J . l\. 
 
 ElIJbri ' 
 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE WITNESS OF GOD 
 
 FAITH 
 
 TWO LAY SERMONS 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 T. H. GREEN, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE AND WHYTE's PROFESSOR OF MORAL 
 PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTICE 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 ARNOLD TOYNBEE, M.A. 
 
 Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK : 15 EAST i6 th STREET 
 1889 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
' * .X 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET 5QUARB 
 LONDON 
 
BX 
 
 5\ ^ *3 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CMTTFORNIA 
 \ o> G/Q SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE two Sermons composing this volume, 
 though previously printed for private circula- 
 tion, are now published for the first time. 
 They were delivered in a college lecture-room 
 to undergraduate members of Balliol College, 
 Oxford. The first sermon was read at the 
 beginning of 1870, shortly after Mr. Green 
 had been made a tutor of the College. He 
 was the first layman who had filled the office 
 of tutor, and he had to consider whether he 
 would follow a custom maintained by former 
 clerical tutors, of speaking on a religious 
 subject to their pupils on the evening before 
 the administration of Holy Communion. 
 
iv Preface. 
 
 After some hesitation he resolved to use 
 the opportunity to meet some of the religious 
 difficulties which haunt the minds of men 
 who are beginning the study of philosophy 
 and the laws of historical evidence. He met 
 these difficulties not merely by the state- 
 ment of a metaphysical position, but by 
 enforcing, with all the impressive energy of 
 a non-sacerdotal teacher, the practical cha- 
 racter of the Christian life. The reader of 
 these sermons, perplexed, perhaps, by ab- 
 stract argument, may not at once detect the 
 buried life of spiritual passion which burns 
 beneath, but those who heard the first 
 sermon have never forgotten the power with 
 which the speaker dealt in a few words with 
 the common theme of sin and vice. 
 
 Though not present when the first sermon 
 was delivered, I well remember the delivery 
 of the second ; the prayer which preceded it, 
 and the stillness with which, for not far short 
 
Preface. v 
 
 of two hours, we listened to a discourse 
 which, even in its most metaphysical passages, 
 seemed to summon us to a new spiritual life. 
 The second sermon was written in 1878, not 
 for Mr. Green's pupils alone, but for the 
 senior members of the whole College. At 
 this time, though taking a less active part 
 in the tuition of the College, he was still 
 deeply interested in meeting the religious 
 wants which he had tried to satisfy eight 
 years before. The use of Biblical phrases in 
 his first sermon he found had caused some 
 perplexity ; and though the intellectual posi- 
 tion of the two sermons is the same, in the 
 second he purposely discards Scriptural lan- 
 guage. Much as he reverenced the Bible, 
 of which he once characteristically said it 
 was the only book he really knew well, he 
 was determined that his devotion to it should 
 never, even in appearance, overpower his 
 intellectual conscience. 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 Like more than one famous book of the 
 present epoch, these sermons have for their 
 aim the separation of the spiritual from the 
 supernatural. Mr. Green sought to establish 
 in them an intellectual position for the 
 Christian faith which should not be called in 
 question by every advance in historical evi- 
 dence and in physical science. It is with no 
 eagerness to impair the existing religious 
 creeds that he insists on the incorrectness of 
 the theories on which they are professedly 
 based ; other thinkers have assailed the 
 orthodox foundations of religion to overthrow 
 it, Mr. Green assailed them to save it. 
 
 [NOTE. Mr. Green in his last illness left the 
 two sermons which are here printed in the hands 
 of Mr. Arnold Toynbee, his friend and former 
 pupil, to be dealt with at his discretion. Within 
 a year Mr. Toynbee has also been taken away. 
 It had been his intention to publish the sermons 
 with an Introduction, elucidating such parts of 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 them as might be difficult to readers unaccustomed 
 to metaphysical thought and language. This In- 
 troduction he was never able to complete, but at 
 the beginning of his illness he expressed the wish 
 that the publication of the sermons should not be 
 delayed, and that as few words as possible of his 
 own should be prefixed to them. The above 
 Preface is an extract from what he had written. 
 C. M. T.] 
 
THE WITNESS OF GOD. 
 
 i COR. v. 7, 8. 
 
 Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us : therefore let 
 us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither 
 with the leaven of malice and wickedness ; but 
 with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 
 (Read also the previous part of the Epistle.) 
 
 T N the chapter from which this text is 
 * taken, St. Paul has been speaking 
 hurriedly, as of a thing not to be dwelt upon 
 of a case of incest which had occurred 
 among the Corinthian Christians. Earlier in 
 the Epistle he had rebuked them more at 
 large for the contentions among them, for 
 the Judaic or anti-Judaic partisanship which, 
 here as elsewhere (Gal. v. 20), he traces to the 
 same root of carnality as what are commonly 
 called sins of the flesh. ' Whereas there is 
 among you envying and strife and divisions 
 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 are ye not carnal and walk as men ? ' All 
 the while, it seems, they were boasting of 
 their privilege as ' spiritual,' as ' free,' as ' wise 
 in Christ.' St. Paul fully admits their privi- 
 lege. Ideally they were the temple of God, 
 and the Spirit of God dwelt in them, commu- 
 nicating a wisdom which the natural or carnal 
 man could not receive. They had the mind 
 of Christ, in virtue of which they might search 
 all things, even the deep things of God. In 
 the risen Lord, whose was the earth and the 
 fulness thereof, all things were lawful unto 
 them. All things were theirs, whether the 
 world, or life, or death, or things present, 
 or things to come. Yet the very assertion of 
 the privilege, as the Corinthians asserted it, 
 belied it. They made it a ground of conceit, 
 of selfishness, even of sensual licence, and in 
 so doing showed that it was not actually 
 theirs. In the exaltation of their new deli- 
 verance they were losing the moral result 
 which gave that deliverance its specific value. 
 The essential opposition, according to 
 St. Paul's conception, between the wisdom of 
 God which he preached and the religions 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 which it was to supersede, lay in its character 
 as at once a gift and a universal gift. It was 
 hus opposed alike to the Gentile and Jewish 
 religions, and to the wisdom of the world. 
 The Gentile religions were inventions of men, 
 ' changing the glory of the incorruptible God 
 into an image made like to corruptible man, 
 and to birds and four-footed beasts and creep- 
 ing things.' In the nature of the case they 
 were exclusive. They rested on fictitious 
 systems of priesthood or caste or local wor- 
 ship, limited by time and place, by national 
 superiority, even by the forces of nature. 
 Those who lived under them were not yet 
 properly moralised. They had not realised 
 their spiritual community ; or, in Pauline 
 phraseology, they were in 'bondage under 
 the elements of the world.' Nor had the 
 Jews escaped this bondage. They had lived 
 under a system which was indeed, in one 
 sense, the gift of God, as having a special 
 paedagogic purpose in His counsels. The Law 
 was properly a schoolmaster to bring them 
 to Christ ; but in so far as its temporary dis- 
 ciplinary character was lost sight of so far 
 
 B 2 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 as it was made a ground of national exclu- 
 siveness, and its observance a matter of per- 
 sonal pride it cut its votaries off from the 
 righteousness of God, which is essentially a 
 derived, communicated, and universal right- 
 eousness ; not of works, but of grace ; not for 
 a peculiar people, but for all men. They 
 were living, not in the freedom and self- 
 abandonment of the Spirit, but in the exclu- 
 siveness and selfishness of the flesh. Nay, as 
 observing days and months and times and 
 years, they were like the heathen nature- 
 worshippers, under the elements of the world. 
 Their religion was not properly a moral one, 
 but still determined by nature and sense. 
 
 The ' wisdom of the world ' was weighted 
 by a like burden of the flesh. Its fault did 
 not lie in its aspiration, or in any inherent 
 impotence of man to know the things of God. 
 On the contrary, ' that which might be known 
 of God ' His intelligible nature ' was mani- 
 fest in man ' (Rom. i. 19), if man would but 
 open his eyes to see it : and the effort to 
 know him fully in whom were hid the trea- 
 sures of wisdom and knowledge, as St. Paul 
 
T/ie Witness of God. 
 
 tells us of himself, was the labour of his life. 
 (Phil. iii. 10 ; Col. ii. 3.) But the aspiration 
 after knowledge and God is one thing, the 
 aspiration of self-conceit another ; and, in the 
 eyes of St. Paul, the intellectual movement of 
 the Gentile world had been of the latter sort. 
 As the Jew, going about to establish his own 
 righteousness, had not attained unto the 
 righteousness of God, so the Greek, seeking 
 for a wisdom which should be his own dis- 
 covery, not a revelation of God's Spirit (i Cor. 
 ii. 10), had lost at every step what he seemed 
 to be finding. The wisdom which he gained 
 was in word, not in power. It had no power 
 over his will. It helped him not to attain to 
 the new life, to the emancipation from sense, 
 to the resurrection of the dead. On his heart, 
 in the study of his poets and philosophers, as 
 upon the Jew's in the reading of Moses, the 
 veil remained the veil of self-regard and 
 sensuous judgment Poring on himself, and 
 looking askance at his fellow, his face was 
 not open to the glory of the Lord, and hence 
 was not changed into its image. When that 
 glory was manifested in a body of humiliation, 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 in the baseness of the cross, blinded by the 
 shows of flesh, he could not recognise it. It 
 was foolishness to him. If the princes of this 
 world crucified the Lord of Glory, its wisdom 
 or, as we should say, its enlightenment and 
 cultivation had been no wiser. It had taken 
 sides with the princes, and thought scorn of 
 the Crucified. Till its own flesh had been 
 crucified till it had ceased to be a wisdom 
 of the world, i.e., a self-seeking wisdom, and 
 become a wisdom of God, it could do no 
 other. 
 
 To this vain wisdom of the world, as 
 represented by Greek enlightenment ; to its 
 self-righteousness, as represented by the 
 zealous for the Law ; to its sensual religiosity, 
 as represented by the impure worships de- 
 scribed in the first chapter of the Epistle to 
 the Romans, St. Paul opposes the wisdom, 
 righteousness, and sanctification which Christ 
 ' is made unto us of God.' Can we penetrate 
 behind the cloak of theological artifice with 
 which this language has been overlaid, to a 
 meaning true, permanently, and for us ? 
 
 Christ is to St. Paul, essentially, if not 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 solely, the crucified and risen One. What- 
 ever he knew of the life of Jesus of Nazareth 
 and there is no reason to think that he 
 knew anything of its details was, at any 
 rate, absorbed and lost in his contemplation 
 of the finishing act by which it became purely 
 spiritual and heavenly of that death unto 
 sin in virtue of which Christ lived eternally 
 unto God. The death and rising again of 
 the Christ, as he conceived them, were not 
 separate and independent events. They were 
 two sides of the same act an act which, 
 relatively to sin, to the flesh, to the old man, 
 to all which separates from God, is death ; 
 but which, just for that reason, is the birth of 
 a new life relatively to God. This act, again, 
 though St. Paul doubtless identified it upon 
 its several sides with the crucifixion of Jesus 
 upon Mount Calvary, and His resurrection on 
 the third day, was not to him an historical 
 event, in the past now as beforehand it had 
 been in the future. Though they are not 
 St. Paul's own words, yet it is quite in his 
 spirit to say that Christ was slain from the 
 foundation of the world. Christ was that 
 
8 The Witness of God. 
 
 Second Man, who is the Lord from Heaven. 
 He was God's power and God's wisdom. God 
 was in Him, so that what he did, God did. 
 A death unto life, a life out of death, must, 
 then, be in some way the essence of the 
 divine nature must be an act which, though 
 exhibited once for all in the crucifixion and 
 resurrection of Christ, was yet eternal the 
 act of God himself. For that very reason, 
 however, it was one perpetually re-enacted, 
 and to be re-enacted, by man. If Christ died 
 for all, all died in Him : all were buried in 
 His grave to be all made alive in His resur- 
 rection. It is so far as the Second Man,, 
 which is from heaven, and whose act is God's, 
 thus lives and dies in us, that he becomes to 
 us a wisdom of God, which is righteousness, 
 sanctification, and redemption. In other 
 words, He constitutes in us a new intellec- 
 tual consciousness, which transforms the will, 
 and is the source of a new moral life. In 
 considering how this is, we shall find the 
 practical realisation and with it the expla- 
 nation and necessity of that conception of 
 the resurrection as eternally wrought by God, 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 which might otherwise seem abstract or 
 mystical. 
 
 The wisdom of the world comes to nought, 
 because it puts its own pretension between 
 itself and God. It will not die that it may 
 live. It will not renounce the sensual view 
 of things and cancel the conceit which grows 
 from this view, that it may open itself to the 
 true knowledge, which can only be received 
 as a revelation of God. This wisdom repre- 
 sents the mental state of what St. Paul calls 
 the carnal or natural man. It is overcome by 
 the exhibition in Christ of that other mental 
 state, in which self is renounced that God may 
 be known. This is the mind of the Spirit. 
 If it were a condition, however, which the 
 individual could attain by his own effort, it 
 would merely be the glorification of the 
 wisdom of the world. It would be a self- 
 renunciation which would be the acme of 
 self-seeking. On the other hand, presented 
 as the continuous act of God Himself, as the 
 eternal self-surrender of the Divine Son to the 
 Father, it is for us and may be in us, but is 
 not of us. Nay, it is just because not of us, 
 
io The Witness of God. 
 
 that it may be in us. Because it is the mind 
 of Christ, and Christ is God's, in the contem- 
 plation of it we are taken out of ourselves ; 
 we slip the natural man and appropriate that 
 mind which we behold. Constrained by God's 
 manifested love, we cease to be our own, that 
 Christ may become ours. We are conformed 
 to the image of the Son, we receive the spirit 
 of adoption, we have the wisdom of God. 
 
