RESENTED BY THE
BOOK
COMMITTEE OF THE
OTTRlENDSOr
PHIM)ELPM ANDVIONIIY 302jqR.CHST^

A DYNAMIC FAITH

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Studies in Mystical Religion.
The Quaker in the American Colonies.
Social Law in the Spiritual World.
The Double Search.
A Boy's Religion from Memory.
Stories of Hefare-nr Heroes.
Quakerism : A Religion of Life.
Clement of Alexandria : Selections from.
Children of the Light : Little Book of
Selections.

HEADLEY BROTHERS, LONDON.

A DYNAMIC FAITH

BY
RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
Author of "Social Law in the Spiritual World" &c.

" This is the victory — even your Faith "

FOURTH EDITION

LONDON
HEADLEY BROTHERS
BISHOPSGATE, E.C.

HEADLEY BROTHERS,
PRINTERS,
LONDON ; AND ASHFORD, KEWT.

TO THE SWEET AND SHINING
MEMORY OF A FRIEND, NOW
IN THE HEAVENLIES, WHOSE
INSPIRATION TOUCHED THESE
PAGES.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
Spite of the fact that this appears to be a busy
and materialistic age — ^bent on wealth and luxury
and the things of sense — ^it is yet true that no
generation has ever been more seriously con
cerned with the things of the Spirit than our
own. The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone,
the electric car, the steamship have made a new
commercial world in our century. The scientific
researches of the same period have given us a new
universe, and made the mediaeval conceptions of
the world for ever unthinkable. But the supreme
feature of this period is, after all, to be found
in the increased vitality of religion and in the
onward sweep of the Truth. There has not been a
discovery recorded in all this rich period which has
not sooner or later forced us to ask : How does this
affect our conception of God, or what does it mean
in terms of ethical and spiritual life, or how does
it bear on the endless destiny of Man ? Every
thoughtful individual has been compelled to face the

8 PREFACE
great issues of Hfe and death, and to adjust himself
to the march of thought. The problems of the
spiritual life have ceased to be problems exclusively
for priest and churchman ; they now concern every
man who asks questions of the universe, and they
must be settled by each man for himself. This
all involves the further fact that no man can settle
down under the comfortable lee of some ancient
" authority " and so keep the faith. One might
as well expect to keep the beautiful crystal of a
snowflake in his warm hand. Faith is kept, as life
is kept, by constant adjustment to environment.
Faith is, any way, but another name for the activity
and life of the inward man. Dynamic, we have
called it, but we hardly mean more by the term
than vital, efficient, result producing. We have
endeavoured to indicate that faith is a spiritual
process of testing the validity of things unseen, and
of appreciating their worth. This little book deals
with some aspects of such a faith, and illustrates it
through types largely chosen from those who have
proved the reality of this spiritual process. Two
of the chapters deal with a phase of rehgious thought
called " Quakerism," but we trust there is no sec
tarian bias in it, and we have aimed to express in a
simple way some truths which may possibly be
of profit to thoughtful Christians of aU conununions.

PREFACE 9
These papers were primarily prepared for the
" Haverford Summer School of Rehgious History,"
and were afterwards delivered at the Earlham
BibHcal Institute, Richmond, Indiana. R.M.J.
Haverford, Pennsylvania,
Eleventh Month, 1900.

NOTE TO FOURTH EDITION
At the request of many friends, and with the per
mission of the author, we have produced this further
edition, and trust that it may find an equally
appreciative audience to the former editions.
The Publishers.

CONTENTS PAGE
I. The Basis of Religion - - - - ii
II. Sources of Quakerism IN the Scriptures 33
III. Mysticism and the Mystics - - 50
IV. The Message of Early Quakerism - 66
V. The Stronghold of the Faith - - 85

I
THE BASIS OF RELIGION
TT was one of the difficult, in fact insoluble,
problems of ancient philosophy to find out what
supported, or held up the world. It was easy to
suppose that it rested on the back of some giant
creature, but then came the chilling question.
What holds up your giant creature ? Each
answer always led to another question. The
answer at last is : It rests on nothing outside
itself. There is no granite foundation underneath,
nor is there any giant creature. Its substance is
of such a nature that it feels a mighty attraction
for every particle of matter in the visible universe.
The sun being the greatest body in our system
exerts upon it the strongest attraction, and this
invisible, intangible power or force holds it like a
woven cable and swings it safely in its elUpse. We
say, then, that it belongs to the nature of matter
to feel an af&nity for other matter, however remotely
the particles may be separated, and were this not
so, no means could ever be found for holding up a
world in space.

12 A DYNAMIC FAITH
There is another question which has been almost
equally difficult of solution : What is the explana
tion, the ground, the basis of rehgion ? On what
authority shall we build our faith ? How do we
know that there is any more reality back of our
faith than there is back of our dreams ? Then we
have the common answers : God has given us a
book which is an ultimate authority, and which
declares the reahty of things not seen. Or again :
God has founded a church in this world by super
natural means. The founders of that church were
divinely ordained and their decisions were in
fallibly right. They have transferred their authority
to their successors and we have now in church
traditions and church officials an authority which
is a sure ground for faith, and which estabhshes
the desired reality. Either of these answers will
do, until someone unkindly raises the question
which is sure to come sooner or later : How do
we know that the Bible is God's book to us, and,
if so, who is infallibly authorised to tell us what
it means, in every line of it ? And secondly, what
proof have we that the founders of the church were
divinely ordained and possessed of infallible authority,
and, if so, on what ground do we assert that their
successors, or the church traditions, have such
divine sanction as to make them authoritative ?
It is the old difficulty of finding a support of our
first support. — ^What does your giant creature stand
on while he holds up the earth ?

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 13
It may be well to postpone our search for an
external authoritative basis of religion, until we
have first looked to see whether there be an5d;liing
within man himself, and in his relationships,
which accounts for reUgion. If we start with
a nature totally foreign to God, an insulated
personahty, windowless for light from Him, and
incapable of recognising such Hght if it did
come — ^then it is hard to see how man could ever
have any immediate certainty of a divine reality,
or where we could find a reasonable basis for religion.
If God could not and did not have a witness to
Himself within our human spirits it is difficult to
see how we could ever expect to establish the reality
of His being, or have any sustained assurance of
His love. We give up the problem of squaring
the circle because we now know enough about the
problem to know that it cannot be solved. It may
as confidently be asserted that a God who is not
self-revealing, who has no relationship with human
spirits, who does not have a witness in human
consciousness, could never be found, and the search
for a basis of religion on those conditions would
of necessity have to be given up. The entire
agnosticism of our time grows out of the fact that
thoughtful men have discovered the hopelessness
of finding God either in or back of the phenomena
of nature.
It is now clear that no increase of either microscope
or telescope will ever show Him. Push back as

14 A DYNAMIC FAITH
far as ever we may, we find only forces, no God.
This is the fact that made WilUam Watson say :
"The God I never once behold,
Above the cloud, beneath the clod.
The unknown God, the unknown God."
They are all looking for Him where He could not
possibly be found. In a different path lies our true
search for the " Holy Grail." The essential fact
of religion is love, and love is impossible apart from
relationships. Until two spirits can meet, and,
in some degree, understand and appreciate each
other, there can be no love. It begins with spiritual
interrelation. The cloud and the clod are mere
describable phenomena ; they can be reduced to exact
description. Love is forever twdescribable. It is
felt and appreciated, or it remains unknown. The
moment, therefore, we get beyond the traditional
God, who is external and one " thing " among many
things, as was the case, for instance, among the
Greeks, we must not expect to find Him apart from
spiritual relationships. It is in our consciousness
of His love, in our appeal from our limited self to His
infinite self, in that unmistakable, though indes
cribable, sense that we are interrelated parts of one
Self who loves us, and who enfolds us, that a rehgion
of any worth becomes possible. We know, when we
love a human soul, that we can transcend our bodily
isolation, our physical insularity, and that our
spirit can share its life with another spirit. But no
description of love could ever account for this, or
be the basis of it, for souls who could not themselves

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 15
so share and appreciate each other. So, too, there
could be no rehgion of this higher sort, and the
agnostics would be right, were it not for the fact —
the supreme fact — ^that the divine Spirit and the
human spirit come together and have spiritual
relations together and witness to each other. Our
reUgion — any rehgion on a high level— begins with
the fact that it belongs to the essential life of God
to impart Himself, to give Himself in love, in sym
pathy and in fellowship, and to share His life with
men ; and with the secondary fact that we are
capable of appreciating such love when we see it and
of responding to it.
We start out, then, boldly, with this primary
fact that there is no necessary dualism between
men and God — ^between the divine Spirit and human
spirits. Their natures are not foreign and unrelated.
There is but one possible separation between them,
namely sin, which, like a cataract, destroys vision,
not the light, and which, once removed, leaves
the two spirits face to face. God and the human
spirit belong together, in as real a sense as the hght
and the eye do, or beauty and the artist's soul,
or harmony and the musician's ear. Who ever felt
the necessity of proof that the sun was shining ?
In fact it makes itself known through closed Uds.
What greater proof could there be than that we see
it ? How could you ever prove to a tone-deaf man
that Beethoven's symphonies are beautiful, or to
a colour-blind man that a sunset sky is glorious ?

i6 A DYNAMIC FAITH
There is no convincing authority ; there can be
no convincing authority beyond this appeal to con
sciousness. This appeal to consciousness carries
conviction and wins assent because the human
spirit has a capacity for truth, because it is not wholly
foreign in nature to Him who is the truth. As we
come into this world so furnished in the structure
of our mind that we must view all objects " in space"
and all events " in time," so also we come with
souls capable of recognising truth and of respond
ing to love and of assenting to righteousness when
they present themselves ; otherwise we never could
learn to prize such things. It is with this in mind
that Pascal explains religion in the famous words :
" Thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not
already found me." The basis of religion, on the
human side, is to be sought therefore in the nature
of the human spirit itself ; in its ability to respond
to God because of a kinship to Him ; in its capacity
for truth and righteousness and its power of recog
nising them as such ; in the possibility of heart-purity,
so that God may be spiritually perceived and known,
and finally, in that act of choice and co-operation
by which the human soul becomes transformed
into a divine likeness and may attain to a union of
self with the Father of Spirits. These facts — ^and
without them there is no explanation of reUgion —
will enable us now to find a basis for faith, for
revelation, for church authority, for the communion
and fellowship of saints, and for the ground that

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 17
religion is an endless characteristic of man — as
sure to abide as consciousness is.
Truth can be transferred from one person to
another, or from a book to a person, only as the
ideas conveyed become appropriated and assimil
ated in the spiritual intelUgence of the recipient.
The thing is not true for me until it is seen to be
truth, until my mind grasps it and knows it to
be true. Even a divine communication could be
recognised as truth only after it had been taken
up into a spiritual inteUigence and the conscious
ness had responded to it. This immediate response
of the human spirit to the truth when it comes is
the only possible ground of certitude— but it is
stronger, not weaker, than our knowledge of historic
facts and events.
Whatever comes from God to us and is expressed
in human terms must come through human
capacity and must bear traces of human imperfec
tion. So only could any revelation be put to human
uses. Suppose a new revelation to be to-day dropped
into our world from the very hand of God, with
no human touch upon it. The first question would
be, " How do we know it is from God ? " and our
answer would be, " Because it accords with our
conception of Him." Then our second question
would be, " What does it mean ? " And at once
we should begin to interpret it in human terms and
apply it to human uses. Every truth, come whence
it may, falls into human custody, and becomes, 2

1 8 A DYNAMIC FAITH
however divine in origin, inextricably mixed with
human elements. Even God could show Himself
to us only in human terms. Until men are infinite
in capacity, there never can be a revelation which
is an infalUble authority. The man, who perhaps
of all mere men was the greatest medium of revelation
the world has ever seen, says with truth, " We have
this treasure in earthen vessels." The seer, then,
can never literally convey his revelation unchanged
into our minds ; the best he can do is to qualify us to
see for ourselves. The supreme test, therefore, of
a revelation is the degree to which it opens our
eyes to what is or to what ought to be. The whole
question of the inspiration of the Scriptures turns
on this other question, " Do they inspire their
reader and do they come to him with a message
which appeals to the highest in him ? " The only
Biblical definition of inspiration which we have is
this, that " God spoke through holy men, who were
moved." This means that the " holy men " were
capable of apprehending divine truth and of ex
pressing it in human terms. They came to such
a spiritual condition that they saw. There is nothing
here contrary to human nature. It is just what
we should expect from what we have already seen.
When a mathematician has learned the fundamental
nature of the figures of space and their relation he
comes at last to see the whole curve involved in the
small arc and he finds the new planet because he
sees that it must be there. So the man who has

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 19
obeyed his heavenly visions, who has been crowding
his old self out by the spiritual method of forming
a new Ufe within — who at length has taken degrees
in the divine school — ^sees truth because now he
has an organ to see it with. He is not less of a man,
but rather more of one. God does not use him as a
telephone to talk through, or as a caligraph to write
through, or as a passive window to send light
through, or as a stringed instrument to send music
through. He uses him because he is a holy man
who can grasp spiritual truth, and put it into human
terms. He " moves upon " him, and the holy man
apprehends what the moving means. The message
does not come apart from his personality but through
it, otherwise any other man would do for the
communication as well as a holy man.
Revelation, then, cannot all be on a single level.
It depends for its height wholly upon the person
through whom it comes, as the same breath through
a flute gives a high note or a low note, according
to the stop that is fingered. If this be so — ^and
it is hard to see how any other view could be held —
then the thing we are to look for in a revelation is
not infalUbiUty, not a dictated word, but a divine
message spoken through a human personaUty, tested
in a personal life and preserved for our use to-day
because it has proved its supreme worth through all
the sittings of the ages.
No process of canonization, no declaration of
infallibility would add to the spiritual content of a

