
 and transcendent past, not only in Calvary but in 
 the very bosom and will of a Holy Father Almighty 
 to save and Eternal to seal. 
 
 
 
 If we catch no echo in these considerations of 
 mighty happenings beyond the light of common 
 day, if we hear no hint or music of them from behind 
 the veil, if, while we prepare (as you are here doing) 
 to play our part upon this stage of time, we hear 
 nothing of the murmur of that eternal cloud of wit- 
 nesses expectant on the other side of the curtain, and 
 if we do not rise to their interests or their thoughts, 
 then we cannot quit ourselves well (as they would 
 count well) when the time comes. And if people
 
 142 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 will not hear of such things, because they are stale 
 lumber well banished to the attics of the Church 
 when it was refurnished in modern taste, then their 
 revolt is not from orthodoxy, dogma, or polemic but 
 from the serious, the Christian, the spiritual, the 
 eternal world of life and reality. 
 
 It is easy for any soft humanist or hard witling to 
 hold up to horror or ridicule our fathers' doctrine 
 of predestination, or reprobation. It is easy because 
 we believe in man (if we do) where they believed in 
 God. We are supremely concerned about human 
 happiness where they were engrossed with the glory 
 of God. We are preoccupied with human freedom, 
 and are not interested (as they were above all) in 
 the freedom of God. We are greatly interested in 
 freedom of thought, and little in the freedom of 
 grace ; much troubled about freedom of thought or 
 action, and little about freedom of soul. But we are 
 not just to those great spirits till we have the same 
 prime concern, the same perspective of interest, the 
 same sense of final values. We are not just to them 
 till we realize that what moved everything in them 
 was concern for that glory and freedom of God which 
 is the supreme object of existence, and which pre- 
 scribes the final interests of humanity. Nothing can 
 make man free which does not secure in advance 
 the freedom of God. The old theologians saw that 
 as I wish we could see it. And that was what led 
 them to positions which can seem absurd and in- 
 human only to people who care but for the glorious 
 freedom of man, and who use a God but as its minis-
 
 The Preacher and the Age 143 
 
 ter. It is easy for any litterateur to sweep Calvin 
 out of doors of a morning, and take in a suite of 
 theological furniture in completely modern style. 1 
 But it is not easy, it is a great moral effort, to 
 think our way out of Calvinism into truth more 
 modest and no less mighty. It is not easy, it is 
 laborious moral effort, as well as mental energy, 
 which enables us to keep in the front of our interest 
 that issue of God's freedom, and yet to secure it by 
 other doctrines than those which have now become 
 untenable. They have become so partly by the 
 growth of the humane idea, but still more by the 
 growth upon us of the revelation latent in a historic 
 Christ and His Gospel. 
 
 
 
 I should like to point out farther that the labour 
 of this reduction cannot be avoided by attempts, 
 like Tolstoi's or other naive spirits, at what we may 
 call mere repristination a violent return to revive 
 Christianity in its earliest and most primitive form. 
 We cannot do with our Christian ideas and institu- 
 tions what we can do with our personal faith. We 
 cannot go back to the fountain head and simply ignore 
 the 2,000 years of Christian evolution. We cannot 
 do that now in the matter of polity. We cannot re- 
 store the exact conditions of the New Testament 
 
 1 I was amused, while delivering these lectures, to see 
 over an American shop the sign of the ' Hegel Furniture 
 Company.'
 
 144 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 Church. Nor can we in the matter of creed, of 
 mental construction either of man or the world. It 
 seems easy to the uninstructed person who has the 
 Bible put into his hand to say, ' Why not return, in 
 mode of life and form of thought, to what is so 
 normative there.' He omits to note that the norma- 
 tive in the New Testament is not a pattern. It is 
 there in a historic context, not on a desert island. 
 We cannot even go back the shorter journey to the 
 Reformation in this sense. It would be destructive 
 to man's spiritual life, even if it were psychologically 
 possible, which it is not. Nor is it historically possi- 
 ble. We have not sufficient data about that very 
 early state of affairs. Those who suggest such a 
 thing are devoid of the historical sense. They 
 have no idea of the dimensions of the problem 
 which is a sure sign of incompetency. And it is 
 therefore as difficult to convince them of the impossi- 
 bility as it would be to perform the feat. To couple 
 up directly with the Church order of the first century, 
 with its literal precepts, with its mental concepts, 
 would be in truth to break with the past in its more 
 inward reality. We may re-interpret and re-organ- 
 ize, but we cannot restore it. We know what the 
 result of Church restoration is in art, in architecture. 
 And it is no less unhappy and impossible in the inner 
 fabric of our faith. It is impossible for Churches to 
 turn this mental somersault, even if individuals 
 tried it, or sects arose upon the effort. All such 
 attempts have been failures, and, more or less, 
 waste. The future must grow out of all the past.
 
 The Preacher and the Age 145 
 
 Neither Church history nor Church piety is a continu- 
 ous fall from the first century, where each age feels 
 itself at the bottom, and must start scrambling up. 
 Rather the whole of history converges and ascends 
 through the present. And we must interpret the 
 originality and normality of Christ and the New 
 Testament consistently with that. We have to solve 
 our own problems as the whole past presents them. 
 We have to draw from an eternity which is brought to 
 our door by the whole course of history up to now. 
 We have to ignore the growing bulk of the question, 
 to fix on its spiritual core. We have to interrogate 
 eternity through the unity of history, past and pre- 
 sent. We must practise divination, and especially 
 at the point where that unity is condensed and 
 narrowed in the Cross of Christ. 
 
 Well, if such be the spirit and method of our 
 theological reduction, are we not entitled to call on 
 the public (for whom we are really acting) to meet us 
 in the like earnest spirit. The work done by theolo- 
 gians is not done for a small group of people with an 
 interest in that hobby. It is not sectional work at 
 all. It is first done for the preachers and their 
 preaching, and through them for the public, on the 
 question of most universal moment. And we are 
 entitled, especially we preachers who stand between 
 the theologians and the public (as the theologians 
 stand between the critics and the preachers), to expect 
 from it some effort to correspond. We may ask it 
 to make moral effort, and to treat more seriously 
 that more portable and potent creed which we 
 
 P.P. 10
 
 146 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 distill from the creeds rather than pick from the 
 poets, or from the poetry even of Scripture. A 
 generous theology should not be associated with 
 mere mobility of sympathy and shortness of spiritual 
 fibre. Let our public put aside the habit of dis- 
 cursive attention and sustained distraction which 
 marks the restless, casual age. Let it deliberately 
 call in its vagrant thoughts, and give itself and its 
 mind to those prime matters of the soul. If they 
 deserve any attention they deserve our best. Let it 
 give to this liigh business of eternity at least some of 
 the same effort as it gives to the grave business of 
 tune. Let it give to life some of the intense and 
 capable energy it gives to living. Let its religion 
 cease to be merely a refuge and a balm for men so 
 jaded with the pursuit of the world as to be fit on 
 Sundays for no more than a warm bath or a sacred 
 concert. 
 
 Moreover, let the religious public at least have 
 some consideration for its ministry, which it irritates 
 and debases by trivial ethics, and the impatient de- 
 mand for short sermons and long " socials." Let it 
 respect the dignity of the ministry. Let it cease to 
 degrade the ministry into a competitor for public 
 notice, a caterer for public comfort, and a mere waiter 
 upon social convenience or religious decency. Let it 
 make greater demands on the pulpit for power, and 
 grasp, and range, and penetration, and reality. Let 
 it encourage the ministry to do more justice to the 
 mighty matter of the Bible and its burthen, and 
 not only to its beauty, its charm, its sentiment, or
 
 The Preacher and the Age 147 
 
 its precepts. Let it come in aid to protect the pulpit 
 from that curse of petty sentiment which grows 
 upon the Church, which rolls up from the pew into 
 the pulpit, and from the pulpit rolls down upon 
 the pew in a warm and soaking mist. There is 
 an element in the preacher's eloquence which only 
 the audience can give. Let it do so by being, not 
 less exalting but more only, exacting on the 
 great right things. Let it realize that for true elo- 
 quence there must be great matter, both in him 
 who speaks and in those who hear. The greatest 
 eloquence is not that of the man but of the theme. 
 There is no such supporter of a minister as the man 
 who, he knows, studies the Bible with as much earnest- 
 ness as himself, if with fewer facilities. Such sup- 
 porters add immeasurably to the staying power 
 of a Church. If our people are experts of the 
 Bible we shall have none of the rude remarks of 
 philanthropy about the time the minister wastes on 
 theology. I say that, in the present state of the 
 Church, and certainly for the sake of its pulpit, its 
 ministers, and its future, theology is a greater need 
 than philanthropy. Because men do not know where 
 they are. They are only steering by dead reckoning 
 when anything may happen. But theology is 
 " taking the sun." And it is wonderful it is danger- 
 ous how few of our officers can use the sextant for 
 themselves. Yet what is the use of captains who 
 are more at home entertaining the passengers than 
 navigating the ship. The theology of the Bible 
 is but the moral adequacy and virility of the word
 
 148 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 of the Cross, and the thews of a powerful Gospel. 
 A theology chiefly curious, or speculative, a second- 
 ary theology, may be left to the leisure of the schools ; 
 but a theology of experienced Grace, primary theo- 
 logy, is of the essence of the Gospel. And it is not 
 merely of the bene esse, it is of the esse of the Church. 
 The Church, then, may adjust itself to the world 
 in reducing its demand to those experimental but 
 rational limits which the New Testament prescribes. 
 But within those limits it must descend on the world 
 from the side of God and the glory of his throne, 
 whether it come, like the Spirit, as a rushing mighty 
 wind, or, like the New Jerusalem, sailing down 
 beautiful as a bride. In the last matters of the 
 soul it is the Church that gives the law to the 
 world ; it is not the world that gives the law to the 
 Church. But it is the Church as prophet, not as King. 
 It is not the imperial Church but the serving Church, 
 the Church not as judge but as witness. It is the 
 Church not as an organization, far less as a monarchy, 
 but as the company of the faithful, the communion 
 of saints and the fellow heirs of the Gospel ; the 
 Church as the trustee of the Word of saving Grace, 
 not as the nuncio of an imperious prerogative ; as 
 the meek, mighty apostle of the Redeemer, not as 
 the gorgeous vicar of Christ. 
 
 
 
 Meantime let us welcome and use any signs that 
 the age presents of the frame of mind we desire to 
 see. Let us be quick to read and interpret not only
 
 The Preacher and the Age 149 
 
 its unrest, not even its compunction, but its deep, 
 though hidden, sense of guilt, and its keen, though 
 stifled, sense of despair. Let us recognize that 
 men are brooding on their moral condition much 
 more than they own. Let us realize how they 
 are being forced, by mightier influences than ours, 
 upon the moral problems that set up the real crisis 
 of the soul. Let us not be the victims of the con- 
 ventional phases of sin, penitence, and prayer; of 
 those forms of them which religious speakers work 
 to death and rob of solemn meaning. Let us learn 
 to discover the thing itself where the traditional 
 expressions of it do not appear, and the ecclesiastical 
 symptoms are wanting. If we get deep enough 
 with the public mind at any rate in the Old World 
 we shall find that men are less satisfied with 
 success than would appear from the plaudits of 
 the day, less the victims of things as they are than 
 the press would indicate, and more preoccupied with 
 their inward moral failure than their bravado will 
 admit. 
 
 It is true, when the conscience begins to act we 
 often find no more than a vague sense of imperfection 
 before the Christian standard, or a dim disquiet. But 
 that is not all. We find also an inner schism and a real 
 sense of retribution, however vague, when conscience 
 does bite. The curse comes home. But it is not the 
 fear of hell, scarcely of God. It is the fear of judg- 
 ment, indeed, but the judgment of exposure to 
 man, not of inquisition by God. It is the judgment 
 of being found out, whether by self or society. And
 
 150 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 the torment of being found out by yourself, and 
 carrying about in yourself a living fraud, a moral 
 corpse, can become to some as great as the exposure 
 to the world. What comes home is the nemesis 
 of guilt in the course of life, not in the judgment 
 outside life. It comes home either in visible tragedy 
 or hi inward desiccation and calm despair. The 
 sense of guilt is still there, it is often more active 
 than we are allowed to know. And it cannot be 
 escaped. It is very actual. Read Ibsen, for in- 
 stance. You will find the dramatists much more 
 to your purpose than most of the novelists. They 
 get closer to life's moral realities. Read him again. 
 Mark and learn his unsparing ethical realism. 
 Could that remorseless insight of his through the 
 shams and clothes of ordinary society miss the 
 grim dull ache of guilt ? For him, as for all the rest 
 of the tragic poets, guilt is the centre of the tragedy. 
 " Guilt remains guilt," he says. " You cannot bully 
 God into any such blessing as turns guilt to merit, or 
 penalty to reward." No, God can be neither bullied 
 nor blandished into that. Yet the blessing is there. 
 The one thing needful is there not the merit but 
 the mercy. The forgiveness is there, and there from 
 God, there of His own free gift, at His proper cost. 
 And to realize how awful that cost is use such as Ibsen. 
 To save your soul from sunny or silly piety, to 
 realize the deadly inveteracy of evil, its dereliction by 
 God, its sordid paralysis of all redeeming, self- 
 recuperative power in man, its incurable fatal effect 
 upon the moral order of society, read Ibsen. Yea,
 
 The Preacher and the Age 151 
 
 to realize how it thereby imports the element of 
 death even into the moral order of the universe 
 read Ibsen. It inflicts death on whatever power 
 you call God. Unless, indeed, that power have the 
 secret (unknown to this great prophet) of transform- 
 ing the death which it cannot evade. Within the 
 moral order there may reside, (Christ says there does 
 reside,) a moral power to make itself effective, not 
 only in spite of the wound to it, but by means of 
 that wound. A holy God has power to make good 
 the moral law by a personal resource which both 
 honoured its affronted but infrangible majesty, 
 and surmounted it in saving love. Such searching, 
 fundamental things a man like Ibsen enables us to 
 realize, and compels us to face. Our thought of 
 evil is too shallow till these keen, hard plough- 
 shares tear to the depths. Our attention is too 
 slight and volatile, our hearts too happy, light, and 
 credulous. These pessimists are a gift of God to 
 us. Their bitter is a tonic to our time. They are 
 the protest of a self-respecting conscience against an 
 idyllic, juvenile, sanguine, and domestic tyranny 
 of life. It is the great dramatists that are the great 
 questioners, the great challengers, the great and 
 serviceable accusers of current, easy, and fungous 
 sainthood. It is not the learned critics that present 
 the great challenge which draws out the last resources 
 of a Gospel. They are too intellectualist. It is the 
 great moral critics like Ibsen, Carlyle, and their kind. 
 They lay bare not our errors but our shams. It is 
 true they have no answer to the question they raise,
 
 152 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 no covering for the shame they expose. Ibsen 
 does not believe that God can be bullied that He 
 can be mocked, as the Bible puts it. I wish more 
 of us shared his belief there. But he also does not 
 believe in a God that cannot be foiled, in a holiness 
 that must establish itself upon everything, hi a God 
 of grace, in grace with all the creative power of 
 God turned to redeem, in God as Lord of the moral 
 order also, and able to deal with it and its mockery. 
 A creed that can cope with such sceptics is the final 
 creed of the world. Why does Ibsen not so believe ? 
 Because, while he reads one book with uncanny 
 penetration, the book of Man, Church, and Society, 
 he has never turned the same piercing eye on the 
 other book, the New Testament, and never taken 
 Christ as seriously as he takes man. He is grimly, 
 ghastly interpretive but not redemptive like 
 his analytic age. It is the fault, the bane, of almost 
 all the great critics and accusers. But consent still 
 to learn from them what they have to teach you 
 you who are already taught by Christ, and sure of 
 your Gospel perhaps too slightly sure, and too 
 lightly persuaded you are, or are making, Christians. 
 Preach to Ibsen's world, and there are few that you 
 will miss. Only do not preach his word. Christ's 
 Gospel has the same radical, unsparing, moral realism, 
 tearing to the roots, and tearing them up with 
 relentless moral veracity. It has the note of thorough. 
 You find it chiefly in the exactions, the irony, and the 
 wrath of Christ's love. And next to them in the 
 Apostle of love, in the Epistles of John. " If any
 
 The Preacher and the Age 153 
 
 man love God and hate his brother he is a liar." 
 Learn, then, to shun every hymn that has the word 
 ' sweet ' in it, to find other sources of " greatness " 
 than the " gentleness " of God, and to look for 
 something else than lightness in the burden of 
 Christ. Let your song be of mercy, but the mercy 
 of judgment. And learn not to say so much 
 to your people of a day of Judgment sure though 
 far. The farness destroys the sureness. Ethicize 
 the reality of judgment. Moralize the eschato- 
 logy. Couple it up to the hour. Drop, if need 
 be, the drapery of the remote assize. The 
 judge is at the door. Everything comes home. 
 It comes home in calamity if you do not take it 
 home in repentance. Everything comes home. 
 Life needs far more for most people, for all people 
 when you get as deep as that, far more than filling 
 out. It needs more than the deep breathing of tonic 
 oxygen. It needs remaking. It needs divine, 
 decisive action, forgiveness, atonement, the cancelling 
 of guilt, salvation in that sense, rescue from the 
 moral nemesis, the breaking of the guilty entail. 
 It needs more even than redemption, if by redemp- 
 tion you mean but Buddhist rescue from the tragic 
 ills and clogs of life. It needs, before all redemption, 
 reconciliation, the reopening of communication, the 
 dissipation of guilt's cloud which darkens for us 
 the face of God. It is unfortunate that so many 
 who preach reconciliation lose sight of redemption, 
 while the preachers of redemption are apt to lose 
 the note of reconciliation.
 
 154 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 
 
 Beware, of course, of censoriousness, which is a 
 frequent trap for the young moralist. But do preach 
 a gospel where salvation is in real rapport with deep 
 guilt, and redemption with holy judgment. For 
 God's sake do not tell poor prodigals and black 
 scoundrels they are better than they think, that 
 they have more of Christ in them than they know, 
 and so on. The conscience which is really in hell 
 is the first to be angered at ingenuities and futilities 
 like these, the more exasperating because of the 
 poetic quarter-truth they contain. 
 
 This is where we suffer from the word of a pseudo- 
 liberalism and humanism. It seeks to be modern 
 by the way of extenuation rather than realism, 
 by palliation rather than penetration, by moral 
 tenderness rather than by moral probing, by poetry 
 rather than prophesying, by nursing where surgery 
 is required. So much of our modern liberalism, even 
 when ethical, is more kindly in tone than positive 
 in power. And, therefore, it fails to grasp much 
 beyond the milder sins and the milder sex. It is 
 shy of the only thing relevant a divine atone- 
 ment, or it empties it of virile force and mordant 
 meaning. Those who so speak seem never them- 
 selves to have resisted unto blood striving against 
 sin, nor to have been snatched from self-contempt 
 and despair. But I venture to think John Newton's 
 " I asked the Lord that I might grow " one of the 
 greatest and most realistic utterances of Christian
 
 The Preacher and the Age 155 
 
 experience. And it represents the course our sunny 
 liberalism must take as it passes from a trout 
 stream of the morning to the river of God which 
 is full of deep water. Our young lions suffer hunger. 
 Do you realize that it was the severity of Christ 
 that made the agony of Christ, His love of God's 
 holy law more even than of His brother men ? Do 
 you realize how, first to last, He stood on God's 
 side against men ? There was in existence in the 
 Judaism of Christ's day a mild, humane, and attrac- 
 tive school of the law, in contrast with those 
 teachers who pressed it into unsparing detail. And 
 has it occurred to you to ask why Christ did not ally 
 Himself with that kind and genial school, and work 
 from its midst ? Nay, how was it that He stood 
 as opposed to it as He did to the other extreme ? 
 Because His freedom in relation to the law lay 
 not in getting rid of it, not in easing it. He 
 preached no mere emancipation. He was not 
 antinomian. What He brought was not a general 
 dispensation. The imperative note was always in 
 the front of His preaching. He always recognized the 
 law as the will of God. His complaint was that both 
 extremes tampered with it ; not that the Pharisees 
 were legalist, but that they were inconsistent with 
 their own legal version of it. " What they bid you 
 do do, but do not as they do." In his own relation 
 to the law He was not so much under it, or against 
 it, as above it. He handled it as God would. His 
 obedience to the law was not free like the Sadducees 
 by reducing its claim, nor slavish like the Pharisees
 
 156 The Preacher and the Age 
 
 by not rising above its claim. It was the obedience of 
 the Son in His Father's house. He pressed the law's 
 validity by expanding its scope. His modifications 
 were to increase its obligations . Love was more search- 
 ing, and therefore more imperative, than precept. 
 Law for him (as for Paul) was always exigent, never 
 outworn. The Sabbath was made for man. The 
 greater man grows the more imperative is a Sabbath, 
 the more serious the penalty of its neglect. Traffic 
 in the Temple was what roused Him, not its priests 
 nor its ritual. Commercialist piety was far more 
 unholy than sacerdotal. As Christ's love to God 
 was greater than His love to man, so His love for 
 God's law was more intense than His sympathy with 
 man's weakness. True His love to men was part 
 of God's love to men. But that shows that a divine 
 love of man is only possible if divine holiness is 
 loved as God loves it. Always the obedience to holy 
 God was precedent with Christ to the service of needy 
 men. He served men chiefly out of obedience to 
 God ; and His love to them was because of His love 
 to God. His teeming pity flowed from His love, 
 and His love was fixed upon the Holy One. The 
 hallo whig of God's name always came first. And 
 for Christ the law was no piece of Judaism to 
 be overthrown with Pharisaism, but it was the 
 expression of God's holy will to be honoured in His 
 Son. The original thing in Jesus was His peculiar way 
 of honouring the law, and not His discarding of it. 
 The claim of God's holy will was never ended till 
 it was met. He was not, as I have said, among the
 
 The Preacher and the Age 157 
 
 liberals of the Jewish Church. He pressed the 
 claim of holy law, only in a new construction. He 
 was neither orthodox nor liberal. It is even bad 
 taste to apply to Him such terms. He had the 
 word of living grace and searching power. That 
 note is what we call positive to-day. And, there- 
 fore, He was adjudged by both dull parties to 
 be unintelligible or a traitor. And it was only 
 when Christ had honoured in full the holiness of 
 God's claim upon the Cross that Paul could take 
 the attitude to the law he did, and speak of Him as 
 its end. 
 
 The guilt, the Pharisaism, that saturates the 
 Europe or America spread out before men like 
 Ibsen, can never be dealt with by pressing a social 
 ethic, or a moral order, or an enfolding sympathy for 
 man, while pooh-poohing the holy demand of God. 
 It can only be dealt with by a conception of God's 
 action in Christ, which shall do more justice to God's 
 inexorable holiness than the Judaisms of ortho- 
 doxy, or the genialities of humanism. It can only 
 be dealt with by making room for the judgment 
 grace of God in Christ's cross applying it as judi- 
 ciously as you will, and remembering always the 
 strength of reserve and the reverence of the holy 
 name hallowed in silent action there. 
 
 But to this subject I shall be compelled to return 
 by the pressure of that idea which underlies, sub- 
 dues, and goes on to absorb all I say in this series 
 of discourse.
 
 THE PREACHER AND RELIGIOUS 
 REALITY
 
 The Preacher and Religious Reality 
 
 THERE are two ways of treating the Reformation 
 one is to complete it, and one is to escape from it. 
 
 And there are two ways of escaping from it. 
 One is the way of deploring it with shame as 
 the grand defection of modern history, re- 
 nouncing it as the grand schism, and returning 
 to the medievalism it abjured. That is the 
 Catholic way. And the other is the way of 
 deploring and renouncing it with regret as a 
 lapse into theology and violence, when all that 
 was needed might have been done by culture and 
 reform. That is the way of Erasmus, and Goethe, 
 the way of the Illumination. Goethe expresses 
 the mind of many refined Protestants when he 
 says that Luther's Reformation threw back the 
 progress of culture by centuries. 
 
 I would express the conviction, against both of 
 these ways, that the proper treatment of the Refor- 
 mation is to finish it to reform and complete it. 
 And, still further, it is not to correct it by an 
 extraneous principle like culture, but to reform it 
 by its own intrinsic principle of faith. We are 
 
 161 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 The Preacher and 
 
 but half way through the Reformation. So mighty 
 was that conversion of Christianity, that second 
 birth of the Gospel. Remember, it was in its nature 
 the Church's reforming of itself. So it goes on still 
 as the self-reformation of the reformed Church. 
 It was evolved from the Church, it was not thrust 
 on it. It was the reward to the Church for the 
 evangelical fidelity that had long been struggling 
 in it. It began at the Church's self-reformation 
 by the Spirit. That is its genius. Therefore, it 
 goes on so. That is to say, the modernizing of our 
 theology, as of our evangelical methods, is some- 
 thing demanded by the reformed faith itself. A 
 new theology is to express the growth of faith and 
 give room for more. 
 
 I have mentioned and applied several of the 
 modern ideas to which we have to adjust our 
 message the idea of authority, the idea of morality, 
 the idea of immanence. There is another modern 
 passion which we must go out to satisfy, one inherent 
 in faith itself the passion for reality and 
 especially moral reality. By which I need hardly 
 say I mean much more than ordinary sincerity. 
 
 The history of 'the passion for reality would be the 
 history of the whole modern mind since medievalism 
 was outgrown. And that indeed is not so very long 
 ago. The medieval period did not really expire till, 
 in the eighteenth century, the Illumination killed 
 its legatee in scholastic Protestantism. But the 
 history of the movement on its moral side began 
 with the Reformation. That was a vast assertion
 
 Religious Reality 163 
 
 of ethical realism. It pursued the actual moral 
 condition of the soul into the recesses of the con- 
 science, and dealt unsparingly, effectually, with it 
 there in the shape of sin. It is true that almost 
 immediately that mighty wave began to ebb just 
 as Judaism surged swiftly back on Pauline Christi- 
 anity, and submerged it in Catholicism till the 
 Reformation. The great moral vis of the Reforma- 
 tion subsided into the renewed intellectualism of 
 the seventeenth century dogmatists, so able, so 
 acute, so elaborate, and so irrelevant to life. Cor- 
 rection then became inevitable ; and it came from 
 the Illumination, the rationalist, humanist move- 
 ment of the i8th century, with its science and its 
 romance, its enlargement both of interest and of 
 heart, its sense of the world and of humanity, its 
 concrete realism. As Luther had faced the reality of 
 the moral situation, the Illumination faced the reality 
 of the intellectual situation. And the result now 
 is that we are driven back to the early moral genius 
 of the Reformation, to its evangelical prime, to res- 
 cue us from a mere eager intellectualism. We are 
 forced back, beyond all eagerness or even earnestness, 
 on the thorough-going moral realism which is the 
 first interest of the Gospel. We are driven there 
 for a refuge from the Illumination ; both from the 
 intellectualism which overdoes its rationality, and 
 from the sentiment which overdoes its romance. 
 At the present hour romantic religion has sub- 
 merged evangelical, the religion of affection and 
 temperament has obscured the religion of will and
 
 164 The Preacher and 
 
 conscience, the religion of love or lovelessness the 
 religion of holiness or sin. Romantic religion lives 
 in the sentiments and sympathies, but evangelical 
 religion faith lives in repentance, forgiveness, 
 trust, and self-committal to the Redeemer. When 
 Paul was in his seventh heaven, and heard 
 things not to be spoken, it was a romantic, mystic 
 moment in his life. But he did not boast of that, 
 but of Jesus Christ, and the Cross, and the faith of the 
 Cross, where was now no condemnation but peace 
 by which he meant not calm but the life-confidence 
 of reconciliation and co-operation with God. His 
 Christianity lay not in his romantic experiences 
 but in his evangelical. We need a more searching 
 evangelical realism to protect us from orthodoxism, 
 rationalism, and the temperamental litterateurs. 
 And we find it in the old faith (when we take the 
 word faith quite seriously) with its realist demand 
 for a new theology. 
 
 
 
 If we are to preach with Gospel effect to our 
 time we must give up the idea of dragging men back 
 to the dogmas of scholastic Protestantism. It is 
 no more wise than the attempt to drag them back 
 to the dogmas and institutions of the medieval 
 Church. The worship of orthodoxy is Protestant 
 Catholicism, Protestant Romanism. And it is 
 what none of the great men did who have chiefly 
 made Christianity what it is. Christianity did arise 
 on Jewish soil ; but the fathers did not try to force 
 the world back into Judaism, or to any oriental
 
 Religious Reality 165 
 
 creed. They poured the wine of Christianity into 
 the bottles of the Greek and Roman spirit. They 
 met with their Gospel the real intellectual problems 
 of their time. The misfortune was that their 
 successors did not know when that time was by. 
 And so it was also with the great Reformers. Luther 
 met with the Gospel his time's moral need, Calvin 
 its social and political. That touch their successors 
 lost. But in completing this work we can only 
 do it by facing the situation around us as really as 
 the heroes did theirs. 
 
 For instance, we must meet criticism of the Bible 
 with a hospitable face. We have learned much 
 from it, and we have much to learn. We preachers, 
 especially, must realize how it has rediscovered the 
 Bible, as Luther rediscovered the Gospel. We must 
 use all wise and tender means to give our people the 
 results of that rediscovery, and to make the Bible 
 for them the real historic and living book which it 
 has so widely ceased to be. We must avoid irritating 
 them with discoveries of what it is not, and state- 
 ments of what is upset ; and we must kindle them 
 with the positive exposition of what it is now found 
 to be for heart, history, faith and grace. We must 
 get rid, as we wisely can, of the amateur and fan- 
 tastic habit of laying out the Bible in diagrams and 
 schemes, which treat it like a public park, and 
 which ignore historic and critical study. We must 
 give up the allegorical interpretations by which 
 some attempt to save its verbal inspiration, now 
 hopelessly gone. And we must restrain ourselves
 
 1 66 The Preacher and 
 
 in the fanciful use of texts at the cost of the historic 
 revelation which the whole context gives. These 
 practices have a show of honouring the Bible, but 
 they really treat it with the disrespect that is always 
 there when we presume people to mean another 
 thing than they say. If you treat a text mystically 
 make it clear that you take a liberty hi doing so. 
 Preach more expository sermons. Take long pas- 
 sages for texts. Perhaps you have no idea how 
 eager people are to have the Bible expounded, and 
 how much they prefer you to unriddle what the 
 Bible says, with its large utterance, than to confuse 
 them with what you can make it say by some 
 ingenuity. It is thus you will get real preaching 
 in the sense of preaching from the real situation 
 of the Bible to the real situation of the time. It 
 is thus you make history preach to history, the past 
 to the present, and not merely a text to a soul. 
 
 
 
 Again we must cultivate reality by preaching to 
 the social situation, to social sin. It is impossible to 
 preach with reality to an age like this and ignore the 
 social crisis and demand. We must face the questions 
 put to the Gospel by a tune which is passing from 
 one social epoch to another. It is to the Gospel these 
 questions are put, though they are addressed to the 
 care of the Church. I hope the Church will see that 
 they reach their destination. We are at the junction 
 of two ages the Capitalist and the Socialist. And 
 we who live in the supreme society of the Church,
 
 Religious Reality 167 
 
 and who possess the word of moral power for every 
 age, must not be unprepared with a relevant word, 
 even if we have not yet the final word. It is a work 
 to be done with the greatest judgment. And it is 
 not honestly done without due knowledge. We 
 must know the ethic of the Gospel on the one hand, 
 and the economics of the age on the other. You 
 will not be so ill-advised as to make this the staple 
 of your pulpit. Some should not touch it there at 
 all. It is not for every preacher, and it is not for the 
 preacher alone, but for the preacher co-operating 
 with men of affairs who will add his knowledge to 
 their own. Neither the preacher alone nor the lay- 
 men alone makes the Church, but both do. But 
 the Church, as the great collective preacher, should 
 have some social word that deserves public attention 
 and respect, even if it cannot secure immediate 
 belief. The realism of the Gospel and of the age 
 alike require that. But the subject is so large I will 
 not embark on it. It is one I have not ignored else- 
 where. I but use it to illustrate my wider plea, and 
 to enforce the demand for reality in our preaching. 
 
 
 
 I would, however, go on to press upon you at more 
 length the demand for spiritual reality, a spiritual 
 reality which is no more mere sincerity than spiritual 
 veracity is mere plain truth-telling. I mean the 
 practical recognition of the fact that the actual pre- 
 dicament of the human soul is its moral case, that 
 its moral case is need and not strength, that its need 
 is a moral more than a sympathetic need, that it is
 
 1 68 The Preacher and 
 
 a matter of conscience and holiness more than of 
 heart and affection, of sin more than wrong though, 
 of course, it is both. 
 
 And here I will venture to confess that the con- 
 dition of the Church may well cause to realist faith 
 something less than high satisfaction. Let me not 
 be accused of being dull to love and pity if I say 
 that these have been developed by the Churches 
 we know best at the cost of the spiritual life, of the 
 moral soul, and of a Gospel of holiness. I assure you I 
 have the affections of other men, and a passion mostly 
 too keen to be safely loosed and let go. I have a 
 sense of wrong in things that would fill many of 
 these lectures with violent, and perhaps some bitter, 
 denunciation. It is a grief to me to walk the streets, 
 and to see, with eyes too dim to see, the needy 
 waifs, the dear, poor women, the lean, weary, great- 
 eyed children. O, these sheep, what have they done ! 
 Love and pity are to me a daily pain. And yet it 
 was not the sorrow of the world that broke the heart 
 of Christ, but its wickedness. He was equal to its 
 sorrow, and His power was never below His pity. He 
 began by being the world's healer. But what broke 
 him was its sin. That mighty heart, so capacious to 
 receive, and so swift to pity, had to end as the 
 moral Saviour. His witness of the loving God had to 
 become His work for the Holy. And the greatest 
 thing He could do in His love and pity was to redeem 
 us. He lived benignly among the poignant realities 
 of human sorrow, but what killed Him was His 
 realization of human sin and guilt. The healer of
 
 -f 
 
 Religious Reality 169 
 
 our pain had to practise a more radical realism 
 than pain stirs, and become the destroyer of our 
 wickedness. Only so could the love and pity prevail 
 at last. The brotherhood of man could only come i 
 by the communion of Saints in the household of 
 faith, of men who by the awful Cross were scarcely 
 saved. Yet to-day this Cross, with its moral realism 
 dredging the very bottom of the conscience, and 
 descending even into hell, is the centre of much 
 more sentiment than repentance, and of far more 
 celebration than surrender. 
 
 We suffer from three things, I will say. The 
 Church, of course, has always suffered from whatever 
 was the great world-power of the age, and suffered 
 either by oppression from it, or, worse, by infection. 
 It suffered so from pagan Rome. It has suffered 
 from the dynasties of modern Europe. And as 
 the world-power of to-day is the money power the 
 Church to-day surfers from the plutocracy. I do 
 not say from the plutocrats. Many of them mean 
 well, and do well. But it suffers from the plutocracy. 
 But this, again, is a matter too large ; and I want to 
 come nearer home to the matter of our spiritual 
 realism. I will say then the Church suffers from 
 three things. 
 
 1. From triviality (with externality). 
 
 2. From uncertainty of its foundation. 
 
 3. From satisfaction with itself 
 
 And to cure these the Gospel we have to preach 
 prescribes 
 
 i. For our triviality, a new note of greatness in
 
 i jo The Preacher and 
 
 our creed, the note that sounds in a theology more 
 than in a sentiment. 
 
 2. For our uncertainty, a new note of wrestling 
 and reality in our prayer. 
 
 3. For our complacency, a new note of judgment in 
 our salvation. 
 
 And these three remedies cannot be taken by 
 way of mere outward enterprise, (which will, indeed, 
 collapse for want of them). They can only be taken 
 inwardly, by means of more religion, more positive 
 religion, and more personal religion. I believe that 
 a Church really sanctified would develop more power, 
 light, and machinery for dealing with the tremendous 
 realities of the world than is possible while we are 
 groping in the dark, picking our timid path in econo- 
 mics, or flogging up the energies of a flagging faith. 
 
 I. As to the triviality from which we suffer. 
 
 I am afraid that, for the general public, religion 
 has become associated with the small and negligible 
 side of the soul. Nowhere has mediocrity its chance 
 as it has it in religion. Nowhere has the gossipy 
 side of life such scope. Nowhere has quackery of 
 every kind such a field and such a harvest. I know 
 very well that this is a perversion of the tendernes > 
 of religion for the weak things of the world and foi 
 the individual case. But a perversion it is. The 
 weak things are not only considered, they take 
 command. They claim to give the law. They make 
 a majority. They trade upon Christian love, and
 
 Religious Reality 171 
 
 belittle it. Eternity and its issues go out of faith 
 as love comes in. Churches and preachers are 
 choked with a crowd of paltry things kept in place 
 by no sure authority, and dignified by no governing 
 power. Both ministers and Churches have as much 
 of a struggle to get time for spiritual culture as if 
 it were none of their business. Christian ethic 
 suffers from what I may call inversion. I mean 
 this. When Paul, the persecutor, goes the length 
 he does in considering the weak brother it is a 
 very great trophy of the moral victory of Christ, 
 and it prescribes a principle of Christian ethic. But 
 it is a total inversion of that ethic when the weakling 
 sets up a claim, and demands as a right what the 
 apostle gave but as a grace. That is overweening 
 in the weak, and it is fatal for the Church. It turns 
 consideration to pampering, and makes Christian 
 pity the factory of moral paupers with the paupers' 
 audacity. Or, on the other hand, the Church's 
 worship, which should gather and greaten its soul, 
 is sacrificed to its work. You have bustle all the 
 week and baldness all the Sunday. You have 
 energy everywhere except in the Spirit. The 
 religious material is tugged and stretched to cover 
 so much that it grows too thin for anything and 
 parts into rents and rags. We are more anxious to 
 cover ground than to secure it, to evangelize the 
 world than to convert it. It is faithless impatience, 
 of the youngest^thinnest kind. A bustling institu- 
 tion may cover spiritual destitution, just as Christian 
 work may be taken up as a narcotic to spiritual 
 
 I
 
 172 The Preacher and 
 
 doubt and emptiness. The minister's study 
 becomes more of an office than an oratory. Com- 
 mittees suck away the breath of power. Socialities 
 become the only welcome sacraments. The tea- 
 meeting draws people together as the communion table 
 does not. The minister may talk the silliest platitudes 
 without resentment, but he may not smoke a cigar 
 in some places without causing an explosion. And 
 religion becomes an ambulance, not a pioneer. 
 