 Thus that which Stoicism could not do, 
 ' in that it was weak through the flesh/ is 
 achieved in Christ. The true wisdom which 
 comes with self-abandonment is attained with- 
 out neutralisation by personal pride developed 
 in the process of attainment. To him who 
 thus gains it, it means a change of ideas, a 
 new view of the world, which gradually re- 
 fashions his life. ' Old things are passed 
 away, behold all things are become new. 
 Even upon the natural world he looks with 
 altered eyes. It is no longer to him a field 
 for complacent curiosity to roam in, but the 
 first stage of God's revelation of Himself. He 
 finds the whole creation groaning and travail- 
 ing after God ; dying because it cannot con- 
 
The Witness of God. 1 1 
 
 tain Him, yet waiting for, and leading up to 
 His manifestation. (Rom. viii. 19, 22.) Much 
 more in the conception of the moral life, as 
 the process in which Christ's death unto the 
 flesh that he might live unto God is evermore 
 repeated, has he a new key to unlock its 
 secrets. Thus receiving Christ as his wisdom, 
 and in the new consciousness thus constituted, 
 he is redeemed from the bondage of sin, re- 
 deemed from the curse of the Law, because 
 he is redeemed from himself. The bondage 
 of sin is that which no discipline, no reforma- 
 tion of the habits, no observance of the Law 
 can break. The observance of the Law carries 
 its own curse, which is this, that the very act 
 of its fulfilment breeds a new selfishness, and 
 with it a new sin. From this curse there is no 
 redemption but in the substitution of Christ, 
 the New Man from heaven, for the old. Our 
 mind must become Christ's, as Christ is God's. 
 Our very self-consciousness, crucified with 
 Him, must cease to be our own. Only then 
 can our works, as being of God that worketh 
 in us, work out the true salvation, the deliver- 
 ance from the self-seeking self. Thus we 
 
1 2 The Witness of God. 
 
 gain a righteousness which is not after the 
 Law, even the righteousness of God ; which, 
 because it is of God, unlike the self-elaborated 
 righteousness of the Jew, instead of exalting 
 men in conceit against each other, blends all 
 in a common society of the redeemed. Thus 
 finally we are sanctified. Bearing each other's 
 burdens, as brethren in the Lord, we fulfil 
 the Law. The blood of sprinkling is upon 
 us, the crucified and risen Christ is in us. 
 The self-abandoning self-consciousness, which 
 knows itself as of God, ' flows through our 
 deeds and makes them pure.' 
 
 In the above I have tried to reproduce 
 with as much exactness as modern phraseo- 
 logy admits of, and without any conventional 
 use of theological language, the essence of 
 St. Paul's belief in Christ. So soon as we are 
 brought face to face with it, the question in- 
 evitably suggests itself Is not this concep- 
 tion of an eternal act of death into life, 
 manifested in Christ and to be shared in by 
 us, a mere piece of doubtful metaphysics, so 
 hard to be understood that Christendom, 
 since St. Paul's time, has been busy in ex- 
 
The Witness of God. 1 3 
 
 plaining it away, reducing the eternal act into 
 a merely historical one, and the substitution 
 of the new man for the old within us to a 
 forensic substitution without us of Christ's 
 merits for our sins, of the penalty which He 
 bore for that due to us? If the conception 
 has some metaphysical truth, what is its re- 
 lation to life ? In what does the man who 
 has it, and with it (according to our interpre- 
 tation of St. Paul) the wisdom of God, differ 
 practically from the man to whom it is un- 
 meaning? Do we not in making righteous- 
 ness and sanctification issue out of such a 
 conception, reduce these themselves to mere 
 ideas or empty phrases ? 
 
 To this I answer, that all moral action 
 begins from ideas. If it did not, the effort to 
 persuade men should cease to-morrow. To 
 say then that Christ, as the wisdom of God, 
 is an idea, or form of intellectual conscious- 
 ness and what else can St. Paul mean when 
 he says that Christ is the Spirit, which God 
 gives us (I Cor. ii. 10; 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18)? 
 is the very reverse of reducing Him to an im- 
 potent abstraction. An idea may indeed, to 
 
1 4 . The Witness of God. 
 
 use St. Paul's phrase, be in word, but it may 
 also be in power. It is in word only, if we 
 regard it as our own invention and glory in 
 it as such ; it is in power, if it is the com- 
 munication of God, and as such received by 
 us. Now this consciousness, of which the pre- 
 sence in us is the presence of Christ this per- 
 petual withdrawal from sense and self-regard 
 into God just because it is the presence of 
 Christ, is the communication of God. It 
 does not thus cease to be intellectual, a mode 
 of thought, an idea. St. Paul constantly 
 speaks of it in terms appropriate to the in- 
 tellect, such as ' wisdom ' and ' knowledge.' 
 But it is a mode of thought which is from 
 eternity, which is of God, not of us, of which 
 we may partake, but which we do not origi- 
 nate. Therefore it is ' in power.' It is meta- 
 physical, if you like ; or, as St. Paul puts it, 
 it is of faith. It has no representative in the 
 world we see, as we see it. No life that we 
 can live is a full expression of it. St. Paul 
 himself, having already in some sort the mind 
 of Christ, yet counted not himself to have 
 attained it. To know Christ and the power 
 
The Witness of God. 1 5 
 
 of His resurrection was still a goal towards 
 which he had to struggle. (Phil. iii. 10, &c.) 
 Yet the very condition of the struggle, if it 
 was to be other than the fruitless warfare with 
 himself which he had experienced under the 
 Law, and which had only taught him to know 
 sin, was that he should know the resurrection 
 from the fleshly life to be already his in Christ, 
 his in the counsels of God, in the divine idea. 
 This knowledge was the ' earnest of the 
 Spirit.' (2 Cor. v. 5.) Without it all his 
 effort, as it quickened the feeling of self, would 
 have deepened the feeling of alienation ; with 
 it, as the things behind were forgotten and 
 the old man daily died, a virtue not his own 
 was being wrought into his life he was be- 
 coming the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 
 
 V. 21.) 
 
 In this lay the demonstration of spirit and 
 power, (i Cor. ii. 4.) In his own body he 
 bore about the dying of the Lord Jesus, that 
 the life also of Jesus might be manifest there- 
 in. But there was another body, which was 
 his as it was Christ's, the body of Christian 
 fellowship, where he found such reality of 
 
1 6 The Witness of God. 
 
 demonstration as mere introspection could not 
 give. Here, too, the stigmata of Christ were 
 graven ; here the ministration of righteous- 
 ness was 'writ large/ not on stone, but on 
 tables of the heart and with the Spirit of the 
 living God. (2 Cor. iii. 3.) In the Christian 
 society a new life was being really lived. To 
 this evidence, not to his visions and revela- 
 tions, St. Paul constantly reverts; and it is 
 one good for all time. For the truth of any 
 practical idea the only possible evidence is its 
 realisation. As the primary Christian idea is 
 that of a moral death into life, as wrought for 
 us and in us by God, so its realisation, which is 
 the evidence of its truth, lies in Christian love 
 a realisation never complete, because for 
 ever embracing new matter, yet constantly 
 gaining in fulness. All other evidence 
 is fleeting and accidental, but this abides. 
 Tongues cease, prophecies fail, knowledge 
 the mere unrealised idea vanisheth away ; 
 but charity never faileth : and in the higher 
 life of the Christian society we may recognise 
 it and make it our own. Amid the luxury 
 and fretfulness, the strife and vainglory, which 
 
The Witness of God. 17 
 
 so noisily surround us, we are apt to ignore 
 it, and thus, while the foundations of practical 
 truth are in debate while some are requiring 
 a sign, others seeking the wisdom that is in 
 word, others asking who will show them any 
 good we miss the demonstration which lies 
 nearest us, which may become as near as con- 
 sciousness itself. Who is there that has not 
 known a simple, self-denying Christian, and 
 known that if he would, he might become like 
 him ? Perhaps, wrapped closely in the fleece 
 of conceit, we think lightly of such an one. 
 He is not clever, or he has awkward manners, 
 or a mean appearance. His bodily presence 
 is weak and his speech contemptible. Yet 
 his daily life is to him, as it might be to us if 
 we would assimilate it, that sufficient evidence 
 of God's quickening Spirit, for the lack of 
 which perhaps we are all the while passion- 
 ately bewailing ourselves. In little, and on a 
 narrow stage no wider, it may be, than the 
 duties of a sickly teasing household can afford 
 he is exhibiting that power of the resurrec- 
 tion which still sends healing to the broken- 
 hearted, deliverance to the captives and 
 C 
 
1 8 The Witness of God. 
 
 recovery of sight to the blind ; which sends 
 the missionary to the heathen, the preacher to 
 the poor, the honest student to his struggle 
 with the delusions of sense ; because it is the 
 spring of that charity which seeketh not her 
 own and rejoiceth in the truth. . 
 
 Thus the Church has been the witness of 
 Christ in another than the conventional sense : 
 not as the depositary of a dogma reflecting 
 but faintly that original intuition of the 
 crucified and risen One, in the light of which 
 the blind Saul saw the barrier between Jew 
 and Gentile, between man and God, dis- 
 appear ; but as the slowly articulated ex- 
 pression of the crucified and risen life. The 
 original intuition, depending, as it seems to 
 have done, on peculiar personal and historical 
 conditions, could never be reproduced in its 
 native form and force. It had to be translated 
 into other terms, which might make it avail- 
 able for men who could only see through the 
 eyes of the Jewish and Greek enlightenment 
 of their time. In this altered state it con- 
 stantly required new supports of the under- 
 standing, and suggested new deductions, 
 
The Witness of God. 19 
 
 which have gradually constituted the theology 
 of the Church. I do not dispute the value of 
 this theology. Most men, who think on such 
 matters, are so steeped in it, that they cannot 
 read St. Paul intelligently at all, without 
 translating him into its formulae ; and to them 
 it commonly affords that intellectual expres- 
 sion without which they could scarcely sustain 
 themselves in the Christian life. But we 
 must not confound the formula with the 
 reality. Dogmatic theology is quite other 
 than the Christian life, quite other than the 
 practical idea on which that life rests. 
 The result of their confusion has been that 
 while men such as Spinoza, who had more 
 real hold on the idea, and better under- 
 stood the spiritual import of the Christian 
 resurrection than the dogmatic theologians, 
 have been reckoned, and driven to reckon 
 themselves, aliens from the Christian Church, 
 the simplicity of the idea itself has been so 
 lost in artificial schemes of salvation, that, 
 apart from these, men cannot recognise it. 
 Thus, to say that the Christian life issues from 
 the idea of a denial of self, as eternally 
 
 c 2 
 
2O The Witness of God. 
 
 wrought out by God but to be renewed by us, 
 and that just because it so issues, it is a life 
 justified and sanctified, though really a return 
 to the simplicity of Christ, seems to many 
 pious men a substitution of moral philosophy 
 for Christianity proper. It is not thus that 
 they account to themselves for the work of 
 the quickening Spirit in and around them. 
 On the other hand, there are men of pure life, 
 holding heroic warfare with the sensual ac- 
 quiescence of conventional religion, to whom 
 such a statement seems only a refinement on 
 theological fictions, which they reject. Our 
 prime concern, however, is not with the 
 word, not with the theory of either sort of 
 men, but with the power ; and this is the 
 power of a present and spiritual resur- 
 rection. In their flesh, i.e., in their common 
 affections as transformed into a hunger fcr 
 God or goodness, the life of Christ is here and 
 now manifest (2 Cor. iv. 1 1) ; though with the 
 understanding they thrust it far from them ; 
 though the one sort externalise it in a mira- 
 culous transaction or event, and the others 
 cannot find in it, thus externalised, the source 
 
The Witness of God. 2 1 
 
 of their own zeal for man. If we are sincerely 
 sighing for a witness of God's work in man, 
 the denial of it in word will matter little to us 
 when the affirmation is present in power. 
 
 It is in Christendom that, according to the 
 providence of God, this power has been ex- 
 hibited ; not indeed either adequately or ex- 
 clusively, but most fully. In the religions of 
 the East the idea of a death to the fleshly 
 self, as the end of the merely human, and the 
 beginning of a divine life, has not been want- 
 ing ; nor, as a mere idea has it been very 
 different from that which is the ground of 
 Christianity. But there it has never been 
 realised in action, either intellectually or 
 morally. The idea of the withdrawal from 
 sense has remained abstract. It has not 
 issued in such a struggle with the superficial 
 view of things, as has gradually constituted 
 the science of Christendom. In like manner 
 that of self-renunciation has never emerged 
 from the esoteric state It has had no outlet 
 into the life of charity, but a back-way always 
 open into the life of sensual licence, and has 
 been finally mechanised in the artificial 
 
22 The Witness of God. 
 
 vacancy of the dervish or fakir. We are not 
 on this account to assume, as hasty and 
 passionate theologians would do, that God 
 reveals Himself to man in some other form 
 than reason, or that He suddenly set up the 
 Christian Church as a miraculous institution 
 owing nothing to the other influences of the 
 world, within which all is light, without it 
 all darkness ; within which He works unto 
 salvation, without it not at all, or only to 
 condemn and to destroy. Such an assump- 
 tion is a short cut to conviction which finally 
 leads, as we have daily proof, through a weary 
 round of unbelief. Christianity is cheaply 
 honoured, when it is made exceptional : God 
 is not wisely trusted when declared un- 
 intelligible. ' Such honour rooted in dis- 
 honour stands ; such faith unfaithful makes 
 us falsely true.' ' 
 
 God is for ever reason ; and His communi- 
 cation, His revelation, is reason : not, however, 
 abstract reason, but reason as taking a body 
 
 1 ' His honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
 And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.' 
 
 TENNYSON, Elaine. 
 