20 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Biblical book which did not of itself speak to human
needs, or bear a living message to the heart of man,
nor could any conclusion of scholarship touching
origin or source or date destroy or lessen the spiritual
meaning or the intrinsic value of a book which does
come to man with such a message. The ultimate
test — in fact the only real test — of the divine quality
of Scripture will always be its effect upon its readers.
The human heart never has given up and it never
will give up anything which could pass the supreme
test of worth. Prove that mother love had its first
origin on never so low a level, yet mother love is the
holy thing which roots itself in the deepest soil of
our nature, and holds us, even when only a memory,
through the whole of a life of temptations. It abides
because our heart knows that it is good, and because
it stands every test. A book that has come through
a holy human life when God moved the man, and
which bears a living message to all who go to it for
help and comfort, is safe in any sort of a crucible.
We may as well be afraid of losing the sky — for the
only way we can lose either is by losing our own
power of perception.
The question whether the Bible is entirely com
posed of such seonian books is merely a question
of fact, and cannot be settled by a theory. These
books that now remain have come to us after
many centuries of sifting, and many books of lower
quality have dropped out because they could not
pass the high test of spiritual worth. These will

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 21
last so long as they continue to inspire those who
go to them for a message and that will, we believe,
be as long as men have a hunger for a knowledge
of God and a perception of spiritual realities. All
this is independent of the conclusions of scientific
study. Such conclusions will no more affect the
spiritual value of these divine messages than the
new science of the universe has destroyed the un
speakable worth of Dante's Paradiso, which is
fashioned on the old astronomy, or the new historical
criticism which proves Macbeth a legend destroys
the mighty moral meaning of Shakespeare's great
poem. Everything turns on spiritual values, on
intrinsic worth, on the quaUty of the message. A
diamond is a diamond, regardless of the fact that it
can be analysed by the chemist and proved to be
composed of carbon.
We find, then, that there are two elemental
truths which furnish the ground and basis of a divine
revelation to man : First, there is something in
man to which God can speak, and secondly, a man's
personality may become so spiritualized and sensi
tized that God can speak through him truths that
lie above the level of ordinary men, and so the message
proves a revelation — a master light — ^to help men's
visions for all time. The sensitive plate photographs
the star which the human eye fails to see, and so
too the inspired man sees and declares what escapes
the common eye. But its value lies in its power to
make us see, and its authority is simply and solely

22 A DYNAMIC FAITH
the authority of truth, i.e., its power of producing
conviction. It is never an authority which bans
investigation and compels bUnd submission ; it is
rather the authority which enforces itself solely by
opening the eyes of the soul to see the truth —
convincing vision. The inspiration is possible
because God has found a man through whom He
can speak, and the message becomes a revelation,
because through it other men are able to see — or
at the least to guess at — ^what the first man saw.
But after all, great as a book-revelation is, it is
a clear fact that the centre around which the Christian
centuries revolve is not a book, nor a group of
books. It is not the words of holy men, moved by
the spirit of God, which make our Christian reUgion
a fact. The Christian religion centres around a
PersonaUty, who claims to reveal or manifest God
as no book ever could. And unless we can find
some ground for this supreme revelation — ^the In
carnation — ^we cannot hope to tell, in any intelligible
way, what the basis of our religion is. Of course we
do not propose to touch the old metaphysical problems
of how two personaUties — a human and divine — could
exist in one person, nor whether He suffered as man
or as God, nor whether He foresaw or did not foresee
all things. None of that. Here is the fact — a
single life which has revealed to us the nature of God
and the nature of man, what God is, and what
man may become. What it means is, of course,
that God and man are not and never were foreign

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 23
and unrelated. There is nothing in the nature of
things human or divine to make an incarnation
unexpected. There is something in every' man
God can speak to. There have been men through
whom He could speak, because He could move
them spiritually. We find at length one single
PersonaUty who was sinless, who lived entirely
open to God, who had a sole purpose — ^to do His
will, and from it this truth emerges, that this
PersonaUty is a complete expression of Divinity
and Humanity. It is no metaphysical puzzle, it is
a concrete fact — ^the fact of facts — ^that One Life has
expressed both God and man. The moment
humanity is perfected and lifted, as here, to its
supreme height, and no mark of the beast is on it,
it can equally well call itself divinity, and the
moment God shows Himself adequately to the
world He does it in terms of humanity. Deity
and humanity form no stubborn dualism. The two
natures belong together, and in Christ they were
together — ^not as two natures, but as one nature
expressing both.
But the incarnation loses its meaning, if it does
not bring with it — as it does — ^the mighty impUca-
tion that a union of humanity and divinity is grounded
in the very nature of man as a rational and spiritual
being. There are all possible degrees of union,
from the thin and slender thread which draws a
prodigal home to the Father, up through the un
selfish love of a saint, to the unparalleled oneness of

24 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Father and Son which Christ has manifested in
solitary completeness.
The incarnation was possible because divinity
and humanity could be expressed in one life, and
now that this fact is forever clear, because it is
realized, the goal of our religion becomes a well-
grounded hope, and a soundly-based purpose. The
goal is nothing less than a union with God and
the attainment of sonship with Him, or put in other
words, the realization of complete spiritual well-
being and well-doing, through correspondence with
the divine will. The religious life — in so far as it is
religious — ^is at once human and divine, and without
the possibility of both aspects united in a single
life no reUgion worthy of the name could be possible.
This fact — ^the union of divine and human aspects
in one person — prepares the way for the considera
tion of the basis and meaning of faith^Ps What is
the criterion or authority of faith. How do we
know that the objects of faith are real, that the
things which are not seen are eternal ? It must first
of all be clearly understood that there is no schism,
no opposition, between faith and reason. We do
not use one as far as it will go and then take up the
other. In fact, there is no knowledge apart from
faith. Every truth, whether of common sense or of
science, rests in the last resort upon some irreducible
conviction, which is after all what we mean by faith.]
It is not something different from reason ; it is,
rather, reason working unconsciously. The moment

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 25
one tries to analyze love, or to explain beauty, or
to get an ultimate ground of duty, he is driven
back to one of these irreducible convictions of the
heart, which are not contrary to reason, which are
essentially and implicitly rational, but which, never
theless, cannot be dissected into lower terms and
expressed in the coinage of thought. These ultimate
realities are their own all-sufficient witness to
our consciousness, and the certitude which the
human spirit has in this immediate response of the
heart to primary truths, is not weaker but stronger
than reasoned knowledge ; and without such
immediate response no knowledge would ever be
possible. Every man's act involves a primary faith and can
be explained only on the assumption of an un
proved conviction. But each successive act tests
the worth of his faith and the validity of his con
victions, until at length he completely forgets that
he is in a world of unproved ultimates, and on
his convictions he predicts eclipses and makes
laws for the universe. Now religious faith is not
something totally different from this — it is not
belief in the testimony of some foreign authority —
it is the immediate response of the soul to a spiritual
fact, a divine truth, a living presence which it feels
to be true, because it brings with it the unmistakable
witness and conviction of reality, just as beauty
and love do. It would be impossible to prove the
freedom of the will of a man who did not have this

26 A DYNAMIC FAITH
inward conviction of personal freedom. No man
would ever believe in God in any real sense, if he
did not find Him involved in these primary con
victions of his heart. It is because the infinite and
the finite, the divine and the human, are in necessary
relation to each other that religious faith is ever
possible, just as it is because the world we see and
the perceiving self belong together that we have
any basis for objective knowledge. The ear alone
would never convince us of the existence of light, for
the ear has no relations with hght. The eye does
it, because it has something in common with light.
So it is that the soul has an inner witness for spiritual
realities, and this inner witness is faith. The soul
has no criterion of certitude outside itself, for that
would involve a contradiction, as though the eye
could get some other eye to prove to it that it
sees. But this primary, irreducible conviction and
response of the inner spirit to a spiritual truth is
capable of imperial expansion, for now the whole
meaning of life centres in its progress toward
spiritual reality. From the very nature of the case
faith is no mere passive, receptive state. It is the
soul's grasp of divine reaUty, and therefore it im
plies both vision and obedience to it. In a word,
it is dynamic — it is the movement of the whole
self toward the goal which it sees. It is the ground
of all spiritual activity, and each test of truth, each
experience of spiritual validity, each victory of

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 27
faith, increases the power of faith. It is, too, a
characteristic of faith, that it wins and possesses
its object, so that the object ceases to be a mere
external goal. This throws light on Paul's con
ception of the spiritual Christ, who through faith —
and Paul's faith is always dynamic — becomes an
inner possession of the believer. As many as believe
in Christ put Him on. He becomes the life through
faith. The object of life is to win Christ. Such a
faith is constructive, it means an ever higher spiritual
Ufe through apprehension of more spiritual reaUty,
and spiritual perception becomes the achievement
of a truer and larger personal life through faith.
Such a faith, far from lessening the value and
meaning of revelation, is the very ground on which
a divine revelation becomes recognised as of value
and can be wrought into spiritual character. The
soul which has learned to recognise the Spirit's
voice will not underprize what He has spoken
through some higher, diviner soul ; on the contrary,
it will feel the power of inspiration as an artist feels
the power and authority of an old master, who is on
a level which he never hopes to reach. But in
spiration could never be recognised as an inspiration
had not each soul the implicit capacity for it, and
no words would ever be regarded as a revelation
if the soul itself had not a first-hand sense of what
revelation implies. It is in this way that faith
becomes the test of things not seen, and the reaUties
of conscience, love and faith, become not less, but

28 A DYNAMIC FAITH
more sure to us than the things we touch and see
with sense-organs. We trust
" 'With faith that comes of self-control
The truths that never can be proved,
Until we close with all we loved
And all we flow from, soul in soul."
When it is once clearly reahzed that faith is not the
mere blind acceptance of what somebody else has
seen, but rather the vision itself, we are ready to
see what the communion and fellowship of the
saints mean. Personal religion, on this basis, in
volves participation in the divine life. Keeping
the faith is synonymous with keeping the hfe, i.e.,
the vital connection with the divine Spirit. Two
Christians are, therefore, not two bare atomic
individuals who can live an unrelated life. They
are' rather like two branches of one vine, or two
organs of one body. Their participation in the
divine life, which we have found to be the primary
fact of true religion, carries with it organic relation
with each other. In a material system, held to
gether by the force of gravitation like our solar
system, the change of position of one body affects
the whole system and makes every other body
adjust itself. Much more so is this true in a spiritual
system. The City of God, the Kingdom of Heaven,
is a spiritual society in which each individual member
makes his own independent contribution to saint
hood, his own peculiar Uving stone to the growing
Temple, yet he makes it not apart from but because
he is taken up into the organic whole, and the fellow-

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 29
ship and association and power of the body enable
him to realize his Ufe.
The church, then, is not a mere aggregation of
individuals, not a composite of atomic elements.
Such a church would no more be vital than a pile
of cannon balls. It would stand only so long as
some authoritative creed held it together. It would
have no inward power of adjusting itself to a
changing environment. There would be no ground
of assurance that it would permanently abide. On
the other hand, a church which is an organism
rather than an organization, which is formed not
by aggregation of elements but by spiritual relation
ship and through union in a common divine centre
whose power permeates the farthest circumference,
has all the capacity for adjustment that life has.
It makes its own bones and structure. It lives in
its environments and partly changes the environ
ment and partly yields to it. It progresses in the
main because it has the life of God in it and its crises
are like the crises in individual spiritual life — for
the testing and perfecting of character. Like
a growing man, its grasp and apprehension will
change as it goes from one height of life to another,
and no conclusions of one age can have an arbitrary
and eternal authority over other ages. The perma
nent authority is the central life, which will always be
consistent with itself. " The anointing teacheth,"
that is, the Spirit abides to guide the church. There
fore church councils and ecclesiastical officials are

30 A DYNAMIC FAITH
not authoritative in the hierarchical sense. There
is no man on the earth and no recorded ecclesiastical
decision which a soul is bound to obey in its spiritual
attitude or in its relations with God. As each soul
must go alone into the unknown when death comes;
so each soul must settle its own relations with God,
and it must be free from restraint to work out its
salvation, as it apprehends God's will.
But if believers are organic, are members one
of another, then the life and character of one in
dividual must be largely shaped by the body, and the
personal life must be determined by the spiritual
society of which it is a part. In a true sense the
Church is authoritative, as we have already found
the Scriptures authoritative. It is, however, not an
authority of compulsion, but the authority of in
spiration. It is the authority of conviction, and
there is no spiritual value in any other. It is an
authority which makes its way, not by forcing
assent, but by winning it through an appeal to that
which is " likest God within the soul." Every
attainment in religion, is the result, not of sub
mission to some outward law or external authority,
but of obedience to a law which has become the
very essence and principle of our own being. The
Kingdom of Heaven, the City of God, the fellowship
of saints, is the corporate life of such autonomous
selves, participating in the divine life and in the
lives of each other, so that every individual is more
than an individual !

THE BASIS OF RELIGION 31
The basis of reUgion is, therefore, to be sought
in the primary fact that God Himself is love — a
self-reveaUng and self-giving Being, and that man,
by the very constitution of his being, is capable of
receiving Him, of responding to Him, of uniting
with Him and of being taken up into the divine
life. The soul no more needs a proof of His love
and His presence than the eye does of the exist
ence of the sunlight which it sees. Deep calls unto
deep ; the deep in God calls to the deep in man,
and they know each other. It is because the divine
thought can be put into human terms and the human
life can be wrought into the divine likeness, that
inspiration and revelation have been possible or that
they have a meaning for us. It is because of this
mighty fact that an Incarnation could be made
which possesses an eternal value for man, and
presents the goal of creation. The meaning of church
authority and of historic truth is rooted in the
same fact. The manifestation of the divine Spirit
in history and in the organization of spiritual men
speaks with peculiar power to the soul which is
itself in immediate relationship with the same Spirit.
One more conclusion forces itself, namely, that
religion is to be a permanent feature of life — ^that
man is " incurably rehgious." In an unfolding,
developing thing one may never with absolute
certainty predict what characteristics may appear
in some remote future, but we may safely beUeve that,
if what we call reUgion, in some future period drops

32 A DYNAMIC FAITH
out of the race, it will be only because some diviner
thing, which we cannot possibly foresee, has taken
its place. The relation between God and man, which
is the ground of religion, is involved in the nature of
both, and it is difficult to see how it can ever go
while God is God and man is man. " We need
not fear that we can lose anything by the progress
of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
That which is so beautiful and attractive as these
relations must be succeeded and supplanted only
by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever."*

* Emerson's Essay on " Love."