 But why need I go on with a diagnosis which is 
 only too apt to describe tendencies as if they were 
 results, and treat extreme cases as if they were the 
 rule. Let us turn from observation to experience. 
 Let us look within. Do our hungry souls not tell 
 us faithfully that much of our vivid and ingenious 
 talk about statistics of Church attendance, about 
 advanced and popular methods is well, is eloquent 
 but 'tis not true. It regards the Church as a going 
 concern rather than a communion of saints. It 
 has the tone of the press rather than of the Gospel. 
 It has not the accent of the Holy Ghost, not his 
 solemn rushing wind, nor the piercing of his dis- 
 cerning sword. It is not the truth, the kind of 
 truth, that goes to the reality of the spiritual case. It 
 treats symptoms rather than diagnoses the disease. 
 Suppose Christ had read no deeper than that the 
 predicament of man and Israel ! Suppose He had 
 pierced no closer to moral reality than that ! Sup- 
 pose He had measured His success by His supporters. 
 Suppose His great and first object had been con- 
 versions.
 
 Religious Reality 173 
 
 
 
 For that state of things, that irdKinrpa^^oavvr] 
 both in the Church and the world, there is no out- 
 ward remedy. What we need most is not the 
 re-organization of society. That is a topic so actual 
 that the press will discuss it freely. But the actual 
 is one thing, the real is another. The actual is the 
 present hour, the real is the eternal power. And the 
 reality of the situation it is hard to make people 
 face. A business man learns the habit of facing 
 fully his financial position, and noting it almost 
 daily. But we have not learned the habit of facing 
 fully and courageously the moral situation. When 
 we do, we find that the re-organization of society is 
 a small matter compared with the re-organization 
 of the soul. And no new methods will do that. No 
 reformation of our modus operandi will do that. 
 You cannot do that by institutionalizing our re- 
 ligious agencies. The re-organizing of the soul is 
 Redeemer's work. We have to secure our found- 
 ations anew. We Protestants have always to be 
 securing the foundation anew. It is our genius to 
 plant every man on the Rock, and to plant the 
 whole man there. He has continually to refer himself 
 to Christ, and to appropriate Christ's salvation anew. 
 We have constantly to acquire what we inherit. 
 The branch must ever draw from the trunk vine. 
 We must keep in close contact at one end with 
 spiritual reality. If we do not we are cut off and 
 withered. That is, we become sectional and shrunk,
 
 
 174 The Preacher and 
 
 sectarian and trivial. And churches may become 
 hives of little bees, with the due proportion of 
 drones and stings, instead of fraternities of godly, 
 great, wise, and worthy souls. 
 
 We must regain our sense of soul greatness, and 
 our sense of its eternal price. If we measure things 
 by the Cross, which is the price of salvation, and the 
 touchstone of spiritual reality, God cares more that 
 we should be great than that we =hould be happy. 
 He cares more that we should trust and help than 
 that we should enjoy. Christ's love (which was God's) 
 was all help and no enjoyment. Whereas for most 
 people, Christian people, it is the other way. A 
 religion that makes men right and real seems to 
 have no chance with one that makes them feel safe 
 and " good." But the Churches can do nothing per- 
 manent and nothing final for human welfare till the 
 soul gets its own. The Church is not " first of all a 
 working Church." It is a communion of saints and 
 lovers, a company of believers, a fellowship of 
 spiritual realists. It is there first to feed the soul 
 with eternal reality, to stablish, strengthen, and 
 settle the soul upon the Rock of Ages. You cannot 
 expect ill fed people to devise much wisdom, or do 
 much good. And many in our active churches are 
 very hungry as to the soul. They are anaemic in 
 the Spirit. They are fed upon sentiment and not on 
 faith. They have hectic energy and leanness of 
 soul. 
 
 
 
 If the sonl is to realize its greatness, and its union
 
 Religious Reality 175 
 
 with God's eternity in the world, it must be nour- 
 ished with more congenial food. What shall that be ? 
 The philosophies, the humanities, the mysticisms ? 
 Can the soul be settled on reality by philosophies 
 of its own cosmic place ? Can it be stayed on 
 psychologies of its mystic structure and volcanic 
 subliminal depths ? Do we come into tune with the 
 infinite by mystic immersion in the sea of Being ? 
 Does our reconciliation consist in recovering a 
 forgotten sense that human nature is always in 
 unbroken continuity with the divine ? Can we 
 cultivate moral reality by a mere transcendent 
 ethic ? Many a gross Pharisee is a mighty moral- 
 ist ; and he believes himself sincere with it. 
 The deadliest Pharisaism is not hypocrisy; it is 
 the unconscious Pharisaism of unreality. Can we 
 escape that by mere moral vigour and rigour ? 
 Can we greaten the soul for good by literary 
 contact with epic heroisms, or aesthetic spectacles 
 of its dramatic fate ? Can we even dilate and 
 confirm the soul into eternity by loftiest speculation 
 upon the nature of Godhead and the psychology of 
 Trinity ? 
 
 No. However these things move us they do not 
 make us. They may alter us but they do not change 
 us. They refit us but they do not reform us. The 
 greatness of the soul, the greatness of faith, cannot 
 be sustained upon any scrutiny of the soul, whether 
 created or increate, human or divine, not by any psy- 
 chology of man or of God ; but only upon the experi- 
 ence of the soul redeemed. The mere contemplation
 
 176 The Preacher and 
 
 of Christ will not save you. You must appropriate 
 Him. You must know the fellowship of His death. 
 But that means that it is moral action that is real- 
 ity. God Himself is an evepyeia. And it is by 
 the fellowship of the supreme moral action of the 
 spiritual world in Christ's Cross that our soul 
 comes to reality, to its true self, its real depths, 
 and its eternal destiny. And most of all we 
 share the last realism of life by the sense, so gone 
 from our practical creed, quanti fionderis sit pecca- 
 tum, what it cost the Redeemer to redeem. No 
 estimate of the soul which may be reached by 
 itself is so true and great as His estimate, who 
 counted and paid the whole cost of the great war for 
 its recovery. That estimate of sin is expressed in 
 the Cross. And if the preachers do not feel this 
 (as they often do not) the Church must, and must 
 force the preachers' hand. But to learn the Cross so 
 is no mere matter of Bible class or of theology. We 
 must give it time and scope to act upon us, as we do 
 not now do, before we can presume to act with it 
 upon the world. And then perhaps we may cease 
 to hear so much of that talk which paralyses the 
 preacher about short sermons, incessant visits, or reli- 
 gious bustle. Justification is far more than visitation. 
 
 
 
 It is impossible to banish sentiment from religion 
 without impoverishing it, but it is quite necessary 
 to teach it its true place ; and never so necessary 
 as to-day. It cannot be allowed to lead, as in
 
 Religious Reality 177 
 
 so many cases it does. What imagination did in medi- 
 eval Catholicism, that sentiment does in contemporary 
 Protestantism. And the one is a guide no safer than 
 the other. Both tend to the unreal. But there is this 
 difference, that the Bible, which is full of imagina- 
 tion, has no sentiment. Such an episode as that of 
 the ajabaster box is not sentiment but passion. 
 It is certain that sentiment occupies a place with 
 us which is quite out of the perspective of New 
 Testament faith. It makes the language of that faith 
 unintelligible. It can be for the hour, and for our 
 democratic Churches, a foe as dangerous to reality 
 as dishonesty is. It creates a demand for emotions 
 which become too facile in the supply, and, therefore, 
 thoughtless and unreal. Unreality is worse than dis- 
 honesty. And we even have in our religion what has 
 been called the pharisaism of the publican. One has 
 often to note in history the total lack of sound judg- 
 ment that goes with extreme pietism, or the absence 
 of reality, and even veracity, that may go with the 
 saintly type. We have, moreover, the modern 
 and most insidious type of Pharisaism the uncon- 
 scious hypocrite, the man or woman not of fraud 
 but of pose, not of deep and dark design but of 
 subtle egoism, prompt certainty, and facile re- 
 ligiosity. The mischief lies in the unreality of 
 their faith and character rather than in a calculated 
 hypocrisy. The victims are fair and fickle, rather 
 than hollow and hard. 
 
 I would trace the undue place which modern 
 religion gives to sentiment to the undue subjectivity
 
 178 The Preacher and 
 
 of the whole modern type of faith, and its loss of 
 hold upon the mind. And, definitely, I would trace 
 it to the loss of a real positive authority, the loss 
 of an objective grasp of the world's moral crisis 
 in the Christian centre of the Cross. So long as 
 the chief value of the Cross is its value for man, 
 so long as its first effect is upon man and not 
 upon God, so long as its prime action is not upon 
 reality but upon our feeling about reality, then 
 so long shall we be led away from direct con- 
 tact with reality at our religious centre ; and we 
 shall be induced to dwell more upon our expe- 
 rience of reconciliation than on the God by 
 whose self-reconciliation we are reconciled. There 
 is something fatal to a real and thorough religion 
 in a view which makes the finished work of 
 God to depend for its fate upon human experi- 
 ence. It makes God a mere offerer, proposer, 
 or promiser, until we have become receivers. It 
 might even descend to present God in a light little 
 different from that of a candidate for the suffrage 
 of our faith. " It generates a religion of words, 
 and not of purposes and facts, having its reality 
 in the creature and only its proposal of reality in 
 God " (Ed. Irving). To regain our spiritual reality 
 and its moral tone we must go back from our sub- 
 jective experience, not only to the objectivity of 
 a historic Cross, but to the objectivity and the 
 cruciality of God's spiritual action behind that historic 
 Cross, to a central action within His own nature. 
 Our spiritual reality and its ethical results, both
 
 Religious Reality 179 
 
 for private and public righteousness, mean a fresh 
 grasp by the Church of the work of Christ upon the 
 holiness of God and upon the principle of evil. That is 
 the spiritual condition on which alone we can restore 
 the note of moral realism that has died from our 
 sympathetic piety. I allude often to that frequent 
 combination of rationalism with sentiment which 
 marks both a hard orthodoxy and a hard heresy. 
 The sentiment then represents the effort on the 
 part of intellectuahsm to make up by feeling, 
 cultivated if not forced, for the great and real 
 emotion that flows of itself from contact with the 
 supernatural issues involved, and from a share in 
 the central moral drama of existence. 
 
 
 
 2. Besides the triviality and externality I have 
 named, we suffer from uncertainty. For the 
 hour perhaps the Church has' more needlo cultivate 
 certainty than sanctity. It is only the certainty 
 we lack that can give us the sanctity we desire. 
 If we are duly certain about God's holiness our 
 own will follow. It is only the certainty of the 
 Cross that can give us the sanctity of the Spirit. 
 For the fountain head of the Spirit is the Cross. 
 An established or a Catholic Church can flourish 
 upon mere assent ; but for our purposes we need 
 certainty as a personal experience, certainty at 
 nrst hand from God in Christ. One has truly said, 
 " The grand remedy for the present epidemic of 
 doubt is a personal interest in the struggle against
 
 1 
 
 180 The Preacher and 
 
 evil." We do not get the full force of these words 
 till we interpret them of Christ's decisive battle with 
 evil in the Cross, and our part and lot there. The 
 certainty which criticism is sapping can never be 
 regained by more positive criticism. The whole 
 situation is being changed by the new movement ; 
 and we are being forced on a new basis of certainty 
 or rather forced anew on the old, on the evangelical 
 basis of personal salvation, personal forgiveness, 
 experienced from the Cross of Christ as the re- 
 demption of the whole moral world. 
 
 For holiness of the evangelical type we surely 
 need this certainty for the true holiness, which 
 grows upon our faith and we know it not. The 
 forms of sanctity in vogue are a little too self- 
 conscious, and too directly cultivated. It is always 
 dangerous to make religion one of the professions. 
 And to work at holiness can be fatal. Yet some 
 forms of sanctity much admired seem to me to be 
 pursued as a spiritual luxury rather than worn 
 upon faith like a spiritual halo as unfelt as our hair. 
 When Moses came down from the Mount he wist 
 not that his face shone. We languish after " peace, 
 perfect peace " when we should be at godly war. 
 The sinlessness we admire may be no more than 
 poverty of blood. And we sing mawkishly about 
 " Angels of Jesus, angels of light " when we should 
 be wrestling with them for the new name. It is 
 so easy to do Christian work, and so hard to pray. 
 Magna res est, magnum omnino bonum, cum Jesu 
 conversari. It is not hard to be devotional, but
 
 Religious Reality 1 8 1 
 
 it is hard to pray. Orare est laborare. What is 
 called a gift in prayer is not uncommon. What 
 is harder to come at is the gift from prayer, the 
 prayer that prevails. Men may even take up Chris- 
 tian work to evade the arduous toil of spiritual 
 concentration. And outward work often does 
 cost us our spiritual insight, certainty, and reality. 
 But without soul-certainty neither our work nor 
 our principle has any meaning. It is sgul-certainty 
 that the world needs, even more than sound prin- 
 ciples not soul-facility but soul-certainty, not 
 ready religion but sure. And it is soul-certainty 
 that the ordinary able preacher, of busy effort, 
 good cricket, vivid interests, actual topics, re- 
 cent reading, and ingenious prayers cannot give 
 you. Knowledge may give you convictions, and 
 thought ideas ; conscience will give you principles, 
 and the heart sentiments ; but that soul-certainty, 
 that saved certainty, which is Eternal Life, can 
 only arise from something very objective and 
 positive, which turns the truths of the preacher 
 to the word of authority, sets him in the Evangelic 
 succession, and clothes him with the apostolic 
 power. Our preaching has lost the note of autho- 
 rity though not the air of authority, the note of 
 authoritativeness. That note, indeed, may be a phase 
 of our Pharisaism. But it has lost the stamp and 
 effect of authority. The minister is more strongly 
 induced to be the friend and comrade of his people 
 than their moral authority and guide. And he is 
 tempted to care more (as the public care more)
 
 1 82 The Preacher and 
 
 for the happy touch in his preaching than the great 
 Word. 
 
 What we need is not so much something pious 
 as something positive which makes piety. We need 
 fewer homilies upon " Fret not " or " Study to be 
 Quiet," fewer essays on " the Beauty of Holiness," 
 or other aspects of pensive piety. And we need 
 more sermons on " Through Him the world is 
 crucified to me, and I to the world," or " Him 
 who was made sin for us." There is the real incar- 
 nation, the emergence of God's reality, the reality 
 of God as an energy. There is the incarnation which 
 puts us at once at the moral heart of reality the 
 Son made sin rather than the Word made flesh. 
 The incarnation has no religious value but as the 
 background of the atonement. And here is the real 
 righteousness of God. It is our practical, experiential 
 incorporation into the holy Christ. It is not our 
 success in doing God's will in a Christian spirit. 
 That is a Gospel of whose ineptitude I confess I 
 am tired. It is at the root of much of our present 
 impotence. Christ's Gospel is the gift (through the 
 gift of Christ) of a totally new righteousness, which is 
 identical with faith, rises in forgiveness, emerges in re- 
 pentance, acts in love, spreads in society, and proceeds 
 in Eternal Life. What is sanctity if it do not bring 
 a deepening repentance ? It was when Christ came 
 to closer quarters with God's holiness that man's 
 sin roused that in Him which is repentance in us, 
 and crushed Him to death. And the repentance 
 of the young convert is the merest regret compared
 
 Religious Reality 183 
 
 with that of the aged disciple. What is our sancti- 
 fication but a perpetual conversion, the realization 
 of pardon in detail. That way alone lies the reality 
 on which man's moral soul rests, and with his moral 
 soul his social future and his eternal destiny. 
 
 The soul of the age asks us to help it to footing. 
 And we try when we can steady our own feet for 
 a moment. And how do we often proceed ? Why, 
 we are so ill-found in the autonomy and supremacy 
 of faith, that, instead of a fresh recourse to 
 Christ, we cry to the men of science in the other 
 boat to help us. We are so incredulous of the 
 knowledge contained in faith, we are so sure that 
 real knowledge cannot come by the moral way 
 of faith, but only by intellectual science of some 
 kind, that we look with nervous anxiety for 
 corroboration nay, more, for verification from 
 the savants. We are actually relieved at the 
 prospect of ghosts, to vouch, on the authority of 
 the Psychical Society, for a sure immortality that 
 we have ceased to find in Christ. And we are 
 grateful to the original and delightful Professor 
 William James and Sir Oliver Lodge for the 
 way in which their fresh results make good 
 the sad defects of our Christian faith as to the 
 spiritual nature of the world, or the spiritual depths 
 of the soul. They tell us the old materialism is 
 dead, and we breathe again. They suggest that 
 the old agnosticism is dying, and we are cheered.
 
 184 The Preacher and 
 
 We look to them and our faces are lightened. Foi 
 a time at least they are lightened, till some ingenious 
 fellow suggests new misgivings. Then we become 
 less certain that the new idealism will sustain the 
 soul's life, and we grow anxious again. Or we 
 find ourselves after a delightful evening with the 
 subliminal self, at deadly grips with a ferocious 
 and ignoble passion. 
 
 But we reflect, perhaps, that though we personally 
 are weak and contrary, yet a new presentiment of the 
 unseen has laid hold of the modern mind, and we 
 think there may be hope for Christianity still. So 
 when that modern mind asks us for help to a footing 
 we still turn to men of science, to men often who 
 evidently never in their lives read a theological classic 
 or an authority on moral philosophy, who indeed 
 might scout the idea, and we ask them to assure 
 the inquirer, with a certainty beyond ours, that 
 things promise well for a soul. We do this, instead 
 of descending upon science or its imagination with 
 a sureness which has nothing to gain in the way 
 of certainty but everything to give, when it is a 
 question of the certainty above and beneath all. 
 Is it not a nervous and pusillanimous Christian- 
 ity, devoid of self-respect ? How can we hope to 
 regain the influence the pulpit has lost until we 
 come with the surest Word in all the world to the 
 guesses of science, the maxims of ethic, and the 
 instincts of art. 
 
 Meantime, all kinds of occultism exploit this 
 groping hunger of the age in the interests of their
 
 Religious Reality 185 
 
 hobby. They believe not Moses and the prophets, 
 but they would believe if one returned from the 
 dead. They have lost the sense of moral evidence, 
 which is faith, and they are devoted to phantas- 
 mal, which is sight. The rubbish that is grotesquely | 
 called Christian science is the scoriae of a volcano. 
 It means, being interpreted, that the upheaval of 
 the hour is not due to the need for truth, formal j 
 and stateable, but for power. It is soul certainty I 
 and moral reality that we crave for more than any / 
 ology or any doxy. We demand the unseen not 
 in the form of a doctrine, or even an idea, far 
 less a system, but as an energy, a life principle 
 of rescue, power, authority. Men ask us, not, 
 "What do you believe? but "What helps you, 
 really ? " What does it matter about our belief 
 if it do not help ? And there is but one way 
 to that reality. The reality that matters, and 
 that helps the race is redemption. Our puny indi- 
 vidualism is always asking, " What helps me ? " But 
 we shall get no satisfactory answer even to that 
 question upon the lines of mere subjective feeling 
 as we might say of a meal " it does me good, I 
 feel fed " but only upon those ethical lines which 
 include the whole race, though they may for our 
 individual selves sometimes bring us rather to heroic 
 confidence than to happy peace. 
 
 The note of the higher age is moral realism. It is 
 the quest for unfailing love, in the spirit of unsparing 
 ethical realism, the quest, in a word, for holy love. 
 It is the quest which is met in prophet, Christ,
 
 1 86 The Preacher and 
 
 and apostle. And the focus of the whole answei 
 is still the Cross, where the holy love of the Eternal 
 spared not His own Son in face of the ghastly 
 realism of guilt. We can trust love only as it is holy. 
 
 
 
 But I can still hear the pertinacious citizen of 
 his own age, who is a Chauvinist or Jingo of his 
 own century as some are of their own country, 
 who is totally disqualified for reading either his 
 time or his land because he knows no other I 
 can hear him say, " Are not Abana and Pharpar 
 at our own doors better than that provincial old 
 Jordan ? Are not art, science, ethic, sentiment, 
 and philanthropy, however defective, better than 
 these Hebrew old clothes ? Is the answer to the 
 soul still in the worn old past and not in the modern 
 spirit ? " Yes, that is so. The answer is in the 
 old past, in the historic cross of Christ or nowhere. 
 " But even Paul was only a Judaist of genius who 
 disfigured Christ by rabbinic notions. And we 
 are so weary of the old theologies." But I was 
 not thinking of theologies. I had in my mind a 
 deeper weariness than yours, and I was thinking of 
 principalities and powers. When shall we learn 
 that Paul, for instance, was not a dogmatist but 
 the apostle of an act of grace which condensed in 
 itself the moral energy of Eternal Reality ? He was 
 the vehicle of a passionate soul-experience, soul- 
 certainty, and moral reality. He was saturated 
 with theology, as you are with (let us say) psychical
 
 Religious Reality 187 
 
 science, but he was not a dogmatician. He was 
 afire with the faith which is a life, with an experience 
 which made his mere ideas possibly inconsistent 
 but still incandescent. I have already pointed 
 out how, to find expression for these experi- 
 ences from the Cross, he seized every likely idea, 
 and pressed it into service, whenever he met it 
 in Judaism, Gnosticism, Roman law or elsewhere. 
 I was thinking of the weariness which the theologies 
 were very earnest efforts to heal. It is the old 
 perennial curse that lies on us and it is the old 
 eternal cure. If you feel the curse (and it is moral 
 dullness not to feel it), where do you find so deep 
 a treatment of it, and so many cases of cure, as in 
 the theologies of the Cross ? That which makes 
 the Church is still the key of the world. The 
 act of the Cross is still the soul's centre, the centre 
 of human destiny, and the centre of the real pres- 
 ence of God ; it is not the centre of our worship 
 alone. It is the centre of that evil conscience 
 which is the pivot of the world's tragedy, and there- 
 fore, the world's destiny. You cannot sound the 
 great literature of the world, the great transcripts of 
 man's moral soul, without realizing that the Pauline 
 issues are the marrow of the great literature of the 
 world. What moral realism finds at the dregs of 
 life is guilt. And as yet the only effectual secret 
 of guilt's treatment is the Cross. The reality of 
 life is Christ and not Christ's beauty, pity, or 
 self-sacrifice, but His love as God's holy grate, 
 His moral mercy, moral judgment, moral atone-
 
 1 88 The Preacher and 
 
 ment, and moral victory of redemption. To that 
 we must return, if all the world go on and leave 
 us. And not only so, but we preachers must steep 
 our soul in that, till we become charged with 
 the one power to which men bow at last, 
 Christ's conquest of the whole crisis of man's 
 moral situation, His power to redeem, and His 
 authority to forgive. The pulpit has lost authority 
 because it has lost intimacy with the Cross, immer- 
 sion in the Cross. It has robbed Christ of Paul. 
 But that Church will be the ruling Church which 
 most frees man's conscience, not his thought, 
 or his theology, but his conscience and which 
 carries in it most of the power to forgive and absolve. 
 Only with this Gospel, authoritative because evan- 
 gelical, can we make the spiritual life a world power, 
 take it out of corners and coteries, give it control of 
 the world and its resources, and save it from convent, 
 conventicle, and college alike, to be ecumenical, prac- 
 tical, and final. Our lack of authority is mainly due 
 to our lack of piercing moral realism, the radicalism 
 of the Cross. It is a power which goes not out and 
 comes not home except by prayer, laborious prayer 
 as the concentration of mind and will. " The truth 
 is not with the right, nor with the left, nor hi the 
 middle, but in the heights." The secret of spiritual 
 realism is personal judgment, personal pardon, 
 and personal prayer prayer as conflict and wrestling 
 with God, not simply as sunning one's self in God. 
 There is no reality without wrestling, as without 
 shedding of blood there is no remission. If you
 
 Religious Reality 189 
 
 are not called to wrestle it is only because the 
 wrestling is being done for you. Somewhere it must 
 be done, and we must do more than watch it. And 
 for the preacher it is only serious searching prayer, 
 not prayer as sweet and seemly devotion at the 
 day's dawn or close, but prayer as an ingredient 
 of the day's work, pastoral and theological prayer, 
 priest's prayer it is only such prayer that can save 
 the preacher from histrionics and sentiment, flat 
 fluency, and that familiarity with things holy which 
 is the very Satan to so many forward apostles. 
 
 
 
 I speak to and of the ministry, which is at once 
 oui despair and our hope. If the preachers have 
 brought preaching down it is the preachers that 
 must save it. The Church will be what its ministers 
 make it. A Church of faith like Protestantism 
 must always be what its chief believers make it. 
 And these foremost and formative believers are 
 the ministers. The real archbishops are the arch- 
 believers. If a Church has not its chief believers 
 in the pulpit it is unfortunate. And if a whole 
 denomination of Churches fail in this matter there 
 is something fatally wrong. The ministers are in idea 
 the experts in faith. They are the elite of prayer. If 
 the Church is to be saved from the world it is the 
 ministers that must do it. And how can they do it 
 but as men pre-eminently saved from the world. And 
 no man has the seal of that salvation on him except 
 by action by thought and prayer which become
 
 190 The Preacher and 
 
 moral action. A man has the stamp of supernatural 
 reality upon him only by such prayer. If another 
 than the minister carry that stamp in any Church 
 he is its true minister. The true minister, in the 
 pulpit or out, does all his business in the spirit 
 of this prayer. The man of commerce may say 
 he cannot. I will not argue that now. I will 
 only say that the minister has this advantage 
 he not only can but he must, if he know his business, 
 and is to keep it going. And no man ought to take 
 up this business unless he know it. A preachei 
 whose chief power is not in studious prayer is, to that 
 extent, a man who does not know his business. A 
 stringent ethic would say he was in danger of 
 becoming a quack. That of prayer is the minis- 
 ter's business. He cannot be a sound preacher 
 unless he is a priest. Prayer of the serious, evan- 
 gelical, unceasing sort is to faith what original 
 research is for science it is the grand means of 
 contact with reality. It is the soul's fruitful contact 
 with that which for the soul is Nature God in 
 Christ. It founds us there upon the rock, and with- 
 stands the gates of hell. The religious life, the 
 life which has religion for a profession, is the 
 most dangerous of all. There are so many tempta- 
 tions to unreality in it especially in connexion 
 with what is sometimes called the deepening of the 
 spiritual life. The bane of much sanctity is its 
 unreality. I do not mean its insincerity, so much as its 
 lack of contact with world-reality, moral, historic 
 reality. Our great peril is not the coarse hypocrisy,
 
 Religious Reality 191 
 
 which the common critic can see and scourge amid 
 cheers. It is the subtler, deadlier unreality which 
 may settle upon the executioner of hypocrisy, which 
 is hidden even from ourselves, hidden by our very 
 peace of mind, or hidden by the cheers, hidden, it 
 may be, by our very well-doing. It is not the 
 amusing hypocrisy of Mr. Pecksniff but the alarm- 
 ing hypocrisy of Mr. Bulstrode, so much more 
 terrible because more true to actual life, because 
 it waits for us at our own door. The preacher feels 
 the full force of these temptations. At least he 
 receives their full force, whether he always feel it 
 or not, from his exposed position. He is a dealer in 
 words ; and it is very hard to keep them full of the 
 Spirit, and yet to keep himself their master. He is 
 a popular leader ; and it is hard to lead the people 
 without being led by the people to yield to them. 
 The winning of souls, or the leading of souls, often 
 costs the soul. A man can be popular and real 
 both, especially as a preacher. I do not know of any 
 line of life in which the combination is more possi- 
 ble. But to continue to be popular and also to be 
 real depends on much. And then the preacher 
 has the sophistries of his own egoism, the egoism 
 even of his own conscience, the seductions of his 
 own vanity, and the insincerities of his own heart, 
 which are always most dangerous in the guise of 
 piety. Some preachers appear to have no humilia- 
 tion, confession, penance, or absolution in their 
 soul's habit or history. Ephraim is a heifer unbroken 
 to the yoke. Many a fervent prayer in the pulpit,
 
 192 The Preacher and 
 
 and many a thrilling sermon, has but deepened the 
 perdition of the unreal soul that uttered it heartfel*: 
 though it was for the hour. Against such things 
 private searching prayer, prayer much alone with 
 the Judge of the Pharisees, is the corrective prayer 
 whose keynote is the Bible, however its motives may 
 be the experiences of the soul. It is better and 
 safer to pray over the Bible than to brood over self. 
 And the prayer which is stirred by the Cross is 
 holier even then that which arises from the guilt 
 that drives us to the Cross. What really searches 
 us is neither our own introspection, nor God's law, 
 but it is God's Gospel, as it pierces us from the merci- 
 less mercy of the Cross and the Son unspared for us. 
 
 3. The third vice of the Christian hour is spiritual 
 self-satisfaction, well-to-do-ness, comfort. The voice 
 of the turtle is heard in the land. 
 
 This is the religious counterpart of that intellectual 
 self-sufficiency in many sections of science, where 
 men are quite sure they have, in the experience that 
 deals so successfully with parts, a key to the infinite 
 whole. Their science gives them a closed scheme 
 of all existence, which only needs filling in with 
 discovery or filling out with invention. They do 
 not realize that the knowledge of a world, a whole, 
 is a knowledge by faith and not by science. None 
 has ever seen or realized a whole world by any 
 scientific experience, only by an act of faith. The 
 more we know things or men the less we under-
 
 Religious Reality 193 
 
 stand them till faith explains them by their goal. 
 We see not yet all things, but we see Jesus. 
 
 Such also, in its way, is the self-satisfaction 
 of so much naive religion, denominationalism, or 
 Churchmanship, the religion of the plain man who is 
 always saying he is Davus and not Edipus, who 
 hates riddles, and who talks to you of his sec tional 
 interests or idols as if they must be of equal 
 interest and volume to all the world. 
 
 " Who takes the murmur of his little burg 
 For all the mighty music of the world." 
 
 We live too happily on the middle register. It 
 is all so interesting the day's doings, the vivid world, 
 the Church, the Bible, the meetings, the movements, 
 the singing, the preaching, the books, the reviews, the 
 music, the marrying, the giving in marriage. We 
 enjoy the long picnic, by the still waters, in com- 
 panies upon the green grass. The flood, indeed, is 
 already in the hills, and trained and gifted ears hear 
 it, and give the alarm. And yet we sit down easily 
 and agreeably beside the modern man, with his 
 mixture of refined materialism and scrappy culture, 
 to whom religion is but a phase of his general 
 interests, or the key-stone of the social arch. 
 Religion is to-day debased to a mere means of 
 human happiness, to a social utility, as it never 
 was before. It was once a political pawn, it is 
 now a social facility. And the result is unfaith, 
 or, worse, an affectation of faith. We are so 
 healthy, so poetical, so kindly, so optimistic,
 
 194 The Preacher and 
 
 God's love and patience and mercy are all so much 
 in line with life's innocent charm, all so much a 
 matter of course and of congratulation. And we 
 are so strange to heart-hunger, or soul-despair, 
 or passionate gratitude, or heavenly home-sickness. 
 Whole tracts of our religion are bare of spiritual 
 passion, or spiritual depth. Christianity speaks the 
 language of our humane civilization ; it does not 
 speak the language of Christ. The age, and much 
 of the Church, believes in civilization and is inter- 
 ested in the Gospel, instead of believing in the 
 Gospel and being interested in civilization. And 
 we treat as fanatics those who tell us that there is 
 no reconciliation possible between the Cross and 
 culture, when each knows its own mind, except as 
 culture itself submits to be redeemed. As if 
 Christ did not come to redeem us not from sin only, 
 nor from worldliness, but from the world. 
 
 I once addressed a meeting of ministers on the 
 necessity of the evangelical consciousness, by which 
 I meant the central or even daily life of forgive- 
 ness, repentance, humiliation, and their fruits, in 
 contrast with what is vaguely known as the 
 Christian spirit. And I created a good deal of 
 bewilderment. For one of them came to me 
 afterwards, and asked me if he had understood 
 me right, as, to his knowledge, the experience 
 was one that few ministers possessed. If that was 
 so I need not say another word to account for the 
 loss of pulpit power and authority. It is not more 
 religion we need so much as a better order of religion,
 
 Religious Reality 195 
 
 and a more serious idea of the soul, its sin and its 
 salvation. 
 
 For an ill like this there is but one cure. It is 
 a deeper, daily, though perhaps reserved sense, not 
 only of our un worthiness, but of our perdition 
 except for the Grace of Christ, the mercy of the 
 Cross. And this deepened sense will not come. 
 It must be sought, courted, entreated. The 
 deepening of personal religion ! It is something 
 much more that we need. We need the humili- 
 ation in which we forget about religion, the 
 faith in which we forget about either faith or 
 works, the sanctity that has no knowledge of its 
 own holiness. We need an experience of Christ 
 in which we think everything about the Christ 
 and not about the experience. We need that 
 preachers shall not keep demanding either a faith 
 or love that we cannot rise to, but shall preach a 
 Christ that produces and compels both. And we 
 need that the Christ we preach shall not be our 
 brother, ideal, or King only, but also our judge. 
 Nay we read that He is chiefly our judge, because 
 He took our judgment on Him for our redemption. 
 Every great revival in the Church has gone with a 
 new sense of Christ's vicarious redemption, and 
 not merely with a new wave of pity. Our great 
 need is not ardour to save man but courage to face 
 God courage to face God with our soul as it is, and 
 with our Saviour as He is ; to face God always thus, 
 and so to win the power which saves and serves 
 man more than any other power can. We can never
 
 196 Preacher and Religious Reality 
 
 fully say " My brother ! " till we have heartily 
 said " My God ; " and we can never heartily say 
 " My God " till we have humbly said " My Guilt ! " 
 That is the root of moral reality, of personal 
 religion, and social security. It is only thus that 
 we really meet the passion for reality, which is so 
 hopeful a feature of modern time, because it is 
 the ruling passion of a Holy God.
 
 PREACHING POSITIVE AND 
 LIBERAL
 
 VI 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 THE first requisite for a Christian man is faith. 
 That is what makes a soul a member of Christ and of 
 the true Church the faith that works and blossoms 
 out into love. Being faith in Christ, how could it 
 but work and flower out into love ? The fact that so 
 often it does not must mean that in so many cases 
 it is not really faith, or not faith hi Christ. It is 
 not personal contact and commerce with Him. 
 This faith it is that is the greatest thing in the world, 
 having in it all the promise and potency of love, 
 godliness, peace, and joy hi the Holy Ghost. It is 
 such living faith that makes a man a Christian. 
 
 But among Christians the preacher stands out 
 in a special place and work. And the first requisite 
 for the ministry of a Church is a theology, a faith 
 which knows what it is about, a positive faith, faith 
 with not only an experience but a content, not glow 
 only but grasp, and mass, and measure. The preacher 
 who is but feeling his way to a theology is but 
 preparing to be a preacher, however eloquent he 
 may have become. He may be no more than " the 
 hierophant of an unapprehended inspiration." And
 
 i| 
 
 2oo Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 that kind of inspiration may be mantic or romantic, 
 but it is neither prophetic nor apostolic. The faith 
 which makes a man a Christian must go on in the 
 preacher to be a theology. He cannot afford to live 
 on in a fides non formata. A viscous unreflecting 
 faith is for the preacher a faith without footing and 
 therefore without authority. In special cases it 
 may have a certain infection about it, but it has 
 not authority. Yet it is authority that the 
 world chiefly needs and the preaching of the 
 hour lacks an authoritative Gospel in a humble 
 personality. And for authority, for weight, we need 
 experience indeed, but, still more, positive faith. 
 
 It is "but a little way that experience will carry 
 the herald of the Gospel. He has to expound a 
 message which, because it is eternal, far transcends 
 his experience. He has to do more than set to 
 his own personal seal. Every Christian has to do 
 that. The preacher has to be sure of a knowledge 
 that creates experience, and does not rise out of it. 
 His burthen is something given, something that 
 reports a world beyond experience, a world that is not 
 of experience, though always in its shape. Experi- 
 ence is but in part, yet he has to dogmatize about 
 the whole. He has to be sure of what ever is, and 
 evermore shall be. Experience is in time, and he 
 has to be positive about eternity. His experience 
 covers but his own soul, or at most a few besides 
 that he touches ; yet he has to declare a certainty 
 about the eternal destiny of the whole world, and 
 the eternal will of the whole God. That is a know-
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 201 
 
 ledge far beyond experience. It is not realiz- 
 able except in experience, but experience could not 
 reach it, could not assure it. It is a knowledge that 
 comes by faith. Wherever you have a universe 
 you have something beyond experience, and acces- 
 sible only to faith. Experience is not the only 
 organ of knowledge, however it may be a condition. 
 Experience deals with but the one, or the several ; 
 faith deals with a whole ; for it deals with God, 
 eternity and the world ; it deals with a reality of 
 the whole, which we experience but in a measure. 
 There is a knowledge by faith as sound of its kind as 
 the knowledge by experience, by science ; and its 
 kind is much higher, deeper, more momentous. 
 It is the knowledge of a person in his purpose, not 
 of a thing and its features, not of a force and its 
 laws. It is not simply faith as a personal experi- 
 ence that is the burthen of the preacher, but faith 
 as a knowledge, the inner objective content of 
 faith, the thing in faith which always creates the 
 experience of it ; in a word, the person, will, and 
 action of God in Christ. It is there, in the objective 
 personal content of faith, and not in the subject- 
 ive personal experience, that the authority of the 
 preacher lies. His experience may make him 
 impressive at times, but it is his faith that gives 
 him permanent power. That power really lies not 
 in the preacher but in his Gospel, in his theology. 
 For the preacher it is most true that his theology 
 is an essential, perhaps the essential, part of his 
 religion. He may be quite unfit to lecture in theology
 
 2O2 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 as a science, but he is the less of a preacher, how- 
 ever fine a speaker, if he have not a theology at the 
 root of his preaching and its sap circulating in it. 
 And if he is a pastor, producing his effect not by 
 a few addresses but by a cumulative ministry, all 
 this is still more true. 
 