The Witness of God. 23 
 
 from, and giving life to, the whole system of 
 experience which makes the history of man. 
 The revelation, therefore, is not made in a 
 day, or a generation, or a century. The 
 divine mind touches, modifies, becomes the 
 mind of man, through a process of which 
 mere intellectual conception is only the 
 beginning, but of which the gradual comple- 
 ment is an unexhausted series of spiritual 
 discipline through all the agencies of social 
 life. In the nations outside Christendom, as 
 a matter of history, this complement has not 
 been vouchsafed, or only in the most limited 
 and elementary way. Hence the idea of 
 death into life, which is the seed of the divine 
 in man, has there lain barren. It has con- 
 tinued bare ' grain.' God in His wisdom has 
 not yet given it a body. Yet is it the same 
 seed which, as sown in Jewish prophecy and 
 Greek philosophy, was the germ of the life 
 of Christendom. The shortcomings of Greek 
 philosophy are, indeed, obvious enough. 
 They distinguish it essentially from Christian 
 philosophy (though the advocates of a 
 thoughtless religiosity would involve both in 
 
24 The Witness of God. 
 
 a common condemnation), inasmuch as the 
 latter has a far higher form of practical 
 spiritual life for its basis. But we must not 
 confound the genuine philosophy of Greece 
 with that wisdom of the world which St. 
 Paul knew to be foolishness with God. It 
 differed from this as much as now-a- 
 days the faithful quest after hidden truth 
 differs from the dialectic with which the 
 enlightened man of the world flatters his own 
 conceit and confutes his neighbour's ; and to 
 include it under St. Paul's condemnation 
 would be as unfair as to apply to the prophets 
 his view of the carnality of Jewish religion. 
 Greek philosophy, like Jewish prophecy, was 
 essentially a struggle upwards from what 
 seems to what is, from sense to reason, from 
 the flesh to the spirit. One as much as the 
 other issued from an active idea, which is not 
 to be regarded as unchristian, but as an un- 
 developed Christianity. Each too had its 
 practical or social side. If St. Paul all over 
 the Roman world, where he carried the 
 Gospel of Christ, had not found, by river 
 sides or elsewhere, places ' where prayer was 
 
The Witness of God. 25 
 
 wont to be made/ social prayer, prayer to 
 God in spirit and truth, which is the true con- 
 tinuance of prophecy where now would have 
 been Christian worship ? If, again, there had 
 not survived, under the organised selfishness 
 of the empire, the idea of self-sacrificing 
 citizenship, which the communities of Greece 
 had originated and its philosophy expressed 
 and expanded, where now would be Christian 
 fellowship ? The glory of Christianity is not 
 that it excludes, but that it comprehends ; 
 not that it came of a sudden into the world, 
 or that it is given complete in a particular 
 institution, or can be stated complete in a 
 particular form of words ; but that it is the 
 expression of a common spirit, which is 
 gathering together all things in one. We 
 cannot say of it, lo, here it is, or lo, there : it 
 is now, but was not then. We go backward, 
 but we cannot reach its source ; we look for- 
 ward, but we cannot foresee its final power. 
 We do it wrong in making it depend on a 
 past event, and in identifying it with the 
 creed of a certain age, or with a visible 
 society established at a certain time. What 
 
26 The Witness of God. 
 
 we thus seem to gain in definiteness, we lose 
 in permanence of conviction ; for importunate 
 enquiry will show us that the event can only 
 be approached through a series of fluctuating 
 interpretations of it, behind which its original 
 nature cannot be clearly ascertained ; that the 
 ' visible church ' of one age is never essentially 
 the same as that of the next ; that it is only 
 in word, or to the intellectually dead, that the 
 creed of the present is the same as the creed 
 of the past 
 
 It is doubtless true that the system of 
 practical ideas, or of life resting on ideas, 
 which we call Christianity, though its roots 
 are as old as mankind, would not exist but for 
 definite past events and actions and personal 
 influences, and that among these some far 
 outweigh all others in importance. There 
 came One who spake as never man spake, yet 
 proclaimed Himself the son of man, and was 
 conscious in the very meanness of human life, 
 in its final shame of death, of the communica- 
 tion of God to Himself, and through Him to 
 mankind. There came another, who, bring- 
 ing with him certain ' metaphysical ' concep- 
 
The Witness of God. 27 
 
 tions, the result of the philosophy of the time, 
 found them in this Man, whom death could 
 not hold, suddenly become real : who in 
 spirit, yet with a light above the brightness of 
 the sun, saw manifested in Him that which 
 Philo and the Stoics knew must be ; even the 
 heavenly Man in whose death all barriers 
 were broken down, that all in the participation 
 of His life might be equal before God. ' The 
 riches of the glory of this mystery ' he 
 preached among the Gentiles, even ' Christ in 
 them the hope of glory.' Thus, in sober 
 ecstasy, with visions and revelations and 
 speaking with tongues in upper chambers, 
 where men breaking bread at their common 
 social meals felt that Christ was among them, 
 and that it was His body they were breaking 
 and communicating by the foolishness of 
 preaching he founded the Christian Churches. 
 In a generation or two the intuition of the 
 present Christ, which Paul even in his lifetime 
 seems to have been unable to convey to 
 others as it was to himself, had faded away. 
 In its stead came the belief in past events, or 
 in present mysterious transactions, external 
 
28 The Witness of God, 
 
 to the man, which had to be stated in a creed. 
 For the spontaneous brotherhood, conscious 
 of itself as one body, and that body Christ's, 
 even as the mind that dwelt in it was ' The 
 Lord, the Spirit/ Himself (2 Cor. iii. 17), 
 there arose a regulated and increasingly 
 artificial society, in which the voice of the 
 Spirit was represented by the authoritative 
 utterance of a bishop. For the breaking of 
 bread at the social meal, in token of that self- 
 abandoning fellowship of each with the other 
 as members of Christ's body, which was the 
 perpetual renewal of His sacrifice, for this 
 sacrament of pure sociality was substituted 
 an exceptional communication of His body to 
 the individual, no longer purely moral, but 
 dependent on material conditions, and media- 
 tion of the priest. 
 
 Thus Christ, if I may use the expression, 
 was gradually externalised and mystified. 
 The miraculous overpowered the moral and 
 spiritual, as much as, in the view of St. Paul, 
 the moral and spiritual overpowered the mira- 
 culous. In this way, while the Christian 
 religion gained in immediate power over the 
 
The Witness of God. 29 
 
 world and adapted itself to men, whose ap- 
 prehensions were too gross for the Pauline 
 intuition, its finer essence, which could draw 
 to itself all knowledge and all goodness, was 
 overlaid with signs and wonders and mysteries, 
 to which, in the long run, both knowledge and 
 the highest goodness must find themselves 
 alien. Yet, when it might be thought that 
 the life of Christ must already have ceased to 
 be a spiritual presence and become a wonder 
 of the past more, probably, than two genera- 
 tions after St. Paul had gone to his rest there 
 arose a disciple, whose very name we know 
 not (for he sought not his own glory and pre- 
 ferred to hide it under the repute of another), 
 who gave that final spiritual interpretation to 
 the person of Christ, which has for ever taken 
 it out of the region of history and of the 
 doubts that surround all past events, to fix it 
 in the purified conscience as the immanent 
 God. The highest result of ancient philo- 
 sophy had been the conception of the world 
 as a system of thought, related to God as His 
 word or expression, i.e., as the spoken thought 
 is related to the man. This conception, how- 
 
30 The Witness of God. 
 
 ever, great as it was, did not present God 
 under moral attributes, nor did it bring Him 
 near to the conscience of the individual. 
 But in Christ, the writer whom the Church 
 calls St. John, saw this divine thought mani- 
 festing itself in human life as Truth and Love, 
 and that not merely or fully through a past 
 visible existence though such existence had 
 been vouchsafed as ' a sign ' but through a 
 spirit which should dwell in men, drawn 
 out of the world, won from sense and the 
 flesh, for ever. The presence of this spirit 
 was the presence of the Son, so that the 
 perfect knowledge and love which subsisted 
 from eternity between the Father and the 
 Son might be reproduced in men as the 
 knowledge of God and love of each other. ' I 
 will not leave you orphans/ says the Christ 
 of St. John to His disciples, ' I will come to 
 you.' (xiv. 1 6, 17.) He thus comes, as the 
 context explains, in the spirit of truth. In 
 this spirit they are with Him where He is, 
 even in the presence of God (xvii. 24), and 
 the love wherewith God has loved Him is in 
 them, even as He is in them. These who have 
 
The Witness of God. 31 
 
 been able to receive this saying, in the spiritual 
 sight of Christ have seen the Father ; in wor- 
 shipping Christ, they have worshipped God 
 under the attributes of personal intelligence 
 and love. Him whom they have not seen 
 with the bodily eye or heard with the hearing 
 of the ear, whom they have not approached 
 through evidence of their own senses or 
 through transmitted evidence of the senses of 
 others, they have yet believed and loved, and 
 in loving have rejoiced with joy unspeakable 
 and full of glory. Such believing love, once 
 wrought into the life and character, ' not in 
 word but in power,' can survive all shocks of 
 criticism, all questions as to historical events. 
 It will not indeed despise such questions. 
 Rather it will welcome them, as setting it free 
 from accidental supports, and teaching it to 
 know itself. It needs no evidence of the 
 presence of God, or the work of Christ the 
 Spirit, for it is that presence and work itself. 
 It is the crucifixion of the flesh, it is the new 
 life, it is the resurrection of the dead. 
 
 ' This is a hard saying,' it may be replied : 
 ' who can hear it ? ' A God who made us and 
 
32 The Witness of God. 
 
 knows us, as from without ; a Christ who at 
 a certain time did certain miraculous acts on 
 our behalf, and who now, having left us cer- 
 tain commands, is at the right hand of God 
 exalted, to return again at some future time 
 and judge us according to our obedience to 
 His commands, these, it may be said, are 
 intelligible objects. There are strong grounds 
 for believing in them, and as believed in they 
 influence our actions through fear, and hope, 
 and gratitude. But an immanent God, a 
 God present in the believing love of Him 
 and the brethren, a Christ within us, a con- 
 tinuous resurrection, these are mere thoughts 
 of our own ; they are not ' objective ; ' if there 
 is nothing else to constrain and restrain us, 
 we are left to ourselves. 
 
 Present limits do not allow of such lan- 
 guage being considered in detail. A little 
 reflection may show us that we cannot really 
 get outside thought or ourselves, though 
 thought may find that it is not merely its 
 own, and the self lose its selfishness. It is in 
 himself and in his thought, which yet is in 
 the truest sense a revelation, and a revelation 
 
The Witness of God. 33 
 
 through Christian influence, that each one of 
 us finds God, if he find Him at all. In those 
 who deem otherwise of thought and the self, 
 who must put God at a distance, or into a 
 mystery, in order to recognise Him ; who hold 
 that a revelation which is not through signs 
 and wonders, is no revelation at all it is not 
 religion but logic which is at fault. Just so 
 far as they make their own the Christian doc- 
 trine of the indwelling spirit, whose quicken- 
 ing, enlightening, interceding power is the 
 presence of Christ, even as Christ is God, they 
 are superior to their own logic. So long, 
 however, as their dependence on it seems to 
 themselves to continue, they will need evi- 
 dence of God's operation in past or present 
 miracle, in an inspired book or in sacraments, 
 and it is matter of thankfulness that the co- 
 gency of such evidence should be what it is. 
 Let no one rashly tamper with it. Rather let 
 us make our own calling and election sure. 
 Let those of us who are seeking, and perhaps 
 intellectually finding, a nearer and surer wit- 
 ness, take heed that it be to us not in word 
 but in power. Let us beware lest, like the 
 D 
 
The Witness of God. 
 
 enlightened Christians of Corinth, professing 
 to be spiritual, we be found carnal. 
 
 St. Paul, as was observed at the outset, 
 does not bid these men renounce their claims 
 to ' spirituality,' but act according to it. He 
 bates no jot of his ideal gospel. The sense 
 of the discrepancy between the idea and its 
 realisation, which the care of the churches 
 forced on him, only moves him to a re-asser- 
 tion of the idea as alone giving impulse to the 
 realisation. Even to the Galatians, bewitched 
 with Jewish ritualism, it is still, 'we live in 
 the Spirit ; therefore let us walk in the Spirit.' 
 (Gal. v. 25.) Let our actual conduct be 
 spiritual, even as is our ideal life. So to the 
 Corinthians, translating the Spirit's privilege 
 into vain-glory and licence, it is still, ' All 
 things are yours, but ye are not your own ; 
 therefore glorify God in your body and in 
 your spirit, which are his.' (i Cor. iii. 22, 
 vi. 19, 20.) From the prison (to the Philip- 
 pians) the voice is still the same, ' God worketh 
 in us : therefore let us work out our own salva- 
 tion with fear and trembling.' (Phil. ii. 12, 13.) 
 
 This work, which is at once God's and our 
 
The Witness of God. 35 
 
 own, and in which therefore His presence is 
 witnessed not with signs from without, but 
 with demonstration from within, is summed 
 up in the one word, Charity, or Christian love. 
 Mere knowledge puffeth up, as St. Paul says, 
 but charity edifieth. Charity, that is to say, 
 is constructive. In the temple of Christian 
 fellowship, where no man seeks his own, but 
 every one another's good ; in the fabric of 
 true knowledge, which without figure of speech 
 is the work of the same spiritual yearning 
 charity is building a presence-chamber of God, 
 which, though filled with His fulness, may yet, 
 so far as the same charity is in us, be no other 
 than the chamber of our own heart. No one, 
 it is often said, doubts of his own existence ; 
 nor does any one practically doubt of the 
 correlative existence of God, though the no- 
 tion of such existence is compassed with diffi- 
 culties of language and logic which lead some 
 to deny it in word. But as it is little for me 
 to know that I am, unless I know what I am, 
 so the mere consciousness of God, to which 
 upon analysis we find that the speech even of 
 the ' Atheist ' testifies, is bootless if it is merely 
 
36 The Witness of God. 
 
 that of an unknown power beyond oneself. 
 Is this a loving and understanding, a recon- 
 ciled and reconciling power? That is the 
 question, and it is a question to which the one 
 abiding answer is the life of charity. In an- 
 ticipation indeed, or by 'an earnest of the 
 Spirit,' it must be answered to begin with, in 
 order to render that life possible ; and this 
 preliminary answer, as it came to St. Paul's 
 converts in a sudden light of intellectual con- 
 viction, so to us, who have had a Christian 
 education, should be furnished by ideas which 
 have lain about us from our infancy, and 
 which later reflection ought to have made 
 intelligently our own. It is ill for us, if in 
 youth, by looseness of talk or deed, we let 
 our hold on them slacken for an instant. But 
 their mere retention as ideas is impossible. 
 Their power must give them a body in labour 
 for truth and the brethren, or it will cease to 
 be, and with it will vanish the presence of 
 which they are the first disclosure. Amid a 
 world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight 
 of his own shortcomings and limitations, or 
 on the edge of the tomb, he alone who has 
 
The Witness of God. 37 
 
 found his soul in losing it, who in singleness 
 of mind has lived in order to love and under- 
 stand, will find that the God who is near to 
 him as his own conscience has a face of light 
 and love. 
 