II
SOURCES OF QUAKERISM IN THE
SCRIPTURES
npHOSE who are famiUar with the "Journal" of
George Fox are aware that he does not repre
sent himself as arriving at the truths which he
proclaimed, by a study of the Scriptures. He tells us
in regard to the ideas which seemed to many of
his generation " dangerously new," that they were
" opened to him." He nowhere tells us that he came
upon the fundamental principles which constitute
his contribution to reUgious thought, through the
interpretation of Scripture passages.
And yet the moment he began to defend his
position against the priests of his day, he appealed
to Scripture, precisely as Paul did, though the
latter also distinctly declared that his gospel was a
personal revelation to him. And in this appeal to
Scripture Fox at once made clear the significant
fact that he knew the Bible as probably no other
man in England at the time did. In fact, his
mind was saturated with it, so saturated that truths
were deposited in him from it Uke a silent dew,
33 3

34 A DYNAMIC FAITH
without his realizing whence they came. To the
end of his life he never knew how much he owed
to the Book, which had become a part of the structure
of his thought ; just as we never reaUze how much
the atmosphere is to us while our lungs are always
fuU of it.
Therefore in speaking of the sources or roots of
Quakerism in the Bible we do not mean to imply
that Fox or the early Friends explicitly thought
out their principles from biblical texts, or that
they saw precisely the same relation between their
views and Scripture passages as we shall find when
we look at the two side by side. Nor do we mean to
imply that there was no immediate working of the
revealing Spirit directly to them. On the contrary,
we are sure there was such immediate working,
but we also think that many truths which were
implicit and unexpanded in Scripture became the
possessions of their minds by a subconscious
process, somewhat as a spring breaks out in a
man's field after a subterranean passage from
another source.
Be this as it may, we wish at any rate to speak
in this paper of some of the Scripture passages,
particularly in the New Testament, which are the
implicit sources of Quakerism.
We shaU select one single passage from the Old
Testament which so far as we remember was never
definitely quoted by Fox, but which expresses what
he was all his life saying, though sometimes none

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 35
too clearly in his phraseology, " In Thy Ught shall
we see light." (Psalm xxxvi. 9.) It is a simple
way of saying that nothing can be understood out
of relation to God, that nothing is clear until it is
viewed in its relation to Him. It means too that
the world is full of Ught only so far as it is full of
God, and that therefore He is the master light of
all our seeing. Even the Bible itself would have no
spiritual meaning for us were there not something
in us which perceived and apprehended the truth
there expressed, and that something which perceives
divine truth is itself of divine origin. That is, the
light by which we see God and spiritual things is a
light which comes from God, just as the light by
which we see the star comes from the star. In
God's light we see light. Fox calls this the light
within (and we shaU speak more in detail of it in a
later chapter), but he never means that it is a light
which a human soul has apart from God, but always
the light which the soul has from its relation to
God, i.e., we see light in His light.
In the synoptic gospels, the most significant
passage for our present purpose is found in the
words of Jesus known as " Beatitudes " : " The
pure in heart see God." As the only obstacle to
vision of God is impurity of heart, necessarily the
business of life can never be to " tithe mint and
anise," to play at reUgion, but to cleanse the heart.
It becomes a man's sole and single task " To make
his heart a stainless mirror for his God." These

36 A DYNAMIC FAITH
words of the Master carry us directly away from a
reUgion of externals to a religion which is inward
and vital, and which deals at once with Ufe and
character. No amount of psalm-singing, or church-
going, no amount of creed-signing, or pious atti
tudes, could make a man see God if his heart was
still impure and if he was still clinging to some
pet sin ; and this fact was as clear as dayUght to
George Fox, who himself went straight to the heart
of things, and based his whole message on this
practical truth, that there can be no substitute in
reUgion for purity of heart.
This fundamental ground, viz., that religion begins
with a more or less clear vision of God, and that
the vision depends solely on purity of heart, is reason
enough, were there no others, why the rituals and
ordinances of the historic church are discarded by
Friends. The man who hates sham and hypocrisy
with all the earnestness of his moral nature cannot
brook any religious cloak which can be put on and
taken off for occasions ; he will have nothing which
stops short of the soul's vision. The religious
teacher must be a spiritual ocuUst whose business
is not to furnish light, but to tell men how to remove
their cataracts and to adjust their sight ; for, behold
God is always visible the moment the inward eye
is clear !
Origen used to say that nobody could fully un
derstand the profound spiritual truths of John's
Gospel who had not, Uke its author, lain on the

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 37
breast of Jesus. This Gospel is an interpretation
of Christianity by one who has grasped its inner
meaning rather than a synoptic sketch of the Ufe
of Jesus, and for this reason it can be appreciated
and appropriated only by those who possess spiritual
penetration. It undoubtedly had more direct
influence in shaping the thought and bent of the
early Friends than any other single book, either
within or outside the Bible, though even here the
influence is perhaps more subconscious than distinctly
realized. John regards Christ as a manifestation of
God, and through this manifestation it becomes
revealed that God is not a foreign Being, living
in splendid isolation apart from the world, but the
ground and substance of all things that are. He
is a spirit, and so Umited to no place. He is light,
and so from His nature pervasive and illuminative,
destroying darkness and evil by showing Himself.
He is truth, and so can be relied upon as real and
undeviating. In other words. He is, supremely,
character and not a blind fate. He is love and so
He gives Himself to men. The incarnation is no
afterthought, no scheme, no sudden miracle. It
is the natural expression of the essential being of
God. He is love, and so He must show Himself
redemptive. It is thus that the early Friends think
of God and it is thus that they interpret Him. The
Calvinistic idea of sovereignty is lost in this Johannine
conception of a loving Father who shares His life

38 A DYNAMIC FAITH
and light and truth with us, and whose dwelhng
place is no more in the heavens than it is in the
Shekinah within a spiritual man.
It is for this reason that worship takes on a wholly
new signification, i.e., new as compared with the
conception of it in the churches of the time. Friends
came together not to please God or to flatter Him,
or to call Him down, or to lecture about Him. They
came together to meet with Him and to enjoy Him.
It was not necessary to do anything to bring Him
any more than it is to bring the sunlight in the
morning. The only human action needed, they felt,
was to open the soul's windows. If anybody failed
to find Him, the trouble was within. The fact
remained that where any met in Christ's name, i.e.,
with that openness of heart and singleness of wiU
which Christ illustrated, the divine presence would
be felt, and every human cup held out would be
fiUed to the brim.
The organic character of the Christian life which
John frequently emphasizes was also a prominent
feature of early Quakerism. If John never thinks
of God as isolated, apart, alone ; no more does he
ever think of man, or at least a spiritual man, as
isolated or out of organic relation. In fact, such a
conception is essentiaUy irrational and impossible.
Life involves organic relation. Who could be a
spiritual being if he were insulated from God, any
more than he could live in the exhausted receiver
of an air pump ? The spiritual life advances pre-

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 39
cisely in proportion as the soul unites with its source
of life and becomes vital by such union — ^branch
with vine. But such union involves further organic
relations with one's brethren. So long as one persists
in guarding his own self-centred isolation and refuses
to lose his life in outreaching love and sympathy
and sacrifice, he does not find his life in God. A
member which will not co-ordinate with the other
members of the body, but asserts its independence,
loses at length its organic union altogether, and
its connection with the head becomes paralyzed.
Significant indeed are the words : " That they may
be one in us, as thou Father art in me and I in thee."
It is out of this ground that the Society of Friends
springs into existence. It is in its first conception
not an organization but an organism. The members
Uve and act primarily through their relation with
Christ, thus they all become organic branches in
one common vine-stock. No member can be a
spiritual creature and live his independent life. He
has lost his isolated Ufe to find his organic hfe with
his brethren. We shall see in a later chapter how
this principle affects every phase of the Quaker's
outward Ufe and how it makes him a practical
reformer and missionary ; but for the moment we
are concerned with stating that the ideal which
takes shape in Christ's prayer and in John xv. is
Uterally accepted by the Quaker as the basis of his
relation to God and his irelation to men.
John presents a type of salvation which is present.

40 A DYNAMIC FAITH
not future alone. He finds no necessity for post
poning blessedness and joy. " He that believeth
on the Son hath everlasting life." " He that hath
the Son hath life." " He is passed from death unto
Ufe." " This is eternal Ufe." " We are in Him."
" This is the victory that overcometh the world,
even your faith." There is no breach between
this life and the other — no chasm. The only chasm
is between the self-life of sin and the life in Christ.
When that chasm has been passed there are no other
necessary breaks, for death is only an episode, the
bursting of the bud for the full flower to appear.
There is no dualism of earth and heaven. The
only dualisms here are light and darkness, love and
selfishness, sin and eternal life. " Verily, verily,
the hour cometh, in fact now is when the dead shaU
hear the voice of the Son of God and they that hear
shall live." (John v. 25.)
This present type of salvation, of eternal Ufe, as a
realized and conscious fact is everywhere a charac
teristic of early Quakerism. Fox does not stake
his hope of heaven on written promises, but he claims
a spiritual experience which is to him an all sufficient
earnest of eternal blessedness. He can say with
the same assurance as John can : " We know that
we have passed from death unto life," i.e., the last
and only chasm has been closed. We shaU see
later what an effect this conception of a present
salvation had upon the early Friends.
No intelligent, robust Christian ever Uved who

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 41
laid less stress and emphasis on the externals in
religion, or who had a profounder grasp of the
spiritual and essential ground of religion than the
Apostle Paul. Hear him : "I did not receive this
gospel from man." " It came to me through reve
lation of Jesus Christ." " God shined into my
heart to give knowledge." " It pleased God to
reveal his Son in me." " Man's wisdom," " the
wisdom of the world," is of no avail in the search
for spiritual truth. " Divine things are spiritually
discerned." "If we have known Christ after the
flesh, we wiU know Him so no more." " We have
the mind of Christ." These are some of the well-
known passages of Paul, which if taken by them
selves as a complete expression of Christianity
would land one in the most extreme mysticism
and antinomianism. It is needless to say that in
spite of these extreme expressions, Paul never even
approached a dangerous individualism and that his
apparent mysticism was in perfect balance with his
clear and open sight of practical truth and with an
organic solidarity of beUevers in Christ. If his
head was above, his feet were soUdly on the earth.
He makes use at every point of his vast fund of
acquired experiences. Everything which his life
has furnished him is drawn upon to express and
iUustrate the things of the Spirit. His culture, and
grace, and versatility, his shrewdness in grasping a
situation, his skill and deftness, are as prominent as
his mysticism. He saw what was essential in order

42 A DYNAMIC FAITH
to estabUsh and make permanent the church as
clearly as he saw his personal heavenly vision.
It is, nevertheless, impossible to ignore the .sub
jective and mystical element in Paul, and it surely
had its influence on George Fox, and, in a less degree,
on the other primitive Friends. Both Paul and
Fox call their new birth a divine fiat lux. " It pleased
God who caused light to shine out of darkness to
shine into my heart to give the light of the know
ledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
So wrote the Apostle. " When aU my hopes in aU
men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to
help me . . . then. Oh, then, I heard a voice
which said, ' There is one, even Jesus Christ, who
can speak to thy condition.' " So spoke the Quaker.
The Pauline view that spiritual things are spirituaUy
discerned by such as have the mind of Christ is
essentially the Quaker view, and this principle under
lies (as we shall see) the Quaker conception of
ministry, and for that matter all gifts for spiritual
service. Paul further teaches that the individual Christian
must personally experience in his own life the
redemptive work and process of Christ. He does
not simply look upon the life of Christ as an historic
fact which brings salvation by a mere act of belief.
It is a mighty divine process, writ large in Jesus
Christ, to be realized and recapitulated in each one
of us. The Ufe and death and resurrection of Christ
reveal the law of spiritual life by which we are all

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 43
to Uve, and the victory over sin and death become
ours through participation in His life and in His
Spirit. In fact participation in Christ, and so in the divine
life, is fundamental in Paul's conception of salvation.
Faith with Him is never an intellectual belief or
assent. It is always a vital or dynamic process
of appropriating Christ Himself. " The life I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of
God." " That Christ may dwell in your hearts
by faith." "Put on Christ." "That I may win
Christ." " That I may know Him, and the power
of His resurrection." This view at once removes
religion from the realm of theory and abstract
metaphysics and makes it personal and experimental.
It aims not to prove the truth of some technical
doctrine, but to realize as a glorious fact that " Christ
is formed in you." This living union of the believer
with Christ who progressively becomes one's life is
a central feature of Paul's teaching, and it is a corner
stone of Quakerism. We are here no longer in the
realm of anatomy, but of biology. We are dealing
with life and not with skeletons articulated with
wire. Every feature of such a rehgion is vital and
practical, and bears directly upon the production
of a spiritual life which is capable of unUmited future
expansion. This Pauline view of Christ, as the believer's life,
involves a most important conclusion which he
himself drew with emphasis. It means that all

44 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Christians are organic as members of a body. He
even goes so far as to express a belief in the unity
and spirituality of the whole universe, which moves
toward the realization of one divine event — ^the
unveiUng of the sons of God. Individuahsm and
isolated personaUty are impossible in such a spiritual
kingdom. Each individual reaUzes his life through
his relationships. He dies unto himself that he
may hve unto the larger divine life. God is thought
of no longer as foreign and dual to us, but we live
in Him and He in us, as far as we truly live, and
the whole spiritual life is a living unto God. This
participation of the beUever in an organic spiritual
whole, so that each is a living stone in a spiritual
temple, indwelt and vitalized by the Holy Spirit ;
so that, to use another figure, each is an articulated
member in a living body, each functioning with all
and receiving its life and power from its Head, is
a fundamental view of early Quakerism and one
which cannot be lost without endangering the whole
system of our faith.
We shall consider but two more points of contact,
though it will occur to everybody that many of
our omissions are as important as our so-called
contacts. We are dealing, however, it must be
remembered, not with testimonies or with super
ficial features, but with elements involved in the
very inward structure of Quakerism.
In the Apocalypse, the glorified Christ is seen as
the one " who hath loved us and washed us from

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 45
our sins in His own blood and hath made us kings
and priests unto God." (I use the authorised
version which George Fox himself read.) A similar
expression is found in i Peter, describing the beUevers
in Christ as " a royal priesthood." Both passages
carry us back, in association and connection, to the
great words at Csesarea PhiUppi : "I give unto thee
the keys of the kingdom of heaven."
These expressions present a conception of the
Christian Ufe which demands a much profounder
examination than it has usually received. Let us
see what it means : A person who has felt the
significance of the divine love and who has been
washed from his sins — or, to put it in terms of the
gospel account, a person who has had an inward
revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God —
becomes through his transformed nature and spiritual
character a centre of spiritual power, and just in so
far as his personal faith gives him spiritual insight
he_£ossesse§^yi^Qrity, i.e., he is a key-bearer in the
kingdom. When Dante stands purged of the last
mark of his sin he hears a voice which says : " Thee
o'er thyself I crown and mitre." The soul has come
at last where it knows good and evil and prefers the
good. It has served under the law, it has made choice
of sonship, and that involves the freedom and royalty
of the sons of God. Each person of this sort is a
nucleus of a church and a propagator of the Gospel to
others. There is no place for a priestly class, or for
that inatter for any kind of a class, for all are priests.