 
 
 The first requirement of the ministry, then, is a 
 positive theology. But by that I do not mean a highly 
 systematic theology, nor an orthodox theology. 
 For a systematic theology easily becomes doctrinaire, 
 and an orthodoxy soon becomes obsolete. It were, 
 well to banish antiquated words like orthodoxy 
 and heterodoxy as anything but historical terms. 
 They belong to an out-grown age, when a formal 
 theology had a direct saving value for the individual 
 soul ; when there was but one true theology instead 
 of many, as there was but one true Church ; when 
 there was an external authority, to make a standard, 
 in an inerrant Bible, a final confession, or an 
 infallible Pope. The one orthodox Church, the 
 Greek Church is the deadest of all the Churches. 
 And we should have been as dead if orthodoxy had 
 had its way with the West as . it had with the East. 
 For at its worst it is mere conformity ; and at its 
 best it is the regime of intellectualism. It reduces 
 religion to an intellectualism with a divine charter. 
 And its reaction in heterodoxy is natural, equal, 
 and opposite. Both are intellectualist and theo- 
 sophic. Let us consider the words, therefore, as
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 203 
 
 archaic and defunct for faith. And instead of 
 speaking or thinking about an orthodox theology, 
 which is canned theology gone stale, let us think 
 of a positive theology which is theology alive, alert, 
 and in power. 
 
 
 
 Again, by a positive theology I mean naturally 
 the opposite of a negative. But when is a theology 
 negative ? Negative of what ? Negative of a 
 tradition ? No, of a power. Negative of the 
 Gospel. A positive theology is an evangelical 
 theology. Positivity in this connexion has a 
 chief reference to what I have often to describe as the 
 primacy of the will. It is moral ; but moral in a far 
 higher sense than a mere imperative moral as being 
 not diffused in an idea or organized in thought, but 
 concentrated in a personal act, in redemption. The 
 love manifested by Christ in His life was positive 
 in the sense that it was not merely affectional but 
 rational and moral. That is to say its great features 
 were first that it understood the total situation 
 so far it was rational and second that it condensed 
 into one definite practical purpose it was saving 
 and moral. It understood God uniquely ; no man 
 knoweth the Father but the Son. It understood 
 man to his moral centre, and needed that no man 
 should tell it what was in man. And it was concen- 
 trated into crucial action both on God and on man. 
 It was decisive and redemptive. Positive means 
 moral in the great evangelical sense. That is to say,
 
 2 04 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 in the first place, it means that the supreme form 
 of God's love was a real act, central in history and 
 critical for eternity. It was a holy life not simply 
 in the sense of being spotless but in the sense of 
 being one vast moral deed, one absolute achievement 
 of conscience, affecting the being both of God and 
 man and the whole spiritual world. It was not 
 merely impressionist. It was not an influence bu1 
 an act, not a fresh stimulus but a new creation, 
 not a career opened for the race but a finished 
 thing. Holiness has no meaning apart from an act 
 into which is put a whole moral person ; and if there 
 be an eternal person it is an eternal act, and not 
 merely a past event, or the attribute of an eternal 
 being, or an infinite presence, as the mystics dream. 
 Accordingly, hi the second place, God's gift was an 
 eternal life, something beyond natural goodness, 
 however good, and however refined. For what is 
 morality, when we are at the height to which we have 
 now come ? It is not a mere obedience. That were 
 in the end but some kind of Pharisaism, of which in- 
 deed Protestantism has been greatly the victim. No 
 compliance with a mere law or creed, however good 
 or fine makes a moral action. Morality is the expres- 
 sion of our personality ; and to grow moral means to 
 grow in personality, and not merely in a certain exer- 
 cise of personality. It is our creative action. It is 
 the soul co-operating with the holy energy of God 
 and fulfilling its redeemed destiny. To live in the 
 Spirit is not simply to walk in the light. The Spirit 
 is creative energy : and to live in the Spirit is to
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 205 
 
 exercise this energy. It is eternal life in its count- 
 less concrete forms of actuality, experience, and 
 history in worship, art, science, politics, in Church, 
 State, or family. Positive Christianity then is 
 Christianity which recognizes the primacy of the 
 moral in the shape of life, and of holy life. It is 
 Christianity which first adjusts man to the holy and 
 then creates the holy in man, and does both through 
 the Cross with its atoning gift of eternal life. It is 
 evangelical Christianity Christianity not as a creed 
 nor as a process but as a Holy Spirit's energy and 
 act, issuing always from the central act and achieve- 
 ment of God and of history hi the Cross of Christ. 
 
 But the name of evangelical theology has often 
 been monopolized by a theology which has not 
 really escaped from the idea of orthodoxy, a theology 
 not only elaborate but final, irrevisable, and there- 
 fore obscurantist, and therefore robbed of public 
 power. By an evangelical theology I mean any 
 theology which does full justice to the one creative 
 principle of grace. Any theology is evangelical which 
 does that. A theology is not evangelical by its 
 conclusions but by its principles, not by its clauses 
 and statements, not by its spirit or temper, but by 
 the Holy Spirit of grace and power. It is the state- 
 ment of a Gospel of Grace, it is not the scientific 
 explication of that Gospel's corollaries and implicates. 
 
 
 
 Some forms of evangelical theology are too fond 
 of describing a critical theology as negative. I do
 
 206 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 not like the word negative. There is a certain 
 unpleasant suggestion in it which we should avoid. 
 I would rather use the more correct and current 
 antithesis of positive, and say liberal. Here again, 
 however, we are in difficulties. For in the first place 
 if what we oppose is liberal, are we not illiberal in 
 opposing it ? And is there not an unpleasant sug- 
 gestion in that ? And in the next place, if we follow 
 current use and say liberal as the antithesis of posi- 
 tive, do we mean that a positive theology is only 
 conservative and incapable of modification with 
 time to meet the progress of thought and know- 
 ledge ? The answer to that, of course, is that a 
 confession of faith not only can be, but must be 
 modified in this way. The creed must take the 
 expression which gives the best effect at the time to 
 the grace which creates it. In this regard it reflects 
 the almighty power of God which (if Christ be His 
 revelation) is chiefly shown in His capacity for any 
 self-limitation needful to give effect to His holy 
 will of grace and love at a particular juncture. 
 Theological form must be adjustable. The old faith 
 demands a new theology. For, in the first place, its 
 nature does, and in the second, its history. 
 
 First, its nature does. Christ, as the standing 
 object of our faith, is the meeting-point of changeless 
 eternity, and changing history. In Him the eternal 
 emerges at a fleeting point. But, if He is the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever, this final utterance 
 must be expressible at every other such point. 
 His eternal revelation is vocal and relevant for
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 207 
 
 every age. The changeless Gospel must speak 
 with equal facility the language of each new time, 
 as well as of each far land. If it be missionary 
 to every soul it is also missionary to the whole soul 
 of history. There is an ironic, socratic docility in the 
 everlasting Gospel. It must be flexible if it is to 
 search and permeate. It must be tractable and 
 reasonable because it is so supreme and sure. It 
 must have the power to vary, and to meet the 
 forms of thought and life which it does so much 
 to produce. We could never preach to the time if 
 our Gospel had but a lapidary and monumental 
 eternity. Remember Lot's wife. 
 
 There must be such a thing as a history of Chris- 
 tianity, not merely a history of the effects of Chris- 
 tian doctrine in the world. That doctrine is not a 
 rock in a stream. The religion itself must have an 
 elasticity of its own, a variableness and adaptability 
 which do not alter its substance. It is not like a 
 philosophic system which cannot reappear in a 
 modified form, but can only be replaced by another 
 system. Christianity must modify, for it is not a 
 fixed quantity cut and dried. It has no existence 
 outside of the life and the will of moving man. 
 Therefore while it has a continuity it has also a 
 history and not a mere persistence. No otherwise is 
 it a living potent religion. Only the lowest religions, 
 like the lowest races and creatures, are without 
 a history. And Christianity has a history because 
 it is under the constant renewing of the Holy Ghost. 
 It is a new and independent power of life within the
 
 2 o 8 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 stream of time. It is not a mere section of civili- 
 zation. And its history has a unity quite different 
 from the development of religion in general. It is 
 not simply a limb in the organism of spiritual 
 evolution. 
 
 In the second place, the history of the old faith 
 demands a re-interpretation of theology, even if 
 we may not say a revision. For I have already 
 noted how the greatest Apostles and fathers of the 
 Church translated the Gospel into the current mind. 
 And I note farther that in history fixed and final 
 dogma constantly tends to produce a type of life 
 quite other than that produced by the old faith. 
 Where you fix a creed you flatten faith. Where 
 dogma is idolized, life is sterilized. Where you 
 canonise a system you demoralize men. But 
 the effect of the faith of the Gospel is entirely 
 the other way. It rouses, exalts, kindles men. 
 A fixed and final system is therefore incompatible 
 with the genius of the Gospel. That is the prin- 
 ciple of the Reformation. Living faith means 
 growing form. Orthodoxy, Catholicism, in differ- 
 ent degrees tend to petrify life. Therefore they 
 lose the power of the Gospel, no matter what the 
 amount of zeal may be. Dogma is not an end hi 
 itself. And even doctrine is but the expression of 
 life, it is not the life indeed. 
 
 The old faith of the Gospel, therefore, is not 
 merely patient of new form, a new theology, but it 
 demands it. It produces it. It fits itself in a masterly 
 way to the shape and pressure of the tune, unless
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 209 
 
 we prevent it. The very power of its eternity, its 
 supernatural power, shows itself in this, that it uses 
 time and is not left behind. What is eternity but 
 the soul's command of time ? 
 
 
 
 But, if a positive Gospel thus asserts its positivity 
 by irrepressible adjustment, why should we set in 
 opposition positive and liberal. Well, as a matter 
 of fact, theological liberalism has tended to destroy 
 positive belief, distinctive experience, and aggressive 
 Christianity. But perhaps the terms are not happy. 
 Still there they are in use. They are part of the 
 accepted language of the discussion. And the word 
 which is employed to express the adjustments 
 native to a positive Gospel is not " liberal " but 
 " modern." A modern theology is one thing, theo- 
 logical liberalism is another. Ritschl represents 
 one Gospel, Pfleiderer another. And they are dis- 
 parate and incompatible. Paul and Luther cannot 
 dwell with Hegel. The one is a function of 
 faith, the other is a school of thought. I am 
 not pleading for the terms. I am simply accept- 
 ing them. They cover distinct things. It is the 
 things I wish to distinguish. And I do so in the 
 course of an attempt to make good my case that 
 a positive and modern theology is a first requisite 
 for a preacher of the Gospel. Of the Gospel, note. 
 For the first requisite for a mere preacher is a tem- 
 perament. And a temperament without a Gospel 
 is more of a bane than a blessing to a public man. 
 The more of a temperament a preacher has the more
 
 2 i o Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 he needs a positive Gospel to carry it, and save it 
 from shipwreck. Of course, I imply by my words 
 that what is called liberal theology, as distinct from 
 theology modern and positive, works on the whole 
 against the preaching of the Gospel, and becomes 
 little more than an enlightened Judaism. 
 
 I may here anticipate what I go on to say later 
 by explaining in brief that by liberalism I mean the 
 theology that begins with some rational canon of 
 life or nature to which Christianity has to be cut 
 down or enlarged (as the case may be) ; while by a 
 modern positivity I mean a theology that begins 
 with God's gift of a super-logical revelation in 
 Christ's historic person and cross, whose object was 
 not to adjust a contradiction but to resolve a crisis 
 and save a situation of the human soul. For 
 positive theology Christ is the object of faith ; for 
 liberal He is but its first and greatest subject, the 
 agent of a faith directed elsewhere than on Him. 
 It is really an infinite difference. For only one side 
 can be true. 
 
 
 
 We need, for our pulpit efficiency, a theology that 
 is new when compared with catechismal orthodoxy, a 
 restatement of doctrine which may be either " modern " 
 or " liberal." Now which does the Gospel demand ? 
 What is the difference between a modernized 
 positivity and liberalism, as I have defined the 
 terms ? 
 
 Let me name some vital distinctions. 
 
 I. I begin with the most essential. The post-
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 211 
 
 tivity of the Gospel means the effectual primacy of 
 the given. And this primacy of the given means 
 two things. I have said that we can think modern 
 and end positive. We can keep abreast of both 
 thought and knowledge and yet emerge with the 
 results of positive faith. We can still believe in 
 the primacy of the given in these two aspects 
 first in respect of history or the origin of our reli- 
 gion, second in respect of theology or the nature of 
 our religion. 
 
 First, in respect of the origin of our religion, when 
 we say it is positive we mean that it is historical. 
 The revelation is not primarily in my soul but in a 
 fact which is in the chain of history. It is in Christ 
 and His Cross. Positivity means therefore in the 
 first place historicity. It opposes a religion whose 
 genius is thought or idea instead of historic event. 
 Christianity is founded in the historic Jesus, it was 
 not merely founded by Him. In Him we have the 
 revelation and not merely the first believer in the 
 revelation. And in Him, in that historic figure, 
 is the final and absolute revelation ; He is not a 
 mere stage in the history of revelation. His religion 
 is not simply one among others and the best of 
 them all. It is religion in the final sense of the 
 word. And it is the religion that believes and 
 worships Him ; it is not simply religion that believes 
 with Him, and with Him worships God. 
 
 Second, in respect of the nature of our religion, or 
 its theology, positivity as the primacy of the given 
 means that we take it seriously as the religion of
 
 212 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 grace. The Gospel descends on man, it does not 
 rise from him. It is not a projection of his innate 
 spirituality. It is revealed, not discovered, not 
 invented. It is of grace, not works. It is conferred, 
 not attained. It is a gift to our poverty, not a 
 triumph of our resource. It is something which 
 holds us, it is not something that we hold. It is 
 something that saves us, and nothing that we have 
 to save. Its Christ is a Christ sent to us and not 
 developed from us, bestowed on our need and not 
 produced from our strength, and He is given for our 
 sin more than for our weakness. 
 
 That is to say, the first feature of a positive Gospel 
 is that it is a Gospel of pure, free grace to human sin. 
 (And you will find that liberalism either begins 
 or ends with ignoring sin or minimising it.) The 
 initiative rests entirely with God, and with a holy 
 and injured God. On this article of grace the 
 whole of Christianity turns. " Christianity," says 
 an unfriendly critic, " stands or falls with its doc- 
 trine of forgiveness." A positive theology means the 
 doctrines of grace brought up to date by all means, 
 but only so as to give larger scope to the Gospel of 
 grace than to the claim of religious culture. 
 
 A liberal theology has most to say of God's love, 
 a positive of God's mercy. The one views God's 
 love chiefly in relation to human love, the other 
 chiefly in relation to human sin. In relation to 
 sin chiefly because a positive Gospel is a reve- 
 lation of holy love, and our answer to it is 
 not merely affectional, but holy, obedient, and
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 213 
 
 worshipful. If the great revelation of God is in the 
 Cross, and the great gift of the Cross is the Holy 
 Spirit, then the revelation is holiness, holiness work- 
 ing outward as love. It is not simply sacred love, 
 as it comes, for most people, to mean ; but it is 
 holiness working out into love on God's side, as our 
 faith does on our side. God's love is the outgoing 
 of his holiness, not as exigent law, but as redeeming 
 grace, bent on reclaiming us, all bankrupt and 
 defiant, to his full, rich, harmonious, eternal life. 
 The holiness of God is His self -sufficient perfection, 
 whose passion is to establish itself in the unholy by 
 gracious love. Holiness is love morally perfect ; love 
 is holiness brimming and overflowing. The perfection 
 speaks in the overflow. It is in redemption. Love is 
 perfect, not in amount but in kind, not as intense but 
 as holy. And holiness is perfect, not as being remote, 
 nor as being merely pure, but as it asserts itself in 
 redeeming grace. Love, as holy, must react against 
 sin in Atonement. Holiness, as grace, must establish 
 itself by redemption in Satan's Seat. It is not the 
 obstacle of redemption but its source and impulse. 
 The primacy of the given, then, is only another 
 way of expressing the final authority of grace. The 
 question of the hour, for all life, and not only for the 
 religious, is that of authority the true effective 
 authority. Where is it ? At the last it is here. It 
 is in God's eternal, perpetual act and gift of grace, met 
 by the absolute obedience of our faith. Faith is abso- 
 lute obedience to grace as absolute authority. Per- 
 sonal faith in the holy, gracious God of Christ's
 
 214 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 Cross is the one creative, authoritative, life-making, 
 life-giving, life-shaping power of the moral soul. 
 
 Now a modernized theology is not only compatible 
 with this old faith, it is inevitable to it. But the 
 liberal theology, as I am describing it, is fatal to the old 
 faith. For all its varieties have this hi common. 
 They are indifferent to a doctrine of the Holy Ghost. 
 It is this doctrine that prevents us from describing 
 the progress of Christianity as a mere spiritual 
 process, or the spread of a movement. Any theology 
 that places us in a spiritual process, or native move- 
 ment between the finite and the infinite, depreciates 
 the value of spiritual act, and thus makes us indepen- 
 dent of the grace of God. Its movement is processional 
 spectacular, aesthestic, it is not historic, dramatic, 
 tragic or ethical. If it speak of the grace of God 
 it does not take it with moral seriousness. It 
 understands by God's grace no more than the 
 Idea moving to transcend our error, or love 
 acting in generosity, or in pity. It reduces mercy 
 to a form of pity by abolishing the claim of holi- 
 ness, the gravity of sin, and the action of an 
 Atonement. It does not take either the measure 
 of holiness or the weight of sin. It makes the Cross 
 not necessary but valuable ; not central but supple- 
 mental ; not creative but exhibitive ; a demonstra- 
 tion, but not a revelation ; a reconciliation but not 
 a redemption. It makes the Church a company of 
 workers and not believers, the brethren of Christ 
 rather than His flock and His property, a genial 
 body rather than a regenerate, a band of lovers rather
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 215 
 
 than of penitents. It attenuates the Fatherhood 
 which it softens. It interprets it as His creating love. 
 Now God the Father is indeed Creator, but it is not 
 as Creator that He is Father. We are all destined 
 to be sons of God ; but the sonship is in our destiny 
 rather than in our origin or state. A distinguished 
 president of the British Association for Science recently 
 ' described the child as " a candidate for humanity." 
 And we are all but personalities in the making. 
 We are sons by an election rather than a creation. 
 We are sons not by heredity but by adoption ; not 
 by right but by redemption. In the Old Testament 
 as in the New Testament the son is no created being, 
 but a chosen. Israel in the Old Testament, and 
 Christ in the New, are the Sons of God by His elec- 
 tion and not by His creation. Christ is increate. 
 The whole Bible use of the word Father refers it to 
 an act of choice and a purpose of redemption. God is 
 Father by His choosing will and not by His creative 
 power, by gracious adoption and not by natural gener- 
 ation. Of His will begat He us, and by no instinctive 
 process. We are sons " begotten in the GospeL" 
 God is, directly, the Father of Christ alone. He is our 
 Father only in Christ. God has but one Son ; the 
 many sons are sons in Him ; and He is Son in none. 
 A positive Gospel.theref ore, is given as a power to our 
 Christian experience, while a liberal theology may bear 
 little trace of Christian experience, and it may exist 
 but as a truth in Christian reason. A positive theology 
 is at bottom the theology of converted men, and not 
 of academic intelligence brought to bear on the soul,
 
 2 1 6 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 the world, or history. It is faith giving a reasonable 
 account of itself ; it is not reason shaping, amending, 
 or licensing faith. It carries in its body the marks of 
 the Lord Jesus. Its datum is in history, not in 
 thought. It has the stigmata of the Cross on its heart. 
 The positive theology is more devout (I am not speak- 
 ing of the theologians), the liberal is more doctrin- 
 aire. The one is more concerned with life, the other 
 with truth. The one is pneumatic, the other dog- 
 matic. The one is evangelical and moral, the other 
 intellectualist. The one is part of the religion, the 
 other is a view of the religion. Thus the liberal 
 theology is the more theological, in the opprobrious 
 sense of the term ; for it is more engrossed with 
 views and truths than experiences of faith. 
 
 2. For liberalism the modern mind constitutes 
 itself the supreme court, and claims that nothing 
 should survive in Christianity but what is congenial 
 to it. Christianity, in so far as it is true, is simply 
 " the passion which is highest reason hi a soul 
 drvine." It is, as the old Apologists said, the 
 practicable and effective completion of the revelation 
 that was labouring for outlet in Paganism. It is a 
 new branch of culture. It is an immense, not to 
 say infinite, extension of our old horizon. We 
 are, on Christ's shoulders, lifted but not saved, 
 not as lost sheep rejoicing in a new life, but as eager 
 disciples rejoicing in a wider, deeper prospect of 
 things. The way to God is thus really the world and 
 not the word. His seat is the heart at its best, and 
 not the conscience at its worst.
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 217 
 
 A positive theology starts with the experienced 
 grace of God to sin as a historic gift in Christ 
 and His Cross. It is a gift which is at once our 
 source and our standard, a gift whose divinity is 
 approved by faith's obedience on the principle 
 that he who willeth to do God's will shall know 
 congenially the moral quality of the doctrine. But 
 the liberal theology starts from certain rational, 
 metaphysical, or ethical principles existing in human 
 thought, which determines by science, and not by 
 obedience, whether any revelation, even Christ's, is 
 divine. The one is theology, the other is theosophy. 
 The one starts from the primacy of the ethos, the 
 other from the primacy of the cosmos. The one is 
 voluntarist, the other is intellect ualist. The one is 
 teleological, finding the world's destiny in the historic 
 Christ as the source and surety of that destiny 
 (" We see not yet all things, but we see Jesus ") ; 
 the other is cosmological, engrossed with the world's 
 structure or with its movement in reason. For posi- 
 tivity God's decisive revelation is in his action in 
 Christ, and its effect is active in a Church ; for liberal- 
 ism it is in reason, and its effect is contemplative or 
 theosophic in a school. The one acts historically, 
 subjugating the world to Christ : the other aesthetic- 
 ally subduing it to thought. The one modifies 
 from age to age according to the intrinsic require- 
 ments of growing faith ; the external Zeitgeist being 
 but the occasion which releases the latent genius of 
 belief. The other modifies wholly in the interest 
 of scientific thought, whether physical, psychical,
 
 2 1 8 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 metaphysical, or critical, as if Christianity were a 
 phase of civilization. The one regards the revela- 
 tion of grace as autonomous, the other will have 
 it licensed by the schools, or countersigned by the 
 humane " heart." The positive starts with the 
 holy and saving Christ, the liberal with Humanity, 
 rational or affectional. The one handles sin, grace, 
 and salvation according to the world's moral mutiny : 
 the other deals but with weakness, ignorance, and 
 their evolutionary conquest, confirming the world 
 in its pride of power. A modern theology, in a 
 word, is demanded by an autonomous evangelical 
 faith : the liberal is prescribed by an aggressive, cos- 
 mological science. But we must start with that faith ; 
 its synthesis with any kind of science is a hope for 
 which we wait and patiently work. The theologian, 
 that is, can wait ; but you preachers cannot. 
 
 Now, when we preach on this liberalistic basis it 
 is not Christ preaching to an age so much as one age, 
 or one part of an age, preaching to another. It is 
 not a message from God to man, it is a message of 
 the elite to the mass, a summons from the super- 
 man. It is man trying to lift himself by his own 
 collar. Positivity, on the contrary, has its source and 
 its standard hi one, in the historic origin of Chris- 
 tianity, the pure word and deed of God in Christ 
 and His finished grace. We preach a historic message 
 from God to humanity, and not a message of 
 historic humanity to itself ; a real rescue by a hand 
 from heaven at our utmost moral need, and not a 
 scaling of heaven by our intrinsic moral strength.
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 219 
 
 It ought to be said in justice that the rationalism 
 of the liberal position takes two forms, a Christian 
 and an anti-Christian. And it would not be fair to 
 charge those who press the normality of the Chris- 
 tian consciousness with the sterilities of scientific 
 rationalism. It ought, however, also to be said, 
 that if the Christian consciousness of each age is 
 the supreme court, the end is Catholicism the 
 supremacy of the Church's voice, of faith's latest 
 stage, over the Gospel. Of course a modern posi- 
 tivity admits the reason as a critic of the Bible, of 
 the mere sacred history, but not of the holy Gospel. 
 The Gospel which recreates our moral experience in 
 the end criticises us. We cannot judge our judge. 
 
 
 
 3. Positive theology is creational, liberal is evolu- 
 tionary. For the positive theologian the course of 
 religious history has been chiefly determined by the 
 due intervention of supernatural and incomparable 
 factors. The spirit of man was invaded by the 
 spirit of God, as the whole Rhone shoots into Leman. 
 Every doctrine of God's immanence must be com- 
 patible with that supreme moral experience, and 
 licensed by it. Liberal theology on the contrary 
 views the course of religion as an immanent evolu- 
 tion accounting even for experience. The action of 
 God is not to recreate our spiritual power so much as 
 to release and forward it. It is not a raising from the 
 dead, but only a loosing and letting go. Religious 
 experiences are inevitable products of the spiritual
 
 2 2 o Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 nature of man and the world as created and consti- 
 tuted by God. Whereas, according to a positive 
 theology, they are produced, in the crucial cases at 
 least, by a special action of God. What is upper- 
 most is a person and not a process. The Church 
 represents not simply the influence of Christ but 
 His Holy Spirit. Christian experience, through 
 that Spirit, must always be more than spiritual 
 evolution. It comes from contact or communion 
 with a living Lord ; and faith is only explicable as 
 His gift by the Spirit. In faith, we do not feel our- 
 selves initiative or creative except as we feel ourselves 
 a new creation. Now as preachers we must choose 
 between these two versions of Christianity. In the 
 preaching of a Gospel it is the one theology rather 
 than the other that serves us. For the Gospel of 
 liberalism whatever it may be in theory, is in effect 
 but man calling to men ; while a positive Gospel 
 is man called by God. You will observe that I am 
 not trying to exhibit the extent to which Christianity 
 may find room for evolution. That would occupy 
 another inquiry. It is more needful in the interest 
 of preaching to set out the antithesis. And here, 
 the interest of preaching, is the interest of the soul. 
 
 4. As the most recent phase of evolutionary 
 religion we have the historic-religious movement, 
 challenging the absoluteness of Christianity. Liberal- 
 ism here rises from the study of the religions that 
 abut upon the age of Christ with this question.
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 221 
 
 " Did they not make Him and the faith of Him ? 
 If they did not entirely create the historic figure of 
 Jesus, did they not supply the ideas that Christianity 
 thought were revealed in Christ ? Did they not 
 create the supernatural Christ, the pre-existent Christ, 
 the propitiatory Christ, the Christ that should 
 judge the world ? If so, how can we speak of the 
 finality of Christ, the absoluteness of Christianity ? 
 Is it not all relative to what went before, all a creation 
 of history, all just the past writ larger ? Is it not 
 relative to the future ? May it not be superseded 
 in its turn ? How can anything historical be more 
 than relative ? How can it do more than serve its 
 place and time, and then, when it has advanced these, 
 retire to make room for something greater ? How 
 can we speak of the absolute and final value of Christ ? 
 How can we speak of Him as veritable God ? " 
 
 To which a first answer is, that historical study 
 certainly does compel us to include Christ in His time 
 and world, and to alter in some points the fashion of 
 His claim on us. In doing so it makes a real historic 
 figure of Him, a real man, and not a magical prodigy. 
 He shared the life of limited man, the life of His 
 age, the life of His land. In the region of mere 
 knowledge He was not infallible. He thought much 
 in Jewish categories, He felt human finitude, He 
 confessed to some human ignorance. We modify 
 the impossible and Byzantine Christ into a national 
 figure real and mighty, and only by doing so do we 
 find His true universality. And a second answer 
 would be this, that if the ideas that have been most
 
 222 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 active in Christianity were drawn from Judaism 
 (which itself was largely shaped by the farther East) 
 then the best Pharisees of Christ's day were more 
 responsible for the foundation of historic Christianity 
 than Christ Himself, which seems a reductio ad ab- 
 surdum that I need not, perhaps, for my present 
 purpose pursue. 
 
 But we go farther. We say that this limitation in 
 Christ was the result, the expression of His absolute 
 power. It was an exercise of His will. It was self- 
 limitation, an effect of His self-emptying. It was 
 the very power of God under conditions imposed 
 not simply by human nature but by holy love, grace 
 divine, and saving purpose. And therefore it was 
 an expression of His absoluteness. By His own 
 eternal self-determined will He became lower than 
 the angels. He exerted power over both the natural 
 and the moral world. For He overrode natural law, 
 and broke the entail and Nemesis of guilt. His very 
 obedience to nature was a voluntary and masterly 
 obedience. And His " becoming sin " for us was 
 a voluntary act, a moral achievement of a kind 
 possible only to Godhead. He parted with a 
 physical omnipotence but never with a moral, 
 never with the omnipotence of love, which is the 
 Christian meaning of the Cross. The limitation 
 of His consciousness was no limitation of His 
 moral power, but its exercise. His ignorance of 
 many things we know at school was part of His 
 divine renunciation. His subjection to nature, to 
 death, to dereliction, was the act of His free grace.
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 223 
 
 " Tis but in limits that the master shows." And 
 the absolute mastery of Christ was made perfect in 
 the relativity He assumed. It was an absolute rela- 
 tivity as being self-determined. Otherwise I do not 
 understand what Troeltsch means by "a relative 
 absoluteness." The absolute is less than absolute 
 if it has not the power of the relative. If the 
 infinite could not be finite, it is less than infinite. 
 For there is then a region outside its range. He 
 had power to do anything perfectly that was due 
 to love and to the will of God. The absoluteness 
 of His obedience to that was the absoluteness of 
 His moral power, which is the only absoluteness we 
 have to do with at last. 
 
 No doubt the preacher of a Christ merely relative 
 brings Him nearer to our conditions, but it is the 
 preacher of the absolute Christ that brings Him nearest 
 to our need. To be near our conditions makes a man 
 interesting, but to be near to our moral need makes 
 him a power. To humanize Christ is to popularize 
 Him, no doubt. But it is His Deity that makes Him 
 outstay popularity, surmount the desertion of the 
 Cross, and become universal. What we need is a power 
 to enter and save us which is possible only to the 
 God we wronged ; we do not need simply the most 
 interesting of historic figures. Our trouble is not 
 our ennui and not our ignorance, it is our sin. It 
 is our Holy One that spoils our feasts and troubles 
 our dreams. Is it not clear which of these two 
 views belongs to a preached Gospel, and to our 
 moral case ? Our moral predicament, the actual
 
 224 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 need of the race, demands chiefly, not a more human 
 Jesus, but a more divine Christ. 
 
 
 
 5. A positive theology finds the essence of Chris- 
 tianity in the core of the New Testament Gospel, 
 cleansed of those temporary hulls that clung to it in 
 the first century. You may seek this core in the 
 heart of Christ's teaching alone, or you may find 
 it in the Cross as the heart of the whole New 
 Testament Christ. That is a controversy which, for 
 the moment, we may pass by. The point is that the 
 source and norm is in the New Testament. The 
 simplification of faith is effected by going to its 
 centre and origin. That is to say it comes from a 
 deepening of faith, and not merely from an easing 
 of it. The maxim of textual criticism has a higher 
 sense lectio difficilior potius. Distrust the simple 
 solutions of old problems. A simplification of 
 Christianity which is not also a deepening of it is 
 fatal to it. Its real simplicity lies at the centre not 
 on the surface. To simplify faith we must be taken 
 to its heart. The simplicity of the heart may be 
 very shallow, but the simplicity at the heart is deep. 
 And history has driven Christianity to more simplicity 
 chiefly by forcing it in on its centre, and not by 
 thrusting it to the surface. The Bible has done much 
 for history, but also history has done much for the 
 Bible. It has driven us in on it. It has simplified 
 not by lucidity but by concentration. It has clarified 
 the issue by staking all on the centre, and by compel-
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 225 
 
 ling us to feel in that deep core our infinite power. It 
 has removed our first concern from the Bible to the 
 Gospel within the Bible. It has forced us from the 
 simplicity of clearness, obviousness, and ease to the 
 simplicity of centrality, depth, and power. 
 
 I speak about Christ and the centre of Christ, 
 which is to be found at the head of Christianity, 
 hi the Cross, as the Epistles exist to say in a 
 very positive fashion. But the liberal theology 
 finds the essence of Christianity to consist of the 
 spine, so to speak, or marrow, or continuity, or, as 
 Hegel would say, the " truth," of the whole de- 
 velopment of Christianity which Christ but initiated. 
 You must, (it says,) include the whole Christian 
 history in your field of induction. The spinal cord 
 has the same value as the brain it prolongs. The 
 Church (viewed historically and not dogmatically) 
 is essential for our definition of Christianity. You 
 cannot read the Gospel aright except along with its 
 results in a Church. 
 
 One objection to this is that, if that be so, the first 
 Christians, like Paul, had next to no data to go on ; 
 and therefore they were less hi a position than we are 
 to say what Christianity really is. They had not 
 the Gospel's results before them, but only the Gospel 
 itself. This is also an objection which tells with equal 
 force against the common and thoughtless saying 
 that the real evidence of Christianity is the lives of 
 Christians. God help us if that were sb ! It was 
 not Christianity that made Paul a Christian, it was 
 no church. It was not even the story of Jesus ; it
 
 226 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 was the personal contact with Christ. It was his 
 invasion by Christ. Paul had nothing to speak of 
 before him in the shape of evidential Christendom. 
 From the Church he had at most but testimony. 
 He had to proceed entirely on Christ's evidence 
 for Himself. 
 
 Another difficulty is that, on the liberal view, the 
 field of induction has no limit. We cannot make the 
 books up. The history of Christendom still goes on. 
 The record of results is not yet done. In some ways 
 it is not well begun. The region before us is in- 
 definite. The half has not been told How do we 
 know that the weightier part of the evidence is not 
 yet to come ? As with an iceberg, the larger part 
 of the mass is as yet under water. It is future and 
 unseen. And there might be something preparing 
 there which would change the centre of gravity and 
 upset the whole fabric. Has God conquered sin, 
 death, and the world in Christ ? Or is it still an 
 open question whether these will not foil, conquer, 
 and mock God ? 
 
 Were Christianity but an evolutionary spiritual 
 process then it were right to look for the key at the 
 close, and not at the origin. That is the principle 
 of evolution. Man explains the monkey, not the 
 monkey man. It is age that explains youth, and 
 eternity time " the last of life for which the first was 
 made." Were Christianity mere evolution we should 
 have no key to it, since we have not yet its goal. 
 But it is not a case of evolution ; it is a case of 
 positive revelation. Our destiny is given us in
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 227 
 
 our new creation. Paul's apostolic commission, 1 
 have reminded you, was given him in his call to be 
 a Christian. " It pleased God to reveal His son in 
 me that I might preach Him among the Gentiles." 
 So the whole genius of Christianity is given us, 
 not by an induction from its history (which would be 
 sight) but by a deduction from its head (which is 
 faith). We do not see eternity but we realize it in 
 Jesus, who is the substance of what we hope, and 
 the reality of the unseen. In all the more spiritual 
 products it is so. On the dawn of poetry we have 
 Homer, the Eddas, the Kalevala, the Mahabarata. 
 We have extraordinary precocity most abundant 
 in the most spiritual of all the arts music. In 
 life we take the most momentous and formative 
 decisions, as to a profession, or a wife, at the thresh- 
 old of life. And conversion, on which Christianity 
 itself essentially rests in one shape or another, be- 
 longs to the first part of life rather than the last. 
 
 It is not in the genius of Christianity that its 
 essence should be distilled for us out of its whole 
 history. The key is given in its source. Were it 
 otherwise we concede the whole principle of an 
 evolutionary Catholicism, as represented in the 
 modern Romanism of Newman and Mohler, with its 
 deep scepticism and lack of personal certainty. 
 
 
 
 6. All this is to say that positive Christianity has a 
 historic standard in the New Testament. We have 
 there the norm for every form. Liberalism has
 
 228 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 none, beyond a thing of fleeting hues, like the 
 modern man, the modern mind, the modern con- 
 science. But is it not hard to fix what the modern 
 mind is ? Shall Goethe represent it or Nietsche, 
 Wordsworth or Byron, Hegel or Haeckel, the meta- 
 physicians or the psychologists, the optimists, the 
 pessimists, or the naturalists ? One says, follow 
 impulse, man is essentially divine. Another says 
 yes man is essentially divine, and mainly so in his 
 power to quell impulse. One says with Morris 
 " Love is enough enjoy.' Another says with 
 Goethe " Die to live renounce." One again says 
 " Follow to the bitter end your individual conscience 
 and its responsibility. Go, with Brand, for all or 
 nothing." Another says with Comte, " No, the 
 social conscience is lord with its hereditary and 
 racial responsibility." And a third translates this 
 social conscience into Christianity as the Church, 
 which relieves you of your conscience altogether and 
 takes charge of it for you. Which of these repre- 
 sents the modern mind ? Do we find it in life-vigour 
 or life-weariness ? In Bismarck or Amiel ? in Roose- 
 velt or Tolstoi ? America or Europe ? 
 