 There is a danger, as I am painfully 
 aware, lest, after all, this should seem ' a tale 
 of little meaning, though the words be strong ; ' 
 lest this realisation of the idea of a loving 
 God, which is to prove its truth and power, 
 should seem very remote from reality. How, 
 it may be asked, is this life of charity to be 
 attained, either in its more obviously prac- 
 tical or in its more philosophic form ? What 
 likeness to it has the easy life we lead here, or 
 the after life of respectable citizenship, which, 
 as cut out for us by circumstances, we are 
 likely to lead for the rest of our days ? Few 
 of us have faculty or opportunity to be philo- 
 sophers or missionaries or preachers to the 
 poor, and if we had, is it certain that we 
 should find ourselves much nearer the ideal 
 life ? Would not each of those high callings 
 turn out to be an affair of habit, very much like 
 any other ; requiring peculiar gifts, no doubt, 
 
38 The Witness of God. 
 
 yet apt to be debased by egotism in propor- 
 tion to the success attained by these gifts ? 
 
 Such language has a partial truth, and it 
 is a truth which is likely to come near home 
 to young men, who have been shaken in the 
 simple faith of childhood, but have as yet 
 learnt little from the discipline of life. Con- 
 scious of this, apprehensive of that most fatal 
 scepticism which attends the reaction from an 
 ideal found to be hollow, and knowing too 
 well with how little of personal example he 
 can enforce his words, a teacher here will be 
 apt to speak seldom, and below his convic- 
 tion, of the possibility in common action of 
 renewing the self-sacrifice of the eternal Son. 
 Yet the least experienced among us must 
 know that it is not in the outward cast of a 
 life, but in the way of living it, that the spirit 
 of a man is shown, and that there are those 
 about him in whose character, though with 
 no outward mark of distinction, and perhaps 
 under a surface of yet unconquered weak- 
 nesses, the love of God and the brethren is 
 the ruling power. All he has to do is to 
 share in the higher spirit . of such men. He 
 
The Witness of God. 39 
 
 need not make a rush after the heroic, or seek 
 to jump out of his circumstances. The end to 
 be attained is indeed infinite ; but he need not 
 therefore vainly try to swell his own effort to 
 a like infinity, for it is already attained for 
 him. The sacrifice has been offered, the goal 
 has been won. God is for ever perfect light 
 and love. It is for us, under the limitations 
 of a petty human life, to take such personal 
 hold on this perfection as may fit us for its 
 fuller communication when, in His good time, 
 these limitations are taken away. To do this 
 requires, doubtless, much thought and prayer 
 and travail, but not a revolution in our sur- 
 roundings. We may be doing it here and 
 now, if (in the words of the text) ' with sin- 
 cerity and truth ' we keep the Christian feast. 
 Let us consider, finally, for a moment the 
 special application of these words to ourselves. 
 It will at once be understood that ' Pass- 
 over ' here means the Paschal Lamb. Under 
 this figure Christ is several times presented 
 to us in the New Testament : probably so in 
 the verse of the Revelation which speaks of 
 the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
 
4Q The Witness of God. 
 
 world, and in the Baptist's utterance, ' Be- 
 hold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the 
 sin of the world ; ' certainly so in the passage 
 of St. John which applies to Christ the rule as 
 to the paschal larnb, ' a bone of Him shall not 
 be broken,' and in that of the First Epistle 
 ascribed to St. Peter, which speaks of the 
 ' blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish 
 and without spot, fore-ordained before the 
 foundation of the world.' It is necessary fur- 
 ther, in order to understand the full force of 
 the text, to remember that the paschal lamb 
 was not only sacrificed, but eaten, and that 
 the eating of it constituted the paschal supper 
 or feast. As then the sacrifice of Christ is 
 presented under the figure of the slaying of 
 the lamb, so our continuous participation in 
 His sacrificed person is presented as the keep- 
 ing of the feast. The sacrifice is already 
 made made for us from eternity ; the Lamb 
 has been slain from the foundation of the 
 world : but we have to perpetuate the sacri- 
 fice in ourselves. We are, as it is put under 
 a like figure elsewhere, to eat the flesh of 
 Christ, as the Jews ate of the sacrificed lamb 
 
The Witness of God. 41 
 
 Christians are in some way to make the per- 
 son of Christ their own. They do this, the 
 feast is kept for ever by the Christian society, 
 in the life of charity. The conditions on our 
 part, as individuals, of joining in the feast are 
 sincerity and truth. These are the unleavened 
 bread without which we may not feed upon 
 the Lamb, but with which we may ; and even 
 in our life here, secluded from great achieve- 
 ments of beneficence, they may surely be ours. 
 By ' sincerity ' (stKLKpivsia) here is to be 
 understood, I think, perfect openness towards 
 God ; that clearness of the soul in which 
 nothing interferes with its penetration by the 
 divine sunlight. Given this openness on our 
 part, Christ, the revealed God, will gradually 
 find His way into our souls, not in word but 
 in power. We must be clear from vice, clear 
 from self-indulgence, clear from self-conceit 
 How imperfectly do we attain this clearness, 
 yet how can we wonder, till we attain it, that 
 we lack the witness of God? We talk, per- 
 haps, half-sorrowfully, half-complacently, of 
 the demoralising, or unchristianising, ten- 
 dencies of modern life. Opinion, it is said, is 
 
42 The Witness of God. 
 
 fundamentally unsettled ; science keeps en- 
 croaching on the old faith ; the lineaments of 
 the God whom our fathers worshipped are 
 blurred by philosophy ; and meanwhile an 
 enlightened Hedonism seems competent to 
 answer all practical questions. It is no fault 
 of the individual if, amid such influences, he 
 loses the thought of God's presence and the 
 consciousness of His love, which indeed can 
 only be retained by taking refuge in mysteries 
 or going out of the world. 
 
 This is the foppery of men who want new 
 excuses for old sins. It is still our sins and 
 nothing else that separate us from God. Phi- 
 losophy and science, to those who seek not to 
 talk of them but to know their power, do but 
 render His clearness more clear, and the free- 
 dom of His service a more perfect freedom. 
 His witness grows with time. In great books 
 and great examples, in the gathering fulness 
 of spiritual utterance which we trace through 
 the history of literature, in the self-denying 
 love which we have known from the cradle, in 
 the \ moralising influences of civil life, in the 
 clos.er fellowship of the Christian society, in 
 
The Witness of Gad* 
 
 the sacramental ordinances which represent 
 that fellowship, in common worship, in the 
 message of the preachers through which, amid 
 diversity of stammering tongues, one spirit 
 still speaks here God's sunshine is shed 
 abroad without us. If it does not reach 
 within the heart, it is because the heart has a 
 darkness of its own, some unconquered selfish- 
 ness which prevents its relation to Him being 
 one of * sincerity and truth.' 
 
 I cannot now trace in detail the forms 
 of this selfishness, nor is there much use in 
 doing so. They are manifold, doubtless, but 
 their source is simple, and subtlety is wasted 
 in their unravelment. The grosser among 
 them, I hope, are little known among us 
 that, for instance, which the world lightly calls 
 looseness, and which religious people are apt 
 to call impurity. Neither the term of extenu- 
 ation nor that of reproach fully expresses the 
 baseness of that hideous wrong against Christ's 
 body the body of human fellowship which 
 outrages it in its tenderest part. Let no one 
 dream that he can be guilty of such wrong, 
 and yet find the loving presence within him, 
 
44 The- Witness of God. 
 
 of which that fellowship is the true convey- 
 ance. If he has been guilty of it but once, let 
 him be sure that if he would have deliverance 
 from its moral result, he must indeed seek it 
 carefully, and with tears. Most of us, how- 
 ever, have perhaps more to fear from a more 
 refined self-indulgence, from habits of luxury 
 or indolence, and from nameless desires after 
 all things sweet and pleasant, which because 
 they do not issue in overt vice are counted 
 harmless, but which yet, as in our heart of 
 hearts we know, keep us off from God, and 
 from that pure self- renouncing spirit which is 
 His manifestation among men. Probably we 
 surround them with a fence of intellectual self- 
 excusing jugglery, which may in time become 
 impenetrable to the assault of that higher 
 reason which speaks through our own con- 
 science, and through the doctrine or example 
 of all the great teachers of mankind. To this 
 jugglery, however, we may have one answer 
 always ready. Prayer is a wish referred to 
 God, and the possibility of such reference, 
 save in matters of mere indifference, is the 
 test of the purity of the wish. Can we then, 
 
The Witness of God. 45 
 
 let us ask ourselves, pray to God with an 
 enlightened conscience for our continuance 
 in the habit, or for the satisfaction of the 
 desire in question ? If not, let us pluck 
 them off, and cast them from us. To do so, 
 indeed, may be the work of years ; but once 
 let the higher resolve be in force, and the 
 discipline of life will gradually neutralise or 
 transmute the passions which thwart the 
 single mind. 
 
 Another cloak of darkness which the soul 
 hugs in exclusion of the light of God is self- 
 conceit. In an ' intellectual society ' every 
 one knows this, as he knows the plague of 
 his own heart. It is something very different 
 from that which is often ill denounced as ' in- 
 tellectual pride,' but which is really the 
 proper virtue of those who are not children of 
 the bondwoman but of the free. Such pride, 
 indeed, is no other than the aspiration of 
 reason to attain its fulness in God, which is 
 the only source of true religion. Yet who 
 that knows anything of such aspiration does 
 not know also how perpetually it is crossed 
 by the importunities of the pitiful earthly self, 
 
46 The Witness of God. 
 
 claiming credit to itself for the aspiration ? 
 Only by the consciousness that we are 
 * workers together with God,' since the best 
 we can do for ourselves has been done for us 
 by Him, and by the consequent growing ab- 
 sorption in great ideas and great causes, can 
 this haunting presence be laid. The higher, 
 indeed, the effort with which it associates 
 itself, the more readily is it got rid of. It 
 prefers baser company, and generally where 
 is least intellectual aspiration, there is most 
 intellectual conceit. Is it not so with us ? In 
 this place how much cleverness, and more 
 conceit of cleverness, goes to how little true 
 spiritual achievement. The reason is plain. 
 We stand by the water, but it is not our real 
 mind to drink. Our vocation keeps us in 
 the presence of the best thoughts of the 
 greatest men. We are, or may be, conver- 
 sant with the sifted wisdom of the ages. We 
 are in the highway and mid-current of 
 spiritual progress. Yet are we not ourselves 
 standing still, or moving in a trivial round of 
 intellectual luxuries ? Is not our heart shut 
 against the voice that calls us out of our- 
 
The Witness of God. 47 
 
 selves, and busy with the idol of its own self- 
 decoration ? How much of our real interest 
 is going to the quest after truth and God, 
 how much to the attainment of skill in writ- 
 ing clever articles and saying 'good things,' 
 which have no result but to make our 
 brethren offend, and to surround ourselves 
 with an atmosphere of irreverence and un- 
 reality over which God's Spirit broods in 
 vain ? He that seeketh findeth what he 
 seeks ; and if in reading and thinking we 
 look merely for a testimony to our own 
 cleverness, we shall find probably what we 
 seek, but no higher witness. We know that 
 egotism has to be outwardly suppressed, if 
 ordinary good fellowship is to be possible. 
 Much more must it be mortified and raised 
 again to an altered life, if we would attain 
 the fellowship of the Son, and with it the 
 spirit of adoption and the truth which makes 
 us free. 
 
 If this riddance of selfishness had to be 
 complete before we could have any share in 
 the Christian feast, any participation in the 
 eternal sacrifice, we might indeed despair. 
 
48 The Witness of God. 
 
 We should be like Saul, still struggling with 
 a body of death, of which he could not be 
 relieved under the Law. But for the Chris- 
 tian, as we have seen, the sacrifice is already 
 complete in God, and is being gradually re- 
 enacted in the true charities of life, in a 
 Church invisible, but operative all around us. 
 In it the Spirit already dwells with us, and is 
 striving to be in us. Each weakest effort on 
 our part is answered by His prevailing 
 motion. If we do but open our hearts 
 at a single point, the spiritual water and 
 blood will find an entrance, will purge our 
 egotism and complete the sacrifice. In this 
 confidence, 'as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing/ 
 we shall go freely on our appointed way, 
 knowing that it may become to us a discipline 
 of God, and that there is no way so beaten but 
 that things true and honest and just and 
 lovely may be found in it. The Christian 
 ordinances are at hand for our refreshment, 
 and if we are wise we shall not neglect them. 
 We cannot afford to individualise ourselves 
 even in respect of outward symbols. We do 
 wrong to ourselves and them, if we allow any 
 
The Witness of God. 49 
 
 intellectual vexation at the mode in which 
 they may be presented to us to prevent us 
 from their due use. If we are really seeking 
 to live as members one of another in the 
 general assembly of the first-born, why do we 
 not gladly approach the table where in the 
 simplest of all rites that mutual membership 
 is expressed ? We shall not value such 
 expression the less, because to us it is only 
 an expression. It is in the hidden life of the 
 Christian society, as we hold in pureness, in 
 knowledge, in long-suffering, in love un- 
 feigned that the true table of the Lord is 
 spread, and His cup for ever flows. Here is 
 the bloodless altar, the continued sacrifice, 
 because here is the perpetual Agape, the 
 communion of good-will. To this spiritual 
 feast, in which the God-man gradually im- 
 parts Himself to the soul, the ' Holy Com- 
 munion ' of bread and wine is related as a 
 mode of speech to thought. As seasonable 
 utterance is needed to give strength and 
 definiteness to a thought, to bring it back to 
 the individual when he has almost lost it, to 
 quicken the consciousness of its being shared 
 E 
 
5O The Witness of God. 
 
 by others ; so may this ordinance strengthen 
 and refresh the thought of our common 
 spiritual interest in God. Its primitive social 
 character we cannot indeed recall, any more 
 than the ecstatic vision of Christ among them 
 which was granted to the early disciples ; yet 
 still to us, if with hearts pure of vice and 
 humbly set on living loyally as Christian 
 citizens, we partake of the symbolic supper, 
 without vision or miracle or mystery, but in 
 moral power, God in Christ a loving and 
 understanding God may be known in the 
 breaking of bread. 
 