46 A DYNAMIC FAITH
We level up instead of levelling down. There wiU
be all degrees of abilities and of gifts, for authority
and efficiency are determined by capacity and
personality, but every^individualis^to the jimit of
his^ spiritual range, a king and j._ priest. This
principle permits no official hierarchy, no church
authority which invades by right of position the
domain of the individual. In fact it annihilates
priestcraft and official tyranny in the church and
establishes the priesthood of believers. But this
does not mean that each individual is a law unto
himself and that he may run unhindered into the
vagaries of his own sweet will even to the anarchy
of the church. Believers in Christ, as we have seen,
constitute an organism — ^it is a body of royal priests
— and one member, though authoritative in his sphere,
can no more be allowed to rule or wreck the whole
than one finger joint should be allowed to direct and
control the whole body. Such a joint would need
amputation, and such a member has ceased to be
organic. This priesthood of believers — ^with a
spiritual authority in each proportionate to his
natural gifts and his appropriation of power through
union with Christ — ^is again an essential feature of
Quakerism. It underlies the conception of member
ship, the idea of ministry and the method of conducting
the business of the church. It crowns and mitres
every Christian who has a Uving personal faith, and
it leaves every soul free to attain to any height of
experience which is within his range. It avoids at

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 47
the same time a tyranny and an anarchy. Its authority
is the authority which the master who knows has
over the pupil who wants to know, and the obedience
which it receives is the obedience which the learner
who wants to know gives to the teacher who knows.
As the royal-priesthood conception gives no ground
for tyranny, so too it gives no ground for fossilization.
It has power to loose or bind. Its historic positions
have no sacred quality — ^no sacramental virtue. Like
any other body it lives in its environment and conforms
to it. This is most certainly the New Testament
conception of the church, and it is a germ principle
in early Quakerism.
We have already indicated the practical character
of New Testament Christianity, and we find the
same mark upon this seventeenth century interpre
tation of it which we are studying. Paul's test of a
Christian is whether he " walks after the Spirit " ;
John's test is whether he " walks in the light."
They both mean the same thing. To neither apostle
is it enough for a person to possess a satisfactory
theology, or to claim an exalted spiritual experience.
Neither of them deals for a moment with abstractions.
Truth is not something merely to be held, but some
thing to be expressed in life, in personality, in deed.
It is easy for some minds to construct theology,
and it is a short step to the conclusion that a system
of theology is a good in itself and a sufficient in
dication of lofty attainment. It is easy also to claim
spiritual guidance, an infaUible inner Ught, a complete

48 A DYNAMIC FAITH
possession by the Holy Spirit. But both theology
and claim to guidance are here subjected to a practical
test. In the last resort a man's reUgion is determined
by his " walk," which includes his whole life-attitude.
He may have a system of beliefs adjusted in perfect
order and buttressed by logic and countless scripture
passages, and yet he is " nothing," he is " clanging
brass " without a positive, practical love which
expresses itself through his life and gives convincing
evidence that he is joined to the Lord in one spirit.
He may claim that he has no will of his own and that
all his impulses are surrendered to the Spirit who
speaks and works through him, but Paul's first
question wiU be. Does he walk according to that
Spirit, i.e., does his life authenticate his claim ?
Does his hfe carry irresistibly the conviction that
the Spirit of the infinite God of love and righteousness
and truth is speaking and working through him ?
He may easily say that he has an inner light which
illumines him and which directs his steps, but John's
question will be. Does he walk in the Ught, i.e., do his
words and actions indicate that he is the recipient
of light from a heavenly source ? and is his life a
source of light and guidance to others ? These
practical tests of the two apostles find expression
in many passages in every part of the New Testament.
In fact it can be safely said that no New Testament
writer knows anything of a religion of theory, a
reUgion of profession, or a religion which is summed
up in theological doctrine.

SOURCES OF QUAKERISM 49
We find this same situation everywhere manifest
in early Quakerism. It was never a mere theory
or doctrine ; it was a method or manner of Ufe. If
it began in an immediate sense of relationship to
God and of illumination from Him, it reached through
and ramified and transformed every relation and act
of life, however ordinary and common. The Quaker's
whole life flowed out from and illustrated the funda
mental truth of his faith. He could call no voice
divine which did not conform to the highest moral
conduct ; he could heed no revelation which did not
tend to elevate and purify the life. He would profess
nothing which was not grounded in reaUty. His
life must be as his teaching : " brave, pure, truthful,
beneficent, hopeful, and cheerful." Fox never
deviated from this consistency of life with truth. He
says that the Lord opened to him, that here was a
principle by which all might be reformed — ^the priests
might be reformed, the lawyers might be reformed,
the physicians might be reformed, namely, " as all
believe in the light, and walk in the light," and so
" become children of the light and of the day of
Christ," " the spiritual heavenly man." (" Fox's
Journal," p. 70.)

Ill
MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS
"DELICIOUS mysticism is an attempt to reaUze
the presence of God in the soul. It is grounded
on the fact that a direct intercourse between the
human soul and God is possible ; and its ultimate
goal is the attainment of a state in which God shall
cease to be an external object and shaU become
known by an experience of the heart. The mystic
refuses to be satisfied with any substitute for God,
or to stop with any " third thing " between the soul
and God, be that so-called " third thing " never so
exalted a representative of Him or means of showing
Him forth.
His aim is not to know about God, but to know
Him. He cannot be satisfied even with what God
has said or done in the past, for his consuming
purpose is to have God Himself. He rejoices in
God's promises, but he sets a higher value still on
his personal acquaintance with God and His character,
so that he needs no longer to ask what the Father
has promised, since now he knows what He Himself
is, and he trusts Him even where He has not promised.
so

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS Ji
Mysticism has always been a protest against formalism
and authority ; and it has always, when healthy,
emphasized inspiration, spirituality and personality.
Whenever Christianity has crystallized into an
unvital system, either of authority or creed, and
has proved in this form inadequate to feed or expand
the souls of men, the mystic has come to proclaim
a direct and living way to God and to announce
communion with God as a fact of experience. When
ever the church has satisfied itself with performing
the functions of a vicar to the distant, absentee
God, dispensing grace through its few sacred channels,
while leaving the human heart still hungry for its
proper food, the mystic has come to declare the
nearness of God, the possibiUty of a certainty of Him
through immediate contact and the soul's sure
privilege of rejoicing in Him.
There are innumerable types of mysticism and
all possible degrees of it — some rising into the clear
light of vision and some giving indications of a
. shockingly diseased personaUty or a sadly morbid
condition. I shaU only outUne its spiritual message,
iUustrating it through some of its best exponents,
and content myself with pointing out some of its
errors and dangerous tendencies.
We will consider first what seems to me the most
important aspects of reUgious mysticism, and which
I have made central in my definition, viz., its attempt
to realize the presence of God in the soul. If such
an experience is possible, we are dealing with one of

52 A DYNAMIC FAITH
the most significant facts which a human being can
ever be concerned with ; and if it is not possible,
religious truth must always be something more
or less foreign to our experience and something
which rests solely on external authority. The
question of such possibility, then, becomes supremely
important. There can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who
has studied Paul's letters, that he claimed not only
that it is possible to realize the divine presence in the
soul, but that he himself did realize it. Religion for
him meant a divine life wrought within ; it was not
the acceptance of a certain system of things, or a belief
in transactions — or at least not primarily that ; it
was a consciousness within himself that everything
had become new and of God. The natural in him was
raised to the spiritual by a union with the divine,
and the spiritual became in a very real sense natural.
Christianity was for him what Edward Caird has said
it should be, "a process by which the natural man
in whom the Ufe of Christ is an external fact is con
verted into the spiritual man to whom the belief in
Christ is one with the consciousness of Himself."
" Christ liveth in me." " For me to live is Christ."
" He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit." " Filled
with all the fulness of God." These are a few of the
words which express the idea which we mean. It
was with him not an attainment through ecstasy
or by a supernatural irruption into the domain of
his personality, it was the normal result of co-operation

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 53
with God. He perceived that God wanted his life
and he also perceived that he needed God to complete
his own life. God reached after him, and he reached
up in co-operation. Their natures met in his per
sonaUty ; his being became spiritualized and God
worked through him. The process went on until his
life became " hid with Christ in God " and he could
no longer tell where the circle of his own human
personaUty stopped and where the divine began, as
one cannot draw the exact Une where ocean and river
meet. The Neo-Platonic Mystics, as they are some
times called from the influence upon them of Platonic
philosophy, generally believe in the possibiUty of a
union with God, but such attainment is rare and
laborious. God and the soul have no natural affinity
for each other, as with Paul, they do not of right
belong together, and find their true life in each other.
For Plotinus, the father of this school of mystics,
himself not a Christian, the chasm between God
and man is wide and unspanned. It must be scaled
if at all by desperate climbing, and the divine glory
breaks only when the last vestige of " the creature "
has been removed. The " union " is attained by
an ecstasy and when the soul returns to itself it
brings back nothing with it which can be used in
this undivine world. So with all mystics of the
speculative, Neo-Platonic class, the soul's attainment
of joy and calm in God is reached by mystical ladders
of purgation, prayer, contemplation, illumination.

54 A DYNAMIC FAITH
towards the goal of union. Each mystic has a different
ladder or ascent, but they all climb up to reach
and merge themselves into a far-off God who is
unknowable except through union wherein " like
knows Uke."
The German mystics of the Fourteenth Century
bring the emphasis back to the original PauUne
position, that God is near, yes, immanent, and that
we Uve and move and have our being in Him. The
great figures of this group are Eckhart, John Tauler,
Ruysbrock, Suso, and the unknown author of
Theologica Germanica. Eckhart, bom circa 1251,
taught that every soul, even in the simplest beUever
as well as in the greatest pope, has a " fiinklein,"
or divine " spark " which is at the apex of our being
and forms its essence — an uncreated essence. It is
the ground of eternal nature, the reason for the soul's
longing for God. It is the " divine soul centre,"
the shekinah, the original part of the soul which
" drew from out the boundless deep." This inner
" spark " is divine — ^it is God, but it becomes our
life only as we make it ours. It is the business of
Ufe to bring the outer completely under the control
of this inner centre of force, i.e., to vitalize and
spiritualize the whole man from within out — ^what
Paul calls letting God work in us to will and to do.
This victory, this attainment, Eckhart says, comes
not without struggle and battle. Spiritual life is
not a calm innocence — it is the fruit of strife and
struggle. " That a man has a peaceful and restful

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 55
life in God is good ; that a man endures a painful life
with patience is better, but that a man has his rest
in the midst of a painful Ufe is best." " When the
man's will becomes God's will it is good ; but when
God's will becomes man's will that is better."
Again he cries out : " Thou shalt sink thy thineness,
and thy thine shall become a Mine in His Mine."
Only God can properly say " I am," and human
personaUty becomes a fact only when the Eternal
ground-form of being is realized in us. Both Eckhart
and Tauler call this, " God begetting His Son in us."
Thus we enter " His everlasting Now." In this
divine process God becomes man and man becomes
divine, i.e., by grace man may become what Christ
eternally is by His very nature.
John Tauler was one of the greatest practical
teachers and preachers, and one of the bravest souls
of the pre-Reformation period. He, too, holds that
every man in the depth of his soul — the inmost centre
of himself — ^touches God. Hear him : " God pours
Himself into our spirits as the sun rays forth its
natural Ught into the air, and fills it with sunshine ;
so that no eye can tell the difference between the
sunshine and the air. If the union of the sun and
air cannot be distinguished, how far less this divine
union of the created and the uncreated spirit." Our
spirit is received and swallowed up in the abyss which
is its source !
Jacob Boehme of GorUtz (bom 1575) finds the
same God in his heart that he finds in nature, and