 Not everything new is modern, in the good sense 
 of that word. That alone is worthily modern which 
 really adds to the spiritual power of the race, and con- 
 tinues to develop from the old the real spiritual life of 
 the world. " Oddities do not last." But still there is 
 the question, What is spiritual life ? and what is soundly 
 progressive ? What makes us sure in each case that 
 we have more than a mere variant ? How to tell a
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 229 
 
 development from a sport, a purpose from a freak, a 
 destiny from a whim ? In the middle ages every- 
 thing was modern which was outside the logic of the 
 period, just as to many to-day everything is modern 
 outside eighteenth century orthodoxy. There is 
 much modernity hi antiquity. How shall we dis- 
 cover and disentangle it ? What is so modern, 
 so fresh, so mighty in every age as eternity ? How 
 discern it ? Where is the favoured haunt of the 
 eternal voice, the region of its choice, where the soul 
 owns its entire control ? Do we not feel that amid OUT 
 unexampled wealth of broad interests, new departure, 
 swift change,teeming variation, and external mobility 
 life is flattening and starving to-day for want of the 
 eternal stay of Christ, as a gorgeous tent slowly sub- 
 sides to the dust as the pole decays ? All our escape 
 from tradition and from bondage, all the fires, feats, or 
 freaks of freedom, the roses and raptures of romance, 
 or even the heroisms of the great, do not permanently 
 lift the tone or dignity of life. Where are we to take 
 our bearings and find our north ? Where shall we 
 rest our lever ? Where does the eternal well up 
 through time to flood history ? To such questions 
 a positive Christianity has an answer in the 
 Gospel of the Cross, taken seriously and object- 
 ively, the Cross where eternity springs up anew 
 in every soul. But what is known as liberalism 
 has none. It believes in the logic of the idea, or in 
 human nature, divine human nature, man failing 
 often but unfallen still, man as God made him. 
 Human nature where lago succeeds and Brutus
 
 230 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 fails, indeed ! Which wins at history's close ? 
 The only answer we have to that is in the absolute 
 finality of the Gospel of the Cross. Human nature 1 
 It is indeed wonderful. But, alas ! 
 
 "Unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how mean a thing is man." 
 
 7. A liberal theology, a belief in the unbroken 
 unity of man with God, a creed of man's essential 
 divinity superseding the need of redeeming grace, 
 needing but benignant grace such a theology may 
 suit those who are constitutionally ready to believe 
 in goodness from simplicity of nature, or through 
 lack of imaginative lucidity, moral shrewdness, 
 or knowledge of the world. It may satisfy those 
 who can turn easily to life's varied interests and 
 energies for relief from the bleeding wounds of the 
 soul, or those who feel indeed the tragedy in the 
 world, but have no power to realize the tragedy of 
 the world. It may meet those whose reason serves 
 them so well that revelation is not called for, who 
 are young enough to rely on their own self-respect, 
 and to trust to their own self-help. But the modern 
 man is inwardly more of a pessimist than that, in 
 the old countries at least, where they have outgrown 
 youth's happy knack of hope, and have long borne 
 the white man's burden. The modern man represents 
 the bankruptcy of natural optimism, and more and 
 more craves for deliverance. He tastes life's tragedy 
 and guilt, and pines for a Saviour, even when he
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 231 
 
 disowns ours. " O, had I lived," says one of them, 
 " when Jesus of Nazareth walked in Galilee I would 
 have followed Him, and lost all my pride in the love 
 of Him." Now, a positive theology comes to this 
 jaded, impotent life with the note of a real, foregone 
 redemption. It comes to modern Europe, the Europe 
 of the Renaissance, and the Illumination, and the 
 Revolution, and it comes to a Europe disillusioned 
 of them all, as it came to the debacle of classical 
 antiquity. And man's extremity elicits the central 
 resource of God the Saviour. As the time grows 
 short God grows swift and keen. " As, the shorter 
 time Satan hath, the more is his rage, so, the shorter 
 time Christ hath, the more is His zeal for His saints 
 and indignation against His enemies. His heart 
 is set on it, and therefore it is we see in this latter 
 age He hath made such changes in the world. We 
 have seen Him do that in a few years that He hath 
 not done in a hundred years before. For, being 
 King of nations, He presses His interests ; and being 
 more near His kingdom He takes it with violence. 
 We are now within the whirl of it and so His motions 
 are rapt." Thus even Goodwin the Puritan. 
 
 It is true a fresh young people, like America, 
 has a somewhat different note. But it is useless 
 to refer the weary Titan of Europe merely to the 
 young Hercules of the West. The young men too 
 shall grow weary, and their strength shall utterly 
 fail. Nature has its due course to senility, and a 
 natural optimism has its dying fall. It is the waiters 
 on God that renew their strength. Christianity comes
 
 232 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 to-day as it came in the first centuries, to a paganism 
 which is disillusioned about itself and is sinking into 
 pessimism. In those first days Christianity took the 
 world at its own estimate, and brought the message 
 that the situation required. Even Stoicism then 
 despaired of the mass of mankind in spite of its 
 high conception of Humanity. It could not make 
 a religion of that idea. It had the dream but not 
 the power. It had not the Redemption, the secret 
 of a new creation. This was the one thing the age 
 craved, and it was the one thing Christianity brought. 
 And it was to this outworn world Christianity came. 
 It was not to the northern world of the fresh Teutonic 
 races. Its method was not to save an old civilization 
 by the infusion of a new and hopeful race. Or do 
 you think that what saved antiquity was not the 
 Christian redemption but the incursion of the Nor- 
 thern peoples ? Well, Europe to-day is rapidly 
 moving to where antiquity had come, to moral 
 exhaustion, and to the pessimism into which natural 
 optimism swings when the stress and burden are 
 extreme. Do you think that that situation is to be 
 saved by the spontaneous resources of human nature, 
 or the entrance upon the Wdtpolitik of a mighty 
 young people like America ? Is there no paganism 
 threatening America ? What is to save America 
 from her own colossal power, energy, self-confidence 
 and preoccupation with the world ? Her Chris- 
 tianity no doubt. But a Christianity which places 
 in the centre not merely Christ but the Cross and 
 its Redemption, in a far more ethical way than
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 233 
 
 America is doing ; a Christianity which is not only 
 set in the presence of Christ's person but caught 
 into the motion of Christ's work, which is not only 
 with Christ but hi Him by a total moral and social 
 salvation. 
 
 For the time, however, your young optimism 
 hardly realizes the tragic need for an absolute salva- 
 tion. You are too Pelagian. I feel that Christianity 
 comes with a less redemptive word, perhaps, to a 
 fresh and dawning race ; as to the vigorous Teutons 
 of the fourth century in the north of Europe it 
 came with a more Arian creed than was extorted 
 from the Gospel by the desperate case of dying 
 Rome. To youth the harmony of Christianity with 
 the nobler natural man may appeal more strongly 
 than does its blow to nature from the Cross. 
 Your energy insists on synergy with God. Your 
 lack of tradition discredits a great theology. The 
 transfiguration of humanity may be more attractive 
 to you than its death and resurrection hi Christ, 
 because it is less deep. Hegel with his calm 
 process of reconciliation may seem more Christian 
 than the pessimists with their cry for redemption, 
 and the iron quivering in their soul. It is easy to 
 believe in man when the world is young, when 
 every woman is a queen, and every goose a swan. 
 It is easy to speak in pantheistic philosophemes of 
 the essential divinity of human nature, and man's 
 homogeneity with God. What has Christianity to 
 do with that ? That is for the philosophers. What 
 brought Christ, and brought Him to the Cross, was
 
 234 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 man's alienation from God and his hate. To harp 
 on continuity when we need communion, and for 
 communion redemption, betrays that the moral 
 eye has still its scales ; that sin has not yet bitten ; 
 that there is not yet resistance unto blood ; that 
 the holy has not yet outgrown the homely ; that 
 grace is untasted still, however the heart takes its 
 fill of love ; and that the holy has not become the 
 one reality. It indicates the ethical amateur brisk 
 in his studies, though at times abashed ; but not 
 the broken man, the broken and contrite spirit, 
 shamed, desperate, and delivered, lost and found. In 
 such a Gospel as that of man's natural and indelible 
 sonship we not only have no need that God be 
 reconciled to us; we hardly seem to need to be 
 reconciled to God. All we seem to need is to be 
 reconciled to our inner truer selves. Be true to 
 yourself, is the note of this youthful Gospel, and 
 stir up one another to love. Cultivate the Spirit 
 of Jesus. Believe and work for spiritual progress. 
 Meet with a shining face the dawn of God who loves 
 to see His children happy. Yes, but meantime, where 
 is the anguish of the new birth ? And where the 
 stricken confession " God be merciful to me a 
 sinner " ? 
 
 In a positive Gospel, on the contrary, everything 
 turns on a real supernatural revelation, on a funda- 
 mental perdition, a radical evil, and a rescue from 
 without as the one thing that makes a Christian 
 humanity. Our salvation is not the mere contagion 
 spread by powerful religious personalities. Nor is it
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 235 
 
 the progress of a gradual spiritualization. It is a 
 unique and finished work of God in Christ, to be 
 taken, not made. It is not a piece of impressionism ; it 
 is a real redemption in the heart of things, in creative 
 deed and not in stirring word alone. You cannot 
 deeply preach without the note of a tragic and total 
 redemption. To harp upon this as a truth is easy, 
 I know, and it can be tedious ; and the world has 
 been well bored by it often. But to preach it, to 
 saturate with the power and principle of it all 
 thought and reality, that is a great life work, which 
 puts the preacher's soul much upon the Cross, but 
 also raises it continually from the dead. 
 
 
 
 Behind all the differences between a positive 
 Gospel and religious liberalism there keep reap- 
 pearing the two elements, personality with its 
 immortality and sin with its witness to holiness. The 
 liberalism I speak of consistently tends to erase the 
 personal element both from God and from the human 
 future. Its note is some variety of Pantheism, 
 with all the spell and appeal of that issue to those 
 who have but an intellectual history. And it 
 farther erases, like all Monistic systems, the decisive 
 factor in history, the factor of sin and of God's holi- 
 ness. The holiness of the Spinosist deity is not 
 holy in the Christian sense, nor in any sense which 
 leaves us with a real conscience. Even Hegel tends 
 to erase that. For such a creed sin is not outside 
 the vast process of reconciliation whereby the
 
 236 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 supreme idea finds in the ideas below something 
 intrinsically serviceable to its final purpose when 
 the hour comes for them to be absorbed and pre- 
 served (aufgehoben) . There is something in sin which 
 can be preserved and utilized for the divine purpose. 
 That is to say, there is something in it (as sin, and 
 not merely as free volition) which is due to the 
 divine purpose, and may be incorporated in the 
 great reconcilement. One day we may see (if at 
 that far day we continue to exist capable of seeing 
 anything) how our sin was a negative contribution 
 to the divine event, and had its place in the divine 
 scheme of things. And we may even be ashamed 
 of the pother we made about it. 
 
 All this is absolutely incompatible with the sin that 
 brought death to God in the Son of God. Sin as we 
 see it by God's holiness in Christ's Cross contains 
 nothing that can be absorbed by that holiness and 
 given an eternal value. It is outside the range of 
 reconcileable things. It can only be destroyed as 
 in principle Christ did destroy it. Doubtless it 
 must be made to minister to God's greater glory ; 
 but never by any kind of exploitation ; and only 
 by entire destruction. 
 
 In all the efforts to subdue Christian theology to 
 be a province of the empire of pure thought there 
 is discernible an inability which seems constitutional 
 to gauge the fact of sin at its moral value. There 
 is some lack of a moral retina. There is an 
 absence of a personal moral history. There is a 
 poverty of moral realism and of soul history as dis-
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 237 
 
 tinct from the mind's. Yet I venture to think that 
 there is more of a key to the divine method in the 
 tragedies of remorse and the shame of guilt than 
 in the fascinating processes of speculative thought. 
 The greatest of modern popular orators, a master 
 of laughter, tears, and all assemblies, often visited a 
 friend of mine. One day as they stood on a height 
 which commanded a noble view my friend missed 
 him, and on search found him some yards away, prone 
 on the heath, sobbing, with his head buried in his 
 hands. When he had recovered somewhat, and assured 
 his companion it was not illness, he said that from 
 time to time some sight of greatness suddenly 
 smote into him the shame of what he had been in 
 the years of his dissipation and sin. And the horror 
 of it never lost its freshness, nor did the freshness fade 
 from the wonder of his forgiveness. Moments like 
 these, and men like these, have a key to the spiritual 
 system of the world which the thinkers must fail to 
 turn till they insert in its ring much more than their 
 thought. And to have no such experience, or at 
 least the power to understand it, is to be a minor 
 in the moral life. 
 
 
 
 8. To gather the matter up. The liberal theo- 
 logy finds Christ's centre of gravity in what He 
 has in common with us ; a positive theology in 
 that wherein He differs. The one urges us to a 
 faith like Christ's, the other to a faith in Christ. 
 The one bids us imitate the religion of Jesus ;
 
 238 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 the other cannot attempt to imitate a Redeemer, 
 or criticize the judge of conscience ; and it takes 
 Jesus for our religion. The one preaches as the 
 principle of Christianity the principle of indefec- 
 tible human sonship, the principle of man's incor- 
 rigible spirituality, with Christ only as its classic 
 case and supreme prophet ; the other identifies the 
 principle with Christ, and finds it secured only in 
 the total act of His eternal person. Liberalism 
 dwells on Christ's preaching, positivity on a Christ 
 preached. The one finds the most impressive thing 
 in Christ to be His perfect human nature ; the 
 other is much more impressed by His treatment 
 of human nature than by His incarnation of 
 it. The one dwells on Christ as the expression of 
 humanity, the other dwells on His business with 
 humanity. For the one He consummates it, for 
 the other He redeems it. Liberalism offers Christ to 
 a seeking world as its answer, or to a suffering world 
 as its healer ; positivity offers Him to a guilty world 
 also as its Atoning Saviour. The one treats the 
 sinlessness of Christ as the expression of the essential, 
 though soiled, sinlessness of man ; the other treats it 
 as the sanctity possible only to the Holy One of God. 
 The one regards it as a relative sinlessness ; the 
 other as an absolute holiness. The one takes stand 
 on love ; the other declares that the divine thing 
 in love, as it is in Christ, is holy grace. For the one 
 the divine reality is a calm and mystic presence and 
 he joys that God is near in love ; for the other it 
 is a perpetual deed, and the nearness is a terror
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 239 
 
 except as grace for love scorned. A liberal theology 
 discerns God's real presence in the mere action, 
 process, or movement of the world ; a positive finds it 
 in the act of the world, the supreme act of history 
 which consummates the world. The one is engrossed 
 with the way God's presence pervades His world, the 
 other with the way He realizes by redemptive act His 
 Purpose in the world. The one finds Christ to 
 crown the immanence of the divine presence in 
 the world ; the other finds Him to be the incarna- 
 tion of the divine will with the world. The one has 
 the cosmological interest of evolution, the other the 
 teleological interest of Redemption. For liberalism 
 the world is God's arena, His sphere of energy, 
 where His substance, forces, and ideas play ; for 
 positivity it is becoming His Kingdom, where His 
 purpose rules. For the one the world is His organ, 
 for the other it is His creature ; and while He is 
 immanent in His creature, He is incarnate only in 
 His uncreated Son. If the world is the creature of 
 His holy love, the Son is more ; He is its eternal 
 counterpart. For the one the world was created 
 for Christ, or at least for Christ's ideal ; for the 
 other it was created in Christ. 
 
 
 
 Religion as it grows powerful grows positive. But 
 the constant drift of liberalism is away from positi- 
 vity, and it devotes itself to the scientific study of 
 religions. Yet even that study might teach us that 
 the constant tendency of religion, as it rises in the
 
 2 4-O Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 scale, is to be more positive, more historic, more 
 defined, and more objective. There is no such thing 
 anywhere as religion per se, religion apart from a 
 specific form of religion unless perhaps we find it in 
 the decadents from the higher types, where you have 
 a vague religiosity with the effort to detach itself 
 from every form Church, doctrine, or any other 
 clear committal. But in the historic religions, as you 
 rise in the scale of quality you grow in positivity. 
 They become more historical, and more dogmatic, 
 more explicit in regard to the gravest issues. They 
 do not erase the frontiers, though they promote the 
 coming and going of a freer trade. A positive 
 religion is a concrete one. It is so intellectually ; and 
 still more so morally. Experience, I keep saying, 
 makes an appeal to our wiU and choice. It puts us 
 upon our moral mettle. It takes a line. It stakes 
 life and eternity on selection, decision, committal. 
 It calls us to moral verve and vigilance. There are 
 mature lives to-day which are darker than they 
 would have been had they not at the early stage 
 fallen victims to a vague and pathetic fallacy of 
 fatherhood, in which the holy had no meaning and 
 judgment no place. But how poor, how remote it 
 all is. As we live we are being tried for our 
 life. And that is the issue you face as preachers. 
 One of these tendencies will make you preachers 
 of a Gospel, the other will make you advocates 
 of a culture. One will make you strangers and 
 sojourners in the world, the other citizens of the 
 world, maybe men of the world. One will make
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 241 
 
 you apostles of Christ, and one will make you cham- 
 pions of humanity. One will make you severe with 
 yourself, one will make you tender with yourself. 
 One will commend you to the naughty people, and 
 one will commend you to the nice. 
 
 Now of these two tendencies one means the de- 
 struction of preaching. If it cease to be God's word, 
 descending on men and intervening in history, then it 
 will cease as an institution in due time. It may become 
 lecturing, or it may become oratory, but as preach- 
 ing it must die out with a positive Gospel. People 
 cannot be expected to treat a message of insight 
 from man to man as they do a message of revelation 
 from God to man. An age cannot be expected to 
 treat a message from another age as they treat a 
 message from Eternal God to every age. Men with 
 the passion of the present cannot be expected to 
 listen even to a message from humanity as they 
 would to one from God. And if humanity redeem 
 itself you will not be able to prevent each member 
 of it from feeling that he is his own redeemer. If we 
 owe everything to man's innate spirituality, asserting 
 itself in various forms of life or worship, we have, 
 in this spirituality, something all too vague for 
 a Gospel, too familiar for a message, and too little 
 positive to give a real preacher his text, or his 
 authority, or even his audience. For if it is all a 
 matter of innate human spirituality it is too innate 
 to each hearer to dispose him to hear it meekly. 
 How should he hear meekly a word which is not 
 engrafted but evolved out of the common spiritual 
 
 p.p. 16
 
 242 Preaching Positive and Liberal 
 
 stock. Each man's own spirituality is in its nature 
 as good as anything another man might bring him. 
 Is it not all really a serious issue, and a grave 
 choice ? The less seriously you feel the issue the 
 more serious it is for you. Not to feel the immense 
 gulf it cleaves is not to choose with open eyes. 
 Whichever side you go to, go with an adequate 
 sense of what is involved. Do not treat the matter 
 as if to men of sense and soul there were but 
 one rational possibility. One respects far more a 
 man who really grasps the situation and deliberately 
 goes to the wrong side far more than one who 
 goes there for want of knowing his subject, or who 
 good-naturedly minimizes the difference and says 
 we are all one at bottom. If we are so, it is either 
 in a positive Christ, or in a pantheistic, monistic 
 unity which is spiritually unmeaning and morally 
 noxious. What we do not respect is the assumption 
 of the liberal and superior note by men who have not 
 wrestled wrth the subject, or measured the ground, 
 but are the victims of epicurean reading, easy 
 books, or popular expositors. This matter is really, 
 for the preacher, an issue of the soul, a decision of 
 the life, which turns study from a pursuit to a con- 
 flict, and makes the attainment of conviction a 
 wrestling with God for your salvation. For the 
 preacher, truly, the salvation of the soul is also the 
 salvation of the mind. Your mind also must come 
 to the obedience and service of faith. There is such 
 a thing as the sacrificium intellectus. But it is not 
 to an institution it is to the conscience. It is the
 
 Preaching Positive and Liberal 243 
 
 estion is I 
 t, " How / 
 is He to \\ 
 
 recognition of that primacy of the moral which views 
 sin as the crux of the ethical, i.e. the human, situation, 
 and redemption as its only solution. Your charter as 
 preachers is not contained in what the world says to 
 your earnest thought but in what the Word says 
 to your sinful conscience. And the question is 
 not " What do you think of Christ ? " but, 
 do you treat Him ? " It is not what is 
 you. It is more even than what is He for you. 
 And still more it is what is He in you. And are 
 you in Him ? That last is in some ways the 
 most crucial question of all. For by having Christ 
 in you, you may mean no more than inheriting 
 the results of His vast historic movement, and 
 absorbing into your character the moral fruits of 
 His legacy to men. So you might have Christ 
 working on in you in a posthumous way. But 
 when you ask yourself, " Am I in Him ? " you can 
 say, Yea, to that only if He still live, and live as 
 Himself our spiritual world, made unto us justifica- 
 tion, sanctification, and redemption.
 
 PREACHING POSITIVE AND 
 MODERN
 
 VII 
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 
 THEOLOGY, if it is to be of real use to the preacher, 
 must be modernized. It is fruitless to offer to the 
 public the precise modes of thought which were 
 so fresh and powerful with the Reformers, or the 
 schemes so ably propounded by the dogmatists 
 of the seventeenth century, and so severely raked 
 by the Socinians. The nineteenth century was not 
 a theological century, but it has not passed without 
 leaving a great and good effect upon theology. It 
 was a century of scholarship, of criticism, and of 
 heresy. But do we not recognize now that com- 
 petent heresy is a negative blessing to the Church 
 and its truth ? Only it must be competent. It 
 is the dabblers on both sides that do the mischief. 
 We must carry on the work of last century in 
 modernizing theology. 
 
 But what does the modernizing of theology mean ? 
 Does it mean that its control passes into the hands 
 of modern theories of the soul and the world ? Does 
 it mean that the Christian idea of a holy God shall 
 
 247
 
 248 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 be at the mercy of what is a mere philosophical 
 ultimate ? Does it mean that theology must be 
 licensed by the cosmologies or psychologies of the 
 hour ? Does it mean that we start with a certain 
 scheme of creation and cut off all that projects 
 over its edge ? For instance, nothing more worthily 
 marks the modern Church than the idea of evolution, 
 especially hi connexion with its own history. But 
 is our belief to be stretched on the pallet of evolution, 
 for instance, and everything to be trimmed down 
 which is beyond that scheme ? The Higher Criti- 
 cism is a gift to us of the spirit which gave us the 
 Bible. But is the Bible to be put on the rack of 
 mere literary criticism, or historic, or even ethical, 
 and nothing accepted from it but what it emits 
 under such question ? Are the scholars, the savants, 
 the philosophers to be the Board of Triers for the 
 Gospel ? Is modern just eqivalent to d la mode ? 
 
 The result of that I have already discussed as 
 mere theological liberalism, which, hi the effort to 
 discard dogma, only substitutes philosophic dogma 
 for theological. The error is in its start and stan- 
 dard. It begins from the wrong end. It begins 
 with a scheme of creation, a scheme of the world 
 or man, with which, in truth, religion is but indirectly 
 concerned. And it does not begin with the new 
 creation, with the evangelical experience, the 
 moral redemption, Eternal Life in Jesus Christ. 
 It begins with the world and not with the Word, 
 with thought and not faith, with love and not 
 grace, with kindness and not holiness. It is cosmo-
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 249 
 
 logical, or it is psychological, being preoccupied 
 with the structure and action of nature or of mind ; 
 whereas religion (and the Christian faith certainly) 
 is teleological, being preoccupied with God's purpose 
 and goal for things, and for history, and for the 
 soul. The one makes a specification of life and know- 
 ledge, and requires any religion which tenders to 
 comply. It thinks of man's rational structure 
 more than his moral need, of his power to under- 
 stand more than his weakness to trust and obey. 
 The other lays hold of God's object with life, finding 
 in Christ both the goal and its guarantee. The 
 one gives no finality, because the schemes of life 
 and drafts of the world are changing with pro- 
 gress ; the other has finality or nothing, because 
 it begins with God's chief end for history in its 
 salvation in Jesus Christ. In Christ it finds in 
 advance the eternal and final purpose of God. We 
 see not yet all things but we see Jesus. It is 
 teleological and redemptive. In a word, if theology 
 is to be modernized it must be by its own Gospel. 
 The two methods differ in their start, then. The 
 one begins with man, the other with God, the one 
 with science or sentiment, the other with the Gospel, 
 the one with the healthy heart and its satisfaction, 
 the other with the ruined conscience and its redemp- 
 tion. The one begins with the world, (as I say) the 
 other with the Word. But, in practice, we find this 
 that to begin with the world is to become dubious 
 about the Word ; whereas to begin with the Word 
 is to become sure about the world. A philosophy
 
 250 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 can bring us to no security of a revelation ; but a 
 revelation develops a philosophy, or a view of the 
 world ; it is adjustable to many schemes of the 
 world ; and it is hospitable to many of the modern 
 principles of interpreting the world. It is not the 
 victim of modern theories like monism, but it 
 has welcome for many modern principles like 
 evolution. In the face of modern theories or dogmas 
 the Word of revelation is autonomous. It has its 
 own dogmas by an equal right. But in face of modern 
 principles it discerns in them, and often through 
 their means, the hidden treasures of its own wealth. 
 But whether on suggestion from without, or on 
 impulse from within, it develops its latent wealth 
 by its own native genius and freedom. It reforms 
 and rediscovers itself, as it did in the Reformation. 
 The creeds are discoveries of the Church to itself by 
 the heresies, which are therefore negative blessings. 
 And these two things, the Church's recognition of 
 modern principles and its rediscovery of its own, 
 combine to modernize the theology it presents to in- 
 telligence. It is friendly and reasonable to theories 
 like evolution, but it is commanded by the fact of 
 redemption and its experience. It claims that its 
 experience of God reconciling in Christ is as real and 
 valid as any experience of the world. Its faith is 
 an organ of real knowledge. 1 What science does for 
 our knowledge of things and forces, faith does for 
 our knowledge of persons, our knowledge, above 
 all, of our personal God and His saving will. 
 1 See, among many others, Paulsen's Ethik. passim.
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 251 
 
 
 
 I. And if I may first ask what are the positive 
 doctrines which, amid all that is modernized in it, 
 make Christianity still a Gospel of the Grace of 
 God, the answer would in my judgment be this. 1 
 They are the Eternal Sonship, the Mediatorship, 
 and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
 
 I. It is a Gospel of Jesus the Eternal Son of God. 
 It sets Christ's person in the centre of theology 
 no less than of religion. If the nineteenth century 
 had done no more than restore the person of Christ 
 to the centre of theology, it would have done a 
 very great theological work. The historic Jesus is 
 personally identical with the Christian principle or 
 with the Eternal Christ. He stood thus in a unique 
 relation to Eternal God. It was a relation unique 
 not only as being unattained so far by other men. 
 For that is not denied by the liberalism of the 
 hour as a mere historic verdict. But He was unique 
 in a dogmatic sense, in a way unattainable not 
 only by any man but by collective humanity. 
 This unique relation to God constituted His person, 
 and it was not simply an exercise of His person. It 
 was not attained by Him, but He was constituted in 
 it. He began by being the Son of God in eternal fact, 
 though He ended by being the Son in historic power. 
 The idea of a metaphysical sonship is not absurd, 
 though our data make its express form tentative only. 
 
 1 See Theodore Kaftan. Die neue Theologie des
 
 252 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 The metaphysical unity with God is postulated 
 by the evangelical unity, however far it may be 
 from being denned. It is a unity which is far more 
 than harmony of will. It involves parity of being, 
 which places the historic Jesus with the Creator, rather 
 than the creature, and beside the Creator, rather than 
 under Him. He was of Godhead. If we take in their 
 full earnest the words that God was in Christ recon- 
 ciling we have in this Christ the real presence and 
 action of a forgiving God. The act of Christ was 
 still more God's act, and not a mere reflection of 
 it. His love was God's love, and not a mere re- 
 sponse to it We have Christ doing what God 
 alone could do forgiving sin committed against 
 God alone. None but the injured could either 
 forgive or save. If God was not saving in Christ, 
 if Christ was not God saving, He was saving from 
 God. And we can do but lean justice to Christ's 
 own description of His consciousness at the close 
 of Matthew xi., if we do not set Him apart in 
 kind as well as function from the rest of the race, 
 and find just there the secret of His unique 
 identification with the race. No one who was 
 simply one of the race could contain and shelter 
 the race as Christ felt He could when He said, " Come 
 unto Me all ye that labour." To come unto this 
 Christ is to come into Him. No one who was 
 simply of the race could identify himself so com- 
 pletely with the whole race as redemption demands. 
 And it was as God that He was worshipped by the 
 first Church. Be the story of His birth fact or
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 253 
 
 symbol, at least it proves that. In Jesus, then, we do 
 not hear of God, we meet Him. He does not simply 
 reveal God ; He is God in revelation, the gracious 
 God revealed. 
 
 2. It is a Gospel of Jesus the Mediator. He 
 mediates the holy grace of God, not as the preacher 
 does, but in a way that the preacher has to preach. 
 He is the mediator and not the medium. He is 
 the Redeemer, and not the champion, of mankind. 
 He is the Revealer, and not the rival, of God. In His 
 Cross He confessed and satisfied the holiness of God 
 in a way so intimate, so absolute, that it was also the 
 radical exposure of sin in all its sinfulness, and thus 
 it became its destruction. If the sinless could not 
 confess sin, He exposed it. He could, and did, confess 
 the holiness which throws sin into complete expo- 
 sure and ruin. The divine morality, established 
 in the holiness of the Atoning Cross, is the true 
 source of our modern ethicizing of theology and our 
 future ethicizing of society. Christ's work was 
 not to proclaim forgiveness in the loftiest, kindest, 
 amplest way. Others did that. Israel did that 
 not indeed as a people, but hi its elect and inner 
 self as a Messiah people. But Christ brought for- 
 giveness as the Son of God alone could, as God for- 
 giving, as forgiveness incarnate, as one actually re- 
 deeming and not offering redemption, as the divine 
 destroyer of guilt, as the Eternal Salvation in God 
 made historic and visible. Christianity is a media-
 
 254 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 tonal religion always. Always, through all Eternity, 
 Jesus Christ is our Mediator with the Father. The 
 mediation of Christ belongs to the perennial nature 
 of communion with God, and not merely to a 
 historic point of our religion. We are sons al- 
 ways only in Him who was Son in none. We are 
 the sons of God's Grace, He alone is the Son of His 
 love. God's relation to him is not the matter of 
 grace it must be for every one of us forgiven 
 sinners. His place with God is by nature and 
 absolute right. He was and ever is the Son that 
 I must become through him. And His absolute 
 Sonship became effective and historic in the con- 
 summation of the Cross. 
 
 When we say that the Cross is a Gospel of holy 
 love, gracious to human sin, we mean that the first 
 concern of Christ was with God and not with man. 
 It was with God's holiness, and its accentuation 
 of man's sin. He poured out His soul unto death, 
 not to impress man but to confess God. Therefore 
 He impresses man infinitely, inexhaustibly. There 
 is nothing that makes sin so terrible as its full exhi- 
 bition before God by God's own holiness, by His own 
 holy one ; in whom the holiness goes out as love, 
 suffers the judgment, and redeems as grace. Love 
 is only divine because it is holy love. And only as 
 holy does it elicit the faith that has all love latent 
 in it. It is in this holiness of God that all our faith 
 and all our theology begin. It is this that must per- 
 petually exalt them, and correct them, and moralize 
 them, and infuse them with passion, compassion,
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 255 
 
 imagination and majesty. All the reconstruction 
 of belief must begin with the holiness of God. All 
 the recovery of faith from mere religion must be 
 brought about by His holiness. And when we come 
 to speak of God's love, and ask how it should differ 
 from the benignities of ideal gods, or nature gods, 
 how it should celestialize human love, the answer 
 is the same. It is as holy love. It is as the love 
 is in the Cross. The purity of the speculative idea 
 falls short, in practical religion, of the holiness in 
 the Cross. It is ethereal rather than divine, and 
 sublimated more than sublime. Herein is love, 
 not that we loved who easily forgo propitiation, 
 but that He loved, who so loved as to make His 
 own unsparing propitiation under the conditions of 
 judgment. Herein is love, not as we love, but as He 
 Loves who loves His holy name before all His children, 
 His holy name before all His prodigals, and therefore 
 spared not even His only Son. Herein is our salvation 
 as sure and perennial as the holiness for which we 
 are saved. And love is thus sure, because it is the holy 
 foundation of the real, the moral world. 
 
 
 
 3. Christianity is a Gospel of Christ's resurrection. 
 The same Jesus who died also rose, and lives as the 
 King of heavenly Glory and Lord of human destiny. 
 The fact that He rose, and that He rose, is the main 
 matter ; it is not the manner of it, or its circum- 
 stances. The point is that the same continuous per- 
 sonality that mastered life during life in death also
 
 256 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 triumphed over death, appeared to sundry in that 
 victory, and lives in its full power and glory for us 
 evermore. The Son of God, in heavenly power and 
 glory now, was and is our dear, real, earthly Jesus. 
 The physical conditions are subordinate. The empty 
 tomb I would leave a question as open as the Virgin 
 Birth. 1 I believe the tomb was emptied else the body 
 would have been produced to refute the apostles. 
 But, even if it had not been, the crucified body 
 was not the redeeming person. And God could 
 prepare, and Christ could take, for His purposes a 
 body as it pleased Him. 
 
 The mistake we make here, especially in preaching, 
 is in treating the Resurrection of Christ as evidence 
 to the world, as a proof, instead of an exercise, of 
 His divine power. The evidential value of miracles 
 is quite gone. As has been said, " instead of the 
 miracles helping faith it takes all our faith to help us 
 to believe the miracles." It is a misuse of miracle 
 to make it evidentiary. None of Christ's miracles 
 
 1 Nothing would more help us to find where we are, and 
 to deal faithfully with our crypto-unitarianism, than to 
 realize that our real difference with the Socinians is not 
 as to the Virgin Birth (which is irrelevant to the Incarna- 
 tion) but as to the Atonement. The locus of the issue is 
 not the cradle but the cross. It is where it was with the 
 first Socinianism a question as to the standing need and 
 conditions of forgiveness, whether forgiveness is the one 
 gift, the one all-inclusive gift of God in Christ (Rom. viii. 
 32). The Unitarian issue is the Evangelical. It is a 
 question as to the Gospel in its true and Pauline sense. 
 In a very true sense the issue of the hour is less about 
 Jesus than about Paul.
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 257 
 
 were so used by Him (in the Synoptics at least). 
 Indeed, He did His best to hush them up. He 
 always refused them as a sign. They were pure, 
 almost irrepressible, acts of real pity and help. 
 They were not advertisements ; they were not 
 credentials. They were not given to unfaith, 
 but to faith. They were no mere exhibitions 
 of power. Christ was not thaumaturgic. He 
 was no impressionist. He would never coerce 
 faith. The reaction against miracle is largely a 
 protest against our un-Christlike abuse of it. 
 We have given it a wrong place, a place which Christ 
 would not allow it to have, even for His contempo- 
 raries. And we do not erase miracles, therefore, 
 when we restore them to their true and blessed 
 place for faith. 
 
 The resurrection of Christ, is thus not evi- 
 dential, but it is real. It is not the surest thing 
 in scientific history, but it is an essential fact to 
 Christian faith. It gave faith back its Lord. It 
 roused faith to know itself and its Master. The 
 apostles did not critically examine the evidence 
 for the resurrection ; they hailed the risen Lord. 
 It was not a resurrection that impressed them, but 
 a returned Saviour. The matter of moment is the 
 reality of the risen Lord, the identity of the Christ 
 now in heaven with the Jesus of the finished victory 
 in the Cross. The great thing is the power given 
 to believers to say and feel with real meaning 
 that they are in Christ and Christ in them. It 
 is to realize that the victorious Jesus was seen of
 
 258 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 many, and was in converse with them ; that as 
 Christ, He still rules the Kingdom He set up ; and 
 that (if He endure at all) He is not sitting apart, 
 solemnly superannuate like a retired and cloistered 
 emperor, and watching, with only a founder's in- 
 terest, the progress of the realm which once He set 
 going but which now runs of itself. Nay, but He 
 watches the Kingdom as the King who ever rules. 
 And the Kingdom will never be but what He is 
 continually making it. 
 
 
 
 II. But now what has a modernized theology 
 to offer in the way of recognizing modern principles 
 as well as in the way of preaching its own ? l 
 
 i. Ever since the Reformation Protestantism has 
 grown in the recognition of one modern principle 
 which it did so much to create the freedom of the 
 individual from external authority. Whether that 
 authority be Bible, Church, or Dogma, merely as 
 such, faith renounces them all. The Bible is no code 
 of either precept or belief. It is not a doctrinal pro- 
 tocol. The Word of God is in the Bible, as the 
 soul is in the body. The one authority is the grace 
 of the Bible speaking to the soul of man. That is 
 to say, the one authority is the Gospel not only in 
 the soul and speaking to the soul, but making the 
 soul. It is a spiritual, practical, creative authority. 
 It is not prescriptive. To be sure, it is an autho- 
 rity which acts under psychological conditions, 
 1 I still make free use of Kaftan's essay.
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 259 
 
 which conditions alone psychology is competent 
 to explore. But with the sanctions of that autho- 
 rity no science is competent to deal, either in 
 challenge or support. The idea of authority is 
 not destroyed because it ceases to be external. 
 Because it ceases to be external it does not cease 
 to be objective, to be presented to consciousness 
 and not produced from it. The moral law which 
 hounds the shiner is nothing external, but it is fear- 
 fully, inevitably, objective. And the Gospel that 
 saves is no less objective and authoritative than 
 the law that damns. Its voice may be inward and 
 private. But these inner voices are what make 
 the real authority ; when the soul is spoken to by 
 another who is its own other. There is no voice 
 so poignant in condemnation as the voice that is 
 dear. Remorse is more than half the grief of 
 many a decent widower. There is no judgment 
 so serious as that of our kin, the judgment of 
 love. The most terrible accusers of the culprit's 
 crime are the children it brands and who never 
 upbraid. The law of Society bears so closely upon 
 us because we ourselves are not insulated wills but 
 products of the same society that made the law. 
 And there is no authority so ubiquitous, and there- 
 fore so objective, as the Word of God that emerges 
 in the colloquy or conflict of the soul God made. 
 It is quite true that a huge problem is set to the 
 Gospel in the present moral anarchy of western 
 civilization. We have not yet found for society the 
 Word which the individual freely finds, the Word
 
 2 60 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 to replace for the public the external authority of 
 the medieval Church. But so long as the individual 
 is made to find that Word for himself in the historic 
 Gospel, there need be no fear that Society will 
 not find it in due course for purposes of public 
 control. 
 