FAITH. 
 
 2 COR. v. 7. 
 ' We walk by faith, not by sight! 
 
 1 "OR the word translated 'Faith,' as used 
 in the New Testament, it would be 
 impossible, according to any fair method of 
 interpretation, to assign a single meaning. 
 Between its various senses a connection can 
 no doubt be traced, but from Faith, as the 
 simple recognition of the claim of Jesus to be 
 the Messiah the sense in which it is com- 
 monly used in the Acts and often in the 
 Gospels to that Faith which, according to 
 St Paul's conception, is the communication 
 of the Divine Spirit, and by which Christ, as 
 the revealed God, dwells in our hearts, there 
 is an interval which no single definition can 
 cover. But difficult as it would be by any 
 
5 2 Faith. 
 
 one formula to represent all that the word 
 conveys, even as used by St. Paul alone, it is 
 less difficult to state what it does not convey. 
 Throughout the New Testament, as has often 
 been pointed out, its meaning is never deter- 
 mined by that opposition to reason, on which 
 it might almost be said that its whole force 
 depends as used alike by theologians and 
 men of science in the literature of the day. 
 Whatever may be the validity of this oppo- 
 sition in itself, as applied to the interpretation 
 of the New Testament, it is a misleading sub- 
 stitute for the truly scriptural antithesis be- 
 tween Faith and Sight. ' Because thou hast 
 seen, -thou hast believed ; blessed are they 
 that have not seen and yet have believed,' 
 says our Lord to Thomas according to the 
 story in the fourth Gospel ; and under the 
 same idea throughout that Gospel we find 
 the true or highest faith represented as that 
 which by a purely spiritual act takes Christ, 
 as the manifestation of God, into the soul 
 without waiting for conviction by sensible 
 signs. Such faith is typified in Nathaniel, who 
 accepts Christ as the Son of God by an imme- 
 
Faith. 53 
 
 diate spiritual recognition in response to that 
 by which Christ recognises him who knows 
 as he is known and who in consequence is 
 promised under a figure an ultimate intuition 
 of some free commerce between God and the 
 perfected man. It is typified again in the 
 Samaritans who believe Christ on His mere 
 word, and in the ' nobleman ' to whom our 
 Lord says by way of trial, ' except ye see 
 signs and wonders, ye will not believe/ but in 
 whom He discerns the higher faith which can 
 accept the simple word ' Thy son liveth.' Con- 
 trasted with it is the hardness of heart which 
 asks for some sign, as convincing as the 
 miraculous manna, that it ' may see and be- 
 lieve.' Those who so ask, instead of a sign 
 are told of the necessity, in order to true spiri- 
 tual life, of that participation in Christ's self- 
 surrendered will which is figured by the eating 
 His flesh and drinking His blood. When 
 some of the disciples, understanding the figure 
 literally, murmur at the hard saying, they 
 are only warned more emphatically against 
 the ' carnal ' mind which, as it had prompted 
 the demand for a sign, so likewise prevented 
 
54 Faith. 
 
 a true understanding of Christ's words. ' It 
 is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh ' or, as 
 we might say, the satisfaction of the senses 
 ' profiteth nothing. The words that I have 
 spoken, they are Spirit.' Being Spirit, they 
 could only, to use St. Paul's phrase, be spiri- 
 tually discerned. ' The natural man ' the 
 man who walked by sight, not by faith, and 
 therefore required a sign could not receive 
 them. They were foolishness to him. 
 
 It is characteristic, no doubt, of the 
 fourth Gospel that, while thus opposing the 
 sensible to the spiritual and representing the 
 highest faith as independent of signs, it yet 
 insists on the sensible evidence which God 
 gave of Himself as manifested In Christ. 
 The words with which the Johannine epistle 
 opens ' That which we have seen with our 
 eyes, and our hands have handled of the 
 Word of life, declare we unto you ' have a 
 softened echo throughout the Gospel. ' The 
 Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, 
 and we beheld His glory.' ' This beginning 
 of miracles did Jesus, and manifested forth 
 His glory.' To Martha, hesitating to have 
 
Faith. 55 
 
 the stone removed from her brother's grave, 
 Jesus says that ' if she will believe, she shall 
 see the glory of God ; ' and again to Philip, 
 ' He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' 
 Thus an accommodation is effected between 
 the traditional belief in Jesus as the Messiah, 
 who has proved His Messianic office by mira- 
 culous signs, and the consciousness of God as 
 a spirit revealed not in signs but in the faith 
 of the spiritual man. Faith in its highest 
 form did not need to wait for miraculous 
 signs ; where it was wholly wanting, no such 
 signs could create it ; yet they had been 
 granted out of mercy to those who, though 
 not of the world, were still in it. Even then, 
 it was only an antecedent faith that could 
 read them aright as a manifestation of eternal 
 truths, as an utterance of the Word which 
 was from the beginning. To the unbelieving, 
 to those who sought honour one of another, 
 not that which cometh of God only, they re- 
 mained mere wonders, not a medium for the 
 Spirit that quickeneth. 
 
 With St. Paul the freedom of faith from 
 dependence on sensible signs is still more 
 
56 Faith. 
 
 marked. With St. John, as we have seen, 
 the relation of faith to miracle is not indeed 
 that of effect to cause : faith is rather the 
 condition of the significance of the miraculous 
 sign : still the sign elicits and strengthens a 
 faith already there. Those who believe see, 
 and seeing believe more fully and surely. In 
 St. Paul we do not find even such secondary 
 dependence of faith upon miraculous evi- 
 dence. The relation of signs to faith is rather 
 that of an effect. He regards faith as making 
 its sign in the ' manifestation of the Spirit 
 and of power' among the Christian congre- 
 gations, but he never treats anything sensible 
 as its source or even its occasion. It works 
 from within outwards : it is not conveyed 
 within from any source external to itself. Its 
 source is the Spirit of God, and itself is that 
 Spirit, as conveyed to us in the form of an 
 earnest or first-fruits, under such limitations 
 as the earthly tabernacle, the bondage of 
 corruption, still imposes. Of the mode of 
 conveyance, as he conceived it, St. Paul 
 tells us little. ' Faith cometh by hearing ' 
 by the Spirit of God, as revealed in one man, 
 
Faith. 57 
 
 awakening an answer from the same Spirit, 
 hitherto silent, in another. On the import of 
 the message conveyed, as a promise of de- 
 liverance from sin and of the reconciliation of 
 men with God, and through Him with each 
 other, he insists much. For signs by which 
 the divine authority of the message should 
 be attested, as distinct from its import, he 
 does not seem to have seen the necessity. 
 He had indeed ' received,' as he tells us, the 
 traditional account of our Lord's last supper 
 with the disciples; of His announcement to 
 them of ' the new covenant in His blood ' ; of 
 His death for our sins ; of His burial, and 
 resurrection on the third day. How much 
 else he had received of the tradition after- 
 wards embodied in the Gospels we have no 
 means of knowing. But he never appeals to 
 any miraculous events of our Lord's life not 
 even to the resurrection as evidence in the 
 sense which later theology has attached to the 
 word. He does not demand our faith in cer- 
 tain truths ' above reason ' on the ground of 
 miraculous proofs of divine authority given by 
 a revealer of these truths. The resurrection 
 
58 Faith. 
 
 of Christ is to him not evidence of a reve- 
 lation, but the thing revealed. The death of 
 the believer to sin, which becomes a new 
 life unto God, he regards as part of the same 
 process by which Christ died -and rose again 
 a process continued in the mighty deeds 
 wrought in the Christian congregation, and to 
 be completed in the deliverance of the ' crea- 
 ture itself from the bondage of corruption 
 into the glorious liberty of the children of 
 God.' All is one continued ' ministration of 
 the Spirit' an unveiling of God in the world 
 and in the consciousness of man. That is the 
 only revelation of which St. Paul knows. 
 Faith is not an acceptance of such revelation 
 upon evidence : it is the first stage of the 
 revelation itself, of which love and knowledge 
 are to be the completion. It is the awakening 
 of the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry 
 Abba, Father, but which has still ' no language 
 but a cry.' It is opposed indeed to the 
 ' wisdom of this world,' but is itself the first 
 communication of what St. Paul calls the 
 'reason of Christ,' which again is identified 
 
Faith. 59 
 
 with the ' Spirit that searcheth all things, yea, 
 the deep things of God.' 
 
 Though most of us have been hearing and 
 reading St. Paul's words from our childhood, 
 language of this kind is apt to strike us as 
 unmeaning. It seems as if we could not re- 
 duce it to statements which should be either 
 speculatively true or have any practical bear- 
 ing on our own lives. Thus we either leave 
 it aside altogether, or translate it into terms 
 which have become the current coin of theo- 
 logical controversy, but in which its native 
 significance is more or less completely lost. 
 St. Paul's theology, founded on a personal 
 experience in the light of which he inter- 
 preted the relations of man to God, inevi- 
 tably changed its character in becoming a 
 popular creed. Such terms as forgiveness, 
 reconciliation, and salvation, instead of repre- 
 senting experiences of the believer processes 
 of his spiritual life came to represent cer- 
 tain divine transactions, in which the believer 
 had no personal part, though through faith 
 he had the benefit of them in the acquisition 
 
60 Faith. 
 
 of final happiness. The death and resur- 
 rection of Christ ceased to be looked upon as 
 perpetually re-enacted in the surrender of 
 the fleshly self and the substitution for it of 
 a new man in the moral life. They became 
 past events by which certain blessings had 
 been obtained for us or divine testimony 
 given to an authority claiming our obedience. 
 The identification of the believer with Christ 
 was no longer realised through a conscious- 
 ness operative in the Christian society, but 
 was supposed to be effected in some mode, 
 mystical not moral, by the sacraments. The 
 gift of the Spirit, instead of being understood 
 as that recognition of an eternal relationship 
 between God and man which carries with it 
 a new insight into the things of God and a 
 new energy of love, was reduced to a super- 
 natural agency guiding the utterance of 
 certain men and the government of the 
 Church. 
 
 Just in so far as what had been according 
 to the Pauline view the realities of the Christian 
 life were relegated to a region of mystery 
 external to the Christian himself, ' Faith ' 
 
Faith. 6 1 
 
 too sank to a lower significance. With St. 
 Paul it is the consciousness of the life hidden 
 with Christ in God as it becomes under the 
 conditions of another life which we now live in 
 the flesh in the flesh, as he would say, but 
 not after the flesh. Faith is no more faith in 
 this sense, when the life of Christ is no longer 
 regarded as one which the believer in any 
 real sense himself lives. It becomes merely 
 the condition upon which the benefit of a cer- 
 tain ' opus operatum ' is extended to him. 
 The nature of this condition has been con- 
 ceived in various ways, implying various 
 degrees of true moral value. Having come 
 to be understood as no more than an accept- 
 ance of the authority of the Church and 
 obedience to its rules, it was restored by 
 Luther to the meaning of an assurance of 
 sonship in Christ, founded on personal expe- 
 rience. This was so far a gain, but it did not 
 carry with it most Christians would say that 
 it would have been pernicious if it had carried 
 with it any change in the view of man's 
 redemption as achieved, by past historical 
 events. The death and resurrection were not 
 
62 Faith. 
 
 interpreted into present realities within the 
 experience of the believer. They continued to 
 be looked upon as mysterious transactions, in 
 their intrinsic nature incomprehensible, by 
 which forgiveness and salvation had been ob- 
 tained for us ; and in consequence the results 
 thus obtained could not be regarded as pro- 
 perly processes of the moral or spiritual life. 
 In ordinary Protestant theology, forgiveness 
 is still something else than the moral act of 
 putting off the old man ; salvation something 
 else than putting on the new. That forgive- 
 ness and salvation should be regarded not as 
 something earned by the individual for himself, 
 but as the free gift of God, is no doubt an 
 essential point in the Gospel which St. Paul 
 preached. On any other view it would be 
 another gospel which, indeed, as he might 
 have said, would be not another but no 
 gospel at all. But a free forgiveness, an un- 
 earned salvation, need not on that ac- 
 count be other than states into which by the 
 self-communication of God the human spirit 
 is brought ; and we are nearer to the mind of 
 St. Paul when we consider them as such states 
 
Faith. 63 
 
 which, in the life of faith or life according to 
 the spirit, become ours, than when we look 
 on them as external blessings, won for us by 
 the crucified and risen Christ, and which Faith 
 is the condition of our appropriating. 
 
 Did not St. Paul then, it will be asked, 
 regard the death and resurrection of Christ as 
 'objective' facts events which had taken 
 place quite independently of any change in 
 his own mind and in virtue of which he, or 
 any one else who would believe, might be 
 justified and saved? Undoubtedly he did ; 
 but his attitude towards them was not that of 
 a man believing certain events to have hap- 
 pened upon evidence. He seemed to himself 
 to die daily and rise again with Christ, and it 
 was this moral and personal experience that 
 gave reality in his eyes to the supposed 
 historical events,' bringing the forgiveness 
 and reconciliation which were involved in 
 Christ's death and resurrection within the 
 sphere of his own consciousness, and leaving 
 no room for faith in the secondary sense of 
 an acceptance of certain propositions as true 
 upon trust. To him therefore that difficulty 
 
64 Faith. 
 
 did not exist which theological controversy 
 inevitably raises for the modern mind. The 
 difficulty is shortly this. 
 