56 A DYNAMIC FAITH
he beUeves that the whole mystery of nature may
be solved and read off by knowledge of and union
with the God who manifests Himself within, and
who is always and everywhere Uke Himself.
These men proclaim as a fact that the vision,
the glory, the aim, the ideal which make Ufe great
are not from us and do not rise within what is or
dinarily called ourselves ; they break in upon us,
but they claim that the attainment of life is reached
only when our personality is no longer outside the
circle of His being, but has its life in Him, as a physical
man lives in the air. We know of no clearer state
ment of this idea than the one found in the Journal
of Amiel (p. 98, Vol. I.) :
" The centre of life is neither in thought, nor in
feeling, nor in will, nor even in consciousness so
far as it thinks, feels or wishes. For moral truth
may have been penetrated and possessed in aU these
ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than con
sciousness there is our being itself, our very substance,
our nature. Only those truths which have entered
into this last region, which have become ourselves,
become spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive
and unconscious are really our life — that is to say,
something more than our property. So long as we
are able to distinguish any space whatever between
the truth and us, we remain outside it. The thought,
the feeling, the desire, the consciousness of life, are
not yet quite life. But peace and repose can nowhere
be found except in life and in eternal Ufe, and the

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS S7
eternal Ufe is the divine life — ^is God. To become
divine is then the aim of life ; then only can truth be
said to be ours beyond the possibility of loss, because
it is no longer outside us, nor even in us, but we
are it and it is we ; we ourselves are a tmth, a will,
a work of God."
We know to-day much more clearly than when
these words were written that the self of which we
are conscious is but a fraction of our real self. Most
of the operations and activities of our life go on
beneath the threshold of consciousness. Our
conscious Ufe of the moment is but a bubble heaved
up from the subterranean life below. We are never
absolutely sure of anything until we know it and
do it subconsciously, as the musician's fingers know
the keys and as the gymnast's feet know the tight
rope. It is this under life which determines all we
do and how we do it. Whether a man is a genius or
a fogy is largely a question of whether he has a rich
and fertile subliminal life so near the surface that
it supplies him on demand with what he wants for
the occasion or not. No one was ever an artist, a
poet, or an orator without that. No one can ever
be wholly and dependably good until he is good
beyond the knowing it, i.e., until his subconscious
self sets toward righteousness, as the ocean obeys
the law of gravitation without knowing it. This
is what Aristotle calls a moral dexterity of the soul.
Speaking religiously, it is what Paul calls being
" hid with Christ in God." Von Hartman defines

S8 A DYNAMIC FAITH
mysticism as a genius or aptitude for God through
the unconscious. The prophet, the saint, the mystic,
has a subUminal self that opens more immediately
upon the divine than others have, or at least he is
more sensitive to it, and therefore he sees, as WilUam
Watson says :
" Those master moments grow less rare,
And oftener feels that nameless air
Come rumouring from we know not where ;
And touch at whiles
Fantastic shores, the fringes fair
Of fairy isles :
And hails the mystic bird that brings
News from the inner court of things.
The eternal courier dove whose wings
Are never furled :
And hears the bubbling of the springs
That feed the world."
We beUeve that every man's subliminal self opens
Godward, as the inlet opens to the sea, but the
mystics are they who have found it out as a fact,
because the surges of the eternal Self broke upon
the shores of their personal being, and they have
realized that only sin could separate man and God.
This fundamental fact of mysticism, namely, the
immediate communion between the soul and God
and the possible realization of the divine Ufe, gives
a peculiar meaning to faith. Faith to the mystics
is not the adoption of a system of doctrine, but
much more, the soul's immediate perception of
truth — it is a spiritual vision. It is the condition of
spiritual life as eating is of physical life. It is not
an intellectual, or an emotional state — ^it is rather
an act of the whole personality. It precedes know-

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 59
ledge and is the ground of knowledge — " he that
willeth shall know " ; " he that beUeveth hath the
witness." It gives reaUty to what the soul hungers
and hopes for, and it becomes " the test of things
not seen " with the physical eye. It is what Paul
calls " the demonstration of the spirit." That means
the soul's direct perception of a spiritual work going
on within it, as little to be doubted as the beauty the
artist sees or the harmony the musician hears. St.
Teresa gives a good iUustration of what we mean.
When her " superiors " were trying to persuade her
that her experiences were delusions, she answered :
" If they who said this told me that a person who
had just finished speaking to me, whom I knew weU,
was not that person, but they knew I fancied it,
doubtless I should believe them, rather than what
I had seen ; but if this person left behind him some
jewels as pledges of his great love, and I found myself
rich, having been poor, I could not believe them if I
wished. And these jewels I could show them.
For all who knew me saw clearly that my soul was
changed ; the difference was great and palpable."
Faith thus begins with the resolution to trust un
falteringly to what it feels to be true and ends with
an experience which transcends ordinary knowledge
in certainty. This is "the faith that comes of self-
control " — ^that rises in power and surety with each
test of experience. It is this, too, that makes
Wordsworth cry out : " Thanks to the human heart
by which we live." It is this that grounds Paul's life

6o A DYNAMIC FAITH
forever in certainty : "I know in whom I have
believed." Therefore the supreme attainment is the
perfection of this truth-seeing faculty without which,
in some degree, spiritual religion would be impossible.
The mysteries of life are understood by living through
them. The mystic, again, is profoundly aware of spiritual
laws. He knows that there is nothing arbitrary,
or capricious, or unethical in God's world. He reaUzes
that it is as impossible to get character, — or heaven
either, without going through the processes and
experiences which win it, as it is to move a load
without a motive force. There is for him no short
cuts to any kind of glory and no palm without an
honest struggle. The connection between holiness
and blessedness is as unvarying as between cause
and effect. It is beautifully illustrated in the
" Paradiso " of that great mediaeval mystic, Dante.
The poet is wondering how he has gone from earth
to heaven directly against the law of gravitation. His
heavenly guide answers that it is necessary for
free spirits to go up.
"Thou should'st not wonder more, if well I judge.
At thine ascent, than at a rivulet
From some high mount descending to the plains.
Marvel it would be in thee, if deprived
Of hindrance, thou wert seated down below,
As if on earth the living fire were quiet."
Paradiso C. I. 135-141.
It remains to be said that mystics are pecuUarly
fond of symbols. A recent French writer, R^cejac,
says that " mysticism is an attempt to approach the

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 6i
Absolute morally, and by means of symbols." While
an EngUsh writer, Nettleship, says that " tme
mysticism is the belief that everything in being
what it is is symbolic of something more." Another
EngUsh writer, Inge, says, "Every truth we know is
but the husk of a deeper truth." There is a famous
saying of old Hermes Trismegistus, that " everything
that is is double." All his life Goethe was pro
claiming the fact that all things transitory are
symbolic and but garments of the eternal spirit.
Carlyle is the English, and Emerson the American
prophet of this tmth. In high spiritual moments
Paul was clairvoyant, in the lofty sense, and realized
that the things seen are temporal, while the things
not seen, except through these temporal things, are
eternal. In such a moment the author of Hebrews
saw that the things that are seen are not made of
tilings which do appear. It is because nature is
symboUc that Christ can say " Consider the lilies,"
and it emboldens Tennyson to say of " the flower in
the crannied wall,"
If I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
There is a prevalent belief that mystics are
dreamers, or at the best only seers of visions — ^not
active workers and doers of deeds. The belief is
partly true and partly false. It has been one of the
grave dangers of the mystic that he contents himself
with " dreamily passive emotions " and makes his
highest good in Ufe the attainment of " a deedlessly

62 A DYNAMIC FAITH
passive and unspeakable rapture in God." But an
excessive quietist mood is a mark of degenerate and
not of true and healthy mysticism. The great mystics
who must be our types have learned that every
new truth, every new vision, involves a new duty and
leads to activity. It is what Paul calls " obedience
to the heavenly vision," and without which new
heavenly visions would surely not come.
In commenting on Mary and Martha as types of
contemplation and activity, Eckhart says : " Mary
hath chosen the good part ; that is, she is striving
to be as holy as her sister. Mary is still at school.
Martha has learnt her lesson. It is better to feed
the hungry than to see such visions as Paul saw."
Tauler says with beautiful simplicity : " If I were
not a priest, I should esteem it a gift of the Holy
Ghost that I was able to make shoes." " Works of
love are more acceptable to God," again he says,
" than lofty contemplation." Best of aU, however,
are Tauler's words which embody a profound spiritual
law : " Never trust in a virtue that has not been
put into practice." The mystics who really face the
issues of life and who see that all spiritual attainments
are part of a divine process and not capricious gifts
to a favoured few, aU teach us that God's highest
tmth is given to those who make the best use of it.
The healthy mystic is the one who sees and does
and who leams to see more because he used what
he found. Eckhart's plan is a safe one : " Take the
nearest way Godwards, but be always sure to keep

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 63
in motion on that way, until God's rest comes of
itself." There is a graver mistake than that of the passive
or quietistic tendency, and one which many, if not
most, mystics have made. They have divided man
into a duaUsm and rejected a necessary half of him.
They have said, and it is a mischievous doctrine,
that the spiritual eye can see only when the eye of
sense is closed. They have held that God can enter
¦with His Ught only when the natural hght of reason
has been brought to naught. One of George Chap
man's characters put this idea weU :
I'll build all inward — not a light shall ope
The common outway —
I'll therefore live in dark ; and all my light
Like ancient temples let in at my top.
Coleridge means the same thing in his " Ode to
Defection " :
It were a vain endeavour
Though I should gaze forever
On that green light that lingers in the west,
I may not hope from outward forms to win ,
The passion and the Ufe whose fountains are within.
That man is certainly on the wrong track who,
when he starts out in a search for truth begins by
destrojang the very faculties which have been given
to him for finding it and testing it. There are not
two kinds of truth — ^that which our human faculties
can discover, and that which lies beyond them.
The divine does not begin where the human leaves
off. If what we have been saying is true, the divine
and the human belong together — ^in fact, without this,

64 A DYNAMIC FAITH
there is no profound tmth in mysticism, and if they
do belong together it is perfectly natural that man
should know God when their Uves come in contact.
God and man are not insulated personalities. It
should require no supernatural ecstasy, no destruction
of normal faculties, no transcendence of the human,
for them to meet. Sin is the only separator, the
only veil. Remove this, and there is no gulf to be
spanned. There is, too, no proper schism between the mind
and the heart. They can no more be sundered than
a living child can be divided into two living parts.
Intellect and emotions are not two independent
faculties. Mind does not go to a certain distance
after tmth and then turn the search over to some
thing above mind.
Mind and soul according well
Shall make one music as before.
But vaster.
So, too, they are wrong who divide the universe
into a dualism of natural and supernatural — ^the
supernatural beginning where the natural leaves off.
The moment God is shut out of any part of this
universe, and is confined to a circle which only touches
or bisects the natural realm, we have an irrational
universe, and our search for tmth is blocked hope
lessly. No, this whole cosmic system is God's, and
it is all from outer rim to inner core stuff which
can be transmuted into spiritual meaning and which
has a use for spiritual beings — ^because, as our greatest

MYSTICISM AND THE MYSTICS 65
and healthiest mystic has seen, " God is all and in
all," and " in Him all things consist." We are
spiritual and partakers of spiritual tmth — ^not because
we have suppressed our human faculties and been
caught up into a remote heaven, but because " He is
our Ufe." This life is completed by this mystic union
with God, but this union with Him is conditional
upon a union with our brethren in a complete
spiritual organism — " That they may be one, as we
are one."

IV
THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM
"PVERY great movement in the world embodies
an idea. It often happens that those who are
working out the idea are only dimly conscious of
its full meaning, but yet it gives direction and form
to the whole process, and if we wish to understand
the movement we must first hunt down the idea.
The great religious movement of the seventeenth
century, which is called Quakerism, is no exception.
It has its fundamental principle, which throws light
upon, if it does not explain all the peculiarities of, this
so-called revival of primitive Christianity.
In a certain rough and general way rehgions
may be divided into two classes, those which have
an aim and purpose to change the attitude and
disposition of God toward men, and secondly, those
which deal primarily with the disposition, the char
acter, the inner nature of the human soul and its
attitude toward God. In religions of the first cIelss
priests are essential and sacrifice and ritual become
an elemental part of worship. In the second, the
whole problem becomes a personal one : How to get
66

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 67
a transformed and sanctified nature, how to realize
the potential self, how to perfect the being. The
supreme question for the first is. How can we get God
to account us righteous and how can we escape the
consequences of wrong-doing ? For the second it
is. How can we become righteous and avoid sin ?
For the first, the church and its rites and ceremonies,
its creeds and its prayers, are a good, as an end in
themselves ; for the second, notliing is a good in itself,
except a glorified nature, a rightly fashioned will,
and a pure and loving heart.
George Fox, who is the original exponent of
Quakerism, could find no satisfaction for himself
in the peculiar performances which in his day largely
constituted religion. The whole system appeared
foreign to his needs. It did not materially contribute
to the end, which for him from very early life was
the supreme one, the attainment of inward harmony
and peace through deliverance from sin. He felt that
there was no correspondence between the religious
system of the church and the supreme purpose of life.
No amount of faithfulness to the one produced the
other. It was the clear conviction that the church
of his day had no " open sesame " to the Ufe which
alone could satisfy his nature that drove him into a
profound melancholy, and made him a soUtary seeker
for another way, if peradventure there were any
other way. The " hollow casks," as he called the
ministers to whom he went for light, had no single

68 A DYNAMIC FAITH
word to give him. They could not understand in
the first place what the young man really wanted.
It was a new idea that anybody should want a real
face back of the picture, when for them the picture
was the face. Why should he plague his head over
any other reality than this shadow which satisfied
all ordinary men ? But it was just that reality other
than the shadow which the young man felt he must
have. Shadow raised to the nth power was for him
shadow stiU. He would have substance or nothing.
The real difficulty was that he wanted to find God,
and no person could give him any method which
furthered his quest ; all known trails merely led to
where God had been once. Here was a book which
told how God once expressed Himself directly to men,
even took flesh and tabernacled among them. But
the Book only told of divine historic facts, which were
now glorious memories, that made the present silence
all the harder to bear. Here was a church which had
a divine origin. Far off at its source God had wrought
and the first building stones had been laid by divine
hands, but the link with that divine PersonaUty was
the shadowy touch of a succession of consecrated
hands. Here was a system of theology which was
supposed to express the divine thought and preserve
it unchanged through the ages, but the very central
feature of it was a dead Christ and nowhere in it could
he find the present God he sought — only at the most
some exact and careful language about Him. These
are aU things which a person might accept and assent