 
 
 2. A second great modern idea is here suggested 
 which profoundly affects the type of our Christian 
 faith the social idea. We always have been greatly 
 affected by the social idea in the shape of the Church. 
 Our Christian theology has been developed as the 
 intelligent expression on the face of a living Church. 
 It has been in vital connexion with the consciousness 
 of a living society. No church, no theology. But 
 it is also becoming amenable to the form and pres- 
 sure of a society wider though not greater civil 
 society ; and especially in respect of its weak. 
 The Brotherhood in the deep Christian sense be- 
 comes much affected by the Brotherhood in the 
 broad humane sense. In the past the strength 
 of Society has much moulded Christian thought 
 and institutions. The Holy Empire, the dynas- 
 ties, the philosophies have all been shaping powers. 
 The ablest jurisprudence at one time much coloured 
 the theology of atonement, for instance. But now 
 the weakness and need of Society exert more 
 and more the modifying pressure. The appeal 
 from the helpless, the passion of pity, affects the 
 whole frame of Christian method, institution,
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 261 
 
 ethic, and even thought, in a growing way. It 
 bears home to us the fact that every single soul is 
 saved in an act which was the organic salvation, 
 the salvation into a kingdom, of the whole race. 
 We are not really saved if we are saved into neglect 
 of a social salvation. The Gospel preached to the 
 soul must be a Gospel which leaves the saved soul 
 much more concerned than he used to be about the 
 saving of civilization, the salvation of the just 
 as well as of the lost, and the restoration of the poor 
 as well as of the wicked. There are very great 
 social changes involved in the modernization of 
 our theology which is now going on. Christian 
 truth must be socialized by the same power as 
 socializes Christian wealth. And it ought in fair- 
 ness to be added that medieval theology was much 
 more social than Protestantism has been except 
 on its Calvinistic side. It was far more social than 
 our debased and individualized Calvinism. It is 
 easy to see why Catholicism, Anglican or Roman, 
 whose golden age was the medieval, should be 
 more socialist than current Protestantism. 
 
 
 
 3. There is another point where the ethicizmg 
 of Christianity has been greatly affected by modern 
 thought the rescue of personality from individualism 
 the socializing of its idea. The influence is social, 
 but it comes from the psychological side. It pro- 
 ceeds first from that growth of the principle of 
 personality which has been mainly promoted by
 
 262 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 Christianity. Christ is certainly no less concerned 
 than Nietsche that the personality should receive 
 the fullest development of which it is capable, 
 and be more and more of a power. The differ- 
 ence between them lies in the moral method by 
 which the personality is put into possession of itself 
 and its resources in the one case by asserting self 
 in the other by losing it ; in the one case by 
 self-pleasing, in the other by self-renunciation. 
 Christianity is interested in the first degree in the 
 modern emphasis on personality, because it is its 
 chief creator. But the influence I allude to is 
 more than that. It lies, secondly, in the conviction 
 that the strength of personality, after an early stage, 
 is damaged by the mere force of individualism, 
 and is a social product. Personality does not come 
 into the world with us ready made, but it has a 
 history and a growth. Education is not merely 
 its training, it is its creation. In all of us the 
 personality is incomplete ; and it misleads us hi 
 the most grave way when we use it as an analogy 
 for the ever complete and holy personality of 
 God. We are but persons hi the making. Per- 
 sonality is created by social influences, and finds 
 itself only in these. We complete our personality 
 only as we fall into place and service in the vital 
 movement of the society in which we live. Isola- 
 tion means arrested development. The aggressive 
 egotist is working his own moral destruction by 
 stunting and shrinking his true personality. Social 
 life, duty, and sympathy, are the only conditions
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 263 
 
 under which a true personality can be shaped. 
 And if it be asked how a society so crude, imperfect, 
 unmoral, and even immoral as that in which we 
 live is to mould a personality truly moral, it is here 
 that Christ comes to the rescue with the gift to 
 faith both of an active Spirit and of a society 
 complete in Himself, which in Him is none of these 
 evil things, the society of the Kingdom of God, which 
 plays a part so great in the modern construction 
 of the Gospel. We are saved only in a salvation 
 which set up a kingdom, and did not merely set it 
 on foot. We have the Kingdom not with Christ 
 but in Christ. Do not leave Christ out of the 
 Kingdom, as if He were detachable from it like any 
 common king. The individual is saved only in this 
 social salvation. And the more you insist that a 
 soul can only be saved, and a personality secured, 
 by Christ's finished work, the more you must con- 
 tend that the Kingdom of God is not merely coming 
 but is come, and is active in the Spirit among us 
 now. There is the closest connexion, if not identity, 
 when you go deep enough, between the theology 
 of salvation and the moral principles of social 
 regeneration. The principle of our salvation is 
 the principle of human ethic, not only of private, 
 as has long been seen, but of public ethic, as we 
 now come to see. A great economist has lately 
 traced in an original and masterly way the vital 
 connexion between the ethic of Calvinism and 
 modern economics. To dismiss the moral necessity 
 for God of Christ's Cross is, in the long run, to banish
 
 2 64 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 moral principles from public affairs ; since the greatest 
 public affair in history would then have in it no 
 causation in the eternal and immutable morality 
 of the universe. 
 
 4. With the modern stress laid by Christianity 
 upon a kingdom, we must recognize the distinction 
 so marked in recent thought ever since Kant between 
 theoretical and practical knowledge, and we must fall 
 in with the modern stress on the latter. Ethic is a far 
 mightier matter than science, and Christian experi- 
 ence a far more precious thing than Christian 
 correctitude. We move to a Gospel of act and 
 experience, which in the long run is independent of 
 either philosophy or criticism. The real Gospel of 
 the Cross is beyond either. In the strict sense of 
 the word theology, that too is immune. For it 
 rests on the contact of indubitable history (viz. 
 Christ's Person and Cross) with present experience. 
 What is vulnerable is a theosophy, a secondary 
 theology which has grown up round experimental 
 theology, and is largely drawn from cosmic or 
 juristic speculation. These speculations are, of 
 course, bound to arise. For the more free we are 
 in the practical experience of our positive Gospel, 
 the more freely we discuss and appropriate from 
 the theoretic world. The more sure we are in our 
 positive Gospel, the less we are tempted to try to 
 control and manipulate philosophy so as to take 
 the danger out of it. But it is by no philosophy or
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 265 
 
 theosophy that we stand or fall. A man speculates 
 with a free judgment if he is not speculating with 
 the capital which means his livelihood. And so we 
 have a new liberty for thought in the primacy of 
 the moral, and the certainty of our moral redemp- 
 tion in experience. 
 
 And we are not only free to go on from that 
 standpoint to be occupied with the interpretation 
 of the world. We must so go on. The faith that 
 makes us free is the faith of a universal, nay a 
 cosmic, redemption. The truths and questions of 
 science are not freaks or hobbies, arbitrary or 
 gratuitous. They are necessary and inevitable. 
 They rise from life, from actual contact with the 
 world. They present real life to us in certain aspects. 
 They represent not only the objective world, but 
 the objective world as it emerges in human 
 experience, in human consciousness and will. The 
 philosophy which cannot license us yet does enrich 
 us. It does not give us our grasp, but it enlarges 
 it. It does not give us a footing, but it does give 
 a horizon. 
 
 I venture to say, therefore, that that separation 
 of the theoretical and the practical (with the stress 
 on the latter) which has been so influential ever 
 since Kant, and rises again with Neo-Kantianism, 
 Pragmatism, and Activism like Eucken's, is a 
 principle of great value both for the certainty and 
 the freedom of our Christian faith in contact with 
 the world. The more we are secured in our practi- 
 cal experience of the Gospel, the more we are free
 
 266 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 to listen to all representations from philosophy or 
 science in shaping to a doctrine our capacious life 
 with Christ in God. 
 
 All this means that our theology must be ethicized. 
 It must be framed with more regard to the practical 
 than to the speculative ideals of life and faith. 
 To modernize theology it must be ethicized, but 
 more from the revelation of God's holiness in the 
 Cross than from the progress of natural or social 
 ethic, however refined. 
 
 
 
 5. Christianity in being ethicized, is popularized. 
 The classical and pagan view of the world was 
 theoretic. It would solve the great riddle intel- 
 lectually. But this was possible for the few alone. 
 It was the work of experts. But when the problem 
 is that of the conscience, it concerns us all. It is 
 accessible to all, nay, it presses on all. The great 
 issue is not being thought out, it is being lived out, 
 loved out, worked out, and fought out. The power for 
 life concerns all, the scheme of life but a few. The 
 whole reality of life is on its moral side, and that 
 is the side which the Gospel appeals to, and so it 
 appeals to all. The last stand of the Gospel is 
 in the whole reality of practical life, individual 
 and social, in homes, marts, senates, and Churches. 
 It is not in the schools. It is only paganism 
 (whether Haeckel's or Hegel's) that rests in the self- 
 sufficiency of thought or the idea. The Gospel is the 
 moral, the universal, the final interpretation of life.
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 267 
 
 Christ came not with a reading of life but with its re- 
 demption, not with the answer to a riddle but with 
 the solution of a practical problem. He did not 
 come with a body of new truth, but with a 
 power of new reality, not with the profoundest 
 knowledge but with Eternal Life. 
 
 
 
 6. I need hardly include among the marks of a 
 modern Christianity the extent to which its whole 
 outlook has been modified by the doctrine of evolu- 
 tion, and especially historic evolution. This might 
 almost go without saying. Even the Roman Church 
 has recognized it, and the line of its apologetic has 
 been profoundly changed by its doctrine of develop- 
 ment as formulated by Mohler and Newman. First 
 the blade, then the ear, then the full com in the ear. 
 Protestantism has recognized the principle more 
 fully still. Dr. Adams Brown, in the most able 
 outline of Theology which we now possess in English, 
 has said that the three types of Christianity usually 
 given the Greek, Roman, and Protestant should 
 be extended by dividing the latter into two the 
 Reformation type and the modern type ; because 
 the difference between these two is as great as that 
 between the Greek and the Roman type. And he 
 notes as the destinctive feature of modern Pro- 
 testantism the effect of this doctrine of evolution. 
 (Outlines of Theology, p. 62 n.}. There are other 
 features, as I venture to point out ; and I should 
 myself lay more stress on the new ethical note.
 
 268 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 But the evolutionary idea is especially attractive 
 to a scientific age. We have certainly no quarrel 
 with that idea till it is lifted from being a method 
 and elevated into a dogma indeed the dogma ; till 
 it is treated as a vera causa, and made to explain 
 not simply the mode of change but the principle of 
 change, the germinating principle of the seed as well 
 as the phases of its process. It is a philosophy 
 which explains much, and makes us patient of much, 
 and hopeful of more. But it cannot give us hope 
 in the Christian and certain sense. Because it can- 
 not give us the goal of its own movements any 
 more than their real cause. And a religion has 
 to do rather with the source and the goal than 
 with the path, with the meaning rather than the 
 method. We must welcome the new force given 
 by this theory to many a word of Christ, and 
 many a movement of the Spirit. It is really not 
 evolution we have to watch, but the Monism which 
 is so often supposed to be inseparable from it by 
 those who have more science than philosophy, more 
 imagination than either, little ethical insight, and 
 theology least of all. 
 
 The whole attitude of the Church to its truth has 
 been altered by the destruction though evolution of 
 the idea of a final system of belief, or a monopolist 
 form of polity. Its intellectual hospitality has been 
 indefinitely extended. And it is free, with a large 
 liberty, from a burden too great for even faith to 
 bear. It can regard the new philosophies as helpers 
 so long as they do not claim to be suzerains, so long
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 269 
 
 as they do not aspire to prescribe belief but only to 
 enrich it, to correct its statement, and to enhance 
 its scope. They help to place us in a new relation of 
 mastery and ease to the Bible and the stage which the 
 Bible registers. And they give us a new grasp of the 
 long action of the Spirit and its way with the Church 
 and the world. The more subtle and plastic the 
 Spirit, the mightier and more irresistible is its action. 
 And the less monumental our Christ is, in a stiff 
 Byzantine figure, the more pervasive He is as a 
 constant and subduing power. When evolution 
 escapes from the bondage of the physical sciences, 
 and its mesalliance with monistic dogma, it is 
 a distinguished badge and blessing of a modern 
 Church. Only let it be taken as a supplement to 
 creation, and not as a substitute for redemption, and 
 it gives a wonderful flexibility and grace to much 
 theological thought that once was formal and hard. 
 
 
 
 7. Nothing is more characteristic of the modern 
 mind than its passion for reality. It is a passion 
 that takes all sorts of extravagant, and some 
 noxious, forms. But it is a worthy instinct. And 
 it is a demand that elicits the moral realism, the 
 unsparing spiritual thoroughness, of the Gospel. 
 Hence the Gospel not only tolerates, it demands, 
 science and criticism. If it can succumb to these 
 it should. The criticism may be the moral caustic 
 applied to Christian society by an Ibsen, or it may 
 be the Higher Criticism of the Bible or the creeds
 
 270 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 by the schools. Our treasure in Bible or Church is 
 in an earthen vessel which is fairly exposed to the 
 critic. And especially historic criticism touches us, 
 as we have the water only in the historic vessel. 
 But every historic phenomenon, in so far as it is 
 historic, must admit criticism, and stand the test of 
 that reality. Be it book or creed, or even Christ Him- 
 self so far as He is a historic personality we cannot 
 seclude them from competent criticism. But then 
 the historic Jesus is no mere historic figure. Even 
 in so far as He is historic, as the object of our faith 
 He is, though not immune from critical action, yet 
 secure. For the living person of Christ stands, and 
 its consummation on the Cross, and its continued 
 life in our experience. And that is where our real 
 faith is fixed on the finished redeeming work of 
 the Saviour on the Cross, sealed indeed in the 
 resurrection but finished on the Cross, published in 
 the resurrection but achieved on the Cross. That 
 is faith's reality, the reality that faith knows. No 
 criticism can shake that if it be thoroughly 
 settled into our experience. From that vantage 
 ground we recognize the rights of criticism because 
 we are in a position to deny its rule. That Jesus 
 we cannot criticize either historically or morally. 
 For we cannot criticize our Judge and our Re- 
 deemer. We can criticize His knowledge about the 
 Old Testament and the like, but we cannot criticize 
 his ownership of our souls. He is for us the last 
 reality, which enables us to criticize all else. His 
 saints shall judge the world.
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 271 
 
 
 
 III. Thus it is not with a critical issue we have 
 really to do, it is with a dogmatic. And this I ask 
 your leave to explain. 
 
 The question of recent criticism and its effect on 
 your Gospel will often arise in your mind, or it will 
 be put to you by others. And unless you found 
 on the true rock it may cost you much trouble and 
 pain. 
 
 You will be wise if you keep it out of your preach- 
 ing. That is to say, do not preach much about it. 
 Preach as men who know about it. Preach habitually 
 neither its methods nor its results, but preach a Gospel 
 which has taken due account of both. The Christ we 
 have to declare is neither a residuum which the critics 
 are pleased to leave us, nor an asbestos quite unaffected 
 by the fire. What criticism acts on is the Bible, the 
 record. And, closely as Christ is bound up with the 
 Bible, He is more closely bound up with the Gospel 
 than with the Bible. When it becomes a religious 
 question, that is, a question of the Gospel, criticism 
 takes quite a secondary place, and, in cases, may 
 even be irrelevant. The matter then ceasing to 
 turn on facts, but turning on a living person, passes 
 into the hands of the believer, and through him 
 to the theologian. It is a dogmatic question. 
 
 
 
 Take the case of the Bible itself for instance. The 
 momentous question does not concern its mode of
 
 272 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 origin, its provenance, its constituent parts, authors, 
 dates. It does not concern the equal value for historic 
 science of every portion, or for theological truth of 
 .every thought it contains. It is a question of a 
 special and real revelation from God to the conscience. 
 Have we here, on the whole, the effective history 
 of redemption ? It is not the history of Israel, or the 
 biography of Christ, that the Bible exists to give. 
 Its history is the history of grace, the exposition of a 
 long action and a final act of grace. And, as I said 
 at the outset, it is history not of a scientific but of a 
 preached kind. It is a kind of history, and an 
 amount of history, prescribed by the practical pur- 
 pose of conveying the grace of God. It is sacra- 
 mental history. It is broken bread such portions 
 of history as form sacramental elements, adequate 
 for the spiritual purpose in hand. It does not exist 
 primarily to instruct us about God, but to convey 
 God to us. The New Testament is not a mere 
 monument of the first century. Nor, on the other 
 hand, is it a mere book of devotion. Revelation 
 is not there to convey theology, nor to elevate 
 piety, but to convey God Himself. It is His self- 
 revelation, which means His self -communication. 
 It is not concerned with thought, nor with mere 
 hints or indications of His action, " making Him 
 broken gleams in a stifled splendour and gloom." 
 These you find in other religions. In a looser sense 
 they too convey revelations of God, self-intimations 
 of God, indications of His presence, His thought, 
 His movement, in some sort. They suggest principles
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 273 
 
 which Christ realized in a person. But we want more 
 than signs of God's presence and movement. We 
 want action positive and final. What we want in reve- 
 lation is God's total final will, His purpose, His heart, 
 His central and final self, the whole counsel of God in 
 a compendious sense. We want answer to the ques- 
 tion, not, Is He here ? Is He accessible ? But, What 
 is He going to do with us ? What is He doing 
 with us and for us ? What must I do to be saved ? 
 And that is the question put and answered, once for 
 all, in the Bible. The best that the religion of nature 
 does for us is to wake us to a helpless sense of the 
 contradiction and crisis in which we are, and make 
 us feel that what we want is not knowledge but 
 salvation. So that while in other religions the 
 element uppermost is man seeking God, in Israel 
 and in Christ the uppermost thing is God seeking 
 man and finding him for good and all. But in all 
 other religions God and man are seeking each other 
 in the dark ; in Christianity they find each other. 
 
 We need fear no criticism which leaves us with 
 that. That is the marrow of all the impossible old 
 theories of inspiration. Their object was, often in 
 very unfortunate ways, to secure the uniqueness, the 
 immediacy, the reality, and the finality of God's self- 
 revelation in the Bible. Let us do them that justice, 
 even against themselves. Let us try, in so far as they 
 survive, to get their advocates to see that if they 
 treat the Bible with respect, we, who sympathize 
 with the critical method, do so out of a respect greater 
 still. We let the Bible speak for itself. The great 
 
 P.P. 18
 
 274 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 question, then, as to the Bible is not about the 
 historic impregnability of certain detailed facts under 
 the full fire of criticism. It is a question whether 
 the record as a whole is effective and sacramental, 
 whether we have the history of a special movement 
 and action of God for our redemption, or whether we 
 have but a wonderful exhalation of the religious 
 instinct and faculty of man. It is really a dogmatic 
 question. 'O 
 
 
 
 So much for the Bible . No w it is so in a like manner 
 with Jesus Christ. The great question is dogmatic. 
 It is, who is He ? What did He do ? What does 
 He do ? What is His present relation to us and to 
 the future ? Was He really the Son of God, or was 
 He but the choice epitome of man ? Have we in 
 Him the final approach and self-bestowal of God, 
 the sempiternal presence and final action of the 
 divine reality ; or have we a distillation, so to say, 
 of all that is best in religious humanity ? Was 
 He an achievement of human nature to make us 
 proud, or was He an achievement of God's nature 
 on our race, called out by the race's deed and shame ? 
 His work was an act of sacrifice, of faith, of pity and 
 of love was it the act of God ? Was it God in 
 action ? Was He, is He, the true Son of God, for 
 ever Mediator and for ever Lord ; or was He just 
 the greatest of all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs 
 of the spiritual life ? Do we possess in Him God, or 
 a messenger from God ? You can see what a differ-
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 275 
 
 ence must be made in our preaching, according as 
 we answer these alternatives. 
 
 Criticism may settle that Jesus loved, taught, 
 blessed, and died. It may decide that to His con- 
 temporaries He did pass for one who performed 
 miracles, and accepted that reputation ; that He 
 held Himself, rightly or wrongly, to be directly and 
 uniquely from and with God, in the sense of Matthew 
 xi. 25 ff . ; and that the first church was only made 
 possible, historically, by its belief that He really 
 rose from the dead. But these are not the prime 
 questions. If they were, our faith would be at the 
 mercy of the critics. The great question is, Did 
 He do the things the apostles believed ? Was He 
 really what He held Himself to be ? These claims 
 and beliefs were actual. They existed as claims 
 and beliefs. The claims were made, the beliefs were 
 held. Were they real and valid ? Could He, can He, 
 make them good ? Have we in the Jesus who so 
 lived, and so thought both of Himself and God have 
 we the living God ? And do we have Him to-day 
 as living, immortal, royal, redeeming Lord God ? 
 Was He, is He, of Deity ? May we worship Him ? 
 The New Testament Church did. They could not 
 help it. The impression left on them was such that 
 worship was a psychological necessity quite inevitable, 
 quite intelligible, quite explicable, as the psychology 
 of religion goes. But while thus inevitable was it 
 really illicit ? Was it an extravagance which our 
 better knowledge of reality must correct and reduce ? 
 Must we beware of that tendency to worship Him,
 
 2j6 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 and arrest it ? Must we hear His own voice arrest- 
 ing us, ever fainter and farther as time goes on, 
 " Why do you call Me so good ? Little children, 
 keep yourselves from idols." 
 
 Now, the answer to these questions is not critical 
 but dogmatic. No criticism can certify us of these 
 things, and therefore no criticism can take certainty 
 from us. The man, the Church, that is in living 
 intercourse with the risen Christ is in possession of a 
 fact of experience as real as any mere historic fact, or 
 any experience of reality, that the critic has to found 
 on and make a standard. And with that experience, a 
 man is bound to approach the critical evidence of 
 Christ's resurrection in a different frame of mind from 
 the merely scientific man who has no such experience. 
 This makes a great difference for criticism between 
 the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the 
 Old Testament we have no historic character with 
 whom we are in daily personal relation still, and 
 who is the greatest contemporary of every age. 
 The fact that the risen Christ appeared only to 
 believers is of immense significance ; as I have said, 
 it impairs the value of the resurrection as proof 
 to the sceptical world, and defines its chief value 
 as being for the Church, for the revival of faith, 
 and not its creation. The external evidence for 
 it, I have owned, is not scientifically complete, nor, 
 suppose it were, is the bearing of the fact upon the 
 rational world, but upon the believing Church. It 
 did not found redemption. That was done and 
 finished on the Cross. But it founded the Church
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 277 
 
 as a historic company, by the resurrection of 
 its faith from the dead. It did not found redemp- 
 tion, but it put God's seal on the completeness of 
 redemption, and it launched the Church. " If 
 our knowledge of Christ closed with the grave, I 
 fear no faith could have arisen in Christ's victory 
 over death. It could not have been a postulate 
 from the outcome of His early action. And if it 
 had it would have been too weak to resist doubt." l 
 
 The living Christ who died has destroyed my guilt, 
 and brought me God. That is not the action of the 
 resurrection but of the Cross. I believe that the divine 
 power in Hun which wells up in my faith, rather than 
 the irrepressible vitality of His divine " nature," is 
 the power by which Christ rose. But it is still more 
 the power by which He gained His finished victory on 
 the Cross. Without the primary theology of the Cross 
 the resurrection of Christ would have no more value 
 than a reanimation. The most present and real 
 fact of our Christian faith is the fact accessible to 
 faith alone. It is the fact that Christ has brought us 
 God and destroyed our guilt. You do not yet know 
 the inner Christ who are but His lovers or friends. 
 You need to have been His patients and to owe 
 Him your life. That is Christianity. A Church 
 without that experience at its centre is not 
 Christianity. What makes a Church Christian is 
 not the historic fact of His death, but the theological 
 spiritual, experimental fact that His death meant 
 
 * Metzger quoted by Reischle Z. i. Th. & K. vii. 205.
 
 278 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 that, and did that, and ever does it. Where there 
 is no such experience it is hard, if not impossible, to 
 convince anybody that His death was more than 
 the close of His life, or the sealing of His witness 
 with His martyr blood. But as a present fact that 
 evangelical action of Christ's death is far more real, 
 and therefore more effective, with us than the death 
 of any Jewish martyr at Roman hands 2,000 years 
 ago. Therefore dogmatic conviction of this kind 
 may have a great effect on criticism, but criticism 
 has only a minor effect upon it. We may be led 
 to recast some of our ideas as to the historical 
 conditions amid which the great life and death 
 transpired. We may modify much in our views 
 as to Christ's omniscience, and similar things affected 
 by His emptying of Himself. He accepted some of 
 the limitations of human ignorance. He consented 
 not to know, with a nescience divinely wise. The 
 story is all recorded in a book, and therefore literary 
 criticism has its rights. Christ worked through 
 history, and hi the concretest relation to the 
 history of His race and age ; and, in so far as you 
 have history, historic criticism has its rights. Christ 
 lived a real, and therefore a growing, human life, 
 as a historic personality. Therefore, being in 
 psychological conditions, He is amenable so far to 
 psychological criticism. But allowing for all such 
 things, the question remains dogmatic, Was He, is He, 
 what Christian faith essentially believes ? Did these 
 convictions, of His and of the Church, correspond 
 to reality ? Was He, is He, in God what He thought
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 279 
 
 He was, and what He was held to be ? When the 
 first Church worshipped Him with God's name, and 
 set Him on God's throne, were they a new race of 
 idolaters ? Was his influence so poor in quality 
 that it could not protect them from that ? He 
 thought Himself redeemer ; did He really redeem ? 
 Did God redeem in Him ? Was God the real 
 actor in His saving action ? These are the ques- 
 tions ; and in all such questions, criticism is ultra 
 vires. These things are settled in another and 
 higher court, and criticism must work under that 
 settlement. The soundest criticism is the criticism 
 by a believing Church, daily living on the Grace 
 of the Cross and the venture of faith. 
 
 It is quite true that these truths become dogmas 
 which, in their statement, are fair matter for criticism. 
 The theology of the Church is not a closed product of 
 the Holy Spirit, any more than the Bible is a closed 
 product of verbal inspiration. A process of criticism, 
 adjustment, and correction has always been going 
 on. Theology, on the whole, has been constantly 
 modernized. But it all proceeds on the basis of a 
 reality above logic and beyond criticism, the reality of 
 experienced redemption in the Cross, of faith's know- 
 ledge, and the Church's communion with Christ. It 
 is thus something within dogma itself that is the great 
 corrective of dogma. Christian truth in a Church 
 carries in itself the conditions, and the resources, of its 
 own self-preservation through self-correction. The 
 Church's dogmatic faith is the great corrective of the 
 Church's dogmatic thought. The religious life in a
 
 280 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 risen and royal Redeemer is always ahead of the religi- 
 ous thought about the nature and method of Redemp- 
 tion. The old faith is always making theology new. 
 The true critic of Christian history is its primary 
 theology. You expected me perhaps to say the true 
 critic of a Christian theology is its history. But that 
 is now a commonplace. I meant something less 
 obvious. It is a theological Christ we have cen- 
 trally to do with an atoning Christ. And it is only 
 a theological Christ that we need take immense 
 pains to preserve for the future. It is that piece 
 of experienced theology, an atoning, reconciling, 
 redeeming Christ, that has made all the rest of 
 theology. And it must therefore be its living test. 
 With historical criticism, simply as a branch of exact 
 science, pursued by the scholars, and taught in 
 the schools, you have as preachers only a minor 
 concern. You may take it up as you might any 
 otter science, only as your nearest pursuit. But 
 you do not wait on it for your message. You 
 must deliver that message while the critics are still 
 at war. Christ is there and urgent, whatever is 
 happening to the story of Christ. A knowledge 
 of criticism may help you to disengage the kernel 
 from the husk, to save the time so often lost in the 
 defence of outposts, to discard obsolete weapons and 
 superfluous baggage, and to concentrate on the 
 things that really matter for eternal life and godliness 
 like the Reconciliation of the Cross. All true 
 science teaches us also its own limits, and so destroys 
 its own tyranny. But the real criticism with which
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 281 
 
 we have to do, from which all our religion starts 
 when we take the whole Christian field into account, 
 is not our criticism of Christ, but Christ's criticism 
 of us, His saving judgment of us. The higher 
 criticism casts us on the highest. There is a second- 
 ary theology of corollaries from faith, and there is a 
 primary of faith's essence. To handle this great 
 and primary theology the first condition is the new 
 man. Our most judicious thing is to treat Christ 
 as our judge, to know Him as we are first known 
 of Him, and to search Him as those who are 
 searched to the marrow by His subtle Spirit. 
 
 
 
 Might I venture here to speak of myself, and of 
 more than thirty years given to progressive thought 
 in connexion, for the most part, with a pulpit and 
 the care of souls. Will you forgive me ? I am 
 addressing young men who have the ministry before 
 them, as most of mine is behind, strewn indeed 
 with mistakes, yet led up of the Spirit. 
 
 There was a time when I was interested in the 
 first degree with purely scientific criticism. Bred 
 among academic scholarship of the classics and 
 philosophy, I carried these habits to the Bible, and 
 I found in the subject a new fascination, in pro- 
 portion as the stakes were so much higher. But, 
 fortunately for me, I was not condemned to the 
 mere scholar's cloistered life. I could not treat 
 the matter as an academic quest. I was kept 
 close to practical conditions. I was in a relation
 
 28 2 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 of life, duty, and responsibility for others. I 
 could not contemplate conclusions without asking 
 how they would affect these people, and my word 
 to them, in doubt, death, grief, or repentance. I 
 could not call on them to accept my verdict on 
 points that came so near their souls. That is not 
 our conception of the ministry. And they were 
 people in the press and care of life. They could 
 not give their minds to such critical questions. 
 If they had had the time, they had not the training. 
 I saw amateurs making the attempt either in the 
 pew or in the pulpit. And the result was a warning. 
 Yet there were Christian matters which men must 
 decide for themselves, trained or not. Therefore, 
 these matters could not be the things which were 
 at issue in historic criticism taken alone. More- 
 over, I looked beyond my immediate charge, and 
 viewed the state of mind and faith in the Church 
 at large especially in those sections of it nearest 
 myself. And I became convinced that they were 
 in no spiritual condition to have forced on them 
 those questions on which scholars so delighted and 
 differed. They were not entrenched in that reality 
 of experience and that certainty of salvation which is 
 the position of safety and command in all critical 
 matters. It also pleased God by the revelation 
 of His holiness and grace, which the great theologians 
 taught me to find in the Bible, to bring home to 
 me my sin in a way that submerged all the school 
 questions in weight, urgency, and poignancy. I 
 was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 283 
 
 lover of love to an object of grace. And so, whereas 
 I first thought that what the Churches needed 
 was enlightened instruction and liberal theology, 
 I came to be sure that what they needed was evange- 
 lization, in something more than the conventional 
 sense of that word. " What we need is not the 
 dechurching of Christianity, but the Christianizing 
 of the Church." For the sake of critical freedom, 
 in the long run that is so. Religion without an 
 experimental foundation in grace, readily feels 
 panic in the presence of criticism, and is apt to do 
 wild and unjust things in its terror. The Churches 
 are not, in the main, in the spiritual condition of 
 certainty which enables them to be composed and 
 fair to critical methods. They either expect too 
 much from them, and then round upon them in 
 disappointed anger when it is not forthcoming. 
 Or they expect so little from them that they despise 
 them as only ignorance can. They run either to 
 rationalism or to obscurantism. There was some- 
 thing to be done, I felt, before they could freely handle 
 the work of the scholars on the central positions. 
 
 And that something was to revive the faith of 
 the Churches in what made them Churches ; to turn 
 them from the ill-found sentiment which had 
 sapped faith ; to re-open their eyes to the meaning 
 of their own salvation ; to rectify their Christian 
 charity by more concern for Christian truth ; to 
 banish the amiable religiosity which had taken 
 possession of them in the name of Christian love ; 
 and to restore some sense not only of love's severity,
 
 284. Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 but of the unsparing moral mordancy in the Cross 
 and its judgment, which means salvation to the 
 uttermost ; to recreate an experience of redemption, 
 both profound and poignant, which should enable 
 them to deal reasonably, without extravagance 
 and without panic, with the scholars' results as 
 these came in. What was needed before we dis- 
 cussed the evidence for the resurrection, was a revival 
 of the sense of God's judgment-grace in the Cross, 
 a renewal of the sense of holiness, and so of 
 sin, as the Cross set forth the one, and exposed 
 the other in its light. We needed to restore their 
 Christian footing to many in the Churches who 
 were far within the zone which criticism occupies. 
 In a word, it seemed to me that what the critical 
 movement called for was not a mere palliation of 
 orthodoxy, in the shape of liberal views, but a new 
 positivity of Gospel. It was not a new compre- 
 hensiveness, but a new concentration, a new evange- 
 lization, that was demanded by the situation. 
 
 But the defective theological education of the 
 ministry seemed to put a great obstacle in the way 
 of such a revival as I have described. For, incre- 
 dible as it may seem to many, and even alarming, 
 theology was, (for reasons on which it would be 
 ungracious for me to enter,) not only distrusted, 
 but hated by many of the stewards of the &eov \6yos. 
 And I have longed and prayed to see the man 
 arise to alter all this, with an equal knowledge of 
 his sin, his Saviour, and his subject, to do the 
 work that had to be done in rearing men with a
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 285 
 
 real, thorough, humble and joyous belief in their own 
 message, and to do it on a scale to compel the 
 attention, and even the concern, of our Churches. 
 Meantime my own course seemed prescribed. It 
 was, in the space of life, strength, and work which 
 was yet mine, to labour as one who waited for 
 that messianic hope, and to try to persuade those 
 who would hear to join me in preparation for so 
 great a gift of God. I withdrew my prime attention 
 from much of the scholar's work and gave it to 
 those theological interests, imbibed first from 
 Maurice, and then more mightily through Ritschl, 
 which come nearer to life than science, sentiment, or 
 ethic ever can do. I immersed myself in the Logic of 
 Hegel, 1 and corrected it by the theology of Paul, and 
 its continuity in the Reformation, because I was all 
 the time being corrected and humiliated by the Holy 
 Spirit. To me John Newton's hymn which I spoke 
 of is almost holy writ. My faith in critical methods 
 is unchanged. My acceptance of many of the new 
 results is as it was. This applies to the criticism 
 of traditional dogma no less than of scripture. 
 But the need of the hour, among the only circles 
 I can reach, is not that. The time for it will come, 
 but not yet. It is a slow matter. For what is 
 needed is no mere change of view, but a change and 
 a deepening in the type of personal religion, amount- 
 ing in cases to a new conversion. There is that 
 amiss with the Churches which free criticism can 
 
 1 I desire to own here how very much I owe to Dr. 
 Fair bairn.
 
 286 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 never cure, and no breadth or freshness of view 
 amend. There is a lack of depth and height, an 
 attenuation of experience, a slackness of grasp, a 
 displacement of the centre, a false realism, a dis- 
 location of perspective, amid which the things 
 that make Christianity permanently Christian are 
 in danger of fading from power, if not from view. 
 In a word, I was driven to a change of front though 
 not of footing to the preacher's and the pastor's 
 treatment of the situation, which is also the 
 New Testament view, and which is very different 
 from the scholar's. The savant may or must frame 
 results and utter them regardless of their public 
 effect, but the preacher may not. The order of 
 truth he deals with has its own methods, his office 
 has its own paedagogic, and his duty its own con- 
 science. In most cases the best contribution the 
 preacher can make at present to the new theology 
 is to deepen and clear the old faith, and to 
 rescue it from a kind of religion which is only 
 religion and hardly Christian faith. What has 
 often passed as the new theology is no more, some- 
 times, than a theology of fatigue, or a theology of 
 the press, or a theology of views, or a theology 
 of revolt. Or it is an accommodation theology, a 
 theology accommodated only to the actual interests 
 of the cultured hour. 1 The effort made is to 
 
 1 While I was writing this I read the address of 
 an estimable preacher of up-to-date theology who was 
 demanding that the theologians should come down and 
 accept a theology imposed by three things physical
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 287 
 
 substitute for the old faith something more human 
 in its origin, more humane in its temper, and 
 more halting in its creed, something more genial 
 and more rational and more shallow. It is that 
 rather than the effort to deepen the old theology 
 by a sympathetic re-interpretation, which pierces 
 farther into its content of revelation, and speaks 
 the old faith hi a new tongue. The tongue is new 
 enough, but it is not certain that it speaks the old 
 thing, or develops its position from a profounder 
 acquaintance with the holiness of the love of God 
 within the Cross. It analyses the Bible, but it 
 does not reconstruct from the Bible, but from what 
 is known as the Christian principle, which is mainly 
 human nature re-edited and bowdlerised. 
 
 I am sure no new theology can really be theology, 
 whatever its novelty, unless it express and develop 
 the old faith which made those theologies that 
 are now old the mightiest things of the age when 
 they were new. Well do I know how little a theo- 
 
 science, historical study (especially as to the origin of 
 the Bible), and comparative religion. Well, these results 
 are pretty familiar to most of us by now, and very sterile. 
 But you will hardly believe that there was not a word 
 about the study of the Gospel, our application to the 
 contents of Christ's revelation of God, the implicates of his 
 idea of God, or the principles of his work. No, that 
 would have put the preacher beside the theologians. 
 He would have had to ask questions about what 
 was meant by God's most holy love in Christ, questions 
 which no science of nature, history or religion can answer.' 
 Our spiritual shyness of God's holiness has more than some- 
 thing to do with the ordinary reaction against theology.
 