 On the one hand, we are called upon to 
 regard Faith as the condition of our attaining 
 the highest spiritual life as that which makes 
 the difference between the man who is as God 
 would have him to be and the man who is not. 
 If we are honest with ourselves, we shall admit 
 that something best called Faith a prevailing 
 conviction of our presence to God and His to 
 us, of His gracious mind towards us, working 
 in and with and through us, of our duty to 
 our fellow-men as our brethren in Him has 
 been the source of whatever has been best in 
 us and in our deeds. If we have enough ex- 
 perience and sympathy to interpret fairly the 
 life of the world around us, we shall admit 
 that faith of this sort is the salt of the earth. 
 Through it, below the surface of circumstance 
 and custom, humanity is being renewed day 
 by day, and unless our heart is sealed by self- 
 ishness and sophistry, though we may not 
 consciously share in the process, there will 
 be men and times that make us reverentially 
 
Faith. 65 
 
 feel its reality. Who can hear an unargu- 
 mentative and unrhetorical Christian minister 
 appeal to his people to cleanse their hearts 
 and to help each other as sons of God in 
 Christ, without feeling that he touches the 
 deepest and strongest spring of noble conduct 
 in mankind ? So far, the office which theolo- 
 gians assign to faith seems to be one which 
 we have the strongest moral warrant for 
 allowing to it. But, on the other hand, the 
 object of Faith is declared to be the work of 
 Christ, consisting specially in the incarnation 
 by which He took on Him our nature, in the 
 death by which He purchased the forgiveness 
 of sins, and the resurrection by which He 
 opened to us the gate of everlasting life. 
 These were events, continuous no doubt in 
 their effects, but which took place in an his- 
 torical past. Faith accordingly, as having 
 the work of Christ for its object, is regarded 
 as necessarily involving the belief that propo- 
 sitions, asserting the actual occurrence of these 
 events, are true. The saving Faith, on which 
 Protestants insist, is doubtless held to imply 
 much more than such an acceptance of certain 
 F 
 
66 Faith. 
 
 propositions ; but though much more, it can- 
 not, according to the common conception, be 
 less than this. A belief, not different in kind 
 from the belief that Caesar was murdered on 
 the Ides of March, must be an integral part 
 of it, if its object is the work of Christ in the 
 sense above explained. 
 
 The Faith then which is supposed to be 
 demanded of us as Christians involves two ele- 
 ments, which, to say the least, are wholly dif- 
 ferent on the one side, a certain intellectual 
 assent of a kind which, if the propositions 
 assented to concerned any other events than 
 those purporting to convey a divine revela- 
 tion, we should say could make no difference 
 to the heart or spirit or character call it what 
 we will which is alone of absolute value in a ' 
 man ; on the other side, a certain attitude or 
 disposition which belongs distinctively to this 
 ' inner man ' and gives us our worth as moral 
 or spiritual beings. The deepening of the 
 conception of Faith in the Lutheran theology 
 only brings this discrepancy into clearer relief. 
 The more strongly we insist that Faith is a 
 personal and conscious relation of the man to 
 
Faith. 67 
 
 God, forming the principle of a new life, not 
 perhaps observable by others, but which the 
 man's own conscience recognises, the more 
 awkward becomes its dependence on events 
 believed to have happened in the past. Th( 
 evidence for their having happened may be 
 exceedingly cogent, but at any rate the ap- 
 preciation of it depends on processes of rea- 
 soning which it would be a moral paradox to 
 deny that a man may perform correctly with- 
 out being the better, and incorrectly without 
 being the worse. It has often been asked 
 whether we can seriously suppose a man to 
 be condemned in the sight of God for mis- 
 understanding a proposition in divinity ; and 
 though the question may have been irreve- 
 rently put, there can be but one answer to it. 
 It is not on any estimate of evidence, correct 
 or incorrect, that our true holiness can depend. 
 Neither, if we believe certain documents to be 
 genuine and authentic, can we be the better, 
 nor, if we believe it not, the worse. There is 
 thus an inner contradiction in that conception 
 of Faith which makes it a state of mind in- 
 volving peace with God and love towards all 
 
68 Faith. 
 
 men, and at the same time makes its object 
 that historical work of Christ, of which our 
 knowledge depends on evidence of uncertain 
 origin and value. 
 
 It will perhaps be said that our assent 
 upon historical evidence to those articles of 
 the Creed which relate to the miraculous 
 events of Christ's life is different in kind from 
 our assent to any other statements of remote 
 history asserting that certain events have 
 happened, just because the events, which the 
 two kinds of statement severally purport to 
 relate, are entirely different. When events 
 are said to have happened as a medium of 
 God's revelation of Himself to man, it is not 
 by an intellectual process of estimating evi- 
 dence, but by our convictions about God and 
 by what our hearts demand of Him, that we 
 are determined to believe or disbelieve their 
 reality. Thus the Faith which accepts the 
 truth of the Gospel story, and that which, as 
 an assurance of God's love, renews the inner 
 man and seeks to impart itself to all man- 
 kind, form one homogeneous process. The 
 consciousness of sin is already the promise 
 
Faith. 69 
 
 and potency of Faith. It determines the soul 
 to believe the narrative which tells how the 
 Son of God took on Him our nature and 
 obtained our free forgiveness. The same 
 longing after God, which welcomes the record 
 of this revelation, having received it, becomes 
 that satisfied love which is Faith in its highest 
 form. Now in this view there is no doubt 
 truth, though it scarcely warrants that infer- 
 ence from the source of belief in a supposed 
 event to the reality of the event which 
 Christian apologists are apt to draw. It is 
 true, no doubt, that it has not been on his- 
 torical evidence that any one has ever been 
 brought to believe in Christ to the saving of 
 his soul. To most of us it is under the name 
 of Christ that all thoughts of God have come 
 since first we were capable of them. God, 
 so to speak, has been incarnate to us, has 
 died and risen again for us in the person of 
 Jesus, ever since there has been for us a God 
 at all. Thought first becomes definite in 
 language, and it is in the language which the 
 creeds furnish that the bare consciousness of 
 God which is involved in the consciousness 
 
7o Faith. 
 
 of ourselves the yearning after Him which is 
 inseparable from the impulse to fulfil our- 
 selves has become a working theory of the 
 relation between God and man. Hence the 
 great concern of the best Christian teachers 
 has been, and, when they are wise enough to 
 stop their ears against the clamours of scep- 
 ticism, still is, not to win assent upon the 
 evidence to the miraculous narrative of the 
 Gospels an assent in most cases already 
 secured by habit, and otherwise scarcely to 
 be obtained by argument but to bring their 
 people to enact in their own hearts and lives 
 the work which the creeds rehearse ; not to 
 convince them that Christ was miraculously 
 born and died and rose again, but so to affect 
 them as that they shall die and rise again 
 with Him and live as those to whom their sins 
 have been forgiven and the gate of eternal 
 life thrown open. The mode of inner life, 
 which is thus recognised as alone giving 
 spiritual value to the acceptance of the his- 
 torical record of Christ's work, has already in 
 germ been the determining cause of its accept- 
 ance by those, from St. Paul downwards, who 
 
Faith, 71 
 
 have not like ourselves learnt their religion in 
 its language. There has been some spiritual 
 process going on in them, such as the conflict 
 described by St. Paul in Rom. vii between 
 the law of his mind or reason and the law of 
 sin in his members, which has made the 
 acceptance of the Gospel narrative seem a 
 divinely-revealed deliverance, but which was 
 after all the natural parent of the seemingly 
 altered life that followed the acceptance. 
 The feeling of helpless alienation from God 
 through the flesh, from which St. Paul found 
 sudden relief in the recognition of Jesus as 
 the Son of God in whom, sent in the likeness 
 of sinful flesh, God had condemned sin in the 
 flesh, itself gave reality to the message which 
 brought the relief, and which enabled it, sur- 
 viving in principle though altered in form, 
 from a spirit of bondage to become a spirit 
 of adoption. There have been many in all 
 ages, whether nursed in Christianity or no, 
 whether they have been left unacquainted 
 with the New Testament or whether it has re- 
 mained to them not an unknown or incredible 
 but an unmeaning tale, to whom at some crisis 
 
7 2 Faith. 
 
 of their lives the record of St. Paul's deliver- 
 ance has come as life from the dead. The 
 account of his case is also the account of 
 theirs. A new man has been forming in them 
 the sign of its presence being perhaps the 
 more conscious antagonism of the old or a 
 more wilful adherence to some mode of life 
 or rule of action which has long ceased to 
 satisfy but till it has received some assur- 
 ance of divine recognition and help, it is weak 
 from ignorance of its proper strength and is 
 merely a source of inward unrest. In the 
 Gospel history, as interpreted by St. Paul, it 
 finds the needed assurance. It does not wait 
 to balance evidence or curiously investigate 
 the sources of the history. It seems to have 
 passed from bondage into a glorious liberty, 
 and that through an announcement of facts 
 received from without : yet in truth, there is 
 no break of continuity between the new life 
 and the old. It was from the old sense of 
 bondage that the announcement which brought 
 deliverance derived at once its character and 
 its certainty. The faith which accepted it 
 was also the faith which interpreted it. Tha 
 
Faith. 73 
 
 faith which accepted and interpreted it was 
 also the faith which had inwardly demanded 
 it ; and the faith which demanded, accepted, 
 and interpreted it is also the faith which lives 
 and works upon it. 
 
 The practical Christian faith, thus formed 
 and sustained, is thoroughly at one with itself. 
 It is not in it, but in the current theological 
 conception of it, that there lies the contradic- 
 tion of which I have previously spoken. An 
 assent to propositions upon evidence is no 
 intrinsic element in it, nor that on which it 
 ultimately depends. Its object is not past 
 events, but a present, reconciled, and indwell- 
 ing God. Its interest in the work of Christ 
 is in this as a finislied work ; i.e., in present 
 relations with God which Christ's work is 
 thought to have rendered possible. It is no 
 doubt historically conditioned ; but it is not 
 on an intellectual estimate of its own con- 
 ditions that it depends for being what it is. 
 Without the Christian tradition it would not 
 have been what it is, but a judgment as to the 
 authenticity of that tradition, though it has 
 hitherto followed from it almost as a matter 
 
74 Faith. 
 
 of course, is not essential to it as a spiritual 
 state. It is upon the formation of a theory 
 about faith that it comes to be regarded as 
 necessarily dependent on assent to proposi- 
 tions concerning past events. Controversy 
 compels the faithful to justify their faith. In 
 its true nature Faith can be justified by 
 nothing but itself. Like the consciousness of 
 God and of duty of which indeed it is but 
 another mode it is a primary formative 
 principle, which cannot be deduced or derived 
 from anything else. Any apparent derivation 
 of it is inevitably a circular process. This, 
 however, is what the understanding is slow to 
 admit. It seeks for an explanatory antece- 
 dent of Faith just as it might of any event in 
 nature. Hence as Christian theology super- 
 vened on Christian faith, the latter, pressed 
 for its reason why, could only appeal to the 
 ostensible facts embodied in the tradition of 
 the Church ; which was in effect to ascribe its 
 origin to an assent given in the past to a 
 certain interpretation of certain events, while 
 in truth both interpretation and assent were 
 the result of the Faith supposed to be derived 
 
Faith. 75 
 
 from them. Faith thus came to found itself, 
 or rather to suppose itself founded, upon 
 dogma : z>., upon propositions representing 
 neither demonstrable truths of science, nor 
 ultimate conditions necessary to the possibility 
 of experience and knowledge, nor formative 
 ideas of reason, nor imperatives of morality 
 but either miraculous transactions, or deduc- 
 tions from and explanations of those supposed 
 transactions. Nor could the process of 
 theorising upon its origin fail to react upon 
 Faith itself. It was not that one man was 
 accounting for the faith of another, but that 
 the faithful were adjusting their faith to the 
 demands of their own understanding. Hence 
 dogma, a theory of Faith as originating in 
 miracle, has come to be regarded by those, 
 whose faith is really a certain disposition of 
 the spirit towards God and man, as part and 
 parcel of their Faith itself ; and though zeal for 
 dogma is often related in inverse proportion 
 to the power of faith in the higher sense, yet 
 the latter cannot but suffer from disturbance 
 of a doctrine which has for ages been the 
 accepted compromise between the conscious- 
 
76 Fait It. 
 
 ness of God and the importunities of the 
 understanding, and which has wrought itself 
 into the language and institutions of all the 
 churches. 
 
 Why then, it may be asked, except out of 
 wilful mischief, should the supposed dogmatic 
 basis of Faith be disturbed at all ? It is 
 admitted that Faith, as the spiritual source of 
 the Christian life, is the highest condition of 
 human character. Why, for the sake of rec- 
 tifying what is at worst a speculative mis- 
 take into which Christians have generally 
 fallen as to the genesis of their faith, should 
 we run the risk of making that condition more 
 difficult to reach or to maintain ? The answer 
 is, that an inquiry into the relation between 
 the life of faith and the order of the world is 
 not one as to which it rests with the good 
 pleasure of certain curious persons whether it 
 shall be undertaken or no. The human spirit 
 is one and indivisible, and the desire to know 
 what nature is and means is as inseparable 
 from it as the consciousness of God and the 
 longing for reconciliation with Him. The 
 scientific impulse on the one side, and the 
 
Faith. 7 7 
 
 faith that worketh by love on the other, ex- 
 hibit the same spirit in different relations. It 
 is only some mistake that we make as to the 
 origin or office of either that brings them into 
 apparent competition. The scientific impulse 
 goes on its own way and yields its own result. 
 It traces the determination of event by event 
 in a series to which it finds neither beginning 
 nor end ; so that to those who have fancied 
 that, if the course of events could be followed 
 by memory far enough back or by a prophetic 
 vision far enough forward, it would lead us to 
 a divine act of creation or completion, science 
 seems to make God disappear. An antece- 
 dent in time which has itself had no antece- 
 dent, a consequent in time which should have 
 no further consequent are found to be impos- 
 sibilities ; and though it is a mistake to iden- 
 tify the causation of any phenomenon with its 
 antecedent in time, yet it is vain to seek for 
 it elsewhere than in conditions, of which each 
 is itself conditioned and, as related to sense, 
 sensibly verifiable. A proposition which as- 
 serts divine causation for any phenomenon is 
 not exactly false, but turns out on strict 
 
78 Faith. 
 
 analysis to be unmeaning. Science is thus 
 within its right so long as it merely rejects all 
 imagination of an intrusion of the supernatural 
 within the natural, or of a limit where the one 
 ends and the other begins. It is another 
 matter when it goes on to assume that there 
 is nothing not natural. In such an assump- 
 tion it is, so to speak, belying itself, for no 
 one has yet succeeded in showing how for a 
 being which was only a part of nature a science 
 of nature should be possible, or how the 
 thinking subject, apart from which nature 
 itself would not be, should be itself natural. 
 Science is therefore misunderstanding its own 
 origin and office when, not content with 
 showing the ' supernatural ' to be a mere 
 phrase to which no reality corresponds, it 
 seeks to apply the same process to the spiritual. 
 Its own existence is a witness to the reality 
 of the spiritual, though this, just because it is 
 the source of knowledge, cannot be one of its 
 objects. The true lesson which it teaches is 
 that God is not to be sought in nature, nor in 
 any beginning or end of nature, but in man 
 himself. It warns us against trying to make 
 
Faith. 79 
 
 statements about God as we might about any 
 matter of fact which, in the strict sense, we 
 know, but it does not touch that relation of 
 the inner man to a higher form of itself of 
 which the expression is to be found, not in 
 the propositions of theology, but in prayer 
 and praise the prayer which asks for nothing, 
 the praise which thanks for nothing, but God's 
 fulfilment of Himself and in that effort after 
 an ideal perfection which is the spring of the 
 moral life. 
 