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 69
to and still remain in sin and be as far from a soul's
peace as ever. He has as yet found no reconstmctive
principle which puts the whole life on a new level.
Such a principle does, however, come to him in a
" revelation " as an " opening," like a flash out of the
sky. This principle may be summed up in his
discovery, that religion must begin as a divine life
within a man. " All believers," he would say, " must
be bom of God, pass from death to life, and none
others are tme believers but such." It means, of
course, that salvation is an actual change in the man's
Ufe. His next step is the discovery that Christ is no
dead Christ but a living one, still present and able
to " speak to one's condition." He saw now that
this very restlessness and hunger for tmth which he
had experienced in the years of search were proof
of the infinite goodness of God, who had never left
him, who had disturbed his ease as the mother-bird
disturbs the nest that the young may leam to fly.
But there is more involved than this : Christ, and
so God Himself, is found right here within and not
somewhere else. It is no longer the old disappointing
story that He was somewhere once, but disappeared.
We have the glorious fact announced, " Behold He
is here now and I have found Him," and this is the
key to the whole Quaker message. The same God
who said " Let there be light," who shaped the course
of the Hebrew commonwealth, who led His prophets
to the mount of vision, who dwelt among men in

70 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Jesus Christ and so manifested His glory and His
love — ^that same God is so near that the heart that
wants Him finds Him, the soul that listens for Him
hears Him and the person who obeys Him and trusts
Him becomes bom into His life, and so begins a new
life which at its source is divine, and may in time
crowd the old life completely out. It wiU be seen at
once that we are here dealing with a reUgion of, what
we called, the second type. It begins in a purpose
to find God, it ends with a conscious likeness to Him.
" I was taken up," says George Fox, " in the love
of God, so that I could not but admire the greatness
of His love ; and while I was in that condition it
was opened unto me by the eternal light and power,
and I therein clearly saw that all was done and to
be done, in and by Christ." "Christ," he says
again, " it was who had enlightened me, that gave
me His Ught to believe in and gave me hope which is
in Himself, revealed Himself in me and gave me His
spirit." George Fox variously calls his newly discovered
principle " the Christ within," " the inner light "
and the " seed." It means in any case that a man
becomes truly religious when he becomes aware
that there is a divine Being within the reach of
his own consciousness, i.e., that the self and God
are not wholly foreign to each other. It means
that religion is fundamentally a Ufe and a growth,
and that this life, which produces a " new crea
ture," is the divine Being taking root, so to speak,

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 71
and growing within the human soul. This Ufe
becomes Ught, and the soul thereby becomes sen
sitive to good and evil, and is made capable of free
choices of the right. It is a veritable divine life
forming within so that the old self yields place to a
spiritual life. It becomes the Christian ideal to have
the spirit and Ufe of God in the heart — ^the Christ
within. This is no new idea with George Fox, as
everybody knows ; it is the beginning and ending of
the original Gospel — ^the " good news " that there
is something so close and intimate between humanity
and Divinity that God can express Himself in human
terms — even in human form — and that man — ^any
man — ^who receives Him can become Uke Him, and
further, that life on its very highest level is nothing
less than Uving a life in the flesh which reproduces
in measure and degree that perfect typical God-man
Ufe. George Fox takes it all literally, and goes to
work to realize it in himself and to caU all other men
to it. " I saw the blood of the new covenant, how
it came into the heart." "The Lord opened to me
how every man was enlightened by the divine light
of Christ." " I knew God by revelation as He who
hath the key did open, and as the Father of life drew
me to His Son by His spirit." These words mean
that religion, at least with this man, is first of all an
inward, personal experience. The blood of the
covenant is not merely a theological dogma, it is not
a metaphysical theory to be held and preached about
alone. Out from the heart the new Ufe must spring,

72 A DYNAMIC FAITH
and all that blood means or can mean must be grasped,
not in a doctrine, but as a fact of the Ufe. The very
life-principle, which the blood symboUzes, which was
in the Saviour of men, must become the principle
of the Christian's life, and must pulsate from his heart
through every fibre of his being. So, too, with the
light. It means hardly more or less than a self-demon
stration through the spirit of a relationship with God,
which, through obedience, becomes clearer and more
expansive until the things of the Spirit attest them
selves and prove their reality, as to the experienced
mathematician the figures and laws of empty space
become more sure even than the temporal, tangible
world. As Kant finds the form of an eternal moral law
written in the very stmcture of the being, which
says to every man, " thou must," so the Quaker
says that there is a law of the heart, a divine Ught
in the soul, " that of God," as he caUs it, which is
absent from no sane man. It may, only too easily,
be disobeyed, shut round with our own darkness
and lost to use as the diamond in the dirt. Browning,
who held substantiaUy the same truth, says : " The
child feels God a moment, *ichors o'er the place,
plays on and grows to be a man like us." But Fox
believes still further that his so-caUed " light," this
* To " ichor o'er the place " is an illustration taken from
physiology. The formation of a cicatrix over a flesh wound
is the ichoring over the spot. So the child becomes case-
hardened after the first effect of the Divine touch and the
sensitive soul grows callous, i.e. ichored.

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 73
"voice," this "law," this "seed," is the living
Christ, the Holy Spirit coming into immediate rela
tions with us, and working out, as we co-operate, our
salvation ; as the principle of Ufe works within the
growing plant. The question at once arises, as it
did in an earUer day, what place does this leave for
the Scriptures and for the historic basis of Christianity,
if every man may enjoy a light in his own soul, if every
man may be taught directly, and if salvation is a
work of the Divine Spirit bringing transformation
and newness of life to all who co-operate with Him ?
This problem hardly presented itself to George Fox.
Like the happy child who enjoys his mother's love
too much to ask how such unselfish love is consistent
with the law of individual stmggle for existence, he
is too sure of direct alliance with God to ask how
this is to be reconciled with certain historical theories.
It is possible, however, to suggest how he would answer
the question : " God has always been talking to
men," he would say, " as far as they have been ready
and wiUing to listen to Him and capable of under
standing Him. The very crudest reUgion of the
untutored savage is indication of a light, however
feeble and dim ; the very distinction of right and
wrong, however imperfect the standard, is evidence of
a budding principle which could not originate in a
mere clay image, a man of mere carnal nature. This
vision, which is so dim and shadowy in most men,
may become unclouded sight in those rare souls who
have been purified and refined and made holy and

74 A DYNAMIC FAITH
spiritual by bringing their lives into complete
paralleUsm with the divine purposes. Through such
holy men God has spoken. The messages which
have come through them have a permanent value
and are profitable for the spiritual life of aU ages.
But these writings — called Scriptures — have a meaning
and spiritual significance to us only because we par
take of the same Spirit as did those men who were
moved to write them. They are not to take the place
of the Spirit, they only show us how the Spirit
manifests Himself when He has a perfectly responsive
instrument ; and so they become the standard of
revelation. In no sense do they do away with the
necessity for a present immediate communion with
God, or for a personal revelation of God in the soul,
or do they preclude the search for further tmth which
God may reveal in these or any other times. They
simply stand as the high water mark of God's revela
tion through men. The proper Christian must see
them as the master Uterature of the Spirit of God,
but he is not shut up to this Book alone — ^to speU out
as with fingers of the blind the words which God
once wrote before He ceased to speak to us. Each
Christian must Uve in the Spirit which gave forth these
Scriptures, and so only can he authenticate them,
understand them, and use them." Those who know
their Fox's Journal and Barclay's Apology will
recognise that I have summed up the spirit of their
teaching on this subject. In regard to the historic
basis of Christianity, it may be said that the early

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 75
Friends took practically the same position which the
Apostle Paul took. The earthly Ufe of Christ was
to them a fact of supreme importance. It was the
culmination of the manifestation of the self-reveal
ing God. It showed once for all what God was
like and what He would do to bring men to Him.
The real purpose of His coming was to make men
Uke Himself, not to enact a divine drama as a spec
tacle. In order to make men like Himself, He had
completely to reveal Himself, and then to give such
a mighty motive and spiritual impulse as should
move men forever to Himself. Both Paul and Fox
find that in the Cross of Christ. " He loved me
and gave Himself for me," therefore, " the life I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God."
Fox takes the Incarnation literally, as " God with us,"
but he finds in it the further fact that this same
Christ who became a sinless Personality is striving
to win aU lives and to reproduce Himself in men.
" They asked me," he says, " whether I was sanc
tified. I answered. Yes ; for I was in the paradise
of God. Then they asked me if I had no sin. I
answered that Christ my Saviour had taken away
my sin ; and in Him is no sin. They asked how we
knew that Christ did abide in us ? I said by His
Spirit that He hath given us. They temptingly
asked if any of us were Christ. I answered, Nay we
were nothing. Christ was all. They said. If a man
steal is it no sin ? I answered, All unrighteousness
is sin."

^6 A DYNAMIC FAITH
This leads us to the phase of the Quaker message
which is sometimes called perfectionism or sanc-
tification. This idea of a victorious and triumphant
life is involved in the very essence of the message
and cannot be divorced from it. His great con
temporary, Bunyan, expresses a type of religion
which is in decided contrast to this idea. The
" Christian " of the " Progress " is probably a correct
picture of the ordinary Christian, but it is a type
which Fox's whole Ufe is bent on proving a false type.
" Christian " wants to escape hell, he wishes to get
rid of a burden on his back. But he is never sure
of himself. He loses his roll and has to go back
after it, he yields to Giant Despair and Ues down in
the dungeon of Doubting Castle. He just manages
to get along over the difficulties by the constant help
and stimulus of his valiant and courageous friends,
but the real shout of victory is heard only when the
last deep water has been passed and heaven's gate
opens. The Quaker's whole struggle is to get freed
from sin and to live a present life in the power of God.
" The Holy Grail " of his quest is nothing short of a
redeemed nature and a victorious spiritual Ufe to be
realized as a demonstrated fact. That he meant by
perfection, or sanctification, incapacity or inability
to sin, he nowhere says, and such a view is incon
sistent with what he does say. He could not,
furthermore, have meant that he had attained to the
goal and limit of spiritual progress. He merely meant
that he had been delivered from the power of sin and

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM jy
the love of it, and was living instead in the power
of Christ. He believed that so long as he continued
to live in this power of Christ, sin was foreign to him,
impossible in fact for him, and that in this same power
lay the possibiUty of apprehending the fuU measure
of life in Christ. This, or something quite like it, is
the seed principle of Quakerism. We have put it
into the language of our own time, but we beUeve
we have not distorted it.
It remains to see how the principle applies itself
and how it explains some of the peculiarities which
attach to our history. It must be recognised at
once that it is a method of reformation, of recon
struction, of regeneration for individuals and for
society. In fact, the apostles of Quakerism
profoundly beUeved that they had a principle which
would transform society and make " this world another
world." They believed that their ideal would become
a universal reality and would reconstruct human
society as Newton's law of gravitation had recon
structed all conceptions of the universe. They went
out to call men to strict obedience to the divine
Voice, wherever it spoke. There is no better illus
tration of the effect of faith. So long as this high
faith lasted, no country was too remote, no labour
too hard, no call too high, no prison too horrible to
daunt the Quaker with his message. The greatest
statesmen, even Oliver himself, and the meanest
poUtician with his paltry scheme, were called to
govern according to the divine Voice. " I did

78 A DYNAMIC FAITH
admonish him [OUver Cromwell ] to harken to God's
voice, that he might stand in his counsel and obey it."
This same principle was to be applied to every con
ceivable business and profession of life. " Mind
the leading of God." " Your teacher is within you,
obey him." " Mind that in thee which doth con
vince thee." This was to be the mle and test for all
actions, however simple and unimportant, until this
law within should be obeyed as naturally as the law
of gravitation now is. This of course [made the
Quaker a reformer of evil customs of every sort.
He came into history during a great civil war, and he
saw at once that war was a wicked custom, incon
sistent at every point with the religion which he
illustrated. He settled his position by saying that he
Uved " in virtue of that Ufe and power which does
away with the occasion for all war." It was his
mission, not to cry against war in the abstract, but
to live himself in " this life and power " and to bring,
as far as it lay in his ability, all other men into it,
and so to produce a society in which war would
be impossible. He became an uncompromising
opponent of injustice in the courts, of corruption
and tyranny in the administration of law, of arbitrary
methods in government, not simply because he
himself suffered from such abuses, but really because
his principle was at stake. According to this prin
ciple, every man is a man and has a man's rights.
In other words, the divine right of man is superior
to the divine right of kings. The judge and the

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 79
king must be caUed back to observe " that of God
within them " as much as the poorest peasant, and
the man who rules or judges by a selfish or arbitrary
method is out of accord with the divine nature of
things and must be testified against at all costs, for
this principle of the divine right of man is at stake.
It is his adherence to what I have caUed the divine
right of man that constitutes the Quaker's sense of
human equality. He was not a " leveller " — except
as he wanted to level everybody up to the highest.
He knew that men were differently endowed and
equipped and that they could not be reduced to a
lot of equal atoms of human society. What he meant
was that every man had a right to be a man, and to
work out his manhood under the divine leading.
That whether low or high each human being has a
self to realize for which he is responsible to God, and
that nothing must prevent him from exercising his
functions as a free spiritual man. The man is more
than raiment and he must not become a creature of
fashion, a peg to hang clothes upon. The personality
must govern dress, not dress the personaUty. This
worth and dignity of man — of all men — ^must, the
Quaker held, be everywhere emphasized, therefore
hollow custom and sham manners in every walk of
hfe must cease. A man is a man, and he shall be
treated as one. There is much in the garb -question
and " hat honour " and " singular " address and
absence of title — even of Mr. — which strikes us to-day
as rather petty and foolish, an overdrawn distinction.