 288 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 logy in itself can do, and how the mighty doer is 
 the living faith. But I know well also that that faith 
 is not the real thing unless it compels and loves an 
 adequate theology ; and if it cannot produce it it 
 dies. I know well also how seldom it is really 
 objections to an outworn system that keep men 
 from Christ, and retard the Gospel. I am sure 
 that, if we had a theology brought entirely up to 
 date in regard to current thought, we should not 
 then have the great condition for the Kingdom 
 of God. It is the wills of men, and not their views, 
 that are the great obstacle to the Gospel, and the 
 things most intractable. The power to deal with 
 those wills is the power of the Gospel as the eternal 
 act of the will and heart of God. And the power 
 of the Gospel as a preached thing is shaped in a 
 message which has had from the first a theological 
 language of its own creation as its most adequate 
 vehicle. To discard that language entirely is to 
 maim the utterance of the Gospel. To substitute 
 a vocabulary of mere humane sympathies or 
 notions for the great phrases and thoughts which 
 are theology compressed into diamonds is like the 
 attempt to improve a great historic language, which 
 is a nation's record, treasure and trust, by reducing 
 it to Saxon monosyllables, and these to phonetics. 
 I cannot conceive a Christianity to hold the future 
 without words like grace, sin, judgment, repentance, 
 incarnation, atonement, redemption, justification, sac- 
 rifice, faith and eternal life. No words of less volume 
 than these can do justice to the meaning of God,
 
 Preaching Positive and Modern 289 
 
 however easy their access to the minds of modern men. 
 It needs such words to act on the scale of God and 
 of the race. And the preacher who sets to discard 
 them or, what is more common, to eviscerate 
 them, is imperilling the great Church for a passing 
 effect with the small. For a living and modern 
 theology our chief need is a living and positive 
 faith, moving in those great categories, and full 
 of confident power to absorb and organize the 
 sound thought of the time. To rouse and feed 
 this faith is the great work of the preacher. And 
 thus the service the preacher does to theology is 
 at least no less than the service theology does to 
 him. A mere theology may strain and stiffen 
 the preacher. But the preacher who is a true 
 steward of the Christian Word makes a living 
 theology inevitable, which, because it lives, demands 
 new form and fitness for each succeeding time. 
 
 In closing his recent admirable History of New 
 England Theology, Dr. Frank Hugh Foster says : 
 " The questions of the present hour are more 
 fundamental than those with which New England 
 Theology, or it immediate successors, have had to 
 concern themselves. A ringing call is sounding 
 through the air to face the true issue the reality 
 of God's supernatural interference in the history 
 of man versus the universal reign of unmodified 
 law [or ideas and processes]. The question is not 
 whether the old evangelical scheme needs some 
 adjustments to adapt it to our present knowledge, 
 but whether its most fundamental conception, 
 
 ** 19
 
 290 Preaching Positive and Modern 
 
 the very idea of the Gospel is true. Before this 
 all the halfway compromises of the present day 
 must be given up. Men must take sides. They 
 must be for the Gospel or against it." 
 
 And for or against a historic Gospel, is what Dr. 
 Foster means
 
 THE PREACHER AND MODERN 
 ETHIC
 
 VIII 
 The Preacher and Modern Ethic 
 
 FROM the varied features of modern life that I have 
 indicated I should like to select for further treat- 
 ment the ethical interest and its development. 
 There is no note in the modern mind more wel- 
 come or hopeful to us than this ethical note, the 
 moralizing of society in its ideas, its conduct, its 
 systems, and its institutions. In the case of institu- 
 tions you may be more struck with the humanizing 
 of them, as for instance, of war. But the moralizing 
 movement is much deeper, and much more 
 permanent, and it carries the other, the humanizing 
 element, with it. 
 
 It is most to our purpose to note the ethicizing 
 of theology, among other legacies of the past. I 
 must have already said that a modern theology is 
 not simply theology a la mode. The main part of 
 the modernizing of theology is the moralizing of 
 it, this much more than its rationalizing. But 
 indeed this tendency is nothing new. It is but 
 continuing a long process in the Christian Church. 
 It was Christ's own action on Judaism. It was Paul's 
 task with his Pharisaism. And a great step in this 
 movement was taken in the Middle Ages, when 
 
 293
 
 294 The Preacher and 
 
 the work of Christ ceased to be regarded as a 
 traffic with Satan for His captives, and became for 
 Anselm a satisfaction made by Christ to the wounded 
 honour of God. It was another step when the 
 principles of a great social discipline like jurispru- 
 dence were applied to explain the situation. It was a 
 real advance when the Reformation introduced the 
 idea of public justice, instead of wounded honour, as 
 the object of satisfaction. The much decried forensic 
 idea was ethically far ahead of the previous idea 
 which recognized in Satan rights of property in souls, 
 ahead also of the feudal idea of the honour of God. 
 And still we move up the moral scale as we substitute 
 for retributive justice with its individualism, uni- 
 versal righteousness and eternal holiness with the 
 social note. So also when we discard the idea of 
 equivalent penalty in favour of Christ's obedient 
 sanctity as the satisfying thing before God. The 
 whole great movement of thought on that question 
 has been on an ascending moral scale. The more 
 we modernize it the more we moralize it. And the 
 modifications called for to-day are in the same 
 direction. Our revisions but continue the long 
 process of moral refinement in the Christian mind. 
 And it appears en route that we cannot ethicize 
 Christianity without pursuing a doctrine of Atone- 
 ment ever more positive. The more ethical we 
 become the more exigent is holiness ; and there- 
 fore the more necessary is Atonement as the action 
 of love and grace at the instance of holiness and in 
 its interests.
 
 Modern Ethic 295 
 
 Let us only flee the amateur notion that in the 
 Cross there is no ultimate ethical issue involved, 
 that it is a simple religious appeal to the heart. 
 The pulpit is doomed to futility if it appeal to the 
 heart in any sense that discredits the final appeal 
 to the conscience. I mean it is doomed if it keep 
 declaring that, with such a Father as Christ's, for- 
 giveness is a matter of course ; the only difficulty 
 being to insert it into men's hearty belief. There is 
 no doubt that is a very popular notion. ' How 
 natural for God to forgive. It is just like Him.' 
 Whereas the real truth is that it is only like the 
 God familiar to us from the Cross, and not from our 
 natural expectation. Real forgiveness is not 
 natural. Nor is it natural and easy to consent to be 
 forgiven. The more quick our moral sensibility is 
 the more slow we are to accept our forgiveness. And 
 that not through pride always, but often through 
 the exact opposite through shame, and the inability 
 to forgive one's self. Is it Newman who says that 
 the good man never forgives himself ? I wish a 
 great many more said it. We should then have a 
 better hold of the forgiveness of God. We should 
 realize how far from a matter of course forgiveness 
 was for a holy, and justly angry, God, for all His 
 love. A free forgiveness flows from moral strength, 
 but an easy forgiveness only means moral weakness. 
 How natural for God to forgive ! Nay, if there 
 be one thing in the world for ever supernatural it 
 is real forgiveness especially on the scale of redemp- 
 tion. It is natural only to the Supernatural. The
 
 296 The Preacher and 
 
 natural man does not forgive. He resents and 
 revenges. His wrath smoulders till it flash. And 
 the man who forgives easily, jauntily, and thought- 
 lessly, when it is a real offence, is neither natural 
 nor supernatural but subnatural. He is not only 
 less than God he is less than man. 
 
 
 
 Is not God's forgiveness the great moral paradox, 
 the great incredibility of the moral life, needing 
 all the miracle of Christ's person and action to make 
 us realize it when we grasp the terms ? A recent 
 authority on preaching warns us that the effective 
 preacher must not be afraid of paradox. For the 
 politician, or the journalist, on the other hand, 
 nothing is more fatal. But that is the region of the 
 ordinary able man, for whom all things must be plain 
 with a tendency to be dull. In that world an epi- 
 gram is a frivolity, an antithesis mere ingenuity, 
 and a paradox is mere perversity. 
 
 Are there not two distinct classes of mind ? The 
 one finds in what is given him just what is given, 
 and he is impatient of anything beyond. His world 
 is as obvious as the primrose quotation from 
 Wordsworth would here be. The other tends 
 always to divine hi the given the not yet given. 
 The second truth, the rest of the truth, the hidden 
 truth, the dark twin, is the weighty, fascinating 
 pole of it. The idea latent, the subtle illusion, the 
 mockery of the face-value, the slow result, the subver- 
 sive effect, the irony of providence, the absurdities
 
 Modern Ethic 297 
 
 of God stronger than all the wisdom of men, the 
 mighty futility of the Cross these are the things that 
 appeal to such a mind, rather than the obvious 
 which smites you in the face. To have the palpable 
 thrown in its face is what the public loves, and it 
 turns the other cheek. And many are the professors of 
 the obvious, and traffickers in the simple, and great 
 is their reward in the heaven of their clientele. But, 
 for all that, when the soul, even of the public, is 
 moved to its depths, it is beyond the reach of help 
 or comfort from the obvious. The review satisfies 
 not, the politician aids not, and the simple pulpit 
 has no stay. Then do we lift our eyes to the hills, 
 even to the twin peaks of Parnassus ; and we flee 
 for strength to the truths of paradox, and to the 
 men who see all things double one against another. 
 Then we find more sense in those who speak of 
 " dying to live " than in those who say " all that a 
 man hath will he give for his life." There is more in 
 those who bid us lose our soul if we would find it 
 than in those who would find our soul for us at a price 
 current. There is a poverty that makes many 
 rich. And Christian wealth consists in our ceasing 
 to possess. And you will remember a whole series 
 of these pregnant epigrams as the only expression 
 of the Apostles' experience in 2 Cor. iv. 8-n. 
 
 Life from its beginning is a vast vital contradic- 
 tion. It proceeds by the tension and balance of 
 forces that destroy and forces that build. We are 
 born with the death sentence in us. We die every 
 hour we live. We live, spiritually, moreover, in a
 
 298 The Preacher and 
 
 standing contradiction of liberty and dependence, 
 freedom and grace, object and subject. Personality 
 itself is I will not say an, illogical but an alogical 
 unity ; else it could not be a power. All scientific 
 experience is paradoxically against the personality 
 whose unity and continuity alone make any ex- 
 perience possible. Credo quia absurdum is much 
 less absurd than it looks. A dogma which contains 
 a contradiction like that of the God-man may, for 
 that very reason, be the only adequate expression 
 for the experience of the soul at its last and greatest 
 height. 
 
 However it may be with the writer, the preacher 
 must not be afraid of paradox. It is his dread of 
 paradox, his addiction to the obvious, that so often 
 makes him a bore. His simplicity succeeds only in 
 being bald and passionless. Of course, a string of 
 paradoxes may easily bore us, but not more than a 
 string of commonplaces. And a string of para- 
 doxes, ingeniously invented, is one thing. It is 
 smart, metallic, offensive. But the great recurrent 
 paradox of the spiritual life, revealed or discovered, 
 is another thing. The haunting moral paradox of 
 the Cross is another thing. And if we shun that, 
 and water that down, and extenuate that, we have 
 no Gospel to preach, or we preach what we have with- 
 out passion. Who has tasted the spiritual life that 
 knows nothing of the deep, eternal, commanding non- 
 sense of " rejoicing in tribulation " or being " more 
 than conquerors " as the " slaves of Christ." Non- 
 sense is just the word a cultivated Roman would have
 
 Modern Ethic 299 
 
 used for such speech. The offence of the Cross, the 
 scandal of it, the blazing indiscretion and audacious 
 paradox of it, has not ceased. Nor has its appeal 
 ceased to that region of us to which we come when 
 our plain palpable world startles and deceives us 
 by smiting us to the dust and rolling over us as if 
 a man should lean upon a wall and a snake bit him, 
 or went for a walk and a lion met him. We do not 
 touch the deep illogical things of God till we find 
 paradox their only expression. Life under God is 
 one grand paradox of dependence and liberty. These 
 two logical incompatibles are only solved in the living 
 active unity of the moral person, especially towards 
 God. So with life and death. The tremendous passion 
 for life is God's paradoxical way of expressing the 
 intense significance of death as life's consummation 
 and solution. What we call the passion of Christ is 
 the divine reflection of the passion of human life. 
 His awful death is but the obverse and not the 
 doom of His solemn and abounding life. And it 
 not only embodies life's intensity but interprets 
 it. It is the whole passion and power of life sub 
 specie eternitatis. The passion of life with which 
 we shrink from death is the negative, but eloquent, 
 expression of the intensity of life's Immortality. That 
 massive and peaceful lake has slumbering in it all 
 the volume and power of the roaring river of earthly 
 life that fills it. Thoughts like these serve to com- 
 pose and dignify us, where the plain is but the 
 trivial, and the clear is but the thin. 
 
 Now holy forgiveness is the greatest moral paradox,
 
 300 The Preacher and 
 
 the most exalting, pacifying paradox, the greatest 
 practical paradox, in the world. Do not think that 
 the word of your Gospel is not a moral paradox 
 law and love, the just and the justifier of the unjust, 
 the holy and the sanctifier of the unholy, holy severity 
 and loving mercy, yea, the Holy made sin. Of 
 their union the Cross is not only the evidential fact 
 but the effecting fact. It not only reveals it, it 
 brings it about. That God might be just and 
 also the justifier of the sinner meant all the moral 
 mystery of the Cross, and all its offence to the 
 natural moral man. The natural moral man either 
 does not forgive and there are none more unfor- 
 giving than some sticklers for morality ; or else he 
 forgives as he shaves " I suppose I ought to ; " 
 or as he dines " because I like to." He believes 
 in a God who either does not forgive, or who for- 
 gives of course c'est son metier. But the true 
 supernatural forgiveness is a revolution and not 
 an evolution yea, it means a solemn and ordered 
 crisis within God Himself. But crisis is Greek for 
 judgment. The forgiveness of the world can only 
 be accomplished by the judgment of the world 
 That is the indispensable paradox whereby Chris- 
 tianity makes morality spiritual. And not to realize 
 that means a step back and not forward in the great 
 modernizing drift which moralizes spiritual things. 
 
 
 
 It is a poor error to think that the ethicizing of 
 religion is its prompt application to present problems,
 
 Modern Ethic 301 
 
 or the reduction of religion to ethics, and faith to 
 cold morality. Rather, by concentrating religion in 
 a crisis between holiness and sin it gives to it a moral 
 nature and a moral core, a moral focus and a moral 
 soul. Sin, it has been said, is the one fact in 
 which religion and morality are inseparably bound. 
 It is still more true of Christ's conquest of sin. 
 In particular, the ethicizing of the Cross means 
 this. It does not mean simply treating the Cross as 
 the apotheosis of that self-sacrifice which is the crown 
 of humane ethic, or the epitome of that altruism which 
 cements society. It does not mean that the Cross is 
 viewed as the grand object lesson in ethics to men, and 
 the great lever in the hand of a changeless God to 
 lift them back to the rails they had left. It does 
 not mean that the Cross must be construed wholly 
 by the moral category of fatherhood instead of the 
 juristic category of judgment. Those who so speak 
 forget that there are other and larger moral cate- 
 gories than the domestic relations, and a world far 
 vaster than the home. Christ's domestic life was 
 a tragedy. His family thought him mad. He 
 has nothing to say of family feeling or fireside joy. 
 " Who doeth the will of God is to me kith and kin." 
 And Paul was of like mind. Those who would trans- 
 late God's ways wholly in homely categories forget 
 that when we are dealing with God we are dealing 
 on the scale of all human society, dealing with the 
 social and not merely the affectional conscience, in- 
 deed with the eternal moral order of existence. They 
 forget that juristic principles form one aspect of
 
 302 The Preacher and 
 
 that social ethic which is such an enthusiasm of the 
 modern world. They forget that to moralize the 
 Cross means to explain it not simply by the enlarge- 
 ment of the best private ethic but by the introduc- 
 tion of the largest public ethic of the time. This 
 was so when the jurists played such a part as theolo- 
 gians, at the close of the middle age. And to-day 
 the demand for social righteousness rather than char- 
 ity (" Curse your charity ! give us work ! ") when 
 it is applied to the Cross as the centre of the Kingdom 
 of God, means the- demand for its explanation in 
 terms of the holiness of God rather than His pitying 
 love or altruism alone. But to this I must recur later. 
 
 
 
 To ethicize religion, I say then, does not mean to 
 reduce it to pedestrian morality but to recognize 
 in its heart the action of the greatest influence in 
 the higher movement of civilization I mean the 
 primacy of the moral. To the preacher this is an 
 observation of the first importance, for it means 
 the primacy and finality of the holy in his con- 
 struction of the Gospel. Faith is not ethic, but it 
 is nothing if it be not ethical. We could not have 
 faith even in infinite love were it not holy love. 
 That is what makes the eternal steadfastness on 
 which faith rests. Faith acts on the heart but its 
 seat is in the conscience, and its reflection is found 
 in the pure bench of a great realm no less than in 
 its kindly homes. The rational, therefore, must here 
 take a second place, and with it goes the hegemony 
 of the doctrinaire. With it goes the rule of
 
 Modern Ethic 303 
 
 intellectualism, whether as orthodoxy or heresy, and 
 the reign of the sentimental, which rationalism always 
 brings as a sweet sauce to moisten its sapless drought. 
 
 In almost every department we are forced tc 
 recognize this ethicizing movement. I need not 
 waste time in pointing out to you that it is identical 
 with the purification of society, its reform, its rescue 
 from politics and commerce, from the tyranny of 
 monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and plutocracy. 
 I need not remind you how much more it means than 
 philanthropy, how it means the salvation of philan- 
 thropy itself, and its provision with staying power. 
 For we preachers have this great advantage in these 
 days. The primacy of the moral, the leadership of 
 the will among the faculties, is really the same as our 
 cardinal principle of justification by faith alone. 
 For faith is the greatest moral act a man can per- 
 form, as the grace it answers is the supreme moral 
 possibility for God, the supreme triumph of His 
 holiness. Faith is the moral act which covers, 
 pervades, and assigns the whole man as a living 
 person. Therefore this modern claim for the primacy 
 of the moral is one which we preachers should 
 welcome, for we have in our charge the supreme 
 means of giving it effect. Much of this, however, 
 may be among things obvious. 
 
 But it may be less obvious, and it may not be 
 beyond our purpose, if I make special allusion to 
 the spread of this movement in philosophy, and 
 especially in psychology ; to the defeat of rationalism, 
 even of the nobler kind, with the retreat of Hegel ;
 
 304 The Preacher and 
 
 and to the triumph of voluntarism in a revised 
 Kant, through men like Schopenhauer, Paulsen, 
 Wundt, Eucken, and James. Even positivism 
 worked in this direction of subduing intellectualism 
 to the will of love. The reason is but the tool of the 
 will. The will is real life. Reality is experience, 
 and experience is the contact of personalities. It is 
 a plexus of wills. Life is not a shadow, or a thing, 
 but an energy, a will to live, as God Himself is 
 not an infinite spiritual presence in repose, but an 
 infinite spiritual power in essential action. Even 
 for Aristotle God was an evepyeia. The moral will is 
 the will to live fully, the passionate self-asseveration 
 of life, slowly shaped by relations social and divine, 
 by humanity and God. Life rises from the unit, 
 through the social stage, to eternal life. Action is 
 good which promotes the life of the race in all its 
 resources ; and the life of the race is good when it 
 fulfils and enriches the life of God in all its fulness. 
 That is to say, man is good not in happiness but in 
 perfection ; that is in holiness. The good is what 
 enhances true life, the bad is what cramps and 
 kills it. Life, spirit, is the first thing and the last. 
 Energy, vitality, fulness of experience takes the 
 place of mechanism, constructions, and schemes. Ac- 
 tion takes the place of vision ; the redemption of the 
 world takes the place of its interpretation. Science 
 therefore, retires to its due place. Our first need is 
 to know the destiny of the world and not its scheme. 
 It is not ability that has the secret of life but energy 
 moral power. Reality is life, and not mere truth,
 
 Modern Ethic 305 
 
 it is life as will, as power, as spirit. It is spiritual 
 ethical, personal life, a world of moral values, becom- 
 ing absolute and eternal in God's holiness. We need 
 urgently that we get over the aesthetic idea of 
 holiness, the idea of white and even burning purity 
 as of Eternal light, and attain the active idea of 
 Eternal Life and absolute moral and personal 
 energy. God the holy is not like a snowy peak on 
 the roof of the world wreathed with the incense of our 
 contemplation ; but rather is he a sun of power in our 
 heaven and the source of all vital force. This will-life, 
 personal, but more, is the prime and creative factor in 
 the soul. Men must achieve themselves, and acquire 
 their souls, rather than think correctly. The theolo- 
 gian, for instance, should first be not a philosopher 
 but a saved man, with eternal life working in him. 
 Christian theology is the theology not of illumina- 
 tion but of conversion. The supreme Christian gift 
 is not eternal truth but eternal life, more life, fuller 
 life, godlier life, holier life, a life inspired spiritually 
 from the past but not ruled romantically by the past, 
 ruled rather by perfection. Life, which began in spon- 
 taneity and not in thought, is raised by a faith passing 
 logic to share in a spontaneity infinite and eternal in 
 the Spirit. To the eye of spiritual reality we are out- 
 growing the age of science. We are outgrowing in- 
 tellectual constructions of the world, whether they 
 be those of modern physics, or of the ecclesiastical 
 systems which represent the best science of centuries 
 ago. Our chief business is not to pourtray the world 
 we are in but to realize and effect it. We have to divine 
 
 **. 20
 
 306 The Preacher and 
 
 rather than define. We have to divine its meaning 
 rather than make pictures and concepts of its state. 
 We are in an actual situation and not in a painted 
 scene. Our first concern is not a sketch, narrow or 
 broad, but a purpose. It is not, How is our world 
 built ? but, What does it intend ? We interpret not 
 from a knowledge of the past but from a revelation of 
 the perfect. There is no such thing as totally disinter- 
 ested knowledge. It is all in the interest of life, all 
 dominated by the will to live. There is no such 
 thing as pure science, absolutely poised and impartial. 
 There are no pure intelligences. They would be 
 monsters. Intellect is a function of personality. 
 Beliefs depend on the will to believe. The ideals we 
 live by are not a product of the intellect, but of the 
 will, of our life energy, of life's ideal, of life energizing 
 at its future best. They are, so to say, the retroaction 
 of our life's urgent future and fulness ; or the bene- 
 ficent pressure of posterity, which plays a part so 
 much greater than heredity. An ideal is a value, 
 not a mere vision; and a value is a judgment 
 of the will. If you have no will you have no 
 ideals ; and no description of ideals by any 
 preacher will move you. Knowledge always follows 
 life-interest in the long run. We prosecute the 
 knowledge of what we are interested in, of what 
 appeals to life, feeling, force, concern. We hate 
 and dread the ennui which is the absence of these 
 things. Religion is so far superstition in that both 
 represent the deep instinct of escape from the 
 rational. We interpret men and movements diversely
 
 Modern Ethic 307 
 
 according to our supreme interest in life. No doubt 
 sects and parties thus arise. But they are better than 
 a unanimity of frozen thought like the Greek Church, 
 or of imperious thought like the Roman. No scheme 
 of the world can give us more than an orthodoxy 
 or a heresy. It cannot give us the main thing, 
 which is the meaning, the drift, the issue, the goal, 
 the settlement of the world. That meaning resides 
 in its action, its movement, its history, its destiny, 
 its purpose. It resides, in a word, in its God, its 
 immanent, transcendent, relative, absolute, and final 
 God. It is only that sectarianism of thought which 
 is called specialism that denies a theology. A the- 
 ology is borne in upon us the more urgently the 
 larger our purview of the world is. 
 
 This moral movement, therefore, so conspicuous 
 in society and philosophy, affects theology no less. 
 The burthen of a real theology is not a cosmology 
 but a teleology. It reveals and assures the moral 
 purpose of the world. It presents us with our 
 future in advance. It builds on the supremacy 
 and finality of intelligent action toward a moral 
 purpose, toward a consummation of life, not of 
 science, whether sacred or secular. A real theology 
 is that which is framed under the primacy, not of 
 the rational or scientific, but of the moral, that is, of 
 the holy. Everything here turns on the hegemony 
 of personality, on its central organ as conscience, 
 on its central energy as will, on its central malady 
 as sin, on its central destiny as redemption. The 
 great object of things is not the self-expression of
 
 308 The Preacher and 
 
 the Eternal in time but His self-effectuation as holy 
 in a kingdom. The work of Christ was not simply 
 the revelation of a new world but its achievement. 
 The world is not God's expression, but His action, 
 His conflict, His conquest. What theology has in 
 charge is the message of a final and holy con- 
 summation, awaiting history, yet anticipated in 
 history, in the consummate, victorious Christ. It 
 is the prepayment of our divine destiny. We see 
 not yet all things put under either God or man but 
 we see Jesus, faith's source and consummator alike. 1 
 
 
 
 I said the interpretation of history comes not 
 from a scientific or inductive knowledge of the past 
 but from the idea of life's perfection, i.e. the 
 revelation, which is also the effectuation, of life's 
 destined holiness. I am particular to say its destined 
 holiness, and not its innate or essential, because it is 
 not intrinsic to man but is the gift and revelation of 
 God. Where then is that creative revelation ? For 
 the Christian it is given in history, but it is not an 
 induction from history, nor an intuition of conscious- 
 ness. It is given first in the inner history of a people 
 with a moral destiny, a select people, Israel, issuing 
 secondly in the life and action of an elect person, 
 Christ. That gift is the great charter of the preacher. 
 He has to do with a situation which is moral above 
 all things, with men and interests that have their 
 
 1 See for the continuation of this line of thought the 
 Appendix to this lecture.
 
 Modern Ethic 309 
 
 raison d'etre there, whose bearing and action are on 
 the will. He is also the steward of a historic act 
 in Christ, whose perennial power over life is in 
 striking contrast with our success as yet in giving 
 any rational account of it. The Apostles were not 
 made preachers by a theology but by a personal 
 act and the experience of it, by a new life and not a 
 new creed, a new power and not a new institution. 
 There was, indeed, a new society but it was made 
 by the new power. What roused the Apostles was 
 Christ as the crown of a long revelation coming 
 through historic action. And when they gave such 
 supreme value to Christ's death, it was not simply 
 the Judaic notion of symbolic sacrifice that moved 
 them. Symbols make poets but not missionaries. 
 The missionary needs a much more real and ethical 
 inspiration. Symbols but reflect, they do not effect. 
 And the effectual thing was the ethical action at 
 the core of Israel's destiny, the long action of 
 election, righteousness, judgment, love ; which had 
 its consummation hi Christ, and gave Christ His 
 unique appeal as Captain of the elect to Israel's 
 choicest sons. In the ethicizing of theology by the 
 idea of the holy we but return to the fountain 
 head. 
 
 
 
 The trust of Israel and its gift to the world was 
 not mere monotheism. It was the ethical mono- 
 theism which could not rest till it rose to grasp the 
 one God only as the holy God. The God of Israel
 
 3 i o The Preacher and 
 
 was not a monopolist. He was not sole as ousting and 
 consuming other deities by sheer push and power ; 
 but as the unity of righteousness and peace, of 
 judgment and mercy, of unapproachable sanctity 
 and of approaching grace. The very history of the 
 word holiness in the Old Testament displays the 
 gradual transcendence of the idea of separation by 
 that of sanctity. It traverses a path in which the 
 quantitative idea of tabu changes to the qualitative 
 idea of active and absolute purity. The religious grows 
 ethical, that it may become not only more religious 
 but the one religion for the conscience and for the 
 world. The one God can only be the holy God. 
 
 When Israel sank to Judaism the ethical element 
 retired before official rule and imperial ambition 
 as to-day Curialism and Ultramontanism have 
 submerged the ethical spirituality which made 
 men like St. Bernard hi the great medieval Church. 
 When Christ came the ethical Israel was in the 
 trough of a wave. Judaism had come to what some 
 of our active and forward Churches have reached. 
 It had lost the sense of sanctity in the pursuit of a 
 righteousness based, now on equity, now on charity, 
 but always disjoined from grace. For Judaism it was 
 the formal righteousness of an ecclesiastical society, 
 for us it is the distributive justice of an economic 
 society. But, for both, righteousness and kindness 
 submerge holiness and grace. We are far more 
 kind to our neighbours than we feel God gracious 
 to us. For many in our Churches a meal to poor 
 children or cripples is associated with more stir
 
 Modern Ethic 311 
 
 of interest and sense of benefit than the Com- 
 munion. There is more heart-certainty and satis- 
 faction about it. If that spread it means that 
 philanthropia is taking his place of Philadelphia, 
 the natural brotherhood of the supernatural, pity 
 of faith, and man of Christ. The one is taking the 
 place of the other, instead of growing out of it. The 
 true Christian love of man is that which blossoms 
 on a far deeper and more lively faith in Christ. 
 Let us not linger to lament this state of things but 
 let us interrogate it and understand it. It means in- 
 ordinate affection which is idolatry. It means the 
 loss of the insight of holiness. We may be getting 
 ready, when the critical time comes, for a blunder 
 as stupendous as that which Judaism made. For 
 does it matter at last what amount of well-doing 
 mark a Church ; will that keep it a Church ? If 
 it has lost the sense of holiness and what is due to 
 it, if it has lost that worship and culture of holi- 
 ness which centres about a real Atonement, is 
 it not deserted by the Holy Spirit ? And unless 
 He return it may be any kind of admirable society 
 for the promotion of goodness and mercy, but it 
 ceases to be a Church. It may contribute much 
 to civilization, culture, and charity, as Judaism 
 does to this day, but it ceases to be the unearthly 
 organ of the holy Kingdom of God. 
 
 When this dullness of spiritual ethic rejected Christ, 
 Judaism kept the monotheism but lost the holiness 
 whose consummation Christ was. And hence 
 Judaism ever since, while it has produced plenty
 
 312 The Preacher and 
 
 of geniuses in many kinds, and plenty of mystics, 
 has not produced moral leaders for the world. If 
 it has produced saints they are not such as have 
 by their sanctity impressed the world. It is too 
 tribal for the last universality, too narrow, however 
 fine, in its practical ethic. The finer and wider 
 ethic of Judaism is no more to-day than Hillel was 
 in Pharisaism, or Stoicism in Greece and Rome. It 
 cannot save the situation. Only when ethic rises 
 to holiness can it become really universal ; and 
 only when holiness gets effect in an Atonement real 
 and not symbolic. The Atonement to God's holiness 
 is the focus of Christian (that is, of all) ethic, the one 
 meeting-point of religion and morals, of grace and 
 conscience, and therefore it is the real secret of 
 Christ's universalism. It was the atoning Cross that 
 made Christ absolutely human. 
 
 Is it not so ? Is not the great universality that 
 of the conscience ; and the final universality is it 
 not God's conscience, that is, God's holiness, of 
 which the Cross is the supreme energy ? It was in 
 Christ and, within Christ, in His Cross (as Paul was 
 crushed to discover) that the ethical soul of the 
 Hebrew God broke into white flame. The true 
 Israelites always found in Israel's God no mere 
 autocrat, whose doings were limited only by logical 
 possibility, but a moral Jehovah, whose power 
 was governed by the absolute holiness of His own 
 nature, and even limited into history hi order to 
 achieve the purpose of that holiness. He led His 
 people in the paths of righteousness for His own
 
 Modern Ethic 313 
 
 name's sake. A God of mercy, truly, but also a 
 God of right ; a God, therefore, whose passion of 
 mercy could act only by way of historic redemption 
 into righteousness. He was a God of grace, but 
 of grace that could never sacrifice His moral nature, 
 or simply waive His moral order. He must honour 
 it. And He could not simply honour it in secret, 
 bear the cost and say nothing about it. That 
 would not be to the ethical point. For it would 
 not be honouring holiness where it was defied, or 
 establishing it in the presence of its enemies. The 
 judge of all the earth must do public right. And, 
 besides, He was a God of revelation, of self-be- 
 stowaL He must be shown as honouring His own 
 holiness hi the motive and act of the revelation 
 itself. He must not be revealed simply as one who 
 incidentally held His holiness in respect. But the 
 act of revelation must be the act of respect, the 
 self-respect of the holy. He must be revealed in 
 the act of honouring it, honouring it by the very 
 act that gave and saved. He must pity in a way 
 to set up for ever the public right and glory of His 
 holiness. That is to say, He was a God whose great 
 act of grace was also, because he was holy, a great 
 act of judgment. For to Israel the Messianic time 
 was always a great day of judgment terrible, but 
 still more glorious than terrible, a time of hope 
 more than fear. Such, then, was the Hebrew idea 
 of God. Such was God's revelation of Himself to 
 Israel. It was a revelation, and a God, supremely 
 ethical, as being supremely holy so supremely
 
 314 The Preacher and 
 
 holy that, from the Cross onwards, holiness ceased 
 to be an attribute of God, and became, in the 
 Holy Spirit, a constituent father and active sub- 
 ject in the Godhead itself. 
 
 This is the God that was in Christ reconciling, 
 redeeming the world. The more we grasp this 
 function of the Cross the more we ethicize it. And 
 it is the only radical way of ethicizing it. To 
 moralize Christianity anew we must replace the 
 idea of judgment among all the gains we have won 
 for the other and sympathetic side of faith. The 
 consummation of this historic union of grace and 
 judgment was in the death of Christ. And as the 
 grace of God was on Christ, and not only through 
 Christ on us, so also the judgment of God was on 
 Christ and not only through Christ on us. That 
 is the serious solemn point, disputed by many, 
 and to be pressed only with a grave sense that it 
 alone meets the moral demand of holiness and com- 
 pletes it. Christ not only exercises the judgment 
 of God on us ; He absorbs it, so that we are judged 
 not only by Him but in Him. And so in Him we 
 are judged unto salvation. " The chastisement 
 of our peace was on Him." 
 
 In the Cross, then, we have the ethical consumma- 
 tion, perfect and prolific, of the old paradox of grace 
 and j udgment. During His life Christ was at one time 
 pitiful, at another severe. He was merciful to one 
 class, and stern to another. But in the Cross this 
 separation of grace and judgment disappears, as the 
 distinction of all times and classes disappears in tlw
 
 Modern Ethic 315 
 
 one issue of the universal conscience. And the good- 
 ness and the severity of God are perfectly one, as 
 God is one in His passion of movement toward the 
 sinner and reaction from his sin, of grace to the one 
 and wrath to the other. 
 
 It is not wonderful that the Disciples with their 
 national past should find in Christ's death something 
 else than the priestly idea of sacrifice symbolized 
 in their ritual. They found in Him a living epistle 
 to the Hebrews, and not merely from the Hebrews. 
 He was as much a manifesto to Israel from God as 
 from Israel to the world. They found in Christ the 
 priest no less than the sacrifice. They found also 
 this prophetic note of blended grace and judgment, 
 which made them preachers of a Gospel in His death 
 rather than narrators of His memorable life. Even 
 in Paul there was more Hebraism than Judaism, 
 far more prophet than priest. The great prophetic 
 note finds itself at last in the apostolic. Prophetism 
 by its very failure was itself a prophecy. Its holy 
 ideal strained on and up into the Holy One, His 
 doom, and His work, wherein history changed key 
 into eternity. The Apostles found in the Cross that 
 involution of mercy and sanctity, of grace and 
 righteousness, that revelation of sin as well as love, 
 which met at once the greatest intuitions of their 
 religious history, and the deepest needs of their 
 shamed conscience. The Cross, which was the 
 chief shame of their soul, personal or national, be- 
 came their sure moral triumph. In it the national 
 past found itself in historic effect, and their personal
 
 3 1 6 The Preacher and 
 
 past found itself in a regenerate life. Some of them 
 had denied it, one had betrayed, and one had perse- 
 cuted it ; but they all carne to find in it a moral 
 power from which they never went back. It was 
 final for them and their hereditary ideals, because 
 it was the last judgment and the last mercy in a 
 nation whose history and whose song had all along 
 been of mercy and judgment. The justified had 
 the last judgment behind them. The holy morality, 
 eternal in the heavens, became actual on earth. It 
 was the Holy made Sin, the absolute moral miracle 
 or else the merest ingenuity of nonsense. 
 
 
 
 A gospel which is not final is a mere programme 
 of reform, and there is no finality in any Gospel which 
 ignores the moral element of j udgment in God's revela- 
 tion of love. And therefore there is in such a Gospel 
 no indefectible power. Yet that element is widely 
 ignored in the popular Gospel of sympathy which has 
 replaced the once popular Gospel of orthodoxy. 
 The primacy usurped by the intellect has been taken 
 by the humane affections instead of the evan- 
 gelical conscience. Judgment has ceased to be 
 preached as an essential factor in a revelation of 
 holy love. Where it is preached it is often in crude 
 forms, without insight, and with non-moral associ- 
 ations which rob it of its practical power. It is 
 preached as "the last day" or the "great assize" or 
 the " quenchless fire." But it is useless to put judg- 
 ment at the close of history if it have not a decisive
 
 Modern Ethic 317 
 
 at the centre of history. Indeed it is impossi- 
 ble. The judgment day of the great future assize 
 dram; its true solemnity of meaning from the judg- 
 ment day in Pilate's hall. To repudiate as mere 
 theology this element of judgment in the Cross, to 
 eliminate the awe of it from our practical habit of 
 piety, 5s to subside in due course into a non-ethical 
 religion, which finally becomes but a sweetened 
 paganism. For it is in the moral element in 
 the Crcsss that the real differentia of Christianity 
 comes to light. It is the Cross, and it is this in 
 the Cross, that makes Christ more than man. 
 The Incarnation as an article of our faith rests 
 on our experience of the Atonement alone, on 
 our ethical experience there, on the treatment of 
 our sin there, on what God found precious and 
 divine there, Christ must be chiefly for us what 
 He is chiefly to God. We press to a historic view 
 of Christ and we do well ; but we must do better, 
 and press still more to -the theological view of Hun, 
 which sets out what He is to God. We must learn to 
 regard Him as God does. And that is as the consort 
 of His throne, in whose Cross and its judgment the 
 Eternal holiness found itself for the universe again. 
 To minimize the judgment really effected on evil 
 in the Cross once for all is to subside into a humane 
 paganism, in which, after due and usual course, the 
 paganism will submerge the humanity. Our gentler, 
 sweeter, more sympathetic piety will show itself, 
 as it often does show itself, unable to bear up our 
 public life against the moral declensions, seductions,
 
 3 1 8 The Preacher and 
 
 vulgarities, and crimes of a too rich, prosperous and 
 miserable world. Some sweet and facile evangelicals 
 have had a bad business name. You might thus find 
 a charming and pious home, where yet the business 
 activity of its head could best be described as preying 
 on the public . People obj ect to the pagan suggestions 
 of a word like expiation. But it is the want of the 
 thing, truly and ethically understood, that is the 
 real pagan danger, the absence of any satisfaction 
 in holiness to the grieved holiness of God. It is a 
 satisfaction which man, as he came to his senses, 
 would insist on making, even if God did not insist 
 on providing it. For this lack the conscience of 
 the Church comes short at its creative centre 
 just as it came short when to expiation was given 
 but the pagan and unmoral sense of mollification. 
 The conscience of the Church loses its moral 
 source and bracing school. And Christianity falls 
 victim to fanciful subjectivity, bustling energies, 
 religious romancers, or the fireside pieties. 
 