 But while science, rightly understood, 
 leaves to the spiritual life all the room which 
 this on its part, when rightly understood, re- 
 quires, it is seldom that the pursuit of science 
 leaves leisure for a true philosophy of what 
 science is and implies. The man of science 
 is apt to deny the existence of, or at least our 
 concern with, anything which is not strictly 
 an object of science or matter of fact. As 
 the moral life cannot be altogether ignored, 
 he misinterprets it into a natural history, and 
 in so doing, though he cannot make it what 
 he understands it to be, he runs the risk of 
 lowering its ideal. Meanwhile the theologian 
 
8o Faith. 
 
 co-operates with him in error by insisting on 
 that misconception of the basis of faith which 
 firings it and science into competition on the 
 same ground. He will have it that Faith 
 stands or falls with the admission or rejection 
 of certain propositions concerning matters of 
 fact, concerning the causation of events, which 
 are strictly within the domain of science and 
 which it must inevitably reject. The man of 
 science is ready enough of himself to assume 
 that the spiritual is no more than the super- 
 natural, which he has always found to be a 
 refuge for ignorance. When he hears the 
 theologian telling the same tale, and talking , 
 glibly of some ' projection of the supernatural 
 within the natural ' as the origination of Faith, 
 his prejudice is confirmed, and he naturally 
 supposes that Faith is merely one of the 
 modes of ignorance, which he has to clear out 
 of his way. Hence arises that conflict be- 
 tween religion and science which nowadays 
 is on the tongues of all and in the hearts of 
 many a conflict for which the champions on 
 both sides are fond of telling us that there is 
 no real ground, while they are alike main- 
 
Faith. 8 1 
 
 taining positions which, so long as they are 
 held, render it simply unavoidable. It is by 
 no means therefore a piece of mere intellec- 
 tual wantonness to disturb the faithful in that 
 theory of their faith which they have come to 
 think inseparable from faith itself : to inquire 
 whether Faith, as a spiritual state, is neces- 
 sarily dependent on assent to those propo- 
 sitions concerning ostensible matters of fact, 
 which form the basis of theological dogma. 
 Such inquiry is necessary for the vindication 
 of Faith itself, and even for its presentation, 
 in its properly scriptural character. It is as 
 presumed to be so dependent on miracle that 
 it has come to be opposed to reason in a 
 manner foreign, as we have seen, to the Faith 
 of the New Testament, while conversely that 
 opposition to sense, which is its characteristic 
 in the New Testament, tends to disappear. 
 If faith were really belief in the occurrence 
 of certain miraculous events upon transmitted 
 evidence of the senses of other people, its cer- 
 tainty would after all be merely a weaker form 
 of the certainty of sense. Such a Faith is 
 neither intrinsically worth maintaining, nor in 
 G 
 
82 Faith. 
 
 the long run can it maintain itself, against the 
 demands of reason. Reason will not be kept at 
 bay by being told that certain truths are above 
 it, when these ' truths/ if they are anything at 
 all, are propositions concerning matters of fact 
 to which from their nature the principles regu- 
 lating all knowledge must be fully applicable. 
 Under different relations, or in different modes 
 of itself, reason is the source alike of Faith 
 and of knowledge. It is but put at strife with 
 itself when in its character of faith it is sup- 
 posed to claim an assent which, as the source 
 of the effort after knowledge, it must seek to 
 set aside. 
 
 A full justification of the statement that 
 Reason is the source alike of Faith and of 
 knowledge would carry me too far from my 
 present purpose, which is to enforce the prac- 
 tical nature of Faith. What it is intended to 
 convey is something of this sort. Reason is 
 self-consciousness. It is only as taken into 
 our self-consciousness, and so presented to us 
 as an object, that anything is known to us. 
 Thus everything that we know is known to 
 us as a constituent of one world, by the other 
 
Faith. 83 
 
 constituents of which it is necessarily deter- 
 mined. Hence arises the conception of what 
 we call the uniformity of nature a concep- 
 tion which, though it may be only formulated 
 and articulated at a comparatively late stage 
 of scientific reflection, is really involved in all 
 knowledge whatever. In conceiving of a 
 nature or ' objective world ' at all, we neces- 
 sarily conceive it as uniform. If we assert a 
 suspension of its laws, a break in its conti 
 nuity, to have taken place even in a single 
 case ; if we maintain so much as the possi- 
 bility of an intrusion or ' projection ' of extra- 
 natural agency within the natural ; though we 
 may be willing to stake our life upon the 
 proposition or more truly upon some moral 
 or spiritual interest which we wrongly sup- 
 pose it to involve, we are none the less saying 
 what is intrinsically unmeaning ; for we are 
 affirming the existence of knowledge and 
 nature, and at the same time denying the 
 principle in virtue of which alone knowledge 
 is possible and there is for our consciousness 
 such a thing as nature. But though Reason 
 is thus, in the sense explained, the source of 
 
84 Faith. 
 
 our knowledge of nature, it can never give 
 completeness to that knowledge or in conse 
 quence find in nature an object adequate to 
 itself. Nature remains to us an endless series 
 in which the knowing of anything implies of 
 itself something further to be known. Yet 
 the assurance of there being a reality, one, 
 complete, and absolute, has been the source 
 of that very knowledge which cannot become 
 a knowledge of such reality. Through it alone 
 a nature the cosmos of our experience, as 
 Mr. Lewes well calls it has arisen for us. It 
 is involved in the presence of Reason in us, 
 as our self-consciousness, as the consciousness 
 of a subject which is at once the negation and 
 the unity of all things ; which we do not know 
 but are, and through which we know. As in 
 us, this rational self-consciousness supervenes 
 upon sense, and it is because the data of sense 
 are the materials which it makes into a 
 knowledge, that a margin always remains to 
 be known beyond what it can know and that 
 thus it cannot know the absolute. But, though 
 communicated to us in a mode which does 
 not allow of its being itself in a strict sense 
 
Faith. 85 
 
 known, it keeps before us an object which we 
 may seek to become. It is an element of 
 identity between us and a perfect Being, who is 
 in full realisation what we only are in principle 
 and possibility. That God is, it entitles us 
 to say with the same certainty as that the 
 world is or that we ourselves are. What He 
 is, it does not indeed enable us to say in the 
 same way in which we make propositions 
 about matters of fact, but it moves us to 
 seek to become as He is : to become like 
 Him, to become consciously one with Him, 
 to have the fruition of His Godhead. In this 
 sense it is that Reason issues in the life of 
 Faith. 
 
 An objector here may naturally ask, how, 
 if we do not know what God is, we can seek 
 to become as He is. Does not the limitation 
 we admit to the possibility of knowledge 
 make faith too, in the sense described, an 
 impossibility, or at any rate reduce it to a 
 vague aspiration 
 
 ' The desire of the moth for the star, 
 Of the night for the morrow, 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow '? 
 
86 Faith. 
 
 Now, in the first place, it may be noticed 
 that some limitation to our knowledge of the 
 object of Faith is implied in the very idea of 
 Faith. If we knew God as we know any- 
 thing else, if His nature had been revealed to 
 us by miraculous evidence of a kind with that 
 which convinces us of matters of fact, then 
 would faith be no more faith. As St. Paul 
 says of Hope, which is but another name for 
 Faith, ' We are saved by hope, but hope that 
 is seen is not hope.' In a certain respect 
 there is a correspondence between Faith, as 
 the practical consciousness of God, and the 
 artist's consciousness of an ideal. The ideal 
 which governs the production of a work of 
 art whether it be the ideal of an imitation 
 of nature, or of something so far removed 
 from this as I should suppose a musical com- 
 position to be is not in the proper sense an 
 object of knowledge to the artist. It is not 
 anything which he could adequately describe 
 in words. He can but gradually, and never 
 completely, define the ideal by means of the 
 work in which it is to some extent realised. 
 It thus appears that an object of conscious- 
 
Faith. 87 
 
 ness may be in the highest degree operative 
 not upon us, but in and through us and in 
 that most proper sense real, which yet is not 
 known, but can only come to be known indi- 
 rectly or piece-meal through the gradual re- 
 sults of its operation. It will be observed 
 further, that such an ideal object does not 
 exist apart from the consciousness of it. It 
 is not what we suppose an external thing to 
 be there ready-made before and indepen- 
 dently of our being aware of it. It exists 
 only in the consciousness : yet any conscious- 
 ness of it that the artist could call his own or 
 that he could express not in a description 
 before-hand, but in his most finished work 
 falls far short, as he would tell us, of the ideal 
 itself. The ideal exists in his consciousness, 
 yet not in its full reality, for if it did it would 
 no longer be an ideal. There is an identity 
 between it and his consciousness of it ; other- 
 wise it would not exist for him at all. Yet it 
 must be more and other than his conscious- 
 ness of it, or that consciousness would not be 
 of an ideal. 
 
 By help of this analogy it may be under- 
 
88 Faith. 
 
 stood how there may be a consciousness of 
 God, which is not a knowledge of Him of a 
 kind with our knowledge of matters of fact, 
 and yet is the most real, because the most 
 operative, of all spiritual principles : a con- 
 sciousness not definable like an ordinary 
 ccnception, but which defines itself in a moral 
 life expressive of it ; which is not indeed an 
 external proof of the existence of God, but 
 is in principle that existence itself a first 
 communication of the Godhead. Such con- 
 sciousness has in manifold forms been the 
 moralising agent in human society, nay the 
 formative principle of that society itself. The 
 existence of specific duties and the recog- 
 nition of them, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the 
 moral law and the reverence for it in its most 
 abstract and absolute form all no doubt pre- 
 suppose society ; but society, of a kind to 
 render them possible, is not the creature of 
 appetite and fear, or of the most complicated 
 and indirect results of these. It implies the 
 action in man of a principle in virtue of 
 which he projects himself into the future or 
 into some other world as some more perfect 
 
Faith, 89 
 
 being than he actually is, and thus seeks not 
 merely to satisfy momentary wants but to 
 become ' another man ' to become more 
 nearly as this more perfect being. Under 
 this influence wants and desires that have 
 their root in the animal nature become an 
 impulse of improvement (' Besserungstrieb ') 
 which forms, enlarges, and re-casts societies ; 
 always keeping before man in various guise, 
 according to the deg ee of his development, 
 an unrealised ideal of a Best which is his God, 
 and giving Divine authority to the customs or 
 laws by which some likeness of this ideal is 
 wrought into the actuality of life. I cannot 
 here attempt to trace even in outline, as a 
 Philosophy of History should do, the pro- 
 cess by which God's revelation of Himself in 
 the human consciousness has thus issued in 
 the institutions by which our elementary 
 moralisation is brought about ; or to show 
 how upon this process there has supervened 
 another in which the consciousness of God 
 has come to distinguish itself from these its 
 partial and changing results, and to recognise 
 itself alone, in opposition to any outward law 
 
o Faith. 
 
 of state or church, as the manifested God, His 
 communication of Himself in spirit and in 
 truth. We are born, so to speak, into a world 
 in which these processes have already been 
 carried so far, in which the consciousness of 
 God has already so far embodied itself, that 
 the problem of faith for us is rather to 
 overcome the selfishness and conceit which 
 prevent us from taking into ourselves in- 
 dividually the revelation of God which is 
 everywhere about us, than to develop that 
 revelation more fully. It is our very fami- 
 liarity with God's expression of Himself in 
 the institutions of society, in the moral law, 
 in the language and inner life of Christians, 
 in our own consciences, that helps to blind us 
 to its divinity, and emboldens us to claim the 
 right to please ourselves unabashed by its 
 presence. Yet if thus, by refusing to recog- 
 nise it, we turn the light that is in us to 
 darkness, how great is that darkness ! In the 
 higher forms of the Christian religion the 
 spirit of man has reached that stage some- 
 times called by mystics the reign of the Holy 
 Ghost in which the consciousness of God is 
 
Faith. 9 1 
 
 a consciousness of Him, no longer as an 
 outward power, but as one with itself, as 
 reconciled and indwelling. If it becomes so 
 perverted in us that, having ceased to look 
 for a God outside us, we will not recognise 
 Him in ourselves and in that which our con- 
 science reveals to us, we are committing the 
 true sin against the Holy Ghost a sin un- 
 pardonable, in the sense that it shuts us out 
 from the higher life the life of correlative 
 self- reverence and self-abasement, of self- 
 sacrifice and self-development the life of 
 faith. 
 
 The enemy which religion, i.e. a God- 
 seeking morality, has now to fear, is not a 
 passionate atheism. Such atheism is often a 
 religion which misunderstands itself. It is 
 seeking after God, but in the hurry of irrita- 
 tion against the ignorance and fear which call 
 themselves religious, it cannot recognise its 
 object under the old name. It may limit and 
 distort the spiritual life, and yet leave the 
 spring of its nobility untouched. Not from 
 it is our danger, but from the slow sap of an 
 undermining indifference which does not deny 
 
92 Faith. 
 
 God and duty, but ignores them ; which does 
 not care to trouble itself about them, and 
 finds in our acknowledged inability to know 
 them, as we know matters of fact, a new ex- 
 cuse for putting them aside. It is this which 
 takes off the native beauty from the fair 
 forehead of a child-like faith, and leaves, not 
 the scars of a much-questioning and often- 
 failing but still believing search after God, 
 whom so to seek is to find, but the vacancy 
 of contented worldliness or the sneer of the 
 baffled pleasure-seeker. 
 