So A DYNAMIC FAITH
That may be so, but it was occasioned by the Quaker's
resolve to be absolutely honest, and to fight sham,
as the mythical Hercules fought beasts, and over
drawn or not, this scrupulous determination to be as
honest and straightforward before man as before God
has done much to clear the air of sham and to crack
the husk of the fooUsh customs.
But a much greater issue than this is involved
in the Quaker's conception of man and his relation
to God. Let it be remembered that our funda
mental principle is, that each man has direct relation
and dealings with God. If he is saved, it must be
through his own choice, not by the act of another.
Within the circle of his own life stands a sanctuary
of which he alone is the priest. If God is met there,
it is because he meets Him ; if God's voice is heard
and obeyed, he is the one who hears it ; if sins are
forgiven it is not through another that it is known,
but by the forgiven soul itself. Therefore, all that
is absolutely necessary for divine worship, or service,
is a human being — any devout human being — ^with
an open heart toward God. A man and God, met
together, make a holy place, and this meeting con
stitutes worship. The vocal expression is not the
important thing — it is the real meeting of the soul
with God that is all-important. It is a fact that such
meeting is rendered easier where many kindred spirits
meet with one accord than where one individual sits
alone, and this is one reason for public meetings for
worship. Another reason, and perhaps the main one,

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM 8i
for pubhc meetings, is the fact that some persons are
more capable of appreciating and apprehending divine
truth than others are. It becomes thus the duty and
privilege of those who see to interpret to those who
do not see so clearly. This ability to minister is a
gift which consists first in the power to see, and
secondly in the power to impart the tmth in its
relation to the spiritual needs of men. The minister,
of course, can do nothing for the congregation apart
from their co-operation. He does not act or speak
or pray for them. He is merely one man among them
who is gifted with rare spiritual sight and whose sole
function is to help others see. Every office or
position in the church rests on the same principle
for the Quaker. No magical authority attaches to
any position. The weight of the official person rests
solely on his spiritual capacity and his abihty to
perform the functions which devolve upon him. It
is after all only a man, doing some particular work
for which the Lord has fitted him.
The Quaker needs to say little of the so-called
ordinances, for there is no more place for them in
his conception of Christianity than there is for horses
on an electric car. They fall off as the old leaves
do when the new ones come. It is an essential feature
of Quakerism that the individual Christian communes
with God and feeds his spiritual life by partaking of
the Uving Christ who nourishes the whole inner being.
If this is so in fact, what place is left for bread and
wine, which at best could only be a symbol of what

82 A DYNAMIC FAITH
he already has in reality ? If it is true that the
believer enters consciously into the divine life, i.e.,
is baptised into Christ and puts on Christ, what
place is left for the use of water, which at best could
only symbolize what he already has in fact. Further
more, the use of material things to produce a spiritual
effect seems to him from the nature of the case
unwarrantable. He fails further to find any clear
and unmistakable command from the Master for
the institution of a system of things which seems
to him incompatible with the whole spirit of the Gospel,
and he concludes that if they ever had a place in the
church it could only have been while it was in its
Jewish swaddling clothes. In short, he finds no
justification for any system or practice which becomes
a substitute for the Spirit Himself, or which lessens
the positive aspiration of the soul to find God Himself
and to live in Him.
This virile and constructive interpretation of
Christianity which we find in the message of the
early Friends should have deeply affected the course
of religious thought and profoundly influenced the
development of society and the race. It has in it
the seed of a new life and a new society and a new state.
It has not yet realized its promise. In fact, the tmth
of its real message has never mastered even the little
group of men and women who have borne the name —
" Friends." The idea which lies at the root has never
had an adequate embodiment. It has found great
individual exponents and interpreters, but no full

THE MESSAGE OF EARLY QUAKERISM S3
corporate expression. George Fox himself is the best
possible exemplification of the Quaker idea of a man
with his Ufe in paralleUsm with divine currents —
fearless, tireless, active, practical, and with all,
aware in his very soul that his life is linked in union
with the divine life and that his main business as
a man is to become an instrument for God.
WilUam Penn patiently endeavoured to work out
in his western commonwealth the Quaker principles
as applied to the state — and it was his purpose to
found a state — ^not in Utopia, but in Pennsylvania
— ^where the people should make their own laws,
hold their own religious views, follow the voice
within, where justice should be given to everybody,
high or low, rich or poor, white or brown, where
all should be educated, where all should be free to
realize their potential lives and to become what God
meant them to be, and where war should be unknown.
All that one brave and noble man could do to make
the " holy experiment " a realized fact Penn did,
but he did not and he could not lift the mass of his
foUowers to the high level of his own conception. It
is the holy experiment of WilUam Penn rather than of
the Society of Friends.
Robert Barclay, the young scholar of the move
ment, grasped in a marvellous way the central features
and impUcations of the Quaker principle and ex
pressed them with convincing argument and un
answerable logic. But his book — ^though in some
periods and localities treated almost as a fetish —

84 A DYNAMIC FAITH
has exerted surprisingly little influence. More than
half the Friends in the world do not know what
is in it, and hold the very views which this book
combats so successfully ; while the most of those
who have been quoting it all their lives have never
once seen the bearing of this book on the onward
movement of religious thought, nor how it put the
Quaker in a position to have led the Christian church
in search for Truth. Barclay has been either ignored
or read microscopically. He has not been inter
preted by his people or to his people, certainly not
to the world.
It is not our purpose now to tell why Quakerism
has not been more effective in the world than it
has been. We are for the moment dealing with its
primitive message, and so far as we can now grasp
it, it has a universal element in it. In fact, it is
as ancient as the first century and as modem as the
twentieth. It is not " new theology," but it ex
presses that permanent tmth that God by His Spirit
is working all things up to better, that His purpose
is to make men into His own image and to reveal
His life, light, truth and love in every man who will
respond to Him and fulfil the conditions of spiritual
life. It is a contribution to the world's knowledge
of the divine method of the making of man — ^the
man who possesses the power of an endless life, and
if it ever does get adequate expression in an organic
body it will have a mighty transforming power on
the world.

V
THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH-
npHERE is a widely accepted theory that the true
rehgion is forever fixed and unchangeable. It
is a system of doctrine, mysteriously communicated,
not to be questioned by reason, to be accepted by
faith, and to be guarded as a " deposit " of tmth,
crystallized into a form suited to every age and
every race of men. If this were so we should have
nothing to do but to accept the deposit of truth,
as the South Sea Islander accepts the bread-fruit
which gravitation brings to his lap. We should have
a fixed standard by which to test every idea, as we
now test our clocks by the Washington observatory,
and error would simply be deviation from this
standard. This deposit of tmth, this body of doctrine
would be the stronghold of the faith. It would be
our Mount Olympus, our supremely sacred citadel,
but if it ever should be carried by the enemy there
would be no second hill, no other kopje, in which we
could entrench ourselves. There are, however, fatal
objections to this theory. In the first place, there
is no such fixed and unchangeable deposit of doctrine,
85

86 A DYNAMIC FAITH
History shows tmth in process, never crystallized.
It is always being revealed and apprehended — ^never
a finished fact. There is nothing in the world which
is so absolutely unmistakable and clear that it can
be used as the foot-rule of truth and error to test every
idea by. Then, too, from the very nature of truth it
could not be crystallized and fixed into something
hard and fast. Truth is not of the nature of some
food product which can be canned or preserved, or
put into capsules. Like goodness or virtue, it belongs
to a life — or better still, it is a life, which means, of
course, that it can no more be reduced to an abstract
statement, and so be preserved, than a flower can be
pressed in an herbarium and still remain a flower.
Tmth lives and grows and sweeps on in wider circles.
It expresses itself in myriad forms, as life always does,
it is an eternal process of manifestation, and it can
no more be caught and deposited than the motion
of a spinning top can.
But even if there were an absolute standard of tmth
in the world which could not be questioned, and
even if truth could be captured and put into fixed
and rigid form for all time, it would not meet the needs
of human souls. The men who are fed by gravita
tion from the bread-fruit tree are incomparably lower
than the men who tease the hard and stubborn soil
of the New England farms to produce for them the
necessities of life. The bread eaten in the sweat of
the brow makes the sturdy, independent manhood,
and nature is not kind to us when she pours out her

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 87
bounties so that we may forego the stmggle. Tmth
received as a deposit and put into the passive mind
would have a still more disastrous effect. The mind
never was, and never can be, a receptacle. It grows
and expands by free choices, by perceiving and
discovering tmth for itself, by reaching and stretching
beyond what it has to what Ues before it, by painfuUy
toiling and stmggling to follow the stream up to its
source, and by making itself an organ or instmment
of the tmth.
But even if the mind could assimilate truth fed to
it in crystallized form, still this method would reduce
us aU to one flat, dead level of attainment. A com
munism of property is questionable enough, but such
a communism of thought is more serious still. Each
soul takes his share of tmth and then is pledged not
to add to it or subtract from it. It ends in producing
a race of men no more original than a quartz crystal,
and the human mind becomes only a static vessel
to hold its quota of the whole stock of truth. When
ever a nation has tried to maintain and enforce this
conception of tmth its vitality has dried up, its
originality has ceased, its creative activity has
slackened, its moral fibre has weakened and degenera
tion has become only too apparent.
We do not hesitate, then, to pronounce this theory
discredited by facts and at variance with the whole
spirit of the original Christian message.
There is no sure stronghold of faith, unless the
God who spoke once is speaking still, and unless

88 A DYNAMIC FAITH
revelation is a continuous process. If there is no
relation at all between the human soul and God,
and if we have no means of direct vision, no capacity
for tmth at first hand, we can have no permanent
assurance that the tmth which men of old time
saw was really grounded in the nature of things and
that it will abide. Our supposed island may any
day turn out to be, as in the Arabian story, a moving
sea-monster. No, our real test and assurance of
past tmth and of former revelation is to be found
in the fact that God still speaks to us to-day, that
human souls are not isolated from God and that we
are immediately conscious of tmths which form a
necessary part of the eternal process of tmth, which
has its source in God. We know we are aUve because
our consciousness of the moment Unks on with our
whole past existence, and we know that this past
existence belongs to us because we feel its unity with
our present life. But the man who should lose his
consciousness of the moment would lose at the same
time all sense of past existence. So also our sense of
the worth of revelation, the reality of the tmth which
has been, rests for us upon our assurance of a present
God, who reveals Himself, and upon our present
consciousness that we know the tmth when it comes
to us. We feel ourselves a part of the entire process
of tmth, as each bubble might feel itself a part of
the whole river which moves on to the ocean from
which it first rose. We must therefore seek for our
stronghold of faith, as we sought for our basis of

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 89
faith, not somewhere outside of man's Ufe — ^not in
some middle third thing between God and man —
but in man himself and in his relation to God.
We have come at last to see, if we are Christians,
that God is self-revealing, that it belongs to His
very nature and essence to show Himself, i.e.. He
could not be God and stay self-contained and self-
regarding. This is the first fact of the Christian
religion, and it is a fact which is grounded in the
divine nature. There is a second fact which is
grounded in human nature, and that is that man
has a capacity for knowing God when He reveals
Himself, i.e., that tmth is self-demonstrative when
it comes to us. There is no other proof that the sun
is shining except this, that we see and feel it. There
is no foreign evidence that love is of supreme worth
— ^nothing except the heart's own testimony. There
is no other proof that there is beauty in the world
than this, that we perceive it and that our hearts
beat with joy at it. It is just this same " demon
stration of the spirit " which is the unassailable
stronghold of faith — ^the citadel of religion. Light
shines in vain for blind fishes in the cave, beauty has
no meaning for the eye devoid of " speculation,"
love is only a word for the heart which has never
felt it. ReUgion could not be — even with a self-
reveaUng God — ^if we could not know Him when
He spoke, if we could not see Him when He
showed Himself, if we could not feel Him when He
touched us.