 These things are attractive enough to a humanist 
 age and to half-culture. And they take often far 
 nobler and graver forms than would be suggested 
 by the words I have just used to describe their effect 
 in many. But they are ineffectual for the great 
 public purposes of the Kingdom. They are in- 
 effectual against the pagan ethic of the natural 
 man, or a society full of moral failures and moral 
 vulgarities. If the death of Christ be preached 
 only for the pathos of its effect on us and not for 
 the ethos of its effect on God, we lack that prime
 
 Modern Ethic 319 
 
 hallowing of His name which exercises on us the pro- 
 foundest moral effect of all, and which bases our ethic 
 on holiness immutable and eternal. For, as I have 
 already said, the spectacle of Christ dealing with 
 God for us and our sin moves us more deeply than 
 the spectacle of Christ dealing with us for God. 
 As our priest and victim he is far more subduing 
 than as a prophet of the Lord. Yet each without 
 the other is false. It is a redemption by revealed 
 grace through effective judgment that is the moral 
 principle of social regeneration. Whether the public 
 take or refuse the dogmas of theologians as such is a 
 light matter. But it is a great matter if the dogmas 
 of the theologians cover living powers and moral ener- 
 gies, by which society stands or falls. And that is 
 the aspect of theology by which theology and society 
 will stand or fall the aspect of it which equips the 
 preacher to be not only a voice but an authority to 
 his time. Public freedom at last depends on spiritual 
 freedom, and spiritual freedom is not in human 
 nature but in its redemption. And the first principle 
 of the Christian redemption is the holy recog- 
 nition of God's wounded holiness, its holy satisfaction 
 in Christ's holy obedience amid the last conditions 
 of human wickedness. The moral perfection of 
 our race is to offer that obedience in sequel and in 
 detail. Man's chief end is not to make the most of 
 himself, but to glorify a holy God by the holiness 
 which alone can satisfy holiness. And that is what 
 sinful man can do only in the power of the atoning 
 holiness of Christ.
 
 320 The Preacher and 
 
 
 
 I know there are those whom we have great reason 
 to honour, who press duly into the heart of the 
 Atonement with the lamp of modern ethic, but who 
 light their lamp at the social and moral relation 
 of fatherhood. That, they say, is the one key 
 put into our hands, by the very constitution of 
 society, for the moral world. The true authentic 
 word of the conscience is the word of father and 
 son. The pillar and ground of social ethic is the 
 family. It was this Word that Christ took up and 
 clothed with eternal validity. It was the Father 
 He preached, and for the Father He died. It was 
 in the name of a disowned Father that He dealt 
 with the conscience. It was to a holy Father that 
 He offered His own conscience. And He retrieved 
 our case by His perfect sympathetic unity with 
 His Father on the one hand, and with His brethren 
 on the other. Accordingly, this theory is offered 
 as a real and near point of attachment for the 
 preacher who has to address people that care more 
 for their families than anything else Bible, Church 
 or Gospel. 
 
 But do they who speak thus go to the bottom 
 of their own plea that it was to a Holy Father 
 that Christ offered His own conscience ? Do they 
 grasp the fact that it was not in the Fatherhood 
 but in the holiness of it that Christ's originality lay ? 
 Do they realize the immense difference it makes when 
 we extend the fatherhood which we learn in the 
 small kind area of family sympathy, to a universal
 
 Modern Ethic 321 
 
 fatherhood a fatherhood which is the guardian 
 of the whole moral order, amidst warring interests, 
 and of the absolute holiness of the Eternal against 
 those who hate the holy for its holiness ? Are the 
 paternal affections the only, or the chief interest of 
 history ? Is the Father of OUT Lord Jesus Christ 
 the crucified simply a magnified and supernatural 
 sire ? Had Jesus much of the family feeling ? Was 
 His family experience quite happy ? Was Joseph 
 a type that he had simply to enlarge to find God ? 
 Where do we find the authority for erecting the 
 house-father, at his spiritual best, into God ? 
 The reply is of course that the authority is 
 Christ. Well, we all admit that Christ is our 
 authority. The question only begins after that. 
 What aspect or action of Christ is selected as the 
 vehicle of the supreme revelation ? Where in 
 Christ is the oracle of the Father's will ? Where 
 is the Father's authentic Word ? Where is the 
 revelation of the Father ? Surely in the act into 
 which was put the whole life and pesonality of 
 the Son. Surely hi the redeeming act, if the main 
 work of a Father or a Son, in a case like ours, 
 be redemption. Surely in the Cross. Everything 
 turns on the interpretation of the Cross. And 
 what is to interpret it ? Must it not interpret it- 
 self, and all else, if it be the focus of revelation ? 
 Must not the redemption it brings to pass create in 
 us the power to interpret it ? Must it not be 
 interpreted by its effect rather than by its ante- 
 cedents ? Antecedents may account for it, explain 
 
 21
 
 322 The Preacher and 
 
 it, but not interpret it. All great interpretation 
 is teleological. The supreme spiritual events have 
 their meaning either in themselves, or in their 
 outcome, rather than in their provenance. That 
 is the Christian way of treating evolution. The 
 interpretation of the series is at its summit. It is 
 man that interprets the world, and not the world 
 man. And, by the same principle, as it is Christ 
 that interprets Israel, so it is the Cross that inter- 
 prets Christ. It is not the teaching of Jesus that 
 interprets the Cross ; it is the Cross that interprets 
 the teaching of Jesus. It may have been so even 
 to Himself. On that I cannot enter here. I will 
 only express my conviction that, unless Christ was 
 principally a teacher aiming at a right interpretation 
 of God, rather than a Redeemer effecting the 
 righteous action of God in the reconstruction of 
 man, it is to the Cross we must look for the true 
 interpretation of Fatherhood in Him. The Cross 
 interprets the Father, not the Father the Cross. And 
 that interpretation was seized and given by John, 
 when the Cross had had more of its perfect work in 
 John with his manifold insistence upon the Holy 
 Father. The nature of the Cross is more revealed 
 in the adjective than in the noun. It is the adjec- 
 tive there that represents the Cross's own inter- 
 pretation of itself. We thus understand the insight 
 of Luther when he found the true commentary 
 on Christ in the Epistles rather than the Gospels. 
 I am afraid the thinkers whom I regret here to 
 oppose use an analogy as a revelation. They over-
 
 Modern Ethic 323 
 
 look the fact that the seat of revelation must be 
 sought in the centre of redemption ; that it lies not 
 in our experience, paternal or filial, but in our 
 faith of salvation ; and that all Christ ever said 
 about God has its true gloss only in what He did 
 about God, and still in our conscience does. And 
 through the effect of the Cross upon the whole 
 conscience, and especially upon the sinful saved 
 conscience, we are driven to think of its prime 
 action as being objective upon God, or upon the evil 
 power, or both. It is there that we have the chief 
 source even of its effect on us. The chief value of 
 the Cross is its value for God, rather than for man. 
 If that be so we must not allow ourselves to be 
 led by either our affections, or even the seeming 
 words of Christ, to interpret the Fatherhood of 
 God as the apotheosis of the natural heart and of the 
 sympathetic, endlessly patient and hospitable sire. 
 If the Cross and not paternity is the supreme 
 locus of the conscience of the race, if, that is, 
 it be a historic locus and not a sociological, 
 then our effort to ethicize faith must begin with 
 the ethic of the Cross. We must not start 
 to ethicize the Cross at a standard of fatherhood 
 brought from elsewhere, whether that elsewhere 
 be in social psychology, in the voice of our affections, 
 or even in the words of Christ Himself. My case 
 would be that the highest ethic is the ethic of 
 holiness ; and that we cannot bring that ethic to the 
 Cross to explain it, but we must draw it from the 
 supreme assertion of holiness, from the Cross and
 
 324 The Preacher and 
 
 its revelation in the conscience it redeems. I 
 hope it may not be thought an unfair thing to 
 say that, as the great jubilants of the Cross have 
 been the great sinners it saved, so its great inter- 
 preters are men who, ceteris paribus, have that 
 scorching of hell upon them, even in heaven, which 
 so many who are interested in theology seem to 
 lack. And because of the lack, when they seek 
 to ethicize they but humanize. They have more 
 humane sympathy than evangelical experience. 
 But the Cross comes with its own ethic in broken 
 and contrite men. All that is provided by the new 
 ethical or paternal interest in modern society is a 
 congenial nidus for Christian ethic ; it does not 
 provide the illuminative principle. The Cross is 
 really luminous only where it is active. It is its 
 own energy that makes its own light. And its 
 truest interpreters, ceteris paribus, are the sinners it 
 has plucked from the gates of death and the 
 mouth of hell. The greatest apostolate is made out 
 of deserters or persecutors, of prodigals more than 
 model sons. 
 
 
 
 The Church has very properly returned to a scrip- 
 tural interest in the Kingdom of God. Her theolo- 
 gians, like Ritschl, have led the way, and her 
 preachers press the new ideal. But it does not seem 
 to meet from the mass of Christians a response 
 which corresponds to the enthusiasm for it of the 
 pulpit. It falls on many as a somewhat archaic 
 conception, too small and primitive for the compass
 
 Modern Ethic 325 
 
 of a modern and complex society. And why ? 
 For one reason because its advocates so often for* 
 get that it was only the Cross that founded it, it 
 was universalized by the Cross, the apostolic Cross 
 first gave it range and currency. When Christ 
 had overcome the sharpness of death He opened 
 the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers. People 
 plant themselves too exclusively on Christ's teach- 
 ing of the Kingdom often expressed in forms more 
 germane to the first century than the twentieth, 
 and to the East rather than to the West. The 
 Saviour is really a more modern idea in these 
 democratic days than the King ; and the Cross has 
 an ethical significance more immortal than the 
 kingdom. In construing the social relations by 
 Christianity, therefore, our first duty is not to 
 analyse the metaphor of the Kingdom. Christ has 
 given us the thing. Christ Himself translated the 
 metaphor into reality for us by His death. He was 
 condemned because of His claim to be a king, and 
 " He did not die for a metaphor." It was there 
 that He really founded the revelation, not in His 
 parables, prophecies, or precepts. These were 
 addressed to Jews. And some of them are heavily 
 coated with the apocalyptic colour of the time. Our 
 first charge in the ethic and service of the Kingdom 
 is to accept and apply love as we find it in Christ 
 crucified, as saving holy grace. All the Kingdom is 
 latent hi that Cross. All its ethic has its creative 
 centre there. Christian ethic consists in living out 
 the life of the Cross freely in the Spirit, rather than in
 
 326 The Preacher and 
 
 obeying all the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount 
 as precepts, which but leads to the attractive 
 crudities of Tolstoi. The true nature and universality 
 of the Kingdom broke out in the Cross. It was 
 Christ's first and final appeal to the world as distinct 
 from Israel. There, for instance, the true charter of 
 missions lies, not in certain injunctions, or " march- 
 ing orders," which are at the mercy of criticism. 
 Accordingly the doctrine of Christianity as an 
 ellipse, with its two centres of the Kingdom and 
 the Cross, will not hold good. If we speak of two 
 centres they must represent the two great categories 
 for interpreting the Cross Reconciliation and Re- 
 demption, which pass but do not fade into each 
 other. We have but the one centre of the Cross 
 for the Kingdom, for the new humanity, and for 
 its ethic. Even in the Lord's Prayer we have 
 the Cross before the Kingdom. The hallowing of 
 God's name is a prior interest to the coming of the 
 Kingdom. It is the action in the heavens which is 
 the constant prelude of the doing of God's will on 
 earth. The Eternal Spirit of Christ's self-oblation to 
 God is the inspiration of the new world. There we 
 find the resources of the Kingdom in one fontal act 
 where that eternal sacrifice looks forth. And it is 
 there that we find it in the ethical form native to 
 the inner Israel, and equally relevant to every age. 
 There we have the focus of that moral eternity 
 of action, that spiritual universe of energy, which 
 is the contemporary of every age, and therefore 
 is always modern. Christian ethic in Christian
 
 Modern Ethic 327 
 
 society is the mutual relation of sons, not un- 
 der a loving father, but under a certain kind of 
 loving father under the Father revealed by a 
 Cross whose first concern was holiness and the 
 dues of holiness. See what manner of love 
 the Father hath bestowed on us. God so loved 
 that He gave His Son to be a propitiation and to 
 hallow His name. It was not enough that evil 
 should be mastered ; holiness had to be set up and 
 secured hi history. And the continuous agent 
 of that holiness is the conscience in us which was 
 first created on the Cross by the offering of holiness 
 to the Holy One. The prime vocation of the society 
 of the Cross is holiness unto the Lord. And as 
 human society grows more Christian this must 
 become its waxing note. It sounds the dominant 
 over all even over love. It is the power, the 
 life, which all love serves. If we are to fill life 
 full, and spread the reign of love, let us preach 
 the holy God, and the Cross where He is at His 
 fullest and Holiest of all. OUT Gospel is not simply 
 God is love, but God's love is holy, for the Holy 
 One is love. 
 
 What is this final appeal even of love to holiness 
 but asserting for God what everything that is best 
 in modern life tends to assert for man the primacy 
 of the moral, the supremacy of life and will to 
 thought or truth. What is it but the ethicizing of 
 religion. For God the moral and the supreme is His 
 holy will of love. You cannot ethicize either re- 
 ligion or life without adjusting it to the holiness of
 
 328 The Preacher and 
 
 God. And that practical adjustment, objective 
 and subjective, was Christ's work in the atoning 
 Cross. Pardon is the perpetual demand of our 
 actual moral situation. And pardon is only pardon, 
 not when it wipes the slate, but as it is the su- 
 preme expression and establishment of moral reality. 
 Its conditions are those required by moral reality 
 on an eternal scale that is, by the holy. 
 
 I 
 
 What an advantage, then, the preacher of holiness 
 as it is in the Cross has in addressing the society 
 of these days, set upon moral righteousness as it 
 never was before. For both the Cross and the 
 public the moral is the first thing. I do not mean 
 that the preacher should preach the moral philo- 
 sophy of the Cross, or confine himself to Christian 
 ethics, but he has to preach a Gospel which has 
 supreme in its heart this moral note of holy grace 
 and judgment love ; and he preaches it to a public 
 in which the moral passion is rising steadily. The 
 modern appeal to the will is the native note of 
 the Christian apostle, the appeal to the moral will, 
 to the conscience. 
 
 There is nothing you will oftener hear from pulpits 
 that strive to be abreast of things than this : " Christi- 
 anity is not a creed ; it is a life." What is meant 
 by it ? Not surely that Christianity is but a 
 certain course or manner of living. That drops 
 all to mere moralism. Not that it is a way of feeling, 
 a certain sympathetic strain. That makes it a senti-
 
 Modern Ethic 329 
 
 mentalism. Not that it is simply the copying of 
 a heroic example. That makes it a depressing 
 legalism, or a no less depressing idealism. If it mean 
 anything it surely means that Christianity is a 
 solution of the problem of life, which is a moral 
 problem. And Christianity means still more, giving 
 us the moral solution of life as a present. Here is 
 another paradox the gift of a moral achievement, 
 moral victory, as a present. You can compare it 
 with that parallel audacity " The Father hath given 
 the Son to have life in Himself. Such is the secret 
 of Christianity and such its gift the gift of a life that 
 masters the supreme moral condition of holiness 
 eternal life, as it was achieved in the Cross, in the 
 holy satisfaction of the Cross. Such is the paradox 
 of the cross, its alogical nature, its defiance of a 
 perfectly consistent theology, its ethical offence to 
 monism, its inner contradiction as the only ade- 
 quate harmony of religious experience, its dualism 
 as the only condition of the moral and holy life. 
 
 This Gospel appeals not only to the strength oi 
 modern society its interest in righteousness, and in 
 a social righteousness but also to its weakness. 
 Because the weakness of the hour (for all our 
 ethical progress) is a moral weakness. In every 
 other respect society is stronger than it ever 
 was before. Never was man's mastery of the 
 world so complete. Never had he such resources 
 in dealing with it, and compelling it to his purpose.
 
 33 The Preacher and 
 
 Yes, but it is the matter of his purpose that is the 
 weak place. What is his purpose when he has 
 one ? What is to repair his lack of one ? Our 
 trouble is the paganism of the age, with its moral 
 hollo wness and its shell of self-confidence. On 
 the one side you have the weakness of over-energy 
 men engrossed with practical activity, like old 
 Rome, till they have neither leisure nor power to 
 note the crumbling of their moral interior. That you 
 may have in a young country. And, on the other 
 hand, you have what you find in the old and deca- 
 dent lands the weakness of no-energy, the hebetude 
 of the outworn, the failure of will, the lack of moral 
 interest. You have the conscience narcotised by 
 civilization, by science, by culture, by religion, 
 by morality itself. All these things conspire to 
 stifle in the conscience the deepest issues which 
 drive us to the Cross. Even religion in this respect 
 can be very mischievous to Christianity, on the 
 principle that the good is the enemy of the best. 
 And at the extreme end you have the moral para- 
 lytics, who find life no longer worth living except 
 in moments of some kind of intoxication ; you 
 have the moral degenerates or cretins, the victims 
 of the age's overfed individualism and its moral 
 fatigue, who live in a perpetual depression because 
 they have no motives ; and you have the moral 
 melancholies and irresolutes, who, by the very 
 wealth of their ideas, have so many motives that 
 they are unable to choose any one of them. I 
 am thinking on the one hand of the famous Melan-
 
 Modern Ethic 331 
 
 cholia of Diirer, limp and listless in the midst of 
 all the resources of science and art. I think on 
 the other hand of a victim of " psychological ru- 
 mination " so noble yet so over-interested as Amiel. 
 And between these two extremes you have a varied 
 gamut of people whose trouble is moral marasmus, 
 and who so often leap at the manifold quackeries of 
 volitional religion, or self-salvation, or will-idolatry. 
 They all betray a narcotised conscience, a light sense 
 and a light hearing of our mortal wounds. Nothing 
 reveals the incompetency of much popular religion 
 more than its inability to gauge the poignancy 
 of the moral situation on the one hand, or the true 
 depth of the moral resources of Christianity on 
 the other. 
 
 
 
 In those circumstances let the preacher who is 
 sure be of new cheer. It is the prophet's oppor- 
 tunity. The conscience of society is awake but 
 it is not illuminated ; and where illuminated it 
 has not power. It is awake enough to cry for a 
 redemption, but not enough to take the Christian 
 redemption home, far less to bring it to pass around. 
 It is power for the conscience the preacher brings. 
 His great object is not to produce either loving 
 affections or correct views of Christian truth, 
 whether broad or narrow, neither sympathies, 
 liberalisms, nor orthodoxies, but the moral power 
 of the Christian Gospel. The correct science 
 of our faith is all very well, but, whether old or 
 new, it is not faith. And the ethics of love, gather-
 
 332 The Preacher and 
 
 ing about the dear person of Christ, is very well, 
 but it is only a partial solution of the problem 
 offered us by the world. That is a moral, a 
 practical problem, a problem not of the sympathies, 
 but of the will and conscience. The ethic of love 
 has more effect on those who are in the Church 
 than on the world. It moves chiefly the already 
 well disposed. It is a Gospel for the sensitive. And 
 it lacks the note of authority which is the modern 
 world's chief need, and which is heard in its power, 
 not in the heart but the conscience. Authority's 
 seat and source is not God's love, but God's holiness. 
 Have I not said that the love in God must itself 
 rest on the holiness of God, that we can trust love 
 with real faith only if it show itself absolutely 
 holy. That is to say, the Church's Word, the 
 preacher's Word, must issue from a Gospel not 
 of love alone but of holy love. It sounds from a 
 Cross which does not merely show love but honours 
 holiness. It flows from a grace which does not 
 merely display compassion, but effects judgment, 
 achieves redemption, does the one deed demanded 
 in the real moral situation by the holy authority of 
 God. The Word of grace is a deed of God. And 
 the answer of faith must be a deed no less. Faith is 
 not a sympathy but an act. It is the moral victory 
 that overcomes the active world by an act greater 
 still, inspired from a world more active still The 
 faith that the preacher would stir is the greatest 
 of moral deeds. It searches the deep and devious 
 recesses of the conscience upon the scale of the
 
 Modern Ethic 333 
 
 whole world yea of the holy world unseen. And 
 it breeds that new mystic life which is the only 
 condition of a new heaven and a new earth 
 wherein dwells holiness. " This is the work of 
 God that they should believe in Him whom He 
 hath sent to be a propitiation for us." 
 
 May I resume ? The history of the world morally 
 viewed is a tragedy. All the great tragedy of the 
 world turns upon its guilt. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, 
 Goethe, Ibsen, all tell it you. The solution of the 
 world, therefore, is what destroys its guilt. And 
 nothing can destroy guilt but the very holiness that 
 makes guilt guilt. And that destruction is the 
 work of Christ upon His Cross, the Word of Life 
 Eternal in your hands and hi your souls. The 
 relevancy of His Cross is not to a church, or a sect, 
 or a creed, but to the total moral world in its actual 
 radical case. The moral world, I say, is the real 
 world, the ever modern world. And the supreme 
 problem of the moral world is sin. Its one need 
 is to be forgiven. And nothing but holiness can 
 forgive. Love cannot. We are both forgiven and 
 redeemed in Jesus Christ and in Him as crucified 
 unto the world for the holiness of God and the sin 
 of men. 
 
 APPENDIX (p. 308) 
 
 THERE is one qualification which has to be made, however, 
 when we use the Pragmatism or Voluntarism of recent 
 philosophy as a calculus for the specific action of Christianity. 
 Action is indeed the material of truth (Wesen=Actus) the
 
 334 The Preacher and 
 
 organ, too, by which we reach it as well as spread it, and be- 
 come true as well as see true. But we have to do with some- 
 thing more than the action either of nature, of men, or of 
 mankind. To fall back thus on the will, energy, or resource 
 of man is to make religion in the end impossible, except 
 by a kind of moral positivism which leaves humanity to 
 worship but itself and its deed. What we have to realize is 
 a spiritual world not simply in man but in which man is, 
 a world that has to temper him and master him, that has to 
 prevent him from taking his needs, passions and energies 
 for charter or standard, a world that has to stand over 
 him, test him, sift him, lift him, and end by setting him 
 on a totally different base from the egotism in which he 
 began. That is, we have to do, above all, not simply with 
 an ideal world of process, but with a spiritual world of value. 
 
 And this spiritual world is not quiescent but active. 
 It does not simply envelop us, it acts on us, and we react 
 on it ; and in that reaction we find ourselves, and we 
 grow into spiritual persons with which we never set out. 
 It does not swathe us and erase us, it besets us, it applies 
 itself to us. It does not simply stand at the door, or pass 
 and suck us into its wake ; it knocks, enters, finds, and 
 saves us all in the way of creating our moral personality 
 and giving us to ourselves by rescuing us from ourselves. It 
 is an active not a static world. It moves, it works, it creates. 
 
 Its movement is not process, as so many to-day are 
 seduced to construe it, in the wake of the great cosmic 
 processionalist and marshal, Hegel, with his staff of sub- 
 ordinate evolutionists. This of Hegel's, indeed, is a con- 
 ception which lifts us over much of the triviality and slavery 
 of life ; but only to substitute for petty bondage a vast 
 tyranny, and to replace a prison by a despotism, with a 
 first show of freedom but a final atmosphere of death. And 
 especially it leaves us with a loss of moral liberty, and 
 ethical dignity, and spiritual initiative and personal con- 
 summation. The actual course of history is not a process. 
 And it is not through yielding to a process that history is 
 created by its great actors. There are stagnations, too, de- 
 generations, enmities which forbid us to call life a process,
 
 Modern Ethic 335 
 
 at the same time as they prevent us from treating its 
 movement as our being rolled over and ground up in a 
 greater process. Mere process ends in mechanism, coarse 
 or fine, and extinguishes a soul. Behind everything that 
 seems process on any large scale our active moral soul 
 insists on placing an act, and an act from a new world 
 something ethical and personal in its kind. 
 
 If this spiritual world, so active, be one ; if we are 
 to escape pluralism, as well as monism ; if we are not 
 to escape being rolled over by a vast process only to be 
 crushed by the active but awful collision of more spiritual 
 worlds than one ; then its action must be one infinite and 
 unitary concursus, one compendious personal act, the actus 
 purus of an infinite personality who is not only ethical but 
 self-sufficient in his ethic. But what is an infinite moral 
 self-sufficiency, an active, changeless, self-completeness, 
 but holiness. The total action of the spiritual world both 
 in us and around is holiness. We find ourselves before and 
 within a holy God, a spiritually moral personality, self- 
 determined and self-complete. 
 
 But no less, if this spiritual world and power be universal, 
 it must assert itself supremely in the region of history. If 
 its inmost nature be action we cannot think of it as secluded 
 from that one region where action has real meaning and 
 effect for man. It must assert, express, reveal and effect 
 itself in history for the holy and mastering power it is. 
 
 Yet such a power cannot adequately reveal itself dis- 
 persed through history, or merely parallel with it, nor even 
 in "mutual involution." For such a diffused revelation 
 would not represent, and might even belie, a spiritual 
 power whose nature was not only action but action of 
 the sole kind which possesses moral unity, namely, the 
 action of a moral person. If it reveal itself I do not 
 merely mean assert itself in history it must surely do 
 so in an act corresponding to its own total ethical nature in 
 the spiritual world, in an act which gathers and com- 
 mands cosmic history, as its nature is to focus and utter 
 all spiritual being. A world of spiritual action with moral 
 coherency can only be revealed in history by a supreme
 
 33 6 
 
 The Preacher 
 
 spiritual act, the supreme act of a person who both gathers 
 up and controls human existence, and delivers it from that 
 submersion in self and the world which in the long run is 
 fatal to man's action as man. If spiritual existence be an 
 infinite and eternal act, such must also be its revelation. 
 
 And this is the act of Christ in the Cross, the act of 
 the Gospel. It is the act of God's grace, met by the act of 
 our faith an act into which a whole divine life was put, and 
 one that issues in a whole life on our part. This act is the 
 gift of God ; whose freedom we attain by no mere develop- 
 ment of our own liberty, but by a free act which renoun- 
 ces our liberty for His, breaks with what is behind and 
 beneath us, breaks with the old self, and, by accepting a 
 new creation, exchanges an assertive individualism for 
 a redeemed personality. The energy of such a spiritual 
 world as we postulate in God can only act on us in the 
 way of redemption and not more evolution from the 
 world of our first stage. We cease to be self-made 
 men, and we are men who let God make us, and make us 
 by His grace and not His evolution. We achieve by this 
 grace a personality we had not at the first. As we reach 
 our freedom we acquire and attain ourselves ; and we reach 
 our freedom by surrendering it to God's. The best use we 
 can make of our freedom is to forgo it, and to sign it away 
 to one whose work and joy it is to create in us a freedom we 
 can never acquire. We are but persons in the making, and 
 we are not made till grace make us and faith is made. 
 Our supreme ethical act is the faith that gives us at once 
 our Saviour and ourselves. We exhaust our own exertions, 
 and we deliver ourselves to a faithful Creator. And our 
 perfecting God is a God of grace, not only because He 
 finishes us, but finishes us as alone we can be perfected 
 by redemption, by a change of base, centre, and affection. 
 He is a gracious God and not simply a benevolent God, 
 because He lets us exhaust, and even wreck, our private 
 powers, instead of only guiding their education, so that with 
 His free and creative act He may make of us what all our 
 native force could never do.
 
 THE MORAL POIGNANCY OF THE 
 CROSS
 
 IX 
 
 The Moral Poignancy of the Cross 
 
 THE leading doctrine of much modem theology is 
 the Fatherhood of God in a sense I have already 
 indicated. It offers us a God genial, benignant, 
 patient, and too great in His love to make so much 
 as Paulinism does of the sin of a mere child like 
 man. Now, how does such a conception really 
 affect modern preaching ? It is another form of 
 the question if we ask how it affects the Church 
 whose voice preaching is. No such vast doctrine 
 can be tested by either the feeling or the character 
 of an individual, even if he be a most successful 
 preacher. There are plenty of individuals, and 
 indeed one whole sex, to whom a religion of naive 
 fatherly love is perfectly satisfactory so much 
 so that they can not only think of nothing beyond, 
 but they grow impatient when anything more 
 is pressed, as if it were a sophistication, an imperti- 
 nence, or a foray of dogma. But the real question is 
 not about individuals, but it is this Is that the faith 
 once committed to the Church ? Is it the faith 
 that has formed the real continuum of the Church, 
 its distinctive note and staying power in history ? 
 
 339
 
 34-O The Moral Poignancy 
 
 And what would the moral and religious result be 
 if the whole Church accepted that position, and 
 lived on that level and climate of faith ? What 
 would be the result then to the preacher's message, 
 and to his ultimate moral effect on life or society ? 
 
 It is easy, of course, to say that above all things 
 we need a simple religion, and that this gospel of 
 fatherly love is of the simplest ; that it speaks the 
 language of the heart, and the piety of our mothers' 
 knee ; and that it is the order of faith that befits 
 an age of democracy, when Christianity is straining 
 every nerve to get at the untaught mass. 
 
 
 
 Now, on this there are several remarks. First, 
 Is the test of a Gospel the welcome it receives, the 
 rapidity of its success ? Is the distinctive note 
 of the Church's Gospel that which immediately 
 appeals to the democracy or the minor ? Is Christ- 
 ianity to stand or fall by its direct effect on the 
 workman or the youth ? Is it great, universal, 
 and final as a religion because it is within the effort- 
 less comprehension of the ignorant or the weak ? It 
 shall, indeed, be for these. The wayfaring man, 
 though a fool, need not err therein. But is he the 
 criterion of the religion ? Is everything to be 
 sacrificed from Bible, Church, or Creed which does 
 not attract or hold the masses of the natural 
 man ? Is it the case that what we now find most 
 valuable in Christianity has arrested and commanded 
 the prompt welcome of men in its course through
 
 of the Cross 341 
 
 history ? These are questions which it is not super- 
 fluous to discuss in the connexion. 
 
 
 
 Second, the situation of the soul is not a simple 
 one. The moral difficulty of society is not that we are 
 strayed children, great babes in a wood. It is that we 
 are sinful men in a sinful race. We are mutinous. It 
 is not a pathetic situation that the preacher con- 
 fronts so much as a tragic. The first question for 
 a Redeemer is still the old one, quanti ponderis sit 
 peccatum. The forgiveness of sin is the foundation 
 and genesis of Christianity ; it is not an incident in it, 
 nor in the Christian life. Not to know sin is not to 
 know Christ. That is true for the race if not for 
 every soul in it. No one can describe the situation 
 as simple who has earned the right to an opinion by 
 gauging that fundamental question, or by knowledge 
 of the moral world round him. Let us not go to 
 war without counting the cost. A remedy for such 
 a situation which is merely simple is a pill for an 
 earthquake, or a poultice for a cancer. The disease 
 is mortal. And, moreover, what is in question is a 
 diseased world. It is a society that is sick to death, 
 and not a stray soul. We have to deal with a radical 
 evil in human nature, and spiritual wickedness 
 in deep places. We have not only to restore the 
 prodigal but to reorganize the household of the elder 
 brother. In life's daily affairs it may be wisdom 
 not to take things tragically. But they have to be 
 taken tragically somewhere if we are to have moral
 
 342 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 realism at all. And the men of power and thorough- 
 ness do so take it, whether Kant or Ibsen. The 
 world as a world has to be tragically taken, and 
 converted to a divina commedia. If it is our wisdom 
 not to be tragic it is only the wisdom of faith, which 
 does not ignore the tragedy, but is able to cast it 
 on One who did take things tragically, and who 
 underwent and overcame at the moral centre of men 
 and things. 
 
 
 
 And, thirdly, we may ask how far this view does 
 justice to the revelation which is the Kr/pvyfia of 
 the Church, and the preacher's capital in the Bible. 
 The Church has not only to read the present situa- 
 tion ; she has to read her own Gospel before that ; 
 which is what multitudes of people, and even 
 preachers, are not doing. How far does this view 
 do justice to the revelation " God is love," in the 
 face of such a world of muddle, misery and anomaly, 
 of guilt, grief, and devilry. The preacher's business 
 is to make that principle of love real and effective 
 in a world of extreme wickedness, a world with 
 Goneril in it, and Regan, and I ago, and Mephis- 
 tophdes, with the Inquisition in it, and the Russian 
 bureaucracy. It is not Hamlet that is the real 
 trouble, though he most arrests the attention of to- 
 day. And the preacher's first inquiry is, How is 
 that revelation ' God is love ' made effective by God ? 
 How does God Himself face the world's worst in 
 the Gospel which is put into the preacher's hands ?
 
 of the Cross 343 
 
 It is not the unwieldy mass of a gross average world 
 that makes the problem of the Cross, but the world's 
 wickedness, condensed, organized pointed, deliberate, 
 and Satanic, not missing or losing God but challeng- 
 ing Him. It is not a misunderstanding but war d la 
 outrance. It is sin's death or God's. For we must 
 keep urging that what is given the preacher is not 
 a truth but a Gospel ; nor is it an offer of God at 
 the mercy of human experience, but an objective 
 finished deed. What is this deed ? How does God 
 reveal Himself as love ? I should like to devote this 
 lecture to an answer to that question more explicit 
 than my previous references, because all these 
 references have been accumulating such a necessity 
 for me ; and because it is the question which goes to 
 the root of the preacher's power ; meaning thereby 
 chiefly the Church's message as the preacher to the 
 world. For it is easy (I said) to be misled by the 
 effect of idiosyncrasy in individual preachers, or by 
 their effect on individual cases. An invalid might 
 be greatly consoled by a kindly preacher whose net- 
 public effect was to undermine the Christian Gospel. 
 
 
 
 We are all agreed that the Gospel is the revelation 
 of God's love to the sinful world. My points are, 
 first, that no revelation of divine love to such a 
 world is possible unless the revelation is an act of 
 redemption. Men had to be delivered into the very 
 power to see a revelation ; so that mere manifestation 
 is but one factor in revelation. And my second point
 
 344 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 is that the redemption of man is inseparable from 
 the satisfaction of God in an Atonement. 
 
 
 
 I. On the first head, I would begin by recalling 
 the educational principle, that as no lesson is really 
 taught till it is learned, so revelation is not 
 revelation till it get home, till it return to God in 
 faith. And we have to be saved into faith before 
 we are saved by it. The power of sin is such that 
 we cannot believe to saving purpose except we are 
 redeemed into that power. We cannot believe even 
 when we wish to. The voice of our distress is, 
 
 " Hilf, Vater mein, 
 Dem Knechte dein, 
 Ich glaub' und kann nicht glauben." 
 
 Faith itself, we say, is the work of the Spirit. 
 And the Spirit itself proceeds from the Cross, and 
 is the Spirit of our redemption. And just as a 
 great and original artist like Turner, or a similar 
 poet like Browning, had first to create the very 
 taste that understands them, so it is with the tre- 
 mendous and creative revelation of God in Christ. 
 It had to recreate man, and redeem him into the 
 very power of realizing it. The difficulty in believ- 
 ing in an Atonement is in great measure due to 
 the fact that the belief needs self-surrender. The 
 real necessity of an Atonement only comes home 
 where it has done its work only to the conscience 
 redeemed. You cannot prove it to the world, or 
 force it on the natural man. If a man say ' I do
 
 of the Cross 345 
 
 not see the need of it ' you can go little farther with 
 him, beyond a caution that he shall not make his 
 myopia the standard of vision. 
 
 We may, and we must, modernize our theories of 
 Atonement, but for preaching, in such a world as 
 this, the Church must have the thing, the deed. 
 It cannot act effectively in a world where evil is 
 so able, so practical, so passionate, so sordid, and 
 so established, with a mere exhibition of father- 
 hood ; nor can it treat the history of sonship as 
 man's natural evolution under Christ's benignant 
 sunshine up to a spiritual plane. 
 