 It is indeed no new malady. While ' the 
 flesh lusteth against the spirit ' it must always 
 be at work, and may be as prevalent in an 
 age of orthodoxy as in an age of doubt. But 
 we know it best and have most to fear it in 
 the form which it takes from the temper of our 
 own time. Most of us, I should suppose, who 
 have felt the influence of modern ' culture ' at 
 all, must have felt that it has been giving at 
 any rate great opportunities to this enemy of 
 our spiritual life. Everything has had a 
 history, we have learnt complacently to say. 
 The notions of God, of duty, of an ideal life, 
 
Faith. 93 
 
 have been constantly shifting. They have 
 'developed,' and that is vaguely taken to 
 mean that they are transitory phases of a 
 force moving we know not whence or whither. 
 ' We are children of nature, the offspring of 
 circumstance ; nature and circumstance may 
 be left to make us what they will, so long as 
 we take our fill undisturbed of such pleasures 
 as they put in our way. A perfect Being 
 whom we cannot know, an absolute law which 
 we cannot describe, are clearly no concern 
 of ours.' So, more or less articulately, we are 
 apt to argue ; and though the Divine con- 
 sciousness in us, which is necessary even to 
 the possibility of our so arguing, cannot thus 
 be wholly suppressed, it is prevented from 
 duly actualising itself, and we are left in a state 
 of moral triviality than which the darkest de- 
 spair of doubt is far more noble. Even though 
 we bear up against the deadening influence, 
 yet as criticism compels us to discard, one 
 after another, 'the fair humanities of old 
 religion ' the anthropomorphic formulae in 
 which we have been used to express to our- 
 selves the presence and action of God as an 
 
94 Faith. 
 
 
 
 external person moulding nature to His pur- 
 poses and intervening in it when and how He 
 will our spiritual life cannot but feel the 
 change. It lacks the means of utterance and 
 communication. We know not how to speak 
 of Divine things to each other; we are es- 
 tranged from the sympathies of the Christian 
 congregation. Yet ' still the heart doth need 
 a language ; ' and, unable to use the old or to 
 make a new one, it loses the energy which 
 free exercise and expression are needed to 
 sustain. Our moral standard indeed may not 
 suffer. We may persist grimly in the walk of 
 duty and refuse to acquiesce in the attitude 
 of disbelief, but ' the fire so bright, the love 
 so sweet, the unction spiritual ' are ours no 
 longer. 
 
 It may seem more easy to show the in- 
 evitableness of this state of mind than a way 
 of deliverance from it. No deliverance indeed 
 is to be looked for from without. No dis- 
 covery in nature, no ' glimpses of the unseen,' 
 no revived force or recognition of authority, 
 will bring us help. Faith is not to be saved 
 by anything that would supersede faith, but 
 
Faith. 95 
 
 only by its own faithfulness ; and it will be 
 so saved if, through the trial to which in the 
 criticism of its supposed dogmatic basis it is 
 subjected, it learns more clearly to recognise 
 its native divinity the God that worketh in 
 it and its proper independence of external 
 support. Thus finding in itself the revelation 
 which it seeks in vain elsewhere, it does not 
 cease to be rather it becomes again what 
 in essence it was to St. Paul. It is in his spirit, 
 I venture to think, that we may reason thus 
 with our doubts. ' You complain that by 
 searching you cannot find out God. No eye 
 can see, or ear hear Him. The assertion that 
 He exists cannot be verified like any other 
 matter of fact. But what if that be not be- 
 cause He is so far off, but because He is so 
 near ? You cannot know Him as you know 
 a particular fact related to you, but neither 
 can you so know yourself ; and it is yourself 
 not as you are but as in seeking Him you 
 become that is His revelation. " Say not in 
 thine own heart, who shall ascend into heaven 
 or descend into the deep," to find God in the 
 height of another world or in the depths of 
 
96 Faith. 
 
 nature ? " The word of God is very nigh thee, 
 even in thy mouth and in thy heart." It is 
 the Word that has been made man ; that has 
 been uttering itself in all the high endeavour, 
 the long-suffering love, the devoted search for 
 truth, which have so far moralised mankind, 
 and that now speaks in your conscience. It 
 is the God in you which strives for communi- 
 cation with God. 
 
 " Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit 
 
 with spirit can meet ; 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 
 than hands and feet." 
 
 Not as to the sensual ear, nor necessarily 
 through the stinted expression of verbal 
 signs, but as a man communes with his own 
 heart, you may speak to God. Though you 
 know not what you should pray for as you 
 ought, yet the Spirit itself maketh interces- 
 sion for you with groanings which cannot be 
 uttered. Look not for an external answer to 
 your prayer. Your prayer will be its own 
 answer, even as the virtuous action is its own 
 reward. Prayer indeed, if of the right sort, 
 is already incipient action ; or, more properly, 
 
Faith. 97 
 
 it is a moral action which has not yet made 
 its outward sign. It is the determination of 
 desire by the consciousness of God, and is an 
 incident of that process which, as the effort to 
 realise a conception of absolute law, to fulfil 
 our true vocation, to develop humanity, to 
 enact God in the world, constitutes the 
 morally good life. Neither the prayer nor 
 the life is a means to anything beyond itself. 
 Each has its value simply as the expression 
 or realisation of the Divine principle which 
 renders each possible. To ask for a verifica- 
 tion of your idea of God before you pray, or 
 for a proof of the existence of an absolute 
 moral law before you deny yourself in obedi- 
 ence to its command, is to deprive yourself of 
 the benefit of the only proof or verification 
 which the nature of the case admits. You 
 cannot find a verification of the idea of God 
 or duty ; you can only make it. God is not 
 something outside and beyond the conscious- 
 ness of Him, any more than duty is outside 
 and beyond the consciousness of it. The true 
 verification of the consciousness is the life of 
 prayer and self-denial which expresses it. 
 H 
 
98 Faith. 
 
 Though the failing heart cries out for evidence, 
 at the worst live on as if there were God and 
 duty, and they will prove themselves to you 
 in your life. The witness which God has 
 given of Himself in the spiritual history of 
 mankind you will in this way make your own.' 
 Whether such language will carry much 
 meaning to those to whom I speak I cannot 
 but feel doubtful. But I can only say to them 
 what I say to myself, and offer them, the 
 thoughts in which, amid much misgiving and 
 frequent failure of heart and will, I still find 
 assurance. Even if the truth of such thoughts 
 be accepted, the difficulty of making them 
 available for the daily food which human 
 weakness requires still remains. They may 
 suffice for us while reason is strong and the 
 temper calm, but when 
 
 ' Our light is low 
 
 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
 And tingle, and the heart is sick. 
 And all the wheels of Being slow,' 
 
 we need another sustenance the support, 
 as we should be apt to say, of something 
 more ' objective ' and tangible. It is idle 
 
Faith. 99 
 
 to ignore the reality and inevitableness of 
 this demand, nor, though we may antici- 
 pate a time when it will be rather met by 
 the sympathies of a society breathing the 
 Christian spirit than by the propositions of 
 an anthropomorphic theology, will this an- 
 ticipation give us much practical help, since 
 the needed sympathies are at present scarcely 
 to be found except among those to whom they 
 seem dependent upon such a theology. To 
 those therefore who find themselves, not 
 indeed even seemingly detached from the 
 eternal basis of faith, but to a certain degree 
 weakened and distressed in their spiritual 
 walk by inability to adopt the received dog- 
 matic expression of the Christian faith and 
 by consequent estrangement from Christian 
 society, I must frankly confess that there is 
 no present compensatory support which I can 
 indicate. I can but make a few suggestions 
 for lessening the danger and loss which can- 
 not be wholly avoided. 
 
 In the first place, let us not make the 
 estrangement wider than it need be. Inability 
 to adopt the ' creeds of Christendom in their 
 
i oo Faith. 
 
 natural sense and in any other sense they 
 are best left alone need not disqualify us 
 from using its prayers. A creed is meant to 
 serve either as an article of agreement with 
 other men, or as a basis of theological argu- 
 ment ; and from each point of view there are 
 objections to using its words in any other mean- 
 ing than that which they are ordinarily under- 
 stood to bear. But in prayer we need not 
 ask whether our words are such as would be 
 understood by others in the same sense as by 
 us, or whether they convey a correct theological 
 conception. They are not meant to be heard 
 of men. ' He that searcheth the hearts 
 knoweth what is the mind of the spirit/ So 
 long as our prayers express the effort after a 
 higher life, recognised as proceeding from, and 
 only to be satisfied by, the grace of God, the 
 theological formulae in which they are clothed 
 are of little importance. In the prayers of 
 the Christian Church, issuing as they do from 
 a consciousness to which the death in Christ 
 to sin and the new life in Him unto God, a 
 free forgiveness and the indwelling of the 
 Spirit, represented spiritual experiences, we 
 
Faith. 101 
 
 have modes of utterance which in the de- 
 velopment of the same consciousness and it 
 cannot be developed without utterance we 
 may properly make our own. The fact that 
 others who use them have beliefs as to his- 
 torical occurrences which we do not share, 
 need not prevent us from sharing with them 
 what is not the expression of an historical 
 belief but of a spiritual aspiration. Such 
 participation is of the more value when it 
 becomes part of a general co-operation in that 
 active life of the Christian society, in which 
 the prayers of the congregation find their 
 proper complement It is often for want of 
 this co-operation that Faith, as a spiritual 
 principle, tends to languish in those to whom 
 the traditional dogmatic expression of it has 
 become impossible. Such persons are much 
 too ready to acquiesce in isolation as a neces- 
 sary result of their opinions. It is rather the 
 result of an obtrusion of their opinions, with 
 which vanity and impatience have much to 
 do. The days of tests and declarations, ex- 
 cept for clerical functions, are over, and it is 
 surely a weakness, when we are not pressed 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 BARBARA 
 
IO2 Faith. 
 
 for our opinions, to make so much of them to 
 other people, or to ourselves, as to be excluded 
 or to exclude ourselves from joining in a 
 common activity, the spirit of which we in- 
 wardly reverence and would gladly make our 
 own, while in separation we are almost cer- 
 tain to lose it. It is one of the misfortunes of 
 our life here that it tends to make us overrate 
 the importance of opinions as compared, I do 
 net say with mere outward conduct, but with 
 the practical principles of the inner life ; and 
 even though, as a matter of theory, we avoid 
 this mistake, yet our position and employ- 
 ment allow us few openings into that active 
 life of charity in which Christian faith is most 
 readily realised. Even here, however, in our 
 intercourse with each other, there are oppor- 
 tunities for us to ' bear one another's burdens, 
 and so fulfil the law of Christ ; ' nor, because 
 much of our intellectual activity is the result 
 of mere curiosity or emulation, should we 
 forget that there is such a thing as a pursuit 
 of truth, in principle identical with the striving 
 after God which animates the moral life. 
 Those of us to whom University life is merely 
 
Faith. 103 
 
 an avenue to the great world, would do well 
 betimes to seek opportunities of co-operation 
 with those simple Christians whose creed, 
 though we may not be able exactly to adopt 
 it, is to them the natural expression of a spirit 
 which at the bottom of our heart we recognise 
 as higher than our own. In the every-day life 
 of Christian citizenship, in its struggle against 
 ignorance and vice, such opportunities are 
 readily forthcoming. It will be rather, it is 
 true, on the fringe of the Church that such 
 work will lie. For some of the deeper cha- 
 rities, so to speak, of the Christian society 
 such as ministering to the spiritual wants of 
 the sick speculative differences may for the 
 present necessarily disqualify us. But there re- 
 mains a large range of Christian activity, from 
 which our excommunication will be our own 
 fault. In it, if we will exercise the needful 
 restraint if we will curb our conceit, and 
 watch our tongues, and keep aloof from temp- 
 tations to controversy we may still have 
 some experience of that fellowship with the 
 saints which is necessary for our daily suste- 
 nance in the life of Faith. 
 
IO4 Faith. 
 
 Meanwhile, if the present distress must 
 still for a time continue, if the cheerfulness 
 and brightness of faith should still seem ne- 
 cessarily to disappear along with the abandon- 
 ment of that dogmatic expression of it which 
 criticism invalidates, let us be all the firmer 
 in refusing any compromise with our lower 
 nature. It is not the reality of God or of the 
 ideal law of conduct that is in question, but 
 the adequacy of our modes of expressing 
 them. We may be passing through a period 
 of transition from one mode of expressing 
 them to another, or perhaps to an admission 
 of their final inefTableness. Whatever we do, 
 let us not make the difficulties of the transi- 
 tion an excuse for concessions to the spirit of 
 self-indulgence. If doubts come thick, and 
 we have ceased to look for any rending of the 
 heavens to remove them, so that our faith in 
 God no longer brings the old joy and peace 
 of believing, let us rather ask ourselves what 
 right we have to be happy than seek our 
 happiness in pleasures where, because we are 
 capable of God, we cannot find it. Faith in 
 God and duty will survive much doubt and 
 
Faith. 105 
 
 difficulty and distress, and perhaps attain to 
 some nobler mode of itself under their influ- 
 ence. But if once we have come to acquiesce 
 in such a standard of living as must make us 
 wish God and duty to be illusions, it must 
 surely die. 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTT1SWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 LONDON 
 
COMPLETION OF T. HILL GREEN'S WORKS. 
 
 WORKS OF THOMAS HILL GREEN, 
 
 Late Fellow of Balliol College, and Whyte's Professor 
 of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford. 
 
 Edited by R. L. NETTLESHIP, Fellow of 
 Balliol College, Oxford. 
 
 VOLS. I. and II. PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS. 
 i6s. each. 
 
 VOL. III. MISCELLANIES. With Memoir, Index 
 to the Three Volumes, and Portrait etched by 
 W. Sherborn. 8vo. zis. 
 
 London : LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 
Pi X 
 
 THE -LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 q'7 
 
 Goleta, California 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DAT 
 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 AVAILABLE FOR 
 
 CIRCULATION AFTER 
 
 liOm-8,'60 ( B2594s4 ) 47<i