90 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Paul is right, therefore, in staking his case on
" the demonstration of the spirit," the witness within
the consciousness of the beUever. This means that
religion is something which can be as thoroughly
and practically tested as any facts in the universe.
We know of an external world only because it stands
revealed in our consciousness and because we tmst
in the reality of what appears to us. Our law of
right or of duty is a law which we discover in the
structure of our own being, and which we obey because
we feel an obligation — an oughtness — ^from which we
cannot alienate ourselves. We feel the power of
ideals toward which we move, not because we see a
definite goal standing before us, but because we feel
within ourselves the law of the fuller hfe which we are
to reaUze. Not otherwise are God and all the tmths
of religion made known and certified. It is the kind
of evidence an artist has of beauty when he stands
caught by the glory of a sunset, it is the kind
of evidence of the laws of mathematics which an
astronomer has when a new planet appears just where
his calculations said it must be ; it is the kind of
evidence an experimenter has of the power of elec
tricity when the current from the dynamo thrills
through him to the ends of his finger and to the roots
of his hair.
A religion which builds on authority or on the
deposits of tradition stands securely only so long
as the " authority " can defy investigation or can
maintain itself in the face of investigation. It

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 91
contains in itself no inherent prophecy of a dateless
future. The gods of Olympus hold their sway there
only till the mountain is cUmbed. On the other
hand, the religion which witnesses itself to the
soul, which bases itself in the experience of the
heart, which stops not short of a demonstration of
the spirit, need fear no investigation, is as certain
as Self-existence, is, and has in itself a prophecy of
period CO- eternal with the reveaUng God.
The strength of modern science lies in the fact
that every law which it announces, everything it
proclaims, is tested at once by facts. It holds to
nothing which wiU not square with the nature of
things. Every department of science is strewn
with the wrecks of discarded theories, untenable
hypotheses and rejected " laws," rejected because
they failed to square with facts. Nothing abides
in science which cannot stand every possible test
of facts, while that which is plumb with the nature
of things is permanent. I have in these papers
been declaring a religion which in the same way
meets every conceivable test. It is the religion of
fact, of life, of experience. We beUeve in God
not because some remote race had dealings with
Him, not merely because some sacred books tell of
Him, not because an authoritative church or a
dogmatic theology proclaims Him. All these things
may well add to and strengthen our faith, may
properly carry conviction to our hearts ; but we
believe in God primarily because we ourselves find

92 A DYNAMIC FAITH
Him, because we cannot flee or hide from Him if
we would, because we have our being in Him, and
because the moment we act as though He were
present by our side we find that He really is there.
He is involved in all our thinking and in all our doing,
and when we in blindness say, " Show us the Father,"
He patiently answers, " Have I been so long with thee
and yet hast thou not known me ? " The soul that
cannot find God in his own life and who gets no
hint of His presence now, would surely have some
difficulty in proving the reality of His presence in
Hebrew history, but on the other hand, the soul that
realizes that his life is immediately grounded in
God and that the one sure fact of consciousness is
the reality of the Divine self, has a sure basis for
his faith in the reality of God's presence with " them
of old time."
The reality of the inspiration of the writers
of the Scriptures is demonstrated in the same
way. They exert a power over our lives and they
carry conviction to our lieatts^nbT*"because they
are canonical, not because they are backedjby_super-
natural authority, but because they appeal to us,
speak to our lives, Teveal thrnp "Which our 'deepest
nature feels to be true,, Coleridge used to say,
" I believe in the Bible because it finds me." These
writings exercise a spiritual power over our Uves,
because they come from men who have had pro-
founder and loftier experiences and visions of our
God and His truth than "we have, and yet our own

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 93
experiences~^of-Gjod_ prepare uS^ to rise to the sig
nificance and meaning of these ^master-revelations.
They carry us and win us not because they are unlike
anytlitng-we know, but rather because they are the
highest level of divine-human relation, lower levels
of Tvhich we already know in ourselves. We shall
ftot prove their authenticity by an appeal to miracle,
or by some celestial mark upon them, or by the
decision of an infallible council which made the
canon, but rather by showings _as we can, that they
are profitable for the formation of spiritual lives and
saintly character ; that they show forth our God and
His purpose and that they are sources of present
inspiration to those who go down into their meaning.
The supreme test of the Scriptures is the practical
one of their power over us when we use them rightly.
If they can stand that test they need fear no other ;
and if they cannot no dogmatic assertion about them
can save them. The stronghold of our faith in them
is the fact that our hearts do feel their power and
that they are dynamic in the making of spiritual lives.
We begin with an experiment and end with an
experience. Every new test of their value increases
our conviction of inspiration until we become so
sure that we want no other proof of it any more
than we want proof of our mother's love beyond
the love itself !
The same method and test apply to everyone
of our Christian doctrines. They are not tme because
they are in ancient creeds, they are not true because

94 A DYNAMIC FAITH
ministers and churches dogmatically declare them.
They rest on no foundation which may cave in any
day. They are true, if they are true, because they
are supreme facts of life — of spiritual life — and
because they abide the deepest tests of life.
The Christian revelation of God demonstrates
itself to us as the Ught demonstrates itself to all
who have a sensitive retina. It comes to us as
light and moisture come to a flower, which prove
their value and worth by putting themselves into
the life of the flower. Abstract theories of Christ's
nature are wide the mark for religion, and are no more
necessary to salvation than abstract theories on any
other subject. We must, again, approach Christ
and the Christian doctrines with our tests of ex
perience. What does He claim to be ? What does
He claim to do ? He claims — ^these are His supreme
claims — ^to manifest God, and to put man into rela
tionship with Him — ^to make him a son of God with
a Ukeness to the Father. Well, we are brought back
at once to the undeniable fact that we cannot think
now of God except in terms of Christ's revelation
of Him. Climb as high as ever we will, we discover
that Christ is ahead of us. We call God spirit, but
He first so revealed Him. We say He is love, but
He showed Him to be love. We say God is Light
and Tmth, but this also comes through Him who said
" I am the Light and the Tmth." " The God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ " is the God our souls
long for, the God meets our highest aspirations,

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 95
who seals Himself as the god of aU other revelations
and who is witnessed to by that " the likest God
within the soul."
But the real test comes when we try the other
claim, for here at least we are on no alien ground.
He himself claims to prove His divinity by making
us sons of God. We are to believe not simply
because He said " Rise up and walk," not because
He said " Come forth," not even because He said
to Thomas, after three days in the grave, " Reach
hither thy finger and feel the prints of the nails."
We are to beUeve because we can test the power
of His life in our lives and because we can see whether
His highest claim is true. He professes to be able
to take a man who has lived in sin, who has been
self-centred and absorbed in self, who has borne all
the marks of the earthly, and given no promise of
the heavenly life, and to transform him into a being
of the spiritud order, glowing with love, forgetful of
self, dying to Uve, and living to do the will of another,
and with a life in parallelism with the divine purpose.
In short. He claims to be able to impart the divine
life to men, to spirtualize and transform their Uves.
It is a claim which can be as carefully tested as the
law of gravitation can. How do you know there is
such a law ? You see every particle of matter in the
universe obey it. It swings satellites and planets,
and by it you can calculate their motions and positions.
It draws the whole ocean and dashes it twice a day
high up the beach and you can announce weeks before

96 A DYNAMIC FAITH
the exact moment of flood tide. How do we know
that Jesus Christ is the Power of God unto salvation
and that God's love comes through Him to us ? There
is one sure test. Try Him. Turn your face to Christ,
obey every call from Him, make an experiment of
following Him completely, tmst Him as you tmst
the laws of nature, throw yourself upon Him in
absolute confidence, act as though you saw Him
standing by you. The result will be — ^the testimony
is universal — ^you will find a new creation going on
within. The old nature will go as the ghostly leaves
of winter go when the new buds open. The new
nature will come as " noiselessly as the springtime
her crown of verdure weaves." New avenues of
activity will open, hfe will become richer, the reaUty
of God will stand no more in theory, heaven will not
seem some far off terminus, and God's will will cease
to be some stubborn objective law ; it will become an
inward choice and pleasure. Such a Christianity has
a three-fold demonstration : its effect on other
individuals, its effective on our own persond Uves,
and its transforming effect on society. No one who
has ever seen a saint made by the power of God in
Jesus Christ can doubt that there is something
dynamic in such a reUgion. One may doubt the
tmth of transubstantiation, or question the value of
outward baptism, but he knows that only a spiritual
power can change hate to love, suUenness to sweetness,
harshness to gentleness, impulsiveness to calm patience,
and fretful discouragement to confidence and victory.

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 97
Then comes the first-hand evidence in one's own
life. There can be no proof so convincing as the fact
that He has drawn me out of the horrible pit and the
miry clay. He has established my goings and put
a new song in my mouth. We know that we are of
God because we love, because we have the witness,
because we overcome, because God has brought us
up into His life. Then there is that slow but steady
coming of the kingdom, going on before the eyes of
those who can see — ^the propagation of the divine life
through the world. " The dial plate marks centuries
with the minute finger." It seems like the slow
swing of the globe in the procession of the equinoxes
which in a thousand years give us a new pole star.
But though slow, Uke the motion of the glacier, the
movement of God in history toward " one far off
divine event " is unmistakable and irresistible. The
old cormpt order does change, the relics of a pagan
age are weeded out, the entrenched evils of centuries
finally do yield. New revelations come, prophets
appear, the horizon of light enlarges. Men become
more civilized, more humanized, more spiritudized,
more Christlike. The New Jemsalem is some
thing more than a dream because God is at work in
His world, and when we take long perspectives we
trace His hand. " There is a serene Providence," our
Emerson says, " which rules the fate of nations, which
makes little account of time, little of one generation
or race, makes no account of disasters, conquers aUke
by what is caUed defeat and by what is called victory, 7

98 A DYNAMIC FAITH
thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes every
thing immoral as inhuman, and obtdns the ultimate
triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything
which resists the moral laws of the world. It makes
its own instmments creates the man for the time,
trains him in poverty, inspires his genius and arms him
for his task." (Emerson's "Abraham Lincoln.")
The moment we begin to Uve by a Christianity
which declares that God is not afar, but in every
spiritual fact and process of life and history, that
He is manifesting Himself in every victory over
sin, in every defeat of evil and march of righteous
ness, in every soul that puts on the white robe
and takes the palm-branch — ^in short, when we
build on the tmth of a present God who witnesses
to Himself in us and proves His power as Ught does
and as love and beauty do, we need never be afrdd of
losing Him or of losing everything which really shows
Him forth. In this stronghold of faith which tests
itself by spiritual facts, we can meet all the questions,
the doubts, the scepticism of our time, and we can
positively establish our tmth. The new conclusions
of science do not weaken one single point of support
under such a faith. Has man come up by a process
of evolution from lower forms of life ? WeU, if such
a view is established, we simply get a new idea of the
divine method of creation, for a universe in endless
process presupposes God as much as a world finished
at a stroke does. We cannot understand why there
should ever be sin in a world turned out perfect

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH 99
from the finger of God. But we see that there must be
sin and evil and imperfection in a world which is
still only in process of making. In our old system
of thought the origin of sin implies a defeat of God
which could be remedied only through an elaborate
scheme of redemption. If this new idea is true, God
never has been defeated. His upward purpose has
simply been growing plainer from the beginning. His
coming in an incarnation was no afterthought, no
scheme. It was part of the eternal process. He
shows Himself, He shows the spiritual method of
drawing men up to the goal of the race. He condemns
sin. He shows its effect. He reveals love, He shows
what life may be, He sets forth its type and He bestows
the power for realizing it. The gospel of Christ explains
the whole process. " That is not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural and afterward
that which is spiritual." At first the process is by
a power working unseen from behind. Now it
is by a perfect typal Persondity who goes on
before to draw out the man within the man. The
long travail of creation has looked and pointed
toward the unveiling of the Son of God.
If we no longer look for God alone in the excep
tional, the miraculous, the interventional, we on the
other hand have discovered a soUd basis for faith
in a God who shows Himself in the whole process
of the world, in the long stmggle for righteousness,
in the slow shaping of an ever better race, in the
growing sway of love, in the victories of tmth. Such

100 A DYNAMIC FAITH
a conception of religion puts it also beyond the
touch of criticism, since it rests on nothing that
criticism, even of the most destructive sort, can
disintegrate. The relation which really exists between
the soul and God, which is grounded in experience,
is affected in no serious way by the discovery of new
dates or new authorship for any or all the Biblical
books. It is immaterial whether Job or Jonah is
literally historical, or dramatic, like the parables of
Christ, teaching a spiritual lesson through a supposed
character. Our interest Ues not in maintaining
some dogmatic " theory of Scripture," but in dis
covering the spiritud message, the practical use of
these books, which so closely bear the mark and
superscription of the God whom we are learning to
know. We see plainly that all revelation must
come in terms of the life and thought of those who
receive it, and so it must be progressive. We know
enough about God now to know that no conclusions
of historical study can shake the foundations of
religion. Much ancient theology will of necessity
succumb, for theology is at the best a man-made
affair, and each new century will more or less re-shape
the crystalUzed thought of former ages. But this
life of God in the life of man which is the basis of
religion will go steadily on. Everything which bears
to the soul a genuine message of God, everything which
shows Him or His purpose, will minister to that Ufe
in the future as in the past. Every book which has
come out of the heart of the universe and which

THE STRONGHOLD OF THE FAITH loi
speaks to the heart of man will survive all tests
and will continue to inspire men, regardless of its
date, and wholly apart from the mere fact that this
man held the pen rather than that. But we shall
learn to use it not as a fetish, but as a source of
spiritual light to be taken for what it is worth.
There are still harder problems than any of these.
Psychology has opened a series of questions which
make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless
Ufe or in any spiritual reality. I do not need now to
drag these questions to the light for examination. It
is enough to say that they are deadly shots against the
armour of a medisevd theology. There is, however,
a basis of religion which lies wholly beyond the reach
of this newest of the great sciences.
The inner spiritual life which comes into immediate
relation with God, and which grows by feeding on
Him, is as much a fact of consciousness as memory
or perception is, and can no more be shaken than
they can. This spiritual Ufe belongs in the kingdom
of ends, which even psychology has to admit, and a
kingdom of ends, i.e, a life of ideals and of purposes
beyond the moment, involves of necessity a divine
infinite self in whom we live and move and have our
conscious Ufe ; and that carries with it the prophecy
and the potency of an endless life.
This religion of fact, this faith grounded on the
soul's immediate relation with God, can meet the
hardest problem that has yet appeared and can
triumphantly face it. Science reduces the phenomena

I02 A DYNAMIC FAITH
of the world under permanent and universal laws,
so changeless and abstract that its description of
facts and events, once accurately made, holds in
every part of the universe for every age. But science
can do nothing with the indescribable, the free, the
spiritual, the ideal. These belong in another realm
into which science not only does not but cannot enter. .
Science stops where the describable stops. Science
can say with authority that a man's body is a mass
of flying molecules — ^trilhons on trillions in number
— and that after a certain number of years these will
fall apart and the man's bodily life will end — with no
hope or promise of any reorganization. But what
can science do with the man who has so entered into
the life of the risen Christ that he can say, " He hath
raised up together and made us sit together in
heavenly places in Christ Jesus." " He hath de
livered us from the power of darkness and translated
us into the kingdom of His dear Son." " We have
come to a kingdom which cannot be moved " because
it is based on the interrelation of God and man which
attests itself in consciousness and is a spiritual fact ?
" A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answered, I have felt.
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands.
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach through nature, moulding men."

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