 How then are we to do justice to God's holy love ? 
 Well, how did He ? He might conceivably have 
 done it through a sage that taught this love. But 
 that is too futile, and He did not act so. He might 
 have done it through a prophet, inspired by his own 
 experience of such righteous love, and aglow with 
 its passion. But prophetism, with all its moral 
 fervour, was a failure for the saving either of Israel 
 or the world. Yea, as a prophet only, Jesus Him- 
 self was a failure both with the people and His dis- 
 ciples. Or He might have done it by a sinless but 
 statuesque personality, who embodied His love, 
 and visualized it to us as its living image and our 
 perfect example or type. But even that is more of 
 a spectacle than a salvation ; it is something more 
 aesthetic for our spiritual contemplation than dyna- 
 mic for our moral redemption. So to view Christ is no 
 doubt a great matter. But it is the nature of a tableau 
 vivant. It leaves Him still a somewhat inert per-
 
 346 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 sonality, a spiritual figure finished all but the arms. 
 He cannot take hold of the world and wrestle with 
 it. He is not among the mighty doers of the race. 
 He remains but a gracious influence. We meet in 
 Him with that nearness of the divine presence 
 which marks an early stage of religion, but not 
 with His searching divine act which makes God the 
 last moral reality. The last moral reality is a person 
 not in repose but in action with the world. The 
 real God is present in the soul, active in history, 
 and master of the world. Now the pure and sinless 
 personality of Christ leaves us indeed with a divine 
 presence in whom our selfhood may be lost, but 
 not with the divine act of new creation in which 
 we are given our true moral place in a saved world. 
 It leaves us with a religion of worship but not with 
 a religion of power, with a message which exhibits 
 rather than achieves, and says rather than does. 
 
 And, therefore, God's way of carrying home His love 
 to the world was by a person who was realized in one 
 act corresponding to the unity of the person and the 
 scale of the world ; a person whose consummation of 
 Himself was in the great man's way of crucial action ; an 
 action giving effect to His whole universal personality 
 and therefore having effect on the whole of man's rela- 
 tion to God. God in Christ's Cross not only manifests 
 His love but gives effect to it in human history. He 
 enters that stream, and rides on its rage, and rules its 
 flood, and bends its course. He reseats His love in com- 
 mand upon the active centre of human reality. He does 
 the thing which is crucial for human destiny. Christ
 
 of the Cross 34.7 
 
 effected God's purpose with the race, He did not 
 merely contribute the chief condition to that end. 
 The Cross effects the reconciliation of man and 
 God ; it does not simply announce it, or simply 
 Prepare it. It does not simply provide either a 
 preliminary which God needs in a propitiation, or 
 the stimulus man needs in a spiritual hero, or a 
 moving martyr. The propitiation is the redemption. 
 The only satisfaction to a holy God is the absolute 
 establishment of holiness, as Christ did it in all but 
 the empirical way. The Cross is the redemption hi 
 principle and effect. It does not avert the great 
 last judgment, it is the action of that judgment. 
 Do not persist in thinking of the last judgment as 
 mainly dreadful and damnatory. In the Bible and 
 especially in the Old Testament, I have already 
 said, the day of the Lord is an awful joy, as the 
 final vindication of goodness, the final establish- 
 ment of righteousness. Judgment is the grand 
 justification, not prepared by the Cross, but 
 effected and completed on the Cross and the justi- 
 fication there. The justified have the last judgment 
 behind them. There the eschatological becomes 
 ethical, the remote near, the last first. The jus- 
 tification in the Cross does not produce the 
 salvation ; it is the salvation. In Christ we 
 have no mere preface or auxiliary to the 
 supreme crisis of humanity. We have that crisis. 
 The day of the Lord is here. We are in its midst. 
 Only as the race is living out Christ's death, for 
 weal or woe, can we truly say Die Weltgeschichtc
 
 348 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 ist das Weltgericht. The work was finished there as 
 well as begun. But it was finished more than begun. 
 It began its career as a finished work. But to this 
 point I must return later. 
 
 Christ does not come to us merely announcing 
 His view of God. Nor does He come afire with the 
 ardour of holiness. Nor does He come to present 
 to the world a perfect but lapidary sanctity. What 
 He carries home to us is not the existence of God 
 but the grace of God. He comes to be the standing, 
 saving action of a holy God in and on the world. 
 He is in it as one who is in perpetual conquest over 
 it. He is in it sacramentally, not as immanent 
 but as incarnate, not as its substance but as its 
 purpose, not as filling it but as effectuating it, not 
 pervading it but subduing and reclaiming it, not 
 as its ground but as its King. 
 
 In Christ God does not simply announce Himself, 
 and He cannot be preached by a mere announcement. 
 He gives no mere revelation about Himself. The 
 revelation about God is the bane common both to 
 orthodoxy and to rationalism. Both are the victims 
 of that intellectualism. What we need, what 
 God has given, what preaching has to convey, 
 is Himself. It is Sacramental work. His revel- 
 ation is His actual coming and doing. He is there 
 in Christ, not through Christ. Revelation is self- 
 communication ; and it is self-communication which 
 is not the mere offer of Himself but the actual
 
 of the Cross 34.9 
 
 bestowal of Himself, His effectual occupation of 
 Man-soul and not His mere claim of it, not the soul's 
 opportunity but the soul's seizure by an act of con- 
 quest. God is the matter of His own revelation ; 
 and, therefore, He only succeeds if he win, not the 
 soul's assent, but the soul itself. If it was Himself 
 He gave, it is man's self He must have. And He 
 is not really revealed to man, for all His outgoing, 
 till He receive that answer, till He redeem, and re- 
 turn upon Himself with man's soul for a prey. Re- 
 velation must take effect in restored communion. God 
 is not really opened to me till He opens me to Him. 
 All this is only possible if revelation and preaching 
 be much more than declaration. Revelation must be 
 an act. Reality is action. Im Anfang war die That. 
 Christ spoke far less of love than he practised it. He 
 did not publish a new idea of the Father rather He 
 was the first true Son. Christ as God's revelation is 
 God's act ; and our conveyance of Christ in preaching 
 is Christ's act. Otherwise, God's love would be a mere 
 lenient word, or a mere affection on His part, lacking 
 in moral energy and in power to give effect to itself. 
 God then would not fully identify Himself with the 
 human case. He feels for men, and speaks to them 
 but He does nothing. He sends, but He does not 
 come. This sending, no doubt, is a great thing, but 
 it is not a Gospel that inspires preaching in the high 
 and powerful sense, in a sense commensurate 
 either with tragic humanity or a triumphant Church. 
 And the philanthropy based on this, prolific as it 
 may be for a time, has not a future, for lack of staying
 
 35 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 power. The divinest love which could not put its 
 whole self into a saving act might but wring its 
 hands on the shore, or wade a little in, as many 
 do, who mean the very best, but who can only 
 tickle the evil of a world with which they cannot 
 grapple. When we preachers ask about the revela- 
 tion of God's love what we ask for is its deed. 
 
 Remember above all things that the love we have 
 to do with is holy love. And holiness is the eternal 
 moral power which must do, and do, till it see itself 
 everywhere. That is its only satisfaction and atone- 
 ment, not the pound of flesh but entire absolute 
 response in its own active kind. And that is what 
 we have in Christ as our head. 
 
 The modernizing of theology (I have urged) 
 means above all things its ethicizing. And its 
 ethicizing can only mean its control at all points by 
 the supreme ethical power. But that must mean 
 not its reformation from without but its self reforma- 
 tion from within. For the supreme ethical idea is 
 one which the Gospel itself provides, which the 
 Gospel alone provides, and, still more, puts in action 
 and makes effective. It is not an idea imported 
 from culture as a corrective to faith. It is given in 
 faith as the idea and the power which necessitated 
 the Cross of Christ and made it mighty, the idea and 
 power of God's holiness, its word and deed. 
 
 And what does that holiness mean and demand ii 
 we become more explicit ?
 
 of the Cross 351 
 
 Turn to man himself. Begin with him as a 
 moral personality. Man finds the moral order oi 
 the world uttered for him in his conscience. In 
 that conscience he even finds the voice of God. He 
 carries back the moral order, whether in himself or 
 without, to God. God as holy is its absolute ground. 
 
 For that conscience is not a voice from a corner of 
 man's being. It is the verdict of his whole moral 
 self. It is himself, as a complete moral personality, 
 pronouncing on himself as something else, either 
 short of that, or hostile to it. It is the expression 
 of his own moral autonomy. In so far as it is a law 
 to him it is the law of his full free moral self. 
 
 But it has power over him not only as being his, but 
 as taking the same supreme place for every moral 
 being. It has this supreme place therefore for 
 humanity. The sanctity of man is the sanctity of 
 man's full, free, and collective moral self. 
 
 But that very complete fulness must go back on 
 a divine ground of it all, the ground of our very 
 autonomy. We are again confronted with the 
 paradox of dependence and freedom " He hath 
 given the Son to have life in Himself." " Work, 
 for it is God working." We go back to secure 
 our autonomy on an autonomy which has its 
 ground in itself, that is to say, to God. Without this 
 divine autonomy, underlying and guaranteeing all 
 ours, we have no principle that gives the moral law 
 a supreme sanction, and raises it above all our wilful 
 doubt or passion. 
 
 Now this principle is the holiness of God. Or
 
 352 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 rather it is God the holy. It is God as self-com- 
 plete and absolute moral personality, the universal 
 and eternal holy God whose sufficiency is of Him- 
 self, the self-contained, and self-determined moral 
 reality of the universe, for which all things work 
 together in a supreme concursus, which must endure 
 if all else fail, and must be secured at any cost beside. 
 Better it were that man should wreck than that 
 God's holiness be defiled and defied. " The dignity of 
 man himself is better secured if it break in the 
 maintenance of God's holiness than if that holiness 
 suffer defeat for man's mere existence." It is a 
 holiness whose claim must be not only made, 
 but made good, and given unmistakable effect. (I 
 beg you to bear with my phraseology often. For we 
 are here almost beyond the limits of human speech 
 and caught up to the verge of realities which it is 
 not given to man to utter.) 
 
 It is not enough, therefore, to emphasize the person 
 of Christ, to set it again in the centre as modern 
 theology was bound to do, and has done ever since 
 Schleiermacher, in order to repair much historic 
 neglect. We may dwell on the person of Christ and 
 mean no more than a perfectly saintly soul repos- 
 ing in God. But this is a conception too sabbatic 
 for a universe which is an act, and whose energy 
 runs up into human history. Christ's person has 
 its reality in its active relation to other persons 
 God or men. We must find the key to it in some- 
 thing Christ did with His entirety, and did in 
 relation to that holiness of God which means so 
 much more than all Humanitv is worth.
 
 of the Cross 353 
 
 The true key to Christ's person is in His work. 
 It lies not in a miraculous manner of birth, nor in 
 a metaphysical manner of two co-existent natures, 
 but in a moral way of atoning experience. It 
 lies in His personal action, and in our experience of 
 saving benefits from Him. It lies not in His con- 
 stitution but in His blessings. His love to us is not 
 the image, the reflexion, or even the result of God's 
 love, it is a part of it, the very present action of it. 
 We feel this particularly when we are forgiven. It is 
 only the holy love we have so wronged that has the 
 right to forgive. And the forgiveness we take from 
 Christ is taken directly from the hand and heart of 
 God, immediately though not unmediated. Christ 
 is God forgiving. He does not help us to God, He 
 brings God. In Him God comes. He is not the 
 agent of God but the Son of God ; He is God the 
 Son. As we must preach Christ and not merely 
 about Christ, so Christ does not merely bring access 
 to God, He brings God. God is Love only if Jesus is 
 God. Otherwise Jesus would become our real God. 
 God's love then is love in holy action, in forgive- 
 ness, in redemption. It is the love for sinners of 
 a God above all things holy, whose holiness makes 
 sin damnable as sin and love active as grace. 
 It can only act in a way that shall do justice to 
 holiness, and restore it. Short of that, love does 
 no more than pass a lenient sentence on sin. It 
 meets the strain of the situation by reducing the 
 severity of the demand. It empties of meaning the 
 wrath of God. And it reduces the holy law of His 

 
 354 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 nature to a bye-law He can suspend, or a habit He 
 can break. 
 
 
 
 Any conception of God which exalts His Father- 
 hood at the cost of His holiness, or to its neglect, 
 unsettles the moral throne of the universe. Any 
 reaction of ours from a too exacting God which 
 leaves us with but a kindly God, a patient and a 
 pitiful, is a reaction which sends us over the edge 
 of the moral world. And it robs us of moral energy. 
 The fatherly God of recent religious liberalism is 
 indeed a conception for which we have to bless 
 Him when we look back on much that went before. 
 But the gain brings loss. It is a conception which by 
 itself tends to do less than justice even to God's love. 
 It tends to take the authority out of the Gospel, the 
 sinew out of preaching, the insight out of faith, the 
 stamina out of character, and discipline out of the 
 home. Such a view of God is not in sufficient moral 
 earnest though nothing could exceed the moral 
 eagerness of many who hold it. It does not 
 descend into hell nor ascend into heaven. It does not 
 pierce and destroy our self-satisfaction. It has 
 not spiritual depth, real and sincere as the piety is 
 of many of its advocates. It has not what I have 
 already called adequate moral mordancy. The 
 question at last is not of its particular advocates 
 but of the result that would follow if this become 
 the view of the whole church. "As is Thy majesty 
 so is Thy mercy," says the sage. But what I
 
 of the Cross 355 
 
 describe is a view of mercy which does justice 
 neither to the majesty of God, nor to the great- 
 ness of man. It has certainly no due sense of 
 the human tragedy, the moral tragedy of the 
 race. And, accordingly, it takes from preaching 
 the element so conspicuous by its absence to-day, 
 the element of imaginative greatness and moral 
 poignancy. It lacks the note of doom and 
 the searching realism of the greatest moral seers. 
 It is no more true to Shakespeare than to the Bible, 
 to Dante than to Paul. It robs faith of its energy, 
 its virility, its command, its compass, and its 
 solemnity. The temperature of religion falls. The 
 horizon of the soul contracts. Piety becomes 
 prosaic, action conventional, goodness domestic, and 
 mercy but kind. We have churches of the nicest, 
 kindest people, who have nothing apostolic or 
 missionary, who never knew the soul's despair or its 
 breathless gratitude. God becomes either a specta- 
 cular and inert God, or a God who acts amiably ; 
 with the strictness of affection at best, and not the 
 judgment of sanctity ; without the consuming fire, 
 and the great white throne. He is not dramatic in 
 the great sense of the word. He is not adequate 
 to history. He is not on the scale of the race. He 
 is the centre of a religious scene instead of the 
 protagonist in the moral drama of Man and Time. 
 The whole relation between God and man is re- 
 duced to attitude and not action to a pose, at 
 last. It is more sympathetic than searching. The 
 Cross becomes a parergon. We tend then to a
 
 356 The Moral Poignancy- 
 Christianity without force, passion, or effect ; a 
 suburban piety, homely and kindly but unfit to cope 
 with the actual moral case of the world, its giant 
 souls and hearty sinners. We cannot deal to any 
 purpose with the great sins or the great fearless 
 transgressors, the exceeding sinfulness and deep 
 damnation of the race. Our word is as a very lovely 
 song of one that has a pleasant voice and can play 
 well on an instrument. And the people hear, but 
 do not. They hear, but do not fear. They 
 are enchanted, but unchanged. Moral taste takes 
 the place of moral insight. Religious sensibility 
 stands where evangelical faith should be. Education 
 takes the place of conversion, a happy nature of the 
 new nature. Love takes the place of faith, uneasiness 
 of concern, regret of repentance, and criticism of 
 judgment. Sin becomes a thing of short weight. It 
 was largely our ignorance ; and when we thought of 
 God's anger we were misreading Him by reading 
 into Him our choleric selves. Our salvation be- 
 comes a somewhat common thing, and glorious 
 heavens or fiery hells die into the light of drab and 
 drowsy day. Much is done by enlightened views 
 in the way of correcting our conception of God, to 
 fit it into its place in the rest of knowledge, and 
 to lift it to a higher stage in the long religious 
 evolution. But it is all apologetic, all theosophic. 
 It aims at adjusting the grace of God to the natural 
 realm rather than interpreting it by our moral soul 
 and our moral coil. It is not theology ; it is not 
 religion, it is not vital godliness. It does not do
 
 of the Cross 357 
 
 much in the way of effectively restoring the actual 
 living relation between God and the soul. I am 
 compelled to recognize often that the most deeply 
 and practically pious people in the Church are among 
 those whose orthodox theology I do not share. 
 I even distrust it for the Church's future. But 
 they have the pearl of price. 
 
 To lay the stress of Christ's revelation elsewhere 
 than on the atoning Cross is to make Him no more 
 than a martyr, whose testimony was not given by 
 His death, but only sealed by it. His message must 
 then be sought in His words ; and His death only 
 certifies the strength of conviction behind them. 
 Or it may be sought in the spell of His character to 
 which His death but gives the impressive close. 
 
 But His message was of Himself, even through His 
 words and deeds. " Come unto Me," " Confess Me 
 if in the judgment you would have Me confess you." 
 The cup of cold water was blessed like the cup of the 
 supper for His sake. I need not add to these passages. 
 If, then, He was a martyr, He was a martyr to Him- 
 self. But a man who is a martyr to Himself on this 
 scale is either a megalomaniac egotist, or He is a 
 redeeming God. But Christ's long moral majesty 
 and influence with man forbid the former alter- 
 native, unless the whole race is a moral lunatic and 
 history a freak. He was God, therefore, and His 
 death was God in action. He was not simply the 
 witness of God's grace, He was its fact, its in-
 
 358 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 carnation. His death was not merely a seal to His 
 work ; it was His consummate work. It gathered 
 up His whole person. It was more than a confirm- 
 atory pledge, it was the effective sacrament of the 
 gracious God, with His real presence at its core. 
 Something was done there once for all, and the 
 subject doer of it was God. The real acting person 
 in the Cross was God. Christ's death was not the 
 sealing of a preacher's testimony ; it altered from 
 God's part the whole relation between God and man 
 for ever. It did not declare something, or prove 
 something, it achieved something decisive for 
 history, nay for eternity. 
 
 If it be otherwise, does it not but add another to 
 our moral problems, and the greatest of them all ? 
 If the holiest of men but suffered here the last 
 calamity, and if it was not the Holy God gaining the 
 last victory, then we have but another, and the 
 greatest, of the many problems that haunt us about 
 God's justice or love in history. The imaginative 
 greatness of the problem is no sufficient answer to 
 it. How could we read God's love in the sinless 
 Christ if His death was but another case of fate 
 submerging love. Even His resurrection would be 
 no proof of love's final victory had that victory not 
 been essentially won in His death. Resurrection might 
 then be no more than a personal reward for extreme 
 but futile fidelity. It would not seal love's final 
 victory for the race, it would not confirm redemption 
 on the world scale. The Cross would simply be the 
 last and worst case of the stoning of love's prophets.
 
 of the Cross 359 
 
 And we should be presented with the alternatives, 
 either that the supreme power was ignorant of it, 
 or indifferent ; or, if not indifferent, he was an angry 
 spectator ; and, in His anger, either helpless, or ac- 
 cumulating a wrath which would break, one day, upon 
 us in avenging judgment and nothing more. This is 
 a dilemma which we escape only if we can regard 
 Christ, not as the witness, nor even as the mere aesthetic 
 incarnation of God's holy love, but as that love itself 
 in its crucial moral act of eternal judgment and grace. 
 
 
 
 If sin be man's fatal act the Cross is God's vital 
 act. But it is action we have to do with. It 
 is will meeting will, yet not in transaction but 
 interaction. It is redemption mastering per- 
 dition. What slew Christ was an act of man, 
 but it was for Him much more than an in- 
 fliction and a fate of which He was the passive 
 martyr. It was much more than man's act and 
 Christ's fate. It was an act on His side much more 
 even than on theirs ; and an act, not of resignation 
 but of conquest absolute over both His own fate 
 and ours. He was more active in His death than 
 was the world, the fate, the sin, which inflicted it. 
 Rather, when we view things on the largest scale, 
 we must reverse the positions. It was not His 
 fate and the world's act, it was His act and the 
 world's fate. The world's condemnation of Him 
 was His condemnation of the world but a condem- 
 nation unto forgiveness and salvation. In the
 
 360 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 Cross the world was doomed to salvation. All 
 were shut up unto sin, that there might be mercy on 
 all. The world's one sin was made by grace the 
 world's one hope. 
 
 It was the world's one sin ; and it was so because 
 it was committed against the one central visitation 
 of man by God. The crucifying of Christ was the 
 greatest crime of history, not in itself, but because 
 it was inflicted on the Holiest. It is not the tra- 
 vesty of justice that is so unique, it is not the crime 
 against humanity. Against humanity alone other 
 crimes may have been as great or greater political, 
 papal, dynastic, Napoleonic, Russian crimes. But 
 this was the crime against the unique action of the 
 Holy God, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And 
 therefore to Israel as a national unity it is un- 
 forgiven. It was man's sin indeed, but it was 
 through Israel. And for the salvation of the whole 
 the offending member was cut off. Israel died as 
 the body, that its spirit, as Christ, might conquer 
 mankind. 
 
 As, therefore, the one sin was consummate in the 
 act of man the one salvation can be nothing less than 
 the act of God. The death of Christ completes by 
 action God's love embodied in His person. It is the 
 one thing that gives His person its full scope and 
 effect. And it does so as a decisive creative act, an 
 act of God and not merely a martyr act. It copes 
 with man's act, it does not but endure it meekly. 
 It was not merely the evidence of a divine love, 
 sensitive yet unpierced at the centre by sin. It was
 
 of the Cross 361 
 
 the deed of a love stung to the core, stung to act for 
 its life, to act once for all and make an end 
 
 
 
 II. But in His death Christ not only acted and 
 redeemed, He suffered and atoned. 1 He acted 
 as only a divine sufferer could. His act of sacrifice 
 became an endurance of judgment. Nothing else 
 than atonement could do full justice to Love. 
 Love might do much, but if it did not suffer, and 
 suffer not only pain but judgment, it could not 
 do its divine utmost. That is to say, it might 
 have contact with us, and blessed contact, but it 
 would be short of identification with us. It could 
 not enter into our self-condemnation. But surely 
 love divine could not stop short of such an identifi- 
 cation with our suffering as made Christ's suffering 
 judicial. Must a divine love not go so far with us 
 and for us as to enter the wrath of holiness ? Even 
 that was not beyond Christ's love. He was made 
 sin. God did not punish Christ, but Christ entered 
 the dark shadow of God's penalty on sin. We 
 must press the results of God's holy love in com- 
 pletely identifying Himself with us. Holiness is 
 not holiness till it go out in love, seek the sinner 
 in grace, and react on his sin by judging it. But 
 love is not divine identification with us till it become 
 sacrifice. Nor is the identification with us complete 
 
 1 1 do not say much in these lectures about the reconciling 
 effect of His work upon men. That may not be understood 
 as it should, but it is better understood to-day than the 
 other aspects of has work.
 
 362 The Moral Poignancy- 
 till the sacrifice become judgment, till our Saviour 
 share our self condemnation, our fatal judgment oi 
 ourselves in God's name. The priest, in his 
 grace, becomes the victim, and completes his con- 
 fession of God's holiness by meeting its action 
 as judgment. To forgive sin he must bear sin. 
 
 As He took the suffering He took and bore the 
 sin that caused it the sin and not its consequences 
 only. If he could not confess, sin, He could and 
 did confess, in experience and act, the holiness of 
 God in its reaction on sin. He confessed the 
 holiness, but the guilt He could not confess hi the 
 same sense. He could but realize it, bear it, as only 
 the holy could, and so expose it hi all its sinfulness. 
 The revelation of love is a revelation no less of 
 sin, because the love is holy love. That holy 
 confession in act of the injured holiness, amid the 
 conditions of sin and judgment, was the satisfaction 
 He made to God. And the necessity for it lay in 
 God's holy name. It was thus that He offered to 
 God, and acted on God. He not only acted from 
 God on man, but from man on God. I do not 
 mean that He changed God's feeling to the race. 
 That was grace always, the grace that sent Him. 
 But He did change the relation between God 
 and man. The reconciliation of one always means 
 a great change for both parties. He made com- 
 munion possible again on both sides. To do this 
 He had to bear the wrath, the judgment, the 
 privation of God. He could not otherwise enact 
 and reveal love, and do the revelation justice.
 
 of the Cross 363 
 
 The more love there is in a holy God, the more 
 wrath. Sin, in the sinner He loves, against the 
 law of His own nature, which He loves better still, 
 could not leave Him either indifferent, or merely 
 pitiful. For Love would then desert its own 
 holiness. And being holy, God's concern with sin is 
 more than pity, and more than pain. It is holiness 
 in earnest reaction. It is wrath unto judgment. 
 That wrath Christ felt, not indeed as personal 
 resentment, but as the dark valley, as the horror 
 of thick darkness. And He felt, moreover, that 
 it was God's will for Him, not indeed inflicted, so 
 far as His conscience was concerned, but still laid 
 on Him by God through His sympathy with us. 
 It was not merely a darkening of His vision of the 
 Father ; it was desertion by the Father hi sympathy 
 with the complete fulfilment of their common task. 
 As one might in certain circumstances say " I love 
 you, but I must leave you," " I love you, but for 
 the sake of all that is at issue I may not show it." 
 And it was by recognizing, honouring, this very 
 desertion as the wise, righteous, loving will of God, 
 that Christ converted it for us all into a new and 
 deeper communion. It was thus He approved 
 His Godhead, and achieved the Redemption. 
 The real Incarnation lay not in Christ's being made 
 flesh for us, but in His being made sin. And the 
 dereliction was the real descent into hell, the 
 bottoming of salvation. Here beneath the depth 
 of sin is the deeper depth of God. " If I make My 
 bed in hell, Thou art there."
 
 364 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 Love, then, must go to entire identification (short of 
 absorption). And Christ, in identifying Himself 
 divinely with sinful man, had to take the sin's 
 consequence, and especially its judgment, else the 
 identification would not be complete, and the love 
 would come short. He must somehow identify 
 Himself in a sympathetic way, even with man's 
 self-condemnation which is the reflection of his judg- 
 ment by God. I need hardly allude to the familiar 
 illustrations in the shame which innocent people 
 feel through the crime of a kinsman. If the chief 
 function of Christ's love was to represent man in a 
 solidary way, a priestly way, He must make offering 
 to God ; He must offer to God's holiness by a holy 
 obedience, and not merely to God's love by loving 
 response. He could not experience sin, for then 
 He would be short of holy identification with God ; 
 yet He must experience and endure God's wrath 
 against sin, else His love would be short of sympa- 
 thetic identification with us. And unless he felt 
 God's holy wrath and reaction against sin, He 
 could not show forgiving love in full. No one 
 can forgive in full who does not feel the fullness of 
 the offence. To feel the fullness of the offence 
 as the Holiest must, is also to feel the wrath the 
 Holiest feels. But for one in perfect sympathy 
 with man to feel what the Holiest feels is to feel 
 the divine wrath, not as its holy subject only, but 
 as its human object. Christ could not show the 
 power of forgiving love in full unless He felt the 
 weight of God's wrath in full, i.e. not God's temper
 
 of the Cross 365 
 
 but God's judgment; which for Him was God's 
 withdrawal, the experience of God's total negation 
 of the sin He was made. Grace could only be 
 perfectly revealed in an act of judgment though 
 inflicted on Himself by the Judge. Atonement 
 to God must be made, and it was only possible 
 from God. 
 
 No one can feel more than I do that if all this be 
 not absolute truth it is sheer nonsense. So it sifts men. 
 
 
 
 This aspect of the matter is not indeed vital to 
 personal Christianity, but it is to the Church's 
 total message and to the final prospects of Christ- 
 ianity. It presents the last issue in the moral 
 war of God and man. It is essential to a full 
 interpretation of God's love. God so loved the 
 world, not quantitatively but qualitatively, not 
 only so intensely, but in such a unique manner, 
 that He gave His Son to be a propitiation. It is 
 the provision of a propitiation that is the distinctive 
 mark of God's love as transcending humane pity 
 or affection in holy grace. Surely it must be so. 
 The greater the love the closer it must come to life, 
 and to the interior of life. It can the less ignore 
 the realities of life. It does not leave us to our- 
 selves, in a careless affection ; it enters our ways, 
 and sounds our depths, and measures all our 
 tragic case. It has a comprehending, and not 
 merely a kindly pity. It does not merely feel for 
 our case, it assumes it wholly. Therefore, it must 
 regard the last reality of sin, and deal with it accord-
 
 366 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 ing to all the circumstances especially those 
 visible to holiness alone, and to us in proportion 
 as we are redeemed into holiness. So dealing 
 with sin it .forgives it ; and forgives it effectually 
 not by way of amnesty, not by mere pardon, not 
 by way of mere mercy upon our repentance, but 
 by the radical way of redemption ; not by indulg- 
 ence, not by treating it as a matter of ignorance, 
 weakness, misfortune, but as the crime of our free- 
 dom, grave in proportion to our freedom, most 
 heinous in the face of the grace that gives our 
 freedom. And as grace is far more than indulgence, 
 so sin is far more than indifference. It is the 
 nature of indifference to go on to become hate, if it be 
 given time and occasion. The mercy, therefore, comes 
 as no matter of paternal course, as no calm act of 
 a parent too great and wise to be wounded by a 
 child's ways. God is fundamentally affected by sin. 
 He is stung and to the core. It does not simply 
 try Him. It challenges His whole place in the 
 moral world. It puts Him on His trial as God. 
 It is, in its nature, an assault on His life. Its 
 total object is to unseat Him. It has no part 
 whatever in His purpose. It hates and kills Him. 
 It is His total negation and death. It is not His 
 other but An other. It is the one thing in the 
 world that lies outside reconciliation, whether you 
 mean by that the process or the act. It cannot be 
 taken up into the supreme unity. It can only be 
 destroyed. It drives Him not merely to action but 
 to a passion of action, to action for His life, to action
 
 of the Cross 367 
 
 in suffering unto death. And what makes Him 
 suffer most is not its results but its guilt. It has 
 a guilt in proportion to the holy love it scorns. 
 The greater the love the greater the guilt. 
 And the closer the love the greater the reaction 
 against the sin, the greater the wrath. Hence 
 the problem of reconciliation both of God and 
 man a problem so integral to Christianity, and 
 so foreign to even the finest kinds of theism. It is 
 not the reconciliation of man with his world, the 
 establishment of his moral personality against nature. 
 That were mere apologetic. But it is the reconciliation 
 of man within himself and God. The channel of holy 
 love must be the bearer, the victim of holy wrath. To 
 bear holy love to us He must bear holy wrath for us. 
 The forgiver of sin must realize inwardly the whole 
 moral quality of the guilt as Christ did in His 
 dereliction in the Cross. Inwardly he must realize 
 it, experimentally, not intellectually. No otherwise 
 could a God, a love, be revealed, which would 
 not let us go, yet was in absolute moral earnest 
 about the holy. 
 
 It may freely be granted also that the reconciliation 
 of God (by Himself in Christ) is not very explicit 
 in the New Testament for the same reasons which 
 forbid the missionary preaching to his heathen on 
 such a theme. The New Testament represents but the 
 missionary stage of Christian thought and action. 
 But the idea is not therefore untrue. If not explicit 
 in the New Testament, it is integral to the Gospel. 
 It is involved in the moral quality of holy forgiveness 
 
 \
 
 368 The Moral Poignancy 
 
 and in its divine psychology. In this respect it is 
 like the full doctrine of the Trinity, and many 
 another. The holiness of God, moreover, does 
 not explicitly occupy the same supreme position 
 in the New Testament as it does hi the Old. Yet it 
 is the very Godhead of God. It is the essence of 
 Christ's idea of God. And ( I think I have said) it 
 really receives in the New Testament a position above 
 any it had in the Old Testament. For it forms 
 much more than an attribute of God. In the Holy 
 Spirit it becomes a constituent element in the 
 Godhead, on its way to become at last a coequal 
 person in the Trinity. 
 
 
 
 To handle this matter means at the last a treatise. 
 I have no such purpose. I wish but to point out that 
 the expiatory idea of Christianity which is concerned 
 with the notion of satisfaction, is quite necessary to 
 do justice to the conception of God as love, and to 
 the closeness of His identification with us. It is 
 not an outgrown notion, a relic of moral immaturity, 
 like the patristic idea of Christ cheating Satan 
 by His death, or even the Anselmic satisfaction 
 of God's honour. I have sought to construe the 
 satisfaction to a holy God as consisting only in a 
 counterpart and equal holiness rendered under the 
 conditions of sin and judgment. And especially I 
 have wished to indicate that an expiatory atone- 
 ment gives expression, by its searching moral real- 
 ism, and its grasp both of holiness and sin, to an
 
 of the Cross 369 
 
 element in Christianity which has a crucial effect 
 on the depth, wealth, and moral penetration oi 
 the preaching of the Gospel. The matter is, of 
 course, a doctrine of the Church, and not a test oi 
 personal Christianity. It is not a Quicunque vult. 
 I will only venture to say I never knew my sin so 
 long as I but saw Christ suffering for me never 
 until I saw Him under its judgment and realized 
 that the chastisement of my peace was upon Him. 
 
 There is something lacking to our preaching, by 
 general consent. It lacks the note, the energy of 
 spiritual profundity and poignancy as distinct from 
 spiritual sympathy, and of moral majesty as distinct 
 from ethical interest. And I am convinced that this 
 is ultimately due to the loss of conviction as to a 
 real, objective, and finished redemption, and to 
 the disappearance from current faith of a real 
 relation to the holiness and the wrath of God. The 
 note, of judgment has gone out of common piety. 
 It is not here a question of either denouncing or 
 unchurching those who cannot recognize an expiatory 
 element in our Salvation. I would simply express 
 the conviction that their interpretation of the 
 Cross does less than justice to the Gospel, and 
 cannot continue to carry the full Kr/pvy/^a of 
 the Church. It has not the promise of the moral 
 future of the world. It is not sufficiently charged 
 with repentance and remission. It does not break 
 men to Christ, but only train them, or at most 
 bend them. And it does not embody that break 
 with the world which, after all, has been a leading 
 note in all the great victories of the Cross. 
 
 FJ-. 24
 
 Epilogue 
 f 
 
 Certain things, I trust, will have appeared among 
 others, in the course of our journey. 
 
 1. Preaching to the Church must recognize more 
 fully the element of judgment, and preaching to the 
 world the element of love. Judgment must begin 
 at the house of God. We must preach more severely 
 to the Church, and more pitifully to the world. We 
 must make the demand on the Church heavier 
 than the demand on the world. 
 
 2. There is nothing the Church needs more 
 profoundly, though there are many things it needs 
 more loudly, than an ethical conversion in regard 
 to its great doctrines. These early went astray in 
 a metaphysical direction. Metaphysic we must 
 have, but even to this day the whole ethic of 
 the Churches suffers incalculably from the long 
 prepossession by metaphysical instead of moral 
 interests, by pursuing the notion of substance in- 
 stead of subject, by intellect cultivated at the cost 
 of conscience. This appears in the interminable, 
 and often barren, strifes about the nature of 
 Christ in the Church's early stage, and of the 
 sacrament hi the later. And in inverse proportion 
 
 871
 
 372 Epilogue 
 
 to the engrossment of ability with these insoluble 
 problems (or rather with their pursuit on insoluble 
 lines) has been the moral insight and energy of 
 the Church, especially on the public scale. So 
 that its idea of justice has become a by- word. 
 Ecclesiastical justice is sport for the Philistines. 
 The justice of a church court or of ecclesiastical 
 politicians is a matter of mockery. In the great 
 churches the Catholic, Orthodox, or Established 
 men of personal honour and uprightness lose the 
 sense of social justice as soon as a question arises 
 which threatens the interest of their Church. They 
 are perfectly sincere, and equally incapable of 
 grasping the just thing. It is a hereditary or 
 ' miasmatic ' paralysis, and not a personal vice. 
 Something is very wrong in some vital place. 
 And the deep root of it all lies in the Church's 
 long moral neglect of the great justification by God. 
 The mighty moral meaning there, original to itself 
 and imperial for all else, has been submerged, 
 where it should have been elucidated, by the 
 maxims of human instincts, utilities, and codes. 
 The intellectualism of the Church, and the counter- 
 intellectualism of its critics, have sucked the sap 
 and vigour from its ethic. Its conscience has not 
 been educated at its Cross. Its eye, from peering 
 into inaccessible heavens, has seen the moral values 
 upon earth only through great flakes of darkness. 
 Holiness has become mere sanctity, and righteous- 
 ness but justice which is less equity than legal- 
 ity.
 
 Epilogue 373 
 
 So that the very institution which was founded 
 upon God's supreme act of public justice the 
 Church has become the dullest to public justice of 
 any institution, and as selfish as any association for 
 the defence of a trade, a monopoly, or an ascend- 
 ancy. From the point of view of Christian ethic 
 there is no word more base-born than that word 
 ascendancy. 
 
 3. The more ethically we construe the Gospel 
 the more are we driven upon the holiness of God. 
 And the deeper we enter that sacred ground the 
 more we are seized by the necessity (for the very 
 maintenance of our spiritual life) of a real and 
 objective atonement offered to a holy God by the 
 equal and satisfying holiness of Christ under the 
 conditions of sin and judgment. 
 
 4. We must be critically liberal without ceasing 
 to be theological. We must be free in our treat- 
 ment of history, whether as doctrine or as Bible. 
 But we must be firm on our faith's base in history. 
 However we treat the Bible we must be positive in 
 our treatment of the Bible's Gospel. We must re- 
 duce demand as to the Bible, and press it as to the 
 Gospel. That way lies the future. That method 
 meets the actual present situation. A mere abstract 
 liberalism without content or responsibility, 
 liberty to go anywhere and believe anything, is 
 pseudoliberalism. What makes us free at the 
 last ? For what are we made free ? Not for 
 certain views broad or narrow. But for the faith 
 of a positive Gospel, understood as I have defined
 
 374 Epilogue 
 
 it, modified, perhaps, but certainly unchanged. 
 Liberty of view is now assured. What is not secure 
 is liberty of soul. And the only thing that can secure 
 it is the faith of a positive Gospel. Liberty of view is 
 a matter of mere science. It is religious liberty that 
 concerns the public most. And that is only the fruit 
 of the Gospel. 
 
 Nothing in the world is so precious as faith, hope 
 and love. But the preacher of the Gospel must be 
 sure on what abysses these rest and abide.

 
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